A History of Zionism (76 page)

Samson Raphael Hirsch, the spiritual leader of German Jewish orthodoxy in the nineteenth century, had stated well before the advent of Zionism that Jews had to hope and pray for their return to Zion, but actively to accelerate the redemption was a sin and strictly prohibited. Accordingly Zionism was interpreted as the most recent and the most dangerous phase in the continuing Satanic conspiracy against the House of Israel, the most recent and the least reputable of a long series of catastrophic pseudo-messianic attempts to forestall the redemption by human action.
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The religious sages of eastern Europe joined in a chorus of condemnation. Zadok of Lublin wrote that he hoped unto the Lord that the Day of Redemption would come. But he was not willing to settle in Jerusalem lest such a step would be interpreted as giving accursed Zionism the stamp of approval. Or, as a representative of ultra-orthodox thought in Britain argued more recently, Zionism was a heresy consisting of a complete and essential denial of the whole content of Judaism: ‘We are in Golus [the diaspora] for our sins. We have been elected by Divine Providence and must lovingly accept our sentence.’
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(It may be noted in passing that this interpretation of Jewish tradition resembles the views of a liberal critic such as Gershenson who was an apostate from Judaism.)

Yet when all was said and done, there was still the obligation in the Bible to settle in Palestine, and the issue continued to trouble the orthodox camp. According to their spokesmen there was a difference between the obligation to live in Eretz Israel and the duty to settle there. Orthodox Jews were exempt for a variety of reasons, such as physical danger, economic obstacles, the difficulty of giving an orthodox religious education to their children, or the impossibility of studying the Torah in Eretz Israel.
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Zionism, moreover, was not regarded as a movement to rebuild Palestine but on the contrary as a heretical attempt to establish a state, a Jewish kingdom, which according to tradition was the privilege of the Messiah. The ideologists of the ultra-orthodox wing, such as Isaac Breuer, regarded the Jews as a
religious nation
, i.e. a nation different from all others inasmuch as religion was its only content. Zionism wanted to leave religion out of the national revival and as a result the nation would become an empty shell. For without religion the whole of Jewish history over thousands of years lacked any purpose. The Jewish nation had refused to perish because it wanted to save its religion and, conversely, religion had saved the Jewish nation. Having suffered so greatly for two thousand years, would it not be madness now to aim at transforming the Jews into a nation like all others, to politicise them, to establish a state which was neutral towards religion.
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According to this doctrine, Zionism was depriving the Jewish nation of its real cultural content by borrowing modern nationalism from western Europe. Thus it had embarked on the worst kind of assimilationism. To the argument that if the Jewish nation had produced geniuses like Spinoza and Marx, if it had made an enormous contribution to western civilisation even in the diaspora, it would reveal even greater capacities once the anomaly and one-sidedness of the diaspora was replaced by a Jewish state, Breuer replied that these speculations were no longer based on historical experience, nor would they give legitimacy to Jewish national claims. A people could press its demands only on the basis of what it had achieved, not on what it was likely to achieve in the future.
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This, in brief and in its most sophisticated form, was the line taken by the anti-Zionist orthodox. In its propaganda and education Agudat Israel bitterly denounced Zionism. In east European communal politics it cooperated even with the assimilationists, for Zionism was the more dangerous enemy. On the other hand, for a long time Agudat Israel refused to collaborate with religious Zionist parties (such as the Mizrahi) because they were part of the world Zionist movement which had declared its neutrality in religious affairs. Occasionally concessions were made. At a meeting in Vienna in 1923 it was decided that the settlement of Eretz Israel in the spirit of orthodox religious tradition was one of the aims of Agudat Israel. But it was one aim out of many and not among the most important. After the Balfour Declaration orthodox opposition became in fact more intense as the Zionists used the opportunity not to promote the economic development of the country but to build it up on a secular basis, without taking into account the religious feelings of the orthodox.
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The orthodox were thinking particularly of such abominations as giving women the right to vote and rejecting the advice of the orthodox rabbis concerning the observance of religious laws in daily life.

