So what was happening for the Jews in Europe during this time?

Hey! Wait! Why just focus on European Jews? There are and have been Jews all over the world for this entire time period – why just talk about European history here? Doesn't this perpetuate racism and Ashkenazi cultural domination within Jewish communities?

Yes, it probably does. So I'm torn – there's so much history, but there's only so much room in this booklet, and we're trying to get to the history of Zionism. Since it was a movement that started in Europe, that's the history we're discussing today. But let's keep in mind that this history is not, and has never been, the only Jewish history.

Let's go back to the medieval period. Actually, just before the medieval period – before monarchs started seriously consolidating their power. For centuries, Jews lived throughout Europe in relatively autonomous communities. They had their own systems of law, and were basically left to govern themselves. This was the time when the kings, the church, and nobility all competed for power. In this matrix, the Jews often sided with the crown, and in return they received protection, and often a fair bit of political influence. This usually meant that they were left alone by the people around them, since they could call on the royal troops to protect them. But it also meant that every once in a while they would be attacked – specifically because they were seen as representatives of the crown. Violence took the form of "scapegoating" as people took their frustrations with the monarchy out on the Jews.

When monarchs began centralizing and consolidating their power, they wanted to squash all competition. So these small communities that functioned autonomously? They could no longer exist. All subjects were to be brought under one system of political authority. The monarchy started dismantling the autonomous communities. It wasn't that they were particularly against the Jews – they were against any power concentration besides their own. This new political set-up ended Jewish communal authority and significantly decreased the power of Jewish communities, but was often paired with new opportunities for individual Jews to gain political power.

Things started getting worse. In the early stages of amassing loyalty, monarchs tried creating religious – i.e. Christian – societies, utilizing religion as a powerful link between subject and ruler. It worked well for the church – why not the king? This was a terrible set-up for religious minorities. Violence against Jews in Western Europe, once episodic events perpetrated by gangs, became state policy. A tension emerged between integrating the Jews completely and expelling them all. "Integrating" often meant forced conversions – as you couldn't have non-Christians in a Christian Empire. But time after time, the crown gave up on "integration" and on came the expulsions: England (1290), France (1394), Spain (1492), and Germanies (1421-1450). The time of royal protection was very much over.

As you can see, the Jews kept being pushed further east. Most of them ended up in the Polish-Lithuanian Kingdom (the largest kingdom in continental Europe for a few centuries), the Ottoman Empire, and North Africa. The Ottoman Empire (present-day Middle East) became the best place to land. Not much anti-Semitism there. Huh. Let's think about that for a minute.

After the Treaty of Westphalia in 1648, the crown no longer competed with the church and nobility – the monarchy was the highest authority in Europe. But most of their lands were totally bankrupt after 30 years of warfare. So what happened? The monarchs started inviting the Jews back in to help reconstruct the country. Specifically, they invited a group of wealthy Jews to come in, and made from them a small Jewish elite. Their entrance coincided with the emergence of a new religious tolerance, something not really existent before. More Jews started populating Central and Western Europe again, and began emancipation movements to increase their civil rights and political power.

1648 was a turning point for another reason – the Polish-Lithuanian Empire collapsed. It got partitioned off into Russia, Austria, and Prussia. This was bad for the Jews. Why? Well, during the centuries when masses of Jews from Western and Central Europe landed in the Polish-Lithuanian Empire, they had formed the Council of Four Lands – the most powerful political governing body in Jewish history. When the Empire collapsed, so did the Council. Now, instead of having access to a large, organized, political structure, most Jews lived under Tsarist Russia. The Tsar wasn't particularly thrilled about this either. He certainly didn't want thousands of poor and war-ridden Jews moving in to the rest of the country. So he drew a line on the map and said Jews couldn't settle past that point. This area became known as the Pale of Settlement. Jews couldn't leave there until 1917.

This situation had positive and negative consequences. On one hand, the Pale of Settlement was characterized by poverty and hardship (traditional Jewish occupations in small-scale commerce and artisanry couldn't compete in the new capitalist economies). On the other hand, the Jews had lived up to this point as tiny populations scattered throughout Europe. Now, most of them were all in one place, and with the general population explosion in Europe in the 1800s, they became a mass of people. They started feeling like a nation, in the political sense of the word, and began regarding themselves in national terms – as a distinct people dispersed over many countries.

Unfortunately, so did the people around them. With the growth of modern racism in the 1800s and the secularization of societies, anti-Semitism became secular as well - based less on religious observance and more on the "physical and mental characteristics" of Jews. Anti-Semites in the late 1800s started to talk about the "Jewish problem" as a national or racial concern. As European nationalism grew and expanded, Jews became viewed as a problem to be dealt with.

A wave of anti-Semitism swept through Europe in the 1880s and 1890s that was directly tied to new nationalist parties. In Western and Central Europe, this anti-Semitism was understood as a kind of backlash to new Emancipation legislation – civil rights that had recently been granted to Jews. No such rights had been granted in Eastern Europe. And in Russia, the anti-Semitism wave took the form of pogroms – violent assaults – that were supported by Populist groups and government alike after the assassination of Alexander the II. Populists viewed the pogroms as the "first step" in moving the masses towards revolution against the government and landowners. The government supported the pogroms to divert attention away from themselves and the landowners. Yikes. In response to anti-Semitism and growing poverty, Jews emigrated like they've never emigrated before. Thousands fled Eastern Europe and settled in Central and Western Europe, the United States, and other continents. The influx of poor Eastern European Jews into Germany, England, and France, made life more difficult for Jews in these countries trying to demonstrate their similarity to their non-Jewish neighbors.

Let's stop and see where we are. It's the end of the 1800s. Ethnic-linguistic nationalism has taken over Europe and patriotism has swept through the middle class. This has led to violence against minority groups. Some minority groups have come to identify themselves as 'nations' and have started claiming the right to self-determination. The age of imperialism has begun, bringing modern racism along with it, and moving the gaze of Europeans out to the rest of the globe. Socialist movements are gaining power and poor people everywhere are seeking radical solutions to society's problems.

At this moment in history, many Jews saw themselves as "a collectivity requiring collective solutions." Some Jews joined the Socialist movements – believing that anti-Semitism was based on class division, and that with the revolution, anti-Semitism would be solved. Some Jews continued working towards assimilation - trying to make Europe a place that could include people of all "nationalities." Another group of Jews started a nationalist movement of their own – Zionism.