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Re: Theos-World RE: Re: "Well, hell most Jews are now atheists andhomosexuals. ....

Mar 14, 2004 05:14 PM
by Bart Lidofsky


Tony wrote:
I would be interested to know more, and am under the impression that
Zionists are about a state of Israel as a Country, but that there are other
(do they have a name) Jews who see it as a state of Consciousness. Is
there anything in this?
Here's the short version:

The Romans had a habit of displacing large numbers of conquered people from their home countries in order to avoid rebellions. They did this with Judea. At this point, until the mid-20th century, that area was always part of owned territory by some empire or other. When the Eastern Roman Empire fell, the Turkish empire took it over, and owned it until WWI. Jews sporadically moved back, and many Jews never left at all. However, there was no organized movement to go back to the "Holy Land" until the Dreyfus affair of 1894 demonstrated that the Jewish people were always vulnerable to persecution, even in the most civilized countries. The original goal of Zionism was to get a homeland for the Jews; the land which would be later called "Palestine" was merely the first choice. Money was raised, and land was purchased from Turkey.

There was actually a lot of resistance to Zionism among Jews who believed that the Jewish homeland would not, and therefore should not, be restored until the time of the Messiah. Great Britain took over the area (now called "Palestine"), and Jews started buying more land, especially in the area now known as "Israel". They did a LOT of development work there. However, many of the Arab residents, who had previously paid rent to the land owners, found themselves being displaced. They were largely ignored by the Jewish settlers, considered to be unimportant (which, based on what happened later, was a major mistake).

It wasn't until Hitler's massacre of European Jews that Jews as a whole started supporting Zionism, as Germany, before Hitler, was considered to be one of the most civilized nations on Earth. The thought was that if it happened there, it would happen anywhere.

I won't bother at this point with the modern history of Israel, as it's somewhat irrelevant. The point is that Zionism didn't exist while Blavatsky was active in the Theosophical Society, and wasn't even near universal among Jews for another half a century.

Bart




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