Why was the zionist movement created?

Answer 1

Zionism (as a political movement) was founded by Theodor Herzl in 1897. It built upon a prior organization of several national organizations going under the collective name of Hovevei Tziyon, most of which were founded in the 1880s.

The term "Zionism" appears to have been coined by the publisher Nathan Birnbaum in 1891 to describe these Jewish-nationalism organizations, though it has been retroactively applied to any movement that promoted a Jewish homeland.

Zionism was one of many nationalistic movements that the latter half of the 19th century spawned. European intellectualism and political thought starting about 1850 began to coalesce several major threats of philosophical ideals from the Age of Revolution (which covered the time from the American Revolution through the French Revolution and Counter-Revolutionary periods, i.e. about 1770 to 1840). Combined with the spread of the Industrial Revolution throughout Europe, this later portion of the 19th Century was a great flowering of socio-political thought covering the proper relationships of the rights of man, the concept of nationhood, and the proper workings of government. Nationalism was one of the more potent ideas that solidified around this time, and it became widely popular.

In political science parlance, a "nation" is a group of people with a common culture which creates a bond of unity. A "state" is a political boundary describing an area under a single government's control. A central tenet of the nationalism theories of the 19th century was that the proper size of a "state" was the entire natural area where a specific "nation" resided. That is, all countries should be "nation-states", where the political boundaries separated different cultural groups.

Naturally, at the time (and even today), there are a large number of ethnic and cultural groups which are NOT the only one in a given political state. The nationalism movements were political movements started by many such ethnic/cultural groups, to agitate for a change in the political state boundaries (often, including creating several states from one or more existing ones).

Zionism as a political movement was born in this period of Nationalistic ferver, along with many other "dispossessed" ethnic nationalism movements. However, given the extremely long period of Jewish ethnic identity (over 4,000 years), and the relatively unique dispersed nature of the Jewish "nation" (peoples), it would be a mistake to claim that Zionism was created solely as a reaction to the nationalistic ideologies of that time; rather, there have been organizations advocating a Jewish state for hundreds of years. However, they never enjoyed large-scale support in the Jewish community; thus, it is proper to consider the start of the Zionist movement to be Herzl's organization in 1897.