Pianko Zionism and The Roads Not Taken

C on t e n ts
acknowledgments vii
1. Breaking the Sovereign Mold:

Nation beyond State in Modern Jewish Thought 1
2. “Sovereignty Is International Anarchy”:

Jews, World War I, and the Future of Nationalism 26
3. Text, Not Territory: Simon Rawidowicz,

Global Hebraism, and the Centering of Decentered National Life 61
4. Making American Democracy Safe for Judaism:

Mordecai Kaplan, National Civilization, and the Morality of Zionism 95
5. From German Zionism to American Nationalism:

Hans Kohn, Cultural Humanism, and the Realization
of “the Political Idea of Judaism” 135
6. Zionism, Jewish Peoplehood,

and the Dilemmas of Nationality in a Global Era 178
Notes 211
selected Bibliography 251
Index 263
acknowledgments v
vi acknowledgments
ac kn ow l e d g me nts
Growing up, I spent a tremendous amount of time under a huge mural

entitled “The Old and the New Palestine” in the social hall of my family’s
synagogue. The picture of muscular, sun-tanned young men and women
building up the Land of Israel had been commissioned decades earlier by
the founding rabbi of the community, Mordecai Kaplan. Even during my
childhood, the placement of this image piqued my curiosity and raised
questions in my mind about the relationship between Zionism, Israel, and
American Judaism. What relevance did this foreign vision of Jews picking
fruit in Palestine have for me, an afternoon Hebrew school student strug-
gling to vocalize ancient Hebrew liturgical passages and completely oblivi-
ous to anything more agricultural than watching the trees bloom in Central
Park? This book represents many years of grappling with these questions,
first on a personal level and later in a variety of academic settings.
I am indebted to many teachers and colleagues for nourishing and
sharpening my intellectual passions along the way. When I was an under-
graduate at Brown University, an incredibly accessible group of faculty
members in the History and Religious Studies Departments, especially
Wendell Dietrich, Mary Gluck, and Harold Roth, introduced me to the
critical methodologies of research and academic scholarship and inspired
me to continue pursuing these interests at the graduate level.
Paula Hyman, my dissertation adviser at Yale University, generously
shared her wisdom and innovative approaches to Jewish history. She has
far surpassed any expectations I had about the role my dissertation super-
visor would play in mentoring me and shaping my career in academia. I am
deeply grateful for her ongoing support. As members of my dissertation
vii
acknowledgments vii
committee, Jon Butler and Frank Turner pushed me to situate my research
within the larger context of modern intellectual history and religion in
America. Arnold Eisen welcomed me during the year I spent as a visiting
student at Stanford University. His approach to modern Jewish thought
added an important layer to my research, and he has remained a friend
and an important sounding board for my ideas throughout the years. I feel
so fortunate to have studied with a group of individuals who I admire so
much as both scholars and as people.
The University of Washington’s Jackson School of International Stud-
ies has been an ideal place to work and teach since 2004. I have enjoyed
fruitful collaborations with my colleagues here: in the classroom, in my
scholarship, and within my departmental setting. Working with the Jack-
son School’s interdisciplinary faculty has encouraged me to view the study
of Jews and Judaism as a lens for addressing pressing global political, eco-
nomic, and cultural issues. Anand Yang, Director of the Jackson School,
and Paul Burstein and Gad Barzilai, chairs of the Samuel and Althea
Stroum Jewish Studies program during the last five years, all worked tire-
lessly to facilitate my transition to the university and to make sure that I
have had the resources and support necessary to succeed here.
My participation in the UW Jewish Studies program has enabled me
to meet superb colleagues from across the university, including Richard
Block, Susan Glenn, Kathie Friedman, Martin Jaffee, Scott Noegel, Naomi
Sokoloff, and Robert Stacey. I have also benefited from working closely with
Joel Migdal, who has provided thoughtful feedback on my project and pro-
fessional advice. The process of organizing a conference on Jewish political
thought with Michael Rosenthal gave me a chance to hone my approach to
the topic. Until last year, I was fortunate enough to have Sarah Abrevaya
Stein as a colleague and neighbor. It was her advice that encouraged me to
find my own voice during the process of revising this manuscript. Finally, it
has been a pleasure to get to know Althea Stroum who, along with her late
husband Samuel, had a great vision for Jewish Studies at UW and around
the country; it is an honor to occupy the chair that bears their names.
This book has also benefited from the feedback of a number of talented
senior scholars at other universities who have gone out of their way to
share their thoughts about this project. The imprint of my discussions with
David Myers about the history of Jewish nationalism and Zionism appears
throughout the following pages. I am thankful to have found in him such
a sharp and intellectually demanding conversation partner; he has been
instrumental in both refining and affirming the theoretical framework of
this book. For many years, Deborah Dash Moore has taken the time to
viii acknowledgments
share her expertise and guidance. She encouraged me not to shy away from
making bold statements, and in particular pushed me to use the language of
Zionism more explicitly as the link between the subjects of this work. Derek
Penslar offered his insightful feedback on several chapters of the manu-
script at an early stage in the process. I have also benefited from exchanges
about this material at conferences and in other settings with Michael Alex-
ander, David Biale, Eric Goldstein, Tony Michels, Riv-Ellen Prell, Jonathan
Sarna, Mel Scult, and Steven Zipperstein. Special thanks to Steven Ascheim,
Yfaat Weiss, and Christian Wiese for inviting me to participate in a confer-
ence on Hans Kohn at the Hebrew University, where feedback from both
the organizers and participants honed my own understanding of Kohn’s
life and thought. I am doubly appreciative to Benjamin Ravid, the son of
Simon Rawidowicz. Ben warmly welcomed me to his house and permitted
me access to his father’s archival material. In addition, he read the book’s
chapter on Rawidowicz with great attention to detail, confirming biographi-
cal details and the timeline of his father’s publications.
My participation in several writing groups over the years has put me
in conversation with a talented group of young scholars and helped me
improve my work in a supportive peer community. Deena Aranoff, Mara
Benjamin, Lila Corwin Berman, Rebecca Kobrin, James Loeffler, Avinoam
Patt, and Daniel Schwartz read through countless drafts of this material
during my graduate school years, offering both encouragement and sug-
gestions on my dissertation project. Since arriving at the University of
Washington, I have met regularly with several colleagues in the history
department to exchange work and ideas, including Purnima Dhavan, Elena
Campbell, Florian Schwarz, David Spafford, and Adam Warren. Members
of the University of Washington History Reading Group have also imparted
their collective wisdom regarding several chapters. It goes without saying
that I take full responsibility for what has emerged as the final product of
years of discussions with all these individuals.
Wiebke Light, Hannah Pressman, and Or Rogovin were kind enough
to review some of my German and Hebrew translations, and Amy Smith
Bell lent her keen editorial eye to the manuscript. Collecting the primary
source material for this book required the help of talented archivists from
around the globe: Ellen Kastel of the Jewish Theological Seminary in New
York, Fred Krome of the American Jewish Archives in Cincinnati, Michael
Simonson and Molly Hazelton of the Leo Baeck Institute in New York,
Colin Harris at the New Bodleian Library in Oxford, and numerous staff
members at the Central Zionist Archives and the National and University
Archives, both in Jerusalem.
acknowledgments ix
A number of institutions and foundations made this project possible
through their financial largess. A stipend from the Wexner Graduate Fel-
lowship supported my graduate studies. Moreover, the professional staff
of the Wexner Foundation during my tenure as a fellow—especially Elka
Abrahamson, Bob Chazan, Cindy Chazan, and Larry Moses—provided
invaluable professional support, inspiration, and mentorship. A fellowship
from the Center for Jewish History in New York enabled me to take full
advantage of their archival holdings. More recently, the Royalty Research
Fund at the University of Washington facilitated the completion of this
book by providing teaching release time while I worked to complete the
writing process. The Samuel and Althea Stroum Jewish Studies program at
the University of Washington has furnished travel grants for research trips
and, along with the Jackson School of International Studies, dedicated sub-
vention funds toward the book’s publication.
I am honored that this book is included in the Modern Jewish Experi-
ence series at Indiana University Press. Janet Rabinowitch, the director of
the press, has had great faith in this project and has impressed me with her
professionalism, attention to detail, and efficiency. Thanks to Joyce Rappa-
port for skillfully copyediting the manuscript and to Managing Editor Miki
Bird for pushing the publication process through in a timely fashion.
My family has had more influence on this project than they probably
realize. The experiences of my parents, Rina and Howard Pianko, as Jewish
immigrants in the United States with close family ties to Eastern Europe
and Israel, put the realities of twentieth-century Jewish history and the
dilemmas of Jewish peoplehood front and center in our home. My broth-
ers Daniel and Gideon, my sister-in-law Melissa, and my in-laws Alan and
Neda Nussbaum have lived through many years of hearing me talk about
this project and always encouraged me to push forward. My daughter,
Yona, born during the final stages of my work on this manuscript, will,
I hope, have no recollection that one of her first sentences was “Daddy
working.” I will certainly remember watching her hop past my home-office
door quizzically asking, “What doing?” Such moments put the stress of
completing a book manuscript in its proper perspective. My wife, Rachel
Nussbaum, has been my strongest supporter, intellectual partner, and
emotional guide as I have navigated the personal and professional journey
leading to the publication of this book. I cannot thank her enough for the
hours she has spent helping me generate new ideas, reading my work, and,
most important, believing in my abilities as a scholar and teacher. It is to
her that I dedicate this book.
x acknowledgments
z ion i sm a n d t h e roa ds n ot tak en
acknowledgments xi
xii acknowledgments
— 1 —
Breaking the Sovereign Mold

Nation beyond State
in Modern Jewish Thought
“What will become of the Jewish people?” Israeli novelist and Zionist
provocateur A. B. Yehoshua’s answer to this question stunned a crowd of
American Jewish leaders who had gathered at a major conference of the
American Jewish Committee in 2006. Yehoshua argued that he saw quite a
limited future for Jews in the diaspora. Even more infuriating to his audi-
ence, however, was his insistence that he “would not cry” if Jews were to
disappear from the diaspora.1 Although framed in a particularly insensi-
tive fashion, Yehoshua’s comments reflected a logic based on classic princi-
ples of Zionist ideology and its understanding of Jewish nationalism. They
echoed an ideology of Zionism associated with “statism” that had been
popularized by Prime Minister David Ben Gurion after the founding of
the state.2 Ben Gurion believed that only political independence would res-
cue Jews from their perverse existence as a religious community in exile,
ensure their normalization as a modern people, and restore their place as
active participants in the world.
Like Ben Gurion, Yehoshua believed that complete membership in the
nation of Israel required participation in the various aspects of life as a
citizen of the state of Israel. As he put it: “[Being Israeli] is in my skin; it’s
not in my jacket.”3 Without living in a Jewish state, he felt, and sharing the
political, economic, and social concerns of citizenship, one cannot live a
full Jewish life. The voluntary, religious bonds created by Jewishness in the
diaspora remain inferior to the political ties forged as citizens in the home-
land. Participation in Jewish self-government thus constitutes the realiza-
tion of Jewish nationalism and the basic criterion for complete expression
of national solidarity.
1
breaking the sovereign mold 1
This narrative of Jewish nationalism elevated the state to the highest
expression of Jewish national life and the culmination of Jewish history.
After thousands of years, the collective group known since biblical times
as Am Yisrael (the people of Israel), named after the patriarch Jacob or
Israel, would revive its original political, social, and cultural boundaries
of solidarity through territorial sovereignty and self-determination. Or, to
put it more succinctly, the historical nation of Israel would return to the
Land of Israel and establish the State of Israel. As a result of this transfor-
mation, the Jewish people would finally resolve their exceptional status by
embodying the doctrine of national sovereignty—the belief that nation-
hood is equivalent to statehood. Conversely, statism implied that Jews in
the diaspora would concede the possibility of creating national culture and
define themselves primarily in relationship to the state.
The most interesting part of Yehoshua’s speech, as historian David
Myers has pointed out, however, was not what he said—his belief that
authentic Jewish national life was only possible in the state was a theme
he had harped on for decades.4 Far more interesting was the reaction to
his speech. His statement sparked dozens of angry responses from Jewish
leaders within Israel and throughout the United States. The outcry against
Yehoshua’s negation of the diaspora language was so ardent that the orga-
nizers of the symposium collected the reactions in a publication called The
A. B. Yehoshua Controversy. The responses indicate that a new generation
of American and even Israeli audiences have become increasingly uncom-
fortable with the underlying hierarchical assumption of the state as the
primary address of national solidarity and the center of Jewish people-
hood (Yehoshua himself acknowledged that he was surprised that his oft-
repeated claims garnered such a vociferous outcry). This change in attitude
reflects the fact that political and communal leaders have begun to replace
the center-periphery model of diaspora–Israel relations with a vision of
partnership and mutual engagement.
Nevertheless, the perceived equivalence of the State of Israel with the
nation of Israel remains deeply embedded in popular consciousness and
Jewish studies. Indeed, the possibility of articulating Jewish nationhood
as anything but statehood seems quite puzzling. Moreover, new models of
Zionism calibrated to reflect today’s political and social trends—especially
the diminishing correlation between nation and state triggered by commu-
nication advances, demographic mobility, and the promotion of cultural
diversity—have been slow to arise. Zionism, and with it the question of
Jewish nationhood, remains stuck between a nation-state paradigm, which
2 zionism and the roads not taken

valued ethnonational homogeneity, and a future concept of Jewish national-
ism that reflects the realities of identity formation in a global era.5
What would an alternative to Yehoshua’s vision look like? New inter-
pretations of Zionism would have to address unresolved questions about
Jewish collective identity given today’s realities of unprecedented intercon-
nectedness and transnational ties. What is Zionism and how does it relate
to Jewish collective or national identity? Does Zionism have relevance out-
side the homeland for Jews and Jewish communities, beyond galvanizing
political and financial support? How can a Jewish state serve as a center for
Jews living in vastly different political, cultural, and social contexts? Can
one definition of Israel encompass Jews living both as sovereign citizens
committed to preserving a particular ethnonational tradition in the state
and as a minority group heavily invested in diversity and equal rights in
the diaspora? What is the role of Judaism within the Jewish state? Does the
Jewish experience of solidarity mirror other models of nationality, sover-
eignty, and difference developing in the twenty-first century? Addressing
these underlying issues requires that American Jewish and Israeli leaders
reopen questions that they have for decades tacitly agreed to defer.
One untapped resource for addressing these questions anew and
expanding conceptual possibilities for Zionism and Jewish peoplehood
today can be found in the rich diversity of interwar Zionism. Before the
creation of the State of Israel in 1948, the questions just raised, as well as
other, far more general questions about the relationship between nation
and state, were openly debated within Zionist ideology and Western politi-
cal thought. This book explores roads not taken in the intellectual history
of Zionism that conceptualized nation beyond state as the central teaching
of Jewish nationalism and the future organizing principle of international
relations and world politics.6
Contrary to one Zionist narrative, key Jewish intellectuals asserted
Zionism’s mission as modeling an alternative to nation-state nationalism
that would reconfigure the relationship between nationality, sovereignty,
and international politics. Zionism, they contended, outlined the blueprint
for a conception of national identity equally relevant for homeland and
diaspora populations, compatible with particular and human allegiances,
and distinct from patriotism or political citizenship. As the embodiment of
the Jewish political tradition, Zionism testified to the limits of national self-
determination on both moral and pragmatic grounds. It also exemplified
the universal benefits of cultivating national ties across spatial and political
boundaries. For these Zionists, however, the rejection of statehood as the

primary criterion of nationhood was not associated with undermining the
importance of a national homeland for Jews in Palestine. The established
categories for thinking about twentieth-century Jewish nationalism—
diaspora autonomy and (statist) Zionism—fail to capture the complex syn-
thesis of diaspora and Zionism in the positions they endorsed.
Three individuals shed light on these roads not taken in the intellectual
history of Zionism and twentieth-century nationalism more generally—the
Hebraist Simon Rawidowicz, the American Jewish thinker Mordecai Kaplan,
and the scholar of nationalism Hans Kohn. These thinkers are well known
to specialized audiences in distinct fields and disciplines for specific accom-
plishments—for example, Rawidowicz’s pathbreaking analysis of modern
Jewish intellectual history, Kaplan’s reconstruction of American Judaism,
and Kohn’s highly influential studies of the history of nationalism. Yet they
have been largely ignored as Jewish political theorists who viewed Zionism
as a platform for negotiating the fundamental categories and assumptions
of modern political thought. To capture the divergent approaches to Zion-
ism and its significance for diaspora Jewish life expressed by Rawidowicz,
Kaplan, and Kohn, I call their formulations respectively “global Hebraism,”
“national civilization,” and “cultural humanism.” At the same time, juxta-
posing their formulations recovers more than the anomalous visions of out-
lying thinkers. Rawidowicz, Kaplan, and Kohn highlight overlapping strate-
gies for theorizing Jewish identity that eschewed the binary choices—such
as homeland versus diaspora, political autonomy versus individual assimi-
lation, and ties based on consent versus descent—imposed by the logic of
nation-state nationalism and Western liberalism. The patterns evident in
their programs are shared, to varying degrees, by a wide range of thinkers
rarely studied as intellectuals grappling with a similar set of Jewish concerns
or adapting parallel strategies for contesting modern political thought.
The narrative arc of this book bridges time and space to trace the ways in
which Rawidowicz, Kaplan, and Kohn joined Jewish and non-Jewish think-
ers committed to reimagining the fundamental categories of nationality
during the period between World War I and the establishment of the State
of Israel in 1948. Placing their thought in its proper historical context indi-
cates that the evolution of the meaning of nationalism did not follow the
smooth trajectory from imperial subject to national citizen mapped onto
the first half of the twentieth century. Moreover, Zionist thinkers actively
participated in contesting this course. They negotiated emerging categories
of national identity and attempted to reconfigure its relationship to chang-
ing concepts of collective solidarity such as race, ethnicity, and religion.
The acceptance of self-determination as the primary right of national

movements and the realization of Jewish statehood marginalized these
voices. Ultimately, Rawidowicz, Kaplan, and Kohn were unable to shape
Zionism according to their understanding of Jewish nationalism. During
their careers, the three moved from the center of Zionist thought and activ-
ism to being ideological outliers. Precisely because of their failed efforts to
create a lasting counternarrative in Zionist thought, however, Rawidowicz,
Kaplan, and Kohn provide a perspective from which to critically assess
Zionism’s meaning and relevance, past, present, and future.
These forsaken figures offer a cautionary tale about equating contin-
gent historical expressions of Zionism and nationalism with those concepts
understood today as normative. Rawidowicz, Kaplan, and Kohn saw them-
selves as navigating a constant course while the discourse of Zionism radi-
cally changed around them. They did not leave Zionism; rather, Zionism left
them outside its evolving ideological parameters. In order to reintegrate these
roads not taken into the historical narrative of Zionism, this book deliber-
ately stretches contemporary notions of nationalism and Zionism to include
expressions no longer considered within the definition of the term. Recover-
ing their struggles to theorize outside the crystallizing nation-state paradigm
underscores the knotty issues faced by Jewish intellectuals in the interwar
period and chronicles the innovative approaches devised to address them.
One would think that the fascination of more recent scholarship with
transnational associations, minority rights, and the moral limits of sovereignty
should have sparked increased interest in Jewish conceptions of nationalism.
Jewish communities have exemplified the possibility of creating cultural, reli-
gious, and legal ties across territorial and geographic borders. In the premod-
ern period, for example, Jews had a rich tradition of self-government, civil
autonomy (including taxation and a separate legal system), and political orga-
nizations that spanned feudal realms. In the modern period the Jews repre-
sented the classic other within European nationalism. This position led Jew-
ish intellectuals and leaders to pioneer strategies for parrying the demands of
national integration and for conceptualizing new categories of identity. Since
the late 1940s, Jews have grappled with being a global population increasingly
split between multiple diaspora centers and a state in the national homeland.
In reality, however, Jews have remained largely invisible in the writ-
ings of scholars who have engaged this growing discourse. Jewish political
thought has been perceived by many as, paradoxically, too integrationist
and too statist to merit serious engagement. On the one hand, the diaspora
Jewish community is viewed as a religious group happily integrated into its
host societies. Conversations within the field of ethnic studies, for instance,
rarely consider the Jewish case because Jews’ “whiteness” combined with

their economic success calls into question their status as a minority group.
On the other hand, the State of Israel, and its ideology of Zionism, is per-
ceived by both its defenders and its critics as being committed to national
sovereignty.7 As a result of these conflicting assumptions, few scholars have
considered the history of Zionism in tracing the evolution of political cri-
tiques of national sovereignty or in locating the early and influential expres-
sions of collective solidarity within and across political boundaries.8
I conclude that interwar Zionism has tremendous contemporary rel-
evance for those interested in considering the nature of group cohesion
today. The themes addressed by interwar Zionists—balancing patriotism
and particularism, reconciling liberalism and nationalism, and challeng-
ing the analytical distinctions between religion, ethnicity, and race—have
shifted to mainstream concerns. Zionism’s roads not taken thus illumi-
nate the breaks and, more important, the surprising continuities between
early twentieth-century efforts to conceptualize the boundaries of the Jew-
ish nation as distinct from political sovereignty and twenty-first century
debates about identity in an era increasingly characterized by multicul-
turalism, transnational solidarity, and minority rights. The same estrange-
ment experienced between the Jew and the nation-state, felt so palpably as
the “Jewish question” at the dawn of the twentieth century, now is felt by a
far wider swath of the world population.
The remainder of this chapter prepares the groundwork for rehabilitat-
ing these neglected expressions of Zionist thought. I introduce the book’s
three main protagonists, their formulations, and the ways in which the his-
torical lens for thinking about nationalism, both Jewish and general, needs
to be reconfigured to fully appreciate the scope of pre-state Zionism and its
contributions to political thought.
Three (Exceptional?) Roads Not Taken

