The unique thing about the manner in which Zionism has sought to usurp Jewish memory has been the way in which its ideological adherents seek to find it everywhere throughout history. Rather than see Zionism as a newly minted historical phenomenon, Zionists have insisted that Zionism was omnipresent throughout Jewish history.
It is this insistence on the transhistorical nature of the Zionist enterprise that has made the study of Jewish history such an incendiary element of modern Jewish life. The following quote is from Yitzhak Baer’s History of the Jews in Christian Spain:
Palestine, with its Temple, pietist movements, and wealth of sacred traditions, had around it, even during that period [the Second Commonwealth], a widely dispersed Diaspora, exhibiting the fundamental characteristics of the Jewish dispersion of a later day – a Diaspora with rights curtailed and living only on limited sufferance, waiting for the Redeemer, defending itself against attackers, and wrestling with a theoretical anti-Semitism which exploited the obvious contradiction between the avowed mission of Israel and his actual state of dependence.
One can see in this citation that the Jewish nationalist historian such as Baer, along with people like Ben Zion Dinur, reads history through the lens of 19th century Romantic Nationalism. The key words in the passage: “Diaspora,” “sufferance,” “attackers,” “anti-Semitism,” “mission” and “dependence,” are all markers of a hermeticism that is central to ethnic nationalism.
Baer’s understanding unfolded the mechanisms of Zionist thought within Jewish history. These ideas have permeated a good deal of Jewish self-understanding at the present moment. Jews see themselves besieged by others - non-Jews, Gentiles - whatever you will call them, who seek to destroy us. Unlike the rabbis who were defending themselves against a real, not imagined, enemy, this revisionist understanding of Jewish history seeks to look in every nook and cranny of Jewish life and find reasons to separate from the world. Again, to quote Baer:
The Judeo-Hellenistic literature, though couched in borrowed forms, was, nevertheless, fully nationalist and religious in content. It differed from the polemic literature of the Middle Ages and of the modern age of enlightenment in that it did not remain on the defensive but set out to destroy paganism, to disseminate Jewish lore among the Gentile nations, and to implant the pure virtues of Israel in the hearts and homes of the depraved pagan masses. It did not seek to disguise the inherent contradiction between the religio-nationalist teachings of Israel and Graeco-Roman culture.
The profundity of this quote masks a number of central problems that must be articulated at the very beginning of our discussion:
The New History
Zionist historiography has thus created an ideological continuum between past and present. Present dilemmas are “read” through the lens of the ancient paradigms as articulated by the Zionist historiographers. This manner of reading leads to the generation of typologies that function as transhistorical markers of Jewish history. It was only a matter of time until Israeli historians began to question these paradigms and refocus their attention on the salient elements of Zionist history – bereft of the historical allegories that have infected Zionist historiography of the ancient Jews.
Thus, the history of the modern state of Israel and its Zionist foundations have come under harsh scrutiny by a number of historians that have examined many of the continuities that Zionism has proposed for the study of Jewish history. These historians have centered their research around the articulation of a number of myths that Zionism has propounded. In the formulation of Simha Flapan, these myths are:
There has been, over the past decade and a half, a relentless attack on the assertions that have enveloped Zionist discourse since 1948. Historians, many of who were trained outside the Israeli academic system, have examined, fact by fact, the history of Zionism and have published iconoclastic works that have given us a new and very different picture of the Jewish state – a picture that has characterized Zionism, in the formulation of Benedict Anderson, as an “imagined community.”
This picture of Israel seeks to include stories that have traditionally been outside the purview of “official” Zionist discourse: Stories of Palestinian dispossession and massacre; stories of the rejection of Holocaust survivors as a crucial part in the psychological underpinning of the state; stories of Arab Jews who lost their standing in their lands of birth after the “founding” of the state; and stories of Zionist figures who sought to compromise with the Arabs and share the land.
By and large, these books had a very limited impact on Western Jews and little or no audience in Israel. The books did, however, make considerable inroads into the scholarly communities both here and in Israel where a reassessment took place that began to look at the issues of 1948 and after anew. These reassessments, some two decades later, though still not part of the common pool of knowledge of Western and Israeli Jews, have found their way into schoolbooks of Israeli children. These textbooks have begun to retrace the arc of Jewish history and radically remap the Jewish trajectory.
Yoram Hazony: Zionist Counter-Attacker
When news of this curricular reform was made known, a young and well-connected Israeli named Yoram Hazony wrote a series of articles attacking the reforms. In an essay in the New Republic called “Antisocial Texts: Who Removed Zionism From Israeli Textbooks?” he writes:
Beginning in 1991, these committees were commissioned to review and revise what Israeli children learned in classes on Zionist and Israeli history, Jewish history, literature, Jewish studies, civics and archaeology – in short, nearly every subject that in some way touches on Israel’s identity. And, while these committees were by no means uniform in their recommendations, their general direction was clear: The old curriculum – last updated during the 1970’s, when the Zionist historical narrative had not yet been seriously challenged – was deemed detached from reality.
In his recent book The Jewish State: The Struggle for Israel’s Soul (New Republic/Basic Books, 2000), Hazony elaborates on the historical basis by which this shocking turn of events has taken place. In a clear and lucid fashion, Hazony, though wont to exaggerate and hyperbolize, by and large provides a cogent account of the movement that has taken place in the Israeli academies that has served to rewrite Jewish history on a more scientific basis than through the haze of Zionist mythology.
Hazony relentlessly repeats the fact that “Israel is a country that concerns itself with war and party politics – tachles, as the Israelis like to say, ‘the bottom line,’ ‘the action-item’ and the doing of the literati, despite their nightly appearance on talk shows, had long been regarded as irrelevant.” It is Hazony’s express purpose to examine in detail what has led to a breakdown in the Zionist orthodoxy through an analysis of the intellectuals in Israel. What he calls the Post-Zionist breakdown has led to the sins of revisionist history, the Oslo accords, the de-Judaization of the state and the general malaise of Israel’s state culture.
To tell this story, Hazony utilizes a multi-pronged strategy: He examines the literary and cultural figures of modern-day Israel, figures such as Meir Shalev and Amos Oz; he goes back to carefully re-read Herzl’s Der Judenstaat; he provides a generous and expansive overview of the first stages of the Zionist movement in Europe; and finally enters into the halls of the Hebrew University where he finds and indicts the master of all that is wrong with the culture of today’s Israel – Martin Buber.
The tale Hazony tells is a fascinating one and one that is not well known outside the small circle of academics that study these texts. And while, as I have said, he frequently indulges in caricature and stereotyping of the views and ideas of people like Buber and his contingent, there is a strong foundation for the what he says – that he seems to get it wrong each and every time is something that I will discuss presently.
The current cultural scene in Israel has been informed by the views of people like Yeshayahu Leibowitz, Meron Benvenisti and Tom Segev. These disparate writers and thinkers have broken a number of central taboos that have permitted an orthodox Zionist culture to function in Israel.
Hazony discusses the cultural scene that has grown out of these writers and a number of others who have had the courage to examine Israel’s past with a critical eye. In his discussion he collects a dossier of evidence that tries to show his reader that Israel is now under siege. The intellectuals, according to Hazony, have not only abandoned the founding principles of the state, but have lost their sense of all that is noble about the Zionist cause.
A good case in point is the well-known Israeli novelist David Grossman:
For Grossman it is not military and political power that will defeat evil in this world. On the contrary, Jewish children who grow up desperately wishing to defend their people using worldly power are on the fast track to becoming Nazis. Genuine resistance cannot, therefore, be based on the pursuit of power. Instead the road of victory belongs to Anshel Wasserman [a character in Grossman’s novel See Under: Love], who will not touch a knife or a gun even to dispose of his own daughter’s murderer – which is to say that victory begins with the insistence on Jewish powerlessness.
