Questions on the Jewish Future
Last year I began with a question: would it be useful to create such a thing as Judeo-Futurism? In the course of answering that question I began with an investigation of the term Futurism and reviewed the variety of movements that have called themselves Futurist.
Italian and Russian Futurisms represented new ways of looking at experience meant to match-up with and help humanity to adjust to the speed of change that was accelerating the pace of daily life. It was not a coincidence that Futurism made such an impact in Italy and Russia. They were two of the most backward societies in Europe. The suddenness that they were finally drawn into modernity was felt more dramatically than elsewhere in industrialized Europe.
The Futurism of the Toefflers as expressed in the book “Future Shock,” was about predicting the course of technological change. For them Futurism was a way to help people deal with the speed of change so that they would not be overwhelmed by it. For them, Futurism had an element of self-help. They were more sympathetic to the average person than the Italian and Russian Futurists.
Afro-Futurism also has an element of self-help. Its purpose was to create a mythology of the Future so that American blacks could live hopeful lives based on the existence of an imaginable future where the injustices that they have experienced in the past and continue to experience today have been overcome. Afro-Futurism is a mental bridge for black Americans to walk towards unfettered self-actualization. It is a powerful tool. Afro-Futurism’s development began in the culture of 1960s America, but in the past twenty years it has begun to be recognized and applied in Africa itself and became a world movement.
What I came to understand in studying Afro-Futurism was that the vision of the future that it contained grew out of earlier black cultural work. Reading a variety of Black Utopian literature from the late 19th and early 20th century made it clear to me that, in order to understand what Judeo-Futurism might be, I would need to have a sense of the history of how the future has looked in the Jewish past.
The history of the Jewish future in the Jewish past arises out of two sources, spiritual history and the secular writing of history. By spiritual history I mean the redemptive future portrayed in the prophetic books of Torah and the subsequent post-Biblical messianic and mystical texts and folk belief. This tradition does not function on any of the scientific basis of modern historiography. At times it might refer to some item from the subject matter of secular history, but it does so only to serve its own purposes. It is a history that is happy to live outside of the narratives of others and keep unto itself. The future could be the end of time, the end of suffering, a time dominated by a messianic figure, a time of universal redemption and recognition of the truth of the one God by all, or some mystery as yet unimagined or understood (That’s right Zohar, I’m talking about you).
Jewish secular history is a much newer phenomenon. In the ancient world, Josephus wrote his histories of the Jews in the tradition of the ancients, along the lines of Herodotus and Thucydides. However, no further attempts at creating a version of Jewish history outside of spiritual history occurred until the rise of the Wissenschaft des Judentums movement, primarily in Germany in the 19th century. This movement grew out of the general climate of the enlightenment and the beginnings of Jewish emancipation in Western Europe. The goal of the writers of the Wissenschaft school was to create a secular history of the Jewish people drawn through critical reading of the whole body of Jewish texts from Biblical times forward. The vision of the Jewish future enclosed within this project was purposeful. For the increasing group of assimilating Jews, the goal was to create a sense of peoplehood outside of religious practice. Going forward, rather than being those who rejected their tradition, they could be the bearers of a proud cultural heritage.
The Wissenschaft school’s focus was backwards looking though. It anticipated the success of assimilation as a solution to the issue of the Jewish future. In Germany, it seemed that this was a path that could take no more than a single generation. Within Eastern Europe, where the bulk of world Jewry resided, emancipation was much less possible. Nevertheless, within that population there arose a group, the Maskilim, who were interested in bringing knowledge of science and mathematics, secular philosophy, political science and world literature into the experience of their community. There was a desire among them to move away from the Heder and the Yeshiva towards the gymnasium (public school) or towards secular Jewish schools. The competition between the traditional camp and the Maskilim was bitter. Despite the differences in the conditions of the societies that they were embedded in and the degree to which they had access to the secular culture around them and higher European culture, both the Wissenschaft proponents and the Maskilim agreed that the path of assimilation was the way for Jews to reach a better future.
In my exploration of Judeo-Futurism, I haven’t talked about the Haskalah or the Wissenschaft school. I began my exploration of ideas about the Jewish future with Herzl’s “Altneuland”/ “Old New Land,” because I recognized it as a Jewish Utopian novel. Herzl proposed a different vision of the Jewish Future. In his vision, assimilation was a failed concept. Non-Jews were too pathologically anti-semitic to allow the assimilationist idea to succeed. Rather, the answer for Jews was to give up on their life in the diaspora and build a secular Jewish society on some piece of land where they would dominate the life of the society there, a place where Jewishness would be normalized and Jews would be able to be a people like any other. Herzl’s great innovation was to maintain the assimilationist vision of the future Jew while resolving the one issue that condemned that vision. His future Jews would assimilate with modernity without having to assimilate with other peoples.
