ABSTRACT
That the vision of Theodor Herzl of establishing a Jewish state was realised fifty years after the First Zionist Congress (1897) witnesses to the remarkable dedication and sense of purpose of his followers. Political Zionism insisted that equality and emancipation for Jews would be achieved only within the framework of an independent Jewish state, whether in Uganda, northern Sinai, Argentina, Biro Bidzhan or Palestine. Whatever the popularity of his analysis of the condition of European Jews—that anti-Jewish racism in Europe was ineradicable—Herzl’s solution was espoused by only a tiny fraction of world Jewry, and was bitterly opposed by both major wings of the religious establishment. The Orthodox rejected emancipation, considering diaspora living to be the divinely ordained fate of Jews until the advent of the Messiah. Reform Jews who regarded the place of their citizenship as their fatherland rejected the re-establishment of Jewish sovereignty, and saw their diaspora condition as facilitating the world mission of Judaism.
