Zionist Movement

Zionism grew out of the Dreyfus affair in France at the end of the nineteenth century. Alfred Dreyfus was an officer in the

French army who was accused in 1894 of selling military secrets to the Germans. French officials subsequently convicted Dreyfus and sent him to a French penal colony. Dreyfus's brother Matieu refused to believe that his sibling was guilty and rallied Jews from around the world to help prove him innocent. French society divided down the middle into anti-Dreyfusards and Drey-fusards. The public debate engendered street battles between the two groups, bitter debates in the French parliament, and a war of words in newspaper editorials around the world. As a result, Theodor Herzl, an Austrian journalist sent by his newspaper to cover the Dreyfus affair, founded the modern Zionist movement.

Herzl became convinced by the outbreaks of anti-Semitic violence in France during the Dreyfus affair that Jews would never be treated justly in Christian society. He felt that Jews must have their own nation, both as a refuge for Jews wishing to return to their homeland and as an international representative for Jews living abroad. He further championed the idea that his proposed Jewish nation should be in Palestine.

Consequently, Herzl organized a meeting of Jewish leaders from all over the world in Basel, Switzerland, in 1897. Many of the Jews who assembled in Basel supported Herzl's proposals and formed the Zionist movement. Some of the representatives were wealthy and agreed to donate large sums of money to establish Jewish communal farms in Palestine—then dominated by the Ottoman Empire—and subsidize any Jews who wished to emigrate to Israel. Already since 1882, Jews from Russia had begun to return to Palestine in the face of increasing pogroms sponsored by Russian anti-Semites.

Between 1897 and 1914, a few thousand Jews from all parts of the world went to Palestine. The Ottoman government, however, was not willing to absorb large numbers of Jews or allow the Jews an autonomous state within their empire.