THE IDEA OF RETURN: A PRE-HISTORY OF ZIONISM
Before there was a word for it, there was an idea: Jews should return to their historic homeland. It was an idea that grew throughout the 19th century and was a result of two trends. First, the Emancipation of Europe’s Jews, the end of their legal segregation in ghettos. This began during the French Revolution and then more generally during the Napoleonic conquests. This changed Jewish identity more profoundly than any event arguably since the expulsion from Spain three centuries earlier. Second, nationalism replaced monarchism as as organizing principle of society. People were no longer subjects of a ruler but citizens of a nation. This nationalism had an ethnic component which excluded Jews, who were considered “a nation within the nation.”
I wrote about this in my book, “Emancipation: How Liberating Europe’s Jews from the Ghetto Led to Revolution and Renaissance” from which the sections in boldface below are taken.
A series of events propelled the idea that there should be a Jewish return to their historic home in Palestine. First, in 1840, came the Damascus Blood Libel outrage.
A Catholic priest disappeared in Damascus which was part of the Ottoman Empire. A Jewish barber was tortured and since torture usually works made a false confession to the crime. Pogroms followed. But while the event echoed medieval anti-Semitism in in the modern 19th century, the wider Jewish community in Western Europe had since Emancipation acquired a more secure place and a voice. Influential, wealthy Jews including the Rothschilds and their relation by marriage, Sir Moses Montefiore lobbied the British and French governments for help. (Montefiore’s four-times great grand-nephew, is the historian Simon Sebag Montefiore)
There was a reason for this. Britain and France already had considerable influence in the affairs of the Ottoman Empire which was slowly dying and full of internal factions that affected the economies of the European powers.
When the crisis passed, some Jews (and non-Jews) thought about the deeper implications of what had happened:
“Towards the end of 1840 one German Jew reflected on the events in Damascus and how they had played out in Europe. He saw the crisis as "a new point of departure in the Jewish life." He had reached his conclusion based on the fact that so many in Europe, from French Prime Minister Adolphe Thiers, to newspaper editors, to ordinary people in the street had been willing to accept the Blood Libel charge without question. This man wrote, "In spite of the degree of education which European Jews have attained there exists a barrier between them and the surrounding nations, almost as formidable as in the days of religious fanaticism ... They don't understand how it is possible such a stupid medieval legend should be given credence even for a moment."
The author, Moses Hess, continued, "We shall always remain strangers among the nations. They may tolerate us and even grant us emancipation but they will never respect us ... in spite of enlightenment and emancipation, the Jew in exile who denies his nationality will never earn the respect of the nations among whom he dwells." When Hess wrote those words he was a committed communist busy working on behalf of the "European proletariat." But he continued to look for an answer to his "Jewish Question," and eventually Moses Hess found it: the Jews will never be allowed to fully integrate into European societies and therefore must return to their own country, to Palestine.”
Moses Hess was the oldest of a group of radical thinkers, most of whom were upper middle class Jewish sons of emancipation: the poet Heinrich Heine and Karl Marx. It was Hess who introduced Marx to the term “communism.” Marx called him, the “Communist Rabbi.”
The second incident happened, in the late 1850s. A Jewish boy, Edgardo Mortara, was taken from his family in Bologna. Apparently, as an infant he had been ill and secretly baptized by his nurse. The church decided Edgardo was now a Catholic and took him away from his family. Despite pleas from his parents the boy was not returned by the Church authorities. The case roiled Europe and became caught up in the politics of the risorgimento, the unification of Italy into a modern nation state.
Back in Germany old Moses Hess followed the events in Italy and decided he had had enough. While the Risorgimento worked its way around the Italian Peninsula creating a new nation he listened to educated Germans mocking the whole enterprise. He was offended by a lack of outrage over the abduction of Edgardo Mortara. The "Communist Rabbi" could no longer suppress an idea that had been gnawing at him since the Damascus days. Hess was convinced there was no possibility that Jews could ever live safely among Europeans. There would always be a large element in the European population whose world-view was founded on Jew-hatred. Hess had agitated for political systems based on universal theories of the brotherhood of man. Workers of all the world were supposed to unite regardless of which country they lived in. Now he was beginning to doubt that such an internationalist view was correct.
