A History of Zionism (75 page)

Opposition to Zionism in Russia before 1917 was by no means limited to Jewish and non-Jewish Socialists. While assimilationist hopes received a blow from which they did not recover as a result of the pogroms, opposition to the Jewish national movement remained wide-spread and vocal in liberal circles, mainly for ideological reasons. But there were also practical objections: Yushakov (to give but one example) argued in 1897 that Palestine was unsafe — the Turks would kill the Jews.
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One of the most interesting spokesmen of spiritual anti-Zionism was Mikhail Gershenson, a Russian emigré to western Europe who developed a highly personal, mystical philosophy of history concerning the destiny of the Jewish people. He was not an enemy of Zionism; on the contrary Zionism touched him; it had, he wrote, a great psychological beauty. But it was based on the nation-state as the only normal form of human existence, a false nineteenth-century European concept. Repudiating the idea of election, Zionism rejected the whole of Jewish history, selling it for a nationalist mess of pottage. Having suffered so much from nationalism, in whose name the greatest crimes had been committed, it was perhaps inevitable that this bloodthirsty Moloch was now asking its due from Israel. Gershenson firmly believed that the Jews were bound to be eternal pilgrims, that their terrible apprenticeship was to continue, ‘for the kingdom of Israel is not of this world’.
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It was a glorious and terrible destiny, not an accident of history but deeply rooted in the national soul. He did not profess to know the purpose and meaning of the trials to which the Jewish people had to submit; these were well beyond human understanding. Gershenson’s theory of suffering was nearer to Slavophilism then to Judaism, but in some respects it also resembled the views of the ultra-orthodox Jews who claimed that Israel was being punished by God for its sins. To the Zionists, needless to say, all this was anathema: if a few assimilated intellectuals wanted to suffer, the overwhelming majority of the Jews wanted to escape oppression and lead a normal life. Again and again the Zionists refused to accept theories about a Jewish spiritual mission in the diaspora at their face value. If intellectuals opposed Zionism this was no doubt because Palestine could not offer them the opportunities which they had in central and western Europe.

When Zionism first appeared on the American scene, the Jewish establishment reacted like their liberal co-religionists in western Europe. It was the ‘momentary inebriation of morbid minds’ (Isaac Wise), a movement arresting the march of progress and tolerance. For rabbis and laymen alike Zionism was a disturber of their peace of mind, an offence to their Americanism, an obstacle to Jewish adjustment in a democratic environment. It revived memories they wished to forget.
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A decade before Herzl published his
Judenstaat
the convention of reform rabbis had declared from their Pittsburgh platform: ‘We consider ourselves no longer a nation but a religious community. And therefore expect neither a return to Palestine … nor the restoration of any of the laws concerning the Jewish state.’ After the first Zionist congress another resolution expressed disapproval of any attempt to establish a Jewish state, which implied a total misunderstanding of Israel’s mission. ‘Ziomania’, as the movement was called by its critics, was thought to be not merely reactionary in character but a menace to Jewish security. As in Germany, feelings ran high and the few early Zionists had a difficult time in the communal organisations. The purge of Zionist sympathisers from the Hebrew Union College was merely one instance of discrimination against them.