The assumption that Zionism exemplifies the paradigm of the nation-state
and its attendant negation of diaspora communities was not the inevitable
outcome of Zionist ideology during the first half of the twentieth centu-
ry.9 As the discourse of European nationalism and Zionism evolved after
World War I, some Jewish intellectuals saw Zionism as an opportunity to
redefine national membership, both Jewish and, more generally, beyond
the concrete borders of homeland and state. Before the establishment of
the State of Israel in 1948, and even during the decade immediately after
independence, Zionism was pregnant with possibilities that are now con-
sidered far outside its ideological parameters, past and present. As Western

political theory and many Zionist intellectuals embraced the principles of
self-determination, other influential Jewish thinkers explored the compli-
cated and ambiguous theoretical terrain left unresolved by the still widely
accepted claim that the globe could (and should) be divided into discrete
political units with homogeneous ethnonational populations.
Against this backdrop, it is far less surprising that Rawidowicz, Kaplan,
and Kohn considered their formulations of Jewish nationalism within the
interwar ideological parameters of Zionism. This book employs a capacious
definition of “Zionism” to capture a more accurate picture of the term in its
specific historical context. These three figures were disillusioned to varying
degrees during their careers with the Zionist movement; they were even
attacked by critics as “anti-Zionist.” 10 Thus I have deliberately maintained
the language as it was used by mid-century intellectuals, even though the
theories depart from conventional readings. Employing a more expansive
definition of Zionism casts light on a set of debates and conversations that
have long been overlooked.
My first goal in assessing Rawidowicz’s, Kaplan’s, and Kohn’s concepts
of nationality side by side is to amplify a counternarrative of Zionism that
challenged the increasingly dominant paradigm of national sovereignty
between World War I and the period immediately following establishment
of the State of Israel in 1948. Born between 1881 and 1896, Rawidowicz,
Kaplan, and Kohn lived in suspended animation between the post–World
War I moment (when radical reorganization of global political structures
seemed possible) and post–World War II (when the nation-state paradigm
became dominant). The three protagonists have been forgotten as Zionist
political theorists because their ideas deviated from the normative path of
nationalism as understood both by Zionists and modern political thought
more broadly.11
Rawidowicz, Kaplan, and Kohn each began their personal and intel-
lectual journeys rooted within the diverse ideological parameters of pre–
World War I Zionism. Rawidowicz, born in northeastern Poland, moved
to Berlin, where he joined a circle of leading Hebrew authors and publish-
ers (including Israel’s future national poet, Haim Nahman Bialik). He went
on to create the first international association of Hebrew speakers, open a
Hebrew publishing house, and publish his articles on Jewish nationalism
in the leading Zionist journal, Ha’olam. Born in Prague, Kohn became a
disciple of the philosopher and Zionist Martin Buber and his writings on
Jewish nationalism as a member of the Bar Kochba circle of young Zion-
ists. Kohn served as an executive in the Zionist Organization, published
regular articles in the yishuv’s (prestate settlement) leading newspapers,

and helped found Brit Shalom, a prominent prestate organization in Pales-
tine that promoted a binational state. One of the first supporters of Zion-
ism at the Jewish Theological Seminary, Kaplan worked with leaders of the
Zionist Organization in the United States and hailed Zionism as an inte-
gral part of the reconstruction of American Jewish life in his writings.
Although their views on key issues (such as the Arab question, the
importance of diaspora communities, and opposition to national sover-
eignty) differed from others in the Zionist movement, Kaplan, Rawido-
wicz, and Kohn were not marginal or even exceptional figures. They wrote
for mainstream Zionist journals, worked for the movement, and dedi-
cated their intellectual energy toward advocating for Zionism and Jewish
national renaissance. All three viewed settlement in Palestine as central to
their project. On a personal level, they each left the diaspora to put their
ideologies temporarily into practice in the great laboratory of Palestine.
Rawidowicz, Kaplan, and Kohn developed their own understandings
of Zionism immediately after World War I—a moment in which national
normalcy was not necessarily tantamount to national sovereignty. Indeed,
the decades after the Versailles peace conference represented a period of
rapid political, economic, and cultural change during which concepts of
nation and state were debated across a wide spectrum of revolutionary ide-
ologies. Chapter 2 of this book illustrates the dynamic cross-pollination
of various transatlantic ideological networks that employed Zionism as a
theoretical tool to promote states of nations rather than nation-states as
the most stable structure for international relations. Zionism would shape
the postwar reconstruction in conjunction with programs advocating
for internationalism based on multinational commonwealths and even a
world-state.
The chapter contextualizes Rawidowicz’s, Kaplan’s, and Kohn’s ap-
proaches to Zionism by exploring shared intellectual influences and af-
finities with their mentors (specifically the cultural Zionist Ahad Ha’am
and the historian Simon Dubnow) as well as a number of their contem-
poraries and conversation partners (such as the American Zionist Horace
Kallen, the Jewish Theological Seminary professor Israel Friedlaender, the
Zionist activist Judah Magnes, and the British internationalist Sir Alfred
Zimmern).12
Across diverse ideological and geographic terrain, thinkers associated
with Zionism defined Jewish political thought in opposition to the concept
I refer to as the “sovereign mold.” This idea refers to a loosely defined col-
lection of expectations, including (1) that territorial boundaries correlate
with particular national populations, (2) that national groups have a right

to political independence, and (3) that substatist loyalties—such as ethnic,
religious, racial, or other special interest groups—must remain second-
ary to a primary allegiance to the state. Rawidowicz, Kaplan, and Kohn
inveighed against the state’s authority to demand ethnonational confor-
mity among its citizenry. Decoupling the link between nation and state
was viewed as a program for strengthening expressions of nationality and
promoting diversity within nation-states on both sides of the Atlantic.
Despite their overlapping criticism of the sovereign mold, Rawido-
wicz, Kaplan, and Kohn did not see themselves as, nor did they represent,
a particular school of Zionist thought. My second goal in juxtaposing these
particular figures is to explore three distinct and idiosyncratic visions for
Zionism as a framework for theorizing nation beyond state. (They did
know of one another during their lifetimes—a reflection of their overlap-
ping interests and shared networks around Zionist publications, intellec-
tual circles, and cultural activities. Kaplan and Kohn met at least once in
1931 at a lecture on Zionism. Kaplan indicated his admiration for Rawido-
wicz’s work in a handwritten note that he sent to Rawidowicz along with
a signed copy of his magnum opus, Judaism as a Civilization. Rawidowicz
included respectful critiques of Kaplan’s essays in his own writings. Kohn
reviewed an essay by Rawidowicz in 1929.)13
Each thinker formulated concepts of Zionism that reflected his engage-
ment with different intellectual traditions, his experiences living in differ-
ent cities around the world, his interest in writing for different audiences,
his personal journeys, and especially his relationship to Jews and Judaism.
Their visions of the basis of national solidarity range from language and
textual interpretation, to religious folkways, to universal civic ideals. So,
too, did they disagree on the ideal level of national preservation in the
diaspora—from Rawidowicz’s communitarian emphasis on diverse cul-
tural groups to Kohn’s concept of nationalism as the historical force engen-
dering human integration.
Rawidowicz’s global Hebraism, the subject of chapter 3, introduced the
most highly developed twentieth-century expression of deterritorialized
and decentralized Jewish nationalism. Not until recently, however, have
scholars assessed Rawidowicz’s significance, beyond his contributions to
the Hebrew Renaissance during the 1920s in Weimar Germany and the
scholarship he produced as an exiled professor in Great Britain and the
United States during the 1940s and 1950s.14 Rawidowicz’s symbolic insis-
tence on writing in Hebrew for a diaspora audience certainly contributed
to the neglect of his scholarship. Global Hebraism rejected the primacy of
Palestine and instead envisioned national life flourishing irrespective of

locale or political context. According to this model, the Hebrew language
and the culture of textual interpretation would generate fluid boundaries,
creating a dynamic equilibrium between integration and autonomy far
more consistent with centuries of Jewish life than state-framed definitions
of Jewish nationality.
Despite the classic Hebrew sources and traditional references embed-
ded in his writings, Rawidowicz developed a theory of collective solidarity
that anticipated modern theories of language as shaping collective bound-
aries, developed in the context of hermeneutics and poststructuralism. His
reliance on traditional Jewish sources, classical rabbinic Hebrew, and an
explicit rejection of secular terminology (language he refers to as lo’az, the
rabbinic term for non-Jewish influence) suggests at best a disinterest (more
likely, an aversion) to engaging with European political thought. The form
he selected to convey his reading of Jewish identity and history, however,
belies a thoughtful reading of rabbinic Judaism’s concept of deferred mes-
sianism and its intellectual centers in both Jerusalem and Babylon as a
sharp critique of what he considered the messianic impulse in German and
Zionist political thought. As Rawidowicz moved westward, from Germany
to England and then to the United States, he expanded his critique of the
nation-state to apply to liberal democracies as well. Although he implicitly
dealt with general questions, he remained focused on writing for a Jewish
audience and within the language (both literally and figuratively) of tradi-
tional sources.
The theory of national civilization, laid out most extensively in Kaplan’s
Judaism as a Civilization (1934), defined membership on the grounds of
shared social associations, religious practices, cultural engagements, and
connection to a homeland. Chapter 4 explores the ways in which Kaplan’s
political thought sought to blur the emerging boundaries between religion,
nationality, and race by constructing a new political category of nationality,
called “civilization,” as a model for Jews in both the United States and Pal-
estine. Kaplan articulated a moral argument that viewed particular attach-
ments as the most effective path toward guaranteeing individual rights and
creating harmony between different groups. Thus he turned the meaning
of progress on its head by linking civilization with national diversity, not
ethnocultural uniformity.
Kaplan’s national civilization not only attempted to reconstruct Juda-
ism, but more important, to reconstruct American democracy to make
space for minority national groups. The chapter challenges Kaplan’s leg-
acy as arguably the most influential American Jewish thinker because of
his ability to transpose Judaism into an American key.15 This conventional

reading overlooks Kaplan’s notion of civilization as contributing to a trans-
atlantic conversation about nationality intended to transform Zionism and
American nationalism.
Chapter 5 argues that Kohn, considered one of the “founding fathers of
academic studies of nationalism,” transformed key principles of nation-
alism first outlined in Zionist tracts, such as the German-language Die
Politische Idee des Judentum (The political idea of Judaism; 1924) and the
two-volume Hebrew book, Perakim letoldot hara’ayon hatzioni (A history
of Zionist thought; 1929), into dozens of influential scholarly books such
as his Idea of Nationalism (1944) and American Nationalism (1957).16 High-
lighting continuities between Kohn’s seemingly disconnected careers as
a German Zionist and an American scholar complicates the very oppo-
sitional dichotomy between civic and ethnic concepts that he is credited
with popularizing. The civic-versus-ethnic contrast, still referred to as the
“Kohn dichotomy,” erases the tension between Western liberalism and
romantic nationalism in Kohn’s personal experiences and historical analy-
sis. His theory of nationalism is more accurately remembered as cultural
humanism—a term that closely captures his enduring debt to the Zionist
ideology that shaped his worldview. In particular, Kohn retained an appre-
ciation for the moral and pragmatic value of preserving groupness, and
even national diversity, within the state as the path toward human integra-
tion and universal equality. Exploring his German Zionism suggests the
importance of rereading one of the most important theories of American
nationalism.
Rethinking the Meaning, Function, and Scope of Nationality

These three expressions forged within the rich ideological firmament of
interwar Zionism—Rawidowicz’s global Hebraism, Kaplan’s national civi-
lization, and Kohn’s cultural humanism—never reached fruition. Indeed,
their failure to influence Zionism was so great that it is hard to imagine
that thinkers engaged in questions of defining nationality outside of state-
hood began their careers as self-defined Zionists. What factors limit our
ability to integrate figures such as Rawidowicz, Kaplan, and Kohn into the
historical narrative of Zionism?
The victory of the very conceptual vocabulary of Zionism, and nation-
alism more generally, which Rawidowicz, Kaplan, and Kohn sought to
replace, impedes the recovery of Zionisms opposed to the sovereign mold
and an understanding of its relationship to larger trends in political thought.
A singular idea of Zionism, based on a conception of Jewish normalization

through self-government and territorial sovereignty, emerged that over-
shadowed the diverse possibilities that had characterized the movement.
As a result of this process, historians and theorists have been largely cut off
from Zionism’s heterogeneity and pioneering engagement with the dilem-
mas of nationality and sovereignty.
Considering Rawidowicz, Kaplan, and Kohn within the proper histori-
cal context also requires a working definition of nationality that expands
the term’s contemporary meaning, function, and geographic scope. Ra-
widowicz’s, Kaplan’s, and Kohn’s itinerant lives—constantly shifting
between geographies, ideologies, and intellectual networks—mirror their
intellectual dislocation and illuminate the anxieties that accompany
eschewing the dominant currents of their times. I thus interpret formula-
tions of nationality as a revealing window that sheds light on personal and
theoretical attempts to reconcile solidifying categories of modern Jewish
life and the construction of political ideologies. Moreover, considering the-
ories of nationality within their local and global contexts demonstrates
that theories of nationality are not complete, consistent, and systematic
programs. Rather, they have evolved as an ongoing project that reflects the
equivocal conclusions and conflicting pulls felt by individual theorists. The
inner contradictions and semantic parameters, best captured through
intellectual biography, created an intellectual bricolage that belies a consis-
tent trajectory within each thinker.17
The working definition of nationality employed throughout this book
amplifies three dimensions of Jewish political thought that have been
eclipsed by nation-state narratives—the theoretical ambiguity of formu-
lating nationality outside the sovereign mold, the role of Jewish political
thinkers as active agents in the development of Western political thought,
and the transnational and interdisciplinary conversation that links theo-
rists from disparate geographic and intellectual milieus.
Including Counterstate Paradigms in the Study of Zionism

A nation, the historian Hugh Seton-Watson wrote in 1977, is a “commu-
nity of people, whose members are bound together by a sense of solidarity,
a common culture, a national consciousness.” Seton-Watson explains the
term “state,” in direct contrast, as “a legal and political organization, with the
power to require obedience and loyalty from its citizens.”18 These definitions
differentiate between collective ties based on historical, cultural, ethnic, or
religious bonds and connections forged by the political rights of the sover-
eign power over its citizens. Seton-Watson’s position on the importance of

retaining an analytical distinction between nation and state, however, is a
minority one among scholars of nationalism. Theories of nationalism that
assume a congruence between the two terms overshadow efforts by scholars
committed to disarticulating notions of nation and state.
The historian Ernst Gellner has exemplified this tendency with his claim
that nationalism “[is] primarily a political principle, which holds that the
political and the national unit should be congruent.”19 Although scholar-
ship on nationalism has spawned diverse ways of thinking about the nature
of nationality, the literature tends to share Gellner’s basic assumption—
namely, that statehood remains an essential component of national identity,
either as the spark leading to the construction of national culture or as the
reflection of national aspirations. Indeed, his claims reflect a basic assump-
tion of the modernist paradigm in the study of nationalism: nationalists,
motivated by various economic, political, and social forces linked to the
modern state, “invented” the nation where it did not previously exist.20 In
the words of the historian Anthony Smith, one of the most vocal opponents
of this approach, this “became the standard orthodoxy by the 1960s.”21
The frequent slippage in terminology between “nation” and “state” is
implicitly reinforced in such key terms as “the United Nations,” “trans-
national,” “international relations,” and even with the hyphen in the term
“nation-state” itself. The very language used for discussing these concepts
in today’s political vernacular reflects the enduring premise that homo-
geneous ethnonational populations correspond directly to sovereign ter-
ritories. Expressions of nationality that contested this dominant trend have
been sidelined from the mainstream narrative of political thought.22 For-
mulations of nation as distinct from state, when they are addressed, are
often viewed as organic, familial, or ethnic—as opposed to rational or civ-
ic—and thus as potentially morally problematic because of the emphasis
on national partiality over individual rights.23
An enduring bias in theories of Western liberalism and modernization
nourishes this presumed clash. In the late nineteenth century, the philoso-
pher and economist John Stuart Mill argued that “boundaries of govern-
ment should coincide in the main with those of nationalities.”24 For Mill,
only a homogeneous national culture would ensure the equality of all citi-
zens and create the shared sense of membership necessary to establish a
successful state. The inclination toward applying a nation-state paradigm
as a lens to explain the historical development and to define the guidelines
of nationalism also has deep roots in a perceived opposition between indi-
vidual rights and ethnonational diversity. National memberships based on
political ties to the state are more inclined to preserve individual rights,

human values, voluntary associations, and toleration of ethnocultural dif-
ferences. Ethnic nationalism, on the other hand, remains associated with
tribal attachments rooted in descent, coercion, or territory. As a result, lib-
eral scholars remain suspicious of affirmations of national solidarity out-
side of statehood.
The close association of nation and state in scholarship on both nation-
alism and liberalism makes it difficult to imagine a liberal nationalism
compatible with particular solidarity across territorial and political bound-
aries—precisely the theoretical space within which Rawidowicz, Kaplan,
and Kohn placed their conceptions of Zionism. Fortunately, increasing
numbers of scholars have begun to question the practical or moral efficacy
of limiting concepts of nationalism to the congruence criteria outlined by
Gellner and other key shapers of the field. Singling out the yearning for
political self-determination as the primary historical or normative crite-
rion for defining nationality fails to capture the historical diversity, psycho-
logical reality, and social networks that characterize national ties.
Approaching the study of nationalism from multiple disciplines and per-
spectives, such commentators as the philosopher Charles Taylor, the legal
theorist Chaim Gans, the political theorist Aviel Roshwald, and the multi-
cultural advocate Will Kymlicka have dramatically expanded the definition
of nationality to include nonstatist expressions.25 The overlapping interest
in broadening the analytical tools for thinking about nationality reflects a
greater appreciation for the failure of the nation-state model to explain the
perseverance of national bonds in the face of contemporary developments.
These interventions provide a methodological framework for my own more
inclusive definition of national identity. In particular, subsequent chapters
adapt the terms suggested by the historian Rogers Brubaker. Brubaker dis-
tinguishes between “state-framed” and “counterstate” typologies. While the
first category includes national movements primarily focused on achieving
territorial sovereignty, he explains the latter as formulations that are “dis-
tinct from or in opposition to an existing state.”26
Integrating counterstate models into the study of Zionism points the way
toward rethinking historical approaches to Jewish political thought. Jew-
ish studies have lagged behind other fields in considering the diverse scope
and functions of twentieth-century conceptions of nationality. This does
not mean that Jewish studies scholars have been insensitive to modern Jew-
ish political thought as a variegated phenomenon. Rather, the ideological
and practical expressions of Jewish nationality have been largely interpreted
within categories derived primarily from state-seeking, rather than coun-
terstate, expressions. As a result, the master narrative of modern Jewish

political thought tends to be recast through the prism of two avenues for
normalizing Jewish identity in the modern world—the nationalists com-
mitted to achieving national sovereignty in the homeland and the integra-
tionists dedicated to affirming Jews’ patriotic attachment to their country of
citizenship. Yet these opposing narratives trace their genealogy to the same
process of translating the ambiguous contours of the people of Israel into
the either/or categories compatible with the world’s political organization
into discrete political, territorial units with homogeneous national popula-
tions.27 Either demands statehood as the rightful expression of nationality
or rejects the vocabulary of nationality and instead claims more acceptable
categories for minority identity, such as religious creed or ethnicity.28
This binary rubric accurately outlines the broad map of twentieth-
century mainstream political movements and explains the ultimate shift
toward two distinct modes of Jewish life as a nationality in Israel and a
religious community in America today. It also enables scholars to organize
the tremendous diversity of modern Jewish politics, trace the schools that
galvanized mass movements during the twentieth century, and document
the increasing ideological polarization of a revolutionary era. However, a
teleological reading of the evolution of modern Jewish politics as leading
inevitably toward the establishment of the State of Israel and the domi-
nance of American Jewry following the Holocaust obscures the fluid pos-
sibilities and elastic contours of interwar political ideologies that charac-
terized the first half of the twentieth century.
Expanding the construct of Zionism to include counterstate expressions
provides a more inclusive approach that integrates formulations excluded
from studies of Zionism particularly and discussions of nationalism more
generally. State-framed assumptions anachronistically assume that there
was widespread consensus in the interwar period that a sovereign state was
the fundamental criterion of Zionism. Yet it was not until the 1940s that
statehood became the official policy of the Zionist movement. Nevertheless,
the central dichotomies that shape the categorization of Zionism versus
diaspora nationalism in the first half of the twentieth century assume a great
deal of clarity around the issue of Zionism’s interwar objectives, specifically
around the goal of creating a Jewish state and the role of the diaspora.
Analytical distinctions between political ideologies based on advocating
for autonomy versus integration, here versus there, and nationality versus
religion fail to fully capture the ambiguities that characterize global Hebra-
ism, national civilization, and cultural humanism.29 Rawidowicz, Kaplan,
and Kohn fiercely resisted the urge to be swept up in either of the two com-
peting political theories that had solidified by the mid-twentieth century:

