Zionism and Jewish statehood as expressions of Jewish modernisation

ABSTRACT

The adaptation to modernity generated among the Jews different amalgamations between European and Jewish concepts and brought about diverse and often opposed ideological trends and movements. One was Zionism, built on a concoction between Jewish tenets such as Shivat-Zion (Return-to-Zion) and European nationalism and secularisation. The result, Jewish statehood, failed to eradicate or diminish the tensions between non-Jews and Jews with the old Jew-hatred now transferred to Israel. This article examines the ideological background of the Zionist idea and the interaction among its components.

KEYWORDS:

• Zionism
• Israel
• Shivat-Zion
• Jewish nationalism
• Jewish statehood
• Haskalah
• Shimon Dubnow

The outbreak of the Hamas-Israel war in October 2023 had immediate repercussions that reverberated far beyond the Middle East. Countries unrelated to the Palestinian-Israeli conflict, mostly with leftist governments, were quick to condemn Israel and support the Palestinians, directly or indirectly. Negative views of Israel uttered in recent years were highlighted in academic circles, especially the denigration of the Jewish state’s creation as a colonialist enterprise in the style of 19th-and early 20th century European imperialism. In tandem, the essence and significance of the Holocaust have been minimised, relativised, and equated with the Herero and other African atrocities. Particularly noteworthy is the demand that Israel undergo radical political and structural transformation that effectively amount to national suicide – a demand unheard of with regard to any other state.

What is Zionism, what were its ideological components, and how did it bring about the creation of a Jewish state? These are themes where academic labour and ideological inclination merge. One of the weirdest, though quite popular, explanations of Israel’s establishment leaps over the Zionist roots of the state and describes this move as a reaction to the Holocaust. This is sheer nonsense: murdered Jews do not create states. Israel was established despite the Holocaust rather than because of it. The Zionist movement, the driving force towards Jewish statehood, was essentially a creation of European Jewry, especially East European Jewry, which preceded the Holocaust by more than half-a-century. This vital segment of the Jewish people that laid the foundations of the Jewish National Home in Palestine, and which would have been best prepared to complete the task – this Jewry was almost completely annihilated in the Holocaust. The child of its hopes and endeavours, the State of Israel, was born beside the graves of its fathers and mothers at the Jewish people’s darkest hour. If there is a point of contact between the Holocaust and the creation of Israel, it is exactly the opposite of what is frequently assumed: the destruction of European Jewry almost rendered the birth of Israel impossible.¹ Equally misconceived is the denigration of Zionism as a colonialist enterprise – a clear case where ideological delusion pushes aside any knowledge of historical facts.²

Israel-critical views are also voiced in academic works by Jews and Israelis, a trend that largely emerged since the 1980s under the general title of ‘post-Zionism’.³ The assertion that the post-Zionist approach represents a radical change in Israel studies is unjustified. The foundation of Israel brought to an end a long era in Jewish history and naturally opened a new phase. Post-Zionism is a life reality shared by everyone in Israel or Diaspora Jewry. The so-called ‘post-Zionist historiography’ proclaimed by a group of Jewish academics is in fact anti-Zionist, its argumentation directed against the Jewish state. It offers no new theoretical framework and its stances reflect a given conceptual background, namely detachment from and disregard for Jewish history. The the state of Israel it envisions is something fictional, with no roots, no threats from outside, no internal tensions, something parve. Problems between non-Jews and Jews go unmentioned. The possibility that the age-old Jew-hatred may be transferred to the Jewish state is ignored. Here the October 7 massacres and the ensuing war should serve as an illuminating hint. They did, but for a few. Mostly, anti-Israel sentiments not only remained intact but spiralled to new heights.

In what follows, this article discusses the broader historical trends, in general society and among Jews, that underlay Zionism and its culmination in the Jewish state, with the attendant anti-Semitic implications.

Acculturation of the Jews in modern times

A mostly accepted position in Jewish historiography states that a characteristic of the continuing existence of the Jewish collective among other peoples was a measure of integration into the non-Jewish environment(s), combined with the up-keeping of the Jewish creed and traditions. That process continued in modern times. The intellectual and social tendencies bound to European 18th century Enlightenment influenced the Jews, first in Western Europe, and in the late 19th century also in Eastern Europe. New ways of social and intellectual contact developed between Jews and non-Jews and brought about a specific pattern of Enlightenment in Jewish society, the Haskalah.⁴ There were other Jewish approaches to modernisation: the Jews in Holland, for example, had undergone modernising changes already in the 17th century. In the 19th century, the Jews in North America and England created paths of their own. Later, in the 20th century, the Jews in the Muslim world followed distinct routes towards modernisation.

Differently from other patterns of Jewish modernisation, the Haskalah adopted an approach where Jewish adaptation to the general environment was also influenced by views about Jews and Jewry that had a critical dimension. Leading Haskalah concepts, like ‘Jewish emancipation’, meant that Jewish society should undergo transformations, an attitude that was to foster new religious and social trends in modernising Jewry. At the same time, the Haskalah acted like a screen of Jewish traditions and beliefs that filtered the strong rays of the general Enlightenment and provided a protective platform for the formulation of new Jewish ways.

The edges of the ideological transformations in Jewry during the last two centuries seem clear. Those belonging to one extreme tended towards a total or at least a far-reaching Jewish integration in the non-Jewish environment, with the accompanying weakening of Jewish peoplehood awareness, in both the social and the ideological sense.⁵ Those belonging to the opposite extreme, later called the ultra-Orthodox or haredi sector, were part of a camp of varying fortunes but undeniable vitality, and they rejected any or most changes in the cultural/religious identity of Jewry, as defined by them.⁶ It was in the middle of that cultural span where, influenced by the Haskalah, a new Jewish conceptual space gradually emerged, Jewish society adapting to the changing European public ambience and its ideas – but not unconditionally so. Among the Jews in German lands, new approaches arose regarding religious issues, among them the Reform movement. In East Europe, the penetration of modern ideas was slower and happened later, from the second half of the 19th century onwards. It gravitated in a social and political direction, shaped by European ideas of the post-Enlightenment period such as romanticism and nationalism, and soon also political self-determination. In modernising Jewish society positions emerged demanding recognition for the Jews as a people, either as a sector of the non-Jewish environment (Autonomism), or in a socially reconstituted human milieu (Jewish Socialism), or in a separate territory (Territorialism), or in Eretz-Israel, the Land of Israel (Zionism), or in a socially reconstituted human environment in Eretz-Israel (Socialist Zionism). A comparison between these positions underscores their similarities and differences and helps in their understanding. Together, they characterised a given period in European Jewish society, a stage in the social and intellectual integration of Jews in the general environment. This is an ongoing process that, in changing circumstances, continues in our days.

