Zionism Definition Research Paper

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Zionism is the modern movement whose goal is the restoration of the Jewish people to the region on the eastern shore of the Mediterranean commonly known (at least until the establishment of the Jewish State of Israel in 1948) as Palestine or Zion. Not all of its adherents have been Jews. It draws, however, on ancient motifs sustained in Jewish collective memory, religion, and culture (and to some extent in the Christian West more generally), relating the telos of world-historical redemption and the coming of the Messiah to the restoration of the Jews to their ancient homeland and the building of the third, and eternal, holy Temple in Jerusalem. Since its inception in the nineteenth century, Zionism has been an ideologically multifaceted and internally contentious movement, and its fortunes have changed in complex relation with European anti-Semitism and with colonialism beyond Europe’s borders.

It is certainly difficult, and may be impossible, to present a summary account of Zionism, along with its bases of support and the sources of opposition to it, that is genuinely objective—not only because the movement continues to inspire intense passions, both positive and negative, but because its premises rest on accounts of history, geography, and nationality that are themselves fundamentally contested. Thus, Palestine refers to an ancient Roman province, to a British protectorate in the period of late European colonialism, and to the place claimed as a homeland by those residents of the region who have come to understand themselves as forming part of a non-Jewish, Palestinian nation. Speaking of the land as Zion reinforces the centrality of the region to Christian as well as Jewish sacred history and eschatological expectations. Even the notion that the Jewish people the world over constitute a single nation, central to Zionism and accepted as well by some competing Jewish movements prior to World War II (1939—1945), has not been universally accepted by Jews in the modern period.

Ancient And Medieval Roots

Zionism draws on a rich and powerful repository of memorial resources preserved through Jewish generations, which profoundly inform ritual and expressions of religious yearning. Memorial literature that has been continuously studied since the destruction of the First and then the Second Temples in Jerusalem mourns their loss, enjoins their memory, and promises their restoration. The model of return from exile, as noble adventure and divinely sanctioned, is prefigured in the chronicles of the return from Babylonian exile led by Ezra and Nehemiah. Portions of the Babylonian Talmud detailing the correct procedures for fulfillment of commandments and strictures that relate only to times when the Jews live in Israel and the Temple stands continued to be studied, both in commemoration of the past and in anticipation of a redeemed future.

Nearly all this commemoration took place not only in the absence of Jewish sovereignty, but outside the land. At least since the destruction of the Second Temple in 70 CE, and continuing throughout the Christian era until the twentieth century, Jewish communities have been found overwhelmingly outside the imagined national homeland. This condition is itself subject to differing designations with various ideological implications. The Hebrew and Yiddish terms galut or goles, commonly translated as exile, stress the element of loss inherent in location outside the homeland. On the other hand, the scattered Jewish communities are also commonly described as being in diaspora, an ancient term originally applied to colonies of Greek settlers throughout the Mediterranean. A thriving Jewish diaspora existed prior to the destruction of the Second Temple, and some recent scholarship has stressed the sustainability and creativity of Jewish and other diasporas.

Along with the memory of the land, its reality was preserved throughout the Middle Ages by the reports of occasional pilgrims, including famous Jewish artists and thinkers, such as the twelfth-century philosopher-poet Judah HaLevi. Extremely pious Jews sought to die, or at least to be buried, in the soil of Zion. Small settlements of religious mystics were established in Jerusalem and the Galilee during the early modern period. During the late seventeenth century, the false messiah, Sabbatai Zevi (1626—1676), raised hopes of immediate restoration of the Jews to Zion; Jews across the Western world sold their worldly goods and prepared for the journey that never came.

Modern Zionism

The modern movement of Zionism, understood in large part as a mobilization to “actualize” these ancient hopes and dreams, is inseparable from key aspects of modern European history, including the dissolution of the ancien regime; the rise of secularism and religious pluralism; and the effort to create one-to-one alignments between ethnic collective identities and territorially defined nation-states. As part of the first aspect, Jewish communities were simultaneously freed of historic restrictions on movement, settlement, and employment, and deprived of their historic self-governing character. As part of the second, the haskalah, or “Jewish Enlightenment,” sparked a profound internal critique and resistance to traditional modes of communal authority, based as it was on patriarchy, family, and class prestige, and mastery of religious law and lore. Meanwhile, chauvinist nationalisms in Europe spawned the modern variety of Jew-hatred that went by the “scientific” name of anti-Semitism. This inspired Zionism as a response, claiming that the only possible place for the Jewish people in a modern world of nation-states was together, preferably in its own historical homeland.

