‘The Jewish State’ at 100

By Yoram Hazony

Does anyone remember the ideas that founded the Jewish state?

We do not yet know what the “final settlement” of which the politicians speak will bring, nor whether we shall ever know what lies buried in that tel. But we do know this—as the old Zionist recruiting poster had it: Our past is where our future is. By building up these religious centers, making them deeper and stronger, allowing the shoots they send out into our culture and our consciousness to grow—in this way we build the true power of the Jewish state. And if, on the other hand, we allow these places to disappear from our horizon, we will make of the state a cripple in the only area where it was just now beginning to grow strong.

The cultural center. Finally, there is the desire of the Jew to participate in the eternal and the universal—to learn truth and beauty as it can be apprehended by every mind, and to make a contribution to expounding this truth before the world. It is to draw that part of the soul which seeks such heights that Herzl foresaw the need to establish Israel as a center of universities and opera houses. And here, too, the achievements of the Jewish state have been marginal. This subject is particularly sensitive because there are so many for whom the revival of the Hebrew language—the existence of the Hebrew University, Hebrew-language literature, theater and film—is in itself the decisive cultural achievement,²⁹ so much so that to describe Jewish national culture in Israel as a failure is for many a blasphemy. But both the partisans and the skeptics of Zionism warned sternly at the beginning of this century against the error of mistaking the resurrection of Hebrew for the establishment of a significant cultural center: Franz Rosenzweig, for example, argued that those who insisted on thrilling with excitement over every menu published in Hebrew would make it impossible to evaluate the merit of genuine Hebrew culture, and sarcastically suggested that there would be no choice but to discount in advance three-quarters of the acclaim that would be received by such works.³⁰ Herzl, too, although a supporter of the Hebrew revival, nonetheless feared that it would turn the Jewish state into a shallow “linguistic ghetto”³¹ without real cultural achievements to speak of. Even Ahad Ha’am, the great advocate of Israel as a cultural center, railed against the kind of Hebrew culture he saw developing, “almost all translation or imitation, and badly done at that: The translation being too far from the original, and the imitation too close to it.”³²

And yet who can seriously dispute that all these fears have come to pass? In this there is no point in engaging in fruitless disputations with “experts” who will point to this or that work of scholarship or art deemed exceptional. Certainly there have been achievements, but the exceptions do not make the Jewish state a formidable center of Jewish national culture, nor of any other culture for that matter. This is not a matter of taste, but of discernible fact, which can be determined by asking the question that Herzl would have asked: Does the cultural life of the Jewish state—its academia, art, science, literature, media, philosophy and law—does this culture attract the Jews of the world, inspiring and teaching them, drawing them nearer and in the end bringing them to live in the Jewish state? And the non-Jews—does the culture of Israel bring them to admire the achievements of the Jewish state as Germany and France were admired and imitated in years past, as America is admired and imitated today? The answer is self-evident. There is no evidence in support of such fantasies: On the contrary, the absence of the magnetic strength for which Herzl had hoped is palpable in virtually every field of intellectual and cultural endeavor. Israel is not attractive to Jews whose personal goals are primarily intellectual or cultural, nor do they make their way to the Jewish state to make it their homeland. On the contrary, such Jews leave Israel for Los Angeles or New York, Paris or London—as they are urged to do by a popular song played frequently on government radio, which reminds them: “In London there are more movies/In London there’s good music/In London there’s excellent television/In London people are more polite.../ If you have to die like a dog/At least the television should be television.”³³

Indeed, the culture of the Jewish state is not attractive, but repulsive. From its historians obsessed with exposing the misdemeanors and crimes of the founders; to its artists with their ghastly assaults on traditional Jews and the defense forces; to the novelists fixated on the Arab claim to the land and the supposed immorality of the settlement movement; to a court system bent on duplicating Canadian legal institutions; to screenwriters and dramatists issuing one savage attack after another against the country’s heroes, from Hannah Senesh to Yoni Netanyahu; to “philosophers” whose ruminations inevitably hit upon the fact that Zionism is a medusa, or that Judaism is a threat to the state, or that the defense forces are engaged in Nazism—the entire enterprise is so poisoned that it has no modes of operation other than “myth-smashing” and the aping of the foreigner. Israeli “culture” is a sewer of vandalism and self-loathing which is of no interest and attracts no one because it has nothing to offer other than the denigration of the past. It is repulsive because it is Post-Zionist.

