The Post-Zionist Jew

Many Jews today feel torn. On the one hand, they feel loyalty to Israel, the land of their fellow Jews, many of whom were driven to that country by persecution. On the other hand, they recognise that Israel has been committing crimes against humanity, which are essentially racially driven. They want to oppose Israel’s wars, but they want to do it as Jews. Is there a specifically Jewish way to address this conflict? I believe there is.

In his Philosophy of History, Hegel wrote:

Religion is the consciousness that a people has of what it itself is and of the essence of supreme being … A people that takes nature for its God cannot be a free people; only when it regards God as a Spirit that transcends nature does it become free and Spirit itself.

By taking nature for a God, Hegel does not only mean the many forms of Mesopotamian and Egyptian polytheism, against which the ancient Hebrews defined their monotheism. He also means the identification of God with the ties of consanguinity that are the basis of ethnic-tribal communities. When God is posited outside nature, the inner unity of these communities dissolves and the natural ties of common descent are no longer recognised as binding. In positing a God situated above and beyond the earthly com­munity, Hegel had in mind Protestantism, but such a God – one that trumps all forms of ethnically based loyalty – is the founding idea of Judaism.

Judaism, then, was founded on a paradox: on the one hand, a promised land for a chosen people; on the other, a God that transcends all locations and identities. Both were intrinsic to Judaism’s early identity. For more than 2500 years, the Jews survived in diaspora by drawing on both. Beginning with the Babylonian captivity (597-539 BC), they survived in part by defining themselves as a separate people, regulating marriage, kashrut, circumcision and other rituals, which is how all ethnic groups survive, down to the present.

At the same time, they also survived because of their conviction that they possessed a unique and wonderful idea of God: a God that created the universe out of nothing, as opposed to one that emerged out of some primal matter, and therefore retained a connection to the natural world, which revealed itself in the form of magic, polytheism or idolatry, including the idolatry of blood ties. Jews had to survive not only prejudice and oppression: they also had to resist incorporation into the great universal religions of Christianity and Islam, both of which claimed to be based on the originally Hebrew conception of God.

The great reckoning in Jewish history was not the Holocaust or the founding of Israel, as many claim today, but rather the Enlightenment and the democratic revolutions, when the Jews were released from their ghettos and became citizens. This led to a conflict between older Jews, who tended to hold to tradition, and younger Jews, who tended to embrace modern science and liberal and socialist thought. Such conflicts were not unique to Judaism, but the Jewish case had a specificity to it. The Hebrew idea of God evolved into modern intellectuality, with its abstract and universalist characteristics, and into such universalist goals as social justice and equality.

This was the period in which Freud called himself a ‘Godless Jew’, and in which Isaac Deutscher coined the phrase ‘non-Jewish Jews’ to describe Spinoza, Heine, Marx, Luxemburg, Trotsky and Freud, all of whom were Jewish by birth but, in Deutscher’s words, ‘found Jewry too narrow, too archaic, and too constricting’ – in a word, too ethnic. I might add to the list Einstein, Benjamin, Derrida and Deutscher himself, all of whom saw Judaism as at the core of their identity and all of whom shaped the modern world indelibly for the better.

If the modern world had moved toward universal ideals of equality and justice, Zionism would never have existed. What in fact happened was that the Jewish embrace of universalism made them even more the target of antisemitic hatred. Zionism was born as a response to that hatred, to the pogroms of the 1880s and the Dreyfus affair of the following decade. There was a real alternative to Zionism, namely socialism, which won the allegiance of as many Jews as Zionism did. Many orthodox Jews meanwhile opposed an ethnically defined nation on religious grounds. Finally, Jewish intellectuals were not persuaded by Zionism because they were universalists. In the words of Ernst Bloch, they felt it would substitute ‘mere nationality’ for ‘chosenness’, by which Bloch meant Judaism’s oppositional intellectualist culture, which embodied a clear opposition of ‘the good and the illuminated against everything petty, unjust and hard’.

After the Holocaust, the argument was made that no Jew anywhere could be safe without Israel, and this argument had merit when applied to the Mizrahi, the Jews of the Middle East, almost all of whom today have been driven out of places they lived in for millennia. But it was always also in the service of racial discrimination and oppression, increasingly so over time. In particular, we have to recognise the invidious role of the alliance between Israel and the United States. Israel today is a wealthy country, perfectly capable of defending itself without American aid. What the aid goes for is not defence but rather ethnic cleansing, land grabs and something approaching genocide.

Contrary to the Israeli claim, then, the relation of the Jewish people to Zionism has always been tentative and complex. The Israeli reaction to the Hamas attack of 7 October 2023 – the destruction of Gaza, ethnic cleansing in the West Bank, the invasion of Lebanon, the threatened war with Iran – has forced Jews everywhere to consider the contradiction between beliefs in universal justice, which cannot allow for ethnic states or occupations, and loyalty to our fellow Jews. Zionists have responded to this situation by heightening the demand for loyalty.

Antisemitism, according to Columbia University, can include not only ‘targeting Jews or Israelis for violence or celebrating violence against them’ but also ‘exclusion or discrimination based on … real or perceived ties to Israel’. By this definition, efforts to boycott Israel, as South Africa was once boycotted, or to disinvest from Israel, are antisemitic. As a Jew, I do not believe that Columbia University has the right to define my politics. On the contrary, my view is that Judaism can only survive in a meaningful form if it is not based on ethnic loyalty. It must, in a word, be non, post or anti-Zionist.

Finally, one may legitimately ask: if Jews define themselves in terms of modern ideals of universality, justice, equality and so on, why are they not simply liberals? Why do we need Judaism at all? My short answer to that is that historic liberalism has never been truly universal, but is deeply imbued with Christian ideas of progress, salvation and redemption, gained via the British and American nation-states, which is why the figures that Deutscher cited, including Freud, were socialists and radicals, not liberals. Judaism, then, is still necessary, even if Zionism is not. Not until we have a genuine universality can we say that the Jewish contribution to world history has been exhausted. When we try to specify what that contribution is, we have to say that nationalist ideals play an ever smaller role in it. In the 1935 preface to the Hebrew translation of Totem and Taboo, Freud poses a question for the non-Zionist Jew: ‘Since you have abandoned all these common characteristics of your countrymen, what is there left to you that is Jewish?’ He replies: ‘A great deal, and probably its very essence.’