In his book Zionism and Jewish Culture: A Study in the Origins of a National Movement, Prof. Yitzhak Conforti presents the convincing case that the roots of the modern Zionist movement are to be found in the cultural and religious heritage of the Jewish people.
He argues against a host of modern historians who downgrade history and cultural traditions as mere “backdrops in shaping modern national identities” as he puts it. This type of academic school prioritizes in-depth analysis of politics, economics, and the secular planning of the nation-state, believing these elements to be the real key to understanding the true nature of modern nationalism.
Conforti, on the other hand, succeeds in identifying and revealing the cultural and religious aspects of the Jewish story and demonstrates their crucial importance in the birth and development of modern Zionism.
He disproves the belief held by some modern historians that Jewish community and tradition are imagined concepts, instead proving that they existed long before political Zionism and played a central role in its emergence.
Zionism, Conforti shows, represents a continuation of an ethnic Jewish community that sustained its distinctiveness throughout centuries in the Diaspora.
“The Zionist movement’s ability to rally Jews from around the world,” Conforti writes, “stemmed from their identification with their ethnic and cultural history.” The formation of a Jewish national identity, he argues, could not have been accomplished without a “bottom-up” identification, rooted in an existing traditional cultural consciousness.
The territorial dimension of Zionism
One vital topic, to which he devotes an entire chapter, concerns how the territorial dimension of the national movement – settled and firm enough in early Zionism – became a political football for a period. It was the Jewish religious and cultural heritage that resolved the issue.
Conforti sets the ground for his analysis by saying that while in every national movement the people are one of the vital components, the land is the other. In all such struggles, the territory at issue is what the national movement sees as its homeland.
From its inception, the Zionist movement (unlike some of its earliest founders) emphasized the centrality of the cultural connection between the Jewish people and the Land of Israel, but for a brief period the political dimension ran in a different direction.
Conforti examines the debate in the light of two sharp political controversies about where the Jewish state might be located – the Uganda controversy, which ran from 1903 to 1905; and the tussle over the Palestine Partition Plan that arose from the report of Britain’s Peel Commission in 1937.
In 1903, Zionist leaders Leon Pinsker and Theodor Herzl were faced with the acute problem of continued Jewish persecution in East Europe and the ever-present Jewish Question in the West (integration as against Zionism).
In early writings, both had failed to specify where a Jewish homeland might be sited. Herzl, in his 1896 book The Jewish State, had mentioned the possibility of Argentina, while in 1882 Pinsker had written in his book Auto-Emancipation: “We need not carry our souls to our holy land now, but to our own land. We seek nothing but a large land for our impoverished brethren…”
So perhaps it was not surprising that Herzl entered into discussions with the British government – which along the way suggested the Sinai Peninsula for a possible Jewish settlement – culminating in an official letter suggesting the establishment of a Jewish colony in East Africa.
Equally unsurprising was the astonishment and anger of many delegates when the proposal was submitted to the Sixth Zionist Congress in 1903. However, when the negotiations were put to the vote, those in favor outweighed the opponents by 295 votes to 178.
The very idea of siting a Jewish homeland anywhere but in the Holy Land was perceived within the Jewish world as challenging the cultural and historical vision of the Jewish people and as a dilution of Zionism’s core ideals.
The plan fizzled out, and by the time of the Seventh Zionist Congress two years later, it was dead, and the Zionist ideal had returned to its roots.
In the final analysis, Conforti demonstrates that early Zionism, though faced with the absence of territoriality, creatively harnessed the Jewish people’s rich religious and cultural traditions to build a cohesive national identity, paving the way for the eventual establishment of the sovereign state of Israel.
The writer’s latest book is Trump and the Holy Land: 2016-2020. Follow him at www.a-mid-east-journal.blogspot.com/
- ZIONISM AND JEWISH CULTURE: A STUDY IN THE ORIGINS OF A NATIONAL MOVEMENT
- By Yitzhak Conforti
- Academic Studies Press
- 342 pages; $130
