Cultural Zionism Research Articles

Zionist Culture and West European Jewry Before the First World War (review)

Zionist Culture and West European Jewry Before the First World War (review)

Elusive Prophet: Ahad Haam and the Origins of Zionism (review)

Book Reviews 111 Elusive Prophet: Ahad Haam and the Origins of Zionism, by Steven J. Zipperstein. Berkeley: University of California Press, 1993. 386 pp. $35.00. Ahad Haam's Cultural Zionism has usually been overshadowed by the Political Zionism of Herzl, the Practical Zionism of Weizmann and Ben Gurion, or the Revisionist Zionism of Jabotinsky. Ahad Haam had impressive followers, among them Gershon Sholem, Chaim Nahman Bialik and Martin Buber, but to many he seemed a luftmensch-bookish, highminded , and cautious-a prophet to be honored rather than heeded. He seemed to exemplify the DiasporaJew's intoxication with the word rather than· Zionism's intoxication with the deed. His rivals appealed to the imagination. Herzl negotiated with crumbling empires, A. D. Gordon called for renewal through labor, Jabotinsky formed clandestine armies. Ahad Haam responded to all of these adventures with scorn. His battles were over the editorship of Hebrew journals, his power struggles over the leadership of obscure study groups in Odessa. His works, like Marx's Capital, could be evoked to demonstrate the theoretical depth ofZionism, but they did not send youthful idealists to clear the swamps and make the desert bloom. Steven Zipperstein's brilliant biography, though still focusing on the thinker and intellectual controversialist, restores the real Ahad Haam as a gadfly with a sting. Though the most important material in the volume remains Ahad Haam's series of articles, Zipperstein provides a number of skillful sketches that reveal the man. There are the paragraphs describing his icy response to his father's death, or his outrage against his daughter Rachel's marriage to a gentile. The pages on Ahad Haam's world, Jewish Odessa at the turn of the century, are especially graphic. As he describes it, it was an anarchist's dream, a free-for-all of contending Hassidic rebbes, religious and secular, "a natural setting for experimentation," eternally subverting established authority. One thinks of the world-quarrelling Russian Socialist exile in Switzerland. Ahad Haam's austerity, singlemindedness , and impatience with adversaries reminds one of the young Lenin. like Lenin, Ahad Haam created a vanguard to guide and transform the masses, though this vanguard, called B'nei Moshe, seemed more like the Freemasons than the Bolsheviks. The volume is primarily an intellectual history. Zipperstein presents the unfolding of Ahad Haam's thought article by article. He begins with Ahad Haam's critique of the Haskala and takes us slowly through the entire series: his critique of the fledgling Jewish settlement in Palestine, his scheme for a revival of Hebrew culture, his notorious review of Herzl's 112 SHOFAR Spring 1995 Vol. 13, No.3 Alteneueland as well as his dismissal of the early romanticism concerning Hebrew labor. Ahad Haam called for a Zionism of the tortoise, a cultural revolution, a Jewish state, but one that would ripen slowly. He abhorred adventurism. He emerges as a paradox, a messiah wary of messianism, a nationalist wary of nationalism. like the other Zionists he too was a prophet, but his prophecies, like those of old, contain a legacy of warnings. Ahad Haam's nay-saying was so relentless and unsparing that he could have been called the Zionist curmudgeon. As editor of the Hebrew journal Ha-Sbiloacb he did not suffer inferior prose. He was critical of the Rothschild enterprises in Jewish Palestine as "inimical to the growth of a self-respecting, pioneering elite"; he scandalized the Zionist movement by ridiculing Herzl's Alteneueland as "inferior" for envisaging a non-Jewish Jewish state with "English games, German or French Theatre, and continental conviviality" and dismissed one of the great Zionist icons, A.D. Gordon, and his call for "Hebrew labour" as "misguided." But Zipperstein also gives a persuasive account of Ahad Haam as a constructive builder of Zion. His cultural revolution was solid and enduring. The revival of the Hebrew language, the establishment of Haifa Technion, the Hebrew University, and Herzliya all gave the Jewish state a strong educational infrastructure. These achievements were more than cultural. At least one Arab writer credits Israel's scientific culture with its military and economic edge. As well, Ahad Haam's vision of a Jewish state as a spiritual rallying point for...

