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Beginning with the French Revolution, European Jewry entered into what seemed like a new and shining period. Ghetto walls fell and Jews rushed out to identify with lands that seemed prepared to accept them as full citizens. Many of the freshly emancipated Jews refused to use words like "exile, " disclaiming the slightest desire to return to Zion. From now on we shall call our synagogues "temples, " said the new Reform religious groups in Germany, for many laws in the Bible and Talmud are outdated and we no longer look forward to rebuilding the Jerusalem Temple. From now on we are Germans or Frenchmen of the Mosaic persuasion-- if we still care for that persuasion (185:1) In the West, the period of emancipation was often accompanied by an exodus from Judaism. But in eastern Europe, where the tsars permitted no such release, Jewish masses maintained strong ties to the historic tree of Jewish life. There the call for emancipation produced a new reaction, a movement late in the 19th century urging Jews to return to the ancient land of their fathers, to rebuild it and their own souls. In 1896 Theodor Herzl, a Viennese writer, came to the same conclusion in his pamphlet 'The Jewish State', and modern Zionism was born (185:2) About the turn of the century, small pioneer groups arrived in what was then the neglected lower part of greater Syria. They laid the foundation for the rebirth of Jewish sovereignty in its ancient homeland. In the same period, immigration of Jews from Europe to the West reached a crescendo: The largest and freest Jewish community in history was growing in the United States. Was all this historic coincidence? Was it again the "healing" that was to precede a "blow"? If so, it would have to be the greatest healing that man could conceive, for the blow which awaited was almost beyond human conception
(185:3)
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