





CHAPTER ONE From Herzl to Rabin

The Changing Image of Zionism

By AMNON RUBINSTEIN

Holmes & Meier Read the Review Zionism and the Quest for

a New Jewish Identity



In 1905, after Dr. Theodor Herzl's sudden death, a stunned grief descended upon the fledgling Zionist organization, moving a young Russian Jew to publish an obituary commemorating the founder of Zionism. Years later that young man, Ze'ev (Vladimir) Jabotinsky, would acquire some posthumous international fame as the original teacher and mentor of Israeli prime minister Menachem Begin. But, at the time, Jabotinsky was one of many young and ardent Russian Jews whose conversion to Zionism manifested itself in a total attachment to Herzl. Not content with cliché eulogies, Jabotinsky, in his obituary, tried to explain the unique impact that the author of Der Judenstaat had on the Jews. The all-consuming adoration, the total subjugation to Herzl's personality could not be explained in ordinary political terms. According to Jabotinsky, Herzl's importance was related to the inherent difficulty accompanying the birth of the new nation Zionism sought to bring about. The difficulty lay in the fact that the new type of Jew was unknown to any of the Zionist founders. "A nation, which lives a normal national life on its land," wrote Jabotinsky, "is replete with stereotypes representing a characteristic national image." Among the nations of the earth are types immediately recognizable as typically Russian or English or German. But, with us, continued Jabotinsky, there is no such characteristic type. "What we see around us among Jews is merely the outcome of arbitrary action perpetrated by others." This prevalent Jew, the Yid, as he is pejoratively called by the Gentiles, does not reflect a proud national past but embodies the very negative traits from which Zionism seeks to redeem the Jews. "Only after removing the dust accumulated through two thousand years of exile, of galut, will the true, authentic Hebrew character reveal its glorious head. Only then shall we be able to say: This is a typical Hebrew, in every sense of the word." The portrait of such a future Hebrew cannot be visualized but merely deduced by juxtaposing him against the prevalent Diaspora few. The words Jabotinsky used are incisive:

Our starting point is to take the typical Yid of today and to imagine his diametrical opposite ... because the Yid is ugly, sickly, and lacks decorum, we shall endow the ideal image of the Hebrew with masculine beauty. The Yid is trodden upon and easily frightened and, therefore, the Hebrew ought to be proud and independent. The Yid is despised by all and, therefore, the Hebrew ought to charm all. The Yid has accepted submission and, therefore, the Hebrew ought to learn how to command. The Yid wants to conceal his identity from strangers and, therefore, the Hebrew should look the world straight in the eye and declare: "I am a Hebrew!"

Such a liberated Jew, such a future Hebrew, explained Jabotinsky, was Theodor Herzl. His personality, his demeanor, his majestic appearance embodied everything that Jews were not but sought to be. It was this element that struck such a strong chord in the collective Jewish mind and that explained why Herzl's death sent such deep shock waves throughout the Jewish world. We shall see how this simplistic dichotomy is undergoing a radical transformation among those very proud Hebrew sons for whom the Zionist Fathers longed with such ferver. But at the beginning, Zionist literature abounded with this very posture: The old-time Jew contrasted with the newly born Hebrew; the Diaspora Jew with the native Sabra; the Yid of yesteryear with the resurrected Maccabee, the inferior Jew with the super-Jew. The message was loud and clear: The Hebrew, the new super-Jew, represents everything that has traditionally been associated with the Gentiles, the goyim, the other side. In contrast, the dominant traits of the Diaspora Jew, our "miserable stepbrother," to use David Ben-Gurion's phrase, were to be discarded. In the post-Holocaust era, it is embarrassing to read Zionism's founders' disparaging evaluation of European, galut, Jewry. Their poverty is reviled, their helplessness despised, their virtues ignored. Zionism did not usher in this attitude. Nineteenth-century Hebrew and Yiddish literature, the first manifestations of a nonreligious Jewish culture in eastern Europe, vilified Jewish existence within the Pale of Settlement, the "parasitical" occupations that marred it and its sickening submission to brute force and oppression. Zionism, especially in eastern Europe, was founded on this total rejection of Jewish existence in galut but, unlike its forerunners, indicated a way out. Zionism is not content with returning the Jewish people to its lost sovereignty and never-forgotten homeland; it also seeks to be the midwife who helps the Jewish people give birth to a new kind of man. This revolution—no less than the political craving for independence—is the very basis of Zionist philosophy and explains its seeming paradoxes. Yes, the Jews are despised and lead an inferior life; no, it is not their inherent fault, as the anti-Semites charge: Circumstance alone is responsible for their plight. Thus, Nachman Syrkin, one of the founding ideologists of the Zionist labor movement, wrote: "Puny, ugly, enslaved, degraded and egoistic is the Jew when he forgets his great self; great, beautiful, moral and social is the Jew when he returns to himself and recognizes his own soul." Normality means the redemption of the individual as well as the normalization of the people. The Return to Zion is coupled with a metamorphosis of the Jew into a new man. The Jew would become a "goy" in the double meaning that this word has in Hebrew, signifying both "Gentile" and "nation." Once this rebirth takes place, the traumas of the past will be forgotten. To be a goy means to be healthy; healthy nations, healthy people are not obsessed with issues of existence and survival. Moshe Leib Lilienblum, one of the founders of the pre-Herzlian "Lovers of Zion" movement in Russia, indicated the dimensions of this transition: If the Jews are going to be a normal goy (nation), they should know how such normal goyim behave:

