Theodor Herzl convened the First Zionist Congress in 1897, and Israel’s Declaration of the Establishment of the State of Israel of 14 May 1948 places that congress, and Herzl, at the head of the historical chain it closes by declaring a Jewish state. The documents that frame a Jewish state as ranking Jews above others are dated after him. In a 1917 Cabinet paper, a British minister assumed the proposed policy meant “Mahommedans and Christians are to make way for the Jews.” A Knesset Basic Law of 2018 made national self-determination in Israel “exclusive to the Jewish People,” 121 years after the congress. Herzl’s own 1896 pamphlet, in English translation, uses the word “supremacy” for sovereignty over territory and promises residents of other creeds “equality before the law.”
Key Findings
- The Provisional Government of Israel’s Declaration of 14 May 1948 was signed by 37 members of the People’s Council. It credits Herzl with summoning the First Zionist Congress of 1897, 51 years earlier, and with no other act (Provisional Government of Israel, 1948).
- E. S. Montagu, Secretary of State for India, wrote on 23 August 1917, 20 years after the congress, that the proposed policy would be “anti-Semitic in result.” He assumed it meant Jews “should be put in all positions of preference” (Montagu, 1917).
- Two 1919 wire reports put at 300 the American Jews who signed a statement calling a “distinctively Jewish State” “utterly opposed to the principles of democracy.” The statement was presented to President Wilson on 4 March 1919 (Berkowitz, Jastrow, Senior and the signers, 1919).
- Israel’s Supreme Court ruled on 8 March 2000 that the State’s values as a Jewish state do not justify, as a general purpose, “discrimination by the State between its citizens, on the basis of religion or nationality” (Israeli Supreme Court, 2000).
- The Knesset enacted a clause making national self-determination in Israel “exclusive to the Jewish People” in 2018. The Supreme Court upheld the law in 2021 and held that the Knesset is “not all powerful” (Knesset, 2018; Israeli Supreme Court, 2021).
What does Israel’s founding text credit Herzl with?
The Provisional Government of Israel’s Declaration of 14 May 1948 credits Herzl with one act, dated 1897. It records that “at the summons of the spiritual father of the Jewish State, Theodore Herzl, the First Zionist Congress convened and proclaimed the right of the Jewish people to national rebirth in its own country.” The Declaration names Herzl nowhere else.
The Declaration’s recitals then run the chain forward. They cite the Balfour Declaration of 2 November 1917, the League of Nations Mandate and the UN General Assembly resolution of 29 November 1947, which the Declaration calls a recognition that “is irrevocable.” They end in the operative sentence: “THE ESTABLISHMENT OF A JEWISH STATE IN ERETZ-ISRAEL, TO BE KNOWN AS THE STATE OF ISRAEL.” Thirty-seven members of the People’s Council signed it, David Ben-Gurion first, 51 years after the Basel meeting. The recitals are the founding text’s own historical narrative. They record what the state’s founders asserted about their lineage, not an independent historical finding.
Herzl’s program is set out in his 1896 pamphlet The Jewish State, which this report quotes in English translation. The excerpt published in Fordham University’s Internet History Sourcebooks states its aim as territorial: “Let the sovereignty be granted us over a portion of the globe large enough to satisfy the rightful requirements of a nation; the rest we shall manage for ourselves.” The full English translation published by Project Gutenberg renders the same object with the word at the centre of the question: “Our first object is, as I have already said, supremacy, assured to us by international law, over a portion of the globe sufficiently large to satisfy our just requirements.” In that sentence, the thing over which supremacy is sought is “a portion of the globe.” The sentence does not describe a rank among inhabitants.
The same translation addresses residents who are not Jews directly. “Every man will be as free and undisturbed in his faith or his disbelief as he is in his nationality,” Herzl wrote. He added: “if it should occur that men of other creeds and different nationalities come to live amongst us, we should accord them honourable protection and equality before the law.” His wider vocabulary, including the colonial terms he used, is read separately in the Institute’s report on Herzl, Jabotinsky and the colonial vocabulary.
Who first said the Jewish-state policy put Jews above others?
E. S. Montagu, Secretary of State for India, put that reading on the British War Cabinet record on 23 August 1917, 20 years after Herzl’s congress. In paper G.T. 1868, held by The National Archives at CAB 24/24/71, he wrote that he assumed the proposed policy meant “that Mahommedans and Christians are to make way for the Jews, and that the Jews should be put in all positions of preference.”
