Zionism: Past and Present

An “Inside Intellectual”:Remarks on the Public Thought of Nathan Rotenstreich

An “Inside Intellectual”: Remarks on the Public Thought of Nathan Rotenstreich AVI BARELI AND YOSSEF GORNY The essence of Nathan Rotenstreich’s career may be adduced from an incident that took place in his early adulthood . In 1932, at the age of eighteen, he moved to Palestine. Rotenstreich was a member of the Socialist-Zionist youth movement Gordonia—a member of one of the first groups in the movement—and a faithful adherent of the halutsic (Zionist pioneering ) ideology that the movement encouraged. In the natural course of events, he would have become a haluts (pioneer) along with the rest of the group. However, according to retellings by friends and family members, the leaders of the movement decided to treat him as an exception and have him enroll at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem. This, they thought, would allow him to make a more meaningful contribution to the nation. Thus, Rotenstreich’s endeavors in scholarship and research were from their outset pregnant with social and national significance and set within a political context. Rotenstreich was committed to the Jewish settler society in Palestine and the Jewish people and was their self-styled emissary. Furthermore, there was a public that did consider him its emissary and designate him to serve the causes of the collective. For decades, he was a member of the leading party in the Zionist Labor Movement, Mapai,1 1 2 Zionism and enjoyed an easy proximity to its leaders, including David Ben-Gurion; he was also a key figure in a political group called Min ha-Yesod, a faction that seceded from Mapai in the early 1960s.2 He maintained strong relations with Gordonia members in the kibbutz movement, in Mapai, and, later on, in Min ha-Yesod, and with their leader, Pinchas Lavon, a leading figure in Mapai who became the leader of Min ha-Yesod. Nevertheless , Rotenstreich was a strongly independent-minded intellectual who did not subordinate himself to anyone. He was engage’, devoted to the interests of the Jewish people at large, but did not submit his own judgment to any authority. His formative environment and national and social affiliations underlay his evolution into an “inside intellectual” who contemplated his society from the standpoint of one who was immersed in its life and who identified with it—in a critical spirit. Nathan Rotenstreich was born on March 31, 1914, in Sambor, eastern Poland (today in Ukraine). His father, Dr. Ephraim Fischel Rotenstreich, was a Polish Zionist leader and an important public figure in his hometown. When independent Poland was founded in 1918, the elder Rotenstreich was elected to the Polish Senate and the Sejm as a representative of the General Zionist Party. The family moved to Lvov, where Nathan Rotenstreich finished high school. His teachers at the Hebrew University included Samuel (Shmuel) Hugo Bergman, Gershom Scholem, Julius Guttman, Leon (Haim Yehuda) Roth, and Joseph Klausner. In 1938, he completed his PhD dissertation on Marx’s Theory of Substance. He worked with the Jewish Agency from the time he moved to Palestine until 1949, and in 1950 he became a senior lecturer at the Hebrew University. Rotenstreich was one of the leading figures in Israeli academia in the country’s formative years. His status was reflected in the official posts that he held: Dean of the Faculty of the Humanities at the Hebrew University (1958–1962) and rector of the University (1965–1969). After his retirement, he was vice-president of the Israel Academy of the Sciences and Humanities from 1986 until his death (October 11, 1993). However , Rotenstreich was also one of the leading exponents of academia and a personality of vast formal and informal influence 3 An “Inside Intellectual” in the affairs of Israel’s universities. He was among the founders of the Israel Academy of the Sciences and Humanities (1963) and the enunciators of its basic principles; he was also the first chair of the Planning and Grants Committee (PGC) of the Council of Higher Education (1973–1979), a powerful institution that regulates the budgeting of Israeli universities and research institutes. Rotenstreich played an important official role in establishing the autonomy of research and higher-schooling institutes by shaping the modus operandi of the PGC. His political and organizational connections with the Zionist Labor Movement, the dominant force in Israel’s first decades, did not diminish his commitment to academic autonomy. Rotenstreich was...