Francis R. Nicosia

Zionism : the crucial phase

This sequel to The Origins of Zionism and Zionism: The Formative Years completes the most comprehensive and thorough examination of the rise and consolidation of the Zionist movement yet attempted. Zionism transformed the structure - and to some extent the ethos - of Jewry and much else besides. Its impact on international politics has been remarkable for a national movement emanating from a people whose condition has been largely determined by their endemic weakness. Yet on the eve of the First World War it was a movement in decline, its leadership was faltering, and the promise it had held out to the crushed and impoverished Jews of Europe was drastically diminished. The sources and consequences of this decline and the dramatic and unexpected war-time recovery from it form the chief subjects of this volume. Not the least of its purposes is to dispel the myths and legends that have long enveloped both the circumstances in which Great Britains temporary patronage of Zionism was decided upon under Lloyd George and Balfour, and the springs and problems of Zionism and the Zionists themselves.

Zionism in anti-semitic thought in imperial Germany

The question of continuity versus discontinuity in modern German history since 1871 has been a dominant theme among historians in the post-World War II era. It has naturally been generated by the unique character and horror of the Third Reich. The inclination to firmly establish, temper or, in some cases, to simply refute the immediate origins in Imperial Germany of the militarism, imperialism, authoritarianism and racism/anti-Semitism of Nazi Germany has explicitly or implicitly formed the basis of much of the scholarship on the Third Reich; at the same time, much of the scholarship on the Second Reich has been cast with an eye toward the failure of the Weimar Republic and the establishment and nature of Hitler’s tyranny. Just as this has been especially true for historians of the Third Reich in their work on anti-Semitism, on Jewish policy during the 1930s and on the mass-murder of European Jews during the Second World War, so too has this tendency characterised the literature on anti-Semitism in its various forms in Imperial Germany between 1871 and 1918. As George Mosse has concluded in his history of European racism: ‘The holocaust has passed. The history of racism which we have told has helped to explain the final solution’.’ Usually with National Socialism and the Holocaust in mind, the literature on anti-Semitism in Imperial Germany has addressed the complex web of political, economic, social, cultural and traditional religious sentiment that formed the basis of hostility toward Jews. The rather tortuous reading of the works of prominent anti-Semitic theorists reveals a high degree of consensus about the nature of the problem, i.e. about the characteristics of alleged Jewish inferiority and depravity and their negative impact on German society. Fantasies about biological inferiority coexisted or were fused with lingering traditional religious myths and biases regarding Judaism and Jewish religious practices. Most saw the Jews as a distinct people rather than a religious community, as historically unwilling and unable to assimilate, as a state within a state, and as determined to carry out their conspiracy to undermine, dominate and exploit the ‘aryan’ world. They deplored the process of Jewish emancipation in the nineteenth century and saw the Jews as alien and as the embodiment of evil in an unsuspecting world. Such reading also reveals differences and, in large measure, confusion and contradictions among anti-Semites, at least on the surface, regarding the best solutions to the so-called Jewish Question. In a recently published essay, Donald Niewyk divides anti-Semites in Germany into three groups in terms of possible solutions: ‘integrationists’ are defined as those who held that Jews simply had to cease being Jews in every way and assimilate completely; ‘segrationists’ were those who wanted to limit or reverse entirely the process of