Return to the Promised Land.. Jacek Surzyn
who express their various attitudes to the Jewish state: from full acceptance, through indifference, to open hatred. Thus, the contemporary Jewish community makes a mosaic of various attitudes, for which the Zionist idea of a Jewish state is the strong point of reference. As I have already mentioned, Zionism has never taken the form of a mass movement, but in terms of activities carried out, it covered really the whole diaspora, thus, influencing the life and the present situation of all Jews. In my work, I attempted to show these positive elements of the Zionist movement in its philosophical and conceptual layers, which could contribute to a better understanding of its phenomenon. I tried to avoid the hagiographic approach, which for obvious reasons dominates in (especially Hebrew) literature.
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To realize my intention, I decided to refer to selected thoughts and concepts that shaped the Zionist movement throughout the nineteenth century. I had to make a choice and adopt some troubleshooting options, so I chose several representative thoughts by authors who can be regarded as the founders and forefathers of the Zionist movement. It is obvious that the group of founders should include Theodor Herzl and Max Nordau. For formal reasons, I had to limit myself to the presentation of their positions only, and omit such well-deserved Zionist thinkers as, for example, Achad Ha Am, Nathan Birnbaum, Nathan Syrkin, or many others. I assumed that their views were already a modification of the idea of the Zionist movement and grew out from the conceptions formed by Herzl and Nordau. To these two figures I added the thinkers who certainly deserve to be called Zionist protagonists, namely, Moses Hess and Leo Pinsker. In their postulates, one can find everything that is contained in the concept of Zionism presented by Herzl and Nordau. The fact that each of these thinkers paid a lot of attention to three issues, namely the anti-Semitism, the emancipation, and the Jewry’s future, definitely played a part. It seems to me that these three issues, inextricably linked to the Jewish reality in the nineteenth century, set the framework for the formation of modern Jewish ideology and philosophy. The anti-Semitism, which in the nineteenth century assumed a new racial but also political meaning (in contrast to earlier anti-Judaism based on religious ground) definitely determined Jewish attitudes and served as a catalyst for the inner personal transformation for each of these authors. Each of them benefited from the fact that the process of legal and social emancipation of Jews had been progressing since the 18th century and gaining momentum. The anti-Semitism and the emancipation had developed at various speeds and in different ways in Europe, and it is no coincidence that all these authors devoted a lot of attention to both. Perhaps the anti-Semitism and the emancipation should also be treated in terms of a political and philosophical founding myth, which every ideology needs and from which Zionism has never been free. However, there is no doubt that both the anti-Semitism and the emancipation allow us to look at the beginnings of the Zionism from the proper perspective, because these two phenomena dynamically developed in the nineteenth century, combined with an extremely important Zionist idea inscribed in the Jewish identity: with the dream of Jews to return to the Promised Land. This dream meant that the birth of secular Zionist thought became a logical consequence of unchanging Jewish expectancy.
Gaining access to social emancipation and equality as part of transformations that began with the French Revolution (there was a reason why the revolution was treated with deference by Hess and Nordau), Jews faced both a chance and an unprecedented threat for the diaspora. The chance was the opportunity to ←14 | 15→obtain full social and political rights, and consequently, also economic rights. In the situation of economical and philosophical transformations and the creation of a new socio-political space in the nineteenth century, the many acted upon this chance, though this phenomenon had an individualized character, i.e. it did not refer to the whole community of Jews but to individuals. The threat mostly resulted from the fact that political and social emancipation de facto forced those individuals to break up the relationships with the diaspora, and actually with their inner Jewishness, because it was practically impossible to take part in centuries-long rhythm of Jewish social life determined by religious rites and faith itself if someone was out of the diaspora. In other words, being the Jew – for centuries connected with the faith, the covenant with God and the belonging to the chosen nation – was destroyed as a result of the emancipation, which forced a new approach to the issue of Jewish identity. Thus, a difficult dilemma arose for Jews: whether to try to improve their personal situation, i.e. leave the diaspora and assimilate, which was tantamount to resigning from their Jewishness, or to remain a part of the community, but without any chance of improving their situation yet with the threat of facing new persecution and repressions from the growing anti-Semitism. This dilemma was faced by Moses Hess and Leo Pinsker, regarded as the protagonists of the Zionist thought. It also affected Theodor Herzl and Max Nordau, so actually each thinker discussed in this book personally encountered the issue of the emancipation and the Jewish assimilation and participated in these processes.
