from Jewish Social Studies Volume 9, Number 2

A Preface to the Study of Modern Jewish Political Thought

Mitchell Cohen

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Universalism or particularism? That was the issue debated around 1890 within a student circle in Berlin. One speaker was A. L. Helphand, a revolutionary better known later by his pen name, Parvus. In ensuing years this curious figure helped to shape Trotsky's theory of permanent revolution; he was expelled from German Social Democracy for corruption, and, after he became the kaiser's agent, he helped to arrange Lenin's passage to the Finland Station.

But one evening in late-nineteenth-century Berlin, he was the champion of radical universalism. And he adamantly opposed proto-Zionist feelings among the students who were, like him, Russian Jewish exiles. The world is globalizing, he told them. Cast off parochial cconcerns He held up his jacket and declared: "The woolÝ.Ý.Ý.Ýwas taken from sheep which were pastured in Angora; it was spun in England, it was woven in Lodz; the buttons come from Germany, the thread from Austria: is it not clearÝ.Ý.Ý.Ýthat this world of ours is international, and that even a miserable thing like a coat is made up of the labor of ten different races?" The illustration worked so well, recalled an observer, that "you could almost feel the stream of intellectual sympathy turning in Parvus's direction." But then Parvus's case was undone abruptly. He gesticulated so vehemently that his coat tore. A voice called from the audience: "The rip in your sleeve comes from the pogrom in Kiev."1

This story, perhaps apocryphal, poses the animating questions of modern Jewish political argument. How specific is--or was--the "Jewish problem"? Does its "solution"--if there is one--demand universalistic strategies, or particularism, or some amalgam of approaches? What is the content of these approaches? Parvus was a "monist." When he held up his coat, he meant to show how a single principle, already at work in the world, would resolve all problems, only one of which was the "Jewish problem." Jewish specificity would not prove intransigent, let alone fatal, in modernity. His claim was not original. Liberalism presumed individualism would provide the singular principle, and republicanism found its universalizer in citizenship. Marxists looked to a universal class begat by but bound to transcend the globalizing markets of capitalism.

The voice challenging Parvus is said to have belonged to Nahman Syrkin, who soon emerged as a founding figure of the Zionist left. He wanted, somehow, to be universal and particular at once, to bring ttogethercontradictory principles. His ideas combined a mélange of socialist, populist, and nationalist notions. He was an egalitarian who insisted, pace Parvus, that particular problems require particular responses. Syrkin represented what Vladimir Jabotinsky, father of the Zionist right, later called shaatnez, a mix of linen and wool in clothing proscribed by Jewish religious tradition. Jabotinsky thought that uuniversalizingand particularizing principles, if brought together, ccorruptedone another. He was like Parvus, only at the other extreme. His one principle was nationalism; he called himself a "monist."

In this article, I want to look at modern Jewish political argument as a debate about shaatnez. By modern Jewish political argument, I mean theoretical and polemical debates about the political condition(s) of the Jews. My concern is not religious thought about politics or hermeneutic derivation of political ideas out of religious texts, but argument that takes chiefly for its object historically placed Jews and their political realities. Theological premises do not generate the arguments; lived politics does. And in a way my approach is like shaatnez because it assumes that no single thread, no one principle of study is sufficient. Moreover, I assume that universalism and particularism cannot work through each other but are needed as correctives to one another. Shaatnez-as-method is a principle of self-correction; it is needed bbe. causequestions from our own times tend, inevitably, to creep into our interpretations of texts and past events. These points are hardly original; myriad debates address the consequences of linguistic or conceptual archaisms and "Whig interpretations." They are important in approaching modern Jewish political thought because of the prominence in it of notions of peoplehood and nationalism. Substantial scholarly literature asks whether or not "nations" are products of "modernity." The ideological protagonists of nationalism are frequently historians who explore the past teleologically to contemporary purpose. But if nationalist historians may eembellishhistorical threads, antinationalists can obscure them. Students of modern Jewish political thought need to be alert to both ppossibilities because the origins of Jewry are ancient, because Jews sustained a notion of peoplehood from their earliest history, and because "nationhood" plays a key role in modern Jewish history. An interpreter's first self-corrective move is to consider the historical saturation of political arguments. Comparison is also important for self-correction because it elucidates what is more and what is less singular in a given case. AAlexanderPope warned, in elegant rhyme, that "'Tis with our Judgments, as our watches, none / Go just alike, yet each believes his own."2 CComparisoncan compel critical adjustments, whether we are judging iimmediate timely politics or historical questions and debates.

One of my points here will be that the lack of adequate historical and comparative corrections mars some recent Jewish political argument, particularly claims made by the "New Historians" of Israel. A number of them protest that, though their work is "objective," their predecessors were "ideological." I will suggest that these New Historians are also normative and that their prominence is a symptom of a broader crisis, as yet unaddressed, in Jewish political thought and political culture. I hope to elucidate this crisis and to give some indication as to how movement beyond it might begin. A consideration of some key phases in modern Jewish political thought is a useful way to start.

Auto-emancipation

Modern Jewish political thought began in the Diaspora, but the issue of a "homeland" came quickly to the fore. Two events marked its emergence: the pogroms of 1881, and the Dreyfus Affair. In other words, it responded to massive anti-Jewish violence in autocratic East European conditions, on the one hand, and to stark prejudice in Western rrepublicancircumstances, on the other. A "new" mass politics developed among East European Jews symbolized by the title of a proto-Zionist pamphlet written in 1882 by Odessa physician Leo Pinsker: "Auto- Emancipation." Western Jews questioned their prospects within "modern" political structures. "The Dreyfus case," wrote Theodor Herzl, "embodies more than a judicial error;Ý.Ý.Ý.ÝDeath to the Jews!, howled the mob, as the decorations were being ripped from the captain's coat.Ý.Ý.Ý.ÝWhere? In France. In modern civilized France, a hundred years after 'The Declaration of the Rights of Man.'"3

Pinsker and Herzl, a decade apart, were convinced that trust could no longer be placed in universalist prescriptions. They also rejected the quietism that (largely) characterized religious orthodoxy's response to recent history. Although some Jews, especially younger ones, turned to Marxist internationalism, and most religious Jews put faith in a more cosmic power, Pinsker and Herzl espoused a this-worldly but Jewish politics--a national politics.

Early Zionists engaged in many arguments. Did a Jewish national home imply negation of Diaspora life? Could "universalist" ideas (like social democracy) blend with Zionist imperatives? Should the Zionist project be both cultural and political? Was Palestine the sole plausible site for it? What of the Arabs? Should Zionists exploit great power politics? Or should they focus on building a new community in Palestine? This latter strategy became the basis of Zionist success and was iidentifiedwith the Zionist left. The Balfour Declaration was useful to Zionist socialists, but they believed primarily in "auto-emancipation." This meant entrenching a Jewish working class in Palestine. "We do not ask for the land of Israel to dominate its Arabs, and we do not seek a market for Jewish goods," declared David Ben-Gurion in 1915:
We are seeking a homeland.Ý.Ý.Ý.ÝA homelandÝ.Ý.Ý.Ýis not acquired by privileges or political contracts, and it is not purchasedÝ.Ý.Ý.Ýor conquered by force; rather it is built by the sweat of the brow.Ý.Ý.Ý.ÝThe source of true rights to a land--like everything else--is not political or legal authority, but in the rights of labor.4

The ideal of "Hebrew labor" allowed Zionist socialists to dominate JJewishPalestine (by building a distinct, labor-oriented infrastructure for immigrant absorption), yet it placed them in intimate competition with Arab peasants who also worked (but did not own) the land.

