Ever since its emergence as a national movement, Zionism has had its ideological and political opponents. Within Jewry itself, opposition arose in the early days both from the Left—the socialists and Communists—and from the Right—the Orthodox. It is perhaps a sign of the times that when one speaks of anti-Zionism today, one is inclined rather to think of resistance and animosity from without. What internal resentment and criticism exist are directed more against particular features of Zionist activity and aspiration than against the phenomenon as a whole, and even such criticism falls silent when confronted with the expressions of absolute denial coming from outside. Thus, in 1975, when the out-and-out assault of the United Nations General Assembly against Zionism occurred, identifying it with racism, Jewry found itself discriminated against at its very core, and reacted by rallying as one around the beleaguered camp of the Zionists.
Recent events have turned the notions of anti-Zionist and anti-Semite into veritable synonyms. At the same time, they have raised the question of the possible historical relation between the national movement of the Jewish people and modern anti-Semitism, a relation which is more complex than a superficial acquaintance with either phenomenon would suggest.
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It is a truism, and one which the founders of Zionism were themselves quick to acknowledge, that the Zionist political program was connected in some way with the prevalence of anti-Semitism in Europe in the late 19th century. Did not Theodor Herzl evolve his Zionist program under the impact of the Dreyfus affair, the drama which he observed as an eyewitness in Paris in the mid-1890’s? Did not Leo Pinsker write his Zionist pamphlet, Auto-Emancipation, in reaction to the bloody pogroms of Russia in 1881? Indeed, two staple arguments of early Zionists in favor of their ideological and political programs were the reluctance of Western societies to accept even emancipated Jews as equals and, in the East, the forestalling of emancipation by the Russian pogroms. And if, on the one hand, the founders of Zionism acknowledged the link between their political program and European anti-Semitism, external opponents of Zionism, on the other hand, often used this same connection as an ideological weapon to discredit the movement. Zionism was represented by its detractors as a mere reflection of anti-Semitism, and, as such, devoid of any deeper historical or spiritual significance.
But how important was the factor of anti-Semitism in the development of Zionism, and how important does it remain today? What is the precise relation between these two phenomena? At times, indeed, the conceptual framework of the two trends has seemed so intimately connected as to be almost identical. Thus, if there is one notion central to anti-Semitism in most of its ideological variants, it is the notion of race or its synonym, blood, employed as a means both of designating and of deprecating the Jews. Now, many Zionist thinkers, from Moses Hess to Martin Buber, used these same terms in delineating the boundaries of Jewish national existence. Did they then adopt the terminology of their enemies? In the case of Martin Buber, who began his Zionist activities toward the close of the 19th century, it is theoretically possible that such a process could have taken place. Moses Hess, however, wrote his Rome and Jerusalem in 1862, almost two decades before either Zionism or modern anti-Semitism appeared on the scene. This suggests that, whatever the parallels between the two phenomena, each had its own independent roots in the past.
Such, indeed, was the case. Hess himself, in Zionist historiography, is designated a “forerunner” of Zionism. The term indicates that although Zionism did not achieve the characteristics of a full-blown movement until the 1880’s or perhaps even the 90’s, it had a preparatory stage, a kind of subterranean preexistence, that preceded the movement proper by decades. And the same is true of modern anti-Semitism. The very term anti-Semitism—which was a creation of Wilhelm Marr—emerged only in the fall of 1879, coinciding with the eruption of the movement connected with the names of Adolf Stocker and Henrich von Treitschke. Yet the movement did not drop from heaven: it too had its forerunners, in Bruno Bauer and Richard Wagner in Germany; Adolph Toussenell in France; and Sebastian Brunner in Austria—to mention only a few. These figures were celebrated by later anti-Semites as early recognizers of the anti-Semitic “truth”—much in the same way as the Zionists of later days identified Hess and others as ideological anticipators.
