274 • 16 THE CONTEST FOR PALESTINEMany false messiahs had led people astray by their extravagant claims,
causing much suffering. Some said that nationalism was a form of collec¬
tive self-love that ran counter to Judaism's basic commandment: "You shall
love the Lord your God with all your heart, and with all your soul, and
with all your might" (Deut. 6:5). Nevertheless, some nineteenth-century
rabbis began thinking along other lines. One wrote that the Jews should
return to the land of Israel to await the Messiah. As early as 1843 another
rabbi urged rich Jews to form a corporation to colonize the country, train
young Jews in self-defense, and teach farming and other practical subjects.
Some Haskala thinkers hoped that this rebuilding of the Jewish homeland
would bring young people closer to nature and make them more like Gen¬
tiles. Moses Hess, one of the first German socialists, argued in Rome and
Jerusalem (1862) that Jews could form a truly socialistic nation-state in the
land of Israel.
Hess's book was little read (until much later), but another early Zionist
work, Leon Pinsker's Auto-Emancipation (1882), had immense influence in
Russia. Official persecution was reaching new heights at this time, as the
czarist regime implemented a series of so-called May Laws that restricted
Russian areas in which Jews might live and put artificially low quotas on the
admission of Jews to the universities and the professions. Pinsker's book
was the first systematic attempt to prove that Jews were vulnerable to anti-
Semitism because they lacked a country of their own. It inspired Russian
Jews to form Zionist clubs and study groups in Russia. Their federation,
Chovevei Tzion (Lovers of Zion), spread from Russia to other countries
where Jews lived. A more activist movement, BILU (Hebrew: Beit Yacov
Ichu vnelcha; To the House of Jacob go and we will follow), sent groups of
young Russian Jews to Palestine. Immigrants in these two organizations
made up what historians of Zionism call the "first aliya." Aliya really means
"going up," the term Jews had long used for going to Jerusalem, set among
the Judean hills, but it came to mean "going to the land of Israel." Jewish im¬
migrants were called olim (ascenders).
Early Jewish Settlers
The Zionist olim found other Jewish newcomers in Palestine. There were
always mystics and scholars going to Jerusalem and the other main centers
of Jewish culture: Tiberias, Safed, and Hebron. Moreover, there were al¬
ready immigrants buying land and trying to farm it. They got help from a
Jewish educational organization, the Alliance Israélite Universelle (Univer¬
sal Jewish Alliance). The Alliance set up modern, French-speaking schools