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This chapter explains the book's central foci—the ways in which Zionism's vision of a new Hebrew nation was translated into the concrete institutions, practices, and rituals that generated a national entity in Palestine. This is placed within the context of the existing literature on the history of Zionism and the Jewish community of Palestine and is framed in terms of the implications of this study for understanding nationalism, secularization, and Jewish modernity. In this context, the chapter sets out the three principal areas in which the book seeks to shed new light. These include chronology (an earlier dating of the formative years to the prewar decade); the relationship between the new Hebrew culture of Palestine and traditional Jewish cultures; and a thicker description of what that culture entailed, based in a methodology that incorporates discourse and imagery with praxis and ritual.

This chapter addresses how Europe became a mass society in the fin de siècle (1870–1914). Explosive population growth gave rise to major metropolises whose residents were divided by rank and religion, gender and class. The new conditions of the fin de siècle, mass migration from eastern Europe, and the rise of the new organized political anti-Semitism propelled Jews across Europe and in the United States to establish social welfare and civil defense organizations. The former practiced solidarity on a grand scale; the latter intervened to protect equality. The organizations' promotion of emancipation was predicated on Jews being a confession or religious group: by functioning under the guise of “welfare” and “civil defense,” they deliberately eschewed political claims. From the 1890s, new forms of mass Jewish politics emerged that contested that basic assumption.

This chapter investigates how the years between 1881 and 1914 saw major changes in the situation of the Jews in the tsarist empire. Antisemitism became the stock-in-trade of the tsarist authorities, who fastened on imaginary Jewish conspiracies as the explanation for the crises that threatened the empire. In the Kingdom of Poland and in the Prussian partition, Polish political life was now dominated by the Endecja, which came increasingly under the sway of obsessive antisemitism, while the national conflict between Poles and Ukrainians was undermining Jewish support for Polish aristocratic hegemony in Galicia. One consequence of these changes was the increasing strength of the ‘new Jewish politics’. This new departure, the politics of ‘peoplehood’, which first emerged in the decade of the 1880s in the tsarist empire, was a response to the perceived failure of the politics of Jewish integration. The new political climate compelled the exponents of the new Jewish politics to look for allies from the broader political spectrum.

This chapter is devoted in its entirety to an analysis of hasidic political activity as a reaction to the policies directed at Hasidim. It describes the actions of Rabbi Isaac of Warka, the best-known hasidic political activist in nineteenth-century Poland, as a case study for the direct and indirect hasidic involvement in elite politics. The chapter focuses on the nature and mechanisms of hasidic political activism and how little is known of how that activism was perceived within the hasidic world. It identifies the technical characteristics of hasidic political activism and its relationship with the forms of Jewish political involvement in the pre-modern Polish–Lithuanian Commonwealth. This chapter also outlines how much modern hasidic politics were inherited from earlier forms of shtadlanut and other traditional Jewish politics, as well as how it adapted to modern circumstances.

This chapter examines how Russian Jewish culture began to unravel from within as early as the first years of World War I, beginning with a now classic ideological debate over the very Jewishness of Jewish music. It analyzes how the complicated fate of Russian Jewish culture reflected the multiple legacies and divergent experiences of Jews in interwar Soviet Russia, Mandatory Palestine, and the United States. The chapter also suggests that the resurgence of Jewish politics coupled with the broader aesthetic challenge of European modernism that led to the decisive breakdown of the Jewish cultural movement.

This chapter turns to the ‘politics of fear’. The politics of fear examines those ideologies that produced conflicting, pessimistic outlooks. These ideologies were notably simultaneously held with the politics of hope discussed in the Chapter 3. Anglo-Jewry, through the prism of this more pessimistic philosophy, saw emancipation as a contract between the Gentile state and the Jews. The state promised civic equality to the Jews and in return Jews promised to abandon all claims to nationality, existing solely as a religious community. Such thinking played a substantial role in Anglo-Jewish politics throughout the war and was adhered to by all sections of the community, Orthodox and non-Orthodox, Zionist and non-Zionist. The politics it engendered was the ‘politics of fear’, for implicit in this contract was the hidden and fearsome agenda of what could happen to Jews if they abrogated their side of the bargain. This fear of a retributive anti-semitism led British Jewry to dread appearing cosmopolitan or supra-national and to avoid any semblance of dual loyalty.