Parameters for these developments were proposed in the second half of the 20th century by scholars of the Jerusalem School of Jewish historical research, among them Benzion Dinur, Yitzhak Baer, Shmuel Ettinger, Haim Hillel Ben-Sasson, and Jacob Katz. Ettinger described a balance between centrifugal (outward-directed) and centripetal (inward-directed) tendencies in Jewish society. In an earlier generation of modernising Jews, he argued, the balance had tended ‘outwards’, towards Western society and its concepts (the centrifugal turn). Later, in the later 19th century, came a reaction that brought parts of Jewish society to an ‘inward’ (or centripetal) direction. It was a dynamic course where the two directions intermixed, every sector in modernising Jewry producing its own fusion.⁷ That broad process, according to Jacob Katz, had a dialectical logic: the ‘emancipation’ of the Jews (as said, an ideologically-laden concept) had to reach a certain outward-directed point before the inward-directed development might occur.⁸ For Ettinger and Katz this meant the adoption of the Jewish-national approach associated with Zionism, two ideological trends they saw as closely related.

National concepts and modernising Jewry

Recent academic work on nationalism has questioned the belief that nations and the national idea are self-evident, ‘natural’, propositions. New criteria defining ethnicity, nation and nationalism were articulated.⁹ Nationalism among the Jews and Zionism have thus been considered according to these academic views and diverse approaches were formulated.¹⁰ The theme warrants careful attention: nationalism and Jewish nationalism demand a differentiated consideration; national ideas played diverse roles in Jewish socialism and in Zionism; there were significant expressions of Jewish nationalism not bound to the Land of Israel; Jews had ties and activities in Palestine, including modern ones, unrelated to Zionism or to national ideas or even opposed thereto.

Whenever exactly the concept ‘Jewish-nationalism’ was coined, by the early 20th century, the term has become recognised ideological currency among Jewish socialists, Zionist-Socialists, Zionists in general, Autonomists, and even among Jews and Jewish organisations that were opposed to the notion. In each of these ideological positions the notion had its own meanings and connections, bound to different expectations about the future of the Jewish collective.

Regarding the timeframe, it is broadly accepted that the 1881–82 anti-Jewish pogroms in southern Russia moved many Jewish East-European intellectuals to consider new Jewish options, the Jewish-national direction among them.¹¹ Otherwise, David H. Weinberg argued convincingly that ‘far from a sudden and desperate response to an externally imposed crisis [the events of 1881–82], the process of ideological and political modernisation among Russian Jews was actually gradual and complex’.¹² In Jewish circles in Eastern Europe receptive to modern European ideas, the reactions to the Russian pogroms were now considered in terms that reflected changing Jewish public perceptions about national ideas and influenced a shift from an ‘outward’ to an ‘inward’-directed ideological direction. Against this backdrop emerged three main positions: Autonomism, Jewish socialism and Zionism.

Autonomism

Jewish Autonomism was the political expression of an elaborated view of Jewish history from a national perspective, formulated at the end of the 19th century by the eminent Jewish historian Simon Dubnow (1860–1941).¹³ Nationalism is a seminal phenomenon in the history of all peoples, he wrote, and evolved in three phases: tribal, political-territorial, and cultural-spiritual. The organic and progressive character of the process, from one phase to the next, indeed, from a lower to a higher condition of national life, was central in Dubnow’s analysis. European nationalities were mostly in the second, the political-territorial phase. The Jewish people had reached the third phase of national development, the cultural-spiritual period.¹⁴ Dubnow distinguished between nation and state, the latter being one of the characteristics of the second, the political-territorial period. The nation, not the state, was the true bearer of a positive nationalism, expressed among the Jews by Autonomism.¹⁵

Dubnow was open-minded about the broad variety of characteristics of the Jewish people and stressed that all aspects of Jewish culture – languages, religion, communal institutions, educational structures, traditions – were together the manifestations of Jewish national life, evolving over the centuries. Regarding Zionism, he thought that much of it was fantasy, but the Zionist programme had also praiseworthy components: ‘Insofar as political Zionism is able to save certain elements of Judaism from the scourge of assimilation or indifference, its effects are all to the good. But it may also cause damage to the degree to which it falsifies the true historical perspective and the fundamental nature of the Jewish national idea’.¹⁶ All in all, Dubnow took a positive view of Zionism, considering it one more manifestation of Jewish national vitality.

Dubnow was aware of (but unconcerned about) a problem of his conceptual framework: that the Jews represented the only major case of the third phase of national development, the cultural-spiritual one.¹⁷ He could take solace from the emergence of a similar ideological trend, the approach formulated by leading Austrian socialists, which asserted the right to national affirmation of the working class belonging to diverse peoples, articulated in a variety of cultural and public ways but short of political independence.¹⁸ Later, after World War I, the multinational states established in Eastern and Central Europe recognised (at least in theory) the cultural and political rights for their different national groups, including the Jews.

