The Impact of Ideology: Nationalism, Socialism, Liberalism

Nationalism is the main thrust of political Zionism; however Zionists differed in other respects, the common core was application of the principle of the nation-state to the Jewish people. Where it clashed with other ideologies “the fact is undeniable that both emotionally and practically nationalism prevailed.” ^[3] Nationalism was of course one of the great forces of the time, and by the end of the nineteenth century it was generally accepted in the Western world that political sovereignty should correspond to ethnic (“national”) divisions; that is, that the nation-state, rather than the dynastic state or the multinational empire, should be the basic unit of world politics. This principle was to achieve its climactic vindication, at least in theory, in the results of World War I. That Jews should also choose the nation-state as the best vehicle of national survival should not be surprising, therefore. David Biale remarks that Jews “have always demonstrated a shrewd understanding of the political forms of each age,” and that adopting modern nationalism was therefore not essentially different from the “tradition of political imitation and accommodation” that was a legacy of Jewish history.^[4]

In choosing nationalism as a framework, Jews were moving from a more particularistic, if not unique, place in the world to a more universal and common model. With their own nation-state, Jews would join a world community of kindred peoples, each exercising its right of self-determination in its own sovereign space. Even in this liberal and moderate version of nationalism, of course, there is some ambiguity, since one is universalizing a principle of particularism: the right of each people to its particular identity, its particular character, and its particular political choices. If this is taken to imply the goal of homogeneity within a nation, then the position of minorities (such as the Jews) does become problematic. But as long as each nation respects the reciprocal claims of other nations to their own self-determination, then in theory the nation-state could be universalized as the basis of a stable world order. We tend to forget that in the midnineteenth century—the period of the unification of Italy and Germany—nationalism was a liberal principle allied to the struggle for democracy and self-determination for all peoples.

By the time Zionism emerged, however, nationalism was slipping from this liberal and universalizable form to more particularistic expressions. Far from accommodating the rights of other peoples on an equal basis, this more assertive nationalism focused on the presumed virtues or rights of a particular people. Taken to the extreme (with Italy and Germany again as illustrations), in its twentieth-century manifestations it preached not only racial or ethnic homogeneity but also denial of self-determination to others.

Historically, Zionism was an emulation of the first nationalism and a defense against the excesses of the second. In its earlier guise, liberal nationalism in league with democratization had indeed improved the situation of Jews throughout Europe. But in its later manifestation as “exclusive” nationalism, the position of Jews in new nation-states became increasingly precarious. The drive for a Jewish state therefore had behind it both a powerful positive pull, in the desire for Jewish self-determination and selfexpression, and a strong negative push, in the simple need for escape from this second strain of nationalism.

Exclusive nationalism gave rise to a new and more vicious ethnic antisemitism, which for many nullified assimilation as a solution to the problematic position of Jews. When religion was the criterion, Jews at least had the option of conversion. But one could not convert to a new ancestry; consequently even the most thoroughly assimilated Jews were not totally accepted in the new hypernationalist European societies. This was driven home by events like the Dreyfus trial—in liberal France yet—where a Jewish army officer, totally French in culture and loyalty, was falsely convicted of treason in a conspiracy involving the high military command. The final proof, some decades later, was the fate of German Jews, perhaps the most assimilated community in Europe. Many early Zionists, including Theodor Herzl himself, began as assimilationists but became convinced by events that integration would not end the persecution of Jews as a minority. Thus the achievement of political sovereignty was seen not only as an inherent right but also as a necessary response to the position of Jews as an exposed minority in Europe and elsewhere.

Eventually some within the Zionist movement also moved from the first form of nationalism to a more assertive and particularistic version. Like their counterparts in Europe, the “nationalist right” among Zionists asserted the exclusive right of the Jewish people to all of Eretz Yisrael, condemned any “compromise” of this right, and stressed the values of order, discipline, and authority above individual rights and democracy.^[5] Organized as the Revisionist movement in the 1920s, under the leadership of Vladimir Ze’ev Jabotinsky, this viewpoint was taken to extremes by others (some even copied elements of European fascism at its peak in the 1930s). Revisionists sought to realize their goals through a political-military strategy, rather than by the slow buildup of a Jewish presence through grassroots settlement activity—Zionism from the top rather than from the bottom.

