Zionism and the Melting Pot: Preachers, Pioneers, and Modern Jewish Politics

By Matthew Mark Silver

Traces the roots of ideologies and outlooks that shape Jewish life in Israel and the United States today

Zionism and the Melting Pot pivots away from commonplace accounts of the origins of Jewish politics and focuses on the ongoing activities of actors instrumental in the theological, political, diplomatic, and philanthropic networks that enabled the establishment of new Jewish communities in Palestine and the United States. M. M. Silver’s innovative new study highlights the grassroots nature of these actors and their efforts—preaching, fundraising, emigration campaigns, and mutual aid organizations—and argues that these activities were not fundamentally ideological in nature but instead grew organically from traditional Judaic customs, values, and community mores.
 
Silver examines events in three key locales—Ottoman Palestine, czarist Russia and the United States—during a period from the early 1870s to a few years before World War I. This era which was defined by the rise of new forms of anti-Semitism and by mass Jewish migration, ended with institutional and artistic expressions of new perspectives on Zionism and American Jewish communal life. Within this timeframe, Silver demonstrates, Jewish ideologies arose somewhat amorphously, without clear agendas; they then evolved as attempts to influence the character, pace, and geographical coordinates of the modernization of East European Jews, particularly in, or from, Russia’s czarist empire.
 
Unique in his multidisciplinary approach, Silver combines political and diplomatic history, literary analysis, biography, and organizational history. Chapters switch successively from the Zionist context, both in the czarist and Ottoman empires, to the United States’ melting-pot milieu. More than half of the figures discussed are sermonizers, emissaries, pioneers, or writers unknown to most readers. And for well-known figures like Theodor Herzl or Emma Lazarus, Silver’s analysis typically relates to texts and episodes that are not covered in extant scholarship. By uncovering the foundations of Zionism—the Jewish nationalist ideology that became organized formally as a political movement—and of melting-pot theories of Jewish integration in the United States, Zionism and the Melting Pot breaks ample new ground.

• Language: English
• Publisher: University Alabama Press
• Release date: Jul 7, 2020
• ISBN: 9780817392987

Book preview

Zionism and the Melting Pot

Jews and Judaism: History and Culture

Series Editors

Mark K. Bauman

Adam D. Mendelsohn

Founding Editor

Leon J. Weinberger

Advisory Board

Tobias Brinkmann

Ellen Eisenberg

David Feldman

Kirsten Fermaglich

Jeffrey S. Gurock

Nahum Karlinsky

Richard Menkis

Riv-Ellen Prell

Raanan Rein

Jonathan Schorsch

Stephen J. Whitfield

Marcin Wodzinski

ZIONISM and the MELTING POT

PREACHERS, PIONEERS, AND MODERN JEWISH POLITICS

M. M. Silver

THE UNIVERSITY OF ALABAMA PRESS

Tuscaloosa

The University of Alabama Press

Tuscaloosa, Alabama 35487-0380

uapress.ua.edu

Copyright © 2020 by the University of Alabama Press

All rights reserved.

Inquiries about reproducing material from this work should be addressed to the University of Alabama Press.

Typeface: Scala Pro

Cover image: Russian Zionist delegates and Theodor Herzl (center, front) at the Sixth Zionist Congress at Basel, Switzerland; courtesy of the Central Zionist Archives

Cover design: David Nees

Cataloging-in-Publication data is available from the Library of Congress.

ISBN: 978-0-8173-2062-1

E-ISBN: 978-0-8173-9298-7

This book is dedicated to two Big Red teachers:

Dominick LaCapra and Walter LaFeber

Contents

List of Figures

Acknowledgments

Introduction

1. The Indeterminacy of Philosemitism and Antisemitism

2. The Indeterminacy of Nationalism in Jewish Letters through the 1870s

3. The Simmering Melting Pot: Indeterminacy in American Jewish Letters through the 1880s

4. Preachers, Emissaries, and Pioneers: Zionism’s Traditional Foundations

5. Reform, Orthodox, and Conservative: Judaism and the Rise of Jewish Ideology

6. Cultural Zionism or Altneuland: Ahad Ha’am, Herzl, and the Problem of Russian Jewish Modernization

7. Uganda, Russian Jewish Modernization, and Jewish Ideology

8. Out of the Crucible Came Canon: The Making of the Melting Pot

9. Ben-Gurion at Sejera: The Second Aliyah and the Making of Jewish Ideology

Notes

Bibliography

Index

Figures

1. Z. H. Masliansky and family in Ekaterinoslav, 1892

2. Rabbi Yitzhak Nissenbaum

3. Eliezer Rokach

4. Israel Belkind, Kharkov, 1881

5. Kaufmann Kohler

6. Solomon Schechter with faculty and students, circa 1910

7. Russian Zionist delegates and Theodor Herzl at the Sixth Zionist Congress at Basel

8. Menahem Ussishkin, 1903

Acknowledgments

THE BASIS OF THIS BOOK was prepared throughout a sabbatical year, 2016–2017, during which I participated in a seminar titled Jews, Liberalism, Antisemitism: The Dialectics of Inclusion (1780–1950), at Oxford University’s Centre for Hebrew and Jewish Studies. I am grateful to seminar leaders Abigail Green and Simon Levis Sullam and to all other participants. Special thanks to Lisa Leff for alerting me about the seminar, and to Carole Fink and Jonathan Sarna for helping me arrange this productive sabbatical year.

