WORKING PAPERS IN NATIONALISM STUDIES

No. 1, 2011

Daniel Brember Zionism and the end of Exile

ISBN: 1 900522 78 0 Our Working Papers in Nationalism Studies present the finest dissertation work from students on the MSc Nationalism Studies programme at the University of Edinburgh.

Daniel Brember graduated with distinction from the programme in June 2010.

Abstract

This dissertation examines the relationship between Zionism and Exile, specifically in the thought, work, and policy of the movement‘s most prominent minds in the pre-state period. The persistent dominance of the Zionist master narrative obscures the complexities to the Yishuv‘s ethno-nationalist discourse and the purpose here has been to challenge the validity of this narrative. By examining the relationship in the non-national (18 th and early 19 th Centuries), the early-national ( fin de siecle ) and the nation-building period (pre-1948), this dissertation has exposed the extent to which these leading and influential Zionist thinkers were influenced by and in turn expressed the dominant theories of nationalism at the turn of the century, including, bioligization, orientalism, and eugenics, with profound effect on the identity of the Yishuv.

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 Zionism and the end of Exile

I

Foundational Myths

—Here everybody is both Jewish and universal…“ David Ben-Gurion (Peretz 1991, : 86)

May 14 th 1948 marked the expiration of the British Mandate of Palestine. On that day in what was then the Tel Aviv Museum, stood Russian-born émigré David Grün. It was just 50 years after the First Zionist Congress held in Basel and Grün, more commonly known as David Ben-Gurion, then chairman of the Jewish Agency for Israel, was now to declare Israel‘s independence. This declaration recalled the Jews‘ biblical connection to Eretz-Yisrael (the ancient land of Israel, Palestine), their modern ”pioneer‘ activities on that land, the trauma of the Holocaust, and of the natural right of the Jews like all other peoples to self-determination. It spoke of the prospects for liberal democracy, peaceful coexistence with neighbouring states, and the importance of the state to world Jewry and that exiled community to the state: Israel was a Jewish state that ”would open the gates of homeland wide to every Jew...‘, ensuring ”complete equality of social and political rights to all its inhabitants irrespective of religion, race or sex…‘ (Smith 2004:214-6).

The extent to which that claim might be said true today is one of the most contentious issues of international politics, as central to local interests as populist discussion of the clash of civilizations makes it to those global. Now over sixty years since Israel‘s independence the much-transformed and ever-evolving conditions of Israeli politics are well documented, but where the state‘s internal circumstances have altered with time its existential character, largely, has not. For Israel persists in a complex relationship with the substantive core values of democracy, liberalism,

 peace, and indeed self-determination. Principally this is augmented and evidenced relative to the near century-long conflict with Palestine‘s indigenous Arab population, challenging Herzlian reverie of Israel as that civilized torch in a barbarously darkened corner of the world.

The grave importance of that conflict commands academic attention, but often to the detriment of broader Israeli and Palestinian historiography that is instead restricted to a ”framework of competitive victimhood‘ (Penslar 2007:17). Thus conventional exploration of Arab-Israeli politics within this framework typically treats these identities as though they are monolithic, masking realities (Kimmerling 2001; Handelman 2004; Penslar 2007). In a pioneering article on the inequities that plague Israeli citizenship, Ella Shohat (1988) acknowledged that it was Zionists who spared no measure in asserting this interpretation. A fundamental myth of the Zionist rationale, this position often assumes the universality of a macro identity and the equality of its membership, it may infer unanimity of opinion, or presume an exceptional and eternal character. Most erroneously, it exudes continuity.

Taken individually, none of these characteristics is peculiar to Zionism, or indeed plausible. In fact, various parties to that society and beyond contest each claim. In reality, a persistent state discourse of cultural superiority has historically subordinated the interests of successive waves of Jewish immigrants to those of Europe‘s ”pioneering‘ Zionists dependent upon regions of origin, restricting the economic development and socio-mobility of the former, and developing a hierarchically stratified citizenship based upon ethnicity (Shafir & Peled 2002: 74- 109; Handelman 2004: 43-54). Furthermore, the Jewish state continues to enforce a range of religious expressions in the public sphere that draw the ire of both the secular population that expect the separation of synagogue and state, and the religious conservatives that demand greater influence. Accordingly, party politics have often coalesced along these divisions, further informing cardinal policies in other areas of Israeli politics from border issues to minority rights, and thus the orientation of the state (Arian 2005). It follows that these conditions prohibit confident aggregation of identity beyond the individual level, and that the characteristics of any presumed macro identity are likely to alter over time as a result of the very same political processes that define them.



In his seminal work Zionism and Territory (1983), the late Israeli sociologist Baruch Kimmerling observed that the historical narratives penned by his predecessors and many of his contemporaries (and subsequent ardent ideologues) isolated Yishuv (the pre-state Jewish community in Palestine) development from that of its environment, specifically Arab and British influence. What emerged was ”the dual society paradigm,‘ that supposes two distinct communities in Palestine (the Jewish and the Arab) developed independently, each according to its own trajectory. The result is the reduction of history to only that of the national movement. Consequently, those ”vacuumed‘ narratives of concern to Kimmerling inherently suppose a flowing continuity to history, erroneously assuming an identity both eternal and consistent.

This is a core component of what Penslar (1991) considers Israel‘s ”master narrative‘. Loosely, this is analogous to a state-sponsored ”official history‘. Imbued with Zionist ideology it served to reinforce and was in turn reinforced by the exculpatory ”facts‘ upon which Israel‘s creation and survival was dependent; such as an ancient claim to Eretz Yisrael , the ever-imminent spectre of a people‘s annihilation, or the voluntary flight of more than half a million indigenous Arabs. The —Exodus version“ of history, as Norman Finkelstein (2005) terms it (so called after Leon Uri‘s historical novel Exodus (1959) , which popularized it) gained international currency validated by later, ”academic‘ offerings such as From Time Immemorial: The Origins of the Arab- Jewish Conflict over Palestine (1984) by Joan Peters and, more recently, Alan Dershowitz‘s The Case for Israel (2003). According to Israeli sociologist Uri Ram (2007), any understanding of this narrative‘s development is rooted in ”the Edinburgh School‘. Developed largely at the University of Edinburgh from the late 1970s onwards by David Bloor, Barry Barnes and others, the ”strong programme‘ contradicts competing theories (notably those of the ”Columbia School‘) that maintain scientific investigation is insulated from the shifting circumstances in which it is conducted; that it is —autonomous“ and that its discoveries are —objective“. Instead, the Edinburgh School contends that there is causality between those circumstances and the interpretation of any discovery; science must be judged within enveloping paradigms. In context, Israeli historiography needs to be understood within its macro-historical frame of reference: ”historical narrative is not an

 inventory of data or a timetable but rather the rendering of the past in a manner meaningful to the present‘ (Ram 2007: 206).

Consequently, on the apparent historical predominance of this ”master narrative‘, one ought to note several points, the first being the prevailing trend in academia at the time of conception. In the aftermath of the Second World War, whether bruised, beaten, but reborn - as were France and Germany - or tired, triumphant, and enduring - as was Britain - the nation was to be lauded. Though writers‘ political biases might have differed, national histories (especially those that dealt with vexed or recent matters) were ”state-supportive‘ (Penslar 2007). The case of Israel was no different; at great cost, and despite all odds, the pioneers had persevered. Second, political realities would necessitate this drafted adulation: however exaggerated Arab military supremacy might have been (by all parties one might add), Israel was besieged, and the ordinary citizen‘s fear of being —driven into the sea“ was genuine indeed. In addition, the capture and trial of Adolf Eichmann in 1960 exposed to all Israel the suffering endured by European Jewry under the Nazis, a development that further enhanced a conviction in ”The Jewish State‘s‘ righteousness (Kimmerling 2001). Third, what might appear as an overt contempt for accuracy, especially regarding the War of Independence, is emblematic of more than just idealistic cant or Zionist whitewash (though one should not infer that either of the two were wholly absent from all, perhaps any, writings of this type). As illustrated by Benny Morris (1988), the master narrative regurgitates the Zionist pabulum pedalled by the state, but is sourced from private memoir and personal correspondence. Access to the official documentation held in Israeli archives is licensed only after 30 years, ensuring that in many instances researchers could write only blind. The impact of this was that the predominant histories were at best myopic, and at worst œ as in the case of Joan Peters‘ œ composed of mangled sources, falsified data, and were in ”large swaths plagiarized from Zionist propaganda tracts‘ (Finkelstein 2005: 2). Finally, as Penslar (2007) suggests, Yishuv (distinct from Zionist; the investigation of the national movement) historiography is traditionally a ”cottage industry.‘ Given the proximity of academic, governmental, and military institutions in post-independence Israel and the defined strata of people that occupied them, common experience was likely. Like other small and recently established nation-states eager to instruct and archive their struggles, ”histories of the Yishuv tend to be popular and pedagogic

 rather than works of analytical scholarship‘ ( ibid : 17). Furthermore, infrequently translated, they were not exposed to the criticisms of an international audience.

These points considered, one understands exactly how Israel‘s master-narrative came to dominate domestic and, diffused through receptive mediums, global thought. But as the master-narrative developed, did a comparatively smaller field labour to expose a competing, at oftentimes-convergent ”counterfactual‘ history. It told of systematic dispossession, disenfranchisement, and the eventual forced expulsion of Palestine‘s indigenous population. Hostage to as many polemicists as Israeli historiography though, this field was for a long time muzzled by global guilt ridden sympathy for the Jews and their story, and amaranthine perception of the Arab as backwards and barbaric. History belonged to the victor. Tales of heroism, improbable feats, and the laboured blooming of a desert landscape, eclipsed those of misery and suffering. The immediate Palestinian sense of history, and of their place in it, was lost to that of the Israeli. But so too, was the Jewish.

It is this that is the central argument of this paper: intended as —a return to history,“ the very success of the Zionist project, engendered rupture from it. For it aspired to a cultural and physical renewal of Judaism. Here, as elsewhere, one must note that the Zionist narrative ”voided…the two millennia of settlement outside [Palestine]‘ (Finkelstein 2005: 8). It was believed the agricultural settlement of that land would shake off the shackles of European anti-semitism, creating a new ”muscular Judaism‘, while its political development would ”normalize the Jew‘ œ a process that would foster Western acceptance (Presner 2008; Piterberg 2008). The symbolic struggle of the veteran Yishuv population and the political and social interactions inherent to it had great influence on the identity of that community. Imbued with the sensibilities of the ideational milieu from whence it came, Zionism‘s approach to the orient and the Jews thereof is comparable to that of the colonial-settler states it so claims distinction from (Piterberg 2008). Thus, Ben-Gurion‘s declaration that Israel was —the Jewish state“ is but another chronicle to a master-narrative that champions a coherent, universal, and timeless whole. In fact, that narrative concealed what was an elitist, prejudiced, and inegalitarian society, one that privileged the history of its national movement over the histories of its nationals‘.

 Turning to the format of this paper, in the following chapter, ”The Jewish Question,‘ we explore the origins of the 19 th Century national Jew, from a macro-historical perspective, placing the origin of the —Jewish nation“ firmly amongst the rise of other European nations. In the third chapter, ”From Pariahs to Prophets,‘ with fin de siècle Europe as the frame of reference, the prevailing attitudes and political trends that influenced the founding figures of Zionism expose the character of that movement and its intended purposes. This reveals Zionism as a programme of social engineering that exhibits a strong correlation with the predominant fascinations of that time: primordialism; secularism; orientalism; eugenics; and ultimately anti- Semitism. The subsequent chapter explores how the implementation of practical Zionism (the colonization of Palestine) moulded the identity of the Yishuv ; a process that resulted in alienation: of the Sabra from the Jew, and of the Jew from Israel. We will discover that by means of selective immigration, cultural suppression, assimilation, and the subordination of deviant ethnicities (both gentile and Jewish), the embryonic state sculpted from its European material the Israeli, the distinct experiences of whom informed that community‘s perception of self, and of the Diaspora. The remainder of this chapter, though, will position this study within the wider framework of historical revisionism, and additionally, will examine some of the dilemmas and ethical issues attendant to that.

