The Restoration of Israel

Book excerpt: The restoration of Israel to the Holy Land was originally an English, Protestant idea. Jewish Zionism came later and succeeded only because of the Holocaust. The principal impetus for the promotion of a Jewish return to Zion was religious and began with the translation of the Bible from the Hebrew to English by Tindale. Because literature in the English language depicted Jews almost always in an unfavorable light, both British and American religious and political leaders were ambivalent about Jews. Nevertheless, the religious impulse to restore Israel became political in the twentieth century and succeeded with the establishment of the Jewish state in 1948.