Hazony thus establishes in his analysis that there is a bedrock principle (the need of Jews to develop the military power necessary to defeat their enemies – a cardinal rule of Zionistic belief) that is violated by Grossman’s characterizations in his novels. And Hazony here is indeed correct; Grossman does seek to engage the rhetoric of triumphalism, of revenge and of power and decode its rhetorical aspect. Hazony, however, neglects to penetrate Grossman’s critique.
Grossman, as is the case with many writers who share his views, has been raised under the banner of triumphalist Zionism. He has seen the rhetorical posturing of Zionist discourse vis-a-vis the Holocaust and its tragedy. While seeking to adopt the tragedy of the Holocaust as the primary raison d’etre of the need for a Jewish state, Zionists were not always so welcoming to the actual physical after-effects of that tragedy – the survivors themselves. In Tom Segev’s words:
At the same time, the yishuv made it clear that the survivors were not ideal “human material.” One of the envoys warned that the 5,000 Jews of the type he had met in Europe would turn Palestine into “one big madhouse.” There were those who said that the survivors were liable to “poison” Zionism, democracy and progress and to obliterate the country’s socialist foundation, until it became, as Meir Yaari said while the Holocaust was still in progress, “one big Tel Aviv.”
By thus contextualizing Grossman’s views within the historical record, we see that there is a rationale for his position that was not present in Hazony’s portrayal. After reading the actual historical record of the Zionist relationship to the survivors – something that is common knowledge in Israeli culture – Grossman in effect seeks to reread the record through his creativity as a writer of stories. In his masterpiece See Under: Love he does turn the tables on the Zionists and their heroic myth of being the representatives of Holocaust survivors.
In addition, Grossman seeks to examine the ideological and philosophical underpinnings of the Zionist myth of Jewish “Protector.” What is found within the Zionist ethos, an ethos built around the character of its violent temperament, is an aggressiveness constantly said to be purely at the service of defending Jews. There is a strong linkage between this violence and a sense of powerlessness. The dichotomy of violence and victimization is a key element in the Israeli culture that is rarely examined.
Grossman looks deeply into the manifestations of this passive/aggressive dialectic in the historical record. His works of fiction thus serve to complement the historical work of those like Segev and Idith Zertal who have smashed the pretense of Zionist mythology. He thus not only demolishes the actual misperceptions created in the Zionist tradition, but he seeks to reverse the cultural preconditions that enable those “invented” traditions to function.
The Zionist “Constitution”
After this extensive analysis of the current cultural scene in Israel, Hazony goes on to assess the political ramifications of the culture wars. In one of the most enlightening portions of The Jewish State, Hazony spends some 30 pages or so trying to look at the evolution of Law and constitutional jurisprudence in Israel as it has been impacted by the Post-Zionists.
One must keep in mind at the outset that Israel, though it has a Declaration of Independence (conveniently printed as an appendix to the Hazony book), has no formal constitution. Israel’s juridical code is a mélange of British colonial law, Western jurisprudence and smatterings of Jewish ideas. The Israeli jurist is faced with a rather daunting task, a task that has begun to devolve into what Hazony correctly identifies as Post-Zionism.
With this in mind, our understanding of Hazony should begin with his attack on the Basic Laws passed by the Knesset in 1992:
The new constitutional legislation challenged Israel’s continued existence as a constitutionally Jewish state on two fronts. The first and lesser difficulty is that although both laws declare themselves, in their preambles, to have been legislated “to establish … the values of the state of Israel as a Jewish and democratic state,” the fact is that the rights enumerated in them are concerned exclusively with protecting universal values such as freedom of speech, privacy and so on. That is, neither law addresses the possibility that the Jewish state may have the right or the duty to enact specialized, non-universal provisions in some of these areas.
The Israeli legislators have deeply understood that for Israel to develop the values and ideals so beloved by the Western nation-state, democracy and freedom, they cannot continue the charade of Jewish ethnic particularity.
The paradox that has stood at the heart of statist Zionism for the past century has been that of Jewish particularism manifested within a universally conceptualized political apparatus. In juridical terms it is quite difficult to continue to speak in terms of democratic principles when, as Hazony says, a Jewish state should “have the right to enact specialized, non-universal provisions in some of these areas,” a euphemistic formulation which translates into discrimination in a purely democratic context.
Israeli jurists have had to deal with the very real dilemmas inherent in this paradox. They do not have the luxury, as Hazony and others do, to pontificate on the specifically Jewish aims and needs of Zionism – they must create a judicial system based on very specific legal principles. Those principles cannot, in effect, be those of the Jewish heritage, as the authority in which Jewish Halakhah is vested is of another order entirely. In the words of Jose Faur:
Jewish law is the result of a bilateral covenant contracted between God and the Jewish people at the foot of Mount Sinai. According to rabbinic tradition, the covenant contains six hundred and thirteen mizvot or “articles” regulating all of Jewish life. The covenant is both “divine” and “eternal.” Since it is “divine,” it requires no promulgation. It binds the contracting parties at all times and in all societies. This principle is known as torah min hashamayyim expressing the tenet that the “Law is divine.” Rather than a theological doctrine, this is a fundamental legal principle postulating that the law requires no promulgation or earthly authority to sanction it.
Such a characterization of the Jewish Halakhah significantly pertains to the issues inherent in trying to create a modern, democratic nation-state. The question here is how the Jewish Halakhah, the cornerstone of the Sinaitic Covenant, is to function within a liberal framework. Can Halakhah be imposed from within a democratic framework or must the particularisms of the Jewish religion be kept outside the specific framework of the state as Leibowitz has insisted?
Such issues of constitutionalism when translated into the fabric of the modern nation-state are quite thorny when it comes to the concept of authority that we have mentioned. The current model of state law in Israel, as Hazony rightly points out, is based on the Rousseauvian “social-contract” theory. As he presents it:
According to Rousseau, the state owes its existence and legitimacy to its being the result of a contract among all individuals living in a particular territory. These individuals submit to “the total alienation of each associate with all his rights, to the whole community,” renouncing their peculiar advantages and claims and establishing in their place a corporate entity equally responsible for all.
This social-contract theory should sound familiar, as it is the primary basis upon which American democracy is built. But, according to Hazony’s argument, where he presents Herzl’s conception of a Jewish State, the social-contract theory is the one that effectively destroyed corporate Jewish existence in Western Europe and led to the greatest crisis in Jewish identity that we have seen in our history.
Some historical background is in order: The French emancipation, in the wake of Napoleon’s convening of a Jewish “Sanhedrin” to represent Jewish interests in the newly formed French state, provided the Jewish people with citizenship into the French state on condition that they renounce their ethnic particularity, the sense of that bilateral covenant mentioned by Jose Faur earlier.
Jews indeed found ways to abandon Judaism and enter into the Gentile stream of history. It was this transformation that so worried Herzl. Herzl, like many “emancipated” European Jews, was shocked at the discovery, during the Dreyfus trial, a trial that exposed the latent contradictions and bad faith of the social-contract system, that Jews had been hoodwinked and had not achieved what was promised to them by the French and other so-called democratic governments in Europe.
Herzl’s analysis of the Jewish Question has been seen as presaging the Holocaust and in Hazony’s view is more than prescient; it should be, in his view, the primary substrate of Jewish existence at present.
