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The History of Zionism
Introduction
We’ve all read and heard the haters tell us how a bunch of Jewish Zionists in Eastern Europe woke up one day in 1897 and decided to start a movement to coerce and manipulate the entire world into “stealing” an Arab land because these evil Jewish Zionists just wanted to take back a land their ancestors lived on and were forced from almost 1800 years earlier.
But what if you knew that the Ottoman Empire itself wanted to return the Jewish people back to their land? What if I told you that it wasn’t even just a Jewish ambition, but that Christians understood and believed that the land of Israel belonged to the Jewish people and that the Jews should be allowed to return, long before political Zionism even existed?
When the Romans destroyed our second temple, massacred hundreds of thousands of Jews after the Jewish Revolt, and forced many to leave our land, it was a dark day in our history. But history shows us that not all Jews left their land. In fact tens of thousands remained.
And as early as 250-300AD, Jews in the diaspora that had fled would slowly return in small numbers.
But I’m going to focus on a few people, and not just Jews, who started what would become known as the Zionist movement.
When the Ottoman Empire conquered all the lands of the Levant in the early 1500’s, they found the land that is now Israel almost entirely barren and uninhabited. Aside from Jerusalem where the majority were Jews and Christians, and Safed where mostly Jewish communities existed, plus a few towns and villages spread around, the land was empty and desolate, deserted and left to die. The Ottomans controlled it, and tried to revive it, and so would bring in a few Arab communities and Turks, but they themselves knew that historically the land belonged to the Jews.
During the same period, Jews were being slaughtered and oppressed in Europe, especially during the Spanish Inquisition. And it was from that event that a safardi Jewish “Princess” and her nephew fled and became close friends to the Ottomans.
The Princess Jewess
By the mid-1500s, much of the world knew her name: Doña Gracia Nasi, a veritable Woman of Valor and an unapologetic Jew who utilized her vast wealth on behalf of her nation.
As a businesswoman, she managed an enormous company of trading ships that sailed across the globe, carrying spices, silver, and Jews fleeing the Spanish Inquisition.
Doña Gracia defied expectations by living openly as a Jew while dressed at the height of contemporary fashion, confronting kings, emperors, popes, and sultans to advance the causes of the Jewish people.
At the age of eighteen, Beatrice de Luna married Francisco Mendes-Benveniste – the most prominent merchant in Lisbon and the undercover rabbi of the converso community.
But the marriage between Beatrice and Francisco was short lived. Francisco died in 1535, leaving Beatrice and their young daughter, Ana, behind. According to Francisco’s will, he divided his fortune between Beatrice and his brother, Diogo Mendes.
Overnight, Beatrice Mendes became one of the wealthiest women in the world. At the age of 25, it became her responsibility to take over the commercial pursuits and covert religious responsibilities of her deceased husband.
Diogo Mendes relocated to Antwerp, the leading financial center in Europe, where Beatrice, Ana, and Beatrice’s sister Brianda soon joined him.
As Antwerp was under the jurisdiction of Spain, Beatrice and her family were still forced to live as crypto-Jews for fear of being caught by the Inquisition. Nevertheless, she began to use her resources to design an underground network that helped hundreds of crypto-Jews flee Spain and Portugal.
The Mendes family business owned trading ships that traveled between Lisbon and Antwerp, and soon enough these ships were carrying Jewish fugitives in addition to spices and bullion.
Once the crypto-Jews arrived in Antwerp, Beatrice provided instructions and money to cross the treacherous range of the Alps to the port city of Venice. From there, transportation was arranged to bring them to the Ottoman Empire – including the holy land of Israel.
Beatrice relocated to Ferrera in 1549 where the ruler, Ercole II, Duke of Este, hoped to bring the commercial assets of the Mendes family to his city.
Ferrera was home to a large Sefardic community that consisted of many ex-conversos from the Iberian Peninsula. For the first time, Beatrice and her family could live openly as Jews.
