Post by Funky George! on May 7, 2008 12:37:58 GMT -5
Aaron J. Haberman
5/5/08
Secular Affirmations of Judaism and Attitudes Towards a Jewish Nation
The affirmation of Judaism as a culture and value-system distinct from its religious trappings was popular among secular Jewish thinkers in the latter part of the nineteenth century. This paper examines the writings of three leading figures in this movement: Moses Hess, Ahad Ha'am and Chaim Zhitlowsky, analyzing the varying beliefs, feelings, events and philosophies that compelled these 19th and early 20th century secular Jews to identify with and redefine Judaism and the Jewish people. This paper further compares and contrasts the varying ideological concepts and priorities ranging from but not limited to cultural, racial, national, and values-oriented identities which led these writers to different outlooks on the future of a Jewish people and the different ways in which they sought to reunite the Jewish community.
One of the foremost secular Jewish thinkers was Ahad Ha'am, who is best understood as a secularist calling European Jewry into action from the detached, rooted religious belief that, somehow, without any action on its part, the Jewish people would be returned to Palestine. Such belief, Ha’am argued, compelled Jews to accept their suffering. Ha'am proposed that Jews abandon the spiritual high-ground and take action to fulfill the prophecy of a return to Palestine in order to re-establish the Hebrew national culture. To Ha'am, Judaism, and Jews, existed as a nationality with, more importantly, a culture; the Hebrews were a people whose past and whose morality advocated the rebirth of Israel
In his essay titled, "The Transvaluation of Values" Ha’am explains why the Jews, having transformed their moral principles into religious beliefs, were left hopeless in European societies. Jewish morals focus on the abstract, placing emphasis, as Ha'am explains, on doctrine which he describes as the ‘book over the sword’. Such doctrine, he asserts, is responsible for Jewish apathy in the physical realm: "By this means…it has subordinated the reality of life to its shadow; it has made the Jew a sort of appendage to an abstract moral law. In this condition it is impossible for the Jews to live on among the nations; still more impossible for them to restore their national life in their own country." (Ha’am, 218.)
Ha'am proposes that Jews transfer their values to the physical world. He continues: "Now, therefore, that the desire of a national rebirth has been aroused in us, it behooves us first of all to trans-valuate the moral values which are accepted among us at present; to overthrow, mercilessly and at a single blow, the historic edifice which our ancestors have left us, seeing that it is built up on this dangerously mistaken idea of the superiority of spirit to matter, and of the subordination of the individual life to abstract moral laws." (Ha’am, 218.)
Ha’am had Zionist sentiments and advocated a return to Palestine, but he disagreed strongly with the Zionist movement; which felt was only interested in creating a state without revitalizing Jewish culture. In advocating the importance of culture over the state, he broke with the Zionist movement, demanding that they return to the mission of the early Zionists. “When, therefore, we demand a clear and explicit statement that work for the revival of the national spirit and the development of its products is of the very essence of Zionism, and that Zionism is inconceivable without such work, we are not giving utterance to a mere empty formula, or fighting for a name.” (Ha’am, 258) Contrary to Zionism’s sole mission of nationhood, Ha’am, believed that the return to Palestine must be rooted in regenerating Judaic culture, which would in turn provide a cultural; identity for all Jewry. For Ha’am, the establishment of a cultural center for Jews in Palestine was far more important than the attainment of sovereignty.
“To gather these atoms together [the creative genius of the Jewish nation], and keep them in our own world for the benefit of our own national culture…prepares the way for the greater cultural work that is to come after the establishment of the centre in Palestine.”(Ha’am, 294.) Ha’am believes the founding of a cultural center for Jews within Palestine will lead to great Jewish cultural work.
