Zionism/Anti-Semitism and Modern Zionism
§ 8. Anti-Semitism and Modern Zionism
But Zionism would never have attained its present overwhelming grasp of the minds and hopes of the vast majority of Jewry but for the outbreak of Anti-Semitism and the clouding of the prospects of Jews, alike emancipated, half-emancipated, and not emancipated at all.
The beginning of the nineteenth century, as has been seen, was still influenced by the liberal ideas of the Revolution. Prejudice there was against the Jew, but it was merely incidental. In 1848 the Continental Jew fought for freedom with all his heart and soul. Even in the three Prussian Wars, which culminated in Sedan and the foundation of the German Empire, Jews had shed their blood for their fatherland and were not subjected to deliberate and organized persecution and attack. But 1870 turned the Prussian heads. Heinrich von Treitschke (1834–96), a Saxon renegade to Prussia, became the chief panegyrist of the House of Hohenzollern and the militarism for which it stood. In his chair at the University of Berlin and in the Reichstag he pleaded eloquently for the narrowest German nationalism. He vehemently supported the Government in its attacks upon the Socialists and Poles, upon the Catholics and the Jews. The Jews have had to suffer from Anti-Semitism ever since 1878; and Treitschke was one of the few men of eminence who gave his support to the attacks upon them which began in that year.
The virus soon spread throughout Europe. In the East it led to the pogroms in Russia which started in 1880 and have recurred about every ten years. In England. Goldwin Smith raised the question 'Can Jews be patriots?' in 1878; then ensued a series of articles in which Hermann Adler was the apologist. The contagion spread a little later even to liberal France, where, in 1886, Drumont wrote La France Juive. preached that all French misfortunes were due to the Machiavellian Jew, and, to keep the ball rolling, founded La Libre Parole. Drumont is the father of the Anti-Semitism of the Dreyfus trial of 1898.
A whole literature arose around Anti-Semitism in general and the Dreyfus trial in particular. The Jews did not confine themselves to apologetic propaganda. Their leaders, in the more enlightened countries of the West, formed institutions with the express object of protecting their less-favoured co-religionists from oppression and injustice. But above all 'Zionism' came into being a positive remedy for the alleged homelessness of the disfranchised Jew. The term appears to have been first used in 1886, but was popularized by Herzl ten years later.