The Jewish Power Blog: New Jews

The story we all grew up on: Theodor Herzl was an assimilated Jew who, assigned to cover the Dreyfus trial in Paris, had an epiphany, and realized that assimilation had failed and that there was no hope for the Jews to be integrated into the ethnic nation-states comprising the new Europe. Therefore, the appropriate response was for the Jews to integrate as a state among states, not as individuals within states; a Jewish nation-state would be the answer to the “Jewish problem.”

However, it turned out that what sounded like a simple solution was not so simple after all, because we couldn’t agree on what the problem was.

Was the problem simply lack of a state? Herzl was criticized for suggesting that that state might be in British East Africa (later Uganda); and for imagining that the language of the new state would be German.

Was the problem our exile from our ancient homeland? The prospect of a modern Jewish state in the land of Israel was seen by many as heresy: if God had exiled us for our sins, how could we just take matters in our own hands and return?

Was the problem the deterioration of Jewish cultural identity due to the challenge of modernity? Many argued that what was needed was not political solutions, but the revitalization and adaptation of Jewish culture – through arts and scholarship and education; from reviving Hebrew to reforming religious practice.

But maybe the problem was the Jew’s physical self, as Herzl’s close collaborator Max Nordau suggested in his address to the Second Zionist Congress in 1898:

In the narrow Jewish street our poor limbs soon forgot their carefree movements. In the dimness of sunless houses, our eyes began to blink shyly. The fear of constant persecution turned our powerful voices into frightened whispers…  Let us take up our oldest traditions. Let us once more become deep-chested, sturdy, sharp-eyed men…For no other people will gymnastics fulfill a more educational purpose than for us Jews. It shall straighten us in body and in character… Our new muscle Jews have not yet regained the heroism of our forefathers who in large numbers eagerly entered the sports arenas in order to take part in competition and to pit themselves against the highly trained Hellenistic athletes…

(As Hanukah approaches, it is worth noting the irony of Nordau’s characterizing the “Hellenizers” as the heroes of that story!) Nordau gave expression to an important Zionist theme: not just a political or cultural revolution, not just a revolution against exile – but an anthropological revolution: the creation of a New Jew.  Zionists across the spectrum of “Zionisms” tended to take for granted the stereotype of Old Jews as weak, pale, timid, self-abnegating, and unproductive. The envisioned New Jew would be the opposite of all those characteristics. Think Ari ben Canaan (Paul Newman) in Exodus.

For many, the image of the Old Jew was inextricably tied to religion, which was seen as crushing initiative and self-reliance and fostering powerlessness. For example, Shaul Tschernichovsky’s (1875-1943) famous poem, “Facing the Statue of Apollo,” ends:

I will bow to life, to power and to beauty,

I will bow to all the beautiful treasures

That corpse-men, rotten human seed,

Rebels against life – stole from my Rock, Shaddai,

God of the wondrous desert,

God of those who stormed Canaan –

Leaving Him shackled in tefillin straps.

However, the idolization/idealization of the New Jew was not limited to secular Zionists, and there were many who envisioned the brave, tanned, strong, rooted, hardworking New Jew faithfully putting on his tefillin every morning; religious faith was not the key characteristic of the Old Jew. Powerlessness was. And after the Holocaust, this drive to rebel against the Old Jew’s powerlessness became even more entrenched in Zionist/Israeli culture. Never again like sheep to the slaughter…

This fascination with strength and productivity and naturalness was not unique to Zionism – it was in the air of early twentieth century Europe, where expressions of rebellion against the perceived decadence of “old” European society were widespread; the ideal of the “New Man” was everywhere, from America to Russia.  And, as in our case, it was often associated with romantic nationalism, an association powerfully portrayed, in the German context, in “Tomorrow Belongs to Me” from the musical Cabaret.

It seems to me that this rebellion against powerlessness has led to a kind of tunnel vision, where all is understood as a dichotomy – total defeat or total victory, powerlessness or power. “The only language they understand is force,” so that seems to have become the only language we know how to speak. It turns out to have been a pretty slippery slope from Nordau’s muscle Jews to Netanyahu’s autarkic Sparta.

Meanwhile, however,  that’s not all there is. Consider this vision of the New Jew written (~1930) by Siegfried Lehman, founder of the first Israeli youth village (agricultural boarding school), Ben Shemen.

We find him in our land … in that new physical type, so foreign to the Jew up to now, nourished by creative work in the fresh air and sunshine. The body, for him, is not secondary to the spirit, simply a necessity for life, but rather it is his direct expression, representing him faithfully. As he always sees before him the broad foundation lines of free nature, he gains rootedness. Without fear he will confront all that is truly essential, even in areas of life that are distant from him, for no essential human connection is foreign to him… His language is simple, devoid of froth and empty words; glibness arouses his distrust, as does the political hack whose words do not match his actions.  His social quality stems from an empathy able to rise above petty bourgeois egotism… and [from] his ability to understand what is in the heart of members of another nation.

If only…