Pilgrimage Zionism: The Maccabean Pilgrimage to Palestine and the Divergent Processes of Zionist Meaning Making

This article shows Zionist emergence as processes of meaning making that took place while organizing and enacting a modern Jewish pilgrimage from London to Palestine and back in 1897. Through ‘thick’ descriptions by the pilgrims, the article offers a bottom-up account of the central boundary formations that in early 1897 demarcated Jewish national collectivity, homeland, and homecoming. Following the Danish-Jewish participant, Louis Frænkel, it shows how Zionist meaning making happened before, during, and after his experiences on the pilgrimage, and how this related to the kind of Zionism that Frænkel eventually would push for in Denmark.