Glory and Agony is the first history of the shifting attitudes toward national sacrifice in Hebrew culture over the last century. Its point of departure is Zionism's obsessive preoccupation with its haunting "primal scene" of sacrifice, the near-sacrifice of Isaac, as evidenced in wide-ranging sources from the domains of literature, art, psychology, philosophy, and politics. By placing these sources in conversation with twentieth-century thinking on human sacrifice, violence, and martyrdom, this study draws a complex picture that provides multiple, sometimes contradictory insights into the genesis and gender of national sacrifice.
Extending back over two millennia, this study unearths retellings of biblical and classical narratives of sacrifice, both enacted and aborted, voluntary and violent, male and female—Isaac, Ishmael, Jephthah's daughter, Iphigenia, Jesus. Glory and Agony traces the birth of national sacrifice out of the ruins of religious martyrdom, exposing the sacred underside of Western secularism in Israel as elsewhere.
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Tears! More tears! More grief and heartache! Strike! Burn! Stoke high the fires! Let me too see the pyres and the rivers of blood! Let me share the bliss of all the massacred and slaughtered!
—M. Z. Feierberg, 1899
Motherland! Why do you demand such sacrifices?
—Z. Shatz, 1918
I, however, saw them differently. Not as victims/sacrifices [qorbanot], but rather as conquerors, climbers, like those alpine mountaineers, who with a void gaping at their feet keep marching up, breathing rarefied air.
—Rachel, 1928
The great hour has arrived for the people of Israel—the hour of the war of liberation, suffused with heroism and blood, the bliss of aqedah and the agony of sacrifice, and above all hope sings for the redemption and revival of the dispersed of Israel.
—Passover Haggadah, Na'an, 1949
In spring of 1949, as the Israeli War of Independence was drawing to a close, a surprisingly new Hebrew phrase adorned the Passover Haggadah of Kibbutz Na'an: osher aqedah. This phrase successfully captured the pathos of the moment by joining together the trope of the aqedah, the “Binding of Isaac,” with the noun osher—generally understood to mean ‘happiness’ or ‘bliss.’ For present-day readers, however, this zeugmatic turn of phrase is not easy to digest. In retrospect, the oxymoronic attribution of “bliss” to the classic sacrificial trope, associated for millennia with Jewish devotion to God, persecutions, and martyrdom, seems rather disturbing.
In fact, it was precisely because of such a concern, if not alarm, that this long-forgotten Passover Haggadah was brought to my attention in the first place. Clearly, from the vantage point of the heady “post”-days of the early twenty-first century, such high valorization of death, albeit for a noble cause, is somewhat difficult to take, even for native Israelis who are well aware that in their national ethos Isaac has long become the emblem of fallen warriors.1 All the more so for those familiar with the bitterly sarcastic use of the aqedah in the well-known English antiwar poem “The Parable of the Old Man and the Young.” Penned by the British poet Wilfred Owen (1893–1918) shortly before his death in the trenches of World War I, this poem caustically points a blaming finger at “the Fathers,” embodied here in the figure of the reluctant Abram, who would not “offer the Ram of Pride,” but instead “slew his son, / And half the seed of Europe, one by one.”2
We often forget, however, that this celebrated negative use of the biblical trope was composed at the end of the war, reflecting the hindsight disillusionment that would permeate the pacifist, antiwar literature written after World War I.3 Yet, as Ivan Strenski has recently argued, “the force of this disillusionment with sacrifice can only be appreciated against the background of at least a generation's worth of cultural formations—including a whole literature—extolling sacrifice, which immediately preceded it.”4 Indeed, Strenski's study of the contest over religious and civic sacrifice in France amply documents “a chilling ethic of sacrifice,” based, he argues, on the sacrificial images of the Catholic Eucharist, and replete with happy, “joyful” giving (55) and idealized “bloody sacrifices” (77) “like Christ on the cross, the altar of the world” (55).5 When it comes to French Jews, they have similarly “responded to the call of nationalism,” Strenski contends, enthusiastically “bringing to bear […] the sacrificial past of the ancient Jewish religion” (87). With few exceptions, mostly of the cosmopolitan kind (86), “Abraham's intention to sacrifice Isaac became exemplary for modern French Jews facing the coming war with Germany” (84).6
Ironically, it was left to a Protestant thinker Raoul Allier to creatively reread the biblical Sacrifice of Isaac. Asking why Abraham “hesitated,” he built on this ostensible hesitation a paradigm for a “proper Christian attitude to sacrifice” (92), based on a theology of “a God of life,” a Protestant ethic that denies “war as a divine institution” (91). Although Strenski argues that Allier “embellished the narrative beyond the text-value” (92), he sees in Allier's 1915 sermons on the war “the beginnings of a process of how religiously informed sacrificial public policies are contested” (93–94). This process seems to have filtered from sermons to literary protest, best known perhaps through Henri Barbusse's novel Feu (Under Fire, 1916; ibid., 53) and its poetic counterpart, Owen's 1918 “Parable” on the enacted Sacrifice of Isaac of World War I.
