The Jewish Question in the 21st Century
The modern Jewish political imagination has long been organized around a seemingly unavoidable question: what political space is available to Jews in the modern world? For generations, the principal answers appeared clear. Jews could become equal citizens within democratic states, or they could establish sovereignty of their own. Assimilation, integration, minority rights and Zionism differed profoundly, yet they shared one assumption: Jewish existence had to be secured within the political geometry of modernity.
The twentieth century appeared to provide two extraordinary answers. The State of Israel gave Jews sovereignty, political majority and control over their collective destiny. The development of minority rights allowed Jews in many democratic societies to remain visibly Jewish without choosing between citizenship and identity. In that sense, the old Jewish Question seemed finally resolved. Yet its persistence suggests something more disturbing: perhaps the answers did not fail because they were badly implemented. Perhaps the question itself contained the mistake.
The question “what political space is there for Jews?” already assumes that Jewish existence must be translated into an ontology built around territory, citizenship, sovereignty, majority, minority and the nation-state. Even apparently opposed answers remain within this architecture. One proposes security through sovereignty; another through legal inclusion within someone else’s sovereignty. Both treat political space as the decisive field in which Jewish existence must become intelligible.
The Hebrew structure begins elsewhere. Israel does not first appear as a nation-state awaiting completion. It appears through distinction. Abram is called out, a people is formed, covenant establishes obligations, and memory, law, land, Sabbath, genealogy, prohibition, ritual, exile and return produce a configuration of relations that cannot simply be reduced to the categories of modern sovereignty. Distinction is not yet nationalism, land is not yet territory in the modern juridical sense, a people is not automatically a state, and law is not identical with sovereign legislation.
Once these categories are collapsed into one another, something profound changes. Jewish particularity becomes political nationality, covenant becomes collective title, land becomes territory, peoplehood becomes sovereignty, and historical memory becomes political legitimacy. The State can then begin to appear not merely as one political organization of Jewish life, but as its natural culmination.
Hebrew monism does not require this. One God does not mean one Humanity, but neither does one people mean one State. The unity of God does not require uniformity below, and the distinction of Israel does not logically require a sovereign apparatus capable of representing Jewish existence as such.
This is where idolatry should become politically explosive. The prohibition of idolatry is not merely a prohibition against worshipping several gods. Its deeper force lies in refusing the identification of the absolute with something finite. No image exhausts God, no ruler exhausts authority, no institution exhausts obligation, and no political form becomes transcendent merely by attaching itself to sacred history. The State therefore presents a particularly serious theological danger precisely when it calls itself Jewish, because a finite political institution can begin to speak in the language of a people, a history, a covenant and a sacred geography older and wider than itself.
The State protects Jews, but it can also begin to define Jewishness. Once marriage, conversion, public ritual, religious status, Torah study, citizenship, national belonging and collective memory become intertwined with state institutions, Judaism no longer stands only outside political power as inheritance, obligation or criticism. It becomes one of the languages through which sovereignty organizes its own legitimacy.
The capture works in both directions. The State requires Jewish categories in order to explain why it is a Jewish state, while religious institutions require state recognition, budgets, legal powers, exemptions and administrative mechanisms in order to preserve forms of authority within that state. Neither side remains untouched. This is why the familiar opposition between “religious” and “secular” Israel is conceptually inadequate. The more important question is what happens when Judaism itself becomes one of the State’s definitional technologies.
The Haredi confrontation with the State reveals this contradiction with unusual clarity. Communities that most insist that Torah cannot be subordinated to secular sovereignty nevertheless inhabit legal, economic and institutional arrangements produced by that sovereignty. When the State attempts to impose military obligations upon them, the coercive structure suddenly becomes visible. A State that recognizes Torah can regulate Torah learners; a State that grants religious autonomy can define the limits of that autonomy; a State that incorporates Jewish values can simultaneously transform those values into administrative categories.
The deeper trap is that once Jewish existence is organized inside a sovereign machine, no Jewish community retains complete control over what “Jewish” will mean inside that machine. This reaches far beyond Haredi society. Israel increasingly structures the political field within which Jewish identity is interpreted, defended, criticized and contested, including in the Diaspora. The State did not merely create political space for Jews; it began reorganizing the meaning of Jewish political existence everywhere.
This is one of the most important consequences of the Zionist answer to the Jewish Question. We should therefore ask not only whether Israel answered the Jewish Question, but what the answer did to the questioner.
A people historically accustomed to thinking about persecution, exile and life under the authority of others became a people possessing political authority over others. The transition is enormous. Yet much Jewish political language continued to carry categories formed under conditions of weakness into conditions of sovereignty. A community can remember slavery in Egypt while possessing prisons, remember exile while controlling borders, remember persecution while exercising military force, and remember being classified by others while possessing institutions capable of classifying others.
