The Paradox Illustrated: Zionism against Judaism

his series of what happened to national liver we heard yesterday some some ask some things about what happened to National Liberation and Michael talked about the paradox of national liberation in India Israel and Algeria and in particular focused on pulling apart first exposing and then beginning to pull apart the the tension between aggressively secular national liberation movements and what was left in their in their path dependent awake some years later and in particular virulent challenges to the very secularism that motivated those movements and today he's going to I think illustrate in more depth the paradox and the many dimensions of it in his second lecture called Zionism against Judaism and just to preview next week of course there'll be the third and fourth of these lectures I did neglect to say that the Stimson lectures are co-sponsored by the Macmillan Center and Yale University Press which will eventually publish these lectures but the so the third and fourth next week same time same place will be on Wednesday at 4:00 and Thursday at 4:00 but today we're going to listen to the paradox Illustrated Zionism against Judaism thank you okay so this is as Ian said an effort to illustrate the argument in some depth and I will next week consider a a rather tough critique of the argument of my argument from a from Marxist and post-colonial perspectives and and then talk about what might lie ahead for National Liberation Zionism is one of the success stories of the 20th century national liberation movements the first generation of Zionist leaders proposed the solution to the Jewish Question that seemed to just about every realistic Jew and non-jew in the world impossible to realize and the next generation realized that the realization came too late for most of the Jews of Europe it was it is darkened by the greatest catastrophe in Jewish history nonetheless Zionism reached the unreachable goal the Theodor Herzl set for it within the 50 year time span that he envisioned the Zionist movement established the sovereign state in which Jewish self-determination impossible for almost 2,000 years is now an everyday fact so why isn't that the end of the story everything after is post Zionist what we should talk about now is Palestinian national liberation but the Zionist story is more complicated than that brief telling suggests and it is complicated in much the same way as the victories of the Indian National Congress and the Algerian FLN the Zionist project isn't entirely a success and it hasn't reached its end what I called in my first lecture the paradox of national liberation has its specifically Jewish version which is my subject today imagine that a group of the zionist founders found themselves in contemporary israel a ghostly congress discussing the history of the of the movement most of the people attending i think wouldn't believe that their project had been fully realized the state as it is today would not match their visions even the political Zionists who were often said to want nothing but a state any state anywhere had in fact a particular state in mind and Israel isn't quite that kind of state it also isn't the kind of state that the Mizrahi rabbis the small number of Orthodox rabbis who supported the Zionist movement it isn't the kind of state that that they had in mind but I'm going to focus on the expectations and disappointments of the others because Zionism was at its center and in the years of its greatest achievements overwhelmingly a secular project that's what makes its relation to Judaism so interesting I propose to look closely at that relationship taking it as a special case of a tension or a contradiction that could be illustrated also in the histories of India and Algeria and since this further case is bound to come up in the case of Palestine to which even before statehood has its own history of secular nationalism and religious revival the Jewish version of the story begins with exile over some 2,000 years a span of time that our imaginations cannot easily encompass the stateless and scattered people of Israel developed a religious political culture that was adapted to statelessness and scattered miss I don't know how long it takes to develop a culture of that kind we can find signs of the adaptation very early on but the social construction of exile as the prototypical Jewish condition took many centuries and the construction is very powerful this is the deep architecture of Jewish life Judaism as it existed in the late 19th century when Zionism was born was a religion of exile a yearning for return to the long-lost homeland played an important part in that religion the idea of political independence played no part at all the Jewish people have forgotten wrote Leo Pinsker and his pamphlet is the early Zionists pamphlet Auto emancipation the Jewish people have forgotten what political independence is exilic politics had only two aspects first Jews submitted to Gentile rule they practiced the politics of deference and second they waited patiently for divine redemption they practice the politics of deferred Hope in fact there's a lot more to say about the actual political experience of the Jews but it is only this dualism that is reflected in their law and literature Jewish submission would last until the coming of the Messiah and the coming of the Messiah was in God's hands and seemed to be indefinitely postponed deference and deferment the words and practices that this politics required had to be reinvented in each diaspora setting but this was in no sense a makeshift invention nor would it