As a movement and an ideology, Zionism began in earnest after 1881 with a
renewed sense of Jewish nationalism, articulated most vividly by Moses Lieb
Lilienblum and Lev Pinsker. Lilienblum wrote in response to Judah Lieb
Gordon, who was among the few maskilim whose view of the future was largely
unaffected by the events of 1881. When Gordon reiterated his call for political
emancipation and internal Jewish reform as the solution to the problems of the
Jews even after 1881, Lilienblum responsed with an essay “Let Us Not Confuse
the Issues,” in which he rejected Gordon’s aims in favor of a nationalist revival.
Even more powerful was Pinsker’s essay “Auto-emancipation,” in which he
attributed the travails of the Jews to an exaggerated reliance on the state to
improve their lot. Only by emancipating themselves, Pinsker argued, could
Jews escape persecution. The ideas articulated by Lilienblum and Pinkser laid a
cornerstone for political Zionism.
Alongside these political ideas was the emergence of practical Zionist ini-
tiatives in the form of two settlement movements: Hovevei Zion (Lovers of
Zion) and BILU, an acronym for Bet Ya’akov Lechu ve-Nelcha(House of Jacob
Come Let Us Depart, from Isaiah 2:5). Like Pinsker and Lilienblum, these
were secular Jews who were disillusioned by the pogroms of 1881. These
organizations advocated resettling Russian and Romanian Jews in the Land of
Israel, and formed local organizations in dozens of Jewish communities in the
Pale and in Romania to this end. In addition, they founded several dozen set-
tlements in the Land of Israel after 1881.
These new settlements transformed the Yishuv, the collective term for
Jewish settlements in the Land of Israel. The Old Yishuv, the term for
Jewish settlements in the Land of Israel prior to 1881, was demographically
skewed, consisting mainly of yeshiva students and older men who had
opted to die in the Land of Israel with the hope of being buried on the
Mount of Olives, and thereby to be among the first to be resurrected with
the advent of the Messianic Age. Most Jews in the Old Yishuv, moreover,
were traditionalists who lived in Jaffa, the Old City of Jerusalem, and two
or three other towns. Most did not work, but were supported by the
Haluka, a system of annual charitable donation sent by diaspora Jewish
communities to support the Jews in the Land of Israel. The language of the
Old Yishuv was a diverse collection of Jewish languages and European and
Middle Eastern vernaculars.
The Zionist settlers who arrived after 1881 were secular young men and
women who founded agricultural settlements. Though secular, they borrowed
from the language of the Bible and rabbinic tradition in defining their secu-
lar Zionist aims. They came to be known as halutzim(pioneers) engaged in a
process of Aliyah (ascent) to the Land of Israel. Implicit in the nascent politi-
cal and practical Zionism were a critique of traditional Judaism and the
limitations it imposed on Jewish productivity by prohibiting work on the
Sabbath and festivals; a frustration with Jewish passivity, particularly the
traditional Jewish notion of passively awaiting the Messiah for redemption;
188 Anti-Semitism and Jewish responses, 1870–1914