To zero in on the actual source of the obvious parallelism between anti-Semitic and Zionist ideas we have to operate from the broader historical perspective. Both anti-Semitism and Zionism appeared against a background of ideological confusion into which Jewish existence had been thrown by the abandonment of the old theological definition of Judaism and the Jewish people. Both the Jewish and the Christian traditions had once accounted for the Jewish Diaspora by seeing it as divinely sanctioned. To Christians, the Diaspora would be terminated by the absorption of the Jews into Gentile society upon their conversion at the end of the days; to Jews, it would be terminated through the ingathering of the Jews into their homeland with the coming of the Messiah. Once divested of these shielding interpretations by the growth of rationalism and historical criticism, Jewish existence turned into an enigma.
Jews at the end of the 18th century, and in most places even much later, retained the physical as well as the mental marks of a special collectivity, whose members, though dispersed over the whole of the Christian and Muslim world, were nonetheless linked together through apparent signs of affinity and solidarity. What they lacked was a plausible ideological justification for this state of affairs. Nor did this embarrassing situation contain any hint of the destiny yet awaiting the remnants of this ancient nation—unless one believed in the idea of emancipation.
Emancipation in its limited political or legal sense meant the granting of citizenship to the Jewish inhabitants of a country—a concession that the secular modern state, contrary to its Christian predecessor, was indeed capable of bestowing. Yet in a broader and deeper sense the idea of emancipation meant the attempt to put an end to the anomaly of Jewish existence, offering Jews of every country the chance to be absorbed into the local population.
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Whether such a solution of the Jewish problem ever stood a chance of being implemented will always remain a matter of speculation. Had the Almighty inspired the rulers of all the countries where Jews lived to emancipate them exactly at the same time, they might indeed have been absorbed by the majority. Yet inasmuch as the granting of emancipation depended upon the phase of economic, political, and intellectual development a country had reached, the idea that it could have occurred simultaneously even in the European states alone is fantasy. It took some three generations from the time of the emancipation of the Jews of France, after the revolution, to the corresponding enfranchisement of German and Austro-Hungarian Jewry. And even before the emancipation of Russian Jewry was seriously contemplated, the reaction to emancipation had already made itself felt in Germany, France, and Austria-Hungary. With the rise of the anti-Semitic movement, the concept of emancipation as the ultimate solution of the Jewish problem was repudiated.
That such a solution was illusory is anyway apparent, at least in historical retrospect, from what was transpiring in the life of the Jewish community before anti-Semitism appeared on the scene. Even where the idea of emancipation had been hailed as the redeeming message of the day, internal as well as external forces were at work to block the absorption of Jews into non-Jewish society. The cohesion of Jews among themselves, supported as it was by their being concentrated in certain economic fields, by their religious nonconformity, as well as by some cultural factors, made them a conspicuous and puzzling phenomenon. Citizenship, whether actually achieved or merely ardently desired, seemed to create a new reality, giving the lie to the old idea of the Jews as a community in temporary exile or subject to divine degradation. Yet if the old patterns of thought were of no avail, new ones had to be invented to do justice to the prevailing conditions. Indeed, a good deal of thinking about Jews and Judaism in the course of the last two centuries, on the part of Jews, their friends, and their foes alike, has been motivated or controlled by the need to take account of this post-theological and post-emancipatory reality. And that is why the most bitter adversaries of Jews and Judaism seem at times to speak the same language as Jews deeply attached to their community and its cultural heritage, though the two have had absolutely conflicting intentions. It is the common object of their reflections which is mirrored in the thought processes of each.
Some strange parallelisms can be adduced to substantiate this thesis. One of the most severe critics of the Jewish aspiration to civic equality in the early 19th century was the Heidelberg theologian, Heinrich Eberhard Gottlob Paulus. Paulus followed closely the Jews’ attempts to achieve their political objectives. He paid special attention to the struggle of Frankfurt Jewry to retain the civil rights which had been acquired during the French occupation of the city in the last decade of Napoleon’s rule. He commented profusely on this matter as well as on the palpable political and cultural mutation which had taken place in German Jewry during his generation. A latitudinarian theologian, who reduced his own religion of Protestantism to some basic moral principles and a minimum of symbolically interpreted rituals, Paulus hailed the attempts of the early Jewish reformers to do the same within their own religion by transferring the Sabbath to Sunday and abolishing the dietary laws and circumcision—in short, by removing the signs of Jewish singularity which were thought to constitute an obstacle to civil equality and social acceptance.
