Mina Graur

Anarchism and Zionism: the Debate on Jewish Nationalism

The need to belong to a distinct, well-defined group has been a natural, some say a biological urge of human beings since early times. Common language and traditions, shared ancestry, history, and mythology, as well as territorial unity have been frequently used to demarcate one people from another. During the nineteenth century, however, these distinctive traits assumed a wider scope in the lives of people, heralding the era of rising national feelings and struggles for national self-determination. Jews began to ponder the issue of separate Jewish national identity relatively late; indeed, they resorted to nationalistic themes only after realizing that emancipation could no longer be considered a suitable solution for the specific problems confronting secular Jews in an era suffused with national outbursts.
Most Jewish radicals, socialists as well as anarchists, initially subscribed to the universalist ideas common to radical thought. They believed that the social revolution, which would solve the problems of the oppressed masses throughout the world, would also solve the specific problems of the Jews in a manner divorced from a national context. However, the belief in internationalism was undermined by events such as the pogroms in Russia in 1881-1882, during which the Russian revolutionary group "Narodnaia Volia" declared that it considered the persecution of the Jews as a positive step on the way to accomplish the social revolution, or the Dreyfus Affair of 1896, during which a wave of antisemitism swept over France. These events caused many frustrated Jewish radicals to question the validity of their international orientations. Suddenly, they realized that a socialist or an anarchist ideology might not solve the problems of the Jews in a satisfactory manner. As a consequence, they started to look for ways to combine their radicalism with their growing sense of national identity.
This paper surveys the anarchist attitudes towards nationalism and examines the various answers given by both Jewish and non-Jewish anarchists to the questions pertaining to Jewish national identity, Jewish political sovereignty, and Zionism. Pillars of anarchist thought, such as Proudhon, Bakunin and Kropotkin, rejected Jewish nationalism. While Proudhon and Bakunin expressed racist antisemitic remarks, Kropotkin gave the problem some thought, and came up with an alternative to the Zionist call for a Jewish state. Kropotkin advocated social, but not cultural assimilation of the Jews in the countries in which they resided. He urged the Jews to continue developing their culture and national folklore, similar to other people devoid of a country, such as the Bohemians and Georgians.
Gustav Landauer considered the Jews to have achieved a level of nationhood, yet he rejected the Zionist interpretation of Jewish national self-determination, and did not advocate a separate Jewish state. Landauer believed that the Jews were entrusted with a historical mission which was to become the driving force behind the construction of socialist communities, divorced from any connection to the state. Rudolf Rocker, too, rejected national sovereignty for the Jewish people, and favored instead the establishment of a cultural, yet by no means a geographical, center for Jews that would serve as a unifying core for Jewish cultural life. Following the establishment of the state of Israel, Rocker was concerned that the new state would destroy the achievements of the communal settlements, the Kibbutzim.
Bernard Lazare, the archetype of the assimilated French Jew, was driven by the Dreyfus Affair to question the validity of assimilation. He reached the conclusion that the Jews should aspire to create a spiritual and moral nation, become a nation within a nation, and not necessarily in the boundaries of a separate state. Lazare's ideas, however, underwent a change, and towards the end of the nineteenth century he was fully converted to Zionism. Hillel Solotaroff's anarcho-national solution to the Jewish question acquired a distinctive Zionist flavor in his proclamation that the only suitable place for a Jewish national homeland was Palestine, yet he also advocated that it would be consisted of independent communes, which would be incorporated within the framework of a federative republic.