Zionism

Overview

Recall questions on Herzl, his pamphlet on the Jewish state, the first Zionist Congress, his diplomacy and the Uganda proposal, Ahad Ha'am and cultural Zionism, the streams of modern Zionism, Orthodox and Progressive responses, non-Jewish support and opposition, and Zionism and anti-Semitism.

What you need to know

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Questions from this subtopic

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1. 1

   Who was Theodor Herzl, and what led him to political Zionism?

   Model answer

   Herzl lived from 1860 to 1904. Born in Pest to an assimilated family and trained as a lawyer, he worked as a playwright and as the Paris correspondent of a leading Viennese newspaper. He had earlier considered assimilation, and even mass conversion, as answers to hostility towards Jews. What changed his mind was the anti-Semitism of the 1890s at close range: the trial and public degradation of a Jewish officer in the French army on a fabricated charge of treason, and the election of an openly anti-Semitic mayor in Vienna, one of Europe's most cultured cities. He concluded that if the most enlightened states in Europe behaved this way, emancipation had failed, and that the problem was not one of prejudice to be educated away but a political condition to be solved politically.

2. 2

   What is the central argument of Herzl's pamphlet on the Jewish state?

   Model answer

   Published in 1896, it argues that hostility to Jews is not a passing irrationality but a permanent feature of any society in which Jews live as a minority, reproducing itself wherever they go and intensifying as they succeed. It follows that neither assimilation nor philanthropy can solve it, and that the only remedy is for Jews to become a nation like others in a territory of their own. Herzl treats this as an administrative and diplomatic project rather than a religious one: the territory must be granted by international agreement and recognised in public law, and he sketches the institutions that would carry it out, a political body to represent the Jews and a company to handle the economics, along with details of migration, labour and settlement. Religion is to be respected but kept out of government.

3. 3

   What was the significance of the first Zionist Congress?

   Model answer

   Held at Basel in August 1897, it turned an idea into an organisation. Around two hundred delegates from many countries met in public, which itself asserted that the Jews were a people with a political will. The Congress founded the World Zionist Organisation with Herzl as president, a permanent executive and an elected assembly, and adopted a programme stating that Zionism sought for the Jewish people a home in Palestine secured under public law, to be pursued by settlement, by organising world Jewry, by strengthening Jewish national feeling and by obtaining the necessary governmental consents. It also created the financial instruments that followed, including a bank and later a fund for purchasing land. Herzl privately recorded that at Basel he had founded the Jewish state and that within about fifty years everyone would see it.

4. 4

   What diplomatic efforts did Herzl make, and how successful were they?

   Model answer

   He worked almost entirely at the level of governments. He sought a charter for Jewish settlement from the Ottoman Sultan, who controlled Palestine, offering financial help with Ottoman debt, and was refused. He courted the German Kaiser, who received him in Constantinople and again outside Jerusalem during Herzl's single visit to Palestine in 1898, but declined to sponsor the project. He negotiated with the British government over settlement in Cyprus, in Sinai near El Arish and finally in East Africa, and met the Russian interior minister after the Kishinev pogrom, and he sought an audience at the Vatican, which rejected the idea. He obtained no charter and no territory. The achievement was of a different kind: he made the Jewish question a subject of international diplomacy and gave the Zionist movement standing and machinery.

5. 5

   What was the Uganda proposal, and why did it split the movement?

   Model answer

   In 1903 the British government offered territory in East Africa, in what is now Kenya, for autonomous Jewish settlement. Herzl brought it to the sixth Zionist Congress that year, not as a substitute for Palestine but as an emergency refuge, with the Kishinev pogrom fresh and Russian Jews in immediate danger. A vote to send an investigative commission passed, and the Russian delegates, the very people it was meant to save, walked out in protest. The split was fundamental: for Herzl the object was to rescue Jews and any territory would serve in the short term, while for his opponents the whole point of Zionism was the land of Israel, without which the movement was merely a relief agency. The scheme was dropped after Herzl's death in 1904, and those who continued to argue for territory elsewhere left to form a separate organisation.

6. 6

   Who was Ahad Ha'am, and why did he write under that name?

   Model answer

   Ahad Ha'am, meaning one of the people, was the pen name of Asher Ginzberg, who lived from 1856 to 1927. He was born in the Ukrainian part of the Russian Empire into a Hasidic family, received a thorough traditional education, taught himself secular subjects and European languages, and became the leading Hebrew essayist of his generation, based for many years in Odessa and later in London and Tel Aviv. He was active in the early settlement movement and in a secret society intended to raise its cultural standards, and he edited an influential Hebrew journal. The modest pen name fitted the argument he made, that the national revival had to come from the character of the people rather than from great men and grand schemes.

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