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The Zionist Reconstruction of the Past
From: University of Chicago Press
| By:
Yael Zerubavel |
EDITOR'S INTRODUCTION |
Central to the Zionist movement, the attachment between the Jewish people and their ancient land of Palestine led to the creation of the State of Israel in 1948. In this excerpt from her book Recovered Roots, historian Yael Zerubavel examines the history of the Zionist movement, shedding light on the process of how new nations commemorate and recast select historic events. Zerubavel argues that, in the years leading to the birth of Israel, secular Zionists intentionally sought to rewrite Jewish history by reshaping Jewish memory--a tool used to revitalize national culture and liberate Israel from the weight of centuries of Jewish exile. |
 lthough "Zionist" ideologies and immigration to Palestine predated the official establishment of the Zionist movement, the meeting of the first Zionist Congress at Basel in 1897 marked the emergence of Zionism as a major political force in modern Jewish history. Its central role in the revival of Jewish national life in the ancient homeland was ritually expressed in the ceremony in which the first Israeli prime minister, David Ben-Gurion, publicly proclaimed the establishment of the State of Israel in 1948: a picture of Theodor Herzl, the founder of the Zionist movement and the "Prophet of the Jewish State," was hanging above his head as a symbolic affirmation of his inspiration to Zionist resettlement of Palestine, culminating in the declaration of independence in that historical moment. |
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| President Truman meeting with Prime Minister David Ben-Gurion of Israel and Abba Eban on May 8, 1951. They presented the menora as a token of esteem for President Truman's timely recognition of the State of Israel on May 14, 1948. | |
The Zionist movement was founded at the end of the nineteenth century in response to the immediate situation of European Jewry. Around that time earlier hopes that the emancipation of the Jews in the modern enlightened European state would solve the problem of Judaism and the Jews eroded. The threat of Jews' assimilation into western European society on the one hand, and the fear of modern antisemitism, dramatized by the 1894 Dreyfus trial in France, on the other hand, became major causes for concern in western Europe. |
But Zionism received its greatest impetus from the political and economic plight of the large Jewish communities of eastern Europe during the late nineteenth century and the beginning of the twentieth century. When a series of pogroms broke out in Russia in 1881, it led to a massive Jewish immigration to the United States and stimulated the first organized Jewish efforts to resettle Palestine. The First Zionist Aliya (wave of immigration, literally "going up") followed these pogroms. When bloodshed recurred in 1903 in Kishinev, reports of the death and destruction that it inflicted alarmed the Jews in Russia and elsewhere in Europe. These reports, and the nationalist literature that they inspired, contributed to the public awareness of the importance of an organized action to relieve the situation of Russian Jews and heightened the sense of urgency that marked the agenda of the newly founded Zionist movement. |
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| The Call of Zion by E.M. Lilien, from Morris Rosenfeld's Gezamelte Lieder (Collected Poems); Lilien, an Austrian artist active in the Zionist movement, portrays the Land of Israel as a haven for the Jews of Eastern Europe. | |
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The Zionist movement, whose members included residents of eastern and western Europe, secular and religious Jews, hard-core socialists and liberal bourgeois, encompassed a wide range of political, social, and religious views. In spite of this diversity, followers of Zionism shared some fundamental views about the Jewish past and the present: they regarded Jewish life in exile as inherently regressive and repressive, and believed in the need to promote some form of revival of Jewish national life as experienced in Antiquity. Although a harsh polemic on the route to achieve national revival split the Zionist movement for a while between the proponents of "cultural" and "political Zionism," it was the latter that became the dominant orientation of the Zionist Organization. Focusing on the politics of rescue as the most pressing agenda, political Zionism advocated the resettling of Russian Jewry in Palestine as the beginning of rebuilding a secure home for all Jews in their ancient homeland. Thus, the first Zionist Congress proclaimed that "Zionism aims at the creation of a home for the Jewish people in Palestine, to be secured by public law." |
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| Theodor Herzl, the father of modern Zionism, in a poster by Zev Raban commemorating the Jubilee of the World Zionist Organization. | |