Race science was becoming an intellectual trend around the continent and Hess was not immune to some of its ideas. There really were different national or racial characteristics among people, he decided. Equality was a matter of respecting the differences between different national groups. The Jews were a nation. Two millennia after Jerusalem was sacked by the forces of Rome and the community scattered around the world, the Jewish people still maintained their national characteristics. There was no reason for Jews to deny this. Until they were established in their own state they could never hope to be recognized as equals.
In 1862, Hess published a book called Rome and Jerusalem: the Last National Question. It is written as a series of epistles to an unnamed reader. Some of what Hess prophesied in 1862 can make a modern reader gasp. "Germany as a whole, in spite of its collective intellectuality, is in its practical social life far behind the rest of the civilized nations of Europe." This, according to the author, is because of the German belief in the superiority of the Volk, in comparison to other races, especially as regards Jews. "The German hates the Jewish religion less than the race; he objects less to the Jews' peculiar beliefs than to their peculiar noses." Hess sees clearly where German Jew hatred must lead,
"The race war must first be fought out and definitely settled before social and humane ideas become part and parcel of the German people."
In the midst of social analysis masquerading as prophesy, Rome and Jerusalem contains the seeds of an idea to overcome the situation.
"Judaism is rooted in the love of the family; patriotism and nationalism are the flowers of its spirit ... it is primarily the expression of a nationality whose history, for thousands of years coincides with the history of the development of humanity; and the Jews are a nation which, having once acted as the leaven of the social world, is destined to be resurrected with the rest of the civilized nations."
Then Hess steps back from prophecy to advocate a political solution to the dilemmas of Emancipation: the creation of a Jewish state in Palestine. His idea is not based in religion but rather in the logic of the modern world in which Jews are living. Jews are reforming themselves out of existence in order to obtain a civil equality, that in Germany at least, they can never attain. If there was a Jewish state, accepted as an equal member of the company of nations, they could have their citizenship and still live anywhere they liked, just as a Frenchman could live in England, if he chose.
He advocated buying up parcels of land in Palestine and re-settling Jews there; not emancipated Jews from western Europe but those of North Africa and Russia and Poland, places where emancipation had not occurred and where oppression and poverty scarred their lives. In Palestine they could be farmers again, as they had in Biblical times. They would turn the place as green as Lebanon
The new Jewish state would be a light to the nations showing them how to live in socialist harmony.
Since the days of Spinoza there had been occasional calls for re-establishing a Jewish state in Palestine, but they had been made by millenarian Protestants eager to live out the prophesies of Revelation. This was an entirely different concept. Hess proposed a modern secular Jewish state, not a religious one, a nation like any other. It would be several decades before the idea became a political movement and given a name: Zionism.
The next anti-Semitic event actually began a return to the land before there was a word for it: the assassination of Czar Alexander II. A wave of pogroms swept Russia. Odessa, on the Black Sea, had a large Jewish population and had not really known that scale of anti-Semitic violence, but was now overwhelmed by it. My great-grandfather left the city then and a decade later managed to make it to America. Others stayed behind and in the late 1880s began to raise money to buy land in historic Palestine, a sub-division of the Ottoman vilayet (province) of Beirut. Small groups of Russian Jews began to return to the area in this same decade. (You can listen to more about this in a BBC radio documentary I made in 2018.)
The return had begun and it would be a decade before the movement was finally named Zionism and its first congress convened in Basel, Switzerland in 1897. The Zionist movement grew out of the last of the 19th century traumas of anti-Semitism: the Dreyfus Affair. It was founded by Theodore Herzl, a Jewish journalist, and another upper-middle class son of Emancipation. Herzl had covered the trial of Alfred Dreyfus in 1894 and been shocked by the anti-Semitism it had unleashed.
I have your book but all my books are packed away as we are trying to move nearer to our daughter and her growing family in London. I am really missing so many books right now and at this time especially.