The Conflict Between Traditional Judaism and Modern Zionism

We’ve all heard of “Jews against Zionism”—from liberal-secularists, such as the philosopher and linguist Noam Chomsky, to those that are more religious dissidents, such as the Neturei Karta, a fringe group within the Haredi minority (often referred to as “ultra-Orthodox”).

Skeptics would argue that, within the liberal-secularist group, there is no real refutation of the ethnoreligious supremacist idea of Jewish sovereignty on occupied lands. They would say that these liberal-secularists are leftists in the West but the equivalent to White nationalists when it comes to Israel. This is because they ask the Jewish state to “stop the oppression” in terms of military actions, but, meanwhile, they do not really criticize the fact that the very establishment of the country was based on illiberal premises.

As for the other group, the issue for many lies not only in their unrepresentative numbers but also a kind of inherent hypocrisy. The reason being that their qualm is not so much the idea of Israel itself but, rather, the idea that it has been brought about by secular means and not by their awaited Messiah (who will be far more brutal than the IDF).

RELATED: Trying to Trick God: Israel Works Around an Unusual Biblical Commandment

But while we hear about Jews criticizing Zionism, we barely ever hear anything about the other side, i.e., that of Zionists criticizing Judaism and traditional Judaism in particular.

The criticism leveled by Zionists against traditional Judaism is that this form of Judaism is essentially a Judaism of the diaspora. They argue that it was a Judaism devised by rabbis who lived in a hostile environment and thus adopted what you could describe as dubious behavior in order to survive more than live (a sort of perpetual sense of paranoia, being surrounded by “enemies,” and so on).

Aaron David Gordon (1856-1922), for example, opposed such Rabbinical Judaism with the idea of Labor Zionism, a leftist and socialist approach that not only wanted to see Jews return to their supposed ancestral lands but to also become a “productive” force, as Gordon, like other Zionists, had internalized anti-Semitic myths and considered Jews to be a “parasitic” merchant class, one that is more exploitative than it is productive, which he perceived to be a result of the diasporic conditions.

RELATED: Magic and Superstition in Orthodox Judaism

So Zionism, by integrating Jews (back) into an agrarian economy, would transform the Jews into a real “nation,” but this would mean that they need to abandon Traditional or Rabbinical Judaism.

Despite the influence of Labor Zionism—having directly impacted both Ben-Gurion (1886-1973) and Golda Meir (1898-1978), the first and fourth Prime Ministers of Israel, respectively—, you could say that Labour Zionism was basically a leftist paradigm and thus naturally inclined towards the criticism of religion.

But such Zionist attacks on traditional Judaism were also found in the right-wing brand of Zionism, such as in Ahad Ha’am (1856-1927) and, more radically, Ze’ev Jabotinsky (1880-1940).

RELATED: Judaism: A Race or Religion?

Ha’am, who was a journalist from the Russian Empire, is now a more or less forgotten figure. However, there was a famous debate between Ha’am and Theodor Herzl (1860-1904), the actual founder of modern Zionism. Herzl desired a State for the Jews. Ha’am, on the other hand, wanted a Jewish state, in the sense that this State should be Jewish not only in terms of politics but also more widely in terms of societal norms, cultural influences, etc.

Jabotinsky, who wrote novels, short stories, and poetry, is, quite simply put, the father of Israel’s right-wing, and those influenced by him include the likes of Benjamin Netanyahu.

We read in a Vox article from 2015:

There are few figures in the history of Zionism as important as Ze’ev Jabotinsky. Born in Odessa, Ukraine (then Russia), in 1880, Jabotinsky founded both the intellectual tradition and political institutions that would eventually produce Netanyahu’s Likud party — and the hardline policies that define it.

 

Jabotinsky’s vision of Zionism, born partly out of experience with Russian pogroms, took as its premise that Jewish life was inherently precarious. Several years before the Holocaust, he was begging Jews to get out of Europe before calamity struck.

 

“You can’t understand [Jabotinsky’s] thinking on the Arab-Zionist conflict, his maximalism, without understanding his role as the lone Jewish voice for emergency rescue,” Yossi Klein Halevi, a fellow at the Shalom Hartman Institute, told Tablet Magazine‘s Jordan Chandler Hirsch.

[…]

Netanyahu’s relationship with Jabotinsky isn’t just ideological. The prime minister’s father, Benzion Netanyahu, was one of Jabotinsky’s personal deputies. In 1940, Jabotinsky sent Netanyahu to the United States to lobby for the creation of a Jewish state. And Benzion’s influence on his son goes well beyond that.

 

“The father. Everywhere I went in Jerusalem, when I asked about Netanyahu, the same answer came back: ‘to understand Bibi, you have to understand the father,'” the New Yorker‘s David Remnick wrote in a 1998 profile. “Bibi, for his part, dismisses all talk of paternal influence as ‘psychobabble.’ His friends and colleagues who have known him for decades do not.”

Jabotinsky was also known for his notable disdain of traditional Judaism.

RELATED: Red Cows & 40 Decapitated Babies: Israel Trying to Start the Apocalypse?

Hillel Halkin, a respected Israeli translator, wrote a well-received biography of Jabotinsky in 2014, where we read (pp.79-80):

In itself, though, the “battered harness” of rabbinic Judaism held little intrinsic value for him. It had been, as he saw it, an indispensable but strictly functional tool, a way of life that had developed in the Diaspora over the centuries to enable the Jews to survive as a de-territorialized nation. A substitute for a land that had been lost, it would lose much of its relevance once that land was regained. Jabotinsky’s ardent Hebraism did not contradict this belief. The revival of spoken Hebrew signified for him both an affirmation of Jewish historical continuity and a repudiation of Diaspora culture with its Judeo-German, Judeo-Spanish, and other hybrid Jewish languages. Hebrew alone could link Jews all over the world with one another and with their past, and restore them to the more authentic, unhyphenated existence of the pre-Exilic Jew.

[…]

What Jabotinsky himself wished to make of it was what he called in another essay a “Jewish humanism,” whose values would be those of liberal European society.

The book is full of such antagonism, something that seems to have pervaded Jabotinsky when it came to traditional or rabbinical Judaism.

In a sense, you could say it’s logical:

Zionism, being a modernist ideology (embracing romantic nationalism and so on), would naturally be opposed to traditional Judaism.

Of course, we’re not exactly appreciative of what the rabbis have historically done with Judaism, but all of this must be borne in mind. Especially since, though there is a religious critique of modern Zionism, there is also a Zionist critique of traditional Judaism, and it is in this latter category that you find right-wingers who have influenced Netanyahu.

RELATED: Jewish Embrace of Polytheism: Expect Confusion