REMAKING HISTORY

Israeli politics is often said to divide into two distinct periods, that before the Six-Day War of 1967 and that after it; a period ”consumed by the dilemmas attendant on the struggle to extricate the country from the fruits of that victory‘ (Arian 2005: 1). That conflict, in which Israel captured territories to the south, east, and north of the 1948 armistice line, and with it their Arab residents, altered the spatial, demographic, and cultural dimensions of the state with profound affect on its citizens. Amidst these developments and broader historical happenings that bore an adversarial ethos to academia, their emerged a new generation of Israeli scholars, whose experiences were far removed from their predecessors. Many had served in ‘67, others in ‘73 when the legality and morality of that past conflict‘s spoils, in addition to Israeli military prowess, were directly challenged. Born in the 1950s, their own growth paralleled that of the organized Palestinian resistance movement, and they witnessed

  worldwide exposure to an alternative narrative at the Munich games of ‘72. Some studied abroad in Great Britain and North America, where academic trends and perception of their country informed their own understanding. These young scholars, Israel‘s ”new-historians‘, battled the labour-Zionist dominated corridors of existing academe and possessed ”a missionary zeal to shatter Zionist myths‘ (Penslar 2007: 26). Their work is often met with hostility, and can be professionally unprofitable, but an understanding of their trials is necessary to illuminate the ethical dilemmas inherent to this study.

Until the developments that accompanied that shift in Israeli-politics, state- historiography espoused an impenetrable chauvinism that forbade genuine introspection. Yet this condition is not peculiarly Zionist. Challenging the master narrative has forever been a perilous hobby, as the lives of Jesus of Nazareth (only his first, though!), Giordano Bruno, and Galileo Galilei testify. Modern-day heretics, for their infractions, expose their personal and professional lives to similar dangers. Challenging a myth-laden master narrative, specifically that of the nation-state in which one is a citizen, is equivalent to apostasy; it is difficult and, in some instances, deadly.

Increasingly, conventional discourse regards criticism of Zionism as criticism of Israel and, with Israel the pillar against which the hopes and fears of world-Jewry now lean, criticism of Jews. For Jeffrey Herf (2007: xviii), in the historical context of recent decades, there has been no ”significant divergence between what anti- Semitism and anti-Zionism have come to mean as distinct ideologies in world politics.‘ To question the Zionist endeavour is to deny the legitimacy of Israel, which is to deny to the Jews, what Israel‘s declaration of independence identified as, —the natural right“ of —all other nations [to] their own sovereign state“ (Smith 2004: 215). 1 For many modern Jews, according to David N. Myers (2007: 21), Israel and its representative institutions are ”beyond reproach‘, most notably in periods of instability, and ”particularly so in the Diaspora where cynicism about those institutions and their efficacy is far less pronounced.‘ The new-historians, or

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  ”revisionists‘, are thus not only anti-Zionist, but also anti-Semitic. What is in effect academic catharsis draws accusations of betrayal and self-hatred (Pappe 2006).

Zionist lore holds that anti-Semitism - while not eternal - is omnipresent; though the horrors of Nazism made traditional anti-Semitism distinctly unfashionable, it merely assumed new guise in anti-Zionism. It is an accusation repeatedly leveled at the Western secular Left‘s obsession with Israel: that underneath the façade of humanistic, cosmopolitan compassion for Palestinian suffering hides a hatred of the Jew. 2 It is beyond my remit to adequately explore this here, but I hold that there is good academic justification to reject the orthodox position, as articulated by Anita Shapira, that ”after Auschwitz and 1948, the distinction between anti-Zionism and anti-Semitism can no longer be upheld‘ (2007: 228). This is not to suppose that criticism of Zionism is never anti-Semitic, or that anti-Semitism does not remain a serious problem. 3 Instead, I agree with Myers (2007: 20), that ”without careful contextualization and delineation‘ this equation must be applied with caution. First, if every anti-Zionist is an anti-Semite, that concept loses its real significance; ”when anti-Semitism is everywhere, it is nowhere‘ (Klug 2004: 5). Second, to fashion anti- Zionism as odious is to shift the debate toward the legitimacy of the interlocutor, thus avoiding any substance of the criticism (Lerner 2007). Furthermore, to posit that global condemnation of Israeli policy (which is often portrayed as anti-Zionist) is evidence of anti-Semitic conspiracy, combined with the associated claims of cynical politicians like Sharon and Netanyahu that the fate of world-Jewry thus hangs with Israel, not only conflates the state and the diaspora but also absolves Israel of any responsibility for its security situation: extreme circumstances necessitate extreme solutions (Penslar 2007).

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  One must not be prohibited from expressing intellectually balanced comment that is suspect of Zionism œ just as one might be suspicious of all nationalisms œ through fear that in doing so one invites allegations of anti-Semitism. Jewish-Zionist history is as glorious as it is tragic, but it is history, and we ought not be hostage to it. Thus, one must proceed on the assumption that there can, as Derek Myers (2007) suggests, exist principled criticism of Zionism. This position is plausible, if only on account of the wealth of Jewish critics of Zionism, past and present. One must distinguish, then, between legitimate and illegitimate criticism of Zionism, the concise criterion for the latter being ”exclusion and group stigmatization‘ (ibid: 22). Provided then, that this criticism does not originate from measures that are not equally applied to every other state or nationalism, and that this criticism does not shift from the actions of individuals to the character of a group, it is legitimate.

A last note on semantics: every effort will be made to ensure that choice of language does not betray my sensitivities. That is to say that the use of terminology will not be so as to assert a belligerent‘s claims. It follows that territories will be referred to with certain flexibility, both as Eretz-Yisrael or Palestine. To every extent possible, anachronisms and misnomers will be avoided. Prior to May 1948 Israel did not yet exist, thus all references to the pre-state period will reflect this; in place of ”Israelis‘ the term Zionists will be used, or where appropriate Jews. However, this is not to imply the term Zionist is synonymous with Jew; not all Jews were Zionists and not all Zionists Jews. Furthermore, prior to the emergence of a comprehensive pan- indigenous movement, which Geldin (2004) places to the Arab Revolts of 1936-9, the ”Palestinians‘ will be referred to as the indigenous-Arab community.

  II

The Jewish Question

—A man without a nation defies the recognized categories and provokes revulsion… A man must have a nationality as he must have a nose and two ears.“ (Gellner 1983: 6)

Though the Jews have faced persecution for thousands of years, anti-Semitism was a relatively new phenomenon at the fin de siècle , and it was the rise of nations that had engendered it. Tony Coady (2006: 63) suggests that nationalism itself is ”an ideology or outlook that insists on some sort of moral priority for national attachment.‘ He distinguishes between the nation understood as a political entity (NP), and that as a racial, religious, tribal, or ethnic group (NE). The nation (NP) is ”so often, a composite of many nations (NE),‘ but it is often presumed that ”promotion of the former requires suppression of the latter‘ ( ibid ). Pre-Enlightenment, Jews were oppressed for their religious beliefs and cultural practices. In the 19 th Century, what Michael Mann (2005) identifies as the organicism of the people overlaid ethnic- racial labels on pre-existing religious ones, creating a deviant ethnic community from what was a religious out-group. The Jews were in many respects unwittingly, even unwillingly, elected to 19 th Century nationhood.

THE ORIGIN OF A SPECIES

As an ideology, Mann (1993) suggests nationalism emerged from the social and economic interactions associated with pre-industrial commerce in late 18 th Century Europe. It is thus not the natural and universal ordering of political life, long-delayed by a ”persistent and mysterious somnolence‘, the nationalist so sees it as; for it is nationalism that engenders nations (Gellner 1983: 46-7). Prior to this period national homogeneity was rare; states comprised regions of distinct religious and linguistic community, many of which exercised relative political autonomy or had historically done so (Mann 1993: 731). The state could conceivably comprise multiple

   such —communities of attachment“ so dispersed by geography that they had no awareness of, let alone affinity to, one another.

Responding primarily to the demands of capitalists, the state increasingly oversaw civilian functions throughout the 19 th Century, developing communications networks, railways, canals, roads, and as Mann suggests ”most significantly,‘ schools. The impact of improved communications and transport links was the development of a more intimate relationship between the individual and the state, but also between previously distinct localities, increasing the density of social interaction: ”quite unconsciously, most state activities furthered the nation as an experienced community‘ ( ibid : 730). Gradually, exposure of each community to another, and the influence of state administration would naturalize social behaviour, thus homogenizing the nation. Yet despite general consensus in approving the majority of state sponsored ventures, the imposition of centrally administered education systems met resistance in regions where religious authority was well established, or from distinct linguistic communities. Broadly speaking, ” national organization increased at the large expense of the local or regional‘ ( ibid : 734). It was the subtle imposition on society of what Gellner (1983: 56) termed ”high culture;‘

…[the] establishment of an anonymous, impersonal society, with mutually substitutable atomized individuals, held together above all by a shared culture of this kind, in place of a previous complex structure of local groups, sustained by folk cultures reproduced locally and idiosyncratically by the micro groups themselves.

In such instances as those where this imposition was opposed, resistance might enhance community attachments and demands for their representation, producing alternationalisms . Thus, Mann (1993: 731-4) suggests the industrial capitalist period encouraged three variants of the nation: ”state-reinforcing, state-creating, and state- subverting.‘

State-subverting nationalisms were particularly potent in regions where unrepresentative imperial powers refused to recognize their autonomy, resulting in great violence and instability. Elsewhere, when naturalization met less resistance and its functions expanded, the interdependencies between the state and the individual

   did also. The emergence of the civilian and military administrations had great influence on the conception of communities of attachment: ”hundreds of thousands of administrators now depended for their livelihood on the state; millions of young men were disciplined by a military cadre into the peculiar morale, coercive yet emotionally attached, that is the hallmark of the modern mass army‘ (Mann 1993: 733). Thus the fate (both material and, in the instance of the soldier, physical) of the population was increasingly relative to the performance of its national state. The nation thus became a powerful and attractive concept, commanding loyalty and demanding reverence, the interests of neighbouring nations presumably opposed to or obstructing one‘s own. And so it was that defining those who comprised the nation - those deserving of its protection or entitled to its benefits œ and those who were its enemies, both within and beyond the state, became imperative.

In his exploration of murderous cleansing, The Dark Side of Democracy (2005), Mann identifies two interpretations of —the people;“ the ”liberal‘ version, and the ”organic‘ version. The former conceives of a diverse and stratified population, where the role of the state is to mediate interest and find compromise within various competing groups. The latter appeals to an indivisible, ethnic body politic, the purity of which (and the sanctity of the state) ”may be maintained by the suppression of deviant minorities‘ (Mann 2005: 55). The liberal version was typically common to the states of Northwestern Europe (and the United States) where democracy had developed incrementally; extended only to the elites initially, but with time, and the social and economic developments described above, other strata in the population. The steady enfranchisement of the broader population enabled the institutionalization of diverse interests within state politics, including class, gender, and age. These issues would transcend those such as ethnicity, typically restraining antipathy. The organic conception occurred more in central and eastern Europe, where, as Hans Kohn (1945: 331) suggested, ”[nationalism‘s] roots seemed to reach into the dark soil of primitive times.‘ Here, both the processes described above and democratic ideals developed later, at a point by which ”political theory had matured into the notion that the whole people must rule‘ (Mann 2005: 61). Unlike in the liberal states to the West, there existed a ”transcendent nation‘ that displaced competing interests, which were construed as foreign to those of the state; it was

   permissible to exclude such elements from the citizenry. Briefly then, Mann (2005: 64) suggests that organicist nationalists:

…came to believe in (1) an enduring national character, soul, or spirit, distinguishable from that of other nations; (2) their right to a state that would ultimately express this; and (3) their right to exclude out-groups with different characteristics, who would only weaken the nation.

