Greater Israel–A Land with No People, for a People with No Land (Part 3 of 5)

(Part 3 of 5)

Utopia, the Night State and the Concept of Land

While Theodore Herzl was imagining a techno-utopia he was simultaneously visualizing a dark night for the Jewish people. Herzl’s plea to accept a temporary “territorial agreement” (the so-called Uganda solution) of the Jewish predicament, was proposed  at the risk of jeopardizing everything he had accomplished and had worked so assiduously towards achieving. The advocacy of such a radical plan suggests just how desperate and apocalyptic Herzl  perceived the  status and future of Jewry to be in Europe. Max Nordau, ever loyal and faithful, supported Herzl’s “Ugandan alternative,”. Nordau called this temporary solution a ‘Nachtasl’–a night state–a safe temporary refuge that would provide a safe harbour from the impending deluge and onslaught.

Herzl could not have anticipated the First World War just ten short years after the publication of Altneuland or the collapse of the Russian, Austro-Hungarian, Imperial Japanese and Ottoman empires in its wake. Nor could Herzl have anticipated the Balfour Declaration, one of the most extraordinary commitments of a world hegemon, to a non-state, loosely associated, ‘unincorporated entity’ in the midst of a war. Herzl could not have foreseen any of these events with any clarity, but it seems, nevertheless, that he had fears of an approaching conflagration of unprecedented dimensions. 

The question that Lewis Mumford posed in his review of Altneuland is, essentially, what is the underlying ‘utopia’ that animates Zionism and that has sustained Jewry in the diaspora across such a vast time period? Mumford concluded that the sustaining vision of Zionism was dependent on what he calls “pragmatic utopianism.” Mumford viewed this form of pragmatic utopianism supporting Jewish existence to be unique. Almost all utopia’s espouse, in Mumford’s view, a universally applicable vision,  the Zionist inspiration (and the Jewish one) he states is specifically national, and it is something that emerges, he believed, from the Jewish concept of “chosenness”, the notion specifically of a special “people,” a “people of peoples”, a “leader amongst nations”, perforce, a “light onto the nations” as is it is stated and restated in different constructions in the Old Testament. The concept of Jewish “chosenness” according to Mumford was deliberately diminished and morally obfuscated in the 19th and 20th centuries. It is dismissed as Mumford suggests with uncomfortable equivocations and self-conscious deflections, by assimilated Jews themselves, in that the concept of ‘election’ and ‘chosenness’ does not align with the democratic and egalitarian zeitgeist of the times. This sense of ‘chosenness’ is, however, for Mumford an active conscious and sentient factor of personality and something that Mumford believes is consciously grasped by Jews and others; not something perforce to be confused with national self aggrandizement or the assertion of any kind of superiority, or what in the 20th century might be called racial pride but rather, he explains,  a peculiar ‘utopian’ construction of the immediate future. The evolving future and the way the ‘present’ is articulated and projected into this immediate future yields unique outcomes which have repeated themselves  over and over again in Jewish history. This “pragmatic utopianism” continues to provide an unusual spur to action and a sustaining element of continuing Jewish existence in the face of exclusion, discrimination, and tremendous setbacks and historical losses. 

Mumford’s own history, carefully guarded, perhaps allowed him to cogitate on this sense of ‘chosenness’ and its relevance to the underlying Zionist utopian vision, with special intensity. Although Mumford curiously never spoke or wrote openly of the matter, in fact, he actively denied the suggestion, Mumford was himself half-Jewish. His German derived mother, Alivira Conrad Baron had told Mumford about his paternal German-Jewish ancestry from his youth, but she never acknowledged or explained who his father might be. Mumford had assumed his father was his mother’s elderly and well-established employer, a successful German Jewish lawyer, for whom his mother worked for many years as a maid and housekeeper. His mother would confide only in 1942, in Mumford’s 47th year, that it was not her employer who was his father but her employer’s young 20-something nephew, Lewis Puck. 

Lewis Puck was the son of a wealthy German Jewish family that owned the Raritan Woollens Manufacturing Company established in Raritan, New Jersey in 1846. One of the largest woollen cloth manufacturers in the United States, the company’s plant spanned 20 acres and employed over seven hundred  people. The company was owned by Mumford’s paternal grandmother’s side of the family, the Einsteins, a large and prosperous family (a family that originated in the German State of Baden-Wurttemberg– the same small Jewish community  from which Albert Einstein’s immediate ancestors derived).  