What of non-Zionist national politics? Two broad trends emerged in Eastern Europe. "Territorialists" argued for a Jewish national homeland but thought it could be in any territory and not necessarily Palestine. In contrast to "territorialism" and Zionism, a nonterritorial Diaspora nationalism also took form. It was articulated by socialist intellectuals in the Jewish Labor Bund and by historian Simon Dubnow in his Letters on Ancient and Modern Judaism.5 Jewry's dispersed religious communities, which long had autonomous lives within their host societies, were rreinventedconceptually--one could say modernized--by them as national communities. Bundists and Dubnow shaped their remarkable ideas within the multinational but autocratic Russian empire. They hoped for Jewish political and civil rights in Russia under an alternative (that is, non-tsarist) regime (social democratic for Bundists, liberal for Dub now), and they argued for national cultural autonomy for the Jews. Autonomy was conceived as a collective right of cultural affinity exercised personally and nonterritorially through networks of institutions (educational, for example.) When the Bund embraced autonomism in 1901 (four years after its founding), its program insisted that "a state such as Russia, which is composed of many different nationalities, must in the future develop into a federation of nationalities in which every nationality enjoys full autonomy, regardless of the territory it occupies." One of the Bund's leading theorists, Vladimir Kossovsky, proposed that social democrats wanted "peaceful co-existence" among nationalities, whereas "bourgeois" nationalists privileged one nation (their own) over others.6

The Yiddish language was the bond of Jewish culture for Bundists, who stressed the East European and proletarian nature of their movement. They chastised Zionists for class collaboration, for pursuit of a Palestinian fantasy (they advocated "hereness" instead), and were active within Russian social democracy. Their ideas are comparable to those of Austro-Marxists like Otto Bauer. (Julius Martov helped to formulate Bundist ideas before he became a social democratic and then Menshevik leader.) Dubnow's diasporism was opposed in principle to Zionism, although he sympathized with the idea of a national cultural center in Palestine, advocated by cultural Zionist Ahad Ha-am.

Democracy and Plural Loyalties

In short, a flowering of Jewish political argument followed 1881. Zionism and Diaspora nationalism offered alternatives, yet both were differentiated within. Zionism's success--but also its difficulties--recast all Jewish political thinking and shapes virtually all Jewish political argument even today. An expansive influence of East European diasporism was constricted because its advocates, and the communities they aaddresseddirectly, were murdered or culturally suffocated in the Hitler and Stalin eras. But their ideas did cross oceans because of interlinks among diasporas and especially Jewish labor movements. And a type of diasporism was rearticulated, really reinvented, in a different context before World War I and after World War II.

Debates about political, economic, and cultural pluralism thread through American history. They intersect in complex ways with questions of republicanism, democracy, citizenship, prejudice, and federalism. James Madison argued in The Federalist Papers that a large republic in which diversity prevented any one interest from dominating best preserves freedom. His "anti-federalist" foes insisted that only small republics, with culturally homogenous citizenries close to their governments, could secure liberty. Most American citizens were then white Protestants. The country's cast changed in the next century due to civil war, urbanization, industrialization, and immigration. At the turn of the twentieth century, politicians like Theodore Roosevelt and intellectuals like Herbert Croly called for a "new nationalism" and extolled the "melting pot." Roosevelt upheld a monistic, "unhyphenated" Americanism. Immigrants were welcome to join an American oneness but not to be German-Americans or Irish-Americans. Wary of blacks, Roosevelt could never appreciate the shaatnez-like "double consciousness" of the world--a struggle to be universal and particular at once--that animated W. E. B. Dubois's The Souls of Black Folk (1903).

Arguments about monism and shaatnez (using other metaphors, of course) intensified before American entry into World War I. Fear was rife within Anglo-America that immigrants from southern and eastern Europe threatened the national culture and harbored dual loyalties. An American Jewish liberal, Horace Mayer Kallen, challenged this "Americanism" on behalf of "cultural pluralism." The "assimilation of diversities into sameness" was simply undemocratic, he asserted. "Hyphenation" is a normal feature of life. Is a citizen disloyal if he is a patriot, a parent, a religious congregant, and a friend all at once? Kallen contended that an orchestra rather than a melting pot was the apt metaphor for a democratic society. Musical instruments make up the whole while retaining their distinct identities. And he qualified his metaphor: whereas orchestras play scripted scores, the playing is the writing in democracy. Philosopher John Dewey influenced Kallen's views on democracy. One of Dewey's students, Randolph Bourne, formulated his own notion of "ttransnationalAmerica" at about the same time. Bourne was a white Anglo-Saxon Protestant, but, in articles and in a lecture to the Jewish student society at Harvard, he imagined a novel type of nationalism in America, different from European models and constituted by a "weaving back and forth with other lands, of many threads of all sizes and colors."7

Kallen made his case after masses of immigrants arrived in the United States and reconstituted American Jewry. Hayim Greenberg, founding editor of the Labor Zionist journal Jewish Frontier, wrote with a similar logic in his 1948 essay "Patriotism and Plural Loyalties." But circumstances were dramatically different: European Jewry had been annihilated and Israel's independence had just been declared. The Holocaust brought considerable sympathy to Jews, yet there was anxiety among them that they might be suspected of dual loyalties now that there was a Jewish state. Cold War "loyalty campaigns" aimed at American communists (among whom were many Jews) added another dimension to Jewish fears.

Greenberg, a social democrat with no sympathies for Moscow, wanted to argue that minorities could be loyal citizens where they lived and also maintain other, robust bonds. Jews, for instance, could be good American patriots while having strong attachments to Israel. And what of an Italian-speaking Swiss, he asked? Is his life simply a fickle compound, with each of its various aspects betraying another? If he owes fidelity to Switzerland, must he therefore be a traitor to his canton? He is likely to have deep cultural ties to Italians and perhaps has rereligiousonds to Catholics the world over. This man, with his multiple commitments, is a nightmare for a monistic nationalist but, for a pluralistic democrat, he is a pretty normal person. Plural loyalties are not conflict-free, yet they are legitimate and fruitful. The right to hold different views is essential to democracy, observed Greenberg, but democratic standards had to include a right "to be different."8

The early Zionists and the diasporists, and then Kallen and Greenberg, anticipated the full scope of late-twentieth-century debates about multiculturalism--about universalism and particularism, citizenship and nationality, prejudice and identity. Their ideas were saturated by the diversity but also the ghastliness of Jewish history in the first half of the century.

The two major Jewish communities in 1950 were in the United States and in Israel. There was an essential political distinction between them: Jewish citizens constituted a small minority group within American society, and Israeli Jewry composed the majority citizenry of a sovereign state. But there is also an important political similarity. If 1881 inaugurated "new" modern Jewish politics, then the vehicle of Jewish political modernization in both American and Palestinian settings became sosocialemocracy.9 After Franklin D. Roosevelt's election to the prpresidencyn 1932, the Democratic Party became America's functional counterpart to European social democracy. The "New Deal coalition" sustained Roosevelt's social reformism and was the principal medium through which most Jews integrated into mainstream American popoliticsfirst during the Depression and then much more so after the war. They identified as "liberal democrats." In Palestine, the social dedemocraticapai party (founded 1930) integrated Jewish immigrants into a state-in-genesis. As the New Deal consolidated Democratic dominance in the United States, the Zionist labor movement established its own hehegemonyn Jewish Palestine through a bitter struggle with the Zionist right. The intellectual expression of this struggle was an argument about shaatnez.

