Book Review

Comparative/World

Tom Nairn has called nationalism "the modern Janus," claiming both continuity and rupture with an imagined past. Religion has been coopted by modern nationalist movements, which portray it as a primal manifestation of the Volksgeist, but the ongoing role of religion in a full-blown national movement is constantly contested. True to form, Zionism and Judaism have, for over a century, formed a complex dialectical relationship, both synergistic and antagonistic.	1
The essays in this collection examine this relationship. As Shlomo Avineri notes in the introduction, an appreciation of the religious underpinnings of Zionism follows naturally from an understanding of the general continuity of religious sentiment into the modern era. Just as the French Revolution and nineteenth-century socialism translated premodern messianism into a secular form, so did the promise of emancipation augur, in the view of Western European Jews, a universalist utopia of tolerance and freedom. Israel Bartal's thoughtful essay notes that although relatively few Jews in Eastern Europe shared this sentiment, Jewish life in the nineteenth-century Russian Empire retained strong corporate qualities, embodied in the courts of Hasidic rabbis, supracommunal yeshivot, and the community of Westernizing, "enlightened" Jews (maskilim), linked together through the Hebrew press. Russia's maskilim championed only moderate religious reform and conceived of the Jews' future existence in corporate terms. Thus, the transition of maskilim to nationalism was less a quantum leap than progression along a spectrum.	2
Zionism's most prominent opponents in Eastern Europe were not Westernized maskilim but rather Orthodox rabbis. Essays by Yosef Salmon, Ehud Luz, and Aviezer Ravitzky depict the popular image among the Orthodox of Zionism as a violation of oaths, allegedly sworn by the Jews to God in the wake of the destruction of the Second Temple, that they would not attempt resettlement of the Holy Land before the messianic era. Some rabbis, however, conceived of secular Zionism in instrumental terms as a possible solution to the problems of Jewish poverty and persecution and as a necessary first step toward divine redemption. Even Orthodox supporters of Zionism, however, were hard-pressed to tolerate the secular nature of the new Jewish society that took form in Palestine of the 1880s. By the 1920s, we learn from coeditor Jehuda Reinharz, secular immigrants outnumbered the Orthodox, many of whom felt compelled to secede from Knesset Yisrael, the corporate entity of Palestinian Jewry established under the British Mandate. Thus secessionist Orthodoxy, which had emerged in Germany and Hungary a half-century previously, became rooted in the emerging Yishuv (Palestinian Jewish community).	3
The reaction of Orthodoxy to Zionism was, however, far more complex than mere rejection. In the United States, according to Jeffrey Gurock, Orthodox support for Zionism was relatively strong. (Unfortunately, Gurock does not provide a satisfying explanation of why this was the case.) In Europe and Palestine, the ultra-Orthodox Agudat Yisrael underwent a gradual evolution from a denial of Zionism tout court to a certain sympathy with the movement's veneration of productive agricultural and industrial labor. Thus, as Yaakov Tsur observes, a desire among ultra-Orthodox youth to create a "Third Yishuv," neither "Old" (rigidly Orthodox and dependent on charity) nor "New" (dynamic but secular) led to the founding of the Po'alei Agudat Yisra'el. More important, numerically and politically, was the Mizrachi (religious Zionist) movement, which remained part of the World Zionist Organization despite the latter's commitment to the promotion of secular Hebraic culture. Unlike the ultra-Orthodox, the Mizrachi accepted women's suffrage and other conditions for involvement in the Yishuv's governing bodies. In one of the volume's best essays, Israel Kolatt traces both the Mizrachi's concessions to secular Zionism and its battle to impose an official piety on the Yishuv in the form of sabbath observance in the public sphere.	. . .