About Jewishness

19th century

1800-1900 The Golden Age of Yiddish literature, the revival of Hebrew as a spoken language, and the revival of Hebrew literature.

1808-1840 Large-scale aliyah in hope of Hastening Redemption in anticipation of the arrival of the Messiah in 1840. A particular school of pietistic reading of the Bible and Talmud established, to the satisfaction of Jews in Persia, England, Morocco, Yemen, and all the communities in between that the Messiah would arrive in the Hebrew year 5600, 1840 on the English calendar. Beginning in the early years of the nineteenth century, thousands of Jews in possession of the wealth to finance such a journey, moved with their families to the Land of Israel to await the great event. The arrival of large numbers of followers of the Vilna Gaon known collectively as the Perushim was especially notable, but sizeable groups are recorded as arriving from most of the world’s Jewish communities, including Persia, Yemen, Morocco, Algeria and Russia.

1820-1860 The development of Orthodox Judaism, a set of traditionalist movements that resisted the influences of modernization that arose in response to the European emancipation and Enlightenment movements; characterized by continued strict adherence to Halakha.

1824 the first Brazilian constitution allows freedom of belief.
Many Sephardi Jews from Morocco emigrate to Brazil.

1830 Greece grants citizenship to Jews.
Ever since Greece recovered her independence by conquest in 1830, the laws of the Kingdom have granted full civil and social rights to the Jews of Greece.

1831 Jewish militias take part in the defense of Warsaw against Russians
Jews were represented in the November Insurrection (1830 - 1831), the January Insurrection (1863), as well as in the revolutionary movement of 1905. Many Polish Jews were enlisted in the Legions, which fought for the Polish independence finally achieved in 1918.

1837 Moses Haim Montefiore is knighted by Queen Victoria, the first Jew to receive an English Knighthood.
Sir Moses Haim Montefiore, 1st Baronet, Kt (24 October 1784 - 28 July 1885) was one of the most famous British Jews of the 19th century. Montefiore was a financier, banker, philanthropist and Sheriff of London.
Montefiore was born in Livorno, Italy in 1784. He began his career as an apprentice to a firm of grocers and tea merchants. He later left for London, and became one of the twelve "Jew brokers" in the City of London. There he went into business with his brother Abraham, and their firm gained a high reputation. Jewish philanthropy and the Holy Land were at the center of Montefiore's interests. He traveled there by carriage and ship seven times, sometimes accompanied by his wife.
These activities were part of a broader program to enable the Jews of Palestine to become self supporting in anticipation of the establishment of a Jewish homeland. In addition to the windmill (to provide cheap flour to poor Jews), he built a printing press and textile factory, and helped to finance several agricultural colonies. He also attempted to acquire land for Jewish cultivation, but was hampered by Ottoman restrictions on land sale to non-Muslims.

1837 Galilee earthquake devastates Jewish communities of Safed and Tiberias.
The earthquake killed 2,158 inhabitants, of which 1,507 were Ottoman subjects, Muslim or Jewish. The north, Jewish section of the town was almost entirely destroyed, while the south, Moslem section suffered far less damage.

1851 Norway allows Jews to enter the country
After tireless efforts by the poet Henrik Wergeland, politician Peder Jensen Fauchald, school principal Hans Holmboe and others, the Norwegian parliament lifted the ban against Jews in 1851 and they were awarded religious rights on par with Christian "dissenters."
In 1852, the first Jew landed in Norway to settle, but it wasn't until 1892 that there were enough Jews to form a synagogue in Oslo. They were not emancipated until 1891.

1858 Jews emancipated in England
Historians commonly date Jewish Emancipation to 1858 when Jews were finally allowed to sit in Parliament though a few other minor pieces of legislation continued into the 1890s. Due to the lack of anti- violence in Britain in the nineteenth century, it acquired a reputation for religious tolerance. Britain became a haven for some Jews fleeing the Holocaust in the 1930s–40s, and the Jewish community in Britain continues to be vibrant today.

