Zionism: the success of a national project

Between 1881 and 1914, two million Jews left Eastern Europe to reach the United States. During the same period, around 60,000 Jews settled in a then-Ottoman Palestine. Many of them, indeed, could not bear the difficult living conditions that prevailed in that corner of the Orient and returned whence they had come. Yet a few thousand of them — in particular those who established the first collective villages in 1909–1910 — gradually laid the foundations of a political project that was to revolutionize Jewish existence: Zionism. How had these young men and women come to abandon their families in Europe in order to engage in thankless agricultural labors, even though their practical knowledge was, to say the least, limited? Why did tens of thousands of sympathizers share this utopia of a Jewish country, refounded through labor?

To understand the ins and outs of political commitments is an exceedingly complex task. Nonetheless, without claiming, within the framework of this contribution, to exhaust the question, we should like to sketch a few avenues for better grasping the internal logic that drove Jews to mobilize around the Zionist cause¹.

Nationalisms and the crisis of tradition

In a first approach, it is fitting to situate Zionism within the more general context of the emergence of Jewish nationalisms in the years 1890–1900. If Bundism, Dubnow-style diasporism, and Zionism diverged on the concrete modalities of reorganizing the Jewish communities in the face of modernity, these different currents converged around the necessity of redefining the Jewish people on a national basis in a period of upheaval of the religious tradition. The crisis of religious authority, in the wake of the Enlightenment movement, was particularly formidable for a theocentric Jewish society, and three great responses emerged: those of the traditionalists, the assimilationists, and the reformists².

The first strove to preserve jealously the traditional religious heritage and sought to make of the Torah a rampart against a modernity perceived as threatening. “All that is new is forbidden by the Torah,” thus proclaimed in definitive fashion the head of Hungarian orthodoxy, the Hatam Sofer (1762–1839). Inversely, the second held that science, closely associated with the idea of progress, had definitively invalidated any religious and particularist vision of the world: men belong to one same universal civilization, and the world must be their horizon. This cosmopolitanism took essentially two forms, particularly prized in the Jewish world: socio-political integration and acculturation within the framework of liberal democratic societies — identification with an egalitarian society that would be born of the socialist revolution. Finally, the reformists sought to adjust to modernity while wishing to preserve the collective specificity of the Jews. This tendency took on two faces. The first was that of religious reformism, which sought to wed religion and reason. This is the era when, under the guidance of Abraham Geiger, most of the Jewish communities of Germany introduced the organ into the synagogues, German into the prayers and sermons, and profoundly modified religious instruction. The second was that of the political reformism defended by the Jewish nationalists (Bundists, autonomists, Zionists…), for whom the Jewish group had imperatively to be refounded on a secularized national basis if it wished to endure.

This national objective was subjected to the crossfire of the traditionalists, who absolutely rejected any redefinition of Jewish existence outside the strictest orthodoxy³, as of the assimilationists — “bourgeois” as well as socialist — who reduced the Jew to the status of an emancipated citizen of the modern State or to that of a worker, a member of the international of the oppressed. As for the religious reformists, who held the Jew to be the faithful adherent of a religious confession with a vocation to disseminate the humanist message of Judaism throughout the world, they were hardly responsive to the invocation of a Jewish national particularism.

In these three circles, each of which gathered millions of individuals in the interwar period, Zionism, with its message of national restoration in Palestine, awoke but little echo. A minority of traditionalists (the precursors of the National Religious Party in Israel) did indeed attempt to legitimize Zionism as a religious enterprise. Likewise, certain moderate reformists⁴, for whom the fundamental religious rules were the manifestation of the creative vitality of the Jewish people, were not insensitive to the Zionist valorization of the Jews as a historical community. Heinrich Graetz, author of the monumental Histoire des Juifs (History of the Jews) and favorable to this moderate reformism, manifested moreover a great receptivity toward the solitary approach of a Moses Hess, author of the founding text Rom und Jerusalem (Rome and Jerusalem, 1862).

Finally, certain assimilated Jews, shaken by the rise of antisemitism, abandoned their emancipatory illusions and became fervent advocates of the Zionist cause. These disillusioned figures, of whom Theodor Herzl remains the archetype, were numerous in the tsarist Empire after the pogroms of the 1880s, which definitively ruined all hope of liberalization and, therefore, of the integration of the Jews.

Yet this radical aggiornamento that Zionism represented would have remained a dead letter had it not been able to lean on the Jewish masses of Eastern Europe.

