Dreams of return to the Promised Land and the city of Jerusalem were at the center of Jewish national ideology throughout their 2700 year long history of Diaspora. Almost all along this long period, at the end of Sedarim, the annual Passover feast in commemoration of the exodus of the Jews from Egypt under Moses, every Jew has earnestly uttered the phrase “Next Year in Jerusalem” implying he or she will celebrate the Passover next year in Jerusalem.
Scattered Jews
Jews were scattered from Judea and Israel, the two kingdoms of the Israeli people, into every known land of the ancient times under repeated foreign invasions and repression. The city of Jerusalem and the Holy Temple were destroyed by the invaders to intimidate and subjugate the people. In two well remembered events, the Assyrians destroyed Israel and carried the people into captivity in 722 BC and the Babylonians under king Nebuchadnezzar reenacted this in Judea in 605 BC. The Babylonians occupied Judea, destroyed Jerusalem, and later burnt down the Holy Temple.
Since then the Jews, the common name by which descendants of all Israeli tribes came to be known, lived for 2,700 years in secluded groups in foreign countries.
Persecution of Jews
But two spells of large scale persecution of Jews during the 19th and 20th centuries, pushed them into a corner and compelled, at least some of them initially, to anxiously look forward to the literal realization of the phrase "Next Year in Jerusalem".
The first was the persecution of Jews unleashed by Tsarist Russia between 1880 and 1914 which saw about two million Jews fleeing the Russian Empire for other parts of Europe and north America. Just two decades after this, Germany under Nazi racist propaganda began killing people like flees, and six million Jews were brutally murdered before Nazism was finally defeated at the end of WW II in 1945.
Efforts at Returning to Israel
The minor efforts by small groups of European Jews towards thinking of establishing a homeland in what was then called Palestine received a miraculous fillip in 1897 when the first Zionist Congress, convened under the leadership of Theodore Herzl at Basle in Switzerland, stressed on the practical need for the return of Jews to their ancestral homeland.
The Zionist Movement was a response to the widespread anti-Jewish and anti-Semitic prejudices and social bigotry in Europe. Return to Israel, where the presence of a skeletal indigenous Jewish population had kept the Jewish identity and culture alive under centuries of foreign domination, had been an aspiration of Jews since millennia.
As a result of the Zionist Congress’ efforts some Jews began to view “Next Year in Jerusalem” as a real cry for their return to Israel before next Passover. The Jewish perception of national life underwent a radical shift and immigration to Israel began to be viewed as a real possibility. Starting from the closing decades of the 19th century Jewish immigrants from European countries where they were socially discriminated against began pouring into Israel, then ambiguously called Palestine, in several waves of mass migration.
