How and why did Zionism change from a passive notion to an active ideology during the nineteenth century? What was the situation for the Jews in the mid 19th century preventing them from premoting mass migration from Palestine?

The first 200 words of this essay...

Although it has been a precondition of Jewish consciousness to believe that the emergence of a Modern political Zionist movement can be attributed to the rampant anti-Semitism suffered by the European Jews, this does not provide an adequate explanation. The entire history of the Jews can be defined by the way in which they suffered persecution under the oppressive hands of others, proving that anti-Semitism was not a phenomenon unique to the Jews of the nineteenth century. Thus, and exploration of the transformation of the Jewish world in lieu of the invention of the modern world as we know it is imperative to the understanding of the development of Zionism from a passive consciousness and yearning to the emergence of the first political Zionist writings marking the beginning of an active ideological movement advocating mass immigration to Eretz Israel.

The nineteenth century was a dynamic climate in European politics. The Enlightenment, a Western movement celebrating man's rationality, centrality, and equality, began in France in the last decades of the eighteenth century; however it was not until the nineteenth century that grants of emancipation proliferated across Europe. With the emancipation of German Jewry by 1871 every European country except Russia had