be right to say that it was reluctantly accepted it was indeed the natural politics of the Jews in the eyes of the Jews themselves the necessary consequence so it was commonly thought of the place that God had assigned them in world history it follows then that any political effort to escape from the Exile any nationalism aiming at statehood and sovereignty would have to be the work of people who rejected this divine assignment who broke with the culture of deference and deferment but since this culture was a central part of Judaism as it existed in the 19th century Zionism was and could only be the creation of people who were hostile to Judaism if pressed I will qualify that remark in various ways but in its naked form unqualified it helps to explain a centrally important Zionist goal the negation of the Exile the negation of the Exile this is not the same as the end of the Exile of course Zionists wanted to bring the eggs out to an end but they also believed or many of them believed that it would be impossible to do that without first negating the cultural predispositions and habits the mentality of the Exile it was necessary to overcome the long term adaptation of the Jews to their captivity among the Gentiles and the name of that adaptation was Judaism this overcoming could find support within the Jewish world but its most prominent and successful advocates were likely to be Jews who had assimilated into the world of their oppressors and who viewed their own people with a foreign eye Herzl was a nationalist leader of exactly that kind who wanted the Jews to have a state like any European state the Zionists dream of normality is born out of persecution and fear but it also has two intellectual sources both of them at odds with exilic culture the first is a close-up knowledge of the other nations and the second is the belief that imitation of those others is both possible and desirable Herzl indeed imitated the most progressive European ideas especially with regard to status of women an issue I spoke about last time in his Zionist utopia the old new land published in 1902 women have equal rights with men and are obligated like men exactly like men to do two years of national service Harold isn't explicitly set this equality against traditional Judaism's exclusion of women from all public roles but it's an obvious challenge to the tradition leaders like Herzl or max Nordau his most prominent intellectual supporter have few anxieties about the negation of the Exile because nothing in their experience suggests that there is value in what is being negated they have no sentimental ties to the old way of life and this may be the key to their effectiveness they are single-minded in pursuit of their goals but the same alienation from the people they mean to rescue can also bring down the leaders of a national liberation movement as the Uganda episode suggests in Harold's case I can't tell that story here but it's probably sufficiently well known so that I can discuss it very briefly it began in 1903 when a British colonial official suggested that a large tract of territory in East Africa what is now Uganda might be made available for Jewish settlement in lieu of Palestine instead of Palestine hair soluz eager to accept the offer which represented the first official recognition of the Zionist movement as a territorial claimant he apparently had little sense of the opposition it would arouse Zionist leaders closer to their people understood immediately instinctively that this was negation gone one step too far however desperate the condition of the Jews and the Uganda debate unfolded immediately after the Kishinev pogrom in in Russia however desperate the condition of the Jews a specifically Jewish nationalism could have only one country as its object the Land of Israel these leaders who opposed the Uganda project most of them Russians wanted to acknowledge the British offer with gratitude and then reject it which is what happened three or four years later after Herzl's death in a curious way the idea of settling Jews and Uganda under British rule was simultaneously too radical and too conservative its radicalism appealed to some secularists and socialist Zionists who worried that the mystique of the Land of Israel would make the work of cultural transformation more difficult or perhaps defeated entirely their argument was forcefully stated in a way that resonates today by Hillel Zeitlin who said the same tradition that burdens us in the Diaspora will burden us a thousand times more in the Land of Israel because that is its home the rabbinic dominion over the masses will not be weakened there as the free-thinking Zionists hope but on the contrary we'll get stronger and stronger Uganda or at least the idea of Uganda offered a new beginning a chance to establish national life on a modern footing at the same time however Ugandan settlement would also be a continuation of the exile and the subjection it entails the new rulers would certainly be more benign than the old the king of Israel the King of England the King of England was far preferable to the Russian czar or the turkish sultan but he was not King David he did not represent Jewish sovereignty and that may be why the Mizrahi rabbis were so comfortable with Harold's scheme they would not have to face the challenge of sovereignty at one of the earliest Zionist meetings the Cata wits conference in 1884 an Orthodox delegate from Romania argued against political independence for reasons that may seem trivial to contemporary secular Jews and non-jews but in fact go to the heart of the conflict between Zionism and Judaism no