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The origins of Zionism
Colin Shindler
Introduction
Zionism grew out of the French revolutionary tradition and the Jewish and European enlightenments ā with the Bible as a cultural and historical backdrop. It was a progeny of early nineteenth-century European nationalism ā when nationalism belonged to the left rather than the right. In part, it took as the paradigm the national revolutionary movements that arose in post-Napoleonic Europe which sought their independence from the great empires that were restored after Waterloo. There was a cross-fertilization between movements, spawning an internationalism which appealed to the Jewish sense of universalism. As early as 1792, an international army, fighting for the French revolutionary forces, had defeated the Prussians at Valmy and at Jemappes.
In the 1850s, the Polish national poet Adam Mickiewicz proposed the establishment of a Jewish Legion which would liberate Palestine. The common slogan of these movements, āFor your victory and oursā, symbolized this internationalism and the struggle of small peoples to secure their independence. It was painted on the banner which Soviet dissidents raised in Red Square following the USSRās invasion of Czechoslovakia in 1968.1 This grew out of the first phase of the French Revolution, epitomized by Mirabeau and the Constituent Assembly in 1789. Other Zionists looked to the later radical phase of Robespierre, St Just and Danton. The Jacobin legacy became their guiding light, the rationalist Jewish philosopher Baruch Spinoza their enlightened guide.
In addition, the advent of modernity in the nineteenth century had fragmented Jewish identity. What was the best synthesis of modernity and rationalism and the traditions of the Jewish past? Both in an individual and in a communal sense, Jews occupied different positions along the spectrum of accommodation. Some, in countries such as Hungary, rebuilt the ghetto walls and ignored the revolutionary wind. In Austria and Germany, some initiated a reformed Judaism and others a modern orthodoxy. In liberal England, some converted to Christianity to advance their entry into accepted society. Benjamin Disraeli, remarkably, became British Prime Minister. Despite his membership of the Church of England, he significantly described himself to Queen Victoria as the blank page between the Hebrew Bible and the New Testament. Jewishness, therefore, in nineteenth-century Europe had a different meaning for different people. It was not surprising that, like Jewish identity, Zionism, when it officially emerged under the stewardship of Theodor Herzl in 1897, was never a monolithic entity.
Different Zionisms
Many Zionists on the left believed fervently in Marxism ā and, indeed, some prayed for the arrival of the Red Army in Palestine in the early days of the October revolution. The early Labor Zionists in the decade before the First World War regarded themselves as the Zionist wing of the international revolutionary movement. In 1924, David Ben-Gurion gave a eulogy following the demise of Lenin. By 1945, Hashomer Hatzair, a Marxist Zionist movement, had authorized the translation of Stalinās writings into Hebrew. Indeed, there were concerns on the US Republican right in 1948 that Israel would willingly fall into the Soviet orbit as a Jewish socialist state.
At the other end of the political spectrum, there were nationalist intellectuals such as Abba Achimeir, who idealized Mussolini ā before the advent of fascist Italyās anti-Jewish laws. His weekly column in Doar Hayom was entitled āFrom the Notebook of a Fascistā. Poets such as Uri Zvi Greenberg in Palestine mirrored the ideological swing from left to right of European intellectuals such as Robert Michels in the 1920s. On the other hand, liberal conservatives such as Vladimir Jabotinsky, the founder of the Revisionist Zionist movement, preached the virtues of nineteenth-century romantic nationalism, the Italian Risorgimento and the example of Garibaldi. A radical follower of his, Menachem Begin, believed in the doctrine of military Zionism and revolt against the British presence in Palestine. Avraham Stern disagreed with both Jabotinsky and Begin and looked to the example of Irish republicanism ā he even translated parts of P. S. OāHegartyās The Victory of Sinn Fein into Hebrew. Stern and his followers, known pejoratively as āthe Stern Gangā, followed the approach of the Russian Narodnaya Volya organization, which advocated the assassination of key political and military figures.
