The Response: Zionism

Abstract

The use of the term “nation” among the founders of Jewish secular nationalism […] was almost always in the ethnic-biological context, and not the cultural-territorial. […] Zionism almost always interchanged in its historic imagination the principle of the religious Jew and the ethnic-Jewish principle. (Sand 1999, p. 343) Zionism is a political movement for the return of the Jews to their homeland. It was formally established on August 29–31, 1897, at the First Zionist Congress in Basel, Switzerland. To most Western European Jews this was an odd idea: Although identity crises were quite common in Jewish history, this alliance that had discarded many of the traditional formal religious symbols in an attempt to integrate into the non-Jewish world, now blatantly declared its Jewish national identity. Emancipation had presumably opened the gates for Jews to enter the world at large; however, they soon realized that even though they might have dropped all their Jewish identification marks to others, they were still Jews. As Jews in Western Europe learned, liberation from the restrictions of the ghetto did not lead automatically to integration into society. Even when Judaism as the religion of a minority community was grudgingly accepted by non-Jews, very few Jews were successfully assimilated. Thus, many Jews who would have preferred assimilation faced identity crises that they had never before experienced, and Zionism seemed to offer a gate to the world at large according to its rules. Instead of denying their Jewish identity, Zionists claimed that prevalent social customs should recognize their Jewish uniqueness. Until then, Judaism provided a common past; now it offered a common future (Katz 1986, pp. 131–132). Thus, in response to physical racial associations, political Zionism was coupled with the idea of the biological identity of the Jew. Discussions about the right of the Jews to their homeland in Palestine were actually discussions about their biological essence, which went above and beyond their religious, cultural, or even national arguments.