Zionism today is a reality. There exists a highly institutionalised and progressive Israel.' Yet not so long ago it was in the realm of aspiration and utopia. In the world of the intellectual nomads, the young radicals of Jewry travelling from Mikhailovsky to Bakunin, from Marx to Plekhanov, from Lenin to Bernstein, Zionism was relegated to sentimentalism. What suddenly brought about its realisation? What forces recruited and invigorated Zionist realisation as expressed in Aliya to Eretz Israel which paved the way for Zionist realism and settlement of Eretz Israel? Was it Stychisni? Mostly not. The Stychic process described a supposedly spontaneous movement of capital and labour to Eretz Israel. It was an intellectual and social doctrine. A study of the composition of immigrants shows that very few Jewish proletarians or capitalists came. Those who came were not intellectuals of the university or gymnasium type but the Pale's articulate group. In the eyes of Jewish russified intellectuals, in the age of materialism and revolutionary realism at the end of the nineteenth century, Zionist doctrines were regarded as 'non-scientific'. Professor Mendelsohn's excellent study of the origins of Jewish working class struggle in the Pale clearly demonstrates that in the absence of a non-Jewish workers' constituency and in view of their non-admission into Russian academic circles or the Imperial bureaucracy, these russified Jewish intellectuals opted first for propaganda, then for agitation among the Jewish workers of the Pale.3 The first generation of a labour aristocracy, the autodidacts of the Jewish workingmen's circles in Bielorussia-Lithuania or North-West Russia at the end of the nineteenth century were trained and educated by the intellectuals. The orientations of the artisan labour aristocracy were populist. They were russified, non-Marxist (some were even fervently anti-Marxist), secular and anti-orthodox.4 This group was a target of Zionist recruitment. Yet it was not among the artisan aristocracy,5 but mainly from the Jewish petite bourgeoisie6 and their 'half-Intellectuals' (non-modernist Yeshiva scholars) that the first Socialist Zionists emerged. The Jewish intelligentsia on the whole contributed, or aspired to contribute, men, ideas and resources to Marxism, Russian Socialism and Communism, not to Zionism or its modified form Socialist-Zionism. Socialist-Zionists recruited from all sections of the Jewish society but only in small numbers. The Haskalah