(1) Zionism’s definition of Jewish national identity as equivalent to citizen-
ship in the homeland, and (2) a diasporist approach that emphasized social
and cultural integration for a religious minority. Instead, they positioned
their theories of Jewish nationalism as opposed to both the homogenizing
demands of nation-state nationalism for ethnoreligious conformity and the
Zionists’ vision of implementing precisely such a vision in Palestine.
Taken together, Rawidowicz, Kaplan, and Kohn shed light on a gray area
in prestate ideologies that blur boundaries between Zionism and diaspora
nationalism.30 Although there were certainly vocal figures who defined the
ideological poles, there was also a continuum of positions that regularly
crossed what would now be viewed as ideologically incompatible positions.
These formulations of Jewish nationalism did not necessarily seek the system-
atic synthesis or theoretical consistency expected by subsequent scholars.
Rawidowicz, Kaplan, and Kohn illustrate this phenomenon by incorpo-
rating positions and allegiances in their personal lives and theoretical
ruminations that are now perceived as oppositional, even oxymoronic.
Applying a counterstate category to interwar Jewish nationalism exposes a
shared set of historical predicaments, strategic solutions, and intellectual
networks far more difficult to recover when such thinkers as Rawidowicz,
Kaplan, and Kohn are placed in clear ideological camps.31 Focusing the lens
of historical scholarship on figures perceived as exceptional for muddled
positions that clash with the clarity of a state-seeking typology documents
the conflicting yearnings, irresolvable dilemmas, and opposing objectives
that characterized a wide swath of interwar Jewish politics.
There is another somewhat misleading distinction in categorizing
streams of Zionist thought that can be avoided by adapting the terminology
of counterstate nationalism. Here I speak of the distinction between politi-
cal versus cultural or spiritual Zionism. Political Zionists sought politi-
cal autonomy in Palestine and believed that Zionism needed to convince
the vast majority of Jews to leave the diaspora for the homeland. Only by
settling in Palestine could Zionism succeed in protecting Jews from their
precarious situation in the diaspora. Cultural Zionism, most notably asso-
ciated with Ahad Ha’am and Martin Buber, focused on the problem of Jew-
ish national culture. These nationalists conceived of Palestine as the center
for the renewal of Jewish life. From the homeland center, Jewish national
culture would radiate to the majority of Jews who would remain in the
diaspora. The Zionist protagonists in this book adapted many of Ahad
Ha’am’s (and in the case of Kohn, Martin Buber’s as well) conceptions of
cultural Zionism.32 They could thus be (and Kaplan has in fact been) char-
acterized as cultural Zionists.33

Yet there is a potential problem with referring to them as cultural, as
opposed to political, Zionists: the misconception that they are not politi-
cal thinkers. The association of national politics with the apparatus of the
state and its government presumes that concepts of Zionism that prioritized
cultural, spiritual, or religious revival had little relevance for political ques-
tions. But this is not the way in which many of Ahad Ha’am’s disciples under-
stood his theory of nationalism. As I discuss further in chapter 2, Kohn was
not alone when he commented on Ahad Ha’am’s influence on his thought:
“Under the influence of Ahad Ha’am, we were cultural rather than political
Zionists. This corresponded to my general attitude, which made me doubt
the wisdom of augmenting the number of nation-states and proud sover-
eignties, and to my distrust of reliance on numbers and power.”34
Although Kohn himself used the category of cultural Zionism, he
understood the term as a direct challenge to the state-seeking paradigm.
Whether or not Ahad Ha’am himself supported the ultimate creation of a
Jewish state, many of his disciples saw him as introducing the theoretical
foundation for Zionism’s challenge to state-seeking nationalism. Cultural
Zionism thus had a far wider significance: first, in its direct influence on
Zionist thinkers who understood their mentor as a political theorist advo-
cating for undermining the relationship between nation and state; and
second, in its largely unmapped dissemination into scholarly theories of
nationalism through the work of academics inspired by Ahad Ha’am (Sir
Alfred Zimmern, Horace Kallen, and Hans Kohn represent prime exam-
ples of this phenomenon).
Brubaker’s discussion of his own motivations for thinking about nation-
alism through state-seeking versus counterstate paradigms adds another
dimension to the historiographical value of adopting his counterstate
terminology. Reorienting the study of nationality around two legitimate
paths—one state-framed and one counterstate—neutralizes the moral
hierarchy implied by the civic–ethnic distinction. Brubaker argues that the
division negates the binary distinction between civic nationalism’s volun-
tary, liberal, and cosmopolitan principles versus ethnic nationalism’s coer-
cive, ascriptive, and intolerant tendencies.
The interwar theories of Zionism analyzed throughout this book antici-
pated efforts by Brubaker to construct alternate conceptual paradigms of
nationality as a way of contesting the false dichotomies encoded within the
division between civic and ethnic typologies. For the Zionists whom we
explore here, neither civic nor ethnic typologies, the two emerging pos-
sibilities for defining national identity, constituted a viable basis for Jewish
collective solidarity. Their understanding of nationalism was too oriented

toward particular solidarity to meet the criteria of a civic nationalism and
too concerned with individual rights to fit into the ethnic, or cultural, cri-
teria. Neither assuaged their anxiety about the plight of Jews after World
War I nor their personal sensitivity to the exclusive nature of both types of
nationalism. Jews, their sensibilities warned them, had little place in the
dominant typologies of nationalism. As a result, Jewish intellectuals had a
vested interest in contesting, even while deeply rooted within, state-seek-
ing models of national identity.
The Strategic Function of Zionism

Considering counterstate streams of Zionist ideology sheds light on a pro-
cess difficult to record from within a historical framework shaped by the
doctrine of national sovereignty: the efforts of Jewish intellectuals to refor-
mulate general conceptual definitions of nationality and sovereignty at a
moment when these terms were very much still open for debate. Cogni-
zant of a range of theoretical possibilities—including both ethnic national-
ism and civic nationalism, multinational imperialism, and socialist inter-
nationalism—Jewish thinkers creatively read and misread the dominant
theories of nationalism, internationalism, and liberalism to negotiate the
discourse of citizenship and sovereignty. Moreover, when juxtaposed,
a thematic thread emerges through the work of these intellectuals. They
attempted to create a trajectory of modernity that valued difference as the
step beyond unity. Their shared interest in recasting the telos of progress
can be seen in the promulgation of such key terms as “ethical,” “civiliza-
tion,” and “progress” throughout these theories. Jewish nationality there-
fore served as a corrective not only to the sovereign mold, but also to the
basic philosophical orientation of modernity.
In recognition of this fundamental dimension of the theories of Zion-
ism discussed throughout the book, the working definition of “national-
ity” includes the term’s mediating function at the crossroads of conflicting
intellectual and political forces.35 Studying Jewish political thought primar-
ily as an internal consideration of the ties that bind Jews to one another, or
the imitation of externally imposed categories, disregards a counterintui-
tive dimension of this discourse: the construction of Jewish nationality as
a prescription for non-Jewish theorists calibrated to negotiate and contest
the terms of Jewish social and political integration into the state and the
international order.
By adopting the very categories of identity they sought to undermine,
Jewish intellectuals engaged in a subtle dialogue with their surroundings

in a struggle to integrate those aspects of nationalist discourse beneficial to
their objectives and to transform connotations that they felt undermined
the continuity of Jews and Judaism.36 The discourse of Jewish national-
ism served as a rhetorical tool to neutralize states’ claims to cultural uni-
formity by proposing theories of citizenship that eschewed ethnonational
assimilation and tolerated, even promoted, the social and cultural auton-
omy of minority groups.37 Considering Jewish nationality as an important
site of political engagement, negotiation, and resistance in the contest for
the meaning of national identity significantly expands the ways in which
this term was deployed. Jewish nationality not only emulated but also sub-
verted dominant paradigms of Western political thought.
Reading theories of nationality as the record of grappling with Jew-
ish concerns and external political realities captures pioneering efforts
to address an enduring problem in modern politics. I am referring to the
challenge of articulating a conceptual language for preserving the status of
stateless nations. The antipathy toward recognizing “otherness” in modern
politics and philosophy remained rooted in the bedrock of foundational
assumptions connecting unity and uniformity. Only by highlighting the
particular claims concealed by the cosmopolitan rhetoric of the Enlighten-
ment, and inverting their conclusions by inserting diversity as the sine qua
non of universal harmony, could Jewish nationalists justify their demands
for collective recognition. Whether consciously or unconsciously, these
thinkers recognized the zero-sum game of identity construction.
This dilemma put Rawidowicz, Kaplan, and Kohn into a fascinating
bind. On the one hand, they could not address their concerns by passively
adapting the conceptual vocabulary of Western political thought. Existing
models of liberalism and nationalism lacked the conceptual framework for
integrating the other and separating nationalism from patriotism.38 Jus-
tifying greater degrees of collective recognition as minority groups thus
required redefining existing categories or creating alternative categories of
otherness. On the other hand, however, nationalists committed to chal-
lenging the sovereign mold consciously recognized the need to frame their
revisions within the existing categories of identity (this despite claims that
their vision of Jewish political theory emerged from Jewish sources, not the
various streams of Western political thought clearly shaping their notions
of nationality). They intended their arguments about Jewish collective
cohesion—with its distinct confluence of religion, race, history, and home-
lessness—to serve as a universal model for a broad audience of Jews and
non-Jews. Only by tweaking non-Jewish assumptions would new catego-
ries of Jewish identity gain currency. To sum up this aspect of the function

of nationalism more succinctly: Jewish nationalists were “ethnopolitical
entrepreneurs” who viewed Zionism as an effective avenue for contesting
the forces of nationalism that threatened individual and collective rights in
the homeland and the diaspora.39
Although modern national groups all had to invent national boundaries
from heterogeneous populations, the Jewish case offered unique challenges.
Demographically, Jewish communities spread across multiple geographical
areas. The proposed homeland had a small fraction of the total world Jewish
population, and the vast majority of the Jewish nation was far more interested
in moving to the United States than to the ancient homeland. Furthermore,
the Jews’ connection to Palestine was based on a two-millennia-old histori-
cal attachment, rather than an enduring tie to actually living on the land.
Finally, the ambiguous position of Judaism as a religious and ethnic commu-
nity confounded the pattern of other secular nationalist movements that did
not have to rely on religious sources to construct a national narrative.
One Zionist response to the Jewish question was to erase these abnor-
malities by shaping Judaism in the mold of national sovereignty. Rawido-
wicz, Kaplan, and Kohn had a fundamentally different approach toward
Jewish normalization than that generally attributed to Zionist solutions to
the Jewish question. This approach transposed the particular challenges of
constructing definitions of Jewish nationalism into a universal model for
other national groups to emulate. They strove to normalize Jews by “Juda-
izing” Western political thought. Zionism, they optimistically believed,
could catalyze a transformation to make stateless people the norm by exem-
plifying the ethical and pragmatic attributes of Jewish national cohesion.
Global and Interdisciplinary Perspective

One of the questions raised is, how did Rawidowicz, Kaplan, and Kohn
translate the concepts of European Zionism into models of American
democracy and Jewish communal life? For historians ever more interested
in tracing the global intellectual and social networks that linked people
and ideas outside the boundaries of the nation-state, these case studies
provide fruitful models for consideration. The émigré journeys of the pro-
tagonists and the transatlantic nature of their conversations provide intel-
lectual biographies that span diverse geographical and ideological milieus.
Indeed, global Hebraism, national civilization, and cultural human-
ism demonstrate a variety of ways in which Zionism served as a conduit
between European political thought and the evolution of what it means to
be an American.

Moreover, their interest in reconceptualizing Jewish nationality outside
of territorial and political boundaries led these Jewish thinkers to imagine
notions of collective identity that crossed nation-state lines. As a result, their
theoretical formulations, and historical interpretations, were sensitive to the
relevance of transnational bonds in shaping historical forces and processes.
Yet Jewish political history, especially within the context of the United States,
like the study of political thought more generally, is often related within the
framework of discrete geographical units. This regional approach diminishes
the role of the immigrant experience, ethnic concerns, and transnational ties
in the construction of political thought, both Jewish and American.40 Schol-
ars have tended to assume that Jews have little political history within the
United States. In the words of Naomi Cohen, a leading chronicler of Ameri-
can Zionism, “The Americans rejected the European-held philosophy of
diaspora nationalism, or the idea that the Jews constituted a political group
in countries outside Palestine.”41 Based on this understanding, American
Jewish intellectuals and leaders are interpreted as charting a different path:
the construction of a religioethnic identity that would culminate in a harmo-
nious American Jewish synthesis. This synthesis rejected nationalist claims
(even American Zionists downplayed Jewish nationalism as little more than
American patriotism) and instead embraced an identity based on religious
confession and the state’s recognition of Jews as individual citizens.
This narrative reflects important distinctions between Jewish experi-
ences on both sides of the Atlantic. The political contexts of Jews in the
United States and in Europe diverged significantly during the second half
of the twentieth century. The European political environment, particularly
in Eastern Europe, where many Jews were never granted citizenship, was
radically different from the American context. As a result, the revolution-
ary politics of both the nationalist and the socialist variety that charac-
terized this period fizzled rapidly in the United States. Mass movements
and nationalist political parties did not develop in the United States as
they had emerged during the same period throughout Central and East-
ern Europe. National minority rights clashed with the view of America
as a place of integration that eschewed nationalist claims. Furthermore,
Jews in the United States did not face the same levels of persecution that
had galvanized the demand for collective protection elsewhere. The United
States promised unprecedented political, social, and religious opportuni-
ties based on liberal individualism.
Yet the chasm separating these two political contexts implied by the
mainstream narrative of American exceptionality was far less clear to intel-
lectuals in their own lifetimes than it has become to historians chronicling

their experiences.42 Despite important sociopolitical differences, the histor-
ical record indicates that Jewish intellectuals on both sides of the Atlantic
saw the United States as a potential promised land for implementing theo-
ries of nationality, redefining sovereignty, and nurturing Jewish collective
consciousness. Theories of Zionism as models for diaspora life extended
to the United States as well. The two lands—Europe and America—shared
political realities and criticisms of nationalism that transcended the Atlan-
tic barrier that has often been projected onto chronicles of early-twentieth-
century intellectual history.43 Although Jewish nationalism has been used
in the past to underscore regional differences, this book analyzes the dis-
course of nationality and Zionism as an integral part of twentieth-century
Jewish Atlantic history.
Studying figures committed to Zionism in the diaspora as a language for
transforming America into a nation of nationalities complicates the notion
that American Zionism was completely sanitized of its European anti-in-
tegrationist position. It raises questions about whether or not American
Jewish historians have largely ignored this possibility. Perhaps in order to
narrate a history of integration and harmonious synthesis between Ameri-
canism and Judaism, American Jewish historians rejected the notion that
they could be part of a nation or that Zionism could mean something dis-
tinct from national sovereignty or a strategy for U.S. acculturation. Under-
scoring transatlantic continuities replaces a trajectory of progressively
increasing rootedness with one that highlights dislocation by character-
izing Jewish immigrants as unrooted wanderers grappling with multiple
national, intellectual, and social allegiances.44
This approach is particularly crucial in studying émigré intellectuals,
whose intellectual biographies are too often bifurcated between their Euro-
pean and American stages. Further compounding the problem, disciplin-
ary boundaries cause scholars to differentiate the contributions of Jewish
thinkers from key public intellectuals who happen to be Jewish. The distinct
legacies of Rawidowicz, Kaplan, and Kohn formulated conventionally as
diaspora Hebraist, religious thinker, and scholar of nationalism reflect this
artificial categorization of Jewish thinkers along geographic lines (Europe
versus America), disciplinary boundaries (history, religious thought, and
political theory), choices in modern Jewish politics (diasporist and Zion-
ist), and academic fields (Jewish studies and general thought). That their
work transcended these arbitrary boundaries demonstrates the importance
of considering Jewish history, in general, and conversations about Jewish
political thought among exiled and highly mobile intellectual wanderers,
in particular, as inherently global and interdisciplinary in nature.

My adoption of this lens is not meant to diminish the recognition that
political thought develops within specific spatial and temporal coordi-
nates.45 Rather, mapping theories of nationality across geographical
regions reveals disjunctures and variations that reflect a particular mix
of intellectual, social, and political forces.46 Conscious of the importance
of tracing the evolution of each theory of nationality within historical
circumstances, I have organized this book around individual biogra-
phies. The chapters exploit the tools of intellectual history to gain a more
nuanced appreciation for the interpenetration that took place between
Jewish thinkers and their specific milieu. I have attempted to synthesize
intellectual history’s attention to space and time with modern Jewish
thought’s appreciation for considering general philosophical dilemmas
and close textual analysis.
Jews, Zionism, and Contemporary Politics of Difference

Now, well into the twenty-first century, it is a particularly important time
to rehabilitate and revive these dissenting streams of Zionist thought that
offer models of Jewish nationality as distinct from, and even defined in
opposition to, the nation-state model. That this rich, yet overlooked, his-
tory merits consideration today may not be immediately obvious, however.
Alternative theories of Zionism failed to challenge the dominant course
of twentieth-century Jewish thought or history. The division between
two typologies of Jewish life they eschewed—religion in the diaspora
and nationality in the homeland—has only solidified since 1948. The vast
majority of the world’s Jewish populations now live as citizens in the state of
Israel or as a religioethnic minority group in the United States. The think-
ers’ visions of Arab–Jewish coexistence in Palestine, cultural and linguistic
bonds uniting Jewish populations in the diaspora, and visions of a stateless
national group as the model for a new international order were impractical
in their own lifetimes and even less feasible decades later. It is thus easy to
dismiss the formulators of grand theories of interwar nationality as naïve
dreamers and insignificant historical actors.
Chapter 6 considers the relevance of these historical formulations for
Jewish thought and political thought more generally. As the quotation at
the start of the chapter demonstrated, Yehoshua contends that one can only
live an authentically Jewish life as a Hebrew-speaking citizen and resident
of the state of Israel. I argue that rebutting Yehoshua should focus not on
his negation of the diaspora, but instead on a far more complex project—
identifying the ways in which Zionist logic continues to limit possibilities

for Jewish peoplehood, reopening conversations long ago frozen as taboo
topics, and debating foundations of Jewish peoplehood that escape the logic
of the sovereign mold. Rehabilitating the tradition of Zionists committed
to breaking the sovereign mold thus supplies a road map for redefining
Israel in the twenty-first century. In particular, the theories of Zionism
unearthed through this book provide a foundation for addressing what has
unfortunately become a highly charged space in public discussions of Jew-
ish politics between activists denouncing Zionism and Jewish statehood
as “anachronistic” and the persisting unwillingess among Israel advocates
to question the centrality of the state in defining Jewish nationalism today.
Evaluating the meaning and relevance of Zionism through an Israel versus
anti-Israel lens only diverts attention from far more pressing problems—
namely, addressing the attenuated sense of collective consciousness among
Jews in the United States and articulating a compelling definition of Jew-
ish peoplehood with two divergent demographic centers. The path toward
building a stronger sense of collective solidarity and closer ties between
diaspora and homeland communities demands reconsidering the central-
ity of the Jewish state and reengaging the rich political tradition of nation
beyond state in Zionist thought.
Recovering the diversity of interwar Zionist thought also has broader
appeal beyond debates about the State of Israel and the morality of Zion-
ism. The forces of globalization and political shifts engendered by the end
of the Cold War have rendered the sovereign mold far less effective as an
analytical tool for explaining the growing realities of collective attachment
and transnational loyalties. Contrary to theories of modernization, how-
ever, globalization has actually fueled the preservation of particular alle-
giances within and across state boundaries. Large diaspora communities
thrive and cultivate enduring bonds to their homelands and other popula-
tions dispersed around the world.47 From Muslim immigrants in Europe
to Latino populations in the United States to Kurdish citizens of northern
Iraq, global diaspora communities maintain a sense of shared solidarity.
Such communities often demand increasing levels of collective recogni-
tion and group rights despite state-building efforts to assimilate them into
the dominant national culture.48 These opposing tendencies—the process
of universal integration and the rise of particular global networks—expose
fissures in the correlation between nationhood and statehood. The failure
of the sovereign mold’s vision of the world divided into units of overlap-
ping ethnonational and political identities to match emerging patterns of
solidarity has fueled scholarly and popular interest in reconsidering funda-
mental assumptions reinforced by the sovereign mold.

Recognizing the urgency of these questions, a variety of political phi-
losophers, social scientists, and cultural theorists have sought a number of
alternative approaches, including redefining the discourse of nationality
by adding conceptual qualifiers (“liberal nationalism” and “long-distance
nationalism”), introducing new philosophical and political vocabulary
(“multicultural citizenship” and “rooted cosmopolitism”), and even forging
novel fields of study (diaspora and transnational studies).49 Although these
approaches differ significantly from one another, they share a renewed
interest in understanding the ties that bind individuals in an increasingly
transnational era and expand the expectations of citizenship to promote
particular allegiances within the nation-state.
The paradigms of interwar Zionism developed by Rawidowicz, Kaplan,
and Kohn anticipated the contemporary tension between the forces of unity
and diversity and the stubborn refusal of religious and national groups to
conform. Concepts of diaspora, liberal nationalism, and multicultural citi-
zenship are conceptually grounded in, and owe a significant debt to, the
theorists of these conceptions of Zionism. Indeed, their work addresses
key questions that have re-emerged around the world today as correla-
tion between nation and state diminishes: How should liberal theories of
nationalism balance a commitment to individual equality with demands by
minority groups for collective rights? What does nationalism mean when
disconnected from political membership in a state? What are possibilities
of collective identification beyond racial dichotomies and class categoriza-
tions? What psychological bonds exist and motivate national membership,
despite the constructed, fluid, and nonessential nature of national iden-
tity? What role does religion play in national solidarity? How do homeland
and diaspora communities interact with one another? Zionism’s roads not
taken are uniquely suited to consider these questions and to contribute to
the expanding literature grappling with these issues today.

