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In what ways did the European racist and racial thinking affect the development of Zionism? This book critically investigates three important figures in the history of Zionism to trace how the rise of eugenics, racism and European and German colonialism and antisemitism influenced Zionist ideology and its proponents in Europe and Palestine.

The book argues that while dismayed by the failure of Jewish assimilation and the persecution of Jews inherent in Europe's embrace of racial hierarchies in the 19th century, Zionism as a counterforce to such oppression reflected elements of these racial ideas in its project to transform Judaism from a religion into a secular national identity. It first provides background on the contradictions and tensions of this intellectual environment, including division between western and central European Jewish thinkers and Eastern European Jews. The book then provides detailed case studies of philosopher and critic Max Nordau's embrace of Zionism and the project of 'muscular Judaism' in response to antisemitism, Arthur Ruppin's racial thinking and its relation to his activities organising Jewish immigration to Palestine, and the life of Ephraim Lilien whose artistic representations of the 'New Jew' the author argues reflects Nordau and Ruppin's respective concepts of the 'regenerated Jewish body' and 'return to the land'.