Europe was preoccupied with the Jews in the 19th century. The Continent was gripped by revolutionary ideas about the relationship of citizens to the state. But because Jews had long been considered outsiders, questions arose about how to incorporate them into these new systems. What rights should they have? How should Jews be integrated into society? What should be their status in various political, social, and economic roles? How should they be treated as a matter of law? Jews faced this complex “Jewish Question” wherever they sought acceptance, equal rights, and security amid prejudice and discrimination. The evolution of this question in Western and Eastern Europe produced several Jewish responses, one of which was Zionism.

Western Europe includes what we know today as France, Germany, Italy, and other nearby states. Eastern Europe refers to Poland, Belarus, the Baltics, Ukraine, and others, which were then part of the Russian Empire. The Jewish experience played out differently in the West and East during the 19th century. In the West, the challenge was primarily assimilation. Many Jews worried that adopting Christian lifestyles and cultures in a bid for acceptance would cause Judaism itself to soon disappear. In the East, though, the problem was tougher. Extreme violence, poverty, and persecution threatened Jews’ very lives. In both cases, early Zionist thinkers and activists came to the same conclusion: the Jews had no future in Europe. 

Western Europe

The Zionist movement officially began in 1897, but we can start a century earlier, in 1791. Before then, Jews in much of Europe were subjected to the whims of local rulers. Those rulers granted Jews certain rights and obligations under charters that treated Jews as a single group, or “corporation.” These charters described precise constraints under which Jews could live and work—even what they could wear—and governed their relations with non-Jews. This system kept the Jews at arm’s length from the rest of society but also offered the benefit of communal autonomy. Jews were largely free to manage their own affairs. They developed a rich inner world of distinct customs, practices, beliefs, languages, and relationships, which reinforced their separation from the Christian majority. All of this, though, hinged on the Jews’ relationship with the local ruler, for the terms of the charter were often dependent on his or her attitude toward them. Toleration could quickly turn to intolerance.

Everything changed in 1791. France became the first European nation to emancipate its Jews. The National Assembly granted French Jews equal rights as citizens, opening the door to their full integration into French society. This marked a triumph in Jewish history. For the first time, Jews could hope to be regarded as equals by their neighbors. 

French emancipation, following the success of the French Revolution, brought an end to the charter system, marking a sea change in the Jewish relationship with state and society. The new rule of law was based on national distinctions, not religious ones, meaning that all French citizens were treated equally. This meant equality for Jews, too, backed by constitutional law under a liberal government. But it’s important to understand that emancipation didn’t come about because French society suddenly decided it loved the Jews. Instead, the French thought emancipation was necessary to demonstrate the legitimacy of the French Revolution, the fulfillment of which promised a more perfect, just society, one that would end discrimination against minorities. Jewish emancipation expressed that promise. After 1791, France’s 40,000 Jews could expect to participate in the life of the nation as equal French citizens.

But there was a catch. During the debate over emancipation, the French nobleman Count Stanislas de Clermont-Tonnerre declared that “we must refuse everything to the Jews as a nation and accord everything to Jews as individuals.” In other words, Jews would no longer be treated as a corporation with special rules and privileges accorded them as a religious group. This, too, fulfilled the Revolution’s promise to secularize the state, relegating religious practice to the private realm. Jews were now treated as individuals, their private religious customs purely a matter of their personal lives rather than a concern of the state. In turn, Jews were expected to devote themselves wholly to their French identity, not their Jewish one.

We can generally say that the price of full equality was some degree of assimilation. For many Jews, individual identity was French first, Jewish a distant second. The hope of French society was that, over time, the Jews would become—and understand themselves as—French, not Jewish.

In the early 19th century, Jewish emancipation spread throughout Western Europe as Napoleon Bonaparte achieved one victory after another. Wherever he conquered, the French emperor freed the Jews from those medieval charters. Although historians debate his personal attitude toward Jews, he earned the Jews’ lasting admiration through his efforts to promote their legal equality. Through his conquests in the early part of the century, Napoleon brought Jews out of the ghettos, ended the enforced wearing of distinctive badges and hats, allowed the construction of synagogues, and even rescued Jews from slavery in Malta. The process of emancipation differed from country to country, and Napoleon’s policies toward the Jews were contradictory. But we can generally say that wherever Napoleon went, Jewish liberty tended to follow.