Such tokens of Jewish flexibility notwithstanding, however, Paulus was angered by the obvious reluctance of the bulk of the Jewish community to go along with the suggested adaptations. In the wake of the revolution of 1830, when the Jewish question was on the agenda of the Baden parliament and the Jewish cause had found an articulate advocate in the person of Gabriel Riesser, Paulus joined the fray with his pamphlet, “The Jewish National Separation: Its Origin, Consequences, and the Means of its Correction.” The thesis of the book, as indicated in the title, was that Jews were a nation apart, and would remain so as long as they were committed to their religion, whose basic intent and purpose were to preserve them in that condition. In a country that was not their own, therefore, Jews could not claim more than the bare protection of their lives and possessions. They might certainly not claim political equality.
The charge that the Jews were an unassimilable nation was a favorite of opponents of emancipation in France, Holland, Germany, and elsewhere. Yet Paulus gave it a particular slant. In contrast to others, he did not concentrate on such external expressions of Jewishness as social cohesion, professional one-sidedness, and the like. His basic argument was that the Jewish religion, by nature of its legal foundation and its claim to the allegiance of all those born of a Jewish mother, turned the Jews into a national body even when individuals failed to live up to all of its principles and demands. This, of course, is exactly what Jewish theologians had been saying since the Middle Ages, and so did modern Jewish nationalists who were religiously oriented. Reading Paulus, one thinks of Isaac Breuer, the leader of Agudat Israel, who, though a militant opponent of political Zionism, defined Judaism in legalistic terms as a nation bound to the constitution spelled out in Jewish law and transmitted through the channels of halakhic tradition.
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Nationalism legalistically defined may have been an idiosyncracy of Paulus and Breuer, but a conception of the Jews as a nation on some other, possibly more secular, ground—the very core of Zionist ideology—seems to have been anticipated by all the opponents of Jewish emancipation. Arthur Schopenhauer, for instance, is to be counted among these, and indeed for that reason he has recently been styled a forerunner of Theodor Herzl. Another and a most surprising instance centers on a hitherto unknown intellectual encounter which took place between Moses Hess and Bruno Bauer.
Bauer initiated his anti-Jewish career with his Judenfrage (“The Jewish Question,” 1842). At the time he was a militant young Hegelian; he pursued his anti-Semitic course unabatedly, even after having turned staunchly conservative in the 1850’s. Bauer thus served as a virtual bridge between the early anti-Semitism of the first half of the 19th century and the outbreak of the anti-Semitic movement proper in the 1880’s. The encounter I am referring to occurred in the middle, with the appearance of Moses Hess’s Rome and Jerusalem. This book is now recognized as an early Zionist classic. Theodor Herzl himself, who became acquainted with it after having developed his own Zionist project, called it a full-fledged anticipation of his ideas. At the time of its appearance, however, the book was a failure. It sold in the course of the first year no more than 160 copies. In Jewish quarters the book created quite a stir, but outside the Jewish pale it received only slight public attention. Hess’s modern biographer, Edmund Silberner, collected some twenty references to it in the Jewish and non-Jewish press, most of the latter being short notices of little significance. But the most interesting review escaped his vigilance. It appeared in an unlikely place, the Berliner Revue, the organ of the extreme Prussian conservatives. The lengthy article, printed in two issues of the weekly, appeared anonymously, but the author was beyond all doubt Bruno Bauer, one of the major contributors to the Revue.