Ha'am felt that the political Zionists (as opposed to his cultural Zionism) were looking to deprive the Zionist movement of an important aspect of any nationality—its culture. He contends that early Zionists, in attempting to spread Hebrew literature, understood the importance of a culture to a people, and that they were nonetheless political; thus, the political Zionists, he says, commandeer the word political to isolate that goal in their Zionism—implicitly stating that they had no interest in a cultural rebirth. Leon Simon, the translator of Selected Essays by Ahad Ha'am, offers the explanation that, "The Zionists seemed to be trying to save the body of the Jewish people, not its soul." (Simon’s Introduction, 39.)
Ha’am uses history to rationalize his argument, and while his argument comprehensively documents the history of the Jewish culture and its existence in the 19th century, I believe his goal is unrealistic without the creation of a state. Instead of alienating himself from the mainstream Zionist movement and becoming an enemy of political Zionists, Ha’am should have aligned himself with the movement. I do not believe he foresaw the importance of a Jewish state. Had Ha’am understood why Zionists were concerned with the importance of securing the land instead of just situating a Jewish culture there, he may have believed that self-determination upon the land was necessary for the culture. Instead, he seemed to despise the diplomatic plans of creating a nation and made the assumption that since establishing a culture was not the first priority of Zionists, they were thus enemies of a cultural establishment.
Another secular Jewish thinker, Moses Hess, intensely favored the founding of a Jewish state in Palestine. Moses Hess had at one time abandoned Judaism for utopian socialism, and ultimately returned to Judaism in part because of a telling incident with a would-be publisher of Hess’ work on Jewish national aspirations. According to Hess, Germans popularly regarded their national values as universal human nature, and upon reading Hess’ submission, the German publisher said the premise of the work offended his human nature. "The 'pure human nature' of the German” Hess wrote, “is, in reality, the character of the pure German race…"(Hess, 257). Hess explains that within the German race there is antagonism towards Jews. Identifying this, Hess concludes that the Jew in Germany must deny his "race" in order to succeed.
Hess's identification with Judaism as a race is most noted in fourth letter in his collection of essays titled "Rome and Jersualem". "Among my friends there is a Russian nobleman…This friend married a Polish Jewess, by whom he had a number of sons, who all possess Jewish features in marked degree. As you see, my esteemed friend, Jews and Jewesses endeavor, in vain, to obliterate their descent through conversion or intermarriage with the Indo-Germanic and Mongolian races, for the Jewish type is indestructible." (Hess, 261) Hess is referring to the physiognomic makeup of the Jews, and uses it as proof that the Jews are racially different.
This belief in the Jews as a unified nation is only one part of Hess's return to his people; this part may be considered the proclamation of his Jewishness, a pseudo-scientific argument for why the Jews are a nation and a race. The second part of his return, though, comes from his realization that the Jews must be a nation, for they are not welcome in Europe.
Hess's return to Judaism is the by-product of Jew-hatred. In 1840 he wrote, "Wherefore the illusion? The European nations have always considered the existence of the Jews in their midst as an anomaly. We shall always remain strangers among the nations. They may tolerate us and even grant us emancipation, but they will never respect us as long as we place the principle ubi bene ibi patria [where it is good, there is the homeland] above our own great national memories." (Hess, 74.)
The above passage was written in response to the Damascus Affair, at a time when Hess was actively socialist but sensed nonetheless that Jews would never be welcome in Europe. Hess is speaking of those who would deny Jewish nationality when he says that the Europeans nations do not respect those who identify their homeland as "where it is good". Hess believed that assimilation offered no escape as those who would be willing to sacrifice their national memories would encounter prejudice for partaking in such false efforts.
Infused in this return, ultimately, is his embracement of what he concludes is the moral genius of Jews Hess offers historical explanation for some of the prominent theological beliefs of Jews and relates these beliefs to the moral genius of the Jews. Hess traces the immortality of the Jews to the Jewish genius in connecting God with the world, saying that nothing in Judaism separates the created world from the Creator. He condemns the Christian conception of immortality as being egoistic, and as promoting the individual above the people. Meanwhile, the Jewish belief in immortality is traced to Rachel weeping from the grave at her children's unhappy fate. "…it is the product of our remarkable family love.” (Hess, 65.) Hess foremost takes from this story evidence of the moral genius of Jews—their profound love for family. He is also carefully constructing immortality as a concept of a spirit extending throughout Jewish history, paralleling it with the moral genius and the physiognomy which he says are undeniable in Jews, and avoiding any supernatural implications within the concept.