The social disparities were such that Mumford’s mother was not suitable as a marriageable partner–for reasons of class not religion it seems, in that Mumford’s biological father subsequently married into the wealthy gentile New Jersey political dynasty of the Frelinghuysens, who were in turn married into the Boston Brahmins, of no less stratospheric heights than the Lodges and Cabots (as in “the Lodge’s only ‘speak’ to the Cabots and the Cabots only ‘speak’ to G-d). Mumford’s father would die young as a consequence of a botched surgical operation so no rapprochement was ever possible between illegitimate son and father. Mumford would hold this secret of his ancestry to himself for another twenty years before giving the details to his own family and children. 

Mumford’s hidden or covert  ancestry, and his close circle of friends might explain his lifelong interest in the safety and security of the Jewish people, the struggle for a Jewish homeland, and a heightened perception of the peril that Jews worldwide were facing in the interwar period. 

All utopias take place somewhere, they require for their verisimilitude to be situated on terra firma, or in the case of science fiction on a habitable planet or spaceship. Utopia’s require an informing moral or ethic and a starting premise necessitating a virgin or unsettled place. A fictionalized utopia requires perforce and an unclaimed land, a place that essentially belongs to no one, a terra nullius (latin for a land that belongs to no one), hence the narrative utility of a desert island, or a lost continent, an Atlantis, or an empty no man’s land on which to build the new utopian paradise. The authors of utopias do not seek to destroy earlier inhabitants, or wreck earlier societies on which to build their own utopia or model society. This would be anathema and antithetical to the whole moral impulse of a utopia. There is, of course, utopia’s siamese twin and mirror opposite, the dystopia, as in Aldous Huxley’s Brave New World or George Orwell’s Nineteen Eighty-Four, where a new edifice is constructed after post-apocalyptic destruction or in a new world state whose origin is not fully explained. But this is not the object for Herzl or the utopias that Mumford seeks to explore in Herzl’s Altneuland. 

The concept of ‘land’ is complicated by the eschatological function of land within the biblical texts and the role that “The Promised Land” plays in the cosmic role that attaches to Israel and the children of Jacob in the biblical dramaturgy and the continuing religious ritual and liturgy of post-exilic Judaism. It is further complicated by the historically shifting and indeterminate concept of land and what is meant by the term legally as opposed to theologically. 

‘Land’ is an emotionally and intellectually loaded term. Great sentiment attaches, of course, to a place where generations of life and families have worked and lived together; where generations of people have been born and died. What is meant by the word land, specifically the land of Eretz Israel, is at the root of the competing narratives and the current conflict. 

We have multiple visions of the Holy Land which have been projected into a modern political dispute. We have many different ‘lands’ all occupying the same geography; we have, for instance, the long sought after ‘lands’ of Canaan, “The Promised Land”, the ‘covenantal land of Abraham’, the bountiful, wealth giving lands of “milk and honey”, and a much layered palimpsest of various legal codes that stretch back to principles established by Roman statutes, through Byzantine, Islamic, Ottoman and English mandatory land registries and codes. 

We further have a type of beneficial ownership and the rights that follow and are due to those who have maintained and ‘tilled’ the top uppermost strata, the few, species-preserving inches of minerals, nitrogen and nutrients that we require for our existence. It is from this ‘topsoil’ that we receive all of our food, cereal crops and animal feed that have sustained humankind since the agricultural revolution. Who we might ask have been trusted to be the guardians of these special lands of the Southern Levant? Who, we might also ask, has actively kept up the gardens, fields and earthworks, the irrigation canals and drainage and the woodlots and forests? Who has rotated the fields and intervened to forestall erosion and to shore up retaining walls? Who has sought to renew the soils very bounty and fecundity? And who has sought to preserve the diversity of fruits and trees that have been culled and selected and hybridized over the millennia to suit Eretz Israel’s special climes and weather? All of these questions and considerations come into play when discussing the subject of the ‘land’ and its tenure and ownership. 

And this is how we arrive at the famous so-called Zionist slogan: “a land without a people, for a people without a land”. No other slogan with the possible recent resurrection of the odious “River to the Sea, Palestine shall be free” as a malign chant of resistance, has been adopted and hijacked to support as many narrative constructs and false beliefs. The slogan has consequently accreted around it an unmatched mass of argument and controversy, including a great deal of deliberate obfuscation. 

*Dedicated to Hilly Solomon, a 24-year-old fashion designer who was murdered at the Supernova music concert on October 7th, 2023. May she not be forgotten and may her memory be a blessing. 

(Part 4 of 5 to follow)