Jewish Body Politics

The idea of a Jewish body provides the background to understand the major Jewish migrations, the core features of modern Jewish politics, the transformation of Judaism as a religion and the role played by Jews in the Minority Rights Movement. Eastern European Jews’ immigration to the United States or Palestine as two sides of the same coin.

The Materialization of Spirit

While most histories of Jewish nationalism stress the ideological differences between Cultural Zionists and Jewish Marxists, I argue that the founding principles of Cultural Zionism advanced by the intellectual and newspaper editor Peretz Smolenskin were shaped and molded by the practical materialism advanced by Lieberman and his Marxist circle. In 1875 Smolenskin invited Lieberman to join his printing operation in Vienna and published the first Jewish socialist newspaper, The Truth (Ha’emet). Smolenskin’s connection to Lieberman embodies the complex architectonics that went into the building of cultural nationalism. Though appealing to ancient ideas, cultural forms of nationalism often piggybacked on modern movements inspired by calls for economic equality, spiritually appropriating and culturally particularizing the resources practical materialists were attempting to wrest away from discriminatory and oppressive political regimes.

Practical Materialism

The discovery of Karl Marx’s writings by Russian Jews in the mid-1870s changed the way they viewed their situation and provided a framework for them to become political actors. The chapter provides a careful reading of Jewish philosophical texts and propaganda literature from the late 1870s. It suggests that Jews who were drawn to Marx viewed Marx in conjunction with, not in opposition to, the Hebrew Bible and the Kabbalah. The early Jewish Marxists’ primary target was the Russian state, not their Jewish parents. The Jewish materialists teased out the messianic universal aspirations and nationalist assumptions that they saw behind Marx’s theories of revolution.

Scientific Materialism

The chapter analyzes the rise of Jewish scientific materialism in the 1870s. Inspired by both the revolutionary politics of the Russian intelligentsia and the German popular science movement, scientific materialists educated Jews about the laws of nature, technological inventions, and, most important, how God and the Jewish people could be understood through biological and chemical processes. Though often overlooked by historians, their views prefigured the major debates in the twentieth century over the scientific and biological basis of Jewish nationalist and cosmopolitan politics.

Social Materialism

The 1860s mark a watershed in the way Jews conceived of Judaism. During this period Jewish intellectuals started employing empirical methods of analysis to examine life in the Pale of Settlement and began formulating a Jewish “materialistic perspective on life” in general. These developments arose from new streams of thought as well as in response to the financial strains placed upon all inhabitants of Russia in the 1860s. Increased economic competition in the handcraft industries, periodic famines, and the slow exodus of wealthy Jews to Saint Petersburg affected everyone residing in the Pale of Settlement, but especially its Jewish population. Judaism offered an endorsement of a materialistic perspective on life. These developments arose from new ideas culled from Russian nihilistic literature as well as in response to the financial strains placed upon all inhabitants of Russia in the 1860s.

Materialisms

It provides an overview of modern Jewish history in relation to the question of Jews’ and Judaism’s relationship to materialism. It explores the way in which Russian Jews in the late nineteenth century mobilized an imagined concept of land, labor, and body for various national and religious projects. Abstract conceptions of God, dogma, or ritual were not the primary elements that connected modern Jews to one another. Instead, it was a new conception of the physical world.

Tradition

This chapter describes the state of the Jews living in the Russian Empire from 1840 to 1860. It details the Russian Empire’s economic and religious program to make Jews “Russians of the Mosaic Faith.” The Jews responded to this program by developing a theory of traditional Judaism that defined Judaism as strictly a religion—but one that reflected Catholic and Orthodox sentiments.