state he said can maintain itself without a postal service railways and the Telegraph and these have to be operated day and night throughout the week but I'm quoting now if the officials of Israel were to rest on the Sabbath according to the laws of Moses other states would protest while if we were to permit our officials to violate the Sabbath and the festivals our brethren would rise up and destroy us and that says nothing about the maintenance of gas and soon electricity services firefighting the police the ordinary functioning of hospitals and clinics and much else in the lands of the exile all this necessary work was done on the Sabbath by Gentiles in Uganda the British presumably would arrange for it to be done it was not yet imaginable to religious Jews that they could do it themselves in their private lives they relied on a figure called the Shabbos a Gentile friend or neighbor or servant who performed all the necessary chores forbidden to Jews on the Sabbath and what was the state what else could it be in pre messianic times but a large-scale Shabbos I doubt that Herzl ever worried about the possible incompatibility of the laws of Moses and a Jewish state his visionary description of a state where as he said the army stayed in its barracks and the rabbi's in their synagogues did not include laws from a political standpoint the sacred geography of the Jews should have worried him more but he had little sense of that either until vo get Uganda controversy erupted accounts of his conversations with British officials suggests that he argued for as much autonomy as he could get in a Ugandan setting the setting itself was of less importance to him and yet sacred geography was one feature of exilic culture that as it turned out neither he nor any of the other Ugandan 's later they called themselves territorial ist's could negate the cultural Zionists followers of Occam opposed the Uganda plan and sharply criticized hair cells lack of Jewish culture and learning even more his insensitivity to Jewish emotional attachments they regularly insisted on the need for continuity with the past and a few of them like the poet Khayyam Nachman Bialik aimed consciously at a critical engagement with rather than a negation of the Exile the Alex call for a cultural in gathering alongside or even before the demographic in gathering suggests the road not taken' which I will want to defend later on as the better path a calm himself sharply attacked Zionist riders who understood the whole of Jewish history as he said to be one long mistake that requires immediate complete rectification though he acknowledged in a private letter that Zionism may involve a latent contradiction with Judaism deep within the soul he consistently opposed what he called defiant apostasy nonetheless his own ideas about continuity were selectively focused mainly on prophetic morality and the ideas of many of his followers and admirers were more selective still zionism wrote Leo Motzkin is in no sense a direct continuation of the ancient culture even though it means to refashion something rather than create something ex nihilo argued Joseph Klausner Zionism is a highly radical Jewish movement it aspires to a total revolution in Jewish life to a revolt against the Diaspora and the chief object of that revolt was religion itself though some of the some of the rebels would have said that they were opposed only to its decadent exilic forms in Martin boobers words to the subjugated spirituality in the imposed tradition drained of its meaning like uber many of the cultural Zionists and later the Socialists too looked for inspiration to biblical Israel here was a culture of Kings warriors and prophets that they could hope to continue but the biblical heroes as they were described in Zionist literature and propaganda seemed to be the exact opposites of contemporary Jews and their Creed was very far from contemporary Judaism it nourished strong men and women whereas the religion of Exile in Zionist size produced political passivity and resignation a slave mentality that was incapable of resistance or self-help to turn to the Bible was to acknowledge or break a cultural chasm it is not in our power declared Israel Kagan a leading Orthodox rabbi as if an illustration of the Zionist thesis it is not in our power to repair the condition of our people because we are under the domination of our enemies statements like that were taken by Zionist writers to represent the lack of national self-respect and self-confidence of political initiative and unity produced by years of exile and religious resignation but Kagan would have said the domination was God's decree and that there were other sources of self-respect than political strength the gap between these views was very wide and it wasn't easy to find continuity sometimes the zionist critique was less doctrinal and more immediate as when writers mostly very young attacked the turning away from physical activity and from the natural world that marked exilic life indeed the anti-semitic stereotype of the pale stooped Jew is also a Zionist stereotype and Zionist writers had no difficulty identifying physical and mental weakness stoop backs and warped Minds those warped minds and the specifically intellectual qualities bred by centuries of subjection frequently provoked Zionist anger okata i'm railed against i'm quoting now the lack of unity and order the lack of common sense and social cohesion the narcissism that holds such terrible sway over the prominent members of the people the thrill of showing off and the arrogance the tendency always to be too clever this kind of diatribe