Jewish Identity: The Challenge of Peoplehood Today by Ruth Shamir Popkin, Gefen Publishing House, Jerusalem; ISBN 978-965-229-671-9 ©2015, $24.95, p. 272, plus Notes, Sources, and Index (also available in Kindle)
By Fred Reiss, Ed.D.
WINCHESTER, California — From the time of the Bar Kokhba Revolt in the second century to 1948 and the establishing of the State of Israel, Jews, wandering the world as a people from a stateless nation, were vilified by the Romans and then by Christianity and Islam; their treatment and survival dependent on the beneficence of the ruler under which they happened to be living at the time. Disdain for Jews continues into modern times—the Holocaust, the death of nearly two-thirds of all European Jews, a twentieth-century phenomenon, exacerbated by the lack of actions of uncaring nations, clearly demonstrates the continuing animus of contemporaneous countries toward the Jews.
Israeli jurist and lecturer at the American-Jewish University, Dr. Ruth Popkin, in her newest book Jewish Identity, explores the confluence and evolution of events, issues, and personalities creating the modern Jewish mindset beginning with the rise of Europen nationalism in the eighteenth century and its connection to the formation of modern Zionism and the creation of Israel, followed by the origins of post-Zionism and the development of a Hebrew-Israeli identity distinguishable from one held by Diaspora Jewry.
In search of the Jewish identity, Popkin raises many important questions, some of which are: can one say that the Jews constitute a nation or are just a religion? In light of the failure of most Jews to return to Israel, to what extent is Zionism, the deep-seated desire of Diaspora Jews to return to their historic homeland, a legitimate aspiration? Who is a Jew and is that distinct from being an Israeli? How has the manifestation of anti-Semitism in the early twentieth century and the Holocaust in mid-century altered American Jewry? Does the existence of a Jewish national life in Israel elevate Jewish identity?
European Jewry’s reaction to the rise of European nationalism, according to Popkin, came in a personal form of nationalism, known as Zionism. Some scholars assert that an early form of Zionism, a “proto-Zionism,” began with the twelfth century poet and philosopher Judah Halevi. Popkin, however, begins with the philosopher Baruch Spinoza, a seventeenth century apostate Sephardic Jew because he “was the first philosopher to define Judaism as a modern secular nation,” and then takes us along Zionism’s intellectual trail through such notables as Eliezer Ben-Yehuda and Theodore Herzl.
The various competing Zionist movements are divided by Popkin into two groups—minimalist and maximalist. For instance, Martin Buber, Ahad Ha’am, Gershom Scholem, and others, mostly academics, minimalists, supported purchasing land for Jewish settlements with the confidence that only a bi-national state of Jew and Arab having a policy of slow and steady immigration and economic expansion could be sustainable over the long haul.
Maximalism, an outgrowth of Herzl’s Political Zionism, which includes such advocates as Chaim Weizmann and Ze’ev Jabotinsky, sought immediate mass Jewish immigration. The Arab riots of 1929, she contends, shattered mainstream Zionism’s “hope that modernization and economic expansion would lead to a rapprochement with the Arabs,” and by 1932, Menachem Begin, rejecting Herzl’s principles, pursued a military version of Zionism.
Jews and Judaism have experienced many different forms of government over its long history, and none of them, the Nazi regime notwithstanding, being more difficult on self-determining Jewish existence than a pluralist, multicultural, democratic civilization. Popkin is very clear, “The data on the Jewish community in America is no grounds for optimism,” arguing that after World War II, culturally assimilated Jews in America, those replacing Yiddish by English and leaving urban Jewish neighborhoods for an “American-dream” life in suburbia, primarily base their secular and Jewish identity on the Holocaust and support for Israel.
Popkin, wanting to know if an assimilated group of historically connected people can continue to transmit their heritage from one generation to another examines the cultural and historical Jewish record and answers that the chances are not high as “such an identity does not appear to be durable in any Western society – with the notable exception of Israel.” If this is so, then in light of the struggle within Israel over religious issues and how to manage its Arab population, what heritage will be transmitted?
