Cionizam i njegova historijska pozadina
Zionism and its Historical Background

Summary/Abstract: The author puts forward the history of Jews in the East and West Europe to give data for better understanding of the Zionist movement, which more and more influences also upon the development of international relations, and with regard to the partaking of Jews in the cultural heritage of Europe, also here strongly acts upon formation of social consciousness. The fate of this nation is closely connected with the fate of other nations it lives with. It has been specially shown their development in west Europe where parallel with the creation of the national state has been made the assimilation of Jews. After the victory of the French Revolution they entered, out of their »ghettos«, into a new world of freedom, with less or more obstacles, to finish finally in the prisoners’ camps of death. In the East Jews firstly lived in Poland in the Jews communities which were formed into a great national federation, and after the division/ of Poland in 1795 they came into the Russian imperial state. On that territory i he growth of population was big, so that at the end of the 19th century it grew up to five million inhabitants, what was the largest number of Jews in Europe. The emancipation of Jews also here comes to some obstacles, but under the influence of a wider Russian acceptance of the western ideas it accepted an another character than it did in the west. The Russian Jews, •who also wanted to break with the spiritual ghetto, they where different of the German Jews who where possessed by emancipation; although they were humanists they wanted to create a modern Jew, what caused the restauration of national feelings. In Poland together with enlightenment the Jews' mysticism also developed, Hasidism which was a social revolt of poor Jews' workers, and which according to Martin Buber, the Jews’, philosopher, reflected the authentic spirit of the Jews’ nation. So on the ground of a cohesive ethnical group in the East Europe developed modem Jewish nationalism differing from the western one where it was only a reaction to anti-Semitism where from it sought its way out. In the Zionist movement the two worlds, the East and the West, conflicted and finally reconciled to create their common country coming back to Jerusalem to create new harmony wherein, according to the Jewish tradition written in the book of the greatest Jews’ prophet Izaia »the country will be full of Lord’s marks, as the sea is full of water. There exists danger of decay of special ability of the historical Jewism, because their spiritual uneasiness and critical impulse slowly dies in the contemporary life of technicism. Israel stands in front of the task to look for its own solutions and voices of consciousness rise again. Erich Fromm, Herbert Marcuse and many other representatives of the Jewish intellectual elite seek an outcome out of barbarism where the western civilization fell in because of their spiritual crisis and because of which the fate of people is uncertain, to affirm finally the victory of spirit also in the present historical epoch and so to create perspectives for future.

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