Monism Versus Shaatnez

The Zionist left, led by Ben-Gurion, built an institutional network in Palestine in the 1920s. The Histadrut (General Confederation of Labor) was its center, and it was conceived as a socialist Jewish state-in-the-making. It comprised not only trade unions but also an array of economic enterprises, a bank, labor exchanges, health care and ededucationystems, cooperatives, kibbutzim, and a military underground. The left faced a vigorous right-wing challenge in the late 1920s by Jabotinsky and his followers. They were contemptuous of socialist ideas, and though Jabotinsky declared himself a liberal, he fostered an illiberal leadership cult around himself. Some of his views were close to those of the European far right of the 1920s. He wrote incendiary articles against strikes with titles like "Yes, Break them!" (Ken, lishbor!) and advocated compulsory arbitration in labor disputes. Nationalist politics was necessarily anti-class politics, he thought. Economic discussions within the Zionist movement ought not, shaatnez-like, to use European social democratic ideas but draw from traditional Jewish sources. Although Jabotinsky was secular, he wrote articles on the "social philosophy of the Bible" in order to show that Jews had a counter- authority to "alien" socialist notions. Monism required one source as well as one goal.10

Ben-Gurion responded fiercely but also with keen moral intelligence. Zionism, he insisted, could be good or bad depending on the kind of society and the type of state it created. "Talk of 'monistic' Zionism in contrast to 'shaatnez' is a fraud," he declared to a 1932 Mapai conference. "The fascist Zionist whoÝ.Ý.Ý.Ýwars onÝ.Ý.Ý.Ý'leftists,' the bourgeois Zionist who wants the rule of wealthÝ.Ý.Ý.Ýand the socialist Zionist who wants a free workers' societyÝ.Ý.Ý.Ýall have shaatnez Zionism. The difference is in the mixture." Ben-Gurion contended that members of his movement naturally had plural loyalties--to the Jewish people, to the international workers' movement, and Labor Zionist women to women's movements, for example.11

By 1935 the left defeated Jabotinsky decisively. It did so in part because of its formidable organizations in Palestine. But there was another reason. Embattled by Jabotinsky, fearful of fascism in Europe, and faced with increasing violence between Jews and Arabs, Labor retreated from purely class politics and built coalitions with (moderate) nonsocialist forces within the World Zionist Organization. This ensured Mapai's hegemony and marginalized the right wing for decades, although it also meant that the left had to make concessions to allies. Crucial questions for students of modern Jewish political thought are: What is the meaning of Mapai's compromise? Did historical conditions impose it? Was it a betrayal of Mapai's own values? These questions lurk behind a great deal of historiographical argument. Zeev Sternhell tries to provide answers in his controversial book The Founding Myths of Israel.12 In this angry text--it sometimes reads like a fit with footnotes-- he aims to demonstrate that Labor Zionists were never truly committed to social democracy. Curiously, he never addresses disputes between left and right, and the book's Hebrew title, which translates as Nation- building or a New Society? (Binyan umah o tikun hevrah?) indicates that he considers debates about the "modern" construction of national societies to be irrelevant to his argument. More important, nation-building and creating a new society entail for him opposed principles--monistic alternatives, one might say. Although he identifies with the left, he is at odds with Labor's traditional premise--that Jews would be reinvented as a nation through creating a new society.

Sternhell's book is, in some curious ways, similar to Yoram Hazony's The Jewish State.13 Both authors rely on bifurcation. Hazony, a former aide to Likud prime minister Benjamin Netanyahu, also sees Zionist history as a contest between monistic alternatives. Herzl and Ben- Gurion, advocates of Jewish statehood, are on one side, and binationalist Martin Buber is on the other. The New Historians are simply Buber's descendents, according to Hazony. Although Sternhell's book comes, at least in part, from despair of the left's intellectual exhaustion, the structure of Hazony's argument derives from American nenonconservativessertions that left-wing intellectuals are almost generically hostile to their country's national needs. Neoconservative claims of this sort were partly a function of Cold War (and then Culture War) debates, and they often sought to obscure the historical place of the anti-Stalinist left. Hazony, similarly, obscures differences among Zionists as well as those among Zionists, binationalists, and anti-Zionists. His premise renders inconsequential all differences between Herzl and Ben-Gurion. Moreover, Hazony seems uninterested in the content of socialist ideas or their complex role in Zionist political history. So he veils the political battles between the Zionist left and right.

The role of socialist ideas is central to Sternhell's account, but his typology derives from his own earlier work on France. The French nation, he argues, is conceivable in one of two ways: either as a "collection" of individual citizens with universal values, or as a spiritual "collectivity"--a Church-tied, blood-bonded family. The unnamed inspiration here seems to be intellectual historian Jacob Talmon,14 who proposed a radical opposition between individualistic "liberal democratic" thought and collectivist "totalitarian democratic" thought. British parliamentarism and Eduard Bernstein's reformism typified the former; Rousseau, Marx, Michelet, Mazzini, and Luxemburg incarnated the latter because they sought universal redemption, be it through a Republic One and Indivisible, a Nation, or a Universal Class.

As Talmon distinguished two types of democracy, so Sternhell distinguishes two concepts of the French nation and two socialisms. "Democratic socialism" saw society as a "collection" of individuals. Its "aim and purpose" was the individual, and so Jaurès and Bernstein claimed legitimately that democratic socialism was "liberalism's heir." What differentiates a liberal and a socialist? The former "sees human beings as autonomous individuals" whereas the latter "places them according to their objective membership in a social category."15 What "social" means is never clarified. Still, Sternhell defines "national socialists" as collectivists who saw individualism as a threat to social unity. Proudhon was, for him, "the major source of inspiration for the most extreme forms of nationalist socialism," which then took "prefascist" forms in Barrès, Sorel, and Maurras.16 Sorel saw that Marxism failed to grasp the changes of the late nineteenth century, and so he relieved socialism of the "universal" class, the proletariat, by integrating it into the nation. In brief, "national socialism" is situated at a conjuncture of left and right.

Sternhell strains to show that the Zionist left can also be characterized as "national socialist" (or sometimes "nationalist socialist"). There is something morally careless in this provocative association of Zionists with "national socialism," especially since Sternhell has strained mightily to show that the Zionist left was not really socialist but that right-wing nationalists in France (and elsewhere in Europe) were. And though the clash between Labor and the Zionist right, a defining moment for both, has no import in his account, neither does "Brit ha-biryonim" (the Union of Thugs). This tiny offshoot from Jabotinsky's movement took on a fascist style and is the one Zionist group that might be compared with national socialism. Some members were ac.accused the 1933 assassination of Hayim Arlosoroff, a young socialist thinker who was then Zionism's foreign minister.

Yet Sternhell reckons that Arlosoroff's ideas and those of Berl Katznelson, Labor's intellectual leader (until his death in 1944), were "national socialist." He proposes that Arlosoroff's opposition to both class war and philosophical materialism is coded rejection of Marxism's "rationalistic content."17 Katznelson was an organic nationalist, as revealed by his 1926 speech asserting that "Our movement wishes to create a new society, which recognizes the freedom of the individual, but an exaggerated individualism which regards the individual as its aim and purpose is not suited to our movement." These views, writes Sternhell, were "obviously" alien to (democratic) socialist thought.18 Labor, dominated by "narrow" minds, devoted itself to power, national interests, and class collaboration rather than socialist internationalism.

