What exactly is Zionism? Where did the idea of Jewish return to the land of Israel, which came to be an integral part of Zionism, originate? And what did this return mean to different groups at different times? Was and is there more than one kind of Zionism? Here are 5 examples of “Zionism Can Be described as.”
The term zionism can be defined as a form of
The term “Zion” is associated with the city of Jerusalem. The land of Israel has always been sacred, and it has inspired countless pilgrimages for displaced Jews, seeking the “Return to Zion”. Around the dawn of the 20th century, immigration to the land of Israel was especially popular because of a growing Zionist political movement.
This “modern Zionism”, created by Theodor Herzl, centered around the belief that all Jews belong to a single nation, and that they should establish a sovereign state to return to. Herzl published a pamphlet on the subject, known in English as the “Jewish State,” and then organized the first World Zionist Congress in 1897 to discuss homeland options. During the next few decades, Jewish states were proposed in places like Alaska and Uganda; but Jerusalem, in the Palestine area, was the area that held the most significance for Jews. In 1917, Britain okayed a Jewish state in Palestine, and after the Holocaust, many other Western countries supported it as well.
The state of Israel gained its independence in 1948. After the establishment of the Israeli government, the World Zionist Congress lost some of its power, but is still around today as a part of the World Zionist Organization. With millions of dollars in their budget, they work alongside the Israeli government to encourage Jewish settlement in Palestine and “Jewish national sentiment through education”.
Zionism can be describe as a religious
How does Zionism affect modern Israel? Well since the early 1900s, many different forms of Cultural Zionism have permeated the country. According to a study by The Israeli Democracy Institute, almost half of Jews reportedly view themselves as affiliated with Religious Zionism., which is the idea that original Jewish traditions should be preserved, and Jews should have a sovereign state in the holy land.
However, many Palestinians call this area “home”, too, and they resent the influx of Jewish immigrants there. So, although Zionism has given a homeland to a long-oppressed community, it has also flared territorial tempers in the Middle East, and contributed to the current Israeli-Palestinian conflict.
Zionism can be describe as a promised land
For starters, we have to know that Zionism didn’t begin with Theodor Herzl. The roots of the Zionist idea grow deep in the promised land of Israel.
The Jewish people’s connection to the land has been at the center of their story for at least 3000 years. For about a 1000 years, the Jewish people built a rich and thriving ancient civilization in the land. This lasted until the year 70 CE, when the Romans destroyed the Jewish temple in Jerusalem and exiled the Jews from their land. For the 2000 years since then, Jews scattered across the globe have been carrying a collective connection to the land of Israel and hoped to return to it. But let’s go back to the beginning.
According to the Biblical record, the Jewish patriarchs and matriarchs made their home in the land of Israel. Their descendants, freed from Egyptian slavery, returned to the land several hundred years later. Centuries of civil war among the Israelite tribes was followed by the United Kingdom of David and later Solomon, which centralized Jewish worship in Jerusalem with the establishment of the first temple.
Of course, there are debates over the historical accuracy of many Biblical stories. But what’s grounded in historical fact is that the Jewish people living in Israel centuries before their exile told these foundational stories. Perhaps, more importantly, these stories have been essential to Jewish identity for millennia. But back to history. After some four centuries of religious and national development under Jewish rule, the land was invaded by the Babylonians. The Jerusalem temple was destroyed and many Jews were exiled to Babylon. This was a period of great devastation for the ancient Jewish civilization.
Zionism represents the world political nationalist movement
It was only after the Babylonian empire fell to Persia, roughly 50 years later, that those exiled were eventually able to return in a remarkable and historic homecoming. Referred to as Shivat Zion or the return to Zion, this political nationalist movement was initiated by the visionary leaders Ezra and Nechemya.
The Jewish community was revitalized and the temple was rebuilt. In many ways, this shorter period of exile and return can be seen as a precursor to the ideals and ambitions of Jewish self-determination that is now known as Zionism. Jewish civilization in ancient Israel then continued for another 400 years until the Romans destroyed the second temple and exiled the Jewish people yet again in the first and second centuries. This time though the exile would last 2000 years.