has many counterparts in other nationalist and revolutionary movements i cannot resist the comparison possibly unfair to akka dom with Lenin's critique of russian intellectuals he charges them with Slaven leanness carelessness untied eNOS unpunctuality nervous haste the inclination to substitute discussion for action talk for work the inclination to undertake everything under the Sun without finishing anything the list of complaints is is different but the tone is very much the same and I don't think that these two men for all their differences would have had much difficulty agreeing on what they disliked in their contemporaries so Zionism was marked simultaneously by a deep commitment to the Jewish people and by an equally deep commitment to the transformation of the Jews these youngsters wrote aaron Eisenberg a moderate religious nationalism these youngsters are frantically opposed to our traditions which have been sanctified by the people and yet they claim that everything they are doing is intended to save the people and some of them even say that the people cannot be saved unless they the youngsters first destroy everything the people have built with their blood destroyed and saved saved but destroyed let me illustrate this the transformation these militants hoped for with a list of contrasting pairs of cultural values and attitudes which might be labeled from and to passivity activity fearfulness courage deference pride obedience rebellion weakness strength indoors outdoors peddlers and shopkeepers farmers and workers subordination of women gender equality dependence independence subjection citizenship isolation from the world engagement with the world fear and hatred of the Gentiles equality and friendship with them I can't deal with all these contrasts and perhaps I don't have to since the paired items form a coherent and more or less self-explanatory whole many Jewish intellectuals and professionals in the West believed that the transformation represented by the second term in each of the pairs required only emancipation civic equality in the lands of the Exile Jews would become British or French or German citizens and then lead normal lives they would be liberated as it were in place they would leave the ghetto but not the Diaspora and then they would be active proud strong and so on and if they weren't the reasons would be individual reasons as with their Gentile neighbors the cultural Zionists thought this belief and illusion but they also more importantly thought it was a typically exilic illusion another sign of the loss of self-respect emancipation was simply the latest version of subjection a new way to defer to the Gentiles typically it did not require a critique of religious belief it was perfectly compatible with the faith of Moses as this had been defined by the rabbis but it did require the surrender of any claim to national self-determination Alcott ha sa slavery in freedom is a bitter critique of Western jewelry which had sold its heritage in his view for meager and purely private advantage at the same time the clothes narrow vulnerable and frightened world of Orthodoxy in the east the most visible form of the heritage was no better it represented slavery in slavery Zionism aimed at an escape from both this required collective action cultural and political in character but assimilated Jews no longer acknowledged the collectivity and religious Jews would wait forever for God to act both these forms of exilic consciousness had to be negated Zionists success was the work of new Jews who embodied this negation there can't be any doubt about the newness though there were plenty of old Jews in and around the Zionist movement nor were all the new Jews heroic pioneers working the land as in Zionist legend nor were there all that many of them Zionism was not a mass movement it always had a certain elitist character which derives from the fact that the negation of an ancient culture is not a popular cause the vanguard of new Jews included political activists and even politicians also soldiers bureaucrats managers professionals intellectuals and farmers and workers what made them new was that they did not accept rabbinic Authority they were not deferential to their Gentile Turkish and British rulers and they refused to defer their hope for national independence Akkad Homme had a very precise picture of how these people would would work first they would transform themselves then they would create a spiritual centre in Palestine and working outward from the center they would slowly transform the general culture of exilic jewelry then slowly again they would create a political center and ultimately an independent state but this gradualist prospect was shattered by the urgencies of 20th century Jewish life in the event the vanguard created the state and won the wars that statehood required long before the cultural transformation was completed once the state was established its first task was the ingathering of the exiles first the surviving Jews of Central and Eastern Europe displaced persons desperate for a place and then the Jews of North Africa and Mesopotamia living under threat because of the eclipses of Empire and the rise of local nationalisms the ingathering was a great success hundreds of thousands of immigrants poured into the new state it's most dramatic effect however was to bring home the under gated culture of the Exile so what Zionism in the Diaspora had not accomplished the new zionist state set out to accomplish the absorption of immigrants was designed as a process of cultural transformation it represented the continuation of the earlier