"Exile, History and the Nationalization of Jewish Memory: Some Reflections on the Zionist notion of...

Journal of Levantine Studies

Exile, History, and the Nationalization of Jewish Memory: Some Reflections on the Zionist Notion of History and Return*

Amnon Raz-KrakotzkinBen-Gurion University of the Negev

The phrase “return to history” is one of the ways in which the activities and historical significance of the Zionist movement have commonly been presented. This concept is closely associated with other facets of the Zionist project that were described in terms of “return”: the “return to the land” and the “return to the source”—that is, to the core of what was perceived as the authentic Jewish national and cultural existence.1 All these associated expressions developed out of the same consciousness, which is also reflected in the concept “negation of exile.”

In its elementary and most common sense, the phrase “return to history” was perceived as signifying the intention of turning the dispersed Jews into a sovereign national subject that can determine its own fate and assume responsibility for its own existence. In that sense Zionism was considered to be the solution to the Jewish question and the conclusion of both the crisis of Jewish existence and the prominent role of anti-Semitism in modern culture. It was based on the accepted interpretation of the term “history” in nineteenth-century culture, which made the nation its exclusive subject and carrier.

Yet, however fundamental this aspect is for the understanding of the rise of the Zionist movement, this presentation is insufficient and even misleading. It ignores the political-theological dimension of the concept and hence the concrete consequences of the national-territorial definition of Jewish collectivity and Jewish history. The “return to history” in Zionist discourse refers first of all to the view according to which the present Jewish settlement in and sovereignty over Palestine/Eretz Yisrael is the return of the Jews to the land regarded as their homeland and

Vol. 3, No. 2, Winter 2013, pp. 37-70

38 Exile, Histor y, and the Nationalization of Jewish Memor y

described as empty and out of history prior to their return. The “return to history” was thus interpreted as a return to the national political sovereignty ascribed to ancient Israel, through a rejection of the passivity ascribed to the Jews of the exile and in protest against messianic expectations for divine intervention. Zionism was thus described as the conclusion of Jewish history and the fulfillment of centuries-long Jewish expectations. This perception is certainly not determined from anti-Semitism and discrimination but was the framework that dominated and defined Zionist consciousness and activity.

In this article I will try to analyze the notions of “history” and “return” in Zionist discourse in order to clarify their political and cultural implications. To answer the main question of this inquiry—what is the “history” to which the “return” refers—I will investigate the meaning and function of the phrase “return to history” in two different sets of terminologies: the theological terms that defined Jewish-Christian polemics and the terms “culture,” “civility,” and “ethnicity” as used in the discourse of modern nationalism and colonialism. I will examine the phrase in different historical contexts to analyze its meaning in the constitution of the Zionist historical myth. Accordingly I will elaborate the following arguments:

First, theologically and in the terms of premodern Christian-Jewish polemics, the phrase “return to history” expresses an acceptance of the Christian perception of history that regarded the Jews’ rejection of the Gospel as their exclusion from history—that is, from the domain of grace. In this sense the “return to history”—the idea that there is a “history” from which the Jews alone were excluded—meant the return to the history of salvation. Thus, from a Jewish point of view, to accept the Enlightenment perception of history meant accepting that attitude whose rejection had previously defined Jewish identity.

Second, the use of an Enlightenment perception of history, “romantic” terminology, and the modern national model of history for the representation of the Jewish past reveals the obvious Orientalist dimension of the secularization of the concept of history. It meant accepting the notion of history as a term that referred to the Christian West and consequently defined Jewish identity as European and opposed to the Muslim Orient.

Third, in Zionist discourse both the theological-redemptive and the Orientalist aspects were integrated in a way that illuminated them both. The articulation of Jewish collectivity and history as national was not a replacement of the theological myth but rather an interpretation of the Christian-Jewish myth. On a different level, Orientalism was essential for the shaping of Zionism. The consciousness

39Journal of Levantine Studies

embodied in the phrase “return to history” meant the acceptance of the very terms and principles that generated the exclusion of the Jews in Europe.

Fourth, the return to history and the return to the land meant the obliteration of the history of the land and the existence of its inhabitants. It also determined the removal of the Jews from the multiple local histories in which they had existed in exile in order to include them in one common, separate narrative. In both cases it determined the boundaries of political discourse and the suppression of history.

The following discussion is not intended to be a description of the historical development of a central aspect of Zionist self-perception: It is an attempt to analyze Zionist consciousness and to write the history of the present by revealing the meaning of “history” and “return” in different contexts, different discursive frameworks, and from different historical perspectives. The intent is to reveal the dialectics of “exile” and “history” and to refer to the critical potential found in such a reading of the concept of “exile.” It also reveals that there are other options to define Jewish collective existence in Palestine/Eretz Yisrael. Zionism should be seen as an interpretation of the theological myth via its articulation as a national narrative. This, however, is not an exclusive understanding of the previous religious discourse, which in fact was based on the denial of previous Jewish traditions and, most directly, on the experience and image of the old Jewish community in Palestine, ha-Yishuv ha-Yashan, which was described in obvious Orientalist terms as an expression of exilic “passive,” “degenerated” existence.

The relevance of this discussion is not limited to the understanding of Zionist historical consciousness and Israeli culture. Discussion of Zionism provides us with the opportunity to integrate various issues and perspectives—those of the colonized with those of the colonizer. The critique relies on previous Jewish attitudes toward history, including trends that have developed within the boundaries of Zionism and Israeli culture. Moreover, the historians I discuss here expressed a critical position toward the dominant Zionist approach that denied any value to the histories of the Jews during the exilic period. At the same time, the critique of Zionist historical consciousness reveals the productivity to be found in the concept of exile—the concept on whose rejection Zionist culture had been established.

* * * The underlying assumption in describing the Zionist project as a return is that until the Zionist immigration and the establishment of the State of Israel, the Jews had existed outside history, as if their dispersion and the absence of political independence meant that their history had come to its temporal end with the destruction of the


Second Temple. The Jewish people, subsequent to their loss of sovereignty, were viewed as a bereft, ahistorical entity in a world in which other peoples apparently possessed a putatively continuous history.

At first sight it may appear that this attitude is based on and follows traditional Jewish historical consciousness as expressed in the concept of “exile”—galut. Indeed, one aspect of the concept of exile is the view that the destruction of the Temple represented the end of history, in the sense of a succession of events of sacral significance.

However, the historical perception embodied in the concept “exile” is different from and even opposed to the perception embodied in the concept “return to history,” which presupposes the existence of a history from which the Jews alone were excluded. That view—that the world was in a state of salvation that had passed over the Jews—had no place, and could have no place, in premodern Jewish thought. On the other hand, it fits the dominant Christian attitude toward the Jews and their history.

On the most basic level, the term “exile” indeed referred to the dispersal of the Jews as well as to their politically and socially inferior status. Yet this inferior status is only one aspect of the concept, and in most cases the understanding of the term was not reduced to the lack of sovereignty and existence outside the land of Israel—although these were certainly important aspects in the images of redemption. It was regarded as evidence of the condition of the entire world. Exile refers to a state of absence, points to the imperfection of the world, and conserves the desire for its replacement. According to several authorities (mainly kabbalists), it describes the state of the deity—that is to say, God’s exile from history. According to this Jewish viewpoint, the exilic existence was not outside history; rather, it embodied the very condition of history. The Jews manifested the condition of history; they were not outside history! They certainly did not wish to return to “history” as such.2 The concept of exile engendered a historical perception that permeated Talmudic literature—both in halacha and Midrash, two genres that defined and expressed Jewish communal institutions and Jewish self-image. Exile served as the axis that determined Jewish rituals and communal existence itself as meaningful.

Premodern Jews developed various theories and perceptions of history (like the doctrine of the Four Kingdoms or the various messianic speculations). Providence played an important role in their thinking, and concrete events were interpreted as manifestations of a divine plan. But this does not mean they saw history as a series of events or believed the Jews were interested in joining history.3 Memory was a crucial category and was the core of both the praxis and exegesis that developed


after the destruction of the Temple (as reflected in different ways in sacred days like Passover and the Ninth of Av). Memory was not, however, central to history after the destruction, apart from historical accounts of the chain of halachic authority that were intended to demonstrate the uninterrupted continuity of the transmission of the Oral Torah. In major and canonical texts, exile from the land is considered the end of “history” as a significant phenomenon. Each exilic community could have its own history, as local tradition and local identity, but not in the framework of a global history.4

The ahistorical perception of exile received its full, concrete articulation in the framework of Jewish-Christian polemics and in the response to Christian attitudes. On this basis one can examine the implications of the expression “return to history.” Jewish and Christian historical perceptions emerged simultaneously after the destruction of the Second Temple, in reference to that event and in the course of a polemical/dialogical discourse. The polemics were the site where the competitive religions and identities were shaped and defined, one against the other.

Jews and Christians shared many aspects of historical consciousness. Both saw the present as a temporary, transitional period and both had the expectation of its messianic conclusion. Many aspects of the interpretation of the past (and the Bible) were based on similar conceptions and were frequently the result of dialogue/disputation. In the first centuries following the destruction of the Temple, Jews and Christians also shared the perception of the present as exile, as the end of history as a meaningful sequence of events. Generally, Christianity also provided an ahistorical perception with respect to the period between the First and the Second Coming of the Messiah. Perhaps influenced by Hellenistic ahistorical trends of the period, which resisted the idea of history, both Christians and Jews shared the idea that history is meaningless, that writing the history of the present is irrelevant.5 Nevertheless, the main difference, and the core of the polemics, concerned precisely the question of the status of the present and its relation to the past, a parallel to the question of the relation between the New and Old Testaments. The exile of the Jews and its historical-theological significance was the key question in the polemics and was a matter of crucial importance in the process of self-definition of Jews and Christians alike. Christianity saw the period after the Crucifixion as the Age of Grace (sub-gratia, as defined by St. Augustine), and regarded the destruction of the Temple as evidence of this. Jews rejected this view, claiming that the world was in exile and that their existential situation was evidence of this.6 It is in the framework of polemics that the concept of exile gained its relevant meaning to the present discussion.


