1882 – Moved by the hardships of Russian refugees he found starving in the streets of Constantinople, the United States minister to the Ottoman empire, Lew Wallace, called at the Porte's Foreign Office; he received a communication from the minister of foreign affairs in which the statement was made that Jews would be made welcome anywhere in the empire except in Palestine.[3]
In reaction to Leon Pinsker's Autoemanzipation! that asserted Jewish emancipation required a homeland of their own outside Europe, Viennese rabbi Adolf Jellinek replied that ‘Jews did not have any national characteristics, as such but "thanks to their universalism they adapt and absorb qualities from the nations in whose midst they are born and educated . .We are at home in Europe and regard ourselves as children of the lands in which we were born and raised, whose languages we speak, and whose cultures make up our intellectual substance. We are Germans, Frenchmen, Magyars, Italians, and so forth, with every fiber of our being. We have long ceased to be true, thoroughbred Semites, and we have long ago lost sense of Hebrew nationality.'[4]
1885 – The Pittsburgh Platform, convened by Reform Judaism leaders Kaufmann Kohler and Isaac Mayer Wise, denounces Zionism, adopting the text: "We recognize, in the modern era of universal culture of heart and intellect, the approaching of the realization of Israel s great Messianic hope for the establishment of the kingdom of truth, justice, and peace among all men. We consider ourselves no longer a nation, but a religious community, and therefore expect neither a return to Palestine, nor a sacrificial worship under the sons of Aaron, nor the restoration of any of the laws concerning the Jewish state".[5]