cultural war by other means ben-gurion description of what needed to be done written before the establishment of the state is instructive this is ben-gurion absorption means taking uprooted impoverished sterile Jewish masses living parasitically off of an alien economic body and dependent on others and introducing them to productive and creative life in planting them on the land integrating them into primary production agriculture and Industry and handicraft and making them economically independent and self-sufficient immigrant absorption was a form of state action the work of civil servants teachers social workers and army instructors as ben-gurion x'v herbs suggests the process was less persuasive than coercive it was marked by a kind of authoritarianism and it was this became clear only later on bitterly resented it was also successfully resisted privately by many of the immigrants and it is now publicly challenged by a revived and militant Judaism though important qualifications are necessary I can tell a similar story about Palestinian national liberation in this case the liberationist militants have not yet won their battle they are at this moment the protagonists of a failed but not a definitively failed political movement one day there will be a Palestinian state but the encounter of secular nationalism with a religious revival is already well begun and the surprise of the secularists at the strength of the rule forces is not much different in this case than in my other cases their inability to found a state no doubt fueled the religious revival but it doesn't explain it had they succeeded the secular nationalists would still have been challenged by an Islamic fierceness that they did not foresee the liberationists leaders in this case never went to school with their imperial opponents they did not study in England and they never attended Israeli universities but with the critical exception of Yasser Arafat many of the earliest leaders of the Palestinian movement because there were Christians and then because there were Marxists did look at their own people from a significant critical distance militants like George Habash and wadi haddad founders of the Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine studied at the American University in Beirut called themselves Marxist Leninist and were brutally critical of traditional Arab politics it would be hard to overestimate the importance of Christian Palestinians like these - in the early liberation movement and especially in its most radical and most radically secularists wing our fight is harder to figure out than the Marxist militants of the Popular Front but in many ways he fits the picture of the nationalist leader that I sketched in the first of these lectures born in Egypt to parents who left Palestine in 1927 well before the Nakba of 48 he came to lead a people whose formative experience he did not share as one of his biographers writes he had no childhood home in the lost homeland no plot of land which became the possession of someone else no close relatives who were transformed into destitute Fuji's for many years he worked as an engineer in Kuwait and it was there that Fatah was founded the name is an acronym but the word means conquering or victory and it is often used to describe the early years of Islamic expansion our thought according to all his biographers was a believing Muslim and by no means a Marxist the organization he founded however was secular and nationalist in character inspired more by the Algerian FLN and the writings of Franz fanon than by the Quran to the true believers of Hamas Arafat was a typical secularist committed to the establishment of a national state and not in Islamic state his successors are no different enemies therefore who must be replaced let me return for a moment to the general version of the story many successful national liberation movements produced without intending to an underground culture a secret traditionalism nourished by memory carried by the family sustained in religious conventicle Zanden lifecycle ceremonies the protagonists of this culture pose as citizens of the new state they attended schools they serve or some of them serve in its army vote in in its elections accept the benefits it provides without ever allowing themselves to be refashioned in its image they don't become the new men and women that ben-gurion and fennan celebrated they don't become modern secular liberal democratic citizens and their first allegiance isn't to the nation-state but to something more like the traditional pre-state community and after a time when national liberation has receded in memory the traditionalist staged a counter-revolution thus the rise of Islamic radicalism in Algeria and in Palestine and of Hindutva in India their resurgence is a great shock to the national liberation elites who had grown complacent about the victory of newness at the same time however the traditionalists are not really as close in spirit or creed to their ancestors as they'd like to think they may not be liberated but they are changed by the experience of liberation often in ways they themselves don't understand so the outcome of the counter-revolution is uncertain in any case it lies beyond my reach here in these lectures for the Indian Israeli and Algerian stories are still unfinished the return of the negated brings with it a militantly religious nationalism which has radically altered the politics of all three countries and of Palestine - but hasn't yet overwhelmed or defeated the liberationist project the return of the negated is a general phenomenon but it's also peculiar to