A Movement With More Than One Origin

Zionism is the modern movement for Jewish national self-determination in the Land of Israel, conventionally dated to Theodor Herzl's 1896 pamphlet Der Judenstaat and the First Zionist Congress he convened at Basel in 1897, which established the World Zionist Organization as the movement's central coordinating body. Herzl's political organizing built on earlier currents that historians treat as Zionism's own prehistory, including Leon Pinsker's 1882 pamphlet Autoemancipation and the Hovevei Zion, Lovers of Zion, societies that had already begun organizing and funding small scale Jewish settlement in Ottoman Palestine before Herzl's congress gave the movement its first formal international institution.

Historians of Zionism describe the movement's emergence as a response to nineteenth century European conditions, including recurring antisemitic violence, exclusion and the rise of nationalist movements elsewhere in Europe that Jewish thinkers of the period read, in various and disputed ways, as evidence that emancipation and assimilation alone would not secure Jewish safety or self-determination. From its first congress onward, Zionism was never a single unified ideology but a coalition of currents that agreed on the goal of Jewish national return while differing sharply over method, religious content, timing and territorial vision.