Zionism – It’s Secular

(From class Wednesday, June 30)
In the historical narrative of Zionism, it is incredibly important to realize that the Zionist movement was, primarily, a secular one. As mentioned in the post on the ultra-Orthodox Haredim, devoutly religious Jews saw Zionism as something that went against God's plans for redemption.
In speaking about Zionism, “ZionismS” is perhaps a better term. As in any movement, people approached Zionism in many different ways and for many different reasons. But if we were to describe the lowest common denominator of Zionists, we would assert the following statements:
1. Who are the Jews? All Jews were part of a nation, either already in existence or to be created. Jews, for Zionists, are a national group.
2. The problem, for Zionists, is Jewish life at the end of the 19th century. Jewish life in the Diaspora was believed to be critically defective.
3. The solution to this problem was the in-gathering of Jews in the land of Israel or temporarily elsewhere, under conditions of autonomy at least and sovereignty at best.
Zionism, at its root, was about political power.
Zionists differed in the exact details of these three main points. Are Jews a national group based on their common land, language, history, and culture or due to a religious covenant? Is the main problem Antisemitism, the “ocean of foreign culture” (Ha'am), some kind of “slavery in freedom” (you have so many options you lose your independence)? They also differed greatly in their proposed methodology. But they were held together in seeing a timeline of Jewish history as one of three main time periods: Biblical/Antiquity, Diaspora (Exile), and Statehood/Autonomy (Return). Sovereignty is, for Zionists, what marks different eras in Jewish history - thus making it much more secular and political than many connotations of today make it seem.