In 1906, Dubnow participated in the formation of a Jewish party, the Yidishe Folkspartay, whose goal was to strengthen the autonomist approach in Jewish public institutions and to represent politically the Jewish national group.¹⁹ The reaction in Russia after the 1905 revolution brought these public steps to naught, but the Folkspartay became again active after World War I in the newly formed states of Eastern and Central Europe. Nevertheless, the Folkspartay never became an influential factor in Jewish public life comparable to the Jewish socialists or the Zionists.²⁰

Socialism

The major representative of a Jewish socialist position with a national component was the Bund (General Jewish Workers’ Union in Lithuania, Poland and Russia), founded in 1897. The Bund’s importance and influence on Jewish life, in Eastern Europe and in immigrant Jewish communities in United States, Argentina and elsewhere, deserve reassertion. In the earlier part of the 20th century, the Bund was large and probably more influential than the Zionist movement.²¹ Acceptance of a Jewish-national self-definition was a protracted process of inner search within the Bund and the parties to which it was ideologically close. The deliberations were complicated by the fact that influential voices in the Marxist camp, such as Otto Bauer, Karl Kautsky and others, while mindful of the specific interests of the national minorities in Central and Eastern Europe, refused to recognise the Jews as a national group. The fate of the Jewish socialist movement was tragic. It was struck three times in the 20th century: by the Bolshevik revolution, by the Nazi onslaught, and by the rapid ingress of Jewish workers in the middle-class, with its typical professions and social views. By the second half of the 20th century, Jewish socialism, a major presence among East-European Jews only two generations earlier, had practically disappeared.

Zionism

The connection between Zionism and the national idea represents a major research issue. Two approaches have emerged. One analyses Zionism as one of the expressions of modern nationalism; the other considers Zionism a historical phenomenon specifically Jewish, albeit influenced by the national idea.²² An interesting elaboration of the first view – Zionism as a form of nationalism – was done by Hebrew University scholar Gideon Shimoni in his book The Zionist Ideology (1995). Shimoni states: ‘Recognition that Zionism is unique only in the sense that each and every nationalism is unique, although also sharing fundamental commonalities that can be typologically compared, opens up the way to understanding the origins of Zionism within the context of a more general theory that accounts for the origin of nationalism’.²³

Elaborating on Anthony D. Smith’s general typology of nations and nationalism, Shimoni described three main stages in the evolution of a human group towards modern nationalism: ethnicity, characterised by the presence of attributes such as language, costumes, territory and historical consciousness; ethnicism, where ethnic attributes of a group are transformed into highly ranked values; and nationalism, when ethnicism is translated into an active programme aspiring to political independence for the ethnic unit, now the nation.

Regarding the Jews, all that relates to the traits of the Jewish group (or ethnie), such as religion, customs, concepts of Jewish unity, Jewish languages, historical consciousness, as well as the ties to the Land of Israel, belongs to the category of ethnicity. In the second half of the 19th century, Shimoni explained, those characteristics turned into Jewish ethnicism, namely, into values that were recognised, affirmed and increasingly cultivated also by circles that did not adopt later a Jewish-national direction (Shimoni mentions the earlier revival of Hebrew as a vehicle for cultural Jewish non-religious expression among maskilim in Western Europe). Along these lines, the growing interest in Eretz Israel indicated a passage from ethnicity-based to ethnicism-based values. In certain Jewish sectors this pattern of ethnicism adopted a Jewish-national direction, which soon expanded into diverse ramifications, one of them the ‘Eretz Israel-oriented nationalist movement that came to be known as Zionism’, as Shimoni repeatedly emphasises.²⁴ Holding to the general framework established by Smith, Shimoni states that

the distinctiveness of Zionism is evident, but there is little that is unique. Parallels may readily be found for almost all of the apparently unique features of Zionism. These range from the important roles played by the sacral myth of being chosen for a special destiny and the drive to return to the ancient homeland, to the complex, contradiction-riddled interaction between religious and secular motifs and the resort to historicist invocation (and sometimes invention) of an usable past.²⁵

Shimoni’s approach explains much about the sociological wheels of the national approach and its relationship to Zionism but less about the other ideological tenets that brought a large segment of Jewish society to Zionism. The Jewish connection to Eretz Israel predated the emergence of modern nationalism by millennia, and many Jews came to the Land during the Zionist period but in no connection thereto and in no relation to national ideas. As we shall see, nationalism played a necessary role in Zionism yet a secondary one. The following question arises: if the same did not happen with regard to other national movements, and to what extent was historical consciousness a prerequisite for the influence of national positions?

Zionism: factors and ideas

This article analyzes Zionism as an amalgamation of several factors and concepts: Ahavat Zion (Yearning for Zion); the national idea; and antisemitism. There were additional ideological components, Jewish and general, but the three mentioned above were essential in the merger that produced Zionism. Essential, though each had its own weight.

Most important was the Jewish-traditional component of Zionism, Ahavat Zion/Shivat Zion (both were connected), the yearning for Zion/return to Zion, meaning the age-old connection of the Jewish people to the Land of Israel. Shivat Zion presents a conceptual problem: it is a notion difficult to translate to Western ideological terms, but it was, the results considered, very real. Ahavat Zion/Shivat Zion, the Return, was bound to other traditional concepts: galut (exile), meaning that due to historical and/or theological circumstances the Jewish people was driven from the Land of Israel; and geulah, redemption of the Jewish people from the condition of exile.

