Iranian Jews in Israel

Between Persian Cultural Identity and Israeli Nationalism

Alessandra Cecolin

• Publisher: I.B. Tauris
• Year: 2015
• Print ISBN: 9781784533113
• eBook ISBN: 9780857738417
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Social Sciences
• Subtopic: Middle Eastern History
• Index: Social Sciences

Since the establishment of the State of Israel in May 1948, more than 40, 000 Iranian Jews have moved to Israel, with the last big wave arriving after the Iranian Revolution of 1978/79. As the governments of these two states continue to display animosity towards each other, an examination of the Jews of Iran who now live in Israel provides important insights into the nature of the relationship between these two key countries in the Middle East. Alessandra Cecolin combines a historical approach to the patterns of Iranian Jewish emigration to Israel with a political analysis of Iranian-Israeli relations, exploring how the political and diplomatic interactions between the two have shaped the processes of emigration and integration of Iranian Jewry in Israel. In this book she explores how this community is often caught between a Persian cultural identity and Israeli nationality, and draws out the implications this has both for the community in Israel and for the wider region.

CHAPTER 1

ZIONISM AND THE BIRTH OF ISRAEL

The rise of political Zionist ideology

The turning point in western and central European Jewish history came in the nineteenth century when an industrial and secularised society with a uniform legal system replaced a more traditional medieval organisation.¹ The wave of socio-political modernisation brought several reforms that improved the social status of the Jews: their condition changed between the French Revolution and the restoration of the ancient regime in the early nineteenth century when ideals of freedom, justice and fraternity strongly influenced the formation of nationalism.² Ernest Renan suggested, with regard to the development of these Romantic nationalist beliefs, that the nation was a great achievement for humanity in that it served the common cause of civilisation and guaranteed freedom.³ Georges Bensoussan defined this form of nationalism as a shallow copy of the motives behind humanism, based on the assumption that the first wave of nationalism in Europe was influenced by romantic ideals of fraternity.⁴ At this stage, nationalism was intended as a passionate form of patriotism that exalted humanism, internationalism and freedom. As such, the status of western and central European Jews benefitted from this wave of nationalism, which was based on a humanistic ethic. In the early decades of the nineteenth century Jewish communities experienced rapid progress up the social-economic ladder and began to enjoy a cultural assimilation into the rest of the society. Gabriel Riesser, a German Jewish politician, welcomed this humanism in western Europe: he became the voice for the emancipation of German Jews as well as one of the emblematic proponents of the spiritual marriage between Judaism and German civilisation.⁵

The emancipation and patriotic ideals based on the romantic concept of nation saw the Jews embracing integration within non-Jewish society. This led to radical changes within the structure of Jewish communities. Jews became members of the European common nation but western and central Europe also saw the increasing prevalence of Jews who no longer recognised the traditional Jewish community as a satisfactory framework for their everyday life.⁶ Jewish identity until the nineteenth century was constantly kept alive by the strong community life that often existed within the ghettos but emancipation, combined with a romantic vision of nationalism, liberated them from the ghettoised condition. The Jews were now free to share with the rest of the nation secular values, which were profoundly different from traditional Jewish culture. The social emancipation of the Jews in western and central Europe indeed produced new problems for the leaders of those Jewish communities. The dilemma of Jewish identity emerged because of a potential assimilation into non-Jewish society. If some Jewish intellectuals, such as Moses Mendelssohn, saw emancipation as a chance to reform Judaism, the common reaction among some Jewish leaders was that integration would challenge the essence of Jewishness.⁷ The fragmentation of the community, and the secularisation of Jewish life alongside new habits gained as a result of assimilation, saw an inevitable duality arise in the Jewish identity: the secular citizen of a common nation and a Jew in personal dialogue with him- or herself as individual.⁸ The concern for the future of western European Jewry was centred on how this dichotomy might cause this Jewish community to disintegrate.⁹ Although the future of the Jews of Europe seemed to be threatened by the increasing process of assimilation, especially among those joining the German Jewish enlightenment of the Berlin Haskala’, the optimism brought about through emancipation was swept away by a new wave of anti-Semitic restrictions that were the consequence of patriotism evolving into a conservative nationalism throughout the 1850s.¹⁰ The era of Romantic idealism was being superseded by a more realistic political approach. With the collapse of the goals of the Vienna Congress in 1815 and the fragmentation of Europe into nation-states, a new series of revolutions took place that led to the unification of Germany under the government of Bismarck in 1871. Bismarck's new Germany and other, increasingly aggressive, European nation-states such as France and Austro-Hungary, were embracing a nationalist ideology that fed into suspicion of the ‘other’ and the foreigner: the Jews became the easiest target to attack since they did not have any legal protection. New anti-Semitic attacks such as the notorious blood libel in Damascus in 1840 and the publication of Gobineau's ‘Essai sur l'Inégalité des races humaines’ in 1853 shocked those Jews who believed they had found a solution to the Jewish problem through assimilation and emancipation.¹¹ A general disillusion deepened, and concern about the future of European Jews persuaded intellectual Jews to initiate a discourse about Jewish resettlement in Palestine. It was in this climate of disenchantment regarding the Jewish condition in Europe that Theodor Herzl's political Zionism must be contextualised.