In this context Christian authors developed a notion of a type of historical progress, from the Old to the New Testament, with a consequent distinction between those who were under grace and those who were outside it. In this connection the concept of exile involved a definite rejection of “history” as the context of salvation, as an essential manifestation of “truth.” The Jews were perceived as an anachronism, a relic of the past that existed in the present.7

The perception embodied in the phrase “return to history” follows, therefore, from the basic Christian attitude concerning the Jews and their destiny, an attitude that denied the Jewish destiny. It assumed the existence of a significant history from which the Jews alone were excluded. In the Christian view the Jewish exile was indeed a retreat from history defined as the unfolding of grace. Christianity saw the exile of the Jews as evidence of and punishment for their rejection of the Gospel, which consequently led to their exit from history. The Jews, in their stubbornness, had taken themselves out of history when they refused to accept the Gospel. Christian authors also claimed that history would reach its fulfillment only when the Jews returned to it—that is, when they accepted Christianity and the truth of the Gospel. This is evidence of the Christian desire for the Jews to return to history—in other words, that they convert to Christianity.

The concept of history, and consequently that of redemption, was given a different understanding in the context of the Enlightenment and post- Enlightenment. The Enlightenment allegedly offered a different context, one in which the sphere of grace was replaced by reason and a new notion of universalism and humanity; it was a context that could, at least theoretically, also embrace the Jews. Generally speaking, the Enlightenment created a linear-teleological model of history that replaced the Christian concept of grace with a new model that was centered on human progress. The Enlightenment view offered an outlook that at least appeared to be neutral from the religious point of view, but it nevertheless persisted in seeing the Jews from the premodern Christian perspective that viewed them as being outside history. This is the framework in which the understanding of the term “history,” to which the return in the Zionist phrase refers, was established.

Without denigrating the shift represented by the Enlightenment, the theological dimension of the modern perception of history is undeniable, though the nature of this link is under continual debate.8 It certainly cannot be ignored with regard to the discussion of the Jews, their history, and their return. It is important to emphasize that from the Jewish point of view, the adoption of this concept of history expressed a renunciation, even an abnegation, of the Jewish position in the Jewish-Christian polemic—the belief that the world is in exile—and an acceptance of the Christian


view according to which the world was in an era of grace, though in a secularized form, a new kind of “rational” grace. In fact, it was precisely in the modern context that the idea of “grace” came to be completely fused with the idea of “history”—a shift that can be traced to Protestant thinking. It was in this context that the concept of the new (modern) era—the basis of the notion of the “return to history”—was established. While the origins of this concept may lie far back in the medieval period (for instance in the theology of Joachim of Fiora), the Protestant formulation of this idea was a crucial stage in the transition to the secular vision of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. As I will argue, the Protestant shift and the terminology it provided are essential for the analysis of the Zionist perception of history.

This reveals the fundamental tension that governed and directed the whole of Jewish discourse in modern Europe, and it may be presented as the tension between the notions of exile and history in their modern sense. A basic feature of this approach was the idea that the present was an era of enlightenment and emancipation (in contrast to the period presented as “the Dark Ages”), an era that was definitely “nonexile.” The dialectic of assimilation postulated an acceptance of Christianity’s ambivalent attitude toward Judaism and reformulated it. The secularization of the Jews did not involve the secularization of the concept of exile but, rather, its rejection. In other words, the modern definition of Jewish identity was not based on the secularization of Judaism but on the secularization of Christianity. The tendency to detach Jewish identity from the Jewish-Christian polemic and to define it as autonomous paradoxically resulted in a view of history similar to that which had molded Christianity’s ambivalent attitude toward the Jews. The discourse concerning the Jews was based on the view that they were “outside history” and sought to reintegrate them into it. This attitude internalized the previous Christian-Jewish polemic through the acceptance of a Christian perspective.

* * *

This framework may help explain the basic tension that characterizes the whole of modern Jewish discourse and reveal the meaning and implications of regarding the process of Zionist settlement as “return.” Carlo Ginzburg has recently pointed out the link between Christian ambivalence toward the Jews and toward the modern perceptions of history and the notion of “collective memory.” In his thought neither the Greeks nor the Jews had anything equivalent to our conception of historical perspective:

Only a Christian like Augustine, who was concerned with the fateful relationship between the Christians and Jews, between the Old and New Testament, was able to


conceive this idea, which later developed into Hegel’s Aufhebung, a concept which all of us—Jews, Christians, Hegelians and non-Hegelians—share. This was the idea that the past must be understood both on its own terms and as a link in a chain leading to ourselves.9

Concerning the modern representation of the Jews, both dimensions of ambivalence are integrated in a way that may clarify a central aspect of modern Jewish discourse and the notion of secularization. In the Christian view the Jews were witnesses to the truth of the Gospel as successors to the Jews of Christ’s period, on the one hand, and were a people who rejected the Gospel (and thus persisted in their stubbornness and blindness), on the other. In the modern Jewish context, and particularly in Zionism, this ambivalent relationship was replaced by an attitude toward the Jewish exilic past. On the one hand, the present was conceived as the realization of aspirations that had existed throughout Jewish history that could not be realized in the conditions of exile. On the other hand, the past was conceived as a partial reality upon whose negation the present was founded. In accepting the values of modern culture as the basis for their self-definition, the Jews in fact submitted to the Christian European “gospel”—to the view that the world was in an Age of Grace and that history represented progress.

The attempt to detach Jewish history from this theological framework demonstrates its obvious Orientalist dimension.10 In the framework of the Enlightenment and romanticism, theological discourse was partly replaced by and in fact re-articulated with the notion of history as referring to the West and as opposed to what was then considered to be outside history. The dialectics of history-exile, Christian-Jew, were at the same time formulated as the dialectics of West-East, colonizer-colonized. The analysis of modern Jewish discourse demonstrates the inherent Orientalism associated with secularization. Secularization involved an obvious identification with the West and a distinction from the East.11

The origin of this shift (that is to say the context in which we can discover its articulation) can be traced to early modern discourse, the context in which the interrelation between the theological and the ethnic-Orientalist definitions of culture was created. It was associated with the rise of the Hebraist discourse, namely the study of Jewish traditions by Christians and from a Christian point of view. Hebraism was established at the same time as and as a part of the rise of Orientalist studies, and it was later academically institutionalized in Orientalist departments. The association of the Jew with the Arab in European culture made the attitude toward the “Orient” (in the sense of its image in the crystallizing “West”) a crucial aspect of the redefinition of Jewish identity—and the shift from exile to history it


involved. While it was commonly presented as a shift in Christian attitudes toward Judaism and the Jews, in practical terms Hebraist discourse reestablished ambivalence toward the Jews by associating them with the Orient: Hebraism was founded on the assumption that Hebrew literature contains an original and authentic knowledge that the Jews themselves could not really understand.

To understand the meaning of writing history, and accordingly the meaning of return to history, we should consider Hebraist discourse as a mediator between traditional Jewish discourse and modern Jewish consciousness. Hebraist scholars created the perspective, the terminology, and the basic literature of later modern Jewish discourse and modern Jewish studies.12 It is important to point out that the very term “Jewish history” as an autonomous field was first suggested and developed by Protestant theologians who hoped for the conclusion of that history through the conversion of the Jews. Significantly, the first to treat Jewish history as a separate topic, and the first to write the history of the Jews as a homogeneous narrative, was the exiled Huguenot Jacques Basnage.13 Basnage depicts Jewish history as a history of suffering caused by the oppression of the Catholic Church, and in the last chapter of his book he raises the wish for their return—in other words, for their conversion as the conclusion of history. Though one can agree that Basnage’s composition “is far from our notion of critical history,” he was the one who established the framework that in general was accepted also by later Jewish historians.14 His project symbolizes the shift from premodern to later modern Jewish consciousness. The modern perspective permitted the acceptance of this view without any need for conversion. Basnage’s last chapter is dedicated to the means of enhancing the conversion of the Jews, insisting that it was Catholic policy that had prevented this from occurring long before. Yet this image was not so far from the Zionist image of the “New Jew,” who was supposed to replace the exilic Jew. In both Christian and Zionist thought, the “end of history” is conceived as a Jewish return: a return to the church and hence to the Gospel in Christian thought and a return to history (which is also a “return to the source” and to a common “gospel”) in Zionist thought. Moreover, as we have seen, this also means the acceptance of a secularized form of the basic Christian approach to Jewish history.

The interrelation between the theological and the cultural modes of representation was crystallized later within the framework of the Enlightenment and nationalism and the reformulation of the “Jewish question” in the context of the centralist state. The discourse on Jews and Judaism at that period embodied both the continuity of and the rupture between the theological debate and the discourse of ethnicity, race, and nation—while integrating them both. In this context the expected conversion


of the Jews was allegedly replaced (but in fact reformulated) by the desire to bring about their civil regeneration. The main issues of the debate were the possibility of incorporating Jews in the centralized state (and, later, the nation-state) and making them citizens and the possibility of cancelling the restrictions placed on them.

The debate—especially in Germany, but in different ways in other countries—centered on the question of whether it was possible to “reform” or “civilize” the Jews: in other words, to restore them to history. In general, the debate was between two positions. On one side were those—such as Christian Dohm, whose famous 1781 treatise generated the discussion—who claimed that the present condition of the Jews was the result of the oppression they had suffered and that only the abolition of all restrictions would lead to their reform and integration into European society.15 On the other side were those—such as the noted Orientalist and biblical scholar Johann David Michaelis—who claimed that this condition was the sign of an essential difference that was a result of their being an Oriental nation whose nature was alien to European culture (and also to biblical Israel). Thus, despite the differences between them, both sides assumed that the current condition of the Jews was distorted and that in order to be “civilized” they had to be drastically changed.

