Jewish state or state of the Jews? How Israel’s independence sparked an identity conflict
In his book ‘To Be a Jewish State,’ Oxford professor Yaacov Yadgar raises provocative questions in the context of the old-new arguments about national and religious identity
Reporter at The Times of Israel
In 1902, Theodor Herzl published the novel “Altneuland,” or “Old-New Land,” which explicated his vision of Zionism. The founder of the movement envisioned a liberal, cosmopolitan Jewish homeland in what was then Ottoman Palestine. It would be a place where the world’s Jews could take refuge from antisemitic violence elsewhere, filled with publishing houses and other mainstays of elite Old World life.
Yet something about Herzl’s “New Society” was lacking for one of Herzl’s critics, the essayist Ahad Ha’Am. In a lacerating critique published that same year, Ha’Am claimed that the vision presented in “Altneuland” smacked too much of Western European assimilationist culture and not enough of the traditional Jewish culture he had grown up with in Eastern Europe. A public conversation ensued over the debate between Herzl’s “political” Zionism and Ha’Am’s “cultural” Zionism.
As Israel celebrates its Independence Day, this old-new debate remains ongoing — with a crucial update following Israeli independence in 1948. Oxford University Israel studies professor Yaacov Yadgar raises some provocative questions in a recent book, “To Be a Jewish State: Zionism as the New Judaism,” published last fall by New York University Press.
The book’s thesis suggests that there are “two conflicting, oppositional ways” of looking at the Jewish state, Yadgar told The Times of Israel over Zoom. “A Jewish state… or the state of the Jews.”
As the book explains, the former is a state centered around Jewish religion and culture (echoing Ha’Am’s pre-state vision), while the latter is aimed at securing a Jewish demographic majority determined more by ethnonationalist origin than religious practice (echoing Herzl’s pre-state vision).
Which direction Israel will take today is a sobering question for Independence Day.
Published by an academic press, the book incorporates esoteric concepts in both English (soteriology) and Hebrew (mamlakhtiyut, which it defines as Israeli nation-statism). Some of the discussion revolves around foundational figures in the history of Zionism: Herzl, his lieutenant Max Nordau, and Ha’Am. The book also addresses more recent history, including the controversial Israeli Basic Law of 2018, “Israel as the Nation-State of the Jewish People.”
The Basic Law is a three-page document that consists of 11 principles. As it outlines the principles, symbols and holidays of Israel as a Jewish state, it makes several statements that have aroused fierce opposition. One such statement says “[the] realization of the right to national self-determination” is exclusive to Jews within the State of Israel; another states that the “establishment and consolidation” of Jewish settlement should be an Israeli national policy.
In the book, Yadgar tracks opposition to the law from three groups within the Israeli population: liberal democrats who see it as a betrayal of Israel’s founding principle to be both Jewish and democratic; Palestinians who say the law makes them second-class citizens, including through the denial of political self-determination and the demotion of Arabic as an official language; and ultra-Orthodox Jews who feel the law prioritizes Zionism over Judaism.
“I think it’s still early to say what the effects of the law, if tangible, are,” Yadgar said.
He added, “The legal debates that emerged since have been kind of subdued by other issues,” such as the 2022-23 crisis over judicial reform and — more significantly — the devastating October 7, 2023, Hamas-led onslaught on Israel and the subsequent, ongoing Israeli war against Hamas in the Gaza Strip.
“My comments to the editor were almost finished around October 5, 2023,” Yadgar recalled. “I wrote back to her, obviously, after the attacks on October 7. The war was already raging on… I felt all this [book] was so irrelevant. The immediate politics was about war, bloodshed, trauma.”
Yet, he found, “by the time the book was ready and published, it was so clear that year and a half had been dominated by the [salience] of these questions of Jewish identity, the meaning of Jewish politics — not only in Israel, but the politics of Jewish identity in the US, the UK, other parts of the world outside Israel.”
Zionism as supersessionism?
Yadgar adds further complexity to his argument about Judaism and Zionism by bringing in parallels from Christianity and Islam. In a provocative chapter, he wonders whether the relationship between Judaism and Zionism can be better understood through the concept of supersessionism.