It was the particular bent of "practical Zionism," however, that became most influential among those who actually took the step of leaving Europe for Palestine at the beginning of this century. While Theodor Herzl's brand of political Zionism focused on the effort to secure political guarantees for the resettlement of Jews, the followers of practical Zionism insisted on immediate action, advocating the resettlement there even before such guarantees were obtained. This position further accentuated the Zionist belief that Jews were to assume a more active role in changing the course of their own history. For the proponents of practical Zionism, the personal and the collective commitment to resettlement, even without waiting for external recognition or support, was a way of promoting such a desired change. This conviction, articulating the Zionist settlers' belief in their historical mission, also helped them endure the difficulties they encountered in the process of implementing their vision. Indeed, the belief that one could act in defiance of an unfavorable political situation in order to promote the national cause was deeply ingrained in the political consciousness of the emergent Hebrew nation in Palestine and represents a fundamental mode of thought in Israeli political culture. |
The Zionist reading of Jewish history was an important facet of its political agenda. In fact, Zionist collective memory provided the ideological framework for understanding and legitimizing its vision of the future. The predominantly secular Zionist movement turned away from traditional Jewish memory in order to construct its own countermemory of the Jewish past. In its call for change and its critical attitude toward Jewish life, culture, and values in exile, the Zionist interpretation of history had a strong anti-traditionalist thrust. The majority of Orthodox Jews thus objected to Zionism as a challenge to traditional Jewish life and a negation of the belief in messianic redemption. A religious Zionist minority who supported the Zionist advocacy of immediate action to promote the Jewish settlement of Palestine resolved the tension between the two frameworks by explaining the Jews' own initiative as a preparation for "the beginning of the blossoming of our redemption." Attempting to reconcile Zionist views with religious premises, their vision of the future focused on a Jewish nation governed by the laws of the Torah, a significantly different view from that of the secular majority. |
While the religious Zionists grappled with the vision of the future, secular Zionists were more concerned with reshaping the past. This preoccupation with the past stemmed from the recognition that the development of a countermemory was in itself an effective tool for revitalizing Jewish national culture, to liberate it from the impact of centuries of life in exile. The Zionist discourse often resorted to oppositionist rhetoric toward traditional Jewish memory. This overt use, however, obscured the many links to tradition that Zionism retained, as we shall see. Even when the Zionist countermemory began to enjoy hegemony among the Jews of Palestine, thus transforming into collective memory, it continued to maintain an oppositionist pose to the larger and more established Jewish society in exile, in order to highlight the new Hebrew society's distinct identity. |
The Zionist periodization of Jewish history
Any commemorative system is based on certain guiding principles that are essentially ideological. For the Zionists the major yardstick to evaluate the past was the bond between the Jewish people and their ancient land. Influenced by European romantic nationalism on the one hand and drawing upon a long, distinctively Jewish tradition of longing to return to the ancient homeland on the other, Zionism assumed that an inherent bond between the Jewish people and their ancient land was a necessary condition for the development of Jewish nationhood. Indeed, the movement's name, Zionism, was based on the Hebrew name of the ancient homeland, Zion, articulating the centrality of this bond between the people and the land. The 1903 "Uganda crisis" marked the failure of an alternative policy of substituting another territory for Palestine for the revival of Jewish national life. The vehement opposition to this idea within the Zionist movement served to affirm the Zionists' commitment to the Land of Israel as the only viable option for rebuilding the Hebrew nation. |
The Zionist periodization of Jewish history is thus based on the primacy of the people-land bond: the past is divided into two main periods, Antiquity and Exile. Antiquity begins with the tribal (prenational) history of Abraham and his descendants, leading to their migration to Egypt. Yet it is the Exodus from Egypt that marks the transition from a promise (to Abraham) to actual fulfillment. It also established the commemorative paradigm of national liberation in Jewish tradition, ritually affirmed every year in the celebration of three major holidays--Passover, Shavuot, and Sukkot. The national past begins with the Israelites' conquest of ancient Canaan and extends over centuries of collective experience there. Antiquity ends with a series of revolts that fail--the Great Revolt against the Romans during the first century, followed by the failure of the Bar Kokhba revolt in the second century. |