Herzl sought to explain the state in a different manner than Rousseau. In Herzl’s view:
A state is not formed by an area of land, but by a number of men united under one sovereignty. The people is the subjective, the land is the objective basis of a state, and of these two the subjective is the more important.
In Hazony’s analysis:
As opposed to the social contract, which presumes the assent of all men, to the government that rules them – an assent that is in fact never given and is nothing but a fiction – Herzl argues that sovereignty actually comes into being within the consciousness of individuals, and ultimately groups, that have subjectively committed themselves to the cause of a nation.
It is my contention that one must grasp this idea in all of its complexity and depth in order to understand the Zionist mindset and its relationship both to the modern nation-state as well as to Judaism. The statement from Herzl conjures up two diametrically opposed images: That of America and that of Germany.
Indeed, the citation reeks of anti-Americanism inasmuch as it rejects the idea that a commonality of interests by disparate racial, religious and ethnic groups is possible. And while there is ample evidence for the failure of Americans to live up to their own constitutional principles, most egregiously in the cases of the Native Americans and the African slaves, the Founding Fathers set into place the legal mechanisms that would eventually lead to massive gains in the civil rights and protections of all American citizens. Jefferson, Lincoln and Franklin Roosevelt, beloved by Americans of all persuasions, sought to read the Constitution back into the prosaic (and sometimes brutal) facts of American life.
On the other hand, Herzl’s view is all-too-reminiscent of the totalitarian ethnic national socialism of Germany. The German concept of state, with its reliance on the Romantic geist, spirit, of the Teutonic tradition, an idea that led to the Holocaust, confused social progress with the limited concept of the ethnic nation. In the words of Ze’ev Sternhell:
The uniqueness of European nationalist socialism, whose origins can be traced to the pre-Marxist socialism of Proudhon, in relation to all other types of socialism, lay in one essential point: its acceptance of the nation’s primacy and its subjection of the values of socialism to the service of nation. In this way, socialism lost its universal significance and became an essential tool in the process of building the nation-state.
This idea of ethnic identification with the concept of state is primary to Herzl’s argument. In arguing his case for a Jewish state, Herzl serves to recapitulate the arguments made by European racists against Jews. As the Jews cannot be integrated into the European nation-state, the argument goes, so they must have a racially segregated state of their own.
Thus, the idea of the Jewish state develops within the bubbling cauldron of anti-Semitism.
This paradox has engaged many Israeli scholars and rightly so. The very need for a Jewish state emerges when European democracy is transformed into a maelstrom of ethnic particularism(s) that form the template for the “Final Solution.” Zionism responds to anti-Semitism with a racialism of its own.
This racialist template must be seen as a fulfillment of the chimeras created by the uneven application of Rousseau’s social-contract theory. In Rousseau’s theory, the citizens of the state must be united by a common interest. As interpreted by French political law, this means that all ethnic allegiances must be removed if one is to be a citizen, thus eliminating the citizen’s freedom of religion and expression. This, as Herzl correctly pointed out, created a mere illusion of civic equality. Behind the illusion was the concept of the White Christian that has so haunted European culture.
In Herzl’s view, there would have to be a match for this sense of Christian hegemony. His idea of the Jewish state is thus meant to mimic the forms of the ethnic Christian European state, a model of state which, as all would agree, led to the catastrophes of the Holocaust.
I do not wish to exonerate European statism from what it has done. But neither do I wish to judge jurists and legislators in the modern state of Israel as guilty, as Hazony has done, in their rejection of the ethnocentric values that have formed the basis of Herzlian Zionism. That the model of state Rousseau articulated can function in a democratic way has been proven by the American success. The failure of the ethnocentric nation-state in Europe should have been a lesson for the Jewish nationalists; rather, it formed the basis of the state created in 1948.
A Colonial Interlude
It is crucial to note that Herzl began his quest for a Jewish state without an organized army. Herzl utilized diplomatic means to realize his dream of a Jewish state. In the world of fin-de-siecle Western Europe that Herzl lived in, the key players were involved in the “Great Game” which led to the formation of empires throughout the non-Western world.
Herzl saw the Imperial system as central to his vision. The ability to piggyback on the backs of the colonialists was a worthwhile thing in Herzl’s own estimation:
Herzl had long been toying with the idea of establishing Jewish colonies on the periphery of the lands still firmly under Ottoman control as a prelude to the Jewish entry into Palestine proper. As early as fall 1899, he had considered the possibility of locating such a settlement on Cyprus, which was then under British control (“We would rally on Cyprus, and one day go over to Eretz Israel and take it by force, as it was taken from us long ago”). And in the summer of 1900, he had orchestrated a high-profile Zionist congress in London, followed by an effort to obtain statements of support from candidates running for Parliament that year…
Herzl saw Imperialism as a valid means to secure his vision. And in this he was not totally incorrect. In order to defeat the Arabs in Palestine, the Zionists sought out the help of the Imperial powers. In the region Israel would forever be linked to the hated Imperialists. In the words of George Antonius in The Arab Awakening:
The significance of Palestine in the Imperial scheme had become much clearer as the War proceeded… now that France was claiming Syria as her preserve and had given her allies unmistakably to understand that Palestine was included in her claim, it became imperative for Great Britain, from the point of view of safety if from no other, to impose a buffer between her position on the Suez Canal and the future French position in Syria… Hence the Balfour Declaration. It prepared the ground for the claim which was afterwards to be preferred, in the fullness of victory, that, since England had given a solemn undertaking to the Zionists in regard to a national home in Palestine, it was only fitting that the task of governing Palestine for the fulfillment of that undertaking be assumed by England…
The machinations inherent in the Imperialist project became central to Zionist aspirations. So while it would be incorrect to say that the Zionists were themselves Imperialists, indeed, they had no country of their own in order to go out and colonize another, they did conspire with the Great Powers to find a means to make some colonial hay.
The arguments that then surface regarding the famous Passfield White Paper (1930) that limited Jewish immigration at a time when Hitler’s rise to power was in the offing, are from this standpoint fairly irrelevant. The Zionists played the Great Game and found that a person’s “word” was little more than hot air. The failing of Zionism is that it believed in the Great Game and believed as well that it could attain its goals by means of the Imperialist project. Imperialism served Zionism in its short-term goals, but destabilized it in the long run.
From working through Imperialist mechanisms to the ideological marginalization of the native Arab population of Palestine is but a short step. As Herzl and Weizmann crisscrossed through the European capitals, it never really occurred to them that there were others already living on the land (native Palestinian and Sephardic Jews as well were ignored by the Zionists who saw only their own community of Ashkenazic Jews as formative in the creation of the Jewish state). This multiple blindness has served to destabilize the state even as we speak. The current generation of disenchanted Post-Zionists must deal with the reality of these angry Palestinians and Sephardim and not with pleasant memories of Lloyd-George and Orde Wingate.
Hazony and Buber: The Demonic Tango
Yoram Hazony has set up a straw man to counter Herzl. In point of fact, his use of Martin Buber is a brilliant stroke that dramatizes what is at stake in the argument. As is known, Martin Buber, the German Jewish philosopher and scholar of religions, was a pacifist and promoted the idea, as did many of his students, of a bi-national state of Palestine for both Jews and Arabs.
Hazony, who has already put into place the Herzlian idea of state, an idea that is blatantly ethnocentric, which serves to function for Jews who are the only “community” that can be serviced by such a state, sees Buber as the architect of a Zionism that, in its acceptance of pluralism, is in defiance of the strictly “Jewish” nature of the state.
