e study of what came to be called the Holocaust (1961) describes the progressive alienation of Jews by the German state: through a systematic definition of Jewish identity; expropriation (of Jewish rights and property); and enforced concentration, expulsion, deportation, enslavement, and murder. An estimated 6 million Jews, the largest ethno-religious plurality targeted by the Nazi regime, as well as 6 million non-Jews, experienced noncombat murder. There has been a longstanding diversity of scholarly opinion about whether the Holocaust was sui generis or part of a continuum of European history marked by church- and state-sponsored restrictions and emancipations of Jews (Dawidowicz, 1975; Wistrich, 1991). It does, however, seem generally agreed that the push for a Jewish state did not originate with World War II.
For much of the 19th century, particularly its latter half, European Jewish intellectuals such as Nachman Krochmal (1987) and S.R. Hirsch (1969) broached the idea (from different points of view) of a Jewish state. Nascent Zionism even makes an appearance as a literary theme in George Eliot's novel Daniel Deronda. The discourse appears to have been a response to post-Napoleonic ghettoization that occurred across Europe over the course of the 19th century (Avineri, 1981); Napoleon had formally enfranchised his empire's Jews in 1791.
Zionism so called surfaced in 1896, with the publication of a tract titled A Jewish State by Hungarian Jewish journalist Theodor Herzl. In 1897, Herzl organized the World Zionist Organization, and over the course of the next 20 years various groups organized around strands of Zionist political thought sought formal international charter from Turkey, Germany, Britain (Rubinstein, 2000). World War I ceded Turkish Palestine to Britain, and in 1917, in a letter to a British Zionist leader, British Foreign Secretary Arthur J. Balfour approved in principle of the physical location in Palestine of a "n...