In Ferrera, Beatrice assumed her Jewish name: Doña Gracia Nasi. Doña is a Spanish honorific reserved for nobility, Gracia is the Spanish equivalent of Chana, and her new surname, Nasi, alluded to the biblical title that connoted royalty and political leadership. A nasi, or prince, represents the Jewish people in communal, legal, financial, and political aspects of life, and Doña Gracia Nasi was the only woman for whom there is evidence that this title was used.
In keeping with this title, even after openly reclaiming her Judaism, Doña Gracia did not submit to the sumptuary laws that restricted the clothing Jews were allowed to wear, and continued to dress fashionably in the high style of living to which she was accustomed.
An active patron of the literary and printing endeavors of Ferrera’s Jewish community, both the Ferrera Bible, a vernacular Spanish translation of the Hebrew Bible, and historian Samuel Usuqe’s Consolation for the Tribulations of Israel – published in Ferrera in 1553 – were dedicated to Doña Gracia Nasi.
In the spring of 1553, Gracia Nasi moved from Venice to Constantinople, the capital of the Ottoman Empire.
She continued to aid refugees fleeing Iberia, redeemed Jewish slaves captured by pirates, and established a yeshivah colloquially called “the academy of the giveret” and a synagogue named “the synagogue of the Señora”.
She organized the boycott of the popular trading port Anacona in 1556 after the papal mistreatment of Portuguese Jews living there – two dozen of whom were burned at the stake. In her own home, she hosted meals that served nearly a hundred hungry people every day.
Her heart, however, was always focused on the Land of Israel. In the 1560s, Gracia Nasi and her nephew, Joseph Nasi, who served in the sultan’s court, sought to establish a settlement in Tiberias with the goal of creating a place of refuge for Jews.
Sultan Suleiman the Magnificent granted Joseph Nasi permission to settle Tiberias, and by 1566, a thriving community of Jews were living there.
Doña Gracia Nasi even reinterred the remains of her deceased parents and husband from Portugal to Israel. Though the settlement she helped to build in Tiberias dwindled to only a few remaining families, she made an indelible mark in the effort to bring Jews back to the Land of Israel.
Today the Doña Gracia hotel and museum is located in Tiberias, welcoming visitors to the land to which she yearned to return.
Doña Gracia Nasi died in 1569. After her passing, the famous poet Sa’adiah Longo wrote an ode to commemorate her called “Doña Gracia of the House of Nasi,” comparing the pain of her loss to the pain felt for the destruction of the Temples on Tisha B’Av.
Revered as a champion for the Jewish people, Doña Gracia was a woman who chose to act at a time when many Jews were burned alive at the stake. Her unabashed allegiance to the Jewish nation made Doña Gracia the embodiment of perseverance in exile, reminding our people that they would one day return as free and proud Jews to the Holy Land.
Now let’s focus a little on her nephew, Joseph Nasi, who was a powerful figure in the Ottoman court, and who secured a grant from the Sultan to rebuild Tiberias and Safed in the Holy Land.
He aimed to establish a Jewish province, encouraging Jewish settlement and even attempting to develop Tiberias as a textile center.
Nasi's actions are considered an early example of practical steps towards Jewish settlement in Israel, predating the formal Zionist movement by centuries.
He was influenced by both religious beliefs about the importance of the Land of Israel, and a pragmatic desire to create a haven for Jews facing persecution in other parts of Europe.
Though his specific plans were ultimately not fully realized, Nasi's actions are remembered as a significant early attempt to establish a Jewish presence in their historical homeland, influencing later Zionist thinkers and activists.
Christian Zionism:
Christian Zionism is a political and religious ideology that, in a Christian context, espouses the return of the Jewish people to the Holy Land.
It began quietly as early as the 12th and 13th centuries AD, but took greatest prominence in the early 17th century.
It’s fundamental belief was that the re-establishment of Jewish sovereignty in the Levant—the eschatological "Gathering of Israel"— is a prerequisite for the Second Coming of Jesus Christ.
