This book is an enquiry into the central processes and events that changed the course of Jewish history in the modern era, emigration, emancipation, secularisation, anti-Semitism, and Zionism. The genesis of these processes derive from the revolutionary upheavals experienced by the Jewish people in the 1870s and 1880s, though their roots, in the form of marginal historical movements, were discerned as early as the seventeenth century. The historical perspective is taken up to present-day Israel.