The Jews’ historical case for a claim to Israel cannot be time-stamped by the founding of the modern state in 1948, the Balfour Declaration of 1917, or the First Zionist Conference in 1897. These are modern political moments—meaningful, weighty—but none of which fully capture the inherent religious, ancestral, and ethnic connection of the People of Israel to the Land of Israel. The claim to Israel begins with firmly establishing that Zionism, the yearning and determination of Jews to return to and re-establish their Jewish homeland in the Land of Israel, is an ancient, integral component of Jewish identity. That Zionism is not political, but as old as Abraham and the Bible, and sustained through millennia. This is the unique analysis of Zionism presented by Alyza Lewin, president of the Louis D. Brandeis Center for Human Rights Under Law, in an article published in the April 2020 edition of the Israel Affairs academic journal. Lewin begins by defining Judaism as both a religion and ethnicity, and that central to both of those components is Zionism. Consequently, for centuries Jewish prayers have been conducted facing Jerusalem and included pleas for the return to and the rebuilding of Zion. This Zionism has served as connective tissue bonding the Jewish people together across a widespread and long Diaspora. Specifically, Lewin reads Jewish messianic movements that periodically emerged between the thirteenth and nineteenth centuries as efforts to turn these Zion-focused Jewish prayers into action. Jews who supported these movements read mystical texts as encouragement not to wait for miraculous divine action that would shepherd the Jews back to Israel, but as inspiration to mobilize Jews to return to their ancestral homeland. Though these Messianists were outside of the Jewish mainstream, Lewin argues they were the result of tapping into an ingrained yearning dating back to the Book of Genesis. Lewin identifies six distinct periods of Aliya—literally “ascent” and the term for Jewish return to Israel—relying on historian Arie Morgenstern’s research, published in “Dispersion and the Longing for Zion, 1240-1840.” The Crusader period saw the “Aliya of the 300 Rabbis,” in which Jews from France, England, North Africa, and Egypt were inspired to move back to Israel by a letter prophesizing the imminent arrival of the Messiah. This was followed by a wave of aliyahin the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries, with Jews responding to widespread violence targeting the Jewish hubs of Europe with a hopeful turn toward to Israel. With tens of thousands of Jews murdered and whole communities expelled, some Jewish leaders prompted their followers to follow them to Holy Land. The expulsion of the Jews from Spain in 1492 and the conquering of Israel by the Ottomans, who subsequently lifted prohibitions on Jewish immigration, further inspired and facilitated Jewish return to their homeland. Many of these olim (immigrants) settled in the northern Israel town of Safed, which flourished into a spiritual center of the Jewish world, thriving for two centuries and producing some of the greatest rabbinic luminaries. Aliyah became so popular in this period that the Vatican actually banned the use of Italian ports and ships for ferrying Jews to Israel. This process—heightened Jewish immigration to Israel, followed by government action to stymie their return—can be tracked throughout history, through the Enlightenment period until the British refusal to allow entry to Jews fleeing the Holocaust. Similarly, while the early seventeenth century saw rapid growth and development in Jerusalem, “children from the four corners of the earth fluttered like birds in their eagerness to settle in Jerusalem”—as one contemporary observer wrote—this Jerusalem renaissance came to a sudden and bitter end when the city came under the control of the Turkish Farukh family. The family persecuted the cities many thousands of Jews, imposing onerous taxes as to make it impossible for Jewish life to continue in the city. The community would not be revived until a century later. In the post-Farukh period, waves of Jews, primarily from the Ottoman Empire and Italy, were again moving in droves to Israel, settling in Jerusalem and Tiberias. In the eighteenth century, eight new yeshivot were established in Israel, many synagogues were either renovated or built in this city centers, and hasidic leaders emigrated in large numbers. The next century saw hundreds of families and Talmudic students from Russia arriving in Israel. Throughout these periods, the returned Jews would seek to reestablish ancient semicha, the process by which new Rabbis are ordained; locate the ten lost tribes of Israel, whose deportation from Israel to some unknown location by the Assyrian king is related in the Bible; and revive the Sanhedrin, the Jewish court system. The Jews arrived in hopes of already being in the Holy Land upon the coming of the Messiah, and of hastening that process by beginning the project of the in-gathering of the exiles by returning to and settling the land. This long history of the Jewish messianic movements and the waves of Aliya since at least the thirteenth century that Lewin outlines