The modern Jewish-American psyche emerges from Anti-Semitism—the villainous events from the Crusades to Holocaust—and the establishment of Israel; the Jewish-Israeli psyche formed differently. Popkin tells us that prior to the establishment of Israel, two mutually exclusive Jewish populations, with differing identities, resided side-by-side: the traditional orthodox Jew and the modern Jew. “The Zionist movement created a third ethos, that of the ‘new Jew’: secular, revolutionary and with allegiances that were in separately linked to historical Eretz Israel…. They were committed to an independent Jewish state, without self-abnegation.”
Today, the Israeli identity is being bombarded by the extreme political left and Israel’s own postmodern “new historians,” questioning the depiction of Zionism treatment of the indigenous Arab population. The new normal, according to Popkin, is called “post-Zionism, an ideological and cultural approach that seeks to strip Israel of its Jewish and Zionist characteristics.” Post-Zionists argue that Israel is no longer just a Jewish refuge, but a state now having “universal values of a liberal democracy whose citizenry share a common civil identity without favoring one ethnic group over others.” Zionists summarily reject this assertion.
Popkin offers numerous post-Zionist arguments for the illegitimacy of Israel. One accuses Israel of acting on the principles of colonialism by first acquiring political control over Palestine, then occupying its territory with Jewish settlers, and finally economically exploiting the Palestinian people. Another says that Israel is an imperial power, building up its military in order to occupy Palestine by force. Popkin counters these arguments, noting that “in the modern world of nationalism the situation of a people without a homeland becomes extremely dangerous.” To prove her point, she names the Israeli novelist and essayist A. B. Yehoshua who cites the holocaust of the Armenians during the First World War and the holocaust of the Jews and Gypsies in the Second World War as examples of what can happen to a stateless people. Moreover, Israel built up its military as a defense against threatening Arab armies, not to become colonial masters.
She presents an even-handed approach with regard to arguments about the relationship of Israel’s government with the governed populous. Is Israel more like America—a liberal democracy, or more like Belgium, Ireland, and most Scandinavian countries—consociational democracies in which “ethnicity is accepted as a major principle in the organization of the state.”
If ethnicity counts in Israel, as many scholars and post-Zionists affirm, then “who is a Jew?” becomes an important question, which Popkin considers in light of Israel’s Law of Return, which gives Jews the right to live in Israel and have immediate access Israeli citizenship. But, if ethnicity counts, then there are identity winners and identity losers. Ashkenazic, or European Judaism, forms the basis of modern Zionism. Everyone else, Sephardic Jews with heritage in the Iberian Peninsula and Oriental, or Mizraḥi, Jews, as two notable examples are, according to Popkin, the losers and part of Israel’s “Other” under-served class.
She also points out that Jews living beyond Israel’s borders in what is known as the Diaspora, “are seeking to develop a Jewish culture that is not linked to the Jewish state and that could be an alternative to Zionism and Israel,” citing renewed interest in Yiddish, Klezmer music, and the revival of Sephardic and Mizraḥi traditions as examples.
Jewish identity also emerges from religious adherence, and Popkin reviews the commonality and divergence of issues, such as ritual practice, education, degree of contact with the “outside” world, and commitment to Israel, among the major Jewish sects living in Israel. She concludes that the 1967 Six-Day War and the unification of Jerusalem in its aftermath, along with the disastrous 1973 Yom Kippur War, profoundly altered mainstream Judaism, leading to the rise of such messianic religious movement as Gush Emunim, who members deny the legitimacy of Israel and its democratic system.
Jewish Identity ends with the 2006 conclusions of A. B. Yehoshua: Jews and Judaism suffers because of the failure of Diaspora Jews to immigrate to Palestine before the Holocaust and their continued failure to immigrate to Israel. According to Yehoshua, Jewish existence and Jewish identity can only be complete in a Jewish state, and with Popkin’s own belief that, although it is desirable, Judaism with its multiple Jewish identities might not be able to concurrently exist under one large umbrella.
In Jewish Identity, Popkin interweaves the historical, philosophical, and cultural forces molding and shaping the lenses through which Jews perceive the world and thereby providing a most interesting and informative book.
____________
Dr. Fred Reiss is a retired public and Hebrew school teacher and administrator. He is the author of The Standard Guide to the Jewish and Civil Calendars; Public Education in Camden, NJ: From Inception to Integration; Ancient Secrets of Creation: Sepher Yetzira, the Book that Started Kabbalah, Revealed; and a fiction book, Reclaiming the Messiah. The author can be reached via fred.reiss@sdjewishworld.com.