Horace M. Kallen: Prophet of American Zionism (review)

178 SHOFAR Spring 1998 Vol. 16, No.3 been the Messiah because the time was not right, according to Abravanel's system of messianic periods. For Abravanel too, in short, there could be no "forcing of the end." Marks fmds Abravanel's "more traditional" (p. 128) description, with its emphasis on miraculous victors, as "exceptions in the history of Jewish images of Bar Kokhba" (p. 120) and distinct from the ordinary human abilities as perceived by Ibn Daud, Maimonides, and the sixteenth-century historians. Still, Marks sees "a shift of perceptions" (p. 130) in the way Abravanel utilized secular sources to address sacred history. He also juxtaposes Abravanel with the sixteenth-century de'Rossi and Zacuto, who "acknowledge and evaluate their sources," and whose image of Bar Kokhba therefore, ultimately, is "more accessible to the reader who now perceives its relation to the historian's mind" (p. 168). Marks of course carefully notes that it was "probably without intention" that Abravanel's account of Bar Kokhba "further approached the modern world of secular historiography" (p. 130). Abravanel certainly belongs in the company of Zacuto, but the juxtaposition with de'Rossi is much less compelling. The intellectual and religious mind-set of both was, apart from all else, deeply identified with the traditional Jewish universe of discourse. But the two would have had significant areas of disagreement, and Abravanel would most likely have shared the position of de'Rossi's opponents-if not of his most extreme detractors-given the slippery slope between the sacred and the "profane," especially as it was then perceived. As for the purely metahistorical sixteenth- and seventeenth-century representation of Bar Kokhba which Marks points to in the kabbalistic work ofHayyim Vital and Nathan of Gaza, it took the form of the transmigrated "soul spark of the messiah" (p. 188) formerly embodied in the ancient hero and destined to re-emerge in Vital himself, or, according to Nathan, in Shabbatai Zevi. To all ofthis scholarship Marks brings his own judicious insights and conclusions which illuminate the process whereby the variety of images took shape and how they contributed to the ongoing Jewish concerns which the ancient hero had come to personify. Lester A. Segal Department of History University of Massachusetts at Boston Horace M. Kallen: Prophet of American Zionism, by Sarah Schmidt. Brooklyn: Carlson Publishing Co., 1995. 209 pp. $50.00. Around 1970, while researching a dissertation idea about the role that Horace Kallen had played in Zionist affairs, a young graduate student named Sarah Schmidt asked a reference assistant at the Library of Congress to help her find an obituary of Kallen. Book Reviews 179 Much to her surprise, he told her that Kallen was still alive, and in fact, he had heard him lecture just the previous week. A' phone call to Kallen's office at the New School confirmed that not only was Kallen still alive, but his intellectual vigor seemed undiminished. For the next few years, btil Kallen died in 1974, Schmidt had the benefit of his counsel. If she did not understand what something meant, or wanted to know I more about some of his activities, she could go directly to the source himself. I For those familiar with Schmidt's previous work on Kallen, the current book, a I slightly modified version of Schmidt'S thesis, will be of primary value in that it brings together a number of articles on Kallen that Schmidt has written over the years and I makes them available in a convenient form. For those who do not know of Kallen or his I work, this will serve as an excellent ,Introduction to an important figure in American Zionism, but one whose contribution has been overshadowed by those who led the ! movement politically-Louis Brande,is, Stephen Wise, and others. Schmidt makes a strong case that lit was Kallen who provided the intellectual basis for what I have called in other pla,ces the Brandeisian synthesis, the merging of European notions of a return to Zion with American pragmatism and a near religious belief in Jeffersonian progress. In trYing to work through his own internal conflicts between the rigorous Judaism ofhis father and the open...