counters any notion of Jewish “colonialism.” The story of a Jewish presence in Israel is one that is constant and pervasive, bookended by the ancient Biblical sovereign Judeans and the modern Israelis. The Zionism that has animated the Jewish people for centuries is the deep religious, spiritual, historical and ethnic belief that (a) all Jews—including the Ten Lost Tribes—are part of a Jewish nation dispersed around the globe; (b) the Jewish nation will one day return to Zion and re-establish a Jewish homeland there; and (c) Jews can hasten the coming of the Messiah, the ultimate redemption and the restored Jewish homeland by re-establishing the Jewish legal framework that applied before the Jews were forced into exile. As Lewin tracks the Jewish tie to Israel, political Zionism in the late eighteenth century emerges not as a wholly new concept, but as the resurgence of open expression of an integral part of Judaism that had only been squashed in the preceding decades as a result of European governments conditioning citizenship on Jews’ surrender of their Zionism. The Western European emancipation movement that began in the late eighteenth century issued, on paper, a message of freedom, equality, and non-discrimination. Yet, what was required of Jews, was that they shed their Judaism and become instead only members of whatever country in which they lived. Persons with a distinct Jewish identity and part of a Jewish nation were “unacceptable,” as the Count of Clermont-Tonnerre told the French National Assembly in 1789. A similar debate took place in the Dutch National Assembly of Batavia. As Lewin writes, the Dutch position was that “Jews should be denied Dutch citizenship specifically because they viewed themselves as part of the Nation of Israel with a special connection to the Land of Israel.” A hundred years later in America, the Reform movement would publish a Passover Haggadah that erased the language, “Next year in Jerusalem,” the line that closed the Seder. The modern Western requirement was clear: Jews must pledge to forgo their sense of and allegiance to Jewish peoplehood, to abandon the nationalist and ethnic component of Judaism, if they desired to be treated as equal human beings in the world. Yearning for Zion, for the return to Israel of all the Jews exiled throughout, that which had been such a crucial component of Jewish identity for centuries, must be repudiated. Jews must become Frenchmen, or Italians, or Germans only. Judaism would be relegated to a private religion of personal ritual, with any communal identity subordinated to the state. Zionism must be forgotten if equality was to be granted. Lewin contrasts this trend in Western Europe and then in the United States with the Eastern European Jews who were not offered the same citizenship-for-Zionism deal. The latter maintained the national, ethnic component of their Jewish identity and their love for and dreams of Zion. As such, when Theodore Herzl did light the fire of the political Zionist movement, his primary support came from these Eastern European Jews for whom the dream of Zion had never abated. Historically, Jews have only shed the ethnic part of their Jewish identity when they felt compelled to do so in exchange for equal rights and full citizenship. Where Jews remained segregated, they maintained the ethnic part of their Jewish identity. Lewin finds the same process underway today. Jews are defined not only by faith and ritual, but by their membership in a nation with a homeland. Requiring that Jews shed their national self-determination is not only antisemitic because it singles out Jews for the denial of a right granted to every other people, but because it demands Jews abandon a specific, key component of their identity as Jews. Self-determination is not only a general human right owed the Jews like anyone else, but a part of the particularistic Jewish identity. Jews pressured to “shed their support for the Jewish homeland is a contemporary form of the historic demand that Jews discard their sense of Jewish peoplehood and yearning to return to Zion,” writes Lewin. This is modern antisemitism. Lewin tracks this contemporary sickness as it has poisoned university campuses. She notes the move by fifty-three student clubs at New York University to sign an agreement promising not to sponsor events or dialogue with any pro-Israel organizations, and the decision by the University of Toronto Graduate Student Union to refuse to aid the campus Hillel in its effort to make kosher food available because Hillel “is openly pro-Israel.” Lewin concludes that “[v]ilifying, marginalizing, demonizing, boycotting and excluding Jews because they express support for Jewish self-determination in the Jews’ ancestral homeland is antisemitic harassment.” It was unacceptable when the Vatican barred Jews from Israel in the fifteenth century, when the Farukh family oppressed the Jews of Jerusalem in seventeenth century, and when the countries of the world promised “equality” in exchange for “Judaism” in the eighteenth century. Today, we must name and confront the antisemitism that requires Jews abandon and disavow their Zionism if they wish to be members of their academic communities.