The question of whether the world can overcome nationalism and learn to think in supra-national terms concerns all of humanity and not only Jews. But since nationalism has identified itself with anti-Semitism to such an appalling extent, surely they have a special interest in the issue. For the rest of humanity it is at worst a question of the survival of the present structure of civilization. For the Jews the flaming up of nationalism on a world scale may well threaten their very physical survival. For at the end of the chauvinistic road lie pogroms, expulsions, new wars, and the extermination camps.
If this is so, it seems peculiarly ironic and unfortunate to find Zionism—at a moment when the very preservation of civilization seems to depend increasingly on humanity’s ability to rise above nationalistic ideologies—fostering a worldwide movement of the most intensely nationalistic character.
“Nationalism” cannot be strictly defined. Certain of its tenets—the national state as the highest form of political organization, for instance, and the inviolability of national sovereignty, etc.—are deeply imbedded in the modem mind, and are almost fixtures in our way of thinking. These beliefs do not necessarily manifest themselves as active political forces; yet they represent almost insurmountable barriers to the realization of those higher forms of world organization that have become our last hope.
At the same time, we have witnessed, and still face, a horrifying degeneration of nationalism, which the defeat of Hitler has not halted. The slogans of fascism may have disappeared; but the forces that supported them have undoubtedly survived, and will sooner or later attempt to rise to the surface again.
Are the two expressions of nationalist ideology—the respectable one and the murderous, hysterical one—substantially different? It is difficult to find criteria for a satisfactory answer. We have as yet not enough distance from the nationalism of our time to evaluate it as a social phenomenon and to understand fully the irrational factors that lend it its enormous mass appeal.
However, by and large, it seems no longer possible to cleanse nationalism from the taint of fascism. Wherever it becomes militant again as an active political force, it seems bound to borrow the ruthlessness and techniques of fascism, and—in countries where Jews live as a distinct minority—its violent anti-Semitism.
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From what high estate has nationalism fallen! Modem nationalism has its roots in the French Revolution, which, reviving an ancient conception, used the term la Nation to denote the community of the people as opposed to the king and the aristocrats. Its rise during most of the 19th century coincided with the spread of demands for human rights, freedom, and democracy. The “national state” became a postulate of liberal and democratic thinking; and John Stuart Mill only formulated the common conviction of liberals when he stated: “. . . it is in general a necessary condition of free institutions that the boundaries of government should coincide in the main with those of nationalities.”
Even after the revolutionary crisis of 1848, when the ideas of the American and French revolutions finally asserted themselves against the remnants of feudalism in Europe, nationalism still worked as a constructive rather than destructive force. The Italian Kingdom and the German Reich were welded together, and the American Civil War fought and won, in the name of national unity.
In the course of time, however, the two ideological currents that had risen from a common source in the French Revolution—nationalism and liberalism—began to flow in opposite directions. Nationalism gradually adopted an attitude of exclusiveness arid aggressiveness, and began to join hands with reactionary forces and to display anti-liberal and especially anti-Semitic tendencies. Liberalism, on the other hand, became antinationalistic in its most important offshoot, the Socialist movement, whose forces increased rapidly in the last decades before 1914.
Simultaneously, the conception of the nation as such underwent certain changes. American nationalism broadened its conception by stressing the primacy of the federal political structure and by endeavoring to create within the confines of this structure a single nation out of the most heterogeneous elements. European nationalism, on the other hand, narrowed down the term “nation” to denote a collectivity with common language, common ancestry, and a certain rather arbitrarily defined common cultural heritage. The “nation” (folk) was not fitted into a political structure, but rather separated from it and opposed to the “boundaries of government” Gradually the “nation” came to assume primacy over the “state.”
Thus there arose the Pan-German and Pan-Slav movements at the end of the late 19th century. These with their supra-state claims became in the long run the dynamite that exploded the old historical political structures of Europe.
It was one of the ironies of history that the country of Abraham Lincoln, which had achieved the greatest miracle of constructive nationalism, should have taken the lead at the end of World War I in demanding the liquidation of the last multi-national structures of Europe. Because of a dogmatism essentially alien to her own principles, America helped to unloose the most destructive forces of nationalism with the slogan of “national self-determination.” The destruction of the Austro-Hungarian and Turkish empires—and the isolation of Russia, the last supra-national structure—gave an enormous impetus to the growing radicalization of nationalist movements in Europe during the inter-war period. The victory of Fascism in Italy was followed by the rise of ultra-nationalistic parties in the political vacuum left by the former multi-national states. Semi-fascist governments, backed by these ultra-nationalistic parties, took power in Turkey, Hungary, Poland, Bulgaria, and Yugoslavia.