The extreme orthodox element in Palestine, mainly concentrated in Jerusalem, found an ally in the Aguda in its struggle against Zionism. Their leaders regularly protested to the British government and the League of Nations against Zionist oppression and against its endeavour to make the national home a Zionist home. On occasion they also tried to enlist the help of Arab leaders against ‘Zionist domination’. The conflict came to a head with the murder of a member of the executive of the Aguda. De Han, a Dutch Jew by origin, was a gifted poet and a tormented soul. (‘For whom am I waiting in this night, sitting at the wall of the temple — for God or for Muhammed the stable boy?’ he asked in one of his poems.)
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On other occasions he called himself a ‘hater of God’ or the ‘pig of God’. At one time a Socialist and a freethinker, and married to a Christian wife whom he would not divorce, he felt himself under the strongest compulsion to make amends after his conversion. He violently denounced Zionism in cables to British newspapers, and attacked the Balfour Declaration as well as the high commissioner and other British officials for their allegedly pro-Zionist policy.

Some of his writings were plainly antisemitic: the Jews stood for world revolution and a Jewish world government. Everywhere they constituted an element of destruction and decomposition. They had overthrown tsarism in Russia and were responsible for the defeat of Germany and Austria in the First World War.
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If Russia and Poland could not absorb the Jews, Palestine could stand them even less. He dressed like an Arab and used to address Jews in Arabic though he knew that they had not mastered the language. De Han was assassinated in the streets of Jerusalem on 30 June 1924. Many years later it became known that he had been killed by members of Hagana without the knowledge of the high command. For the extreme orthodox Jews of Jerusalem he became a hero who had died like a medieval martyr for the greater glory of God. De Han was by no means a typical Aguda leader, but the whole affair revealed the depths of hatred that had accumulated. Rabbi Sonnenfeld habitually referred to Zionists as ‘evil men and ruffians’; hell had entered Eretz Israel with Herzl. Rosenheim, the political head of central European orthodoxy, who was accustomed to using far more moderate language, nevertheless warned the religious Zionists against the ‘mortal danger’ they risked by collaborating with those who did not accept the divine law.
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The new realities created in Palestine gradually forced the leaders of anti-Zionist orthodoxy to modify their approach. They did not accept Zionism, but they slowly moved towards taking a more active part in settlement in Palestine. The main agents of change were the youth organisations of the Aguda and the workers section founded in Poland in 1922. Some of the latter’s members migrated during the 1920s and 1930s and established settlements in various parts of the country. There was also a change in their attitude to the Hebrew language, which previously had been taboo; only the extremist fringe persisted in using Yiddish exclusively. The murder of orthodox, anti-Zionist Jews in Hebron, Safed and Jerusalem during the riots of 1929 came as a shock to members of the Aguda and made them more inclined to cooperate in some fields with the Zionists, even though they refused as a matter of principle to join the National Council of Palestinian Jewry (
Va’ad Leumi
) which had been set up in the 1920s. They had pressed demands which were wholly unacceptable to the non-religious majority, namely that the National Council should acknowledge the authority of the Torah, that no open desecrator of the Sabbath should be eligible for membership, that women should not have the vote, and that the council should not subsidise institutions, such as the workers’ kitchens, which served forbidden food.
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Above all, Nazi rule and the holocaust caused confusion and eventually a deep split in the ranks of the Aguda. Isaac Breuer accused his own movement of having neglected Palestine, though in theory ‘constructive work in Palestine’ had been part of its programme for a long time: ‘Do not leave Jewish history to the Zionists’, Breuer said in a speech in 1934; if Aguda really wanted to combat Zionism it had again to become part of Jewish history, to prepare the Jewish homeland and the Jewish people for their reunion under the rule of the Torah. This was the will of divine providence which orthodox Jewry could afford to ignore only at the risk of its own existence.
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If the Zionists had sacrificed meta-history for history, i.e. the wish to be like all other nations, orthodoxy had been so involved in its struggle against Zionism that it had fallen down in its duty towards the Holy Land. It had not been aware that the Balfour Declaration and the resettlement of Palestine was a historical-metahistorical miracle, an encounter between these two strands in religion such as had occurred once before with the Revelation at Sinai.
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In 1937 Breuer asked the Grand Assembly of the Aguda to make up its mind whether the Balfour Declaration constituted a divinely imposed task or a Satanic contrivance, but received no answer. Some of the Palestinian spiritual leaders of orthodoxy sympathised with him, whereas Rosenheim and other leading members expressed doubts. Was the Aguda strong enough to counteract Zionist influence in Palestine since the Zionists had such a headstart? Building up Palestine was meritorious, but only if the law of the Torah was observed; if not, the whole effort was in vain. Which meant that in Rosenheim’s view (in 1934) it was not at all certain whether orthodox Jewry was right to link its fate to that of a secular Eretz Israel. He and his anti-Zionist friends did not essentially modify their views even after the holocaust. They argued that the Zionist slogan of evacuating Europe, of the ingathering of the exiles, was wrong, for who could know in what part of the diaspora the mysterious fate of the house of Jacob was yet to unfold itself before the coming of the Messiah?
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The orthodox remnants of European Jewry thus received conflicting advice: emissaries from Palestine tried to persuade them to come to Eretz Israel to strengthen the orthodox forces there, whereas Agudist spokesmen from the west advised them to emigrate to America.

In Palestine in the years between the end of the war and the establishment of the state of Israel there was a small but highly active and vociferous ultra-extreme group which accused the Aguda of succumbing to Zionist influence. These were the ‘Guardians of the City’ (
Neturei Karta
) in Jerusalem, headed by Amram Blau and Aharon Katzenellenbogen. They had the support of the followers of the rabbis of Brisk (Poland) and Szatmar (Hungary), who had found their way to America and other western countries, and the blessing of several talmudic sages such as Hazon Ish.
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According to their teachings, everyone who accepted the state of Israel was an apostate, for it was the purpose of the state to lead the Jews away from religion. In their eyes there was no longer any substantial difference between the Aguda, which was compromising with the Zionists, and the Mizrahi, which had been pro-Zionist from the start. The rabbis who supported the Aguda were charged by the ultra-extremists with responsibility for poisoning the new generation, and for the blasphemies committed daily and openly in the state of Israel.
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The Guardians refused to take part in the war of independence of 1948, and demanded the internationalisation of Jerusalem under the supervision of the United Nations. They refused to accept Israeli identity cards, for they believed that any concession to secularism and modern life, however small, would sooner or later spell doom for traditional Judaism as they understood it. In their stubborn struggle to preserve their specific character they were willing to recognise every state in the world but the one established by their own coreligionists. Their attacks on the Aguda were justified in so far as this party had indeed, after the end of the Second World War, moved towards a compromise with Zionism. The bastions of religious orthodoxy in eastern Europe having been destroyed, its leaders realised that the future of Judaism in Eretz Israel depended on Agudist support for the Jewish community in that country and the extraction of maximal advantages for the faith in exchange for displays of solidarity.
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About one year before the establishment of the state, an understanding was reached between them and the Palestinian Zionist leaders on certain issues of special importance, such as observance of the Sabbath and of the dietary laws, and the laws on education and marriage. Thus the ground was paved for participation by the Aguda in Israeli politics as part of the United Religious Front. Later on, in 1961, the workers section of Agudat Israel, which had split away from the main body, was represented for the first time in the Israeli cabinet.

The conflicts within the orthodox camp after the establishment of the state and its disputes with the non-religious majority are beyond the scope of the present study. It may be unfair to describe the change in the Aguda attitude towards Zionism solely in terms of practical politics. The reorientation had started, after all, well before 1948. Addressing fellow members of the Aguda in 1936 from Jerusalem, where he had settled, Breuer stated that there could be no doubt of the continuity of the link between the Jewish people and Eretz Israel throughout the centuries. The Jewish people had no reason therefore to fear the judgment of the god of history in its dispute with the Arabs.
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Ten years later Aguda representatives defended, albeit on religious grounds, the Jewish claim to Eretz Israel in their testimony to the Anglo-American Committee of Inquiry. In the coming of the state they saw the finger of God, heaven’s gift to the martyred Jews. The establishment of the state was not the redemption, but it was the beginning of the redemption. Thus after almost a century of opposition the majority of the orthodox rallied to the Jewish state. Israel had come into being, as they saw it, not as a result of the efforts of the Zionists but as a gift from heaven. It was a ‘sacred opportunity and challenge’ and did not necessarily involve them in recognising Zionism.
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With all their doctrinal extremism, the majority had always shown great realism in their policies. Following the injunctions of S.S. Sirsch and other sages, they had done nothing to help in the founding of the state. But once it had come into being it was a
fait accompli
which they could not ignore.