Diaspora in Modern Jewish Thought

This chapter explores the broad contours of concepts of diaspora in modern Jewish thought. Philosophers, intellectuals, religious thinkers, and non-Zionist nationalists who disagreed on the ideal political structure for Jewish collective life (including Moses Mendelssohn, Hermann Cohen, Franz Rosenzweig, Simon Dubnow, Hannah Arendt, Mordecai Kaplan, and Horace Kallen) shared a commitment to diaspora as a value, rather than just a fact, of modern Jewish life. Yet the emergence of the terminology of diaspora in tandem with the rise of nationalism and Zionism shaped the theoretical evolution of diaspora as the binary opposite to homeland and statist visions of Jewish identity. As a result, seminal Zionist theorists deeply critical of diaspora life, such as Theodor Herzl, Achad Ha’am, and David Ben-Gurion, also had a key role in framing the significance of diaspora. Modern theories of diaspora internalized and contested the privileged position of territory and sovereignty demanded by the rise of nationalism in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries.

A imaginação nacional dos judeus norte-americanos: do pluralismo cultural liberal e sionista de Horace Kallen às incertezas do século XXI

No debate de inícios do século XX acerca da incorporação dos imigrantes europeus, duas perspectivas compartilhavam a visão de que a nação norte-americana se assentava sobre valores cívicos, mas divergiam quanto às formas da incorporação: de um lado, o melting-pot de Israel Zangwill; de outro, o pluralismo cultural de Horace Kallen. Ao elaborar a ideia de pluralismo cultural, Kallen propôs, ademais, que os judeus dos Estados Unidos construíssem sua identidade norte-americana articulando sionismo e liberalismo. No pós-Segunda Guerra Mundial, os judeus dos Estados Unidos teriam, portanto, construído uma imaginação nacional assentada nesses dois eixos culturais e políticos. Desde os anos 1970, porém, o consenso sionista dos judeus norte-americanos entrou em processo de erosão, o que, ao lado de mudanças demográficas, tem colocado novos desafios à sua imaginação nacional neste início de século XXI.

Normalization and Its Discontents

This chapter concentrates on the question of normalcy and its relationship to twentieth-century notions of Jewish distinctiveness and purpose. It describes how the idea of a special Jewish mission that initially thrived within the American Reform movement disintegrated as the urge to integrate within American society to gather strength among Jews prominently waned. It talks about Jewish exemplarity that was influentially presented in relation to specifics of the American context through the competing “melting pot” and “orchestra” metaphors of Israel Zangwill and Horace Kallen. The chapter illustrates the hope of Jewish normalization that was perceived by sharp observers, such as Karl Kraus, Theodor Lessing and Sigmund Freud in the first half of the twentieth century. It also mentions the horror of the Holocaust that cast a profound chill over the idea of Jewish instrumental purpose, but at the same time brought about a renewal of the idea on the ethical and historical lessons imparted by the Nazi genocide.

Coda

This brief coda considers the advantages of making the aesthetic a key term in our thinking about secularism. Accounts of Victorian secularization often treat the aesthetic as a kind of fetishized shell for the vanished contents of belief. What Arnold, Eliot, and Pater show us is how aesthetic thought offered Victorian writers something more nuanced: a rubric for mapping out the different spaces and distributions of religion in the modern world. Approaching the problem in this way, we not only gain new interest in Arnold and Pater as secularist thinkers but also discover how their work informed early theorists of cultural pluralism such as Horace Kallen and John Dewey, who were steeped in Victorian social criticism and based their models of the social upon Arnoldian images of society as an aesthetic harmony of fixed differences.

Jewish Internationalists

The role of Jewish radicalism is the theme of this chapter, especially as it was expressed in the pages of Menorah Journal. The ideas of Isaac Deutscher in regard to the “Non-Jewish Jew” and of Horace Kallen about “cultural pluralism” are treated in relation to the debate about assimilation and internationalism. Elliot Cohen, Lionel Trilling, and Herbert Solow are treated as representative figures.

The Progressive Seedbed

This chapter discusses conceptions of America's political community advanced by Progressive-era thinkers and activists that proved especially significant in American political development. These are the white middle-class reformist nationalism of Herbert Croly and Theodore Roosevelt; the varied and more radical efforts to blend democracy with cultural pluralism advanced by John Dewey, Randolph Bourne, Horace Kallen, and W. E. B. Du Bois; and the visions of economic democracy urged by Walter Weyl, Florence Kelley, and the National Consumers League. Although all have since remained politically important, their relative political prominence and their places on the prevailing American political spectrum have shifted over time. The chapter discusses these shifts and how they have remained central to the nation's politics.