According to Nathan Weinstock‘s then radical Marxist interpretation of Zionism, Le Sionisme contre Israël ( Zionism: False Messiah 1969), the Jews of this period were already identified as such peculiar strata, even where religious persecution had declined, as the result of class antagonisms. Weinstock‘s analysis of Jewish history identifies four successive periods, the pre-capitalist (lasting in Western Europe until the 11 th Century, and in Eastern Europe to the 18 th Century), the medieval-capitalist, the period of manufacturing and industrial capitalism, and the age of capitalist decline; remarking that ”the content and form of Jewish identity in a given society tends to reflect the Jews‘ material conditions of existence‘ (1969: 2-17, 27). Weinstock suggests the Jews are a people class : they ”constitute historically a social group with a specific economic function‘ ( ibid : 2). Their economic function has dictated the Jews‘ position within wider society, while in turn economic and social developments have dictated the nature of that economic function; a process of selection and elimination .

Expulsion (from England in 1290, France in 1306, and later Spain in 1492), oppression, and material necessity, had gradually driven the Jews East since the end of the 12 th Century, through the Rhineland and into Eastern and Central Europe by the 1400s. The districts of the Western cities in which they settled communally for reasons of convenience and safety, gradually became the ghettos; ”prescribed residential areas to which the Jews were forcibly confined and where they were subject to the worst exactions‘ (Weinstock 1969: 8). By the early 18 th Century the majority of Jews had settled in Poland to the East where the feudal economies to which the Jews had become suited had persisted far longer, while back in the West the period of manufacturing and industrial capitalism, preceded by the interactions of pre-industrial commerce as described above, would develop a more general

   monetary economy; eliminating the Jews‘ economic function. At the same time, Western Europe‘s incremental extension of political rights on the basic premise of equality would confer citizenship to those Jews willing to assimilate; to relinquish their commitment to a separate community bound by Jewish law, and their religious commitment to a return to Eretz-Yisrael , a ”hope that had bound them together for centuries‘ (Smith 2004: 31). During the 19 th Century most of Western Jewry would assimilate and acculturate to their surrounding societies, be it German, Austrian, Hungarian, English, or French. Alternatively, one could divide themselves ”between private and public spheres, between religion and nationalism, to be Jewish by religion at home and German, say, by nationality in public‘ (Kimmerling 2001: 21).

In Eastern Europe, where the Jews had for a long time monopolized the feudal economy, the emergence of capitalism occurred in the same period as a popular political consciousness. In this region, where religious tensions had not yet abated, ”the —killers of Christ“ had been forced into unpopular economic middleman roles by bans against owning land or having public employment‘ (Mann 2005: 64). The partition of the Polish kingdom in the 1790s, the highest Jewish-populated region, between Russia, Prussia, and Austria, significantly enlarged the population of Russian Jewry, presenting ”a question they had to deal with in a decisive manner‘ (Smith 2004: 32). The answer was the Pale of Settlement, created in 1794, part of a series of decrees restricting Jewish habitation to the frontiers of the empire, predominantly the Polish territories, and preventing Jewish participation in wider Russian society lest they converted (Kimmerling 2001). Thus, at a time when the Jews of the West were secularizing and assimilating, gradually drifting further from their traditions, ”isolation and concentration of habitation ensured the continuity of strong religious and communal bonds within Eastern European Jewry‘ (Smith 2004: 32).

The ”fragility‘ of the emerging capitalist systems in the East would incur widespread unemployment, the frustrations and resentment from which entangled class frustrations and nationalist sentiments, expressed in anti-Semitic fashion. Thus economic nationalism had identified in the pauperized Jews an alien element, anchored to the ”persistent memory of the Jewish usurer and the historical link between Jews and commercial capitalism‘ (Weinstock 1969: 14). As Weinstock (1969:

   11) suggests, whereas prior to 1880 Jewish migration in the region had primarily been determined by the prospect of penetrating capitalist economies, intensified anti-Semitism had forced hundreds of thousands of impoverished Eastern European Jews into the West, home to established, assimilated, bourgeoisie Jewry; ”the Jewish problem, as it arose in the West from the end of the 19 th Century onwards, was in fact a transplantation of the difficulties of East European Jewry.‘

And so there had arrived in Western Europe a new community of Orthodox Jews, haggard and forlorn; their ”strange language, garb, and ringlets seeming alien and primitive‘ (Mann 2005: 182). The perception of a menacing spectre intent on polluting the purity of the people and corrupting —higher cultures“ was exacerbated by their having arrived from the East, particularly Russia; the imperial enemy and home to a primitive Slav culture. The presence of these threatening elements stoked the fires, now smouldering in the wake of assimilation, of ”that metonymic association between Jew and capitalism, and by extension with modernity as such‘ in Western Europe (Penslar 2007: 3); generating tales of great global conspiracies. Worse still was the implication that all Jewry was complicit, that they represented an alien other wherever they were and in whatever guise ; even the emancipated bourgeois Jewry of Europe‘s elite. And yet to Europe‘s assimilated Jews, these Russian émigré were as alien as Slavs themselves, and no less primitive.

THE WAGES OF ANTI-SEMITISM

The decisive role of Jew-hatred in both the conception and orientation of Zionism is traced to a broader phenomena Dan Cohn-Sherbok (2006) calls ”the paradox of anti- Semitism‘, the crux of the Zionist master-narrative. Cohn-Sherbok ( ibid : 5) remarks of history that, wherever present ”antipathy towards Jewry has reinvigorated Jewish life.‘ From a secular perspective one might infer that Jewish life has persisted through time partly because of, rather than in-spite of, anti-Semitism; that it was a necessary evil. 4 For Cohn-Sherbok, it has been the Enlightenment and its associated ideals, having gradually distanced Jews from their ancestral ties, which have posed Judaism‘s greatest threat. As Jewish life reengaged with the currents and trends of

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   gentile existence, emancipation cleared alternative paths for resisting Jew-hatred, via integration and assimilation. Whereas, pre-Enlightenment the community response to anti-Semitism was to turn inward, defending Jewish tradition. But Abraham B. Yehoshua (2008) goes further, noting the ”basic Jewish perception‘ that anti- Semitism is the omnipresent associate of the eternal people; it is intrinsic to the Jewish experience. That this perception enduringly nominates our candidate for obliteration, Yehoshua thus finds it no surprise that the Jew ”internalized the motif as an integral, immanent part of his historical destiny.‘ Anti-Semitism is of course to be detested; both irrational and vacuous, it is virulent, but not wholly destructive. Yehoshua‘s exploration of Jew-hatred‘s root causes corresponds with this interpretation. It is suggested that anti-Semitism is a tool; a ”powerful cement.‘ Regardless of the fear and anger it inspired, there was an alluring function to anti- Semitism, that it could be used ”to reinforce the unstable structure of Jewish identity‘ (Yehoshua 2008). Thus what Cohn-Sherbok (2006) identifies as anti-Semitism‘s ”positive benefits‘, I will instead refer to as its instrumental outputs .

When Yael Zerubavel (1995) suggests that Zionism emerged as a response to the immediate situation of European Jewry at the fin de siècle , she is of course referring to the Jews‘ increasingly hostile, anti-Semitic environment. But by the composition it took, Zionism emerged also as a response to the state of European Jewry, particularly the Ostjude . Within the context of nationalisms, anti-Semitism identified an excluded ”other,‘ a minority, incongruous with the macro-nationalism and necessarily recognized as such: Jews. The extent to which this label, as a mark of distinction, becomes a ”significant site of identification‘ for a population so diverse and unrecognizable to one another as were the Jews of Europe in this period (bourgeois or working class; French or German speaking; religious or secular) and to which Jews themselves did not necessarily subscribe, is located in what Umut Özkirimli terms the social constructionalist approach.

This approach asserts that ”meanings are constructed by human beings as they engage with the world they are interpreting‘ (Özkirimli 2005: 162). He suggests that an identity, such as a nation, might be generated unconsciously, the product of very mundane and rational actions, as was the case with the rise of modern nations in the 19 th Century. Özkirimli (2005: 166) also notes that ”[n]ationhood may exist in

  people‘s minds, but this does not make it ephemeral;…whatever their origins and the extent of mythologizing that go into their making, nations assume a life of their own in time.‘ Michael Mann (2005: 21) agrees, arguing that ”once an ethnic identity is socially constructed, it may engender deep and long lasting sentiments such that it becomes institutionalized, even structural.‘ For the purposes of our inquiry, we must here distinguish between two forms of identity, personal and collective . The former relates principally to ”roles or types that the person identifies with‘ and is typically voluntary (Moore 2006: 32). The latter refers to characteristics we are identified by, and are thus ascriptive; they are not chosen and are largely inescapable, denoting race, gender, or ethnicity for example. Given the ascriptive quality of collective identities, and that they can be biologically based, they are often ratified by others independent of the individual‘s conscience. Thus, if we are to invert the logic of the social constructionalist approach, an ascriptive identity independently ratified but institutionalized and reinforced by a person‘s environment, furthering it as an experienced community, could with time become such a site of significant identification for the individual.

Modern anti-Semitism differed from traditional Jew-hatred. 5 Wilhelm Marr (1819- 1904) did not coin the term ”anti-Semitism‘ until the late 1870s, yet it had been evident in his work, and that of his contemporaries, for more than a decade. This particular brand of Judeophobia emerged from the popular theories of romantic nationalism, biological determinism of race, and an exclusive ”Volk‘ (people) developed by Johann Gottfried Herder (1744-1803), and from works on the inferiority of ”Semitic peoples‘ (as opposed to Indo-Germanic ”Aryan peoples‘) pedalled by Heinrich von Treitschke (1834-96) and others, what Mann (2005) would term ”organicist‘ theories. As Boyarin, Itzkovitz, and Pellegrini (2003: 2) suggest, this ”biologization of difference‘ re invented Jewish distinction in terms of race:

The new sciences of race and sex emergent in the nineteenth century were effectively —secularizing“ Jewish difference. It is not that Jewish religious practices and identifications ceased to matter as identity markers of difference. Rather, race, which was held to be an

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  objectively measurable, indelible difference, rationalized Jewish difference. (2003: 3)

Thus, the biological foundations of anti-Semitic Judeophobia distinguished in its practice the boundaries of a particular people and further determined its membership: those of Jewish lineage, not just faith, were racially incorrigible, and could not relinquish the Jewish aspect of their identity by assimilation. Moreover, anti-Semitism identified elements in the Jew that would undermine the purity of their host nation and that distinguished the distinct character of that people. Jews were believed to be an ancient people that ”never progressed past the first stages of world history‘ (Presner 2007: 148), having survived only by virtue of their strict adherence to Jewish law and unique hygiene practices; evidencing their incapability of political fealty to anyone other than themselves, they were incompatible with the modern European nation.

