Zionism and Jewish nationalism: what’s the link?

Israel’s Declaration of the Establishment of the State of Israel, signed on 14 May 1948 by the 37 members of the People’s Council, traces the Jewish state it proclaims to the First Zionist Congress of 1897. On the founding text’s own account, Zionism is the movement whose national aim the state realised. The dated record also shows that Jewish nationalism was wider than Zionism. In April 1901 the Bund recognised the Jews as a nationality while seeking “national autonomy, not territorial independence.” A rabbinical conference at Pittsburgh in 1885 went further and declared Jews “no longer a nation, but a religious community.” By the beginning of 2024, on the Central Bureau of Statistics’ Holocaust Day 2025 release, 45% of the world’s Jews lived in Israel, up from 6% in 1948; the world total outside Israel uses a “core” Jewish population definition the Bureau draws from the American Jewish Year Book.

Key Findings

• Israel’s founding Declaration, signed on 14 May 1948, recites a chain running from the First Zionist Congress of 1897 to the state it proclaims, 51 years later (Provisional Government of Israel, 1948).
• In 2018 the Knesset enacted a Basic Law stating that “the realization of the right to national self-determination in the State of Israel is exclusive to the Jewish People” (Knesset, 2018).
• The Bund’s Fourth Congress of April 1901 unanimously recognised that the concept of nationality applies to the Jewish people. On its Central Committee’s report, the congress sought “national autonomy, not territorial independence” (Bund, 1898 to 1901).
• A rabbinical conference in 1885 declared Jews “no longer a nation, but a religious community.” The CCAR, which publishes the text today, affirmed a “Jewish homeland” in its Columbus Platform of 1937, 52 years later (Pittsburgh Rabbinical Conference, 1885).
• Israel’s Central Bureau of Statistics, in its Holocaust Day 2025 release, records 650,000 of 11.5 million Jews (6%) living in Israel in 1948 and 7.1 million of 15.7 million (45%) at the beginning of 2024, with every figure outside Israel on a “core” Jewish population definition (Central Bureau of Statistics, 2025).

Is Zionism the political movement of Jewish nationalism?

Israel’s Declaration of the Establishment of the State of Israel, read and signed on 14 May 1948, draws its own line from the First Zionist Congress of 1897 to the state it proclaims. The founding instrument therefore presents the national state as the outcome of the Zionist movement. On that text’s account, the answer to the heading is yes.

The Declaration states its operative act in capitals: “THE ESTABLISHMENT OF A JEWISH STATE IN ERETZ-ISRAEL, TO BE KNOWN AS THE STATE OF ISRAEL.” Its recitals place that act at the end of a sequence:

• the First Zionist Congress, convened by Theodor Herzl in 1897
• the Balfour Declaration of 2 November 1917
• the League of Nations Mandate
• the United Nations General Assembly resolution of 29 November 1947, a recognition the Declaration describes as “irrevocable”

The text was signed by the 37 members of the People’s Council, with David Ben-Gurion signing first (Provisional Government of Israel, 1948).

These recitals are the Declaration’s own historical narrative. They establish what the founding text asserts about its lineage. They are not independent historical findings about how the state came to be.

What the instrument does establish is the self-understanding of the state at its founding. The document that brought Israel into existence names a Zionist congress as the first link in its chain and names its own product as a Jewish state. That is the plainest documentary form of the connection the question asks about. It is the founders’ own description, signed and dated, of Zionism as the political movement through which a Jewish national claim became a state.

The instrument settles less than it might appear to. It shows that the state traces itself to Zionism. It does not show that every Jewish national programme ran through the 1897 congress, or that every Jewish body of the period accepted the premise that Jews formed a nation. Those questions have their own records, and the Bund’s congress reports and the Reform platforms of 1885 and 1937 answer them differently. The sections below read those records.

Who defines Zionism as Jewish self-determination, and since when?

The Knesset’s Basic Law: Israel as the Nation-State of the Jewish People, adopted in 2018, states in clause 1(b) that Israel is “the nation state of the Jewish People in which it realizes its natural, cultural, religious and historical right to self-determination.” In that form, the claim that Jews are a nation entitled to self-determination is enacted Israeli constitutional text.

