Revisionism began in the 1920s, the ‘era of illusions’ in European history. Led by Ze'ev (Vladimir) Jabotinsky – the man who had challenged Zionist policy and Chaim Weizmann – a group of young Zionists, most of them educated and assimilated émigrés from Russia, met in the Latin Quarter of Paris in the spring of 1925. Jabotinsky's frustration at his inability to gain the leadership of the Zionist Movement or direct it in accordance with his maximalist beliefs lay behind the establishment of the new movement. But the rapid growth of Revisionism showed that it met deepseated needs among eastern European Jewry, needs which were not always different from the roots of the European nationalism that was about to sweep across the continent. Binyamin Akzin, an astute observer, adherent of Jabotinsky and political scientist, wrote: ‘Revisionism attracted not only people who supported it for analytical and rational reasons, but also those whose nature impelled them to support extreme ideas, individuals who were innately nonconformist.’

The speed with which Revisionism spread was unparalleled in Zionist history; a few thousand members in the 1920s had become over 65,000 by 1933. The movement's representation at the Zionist Congress grew tenfold in that time, so that more than one fifth of the delegates were Revisionists. This could not have happened if Zionism had not become a mass movement, particularly in Poland, where most of Revisionism's strength lay. It was there, too, that the movement rose and fell.