Jewish Autonomism
“Men suffering from historical myopia burden the future generations with the conditions of the period in which they themselves live.”
We all do our best. Well, we wish we did. Reading the work of Simon Dubnow I go back and forth between two feelings. On one hand there is a sense of excitement over an analysis of Jewish life that seems both powerful and helpful. On the other hand there are the many passages where subsequent history has undermined his arguments.
Often we say of the greats of previous generations that if they were alive today, they would be surprised to see where we have gotten to in the passage of time. Dubnow saw enough change in his own lifetime – and revised much of what he wrote repeatedly – that our present conditions might have shocked him in the first moment, but would have made sense to him once he was able to think things through.
Dubnow was the leading exponent of Autonomism, an ideology opposed to both assimilation and political Zionism. He believed that the cultural Zionism of Ahad Ha’am was much more closely compatible with Autonomism, although he sparred with Ahad Ha’am in the press over the differences that remained between them.
Dubnow defines Autonomism as a type of nationalism. There are members of the Jewish community today who oppose nationalism broadly as an inherently corrupt concept. For anarchists and libertarians, this follows logically from their philosophical beliefs. Dubnow would accept the logic of their beliefs, but would dismiss their cases, finding them outside observable history. For him, the individual exists as part of a national group, just as the individual nation exists within a group of nations.
In his letter, “The Doctrine of Jewish Nationalism,” he wrote, “we can distinguish the following stages in the evolution of national types: (1) the tribal type, (2) the territorial-political or autonomous type, (3) the cultural-historical or spiritual type. Each type is combined with the succeeding one in either mechanical or organic fashion, that is, the earlier may be preserved in the later type in its original form, or it may disappear or take on a new form.”
In the same letter further on he wrote, “The charges usually leveled against nationalism in general are also directed against Jewish nationalism. The chief point made is that it runs counter to the fundamental principle of the progress of humanity … The basic error in these arguments arises from a confusion of terms, from the failure to distinguish between the two forms of nationalism, national individualism and national egotism. National individualism … involves the striving by every people to retain its originality and to preserve the necessary internal or external cultural or political autonomy in order to insure its own free development It is the fruitful and creative will of a national group to remain true to itself, to improve and to adorn its historical forms, and to defend the freedom of its collective personality…. The freedom of the national individual flows from the freedom of the individual as a human being. … National egotism, on the other hand, means the complete rejection of these progressive principles. It represents the ambition of the ruling nationality to dominate over the dependent national groups, the desire of the national majority of a state or region to force its culture upon the national minority. It constitutes the negation of freedom and equality in relations between nationalities. National egotism is characterized by strife, hostility and aggression; national individualism fights only in self-defense.”
White nationalism and the MAGA movement are good examples of national egotism. The founders of the United States, with all of their blind-spots (slavery, the genocidal occupation of native lands, gender discrimination) can be seen as practitioners of national individualism. It is harder to identify functioning examples of national groups functioning as national individualists today. (Costa Rica, maybe. The Tibetan people in exile.) Dubnow considered the Jewish people to be a national group that had evolved to the third stage of national development, the cultural-historical or spiritual type. He believed that the Jewish nation functioned through national individualism. This seems like a fair observation of the function of the Jewish nation in his time, though Ahad Ha’am had raised an alarm about the Jewish communities’ relationship to the Arab population in the Holy Land, first briefly in his essay “Zeh Lo Ha-Derekh,” in the early 1890s, and again in reference to the killing of an Arab youth in Tel Aviv, in the 1920s. Dubnow’s view had certainly been the case throughout the long exile of the Jewish people into the 19th Century.
The nationalism of the Jewish people was a special case for Dubnow in two ways. In the first case, the Jewish people’s nationalism was a minority nationalism. In the second case, the Jewish minority was (excepting the case of the Holy Land) not a nation occupying its national homeland. Its presence and its minority status was not restricted to the territory of one other national majority, but existed among many different majority nations.
Dubnow’s primary disagreement with the Zionists was in the primacy of the role of the Jewish settlement in the Holy Land. While Dubnow did not oppose that settlement, he questioned its primacy. He favored a struggle for Jewish autonomy wherever there was a Jewish community. The common purpose that all Jewish communities could unite on was their unity in struggling for their own autonomy wherever they were. This nationalist struggle for autonomy did not require the transition from national minority to national majority. It was a struggle to lift the Jews out of subjugation towards freedom to be themselves regardless.
“The chief axiom of autonomism is that Jews in each and every country, who participate in an active measure in the civic and political life of the country, enjoy all the privileges given to the citizen not only as individuals but also as members of their national group. The Jew says in effect: ‘As a citizen of my country I participate in its civic and political life, but as a member of the Jewish nationality I have, in addition, my own national needs. In this sphere … I have the right to speak my language, to use it in all social institutions, to make it the language of instruction in my schools, to order my internal life in my communities, and to create institutions serving a variety of national purposes; to join in the common activities with my brethren not only in this country, but in all countries of the world, and to participate in all organizations which serve to further the needs of the Jewish nationality and to defend them everywhere.’”
What Dubnow sought in his advocacy of Jewish Autonomism (and autonomism in general for all minority groups everywhere) was the full measure of civil rights that we assumed (until recently) are promised to us in the United States. That he was advocating for them in Czarist Russia shows how radical he was for the place that he was in and for the Russian Jewish community that he was raised in and felt his greatest loyalty to. He participated in the Russian revolution of 1905 and organized the Folkspartay, a Jewish political party that ran a slate of candidates for the post-revolutionary Duma conceded to the Russian people by the Czar.
While I have discussed Dubnow’s relation to the Zionists, I have not addressed his strong critique of the assimilationists. I will continue this subject next week there and discuss how Dubnow’s ideas apply in our world today, vastly changed as it is from the one he knew.
[All quotes are from Nationalism and History: Essays on Old and New Judaism, by Simon Dubnow, edited and translated from the Russian, and with an introduction by Koppel S. Pinson. Philadelphia, Jewish Publication Society, 1958.]