I have, over the past two decades, taught Jewish history to several hundred students, Arabs and Jews, in public college education in Galilee. The qualities and motivations of this experience are hard to translate, but I have little doubt that whatever intellectual integrity and versatility might be found in the following pages owes much to it; and so I am pleased to thank here students, faculty colleagues, and administrators at the Max Stern Yezreel Valley College for their support.

Thanks to Gur Alroey and the Ruderman Foundation for the ongoing opportunity to teach at a graduate school program in American Jewish Studies at Haifa University. Conversations with Gur over the years, as well as many comments made by students in class discussions, sharpened several passages in this book.

As ever, some inadequately brief words of thanks to my children—Eitan, Galit, Lior, and Talia—whose activities and attitudes continually inspire me. Thanks to Manuella Gal for indulging anxieties and peculiarities imprinted in my way of authoring books.

Finally, I thank the University of Alabama Press for handling and producing this book—it has been a pleasure to work with its staff. I should especially acknowledge Daniel Waterman, its editor-in-chief, for his help on a range of issues; the two anonymous readers who volunteered useful and insightful responses; and editor Eric Schramm.

I am dedicating this book to two Cornell University historians because of the lasting impact exercised by their critical spirit and professional dedication. In imagining that some portion of their teaching ethos has been transported to my classrooms in Israel’s democratic north, I confess to a worthy illusion.

Introduction

MANY FORCES IMPINGED ON THE development of modern Jewish politics and ideology from the late eighteenth century to the present. Along with associated topics, this book relates to three modes or roles in a relatively short period, from the early 1870s to a few years before World War I, which was defined by the rise of new forms of antisemitism and by mass Jewish migration. These three modes are Jewish preachers, Jewish emissaries, and Jewish pioneers. These three sociopolitical nodules constitute, I believe, revealing barometers of internal dynamics in Jewish society, and also of the interplay between these dynamics and ideas, sensitivities, and stereotypes in outlying gentile society. Analysis of their evolution in this circumscribed period sheds light on how traditional roles in Jewish society were recalibrated in modern times for specific ideological purposes; and such analysis also reveals how intramural Jewish tensions and conflicts could be self-defeating and debilitating, or positively creative and enabling.

Nothing in my argument presumes that qualitative leaps (paradigm shifts) in modern Jewish political ideology could not have happened, or did not happen, outside the time period and the sociopolitical modes chosen for this study. I hope, however, that contents and chronology that frame this discussion usefully isolate issues of agency, volition, and control that are of continuing urgency in Jewish self-understanding.

In view of a growing, and rather confusing, corpus of scholarly studies and popular commentaries about the American Jewish-Israel connection,¹ I hope that my decision to produce a volume that traces roots of two mega-ideologies, Zionism and the melting pot, in the defined period might prove useful. Throughout this volume, I am interested in highlighting crossovers and common origins that link these two ideologies—ultimately, I argue, both standpoints emerged largely in response to the specific issue of Jewish modernization in the Russian empire.

This book’s central claim is that the protracted, sprawling conversation about Russian Jewish modernization, from the advent of modern antisemitism around 1870 through the institutional consolidation of melting pot and Labor Zionist (Second Aliyah) pioneering ideologies in 1908, was an extension of an ongoing East-West dynamic in Jewish affairs. In modern times, Jewish societies, including imperial Russia’s massive Jewish population centered in the Pale of Settlement,² invariably became divided between westernized and eastern subgroups, owing to migration and urbanization processes, legal realities, preexisting cultural dispositions, and many other factors.³ To some extent, the perception that various Jewish subgroups (including Russia’s large Jewish population in our own context) were eastern, and therefore backward and behind, was imposed from the outside, by gentile groups. In a complicated process that can, for better or worse, be called in shorthand sublimated antisemitism, this perception was adopted, usually with some modulation, by elite Jewish groups.

Jewish ideologies served as the agency for the Jews’ own dealing with this issue of perceived eastern backwardness. Obviously, as in the example of Zionism’s reliance on European nationalist experience, the form, and much content, in this Jewish ideological development also came from the outside; but such borrowing does not mean that these ideologies did not develop in an authentically Jewish way. In fact, shaped by long-standing cultural dispositions and a wealth of historical experience, the ideologies became essential expressions of Jewish volition and innovation. Historically, they are interesting not for their borrowed aspects, but rather for their novel contribution to other, non-Jewish, ideological systems (as in the example of the melting pot’s emergence as America’s most intriguing twentieth-century social theory),⁴ or to completely novel Jewish circumstances, particularly the experience of political sovereignty in modern times, in Israel.