But Labor never accepted a monistic approach to Jewish politics--not Parvus's, not Jabotinsky's, and thus not Sternhell's--and it insisted that there was a Jewish question to be addressed in its specificity. Al.Al. thoughforts at a Jewish-Arab modus vivendi were pursued in the 1920s, Labor did believe that the Jewish question worldwide was the most pressing matter.19 Certainly, a threat to more than Parvus's sleeve had emerged by the 1930s in Europe. Although Labor Zionists were committed socialists, the world had become complicated and desperate. The probability was always small that Palestinian Arab and Jewish workers would unite in class struggle; it vanished with Hitler's rise (and then support of him by Palestinian and other Arab nationalists). Oddly, Sternhell contends concurrently that Labor was insufficiently universalistic but that it ought to have created in Palestine "its own in.institutionsd egalitarian forms of life and thenÝ.Ý.Ý.Ý[sought] to transform society as a whole." Instead, he writes, it accepted "the existing order," the development of Palestine along capitalist lines, and the development of Jewish Palestine into "a normal bourgeois society."20

This is an idiosyncratic reading of ideas and history, not least because Labor's priority was to create autonomous institutions. The "pure" class approach did not favor building egalitarian forms within capitalism; it presumed capitalist development to be the prelude to "the final" class conflict. Arlosoroff and Katznelson favored "consconstructivism the shape of the Histadrut and the kibbutz. That is, they fa.vfavoredcapitalist development, partly because they thought the "class struggle" approach of Marxist Zionists, many of them followers of Ber Borokhov, made no sense. The Marxists thought Palestine would evolve into a normal bourgeois society; constructivists thought it would not. The small Palestinian Jewish proletariat, Arlosoroff warned (using Marxist categories against themselves) did not exist "in-itself"--it was barely an "objective class" formation. But Zionist socialists spoke as if it already existed "for- and in-itself"--that is, as if it were a fully formed, self-conscious historical protagonist. Because Marx's vision of class war was born of advanced capitalism and Palestine was nothing of the sort, Arlosoroff advocated a politics of socialist institution and community- building. His alternative to "materialism" was a mix of Russian popupopulism anarchist utopianism. If about half of Israel's post-indeindependencenomy was public, this was due significantly to the strategy advocated by Arlosoroff (and Katznelson), not to "normal" bourgeois development.

Intellectual historians will puzzle at Sternhell's dismissal of critcriticisms"exaggerated individualism." Most socialists, democratic and undemocratic, shared Katznelson's protest against capitalism's "atomatomizingndencies. "The human being," Marx wrote, "isÝ.Ý.Ý.Ýan animal that can individuate itself only in the midst of society."21 He dreaded that society might become just a collection of Robinson Crusoes, and so did Jaurès, Bauer, Bernstein, Bauer, Lukács, and the Frankfurt School, among others. They spoke instead of a "social individual." Sternhell cites Kant's influence on Austro-Marxism to buttress hcontentionsons. It is true that the Austrian theorists saw socialism as liberalism's heir, but not as Sternhell formulates it: they used Kant on behalf of social individualism and against "exaggerated individualism." Max Adler, their leading philosopher, proposed that sociality wastranscendentaltal condition of experience like time, space, and tcategoriesies in Kantian epistemology.22

In fact, Sternhell's strictures can make virtually every major non- Marxist socialist into a "national socialist." JaurËs criticized bomaterialismism and exaggerated individualism; he contended that "it is the nation that will, for a long time to come, furnish the historical framework of socialism, the unifying mold [le moule d'unité] in which the new justice will be cast."23 He opposed mechanical applications of "class" formulas (rejecting, for instance, the nationalization of French small proprietors as the imposition of a German Marxist program); he accepted coalitions with "bourgeois" parties if demanded by the moment; his socialist party included Marxists and anti-Marxists; he supported a citizen's army.24 Would it be appropriate to call him a "national socialist"? Only if one imposes a scheme that does not account for the spirit, content, and context of Jaurès's ideas (and ignores the fact that he fought against French "national socialists"). The same may be said of Labor Zionism.

The Austrian Social Democrats defined their own situation as anomalous and, consequently, did not simply oppose "state-building" to a new society. They were protagonists of a modern "bourgeois" state to supplant the rickety regime of the multinational Austro-Hungarian empire. They knew that this was not "pure" Marxism, but they determined it to be a prerequisite of social democratic goals. The Labor Zionists also defined their circumstances as anomalous, in this case be.cause they were responding to the Jewish question. In fact, moEuropeanean socialist parties in the early twentieth century distinguished their circumstances from "pure" Marxist models of "normal" class development. In time, most social democrats recognized that the idea of a universal class composed by a vast proletarian majority was a myth. With this in mind, one sees the multiple difficulties of Sternhell's comparative strategy. He compares Labor Zionists to "national socialists," although Labor Zionists either did not read them seriously (certainly not Barrès or Maurras) or considered them mortal foes. He does not examine the profound influence on Labor Zionism of Russian populism (in which extensive debates occurred about "by-passing" capitalism). Finally, he does not make the most important comparison, which is between Mapai--the socialist party founded in 1930 by Ben-Gurion, Arlosoroff, and Katznelson--and European socialist parties facing "normal" (or abnormal) class development.

Social democrats have never secured decisive mandates for radical change. Their popular electoral tallies have averaged around 40 percent (with intermittent exceptions). Some were nonetheless able to dominate their country's political agenda. This was occasionally under trying circumstances (such as the French Socialists in 1936), and it meant unavoidably that there would be compromises (necessitated by coalition-building). This was precisely what Mapai did. Even if it did not have to reckon with the Nazi menace or Jabotinsky's challenge or conflict with the Palestinian Arabs, Mapai would have had to turn to coalition politics--particularly if Palestine/Israel had "normal bourgeois development" because normal bourgeois development, if there is such a thing, did not follow Marx's predictions. The proletariat has always had "minority status" in "normal bourgeois societies," as Adam Przeworski pointed out in his remarkable book Capitalism and Social Democracy. Social democratic parties, as purely class parties, could never have obtained large electoral majorities for radical transformation. Combine minority status with the democratic principle of majority rule, and there was no option for social democrats but coalitions, championing goals "which workers share[d] as individuals wimembersers of other classes," and tempering class politics.25

Socialist parties had to function, then, on a "popular" or "national" and not solely a class basis. This translated into pluralist welfare states rather than a classless world. If Mapai pursued class politics alone, it would have become "a minority party dedicated exclusively to ultimate goals in a game in which one needs a majority--more, an overwhelming mandate--to realize these goals."26 Even without the "national question," it would have had to be a national party or forgo any exercise of political power (in Léon Blum's sense).27 But once it had made an interclass coalition, Mapai could no longer simply identify the interests of Jewish workers with those of a Jewish nation. The category of nation-state had to be separated from and raised above class. Ironically, Ben-Gurion increasingly made a virtue of this necessity, leaving shaatnez more and more behind.

Mamlakhtiyut Versus Shaatnez

Most social democratic parties had strong statist orientations that eased a transition to national policies. "Socialization" was oftenationalizationion" because the state was a public counter-power to capital's private strength. But here, again, Israel was anomalous. Some time in the early 1940s, Ben-Gurion decided he was no longer a socialist. He found himself in growing conflict with the labor movement's left and increasingly sought to reorient the terms of political debate. The state increasingly became his universal category as calls for "unity" displaced "shaatnez." As prime minister after 1948, he inverted socialist policies. Instead of using the state to socialize the private realm, he tried to nationalize--that is, transfer into state hands--the labor movement's assets and to diminish labor's public sphere. Mamlakhtiyut became his master term. It may be translated (somewhat imprecisely) as "statism." The word derives from "kingdom" (mamlakhah) in Hebrew.28 Ben-Gurion preached mamlakhtiyut to Israelis in order to instill in them a sense of civic responsibility. He was not at all sure that Jews were ready for political independence, and in his view an independent nation had to be capable of "statist activity [peulah mamlakhtit]."29 But it is notable that he chose a derivation from the word "kingdom" rather than "citizen" (ezrakh). His ideological pronouncements always hadconsistentlytly practical dimension: the subordination of all institutions, particularly Labor's, to the state. Labor was not the first target, but it became the principal one in the first decade of independence. At the beginning of the 1948 war, the Zionist military underground was politically fragmented, and mamlakhtiyut demanded that it become a single force. Despite resistance from the right, this was accomplished and generally accepted as necessary. But the consequences of mamlakhtiyut for both social democracy and pluralism in postwar Israel were controversial; it may be argued that virtually all of Ben-Gurion's post-1949 policies undermined the prospects for both on behalf of a heady mix of "statism" and secular messianism. The more pronounced his own version of monism, the more he insisted on "unity," the more he presented Spinoza as his intellectual hero, and the more he identified public life with the state per se and sought to transfer from the Histadrut to the state institutions ranging from labor exchanges to health services.

