Zionism

views updated

ZIONISM

jews and nationalism
jewish nationalism
the lovers of zion
theodor herzl and "political zionism"
struggle for the jewish future
bibliography

First used in public on 23 January 1892 by Nathan Birnbaum, Zionism is the term used for the main Jewish nationalist movement that originated in central and eastern Europe in the last quarter of the nineteenth century. Zionism's main ideological claim was that the Jews were not simply an ethnic or religious minority group but were rather a distinct, if dispersed, people—a nation. As such, Jews could never be fully integrated into their host societies, and indeed should not; instead they needed, and had a right to, their own state, in their national homeland, Palestine, or, as most Zionists came to call it, Eretz Israel (Hebrew for "Land of Israel"). Zionism therefore rejected the main integrative, assimilationist strategy of the movement for Jewish emancipation that started in the late eighteenth century. Zionism's relation to this movement was, however, highly ambivalent, for while many Zionists insisted on a distinct cultural and national identity for Jews, many others, including its founding figure and initial leader, Theodor Herzl, also saw the movement as a means of integrating the Jews into the rest of civilized society, but on a national rather than individual level. Jews were to be, therefore, a "normal" nation, but they were also to be a model "normal" nation: pioneers in technology, culture, progressive social causes, and pluralist tolerance, and at the center of world civilization. Zionism, therefore, rather than "solving" the Jewish Question, as was claimed for it, came to reflect the complex, dialectical relationship between particularism and universalism that marked Jewish emancipation and indeed modern Jewish history generally.

jews and nationalism

Zionism differed markedly from almost all other European nationalisms in the period, even diasporic nationalisms such as that of the Greeks, by having only a marginal overlap between people and territory. There were some Jews in the Jewish "homeland" in Palestine, but Jews were far from being a majority in the area, and had no political control or recognized claim to the territory. The vast bulk of Jews lived outside of Palestine: the Sephardic Jews were scattered mainly across the lands, current and former, of the Ottoman Empire as well as parts of western Europe and the Americas; the Ashkenazi Jews were concentrated in central and eastern Europe, especially the area of the Russian Empire known as the Pale. This discrepancy between people and territory was an accepted part of premodern, traditional Jewish life and thought. Jews thought of themselves as a people, living as they did in autonomous communities, apart from, and usually discriminated against by, the surrounding societies. Yet they did not see themselves in modern nationalist terms, and their dispersion was explained, and justified, in religious terms, with an ingathering of the Jewish people to the homeland in Palestine seen almost exclusively in connection with the coming of the Messiah.

This situation became untenable with the onset of the modern state and its concomitant, secular nationalism, in the late eighteenth century. Jewish autonomy was abolished as part of the centralization of state power, and the spread of secular nationalism, associated most strongly with the French Revolution, was a direct challenge to the Jews' traditional group identity.

The modernizers within western and central European Jewry, including the neo-Orthodox, initially responded by defining Jewish identity exclusively in individual religious terms, thus denying any secular Jewish group (i.e., national) identity. Many even removed any vestigial mention in the liturgy of the wish to return to Zion as an outdated confusion that might hamper the full identification of Jews with their respective nations, whether French, German, or any other. This "assimilationist" strategy was effective as long as the national identity in question was inclusive, civic, and not seriously challenged by competing national identities. Where the nation gained an ethnic or racial, hence exclusive, definition, or where nationalities competed for regional supremacy, as in the empires of central and eastern Europe, the strategy's success was not so clear: Jews were not accepted as members of the nation because of their different ethnicity and traditional prejudices against them. It was also unclear to which national group Jews should try to belong: in Bohemia, for instance, German, Czech, or "Austrian"? In this way, Jews often became caught in the crossfire between competing nationalisms.

jewish nationalism

There was also a more positive possibility arising from the Jewish confrontation with nationalism. In areas such as the Russian Pale, where Jews were in sufficient numbers to retain a strong group identity, the option presented itself of Jews imitating the other groups around them by themselves forming their own "nation." Hence Russian Jewish intellectuals, led by Perez Smolenskin, developed in the 1860s their own brand of secular Jewish nationalism, alongside all the others.