Jewish nationalism, and other Jewish preservation or empowerment ideologies, are not the invention of elite groups motivated by status concerns who had manipulative access to modern techniques (e.g., print capitalism, in Benedict Anderson’s formulation) and media and educational resources. Writers who have presented Zionism along these lines⁵ may or may not be offering a fair reading of well-known works on nationalism,⁶ but they are thinking about the wrong Jewish contexts. The primary purpose and function of modern Jewish ideologies was to relieve tensions along this West-East axis; and because the eastern Jewish subgroups frequently shared the perception of backwardness, they were often proactively involved in the ideologies’ development (that is to say, Zionism is as much a mass Jewish expression as it is an elite invention). Moreover, in tune with claims and findings that have surfaced in a later generation of scholarship on nationalism, in what might be called the post-postmodernist works of researchers such as Anthony Smith,⁷ it has become less tenable to view the raw materials of Jewish ideologies, including Zionism, as articles of modernity. Instead, they are sentiments about Jewish collectivity and communal revival that persisted for centuries in the diaspora, mostly, of course, in religious tradition. When these sentiments made their way into a modern ideology such as Zionism, it was not due to the manipulation of modern media by status-hungry, secularized, elites. Instead, long-standing Jewish sensibilities found their way into modernizing ideology as a result of the skillful use of traditional, oral means of communication that were especially wed to religious sentiment (the current study underscores the impact of nationalist-minded preachers who sermonized in synagogues throughout the Pale of Settlement).

In Jewish history, the scholar who first identified this issue of agency as a continuing discussion between Eastern and Western Jewish subgroups was Jacob Katz, in his influential study Tradition and Crisis.⁸ Katz mainly limited his utilization of this East-West polarity to religious issues, as in cleavages in traditional society caused by the rise of the Hasidim (subsequent scholars such as Shmuel Feiner continue with this emphasis on religious-secular issues, identifying points of crisis and continuity in modern Jewish culture with the rise of Jewish enlighteners, the Maskilim, themselves mostly observant Jews).⁹ Katz’s focus was on Europe, in the early modern period (he believed that the eighteenth century was the turning point in Jewish history,¹⁰ but this issue of marking the divide between medieval and modern Jewish life has engaged a number of historians, with no clear consensus really emerging).¹¹

A large number of studies in modern Jewish history have centered on East-West conflicts in analyses of particular issues and processes of sociopolitical consequence to Jews. Such issues and processes include (this list is just a sample): the Ostjuden encounter between westernized German Jews and traditional Jews from eastern Europe;¹² dealings between Israel’s early Ashkenazi elite and Mizrahi immigrants in the ma’aborot tent-towns during the first years of statehood, in the 1950s;¹³ early twentieth-century relations between New York City’s uptown elite, mostly Jews of Central European descent involved in business spheres, and downtown immigrants from eastern Europe;¹⁴ tensions arising from educational work carried out after 1860, through World War I, by the Alliance Israelite Universelle, a French-based international Jewish organization, among Jewish communities in the Middle East and North Africa;¹⁵ and a number of specific incidents, including the compulsory education (haskalah mita’am) crisis in the midpoint of Nicholas I’s reign in Russia,¹⁶ and the post–World War I dispute in the world Zionist movement between Louis Brandeis’s western faction and Chaim Weizmann’s victorious eastern group.¹⁷ However, these process analyses, incident reports, and localized histories were never conceptualized within an overall framework, a kind of master narrative, of modern Jewish history,¹⁸ for a variety of intelligible reasons. These can be quickly cited.

In the aftermath of the Holocaust, and in view of Israel’s ongoing armed struggle for survival, Jewish historical writing had incentive to stress themes of unity, whereas East-West conceptualizations seemed indicative of division. Israeli scholars such as Hebrew University of Jerusalem sociologist Shmuel Noah Eisenstadt explicitly viewed the post-1948 period’s most prominent East-West topic, Israeli immigrant life in the ma’abarot transit tent camps, as a passing phase of little lasting import;¹⁹ and they developed modernization models to warrant this view. Fairly or not, generations later, radicalized Israeli scholars such as Yehuda Shenhav claimed that this sort of Israeli melting pot modernization ethos was manipulated by an Ashkenazi elite with such coercive agility that young Israelis of Mizrahi descent grew up through the 1970s in a conspiracy of silence about their own Arab-Jewish identity.²⁰ Shenhav’s claim implied that the Jews’ East-West drama was proactively erased from historical consciousness in Israel.

To date, perhaps the most ambitious attempt to present an overall theory about East-West coordinates in Jewish history draws from Edward Said’s influential study, Orientalism.²¹ This 2005 collection, Orientalism and the Jews,²² contends that Jews in many settings were seen from the outside as a nonwesternized, retrograde group to be brought into modernity, or not, in a coercively developed, or simply imposed, process. Its editors, Derek Penslar and Ivan Davidson Kalmar, concede that the adoption of a rhetoric of victimhood, originally developed by Said to describe anti-Arab stereotypes, can be problematic in many Jewish settings;²³ but the volume nonetheless experiments with the theoretical concept over a vast canvas of space and time, including premodern settings foreign to Said’s influential study, which focused on anti-Arab prejudice as a function of modern colonization processes. Casting members of a particular group as more or less passive victims of academic and political discourses that project them as being backward and eastern (Asiatic), Orientalism theory falters at the altar of historical agency. Hierarchies implicit in it between colonizing elites and objectified masses are a bad fit for dynamics important to this study, which argues that ideologies such as Zionism and the melting pot were developed with substantive effect by Jews themselves, and were used by Jews as fulcra to leverage visions of modernization.

Published, case-specific studies make no attempt to develop an arching theory about East-West interaction in modern Jewish history, and they also noticeably lack normative equilibrium. Are these East-West interactions a source of creativity or attenuation in modern Jewish culture? Are they good or are they bad?