Mixed marriages and foreign culture are not strange to a healthy people. Such people swallow everything and digest everything, And occasionally, the foreign things they take in, turn into a source of life. A healthy people are oblivious to the fear of death and do not have to be on guard in order to ensure their survival.

"To be a goy" was, therefore, the dominant theme of Zionist philosophy in its formative period. The idea was so forceful that it united the warring factions and parties. On everything else Zionists differed: "Territorialists," ready to consider territories outside Palestine as a "night shelter" for the hard-pressed Jews, clashed with "Zionists of Zion," who regarded any substitute for the ancestral homeland—including the notorious British offer to settle Jewish refugees in Uganda—as high treason; "practical Zionists," who believed in practical steps to implement Zionism, railed against those who believed mainly in political and international action; Labor Zionists, who saw the return to Zion inextricably intertwined with a socialist-universal mission, fought against the Zionist Right, which gave precedence to the national cause. Even the very basic idea of a Jewish state did not escape dispute, and much doubt was cast on its soundness and practicality. One idea, one craving, one urge, enjoyed a veritable consensus: to be a new people; to escape the role that history had imposed on the Jews; to become, in Herzl's words, "a wondrous breed of Jews which will spring up from the earth." Indeed, Jewish existence in exile was regarded as lying outside history. Both Ben-Gurion and Jabotinsky, incorrigible opponents, denied the legitimacy of Jewish history in galut. Ben-Gurion said:

Since our last national tragedy—the suppression of the Bar Kochba rebellion by the Romans—we have had "histories" of persecution, of legal discrimination, of the Inquisition and the pogroms, of dedication and martyrdom, but we did not have Jewish history anymore, because a history of a people is only what the people create as a whole, as a national unit, and not the sum total of what happens to individuals and to groups within the people. For the last fifteen hundred years, we have been excluded from world history, which is made up of the histories of nations.

Even the religious Zionists, aware as they were of the historic continuity that gave meaning to Jewish survival even in exile, subscribed to these extreme sentiments. Thus S. H. Landau, founder of Hapoel Hamizrachi, the religious Labor movement that gave rise to the National Religious Party, wrote:

Israel in exile ceased to be a nation or, to be exact, a living nation.... A people lacking a land of their own whose natural life force has dried up is not a nation. Parasitism, conscious or unconscious, becomes its second nature—parasitism of the individual and of the community.

