local society was the key to this predicament. In the 1890s he became a journalist and, according to his own version of his life, it was at this time that he realized how potent anti-Semitism was. He concluded that there was no hope for assimilation and opted instead for the foundation of a Jewish state in Palestine as the best solution to what he defined as the “Jewish Problem.”
As these early Zionist ideas were aired among Jewish communities in countries such as Germany and the United States, prominent rabbis and leading figures in those communities rejected the new approach. Religious leaders dismissed Zionism as a form of secularization and modernization, while secular Jews feared that the new ideas would raise questions about the Jews’ loyalty to their own nation-states and would thus increase anti-Semitism. Both groups had different ideas about how to cope with the modern-day persecution of the Jews in Europe. Some believed that the further entrenchment of Jewish religion and tradition was the answer (as Islamic fundamentalists would do at the same time, when faced with European modernization), while others advocated for further assimilation into non-Jewish life.
When Zionist ideas appeared in Europe and the United States between the 1840s and the 1880s, most Jews practiced Judaism in two different ways. One involved entrenchment: living within very tight religious communities, shunning new ideas such as nationalism, and indeed regarding modernization as such as an unwelcome threat to their way of life. The other way involved living a secular life, which differed from that of the non-Jewish communities in only very minimal ways—celebrating certain holidays, frequenting the synagogue on Fridays, and probably not eating in public during the fast of the day of atonement (Yom Kippur). Gershom Scholem, who was one such Jew, recalled in his memoirs Berlin to Jerusalem how, as a member of a young Jewish group in Germany, he used to dine with his friends in the same restaurant in Berlin during Yom Kippur; on their arrival, the proprietor would inform them that “the special room for the fasting gentlemen in the restaurant was ready.”1 Individuals and communities found themselves between these two poles of secularization on the one hand and Orthodox life on the other. But let us look more closely at the positions they adopted towards Zionism in the second half of the nineteenth century.
Jewish secularism is a slightly bizarre concept of course, as is Christian secularism or Islamic secularism. Secular Jews as described above were people with various degrees of connection to religion (very much as a secular Christian in Britain celebrates Easter and Christmas, sends his children to Church of England schools, or attends Sunday mass occasionally or frequently). In the latter half of the nineteenth century, this modern form of practicing Judaism became a powerful movement known as the Reform movement, which looked for ways of adapting religion to modern life without succumbing to its anachronistic aspects. It was particularly popular in Germany and the United States.
When the Reformists first encountered Zionism, they vehemently rejected the idea of redefining Judaism as nationalism and the creation of a Jewish state in Palestine. However, their anti-Zionist stance shifted after the creation of the state of Israel in 1948. In the second half of the twentieth century, the majority among them created a new Reform movement in the United States, which became one of the strongest Jewish organizations in the country (although not until 1999 did the new movement officially vow allegiance to Israel and Zionism). However, a large number of Jews left the new movement and set up the American Council of Judaism (ACJ), which reminded the world in 1993 that Zionism was still a minority view among Jews, and which remained loyal to the old Reformist notions about Zionism.2
Before that schism, the Reform movement in both Germany and the United States had provided a strong and unanimous case against Zionism. In Germany, they publicly rejected the idea of a Jewish nation and proclaimed themselves “Germans of the Mosaic faith.” One of the German Reformists’ early acts was to remove from their prayer rituals any references to a return to “Eretz Israel” or the rebuilding of a state there. Similarly, already in 1869, American Reformists stated in one of their first conventions
that the messianic aim of Israel [i.e. the Jewish people] is not the restoration of a Jewish state under a descendant of David, involving a second separation from the nations of earth, but the union of the children of God in the confession of the unity of God, so as to realize the unity of all rational creatures, and their call to moral sanctification.
In 1885, another Reformist conference stated: “We consider ourselves no longer a nation, but a religious community, and we therefore expect neither a return to Palestine, nor a sacrificial worship under the sons of Aaron, nor the restoration of any laws concerning the Jewish state.”
One famous leader in this respect was Rabbi Kaufman Kohler, who repudiated the idea “that Judea is the home of the Jew—an idea which ‘unhomes’ [sic] the Jew all over the wide earth.” Another leader of the movement at the end of the nineteenth century, Isaac Mayer Wise, often ridiculed Zionist leaders such as Herzl, comparing them to charlatan alchemists claiming to contribute to science. In Vienna, the city of Herzl, Adolf Jellinek argued that Zionism would endanger the position of Jews in Europe and claimed that most of them objected to the idea. “We are at home in Europe,” he declared.
Apart from the Reformers, liberal Jews at that time rejected the claim that Zionism provided the only solution for anti-Semitism. As Walter Lacquer shows us in his book, The History of Zionism, liberal Jews regarded Zionism as a fanciful movement that provided no answer to the problems of the Jews in Europe. They argued for what they called a “regeneration” of the Jews, involving a display of total loyalty to their homelands and a willingness to be fully assimilated into them as citizens.3 They hoped that a more liberal world might solve the problems of persecution and anti-Semitism. History showed that liberalism had saved those Jews who moved to, or lived in, the UK and the USA. Those who believed it could happen in the rest of Europe were proven wrong. But even today, with hindsight, many liberal Jews do not see Zionism as the right answer then or now.
Socialists and Orthodox Jews began to voice their criticisms of Zionism only in the 1890s, when Zionism became a more recognized political force very late in the decade, thanks to the diligent work of Herzl. Herzl understood contemporary politics and wrote utopian stories, political tracts, and newspaper reports summarizing the idea that it was in Europe’s interest to help build a modern Jewish state in Palestine. World leaders were not impressed; neither were the Ottomans, as the rulers of Palestine. Herzl’s greatest achievement was bringing all the activists together at one conference in 1897, and from there building up two basic organizations—a world congress promoting the ideas of Zionism globally, and local Zionist outfits on the ground expanding the Jewish colonization of Palestine.
Thus, with the crystallization of Zionist ideas, the criticism of Jews opposed to Zionism also became clearer. Apart from the Reform movement, criticism came from the left, lay leaders of the various communities, and from Orthodox Jews. In 1897, the same year as the first Zionist conference was convened in Basel, a socialist Jewish movement was born in Russia: the Bund. It was both a political movement and a Jewish trade union. Bund members believed that a socialist, even a Bolshevik, revolution would be a far better solution to the problems of Jews in Europe than Zionism. They regarded the latter as a form of escapism. More importantly, when Nazism and Fascism were on the rise in Europe, Bundists felt that Zionism contributed to this brand of anti-Semitism by questioning the loyalty of Jews to their homelands. Even after the Holocaust, Bundists were convinced that Jews should seek a place in societies that cherish human and civil rights, and did not see a Jewish nation state as a panacea. This strong anti-Zionist conviction, however, slowly subsided from around the mid-1950s, and the remnants of this once-powerful movement eventually decided to support the state of Israel publicly (they even had a branch in the Jewish state).4
The reaction of the Bund did not trouble Herzl as much as did the lukewarm response of the Jewish political and economic elites in places such as Britain and France. They saw Herzl either as a charlatan whose ideas were far removed from reality, or worse as someone who could undermine Jewish life in their own societies where, as in Britain, they had made immense progress in terms of emancipation and
