Jewish Assimilationist and Anti-Zionist Responses to Modernity

Embracing the Nation: Jewish Assimilationist and Anti-Zionist Responses to Modernity C.R. Power.* and Sharon Power.** 1. JEWS AND THE “MODERN QUESTION” With the idealization and proliferation of the secular Christian nation-state in Europe in the modern era, power and legitimacy were for the first time seen to flow up from the people, rather than down from G-d through his sovereign. Enlightenment and post- Enlightenment thinkers adapted Hellenic democratic theory to re-imagine the polis as a nation whose citizens were organic members of a body politic with its own, presumably unique, democratic will. The normative idea that a “people” should be self-governing, that in fact any other form of political arrangement was inherently unenlightened and oppressive, informed the new delineation of states, borders and sovereignty. Member- ship in a people, one’s personal sense of collective identity, became of crucial political importance. One people, one nation became the rule. Thus arose “The Jewish Question,” a consideration of what the presence of the Jews meant for the modern conception of nationhood. The idea of the Israelites representing a distinct “people” became a key problem of modernity. As the universalism of Enlightenment thinking was transformed by 19th century socialist thinkers, Jewish difference, as collective difference, remained a central problem, deemed anathema to the socialist project, this time preventing the realization of the international socialist collective rather than of the liberal democratic nation. Socialists see the coming post-capitalist era as, by definition, a post-Jewish era. Thus Jewish and non-Jewish post-Enlightenment thinkers alike, from Voltaire to Hegel to Marx, realized that the new modern forms of political organization could be – and perhaps needed to be – articulated through resolution of the “Jewish Question.” Inverting our perspective from the majority to the minority group, we can see how the Enlightenment brought with it for the Jews what we might call the “Modern Ques- tion.” The implicit question of modernity was an existential ultimatum: are you one of “us,” a legitimate member of the “people” of a given nation-state or international collective – which is by definition non-Jewish – or are you a separate “people,” an alien presence on the body of the nation? Jews have responded to this ultimatum in various ways, but two strong and conflicting answers were to emerge. * Graduate Student, McGill University. ** Graduate Student, York University. 111 © C.R. Power and Sharon Power, 2013 | doi 10.1163/9789004265561_012C.R. Power and Sharon Power - 9789004265561 This is an open access chapter distributed under the terms of the CC BY-NCDownloaded 4.0 license. from Brill.com09/26/2021 09:28:27PM via free access 112 C.R. POWER AND SHARON POWER The first response is the reaffirmation and reframing of Jewish difference that came to be expressed as Zionism. In an era when all rights flow from “peoplehood” and citizenship in a “nation,” one way for Jews to access those rights is by asserting their difference, breaking off from the nations in which they live and demanding equal rights as a separate “people.” This response eventually led to the founding of a modern Jewish nation-state, Israel. The second response, which is the primary focus of this paper, is the negation of Jew- ish difference, which we classify as an assimilationist response. The new nation-state model held out the inherent promise of equality to Jews, since citizenship rights were granted to all simply by virtue of one’s belonging to the “people.” The secularizing impulse of modernity also meant that religious difference became privatized and ostensibly depoliticized. Under these conditions, Judaism could be tolerated as long as it was exclusively a personal faith. Thus, as a logical part of their assimilationist strategy to obtain equal civil rights, Jewish Reformers and maskilim worked to reformulate Jewish- ness exclusively into an expression of personal faith, with absolutely no national or political affiliation. Our proposal in this paper is that the major Jewish assimilationist responses to modernity, from the Enlightenment’s liberal and Reformist responses through 20th-century socialism, universalism and anti-Zionism, are driven by this impulse to deny Jewish difference and Jewish collectivity. It is crucial here to define our use of the term assimilationist as a central element of our analytical framework. Some scholars use “assimilationism” in a way that might more accurately be termed “adaptationism”: the impulse of Jews to divest themselves of particular signs of difference in order to adapt to mainstream society. For our purposes, assimilationism is not merely a passive adoption by Jews of non-Jewish cultural, linguis- tic or national identity markers, but rather an active ideological compulsion towards the eradication of Jewish difference. Thus, one might be a highly assimilated Jew, but not necessarily an assimilationist. The unending need to identify, vilify and ultimately negate threatening Jewish difference is the