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No. 46. | Vienna, 15th November 1901. | Fifth Year

On the Writing of the History of Zionism.

The history of the development of Zionism has yet to be written. Here and there we meet with noteworthy beginnings towards it. It was a glad surprise to us to find one such this time, not in a publication of our own persuasion, but in one of the most modern and most European of journals, in the Paris "Fronde," the well-known great women's paper, whose interest in Zionism we lately reported. In its numbers of the 31st of October and the 1st of November it gives an article signed with the cipher "B. Mil.," which sets forth the growth and the aims of our movement in a singularly lucid and understanding manner. We do not hesitate to reproduce the weighty exposition below in its entire content.

Zionism is the movement which has sprung up in the midst of Jewry and which strives towards the national independence of the Jewish nation upon the soil of its ancient homeland, Palestine. It is an historical movement which, throughout the whole of the Jewish Dispersion, under various names and forms according to the age, has either shown itself in visible activity or has remained latent. One might say, summing up, that during the centuries of Jewish suffering this movement for independence assumed three forms: 1. The form of military risings during the four centuries which followed the overthrow of the Jewish State by the Romans. The second form is that of the belief in a Messiah who should free his people from the foreign yoke; this belief expressed itself in mighty agitations and in emigrations, called forth by ardent and daring patriots who are known in Jewish history under the name of false Messiahs. Thirdly and lastly, the present form of the Jewish national movement, whose beginnings fall in the middle of this century and which afterwards took the designation of Zionism.

This is at once a political, an economic and a social movement, which has for its aim the restoration, the political rebirth of the Jews in Palestine, in order to secure their physical, intellectual and moral prosperity in freedom and well-being.

Zionism in its present form dates, not from the appearance of Dr. Herzl's pamphlet, as many believe, but from the Palestinophile propaganda of Alkalay, Nathan Friedländer, Rabbi Kalischer, Moses Hess*) and other German Jews, who in the years 1840 to 1862 published important works upon the Jewish national question. A committee for a Jewish colonisation of Palestine was formed in Germany in the year 1860 under the presidency of Dr. Loria. The idea spread in Austria, where circles for Jewish studies were formed. In France Joseph Salvador studied the Hebrew institutions and the history of the Roman dominion in Judæa; as the crown of his scientific and original labours he wrote the book "Paris, Rome, Jerusalem," in which he pleaded for the restoration of Jewish independence in Palestine. Although Salvador was an historian of the first rank, his purely theoretical conclusions nevertheless had no immediate practical success.

In the year 1857 the famous philanthropist Moses Montefiore attempted to found two Jewish agricultural colonies in Palestine. It is difficult to determine whether Montefiore had in mind a mass colonisation of Palestine by the Jews. Adolf Crémieux, one of the founders and president of the "Alliance Israélite Universelle," had in view the plan of an extensive colonisation of the ancient homeland of Israel when he came forward for the founding of a Jewish agricultural school at Jaffa. This appears from a speech delivered by him at a sitting of the "Alliance." The school in question was in fact founded by Charles Netter and exists to this day under the name of "Mikweh Israel."

In the year 1878 an English statesman, L. Oliphant, laid before the Jews his project concerning the re-acquisition of Palestine and its colonisation; the Prince of Wales, Disraeli, Salisbury, were favourable to the project; under the influence of Oliphant's propaganda several Jewish colonisation societies were formed in Roumania and Russia. Nor is the vigorous propaganda of Peter Smolensky in favour of the national idea and of the colonisation of Palestine to be forgotten.

In 1878 the agricultural colony of Pethach Tikwah was founded in Palestine. I pass over several further events of a like kind. — All this preceded the Russian massacres of the year 1881, a fact which proves that the ordinary condition

*) The esteemed writer of the article has left out of account the French democrat Erneste Laharanne, whose book upon the Eastern question was of great influence upon Moses Hess.