Religious Zionists originally did not follow the redemptionist approach of their twenty-first-century successors and elevate messianism to a political level. They concentrated on the more practical aspects of how to live a religious life in Palestine and took little notice of the actual borders of a future Jewish state. Indeed, Hapoel Hamizrachi, the movement of religious labour pioneers, voted for partition of the Land of Israel into two states ā one Jewish, the other Palestinian Arab ā in 1947. Religious Zionists further distinguished themselves from the ultra-orthodox, who believed that Zionism was a heresy. The Zionists, they argued, had intervened, perhaps deflecting divine designs, and forced Godās hand. The messiah would come only when God ordained it and would establish a truly Jewish state.
Zionism therefore has many faces; there are in reality a multitude of Zionist ideologies. Its complexity contrasts with the reductionism propagated in the megaphone war between Israelis and Palestinians over the origins of the conflict. A monochrome depiction of the conflict necessarily either satanizes Zionism or idealizes it.
The failure of emancipation
Jewish religious culture has for millennia believed in the eventual return of the Jews to Zion. Down the centuries, Diaspora Judaism and Jewish communal life emphasized the centrality of Jerusalem and the Land of Israel. In times of adversity, there was a deep desire for deliverance from oppression and a heightening of the sense that the Jews were in exile. Such wishful thinking was translated into a concrete political movement only in the age of rationalism and the nation-state in the nineteenth century. It was, however, buttressed previously by the Protestant Reformation and Cromwellās English Republic, as well as by critical thinkers such as Spinoza, Voltaire, Herder, Mendelssohn, Kant and Rousseau. When the legions of the French Revolution battered down the ghetto walls in many European cities and ended the old order, Jews flooded out to embrace the bright future of emancipation. However, the French Revolution liberated the Jews in keeping with its own internal logic, according to theory and not to the reality in which the Jews found themselves. As Max Nordau commented in his speech to the first Zionist Congress in 1897 a century later:
The philosophy of Rousseau and the encyclopaedists had led to a declaration of human rights. Then with this declaration, the strict logic of men of the Great Revolution deduced Jewish emancipation. They formulated a regular equation: Every man is born with certain rights; the Jews are human beings, consequently the Jews are born to all the rights of man. In this manner the emancipation of the Jews was pronounced, not through a fraternal feeling for the Jews, but because logic demanded it. Popular sentiment rebelled, but the philosophy of the Revolution decreed that principles must be placed higher than sentiments. Allow me an expression which implies no ingratitude. The men of 1792 emancipated us only for the sake of principle.2
Nordauās somewhat sorrowful commentary reflected the end of a century of dashed hopes. The liberation of the Jews was held aloft as a mark of the new liberalism ā opposition to anti-Jewish discrimination was a revolutionary badge of honour. Yet there were conditions. In the Constituent Assembly, Count Stanislaus de Clermont-Tonnerre declared in December 1789:
Everything must be refused to the Jews as a nation; everything must be granted to them as individuals. They must be citizens. It is claimed that they do not wish to be citizens. Let them say so and let them be banished; there cannot be a nation within a nation.3
This approach continued when Robespierre and the Jacobins took power and when Bonaparte crowned himself Emperor of the French. The new France would be mono-national, a nation, free of ethnicity ā Jewish Frenchmen were welcome, but not French Jews. If theory did not accommodate the Jews, it was easier to make the Jews accommodate theory. Many Jews obliged and attempted to project themselves as no different from other members of society. However, by the end of the nineteenth century, even the most assimilated Jew found himself the target of anti-Semitic innuendo. In the British Parliament, Disraeliās Jewish origins were invoked by his opponents. As Lady Palmerston so succinctly observed in 1868: āWe are all dreadfully disgusted at the prospect of having a Jew for our prime minister.ā Dislike of Jews was linked to opposition to British imperialism in the late Victorian era. J. A. Hobson, the well-known economist, argued that the Boer War had been instigated by international Jewish bankers and East End Jews made good, such as Barney Barnato. The non-Jewish Cecil Rhodes became āRhodes-steinā. Neither did it matter that the vast majority of Jews were impoverished; the widespread feeling was that āthe Jews are our misfortuneā. An early Russian Zionist, Moses Leib Lilienblum, commented in 1883 on this all-pervading sense of the Jewish predicament:
The opponents of nationalism see us as uncompromising nationalists, with a nationalist God and a nationalist Torah; the nationalists see us as cosmopolitans, whose homeland is wherever we happen to be well off. Religious gentiles say that we are devoid of any faith, and the freethinkers among them say that we are orthodox and believe in all kinds of nonsense; the liberals say we are conservative and the conservatives call us liberal. Some bureaucrats and writers see us as the root of anarchy, insurrection and revolt, and the anarchists say we are capitalists, the bearers of the biblical civilization, which is, in their view, based on slavery and parasitism. Officialdom accuses us of circumventing the laws of the land ā that is, of course, the laws directed specifically against usā¦Musicians like Richard Wagner charge us with destroying the beauty and purity of music. Even our merits are turned into shortcomings: āFew Jews are murderersā, they say, ābecause Jews are cowards.ā This, however, does not prevent them from accusing us of murdering Christian children.4
The emancipation of the Jews had fragmented Jewish identity, but it had also multiplied the number of anti-Jewish stereotypes in an age of rising judeophobia ā a Jew for all seasons.
