The Making of Modern Zionism: The Intellectual Origins of the Jewish State by Shlomo Avineri

Shlomo Avineri was an Israeli political scientist. He was a professor of Political Science at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem and member of the Israel Academy of Sciences and Humanities.

The purpose of this book is, "Its aim is more limited: to delineate a number of aspects of Zionist thought, as expressed through the writings of selected nineteenth- and twentieth-century individuals.

Because Zionism rose as a secular, political movement under concrete conditions in nineteenth- and twentieth-century Europe but also drew on deep historical sources, some of them religious, it is in a way much more complex and pluralistic, and perhaps even baffling, than other modern national movements."

Jewish homeland

"What singled out the Jews from the Christian and Muslim majority communities in whose midst they have resided for two millennia was not only their distinct religious beliefs but also their link—tenuous and nebulous as it might have been—with the distant land of their forefathers. It was because of this that Jews were considered by others—and considered themselves—not only a minority but a minority in exile."

Jewish passivity

Jews justified their passivity and lack of action with "Jewish religious thought even evolved a theoretical construct aimed at legitimizing this passivity by a very strong skepticism about any active intervention in the divine scheme of things.

'Divine Providence', not human intervention, should determine when and how the Jews will be redeemed from exile and return to Zion."

Emergence of Zionism

"The most common explanation, in textbooks and political propaganda (both Zionist and anti-Zionist), relates the emergence of Zionism in the nineteenth century to the outbreak of anti-Semitism: the appearance of racist theories in Germany and France, pogroms in Russia in 1881–82, the Kishinev killings in 1903, and the Dreyfus affair."

"Jews were persecuted under the Visigoths and Byzantines; massacred during the Crusades; expelled from England, France, and then traumatically from Spain and Portugal; not allowed to reside in imperial cities in the Holy Roman Empire; forcibly converted in Portugal and Persia alike; made to wear distinctive clothes and barred from holding public offices in Christian Italy and Muslim Morocco.

In all these cases Jews reacted with resignation and by immigration to other countries but not to Palestine. What made them react to the persecution of the nineteenth century by turning toward Zion?"

"From any conceivable point of view, the nineteenth century was the best century Jews had ever experienced, collectively and individually, since the destruction of the Temple. With the French Revolution and Emancipation, Jews were allowed for the first time into European society on an equal footing. For the first time Jews enjoyed equality before the law; and schools, universities, and the professions were gradually opened to them."

"Since Christian society viewed its political organization as expressing the religious tenets of a Christian state, the Jew had to be excluded. He could, of course, be tolerated in the sense that most Christian societies in most periods allowed Jews freedom of worship: but the price for that toleration was apartness and clearly defined and legitimized discrimination"

Herzl: founder of modern Zionism

[Theodor] "Herzl was the first one to achieve a breakthrough for Zionism in Jewish and world public opinion. He turned the quest for a national solution to the plight of the Jewish people from an issue debated at great length and with profound erudition in provincial Hebrew periodicals read by a handful of Jewish intellectuals in the remote corners of the Russian Pale of Settlement into a subject for world public opinion. From a marginal phenomenon of Jewish life he painted the Zionist solution on the canvas of world politics—and it has never left it since."

"The Jewish establishment, both financial and rabbinical, viewed him, in most cases, with suspicion if not outright horror."
"More careful and less superficial people would have feared to tread where he did. But from the moment Herzl came to his conclusion about the necessity for a national solution to the Jewish problem, he correctly realized that such a momentous and revolutionary task could not be achieved through silent labor at the edge of world politics.

Articles in obscure Jewish publications would not mobilize the massive forces needed for such a tremendous transformative effort, ideological disputations between a few scores of semi employed Jewish intellectuals in unheard-of tracts would never get the message across."