The gist of the review was this: the author of Rome and Jerusalem thinks he has made a great discovery in stating that the Jewish race represents a full-fledged nation with a particular spirit and destiny. Yet very soon he will have the opportunity to read the reviewer’s Das Judentum in der Fremde (“Jewry Abroad”), and realize that others before him have been aware of this state of affairs. Obviously, Bauer glossed over the fact that his own presentation of Jews as a race and a nation carried with it overtones of animosity and contempt, while that of Moses Hess was geared to a positive reevaluation of Jewish national abilities and the prospect of their revitalization. For Hess this meant the reestablishment of a Jewish commonwealth in Palestine. Bauer, on the other hand, denied the Jews’ ability to maintain their own state. They were a nation, but one doomed to live in everlasting exile at the expense of other nations. Still, despite their conflicting visions of the future, the fact remains that Bauer, the anti-Semite, regarded his conception of Judaism as identical with that of Moses Hess, the Zionist.
Like Bruno Bauer, Richard Wagner too evolved his anti-Jewish theory decades before the outbreak of anti-Semitism proper. Wagner’s Judentum in der Musik (“Jews in Music”), published anonymously after the 1848-49 revolution, and republished under his full name in 1869, rightly ranks as an anti-Semitic classic, and has been used as effective propaganda by all subsequent generations of anti-Semites. Though specifically aimed at discrediting Wagner’s contemporaries and competitors, Felix Mendelssohn-Bartholdy and Giacomo Meyerbeer, the book is sustained by vituperative generalizations on the alleged deficiencies of the Jewish character and spirit. Yet beneath the vitriol is a layer of astute observation on the process of Jewish cultural assimilation. According to Wagner, Jewish artists, by severing themselves from their own popular cultural tradition, have relinquished the source of inspiration for creative activity. Since Jews are incapable of merging with the deeper layers of their surrounding society, and since their efforts at assimilation are directed exclusively toward the culturally barren middle class, Jewish artists find themselves in a vacuum. To anybody acquainted with the teachings of Ahad Ha’am, these arguments must have a familiar ring; for that leading exponent of cultural Zionism expressed in almost identical terms his reservations about the attempts of the Jews to assimilate.
Finally, the very idea of a possible transplanting of the Jewish community to Palestine also turned up from time to time in the writings of the early anti-Semites. Usually the idea was brought up in a perfunctory fashion, but there is one example of a detailed proposal for founding a Jewish state in Palestine, presented by the central figure of Hungarian anti-Semitism, Gyozo Istoczy, to the Hungarian parliament in 1878. It was the time of the Berlin Congress, where the future of the Near East was among the subjects to be discussed. Istoczy formally requested that the Hungarian parliament resolve to support the establishment of a Jewish state in Palestine, should such a plan be recommended by the Berlin Congress. In enlarging upon the subject to show that such a plan would be appropriate as well as feasible, he pointed to the immense potentialities of a newly awakened Jewish nation, for whom the founding of its own state would be a highly desirable and expedient objective. Reading these passages in praise of the Jewish nation and the blessings of the future state, one would imagine oneself in the company not of one of the radical anti-Semites of the 19th century but of one of the great advocates of political Zionism.
But Istoczy’s speech had only the façade of a Zionist oration. Very quickly he divulged his real intention in conjuring up the vision of a Jewish state in Palestine. Istoczy’s speech made his listeners laugh—the idea of a Jewish state sounded to contemporaries like the figment of an excitable imagination. He then explained that what he meant to demonstrate was that although the Jews could have their own state if they really wanted one, so committed were they to the fancy of world domination that they preferred to invest their immense energy and power in conquering the commonwealths of others.
As with Istoczy, so with Wagner and Paulus. Wagner’s analysis of the assimilationist state of mind did not evolve, as did that of Ahad Ha’am, in the service of a Jewish national renaissance, but rather had a purely negative intention, to substantiate the alleged artistic impotence of his Jewish competitors. Similarly with the application of the term “nation” by ideologues like Paulus or Schopenhauer; it was employed to obstruct the Jewish claim to be emancipated, and not, as in its Zionist counterpart, to stimulate the will of self-emancipation.