Opposition was by no means limited to the middle class and upper class Jewish establishment and its rabbis. Among the masses of recent arrivals from eastern Europe, too, Zionism had little support. In so far as they were interested in politics, they tended to gravitate towards various shades of Socialism. After the Balfour Declaration and the Russian revolution, opposition to Zionism decreased in America as in Europe. When in 1918 David Philipson tried to organise a conference to combat Zionism, some of the leading figures in Jewish life such as Oscar Strauss and Jacob Schiff refused to cooperate. Louis Marshall wrote in his answer that Zionism appealed to the imagination and to poetry and was an affirmative policy.
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The American Jewish Committee in a resolution gave cautious approval to the Balfour Declaration while making it clear that only a part of the Jewish people would settle in Palestine. As for American Jewry, it was axiomatic that they owed unqualified allegiance to their country of which they were an integral part. The Reform rabbis passed another resolution to the effect that Israel was not a nation, Palestine not the homeland of the Jewish people — the whole world was its home.
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Nevertheless, throughout the 1920s and 1930s Zionism gained many new sympathisers. Reform Judaism (in the words of one of its critics) tacitly endorsed synthetic Zionism in 1937 in a resolution intended to supplant the Pittsburgh platform.
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This caused much dismay among diehard anti-Zionists who, at a meeting in Atlantic City in 1942, decided to work out a programme to reactivate their case. While conceding the contribution of ‘Palestinian rehabilitation towards relieving the pressing problem of our distressed people’, it asserted that the political emphasis in the Zionist programme was contrary to ‘our universalistic interpretation of Jewish history and destiny’.
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The case against Zionism was very briefly that (a) as a secularist movement it was incompatible with the religious character of Judaism; (b) as a political movement it was inconsistent with the spiritual emphasis on Judaism; (c) as a nationalist movement it was out of keeping with the universalist character of Judaism; and (d) it was a threat to the welfare of Jews as it confused gentiles in their thinking about Jews and thus imperilled their status. In all essentials these arguments were identical with those formulated by the German liberals forty years earlier, although there were different nuances in approach: for example the radical anti-Zionists always referred to the ‘myth of the Jewish people’, whereas the more moderate elements (such as Rabbi Lazaron) referred on occasion to the Jewish people and its ‘religio-cultural heritage’, implying that Judaism was more than a religion. In 1943 the American Council for Judaism was established and announced in its statement of principles that ‘we oppose the effort to establish a national Jewish state in Palestine or anywhere else as a philosophy of defeatism. … We dissent from all these related doctrines that stress the racialism, the national and the theoretical homelessness of the Jews. We oppose such doctrines as inimical to the welfare of Jews in Palestine, in America, or wherever Jews may dwell.’
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The council had only a few thousand members, but some of them were influential in public life. It continued its activities after the establishment of the state of Israel, and some of its more extreme spokesmen, such as Alfred Lilienthal and Elmer Berger, supported the Arab case against Zionism. There was also opposition of a more moderate kind, expressed in articles published in
The Menorah Journal
, the most prestigious periodical of the period. The American Jewish Labor Committee, under Bundist inspiration, continued to reject political Zionism. Hannah Arendt, writing shortly before the establishment of the state of Israel, declared that Herzl’s concept of the place of the Jews in the world had become even more dangerous than before: ‘The parallels with the Shabtai Zvi episode have become terribly close.’
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There were similar objections in the writings of Solow, Hans Kohn, William Zukerman, Koppel Pinson and others, but the majority of American Jews (90 per cent, according to a Roper poll in 1945), favoured the establishment of a Jewish state without necessarily joining the Zionist movement.

The debate did not end with the establishment of the state. The critics accepted Israel as a
fait accompli
but not without considerable misgivings and reservations. The work of the Zionist politicians had been crowned with success, Ignaz Maybaum wrote, but history was not eternity, and the state of Israel was by no means the safest part of the Jewish diaspora. In the post-Zionist era it was merely part of the diaspora; it was not to be burdened with the Utopian task of ending Jewish life in the diaspora.
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A systematic critique of Zionist ambitions was provided by Rabbi Jacob Petuchovski. It was sheer deception, he wrote, to argue that Israel was or would be the spiritual centre of world Jewry. At best it would be one spiritual centre among several;
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the establishment of the state was not the fulfilment of the millennial aspirations of Judaism. Jewish culture was wider than Israel, and it was not true that only there was a full Jewish life possible. The Jewish tradition, Judaism itself, was shot through with assimilation — the Jewish holidays such as Passover, Shavuot and Succot had been taken over from the Canaanites, the legal concepts embodied in the Mishnah, the Midrash and the Talmud had been borrowed from a non-Jewish environment, and so it had been throughout the ages. There was no reason to assume that Israeli culture would be specifically Jewish in any meaningful sense or superior to Jewish culture elsewhere.

