6. The Promised Land

2021 ◽  
pp. 61-69
Author(s):  
Ilan Stavans
Keyword(s):  
Nineteenth Century ◽  
Jewish Life ◽  
National Literature ◽  
Jewish Literature ◽  
Jewish State ◽  
Promised Land ◽  
Zionist Movement ◽  
Theodor Herzl ◽  
Palestinian Literature

“The promised land” looks at the Zionist movement at the end of the nineteenth century in its commitment to create a Jewish state that could not only normalize diaspora Jewish life but also establish a national literature. It meditates on the work of Theodor Herzl, Vladimir Jabotinsky, Chaim Nakhman Bialik, Sh. Y. Agnon, and Amos Oz as canonical voices in Israeli literature. It is worth reflecting on Palestinian literature written in Hebrew, as in Anton Shammas’s Arabesques, and ask the question: ought it to be considered part of Jewish literature? Israeli literature, despite argument to the contrary, is another facet of modern Jewish literature in the diaspora.

A ‘Polis’ in Jerusalem: The Jewish State

1997 ◽  
pp. 432-448
Author(s):  
Yaacov Shavit
Keyword(s):  
Nineteenth Century ◽  
Classical Antiquity ◽  
Western Civilization ◽  
The Political ◽  
Late Nineteenth Century ◽  
Jewish State ◽  
Liberal Democratic ◽  
Political Experience ◽  
Zionist Movement ◽  
Late Nineteenth

This chapter turns to politics. Here, the return of the Jews to history was also their return to the realm of politics and statesmanship, whether as participants in European politics in various countries or as a new emerging political entity in Palestine from 1882. The idea of a Jewish state could be nourished by the memories of Jewish independence and Jewish sovereignty in biblical and post-biblical times, or by the messianic prophecies, but no one seriously thought of a revival of a Jewish kingdom. Thus it was the European political experience which was the political school of the Zionist movement. When Jews of the late nineteenth century lost faith in absolute enlightened monarchies (or after monarchies gave way to other types of government), the liberal-democratic paradigm of state that they adopted was closer to the political heritage of classical antiquity than to the Jewish political heritage. In that they followed the course taken by Western civilization.

Beyond the Nation-State

2018 ◽  
Author(s):  
Dmitry Shumsky
Keyword(s):  
Central And Eastern Europe ◽  
Self Determination ◽  
Late Nineteenth Century ◽  
Nation State ◽  
Jewish State ◽  
Zionist Movement ◽  
Theodor Herzl ◽  
History Of ◽  
Late Nineteenth ◽  
State Of Israel

The Jewish nation-state has often been thought of as Zionism's end goal. This bracing history of the idea of the Jewish state in modern Zionism, from its beginnings in the late nineteenth century until the establishment of the state of Israel, challenges this deeply rooted assumption. In doing so, the book complicates the narrative of the Zionist quest for full sovereignty, provocatively showing how and why the leaders of the pre-state Zionist movement imagined, articulated, and promoted theories of self-determination in Palestine either as part of a multinational Ottoman state (1882–1917), or in the framework of multinational democracy. In particular, the book focuses on the writings and policies of five key Zionist leaders from the Habsburg and Russian empires in central and eastern Europe in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries: Leon Pinsker, Theodor Herzl, Ahad Ha'am, Ze'ev Jabotinsky, and David Ben-Gurion to offer a very pointed critique of Zionist historiography.

3. Theodor Herzl and the creation of the Zionist movement, 1897–1917

2016 ◽  
pp. 22-34
Author(s):  
Michael Stanislawski
Keyword(s):  
Theory And Practice ◽  
Great Success ◽  
Jewish State ◽  
Anti Semitism ◽  
Zionist Movement ◽  
Theodor Herzl ◽  
The Creation ◽  
Set Up

The man universally credited with founding the Zionist movement was Theodor Herzl (1860–1904). Herzl’s Zionism was purely political in theory and practice: the Jews as a nation did not need a new culture, language, or concept of the messianic era, but only a national polity of their own, whose creation would solve the problem of anti-Semitism both for the Jews themselves and for Europe as a whole. His book Der Judenstaat (The Jewish State) was a key publication, and he set up the First Zionist Congress in Basel in August 1897. This was a great success, but did not resolve the fundamental ideological divides within the Zionist movement.

