Return to the Promised Land.. Jacek Surzyn
and to gain a strong position in the community of nations. The formation and existence of a Jewish state seemed to Pinsker the only logical solution to the Jewish Question.
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The thoughts advanced by Hess and Pinsker were collected and finally expressed in full in the initiative by Theodor Herzl. The Jewish State, as a real political program, became the basis for the new movement. The history of Zionism is determined by the slogan of forming the Jewish nation and Jews’ right to have their own, independent, and politically and economically strong state. Unlike the theoretician Hess and the social activist Pinsker, Herzl had a great charisma as a politician and practitioner. His social and political activity was complemented by the thinking by Max Nordau, who at the very beginning of the movement created the theoretical foundation for Zionism and perhaps Max Nordau may be called the first Zionist philosopher. He was the author of the Zionist movement program, which was adopted at the First Congress in 1897, and then, for two decades, he determined the ideological framework of Zionism; Nordau also needed philosophical arguments to discuss with opponents and present Zionism to others as a coherent thought about the situation and goals of Jewry.
This approach to the Zionist issue made me select these four authors: Hess, Pinsker, Herzl, and Nordau. This selection determines the internal composition and scope of the work. Hence, I divided the book into four parts, each of which refers to one of the thinkers. All of these thinkers originated from Jewish families of intelligentsia with different degrees of the assimilation. They benefited from the emancipation, but each of them was personally affected by the anti-Semitism, and at least in two cases (Pinsker and Herzl, but also Hess), the anti-Semitism was the main motivation for their return to Jewry and looking for solutions to the Jewish question. In this respect, the biographies of the presented thinkers are very similar.
I based the presentation of their thoughts on the analysis of their selected source texts, and I only used studies and secondary literature to supplement or stress the importance of some problems and concepts I discussed. I referred to secondary literature to a limited extent, because the larger part of it (e.g. concerning Herzl and Nordau) is either hagiographic or critical, which I tried to avoid in my text, in an attempt to remain objective (although I may not have maintained full objectivism, because the choice and evaluation are always subjective). I did my best to document the thoughts of thinkers described in this book with relevant sources, so it includes multiple quotations from their original works.
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1 Theodor Herzl, A Jewish State. An Attempt at a Modern Solution of the Jewish Question, trans. Jacob de Haas, New York: Maccabean Publishing Co. 1904, pp. 4–5.
Chapter I. Moses Hess and the Shabbat of History
The intellectual path of Moses Hess can be a good illustration of the process of assimilation, which intensified in the Jewish Diaspora in the nineteenth century. It was connected with social changes initiated by the French Revolution and the advancing emancipation of the Jewish community. Hess may serve as an example of these changes. At the beginning of the book Rome and Jerusalem, he points out that he initially followed the assimilation wave, just to return to the Jewish community twenty years later. In his opinion, this was related to the promotion of the Messianic idea of restoration of mankind as a whole, given to the Jewish people as a historic mission.1 His return to Judaism was determined by the task ←19 | 20→he set himself: after years of studying the Pantheist philosophy of Spinoza and Hegel’s conception of history, Hess became one of the fathers and promoters of socialism, collaborating with Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels,2 though there were some fundamental differences between Hess and Marx (and Engels), both in the approach to socialism and to the Jewish question. Hess recalls that the impulse for his return to the Jewry was events connected with pogroms involving Jews in Damascus in 1840.3 They made him realize that history may be repeating itself and perhaps Jews were nearing the point when they had to restore mankind.
Ever stronger national movements in Europe contributed to the growth of traditional anti-Semitism. As a result of social transformations, its form also changed: it was no longer based on religious antipathy consolidated in the Christianity since the Middle Ages, but it was related to the emergence of national ideology and the concept of races, which Hess emphasized.4 All this was enough for the author to adopt the thesis on the unique role of the Jewish nation, based on the religious concept of Messianism, which he combined with the social postulates of the socialist ideology. Religion, approached by Hess in a specific way – from the perspective of an assimilated and emancipated Jew – gave Jews the access to the modern world and made them equal to great nations, which according to Hegel’s concept of history,5 took over the world leadership ←20 | 21→from one another, contributing to the constant progress of mankind. Jews are nearing that most important time prophesied by great prophets, when they finally can play their role in the history of the world connected with the restoration of the humanity and the implementation of the idea of universal humanitarianism.6 Hess saw a new role for religion, implementing the successive stages of the cosmic history of creation. This definitely could not have been accepted by the traditional orthodoxy of the Diaspora. Such a religion goes beyond the Jewish individualism taken over by Christianity, perceiving the decisive role of an individual in the act of creation (God created the world made up of individuals – indivisible, perfect entities) and in the final act of salvation. It refers to the group, community and humanity seen in the context of one general organism. According to the author, the Jewish religion gives the world an opportunity to unify and achieve the universal happiness of mankind; thanks to Judaism, the history will become holy, showing mankind the direction and the ultimate goal. Judaism plays an active role; it is not just passive consent to the historical necessity but a factor dynamically participating in the formation of history.7
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According to Hess, an important factor that determines the essence of the Jewish religion and the Jewish identity is the category of immortality. The promise of immortality (of the soul and body) is the most important dogma of the Christian faith, significantly affecting the history of Europe, and indirectly, also the history of mankind. The dominance of Christianity is connected with overcoming the dogma of death: salvation means everlasting life, being a real promise that man can achieve eternal happiness. This understanding of immortality is related to immortality in the individual dimension, i.e. salvation and everlasting life refer to each human individually and can only be achieved in this dimension: Christ saved each person individually, not mankind in general. In Hess’ opinion, Christian emphasis on the individual dimension fundamentally changed the content of the Messianic message drawn by Christianity from Judaism. In the Old Testament, immortality applies rather to the nation than to an individual. It is the nation, people, or community that are subject to the Messianic vision of immortality and salvation; thus, the Jewish belief in immortality is connected with the national/humanistic dimension of Messianism in the form of a general human idea. Its ultimate goal is the coming of the Messiah and the creation of a universal Messianic state.8 According to the author, Judaism makes an important proposal to mankind, based on the promise of overcoming death through the execution of God’s state on earth, i.e. the achievement of real happiness here, in the earthly life, unlike in the Christian promise of everlasting life in an obscure other world (“heaven”). The Messianic time is the time of a person’s real, earthly life, understood by Hess in collective, communal categories, devoid of poisonous egoism strengthened by the events and consequences of the French Revolution.9 On the one hand, the revolution promoted new ideas of human solidarity, justice and equality and it “moved great nations,” but on ←22 | 23→the other hand, it caused strong opposition and reaction, particularly evident in Germany.10
The result of the adopted assumptions