Rhetoric and Nation: The Formation of Hebrew National Culture, 1880-1990

4. The Rhetoric of Historical Anxiety

153 4 The Rhetoric of Historical Anxiety David Ben-Gurion and Meir Yaari History and Return In his autobiography, From Berlin to Jerusalem, Gershom Scholem (1897–1982), the eminent scholar of Jewish mysticism, ruminates on the source of his personal engagement with Zionism: Zionism . . . possessed something naturally that so many youth movements fifty years later lacked. That something was historical consciousness. I have already mentioned the dialectics concealed in this historical consciousness of the Zionists, a consciousness which I shared with all my heart and soul: the dialectics of continuity and revolt. But it would not have occurred to any of us to deny the history of our people when we have just recognized or rediscovered it as a people. That history was in our bones, whatever we were striving for now. With our return to our own history we . . . wanted to change it, but we did not want to deny it (1980, 172). As part of Scholem’s narrative of his 1923 immigration to Mandatory Palestine, these sentences transcribe the map of Jewish nationalist migration onto the field of history: the move from Central Europe to the Eastern shore of the Mediterranean traces not so much a spatial trajectory as a temporal, even spiritual one—it marks the recognition of one’s own history, the homecoming of a prodigal son, and the emergence of a historical consciousness. Setting Zionism as a threshold between non-history and history, the geographical move 154 ✦ Rhetoric and Nation does not only constitute a personal awakening but also a return to history. Indeed, the geographical move is merely a manifestation of that return.1 The next three chapters shall consequently bracket the double bind of language and territory, my focus up till now, to probe, almost exclusively, what is entailed in this return to history. To the best of my knowledge there is no study of the return to history as a trope that molds the Hebrew discourse of the nation as a historical discourse. Commonly, the return is seen as a theme of Jewish history and historiography from the late eighteenth century on. Disagreements between various schools of thoughts notwithstanding , the return is read in two senses, “material” and “discursive.”2 On a material level, it is said that the spatial exile of Jews from their homeland equals their temporal exile from history. The return thus implies that, with the loss of Jewish political sovereignty in Palestine and the dispersion of Jews that followed the anti-Roman revolts of 66–73 CE and of 132–35 CE, Jewish history came to a halt. Thereafter , Jews were excluded from history, becoming a singularly ahistorical group in a world in which all other collectives played an active role. Of course, during the period of their exile, Jews continued to lead communal lives and to be affected by the political, economic, and social forces that shaped their environment. Nonetheless, the Jews’ passive dependence upon non-Jewish authorities—as the Hebrew discourse of the nation often portrays “exiled” life—is taken as a sign of the ahistorical essence of Jewish existence in exile. More than any other aspect of Jewish life, traditional Jewish scholarship—the study of the Mishnah and the Talmud, inasmuch as it discusses trans-temporal 1. For a review of Scholem’s historical perspective and of the ties between his political stance(s), his unique interpretation of Jewish mysticism, and his endeavors to make of Jewish mysticism an academic discipline see, for instance, David Biale 1979, in particular chapters 3 and 8; Moshe Idel 1995; David Myers 1995, 151–76; Christoph Schmidt 1995. 2. For an examination of the term return to history and its deployment in twentieth-century Jewish nationalist discourses see, for instance, Salmon 2004; Eliezer Schweid 1980; Shmuel N. Eisenstadt and Moshe Lissak 1999. The Rhetoric of Historical Anxiety ✦ 155 matters of Jewish daily and ritual activity—came to embody for Jewish nationalist scholars passivity and withdrawal from worldly matters .3 Only with the rise of modern Jewish nationalist consciousness, with the rejection of Jewish religious scholarship and the development of “worldly” everyday practices, and with the establishment of a Jewish majority in the “historical” Land of Israel and of the State of Israel, have the Jews reassumed—so argue these scholars—an active political role on par with other national collectives and have, consequently, returned to history. More than the development of new social-cultural practices, however , the...