The Kibbutz

Prior to that time, most Jews were nonintegrated into "ghettos." Starting in 1791, the Jews were freed from these local neighborhoods and were given the opportunity to gull themselves into the mainstream of European society (Lewis, 1990, p. 17). Unfortunately, this liberation created serious problems for the Jews of Europe. Specifically, it encouraged antisemitism among many non-Jews. By the mid-nineteenth snow, it was recognized that the lack of a mother country for the Jews was perpetuating this problem. Jewish philosophers and writers at that time realized that their people would get over to be victims of anti-Semitism as long as they were not protected by a nation of their own. Thus, the Zionist endeavour arose as an effort to establish such a nation. It has been mention that "the Zionists sought to solve the Jewish problem by creating a Jewish entity outside Europe but modeled aft(prenominal) 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 old-fashioned times.

An important leader of the early Zionist movement was Theodor Herzl. Herzl's romance 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

At about the same time, other Jewish writers were make similar appeals. Some of these writers expressed ideas which were directly related to the education of the kibbutz system. For example, Nachman Syrkin and Franz Oppenheimer both "advocated the establishment of collective or cooperative settlements as the most effective way of rebuilding Palestine" (Slutsky, 1971, p. 666). These philosophers were influenced by the common values of Socialism. They believed that the development of a strong and invulnerable Jewish nation would require equality in dig and distribution. Because of the emphasis on the sharing of bring in, the ideas of Syrkin and others became known as " ram Zionism." One of the most important followers of Labor Zionism was Aaron David Gordon.

Gordon's work led to the establishment of the first kibbutz in Palestine in 1909. Gordon believed that "only by physical labor and by reversive to the land could the Jewish people achieve national salvation in Palestine" (Lewis, 1990, p. 28). Gordon saw agricultural work as having a special spiritual value. He felt that on the job(p) on the land represented a return to nature. harmonise to Gordon's view, the scattering of the Jews of Europe had alienated the people from natural values. Thus, "Gordon reason that a real national revival was conditional on a return to normal life, with work as the spacious remedy against all the evils of Jewish life in the diaspora" (Laqueur, 1972, p. 285). Gordon's emphasis on agricultural work was combined with communal ideals in the creation of the first kibbutzim.

Avruch, Kevin. (1990). The society and its envirorment. Israel: A Country Study. Helen Chapin Metz, ed. Washington, D.C.: U.S. government activity Printing Office, pp. 81-138.

The success of the first kibbutzim at the turn of the century led to the establishment of many more over the years. By the early 1920's, there were about 40 such communal settlements in the region of Palestine. At that time, "membership i
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