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Diaspora, Nation, and Messiah An Introductory Essay Simon Rabinovitch When I teach survey classes on modern Jewish history, I often end the semester by discussing a public exchange of letters between Jack Wertheimer, at the time provost of the Jewish Theological Seminary in New York, and Joey Kurtzman , then an editor at the online journal Jewcy.com.1 In their correspondence they debate whether American life has made the concept of Jewish peoplehood anachronistic. To Kurtzman, the openness of American society is a gift, and Judaism, if it is to remain relevant, must move beyond an identity based on “ethnocentrism” and “jettison the language and ideology of peoplehood.” To Wertheimer, Jewish peoplehood is self-evidently based on the religious and communal ties in Judaism that bind Jews together as a people; the distaste for those things among the younger generation only reflects the hollowness of much of Jewish life in the United States. As Wertheimer points out, their conversation merely recapitulates an earlier debate that absorbed European Jews about universalism versus particularism in Judaism, and about whether, in adapting Jewish life to the modern world, Jews should refocus what it means to be Jewish based on Judaism’s universal or particular traits (or both). In other words, if Jews are to be good citizens, how separate, if at all, should they remain from the dominant culture and body politic? Within the United States much of this debate took place roughly a century ago, during the most intense period of Jewish immigration from Eastern Europe, and it used two dominant metaphors representing America as a new nation. For some, the United States should be seen as a melting pot or crucible that would melt away the differences between Jews and other Americans. In opposition to this viewpoint, others saw the United States as an orchestra in which each instrument represented a different nationality , with all playing together harmoniously when combined in a symphony (see Horace Kallen’s chapter, “Democracy Versus the Melting-Pot,” in this volume). Today, diaspora nationalism implies a sense of national affiliation to a place where one is not at the moment—in most cases, a distant homeland. In that sense, for Jews in the diaspora today, and indeed since the establishment of Israel xvi | d i A s P o r A , n At i o n , A n d m e s s i A h in 1948 (at the very latest), Zionism has become the dominant form of Jewish diaspora nationalism. While not everyone between the two poles of America as melting-pot and America as symphony would describe himself or herself as a Zionist (a term that today has greater resonance in the diaspora than in Israel), from my teaching I can anecdotally surmise that when most think of Jewish politics or Jewish nationalism, it is Israel that comes to mind, and for perfectly comprehensible reasons. In order to fully understand the development of Jewish nationalism, Jews’ new definitions of Jewish peoplehood, and indeed the Jewish experience in the modern world, however, it is important to see the full scope of the debate between Jewish universalism and particularism—especially during the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, when Jews became swept up in both European national movements and the question of civic equality. During this time, when the vast majority of Jews lived in the diaspora without political sovereignty, many of them sought to recast Jewish peoplehood in a largely secular way that would preserve, reconstruct, or fortify Jewish nationality for survival in the diaspora. The many different ways people attempted this can be seen in the diversity of ideas represented here. The question of whether the Jews can or should constitute a secular nation in the diaspora was most acutely debated between the beginning of the twentieth century and the treaties following the end of World War I that recognized the dismemberment of the Austro-Hungarian and Russian Empires, as well as the rights of national minorities in the new states (however unenforced those treaties were). The two most significant centers in this debate were Eastern and Central Europe and the United States, in part because of the demographic concentration of Jews in those places, and even more because of the heterogeneous and multiethnic nature of these states, whose various groups had different, and often competing, conceptions of how the systems of government should be constituted .2 Many who participated in Jewish radical or liberal politics in Eastern and Central Europe came to...

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