The shelter and seclusion provided by the national state cannot, of course, guarantee that it will be home to the creation of an original and worthwhile intellectual life within its boundaries, any more than the establishment of a university can guarantee it. Every institution depends on the particular men who comprise it, and if these choose to devote all their activities to mimicking the ideas of others, then no institutional structure will prevent such assimilation. But where there exists an intellectual leadership of even moderate creativity and daring, the barriers erected by language, territory, and polity assume their seclusionary role, creating the secure space in which different voices can be heard and can gain their first blush of respect, without immediately becoming the focus of withering opposition from the partisans of dominant contrary ideas. Under such circumstances, the national state becomes the ideal vessel for the development and propagation of an original intellectual climate. And if, as often happens, we find the writers and scholars of other national states jealous for the reputations of their own peoples, we may also find that the system of independent national states—with each nation devoted to the development of its own special way in life and thought—has become a great nursery for innovations and experiments, in which each people pursues its own ends, to the ultimate benefit of all.

In October 2002, exactly one hundred years will have passed since the Minsk Conference, at which Ahad Ha’am called for the establishment of an extensive and concentrated Jewish settlement in Palestine capable of serving as what he called a “spiritual center” for the Jews. In the intervening time, the work of generations has succeeded not only in making the Hebrew language one that is spoken with fluency by millions of Jews, but also in bringing it to a level of sophistication and beauty not seen in many centuries. And in this land, too, there have arisen universities and other institutions of higher learning and culture, as well as a greater number of yeshivot than the Jewish world has ever known—so that the potential for learning what the Jews have to say, to use again Rousseau’s phrase, has never been greater than it is in modern Israel.

The reality, of course, has been something of a surprise and a disappointment. The spirit of the German academy, in which the works of the Jewish mind were seen as having contributed little or nothing to man’s advancement, hovers over the universities of the Jewish state; and many a good mind has succumbed to this view of things. Nor do the great founders of our national intellectual life—Agnon and Bialik, Dinur, Scholem, and R. Kook, all of whom were immigrants from Europe—have much in common with the new generation of Israeli academics and authors, many of whom seem to believe that the nihilistic fads emanating from America and Germany constitute a definitive revelation as to how we must understand our world. A book published in Hebrew, as it turns out, may be as distant from making a contribution to the dream of a “home of refuge for the national spirit” as any in German or English.³⁰ And as might be expected when the best energies of so many of Israel’s men of letters are devoted to copying foreign fashion, the nations of the world, who can more easily have the originals, tend to dismiss the entire gallery of them without so much as a footnote.

Unfortunate though the failings of many among the present generation of Israeli writers and scholars may be, these cannot be considered decisive. The establishment of the Jewish state is an enterprise of many generations, and it should always be judged from this perspective. On such a scale, perhaps only the re-establishment of the Hebrew language as a living medium can be judged to be of enduring significance. True, this is in an important sense no more than the achievement of a formal requirement of an independent national life, as is the establishment of a Jewish political sovereignty. After all, Jewish sovereignty will not rescue persecuted Jews in other lands if we have no public men devoted to the principle of Jewish guardianship; and by the same token, our intellectual heritage will remain a closed book to Jew and gentile alike as long as we do not have an intellectual leadership guided by a similar devotion. But this is already a matter of character, the third aspect of Israel’s purpose, which will be the subject of the third and final section of this essay. For our purposes here, suffice it to say that an apparently formal achievement on the scale of the revival of the language of the Bible is not to be underestimated in terms of the possibilities it opens up for us as a historic nation. 

Yoram Hazony is President of the Shalem Center in Jerusalem, and author of The Jewish State: The Struggle for Israel’s Soul (Basic Books and The New Republic, 2000). The third and final part of this essay will appear in the coming issue of AZURE.

Notes

1. “On the National State, Part 1: Empire and Anarchy,” AZURE 12 (Winter 2002), pp. 27-70.

2. Charles de Secondat Montesquieu, The Spirit of the Laws, ed. and trans. Anne M. Cohler, et al. (Cambridge: Cambridge, 1989), p. 156.

3. Theodor Herzl, Der Judenstaat (Vienna: M. Breitenstein, 1896), p. 94. [German]

4. Burke’s speech appears in William Cobbett, The Parliamentary History of England from the Earliest Period to the Year 1803 (London: T.C. Hansard, 1806), pp. 223-224.

