Introduction

Introduction Independently of one another, yet roughly at the same time, Jewish intellectuals have called for a rejection of social assimilation (better: acculturation1) in favor of an identity-conscious Jewishness since the mid-nineteenth century. Voices all over Europe were campaigning loudly for the founding of a Jewish national center in Palestine. To be sure, there had been proposals for a Jewish State in various forms in earlier periods,2 but these were mostly projects of a philanthropic nature or stemming from an enthusiastic religious fervor. As interesting as these may have been, taken separately, they never actually held any political relevance. Change first appeared on the horizon as the idea of a nation-state was gaining popularity all over Europe3 and not only for the Italians, Germans and Irish. Influ- enced by these national movements, Jews were also beginning to think about the founding of their own state instead of just increasing their (often failed) attempts at assimilation. This period in which the Jewish national vision resulted in con- crete political objectives began with men like Moses Montefiore 1784-1895), Karl Netter (1826–1882) and others. After a trip to Palestine in 1827 – one of seven trips he was to take there – Montefiore, a comfortably well-off British Jew, brought to life the idea to develop the land between the River Jordan and the Mediterranean Sea commercially and to make it arable.4 He began to plan a series of industrial and agricultural projects within his resources. For example, he attempted to establish two agricultural col- onies in Safed and Tiberias. Karl Netter founded “Mikveh Israel”, an agricultural school near Jaffa for the “Alliance Israelité Universelle”. A windmill that Monte- fiore had built in Jerusalem still exists today and is a reminder of the energy of the settlement attempts in Palestine at that time. These sensational projects were supported by the positions taken by a whole series of respected Rabbis such as Elia Gutmacher (1795-1874), Yehuda Alkalai (1798–1878) and especially Hirsch Kalischer (1795–1874), who did not only support the colonization attempts, but also were convinced that the self-liberation of the Jews would precede the messianic eschaton. For example, in his writings, Hirsch Kalischer was careful to provide the proof that the salvation expected by all devout Jews would not come suddenly, but gradually and naturally. The colonization of Palestine, in his view, stood at the beginning of this process. The key to Kalischer’s plan for colonization, set out in his work Emunah Yesharah (1860), was for wealthy Jews (Montefiore, Rothschild and others) to found a public holding company which would buy land in Palestine. According to the plan, the plots purchased by the company were then to be transferred to poor colonists to cultivate and develop. The purchasing price was to have been 2 Introduction refunded as soon as the project met with economic success. Kalischer thought that in this way, Palestine could gradually be transferred into Jewish hands. However, just as with Gutmacher and Alkalai, Kalischer’s intellectual approach was also heavily influenced by religious intent. Drishat Zion [Seeking Zion] or the creation of Zion, published in Hebrew in 1861, reads like an exegetic work and consists primarily of quotes from the Bible, Talmud, kabbalistic writings and their commentaries. In it, Kalischer argues that the Bible’s messianic promise can only mean the rebirth of the Jewish nation on the ancestral soil in Palestine. The rebirth of the Jewish nation, as it once was, would require God’s help on the one hand, but would most of all require the active participation of the Jewish people. Like many of his contemporaries, Kalischer understood “active participation” to mean the actual work necessary for colonization, which he considered to have a particular importance.5 Therefore, the conference of prominent Jews and Rabbis he convened in the western Prussian town of Thorn in 1860 demanded measures to introduce colonization activities in Palestine, or Eretz Israel, as the land has always been called by the religiously observant. In the 1870s, the idea of a return of the Jews to the Holy Land did not only fascinate Rabbis like Gutmacher, Alkalai and Kalischer, but also a whole group of authors, as, for example Lord Beaconsfield-Disraeli, George Eliot, and particularly Sir Laurence Oliphant, who encouraged a Jewish settlement of Palestine in his book The Land of Gilead (1879). Similar to Kalischer a few years earlier, he advocated a colonization company with sufficient capital which would purpose- fully purchase land for the Jewish proletariat from Poland, Lithuania, Romania and the Asian parts of Turkey to settle. Oliphant’s secretary Naphtali Herz Imber (1859–1909), who was his travelling companion in Palestine and had made a name for himself as a poet, wrote the poem “Tikvatenu” [Our