naraburns nihil supernum
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Israel-Gaza Megathread #3
This is a refreshed megathread for any posts on the conflict between (so far, and so far as I know) Hamas and the Israeli government, as well as related geopolitics. Culture War thread rules apply.
I don’t think it is super significant that some Jews in Academia are anti-Zionist if the whole infrastructure of the religion is Zionist. If you consider yourself a practicing Jew and are not a Karaite, the odds are that you participate in and pay a membership to a synagogue which promotes Zionism, and the wealthier Jews of that synagogue spend money on various Zionist associations like the World Zionist Organization. Even the liberal Reform Judaism “views a Jewish, Zionist, democratic and secure State of Israel to be the expression of the common responsibility of the Jewish people for its continuity and future.” Zionism is entrenched in non-Haredi Judaism. The idea that Judaism is merely a religious community and does not have nationalistic or political aspirations a la Zionism is actually criticized by major Jewish publications,
Initially, Reform Jewry rejected peoplehood and Palestine. America’s Reform rabbis distorted Jewish history and ideology — anticipating today’s ultra-ultra-Orthodox Jews — in their 1885 Pittsburgh Platform when they declared: “We consider ourselves no longer a nation, but a religious community.”
Obviously, Jews as a whole are not “complicit” in Zionism in the sense that they bear moral responsibility and/or blame. Just like not every American in the South was complicit in slavery, not every Catholic complicit in Vatican scandals, not every German complicit in WWII. But the relationship between mainstream institutional Judaism and Zionism is still a little troubling IMO and it can’t be ameliorated with a simple “there are anti-Zionist Jews in academia”.
I don’t see it as anything other than a truth of the religion. You cannot read very far into the Old Testament or Hebrew Bible without hitting a verse (and it doesn’t matter much which book you read) that’s talking about Jews and “the land”. It’s simply part of how Judaism works, and you’d have to twist things quite a bit to create a Judaism that doesn’t have some version of Zionism in it. Judaism is an unusual religion in the modern world because of it being an ethnic religion tied to the land of Israel or Palestine. Outside of some very odd survivals of Native American religions (Lakota and the Black Hills for example) there just aren’t that many religious land claims out there.
Most of the rest of the world religions are faith based and missionary. Christian and Muslim are what they are not because of ethnic ancestry or connection to a place, but because they share a creed. Buddhism is a practice. Hinduism is a practice more or less. I think it’s hard for outsiders to understand the Zionist idea simply because it’s alien to what most of the rest of us have as a religious experience.
Going to my other example, the Lakota aren’t actively trying to retake the black hills because they’re not realistically able to. Until Palestine became part of the British Empire, there was no chance of retaking it.
True, but the project wasn’t a continuation of some ancient or medieval movement. I’m not an expert, but I believe the established view was that they would return to the promised land under the leadership of the messiah, conceived in religious and eschatological rather than practical terms. The Zionist movement that eventually produced the state of Israel arose in the same post-French revolution context as other European nationalisms of the era (e.g., Croatian, Bulgarian, Greek, Polish (based on all of what we would now call Poles considered as a whole people rather than on the political ‘nation’ of Poles in the medieval/early modern sense (which only referred to the nobility)). Having a pre-existing holy book that promised them a specific territory certainly has had its effects, but the movement was a break from the traditional Jewish religion rather than a linear development.
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Notes -
I don’t think it is super significant that some Jews in Academia are anti-Zionist if the whole infrastructure of the religion is Zionist. If you consider yourself a practicing Jew and are not a Karaite, the odds are that you participate in and pay a membership to a synagogue which promotes Zionism, and the wealthier Jews of that synagogue spend money on various Zionist associations like the World Zionist Organization. Even the liberal Reform Judaism “views a Jewish, Zionist, democratic and secure State of Israel to be the expression of the common responsibility of the Jewish people for its continuity and future.” Zionism is entrenched in non-Haredi Judaism. The idea that Judaism is merely a religious community and does not have nationalistic or political aspirations a la Zionism is actually criticized by major Jewish publications,
Obviously, Jews as a whole are not “complicit” in Zionism in the sense that they bear moral responsibility and/or blame. Just like not every American in the South was complicit in slavery, not every Catholic complicit in Vatican scandals, not every German complicit in WWII. But the relationship between mainstream institutional Judaism and Zionism is still a little troubling IMO and it can’t be ameliorated with a simple “there are anti-Zionist Jews in academia”.
I don’t see it as anything other than a truth of the religion. You cannot read very far into the Old Testament or Hebrew Bible without hitting a verse (and it doesn’t matter much which book you read) that’s talking about Jews and “the land”. It’s simply part of how Judaism works, and you’d have to twist things quite a bit to create a Judaism that doesn’t have some version of Zionism in it. Judaism is an unusual religion in the modern world because of it being an ethnic religion tied to the land of Israel or Palestine. Outside of some very odd survivals of Native American religions (Lakota and the Black Hills for example) there just aren’t that many religious land claims out there.
Most of the rest of the world religions are faith based and missionary. Christian and Muslim are what they are not because of ethnic ancestry or connection to a place, but because they share a creed. Buddhism is a practice. Hinduism is a practice more or less. I think it’s hard for outsiders to understand the Zionist idea simply because it’s alien to what most of the rest of us have as a religious experience.
And yet collective, non-messianic Zionism only became popular in the late 1800’s in the context of modern European nationalism.
Going to my other example, the Lakota aren’t actively trying to retake the black hills because they’re not realistically able to. Until Palestine became part of the British Empire, there was no chance of retaking it.
True, but the project wasn’t a continuation of some ancient or medieval movement. I’m not an expert, but I believe the established view was that they would return to the promised land under the leadership of the messiah, conceived in religious and eschatological rather than practical terms. The Zionist movement that eventually produced the state of Israel arose in the same post-French revolution context as other European nationalisms of the era (e.g., Croatian, Bulgarian, Greek, Polish (based on all of what we would now call Poles considered as a whole people rather than on the political ‘nation’ of Poles in the medieval/early modern sense (which only referred to the nobility)). Having a pre-existing holy book that promised them a specific territory certainly has had its effects, but the movement was a break from the traditional Jewish religion rather than a linear development.
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