be able to find a place within the European community, and that, therefore, they had to form a nation of their own. Thus Zionism was a direct product of the spirit of nationalism in nineteenth-century Europe.

At a time when the idea of nationalism was all-conquering, when it reached and engulfed even the most backward peoples in Eastern Europe, it also reached the Jews. These Jews were not a nation in the usual sense of living together in a territory and having the outward signs usually attributed to a nation. Herzl decided to provide them with the attributes artificially, giving them first a sense of nationality and then a territory in which to live a national life. One could say that Zionism, as such, was the last of the national movements of Europe. It began to emerge and gather momentum just when the older nationalisms of Western and Central Europe had passed their peak, when nationalism, as a manifestation of Western culture, as a response to economic and political challenges, was slowly becoming anachronistic. All around, fierce new national movements were raising their heads in Eastern Europe. Poles, Czechs, Slovaks, Serbs, Croatians, Lithuanians, and many others were clamoring for nationhood and independence, each dreaming of a small homogeneous nation-state of its own, where its own language and its own culture would reign supreme.

In these new nation-states, as yet unrealized, there was no place for the Jews. They did not belong. They were different. And so there was something highly appealing to Jews in the idea of leaving it all and creating a Jewish nation-state.

One of the peculiarities of the time was that each one of these new national movements tried to resurrect, and, if necessary, to invent, a glorious national history of its own. Each new state was conceived as a reincarnation of ancient glories, of the resurrection of some ancient state or empire in which that particular people had stamped its imprint on history. It was, therefore, quite natural for

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