Judah Magnes: The Prophetic Politics of a Religious Binationalist by David Barak-Gorodetsky

Abstract

Reviewed by: Judah Magnes: The Prophetic Politics of a Religious Binationalist by David Barak-Gorodetsky Eric Fleisch David Barak-Gorodetsky. Judah Magnes: The Prophetic Politics of a Religious Binationalist. Translated by Merav Datan. Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press and the Jewish Publication Society of America, 2021. 364 pp. In Judah Magnes: The Prophetic Politics of a Religious Binationalist, David Barak-Gorodetsky presents a refreshingly original take on Judah Magnes (1877–1948), one of the most renowned Jewish figures in America and the Yishuv in the first half of the twentieth century. To date, Magnes has received considerable attention from biographers (i.e., Norman Bentwich, Arthur Goren, Daniel Kotzin, and an edited volume by William Brinner and Moses Rischin). One might wonder whether another exploration of Magnes was necessary, but Barak-Gorodetsky emphatically answers that question, making numerous unique contributions that sharpen an understanding of Magnes’s fundamental ideas and challenge traditional historiographical conceptions of Magnes as an almost ideologically schizophrenic figure. The title of this book is, itself, notable in its complexity. Barak-Gorodetsky and his editors packed a number of rich, loaded terms (prophetic, politics, religious, binationalist) into a short title. Though Magnes is perhaps best known as a binationalist and political leader—a founder of Ichud who advocated for a binationalist state at the Anglo-American Committee of Inquiry on Palestine in 1946 and made the case directly to President Harry Truman in May 1948; and as a leading Jewish political figure, instrumental in the Kehillah experiment in New York and longtime chancellor of Hebrew University—it is the other two descriptors in the title—religious and prophetic—that are the cornerstones of the author’s creative exploration [End Page 209] of Magnes as a person. Above all, Barak-Gorodetsky argues, Magnes defined himself by his own deep and conflicted lifelong religious exploration and eventually, the associated self-conception he developed as a modern-day Jeremiah. Barak-Gorodetsky devotes considerable attention to Magnes’s own personal search for God, which he demonstrates as, at once, Magnes’s greatest lifelong aspiration and least successful endeavor. Making good use of both often-referenced and more esoteric sources of Magnes’s writings, Barak-Gorodetsky highlights Magnes’s anguish at his inability to better understand and connect with God. But, Barak-Gorodetsky explains, regardless of Magnes’s disillusionment in his own religious search, his core intellectual identity should nonetheless be understood as “religious.” In other words, Magnes believed that Jewish communal values and aspirations of the day could only truly and holistically be achieved if they were based on what he lamented was a too-often-ignored Jewish religious core. Barak-Gorodetsky convincingly illustrates how this consistent focus on a Jewish essence explains Magnes’s evolving attitudes toward concepts like socialism, pacificism, and Zionism—ideas that he alternately advocated for and eschewed at different points in his life. In this way, Barak-Gorodetsky makes perhaps his most important contribution in challenging the classic historiography of Magnes, which likened him to an intellectual chameleon. Instead, Barak-Gorodetsky argues that Magnes indeed had a “center of vision” (261) that ran as an internally consistent throughline in his developing ideologies and political stances over time. Another paradigm Barak-Gorodetsky features was Magnes’s role as a prophet-like figure. Whether in his support for social equality, nonviolence, religious reform, or the equal legitimacy of Arab national yearnings in Palestine, Magnes was guided by what Barak-Gorodetsky identifies as a “call to establish the kingdom of heaven here and now on earth” (47). He further frames what many contemporaries and retrospective commentators have criticized as Magnes’s unrealistic and naïve belief in the potential success of a binational state, rather in Magnes’s self-understood tension between priest and prophet. Even more than as a duty to lead the community toward material political success, Magnes saw his principal role as being an unwavering beacon of Jewish morality. Barak-Gorodetsky draws on the writings of Protestant minister and friend of Magnes, John Hayes Holmes, in explaining that to Magnes, “earthly success was actually the enemy of . . . a vision [of justice and peace on earth], since the conditions it created annulled the spiritual success. Thus, external success...