ABSTRACT
Zionism, as a Jewish national movement aiming to re-establish the Jewish people in their ancestral homeland, Palestine, developed mainly as a response to the new socio-political circumstances caused by modernity and Jewish Emancipation.1 For, after the Emancipation, the Jews encountered an unprecedented identity crisis, on the one hand, and the problem of anti-Semitism, on the other. Yehezkel Kaufmann maintains that ‘Emancipation is the due of the individual Jew, whereas the problem of the Exile is the problem of the Jewish group, one which Emancipation cannot solve’.2 However, Zionism, as well as providing Jews with a haven, generated serious divisions among the Jewish communities, as much as modernity did in the beginning of the nineteenth century. Indeed, despite the fact that Zionism would become a civil religion for the Jewish settlements in Palestine as early as the 1920s and that it would be accepted by many Jews as a legitimate movement after the creation of the state of Israel in 1948, its transformation into a dominant ideology for world Jewry would only be achieved in the late 1960s.
