What Is Zionism? Look at these statements and guess who made them: The Jews are a non-people, a non-nation – non-men, indeed. Jews have taken on a number of antisocial characteristics Jewish life is a dog’s life that evokes disgust. Jews are like filthy dogs, inhuman dogs. The Nazis? The Ku Klux Klan? David Duke? No. Those statements were made by early Zionists. The second one was said by Herzl. That’s why they created Zionism. They were unhappy with the traditional Jewish “nation” (and its despised state among the nations) so they strove to get rid of it and replace it with a new one. A real one. One that would be “normal” – like the Aryans or Cossacks. Their goal was to re-define the very meaning of a Jew and the Jewish nation.
Rabbi Avigdor Miller describes it as follows:
What Haman and Titus could not do, the Israelis are attempting. The first could only attempt to destroy the physical existence of Israel, but the State of Israel is attempting to counterfeit the term Jew and to erase all boundaries between Jew and non-Jew. (Sing You Righteous, p. 20).
The way they sought to accomplish this was through rewriting national history, including creating new national heroes, allies and enemies, politics, aspirations, culture, even a new language, and re-educating the masses, especially the youth who they tried very hard to separate, culturally and psychologically, from their parents. They would leverage thousands of years of Jewish history and religion and exploit them to give an illusion of historical momentum to their newly created nationality. And, of course, they would also use the plain force of arms to make sure that the New Hebrew replaced the old religious Jew (as in the case of the children of Tehran). They learned these tried-and-true methods from other people who used them or variations thereof, including the Bolsheviks / Communists. That’s the executive summary. Here are the details: The Jewish People Nations are nations because its members share a common land, common language, common culture, common enemy, etc. The Jewish nation, however, is different. As Rav Sadiah Gaon says, the Jews are not a people because of any such factors. We are a nation for one reason only: Because we share the Torah. Our religion is our nationhood. Nothing else contributes to our nationhood besides the Torah. Rav Samson Raphael Hirsch writes that the reason Hashem gave us the Torah in the desert is to show that the Jewish nation does not need a country to be a nation. We are a nation because of our religion. The language we speak, the place we live, the food we eat, etc., have no impact on our being an Am. The Am Yisroel is the Am Yisroel because we came out of Egypt and Hashem gave us the Torah on Mt. Sinai.
“Nationalism is a political ideology that involves a strong identification of a group of individuals with a political entity defined in national terms, i.e. a nation. In the ‘modernist’ image of the nation, it is nationalism that creates national identity.”. To understand the concept enough for our purposes, please read at least the first and second parts of that Wikipedia article (until after the History section). As people in many different lands were starting to define themselves through national identities, the secular Jews were not far behind in wanting their own national identity as well. Identifying with their host countries was unsatisfying for them because due to antisemitism, they found that they were not really welcome much as German or Russian nationals. Identifying with their religion was not an option either because they rejected their religion. But even more than rejecting the religion itself, they rejected, in the most awful terms, the identity and the self-image that the Jewish religion bestowed upon a Jewish person. They rejected the national identity of the Am Yisroel. The hatred that these assimilated Jews had for the Jewish identity that resulted from Torah and Mitzvos was terrible to behold. One need not search hard to find denigrating images of the Altjude [traditional Jew] in Zionist rhetoric and pamphletry. Herzl had already noted in 1894 that Jews had “taken on a number of antisocial characteristics” in the ghettos of Europe and that the Jewish character was “damaged.” Frishman opined that “Jewish life is a dog’s life that evokes disgust.” Joseph Haim Brenner likened Jews to “filthy dogs, inhuman, wounded dogs.” Gordon wrote that European Jews were parasites. Berdyczewski christened traditional Jews “spiritual slaves, men whose natural forces had dried up and whose relation to the world was no longer normal,” and elsewhere, “a non-people, a non-nation – non-men, indeed.” (Efron p.88, Rabkin, p. 46).
If only we would be real nationality, not only a religion, , our problems would be solved, they said, Herzl insisted, on the last page of his Zionist manifesto, The Jewish State, that as soon as Zionism gets off the ground, anti-semitism will cease to exist. Zionism: The Transformation of the Jews into a Secular People Enter Zionism: The Re-Defining of the very meaning of Jewishness. The Jewish people, instead of being defined by Judaism (religion) would be defined as normal nations are – a common land, a common language, a common culture, common enemies. The New Jewish Nation would no longer possess all those despicable characteristics of the “Exile Jews” such as the nation’s role models, the righteous, and the spiritual rabbis. Instead, the New Jewish Nation will be strong, proud, and feared. To do this, the Zionists leveraged the already-existing Jewish national symbols, traditions, and even its history, and used them as propaganda tools for the transformation of a nation.
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