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Recollections of the founding of Hibbat Zion, the early forerunner of the Zionist movement, in 1882 by Eliezer Elijah ben Benjamin Friedman (1857-1936). The text is accompanied by numerous photographs of founders and significant members, both rabbis and secular individuals. There are photographs of Isaac Leib Goldberg, R. Benjamin Friedman, Bezalel Lipshitz, R. S. Y. Fuenn, A. B. Wolf of Kovno, R. Leib Klausinski, Moses Beremson, and a sketch of R. Jacob Elchonon. The text is comprised of twelve chapters.
Hibbat Zion (Love of Zion), the movement that constituted the intermediate link between the forerunners of Zionism in the middle of the 19th century and the beginnings of political Zionism with the appearance of Theodor Herzl and the First Zionist Congress in 1897. The adherents of Hibbat Zion, called Hovevei Zion ("Lovers of Zion"), were a widespread movement among the Jewish masses of Russia and Rumania, but groups of Hovevei Zion also existed in Western Europe and in the United States. Originally, the declared aim of Hibbat Zion was not different from that of its predecessors, the forerunners of Zionism, and of the subsequent political Zionist movement, namely, to solve the problem of the abnormal Jewish life in the dispersion by a return of the Jewish people to Erez Israel, settlement on the land on a large scale, and attaining the recognition of the major powers for this purpose (see, e.g., Leon Pinsker and his program). But, in the early 1880s, when aliyah to Erez Israel from Eastern Europe began, mainly in the wake of the Russian pogroms, and the first Jewish agricultural settlements in Erez Israel were established, the Hovevei Zion concentrated their means and efforts in encouraging and strengthening the movement toward aliyah and settlement and not in the political field. Conditions in Russia did not permit open political activity and forced the Russian Hovevei Zion to engage in "practical" work only.
In Western Europe as well, where Jews were permitted more freedom in this field, members of Hibbat Zion were not prepared to carry on the political cause of Zionism, basically because of fears that their patriotism would be suspect. Thus the efforts of Hovevei Zion turned de facto into philanthropic activity of limited scope and with minor results. Were it not for the aid of Baron Edmond de Rothschild, it is doubtful whether Hovevei Zion would have been able to maintain the first settlements.
When Herzl began his activities, he was not aware of the political Zionist idea that had originally inspired the Hibbat Zion movement, and at first he negated the value of the existent small-scale settlement activity that was carried out semi-illegally, against the wishes of the Ottoman regime, and referred to it as "infiltration." The Hovevei Zion in the West reacted with reservation toward Herzl and continued their philanthropic aid to both the old and the new yishuv by means of Ezra and other institutions. Hovevei Zion in Eastern Europe, however, mostly joined Herzl, but disassociated themselves from his negative approach to practical settlement work in Erez Israel and continued to support the yishuv. This difference in approach was the source of friction during Herzl's time and afterward between the "political" and the "practical" Zionists, until the consolidation of "synthetic Zionism" after David Wolffsohn resigned from the presidency of the World Zionist Organization (1911). Hibbat Zion was in effect the first mass movement to provide Herzl with wide popular support.
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