In search of Zion: reconsidering the political category of Zionist utopias

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ABSTRACT This article focuses on the so-called Zionist utopias in order to reconsider these unprecedented Jewish utopian novels, which arose in the late nineteenth century, from a different perspective to the canonical one that formed within the Zionist historiography of the 1940s. To do so, it examines the literary textual corpus and includes other new utopian sources that have not been considered thus far. It then offers a brief reconstruction of the rediscovery of this utopian imaginary by Zionist scholars. Finally, this article proposes a new historiographical interpretation based on the disjunction between dreaming of Zion and founding Israel in order to deconstruct the underlying Zionist teleological view and thus reconsider these utopias in the long history of Jewish emancipation.