The period of Exile, in turn, covers the many centuries when Jews lived as a religious minority dispersed among other peoples. Exile thus embodies the loss of both physical bond with the ancient homeland and the Jews' collective experience as a unified nation. More problematic was the delineation of its ending, since Jewish life in exile actually continued at the time when the Zionist settlement in Palestine was in process, although it was expected to bring Exile to an end. The actual fulfillment of the Zionist ideology was thus motivated by the double vision of ending the state of exile and of beginning a new national era. |
In itself this periodization of the Jewish past into Antiquity and Exile did not mark a revolutionary break with Jewish memory: Jewish tradition, too, differentiated Jewish life in exile from the ancient past in the Land of Israel. It, too, commemorated Zion and galut (the homeland and exile) as two distinct situations in the Jewish collective experience. But Jewish tradition also offered alternative periodizations of the past, such as classifying it by different generations of rabbinical scholars or the writings that they produced (namely, the Tana'anic period or the Mishna period). |
For traditional Judaism, exile from Zion was a divine punishment, but it was also a condition that highlighted the Jews' spiritual mission as the chosen people. During centuries of life in exile the meaning of the concepts of Zion and galut continued to evolve and remained interconnected. No longer embedded only within a political-historical reality, they attained a spiritual, metaphysical meaning that made it easier to endure the state of exile: Zion was not only a physical homeland but also a metaphysical land that the Jews carried with them wherever they went. Although Zionism pursued the traditional binary opposition of Zion and galut, it offered a primarily historicist approach to their interpretation. It thus forced Jewish memory to recreate itself by turning from a theological to a historical framework. |
In its reconstruction of Jewish history, the Zionist commemorative narrative accentuated the perception of a "great divide" between Antiquity and Exile. The result of this process was twofold: it highlighted the contrast between these two major periods, but it also imposed a sense of uniformity within each period. By grouping eighteen centuries of Exile into one period, the Zionist commemorative narrative overlooked the considerable cultural, economic, social, and political differences in the development of various Jewish communities. Underlying this periodization is the assumption that the exilic condition is more central to Jewish communities' experience than any other dimension of their lives that would distinguish, for example, between the Babylonian Jewry during the fourth century and the Jews of Spain during the twelfth century, or the Jews of eastern Europe in the nineteenth century. |
This periodization obviously requires a highly selective representation of many centuries of Jewish experience in a vast range of geographical territories and ignores historical developments that do not fit the principles underlying this mold. For example, it ignores the exile of the ten tribes of Israel from their land, which occurred within the period of Antiquity (722 B.C.), and the long stretches of time during that period when the Israelites lived under Babylonian, Persian, Greek, and Roman rule and their political freedom was severely curtailed. It also suppresses the memory of Jewish revolts against a foreign rule by those who remained in Judaea after the second century, and incidents of Jewish self-defense during the Middle Ages, namely, within the Exile period. The acceptance of the Zionist commemorative framework as given buries important social, economic, and cultural developments that do not relate directly to the political expressions of nationhood, and obscures the continuity within Jewish life between Antiquity and Exile. |
Nonetheless, the emphasis on a great divide separating Antiquity from Exile articulates Zionism's ideological message that the political expression of nationhood stands above and beyond any other criterion of classifying Jewish history. Playing Antiquity and Exile against each other was necessary for constructing distinctive commemorative attitudes for each. It was also important for creating an equally dramatic contrast between Exile and the Zionist revival on the other end, marking the beginning of a new national period. |
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