Europe was in an age of nationalism and liberalism, when the great empires were giving way to modern nation-states. As Napoleon’s armies conquered small, independent states and dismantled centuries-old feudal structures, people began to identify with their national group—that is, those whom they considered their “people.” This group identity was based on common language, history, ethnicity, and culture, and it often featured a hated enemy. Rising nationalist movements offered a romanticized view of a unified state with a national destiny. They paired these ideas with liberal notions of freedom and equality, in which self-government would guarantee individual rights. People demanded self-determination in the quest for freedom from foreign domination. And just as in France, Jewish emancipation was considered proof that these new states embraced universal, enlightened ideas.

Nationalism spread throughout Western and Central Europe. A series of uprisings and deft diplomatic maneuvers consolidated several independent states into the new Kingdom of Italy, proclaimed in 1861. Germany emerged 10 years later through a similar process that unified more than two dozen independent states. Elsewhere, the Austro-Hungarian and Ottoman empires were struggling. Poles, Greeks, Bulgarians, Serbs, Albanians, Ukrainians, and many others seized the opening to agitate for their own independent states. Independence movements, insurgencies, and wars followed. Borders were redrawn as new states were created and new alliances formed, altering the centers of power and giving rise to wholesale changes in European politics and society. Nationalism reflected a powerful desire for self-determination and a deep loyalty to, and kinship with, one’s “people.” These ideas, and these events, would profoundly influence the early Zionists.

At first, this was all great news for the Jews. They were now freer than they had ever been to fully participate in Western European society. For the first time, they could live, work, socialize, and pursue prosperity on par with their fellow French, German, and other Western European citizens. Many—though not all—jumped at this opportunity to integrate, shedding their outward Jewish distinctions to look, sound, and act like every other European man or woman. There was theoretically no limit to what an individual Jew could achieve.

Yet emancipation and assimilation also posed unique challenges to Jewish identity. For centuries, the enforced separation of Jews meant that there was no great clash between Jewish and non-Jewish lifestyles, since they rarely entwined. Emancipation forced Jews to consider for the first time where they wanted to draw the line between their public persona and their private Jewish identity. They had to navigate the tension between maintaining their religious and cultural traditions and assimilating into the dominant culture. This included debates over intermarriage, religious observance, and language.

For instance, now that Jews could attend French universities just like everyone else, should they attend classes on Saturday, in violation of the Jewish Shabbat? What if a business obligation clashed with a Jewish holiday? Should one eat nonkosher food at a social function or politely decline and risk the faux pas? Should one marry a non-Jew? These were profound questions that drove to the heart of Jewish identity. Jews had rarely before needed to consider such dilemmas. Further integration risked diluting, and then erasing, Jewish distinctiveness until future generations would, indeed, be fully French and no longer Jewish. Many Jews decided to integrate, attracted to the benefits that came with assimilation, and willing to forgo all but the most tenuous connections to their (now private) Jewish faith. Other Jews, though, watched with trepidation, worried that Judaism would disappear in Europe as Jews gradually assimilated so thoroughly that they became indistinguishable from Christians and even converted. Assimilation risked ending Judaism in Western Europe. 

Jews also expected that assimilation would end hatred of Jews, since the phenomenon was based on religion (or so they thought). In this new era of secularism and rationalism, education and the pursuit of knowledge were supposed to be the governing principles, giving religious discrimination no room to flourish. Many Jews took this at face value. As they adopted the patriotic loyalties of national citizens, they assumed their non-Jewish neighbors would shun discrimination and finally accept them as equals. 

But centuries of religious discrimination and its attendant social attitudes didn’t give way easily. And Napoleon began losing battles. Wherever Napoleon was pushed back, Jewish emancipation was also forced to retreat. Granting the Jews equality had upset the social hierarchy that had placed Christians on top for centuries. It “challenge[d] the habit of thinking that sees Jews as inferior, in servitude, and otherwise insolent and arrogant,” says the historian Magda Teter, and fueled political and social fear. Jewish emancipation was seen as a loss of status for Christians used to feeling and being superior. 

