If, without further facts, anyone were told that the early Zionists were racists, it would be automatic to assume this to be a part of the colonialist aspects of Zionism in Palestine. In reality this is not so; Blut Zionism would have evolved even if Palestine were to have been completely empty. Enthusiasm for Blut und Boden were part of Zionism before the first modern Zionist ever left Europe.
Race Zionism was a curious offshoot of racial anti-Semitism. True, these Zionists argued, the Jews were a pure race, certainly purer than, say, the Germans who, as even the pan-Germanics conceded, had a huge admixture of Slavic blood. But to these Zionists, even their racial purity could not overcome the one flaw in Jewish existence: they did not have their own Jewish Boden. If the Teutonic racists could see themselves as Übermenschen (supermen), these Hebrew racists did not see the Jews in that light; rather, it was the reverse. They believed that because they lacked their own Boden the Jews were Untermenschen and therefore, for their “hosts”, little more than leeches: the world pest.
If one believes in the validity of racial exclusiveness, it is difficult to object to anyone else’s racism. If one believes further that it is impossible for any people to be healthy except in their own homeland, then one cannot object to anyone else excluding “aliens” from their territory. In fact the average Zionist never thought of himself as leaving civilised Europe for the wilds of Palestine. In life it is obvious that Zionist Blut und Boden provided an excellent rationale for not fighting anti-Semitism on its home ground. It was not the fault of the anti-Semites, it was because of the Jews’ own misfortune of being in exile. The Zionists could tearfully argue that the loss of Palestine was the root cause of anti-Semitism and the regaining of Palestine was the only solution to the Jewish question. Everything else could only be palliative or futile.
Walter Laqueur, the doyen of Zionist historians, has asked in his book, A History of Zionism, if Zionist insistence on the naturalness of anti-Semitism was not just “grist to the mill of Nazi propaganda”. [i] It certainly was. Laqueur’s question can best be answered with another question: is it difficult to understand the gullible reader of a Nazi newspaper, who concluded that what was said by the Nazis, and agreed to by the Zionists – Jews – had to be right?
There would be worse: any Jewish movement that prattled on about the naturalness of anti-Semitism would, just as “naturally”, seek to come to terms with the Nazis when they came to power.
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[i] Walter Laqueur, A History of Zionism, p.500.
Tuesday, September 25, 2007
Chap 2(ii): “To be a good Zionist one must be somewhat of an anti-semite”
Although Blut was a recurrent theme in pre-Holocaust Zionist literature, it was not as central to its message as Boden. As long as America’s shores remained open, Europe’s Jews asked: if anti-Semitism could not be fought on its home ground, why should they not just follow the crowd to America? The Zionist response was double-barrelled: anti-Semitism would accompany the Jews wherever they went and, what was more, it was the Jews who had created anti-Semitism by their own characteristics. The root cause of anti-Semitism, Zionists insisted, was the Jews’ exile existence. Jews lived parasitically off their “hosts”. There were virtually no Jewish peasants in the Diaspora. The Jews lived in cities, they were alienated from manual labour or, more bluntly, they shunned it and preoccupied themselves with intellectual or commercial concerns. At best, their claims of patriotism were hollow as they wandered eternally from country to country. And when they fancied themselves as socialists and internationalists, in reality they were still no more than the middlemen of the revolution, fighting “other people’s battles”. These tenets combined were known as shelilat ha’galut (the Negation of the Diaspora), and were held by the entire spectrum of Zionists who varied only on matters of detail. They were argued vigorously in the Zionist press, where the distinctive quality of many articles was their hostility to the entire Jewish people. Anyone reading these pieces without knowing their source would have automatically assumed that they came from the anti-Semitic press. The Weltanschauung of the youth organisation Hashomer Hatzair (Young Watchmen), originally composed in 1917, but republished again as late as 1936, was typical of these effusions:
Similarly, in 1935 an American, Ben Frommer, a writer for the ultraright Zionist-Revisionists, could declare of no less than 16 million of his fellow Jews that:
This style of Jewish self-hatred permeated a great deal of Zionist writing. In 1934 Yehezkel Kaufman, then famous as a scholar of biblical history at Jerusalem’s Hebrew University and himself a Zionist, though an opponent of the bizarre theory of the Negation of the Diaspora, aroused furious controversy by culling the Hebrew literature for yet worse examples. In Hebrew the ranters could really attack their fellow Jews without fear of being accused of providing ammunition for the Jew-haters. Kaufman’s Hurban Hanefesh (Holocaust of the Soul) cited three of the classic Zionist thinkers. For Micah Yosef Berdichevsky the Jews were “not a nation, not a people, not human”. To Yosef Chaim Brenner they were nothing more than “Gypsies, filthy dogs, inhuman, wounded, dogs”. To A.D. Gordon his people were no better than “parasites, people fundamentally useless”. [iii]
Naturally Maurice Samuel had to apply his fine hand to concocting libels against his fellow Jews. In 1924, in his work You Gentiles, he fabricated a Jewry driven by its own sinister demiurge to oppose the Christian social order:
Labour Zionism produced its own unique brand of Jewish self-hatred. In spite of its name and pretensions, Labour Zionism was never able to win over any significant section of the Jewish working class in any country cf the Diaspora. Its members had a self-defeating argument: they claimed that the Jewish workers were in “marginal” industries, such as the needle trades, which were unessential to the economy of the “host”, nations, and therefore the Jewish workers would always be marginal to the working-class movement in the countries of their abode. Jewish workers, it was claimed, could only wage a “healthy” class struggle in their own land. Naturally poor Jews showed little interest in a so-called labour movement that did not tell them to put their all into fighting in the immediate present for better conditions, but rather to concern themselves about far-off Palestine. Paradoxically, Labour Zionism’s primary appeal was to those young middle-class Jews who sought to break with their class origins, but were not prepared to go over to the workers of the country of their habitation. Labour Zionism became a kind of counter-culture sect, denouncing Jewish Marxists for their internationalism, and the Jewish middle class as parasitic exploiters of the “host”, nations. In effect they translated traditional anti-Semitism into Yiddish: the Jews were in the wrong countries in the wrong occupations and had the wrong politics. It took the Holocaust to bring these Jeremiahs to their senses. Only then did they appreciate the common voice in their own message and the Nazis’ anti-Jewish propaganda. In March 1942 Chaim Greenberg, then the editor of New York’s Labour Zionist organ, Jewish Frontier, painfully admitted that, indeed, there had been:
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[i] Our Shomer “Weltanschauung”, Hashomer Hatzair (December 1936), p.26.
