A Religion or a Nation?

More than two hundred years ago, in 1789, the Count of Clermont-Tonnerre rose to make a speech in the French National Assembly. It was a fateful moment in the history of Western Europe and it was to have repercussions for Jewish identity that have lasted to this day.

The French Revolution had ushered in, earlier that summer, the modern democratic state. The National Assembly had made its momentous declaration of the rights of man: “All men are born, and remain, free, and equal in rights.... No person shall be molested for his opinions, even such as are religious, provided that the manifestations of these opinions does not disturb the public order established by the law.”

The question was: Did these rights apply to Jews? In theory, yes. But theory was at variance with public sentiment. There was powerful antagonism to Jews, particularly in Alsace where the local peasantry, in a wave of revolutionary fervor, rioted against the Jewish population. Jews were seen, and to some extent saw themselves, as outsiders: not so much Frenchmen as a section of the Jewish nation in temporary exile.

It was in response to the reports of the riots that the count rose to make his speech. He defended the idea of the separation of church and state. The law, he reaffirmed, has no concern with a person’s beliefs. It is interested only in his actions. Jews therefore were entitled to equal rights within the state. But he made one proviso: if Jews were to be part of the French nation, they could not at the same time be members of the Jewish nation. “The Jews should be denied everything as a nation, but granted everything as individuals.... It is intolerable that the Jews should become a separate political formation or class in the country. Every one of them must individually become a citizen; if they do not want this, they must inform us and we shall then be compelled to expel them.”

Were Jews adherents of a religion or were they members of a people with its own distinctive laws, governance, and homeland? This was the choice the count called on Jews to make, and it was to determine the course of emancipation for Jews throughout Europe during the course of the nineteenth century. The question demanded, in effect, a revolutionary transformation of Jewish identity. It led, as we shall see, to radical and divergent ideas of what it was to be a Jew. Ultimately, it was to divide Jews to such an extent that Martin Buber was to say later that emancipation had led to the end of knesset Yisrael, the idea of the Jewish people as a single entity standing before God.

A People Apart

The choice was, of course, impossible. Judaism is a religion with its distinctive beliefs and practices. But it is the religion of a people. To be sure, there are conversions and apostasies, entrances and exits, but for the most part Jewishness is a matter of birth. The concept of an unbelieving Christian is self-contradictory; that of an unbelieving Jew is not. And it is a religion tied to a particular land, the land of Israel. During their long dispersal, Jews saw themselves in but not of their geographical and cultural environment. They were not merely scattered, they were in galut, exile. They had a homeland, which they had left not voluntarily but “because of our sins” and to which they believed they would eventually return. It was toward Jerusalem that they prayed; Jerusalem that they remembered at the heights of religious emotion; nowhere outside Israel was ultimately home.

In a real sense, then, prior to modernity, Jews constituted a single if scattered nation. They were divided by country, language, culture, and custom. But they were united by a common history, beliefs, and hopes, and above all, by the shared discipline of conduct spelled out in halakhah or Jewish law. They were a people apart. To a certain extent, this was a matter of belief. Jews were a singular and chosen people, the children of the covenant. They were linked together as the family of Jacob, bound by the sense that “all Israel are responsible for one another.”

In part, too, it was a matter of conduct. Jewish law maintained a code of difference. In the Book of Esther, Haman describes Jews as “a certain people, dispersed and scattered among the peoples…whose laws are different from those of all other peoples,” and this distinctiveness was not accidental. It had been one of the dominant motifs of biblical law that Jews and Judaism should be kept apart from the pagan practices of surrounding nations. Intermarriage with idolaters was forbidden, and Ezra and Nehemiah waged a successful campaign against it. Rabbinic law extended some of the biblical fences against intermarriage and too close a social interaction between Jews and non-Jews.