As has been recently presented by various scholars, such as Jonathan Hess, this debate demonstrates the Orientalism inherent in the notion of “secularization.”16 This discourse was one expression of how the European “self” as the exclusive carrier of “history” was defined through the alienation and exclusion of the “other,” with direct connection to Orientalist and colonial discourse. The main issue can also be presented as the question of whether the Oriental nature attributed to the Jews was essential and intrinsic, and thus in opposition to “secular” civil norms, or was rather a result of their legal condition and of their oppression. Following Hess we can simplify and say that while Christian Dohm argued that the annulment of certain limitations on the Jews would promote their “regeneration,” Michaelis rejected that supposition, emphasizing their inherent “Oriental essence” instead, in order to support the claim that they were incapable of integrating into Christian European society.17 Both sides of the debate agreed that the Jews should be regenerated.

According to Dohm the Jews’ “return to history” had to take place in Europe through a process of reeducation. This view was shared by many European Jewish thinkers in the nineteenth century and was the foundation of the redefinition of Jewish identity. Dominant Jewish thought regarded the Jews as being out of history, a group in need of reform in order to be integrated into Europe. The demand for reform raised by thinkers such as Abraham Geiger was based on the assumption that since the Middle Ages the Jews had been out of history and their anachronistic law


needed to be updated in order to return them to civilization, namely to the history of the West.18 This is a brief outline of a much more complicated phenomenon, but it emphasizes the main aspects that directed this complexity. The link between the Jewish question and Orientalism was basically parallel to the question of whether the Jews are solely a “religion” (a confession), and thus capable of integrating into European civil society, or a distinctive nation, Oriental and alien to European values. Generally speaking, mainstream European Jews turned to characterizing Judaism as a religion, while de-emphasizing all those same elements that were perceived as being Levantine or national.

Zionist thinkers reacted against these assimilationist tendencies and offered what they thought was an authentic Jewish alternative to both assimilation and orthodoxy. Yet it was within Zionist ideology that this tendency reached its most radical form. In Zionism the return was supposed to occur outside Europe, in the East, but it was explicitly a return to the common source of the West, to the origins of what was considered as common to Judaism and Christianity. Zionism accepted the claim (raised by opponents of Jewish emancipation) that the Jews are an autonomous nation (in the modern European sense) but a Western nation, shaped in contrast to the Orient. The narration of Jewish history as a national history meant its assimilation to the Western narrative. The return was to the origin of Western culture, of which the Jews were considered the outstanding representatives, to a place in the theological narrative that constituted the Western, especially Protestant, imagination. Thus, paradoxically, the exodus from Europe and the hope of creating a separate Jewish entity in the east was a way of joining the Christian West through a complete identification with the Western self-image. It was perceived as the basis for joining—for being assimilated into—the history of the Christian West, the narrative of European redemption.

Despite its explicit rejection of the various assimilationist solutions, Zionist discourse fundamentally remained within the boundaries of modern Jewish discourse and constituted a position within that discourse.19 Moreover, Jewish European discourse also produced different critical attitudes and modes of resistance intended to define autonomous spaces of “exile” within European culture and the centralist state. One can define the modern Jew as being located between “Europe” and the “Orient,” between assimilation and resistance, in a hybrid place that produced continuous tension and led to varying responses, whether “assimilationist” or “subversive.” Side by side with the rise of modern Jewish historiography, with its intention of returning the Jews to history as a distinctive group, a significant theme in modern Jewish thought was “resistance to history,” to use David Myers’s words.20


In fact, it was in the modern context that the term “exile” could fully receive its meaning specifically in opposition to the modern notion of progress and the idea of progressive history. In the context of the rise of modern historical consciousness, Orthodox Judaism was founded on the explicit objection to progressive history and to such a return.21

Zionism, on the other hand, denied any kind of distinction and was based on the demand for a total integration of the political and the national-theological, a total integration into history and its images. Its fundamental position involved the definition of the Jewish state as the ultimate conclusion of history.22 The Zionist position aimed to eliminate the ambivalence that was preserved in modern Jewish attitudes and in the dialectics of assimilation.23 The rejection of assimilation was a rejection of the ambivalent position inherent in modern Jewish discourse. The very intention of defining Jews and Judaism as a nation was to accommodate Judaism to the originally Christian model and to Christian perceptions of Judaism. The condemnation of assimilation was, in fact, the rejection of the ambiguity and “in-betweenness.”

In spite of the hegemonic status of the radical approach of “negation of exile,” the tendency to establish the new Hebrew culture on a total denial of all aspects of exilic culture and rabbinic tradition, it was never fully realized. Critical voices continued to question and resist it.

* * *The Zionist national-territorial interpretation of Jewish history represents a fusion of the two concepts of return: the theological and the modern. It was explicitly an adaptation of the Jewish religious imagination to the modern model of national history, with its division of history into three periods: ancient, medieval, and modern. In this framework, the concept of “exile” was given its reductive political significance as the “Middle Ages.” Consequently modernity was the manifestation of redemption and Zionism its conclusion. The writing of Jewish history, in a European language and with European concepts, was itself a kind of return to history in which the present—the modern period—was regarded as an era of redemption through which the Jews, including the Jews of the past, were integrated. The shift from the theological-polemical to the national-political involved a new interpretation of the concept of exile and was perceived as parallel to the shift from exile to redemptive history. Narrating the history of the Jews as a European nation meant also portraying the Jews in accordance with the Christian vision: as the origin of the West, as the original model of the nation.


The combination of religious language and national-romantic terminology contributed another dimension to this notion. The role of religious motifs and images is, of course, not unique to Zionism.24 Zionism was unique in that its national consciousness was from the beginning an interpretation of the Jewish-Christian religious myth and not its replacement. In other words, not only was a theological dimension attached to the idea of the nation but nationalism itself was a reinterpretation of the Judeo-Christian theological myth, adapting it to the modern-romantic concept of history and, in particular, accepting the European point of view concerning history. Moreover, nationalism was described as the realization of messianic desires.

This applies especially to the notion known as secular Zionism. Secularism was manifested in the abandonment of halachic law and the rejection of rabbinic authority, but at the same time it presented a theological consciousness—even if as a secular theology. Secularization was expressed by a nationalization of religion, on the one hand, and by the sacralization of the political sphere on the other. Nationalism was considered the sole and exclusive interpretation of the religious myth, of scripture. God was excluded, but his word continued to direct the discourse and to serve as a source of legitimacy for the process of colonization and dispossession. A national theology was the source of a wide variety of interpretations, but underlying them all was the perception of return and the redemptive fulfillment of history.25 The act of colonization was represented in obvious terms of redemption and as the realization of the longings of generations of Jews. The sources of the images of redemption were varied, but all were connected with the messianic-religious myth of exile and redemption.26 This view of the present as the realization of Jewish history prevented any simple separation of religious-messianic from national concepts.

The intention of the formulators of Zionist ideology was to give the Jewish idea of redemption a new interpretation, one that would distinguish it from the centrality of the Temple and the desire for its restoration found in Jewish prayers and messianic aspirations. They developed an ambivalent and obscure attitude toward messianism. On the one hand, messianism was rejected as being merely a passive expectation of divine intervention as well as being an apocalyptic and unrealistic image. On the other hand, messianism was interpreted as a national myth of return to a prior order, and Zionism was perceived as its fulfillment.27 To make this interpretation, however, it was necessary to accept both the basic Christian viewpoint with regard to Jewish history and the concept of culture underlying the Western view of history. This did not eliminate the apocalyptic elements of Jewish messianic traditions; rather, it led to their repression or postponement to a distant future. It generated a


permanent messianic tension that accompanies Israeli existence. In addition, other religious motifs that constituted Zionist culture were adopted in a way similar to that of religion in other nationalisms.28

* * *

On a fundamental level Zionist historians such as Yitzhak (Fritz) Baer, Gershom Scholem, and Ben-Zion Dinur (known as “the Jerusalemite school”), who dealt with the medieval/exilic Jews, developed a critical stance vis-à-vis the dominant radical interpretation of the negation of exile as the total negation of all aspects of Jewish exilic culture and its being regarded as decadent and stagnant. These historians, on the other hand, argued that exilic culture was crucial for the building of the new culture and that exilic history was continuous and national. The complex position they reflected in their studies and programmatic essays contributed to the shaping of Zionist historical perception and can clarify the tensions mentioned above.

The Zionist historians and ideologists sought to overcome “theology,” a term they attached to their European predecessors. Baer and Scholem strongly attacked the “apologetics” of nineteenth-century historiography and represented it as a genre still under the dominance of Christian scholarship. They believed that the adoption of romantic terminology and the national-organic conception of Jewish existence were the preconditions for the writing of an authentic history, one that would be “freed” from these impediments. “We claim that we have viewed Jewish history as a causal, biological phenomenon, without any theological or metaphysical preconceptions,” wrote Baer in one of his programmatic essays.29 “Romantic rhetoric” (a term used quite often by these historians but never precisely defined) was perceived as neutral from the religious point of view, dissociated from the Christian aspect of European culture. Romanticism seemed to create a common platform for both Christians and Jews and as such to become the full expression of the history to which the “return” was applied.30 Baer, Scholem, and other historians saw the romantic approach as a precondition for the writing of authentic history. According to Baer, “Our duty as Jews is to reveal the self of our history. In this we must be guided by the genetic approach to history we have learnt from European science; and although we should not accept the authority of foreign values, we should accept their scientific methods.”31 Baer believed that romanticism could be separated from its “alien” foundations, its obvious Christian characteristics. But his work manifests the close link between the theological discourse and the nationalization of Jewish history. Gershom Scholem saw the romantic idiom as a way of writing history “from within.”32 But to do this he was compelled to use an external idiom, that is to say, a


language different from that of the Jewish sources he studied—one that embodied the European historical approach and that had originated in Christianity. On these grounds the Jewish people were represented as a “self-sustaining organism” and “a personality bearing a history.”33

The Zionist historians saw romanticism as the source of a new revelation, one that shed new light on the Jewish past and could produce an objective, definitive view of Jewish history. Baer described it as “the magical doctrine of romanticism,” and Scholem regarded it as the splendor of the national Shechina.34 Consequently it created a common Jewish-Christian context that postulated a belief in a second “revelation.” This was a revelation without a messiah, but it was a revelation based on an interpretive position, which clearly indicates, once again, that the national interpretation was bound up with an adoption of the Western idiom.

