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The essentialist interpretation of the Zionist narrative addresses the problem of attributing nationhood to nonterritorial world Jewry by asserting a fully fledged nationhood to be the essence of Judaism and relying on a misleading historiography of Judaism. Against this, post-Zionists argue that the Jews have been a fully fledged nonnation and that the Zionist narrative is false both conceptually and factually. The chapter argues that the Jews (as a world collective) are neither a fully fledged nation nor a fully fledged nonnation but rather a nation in a partial sense of the word. Zionism was an interpretive stance and a normative idea that drew on the Jews' partial nationhood in order to solve the practical/political problems they faced during the nineteenth century. This conception of the relationship between Jewish nationhood and Zionism, unlike the other positions, is loyal to Jewish history in general and to Zionism's own history in particular.

The chapter discusses the implications of Zionism and post-Zionism for the relationship between Israeli Judaism and world Jewry. (1) Proprietary Zionism conceives of Jewish life outside Israel as exile, not diaspora, even after the establishment of the state of Israel. It aspires to end this exile, but practical realities make this impossible. The chapter describes how Israeli discourse, policies, and manners regarding non-Israeli Jews embody this stance. (2) The predominant Israeli post-Zionist denial of Jewish nationhood implies that Jews outside Israel constitute neither exile nor diaspora. The color-blind liberal or postcolonial political moralities of these post-Zionisms produce moral reasons against diasporic existence of Jews outside Israel. (3) For egalitarian Zionism the negation of exile means a negation of a total, and nonpolitical, Jewish existence outside the Land of Israel. It thus considers Jewish existence outside Israel since it was established as diasporic, not exilic. It welcomes this diasporic existence side by side with Jewish national existence on many grounds, mainly freedom.

The chapter first rejects post-Zionist arguments against the very justifiability of Zionism’s undertaking to establish Jewish self-determination in Israel. These arguments deny Jewish nationhood and depict Zionism as a mainly colonialist movement. The chapter then discusses post-Zionist writers’ moral arguments for rejecting the legitimacy of the ongoing realization of Jewish self-determination in Israel, and the three types of arrangements they propose for replacing it: transforming Israel into (a) an all-inclusive color-blind civic nation; (b) a postcolonial compensatory multicultural state (for Mizrahi Jews and Palestinians); and (c) another Jewish diasporic community. The third regime is proposed mainly by American Jewish intellectuals. The chapter argues that although many of the premises of the post-Zionist arguments are at least partially sound, none of these arguments in fact supports their conclusions. They rather support the egalitarian version of Zionism as developed in this book.

This chapter details the radical transformation of Jewish culture which occurred during the middle decades of the sixteenth century. Whereas medieval and Renaissance Italian Jewish intellectual life was essentially Talmudic, the changes of the mid-sixteenth century produced an altogether more rounded, complete, and coherent Jewish culture. Jewish society, indeed Jewish nationhood, as something distinct from Jewish religion, now emerged as much more definite realities than before. As late as the early sixteenth century, some Italian Jewish scholars had adhered to traditional Judaism rather than inhabited a specifically Jewish cultural world. Intellectually, they had immersed themselves in the learning of their non-Jewish contemporaries. From around 1550, by contrast, Jewish scholars lived and worked in a cultural atmosphere increasingly removed from that of their neighbours, even though in close touch and constantly interacting with it. Allegiance to traditional Judaism now fused with a whole package of new elements: a much intensified political and historical awareness; a new involvement in poetry, music, and drama; and an urgent quest to incorporate fragments of western philosophy and science into the emerging corpus of Jewish culture, all welded by a far more potent current of mysticism than had ever pervaded the Jewish world previously.