5. See Leonard Stein, The Balfour Declaration (London: Mitchell, 1961),
p. 7.

6. Theodor Herzl, The Complete Diaries of Theodor Herzl, ed. Raphael Patai, trans. Harry Zohn (New York: Herzl Press, 1960), p. 10.

7. Theodor Herzl, Complete Diaries, pp. 131-132.

8. Speech by Ben-Gurion before a special session of the National Assembly, November 30, 1942. Central Zionist Archives, J/1366. Cf. Herzl, who argued that the one thing that was needed was “Jews who carry out Jewish policies, and not cabinet policies on orders from someone else.” Theodor Herzl, “Judaism,” in Theodor Herzl, Zionist Writings: Essays and Addresses, trans. Harry Zohn (New York: Herzl Press, 1973), vol. 1, p. 55.

9. Theodor Herzl, The Jewish State, trans. Harry Zohn (New York: Herzl Press, 1970), pp. 107-108. The possibility that the national state would wither away and would be replaced by a world of small, independent communities was also discussed by the Zionists. As Max Nordau wrote, “I would prefer to believe that the organic evolution of human beings will bring them someday to a point where… the molecular motion of the brain will be imparted directly to other brains by a kind of radiation or continuous transmission. I ascribe the same degree of probability to this imaginary onward evolution from the national state into the independent community.” Quoted in Ben Zion Netanyahu’s introduction to Max Nordau, To His People: A Summons and a Challenge (New York: Scopus, 1941), pp. 37-38.

10. Hermann Cohen, “Germanism and Judaism,” in Hermann Cohen, Juedische Schriften (Berlin: Schwetschke, 1924). [German] On Cohen’s relationship with the established German-Jewish leadership, see: Jehuda Reinharz, Fatherland or Promised Land: The Dilemma of the German Jew, 1893-1914 (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan, 1975), p. 84; D. Engel, “Relations Between Liberals and Zionists in Germany During World War I,” Zion 27:4 (September 1982), p. 447 [Hebrew]; Jehuda Medler, “Hermann Cohen’s Philosophy of Judaism,” doctoral dissertation (Ann Arbor: University Microfilms, 1968), p. 488.

11. See Francis Fukuyama, The End of History and the Last Man (New York: Free Press, 1992); and Shimon Peres, The New Middle East (New York: Henry Holt, 1993). Today these works are even more painful to read than they were a decade ago.

12. Yossi Beilin, The Death of the American Uncle (Tel Aviv: Yedi’ot Aharonot, 1999), p. 49 [Hebrew]; Moshe Zimmermann, “Anti-Semitic Imports from Europe,” Ha’aretz, October 26, 2000.

13. Tosefta Shabbat 15:17; Yoma 82a.

14. My use of the term “historic nation” is not intended to imply an acceptance of any of the specific doctrines that have been appended to it and to other terms that might be thought to be similar. In particular, I have no sympathy with the idea of an ur-nation, or “primary nation,” as this term was used by Herder and others. I mean only to refer to peoples who have for many generations been aware of a particular calling or purpose which describes and animates their place within history.

15. Exodus 20:12.

16. Such a cursory mentioning of ideas cannot ever be satisfactory, much less complete in any sense. I have not, for example, included many of the most important Jewish ideas (e.g., the one God; or the social order based principally on respect for marriage and property) out of fear that these will, in this context, appear trite. In addition, it is obvious that every way of life will be of interest only relative to what is accepted among surrounding peoples, so that every such sketch must change from one generation to the next.

For a more significant discussion of this general topic, see David Novak, Natural Law in Judaism (Cambridge: Cambridge, 1998); Ofir Haivry, “The Way of the World,” Azure 5 (Autumn 1998). On the place of law in Jewish moral thought, see David Hazony, “Eliezer Berkovits and the Revival of Jewish Moral Thought,” Azure 11 (Summer 2001); on the individual and the state, see Yoram Hazony, “The Jewish Origins of the Western Disobedience Tradition,” Azure 4 (Summer 1998); on the Sabbath, see Yosef Yitzhak Lifshitz, “Secret of the Sabbath,” Azure 10 (Winter 2001). It is also possible to describe a Jewish literary esthetic with an evident affinity for the epistemology and morality described here. See Assaf Inbari, “Towards a Hebrew Literature,” Azure 9 (Spring 2000).