The premise that Zionism means Jewish national self-determination is therefore directionally right, and it has a named and dated holder. The Knesset publishes the English text of the law and labels its translation unofficial. The published version incorporates amendments through 1 May 2022 (Knesset, 2018).

The 1948 Declaration had proclaimed “a Jewish state.” The 2018 Basic Law, 70 years later, writes the self-determination formula into the body of law that Israel treats as constitutional. It also makes that self-determination exclusive, and it attaches the classic Zionist programmes of immigration and settlement to it.

Read together, the four clauses give a statutory definition of the national project that the Declaration announced. The nation is the Jewish People. Self-determination within the state belongs to that nation alone. Immigration of Jews and Jewish settlement are national purposes.

The text names its subject as the “Jewish People.” It does not define who belongs to that people. Membership is set by other statutes, which are read later in this report.

The Knesset’s formula answers the question for the State of Israel, in 2018. It does not show that Jews who called themselves nationalists in the decades before 1948 agreed on what the nation was, or on whether it needed a territory. The records of the Bund, a Jewish socialist party in the Russian Empire, show a national claim that rejected the territorial aim.

Was there a Jewish nationalism that rejected Zionism?

The Bund’s Fourth Congress, held at the end of April 1901, “unanimously recognised that the concept of ‘nationality’ fully applies” to the Jewish people, according to the printed report of the party’s Central Committee. The same report places the only guarantee of national equality “in national autonomy, not territorial independence.” On its own record, a Jewish workers’ party held a national claim without a territorial one.

The report is document 9 in the documentary edition of Bund records published by ROSSPEN in Moscow in 2010. The English renderings here are the Institute’s working translations from the Russian, because the edition publishes none. The document is the Central Committee’s narrative of the debate and of the positions adopted. It is not the operative text of the resolution itself (Bund, 1898 to 1901).

The same report records that the territorial solution “had not a single defender at the congress.” Its own footnote identifies that territorial model as the Polish Socialist Party’s, not Zionism’s.

Zionism was the subject of a separate resolution, section XVII of the report, which reads in full:

“The congress considers Zionism a reaction of the bourgeois classes against antisemitism and the abnormal legal position of the Jewish people. The congress finds the ultimate goal of political Zionism, the provision of a territory for the Jewish people, insofar as that territory would hold a small part of the people, a matter of no great significance that does not resolve the ‘Jewish question’; and insofar as it is claimed to concentrate the whole Jewish people or even a significant part of it, utopian and unrealisable. The congress considers that the agitation of the Zionists inflames national feeling and may hinder the development of class consciousness. As for the cultural activity of certain Zionist groups, the congress regards it as it regards any legal activity.”

A further decision, voted separately, barred Zionists from the party’s economic and political organisations.

The national position was not the party’s founding doctrine. The Third Congress, which the edition dates to 23 to 25 December 1899 at Kovno, resolved that the Bund “puts forward among its political demands the demand only for civil, and not national, equality of rights.” The Fourth Congress report records that the national question had already caused “prolonged heated debates” at the Third Congress. The 1901 position was adopted only after more than 12 hours of debate.

The 1901 report speaks of “national autonomy.” The compound term “national-cultural autonomy” is later usage and does not appear in the 1901 text.

Who argued Jews were a religion rather than a nation?

A rabbinical conference meeting outside Pittsburgh on 16 to 19 November 1885 adopted a Declaration of Principles whose article five states: “We consider ourselves no longer a nation, but a religious community, and therefore expect neither a return to Palestine…” The Central Conference of American Rabbis publishes the text today, but it did not exist until 1889.

Article five reads in full that the signers “expect neither a return to Palestine, nor a sacrificial worship under the sons of Aaron, nor the restoration of any of the laws concerning the Jewish state.” The middle clause fixes the register. “The Jewish state” in 1885 is the ancient polity of Temple restoration, not a modern political programme. Adopted on 16 to 19 November 1885, the text predates the First Zionist Congress, which the CCAR’s Miami Platform dates to 29 August 1897, by nearly 12 years, and the Declaration of 14 May 1948 by 62 years (Pittsburgh Rabbinical Conference, 1885). It records a theological denial of Jewish nationhood. It is not a position on Zionism or on Israel, neither of which yet existed. For how such statements bear on the distinction between Zionism and Judaism, see the distinction between Zionism and Judaism.