Zionist Culture and West European Jewry before the First World War

Zionist Culture and West European Jewry before the First World War

Michael Berkowitz. <italic>Zionist Culture and West European Jewry before the First World War</italic>. New York: Cambridge University Press. 1993. Pp. xviii, 255. $49.95

Journal Article Michael Berkowitz. Zionist Culture and West European Jewry before the First World War. New York: Cambridge University Press. 1993. Pp. xviii, 255. $49.95 Get access Berkowitz Michael. Zionist Culture and West European Jewry before the First World War. New York: Cambridge University Press. 1993. Pp. xviii, 255. $49.95. Vicki Caron Vicki Caron Brown University Search for other works by this author on: Oxford Academic Google Scholar The American Historical Review, Volume 99, Issue 5, December 1994, Pages 1683–1685, https://doi.org/10.1086/ahr/99.5.1683 Published: 01 December 1994

Zionist Culture and West European Jewry before the First World War.

Zionist Culture and West European Jewry before the First World War.

Chaim Weizmann: The Making of a Statesman; Zionist Culture and West European Jewry before the First World War; Land and Power: The Zionist Resort to Force 1881-1948; The Kibbutz Movement: A HistoryReinharzJehuda Chaim Weizmann: The Making of a Statesman Oxford University PressNew York, 1993, xii, 536, $39.95BerkowitzMichael Zionist Culture and West European Jewry before the First World War Cambridge University

Chaim Weizmann: The Making of a Statesman; Zionist Culture and West European Jewry before the First World War; Land and Power: The Zionist Resort to Force 1881-1948; The Kibbutz Movement: A HistoryReinharzJehuda <i>Chaim Weizmann: The Making of a Statesman</i> Oxford University PressNew York, 1993, xii, 536, $39.95BerkowitzMichael <i>Zionist Culture and West European Jewry before the First World War</i> Cambridge University

Cultural Zionism in Sweden: Daniel Brick's Judisk krönika

The present study examines the content of the Swedish-Jewish Zionist periodical Judisk Krönika during its earliest years of publication, 1932 to 1950, under the editorship of its founder, Daniel Brick. The focus will be on how the magazine in its brightest and most ambitious years, acted as a conduit through which the ideas of cultural Zionism flowed into Sweden. Through essays, reports, editorial comments, book reviews and debates, the circle of intellectuals grouped around Brick clamored for a revivification of what they considered to be the moribund cultural life of Swedish Jewry, the result (in their eyes) of decades of Reform dominance in communal life. Not wishing to make themselves any less “Swedish”, the cultural Zionists nevertheless insisted that Jews in Sweden and other Nordic countries needed to adopt an international perspective, integrating the proposed idea for a Jewish national home in Palestine into their lives as a source of cultural pride and spiritual renewal.

Judiskt – kristet – mänskligt. Ett symposium om Martin Buber

In this article the authors outline the personal history and thoughts of Martin Buber. Buber’s Judaism stresses the realization of the prophetic ideals – themes which he also found in the Hasidic tradition. Another realization of these ideals he found in cultural Zionism, for which he fought in Europe as well as in his later homeland, Israel. His following in the political field was rather limited, whereas his influence on dialogical philosophy, theology and even psychiatry has been considerable. His strength lies in the encompassing character of his thought as well as in his effort to unify and concretize his ideas in everyday practice. Buber claims that neither individualism nor collectivism can answer the basic question of man’s nature. Individualism sees only part of man&&collectivism man as only a part. A third possibility would be to see man constituted as a human being, and this appears when man enters into relation. The key to this experience of meeting is the Jewish and especially the Hasidic concept of God as embodied in the whole world.

Arab-Jewish Unity in Palestine

I shall attempt to answer these two questions by an analytical and objective presentation of the Arab attitude toward Zionism. The words political are used advisedly. By Zionism the Arab understands an attempt to set up in Palestine a Jewish state which shall be, to use Weizmann's words, Jewish as England is English or America is American. In this imperium in imperio, the Arabs will be forced either to trek along (Zangwill) or to be hewers of wood and drawers of water. In this Judenstat, a Jewish majority is a sine qua non. This is not the spiritual and cultural Zionism of Ahad Haam or Judah