ZIONISM IN THE AGE OF THE DICTATORS

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BRENNER : ZIONISM IN THE AGE OF THE DICTATORS throughout the First World War the German Zionists passionately supported their own government. For all their grandiose intellectual pretensions, their voelkisch Zionism was simply an imitation of German nationalist ideology. Thus the young philosopher Martin Buber was able to combine Zionism with ardent German patriotism during the First World War. In his book Drei Reden uber das Judentum, published in 1911, Buber spoke of a youth who : senses in this immortality of the generations a community of blood, which he feels to be the antecedents of his I, its perseverance in the infinite past. To that is added the discovery, promoted by this awareness, that blood is a deep rooted nurturing force within individual man ; that the deepest layers of our being are determined by blood ; that our innermost thinking and our will are colored by it. Now he finds that the world around him is the world of imprints and influences, whereas blood is the realm of a substance capable of being imprinted and influenced, a substance absorbing and assimilating all into its own form… Whoever, faced with the choice between environment and substance, decides for substance will henceforth have to be a Jew truly from within, to live as a Jew with all the contradiction, all the tragedy, and all the future promise of his blood. 40 The Jews had been in Europe for millenniums, far longer than, say, the Magyars. No one would dream of referring to the Hungarians as Asiatics, yet, to Buber, the Jews of Europe were still Asians and presumably always would be. You could get the Jew out of Palestine, but you could never get Palestine out of the Jew. In 1916 he wrote that the Jew : was driven out of his land and dispersed throughout the lands of the Occident… yet, despite all this, he has remained an Oriental… One can detect all this in the most assimilated Jew, if one knows how to gain access to his soul… the immortal Jewish unitary drive — this will come into being only after the continuity of life in Palestine… Once it comes into contact with its maternal soil, it will once more become creative. 41 However, Buber’s voelkisch Zionism, with its assorted strands of [21] mystical enthusiasm, was too spiritual to appeal to a wide following. What was needed was a popular Zionist version of the social-Darwinism which had swept the bourgeois intellectual world in the wake of Europe’s imperial conquests in Africa and the East. The Zionist version of this notion was developed by the Austrian anthropologist Ignatz Zollschan. To him the secret value of Judaism was that it had, albeit inadvertently, worked to produce a wonder of wonders : a nation of pure blood, not tainted by diseases of excess or immorality, of a highly developed sense of family purity, and of deeply rooted virtuous habits would develop an exceptional intellectual activity. Furthermore, the prohibition against mixed marriage provided that these highest ethnical treasures should not be lost, through the admixture of less carefully bred races… there resulted that natural 40 . Martin Buber, On Judaism, pp. 15-19. 41 Ibid., pp. 75-7. — 26 —
BRENNER : ZIONISM IN THE AGE OF THE DICTATORS selection which has no parallel in the history of the human race… If a race that is so highly gifted were to have the opportunity of again developing its original power, nothing could equal it as far as cultural value is concerned. 42 Even Albert Einstein subscribed to the Zionist race conceptions and in so doing he reinforced racism, lending it the prestige of his reputation. His own contributions to the discussion sound suitably profound, but they are based on the same nonsense. Nations with a racial difference appear to have instincts which work against their fusion. The assimilation of the Jews to the European nations… could not eradicate the feeling of lack of kinship between them and those among whom they lived. In the last resort, the instinctive feeling of lack of kinship is referable to the law of the conservation of energy. For this reason it cannot be eradicated by any amount of well meant pressure. 43 Buber, Zollschan and Einstein were but three among the classic Zionists who pontificated learnedly on race purity. But for sheer fanaticism few could match the American Maurice Samuel. A well-known writer in his day — later, in the 1940s, he was to work with Weizmann on the latter’s autobiography — Samuel addressed the American public in 1927 in his I, the Jew. He denounced with horror a town which he readily conceded that he only knew by repute — and that the evidence would make us think was the free-living artists’ [22] colony at Taos, New Mexico : there came together into this small place, representatives of the African Negro, the American and Chinese Mongol, the Semite and the Aryan… free intermarriage had set in… Why does this picture, part actual, part fanciful, fill me with a strange loathing, suggest the obscene, the obscurely beastly ?… Why then does that village which my fancy conjures up call to mind a heap of reptiles breeding uglily in a bucket ? 44 "To be a Good Zionist one must be Somewhat of an Anti-Semite" Although blut was a recurrent theme in pre-Holocaust Zionist literature, it was not as central to its message as boden. As long as America, s shores remained open, Europe’s Jews asked : if anti-Semitism could not be fought on its home ground, why should they not just follow the crowd to America ? The Zionist response was double-barrelled : anti-Semitism would accompany the Jews wherever they went and, what was more, it was the Jews who had created anti-Semitism by their own characteristics. The root cause of anti-Semitism, Zionists insisted, was the Jews’ exile existence. Jews lived parasitically off their ’hosts’. There were virtually no 42 Ignatz Zollschan, Jewish Questions (1914) pp. 17-18. 43 . Solomon Goldman, Crisis and Decision (1938), p. 116. 44 Maurice Samuel, I, the Jew, pp. 244~6. — 27 —
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ZIONISM IN THE AGE OF THE DICTATORS

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