BIRNBAUM, Nathan. Inventor of term "Zionism" rejected Zionism.

Nathan Birnbaum (1864-1937) was an early Zionist and is credited with coining the term :”Zionism”. He left the Zionists in 1899, became a devout Orthodox Jew and was necessarily implacably opposed to the Zionist heresy. He was for a time a member of the anti-Zionist Agudas Yisrael (“The Union of Israel”), the Orthodox Jewish organization founded in 1912 in opposition to Zionism but one wing of which unfortunately succumbed, joined the Zionists and is now an Israeli political party.

Nathan Birnbaum, decrying political Zionism, 1919: “And is it at all possible that we, who regard Judaism as our one and only treasure, should ever be able to compete with such expert demagogues and loud self-advertisers as they [the Zionists]? It is surely not necessary that we should. We are, after all, still the mountains and they the grain, and all we need to do is to gather all our forces in a world organization of religious Jews, and it will follow of itself, and without the application of any great political cunning on our part, that we shall have it in our power to prevent what must needs be prevented and to carry out what we have to carry out. But there is no need first to create this world organization of religious Jews. It is already in existence. The world knows its name, it is Agudas Yisroel [The Union of Israel].” [1].

[1]. Nathan Birnbaum, “In bondage to our fellow Jews”, 1919 from Nathan Birnbaum, "Series of Essays on Agudas Yisroel", London, 1944 reproduced in Michael Selzer, editor, “Zionism Reconsidered”, Macmillan, London, 1970.