Strange Bedfellows: The Question of Lawrence Oliphant’s Christian Zionism

Abstract

Modern Zionism is a nineteenth-century product, inextricably bound up with the romance of the nation-state as the most appropriate form of political organization. All nationalisms have their particular romance, their myths of community origins, sufferings, and eventual just triumph. Most nationalisms include a religious aspect as well, although to be respectable a modern nationalist project must be argued in secular terms, at least publicly. Modern Zionism is no exception to this description, even if the relationship between its secular and divine self-justifications has been a bit more awkwardly intimate than is usually the case. After all, isn’t this nothing but the reflection of the original tension in Jewish identity: the simultaneous claim to be an ethnicity and a religion such that nonparticipation in one or the other places into question, but does not cancel out, the supposedly unified binary identity? Arguments for the sacred grounding of the Zionist national project may be disconcertingly active, but they are not unfamiliar. Most other successful nationalisms incorporate a prehistorical foundation hero and consciously model the public representations of the modern, human political leaders on the premodern founding fathers. These early heroes may be sanctified, but they are also inevitably tragic; they failed to safeguard an earlier national triumph (or there would be no need for the modern movement), so their existence both legitimates and justifies the nationalist claims of their appointed heirs—legitimizes because the premodern history testifies to the historical truth of national existence, and justifies because the decline of the earlier national entity proves the need for its rescue and renewal. All this is familiar to the point of banality: the modern story of emergent nationalist self-consciousness, popular mobilization, strategic negotiation, and eventual state founding and consolidation (or not).