This was the driving power behind the Zionist call for revolution against passivity, against tradition, against all which, at the time, was synonymous with Jewishness. But in addition to this Zionist consensus there was a deep division regarding the very essence of the new Jewish society to be created in Palestine. This division demonstrated the difference between the Jews who came into Zionism via the route of a failed emancipation and the Jewish communities of eastern Europe living under the yoke of an authoritarian czarist regime, from which emancipation was conspicuously absent. Needless to say, the attempt to reach a consensus papered over such inherent divisions; the crucial issue of religious belief and all that it entailed was shunned. Such was the desire to escape the humiliation of life among hostile Gentiles that it even produced, in 1906, a strange phenomenon: Herzl, frustrated by his failed attempts to persuade the sultan of the Ottoman Empire to grant a charter to the Jews, grasped a vague British offer to establish a Jewish homeland in Uganda—the famous Night Shelter. This offer nearly rent asunder the fledgling movement between "territorialists," whose main purpose was saving Jews, and "Zionists of Zion," who refused to consider another homeland. It is instructive that while the secular Chaim Weizmann stood up as Herzl's main opponent, the religious group supported the Uganda solution, divine promises notwithstanding. Herzl himself personified this chasm between East and West. His attachment to Judaism was minimal, his knowledge of things Jewish nebulous, consisting mainly of childhood memories of a Budapest synagogue. As a European and as a civilized man, anti-Semitism aroused anger and disgust in him. When he gradually came to discover the unfathomable depth and intensity of the new-old sickness, he was driven to the idea of a Jewish state. Yet his very philosophy remained European, secular and liberal. He sought to heal the ugly wound that afflicted the Jews and marred the enlightened face of Christian Europe: hence, his stubborn insistence on the need for international recognition and cooperation with enlightened Gentiles in carrying out the Return to Zion. That recognition, Herzl argued, should be expressed through a charter enabling the Jews to return to their homeland. The granting of the charter by the enlightened nations of Europe would constitute the one event revolutionizing relations between Jews and Gentiles. The creation of a Jewish commonwealth, a progressive society based on the European model, would symbolize the end of anti-Semitism. Recognition was imperative not only because of obvious demands of political expediency but also because of the need to put an end to the tragic friction between Jews and Christians. Because assimilation was impossible and did not solve the issue of Jewish existence in an antagonistic Christian environment, Herzl rejected its very notion:

We have sincerely tried everywhere to merge with the national communities in which we live, seeking only to preserve the faith of our fathers. It is not permitted us. In vain we are loyal patriots, sometimes superloyal; in vain do we make the same sacrifices of life and property as our fellow citizens; in vain do we strive to enhance the fame of our native lands in the arts and sciences or their wealth by trade and commerce. In our native lands where we have lived for centuries we are still decried as aliens, often by men whose ancestors had not yet come at a time when Jewish sighs had long been heard in the country. The majority decide who the "alien" is; this, and all else in the relations between peoples, is a matter of power.

This is the substitute to an idea Herzl had before converting to Zionism: a mass conversion to Christianity in order to put an end, once and for all, to Jewish suffering. Because he realized that such a conversion was impossible, he reached the inescapable conclusion: Without giving up Jewish identity, the new solution serves a parallel approach—entering the family of nations not through a side entrance for individuals but through the main gate—as an equal and respectable quest. In this respect, Herzl was a spokesman for a whole generation of acculturated, assimilated Jews who found their way to Jewish nationalism. For him, as for other founders of Zionism, anti-Semitism was the prime mover; but as soon as the urge to combat it took the form of a national solution, a new pride in their half-forgotten, vaguely sensed Jewish heritage set in. This pride notwithstanding, there was precious little Jewishness in Herzl's writings. The new Maccabee who would inhabit the utopian future state was not really different from the cultivated European—that figure of reason and progress whose love and acceptance Jews like Herzl sought in vain. Herzl's colleague in the First Zionist Congress, Max Nordau, shared these attitudes. Nordau himself was a product of Jewish assimilation. Before his conversion by Herzl to Zionism, he had already acquired a reputation throughout Europe as an atheist thinker, an iconoclast author, and a sharp critic of European manners and morals. Like Herzl's, his education was basically Germanic, his outlook cosmopolitan. Like Herzl, he lost contact with Judaism and watched with shock the old anti-Semitic monster raise its menacing head. Like Herzl's, his new attachment to Jewish nationalism was neither motivated nor accompanied by a return to Judaism. In his moving address to the First Zionist Congress in Basel in 1897, he described the plight of the emancipated Western Jews—talented, ready to serve their beloved countries, humiliated, and rejected by their Christian neighbors. This plight, Nordau stressed, should not be an exclusively Jewish concern:

To Jewish distress no one can remain indifferent—neither Christian nor Jew. It is a great sin to let a race, whose ability even its worst enemies do not deny, degenerate into intellectual and physical misery. It is a sin against them and it is a sin against the course of civilization, to whose progress Jews have made, and will yet make, significant contributions.