Zionist interpretation created a periodization of Jewish history in which the term “exile” was used, as an exclusively political term, to describe the period when there was no Jewish sovereignty in Palestine. The historians concerned with the matter sought to detach the idea of exile from its theological framework and from the destruction of the Temple and to present it as identical to the “Middle Ages” in the conventional understanding of the term in European historiography. This was not considered a different category but the exclusive interpretation of the term. Thus, the concept of exile was reduced to the absence of political independence, and the European historical model was adopted as the framework for the interpretation of the Jewish concept of redemption and for the reinterpretation of the Jewish concept of time.

The need to distinguish the writing of Jewish history from the traditional consciousness was clearly indicated by the Zionist historian (and later, minister of education) Ben-Zion Dinur when he claimed that the Arab conquest of Palestine in the seventh century marked the beginning of a new period in Jewish history. Dinur distinguished between what he called the “popular conception” of exile, whose core was the destruction of the Temple, and the “historical conception.” He moved the beginning of the historical exile forward to the time of the Arab conquest and what he called the “capture” of the country by “foreigners,” which was perfectly in accord with the way he treated the Palestinians of his time. Dinur claimed that only after the Islamic conquest did the Jewish community in Palestine cease being a central factor in the life of the Jewish people and one that gave the country its particular character. He denied the “popular” (namely, the traditional Jewish) interpretation that was specifically linked to the destruction of the Temple: “Tradition and the popular view do not distinguish between the


end of our people’s rule over the country and not having its soil under their feet. For them, the two things are the same, but from the historical point of view, one must distinguish between these two situations.”35 The nationalization of the theological concepts was based on their dissociation from the destruction of the Temple, which Dinur regarded as “the end of our people’s rule,” and on the denial of the traditional concept of Jewish consciousness, including that of the pre-Zionist Jewish community in Palestine. Accordingly, nationalization helped to distance “Jewish history” from the Jewish-Christian polemic and to establish a common Jewish-Christian context—one that included the Jews as part of the West and part of history—and direct it against Islam. The collection of medieval historical documents compiled and edited by Dinur, Israel in Exile, begins with the Muslim conquest and ends with Sabbatianism, the messianic upheaval of the seventeenth century, which was considered to be the “awakening” of the Jewish people from its “exilic passivity.” He did not title the multivolume collection “Israel in the Middle Ages” but rather Israel in Exile. The ambivalent identification of exile with the Middle Ages paralleled the relationship between modern times, or the “new era” (which implied a dialectical progress toward Zionism), and “redemption,” in which Zionism was seen as the complete fulfillment of the historical-redemptive process. It also enabled the (obviously distorted) perception of Zionist colonization as a war of liberation against the “Muslim conquerors.”

The act of shifting the historical turning point away from the destruction of the Temple, as all the Zionist historians did in one way or another, was perceived as overcoming the religious aspect of the collective definition (though not necessarily of Jewish practice). But the narrative remained within the boundaries of the religious myth of redemption, in both its Jewish and Christian forms, constituting an interpretation of this myth.

* * *It is illuminating to focus on the strong resemblance between the “national” interpretation of Jewish history, and hence the images attributed to the nation, and the Protestant view of history and the images and values it produced. This is the context in which the integration of the theological and romantic approaches is revealed. What should be emphasized is the similarity between the cultural approach reflected in the Zionist concept of the “return to history” and the Protestant conception of return. The return referred to existed in the same historical context and was represented in the same terms: the Protestants saw a return to the origins of Christianity and the early church, whose values had been corrupted by the period


of Catholic hegemony, as the precondition for religious reform and the basis for describing the present as a “new era.” This had also been the guiding principle of the earlier ideal of imitatio Christi. In this respect the new era was a return to an earlier era, to the pure church that existed prior to Catholic domination.

The return of the Jews in Zionism was also related to the idea of the Holy Land of the same period: the biblical narrative from Joshua to Kings, and the period of the Second Temple. It was based on a fundamentally Protestant imagining of the Holy Land in the age of Jesus. The social-cultural images associated with that period bear close resemblance to the images to be found among the Protestants. In Zionist literature the image of the early church was replaced by the image of an ideal, autonomous Jewish community of the biblical and the Second Temple periods, just before the appearance of Christianity. The qualities ascribed to this community were the same as those ascribed to the pre-fourth-century church in Protestant literature, and they were formulated in similar terms. The idea of making the Bible the sole source of authority, an obvious Protestant principle, once again reflected the fact that the definition of Jewish identity as a national identity represented an assimilation into a joint Jewish-Christian context. The national myth was indeed a universal, that is to say Western, myth. The return was to similar values, to pure ideals that had been lost, to an organic community of “farmer-saints.” In other words, the concepts that defined Jewish national identity were those that defined the Protestant theological ideal.

A conscious reflection of this issue exists in the writings of Yitzhak Baer. Baer claimed that the values that had characterized the early Christian church were Jewish in origin and had been borrowed by the church.36 Since the Jewish origins of Christianity are well established, Baer could use terminology that historically had been employed in and identified with Christian theology in order to describe Jewish history and Jewish collectivity. Whatever the origins of these terms (in the Hellenistic context), it demonstrates the fact that the national—secular—definition of Jewish collectivity meant its adaptation in terms of Christian theology. Thus, the authentic Jewish society was described as an ecclesia; the return also meant a return to the Bible, precisely as sola scriptura, in fact to the “Old Testament,” and to its representation as an expression of the national genius, with a repudiation of the exilic rabbinic culture.

The idea of the return of the Jews to their homeland, moreover, was first formulated in a modern context—that is to say, in the conceptual language of later modern political discourse—in Protestant millenarian circles, especially in the Anglo-Saxon world, which saw the return of the Jews to the Holy Land and the


restoration of a Jewish polity in that land as a precondition for the Second Coming of Jesus.37 A remarkable number of books and treatises, from the seventeenth century until the present, have made the idea of the restoration of the Jews and the establishment of a Jewish political entity a prominent issue in the messianic scenario. Zionist thought rejected the Christological aspects of this vision, and it obviously also drew on earlier Jewish attitudes. But it is significant for the present discussion that this was the context in which the notion of the return of the people of Israel to their land was first formulated in modern political terms, the terms that defined historical Zionism.

Indeed, the idea of the Jews’ return to their land, in the Christian-millenarian context, was generally bound up with the hope of their conversion to Christianity, a hope that was of course rejected in Zionist thought. Yet it is necessary once again to point out that the Zionist idea of “return” was also associated with the transformation of the Jews and their integration into the Western world. The secularization of this idea and the formation of the image of the “new Jew” manifested the possibility of such a return without the need for conversion. But it was the secularization of a Protestant, not a Jewish, ideal. What was depicted as the authentic Jewish tradition followed the notion of authenticity in Christian theology. Zionist consciousness created the image of the “new” Jew who represented the ancient Jew and who had cast off the supposedly false yoke of rabbinic tradition—without converting but with a full adoption of the Western historical perspective.

By suggesting the parallels between Zionist and Protestant consciousnesses, I am not claiming that there was necessarily a direct influence, although this also existed, and Zionist writers from Borochow to Netanyahu insisted on emphasizing these origins.38 My aim is to elucidate the theological aspect of Zionism and the context in which the term “history” in its national and supposedly secular sense acquired its meaning. It might be said, of course, that these developments could have been derived from Jewish sources. Zionist thought was obviously inspired by Jewish traditional sources. Images of return, of the ingathering of the Diaspora, and the construction of the Temple had always preoccupied the Jewish imagination. Nevertheless, the formulation of these elements in modern romantic terminology and their adaptation into the modern Western discourse of progress gave them new meaning and marked a shift in the Jewish concept of history. It is the Protestant context that demonstrates the meaning of the formulation of Jewish-messianic discourse as a modern political myth in modern political terminology.


* * *In its adoption of the European model, Jewish nationalism was no different than other national movements, whether in Europe or in the Third World as part of the anti-colonial struggle. Nationalism was, among other things, the only way of joining history, and it was instrumental in the formation of the new collective identities and the various nation-states.39 It involved the invention of traditions and a rewriting of history. Indeed, the national perspective is essential for situating Zionist culture with its various expressions and for an analysis of the historical consciousness that determines present Israeli-Jewish discourse. Many Zionist cultural manifestations resemble similar manifestations in other national contexts, and a comparative approach is instructive. The notion of return is fundamental in the construction of many modern national identities.

As valuable as the national perspective may be, however, it is never a satisfactory framework for providing an analysis of each national context. It does not embrace all aspects of Zionist consciousness, and there still remains the need to examine the actual consequences of the national-territorial interpretation of Judaism in order to perceive its particular character. Our awareness of the “imagined” aspect of nationalism leads us to think about the concrete ways in which nations are represented and narrated. The complexity of perspectives embodied in the concept of history reveals the concrete aspects of this nationalism, particularly the link between the theological and the Orientalist.

In one respect, the question under discussion here bears a similarity to the questions raised by national movements that developed outside Europe in anti-colonial contexts. Here too one may find—in the early stages of the development of the national consciousness—the same ambivalent attitude resulting from the adoption and internalization of the European model by groups whose alienation from history was one of the foundations of the self-definition of Europe or the West. The description of the Jews as being outside history was in many respects analogous, a manifestation of the colonial perception of history (and, at the same time, of the terms “humanity” and “nation”). In various colonial contexts in Asia and Africa, nationalism was the main means of opposition to colonialism. The struggle was waged through the use of the European concepts and the European model of history.40 And indeed, as indicated by Dipesh Chakrabarty, any history in the modern context is European, and therefore the return is necessarily formulated in Western terms.41 Nationalism was a way of joining history and accepting its postulates. In principal these phenomena demonstrate the same ambivalent attitude resulting from the adoption of the European model for the purpose of


distancing the nation from colonial Europe. For the Jews in Europe, and for the various nationalisms outside Europe, this meant the dialectical and complicated adoption of the very same consciousness that had authorized their estrangement from history.42 In that sense Zionism in its early stages emerged as what indeed should be considered an anti-colonial national movement resisting oppression and defending against measures similar to those employed in colonies.