1858 Ottoman Land Code
The Ottoman Land Code of 1858 required the registration in the name of individual owners of agricultural land, most of which had never previously been registered and which had formerly been treated according to traditional forms of land tenure, in the hill areas of Palestine generally masha'a, or communal usufruct. The new law meant that for the first time a peasant could not be deprived of the title of his land, which he had rarely held before, but rather of the right to live on it, cultivate it and pass it on to his heirs, which had formerly been inalienable. Under the provisions of the 1858 law, communal rights of tenure were often ignored. Instead, members of the upper classes, adept at manipulating or circumventing the legal process, registered large areas of land as theirs. The fellhin (peasants) naturally considered the land to be theirs, and often discovered that they had ceased to be the legal owners only when the land was sold to Jewish settlers by an absentee landlord. Not only was the land being purchased; its Arab cultivators were being dispossessed and replaced by foreigners who had overt political objectives in Palestine.

1860 Alliance Israelite Universelle, an international Jewish organization is founded in Paris with the goal to protect Jewish rights as citizens.

Sir Moses Montefiori

1860-1875 Moshe Montefiori builds Jewish neighbourhoods outside the Old City of Jerusalem starting with Mishkenot Sha'ananim.
Montefiore left an indelible mark on the Jerusalem landscape with the Moses Montefiore Windmill in Yemin Moshe, named after him, which was the first Jewish neighborhood built outside the Old City walls.

1860-1864 Jews are taking part in Polish national movement, that was followed by January rising.
Though the Jews were accorded slightly more rights with the emancipation reform of 1861, they were still restricted to the Pale of Settlement and subject to restrictions on ownership and profession. The status quo was however shattered with the assassination of Tsar Alexander II in 1881, an act falsely blamed upon the Jews.

1862 Jews are given equal rights in Russian-controlled Congress Poland.
The privileges of some towns regarding prohibition of Jewish settlement are revoked.

1867 Jews emancipated in Hungary.
By 1796, France, Britain, and the Netherlands had granted the Jews equal rights with gentiles. Napoleon also freed the Jews in areas he conquered (see Napoleon and the Jews). However, it was not until the revolutionary atmosphere of the mid-19th century that Jewish political movements would begin to persuade governments in Central and Eastern Europe to grant equal rights to Jews.
However, in the face of persistent anti-Jewish incidents and blood libels such as the Damascus affair of 1840, and the failure of many states to emancipate the Jews, Jewish organizations formed in order to push for the emancipation and protection of Jews. The Board of Deputies of British Jews under Moses Montefiore, the Central consistory of Paris, and the Alliance Israelite Universelle all began working to assure the freedom of Jews.

1868 Benjamin Disraeli becomes Prime Minister of the United Kingdom.
Though converted to Christianity as a child, he is the first person of Jewish descent to become a leader of government in Europe. He saw no conflict of interest in using British power to support Jewish interests (such as supporting the tolerant Ottoman Empire above the anti-semitic Tsarist Empire). Adam Kirsch, in his biography of Disraeli, states that his Jewishness was "both the greatest obstacle to his ambition and its greatest engine." Much of the criticism of his policies was couched in terms. He was depicted in some antisemitic political cartoons with a big nose and curly black hair, called "Shylock" and "abominable Jew," and portrayed in the act of ritually murdering the infant Britannia. In response to an anti-Semitic comment in the British parliament, Disraeli memorably defended his Jewishness with the statement, "Yes, I am a Jew, and when the ancestors of the Right Honourable Gentleman were brutal savages in an unknown island, mine were priests in the Temple of Solomon." Although there are no reasons to believe that Disraeli's ancestors where of the priest class (Cohens) or even the priest-assisting class (Levis), there are texts which suggests that he was a Zionist avant la lettre. In Bernard Glassman's book "Benjamin Disraeli: The Fabricated Jew in Myth and Memory" he mentions an article of The New Judea, a leading Zionist periodical in the United Kingdom in the 1920s, which claims that, "The most creative Jewish mind produced by Anglo-Jewry - Disraeli - dreamt of Israel's return to Palestine. Through his Jewish Heroine in 'Tancred', he heralded the conviction that 'the race that persists in celebrating the vintage, although it has no fruit to gather, will in time regain its vineyard'."