The controversy between Zionists and their liberal critics has continued for a long time and the end is not in sight. The essential arguments on both sides have changed little over the years. The optimistic assumptions of the liberals were not borne out by the turn European history took after the First World War. The reality of the holocaust surpassed by far the direct predictions of the Zionists. But as one anti-Zionist commented after the Second World War, that tragedy was not the result of the lack of a Jewish state. The annihilation could also have happened in Israel had Hitler not been stopped at El Alamein. Twice in their history Jews had suffered a national disaster when they had their own state.
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The liberals’ critique of Zionism was not all wrong. They were on weak ground in stressing Israel’s universal, spiritual mission in the diaspora, but they were right in pointing out that assimilation had made great strides in central and western Europe, and that despite discrimination the majority of Jews in these countries felt rooted in their respective homelands. They had more in common with their non-Jewish compatriots than with east European Jews, let alone those in Morocco or Yemen. They were right in insisting that Zionism, in the given political conditions, had no answer for the masses of east European Jewry. As for the spiritual problems, the quest for identity faced by the Jews of western and central Europe, described in such lurid colours by Nordau, was regarded by the liberals, not altogether wrongly, as unduly pessimistic and overdramatised. True, there were dangerous anomalies, such as the predominant position of Jewish intellectuals in Germany and Austria, but in France and England the situation was different. In certain professions they were fully exposed to the limelight, and were bound to attract particular attention and provoke enmity, but even among the intellectuals the majority were gradually moving into fields such as science or medicine which were much less vulnerable ‘ideologically’ and where ethnic origin did not greatly matter.

Assimilation was a natural process. There was nothing shameful about it, despite the questionable behaviour of individual Jews over-eager to forget their past and to dissociate themselves from their people. It was not the first time in their history that whole communities had become assimilated and disappeared; the fact that assimilation was not likely to function in some countries did not imply that it would not be a success in others. If the majority of Jews of central and western Europe did not feel an inner need for a national existence and a national culture, there was nothing Zionism could do about it. It was not a question of ‘good’ Jews and ‘bad’ Jews, of patriots and renegades. Since a territorial centre had not existed for many centuries, and since the need for one was no longer a generally accepted article of faith, it was up to the individual to make his choice. As the links uniting the Jews had grown so much weaker since the days of the emancipation, it was not a matter for surprise that the great majority in central and western Europe chose to remain in the existing fatherland rather than face the uncertainties of a national home.

This, briefly, is the case that can be made in retrospect for liberalism and assimilation. Despite Nazism and the murder of millions of Jews, it is not easy to refute. It was only a catastrophe of unprecedented extent which enabled Zionism to achieve its aim of a Jewish state. It could not have saved east European Jewry. It had a blueprint for a solution but the conditions for the transfer of millions of Jews simply did not exist. The debate between Zionism and assimilationism is, in a sense, over; few now advocate assimilation as the liberals and the protest rabbis did at the turn of the century. But as the majority of Jews have not chosen to become citizens of the Jewish state the dilemma persists and Zionism has not won the battle. Since a national or even a cultural revival in the diaspora is unlikely, assimilation is bound to take its course in the years to come with or without the benefit of ideological justification.

Zionism and Jewish Orthodoxy

While Zionism was ridiculed from the start by the liberals, it was taken far more seriously by the orthodox, who with some notable exceptions regarded it as their mortal enemy. If the liberals found, however reluctantly, some redeeming features in Zionism, the leading east European rabbis regarded it as an unmitigated disaster, a poisonous weed, more dangerous even than Reform Judaism, hitherto regarded as the main menace.
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A few orthodox rabbis such as Raines gave it their blessing and established a religious faction within the Zionist movement. But orthodoxy in Germany, Hungary and the countries of eastern Europe rallied in order to be able to fight the national movement more effectively. To promote this aim
Agudat Israel
was founded in 1912, uniting leading rabbis and orthodox laymen from various countries. The doctrinal position of the orthodox was complicated, for the Torah stated unequivocally that it was the duty of every faithful believer to settle in the Holy Land (
Mitzvat Yishuv Eretz Israel
). Some of the ultra-orthodox argued that this was merely one out of 248 religious duties which could conceivably clash with others no less important. But this was hardly a tenable position, as other orthodox leaders pointed out. ‘Thou shall not kill’, was also only one out of many obligations, but it was unqualified. How then was opposition to Zionism to be justified?