The Zionist Ideas: Visions for the Jewish Homeland-Then, Now, Tomorrow
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The Zionist Ideas: Visions for the Jewish Homeland-Then, Now, Tomorrow
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Overview
The most comprehensive Zionist collection ever published, The Zionist Ideas: Visions for the Jewish Homeland—Then, Now, Tomorrow sheds light on the surprisingly diverse and shared visions for realizing Israel as a democratic Jewish state. Building on Arthur Hertzberg’s classic, The Zionist Idea, Gil Troy explores the backstories, dreams, and legacies of more than 170 passionate Jewish visionaries—quadruple Hertzberg’s original number, and now including women, mizrachim, and others—from the 1800s to today.
Troy divides the thinkers into six Zionist schools of thought—Political, Revisionist, Labor, Religious, Cultural, and Diaspora Zionism—and reveals the breadth of the debate and surprising syntheses. He also presents the visionaries within three major stages of Zionist development, demonstrating the length and evolution of the conversation. Part 1 (pre-1948) introduces the pioneers who founded the Jewish state, such as Herzl, Gordon, Jabotinsky, Kook, Ha’am, and Szold. Part 2 (1948 to 2000) features builders who actualized and modernized the Zionist blueprints, such as Ben-Gurion, Berlin, Meir, Begin, Soloveitchik, Uris, and Kaplan. Part 3 showcases today’s torchbearers, including Barak, Grossman, Shaked, Lau, Yehoshua, and Sacks.
This mosaic of voices will engage equally diverse readers in reinvigorating the Zionist conversation—weighing and developing the moral, social, and political character of the Jewish state of today and tomorrow.
Product Details
| ISBN-13: | 9780827613980 |
|---|---|
| Publisher: | The Jewish Publication Society |
| Publication date: | 04/01/2018 |
| Series: | JPS Anthologies of Jewish Thought |
| Sold by: | Barnes & Noble |
| Format: | eBook |
| Pages: | 592 |
| Sales rank: | 645,123 |
| File size: | 1 MB |
About the Author
Read an Excerpt
CHAPTER 1
Pioneers:Political Zionism
Political Zionism identified the fundamentals that still define the Zionist project. As the Russian Jewish novelist Peretz Smolenskin exclaimed, "We are a people" — the Jews share national ties, not merely religious ones. Beyond that, as the Zionist pioneer Leon Pinsker and others proclaimed, this people, like all peoples, needed and deserved a state: "Since the Jew is nowhere at home, nowhere regarded as a native, he remains an alien everywhere." Finally, as Theodor Herzl discovered by the mass Jewish rejection of his Kenya Highlands–Uganda proposal in 1903, Jews must return to the Jewish homeland, Eretz Yisra'el, the Land of Israel.
Beyond these tenets, all Zionists assumed that creating a Jewish state would solve the Jewish Problem. Yet, as the following selections demonstrate, even the first Political Zionists differed regarding just what was the Jewish Problem. While most specified antisemitism, others addressed the drift toward assimilation, the shame of accommodation, the ongoing humiliation.
In short, Zionism arose from the dashed hopes of Emancipation, the European movement promising that Jews would be recognized fully as equal citizens communally and individually. The pogroms, the ranting and ravings of Jew haters, the continued toadying of Jews who wanted so badly to be accepted, all this tormented — and dispirited — many Jews.
The Haskalah, the enlightened Jewish intellectual movement, sought to reconcile tradition and modernity. In the early 1860s, a century after the German Jewish philosopher Moses Mendelssohn first started imagining it, the Russian Jewish poet J. L. Gordon articulated the sentiment exquisitely, endorsing "being a person on the street and a Jew at home." Although that model works for millions in the Diaspora today, Zionists ultimately concluded that Jewish pride, dignity, and integrity required living on a Jewish street in a Jewish state.
Although Theodor Herzl is the central figure of this first founding phase of Political Zionism, other contemporaries offered similar diagnoses. After his death at age forty-four, the movement was blessed with worthy successors who took Herzl's dream and improvised a blueprint for a functional state — even if, as the Israeli writer Natan Alterman warned, it wouldn't be delivered on a silver platter.
Peretz Smolenskin (1842-85)
Yes, we are a people!
