It has been a difficult year for Israel and — with Jewish communities in France, Ukraine and elsewhere on edge — also a tough one for the diaspora. Few times in recent history have been marked by so much discussion about where on the map the future of the Jewish people will lie, and what the relationship of diaspora Jews to the State of Israel should be.
Two new books have me thinking further about this question. Alan Wolfe’s “At Home in Exile: Why Diaspora Is Good for the Jews” begins with a discussion of the phenomenon of shlilat ha’golah, negation of the diaspora. This perception took root in the early 20th century as Zionists sought to supplant the exilic Jew they viewed as weak, rootless, alienated from the physical world and unable to stand up for oneself. Although this exaggerated dichotomy between Israeli and exilic Jews prevails far less today, it persists, for example, in novelist A.B. Yehoshua’s disparaging references to Jews in the diaspora as “partial Jews.”
Wolfe, a professor of political science at Boston College and a prolific writer on American religious life, answers by celebrating exile’s virtues — chiefly the universalism that he traces to Moses Mendelssohn and the Jewish Enlightenment, but which has declined in the modern era. Bemoaning the inward-facing tendencies of Jewish particularism that have taken hold in the aftermath of the Holocaust and Zionism, Wolfe holds that Jews’ best hope lies in “bringing back to life the universalist ideals developed during their long residency in exile.”
Wolfe unapologetically views this universalism as a sort of corrective to what he sees as the excesses of Israeli particularism. He opines that if Jews in the diaspora were “to play a greater role in helping Israel come to its senses, the tradition of Jewish universalism that began long ago will have brought the light of reason to all nations, including the one created by the Jews themselves.”
I found myself disagreeing with many of Wolfe’s assertions and his selective presentation of history, but I enjoyed the process of reading and questioning. As an example, Wolfe holds that “exile keeps alive a tradition far older than Zionism: a people who live among others not like themselves, conscious of their status as a minority, will inevitably develop a sympathy for the underdog.”
Missing in this explanation of the Jewish tendency toward liberalism is the role of religious tradition, represented, for example, by the Torah’s oft-repeated injunction, “Do not oppress the stranger, for you were strangers in the land of Egypt.” Do such religious mandates have a meaningful impact on ethical behavior, or must one continue to live as such a stranger oneself — with all of the tribulations that Jewish history has included — in order to develop and sustain this empathic perspective that Wolfe embraces?
Questions of homeland and diaspora also loom large in Adam Rovner’s “In the Shadow of Zion: Promised Lands Before Israel,” which excavates the history of the territorialist movement — a series of attempts to develop a Jewish homeland wherever one could be established. That concept will be familiar to readers of Michael Chabon’s counterfactual novel “The Yiddish Policemen’s Union,” set in a Jewish colony in Alaska.
The first such effort took place in the early 19th century in New York, when Mordecai Noah proposed the Jewish state of Ararat on the Niagara River. But the movement acquired new momentum at the end of the century when, with pogroms sweeping Russia, the desire to bring Jews out of Eastern Europe acquired great urgency.
The Zionist response to these circumstances was to create a Jewish national home in the land of Israel. But territorialists, feeling a sense of emergency, thought it unrealistic that a land with miles of desert, malarial swamps, an existing Arab population and inhospitable Turkish rulers would see a Jewish state come to fruition any time soon. Meanwhile, Europe’s colonial powers oversaw vast holdings of sparsely inhabited lands, some of which might hold promise as places of refuge and self-rule for Jews escaping oppression.
The best known of these options, known as the Uganda Plan (although the British-controlled land that was under consideration lies in modern day-Kenya), actually had widespread support among many Zionists, including Theodor Herzl and Eliezer Ben-Yehuda, the father of modern Hebrew. When Herzl brought the proposal to the Sixth Zionist Congress in Basel in 1903 — not as a replacement of the movement’s goal of establishing a state in Palestine, but as an interim stage — the majority of attendees voted to investigate the option. However, the sizeable Russian delegation stormed out in vehement protest and branding Herzl a traitor.
The Uganda Plan did not materialize, nor did subsequent attempts to develop Jewish homelands in Angola, Madagascar, Suriname and Tasmania. But these largely forgotten stories, in Rovner’s telling, are compelling ones.
The chapter on Tasmania is especially poignant. Isaac Steinberg, an Orthodox Jew who had served as Lenin’s first commissar of justice in the Bolshevik government, came to Australia during the Nazi era in the 1930s in hopes of establishing a place of refuge for Jews in one of the continent’s northwestern territories. A young Christian from Melbourne named Critchley Parker had a different idea, persuading Steinberg of the merits of settling Jews in an uninhabited portion of the island of Tasmania. Unfortunately, Parker’s effort to explore and survey the territory turned disastrous. He mismanaged his supply of matches, making it impossible to create a smoke signal for rescue. He took refuge in a cave, where, before dying of starvation and exposure, he filled notebooks with a detailed plan for a new Jewish society on the island. I applaud Rovner’s act of restoring such endeavors to memory.
“At Home in Exile: Why Diaspora Is Good for the Jews” by Alan Wolfe (296 pages, Beacon, $27.95)
“In the Shadow of Zion: Promised Lands Before Israel” by Adam Rovner (352 pages, New York University Press, $35)
Howard Freedman is the director of the Jewish Community Library, a project of LearningWorks, in San Francisco. All books mentioned in this column may be borrowed from the library.