ZIONIST HISTORIOGRAPHY AND THE EMERGENCE OF ROMANIAN ZIONISM
ZIONIST HISTORIOGRAPHY AND THE EMERGENCE OF ROMANIAN ZIONISM

Summary/Abstract: The Focsani Conference and the sailing of a group of emigrants from Romania in 1882 were among the most dramatic events in the emergence of pre-Herzlian Zionism. The Romanian Zionist enterprise was supported for years, by the special attention paid to the plight of Romanian Jewry in face of mounting anti-Semitism and the authorities’ refusal to grant equal rights to the Jewish population. Some of the well known personalities of the period participated in the international support, calling on Romanian emigration to Palestine. The paper outlines the significance of the “torch that was lit in Romania” some seventeen years before the First Zionist Congress, a fact unknown to Herzl till 1897, and the gradual demise of its importance in Zionist historiography, with the “show being stolen” by other groups, as a result of the Russian emigration, and the rise of political Zionism.

• Details
• Contents