Ambiguous Semantics: Reflections on Jewish Political Concepts

The history of jewish politics is a notoriously complex and complicated issue insofar as it deals with a subject matter that is traditionally thought to be external to the Jews as a Diaspora population. Although diasporic populations are obviously familiar with the implementation of various forms and practices of influence, of persuasion, and intercession, the core instruments of power, generally deriving from the ability to exercise force or threaten its use, are seemingly alien to them. Power is, by and large, the dubious privilege reserved to territorial entities—to states and nations. In the past, during the high days of historicist thinking in the nineteenth century, when states (and nations) were perceived as the most exalted subjects in history, the existence of the Jews as a diasporic population was—if at all—of interest only to Jews. Yet since that time, the modes of historical thinking have changed. And with this transformation, key concepts, methods, and subject matter have also changed. Its formerly privileged subjects—state, power, and rule—have lost their predominance. After the dominant, even exclusive, importance of the state declined in historical inquiry in favor of sociologically based inquiry, interest in the Jewish experience grew; and this interest became more pronounced when even softer concepts—the concepts of memory and culture—advanced to the forefront of historical investigation.

Nonetheless, we still find that the state—and with it, power, domination, and the threat and use of force—remains with us in the world. And this brings us to the main question of modern Jewish political history. Namely, how and to what extent can we conceive of a political history of the Jews at all—if we understand the Jews as the ultimate diasporic population beyond and above the nation-state? Can we apply the still regnant concepts of politics and power to the Jewish experience? I question such a presupposition and argue that it is very difficult, even presumptuous, to apply the conceptual apparatus of political history proper to the Jews.

Resisting the political historical mode can be traced back to the time of emancipation.¹ The founding fathers of modern Jewish studies were extremely cautious, overtly hesitant, indeed even to apply the term "history" to the Jews. Leopold Zunz and his contemporaries obviously preferred the more traditional, neutral, and philologically oriented Wissenschaft des Judentums—the German Jewish translation for the traditional enterprise of ḥokhmat Yisra'el. He and others were intuitively aware of the fact that "history" implied a secular reinterpretation of the world, and that historical thinking as such accelerates the rate of profanation. This process could endanger the eternal connotation of 'Am Yisra'el (the Jewish people) whose existence rests on sacred time and sacred law. History with a capital "H" challenges Jews and Judaism twice: in its profane understanding of the human condition and of human development; and in its association with categories and concepts of power, state, territory, and nationhood. In contrast to the core concepts of modern historical inquiry and to the meaning of profane time and concrete place in modern politics, Diaspora existence is highly related to sacred time.

What does this mean for modern Jewish politics and for Jewish political action? In order to do justice to our object of interest—the Jewish experience in this world—one has to acknowledge the limited value of applying concepts drawn from territoriality and statist nationality. In such cases, the Jews as a fundamentally diasporic population would be burdened with false expectations or even falsely blamed for massive deviance or clear anomalies.

More dramatically than ever before, the disparity between the diasporic existence of Jews, on one hand, and the expectations placed on Jews by the political semantics of nation, state and power, on the other hand, was greatest in the most radical crisis faced by the Jews—the Second World War and the Holocaust. In those days of profound eclipse, Jews were compelled to react to situations whose sheer extremity and enormity dwarfed everything Jews had ever been called on to confront. And this crisis dramatically exposed the grand and fundamental misjudgment of transposing notions from the conceptual...