For Herzl and Nordau, anti-Semitism was a plague affecting both Jew and Gentile, but it also explained where the evil was and how it could be uprooted. For the Jews, it served as a reminder of their unique position: They shared not merely a common faith but also a common fate. Herzl's conclusion—"we are a people—one people"—was totally realistic: "Prosperity weakens us as Jews and wipes out our differences; only pressure drives us back to our own; only hostility stamps us ever again as strangers." Willingly or unwillingly, the Jews remain one: "Affliction binds us together, and, thus united, we suddenly discover our strength." Upon this diagnosis, Herzl wrote his prescription for the Jewish illness, and his remedy is captivating in its simplicity: The new Jews will establish an exemplary society characterized by tolerance and social justice, and they shall not forget "the ways of the world." They shall acquire the same international habits and customs that enable the world to have "English hotels in Egypt and on Swiss mountain tops, Viennese cafés in South Africa, French theaters in Russia, German operas in America, and the world's best Bavarian beer in Paris." The Jews, in short, will finally become true Europeans. They will, for instance, forsake the peddler trades that had so infuriated the anti-Semites. Herzl did not rebel against this anti-Semitic stereotype. Modern European experience proves, he wrote in Der Judenstaat, that through modern marketing techniques and department stores, it would be possible to prevent in the future Jewish state the renewal of the hated Jewish trades. Thus the Jews' own state would rid both Europe and the Jews of their problems. The Jews will be able to occupy all appropriate trades and professions without enraging their threatened Christian rivals. They will settle on the land and cultivate it without incurring the wrath of the Christian farmer, without the envy and antagonism that frustrated all attempts to turn Jews into farmers in Europe. The state of the Jews will therefore be a mini-Switzerland in the heart of the Middle East. It will be, as Herzl titled his famous booklet Der Judenstaat, a state of the Jews, hardly a Jewish state. In Herzl's utopian novel, Altneuland, which depicts an imaginary journey to the new state, as well as in the Zionist writings of Max Nordau, who did not forsake his militant atheism upon his conversion to Zionism, the recurrent theme is the integration of the Jew into Western civilization. Whereas he was barred from entrance to this world through emancipation and tolerance, he will enter it through the new gate: full participation founded not on a personal justice but on a national, sovereign equality. In the political climate of fin de siècle Europe, the renewal of Jewish political independence seemed—certainly to Western Zionists—the embodiment of the spirit of modernity and progress. They understood that anti-Semitism is criminal because, among other evils, it precludes Jews from participating in, and contributing to, a progressive Western society. Their immigration to a territory of their own, in which their national identity combines with a liberal progressive spirit, would remove this obstacle. This analysis throws light on the universal nature of the Herzlian approach: The establishment of a state for the Jews and their emigration out of Europe were compatible with the interests of the family of enlightened nations. The Western world would rid itself of a painful problem and would acquire another civilized offshoot state, which would incorporate its highest values. Zionism is not only a Jewish revolution; it is, to quote Herzl, "simply the peacemaker"; it proclaims peace between Jews and Gentiles, between Judaism and Christianity. It is, of course, easy to deride, with the benefit of hindsight, such simplistic attitudes and to criticize Herzl and many of his colleagues for failing to appreciate the enduring vigor of traditional Jewish civilization and failing to fathom the depths of those ancient roots that nourish anti-Semitism. Indeed, as we shall see, such criticism was leveled at Herzl at the time by other Zionists. Nevertheless, it was this very simplistic attitude—a product of a European non-Jewish environment—that translated into political action the age-old yearning for Zion and that forged an organizational tool destined to save many Jews from persecution and extinction. Herzl's declaration that the Jews are a people, that there is an international benefit in giving them a land of their own, and that Zionism offered a total solution to both Jews and Gentiles was responsible for taking Zionist ideas out of the amateurish circles of the "Lovers of Zion" movement and placing them squarely in the focal center of Jewish and international attention. Without such a simplistic attitude—again, typically non-Jewish—without couching the Jewish problem in universal and international terms, it is doubtful whether a Zionist movement would have been established or whether massive Jewish immigration into Palestine would have replaced the trickle of pious Jews and devoted pioneers that preceded Herzl's initiative. However, Herzl's and Nordau's idea of what "normalization" meant did not pass