Scholarship and Commitment

Last week I began my new position as director of the Ben-Gurion Research Institute for the Study of Israel and Zionism at Ben-Gurion University. Entering a new position of this kind entails a kind of dissonance between a sense of the quotidian and the routine on the one hand, and a humbling and commanding sense of mission and significance on the other. The BGRI is, in some sense, yet another academic unit in yet another academic institution. In fact, however, it is far more than that. It is an institute established by the Ben-Gurion Law of 1976. It is one that bears a weighty name, housed in a university that bears that same name—of a founder, a visionary, a leader who established a state on the one hand, and yet declared repeatedly that that state was not in fact the end goal of his life-long Zionist activity, but rather a “vehicle” for the fulfillment of what he termed “the prophetic vision”. As I see it, in other words, it is an institute tasked both with aiming at academic scholarship of the highest caliber and with continuing to be a part of that “vehicle” aiming at the broader vision.

One of the key elements of our training as academics is the notion that we should approach our subject matter with “dispassion”. This is important, of course—it is imperative for scholarship that we not allow our own passions to interfere with our gathering of evidence, with our assessment of it, or with our presentation of it as we construct our historical narratives. But of course, making sure that passion does not interfere does not mean that it will not color what we do, how we frame our understanding of our evidence and how we tell the stories about what people have done and our explanations of why they have done so. Even more fundamentally, one cannot write without caring about one’s subject matter—without, in other words, coupling that dispassion with passion. Further complicating this delicate balance, when I write history, I am using language and creating a text—engaging, in other words, not only in the study of culture, but in the creation of a cultural artifact. Study of Israeli society and culture is in itself participation in the shaping of that very culture, which is in a continuous process of emergence and evolution.

Based on these notions, coupled with what I see as the ethical underpinnings of humanistic scholarship (see my “Humanities, Humanity, and the Gaza War”, November 23, 2023), I consider it particularly imperative that we as scholars have a voice that has an impact on the societies in which we live, an impact beyond the academic “ivory tower.” Now in particular, in the unprecedented confluence of crises that Israel is undergoing, neutrality is neither a moral option nor a worthy expectation from scholars. There is, to be sure, a fine line between what will bear the aroma of some form of advocacy on the one hand, and a simple insistence on intellectual integrity on the other. This line, I think, is one of the greatest challenges that we face as scholars.

There is a powerful tendency in the world of scholarship on Israel and Zionism to assume that any inclination by a scholar to sympathy with Zionism disqualifies their scholarship. This is a notion that has no equivalent in any other field that I can think of. In his book on Nations and Nationalism, for example, Eric Hobsbawm argues that “being a Zionist” is incompatible with “writing a genuinely serious history of the Jews”. He had no comparable issue, on the other hand, with the fact that as a life-long member of the Communist Party, he also wrote histories of Marxism and socialism.

I am one of those scholars against whom Hobsbawm railed. I believe that, like any other human collective, the Jewish collective has a right to define its own identity as it sees fit; that that collective identity, as it has evolved over the course of the twentieth century, is bound up with a sense of nationhood that entails a close (if complicated) relationship with the Land of Israel (admittedly one that has evolved over time and into which Zionism decanted new meanings) and the State of Israel. I am, in other words, a Zionist. To be sure, Zionism itself has meant many different things to many different people. I think it is fair to say, however, that the central goals of much of Zionism, much of the time, was to make it possible for Jews to become full-fledged members of the community of nations—neither more nor less so than any other national group—as a precondition for allowing the Jewish collective to cultivate its own unique Jewish-Hebrew-Israeli culture.

There is certainly no epistemological advantage in being hostile or indifferent to a group’s fate and wellbeing as opposed to caring about it. It certainly does not bespeak any greater ethical standing—what do we think of scholars who have nothing to say at a time of national, social, moral crisis? Notwithstanding the atmosphere in a great deal of academic contexts, anti-Zionism does not ipso facto situate one better for understanding Zionism than does sympathy for Zionist ideas. The challenging balancing act between commitment to ideas and ethical stances on the one hand, and to intellectual integrity on the other, faces scholars of all ideological positions—certainly no more so for a Zionist than for an anti-Zionist.

It goes without saying that Zionism’s rendering of Judaism and of the Jewish past has entailed innovation, new readings and interpretations of the historical record. Jews did not and could not think of themselves in modern nationalist terms before the age of modern nationalism. In this, Jews are just like every other human group that would come to think of itself as a nation in the modern sense. In the intellectual-ideological marketplace of modern Jewish politics, there were indeed alternative and competing understandings of, and efforts to shape, a modern Jewishness that would bridge the gap between inevitable rupture and the effort to salvage elements of an old world and tradition through reinterpretation and reinvention. And although Zionism was in its first decades a minority movement, the appeal of Zionist ideas and projects spread and proved long lasting and resonant with much of world Jewry. That is how human collectivities, cultures, and civilizations evolve. It is legitimate for someone to find that historical trajectory distasteful. It is legitimate to struggle for alternative understandings and conceptualizations—alternative imaginings—of Jewishness. That too is how vibrant, healthy civilizations thrive, through a lively marketplace of ideas, identities, selves. It is not legitimate, however, to deny the vast majority of Jews the right to hold the identity they have created for themselves.

There is hardly a historian today, or a scholar in any other field, who would not recognize that our views, inclinations and emotional commitments inform the ways in which we conduct our research and write. And yet there remains a difference between a mobilized, tendentious scholarship and scholarship that is rooted in intellectual integrity and methodological honesty. When we engage in the latter, we produce new knowledge—to be sure, open to often wide-ranging, differing interpretations, but not without limits imposed by empirical evidence, external reality and clarity of logic and rigorous thought. That is our principal task. We also bear a responsibility to make that knowledge available as widely as possible, so that it might enrich and inform public, political, cultural discourse. This seems particularly to be the case when we are living in a society, a culture that we do care about, to which we are committed, and that is being threatened from without by enemies who would deny it its humanity and its right to exist (an effort that is granted tacit or explicit legitimacy in a disturbingly broad range of academic discourses); and that is being undermined from within through the willful dismantling of the democratic underpinnings of the state that is ours and by the deliberate sowing of social division in order to undermine the social fabric of the society that we live in and value. How we do that, how we seek to influence, deepen, enrich an increasingly shrill and one-dimensional public and political discourse, seems to me one of the principal challenges facing scholars in and of Israel today.