Still, the loss of sovereignty, combined with the blows dealt by the crushing of the Great Revolt against the Romans (first century C.E.) and of the Bar Kochba Revolt (second century C.E.), undermined the political confidence of the Jewish people. The sense of being cut off from divine protection (the “exile of the Shechina”) made the Jew a stranger in a strange world, a homeless child abandoned to the vagaries of the nations, even when in his own land. In exilic consciousness, the Jew found a new home within the text: “Since the destruction of the Temple, the Holy One has nothing in his world but the four cubits of halacha.”²¹ This found expression in, among other things, a downgrading of the status of the Bible—the political, historical text in which a direct connection with the land is assumed—in favor of halachic literature, which is ahistorical in both form and content. Concurrently, the collective memory of the physical, concrete experience of the land of Israel gradually faded, replaced by longings more metaphysical in nature. In contrast to its original status as a plot of earth, the land of Israel grew metaphorical wings, was treated increasingly as the “palace of the king,”²² a sublime, metaphysical entity. Thus, when Zionism burst on the scene a century ago, it found the national consciousness of the Jews to be in a state of chronic abstraction, greatly distanced from the enterprise of national renewal.

Yet alongside the religious consciousness, which had largely abandoned the practical, political side of the connection to the land while continuing to adhere to it on an ideal, spiritual, ahistorical plane, another view developed in the exile of the modern era, one which made a complete break from the biblical connectedness to the land. It was expressed in the writings of a number of educated Jewish thinkers who were familiar with Western culture yet maintained ties to Jewish thought, while rejecting its national-worldly side. By virtue of their exposure to European history and philosophy, these thinkers were well aware of the nature of Western nationalism, and the myths that sustained it. They developed a theory that depicted the state of exile as no less than the essence of Jewish uniqueness; in so doing, they made explicit a view which in more traditional circles was at most only hinted at: That a return by the Jewish nation to the Holy Land—what in rabbinical literature was known as “storming the ramparts”—was not only undesirable from a political point of view, but also alien to the spirit of post-biblical Judaism.

The most important proponent of this position was Franz Rosenzweig, the Jewish-German philosopher and theologian, who was among the harshest critics of Zionism. Rosenzweig held that the exile of the Jewish people from its land was not a curse but a blessing, one which placed the Jews above other nations. In his analysis of the national consciousness, Rosenzweig points to the central role of autochthony:

But Rosenzweig grasped the rationale behind the autochthonous argument as a sign of weakness rather than strength, as reflecting a primitive consciousness. He explains that the national identity is usually held together by two factors—the nation’s common origin and its possession of the land:

The Jewish people, in contrast, is the one nation on earth for whom blood ties are sufficient, the one nation which does not require earthly rootedness:

Rosenzweig, then, is rather at home with exile. Contrary to the Jewish tradition, which sees it as a punishment, he considers exile to be a matter of choice, of willing relinquishment. For Rosenzweig, the earth is “dead,” and the devotion which the nations of the world exhibit towards it is a gratuitous risk of life. The abnormal life in exile, shorn of land and state, is the mission of the people of Israel, a people that belongs not to history but to eternity. Retaking the land would constitute a betrayal of this mission. Rosenzweig asserts that for the Jews the land of Israel should always remain out of reach, an object of longing only, for this people “never loses the untrammelled freedom of a wanderer who is more faithful a knight to his country when he roams abroad, craving adventure and yearning for the land he has left behind, than when he lives in that land. In the most profound sense possible, this people has a land of its own only in that it has a land it yearns for—a holy land.”²⁶ 

Rosenzweig’s justification of exile, then, turns the biblical negation of autochthony on its head. Whereas in the Bible this negation serves to vindicate the conquest of the land, for Rosenzweig it undermines any active connection with the land, and provides further evidence that the spiritual and ethical mission of the Jews lies in exile. Rosenzweig’s position simply dismisses the plain meaning of the Bible, and the yearning expressed there to settle in the promised land. Similar arguments can be found among other non-Zionist intellectual Jews, such as Hannah Arendt, Edmond Jabיs and George Steiner. ²⁷ 

 

In Zionism we find, for the first time in Jewish history, an attempt to adopt the autochthonous myth, by imitating “organic” European nationalism. The first Zionists, as well as the generations that followed, fashioned the new Jewish nationalism according to the political models they had encountered elsewhere, whether in the form of socialist revolution or bourgeois liberalism. Under these circumstances, the borrowing of the autochthonous motif from nineteenth-century European nationalism was a predictable step. It served as a founding element of the new political consciousness, bearing only a pale resemblance to the “old” national Jewish experience. As David Ben-Gurion put it: “The Zionist conception was revolutionary to the core. It was a revolt against a centuries-long tradition, a tradition of exilic life in practice and infertile longings, lacking the will for redemption. In place of barren, pallid longings came a will for realization; in place of a detached exilic life—the effort to build and create on the soil of the motherland.”²⁸ 

The autochthonous principle found its place in Zionist thought and rapidly put down roots in the new national experience, not merely because it had been a fundamental element in the nationalisms that had influenced the fathers of Zionism, but also because it furthered two basic Zionist objectives. The first, which was the essential goal during the early stages of the new settlement, was the grand existential-spiritual mission—the ontological project—of Zionism: The renewal of the lost connection between the Jew and earthly reality, nature and land, of which the autochthonous (or, more precisely, near-autochthonous) consciousness was a significant element. The second objective, already present at the outset of Zionism but becoming all the more important with the passage of time, was the political and educational campaign to distinguish Zionism from colonialism. This issue did not particularly trouble the early immigrants, who were mostly indifferent to the political implications of the Arab presence in the land of Israel.²⁹ In the eyes of these socialist pioneers, their own right to the land was based primarily on the legitimacy conferred by their labors, which redeemed the land from abandonment and desolation. Only after the Arab problem ignited in the 1920s did the historical claim to the land gather strength, developing an autochthonous character as a counterweight to the territorial claims of “indigenous” Arabs.³⁰