For the most part, scholars who use the East-West measuring rods do not appear to be thinking of their subject as a tragedy. Instead, a bittersweet tone, framed around the useful, but analytically indefinite, concept of ambivalence, prevails in these studies. Typically viewing the subject from the vantage point of settled, westernized Jews in a particular context, the studies both project immigrant Jews from the East dualistically as being brothers from the same family (or people), for whom acts of fraternal assistance are enjoined by revamped traditional practices such as pidyon shevuyim (the ransoming of captives),²⁴ and also as strangers whose arrival threatens to destabilize the circumstances of the veteran group’s status, for which it had fought hard. Tellingly, two major studies of important phases in this ongoing East-West drama, the Ostjuden issue in Germany and the integration of Holocaust survivors in Israel during its first years, have this concept of familial ambivalence imprinted in their shared title, one in Hebrew and the other in English, Brothers and Strangers (or Strange Brothers).²⁵ Forthright, empirically rigorous, discussion of Ashkenazi-Mizrahi tension during early years of Israel’s history has generated suggestive new terminology, as in the case of Avi Picard’s use of the term paternalistic solidarity; but, in essence, this recent historiography also revolves around the idea of ambivalence.²⁶

No doubt, ambivalence is an apt way of thinking about East-West Jewish interactions in specific cases of individuals or defined groups. Yet the concept in no way furnishes a general theory. Its connotations of half-reluctant, sporadic, engagement, typically in circumstances where encounters with the less modern Jewish subgroup are thrust upon a settled, westernized Jewish elite by nonvoluntary or unstoppable processes of immigration or wartime annexation, are misleading.

When viewed internally, from the standpoint of the Jews’ own interests and orientations, Jewish ideologies of East-West reconciliation seem neither half-reluctant nor sporadic. Instead, they are urgently necessary negotiations; and the ideologies are abidingly engaging and empowering.

By and large, this study is written from this internally Jewish vantage point and depicts the emergence of two grand visions of Jewish settlement out of Russia, in late Ottoman Palestine and in the United States, as the result of an ongoing conversation between groups of modernized and less modernized Jews. As such, it goes against the grain of a developing trend in Jewish historiography, succinctly captured in the amusing title of a serious book, How Jewish Is Jewish History?, whereby Jewish identity in modernity is viewed basically as a hybrid phenomenon, with relatively little of its own internally generated conceptualizations to stand on.²⁷

This recent trend takes as its point of origin what one scholar has called Heine’s Law—If we want to understand the Jews we should begin by looking at the Gentiles.²⁸ Standing Heinrich Heine’s adage on its head, our book’s methodological premise is that if we want to understand Jewish ideology and politics we should begin by listening to the Jews. Just as proponents of the first viewpoint are not really dismissive of what the Jews are saying, I am hardly proposing that Jewish history can be reasonably interpreted while keeping the gentiles out of view. But here there is a significant difference of emphasis and perspective, and early parts of this study frame it. They challenge ways in which we have become accustomed to think about Jewish ideology and politics as being intertwined with, or directly responsive to, particularly assertive gentile attitudes, among them antisemitism.

This book’s claim about Jewish ideology’s oral origins in traditional Jewish settings, such as synagogue preaching, is far from ironclad. Of course, I am not trying to deny that creative prose and journalism in various languages, along with ostensibly modern performance venues (e.g., Yiddish theater), played powerful causal, or dissemination, roles in the development of Jewish ideology, in a multitude of regions; and, no doubt, the repressive condition of public life in late nineteenth-century Russia heavily contributed to the salience of private, traditional Jewish settings in ideological processes identified in this study. In all likelihood, the significance of public, including published textual, performances of Jewish ideology rises in proportion to the distance one moves westward in Jewish life, out of the stranglehold of Russia’s Pale of Settlement. No less true, Jews everywhere negotiated the terms of complicated or compelling sociopolitical ideas in intimately familiar contexts, such as the synagogue, where their hearts and minds were best inspired and composed.

This point is brought out in Joshua Shanes’s study of Jewish nationalism in Galicia, a region in the Habsburg Empire where some 900,000 Jews dwelled in 1910, in complicated interaction with other, Polish and Ruthenian, minorities, and, under political and cultural conditions that were, in some ways, a midpoint between the restrictive Russian empire and the open west.²⁹ The study carefully documents the rise of a Yiddish populist nationalist press in Galicia during the 1890s but is unable to measure its actual impact in the transmission of Jewish nationalist ideas.³⁰ In its depiction of surging enthusiasm among Galician Jewry, including parts of its Hasidic population, for Zionism during the 1897–1904 years of Herzl’s leadership, the study hints that synagogue meetings and events, not newspapers, constituted the prime venue of ideological consolidation.³¹

By emphasizing Jewish political consolidation in oral settings of direct personal encounter, and designated sacred space, our study deconstructs the regnant strategy of associating the rise of a new ideology such as Zionism with printed texts. Precisely what is interesting about Hebrew, the anointed language of Jewish nationalism, is that in years leading up to Zionism’s initial organized emergence under the Hibbat Zion framework in eastern Europe in the 1880s, it never could have functioned as a coherent creative forum for deliberation about important problems of Jewish identity. In the era of Jewish ideological formation, Hebrew writing was fundamentally indeterminate.