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In spite of these qualifications, however, there remains a historical connection between early anti-Semitic tendencies and the subsequent emergence of Jewish nationalism. Yet the connection is not to be sought on the level of ideological congruency, but on the level of historical reality. To elaborate, let me quote a passage from Schopenhauer, which occurs in the second part of his Parerga and Paralipomena, written in the late 1840’s. The philosopher describes the Jewish race as one that has been “driven from its native land some two thousand years ago, and has ever since existed and wandered homeless,” while other great nations of antiquity “entirely disappeared”:
And so even today . . . this John Lackland among the nations is to be found all over the globe, nowhere at home and nowhere a stranger. Moreover it asserts its nationality with unprecedented obstinacy and . . . it would also like to set foot somewhere and take root in order to arrive once more in a country, without which of course a people is like a ball floating in air. Till then it lives parasitically on other nations and their soil, but yet it is inspired with the liveliest patriotism for its own nation. . . . The rest of the Jews are the fatherland of the Jew . . . and no community on earth sticks so firmly together as does this.
On the basis of this characterization, Schopenhauer then protests the use of the term “confession” for Judaism, a term borrowed from the Christian church: “Jewish nation is the correct expression.” And as the Jews are a nation, it would be absurd to concede them a share in the government or administration of any country, that is, to grant them full emancipation.
Here, the term “nation” is clearly applied in the service of politics: the denial of the Jews’ claim to full emancipation. But does this mean that the premises on which the conclusion rests were unfounded, or that the description of Jewish characteristics had been pulled out of thin air? Schopenhauer’s statement contains a description of Jewish collective behavior, an evaluation of the Jewish presence among the nations, and a hypothetical prognosis of future development. As to the designation of Jewish activity as parasitic, this is one of the most widely spread anti-Jewish stereotypes. It was probably introduced by J.G. Herder in the late 18th century, and was based upon the one-sidedness of Jewish occupational distribution and the widespread contempt among European intellectuals for the professions of trade, finance, and the like. Therein Schopenhauer simply followed the current trend of anti-Jewish opinion. The extraordinary degree of social cohesiveness and mutual solidarity of Jews, too, was often observed and commented upon, for the preservation of Jewish separateness ran counter to the expectation that with access to at least some social avenues the Jews would disperse and lose the character of a sub-society, a state within a state (as the slogan had it). It is a keen insight on the part of Schopenhauer into the nature of Jewish reality that in the long run this social cohesiveness would translate itself into a drive for political independence.
Most observers of Jewish cohesion stopped at the stage of criticism. They decried the manifestations of Jewish public life, the establishment of special Jewish institutions, Jewish scholarship, or a Jewish press, anything that went beyond the satisfaction of purely religious needs. All other symptoms of Jewishness, especially of Jewish cooperation on a larger than local level, were regarded as a virtual breach of the unwritten contract of as-similation-in-return-for-emancipation. Sometimes, indeed, the payment of the Jewish debt, in the currency of assimilation, was demanded even where formal emancipation was far from being complete.
An outstanding case in point is the suspicion that fell on the establishment of the Alliance Israelite Universelle in France in 1860. Admittedly, the founding of an organization with the declared purpose of furthering common Jewish interests on an international level was at variance with the expectation that world Jewry would dissolve itself into so many locally based religious communities. The founders of the Alliance themselves had to overcome their own misgivings on this score. Adversaries of Jewish public activity took the Alliance as proof positive of their contention that Jews were determined to maintain their international ties and to strive for their age-old sinister objectives. Scarcely another Jewish activity or phenomenon played such a conspicuous role in the thinking and imagination of anti-Semites all over Europe, among them prominently Gougenot des Mousseaux in France and Gyozo Istoczy in Hungary. The Alliance served to conjure up the phantom of the Jewish world conspiracy conducted from a secret center—later to become the focal theme of the Protocols of the Elders of Zion.
