LYCOS RETRIEVER 
Zionism: Western Europe
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Seen in a larger context, this turn from Zionism echoes trends in other Western countries, where old-style patriotism and national pride have ... declined. In Western Europe, citizens tend to see little of special value in their own history, customs, and mores. Last month, for example, the Netherlands' Princess Máxima, wife to the heir to the throne, announced to wide acclaim that "The Dutch identity does not exist." This Western-wide decline of patriotism aggravates Israel's predicament, suggesting that developments there fit into a larger trend, making them the more difficult to resist or reverse.
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Jewish anti-Zionism - Jewish religious anti-Zionism arose out of fear that a secular ideology would supplant religion as the mainstay of Judaism. Assimilationist Jews were afraid that Zionism, with its insistence on Jewish nationhood, would hinder acceptance of Jews as equals in European nation-states. Marxist Jews and non-Jews opposed Zionism as a "reactionary" nationalist tendency, but later, paradoxically, came to support every "national liberation movement" except Zionism.
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Zionism was established at the end of the 19th century to solve the so-called "Jewish Problem" resulting from centuries of persecution of the Jews in Europe. Palestine was chosen because it was considered the "historical homeland" of the Jews even though the Jews spent less than 100 years in historic Palestine some 3,000 years ago.
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Michael Stanislawski's provocative study of Max Nordau, Ephraim Moses Lilien, and Vladimir Jabotinsky reconceives the intersection of the European fin de siècle and early Zionism. Stanislawski takes up the tantalizing question of why Zionism, at a particular stage in its development, became so attractive to certain cosmopolitan intellectuals and artists. With the help of hundreds of previously unavailable documents, published and unpublished, he reconstructs the ideological journeys of writer and critic Nordau, artist Lilien, and political icon Jabotinsky. He argues against the common conception of Nordau and Jabotinsky as nineteenth-century liberals, insisting that they must be understood against the backdrop of Social Darwinism in the West and the Positivism of Russian radicalism in the fin de siècle, as well as Symbolism, Decadence, and Art Nouveau.
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Until 1791 and the Jewish emancipation during the French Revolution, Jews lacked the mobility essential to the success of Zionism. In the 19th century... rising national sentiment in Europe inspired Moses Hess, David Luzatto, Leo Pinsker, Zvi Kalischer, and Yehudah Alkalai to attempt to raise the national consciousness of ghetto Jewry. Financial assistance came from philanthropists Moses Montefiore, Edmond de Rothschild, and Maurice de Hirsch, and various programs for the return of Jews to the Middle East were implemented.
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