Basel Program

From the center of Western assimilation, advocating the disappearance of Jewry, came the war cry proclaiming the continued existence of the Jewish nation, though that existence was conditioned by the establishment of a separate, publicly and legally assured territorial center.

Of the four articles of the Basel Program, which were adopted by the First Congress, three deal with the fundamental tasks of the party, the political and financial endeavors looking to the colonization of large Jewish masses in Palestine, and only one voices the need of strengthening the Jewish national feeling and self-respect.

In the further progress of the Zionist organization, these two principles, the political and the cultural, were constantly struggling for mastery.

The Zionists of the West gravitating towards political activities and diplomatic negotiations, while the Zionists of the East laid greater emphasis upon internal cultural work along national lines, looking upon it as an indispensable prerequisite for national rebirth.

The formation of a spiritual center in the historic homeland of the nation, the creation in the center of a Jewish national school, the revival of the Hebrew language as a medium of daily speech, the untrammeled development of a Jewish culture without the pressure of a foreign environment, such, in short, he held to be the true goal of Palestine idea.

A publicly and legally assured home for the Jewish spirit of this kind would exert an uninterrupted nationalizing influence upon the diaspora, serving as a living center of attraction for a genuine Jewish culture and acting like a focus which scatters its rays over a large periphery.

The Zionist doctrine of Ahad Ham as a counterbalance to official Zionism, which was hallmarked by the Basel program, led to interminable discussions among the partisans of the movement.

It did not succeed in creating a separate party or a special public agency for its realization.