Zionism

Overview

Recall questions on the aims and origins of Zionism, the Haskalah, Herzl, religious, cultural and labour Zionism, the State of Israel after 1948, the covenant and the land, Jewish rejections and critiques, and Gorny and Neusner.

What you need to know

Answer each one before you reveal it.

Questions from this subtopic

Each one with the model answer underneath.

1. 1

   What was the basic aim of Zionism?

   Model answer

   To bring Jews scattered across the world back to the land promised to their ancestors, and to re-establish Jewish national life there. Beyond that shared aim its supporters disagreed profoundly about whether the project was religious or secular, what kind of society should be built and what relationship it should have with the people already living in the land.

2. 2

   What conditions in nineteenth-century Europe gave rise to Zionism?

   Model answer

   Emancipation had granted Jews legal rights in much of western Europe without ending hostility towards them, and many who had assimilated fully still found themselves treated as foreign. In the Russian empire Jews remained confined and impoverished, and the wave of pogroms after 1881 was devastating. The Dreyfus affair in France, where a Jewish officer was falsely convicted amid open antisemitic agitation, persuaded many that legal equality was not enough.

3. 3

   What part did the Haskalah play in the emergence of Zionism?

   Model answer

   It cut both ways. By promoting secular learning, modern Hebrew writing and a sense of the Jews as a people with a history rather than only a faith, it supplied Zionism with its language and many of its leaders. But it had also urged Jews to integrate into European nations, so the failure of that hope in the face of persistent antisemitism was exactly what drove some of its heirs towards nationalism instead.

4. 4

   What had been achieved before Herzl?

   Model answer

   Leon Pinsker argued that hostility to Jews was a permanent condition of their homelessness and that only self-emancipation could answer it. The Lovers of Zion groups formed across eastern Europe from the 1880s, and the first wave of settlers reached Ottoman Palestine from 1882, founding agricultural settlements that survived largely on outside subsidy. The numbers who actually moved there in that century remained very small.

5. 5

   What did Theodor Herzl contribute?

   Model answer

   He turned the idea into an organised political movement with an address. His pamphlet arguing for a Jewish state made the case that antisemitism was permanent and that only sovereignty could answer it, and the congress he convened in Basel in 1897 created a movement with institutions, funds and a diplomatic strategy of seeking a recognised charter from the great powers.

6. 6

   What were the key political developments in the first half of the twentieth century?

   Model answer

   The British government's declaration of 1917 expressed support for a Jewish national home in Palestine while stating that the rights of the existing non-Jewish communities should not be prejudiced. Britain then governed Palestine under a mandate, immigration and land purchase grew, Arab opposition hardened, and British policy tightened, with the 1939 White Paper severely restricting Jewish immigration at the very moment European Jews most needed refuge.

Other ways to work this

The same content, four other ways.

What is inside Levo

Six ways to work the same material.