Proto-Zionist ideas, with Ahavat-Zion in its centre, emerged in sectors of European Jewry already in mid-19th century. In his excellent study of the 1840 Damascus Affair, Hebrew University historian Jonathan Frankel pointed to ‘a recognizable body of opinion, sprung not from the traditional but from the modernized sections of the Jewish world, which demanded that a positive response be made to the restorationist [i.e. Land of Israel-oriented] challenge’.²⁶ The people in question included Jewish students at the University of Vienna, contributors to the German-Jewish periodical Der Orient, so central a figure in the Damascus Affair as Adolphe Crémieux, budding Jewish intellectuals like Moritz Steinschneider and Abraham Benisch.²⁷ Were they exceptions? Additional sources show that modern segments of European Jewry were receptive to similar ideas. In 1842, Zehariah Frankel, later considered the spiritual father of the Conservative movement in Judaism, wrote about the idea of Jewish independence in the Land of Israel.²⁸ Likewise, utterances are found in the Jewish periodical Oesterreichisches Central-Organ für Glaubensfreiheit, Cultur, Geschichte und Literatur der Juden, which appeared in Vienna for about six months during the 1848 revolution.²⁹ Simon Hock, a prosperous Prague industrialist with a good Jewish and German education, published there a surprising statement, the time considered:

We must reject emphatically all reproaches that the hope for the restoration (Erstehung) of a new Jewish state [in the Land of Israel] stands in contradiction to the loyal devotion to the present fatherland; in this matter, we may leave the patriotic scruples to the personal discretion of each individual; the more so, since beliefs and desires regarding this subject are not so much related to the religion but to the national feelings of everyone; it is, then, a pure matter of inner conviction, that can be neither inoculated nor explained away.³⁰

Similar views were expressed by another collaborator of the journal, Simon Szántó, later the editor of the important Viennese Jewish periodical Die Neuzeit. Szántó described blue-white as the Jewish colours and the Magen-David as the Jewish coat-of-arms.³¹ We may assume that the views of Hock, Szántó, and Frankel, attuned as they were to the multinational realities of the Habsburg Empire, reverberated also in the broader Jewish milieu already in the 1840s. Jewish traditional beliefs then combined with modern European concepts, an example of what scholars of the Jerusalem School would explain as a combination of centripetal (Jewish) and centrifugal elements (European) with an inclination towards the first.

Regarding the other component of Zionism, antisemitism, the persecutions of Jews in Russia from the late 19th century onwards, the pogroms in Poland in the early 1920s, the general antisemitic atmosphere in Europe – Jew-hatred was a major concern that burdened all sectors of Jewish society. Theodor Herzl, founder of the organised Zionist movement, stressed that the concentration of the Jews in a state of their own would solve that problem and therefore the Zionist solution deserved support from the European powers.

Nevertheless, a distinction should be made between antisemitism as an ideological issue and antisemitism as a driving element in the Zionist enterprise. The fact is that in 1939, on the eve of the Catastrophe, after more than 40 years of Zionist activity, only about three percent of world Jewry lived in Mandatory Palestine, and even among those a significant part were non-Zionists or even anti-Zionists, such as the ultra-orthodox community. Antisemitic pressure may have driven Jews to America or to other countries, but hardly to Mandatory Palestine. Though an important argument in the Zionist concept, the role of antisemitism in the unfolding of the Zionist project was much smaller than classical Zionist historiography has stated.³²

The national component, connected to the secular approach increasingly common in Europe, opened new conceptual ways in Zionist thought. For the large sector of Jewish society where the ties to the Land of Israel were keenly alive, the national view provided ‘European’ answers to crucial questions: what, besides religion, had held the Jewish people together from time immemorial to the present? And how to describe the ties to the Land of Israel?³³ The national account explained that Zion-bound longings were not messianic dreaming, but an ideological urge in Jewry that ran parallel to similar hopes among European peoples. Historical perspective tied with moral argument: like other peoples, the Jews too had a right to a political life of their own.

Zionism as a full-fledged political position emerged when the encounter of the three factors – Shivat-Zion, nationalism and antisemitism – generated a seminal shift in one of the foundations of Jewish modernisation: the turn from integration in the general environment to disintegration. The move expressed a fusion of Jewish and European tenets at a point when the Shivat-Zion tenet in Jewish modernising society was strong enough to affirm itself and the absorption of European concepts had not (yet) overcome historical Jewish core beliefs. The yearning-for-Zion position (the ‘inward’ trend) imposed itself on the integrational tendency (the ‘outward’ trend) and declared that the Jews would leave the lands where they lived (galut, the exile) and ‘ascend’ (aliyah) to the Land of Israel (Shivat-Zion). The blend of Shivat-Zion with the national approach and with the hope that Jewish statehood was a solution for the vexing problem of antisemitism presented Zionism as a modern ideology that appeared in tune with major trends of European political thought. The impelling pull in the Zionist concoction was Shivat-Zion, the Return.

Reassessment: the national factor in modern Jewish ideologies

The national idea fulfilled a different role in each of the Jewish movements of which it became a part. For the Bund and other Jewish socialist organisations, the Jewish national concept was of primary importance. It was in the name of the national characteristics of the Jewish working class that the Bund demanded and later attained a measure of recognition as an autonomous body within the broad framework of the social revolutionary movement. The adoption of a Jewish-national self-definition was for the Jewish socialists as much a matter of necessity as of conviction, the latter being a gradual development. Having discarded religion, disavowed the ties to Zion and being militantly opposed to large sectors of Jewish society (the ‘clerics’ and the bourgeoisie), embroiled in ideological confrontation with other European leftist movements, what remained for a specific peoplehood self-affirmation of the Bund, besides the Yiddish language and the national definition? ‘National’, however, had to mean necessarily, explicitly, ‘Jewish-national’.

For many Zionists the idea of nationalism had a touch of redundancy, since the basis of the concept – that the Jews were a people – was self-evident: Jews had always seen themselves as a people (am). No Jew needed to define him/herself as a Jewish nationalist in order to participate in the Zionist organisation, and many Zionists never considered the matter. Furthermore, the incorporation of the national idea into Zionism was not without problems. In the 1880s and 1890s, when Zionism was groping towards its first organisational expressions, religious Jews, some touched by the Haskalah, others less, vied with the question of participation in the budding movement.³⁴ Zionism represented a perplexing riddle for religious Jews: on the one hand, it embodied some of the core concepts of Judaism and its deepest hopes (Shivat-Zion); on the other, it seemed increasingly in the grip of non-religious circles and ideas (secularism, nationalism) that were anathema for traditional believers. The dilemma sharpened with the appearance of Herzl, the First Zionist Congress in 1897 and the creation of the World Zionist Organization (WZO), when the secular trend in Zionism gained the upper hand. In the early 20th century the religious camp split to supporters of the WZO, organised since 1902 in the Mizrahi movement, and opponents of Zionism, who in 1912 formed the organisation Agudat Israel.³⁵ However, Zionism did not become so declaredly secular as to make it impossible for parts of the religious sector of Jewish society to find a place in the movement without compromising their beliefs and ways of life. How primordial in Zionism were the traditional ties to Zion was emphatically stressed in 1903, at the Sixth Zionist Congress, during the so-called ‘Uganda controversy’. Though the justification then presented for temporary Jewish settlement in East Africa (as an emergency shelter from persecution) made practical sense, it was the Zion-directed tendency that imposed itself, and definitively so, on the Zionist movement.³⁶