Hess has a similar values-based explanation for the return of the messiah. He proclaims his belief in the return from exile, not as the product of the return of the Messiah, enabling him to define his belief in the return from exile as "the belief in the regeneration of the historical civilized nations, which will be accomplished only by raising the oppressed nations to the level of the mighty and dominant ones." (Hess, 75.) This is very similar to Ahad Ha'am's aforementioned longing for Jews to take action and return from exile; however, Hess’s longing is for the return of a nation, while Ha’am’s is for the rebirth of a culture.
Hess’s Zionism is unmistakably apparent in his twelfth letter as he quotes a rabbi whose Zionists ideals corroborate Hess’s own: “…even if we cannot expect to win the consent of the Sultan, the following proposal is still practical, especially at a time when under God's Providence, there have arisen in Israel a number of men who possess great political influence or rule, by virtue of their wealth…These men are Jewish princes such as the Jewish people has not had since the dispersion. These should organize a Society for the colonization of Palestine”. (Hess, 178.) Moses Hess returned to the Jewish identity on grounds of moral traits, national identity and his belief that the Jews were a race that should return to its homeland.
Moses Hess’s argument for Zionism is comprehensive in that it details why the Jews are a race and why they must choose to rebuild their nation. Yet I do not believe it is relevant to isolate the Jews for physiognomy, as it is a narrow-minded and unconvincing argument to suggest that physical traits create an insurmountable difference between people; the story of the Russian whose children still bear Jewish facial structure does not mean the Jew cannot assimilate. Hess’s stronger argument focuses singly on the fact that Jews are mocked for their physiognomy. Hess furthers his argument for the necessity of a Jewish state by documenting the Jew-hatred in Germany and predicting a showdown between races, perhaps his strongest point, given its accuracy. At the onset of the 20th century, an anti-Zionist perspective emerged and was advocated by a socialist, secular Jew.
For Chaim Zhitlovsky, one’s Judaism is undeniable: he argues in his essay, “Yid un Mentsch” that a Jew never ceases to be a Jew, as it is his nationality. “Jews lived for generations in their own cultural milieu, on their own land, developing physical and spiritual traits transmitted from generation to generation. A child born of baptized Jews has a Jewish mind and heart, a certain build of the body and soul; he is a Jew, even if Jews do not accept him and he hates them.” (Zhitlovsky, 3.) Much like Hess, Zhitlovsky believes in the physical uniqueness of the Jewish person.
Zhitlovsky shares other ideas with both Hess and Ha’am, as he makes reference to the Jews as a race, and distinguishes the religion from the nationality. “Jewish religion and Jewish nation are independent variables. Any Jew may belong to both, but he must belong to the Jewish nation…his Jewish personality, his decided national type, manifested more or less pronouncedly in his physiognomy, his character, and his style of intellectual and cultural expression,” Zhitlovsky writes. (Zhitlovsky, 4.) Zhitlovsky hereby dismisses assimilation as a farce; shedding one’s Jewish religious beliefs is no step in changing one’s nationality, personality, or physiognomic character.
The ways in which Zhitlovsky reconciles his religious secularism with his Jewish nationality and character overlap with the arguments made by Ha’am and Hess. However, Zhitlovsky’s method of reuniting Jews as a “nation” is severely different ideologically and methodologically than the Zionist and culturally Zionist sentiments of Ha’am and Hess. Zhitlovsky wants to make progress for all Jews by breaking from dogma. Of the traditions of ‘mitzvot’ Zhitlovsky says: “These cannot withstand the critique of progressive thought…our modern tolerance forbids that the nation force anyone to believe these outmoded dogmas”. (Zhitlovsky, 5.)
