Sources: Theodor Herzl, Der Judenstaat (The Jewish State, 1896); Ahad Ha’am, Al Parashat Derachim; the Basel Program (1897); the Balfour Declaration (1917); Hannah Arendt, Origins of Totalitarianism.

Zionism is the movement for Jewish national self-determination in the ancestral homeland — a response to the failure of emancipation to end European antisemitism, crystallized by the Dreyfus Affair (1894) and the persistent pogroms in Eastern Europe. Theodor Herzl (~1860–1904 AD) convened the First Zionist Congress in Basel (1897), declaring the aim of establishing a “publicly and legally assured home in Palestine for the Jewish people.” Ideological streams within Zionism: (1) Political Zionism (Herzl) — a charter state through diplomacy; (2) Cultural/Spiritual Zionism (Ahad Ha’am) — a spiritual center for Jewish culture, not necessarily a mass migration; (3) Labor Zionism (Ber Borochov, A.D. Gordon) — socialist agricultural settlement transforming the Jewish relationship to land and labor; (4) Religious Zionism (Rav Kook) — the return to Zion as the beginning of divine redemption. Theological divisions: ultra-Orthodox anti-Zionism (Satmar, Neturei Karta) holds that the return to Israel must await the Messiah; Religious Zionism holds the state is the beginning of redemption (atchalta de-ge’ulah); secular Zionism brackets the religious question. The founding of the State of Israel (1948) transformed Zionism from a movement into a fact — and split Jewish opinion worldwide on questions of settlements, Palestinian rights, and the relationship between diaspora and Israeli Jewish identity.