What has so far escaped Israel’s culture-makers is the fact that a culture is powerful and attractive only to the degree that it has a positive ideal to offer; that true culture consists of creating myths, not destroying them. And it is only such a positive ideal, once it has proved itself capable of infusing an entire people with direction and meaning, which can then go on to inspire others and eventually become universal.³⁴ But what can our present-day Jewish nationalists, who have been so ready to deprecate Israel’s professorate and artists for their sickliness and failure—what can they offer in the way of such a constructive ideal to inspire the nation, much less universal truths? In the yeshivas it is a commonplace that all that is of grandeur, splendor and value is to be found in the Jewish tradition—and this may be so. But since hardly anyone ever ventures out from these self-absorbed worlds to attempt to describe his ideas in a way that Jews or gentiles might understand him, the question is largely moot. The culture of the yeshivas does not produce national history, books of philosophy, constitutional law, art, literature or anything else that can be understood by anyone other than a yeshiva student. Other than one fascinating adaptation of the last few years—yeshivas that have begun training cadets for the military’s elite combat units—the yeshiva nationalists are simply absent from the national culture.

As for a national culture beyond the yeshivas, one could point to a journal or two, a novelist or poet here and perhaps another there, and continue on in this way. But this is an absurdity, an exercise in politeness. The truth is that there is no Jewish national culture. More than a century after Ahad Ha’am argued for the resurrection of the national spirit in the land of Israel, the national culture of the Jewish state remains an empty phrase, and the cultural center—a wasteland.

VII

No, the Jewish state is not powerful; it is perilously weak. Neither the materialism of Labor Zionism nor that of its religious-nationalist heirs was able to lay the foundations for a solid Jewish national idea among the Jews. The idea of the Jewish state does not move men of business, nor does it move men of culture; for a few years it moved men of religion, but this too is now in doubt. As a motivating idea, the Jewish state is emaciated and grows fainter with each passing year.

“No man is strong or wealthy enough to move a people,” Herzl wrote. “Only an idea can do that.” In The Jewish State, he tried to provide the Jews with such a motivating idea as best he was able, but they paid it little heed, devoting themselves instead to the “practical” work of building houses.³⁵ Even now, with the confusion and lack of purpose deepening from day to day for want of an idea, and with the questions accumulating in drifts and mounds until they threaten to reach the sky—Of what value is the Jewish nation today? What is its mission? What should be the nature of its institutions? What has it to contribute to mankind? What is to be gained by joining in its struggle? Why should one sacrifice on its behalf? Why should the Jewish state exist at all?—the Zionists continue to plod along with their masonry, oblivious, and it is doubtful whether they have produced even a single pamphlet since the founding of the state to try to provide answers.

“What is the alternative?” we have heard again and again, for years now—“the alternative to a Post-Zionist Israel?”

The intellectual and economic freedom of the individual—which today does not exist; a historic and religious rootedness in our ancient land—which today does not exist; and a positive Jewish national culture capable of enlightening our lives and serving as a beacon to mankind—which today does not exist. This is a philosophical program, a religious program, a political program; it is a program to create a home which will attract the Jews of the world to the Jewish state, in spirit and in body, and the gentiles as well. This is Jewish nationalism, the teaching of The Jewish State,one hundred years old this year.

Is this not the alternative which the Jewish people seeks?

Dr. Yoram Hazony is Executive Director of The Shalem Center in Jerusalem.

Notes

1. Yeshayahu Friedman, “Anti-Semitism on Behalf of Zionism,” Ha’aretz, February 16, 1996.

2. Ma’ariv, February 12 and February 19, 1996.

3. Ha’aretz, March 26, 1996. An accompanying piece was more positive; it sought to demonstrate that Herzl was not, as is commonly believed, entirely ignorant of Hebrew.

4. Tom Segev, “The First Post-Zionist,” Ha’aretz, April 3, 1996, p. B1.

5. The passage quoted is referring to the spirit of Herzl’s Oldnewland, but Elbaum-Dror makes it clear throughout the interview that she considers Oldnewland to be where Herzl expresses his actual opinions and “reveals himself in his true character.” “Herzl? Post-Zionist?” Kol Ha’ir, March 22, 1996.

6. Ma’ariv Weekend, November 29, 1996.

7. Theodor Herzl, The Jewish State,trans.Harry Zohn (New York: Herzl Press, 1970), p. 31.

8. Herzl, The Jewish State, p. 105.

9. Herzl, The Jewish State, pp. 48-49.

10. Herzl, The Jewish State, p. 50.

11. Herzl, The Jewish State, p. 105.

12. Herzl, The Jewish State, p. 61.

13. Herzl, The Jewish State, pp. 38-39.

14. Herzl, The Jewish State, pp. 71, 81.

15. Herzl, The Jewish State, p. 59.

16. Herzl used as examples Mecca in the Moslem world, and Lourdes and Trier among the Catholics. Herzl, The Jewish State, p. 88.

17. Jacques Kornberg, Herzl: From Assimilation to Zionism (Indianapolis: Indiana University Press, 1993), p. 178. The word “culture” does not appear in this context in The Jewish State, and the only example Herzl provides of the centers of “entertainment” he has in mind is a horse-racing track—which he describes as “a humorous example,” p. 85. In practice, Herzl’s political strategy was from the outset designed to build a coalition with businessmen and rabbis, and while he cannot have been accused of neglecting the recruitment of cultural figures, it is obvious that culture was in all respects a distant third in importance to him as a political factor after business and religion. It is interesting to note that Herzl was himself a playwright, and literary editor for one of the most prestigious newspapers in Europe, so that this undervaluing of the political importance of culture reflected his assessment of the relative relevance of his own profession.