Initially, however, most of the proponents of this secular Jewish national identity thought it could be realized in Europe in deterritorialized form. Most saw no need for the apparently impossible project of mass immigration of Jews to Palestine. There were, admittedly, calls from the early nineteenth century from various sources, including several British Christian evangelicals and Benjamin Disraeli, for the Jews' return to their biblical homeland, and the connection between the rediscovery of Jewish identity and the reclaiming of Zion was the centerpiece of George Eliot's novel Daniel Deronda, published in 1876. A prominent German Jewish intellectual, Moses Hess, once an avowed supporter of total Jewish integration in a socialist society, in his book Rome and Jerusalem (1862), also lent his voice to the call for recognition of Jewish nationhood and the restoration of a Jewish state in Palestine. Until the very end of the 1870s, however, very few held this view. In western and central Europe the strategy of assimilation, or at least integration, remained dominant among Jews, and even those, largely in eastern Europe and Russia, who supported a secular Jewish nationalism denied that this necessitated a Jewish state in Palestine.

the lovers of zion

The radicalization of European nationalism around 1880 brought a sea change in Jewish attitudes. In central Europe the emergence of "anti-Semitism" as a formal political movement began to sow doubts in the minds of some supporters of assimilation; and in eastern Europe the success of Slav liberation movements against the Turks led to the rapid growth in Russian elites of Pan-Slavism. The effect of this on Jews was twofold. Some, such as Eliezer Ben-Yehuda, were inspired by Slav nationalist success to demand that the Jews also realize their national identity. In Ben-Yehuda's view this meant that Jews should speak Hebrew, which in turn necessitated their living in their own land, which meant immigrating to Palestine, as he recommended in 1879. Others were dismayed at the ethnonationalist nature of Pan-Slavism, which threatened the status of Jews within the Russian Empire. Their fears were confirmed in 1881 when the assassination of the relatively liberal Tsar Alexander II was followed by a spate of pogroms and a reactionary crackdown under Alexander III.

After the pogroms of 1881 most Jewish nationalists, including Smolenskin, became supporters of mass Jewish immigration to Palestine. In many of Russia's Jewish population centers they formed groups, under the general rubric of Hovevei Ziyyon (Lovers of Zion), to promote this goal. The new rationale of the movement was articulated by Leo Pinsker's Auto-Emanzipation (1882), which identified anti-Semitism as a psychic disease that was incurable and would bar the acceptance of Jews by European societies. Hence Jews needed to emancipate themselves, and form their own state. Ironically, Pinsker was not at all convinced that this state should be in Palestine, thinking North America a preferable site, but the vast majority of secular Jewish nationalists, with their more ethnocultural understanding of Jewish identity, could recognize only Palestine as the goal of emigration.

The new movement gained some unity of purpose at the Kattowitz Conference of 1884, received some financial backing from such figures as Edmond de Rothschild, and did see some land purchases and immigration to Palestine, the "First Aliyah" (literally "Going Up"). Overall, however, the Lovers of Zion suffered from a lack of organization, persecution by the Russian authorities, and conflict between the secular and religious factions. Although the pressure to emigrate remained, this could be relieved more easily by settling in America than in Palestine. By the early 1890s, with its initial impetus long gone, the movement was almost defunct.

theodor herzl and "political zionism"

The intervention of a Viennese journalist with no previous connection to Zionism, Theodor Herzl (1860–1904), revived the movement's fortunes. A fairly typical product of Vienna's assimilated Jewish liberal bourgeoisie, Herzl had been a liberal German nationalist in his youth, and he held quite a negative opinion of the parvenu Jewish society around him. Increasing concern about anti-Semitism in France (where he was the correspondent of the Neue Freie Presse in Paris from 1891 to 1895) and Austria, and the negative effects of the new, social "ghetto" in which assimilated Jews found themselves as a result, eventually led him to question the wisdom of assimilation. In June 1895, in the wake of the Dreyfus trial in France and, more crucially, the electoral triumph of the anti-Semitic Christian Socials in April that year in Vienna, Herzl came to the radical conclusion that the only way to solve the Jewish Question was for the Jews to recognize that they were a separate people, and should leave Europe to settle in a state of their own, as agreed to by the international community.

After failing to win over the western and central European Jewish elite, Herzl started appealing to the Jewish masses, and his plan was published as a pamphlet, Der Judenstaat: Versuch einer modernen Lösung der Judenfrage (The Jewish state: An attempt at a modern solution of the Jewish Question), in February 1896. His call met with an enthusiastic response not among western and central European Jews (at which it was aimed), but rather among eastern European Jews, in the preexisting Zionist movement of which Herzl had been unaware. While in many respects simply repeating the core ideas of Pinsker, Herzl's plan was more detailed, Herzl himself had a higher prestige, as a "Western" intellectual, and he brought to the "Jewish cause" a remarkable political and organizational flair and energy. Very soon he became the leader of the movement, with Max Nordau, another highly prestigious "Western" intellectual, as his deputy.

