Zionism in the Bohemian Lands Before 1918
Zionism in the Bohemian Lands Before 1918

Summary/Abstract: The increasing secularization of Jews and the rise of Zionism in the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries threatened the traditional distinction between heresy and Judaism within the bounds of the rabbinical religious law, the Halakha. Instead, this distinction was gradually superseded by a nationalist differentiation between ‘bad’ assimilation and ‘good’ acculturation, the former connoting a sorry sellout, and the latter a successful and necessary adaptation. Instead of Halakha, the core tenet of neo-Romantic ideology – the ‘Volk-spirit’ emerged as the seemingly timeless yardstick for measuring the proximity or distance of Jewish communities to the newly designated target, a Jewish Volk. The more a community used Hebrew, the more it was Jewish, the more autarchy or autonomy it enjoyed, the greater it’s ‘Volk-ness’, and the closer its ties to the ‘Holy Land’, the more it ostensibly paved the way for a State of the Jews. With a map showing the founding of (proto-) Zionist organizations in the Bohemian Lands: before the Hilsner Trial (1893–1898) and during the trial (1899–1900) as well as a table with arough timeline for the Bar Kochba fraternity and its agglomerated organizations 1899–1918.

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