Draft:Anti-Zionism in Judaism

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Anti-zionism in Judaism

Early Jewish anti-Zionism[edit]

This section is an excerpt from Anti-Zionism § Early Jewish anti-Zionism.[edit]

Formal anti-Zionism arose in the late 19th century as a response to Theodor Herzl's proposal in The Jewish State (1896) to create an independent country in Palestine for Jews subject to persecution in the "civilized nations" of Europe,[1] but even before Herzl, the idea of Zionism – of Jews as constituting a nation rather than a people constituted by their religion – promoted by Moses Hess (1862) and Leo Pinsker (1882) elicited fierce opposition within European Orthodox Jewry. Samson Raphael Hirsch, for one, considered the active promotion of Jewish emigration to Palestine a sin.[2] The creation of a Jewish state before the appearance of the messiah was widely interpreted in Jewish religious circles as contradicting the divine will,[a] a programme, furthermore, that was visibly driven by Jewish secularists. Until World War I, across Central Europe, Jewish religious leaders largely perceived the Zionist movement's aspirations for Jewish nationhood in a distant "New Judea" as a threat, in that it might encourage paradoxically the very antisemites, with their treatment of Jews in their midst as "aliens", whose fundamental rationale Zionism itself sought to undermine.[3]

When Herzl began to propound his proposal, many, including, secular Jews, regarded Zionism as a fanciful and unrealistic movement.[4] Some antisemites even dismissed it as a "Jewish trick".[b] Many assimilationist Jewish liberals, heirs of the Enlightenment, had argued that Jews should enjoy full equality in exchange for a pledge of loyalty to their respective nation-states.[5] Those liberal Jews who accepted integration and assimilationist principles saw Zionism as a threat to efforts to facilitate Jewish citizenship and equality within the European nation-state context.[6] Many in the intellectual elite of the Anglo-Jewish community, for example, opposed Zionism because they felt most at home in England, where, in their view, antisemitism was neither a social or cultural norm.[c][d] The Jewish establishment in Germany, France (and its Alliance Israelite Universelle),[e] and America strongly identified with its respective states, a sentiment that made it regard Zionism negatively.[f] Reform rabbis in German-speaking lands and Hungary advocated the erasure of all mentions of Zion in their prayer books.[7] Herzl's successor, the Zionist atheist Max Nordau, whose views on race coincided with those of the antisemitic Drumont,[g] lambasted Reform Judaism for emptying ancient Jewish prayers of their literal meaning in claiming that the Jewish diaspora was a fact of destiny.[h]

Herzl's proposal initially met with broad, vigorous opposition within Jewish intellectual, social and political movements.[i] A notable exception was the religious Mizrachi movement.[8] In his essay Mauschel, Herzl called Jews who opposed his project "yids", and not true Jews. Among left-wing currents within diaspora Jewish communities, strong opposition emerged in such formations as the Bundism, Autonomism, Folkism, Jewish Communists, Territorialism, and Jewish-language anarchist movements. Yevsektsiya, the Jewish section of the Communist Party in the Soviet Union created to combat "Jewish bourgeois nationalism",[j] targeted the Zionist movement and managed to close down its offices and place Zionist literature under a ban,[9] but Soviet officials themselves often disapproved of anti-Zionist zeal.[10][11][12]

Notes[edit]

  1. ^ "in the language of the Hebrew prophets, the Return to the Land of the Fathers belonged to the end of history, to Aharit hayamim, to the coming of the Messiah and the establishment on earth of the Kingdom of God," (Wistrich 1996, p. 98)
  2. ^ "By and large, antisemitic ideologues of the fin de siècle paid Zionism little heed, and when they did think about it, dismissed it as a trick, perpetrated by the agents of the international Jewish conspiracy." (Penslar 2020, p. 83)
  3. ^ Cohen in his study of Anglo-Jewish anti-Zionism wrote of "those men and women who felt themselves to be members of this distinct unit within world Jewry, with its own cultural tradition, … those members of that community who felt themselves to be most at home in the British Isles, men such as Claude Montefiore, Israel Abrahams, Hermann Adler, Lucien Wolf, Simeon Singer, Laurie Magnus, Oswald J. Simon, in fact most of the members of the Maccabaeans, the Association of Jewish Literary Societies, the Jewish Historical Society of England and hence the community's intellectual elite. These persons spoke and wrote primarily in English and for an English-speaking audience. Moreover, they specifically and explicitly related what they had to say about Zionism to the fact that they were themselves living in a particularly tolerant society where anti-Semitism (although undoubtedly present) was very far from being either a cultural or social norm." (Cohen 1987–1988, p. 151)
  4. ^ In an exchange between Henry Grunwald, the then president of the Board of Deputies of British Jews and chief rabbi Sir Jonathan Sacks in the mid-2000s, the former stated that:"there is probably a greater feeling of discomfort, greater fears now about anti-Semitism than there have been for many decades". Sacks' s position was that, "If you were to ask me if Britain is an anti-Semitic society, the answer is manifestly and clearly No. It is one of the least anti-Semitic societies in the world." (MacShane 2008)
  5. ^ "In France, strong opposition to Zionism had existed among the Jewish elite since 1897. Alliance Israelite Universelle, an organization founded in 1860 to promote Jewish emancipation and education as well as to combat anti-Semitism, strongly disapproved. Sylvain Levi (1863-1935), one of its foremost activists and its president from 1920 until 1935, declared that creating a Jewish polity in Palestine was 'singularly dangerous,' fearing it might provoke Muslim fanaticism and intense hostility in the Arab world." (Kolsky 2009, p. 337)
  6. ^ "The anti-Zionism of the Western Jewish establishment in pre-state days was rooted, after all, in their firm belief that they were Frenchmen, Germans, Englishmen, and Americans of the Mosaic persuasion." (Wistrich 1998, p. 60)
  7. ^ According to Lenni Brenner (citing Desmond Stewart), Nordau, in an interview with Drumont's fiercely antisemitic La Libre Parole in 1903, stated that: "Zionism wasn't a question of religion, but exclusively of race, and there is no one with whom I am in greater agreement on this point than M.Drumont." (Brenner 1983, p. 18)
  8. ^ "The followers of this movement, according to Nordau, saw 'the dispersion of the Jewish people' as 'an immutable fact of Destiny' and they 'emptied the concept of the Messiah and Zion of all concrete import.' The 'Mendelssohnian enlightenment consistently developed during the first half of the nineteenth century into 'Reform' Judaism, which definitely broke with Zionism'." (Gribetz 2015, p. 58)
  9. ^ "Opposition was not late-coming from within: the Zionist movement was vehemently opposed by most other intellectual, social and political movements within the Jewish people." (Porat 2022, p. 450)
  10. ^ The communist party nonetheless did create an autonomous Jewish oblast, Birobidzhan, in 1931 (Kolsky 2009, p. 335).

References[edit]

  1. ^ Penslar 2020, pp. 80–81.
  2. ^ Glass 1975–1976, p. 58.
  3. ^ Wistrich 1996, pp. 98–99.
  4. ^ Laqueur 2003, pp. 385–386.
  5. ^ Benbassa 2001, pp. 87–90.
  6. ^ Laqueur 2003, p. 399.
  7. ^ Wistrich 1996, pp. 94, 103.
  8. ^ Dimont 1978, p. 218.
  9. ^ Kadish 2013, p. 4.
  10. ^ Shindler 2011, pp. 31–32.
  11. ^ Arad 2009, p. 19.
  12. ^ Porat 2022, pp. 450–451.
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