unchallenged. Herzl's secular, Western concept of the new Jewish society was anathema to many who were unwilling or unable to forsake what they regarded as their Jewish raison d'être. Herzl's most awesome opponent was the Hebrew author Asher Zvi Ginsberg, who, under the pen name Ahad Ha'am, periodically delivered literary broadsides against the Western, Europeanized concept of Jewish nationalism. In a series of vitriolic critiques, Ahad Ha'am demolished Herzl's Altneuland: "Anyone examining this book will find that in their state the Jews have neither renewed nor added anything of their own. Only what they saw fragmented among the enlightened nations of Europe and America, they imitated and put together in their new land." And Ahad Ha'am added sardonically that Herzl denied the Jews even the credit for uniting these fragments into a new whole—even that art was a result of circumstance, not talent. Inasmuch as they founded their state without "the agony of heritage," they were in a position to pick and choose the best from everywhere—because, as Herzl put it, they were especially qualified for this task by their economic and cosmopolitan expertise. This typical clash between Herzl and Ahad Ha'am reflected, to a large extent, the wide divergence between the emancipated Western Jews who entered Zionism via the corridor of frustrated assimilation and the Jewish masses of eastern Europe living under the authoritarian yoke of anti-Semitic regimes. In western Europe, Jews experienced, for a short time, the sweet taste of equal rights; they participated in the seemingly rational and secular new era with an eagerness fed by generations of cultural deprivation. In the East, masses of impoverished Jews lived in the isolation of their crowded Pale of Settlement, subject to perennial persecution and periodic violence. In the West, a great majority of the Jews shook themselves free of the Jewish tradition that had shaped their forefathers' world. They sought to obliterate their former "otherness" and merge into the host societies through secularization, assimilation, reform synagogues, intermarriage, and conversion. The speed with which they acted—within one or two generations they had moved from ghettos to the very heart of European civilization—attested to their urge to cast off the yoke of a tradition that many regarded as irrelevant in the new era of progress and enlightenment. In the East, too, the ghetto walls were beginning to crack. The vast majority of Jews living in Poland, czarist Russia, and Rumania belonged to Yiddish-speaking, Orthodox, and self-contained communities. But there were the Maskilim—the enlightened and secularized men of letters—and there was even some initial Jewish response to a halfhearted czarist attempt at Russification of the Jews. There were the few who broke through the Pale of Settlement into Russian society and acquired "non-Jewish" professions. There was some hope of a better, more progressive Russia, and there was, of course, a growing rebellion among the young against the Jewish Orthodox establishment. The emergence of a new Jewish proletariat and the opening of some secular schools to Jews ushered in a sense of an impending turning point that would bring Russia closer to Western standards. Instead, Russia reverted to a series of pogroms, beginning in 1881 after the assassination of Czar Alexander II, which ended any hope that the czarist regime would emulate the West in granting some measure of equal rights to the Jews. Thus, Eastern Jews witnessed a rejection similar in some respects, yet more brutal and violent, to that which drove Herzl and other Western Jews toward Zionism. In both parts of Europe, the Jewish intelligentsia encountered a double rejection. The traditional, boorish anti-Semitism was compounded and made more horrible by the acquiescence of the intellectuals in the West and the socialist revolutionaries in the East. But in the East, the rejection was inherently different from that which came to be associated with the Dreyfus affair in the West. For the Jewish communities of Russia, Poland, and Rumania—the great bulk of Jews from which Zionism would draw its main strength—emancipation was a distant dream, but Judaism was a present, palpable reality. For the eastern European Zionists, the synagogue was not a vague memory of childhood days but a reality against which they rebelled. Yet, Jewish culture, with its rich tradition of prayers and folklore, was familiar. The Hebrew language did not sound strange and foreign. Many learned it as the language of the new Jews. Yiddish was spoken by almost all. As well as being their ancestral homeland, Eretz Israel (the Land of Israel) was familiar from the Bible, the prayer book, and the fledgling modern Hebrew literature. For the eastern European Zionist, Judaism, as such, could not be glossed over with the benign and patronizing attitude that was the hallmark of emancipated Jews in the West. Judaism itself was an issue. Zionism served—like the Revolution, like the secular-socialist and anti-Zionist Bund—a collective psychological need. It was not merely a corridor through which a higher and more successful integration into European society could be achieved. In eastern