It has been suggested that Ben-Gurion was animated by a desire to secure pluralism in Israel, yet a contextualized reading of his statements--one that links them to policies he pursued concurrently with them--shows that his aim was less pluralism than the displacement of the dominant social democratic culture by an alternative, mamlakhti civic religion. His themes were "oneness" and (secular) messianism. Peter Berkowitz, a follower of Leo Strauss, the conservative political philosopher, reads Ben-Gurion's 1954 statement on "The Eternity of Israel" in light of recent American debates between liberals and communitarians as well as Israel's early development. The new state's premier attacked divisiveness on behalf of the general will and called for religious tolerance. Berkowitz sees this as a demand to balance rights and duties of citizenship and remarks that Ben-Gurion could not cite Hobbes to Orthodox Jews in order to explain how public assertion of their judgments could lead to civil strife.30

These points are not wrong, but they are not contextualized adequately. Ben-Gurion had other purposes and assumptions, which were teleological, not pluralist. "History has a sequence," he declared, "and one must distinguish between the primary and the tangential."31 The tangential, in this case, was Ben-Gurion's limited victory in his attempt to establish a single mamlakhti educational system for all Israelis. Israel initially had several autonomous educational "trends" (zramim)--Labor (that is Histadrut-run), General Zionist (that is, centrist and middle class), and religious. In the summer of 1953, the Knesset passed at the premier's urging a law merging the Labor and General trends. The religious trend was exempted because religious parties threatened to quit the governing coalition (which also included the General Zionists). Political expediency--the "tangential"--trumped mamlakhtiyut. Ben- Gurion's call for pluralism and tolerance was in this case a rhetorical tactic in the aftermath of his failure to establish a unitary educational system, and in the face of protests from within his own party (and from other left parties). His critics argued that Israeli social democracy jeopardized its future if mamlakhti rather than social democratic education became the norm. It was, they thought, a major, long-term blunder to yield an essential means of political socialization, especially in a country devoted to immigration. In retrospect, their argument seems persuasive, especially because mamlakhtiyut aimed to nationalize social democratic institutions rather than social-democratize state institutions. This was in fact what happened to Israeli education just as massive numbers of newcomers arrived in the country.

But Ben-Gurion's worldview had changed. All threads now led to the state, and through mamlakhtiyut he became the first post-Zionist. He did not push aside socialist vocabulary for the sake of other modern ideologies; he advocated something both new and old. In his mind, the rebirth of a Jewish state transformed everything in Jewish politics. A Diaspora Zionist was now an oxymoron; either one moved to the state or one was not a Zionist. But once a Jew became an Israeli citizen, the Zionist "narrative" was superfluous. Just as Marx saw in communism the abolition of both the proletariat and the bourgeoisie--and consequently class struggle--Ben-Gurion saw in mamlakhtiyut the transcendence of the alienating and painful circumstances of Jewish modernity, of the "cleavage between the Jew and the man." The Jewish state made Zionism passé.32

Marx and Herzl were irrelevant to Israeli reality, Ben-Gurion insisted in 1957. National liberation struggles in Asia and Africa refuted the proposition that all history was class struggle, and "the stories of our forefathers 4,000 years agoÝ.Ý.Ý.Ýhave more actuality [yoter aktualiyut], are closer, more edifying and meaningful for the young generation [of Israelis]Ý.Ý.Ý.Ýthan all the speeches of the [Zionist] Congresses."33 Not surprisingly, it became a humorous commonplace for some young Israelis to rebuff all types of theoretical discussion with the phrase: "Don't give me Tsiyonut [Zionism]."34 Ben-Gurion still spoke repeatedly of "vision," but his politics of anticipation--the mixture of teleology and secular messianism--lent itself to a practical focus on means, on the tools of statehood. The end was already implicit in them, and this engendered a contempt for "ideology"--it engendered a political positivism, one might say--among Ben-Gurion's leading protégés within Mapai's "Young Guard," notably Shimon Peres and Moshe Dayan. Peres captured the moment when he declared in 1958 that his generation needed "not to know what we want to be, but what we want to do."35 This bifurcation of doing and being was an essential dimension of the political and intellectual undoing of the Israeli Labor. It also helps us to understand the political and intellectual impact of "new historians" and the new "post-Zionists" in the 1980s. Labor had few intellectual resources at its disposal when it was finally defeated by the right wing in 1977.

New History and the Rise of the Right

The new "post-Zionism" and the "New Israeli History" are not identical, and neither one is homogenous. Still, they often overlap. Some post-Zionists agree with Ben-Gurion--without bringing along his mamlakhti baggage--that Zionism was legitimate yet is no longer relevant. In contrast, other post-Zionists question the basic assumptions of Jewish statehood. Some go so far as to concur with Azmi Bishara, an Israeli Arab member of the Knesset who argues that states should belong only to their inhabitants. Israel, consequently, ought not to belong, in some way, to a world Jewish people as well.

Bishara is, in his own way, a monist, because he presumes that there is only one legitimate structure of citizenship. But while he denies the legitimacy of Jewish nationalism, he endorses Palestinian nationalism, and some Jewish "post-Zionists" second his position. The prefix "post" becomes barely indistinguishable from "anti" in their writings, and "anti" often takes form as a tendency to find Israel culpable for most aspects of its conflict with the Arab world. The prefix "post" might lead one to expect that post-modernist theory, with its anti-foundationalism, shaped the New History. Although Israel has Foucauldians, like philosopher Adi Opher, a partisan of Bishara, some of its leading practitioners make claims contrary to post-modernist assumptions. In particular, they stress that their revisions of the Zionist "narrative" were due only to the availability of new archival materials and to their own "objectivity."

This claim detaches the New Historians from their own historical environment. It is true that new resources became available in 1978–79. Thirty-year restrictions expired on archival materials dating to Israel's founding. By coincidence this was just after Labor lost to Likud. In other words, the New History materialized not simply out of newly available documents but at a specific historical juncture: the displacement of Labor dominance by its long-time adversary. A competitive party system took form in which the right had an edge and dominated political discourse. Zionist social democracy led the struggle for Jewish statehood, but, by Israel's thirtieth anniversary, it was besieged politically (by Likud), and its legacy was soon contested (by New Historians and post-Zionists).

The New Historians rarely addressed the political history of the new ruling party. It was addressed in the 1950s, 1960s, and 1970s, but mostly by sympathizers.36 These right-wing historians, who were often tendentious, felt isolated in Israeli academia and frequently protested that Israeli historical studies were too informed by ideology. The New Historians made a similar complaint, although with a positivist twist. They presented narratives that were sharply critical of Labor's record, particularly in foreign policy, and claimed to transcend the "ideological" bent of previous Israeli historiography on behalf of factuality. We can take the work of Benny Morris, Avi Shlaim, and Ilan Pappe as examples. Morris's The Birth of the Palestinian Refugee Problem is the most accomplished and balanced work of "New History."37 This author contends that the "old" cohort of historians was not "objective," but his is. Despite these claims, his book did take a position. His main conclusion--that the refugee problem resulted from war, not the intentions of either side--corresponds roughly to the traditional position of Zionist doves, who usually asserted that rights and wrongs could be ascribed to all parties in the conflict. Morris identifies as a Zionist, and it is not surprising that Shlaim and Pappe, New Historians with sharply anti-Zionist slants, chastised his conclusion (as did Arab historians).

