Interesting topics from various branches of science such as History, Art, Technology, Music, Space, Geography, Philosophy and biographies of various scientists are on this channel. Subscribe to our channel and learn new interesting things.
Hamas : https://youtu.be/hxwxJBn0WM4
Why is the Mediterranean Important for Russia ? :
International Relations :
#israel #israelpalestineconflict #israelhamaswar #palestine #palestines #international #internationalrelations #internationalnews #history #historychannel #historyfacts #newvideo #youtubevideo
Zionism is a national movement that aims at the political return of the Jewish people to the Land of Israel, their original homeland, in order to form a nation-state. The term Zionism was first coined in German in 1891 by Nathan Birnbaum, editor of the newspaper Selbstemancipation, referring to Mount Zion. The etymology of Zionism refers to the history of the bonds that unite the people of Israel, the Torah of Israel and the Land of Israel.
Zionism, as a political project for the national emancipation of the Jewish people, had been gradually emerging throughout the 19th century, at the intellectual level with Hess and Pinsker, and at the organisational level through the Zionist Donation Movement and various Palestinophile societies.
The reason for Zionism’s relatively late emergence, compared to nationalist movements in Europe, is that it was initially confronted with the ideologies of emancipation, i.e. individual emancipation, and assimilation. Emancipation is the idea or policy that enabled Jews to gain citizenship rights in their countries of residence in the 19th century.
Before the emergence of Zionism, there were some tendencies that could be defined as Zionist. Zionism without Zionism was intended to represent the aspirations of the Jewish people for national rebirth outside Israel. Then came the question of the choice of land and the justification of such a claim; it was realised that the search for an empty land was an illusion in a world full of bourgeois conquests and colonial empires.
The Arab presence in Palestine was an obstacle to the idea of a land without a people for a landless people. Soon land was sought in countries such as Madagascar, Argentina and Uganda that would allow the Jewish people to establish a state. However, since there was no Jewish legitimacy in these territories, they were doomed to failure.
The so-called Christian Zionists, who, for theological reasons, sought to help the Jews regain their land in order to hasten the fulfilment of the promises and the return of Jesus to the earth, also emerged.
Throughout history, the Jewish people have been shaped by beliefs in a relationship with God. Jewish identity was embodied in the covenant God made with His people in the time of Abraham, which guaranteed the Land of Israel.
This faith was shaped through the major historical phases: the liberation from exile in Egypt, the exodus and conquest of Canaan, the establishment of the monarchy, the destruction of the First Temple and the Babylonian exile, the return and rebuilding of the Temple, the revolt of the Makkabites and the rule of the Hasmonean dynasty.
But from the Hellenistic era onwards, the population of the Diaspora would begin to exceed that of the Land of Israel. At the end of the Babylonian captivity, only a small minority would return, most would remain in Mesopotamia and spread throughout the Mediterranean basin.
Judaism attracted many Pagans to its ranks in the Roman world. Diaspora Jews, aware of the centrality of Israel in spiritual life, visiting Jerusalem for all the pilgrimage festivals they could attend, and having to live their Judaism outside the physical presence in Palestine, would create the cult of the synagogue as well as the Temple.
Even the destruction of the Second Temple, a dramatic and traumatising event for the Jews, could not end the existence of the Jewish people. This national catastrophe was interpreted by Jewish leaders as a divine punishment, a call to repentance and return to God, a sign of the need to tighten the ranks in anticipation of the Messiah who would restore his people, rebuild the Temple and reign in peace.
With the triumph of Christianity in the Roman empire, conversions to Judaism would cease. Mass conversions could only take place in the far corners of the civilised world of the time, in North Africa or in the Khazars, who ruled from the Caucasus to the Volga between the 8th and 12th centuries. Henceforth, the Jews would retreat back to their identity and endeavour to preserve their distinctive characteristics, taking into account the teachings of the Tradition.
The unity of the Jewish people was shaken by the use of local languages, which developed under the influence of geographical dispersion, the different experiences of each community, and the linguistic environment. These divisions gave rise to different languages such as Yiddish, Ladino and Judeo-Arabic. The unity of the Jewish people has been preserved through the common reference to the Torah, the use of Hebrew in religious life and rituals, loyalty to Zion, remembrance of the past and the importance attached to education.
The Jewish people, persecuted and ostracised, clung to the memory of those who died for the Jewish faith, and Jewish distinctiveness was sanctified. This strengthened the acceptance of Jewish national values. Since the Crusades, Jews have been largely excluded from military and administrative positions, land ownership and various crafts. This situation would lead Jews to concentrate on professions that were economically indispensable but at the same time disreputable.