The rise of political Zionism towards the end of the nineteenth century as a Jewish nationalist movement has often been seen as the result of Herzl's diplomatic efforts. However, other scholars viewed Herzl's initiative mainly as the culmination of a Jewish national revival that had been taking place throughout the entire nineteenth century amongst European Jewish intelligentsia.¹² Theodor Herzl's principal contribution to Zionism was to codify its ideals into a political manifesto and organisation that led to the birth of Israel in 1948. In fact, when Herzl founded the Zionist Organisation during the first Zionist Congress held in Basle in 1897, Zionist discourse had already reached its final form, having been already crystallised into a comprehensive political programme and structured movement: political Zionism was clearly a diplomatic attempt to create the necessary political prerequisites for the birth of the State of the Jews in Palestine under the auspices of a cultural programme of Zionists.¹³ Political Zionism was thus the result of the intellectual discourse that arose in both the eastern and western European Jewish community at the end of the nineteenth century.

Both western and eastern European Jewish communities had experienced the failure of integration into non-Jewish society. As such, they developed Zionist visions based on their experiences in European countries. In the history of eastern European Jewry, and in particular Russian Jewry, their social and cultural conditions differed from those in western Europe since they did not experience any form of secular humanism; hence they had never been exposed to integration into eastern European societies. Eastern European Jewry did not develop a positive attitude towards assimilation as a solution to the ‘Jewish Problem’. Indeed the pogroms in Russia in the early 1880s and the strong anti-Semitic policy of the Tsar Alexander III were a shattering blow for those Russian Jews who had hoped for a progressive integration into Russian society.¹⁴ Many Jewish thinkers therefore reacted to the pogroms of the 1880s with a growing disillusionment towards assimilation. In the 1870s, exponents of Jewish cultural nationalism such as Peretz Smolenskin and, later, Moses Leib Lilienblum argued that assimilation would never have solved the problem of European Jewry. Instead they started to develop Zionist theories based on the perennial desire of Jewish people to return to Israel.¹⁵ Leon Pinsker, a Russian Jewish physician, wrote his ‘Auto-Emancipation’ in 1882 as a prompt reaction to the pogroms.¹⁶ Pinsker offered his personal diagnosis of the Jewish problem, advocating auto-emancipation as the solution. Pinsker's innovative analysis stated that ‘Judeophobia’ was a hereditary form of ‘demonpathy’ peculiar to the human race and therefore impossible to eradicate.¹⁷ He believed that no form of civic assimilation would have been able to remove anti-Semitic behaviour from humanity. The only solution to the Jewish problem was, for Pinsker:

The formation of a Jewish nationality, of a people living upon its own soil, the auto-emancipation of the Jews, their emancipation as a nation among nations by the acquisition of the home their own.¹⁸