Hazony traces Buber’s disaffection with Herzl through his personal falling out with the man as well as from the anti-Herzlian Zionist ideas that animated his own personal philosophy. In this regard, it is significant to note that Buber sees the future Jewish political entity in the following manner:
For me, just as the state in general is not the determining goal of mankind, so the “Jewish state” is not the determining goal for the Jews. And the “viable ethnic group’s need for power” … is completely foreign to me. I have seen and heard too much of the results of empty needs for power. Our argument … does not concern the Jewish state, that, yes, would it be founded today would be built upon the same principles as any other modern state. It does not concern the addition of one more trifling power structure. It does, however, concern the settlement in Palestine, which, independent of “international politics,” can effect the inner consolidation of the energies of the Jewish people and thereby the realization of Judaism… This, then, is what I mean by Palestine – not a state, but only the ancient soil which bears the promised security and hallowed permanence…
Buber seeks to engage the classic messianism that is encountered in the traditional sources of Judaism. Understanding that Jewish tradition maintains its notion of exclusivity through the Covenant, Buber looks at Zion as a means to fulfill our comprehensive role as Jews in the creative and religious sense(s). His Zionism, religious in orientation, is thus inclusive of non-Jews. Buber’s views are therefore germane to an Israel that is seeking to solidify its relationship with all of its inhabitants rather than remaining a state that can only be responsive to the needs of a single group.
The strategy presented by Herzl, and agreed upon by Hazony, is one that merges Judaism with the ethnic model of state emerging in Hegelian thought. In a deeply penetrating study called “Hegel’s Zionism” Jonathan Boyarin states:
My claim is that Zionism, more than the atavistic or restorative movement toward an ancient vision or the revolutionary irruption into history of a messianic promise, represents an altogether modern, “Hegelian” attempt to fix, eternally, Jewish identity by grounding in territory. There is a much more than superficial link between Hegel’s desire to allow the Germanic peoples to be “at home” in history and the literalized Zionist rhetoric of enabling the Jews to be “at home” on the globe, once modernity had stripped them of their “portable homeland” of memory.
The point Boyarin is making comes at a time when Jews have lost all sense of their cultural memory. As Yosef Yerushalmi has said in his Zakhor: Jewish History and Jewish Memory: “I live within the ironic awareness that the very mode in which I delve into the Jewish past represents a decisive break with that past.”
Zionism is thus the attempt to resolve the crisis in Jewish modernity by literalizing the messianic promises (thus offending the sensibilities of religious fundamentalists such as Neturei Karta who still reject the state of Israel) and breaking off the universalizing and humanistic aspects of the Jewish heritage – all in the name of Jewish “welfare.” This resolution takes a shortcut through the fields of memory and concretizes the very poetics that have given Jewish memory its elasticity and adaptability.
It is therefore Hazony’s major claim that the resurgence of Post-Zionism is a product of Buber’s humanistic reading of the Jewish past. The movements that have given us a new understanding of Zionism are all, in Hazony’s view, extensions of the principles articulated by German Jewish intellectuals such as Buber, Ernst Simon, Albert Einstein and Gershom Scholem, among others, all of whom sought to create an ethnically pluralistic state that withdrew the Jewish principle as the sole means for promoting Jewish survival.
But the German Jewish thinkers all tried to promote a Jewish revivalism that would take into account the rich tapestry that was woven into Jewish life over the many centuries of its existence, in the Diaspora and in the state of Israel. It is this insistence on maintaining the vast richness and complexity of the Jewish experience, in its wide-ranging breadth, which lends coherence to these ideas. The reduction of the Jewish experience, as is evidenced by the Zionist ideology of Herzl and Ben-Gurion, has led to a great impasse not only in the functioning of Jewish memory, but in the many political crises that have enveloped the Jewish state since 1948.
Hazony’s Big Gamble: Ben-Gurion and his Enemies
Yoram Hazony has written a passionate defense of Zionism from the standpoint of one of its last adherents in the academy. He has presented a case for Herzl and Herzl’s heir David Ben-Gurion, the bete noir of the Post-Zionists.
From a purely pragmatic point of view, David Ben-Gurion, the Father of the Jewish State from 1948 to his death in 1973, was the sort of figure that you either love or hate. Larger than life, Ben-Gurion saw himself as the sole head of a state that was meant to function as the singular means to ensure Jewish survival. Ben-Gurion’s own self-aggrandizement, which has deeply impacted the sense of animosity and vitriol regarding the manner in which Post-Zionism has been formulated by its partisans, ratcheted up the stakes in this contest of wills in Zionist history.
Many readers are startled by this fact of Ben-Gurion when they first begin to be exposed to the ideas being debated. While many are aware of Herzl and Weizmann, the great political architects of the Jewish state, and know Rabin and Dayan as the great military giants of Israeli politics, very few really know David Ben-Gurion. Some background is in order. As Tom Segev has said:
David Ben-Gurion, of course, bore the ultimate responsibility for the system’s continuity and stability and symbolized them as well. By 1949, the man with the shock of white hair, a native of Plonsk, Poland, was 63 years old, with many years of politics behind him. His leadership and political power reflected his abilities and his courage in making decisions. Those around him tended to treat him as the source of all authority, the man who creates precedents and epitomizes values; some even saw him as the personification of history.
So towering a figure was Ben-Gurion (nicknamed the “Old Man”) that even when he was out of political office, there was a constant phalanx of people that would visit him on his farm in Sdeh Boker to get advice on current problems facing the Israeli government.
There is thus no figure in Israel who matches up to Ben-Gurion in terms of stature and influence.
In dealing with Israel one must somehow come to understand who Ben-Gurion was and what he accomplished. Hazony puts it this way:
From the time David Ben-Gurion came to Palestine at the age of twenty, he regarded himself as personally responsible for the fate of the Jewish people… And it was this relationship of guardianship that was in evidence at every moment of Ben-Gurion’s nearly fifteen years at the head of the Jewish state itself. As he described it in a letter to Shmuel Sambursky of the Hebrew University: “To some extent, [security] is the most important problem, but – this is at any rate what I feel – it does not conceal from my eyes and blur in my consciousness the importance of other problems and needs, because I experience every day, not just all the problems of the state, but the main problems of the whole of the Jewish people.”
The sheer hubris and arrogance of Ben-Gurion is brought out nicely by these words. We will examine below the notion of Zionism’s stated role as the sole representative of Jewish history and memory, but suffice it to say here that in examining Ben-Gurion we must come to understand that he was not elected King of the Jews, although he certainly saw himself as such.
His role as “protector” of the Jewish people, a role that Hazony clearly accepts, is one that has no precedent in Jewish history. When many of the arguments in Post-Zionist or revisionist works seem to revolve around Ben-Gurion, to the point of obsession, we must view it in this light, the way Ben-Gurion and his adherents would have us see it.
It is therefore valid to examine Ben-Gurion in a rigorous manner to see if he really did take his role as King of the Jews seriously. Or, to his eternal shame, did he develop his status for his own benefit with little actual concern for the Jewish people?
I will present two direct quotes from Ben-Gurion, two statements that are now well known due to the work of the writers excoriated by Hazony.
These two statements reflect a thread that runs throughout Ben-Gurion’s discourse: The negation of traditional Judaism and traditional Jews. And it is this facet of Zionism that Hazony seeks to skirt in his discussion of Ben-Gurion. Hazony asserts that Zionism and Judaism are one and the same thing and neglects to provide evidence that Zionism was, in many ways, the antithesis of traditional Judaism. Zionism was, and is, the attempt to tear the political and messianic tendencies of Judaism away from its religious base.
