Tonight, I gave a talk to the local chapter of the Daughters of the American Revolution. Great group. Good questions asked; I will have to do a write up later. For this Monday, I want to continue my indirect response to Ta-Nehisi Coates and his writing on Israel and Palestine.
Zionism is Jewish nationalism. Full stop. It is both simple and problematic because of the context and location. We have to travel to the years after the defeat of the Emperor Napoleon the Great and establishment of the Congress of Vienna system.
Jewish thought during this period was electric with anticipation and in awe of European ideas in the Christian world. This was the era after the Enlightenment and the French Revolution, and the era of Romanticism. The Jews of Europe were taken in by the heady mixture of European power and political activity. Zionism grew out of that European moment; as such, it was ordinary, yet its position was unique.
A way I introduce this to my students is to focus on Italy, Germany, and Poland. To be succinct, I’ll focus on Germany first. The Congress of Vienna sorted the borders of Europe to create a balance of power among Austria, Prussia, Britain, Russia, and France. In many ways the big winner was Austria, though Russia also gained. The losers—other than the French—were the German people, the Italian people, and the Poles. Many looked at France and Napoleon and said, “They could do that because they had their own nation-state; we have a nation with many states.” Germany had around 30 sovereign states with their own armies and foreign policies. “Germany” was a nation; it was not a government. People responded differently to that fact.
Most Germans had Vaterlandsliebe, or love of the fatherland, which meant love of Germany as a land and its shared culture. It did not have to imply political opinions of one sort or another. Many Germans also had Lokalpatriotismus—that is, an intense political loyalty to their part of Germany. For example, there was a Kingdom of Saxony and a Kingdom of Bavaria, and a Saxon or Bavarian with Vaterlandsliebe could love “Germany” without wanting Saxony or Bavaria to cease to be independent states with their own kings, laws, and armies. However, many Germans wanted a single German monarch and parliament to rule the other German lands with one common foreign, military, and economic policy: this was Nationalismus (nationalism). Nationalism is not hatred of other countries, nor is it the wild belief in your people’s supremacy—that is chauvinism. Nationalism was a specific political position regarding a people and their governance: if you believed that Germany was one nation that needed one government, you were a nationalist. You could disagree and simply have Vaterlandsliebe—or even be a chauvinist. If you already have a nation-state then patriotism and nationalism become synonyms because the goal has been achieved. Could you call someone an American patriot if they believed that America was not a nation indivisible? Of course not. But in the German case, Germany was not a nation-state and had not been one at least for centuries, if not ever.
This is only counterintuitive because too much of our history is read backward from 1945 or 1933. Put it this way: anti-colonial movements in the Third World were usually nationalist—oppressed peoples saying, “We should rule ourselves in our home with our own sovereign government, free of foreign control.” That sounds a lot like the Polish people in the nineteenth century, with their country conquered and divided by Prussia, Austria, and—primarily—Russia. They resented that the tsar declared himself “King of Poland.” The Russians oppressed the Polish people for the better part of two centuries, from the 1770s to 1989. Poles who resisted and fought wanted a Polish government that was sovereign and ruled all Polish lands; again, they were nationalists. Their nationalism was a response to mistreatment by imperial powers. And the Italians were stuck in a mix of the German and Polish situations.
Austria ruled the Kingdom of Lombardy-Venetia in northern Italy; the papacy ruled the regions around Rome; the Kingdom of the Two Sicilies under the Bourbon dynasty ruled the south; and members of the House of Habsburg ruled in Parma, Modena, and Tuscany. Together, these arrangements meant that Italy was disunited, and, effectively, Austria was the overlord of Italy. If you were an Italian patriot who felt that the heirs of the Romans deserved to rule themselves and not be pitted against one another by rival monarchs, then the solution was, once again, national unification. Other peoples, including Norwegians, the Irish, and the Greeks, saw the solution to their problems as national independence and sovereign states for their own nationalities.
The US Civil War was a nationalist war; we just called it Unionism. Was the Union a nation-state or not? That was the argument of the Lincoln administration: the Southern slaveholder rebellion was illegal, and secession was treason. When men volunteered to fight to force the South to remain under the sovereign authority of Washington, D.C., and the US Constitution, they were fighting an avowedly nationalist cause and did not hesitate to own that. African Americans saw American nationalism as the solution to slavery: join the war effort → fight for the Union → end slavery → get citizenship as Americans. Frederick Douglass was an American nationalist, which is why he pushed for America to live up to its creed regarding everyone, regardless of racial category as opposed to a “return” to Africa or other such scheme.
And the history overlaps. The wars that unified Germany were the Second Schleswig War (1864), the Austro-Prussian or Seven Weeks’ War (1866), and the Franco-Prussian War (1870–71). The wars and campaigns that unified Italy were the First Italian War of Independence (1848–49), the Second Italian War of Independence (1859), Garibaldi’s Expedition of the Thousand and the fall of the Kingdom of the Two Sicilies (1860–61), the Third Italian War of Independence (1866), and the Capture of Rome (1870). Poland’s January Uprising insurrection against Russian rule was from 1863–64. And the US Civil War, in which American nationalism crushed an attempt at slaveholder nationalism, lasted from 1861–1865. This was an era of nationalist consolidation and resistance to foreign oppression.
Jews in Europe—facing discrimination and persecution, especially in Russia, and those watching other Jewish communities suffer—came to see a self-governing Jewish homeland as the answer. That impulse was not unusual; it matched the nationalist currents sweeping Europe. One difference mattered: location. Poles were in occupied Poland; Germans and Italians were in their divided homelands; African Americans were in America; the Irish were in British-ruled Ireland. European Jews…were not in Judea. How could they get there? That posed a problem.
Next week I will look at how Jewish thinkers considered the position of Jews in late 19th century Europe, and the early ideas, assumptions and drama around the development of Zionism.