— 2 —
“Sovereignty Is
International Anarchy”
Jews, World War I,
and the Future of Nationalism
“Sovereignty is international anarchy” is not a claim one might expect

to hear from an American Zionist writing a book about the post–World
War I political order in 1918. Yet, one year after the Balfour Declaration
promised a “national home for the Jewish people,” public intellectual and
Zionist Horace Kallen vehemently objected to the premise of national self-
determination (the official policy of the United States at the Paris Peace
Conference).1 Moreover, Kallen traced his opposition to national sover-
eignty to the teachings of the Jewish political tradition. As heir to this tra-
dition, Zionism represented the hope for a new stage in the evolution of
nationalism that challenged the doctrine of national sovereignty without
eroding the legitimacy of national identity. The Jewish people, past and
present, exemplified the ethical benefits and pragmatic necessity of pro-
moting the coexistence of diverse national groups within a single polity as
the future of nationalism.
The association of a Zionist thinker with the rejection of the principle of
national sovereignty is baffling from a post-1948 perspective. Zionism has
come to stand precisely for the right of the Jewish people to have a state in
the national homeland. In fact, those most critical of Zionism and the state
of Israel tend to frame their negative assessment of the state in language
that echoes Kallen’s censure of national sovereignty. But the relationship
between Zionism, nationalism, and sovereignty appeared quite differently
to Kallen during the first two decades of the twentieth century. Although
his counterstate conception of Zionism would certainly be considered
marginal today, it was not atypical at the time for American or European
Jewish thinkers.2 The intellectual and political milieu created a moment
26 26 roads not taken

zionism and the
of possibility for an alternate logic of Zionism that viewed the solution to
the Jewish question in rejecting the division of the globe into distinct units
with homogeneous populations rather than establishing precisely such a
place for the Jewish people.
Probing this phenomenon of counterstate Jewish nationalism in the
early twentieth century raises two questions. First, what shared concerns,
historical forces, and political ideologies made the concept of nation
beyond state so appealing at the time for Jewish intellectuals in general
and to Zionists in particular? Second, what strategies did Jewish thinkers
develop to address the dilemmas of articulating collective boundaries out-
side of territorial sovereignty? Addressing these questions sets the histori-
cal and intellectual backdrop for the subsequent chapters’ investigation of
three of the most sophisticated expressions of interwar, counterstate Zion-
ism: Rawidowicz’s global Hebraism, Kaplan’s national civilization, and
Kohn’s cultural humanism. These expressions developed within a fruitful
and manifold context of Jewish and non-Jewish debates about nationalism
and the international order.
Examining this moment without a historical lens molded by events that
occurred midcentury—the Holocaust, the creation of the State of Israel,
and the emergence of the nation-state as the organizing principle of inter-
national relations—sheds light on the rationale for rejecting, rather than
emulating, the nation-state model as the most promising solution to the
Jewish question. From this historical vantage point, the dominance of
national sovereignty as the organizing principle of world politics, and the
possibility of establishing a Jewish state, were far from certain outcomes.
Instead, with the national question very much open for debate in Western
political thought, the possibility that a new set of guiding principles that
would recognize Jewish national identity across territorial and political
boundaries (including Palestine) was quite a logical path to explore. More-
over, the prevalence of potential ideological partners committed to replac-
ing nation-state nationalism with other paradigms created an incubator
for radical experimentation and innovation, especially around conceptions
of Jewish nationalism and Zionism.
My intention is not to provide an exhaustive overview of the diverse
spectrum between counterstate and state-seeking Jewish nationalisms that
thrived in this period. Instead, this chapter aims to identify and explore
a shared theoretical predicament catalyzing Jewish interest in theories
of nationalism—namely, the totalizing logic of nation-state nationalism
and its implications for preserving Jews’ individual and collective rights.
I also introduce the overlapping strategies developed for contesting this
“sovereignty is international anarchy” 27

logic. Jewish thinkers molded conceptions of nationalism that consciously
disputed the either/or logic of the nation-state template by underscoring
the compatibility of national autonomy and civic integration, particular
solidarity and human allegiances, and categories of identity intended for
homeland and diaspora settings. The both/and logic of counterstate Jewish
nationalism advocated for a liberal, inclusive, and depoliticized theory of
collective identity.
To emphasize the concurrent theoretical trends across spatial bound-
aries and ideological categories, the examples selected in this chapter
focus on a few zones of contact that demonstrate the interconnectedness
between Jewish and non-Jewish efforts to reject self-determination as the
template for nationalism. These sites of interpenetration generated theo-
retical syntheses between Jewish political thought and formulations of a
multinational state in late imperial Russia, national cultural autonomy
within the Austro-Hungarian Empire, British internationalism, and Amer-
ican cultural pluralism. Focusing on several Jewish thinkers, including his-
torian Simon Dubnow, international relations professor Alfred Zimmern,
cultural Zionist Ahad Ha’am, scholar Israel Friedlaender, and American
pluralist Horace Kallen reinforces important regional differences, but also
facilitates a global and comparative analysis of this particular moment in
Jewish thought and political thought in general.
Categorizing these multidimensional figures as “Zionist” or “diasporist,”
“Jewish thinkers” or “political theorists of Jewish descent,” and “Euro-
pean” or “American” overlays anachronistic geographic and disciplinary
boundaries that cloud common concerns and a shared discourse across
what have become distinct fields of study. Rather than presenting ideo-
logical or regional clarity, the historical record demonstrates anxiety, hazy
boundaries, and ambiguous formulations during this moment of radical
social, political, and intellectual transition. Probing the often unsystematic
conceptions of Jewish nationalism, and its strategic engagement with the
nation-state paradigm, reveals a nuanced and complex process of explor-
ing paths of particular preservation and individual rights before many of
the assumptions about national identity, minority rights, and citizenship
had crystallized by the middle of the century.
World War I and the Question of Nationality

The historian Jonathan Frankel argued that Jewish political thinkers
responded in a paradoxical fashion to the unparalleled (at least in the mod-
ern period) destruction, dislocation, and persecution sparked by World

War I.3 Wartime political and military upheavals generated a large number
of unwanted refugees, kindled waves of anti-Semitism, and contributed to
increased brutality against Jewish populations. The vulnerability of Jews as
a stateless community was even more pronounced because so many Jewish
population centers stood in contested zones between the great powers. The
war thus underscored Jews’ political weakness as a dispersed community.
Their individual and collective security in Europe remained precarious in
the war’s aftermath.
Despite the hostilities and the uncertain status of many Jewish com-
munities, however, Frankel highlighted the cautious optimism that char-
acterized the war’s effect on Jewish intellectuals. “Many Jews—movements,
groups, individuals—came to the conclusion that the moment of eman-
cipation or autoemancipation had arrived,” Frankel wrote. “The Jewish
people had it within their grasp at last to solve the Jewish question.”4 The
belief in the dawn of a new era, with the potential to readdress fundamen-
tal questions about Jewish identity, generated tremendous ideological cre-
ativity, theoretical experimentation, and historical opportunities.
Frankel’s reminder to analyze interwar Jewish politics as a distinct
moment of promise, rather than as a prelude to the Holocaust, helps avoid
a teleological reading of Zionism as inevitably leading to statehood. Situ-
ated against the backdrop of the twentieth-century narrative of European
destruction, state-seeking Zionism emerges as the most obvious response
for Jewish nationalists seeking emancipation following the cataclysm of the
war. From a post-Holocaust vantage point, the events of World War I could
easily be interpreted as marking the first convulsion of an unavoidable
process that would lead to the destruction of European Jewry fewer than
thirty years later. The effects of Jews’ marginal position as outsiders during
the war underscored Theodor Herzl’s analysis of the failure of Jewish inte-
gration within Europe and bolstered his claim that Jewish normalization
demanded a Jewish state. Herzl had presented Zionists with one potential
solution—the creation of a Jewish state. This approach operated under the
premise that the normalization and acceptance of Jews in the international
order rested in Jews’ adopting the logic of nation-state nationalism. The
clearest path to emancipation was to exploit President Woodrow Wilson’s
articulation of the principle of national self-determination, promulgated at
the Paris Peace Conference, and the Balfour Declaration to press for a Jew-
ish homeland—and eventually, a state.
Yet the possibility of shifting a large percentage of the global Jewish
population to the national homeland, let alone establishing a sovereign
territory, was by no means the only (or the most likely) solution for early-

twentieth-century Zionists. Frankel’s description of the period, especially
the sanguine hopes for radically overhauling the relationship between Jews
and the state, suggests that postwar Jewish nationalists, including those
strongly in favor of Zionism and settlement in Palestine, identified other
options they considered more viable paths toward securing national pres-
ervation and individual freedom. The disintegration of imperial rule and
the gradual process of decolonialization created a brief window during
which theorists and activists advocated various alternate possibilities for
envisioning the future of nationalities and the global political order. Such
key concepts as nationality, sovereignty, and international relations were in
flux. Changing borders, refugees, and demographic shifts exacerbated the
disconnect between states and their ethnonational population and national
identity. These historical conditions created the perception among political
theorists of a tabula rasa of political possibilities.
As a result, programs that advocated for states of many nationalities,
rather than for national states, and to separate ethnic or cultural identity
from political citizenship, abounded. The postwar transition sparked calls
for concepts ranging from minority national rights, federated international
bodies, and even options for a world government. Although the details
of these plans differed, and many of them never developed past the stage
of abstract formulations that lacked specific details, they shared a basic
assumption that nation-state nationalism was the primary cause of the war
and would need to be replaced by alternate notions in order to build a
peaceful postwar order. The prevalence of such notions was apparent at the
Paris Peace Conference, which included numerous proposals for minor-
ity protection schemes. Also apparent was the support such critiques of
nation-state nationalism had among world Jewry. The historian Carole
Fink, one of the few scholars to look closely at the Jewish minority rights
movement, has argued that Jewish leaders took a leading role in advocat-
ing for the recognition of national rights.5 For Jews and non-Jews alike,
distinguishing “nation,” “state,” and “territory” was not a marginal concept
in the early decades of the twentieth century.
The Logic of Nationalism: A Transatlantic Concern

A significant number of geographically diverse Jewish nationalists aligned
their work with intellectual currents and political movements dedicated
to formulating concepts of nations as distinct from states. This phenom-
enon represents a shared concern with the totalizing demands of nation-
state nationalism. Liberal strains of nationalism articulated during the

nineteenth century viewed the nation-state as a particular political unit
dedicated to spreading civic right and Enlightenment values. Such formu-
lations of nationalism promised integration and individual rights for Jews.
However, they also introduced a binary logic that made national identity
an exclusive allegiance that demands complete loyalty. Each individual
belonged to one primary ethnocultural community. One could not be Ger-
man and French, for instance.
Conflating nation and state raised the stakes of this either/or logic even
further by confusing patriotism and nationalism.6 Full acceptance as a
citizen derived from national membership. The legal standing of citizens,
based on a social contract with the nation-state, could be altered by the
sovereign national power depending on each individual’s national status.
Even if rights were not formally linked to membership in the nation, those
perceived as non-nationals could face social and political discrimination.
Thus, the retention of multiple group loyalties (especially across nation-
state boundaries) was problematic and had the potential to undermine the
rights granted by the state to its citizenry.
At the same time, nationalism severely restricted acceptable categories of
difference within the polity to subordinate categories of identity (such as reli-
gion) that reinforced the primacy of national solidarity over other collective
ties. The philosopher Charles Taylor has analyzed the relationship between
nationalism and modernity, describing this force as intimately linked to the
rationale of the nation-state paradigm. He identifies the “homogenization
of identity and allegiance that it [the state] must nourish for survival.”7 In
order for the state to achieve its economic, social, and political objectives,
it must reinforce some degree of national conformity. The emerging choice
between conformity for insiders and marginalization for outsiders left Jew-
ish thinkers unable to express difference without further undermining their
claims for equality and citizenship, increasingly based on their degree of
national conformity. The shift in the rhetoric of nationalism toward more
conservative, ethnic tendencies at the start of the twentieth century exac-
erbated the implications of the logic of linking people, territory, and state.
This trajectory placed a greater emphasis on ethnonational uniformity, and
in some cases raised the bar for integration by underscoring descent as the
primary criterion for national membership. As a result, confidence in the
nation-state as the guarantor of individual rights eroded.
It is important to avoid the tendency to focus primarily on how so-called
romantic, cultural, or völkisch varieties of nationalism undermined indi-
vidual rights and collective legitimacy. Historians of nationalism tend to
divide its expressions in the modern period into two categories—civic and

ethnic variations.8 As general categories, civic and ethnic paradigms out-
line fundamentally different claims about the nature of national cohesion,
the central objectives of membership, and the relationship between nation
and state. Ethnic nationalism is a tradition linked to the German Romantic
tradition, beginning with Johann Gottfried von Herder in the eighteenth
century and developing through Johann Gottlieb Fichte and Georg Wil-
helm Friedrich Hegel in the nineteenth. These figures developed the con-
cept that authentic nationality reflects organic ties rooted in blood, spirit,
and land. On the other side of the spectrum are theories of nationality that
view the voluntary commitment to universal civic principles (such as indi-
vidual rights, free choice, and equality) as the basis for national cohesion.
Civic nationality, at least in theory, eschews innate characteristics such as
race, language, or culture advocated by ethnic nationalists as the primary
grounds for national unity.
Yet this typological distinction does not reflect the ways in which many
Jewish intellectuals viewed the logic of nation-state nationalism. (Indeed,
the popularizer of this concept was Hans Kohn, whose intellectual journey
from German Zionism to American nationalism is the subject of chap-
ter 5. Tracing the development of the civic–ethnic dichotomy in Kohn’s
thought historicizes its evolution and demonstrates his own ambiguous
relationship to the rigid dichotomy attributed to his scholarship.) Clearly,
the threats posed by states committed to a particular community based
on organic, familial categories are more easily discernible. Associating
national membership with unchanging biological or cultural character-
istics severely restricted the possibility of being considered a conational,
with its attendant rights of citizenship.
From the perspective of the counterstate nationalists explored in this
book, however, liberal nationalisms associated with the rhetoric of univer-
sal principles demanded conformity and promoted intolerance as much
as exclusivist, or ethnic, conceptions. More recent scholars of nationalism
have helped explain the limited relevance of this distinction for minor-
ity groups. The political theorist Bernard Yack, for instance, exposes what
he has called the “myth of civic nationalism.”9 Yack contends that the dis-
course of equality at the heart of civic conceptions masks particular con-
cerns within universal rhetoric. Both civic nationalism and ethnic nation-
alism implicitly undermined efforts to preserve corporate identity, and at
their logical extremes they defined difference as antithetical to their funda-
mental projects.10 Conceptions of national sovereignty were thus simulta-
neously too particularistic and too universalistic for securing Jewish inte-
gration and preserving Jewish solidarity.

One particularly important ramification of the perceived difference
between the exclusivist, unwelcoming nationalism in Central and East-
ern Europe and a liberal, integration-compatible nationalism in Western
Europe and the United States was its tendency to reinforce the existence of
a qualitative difference between the American Jewish and European Jew-
ish experiences of nationalism. Although the success of the American–
Jewish synthesis is not often told explicitly through the language of civic
nationalism, the concepts help delineate why the experience of Jews in the
United States differed so markedly from those in Europe. The United States
represents the exemplar of civic nationalism. A state that unites its citi-
zenry around shared principles of equality and freedom welcomed Jews, as
opposed to the European experience, which excluded Jews because of their
inability to integrate into the tribal bonds that had served as the cohesive
basis of Central and East European nationalisms.
Historicizing the civic–ethnic dichotomy challenges the narrative of a
harmonious synthesis between American Jewish thinkers and the state.
Notable variations in theories of nationalism and Jewish responses to these
conceptions of the national identity exist. The realities of Jewish integra-
tion in the United States were significantly different than those in Europe.
The corporate status of Jewish communal life, which characterized most
of European Jewry until the nineteenth century, never existed in North
America. Jewish immigrants found themselves in a country that welcomed
them as full citizens (with some early restrictions on Jews serving as elected
officials), provided unprecedented opportunities for acculturation, and
viewed religious association as completely voluntary.11 These characteris-
tics underscore unique aspects of the American Jewish experience.
Despite these important historical and theoretical differences, however,
American Jewish intellectuals viewed the dangers of nation-state national-
ism and the promise of separating nation from state as a problem germane
not only to their European brethren, but also to their own political milieu.
The work of recent American historians, such as Gary Gerstle, has situated
early-twentieth-century Jewish intellectuals within a broader context that
disputes the exceptional status of nationalism in the United States. Gers-
tle has illuminated the intertwined streams of civic and ethnoracial con-
ceptions of American identity that characterized U.S. history. His analysis
suggests that rhetoric rooted in exclusivist theories based on ethnoracial
characteristics and liberal civic theories dedicated to individual rights con-
tributed to nativism and pressure for immigrants to conform.12
The most obvious parallel for American Jews was the rise of nativism
and racialized concepts of American identity that manifested themselves

in new immigration regulations as well as popular publications. A series
of immigration acts in the late 1910s and early 1920s exhibited the tremen-
dous currency nativism and racial nationalism had achieved. The acts
severely curtailed immigration from Eastern and Southern Europe, a move
that was aimed primarily at Jewish and Italian immigrants. In fact, the U.S.
Congress justified this last series of stringent immigration acts by citing
“the menace that eastern and southern Europeans, especially Jews and Ital-
ians posed to the United States.”13 The racial and biological language that
was used to justify the act reflected the considerable increase in discus-
sions of scientific racism and eugenics. The proliferation of racial science
relegated all non-Anglo-Saxons, including “Hebrews,” to inferior status.14
For the American Jewish community living through this explosion in anti-
immigrant fervor and racial categorization, who obviously lacked the fore-
knowledge of what the twentieth century would bring, these theories must
have augured perniciously.
It was not only streams of American racial and ethnic nationalism that
posed a threat to Jews’ individual and collective rights. Pressure for Jews to
conform to certain national characteristics and to exclude Jews from full
acceptance also emerged from proponents of integration, progressive lib-
eralism, and a religious Social Gospel Movement. If one trend in theories
of Americanization was the exclusionary language of racial nationalism,
the second trend was civic nationalism. This theory of American identity
was often linked with the notion of the melting pot, which had a long his-
tory in U.S. political discourse. The French-born essayist Hector St. John
de Crèvecoeur helped to coin this phrase in 1782, when he wrote in Letters
from an American Farmer: “What then is the American, this new man?
Here individuals of all nations are melted into a race of men.”15
Israel Zangwell’s 1908 play The Melting Pot vitalized this vision of U.S.
identity and ushered it into the foreground of twentieth-century identity
discussions. The melting-pot concept allowed for a number of possible
interpretations, particularly regarding two fundamental questions. First,
which of the many “flavors” would become dominant in the new national
identity? And second, what would be the level of political, cultural, and
social conformity demanded from each member of the nation? Notions of
melting pots never guaranteed neutral unbiased territory for creating an
equal mixture that embraced all of its constituent members. As the theorist
Werner Sollors has commented, Pauline tropes of universal identity inte-
grally linked with critiques of Jewish particularism profoundly prejudiced
Zangwell’s and Crèvecoeur’s notions of the melting pot.16 This etymol-
ogy of the term in Christian thought suggests that although the reformers

encouraged the integration of new Americans into their “new national-
ism,” they demanded a high price of national, religious, and linguistic
conformity.
Even many of the reforms that gave the period the name the “Progressive
Era” further defined a unified, organic American identity as the ultimate
end of the melting-pot process by promoting a shift from individualism
to corporate identity. Unlike racial nationalists, Progressives rejected the
erection of racial boundaries to safeguard American biological purity; in
its place, they developed a monolithic vision of American nationality that
eliminated a large section of the political, cultural, and social spaces previ-
ously available to minority communities. The tone of the new nationalism
constricted the separation in liberal societies between political citizenship
and national character. American identity now was seen to connote a com-
mitment to a national mission that entailed not only political membership,
but also certain cultural and religious assumptions.
Unlike classic liberalism, which stressed the autonomy of the individual
as the primary political actor, Progressive thought developed a political
philosophy that emphasized the national corporate group.17 As the political
scientist Rogers M. Smith has explained, in classic liberalism individuals
were considered members or foreigners depending only on their status of
citizenship and not on their decision to join voluntary religious, political,
or social organizations.18 The Progressive concept of citizenship maintained
certain standards that made cultural, religious, and political demands on
individual citizens. In opposition to the notion that the individual political
actor was responsible for only his own actions, many Progressive think-
ers constructed ideas of citizenship “that stipulated that the possession of
social knowledge entailed the duty of reflecting on and articulating ideas
of national public good unmediated by party, interest, region or sectarian
religion.”19 This major shift in U.S. political culture had a significant impact
on discussions of “otherness” and American identity. The expansion of the
definition of American identity to include a range of characteristics there-
fore challenged the possibility of alternative communal affiliations.
The Progressive conflation of patriotism and nationalism in U.S. poli-
tics spread into political practice through the contributions of such writers
as Walter Croly, the editor of The New Republic. Croly’s highly influen-
tial 1909 work, The Promise of American Life (which Theodore Roosevelt
used as the basis of his New Nationalism campaign in 1912), decried the
moral and social ills brought about by American individualism. To fulfill
the “promise of American life,” Croly advocated the restoration of Ameri-
can “solidarity.” By conferring more power on the government’s ability to

