How far is Israel a Jewish state? - The Jewish Chronicle

Israel is often referred to in a matter-of-fact way as “the Jewish state”. But it is a phrase fraught with a deep tension, one that goes back a century to the early origins of the Zionist movement and the divisions between the political Zionism of Theodor Herzl and the cultural Zionism of Ahad Ha’am.

Does the notion of a “Jewish state” simply mean a “state of the Jews”, where Jews are a majority and there may be nothing distinctly Jewish about its economics, social policy or any other aspect of its national culture? Or does it imply that the state should draw its core values from the millennial-old Jewish tradition?

No one has wrestled more with Israel’s Jewish identity than Yaacov Yadgar, whose recently published book, To Be a Jewish State - Zionism as the new Judaism, is his third in a row exploring the subject. For the past seven and half years, the Israeli-born academic, who is of Iranian-Jewish heritage, has been Stanley Lewis Professor of Israel Studies at Oxford University.

As the book demonstrates, diving into the sometimes concealed currents that drive the “theopolitics” of Israel today, the relationship between Judaism and Zionism is not straightforward.

“One of the greatest challenges thrown at Jewishness, Judaism, the Jewish tradition is the process of the last century or so when Jewish identity was politicised and then mobilised to serve a certain nation-statist agenda, a nationalist agenda,” he told the JC.

Daringly, the book even brings in an analogy with supersessionism, the concept usually used of Christian supremacy that sees the Church as the “true Israel”. But he makes a distinction between “hard” supersessionism which regards the new movement as having completely replaced the old way; and a “soft” version which considers the new form as a higher-level fulfilment but not a complete negation of the old.

The book cites some people who celebrate the creation of the state “as the most important thing that ever happened to Judaism”. But as he reminds us, there were Zionist thinkers who believed the movement represented a decisive break from the past.

“Zionism both speaks for Judaism as the culmination of Jewish history but at the same time it negates what it calls Jewish religion which identifies with exile, the malady of exile, a sense of being outside of history,” he said.

[Missing Credit]

Among some Zionist thinkers and “some spokespeople for Israeli nation-statism, the answer seems to be very much in line with a supersessionist mindset, that Zionism replaces…and… makes Judaism almost redundant.”

What we know as Judaism, “2,000 years of rabbinic Judaism, did not develop centred around the state and around the political theology of the state. It has developed in a completely different political situation and to force it into the nation-statist mindset can create big challenges.”

As the book suggests, the two ideas — of Israel as a “state of the Jews” and as a “Jewish state” — in practice may co-exist in an “uneasy combination”. The tension can be creative, leading to new attempts in recreating Judaism. “But if you look at other parts of Israel and the Jewish world generally, you can see it can be a potentially detrimental tension, a tension that can cost Judaism, that can bring about the demise of what we traditionally appreciate as the Jewish world,” he said.

For Israel’s founding Prime Minister, David Ben Gurion, and his followers, cultural diversity among Jews was potentially a threat to the new state and nation-building, where the new Hebraic culture was to be a unifying force. Jewish differences were to evaporate in Israel’s melting-pot.

“Zionist revolution is a watershed in Jewish history because it doesn’t see itself primarily as a development of this history, it sees itself as revolutionising this history, a revolution that also negates large chunks of it,” he said.

“There are different aspects of what is lost when this is done. I highlight in the conclusion of the book only one aspect of it… which is the erasure of Jewish diversity or at least a delegetimation of Jewish diversity.”

But against the claims of Zionist supersessionism he offers countervailing voices. One is Leon Roth, an older brother of the more famous Anglo-Jewish historian, Cecil.“I hadn’t heard of Leon Roth before arriving in Oxford seven years ago. I just happened upon his book which was on the lending shelf of the Oxford Jewish Congregation. Reading his book Judaism: A Portrait was highly insightful.”

For Roth, Judaism took precedence in that it defined the Jews, not the other way round. He emigrated to Palestine in 1928 to become the first professor of philosophy at the Hebrew University, but he later returned to Britain.

When a debate erupted over Israel’s retaliatory raid in 1953 on the Jordanian village of Qibya, an operation in which several dozen Arab civilians were killed, Israel’s action was defended by the Board of Deputies. But Roth was critical, believing it to be “the type of action which we have been accustomed to say that Judaism taught the world to condemn and from which Jewry itself has so often suffered.” For Roth, the state should be governed by what he considered to be Jewish ethics.

For Yadgar, “the predominance of the nation-statist mindset that defines Judaism as centred around the Jewish nation-state” is a challenge that “needs to be confronted”. How the argument should be resolved he wouldn’t “dare” to prescribe but if conducted as an “authentic Jewish exercise”, it is one in which he would be “happy to take part”.

To Be a Jewish State - Zionism as the new Judaism, New York University Press, £23.99 is out now

Topics: