A Nation Instead of God

Second in a series on Zionism, Judaism, and why the difference matters to you. Read part one here.

The previous article let the founders of Zionism speak for themselves, and it turned out that most of them didn't believe in the God of the Bible — and quite a few were openly hostile to the religion itself. Which raises an obvious question. If these men had walked away from Judaism, what was powering all that zeal? You don't drain swamps and build settlements and die for a cause out of mild preference. Something was filling the space where faith used to be.

The answer is that they found a new faith. And they didn't find it in any Jewish source. They found it in nineteenth-century Europe, where it was the hottest idea around: nationalism.

Not the flag-and-fireworks kind

First, a distinction, because "nationalism" covers a lot of ground. There's the civic kind — a country is basically an agreement among its citizens, and loving it means loving what it stands for. Most Americans' patriotism works roughly this way. You can join it by signing up.

Then there's the other kind, which historians call organic or ethnic nationalism. On this view, the nation isn't an agreement at all. It's a living thing, almost a creature, with its own soul and its own destiny, mystically bound to a particular soil. You can't join it. You're born into it, and it lives in your blood whether you like it or not. This is the nationalism of Herder and the German romantics, the one that talks about the Volksgeist, the "spirit" of the people. It swept Europe in the 1800s, and it is the version Zionism drank deeply from.

Here's why that matters. Ethnic nationalism doesn't just organize a country. It functions as a religion — a religion whose gods are the nation, the land, and the people themselves. That's not a hostile paraphrase. The Zionists said it, over and over, and they meant it as a compliment.

Listen to them talk

A. D. Gordon was the philosophical soul of Labor Zionism, the man the pioneers revered. Read him and try to call this politics rather than theology. The nation, Gordon taught, "created man." It is "the source of our soul." Individuals are "like cells in the body of the nation." And if the Jews wouldn't embrace nationalism as "the loftiest of ideals" demanding devotion "body and soul," Gordon wrote, then better "that we should disappear in the midst of the nations."

For Gordon, the loftiest of ideals was not God or Torah but the nation itself.

The land got the same treatment. Gordon called the soil of the homeland "the root of its soul" and warned that a nation living away from its land rots like an uprooted plant. Jabotinsky, from the opposite end of the Zionist political map, put it even more baldly. Working for Zion, he said, should tolerate "no other idols but this goddess." His word — goddess. And: "There is only one god, one ideal: to rebuild the Jewish state."

When both wings of a movement, the socialists and the militarists, independently reach for the vocabulary of worship, they're telling you what the thing actually is.

Remember the young man from the previous article who begged Jabotinsky, "Give us a god"? This was the god he got.

Why Judaism can't be squared with this

At this point a reasonable reader might ask: fine, but don't Jews also believe they're a special people connected to a special land? Isn't this just the religious idea in secular clothes?

No — and the difference isn't a technicality. It's the whole ballgame.

In Judaism, the Jewish people exist because of a covenant. God gave the Torah, the people accepted it, and that acceptance is what a Jew is. Strip away the covenant and there's no remainder called "the Jewish nation" waiting underneath. The land, likewise, was never just real estate. Jewish tradition treats it as something closer to a palace — a place with conditions attached, given for a purpose, and taken away when the conditions were broken. Jews have said as much in their prayers for two thousand years: because of our sins we were exiled from our land. Whatever you make of that belief, notice its structure. The people serve God. The land serves the relationship. Nothing in the system is worshipped except God himself.

Ethnic nationalism flips every piece of that. The nation doesn't serve anything — it's the supreme value, the thing that "created man." The land isn't conditional — it's mystically fused with the people's soul, full stop. And the people aren't defined by what they believe or do, but by blood and by borders.

There's one more difference, and it's the one you should sit with the longest. Covenant identity is defined from the inside: a Jew is someone bound by the Torah, and that would remain true if every other nation on earth vanished tomorrow. Ethnic-nationalist identity is defined from the outside — by contrast with an "other." A tribe needs rivals the way a team needs opponents; take away the other teams and "the New York Yankees" stops meaning anything. Zionist identity was built on exactly this team logic, which is why it has always needed an enemy in view to hold itself together, and why the movement leaned so hard on antisemitism as proof of who the Jews are. On that model, the hater defines the Jew. On the Torah's model, God does. Those conceptions are polar opposites.

What this means for you

So when you watch the State of Israel invoke "the Jewish people" and "the Jewish homeland," it helps to know which system is talking. The state's concepts — the nation as supreme value, the soil as sacred in itself, identity secured by an enemy — came from Herder and the European romantics, not from Sinai. Religious Jews had lived without those ideas, and without any state, for eighteen centuries, and traditional Jewish communities are still living without them now.

Keep the two systems separate in your mind and a lot of confusion clears up. A government acting on a European nationalist ideology is not "the Jews" doing anything, and holding Jews answerable for it makes no more sense than resenting your Catholic neighbor for the decisions of Italy.

Next time: the strangest chapter in this story — how the movement set out to build a "New Hebrew," modeled on Nietzsche's Superman, and consciously designed to be everything the traditional Jew was not.

Quotations from A. D. Gordon and V. Jabotinsky are drawn from their collected writings; scholarly treatments include Shlomo Avineri's Varieties of Zionist Thought and Zeev Sternhell's The Founding Myths of Israel*. Full citations available on request.*