Shlaim, like Morris, contends that he did not set out to revise history for political purposes; documents, he insists, made him do it. Despite this positivist claim, the title of his book, Collusion Across the Jordan, does not suggest value-neutralism. It suggests illicit scheming (by Zionists and Jordanians) and victimization (of the Palestinians) during the 1948 war. Yet it has been long known that Israelis and Jordanians negotiated secretly about the future of post-Mandate Palestine. Adding new details to a known story does not create a new historiography, much less a revision of history. Pappe writes that new archival materials serve "to demolish many myths" but openly declares as well that contemporary issues "dictate" his "selection from the vast sea of facts." Post-Zionist Boas Evron, a critic and translator (rather than an academic historian), also declares that his view of Jewish and Zionist history is, unlike that of earlier writers, "more in keeping with the facts." Yet he is the proponent of a distinct ideology, a new version of Canaanism, which aims to separate Hebrew nationhood from Jewish peoplehood.38

Norms are implicit in the work of all three of these authors. The orientation of Israeli historians of the 1950s, 1960s, and 1970s was heavily empiricist, though often tinged by Zionist socialism. Methodological reflections by them were often wanting. But this does not distinguish them greatly from the New Historians. Most "Old" Historians assumed the legitimacy of Israel's creation. New Historians rarely find fault on the Palestinian side of the conflict (except on tactical grounds). This can lead occasionally to startling formulations. Pappe, for instance, reports that in 1947 Jorge Garcia-Granados, a member of the United Nations Special Committee on Palestine, described the Arab Higher Committee as "a political hierarchy ruled by a former Nazi collaborator." In Pappe's view, this remark exemplified "prejudices against the Palestinian leaders." However, the former collaborator was Hajj Amin el-Husseini, the leading figure of Palestinian Arab nationalism during the British Mandate, who had spent World War II in Berlin making radio broadcasts on behalf of the Third Reich and promoting Muslim participation in the German war effort.39 Pappe's way of selecting from "the vast sea of facts" would appear here to be problematic. In any event, the real difference between "Old" and "New" Historians is due, clearly, to perspective, not "facts." A rereading of Israel and the Arab World, a largely forgotten but formidable historical study published in 1964 by the controversial Israeli intellectual Aharon Cohen, puts into question the positivism of the New Historians. He sought to balance Zionist and Palestinian claims long before new archival materials became available.40

Positivist claims by New Historians are, ironically, reminiscent of the "pragmatism" of Israel's mamlakhti generation, for whom "facts" were relentlessly contrasted to (Zionist Socialist) "ideology." This positivism also distinguishes the New Historians from European or American post-modernists (even though both trends emerged as the mainstream left weakened in their respective societies). Positivism made them vulnerable to charges of imbalance. Anita Shapira (Katznelson's biographer) and Shabtai Tevet (Ben-Gurion's biographer), for example, note that the New Historians drew major conclusions on the basis of new Israeli sources without corresponding access to Arab materials. In Shapira's words,
To write the historyÝ.Ý.Ý.Ýalmost exclusively on the basis of Israeli documentation, results in obvious distortions. Every Israeli contingency plan, every flicker of a far-fetched idea expressed by David Ben-Gurion and other Israeli planners, finds its way into history as conclusive evidence for the Zionist state's plans for expansion. What we know about Nasser's schemes regarding Israel, by contrast, derives solely from secondary and tertiary sources. The same is true for the planning of defense ministers of Syria and their fantasies of "Greater Syria."41

These points have never been rebutted adequately by New Historians. Still, neither Shapira nor Tevet interrogates the initial positivist assumptions.42 Moreover, their criticisms have a limit. Soviet archives were largely unavailable to Western academics during the Cold War, yet serious scholarship on Stalinism was done before 1989. The quality of work depended in part on scholarly self-consciousness of the problems of one-sided access. (It is worth noting, however, that post-1989 archival access has not led to a new historiography of Stalinism; it mostly buttressed earlier theories with new details.)

In short, neither side of this argument addresses sufficiently the interpretive dimension of its own scholarship or the need for appropriately conceptualized comparisons to test "objectivity." It is useful to examine the New Israeli History debate in light of controversies in other fields. Derek J. Penslar, for instance, has perceptively compared the New Israeli Historians to the American "diplomatic Revisionists" of the 1960s and 1970s. The latter also argued that their objectivity and access to declassified (American) documents facilitated their challenge to an ideological narrative (in which blame for the Cold War was ascribed to Soviet aggression).43 The Israeli debate also shares important features of a quarrel about Stalinism among Russian experts in the late 1980s. "Revisionist" historians like J. Arch Getty and Sheila Fitzpatrick insisted then that "detachment" and positivism enabled them to question a mainstream paradigm. In this case the paradigm was "totalitarianism," which they viewed as an outgrowth of Cold War ideology.44

As the New Historians--who came of age as Likud displaced Labor--sought to discredit narratives that made Israel a victim of Arab aggression, these Russian historical Revisionists--who matured as American Cold War rhetoric was discredited by the Vietnam War-- tried to deflate the idea of an all-controlling, ideologically driven Stalinist state. Just as the New Historians insisted that facts made their case, so Fitzpatrick proposed that "facts" of social history showed how social change from below, rather than dictates by the state, explained Soviet evolution. (The purges of the 1930s did not incarnate Stalinism but were "a monstrous postscript" to earlier developments.)45 Just as the New Historians claimed that documents disproved the ideological perspectives that underlay the Old Historians, so Getty challenged Merle Fainsod's Smolensk Under Soviet Rule, a classic study of one of the few Communist Party archives in Western hands before 1989.46 Where Fainsod found fastidious (totalitarian) coordination, Getty saw in the same documents inefficient administration. The New Historians seem angriest with Israel's founding generation of historians and politicians; the Revisionists seemed angrier at the totalitarianism model than at historical deceits of Stalinist regimes.

Sharp challenges to the Russian Revisionists came quickly upon their publication, and many were by scholars who were not at all committed to the totalitarianism model or to a simplistic Cold War view of the world. Critics of the New Historians include Israeli doves. Robert C. Tucker, whose work on Stalinism stresses the influence of Russian political culture, argued against the Revisionists that the proper issue was not how facts oppose ideology but how one interprets documents--and, one could add, circumstances.47 The same point may be directed toward the New Israeli Historians. Itamar Rabinovitch, a political moderate who is a leading authority on early Israeli-Arab negotiations and who served in the 1990s as a negotiator and ambassador for the Israeli government, has provided formidable analyses that contrast radically with Shlaim's work, as well as Pappe's.48 His persuasiveness (or lack thereof) does not depend on facts, old or new, but on a different understanding and explanation of them. Although parallels among historical disputes are always inexact and ought not to be pressed simplistically, debates about the New Israeli History--and the "fact" that they have political implications--are not so different from debates in other scholarly fields.

Impasse

Modern Jewish political thought began as an effort--as several efforts-- to address "the Jewish problem." Its animating arguments concerned how Jews could live and survive in modern and threatening circumstances. The arguers assumed that something was abnormal about these circumstances. Consequently, they sought "normalcy," whether in the form of statehood or of sustainable, secure diasporas. But by the end of the twentieth century, modern Jewish political thought often turned into disputes, particularly among academics and under the guise of history, about the legitimacy of one particular solution--Jewish sovereignty. These debates, which focused on Israel's formation, would not have occurred had Zionism failed, yet their focus on history indicates that a political and intellectual impasse had been reached.

In a way, diasporism and Zionism really argued about the nature and circumstances of normalcy. The former was hopeful and the latter deeply pessimistic about Jewish political dependence. The former assumed general political change accompanied by national cultural recognition would secure Jewry; the latter took independence to be the perspicacious response to the events of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. It is difficult to challenge Zionist pessimism in light of those events. Zionists did not foresee the Holocaust; they did have a keener sense of historical reality than most of their foes, universalistic or diasporist, Jewish or non-Jewish. They feared modernity but yearned for its best promises.