HaToeh BeDarchei HaChayim (The wanderer in life's ways) is the title of Peretz Smolenskin's autobiographical novel describing the adventures of an orphan who wanders through all of contemporary Jewish life until he dies defending his people in a Russian pogrom. This tale summarized not only Smolenskin's life but his generation's journey. This most widely read book of modern Hebrew letters in the 1870s depicted the painful halfway house many enlightened Jews lived in, between the ghetto and modernity.
Like his protagonist, Smolenskin was born in the Russian Pale of Settlement, the western provinces of the tsarist empire, which were alone open to the Jewish population. At the age of twenty he migrated to Odessa, the great Black Sea port that hosted Russia's most modern Jewish community. He spent five years there studying music and languages while earning his keep by teaching Hebrew — and writing.
In 1868 Smolenskin settled in Vienna. He and a collaborator founded a monthly publication, HaShahar (The dawn), which he issued until his death from tuberculosis in Meran, Austria, in 1885.
Smolenskin is modern Hebrew literature's transition figure between the "Enlightenment," which ended with the Russian pogroms of 1881, and the return to nationalist moorings. Until his last "Zionist" novel, written in the 1880s following the pogroms, his work in belles lettres expressed the usual notions that modernizing Jewish life was desirable and inevitable. Even then, however, he was no uncritical admirer of modernity. His novels emphasized a countertheme: the assimilation of the Jew would not necessarily yield acceptance by society or personal happiness.
In the aftermath of the pogroms, Smolenskin abandoned his theorizing about Jewish national culture and the definition of Jewry as a spiritual nation. Instead he endorsed the evacuation of Eastern Europe. He asked its Jews not to repeat the woeful cycles of their history by emigrating to America or to any other lands of exile. There was only one answer — Zionism.
The excerpts which follow are from a volume he published as a series of articles in his own HaShahar in the years 1857–77: from an essay reacting to the pogroms of 1881, which expressed his later Zionism of complete exodus; and from a late piece critiquing Reform Judaism and the Haskalah, which he regarded as the immediate enemies.
It Is Time to Plant (1875–77)
The Jewish people has outlived all others because it has always regarded itself as a people — a spiritual nation. ... Yes, we are a people. We have been a people from our beginnings until today. We have never ceased being a people, even after our kingdom was destroyed and we were exiled from our land, and whatever may yet come over us will not eradicate our national character. But we are not today a people like all others, just as we were not a people like the others even when we dwelt in our own land. The foundation of our national identity was never the soil of the Holy Land, and we did not lose the basis of our nationality when we were exiled. We have always been a spiritual nation, one whose Torah was the foundation of its statehood.
From the start our people has believed that its Torah took precedence over its land and over its political identity. We are a people because in spirit and thought we regard ourselves bound to one another by ties of fraternity. Our unity has been conserved in a different way, through forms different from those of all other peoples, but does this make us any the less a people?
Let Us Search Our Ways (1881)
Calamity after calamity and disaster after disaster have afflicted the Jews of Russia. In many communities not a stone has been left standing. The shops of our brethren have been pillaged and looted, and whatever the mob could not carry off, it has utterly destroyed. Many Jews have been murdered and the wounded are without number. The mob, a ravenous wolf in search of prey, has stalked the Jews with a cruelty unheard of since the Middle Ages. Perhaps most shocking of all, many supposedly decent people appeared among the makers of the pogroms. There is no end to the affliction that has already struck so many tens of thousands. ...
We have no sense of national honor; our standards are those of second-class people. We find ourselves rejoicing when we are granted a favor and exulting when we are tolerated and befriended. ...
The Haskalah of Berlin (1883)
The Haskalah of Berlin rested on this keystone: to imitate the gentiles, to abandon our own traditions, to disdain our own manners and ideas, and to conduct ourselves both at home and without — in the synagogue, within our families, everywhere — in imitation of others. As a reward for such a great achievement, so these upright and wise teachers assured us, our children, or our children's children, or their children, would be accepted as equals.
The consequences of this doctrine were: first, the destruction of the sentiment which is the unifying principle and strongest foundation of the House of Israel — that we are a nation; and, second, the abandonment of the hope of redemption....
A false doctrine, that religion is the keystone of the House of Israel, was substituted. But this stone, too, crumbled into dust; the very people who paid all this lip service to religion condemned it and spurned all religious customs and laws because they were different from the ways of the gentiles....