The CCAR’s Columbus Platform of 1937, 52 years after Pittsburgh, affirmed “the obligation of all Jewry to aid in its upbuilding as a Jewish homeland by endeavoring to make it not only a haven of refuge for the oppressed but also a center of Jewish culture and spiritual life.”

The CCAR’s Miami Platform, accepted on 24 June 1997, records the change in the movement’s own words: “By 1937 the CCAR had reversed its stand on Jewish peoplehood.” That sentence attributes the 1885 position to a body founded four years after it was adopted. It is the CCAR’s wording, reported here as such.

The sequence runs one way. The CCAR’s Platforms index lists further statements in 1976, 1997 and 1999, and none restores the 1885 clause. The platform carries no count of any kind. It is evidence of what a rabbinical conference declared in November 1885, not of what American Reform congregants believed.

Did early Jewish opponents of Zionism deny Jewish nationhood?

A Statement to the Peace Conference, presented to President Woodrow Wilson by Representative Julius Kahn on 4 March 1919, was reported by 1919 wire stories as signed by 300 prominent American Jews. Its fifth objection states: “it is an error to assume that the bond uniting them is of a national character.” The objection was to the national premise, not only to a state.

The document itself states no signatory count. The figure of 300 comes from the Douglas Daily International of 5 March 1919 and the Wisconsin Weekly Blade of 15 March 1919. Signatures were still being added after the presentation. One rabbi announced his decision to sign on 22 April 1919 (Berkowitz, Jastrow, Senior and the signers, 1919).

Objection 5 continues: the Jews “are bound by two factors: First, the bond of common religious beliefs and aspirations and, secondly, the bond of common traditions, customs, and experiences.” Objection 1 rejects “every suspicion of a double allegiance.” The closing sentence reads: “We do not wish to see Palestine, either now or at any time in the future, organized as a Jewish State.”

The text claims to voice “the majority of American Jews born in this country.” That is a claim made inside a petition, not a measurement. The Denver Jewish News printed the statement on 19 March 1919. On the same page it printed the Zionist Organization of America’s rival claim to speak for American Jews, under the headline “American Lawmakers Favor Jewish State.” Neither organisation published a method for its claim.

Two years earlier, E. S. Montagu, Secretary of State for India, put a similar objection on the British War Cabinet record. His paper G.T. 1868, dated 23 August 1917, states: “Zionism has always seemed to me to be a mischievous political creed, untenable by any patriotic citizen of the United Kingdom.” Its second page states: “I assert that there is not a Jewish nation” (Montagu, 1917).

The National Archives publishes the first page of the paper as an image. The second page was read from a relayed scan of the same print, whose first page matches the archive’s image word for word.

Montagu wrote “as the one Jewish Minister in the Government.” His paper argued against a draft declaration. It is one minister’s argument on one date. It is not evidence of what British Jews or the Cabinet held.

Does Israeli law define the Jewish nation by religion?

The Knesset’s Law of Return (Amendment No. 2), passed on 10 March 1970, defines “Jew” in section 4B as “a person who was born of a Jewish mother or has become converted to Judaism and who is not a member of another religion.” The legal test combines descent, conversion and religious affiliation, and it is bounded “for the purposes of this Law.”

The 1950 Law of Return opens with section 1: “Every Jew has the right to come to this country as an oleh.” The translator’s note defines an oleh as “a Jew immigrating, into Israel.” For twenty years the statute used the word “Jew” without defining it, and the 1970 amendment supplied the definition (Knesset, 1950 and 1970).

The same amendment carried the definition beyond the Law of Return. It inserted section 3A into the Population Registry Law, which governs registration “as a Jew by ethnic affiliation or religion.” Subsection 3A(b) gives “Jew” “the same meaning as in section 4B” for the Registry and for “any registration or document thereunder.” The same amendment also added section 4A, which extends the Law’s rights to named relatives who are not themselves Jewish.

Personal status follows a separate statute. The Rabbinical Courts Jurisdiction (Marriage and Divorce) Law of 1953 states in section 2: “Marriages and divorces of Jews shall be performed in Israel in accordance with Jewish religious law.” Section 1 gives rabbinical courts “exclusive jurisdiction” over those matters (Knesset, 1953). The 1953 statute defines “Jew” nowhere, and the 1970 definition does not reach it by its terms.

