Summary
The first organised political manifestation of modern Jewish nationalism in Zachary Lockman’s account: a small, loose-knit movement that crystallised after the pogroms of 1881 to promote Jewish immigration to and settlement in Palestine and the reconstitution of Jewish national life there (Comrades and Enemies: Arab and Jewish Workers in Palestine, 1906-1948, lines 416-418).
Details
- The Lovers of Zion understood migration to Palestine as ontologically different from migration anywhere else: a return through time and space to the ancestral homeland, the only place Jews could achieve personal and collective regeneration through commitment, love and labour (Comrades and Enemies: Arab and Jewish Workers in Palestine, 1906-1948, lines 416-418).
- Hibbat Tziyon’s proto-Zionism, and later Herzl’s political Zionism, remained minority movements in eastern Europe, overshadowed by other tendencies; of the approximately 2.4 million Jews who left eastern Europe between 1881 and the First World War, less than 3 percent went to Palestine (Comrades and Enemies: Arab and Jewish Workers in Palestine, 1906-1948, lines 418-420).
- Despite slender resources the movement established new Jewish agricultural settlements, moshavot; within a few years many were on the verge of bankruptcy and collapse and were rescued by Baron Edmond de Rothschild and later other European Jewish philanthropists, who assumed control of many settlements with large-scale finance, technical assistance and paternalistic supervision (Comrades and Enemies: Arab and Jewish Workers in Palestine, 1906-1948, lines 420-422).
- By 1900 there were twenty-two moshavot with a total population of about 5,000, most organised on the Algerian colonial model, with European Jewish farmers employing local Arab peasants; yet most Jews in Palestine, including most of the First Aliya (1881–1903), preferred to live in towns (Comrades and Enemies: Arab and Jewish Workers in Palestine, 1906-1948, lines 422-424).
- The movement was not unitary or monolithic, and is treated by Lockman alongside the Zionist Organization founded in 1897 as encompassing tendencies that shared broad premises while differing sharply (Comrades and Enemies: Arab and Jewish Workers in Palestine, 1906-1948, lines 424-426).
Related pages
Comrades and Enemies: Arab and Jewish Workers in Palestine, 1906-1948, Zionism, Theodor Herzl, Edmond de Rothschild