These internal safeguards were reinforced by the external reality of the Middle Ages in which Jews were usually minorities in an Islamic or Christian culture. Their participation in society, in terms of the occupations they could engage in and the areas they could live in, was limited. For the most part they had little access to the main avenues of political power. There were times in which they were made to wear distinctive clothing; others in which they were confined to specific and enclosed locations, the ghettos. They were subjected to suspicion, sporadic attacks, and arbitrary and restrictive decrees. They suffered periodic expulsions. The biblical concept of exile precisely matched the historic reality.

Their apartness from the central institutions of the majority culture had another consequence. Throughout the Middle Ages, Jewish communities exercised a degree of autonomy, governing their own educational, welfare, and judicial functions. The kehillah, or self-governing community, imposed both Jewish law and local legislation and had at its disposal the coercive sanction of fines and excommunication. Since, for the most part, a Jew could only leave the Jewish community at the cost of conversion to another faith – something to which Judaism embodies a profound aversion – the power of the community to impose its will on individuals was considerable.

A New Identity

The premodern Jewish world, then, was one in which much else was problematic but Jewish identity was not. To be a Jew was to be born into a society, history, destiny, and way of life whose content was coherent and shared by other Jews across space and time. But that identity did not fit into the abstract conception of the modern state as embodied in the French Revolution. Jews were no longer to be members of the Jewish nation who were temporarily located in France. They were to be French citizens first, and only secondarily Jews.

The Count of Clermont-Tonnerre did not spell out specifically what this might mean. But it became clear in the questions directed by Napoleon a generation later to the assembly of Jewish notables and to the specially convened group of rabbis, the Napoleonic “Sanhedrin.” Did Jews, Napoleon wished to know, practice their own laws of divorce, distinct from those enforced by civil courts? What judicial powers did rabbinic courts possess and what sanctions were available in enforcing their decisions? Were Jews allowed to marry non-Jews? Did they consider non-Jewish Frenchmen as “brothers” or as “strangers”? Did French-born Jews consider France their country?

These questions, untroubling now, went to the heart of the new situation. A social order that had dominated Jewish existence since the destruction of the Second Temple was coming to an end. Jews were to be fully integrated in the secular state. They were no longer to be outsiders. This meant opportunity but also sacrifice. The conditions were unstated but implied. Jewish self-government would have to cease. Jews would no longer have the power to fine or excommunicate individuals who disobeyed community ordinances. In addition, Jews would have to demonstrate that in their language, dress, and etiquette they were fully part of the majority culture.

The implications for Jewish identity were profound in two respects. Firstly, Judaism was henceforth to be a voluntary commitment. To be sure, Jewish law was not directly affected. One who was born a Jew was still bound by the commandments and prohibitions. But existentially, there were choices available to a Jew in the new situation that had not existed before. If he chose to ignore Jewish law, the community could not compel him to do otherwise. Moreover, the secularization of the state meant that one could cease to be a Jew without becoming a Christian. When Benjamin Disraeli was asked what his religion was, he took an English Bible and pointed to the blank page between the Old Testament and the New. “I,” he said, “am that blank page.” That “neutral space” had not existed before.

Secondly, to be a Jew was now only one aspect of personal identity, not its totality. Emancipated Jews were expected to work and mix socially with non-Jews and to become fully conversant with European culture. Their Jewishness, it was tacitly agreed, should not be too obtrusive. Jews had to pass through what one writer has called “the ordeal of civility.” This meant a new double identity, one that the poet Judah Leib Gordon described as being “a Jew at home and a person in the street.” Sigmund Freud, for example, spoke of the “dissimulation [which] I practice every day.” The art was to be Jewish without seeming to be. This was sharply at odds with the integrated identity of traditional Jewish societies. How far was the new order compatible with Jewish tradition itself?