The separation of Zionist messianism from Halakhah is given prominent place in the thought of Yitzhak Baer who puts it in the following way: “Ordinary historical laws brought it about that the contributions of a small group, active during a limited period, achieved authoritative status among the Jews for ages to come.” In his discussion of this passage Benjamin Gampel notes: “Baer was aware that the law, the form their instruction took, had within itself the possibility of petrifaction. Creation of the law was a religious and national response to the culture and power of pagan civilization, of Hellenistic society, the enemy and oppressor of the Jewish people.”
The Law thus functions only within a specific temporal context, but the “spirit” of the Law, shorn of the specifics of Halakhic praxis, is eternal. In this point there are echoes of the Christian abrogation of the Law with a renewed effort to reconstruct traditional Jewish messianism. Zionism replicates this sense of a non-Halakhic messianism.
Here again we may see that there is an unwavering nationalist essence that animates the Jewish geist. The authority of Jewish Law is subordinated to the nationalist idea. The messianism of the Zionist project makes the Halakhah irrelevant. It is this spirit that anchors Ben-Gurion’s project. When he assesses the Yemenite Jews he sees them not as pious Jews, but as relics of a Jewish past that is anathema. The very substantive fabric of traditional Jewish life must capitulate to the nationalist idea.
Is this then the fulfillment of the Jewish dream for redemption? Hazony maintains that Ben-Gurion’s goals “were aimed at ensuring that Israel would not simply be a neutral, social-contract state but that the new country would in fact understand itself as Herzl had believed it would: As a Jewish state, committed to the ideals of Jewish strength in the service of Jewish interests and aspirations.”
I would then like to question whether or not there is (or can ever be) in reality a single variation on Jewish interests and aspirations. If so, who determines what they are? And if that determination is made, as it ostensibly has by the successes of the Zionist project, what then happens to the multiplicity of opinions and views that have been the legacy of the Talmudic dialectic, the same Talmud – the epistemological foundation of Jewish life - that had been rejected by Ben-Gurion?
And how does this Zionism serve the interests of Judaism, a Judaism that has maintained its own internal coherence in the face of its loss of national hegemony by developing a massive architecture of religious humanism, a pluralistic humanism based in the ethics of the Aggadah; in the science of Maimonidean scholasticism; and in the daring speculative post-Gnostic metaphysics of the Kabbalah?
Representing Judaism: Ben Zion Dinur and Zionist Historiography
One of the most important elements of Ben-Gurion’s hegemony over Jewish life rests in the State Education Law of 1953 drawn up by Ben-Gurion’s hand picked educator, Ben Zion Dinur. In the words of Hazony:
The Israeli school system in its present configuration was created by the State Education Law of 1953, a classic piece of Labor Zionist legislation, which in forty-three words sought to define the purpose of the state education system. First and foremost among its concerns was that the school system inculcate “the values of Jewish culture,” “love of the homeland,” and “loyalty to the Jewish people.”
The law itself was not as benign as Hazony seeks to present it. In the words of Uri Ram:
The enactment of the 1953 Law of Education was one component in David Ben-Gurion’s grand campaign of mamlakhtiyut (literally “kingdomship”; here the prosaic meaning is “statehood”), which accorded the state dominant institutional authority in the life of the community and also the status of a core value in its own right. Dinur was the emissary of this program in the field of culture and education. Incidentally, it was when nominated minister that Dinur Hebraized his family name from Dinaburg to Dinur (i.e. from a diaspora-Jewish to an Israeli-Hebrew name), a demand made by the Prime Minister on holders of official positions as a symbol of the mental return to the Jewish past. Dinur had an ambitious vision of a nation-state-oriented unified culture and upon assuming office summoned a “Supreme Cultural Committee” to invent the new tradition (avant la lettre!). The idea was to pour new Zionist substance into common Jewish ceremonies. Among his proposals were unitary secular national Sabbath ceremonies and an Independence Day “seder,” the specific hymns and verses of which were to be designated by committee.
As Ram also states “these particular far-reaching proposals were rejected, yet they provide a blunt indication of Dinur’s policy and of the historical consciousness underlying it (which after all did win the day, since Israeli state ceremonies are imbued with Jewish religious symbols, and Jewish religious holidays are today imbued with nation-state symbols).”
Let us unpack these ideas one at a time. Dinur’s bizarre attempt to actually “invent” rituals where rituals do indeed exist is not merely an affront to Jewish jurisprudence; it is a frontal assault on the integrity of the ancient traditions. As we have noted earlier, the concept of authority is central to our discussion. Who has the authority, the modern Zionist historiographer, or the rabbinical tradition?
In looking at this Zionist “invention” of tradition, the great irony that emerges is that Judaism has consistently undergone a process of revision and refinement, through its literary modality known as Midrash. Jewish sages continually transformed the symbols of the Jewish past and invested them with new meaning. Judaism was able to navigate through the rough seas of history by adapting and reformulating its own beliefs and symbols.
The emergence of Zionism as the “end,” in the Fukuyamian sense, of Jewish history affects this transformative tradition. When new rituals are created, they become static markers of a new order that eliminates the very possibility of transformation. Zionism sought to usurp Jewish memory and experience through semiological means; that is, the Zionist symbols and the writing of history, as encapsulated in the State Education Law of 1953, were meant to unite Jews in such a manner that would supersede the old pathways of tradition.
There is then the issue of the name-change as mandated by Ben-Gurion. This plays right into the theme we have been discussing: The ownership of the past. Who owns the Jewish past? The agency of the name is a vital element in self-knowledge. In a masterful study on the subject, The Language of Names, Justin Kaplan and Anne Bernays note:
Names are agents of personal perpetuity and give the dead a continuing role and presence and this is true of advanced as well as primitive societies.
In this case the name-change functions to eliminate the memory of the family, but also to blur the circumstances that led to the choosing of the name. Jewish names, particularly Ashkenazic names, reflect names of hometowns, professions and the like.
Those names are a part of the Diaspora baggage that was very much anathema to the Zionists. The name change, interestingly mandated by Ben-Gurion, thus serves to “invent” a new person, a person now having passed through the stigma of the golus and into the new reality of the Jewish state.
But the main concern of Ben Zion Dinur was in the writing and teaching of Jewish history. Dinur changed the terms of understanding Jewish history by requiring that the study of Jewish history answer a number of, to him, fundamental questions that reflect the essential framework of Jewish identity.
In his essay “Israel in Diaspora” Dinur formulates these points as follows:
These points serve as the filter through which Dinur saw all of Jewish history.
Rather than using a positivist model as the Wissenschaft historians did, the Rankean model of objective historical facts, or seeing history as Midrashic transformation, in the manner of traditional historical writings like Ibn Verga’s Shebet Yehudah, Dinur, setting the bar for Zionist historiography, asks questions and raises issues that are directly relevant to the Zionist ethos.
A religious Jew who holds by the primacy of piety and Halakhah would not necessarily ask what the land of Israel would mean in assessing the history of the Jewish people. He would see Israel as God’s land and not man’s. He would more naturally see Jewish history as a manifestation of God’s will and the Diaspora as being the place that God has chosen for His people.
It would not occur to such Jews to put the Diaspora into question and engage in an analysis of Jewish history that would serve to problematize that history and discover if it would be worthwhile to have history teach us how to change Judaism in the Zionist manner.
On the other hand, a Jew who seeks to become a part of the larger world would not necessarily see the need to resurrect Zion in a time of multi-ethnic co-existence.
