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The Zionist Revolution

The reign of Tsar Alexander II had been a period of great hope for Russian Jews. With doors open as never before, many Jews - especially the maskilim - became more integrated and visible in Russian society. But the estimated 250 pogroms of 1881 were fueled precisely by resentment of these same newly won advances. The new Russian regime under Alexander III, calculating that antisemitism was useful in diverting popular discontent, blamed Jews for having roused popular anger and reimposed many anti-Jewish restrictions.

As the Russian case showed, the essence of antisemitism had itself changed. In the past it had been primarily religious, but in the new nationalist Europe a newly vicious ethnic and racist antisemitism was taking hold. Jews were to be judged not by their beliefs but by their ancestry, which they could not alter even had they wished. Jews who tried to assimilate to the emerging national identities found themselves excluded; for example, a young Theodor Herzl in Vienna, who joined and was then forced out of a German nationalist fraternity. Assimilation, which had seemed so promising, suddenly appeared to be a dead end.

The new antisemitism was a consequence of this now-dominant model of national identity and the nation-state. The nations of Europe were discovering and reaffirming their own claims to nationhood and national self-determination. But were the Jews less entitled to national sovereignty than Serbs or Albanians? The Return to Zion, previously a religious aspiration, became a political program as Jews also adopted the model of the nation-state, having found themselves rejected in the new nation-states being erected by others. Jews would be integrated into the emerging world order, but as a nation rather than as individuals: a nation like other nations. Leon (Lev) Pinsker, in the first Zionist "scripture" (Auto-Emancipation, 1882), called for "emancipation [of Jews] as a nation among nations by the acquisition of a home of their own."1

The First Aliya

Again, only about 2 percent of the Jewish refugees, at the time, found this argument compelling enough to take on the rigors and challenges of Eretz Yisrael. Who were these pioneers? They were not the elderly who traveled to the Holy Land in order to be buried there, nor were they the devoutly religious drawn to Zion by scriptural command. They were predominantly young and relatively well-educated. As noted, many of them, especially among the leaders, came from the ranks of the maskilim. They were precisely those who had tried to assimilate, and were now bitterly disillusioned. Much of this despair came from the way their non-Jewish comrades had failed to stand with them in opposition to the pogroms. As one young maskil recorded the impact of the attacks:

With my own eyes I saw the terrible tragedy in one of the more beautiful and enlightened cities, in which important people were joining in. If they did not actually do the beating, they were stirring the fire and adding fuel to the flames. When I saw all this something in me snapped . In one flash all my illusions were revealed, and all the beautiful pictures of the future, that I and my friends painted for ourselves, dissipated like smoke. And I, a law student, a member of a cosmopolitan intellectual society, devoted to progress - I felt suddenly my unique Jewish soul . There is a source of hope. Eretz Yisrael must become our future land. Only there will our people find rest and relief. Only there will it find a place to bring its old, dry bones to life. It only needs a beginning.2

This student was one of about 500 young people in the Kharkov area, many of them university students, who came together as the Bilu society. The name was taken from Isaiah 2:5: "Beit Ya'akov, l'chu v'nelcha [House of Jacob, come, let us go]." As an early Manifesto declared, Jews needed to awaken from "the false dream of assimilation." The goal of the movement was defined as "a home in our country," which the Biluim proposed to beg of the Ottoman Sultan himself. Recognizing implicitly that the Sultan might not be so generous, they proposed asking for at least "a state within a larger state" that would govern itself domestically but act with the Turkish Empire in foreign affairs "so as to help our brother Ishmael in the time of his need."3

The Biluim were insignificant numerically; only fourteen managed to enter Eretz Yisrael during the first year, altogether only about sixty actually settled there, and many of those did not remain. Their significance was that of an intellectual vanguard that first declared the explicit goal of statehood, which only a few Jewish intellectuals called for at the time (the first was Leo Pinsker, quoted above).

As noted, the Ottoman government formally closed Palestine to Jewish immigration even before the first would-be settlers arrived. Those who did enter were usually not allowed to purchase land, despite official Ottoman policy allowing land sales to foreign citizens. And if they did manage to acquire land, the authorities refused to grant them building permits and would demolish any structure built without a permit.

There were various ways of surmounting these obstacles. Some came as religious pilgrims - a traffic the Ottoman Empire was forced to allow - and simply overstayed their visas. Others entered the Empire at ports other than Jaffa, where enforcement was most stringent, and then traveled overland to Palestinian areas (the two northern districts of "Palestine" being easier to enter than Jaffa and the Jerusalem district). Land was often bought in the name of Ottoman Jewish citizens. Building permits might be obtained through the widespread Ottoman practice of baksheesh (bribery), which might also be employed in border entry and land sales, at least on the lower levels of officialdom.

Often the last resort, however, was to evoke the intervention of European consuls acting as protectors under the Capitulations. Given Ottoman dependence on European support - Britain and France in mid-century and Germany later - these interventions were often quite effective. Settlements supported by the French philanthropist Baron Edmund de Rothschild, for example, could usually count on French diplomatic intervention. The founders of Petah Tikva included one German citizen, and at one point the German Consul threatened to mobilize the Templers (German Protestant settlers) from nearby Sarona to prevent the demolition of "illegal" structures in the settlement.4

The settlers in Gedera resorted to a different tactic when they could not get a building permit. Ottoman law provided that a structure with a roof could not be demolished; the problem was that Arabs living nearby would report any construction before it had a roof. The Gederans therefore dug a large pit, supposedly as a stable for their animals, and quickly roofed it over as a shelter for man and beast before the authorities could intervene.5

Groups similar to Bilu sprang up in Jewish communities across Russia. By the mid-1880s they became loosely linked together as the Hovevei Zion (Lovers of Zion) movement, soon to be known simply as "Zionism." Hovevei Zion focused on settlement in Eretz Yisrael and the rebuilding of Jewish life there, sending several thousand settlers during the 1880s and a total of 20,000-30,000 by 1903.6 Since immigration to Eretz Yisrael is extolled in Hebrew as aliya (ascent), this wave of settlers is known as the first aliya. The new immigrants founded ten new settlements during the 1880s and another seven in the 1890s, though most settled in existing cities. The new settlements were concentrated in low-lying, often marshy areas that were relatively sparsely populated: the coastal plain, the Jezre'el Valley between the coast and the Sea of Galilee, and the Jordan Valley around and north of the Sea of Galilee. This was because only in these areas were significant plots of potential agricultural land available for purchase.

There was a strong agrarian thrust to this settlement effort, reflecting a deep-seated yearning for a return to the soil as part of the return to life as a "normal" nation. Because of their all-Jewish character and their ideological virtues, these rural settlements have received most of the attention in Zionist history, even though there were always more Jews in the cities. The cities included not only many in the "new" yishuv, or community, but also all of the "old" yishuv, the more traditional Jewish community that had existed before Zionism. Jews of European origin in the old yishuv were generally ultra-Orthodox (haredi), living a life of quiet piety and hostile to Zionism as a largely secular movement. The old yishuv also included a Sephardi (native Middle Eastern) Jewish population, with the Sephardi Chief Rabbinate exercising authority under the Ottoman millet system of autonomous religious communities.

Apart from the obstacles posed by the Ottoman authorities, the settlers of the new yishuv faced daunting hardships in overcoming their lack of farming experience, an unfamiliar and often hostile climate, the unsuitability of much of the available land, lack of water, and rampant disease. They survived the first years only through outside support, partly from Hovevei Zion, but mostly from Baron...