ZIONISM is the lineal heir of the attachment to Zion which led the Babylonian exiles under Zerubbabel to rebuild the Temple, and which flamed up in the heroic struggle of the Maccabees against Antiochus Epiphanes.
During the middle ages, though the racial character of the Jews was being transformed by their Ghetto seclusion, the national yearning suffered no relaxation. The nationalist spirit of the mediaeval Jews is sufficiently reflected in their liturgy, and especially in the works of the poet, Jehuda Halevi.
The strength of the nationalist feeling was practically tested in the i6th century, when a Jewish impostor, David Reubeni (c. 1530), and his disciple, Solomon Molcho (1501-1532), came forward as would-be liberators of their people. Throughout Spain, Italy and Turkey they were received with enthusiasm by the bulk of their brethren. In the following century the influence of the Christian Millennarians gave a fresh impulse to the national idea. Menasseh ben Israel (1604-1657) co-operated with English Millennarians to procure the resettlement of the Jews in England as a preliminary to their national return to Palestine. In 1666 a leader appeared at Smyrna, in the person of a Jew named Sabbatai Zevi (1626-1676), who proclaimed himself the Messiah. The news spread like wildfire, and despite the opposition of some of the leading rabbis, the Jews everywhere prepared for the journey to Palestine. Throughout Europe the nationalist ex citement was intense. Even the downfall and apostasy of Sabbatai were powerless to stop it. The bulk of the people refused for a whole century to be disillusioned.
The reaction arrived in 1778 in the shape of the Mendelssohnian movement. The growth of religious toleration, the attempted emancipation of the English Jews in 1753, and the Judeophilism of men like Lessing and Dohm, showed that a new era was at hand. Moses Mendelssohn (1729-1786) sought to prepare his brethren for their new life as citizens of the lands in which they dwelt, by emphasizing the spiritual side of Judaism and the neces sity of Occidental culture. His efforts were successful. The nationalist spirit showed signs of yielding before the hope or the progress of local political emancipation. In 1806 the Jewish Sanhedrin convened by Napoleon virtually repudiated the nation alist tradition. The new Judaism, however, had not entirely
destroyed it. It had only reconstructed it on a different founda tion. Mendelssohnian culture, by promoting the study of Jewish history, gave a fresh impulse to the racial consciousness of the Jews. From this race consciousness came a fresh interest in the Holy Land. It was an ideal rather than a politico-nationalist interest—a desire to preserve and cherish the monuments of the ancient national glories. It took the practical form of projects for improving the circumstances of the local Jews by means of schools, and for reviving something of the old social condition of Judea by the establishment of agricultural colonies. In this work Sir Moses Montefiore, the Rothschild family, and the Alliance Israelite Universelle were conspicuous. More or less passively, however, the older nationalism still lived on—especially in lands where Jews were persecuted—and it became strengthened by the revived race consciousness and the new interest in the Holy Land. Christian Millennarians also helped to keep it alive. Lord Ashley, afterwards Lord Shaftesbury, Col. Gawler, Walter Cres son, the United States consul at Jerusalem, James Finn, the British consul, Laurence Oliphant and many others organized and supported schemes for the benefit of the Jews of the Holy Land on avowedly Restoration grounds. Another vivifying element was the re-opening of the Eastern Question and the championship of oppressed nationalities in the East by the Western Powers. In England political writers were found to urge the re-establishment of a Jewish State under British protection as a means of assuring the overland route to India (Hollingsworth, Jews in Palestine, 1852). Lord Palmerston was not unaffected by this idea (Finn, Stirring Times, vol. i. pp. 1o6-112), and both Lord Beaconsfield and Lord Salisbury supported Laurence Oliphant in his negotia tions with the Porte foe a concession which was to pave the way to an autonomous Jewish State in the Holy Land. George Eliot's Daniel Deronda, which appeared in 1876, was a striking illustra tion of the sympathy with which Jewish national aspirations were regarded by cultivated Western minds.