key distinguishing marker of assimilationism as an active, politically salient ideology. These two primary orientations, the one Zionist, the other assimilationist, character- ize the ongoing Jewish response to the “Modern Question.” They are also perceived, particularly by assimilationists, as existentially threatening to one another. If Jews do indeed share some sort of national, and therefore political, association, how can they rightly demand access to belonging, and its attendant civic rights, in another nation or international collective? The question of Jewish “dual loyalties” persists to this day, although the language may have shifted from conflicting “Jewish loyalty” to conflicting “Zionist loyalty.” The assimilationist response, in its purest expression, has remained profoundly hostile to Zionism as an expression of Jewish difference, as it must indeed be hostile to any expression of Jewish difference. By tracing the major strategies that Jewish post-Enlightenment thinkers have utilized in their quest for political emancipation, we can gain a broader understanding of the connections between early assimilationist responses to the “Modern Question” and contemporary Jewish anti-Zionist thought. 2. ASSIMILATIONIST STRATEGIES The rest of our paper outlines the major types of Jewish assimilationist strategies, which we have divided into three categories: the first is political apostasy, the personal renun- C.R. Power and Sharon Power - 9789004265561 Downloaded from Brill.com09/26/2021 09:28:27PM via free access EMBRACING THE NATION: JEWISH ASSIMILATIONISM AND ANTI-ZIONISM 113 ciation and emphatic negation of Jewish “peoplehood”; the second is the “moderniza- tion” of religious Judaism so as to make it represent Enlightenment values; and the third is the strategy of positioning oneself as the “good Jew” in a “good Jew/bad Jew” dichot- omy. A. Political apostasy Political apostasy eventually came to replace religious apostasy as a means for Jewish assimilation and emancipation. In the secularized modern world, a world where religious affiliation had ostensibly been subordinated to the political, the source of Jewish difference was re-centred onto the political as well. Whereas, in the Medieval era, conversion to Christianity theoretically allowed Jews to neutralize Jewish difference, promising an end to religious persecution, political apostasy carries with it a promise to end Jewish political persecution. All one has to do is reject one’s political difference through the emphatic negation of Jewish “peoplehood.” This can be clearly seen, for example, in the Statement to Napoleon made by the Assembly of Jewish Notables in late 18th century France, in which the Assembly stated: France is our country; all Frenchmen are our brethren…. At the present time, when the Jews no longer form a separate people, but enjoy the advantage of being incorpo- rated with the Great Nation (which privilege they consider as a kind of political re- demption), it is impossible that a Jew should treat a Frenchman, not of his religion, in any other manner than he would treat one of his Israelite brethren.1 Similar statements of political apostasy can be found throughout the Western European debates on “The Jewish Question,” in which many Enlightened Jews hastened to claim their rights as emancipated citizens of the states in which they lived by denying any separate national or political claims as Jews. Another aspect of political apostasy is the defence of Judaism as exclusively religious in nature to renounce all threatening political difference. This became a core tenet of the radical Reform Judaism movement of 19th century Germany and America. At the Second Reform Rabbinical Conference at Frankfurt in 1845, where the president charged speakers to “beware of creating any doubt concerning their allegiance to the state,” one speaker, Rabbi Samuel Holdheim, saw Zionism as contradicting German Jews’ patriotic “feeling for the fatherland.”2 He asserted, “Our nationality is now only expressed in religious concepts and institutions…,” cautioning that, with respect to Judaism in Germany, “One must not mistake a national for a religious phenomenon, otherwise many abuses could be justified.”3 The same strain carried through the radical Reform movement in America into the late 19th and 20th centuries. The Platform of the Reform Rabbinical Conference in Pittsburgh, the basic statement of Reform Judaism from 1889 until 1937, included a principle rejecting Zionism and any restoration of laws formerly pertaining to the Jewish state based on the premise, “We consider ourselves no longer a 1 The Assembly of Jewish Notables, “Answers to Napoleon” (1806), in The Jew in the Modern World: A Documentary History, edited by Paul R. Mendes-Flohr and Jehuda Reinharz (New York, Oxford University Press 1980) p. 116. 2 The Reform Rabbinical Conference at Frankfurt, “The Question of Messianism” (1845), in The Jew in the Modern World, supra note 1, at p. 163. 3 Ibid., p. 164. C.R. Power and Sharon Power - 9789004265561 Downloaded from Brill.com09/26/2021 09:28:27PM via free access 114 C.R.

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