Israel Studies

Israel Studies 6.2 (2001) 118-128

The Foundations of the 20th Century: Herzlian Zionism in Yoram Hazony's The Jewish State

Derek J. Penslar

Yoram Hazony's book The Jewish State: The Struggle for Israel's Soul¹ is neither scholarship nor journalism. It is a learned polemic, the work of a talented and impassioned thinker for whom facts and arguments are weapons to be marshaled in the service of a political cause. A critique of a book of this type should not content itself with disputing the validity of its evidence and arguments, which are, by the very nature of the text, little more than rhetorical devices designed to convince the reader of a particular point of view. Rather, I wish to reveal this polemic's ideological scaffolding and reconstruct the socio-cultural Sitz im Leben that made possible its production.

Despite some affinities with national-religious Zionism, Hazony's world view is essentially an incarnation of secular Revisionism, particularly in its most radical manifestations, as expressed by Uri Zvi Greenberg, Yehoshua Heshel Yeivin, and, at times, by the Revisionist leader Vladimir Jabotinsky himself. Like the Revisionists in their day, Hazony claims to be the true legatee of Herzlian political Zionism, which allegedly understood the indispensability of state power as the vehicle of Jewish national liberation and exalted the collective will as the source of the élan vital that would create a successful nation-building movement out of thin air. As in radical Revisionism, Hazony has obscured Herzl's liberal, utopian. and universalist qualities in order to provide intellectual respectability for an integral Jewish nationalism, a call for eternal sacrifice and struggle, and a monistic fetishization of the state.

Hazony's sweeping and caustic account of Zionist and Israeli history--his scorn for Chaim Weizmann, adulation of David Ben-Gurion, and boundless contempt for a host of German-Jewish intellectuals (chief among them Martin Buber)--unfolds from the eponymous linkage between Hazony's book and Herzl's classic Zionist manifesto of 1896, Der Judenstaat. ² Every generation invents its own Herzl, from the stern and tragic [End Page 118] visionary of classic Zionist ideology to the post-Zionist image of Herzl as the neurasthenic aesthete, a narcissist suffering from unrequited love. But never has Herzl been more clearly cast in his biographer's image than in Hazony's work. For not only has Hazony resurrected the Great Leader of Revisionist lore; he has made the staunchly secular Herzl into a man drawn to and captivated by Jewish religiosity. Hazony, speaking through his fictitious Herzl, sees Jewish religious fervor as an inexhaustible energy source for the machinery of the state, which is the ultimate object of sacrifice and adulation.

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Hazony devotes a substantial portion of The Jewish State to Herzl and Herzlian Zionism. The gist of his argument was adumbrated in a brief article in Commentary in 1996 ³ and developed more fully in an article published in Azure shortly before the appearance of Hazony's book. ⁴ Hazony argues that Herzl's turn to Zionism was accompanied by a religious awakening, that he envisioned an important role for religion in the Zionist movement and the Jewish state, and that Herzl's term Judenstaat clearly meant a state possessed of an overarching religious identity, as opposed to a body of individuals who defined themselves, or were defined by others, as Jews (that is, a Jewish state as opposed to a state of the Jews).

Hazony may well be correct that Herzl envisioned a polity stamped by certain unifying Jewish characteristics, but there is no reason to believe that those characteristics would be religious ones. Hazony is right that the term Juden- as a prefix in German nouns is most accurately rendered by the adjective "Jewish"; for example, diabetes was referred to in fin-de-siècle German medicine as the Judenkrankheit, the "Jewish disease." Judentum was the word for Judaism, although it could also mean "Jewry," just as Deutschtum referred to the German people as an abstract whole. Thus the prefix Juden- meant...