In late 19 th Century Europe, anti-Semitism was everywhere, from the highest office of politics to the scribbling of regional rags; expressed by the ethno-nationalists on the right, fearful of the Jews‘ impurity, and by the internationalists of the left, who despised Judaism for its‘ associations with capitalism (Penslar 2007; Piterberg 2008; Smith 2004). Supposed solutions to the ”Jewish Problem‘ entailed restrictions on their number in the fields of education, journalism, the civil service, medicine, and punitive taxes for Jewish businesses; in short, the ”de-emancipation of European Jewry‘ (Penslar 2007: 7). Anti-Semitism had fashioned from a polyglot, polynational community of religious, secular, communist, and nationalist individuals, a supposed coherent whole that, by basis of its biological foundations and widespread institutionalization, would co-opt even the nominal Jews of central Europe who were ”completely alienated from Judaism and knew very little about it‘ (Piterberg 2008: 82).

Such activity is, as Coady (2007: 67) asserts, the ”strong tendency‘ of nationalist attachments ”to be harnessed, manipulated, and often created in the cause of wreaking havoc on people and institutions perceived as outsiders.‘ It was in this instance the Jews: the ”Pariah People‘ or guest people ( Gastvolk ), as Weber (cited in

  Momigliano 1980) referred to them, ”ritually separated, formerly or de facto , from their surroundings.‘ Amongst the rise and consolidation of nations, the Jews had gone from people-class to caste. In the developed West, though Jews had been liberated from the impoverished city districts that had been their proverbial gaol, aspiring to the heady heights of political office or academe, there now enclosed them ”the New Ghetto‘, as French Jewish littérateur Bernard Lazarre (1865-1903) termed it: the moral ghetto; that atmosphere of mistrust, hostility, of hatred and prejudice. Anti-Semitism had identified a community of degenerate common ancestry, of common (if in many respects estranged) cultural tradition; accorded this community a history of deceit and mischief; a fantastical future of great global conspiracy; and it identified a territory in which it belonged: nowhere. The environment anti-Semitism had created restricted the social and political worlds available to Jews, until political fealty to their own, or ethnic nationalism, was the only viable attachment. As Lazare would comment:

The Jew who today says ”I am a nationalist‘… is saying ”I want to be a man who is completely free, who has his place in the sun; I have the right to be treated as a human being with dignity. I want to escape oppression, escape outrage, escape the disdain that is heaped upon me.‘ At certain times in history, for certain groups, nationalism represents freedom. (cited in Piterberg 2008: 12)

It was as Weinstock (1969: 32) notes, a reflex nationalism; ”a defensive reaction against the rising bourgeoisie which justified its anti-Semitism through the exaltation of national sentiment.‘ Michael Marrus (1971: 251) agreed, suggesting that for the majority of Jewish nationalists the essence of Jewishness was ”a social perspective on the society in which the Jew found himself… they perceived their Jewishness in terms of alienation [:] Jewish nationalism was thus an overwhelmingly negative phenomenon, a phenomenon of protest and rebellion rather than one of affirmation.‘ At the fin de siècle , anti-Semitism‘s instrumental output had been Jewish nationalism.

  III

From Pariahs to Prophets

—In the special instance of this play, I wish to hide my genitals more than any other time.“ Theodor Herzl (quoted in Piterberg 2008: 33)

It is widely asserted that the Zionist project was the vehicle intended to save world- Jewry. Indeed the Holocaust is commonly held as Israel‘s raison d‘être (Weitz 2007). From this perspective the now well-documented excesses of Zionist paramilitaries in the months preceding Israel‘s establishment might appear rational, even obligatory. Yet, however unsavoury the conditions of European Jewry in 1897 (and they were particularly so) when the World Zionist Organization was founded in Basel, these Zionists could never have foretold the barbarities that Nazism would visit upon the World and its Jews in particular. For certain, the first instance of Zionist immigration to Palestine, the second Aliyah (an earlier wave of East European Jews arrived in the early 1880s but with religious not nationalist motivations and thus technically non-Zionist), occurred in the ten years 1904-14; decades prior to Hitler‘s ascendency, or an imagining let alone realization of such catastrophe (Smith 2004). The tempered success of Zionism during its formative years then, despite the increasingly violent persecution of Eastern European Jews ( Ostjude) , is evidence of Zionism‘s raison d‘être : not restricted to the liberation of Jewry from the calamity that beset them (the Jew‘s immediate material circumstances), but the metaphysical emancipation of the Jew; to rescue the Jew from Jewry.

It is one of the many ironies to Zionism that those figures around whom the movement gravitated were arguably as acculturated and well assimilated into their host societies as one could have been, but this was an essential component to the genealogy of Zionism (Piterberg 2008). Schooled in Western thought, it would be difficult to argue that the inclinations of Zionism‘s West European forefathers went unfurnished by the passions of their enveloping paradigm, namely fin de siècle

  Europe; as Todd S. Presner argues, Zionism ”must be seen as a manifestation of the dialectic of modernity, both its progressive ideals and its dark sides‘ (2008: 17). Indeed if only in approach not explicit policy, anti-Semitism exerted a considerable yet convoluted influence on the movement.

THE GENEALOGY OF ZIONISM

If we were to secularize Zionist historiography, then one might consider Theodor Herzl (1860-1904) as biblical Reuben incarnate; he from whom all Israel descended, a point with which the Zionist master narrative would likely agree. Except, this chapter was introduced by a startling confession from Herzl - ”In the special instance of this play, I want to hide my genitals more than any other time.‘ - taken from his correspondence with fellow Viennese Jew Arthur Schnitzler, regarding Herzl‘s desire to distribute Das neue Ghetto under the —very ordinary“ pseudonym Albert Schnabel. What one ought to take from this is neatly outlined by Piterberg (2008: 2): that, in 1894, ”the beginning of Herzl‘s —conversion“ to Zionism is also the moment in which he most strongly wanted to occlude the fact that he was Jewish.‘ It is important to note that ”the buck‘ all too often stops short with Theodor Herzl. Though it is inevitable that any research, sympathetic or hostile, on the State of Israel will accord prominence to the 1896 publishing of Herzl‘s Der Judenstaat , the reduction of history to a single, albeit central, text (or man) conceals far more than it illuminates. One must project with caution the significance of personal musings of an individual, just as one must distinguish between intention and action, lest they repeat the solecisms the Master Narrative is marred by. As an idea, Zionism had long preceded Herzl, and as an ideology it has long survived him. And yet the self-hatred, shame, and embarrassment exuded here, typical of Theodor Herzl, permeated much about the wider Zionist movement.

Hence Weinstock (1969: 32-45) believes that as a response to the trials of fin de siècle Jewry Zionism was ”quite natural,‘ but that ”the approach of the Zionist and the argument of the anti-Semite show a disquieting similarity.‘ For Zionists conceived of the Jews as a distinct people, a race: a nation. Most importantly, early Zionists were convinced of the incompatibility of Jews and Gentiles; the dangers posed to the Jews within Gentile nations; even the danger posed to the Gentile nation by the Jew. It is Weinstock‘s final conclusion that Zionism is ”contaminated by racism‘: internalizing

  the very thesis of the anti-Semite, the Zionist ”inverts the values of anti-Jewish racism… he even adopts the racist‘s verdict: the Jew must disappear‘ (1969: 44-5). Accordingly, Weinstock considers the resurgence of the Chosen People myth merely the reverse of the anti-Semite‘s Wandering Jew and the Deicidal People . In many respects he is correct, as we will see, Zionism did internalize and project onto that community many anti-Semitic characterizations of the Jew, but it would be incorrect to infer from this that Zionism is in any way analogous to later ideological currents that developed from a similar platform of anti-Semitism, such as National Socialism, for there were subtle yet important distinctions in the implication of this position for the evolution of Zionism. It would be more appropriate to suggest that Zionism was both the quintessential product and exhibition of 19 th Century nationalism; the movement was not necessarily anti-Semitic but, equally, far from philo-Semitic in the contemporaneous sense. As Weinstock (1969: 47) later notes more calmly, the Zionist was inextricable from the influence of the fin de siècle , for ”the solution [(s)he] advocated was conceivable only within [that] framework.‘

Moses Hess (1812-1875), whom in his youth was an associate of Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels, was likely the original Zionist, though no such term existed at this time. His Darwinian concern was primarily for the spread of historical ineptitude, specifically amongst the Jews. He was therefore the first to express that maudlin fondness for the Hebraic period so characteristic of Zionism. As Presner (2007: 30) explains, in Rom und Jerusalem (1862) ”Hess argued vigorously for the —rebirth“ and —resurrection“ of the Jewish people through the reclaiming of their ancient strength and original vitality.‘ But in contrast with Zionists of the fin de siècle , for Hess, Jewish restoration in Eretz-Yisrael was a mitzvah ; the Jews were the sui generis of human history and theirs was —the last nationality question“, the messianic solution to which would inevitably redeem and reunite Jews and humankind. For Hess, far from inherently degenerate, the Jews were in fact a fertile —indestructible tribe“ as he remarked of their capacity to endure when other —ancient people“ had long since disappeared. As such, Hess had conclusively:

…transformed the Hegelian philosophy of world history into a positive Jewish destiny by appropriating the hygienic claims of the emerging field of race science as a testament to the unlimited regenerative capacity of the Jewish people. (Penslar 2007: 31)

 

Essentially Moses Hess‘, like Leo Pinsker (1821-1891), author of Auto-Emancipation (1882) and founding member of Hovevei Zion (Lovers of Zion œ the first organization to actively advocate Jewish restoration in Palestine, though as a spiritual centre not a national home), embraced Jewish nationalism through his disillusionment with the haskalah (Jewish enlightenment). Pioneered by Moses Mendelssohn (1729-1786) in the late 18 th Century, the haskalah referred very broadly to Jewish reintegration with their surroundings. Not only physically but also intellectually and spiritually, the movement advocated the restructuring of Jewish existence so that it was consonant with the emerging secular world. Where the Jew was confined to the ghetto the Talmud occupied a pervasive role in daily life, typically restricting the socio-economic and political development that appeared to be occurring beyond the ghetto walls. Here the Rabbi was the central figure of society and the halakha (Jewish law) was widely enforced. The popularity of this predominantly science-affirming movement manifest within the emerging secular capitalist elite who considered the haskalah a vehicle for the transformation of ”a people psychically stunted by Talmudism‘; those whose ”fall from ancient glory was the result of chance and human action, not divine will [emphasis added]‘ (Penslar 2007: 100-2). The haskalah did not intend an absolute break from Judaism but, like many enlightenment currents, religious compartmentalization; it argued that the individual relinquish all but the ethically prudent components of Jewish tradition in order to better integrate with wider society. If the Jews could demonstrate their functionality, traditional mistrust and suspicion might decrease. Moreover, if assimilation proved successful and the label ”Jew‘ ceased to function as a relevant mark of distinction, Judeophobia would lose all currency.

From Berlin, where Mendelssohn was based, the haskalah spread relatively quickly throughout Prussia and Western Europe, and by the mid-19 th Century to the peripheries of Belorussia, Habsburg, and Moldavia. The comparatively sluggish expansion of the haskalah into the East is due to the later development of industrial capitalism there, as explained above, which provided Jews the means and motive to integrate. To this end, it was the relative success of the haskalah in Western Europe, where capitalist liberalization had occurred earlier, accelerating Jewish emancipation, which forced the general estrangement of West European Jewry from

  the Ostjude . Within this context the reactionary strand of Orthodox Judaism developed, which very generally stood in opposition to the haskalah , advocating the traditional interpretation of Judaism and the strict observance of halachic law. The growth of Orthodoxy inversely mirrored that of the Jewish enlightenment, proving especially popular in the East where the Jews were largely confined to the Pale with limited autonomy, and markedly less so further West where mysticism and spirituality were increasingly deferred. Ultimately, the haskalah would prove a lost cause: what Mendelssohn and his associates identified with assimilation was possible only as long as it was their religion that distinguished Jews from Gentiles but, as discussed above, the popularization of this movement occurred simultaneously with that of Herder‘s theories of nationality and race, forever relegating the Jew to the villain of nationalist pantomime.