Zhitlovsky herein agrees with the assimilationist viewpoint: “The cosmopolitans were right in principle to demand that everything in Jewish life should be judged by the standard of universal truth, goodness, and beauty”; the above-mentioned customs do not pass the test. (Zhitlovsky, 5.) Yet he disagrees with the next step in the cosmopolitan logic—that since Jewish religious customs fail this test, Jews should essentially shed their Jewishness. Zhitlovsky believes that each culture has a different means of expressing its “human reason”. This is the basis of his argument for the preservation of Yiddish culture. Zhitlovsky contends that Yiddish culture should be allowed to progress wherever it should exist.
Jewish cultural advancement, Zhitlovsky says, will come as the European community advances towards equality. “But with human progress, there must come a time when... no group will exercise domination over any other…” he writes, and it is in this vain that he says no longer will the Jews be forced from the Yiddish language. (Zhitlovsky, 6.) Zhitlovsky accepts the presence of all cultures and all religions in what he calls the “human symphony” and does not believe man can rise above religion or multi-culturalism.
Chaim Zhitlovsky employs strong reasoning in advocating the importance and the usage of a language and culture prevalent in worldwide Jewry. Yet I believe his argument fails when he equates Jewish culture with other cultures. Zhitlovsky’s ideal global community would grant equality to all cultures, but his expectations are unrealistic: perhaps Jews would favor preserving their cultures and gaining equal rights in the European lands, but why, ultimately, would European nations grant rights or fully accept in their lands a people with a language and a culture different than their national language and culture? Zhitlovsky’s idealism herein lacks rationale. His advocacy of multi-culturalism and of Yiddish culture is persuasive and rational, yet I believe his idealistic plan has a passive expectation that European societies will accept Jews; his expectation that human progress will inevitably lead to equal rights for each cultural group is unfounded.
The three figures discussed in this essay lived in a world before the return from exile at a time where Spinoza’s impartial hypothesis that “if the foundations of their religion have not overly emasculated their minds, [the Jews] may even, if occasion arises, so changeable are human affairs, raise up their empire afresh...” was coming to premise as secular Jewish thinkers offered their views on what it meant to be Jewish and how to unite Jews. (Nadler, 27.)While Moses Hess accurately forecasted a racial showdown and argued for the necessity of a Jewish state, Chaim Zhitlovsky was a believer in the amelioration of all societies through human progress as a means of elevating and uniting Judaism without creating a homeland for Jews. Meanwhile, Ahad Ha’am was more concerned with a united Jewish culture, with Palestine as its cultural center. These men had to convince their readers of the existence of Jews to justify a Jewish nation or a Jewish culture. While modern secular Jews dispute the necessity of Israel, they are not asked to justify their people. I believe the concepts Ahad Ha’am, Chaim Zhitlovsky and Moses Hess had to justify and rationalize in order to propone some sort of Jewish unity were far more open-ended than the same concepts facing modern secular Jewish thinkers. This is evident in the broad scope of ideas these men adopted in order to validate their Jewishness. Ahad Ha’am believed in the Hebrew culture of a Jewish race; Moses Hess coupled his belief in genetic traits, moral genius, and the Jewish nationality and race with the realization that Jews were hated by other cultures to argue for the necessity of a Jewish state; and Chaim Zhitlovsky applied his socialist ideals to his argument that Jews can survive in Europe and in the United States by affirming their Yiddish culture, embracing their differences while at the same time shedding their superstitious religious traditions, believing in the existence of Jews as a nationality without believing a nation was necessary for them. All saw a world in which “The powers of creativity in the Jewish nation are now broken and split apart”, as Zhitlovsky wrote, and this dismayed these men, yet all had different interpretations of what, precisely, made them Jewish, and what Jewish unity entailed. (Zhitlovsky, 15.)
