Beyond the Nation-State: The Zionist Political Imagination from Pinsker to Ben-Gurion by Dmitry Shumsky, and: Partitions: A Transnational History of Twentieth-Century Territorial Separatism ed. by Arie M. Dubnov and Laura Robson (review)

About five years ago, in a meeting of the Forum for Young Scholars of Zionism at Tel Aviv University, the forum’s director, historian Anita Shapira, expressed sorrow for the young researchers, in light of the fact that the “big” archival discoveries relating to the history of Zionism and its leading figures had already been made. What is left for historians to do, Shapira said, is to search for unique and more limited angles of research. Shapira was, to a large extent, correct. In recent decades, scholars in the field of Israel Studies have largely shifted from dealing with the classical national narratives and senior leadership figures to the study of less dominant events and individuals, as well as what is known as “history from below.”¹

Nevertheless, it seems that we are currently witnessing another phase of renewal in the scholarly field, with innovative research that is not based on any new, transformative archival discoveries but which nevertheless has returned to a focus on “big” events and the central figures who led them. This scholarship employs a new, transnational perspective and offers new interpretations based on international archives, alongside those belonging to the State of Israel. By virtue of its use of new methodologies and comparative research, these new studies evoke a sense of reverse déjà vu: instead of feeling that the new is familiar, one discovers the extent to which the familiar is in fact new.

Two fascinating, recently published books exemplify this trend well. The first, Beyond the Nation-State, by Dmitry Shumksy, a historian at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem, offers an alternative reading of the attitudes of five Zionist leaders toward the idea of the nation-state. The dominant narrative in scholarship on Zionism — represented well in Shapira’s seminal work, Israel: A History (Brandeis University Press, 2012) — describes a kind of natural, if intermittent and multifaceted, development from the beginning of the Zionist idea to the establishment of the State of Israel in 1948. Shumsky attempts to refute this perspective, arguing that the Zionist leaders did not aspire to establish an ethnic nation-state.

It is, of course, well known that there were Zionist groups and individuals who did not envision the realization of their Zionism in the form of a recognized ethnic nation-state, as is testified by the extensive scholarship on the organization Brit Shalom (“peace alliance”) and its splinter groups. The uniqueness of Shumsky’s fascinating study lies in the fact that it focuses precisely on the Zionist mainstream: Leon Pinsker (1821–91), Ahad Ha‘am (the pen name of Asher Ginsberg, 1856–1927), Theodor Herzl (1860–1904), David Ben-Gurion (1886–1973), and Ze’ev Jabotinsky (1880–1940).

Ostensibly, the very title of Herzl’s book, Der Judenstaat (“The Jews’ state,” but usually translated as The Jewish State), suffices to draw conclusions about his original aspirations. However, Shumsky compares Herzl’s perspective to those of the leaders of ethno-nationalistic movements that developed under the Russian, Austro-Hungarian, and Ottoman empires in the late 19th and early 20th centuries, from which Herzl drew inspiration, showing that their desire for independence was not necessarily directed toward the attainment of an ethnic nation-state. Rather, most aspired to a kind of independent national existence within these empires, alongside other nations: “[M]ost of the neighboring non-Jewish national movements of the Habsburg imperial space in Herzl’s time used the term Staat with explicitly substatist intentions in their national political programs and positions” (p. 79). Against this backdrop, Shumsky argues that Herzl’s striving for a Jewish state essentially expressed an aspiration for broad, liberal Jewish autonomy...