The point is not to reverse victim and oppressor as permanent identities. That would merely reproduce the same crude ontology. The point is that power changes the conditions under which inherited concepts operate. A covenant spoken without sovereignty and a covenant spoken by those possessing an army cannot be assumed to mean politically the same thing.
At the same time, Jewish particularity has increasingly been justified through universalism. Chosenness becomes greater responsibility, Israel becomes “a light unto the nations,” tikkun olam becomes repairing the world, and b’tzelem Elohim becomes a Jewish foundation for universal human dignity. This produces a remarkable double movement: politically, Judaism becomes increasingly particularized through the State; morally, Judaism becomes increasingly universalized through Humanity.
The State says: this is the political home of the Jewish people. The universalist explanation says: the Jewish people ultimately exists for a moral purpose concerning everyone. Both movements translate Hebrew categories into structures historically later than those categories themselves. The nation-state captures Jewish difference politically, while universalism captures Jewish difference morally. One freezes particularity into sovereignty; the other redeems particularity by assigning it a universal mission.
Both may obscure something more difficult. Israel can be particular without becoming sovereign absoluteness. Judaism can impose obligations extending beyond Jews without becoming a universalist religion. The stranger can matter without becoming an instance of Universal Man. Jewish existence can remain politically plural without being incomplete.
This is why tikkun olam is such an instructive example. The contemporary phrase “repairing the world” suggests a universal human subject confronting an object called the world and undertaking its moral improvement. Yet the Hebrew and rabbinic histories of tikkun are more specific, relational and heterogeneous than that slogan suggests. A stronger reading would begin not with humanity repairing the world from outside, but with agents correcting relations from within configurations in which they are already implicated.
The same applies to b’tzelem Elohim. The strongest interpretation may not be that the other deserves recognition because beneath all differences he belongs to the same universal category I do. It may be that the other exceeds my authority precisely without needing to become the same as me. The stranger may remain strange, another people may remain another people, and responsibility does not begin after difference disappears. It begins where difference remains.
This provides a more severe ethical test for Jewish sovereignty than the language of moral mission. The question is no longer whether Israel represents Jewish values well enough, but whether Jewish obligation is capable of limiting Jewish power. A mission can flatter the one who possesses it; an obligation constrains. A “light unto the nations” can become a story about who we believe ourselves to be, while a prohibition tells us what we may not do.
Some of the most brutal public language in Israel today comes not from movements rejecting Jewish identity, but from movements invoking Torah, sacred land, Jewish history and national destiny with exceptional intensity. This does not prove that Judaism produces brutality. It does prove that Jewish vocabulary can be incorporated into political structures capable of authorizing domination. Politics does not have to defeat Judaism; politics can learn to speak Judaism.
At that point, the prohibition of idolatry becomes the internal critique we need most. No State is God, no Nation is God, no Land is God and no historical destiny is God. No political institution becomes transcendent because it calls itself Jewish. The same prohibition applies in the opposite direction: Humanity is not God either, and the Universal Man cannot become the tribunal through which Jewish particularity must justify its existence.
The alternative is not moral relativism. It is a more demanding conception of obligation. I do not refrain from destroying the other because I have successfully recognized him as someone fundamentally like me; I refrain because my power over him is not unlimited. His difference does not cancel the limit. It is precisely where the limit matters.
This may finally allow us to reformulate the Jewish Question. The old question asked what political space there is for Jews. Perhaps the more important question now is why Jewish existence should be exhausted by the political forms that modernity made available. Israel answered one historical emergency with extraordinary effectiveness. It created safety, agency, political power and a center of Jewish life. None of that should be erased. But an answer can solve one problem while creating a new field of problems.
The nation-state may have secured Jewish political space while simultaneously narrowing the political forms through which Jewish existence can be imagined. It may also have transformed Judaism itself by placing sacred categories inside the machinery of sovereignty. If so, the task is not to abolish Israel, abandon particularity or return nostalgically to powerlessness. The task is to prevent one historically contingent political form from becoming the ontology of Jewish existence.
Judaism is older than the State of Israel, the Jewish people is wider than the population governed by Israel, covenant is not citizenship, Torah is not legislation, Eretz Israel is not reducible to cadastral sovereignty, Jewishness is not a passport category, and political power, however necessary, remains political power. These distinctions must remain visible if Judaism is not to be absorbed by the State that claims to represent Jewish political existence.
Perhaps the Jewish Question remains unanswered because “what political space is there for Jews?” was never large enough to contain Jewish existence. The answer may require neither another State, nor another ideology, nor another universal mission. It may require something intellectually harder: recovering the capacity to think Jewish difference without immediately converting it either into sovereignty or into Humanity.
One God does not mean one Humanity. One people does not mean one State. And no answer to the Jewish Question should ever become powerful enough to define what questions Jews are still permitted to ask.
Yochanan Schimmelpfennig
