Hope of a return to Zion emerged as a central theme of Jewish religiousness soon after the destruction of the Temple in Jerusalem in the year 70 CE. But despite ardent hopes and fervent prayers, the reality of large-scale Jewish settlement in Eretz Israel remained a remote and unrealized dream.

At the close of the 19th century, Theodor Herzl, an assimilated Austro-Hungarian journalist, proposed a radical solution to the problem of Jewish homelessness and oppression in the form of independent Jewish statehood. The following year he convened the 1st Zionist Congress in Basel, Switzerland, and laid the groundwork for the modern State of Israel.