Opportunities presented to Jewish writers in America could only stir envy among the hard-strapped Hebrew literati in central and eastern Europe, but this does not mean that literary expression was especially important to Jewish ideological growth in the New World. Exactly because she was such a precocious and innovative figure, Emma Lazarus demonstrates this point—the inconclusive character of her literary career intriguingly parallels the indeterminacy of Hebrew writing in Europe. However sketchily, these literary examples underpin the study’s basic premise: rather than being invented creatively in the writing of secular elites, Jewish ideology came out of religion. The burden of this book is to show how this premise holds true both in the case of Zionism in eastern Europe and Ottoman Palestine and the melting pot in the United States, despite obvious divergences in the practice of religion, and the upholding or reconstruction of tradition, among Jewish communities in these different places.

Increasingly, scholars are noticing how Zionism’s evolution cannot be unhinged from the crystallization of other Jewish ideologies. Hence, in a 2018 study surveying how the Jewish state, in theory and practice, might possibly be unique, Michael Brenner underscores how Herzl’s arrangement of the first Zionist Congress in 1897 intersected with other Jewish ideological developments, namely radical assimilation, socialist Bundism, and diaspora nationalism. Zionism was only one of these responses to modern antisemitism and delayed integration, he declares.³² Surveying a quite different subject, the origins and development of human rights doctrine and policy, James Loeffler explores its underpinnings in Zionist activism. Key proponents of international human rights were lifelong Zionists. The post–World War II vision of international human rights came couched in the political language of early twentieth-century Zionism, Loeffler observes.³³ This current study draws from methodological assumptions and procedures that are operative in such recent scholarship. Like such other works, it is transnational in reach, it views Zionism as one ideological choice of several available to Jews who were working on particular, identifiable, problems, and it projects a yin and yang sort of revisionism by which liberalism, ostensibly an integrationist and individualized aspiration for rights, and Jewish nationalism, ostensibly the aspiration for collective separation, are fused as two sides of one coin rather than remaining two coins. Also, in keeping with another 2018 publication, Eliyahu Stern’s Jewish Materialism, which deliberates ambitiously about how debates regarding materialism conducted by a coterie of eastern European Jews in obscure Hebrew-, Yiddish-, and Russian-language journals might be related to the outsized role Jews played in various late nineteenth-century political and economic movements such as socialism,³⁴ this book’s analytic narrative arches far and wide, from forgotten Jewish discussions in the Pale to prominent sociocultural understandings in twentieth- and twenty-first-century America, and other outsized ideological destinations. However, compared to this latest wave of scholarship in Jewish Studies, this study’s methodological divergence is, I believe, as significant as its points of convergence.

Many of these points of departure will quickly become evident to readers and so require no extended elaboration in this introduction. Just as I am not thinking about Zionism’s origins and overlap with other Jewish ideologies within the parameters of Herzl’s activities of fin de siècle Vienna, I am not mapping liberalism in Jewish politics as one particular procedure or set of activists, as in the case of human rights devotees. Unlike the aforementioned publications, this volume’s intellectual history approach joins literary criticism to other scholarly modes (biography, organizational history, etc.) that more frequently appear in Jewish studies analyses of ideologies such as Zionism. As mentioned, this book’s internal focus, whereby the making of Jewish ideology is analyzed primarily as an outgrowth of discussions among Jews, distinguishes it from recent studies that quite relentlessly contextualize Zionism (and other Jewish ideologies) in interaction with comparable problems faced by activists and thinkers affiliated with other national groups. Dmitry Shumsky’s groundbreaking 2018 survey³⁵ of how Zionism’s most prominent leaders contemplated the fulfillment of Jewish nationalism in nonsovereign terms—as the conferral of recognition of collective rights for Jewish groups in Europe and Ottoman Palestine within imperial frameworks, under explicitly identifiable, or suggestively tacit, influences exerted by other nations’ ideologues and movements—exemplifies the opposite methodology of looking at the rise of Jewish ideologies from the outside, in comparative discussion of gentile ideological dynamics (on a few occasions, Shumsky’s interpretive conclusions overlap with my own,³⁶ but his high-history approach of analyzing exclusively leadership figures, and of focusing on one specific political issue, differs from the present study’s focus and methods). Finally, presented as a study that moves back and forth between Zionist history and American Jewish history, this work is a willful intervention, an attempt to detoxify myths of American Jewish exceptionalism. Some studies, most famously Jonathan Frankel’s 1981 Prophecy and Politics,³⁷ have chased Jewish ideologies from the Pale, or elsewhere in Europe, to North America; but even Frankel’s magisterial work evinced this tendency to focus on one specified orientation (left-wing Jewish politics, in its case), whereas this study is ecumenically diverse in its approach to Jewish ideology. It does not entertain counterintuitive conclusions about American Jewish experience (in fact, this book’s final chapter about the melting pot accentuates ways in which early twentieth-century circumstances in American Jewish life were distinctive), but it insists that American Jewish ideologists were grappling with a set of problems essentially similar to that faced by eastern European counterparts. It also insists that the transmission of Jewish tradition via modes such as preaching and emissary work was global, and in no way bypassed North America.