But it was especially the inner strength of the Jewish people that kept them going through all the convulsions. The Jews were willing to die in defence of God’s name. Conversion was perceived as a spiritual death that ended the relationship with the community as well as with the family. The tight, indissoluble unity of Israel was a requirement of the people’s loyalty to their God.
During the dispersion of the Jewish people throughout the world, Jewish religiosity endeavoured to create a spiritual homeland to preserve the unity of Israel and to compensate for the loss of independence and country. The oral expression of the Torah, the written expression of the Talmud, is the result of the desire to compile the sacred books.
The unity of the Jewish people was preserved by the hope of the Messiah and the devotion to Zion. The Torah, which represents the spiritual home of the Jewish people, is filled with memories of life in Israel. The daily recitation of the Torah in prayers and festivals brought the Jewish individual closer to his homeland at every moment.
The desire to return was a vivid phenomenon in the memories of all Jews. The return to Israel was an obligation based on Jewish faith. After the destruction of the Jewish temple and the suppression of the uprisings by Rome, the Jews were thought to have been exterminated from Palestine. However, a small Jewish population remained in this region.
Religious Jews settled in the Holy Land to educate themselves and complete their lives there, and they desired to be buried on the Mount of Olives in order to be among the first resurrected during the resurrection of the Messiah.
Movements such as the Messianic or Hassidic movements, movements of revival within Judaism, gave rise to a revived interest in the Land of Israel. At certain periods in particular, through the efforts of Jewish notables, the Land of Israel remained vivid in the memory as the centre of Jewish spiritual life. Rabbi Yahonan Ben Zakai, who left besieged Jerusalem in 69 AD, reorganised the Jewish community in Palestine and created the cult of the synagogue after the destruction of the Second Temple.
The massacres during the Crusades and the black plague would lead the Jewish community to settle in Eastern Europe, where important centres would later be established and innovative movements such as Haskala would flourish.
But spiritual life in Israel was far from over. It was concentrated in Safed, Tiberias, and Ilebran, especially in the congregation re-established in 1267 by the Mahmanid. The Galilee region, on the other hand, experienced a real revival in the 16th century, thanks to Ottoman support, economic progress and security. This region was to become the centre of the Jewish mysticism of Kabbalah.
In the turmoil of Palestine in the 18th century, the living conditions of the Jewish people deteriorated considerably, but their population did not decline. The community was sustained by the obligatory collection of halukah among the Jews of the diaspora, and wealthy communities mobilised to keep the Jewish population alive. Likewise, the regular arrival of officials from the Holy Land fuelled the enthusiasm of the masses for the Land of Israel.
Although Jews remained a small minority compared to Arabs and, like Christian minorities, lacked the tutelage of a great power to protect them from Ottoman domination, they nevertheless became an important human element, especially in the cities, from the 15th century onwards.
In Europe, the Jewish people were unable to determine their own destiny and were under the threat of being expelled, besieged and enclosed behind ghetto walls at any moment. The religion of the people, who were massacred in major crises and made scapegoats by being identified with Satan, was also forcibly changed.
The Jews, recognised as a separate nation, enjoyed extensive legal and financial autonomy. But since they were excluded from society, they had no power. In Islamic countries, as in Christian Europe, they had to be in constant harmony with the government. For this reason, among the Jewish people there were court Jews who established good relations with the top management of the state.
As a result of the exclusion of Jews from society in Europe, Jews gained a legal existence, internal autonomy and important legal and financial privileges. This situation, which ensured the unity of the Jewish people, was not mature enough to develop a political proposal, a national programme in the sense expected by the national movements.
A national movement for the establishment of a Jewish state in the Land of Israel had not yet emerged. There was only a mystical attachment, fuelled by nostalgia for Zion, which stifled collective hope. The opening up to politics that followed the exit from the ghetto and emancipation was the only development that could make it possible for Zionism to take shape as the national liberation project of the Jewish people.
With the French Revolution, the situation of the Jews changed radically; they were admitted into the political sphere, but with it the Jewish unity began to dissolve. Many Jews who acquired citizenship in their countries of residence, thinking first and foremost of integrating into their new homeland, rejected the idea of a Jewish people and the Zion sending that reminded them of the ghetto period, often believing it to be an ominous omen.
Jews, liberated by citizenship, became citizens with all rights, and after centuries of persecution, the modern world granted them all the privileges of freedom based on political and civil equality.
Yet Judaism was not prepared to face these new challenges, the rationalism and secularism of the Enlightenment. On the other hand, the emancipation that came with citizenship was achieved only at the individual level. The Jewish community thus ceased to exist in the legal sense. Jews could no longer form separate groups, they had to integrate into European nations and sacrifice their cultural identity.
