Enlightenment, Haskalah, and the State of Israel
Fania Oz-Salzberger
2020
The European Legacy
This article charts the broad and transforming effects of the European Enlightenment and the Jewish Haskalah on Zionism and on modern Israel's government, judiciary, and political discourse. It traces this complex legacy using a semantic distinction between two Modern Hebrew terms for the Enlightenment, haskalah and ne'orut, that illustrates their importance in the political and discursive legacies of the State of Israel. The article then explores the recent populist and nationalist assaults
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... inst some of these legacies. independence of the judicial branch of government, and the freedom of thought and public debate. I will be using "the Enlightenment" to denote two clusters of ideas. The first is the modern quest for political liberty, hailing from John Locke, Voltaire, the Scottish Enlightenment, and the American Founders, and combining early modern republicanism with liberal demands for individual freedom and civil equality. The second cluster is cultural, drawing on Giambattista Vico, Adam Ferguson and some of his Scottish contemporaries, and J. G. Herder. During the nineteenth century, some elements in the political cluster evolved into radicalism, while others helped construct the foundations of modern liberal democracy. At the same time, some elements in the cultural cluster shifted toward extremist nationalism, nurtured by the Romanticist movement, and into colonialist supremacism. A more temperate current, which advocated non-hierarchic respect for cultural differences, was inspired by Vico, Ferguson, and Herder and underpinned moderate national consciousness. As a result of these parallel divisions, both Marxism and ultra-nationalism retreated from their Enlightenment roots. By contrast, political liberalism and the non-aggressive model of national culture were able to retain some of their Enlightenment heritage, and consequently remained mutually compatible. Significantly, almost all of the physical and intellectual forces attacking European Jews in that period were anti-Enlightenment in their intellectual orientation: the Russian-Orthodox and Catholic churches, extremist Christian currents within them, the Czar's conservative advisors, corrupt administration and paramilitary henchmen; reactionary elites of the Habsburg and Prussian Empires; anti-modernists blaming Jews for industrialization and urbanization; harbingers of modern "scientific" racism in western and central Europe; and illiberal nationalists bent on ethnic purity. To all of these anti-Enlightenment movements, which often overlapped, the Jews served as a specific and symbolic scapegoat. There was also, to be sure, rampant salon anti-Semitism in purportedly enlightened circles, from French and British wellheeled milieus to German and Austrian drawing rooms. Some of the Enlightenment thinkers themselves, notably Voltaire, made anti-Semitic remarks. Once divested of its universalist and rights-equality threads, the Enlightenment's nineteenth-century legacy could easily dissolve into facile acculturement, or give way to rampant nationalism. Despite its painful causes, mainstream Zionism was essentially moderate and liberal until the end of the twentieth century. It nevertheless had serious flaws, largely due to the intertwined catastrophes of the Holocaust and the Palestinian Naqba. These catastrophes were dissimilar in scope and moral intentionality, and from the viewpoint of Zionism, one was a horrible realization of its warnings. The other emanated from the diplomatic civil and military failure of Arab leaders, alongside Zionism's negligence of equality for the Arabs, which both Theodor Herzl and pacifist Zionists (Martin Buber's Brit Shalom group, among others) proscribed. Israel's existence was thus affected by external anti-Enlightenment forces and by antiintellectual forces more than any other modern country. It also caused injuries, political and legal, which contradicted its stated Enlightenment values as spelled out in its Declaration of Independence. Nevertheless, the key Enlightenment principles enshrined in liberal democracy prevailed, albeit under increasing attack, and these legacies have come under attack from the political left and, more ominously, from the political right. This article offers a road map of modern Israel's Enlightenment legacies. It reviews the relevant Hebrew terminology, distinguishing between the partially overlapping 802 F. OZ-SALZBERGER
doi:10.1080/10848770.2020.1800203
fatcat:yzdvy3juxrhcpgj4u2y35aoa3i