Part II Alex Grobman, PhD June 26, 2025
Rabbi Abraham Joshua Heschel pointed out that Zionism was “born out of memory, out of ritual and prayer, out of faith in the promise, out of loyalty to the biblical command, never to forget our origin, our link, never to relinquish hope for Zion and Jerusalem.”
“The return to Zion,” Heschel said, “is an unprecedented drama, an event sui generis for which there is no model, no analogy.” Never before in history “has a nation been restored to its ancient hearth after a lapse of 1,897 years.” For Jews, this resurrection was “an accord of a divine promise and a human achievement.” Rabbi Joseph B. Soloveitchik, the spiritual leader of Modern Orthodoxy, saw the rebirth of the State of Israel “in a political sense” as an “almost a supernatural occurrence.”
A team of experts from the Royal Institute of International Affairs, headed by British historian Edward Hallett Carr, concluded in 1939 that “Jewish national feeling [in the Diaspora] could never have remained so strong if Jerusalem had been blotted out and the place of it forgotten….”
Five years before Israel’s War of Independence, theologian Eliezer Berkovits said, “The creation of an autonomous Jewish body corporate is the sine qua non for the regeneration of Jewish religion and culture. Without it, further development of Judaism is impossible; without it, Judaism can hardly be saved in the present.”
Historian Abraham I. Edelheit believes Zionism—the Jewish national renaissance movement—was perhaps the most successful example of modern nationalism and one of the least understood. Zionism is a paradox: At its core is an attempt to return the Jewish people to their ancestral homeland, and make them “like all the nations.”
It is, he says, the “effort to return the Jew to history through national rebirth while rebelling against Jewish history; an attempt to restore Jewish tradition while recasting that tradition; an effort to make Jews like all the nations while highlighting the unique elements in Jewish culture, tradition and history.”
Motivation to Immigrate
Those who initially immigrated to the Yishuv (Jewish settlement in Palestine before the establishment of the State of Israel), historian Shlomo Avineri said, were motivated by a desire for self-determination, liberation and identity within the context of liberalism, secularism, modernism and nationalism unleashed by the French Revolution and the Declaration of the Human Rights of Man.
The Enlightenment, an intellectual utopian movement in the 18th century, posited that logic and reason would overcome superstition and hatred, explains historian George Mosse. With regard to the Jews, it was supposed to free the Jews from their old ways and enable them to acquire roots in their adopted lands. But the idea that it would usher in an era where bigotry and prejudice would be replaced with tolerance and moderation turned out to be a fantasy. It was ambivalent toward the Jews of Europe because in the 18th century they still lived behind ghetto walls, making them appear peculiar and parochial. Their dress, religious practice and ways of thinking set them apart. And even after the ghetto walls “fell,” masses of East European Jews maintained their “fossil” Judaism instead of assimilating.
Zionism itself did not develop before the 19th and 20th centuries, Avineri opines, because it was much more than just a response to antisemitism. It was an attempt to create a new Jew, based on Enlightenment ideas.
Zionist “colonists” were unique in that they had “no mother country,” as did European immigrants to foreign soil, observed historian Ilan Troen. The Yishuv was not a colony in the conventional sense. The Jews who went had no strong roots in Europe, and were not exploiting natural resources to export to mother countries. Israel has no towns or villages named New Warsaw, New Lodz, New Moscow, New Minsk or New Pinsk—unlike the New World, where settlements were named for old cities—i.e., New London, New Orleans, New York, New England and New Madrid.
By rejecting Europe and by creating the modern Hebrew language, Troen said, the Zionists tried to create their own intellectual and cultural energy without imitating or transplanting the old ways. They did not consider themselves outsiders or conquerors. They used biblical (Hebrew) names to affirm control over their geography. Their settlements were tangible manifestations of the Jewish return to the homeland.
Norman Bentwich, the first attorney general of Mandatory Palestine, observed, “Wherever you plant your foot in that land you tread on history. A hundred years ago Palestine was largely deserted and derelict.” Aside from the holy cities of Jerusalem, Hebron, Bethlehem, Nazareth and Tiberias, which were visited by pilgrims, and except for a number of biblical sites such as Gaza, Ascalon, Jericho, Shiloh and the graves of the righteous, most of the locations referred to in the Torah had not been identified.
Condition of Jews in Palestine: Early Zionist Era
During the 1880s, Sultan Abdul Hamid saw Zionism as another national movement endangering his empire, Efraim Karsh points out, but not the most threatening when compared to nationalistic fervor in Armenia and the Balkans. The Jews were a tolerated and inferior community he would not allow to possess Islamic lands, especially Jerusalem, Islam’s holy city. “Why should we accept Jews whom the civilized European nations do not want in their countries and whom they had expelled?” the sultan asked. “It is not expedient to do so, especially at a time when we are dealing with the Armenian subversion.”
Though not outwardly worried about Zionism, the sultan did not want a large number of foreigners, particularly with nationalistic interests, settling in his territory. Jews were specifically banned from immigrating, and new laws were enacted whenever ambiguities were detected in enforcing them. Yet between 1881-1882 and 1890, the Yishuv population doubled to 50,000 people, mostly due to immigration.
Relations with Jews improved after the Committee of Union and Progress (CPU) took control of Turkey in 1909, Karsh explains, but there was no government consensus on how to proceed. Following the Balkan wars of 1912-1913, Pasha Talaat turned to the Zionists for financial aid. Talaat expected that the Zionists would be able to influence worldwide Jewry to provide loans to Turkey in exchange for eliminating restrictions on immigration and property ownership in Palestine. As a sign of friendship, the Young Turks in September 1914 abolished the “Red Slip,” the temporary residence permit that had been in effect since 1901, as well as restrictions on Jewish settlement.
Dr. Alex Grobman is the senior resident scholar at the John C. Danforth Society, a member of the Council of Scholars for Peace in the Middle East and on the advisory board of the National Christian Leadership Conference of Israel (NCLCI). He has an MA and PhD in contemporary Jewish history from The Hebrew University of Jerusalem.