During the First World War and its aftermath, the Zionist movement in many regions managed to evolve from relatively small groups, primarily of bourgeois intellectuals, to become a mass movement that in many cases came to dominate Jewish political and social life. This meteoric rise can be attributed to the hard, everyday work of Zionist activists in the communities of East-Central Europe. The introduction identifies the key questions at the heart of this development and anticipates the main problems and themes of the book. In order to situate the events of 1914–20 in a wider regional and historical context, central aspects of Jewish life in East-Central Europe before the outbreak of the First World War are explained. The different legal, economic, and cultural conditions under which the actors of the book lived produced conflicting responses to many of the main challenges posed by modernity—nationalism, antisemitism, economic transformation, and mass migration. One of these responses was Zionism, which from Lithuania to Austria presented itself in many different forms. The introduction discusses the various trends in the Zionist movement, the role of Palestine in activists’ thinking, and their engagement in their local communities––questions that would be central in the years of war and revolution.
Death of a Nation? Debating the Great Transatlantic Emigration from Hungary, 1900-1914
