Zionists wanted to reshape Jewish culture in the spirit of modern nationalism. They based their national vision on Jewish history and Jewish tradition but gave both a thoroughly modern interpretation. Instead of hiding their difference to ease their assimilation into the greater, non-Jewish society, they emphasized Jewish difference by giving it a distinct cultural character. They began by writing modern literature in Hebrew, their ancient language, and eventually turned Hebrew into a spoken language, the vernacular of their emerging national community. They organized the land they bought and settled in Palestine in new ways that expressed their revolutionary social and communal values and built new kinds of houses on it. Their new occupations as farmers, builders, and then soldiers reshaped their bodies, the clothes they wore, and the way the carried themselves. They renewed their festival calendar to celebrate and commemorate their innovations, and they developed new aesthetic sensibilities in visual art and music that expressed their cultural revolution in more abstract ways.

An unofficial ban on Wagner’s music has existed in Israel since Kristallnacht in 1938. This chapter places the ban, its adherents, and its detractors, into the context of the early Zionists during the 1890s, and specifically their relation to Wagner’s music. Theodor Herzl, father of modern political Zionism and author of The Jewish State (1896), wrote of the inspiration he took from Wagner’s music for advancing his project, opening the Second Zionist Congress in 1898 with the overture from Tannhäuser. Wagner’s regeneration writings, the discourse of secular Jews in Vienna in search of ‘the soil’ for an independent state outside Europe, and Nietzsche’s advocacy of freedom from religious or dogmatic identities all combined in unfamiliar ways to advocate a future that abandoned a European past, with Wagner in tacit support.

This chapter traces the emergence of the Zionist movement and the colonization of Palestine from the late nineteenth century through the 1930s. It begins with two Zionist pioneers. The first, Theodor Herzl––the father of political Zionism––was important both for his approach to Jewish colonization (he sought the backing of a Great Power for the project) and for his organizational skills which created structures in Europe that nurtured the movement. The second, Leo Pinsker––the father of Practical Zionism––believed the Jews of Europe could not wait, and thus organized Jewish emigration to Palestine. While the first attempts at colonization failed, the chapter goes on to discuss three more waves of immigration. The second and third wave were inspired by socialism and Romanticism, and the structures they created––which lasted well into the statehood period––reflected this. The fourth wave, however, was mainly made up of economic refugees who were attracted to a rightwing, petit-bourgeois ideology. They and their descendents became influential in Israel beginning in the late 1970s.