As more Christian groups began to break away from the Catholic Church, and from the original Replacement Theory ideology of the Lutheran and Protestant churches which were ideologically founded believing that the Christian Church replaced Jews as the “Spiritual Israel”, more and more Christian leaders began to believe that the prophecies of the Bible would never materialize until the Jewish people were returned to their ancestral home in Israel.
Thomas Brightman, an English Puritan, published “Shall They Return to Jerusalem Again?” in 1615. This was one of the earliest Restorationist works.
Another famous Christian Zionist, Sir Isaac Newton, who held Radical Reformation views in terms of religion and also dabbled in Kabbalah, predicted a Jewish return to Israel, with the rebuilding of Jerusalem in the late 19th century and the erection of the Third Temple in the 20th or 21st century, leading to the end of the world no later than 2060.
Many of Newton’s private writings, collected by Abraham Yahuda, now rest in the National Library of Israel since 1967.
In 1621, Sir Henry Finch published “The World's Great Restauration, or Calling of the Jews, and with them of all Nations and Kingdoms of the Earth to the Faith of Christ”
This was one of the first full length 251 page books published with the belief that the Jewish people need to return to Israel, their homeland. It was written in English but with several pages in Hebrew.
In 1649 - 250 years before modern Zionism, Ebenezer and Joanna Cartwright sent a petition to the British Government calling for the ban on Jews settling in England to be lifted and for assistance to be provided to enable them to be repatriated to their ancestral homeland, Israel.
In 1700, Judah he-Hasid led some 1,500 Jewish immigrants to the Land of Israel and settled in Jerusalem.
In 1771, Joseph Eyre published a scholarly essay entitled “Observations Upon The Prophecies Relating To The Restoration Of The Jews”, detailing why the Jews should return to the land of Israel.
In 1777, Menachem Mendel of Vitebsk along with a large group of followers emigrated and settled in the Jewish city of Safed in Israel. In 1783 they were forced out of Safed, and moved to Tiberias.
In 1804/5, a new organization was formed in Britain, called the Palestine Association, or Syrian Society. According to this organization, Palestine was a region that included Syria, Jordan, Israel, and even the island of Cyprus.
It was a scientific body founded to survey the entire Levant, and to ultimately return the Jewish people to their ancestral and biblical homeland.
It was founded ahead of its time, and was ultimately placed within the Royal Geographical Society until 1860 when it reformed as the Palestine Exploration Fund. It set up its main base for exploration in Jerusalem and still exists today.
As you can see, unlike what the propagandists try to tell you, Zionism isn’t some 19th/20th century construct by Jews who woke up one day and decided to cunningly manipulate the west to steal Arab land.
Zionism has existed since the very day the Jewish people were forced from their land. It is simply the belief that the Jewish people have the right to self determination in their own land.
It’s not an oppressive movement. And it is not a movement of colonization. If anything, it is about decolonization and taking back the land that was always our land and had been occupied by the actual oppressors, the Muslim Arabs.
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References:
- Research Article by Chaya Oppenheim
Mayim Achronim - The Economics of Jewish History (2021)
Jewish Virtual Library
Ben Barka, Mokhtar (December 2012)
Regina Sharif (1983). Non-Jewish Zionism: Its Roots in Western History
Proceedings of the World Congress of Jewish Studies: World Union of Jewish Studies, 1993
Stephen Spector, Evangelicals and Israel: The Story of American Christian Zionism, Oxford University Press 2009
Edelheit, Hershel (September 19, 2019). History Of Zionism: A Handbook And Dictionary
Richard Brothers (1794). A revealed knowledge of the prophecies & times
Ruth Kark; Haim Goren (2011). "Pioneering British exploration and scriptural geography: The. Syrian Society/The Palestine Association". The Geographical Journal. 177: 264–274
"Letters on Egypt, Edom and the Holy Land". March 10, 2001. Retrieved July 26, 2012