Jewish National Movement Research Articles

The re-emergence of jerusalem: new Zionist approaches in attaining political goals prior to the First World War

From 1882, the beginning of Zionist activity in Palestine, and until the years immediately prior to the First World War, Zion, i.e. Jerusalem, never received real attention from the Jewish national movement. Indeed, Zionism's attitude to Jerusalem's population and to the entire city could he summed up as negative, derisive, estranged and neglectful. Zionist efforts were channelled towards creating agricultural settlement in the coastal plain and in Galilee. In the urban sector, Zionist activity concentrated on Jaffa. Adjacent to Jaffa the Zionists planned the construction of Tel-Aviv, which was to mature into the first Zionist city in Palestine. Zionism's attitude towards Jerusalem underwent a substantial change in the years immediately preceding the outbreak of the First World War. The Zionist Movement grew aware of the fact that its traditional modes of activity for securing political rights and sovereignty in Palestine had not achieved results. The Zionists further assumed that the political future of Palestine would be decided imminently in international fora. This sense of urgency obligated the Zionist movement to adopt alternative and original measures to secure Zionist goals in Palestine. Territorial-settlement activity did not cease but the emphasis shifted to demographic ‘conquest’, magnifying national prestige and cultural ‘conquest’. In Jerusalem, one could apply all three of the new methods in tandem. Zionism intended to achieve cultural influence and ‘conquest’ via a plan to establish a Hebrew University there. This project constituted the centre-piece of Zionist cultural ‘colonization’ in Palestine.

The struggle for equal rights for women in the early jewish defense underground: bar giora and ha’shomer, 1907-1918

The Jewish National Movement, emerging from the second half of the nineteenth century, brought many waves of emigration to Palestine. One of those waves, the Second Aliyah, gave birth to new social-national concepts, including the aspirations both to establish underground organizations to defend the Jewish national enterprise in Palestine and to meet the aspirations of women workers struggling to transform the traditional status of women to one of equality. This essay explores the women’s struggle for equal rights within Bar Giora and Ha’shomer between the years 1907-1918.

German Jewry: Its History and Sociology Selected Essays

This history of post-Emancipation German Jewry and of Holocaust aftermath has received considerable scholarly attention. The study of Jewish life in Germany in 1930s and migration impelled by Nazi period has, on other hand, been comparatively neglected. The work of Werner J. Cahnman (1902-1980) goes a long way toward filling this gap. Cahnman's examination of the Jewish people that dwells among nations is focused on Germany because it was country in modern times symbiosis . . . has been most intimate and it also has been country where conflict degenerated into monstrosity of Holocaust. This representative anthology of his essays shares a common theme, although examples differ in thought, method and style. Whether he explores stratification of pre-Emancipation German Jewry, rise of Jewish national movement in Austria, or such an esoteric topic as influence of kabbalistic tradition on German idealist philosophy; whether he muses on of Jewish history or reports on his firsthand experience in Dachau, Cahnman's work reflects central concerns of his personal and scholarly existence as a German Jew. Because he usually combined extensive empirical data with his own background and personal experience, he is able to craft a penetrating analysis of recent history of Jewish life in Central Europe. Werner Cahnman believed that writing of history is vital for continued cultural identity of human kind.

Unconventional “Christian Zionist”: The theologian Reinhold Niebuhr and his attitude toward the Jewish national movement

(1990). Unconventional “Christian Zionist”: The theologian Reinhold Niebuhr and his attitude toward the Jewish national movement. Studies in Zionism: Vol. 11, No. 2, pp. 183-196.

India on the Map of ‘Hard Science’ Folkloristics

SINCE the science of folk literature came into being, India has been one of the main sources of its subject matter. As it became known in the last century, the wealth and colourfulness of Indian folk literature and the very age of its sources overwhelmed the Western centres of scholarship. The first to pay attention to the lore of the simple folk in India were the well-educated British ladies and gentlemen of the colonial adminstration in the last quarter of the 19th century and the first quarter of this century. Indian intellectuals joined this stream later and in smaller numbers. That is the very period during which the collecting of popular antiquities and folklore blossomed in England and on the Continent, borne by the wave of the romantic and nationalistic trends and movements. While, however, the tide of 19thcentury nationalism brought with it the development of the main social and academic tools and institutions (associations, archives, museums, publishing enterprises, university chairs) for folklore research in Europe, India did not join in. The rising Indian modern national consciousness had no need to seek support by reference to its folk culture. Like the Greek and Jewish national movements, the Indian movement could build on its extremely rich national classical heritage, featuring great works in all arts and humanities, a basis which the young, just awakening European nations could not boast of. In India, the interest in folk culture arose mainly after attaining national statehood. The interest developed from two directions: anthropologists trained in part abroad (first in England, and after independence, mainly in the U.S.A.) included in their interests also folk literature of the tribes they happened to investigate;' this, however, did not usually include an interest in the folk literature of the main Hindu groups. The interest in these groups was to be developed by philologists and linguists. A decade and a half after the attaining of independence, Upadhyaya's review2 had still to report only of collecting activities, made by both native philologists and by foreign missionaries and colonial officials. The first systematizations of Indian folk literature, ancient and modern, came from the West.3 The attitude changed rapidly in recent years. The beginning of an independent interest in folk literature as such in the Indian public is signalled by the publication by a private publisher of the impressive series of 21 volumes of folktales, each from a different province of India.4 And now, new people are coming to the Indian scholarly scene. As in the West, the main impetus has come from linguistics. Under the patronage of linguistic institutions, folklore institutions and publications begin to appear, and linguistically trained scholars turn to the investigation of folk literature.5 From being a side-concern of philologists and anthropologists, the investigation of folk literature develops into an independent field. Collection for the sake of preservation is now being coupled with the search for understanding, a turn towards theory. As with most countries, developed and developing, the theory is being taken over from the few

Zionism in Sweden

The first Zionist Congresses left the Jewish majority in Sweden relatively untouched. It is true that Professor Gottlieb Klein, the influential Rabbi of Stockholm, a student and personal friend of the great German reformer, Abraham Geiger, and to a lesser extent his colleague in Gothenburg, Dr. Koch, did oppose the Jewish national movement, but not until January 1910, when the first Zionist society was founded in Stockholm, did Swedish Jews seriously consider this alternative to their “prophetic” Judaism. Efforts by the Zionists in Sweden to gain public attention for themselves were mainly ineffectual until Kurt Blumenfeld, the General Secretary and Chief of Information for the World Zionist Organization in Berlin, visited Stockholm and Gothenburg in 1912 to deliver several open lectures.