Zionism and the Jews
The Idea of the Jewish State.
by Ben Halpern.
Harvard University Press. 500 pp. $10.00.
Mr. Halpern’s treatise sets out to be, not a history of the Zionist movement, or even of Zionist thought, but an analysis, as the word goes, of certain Zionist notions in terms of what “social scientists” call a “conceptual framework,” the main lines of which the author indicates in an Appendix entitled “Assumptions, Methods, and Terms.” The book is thus a tricky one for a reviewer to describe and appraise: it contains bits of history, some of them very good, such as the author’s appraisal, in Chapter 9, of the true nature and ground of the Palestinians’ opposition to Zionism, or his description, in Chapter 6, of Weizmann’s policies and activities in the 1920’s from the rift with Brandeis until the formation of the extended Jewish Agency. But since history, political or intellectual, is not the author’s prime concern, it is difficult to set down in short compass the aim of the book, or to say with any precision how well it has been accomplished.
It is therefore perhaps best to begin by looking at some of Mr. Halpern’s concepts, since they govern his treatment of the material in the two sections into which his book is broadly divided: the section on the relations between Zionism and world Jewry, and that on the relations between Zionism and the international community. Two of these concepts, in particular, recur again and again in the book; those of consensus and sovereignty, and we may say that Mr. Halpern’s object appears to be an examination of Zionism as an expression of the consensus of Jewry, and as a method of bringing about and maintaining the sovereignty of the Jewish people. We may add that doubts concerning this book largely arise from the ambiguity and vagueness in the use of these two terms.
“Consensus” is nowhere directly defined, but we may understand the author’s use of the term from the way in which it is first introduced to the reader. “Pre-Emancipation Jewry,” he writes in his first chapter, “displayed a remarkable unity, continuing over vast stretches of time and space. Their solidarity rested upon an effective consensus that united them among themselves and set them apart from the environment in regard to both religious culture and communal organization.” It is the author’s case that the Enlightenment and the Emancipation destroyed this consensus, but that it is now reestablished—focusing, however, not on the traditional community and the creed as defined by the rabbis, but on Zionism and the State of Israel. That there was a consensus in traditional Jewry nobody is likely to question; doubts will arise concerning the more recent period. It is now a matter of opinion whether or not Zionism represents a con-census in Jewry, and Mr. Halpern’s book is unsatisfactory to the extent that, after reading it, this still remains a matter of opinion. Mr. Halpern is diligent, learned, and painstaking in presenting the numerous varieties of Zionist, non-Zionist, and anti-Zionist views; but on the crucial question, whether or not Zionism represents a consensus in Jewry, we are left in the dark. Thus when we are informed that “in the closing years of the First World War, the resistance of ideological non-Zionists to Zionist demands had set them against the communal consensus,” we are by no means satisfied; we feel that what ought to be proved is here taken for granted and that a crucial step in the argument has been missed. Our doubts are not set at rest when we find the author using the word “people” in a special way, writing that “the ‘people’ had already turned to Herzl. Zionists and student groups from near and far placed themselves at his disposal. . . .” We wonder if Zionists and student groups can be equated with a people, even a people that lives in inverted commas. Again, when we are told in passing that after World War I ideological anti-Zionism showed considerable power in Eastern Europe, we wonder how considerable this power was and how it affected the communal consensus, and again our curiosity, on a crucial point, is left unsatisfied. Since the existence or nonexistence of a consensus is not established, may it not be then that a treatment of Zionism in terms of a communal consensus is bound to be question-begging; that, in fact, the success and spread of Zionism had little to do with it, and much to do with matters over which Zionists and Jews had little control, such as the policies of the British government in 1917 and 1947, the Nazi terror, the incapacity of the Arab League, etc?
Dissatisfaction with the term sovereignty parallels our misgivings about consensus. Sovereignty is a term of (legal) science, as well as one of (oratorical) art. The word, the author writes, “represents the very core of the subject of this volume,” yet, as he also says, he has assigned no precisely defined technical meaning to it. To him, it expresses “the sudden passionate conviction that only by freeing themselves by an active effort of their own national will would Jews be able to solve the Jewish problem.” Such a usage is bound to involve the writer in hopeless ambiguities. Sovereignty is the capacity to perform sovereign acts: when we say that the war against Egypt in 1956 or the organization of Zionist underground activities among Jewish communities in Arab countries were sovereign acts of the State of Israel, we are readily understood. If we say that these are acts of Jewish sovereignty, does it follow that the Jewish communities of Iraq and Egypt participated in these acts, which, in effect, led to their own undoing, or are we to say that these communities do not share in Jewish sovereignty? This concept, then, does not make for clarity; rather it contributes to the reader’s perplexity. Moreover, is it possible to accommodate without ambiguity all varieties of Jewish thinking within this concept of Jewish sovereignty? Is it permissible to describe, as the author does, Agudist thinking as concerned with the re-establishment of “Jewish sovereignty upon its legitimate basis, the strict tradition”? Do we not know, in fact, that rabbinical thought utterly rejects the idea of human sovereignty, reserving such omnipotence to God alone?
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Mr. Halpern’s general scheme is thus open to question; his account of Zionism as a doctrine is likewise, at some points, debatable. Zionism he rightly describes as a nationalist doctrine, but he thinks that it is to be distinguished from other nationalisms which ordinarily develop in countries where an autochthonous mass is ruled by foreigners, since the Jews were themselves oppressed by the autochthonous masses of Eastern Europe. But is this not precisely the case of the Armenians whose persecution by the Ottoman government had the wholehearted support of the Moslem population? In any event, is the distinction at all worth making when we consider that Nazism, the reductio ad absurdum of nationalism, arose in a country which was not and had never been ruled by foreigners?
A point, finally, worth noticing is that the author considers that “the fundamental movement of Zionism, emotionally even more than intellectually, is away from the Enlightenment and back toward tradition.” Such a statement bristles with difficulty. The inventors of Zionism were the “emancipated” and the “enlightened” of Eastern and Central Europe, one of whose firmest instincts was to mock and depreciate traditional Judaism, and who had no use for religion as a discipline of the moral and spiritual life. The inventors of Zionism were not traditionalists but radicals who wanted to recreate Judaism and Jewish life into something shining and new, discarding, in the process, all elements which were not to their purpose, whether in Eastern Europe where Orthodoxy still reigned, or in the West where Emancipation was a political and social reality. As an example of Zionist respect for traditional Jewry, the author quotes a passage in which Ahad Ha’am jeers uncharitably at “Jewish professors, Jewish members of Academies, Jewish officers in the army, Jewish civil servants.” Yet in this same passage, the so-called traditionalist to whom Jewish professors were an offense gives himself license to remain a Jew while adopting any heresy he chose. And why? Simply because he was an Easterner, of the virtuous Eastern mass, not a Westerner, bourgeois, well-to-do, and corrupt. This, if you like, is Russian populism, but it is hardly traditional Judaism.
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