Where Is the Jews’ Homeland?

In the late 19th century, as stirrings of pre-Zionist Jewish nationalism were beginning to coalesce in overtly Zionist activism, they attracted a variety of reactions from leading Jewish thinkers, writers, and public figures. No reaction was more complex, more fascinating, or perhaps historically more telling than that of Yehudah Leib Gordon (1830-1892), influential editor and polemicist—and the greatest Hebrew poet of the age. In tracing here the decades-long arc of Gordon’s responses, in verse and prose, to the radically shifting prospects of his fellow Russian Jews, Hillel Halkin illuminates both the political landscape in which Zionism struggled to grow and the role in particular of Hebrew in forging the consciousness of the emergent nation of Israel.

This essay is the fourth in a series of fresh looks by Halkin at seminal Hebrew writers and thinkers of the 19th and early 20th centuries. The first three, on the proto-Zionist novelists Joseph Perl, Abraham Mapu, and Peretz Smolenskin, are available here, here, and here.

A Hebrew translation of this essay by Tsur Ehrlich, with the poetry in the original, is available at the Israeli website Mida.