Beyond measurable differences of scope, and of angles of analysis and emphasis, this book’s methodology hangs on one broad, albeit less palpable, qualitative disagreement and difference, I believe. Contemporary scholarship casts ideologies as agencies onto themselves that promote identifiable final outcomes, whereas I am viewing Jewish ideology as an ongoing mediation with tradition wherein the very meaning of modernization is ever fluctuating and even reversible. To put the point much less abstractly: I do not believe that Jewish history is currently being written in recognition of the reality that should our grandchildren or great-grandchildren reside as Jews in America or Israel, the two centers of post-Holocaust Jewish life, the statistical likelihood that they will be, to our minds, modern is by no means greater than the probability that they will be traditional (mostly meaning religiously Orthodox, but the fact that other theoretically possible designations, such as premodern or postmodern, are so clumsily unacceptable in this context is itself an indication of how confused we have long been in our conceptualization of modernity). Should we not be inching toward a new methodology that views modernization not as a fixed commodity, but rather as a medium of exchange whose terms are constantly renegotiable, which frames modernity as an item of acute ambivalence, concurrently cherished and dreaded, not just by the subjects under study and their present-day readers, but by both of their descendants, one or two or more generations hence?

The issues and questions seem imponderable, but the stakes are very high. At present, there is very little in Jewish history methodology and execution that would explain why butterflies become caterpillars, why an ideology like Zionism exploded onto the scene with a hyper-modern, liberal-left ethos and then after less than a century appeared to reorient radically, jumping onto a track drenched in right-wing religiosity, and sprinkled discernibly with anti-liberal elements. As left to right, and secular to religious, transformations in Israeli and American Jewish political culture stir continuing debate, Jewish history research has powerful incentive to reassess what ideology might possibly have had to do with them.

My own explanation of these transformations pivots on the contention that Jewish tradition was embedded within Jewish ideology from the very start. The protagonists of Jewish ideological emergence and innovation were not secularized, mostly assimilated, figures like Herzl who returned to Jewishness in order to rescue Jewish tradition presumptively from itself. Instead, they were figures who worked within long existing, embedded but also readjusted, modes whose discursive rules were readily accessible to large groups of Jews, many of them traditional, some of them preliterate. These modes included preaching and emissary work. They were more likely to be rabbis than lawyers and doctors, and if they were journalists, they were not exactly writing in Herzl’s breezy feuilleton, pre-Zionist, style. More than anything, these were figures caught in the crossroads of the Jews’ peculiar East-West cultural geography, and they had an unusual communicative or charismatic capacity to bridge perceived gaps between these two poles of traditionalism and modernity.

1

The Indeterminacy of Philosemitism and Antisemitism

IN THE TIME FRAME AND sociopolitical context of this study, Jewish ideologies gained authority, often in a dire existential atmosphere, because discursive options with outside, gentile groups were blocked. Presumably, when most Jews in most places and times engage daily contacts, they mix with relatively unassuming, nonextremist, gentiles—but to clarify our theoretical intents and assumptions, we can finesse this point and consider Jewish circumstances in this roughly forty-year period, starting in the 1870s, vis-à-vis the two most intensely concentrated gentile orientations of enmity or comity, namely antisemitism and philosemitism. Jewish ideologies in this era became agencies of self-transformation because Jews really had nobody to talk to, other than their own pro-modern or traditionalist preachers, emissaries, and pioneers. Looking outside, to their foes and friends, to the antisemites and the philosemites, they had no definitive way to elucidate intents and messages.

These two, antagonistic and friendly, gentile discourses about Jews were fundamentally indeterminate. Jews developed ideologies to make sense of what they were saying to one another because they had no certain way to make sense of what the antisemites and the philosemites were really saying. Nor do historians today easily reach a consensus in retrospective efforts to decipher intents and messages of the antisemites and the philosemites.

Scholars have drawn a strong distinction between medieval and early modern Jew hatred and a new form of modern antisemitism that consolidated in Central Europe in the 1870s. Premodern antisemitism, on this theory, emanated primarily out of theology and religious myth, centered on the idea of deicide, a logically unfathomable notion that ultimately can serve as a warrant to do anything against an individual or group faulted for the crime. In other spheres, such as economics (e.g., the Shylock image of the Jew),¹ correlate accusations latched on to this long-standing, religious-based prejudice, which constitutes, in the words of one scholar, history’s longest hatred.² In contrast, modern antisemitism emerged in the second half of the nineteenth century. In a climate saturated with pseudo-scientific notions of race, subsequent to the 1859 publication of Darwin’s On the Origin of Species, this new antisemitism opportunistically grasped key concepts or phrases (competition as the natural state of affairs, survival of the naturally fit element in a species, and so on) that had prominence in schools of thought such as Social Darwinism. It also exploited new information media and penetrated political party systems.

Relying on this conventional distinction between premodern and modern forms of the phenomenon, or rebelling against it, scholars have developed three quite different sets of interpretation about the course of antisemitism, through the Holocaust. One kind of analysis argues that medieval religious bigotry set the stage for the Holocaust, though modern antisemitism significantly altered and accelerated the preexisting wealth of religious-based Jew hatred that accumulated before the mid-nineteenth century. Another interpretation underscores the singularity of modern antisemitism, including its capacity for genocide, in contrast to the supposedly localized and relatively limited scope of premodern expulsions and blood libels. The third explanation depicts Nazism as its own aberration, as a juggernaut that arose in the particular interwar socioeconomic circumstances of the Weimar Republic, without necessarily having been preordained by the new form of antisemitism that had evolved over the previous half-century (itself in contradistinction to preceding centuries of medieval anti-Jewish prejudices). None of these interpretations has acquired authoritative status, however.

