The Role of European Jews in crystallizing the Zionist project (1834 – 1948)

Abstract

    Throughout modern and contemporary history, several calls have appeared, all launched from Europe to gather the Jews and direct them towards Arab Palestine. The Jews of Europe in particular played a major role in it, as their first calls came at the hands of the Bosnian rabbi Yehuda al-Qala’i in the year 1834 AD, and after him the German rabbi Zvi Hirsch Kalisher in the year 1862 AD, and others, and those calls took on their wide scope at the hands of the Austrian Jew Theodor Herzl, and the Russian Chaim Weizman. These calls were accompanied by feverish practical activity regarding the idea of settlement, the first of which dates back to the 1830s. Then the wheel of settlement accelerated after the emergence of a number of Zionist settlement associations, most of which were based in European cities, and which took upon themselves the task of building settlements and providing the necessary human resources to occupy them. Then came the defeat of the Ottoman Empire, and the resulting British occupation of Palestine, and the approval of the draft British Mandate, ending with the establishment of a Zionist entity in Palestine.