The Rise of Zionism and the World Wars : Introduction To The Region

By the late 19th century, Jews had begun to doubt the improvements in their status promised by the liberal notions of the Enlightenment. In Czarist Russia, Jews were victims of increasingly violent government-sponsored pogroms. In Germany and Austria, anti-Semites had banded into powerful political parties. In the wake of the Dreyfus affair (where mobs cried “A. mart lesjuifs” in the streets of Paris following the trial, for spying, of ajewish military officer), even France, the role model for liberal revolutions, seemed an unwelcoming option.

One observer at the trial was Austrian journalist Theodore Herzl who, in 1896, published a small pamphlet entitled The Jewish State, calling for the establishment of a Jewish homeland as the only effective answer to Jewish persecution. This had been proposed earlier in such works as Leo Ptnsker’s Auto-Emancipation, but never before had a secular, pro-Enlightenment Jew like Herzl so despaired of the possibility of Jews ever being accepted as equals or even tolerated by other Europeans. Impelled by the grave situation of Russian Jewry, Herzl was willing to consider a number of sites in the drive to establish a Jewish state. However, as the options fsuch as Uganda and South America) for settlement were broached, it became : apparent that only Palestine had the emotional lure to prompt Jews to immigrate by ; the hundreds of thousands.