Today it is difficult to define normalcy--partly, though not entirely, because of the Arab-Israeli conflict. Palestinians and Israelis are effectively occupying each other; they cannot escape each other. Their struggle might be viewed as absurd "normalcy" since its pains, and arguments about curing them, are comparable to other, seemingly intractable and brutal "ethnic" and/or religious conflicts (like Kashmir). This is not the normalcy for which many early Zionists hoped, and it is fair to say that the Arab-Israeli conflict became a historical shredder of shaatnez. Still, if the arguments I have made about mamlakhtiyut are persuasive, another crucial factor was at work. Because Labor (more specifically Mapai) was Zionism's principal vehicle of Jewish politicamodernizationon, its decline, partly under the impact of mamlakhtiyut (and especially with the abandonment of social democratic education in a country devoted to immigration), meant that Israel's society would inevitably and dramatically alter, that its political culture would become more receptive to monism and "pure" nationalism, especially in conditions of ongoing siege.

This process crystallized in Menahem Begin's election in 1977; it was reflected intellectually by the New Historians and the new "post-Zionists," even if they wrote from political perspectives opposite to the Likud's. The New History and the new post-Zionism were also a function of Labor's inability to reinvent itself. This failure was concurrent with a general intellectual impasse in Western social democracy. (The unraveling of the New Deal coalition was the American counterpart.) Changes of substantial magnitude--revolutions in communications and technology together with the progress of neoliberal globalization--occurred in the last decades of the twentieth century. Structures of national statehood, which were essential tools of fiscal and domestic policies in social democratic welfare states, were challenged. This was especially so for small states, although Israel's economy has peculiarities due to a persistent state of war (which demands a government role in the economy) and financial ties to the United States. These peculiarities manifested themselves in both leading parties. The economic policies of Likud governments jumbled populism and liberalism. Shimon Peres, Labor's chairman in the 1980s, championed a "new socialism" that mixed unevenly--it could not do otherwise--neoliberalism and mamlakhtiyut.

Zionist thinking took shape initially in a period of rising nationalism; it was also a time in which socialist movements burgeoned. Zionism and socialism originated in opposition, respectively, to antisemitism and social suffering. These problems are still with us, albeit in altered forms. But the role of nation-states, which was a given for Zionists, is changing, and some important, long-standing social democratic assumptions about class and class politics are untenable. Zionism and social democracy began stuttering at about the same time (the 1970s) because neither proved capable of moving beyond themselves and of extricating themselves from some deeply embedded nineteenth-century concepts--concepts that originated in legitimate protests. An intelligent post-Zionism starts with the legitimacy of that protest rather than with anti-Zionism, but it also recognizes the insufficiency today of the Zionist solution; an intelligent post-socialism begins with a parallel acknowledgment of insufficiency and a quest for new ways to enhance social egalitarianism.

Post-Zionism will displace Zionism (and mamlakhtiyut within it) to the extent that Israel and Jewry are integrated into a globalizing world. Several factors thwart this displacement. Among them is the continuation of the Arab-Israeli conflict and antisemitism, which is frequently articulated through anti-Zionism. (Anti-Zionism and antisemitism may be distinct in principle but are often not so in discursive practice.) Still, changes in the nation-state and the revolution in communications will eventually compel Jewish political thought to reconsider some principal tenets of Zionism, specifically what "normalcy" and the "centrality" of Israel in Jewish life mean. A people cannot "dwell apart" in a globalizing world--politically, intellectually, or in daily life.

An intelligent post-Zionism will not be anti-Zionism but a transnational Zionism, a Zionism of plural loyalties that reinvents shaatnez for a globalizing era. It will have to go beyond many nineteenth-century notions of the nation-state while remembering why the Jews needed one so badly--that is, while remembering the rip on Parvus's sleeve and that universalism failed the Jews in the twentieth century. It will--I borrow from Bourne--have to weave "many threads of all sizes and colors," and it will have to weave them "back and forth with other lands." It will have to retrieve and incorporate the spirit of diasporism. Israel's centrality in a world Jewish community will have to be earned, rather than be metaphysical (especially if there is, one day, an Arab- Israeli peace). Jewish political thought in the twenty-first century will have to be animated by rooted cosmopolitanism--that is, by a recognition that universalism and particularism are both legitimate and illegitimate. They are not necessarily born of the other, but we need both as correctives to each other.

Notes

I wish to thank Derek J. Penslar and Steven J. Zipperstein for criticisms of drafts of this article. An earlier, shorter version appeared in French in Raisons politiques (Aug.–Sept. 2002).

1 Shmarya Levin, Youth in Revolt (New York, 1930), 248–49. Levin is unclear about the date.

2 Alexander Pope, "An Essay on Criticism," in Poetry and Prose of Alexander Pope (Boston, 1969), 38 (emphasis in the original).

3 The phrase "New Jewish Politics" is Jonathan Frankel's in his classic study, Prophecy and Politics: Socialism, Nationalism, and the Russian Jews, 1862–1917 (Cambridge, Engl., 1981); Herzl's comment is in Alex Bein, Theodor Herzl (New York, 1970), 115–16. On methodological problems in the study of Jewish nationalism, see Mitchell Cohen, "A Preface to the Study of Jewish Nationalism," Jewish Social Studies, n.s. 1, no. 1 (Fall 1994): 73–93.

4 David Ben-Gurion, "Matan Erets," in his Mi-maamad le-am (Tel Aviv, 1974), 9–10.

5 Simon Doubnow, Lettres sur le Judaïsme ancien et nouveau (Paris, 1989).

6 On the Bund's early development, see esp. Frankel, Prophecy and Politics, chap. 4, from which I quote the Bund's program (p. 220) and Kossovsky (p. 235), and Henry J. Tobias, The Bund in Russia: From Its Origins to 1905 (Stanford, 1972). Frankel shows that the Bund's ideas were not only a product of East European conditions but also shaped by the ideas of their "exiles"--that is, Bundists in Central and Western Europe (p. 215).

7 Horace M. Kallen, "Democracy Versus the Melting Pot" and "A Meaning of Americanism," in his Culture and Democracy in the United States (New York, 1924). For Randolph Bourne, see "Trans-national America," in his The Radical Will: Selected Writings, 1911–1918 (New York, 1977), and "The Jew and Transnational America," in his War and the Intellectuals: Collected Essays 1915–1919 (New York, 1964). For a contemporary use of Kallen, see Michael Walzer, What It Means to Be an American (New York, 1992). For an effort to distinguish Kallen and Bourne, see David Hollinger, Postethnic America: Beyond Multiculturalism (New York, 1995). See also Mitchell Cohen, "In Defense of Shaatnez: A Politics for Jews in a Multicultural America," in Insider/Outsider: American Jews and Multiculturalism, D. Biale, .M. Galchinsky, and S. Heschel, eds. (Berkeley, 1998).

8 Hayim Greenberg, "Patriotism and Plural Loyalties" (1948), in his The Inner Eye: Selected Essays, vol. 1 (New York, 1953).

9 The Bund might have played a similar role in Russia had democracy rather than Bolshevism taken hold there. The Bund emerged as the most powerful political force within Polish Jewry in the 1930s.

10 See Vladimir Jabotinsky, "Prakim be-filosofyah ha-sotsialit shel ha- tanakh," "Raayaon ha-yovel," and "Mavo le-torat ha-meshek," in his Umah ve-hevrah (Jerusalem, 1950). For an analysis of Jabotinsky's political ideas, see Mitchell Cohen, Zion and State: Nation, Class and the Shaping of Modern Israel, 2d ed. (New York, 1992), esp. chaps. 7, 8, and 9.

11 David Ben-Gurion, "Ha-poel ba- tsiyonut," in Mi-maamad le-am, 247, 249. For his polemics against Jabotinsky, see Ben-Gurion, Tnuat ha-poalim veha- revizyonizmus (Tel Aviv, 1933). Jabotinsky called himself a "revisionist" because he believed he was returning Zionism to its Herzlian foundations, in opposition to the Labor movement. I have avoided using "revisionism" to describe him only to avoid confusion with "Revisionism" in historiography, which is discussed later in this article.

