What’s love got to do with it? The emotional language of early Zionism

Abstract

ABSTRACT This article looks to European Jewry between the mid-nineteenth and early twentieth centuries to illuminate the role of love in a modern nationalist movement. In the third quarter of the nineteenth century, the political activist Moses Hess (1812–1875) and the historian Heinrich Graetz (1817–1891) professed a sentimental love of Jews and of the land of Israel. In the 1880s, the hovevei tsion (Lovers of Zion) movement produced poetry in which attachment to Zion and the Jewish people was more romantic than sentimental, oscillating between a passive, mournful yearning for the land and an active, muscular striving to rebuild it. With the advent of Herzlian political Zionism, the Zionist labor movement, and the Zionist-Palestinian conflict, the more dynamic variety of romanticism became dominant, and it assumed more explicitly erotic and militant dimensions than had previously been the case. Older forms of sentimental love did not disappear, however. Until the end of his life, the Zionist leader Nahum Sokolow (1859–1936) remained convinced that sentimental love was Zionism’s overarching organizing principle.