Moses Mendelssohn

Moses Mendelssohn (1729–1786), the first Jewish philosopher of emancipation, argued that it was. In 1783 he published Jerusalem, his plea for freedom of religious conscience. The laws of the state and the commands of religion are, he insisted, two entirely separate realms. Religion uses education and persuasion, not power, to secure the loyalty of its followers. Excommunication is “diametrically opposed to the spirit of religion.” What then of the fact that the Bible prescribes punishments for sins? That, he argues, was only as long as Jews were a nation in their own land, when an offense against the law of God was also a crime against the state. Since then, Judaism “knows of no punishment, no other penalty than the one which the remorseful sinner voluntarily imposes on himself.”

Already, then, we see in Mendelssohn an argument for the voluntariness of Judaism and an attempt to persuade the Jewish community to renounce its self-regulating powers and embrace the new terms of emancipation. What is more, he suggests, Judaism is a model of rationality and tolerance. “It boasts of no exclusive revelation of eternal truths that are indispensable to salvation.” What was revealed at Sinai were not truths like the Divine creation of the world. These are arrived at by reason, and are thus available to any rational human being. They constitute the “universal religion of mankind.” The revelation at Sinai disclosed only “revealed legislation,” the commands that are peculiar to Jews. Here, in philosophical terms, is the distinction crucial to the Jewish response to emancipation, between the “Jew at home” practicing his particular religious heritage, and the “man in the street” engaged in the pursuit of universal truth and the general welfare.

Mendelssohn was a traditional Jew, who proposed no halakhic or intellectual reforms. But already we sense the strain to which Judaism would be put in this new environment. Why, we ask ourselves reading Jerusalem, should Jews continue to practice their ancestral faith when a new and glittering secular culture was beckoning? To this question Mendelssohn can give only the most negative of answers. “Adapt yourself to the morals and constitution of the land to which you have been removed; but hold fast to the religion of your fathers, too. Bear both burdens as well as you can! It is true that on the one hand, the burden of civil life is made heavier for you on account of the religion to which you remain faithful, and on the other hand, the climate and the times make the observance of your religious laws in some respects more irksome than they are. Nevertheless, persevere; remain unflinchingly at the post which Providence has assigned you....” This is not an argument calculated to inspire.

Nonetheless, it provided the basis on which Jews in England, France, and Italy came to terms with their new situation. Jews could indeed be both loyal and active citizens and remain within the classic terms of the Jewish tradition. To be sure, they prayed for a return to Zion. But that was in the messianic future, not the immediate present. Within their countries of birth they heeded Jeremiah’s words to “seek the peace and welfare of the city to which I have carried you in exile; pray to the Lord for it, because in its prosperity you shall prosper.” In France, a semblance of the old kehillah was recreated, the Consistoire, under state supervision. In England, it took the form of voluntary but governmentally recognized institutions: the Board of Deputies, the Chief Rabbinate, and the United Synagogue.

In England, in particular, the course of political equality ran slowly but smoothly. There were no preconditions asked, no religious reforms or declarations. Victorian society was both liberal and traditional, and Jews of all social classes acculturated without seeking religious legitimation for their new behavior patterns. The institutions of Judaism, for their part, adapted to the new environment through merely cosmetic changes: grand synagogues, ministers who wore canonicals with more than a passing resemblance to those of the church, sermons in the vernacular, choirs, and an insistence on decorum during services. The style was eminently English; the substance remained within the boundaries of Judaism.

But it was in Germany that Jews encountered the greatest hostility to emancipation. It seemed that as Jews they remained suspect and unacceptable. There was, in the last decades of the eighteenth century, a wave of conversions to Christianity, especially among the most affluent and cultured. They counted among their number several of Moses Mendelssohn’s own children. Heinrich Heine famously described Judaism as not a religion but a misfortune, and called the baptismal certificate “the ticket of admission to Western culture.”

