Judah Alkalai

This is, by the way, long before there are any Jewish Zionists.

The first Jewish Zionists, you could say, come around in the 1860s and '70s, people like Judah, uh, Rabbi Judah Alkalai and others, uh, who, who are strongly influenced by the European nationalisms of the era, Serbian nationalism, German nationalism, German unification, Italian, uh, nationalism and Italian unification, Russian nationalism.

So all these Jews in Europe are seeing all of these national movements and, and, and, and wondering where, what role they play, right? And, and they're, then they're told by the Europeans, "Well, you're, you're not Russian, you're Jewish," right? "You're not German, you're Jewish." So the, the European anti-Semites, uh, deny Jews the ability to kind of play important roles in those national struggles in Europe, and so they just say, "Okay, well, if we can't, uh, be part of the, the German nation or the Russian nation or the French nation, well, I guess we're a separate nation, and where's our national homeland? Well, it's Palestine." And you get this movement of, uh, uh, uh, of, of, they're, they're, they're initially called the Khovevei Zion in Baloo, these Zionist clubs in Eastern Europe.

This is still a decade and a half before Theodor Herzl.