Montagu framed his charge in an opening sentence that has to be read whole, because it separates result from intent: “I have chosen the above title for this memorandum, not in any hostile sense, not by any means as quarrelling with an anti-Semitic view which may be held by my colleagues, not with a desire to deny that anti-Semitism can be held by rational men, not even with a view to suggesting that the Government is deliberately anti-Semitic ; but I wish to place on record my view that the policy of His Majesty’s Government is anti-Semitic in result and will prove a rallying ground for Anti-Semites in every country in the world.”
He wrote, in his own words, “as the one Jewish Minister in the Government.” He was answering a draft, not the Balfour Declaration. The paper responds to Lord Rothschild’s letter of 18 July 1917 and to a reply then still unissued, and the Declaration itself followed ten weeks later. His sentence about preference continues: “Turks and other Mahommedans in Palestine will be regarded as foreigners, just in the same way as Jews will hereafter be treated as foreigners in every country but Palestine.” His objection had two sides: one concerned the existing inhabitants, the other the standing of Jews in Britain. He wrote that “Zionism has always seemed to me to be a mischievous political creed” and asserted “that there is not a Jewish nation.”
His proposed alternative was equality within Palestine. He asked the Government to secure “for Jews in Palestine complete liberty of settlement and life on an equality with the inhabitants of that country who profess other religious beliefs” and to “go no further.”
The paper records what one minister argued on one date. It carries no figure and is not evidence of what the Cabinet decided, what British Jews believed or what Zionists intended. The first page was read from the archive’s own published image. The passages from pages 2 and 3, including the end of the preference sentence, were read from a relayed scan of the same print.
How many American Jews objected to a Jewish state in 1919?
Two 1919 wire reports put the number at 300. The Douglas Daily International of 5 March 1919 reported that “Three hundred prominent American Jews signed a petition” against “the organization of the Jewish state of Palestine.” Representative Julius Kahn of California presented the statement to President Woodrow Wilson on 4 March 1919.
The statement itself states no count. It opens “we, the undersigned citizens of the United States.” Rabbi Henry Berkowitz, Professor Morris Jastrow and Max Senior drafted it, with Rabbi David Philipson completing the soliciting committee. The Wisconsin Weekly Blade repeated “a statement signed by 300 prominent American Jews” on 15 March 1919. A figure of 299 traces to a 1932 biography by Max E. Berkowitz, the drafter’s nephew, quoted by Irving Levitas in American Jewish Archives in 1962. That sentence counts “the two hundred and ninety-nine other signatories,” meaning the others besides Berkowitz, so it describes the same 300. The total was also still moving after the presentation. Levitas records Rabbi Leo M. Franklin of Detroit deciding to sign on 22 April 1919.
| Count stated | What it counts | Source |
|---|---|---|
| 300 | Signers, as of early March 1919 | Douglas Daily International, 5 March 1919 |
| 300 | Signers, restated | Wisconsin Weekly Blade, 15 March 1919 |
| 299 | Signers other than Berkowitz | Max E. Berkowitz, 1932, quoted by Levitas, 1962 |
| None | No total in the document | The Statement’s own text |
Source: Berkowitz, Jastrow, Senior and the signers, 1919, in the reproductions named in Sources.
The objection was framed in democratic terms. Objection 4, in the American Jewish Archives text, protests “the re-establishment in Palestine of a distinctively Jewish State as utterly opposed to the principles of democracy.” The closing asks that Palestine be governed “under a democratic form of government recognizing no distinctions of creed or race or ethnic descent.”
The Denver Jewish News of 19 March 1919, which spells words in its own house style, prints the signers’ claim to voice “the majority of American Jews born in this country.” The same page prints the Zionist Organization of America’s rival claim to a majority of adult American Jews. Neither organisation published a method.
How did the Bund judge political Zionism’s aim in 1901?
The Bund’s Fourth Congress, held at the end of April 1901, judged political Zionism’s territorial aim either insignificant or utopian, according to the Central Committee’s printed report of August 1901. The report is reproduced in the documentary edition Bund: Dokumenty i materialy (ROSSPEN, 2010). The congress objected on grounds of feasibility and class consciousness.
The resolution reads in full, in the Institute’s working translation from the Russian: “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 final aim of political Zionism, the acquisition of a territory for the Jewish people, insofar as it would hold a small part of that 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 regards the cultural activity of certain Zionist groups, the congress treats it as it treats any legal activity.”
A separate vote of the same congress barred Zionists from the Bund’s “economic” and “political” organisations. The territorial model that the congress’s national-question debate rejected was a different one. A footnote to the report identifies it as the Polish Socialist Party’s.
The phrase “Jewish state” also predates Herzl, and its earlier use had another referent. Article five of the Declaration of Principles adopted by a rabbinical conference near Pittsburgh in November 1885 stated: “We consider ourselves no longer a nation, but a religious community, and therefore 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 mention of sacrifice under “the sons of Aaron” places that “Jewish state” in ancient Temple restoration, nearly 12 years before the 1897 congress.
