The historian Isaac Deutscher explained it using the following parable: a man lives on the top floor of a building in which fire breaks out. To save his life, he jumps out of a window and lands on the head of a passer-by, who is severely injured. Bitter hostility develops between the two, and only gets worse day by day. That is approxi-mately what really happened.
At the end of the nineteenth century many Jews felt that the ground was starting to burn under their feet. National movements were developing in Europe. Every national grouping, whether large or small, wanted to live in its own national state. There was a devel-opment of national culture, which was moving to fill the space left by the decline of the great dynastic conglomerates like the Austro-Hungarian and Ottoman Empires.
Almost all of these national movements were anti-Semitic. France, the homeland of Jewish emancipation, had the Dreyfus Affair. Demonstrators shouted "Death to the Jews." In the new German Reich, every level of the population was infected with anti-Semitism, an expression that was coined at the time the Reich was founded. The royal court preacher propagated this teaching. The Polish movement for national independence was just as openly anti-Semitic as the majority of the smaller peoples of Europe.
The Jews were an "anomaly" in nationalistic Europe. They were scattered over many lands and among many peoples, and had no homeland of their own. They were a remnant from an earlier age, two thousand years before. At that time the Mediterranean region was divided into ethnic-religious communities. Each community was autonomous, with its own legal system - whether in the Byzantine or the later Ottoman Empire. A Jew from Alexandria in Egypt could marry a Jew in Antioch (in today’s Syria), but not the Christian woman who lived next door.
In the Europe of the late nineteenth century nobody considered the possibility of the Shoa, the Holocaust: the planned, industrial-scale destruction of the Jewish people. But the pogroms in Russia were a clear warning.
When the Jews realized that there was no place for them in the developing national movements, they decided to do the same as all the others: to form themselves into one nation on the European pat-tern, with a unified territory, and a common history and