In Western Europe, especially Germany and France writes Alain Dieckhoff (2003: 1), ”adoption of the national principle by the Jews was… really a regrettable backward step.‘ He continues to suggest that multilingual, educated and socially progressive, ”through their dispersion the Jews had overcome narrow local particularisms to invent an identity of a universal character... but in the end it was through violence that the existence of a Jewish nation was to become an obvious imperative necessity‘ ( ibid ); post hoc, ergo propter hoc . Indeed Dieckhoff‘s assessment offers here a casual nod to the Master Narrative and provides little by way of illumination, less still in explanation, on the precise relationship between that violence and the character of Zionism. As previously noted there is a causal relationship between the hatred of the Jews and the development of Jewish nationalism, indeed every pivotal stage of Zionist history corresponds to an intensification of persecution. Jewish nationalism almost certainly originates in the East, amongst those proscribed to the Pale and subject to the harshest exactions, while its spread ”faithfully reflected the pattern of Jewish emigration‘ (Weinstock 1969: 32). But Zionism, the most influential current of Jewish nationalism, originates in the West and did not aspire to the rescue of that tribe but rather its regeneration . The Zionist, inspired by the achievements of the Gentile, did not desire the secured existence of contemporaneous Jewish life but the transformation of a people of petty peddlers into a robust labouring nation, akin to those they were excluded from (Penslar 2007: 77).

 

The seeds of this precise orientation were sewn with the interaction of those emancipated Western Jews with their frail, poorly educated and poverty stricken East European brethren, who had fled West by the hundreds of thousands following the brutal pogroms of the 1880s. For Alan Taylor (1972: 37) this was a clash of quasi-civilizations, the Hebraist (secular) and Yiddishist (Orthodox) interpretations of Jewish experience:

…one rooted in the romantic futurism of the disillusioned elite and the other remaining close to the life of the Pale… the two traditions culminated in Zionism and Autonominism, which stood not only as divergent political approaches to the Jewish problem, but as opposite philosophies of Jewish life.

Early Zionism was ”openly contemptuous of Judaism as a religious tradition‘ (Taylor 1972: 39), which in its‘ adoration for the diaspora existence as divine punishment, was strongly associated with the perceived degenerative condition of world Jewry. It is widely acknowledged that Jewish emancipation entailed both integration within wider society and, importantly, the autonomy of the Jew from Judaism, producing what Penslar (2007) terms a ”colonized‘ field of critical study, specifically Wissenschaft Des Judentums (the science of Judaism). Admirable as they were, Taylor (1972: 36) suggests, ”these efforts resulted in a tradition of observance and philosophy marked by its deference to the dominant criteria of respectability in European culture‘. By applying prevalent scientific values to the investigation of Jewish culture and tradition they drew similar observations to those typical of the anti-Semite. The fundamental distinction between the two being that while the anti- Semite considered the Jew‘s inferiority innate, Zionism recognised it as the product of two millennia wandering the world. For the Zionist, whose primary objective meant the creation of a state for the Jews, exilic life was unfulfilled and characterized by subordination, weakness and regression.

This depiction of the diaspora is indicative of what Zerubavel (1995) identifies as the Zionist periodization of history. Recalling the conquest of Canaan by the Hebraic warrior, Zionism conceived of Jewish restoration as a return to the ”golden age‘ of antiquity; back to national glory and triumph. What followed Maccabean heroics

  was a ”long, dark period‘ in that tribe‘s history, that had —polluted“ and —diseased“ a virtuous people. To Zionism, exilic Jews were ”objects rather than subjects, victims rather than actors‘ (1995: 19-21). What Zionism intended, was to reverse this condition: to restore the Jews to their glorious past and to abandon the debilitating circumstance of exile; to overthrow the diaspora.

Zerubavel (1995: 17) points out that where the Zionist narrative ”accentuates the —great divide“ between Antiquity and Exile‘ it has in highlighting this contrast imposed uniformity on both, wholly positive and negative respectively, in essence burying the distinct and non-national social, economic and political experiences of dispersed Jewish communities. Moreover, the Zionist narrative supposes that ”the exilic condition is more central to Jewish communities‘ experience than any other dimension of their lives‘ ( ibid ). More important, for instance, than any dimension that might distinguish between the Galician Jews of the 15 th Century and the German Jews of the fin de siècle . Thus, far removed from that of traditional Judaism, Zionist thought conceived of exile as nothing but the loss of both an ancient homeland and the collective experience of a unified nation. In its pursuit of a national home for the Jews, specifically in Palestine, Zionism was both anti- traditional and revolutionary (Zerubavel 1995; Penslar 2007).

This position is perhaps best evidenced in the work of Max Nordau (1849-1923), co- founder of the Zionist Organization with Theodor Herzl, who might well be described as the Lenin to Herzl‘s Marx: translating the theoretical ”political Zionism‘ into ”practical Zionism‘. Twenty years Herzl‘s elder, he, like Herzl, was born in Budapest to an Orthodox family but by his early twenties was living in Berlin, and prior to his conversion to Zionism was very much the example of the assimilated and acculturated Jew. Like Herzl, who was then a correspondent for the prestigious Viennese newspaper Neue Freie Presse , Nordau was resident in France during the Dreyfuss Affair - when French-Jewish Captain Alfred Dreyfuss was tried and wrongly convicted of treason - and the extent of popular if not institutional anti- Semitism was well known to Nordau. Yet the exact content of Nordau‘s thought on the Jewish problem reflected his thoughts on society and morality more generally, and differed considerably from Herzl who‘s earliest solution extended only to a mass conversion of European Jewry to Christianity (Kimmerling 2001; Smith 2004).

 

Nordau‘s most notable work, and that which exerted the most influence on Zionism and the Wissenschaft Des Judentums school more generally, was Entartung (Degeneration ), published in 1892; an exhaustive study of the —crisis“ of the fin de siècle . Nordau‘s work, though hitherto unprecedented within Jewish intellectual circles in its harangued address, was wholly unoriginal, correlating strongly with the ”budding interdisciplinary paradigm that became known as Eugenics or Racial Hygiene ( Rassen-hygiene )‘ (Piterberg 2008: 83). Broadly speaking, by the end of the 19 th Century that flowing current of change that swept Europe in the wake of the enlightenment began to stagnate. The accelerated discoveries of the scientific world, just as they had informed and eased human existence, posed alternate dangers, particularly to the nation. In a world in which medical discovery could prolong the lives of the sick and where developments in welfare would sustain the parasitic of society - from a Social Darwinian perspective - modernity had incubated the degeneration of the people. As Nordau‘s gentile contemporaries had commented, such as Germans Alfred Damm and Alfred Ploetz, no longer would the healthy and virtuous purely populate the nation. Damm and Ploetz, who each had enthused over the work of Charles Darwin, were responsible for founding the League for Regeneration (1892) and the League to Reinvigorate the Race (1879) respectively, advocating the creation of ”new social policy focused on hygiene and sanitary reform,‘ in order to counter the ”exigencies of modern society [that] resulted in physical, mental, and spiritual degeneration…necessary to rejuvenate the German people and re-cultivate their wholeness‘ (Presner 2007: 32). Throughout Europe at this time a new health and body cult was emerging; biological theories of race predominated, and where concern for the vitality of the nation was severe, revitalization was intended through the individual. If the citizen was strong, healthy, masculine and virtuous, so would his offspring be, and thus, so too would the nation be. In Victorian England, the second half of the 19th Century had seen the emergence of a —muscular Christianity,“ in which the traditional values of Christianity was combined with those of the individual and national reform movements of the German Körperkulture (body culture), by concerned elites sympathetic to Völk ish ideals. The potential of the nation was believed inextricable from its most primitive elements.

  Nordau‘s analysis was similar. The traditional virtues of humanity, he argued, such as originality, honesty, individuality, restraint etc, were steadily consumed by the all encompassing and valueless spectre of mysticism and piousness:

In our days there has awakened in the minds of the more highly developed a dark fear of a dusk of nations ( Völkerdämmerung ) in which all the suns and stars are gradually burning out and humankind with all its institutions and creations is perishing in the midst of a dying world. (cited in Presner 2007: 37)

His solution is a radical, evolutionary break ”in which the —degenerates“ shall perish and those who are strong, disciplined, and well-adapted will come forward to preside over a new world‘ (Presner 2007: 37). Though Nordau‘s prose exudes much the proverbial lucidity of the mad, his position is consistent: the fin de siècle , that —nervous age“, corrupted all that was good in humanity, stunting intellectual capacity but also producing inherent physical —deformities,“ including but not limited to stunted growth, squinted eyes, and asymmetry of the face and cranium; degeneracy was not only a catch all term for the perversions of modernity, but a distinct physical deviation from type. For Nordau this morbid discovery was that any triumph of the fin de siècle meant the —end of race.“

As Presner (2007) suggests, the violence and morbidity of Nordau‘s imagery cannot easily be exaggerated. Amongst the Jews, Nordau identified two forms of suffering: the material and the moral. The former applied principally to the Ostjude of the shtetl ; the backward Jews of Orthodoxy who, impoverished, disenfranchised and persecuted, lived like leeches on their host societies. The latter referred exclusively to the assimilated Jews of the west, who having abandoned Judaism - their moral anchor - were now without refuge in the communities of their residence. Nordau‘s Jew was very much the anti-Semite‘s: ”no religion, no character, no home, no children. He is a piece of humanity that has become sour‘ (Langbehn, quoted in Stern 1963: 141). It was Nordau‘s belief that if - irresponsibly on behalf of humanity - left in their suffering to degenerate further, the Jews would become very much the menace to society the anti-Semite considered them to be:

  Neither Christians nor Jews can indifferently ignore Jewish suffering . . . it can turn into a great danger for everyone if strong-willed people, whose size extends beyond the average in good and bad, become embittered through undignified treatment and, through embitterment, become enemies to the existing social order. . . Governments and peoples had better beware of making the Jews into anaerobic beings. (cited in Presner 2007: 53-54)

Nordau delivered the above address in his opening speech to the First Zionist Congress in 1897. He believed that it was Galut (exile) that had —made a chaos out of us“ by depriving Jews of their organicism and unity. As Ben-Gurion, the most strident negationist, would comment half a century later, —… for 1800 years these Jews were not citizens. There is no sense of it [citizenship] among European Jews“ (quoted in Zertal 1998: 220). Yet in every theory of degeneration there existed an ideal type; something from which the present form was an unscripted deviation, be it society or man. In the months following the Basel Congress, Herzl pseudonymously submitted an article entitled ”Mauschel‘ to Die Welt , in which he attacked the stereotypical degenerate Yiddish-accented figure of the Ostjude , personified in —Mauschel“ (the 19 th Century East European variant of the biblical name Moyshe or Moses), for the —curse“ (s)he had wrought upon the Jews. Greedy, insolent, and mean spirited, Mauschel and —the Jew“ were not of the same type; (s)he was nothing more than ”a distortion of character, something unspeakably low and repugnant‘ (cited in Piterberg 2007: 35). Yet Nordau, well acquainted with the work of Moses Hess on the unique character of Jewry, saw in the Jew that ideal type and the potential for regeneration; that despite their hindrances and obstructions, the Jews‘ —particular elasticity,“ the type possessed only by a tribe that had endured when others perished, would enable the reawakening of that —slumbering wealth“ of Jewish talent. For Nordau and his contemporaries the Zionist national solution was the only plausible option, the only way in which to civilize such —anaerobic pests“ to discipline, order and regenerate a decomposing body.