The Zionist “invention” of history is not a literal creation of new and hitherto unknown facts, but it is a form of rhetoric, a way of seeing. This way of seeing was disseminated by Dinur and his school, a school that, much to the detriment of Hazony’s argument that the Zionists have not had the ability to be heard over the din of the “intellectuals,” held the Israeli educational system in its grip for many decades, thus barring other forms of historical discourse and ways of seeing.
We must now see what the ramifications of Dinur’s methodology actually are. To begin with, Dinur, contra every other Jewish historian, begins the Jewish Diaspora with the Arab conquest of Palestine in the 7th century. It is this point that is at the very core of Dinur’s historical presentation.
In conceptual terms, Dinur argues, the need for this change is as follows:
My reason for not choosing an earlier starting-point is that, until this date, Jewish history was, in the main, the history of the Jewish people living in its own land. This is so in spite of three facts of cardinal importance: (1) the antiquity of the Jewish Dispersion, the origins of which may be presumed to go back to before the destruction of the Northern Kingdom; (2) the large number of Diaspora Jewish settlements and communities already existing in the time of the Roman and Byzantine empires (three hundred of them are known to us by name); and (3), the fact that, in this same period, the majority of the Jewish nation was living outside the borders of its own land.
There is a bizarre logic in this passage, a passage central to the ideology of Dinur and his school. The admission of the contradiction is never resolved by rational means. In point (3) the thesis statement – that the Jews lived in their land up until the Arab conquest - is explicitly contradicted. Might there be some other reason for the dating of the Diaspora to the Arab conquest?
For the purposes of Zionist historiography, Dinur’s dating of the Dispersion against the very facts of history serves to create an innate tension with the Arabs. Rather than showing that God, Rome or the Babylonians exiled the Jewish people, here we see that it was the Arabs who exiled the Jewish people. How handy! Thus the historian redoubles the facts of the current conflict between Jew and Arab and finds it present in the distant past.
The past thus becomes the primordial moment of Jewish identity. As Yosef Yerushalmi has noted:
The modern effort to reconstruct the Jewish past begins at a time that witnesses a sharp break in the continuity of Jewish living and hence also an ever-growing decay of Jewish group memory. In this sense, if for no other, history becomes what it had never been before – the faith of fallen Jews. For the first time history, not a sacred text, becomes the arbiter of Judaism.
Dinur’s typological setting for the Jewish Diaspora, a battle of Jew versus Arab, a clearly antithetical modality, will become a prime motif in Zionist historiography. Rather than examining the vast complexities of rabbinic modes of accommodation and assimilation, the Zionist historiographer eliminates the ambiguity and focuses on the notion of nationalism at the expense of a more developed and nuanced view of history.
Dinur thus offers a version of Jewish history that is not bent on examining the organic development of that history through its literature and religion, but through the lens of the national experience. The salient fact is that the Romans eradicated Jewish territorial hegemony in Palestine in 70 CE. New forms of Jewish continuity were created for the Jewish Diaspora. These facts are immaterial to Dinur as a nationalist historian. He will continue to follow the national idea wherever it appears.
To this effect he reorganizes Jewish history to reflect the impact of Biblical historiography on the national idea. In Ram’s analysis:
In the invention of the Zionist national tradition the Bible played two pivotal and complementary functions. On the one hand, it attached Zionism very convincingly to Jewish history and culture while, on the other, it enabled Zionism to skip almost two millennia of Jewish Exile and reach back in time to the period of the alleged source of the nation. This was accomplished, first, by singling out the Bible, rather than exilic Jewish literature (the Talmud and other commentaries) from the corpus of Jewish traditional literature, and, second, by the pertinent selection of sections, and the biased interpretations of themes, from the Bible itself.
By purging the Diasporic centrality from the nationalist version of Jewish history, Dinur reconceptualized the framework that enabled Jewish self-understanding. This method has reoriented all Jewish education at present. Jewish day school students study some variant of this nationalist ideology in their Yeshivahs.
We will examine this nationalist historiography in more detail later on in the essay in an assessment of Yitzhak Baer’s biased presentation of Sephardic Jewish history, but suffice it to say here that this reframing makes demands on the facts themselves. In Dinur’s words:
From the standpoint of world Jewry the salient fact in this period [1215-1348] is the destruction of the Oriental centers of Jewish life. Most of the great Jewish communities and congregations in the lands of Islam were so decimated by the Crusades and by the devastations of the Mongol hordes that, for long afterwards, they virtually ceased to play any part in Jewish history.
For myself as an Oriental Jew, this passage comes as a pathetic attempt to fashion, as Ben-Gurion was shown earlier to have done to the Yemenites, an inert Arab Jewry. There is a clear and manifest Orientalism at work here, a racism that is all the more embarrassing as it seeks to degrade Jews. This Orientalist fact would then serve to explain the ascendance of the Ashkenazim and the need to filter Jewish history through the Ashkenazi prism.
As we have already seen, while Dinur is well aware of the raw facts of Jewish history – there is no way that he can believe that Oriental Jews “virtually ceased to play any part in Jewish history” – what he chooses to do with those facts and what significance he attributes to those facts are patently debatable.
In fact, the permanence and stability of Oriental Jewry in the 14th and 15th centuries laid the groundwork for the re-emergence and vitality of the Spanish Jewish exiles in the 16th century Ottoman Empire. But this sense of history is clearly irrelevant to Dinur’s concerns. He works by cutting out huge blocks of history and fitting them into the nationalist paradigm he is creating. The contours of Jewish history are thus realigned to fit the specific needs of Zionism.
The Domineering Discourse
Hazony persistently points out that Zionism, in its classic Herzlian form, is dying out. In his rhetorical posturing, one gets the feeling that there is a massive conspiracy attempting to destroy the Jewish nation.
The “post-Jewish” condition had become a matter of national policy – to the point that one could imagine the Jewish state, for which such a fantastic price had been paid in sweat and blood, actually being dismantled in favor of a non-Jewish state: a political state for which the ideals and memories, traditions and interests of the Jews would be simply irrelevant.
As we have now learned, the case is not precisely as Hazony has described it. The Jewish state is not really a Jewish state per se. The Jewish state is a modern creation that has cobbled together elements of the Jewish past, in a highly tendentious and ideologically charged fashion, run roughshod over the fragile branches of the Jewish memory and sought to “invent” a new version of things to replace the old. Confusion arises when the Zionist-augmented facts of the Jewish past are taken for the facts themselves.
The official Zionist state apparatus has sought to enforce its version of history both in Israel and the Diaspora by disseminating the historical information in an institutional capacity. It is somewhat exasperating to read Hazony’s plea for tolerance when those of us who have been on the outside of this discourse have not been treated with any respect by the Zionist side.
It is as if matters like the War of 1948 are a piddling affair. Read Hazony on the manner in which these stories have been told, past and present:
The old books told the story of Zionism so that students could empathize with the Jews who worked to establish the state of Israel. The new books, on the other hand, are frequently so preoccupied with being “universal” that they are in fact completely neutral to the Zionist cause. This is not to say that the old books were perfect; one can easily point to instances – the role of the Jewish forces in creating the Arab refugee problem in 1948 being an obvious case – in which a greater willingness to deal with unpleasant aspects of Zionist history would have been salutary.
But this is just the point – the old books could not deal with these aspects because they were composing triumphalist history!
Until one can see the current scholarship as a corrective, the point will be missed. Because of the work of Ben Zion Dinur there were Israeli students - the ones who sat with Buber, Scholem and the others Hazony has identified as his enemies, scholars who looked at Jewish history from a more variegated and dialectical perspective and not the static monochrome of Dinur - who became increasingly frustrated with the fact that Zionism simply wrote out of its narrative those who it did not care about – Sephardim, Palestinians (and note carefully that Hazony calls the 1948 refugees “Arabs” not “Palestinians” – there are all sorts of games played with names and language in Zionist historiography), Holocaust survivors and others – and consigned them to the scrapheap of the Jewish “nation.” It was these students who “turned” on Zionism with a vengeance.