The movement reversed the clause. The Central Conference of American Rabbis, founded in 1889 and now the text’s publisher, affirmed in its 1937 Columbus Platform “the obligation of all Jewry to aid in its upbuilding as a Jewish homeland.”
What equality did the 1948 founding text promise non-Jews?
The Provisional Government of Israel’s Declaration of 14 May 1948 pledges equality in so many words. In the Knesset’s English text, the state “will ensure 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 English versions are Israeli government translations of a Hebrew original, and they differ on the word the clause turns on. The quotation above follows the Knesset text. The Declaration adds that the state “will guarantee freedom of religion, conscience, language, education and culture.”
The Declaration also addresses Arabs by name. It appeals “to the Arab inhabitants of the State of Israel to preserve peace and participate in the upbuilding of the State on the basis of full and equal citizenship and due representation in all its provisional and permanent institutions.” The founding text therefore pairs the declaration of a “JEWISH STATE” with an equality pledge that names religion and race as grounds on which rights do not vary.
The pledge later entered Israel’s constitutional texts by reference. Section 1 of Basic Law: Human Dignity and Liberty, in the Knesset’s unofficial English translation through May 2022, provides that basic rights “shall be upheld in the spirit of the principles included in the Declaration of the Establishment of the State of Israel.” That wording points to the Declaration’s spirit. It does not incorporate the Declaration or enact its equality sentence.
The Declaration’s 1948 pledge is a statement of intent. The text alone does not record how any person was treated under it.
Which part of Herzl’s program did Israeli law enact first?
The Knesset passed the Law of Return on 5 July 1950. Section 1, as enacted, reads: “Every Jew has the right to come to this country as an oleh.” The English text published by the Knesset glosses oleh as “a Jew immigrating, into Israel.” Jewish immigration was the element of the Zionist program the state put into statute first.
As enacted in 1950, section 2(b) let the Minister of Immigration refuse the immigrant’s visa to an applicant engaged “in an activity directed against the Jewish people” or likely “to endanger public health or the security of the State.” That page shows the text as passed. A 1954 amendment is recorded in the 1970 statute’s own footnote, but its content was not read, so the 1950 grounds are not the grounds in force today. The Law carries no count of immigrants.
The Knesset’s Amendment No. 2, passed on 10 March 1970, inserted two sections that work in opposite directions. Section 4B defines the term: “For the purposes of this Law, ‘Jew’ means a person who was born of a Jewish mother or has become converted to Judaism and who is not a member of another religion.” Section 4A extends the same rights to people who are not Jews under that definition: “a child and a grandchild of a Jew, the spouse of a Jew, the spouse of a child of a Jew and the spouse of a grandchild of a Jew.” The same amendment inserted section 3A(b) into the Population Registry Law, which carries the 4B definition into “any registration or document thereunder.”
The State’s later texts connect the Law to the earlier program. The 2018 Basic Law states that the State “shall be open to Jewish immigration, and the ingathering of the exiles.” In 2000, Israel’s Supreme Court described the Law of Return as a “special key to enter.” The statutes most often cited in this debate are compared in the Institute’s report on Israeli laws called Jewish supremacist.
Did Israel’s Supreme Court accept the Jewish state as justifying discrimination?
No. Israel’s Supreme Court, sitting as the High Court of Justice, held on 8 March 2000 in HCJ 6698/95 Ka’adan v. Israel Land Administration that it does “not accept the approach that the values of the State of Israel, as a Jewish state, would justify, on the level of a general purpose, discrimination by the State between its citizens, on the basis of religion or nationality.”
The case arose from land at Katzir. The State had allocated the land through the Jewish Agency to a cooperative society that admitted only Jews, and an Arab couple sought to build a home there. The same paragraph 31 that rejects the Jewish-state justification states that there is “no contradiction between the values of the State of Israel as a Jewish and democratic state and between the absolute equality of all of its citizens.” It reads the Law of Return in the same frame: “once a person has lawfully entered the home, he enjoys equal rights with all other household members.” Paragraph 34 closes the indirect route: “What the State cannot do directly, it cannot do indirectly.”
The remedy was narrower than the holding. A panel of five declared the allocation unlawful and ordered the State to “consider the petitioners’ request” on the principle of equality. It did not order the couple admitted. Justice Y. Kedmi dissented only on whether the ruling reached past allocations. He wrote that he concurs with the President’s “fundamental approach regarding the position of the value of equality.”
