- Here's some trivia for you.
When did Zionism get its start?
Ask the average person on the street,
and they would probably assume that Zionism
is a more recent phenomenon.
After all, the state of Israel is barely 75 years old.
Many think of Zionism as a response
to the horrors of the Holocaust.
World War II had Europeans feeling guilty
about what had happened to the Jews,
and were finally inclined to give the Jewish state a chance.
But Zionism's rise in the last century
isn't the first chapter of the story.
It's actually the culmination of a much longer one.
And to complicate matters further,
Zionism actually wasn't born just once,
but rather at three distinct moments in history.
It's not possible to fully grasp
the nationalist movement of Zionism
or to really understand the modern state of Israel
without getting this clear,
so let's get to the bottom of this, shall we?
When did Zionism get its start?
When you think of Abraham, you probably don't think Zionism,
and, obviously, Abraham himself never even heard that word.
But in many ways, Abraham was the first Zionist.
When Abraham left his home
to travel to the land of Israel in Genesis 12,
God didn't say, "I will make you a great religion,"
but, "a great people."
In other words, the Bible was signaling
from the very start that Judaism wasn't just a religion.
Judaism, by definition and from its inception,
included existing as a people in the land of Israel,
and that in itself is, well, a very Zionist idea.
You might think of this as Judaism's special sandwich,
combining the Jewish nation and religion
with ingredients homegrown in the Jewish homeland of Israel.
Judaism isn't one of those things, it's all of them.
It seems like everywhere you go in Israel,
someone has found ancient evidence of Jewish civilization,
demonstrating how Jews lived as a people
and practiced a unique religion.
The oldest proof archeologists have discovered
is from 1206 BCE, 3,200 years ago.
The Merneptah Stele inscription mentions Israelites
living in this land, then called Canaan, as a people.
Wherever you start the story,
Judaism pivoted on this Zionist triangle:
In the land, the people fulfilled God's vision.
It's a packaged deal, religion, nation, homeland.
Cutting Israel out of Judaism
is like trying to run software without the hardware.
The Jewish religion was designed around the land of Israel
to reinforce Jews' identity as a people.
So, back to our question, when did Zionism start?
Well, it seems that Zionism was first born
with the original Judaism.
The Bible's land-based Zionism established Jews
as the first of First Nations,
forever rooted in the same land,
reading from the same Bible,
speaking the same Hebrew language,
and continuing the same indigenous Jewish civilization.
But this special connection
between land, religion, and people was disrupted in 70 CE,
when the Romans destroyed the second temple,
torching the capital city of Jerusalem
and killing hundreds of thousands.
Many of the survivors were enslaved
or banished from their homeland,
and yet, wherever the Jews scattered,
they continued to define themselves by their homeland,
not their temporary homes.
For 2000 years, Jews prayed towards Zion,
the central hill in Jerusalem,
dreaming of their eventual return.
In exile, kept apart from Israel,
the children of Israel remained a people
set apart from their neighbors,
making the Jews forever strangers.
After centuries of discrimination and poverty,
in the 17- and 1800s, the world modernized,
European countries nationalized,
and the Jewish soul stirred.
The stage was set for Zionism's second birth.
The Enlightenment, the European movement of rationalism,
liberalism, and individualism,
promised the Jews equality and dignity,
but European reason would only go so far.
European nationalists mocked
the aspirations of Jewish nationals,
wondering why do Jews need their own national movement?
Why won't they fit in?
In 1789, the French Count Stanislas Adelaide
de Clermont-Tonnerre promised
to deliver everything to Jews as individuals,
but to Jews as a nation, nothing.
One Jew who got tired of that nothing was Moritz Hess.
He befriended Karl Marx and other early communists,
until they clashed.
Marx divided the world into classes
and saw everyone in constant competition
over how much money and power they had.
Hess disagreed.
He feared that Marx's obsession with class and power
would make everyone all over the globe the same,
without appreciation for the power of history,
heritage, geography, or identity.
Hess understood that the world was filled
with different peoples able to live side by side,
imagining individuals as different colored flowers
planted in one particular soil.
He thought nations flourished in their own natural habitats.
Europe's growing hatred of Jews also convinced him
the Jews needed to return home.
Defiantly, Moritz changed his name back to Moses.
In his 1862 book, "Rome and Jerusalem",
Hess proclaimed, "My nationality is inseparably connected
with my ancestral heritage, with the Holy Land.
and the Eternal City, Jerusalem."
Hess and some other thinkers
mapped out Zionism's core ideas.
If Italians could be free, proud Italians in Italy
and the Dutch could be free, proud Dutch people
in the Netherlands,
why can't the Jews be free and proud in their home,
the land of Israel?
But the European nationalists
who could not tolerate Jewish nationalism
showed that history was not yet ready
for a thriving Zionist national movement.
So if Abraham and biblical Judaism
first gave birth to the Zionist idea
that the Jewish homeland is central to Judaism -
Zionism version one, then the understanding
that the Jews are a nation with rights and dreams
like all other nations gave rise to Zionism's second birth,
Zionism version two.
Ultimately, the enlightenment disappointed most Jews.
Assimilation spread.
Antisemitism surged.
The 1881 to 1884 Russian Pogroms terrified Jews worldwide
with over 200 anti-Jewish riots,
unleashing mass rowdiness and rape.
The pogroms destroyed many Jews' hope
that they would be accepted by everyone.
Many desperately wanted to escape, but where could they go?
Some fled back into the bleak ghetto,
some, 2 million-plus, immigrated, mostly to America.
Some escaped into Marxist socialism's class-based promise
that they would no longer be defined as Jews,
but simply as workers, and some converted to Christianity.
Still, a few Jewish nationalists championed Zionism
to fight hatred and rebuild the Jewish community
by returning Jews to their homeland.
Enter Zionism version three.
Born again and maturing into adulthood,
Zionism now focused on establishing a Jewish state
in the way that so many other modern states formed.
This is also when the actual term Zionism was introduced,
first coined in 1890
by the Viennese anti-religious rebel, Nathan Birnbaum.
And it was at the first World Zionist Congress in 1897
that a charismatic journalist named Theodore Herzl
launched the formal Zionist movement
to win Jewish statehood in Israel,
renamed Palestine by the Romans.
So, if someone asks when was the state of Israel born?
It's easy to answer, 1948.
But if they ask when was the Zionist movement
that established Israel born,
it's pretty clear that it was much, much earlier.
Zionism was first born thousands of years ago,
when the Jews, as a people, became forever intertwined
with the land of Israel.
It was introduced again 200 years ago,
when the modern idea that Jews are a nation like any other
and not just a religion reemerged
amidst a wave of other nationalist movements.
And it reappeared yet again 125 years ago
when Theodore Herzl hosted his Zionist Congress
to declare that the Jewish people deserve a state,
because they are still historically connected to one land,
no matter where individual Jews might live today.
Viewed this way, the state of Israel
can be seen through a whole new lens.
Skyscrapers in Tel Aviv, dancing masses at the Western Wall,
these are the culmination not of decades,
not of centuries, but rather of millennia of striving,
of seeking to integrate all the core elements
of Jewishness as a religion, as a people,
and as a nation in a land.