Did the creation of a Jewish homeland in Palestine change the way Jews were thought of in Europe?
It didn’t greatly affect the position of the European Jews up to the 1930s. Many tried to leave Europe, but they found it increasingly difficult to get to Palestine — and to get to America, which is where most of them would have gone if they’d had the opportunity. In many ways the most important event in the Jewish story in the period between 1910 and 1930 wasn’t the Balfour Declaration, which created the Jewish homeland in Palestine; instead it was the American legislation of the early 1920s that ended immigration into America. If it hadn’t been for that, there would have been millions more Jewish immigrants to the United States. You say that “Jewry as a whole was converted to Zionism not by arguments but by events.” Is there any way that the state of Israel could have been created, perhaps years later, without the events of the Second World War? More to the point, Israel would have been different if it had been created many years before. It would have been established like New Zeala