Being of an imaginary, and at times even of a clinical, character, such fantasies nevertheless did not lack a point of reference in historical reality. The point of reference consisted of the token remnants of pre-emancipatory Jewish life and the visible expressions of collective Jewish activity. Both of these phenomena appeared redundant or supererogatory in the light of the officially accepted designation of Jewry as a religious confession, and it was this redundancy that caused Schopenhauer and others to opt for the expression, Jewish “nation.” Whether this was justifiable according to some preconceived idea of what constituted a nation is of little importance. Most Jews, especially in the West, lacked at that time any consciousness of Jewish nationality, though a small minority, the forerunners of Zionism, were already at work cultivating and formulating it—a fact of which Schopenhauer could not possibly have been aware. Had he been acquainted with the Eastern European Jewry of Russia, Poland, and Rumania, he could have observed there the elements of a full-fledged Jewish nationalism emerging through the process of secularization that affected Jewish society without the experience of emancipation and assimilation. There the Jewish masses, living in close physical proximity, speaking their own language, and immersed in their popular culture, represented a veritable national minority. The crystallization of Jewish nationalism at times reached the level of literary and ideological expression, and was clearly in evidence decades before the anti-Semitic reaction set in in the shape of the bloody pogroms of the 1880’s. Of all of this Schopenhauer was of course ignorant. To his unfriendly but perceptive eye, it was sufficient to observe Jewish cohesion and solidarity in the West to speak of a Jewish nation and a Jewish nationality.
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This leads us to an important point concerning the relationship between anti-Semitism and the Jewish national movement. It was not the emergence of the former that provoked the emergence of the latter by way of reaction. Rather, modern anti-Semitism was itself a reaction to Jewish proto-nationalism, to the incapacity and unwillingness of Jewry to divest itself of all the characteristics of national life except that of religion. True, once anti-Semitism—until then a mere undercurrent—erupted as a full-fledged movement in the 1870’s and 80’s, it gave a tremendous push to Jewish national aspirations. Yet this was already the second phase of a dialectical process. The starting point of the process was not anti-Semitism, but the perseverance of Jewish qualities.
There was no need for Zionism to deny that it shared a common historical ambience with anti-Semitism. Indeed, in the course of their twin histories up to the present day it has looked at times as if they might not only be reacting to one another but be capable of evolving identical objectives and even cooperating in their realization. Theodor Herzl, for one, hoped to reach an understanding with anti-Semites, who, he imagined, would appreciate his attempt to solve the Jewish problem. Ivan von Simonyi, Istoczy’s colleague in the Hungarian parliament, in fact approached Herzl upon the publication of the latter’s Judenstaat (“The Jewish State”), expressing sympathy for Herzl’s scheme. Practical support later seemed forthcoming from the Czarist government, and Herzl had no hesitation in negotiating with the minister Viacheslav von Plehve, who was held responsible by Jewish public opinion not only for a series of anti-Jewish measures but even for the bloody Kishinev pogrom of 1903, a few months before Herzl came to see him in St. Petersburg. A similar attitude was later displayed by Vladimir Jabotinsky, who in the 1930’s sought the support of the anti-Semitic government of Poland for the planned “evacuation” of Jews to Palestine.
Such contacts between the representatives of the two movements remained the exception. During the course of its venturesome history, Zionism received moral and material support from various non-Jewish quarters, but none from anti-Semites. These as a rule conceived of Zionism as no more than another variation of the perennial Jewish conspiracy against the Gentile world, an evaluation that arose out of the very nature of anti-Semitism. For the actual difficulty of coping with the Jewish presence within Gentile society was only one reason, and not the deepest one, for its virulence. Behind the rational arguments lurked the historically conditioned image of Jews and Judaism. Indeed, the more articulate and radical anti-Semites, like Bruno Bauer and Eugen Duehring, denied even the possibility or the desirability of a Jewish state, the former because of the alleged incapacity of Jews to live except as parasites, the latter because he regarded Jews as a particularly pernicious species that ought not to be tolerated anywhere, under any circumstances.
It was because of his unqualified denial of the right of Jewish existence that Duehring was retrospectively recognized as a kind of ideological precursor to Hitler. The Nazis, too, toyed with the idea of establishing a separate Jewish province or protectorate in Eastern Europe or in Madagascar, but even if established, it would have been a mere stopover on the way to the planned Final Solution. For according to the more radical version of anti-Semitism spelled out consistently in Nazi ideology, there was no room for Jews anywhere on earth, whether spread among the nations or concentrated among themselves.