Herzl and Nordau are special cases because of their significance for the Zionist movement. Both of them underwent the process of assimilation, especially in Nordau’s case reflected in his conscious choices. Both Nordau and Herzl were deeply permeated with the German culture, both spoke German as their native language and perfectly well suited the avant-garde of European intelligentsia of the second half of the nineteenth century. Nordau, older than Herzl, was one of the key thinkers of the end of the century, a mentor of his times, and one to critical evaluate the condition of the society, the culture and philosophy of the fin-de-siècle (see his works, particularly the book Degeneration). Herzl perfectly well suited the avant-garde of bourgeois Western Europe intelligentsia. He was a renowned, brilliant journalist, as well as playwright and prose writer. In his work, he related and criticized major socio-political events of contemporary Europe.
For both of them, the experience of emancipation of Jewry mostly meant the assimilation and the adoption of culture of the leading European nations, especially Germans. The encounter of anti-Semitism proved to be the breakthrough (although the breakthrough should largely be treated in the category of the founding myth), and in more practical terms, for Herzl and Nordau, the ←15 | 16→anti-Semitism was an important basis for justifying the Zionist thought as a solution to the “Jewish Question.” Thus, both the anti-Semitism and the emancipation led to the birth of a secular-philosophical version of the religious idea of Jews’ return to Zion after a thousand years of exile. Against this background, Zionism emerges as an inevitable complementation of the abovementioned nineteenth-century phenomena. I think we may and should approach the sources of the Zionist idea in this way, and if I research this issue and study the philosophical and social background of Zionism, such a triad (anti-Semitism, emancipation and return to Zion) makes up a logical whole, explaining my choice of thinkers and thoughts. Undoubtedly, it is impossible to write about the origin of Zionism without writing about Hess, Pinsker, Herzl, and Nordau, although apart from them, there are a number of authors who were extremely important for the shaping of Zionism and its different forms. I mean particularly Ahad Ha Am, but also Nathan Birnbaum. With limitations resulting from the length of the book and the need of text coherence, and with the intention to avoid just another story of Zionism, I decided to limit myself to the views of four most outstanding thinkers and omit all the others, though equally interesting. On the one hand, I did not intend to write another history of Zionism, presenting all its trends and doctrinal interpretations, because in source literature there are many such works. On the other hand, I feel that deeper analysis of the main works by Hess, Pinsker, Herzl, and Nordau may be justified and valuable in the light of the state of research on Zionism and alternatively its philosophical principles. Here, I want to stress that the choice of the analyzed works, i.e. Rome and Jerusalem by Hess, Auto-Emancipation by Pinsker or The Jewish State by Herzl is not a random one and is has both historical and thematic legitimizations. Most researchers agree that Hess’ book Rome and Jerusalem was the first comprehensive presentation of the situation of the Jewish diaspora combined with the Messianic idea of realization of religious Zion. Hess presents the Jewish nation as the restorer and leader of all the nations in the upcoming new era. In this context, he emphasizes the need for a real Jewish revival and building their own identity. Pinsker points to the problem of Jewish identity even more straightforwardly. His Auto-Emancipation is basically a manifest, almost entirely overlapping with a later brochure by Herzl, The Jewish State, which Herzl used to emphasize. According to Pinsker, auto-emancipation, or the self-liberation, of Jews was to be the means to create their new national philosophy and, thus, to form a strong nation, which could