الصهيونية اختراع أوروبي: نشأة أيديولوجيا

In a time of conflicting narratives about history and memory, French researcher Sonia Dayan-Herzbrun, in her book “Zionism is a European Invention: The Origins of an Ideology” (Luxediteur, 2025), provides a radical reading of one of the most ambiguous concepts in thought. Contemporary politics, refuting the basic narrative on which the Zionist movement was based, based on historical data that was approached with scientific objectivity. From the introduction to the book, the author announces her project: to examine the truth about the Zionist ideology, its roots, its origins, development and manifestations, “because ideas do not make history, but when they are harnessed to serve the interests of the most powerful to grant legitimacy to his projects, they gain terrifying effectiveness.” The book does not limit itself to tracing the emergence of Zionism as a political movement, but seeks to deconstruct its intellectual structure, revealing that it is a modern European product formed at the intersection of nationalism, imperialism, and religious interpretation. Rather, it goes further to examine the European-Jewish relationship since the Middle Ages. ## From Christian-Jewish hostility to Messianism, the author shows that European Christianity’s hostility to the Jews is rooted in history. Saint Augustine, in the fourth century AD, considered the Jews “a people rejected by God” “because their fathers crucified Christ.” This anti-Jewish view in the Church continued for many centuries and contributed to the emergence of the myth of the “vagrant Jew” and the concept of a people who “have no land and no covenant,” according to Jacques Pinin Bossuet, one of the leading church preachers during the seventeenth century. Later, the representation of the Jew in European thought became associated with “the exile who has no homeland and the cunning usurer,” as Immanuel Kant explained.