Envisioning a Jewish Maritime Space

2018 ◽  
Author(s):  
Björn Siegel
Keyword(s):  
Interwar Period ◽  
Personal Networks ◽  
Shipping Industry ◽  
Jewish State ◽  
Shipping Company ◽  
Spatial Factors ◽  
Mass Migration ◽  
Political Interests ◽  
The Future ◽  
Theodor Herzl

This chapter examines the ideological and economic dimensions of the Zionist concept “conquest of the sea” that emerged in the 1920s and 1930s by focusing on the role played by Arnold Bernstein in the emergence of an example of a Jewish shipping industry during the interwar period. In 1895, Theodor Herzl characterized the future Jewish state as the end product of an organized mass migration and endorsed the notion of “conquest of the sea” as a necessary component of this process. The chapter first provides a background on the Palestine Shipping Company founded by Bernstein before discussing the spatial factors that influenced the emergence of a Jewish shipping industry. It suggests that the construction of a Jewish maritime “space” was guided by ideological clashes, economic and political interests, and personal networks.

Conclusion

2012 ◽  
pp. 360-370
Author(s):  
Shaul Stampfer
Keyword(s):  
Nineteenth Century ◽  
Young People ◽  
Jewish Identity ◽  
Jewish Life ◽  
Effect Change ◽  
Jewish Society ◽  
Traditional Approaches ◽  
Desire To Change

This concluding chapter examines changes to the role of yeshiva in Jewish society as well as several developments to yeshiva history after the nineteenth century. By the end of the nineteenth century, the changes and conflicts that had struck the Jewish world had affected the yeshiva too. Contemporary discussion of the yeshiva was frequently in the context of the Haskalah and noted its power to effect change. There is no clear answer as to what it was that persuaded young people to abandon traditional Jewish life, but the wholesale attribution of this to the Haskalah is not self-evident. It seems much more likely that the threat to traditional ways came from indifference to Jewish identity rather than from any desire to change that identity. Indifference is naturally hard to identify, and it was easier for conservatives to battle against a concrete enemy, equally eager to do battle, than to engage with an attitude that was so contemptuous of traditional approaches that it did not even bother to argue with them.

‘A Better Remedy’

2021 ◽  
pp. 251-290
Author(s):  
Rotem Giladi
Keyword(s):  
Jewish Life ◽  
The Other ◽  
Jewish State ◽  
Refugee Convention ◽  
Other Hand ◽  
Jewish Refugees ◽  
The One ◽  
Radical Solution

Chapter 7 traces the sensibilities that brought Jacob Robinson and Shabtai Rosenne to clash over the Refugee Convention’s ratification. Here they diverged in how they read the Convention’s Jewish aspect and the Diaspora’s place in Jewish life at the age of Jewish sovereignty. The Refugee Convention confirmed and challenged cardinal Zionist principles. On the one hand, it affirmed Israel’s character as the Jewish people’s state of asylum and validated the Zionist principle of ‘Return’ and Israel’s ‘in-gathering of exiles’ policy. On the other hand, the Convention was rendered superfluous by Zionism’s ‘radical solution’ and ‘better remedy’ of ‘Return’ to the Jewish state. Moreover, the Convention subverted the Jewish state’s very raison d’être: a permanent political remedy to Jewish statelessness itself. Robinson’s reading of the Convention as according Israel ‘legal title’ to intervene on behalf of Jewish refugees, therefore, marked an ideological deviation accentuated by Rosenne’s reticence to see it ratified.

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