promote the national public interest, he hoped to eradicate the economic
and social troubles of big business. American democracy, Croly claimed,
had failed because “the national interest has not been consistently asserted
as against special and local interests.”20
The stress on placing national considerations over individual or group
rights during this period manifested itself in both Theodore Roosevelt’s
and Woodrow Wilson’s calls as president for minority Americans to fully
embrace their U.S. identity—without other markers of identity. Accord-
ing to the historian John Higham, Roosevelt considered the hyphenated
identity a menace to society. His militant nationalism propelled him on
a crusade against the notion of dual identities, and he stood out “as the
standard-bearer and personification of ‘unhyphenated Americanism.’ ”21
Wilson, provoked by the xenophobia of the war years, continued the
Americanization thrust with his “100 percent America” campaign. This
movement burgeoned to such a degree that “by the time of the Armistice
the 100 percent spirit . . . reigned supreme. Where the liberal American-
izers had looked to the government for aid in the immigrant education
program, 100 percenters now pressed to enlist the state’s authority for pur-
poses of repression and exclusion.”22
The slippage between nation and state in the American context even
expanded to include religious intellectuals preaching an explicit variation
of the message. Liberal Protestantism, and particularly the social gospel
movement, which had reached its apogee in the first two decades of the
twentieth century, embraced Progressive politics as a vehicle for Christian-
izing America and thus ensuring the social salvation of the entire nation.23
Through this syncretic fusion of social gospel and Progressive thought,
these adherents hoped to “realize the nineteenth-century dream of a Prot-
estant nation. . . . It was the old concept of Christendom, refurbished to fit
the realties of voluntaristic, pluralistic, liberty-loving Protestantism.”24 The
eruption of religious, racial, and national expectations of American citi-
zenship in the years surrounding the Great War severely restricted options
for articulating the meaning of Jewish identity and its relationship to the
state. The extensive vocabulary that would develop in the second half of the
twentieth century to include Jews as an ethnic group, or as one of the three
core religions of American nationalism, did not yet exist. As the American
historian David Hollinger has explained, “American political ideology and
constitutional doctrine so emphasized individuality that the pluralists of
the early twentieth century were endowed with very few tools for talking
about the claims of groups.”25 Jewish intellectuals faced the challenge of
inventing new conceptual vocabulary that would both counter the claims

of American nationalism and promote an alternate category to define “oth-
erness” in the American context.
Projecting the existence of a categorical distinction between American
civic and European ethnic nationalisms in the early interwar period over-
shadows the existence of shared concerns and Jewish responses across the
Atlantic. Nationalism’s totalizing logic—exacerbated by the tendency to
merge civic, religious, racial, and ethnic conceptions of collective identi-
ty—manifested itself on both sides of the Atlantic. So did the dilemmas it
raised for Jewish thinkers grappling with ways to express otherness within
the state without accepting the poles of assimilation or alienation. As long
as the concepts of nation and state remained intertwined, theoretical and
practical opportunities for creating an equilibrium between Jews and the
state that recognized both the right to integration and to the preservation
of particular collective were quite restricted. In response to this realiza-
tion, Jewish thinkers identified potential allies in mainstream programs
and movements dedicated to reconsidering the logic of nationalism.
From Nation-States to States of Nations

The scholar and American Zionist Israel Friedlaender wrote in 1905:
“Therefore we must clearly distinguish between state and nationality, as has
long been done with regard to state and religion.”26 This comment exem-
plifies the first objective for Jewish thinkers interested in fragmenting the
totalizing claims of national sovereignty: developing a theoretical distinc-
tion between the organic bonds of national solidarity and the patriotic ties
of citizens to the state. The intellectual sources of Friedlaender’s concept of
separating nation and state reflect the overlapping currents of Jewish and
Western political thought grappling with the nation-state model in Europe
and the United States. This section of the chapter traces the broad reach of
Jewish and non-Jewish theories and programs that advocated for categori-
cal distinctions between national allegiance and political citizenship.
Even before the conclusion of World War I brought questions about the
relationship between nation and state to the forefront of public debates in
Western Europe and the United States, the possibilities of formally creating
multinational polities evolved in Central and Eastern Europe. The demo-
graphic patchwork of ethnic groups created tremendous ethnonational rifts
within heterogeneous populations. Political theorists and politicians con-
ceived of various models for mitigating hostility by recognizing collective
rights within the framework of the state. For instance, political reforms in
late imperial Russia provided a brief period in which the Kadet Party aspired

toward creating a multinational state that would support the cultural auton-
omy of minority populations as well as their rights as individual citizens.27
The Jewish historian Simon Dubnow saw these developments as poten-
tially well suited for the implementation of his comprehensive theory of Jew-
ish nationalism, which he called “autonomism” or “diaspora nationalism.”28
In the years leading up to and immediately following the Russian Rev-
olution of 1905, Dubnow outlined a program of Jewish nationalism that
sought cultural, social, and educational autonomy, along with a complete
guarantee of civic equality. In 1906, he created a political party called the
Folkspartei to translate his theoretical program into political action, and
by 1915 he had established a monthly journal dedicated to advocating for
extraterritorial autonomy.29 Dubnow viewed his activism and writings on
Jewish nationalism as a forum for addressing the central problem of mod-
ern political thought: “Contemporary legal philosophers and political sci-
entists frequently confuse the terms ‘nation’ and ‘state’. . . . For them, the
typical nation is the uni-national state.”30
Negating the tendency to confuse nation and state in Western politi-
cal thought was an issue of central concern that Dubnow chose to address
in a rather indirect fashion—through a series of essays exploring Jewish
nationalism.31 Jewish nationalism introduced a more ethical alternative to
the nation-state model that celebrated the Jews’ ability to thrive without
sovereignty. The shared culture and language linking the Jewish people
exemplified the most progressive grounds for collective solidarity. Dub-
now’s attempt to partner with the liberal Kadet Party failed—he remained
frustrated by the high degree of Russification and conformity that they
demanded from minority groups. Moreover, the entire project of liberal
reforms in Russia became increasingly unlikely after the failed revolution
of 1905. Yet Dubnow’s belief that a political entity that rejected the uni-
national state provided a path toward Jewish national and individual rights
underscores a shared predicament for subsequent Jewish nationalists writ-
ing in different milieus.
Dubnow’s analysis of the threat of merging the concepts of nation
and state, his vision of Jewish political thought as the highest level in the
development of nationalism, and his belief that a multinational state rep-
resented the best hope for normalizing Jewish life has significant paral-
lels with a number of the Zionist intellectuals explored in this chapter and
throughout this book. Indeed, Friedlaender, a Zionist who opposed Dub-
now’s rejection of Palestine as a territorial center, called for the separa-
tion of nation and state in a review essay of Dubnow’s theory of national-
ism. In the case of Friedlaender and Dubnow, Zionism and diasporism
differed on the role of Palestine. However, the two theorists agreed on a far

more basic assumption about Jewish political thought: namely, that Jews,
the pariah of the nation-state era, would emerge as the normative model
for the post-nation-state moment. Streams of Zionism and diasporism had
a common theoretical agenda of outlining a Jewish mission of unlinking
nation from state as the template for twentieth-century nationalism. The
Russian context, with Dubnow the most influential example, did not pres-
ent the only theoretical or geographical context for grappling with these
relationships in Jewish thought. The collapsing Austro-Hungarian Empire,
which included a number of Jewish population centers, also served as a
fertile backdrop for promoting the categorical distinction between nation
and state. As the historian Malachi Hacohen has explained, “the ambigu-
ity of Austrian nationality gave Jews an opportunity missing elsewhere for
negotiating Jewish and national identity.”32
Jewish intellectuals thinking within this milieu also had the support of
mainstream intellectuals and political leaders formulating nonstatist, deter-
ritorialized definitions of nationality. In order to address the tremendous
national tensions, the Austrian Marxist theorist Karl Renner, who served as
chancellor of Austria from 1918 to 1920, developed a model of national cul-
tural autonomy in such key works as State and Nation (1899) and the Strug-
gles of the Austrian Nations over the State (1902).33 In these works, Renner
critiques the “territorial principle” that underlies the concept of national sov-
ereignty. This principle, Renner contends, assumes that “if you live in my ter-
ritory you are subjected to my domination, my law and my language.”34 Such
a claim, he concludes, “is the expression of domination, not of equal rights.”35
Given heterogeneous population, demographic shifts, and economic inter-
change, any attempt to align a specific land with a people would disenfran-
chise those groups not part of the ethnonational elite. Renner proposes an
alternate definition of a nation as a “cultural community.”36 Adopting a cul-
tural rather than territorial basis of identity created the possibility of a mul-
tinational state sensitive to collective loyalties and individual rights.
Another influential scholar, Friedrich Meinecke, the founder of German
political intellectual history, further contributed to the active debates about
the relationship between nationhood and statehood. His book, The Idea of
Reasons of State (1925), traced the historical development of the relation-
ship between ethics and realpolitik from Machiavelli through World War
I.37 In his conclusion, Meinecke critiqued the notion of the “power state”
and denounced the “false idealization of power politics.”38 Both Meinecke’s
power state and Renner’s territorial principle laid the groundwork for a
moral critique of blurring the organic ties of national solidarity and the
political apparatus of the state and its demands of citizenship. As the histo-
rian Yfaat Weiss has underscored, these distinctions shaped the Zionism of

a number of Central European Jewish thinkers, including Hans Kohn and
his teacher, the philosopher Martin Buber.39 Zionism promised to create a
laboratory for implementing moral principles that demanded a multina-
tional state to avoid the potential problem of fusing political power and
national solidarity.40
Efforts to break the sovereign mold took root in the Western Euro-
pean context as well. British internationalists insisted that the doctrine of
national sovereignty presented the most destabilizing threat to postwar
government and international relations. Liberal internationalists disagreed
with the doctrine’s fundamental premise—that each ethnonational com-
munity had the right to self-determination and territorial sovereignty—on
both practical and normative grounds. This equation of national collec-
tivity with a sovereign polity would fuel enduring strife between nation-
states committed to their particular concerns. From an ethical perspective,
remapping the globe in accordance with nation-state boundaries would
impede progress toward the spread of universal justice and equality by
erecting boundaries rather than promoting integration through education,
social interaction, and economic cooperation. The antidote to the mili-
tarism and belligerent nationalism engendered by national sovereignty,
liberal internationalists contended, was the creation of a “federation of
nationalities” or the establishment of a “commonwealth.”
A brief, albeit significant and overlooked, synthesis developed between
internationalism, with its vision of a commonwealth of nationalities, and
Zionism during the first third of the twentieth century. A disproportion-
ate number of leaders in colonial government, Zionism, and the creation
of the field of international studies were of Jewish descent.41 An enduring
British Empire held great hope for many Jews as an ideal political structure
to mitigate their alien status as a stateless community. One of the archi-
tects and propagators of the synthesis was Sir Alfred Zimmern. During the
war years, Zimmern had been a central figure in the Round Table group,
a society of British intellectuals that promoted internationalism. In addi-
tion, he had served as a member of the Political Intelligence Department
in the British Foreign Office (1918–1919), where he focused on postwar
reconstruction plans. Shortly after the war he was appointed the world’s
first professor of international relations in 1919 at the University College of
Wales and later the Montague Burton Professor of International Relations
at Oxford University (from 1930 to 1944).42 From 1905 until the 1920s, Zim-
mern, whose Jewish father had converted to Christianity before marrying
his mother, was a strong supporter of Zionism and was engaged in theoriz-
ing Jewish nationalism.

Zimmern’s vision of nationality and internationalism developed as he
explored his own Jewish identity and Zionism beginning around 1905, and
continuing for about two decades. Zimmern publicly attributed his under-
standing of nationality as cultural, rather than political, to his experience
as a man of Jewish heritage: “I learnt to value Nationality, not from read-
ing Mazzini’s essays . . . nor from sympathizing with European Nationalist
movements . . . but from realizing, as I grew to manhood, that I was not
an Englishman, and from my sense of the debt I owe to the heritage with
which I am connected by blood and tradition.”43 Over the next two decades,
the idea of nationality he developed in his writings in the Round Table and
used as the basis for the British draft proposal for the peace treaty reflected
his devotion. Like Dubnow, Zimmern promulgated the notion that the
Jews represented the nation that had best learned “to eschew the mislead-
ing confusion of nationality and statehood and to avoid the pitfall of con-
sidering the nation-state as the normal and final unit of government.”44
Although Zimmern has been largely ignored by Jewish historians, his
interwar writings had a tremendous effect on his contemporaries, includ-
ing a number of American Jewish thinkers.45 Chapter 4 in this book tells
the story of Mordecai Kaplan, one of the most influential American Jew-
ish thinkers, who integrated Zimmern’s theory of nationalism and interna-
tionalism into his own concept of “Judaism as a civilization.” The American
Jewish theorist responsible for introducing Zimmern, and the synthesis
between Zionism and internationalism he championed, to Kaplan and
other Jewish intellectuals was Horace Kallen, whose declaration that sov-
ereignty was “international anarchy” was discussed earlier.46 Kallen devel-
oped a close friendship with Zimmern during the British internationalist’s
visit to the United States in 1912.47 Their intellectual exchange is clearly
evident in Kallen’s evolving understanding of Zionism’s role in promoting
internationalism. “Zionism and the Struggle towards Democracy,” which
Kallen published in the Nation magazine in 1915, contends that “Zion-
ism reasserted the prophetic idea of internationalism as a democratic and
cooperative federation of nationalities.”48
Placing Kallen within this transatlantic context offers new perspectives
on his seminal conception of American pluralism. Kallen is remembered
primarily as the architect of an American conception of cultural pluralism
and not as an advocate of a stream of Zionism and internationalism that
challenged the nation-state paradigm. Yet “Democracy versus the Melting-
Pot,” the essay considered the blueprint for the concept of cultural plural-
ism, does not mention the term “cultural pluralism” even once.49 Instead,
Kallen uses vocabulary such as nationality, federation of nationalities, and

commonwealth that had very specific connotations for his contemporaries
regarding the ethical and practical need to contest the spread of self-deter-
mination as the principle of nationalism. Kallen’s reputation as a pluralist
blunts the extent to which his most important contributions to American
thought, such as “Democracy versus the Melting-Pot,” framed the debate
as part of a much larger question of nationality and its relationship to the
American state. Referring to Kallen as a pluralist (a term he only associated
with “Democracy versus the Melting-Pot” when it was reprinted in 1924)
rather than a nationalist links the American Jewish thinker to a uniquely
American discourse of difference that had little relationship to, and thus
avoided the pitfalls of, European nationalism. Although Kallen contrib-
uted theoretical building blocks for what would later become American
concepts of ethnicity and multiculturalism, they emerged from within the
capacious parameters of Zionism and its emerging strategies for negotiat-
ing the demands of European nationalism.
American Jewish historians would also not be predisposed to link Kal-
len’s interest in Zionism with a nationalist orientation. The “Americaniza-
tion of Zionism” thesis, a central historiographical narrative in American
Jewish history, diminishes the full scope of Zionism’s impact in the United
States.50 According to this account, the American experience transformed
European Zionism to meet the unique political opportunities available to
Jews in the United States. The separatist claims and political analysis of
European Jewish nationalism had little relevance in the United States.51 As
opposed to the persecution and political instability that galvanized early-
twentieth-century European Jews to develop and embrace Jewish nation-
alism, the United States promised a harmonious balance between Judaism
and Americanism.52
The oft-repeated episodes from Kallen’s intellectual biography—specif-
ically the rejection of his father’s traditional Judaism and his introduction
to Zionism through the lectures of his professors at Harvard University—
fit the contours of embracing Zionism as a path away from the “old” Euro-
pean context and assimilating the expectations of Americanism. Until
recently, few scholars have analyzed Kallen’s own claims about the role that
his personal sense of discrimination and proud associations with Judaism
and Zionism played in staking out his vision of integration without assimi-
lation.53 Kallen’s legacy provides an instructive example of how the history
of American Zionism downplays Zionist ideology’s active opposition to
homogenizing and exclusivist trends in American nationalism.54
Kallen did not write “Democracy versus the Melting-Pot” at the post–
World War II moment when the American–Jewish synthesis crystallized

and the idea of cultural pluralism gained popular currency. Instead, he
engaged American nationalism at a time of tremendous insecurity for Jews,
both in the United States and around the world. From the perspective of sev-
eral leading American Jewish thinkers, such as Kallen, American and Euro-
pean nationalism were not qualitatively different. Kallen penned “Democ-
racy versus the Melting-Pot” shortly after reading a pamphlet in which his
colleague at the University of Wisconsin, the sociologist Edward Alsworth
Ross, had concluded that the immigration of such groups as “Eastern Euro-
pean Hebrews” will lead to “the rise of a Jewish question here, perhaps riots
and anti-Jewish legislation.”55 The anxiety that Jews would remain perma-
nent outsiders reminded Kallen of the tremendous stakes involved in dis-
puting the demands of the American state and nationalism more generally.
Constructing a counterstate paradigm of Jewish nationalism emerged as one
strategy for addressing this anxiety and eliminating it by undermining the
theoretical basis of its perceived root causes.
Reconfiguring the Basis and Boundaries

of National Membership
Jewish thinkers’ engagement with multinationalism, internationalism, and
cultural pluralism shed light on a global phenomenon of synthesizing Jew-
ish political thought with theories of nationalism opposed to national sov-
ereignty. Establishing a distinction between nation and state, however, was
only the first step in validating the collective status of stateless populations.
The next step involved defining alternate boundaries of national iden-
tity. The doctrine of national sovereignty set concrete boundaries—such
as citizenship, border controls, education systems, cultural policies, and
language requirements—that constitute the basis of national membership.
Identifying grounds for national cohesion beyond the material characteris-
tics typically underscored by the doctrine of national sovereignty compels
theorists to identify alternate criteria.
In formulating counterstatist national ties, Jewish thinkers grappled
with a catch-22. To an external audience, the primary function of formulat-
ing Jewish nationalism was to provide a template that would neutralize the
state’s monopoly on national identity and promote integration. To an inter-
nal audience, however, the Jewish nationalist had the opposite concern—to
locate sustainable grounds for solidarity, cohesion, and particular preser-
vation. Theorizing national boundaries thus functioned to promote discor-
dant objectives: integration and differentiation. Counterstate nationalists
sought a logic of nationalism that walked a fine line between affirming

the particular aspects of Jewish national identity and highlighting perme-
able boundaries between Jews and non-Jews. This section of the chapter
explores the emergence of a Jewish logic of nationalism that mitigated this
tension by replacing an either/or logic of nationalism with a more inclusive
both/and approach. In particular, Jewish theorists constructed formula-
tions of Jewish nationalism that rejected three specific choices encoded
within the nation-state paradigm—assimilation or autonomy, nationalism
or humanism, diaspora or homeland—as false dichotomies.
One common strategy for developing a conceptual language for collective
identity between the poles of assimilation and autonomy was the adoption,
and reinterpretation, of terms associated with German Romanticism—such
as “idea,” “spirit,” and “culture”—to describe the ties that bind Jews to one
another. The nineteenth- and early-twentieth-century roots of these con-
cepts in German Romanticism and Idealism provided rich possibilities for
justifying the national status, despite their stateless condition and demo-
graphic dispersion. By emphasizing that each national group shared a par-
ticular living essence reflected in a set of characteristics shared by members
of the group, these theories downplayed the importance of territory and self-
determination. Moreover, the terminology enabled Jewish thinkers to pro-
pose a diverse (and often, even within the same thinker, inconsistent) range
of constituent elements, including language, history, connection to a home-
land, and even religion, to highlight various grounds of membership.56
Yet adapting this conceptual language as the basis for national boundar-
ies had a significant disadvantage. The essentialist rhetoric of terms such as
spirit was associated with the very theories of nationalism whose emphasis
on descent and blood prevented the possibility of integration for minor-
ity populations. Why would Jewish thinkers employ concepts associated
with ascriptive characteristics as a tool for articulating the compatibility of
national autonomy and integration as citizens? Understanding the choice
of this terminology, and the process of transvaluing its connotations, in
the theories of Dubnow, Kallen, and Zimmern, highlights the challenge of
developing a conceptual vocabulary to articulate notions of national col-
lectivity that eschewed the polar possibilities of assimilation or autonomy.
Dubnow viewed the concept of spirit as a crucial basis in his search
to legitimate a stateless, deterritorialized national identity as the most
advanced stage in political thought. Yet he remained deeply aware that
organic notions of solidarity ran the risk of creating rigid boundaries and
tribal exclusivity. As a result, Dubnow adapted the term and repudiated
some of its connotations. He defined the spirit of Judaism as the discovery
that “there is no single definite idea which runs through all periods like
a silk thread. There are various ideas, which increase cultural creativity