The English texts are those the Knesset publishes, marked neither official nor unofficial. They show the law as enacted on the dates given, not the consolidated law in force today.

On these texts, membership in the nation named by the 2018 Basic Law is defined in religious categories: maternal descent, conversion, and the exclusion of members of another religion.

Does the nation in Israel’s law match its citizenry?

Arabs made up 21.1% of Israel’s population on the eve of its 78th Independence Day in 2026, on the Central Bureau of Statistics’ own preliminary estimate. Clause 1(c) of the 2018 Basic Law reserves national self-determination in the state to the Jewish People. By the Bureau’s definitions, the national collective named in law and the state’s population are different sets.

The Bureau counted 10.244 million people, up to date for 22 April 2026. Of these, 2.157 million were Arabs, a category it defines as Moslems, Arab Christians and Druze. Another 7.790 million (76%) were “Jews and Others,” where “Others” covers non-Arab Christians, members of other religions and people registered as not classified by religion. A further 296,000 foreigners (2.9%) are counted from end-2025 data (Central Bureau of Statistics, 2026).

The estimates rest on the 2022 census. Since 2023 they have included foreigners, so the series is not continuous with earlier years.

The founding Declaration addressed the population outside the national definition directly. In the Knesset’s English text, it pledges “complete equality of social and political rights to all its citizens irrespective of religion, race or sex.” The Ministry of Foreign Affairs publishes the same sentence with “all its inhabitants.” Both are translations of the Hebrew original.

The Declaration also appeals “to the Arab inhabitants of the State of Israel” to participate “on the basis of full and equal citizenship and due representation” (Provisional Government of Israel, 1948).

The 2018 Basic Law contains no equality clause and no individual-rights clause. That is a fact about the text, not a finding about how the state treats anyone. On language, clause 4 provides that “Hebrew is the language of the State” and that “Arabic has a special status in the State” (Knesset, 2018).

How did Zionism’s state grow as a share of world Jewry?

The Central Bureau of Statistics records that the share of the world’s Jews living in Israel rose from 6% on the eve of the state’s establishment in 1948 to 45% at the beginning of 2024. The Bureau’s series measures where Jews live, not what they believe about Zionism or nationhood.

In 1948, 650,000 of a world Jewish population of 11.5 million lived in Israel. In 1939, on the eve of the Second World War, 449,000 of 16.6 million did, or 3%. At the beginning of 2024, Israel held 7.1 million of 15.7 million Jews (45%), and the United States held 6.3 million (40%) (Central Bureau of Statistics, 2025).

Of the 7.1 million Jews in Israel in 2024, 5.7 million were born in Israel.

The world totals are not Bureau collection. The release states that every figure outside Israel uses a “core” Jewish population definition from the Hebrew University of Jerusalem’s American Jewish Year Book 2023. Different definitions of who counts as Jewish would produce different shares.

The rival programmes in the earlier sections each spoke for this population. The Bund claimed the Jewish workers of the Russian Empire. The 1919 signers claimed the majority of American-born Jews. The Zionist programme located the nation in a state.

The Bureau’s series shows that the state has become the largest single place of Jewish residence, ahead of the United States by 5 percentage points. It does not measure Zionist self-identification among either group.

Methodology and limitations

The Knesset, Israel’s Central Bureau of Statistics and the Provisional Government of Israel supply the official records used here: one founding instrument, four enacted statutes and two statistical releases. The historical records are a political party’s congress reports, a rabbinical platform, a Cabinet paper and a petition. Each is labelled by type in the Sources list.

The Bund documents are Russian-language party records in a 2010 documentary edition published by ROSSPEN. The English renderings are the Institute’s working translations. The 1901 material is the Central Committee’s report of the congress, not the operative resolution text: the page carrying that text was illegible in the edition’s digitised copy, and the only partial quotation of it located is secondhand. The three participants’ memoirs of the 1897 founding congress, written 12 to 33 years after the event, disagree on whether resolutions were adopted.

The Pittsburgh Platform survives in modern transcriptions published by the CCAR and the American Jewish Archives. These agree on article five. No facsimile of the 1885 printing was located.