each case so let me focus again on the Israeli peculiar well on the exact ace with its peculiarities when exilic jewelry comes home it brings with it a characteristic politics this may be concealed for a time behind a facade of conventional citizen like behavior but it is possible nonetheless to describe its basic features I have to note at this point that I'm not discussing here the arrival of the Soviet Jews in Israel who had been modernized and secularized by communists not by Zionists and who don't fit neatly into my schematic account the politics of religious especially of Ulker religious Jews in Israel follows from the experience of Exile and is obviously more closely continuous with that experience than Zionism is many of Israel's Jewish citizens do not really think of the state as their own they may be fierce nationalists but they don't have the sense that citizens are supposed to have of being responsible for the whole they don't recognize a good that is common to themselves and all other Israelis they retain a view of the state characteristic of a stateless people always Outsiders always vulnerable they are political opportunists seeking to seize whatever benefits the state provides and escape its burdens exactly as they did with better reason in Czarist Russia the fellowship of democratic citizens and the freewheeling debates of democratic politics are largely alien to them they participate in an older fellowship Zionism for them as I'm nan Rubinstein has written is not a return to the family of Nations but it's diametric opposite a new polarization between the Jews and the Gentiles of the earth the arab-israeli conflict gives this polarization a special force but the view is general all the others are hostile and threatening the whole world is on one side and we are on the other wrote an Orthodox rabbi in the 1970s in what is really an astonishing misrepresentation of the condition of his country other nasaan this view is always closed and always dangerous it includes the world of secular Jewish enlightenment as well as the world of the Gentiles but all this represents only one side of exilic political consciousness the side of deference fear and resentment the other side is represented is what I called millennialism in my first lecture the other side is represented among the Jews by the figure of the Messiah whose coming was in the long years of the exile indefinitely deferred the insistence that one must wait for the Messiah and the rabbinic ban on forcing the end obviously support the political culture of passivity on the other hand the abiding certainty that he will one day come the intermittent unforeseen inexplicable intensification of expectancy the appearance of false prophets and messianic pretenders all these suggests a deep dissatisfaction with that culture messianism is simultaneously a comforting fantasy and a great disruptive force secular Zion is exploited this force even claimed sometimes to embody it but in fact they naturalized that they came to they made messianism into hard work and redemption into a gradual process of acquisition and renewal another dunam another goat but once the mundane work was done and religious Jews beheld the state especially the state as it was in that ominously magical moment of 1967 triumphant over its enemies many of them decided that they that they did indeed live in messianic times or better on the very brink of messianic times national liberation had brought them this far but could go no further now the Messiah waited only for the zeal of the faithful to express itself in political life like the Zionist pioneers the faithful would settle the land but they would act in fulfillment of divine command not of secular ideology and they would live in accordance with divine law and then the glorious days would begin fundamentalist enthusiasm is the most visible and frightening version of the Jewish counter-revolution it enacts the old exilic understanding that redemption is the only alternative to exile but it is also at the same time a radically new politics it lays claim to state power it exalts military force both of which excellent off' ID with the other as many ultra-orthodox jews still do but messianism in modern israel as in the history of the exile is likely to have a short life it is infinitely susceptible to disappointment disillusion and new postponements and post 67 jewish messianism has already I think begun to fade the real challenge to Zionist liberation comes from a strange and as contemporary Israeli politics suggests only partially consummated merger of messianic militancy with the coming out and the rising assertiveness of the traditional culture since this was a culture born in statelessness its political enactment in an actual state is often strident confused and contradictory if protagonists are at once fearful of the non-jewish world and hostile to it anxious and aggressive they are opportunistically committed to the state ret reliant on its military strength eager to use its coercive power on their own behalf but they are quick to deny the legitimacy of the state's elected and even more its judicial representatives whenever they don't like official policies they are nationalists with a ghetto mentality parochial besieged and belligerent it's very hard to figure out who benefits from this kind of nationalism Marxist analysis isn't of much help in this case as I suggested yesterday it might be in the Indian case certainly Israeli capitalists do not benefit from this religious zealot Rhee the rabbi's benefit their authority is enhanced and right-wing populist politicians find new opportunities