Of course, this is a fairly simplistic, condensed summary of a much more extensive ancient history. But what it all means is that for 1000 years the land of Israel was the center of Jewish political and cultural life and day-to-day society. So there’s an ancient connection between the Jewish people and the land of Israel.
But if the land is so important then how were Jews able to remain Jews for almost 2000 years without living there? Well, despite their distance from it, the land has always remained the geographic center of the Jewish faith and religious practice. The annual cycle of the Biblical Jewish festivals are based on the agricultural cycles and seasons in the land of Israel. The Maccabean Revolts commemorated by Hanukah, also occurred in the land.
The Biblical and post-Biblical stories still studied today were rooted in the land. The rabbis that taught and developed the very foundation of Jewish practice resided in Israel. Their teachings were compiled in this 63-volume legal anthology known as the Mishnah, the basis of Jewish religious law even today, also written in Israel.
Even the longing for their return to the land developed into a foundational piece of Jewish religious, cultural, and national identity. The Jewish liturgy includes prayers three times a day for a collective return to and rebuilding of the land. Religious study includes ancient rites and rituals that would only apply once the Jews were to return and rebuild the temple. At the close of the Passover Seder, Jews call out, “next year in Jerusalem” and each summer on Tisha B’Av, the Jewish people mourn the destruction of the temple and their exile from the land.
At Jewish weddings, the couple breaks a glass in commemoration of Jerusalem’s destruction and the hope that they return to it. From country to country throughout the diaspora Jews maintained a deep faith that they would one day be returned to their homeland. Some Jews even made efforts to actualize that dream by immigrating to Israel, known as making Aliyah. The long and dangerous journey was difficult and often life threatening. Many who sent out on Aliyah didn’t make it. The 13th century Spanish rabbi Nahmanides was one of the first medieval rabbis who traveled to Jerusalem hoping to renew Jewish life there. He found the city in desolation as a result of The Crusades, yet he succeeded in reestablishing a lasting Jewish communal life there and established a synagogue that is still in use today.
After the expulsion of the Jews from Spain in 1492, a large number of Jews immigrated to the land. Among them were the families of future rabbis who would become pivotal in the development of Judaism. These included Rabbi Isaac Luria and Rabbi Joseph Caro, both of whom became the leaders of the mystical Kabbalistic Movement that emerged in the City of Tzfat in Northern Israel.
The influx of Jews from Spain and North Africa led to a Golden Age of Tzfat, during which the city was a global center for Jewish learning and trade through the 15th and 16th centuries. In the late 18th century, some followers of the Hasidic Movement also began to make Aliyah to the land of Israel. One of the earliest Hasidic masters, Rabbi Menachem Mendel of Vitebsk, settled in Tzfat with 300 of his followers in 1777, the first of several Hasidic settlements. During roughly the same period, The Vilna Ga’On, who many consider the greatest Jewish scholar in centuries, wrote that the long-awaited redemption would only come once the Jews took practical action on their own and settled the land of Israel. They could not rely on prayer and meditation alone while waiting for a Messianic age.
So in the early 19th century, more than 500 disciples of The Vilna Ga’On made the difficult and dangerous journey to Israel, settling in Jerusalem, where they revived ancient rituals and customs and established schools. Later, in the mid-19th century, Rabbi Yehuda Alkalai and later Rabbi Zvi Hirsch Kalischer, also stressed that redemption would only come as a result of practical steps. They called for resettling of the land as a method of Jewish self-help and shared many ideas that would later be applied by the Zionist Movement.
There were plenty of small migrations and movements to return to Israel but how did these give way to the organized mass movement of Jews from around the world returning to the lands that we know today as Zionism? Well, a large part of what fueled such organization was the idea of Jewish Emancipation that emerged from the Enlightenment in the 18th century combined with the new 19th century concept of nation-states. Added to the mix was the intensifying persecution of Jews in Europe. In 1882, a pamphlet called Autoemancipation: Warning to His Kinsman From a Russian Jew was published by a physician named Leon Pinsker. Pinsker came to the novel conclusion that hatred of Jews, what he termed Judeophobia, wouldn’t be overcome by a change in Jews’ political status in their host countries or even by equal rights. Instead he argued for a new approach, the establishment of a sovereign political Jewish state. He then founded an organization called Hovevei Zion or Lovers of Zion, which began to facilitate the immigration of Jews to the land of Israel.
