David Vital – författare

This sequel to The Origins of Zionism and Zionism: The Formative Years completes the most comprehensive and thorough examination of the rise and consolidation of the Zionist movement yet attempted. Zionism transformed the structure - and to some extent the ethos - of Jewry and much else besides. Its impact on international politics has been remarkable for a national movement emanating from a people whose condition has been largely determined by their endemic weakness. Yet on the eve of the First World War it was a movement in decline, its leadership was faltering, and the promise it had held out to the crushed and impoverished Jews of Europe was drastically diminished.The sources and consequences of this decline and the dramatic and unexpected war-time recovery from it form the chief subjects of this volume. Not the least of its purposes is to dispel the myths and legends that have long enveloped both the circumstances in which Great Britain's temporary patronage of Zionism was decided upon under Lloyd George and Balfour, and the springs and problems of Zionism and the Zionists themselves.

The twentieth century has seen both the greatest triumph of Jewish history and its greatest tragedy: the birth of the nation of Israel, and the state-sponsored genocide of the Holocaust. A People Apart is the first study to examine the role played by the Jews themselves, across the whole of Europe, during the century and a half leading up to these events. David Vital explores the Jews' troubled relationship with Europe, documenting the struggles of this 'nation without a territory' to establish a place for itself within an increasingly polarized and nationalist continent. He examines the clash within the Jewish community between politically neutral traditionalists and a new group of activists, whose unprecedented demands for national and political self-determination were stimulated both by increasing civil emancipation and the mounting effort to drive the Jews out of Europe altogether. Controversially, Professor Vital concludes that the history of the Jewish people was indeed in crucial respects although certainly not all of their own making; at times by their own autonomous action and choice; at others by inaction and default. This powerful and stimulating new analysis represents a watershed in our understanding of the history of the Jews in Europe.

This first volume of Vital's trilogy traces the roots of the movement from its source in Jewish tradition, concentrating on the crucial formative period from the onset of the great East-West migration of European Jews in 1881 to the first World Congress of Zionists in 1897, which marked the emergence of Zionism as an organized political force.

This sequel to David Vital's The Origins of Zionism (Clarendon Press, 1980) traces the emergence of the Zionist movement through which the Jews were, to a large extent, re-formed as a political people. It concentrates on the decade following the launch of the Zionist movement by Herzl in 1897, when its main ideas and central institutions were established, along with its modes of political, social, and economic action, and its internal ideological and party-political divisions on such issues as religious orthodoxy and socialism.Originally published in 1982, this book won the Jewish Chronicle Prize and the 'Present Tense' Literary Award for history. Professor Vital's major three-volume study of Zionism was completed in Zionism: The Crucial Phase (CP, 1987).

The twentieth century has seen both the greatest triumph of Jewish history and its greatest tragedy: the birth of the nation of Israel, and the state-sponsored genocide of the Holocaust. A People Apart is the first study to examine the role played by the Jews themselves, across the whole of Europe, during the century and a half leading up to these events. David Vital explores the Jews' troubled relationship with Europe, documenting the struggles of this 'nation without a territory' to establish a place for itself within an increasingly polarized and nationalist continent. He examines the clash within the Jewish community between politically neutral traditionalists and a new group of activists, whose unprecedented demands for national and political self-determination were stimulated both by increasing civil emancipation and the mounting effort to drive the Jews out of Europe altogether. Controversially, Professor Vital concludes that the history of the Jewish people was indeed in crucial respects although certainly not all of their own making; at times by their own autonomous action and choice; at others by inaction and default. This powerful and stimulating new analysis represents a watershed in our understanding of the history of the Jews in Europe, and therefore in the whole history of the continent.

How is foreign policy made? Who makes it? To what conscious and unconscious influences are policy-makers subject? What is distinctive about the immensely complex process as it unfolds in Britain? And what, therefore, is distinctive and characteristic about Britain’s foreign policy today? Who in Britain, has the decisive word? Why is the Foreign Office the king-pin of the system? Why does Parliament count for so little? Does public opinion count at all? Originally published in 1968, these are some of the questions which this book considers in the course of a tightly argued but very readable analysis. Some had been considered on their own elsewhere, but this study represented the first attempt by a contemporary political scientist to pull together, in brief compass, all the relevant threads – including the constitutional, the political, the institutional and the sociological. It is done, moreover, on the basis of a sharp assessment of the type of foreign policy problem that most notably confronted Britain at the time.The author has been successively journalist, official of the Israel Government, and university lecturer in politics. Throughout, his special interests and activities have been in the sphere of international affairs and it was while teaching International Relations at the University of Sussex that he wrote this book. He combines the experience of one who has seen the policy being made from the inside with the theoretical insight of the political scientist; he assesses with a sympathetic but unemotional detachment the constraints on the formation of British foreign policy.