The past generation of scholarship in Jewish studies has produced at least two significant volumes³ which explicitly contest the first aforementioned interpretation. Jonathan Elukin, the first such revisionist, claims that his book was prompted by a deceptively beguiling question posed by his students: How did Jewish communities continue to survive in Europe despite facing what seemed to be endless persecution, violence and expulsion?⁴ Possibly, these scholars were responsive to an early twenty-first-century, multicultural, classroom mindset about diversity and cooperation between ethnonational groups; but their critique disputing the idea that antisemitic persecution constituted the dominant circumstance of premodern Jewish life is not really new. A well-established historiographic school associated with the scholar Salo Baron, and a censorious critique he issued in 1963 regarding the lachrymose conception of Jewish history, contests the view of antisemitic persecution as the dominant fact of premodern Jewish life.⁵ And with no certain relation to the Baron historiographic school, scholars in past decades have released argumentative books expressly designed to overturn Zionist interpretations of Jews as an everlastingly weak and persecuted people outside of Eretz Israel⁶ (no vulgar sociological assessment about the motivations of such scholarship is easy to come by, because these reassessments of diaspora experience and antisemitism have been produced by scholars who work in diaspora settings, and also in Israel).⁷

In a stimulating discussion, Antisemitism Old and New,⁸ the historian Shulamit Volkov analyzes the writings of historians who have equivocated about the second above-mentioned contention, a proposition holding that the Holocaust was ushered in by the rise of modern antisemitism. On this second contention, the Holocaust is not seen as an instantaneous eruption wrought by the chaos of World War I and the failed armistice, the ensuing economic crash, and the Nazi takeover. Instead, it results from various modern developments that took shape in the 1870s.

Many aspects of this argument, Volkov shows, are objectively problematic. For instance, can the formation of antisemitic political parties in late nineteenth-century Europe really be seen as a distinctively important and modern element if these parties never displayed significant electoral power before the Nazis (in Germany, even in their heyday, between 1893 and 1907, these parties never carried more than 2 percent of the votes)?⁹

A number of considerations—the evident incapability of antisemitic parties in Germany, the underlying tentativeness of the new creed in the hearts and minds of the hateful men such as Wilhelm Marr¹⁰ and Adolf Stoecker,¹¹ who first designated the term and brought it into politics, its apparent comparability to antisemitic discourse in democratic lands, such as France, in which a genocidal party like the Nazis did not consolidate before World War II¹²—militate against certitude with respect to pre-Holocaust antisemitism in central Europe, dating from the 1870s. Just as there is no clear answer as to how representative Jews in Germany could have, and should have, responded to it, there linger serious questions as to how historians should position this intermediary brand of antisemitism, in relation to the age-old form of religious antisemitism that preceded it, and genocidal Nazism that succeeded it.

The third interpretive possibility assesses the genocide in light of the singular terms specific to the time and circumstances of the Nazis.¹³ First and last, the Holocaust was a Nazi crime. Such an assertion says a lot, though it skirts around a number of issues, from the level of complicity of ordinary Germans in Nazi policy to the relationship between the economic failure of the 1930s and the Nazis’ rise, which excite considerable discussion in laymen and academic settings. To conclude, as Volkov does, that the Nazi’s genocidal policies were of a different category¹⁴ is an entirely sensible claim, both in terms of the brutal and intense character of the crime and also with respect to the globalized racism inherent in the Nazi scheme to cleanse all lands of Jewish contamination (Yehuda Bauer and many others have emphasized the Holocaust’s ideological transnationalism as one of its distinguishing characteristics).¹⁵ Bringing our discussion full circle, this is the sort of claim people simultaneously believe and disbelieve—of course, the Nazis’ policies and acts were of a different category, just as it is equally true that the Holocaust had to have had some relationship with the long history of antisemitism that preceded it.

This brief summary suffices as indication of modern antisemitism’s elusively pliant indeterminacy, both in the retrospective analysis of scholars, and also as seen by Jews who by the end of the nineteenth century had cause to get a handle on it. For these Jews it was extraordinarily difficult to assess how the new forms of antisemitism in the 1870s might have differed from medieval Jew hatred, just as it remains hard today to adduce precisely how such late nineteenth-century antisemitism became connected to the Nazis’ genocidal policy.

A no less challenging and enlightening way of identifying Jewish isolation on the edge of modernity, and of ascertaining why Jews needed to develop their own modernization ideologies because they had no way of decoding and grasping what gentiles were saying about them, is to examine what their friends were talking about, and how their well-intentioned messages might have been processed. Since the indeterminacy of philosemitism is a less familiar topic, it warrants somewhat more extended treatment here. Fortunately, one particular text, George Eliot’s Daniel Deronda, furnishes convenient and substantive focus to this discussion.