One of Mendelssohn’s disciples, David Friedlander, proposed a form of general conversion to Christianity that he believed might find favor among Jews and Christians alike. Mendelssohn had, after all, described a universal religion of reason. What was distinctively Jewish about Judaism was its rituals, and these could be abandoned in favor of their Christian equivalents. The church should invite Jews into its ranks without insisting that they believe in Christian dogma. Jews then would merely be exchanging one set of practices for another. Within sixteen years of Mendelssohn’s defense of Judaism, therefore, his own arguments were being employed to argue for its total dissolution.

The Legacy of Spinoza

Friedlander’s proposal outraged both sides, but it is a measure of the traumatic impact of the new situation in which Jews found themselves, especially when the equality they sought was being actively and politically resisted. The nineteenth century saw a retreat from this conversionary brink. But it was in Germany that two radical Jewish proposals emerged. Their inspiration came, not from Mendelssohn but from an earlier and more disturbing figure, Baruch Spinoza (1632–1677), who in his early twenties had been excommunicated by the Amsterdam Jewish community for propagating heretical views.

Spinoza was the first of a series of intellectuals of Jewish origins – Marx, Freud, and Durkheim were others – who not merely rejected Judaism and religion generally but sought to explain and thus exorcise it. For Spinoza, God was not supernatural but was nature itself under a different aspect. It followed that there were no supernatural events and therefore no revelation. The Torah was the work of human beings (Spinoza was a forerunner of “biblical criticism”) and the commandments were a system of national legislation. It followed that, with the destruction of the Second Temple and the loss of national autonomy, the commandments no longer applied and Jews themselves had ceased to be the chosen people. They had continued to exist as a separate people only because antisemitism blocked the way to assimilation. Where tolerance reigned, Jews would and should merely abandon Judaism, though, in an aside, Spinoza conjectured that “if the foundations of religion have not emasculated their minds” they might yet rebuild their nation in Israel and “God may a second time elect them.”

These views are, by any standard, radically destructive of Judaism but they were to exercise a powerful influence over Jews grappling with the phenomenon of German antisemitism, and they were to lead eventually in two diametrically opposed directions.

The first was Reform. To understand the development of the Reform movement in Germany, it is necessary to remember two things. The first was that enlightened defenders of Jewish emancipation like Clermont-Tonnerre did not demand that Jews renounce their Jewishness completely. But they did assume that Judaism was, or could be turned into, a religion in the “Protestant” sense of a private faith of individuals. The second is that opponents of Jewish emancipation seized on just those aspects of Judaism that did not conform to this definition, but instead seemed to mark Jews as a people apart, a group who were incapable of being fully integrated into society.

Some of these features had little to do with Judaism as such. Jews spoke a distinctive language, Yiddish, and were concentrated in trading and financial services. These facts, their critics argued, showed that Jews kept themselves apart and were naturally exploitative. But there were other objections that had everything to do with Judaism. Jews believed that they would one day leave Europe and return to Zion. Johann David Michaelis, in 1782, accordingly argued that “the Jews will always see the state as a temporary home, which they will leave in the hour of their greatest happiness to return to Palestine.” Their dietary laws kept them from fully mixing in Gentile society. Michaelis drew the conclusion that “as long as they observe the laws about kosher and nonkosher food it will be almost impossible to integrate them into our ranks.” The laws of Shabbat*,* too, Michaelis argued, prevented Jews from accepting the full responsibilities of citizenship. The “Jews will not fight on the Sabbath, for they are forbidden to do so if not attacked.” They would not provide reliable soldiers for the German army and would not therefore contribute fully to the state.

Nineteenth-Century Reform

Was it possible to construct a Judaism that met these objections? In 1817 a Reform “Temple” was opened in Hamburg. Its major innovation was the elimination from the prayer book of all references to the ingathering of exiles and the return to Zion. The name Temple itself signaled its founders’ intentions. They no longer yearned for Jerusalem. A temple could be built in Hamburg as well. It was, its constitution declared, a “church,” a purely religious institution without the political-national motifs hitherto associated with Judaism. Many of the prayers would be said not in Hebrew but German. The Shabbat services would be accompanied by an organ and choir. It was a significant breach with Jewish tradition, and was denounced, a little over a year later, by a group of distinguished rabbis. The breach between Reform and the classic terms of rabbinic Judaism – or Orthodoxy as its opponents now named it – had begun.

