Introduction
“For Jewish historians Zionism is, of course, one of the pre-eminent facts — for most, it is the crucial issue — of Jewish life in the modern age, and it therefore engages their complete attention”.– (Hertzberg, 15).
The ideas underlying the numerous institutions of Israel are not new to the idea of the Jewish state: that sees sovereignty as a tool for the solution of the Jewish crisis. National independence, as the defined means for solving the Jewish crisis, is an idea revealed in all the institutions of Israeli society and in the political construction of the Jewish state.
Thus the rationale of Israel, embodied in its economic, cultural, as well as social institutions, comprise the following: to build up Hebrew as the national language; to take up mass immigration of Jews who cannot or do not wish to be located in other countries; to set up a community in Israel free from the social as well as cultural ills that in the past attended the Jewish position as a minority people dispersed all through the world; and to perform necessary transformations in social as well as economic distribution, create suitable socioeconomic institutions, and promote cultural changes necessary for the understanding of such a revolutionary program.
In all these efforts, the original myths of Jewish independence–the will to declare the right as well as obtain the ability to control one’s own national destiny and freely express one’s own national individuality–is disguised, though with varying comprehensibility and in various forms (Shimoni, 81).
Main text
Israel is one of those modern societies whose early institutions were evidently shaped by an ideological movement. Israel is identical to other new states whose political institutions straightforwardly obtain from the nationalist movement that won their sovereignty. But additionally, a wide variety of economic, social, as well as cultural institutions of the new Jewish state were originally developed by the Zionist organization along with its associated bodies. In these respects, Zionism had a remarkable impact among nationalist movements. It must rather be compared to social revolutionary as well as radical reform movements.
The Zionist movement and the rise of Israel are terrific exceptions. Jews did not face the common nationalist circumstances of being exploited in their own land by a foreign ruler, the national enemy, who infuriated all of them, whatever their category or kind, by the same agonizing contact to the point where they could focus their various hostilities in a single legend image. The Jewish people lived as a minority in many countries all over the world, among many diverse ruling nations as well as under different regimes. The oppressions they suffered were different in kind, varying from intense to barely visible and no single foe could reasonably be held accountable for all Jewish frustrations.
Hence, when Jewish nationalism arose, rival beliefs did not surrender to it. They engaged instead in a sharp polemic through which their own positions became more entirely complicated as well as well defined. Nor did the whole nationalist movement think upon the principal purpose of national sovereignty. Many nationalist factions arose, each maintained that its individual goal was most significant and all others secondary.
Zionists detested the idea of restraining distinguishing Jewish qualities as well as aspirations for the sake of approval in gentile society. Yet they proposed to press on to many of the very social, cultural, as well as economic reforms started by earlier modernists; but by relating them to a diverse purpose, the immigration in Zion, they distorted the nature and enlarged the range of these reforms (Almog, 125).
In addition to the objective of political sovereignty, Zionists announced the following precise aims: to build up Hebrew as a spoken language and the base of a national consensus; to transfer to Palestine all Jews who could not or did not desire to live in Diaspora countries; to institute a community in Palestine free from the peculiar social, economic, as well as cultural problems that overwhelmed the Jewish position as a dispersed minority people. When Israel arose, the Zionist idea of the auto-liberation of the Jews was realized in the clearest, most accurate form, through the institution of the Jewish state. This was a topmost accomplishment, the capstone of an institutional structure exemplifying many other, nonpolitical, Zionist aims.
In the year 1948, Hebrew was a spoken language in Palestine, and the language of teaching in Jewish schools from the kindergarten to the university. Jews had established that they could be farmers as well as workers–and soldiers, if requirement be–as well as scholars in addition to merchants.
They had an economy resolutely established on a base of Jewish labor in agriculture as well as industry as well as the service trades; the community had established its ability to absorb immigrants as well as expected rapid growth in the future The commencement of Zionism may be traced to the generation of European Jews who experienced the increase of political anti-Semitism on the continent since the 1870s, oppressive anti-Jewish nationalism in Rumania, pogroms, and, in particular, the overlooking of pogroms by Russian radicals, in the 1880s.
