The term “Zionism” was coined in 1890 by Nathan Birnbaum.
Its general definition means the national movement for the return of the Jewish people to their homeland and the resumption of Jewish sovereignty in the Land of Israel.
https://www.jewishvirtuallibrary.org/jsource/Zionism/zionism.html
One of the most important aspects of modern Jewish life in Europe since the mid-nineteenth century was the development of a variety of Jewish national movements such as Zionists, Bundists and Autonomists that offered competing ideologies and solutions to the issues of Jewish nationhood and individual nationality as well as to problems posed by modernity. Among these problems was the breakdown of the parochial molds of Jewish life and the fragmentation of the traditional Jewish community. This article focuses on Zionism, the most radical of all modern Jewish national movements.
Zionism’s revolutionary character stemmed from its emphasis on the need to construct a Jewish national life in response to modernity and to do so only in Eretz Israel — the Land of Israel. Additionally, Zionists were the first to believe that policies on the major issues confronting Jewry should be subject to free and open debate. Furthermore, due to the catastrophic condition of East European Jewry, they were the first to assert that the solution to the “Jewish Problem” hinged on migration to a homeland (Vital, 1998, p. 208-9).
https://www.jewishvirtuallibrary.org/jsource/isdf/text/maor.html
The Trigger and the Cause
The most common explanation for the emergence of Zionism is the spread of anti-Semitism. Interestingly, no Zionist movement emerged as a result of anti-Semitic events during the eighteenth century or at any earlier period. The rise of the Zionist Movement following the escalation of anti-Semitism at the end of the nineteenth century implies, therefore, that anti-Semitic events could have been a trigger to the emergence of Zionism but not a cause. Any analysis that makes a cause and effect argument regarding Zionism should look for a factor that operates continually on a given effect for a considerable period of time. In the case of Zionism, this factor was the breakdown of traditional Jewish life and the attempts by Jews to reconstruct their life within European nation states (Eisenstadt, 1992).
The Emergence of Zionist Ideology
Rabbi Yehudah Shlomo Alkalay (1798-1878) and Rabbi Zevi Hirsch Kalischer (1795-1874) appeared in the mid-nineteenth century and were among the first proponents of Zionism to argue that Jewish settlement in Israel was a preparatory stage for the coming of the Messiah. A more modern utopian version of Zionism — based on a socialist perspective and framed in terms of moral necessity —was developed by Moses Hess (1812-1875). In his Rome and Jerusalem (1862), Hess argued that Jews were not a religious group but rather a separate nation characterized by a unique religion whose universal significance should be recognized. The attempts of religious reformers to mold Jewish ceremonies into a version of Christianity left only the skeleton of a once magnificent phenomenon in world history. The response, according to Hess, should be a political organization of Jews as well as the establishment of a Jewish state in Palestine that would act as a spiritual center and a base for political action, embodying socialist principles within its institutions.
The Coalescence of the Jewish National Movement
The Jewish national movement appeared on the stage of history in the 1870s with the emergence of associations for the promotion of immigration of Jews to Palestine –Hovevei Zion(Lovers of Zion) – in a number of Russian cities and later spreading to Poland. The movement adopted three central goals that it saw necessary for a healthy nation and society: Auto-emancipation (i.e., self-action by an organized national body); productivity (i.e., the restructuring of the historical professions of Jews and the utilization of new sources of livelihood such as agriculture) and some measure of home-rule (Ettinger and Bartal, 1996).
Bibliography/Sources:
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Avineri, A. (2007). Herzl. Jerusalem: The Zalman Shazar Center (in Hebrew).
Avishai, B. (2002). The Tragedy of Zionism: How Its Revolutionary Past Haunts Israeli Democracy. New York: Helios Press.
Berlin, G. L. (1996). The Brandis-Weizmann Dispute. In J. Reinharz & A. Shapira (Eds.) Essential Paper on Zionism (pp. 337-370). New York: New York University Press.
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Vital, D. (1998). Zionism as Revolution? Zionism as Rebellion? Modern Judaism, 18(3), 205-215.
Interesting how the folks at the Jewish Virtual Library agree with me that Zionism is a relatively modern movement. But I guess they are just "Nazi Jew-haters".