A violent backlash, known as the Hep-Hep Riots, broke out in several German states in 1819. Jews who had gained rights there were accused of using those freedoms to wield disproportionate influence and power at the expense of Christians. Jews in economic professions—finance, trade, and commerce—became scapegoats for the instability that followed the Napoleonic Wars and saw their rights rolled back. Cities revoked Jews’ citizenship, fired them from public posts, kicked them out of schools, and imposed heavy regulations designed to return them to their medieval second-class status. In Switzerland, the constitution of 1848 declared that only “Swiss citizens of a Christian denomination” had the right to settle there.

There was also a dark side to nationalism. The obsession with national unity could quickly turn exclusionary, aggressive, and expansionist. The strong identification with one’s own nation often meant disparaging those considered outside that circle. Minority groups faced resentment and repression as majorities consolidated their power through an appeal to a shared glorious past that deliberately pushed aside “the other.” Jews especially were seen as outsiders who didn’t fit in and, worse, were corrupting the purity of the idealized national character. Discrimination against Jews morphed from a religion-based prejudice into a national and ethnic one. Jews found themselves convenient scapegoats for social and economic disruption, and assaults on them were legitimized as national preservation. They were excluded no matter how much they tried to demonstrate their loyalty to the nation or to wrap themselves in its triumphant myths.

Where Jews thought that their embrace of modernity, citizenship, and national loyalty would end discrimination against them, they instead found themselves still blamed for society’s ills. It turned out that education was not the answer, that rationalism couldn’t shake centuries of suspicions about Jews, and that legal advancements couldn’t protect them from social ostracism. This period saw the rise of pseudoscientific theories about racial purity, when Jews were coded as coming from the Middle East, specifically the Levant. “Jews are no longer seen as European,” says Teter. “They are seen as ‘Oriental’ [and] their differences are now also racialized. ‘They are not like us….’”

In 1879, a German publicist named Wilhelm Marr popularized the term “antisemitism.” Marr argued that Jews could never be fully German no matter how much they assimilated. Germans and Jews, he insisted, were locked in a racial struggle to the death over who would control society, and Marr worried that the Jews would win. 

By the late 19th century, then, the Jews of Western Europe confronted two connected problems. One was assimilation, in which the Jewish desire for equality threatened to eventually erase Judaism from this half of the Continent. At the same time, anti-Jewish hatred found new expression as an attack on the Jews as a race, preventing them from obtaining the full acceptance that emancipation promised. 

As uncomfortable as this was, though, it paled in comparison to the torments of their coreligionists in Eastern Europe.

Eastern Europe

The 19th century was particularly awful for the Jews in Eastern Europe. The Russian Empire and its tyrannical czars ruled over a vast imperial landscape. The Jews were confined to an area called the Pale of Settlement, a strip of land running north to south for 800 miles from the Baltic Sea to the Black Sea. There, the Jews mostly lived in shtetls—small, impoverished towns of the kind depicted in Fiddler on the Roof. 

Jews constituted only a small percentage of the total population, yet they endured intense persecution and violence. They were kept in abject poverty, severely restricted in what kinds of professions they could work in, whether and how far they could travel, and how much property they could own. Teenage boys were often conscripted into the military (in effect kidnapped), disappearing for years if not forever. Most horribly, Jews were subjected to the infamous pogroms—anti-Jewish violence that destroyed Jewish lives and property. These pogroms were instigated by propaganda that blamed Jews for unrest and instability and promised that violence against the Jews would improve local fortunes and serve as an outlet for rage. Local authorities often condoned, or even participated in, the violence. 

Despite these hardships, Jews developed a dynamic culture from one end of the Pale of Settlement to the other. The shtetls may have kept Jews on the periphery of society, but there they formed close-knit communities centered on traditional family structures, religious observance, a rich intellectual life, and entrepreneurship. Synagogues, yeshivas (Jewish academies), and other communal organizations produced brilliant scholars, wise rabbis, and reams of Talmudic and other commentaries that carried Jewish traditions and practices from one generation to the next. Jews, though severely limited economically, still developed skills in various crafts, textile production, local commerce, and merchant trades. Again, think of the marketplace scenes in Fiddler on the Roof and the various professions of the main characters: milkman, butcher, tailor, and teacher. 

