Zionism and Judaism: A New Theory

David Novak’s Zionism and Judaism is a very personal book that deals first and foremost with its author’s own positioning on the subject matter. Novak rejects a secular, or as he calls it secularistic, interpretation of Jewishness and seeks to combine Orthodox Judaism with Zionism in a rather unorthodox fashion.

Novak begins his discussion with a figure unlikely to be claimed by Orthodox Jews. He refers to Spinoza as the first philosopher to have provided Zionism with a cogent philosophical expression. His reading of Spinoza differs substantially from that of secular Zionists like David Ben-Gurion who, in 1954, wrote to the Hakham of the Portuguese Jewish Community in Amsterdam asking that the ban of excommunication against Spinoza be repealed. In contrast to Ben-Gurion and many other Zionists, Novak does not regard Spinoza as a precursor of secular Zionism but interprets Spinoza’s call for the re-establishment of a Jewish state, when the opportunity arises, as a call for a renewed Jewish theocracy, in a biblical and not in a rabbinical sense.

The defense of a theocratic Jewish state is one of the central theses of the book. Of course, Novak does not understand theocracy in the sense in which it is associated today with states like Saudi-Arabia or Iran. What it rather means for Novak is the constant awareness of the connection between God’s promises and the Zionists’ fulfillment. We will return to this theme below.

The tension between universalism and particularism, and more specifically between the wish to become a nation like any other nation (a phrase that found its expression in the Israeli Declaration of Independence) and the traditional Jewish understanding of being a nation different from all other nations, is another leitmotif. For Novak the matter is clear: Jews are a unique people and as such they can only have a unique state. Thus, in his reading of Herzl, of Achad Ha’am and of other secular Zionists Novak dismisses what he understands as their attempts to “normalize” Jewish history by giving the Jews a state just as any other state. Novak advocates for a religious-based medina yehudit (a Jewish state) and not a medinat yehudim (state of the Jews). In his eyes, both political and cultural Zionists attempted to straighten the course of Jewish history, and thus tried the impossible. Achad Ha’am’s attempt to replace the Torah with modern Hebrew creativity was doomed to fail, just as the Yiddish-speaking Bundists or the Birobidzhan project had no chance to succeed.

Novak underestimates the resistance of these secular Jews to the idea of creating a “state like any other state.” It is certainly true that Achad Ha’am, just as Herzl, and later Jabotinsky and Ben-Gurion, personally attempted to build a secular state, but none of them would have been content with “just another” nation-state. For Novak, there is no room between a unique religion-based Jewish state and a state of the Jews, which would be a state like any other state. “The only other option was for the Jews to assimilate, and that was not a real option” (p. 62). But in fact, the secular founders of Zionism were very well aware of that tension and tried to find other options.

Theodor Herzl constantly talked about a model society for all of humanity. The state, which he loved to call “The Seven-Hour Land” according to its number of working hours per day, was to be evaluated regularly by an international jury. Herzl’s novel Old New Land is an illustration of this model society. Ben Gurion, too, planned his state as a light unto the nations (or la-goyim), while being at the same time interested in normalizing the course of Jewish history. Like many other Zionists they wanted to set up a (secular) model society and at the same time become a nation like any other nation. Ben Gurion was well aware of this tension, as he described it, for example...