"He, Theodor Herzl, a well-known but penniless journalist, would negotiate with the Sultan about granting a charter to the Jews for Palestine; he, the assimilated Jew, would find paths to the heart of the Pope; he, whose only weapon was his pen, would convince the Kaiser, Her Majesty’s Government, the Russian Imperial Minister of the Interior, all the high and mighty. None of these efforts proved successful."

"The Sultan was not convinced that an alliance with the Jews was the wisest policy open to him; the British government backed off even from the outlandish idea of allocating parts of East Africa for Jewish settlement; Emperor Wilhelm II probably did not exactly realize the implications of what Herzl was asking for; even Rothschild and Hirsch remained unconvinced and did not open their coffers. Nevertheless, Herzl could point to his achievements: through lobbying and impressing courtiers, bribing his way through the maze of the Ottoman court, calling on Wilhelm II when he visited Jerusalem, cooling his feet in the antechambers of the High Porte, besieging and pestering the shakers and movers of world politics—eventually, despite his failures, Herzl did reach all those rulers, talk to them or their immediate entourages, propose to them his ideas and plans. In that he succeeded more than anyone before him, and in doing all this he always appeared as if speaking as a plenipotentiary for a mighty Jewish empire—while behind him he had no movement and practically no organization, no money and no influence, and a pawnbroker's shop was sometimes his only financial support."

"The Balfour Declaration of 1917, the United Nations Resolution of 1947 calling for the establishment of a Jewish state in a part of Mandated Palestine, and other landmarks on the way to the Jewish state have been achieved not through Jewish economic or political power but through the ability of the Zionist movement to enlist again and again the intellectual and spiritual resources of a highly literate and vocal people, adept at polemics, loquacious and oriented toward public debate.

These were the weapons wielded by a weak, persecuted, and small nation in its struggle against extremely uneven odds. Herzl was the first one to realize their potential and forge them into a public force. Zionism and the State of Israel rely to a large extent on them until this very day."

It is worth repeating for its importance:

Emancipation [equality] makes things worse

"The emergence of this modern anti-Semitism in the country that stood for universalism and human fraternity and where the Jewish population was minuscule made Herzl realize the irony of the liberal conventional wisdom that Emancipation and equal rights will solve the Jewish problem. Not only is Emancipation unable to solve the problem, the problem in its new dimensions is itself caused by Emancipation and the emergence of the modern, secular Jew."

"According to Herzl, these processes would intensify, and he sees no guarantees or built-in mechanisms to curtail or reverse these developments in the future. The painful conclusion is that the Jews have ultimately only one way open to them—out."

"To be held in low esteem by that public opinion was the punishment for unworthiness. Here all specific Jewish qualities were esteemed... What did it matter that outside the ghetto was despised that which within it was praised? The opinion of the outside world had no influence, because it was the opinion of ignorant enemies. One tried to please one’s co-religionists, and their applause was the worthy contentment of one’s life. So did the ghetto Jews live, in a moral respect, a real full life. Their external situation was insecure, often seriously endangered."

"In his speech at the first Zionist Congress, Nordau explained that Emancipation was nothing but a thin veneer covering a much more complex social reality. Therefore, it rather quickly became evident that non-Jewish society was not yet ready to accept the Jews as equal members. The emergence of modern, racial anti-Semitism is now confronting the emancipated and educated Jew, and it, rather than the formalism of equal rights, expresses the authentic feelings of so many of the non-Jews vis-à-vis the Jewish question. Faced with this dilemma, the educated, Western Jew finds himself in a much greater quandary than that of the traditional Orthodox denizen of the ghetto."

Need for of a Jewish State

"For East European Jewry, the problem is mainly that of economic misery, whereas in the West the Jews find themselves in moral agony when faced with the failure of Emancipation to give an adequate answer to the quest for Jewish identity in the modern world. Both communities thus turn to the Zionist solution—the establishment of a Jewish state in Palestine."

"Therefore, for the continued existence of a national Jewish identity outside of Palestine, a Jewish community in Palestine is necessary, which will radiate its culture to the Diaspora and facilitate this modern Jewish existence."


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