Nevertheless, the national component fulfilled a necessary role in the Zionist position. The secular dimension it introduced was indispensable for the portentous turn that transformed Shivat-Zion from a religious hope into a political programme. Thus armed, Zionism acquired a radical impact as powerful as its propositions were far-reaching, able to inspire fervour and persistency. The secular approach brought the Zionist movement to adopt an organisational framework in tune with the most advanced ideas of European political thought: the Zionist World Organization was democratic, rational and relatively efficient, with a wide international network, with duties and rights accepted by members all over the world.

An instructive example of the significance of the national component was American Zionism. For European Zionists, the American movement was a riddle: unstable, with recurring ups-and-downs, and this despite the fact that the large and active American Jewry was well disposed to the Jewish settlement in the Land of Israel. ‘I suggest that American Zionism has to undergo a fundamental and comprehensive reorganization, and that this work of reconstruction will not be undertaken unless the World Zionist authorities intervene’, asserted Chaim Arlosoroff, a rising European Zionist leader, after a stay in the US in 1929.³⁷ Apparently, it was the absence of the national component in American Zionism that caused its weakness. The concept ‘nationalism’ in the European sense was not part of the American political culture, and the term ‘Jewish nationalism’ was hardly mentioned in American Zionism. American Zionists felt more comfortable with the concept ‘Jewish peoplehood’.³⁸ In his way, Chaim Weizmann, President of the World Zionist Organization, had already recognised the issue. ‘The leaders of American Zionism are not nationalist Jews. To them Zionism is not a movement which gives them a definite view point of the world, which gives them a definite outlook on Jewish life’, he wrote in 1920.³⁹ Seemingly, the absence of the national component brought about that American Zionism was apt to generate enthusiasm, but not political endurance.

There were circumstances when both socialists and Zionists espoused the Jewish national position. Maturing Zionism also became active in European political life, engaged in Gegenwartsarbeit, local political activity for those Jews who lived (temporarily, from a strict Zionist point of view) in the galut. In such a situation, the principles of Jewish nationalism became a required political tool. At one of the seminal moments in the ideological evolution of the Zionist movement – the Helsingfors Conference of the Russian Zionists (November 1906), resolutions were adopted that demanded from the Russian state ‘recognition of the Jewish nationality and legal self-administration in all matters of Jewish national life’.⁴⁰ Like the Jewish socialists, the Zionists now adopted a Jewish-national self-definition as a fence between Jews and other peoples in the rich East European human tapestry. However, recognition of the Jewish national component both in Zionism and in Jewish socialism did nothing to bring the two movements together. Bundists and Zionists had in common a sense of Jewish peoplehood, but they diverged in their views about the modern Jewish condition, their conception of the Jewish people, their linguistic and cultural instruments, and especially in the vision of the future of the Jewish ethnie each movement strove for. Both were examples of the diverging patterns of Jewish acculturation to Western conditions that led two large and active sectors of Jewry in different directions and to confrontation.

Finally, the fate of Jewish nationalism on its own, without a socialist or Zionist connection, is telling. As noted above, its most elaborated formulation was Dubnow’s Autonomism: that the Jews were a national group with a long tradition who should establish autonomous forms of Jewish life in the countries where they lived. Dubnow’s approach inspired thought-provoking cultural and political ideas, but these depended on political circumstances that were found wanting. Alone, Jewish nationalism did not succeed, mainly because no significant sector of Jewish society supported it. The political arm of Autonomism, the Folkspartay, active in the countries of Eastern and Central Europe in the 1920s and 1930s, never became a significant force in local Jewish politics. The tendency to acculturate in the general environment was seemingly more powerful than the attraction of ‘pure’ Jewish-national ideas, even within East European Jewry.

Maturing Zionism soon elaborated further concepts and positions, some with radical aims. A new goal was stated, Shlilat ha-Golah, negation of the Diaspora, embodying a sharp critique of the social and cultural characteristics of modern Jewry dwelling in the midst of other peoples. The aim was to attain ‘normalization’ of Jewish life (again, a problematic concept with a Haskalah echo) in Eretz-Israel. Meant were broad changes in the professional and social structure of the Jews in the Land of Israel, accompanied by revitalisation of Jewish culture and the emergence of a new Jewish consciousness. The very interesting social experiments of Labour Zionism in Mandatory Palestine, such as the kibbutz movement, were an expression of the Zionist quest for new and socially advanced forms of Jewish life. Strangely enough, all this happened at a time when ‘integrating’ Jewry was reaching economic and cultural achievements in Western society that had no parallel in recent and not-so-recent Jewish history.⁴¹

Non-Zionist Jewish links and activities in Palestine

As mentioned, Zionism did not have a monopoly on Jewish interest and activities in Palestine or on the development of the Jewish community in the country. From the 19th century onwards there was a wide field of Jewish initiatives in the country that bore the imprint of modernity, without national-related awareness and no ties, or only conditional ones, to the Zionist movement. A background factor facilitating Jewish activities in Palestine was the increase of European interest in the Holy Land in the second half of the 19th century, due to a mixture of geopolitical reasons and nebulous religious sentiments. Churches and schools were built, diplomatic representations established, stimulating the general development of the country and creating conducive conditions for a growing Jewish presence.⁴²

