Eretz Yisrael, the Land of Israel, is these days a hot, rocky, swampy, impoverished backwater of the Ottoman Empire without an economy to its name. So what kind of Jew is going to live there? That’s the question confronting the Zionist Movement in the last couple decades of the 1800s. And they had an answer. They were going to create New Jews. Jews who were physically strong, burning with idealism and practical know-how, Jews who were young, Jews who were women, Jews who could fight, Jews who could work, and Jews who would reject the stern religiosity of Orthodox Judaism and instead nurture a spirituality connected to the land of the Torah. Zionism, then, wasn’t just an effort to create a Jewish state. It was also a movement to create an entirely new Jew.THE PLOTZionism was still a minority movement within the diaspora (i.e. outside of Israel) Jewish community. It was primarily a mass movement of secular, poor-or-middle-class Jews from Eastern Europe. Who was against Zionism, and why? Orthodox Jews: only God, not humans, can bring about the restoration of the Jewish homeland. The return of the Jewish People to sovereignty in the Holy Land is part of God’s larger plan for humanity, so its creation can’t happen until the coming of the Messiah and the redemption of humanity.Secular Jews: despite the occasional anti-Semitism, Western Jews generally feel like they are safe, assimilated, and cultured — so why give that up to move to Palestine?American Jews: don’t create a new homeland, just move to the new one that already exists, the United States! With its constitutional democracy, equal rights, and freedom and prosperity, American Jews feel that there is no reason to think that Jews won’t forever be safe and secure here, free to practice Judaism and celebrate Jewish culture.Zionism said that a New Jew is needed. Someone whose Judaism is based on physical strength, a renewed spirituality, and an unrelenting focus on the land; as opposed to the weak, intellectual Jew of the European ghetto. Max Nordau, a Zionist leader, called this “muscular Judaism.” So we have a new Zionism tree branch: Labor Zionism. Aaron David Gordon pushed the idea that the New Jew would be created by working the land. Through the hard labor of agricultural work the New Jew would connect with nature to invigorate creativity and spirituality. This worldview joining socialism with physical labor, is the basic premise behind Labor Zionism. It profoundly influenced Israeli life, and still does, most visibly through the kibbutz.What we have emerging at this point, in the late 1800s and early 1900s, are different clumps of ideas and theories manifesting themselves in Eretz Yisrael. Small cities are popping up, socialist villages are being built, land is being cleared for agriculture, new kinds of music, dance, and social interactions are developing, there’s an old language (Hebrew) being revived. All of these leaves and branches are creating this new world, this new Jewish culture, and a new kind of Jew. All of these things are Zionism. And all of these things contribute to the Israel that eventually emerges, and the Israel that we have today.FUN FACTSGiven the religious opposition to Zionism, there still exists today Orthodox Israelis who reject their Israeli identity as illegitimate, even though they live there.Max Nordau’s solution to the physical degeneration of European Jews was to create Hebrew sports clubs to promote Jewish achievement in sports as a way to boost confidence. NAMES TO KNOWMax Nordau: a close confidant of Theodore Herzl, Nordau was born Orthodox but rejected his identity to become an assimilated German. The Dreyfus Affair awakened his Jewish identify and he became a prominent Zionist leader, focusing on developing the democratic nature of the movement. He coined the term “muscular Judaism” to describe the new kind of Jew Zionism wanted to develop.Aaron David Gordon: AD Gordon was a Zionist thinker, philosopher, and early leader of the Labor Zi