Imagined Worlds Made Real

Abstract

All the foreign revolutionaries who floated in and out of Victorian London were searching for societies which only existed as imagined places inside their heads, universal utopias not yet quite realised and Jerusalem in the clouds. National revolutionaries such as the Hungarians, Italians and Poles looked upon Britain as a very temporary home until their return to their own lands. One group fell between the universalists and nationalists, and it was the genius of a visionary revolutionary coupled with the very fact that Britain had an empire which turned the trick of creating an imaginary homeland whose centre might actually be the real geographical Jerusalem. Political Zionism was born out of the misery and pogroms of Russian oppression.