5/5/08
Secular Affirmations of Judaism and Attitudes Towards a Jewish Nation
The affirmation of Judaism as a culture and value-system distinct from its religious trappings was popular among secular Jewish thinkers in the latter part of the nineteenth century. This paper examines the writings of three leading figures in this movement: Moses Hess, Ahad Ha'am and Chaim Zhitlowsky, analyzing the varying beliefs, feelings, events and philosophies that compelled these 19th and early 20th century secular Jews to identify with and redefine Judaism and the Jewish people. This paper further compares and contrasts the varying ideological concepts and priorities ranging from but not limited to cultural, racial, national, and values-oriented identities which led these writers to different outlooks on the future of a Jewish people and the different ways in which they sought to reunite the Jewish community.
One of the foremost secular Jewish thinkers was Ahad Ha'am, who is best understood as a secularist calling European Jewry into action from the detached, rooted religious belief that, somehow, without any action on its part, the Jewish people would be returned to Palestine. Such belief, Ha’am argued, compelled Jews to accept their suffering. Ha'am proposed that Jews abandon the spiritual high-ground and take action to fulfill the prophecy of a return to Palestine in order to re-establish the Hebrew national culture. To Ha'am, Judaism, and Jews, existed as a nationality with, more importantly, a culture; the Hebrews were a people whose past and whose morality advocated the rebirth of Israel
In his essay titled, "The Transvaluation of Values" Ha’am explains why the Jews, having transformed their moral principles into religious beliefs, were left hopeless in European societies. Jewish morals focus on the abstract, placing emphasis, as Ha'am explains, on doctrine which he describes as the ‘book over the sword’. Such doctrine, he asserts, is responsible for Jewish apathy in the physical realm: "By this means…it has subordinated the reality of life to its shadow; it has made the Jew a sort of appendage to an abstract moral law. In this condition it is impossible for the Jews to live on among the nations; still more impossible for them to restore their national life in their own country." (Ha’am, 218.)
Ha'am proposes that Jews transfer their values to the physical world. He continues: "Now, therefore, that the desire of a national rebirth has been aroused in us, it behooves us first of all to trans-valuate the moral values which are accepted among us at present; to overthrow, mercilessly and at a single blow, the historic edifice which our ancestors have left us, seeing that it is built up on this dangerously mistaken idea of the superiority of spirit to matter, and of the subordination of the individual life to abstract moral laws." (Ha’am, 218.)
Ha’am had Zionist sentiments and advocated a return to Palestine, but he disagreed strongly with the Zionist movement; which felt was only interested in creating a state without revitalizing Jewish culture. In advocating the importance of culture over the state, he broke with the Zionist movement, demanding that they return to the mission of the early Zionists. “When, therefore, we demand a clear and explicit statement that work for the revival of the national spirit and the development of its products is of the very essence of Zionism, and that Zionism is inconceivable without such work, we are not giving utterance to a mere empty formula, or fighting for a name.” (Ha’am, 258) Contrary to Zionism’s sole mission of nationhood, Ha’am, believed that the return to Palestine must be rooted in regenerating Judaic culture, which would in turn provide a cultural; identity for all Jewry. For Ha’am, the establishment of a cultural center for Jews in Palestine was far more important than the attainment of sovereignty.
“To gather these atoms together [the creative genius of the Jewish nation], and keep them in our own world for the benefit of our own national culture…prepares the way for the greater cultural work that is to come after the establishment of the centre in Palestine.”(Ha’am, 294.) Ha’am believes the founding of a cultural center for Jews within Palestine will lead to great Jewish cultural work.