and deep yearning for social progress in every generation.”57 This argu-
ment makes two counterintuitive claims: first, the unique spirit of the Jew-
ish political tradition is the appreciation of diversity; and second, the core
characteristic that differentiates Jews from other national groups is their
enduring commitment to progress and evolution. Dubnow remained con-
sciously aware of both, and used the terminology he attributed to Fichte,
the author of the nationalist tract “Addresses to the German Nation,” and
undermined its emphasis on fixed biological characteristics at the same
time. Dubnow’s spirit embodies the competing ideals of unity and multi-
plicity, fixed essence and dynamic evolution. Juxtaposing conflicting prin-
ciples thus helps explain the notable lack of detail provided by Dubnow
(and other thinkers adopting the same ambiguous terminology) about the
specific grounds of national identity. Underscoring fixed attributes would
undermine the delicate attempt to establish an intentionally vague rela-
tionship between unchanging characteristics and permeable borders.
The theories of nationalism, both Jewish and general, developed by Kal-
len and Zimmern indicate the existence of a parallel strategy among self-
identified Zionist intellectuals for defining the essence of Judaism as the
process of change. Zimmern’s spiritual principle of nationalism and Kal-
len’s conception of Hebraism as a living spirit serve primarily to underscore
Jewish political thought’s historical ability to maintain an evolving equilib-
rium between national autonomy and international integration.58 Neither
thinker linked his notions of spirit to Dubnow, the most obvious source
for altering concepts of the national spirit to meet integrationist objectives.
Instead, both theorists traced the intellectual genealogy for their under-
standing of the Jewish spirit to the Zionist ideology of Ahad Ha’am.
For Zimmern and Kallen, Ahad Ha’am represented “the best exponent
of nationalist theory in modern times”; he was the thinker most closely
associated with the Jewish political tradition as espoused by the prophets
from Amos to Job.59 Why would highly acculturated Western intellectu-
als place Ahad Ha’am, a man committed to a romantic, linguistic articula-
tion of nationalism, in such an esteemed position in demonstrating the
compatibility of the Jewish spirit with integration and pluralism? For Zim-
mern and Kallen, Ahad Ha’am set the groundwork for shifting the mean-
ing of national spirit from its genesis in organic, familiar, and essentialist
ties to a purposefully imprecise phrase promoting the dynamic interaction
between national groups.
Ahad Ha’am’s conviction that the diaspora was an enduring fact of Jew-
ish life propelled him to consider the relationship between various national
groups living within shared territorial and political boundaries.60 He devel-
oped a concept of “imitation” to address this reality. Imitation promoted a

middle path between the twofold dangers of self-effacing assimilation, on
the one hand, and radical national separation on the other. Preserving dis-
crete national groups (often dispersed across political boundaries) and pro-
moting the interactions of diverse nationalities within a single polity ignite
conversations that propel both groups toward greater degrees of coopera-
tion and cosmopolitan aspirations. Indeed, Ahad Ha’am had already paved
the way for the fusion of Jewish nationalism and internationalism by con-
cluding that the process of imitation “widens its [the nation’s] scope, and
becomes intersocial or international.”61 No wonder Zimmern insisted in
1905, shortly after reading the cultural Zionists’ essays for the first time,
“Ahad Ha’am should be commended to British Internationalists.”62
Kallen’s discussion of the Hebrew spirit, which he referred to as “Hebra-
ism,” as the glue connecting Jews past and present, also reflects the influ-
ence of Ahad Ha’am. Kallen defines Hebraism as “the name for this living
spirit which demands righteousness, expressed in all the different inter-
ests in which Jews, as Jews, have a share—in art, science, philosophy, and
social organization and in religion.”63 In adopting this term, Kallen both
nods to Ahad Ha’am’s language and further distinguishes himself from the
cultural Zionist. The primary function of Hebraism was not to establish
a set of particular beliefs, practices, or allegiances. Despite the similarity
with linguistic or völkisch categories of nationality, Kallen clearly stresses
the evolving and multifaceted aspects of Jewish national culture. The con-
scious shift from static content to dynamic process at the heart of Jewish
national cohesion makes this theory of collectivity completely compatible
with the model of imitation. The specific details of Hebraism were far less
important than its historical ability to maintain an evolving equilibrium
between particular allegiances and cosmopolitan aspirations, national
autonomy and international integration.
A variation of Kallen’s modified interpretation of Ahad Ha’am’s concept
of spirit emerges as an underlying argument in “Democracy versus the
Melting-Pot.” The essay’s promotion of dissimilation, rather than assimi-
lation, upholds the paradoxical contention that perpetuating national
boundaries stimulates the intermingling of distinct communities. Kallen
wrote: “Although it [Jewish nationality] is far more in tune than the other
quarters, it is also far more autonomous in spirit and self-conscious in
culture.”64 The Jewish spirit stands out for its distinct ability to embody two
poles: the dynamic engagement with other national groups and the pas-
sionate affirmation of its individuality.
A noteworthy difference distinguishing Kallen’s Hebraism from Ahad
Ha’am’s conception of national spirit is the omission of the centrality of

the Hebrew language. Utilizing a theory of linguistic nationalism while
jettisoning the particular national language undermines the internal con-
sistency of Ahad Ha’am’s cultural Zionism. Kallen’s reliance on Hebrew
sources, specifically the prophetic writings, as the primary source of Jew-
ish national culture was a poor substitute for the reemergence of Hebrew
as a living language that would bridge ancient sources and modern cul-
ture. At the same time, however, the decision reconfigured Hebraism to an
American milieu by underscoring the process of integration as the defin-
ing characteristic of the Hebrew spirit and eliminated the most concrete
border: the need for American Jews to actually know or learn the Hebrew
language. As a result, Kallen’s Zionism went even further than diasporist
Dubnow in identifying nationality with integration. Writing in a multilin-
guistic context, Dubnow (like his friend Simon Rawidowicz, the subject of
chapter 3) retained language as a primary marker of difference. Zimmern
and Kallen (paralleling Hans Kohn’s interpretation of cultural Zionism)
took the logic of the spirit of progress to its essence—a catalyst for mutual
understanding and accelerated cultural amalgamation.
This function of the language of spirit in Kallen’s writings has been com-
pletely overshadowed by another, far more famous, quotation from “Democ-
racy versus the Melting-Pot.” The essay concludes: “men may change their
clothes . . . they cannot change their grandfathers.”65 For recent interpreters
of the history of American pluralism, such as Werner Sollors and David Hol-
linger, this emphasis on descent demonstrates Kallen’s adoption of the bio-
logical criteria of group identity negatively associated with the term spirit.66
This distorts the conscious effort Kallen made through his writings during
the early decades of the twentieth century to find a language of collectivity
that supported both permeable and fixed boundaries of identity.
These readings fail to appreciate Kallen’s attempt to dissolve the tension
between national autonomy and integration. Kallen grappled with national
boundaries that would fall “between race and more external forms of asso-
ciative unity.”67 For Kallen, “the mythology of race” did not contradict
the claim that men “cannot change their grandfather.” This balancing act
between what scholars today might contrast as essentialism and hybridity
reflects conflicting yearnings to limit the exclusivist claims of nationalism
to make space for Jews as a distinct, and equal, minority community and
to legitimate the national boundaries of the Jewish people.
Jewish thinkers revised concepts of national spirit and culture as tools
for navigating these contrasting objectives. The primary strategic benefit
of deploying these terms was what they were not—concepts of nationality
based on territorial or political ties. One could identify with both a particular

national spirit and a patriotic allegiance to the host country. In addition, con-
cepts of spirit and culture appealed because their semantic elasticity allowed
them to do double-duty as terms reflecting Jewish political thought’s com-
mitment to facilitating both acculturation and differentiation. Such an essen-
tialized definition created a clear boundary between Jews and other groups
that transcended territory or sovereignty. Yet the terms could be adjusted
to blur the dichotomy between the choices of fixed identity and a complete
rejection of the enduring ties created by family loyalties, sociological attach-
ments, and intellectual curiosity. Addressing this dilemma, however, left
Jewish nationalists such as Kallen and Zimmern open to two potential criti-
cisms: their notions of collectivity are too amorphous for those interested in
national autonomy and too impermeable for integrationists.
Nationalism, Liberalism, and Humanism

One of the noteworthy patterns that emerged in counterstate expres-
sions of Jewish nationalism was its association with universal principles
connected to modernity, progress, and morality. A number of thinkers
unequivocally equated Jewish nationalism (generally in opposition to the
nation-state variety) with such key terms as civilization, progress, liber-
alism, and ethical. The juxtaposition of Jewish particularity with univer-
sal allegiances reflects a second area in which Jewish nationalists sought
to alter the logic of nationalism. They argued for a symbiotic, rather than
divergent, relationship between national and human loyalties. Nurturing
collective national ties within political boundaries promised equal rights,
peaceful coexistence, and human progress.
Dubnow’s concept of “ethical nationalism” provides a starting point
for interrogating the strategy of fusing human and national objectives. “If
some artificial language would coin a new word for our ethical nationalism,”
Dubnow wrote, “we would gladly leave to you the old disreputable and hol-
low term. As long as such a word is still lacking, however, it is our duty to
establish by exact definition how the existing term should be used.”68 What
does he mean by ethical nationalism? For Dubnow, the ethical idea was inti-
mately linked to the recognition of national diversity as the most effective
path toward promoting human allegiances. He justifies his normative claims
about the human value of difference by contrasting two terms: cosmopoli-
tanism and universalism. From Dubnow’s Nationalism and History:
[Cosmopolitanism] rejects the psychological and ethical foundations of

nationalism and does not recognize any intermediate links between the

individual and humanity. Universalism, on the other hand, recognizes that
each individual is a member of a people, and that each people is a member
of the family of nations or of mankind, and demands therefore that the
same brotherhood prevail between the peoples of the community of man-
kind as exists between individuals in each people.69
This idea challenges classic liberalism’s assumption that sameness or uni-

formity provides the most effective path toward ensuring equality. Human
freedom and progress, Dubnow posits, require a clear distinction between
conformity-seeking cosmopolitanism and diversity-tolerant universalism.70
Introducing this dichotomy demonstrates Dubnow’s sensitivity to the prom-
ise and perils of liberalism. The liberal tradition provided the primary the-
oretical engine for Jewish emancipation and acceptance. While liberalism
secured individual rights—a coveted assumption for Jewish intellectuals—it
also linked the preservation of such rights to erasing collective allegiances.
This placed Dubnow in a bind. On the one hand, he viewed thinkers such
as the British liberal John Stuart Mill and the French thinker Ernst Renan as
laying the basis for applying civil rights to all citizens of the state.71
Yet Dubnow’s attitude toward Mill was complicated by Mill’s claim that
“free institutions are next to impossible in a country made of different
nationalities”72 (Zimmern also pointed to Mill’s writings as “fundamentally
wrong” on this count).73 For Mill, the dissolution of cultural and ethnic
differences would prevent intergroup strife from undermining the prin-
ciples of individual equality. As a result, liberalism pressured conformity,
prevented state or public recognition of different minority communities,
and generated antipathy toward religious traditions that did not conform
with liberal values. The individual freedom sought by liberalism created a
double-edged sword: hiding beneath the cloak of universal individuality is
a compassionate theory of elimination. The political theorist Steven Smith
has called this the “unspoken premise of liberalism.”74 As he explains, “Jews
were to be welcomed into the liberal polity so long as they ceased to be dis-
tinctively or recognizably Jewish.”75
Given this assumption, how could Jewish theorists retain the promise of
liberal integration without the bedrock assumption of uniformity? Only by
highlighting the particular claims concealed by the cosmopolitan rhetoric
of the Enlightenment, and inverting their conclusions by inserting diversity
as the sine qua non of universal harmony, could Jewish nationalists jus-
tify their demands for individual rights and collective recognition. To make
this argument, Dubnow suggests that an integral part of human freedom is
the recognition of allegiances to cultural, historical, or ethnic communities.

Human beings do not make choices as autonomous individuals without ties
to particular communal contexts. The larger horizon within which individ-
uals make decisions constitutes a critical aspect of human freedom.76 One of
Dubnow’s conversation partners, Simon Rawidowicz, identified this as the
“right to be different.” A more capacious (and ethical) definition of liberal-
ism would recognize both individual equality and collective attachments.
A second dimension to the argument that ethical nationalism (mod-
eled by the Jewish case) and humanism are compatible relied on another
assumption about the national essence of Judaism. Earlier, the chapter dis-
cussed Dubnow’s emphasis on evolution and progress as core characteristics
of Jewish nationality. Another aspect distinguishing Judaism’s conception of
collective solidarity was the dedication to promoting equality and tolerance.
The national mission of the Jewish people was rooted in the shared com-
mitment to individual rights, universal equality, and free choice of asso-
ciations. This instrumental definition resolved potential tension between
particular and universal allegiances by equating the ultimate objective of
both loyalties. Yet addressing this friction intended to justify Jewish preser-
vation through liberal categories severely weakens the claims counterstate
Jewish nationalism can make regarding the nature of membership. As an
ethical nationalism, the grounds of Jewish collective identity eschew coer-
cion, reject any special position relative to other national groups, and dis-
card illiberal cultural, religious, or political practices. Thus, the challenge
to liberalism remains fixed in its universalistic logic. Particular bonds exist
primarily for the sake of promoting universal brotherhood.
Formulations synthesizing Zionism and internationalism included par-
allel attempts to negotiate the relationship between nationalism and liber-
alism. Zimmern’s collection of essays, Nationality and Government, echoed
(even at times with the same terminology) Dubnow’s normative rejection
of cosmopolitanism. The failure to preserve distinct cultures and social
networks thus engenders “moral degradation,” “drab cosmopolitanism,”
and “spiritual atrophy.”77 Assimilation may result in great material profit
but will certainly eviscerate man’s “strength to keep his own soul alive.” For
Zimmern, the “Boston Jew from a Russian ghetto” who “apes the manners
and customs of New England” represented the problematic by-product of
the nation-state’s policy of cultural homogeneity.78
To emphasize the moral value of national diversity, Zimmern advanced
a dichotomy between two typologies of nationalism. He included Zion-
ism and British nationalism in a category he called “civilization national-
ism.” This model contrasted directly with Prussian Kultur. Prussian Kul-
tur, he concluded, represented the epitome of a modern state that erased

collective identities and associations to preserve the national character of
the state. The alternate model, British civilization, stood “for something
moral and social and political.”79 This concept renounced cultural homo-
geneity and ensured the right to practice separate national customs, speak
different languages, and preserve religious practices. Zimmern’s definition
of civilization can be summarized as progress toward the establishment of
multinational commonwealths or composite states. The path of progress
and civilization therefore demanded not only individual rights for citizens
but also the recognition of distinct national groups.
Variations of Jewish civilization nationalism and Zionism, as opposed
to Prussian Kultur, appeared in Kallen’s essays written for both Jewish and
non-Jewish audiences (the contrasting nationalisms was the main theme in
a 1919 New Republic article).80 In the Menorah Journal, Kallen underscored
Zionism’s “service to civilization” as a check against conformity, which he
associated with nation-state nationalism and imperialism. Kallen’s most
famous dichotomy, the distinction between democracy and the melting
pot, does not explicitly use the civilization–Kultur dichotomy (adopting
Zimmern’s specific examples of British civilization and Prussian Kultur
while the United States remained a neutral party during the war was not an
option). Yet Kallen’s concept of American democracy mirrors Zimmern’s
civilization concept as the basis for creating a commonwealth or federa-
tion of nationalities. Likewise, the detrimental alternative for the United
States, the melting pot, shares the associations Zimmern linked to Prussian
Kultur, specifically the demand for national uniformity and resistance to
diversity within the polis.81
Making theoretical distinctions between universalism and cosmopoli-
tanism, civilization and Kultur, and democracy and the melting pot con-
tributed a rubric for classifying nationalisms that differed in important
ways from the civic–ethnic dichotomy described earlier in the chapter.
The distinction is not between those theories of nationalism that cling to
national partiality versus those that espouse universal principles. Instead,
the bifurcation separates nationalisms that promote tolerance and diversity
from those dedicated to homogenization and ethnic conformity. National-
ism, compatible with the ideals of civilization and progress, must recognize
the right to be different. Juxtaposing universal and particular terminology
had a twofold objective: to demonstrate that liberalism should incorpo-
rate particularism as a crucial dimension for preserving and promoting
individual rights; and to establish that nationalism could only contribute
to human progress by renouncing the tendency toward intolerance, exclu-
sion, and coercive demands for homogeneity.

Precisely this blending of Western liberal and Romantic typologies of
nationalism characteristic of Jewish thinkers in the early twentieth century
exemplifies a problematic synthesis for some scholars. The political scien-
tist Jeanne Morefield, for instance, has criticized Zimmern as a “liberal in
a muddle.” According to Morefield, “Zimmern also brought together two
seemingly contradictory notions of nationhood: the liberal understand-
ing of nationhood as something one enters into by choice, and the more
German idea of Volk nationalism based on a shared ethnic parentage. In
this manner, Zimmern transformed nationhood into both a voluntary and
natural—liberal and organic—phenomenon.”82 Zimmern’s espousal of uni-
versal human rights clashes, she argues, with his embrace of “organic” met-
aphors (including the concept of a national “spirit” discussed earlier) to
describe solidarity. For Morefield, Zimmern fuses aspects of what scholars
now perceive as mutually exclusive categories of civic nationalism and eth-
nic nationalism. This assumption demonstrates a general suspicion among
liberal theorists about the problem of recognizing particular group loy-
alties.83 Particular loyalties may demand coercive criteria of membership
that undermine an individual’s autonomy and freedom. Moreover, com-
mitment to a specific group potentially erodes an individual’s allegiance to
all of humankind and the equal treatment of fellow citizens.
But the choice between national and human allegiances created two
untenable choices for some Jewish political thinkers: complete integration
or national autonomy. To escape this either/or logic, Jewish nationalists had
little choice but to seek a middle-ground approach now deemed muddled
and contradictory. Zimmern’s civilization, Dubnow’s ethical nationalism,
and Kallen’s democracy consciously adapted terminology associated with
liberal progress, modernity, and integration. Yet they emphasized terms of
integration that delineated the retention of national diversity as the means
for achieving progress and coexistence. Their strategy was to formulate an
intentionally ambiguous position that negotiated liberalism’s guarantee of
individual rights with nationalism’s organic grounds of membership (espe-
cially romantic and völkisch expressions) that transcended territory and
statehood. Reading the failure to reconcile Jewish nationalism with either
civic or ethnic conceptions as a muddled position shifts the attention of
intellectual historians away from documenting the very process of negoti-
ating the meaning and moral parameters of national identity that charac-
terized the interwar period.
Morefield’s analysis of Zimmern raises an additional concern about
the juxtaposition of liberal and organic concepts. She underscores efforts
among colonial elites to obfuscate power differentials in the name of liberal

progress. The liberal principles espoused by British supporters of interna-
tionalism masked an integral part of their self-interest in distinguishing
nation from state: an attempt to preserve the British sphere of imperial
influence and to address anticolonial nationalism’s demands for autonomy
and intendance. Guaranteeing limited cultural autonomy and universal
rights deflected calls for self-determination among colonialized popula-
tions. Zimmern’s repudiation of national sovereignty on the grounds of
promoting liberal ideals serves as an apologetic for his agenda of preserv-
ing the British Empire.
Morefield’s warning about the ulterior motives engendering the fusion of
liberalism and nationalism in early-twentieth-century thought adds impor-
tant dimensions to this book’s analysis of the phenomena within counter-
state Zionism. Morefield sensitizes readers to the full implications of the
adoption of key terms, such as civilization and progress, to define Jew-
ish nationalism. Jewish intellectuals also integrated the problematic set of
assumptions encoded within the logic of these terms. Placing Jews in the
category of civilization reconfigured their position without challenging the
legitimacy of hierarchies based on racial, geographic, or religious consider-
ations. The project of civilizing Jews was completely compatible with (and
most likely engendered) the placement of other groups in inferior positions.
Zimmern was particularly guilty of this tendency. Morefield notes that “the
majority of his [Zimmern’s] prewar writings on commonwealth and empire
reveal an almost insouciant assumption that full citizenship rights be denied
to nonwhite ‘dependencies’ based on their well-understood immaturity.”84
Kallen explicitly shared the sense of noblesse oblige that shaped the atti-
tude of British internationalists toward nonwhite, indigenous populations.
Indeed, he proudly declared noblesse oblige as the “motto of the Jew.”85
Jews deserve this motto because they, like the British, have a civilizing mis-
sion to accomplish among the primitive Arab population of Palestine. Kal-
len explained: “The fellah of Palestine is a case of the arrested develop-
ment and enforced degradation typical of the whole Arabic-speaking and
Mohammedan world. The cultural level on which he has found stability is
barbarous. His rise above it is restricted by the accumulations of immemo-
rial precepts, prescriptions, and taboos which even in the Bible appear in
already vestigial form.”86
Kallen’s specific reference to the Bible’s rejection of primitive behav-
iors characterized by the Arab population reflects the need to draw a clear
dichotomy between progressive Jews and uncivilized Arabs. The establish-
ment of this hierarchy, and the resulting self-proclaimed duty of raising the
standards of this population, sets the logical foundation for deferring (for