The last struck home with disturbing effect among the Jewish intelligentsia: many who had hoped for a “coherent” solution of the Jewish problem on liberal lines now turned in aggressive disenchantment against attitudes as well as assumptions they had beforehand shared. They not merely denied the supposition that gentiles would kindly grant liberation to Eastern European Jews if Jews adapted themselves to Western humanism; they fervently rejected so obedient a Jewish policy as worthy of contempt.
Anti-Semitism, they contended, was not just an indication of historical backwardness among some gentile communities. It was entrenched in enduring features of the Jewish situation: in their homelessness, their worldwide minority status, or their incomprehensible, anxiety-provoking, millennial endurance in exile. As a result, anti-Semitism should be anticipated to continue wherever Jews lived in gentile society, whether or not liberalism was in fact the wave of the future.
The Jews could only in fact be free– and, indeed, only ought to have freedom–if they freed themselves by communal action: by an “auto-emancipation.” So, too, they would recover a true culture not by slavishly copying a general, Western Enlightenment but by refining their own significant tradition as well as national independence (Almog, 1987, 121-125).
Such stress on national independence and self-sufficiency is, of course, not exclusively Zionist. Similar ideas as well as feelings were widespread in nationalist revivals everywhere. From the French Revolution to pan-Slavism, there were many models whose influence could have created a Jewish nationalism, if Jews had been adequately susceptible to such influences.
But for most of the nineteenth century, Jewish receptiveness to a nationalist solution of their problem was efficiently blocked. Devout traditionalists observed the history of Jewish suffering as reparation to be affectionately borne until the messiah brought deliverance, and they suspected any suggestion for active efforts by Jews to finish the exile as unorthodox. Modernists who favored action to end Jewish disabilities as well as improve their social along with their economic positions had other reasons to refuse nationalist ideas: the argument that Jews were a separate nation was used as a disagreement against their liberation by anti-Semites throughout Europe.
Therefore, the nationalist revivals that Jews observed around them did not give birth to a noteworthy parallel movement of Jewish nationalism. Individual thinkers in the West developed a Jewish nationalist policy as well as some traditionalists saw messianic portents in the nationalist uprisings of the time, but no previously effective political movement arose until disenchantment with gentile liberalism set in among East European modernists (Shimoni, 78-81).
Conclusion
One further constituent that made Zionism striking to some Western Jews was their growing concern over the effects of the rationalist universalism of Jewish sacred reform and of secularist liberalism in Western countries. Young Jews brought up in such a setting too often troubled their parents by discarding their tribal loyalties; or, otherwise, the young might themselves find their parents’ secularism or reformed religion to be repugnant expressions of a bourgeois lifestyle.
Both situations could lead, among other divergence from the recognized Western Jewish consensus, to a heightened admiration of the solid ethnic-rootedness believed to typify the East European Jewish community. Zionism, as an expression of this class, drew some German Jews of Orthodox religious setting in the early years.
Later, particularly after closer contacts with Eastern Europe during World War I, an avant-gardist group of young Zionists in Berlin, Prague, as well as other centers of German modernist culture came to lead the German Zionist movement. Both there and in America and other Western Jewish communities, Zionism was taken up, like the fashion for neo-Hasidism enthused by Martin Buber and others, as part of a broader rebellion of the young in opposition to the older Western Jewish institution.
Works Cited
Almog, Shmuel. Zionism and History: The Rise of a New Jewish Consciousness New York: St. Martin’s Press, 1987.
Hertzberg, Arthur. “The Zionist Idea: A Historical Analysis and Reader”. Jewish Publication Society, Philadelphia (1997): 15.
Shimoni, Gideon. The Zionist Ideology. Hanover and London:University Press of New England, 1995.