The equality rule in this area is judge-made. The Knesset’s unofficial English translation of Basic Law: Human Dignity and Liberty contains zero occurrences of “equal.” Its purpose clause, numbered 1a in the Knesset text, embeds “the values of the State of Israel as a Jewish and democratic state.” Section 10 leaves every law in force before 1992 untouched.
When did Israeli law make self-determination exclusive to Jews?
The Knesset enacted that language in 2018, 121 years after the First Zionist Congress. Clause 1(c) of Basic Law: Israel as the Nation-State of the Jewish People reads, in the Knesset’s unofficial English translation: “The realization of the right to national self-determination in the State of Israel is exclusive to the Jewish People.”
The same law states in clause 7 that “The State views the development of Jewish settlement as a national value, and shall act to encourage and promote its establishment and consolidation.” Clause 4 makes Hebrew “the language of the State” and gives Arabic “a special status.” The law contains no equality clause and no individual-rights clause. That is a fact about the text and not a finding about how the State treats anyone. The law’s text is read clause by clause in the Institute’s report on the Nation-State Law and Jewish supremacy.
Israel’s Supreme Court ruled on the law on 8 July 2021 in HCJ 5555/18 Hasson v. Knesset, dismissing fifteen petitions before an eleven-justice panel. The ruling has two halves. The law was upheld. The Court also held that the Knesset, acting as constituent authority, is “not all powerful” and may not, even by Basic Law, deny the core of the State’s character as both Jewish and democratic.
Methodology and limitations
The evidence is documentary. It consists of primary and official records: Israel’s 1948 Declaration in the Knesset’s English text, three Knesset statutes in published English translations, two Supreme Court judgments in English, and a British Cabinet paper held by The National Archives. It also draws on primary historical artifacts: a 1919 petition, a 1901 party congress report and an 1885 rabbinical platform. The term “Jewish supremacist state” is treated as a characterisation, and each section locates the dated text to which a reading of that kind points. No source here measures attitudes or counts outcomes. Every date and quotation is reported as the named document gives it.
Each source carries its own limits. Herzl’s 1896 pamphlet is quoted from two English translations, the Fordham sourcebook excerpt and the Project Gutenberg edition, not from the German original. Pages 2 and 3 of the Montagu paper were read from a relayed scan whose first page matches the archive’s published image word for word. The 1919 statement survives in two reproductions that differ, so passages are quoted from the American Jewish Archives text except for the opening, which comes from the Denver printing. The copy presented to Wilson was not located. The Bund quotations are the Institute’s working translations from Russian, and the text of the 1901 national-question resolution itself was illegible in the published scan.
The Knesset labels its Basic Law translations unofficial, and the Law of Return pages carry no marking either way. The 1950 text is quoted as enacted, and the content of the 1954 amendment was not established. The vote split in Hasson is not recorded in the sources read.
Conclusion
So what role did Herzl play? On the record of Israel’s own founding text, he summoned the 1897 congress that the 1948 Declaration names first in the chain ending in statehood. In the English translations of his 1896 pamphlet, he sought sovereignty over territory and offered residents of other creeds “equality before the law.”
The reading of a Jewish state as one that places Jews first among its inhabitants appears on the record in 1917, in the words of the one Jewish minister in Britain’s government. He described it as a result of the policy, not its intent. Three hundred American Jews objected in 1919 that a Jewish state was undemocratic. The Bund’s 1901 objection concerned whether the plan could work, not who would rank above whom. The state’s 1948 Declaration pledged equality “irrespective of religion, race or sex.” Its Supreme Court ruled in 2000 that Jewishness does not license discrimination between citizens, and its Knesset made self-determination “exclusive to the Jewish People” in 2018.
Each layer of that record has its own author and its own date. When the characterisation is attached to a person, what changes depending on whether the reader weighs the pamphlet of 1896 or the clause of 2018, and how much weight should the 121 years between them carry?
Frequently Asked Questions
Was Montagu’s paper a response to the Balfour Declaration?
No. Montagu’s paper is dated 23 August 1917, and the Declaration of the Establishment of the State of Israel dates the Balfour Declaration to 2 November 1917, ten weeks later. The paper answered a draft exchange that began with Lord Rothschild’s letter of 18 July 1917, so it could not have seen the wording that was finally issued.
Who handed the 1919 statement to President Wilson, and where?
Representative Julius Kahn of California presented it on 4 March 1919, the day before Wilson sailed from Hoboken for the Paris Peace Conference, according to the record assembled from the 1919 wire reports and the 1932 biography. A presentation in Paris is therefore impossible on these dates. The copy given to the President has not been found in the sources searched.
Did the Bund admit Zionists as members?