But here the parallel ends, and the consequences of this ambivalent position in the Zionist context were different and even opposite. While Zionism as an idea and a movement in Europe and elsewhere contained an early critical approach to modernity and liberal Europe, its realization in the east, in Palestine, resulted in accommodating Jewish consciousness to the European colonial framework as part of Europe versus the East and as the realization of a common Western Jewish-Christian vision. While in anticolonial national struggles the national model served as the basis for the struggle against European rule, in the Zionist case it was more a step toward joining—returning to—all that was envisaged by the concept “Europe.” In the colonized world the struggle was to take “Europe” out of the East, while Zionism adopted the national model to depict the process of settlement, thus “importing” the Western model and image to the East. It was perceived as a carrier of the Western mission to the East. Zionism did not wage its struggle against Europe but against the Palestinians, thus alienating them from history.

The theological aspect of nationalism, and especially the tendency to ignore and suppress it, reveals the colonialist aspect of Zionist nationalism in a way that reveals the colonial aspect inherent in Western secularism and nationalism. The term “colonialism” does not embrace all aspects of Zionist activity and consciousness. Just as it is not sufficient to describe Zionism as a type of nationalism, so it cannot be adequately described simply as a colonialist movement, although in many aspects it is an obvious case of settler or national colonialism (such as developed in South Africa, Australia, New Zealand, and elsewhere).43 Colonialism, however, is an aspect without which any analysis of Zionism as a historical phenomenon would be partial and misleading. Zionism is a process of nationalization of the Jews and of the land. The notion of secularization, namely the attempt to distinguish Jewish settlement from messianic aspirations, determines the adoption of a colonial-Orientalist perspective. Thus, Zionist return to history can be regarded as a colonialization of the Jewish consciousness. This is especially so when speaking of a settlement in the east that explicitly identifies itself with the image of the West as opposed to that of the East and is treated as a sphere outside history.


The changes that have taken place in the meaning of the terms “election” and “chosen people” may help to locate and explain this phenomenon. The term “election” was interpreted in various ways in Jewish thought, and it was generally used to explain the exile and the inferior position of the Jews. It gained a new meaning in Protestant, and especially Calvinist, thought where “chosen people” was interpreted as the community of true believers, as distinguished from other Christians. The secularization of this perception was the basis for colonialist consciousness. As Paul Mendes-Flohr convincingly demonstrated, later Zionist reflections on the term originated from within this framework and determined the argument of “historical rights” to justify Zionist colonization and domination of the land.44 The Bible, and mainly the idea of “chosen people,” gave rise to the images of the nation, to the ideas of the superiority of the West, and to the legitimacy of colonial conquests. Zionist return to the Bible and to the West means the integration of these two understandings of the term “chosen people.”

Indeed, a crucial aspect that distinguishes Zionism from other colonialisms is that those who had adopted it were a minority group who had been subject to oppression and extermination guided by the same principles that governed colonialism. In fact this only emphasizes the implications of the adoption of colonial language to define Jewish collectivity. The negation of exile in its secularized form means that the colonized, the European Jew, accepted the perspective of the colonizer. In this way Zionist discourse embodied both sides of the colonial discourse, that of the colonized and that of the colonizer, while the perception of return signified the transition from one status to the other and the change in the dialectical relationship between them. The return thus reflects the attempt of a persecuted minority to adopt the consciousness of the majority, albeit through a disengagement from the majority society. In the Jewish case, it meant also accepting the religious historical perspective of the Christian majority. The acceptance of a secularized version of the Christian view of Jewish history went hand in hand with the adoption of a colonialist-Orientalist consciousness, the very consciousness that had given rise to the Jews’ oppression.

* * *An important aspect of Zionist return was the negation of the history of the land itself as a territorial-cultural entity. The tendency to regard the Jewish relationship to Eretz Yisrael as an exclusive and national one resulted in a negation and obliteration of the history of Palestine in the exilic/medieval period, except for what was presented as the “continuity of Jewish presence and settlement.”45 This approach


was particularly developed by the historian Ben-Zion Dinur and was to be found in various fields of scholarship.46 The land in the period of exile was regarded as a territory ruled by “foreigners” who did nothing but destroy it.47 Apart from Jewish existence in Eretz Yisrael, Zionist writers saw the history of the land chiefly as the history of the Jewish longing for the land.48 According to this approach, the land itself was in “exile” during the period when there were no Jews there.49 Zionism was a return to the land, which was simultaneously a “return of the land to history”—that is, its restoration to the West.

The return to history was bound up with an obliteration of history. In this, Zionism was undoubtedly different from other national movements, seeking as it did to create a common memory for the entire population of a particular territory. The “territorialization” of Jewish memory meant defining the history of a collectivity notably lacking in territorial unity while disregarding the history and culture of Palestine, the land itself. Moreover, the narration of the history of the Jews as a national history involved a mythicization of the territory. It necessarily led to a reduction of the complex conceptual load that characterized the attitude toward the land in Jewish thought.50 The adaptation to the modern system of values of the Jewish approach to the land in fact necessitated a negation of the land and an assimilation of the Christian theological position, especially that of the modern (from the nineteenth century onward) Christian literature devoted to the land.51

This aspect of the consciousness of the return had particular significance for the treatment of the history of the land in the twentieth century, the period of Zionist settlement. It permitted the history of Zionist settlement to be viewed in isolation, with repression of the history of Palestinian existence and thus of the Jewish-Palestinian conflict. Here the return to history was expressed as an attempt to isolate Jewish identity from Palestinian existence and the Palestinian fate. The Palestinian tragedy caused by Jewish settlement and by the establishment of the Jewish state was not considered part of the history; rather, it was denied and suppressed. The perception of the state as a manifestation of redemption was based on this continuous suppression of the consequences of the return for the inhabitants of the country. There was no room for the culture of the peoples of the land or the desires and rights of its inhabitants. They were outside “history.”

The theological-redemptive dimension is crucial for the analysis of the question of Palestine. The notion of return has determined the exile of the Palestinians and still prevents any discussion based on the recognition of their rights. It determines their state of exile in their own land, through Jewish negation of exile.


* * * Another aspect of the national interpretation of Jewish history was the removal of the Jews from the various “histories” in which they had lived—that is, the different cultural and political contexts to which they belonged and in which they had functioned. The major historians, such as Baer and Scholem, spoke a great deal about what they called “external influences.” But the leading assumption was that the differences between Jews in various times and places were nothing but different expressions of one and the same national history. This position was clearly stated by Baer and Dinur in the manifesto they wrote as an introduction to the first volume of the journal Zion: “With regard to the political situation of the Jews in exile in various periods, we do not think one should give priority to a discussion and an investigation of the special conditions in each context, but to discuss and investigate the common situation of the Jews in exile in all generations.”52

This was an explicit assertion that the context had no significance. The return of the Jews to history was therefore an act of taking the Jews of the past out of history and into a mythical, nonterritorial and ahistorical sphere that was considered the essence of Jewish existence. The definition of the Jews as a European nation was done through the exclusion of the Jews from Europe (and, in a different way, from the Islamic countries).

The “return to history” thus involved a rejection, and even an active suppression, of central aspects of Jewish cultures—that is to say, of the cultural frameworks within which and in whose language the Jews had previously defined their identity as Jews. From the historical point of view, the concept of “exile” indicates the fact that the definition of Judaism was always expressed in the conceptual language of the culture in which the Jews lived and as part of that cultural framework. In other words, based on the reading and interpretation of the Bible and the Talmud (and without ignoring the interrelations between different Jewish communities), the definition of “exile”—that is to say the definition of “Jewishness”—always tended toward a specific cultural framework to which Jews belonged. The idea that the Jews constituted a nation represented a wish to obliterate these various cultural traditions.

The obvious Orientalism embodied in the Zionist understanding of history, and hence of Zionist collectivity, made the demand for a cultural renunciation and obliteration explicit specifically concerning Jews from Arab countries, whose “real” history was excluded from the concepts of “history” or “Jewish history.” To be integrated into Israeli society they were asked to reform, to abandon their Arab Oriental culture, and to accept the cultural values of the dominant Ashkenazi


elite, values that were presented as “universal,” “enlightened,” and so on. The same arguments that shaped the debate on the Jews in Europe in the eighteenth century were now applied to “Oriental Jews,” a category that was reshaped within the Israeli framework. They were seen as people who existed “outside history,” and the aim was to bring them into it. The Zionist attitude toward the Oriental Jews (including the positive images of them) was obviously Orientalist and reflected the meaning the theological had acquired in its change to the national-modern language.53

This attitude was not required by the medieval modes of Jewish collective definition, whether those relating to each particular community or those concerning the Jewish collectivity as a whole. History was now supposed to be a substitute for the commitment to halacha (Jewish religious law) that had previously defined Jewish collectivity. While the commitment to the halachic framework had obviously produced Jewish unity in many spheres, it did not constitute a culture in the sense assumed by modern nationalism. It is not surprising that there was no room in this framework for the idea of Jewish history. That idea refers to a very different mode of collectivity.

The idea that there was a separate Jewish history that could be represented as a single phenomenon was paralleled by an almost complete disregard of the existence of the Jews in classical European historiography until very recently.54 This is one more aspect of the acceptance of the European cultural image as the basis for the definition of history. To represent Jewish history as a European nationalism, one had to accept the triumphalist narrative of Western progress, which ignored the oppression of the Jews (and of course not only of the Jews) and was based on the negation and rejection of all that was defined as “noncivilized” or, in other words, non-European. Far from opposing this concept, Jewish historiography adopted it as the basis for describing the history of the Jews. Jewish historiography dedicated much discussion to the oppression of the Jews, but it was treated as something separate from history as such, as a different autonomous narrative. Jewish history was not presented from a critical perspective; it was presented as an autonomous manifestation integrated into the consciousness of the majority.