This chapter discusses the formation of an African American diasporic imagination that was deeply influenced by Jewish diasporic politics and European Jewish Zionism. Beginning in the 1860s, African Americans traveled to Ottoman Palestine as slaves traveling with masters or as free black ministers in search of holy lands. The chapter examines the politics of diaspora and early pan-Africanism by identifying the comparisons black intellectuals drew between the European “Jewish question” and the condition of blacks within the United States. Both groups developed political imaginaries that responded to racial modernity. In the late nineteenth century, European Jews confronted the Dreyfus affair at the same time that black Americans witnessed how their nation failed to realize Reconstruction and allowed the ascendency of Jim Crow legislation.

This chapter examines three episodes in Arendt's political life and considers her own political engagements as they illuminate her conception of political agency. It covers, first, her Jewish politics in the interwar years, from 1926 to 1941; second is the phase from 1941 to 1948, referred to as the “heartbreak over the Jewish state”; and third is her engagement with the American republic from the early 1960s onward, which may be named “citizenship in a new republic”.

Though he left it incomplete, Schoenberg never gave up Jakobsleiter, the Balzacian/Swedenborgian rise to heaven and Strindbergian struggle for faith of which stayed central to the composer's religious visions. Like his involvement in Jewish politics, his ideas about religion had no practical implications. Schoenberg's rare attempts to put his art in the service of any religious ritual more specific than the worship of an abstract, unimaginable God resulted in awkward interactions between him and religious authorities. The best summary of his religious beliefs are the texts of Modern Psalms, which recycle many ideas from The Biblical Way, Moses und Aron, and his political writings. Instead of seeing these works as the final manifestations of a journey toward Jewish identity, one should recognize in them the same idiosyncratic combination of spiritual, political, and artistic concerns that characterized some of Schoenberg's earlier compositions.

This chapter covers the prominence of the Jewish Question in the political debates of the last years of the Commonwealth, as well as in the later journalism of the Duchy of Warsaw and the Kingdom of Poland regarding interests in hasidim. It analyzes the cradle of Polish Hasidism, Podolia and Volhynia, the south-eastern borderlands of the Polish–Lithuanian Commonwealth, where from the 1740s to 1760 the putative creator of the group, Israel ben Eliezer, also known as the Besht was active. Though Hasidism appeared in the lands of central Poland as early as the mid-eighteenth century, the governments that controlled these territories between 1772 and 1830 did not become aware of it until nearly the end of that period that the existence of hasidic groups became an issue in Jewish politics. It explains how the lack of official interest in Hasidism was caused by the very complicated general history of the states of central and eastern Europe at the start of the nineteenth century. The growing wave of interventions in issues related to Hasidism and the fact that the question of the legality of Hasidism became tied up with the issue of religious fraternities.

This chapter addresses Shlomo Netzer's The Struggle of Polish Jewry for Civil and National Minority Rights (1918–1922) (1980). In this richly documented study, Shlomo Netzer surveys the formative period of Jewish politics in inter-war Poland. The period under consideration witnessed not only the recovery of Polish independence, but also the elections for the Constituent Sejm, the crystallization of the Polish parliament and constitution, the signing of the Minorities Treaties, the protracted struggle over the borders of the Polish state, the Polish-Soviet war, and the 1922 elections to the Sejm and Senate. All these events influenced the form and direction of Jewish political activity during this critical time, and in his internally directed study, Netzer is careful to keep the historical background in view and avoid becoming lost in the labyrinth of inter-party polemics and editorial broadsides. After a useful short introduction on the history of independent Jewish politics under the various partition regimes, the author chronicles the struggle of Jewish elected representatives to secure civil and national rights for Polish Jewry, a struggle which to some extent has been described elsewhere, if not in such detail.