Hope] in 1878, the first verse of which is: Kol od balesav penimah/ Nefesh yehudi homiyah/ Ulefa’ atei mizrah kadimah/ Ayin letzion tzofija [As long as in the heart, within/ A Jewish soul still yearns/ And onward, towards the ends of the east/ An eye still looks toward Zion]. In 1948 this poem, in a slightly modified and revised version, was declared to be the lyrics for the Israeli national anthem (Hatikvah). Set to a melody by Samuel Cohen, the Hatikvah reminds Jews all over the world that the land between the River Jordan and the Mediterranean Sea is the historical homeland for the Jewish people. In the second half of the nineteenth century a Jewish State remained a distant dream, yet Jewish national propositions and ideas were enjoying increasing favor. Already before Theodor Herzl’s time, the Hebrew language author Peretz Smoleskin (1842–1885) of Russia propagated the rebirth of the Jewish people and the return of the Jews to the land of their forefathers in his poems and essays pub- Introduction 3 lished in Ha-shahar, the periodical he founded, (The Dawn, 12 vol., 1868–1884). In Am Ha-Olam (The Eternal People, 1871) he fiercely argued against all attempts at assimilation. Looking back, the parallel efforts to comprehend and live Jewish nationalism politically seem almost more significant than the calls to agricultural colonization on a nationalistic-religious basis. These efforts were connected to the tra- ditionally passed down Jewish consciousness as a people and incorporated religious and historical traditions, yet received their main impulses from the ideas and ideals of the Enlightenment and the emerging nation-state movements of the nineteenth century. Fichte and Herder6, the early pioneers of the German national movement, were particularly significant reference points. Three authors, Moses Hess, Leon Pinsker and Isaak Rülf will be presented below to illustrate the increase in intensity of Jewish national ideas during the second half of the nineteenth century. Their programmatic writings met with con- siderable resonance in Europe. All three are celebrated as important thinkers of the pre-Herzl period in Zionist historiography. They are considered to be pioneers of modern political Zionism and the Jewish nation state because they reveal the path of national self-determination in their writings. The question as to whether this can be generalized to hold true for all three of these pioneers of Zionism or if their thinking reveals some significant dif- ferences will be answered below. They were all roughly the same age. They all belonged to the first emancipation generation which can also be seen in the fact that they offered similar suggestions to answer the so-called “Jewish question”. It is, however, possible to identify and reconstruct different causes for each of these three men to have developed such a strong commitment to Jewish nationalism and to have become so publically adamant in its advocation. For Moses Hess, originally from Cologne, but who as a political refugee wound up in Paris, certainly hurt pride played a role, a feeling of humiliation and a lack of recognition from his peers led to a new reorientation. On the other hand, for Pinsker and Rülf, the pogroms in Eastern Europe in the 1880s must have triggered such a shock that they definitively dismissed the idea of a gradual social assimilation once and for all and became outspoken proponents of the idea of Jewish nationalism and the colonization of Palestine. Still, the late-nineteenth century pogroms in Eastern Europe do not them- selves sufficiently explain these authors’ radical change in attitude. In addition, Hess, Pinsker and Rülf had vastly different biographies in terms of family back- ground, education and career, yet all three had internalized – subconsciously or not – certain traditions, opinions, and thought patterns from the Jewish world which served to remind them of the difficult situation of their own minority and to indicate a clear call to action. This unifies these three thinkers in retrospect. 4 Introduction One was a writer and philosopher, the second a doctor and the third a Rabbi, who besides providing spiritual guidance in Memel, also made a name for himself as a journalist and newspaper editor. What they did have in common, as different as their individual thought processes were and as distinctly they argued their cases, was the conviction that the Jews’ emancipation and assimilation process in Western and Eastern Europe was doomed to fail. This was a conviction that no one else had ever formulated so explicitly before. Another aspect which also requires closer inspection is the fact that Hess, as well as Pinsker and Rülf, came from Orthodox Jewish families, which was reflected in varying degrees in their theoretical proposals to solve the “Jewish question”7. However, the emphases given were quite distinct, and we will make an effort to show this below.

Load more