Post-Zionist Zionism

In the late-18th century European Jewry was delivered from oppression by Napoleon.  As the general’s army swept through Europe, he ordered Jews freed from their captivity in urban confinement.

Liberation from the ghetto unleashed creative and intellectual energies bottled up for centuries.  Jews flourished.  Their presence in various professional trades—textile manufacturing, dry good merchandising, footwear distribution, etc.—grew dramatically.  As Michael Goldfard recounts in Emancipation: How Liberating Europe’s Jews from the Ghetto Led to Revolution and Renaissance, already by the 1830s a German joke had it that “Doctor” was a Jewish first name.

Liberation had a profound impact on Jewish identity.  In 1810, a new place of worship was built in Germany and christened a “Temple.”  As Goldfard explains, Temple had referred to the great holy place in Jerusalem whose destruction by the Romans in antiquity marked the beginning of Jews’ exile in the Diaspora.  To name a new place of worship as such therefore signified an end to Jewish peregrinations.  Germany was now home.

Bigotry nevertheless persisted.  The persistence of anti-Semitism disillusioned some Jews who claimed that they would never be accepted as equals in the Diaspora.  Moses Hess, a learned rabbi, writing in 1862 presciently predicted that a “race war” would have to take place before Germans would definitively shed their hate.  Accordingly, Hess argued, Jews needed their own homeland.  Only then would they be safe.  Theodore Herzl and others later took up the Zionist mantle, but it was the nightmare of the Holocaust, which confirmed Hess’ dark prophecies, that made the dream a reality.  From its ashes Israel was born.

Zionism, it appears, delivered on its promise of the Promised Land.  Jews, after all, don’t fear persecution in Israel, though the threat from Arab states, Iran, Hezbollah, and Hamas remains real.   But is this the whole story?  Have Hess, Herzl, and others been vindicated?

Zionism asserted that the minority rights of Jews could only be guaranteed if they were a majority in their own homeland.  But once this came to pass, Jews began to treat minorities in their midst callously—non-Jewish Israelis and West Bank Palestinians alike.  This is no small matter.  It raises fundamental questions about Zionism itself.

It may well be that many of the Jewish traditions most worth cherishing, foremost being a steadfast commitment to social justice, stems from millennia of persecution.  Make Jews a majority and that memory fades quickly; they become just like everyone else.  If so, Zionism has ensured the preservation of the Jewish people through the creation of a Jewish State but at the cost of the very best of what makes Jews Jews.  It’s a Pyrrhic victory.

Undoing this paradox requires redefining Zionism so that those traditions that have made Jews exceptional will endure.  One possible way to do this is by viewing a Jewish homeland not as an actual place but rather as a metaphorical one.  In other words, Zionism should be recast as striving to Judaize the world.  By that I don’t mean converting non-Jews in a religious sense: our planet would not be a better a place if its six billion inhabitants separated meat from dairy or dressed in 18th century Polish garb.

What is meant here is propagating far and wide the best Jewish values promoting decency, fairness, and respect that have made Jews staunch defenders of Enlightenment values.  The prophet Isaiah said that the children of Israel would be “a light unto the nations.”  Zionism for the 21st century would update the concept.  Not simply role models to be emulated, Jews would seek to transform societies by making them more “Jewish.”  Jews, in other words, would be a light within nations, not unto them.

This may sound like hokum but there are examples.  Consider the American Jew.  Though small in number, Jews in the US have played an outsized role in many great moral causes that have made the country a far better place.  They have been at the forefront of the fight for the rights of women, workers, blacks, and most recently gays.  American Jews aren’t parochial either.  They have taken to heart “Tikkun Olam,” the special mandate to heal the world by speaking out about injustice wherever it’s found.  And yes, this even includes the treatment of non-Jews in Israel’s midst.

America is a better place because of Jewish activism.  More precisely, it is more “Jewish.”  This model can be replicated elsewhere, making Zionism relevant again by preserving the Jewish traditions that most deserve preservation.

Napoleon freed the Jews from the ghetto.  Jews now must free themselves from their self-imposed ghettos by recommitting themselves to making their mission global.