A Man Without a Country

Sixth in the series “Seek the Peace of the City,” on what Judaism teaches Jews about the countries they live in. Earlier installments are here: Part 1 | Part 2 | Part 3 | Part 4 | Part 5

The articles in this series so far have followed one line of thought. The Jewish tradition teaches Jews to seek the welfare of the countries where they live, keep their laws, pray for their governments, and deal honestly with their neighbors. The historical record shows that when the loyalty of Jews was tested, they lived up to that teaching. The charge that Jews secretly belong somewhere else was an accusation made by their enemies, and the evidence did not support it.

Then, in the late nineteenth century, a movement arose among Jews themselves that agreed with the accusation.

“For the patriot, a man without a country”

In 1882, a Jewish physician in Odessa named Leon Pinsker published a pamphlet called Auto-Emancipation. It became one of the founding texts of Zionism. Pinsker argued that the Jews could never be at home among other nations, and he described the Jew’s position in a list that reads like a summary of every antisemitic complaint of his time. To the living, he wrote, the Jew is a dead man; to the natives, an alien; to property owners, a beggar; to the poor, an exploiter; “for the patriot, a man without a country.”

Pinsker did not write this as a complaint against the antisemites. He wrote it as a diagnosis. In his view the hatred was natural and permanent, because the Jews were a nation without a land, and no nation would ever accept them as its own. His cure was for Jews to give up on belonging to the countries where they lived and to get a country of their own.

Theodor Herzl, who founded the political Zionist movement fourteen years later, built on the same idea. “We are a people, one people,” he wrote in The Jewish State in 1896. In his diary he went further: “The anti-Semites will become our most dependable friends, the anti-Semitic countries our allies.” He meant it practically. Governments that wanted to be rid of their Jews would help the Zionists take them somewhere else.

The accusation, accepted

Put plainly, the founders of Zionism took the dual-loyalty charge and accepted it. The antisemites said that the Jews were a separate nation living as foreigners in Europe. The Zionists answered that this was true, and proposed to act on it.

Their enemies noticed. In France, a writer of the radical right named Gabriel Malglaive called for the recognition of a Jewish nation with its own territory. All the Jews of the world, he proposed, would then officially take on “the Jewish nationality that their heart has always secretly chosen.” Those who wished to stay in France or Germany could stay, “with the status of aliens.” An antisemite had found in Zionism exactly the argument he needed.

He was not the only one. In Mein Kampf, Adolf Hitler wrote that he had once wondered whether the Jews of Vienna were Germans of a different religion. Whatever doubt he still had, he wrote, “was finally removed” by the Zionist movement, whose whole aim was to assert that the Jews were a separate nation. Zionism did not create Hitler’s hatred. But the most dangerous antisemite in history saw in Zionism a confirmation of what he already believed, and he said so in his own book.

The same idea in our own day

The founders’ idea did not disappear when the State of Israel was established. It became part of the state’s identity.

Israel describes itself in its laws as the national home of the Jewish people, meaning all Jews, wherever they live and whatever their citizenship. Its leaders regularly speak in the name of “the Jewish people.” After terrorist attacks on Jews in Paris and Copenhagen in 2015, Israel’s prime minister publicly called on the Jews of Europe to move to Israel, telling them that Israel was their home. French leaders answered that France without its Jews would not be France. It was the governments of those countries, not the government of Israel, that insisted their Jewish citizens belonged where they were.

The tension was clear from the state’s earliest years. In 1950, Jacob Blaustein, the president of the American Jewish Committee, was troubled enough by Israeli statements about American Jews that he asked Prime Minister David Ben-Gurion to correct them publicly. Ben-Gurion agreed to state that the Jews of the United States “have only one political attachment and that is to the United States of America.”

Consider what that exchange shows. American Jews had been loyal citizens for a century and a half without anyone needing to say so. Only after a state was founded that claimed to speak for them did a Jewish leader feel he had to get that statement from a foreign prime minister.

Every time an Israeli official speaks as though all Jews belong to Israel, an antisemite somewhere can quote him. The old charge no longer needs evidence of its own. It can cite the State of Israel’s own description of itself.

Exile is not disloyalty

A careful reader may raise an objection here. The Jewish tradition itself speaks of exile, and observant Jews pray daily for the redemption and the return to Zion. Doesn’t that mean they too consider themselves strangers in the countries where they live?

It does not. In the tradition, exile is a spiritual condition decreed by God, and it ends only when God ends it, through the redemption He will bring in His own time. While it lasts, the tradition’s instructions are the ones this series has described: build houses, seek the peace of the city, keep its laws, pray for its government. The longing for redemption creates no political allegiance to any government on earth. A Jew who prays for the Messiah owes nothing to a foreign state, and his prayers ask nothing of the country he lives in except that it be at peace.

Zionism turned a religious hope into a political program and attached the program to a state with a government, an army, and a foreign policy. Then it told Jews everywhere that this state was their true home. That is exactly what the dual-loyalty charge has always accused Jews of doing. The Torah never did it. A political movement did, and then announced that it spoke for all Jews.

Answering the charge

Zionist ideology does not make the dual-loyalty charge true. The record described in the last article stands. The vast majority of Jews in America, Britain, France, and elsewhere are loyal citizens of their countries, and the observant among them are taught by their own law to be. But anyone who wants to answer the old charge honestly has to say where its modern support comes from. It does not come from Jeremiah, from the Talmud, or from the prayer said every Sabbath for the government. It comes from a movement that agreed with the antisemites about the Jews and built a state on that agreement.

That leaves one last question for this series. If a Jew does not owe political allegiance to the State of Israel, what does he owe, and to whom? The final article takes it up.