Zionism could be defined as "The national movement for the return of the Jewish people to their homeland and the resumption of Jewish sovereignty in the Land of Israel."

One doesn’t need to peruse the news for too long before reading or hearing about Zionism. So, it becomes necessary to go back in history to understand how Zionism came about. European Jews had suffered at the hands of many popes, kings, and the masses since the Early Church Fathers. Anti-Semitism, in many shapes, from theological to social to ethnic, had punctuated Jewish life throughout the centuries, limiting if not eliminating any semblance of normalcy within the Jewish communities of Europe. The Crusades, the crushing hatred unleashed by false claims of blood libel against the Jewish people READ NOTE, the 1492 Spanish Inquisition and the creation of the first Ghetto in Italy in 1516, to name a few, were ominous milestones of terror against the Jewish people on the timeline of Jewish history. It would eventually get much worse, with the Russian pogroms (massacres occurring during fomented riots against the Jews in the Ghettos) and the Holocaust (1933-1945), a systematic extermination in which six million Jews were murdered by the Nazis.

After all this persecution and devastation, something had to change. Jewish people felt they had to “leave the Ghetto” not just physically, but spiritually and emotionally as well. In the midst of their misery, the Jewish people saw a ray of hope with the advent of the Haskalah. LISTEN TO THE REST IN THE PODCAST!

[2] Blood Libel can be broadly defined as an accusationthat Jews kidnapped and murdered the children of Christians to use their blood as part of their religious rituals during Jewish holidays. More than 150 claims of blood libel were recorded throughout history resulting in the death of Jewish people (mostly during the Middle Ages). More on blood libel can be read in Joshua Trachtenberg’s book, The Devil and the Jews, The Medieval Conception of the Jew and Its Relation to Modern Antisemitism (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1983), pp. 140-155.