From Patriachs To Promised Land

Return to Zion (Part 1 of 2)

Young and old, the Nazis spared none

Although violent anti-Semitism was by no means widespread in Europe at the end of the 19th century, intellectual anti-Semitism was as rife as ever, and in 1894, a French army captain, Albert Dreyfus, was falsely accused of spying.

Although the real culprit was uncovered quickly, the army persisted in its accusation of Dreyfus, who was tried and convicted to life imprisonment in 1895. As he was led through the streets of Paris, crowds bayed “death to the Jews”.

Dreyfus was eventually acquitted, but one ramification of the affair was that Austrian journalist Theodor Herzl, shocked by the virulent anti-Semitism he had witnessed, decided to convene the first Zionist congress in Switzerland in 1897.

The World Wars and the Holocaust
More than 1.5 million Jews fought in the First World War. But the onset of the global conflict (declared on the date corresponding to the 9th Av, 1914) set in motion a chain of events that led to the terrible destruction of European Jewry in the Holocaust.

Germany’s crushing defeat paved the way for the election of Hitler and the Nazi party in 1932. And by 1935, the Nuremberg Laws had been put into place, ultimately stripping the Jews of their civil and economic rights in the country.

In 1938, Hitler annexed Austria and took over Czechoslovakia. On the night of 9 November, which came to be known as Kristallnacht (the night of the broken glass), nearly 200 synagogues were destroyed and many Jewish men murdered.

The Jews began to make concerted efforts to get out of the country after this violent episode, but the world turned its back on them. Only 800,000 managed to make their escape before the war began, on 1 September 1939, with the invasion of Poland.

France was next and then, in 1941, the pact between the Russians and the Germans broke down. Hitler began his advance into the Soviet Union. In 1942, frustrated with the slow rate at which his simultaneous attempts to eradicate the Jews was progressing, Hitler instigated the Final Solution – ghettos, labour camps, concentration camps and death camps all became part of his giant killing machine.

By the time the Russian and British armies came to liberate the camps in 1945, six million Jews had perished – nearly half the pre-war Jewish population of Europe.