8. The Ideal at its Height: Jewish Socialism and Zionism
Jewish socialism and Zionism were thus near-contemporaries as popular movements
- and they competed in bitter rivalry on the Jewish street of Eastern Europe,
particularly in the latter years of the nineteenth century and the first decades
of the twentieth.
Jewish socialism, or Bundism (1897), envisaged an ideal society, along the
following lines:
- Jewish communities would be governed by the Jewish working class who would
live according to (a secularised version of) Jewish
culture.
- Jews would live among the nations, as part of wider society;
- Yiddish would be their cultural language (at least in Europe);
- and the reign of the scholars would pass from the world.
- Jewish workers would – at times of need – be the protectors
of the Jewish world, working shoulder to shoulder with workers of other nationalities
against the forces of reaction (in the class struggle and revolution).
Further reading:
http://www.friends-partners.org/partners/beyond-the-pale/english/38.html
http://www.myjewishlearning.com/history_community/
Modern/Overview_The_Story_17001914/Socialism/SocInRussia.htm
Zionism held out a very different vision:
It was based on a primary and stronger attachment to a (perhaps romanticised)
vision of an ancient history and an old-new land, and aspired to join the
family of nations, through a removal of the Jews from the physical presence
of the host nations to concentrate them in Eretz Yisrael.
Jews would create their own society or state, and would accept responsibility
for all aspects of life in the land: they would farm, they would build up
their land and their way of life – and they would, of course, defend
their land.
Zionism demanded the restoration of the physical Jew in all his, or her,
three-dimensional glory.
In the Zionist world-view, the Zionist Jew would thus try and erase thousands
of years of the Diaspora (termed Galut [Exile] – or, the traditional
model of) life and Diaspora attitudes. The Zionist Jew would bridge these
intervening millennia, of both powerlessness and the glorification of powerlessness,
to reclaim – or recreate - this concept of the full, three-dimensional
Jew.
This person, moreover, might or might not respect G-d and have a sense of
G-d, but would not view G-d as a replacement for his or her own physical action.
# Religious Zionism would develop a model of “a G-d helps those who
help themselves” and consider human physical endeavour to be the necessary
prelude to Divine, messianic action.
# Secular Zionism would perceive Jewish physical endeavour as a replacement
for G-d.
In both versions, Jews would not rely on G-d to do things for them; Jews
would do what needed to be done for themselves. Both models – the religious
Zionist and the secular Zionist – drew on Haskalah roots and prescribed
a model of the working Jew who would both work the land and defend what she
or he had grown.
Zionism and Jewish socialism were thus very different in many ways.
At times, the bitterness between the two movements became extremely pronounced.
However, these two movements, more than any others, fashioned the image of
the physically emancipated Jew - the Jew who would use power and physicality
wherever it was needed -, drawing upon the source of earlier, Haskalah ideology.
It was therefore Jewish Socialism and Zionism as movements which gave birth
to a new Jewish type, that - only a few generations earlier - would have seemed
utterly fantastic as a model: the fighting Jew, someone who was prepared to
use force unapologetically, although always in the service of a higher moral
goal.
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