If nationalism was an ideology with both universalist and particularist potential, the role of socialism should be less ambiguous. Based on a materialist and “objective” view of history, socialism presumes to transcend national differences and provide a class-based analysis of universal applicability. It must be noted at the outset, however, that socialism appealed to Jews in part because of clear points of convergence with Jewish traditions. Among the compatible elements were emphasis on collective identity and interest, concern with social justice, a conception of ultimate deliverance (messianism), perception of a basically hostile environment, and justification of revolt against established authority. The case should not be overstated; clearly other elements in socialism were foreign to Jewish thinking: the primacy of economic factors, historical determinism, the cosmopolitan focus on class rather than nation, the denigration of religion, the argument for centralizing power, and belief in impersonal forces (rather than personal connections). But still many Jews saw secular socialism as “old wine in new bottles,” and some non-Zionist Jewish socialists saw the revival of traditional Jewish autonomy (the kahal) as a logical means of achieving their ends.^[6]

The Haskala had also prepared the ground for socialism by exposing many Eastern European Jews to major currents of Western thought and secularizing their outlook. Changes in Russia also had a major impact: education had advanced sufficiently to create an intellectual class (of both Russians and Jews), but opportunities for integration into the system were blocked. This creation of an alienated group of “rootless intellectuals” is the classic recipe for producing professional revolutionaries, and nineteen-century Russia is a classic example. And since Jewish intellectuals were even more marginal than their Russian counterparts, they were also heavily overrepresented in this “school of dissent.” ^[7]

The structure of Jewish life also enhanced the appeal of Marxist socialism, in particular. By the late nineteenth century, the Jewish population of Eastern Europe had to a great extent been urbanized, pauperized, and proletarianized (with perhaps 40 percent of Jewish workers, by one estimate, employed as cheap industrial labor). This came on top of a strong resentment of the rich by the poor in the traditional kahal, which had earlier been an ingredient in the appearance of Hasidism as a movement. The convergence of all these circumstances created a state of ferment “that stamped the tradition of radicalism irrefragably upon the souls of untold thousands of Russian-Jewish young people.” ^[8]

The first wave of Jewish socialists were indeed universalistic in outlook; they rejected specifically Jewish concerns and outlooks in the belief that all problems would be solved by eliminating class-based oppression. As one orator proclaimed in 1892: “We Jews repudiate all our national holidays and fantasies which are useless for human society. We link ourselves up with armies of Socialism and adopt their holidays.” ^[9] The Jewish participants in the Vai Narod (Movement to the People) tried to take the case for socialism to the Russian peasantry, with even less success than their Russian comrades. Jewish socialists turned to their fellow Jews, in the end, largely for tactical rather than ideological reasons: it was only among Jews that they had any success. But their program still had no Jewish content; when it was decided to establish Jewish agricultural colonies, there was no inclination to favor Palestine over other locations, and colonists were sent to South Dakota, Louisiana, and Oregon.^[10] With the establishment of the Bund a brand of Jewish socialism was devised, but along non-Zionist lines. The Bund sought to achieve Jewish autonomy in existing places of residence, largely through the revival and democratization of the classic kahal.

The next step beyond the program of the Bund, combining socialism with full-blown Jewish nationalism, had actually been taken earlier by one of the founding figures of socialism. Moses Hess, a German Jew and collaborator with Karl Marx, in 1862 published Rome and Jerusalem, calling for the establishment of a Jewish socialist commonwealth in Palestine. The idea attracted no support at the time but was picked up and elaborated fifteen years later by Aaron Liberman, a Russian Jew, who adapted it to Russian circumstances. Then in 1898, only two years after Herzl published Der Judenstaat, Nachman Syrkin published an influential pamphlet that approached Zionism systematically from a socialist context. The final synthesis of Marxism and Zionism was carried out by Ber Borochov, whose first important writing appeared in 1905.^[11]

Even then, Zionistically inclined socialists did not rush to embrace Jewish nationalism wholeheartedly. The strongest group in early Labor Zionism, the Zionist Socialists, were actually supporters of “territorialism,” the idea that a Jewish state could and should be built in any suitable location. Fixation on the historical attachment to Palestine was, in their eyes, romantic nationalism. The important justification for building a new state was to correct what was considered to be the abnormal, distorted structure of Jewish society, and this could be done in any territory in which Jews were free to build their own “normal” society.