* * *This preliminary survey intends neither to invalidate the principles contained in the concept “return to history” nor to discredit the idea of redemption in itself. On the contrary, it is worth exploiting a historical perspective in order to broaden the implications of this concept—in other words, to broaden our vision of responsibility to the historical reality. This critical clarification is required because of the implications


of this problematic expression, “return to history.” It examines the principles negated and denied by the concept of “history.” It may contribute to a new definition of the Jewish Israelis, their self-perception and historical consciousness, that will include those principles alienated by the perception of “redemption.” A “return to history” in our generation also means a return to these alienated principles.

In this context I think that political-theological concepts of historical Judaism also have an important value for the discussion of national contexts elsewhere, particularly in view of their rejection by the Jewish State. This is especially relevant if we are able to bear in mind the objective and subjective differences between the present reality and the different contexts in which the idea of the community existed, together with the consciousness it represented. I am not claiming that the idea of the community can be implemented in a literal way, or that it provides a solution to the problem of the present definition or to current attitudes, but it can serve as a valuable critical tool for the reformulation of what can be regarded as basic liberal principles, a framework permitting a separation between the national-theological consciousness and the state. One should remember that this concept, like the actual structure of the communities, was not only the product of necessity: both are the expression of the form of historical existence of the Jews in various situations and are concrete evidence of the fact that Jewish identity developed in a variety of contexts and cultural settings.55

Elsewhere I have suggested the possibilities of linking the notion of exile with the notion of binationalism. This attitude was presented in the twentieth century by the small group Brit Shalom (Covenant of Peace) that included intellectuals such as Gershom Scholem, Hugo Bergman, Hans Kohn, and later, Martin Buber, Judah Magnes, and Hannah Arendt. All of them shared a critique of the radical notion of the negation of exile, and expressed the desire for an equal national coexistence between Jews and Arabs. All of them were well aware of the theological dimensions of Zionism, and they shared the desire to establish in Palestine a spiritual Jewish center. They expressed these ideas in a very different context, yet their writings are still relevant and may clarify the difficulties mentioned here.

Exile, diasporism, and dispersion have become common phenomena of global culture and determine the fortunes of millions of people. It is no longer uniquely the experience of Jews and has nothing to do with theological connotations and Christian-Jewish medieval polemics. But it seems productive to use the notion of exile as a critical tool toward understanding the concrete significance of history in order to trace its suppressive elements.


Notes

* An earlier version of this article was presented as the annual Meyerhoff lecture at the University of

Pennsylvania on February 1, 2007. Substantive and important literature published after the date

of the lecture will be discussed in coming studies.

1 The expression “return to history,” as a description of Zionist activity, was used a great deal

and became a common way for describing Zionism. Its use by Gershom Scholem is particularly

well known. See David Biale, Gershom Scholem: Kabbalah and Counter-History (Cambridge, MA:

Harvard University Press, 1982), 106–111. On this concept as the basis of the Zionist outlook

and Zionist historiography, see David N. Myers, Re-inventing the Jewish Past: European Jewish

Intellectuals and the Zionist Return to History (New York: Oxford University Press, 1995), 3–4. See

also Shalom Ratzabi, Between Zionism and Judaism: The Radical Circle in Brith Shalom, 1925–

1933 (Leiden: Brill, 2002), 143–156. On the concepts of “return” and “history” in Zionism,

see Shmuel Almog, Zionism and History: The Rise of a New Jewish Consciousness (New York: St.

Martin’s Press, 1987), 23–83. On the concept of “history” in modern Jewish thought in general,

see Eliezer Schweid, “Ha-shiva el ha-historia ba-hagut ha-Yehudit shel ha-me’a ha-esrim” [The

return to history in twentieth century Jewish thought], in Hevra ve-historia [Society and history],

ed. Y. Cohen (Jerusalem: Ministry of Education and Culture, 1980), 673–683.

2 The beginnings of this approach date to before the destruction of the Second Temple, and it

already existed in biblical literature; only later did it become basic to the definition of Judaism and

instrumental in the formation of rabbinic—that is, historical—Judaism. Jacob Neusner traces the

crystallization of this outlook to the period of the first exile, between the destruction of the First

Temple and the building of the Second, and sees it as the guiding element of the later “Judaisms.”

Jacob Neusner, Self-Fulfilling Prophecy: Exile and Return in the History of Judaism (Boston: Beacon

Press, 1987). On its biblical expressions, see Benjamin Uffenheimer, “Ra’ayon bechirat Yisrael

ba-mikra” [The idea of the chosen people in the Bible], in Ra’ayon ha-bechira be-Yisrael u-be-

amim [Chosen people, elect nation and universal mission], ed. Shmuel Almog and Michael Heyd

(Jerusalem: Merkaz Zalman Shazar, 1991), 17–40. The concept of exile was molded in Talmudic

literature and was later given a wide variety of interpretations in accordance with the changing

historical-cultural context. The number of studies dealing with the concept of exile, which was

developed in various Jewish writings, is enormous. In fact every discussion dealing with Jewish

consciousness touches in one way or another on the concept of exile. Yosef Hayim Yerushalmi,

“Exile and Expulsion in Jewish History,” in Crisis and Creativity in the Sephardic World, 1391–

1648, ed. Benjamin R. Gampel (New York: Columbia University Press, 1997), 3–22.

3 Among the few historical works produced by the Jews in the Middle Ages, there are none that

could be described as histories of the Jews after the destruction of the Temple, apart from certain

writings dealing with the history of halacha (such as the Epistle of Rabbi Sherira Gaon or the Sefer

Kabbalah of Rabbi Abraham ben David). But these merely demonstrate the absence of a view


of history as a succession of events, and they are closer to halachic discourse or form part of the

polemic against Karaism. See Yosef Hayim Yerushalmi, Zachor: Jewish History and Jewish Memory

(Seattle: University of Washington Press, 1982).

4 See Lucette Valensi, “From Sacred History to Historical Memory and Back: The Jewish Past,”

History and Anthropology 2, no. 2 (1986): 283–305. See also Yerushalmi, Zachor.

5 Robert Bonfil, “How Golden Was the Age of the Renaissance in Jewish Historiography?,” in Essays

in Jewish Historiography: In Memoriam Arnaldo Dante Momigliano, 1908–1987, ed. Ada Rapoport-

Albert, History and Theory, Beiheft 27 (Middletown, CT: Wesleyan University, 1988), 78–82;

Amram Tropper, “The Fate of Jewish Historiography after the Bible: A New Interpretation,”

History and Theory 43, no. 2 (May 2004): 179–197.

6 Amos Funkenstein examines this difference in his discussion on the typological interpretations of

Nachmanides. In his discussion of Christian typological interpretation, he says that typologies,

and for that matter all forms of historical speculations in Christianity, express a distinct sense of

steady progress within history: progress from the old to the new dispensation, progress within

the further history of the ecclesia militans et triumphans, extensive progress (mission) as well as

intensive progress (articulation of faith and dogma). Jews lacked such a sense of progress and

hence the desire to show how matters repeat themselves periodically on a higher level. Amos

Funkenstein, Perceptions of Jewish History (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1993), 120.

7 See James M. Scott, ed., Exile: Old Testament, Jewish, and Christian Conceptions (Leiden: Brill,

1997).

8 Karl Löwith, in his fascinating classic Meaning in History (Chicago: University of Chicago Press,

1949), claims that secularism was really an extension of Christian theology as developed since

Augustine, an approach that was contrary to the Greek conception of time. Hans Blumberg

criticizes him, trying to demonstrate the uniqueness of the modern idea of progress in relation

to the historical outlook of Christianity. Hans Blumberg, The Legitimacy of the Modern Age,

trans. Robert M. Wallace (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1983). In another context, Amos

Funkenstein, in Theology and the Scientific Imagination from the Middle Ages to the Seventeenth

Century (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1986), examines the origins of the modern

scientific approach and thus of the modern historical perspective—especially the way in which

various elements of the Jewish-Christian theological discourse are incorporated within it. On

the theological origins of the perception of history during the Enlightenment, see Peter H. Reill,

The German Enlightenment and the Rise of Historicism (Berkeley: University of California Press,

1975); and Thomas Albert Howard, Religion and the Rise of Historicism: W. M. L. de Wette, Jacob

Burckhardt and the Theological Origins of Nineteenth-Century Historical Consciousness (Cambridge:

Cambridge University Press, 2000). On the connection between Protestantism and secularism, see

also Michael Heyd, “Protestantism, Enthusiasm, and Secularization in the Early Modern Period:

Some Preliminary Reflections,” in Religion, Ideology and Nationalism in Europe and America:


Essays Presented in Honor of Yehoshua Arieli (Jerusalem: Historical Society of Israel and the Zalman

Shazar Center, 1986), 15–27.

9 Carlo Ginzburg, Wooden Eyes: Nine Reflections on Distance, trans. Martin Ryle and Kate Soper

(New York: Columbia University Press, 2001), 148, 155.

10 I follow the analytical framework of Edward Said, who also demonstrates its unique appearance

in Zionist discourse. Edward Said, Orientalism (New York: Pantheon Books, 1978). I find Said’s

argument essential for the discussion of Jewish discourse, and particularly of Zionist consciousness,

yet I also think that the Jewish example can contribute to the critical evaluation of Said’s analysis.

See my “Mada’ey ha-Yahadut ve-ha-hevra ha-Yisraelit” [Jewish studies and Israeli society], Gama’a

4 (1998): 37–60. See also Raz-Krakotzkin, “Zionist Return to the West and the Mizrachi Jewish

Perspective,” in Orientalism and the Jews, ed. Ivan Kalmar and Derek Pensler (Waltham, MA:

Brandeis University Press, 2005), 162–181.

11 Jonathan Boyarin, Storms from Paradise: The Politics of Jewish Memory (Minneapolis: Minnesota

University Press, 1992).

12 See the preliminary remarks of Stephan Burnett, From Christian Hebraism to Jewish Studies:

Johannes Buxtorf (1564–1629) and Hebrew Learning in the Seventeenth Century, Studies in the

History of Christian Thought 68 (Leiden: Brill, 1996).

