Bagrut History cheat sheet

Haskalah (Jewish Enlightenment, late 18th c. onward) promoted secular learning, Hebrew revival, and integration; it split Jewry into Orthodox, Reform, Conservative, and secular streams.

Emancipation in Western Europe (France 1791, German states gradually 1812–1871) granted citizenship rights but conditioned them on assimilation, fuelling both integration and antisemitic backlash.

Pogroms in the Russian Empire (1881–1884, Kishinev 1903, 1905–1906) drove mass emigration of about 2.5 million Jews westward and to Palestine between 1881 and 1914.

Hibbat Zion and the First Aliyah (1882–1903) founded agricultural settlements such as Rishon LeZion and Petah Tikva, financed by Baron Edmond de Rothschild and the Hovevei Zion societies.

Theodor Herzl's Der Judenstaat (1896) and the First Zionist Congress in Basel (1897) created the World Zionist Organization and defined Zionism as a movement to establish a Jewish homeland in Palestine.

The Uganda Proposal (1903) split the Zionist movement; the Seventh Congress (1905) rejected territorial alternatives to Palestine.

The Second Aliyah (1904–1914) brought socialist pioneers who founded the kibbutz and Hashomer; the Third Aliyah (1919–1923) followed the Balfour Declaration and built the Histadrut (1920).

Ahad Ha'am promoted 'cultural Zionism' - Palestine as a spiritual center - while Revisionist Zionism (Jabotinsky, 1925) demanded a Jewish state on both banks of the Jordan.

Nazi antisemitism was codified in the 1935 Nuremberg Laws, which stripped Jews of citizenship and forbade marriage or relations between Jews and 'Aryans'.

Kristallnacht (9–10 November 1938) was a state-organized pogrom: synagogues burned, about 30,000 Jewish men arrested, and Jewish property seized.

The Wannsee Conference (20 January 1942) coordinated the 'Final Solution'; the Einsatzgruppen mass shootings (Babyn Yar, 1941) preceded the death camps.

Extermination camps included Auschwitz-Birkenau, Treblinka, Sobibor, Belzec, Chelmno, and Majdanek; Auschwitz-Birkenau alone killed about one million Jews.

The Warsaw Ghetto Uprising (April–May 1943) under Mordechai Anielewicz and the Sobibor revolt (October 1943) are the major armed Jewish resistance episodes.

Righteous Among the Nations (Yad Vashem) honors non-Jews who risked their lives to save Jews, such as Oskar Schindler and Raoul Wallenberg.

About six million Jews were murdered - roughly two-thirds of European Jewry; the genocide is termed Shoah in Hebrew.

The Nuremberg Trials (1945–1946) established the concept of crimes against humanity and the precedent that obedience to orders is not a defense for atrocity crimes.

UN General Assembly Resolution 181 (29 November 1947) partitioned Mandatory Palestine into a Jewish state, an Arab state, and an international zone for Jerusalem; the Jewish side accepted, the Arab side rejected.

David Ben-Gurion declared independence on 14 May 1948; the new state was attacked by Egypt, Jordan, Syria, Iraq, and Lebanon, and the 1949 armistice lines became the 'Green Line'.

The Law of Return (1950) grants every Jew the right to immigrate; the 1952 Reparations Agreement with West Germany funded absorption of mass immigration.

The 1956 Suez Campaign, the 1967 Six-Day War (capture of Sinai, Gaza, West Bank, Golan, East Jerusalem), and the 1973 Yom Kippur War shaped Israel's security doctrine.

The 1979 Egypt–Israel peace treaty (Camp David Accords, 1978) was the first peace agreement with an Arab state; the 1994 treaty with Jordan followed.

Israel's proportional-representation Knesset (120 members) and Basic Laws function as a constitution-in-progress; the 2018 Nation-State Basic Law defined Israel as the nation-state of the Jewish people.

The 1985 'Zionism is racism' UN resolution (rescinded 1991) and the 1975–1991 period illustrate Israel's diplomatic isolation, countered by ties with the United States and later normalization (Abraham Accords, 2020).

The Industrial Revolution (c. 1760–1870, Britain first) shifted production to factories, urbanization, and wage labor; the Second Industrial Revolution (steel, chemicals, electricity) followed after 1870.

The French Revolution (1789) proclaimed liberty, equality, and fraternity and the Declaration of the Rights of Man; the Congress of Vienna (1815) restored the conservative order after Napoleon.

The 1848 'Spring of Nations' revolutions spread across Europe, demanding liberal constitutions and national unification; most were suppressed but the ideas endured.

World War I (1914–1918) was triggered by the assassination of Archduke Franz Ferdinand; the Treaty of Versailles (1919) imposed reparations and territorial losses on Germany.

The Russian Revolution (1917) brought the Bolsheviks to power under Lenin; the USSR was formed in 1922 and became a superpower after World War II.

The Great Depression (1929 onward) followed the Wall Street Crash, caused mass unemployment, and boosted extremist movements in Germany and elsewhere.

The Cold War (1947–1991) divided Europe, produced NATO (1949) and the Warsaw Pact (1955), and ended with the fall of the Berlin Wall (1989) and the dissolution of the USSR (1991).

Nationalism holds that a people sharing language, culture, history, or ethnicity should form a sovereign state; it can be civic (based on citizenship) or ethnic (based on descent).

Italian unification (Risorgimento, 1861) under Cavour, Garibaldi, and Mazzini and German unification (1871) under Bismarck are the classic 19th-century nation-building cases.

The principle of national self-determination, popularized by Woodrow Wilson's Fourteen Points (1918), guided the post-WWI redrawing of borders in Central and Eastern Europe.

The Ottoman and Habsburg multinational empires collapsed after WWI, replaced by nation-states such as Czechoslovakia, Yugoslavia, and Poland - often with large minorities.

Irredentism (claiming territory inhabited by co-nationals in another state) and revanchism (revenge for lost territory) destabilized interwar Europe.

Fascism and Nazism fused extreme nationalism with racism and expansionism; the post-1945 order responded with human-rights law and minority protections.

Decolonization after 1945 created new nation-states in Asia and Africa, often with borders drawn by colonial powers and contested by competing national movements.

Primary sources are produced in the period studied; secondary sources interpret primary evidence later - both must be evaluated, not merely trusted.

Evaluate a source by its origin (who made it, when, where), purpose (persuade, inform, record), audience, and reliability given the author's interests.

Corroboration means comparing independent sources; a claim is strengthened when sources produced independently agree.

Contextualization places a document in its political, social, and economic setting; anachronism (judging the past by present standards) is a common error.

Chronology and causation distinguish long-term causes, immediate triggers, and consequences; correlation is not causation.

Point of view and bias are not the same as lying: a source can be truthful yet selective - identify what is emphasized or omitted.

Continuity and change: identify what changed, what persisted, and the pace of change; historians distinguish turning points from gradual trends.

Historical significance depends on impact at the time, depth of consequences, and relevance to later developments - not simply on dramatic interest.