Leon Pinsker's understanding of Jewish nation is similar to Clifford Geertz's notion of a nation-state. The latter defined a nation-state as being achieved only when the whole nation had become the sovereign of its own territory.¹⁹ Pinsker believed that the formation of a Jewish nation-state in which the Jews governed their own land would finally give human dignity back to the European Jewish diaspora. Pinsker actively worked for the formation of a Jewish national body and the convocation of a ‘Jewish national congress’ that would be responsible for finding a territory that could provide refuge for all European Jews. Pinsker became the leader of the new Hibbat Zion movement in 1884.²⁰ He was one of the first pioneers to try to transform Zionism into a political and structured movement that worked to settle Jews in Palestine and paved the way for figures such as Theodor Herzl. The latter's approach to Zionism came from Pinsker's similar reaction to anti-Semitic mobs in Russia.

Theodor Herzl was a secular Austrian-Hungarian Jew who had successfully assimilated into society. Towards the end of the nineteenth century he began to feel the effects of the virulent anti-Semitic policy fostered by Karl Lueger, the leader of the Christian Social Party. Herzl's first reaction to anti-Semitism remained moderate and, unlike Pinsker, he believed that it could be eradicated from contemporary society. The anti-Semitism and injustice revealed in France by the conviction of Alfred Dreyfus had a radicalising effect on Herzl, who moved towards Zionist beliefs. The Dreyfus affair made Herzl re-evaluate his views on the condition of the Jews in Europe and led him to believe that the problem was intractable, especially given that the Dreyfus affair had taken place in France: ‘home to the principles of equality, freedom and fraternity’.²¹ In 1896 Herzl published a pamphlet called ‘The Jewish State’ in which he arrived at a similar conclusion as had Pinsker in his ‘Auto-Emancipation’ whereby the only solution to European anti-Semitism was to find a territory where Jews could settle and prosper under Western political and civic principles.²² Although from different cultural European backgrounds, both Herzl and Pinsker supported the urgency of creating a Jewish state as the only possible solution to European anti-Semitism. Herzl's innovative approach to the Jewish problem was that it was political: according to him, the ‘Jewish problem’ could only be solved by overt diplomatic action in the international political arena. Herzl's goal was to obtain a charter recognised by the world leadership, granting the Jews sovereignty in a Jewish-owned territory. In order to establish a Jewish state, Herzl concentrated his efforts almost exclusively on diplomatic efforts to gain international recognition for the establishment of a Jewish home in Palestine.²³

Theodor Herzl's political Zionist activity and beliefs, as stated by Simon Dubnov, can be interpreted through the achievements of the First Zionist Congress held in Basle in 1897.²⁴ The First Congress was attended by 200 delegates from the European Jewish diaspora and it institutionalised political Zionism with the formation of the World Zionist Organisation, chaired by Theodor Herzl and begun as an autonomous federation.²⁵ The goal of the First Congress was to: ‘Lay the foundation stone of the house which is to shelter the Jewish nation.’²⁶

The first congress declared the existence of the Jewish nation and the necessity for it to form a Jewish state. The impetus that followed the First Zionist Congress focused on the diplomatic effort of Herzl and the Zionist Organisation to set up a network of offices in European powers, primarily in Great Britain, that would help support the creation of the Jewish state.²⁷ In the summer of 1903, Joseph Chamberlain, Britain's Colonial Secretary, asked Herzl about the possibility of settling the Jews in Uganda, at that time under British control.²⁸ The pragmatism of Herzl and the urgency that he brought to his task of rescuing European Jewry persuaded him to consider this offer. Palestine, however, remained the ultimate objective of Zionism for the majority of political Zionists. Political Zionism's pragmatism differed from any other type of philanthropic or religious Zionism in that it refused to accept any form of religious mysticism and messianic interpretation of the return to the Holy Land. The emancipated European Jews were no longer waiting for messianic redemption in the Holy Land, but instead tried to take action by themselves, in response to persistent European anti-Semitism, through the creation of a modern Jewish state. As such, Herzl's pragmatism aimed to form a national Jewish community that would have been able to claim the rights of a political society through the creation of a state. Political Zionism aimed to construct a political society rather than an ethnic community, in which Jews would have been free to express their Jewish identity. The innovative aspect of political Zionism in the twentieth century was that Zionism was able to create a nationalism based not on imaginary common Jewish roots but on the political contingency of European Jews and the necessity for them to create a Jewish state. The Jewish nation was the product of a political Zionism that attempted to create a category of national citizens eligible to settle in the Jewish state. Although the creation of a nationalist Jewish identity was challenged by different cultural approaches and interpretations of the Jewish identity and Jewish state, political Zionism succeeded in its goal to establish the State of Israel in 1948.