13 Jacques Basnage de Beauval, Histoire des Juifs depuis Jesus-Christ jusqu’a present [A history of the

Jews from the age of Jesus Christ until the present] (La Haye: 1716). Basnage believed that the

conversion of the Jews was close, but he completely rejected any attempt to impose Christianity

on them. Accordingly, he gave Jewish existence an autonomous position and paved the way for

the entry of the Jews into the new cultural universe. On Basnage, see Gerard Cerny, Theology,

Politics, and Letters at the Crossroads of European Civilization: Jaques Basnage and the Baylean

Huguenot Refugees in the Dutch Republic (Dordrecht: Martinus Nijhoff, 1987); Miryam Yardeni,

“New Concepts of Post-Commonwealth Jewish History in the Early Enlightenment: Bayle and

Basnage,” European Studies Review 7, no. 1 (January 1977): 245–259; Lester A. Segal, “Jacques

Basnage de Beauval’s l’Histoire des Juifs: Christian Historiographical Perception of Jewry and

Judaism on the Eve of the Enlightenment,” Hebrew Union College Annual 54 (1983): 303–324;

Jonathan M. Elukin, “Jacques Basnage and the History of the Jews: Anti-Catholic Polemic and

Historical Allegory in the Republic of Letters,” Journal of the History of Ideas 53, no. 4 (1992):

603–630.

14 Yerushalmi, Zachor, 81.

15 Christian Wilhelm von Dohm, Über die bürgerliche Verbesserung der Juden [Concerning the

amelioration of the civil status of the Jews] (Hildesheim: Georg Olms Verlag, 1973), 26–39,

91–100, 107–13, 125–26. An English translation appears in Ellis Rivkin, ed., Readings in Modern

Jewish History, trans. Helen Lederer (Cincinnati, OH: Hebrew Union College-Jewish Institute of

Religion, 1957), 12–69.


16 On the topic in general see Gil Anidjar, “Secularism,” Critical Inquiry 33 (2006): 52–77. On the

complicated Orientalist dimension in this debate on the Jewish question see Jonathan M. Hess,

“Sugar Island Jews? Jewish Colonialism and the Rhetoric of ‘Civic Improvement’ in Eighteenth

Century Germany,” Eighteenth Century Studies 32, no. 1 (Fall 1998): 98; Hess, Germans, Jews

and the Claims of Modernity (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2002); Susannah Heschel,

“Revolt of the Colonized: Abraham Geiger’s Wissenschaft des Judentums as a Challenge to Christian

Hegemony in the Academy,” New German Critique 77 (Spring-Summer 1999): 61–85.

17 Jonathan Hess, “Johann David Michaelis and the Colonial Imaginary: Orientalism and the

Emergence of Racial Antisemitism in Eighteenth-Century Germany,” Jewish Social Studies 6, no.

2 (2000): 55–101.

18 But compare Susannah Heschel’s illuminating analysis of the role of Orientalist discourse in

relation to Jewish discourse. Heschel reads Geiger as subverting the Orientalist paradigm in his

studies on Muhammad and Islam. See Susannah Heschel, Abraham Geiger and the Jewish Jesus

(Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1998).

19 This aspect was emphasized by David N. Myers and served as the basis of his study of the setting

up of the Institute for Contemporary Jewry at the Hebrew University, Jerusalem (see note 1). In a

more incisive formulation see Myers, “Was There a ‘Jerusalem School’?: An Inquiry into the First

Generation of Researchers at the Hebrew University,” Journal of Contemporary Judaism 10 (1994):

66–91.

20 David N. Myers, Resisting History: Historicism and Its Discontents in German-Jewish Thought

(Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press: 2003).

21 See David Sorotzkin, Ortodoksia u-mishtar ha-moderniyut: Hafakata shel ha-masoret ha-Yehudit

be-Eropa ba-et ha-hadasha [Orthodoxy and modern disciplining: The production of the Jewish

tradition in Europe in modern times] (Tel Aviv: Ha-kibbutz Ha-meuchad, 2011).

22 Generally speaking, since the Enlightenment the debate concerning history has had a central

place in Jewish thought and has led to a variety of approaches. Moses Mendelssohn, who defined

the terms of the modern discourse, had a critical attitude toward the idea of progress, and he

expressed it in response to his friend Gotthold Ephraim Lessing. See Moses Mendelssohn,

Jerusalem and Other Jewish Writings, trans. Alfred Jospe (New York: Schocken Books, 1969). A

similar approach directed his attempt to distinguish between “man” and “citizen” (a point of

debate with Kant). This position is of great significance for the subject of this paper, for it can

be regarded as an attempt to retain the concept of “exile” while participating in the discourse of

the Enlightenment. In the context in which he wrote, Mendelssohn was compelled to relate to

Judaism in a nonpolitical way. Yet despite his critical point of view, Mendelssohn generally viewed

his era as a period of enlightenment and considered important aspects of Jewish existence to be

the consequence of oppression. The debate on the views of history that subsequently developed is

too complex to be dealt with here.


23 See Amos Funkenstein, “The Dialectics of Assimilation,” Jewish Social Studies (n.s.) 1, no. 2

(1995): 1–14.

24 See Peter Van der Veer and Hartmut Lehmann, Nation and Religion (Princeton, NJ: Princeton

University Press, 1999); among earlier contributors to the issue, see Salo W. Baron, Modern

Nationalism and Religion (New York: Meridian Books, 1947).

25 This was developed as part of the debate over the concept of “political theology” in its formulation

by Karl Schmitt. Christoph Schmidt has indicated the role of Schmitt’s texts in the writings of

prominent Jewish thinkers in the 1920s and 1930s, including Gershom Scholem. Christoph

Schmidt, “Der haeretische Imperativ: Gershom Scholems Kabbala als politische Theologie?” [The

heretic imperative: Gershom Scholem’s kabbalah as a political theology], Sonderdruck: Zeitschrift

fuer Religions und Geistesgeschichte 50, no. 1 (1998): 61–83.

26 Anita Shapira, “The Religious Motifs of the Labor Movement,” in Zionism and Religion, ed.

Shmuel Almog, Yehouda Reinharz, and Anita Shapira (Hanover, NH: Brandeis University Press,

1998), 251–272. Shapira describes the main messianic images used to depict settlement and

especially the conquest of the country by the British (Zionism and Religion, especially p. 307).

Zeev Sternhal has argued that socialist terminology was nothing but a rhetoric that covered a

nationalistic position, but he did not examine the components of what he described as nationalism.

See Zeev Sternhal, The Founding Myths of Israel, trans. David Maisel (Princeton, NJ: Princeton

University Press, 1997).

27 On the distinction between the restorative and apocalyptic versions of Jewish messianism, see

Gershom Scholem, “Towards an Understanding of the Messianic Idea in Judaism,” in The

Messianic Idea in Judaism (New York: Schocken Books, 1971), 1–37.

28 These were expressed in what has been called the “civil religion in Israel,” a term coined by Charles

Liebman and Eliezer Don-Yehia, Civil Religion in Israel (Berkeley: University of California Press,

1983). Several scholars have written about the religious motifs in the culture of the Zionist Yishuv,

including Shmuel Almog, “Religious Values in the Second Aliya,” in Almog, Reinharz and Shapira,

Zionism and Religion, 285–300; Eliezer Don-Yehia, “Hilun, shlila ve-shiluv tfisot shel ha-Yahadut

ha-mesoratit u-musageiha ba-Ziyonut ha-sotsialistit” [Secularization, negation and integration of

elements of traditional Judaism and its concepts in socialist Zionism], Kivunim 7 (1980): 29–46;

Oz Almog, The Sabra: The Creation of the New Jew (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2000).

Maoz Azariahu discussed the Christian motifs in some of the state ceremonies; see Azariahu,

Pulhanei medina: Hagigot ha-atsmaut ve-hantsahat ha-noflim be-Yisrael 1948–1956 [Ceremonies

of the state: Celebrations of independence and commemoration of the fallen in Israel, 1948–

1956] (Sde Boker and Beersheva: Ben-Gurion Heritage Center, 1995). But, as mentioned, these

studies did not examine the close similarity between Zionist consciousness and the theological-

messianic narrative.

29 Yitzhak Baer, “Ha-erech ha-hinuchi shel ha-historia ha-Yisraelit” [The educational value of Jewish


history], in Mehkarim u-masot be-toldot am-Yisrael [Essays in Jewish history] (Jerusalem: Ha-hevra

ha-historit ha-Yisraelit, 1986), 20 (my translation).

30 Baer uses the term “romanticism” elsewhere in his writings in the same vague way in which it is

employed in historiographical discourse, where it is usually referred to as romantic rhetoric. I do

not intend here to investigate the concrete sources of Zionist thought in idealistic philosophy or

in nationalistic discourse. An attraction to romantic concepts was characteristic of many Zionist

manifestations and has been the subject of much academic study. Many different ideological

trends that developed within the Zionist framework and in connection with Zionist settlement

were formulated in these terms. Settlement in Palestine was represented as a mystical return to a

home whose origins must be found in the ancient culture, which was expected to revive through

the return to the land.

31 Baer, “Ha-erech ha-hinuchi,” 19 (my translation).

32 Gershom Scholem, “The Science of Judaism: Then and Now,” in The Messianic Idea in Judaism,

304–313. Scholem, “Mitoch hirhurim al hochmat Yisrael,” [Reflections on “Hochmat Israel”

(Wissenschaft des Judentums)] in Devarim Bego [Explications and implications] (Tel Aviv: Am

Oved, 1976).

33 Yitzchak Baer, “Ekronot ha-limud shel ha-historia ha-Yehudit” [Principles of teaching Jewish

history], in Mehkarim u-masot [Essays], 12 (my translation). The term “organism” appears

elsewhere in his writings as well.

34 Yitzchak Baer, “Le-berur ha-matzav shel ha-limudim ha-historiim shelanu” [An examination of

the state of our historical studies], in Mehkarim u-masot [Essays], 15 (my translation).