In assuring us that, as a reward for "Enlightenment," we would be able to establish our homes wherever we happened to be, they have told us to abandon all hope of returning to our own land and living there in dignity, as all peoples do. And we, having seen that all this did not get us anywhere, and that it did not even help us secure the love we sought — we declare: Only a dog neither has nor wants a home. A man who chooses to live his whole life as a transient, without a thought for the establishment of a permanent home for his children, will forever be regarded as a dog. And we must seek a home with all our hearts, our spirit, our soul....
Leon Pinsker (1821-91)
Autoemancipation: Judeophobia! Since the Jews are nowhere at home, they remain aliens everywhere....
Leon Pinsker was the most assimilated among the Russian Jews who turned Zionist under the impact of the events of 1881. A passionate patriot, he had believed the Russian regime would liberalize itself into a constitutional monarchy in which all people would be equals. Because he had staked his faith in Russia and had relatively little Jewish affiliation, he was even more disillusioned by the pogroms than most of his contemporaries.
Alongside an impressive medical career, after 1860 Pinsker took a considerable interest in Jewish affairs. He wrote for the two earliest Jewish weeklies in the Russian language and was active in the affairs of the Society for the Spread of Culture among the Jews of Russia, founded in 1863. Rejecting the "Enlighteners" who wrote in Hebrew, he believed the Russian language and culture should dominate the inner life, even the religion, of the Jew.
Outbreaks of violence were familiar phenomena in the life of Russian Jews. Why, then, did the 1881 pogroms constitute an emotional crisis for so many, Pinsker among them, and a break in modern Jewish history? There are two major reasons: their extent, and the composition of the mobs. The assassination of Tsar Alexander II in March 1881 (ironically as he was about to grant a liberal constitution) triggered violence in nearly two hundred cities and villages. These, moreover, were not lynchings carried out by an illiterate rabble. Leading newspapers whipped up the frenzy. Men of education and position participated in the attacks. And the government abetted the pogromists.
Pinsker left the Society for the Spread of Culture, declaring that "new remedies, new ways" would have to be found. He went to central and western Europe to advance his new ideas about concentrating the bulk of Jewry in a national state. Alas, he found no adherents. Returning to Russia, he published his views anonymously in German in a pamphlet entitled Auto-Emancipation.
Like Herzl fifteen years later, Pinsker was sufficiently outside the influence of the traditional emotions centering around the Holy Land not to argue that a Jewish state had to be only in Zion. Palestine was preferable, but any land suitable for a national establishment would do.
Pinsker's pamphlet was greeted with vociferous indignation in many circles. The Orthodox regarded the author, who did not remain anonymous for long, as lacking in religion. The liberals, especially those outside Russia, attacked him as a traitor to the faith in humanity's ultimate victory over prejudice and hatred.
Nevertheless, the personal prestige of the man and the intellectual impact of the pamphlet propelled Pinsker to the foreground of the ferment toward creating a Jewish nationalist organization. Pinsker became the leader of the new Hibbat Zion movement, also known as Hovevi Zion. These groups of "lovers of Zion," believing the best reaction to the pogroms was to establish agricultural settlements in Palestine, convened in a founding conference in 1884. Pinsker's "Auto-Emancipation" is the first great statement of the anguish of the Jew driven to assert his own nationalism because the wider world rejected him. The theme would recur in Theodor Herzl's writing.
Auto-Emancipation: An Appeal to His People by a Russian Jew (1882)
That age-old problem, long called the Jewish Question, yet again provokes discussion....
This is the kernel of the problem as we see it: the Jews comprise a distinctive element among the nations under which they dwell, and as such can neither assimilate nor be readily digested by any nation.
Hence the solution lies in finding a means of readjusting this exclusive element to the family of nations, so that the essential reason for the Jewish Question will be permanently removed....
The Jewish people lacks most of the essential attributes which define a nation. It lacks that authentic, rooted life which is inconceivable without a common language and customs and without geographic cohesion. The Jewish people has no fatherland of its own, though many motherlands; no center of focus or gravity, no government of its own, no official representation. The Jews are home everywhere, but are nowhere at home....
Among the living nations of the earth the Jews as a nation are long since dead.
