A great majority of Jews in Western…
1852 CE to 1863 CE
A great majority of Jews in Western and Central Europe respond to the new anti-Jewish stirrings by seeking even deeper assimilation into European culture and a secularization of Judaism.
A minority, who believe that greater assimilation will not alter the hostility of non-Jews, adopt Zionism.
According to this view, the Jew will remain an outsider in European society regardless of the liberalism of the age because Jews lack a state of their own; Jewish statelessness, then, is the root cause of anti-Jewish sentiment.
The Zionists seek to create a Jewish entity outside Europe but modeled after the European nation-state.
West European Jewry, after more then half a century of emancipation, has become distanced from both the ritual and culture of traditional Judaism.
Thus, Zionism in its West European Jewish context envisions a purely political solution to the Jewish problem: a state of Jews rather than a Jewish state.
