ABSTRACT
The development of the Zionist movement and ideology in the late nineteenth century can only be understood within the context of the social and cultural processes. The Zionist movement itself began to crystallize in the groups of Hovevei Zion, principally in Russia, from about the 1870s and gathered momentum following the pogroms in the early 1880s. The Zionist movement and ideology have sometimes been defined as the culmination of modern Jewish nationalism or as the Jewish counterpart of modern nationalist movements. The Zionist movement and ideology faced, of course, a rather new intercivilizational situation. While the principled radicalism of the Zionist ideology in modern Jewish life denied the legitimacy of the viability of such dynamics, in practice the Zionist movement became a part even if an ambivalent part - of this dynamism. The Zionist vision or visions naturally drew on some of the perennial themes of Jewish civilization and reformulated them in terms of their own basic orientations.
