that the lack of a homeland for the Jews was perpetuating this problem. Jewish philosophers and writers at that time realized that their people would continue to be victims of anti-Semitism as long as they were not protected by a nation of their own. Thus, the Zionist movement arose as an effort to establish such a nation. It has been noted that "the Zionists sought to solve the Jewish problem by creating a Jewish entity outside Europe but modeled after the European nation-state (p. 20). Most Zionists looked to Palestine for this homeland, because it was the region that the Jews had been exiled from in ancient times.
An important leader of the early Zionist movement was Theodor Herzl. Herzl's dream of a Jewish state was based directly on his perceptions of anti-Semitism in Europe. For example, Herzl was shocked by the pogroms of the 1880's, in which thousands of European Jews were massacred. Herzl was also influenced by the trial of Alfred Dreyfus which took place in 1894. Dreyfus was a Jew in the French Army who was wrongfully accused of treason. The bloody pogroms and the Dreyfus trial made Herzl realize that "Jews would always be an alien element in the societies in which they resided as long as they remained stateless" (Lewis, 1990, p. 25). On the basis of this observation, Herzl began making a concert
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