Ha'am felt that the political Zionists (as opposed to his cultural Zionism) were looking to deprive the Zionist movement of an important aspect of any nationality—its culture. He contends that early Zionists, in attempting to spread Hebrew literature, understood the importance of a culture to a people, and that they were nonetheless political; thus, the political Zionists, he says, commandeer the word political to isolate that goal in their Zionism—implicitly stating that they had no interest in a cultural rebirth. Leon Simon, the translator of Selected Essays by Ahad Ha'am, offers the explanation that, "The Zionists seemed to be trying to save the body of the Jewish people, not its soul." (Simon’s Introduction, 39.)
Ha’am uses history to rationalize his argument, and while his argument comprehensively documents the history of the Jewish culture and its existence in the 19th century, I believe his goal is unrealistic without the creation of a state. Instead of alienating himself from the mainstream Zionist movement and becoming an enemy of political Zionists, Ha’am should have aligned himself with the movement. I do not believe he foresaw the importance of a Jewish state. Had Ha’am understood why Zionists were concerned with the importance of securing the land instead of just situating a Jewish culture there, he may have believed that self-determination upon the land was necessary for the culture. Instead, he seemed to despise the diplomatic plans of creating a nation and made the assumption that since establishing a culture was not the first priority of Zionists, they were thus enemies of a cultural establishment.
Another secular Jewish thinker, Moses Hess, intensely favored the founding of a Jewish state in Palestine. Moses Hess had at one time abandoned Judaism for utopian socialism, and ultimately returned to Judaism in part because of a telling incident with a would-be publisher of Hess’ work on Jewish national aspirations. According to Hess, Germans popularly regarded their national values as universal human nature, and upon reading Hess’ submission, the German publisher said the premise of the work offended his human nature. "The 'pure human nature' of the German” Hess wrote, “is, in reality, the character of the pure German race…"(Hess, 257). Hess explains that within the German race there is antagonism towards Jews. Identifying this, Hess concludes that the Jew in Germany must deny his "race" in order to succeed.
Hess's identification with Judaism as a race is most noted in fourth letter in his collection of essays titled "Rome and Jersualem". "Among my friends there is a Russian nobleman…This friend married a Polish Jewess, by whom he had a number of sons, who all possess Jewish features in marked degree. As you see, my esteemed friend, Jews and Jewesses endeavor, in vain, to obliterate their descent through conversion or intermarriage with the Indo-Germanic and Mongolian races, for the Jewish type is indestructible." (Hess, 261) Hess is referring to the physiognomic makeup of the Jews, and uses it as proof that the Jews are racially different.
This belief in the Jews as a unified nation is only one part of Hess's return to his people; this part may be considered the proclamation of his Jewishness, a pseudo-scientific argument for why the Jews are a nation and a race. The second part of his return, though, comes from his realization that the Jews must be a nation, for they are not welcome in Europe.
Hess's return to Judaism is the by-product of Jew-hatred. In 1840 he wrote, "Wherefore the illusion? The European nations have always considered the existence of the Jews in their midst as an anomaly. We shall always remain strangers among the nations. They may tolerate us and even grant us emancipation, but they will never respect us as long as we place the principle ubi bene ibi patria [where it is good, there is the homeland] above our own great national memories." (Hess, 74.)
The above passage was written in response to the Damascus Affair, at a time when Hess was actively socialist but sensed nonetheless that Jews would never be welcome in Europe. Hess is speaking of those who would deny Jewish nationality when he says that the Europeans nations do not respect those who identify their homeland as "where it is good". Hess believed that assimilation offered no escape as those who would be willing to sacrifice their national memories would encounter prejudice for partaking in such false efforts.
Infused in this return, ultimately, is his embracement of what he concludes is the moral genius of Jews Hess offers historical explanation for some of the prominent theological beliefs of Jews and relates these beliefs to the moral genius of the Jews. Hess traces the immortality of the Jews to the Jewish genius in connecting God with the world, saying that nothing in Judaism separates the created world from the Creator. He condemns the Christian conception of immortality as being egoistic, and as promoting the individual above the people. Meanwhile, the Jewish belief in immortality is traced to Rachel weeping from the grave at her children's unhappy fate. "…it is the product of our remarkable family love.” (Hess, 65.) Hess foremost takes from this story evidence of the moral genius of Jews—their profound love for family. He is also carefully constructing immortality as a concept of a spirit extending throughout Jewish history, paralleling it with the moral genius and the physiognomy which he says are undeniable in Jews, and avoiding any supernatural implications within the concept.
