Celebrating the Diaspora

Few people today are familiar with the ideas and personalities associated with Jewish diaspora nationalism, or “autonomism,” as it was often called. The creation of the State of Israel has made the central premise of autonomism, the notion of the diaspora as the primary locus of Jewish intellectual and cultural creativity and the authentic home of the Jewish people, seem irrelevant. Jewish national identity has become inextricably linked with political sovereignty and land. And despite a recent spate of scholarly works on the leading figures in the movement, diaspora nationalism remains a mere footnote in modern Jewish historiography. Yet little more than a century ago, advocates of Jewish national rights in the diaspora aggressively competed with Zionists for the hearts and minds of Jews living in the multinational empires of Austria-Hungary and Russia. In the period between the 1880s and the 1930s, the movement to ensure national rights for Jews played a major political and cultural role in the Jewish communities of eastern and central Europe and among immigrants in the United States. This chapter examines some of the leading proponents of “autonomism,” including Simon Dubnow, the Bund, Nathan Birnbaum, Haim Zhitlowski, and Simon Rawidowicz. A conclusion discusses Jewish diasporist thinkers in western Europe and in the United States in the era after the Second World War.