The Comparative Roots of Modern Zionism

SIS 150:Lecture 2

Professor Noam Pianko

January 10, 2007

Announcements

• Please join the Jewish Studies Program for the New Interpretations of Israel: Politics, Society, Culture and Human Rights Lecture Series Jan. 24, Feb. 19, Mar. 11 and Apr. 8 at 7 p.m. in 220 Kane Hall. The lectures are free and open to the public. http://jsis.washington.edu/jewish/calendar.shtml

Lecture Goals

• Contextualize origins of Zionist ideology within European Jewish experience

• Understand the relationship between European political ideologies and Zionism

• Introduce competing streams of Zionism

European Jewry at the End of the 18th Century

• Communal Structure

• Religious and Cultural Life

• Economic Practices

• Social Relationships

• Religion or Nation?

Emancipation and its Benefits

Price of Emancipation

• But, they say to me, the Jews have their own judges and laws. I respond that is your fault and you should not allow it. We must refuse everything to the Jews as a nation and accord everything to Jews as individuals.– Count Clermont–Tonnerre, 1789

Spread of Emancipation

Emancipation brings..

• Acculturation

• Secularization

• Judaism as a Religion

• Economic integration

• Discrimination

Different Situation in Eastern Europe

• Geographic Restrictions

• Limited Acculturation

• Jewish Learning and Observance

• Persecution

• Multi-national states

Pale of Settlement

Comparing West and East circa 1870s

Emancipated Hopes for liberal reforms

Assimilated Distinct Jewish Community

Middle-Class Poor

Liberalism Radical Political Ideologies

Intellectual Discrimination

Physical Violence

Demographic Snapshot of Jewish Population in 1880

• 7.75 Million Jews– 75% in Eastern Europe– 13.5% in rest of Europe– 3.5% in America– 8% in the Near East

• Zionism, Jewish Nationalism, Huh?• But, that is about to change!

What Sparks Jewish Political Ideologies?

• Jewish Question Remains Unsolved

• Explosion of Nationalism

1881 in Russia

• Czar Alexandar II Assassinated

• Increased Restrictions, pogroms

“On the Slaughter”Chaim Bialik, 1903

• You, executioner! Here is my neck-go to it, slaughter me! Behead me like a dog, yours is the might arm and the axe, and the whole earth is my scaffold--and we, we are the few! Myth blood is fair game-strike the skull, and murder’s blood, the blood of nurslings and old men, will spurt onto your clothes and will never, never be wiped off.

Anti-Semitism in Western Europe

The Jewish Question Revisited

• Integration

• Radical Politics

• Jewish Nationalism

Why Nationalism?

• National Unification Movement (Italy, Germany)

• National Awakening (Balkans, Austria-Hungary)

• Rise of Nation-State– Citizenship and Patriotism

Jewish Nationalisms

• Autonomism

• Territorialism

• Socialism

• Zionism

Key Differences

• Diaspora or Homeland

• Integration or Separation

• Hebrew or Yiddish

IdeologieS of Zionism

• Yearning for Zion

• Assumptions of European Nationalism

• Anti-semitism and Negation of Diaspora

Zionist Ideologies

• Political

• Cultural/Hibbat Zion

• Religious

• Socialist

• American

Political Zionism

Theodore Herzl, 1860-1904

Goal: “Restoration of the Jewish State”

• “Seven-hour work day”• “a white flag with seven golden stars”• “modern system of legislation”• “We cannot converse with one another in Hebrew”• “There are English hotels in Egypt and on the

mountain crest in Switzerland, Vienna cafes in South Africa, French theatres in Russia, German operas in America, and best Bavarian beer in Paris. When we journey out of Egypt again we shall not leave the fleshpots behind…”

Cultural Zionism/Hibbat Zion

• Achad Ha-am (1856-1927)

• “The eastern form of the spiritual problem is absolutely different form the western, In the west it is the problem of the Jews; in the East, the the problem of Judaism. The first weights on the individual;the second on the nation.”

• What is his critique of Herzl?

Religious ZionismAbraham Kook, 1865-1935

Religious Zionism

• “To regard Eretz Israel as merely a tool for establishing our national unity-or even for sustaining our religion in the Diaspora by preserving its proper character and its faith, piety, and observances—is a sterile notion; it is unworthy of the holiness of Eretz Israel…The hope for the Redemption is the force that sustains Judaism in the Diaspora; the Judaism of Eretz Israel is the very Redemption.”

Socialist ZionismNahman Syrkin

• A Classless Society and national sovereignty are the only means of solving the Jewish problem completely. The social revolution and cessation of the class struggle will also normalize the relationship of the Jew and his environment…today , after the liberal bourgeoise has betrayed its principles and has compromised with those classes whose power rests on force, the Jew must become the vanguard of socialism.

American ZionismJudge Louis Brandeis

• Every American Jew who aids in advancing the Jewish settlement in Palestine, though he feels that neither he nor his descendants will ever live there, will likewise be a better man and a better American.

Zionism: Continuity or Rupture?

– “Modern nations and all their impedimenta generally claim to be the opposite of novel, namely rooted in the remotest antiquity, and the opposite of constructured namely human communities so natural as to require no definition other than self-assertion. Whatever the historic or other continuities embedded in the modern concept of ‘France’ and ‘the French’—and which nobody would seek to deny—these very concepts themselves must include a constructed of ‘invented’ component.” (Hobsbawm, The Nation as Invented Tradition)

Final Thoughts

• Zionism not inevitable

• Divide between “Religion” and “Nation”