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Anti-Zionist

As far back as the third century CE there were among the leading teachers of the Talmudic era representatives of both the activist and the quietist schools of thought. There were those who considered it a religious duty to leave Babylon and to settle in the Holy Land, as there were others who believed that one had to await the coming of the Messiah in exile. The great codifiers of the Law listed the injunction to live in Eretz Israel as one of the 613 commandments of the Torah. But the Quietist Agudath Israel left the return to Zion entirely to God.

Was not the solution of the perennial Jewish problem an autonomous Jewish state in Palestine under Turkish suzerainty? When in 1896 a Viennese journalist, Theodor Herzl (d. 1904), in his "Jewish State," struck out a plan for the new exodus to the promised land, his words found an instant and enthusiastic response in many quarters. Opposed by liberals as a revival of an old delusion; by hard-headed men of affairs as a visionary scheme; by the ultraconservative, partly out of prejudice against the origin of the movement, partly because in the orthodox program the advent of the Messiah should precede the return to Palestine, Zionism spread rapidly.

The relation between traditionalists and the Jewish state has always been ambivalent and fraught with paradox. In the nineteenth century, Zionism often competed with Orthodox Judaism for the hearts and minds of young Jews, and enmity existed between Orthodox Jews of Eastern Europe and the Zionists (and those residing in Palestine in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries). Orthodox Jews resented the dominantly secular nature of Jewish nationalism (for example, the desire to turn the holy tongue of Hebrew into an instrument of everyday discourse), whereas the Zionists derogated the other-worldly passivity of Orthodox Jews.

Among the most extreme Orthodox Jews, the Zionist movement was deemed heretical because it sought to "force the End of Days" and preempt the hand of God in restoring the Jewish people to their Holy Land before the Messiah's advent. During the prestate period, Agudat Israel, founded in 1912, opposed both the ideology of Zionism and its political expression, the World Zionist Organization. It rejected any cooperation with non-Orthodox Jewish groups and considered Zionism profane in that it forced the hand of the Almighty in bringing about the redemption of the Jewish people.

Some Hasidim are strongly anti-Zionist, believing it blasphemous for the Jews to have their own country before the arrival of the Messiah. Zionism's reformulation of traditional Judaism was deeply resented by Orthodox Jews, especially the Hasidim (sing., Hasid). Most East European Jews rejected the notion of a return to the promised land before the appearance of the messiah. They viewed Zionism as a secular European creation that aspired to change the focus of Judaism from devotion to Jewish law and religious ritual to the establishment of a Jewish nation-state.

The Reform movement founded by Moses Mendelssohn (1729-1786) put aside the expectation of the coming of a Messiah, the return of the Jews to Palestine. As for the doctrine concerning the Messiah: The Reform Jew believes that so-called Messianic passages referring to a personal Messiah, have been fulfilled, either at the time of or shortly after their utterance by prophets. The Orthodox Jew looks toward the re-establishment of the Kingdom of David in Palestine, the rebuilding of the temple, the rehabilitation of the Priesthood and the reintroduction of the sacrificial cult as possible in the future, just as it was made possible after the Babylonian captivity. This difference in the interpretation of the Messianic doctrine seems to be the main dividing point between the Reform and the Orthodox Jew and finds expression in the Prayer Books used by them respectively. It should, however, not be overlooked that both Reform and Orthodox Jew hope for the coming of the day oft designated the "Messianic times" when "nations shall beat their swords into plough-shares," etc.

The opinions of the English historian Arnold J. Toynbee on Judaism and the Jewish people were expressed in his monumental A Study of History. Toynbee's attitude to Judaism and Jewry is determined by his general interpretation of history. He is a historian disillusioned with man and civilization. The crimes, the failures, the beastly inhumanity that crowd the annals of man's history, prove to Toynbee that human nature is basically perverse. Toynbee dismissed Judaism and Jewry, with an awe-inspiring claim to scholarship, on the grounds that they have failed in their endeavor to solve the problems of human existence. Diaspora Jewry alone was the "historic Jewry," and the "essence of Jewishness" is a masterly adaptation to a Diaspora environment, which is achieved by "a meticulous devotion to the Mosaic Law".

Messianism is of the essence of Judaism and until the rise of Jewish emancipation, chiefly in the 19th century, it was inseparable from the return to Zion. It is therefore rather surprising to find Toynbee insist that Messianism was "finally extinguished" in the defeat of Bar Kokba in 135 CE. True, Toynbee explains in a footnote: "The word 'finally' holds good, notwithstanding the recent rise of Zionism; for Zionism is a nemesis of the contemporary Nationalism of the Western World and is not a revival of Jewish Futurism which was extinguished at last in the blood of the followers of Bar Kokaba... ."

A Zionism that actually led to the re-emergence of ancient Judea as a modern state drove Toynbee to exasperation. To Toynbee the Zionists based the Jewish people's title to Erets Israel "on the physical ground that they were a master race in virtue of 'having Abraham for their father'"; that they caught the "psychic infection from their Nazi persecutors" in ascribing "a rigidly racial significance to the historic distinction between the 'seed of Abraham' and 'the Goyim'"

The outstanding feature of Toynbee's condemnation of Zionism is the obsessive need to equate Zionism with Nazism and to declare it even more abominable than Nazism. The annals of human history are, unfortunately, crowded with the most sordid crimes imaginable; yet Mr. Toynbee's righteous indignation was nowhere as intense as in his unqualified condemnation of the Zionists. According to him, the Zionists, acting on "the principle of making the defenseless pay," on the 14th of May, 1948, set up "a state of Israel in Palestine by force of arms in a war that had resulted in more than half a million Palestinian Arabs losing their homes, in compensation for atrocities committed against Jews in ... 1933-1945, not in the Levant, but in Europe, and not by Arabs, but by Germans." It was because of "the sympathy of the Western World with the Jews over their sufferings at Germany's hands" that the Zionists were able to obtain "a retrospective condonation from the UNO for their violation of the rights of the Arab people of Palestine."

"If the heinousness of sin is to be measured by the degree to which the sinner is sinning against the light that God has vouchsafed to him, the Jews had even less excuse in . . . 1948 for evicting Palestinian Arabs from their homes than Nebuchadnezzar and Titus and Hadrian and the Spanish and Portuguese Inquisition had had for uprooting, persecuting, and exterminating Jews in Palestine and elsewhere at divers times in the past. In ... 1948 the Jews knew, from personal experience, what they were doing; and it was their supreme tragedy that the lesson learnt by them from their encounter with the Nazi German Gentiles should have been not to eschew but to imitate some of the evil deeds that the Nazis had committed against the Jews."