Europe, the search for a new meaning or substitute to Jewish life, for new Jewish or secular values was a direct outcome of the absence of all that characterized western European Jewry: legal equality, a reformed version of Judaism, a secular culture whose benefits Jews could experience and whose values they would want to acquire. In the East, the Jews were thrown straight from the claustrophobic existence of the shtetl into the arms of either Zionism or revolution. For young Jews, Zionism filled the gap formed by the revolt against the Orthodox father on the one hand and the disappointment with the Russian revolutionary brother on the other. The constant, painful friction between young Zionists and the strong rabbinical establishment and the tradition it represented contrasted sharply with the distant calm with which the assimilated Jews of France, Germany, Austria-Hungary, and England regarded the religious issue. Indeed, it was this combat with traditional Judaism that gave birth in eastern Europe to both the budding Hebrew secular literature and those wondrous Jewish idealists who gave their lives for the Revolution. It also gave Zionism its special soul. Herzl wanted to solve the plight of the Jews. But, as Ahad Ha'am phrased it, there was also the plight of Judaism, which could no longer be contained within the shackles of traditional religion and which had to find viable alternatives or disappear by attrition. Thus, all the major trends that were destined to influence the State of Israel were born in eastern Europe: socialist Zionism, religious Zionism, the revival of Hebrew, Palestine as a spiritual center. All these, in various ways, sought to give a substantive answer to a question to which Herzl was oblivious. It is this phenomenon that also explains an apparent paradox in Zionist history: The Western Zionists, headed by Herzl, whose Jewish background was so meager, did not find any difficulty in coexisting with the religious Zionists. In progressive Western society, due respect is to be paid to faith. But the religious issue infuriated the eastern European Zionists, who were divided between an observant minority and a rebellious secular majority. Herzl could easily accept the religious demand that the Zionist organization desist from all "cultural work"; by definition, it would put an emphasis on secular value. But for leaders like Chaim Weizmann, a rebel against his own shtetl upbringing, the issue was of crucial importance and reason enough to break with Herzl and to form, at the Second Zionist Congress, his own separate faction. For Herzl, religion had its place; the rabbis were to be respected but confined to their religious sphere, like soldiers to barracks, as is the custom of a modern progressive state. In the East, as Weizmann wrote Herzl, the rejection of religion among the youth reached such proportions that young Jews were venting their anger by desecrating Torah scrolls. In the West, such preposterous behavior could not be contemplated by those who advocated reason and tolerance. That the Jews had a religion of their own was, by itself, compatible with the Zionist wish for normalization. After all, there were national churches in European countries, such as Greece, Rumania, Bulgaria, and Russia; there were the Anglicans and the German Lutherans; and even the universal faiths acquired in many countries a distinct national expression. Moreover, toward the end of the nineteenth century, a tendency developed to view religion as part of that national spirit that allegedly characterizes every people. This new Zeitgeist, this romantic-nationalist view, contrasted sharply with the more universal and rational approaches that had prevailed in the first half of the nineteenth century and had enabled the Jews to acquire their new equality. According to this romantic view, which won many admirers in Germany, every people has its own manifest destiny and its own national "soul," and, consequently, its religion too must express these special attributes. If rational universalism was going to make way for this new brand of nationalism, the Jews could easily claim their own ancient faith as a national asset par excellence. Indeed, years before the advent of Zionism, Moses Hess, the socialist philosopher and onetime collaborator of Marx and Engels, wrote that the existence of their own distinctive religion proved that the Jews were a people entitled to national independence. The existence of this both national and universal religion merely confirmed his view that the Jews were truly the first authentic nation. Thus, in Western Zionists' eyes, the existence of a Jewish faith was not incongruous with the desire of the Jewish people to be a nation like all other nations. Max Nordau, who combined ardent Zionism with fiery atheism, brought this nationalist attitude to its extreme conclusion. Asked about the future of the Sabbath in the Jewish state, he did not exclude its optional replacement by the more universal Sunday, as is the custom of the Gentiles. Ahad Ha'am, who regarded the Jewish Sabbath as the incarnation of the Jewish spirit, was flabbergasted and infuriated by such ideas, and from his Odessa home he directed at Nordau words of fury and scorn:

