Calls for a restoration of the Jews to Palestine had been growing throughout the 19th century, in Britain and elsewhere. The land had always been central to Jewish religious aspirations, and small Jewish communities had always lived there. In response, however, to a number of atrocities in lands where they were an oppressed minority, and in step with the developing tide of nationalism throughout Europe, radical Jews now began to argue for the colonisation of Palestine.

The Anglo-Jewish establishment was not generally sympathetic: they were concerned to develop, first and foremost, a sense of British patriotism. Many of the immigrants from Eastern Europe, however, were seized by the nationalist vision. In 1884 they set up the first of a number of organizations committed to setting up a Jewish colony in Palestine.

By the 1890s, the emphasis had shifted from colonisation to the creation of a fully-fledged Jewish state, and the activists rapidly developed institutions to raise funds and argue the case. Their 'political Zionism' was spurred on by the arrival in Manchester in 1904 of Dr Chaim Weitzman, already an important figure in world Zionism.

It was during Weitzman's years in the city, as a lecturer at the University, that Manchester itself evolved as a major centre of world Zionism. Manchester was where Rebecca Sieff (daughter of Michael Marks, founder of Marks and Spencer) pioneered the development of women's Zionist groups. The Balfour Declaration in 1917 was brought about partly by pressure applied on the British government by Weitzman and his so-called 'Manchester School'

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