Eliot’s novel represents the public promise and inner tension of philosemitism, a phenomenon that well predates the onset of modernity in the era of the French Revolution, but which gained semantic designation and new measures of coherence as an antonym to the modern emergence of its counterpart, antisemitism, exactly in the period of Deronda’s 1876 publication.¹⁶ As a precocious, extraordinarily rich and complex philosemitic testament, the novel reflects and recasts a nineteenth-century English cultural climate saturated in premillennarian notions of Jewish restoration in the Holy Land,¹⁷ and it also trenchantly expresses years of study and reflection undertaken by its authoress regarding Judaism, German philosophy, individual ethical burden, the character of British society present and future, nationalism, gender roles, and marriage.

Eliot’s long-standing fascination with Jewish culture and issues has been studied in detail, and can be quickly summarized. In 1838, at the age of nineteen, when she made her first excursion to London, "the chief thing she wanted to buy was Josephus’s History of the Jews."¹⁸ Her translation of D. F. Strauss’s Das Leben Jesu, a project undertaken in 1844–1846,¹⁹ provided an early encounter with Jewish religious concepts, as well as with modern investigations of Jesus’s historic, mythic, or divine character. She also struggled in this period to assimilate racial theories of Jewish identity conveyed in Disraeli’s novels. In one 1842 letter, Eliot dismissed as an inferior impulse Disraeli’s exultingly presented ideas about the fellowship of race.²⁰

More than anything, Eliot’s friendship with Emanuel Deutsch, a Silesia-born scholar employed by the British Museum in mid-level capacities incommensurate with his accomplishments,²¹ alerted Eliot to difficulties faced by Jews in England. The two were friends from 1867 until Deutsch’s death in 1873. Deutsch gained international renown after his 1867 publication of an article on the Talmud in the Quarterly Review; reprinted in numerous languages, and written in a liberal, ecumenical key, the treatise underscored striking parallels of dogma and parable, of allergy and proverb, exhibited by the Gospel and the Talmudical writings.²² Deutsch’s erudition, his insistence on Judaism’s unique contributions and also its ethical interlocking with other religious traditions, and his enthused response to an 1869 visit to Ottoman Palestine (on a trip where he was invited to witness the opening of the Suez Canal), profoundly influenced Eliot. Among many other things, the inchoately overpowering sense of destiny evoked by the protagonist Daniel Deronda’s planned journey to the East seems based on Deutsch’s journeys (the scholar died in Alexandria).

In a famous Hand and Banner Pub sequence²³ in Daniel Deronda, Eliot depicts a dialogue between exponents of various Jewish viewpoints, running along a spectrum from proto-nationalism to outright assimilation. A somewhat jarring interlude of political philosophy in a dramatic narrative, the daring scene is famous as the novel’s first and fullest explication of Eliot’s own proto-Zionist viewpoint (advocated by her quasi-spokesman, an ailing visionary named Mordecai whose real name is Ezra, a token of Eliot’s interest in the project of a Jewish return to Palestine inspired by biblical characters).²⁴ In fascinating detail,²⁵ the scholar William Baker uncovers the extraordinary depths of research undertaken by Eliot to represent these contrasting, pro-assimilation and pro-nationalist, Jewish viewpoints. The assimilationist voices draw upon the writings of Reform rabbi Abraham Geiger and the Science of Judaism (Wissenschaft des Judentums) founder Leopold Zunz, whereas Mordecai’s arguments about Jewish heritage, memory, and popular will bear the stamp of writings by the Jewish historian Heinrich Graetz, the German Lutheran theologian Franz Delitzsch, Wissenschaft scholar Salomon Munk, and the scholar Moritz Steinschneider. Mystic ideas from the Kabbalah that thread through the novel (and which are laced heavily in Mordecai’s nationalist mentoring of the protagonist, Deronda) rely on yet another scholarly source, Christian David Ginsburg, and his mid-1860s publication, The Kabbalah, Its Doctrines, Development and Literature.²⁶ The research underpinnings of Eliot’s philosemitic treatise are significant.

Upon the novel’s initial publication in serial form, in early 1876, Eliot worried about how her reading public would assimilate Deronda’s Jewish parts. The Jewish element, she confided in her journal, was likely to satisfy nobody.²⁷ When Harriet Beecher Stowe, herself the author of a renowned political novel whose family milieu was heavily steeped in philosemitism,²⁸ innocently remarked to Eliot that the book’s English parts suited her taste more than its Jewish sections, Deronda’s creator responded defensively. Eliot’s October 1876 reply to Stowe revealed the innermost motivations of her philosemitic apologetic: "I expected from first to last in writing it [Daniel Deronda], that it would create much stronger resistance, and even repulsion, than it has actually met with. But precisely because I felt that the usual attitude of Christians toward Jews is—I hardly know whether to say more impious or more stupid when viewed in the light of their professed principles, I therefore felt urged to treat Jews with such sympathy and understanding as my nature and knowledge could attain to."²⁹

For decades, prominent critics essentially boycotted the Jewish portions of the novel. This position is exemplified by F. R. Leavis’s 1948 volume, The Great Tradition,³⁰ which refers to the novel as though it is titled after its gentile heroine, as though it were named Gwendolen Harleth, and flatly rejects as bad its Jewish sections.³¹

Reversing Eliot’s original apprehension, some late twentieth-century and early twenty-first-century critiques of Deronda underscore the importance of the novel’s Jewish sections but criticize their connections to imperialist practices in the Victorian era. One critic argues that Eliot went much farther than contemporary English Jews were willing to go—"it was the English gentiles of the time, not the Jews, who were fascinated with the idea