An outstanding example of Jewish enterprise without national ties was the Paris-based Alliance Israélite Universelle, which in 1870 established Mikveh Israel, the first modern-day agricultural school in Palestine. To note, the original intention of the Alliance was nothing less than to establish Jewish settlements. An agricultural school was an alternative, a more modest plan, reflecting the recognition that rural localities were not viable until Jewish farmers came into being.⁴³ Then there was Baron Edmond de Rothschild, who rescued from economic collapse most of the settlements of the First Aliyah (1882–1903), considered in Zionist lore the first step of the Jewish national rebirth. Until the early 1920s, Rothschild was the largest Jewish landowner in the country.⁴⁴ Another case was the health institutions established by the American-Jewish magnate Nathan Straus (in whose honour the Israeli city of Netanya is named). Then there were Palestine-directed social and educational activities of Jewish organisations such as the Anglo-Jewish Association, the German-Jewish Hilfsverein, and the American-Jewish Joint.⁴⁵ Last but not least, there was the large and consistent work in the country of Orthodox sectors of Jewry, from financial assistance (the haluka) to yeshiva building and social support, done in traditional ways.

Many of the newcomers at the time of the first and second aliyot (1882–1914) were not motivated by national ideology.⁴⁶ Neither were the Orthodox Jewish newcomers from Europe. Or the Sephardic Jews from Turkey and Greece, or Jews from Muslim countries, from Morocco to Afghanistan, who settled in Jerusalem, Jaffa and other cities. Worth of attention is the Yemenite Aliyah, a story by itself: from no other Jewish community did such a large proportion migrate to the Land of Israel before the creation of the Jewish state.⁴⁷ The immigration of the Yemenites (whose numbers ran into the tens of thousands), or of other Jews from Muslim states, was totally driven by Ahavat-Zion ties to Eretz-Israel.

The growing Zionist activities in Palestine brought about a rising collaboration between non-Zionists and the movement. New figures emerged, among them the American-Jewish leader Louis Marshall, the decisive non-Zionist in the negotiations with the Zionist leadership that culminated (in 1929) in the establishment of the Enlarged Jewish Agency. More significant than Marshall’s reservations regarding certain aspects of Zionism (among them his opposition to its national component) were the motives for his positive interest in the Zionist enterprise. Marshall, like Rothschild before him, possessed a strong sense of Jewish peoplehood and was responsive to Palestine-bound core ideas significant enough to lead him to collaborate with the Zionists there. The same applies to the other non-Zionist participants in the Enlarged Jewish Agency. Similar inclinations moved many of Jews from Poland, Germany and other European states who settled in Mandatory Palestine in the 1920s and 1930s. Then there were the Jewries of Muslim countries who immigrated to Israel after the establishment of the Jewish state, an astonishing process with few parallels in modern history. These Jews, who had lived for centuries in their respective countries according to their own patterns of acculturation, had little interest or understanding for ‘external’ concepts of European origin, such as national ideas. They were not ‘Zionists’, in the sense the concept is analysed here. What brought these very diverse persons and organisations to activities in or immigration to Eretz-Israel were Jewish traditional ties, first and foremost Ahavat-Zion, which had a hold on Jews everywhere, in the lands of West as of the East, where Jews had integrated in many cultures, speaking different languages, living in diverse stages of modernisation.

Admittedly, the approach in this article suggests that Jewish history (and Zionism as part of it) has specific characteristics that encumber the application of accepted historical categories. And to consider Jewish history unique, it has been authoritatively stated, runs against the sense of modern historiography.⁴⁸ This article does not share this view. As stated by the sociologist/historian Jacob Katz, Zionism ‘obliges a historian who would assess its character to avoid comparing it with contemporary movements. It is only proper that an examination of the Zionist essence be conducted against the background of Jewish history in its entirety’.⁴⁹ Indeed, whatever modern theory suggests regarding nationhood, Zionism hardly fits into and should not be forced into interpretations that have the allure of compliance to present academic trends but leave doubts that the phenomenon has been convincingly explained.

As noted above, a central notion here is that the Jewish collective (however defined) always embodied an amalgamation of Jewish particularism with influences of the non-Jewish environment. Zionism was an expression of that trend, but well into the 20th century neither the Zionist idea nor the movement were as important in Jewish life as later supposed. The predominant tendency of modernising Jewry was acculturation into the general surroundings. Compared to the highly vocal Zionism, the incorporation of the Jews into non-Jewish environments was almost mute, which should not delude us regarding its pervasiveness: it was – and has remained so – a weighty and continuing tendency in modern Jewish life.⁵⁰

Like comparable political movements, Zionism embodied a combination of hope and gloom. Expectations about the future mixed with pessimism about the actual situation of the movement. In historical research, one frequently finds a disparity between occurrences ‘as they were’ and their later historical understanding. Such incongruence was extremely sharp in the Zionist movement. Everyone familiar with Zionist historical sources knows the deep streak of despondency that characterised its activists, the sense of unfolding crises, lack of resources, insufficient support inside the Jewish camp and on the international stage. Zionism fed from a negative view about the Jewish condition, or the situation of the Zionist movement, which was frequently out of tune with the realities of Jewish life. Otherwise formulated, Zionism apparently had a historical logic of its own that its supporters not always understood clearly. Consider, for example, the leading Zionist figures who deemed the situation of the movement as very critical,⁵¹ about a year before the movement’s decisive political achievement – the United Nations partition resolution of 29 November 1947. Or the so-called normalisation of the Jews, that major aim of Zionism: in fact, the Jewish state bears many of the signs of the supposed anomaly (‘specificity’ is the right term) of past Jewry. Or the Zionist-proposed solution of the so-called Jewish problem, namely, the tensions between non-Jews and Jews, which was not solved. A reflective view may suggest that the unfolding of Zionism happened almost independently from the conceptions of the Zionists. One ends asking who had a grip on whom: the activists on Zionism or Zionism on its activists.