From there I moved backwards in time to discuss earlier figures in Zionist history going back to Moses Hess in the 1860s. Hess was closely associated with Marx and Engels early on, but over time he came to believe that national and racial struggle was more relevant than class struggle. In response to rising anti-semitism in Germany he wrote “Rome and Jerusalem: The Last National Question,” which advocated Jewish settlement in the Land of Israel as a logical choice for the Jewish future. He was before his time though and he was only recognized later for his work. Lev Pinsker in the early 1880s, in response to the wave of pogroms after the assassination of Czar Alexander II in 1881, revived Hess’s idea and the early Zionist organization Hibbat Zion was founded. Pinsker, like Hess, was not deeply educated in traditional Judaism. They came from the community of those who were already well on the assimilationist track.
In the late 1880s Ahad Ha’am became involved in Hibbat Zion and came to be the leader of Hibbat Zion after the death of Pinsker. Hibbat Zion sponsored several settlements and schools in Eretz Yisrael and as a leader of the organization he traveled to Jaffa to inspect the situation. There, he found that much ballyhooed successes were barely surviving. It became clear to him that the Hibbat Zion/Zionist goal of settlement in the land was not going to be an effective solution to the sufferings of the Jews in exile in real time. He re-framed the goal of settlement in Eretz Yisrael as an effort to found a spiritual center for the Jewish people there. That center would be the focus of world Jewry and inspire the people of Jewish communities throughout the world with a vision of an ideal evolving Jewish future.
Ahad Ha’am differed from Herzl, Hess and Pinsker in that he had a strong education in traditional Judaism and was familiar with the well-springs of Jewish messianism. While he moved towards a Maskilic practice, he still spoke the language of Jewish tradition and had internalized traditional Jewish sensibilities. He functioned like an hasidic rebbe in an environment that included Jews from a broad range of backgrounds. While he initiated the idea of Eretz Yisrael as a spiritual center, he was vague in his understanding of the importance of the diaspora. Herzl and the political zionists negated the value of the diaspora. They believed that the diaspora would just die away as the political state. Consequently, maintenance and improvement of Jewish life in the diaspora was devalued.
Simon Dubnow, a close friend of Ahad Ha’am challenged him about this in person and in print in his essay, “Negation and Affirmation of the Diaspora in Ahad Ha’am’s Thought.” Dubnow supported Ahad Ha’am’s idea of Eretz Yisrael as a spiritual center of Jewish life. However, like Ahad Ha’am, it was clear to him (based on his academic research) that the growth of population there wouldn’t make it one of the top demographic centers for a very long time. The two existing centers were the one within the Russian Empire and in the United States. Dubnow believed that the severe problems of anti-Jewish legislation, common prejudice and homicidal violence within the Russian empire (and later Soviet state) would cause the outflow that had begun in 1881 would continue indefinitely. Nevertheless, natural growth of that community, given the scale of emigration would still maintain the numbers of that community. At the same time, the community in the United States would continue to mushroom. For Dubnow, this fractured the Jewish future by location. Eretz Yisrael would be the new spiritual center, but the Russian empire would continue on as the site of the tightest community. Meanwhile, the American community would provide the economic engine that would support the maintenance of all three of these centers.
Dubnow believed that all of these communities required care, that none of them had a value that overshadowed the other. Dubnow believed in Jewish nationalism, but his definition of Jewish nationalism lacked the dogmatism of political Zionism. He believed that any place where Jews could maintain the power to exercise their own cultural sphere and not be required to assimilate and negate their Jewish identity could be a national home. He wrote, “To the same degree that the nationalist is obligated to participate in the revival of Eretz Yisrael, the Zionist who does not negate the Diaspora is obligated to participate in the revival of Israel in all countries in the world and to make use for this purpose of all the fighting weapons adopted by nations fighting for survival, even though he does not believe that the goal can be achieved in its entirety.”
Dubnow’s vision of Jewish autonomism, Jewish nationalism as a way of life that depended on Jewish communal cohesion rather than Jewish political control of specific pieces of land, was as good as any vision of the Jewish future in the years leading up to the First World War. Some refer to autonomism as Diaspora Nationalism and oppose it to Zionism, which is false. For Dubnow, Zionism was one piece of a larger autonomist vision.
After the holocaust and the establishment of the State of Israel it is unclear whether Dubnow’s autonomism can stand. It is very easy to find an Israeli to tell you that you can’t be Jewish outside of the State of Israel. And yet, most Israelis are painfully ignorant of both Jewish traditions and history. Israel as a nation has thoroughly failed to live up to the vision of Eretz Yisrael as a spiritual center that was of so much importance to Ahad Ha’am (and Dubnow).
If the primary inherited elements for imagining the Jewish future are assimilation, Zionism, autonomism and a retreat into (faux) traditionalism/messianism, can we make do? Or, do we need something else, or some new admixture of these existing ideas? (Judeo-Futurism?) What, if anything else, do we have at the ready?