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Theodor Herzl’s vision of liberating Jews and Gentiles alike from the curse of anti-Semitism can be said to have erred on two counts. First, he identified the ingathering of Jews in their homeland with the elimination of the Diaspora, assuming that with the establishment of a state, Jews would either join it or disappear in their social surroundings. Second, he attributed anti-Semitism exclusively to the actual strain suffered by Jews and Gentiles when living in social symbiosis; he ignored the historical roots of anti-Semitism, which were in need only of the slightest stimulation to begin anew their poisonous growth.
It has been the paradoxical result of the Zionist endeavor that instead of removing the external stimulus to anti-Semitism—namely, the social entanglement of Jews in non-Jewish society—it has added a new dimension to it. The Jewish state, being the outgrowth of the perennial Jewish predicament—the retention by Jews of their national existence without the possession of its physical basis—is beset by many of the same problems and perplexities. Thus, the clash between Israel and its neighbors is not simply one of conflicting political interests. At stake also is the issue of the definition of Jews as a nation. Not unexpectedly, perhaps, the positions are now reversed, with Israelis claiming for themselves the status of a nation, characterized by historical ties to a country, while their opponents deny it to them. Arab propaganda has also shown itself ready to adopt ideological weapons that include stereotypes of Christian background, from the arsenal of traditional anti-Semitism. The most discredited anti-Jewish writings of Europe, such as the Protocols of the Elders of Zion, have been widely disseminated, read, and believed in the Arabic-speaking countries.
The post-Zionist variation of anti-Semitism is hardly restricted to Arabs. Since the partial realization of the Zionist project left most of the Diaspora communities intact, social friction between Jews and Gentiles remained endemic to the Jewish situation. Moreover, since the Jewish state has become a subject of international debate, and since Jews everywhere are inevitably associated with its fate, a new occasion for possible friction has been added. There is no anti-Semitic movement of intensity in evidence anywhere today, but occasional outbursts in the West and a steady pressure by Russia and other Communist countries are intimately linked with the real or putative allegiance of Jews to the Jewish state. The charge of divided or dual loyalty, which is of course of long standing—in fact, it is but a variant of the accusation of Jewish international cohesion—has now received some semblance of substantiality.
If Zionism has failed to eliminate the determining factors of anti-Semitism, it nevertheless has succeeded in changing the climate within which anti-Semitism operates. As the proverbial Jewish passivity has given way to active self-defense—sometimes called excessive or overactive—the traditional image of the Jews has undergone a transformation. Similarly, the reconstruction of a full-fledged Jewish society has given the lie to the notion of an inherent Jewish parasitism. If it had had the opportunity to exercise its full potential, the Zionist enterprise might well have undercut anti-Semitism altogether—not so much through a change in the Jewish situation as through a rehabilitation of the Jewish character and mentality. As things stand, the rehabilitating effect of Zionism is balanced by the continuing controversy not only over the acts and deeds of the Jewish state but over its very right to exist. The passion with which this issue is debated even in circles uninvolved in the problem makes it clear that the stand taken by people on this question for better or worse is strongly influenced by their attitude toward Jews and Judaism. Thus in our day the anti-Semitic tradition has found new sources to thrive on and new subterfuges with which to cover itself.
In view of all this, one may say that in the struggle of the Jewish state for a peaceful and tranquil existence, the fate of anti-Semitism too hangs in the balance. The continual wrangling over Israel is apt to keep alive and even to exacerbate anti-Jewish sentiment, while a catastrophic termination of the struggle would throw world Jewry back into a condition of pre-Zionist deprivation, and worse. By contrast, a comparatively tranquil resolution would alone hold out the hope of the gradual receding of the perennial tension between Jews and Gentiles. Whether the realization of this hope is to be granted us is the fateful question hovering over Jewish—and in a sense also over