The 1949 kibbutz Passover Haggadah reflects then a climate in which a religiously colored national sacrifice is extolled just as it had been in Europe around the turn of the century. As we shall see, it would take Israeli discourse another decade and another war to follow in Allier's, Barbusse's, Owen's (and others’) footsteps and to begin stripping Israeli national sacrifice of its heroic bliss, turning it instead into an object of filial rage and revolt.
This intriguing process, the transition from glory to agony and then to agon, or ‘the oedipalization of the aqedah’ as I label it, is the subject of Part II of this book. The subject of Part I, on the other hand, is a question that is yet to be asked: When, in fact, did the secularization of the Hebrew aqedah begin, and how did it turn from a narrative of religious overtones into a trope for heroic national sacrifice?
The answer to this question is not self-evident, and not only because of the difficulty of distinguishing the national-secular from the religious in Judaism's special brand of ethnic religion.7 Popular wisdom will probably point to the 1940s, the decade that had to grapple with both the Shoah and the Israeli War of Independence. Historian Anita Shapira, however, has attributed the phrases “the love of sacrifice” and “the joy of aqedah” (sim
at ha'aqedah) to the Zionist forefathers in the early twentieth century, such as Berl Katznelson (1887–1944) and his generation (the Second Aliya [wave of immigration, 1904–1918]).8
Still, a close examination makes clear that these idioms were rather rare in early twentieth-century literary and political writings.9 As I show in this chapter, “the myth of heroism and sacrifice” did dominate the language of the first two aliyot (1882–1918), indeed across the political and generational divisions: from the leadership through the rank and file, on the right and on the left, by European-born pioneers as well as young “natives.”10 The figure of the aqedah was not, however, central to their ethos and rhetoric. “Sacrifice” (qorban)—yes; “martyrs” (harugei malkhut, the legendary “Ten Martyrs” killed by the [Roman] empire), and “Sanctification of the Name” (qiddush hashem)—yes; but aqedah (the Binding of Isaac)—not really.
Given the ubiquity of the aqedah in Israeli cultural and political discourse, this discovery must come as a surprise. The question then is when and why did the rhetorical shift from “qiddush hashem” to “aqedah” occur, and what did it signal for the ethos and psychology of incipient Jewish nationalism?
I probe this shift in the following pages in an attempt to outline its special dynamic and unravel its cultural significance. In particular I explore two fascinating aspects: first, the continuity of Jewish religious martyrological terms within an ostensibly secular socialist Hebrew culture, the very framework of the new national discourse;11 second, the unmistakable mark of a Russian impact. By the latter, I do not mean just the general absorption of the revolutionary ideologies of nineteenth-century Russia (“the love of sacrifice” already pointed out by Anita Shapira),12 but rather a direct semantic transference from the Russian language.
This transference was facilitated, I argue, by a similar (though not identical) semantic problem shared by Russian and Hebrew. As noted in the Introduction, Hebrew uses one word to cover both active (agentic) and passive senses that in most languages are split between two lexical signifiers (sacrifice versus victim). A similar overlap exists in Russian. Thus in both languages the word used for “sacrifice” (qorban in Hebrew; zhertva in Russian) represents polar and almost opposing semantic fields. In both, moreover, there is a double tension, of congruence and contrast, between the religious root of the concept “martyr” and its secular transmutations (as in the concepts “heroism and sacrifice” or “heroic deed” [gevura vehaqrava, alilot gevura in Hebrew and podvig in Russian]).
To complicate matters further, I suggest looking at this tension through the lens of gender. I therefore begin by exploring the gender trouble of one of the heralds of Zionist ideas in the Hebrew Revival literature, the novella Le'an? (Whither?) by M. Z. Feierberg (1875–1899).13 Was it only a coincidence, I wonder, that the tale about “the mad Nachman,” perhaps Zionism's first literary sacrificial victim on the altar of the new ideology, invokes not the aqedah—destined to become the ultimate rhetorical figure of Zionist ethos—but rather the biblical story of female virgin sacrifice—Jephthah's daughter (Jud. 11)?