an unspecified period) the individual and collective rights of the majority
Arab population. In a 1915 essay outlining the “constitutional foundation
of the new Zion,” Kallen suggested that democracy be delayed for a long
period—“perhaps a generation” of “transition and preparation.”87 Kallen
turned a deaf ear to the collective claims of the Arab population by arguing
that they will opt (voluntarily, Kallen assured his readers) to fully “absorb
Jewish standards of life, labour, and thought.”88
Comparing the programs for Palestine with American democracy reveals
that Kallen did not apply his theories uniformly.89 The two defining prin-
ciples of American democracy as developed in “Democracy versus the Melt-
ing-Pot”—the protection of individual rights, such as the right to vote, and
the recognition of the enduring value of national solidarity—do not apply
to the situation in Palestine. To be consistent with these principles, Kallen
would have advocated for a federation of Arab and Jewish nationalities coex-
isting within Palestine. The two semiautonomous groups would preserve
their unique cultures and cooperate with the sovereign political power in the
region. Instead, however, Kallen’s concept of the relationship between Jews
and Arabs in Palestine has a lot in common with the melting pot, a notion
he rejected vociferously as the antithesis of American democracy. He dis-
missed Arab national claims, and wrote, rather, that Palestine would become
“a unity established through a meeting of minds, an interchange of intel-
lectual culture, a cooperation in the public enterprises . . . and the progres-
sive enrichment of the daily life of the two people.”90 Deeply transformed by
the “the example of Jewish success and prosperity before his eyes,” the Arab
majority would willingly embrace the immigrants’ culture.91
Kallen failed to see a double standard in advocating for the melting of
the Arab population into a Jewish one in Palestine and the fragmentation
of a monolithic American national identity in the United States. His inabil-
ity to note any contradictions reflects the inner logic of the worldview he
shared with British internationalists. The elevation of Jewish nationality to
the pinnacle of civilization, and the corollary demotion of the Arabs in Pal-
estine, prevented Kallen from even considering that the indigenous popu-
lation might contest full integration within a Jewish polity. Kallen noted
that this process “must be accomplished not by coercion but by contagion
[which] is, of course, obvious.”92 Kallen’s self-understanding of raising the
quality of life among the indigenous population enables him to frame the
establishment of Jewish standards in Palestine in the liberal rhetoric of free
choice and autonomy.
The application of British internationalism, specifically the associa-
tion of Judaism and civilization, thus had another advantage for Zionist

intellectuals committed to building a Jewish homeland in Palestine and
sensitive to the enduring plight of Jewish minority groups scattered
around the globe. Internationalism provided a clear justification for the
inconsistent application of the universal principles of individual and col-
lective rights. The assumptions of British internationalism supported con-
tradictory objectives: the rights to individual and collective claims in the
diaspora would be granted immediately while Arab demands for national
recognition and democratic representation in Palestine could be deferred
indefinitely. Internationalism insulated liberal Zionists from claims of dis-
enfranchising the Arab population in Palestine. Kallen’s description of
Judaism as an “anti-imperial” political tradition masked the immersion of
his own conceptualization of Jewish political thought within an intellectual
tradition deeply influenced by British imperialism.
The attention to power dynamics and the particular demands of univer-
sal rhetoric highlighted by Morefield and other critical theorists compli-
cates the motivations attracting counterstate Zionists to theories of inter-
nationalism and to key terms such as civilization to define Jewish collective
identity. Yet by ignoring the Jewish concerns and experiences of such fig-
ures as Kallen and Zimmern, historians of political thought fail to situate
the uncertain position of Jewish and Zionist theorists.93 Just as Jewish col-
lectivity was often considered outside of nation-state nationalism, it was
also excluded from formulations of counterstate national identity.94 Jew-
ish intellectuals struggled to align Judaism with such concepts as civiliza-
tion, humanism, and progress at precisely the moment in which questions
about their qualifications for integrating were being challenged by alien
acts, nativism, and discrimination in the United States and Europe.
As both insiders and outsiders, Jewish nationalists navigated between
white and black, colonial authority and colonialized oppressed, elite intel-
lectual circles and discriminated minority group. Anxiety about the per-
ceived inferior status of Jews necessitated a polemical effort to demonstrate
the Jewish traditions and exemplification of the characteristics deemed
necessary for acceptance and integration. Underscoring these particular
attributes of Jewish nationalism was also calculated to remind non-Jewish
nationalisms to respect the individual rights of Jewish citizens. These addi-
tional factors meant that Jewish intellectuals had their own motivations
for aligning themselves with the ideological movements that they viewed
as potential partners. Jewish nationalists adopted a conceptual vocabulary
that reinforced hierarchies between various groups and were, at the same
time, victims of such exclusionary categories.

Between Homeland and Diaspora
Identifying Jewish nationalism as the harbinger of a new stage in the evolu-
tion of nationalism and sovereignty challenged a third assumption generated
by the binary logic of nation-state nationalism—the distinction between
diaspora and homeland. The doctrine of national sovereignty links member-
ship in the national group to living in the homeland, a territory connected
by history, demography, and national consciousness to a particular people.
Individuals living outside the established homeland had an uncertain status
that undermined the rationale of territorial self-determination. State-seek-
ing Zionist thinkers responded to the central role that land played in estab-
lishing the boundaries of national membership by evolving a categorical dis-
tinction between Jewish life in the diaspora and the homeland.95 Following
the logic of the nation-state model, individuals could choose between mutu-
ally exclusive options of vanishing in the diaspora (either by persecution or
assimilation) or creating a vibrant national identity in the homeland.
Counterstate Zionists, I argue throughout this book, viewed the relation-
ship between diaspora and homeland through quite a different lens that
reflected their larger project of replacing the either/or logic of the nation-
state paradigm with an integrated approach to theorizing Jewish national
life. They envisioned one definition of Jewish national identity applicable to
Jews around the globe. As a result, their writings illuminate an important
moment of ideological fluidity before the rigid distinction between here and
there emerged as a definitive crossroads separating paths in modern Jewish
nationalism. Zionism was understood as a unifying principle relevant for
Jews living in two distinct contexts: as minority communities living outside
Palestine and as a semiautonomous community in the homeland.
How could Zionism offer a uniform theory of nationalism for address-
ing the Jewish question in both homeland and diaspora settings? Part of the
appeal of internationalism for Kallen and Zimmern was its legitimization
of the same national status for Jews scattered around the world. Jews’ posi-
tion as a minority national group within a commonwealth in the United
States or Europe would not be categorically different from their status in
Palestine. This did not necessarily mean that the geographic distinction
between homeland and diaspora had no relevance. Indeed, counterstate
Zionists developed a variety of stratagems for recognizing the distinct and
unique aspects of settlement in Palestine without elevating living in the
homeland to the sine qua non of national membership.
Cultural Zionism’s concept of the Land of Israel as a spiritual center pro-
vided one such possibility. Ahad Ha’am believed that a territorial homeland

would invigorate Jewish national culture for the remainder of the Jewish
population scattered around the world. The center-periphery model he
outlined became an essential part of the definition Zimmern integrated as
his own concept of nationality. Zimmern wrote: “Nationality is a spiritual
principle of peculiar force and dignity, springing from the intimate life of
the soul, and embodied in a distinctive corporate mode of life and related
to a particular homeland.”96
Kallen harnessed Ahad Ha’am’s center-periphery paradigm to equate
the ties that bind Jews across homeland and diaspora to those that link
Englishmen across the British Empire. Kallen insisted: “[A]s a matter of
fact, the ‘diaspora’ is only a partial thing; it is like the diaspora of the English
in the British Empire. The Jews always had a center of reference, a spiritual
capital to look to.”97 The center-periphery metaphor served to strengthen
the argument that Zionism and British internationalism shared a com-
mon basis for thinking about the relationship between national identity
and territory. The homeland remained central as an organizing principle
of collective solidarity, but not as the physical address for all members of
the national community. The existence of a spiritual center would ensure
the preservation of minority national communities around the world. Pal-
estine, Zimmern contended, was not intended “to get rid of the Jews from
the west,” but instead to “deepen and dignify their corporate life.”98 The
centripetal pull of a cultural center provided grounds for collective iden-
tity that avoided the coercive language of blood and descent as the orga-
nizing principle of national membership.99 This basis for shared solidarity
fit in particularly well with the argument linking Jewish nationalism and
humanism.
Theorizing Palestine as a homeland center, but not a sovereign state or
the place for all Jews to live, thus enabled Zimmern and Kallen to turn what
state-seeking Zionists viewed as the great liability of Jews’ stateless status
into the ideal model of nationality in a post-nation-state era. Internation-
alism provided a strategy for theoretical hedging at a moment in which
Jewish confidence in nation-state nationalism faced new challenges. Inter-
nationalism, augmented by Judaism’s status as a civilization, supported the
simultaneous pursuit of two unlikely possibilities that could potentially
secure Jewish individual and collective security: the creation of a Jewish
homeland with semiautonomous status in Palestine and the recognition of
minority rights for Jews in the diaspora. As discussed earlier, their fusion
was also based on a series of assumptions about the role of European Jews
in Arab lands. The prevalence of these assumptions, and the fact that only
a small number of Jewish settlers had actually arrived in Palestine, enabled

Zimmern and Kallen to ignore the potential tension between articulating
one definition of Jewish nationality that resisted the claims to homogene-
ity and conformity of European and American host countries and encour-
aged the acceptance of precisely such an ethnonational character in a terri-
tory populated by a resisting Arab-majority population. They failed to fully
come to terms with how the same pluralistic, integrationist, humanistic,
and even deterritorialized concepts of Jewish national identity calibrated
to create space for Jewish citizens in Europe and the United States could
also apply to creating a Jewish homeland in Palestine.
As the interwar period progressed, however, this quandary became
increasingly difficult to neglect, for two reasons. First, the situation in Pal-
estine changed. Arab voices began to challenge Jewish immigration and
to assert their own demands for national recognition. The possibility of
ignoring the tension between Jewish nationalism as a force toward integra-
tion and pluralism clashed with the emerging realities of ethnonational
strife on the ground. Second, the eclipse of new visions of international
organization by the spread of the nation-state paradigm as the template
for nationalism lessened the possibility that stateless nationalities would
become the norm in the postwar era. The growth of national self-determi-
nation left Jewish proponents of counterstate nationalism with fewer ideo-
logical allies or realistic political possibilities.
As a result of these shifts, Rawidowicz, Kaplan, and Kohn grappled far
more directly with the increasingly difficult task of harmonizing their
views of Jewish political thought as the peaceful alternative to nation-state
nationalism with an emerging national conflict in Palestine. Each thinker
grew increasingly disillusioned with Zionism and, at the same time, Zion-
ist ideology grew less open to counterstate visions of nationalism perceived
as untenable options, given the violence and tension in Palestine. The mar-
ginalization of counterstate Zionism in the years leading up to 1948 did not
resolve the main tension it highlighted, however. Indeed, the Jewish people,
today almost equally split between homeland and diaspora settings, continue
to struggle with the issue of squaring two different perspectives on Jewish
collective identity—one underscoring Judaism’s commitment to universal
equality grounded in the separation of nation and state, and the other seek-
ing a Jewish state linked to preserving a particular ethnoreligious tradition.
In 1934, Kaplan wrote in Judaism as a Civilization, “Nationalism is not
a political, but a cultural concept. Its fundamental purpose is to human-
ize and civilize.”100 His explication of nationality as a cultural concept
whose primary function is to “humanize and civilize” confounds contem-
porary assumptions about nationalism and Zionism. Kaplan disengages

national identity from citizenship and aligns the concept with the realiza-
tion of human values and progress. This juxtaposition demonstrates the
same “seemingly contradictory notions of nationhood” described earlier
by Morefield in her critique of Alfred Zimmern. Yet this chapter demon-
strates that Kaplan’s formulation of Zionism as cultural or spiritual bonds
dedicated to humanize and to civilize was not an exceptional claim in
early-twentieth-century Jewish or Western political thought.
Kaplan, as had Rawidowicz and Kohn, encountered concepts of Jew-
ish nationalism and Zionism in his formative years (specifically, but not
exclusively, through the work of such figures as Kallen, Zimmern, and
Dubnow) that conceived of Jewish political thought in direct opposition
to nation-state nationalism. Their formulations exhibit a number of pat-
terns and themes that reflect the dilemmas and possibilities of establishing
counterstate nationalism as a universal applicable model. National identity
promoted a language of difference fully compatible with citizenship, lib-
eralism, and geographic dispersion. By working within the framework of
a larger critique of the nation-state in the early twentieth century, Jewish
nationalists saw an opportunity to shift the logic of nationalism from fos-
tering particularism, exclusion, and mutually exclusive loyalties to human-
ism, inclusion, and multiple allegiances.
Challenging the premise of national sovereignty and formulating coun-
terstate concepts of nationalism offered an alternative to state-seeking Zion-
ism’s strategy for solving the Jewish question—normalization by emulat-
ing the nation-state model. Contesting the meaning of nationalism offered
another possibility: the normalization of the unique Jewish case by trans-
forming the general definition of nationality to match the Jews’ stateless sta-
tus. Subsequent developments in Europe and Palestine (as well as the rise of
conflict) make the belief that national identity could be harnessed to promote
diversity, tolerance, and peaceful coexistence rather than division appear
naïve and idealistic. Indeed, counterstate Zionists severely underestimated
the enduring force of nation-state nationalism in Europe. In retrospect, 1917
represented a turning point that made self-determination the basic blueprint
for nationalism and international relations for the twentieth century.
At the same time, however, Jewish thinkers identified persisting weak-
nesses in the doctrine of national sovereignty—a limited framework for
recognizing and understanding the experiences of individuals attached to
multiple identities, including ties that bind stateless, diaspora, or trans-
national populations. We now turn to three Zionists who dedicated their
considerable intellectual talents to grappling with this undertheorized
space in modern political thought.

Portrait of Simon Rawidowicz, probably in Berlin, 1920.
Courtesy of Simon Rawidowicz Archives.

— 3 —
Text, Not Territory

Simon Rawidowicz, Global Hebraism, and
the Centering of Decentered National Life
In 1954, Simon Rawidowicz exchanged a series of confrontational letters

with Prime Minister David Ben Gurion about his decision to name the state
“Israel.” Rawidowicz exclaimed, “‘Israel’ cannot be reserved exclusively for
the State and shared by the State and outside the State alike. . . . As long as
the State of Israel and the Diasporas of Israel have not clarified this matter
for themselves and the world, the confusion becomes more serious from
day to day. [I am annoyed by the] speed with which some of the best of our
people in the State have hastened to remove Israel outside the State from
the totality of Israel.”1 The designated name Israel, Rawidowicz continued,
“cannot but lead to the conclusion that Israel, as such, does not relate to the
concept Jewish in any sense. Israel becomes nothing but a geographical-
political term, devoid of Jewish identity.”2 Eretz Yisrael (the Land of Israel),
Rawidowicz suggested, was a far better alternative because it prevented any
terminological confusion between the citizens of the state and the entirety
of the Jewish people. After reading Rawidowicz’s comments, a strongly
opposed Ben Gurion, the man primarily responsible for the choice of Israel,
responded with an emphatic repudiation: “The name ‘Israel’ applies since 14
May 1948 only to the Jewish state.”3
Ben Gurion and Rawidowicz’s dispute was not merely over semantics.
At stake in this exchange was the struggle to define the meaning of the tra-
ditional Hebrew term that refers to the Jewish people—Am Yisrael—and
with it, the nature of Jewish collective self-definition in a new era of sover-
eignty. Ben Gurion’s position—that “only the citizens of the Jewish state are
Israel”—followed logically from his ideology of mamlakhtiyut, or statism.4
The Zionist leader believed that only political independence would rescue
text, not territory: 61

Simon Rawidowicz 61
Jews from their perverse existence as a religious community in exile, ensure
their normalization as a modern people, and restore their place as active
participants in world history. Because the state represented the future for
Jews and Judaism, Ben Gurion believed, it inherited the legacy of the term
used throughout the textual tradition to refer to the entire people. Jews liv-
ing outside the political boundaries—that is, in the diaspora—would not
be worthy of the title Israel.
Whether Ben Gurion was aware of it, there was another level to his insis-
tence on keeping the name Israel. Following the expectations of European
nationalism meant that normalization required linking sovereignty, terri-
tory, and people. The term Israel symbolically conflated these various char-
acteristics. Adopting Rawidowicz’s proposed name, the Land of Israel, would
have only exacerbated one of the greatest challenges of fitting the Jewish peo-
ple into the sovereign mold: the demographic reality that the vast majority of
the national population lived outside the geographic homeland.
Rawidowicz’s letter to Ben Gurion did not come out of the blue. Ra-
widowicz’s position reflected an argument he had been waging among
his Zionist and Hebraist friends and polemical opponents for almost two
decades. Rawidowicz inveighed against this effort of casting various geo-
graphic, political, and cultural expressions of Jewish national life into a
nation-state paradigm. The decision to call the state Israel solidified the
suppression of Rawidowicz’s position by symbolically equating the nation
of Israel with the State of Israel. For Rawidowicz, Ben Gurion’s normaliza-
tion was actually a distortion of the category Israel. The term had always
referred to Jews living in multiple centers, without an implied hierarchy
between homeland and diaspora. Naming the state Israel, Rawidowicz
believed, thus created a split in the global Jewish community by legitimat-
ing a set of binary characteristics that he had spent a lifetime trying to blur:
diaspora versus homeland, religious versus secular, exile versus redemp-
tion, and dependent subjects versus independent sovereigns. Israel, Raw-
idowicz argued in his Hebrew writings, represented a very different type
of nation. Unlike modern nation-states, the Jewish nation was united by
language and texts rather than by territory and citizenship. The debate over
whether to employ the term Israel or the Land of Israel was really a dis-
agreement about whether Jewish nationality should emulate nation-state
nationalism or model paradigms of global nationality dedicated to break-
ing the sovereign mold linking nation and state.
Who was this largely forgotten voice who boldly challenged Ben Guri-
on’s decision about the name of the state, a decision that few, then or now,
would even think to question?5 Simon Rawidowicz was an erudite scholar

of Jewish intellectual history, a prolific Hebrew writer and publisher, and
one of the twentieth century’s most creative Jewish political theorists.
Throughout his lifetime, Rawidowicz was both a self-affirming Zionist
and a critic of state-seeking Zionism who advocated for building Jewish
national centers in the diaspora as well as in Palestine.
Rawidowicz developed this understanding of Jewish nationalism by
proposing the concepts of Babylon and Jerusalem as a symbolic alternative
to constructing national myth around a territorial nation-state. Although
state-seeking Zionist ideology and historiography underscored the Land of
Israel as the territorial center of the people of Israel, Rawidowicz empha-
sized the place that Babylon played in the development of the Jewish tex-
tual tradition. After the destruction of the Second Temple, the center of
rabbinic learning gradually shifted from Palestine to Babylon. The legal
code that developed in exile—the Babylonian Talmud—would become the
authoritative legal, religious, and literary document in the Jewish canon
(the Palestinian Talmud largely disappeared after this).
Rawidowicz used this narrative to find key terms from within the tradi-
tion to comprehend the relationship between space and national boundar-
ies. In his view, Babylon becomes a symbolic counterpoint to Jerusalem,
upon which he erects a counterstate Zionist conception of the people of
Israel. Rawidowicz’s writings refer to Israel as a synonym for the Jewish
people—not the name of the state, which he contended should be called
something other than the term traditionally applied to the entire people
of Israel. But he does not embark on this alternative path by rejecting the
existence of the state, represented in his dyad by Jerusalem, or the central-
ity of the Land of Israel. This is why he is such a refreshing figure to recon-
sider. His work invites a conversation about the meaning of nationality
when it is disconnected from the state but not necessarily without a state.
Rawidowicz certainly did not select the ideal moment to articulate this
theory of Jewish nationality that pushed for Babylon as one of its centers.
He formulated his theory between the 1930s and the 1950s—decades that
witnessed the complete eradication of the modern Babylons of Europe
as well as the reestablishment of Jerusalem with the founding of a politi-
cal state. Despite (or perhaps partially because of) his erudition, fecund
pen, and prescient insights, Rawidowicz’s attempts to write against the tra-
jectory of Zionist thought in the first half of the twentieth century have
left him a neglected figure. Thanks to the recent passionate interest of a
number of scholars, especially the Jewish historian David Myers, Rawido-
wicz’s fascinating intellectual and personal journey between Zionism and
diasporism has begun to gain the attention it deserves.
text, not territory: Simon Rawidowicz 63

