Mainly in the Austro-Hungarian empire, at a time when the government there was relaxing the long-standing policy of discrimination against Jews, enabling them to assimilate. The Zionist leaders were panicked by the possibility that assimilation might erase Jewish identity, and by the alternative possibility that a reactionary backlash against equal rights might lead to further persecution. The latter is what ended up happening.
The diagnosis of the risk was correct. The problem was with two linked features of the proposed cure: ethnonationalism and colonialism.
And yeah, for centuries, Islam treated its second-class citizens less badly than the Christians did. That didn’t make Islam a human-rights paradise, but consistent discrimination was more bearable than the Christian kingdoms’ pendulum swings between tolerance and pogroms.
Mainly in the Austro-Hungarian empire, at a time when the government there was relaxing the long-standing policy of discrimination against Jews, enabling them to assimilate. The Zionist leaders were panicked by the possibility that assimilation might erase Jewish identity, and by the alternative possibility that a reactionary backlash against equal rights might lead to further persecution. The latter is what ended up happening.
The diagnosis of the risk was correct. The problem was with two linked features of the proposed cure: ethnonationalism and colonialism.
And yeah, for centuries, Islam treated its second-class citizens less badly than the Christians did. That didn’t make Islam a human-rights paradise, but consistent discrimination was more bearable than the Christian kingdoms’ pendulum swings between tolerance and pogroms.