Hertzberg - The Zionist idea: a historical analysis and reader

This book is a work of fiction.
Names, characters, places, and incidents either are productsof the authors imagination or are used in a fictional setting. Any resemblance to actual events or locales or persons, living or dead, is entirely coincidental.

Copyright 1997 by Arthur Hertzberg

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Manufactured in the United States of America

Library of Congress Cataloguing-in-Publication Data

The Zionist idea: a historical analysis and reader / edited and with an introduction and biographical notes by Arthur Hertzberg .

p. cm .

Previously published: [1st ed.]. Garden City, N.Y.: Doubleday, 1959 .

Includes bibliographical references .

ISBN 0-8276-0622-2

ISBN-13: 978-0-8276-1231-0 (electronic: e-pub)

ISBN-13: 978-0-8276-1232-7 (electronic: mobi)

1. Zionism History Sources. I. Hertzberg, Arthur .

DS149.Z675 1997

320.54095694dc21 96-49372

The publisher does not have any control over and does not assume any responsibility for author or third-party websites or their content .

For Phyllis, Linda, and Susan

ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS

THE INITIAL IMPULSE for this volume came four years ago from Dr. Emanuel Neumann, in his capacity as head of the Theodor Herzl Foundation. It was his notion that the time had comeindeed, it was long overduefor a presentation of the whole range of Zionist thought in English. Despite his many duties in the intervening years, he has been both a goad and a guide.

In the course of my work I have benefited greatly from the help and advice of the editors for the Herzl PressBen Halpem, Moshe Kohn, and Raphael Pataiand of the editor for DoubledayClement Alexandre. Thanks are due to the Hebrew Union College Library in Cincinnati (Herbert C. Zafren, Administrative Secretary) and to the Zionist Library and Archives in New York City (Mrs. Sylvia Landress, Director) for their co-operation in acting as the major sources of the books I required; to Itzhak Ivry, Murray Silberman, Pearl Silver, and Mrs. Minerva Kraut for technical aid; and to Evelyn Kossoff for her painstaking labors in copy editing the manuscript.

Various friends and colleagues have been generous with their time and special knowledge on specific points or sections of this book, but the list is too long to permit individual acknowledgments. I must, however, add that the responsibility for the entire manuscript, including not only the signed introduction and the choice of the readings, but also the original translations, the biographies, and the annotations, is mine.

It remains to acknowledge larger debts. In the first place, whatever interest I may have in the affairs of the spirit, I learned from my parents, Rabbi and Mrs. Zvi Elimelech Hertzberg. How much I owe to the outlook of my teacher, Dr. Salo Baron, will be evident to the reader not only from the important matters on which I have followed his lead but also even in those questions where my emphases are different. My wifes labors on this manuscript approached collaboration; the dedication of this book to her, and to our daughters, is but a small symbol of what she means to the authors workand to the author.

Arthur Hertzberg

Englewood, New Jersey

INTRODUCTION

ZIONISM EXISTS , and it has had important consequences, but historical theory does not really know what to do with it. Though modem Zionism arose within the milieu of European nationalism in the nineteenth century, the historians of that era usually content themselves with briefly noticing the movement, for the sake of completeness. The root cause of their difficulty (the relatively few members involved and the partial inaccessibility of the source material are quite secondary reasons) is that Zionism cannot be typed, and therefore easily explained, as a normal kind of national risorgimento . To mention only one important difference, all of the other nineteenth-century nationalisms based their struggle for political sovereignty on an already existing national land or language (generally, there were both). Zionism alone proposed to acquire both of these usual preconditions of national identity by the Hah of its nationalist will. It is, therefore, a maverick in the history of modem nationalism, and it simplifies the task of general historians to regard it, at least by implication, as belonging only on the more parochial stage of the inner history of the Jewish community.

For Jewish historians Zionism is,, of course, one of the pre-eminent factsfor most, it. is the crucial issueof Jewish life in the modem age, and it therefore engages their complete attention. Nonetheless, how to place it in some larger frame is still the most debated, and least solved, problem of Jewish historiography. In part, the difficulty stems from the very nature of the Zionist phenomenon. As the historian attempts to assimilate Zionism within his larger understanding of the Jewish past, he is confronted by a movement for which the meaning and validity of that past are a central concern. The earliest forerunners of Zionism, pious rabbis like Alkalai and Kalischer, who insisted on standing within the tradition, had to prove before the bar of the classical religious heritage that self-help was a necessary preamble Pinsker and Herzl, who appeared several decades later to preach the total evacuation of the land of the gentiles, could make their case only by interpreting the whole of postexilic history as an otherwise insoluble struggle with anti-Semitism. Nor was the past less of a problem to the extremist versions of Zionism which crystallized in the early years of the twentieth century. Their program of total revolution, of a complete break with the entire earlier career of the Jew in favor of purely secular national life (let us be like all the gentiles), required the assumption that the eighteen centuries of life in exile had been a barren waste. In sum, therefore, the past was, in two senses, a crucial issue for Zionist theory: on the one hand, history was invoked to legitimize and prove the need for the Zionist revolution; in another dimension, as it followed the pattern of all revolutions in imagining the outlines of its promised land, the mainstream of Zionism sought a usable past, to act as. guideline for the great days to come. The inevitable differences about the meaning of Jewish history thus are the stuff out of which the warring Zionist theories have been fashioned. Precisely because these discussions have been complex, passionate, and often brilliant, the analysts of the career of Zionism have tended to be swept into the debate, so that most have written as partisans of, or in conscious opposition to, one or the other of these Zionist doctrines.

But there is a more fundamental difficulty. From the Jewish perspective messianism, and not nationalism, is the primary element in Zionism. The very name of the movement evoked the dream of an end of days, of an ultimate release from the exile and a coming to rest in the land of Jewrys heroic age. Jewish historians have, therefore, attempted to understand Zionism as part of the career of the age-old messianic impulse in Judaism. Writers too numerous to mention have characterized the modem movement as secular messianism, to indicate at once what is classical in Zionismits eschatological purpose; and what is modernthe necessarily contemporary tools of political effort, colonization, and the definition of Jewry as a nation, thereby laying claim to an inalienable right to self-determination.