Hess has a similar values-based explanation for the return of the messiah. He proclaims his belief in the return from exile, not as the product of the return of the Messiah, enabling him to define his belief in the return from exile as "the belief in the regeneration of the historical civilized nations, which will be accomplished only by raising the oppressed nations to the level of the mighty and dominant ones." (Hess, 75.) This is very similar to Ahad Ha'am's aforementioned longing for Jews to take action and return from exile; however, Hess’s longing is for the return of a nation, while Ha’am’s is for the rebirth of a culture.
Hess’s Zionism is unmistakably apparent in his twelfth letter as he quotes a rabbi whose Zionists ideals corroborate Hess’s own: “…even if we cannot expect to win the consent of the Sultan, the following proposal is still practical, especially at a time when under God's Providence, there have arisen in Israel a number of men who possess great political influence or rule, by virtue of their wealth…These men are Jewish princes such as the Jewish people has not had since the dispersion. These should organize a Society for the colonization of Palestine”. (Hess, 178.) Moses Hess returned to the Jewish identity on grounds of moral traits, national identity and his belief that the Jews were a race that should return to its homeland.
Moses Hess’s argument for Zionism is comprehensive in that it details why the Jews are a race and why they must choose to rebuild their nation. Yet I do not believe it is relevant to isolate the Jews for physiognomy, as it is a narrow-minded and unconvincing argument to suggest that physical traits create an insurmountable difference between people; the story of the Russian whose children still bear Jewish facial structure does not mean the Jew cannot assimilate. Hess’s stronger argument focuses singly on the fact that Jews are mocked for their physiognomy. Hess furthers his argument for the necessity of a Jewish state by documenting the Jew-hatred in Germany and predicting a showdown between races, perhaps his strongest point, given its accuracy. At the onset of the 20th century, an anti-Zionist perspective emerged and was advocated by a socialist, secular Jew.
For Chaim Zhitlovsky, one’s Judaism is undeniable: he argues in his essay, “Yid un Mentsch” that a Jew never ceases to be a Jew, as it is his nationality. “Jews lived for generations in their own cultural milieu, on their own land, developing physical and spiritual traits transmitted from generation to generation. A child born of baptized Jews has a Jewish mind and heart, a certain build of the body and soul; he is a Jew, even if Jews do not accept him and he hates them.” (Zhitlovsky, 3.) Much like Hess, Zhitlovsky believes in the physical uniqueness of the Jewish person.
Zhitlovsky shares other ideas with both Hess and Ha’am, as he makes reference to the Jews as a race, and distinguishes the religion from the nationality. “Jewish religion and Jewish nation are independent variables. Any Jew may belong to both, but he must belong to the Jewish nation…his Jewish personality, his decided national type, manifested more or less pronouncedly in his physiognomy, his character, and his style of intellectual and cultural expression,” Zhitlovsky writes. (Zhitlovsky, 4.) Zhitlovsky hereby dismisses assimilation as a farce; shedding one’s Jewish religious beliefs is no step in changing one’s nationality, personality, or physiognomic character.
The ways in which Zhitlovsky reconciles his religious secularism with his Jewish nationality and character overlap with the arguments made by Ha’am and Hess. However, Zhitlovsky’s method of reuniting Jews as a “nation” is severely different ideologically and methodologically than the Zionist and culturally Zionist sentiments of Ha’am and Hess. Zhitlovsky wants to make progress for all Jews by breaking from dogma. Of the traditions of ‘mitzvot’ Zhitlovsky says: “These cannot withstand the critique of progressive thought…our modern tolerance forbids that the nation force anyone to believe these outmoded dogmas”. (Zhitlovsky, 5.)
