Theodor Herzl (1860-1904) is rightly designated as the founding father of Zionist ideology. He was a native of Budapest and Paris correspondent of the Neue Freie Presse of Vienna that gave Zionism a political turn.

At the age of thirty six he wrote a book titled, Der Judenstaat (The Jewish State) in which he stated with remarkable clarity, “our national character is too historically famous and in spite of every degradation, too fine to make its annihilation desirable.” He also asserted, “The distinctive nationality of the Jews neither can, will, nor must be destroyed. The Jewish question… is a national question which can be solved only by making it a political-world question to be discussed and settled by the civilised nations of the world in council.”

In the first part of this series of columns, the first Zionist Congress at Basel held in 1897, has already been mentioned. That congress adopted a resolution favouring “a home in Palestine” for the Jews and thus the World Zionist Organisation came into being with Herzl as its president. The same year, he founded a weekly Die Welt which became an official mouthpiece for Zionism. Then onwards, Herzl began his efforts to secure Jewish settlement through his appeals to the Ottoman Sultan. He also tried to put pressure on the Sultan by lobbying to influence Kaiser William II and suggested that a Jewish charter company be formed under a German protectorate.

The question that may niggle young minds is why had Jewish intelligentsia suddenly stirred into action in the last quarter of the 19^th Century? The one-phrase answer to this question will be “anti-Semitism”, a xenophobic impulse engendered because of high-handedness perpetrated against the Jews. That phenomenon emerged as a response to the violence perpetrated against the Jews in (Eastern) Europe and particularly Russia.

Scholars of Jewish history have meticulously documented the atrocities committed against Jews. Ironically, the phrase anti-Semitism has been reserved only for the Jews whereas they are not the only Semitic people. I think that phrase needs to be unpacked and made more inclusive than it currently is. Now let us revert to the pogroms and massacres against the Jews which culminated into the formation of Zionist ideology.

Paul Johnson in his A History of the Jews refers the first modern pogrom against Jews that took place in Odessa in Russia. That pogrom was orchestrated by Slav nationalists. When Tsar Alexander II was assassinated by the revolutionary group Free Will in 1881, Jews seemed to have lost their patron of sorts. The major pogroms which started on April 29, 1881 were incited, condoned, or organised by the minister of interior, Ignatiev, an enthusiastic Slavophile.

That anti-Semitic sentiment exhibited itself with utmost lethality until 1911. Thus, 1881 was the most important year in the history of the Jews since 1648. That year saw the Cossack riots turn into pogroms carried out against the Jews of modern Ukraine during the 1648 uprising of the Cossacks and serfs led by Bogdan Khmelnitsky against the Polish–Lithuanian Commonwealth. Hence, from 1881, “this vicious, mounting and cumulatively overwhelming pressure on Russian Jewry produced inevitable consequence — a panic flight of Jews from Russia westwards.

The pressure on Jews was far more widespread. Romania, Austria and Poland had not been hospitable enough for them and a large number moved to other territories, more specifically the US. But the event that proved the foremost reason for the European Jews to invest their energies and resources in Zionist ideology; the resonance of that event was far more consequential than a series of pogroms of the Jews in several parts of Eastern Europe and more specifically in Russia. That event was the Dreyfus Affair (1894-1906). Because of its importance, Dreyfus Affair warrants elucidation to have a proper perspective of Zionist ideology’s coming to fruition.

Captain Alfred Dreyfus (1859-1935) was the son of an old Jewish family from Alsace who were textile manufacturers. That family settled in Paris in 1871. In 1894, evidence surfaced from an unemptied wastepaper basket in the German military attaché’s office, indicating that someone in the French military had been passing secret information to the Germans about French military operations. Circumstantial evidence pointed to Captain Dreyfus.

He was court martialled on charges of treason. He was stripped of his rank and sent to the Devil’s Island, a French penal colony. In 1906 some evidence came to surface proving his innocence, resulting in his exoneration. Importantly, the novelist Emile Zola wrote an article in a daily newspaper denouncing the military and the government on their unjust handling of the affair. All said and done, Dreyfus Affair has been highlighted for the discrimination meted out to an office just because he was a Jew. Jew historians mention it, bemoaning the discrimination that their community suffered, Dreyfus Affair being its hallmark.

It is important to mention that the mass pogroms of the Jews in 1903 which occurred in Kishinev and Gomal in Russia had rendered the Jewish question more acute than ever. Herzl negotiated with the British government and obtained the offer of Uganda as a territory for settlement. But that offer was rejected by the Russian Zionist majority of the Seventh Congress of the World Zionist Organisation in 1904. They wanted no other land but Palestine.

In 1904, Herzl died. But Zionism kept growing and soon became a powerful organisation, ably financed by the Jewish National Fund (Keren Kayemeth) and also by the Palestine Foundation Fund (Keren Hayesod). In United States, the Zionist Organisation recruited members primarily from Eastern European Jews, who because of Russian persecutions, were pouring in. Other Jewish communities were Spanish and German which were more prosperous.

Zionist organisations had such wealthy and influential financiers like the Rothschild family, a wealthy Jewish family originally from Frankfurt that rose to prominence with Mayer Amschel Rothschild (1744–1812). In 1917 Walter Rothschild, the 2nd Baron Rothschild a British banker, politician, zoologist and soldier was the addressee of the Balfour Declaration to the Zionist Federation, which committed the British government to the establishment in Palestine of a national home for the Jewish people.

Zionists had to face stiff opposition from the orthodox sections of the Jews who objected to the political aspects of the movement, believing that the return to Zion must be brought about by divine intervention and not by temporal agency. However, with Balfour Declaration, Zionists stole the limelight, and their ideology was accorded legitimacy by world powers.

On November 2, then British foreign secretary, Arthur Balfour, sent a letter to Lionel Walter Rothschild stating that: “His Majesty’s government views with favour the establishment in Palestine of a national home for the Jewish people, and will use their best endeavours to facilitate the achievement of this object, it being clearly understood that nothing shall be done which may prejudice the civil and religious rights of existing non-Jewish communities in Palestine, or the rights and political status enjoyed by Jews in any other country.”

The long-term effects of the Balfour Declaration, and the British government’s involvement in Palestinian affairs, are felt until today.

(To be continued).

The writer is a professional historian and an author. He can be reached at tk393@cam.ac.uk