Moderation from Right to Left: The Hidden Roots of Brit Shalom

Abstract

Hans Kohn, Hugo Bergmann, and Gershom Scholem were among the leaders of Brit Shalom, a small but intriguing Zionist faction that advocated binationalism. This essay contends that their moderation and their consistent opposition to the prevailing Zionist vision of a Jewish state in Palestine issued from a volkisch outlook. Kohn, Bergmann, and Scholem shared a postliberal stance and a youthful Zionism influenced by Martin Buber, and their later binationalism emerged not from a renunciation of their former ideology but rather from its creative adaptation.