Die Aufgaben des Zionismus ( The Tasks of Zionism ), published in 1898, detailed what Nordau believed to be the fundamental goals of Zionism: first, the —conquest“ of Palestine by the Jewish people, and second, and most important, the preparation

  of the Jewish people for Palestine. Centuries confined to the shtetl had inbred the Jews‘ commercial instinct, disproportionately cultivating the mind œ to the detriment of the body œ emasculating and enfeebling what had become a Jammergeschlecht (wretched race). By the Second Zionist Congress in 1898 Nordau had found that ideal type, onto which he could transpose the virtues of the —true modern“ in a —lost muscular Judaism,“ for through ”their heroic traditions, Jews embody precisely what degenerates are not‘ (Presner 2007: 60). In exile, the restrictions of the ghetto had diseased the Jew, wasting his spirit and crippling his limbs; as they were, the Jews were not strong enough, noble enough, nor virtuous enough to realize their place in history - as determined by the European benchmark œ in the modern nation-state. Only through corporeal reinvigoration and discipline would the Jews realize a national rebirth, and through national rebirth would they realize physical and spiritual regeneration.

Nordau‘s —muscle Jew“ constituted the physical embodiment of a counter-factual Zionist collective memory that served as ”a framework for understanding and legitimizing its vision of the future‘ (Zerubavel 1995: 14). The —muscle Jew“ was in fact the Hebrew man, which, Nordau believed, centuries of persecution and Talmudism had gradually destroyed. Zionism was to recast the Jew in the mould of the —true modern“ from the material of the old Hebrew; filled with health, clarity of vision, purpose, strength, and discipline, who, in adapting to the challenges of modernity, overcomes degeneracy. The Zionist adaptation of Herzl‘s blueprinted Judenstaat was to be the manufacture, rather than manifestation, of modern Jewish life.

Rupture and return are thus, as Penslar (2007) suggests, two sides to the same discursive coin. Though Zionist thought represented a ”profound rupture‘ with traditional Jewish chrono-spatial conception, its ”boldest wage‘ was that it heralded the Jewish return to history; that the negation of exile would release the Jew from the ”extraterritorial and ahistorical domain‘ of the diaspora (Myers 2006: 36). Appealing primarily to the impoverished and harassed Ostjude , the Zionist programme sought physical and cultural regeneration of the Jews, convinced that the psychological traumas of the diaspora had transformed the chosen people (Gottesnation ) into a community of beggars and petty peddlers, weak in spirit and

  body; a dysfunctional, degenerate, and dishonourable people, rendered wholly incompatible with their gentile neighbours (Penslar 2007; Piterberg 2008; Presner 2008). For too long an insignificant object in history, Zionism envisioned the Jew as an active participant of it; it advocated the return to a glorious national past, replacing the passive, submissive Jew of exile with the New Hebrew, who active, self-reliant, and proud, was ”a man of action, not a man of words‘ (Zerubavel 1995: 27).

The rise of Zionism was very much that of the archetypal nationalism, albeit perhaps by inverse processes. For centuries, despite being —bound together“ by religious adhesive, the Jews had existed in what Mann (1993) refers to as —distinct communities of attachment,“ as separate in culture, history, and even language, as they were by geography. Even that deemed particular to all Jewish existence, Judeophobia, divided as much as it united the Jews, for the severity of that experience depended upon the character of the oppressor rather than any other Jewish community. Contrary to most nationalisms, which are founded upon counterfactual claims of historical continuity in character, location, history and so on, this lack of continuity was a central tenet to the Zionist Narrative. What was remarkable about Jewishness was that it was unremarkable; what had made it distinct was that it was indistinct; what made the Jews a nation was that the Jews had no nation. The interactions of pre-industrial and industrial commerce in the late 18 th and long 19 th Centuries only served to reinforce this in what Weinstock (1969) would identify as —selection and elimination“: those processes that had typically served to further the nation as an experienced community by incorporation, only isolated the Jews, which in turn furthered that demographic as a community of attachment. The Jews had been thrust together.

At the opening of the Second Zionist Congress Max Nordau made bold his belief that —Zionism awakens Judaism to new life“ (quoted in Presner 2008: 1). Presner (2007: 18) maintains that ”the intersecting discourses of the muscle Jew œ the aesthetic, the therapeutic, the hygienic, the colonial, and the militaristic œ gave form to a state through the logic of bio-power.‘ Zionism was wholly and unequivocally an extension of European hegemonic ideas, even those that were responsible for anti-Semitism, from the nation-state to the science of race. For all of Zionist pageantry, heralding

  Jewish fulfilment, it was primarily the vehicle for Western acceptance. As a form of Jewish social policy, Zionist engineering ultimately promised the Aryanization of European Jewry. It is to the realization of that Zionist project that we now turn.

IV

Right Peopling the State

Shafir and Peled (2002: 37) suggest that what is most notable about the hityashvut ovedet (Labour Settlement Movement œ Zionist terminology for the nation-building project) in Palestine is that it was not a labour movement at all, but rather ”a colonial movement in which the workers‘ interests remained secondary to the exigencies of settlement.‘ In many respects they are correct, but the relationship between Zionism and colonialism is far more complex than that of traditional European settler, penal, and exploitative colonial movements. From one respect, the Zionist project lacked a colonizing state, what Penslar (2007) terms ”the mother country.‘ From another, the land intended for settlement was already controlled by an imperial power: initially the Ottomans and later the British. Moreover, the precise selection of that territory was motivated more by its cultural significance than by its strategic or commercial potential. Nevertheless, Zionism‘s underlying sensibilities were bathed in the logic of colonialism, from the desire to create an enlightened outpost at what was believed the very edge of civilization, to the movement‘s sentimental adulation for the native savages‘ —authenticity“ and the Zionist‘s self-perception of both moral and material superiority. According to Presner (2007: 95) Zionism, like many other European colonial ideologies, attributed the arid ecology of the territory intended for settlement to human malfeasance and carried with it ”a powerful mission civilisatrice to awaken the Middle East from what was believed to be a narcotized Levantine torpor; to shatter the fossilized soil of the Holy Land with European tools and technology.‘ Yet the indigenous Arab population was largely absent from pre-World War I Zionist discourse (Piterberg 2008): Herzl made no mention of the indigenous Arabs in Der Judenstaat (most likely attributable to his promiscuity regarding the

  intended territory for settlement) and even Max Nordau was reputedly surprised to learn, upon the return of a Zionist scouting party, that the land was already inhabited (Smith 2004). Inarguably however, the Zionist project in Palestine was characterized by —conquest“, of both land and labour. The fundamental expression of that conquest, and universally regarded as the foundational backbone of the Israeli state is the kibbutz, the cooperative small holdings that were developed to home settlers in the first decade of the 20 th Century. The Zionist narrative maintains that the kibbutz best evidence the socialist spirit of the pioneer settlers ( chalutzim ), but the true genealogy of the Zionist settlement current (explored in the previous chapter), according to Piterberg (2008: 78), indicates that ”in terms of ideational flow from Europe to Palestine, what we have is ideas of colonization and race rather than socialism.‘ For Zionist settlement in Palestine was intended to redeem the Jews as a nation, to ”renew the purity it once knew how to preserve‘ ( ibid : 83). In accordance, the redemptive qualities of agricultural settlement, physical labour and military defence, central to the settlers‘ cant, were to transform those pioneers, and in addition ”procure… the political, economic, and cultural institutions that could serve as the infrastructure of a Jewish nation-state‘ (Shafir and Peled 2002: 38). The dynamics of settlement activity and the interactions attendant to that struggle - with both pre-existing settler communities and the indigenous Arab population - would inform the identity of the chalutzim , which became increasingly autonomous from and suspicious of any other community the settler had previously been attached to, be it national or religio- cultural.

EARLY ZIONIST SETTLEMENT

Pre-state Zionist settlement activity was almost exclusively coordinated by agencies of the Herzl-Nordau founded Zionist Organization (ZO). However, the First Aliyah (1882-1903) occurred largely prior to the establishment and independently of the ZO and was made primarily by precisely those Zionism desired extraction of: bourgeois European Jewry, or, those with the means to do so. Importantly this wave of immigration overwhelmingly reflected private rather than national interests and should be treated as distinct from the Zionist project and the Labour Settlement Movement (LSM). The distinction, note Shafir and Peled (2002: 40), is that where the LSM was grounded in separation of the Jewish community, or national

  exclusivity, the First Aliyah ”sought to establish a society based on Jewish supremacy.‘ Unlike purist advocates of the Zionist endeavour, for whom the promise of physical and nation corporeal rebirth demanded homogeneity and thus the prioritization of demography and moderation, the first aliyot were territorial maximalists, a position that necessitated the incorporation (and subordination) of the indigenous Arab population, effectively engendering a bi-national community. The extent to which the activities of the first aliyot threatened the security of the Zionist project was exposed by the arrival of the Second Aliyah (1904-14), the —true pioneers“ of the LSM. For the character of the second aliyot was markedly different from that of the first. Largely originating in the Pale these Zionists were the persecuted of the increasingly violent pogroms along Russia‘s Western front and arrived impoverished, unskilled, and poorly educated. Despite their purportedly being the most idealistic wave of immigration (Handelman 2004; Kimmerling 2001; Shafir and Peled 2002), the immediate motivation was employment; labour. Given the relatively limited number of marketable skills possessed by these aliyot they were forced to seek employment upon the plantations and vineyards of their predecessors, placing them in direct competition with the indigenous Arab workforce who œ less organized, lower waged, and more accustomed to lower standards of living than their European contemporaries œ were an infinitely more attractive commodity for the private capitalist, Jewish or not. Of course, any successful joint Jewish-Arab labour organizing, however conducive to settlement, was wholly unfavourable to the Zionist project envisioned by Herzl, Nordau, et al.

In very few years, the volume, function, and remit of institutions directed by the technocrats of the ZO increased exponentially from that single organization‘s founding at the First Zionist Congress in Basel. These agencies emerged within a broader network of Jewish philanthropic organizations that had seen staggered development in response to the intensifying crisis of the Ostjuden , or, rather, that crisis‘ transplantation to Western Europe. Western states were predictably less than forthcoming with aid and support for this fresh influx of aliens and, in these relatively early days of welfare reform, few to no international bodies for public aid ensured that where anti-Semitism had effectively fashioned a community of attachment, or in the least association, there was an urgent noblesse oblige . Yet the work of these organizations caused considerable tensions within the Jewish

  community where interests clashed, particularly when agencies had non-nationalist sympathies, be they autonomist or assimilationist. Naturally, the action of these groups, including the non-nationalist, in the extension of a central agents‘ services and provisions to a variegated, polyglot diaspora only served, as Mann (1993) would say, to —further the nation as an experienced community.“ Curiously however, these respective agencies would advocate competing policies to those of the Zionists, accommodating immigrants in the cities of Western Europe, or facilitating emigration to North or Latin America, such as Maurice De Hirsch‘s 1891 founded Jewish Colonization Association; far more an attractive potential than emigration to Palestine, in which a perilous journey was only the beginning of one‘s challenges. Less than 3 percent of the two million-plus Jews who fled Eastern Europe in the years 1882-1914 would immigrate to Palestine, while 90 percent of those who arrived with the Second Aliya - those frozen out of Palestine‘s labour market by their capitalist predecessors œ would later emigrate from Palestine (Shafir and Peled 2008: 38-43). Zionism risked stillbirth. It was within this crisis that the intensive relationship between the ZO and the agricultural settlers of the Second Aliyah was formed: the —practical alliance between a settlement movement without settlers and a worker‘s movement without work“ (Shalev 1990).