12 Zeev Sternhell, The Founding Myths of Israel (Princeton, 1998), 17.

13 Yoram Hazony, The Jewish State (New York, 2000).

14 Jacob Talmon's major works were The Origins of Totalitarian Democracy (London, 1952), Political Messianism (London, 1960), and The Myth of the Nation and the Vision of Revolution (Berkeley, 1982).

15 Sternhell, Founding Myths, 17.

16 For Sternhell's arguments on the left and right in France and Europe, see his Neither Right Nor Left: Fascist Ideology in France (Princeton, 1996). On Proudhon's role, see also Sternhell, Founding Myths, 99. On Barrès as a "nationalist socialist," see Sternhell, Maurice Barrès et le nationalisme français (Paris, 1985), esp. 205, 367.

17 Sternhell, Founding Myths, 25.

18 Ibid., 148–49.

19 For one account, see David Ben- Gurion, My Talks with Arab Leaders (Jerusalem, 1972).

20 Sternhell, Founding Myths, 222.

21 Karl Marx, Grundrisse (Harmondsworth, 1973), 84.

22 This was his notion of "social a priori." See esp. Max Adler, "Kant und der Marxismus," in Austro-Marxism, T. B. Bottomore and P. Goode, eds. (Oxford, 1978), and Lucien Goldmann, "Propos dialectiques: Y-a-t-il une sociologie marxiste?" in his Recherches dialectiques (Paris, 1959).

23 Jean Jaurès, "Le but," in his Études socialistes (Paris, 1902), 130.

24 The spirit of Jaurès's military doctrine in L'Armée Nouvelle (Paris, 1910) was similar to "Havlagah" (Self-Restraint), the creed articulated by the Labor Zionist-led underground during the Jewish-Arab violence of the 1930s. In 1938 the Haganah distributed a pamphlet to members explaining, "Your duty is to beat off attacks but not to let the smell of blood go to your heads. Remember that our meaning is in our name, Defense [Haganah], and that our only aim is to provide security for creative work. Your organization is subordinate to this ideal; it is the instrument that enables us to live and work; it is the servant of our purpose; it must never become its master." Cited in Arthur Koestler, Promise and Fulfillment (London, 1949), 72.

25 Adam Przeworski, Capitalism and Social Democracy (Cambridge, Engl., 1988), 21–22, 24.

26 Ibid., 24–25. He refers to European socialists; I extend his point to Mapai.

27 Léon Blum may have anticipated some of Przeworski's points when he distinguished socialist "participation" in power (i.e., serving in governments defined by "bourgeois" parties) from "exercising" power (i.e., setting priorities for government within a "bourgeois" order) or "conquering" power (i.e., taking command on behalf of radical transformation). He generally opposed the first (save for exceptional circumstances), believed the second was a duty in a democratic regime, and endorsed the last only in the event of overwhelming popular support. See esp. Léon Blum, "Le problème de la participation" (1929), in L'Oeuvre de Léon Blum, 1928–1934 (Paris, 1972), 117–18. Blum understood that the Popular Front's electoral success in 1936 did not imply a mandate for revolutionary socialism, so his government sought to reset the country's agenda, thwart the radical right, and compel the business classes to make vast legal concessions to French workers (through the Matignon Agreements). Przeworski's analysis implies that a "conquest of power" ought, necessarily, to be abandoned. Mapai's political logic, which led to a type of exercise of power, can be compared usefully to that of Blum.

28 For an analysis of the evolution of Ben-Gurion's mamlakhtiyut, which argues that it can be found in his thinking as early as the 1920s, see Cohen, Zion and State, parts 2–3.

29 David Ben-Gurion, "Darkenu ba- medinah," in his Hazon va-derekh, vol. 3 (Tel Aviv, 1952), 104.

30 Peter Berkowitz, "Hobbes and Rousseau in Israel," in The Jewish Political Tradition, vol. 1, M. Walzer, M. Loberbaum, and N. J. Zohar, eds. (New Haven, Conn., 2000).

31 David Ben-Gurion, "The Eternity of Israel," in Walzer et al., eds., The Jewish Political Tradition, 1: 496.

32 David Ben-Gurion, "A New Jew Arises in Israel," Jerusalem Post, May 16, 1958, p. 5.

33 David Ben-Gurion, "Munahim va-arakhim," Hazut (1957): 11.

34 I heard this often when I was a student at the Hebrew University in 1972–73.

35 Quoted in "Peres: Living in a Dangerous Era," Jerusalem Post, Aug. 30, 1960; see also Cohen, Zion and State, 2.

36 See, e.g., Joseph Schechtman, The Jabotinsky Story, 2 vols. (New York, 1956, 1966), and Joseph Schechtman and Yehuda Benari, History of the Revisionist Movement (Tel Aviv, 1970). For a more recent academic treatment of Jabotinsky that is sympathetic to his side in the conflict with Labor, see Jacob Shavit, Jabotinsky and the Revisionist Movement, 1925–1948 (London, 1988).

37 Benny Morris, The Birth of the Palestinian Refugee Problem (Cambridge, Engl., 1987).

38 See Benny Morris, "The New Historiography: Israel Confronts Its Past," Tikkun (Nov.–Dec. 1988): 21; Avi Shlaim, Collusion Across the Jordan (Oxford, 1988), viii; Avi Shlaim, "Letter to the Editor," Commentary (Feb. 1990): 4; Boas Evron, Jewish State or Israeli Nation (Bloomington, Ind., 1995), 1; and Ilan Pappe, The Making of the Arab-Israeli Conflict, 1947–51 (London, 1992). Canaanism was initially a small movement of intellectuals in the 1940s and 1950s (see Evron, Jewish State, 205–22, for a summary and critique). Like Pappe's works, Shlaim's recent book, The Iron Wall: Israel and the Arab World Since 1948 (New York, 1999), is remarkably consistent in ascribing blame to one side alone throughout 50 years of conflict.

39 Pappe, The Making of the Arab- Israeli Conflict, 22–23. See Rafel Medoff, "The Mufti's Nazi Years Re-Examined," Journal of Israeli History 17, no. 3 (Autumn 1996).

40 Aharon Cohen, Israel and the Arab World (New York, 1970).

41 Anita Shapira, "The Past Is Not a Foreign Country," The New Republic (Nov. 1999). See also Shabtai Tevet, "Charging Israel with Original Sin," Commentary (Sept. 1989).

42 Tevet asserts "academic" impartiality for his work, although it is clearly informed by a mamlakhti historical teleology.

43 Derek Jonathan Penslar, "Innovation and Revision in Israeli Historiography," History and Memory 7, no. 1 (1995): 125–46, esp. 136. See also Penslar's review of Sternhell, "Ben-Gurion's Willing Executioners," Dissent (Winter 1999), and his "Narratives of Nation Building: Major Themes in Zionist Historiography," in The Jewish Past Revisited, David Myers and David Ruderman, eds. (New Haven, Conn., 1998).

44 For Getty's positivism, see his "State, Society and Supersti.tion," Russian Review (Oct. 1987). For Fitzpatrick's, see her The Russian Revolution (Oxford, 1982), 9, and her "Afterword: Revisionism Revisited," Russian Review (Oct. 1986). In the latter, Fitzpatrick denies that "all historians profit from working within a general theory" and calls herself a "positivist at heart" (410–11). Both Getty and Fizpatrick have written numerous works and changed some of their views since these debates.

45 Fitzpatrick, Russian Revolution, 3.

46 Merle Fainsod, Smolensk Under Soviet Rule (Cambridge, Mass., 1958).

47 See J. Arch Getty, "Party and Purge in Smolensk: 1933–1937," and Robert. C. Tucker, "Problems of Interpretation," both in Slavic Review (Spring 1983).

48 Itamar Rabinovitch, The Road Not Taken (Oxford, 1991).

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