It was to widen. Opposition to Jewish emancipation, often couched in brutally hostile terms, continued. German Jews were making their own compromises with a non-Jewish world and were rapidly abandoning religious observance. The early efforts at the “Germanization” of Judaism, represented by the Hamburg Temple, were seen by some to be inadequate. A fresh wave of radical reform took place in the 1840s. There were those who advocated an abandonment of the laws of kashrut; others who promised a curtailment of the laws of Shabbat; there were even those who proposed the transfer of Shabbat to Sunday. Some argued for the abolition of circumcision; others for the abandonment of the Jewish laws of divorce in favor of recognition of civil divorce as an adequate termination of Jewish marriage. These became the hallmarks of radical reform as it developed in Germany and America.

These were violent assaults on the substance and spirit of Jewish life as hitherto conceived, and they produced strong reactions. In 1845 a previous sympathizer, Zechariah Frankel, broke with the Reform movement and proposed in its place a more traditional, evolutionary form of Judaism. This he called “positive historical,” and it eventually became known in America as Conservative Judaism. A Galician rabbinic authority, R. Zvi Hirsch Chajes, who was deeply impressed with the Enlightenment and contemporary secular culture, nonetheless proposed, in his 1849 pamphlet Minchat Kena’ot, a formal ban declaring Reform leaders total Gentiles in Jewish law. The most modern of Orthodox leaders in Germany, R. Samson Raphael Hirsch, devoted a significant part of his energies to a ceaseless campaign against Reform. The discontinuities between Reform and tradition were obvious. What were the continuities? By what logic did the radical reformers defend their innovations as lying within the parameters of Judaism?

There were two dominant schools of thought. One, advocated by Abraham Geiger (1810–1874), argued for a historical understanding of Judaism that would see both its biblical and rabbinic forms as not a fixed orthodoxy but a process of constant development and adaptation. In Geiger we see the influence of Spinoza’s “biblical criticism” allied to a Hegelian idea of history as evolution. What was fundamental to Judaism was its monotheism and morality. Ritual could and should change as Judaism developed from its early particularism to a more universal mission to humanity. Judaism was not fixed for all time at Sinai. Instead, it was an expression of “Progressive Revelation.”

More radical still was his contemporary, Samuel Holdheim (1806–1860). Holdheim argued that there were two elements in biblical Judaism: religious and ceremonial. The religious element – with Geiger, he saw this as monotheism and morality – was eternally valid, but the ceremonial law applied only as part of the constitution of a Jewish state. Since the state had ceased to exist with the Roman destruction in 70 C.E., it was now null and void. “Now that Jews have become integral elements of other peoples and states…all laws and institutions of Judaism which were based on the election of a particular Jewish people – yes, of a particular Jewish state – and hence by their very nature implied exclusiveness and particularism…have lost all religious significance and obligation and have given way to the national laws and institutions of such lands and peoples to which the Jews belong by birth and civic relationship.”

This was a restatement of Spinoza’s argument in the Tractatus Theologico-Politicus. Emancipation heralded a new messianic age of universal brotherhood, and all laws which tended to keep Jews as a separate people were irrelevant at best; at worst, they impeded the progress of civilization. Holdheim’s revolutionary stance was adopted as the ideology of the American Reform movement in its Pittsburgh Platform of 1885. Thus, Spinoza had inspired radical reform.