It was against this background that German racism arose as the ultimate exaltation of the nationalist idea.
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In judging the development of the political attitude of the Jews against the background of one and a half centuries of rising nationalism, we have to take into account that this development was hardly the Jews’ free choice. Because of their dispersion and their desire for emancipation, which meant intrinsically accommodation to the ways of thinking prevalent in their environment, the Jews did little more than adjust themselves to the nationalism of the Gentile world.
To be sure, there were certain supra-national elements peculiar to the Jewish situation. The Jews were bound together by certain cultural and religious ties; at the same time they were scattered among different countries and exposed to different national cultures. But, unlike the Catholics, they had neither a centralized organization nor a unified leadership.
However, during a great part of the 19th century, the Jews had no reason to regard nationalism as a hostile force, even potentially. Like everybody else, they assumed nationalism to be part and parcel of the ideology of the great democratic revolutions that brought to them, in particular, freedom and equality of rights. In many European countries emancipation went hand in hand with the ascendancy of the national idea; and one of the main features of Jewish emancipation was the effort of the higher strata of Jewish society to participate in the national movements of their respective countries.
Violent reaction against Jewish emancipation and against the penetration of Jews into Gentile society began as soon as national conceptions became restrictive and exclusive. Growing national consciousness of this new kind, embodying ideas that already anticipated certain features of racism, was bound to provoke a feeling that Jews were an “alien” element. The Dreyfus Affair was significant in this development because of its repercussions throughout France. At the same time, the Stoecker movement in Germany and the Schoenerer movement in Austria made definite attempts to establish a “scientific” basis for anti-Semitism.
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The increasingly reactionary character of Nationalism, along with its growing tendencies toward anti-Semitism, gave Jews the choice of three paths.
One way was to go as far along the road of emancipation and assimilation as the others would permit—participating in all the political movements of their respective countries to the extent to which these did not expressly bar the Jews. (In actual fact most political movements in Europe, except for Socialism, displayed more or less nationalistic or clerical tendencies, equally inimical to Jewish participation.)
It was the path toward assimilation that the majority of the bourgeois and petty-bourgeois Jews in the West took—and until 1918 a great percentage of the German and Hungarian Jews joined them. In Italy Jews even joined the Fascist movement, and many of them held high positions in the Fascist party before it turned anti-Semitic under German pressure.
However, this path led Jews into an ambiguous situation; they met latent, if not openly admitted, anti-Semitic feeling and prejudice almost everywhere and could hardly avoid transgressing the limits of self-respect.
The second path open to the Jews was to meet nationalism on its own ideological platform by organizing and uniting themselves under a national flag of their own. Contrary to the traditional view, the birth of Zionism actually less reflects independent Jewish thinking than it does imitation of ideas sweeping the world at large. Zionism was a true offspring of the combination of nationalism and neo-romanticism that characterized the 19th century. One can in many ways admire the wisdom and political foresight of the founders of Zionism—yet its rapid spread was not due to rational political thinking, but rather to the enormous appeal that a new national ideology made to the emotions and irrational romantic—even Messianic—urges of the Jewish masses.
One thing was peculiarly characteristic of this new Jewish nationalism: the disproportion between the small number of those who were ready to go to Palestine—and whose nationalism thus had a practical goal—and the large number of those determined to remain in the Diaspora, for whom the adoption of Jewish nationalism was but an emotional and romantic reaction to the nationalism of their surroundings. And though the Balfour Declaration opened more practical perspectives to Zionism, the rise of fascism and racism in the inter-war period gave still further impetus to its emotional and irrational elements.
In addition, Jewish nationalism today still preserves certain features that can only be attributed to the Central European scene in which it first arose—that is, it was born on the frontiers of Pan-Germanism and Pan-Slavism, in the homeland of the nationalism that most radically separated the concept “nation” from the existing state structures, and which as a result demanded for the future that the state (and citizens’ rights) be absolutely and inextricably identified with and limited to the “nation” or ethnic body.