The ZO was by far and away the largest of all the Jewish organizations in this pre- state era, holding 217,000 members by 1913, and close to a million by the time of Hitler‘s ascendency to power in 1933 (Penslar 2007: 136). The blueprint for its settlement model can be traced to the German Reich‘s 1886 founded colonization project in the Ostmark, acquired during the same partition of the Polish Kingdom that led to the Pale of Settlement. As explained by Gabi Piterberg (2008: 79-88), by appropriating Polish land in Posen (then considered by the Germans a centre of Polish nationalism) and establishing small German-only colonies they could transform the demographics of that territory, thereby restricting the geographic expansion of the Poles and ensuring the purity of their own. Significantly, here, the process relied upon a central body, the Colonization Commission, whose purpose it was to purchase the land and prepare it for settlement, typically entailing the sub- division of an estate in order to incorporate a farm and a worker‘s colony. Essentially, this design was intended to isolate the Pole from the land and labour markets, whereby these new societies could maximize both their self-sufficiency and purity.

  Piterberg (2008: 80) makes clear the extent of influence this colonization project had on the Zionist movement:

…it accorded primacy to national colonization over economic profitability; it accorded primacy to (an equivalent of) the state and its bureaucracy over the market and private capitalists; and it implanted in the [ZO] what Shafir perceptively calls the pure settlement frame of mind.

Thus, by applying the logic of the German model to the ongoing Zionist endeavour in Palestine, it was apparent that private capital, predominant amongst the settlement activities of the First Aliyah and which condoned the hiring of Arab labour, was wholly incompatible with the nationalist goal of creating a Jewish majority, both ideological and practical. What was required was a —national capital“(Shafir and Peled 2002). Only by developing extra-market mechanisms, specifically enabling the circumvention of both land and labour markets, as applied in the German model, could the security of the Zionist national project be ensured.

By the time of the Second Aliyah, the ideological mantle had passed from the movement‘s prophets to its technocrats, the most instrumental of who, Arthur Ruppin (1876-1943), was as enamoured with the racist ideologies and practices of his own gentile contemporaries as had been his progenitors with theirs. The adoption of the German model, most likely upon realization of the difficulties facing the second aliyot (1904-14), entailed the full-scale mobilization of the hitherto largely ineffectual agencies of the Zionist Organization, the most instrumental of which being the Keren Kayemet Leyisrael (Jewish National Fund) created in 1901. The overall centrality of the JNF to the nation-building project cannot be overestimated (but is too often overlooked), for by 1948 œ the year of Israel‘s independence œ the JNF leased 54 percent of Jewish-owned land, home to 85 percent of Jewish settlement in the territory (Lehn 1974). The motion for a fund to procure land for Jewish settlement was floated as early as the First Zionist Congress, but given the movement‘s infancy, and the absence of any coherent strategy, deliberation was deferred. The JNF was thus officially proposed and approved, as —a trust for the Jewish people, which… can be used exclusively for the purchase of land in Palestine and Syria,“ at the Fifth Zionist Congress, its constitution further stipulating, records Lehn (1974: 76-80), that

  it was to purchase —land of every type“ that could be built on or cultivated, but leased (and never subleased) —only to Jews.“ Furthermore, the JNF was to grant only hereditary leases, ensuring Jewish land was never subject to property speculation, and constituting, according to Weinstock (1969: 71), a ”guarantee against the temptation to which the farmer might have succumbed to employ Arab labour.‘ The JNF did not purchase its first land until 1905, when, through the Jewish Colonial Trust (now Israel‘s Bank Leumi), established in 1899, it secured 5,600 dunams of Ottoman land for settlement. The JNF‘s activities, though modest, accelerated during the middle period of the Second Aliyah. In 1908, at the Eighth Zionist Congress in The Hague, the Palestine Land Development Company (PLDC) was established; a central ZO-led land-purchasing agency intended to manage both private and national (JNF) purchases. In the same year, the ZO, through the auspices of the JNF, opened its first Palestine office in Jaffa, capable of assisting and overseeing Jewish settlement in land appropriated by the JNF, headed by Arthur Ruppin.

Ruppin was born in Posen, the site of the German colonial experiment, and is considered, by scholars and Zionists alike, ”so pivotal‘ that he is often referred to as —the father of Jewish settlement in the land of Israel“ (Piterberg 2008). Prior to his emigration to Palestine, he had been Zionism‘s foremost statistician and editor of Zeitschrift für Demographie und Statistik der Juden (Journal for Jewish Demographics and Statistics), a publication that collated research into the Jewish body œ including muscularity, racial features, brain size etc œ and lifestyle, commissioned by Max Nordau in his quest to —muscularize“ Judaism, and intended œ in comparative fashion œ to increase understanding ”of the composition of the scattered Jewish population‘ (Presner 2007, : 109). Piterberg (2008: 83) explains that Ruppin was a firm adherent to the biological theorization of race, like many nationalists of his time, whereby —we are connected to our predecessors not through spiritual tradition but through the continuity of the primordial substance that exists in our body.“ Ultimately, Ruppin‘s analysis, drawn from that data collected by Zeitschrift , is little more than the logical ”scientific‘ extension of Max Nordau‘s theory of degeneration. Ruppin maintained that the —commercial instinct“ - the Jews peculiar affection for Mammon - was attributable to the —Semitic element.“ The Jewish Volk ( Urjude ) were originally, he believed, an indo-European tribe and it was their continued association with the peoples of the East that had led to their

  degeneration. For Ruppin, the solution lay in racial purity; the plan, remarks Piterberg (2008: 83), was ”to remove the Semitic component œ or at least reduce its presence œ from the Jewish Volk. ‘ The dysgenic quality of the Semitic component thus necessitated a —human reservoir“ from which to effect renewal. In the East European Jew, Ruppin, like Nordau, saw an —authenticity“ absent in the Jews of the Middle East and North Africa. The —Ashkenazi“ Jew was Ruppin‘s —ideal type“; as close to the Jews‘ Indo-European ancestry as existed, from which all other forms of Jewish life had degenerated (Piterberg 2008, : 80-6).

Thus, as Penslar (2007: 142) claims, under the influence of Arthur Ruppin, immigration to Palestine was far from a universal right. Ruppin‘s desire to establish a community of —higher types“ led him to adopt strict selection procedures and, according to Piterberg (2008: 84), refuse over 80 percent of immigration applicants in the two-years 1912-14. This selection was intended to transplant only the strongest, most athletic, and determined Jews œ those possessing the —Maccabean type“ œ that, combined with the emerging preference of the ZO for the German model of settlement, eschewing inter-communal cooperation, ensured the kibbutz (as the settlement par excellence) cemented the relationship between the LSM, who had struggled to settle in the early years of the Second Aliyah, and, by way of Ruppin‘s office, the ZO, which had enabled their settlement by circumventing the land and labour markets: ”thus, in need of national protection, the settler-immigrants of the LSM came to identify themselves as the anvil on which to hammer out the national project‘ (Shafir and Peled 2002, : 42). The chalutzim had become the ultimate expression of the Zionist endeavor, their social, political, and economic sacrifice (the kibbutznik abdicated all personal entitlement to that of the collective) the purest expression of Zionism. It followed that these veterans of the settlement movement were, despite their minority, the primary recipients of all —national funding,“ for these chalutzim represented ”the vanguard of the colonial-national effort‘ ( ibid : 44).

Most important, the kibbutz was invariably ethnically homogenous. The almost-total control the Palestine Office exercised over legalised immigration, especially under the British mandate, ensured that this type of settlement was exclusively Ashkenazi. This Euro-centrality was necessitated both by the desire to establish racial purity and the movement‘s Orientalist perspective. Despite the conceptual impossibility of the —Arab

  Jew“ within Zionist ideology, the bnei edot hamizrah (—descendents of the oriental ethnicities“), now termed —Mizrahim“, comprising Jews as geographically and culturally distinct as those originally of the Yemen or Morocco, were to be excluded from the settlement project. As Ella Shohat (1999: 14) suggests, ”the Arabness of the Mizrahim…threatened the Zionist ego-ideal fantasizing Israel as a prolongation of Europe —in“ but not —of“ the Middle East.‘ She continues, recalling the first Zionist congress, when all prospect of Mizrahim incorporation, or the —Levantization“ of those settlements infused with —Levantine Jews“, was categorically opposed. Indeed it was not until the Second World War, when conditions in Europe and the eventual extinction of that particular reservoir of human material made Ashkenazi recruitment more difficult, that the Zionist movement became active amongst the Mizrahim.

Nevertheless, there had been a constant flow of immigrants from the region (particularly the Yemen) since the First Aliyah, but their presence did not figure in the Zionist narrative. Despite this, these Jews served an important purpose for the Zionist project, satisfying the immediate demographic concerns of leading technocrats. The widely-held perception that those of the Arab countries were culturally backward and dim-witted but acclimatized and physically suited to manual work ensured they would play a central role in the Zionist conquest of labour. The undeniable dominance of —the semitic-element“ in the Mizrahim made them —natural workers“ (as opposed to the —idealistic“ workers of the Ashkenazi chalutzim ): non- moderns most responsive to harsh-discipline and requiring little material incentive. Such —natural workers“ ”…were to be the foot-soldiers of the Zionist campaign, adding —quantity“ to the pioneers‘ —qualitative“ efforts‘ (Shafir and Peled 2002: 76). During the Second Aliyah, those Yemenites arriving in Palestine were typically recruited by Ruppin‘s Office for employment on the Jewish-owned plantations, in order to displace the Arab workers. Appropriately, the wages of Yemenites were comparable with those of the indigenous Arabs - considerably less than those expected by European Jews - and they were allocated small private properties well away from the pioneer collectives (a policy that continued throughout the pre-state and early-state era), with Mizrahi immigrants typically ”compressed into small, newly formed agricultural frontier settlements, some of them on the sites of appropriated —abandoned“ Arab villages;‘ relegated to the very peripheries of the nation (Kimmerling 2001: 98).