Conclusions: from the past to the present

Considering Jewish realities after 7 October 2023, did Zionism and its outcome, the Jewish state, make Jewish existence more difficult? The question, occasionally asked, is an idle one. Zionism resulted from Jewish-internal dynamics that had a trait of inevitability. It was built on historical developments in Jewry with roots in the European Enlightenment set in motion long before the emergence of the Zionist movement. An amalgamation of ideas, Jewish and European, created in Zionism the power to confront the awesome challenges that stood in the path of the movement:

• The Holocaust that destroyed most of the human reservoir from which Zionism had emerged.

• The pan-Arab attempt to destroy the nascent Jewish state at birth.

• The mass Jewish immigration to Israel that multiplied its population in a few years, a feat with no comparison in modern social history; and

• The building of a modern state and society that managed to accommodate Jews from all over the world, with different social and cultural backgrounds.

Jewish statehood expressed adaptation to the possibilities of modern times and the capacity to confront its challenges.

Regarding the fight against antisemitism, Zionist hopes that life in a state of their own would ‘normalize’ (again, a problematic concept) the Jews’ condition and end the age-old tensions between non-Jews and Jews were not realised. New critical postures have emerged in general society, mostly reformulations of anti-Jewish views of the past, the old animus directed now against the Jewish state, the most evident symbol of contemporary Jewish vitality.⁵² Translating classical antisemitic utterances into present language, a string of catchwords is hurled at Zionism and Israel, including their denigration as colonial enterprise and/or imperialist venture. It is evident that Jew-hatred, deeply rooted in Western as in Muslim culture, has so remained.⁵³

However, Zionism was but a moment in Jewish history. Life goes on and new sociopolitical circumstances emerge by the day. About half of world Jewry now lives in Israel, in a society still in evolution, with its own features and trials, still labouring on the upbuilding of its public institutions and its relations with its non-Jewish surroundings in the region and beyond. To recognise, many contemporary Jews are unaffected by the Zionist spark that stirred Jews so short a time ago. In fact, some are touched by the Zionist idea and Jewish statehood – but negatively so. An apparent reason is that the integration of the Jews into the general environment, against which Zionism rebelled, was not a static event but a continuous process that affects Jews in our days, also in Israel. Such ‘centrifugal’ Jews are not immune to the influence of ambivalent or hostile views in the non-Jewish environment regarding the Jewish state. The result is a conundrum that frequently bears the signs of spiritual bewilderment. An example is the so-called post-Zionist position among Israeli academics. Fortunately, the broad mass of Israelis is a levelheaded bunch, hardworking and future oriented, who keep the collective ship relatively balanced and sane.

All the ideological factors that generated Zionism, the general as the Jewish ones, continue to exist in contemporary Jewry, albeit under changed roles and conditions. What emerging trends, combined with old/new ideas, will shape the future of Jewry in and outside Israel is beyond human hindsight. ‘Since the destruction of the Holy Temple prophecy was given to fools and infants’, says the Talmud. Nevertheless, historical understanding offers a degree of discernment regarding human sequences spanning from the past to the present. The words of Dubnow, written over a century ago, remain meaningful to this day:

Each generation in Israel carries within itself the remnants of worlds created and destroyed during the course of the previous history of the Jewish people. The generation, in turn, builds and destroys worlds in its form and image, but in the long run continues to weave the thread that binds all the links of the nation into the chain of generations … . Thus each generation in Israel is more the product of history than it is its creator. Every individual member of a generation, who is not like a dry branch or a leaf fallen from the tree, carries the ‘burden of the heritage’ of the chain of generations; and he carries it willingly or unwillingly, knowingly or unknowingly. He is nursed and fed by the national forces accumulated in the past even when he rebels against the very means through which the forces were accumulated and even when he strives to destroy them, or to alter their form, or ‘reform’ them.⁵⁴

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Notes on contributors

Evyatar Friesel

Evyatar Friesel is Emeritus Professor of Jewish History at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem, and former State Archivist of Israel.

Notes

1. Friesel, “On the Myth of the Connection.”

2. Gelber, “Is Zionism Colonialism?”

3. See, for example, Shapira, “Politics and Collective Memory”; Likhovski, “Post-Post-Zionist Historiography”; Penslar, “Innovation and Revisionism”; and Gelber, “Some Basic Issues.”

4. Feiner, Haskalah and History; and Feiner and Sorkin, New Perspectives.

5. Wistrich, “Zionism and Its Jewish ‘Assimilationist’ Critics”; and Vital, A People Apart.

6. Salmon, Dat ve-tziyonut [Religion and Zionism], especially xiii–xxvii.

7. Ettinger, “The Specificity.”

8. Katz, “The Idea and the Reality”; and Ettinger, “The Jewish National Movement.”

9. Classical works on the theme are Anderson, Imagined Communities; and Smith, The Ethnic Origins of Nations. For a summary of the emergence of that new academic approach see Smith, “Nationalism and the Historians.”

10. Shimoni, The Zionist Ideology; Ben-Israel, Be-shem ha-umah, especially “Teoriyot al ha-le’umiyut u-midat halutan al ha-tziyonut” [Theories of nationalism and their application to Zionism], and her essays: “Zionism and European Nationalisms” and “From Ethnicity to Nationalism”; Smith, “The Question of Jewish Identity”; and “Zionism and Diaspora Nationalism.”

11. The theme is analysed in detail in Chap. 2 of Frankel, Prophecy and Politics; and see also Shimoni, The Zionist Ideology, 29–31.

12. Weinberg, Between Tradition and Modernity, 2.

13. Dubnow’s position was presented in a sequence of articles (in Russian) in the years 1897–1907, later published as Letters on Old and New Judaism. Especially interesting is the first essay, “The Doctrine of Jewish Nationalism” (1897). For an excellent edition of the articles, together with other essays and a comprehensive introduction, see Pinson, Dubnow; and Weinberg, Between Tradition and Modernity, 145–216.

14. “Second letter: The Jews as a spiritual (cultural-historical) nationality in the midst of political nations,” Pinson, Dubnow, 100–115.