A growing audience

Evidently, the Jewish world did not convert to Zionism as one man — Zionism’s success varied greatly from country to country. Its influence was restricted both in the ultra-orthodox bastions (such as Romanian Transylvania) and in the regions where the processes of assimilation to the host society were already well under way (Hungary, Bohemia-Moravia). On the other hand, in the zones where there existed old Jewish communities, endowed with a specific culture as well as a strong social density, but which were touched by the wind of modernity, Zionism obtained a far more considerable echo. This was the case in Russia — up until the 1920s —, in Poland, in Lithuania, in Latvia, and in the Romanian provinces of Bukovina and Bessarabia. In these economically backward, strongly nationalist States, worked upon by a powerful antisemitism, the Jews constituted a veritable national minority that could only be responsive to the message of national mobilization conveyed by Zionism⁵. To be sure, Zionism was not alone, in this Northeastern Europe, in occupying the space of Jewish nationalism. The Bund in particular constituted a formidable competitor. Yet, although their mission fields were identical, the social categories touched by the political messages of the Bundists and the Zionists were not the same. The first owed the essential of their success to the Jewish proletariat present in countless small workshops. The second were much better implanted among the merchants and the children of educators (rabbis, teachers). An extremely fine study devoted to the second aliyah (1904–1914), from which issued the immense majority of the founding fathers of the State of Israel, fully confirms these sociological characteristics. Fifty-five percent of the immigrants were the sons of merchants, while 13% were sons of “clerks” and schoolmasters, a considerable proportion if one takes into account the fact that they represented a very narrow “elite” in Jewish society. By way of comparison, they were as numerous in this aliyah as the sons of artisans, whereas these latter formed a group half a million strong in tsarist Russia. The educational profile of the immigrants also underscores that they came largely from a traditional milieu (31% had attended the heder [elementary religious school], 16% the yeshiva)⁶. If their Zionist commitment constituted an act of rebellion against this fixed Jewish world that had seen them born, their traditional anchoring (both familial and educational) makes it possible to understand that their ambition was not to abolish Jewish singularity, but to reformulate it on a national basis, within the framework of an independent State. This message gradually found an ever wider echo in a historical context marked by the deterioration of the socio-political situation of the Jews.

It was above all in Northeastern Europe (Poland, Lithuania) that Zionism obtained its finest successes during the interwar period, because its radical diagnosis as to the impossible persistence of the Jews in the diaspora appeared more and more justified. In Poland, it dominated Jewish communal life — even if antisemitic, antizionist religious orthodoxy (Agudat Israel) and, to a lesser extent, the Bund were not without support. Served by men of talent, Zionism offered the Jewish masses a means of affirming a national identity that could stand up to a Polish nationalism tinged with antisemitism. As early as 1922, the Zionists held 32 elected seats (out of 47 Jewish deputies and senators) in the Parliament of Warsaw.

The whole Zionist political spectrum was represented. If the most influential current was that of the general Zionists (centrists) led by Yitzhak Gruenbaum, the most activist were found in two opposed ideological families. On the left, the Hehalutz, which grouped the pioneering youth movements (100,000 members in the 1930s), put forward the principle of personal realization — that is to say, settlement in Eretz Israel. On the right, the revisionist movement of Vladimir Zeev Jabotinsky, well implanted in the middle classes, enjoyed a growing success with its watchword of evacuation toward Palestine. Zionism was also very present culturally, with the development of the schools of the Tarbut network, where instruction was given in Hebrew.

The picture was fairly similar in the neighboring republic of Lithuania. There too Zionism was well anchored. In 1934, its partisans numbered nearly 50,000 — that is, nine times more than in the Hungarian community, which was nonetheless three times as numerous⁷. In these two countries, the rise of antisemitism pushed ever more numerous emigrants toward Palestine, and these durably left their imprint on the Yishuv.

The strengthening of Zionist commitment is not, however, explained solely by the negative constraint of antisemitism; it is also due to the fact that, contrary to the other Jewish nationalisms, Zionism could quite quickly avail itself of a positive political record, with the consolidation of a Jewish society in Palestine.

