448 A History of Judaism
Hungarian journalist Theodor Herzl, who organized the First Zionist
Congress in Basel in 1897, but his plan to establish a national home for
the Jewish people in the land of Israel was essentially secular, even if he
too turned to rich Jewish financiers (Baron Maurice de Hirsch and the
Rothschilds) for help with the project, and indeed gained the support of
Mohilever (who was however too ill to attend the Congress, dying the
following year). The severely practical and secular aims of the new
Zionist movement became starkly apparent in 1903, when Herzl
attempted to persuade the Sixth Zionist Congress, also held in Basel,
that they should consider a suggestion by the British government that
Jews might be settled in an area in east Africa. The proposal had been
made more urgent by the flood westwards of eastern European Jewish
refugees following reports of a pogrom in Kishinev. The resulting outcry
led by those horrified at the idea of a Jewish land elsewhere than Pales-
tine may have in part been responsible for Herzl’s death in July 1904 at
the age of only forty- four.^13
Herzl’s secular nationalism posed major challenges to traditional
Jewish messianic expectations and the longing for a return to Zion
embedded in the liturgy. For Jews who prayed daily that God should
‘gather our exiles ... from the four corners of the earth’, it was unclear
how plans for a political Jewish state played a role in the divine redemp-
tion of Israel. As a result, there were sharply conflicting responses to
Zionism among religious Jews in the first half of the twentieth century.
By the early twenty- first century, religious doubts have not altogether
disappeared, but the growing popularity of political Zionism among
secular Jews in the first half of the twentieth century, and the eventual
foundation of the secular Jewish state in 1948, has encouraged appre-
ciation of the accomplishments of Zionism by most Jews, whether or
not they themselves heeded the call to migrate to the land of Israel.
Indeed, for many Jews in the latter part of the twentieth century, sup-
port for the State of Israel, in what was perceived as its embattled
position within a largely hostile Arab Middle East, combined with a
vaguely focused desire to commemorate those who died in the Holo-
caust of 1939– 45, has constituted the main bulwark of communal
solidarity. Since the 1990s, in particular, a post- Zionist approach has
emerged among Jews willing to re- examine the foundational narrative
of the State of Israel and to insist on a more central role for the rights
and experiences of non- Jews in the national consciousness.
The enormity of the Holocaust (in Hebrew, Shoah, meaning ‘catas-
trophe’) has ensured a quasi- universal liturgical response by Jews in