For a brief moment in the 19th century, it seemed that the Jewish situation might be improving. As a response to the Jews’ sociopolitical environment, and taking inspiration from modern movements elsewhere in Europe, the Haskalah, or Jewish Enlightenment, emerged as a significant intellectual movement, beginning in Berlin in the 18th century and then spreading east. Its advocates, known as maskilim (mass-key-leem), urged greater integration into broader society through secular education and modernization, while also keeping their distinct Jewish identity. They believed that enlightened, universal human values would conquer all prejudice, and many thought that Russia was the new center for progress, harmony, and justice. 

Meanwhile, Czar Alexander II came to power in 1855. He was a reformist committed to modernizing the empire in line with the developed nations of Western Europe. He made political, economic, technological, and social changes—such as ending serfdom in 1861—to improve the lives of his subjects, including the Jews. The czar brought greater religious freedom, a fairer system of justice, and a loosening of restrictions on the Jews. 

Russia’s Jews benefited from these changes. They enjoyed greater access to schools and universities, and those in certain trades were able to live outside the Pale of Settlement. These measures were relatively modest when compared with the status of Jews in emancipated Western Europe. But compared to the terrors and poverty of Jewish life in Russia, there was every reason to expect that the czar’s reformist disposition toward the Jews would only improve as his reign went on. Instead, things got worse.

Alexander II may have been enlightened, but he was still a czar: autocratic, deeply conservative, and repressive. His reign saw revolt and insurrection. Members of a revolutionary socialist group intent on overthrowing the czarist system assassinated Alexander in St. Petersburg on March 13, 1881. The era of reform came to a bloody end.

Alexander II was succeeded by his son, Alexander III, who used the assassination as an excuse to roll back his father’s reforms. The new czar suppressed civil liberties and unleashed a brutal police force to violently squelch any hint of dissent. The repression profoundly affected the Jews. The so-called May Laws restricted Jewish housing, property, and business rights, and measures over the following decade established quotas on Jewish students and doctors, curtailed Jewish political participation, and expelled around 20,000 Jews from Moscow. The laws were so harsh that they drew the attention of U.S. President Benjamin Harrison, who criticized Russia’s antisemitism in his 1891 State of the Union message.

Most shocking to Jews were the pogroms. Though they had never gone away, they now intensified. Rather than isolated incidents instigated by uneducated mobs, the 1880s pogroms were spread over hundreds of Jewish towns. They were encouraged and supported by newspapers and educated elites, and tolerated by local officials. The violence didn’t just target unassimilated Jews. Even those who had adopted Russian secular life as a signal of their humanistic enlightenment were attacked. It was a harsh awakening that forced many maskilim to reconsider their entire worldview, driving many of them toward the conclusion that Jews would never be welcome in non-Jewish nations.

Ultimately, the Haskalah did not achieve Jewish equality or security. What had been a glimmer of hope in the 1860s turned to dread a couple decades later. Where Western European Jews saw assimilation and social antisemitism as a threat to their survival, Eastern European Jews faced immediate threats from extreme violence and repression. In response, many Eastern European Jews sought to emigrate. More than 2 million moved to the United States, while several hundred thousand more went to Western Europe and elsewhere in search of safety and a better life. But millions more stayed behind. The quest for a solution to their plight would, like Western Europe’s dilemmas, form a crucial building block in what would become Zionism. 

The Jews’ problems weren’t limited to Europe. Jews in the Middle East and North Africa—who came to be known as Mizrahim (meez-rah-heem)—often lived as second-class citizens, facing legal discrimination, periodic violence, and severe restrictions in employment, education, and social relations. While mass expulsions from countries like Iraq, Libya, and Egypt would come later, the precarious state of Mizrahi communities was already apparent, making the case for a Jewish homeland relevant beyond Europe.

We began with a triumph and ended with a murder. The emancipation of French Jewry in 1791 and the assassination of Czar Alexander II in 1881 served as bookends for a 90-year experiment in Jewish equality, acceptance, and integration. The bewildering whiplash of hopes, promises, and setbacks of those decades brought an array of responses from Jews uncertain about their future. Some were sure of at least one thing: that antisemitism had made it impossible for Jews to fully thrive in Europe. The question they now asked was: So what’s the solution?