Interestingly much of this historical work that has now been mainstreamed into the Israeli educational system was not welcomed into Israel’s universities. Benny Morris, Avi Shlaim and Ilan Pappe, to name the most prominent of the New Historians, all got their advanced training at British universities and published their books – not in Hebrew – but in English. It took quite a long time for these writers to gain legitimacy in the Israeli intellectual culture.
Hazony does not understand that Zionism has had its opportunity and flubbed it. It has tried to reframe Jewish history in a very limiting way and has been found out. It has attempted (and still does attempt) to silence marginal voices and stigmatize their representations. Below we will attempt to highlight two instances of such historical discourse: One is the famous myth of Masada and its uses in the Zionist project and the other is Baer’s biased presentation of Sephardic Jewish history.
Masada, Ho!
One of the foremost tourist attractions in the state of Israel is the ancient Herodian fortress of Masada. The process whereby this fortress became a household word is told in fascinating detail in Nachman Ben-Yehuda’s The Masada Myth: Collective Memory and Mythmaking in Israel.
The story of Masada is not found in any of the traditional Jewish sources. What is known of Masada might only be found in Josephus’ Jewish War, a text not available to Jews until the modern period (Ben-Yehuda points out, interestingly, that the very process of the 1923 translation of Josephus into Hebrew is intimately related to the Masada issue). What Josephus has to say about Masada is neither flattering nor compelling from a Jewish point of view: The people who ran off from Jerusalem to Masada came from a group called the Sicarii, Jewish terrorists who took their name from the Latin word for “dagger.”
These Sicarii managed to escape the siege of Jerusalem and run to the hills. In their trip they managed, according to Josephus, to pillage the neighboring town of ‘Ein Gedi. In his words:
Not far from Jerusalem was a well-nigh impregnable fortress built by the kings of long ago for the safe keeping of their treasures and their personal security in the hazards of war. It was called Masada, and was in the hands of the so-called Sicarii. Hitherto they had merely raided the districts nearby to procure supplies: fear prevented any further ravages; but when they heard that the Roman army was making no move, while the Jews in Jerusalem were torn by party-strife and domestic tyranny, they launched out on more ambitious schemes. During the Feast of Unleavened Bread they eluded those who lay in their path and made a night raid on a little town called Engedi. Those who might have put up resistance were scattered before they could seize their weapons and form up, and thrown out of town; those who could not fly, women and children more than 700 in number, were butchered. Then they stripped the houses bare, seized the ripest of the crops, and brought the loot to Masada.
I am almost certain that most of you have never read this passage from Josephus. And I am also quite certain that you are now scratching your head trying to figure out how such decrepit people now form the center of one of the foremost tourist attractions in Israel.
The story is itself rather simple: A man named Shmaria Guttman climbs Masada in 1933 and becomes a one man campaign to make sure that the site becomes a national monument. Due to a fortuitous series of circumstances, the site becomes a national monument to the “martyrs” that is excavated by the legendary Yigal Yadin and forms the crux of a Zionist mythology that is then connected to Tel Hai and the Bar Kokhba revolt. The mythical elements are invented due to the fact that all three events end in failure, yet the Zionist reading of the events transforms them into heroic acts that served to buttress the inventory of heroic deeds of the historical Jewish nation.
The following quote from Guttman encapsulates the idea nicely:
I wanted to bring ourselves, the young adolescents, to the point where they would have the willingness to fight to the end. We already stood in such difficult moments when Rommel was approaching the country, and then we turned Masada into a symbol for standing to the end. Not for a search for the end. The question is, is fight needed? Is it worth it? Why is fight necessary? Maybe it is better to surrender?
At some periods we wanted to turn this into a symbol – not to die, not to commit suicide, but to be ready for whatever is required for the goal in which you believe – if indeed you believe in a goal. If you do not believe in a goal, you have to put your neck forward and give it to the yoke.
The creation of the myth was born out of necessity. The desired effect was to link current existential concerns to the salient “facts” of the Jewish past. Masada thus linked armed conflict, rebellion and Jewish heroism to archaeology and history, concerns central to the Zionist ideological transformation of Jewish identity. The excavation of Masada, as is well known, became in and of itself a symbol of the great stature of the state of Israel.
Masada thus became a great myth. The only problem was the story. The actual story, as we have intimated earlier, is somewhat problematic. The partisans at Masada were not fighters or rebels, but criminals and thugs. They did not try to save Jerusalem - they ran off into the hills and tried to save their own skin rather than throw in their lot with their brethren who were dying in vast numbers. Then, to cap it all off, they elected to kill themselves in a mass suicide rather than fight or be captured by the Romans. In contrast to the movement of the rabbinical community to cut a deal with the Romans and move to Yavneh, thus ensuring Jewish continuity, the Sicarii killed themselves.
A good deal of the myth remains because Jewish history is not well known and the fact that Josephus has been marginalized by many Jews. But it must be also understood that without Josephus there is no story to tell. In Ben-Yehuda’s book there is a lot of discussion about the Josephus account against what the Zionist imagination seems to want to believe. In this vein we read in a pamphlet put out by a youth group in 1950:
… the fortress of Masada was the largest among the fortresses in which Jews fortified themselves in the Great Revolt against the Romans. For three years, from the day that the Temple was destroyed, the Jews held their position. Their zeal for their people, their hatred of the enemy, and their belief in the lack of choice facing them aided them.
In this passage we may quite easily see history being placed at the service of current concerns. The Zionist imagination saw in the Masada situation a mirror image of its own situation. Just as there is an Arab enemy, so there is a Roman enemy. Just like the Israeli Jews had to stick together, so the partisans at Masada had to stick together. Just like the Israeli Jews have no choice but to fight on against the Arabs, so those at Masada had to “fight” on.
The fact that such details and the parallels extrapolated from them are not factually correct is of little concern. Masada became what it had to be in order to fulfill its role as a “heroic” tale that could be studied by Israeli youth and imbibed as a heroic fantasy for young people who required such tales of heroism to help them in their fight to protect the “homeland.” That was the key. The message that Masada was a moment of glory in Jewish history was more important than the actual events themselves.
It must be remembered that until recently Israeli soldiers were inducted on the top of Masada to be presented their gun and Bible (!). Youth groups took annual hikes up Masada as a means to inculcate the children with the “spirit” of “resistance” that animated these “fighters.” American tourists were told the story of the Jewish “fighters” who formed the last stronghold against the hated Roman occupiers.
The net impact of Masada on Jewish culture (and you should also recall that there has been an American TV miniseries on the subject) has been overwhelming. The fact that it is a chapter out of Jewish history better left forgotten (and was indeed forgotten by the rabbinic tradition) does not seem to figure into the calculus created by Zionism.
Thus it is that Hazony’s obsession over the death of Zionism leaves me with an ambivalent feeling, as it is to these myths that Hazony constantly refers. There is little questioning of the coherence of the narrative that is currently being dismantled.
Baer’s Sephardim: The Ashkenazim are Better
In the words of Benjamin Gampel in his introduction to the reprint of Yitzhak Baer’s A History of the Jews in Christian Spain we read the following:
In his treatment of Sephardic culture, Baer introduced a comparison that haunted all of his writing about Iberian Jews: he measured the Sephardim against the standard of the Medieval Jewry that for him was a true and faithful community – the Ashkenazim of the Rhine river valley. Baer highly esteemed the Asheknazi pietists who followed in what he imagined were the footsteps of the author of the Mishnah. He was proud that their fealty to Judaism was expressed in a willingness to die “a martyr’s death for their faith.”
