Zionist Culture and West European Jewry Before the First World War (review)

Book Reviews 113 Zionist Culture and West EuropeanJewry Before the First World War, by Michael Berkowitz. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1993. 255 pp. $49.95; £29.95. The purpose of Michael Berkowitz's study Zionist Culture and West Europeanjewry Before the First World War is to explore the means which the Zionist movement, intent on portraying the Jews as a unified people, devised to create a modern Jewish national culture and to promote its acceptance among assimilated Western Jews from 1897 to 1914. He starts his analysis by asking two questions, the first concerning the compatability of Zionism with Jewish participation in the modern nation-state, the second concerning the cohesion within the Zionist camp. How did Zionism operate in the Jewish milieu ofWestern and Central Europe, which by and large rejected the tenets ofJewish nationalism, and second, how could the Zionist movement, in spite of notorious factional divisions and divergent ideologies, survive and gain in importance? He reaches the conclusion that the success in nationalizing parts of Western European Jewry has to be attributed to the specific character ofJewish nationalism, which the Zionist movement designed. With the Zionists draWing heavily on what was popular among bourgeois Jewry and comparable strata of Western European society in general, such as the concept of Bildung, belief in progress and a nationalism reminiscent of a belated 1848 in the sense of a Mazzini or the Paulskirche, they were able to present their ideology as a "supplemental nationality" (pp. 188-190), which involved no deep commitment and was perfectly compatible with the social and political standing ofemancipatedJews. Incorporating aspects oftraditionalJudaism, while careful to tone down their religiOUS and potentially controversial content, the Zionists procured both an appealing and yet vague enough set of myths and symbols as a focus of cohesion for their movement and a means to reach an audience beyond the Zionist circles proper. By devoting a chapter each to the institution of the Zionist Congress, the emergence of Hebrew as a national language, the Kulturfrage, the projected image of the new Jewish man, the artistic presentations of the Zionist movement, the portrayal of Palestine as the ancient and yet also future Jewish homeland, and the Jewish National Fund (JNF) as the principal Zionist fundraising machinery, Michael Berkowitz scrutinizes the tools devised by the Zionists to create a national culture, which at the same time served as avenues for its dissemination. The study is most convincing and innovative in its atempt to reconstruct how early Western European Zionists experienced their nascent national culture, not only during the emotionally uplifting episodes of the quasi-parliamentary Zionist 114 SHOFAR Winter 1995 Vol. 13, No.2 Congresses, but also on the grass-roots level of the individual: the JNF donor, the visitor of a Zionist exhibition, or the customer of products manufactured by the Bezalel Art Institute. By emphasizing the channels of transmission of Zionist culture, be it through the visualization of the founding fathers of the movement and the Palestinian landscape or through the omnipresent appeals for the JNF and other more specific Zionist causes, the author succeeds in capturing popularJewish perception of and participation in Zionism. The book has two major drawbacks. First, by concentrating on the Zionist scene in Central Europe to the almost total exclusion of developments in Britain, France, Italy, and the smaller Western European nations, Michael Berkowitz does not address the differences that existed between the Zionist movements in the various European countries in the way they presented their respective version of Zionist culture and thus fails to live up to the expectations raised by the title of his book. The concept of Bildung, for example, whose importance he correctly stresses for Jewish and Zionist culture in Central Europe, did not figure as prominently in Britain, where the Zionist movement incorporated ideas of political freedom and social progress into its program instead. Given the predominance ofCentral Europe it is all the more ironic that Cambridge University Press should have been unable to find a more competent editor for the numerous German quotations and captions. Second, by describing Zionism in Western Europe purely in terms of a supplementary nationality he consequently has little to tell his readers about the "fresh...