Zelensky is the latest in a long line of proud Jewish patriots

Both the Ukrainian national poet, Taras Shevchenko (1814-1861) and the Jewish national poet, the Ukraine-born Chaim Nachman Bialik (1873-1934), went against Russian policy in elevating the Ukrainian and Hebrew languages respectively, encouraging national pride and resistance to the dominant culture. Shevchenko, a freed serf, had a degree of identification with the persecuted Jews; he saw parallels between Ukrainians and Jews, and sought in the portrayal of Jews in the Bible insight into Ukrainian national identity. Shevchenko was imprisoned between 1847-1857 by Nicholas I; Bialik was expelled from Russia in 1921. Their voices of national affirmation and protest survive in their poetry, as do those of other cultures in the empire, including Mickiewicz in Poland, Toumanian in Armenia, and Kupala in Belarussia.

The survival and growth of these cultures in the Tsarist empire, particularly in Poland, which revolted in 1830 and 1863, encouraged some Russian Jews to see Hebrew not as a tool of secularisation and assimilation in Russia, but as a precious heritage and the basis for a modern Jewish national culture.

Bialik’s contemporary, the Hebrew poet Saul Tchernichowsky (1875-1943), also Ukrainian-born, translated Lönnrot’s The Kalevala into Hebrew; like Bialik, he was expelled from Soviet Russia in 1921 before making his way to Tel Aviv.  

The long history of denial of Jewish national identity, not just by Russia but also by most other countries at various times, means that when Zelensky speaks of the Russian rejection of national identity, he speaks with especial passion and insight. 

Even so, in view of the horrific Jewish experience in Christian Europe, it might be thought that Jews labelled “perfidious murderers of the Saviour” could not be patriots, even in enlightened times, and were incapable of attachment to the lands of their exile and oppression.  

The seeming implausibility of the historian Thomas Babington Macaulay’s “patriotism of gentlemen with red hair” — if men with red hair were persecuted as Jews were, Macaulay asked in Civil Disabilities of the Jews (1831) could patriotism be expected of them?  —  underlines Proust’s caustic observation in À la Recherche du Temps Perdu that in France during the Dreyfus affair that “the Jews showed, to the general astonishment, that they were patriots” (Les Juifs ayant, à l’étonnement général, montré qu’ils étaient patriots). 

Jewish patriotism conflicted with the antisemitic stereotype — with the very definition of “Jew” — and often this was the intent among increasing numbers of emancipated Jews in 19th century Western and Central Europe, freed (in theory at least) from centuries of hatred and persecution, with good reason to be among the most ardent of patriots, determined to be accepted in their countries of citizenship by showing unswerving loyalty, though patriotism carried a host of meanings and motives, in different times and places.

Some became national leaders:  for example, Benjamin Disraeli in England, Walther Rathenau in Germany, Sidney Sonnino in Italy and Leon Blum in France.  

However, in Eastern Europe, particularly in Tsarist Russia, where the bulk of the world Jewish population was concentrated before the Holocaust,  emancipation was slower to come and traditional antisemitism more widespread.   

Prior to the Revolution of 1917, most Jews were Orthodox and tended not to identify with the nation: their loyalty was to traditional Judaism, to Holy Scripture and the memory of the Holy Land.   

Until 1917, Russian Jews were more likely to become Jewish nationalists or socialist revolutionaries than local patriots;  and it was chiefly in Russia that ancient Jewish religious nationalism was transformed into a viable modern secular nationalism.  

Bialik, writing in Hebrew during a murderous wave of pogroms, mostly in southern Ukraine, in 1903-1906, denounced Jews who ignored their own heritage while devoting themselves, body and soul, to countries that hated and tried to destroy them: “As your flesh drips blood between the teeth of your destroyers, you’ll feed them your soul.” 

Yet, Jews — including Zionists — were involved in every 19th century European national or liberation movement: even Theodor Herzl, founder of political Zionism, was initially a German patriot and  admirer of Bismarck.  His Zionism grew out of his recognition that Jewish loyalty, such as his own, to antisemitic countries was a form of sickness.  

Herzl summed up his feeling in the JC (17th January 1896) after the first Dreyfus trial: “In vain are we loyal patriots”.  His call for Jews to cease sterile assimilation and follow fruitful national interests echoes George Eliot in Daniel Deronda:  “Is it rational to drain away the sap of special kindred that makes the families of men rich in interchanged wealth, and various as the forests are various with the glory of the cedar and the palm?”   

As the Church had traditionally denied Jewish national identity — a superseded people and their religion cannot be recognised as having survived, prospered, and adapted successfully to changing circumstances — so revolutionary Russia was intolerant of the idea of Jewish nationalism, or any nationalism. Russia denied Jewish identity in its post-1917 ban on Judaism and Hebrew and Yiddish culture, and on Zionism and, after 1967, in its defamation of the state of Israel as a decadent and shallow offshoot of colonialism. 

Arab rejection of the legitimacy of Jewish nationalism derives in part from a supersessionist view of Judaism as a monotheism replaced by Islam, with an admixture of Christian antisemitic teachings starting from the early 19th century.  Yet after 1967, these prejudices were amplified by Soviet antisemitic propaganda, encouraging the notion that the Jewish state was an artificial, temporary aberration, corrupt and doomed, with no moral basis for survival. The Arab view of Jewish nationalism as illegitimate and a provocation to violence is not far different from the Russian view of Ukrainian nationalism.

The emergence of Zelensky as national spokesman for Ukraine represents a significant reversal in Eastern European Jewish history:  in the past Jews tended to see Ukrainian patriotism as non-Jewish and often linked with antisemitism.   

In his early years, Zelensky witnessed the largest aliyah to Israel of the past half-century, from the former Soviet Union and its satellites, after decades in which Russia effectively held its Jewish population hostage within its borders. Clearly, Jewish national feeling was not broken by Soviet oppression. On the contrary, many Jews rediscovered Jewish culture. At one time, Zelensky considered moving to Israel and studying there.

Zelensky, in articulating the Ukrainian struggle for recognition of its distinct national language, culture, history, and hopes, has shown an understanding based in part on the Eastern European Jewish experience, of how a dominant culture cruelly denies the legitimacy and meaning of a national identity, and the consequent need to fight for self-determination and sovereignty.   

David Aberbach is author of The European Jews, Patriotism and the Liberal State 1789-1939.