The
Jews as a nation.
By Eli Barnavi
Countries and peoples
across the globe have struggled to outline the feasibility and parameters of
nationhood in the modern period. Thus, it is not surprising to find the Jews
also engaged in the creation and execution of a nationalist ideology. Zionism,
the movement to create a Jewish state, emerged as a result of and an
alternative to emancipation--or lack thereof--in the second half of the 19th
century.
Competing visions
emerged from the Jewish world regarding how, exactly, a Jewish state should be
organized. Political, cultural, socialist, and religious factions of the
Zionist movement developed. A Jewish homeland solves the problem of
anti-Semitism, argued the political Zionists, led by Theodor Herzl. The cultural
Zionists, including Ahad Ha-Am, saw the Jewish homeland as a solution to the
problem of assimilation. Socialist Zionism envisioned a Jewish homeland that
took the form of a cooperative society based on economic justice, while
religious Zionists stressed the authority of Jewish law in a Jewish state.
The following article
summarizes the origins of and general reactions to Jewish nationalism. It is
reprinted with permission from A Historical Atlas of the Jewish People,published by Schocken Books.
The roots of Zionism lay in Eastern Europe, notably within
the confines of the Russian Empire. It was there, towards the end of the 19th
century, that the largest and, in many ways, the most dynamic of Jewish communities
was located--though it was also the most troubled. Conceived by czarist
autocracy as a major obstacle to its drive to transform the population into a
uniform and malleable society, Russian Jewry was subjected to extremely severe
pressure to change its customs, culture, and religion. The Jews, for the most
part, tended to bear with the laws that regulated their daily lives and
cumulatively humiliated and impoverished them. But when wholesale expulsions
from certain areas and successive waves of physical attack were added to the
long‑familiar misery, life under Russian rule in the 1880s began to be
judged intolerable.
The Jewish predicament precipitated several reactions, all
with a view to finding a lasting solution: a vast movement of emigration,
chiefly to the west; the radicalization and politicization of great numbers of
young Jewish people, many bending their energies to the overthrow of autocracy;
and, among the increasingly secular intelligentsia, a rise in modern
nationalist consciousness. It was the latter tendency--Zionism--that bore the
most radical implications and was to have the most remarkable results.
The
Zionist analysis of the nation’s afflictions and its prescription for relief
consisted of four interconnected theses. First, the fundamental vulnerability
of the Jews to persecution and humiliationrequired total, drastic, and collective treatment. Second, reform and
rehabilitation--cultural, no less than social and political--must be the work
of the Jews themselves, i.e., they had to engineer their own emancipation.
Third, only a territorial solution would serve; in other words, that
establishing themselves as the majority population in a given territory was the
only way to normalize their status and their relations with other peoples and
polities. Fourth, only in a land of their own would they accomplish the full,
essentially secular, revival of Jewish culture and of the Hebrew language.
These exceedingly radical
theses brought the Zionists into endless conflict with an array of hostile
forces, both Jewish and non-Jewish. On the one hand, Zionism implied a
disbelief in the promise of civil emancipation and a certain contempt for Jews
whose fervent wish was assimilation into their immediate environment. On the
other hand, by offering a secular alternative to tradition, Zionism challenged
religious orthodoxy as well--although, given the orthodox view of Jewry as a
nation, the two had something in common after all. The Zionists were thus condemned
from the outset to being a minority among the Jews and lacking the support
that national movements normally receive from the people to whose liberation
their efforts are directed.
The other struggle which the Zionists had to face resulted
from their political and territorial aims. They had to fight for international
recognition and for acceptance as a factor of consequence, however small, by
the relevant powers. In the course of time they have had to contend with the
political and, eventually, armed hostility of the inhabitants and neighbors of
the particular territory where virtually all Zionists desired to re‑establish
the Jewish people as a free nation: Palestine, or in Hebrew, Eretz Yisrael, the Land of Israel.
They were more successful in the broader international arena
than on the local front. Ottoman opposition hobbled the movement almost totally
in its early years, and the violent opposition mounted by Arab states and
peoples has to this day shaped the physical and political landscape in which
Zionism has implemented its ideals. In the final analysis, it is nonetheless
the reluctance of the majority of Jews worldwide to subscribe to its program in
practice that has presented the strongest challenge to Zionism, and has proved
the greatest obstacle to its ultimate triumph.
Eli Barnavi is the
Director of the Morris Curiel Center for International Studies and a Professor
of Jewish History at Tel Aviv University. This article is reprinted with
permission from A
Historical Atlas of the Jewish People edited by Eli Barnavi and published by Schocken Books. © 1992 by
Hachette Litterature.
