Monday, December 19, 2022
Elder of Ziyon
From the 1902 edition of Encyclopedia Britannica:
Less than a decade after the term was coined, the writer - Lucien Wolf - recognized clearly that modern Zionism was a direct "lineal heir" to the longtime Jewish attachment to the Land of Israel since the Jewish nation's first exile.
Today's scholars find such an idea anathema, because it would mean that the Jews have a historic tie to the land, and too many modern academics want to separate Zionism from Judaism. But at the time, it was obvious to all, Jew and non-Jew.
Wolf was an anti-Zionist himself. He lobbied against the Balfour Declaration and co-founded the anti-Zionist League of British Jews. His political opinion caused his blind spot, both in this article and his article on antisemitism in the encyclopedia, where he fervently believed that Jew-hatred was a thing of the past and the world was more enlightened - dooming Zionism to failure.
His predictions were fatally wrong.
Yet even as the antisemitism that he confidently believed had been receding was proven to be not only resilient but far deadlier than anyone could imagine, he didn't have the honesty to admit his mistakes.
If there were fewer Jewish anti-Zionists in England in the 1920s and 1930s, it is possible that many more Jews could have been saved from the gas chambers.
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