Jewish political movements: Encyclopedia II - Jewish political movements - Zionist movements

Jewish political movements - Zionist movements

The aims of Zionism are as follows: The unity of the Jewish people and the centrality of their ancestral and Biblical homeland in Israel. The ingathering of the Jewish people in its historic homeland, the Land of Israel. The strengthening of the re-born Jewsih state based upon the prophetic vision of justice and peace. The preservation of the identity of the Jewish people through the fostering of Jewish and Hebrew studies and of Jewish spiritual and cultural values. The protection of Jewish rights everywhere. Zionism, or the idea of a restored national homeland and common identity for the Jews, had already started to take shape by the mid-1800s, with Jewish thinkers such as Moses Hess whose 1862 work Rome and Jerusalem; The Last National Question argued for the Jews to settle in Palestine as a means of settling the national question. Hess proposed a socialist state in which the Jews would become agrarianised through a process of "redemption of the soil" which would transform the Jewish community into a true nation, in that Jews would occupy the productive layers of society rather than being an intermediary non-productive merchant class which is how he perceived European Jews. Hess, along with later thinkers such as Nahum Syrkin and Ber Borochov, is considered a founder of Socialist Zionism and Labour Zionism and one of the intellectual forebears of the kibbutz movement.

As the 19th century wore on, the persecution of the Jews in Eastern Europe where emancipation had not occurred to the extent it did in Western Europe (or at all) only increased. Starting with the state-sponsored massive anti-Jewish pogroms following the assassination of Tsar Alexander II and continuing with the Dreyfus Affair in France in 1894, Jews were profoundly shocked to see the continuing extent of anti-Semitism from Russia to France, a country which they thought of as the home of enlightenment and liberty. In reaction to the first, [Judah Leib Pinsker]] published the pamphlet Auto-Emancipation in January 1, 1882. The pamphlet became influential for the Political Zionism movement. The movement was to achieve momentum under the leadership of an Austrian-Jewish journalist, Theodor Herzl, who published his pamphlet Der Judenstaat ("The Jewish State") in 1896. Prior to the Dreyfus Affair, Herzl had been an assimilationist, but after seeing how France treated its loyal Jewish subjects, he became ardently pro-Zionist. In 1897 Herzl organised the First Zionist Congress in Basel, Switzerland, which founded the World Zionist Organisation (WZO) and elected Herzl as its first President. By the middle of the 20th century, Zionism, in its various forms, would become the major Jewish political movement that transcended national boundaries, although many more Jews would come to participate in the national politics of the countries in which they resided.

Adapted from the Wikipedia article "Zionist movements", under the G.N U Free Docmentation License. Please also see http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki