[NGFP-BookClub] response

[David Myers]

Dear Friends,

Thanks to David de Vries, Luka Girardi, and Haim Sperber for their 
interesting and informed comments.  A recurrent theme in the postings 
that I'd like to address is the question of whether the Jewish state 
should be "normal" or "exceptional" in some way.  While every national 
movement makes claims about the exceptional nature of its people, it is 
interesting to note that Herzl and a number of his close colleagues 
aspired to "normalize" the Jewish condition--that is, to accord to Jews 
what other self-respecting and respectable nations possessed: a state.  
Luka is absolutely right in suggesting that Herzl's vision was drawn 
from the formative Austro-Hungarian context in which he was born and 
raised.  He dreamt of a Jewish state governed by an enlightened (which 
is to say, German-speaking) elite, cosmopolitan in its cultural 
appetite, and unburdened by an overly obtrusive allegiance to religious 
tradition.  Herzl's indifference to Hebrew and willingness to consider 
Argentina (or in 1903, a part of eastern Africa known then as Uganda) 
rather than Palestine point to his lack of sentimentality.  He was a 
bourgeois European first and foremost, leading us to conclude that even 
if it was possible to take Herzl out of Europe, it was not possible to 
take Europe out of Herzl. 

Has his dream of a normalized state emerged?  The answer is an easy one: 
yes and no.  Daily life in Israel resembles that in countries throughout 
the world, with a robust consumerism and a dizzying array of cultural 
choices. And yet, Jews themselves, and much of the wider world, continue 
to regard the state as exceptional in some way.  David de Vries argues 
that holding on to that exceptional condition is essential to preserving 
a cohesive sense of collective Jewish identity.  On this view, it is the 
state and its institutions that serve to protect the Jewish commonweal, 
as well as to validate and bestow identity to Jews, both in the State of 
Israel and beyond.  And yet, that exceptonalist vision begs a number of 
important questions that Herzl did not have to face directly: 1) Can the 
State of Israel be both the state of the Jews and a fully democratic 
state (to all its citizens, Jewish and non-Jewish alike)?  2) What role 
should the Jewish world outside of Israel have in deciding questions 
affecting the collective Jewish well-being?  For example, who should 
decide the grounds for conversion to Judaism, as David ponders?  Should 
it be the Israeli Chief Rabbinate?  Or should there be a representative 
body of Jews throughout the world to engage the question (as Israeli 
legal theorist Chaim Gans suggests in /The Limits of Nationalism/)?  An 
interesting model might be the inquiry that Israel Prime Minister David 
Ben-Gurion sent to some 50 leading intellectuals in 1958 regarding the 
question of "Who is a Jew?"  Significantly, those scholars included both 
Israelis and those in the Diaspora.  (For a collection of the responses, 
see Elizer Ben-Rafael, /Jewish Intellectuals Answer Ben Gurion/.)  This 
roster of scholars reminds us that it might make sense to leave 
questions of global Jewish significance not to the institutions of a 
political state, but to a wider and more representative body of Jews 
throughout the world.

But is there really a global Jewish collective to speak of?  Haim 
Sperber cautions us against confusing the past and the present.  He is 
right, of course (as we shall soon see), to point to competing notions 
of Jewish nationalism in the early twentieth century.  It is precisely 
the rich terrain of this discourse to which I turn in search of 
conceptual models that may help to reinvigorate the debate over Jewish 
collective existence today.  In doing so, I am mindful of the famous 
Prussian historian Ranke's famous call to study the past "wie es 
eigentlich gewesen ist" (as it actually happened).  And yet, I am much 
more beholden to Benedetto Croce's insight that all history is 
contemporary history.  Our lens onto the past is not only shaped by our 
contemporary cirucumstances, but we have much to learn about the present 
from the past.  It is in this spirit, following the line of thought of 
Ahad Ha-am and Dubnow (whom we next read), that I ask whether there can 
be a Jewish nation independent of a Jewish state.

Looking forward to hearing from you all.

Best,
David Myers

-- 
David N. Myers

Professor of History and Director, 
UCLA Center for Jewish Studies

UCLA History Department 
405 Hilgard Ave. 
Los Angeles, CA  90095-1473 
(310) 825-3780 
(310) 206-9630 (fax) 
myers at history.ucla.edu 
www.history.ucla.edu/myers

UCLA Center for Jewish Studies 
302 Royce Hall 
Box 951485 
Los Angeles, CA 90095-1485 
(310) 825-5387 
(310) 825-9049 
cjs at humnet.ucla.edu
www.cjs.ucla.edu

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