Jewish nationalism, except in the case of the relatively few Jews who went to Palestine, has not been able to deliver us from our ambiguous political situation. By displaying a nationalism of their own in surroundings that had made “national-mindedness” a moral postulate, the Zionists won the respect of other nationalists and enhanced the Jews’ own self-respect. But the price they paid for this dish of lentils was to accept the scale of moral values of their enemies. Moreover, Zionism essentially implied a promise—not merely to the Jews themselves, but also to all those interested in getting rid of the Jews.
Until the exodus to Palestine, Zionism would have had the Jews of Europe become just another national minority—this at a time when sober political thinking could already foresee the futility of all artificial schemes for minority protection. In America, where Jewish nationalism spread in the main among Jews whose thinking was still rooted in European conditions, Zionism tended to perpetuate the difficulties encountered by all immigrants, Jewish and Gentile alike, in trying to reconcile the separatist European notion of nationality with the amalgamating American conception.
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The third way in which Jews reacted to political forces of the rising nationalism was to challenge its principle and repudiate it. This expressed the Jewish urge toward cosmopolitanism. Many Jews, who did not themselves belong to the proletariat, joined the Socialist movement in Europe as a reaction against the nationalism of the other political parties. The hopes many Jews placed in the Second—or Socialist—International were disappointed when, at the outbreak of the First World War, labor made common cause with national fronts everywhere. And the irresolute attitude of the Socialists towards nationalism in the interwar period, afterwards, left many Jews disoriented, and led some of them to turn to Communism as the only supra-national ideology accessible to Jews.
But this path also left the Jews in an ambiguous position. Throughout their history they had displayed more stubborn individualism than any people in the world. And at the same time their material pursuits tended to identify them with “free enterprise” or economic individualism more than any other group. The flight from nationalism into Marxist collectivism sent them in a direction that was contrary to their peculiar ideological traditions as well as to their momentary material interests.
Retrospectively, all three of these ways of Jewish reaction to nationalism appear to have been natural, logical, and more or less inevitable. But none of the three offered a real remedy for the desperate plight in which the European Jews found themselves after a century of emancipation. They were already politically and ideologically uprooted when the furor teutonicus precipitated a Second World War and brought them the agony of the slave-labor camps, ghettos, and death factories, to leave but a small fraction of wretched Jewish survivors on the European scene—and to shift the center of gravity of Jewish life and of Jewish problems definitely to the Western Hemisphere.
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The present postwar period is marked by the discrepancy between old 19th-century political ideas, ideals, and values, which still determine the thinking of people everywhere, and the real political conditions and forces of the world as now constituted. This discrepancy is reflected, and even magnified, in the attitudes of many Jews.
The war years brought the Jews not only unspeakable horrors, but also frustration caused by their own helplessness and by the callousness of a world too occupied with its own troubles to notice those of the Jews, plus the supreme frustration of having their “national home,” built at the cost of so much sacrifice for a refuge in an emergency, closed to them just when they had most need of it. All this could not but provoke overwhelming emotional, irrational, and even neurotic reactions. Yet, in the minds of an increasing number of Jews—indeed, the majority inside and outside Europe—these reactions did not transcend the thought patterns of nationalism, the very force ultimately responsible for their catastrophe.
The nationalistic reaction of Jews to the ruthless nationalism of their foes has survived the war. It may take considerable time for the pendulum to swing back from emotionalism to rationality and for the Jewish masses to be able to face the facts again and accommodate their political thinking to the emerging patterns of the postwar world.
But meanwhile the relative weights of the old ideologies and political forces have been changed or have shifted. Nationalism no longer has the character of an inescapable fate. It has suffered a serious, if perhaps not final, defeat. At last it can be fought with prospects of success; mighty forces are already arrayed against it.
Anti-Semitism—either as an old endemic phenomenon or as part of the legacy of Nazism—exists in almost every country; and thee is enough anti-Semitic feeling present everywhere to revive it as a dangerous force once it is backed and exploited by new nationalistic movements. Indeed, the real, the mortal danger to Jewry does not consist in the extent of anti-Semitic sentiment as such, but in the possibility of having this sentiment translated into action by constellations of nationalistic forces supporting it. It must not be forgotten that the Germans were, by comparison with other peoples, only moderately anti-Semitic. Yet they built and staffed the extermination camps.