The initial results of Herzl's leadership were dramatic: in 1897 he convened the First Zionist Congress in Basel, Switzerland, and he managed in a very short space of time to create the institutional structures and the appearance of a legitimate, substantial Jewish nationalist movement that firmly anchored Zionism in the international political world. His brand of "political Zionism" laid great stress on securing international recognition of and hence legitimacy for the goal of a Jewish state, and the resulting diplomatic campaign saw Herzl meet many of Europe's heads-of-state, including William II of Germany. This made Zionism respectable and gave it a high profile that was indispensable for its later success.

struggle for the jewish future

Zionism, however, remained weak, and was soon in deep crisis. The movement convinced only a small minority of western and central European Jewry of the need to give up the strategy of integration into European society. Even in eastern Europe, Zionism had to compete with other models of Jewish modernization, such as the socialist Bundists, and within Zionism there were several competing visions of how to proceed. Herzl's political Zionism, for all its diplomatic glamour, had achieved hardly any success in pursuit of the movement's main goal: securing the right to a Jewish homeland in Palestine. Its neglect of a distinct, ethnoculturally Jewish content for the new state of the Jews also antagonized the "cultural Zionists," such as Asher Ginzberg (also known under the pseudonym Ahad Ha'am) and Martin Buber. Herzl's main goal for his Jews' state was to act as a refuge from anti-Semitism and to transform Jews into "real humans" by making them fully responsible citizens—of their own country. He had (like Pinsker) initially not seen Palestine as the necessary and sole site for his state, and even when he accepted this need, his Zionist vision, as articulated in the novel Altneuland (1902; Old new land), remained one with a progressive, liberal, universalist, pluralist, and humanist character (as befitted his central European Jewish background), rather than one with an identifiably, ethnically Jewish one. Cultural Zionists, in contrast, were intent on promoting a particular, culturally Jewish national identity (especially involving Hebrew as the national language), and saw a Jewish homeland more as a means to that end, rather than as a site for the "normalization" of Jews. "Practical Zionists" also differed from the political Zionists in insisting on the need to pursue colonization of Palestine even before international agreement on this (especially from the Turkish government that ruled Palestine) had been achieved.

The conflict over the movement's future culminated in the Uganda Crisis of 1903, when the (largely Russian) opposition protested vehemently at Herzl's agreement to pursue the prospect of a Jewish colony in British East Africa ("Uganda"), seeing this as a fatal detour from the goal of Palestine. Herzl achieved a compromise with the rebels, but very soon thereafter, on 3 July 1904, he died of heart disease. In the aftermath of the leader's death, the movement regrouped, but with power shifting to the "Russians." The supporters of the idea behind the Uganda project, of a territory that could be a "night shelter" for Jews fleeing anti-Semitism, broke away in 1905 and formed the Jewish Territorial Organization. David Wolffsohn became the new leader and continued the political Zionist strategy of Herzl, negotiating with Turkey for more Jewish rights in Palestine. Meanwhile, however, the goals of the cultural and practical Zionists, to further Jewish educational and economic development, and Jewish settlement, in Palestine, were also pursued. The combination of diplomatic activity and practical activity on the ground, named "synthetic Zionism" by its leading practitioner, Chaim Weizmann, became the dominant trend in the movement, especially after Wolffsohn's resignation in 1911, and Nordau's subsequent self-imposed absence.

By 1914, Zionism presented a complex and ambivalent picture. On the one hand, it remained riven by factional disputes, with political, cultural, and synthetic Zionists being accompanied by other factions, such as the religious-Orthodox Mizrahi, and the socialist Poale Zion. On the other, however, many of these disputes were taking place in Palestine as well as in Europe because the Second Aliyah, after 1905, had brought a substantial number of Jews to Palestine, and various educational, cultural, and economic institutions had been founded and financed, much of it under the skillful direction of Arthur Ruppin at the Palestine Office of the Jewish National Fund. Moreover, the evident weakness of Turkish rule in the area had led to renewed hopes of a diplomatic breakthrough, which was indeed to occur with the Balfour Declaration of 1917.

What remained quite unclear in 1914, and almost entirely unaddressed, was the question of how—assuming its future success—the nascent Zionist colony in the Jewish homeland of Palestine would deal with the fact of the Arab population that already lived there.