2 01 7— I SR A E L’ S T RIP LE ANNIVERSARY YEAR
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A second Jerusalem Temple, erected in 515 BCE, functioned as the center of
Jewish life for close to six centuries. Over that period Jews exercised varying
degrees of self-rule under the Persians, the Syrian Greeks, the Hasmonean
Jewish dynasty, and the Romans, who finally destroyed the Temple in the
course of quelling a rebellion in 70 CE. Another uprising aimed at achieving
independence in 135 CE met a similar fate, ending the dream of Jewish
sovereignty in the Holy Land until modern times.
Nevertheless, Jewish communities persisted over the centuries in what had
been the Land of Israel under Byzantine Christian and then Muslim rule.
Furthermore, the Jewish connection to the Land remained a centerpiece of
Jewish religious practice even in far-flung exilic communities. The prayer book
featured requests for God to “gather us from the four corners of the Earth to
our land” (morning service immediately before the Sh’ma prayer); the Yom
Kippur service and the Passover Seder ended with the declaration, “Next year
in Jerusalem!”; the prayers for rain in the fall and dew in the spring were geared
not to the agricultural calendar where most Jews actually lived, but to the
seasons in Israel; and pious Jews all over the world arranged for their bodies to
be buried in Israel, and, if that proved impossible, acquired small bags of Israeli
earth to place in their graves.
The return of sizable numbers of Jews to Israel and the establishment there of a
functioning, modern Jewish community along with a revival of Jewish national
culture began to be discussed in the late 19th century, as rising anti-Semitism
and economic hardship convinced many European Jews that they would never
achieve full equality where they lived. Jews were already the largest religious
group in Jerusalem in the 1860s, and over the next few decades Jews, mostly
from Russia—where a wave of pogroms beginning in the 1880s set off a large
Jewish emigration—and Romania, established agricultural settlements in
previously barren locations. The Zionist movement, which explicitly called for a
Jewish state as the only realistic antidote to anti-Semitism, was launched by the
Hungarian-born Theodor Herzl, whose 1896 publication Der Judenstaat (The
Jewish State) set the stage for the First Zionist Congress, which convened the
next year in Basel, Switzerland, chaired by Herzl. The movement, committed to
diplomatic action to secure a state, continued on its course after Herzl’s untimely
death in 1904, even as its annual congresses reported little progress.