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Zionism: Religious Zionism
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Zionism is the Jewish national liberation movement. "Zionism" derives its name from "Zion," (pronounced "Tzyion" in Hebrew) a hill in Jerusalem. The word means "marker" or commemoration. "Shivath Tzion" is one of the traditional terms for the return of Jewish exiles. "Zionism" is not a monolithic ideological movement. It includes, for example, socialist Zionists such as Ber Borochov, religious Zionists such as rabbis Kook and Reines, nationalists such as Jabotinski and cultural Zionistsexemplified by Asher Ginsberg (Ahad Ha'am).
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By the time of the Balfour Declaration, Zionism was a standard nationalist movement. Zionists claimed to speak on behalf of a people, the Jewish people. They claimed a nation state for that people in Palestine, on the grounds that it was the historic homeland of the Jewish people. The 'Jewish people' for almost all Zionists was (and is) an ethno-national group - and not a religious community. A minority of religious Jews still opposes Zionism for religious reasons.
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Zionism has always had both religious and secular aspects, reflecting the dual nature of Jewish identity, as both a religion (Judaism) and as a national or ethnic identity (Jewishness). Many religious Jews opposed Zionism, while some of the founders of the State of Israel were atheists.
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A secular Zionism could not emerge until Jewish life itself was to some extent secularized. This process began in the 18th century with the Haskalah (Hebrew, “enlightenment”), a movement inspired by the European Enlightenment and initiated by the German Jewish philosopher Moses Mendelssohn. The Haskalah marked the beginning of a move away from traditional orthodox Judaism and created a need for Jewish national feeling to replace religion as a unifying force. Initially... the trend was towards assimilation into European society. The liberal Jewish reform movement in Germany sought to reduce Judaism to a religious denomination, allowing Jews to adopt German culture. The achievement of political equality by European Jewry began in France in 1791 during the French Revolution and spread over most of Europe in the next few decades.
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Zionism's preoccupation with political solutions and stratagems triggered opposition. Against the political orientation associated with the leadership of Hibbat Zion, the writer Ahad Ha-Am argued that the purpose of Zionism ought to be to revive a modern Jewish culture through the medium of the Hebrew language and a renewed interpretation of classic religious texts; a new Jewish state could only be founded with new artifacts of Jewish culture. Cultural Zionist Ahad Ha-Am's insights on the problems besetting the Jewish people and the Zionist movement helped to inspire a group opposing Herzl's leadership and political Zionism - the Democratic Faction. This group, led by the scientist Chaim Weizmann, did not repudiate political methods or consider them insignificant; rather, they insisted that just as legal titles (to land) could facilitate resettlement, so could settlement lead to concrete political gains. Insisting that the structure of the WZO must be reformed to increase popular participation and broaden its agenda, the Democratic Faction defined its own priorities as the investigation of the physical, political, and social conditions of Palestine for purposes of increasing Jewish immigration.
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Zionism's reformulation of traditional Judaism was deeply resented by Orthodox Jews, especially the Hasidim. Most East European Jews rejected the notion of a return to the promised land before the appearance of the messiah. They viewed Zionism as a secular European creation that aspired to change the focus of Judaism from devotion to Jewish law and religious ritual to the establishment of a Jewish nation-state.
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Religious Zionism