History of the Jews

by Paul Johnson

The founders of Zionism, for the most part, were not merely Westerners, they were (in the eyes of the Orthodox) atheists. When Herzl and Nordau went together to the Sabbath service on the eve of the First Zionist Congress, it was the first time either had done so since childhood – they had to be coached about the benedictions.188 The Orthodox knew all this. Most of them saw secular Zionism as open to all the objections raised against the enlightenment plus the mighty additional one that it was a blasphemous perversion of one of the central and most sacred Judaic beliefs. The notion that religious and secular Zionism were two heads of the same coin is quite false. To religious Jews the return to Zion was a stage in the divine plan to use the Jews as a pilot-scheme for all humanity. It had nothing to do with Zionism, which was the solution of a human problem (Jewish unacceptability and homelessness) by human means (the creation of a secular state).