Went down the rabbit hole today researching alllllll the links in the chain from the expulsion from Spain in 1492 to the establishment of the state of #Israel in 1948.
I won’t go into all the details in this post – this needs to be a book – but here’s the upshot:
This is not a case of someone starting a project that failed and was picked up three centuries later and brought to fruition… This is someone starting something that continued and grew and eventually attained one of its concrete goals.
Doña Gracia Nasi, born into a culture wrestling with the political implications of being a disenfranchised minority and the national alternatives to perpetual exile and instability, literally started modern #Zionism (defined as the organized movement to reestablish Jewish autonomous society in Israel), developed the Galilean communities into a thriving independent society, and built the political, economic, and social networks that coalesced into what became later known as the Old Yishuv.
The communities that she built spread to Jerusalem and Hebron, absorbed waves of Sepharadi and Maghrebi immigrants, and eventually (re)established the northern coastal cities as Jewish centers. It was the Sepharadi and Maghrebi leaders of these communities who helped the incoming Europeans establish what became known as the New Yishuv.
Theodor Herzl definitely contributed to modern Zionism. He established many effective organizations that exist to this day and translated the Zionist project into the European political language of nation-statism in vogue in his day. But Herzl inherited an intellectual apparatus that originates with Sepharadi rabbis wrestling with the expulsion from Spain and he built on a foundation laid and lived by Sepharadi and Maghrebi immigrants and their descendants. Herzl’s efforts were just one phase in the long story of modern Zionism, and he ultimately did not succeed in creating a state.
It took two world wars, the fall of the Ottoman and British empires, and a genocide, before conditions emerged and international support could be garnered for the creation of a fully autonomous Jewish state in Israel.
Which leads us to an intriguing What If:
If Herzl had never been born, but all the international events of the first half of the twentieth century transpired, would we still have a state?
Maybe. The Old Yishuv was a robust, autonomous society, and in the 20th century it could have conceivably transitioned into a state.
But if Doña Gracia had never been born, could Herzl have done what he did? Could a state have later emerged?
I think the answer is, most likely not.
The truth is, modern Zionism starts with Doña Gracia Nasi:
The mother of the state of Israel.