Cultural Zionism: Ahad Ha-Am

Political Zionism was a dynamic movement that perceived the creation of the Jewish state as the only solution to improve the Jewish condition in Europe. However, one repercussion of the drive for this goal was that it subordinated the formation of a Jewish national culture to diplomatic efforts to secure the formation of the Jewish state in Palestine. Even at the beginning of the twentieth century in Europe, when continuous anti-Semitic persecutions seemed to make an immediate solution to the condition of the Jews more urgent, a large portion of Jewish intellectuals seemed to waver about the effectiveness of political Zionism. Among them, Ahad Ha-Am was one of the most prominent Zionist figures to oppose it. According to Joseph Fraenkel, his ‘cultural Zionist’ ideology became a practical alternative to Herzl's Zionism.²⁹ Cultural Zionism succeeded in offering a shelter to those Zionists who did not believe in Herzl's ‘messianism’ and in the immediacy of a Jewish state; hence they believed in the priority of forming a Jewish national consciousness among the European Jewish masses.

Ahad Ha-Am was born as Asher Zvi Ginsberg in Skvira in the Russian Ukraine on 18 August 1856.³⁰ His family belonged to the upper echelons of society in the Jewish community and his education was keenly encouraged, ensuring that he was strictly devoted to religious studies and biblical tradition. Since adolescence he had been considered a celebrated scholar of not only Talmudic literature but also Hasidic traditions and texts. Although his education was based on the pillars of traditional Judaic principles, he later came across Jewish philosophers such as Maimonides and Russian intellectuals who profoundly widened and changed his intellectual horizons. He then started a journey, which was influenced not only by an appreciation of Jewish enlightenment thinkers but also by Russian literature, contemporary philosophy and historical canon.³¹ This was a lonely process not just because he was entirely self-taught but also because he silently developed a criticism of the Jewish tradition and of Hasidism, which were the only forms of culture allowed by his parents, who had supervised his education. Therefore, Ahad Ha-Am formed and developed his Jewish identity through his modernist rejection of the religious tradition that influenced the formulation of his cultural Zionist thought.

A defining moment in Ahad Ha-Am's life came in 1891 when he went to Palestine for the first time and was fully exposed to the activity and the status of the colonies of Hibbat Zion, a proto-Zionist movement that encouraged the settlement in Palestine of Jews and the revival of the Jewish nation at the end of the nineteenth century via practical labour. He documented his experience in Eretz Israel in an article entitled ‘Truth from Eretz Israel’, in which he partly criticised the activities of the Jewish settlers. He understood that it was a land with harsh economic potential that could not easily absorb a mass emigration.³² The...

Table of contents

• Front Cover
• Title Page
• Copyright
• Dedication
• Contents
• Foreword
• Introduction
• 1. Zionism and the Birth of Israel
• 2. Jews: Their History, Education and Social Status
• 3. The Rise of Political Zionism in Iran
• 4. International Factors
• 5. Domestic Factors: The Pull Factors in Making Aliyah in both 1951 and 1979
• 6. Iranian Jewry’s Process of Making Aliyah and their Integration in Israel in 1951 and 1979
• Conclusion
• Glossary
• Notes
• Bibliography
• Back Cover