1890 The Term “Zionism” / “Political Zionism”

During 1885-1894, also published and wrote much of the contents of a journal he called Self-Emancipation!, which is where he coined the term “Zionism” in 1890 – five years before Theodor Herzl wrote “Der Judenstaat.” (He also was the first to use the term “political Zionism,” in the same periodical.)

For his early advocacy of political Zionism (in 1893, for example, he published an article on the subject of “The National Rebirth of the Jewish People in its Homeland as a Means of Solving the Jewish Question”), Birnbaum was elected secretary-general of the Zionist Organization, at the First Zionist Congress in 1897. He soon resigned the position, however, as by that time, he was already moving toward Jewish cultural nationalism, which foresaw a Jewish national rebirth in Eastern Europe, and through the Yiddish language – rather than a renaacent Hebrew.

Source: Haaretz. Wednesday, April 2, 2014