ABRAHAM WENT:

On Jewish History (Christopher Dawson, Winter 1967, Orbis)

The men who led this spiritual exodus were, for the most part, representative of the Enlightenment and the assimilationist tradition: Bernard Lazare in France, J. Max Nordau in Austria, Israel Zangwill in England, and Justice Brandeis in the United States. Above all, this was the case with Theodore Herzl, who founded the modern Zionist movement. Herzl was by training and environment a typical product of assimilationist culture, a free-thinking Liberal journalist from Vienna who was in Paris as the correspondent of the Neue Freie Presse and who covered the Dreyfus case in the normal course of his duties. But the shock of the Dreyfus trial changed his whole outlook. Henceforward he dedicated his life to the creation of a national Jewish state, and his leadership was so dynamic that he succeeded almost immediately in establishing the worldwide Zionist movement, which held its first congress at Basel in 1897. A few days after this event he wrote in his diary: "If I were to sum up the Basel Conference in a word, it would be this: at Basel I founded the Jewish State. If I were to say this today, I should be met by universal laughter. In five years perhaps and certainly in fifty, everyone will see it. The State is already founded in essence in the will of the people to the State."

Never has the prediction of a political reformer or revolutionary been so completely fulfilled as in Herzl's case. The opposition among his own people, among the orthodox Jews and the anti-political Zionists, seemed alone sufficient to ensure his defeat. But in spite of his numerous disappointments and his premature death in 1904, it was his program and his ideal of Jewish political nationalism that were realized by the creation of the modern state of Israel. The establishment of the Jewish national home in Palestine, made possible by the Balfour Declaration of November 2, 1917, was the direct result of Herzl's propaganda which was able to rally Jews from every intellectual tradition and from every part of the world to cooperate toward this common end.

But the vital factor in the success of Zionism was the catastrophic disaster that overwhelmed the Jewish culture of Central and Eastern Europe in the twelve years of the Nazi terror and intensified the demand for a radical, national solution of the Jewish problem. The proclamation of Israel as a sovereign national state in 1948 represents the total realization of the Zionist ideal and the beginning of a new era in Jewish history and world politics. It marks the end of the European age of Jewish culture which had characterized both the Spanish and the East European phases of Jewish history and, even more, the end of that unique function which Jewish culture has fulfilled for 2,000 years as intermediary and link between two opposing civilizations.

It is true that the new culture of Israel stands on the frontier of two worlds between East and West. But it is no longer a bridge between them: it is a fortified stronghold in a hostile world, a crusading state such as the Christian Kingdom of Jerusalem was eight centuries ago.

V

The modern Jewish world has a double axis. It has one center in Israel and the other in America, and its future development depends on how these two centers can be interrelated and integrated. The problem is a difficult one, for the violent destruction of European Judaism has not weakened the divergent tendencies in Jewish culture that manifested themselves during the age of Enlightenment. The purely political and nationalist solution of the Jewish problem, which was the primary force in Zionism, has not been completely accepted even in Israel. Judaism always has been three things: a people or a nation, a culture or a way of life, and a world religion or a spiritual ideal. Any attempt to identify it with one of these to the exclusion of the others has invariably led to a reaction and restoration of the neglected aspect. Even today, even in the little land of Israel, we have political Zionism, cultural Zionism and religious Zionism coexisting without coalescing. It is obvious that if Zionism is conceived in purely nationalist and political terms, the triumph of Zionism in Israel would lead to the triumph of assimilationism or liberal Judaism in America.

In the past the strength of both religious Judaism and cultural Judaism in Europe was a common factor that helped to unite America and Israel. Now that the Judaism of Eastern Europe, with its ancient tradition of culture and its deep religious life, has been destroyed, America and Israel will have to find a closer and more direct bond of union. Justice Brandeis, speaking some years before the European catastrophe — I think in 1915 — suggested that the problem could be solved on exactly the same lines as those followed by the other national groups in the United states, since the relation of American Jewry to the future state in Palestine would be "exactly the same as is the relation of people of other nationalities all the world over to their parent home." But it is obvious today that the relation of Israel to the Dispersion must be entirely different from the relations of Portugal to Brazil or of the Irish Free State to the Irish of the United States. Whatever view we take of Zionism, we can hardly deny that Jewish history transcends politics and that the Jewish people still has, as it always has had, a world mission. That is the one point on which the cultural Zionists like the late Asher Ginsberg and the religious Zionists like the Misrachi are agreed; even the political Zionists themselves do not altogether deny it. For it is obvious that if Zionism is conceived in terms of a purely political nationalism, it can no longer claim to represent the whole Jewish tradition and becomes merely a new and more sophisticated form of assimilationism.

Hitherto, throughout the successive ages of Jewish history Israel has held fast to this idea of universal mission: it has served as a unifying factor through the vicissitudes of centuries and in all the different forms of Jewish culture. The present generation may not easily see what expression it will find in the future under the altered conditions of the new age. But it has not been brought to an end by the creation of the political state of Israel. Somehow, it still has to be fulfilled, and Israel and America — or American Jewry — each have to make their contribution to it.

The key to understanding the historic hatred of Judaism and the modern hatred of Israel, America, and Judeo-Christianity is that the arc of history requires that the world be assimilated into Judaism, not vice versa.

Posted by Orrin Judd at June 13, 2004 9:44 AM