The structuring of a national reality

The competitors of Zionism did not spare their efforts to attain their ends, but the results were quite meager. The territorialists of Israel Zangwill scoured the world in search of a place where the Jews could regroup and benefit from a political autonomy. Their efforts to establish a Jewish home in Cyrenaica, in Mesopotamia, in Australia, or in Angola proved vain. The sole half-success of territorialism is to be credited to… the Soviet Communist Party, which created in 1928, on the borders of Manchuria, the Jewish autonomous region of Birobidzhan, which counted, with difficulty, 20,000 Jews in 1936. The partisans of national-cultural autonomy in the diaspora were hardly luckier. This autonomy was very briefly recognized in 1917–1918 by a Ukraine ravaged by civil war and imposed, in principle, on the new States born of the collapse of the central powers. Most of these States — in particular Poland, Romania, and Lithuania — hastened, however, to forget the clauses relating to the protection of minorities, on the grounds that they hampered the full exercise of national sovereignty. Faced with these repeated failures, the Zionist movement could take some pride in the incontestable successes it had achieved in a span of time that was, after all, fairly short, and under rather difficult conditions. On the one hand, after the unfruitful attempts of Theodor Herzl between 1896 and 1904, Zionism had become an international political fact as early as 1917, when the British Foreign Secretary, Lord Balfour, declared that Great Britain viewed favorably the establishment in Palestine of a national home for the Jewish people. This commitment, reiterated in the mandate entrusted to Great Britain by the League of Nations in July 1922, constituted an official and public recognition of the legitimacy of Jewish nationalism in its Zionist version.

On the other hand, parallel to its entry into the concert of nations, Zionism was also asserting itself as an increasingly total socio-political reality in Palestine. The regular arrival of new immigrants demographically reinforced the Yishuv and consolidated its economy. As for Hebrew culture, diffused notably by the school network, it was becoming more and more dominant. The Yishuv was structuring itself, above all, politically, with the creation of political institutions (national council, Assembly of the Elected, Jewish Agency), of parties, of an army (Haganah…). It is a quasi-Jewish State that is gradually put in place during the interwar period.

Whereas the diasporic and territorialist nationalisms are at a standstill in the years 1920–1930, Zionism, then, managed for its part to transcribe itself into the daily reality of Palestine, and on this account it would appear more and more seductive to numerous Jews, all the more so as its national project had an evident vocation for the broadest possible gathering.

The key to the success of any nationalism is to subsume real differences under a common identity that has been fashioned by a powerful ideological labor. For this learned alchemy to be realized perfectly, nationalism must imperatively have, as Eric Hobsbawm observes, one cardinal virtue: imprecision. This indeed assures it “a potentially universal support within its community. The ethnic group can [then] mobilize the great majority of a community, provided that what it appeals to remains sufficiently vague or beside the point”⁸.

Among the various Jewish nationalisms that took shape at the end of the nineteenth century, Zionism had, without any doubt, the largest integrative capacity. Folkism and territorialism suffered from being too abstract, and could hope to attract only certain educated elites. The Sejmists of the SERP and the Bundists had, for their part, another handicap: in wishing to be the “secular” representatives of the Jewish proletariat, they ipso facto excluded large fractions of the Jewish people. Their social project contradicted their national aspiration. Zionism was, comparatively, far better placed. Its objective — the creation of a “home guaranteed by public law” — was, indeed, fairly precise while being sufficiently general in its programmatic modalities to appear attractive to Jews who were, moreover, separated by great cultural, political, and social differences. Because its global ideology (its Weltanschauung) was diffuse and enveloping, Zionism could gather under its banner bourgeois as well as workers, the religious as well as the secular, Ashkenazim as well as Sephardim, partisans of the left as well as adherents of the right. Of course, ideological cleavages, sometimes sharp, subsisted, but these were contained within a national consensus. The divergences (over the nature of the future society, the pace of the construction of the nation…) were always secondary in relation to the primary objective: the conquest of political independence within a national framework. The force of Zionism’s attraction resided in this: that it did not wish to break the unity of the community (Klal Israel — the totality of the Jewish people) but to reinforce it⁹.

A whole cluster of reasons therefore makes it possible to grasp how Zionism attracted ever more numerous vocations. Yet if this set of conditions was necessary, it was in no way sufficient. After all, many Jews made, in the same context, different choices. The personal itinerary of each was, fundamentally, determining. Many “chose” Zionism for want of anything better, like the Polish immigrants of the mid-1920s. They landed in Palestine as refugees, driven from Poland by antisemitic economic measures and prevented from reaching the United States by restrictive immigration laws. Others, less numerous but more resolute, like the pioneers of the kibbutzim, opted voluntarily for Zionism because they considered that Jewish existence in the diaspora was devoid of any durable existential foundation and that it was fitting to fashion a complete Jewish national collectivity in Palestine. It is from this encounter between the idealists and the refugees that the State of Israel was born.

Alain Dieckhoff

Notes