‘The Age-Long Dream’: Zionist Philosemitism

Abstract

The existence of ‘gentile Zionism’ has been extensively documented by historians.1 George Eliot, whose pro-Zionist novel Daniel Deronda appeared in 1876, is the ‘gentile Zionist’ perhaps most familiar to a wide audience.2 Gentiles favoured the restoration of a Jewish homeland on various grounds. Millenarian Zionists regarded the mass return and conversion of Jews as fulfilment of prophecy, a necessary prelude to the Second Advent (or Coming) of Jesus. This type of Zionism had a secure niche within the English Protestant tradition, and during the first half of the nineteenth century it was strong among Evangelical Anglicans.3 Humanitarian Zionists – who were sometimes religiously inclined – regarded the re-establishment of a Jewish homeland, with its concomitant Jewish migration, as a realistic means of alleviating the suffering of Jews in lands of oppression. Often this was accompanied by an explicit avowal that the non-Jewish world, in supporting Zionism, was atoning for centuries of persecution.