The Birth of Secular Zionism

But German Reform showed how extreme were the implications of Clermont-Tonnerre’s either/or. Was Judaism a religion of individuals or was it the national expression of a people? Holdheim’s Reform carried to its logical conclusion a positive answer to the first alternative and a rejection of the second. Judaism, to be turned into a religion in a sense acceptable to German opinion, had to be stripped of its most fundamental laws, those of Shabbat, kashrut, circumcision, and divorce. They represented a dimension of nationhood in Judaism that Holdheim and others felt was inappropriate to the new age. Emancipation proposed to recognize Jews as individuals, not as members of a collective people. German Reform was a Jewish response to this unprecedented dichotomy.

But, as was already evident in the France of 1789, theory was one thing, public emotion another. Throughout the Middle Ages, Jews had suffered from a Christian anti-Judaism that at times – during the Crusades, fifteenth-century Spain, and the periodic blood libels – exploded into persecution and violence. The Enlightenment promised an era of rationality, religious freedom, and tolerance. It did not happen. Already in the writings of Voltaire (1694–1778), one of the most powerful advocates of Enlightenment, we sense that Jews were to be the exception to the rule of universal toleration. We find in Jews, he wrote, “only an ignorant and barbarous people, who have long united the most sordid avarice with the most detestable superstition and the most invincible hatred for every people by whom they are tolerated and enriched.” He made one concession. “Still,” he added, “we ought not to burn them.”

A new phenomenon was making its appearance: hostility to Jews without a theological framework to justify it. An emotion that had had a specific place within an ordered religious world view was in the process of being secularized. Christian anti-Judaism was being transformed into racial antisemitism. Antisemitism as such – the hatred of Jews not for what they believe and do but for what they are, because of their supposedly indelible racial characteristics – is, properly speaking, a phenomenon of the nineteenth century. And it led one perceptive Jewish thinker to conclude that the entire project of European emancipation would fail. Jews would never be accepted within German society, however they adapted their dress, language, mores, and religion. For they were now experiencing a hatred that was directed not at externals of behavior but at their very birth and being. Clermont-Tonnerre’s choice still stood before them. But Jews must see that their future lay in the opposite direction to that taken by Reform. They were a nation, not a religion. And they must seek their future not in Europe, where ­antisemitism was ineradicable, but in a rebuilt land of Israel. Individual emancipation in the diaspora would fail. The only alternative was collective emancipation in a land of their own. It was in this series of perceptions that secular Zionism was born.

Moses Hess

The author of these ideas was Moses Hess (1812–1875). Hess had been deeply influenced in his youth by the work of Spinoza. His first book had been entitled The Holy History of Mankind, by a Young Spinozist. From there he moved on to the cause of international socialism, in which role he became a friend and collaborator of Karl Marx. In this vision Judaism had no place. To the contrary, he believed, as Isaiah Berlin put it, that “the people chosen by God must disappear forever, that out of its death might spring a new, more precious life.”

Three phenomena, however, influenced Hess in a new direction. The first was the rise of European nationalist movements in the 1840s. Nationalism rather than internationalism was the order of the day. The second was the profound shock he and other European Jews experienced at the revival of the medieval blood libel in the Damascus Affair of 1840. This shook Hess’s assumption of a new era of tolerance in which Jews would benignly assimilate, much as the Dreyfus Affair a half century later was to radicalize another alienated Jew, Theodor Herzl. The third was the escalating antisemitism Hess detected in Germany. Nothing Jews could do to reform their religion would have the slightest effect on this animosity since, he wrote, the Germans “hate the peculiar faith of the Jews less than their peculiar noses.”

These slowly maturing observations came to expression in Hess’s brief but powerful book Rome and Jerusalem, published in 1862. It was prefaced by a personal declaration of teshuvah, spiritual homecoming: “Here I stand once more, after twenty years of estrangement, in the midst of my people.... A thought which I had stifled forever in my heart is again vividly present with me; the thought of my nationality, inseparable from the inheritance of my ancestors, the Holy Land and the eternal city.” Hess’s argument was simple. “That which Jews were not able to obtain as individuals, the people can secure as a nation.” Instead of emancipation, Jews should seek self-emancipation as a people in their own right. Jewish nationalism was, after all, far more ancient than European nationalism, and if the French could establish and create their own revolutionary state, so could the Jews. With the French Revolution began the rebirth of the nations who owe their national historic religion to Judaism.

