A homeland for the Jewish people was an idea that rose to the fore in the 19th century in the wake of growing anti-Semitism and Jewish assimilation, with many competing proposals considered. Jewish emancipation in Europe paved the way for two ideological solutions to the Jewish Question: cultural assimilation, as envisaged by Moses Mendelssohn, and Zionism, promoted by Theodore Herzl. In the late 19th century, Herzl set out his vision of a Jewish state and homeland for the Jewish people in his book Der Judenstaat. Herzl was later hailed as the founding father of the State of Israel. In the Balfour Declaration of 1917, the United Kingdom became the first world power to endorse the establishment in Palestine of a "national home for the Jewish people." The British government confirmed this commitment by accepting the British Mandate for Palestine in 1922. In 1948, the State of Israel was established as a Jewish state.
Read more about Homeland For The Jewish People: History, Moves To Statehood, Founding of The State, Jewish State or A State of Jews?
Famous quotes containing the words homeland, jewish and/or people:
“Let those who desire a secure homeland conquer it. Let those who do not conquer it live under the whip and in exile, watched over like wild animals, cast from one country to another, concealing the death of their souls with a beggar’s smile from the scorn of free men.”
—José Martí (1853–1895)
“For every nineteenth-century middle-class family that protected its wife and child within the family circle, there was an Irish or a German girl scrubbing floors in that home, a Welsh boy mining coal to keep the home-baked goodies warm, a black girl doing the family laundry, a black mother and child picking cotton to be made into clothes for the family, and a Jewish or an Italian daughter in a sweatshop making “ladies” dresses or artificial flowers for the family to purchase.”
—Stephanie Coontz (20th century)
“Nothing is more repugnant to me than brotherly feelings grounded in the common baseness people see in one another.”
—Milan Kundera (b. 1929)