Zionism's Greatest Conceit

THE TENSION BETWEEN THE PULL of universalism and the demands of particularism is central to Jewish and Zionist history, and a basic point of contention over the character of Israel. Was the Jewish state to be "a state like other states," by which advocates usually meant something on the progressive European model? Or was it to be something uniquely Jewish, an expression of the Jewish people's own history, traditions, and way of life? Or some synthesis of the two?

Though rejecting assimilation, Zionism was a reaction to the particularism of Jewish life. The movement for a Jewish state was very much part of the currents then sweeping Europe. In copying the nationalism of other peoples, proponents of a Jewish state were revolting against the powerlessness, passivity, and pious quietism they associated with the ghettoized Jewish life of recent centuries. Zionism was an act of assertion against age-old patterns of Jewish existence, and an attempt to establish "normal" social, political, cultural, and occupational patterns that would make Jews more like other nations. The fact that many early Zionists sought to "divorce" themselves from Jewish history does not, however, mean that they always succeeded in disentangling themselves from its grip. In fact, the illusion that Zionism could escape the legacies—negative and positive—of the Jewish past, through an exercise of sheer ideological will, may have been the greatest conceit among the necessary self-deceptions of the founding generation.

One of the great contributions of twentieth-century Jewish historians has been to challenge the notion that Jews have no political history, and that Jewish history is a lamentable chronicle of persecution, suffering, and powerlessness. Salo Baron attacked the "lachrymose" depiction of the Jewish past already in 1928; David Biale recently argued that Jews were not powerless, but exhibited "a wide spectrum of persistent and on-going political activism." ¹ To survive two millennia of hostility, emerging with an undiminished sense of self-identity, required not only spiritual strength, but also a capacity for organization and for the assertion of collective interests: in other words, a capacity for politics. As Biale contends, "without some modicum of political strength and the ability to use it, the Jewish people would certainly have vanished." ²

Jewish Politics

The Jewish experience in self-government over the centuries has actually been a rich one; Jews have often managed their own self-contained political system. "The Jewish people," it has been argued, "is most probably the only people which has realized the principle of personal autonomy in its life, creating in different countries under different political regimes certain forms of national autonomy and national organizations recognized in public law as state institutions"; more concretely, the Encyclopedia Judaica lists over 120 cases of Jewish autonomy, in various forms, over the ages. ³ Wherever Jews lived, they held in common not only the heritage of Jewish law and other normative Jewish institutions, but also patterns that arose from their universal position as a beleaguered minority: the tendency to close themselves off from a hostile environment, the provision of needs that could be met only within the community, the organization of their own life so as to minimize the intervention of outside authorities, and the establishment of representatives to deal with those authorities. In some places and periods (such as Europe in the Middle Ages) it was inconceivable for a Jew to live as a Jew except as part of a Jewish community. Long before the modern concept of a "nation" had been devised, Jews had acquired many of the attributes that nationhood is said to entail, including a sense of community and a felt need for collective expression. ⁴ As Shlomo Avineri concludes, "it is in those myriads of Jewish communities, struggling to survive in a hostile environment, carving out for themselves their rules and regulations and developing their institutions, that we have the origins of Israeli democracy." ⁵

The basic fact of Jewish politics was the very tenuousness of the framework within which politics were conducted. The scope...