18. Herzl, The Jewish State, p. 88. The entire section entitled “The Phenomenon of the Multitude” (pp. 84-88) is intended to deny the socialist tenets that vast financial handouts can induce the Jewish masses to move to Israel and stay there.

19. “For Europe we could constitute part of a wall of defense against Asia; we would serve as an outpost of civilization against barbarism.” Herzl, The Jewish State, p. 52.

20. Herzl, The Jewish State, p. 88.

21. Shabtai Teveth, Ben-Gurion: The Burning Ground, 1886-1948 (Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1987), p. 389. Compare Ben-Gurion’s views of these same “parasites” to Herzl’s, as explicated in a letter to one of the early proponents of farming settlements and “practical” Zionism: “[A]ll those engineers, architects, technicians, chemists, physicians, lawyers who emerged from the ghetto in the last thirty years…. All my love goes out to them. I want to see their breed multiply, unlike you who want to reduce it, because I see in them the inherent future strength of the Jews. They are, in other words, the likes of myself.” Letter to Baron Maurice de Hirsch, June 3, 1985, in Herzl, The Complete Diaries of Theodor Herzl, Harry Zohn, trans., Raphael Patai, ed. (New York: Thomas Yoseloff, 1960).

22. David Ben-Gurion, Rebirth and Destiny of Israel, trans. Mordekhai Nurock (New York: Philosophical Library, 1954), p. 426.

23. Nurit Gretz, Amos Oz: A Monograph (Tel Aviv: Workers Library, 1981), p. 28.

24. Ha’aretz, August 13, 1995.

25. See Yoram Hazony, “The End of Zionism?” in Azure 1 (Summer 1996), pp. 74-88.

26. Leon Wieseltier, “Isreality” in The New Republic, November 27, 1995, p. 12.

27. Fraiser Institute 1995 ratings, cited in Yediot Aharonot, January 16, 1996.

28. See, for example, Eliezer Schweid, “On the Substance and Background of Post-Zionism,” Gesher 131 (Summer 1995), p. 22; Ya’akov Hisdai, “The Global Village vs. the National Home,” Ma’ariv, October 3, 1995, p. 36; Moshe Shamir, “Is Hebrew Literature Still Zionist?” in Nativ 1/1989, p. 42.

29. For an elaboration of this position, see interview with Gershon Shaked, “The Empty Wagon Returns Fire” in Yerushalayim,January 19, 1996, p. 49.

30. Ya’akov Fleischmann, “Franz Rosenzweig as a Critic of Zionism,” Conservative Judaism, Fall 1967, p. 65.

31. Herzl, Complete Diaries, February 23, 1896, vol. 1, p. 306.

32. Ahad Ha’am, “The Spiritual Revival,” in Leon Simon, trans., Selected Essays of Ahad Ha’am (Philadelphia: Jewish Publication Society, 1912), p. 286.

33. Hava Alberstein, “London,” from the album London, 1989.

34. Herzl understood this, and one of his first essays on Jewish nationalism, published in November 1896, argued that it was just such a Jewish-national ideal that had formed the basis for the “spiritual and intellectual environment in which so many generations before us survived,” and that had provided “great strength, an inner unity which we have lost.” A return to such an ideal, he concluded, was a necessary requirement not only for the continued survival of the Jewish nation, but also for the nation’s ability to make a contribution to humanity: “A generation which has grown apart from Judaism does not have this [inner] unity; it can neither rely upon our past nor look to our future. That is why we shall once more retreat into Judaism and never again permit ourselves to be thrown out of this fortress…. First let us make this avowal and declare that we are Jews; only then will we take part in the troubles of others…. We, too, want to work for the improvement of conditions in the world, but we want to do it as Jews, not as persons of undefined identity…. Once we, too, have an ideal[,] like all the other nations, people will learn to respect us…. We shall thereby regain our lost inner wholeness and along with it a little character—our own character, not a Marrano-like, borrowed, untruthful character, but our own. And only then shall we vie with all other righteous people in justice, charity, and high-mindedness, only then shall we be active on all fields of honor and try to advance in the arts and sciences…. This is how I understand Judaism.” Herzl, “Judaism,” in Zionist Writings: Essays and Addresses, trans. Harry Zohn (New York: Herzl Press, 1973), vol. 1, pp. 57-58. First published November 13, 1896.

35. The most recent expression of such exaggerated confidence in the redemptive capacity of the material is Ofir Haivry’s essay, “Act and Comprehend,” in Azure 1 (Summer 1996), pp. 5-42.

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