Not one word escaped the mouth of this Zionist sage which would testify that his heart rebels against the cancellation of the Sabbath, because of its historical and national value. The whole question, in his eyes, is purely religious, and therefore he excludes himself from any direct commitment. He, the freethinker, will have his own appropriate day of rest, bereft of any religious, intent, and he does not care whether the Sabbath, the Queen of Judaism, exists or not.

Ahad Ha'am was convinced that eastern European Zionists, including freethinkers, "will feel, like me, as if a cold northern wind invaded their hearts and threw ice on their most sacred feelings." There were, of course, other voices within Russian Zionism. In typical fashion, some of them carried the Herzlian idea to its extreme, almost fanatical, conclusion. One of these, Jacob Klatzkin, born within the Russian Pale of Settlement and later editor of Die Welt, the official organ of the Zionist organization, railed against the eastern European need for "Jewish content." For Klatzkin, Zionists like Ahad Ha'am represented a galut mentality and would be responsible, if successful, for frustrating the very idea of national renaissance: "It is no accident that Zionism arose in the West and not in the East. Herzl appeared among us not from the national consciousness of a Jew but from a universal human consciousness. Not the Jew but the man in him brought him back to his people." Klatzkin claimed that the basic intention of Zionism was "to deny any conception of Jewish identity based on spiritual criteria." This is the real revolution. This is the world-destroying and world-building movement that is diametrically opposed to the eastern European attitude. That attitude, having "none of the heroism of revelation," viewed Zionism as a continuation of Jewish history and "draws its energies directly from the sources of Judaism." Klatzkin represented an extremist view, both in the way he depicted the clash between East and West and in his denial of any element of continuation between Jewish existence and the future society of new Jews. Ahad Ha'am, too, represented only a faction of Eastern Zionists, among whom there were many ardent followers of the Herzlian view. But the clash between these two dogmatic personalities expressed the emotional upheaval sweeping the Jewish world east of Vienna. It was this world that supplied the future state of Israel with pioneers, settlers, and leaders. From them, its eastern European founders, Israel inherited its habit of continuous soul-searching concerning its identity as successor to that ancient Jewish tradition on which so many of her founders were raised and against which so many rebelled. All the problems that lie heavily on Israel's soul politic—the Jewish nature of Israel, its relations with the Diaspora and the outside world, its attachment to Jewish heritage—are the offspring of that intellectual ferment that characterized eastern European Zionism in its early heyday. The search for new values, for a contemporary gospel expressing the change in Jewish society, which would renew, or even replace, the old, crumbling, irreparable Jewish civilization of yesteryear, did not come from the salons of Western Jewry but from those for whom Zionism was the direct result of their revolt against both the father's home and the rabbi's synagogue. This debate runs through a hundred years of Zionism. When, in the summer of 1996, after the establishment of Netanyahu's government, a meeting of secular academics was convened to speak against the rise of fundamentalist religious Judaism, the speakers reminded the audience that the majority of the deputies in the First Zionist Congress were secular. The hidden cleavage over which Herzl built a diplomatic bridge, did not disappear. On the contrary, it became wider and more menacing. (C) 2000 Holmes & Meier Publishers, Inc. All rights reserved. ISBN: 0-8419-1408-7



Home | Site Index | Site Search | Forums | Archives | Marketplace Quick News | Page One Plus | International | National/N.Y. | Business | Technology | Science | Sports | Weather | Editorial | Op-Ed | Arts | Automobiles | Books | Diversions | Job Market | Real Estate | Travel Help/Feedback | Classifieds | Services | New York Today Copyright 2000 The New York Times Company