The Controversy of Zion: Jewish Nationalism, the Jewish State, and the Unresolved Jewish Dilemma

After centuries of persecution and contempt, European Jews were slowly emancipated in the nineteenth century. This gave them a chance to become what they were never allowed to be before; loyal citizens of the countries where they lived. As the nineteenth century wore on, however, this emancipation proved to be an illusion. The hatred once based on religion made way for a new and more insidious form of anti-Semitism based on race and culture. The Jew was still a stranger, his position the more false and humiliating for his attempt to assimilate. This was the Jewish Question, to which, at the end of the nineteenth century, a drastic solution was proposed. In 1896, Viennese journalist Theodore Herzl first coined the term "Zionism," for a movement to found a homeland where Jews could live free from his persecution. .