Dainel Deronda and Zionism

I am now getting into the Jewish part of the story, or should I say, the Jewish story, as the two strands pretty much stand alone.
SPOILER: I was surprised what Mordecai was actually up to. He wanted to recreate a Jewish homeland in Palestine. I was surprised that the project for recreating Israel went so far back, but George Elliot actually wrote Daniel Deronda several years before the first Zionist settlements in Palestine, and two decades before Zionism was political launched by Theodor Herzl.

http://forward.com/culture/107981/el...efore-zionism/
http://www.newenglishreview.org/Ibn_..._Observations/
http://www.theguardian.com/books/boo...a-george-eliot

I suppose the idea must have been current at the time Elliot was writing, but that it took time for the movement to get organized enough to make something happen. A bit like John Barton's ideas in Mary Barton appeared to prefigure Marxism.