This introductory chapter provides a background of David Oppenheim and his Jewish library. At the core of Oppenheim's identity and activity as a rabbi, intellectual, and communal leader stood his library. His library gained renown among Jewish colleagues and Christian contemporaries. It thus informed the decisions of local courts and distant decisors. He possessed highbrow scholarly material alongside popular pamphlets and broadsides, and he preserved diplomatic exchanges and communal ordinances in manuscript—an archive of contemporary Jewish life. Oppenheim's intellectual authority made him a much-sought-after source for endorsements for newly written books. This book then tells the story of premodern Jewish life, politics, and intellectual culture through an exploration of a book collection, the man who assembled it, and the circles of individuals who brought it into being and made use of it.

This introductory chapter provides an overview of the Jews in Poland and Russia in the years between 1881 and 1914. After the assassination of Alexander II in 1881, the situation of the Jews in the tsarist empire began to deteriorate rapidly. This was partly a result of the government's growing disillusionment with the effectiveness of its policies of transforming the Jews into useful subjects. In part, too, the deterioration was caused by the growing revolutionary threat and the social tensions which this engendered. In this new situation the goal of integration and transformation of the community through education and Russification also became increasingly discredited within Jewish circles. Instead of religion, it was now ethnicity that was seen by many as the chief marker of Jewish identity, while others came to perceive socialism, with its promise of a new and equal world, as the ‘solution’ to the ‘Jewish problem’. From the tsarist empire this ‘new Jewish politics’ spread to the Kingdom of Poland and to Galicia. The new politics even had an impact in Prussian Poland.

This concluding chapter highlights how the ‘long nineteenth century’ had an extremely disruptive impact on Jewish communal solidarity in the lands of the former Polish–Lithuanian Commonwealth. The principal reason for the fractious character of Jewish life was the increasingly desperate situation of the Jews. Antisemitism became the stock-in-trade of the tsarist authorities, who fastened on imaginary Jewish conspiracies as the explanation for the crises which threatened the empire. In the Kingdom of Poland and in the Prussian partition, Polish political life was now dominated by the Endecja which came increasingly under the sway of obsessive antisemitism. Ideological rifts and an inability to compromise were deeply embedded in the new Jewish politics. This new departure, the politics of ‘peoplehood’, which first emerged in the decade of the 1880s in the tsarist empire, was a response to the perceived failure of the politics of integration. From there it transformed Jewish politics in the Kingdom of Poland and Galicia and gradually the whole of the Jewish world.

This chapter presents a number of reviews of books in the fields of history and social science. Topics covered in the first few books reviewed include the emigration of Jews from the Russian Empire; the history, identity, and experiences of different Jewish groups in Africa; and the postwar experiences of Holocaust survivors and their postwar immigration and integration into American society. The next selection of books reviewed consider Jewish power in America, modern Jewish politics, the experiences of American and British Jews during the Great Migration, and the history of the emergence of an influential Jewish group in France during the early 20th century. Finally, the last few books analyzed here examine Jewish historiography, the political views of German art historian Aby Warburg, Jewish organizations, and Soviet Jews.

This chapter turns to politics. Here, the return of the Jews to history was also their return to the realm of politics and statesmanship, whether as participants in European politics in various countries or as a new emerging political entity in Palestine from 1882. The idea of a Jewish state could be nourished by the memories of Jewish independence and Jewish sovereignty in biblical and post-biblical times, or by the messianic prophecies, but no one seriously thought of a revival of a Jewish kingdom. Thus it was the European political experience which was the political school of the Zionist movement. When Jews of the late nineteenth century lost faith in absolute enlightened monarchies (or after monarchies gave way to other types of government), the liberal-democratic paradigm of state that they adopted was closer to the political heritage of classical antiquity than to the Jewish political heritage. In that they followed the course taken by Western civilization.