UNDERSTANDING ISRAEL - Israel: An Introduction - page 3

Substituting human action for religious patience, Zionists also argued, would preserve the
lives of the Jews themselves and the prospering of their religion.
In Eastern Europe, where the great majority of European Jews were concentrated, a de
facto national life still existed throughout the nineteenth century and in many places into the
twentieth as well. Most European Jews spoke Yiddish, a language derived from Hebrew and
German. They worshipped daily in synagogues, where the Land of Israel was at the center of
their religion, and functioned as a community totally separate from their neighbors. Only
mass murder by the Nazis and their many allies, along with forcible assimilation under Com-
munism, ended this way of life.
A roughly parallel picture held for the Middle East. Jews lived almost entirely within their
own communities, observed the religiously based laws, had distinctive dress and occupations,
and spoke a distinctive language that was an Arabic-Hebrew or Spanish-Hebrew (Ladino)
equivalent of Yiddish.
Given this history, the common perception today that Jews were always outsiders, kept in-
voluntarily from full integration into the larger communities among whom they lived, is also
a relatively recent concept. For Jews in Christian Europe or the Muslim-majority Middle East,
there was never — or only very recently — any offer of full integration. Still, the vast majority of
Jews did not view their identity in only negative terms but saw themselves as being “inside,”
that is, part of, their own cohesive community, sharing a worldview with its other members no
matter their geographical location or economic status.
Thus, modern Israel is not an arbitrary or accidental creation — it was not merely the result
of the Holocaust, for example. Rather, it was the continuation of a long historical process.
The creation of the state was not inevitable — far from it — and not all Jews supported such an
outcome. But its establishment was just as logical as that of any other state in today's world in
being created by a community of people with a shared worldview, history, and desire to share
their fate.
The mere existence of proto-Zionist sentiments in Jewish society and religion and world-
view, however, would have amounted to nothing without an organized movement. Vanguard
thinkers in the mid-nineteenth century — Moses Hess, Leon Pinsker, and others — provided
glimpses of the idea of a Jewish state, but Theodor Herzl truly brought the movement into
existence in the 1890s.
The movement required complementary action in the Land of Israel itself. Young Russian
Jews acting on their own in the 1880s began that work; they were thereafter supported by the
Zionist movement.
The physical movement of people to the Land of Israel to join the traditional religious
community already present brought about the Yishuv. This was the community of Jews in the
Land of Israel between the 1880s and 1948, when Israel became an independent state. It laid
the foundation for the projected state. While Jewish tradition and history was the fi rst layer in
shaping the modern state of Israel, the Yishuv was the second.
Cultural attributes and political-economic structures created during the Yishuv era be-
came basic attributes of Israel's state and society. The best-known pre-state features include:
the revival of the Hebrew language, the start of self-defense organizations, the establishment
of a socialist-structured industrial economic base, the development of a comprehensive social