Whether attached to Palestine or not, Labor Zionists all shared this preoccupation with the total restructuring of Jewish life. Labor Zionism targeted the “unnatural” economic role that had been forced on Jews in the Diaspora. It urged Jews to move out of such accustomed trades as commerce, finance, and the professions, and to create a Jewish proletariat based on manual labor, a return to the soil, and self-reliance in all spheres of production. In contrast to most other nationalisms, Labor Zionism strongly stressed self-transformation as well as the achievement of external political aims. In the words of the Zionist slogan, Jewish pioneers came to Eretz Yisrael “in order to build and to be built in it.” The establishment of the kibbutz, or rural communal settlement, was a perfect expression of these ideals.^[12]

Labor Zionism represented a clear break with the Jewish past and a clear call for a program that would make the Jewish people “a nation like other nations.” And while its success may have rested in part on its compatibility with some Jewish traditions, it also contributed important novel elements to the Zionist enterprise. The socialist method of building “from the bottom up,” by the slow and patient construction of settlements designed to restructure Jewish life, became the dominant model in the Zionist self-image (even though most settlers came to cities, hardly a novel departure). Socialist ideology provided the rationale—and the manpower—for the mobilization of human resources under prevailing conditions, without waiting for deliverance by the powers-that-be.^[13] But perhaps most importantly, socialism (like nationalism to a lesser degree) put Jewish politics into a conceptual framework and vocabulary of general relevance. It helped to provide the link to secular, Western ideas and influences by which its own progress could be guided and judged.

The direct influence of Western liberalism, as opposed to Eastern European socialism, was more attenuated but still a factor. Even in tsarist Russia, Lockean ideals of limited government and individual rights were not unknown (if socialism could penetrate the walls of absolutism, so could other ideas). The concepts of democracy, if not its practice, had by this time acquired general currency. The early Zionist leaders from Central Europe lived in an intellectual milieu where liberalism was prevalent. A number of “Western” Jews (including, by virtue of his long residence in England, Chaim Weizmann) occupied important posts over the years in the Zionist movement. The British and U.S. branches of that movement were important and vocal in supporting their own political ideals. Finally, the British government presided for thirty years over the development of the Jewish national home, as the Mandatory power.^[14]

While some Western conceptions of unfettered individualism and uncompromising secularism ran against the grain of nationalist, socialist, or religious influences, democratic ideas were also reinforced—it should be recalled—by both traditions and circumstances. Even when democracy was not practiced as a matter of intellectual conviction, some sharing of power had often been necessary because of the voluntary basis of Jewish selfgovernance.

Western liberalism has been especially visible in two areas. First is the legal and judicial system with its strong borrowings from British and other Western sources.^[15] Second is the economic sphere, where the opponents of socialism (organized historically as the General Zionists) adopted liberal economic doctrines as a platform. The General Zionists originally were simply those Zionists who were not socialist, religious, or revisionist; they occupied a centrist position by virtue of their opposition to both left and right. When they were organized as a party, in the 1930s, a large influx of immigrants from Central Europe reinforced the party’s liberal image. General Zionists became the movement most clearly identified with Western liberalism, especially in economic policy but also to some extent in political matters.

The fourth strand of the Zionist movement, after Labor, Revisionist, and General Zionists, was religious Zionism. Religious Zionists accepted the aim of rebuilding a Jewish state in Palestine but sought to do so in strict accordance with traditional Jewish law. Clearly this was the least revolutionary and least universalistic version of Zionism; it remained a small minority within the Zionist movement and, for a considerable period, within the Jewish Orthodox community as well. Perhaps nothing else indicates as well how Zionism was seen as a revolutionary threat to traditional values and hierarchies in the Jewish world. In the eyes of rabbinical authorities, the Zionist movement was regarded as a secular nationalist movement that threatened traditional Judaism. They correctly associated it with the secularizing Haskala movement, which had posed the same threat, and which they had also opposed. The vast majority of them “knew danger when they saw it” and took a hard anti-Zionist line.^[16] This left only a small number in the religious Zionist camp—the forerunners of today’s National Religious Party—who were able, in the early days of Zionism, to reconcile its basically secular and revolutionary ideological thrust with religious Orthodoxy.