This concept is generally associated with the belief among some Christian groups that Christianity has superseded Judaism, with the role of God’s chosen people passing from Jews to Christians. Citing statements from sources such as novelist A.B. Yehoshua and political scientist Shlomo Avineri, Yadgar suggests that among Jews in Israel and the Diaspora, an interest in Zionism has replaced a previous identification with Jewish religion and culture. He asks whether this was foreshadowed by earlier Zionists who stressed the need for a “New Jew” in Israel to replace the older, exiled version.
“This is actually sort of an ideational provocation, an academic provocation,” Yadgar explained, noting that he bears a debt of gratitude toward previous proponents of the idea who did not quite express it in such terms. “It tries to force us to think more carefully — I would say critically — about the relationship between Zionism and Jewish history.”
He also wonders whether there are similarities between Israel and its Islamic neighbors in the Middle East, many of whom have relations with the Jewish state that can be described as tense (Saudi Arabia) or outright hostile (Iran).
“I show that some people understand Israeli Jewishness exactly in the frame which we understand Iran as an Islamic Shia [state] or Saudi Arabia [as having] an Islamic constitution,” Yadgar said. “A couple pages later, I bring up very vociferous Israeli arguments saying Israel is nothing of this sort.”
His purpose: “To show there is a debate over the very meaning of Israeli Jewish identity.”
“I don’t have to explain how controversial this issue is,” he deadpanned.
Although the book advances arguments that might strike many as new, it also delves into more familiar aspects of Zionist history from its founding era in late 19th-century Europe, including how Zionism was influenced by the rise of European nation-states, and the debate between Herzl and Ha’Am over which course it would take.
In Ha’Am’s vision, Yadgar said, “Jewish politics had to be in some sort of dialogue with Jewish tradition.” By contrast, “Herzl said Jewish politics are whatever Jews do — that is Jewish politics.”
These differing views represented “two contested visions of what Israel as a Jewish state should and could be,” Yadgar said.
The author recognizes that Jewish opinion — in Israel and the Diaspora — is anything but monolithic, including when it comes to Zionism. The book discusses Jewish anti-Zionism among both progressives and the ultra-Orthodox, with UC Berkeley comparative literature scholar Judith Butler an example of the former and rabbi Joel Teitelbaum, the late founder of the Satmar Hasidic dynasty, among the latter.
Younger generations in the Diaspora have been growing increasingly non-Zionist or anti-Zionist, in part due to Israel’s conduct of the war against the Hamas terror group that rules Gaza, with an estimated 51,000 Palestinians dead — an unverified number that doesn’t distinguish between civilians and combatants — and much of the enclave’s infrastructure in ruins. Jewish students have been among the pro-Palestinan protesters who set up encampments across American college campuses last year.
“The biggest challenge for the younger generation, the critics,” Yadgar said, “is their ability to define a constructively meaningful Jewish identity that does not depend on the state. It’s not enough to say you’re against Israel, that you’re a critic, or even that you’re anti-Zionist. You still have to account for the creation of Jewish identity — the challenge that the younger generation will have to tackle.”
Meanwhile, in Israel, the author is heartened by a source of continued diversity within Judaism and the Jewish state: the synagogues. He contrasts Ashkenazi, Sephardic and Mizrahi liturgies and practices, marveling at the Arab soundscape of a Syrian synagogue or the North African soundscape in a Moroccan synagogue — a diversity that has outlasted Israeli state standardization attempts. He finds a proponent for such diversity from an era even older than that of Herzl and Ha’Am: the 16th-century Safed-based kabbalist Rabbi Isaac Luria, who saw parallels between global Jewish diversity and the biblical 12 tribes of Israel.
In the conclusion of the book, Yadgar writes, “The plurality, diversity, and heterogeneity of Jewish traditions — that which statism feared and wished to dissolve — holds the potential for Judaism, lived through these diverging traditions, to talk back at Zionist supersessionism and the nation-statism it theologizes.”
The Times of Israel Community.