The expression “a proposal and a challenge to mankind” is borrowed, roughly, from Pierre Manent, “Democracy Without Nations?” in Daniel J. Mahoney and Paul Senton, eds., Modern Liberty and Its Discontents (New York: Rowman and Littlefield, 1998), p. 195.

17. See Fania Oz-Salzberger, “The Jewish Roots of Western Freedom,” in this issue of Azure, pp. 88-132.

18. Jean-Jacques Rousseau, On the Social Contract, ed. Roger D. Masters, trans. Judith R. Masters (New York: St. Martin’s, 1978), pp. 125-126. Nonetheless, this controversy with the Jews did not prevent him from recognizing, for instance, in his essay on The Government of Poland, that his own conception of the proper founding of the nation was based to no small degree on the establishment of the Jewish polity as depicted in the Hebrew Bible. Jean-Jacques Rousseau, The Government of Poland (New York: Bobbs Merrill, 1972), pp. 5-6, 8.

19. Moses Hess, The Revival of Israel: Rome and Jerusalem, trans. Meyer Waxman (Lincoln: University of Nebraska, 1995).

20. Jean-Jacques Rousseau, Emile, trans. Allan Bloom (New York: Basic Books, 1979), pp. 303-304.

21. Rousseau, Emile, p. 304.

22. It is for this reason that the institution of tenure has done nothing to secure intellectual freedom at the universities. Proponents of this arrangement claim that by removing permanently the threat of dismissal, they permit academics to write and teach according to their true convictions. But this argument is predicated on the false premise that a learned professor will generally value his daily bread more than the comradeship and esteem of his fellows.

23. Ahad Ha’am, “The Spiritual Revival,” in Selected Essays of Ahad Ha’am, ed. and trans. Leon Simon (Philadelphia: Jewish Publication Society, 1962), pp. 265, 286-287.

24. I am careful here to speak of seclusion rather than exclusion, whose meaning is the precise opposite of my intention. By seclusion, I mean the purposive gathering of like-minded people to advance a common aim, without any intention of excluding others. In general, I think it would be correct to say that exclusive institutions do not welcome outsiders, whereas seclusive institutions do welcome outsiders who are not opposed to the aims of the institution.

25. Eruvin 13b.

26. For over a century, those who have attempted to incite the Jews to reach for such a goal have had to contend with those who say they wish to see just such a flourishing of Jewish life in Germany, or more recently, in America. I believe that this is an impossibility, unless American Jewry concludes that it is willing to sacrifice its social status and mobility for seclusionary institutions such as only the Orthodox have generally maintained until now. It is difficult to imagine, for example, a Jewish university in the United States that would be voluntarily attended by most of the country’s best Jewish students. At this point, such a vision seems fantastic, and this fact is of the first consequence. For so long as Harvard and Yale continue to draw the most gifted students—including many of the Orthodox—it is futile to speak of a Jewish renaissance that is not predicated upon and derivative of such a cultural restoration in Israel. Without seclusion, in other words, American Jewry is doomed to find itself operating to a greater or lesser extent within the same framework described by Ahad Ha’am a century ago: The most original minds leave aside the concerns of Jewish civilization and devote their best efforts to the more general advancement of things American, while Jewish literature and ideas remain largely a barren field.

27. Compare this with Mill’s comment that in a multinational regime, “One section does not know what opinions, or what instigations, are circulating in another,” due to differences in language. John Stuart Mill, “On Representative Government,” in H.B. Acton, ed., Utilitarianism, On Liberty, and Considerations on Representative Government (London: Everyman, 1984), pp. 392-394.

28. These dividing effects of geography, language, and polity are well known to those accustomed to reflecting on intellectual trends, which are for this reason consistently and usefully represented by geographic designations—such as the FrankfurtSchool, the AustrianSchool, English empiricism, the Scottish Enlightenment, German idealism, and so on. This is not just convention, but a reflection of the fact that individuals familiar with the subject matter treated by these styles of thought can and do feel the changes of intellectual climate from the moment they descend from the train to pay a visit to their colleagues.

29. Ahad Ha’am, “The Spiritual Revival,” Hashiloah 10:60 (December 1902), pp. 481-482. [Hebrew] Cf. Ahad Ha’am, “The Spiritual Revival,” pp. 287-289.

30. On the change in the character of the Hebrew language itself in recent years, see Joseph Dan, “On Post-Zionism, Modern Hebrew, and False Messianism,” Ha’aretz, March 25, 1994.