Early Danish Zionism and the ethnification of the Danish Jews

ABSTRACT From 1897 to 1914, a small group of Danish Zionists presented the Danish Jewish community with a variety of Zionist objectives. In contrast to existing research, I argue that this activism played an important role in the communal change that took place among the Danish Jews before the outbreak of WWI. I identify how the salience of East European immigrants in Copenhagen compelled the self-conceived “ethnically” Danish Jews to reconsider and alter their boundaries of groupness in a significantly different way that resonated with the framework of Jewish groupness invoked earlier by the Zionists.