Jews were often encouraged to take this path of integration. In Western Europe, the formerly humiliated Jews welcomed the emancipation that came with citizenship with enthusiasm and fully accepted it, assimilated, became patriots and tried to justify their abandonment of national and traditional Judaism.
The process of assimilation of the Jews consists of several processes. It includes linguistic assimilation, cultural assimilation and social integration. The citizenship rights granted to the Jews by the European states had to come at a price. Jews had to reject the idea of a return to the Land of Israel, the secularisation of the Messianic faith, i.e. the idea that it was God’s will that Jews be scattered in various countries. For most Jews in Western Europe, Jerusalem was now Berlin and Paris.
All these tendencies indicate a radical reform of traditional Judaism. The spiritual connection with the Land of Israel has been severed and the Jews are recognised as having only one homeland. With the granting of citizenship rights to Jews in France and Germany, Jews there became patriots of these countries. However, the vast majority of the Jewish population lived in Eastern Europe.
The Jews in Eastern Europe and Russia were not assimilated by being granted citizenship rights like the Jews in Western Europe. Jews in Eastern Europe and Russia were forced to convert through coercion, oppression and massacres.
Eastern European Jewry had a national character with its structure, organisation and distinctive culture. Throughout the 19th century, the nationalist movements in Europe would engulf the Jews as well, making them see the Jewish problem as a “national” problem, and solutions similar to the ideology of the Nation-State, i.e. the idea of establishing a state for the Jews, would begin to be expressed.
During the exploration of this national idea, the economically and politically threatened Jews of Eastern Europe would encounter assimilated and even marginalised Jews of the West, witnessing the rise of antisemitism, the bankruptcy of assimilationist ideologies and identity crisis, and rediscovering the previously denied existence of the Jewish people in the framework of a national plan.
The infrastructure of political Zionism was to be laid by the emancipated Jews who were granted citizenship, and Eastern European Jews were to be the fiercest advocates and the most populous group of this national movement.
The historical and geographical meeting point of these two movements is the Basel Congress. Excluded from politics during centuries of oppression and exile, they faced the modern world with emancipation on the basis of civil rights and the subsequent tendency towards assimilation.
The Jews could neither melt into other nations, nor did the Jewish people aspire to do so, and they entered the 20th century with a national project that would encompass their entire contemporary history and would be made possible by wars, strife and division.
The demographic revolution in Europe and North America, caused by a decline in the mortality rate and a high birth rate, particularly benefited the Jews of Central and Eastern Europe, covering losses due to conversions, mixed marriages and religious indifference.
This demographic growth, resulting from economic constraints and political pressures, would soon expose the poverty and overpopulation of dense Jewish settlement centres, such as the enclaves in the Russian Empire; the problem of place would become increasingly acute for Jews with a higher rate of population growth than that of the indigenous nations; this problem would create a spontaneous wave of emigration to the West, especially to the United States, giving rise to numerous designs for organising the departure, reception and settlement of these people deprived of livelihood opportunities.
At the same time, the Jews of Eastern and Central Europe in particular were rapidly urbanising. A significant Jewish population was concentrated in large cities such as Paris, Berlin and London. This geographical mobility would also create a rupture in Jewish life with the traditional cadres. The big city was the breeding ground for new ideas, for certain tendencies rejected by the orthodox authorities.
Jews contributed to economic growth in the most innovative sectors. Although few Jewish workers could be found in Western European industry, a significant Jewish proletariat was developing in Eastern Europe.
The development of capitalism and free enterprise, based on money, created new social hierarchies. A more open society encouraged upward mobility and offered Jews the possibility of integration. The Jew, identified with the banker, was a symbol of the modern world, which was detrimental to the old ruling classes, such as the nobility and the clergy, and to social classes, such as the artisans, which had collapsed due to technical evolution.
Jewish capitalists were able to adapt to the new requirements of government bond investments, joint stock companies, business and deposit banks, capital compounds and cross participations. Economic development also led to the rise of the idea of the end of poverty and prosperity for all.
For the Jews, the idea of valorising Palestine and transforming the desert corresponded to the economic and social development of humanity. With rationalism and the principles of 1789, a pluralistic society was emerging in which the religious was confined to the individual sphere.
This kind of secularisation gave Jews equal rights only if they perceived Judaism as a religion. Zionism as a political design would emerge from this process of secularisation and the transcendence of traditional Judaism, and as a national movement, it would break ties with individual assimilation, reject the confinement of Judaism to the individual sphere, and accept it in a cultural and collective dimension.