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.

‘A False and Perverse Doctrine’

Chapter 5 explores the origins of Jacob Robinson and Shabtai Rosenne’s ambivalence towards the Genocide Convention and Raphael Lemkin. At its core was their reading of the Convention as the extension of interwar protection of minority rights—in essence, as a programme of Diaspora Nationalism. The Convention was predicated on a competing model of Jewish nationalism that, following Simon Dubnow, identified the Diaspora—not Palestine—as the proper locus for Jewish national revival. It challenged Zionism’s core assumptions about the Jewish condition and the solution it prescribed to the ‘Jewish Question’. A return to minority rights, after the Holocaust, undermined Zionism’s achievement of majority status in Palestine and negated the need for a Jewish state to guarantee the protection of Jews. Both Robinson and Rosenne had previously subscribed to Dubnow’s teachings; the chapter traces their ideological transformations: from investment in to disenchantment with national autonomy, minority rights, and Dubnow’s theories.

Terms of Engagement

Chapter 1, a primer on international law in modern Jewish political thought and praxis, sketches the conceptual framework underlying the argument that Israel’s early ambivalence towards international law was rooted in pre-sovereign ideological sensibilities. The chapter considers the Jewish turn to international law as driven by the ‘Jewish Question’ in the pursuit of competing ideological visions of Jewish emancipation. It presents three models of Jewish emancipation and the terms on which each engaged international law: Assimilation, invested in the civic emancipation of Jews as individuals; Zionism, seeking national emancipation through the establishment of a territorial polity; and Diaspora Nationalism, prescribing national emancipation through the practice of Jewish autonomy in the Diaspora. The chapter proposes to consider international law as a field of contestation among these models of Jewish emancipation. In particular, the chapter traces the ambivalence towards international law inherent in Herzlian, Zionist thought and entrenched by Zionism’s political experience.

Nationalism: Issues and Concerns

Most Scholars contend that issue of nationalism is being challenged because of the rising globalization. Since most studies related to nationalism have focused on the contemporary issues in nationalism, this article examines the different verities, issues and concerns of nationalism. By employing document review, this article assesses the ethnic nationalism, civic nationalism, expansionist nationalism, romantic nationalism, cultural nationalism, post-colonial nationalism, liberation nationalism, liberal nationalism, religious nationalism and diaspora nationalism. The study finds that participation in international organizations as well as regional integration erodes nationalist ideology and because of the more interdependent world, not only economically, but politically and culturally as well leads the declining of nationalism. Finally, the article concludes with the concept that in homogeneous and uniformly global world, the ultra-nationalism may lead to further crisis and radicalization of Nationalism is not appreciated in the present world.

Stateless Zionism: Old traditions, new ideologies

This essay aims at exploring Zionist currents that resisted the establishment of a Jewish nation-state, their non-statist vision of Zionism and its roots in Jewish conditions and political traditions, as well as in European anti-statist ideologies and national patterns. First, the non-Zionist diaspora nationalism of Simon Dubnow will be examined, as an important point of reference of non-statist Zionisms; then, the reservations of Ahad Ha’am, founder of “spiritual Zionism”, from the vision of a nation-state and the Marxian anti-statism of Ber Borochov and his socialist followers will be observed. Thereafter, the anarchism of Martin Buber and his followers in the binational factions “Brit Shalom and Ihud” will be discussed; here anti-statism is manifestly theological. Lastly, the current manifestations of non-statist Jewish nationalism will be succinctly explored, focusing on two religious-Zionist rabbis, the late Menachem Fruman and Shimon Gershon Rosenberg, and the American historian David N. Myers.