Starting in the late nineteenth century, various Zionist manifestos appeared. In Eastern Europe, Leon Pinsker’s (1821—1891) Autoemancipation, which was inspired by a wave of pogroms in 1881 and argued that the Jews would neither be safe nor free so long as they remained in an “abnormal” situation as guests and strangers, was published in 1882. In 1896 the Viennese journalist Theodor Herzl (1860-1904), who came to be canonized as the founder of Zionism, published his The Jewish State, arguing that the Jews would never be free nor gain respect until they ceased being a scattered minority. Ahad Ha’am (1856-1927), who argued that Zion should serve as a spiritual center for the renewal of world Jewry, did not carry the day, but his vision may be seen as a remarkable prediction of the relation between Jewish Israel and the Jews of the diaspora at the start of the third millennium. Intellectuals such as Judah Magnes (1877-1948) and Martin Buber (1878-1965), concerned with the ethical demand to acknowledge the presence and humanity of the Arab inhabitants of Palestine, argued early in the twentieth century for a binational solution to what came increasingly to be understood as a conflict between two nationalist movements struggling for control of the same land. The Revisionists, led by Vladimir Jabotinsky (1880-1940), contended that such reconciliation was impossible and that the conflict might well be a fight to the death, one that the Jews must at all costs win. Meanwhile the most popular variant of Zionism as a popular movement was Socialist Zionism, itself subject to bitter contention, though all of its adherents believed both that the way to revive the Jewish people was through the renewal of Jewish labor in the Jewish land and that the Zionist effort was consistent with the worldwide movement of the working class. Zionist ideology emphasized the close attachment between the people and the land in modern practice, not only in historical memory; and Zionist strategy prior to World War II involved substantial efforts to purchase land in Palestine.

World War Ii And Postcolonialism

World War II affected the Zionist movement in profound ways: It seemed to offer convincing proof that there was no safe future for Jews in diaspora, and it led to mass immigration by refugees and survivors to what was, until the late 1940s, still commonly called Palestine even by Jews. The establishment of the State of Israel in 1948 and the ensuing war marked a new phase in the history of the movement and the controversies surrounding it. Many Zionists understood themselves as anticolonialists, both because the Jews worldwide whom they sought to redeem could plausibly be understood as being “internally colonized” by various powerful nations and empires, and because the Zionist pragmatic and military effort involved resistance as well as collusion with the British protectorate. Palestinians displaced during the 1948 war known in Israel as the War of Independence were neither allowed by Israel to return to their homes, nor absorbed into surrounding Arab countries, thus exacerbating and perpetuating the Israeli-Palestinian conflict. The Soviet Union, after initially voting in the United Nations for recognition of Israel, came to be aligned with the Arab States and with the Palestinian movement, while much of the world came to see Israel and Zionism as opposed to postcolonial liberation struggles.

Consistent both with the Zionist ideal of worldwide Jewish peoplehood and with the reality of vastly different Jewish communities in various parts of the world, the mass absorption of a large percentage of the world’s Jews has been problematic and controversial. In the decades following World War II, the majority of the Jews of North Africa and the Middle East emigrated to Israel, as did a large percentage of the Jews of Eastern Europe and, somewhat later, the Soviet Union. Tensions arose and persist among these major immigrant groups. In the latter decades of the twentieth century, the secular Zionist goal of shaping the “new Jew,” free of supposed religious obscurantism and the supposed neuroses of diaspora, was challenged both by movements to retain rather than jettison traditional Jewish cultures and by an increasingly popular and militant combination of Zionist-exclusive territorialism and fervent religious orthodoxy. Moreover, a number of scholars and commentators have argued that by the end of the twentieth century, the era of “post-Zionism” had come, meaning that the fundamental goal of establishing and securing a Jewish state had been achieved, but that it was no longer feasible or necessarily desirable to persist in the attempt to gather in all of the world’s Jews.

Bibliography:

  1. Ben-Ari, Eyal, and Yoram Bilu, eds. 1997. Grasping Land: Space and Place in Contemporary Israeli Discourse and Experience.Albany: State University of New York Press.
  2. Benvenisti, Meron. 1986. Conflicts and Contradictions. New York: Villard.
  3. Herzl, Theodor. [1896] 1997. The Jews’ State. Trans. Henk Overberg. Northvale, NJ: Jason Aronson.
  4. Vital, David. 1975. The Origins of Zionism. Oxford: Clarendon.
  5. Zerubavel, Yael. 1995. Recovered Roots: Collective Memory and the Making of Israeli National Tradition. Chicago: University of Chicago Press.

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