The Montagu paper’s first page was read from The National Archives’ own image. Its later pages were read from a relayed scan of the same print. The 1919 Statement was read in the Denver Jewish News printing and in a 1962 American Jewish Archives article. The two differ in wording, and the article’s text is used wherever it carries the passage.

The Knesset’s English statute texts are scans of the Laws of the State of Israel series and show the law as enacted. What the 1954 amendment to the Law of Return changed was not established.

The Bureau’s 2026 figures are preliminary. Its world Jewish population figures use a core definition drawn from the American Jewish Year Book.

Conclusion

Israel’s 1948 Declaration ties the state to the Zionist congress of 1897, and that is the plainest form of the connection. Zionism is the strand of Jewish nationalism that produced a state and wrote its national claim into law. Are the two words one idea, then? On the dated record they are a family and its largest branch.

The branch had rivals whose positions the documents date:

• The Bund recognised the Jews as a nationality in 1901 and sought autonomy without territory.
• A rabbinical conference denied Jewish nationhood in 1885, and in 1937 the CCAR, which now publishes that text, affirmed a Jewish homeland.
• A British Cabinet minister wrote in 1917 that there was “not a Jewish nation.”
• In 1919, 300 American signers objected to the national premise itself.

Against them stands the enacted record. A 2018 Basic Law reserves national self-determination to the Jewish People. A 1970 statute defines the Jew by descent, conversion and religious affiliation. Arabs make up 21.1% of the population on the Bureau’s own 2026 estimate. The state held 6% of the world’s Jews in 1948 and 45% at the beginning of 2024.

The rival programmes argued over two questions: who belongs to the Jewish nation, and where that nation lives. The state now answers both, one in statute and the other in its population register. When one branch becomes the place where nearly half the family lives, and the author of the law that says who belongs to it, does the wider word still name anything the branch cannot? And what follows for a country whose founding text promised equality to all, and whose Basic Law names a nation that a fifth of its people sit outside?

Frequently Asked Questions

Did the Bund’s founding congress in 1897 adopt a programme on Jewish autonomy?

Arkady Kremer, who convened the founding congress, wrote in 1922 that “questions of programme and tactics were not discussed” and that no formulated resolutions were adopted. The Bund’s own 1901 report dates the founding congress to September 1897 on the Julian calendar, which corresponds to October 1897 on the Gregorian. The national-autonomy position appears in the party’s records from the Fourth Congress of 1901 (Bund, 1898 to 1901).

Who issued the Pittsburgh Platform, if not the CCAR?

A rabbinical conference convened at the call of Kaufmann Kohler of New York, with Isaac Mayer Wise presiding, adopted the text in November 1885. The CCAR records its own founding on 9 July 1889 and publishes the platform as its movement’s founding text. Whether any Reform body formally ratified the platform is not established in the published record (Pittsburgh Rabbinical Conference, 1885).

Was Montagu’s 1917 paper a reaction to the Balfour Declaration?

Montagu dated his paper 23 August 1917. It answered Lord Rothschild’s letter of 18 July 1917 and a draft reply by Balfour, not the issued text. The Balfour Declaration was sent on 2 November 1917, ten weeks later, in wording the paper could not have seen (Montagu, 1917).

Does the Law of Return apply to people who are not Jewish?

Section 4A, inserted in 1970, extends the Law’s rights to the child, grandchild and spouse of a Jew, and to the spouse of a Jew’s child or grandchild. It excludes “a person who has been a Jew and has voluntarily changed his religion.” Under subsection 4A(b), it is immaterial whether the Jewish relative is alive or ever immigrated (Knesset, 1950 and 1970).

What status does the 2018 Basic Law give Arabic?

Clause 4(b) states that “Arabic has a special status in the State.” Clause 4(c) provides that nothing in the article “shall compromise the status given to the Arabic language in practice” before the law came into force. Hebrew is designated “the language of the State” (Knesset, 2018).

How much of Israel’s growth came from immigration?

The Central Bureau of Statistics counts over 3.5 million immigrants since 1948, about 1.68 million of them since 1990. The population grew from 806,000 at the state’s establishment to more than 12.5 times that figure in 2026. In the 11.75 months to 22 April 2026, about 21,000 immigrants arrived, against about 177,000 births (Central Bureau of Statistics, 2026).

How many Jews identify as Zionists?