Here we face yet again more death and more martyrs, a common leitmotif in Zionist historiography. In a fascinating reversal of the usual scholarly admiration for the Spanish “Golden Age,” Baer seeks to denigrate the synthetic humanistic culture developed by the Sephardim in Muslim Spain and laud the retrogressive pietism presented by the Ashkenazim who moved from Germany to Spain in the 14th century. In Baer’s words:
The attack against rationalism in the name of faith is typical of all the cabalistic works produced during this period. It is most pronounced in Nahmanides’ commentary to the Pentateuch. His vigorous opposition to the allegorical interpretation of the Torah is expressed on every page of this work, the most popular of Nahmanides’ writings. His avowed aim was to “silence the mouths of the men of little faith and meager wisdom who scoff at the words of our sages,” and to refute the opinions of Abraham ibn Ezra and Maimonides, on whom the rationalists leaned for support. He denies categorically that the universe operates according to fixed laws and that the wise man with insight into these laws can base his course of action upon them.
If there is any doubt as to Baer’s own sympathies one can read the following assessment of the reasons for the massive Jewish conversions after the riots of 1391:
Reliable reports of heroism and self-sacrifice have come down to us from the very days of the disorders. There were some Spanish Jews who, following in the footsteps of the pious of Ashkenaz, killed themselves, their wives and their children for the sake of their religion. But these martyrs were far outnumbered by those who readily acknowledged the Christian Messiah, “who came to them by force.” Whole communities were scattered and disintegrated due solely to conversions. As is to be expected, most of the apostates whose names we know came from the wealthy and cultured classes. Jewish religious zealots rightly sought the cause of apostasy in the philosophical views of the converts, and contrasted these people with the humble men and women whose simple faith withstood the test.
Rather than seeing the new pietism as the cause for the massive shift away from Judaism, Baer blames philosophy and science.
Jews had found a way to bring science and humanism into their Jewish civilization, via the Spanish convivencia that produced Maimonides. The Christian zealots who took Spain back from the Muslims sought to destroy this humanistic culture. Never mind the fact that these Christians were living at standards well below the Muslims, culturally and materially; the sense of “faith” that Baer presents, the purity of essence – again so similar to the anti-intellectualism that was so pronounced among the Zionists (and taken to new heights by Hazony in his attack on the German Jewish intellectuals) – shows that Baer, like Dinur, sought to read Jewish history along the grain of the modern ethos, the modern ethos of Zionism.
What is even more ironic in this valorization of the Ashkenazi pietism is that the Muslims never expelled Jews from their lands or committed acts of genocide against Jews as the Christians did. This tilt toward the superiority of the Christians and the Jews who lived exclusively under the Christians by Baer and Dinur displays not merely contempt for civilization, in this case the heightened culture of the Arabs, but for the very sanctity of Jewish life. It seems that Baer prefers martyrs to rationalists and scientists.
The final irony here is that as the Jews would be in dire need of the ability to think logically about their predicament, as Spain was led inexorably to the tragedy of the 1492 Expulsion, they were led by increasingly rigid and fanatical rabbis (all approved of by Baer) who understood little about the functions of state and society as they were studying Talmud all day! Rationalism could have transformed Judaism, but it was cut down in the wake of the upheavals occurring in Spanish politics and society.
Probably the best formulation of the disintegration of Sephardim who lived in the Ashkenazi-led communities of Christian Spain is that of Jose Faur who comes to the diametrically opposite conclusion of Baer:
The new ideology [of pietistic Judaism] alienated the educated Jews and strengthened in the uneducated masses patterns of thought and feelings akin to Christian society. The consequence of this ideology is reflected in the fact that precisely in the regions of Catalonia and Gerona, where this ideology thrived, Jews assimilated more fully to Christianity than anywhere else in Spain.
According to Faur, contra Baer and Dinur, it was Asheknazi pietism that destroyed Judaism in Spain, rather than Averroism. Faur’s argument is logical: Enlightenment and science serve to open the individual rather than force the individual back into a mental servitude. The very failure of Maimonidean rationalism to take hold of the fanatical rabbinic class of Christian Spain led to poor political judgments within that class. Pietism, in its extreme form, clouds thought and at moments of crisis ideas are of the essence. And when the crisis hit, there was little to be done by the rabbis who had closed off rational thinking among the masses of Jews in Spain.
Zionism After Hazony: A Reconsideration
The work of Zionism has been transformed by a number of courageous young scholars who are finally being heard in Israel and abroad. The books they have written seem to frighten those who have been indoctrinated with the Zionist mythos. Yoram Hazony’s The Jewish State merely serves to heighten that sense of paranoia.
As we have been arguing throughout this essay, it is Zionism that is responsible for Jewish “revisionism,” not the works of the young Israeli historians. Zionism, in a short century, has gone from a small, relatively insignificant movement in Eastern European socialist circles, to, in the wake of the tragedy of the Holocaust (which it used to further its own ends), forever transform the face of Judaism. The works of the so-called New Historians, as I have tried to show, are far more sensitive to the complexities of Jewish tradition than their Zionist counterparts.
This essay does not seek to comment on the massive logistical complications engendered by Zionism and how Zionism will seek to resolve them. I am simply concerned with treating the ideas that have been raised by Zionist writers and have them answer to the context of Judaism in its various manifestations. I will leave it to more insightful minds to try and solve the military conflicts.
Zionism has clearly usurped a large portion of Jewish collective memory. I am well aware that the arguments I have made from within traditional Judaism ironically serve to marginalize me from the very Jewish element that I am so zealously seeking to uphold. And much that has gone on, and is still going on, in Israel is troubling in the sense that Zionism has forced Jews away from the sources of their past and into a more embattled sense of identity.
The attempt by Yoram Hazony to bring Israeli discourse into the realm of American Conservatism (his Shalem Center has translated Hayek and Burke into Hebrew) will ultimately fail because, as I pointed out in the body of the essay, Zionism is a capitulation to ethnic particularism that violates the spirit of American democratic principles. In reviewing his work, many American Conservatives find fault in his rejection of basic democratic principles, as even Conservatives cherish the American Constitution and Bill of Rights as sacrosanct.
The fact that the Zionists have made Palestinians nameless (and have done the same in a much more sinister manner to their Sephardic brethren) shows that they now understand how the race game is played. Hillel, the great sage who lived at the same time as Jesus, once said that the whole Torah lies in the idea that one should treat others the way that one would like to be treated (ve-ahabta le-re’akha ka-mokha). Zionist ethnocentrism, a la the whites in South Africa or the Protestants of Northern Ireland, serves us as Jews little purpose.
We have begun to abandon what is most vital about who we are as Jews. The great science of the Sephardic Sages is now buried under the detritus of the various difficulties that have been engendered in Christian Europe by our Ashkenazi brethren. The so-called Jewish “question” has culminated in the tragedy of the Holocaust, a nightmare fed, unfortunately, by the same benighted form of nationalism that we have now adopted.
The idea is not to turn into what you despise. The idea is to follow the wisdom of the generations and create a sense of pride based on accomplishment rather than the amount of their corpses you can amass and shove into body bags. Body bags, as we have recently seen, are not limited to one side of the conflict. This short essay is an attempt to reconsider the terms of the discourse we have now adopted.
David Shasha
December 2003