| Abstrakt: |
The article focuses on the German Zionism and Jewish Identity. The preponderating tendency of German Zionists not to leave their native land immediately raises the question of what Zionism could have meant for those of its adherents who chose to remain in the Diaspora. At least a brief look at the early history of Zionism is necessary to answer that question. The origins of the modern Zionist movement are in Theodor Herzl's manifesto, "The Jewish State," published in 1896; and in the international Zionist Congress, which he convened in Basel in the following year. Herzl's goal was only the latest in a series of attempts dating back to the late eighteenth century to provide a solution to the so-called "Jewish question," which asked, quite simply, whether there was any place at all for the Jew, as a Jew, in the modern world. To a considerable extent, the emergence of Zionism must be understood as a reaction to the failure of emancipation, in two senses: first, that failure was total in eastern Europe; and second, in western Europe legal emancipation produced neither full integration nor did it eradicate or appreciably diminish antisemitism. |
