lThe gradual emergence of Zionism, as a movement advocating the gathering of the Jewish people in the land of Israel, was particularly complex. In fact, it was above all the evangelical current of Anglo-Saxon Protestantism that, from the mid-nineteenth centurymy century, defended a form of Christian Zionism, according to which the fulfillment of biblical prophecies depends on the “restoration” of the Jewish people in the Holy Land. Only from 1882 onwards did the Lovers of Zion and other groups of Jewish activists in the Russian Empire organize, in response to the wave of anti-Semitic pogroms, a first wave of emigration to Ottoman Palestine.
It is because of the Hebrew term foralya What is called this “ascension” towards Land of Israelthe “land of Israel”. The Ottoman authorities then estimated the population of Palestine at 465,000 inhabitants, of which 405,000 were Muslims, 45,000 Christians and 15,000 Jews. These statistics, compiled for tax purposes, do not take into account either the Bedouins or the approximately 9,000 Jews of foreign nationality, nor those who benefit from the protection of a European consulate in Jerusalem.
Too little known pioneers
This first alya has been too often neglected, because it anticipates the conceptualization of the term “Zionism” (in 1890, by Nathan Birnbaum) and the official founding of the Zionist movement (in 1897, in Basel, at the initiative of Theodor Herzl). . It is, furthermore, marked by the heterogeneous character of the movements, often in competition, that compose it: the Lovers of Zion, led from Odessa, who try to divert to Palestine a part, even a limited one, of the flow of Jewish emigration to the region . USA; the Bilu, animated from Kharkiv and designated with the Hebrew acronym “house of Jacob, go and we will go”; The sons of Moses, disciples of Asher Guinzbourg, born near kyiv, who preferred to Hebraize his name into Ahad Haam, or “one of the people.” The Ukrainian dimension of this first alya is fundamental, as is its determination to transform Hebrew from a religious language to a national language.
The voluntarism of such Hebraization is reflected in the motto pronounced from Jerusalem by Eliezer Ben Yehouda: “One people, one land, one language”. This triptych echoes different European nationalisms and establishes an unbreakable bond between the Jewish people, the land of Israel and modern Hebrew. But the pioneers of this first alya, themselves divided, must face the hostility of the Jewish communities long established in Palestine and dedicated to study and prayer in the rabbinical schools of Jerusalem, Hebron, Safed and Tiberias.
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