No official body publishes a worldwide count of Zionist self-identification. The closest measured figure is attachment to Israel. In the Pew Research Center’s survey of 4,718 U.S. Jewish adults, fielded from 19 November 2019 to 3 June 2020, 45% said caring about Israel was essential to what being Jewish means to them and 37% said it was important but not essential. That measures attachment to Israel, not adherence to Zionism as a defined position (Pew Research Center, 2021).

Sources

• Berkowitz, H., Jastrow, M., Senior, M. and the signers, 1919. A Statement to the Peace Conference. Presented to President Woodrow Wilson by Representative Julius Kahn, 4 March 1919; full text in The Denver Jewish News, 19 March 1919, pp. 1 and 3, Library of Congress, https://www.loc.gov/resource/sn91052360/1919-03-19/ed-1/?sp=1; objections reproduced in Levitas, I., “Reform Jews and Zionism, 1919-1921,” American Jewish Archives 14(1), 1962, https://sites.americanjewisharchives.org/publications/journal/PDF/1962_14_01_00.pdf; signatory count from Douglas Daily International, 5 March 1919, and Wisconsin Weekly Blade, 15 March 1919. Primary historical record (signed petition).
• Bund (General Jewish Workers’ Union in Lithuania, Poland and Russia), 1898 to 1901. Founding-period documents 4, 5, 6 and 9, in Bund: Dokumenty i materialy, 1894-1921, ed. Yu. Amiantov and colleagues. Moscow: ROSSPEN, 2010. Electronic Library of Historical Documents, Russian Historical Society, https://docs.historyrussia.org/ru/nodes/106-otchet-tsk-bunda-o-iv-sezde-bunda-v-aprele-1901-g-avgust-1901-g. Primary record (party documents in a scholarly documentary edition).
• Central Bureau of Statistics, 2025. On the Occasion of Holocaust Day, 2025. Israel Central Bureau of Statistics. https://www.cbs.gov.il/he/mediarelease/DocLib/2025/124/11_25_124e.pdf. Official record.
• Central Bureau of Statistics, 2026. Israel’s Independence Day 2026. Israel Central Bureau of Statistics. https://www.cbs.gov.il/he/mediarelease/DocLib/2026/117/11_26_117e.pdf. Official record.
• Knesset, 1950 and 1970. Law of Return, 5710-1950, and Law of Return (Amendment No. 2), 5730-1970. The Knesset. https://main.knesset.gov.il/EN/about/history/documents/kns1_return_eng.pdf and https://main.knesset.gov.il/EN/about/history/documents/kns7_return_eng.pdf. Official record (enacted legislation).
• Knesset, 1953. Rabbinical Courts Jurisdiction (Marriage and Divorce) Law, 5713-1953. The Knesset. https://main.knesset.gov.il/EN/about/history/documents/kns2_rabbiniccourts_eng.pdf. Official record (enacted legislation).
• Knesset, 2018. Basic Law: Israel as the Nation-State of the Jewish People. The Knesset, unofficial English translation. https://main.knesset.gov.il/EN/activity/documents/BasicLawsPDF/BasicLawNationState.pdf. Official record (enacted legislation).
• Montagu, E. S., 1917. The Anti-Semitism of the Present Government. War Cabinet paper G.T. 1868. The National Archives, Kew, CAB 24/24/71. https://discovery.nationalarchives.gov.uk/details/r/D7640371. Official record (Cabinet paper).
• Pew Research Center, 2021. Jewish Americans in 2020, chapter 5: U.S. Jews’ connections with and attitudes toward Israel. Pew Research Center, 11 May 2021. https://www.pewresearch.org/religion/2021/05/11/u-s-jews-connections-with-and-attitudes-toward-israel/. Survey research.
• Pittsburgh Rabbinical Conference, 1885. Declaration of Principles (“The Pittsburgh Platform”), with the Columbus Platform (1937) and the Miami Platform (1997). Central Conference of American Rabbis. https://www.ccarnet.org/rabbinic-voice/platforms/article-declaration-principles/. Primary historical text.
• Provisional Government of Israel, 1948. Declaration of the Establishment of the State of Israel. Official Gazette Number 1, Tel Aviv, 14 May 1948; English text published by the Knesset. https://main.knesset.gov.il/en/about/pages/declaration.aspx. Official record (founding instrument).