This was the birth of a practical or political Zionism that aimed towards the eventual creation of an independent nation-state for Jews. And when Rabbi Samuel Mohilever and his disciple Rabbi Yitzchak Yaacov Reines became leaders of Hovevei Zion and its religious offshoot, the Mizrachi Movement, it marked the beginning of Religious Zionism as a movement and its early partnership with political Zionism. But these weren’t the only Zionist ideas in development. Another Zionist Movement began to emerge in 1888 with the circulation of an essay called Lo Zu Haderekh or This is Not the Way. It laid out a harsh critique of practical Zionism and was written by Ahad Ha’Am, the founder of what would come to be known as cultural Zionism.
Ahad Ha’Am had been influenced by Pinsker’s pamphlet and ideas and was a member of Hovevei Zion. But he was critical of the feasibility of practical Zionism and the massive immigration that it envisioned, let alone the large scale establishment of a nation-state. Instead, Ahad Ha’Am proposed the gradual establishment of a Jewish cultural renaissance that would unite Jews across the world with its spiritual center in Israel. Two of its central goals would be a revival of Hebrew language and Jewish literacy. But there were yet other strains of Zionism developing during the same period.
Zionism can be describe as a social zionism
Socialist and labor Zionist movements, inspired by Marxist ideals, aimed to work the land in order to create a socialist communal model of society. In time these efforts would eventually lead to the early Kibbutz Movement. But then how did all of these different movements eventually come together? Well, this is where a Jewish Austrian journalist named Theodor Herzl finally comes in.
Just five years after Pinsker’s death, Herzl published his book, Der Judenstaat or The Jewish State in 1896. This changed everything. Not necessarily because Herzl’s ideas were so new. In fact, they were very similar to Pinsker’s. But mainly because the timing was so perfect. There had been so many Zionist developments that the stage was now set for Herzl’s vision. And so when Herzl convened the First Zionist Congress, Pinsker’s Hovevei Zion was absorbed into Herzl’s new Zionist organization. But disagreements remained.
Ahad Ha’Am, as before, opposed what he now referred to as westernized Zionism. He saw Herzl’s Zionism as devoid of Judaism and as an abandonment of Hebrew language and Jewish culture in preference of a purely westernized state. He considered Herzl’s vision of mass immigration and a nation-state to be wishful thinking. He also objected to the Zionist Movement’s general dismissal of the Arab population already living in the land. Herzl died in 1904 and so he didn’t witness the most significant development towards his vision, which came 13 years later when the Balfour Declaration was issued in 1917.
This was a statement by the British Government that supported the establishment in Palestine of a national home for the Jewish people. It was a hard-won result of more then a decade of effort by Zionist leader, Dr. Chaim Weizmann. Weizmann’s mentor, none other than Ahad Ha’Am, advised him during the Balfour negotiations. Ultimately, Ahad Ha’Am’s cultural Zionism merged with Herzl’s political Zionism. Once it was clear that not only was a Jewish state feasible but that a large immigrant population and Jewish culture were already flourishing in the land.
So, do we think there’s just one idea that defines Zionism or that Zionism is the same for everyone? Whatever one’s flavor of Zionism, be it political, religious, cultural, social, or other, the unique advancements for the Jewish people that have come with the state of Israel, demonstrate how self-determination fulfills not merely a single expression of Zionism but as Zionism that can cover the entire spectrum of Jewish life. Zionism is not just about the successful return to Jewish sovereignty that was central to political Zionism or the spirituality and national redemption that was a concern of religious Zionism or the establishment of a socialist community dedicated to radical equality that was an ideal of social Zionism or even the revitalization of an ancient language, literacy, and culture that was the ambition of cultural Zionism.
Conclusion
Zionism is all of these things and much more. It is an acknowledgement of the unique role of the State of Israel in establishing a thriving, modern Jewish civilization as the embodiment of the Jewish people’s connection to their ancient homeland that is rooted in history and dedicated to the future.