35 Ben-Zion Dinur, Yisrael ba-gola [Israel in exile], 2nd ed. (Tel Aviv: Dvir, 1959), 1:1.

36 Yitzhak Baer, “Ha-yesodot ve-ha-hatkhalot shel irgun ha-kehila ha-Yehudit bi-yemei ha-beinayim”

[The foundations and origins of the organization of the Jewish community of the Middle Ages],

Zion 15, no. 1 (1950): 11; and, in a stronger form, Baer, Yisrael be-amim [Israel among the nations]

(Jerusalem: Mossad Bialik, 1965), 113. Baer took the same approach in other articles in which he

discussed Jewish history in the Second Temple period in terms derived from Christian theology.

Israel Yuval has examined Baer’s use of Christian terminology. See Israel J. Yuval, “Yitzhak Baer

and the Search for Authentic Judaism,” in The Jewish Past Revisited: Reflections on Modern Jewish

Historians, ed. David N. Myers and David B. Ruderman (New Haven: Yale University Press,

1998), 67–77. See also Amnon Raz-Krakotzkin, “Lelo heshbonot aherim: She’elat ha-Natsrut

etsel Baer ve-Shalom” [Without other accounts: The question of Christianity in Scholem and

Baer’s writings], Madaei ha-Yahadut 38 (1998): 73–96.

37 Mayir Verete, “The Restoration of the Jews in English Protestant Thought, 1790–1840,” Middle

Eastern Studies (Jan. 1972); Verete, From Palmerston to Balfour: Collected Essays, ed. Norman Rose,

intro. Albert Hourani (London: Frank Cass, 1992); Nabil I. Matar, “Protestantism, Zionism and

Partisan Scholarship,” Journal of Palestine Studies 18, no. 4 (1989): 52–70. Verete, “Milton and the


Idea of the Restoration of the Jews,” Studies in English Literature 27, no. 1 (1987): 109–124; Eitan

Bar-Yosef, The Holy Land in English Culture 1799–1917: Palestine and the Question of Orientalism

(Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2005); Regina Sharif, Non-Jewish Zionism: Its Roots in Western

History (London: Zed Books, 1983).

38 Nahum Sokolow, History of Zionism (London: Longman, 1919). Benjamin Netanyahu, A Place

among the Nations (New York: Bantham, 1993).

39 As indicated by Eric Hobsbawm, since the nineteenth century the criterion for describing a group

as “national” was its harmony with the idea of historical progress, or its capacity to develop this

idea. Eric Hobsbawm, Nations and Nationalisms since 1780: Programme, Myth, Reality (Cambridge:

Cambridge University Press, 1990).

40 For the main discussions of the issue see Partha Chatterjee, Nationalist Thought and the Colonial

World: A Derivative Discourse? (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1986); Prasenjit

Duara, Rescuing History from the Nation: Questioning Narratives of Modern India and China

(Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1995); and Gian Prakash, “Writing Post-Orientalist

Histories of the Third World: Indian Historiography is Good to Think,” in Colonialism and

Culture, ed. Nicholas B. Dirks (Ann Arbor: Michigan University Press, 1992), 353–388.

41 Dipesh Chakrabarty, Provincializing Europe (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2000).

Arif Dirlik, “Is There a History after Eurocentrism: Globalism, Postcolonialism and the Disavowal

of History,” Cultural Critique 42 (Spring 1999).

42 The historical connection between the Enlightenment, colonialist discourse, and the attitude

toward the Jews has been dealt with by several scholars. Richard Popkin, for example, also

considered the theological aspects of the early secular approach. See Richard Popkin, The Third

Force in Seventeenth-Century Thought (Leiden: Brill, 1992). On the alienation of the Jews as

part of the process of secularization, see Heiko Oberman, The Roots of Antisemitism in the Age

of Renaissance and Reformation, trans. James I. Porter (Philadelphia: Fortress Press, 1984). See

especially the reflections of Jonathan Boyarin, “The Other Within and the Other Without,” in

The Other in Jewish Thought and History: Constructions of Jewish Culture and Identity, ed. Laurence

J. Silberstein and Robert L. Cohn (New York: New York University Press, 1994), 424–452. See

Silberstein’s introduction to this work (pp. 1–34).

43 On Zionism as a settler colonialism, see Lorenzo Veracini, Israel as a Settler Society (London: Pluto

Press, 2006). See also Gabriel Piterberg, The Returns of Zionism: Myth, Politics and Scholarship

in Israel (London: Verso, 2008). Here we must rid ourselves of the tendency to think in terms

of the dichotomy colonialism/nationalism, which often dominates the discussion of the Zionist

consciousness. This dichotomy has value connotations, as if the use of the term “colonialist”

were a total delegitimation, or as if the term “national” justified anything. In this way, the serious

analysis required is rendered impossible. On the colonial characteristics of Zionist settlement

see especially Gershon Shafir, Land, Labor and the Origins of the Israeli-Palestinian Conflict,


1882–1914 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1989). These aspects were developed by

Edward Said, who also emphasized the theological aspects of the colonial attitude and their roots

in Western thought. Edward Said, The Question of Palestine, rev. ed. (New York: Vintage Books,

1992).

44 Paul Mendes-Flohr, “In Pursuit of Normalcy: Zionism’s Ambivalence toward Israel’s Election,”

in Many Are Chosen: Divine Election and Western Nationalism, ed. William R. Hutchison and

Hartmut Lehman, Harvard Theological Studies 38 (Minneapolis, MN: Fortress Press, 1994),

203–224.

45 This phenomenon was examined exhaustively by Yaakov Barnai, Historiographia ve-leumiyut:

Megamot be-heker Eretz Yisrael ve-yishuva ha-Yehudi, 634–1881 [Historiography and nationalism:

Trends in the study of Eretz Yisrael and its Jewish community, 634–1881 (Jerusalem: Magnes

Press, 1995), 23–70 (my translation). Barnai stresses the tendency to disregard the history of

the country and to make the presumed historical continuity of Jewish existence there the central

theme of Zionist historiography.

46 Ibid. On Dinur’s role and outlook, see Myers, Re-inventing, 129–150, and his early article “History

as Ideology: The Case of Ben-Zion Dinur, Zionist Historian Par Excellence,” Modern Judaism 8,

no. 2 (1988): 167–193. Myers examines the role of Shmuel Klein in Zionist historiography in

depth, ibid., 89–92. Dinur’s ideological position and his role in molding the national consciousness

were investigated by Uri Ram, “Zionist Historiography and the Invention of Modern Jewish

Nationalism,” History and Memory 7, no. 1 (1995): 91–124.

47 The first writer to clearly express this point of view was Alexander Z. Rabinowitz in his Toldot

ha-Yehudim be-Eretz Yisrael [History of the Jews in Palestine] (Jaffa: 1921), 1. It was strongly

supported and developed by Shmuel Klein in various studies, including Sefer ha-yishuv [Jews in

Palestine] (Jerusalem: Mossad Bialik, 1929), of which he edited the first of the three volumes.

48 The exception to this rule is the Crusader period, about which, for a number of reasons, there

have been many studies—one of those reasons being the ambivalent attitude toward that period.

While there was obvious sympathy for the European settlers, a clear distinction is made between

the Zionist view of Eretz Yisrael and the Crusaders’ approach to the country.

49 On Dinur’s approach, see Ram, “Zionist Historiography”; and Myers, Re-inventing. A similar

approach was also developed by Martin Buber in Israel and Palestine: The History of an Idea

(London: East and West Library, 1951).

50 See Moshe Idel, introduction to Aaron Z. Eshkoli, Ha-tnu’ot ha-meshihiyot be-Yisrael [The

messianic movements in the Jewish people], 2nd ed. (Jerusalem: Mossad Bialik, 1988), 9–29.

51 On the recreation of the image of the land in Christian thought, see Yehoshua Ben-Arieh, The

Rediscovery of the Holy Land in the Nineteenth Century (Jerusalem: Magnes Press, 1979). Barnai

pointed out that modern Jewish historiography concerning Eretz Yisrael echoed the Christian

historical literature of the same period. Bishara Doumani also noticed the similarity between the


Zionist consciousness and Christian ethnographic literature. See Bishara Doumani, “Rediscovering

Ottoman Palestine: Writing Palestinians into History,” Journal of Palestine Studies 82 (Winter

1992): 5–28.

52 Yitzhak Baer and Ben-Zion Dinur, “Megamatenu” [Our intention], Zion 1, no. 1 (1936): 2–3

(my translation).

53 Ella Shohat, “Sephardim in Israel: Zionism from the Standpoint of Its Jewish Victims,” Social

Text 19/20 (1988): 1–35. Shohat, Israeli Cinema: East/West and the Politics of Representation

(Austin: University of Texas Press, 1989). See also Gabriel Piterberg, “Domestic Orientalism:

The Representation of ‘Oriental’ Jews in Zionist/Israeli Historiography,” British Journal of Middle

Eastern Studies 23, no. 2 (1996). The Orientalist attitude embodied within Jewish studies and the

estrangement of Jewish thought from Islam was analyzed by Gil Anidjar in his critical discussion

of kabbalah scholarship. Anidjar perceived that Scholem’s paradigm (which was accepted without

question by his successors and even by his critics) was based on an ambivalent attitude toward

the East, placing it beyond the sphere of “Christian Europe.” He shows that Scholem’s approach

to the kabbalah reflected an obvious Orientalist attitude and that his aim was to incorporate it

within the European framework.

54 Several scholars have remarked on the neglect of the Jews in European historiography: for example,

Gevin Langmuir, “Majority History and Post-Biblical Jews,” Journal of the History of Ideas 27,

no. 3 (1966): 35–56; and Jacob Talmon, Ahdut ve-yihud: Masot be-hagut ha-historit, [Unity and

uniqueness: An essay on historical thought] (Tel Aviv: Schocken, 1965).

55 Here it is important to draw attention to Baron’s historical outlook, which is very different from

the one implied by the concept “return to history.” Salo W. Baron, The Jewish Community: Its

History and Structure to the American Revolution, 3 vols. (Philadelphia: Jewish Publication Society

of America, 1942); Robert Liberles, Salo Wittmayer Baron, Architect of Jewish History (New York:

New York University Press, 1995), 243–265.

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