The Jews must become more than ever aware of the fact that active and militant nationalism, whatever its denomination, is their inevitable enemy. Nationalism has become so closely identified with anti-Semitic political action that, at least in our generation, one cannot be conceived of without the other. In the long run other forces may arise to exploit anti-Semitism and to avail themselves of the eternal scapegoat the Jew provides; but no such other force is yet to be discerned on the political scene. So far as the foreseeable future is concerned, rational Jewish political thinking will have to assess the situation anywhere as menacing or hopeful primarily on the basis of the rise and decline and incidence of political nationalism.
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For Jews the world political problem can be divided roughly into three geographical and cultural areas in which conditions differ widely: the Moslem world enclosing Palestine; the Russian sphere of influence in Eastern Europe and elsewhere; and the sphere of influence of the Western democracies. The fight for the opening of Palestine to Jewish immigration is a quite separate problem, apart from any question of nationalism.
The flight of tens of thousands of Jewish survivors in Europe is too desperate not to justify the future risks involved in their transfer to Palestine. Furthermore, the Pales tine issue will in all likelihood be settled in the near future in so far as it concerns the character of the Jewish national home and the determination of the number of Jewish immigrants Palestine will be able to absorb. This will eliminate one factor of uncertainty that has contributed greatly to the disproportion of emotional and irrational factors in Jewish political thinking in recent times.
The extent and probable development of Arab nationalism and its potential danger to the Jews in Palestine is difficult to estimate in the absence of unbiased reports or analyses. Zionists are in the habit of minimizing Arab nationalism and presenting it as an artificial creation; yet they cannot deny that it is still on the rise, fostered not only by the foreign agents of rival imperialisms but by the most influential Arab circles.
The second area in which large numbers of Jews remain is Eastern Europe. In all likelihood they are destined to stay there and adapt their lives to surrounding conditions. Despite reports of recrudescent Russian nationalism, there seems common agreement that the nationalities problem has been solved on Russian soil more efficiently than anywhere else. With their typical iron consistency, the Bolsheviks have sought to confine nationalism to the cultural sphere and eliminate it from the political one.
The Russians’ stand against national tendencies in their spheres of influence will certainly affect the future of the Jews in countries neighboring Russia. There they still desperately struggle against a widespread combination of inveterate anti-Semitism and political nationalism—whose remnants have become all the more violent since going underground. It seems inevitable that Russian influence will in the long run make itself felt against this combination, especially since the forces of nationalism are also violently anti-Russian in this region.
In the sphere of the Western democracies, the question of nationalism is still very much undecided and remains a problem of the future. But after the holocaust of fascist nationalism there are signs that a new kind of universal and supra-national ideology seems to be in the making. The masses of “common men,” although they still think in nationalist terms and cling to nationalist notions, have become obsessed by a deep fear of nationalist passions igniting another world catastrophe. And leaders of political and cultural life, scientists, union leaders, churchmen, men of good will everywhere, are striving to devise new plans, new ideas, and new organizational forms to replace nationalism.
It would seem obvious that the Jews are challenged—after the most serious war wounds have been healed, the factors of uncertainty in Palestine eliminated, and another period in the history of Jewish migrations finished—to adopt as their own the supra-national political orientation that represents the only rational and logical hope for the solution not only of their problems, but of the world’s needs.
In Palestine, the Jews may still have to safeguard their own nationalism as an offset to Arab nationalism. But it is to be hoped that leadership and political wisdom on both sides will achieve the miracle of moderating both nationalist movements, and preventing them from becoming uncompromising, radical, and exclusive. Otherwise disaster will be unavoidable.
The majority of the world’s Jews, however, either unable or unwilling to go to Palestine, will have to realize that the time has come to fight political nationalism uncompromisingly and on principle, inside Jewish life, as well as outside. This, in turn, involves recognizing that nationalism cannot in the long run be fought by means of another political nationalism. Above all, it means accepting this fact: that if history has any logic, no group in the world has been so obviously chosen to be the protagonist in the fight against nationalism as have the Jews, whom nationalism itself singled out for destruction. By now it should be obvious even to the most blind that in fighting nationalism wherever they see it, Jews will serve not only the interests of mankind at large, but their own best interests as well.