1870-1890 Russian Zionist group Hovevei Zion (Lovers of Zion) and Bilu (est. 1882) set up a series of Jewish settlements in the Land of Israel, financially aided by Baron Edmond James de Rothschild. In Rishon LeZion Eliezer ben Yehuda revives Hebrew as spoken modern language.

1870 Jews emancipated in Italy.

1871 Jews emancipated in Germany.

1875 Reform Judaism's Hebrew Union College is founded in Cincinnati. Its founder was Rabbi Isaac Mayer Wise, the architect of American Reform Judaism.

1880 World Jewish population around 7.7 million, 90% in Europe, mostly Eastern Europe; around 3.5 million in the former Polish provinces.

1881-1884, 1903-1906, 1918-1920 Three major waves of pogroms kill tens of thousands of Jews in Russia and Ukraine. More than two million Russian Jews emigrate in the period 1881-1920.

1881 On December 30-31, the First Congress of all Zionist Unions for the colonization of Palestine was held at Focani, Romania.

1882-1903 The First Aliyah, a major wave of Jewish immigrants to build a homeland in Palestine.
Between 1882 and 1903, approximately 35,000 Jews immigrated to Palestine, then a province of the Ottoman Empire. The majority, belonging to the Hovevei Zion and Bilu movements, came from the with a smaller number arriving from Yemen. Many established agricultural communities. Among the towns that these individuals established are Petah Tikva (already in 1878), Rishon LeZion, Rosh Pina, and Zikhron Ya'aqov. In 1882, the Yemenite Jews settled in an Arab suburb of Jerusalem called Silwan located south-east of the walls of the Old City on the slopes of the Mount of Olives.

1891 Bitter Harvest
Ahad Ha'am writes, "Serfs they (the Jews) were in the lands of the Diaspora, and suddenly they find themselves in freedom (in Palestine); and this change has awakened in them an inclination to despotism. They treat the Arabs with hostility and cruelty, deprive them of their rights, offend them without cause, and even boast of these deeds; and nobody among us opposes this despicable and dangerous inclination."

1895 First published book by Sigmund Freud.
Sigmund Freud, born Sigismund Schlomo Freud (6 May 1856 – 23 September, 1939), was a Jewish-Austrian neurologist who founded the psychoanalytic school of psychiatry.
Freud was born to Jewish Galician parents in the Moravian town of Príbor, Austrian Empire, which is now part of the Czech Republic.After planning to study law, Freud joined the medical faculty at University of Vienna. In 1932, Freud received the Goethe Prize in appreciation of his contribution to psychology and to German literary culture. One year later (on 30 January 1933), the Nazis took control of Germany, and Freud's books were prominent among those burned and destroyed by the Nazis. In June 1938, Freud left Vienna aboard the Orient Express train and settled in London.

Theodor Herzl, Basel 1897

1897 In response to the Dreyfus affair, Theodore Herzl writes Der Judenstaat (The Jewish State), advocating the creation of a free and independent Jewish state in Israel.
Theodor Herzl (May 2, 1860 — July 3, 1904) was an Austro-Hungarian journalist and the father of modern political Zionism.

1897 The Bund (General Jewish Labour Bund) is formed in Russia
The Jewish Labour Bund, was a secular Jewish socialist party in the Russian empire, active between 1897 and 1920. Remnants of the party remain active in the diaspora as well as in Israel.

1897 First Russian Empire Census: 5,200,000 of Jews, 4,900,000 in the Pale of Settlement. The lands of former Poland have 1,300,000 Jews or 14% of population.

1897 The First Zionist Congress was held at Basel, which brought the World Zionist Organization (WZO) into being.
When the State of Israel was declared 51 years later on May 14, 1948, many of its new administrative institutions were already in place, having evolved during the regular Zionist Congresses of the previous decades. Some of these institutions remain to this day. The WZO's headquarters was permanently moved to Jerusalem, after being located over the years in capitals of Europe, including Berlin and London, and most recently in New York City, in the United States.