With the loss of their country, the Jewish people lost their independence, and fell into the kind of decay that would suck the life out of any healthy organism. The state was crushed before the eyes of the nations. But after the Jewish people had ceased to exist as an actual state, as a political entity, they nevertheless resisted total annihilation — they lived on spiritually as a nation.
In this people the world saw the uncanny form of one of the dead walking among the living. The ghostlike apparition of a living corpse, of a people without unity or organization, without land or other bonds of unity, no longer alive, and yet walking among the living — this spectral form without precedence in history, unlike anything that preceded or followed it, was doomed to haunt the imagination of the nations. ...
Judeophobia is a psychic aberration. As a psychic aberration it is hereditary, and as a disease transmitted for two thousand years it is incurable.
This fear of ghosts, the mother of Judeophobia, has evoked this pure — I might say Platonic — hatred. As a result, the whole Jewish nation is often blamed for the real or supposed misdeeds of its individual members; it is libeled in so many ways — and buffeted about so shamefully....
Since the Jews are nowhere at home, nowhere regarded as a native, they remain aliens everywhere....
To sum up then: to the living, the Jew is a corpse; to the native, a foreigner; to the homesteader, a vagrant; to the proprietary, a beggar; to the poor, an exploiter and a millionaire; to the patriot, a man without a country; for all, a hated rival....
Consequently, we are duty-bound to devote all our remaining moral force to reestablishing ourselves as a living nation, so that we may ultimately assume a more fitting and dignified role among the family of the nations....
In order to build a secure home, end our endless life of wandering, and rise to the dignity of a nation in our own eyes and in the eyes of the world, we must, above all, not dream of restoring ancient Judaea.... We shall take with us the most sacred possessions which we have saved from the shipwreck of our former country, the God-idea and the Bible. It is these alone which have made our old fatherland the Holy Land, and not Jerusalem or the Jordan. Perhaps the Holy Land will again become ours. If so, all the better, but, first, we must determine — and this is the crucial point — what country is accessible to us, and at the same time suitable to offer the Jews of all lands who must leave their homes a secure and undisputed refuge, capable of flourishing....
The people's consciousness is awake. The great ideas of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries have not passed us by without leaving a trace. We feel not only as Jews; we feel as people. As human beings, we, too, wish to live and be a nation as the others. And if we seriously desire that, we must first of all extricate ourselves from the old yoke, and rise courageously to our full height. We must first of all desire to help ourselves and then the help of others is sure to follow. ...
Let "Now or never" be our watchword. Woe to our descendants, woe to the memory of our Jewish contemporaries, if we let this moment pass by! ...
Help yourselves, and God will help you!
Theodor Herzl (1860-1904)
We are one people. ... We are strong enough to form a State, and, indeed, a model State.
Theodor Herzl was born on May 2, 1860, in Budapest, Hungary, the second child and only son of a rich merchant. He received his preliminary education in a technical school and high school in Budapest. When he was eighteen, the family moved to Vienna after his sister's death from typhoid. Herzl enrolled in the University of Vienna's law school. After gaining his doctorate in 1884, Herzl practiced for a year as a minor civil servant but soon gave up the law to devote himself to writing. With relative ease he won regard as a feuilletonist, a familiar essayist, the favorite form of central European journalism, and as a writer of light, fashionable plays. In 1892 he was appointed to the staff of the Neue Freie Presse, the most important Viennese newspaper. Later that year Herzl arrived in Paris as its resident correspondent.
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Table of Contents
Foreword by Natan Sharansky,
Acknowledgments,
Introduction: How Zionism's Six Traditional Schools of Thought Shape Today's Conversation,
Part 1. Pioneers: Founding the Jewish State,
1. Political Zionism,
2. Labor Zionism,
3. Revisionist Zionism,
4. Religious Zionism,
5. Cultural Zionism,
6. Diaspora Zionism,
Part 2. Builders: Actualizing and Modernizing the Zionist Blueprints,
7. Political Zionism,
8. Labor Zionism,
9. Revisionist Zionism,
10. Religious Zionism,
11. Cultural Zionism,
12. Diaspora Zionism,
Part 3. Torchbearers: Reassessing, Redirecting, Reinvigorating,
13. Political Zionism,
14. Labor Zionism,
15. Revisionist Zionism,
16. Religious Zionism,
17. Cultural Zionism,
18. Diaspora Zionism,
Source Acknowledgments,
Sources,