Zionism: the Jews' Greatest Betrayal

The non-Jewish Jew and the non-Arab Arab from Deutscher to Said

“And among the prophets of Jerusalem

    I have seen something horrible:

    They commit adultery and live a lie.

They strengthen the hands of evildoers

    so that not one of them turns from their wickedness.

They are all like Sodom to me;

    the people of Jerusalem are like Gomorrah.” Jeremiah 23-14

“Go, marry a promiscuous woman and have children with her, for like an adulterous wife, this land is guilty of unfaithfulness to the Lord” Hosea 1:2

In the mid-1960s, many Western Jewish intellectuals found themselves in the midst of a debate about a question that pierced the core of their experience: who is a Jew, and what does this identity entail in the rapidly evolving modern world? What is the relationship, if any, between a Jew, Judaism, and Zionism in a world dominated by the dream of radical universal humanism? This was the decade of the birth and the peak of the New Left and its aftermath of a new era of postmodernist identity politics on which the towering figure of Edward Said will cast its shadows. As chronic pioneers, the debate of a handful of contemporary Jewish intellectuals should not just be seen as a prelude to a new universe of cultural development but as a guide to understanding the world of today, especially since Said’s polemical ontology of Zionism is nothing if not part of its most enduring legacy: Zionism as the greatest betrayal of humanity.

Is there a positive content to the Jewish identity? Can it be defined by anything that may be inherent in it? This was the question with which Isaac Deutscher’s 1966 article, Who Is a Jew, opened. Deutscher, one of the most prominent Western Marxist writers of his time and the eminent biographer of Trotsky, had started his life in Poland following the traditional path of his Orthodox family to become a rabbi. A young man with great intellect and heightened literary sensibilities growing amidst times of great revolutions and upheavals, Deutscher (1907 - 1967) soon abandoned the Midrashic and Talmudic parochialism for the great minds of European thought and letter. His conversion to Marxism at a young age was, as he saw it, a natural consummation of his embrace of European humanism. But in so doing, did this entail his abandonment of being a Jew? Not quite. At least not as he understood Judaism to be.

A decade earlier, in a lecture he gave during the Jewish Book Week at the Jewish World Congress, Deutscher sought to discuss his identity as a modern Jew, or as the title of the lecture says, a Non-Jewish Jew, and which became a definitive statement on the issue for the subsequent generations of Jewish intellectuals on the Marxist and post-Marxist Left. In the lecture, Deutscher placed himself in a particular line of modern Jewish lineage, one of “Jewish heretics,” that extends from Spinoza through Heine, Marx, Luxembourg, Trotsky, and Freud. (Freud’s annexation to a largely radical Marxist club is itself an interesting occurrence that must be examined within the broader efforts of dissolving psychoanalysis into revolutionary thought by Deutscher’s generation of Western Marxists) For Deutscher, these radicals were able to transcend the Jewish tradition and Jewry whom they found to be “too narrow, too archaic, and too constricting.” Their journey, as heretical Jews, to this great beyond ultimately formed the very substance of the greatest achievement of the Enlightenment: radical humanism. But for Deutscher, this wasn’t a rebellion or an abandonment of their Jew-ness, but rather its fulfillment, for it is exactly through being a Jew, rootless, unbelonging, and permanent inhabitant of the borderlines with all their ambiguities that Jews acquire an insider-outsider self. This out of placeness and marginality is ultimately the source of their genius, allowing them to transcend entire nations, cultures, and epochs.

In this universal portrait of Deutscher’s Jew, Judaism serves as a chronic irritant, a permanent homelessness obstructing the very possibility of reconciliation and thus inducing them “to strive for a universal Weltanschauung” the achievement of which becomes the ultimate Hegelian fulfillment and negation, Aufhebung, of Judaism itself. In the essay, Deutscher provides his Olympian view on this intellectual development in which Spinoza dissolved the Jewish God into the universal imminence of nature and Jewish ethics into his universal ethics of mankind. It was “Jewish monotheism carried to its logical conclusion and the Jewish God thought out to the end.” Then, after a brief stop in the tormented world of Heine comes the epoch of Marx in which the remnants of the metaphysical mystique that was in Spinoza get thoroughly dispelled: “The God of the Jews is money.” Marx's iconic statement from his Jewish Question was one of the earlier expositions of what came later to be known as historical materialism, the central doctrine of Marxism. In Marx’s account, Jews survived in a Christian world because they were agents of money and represented a form of particularly advanced economic organization, capitalism, in the midst of cycles of natural agrarian economies. Judaism is nothing but the religious reflection of the capitalist way of thought. With the universalization of capitalism in European societies, Marx then claimed that Europe was becoming “assimilated to Jewry.” A capitalist oppressive society is a Judaized society. Marx then postulates his solution, which will mature later in his Communist Manifesto, through the radical emancipation of society, both Jew and gentile, from Judaism, i.e. capitalism, and heralding a world of universal humanism.