Ethan B. Katz - Colonialism and the Jews

COLONIALISM AND THE JEWS

THE MODERN JEWISH EXPERIENCE

Deborah Dash Moore and Marsha L. Rozenblit, editors Paula Hyman, founding coeditor

COLONIALISM AND THE JEWS

Edited by Ethan B. Katz, Lisa Moses Leff, and Maud S. Mandel

Indiana University Press

Bloomington and Indianapolis

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Indiana University Press

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2017 by Indiana University Press

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No part of this book may be reproduced or utilized in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopying and recording, or by any information storage and retrieval system, without permission in writing from the publisher. The Association of American University Presses Resolution on Permissions constitutes the only exception to this prohibition.

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Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

Names: Katz, Ethan, editor. | Leff, Lisa Moses, editor. | Mandel, Maud, 1967 editor.

Title: Colonialism and the Jews / edited by Ethan B. Katz, Lisa Moses Leff, and Maud S. Mandel.

Description: Bloomington and Indianapolis : Indiana University Press, [2017] | Series: The modern Jewish experience | Includes bibliographical references and index.

Identifiers: LCCN 2016035063 (print) | LCCN 2016036190 (ebook) | ISBN 9780253024503 (cloth : alk. paper) | ISBN 9780253024572 (pbk. : alk. paper) | ISBN 9780253024626 (ebook)

Subjects: LCSH: ColoniesHistory. | ColonialismHistory. | JewsHistory. | ZionismHistory.

Classification: LCC JV185 .C625 2017 (print) | LCC JV185 (ebook) | DDC 325/.3089924dc23

LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2016035063

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CONTENTS

Ethan B. Katz, Lisa Moses Leff, and Maud S. Mandel

Colette Zytnicki

Susannah Heschel

Adam Mendelsohn

Frances Malino

Israel Bartal

Ethan B. Katz

Tara Zahra

David Feldman

Daniel Schroeter

Maud S. Mandel

Derek J. Penslar

Joshua Cole

Elizabeth F. Thompson

Derek J. Penslar

ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

THIS VOLUME EMERGED from a rich scholarly conversation begun in November 2012 at the workshop, Jewish History after the Imperial Turn: French and Comparative Perspectives, sponsored by Brown Universitys Program in Judaic Studies. The editors and contributors would like to thank Tracy Miller, department manager of the Program in Judaic Studies, for her integral role in the success of the workshop. In addition, our thanks goes to all workshop participants for their thoughtful feedback and incisive interventions, including Nathaniel Berman, Paris Chronakis, Jonathan Gribetz, Mary Lewis, Richard Parks, Rachel Rojanski, Joshua Schreier, Sarah Abrevaya Stein, and Adam Teller.

The workshop would not have been possible without financial support from key units at Brown, including the Department of History, the Cogut Center for the Humanities, the Office of International Affairs, The Office of the Provost, The Arthur B. and David C. Jacobson Lecture Fund, and the Elga and the K. Stulman Memorial Lecture Fund. Additional support came from the American University Jewish Studies Program, the Salo W. and Jeannette M. Baron Foundation, the Lucius N. Littauer Foundation, and the University of Cincinnati Department of Judaic Studies and Faculty Development Council.

At Indiana University Press, we received immediate and enthusiastic support from Deborah Dash Moore and Marsha Rozenblit, as well as from Dee Mortensen, who steadily shepherded this project through the editorial process and offered important structural and conceptual suggestions that made this a better book. We are also grateful to the two anonymous reviewers for their useful and productive feedback. We would like to thank the Centre de documentation juive contemporaine for providing the photo incorporated into the books cover image as well as Kevin Lewin from Brown University Graphic Services for designing the poster that became the books cover. We owe a special thanks to Derek Penslar and the editors at Taylor and Francis for enabling us to republish his essay Is Zionism a Colonial Movement?

Books of this nature are meant to reflect and spur scholarly conversation. We are grateful to all of the contributing authors for their sustained and stimulating engagement around challenging issues of colonial history and Jewish history over a period of four years.

COLONIALISM AND THE JEWS

INTRODUCTION

ENGAGING COLONIAL HISTORY AND JEWISH HISTORY

Ethan B. Katz, Lisa Moses Leff, and Maud S. Mandel

WHERE ARE JEWS in colonial history? Where is colonialism in Jewish history? In many ways, these unasked questions haunt contemporary Jewish and often world politics. Indeed, in the twenty-first century, the relationship between Jews and colonialism has been present in debates about not only Zionism but JewishMuslim relations, the wider Middle East, the future of European identity, and the aims and roots of American empire. And yet, typically, the subject of Jews and colonialism is hidden in plain sight, more polemicized or avoided than probed, let alone illuminated. If statesmen, activists, and pundits have difficulty addressing colonialism and the Jews, they are not alone. Until recently, scholars have offered little help.

Indeed, despite the recent outpouring of fruitful scholarly attention to modern colonialism, Jewish historians have been surprisingly reticent to explore the complex ways in which Jews interacted with nineteenth- and twentieth-century overseas empires. Prior to the early 2000s, most historians of European Jewry sidestepped the issue or ignored it altogether. Like most of their colleagues in the wider field of European history, many specialists in Jewish history saw nation-states, rather than empires, as the framework within which the great changes that characterized modern Jewish life took place. In addition, scholars of Jewish history were particularly resistant or late coming to many of the methodological developments that proved crucial to the so-called Imperial Turn. These included critiques of positivism and empiricism; attention to metanarrative and the subjectivity of archival sources; and an emphasis on language, reflecting the influence of Foucauldian ideas about the nexus of knowledge and power.

Undoubtedly, the greatest elephant in the room has been Zionism. During the very period in which postcolonial studies emerged, debates raged over the This rendered colonialism a veritable minefield for Jewish studies scholars. From the vantage point of postcolonial studies, Jews and colonialism frequently became reduced to polemics over Zionism, flattening the issue rather than taking account of its nuances.

In fact, the modern Jewish experience connects to the history of colonialism by virtue of a number of its central components: mobility and exchange, diaspora, internationalism, racial discrimination, and Zionism, to name but a few. Little wonder that specialists of Jews in North Africa and the Middle East, by contrast with those of Europe, have always made colonialism part of the stories they told. And yet there, too, early work tended not to interrogate the distinctive roles Jews played in colonial societies, economies, and politics. Rather, scholars often simply celebrated the impact of European colonialism by explicitly or implicitly depicting colonial rule as a harbinger of progress for non-European Jews, whether in the form of emancipation at European hands or Zionist migration to Palestine and then Israel. In this sense, earlier generations of scholars tended to work within the linear narrative of modernization that characterized the field of European Jewish history, in which colonized Jews became increasingly modern by virtue of their contact with Europeans. Such work typically saw colonialisms role in Jewish history and Jews role in colonial history as a gentler one, that is, distinctively benevolent in the scheme of the broader history of European colonialism. Even when these historians revealed a colonial society far more complex than they explicitly recognized, they generally overlooked the ambiguities of colonial Jewish life.