Simple definition for easy-understanding:
Zionism is an aspiration of the Jews in the post-European Renaissance environment to avail the opportunity to have a Nation State.
Jewish Definition
http://www.jewishvirtuallibrary.org/jsource/Zionism/zionism.html
Zionism, the national movement for the return of the Jewish people to their homeland and the resumption of Jewish sovereignty in the Land of Israel, advocated, from its inception, tangible as well as spiritual aims. Jews of all persuasions, left and right, religious and secular, joined to form the Zionist movement and worked together toward these goals. Disagreements led to rifts, but ultimately, the common goal of a Jewish state in its ancient homeland was attained. The term “Zionism” was coined in 1890 by Nathan Birnbaum.
Nathan Birnbaum (Pseudonym: Mathias Acher) (1864-1937)
Nathan Birnbaum was born in Vienna, and lived there from.1864-1908, and again from 1914-21. He lived in Berlin from 1912-1914, and again from 1921-1933. After the rise of Nazism, he left Germany for Scheveningen, Netherlands, where he edited Der Ruf ("The Call"), a platform for his ideas. He died there in 1937.
In 1882, together with two other students in the University of Vienna, he founded “Kadimah,” the first organization of Jewish nationalist students in the West.
In 1884, he published his first pamphlet, Die Assimilationsucht (“The Assimilation Disease/Mania”).
In 1890, Birnbaum coined the terms “Zionist” and “Zionism,” and, in 1892, “Political Zionism.”
In 1893, he published a brochure entitled Die Nationale Wiedergeburt des Juedischen Volkes in seinem Lande als Mittel zur Loesung der Judenfrage (“The National Rebirth of the Jewish People in its Homeland as a Means of Solving the Jewish Question”), in which he expounded ideas similar to those that Herzl was to promote subsequently.
in the First Zionist Congress (1897) and was elected Secretary General of the Zionist Organization.
he and Herzl developed ideological differences. Birnbaum had begun to question the political aims of Zionism and to attach increasing importance to the national-cultural content of Judaism.
Birnbaum eventually left the Zionist movement and later became a leading spokesman for Jewish cultural autonomy in the Diaspora.
In the years preceding World War I he gradually abandoned his materialistic and secular outlook, eventually embracing full traditional Judaism. .. His most famous book of this period was Gottesvolk (“God’s People”) first published in German and Yiddish in 1917 (translated into English in a shortened form by J. Elias in 1947 titled "Confession").
Dissatisfied with the spiritual complacency of the religious masses, he initiated a movement, the Order of the Olim (“[Spiritual] Ascenders”), to consist of small groups of people dedicated by their way of living to raising spiritual awareness within the larger Jewish society, thus leading toward a Jewish spiritual renaissance. (See Divrei Ha-Olim: “The words of the Olim,” 1918, in Hebrew, Yiddish and German).
Disturbed by the urbanized focus of Jewish life, he promoted the establishment of agricultural communities and other groups living a style of Jewish life more in conformity with nature. Settlement in Eretz Israel was to be for the prime purpose of fulfilling the spiritual role of the Jewish people. (See Im Dienste der Verheissung: “In the Service of the Promise,” 1927).
Judah Leib (Leon) Pinsker (1821-1891)
Born in Russian Poland in 1821. ..in 1882 he anonymously published a rallying cry to Russian Jews ¬ his German language pamphlet Autoemancipation, in which he urged the Jewish people to strive for independence, national consciousness and a return to independent territorialism.
Pinsker died in Russia in 1891 and his remains were brought to Eretz-Israel in 1934 and reburied in Nicanor's Cave next to Mount Scopus. The yishuv of Nahalat Yehudah near Rishon Le¬zion is named after him, as well as streets in several towns in Israel.
Quotations from
“Auto-Emancipation” by Leon Pinsker (1882)
http://www.jewishvirtuallibrary.org/jsource/Zionism/pinsker.html
“the Jews comprise a distinctive element among the nations under which they dwell, and as such can neither assimilate nor be readily digested by any nation. Hence the solution lies in finding a means of so readjusting this exclusive element to the family of nations, that the basis of the Jewish question will be permanently removed. This does not mean, of course, that we must think of waiting for the age of universal harmony. No previous civilization has been able to achieve it, nor can we see even in the remote distance, that day of the Messiah, when national barriers will no longer exist and all mankind will live in brotherhood and concord. Until then, the nations must narrow their aspirations to achieve a tolerable modus vivendi. The world has yet long to wait for eternal peace. Meanwhile nations live side by side in a state of relative peace, secured by treaties and international law, but based chiefly on the fundamental equality between them.”
“Friend and foe alike have tried to explain or to justify this hatred of the Jews by bringing all sorts of charges against them. They are said to have crucified Jesus, to have drunk the blood of Christians, to have poisoned wells, to have taken usury, to have exploited the peasant, and so on. These and a thousand and one other charges against an entire people have been proved groundless. They showed their own weakness in that they had to be trumped up wholesale in order to quiet the evil conscience of the Jew-baiters, to justify the condemnation of an entire nation, to demonstrate the necessity of burning the Jew, or rather the Jewish ghost, at the stake. He who tries to prove too much proves nothing at all. Though the Jews may justly be charged with many shortcomings, those shortcomings are, at all events, not such great vices, not such capital crimes, as to justify the condemnation of the entire people. In individual cases, indeed, these accusations are contradicted by the fact that the Jews get along fairly well with their Gentile neighbors.”
“The Jewish people has no fatherland of its own, though many motherlands; no center of focus or gravity, no government of its own, no official representation. They home everywhere, but are nowhere at home. The nations have never to deal with a Jewish nation but always with mere Jews. The Jews are not a nation because they lack a certain distinctive national character, inherent in all other nations, which is formed by common residence in a single state.”
Wikipedia
Zionism (Hebrew: ציונות, Tsiyonut) is a nationalist[1] Jewish political movement that, in its broadest sense, calls for the self-determination of the Jewish people and a sovereign, Jewish national homeland.
Zionism did not have a uniform ideology, but a plethora of ideologies:
General Zionism,
National-Religious Zionism,
Labor Zionism,
Revisionist Zionism, etc.
Zionism is based on historical ties and religious traditions linking the Jewish people to the Land of Israel.[4]
Almost two millennia after the Jewish diaspora, the modern Zionist movement, beginning in the late 19th century, was mainly founded by secular Jews, largely as a response by Ashkenazi Jews to antisemitism and the Anti-Jewish pogroms in the Russian Empire.[5]
Zionism is included in diaspora politics as a broader phenomenon of modern nation liberation movements.[6]
The political movement was formally established by the Austro-Hungarian journalist Theodor Herzl in the late 19th century following the publication of his book Der Judenstaat.[7] The movement sought to encourage Jewish migration to the Ottoman Palestine and was eventually successful in establishing Israel on 14 May 1948
(5 Iyyar 5708 in the Hebrew calendar), as the homeland for the Jewish people.