[ii] Ben Frommer, The Significance of a Jewish State, Jewish Call (Shanghai, May 1935), p.10.
[iii] Yehezkel Kaufman, Hurban Hanefesh: A Discussion of Zionism and Anti-Semitism, Issues (Winter 1967), p.106.
[iv] Maurice Samuel, You Gentiles, p.155.
[v] Chaim Greenberg, The Myth of Jewish Parasitism, Jewish Frontiers (March 1942), p.20.
The Jew is a caricature of a normal, natural human being, both physically and spiritually. As an individual in society he revolts and throws off the harness of social obligations, knows no order nor discipline. [i]
Similarly, in 1935 an American, Ben Frommer, a writer for the ultraright Zionist-Revisionists, could declare of no less than 16 million of his fellow Jews that:
The fact is undeniable that the Jews collectively are unhealthy and neurotic. Those professional Jews who, wounded to the quick, indignantly deny this truth are the greatest enemies of their race, for they thereby lead them to search for false solutions, or at most palliatives. [ii]
This style of Jewish self-hatred permeated a great deal of Zionist writing. In 1934 Yehezkel Kaufman, then famous as a scholar of biblical history at Jerusalem’s Hebrew University and himself a Zionist, though an opponent of the bizarre theory of the Negation of the Diaspora, aroused furious controversy by culling the Hebrew literature for yet worse examples. In Hebrew the ranters could really attack their fellow Jews without fear of being accused of providing ammunition for the Jew-haters. Kaufman’s Hurban Hanefesh (Holocaust of the Soul) cited three of the classic Zionist thinkers. For Micah Yosef Berdichevsky the Jews were “not a nation, not a people, not human”. To Yosef Chaim Brenner they were nothing more than “Gypsies, filthy dogs, inhuman, wounded, dogs”. To A.D. Gordon his people were no better than “parasites, people fundamentally useless”. [iii]
Naturally Maurice Samuel had to apply his fine hand to concocting libels against his fellow Jews. In 1924, in his work You Gentiles, he fabricated a Jewry driven by its own sinister demiurge to oppose the Christian social order:
We Jews, we the destroyers, will remain the destroyers forever. Nothing that you will do will meet our needs and demands. We will forever destroy because we need a world of our own, a God-world, which is not your nature to build ... those of us who fail to understand that truth will always be found in alliance with your rebellious factions, until disillusionment comes, the wretched fate which scattered us through your midst has thrust this unwelcome role upon us. [iv]
Labour Zionism produced its own unique brand of Jewish self-hatred. In spite of its name and pretensions, Labour Zionism was never able to win over any significant section of the Jewish working class in any country cf the Diaspora. Its members had a self-defeating argument: they claimed that the Jewish workers were in “marginal” industries, such as the needle trades, which were unessential to the economy of the “host”, nations, and therefore the Jewish workers would always be marginal to the working-class movement in the countries of their abode. Jewish workers, it was claimed, could only wage a “healthy” class struggle in their own land. Naturally poor Jews showed little interest in a so-called labour movement that did not tell them to put their all into fighting in the immediate present for better conditions, but rather to concern themselves about far-off Palestine. Paradoxically, Labour Zionism’s primary appeal was to those young middle-class Jews who sought to break with their class origins, but were not prepared to go over to the workers of the country of their habitation. Labour Zionism became a kind of counter-culture sect, denouncing Jewish Marxists for their internationalism, and the Jewish middle class as parasitic exploiters of the “host”, nations. In effect they translated traditional anti-Semitism into Yiddish: the Jews were in the wrong countries in the wrong occupations and had the wrong politics. It took the Holocaust to bring these Jeremiahs to their senses. Only then did they appreciate the common voice in their own message and the Nazis’ anti-Jewish propaganda. In March 1942 Chaim Greenberg, then the editor of New York’s Labour Zionist organ, Jewish Frontier, painfully admitted that, indeed, there had been:
a time when it used to be fashionable for Zionist speakers (including the writer) to declare from the platform that “To be a good Zionist one must be somewhat of an anti-Semite”. To this day Labor Zionist circles are under the influence of the idea that the Return to Zion involved a process of purification from our economic uncleanliness. Whosoever doesn’t engage in so-called “productive” manual labor is believed to be a sinner against Israel and against mankind. [v]
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[i] Our Shomer “Weltanschauung”, Hashomer Hatzair (December 1936), p.26.
[ii] Ben Frommer, The Significance of a Jewish State, Jewish Call (Shanghai, May 1935), p.10.
[iii] Yehezkel Kaufman, Hurban Hanefesh: A Discussion of Zionism and Anti-Semitism, Issues (Winter 1967), p.106.
[iv] Maurice Samuel, You Gentiles, p.155.
[v] Chaim Greenberg, The Myth of Jewish Parasitism, Jewish Frontiers (March 1942), p.20.
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