 

Essentially, within the Zionist colonial framework, the Mizrahim were expendable human capital, intended to ethnically cleanse the labour market (albeit unsuccessfully), and paving the way for more desirable homer enushi (human material) to successfully settle the land in Palestine. Ruppin‘s office went to great effort to ensure only —suitable elements“ were admitted to the Zionist preparatory camps ( haksharot ) in Europe, that is, the most idealistic, young, skilled men and women; malleable material (Kimmerling 2001; Penslar 2007). The combination of Zionist prejudice and the British administration‘s system for the distribution of immigration permits, which were allocated only to —capital owners“ (of which the PLDC and JNF were the largest in Palestine), ensured that the Zionists exercised almost total control over the —type“ entitled to immigrate, meaning, as Shafir and Peled (2001: 47) suggest, ”the kibbutz was as closed a —shop“ as there ever was.‘

TOWARD A HEGEMONIC IDENTITY

Perhaps the single most transformational event, ensuring the dominance of an Ashkenazic pseudo-Jewish identity in the pre-state era, originally held by the LSM and incubated in the kibbutz, was the Arab revolt of 1936-9. This period of conflict, the most intense prior to the war of 1948, paralyzed Palestine‘s services industries and a majority of the private economy when the indigenous Arab workers organized to strike. As Shafir and Peled (2002) explain, under these conditions, and with the British operating a —hands-off“ approach to much infrastructural development in the face of increased hostility from Jewish and Arab extremists, the import of private capital, which financed both construction and administration in the territories, declined considerably, until both these, as well as private agriculture and industry, were reliant on the Zionists‘ —national capital.“ By now, allocation of national resources was controlled by the Histradut; what Kimmerling (2001: 66) identified as a ”quasi-statist mechanism.‘ Originally functioning as a federated trades union, it was established in 1920 by the immigrants of the second and third aliyahs, those who, Yonathan Shapiro (1976: 2) observed, breathed Russian political culture, from tsarist absolutism to governmental intervention. It followed that the Histradut‘s activities expanded into control of labour exchanges, settlement planning, manufacturing and construction firms, a publishers, a newspaper, a bank, hospitals, and schools. Making it, according to Kimmerling (2001: 65) ”an immediate alternative to the colonial state

  that was to disappear with the British colonial regime.‘ As Don Handelman (2004: 40) remarks, ”though limited and embryonic in their resources, these infrastructures did their utmost to organize, control, plan, and totalize numerous spheres of living.‘ Yet in 1930, the Ahdut Ha‘Avodah and Hapoel Hatzair parties (the LSM unions whose disputes had led to the creation of the Histradut) merged forming the Mapai (becoming Labour in 1969), which by 1933 had amassed 44% of the delegates to the Zionist congress; the most powerful bloc within the Jewish Agency (world Jewry‘s body for representation at The League of Nations), and, through David Ben-Gurion, the presidency of the Histradut:

..the nascent bureaucracy was taken over by the dominant political party, using methods reflecting how the Communist Party in the Soviet Union had gained control of the state by establishing party cells in all important centres of power, leading to control by a powerful, centralized party machine. (ibid : 40)

The ever increasing capacity of the Histradut to mobilize and respond to the dilemmas attendant to settlement, including its monopoly of labour-power, inexhaustible flow of capital, and, crucially, with the support of its clandestine military wing the Haganah, the ability to expand colonization even under the conditions of civil war, convinced all the Yishuv of its might, and of its centrality to the Zionist project (Shafir and Peled 2002). The chalutzim of the LSM, through the Histradut, had translated their mythical status, and privileged position, into power, and ”like rising and self-conscious elites everywhere, sought to remodel the Yishuv in their image‘ ( ibid : 70).

This elite, these pioneers, were, as a result of Arthur Ruppin‘s successful settlement planning, almost exclusively Ashkenazi, secular, and white; Occidental . By virtue of their place of origin most were strongly imbued with the collectivist spirit conducive to settlement. He or she was, as Kimmerling (2001: 101) writes, held to be ”healthy, muscular, a warrior, industrious, hard working, rational, modern, Western or —Westernised,“ [and] educated (but not intellectual).‘ The symbolic struggle - against man and nature - of —the man of the Yishuv“ ( adam min ha‘yishuv ) ”became the subject of an epic of heroism and sacrifice,‘ his image firmly fixed as ”the only

  legitimate model within the collectivity…[from which] the margins of tolerance were relatively limited (Kimmerling 2001: 91). Such a creature is more commonly known as the sabra ( tzabar ); honourable, practical, disciplined, the very antithesis of Exile, but underneath whose cold and tough exterior beats a warm Jewish heart. These were Nordau‘s romanticized —true moderns;“ Ruppin‘s long-sought —higher type;“ Zionism‘s own —nationals.“ And by the second, even first generation natives - those born to Ashkenazic immigrants - they had a lifestyle, a language, a history, and a destiny: a culture as unique as any other Jewish community in space and time.

Indeed, this particular community was entirely estranged from that they had originated in. The Yishuv, according to Zerubavel (1995), was closer to its ancient forefathers than it was its exilic parents. The Zionist periodization of history, what Zerubavel terms —collective amnesia“, with its celebration of the heroic Hebraic sacrifices of antiquity, such as that of Massada, as opposed to the commemoration of the expulsions and pogroms —typical“ of Exile, was just part of a deliberate attempt to reconstruct the Hebrews‘ roots and spirit; to create a ”symbolic continuity with the ancient national past and departure from Exile‘ (1995: 25-6). What Kimmerling (2001: 93) called the Yishuv‘s ”most profoundly revolutionary step‘ was its total rejection of the Yiddish vernacular, a language with several hundred years of history and many thousands of works to its name, yet inextricably associated with Exile. Instead, immigrants of the Second Aliyah onward were expected to learn Hebrew, a language that had all but died in Europe and, despite its often-limited vocabulary, was the exclusive language of administration and school instruction within the Yishuv. Furthermore, the Yishuv appropriated and secularized traditional Jewish holidays and created new ones to fit its national calendar. Such actions were, what Shafir and Peled (2002) term, —wages of legitimation;“ an attempt to justify and inspire the Zionist national project while simultaneously trying to coerce the wider Jewish community into supporting its goals. Most important, the intended purpose of this venture was to contrast the Jew of Exile, with the Hebrew or —new Jew;“ the Sabra.

The superior Sabra is characterized not only by what he possesses, but also by that he does not have: he has no fear, weakness, or timidity; he has none of the exilic spirit [ galutiyut ] … He is Hebrew

  and not Jew, and he is to put an end to the humiliation of his fathers. (Rubenstein 1977: 102)

The Yishuv had internalized what Shohat (1999: 6) calls Zionism‘s ”morbidly selective‘ history of Exile, which —traced the dots“ from pogrom to pogrom, and, with much the same vigor, the characterization of the exilic Jew as inferior. Of course, as Zerubavel (1995: 18) explains, for the chalutzim , those who had left Eastern Europe with the Second and Third Aliyahs, persecution was the ”final and decisive‘ experience of Jewish life in Exile. They had felt the humiliation and witnessed the passivity, they had understood the degeneracy Nordau spoke of, and they each knew a character such as Herzl‘s Mauschel. To the Yishuv, if Exile was pollution, then the Exilic Jew was diseased, and, worse still, contagious. Thus, so as not to undermine the Zionist project, every measure would be taken to distance the sabra from Exile.

A MODERN DIASPORA

The effect of the dissemination of Zionism‘s European ideas of —ideal types,“ primordialism, and the natural order of the nation was, as Taylor (1972: 46) explained, that ”fidelity to Judaism and conformity to the quality of Jewishness were frequently measured in terms of loyalty to the Zionist idea and the Jewish state.‘ If true —Jewishness“ were devotion to the nationalist idea, then the true Jew was the sabra, they of the chalutzim , and all of the qualities embodied. Exilic Jews, then, displaying very few such qualities, were deviants from —type“, whose presence threatened to —lower the quality“ of the nation. This, the Yishuv‘s striking internalization of the same, potentially murderous currents of fin de siècle thought that had seen the Jews pilloried for their immutable —otherness,“ was but the logical extension of the hopes and fears of Zionism‘s architects. Their ideals, as is typical of all ideologies, were at their foundation a reflection of the dominant trends and the greatest wisdom of their enveloping paradigm: Max Nordau‘s critique of Jewish degeneracy corresponded to other community leaders‘ concerns for their own, Theodor Herzl‘s solution to Jewish disenfranchisement was rational, even natural, in an era of romantic nationalism, and Arthur Ruppin‘s quest for that —ideal type“ of —human material“ is understandable within an age of eugenics and biologically determined race. Zionism‘s desired break from history, then, was obvious, even necessary, but distinctly European.

 

This reality, though, directly contradicts Zionist lore. Zionism, according to its adherents, was to reunite the Jews with history, which, for too long, they had been passive spectators to. As Piterberg (2008: 95) writes, to the Zionist, indeed all nationalists of that period, ”the nation is the autonomous historical subject par excellence, and the state is the telos of its march to self-fulfillment.‘ Without a state for themselves, the Jews were destined to watch from the sidelines, never to shape the future, even their own. Centuries of expulsion, pogroms and persecution were not history, only evidence of cowardice, docility and irrelevance. Yet the —normalization“ of the Jew, the ”negation of Exile,‘ required the eradication of Jewish life as it was understood. The Zionist perspective of exilic life - so rich, varied and international - reduced it to its most common component; its —ab-nationality,“ precluding, as Shohat (1999) makes clear, historical analogy and cultural metonymy: all other identity was made subordinate to that of the Jewish —universal.“

Conversely, as we explored in the second chapter, this macro-Jewish identity was a product of the pre-industrial expansion of European state mechanisms, whereby isolated existing communities of attachment were exposed to and integrated with one another, through the imposition of a higher culture that many Jewish communities abstained or were restricted from accessing. The later —biologization“ of this group identification served to institutionalize these differences, effectively electing, albeit unwittingly, the Jews œ many of who were as alienated from each other (and their —Jewishness“) as the German was from the Slav œ to nationhood. Yet the subsequent application of European ideals (romantic nationalism, degeneracy, colonialism and, ultimately, eugenics) to the Jewish Question as it had arisen at the fin de siècle , by the likes of Herzl, Nordau, Ruppin and others within the national movement, would eventually, and quite intentionally, transform —the universal“ into the particular.

The endeavour to establish a —Jewish“ state, as developed primarily by Herzl, nurtured by Nordau, and accomplished under the expertise of Ruppin (among others), fostered a nation nothing like the —organic,“ essential, timeless organism it had claimed to recreate, and that all nationalisms claim to be. Rather, the Yishuv might better have been termed —genetically modified.“ For the Zionists had implemented a planned population transfer, that deliberately sought to eradicate the

  less desirable elements of Jewish society. It was to be the militant pioneers that replaced the bookish intellectuals and gentle schlemiels of old: the ”Yiddish speaking Jew of the Eastern European shtetl had become supplanted by the Hebrew speaking —Sabra“ Jew who is always prepared to fight off would-be attackers and secure the perimeters of his land‘ (Presner 2008: xxii). This Israeli Jew was to be masculine, independent and self-sufficient, and in the processes attendant to settlement, he was to become estranged from and ashamed of his European cousins, whose timidity led them as ”sheep to the slaughter‘ (Shapira 2008: 230). The nation-building project had developed a —higher type“ and constructed a society around it that would ensure its continued privilege and the future subordination of others‘ lives, histories, and futures. For those exilic Jews who arrived in the decades following the horrors of the Second World War, from Europe, the Middle East, Africa, and Latin America, seeking messianic enlightenment, comfort, security, opportunity, or equality, it was unlikely to be easy. Indeed, there, in a territory so unfamiliar, catching a conversation - in a tongue one barely understands œ that recalls a history they have not yet learnt, between two people so tanned, so healthy, so alien , it would be hard not to consider it - —the Jewish state“ - an extension of Exile: the modern Diaspora.

In what is already an emotionally charged field, the political and ideological motivations that frequently commission its exploration can mean contemporary projections obfuscate historical realities. Research of this region has typically leaned toward the popular interpretation of the ethno-nationalist discourse in terms of —Jewish“ and —Palestinian“ identities. The peaceful reconciliation to the region‘s perpetual cycle of violence one presumes all researchers covet is dependent upon an understanding of every process that informed the present situation, and tunnel- visioned gaze into the past that assumes the accuracy of traditional conceptions will only impoverish that project. The danger inherent in this, as Penslar (2007: 67) explains, is ”essentializing —the diaspora,“ of assembling Jews who have lived in diverse environments into a coherent whole and asserting the existence of common characteristics that span space and time‘. For Israel, this conflates identities until —Jewish“ is synonymous with —Zionist“ is synonymous with —Israeli,“ which we have seen here, albeit briefly, is not so. The purpose now must be to extend this discourse beyond conventional dichotomies. As Ilan Pappé (2006: xviii) suggests, the

  understanding needed can only be procured by a historical reconstruction, as to retrieve ”from oblivion‘ those obscured realities.

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