Of course Zionism was not new. It was as old as the Babylonian exile. Had not the psalmist sung: ‘By the rivers of Babylon, there we sat down, yea, we wept, when we remembered Zion’?128 For more than a millennium and a half, every Jewish generation, in every Jewish community, had contained one or two who dreamed of Zion. Some had fulfilled the dream personally by going there: to Tiberias, to Safed, to Zion itself. Others had thought to found little congregations or colonies. All of these, however, had been religious Zionists. In one way or another they hoped to precipitate the messianic
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