Zhitlovsky herein agrees with the assimilationist viewpoint: “The cosmopolitans were right in principle to demand that everything in Jewish life should be judged by the standard of universal truth, goodness, and beauty”; the above-mentioned customs do not pass the test. (Zhitlovsky, 5.) Yet he disagrees with the next step in the cosmopolitan logic—that since Jewish religious customs fail this test, Jews should essentially shed their Jewishness. Zhitlovsky believes that each culture has a different means of expressing its “human reason”. This is the basis of his argument for the preservation of Yiddish culture. Zhitlovsky contends that Yiddish culture should be allowed to progress wherever it should exist.
Jewish cultural advancement, Zhitlovsky says, will come as the European community advances towards equality. “But with human progress, there must come a time when... no group will exercise domination over any other…” he writes, and it is in this vain that he says no longer will the Jews be forced from the Yiddish language. (Zhitlovsky, 6.) Zhitlovsky accepts the presence of all cultures and all religions in what he calls the “human symphony” and does not believe man can rise above religion or multi-culturalism.
Chaim Zhitlovsky employs strong reasoning in advocating the importance and the usage of a language and culture prevalent in worldwide Jewry. Yet I believe his argument fails when he equates Jewish culture with other cultures. Zhitlovsky’s ideal global community would grant equality to all cultures, but his expectations are unrealistic: perhaps Jews would favor preserving their cultures and gaining equal rights in the European lands, but why, ultimately, would European nations grant rights or fully accept in their lands a people with a language and a culture different than their national language and culture? Zhitlovsky’s idealism herein lacks rationale. His advocacy of multi-culturalism and of Yiddish culture is persuasive and rational, yet I believe his idealistic plan has a passive expectation that European societies will accept Jews; his expectation that human progress will inevitably lead to equal rights for each cultural group is unfounded.
The three figures discussed in this essay lived in a world before the return from exile at a time where Spinoza’s impartial hypothesis that “if the foundations of their religion have not overly emasculated their minds, [the Jews] may even, if occasion arises, so changeable are human affairs, raise up their empire afresh...” was coming to premise as secular Jewish thinkers offered their views on what it meant to be Jewish and how to unite Jews. (Nadler, 27.)While Moses Hess accurately forecasted a racial showdown and argued for the necessity of a Jewish state, Chaim Zhitlovsky was a believer in the amelioration of all societies through human progress as a means of elevating and uniting Judaism without creating a homeland for Jews. Meanwhile, Ahad Ha’am was more concerned with a united Jewish culture, with Palestine as its cultural center. These men had to convince their readers of the existence of Jews to justify a Jewish nation or a Jewish culture. While modern secular Jews dispute the necessity of Israel, they are not asked to justify their people. I believe the concepts Ahad Ha’am, Chaim Zhitlovsky and Moses Hess had to justify and rationalize in order to propone some sort of Jewish unity were far more open-ended than the same concepts facing modern secular Jewish thinkers. This is evident in the broad scope of ideas these men adopted in order to validate their Jewishness. Ahad Ha’am believed in the Hebrew culture of a Jewish race; Moses Hess coupled his belief in genetic traits, moral genius, and the Jewish nationality and race with the realization that Jews were hated by other cultures to argue for the necessity of a Jewish state; and Chaim Zhitlovsky applied his socialist ideals to his argument that Jews can survive in Europe and in the United States by affirming their Yiddish culture, embracing their differences while at the same time shedding their superstitious religious traditions, believing in the existence of Jews as a nationality without believing a nation was necessary for them. All saw a world in which “The powers of creativity in the Jewish nation are now broken and split apart”, as Zhitlovsky wrote, and this dismayed these men, yet all had different interpretations of what, precisely, made them Jewish, and what Jewish unity entailed. (Zhitlovsky, 15.)
