At the dawn of the modern period, as the issue of granting civic rights to Jews was broached in the states of central and western Europe, every objection raised by those opposed to such rights found its Jewish supporters.
One notable objection was that the Jews constituted a separate nation and this in itself rendered them unfit for being given equal rights in their nations of residence. Many Jews embraced this attack and sought to divest themselves and their fellow Jews of whatever smacked of “nationhood.” In the early nineteenth century, for example, as reformist Jewish congregations were founded in the German states, many sought to strip the liturgy of all references to longings for Jerusalem and for Zion, to demonstrate that Jews were now simply a religious community and no longer a nation.
Those within besieged communities who choose to endorse the indictments of their attackers usually do not acknowledge they are doing so to appease their enemies. Rather, like Avraham Burg, they cast their stance as somehow an ethically superior one. Consistent with this, those who sought to strip Jewish identity of any accouterments of nationhood insisted that Judaism had evolved beyond a narrow, national agenda and now comprised solely a universal spiritual message and mission. From this perspective, the insistence by some Jews that the community had a claim to its national patrimony as well as to its patrimony of faith was derided as narrow-minded and anachronistic.
The rise of Zionism led many Jews in the West, including in the German-speaking states and among German Jews in America, to fear that a resurgent Jewish nationalism would threaten all the civic gains they had made in their respective countries. And so, once more choosing to give a moral cast to their fears, they decrid Zionism as morally reprehensible. Even among German Jews who supported the Zionist movement, many did so with the proviso that the Zionist agenda must be one of creating a “cultural” or “spiritual” center that would abet Judaism’s pursuit of its universal ethical mission and that it not entail nation building.
The perversity to which this led can be seen in the response of some German Jews in the Yishuv to Arab attacks in the 1920’s and during the Arab Revolt of 1936-39. They blamed the attacks on what they insisted was the misguided pursuit of a Jewish state and demanded abandonment of that goal.
As the Nazi assault on the Jews grew steadily worse, and as Britain raised ever greater obstacles to Jewish immigration to the League of Nations-sanctioned Jewish National Home, Ben-Gurion struggled with shaping a policy that would gain the Jewish leadership in the Yishuv greater control over immigration. As he stated in 1937, his concern was “Through which [option] can we get in the shortest possible time the most Jews in Palestine?”
But some Jews in the Yishuv, particularly the circle of German Jewish academics around Martin Buber, reared in Germany on anti-Jewish attacks against the alien Jewish “nation” and on the supposed ethical superiority of renouncing that nationhood, chose to savage Ben-Gurion for his nation-building efforts and to denounce the promotion of large-scale immigration as serving the “immoral” cause of nation-building.
Indeed, two months after Hitler’s invasion of Poland, as German cadres were already slaughtering Jews by the thousands, Buber wrote in Haaretzthat “[The Zionists are] performing the acts of Hitler in the land of Israel, for they want to serve Hitler’s god [i.e., nationalism] after he has been given a Hebrew name.” As to immigration, Buber insisted that the Arabs be given a veto over any additional admission of Jews to Mandate Palestine.