the post 67 settlers obviously benefit at least in the short run but they are the creation of gsella tree not its cause no one else's position is likely to be improved or strengthened can Jewish zealots and traditionalists exercise effective power in the modern world or sustain a modern economy or negotiate with Israel's neighbors or find a way to peace with the Palestinians can they govern justly in a state that includes large numbers of non-jews and larger numbers of non-believing Jews my own view is that these questions cannot be successfully answered from a position of traditionalist militancy ultimately the counter-revolution will fail though the militants may play significant roles in present and future governments a modern state with anti-modern ministers a formula for trouble how is such a thing possible given the success of national liberation in fact Zionist responses to the eruption of messianism and the return of traditionalism have been surprisingly weak the chief intellectual reason for the weakness there are also political reasons is the double failure of cultural negation on the one hand the old religious culture was not overcome on the other hand the new secular culture isn't thick or robust enough to sustain itself by itself trying to explain the return to pre emancipation days his phrase the literary and social critic our own Megan says simply every vacuum must fill up that isn't really fair since Zionists writers and activists did a great deal to fill the cultural space left by the negation of the Exile the new culture was partly a reflection of the history of the movement itself but it also reached back to the Bible and outward to 19th and 20th century liberationists I geologies Arthur Hertzberg has said of Zionism that it's ultimate values derived from the general European milieu but it nonetheless produced its own ideas and institutions heroes and holidays ceremonies and celebrations songs and dances all this was very powerful for a couple of generations it hasn't had much staying power beyond that however the social reproduction of secular Zionism has faltered badly in the last few decades and mega ads claim that there isn't anything there has acquired greater currency than it deserves but if a vacuum doesn't exist there is as I suggested yesterday a thinness in the cultural air and there may be a connection between that thinness and the radical negation with which Zionism began one important consequence of radical negation is the force of the secular religious dichotomy in Israel today secular describes the people for whom the Exile has indeed been negated religious those for whom it definitely hasn't been who sustained the old culture in the new state it seems that there are no middle terms no compromised versions of negation no liberalized versions of the old religion perhaps Zionist bibletump was intended as a kind of synthesis of the religion of the ancient Israelites though not of exilic Judaism with modern secularists ideology the connections forged through historical study archaeology exploration of the land secular adaptations of biblical holidays and much else but there was something artificial in all that given the actual history of the Jews the leap to the Bible garum Sholem argued in a 1970 interview is purely fictitious the Bible being a reality that does not exist today in any case the leap was only to the most politically useful biblical texts and it invited counter leaps to different texts there is a line in Shakespeare's Merchant of Venice about this sort of thing that resonates with recent Israeli experience the devil can cite scripture for his purpose of course the Bible is a Jewish text and a critical engagement with it could and sometimes did produce interesting arguments but I want to suggest an alternative to this Zionist search for a useful past I don't do this with any confidence that the alternative could have been realized in the history that I've just described but it might still have some relevance for the future what National Liberation required was a critical engagement with the post biblical Jewish tradition that is with Judaism itself Sholem argues that Zionism was constituted from its beginning by a dialectic of rebellion and continuity the rebellion takes the form of secular negation the continuity is embodied in traditional Judaism these terms are certainly contradictory but they haven't been brought into a dialectical relation that is a relation in which each influences the other and the two are transformed in some interactive way what sorts of moves from each of the two sides might make their interaction possible I can speak only from the side of secular rebellion and try to answer as it were one half of that question how might a critical engagement with the tradition strengthen liberationists culture in the fourth and last of these lectures I will lay out a tentative response to that question and I will also suggest that the question has close analogues in contemporary Indian debates about the future of Nehru Veon secularism but before that I need to deal with Marxist and post-colonial critics who deny that there is a paradox of national liberation who insists that the question at which I have just arrived is not the right question and who argued that the strengthening of Zionists culture or Nehru V and secularism is not a desirable goal I'll take up that line of criticism in my next lecture yes you

Channel: Yale University

Views: 26,583

Keywords: Michael Walzer, Yale University, The MacMillan Center, National Liberation

Id: axcQbPe8cYc

Length: 54min 13sec (3253 seconds)

Published: Wed Apr 10 2013