The Jews of the Rhineland
The defeat of Napoleon led to attempts in Europe to reverse the emancipatory ethos of the revolution. With Prussia now in control of the Rhineland, Jews were forced out of numerous professions if they maintained their fidelity to Judaism. Many, such as Marxās father, converted to Protestantism to gain access to a professional life and to enter Prussian society. Regardless of the sincerity of the renunciation of their Jewishness, the opprobrium still hovered in the air. In the Rhineland, many Jewish intellectuals, such Heinrich Heine and Ludwig Borne, found themselves floating between identities.
The nation-state characterized the age and the mode of its governance offered several distinct choices. France, for example, took the best part of a century to decide between the autocratic monarchy of the Bourbons, the constitutional monarchy of the House of Orleans, the imperialism of the Bonapartes and the dream of Republicanism. The plight of working people in an age of industrial revolution began to be an issue. All this moved many Jews to embrace socialism as a means of repairing the world and, in so doing, liberating them from an epoch of discrimination. Some saw it as a means of escaping Jewishness into an egalitarian universalism. Such views dovetailed very well with Clermont-Tonnerreās approach to Jewish emancipation.
In his articles on the Jewish question, Marx projected a negative view of Judaism and, by extension, all those who adhered to it. In an anonymous article for the New York Daily Tribune in 1856, he had spoken of āthe freemasonry of the Jews which has existed in all agesā.5 Marxās private remarks on figures such as Ferdinand Lassalle and Edouard Bernstein were marred by anti-Jewish commentary. Significantly, the hostility of both Marx and Engels towards Jews was also directed at Moses Hess, a one-time colleague. Hess had renounced Marxās belief that the actions of humankind could be placed in a scientific framework. As Isaiah Berlin commented:
Hess believed that social equality was desirable because it was just, not because it was inevitable; nor was justice to be identified with whatever was bound, in any case, to emerge from the womb of time. All kinds of bad and irrational conditions had been produced before now, and persisted. Nothing was to be accepted merely because it had occurred ā but solely because it was objectively good.6
Hess, unlike Marx, had been given a traditional Jewish education by his grandfather. In his first book, although then distant from familial roots, he described himself as a follower of Spinoza rather than Hegel. Following the year of revolutions in Europe in 1848, he noted that anti-Semitism was on the rise and concluded that a state of the Jews in Palestine was the socialist solution to the Jewish problem. The reunification of Italy in 1861 catalysed the writing of his well-known book Rome and Jerusalem.
The tsars and the Jews
In Eastern Europe where the Jewish masses were concentrated, the situation of the Jews was far worse and the conditions distinctly primeval. The autocratic rule of the Romanov tsars had been relatively unimpaired by the new ideas circulating in Western Europe in the early nineteenth century. Under Catherine the Great, Russia had embarked on new imperial conquests and had benefited territorially from the successive partitions of Poland. Russia had therefore acquired a large population of traditional, unassimilated, poor Jews. In order to cope with this unwanted mass of humanity, Catherine initiated the ...