15. “Fourth Letter: Autonomism, the Basis of the National Program,” Pinson, Dubnow, 131–42; and Weinberg, Between Tradition and Modernity, 194–208.

16. “Sixth Letter: Reality and Fantasy in Zionism,” Pinson, Dubnow, 162. The theme Zionism also appears in other essays, among them see “Negation and Affirmation of the Diaspora in Ahad Haam’s Thought” (1914), Pinson, Dubnow, 242–49. Dubnow and Ahad Ha-Am were in close personal contact.

17. “First Letter: The Doctrine of Jewish Nationalism,” Pinson, Dubnow, 80.

18. Bottomore and Goode, eds., Austro-Marxism, especially the introduction and the texts on 102–25. Most Austro-Marxists applied their approach to the working class of the diverse peoples of the Austro-Hungarian Empire but excluded the Jews. See also Wistrich, “Social Democracy”; and Jacobs, “Austrian Social Democracy.”

19. “Twelfth Letter: On the Tasks of the Folkspartay,” in Pinson, Dubnow, 224–32; Weinberg, Between Tradition and Modernity, 165 ff; and Kiel, “The Ideology of the Folks-Partey,” which cites the 1917 programme of the party.

20. Mendelsohn, The Jews of East Central Europe, 46–51 ff.

21. Among the large literature on the Bund, see Frankel, Prophecy and Politics, especially chaps. 3–4; Jacobs, On Socialists and ‘The Jewish Question,’ especially chap. 5; Mendelsohn, Class Struggle in the Pale, especially 63–81; and Tobias, The Jewish Bund in Russia.

22. Frankel, Prophecy and Politics, Chap. 2; and Shimoni, The Zionist Ideology, 29–31.

23. Shimoni, Zionist Ideology, 6.

24. Shimoni, Zionist Ideology, 51; and Weinberg, Between Tradition and Modernity, 81.

25. See note 23 above.

26. Frankel, The Damascus Affair, 312.

27. Baron, “Abraham Benisch’s Project.”

28. Horwitz, “Zacharias Frankel’s Idea.”

29. Friesel, “The ‘Oesterreichisches Central-Organ’.”

30. “Des Juden Vaterland,” OCO, no. 5, 29.04.1848, 61.

31. “Wappen und Farben,” OCO, no. 47, 19.10.1848, 408.

32. Shimoni’s position apparently tends in a similar direction: “The genesis of Jewish nationalism is traceable to their [Jews’] ethnically self-affirming sentiments and views, which antedated the appearance of antisemitism as a major factor” (Zionist Ideology, 8).

33. Almog, Zionism and History, 165–73.

34. This theme has been carefully examined by Yosef Salmon. See his collection of essays in Dat ve-tziyonut (Religion and Zionism, in Hebrew). Regarding the present theme, see his article (not included in the mentioned volume) “Zionism and Anti-Zionism,” 25–43.

35. Salmon, “Zionism and Anti-Zionism,” 26–31.

36. Heymann, ed., Minutes of the Zionist General Council; and Almog, Zionism and History, 238–304.

37. Arlosoroff, Surveying American Zionism; in the same vein, see Shmaryahu Lewin to the Small Actions Committee of the WZO, July 4, 1914 (Central Zionist Archives, Jerusalem, Z3/395).

38. If not coined by Mordecai M. Kaplan, the concept “Jewish peoplehood” was certainly popularised by him. See The Future of the American Jew, 66–72. Thanks are due to Professor Jonathan Sarna for his suggestions on that matter.

39. Letter to Herbert Samuel, October 8, 1920, The Letters and Papers of Chaim Weizmann, vol. 10 (July 1920–December 1921), 7–13.

40. For the discussions and resolutions of the conference, see Die Welt, no. 51, 21.12.1906, 2–6; no. 52, 28.12.1906, 5–8.

41. The theme is developed in Almog, Zionism and History.

42. Gilbar, “The Growing Economic Involvement”; and Eliav, “The German and Austrian Consular Archives in Jerusalem.”

43. Krause, “The Birth-Pangs of Mikveh Israel.” In later years, the position of the Alliance regarding Jewish immigration to the Land of Israel became more reticent.

44. Schama, Two Rothschilds, especially 13–24, 66–7; and Aaronsohn, Rothschild, especially 270–75.

45. Penslar, Shylock’s Children, 232–8.

46. Alroey, Imigrantim.

47. The total number of Jews in Yemen and Aden in the early 20th century has been estimated at 55,000–70,000. Close to 20,000 Yemenite Jews came to Mandatory Palestine in the first half of the 20th century, prior to the establishment of Israel. About 48,000 arrived in Israel in 1948–51. Sicron, Immigration to Israel, Statistical Supplement, table A8. My thanks to Sergio Della Pergola for his help with these demographic data. See also Shilo, Nisyonot be-hityashvut, 160–71.

48. “To the degree that this [Jewish] historiography is indeed ‘modern’ and demands to be taken seriously, it must at least functionally repudiate premises that were basic to all Jewish conceptions of history in the past. In effect, it must stand in sharp opposition to its own subject matter, not in this or that detail, but concerning the vital core: the belief that divine providence is not only the ultimate but an active casual factor in Jewish history, and the related belief in the uniqueness of Jewish history itself.” Yerushalmi, “Modern Dilemmas,” in: Yerushalmi, Zakhor, 89.

49. Katz, “Situating Zionism,” 116.

50. A insightful study of Jewish acculturation in the 1920s and 1930s is found in Ezra Mendelsohn’s The Jews of East Central Europe. The integration of the Jews in the diverse countries happened parallel to a vigorous unfolding of internal Jewish life. See his comments on pp. 255–8.

51. Friesel, “Towards Partition.”

52. Schwarz-Friesel and Friesel, “The Israelization of Jew-Hatred.”

53. Schwarz-Friesel and Reinharz, Inside the Antisemitic Mind.

54. Dubnow, “The Survival of the Jewish People,” 326.