Reform Judaism, he argued, was utterly misconceived. “Danger threatens Jewry only from those reformers of its religion who, with their newly invented ceremonies and stale rhetoric, have sucked the last marrow out of Judaism and have allowed nothing to remain of this sublime phenomenon of history but the shadow of a skeleton.” The reformers believed that antisemitism could be deflected by a change of conduct on the part of Jews. But it cannot be done. Firstly, “even baptism itself” does not protect the Jew from “the nightmare of German Jew-hatred.” Second, Jews are a primary race whose distinguishing features cannot be disguised. Third, the denial of the national components of Judaism is ethically unacceptable. The Jew who argues that Judaism is a religion only is “a traitor to his people and to his family.”

The Jewish tradition had always seen religion, peoplehood, and nationalism as inseparable. The biblical and rabbinic literature sprang from a “deep national fountain of life.” Jews felt bound to one another as members of a single family: “All Israel are responsible for one another.” Jewish identity went deeper than religious identity: “The Jew who sins remains a Jew.” Judaism, through its holy deeds and days, preserved the memory of its national past. On the ninth of Av, Jews sat in mourning for the ruins of Jerusalem. In their messianic hope they longed for the reconstruction of the nation in its own and promised land.

Never, prior to the nineteenth century, had it been thought possible to separate Jewish religion from nationalism. Enlightened European Jews felt a sense of inferiority to Christians, but they were wrong. Christianity was purely a religion; therefore it was threatened by the decline of religion in a secular age. Judaism was more than a religion; therefore it would be lifted on the rising tide of nationalism. “Only from the national rebirth will the religious genius of the Jews draw new powers, like that giant who touched the mother earth, and be again animated by the sacred spirit of the prophets.”

Spinoza and the Secularization of Zionism

Hess was not the first Zionist. In one sense he was only a precursor. It was to take another generation before the Russian pogroms of the 1880s and the Dreyfus Affair of the 1890s energized Pinsker and Herzl to set the movement into motion. In another sense he was only a follower. It had been two Orthodox rabbis, Zvi Hirsch Kalischer (1795–1874) and Yehudah Alkalai (1798–1878) who first argued for a new program to settle the land of Israel, set up agricultural colonies, revitalize the Hebrew language, and create a land-purchasing scheme under the leadership of Jews of international stature like Sir Moses Montefiore and the Rothschilds. Hess acknowledged Kalischer as an influence and inspiration.

But Hess’s seminal significance is that he was the first secular Zionist. Alkalai and Kalischer spoke within the classic religious vocabulary. The return to Zion was part of the Divine process of redemption, even though, they argued, the first steps must be taken by man. Hess, by contrast, spoke in terms of national spirit and the processes of history in which “race struggle is primary, class struggle is secondary.” His work is punctuated by a secular messianism that owes more to Marx than to Moses. His greatest mentor, whom he constantly acknowledges, was Spinoza. Reading Rome and Jerusalem for the first time, in 1901, Theodor Herzl remarked, “Since Spinoza, Jewry has brought forth no greater spirit than this forgotten Moses Hess.”

To be sure, Jews had always longed for the return to Zion. At the twin peaks of the religious year, on Pesach and Yom Kippur, they had said with deep feeling, “Next year in Jerusalem.” But, as Yehoshafat Harkabi has pointed out, “Zionism is not an idea; it is the realization of an intention, a political program.” A certain secularization is implicit in the translation of the longing for Zion into a practical and political movement. Throughout the Middle Ages, Jews like Judah Halevi, Maimonides, and Nachmanides had traveled to Israel. At the threshold of modernity, figures like the Vilna Gaon, R. Moses Sofer, and a number of chasidic leaders, had encouraged settlement there as an antidote to the corrosive forces of a secularizing Europe; perhaps even as a mystical means of hastening the messianic age.

