Saladin has since become a contemporary Palestinian hero, symbolizing the Arab hope for liberation of Palestine after a lengthy period of colonization and the establishment of the Jewish-Zionist state. For their part, the Zionists also drew a lesson from the demise of the Latin kingdom. By identifying the major “mistake” of the Christian settlers—their failure to maintain their cultural, technological, and military links with their countries of origin and their openness to the local Levantine culture—the Zionists hope to avoid it.
THE SEEDS OF ZIONISM IN EUROPE
About 150 years before the triumph of Zionism, traditional Jewish communities in western Europe slowly began to be dismantled. The political and social emancipation granted to Jewish citizens by several European states following the French and American revolutions produced a small but very influential Jewish cultural enlightenment movement, the Has kala, which was highly ambivalent about Jewish religion and ethnicity. More important results of the political emancipation included large waves of secularization, both in conjunction with and separate from attempts at complete assimilation of the Jews into local non-Jewish society. In addition, emigration increased from eastern Europe to North America and to a lesser degree to South America.5 The countereffect of these processes was the appearance of Jewish Orthodoxy, which attempted to rebuild and redraw the boundaries of the religious community by imposing stricter social control on its members and overseeing their daily lives.
The ideological and lifestyle opportunities and options presented to Jews by the brave new world of sociopolitical emancipation and intercontinental mobility were immense. Even nationalism opened up new horizons for Jews, who could now choose to adopt a new collective identity and become loyal solely to their French, German, Dutch, or English citizenship. Alternatively, they could choose to divide themselves between private and public spheres, between religion and nationalism, and to be Jewish by religion at home and German, say, by nationality in public. In the context of European nationalisms, Zionism had no place. Other ideas also captured imaginations. A radical transformation of the entire world order, based on socialist, communist, or some other universalistic ideology, would also, it was thought, include personal or collective salvation for Jews. Later, the historian Simon Dubnow fused nationalism, internationalism, and secular Jewishness into a non-Zionist cultural nationalism.
At the beginning of the nineteenth century, there were about 2.5 to 3 million Jews in the world. By the end of the century, their number had grown to close to 13 million—one of the most unprecedented demographic increases known to history. About four-fifths of the world's Jews lived in eastern Europe, including the “Pale of Settlement,” a frontier zone of the Russian Empire designated by the government in 1794 as permitted territory for Jewish settlement. Here Jewish semi-autonomous communal life flourished in the absence of the newly created Western dichotomies between religion and secularism, private and public spheres, citizens' rights and oppression and persecution. During this period, the Jews rapidly transformed themselves from a semi-rural population into an urbanized people, socially organized around the almost exclusively Jewish ghetto, or shtetl, in which local leadership was able to exercise control over the members and boundaries of the community.
In 1881-82, a wave of pogroms directed at Jews broke out along the western frontier of the Russian Empire. At the same time, the Romanian government reduced many of the rights accorded to its Jewish subjects. Many of the Jews affected by these events immigrated to America, while a much smaller percentage established associations to prepare for their return to what Jews had always considered their utopian fatherland and patrimony—Palestine/Eretz Israel (the Land of Israel), the Holy Land. The best known of these movements was a small group of high school students in Krakow known as the Bilu association, which was supported by a larger organization called the Lovers of Zion, established in Katowice (Silesia) in 1884. Envoys were sent to buy land in Palestine and to establish agricultural colonies there. A striking similarity exists between this group's motives and those of the first Protestant immigrants to North America, as seen in the mixture of articulated religious convictions strengthened by a history of persecution. This movement founded colonies such as Zichron Yaakov, Hadera, Gadera, and Mish-mar Hayarden. In addition, and unrelated to the Bilu movement, an agricultural school (Mikve Israel) was founded in 1870 for Jewish students by a French-Jewish philanthropist organization, the Alliance Israélite universelle, and an agricultural settlement was set up by Orthodox Jews who had left Jerusalem in 1878. Later, in Zionist historiography, this immigration came to be considered the “first wave” of Zionist immigration and as such was linked to other, subsequent “waves,” despite the fact that it was not politically driven and that the newcomers did not possess a coherent ideological vision.
All the lands on which these colonies were established were purchased from major landowners, and, in many cases, the Arab peasants who had previously leased the land, and often considered it to be their own property, were driven away. The Jewish colonists tried to be self-sufficient, but economic necessity soon forced them to employ hired labor. In many cases, the seasonal and permanent laborers they employed were the Arab peasants previously expelled from the same lands. This caused friction between the colonists and the local population and even led to attacks on colonial settlements, such as that by Bedouin tribal warriors on Petach Tikva. A circumstance that allowed for these frictions was the general weakness of the Ottoman Empire and the poor state of law and order outside urban areas and military garrisons. One response of the Jewish colonists was to adapt to the common pattern of cooperation at the time and hire protection from local Arab strongmen and chiefs.
On several occasions, the Ottoman authorities tried to bar Jewish immigration and impede the transfer of land to foreign ownership, as evidenced by a law to this effect promulgated in 1893. Support from the local Sephardi Jewish community, who all held Ottoman citizenship, and bribes to Turkish officials cleared many of these obstacles, but not all the Ottoman clerks were corruptible. A Tiberias district officer, Amin Arsalan, bitterly opposed the registration of extensive Jewish land purchases, because he saw it as part of the Arab “denationalization” of the district. This episode ended when, following Jewish intervention in Istanbul, Arsalan was fired. From 1892 onward, Arab notables sporadically resisted Jewish colonization. In Jerusalem, for example, they petitioned the Ottoman government, demanding an end to Jewish immigration and land purchases. In general, however, they never posed much trouble for Jewish immigration, mainly because the scope of immigration was very small and never amounted to a real threat to the interests of local notables. On the contrary, their lands actually rose in value.
THE BIRTH OF THE ZIONIST IDEA
In 1894, an assimilated Jew, Captain Alfred Dreyfus, was found guilty of treason by a French military court and sentenced to degradation and deportation for life (he was subsequently fully exonerated in 1906, reinstated as a major, and decorated with the Legion of Honor). The Dreyfus Affair, which was exposed by Émile Zola's article “J'accuse” in 1898, shocked the Jewish world, especially Western assimilated Jews. It seemed to provide evidence that even a completely assimilated Jew with a brilliant military career in an enlightened and free country such as France could not escape the clutches of anti-Semitism. Among the journalists covering the trial was Theodor Herzl, a young correspondent representing the famous Viennese newspaper Neue Freie Presse. According to Zionist myth, the Dreyfus Affair was the trigger to Herzl's search for a solution to the “Jewish Problem.” Herzl, born in a Budapest ghetto in 1860, was, like Dreyfus, a completely assimilated Jew who had never been particularly concerned by his ethnic origins. He held a doctorate in law, but was preoccupied with writing theatrical plays and newspaper articles. The Dreyfus trial and subsequent outbreaks of anti-Semitism changed his life.
Herzl's first thought was a collective and honorable conversion of world Jewry to Christianity. His second was to find a place in the world for an ingathering of Jews and establish an independent Jewish state. Inasmuch as he was a completely secular product of the late European colonial world, he envisaged this state in political, social, and economic terms. Among other places, he considered Argentina, with its abundance of free land, natural resources, and good climate. Later, he also considered the British protectorate of Uganda in East Africa, which was politically convenient. Initially, he thought Palestine inappropriate owing to its lack of resources