No. The Bund’s Fourth Congress of April 1901 decided, in a separate vote from its resolution on Zionism, that Zionists were not to be admitted “in any case” to its economic or political organisations. The same congress treated the cultural activity of some Zionist groups like any legal activity.
Can a person who left Judaism claim under the Law of Return?
Section 4A, inserted by the Knesset in 1970, excludes from its extended rights “a person who has been a Jew and has voluntarily changed his religion.” The exclusion applies to the claimant’s own history, not the ancestor’s. Section 4A(b) adds that it is immaterial whether the Jew through whom the right is claimed is still alive.
Does Basic Law: Human Dignity and Liberty override laws passed before 1992?
No. Section 10 of the Knesset’s 1992 Basic Law states that it “shall not affect the validity of any law that existed prior to the inception of the Basic Law.” A statute that predates it, such as the 1950 Law of Return, cannot be challenged under the Basic Law on that ground.
What does the 2018 Nation-State Law say about Arabic?
Clause 4(b) of the Knesset’s 2018 Basic Law gives Arabic “a special status in the State,” while clause 4(a) makes Hebrew “the language of the State.” Clause 4(c) provides that nothing in the article compromises the status Arabic held “in practice” before the law came into force.
Sources
- Berkowitz, H., Jastrow, M., Senior, M. and the signers, 1919. A Statement to the Peace Conference. Read in The Denver Jewish News, 19 March 1919, pp. 1 and 3 (Library of Congress, Chronicling America, https://www.loc.gov/resource/sn91052360/1919-03-19/ed-1/?sp=1), and in Levitas, I., “Reform Jews and Zionism, 1919-1921,” American Jewish Archives, Vol. XIV, No. 1, 1962 (https://sites.americanjewisharchives.org/publications/journal/PDF/1962_14_01_00.pdf); counts from Douglas Daily International, 5 March 1919, and Wisconsin Weekly Blade, 15 March 1919. Primary historical artifact.
- Bund, 1898 to 1901. Founding-period documents, including the Central Committee’s report on the Fourth Congress, April 1901. In Bund: Dokumenty i materialy, 1894-1921, Moscow: ROSSPEN, 2010. https://docs.historyrussia.org/ru/nodes/106-otchet-tsk-bunda-o-iv-sezde-bunda-v-aprele-1901-g-avgust-1901-g. Primary historical record in a scholarly documentary edition.
- Herzl, T., 1896. The Jewish State (excerpt, English translation). Internet History Sourcebooks: Modern History, Fordham University. https://sourcebooks.web.fordham.edu/mod/1896herzl-b.asp. Primary historical text in translation.
- Herzl, T., 1896. The Jewish State (English translation). Project Gutenberg, eBook 25282, 2008. https://www.gutenberg.org/ebooks/25282. Primary historical text in translation.
- Israeli Supreme Court, 2000. HCJ 6698/95 Ka’adan v. Israel Land Administration, judgment of 8 March 2000. Cardozo Israeli Supreme Court Project. https://versa.cardozo.yu.edu. Official record (court judgment).
- Israeli Supreme Court, 2021. HCJ 5555/18 Hasson v. Knesset, judgment of 8 July 2021. Cardozo Israeli Supreme Court Project. https://versa.cardozo.yu.edu. Official record (court judgment).
- Knesset, 1950, amended 1970. Law of Return, 5710-1950, and Law of Return (Amendment No. 2), 5730-1970. 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, 1992. Basic Law: Human Dignity and Liberty, 5752-1992, unofficial English translation with amendments through 1 May 2022. https://main.knesset.gov.il/EN/activity/documents/BasicLawsPDF/BasicLawLiberty.pdf. Official record (enacted legislation).
- Knesset, 2018. Basic Law: Israel as the Nation-State of the Jewish People, 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, 23 August 1917. The National Archives, Kew, CAB 24/24/71 (https://discovery.nationalarchives.gov.uk/details/r/D7640371); copy at CAB 21/58 folio 218. Official record.
- Pittsburgh Rabbinical Conference, 1885. Declaration of Principles (“The Pittsburgh Platform”), as published by the Central Conference of American Rabbis. https://www.ccarnet.org/rabbinic-voice/platforms/article-declaration-principles/; Columbus Platform, 1937, https://www.ccarnet.org/rabbinic-voice/platforms/article-guiding-principles-reform-judaism/. Primary historical text.
- Provisional Government of Israel, 1948. Declaration of the Establishment of the State of Israel, 14 May 1948. Official Gazette Number 1; Knesset English text. https://main.knesset.gov.il/en/about/pages/declaration.aspx. Official record (founding instrument).