The first yishuv, the settlement of Jews who had arrived in the land between 1840 and 1880, was composed primarily of deeply religious Ashkenazic Jews who sought to create a religious community on Eastern European lines. But their vision did not extend to creating the infrastructures of an economy, a defense force, and a government, nor did it envisage political action to generate international support for the Zionist cause. To the contrary, such action would have seemed heretical, “forcing the end” by seeking redemption through secular channels.

In Jewish mystical thought, the idea of Israel had become deeply spiritualized. R. Nachman of Bratslav (1772–1811), chasidic leader and great-grandson of the Baal Shem Tov, shortly before his own visit to the land, reported on a conversation he had had with some other chasidim who had just returned. Before they had gone, they told him, they could not visualize the land of Israel as actually existing in this world. They had imagined that the holy land was located outside time and space.

Nor was this the primary obstacle to religious Zionism. Since the failure of the Bar Kochba rebellion in the early second century, Judaism had encouraged a stance of quietism and political passivity. In 1770 a German nobleman suggested the idea of a Jewish state in Palestine to Moses Mendelssohn. Mendelssohn replied that the idea was quite implausible. The Jewish people, he lamented, was “not adequately equipped to undertake anything great.” The long exile had sapped its spirit. “It is not our fault; but we cannot deny that the natural urge to freedom has completely ceased to be active in us. It has transformed itself into a monkish virtue and expresses itself in prayer and patience, not in action.”

It was here that Hess found Spinoza liberating. For it was Spinoza who had “demythologized” the land of Israel, describing it not as a land possessed of intrinsic holiness but as a “certain strip of territory” on which Jews “could live peaceably and at ease.” It was Spinoza who had reconceived Jewish history in naturalistic terms, without Divine intervention. It was Spinoza who had stressed the national component of biblical Judaism. And it was Spinoza who, as Hess wrote, “believed that the restoration of the Jewish state depended merely on the courage of the Jewish people.” All these effectively secularized the ideas of the Jewish people, Israel, and the connection between them. They allowed them to be translated into the emerging European vocabulary of nationalism. They turned the return to Zion from a religious hope into a political program.

Discontinuities

Spinoza, a thinker who had actually argued for the dissolution of Judaism, thus ironically became the inspiration of two radically opposed conceptions of Jewish identity, each of them a revolutionary break with the past: German Reform Judaism and secular Zionism. The Enlightenment, and its political expression in the French Revolution, embodied a sharp dichotomy between religion and state. The state itself was neutral and secular. Religion was to be the private persuasion of individuals.

For a Christian Europe this was a gradual and internal development. For Jews it came as a sharp external demand, stated with unavoidable clarity by Clermont-Tonnerre at the very threshold of emancipation. Was Judaism a religion or the framework of a nation? It could not be both. Holdheim’s Reform took the first alternative to its limits, Hess’s Zionism took the second. The former denationalized Judaism, the latter secularized it. Each involved a fundamental rewriting of Jewish history and tradition. Thus were born the two major alternatives to Orthodoxy that have persisted into the late twentieth century.

There were other revolutionary Jewish identities, particularly in Eastern Europe: Jewish socialism, culturalism, and a movement for diaspora Jewish autonomy. None proved durable. We will, in a later chapter, encounter a peculiarly twentieth-century alternative, neither religious nor national though mixing elements of both: the phenomenon of Jewish ethnicity. But this chapter has shown how the French Revolution set in motion a questioning and redefinition of Jewish identity that had no precedent in the previous seventeen centuries of exile. It led – in two opposite directions – to a dramatic break with tradition. Was this inevitable, or were there ways of preserving Jewish continuity within the classic terms of faith and practice? What were the traditional responses to the challenges of modernity?