In what follows I propose that this choice was no accident since no other biblical story so fully represents the tragic tension between active, virile, agency, the embodiment of both heroism and sacrifice-of-the-other (especially of one's progeny), and feminine passivity, the emblem of victimhood and the loss of one's own life.14 It was this tension, I argue, that perfectly served the young Feierberg as a vehicle for addressing the core dilemma of nascent Jewish nationalism—the transition from (feminine?) passivism to (masculine?) activism, from religious heroism of the spirit to the fully embodied heroism of political secular rhetoric.15 As such it will serve as a prelude to my probe, in Chapters 1 and 2, of the various meanings of and attitudes toward the concept of qorban in Palestine from the early days of the twentieth century to the Balfour Declaration (1917), the ensuing establishment of the Jewish Legion in World War I, and its aftermath.
Nachman's “Madness”: Between Jephthah the Warrior and His Martyred Daughter
Le'an? (1899), Feierberg's only novella (published posthumously), is a Zionist proto-text that questions the borderline between religious and national redemptions,16 while also challenging their shared demand for sacrifice. In contrast to the expectations of contemporary critics, however, who somewhat anachronistically interpret the novella in light of the Jewish and Israeli preoccupation with the aqedah,17 the young author chose to imagine the roots of his protagonist's madness through the story of Jephthah's daughter. It seems that the narrator's instincts were right, for no other story in the Hebrew tradition rivals the story of Jephthah in the way it maps the tension between masculine heroism and feminine victimhood over two intersecting conflicts—the generational and the gendered (in contrast to the father-son paradigm, the father-daughter paradigm involves a sex/gender difference as well).
In Feierberg's story, the boy Nachman is pushed by his father, the elderly rabbi, to devote his life to the redemption of this world. Curiously, this project is cast in a military image, “an army man” (ish tzava), rather than in the language of self-sacrifice. Nachman is required to become one of the few chosen ones “who are picked to serve for all the people,” because “more than three thousand years ago God gave us His Torah and made us His soldiers. We are the army of God and of all that is ‘holy’ in this world.”18 The role models for the members of “God's army” are “the Prince Don Isaac Abrabanel and Rabbi Menasshe ben Israel,” claims the father, because “they gave up everything—their lives, their fortunes, their honor—to martyr themselves for God” (ibid., 95; Heb. 55–56).
How come? the reader may ask. Surely it was not martyrdom, nor “dying for God” that these two sages of the Torah, separated by some hundred and fifty years (1437–1508 and 1604–1657, respectively), share, since each of them died a “natural” death. Rather, what they had in common was precisely the dedication of their lives to their people, not only as spiritual leaders but also as practical politicians who greatly furthered the earthly lives of their congregations among the nations. Is Feierberg proposing here—through the voice of the unsuspecting old rabbi—a revision of the traditional concept of qiddush hashem, famously defined as yehareg ve'al ya'avor (one should let oneself be killed rather than transgress)?19 Is this why he created the seemingly impossible combination between two apparently contradictory linguistic figures—“soldiering” and “qiddush hashem,” militarism and martyrdom?
Indeed, this paradoxical amalgamation is reiterated frequently by the father: “Our holy ancestors were true soldiers who shed their blood like water so that God's work will be done” (al qiddush shem shamayim; lit. for the sanctification of the Heavenly Name) (ibid.). If the father is not aware of the inner paradox of his rhetoric, however, Nachman apparently is. He is therefore not convinced. In his view it is precisely the idler Alter (habatlan), the only devout yeshiva student (hamatmid, lit. the perpetual student) who shares with him the deserted beit midrash (house of study), that is really “the model soldier his father wanted him to be” (97; 58). Since Alter is obviously miles away from any economy of (active) sacrificing of life and shedding of blood, no wonder “a bitter smile played over Nachman's lips” (98; 58).
What, however, does Nachman himself want? What is the ideal in whose name he rejects his father's demand that he become a soldier “for his people”? Feierberg does not spell this out directly. We learn about the boy's aspirations only indirectly, in an associative chain listing his emotional reactions. First, refusing his father leads him to “depressing thoughts” that “bring tears to his eyes”—a r...