This chapter contributes to this rehabilitation of Rawidowicz’s work by
focusing on his unique vision of national cohesion linked by textual inter-
pretation rather than territory—a theory of Zionism I call global Hebra-
ism. Heavily influenced by East European diaspora Jewish nationalism,
Rawidowicz envisioned text as defining the collective boundaries of the
Jewish people. His emphasis on Hebrew language in the diaspora, his criti-
cisms of the State of Israel’s attitude toward the Arab minority in the state,
and his esoteric rabbinic writing style marginalized his iconoclastic mes-
sage, however. Proposing a fundamentally new interpretation of Rawido-
wicz’s historical relevance, I argue that his views prefigured strategies for
advocating distinct group boundaries while remaining cognizant of mul-
tiple loyalties, fluid identity formation, and antiessentialist critiques of col-
lective consciousness.
In recovering Rawidowicz’s theories, I pay special attention to what I see
as the three pillars of global Hebraism: a decentered geography, a perme-
able hermeneutic community, and an appreciation of the cohesive power
of Judaism’s deferred messianic yearning that preserved a clear boundary
between religious myth and political aspirations. I have deduced these
tenets from Rawidowicz’s rather speculative and unsystematic treatment
of Jewish political thought. Particularly interesting are his efforts to mine
Jewish sources for terms, symbols, and even words that would neutralize
the diaspora–homeland dichotomy and support nonspatial boundaries for
Jewish collective life. Rawidowicz developed a series of metaphors—such
as an ellipse with two centers or a rabbinic concept called eruvin—to theo-
rize the flow of national culture and the decentered evolution of organic
relationships. One of the primary ties that bind members in Rawidowicz’s
vision is Hebrew language. He viewed language not as an end in itself, but as
a medium for enabling the construction of communities of interpretation.
Rawidowicz’s penetrating and deeply insightful work is best appreciated
years after its publication. His questioning the role of the state in defin-
ing Israel maps the fissures in narratives of Jewish nationalism. By raising
unresolved dilemmas, many of which have become taboo topics in Jewish
political thought, his work shows fault lines that continue to destabilize a
sense of shared peoplehood connecting Jews in the diaspora with those
in the homeland. Moreover, global Hebraism introduces a vision of Zion-
ism with potential lessons for theorizing nation beyond state today. Few
typologies of nationalism or diasporaism posit the existence of multiple
centers with equal roles in nourishing the ties that bind dispersed popu-
lations. Rawidowicz’s work explores the theoretical and practical difficul-
ties of constructing one narrative of nationality robust enough to reflect

the experiences of individuals living as part of a majority population in a
homeland as minority citizens dispersed around the world.
Rawidowicz: An Intellectual Biography

Before delving into the analysis of the various components of global Hebra-
ism, let us begin with a brief look at Rawidowicz himself. This biographical
component is crucial in appreciating Rawidowicz’s lifelong effort to pre-
serve an organic sense of national membership, nourished by lived experi-
ences and permeable boundaries, against forces of ideological clarity, pure
national characteristics, and rigid boundary markers. The either/or logic of
the sovereign mold paradigm—which forced dichotomies between home-
land and diaspora, subject and sovereign, secular and religious, national
members and alien outsiders—failed to match Rawidowicz’s personal
experiences or his understanding of how Judaism had functioned for cen-
turies. Rather than the either/or logic, the conjunction and better reflects
his approach to blurring the ideological polarity that characterized his
own lifetime. This appreciation for the fluidity, diversity, and decentralized
nature of Israel’s historical experience led Rawidowicz to the surprisingly
radical claim that stands at the conclusion of his landmark Babylon and
Jerusalem: “May the name of the people of Babylon be as the name of the
people of Jerusalem: Israel.”6
Summarizing Rawidowicz’s intellectual biography is beyond the scope
of this chapter, but I offer some key reference points.7 Rawidowicz made
significant contributions to multiple fields—including philosophy (both
German and Jewish), literary analysis, Hebrew publishing, and historical
scholarship—over a lifetime that spanned living in Russia-Poland at the fin
de siècle, Weimar Berlin in the 1920s and early 1930s, Great Britain during
World War II, and the United States of the early Cold War.8 His many con-
tributions, specifically his engagement with influential intellectual circles
at each of these moments in twentieth-century history, merit in-depth
analysis. My objective here, however, is to amplify a unifying thread in
Rawidowicz’s oeuvre that is potentially obscured by his multiple areas of
interest. Rawidowicz’s scholarly and popular writing reinforced the claim
that “the people of Israel have an inherent national status, with a state or
without.”9 In grounding this claim, Rawidowicz focused primarily on read-
ing Jewish sources and historical precedents that challenged their compat-
ibility with the logic of the sovereign mold.
Like other figures developing counterstate theories of Zionism dur-
ing this period, Rawidowicz viewed Jewish nationalism as a vehicle for

challenging emerging assumptions about the relationship between nation
and state in Western political thought. His interpretation of Judaism, while
couched in very traditional language and terminology, reveals (as I explore
in detail below) both a deep grounding in and a philosophical critique
of the non-Jewish intellectual milieu. This aspect of his thought is easily
obscured by his passion for rabbinic commentaries, use of Hebrew word-
play, and his intentional understatement of the role of external influences
on Jewish thought. Yet Rawidowicz does acknowledge political philoso-
phy, and specifically the engagement with non-Jewish thought, as a crucial
part of his work. Jewish political philosophy, he wrote,
does not, unfortunately, receive the attention it deserves. The Jewish scholar
or theologian frequently refuses, a priori, to pay attention to it, either out of
fear of being mixed up with “politics” or because he dislikes it. . . . For in this
field lie burning problems of the Jewish present and future, questions which
concern the very essence of Jewry as a national or political community . . .
and their correlation with other political communities and present systems
of thought.10
An appreciation of this political prism, specifically the attempt to define

an alternative conception of Israel and to reconfigure the appropriate equi-
librium between Jews and gentiles, guides this intellectual biography. In
taking this approach, I am conscious of the tension between Rawidowicz’s
fascination with external political developments and his explicit claims to
analyze current events through traditional religious categories and rab-
binic constructs. Despite these latter claims, his work does not represent
the ruminations of a philosophical idealist uninterested in engaging the
political realities of his century. Key insights about Rawidowicz, and the
function of global Hebraism, emerge only by challenging his emphasis on
the internal development of Jewish thought. Contrasting the theories of
the medieval Jewish philosopher Moses Maimonides with those of Prime
Minister David Ben Gurion or the ideas of the biblical commentator Rashi
with those of the American Jewish Committee indicates Rawidowicz’s keen
interest in using traditional sources to address contemporary political ques-
tions. Between the lines of his rabbinic metaphors and classical Hebrew, he
searched primarily for a political philosophy to gird Judaism’s survival.
The apparently conflicting relationship between the form (classic
Hebrew, esoteric language games, and Talmudic references that demand a
thorough grounding in Jewish textual tradition) and the content (engage-
ment with early-twentieth-century philosophical and political thought)
of Rawidowicz’s writings on nationalism prompts an interesting question.

Why raise a universal set of questions about identity formation through
such a particular lens? An understanding of the tension and intimate link
between form and content, a central theme in this chapter and a defining
feature of global Hebraism, begins with Rawidowicz’s formative years.
As mentioned earlier, Rawidowicz’s biography bridges radically differ-
ent moments in modern Jewish history and engages multiple ideologi-
cal streams. Several important dimensions of his life story—including his
immersion within Jewish sources as a yeshiva student in Eastern Europe,
his leadership role in the Hebrew renaissance in Weimar, and his scholarly
research into nineteenth- and twentieth-century philosophy (both Jewish
and general)—helped shape Rawidowicz’s iconoclastic views. Before tak-
ing a more in-depth look at how these strands are woven together into the
theory of global Hebraism, let us contextualize these dimensions.
One can best categorize Rawidowicz as part of the last generation of East-
ern European maskilim (followers of the Haskalah or Jewish Enlightenment).
Born in 1896 in Grayewo, a town in northeastern Poland, his early education
consisted heavily of rabbinic sources. After studying Talmud daily with his
father as a boy, Rawidowicz went off at age fourteen to learn the traditional
canon of Jewish religious life at the Lida Yeshiva. The language and hermeneu-
tic approach he mastered as a child continued to serve as the basic expression
of his Jewish identity, even though his level of observance waned. Growing
up within the polyglot milieu of Eastern Europe shaped the association in his
thought between national movements and linguistic and social autonomy.
In a number of key ways, this integral link between language and
national status resembled the autonomism of his friend and mentor Simon
Dubnow (discussed in chapter 2). The two thinkers became close friends
while living in Berlin. Rawidowicz published the first volume dedicated to
the memory of the great Jewish historian, who was killed by the Nazis in
1941.11 Rawidowicz’s comments about the dearth of Jewish thinkers engaged
in political thought actually appeared in the context of extolling Dubnow
in the introduction to this memorial volume. Rawidowicz’s sensitivity to
the relationship between Jews and non-Jews, specifically as it applied to
the possibility of minority nationalism and the centrality of language in
constructing such diasporic boundaries, emerged from his formative years
living within the same multinational Russian imperial context that nour-
ished Dubnow’s program of autonomism. Despite these similarities with
Dubnow, however, it would be wrong to pigeonhole Rawidowicz as a direct
heir to the diaspora nationalist and thus as an anti-Zionist. Three crucial
differences demonstrate that Rawidowicz straddled key ideological posi-
tions separating the developing diaspora–Zionist divide—a passion for
Hebrew rather than Yiddish as the national tongue, the belief that national

culture could thrive both inside and outside of Palestine, and the rejection
of diaspora political autonomy.
Rawidowicz’s commitment to Hebrew developed in relationship to the
concurrent revival of Hebrew literature, a major influence on his life. Despite
his highly regarded command of spoken and written Yiddish, Rawidowicz
took the position of supporting Hebrew as the national tongue and the key to
Jewish cultural survival. Arriving in Berlin in 1919, he quickly took a leading
role in the renaissance of Hebrew literature in Weimar Germany. He taught
Hebrew classes, created Ayanot (the Hebrew publishing house dedicated
to promulgating post-rabbinic Hebrew sources), and founded the Brit Ivrit
Olamit (the Hebrew World Union).12 His abilities as a writer and publisher
were so impressive that Haim Nahman Bialik, the future national poet of
Israel and leader of the Hebrew revival in Weimar Berlin, begged him to con-
sider working as an editor in chief for his journal Dvir.13 In addition to these
activities, the East European immigrant quickly made a name for himself as
an important scholar of medieval and modern Jewish philosophy.
By the late 1920s, however, Rawidowicz’s position began to more clearly
diverge from that of other Hebraists who had shifted their energy away
from Europe and toward Palestine. The role of the diaspora, both ideologi-
cally and practically, as the center of Hebrew literature and language was
beginning to rapidly diminish.14 Like many of his contemporary Hebraists,
Rawidowicz also seriously considered moving to Palestine and appreci-
ated its significance for Hebrew cultural production. Rawidowicz’s father
and several of his siblings, including his favorite brother, Abraham, settled
in Palestine in the mid-1920s. “All people of Israel like us,” he wrote to his
brother in 1930, “need to take it upon themselves to live in Palestine, even
if it is a land of Arabs.”15 Rawidowicz made two visits to Palestine, in 1925
and 1933, to explore the possibility of joining these family members and to
actively pursue a position in Jewish philosophy at the Hebrew Universi-
ty.16 The decision to remain in the diaspora was certainly not ideological.
Economic and professional hurdles prevented Rawidowicz from fulfilling
his desire to live closer to his family and among a cohort of like-minded
Hebraists and scholars.17 Despite his personal efforts to relocate to Pales-
tine, Rawidowicz disagreed with the emerging negation of the potential for
Hebrew culture in the diaspora.18 Rawidowicz embarked on a campaign in
a number of leading Zionist and Hebrew journals, including Ha’olam, Dvir,
and Moznayim, to affirm the endurance of Hebrew culture in the diaspora.
Even more controversially, he argued that the diaspora played an integral
part in the preservation of Hebrew national culture.19 Over the following
three decades, this remained a central theme in his oeuvre.

Rawidowicz considered his own position on the equal centrality of
diaspora and homeland as fully within the parameters of Zionism. As
Myers has reported, Rawidowicz continued to affirm his Zionist bona
fides, and explained to an audience gathered to discuss Hebrew language
in the diaspora that “my Zionism is no less than those who discharge their
obligations by ‘negating the Diaspora’ or reciting ‘Kaddish’ [the mourner’s
prayer] for Diaspora Jewry.”20 Rawidowicz’s literary circle, including Bia-
lik, writers Shaul Tchernichovsky and Yaakov Klatzkin, and editor Moshe
Kleinman, placed him in the center of Berlin’s Zionist intellectual life.
Those with the power to shape Zionist opinion also clearly considered his
voice part of the larger conversation about the meaning of Jewish nation-
alism, even if he advocated a contrarian position. For instance, Ha’olam,
the journal of the Zionist movement, regularly published Rawidowicz’s
proddings to place Jewish culture in Palestine and the rest of the world
on equal footing.21 The Israeli author Amos Oz related in his recent auto-
biography that he remembers Sabbath visits to the Jerusalem home of his
uncle Joseph Klausner, the scholar of Hebrew literature and candidate for
president of Israel, who was eagerly awaiting the next issue of Rawidowicz’s
journal Metzudah.22 Rawidowicz viewed himself, and was viewed by others
at the time, as very much a part of the fluid discourse of Jewish nationalism
that belied a rigid diaspora–Zionist bifurcation.
Debates about Hebrew culture represent only one component of Rawido-
wicz’s intellectual pursuits during this period, however. He pursued secular
studies, spending seven years completing his university education. His doc-
toral dissertation, which focused on the intellectual influences and develop-
ment of Ludwig Feuerbach’s philosophy, was published in 1931.23 But Hitler’s
rise to power in 1933 terminated Rawidowicz’s fecund intellectual career in
Berlin. At the same time, negating the increasingly dominant negation of the
diaspora rhetoric alienated him from the trajectory of Hebrew culture.
After settling in London in 1933 following the early Nazi anti-Jewish
ordinances, Rawidowicz wrote a remarkable and telling essay that encapsu-
lated his position on the relationship between Zionism and the diaspora.24
“Kiyum hatefutzah” (The endurance of the diaspora) decried those Zion-
ists who viewed Hitler’s rise to power as the final fulfillment of Zionism’s
repeated warnings about the ultimate destruction of diaspora Judaism.25
Rawidowicz acknowledged the grave seriousness of the Nazi takeover. He
also expressed his growing frustration at Zionism’s ideological rejection of
diaspora Jewish life and its claims of having found a solution to the Jewish
problem. One of the fascinating questions about Rawidowicz’s intellectual
biography is why this personal experience of exile failed to change his view

on the role of the diaspora in Jewish national life. In fact, as his career pro-
gressed, his belief in the role of diaspora communities actually burgeoned.
What began as an observation that Jews will remain outside the home-
land developed during his career toward an increasingly clear position that
made that reality a positive attribute of Jewish national life.
Rawidowicz continued his scholarly research and his active support for
the Hebrew language in the diaspora as a faculty member at Jews’ College
in Great Britain and later, from 1941 until 1948, as a member and later head
of the Semitics department at the University of Leeds. In an attempt to keep
Hebrew alive while its traditional centers in Europe were being destroyed,
Rawidowicz founded a second Hebrew publishing company, Ararat. The
company, which he symbolically viewed as a refuge for Hebrew amid the
anti-Semitic deluge of Nazism, published a series of books on various Jew-
ish topics. In 1948 he began teaching at the College of Jewish Studies in
Chicago, before being recruited by the president of the new Brandeis Uni-
versity in 1950 to join its faculty as a professor of Hebrew literature and
Jewish philosophy. He remained at Brandeis, serving as chair of the depart-
ment of Near Eastern and Judaic Studies until his death in 1957.
Babylon and Jerusalem

While Rawidowicz’s early essays indicated the direction of his future work,
the final formulation of his ideas of diaspora Jewish nationalism did not
appear until 1957. Babylon and Jerusalem, Rawidowicz’s last project before
his untimely death, reworked decades of polemical debates about Zionism,
updating them to reflect his frustration with the State of Israel’s early deci-
sions and his disappointment with the American Jewish community. As one
of the period’s most insightful, critical, and Jewishly knowledgeable observ-
ers, Rawidowicz penetrated the ebullience of Israel’s creation in order to high-
light what he considered the ideological contradictions, moral challenges,
and fundamental Jewish identity questions that accompanied statehood.
Outside of a small group of committed followers, however, the book
received little attention. There are several possible technical reasons for the
poor reception. The book was repetitious, lengthy (over nine hundred pages),
and written in a prolix Hebrew style laced with rabbinic and medieval philo-
sophical references. However, even a more accessible version would not have
overcome the ideological reasons for the work’s underwhelming reception
and its inability to enter the popular or even scholarly canon of modern Jew-
ish thought. By the time of its publication, there was no potential reader-
ship for this work. Zionist intellectuals and activists would most likely have

found the content deeply problematic. Those Israelis capable of reading the
difficult style would have chafed at Rawidowicz’s affirmation of independent
diaspora centers, his sobering critique of Israel’s policies, and his declaration
that Jewish nationalism was not Zionism. But outside of Israel, only a rapidly
dwindling number of Jews could even read Rawidowicz’s writing, let alone
feel passionate about his repudiation of American Judaism.
It is therefore easy to dismiss Rawidowicz’s final project, and his life’s
work for that matter, as one man’s stubborn refusal to recognize the incom-
patibility of his notion of Zionism based on his understanding of Jewish
nationalism and the path solidified by the founding of the state. Babylon
and Jerusalem’s style and tone reflect a complete misunderstanding of the
realities of Jewish life after the Holocaust and the euphoria of 1948. Like
other émigré intellectuals who failed to translate Old World ideologies
into the language of the New World, Rawidowicz underappreciated the
tremendous discontinuities in twentieth-century Jewish life. Without dis-
missing the trends and dramatic changes that he refused to acknowledge,
it is valuable to consider what his marginalization from Jewish thought
reveals about foundational biases in conceptualizing the modern Jewish
experience. Although Rawidowicz firmly rooted his conceptions in a con-
text forever altered by World War II and the founding of the State of Israel,
in fact his work looked forward to theories of national identity formation
that have become increasingly relevant in a post–Cold War era.
A Decentered Geography
Rawidowicz saw Jews’ political uniqueness—the fact that “no other people
has an outside house [a diaspora population]”—as the key to their “chosen”
status.26 This position posed a theoretical challenge of how to articulate a
definition of nationality that downplayed place as the primary characteris-
tic and boundary marker of communities. Global Hebraism, Rawidowicz’s
response to this dilemma, was unique for creatively reading and rereading
religious symbols, myths, and words to build a new vocabulary, and with
it an alternative geography, for imagining national boundaries that dimin-
ished the importance of location within the calculus of identity formation.
Although global is not the exact word Rawidowicz adopted to describe
Jewish nationalism, it is a far more accurate term for his theory than
diaspora nationalism. In fact, although his passion for the endurance of
the diaspora could lead to his being categorized as a diaspora nationalist,
it would be wrong to force this theory of nationalism into the very termi-
nological orbit he hoped to escape. The most effective approach to fully

appreciating Rawidowicz’s conception of Jewish nationalism is to introduce
the new term global. This provides a fresh lens for exploring the ways in
which he departed from conventional readings of nationalism, both past
and present. The process of developing novel terminology as a way of ques-
tioning assumptions encoded in scholarly and popular vocabulary reflects
Rawidowicz’s recognition that language and terminology color our percep-
tion of reality. Moreover, such key terms as homeland, diaspora, and even
Jerusalem are so deeply ingrained in our perception of national identity that
the ideological connotations they convey are taken for granted.
A global nationality required fresh terms (such as Babylon and Jerusa-
lem), symbols (such as the rabbinic concept of eruvin), and words (such
as beinartzit, or interland) to construct ties that bind outside of geopo-
litical markers. The terms Babylon and Jerusalem provide the most vis-
ible example of how Rawidowicz sought new terminology to replace the
binary either/or opposition of homeland versus diaspora with an and, con-
necting multiple centers around the globe.27 This vocabulary, firmly rooted
within the Jewish textual tradition, reconceptualizes the relative weight of
diaspora and homeland within the national imagination. Employing this
language affirms the dominance of a generally erased chapter in Zionist
historiography: the central authority that the rabbinic academy in Baby-
lon held in crafting rabbinic tradition. Zionist ideology focuses on bibli-
cal experiences in the land and the humility of exile to mold the people of
Israel into the territorial paradigm of modern nationalism. But Babylon
offered another narrative, one that complicated the mapping of the people
of Israel on a specific homeland or political model.
One of the central spatial metaphors that the Babylon and Jerusalem
framework defied was the theorist Ahad Ha’am’s center-periphery language
(discussed in chapter 2). This had elevated the homeland as the source of
cultural vitality and national regeneration. Instead, Rawidowicz insisted
that diaspora Jews must “auto-emancipate” themselves from the cultural
hegemony of Jews living in the Land of Israel. His argument stems from the
insightful contention that national culture, unlike commerce and people,
cannot successfully be imported and exported. A monolithic and homo-
geneous Jewish culture could not, by definition, allow Jews living in such
diverse contexts to thrive. This constitutes quite a radical statement for a
thinker writing in a period that considered cultural, linguistic, and politi-
cal uniformity as the sine qua non of nationalism. Rawidowicz felt that the
linguistic, artistic, and intellectual developments in the new state would
not answer the needs of Jews living within another cultural milieu. In fact,
he continued, the existence of a perceived center actually undermines the

promulgation of national culture in other locations. A national cultural
center strips responsibility and agency from those outside the communi-
ty.28 The perimeter, Rawidowicz demanded, must also have a role in the
creation of sui generis national culture.29 Rawidowicz developed several
novel metaphors and symbols to map a geographical paradigm with a pref-
erence for multiple centers, rather than a single homeland center. In one
of his most popular images, Jews in the Land of Israel and in the diaspora
represent the two foci of an ellipse. In an ellipse the distance from all points
along the curve to the two foci remains constant. Each geographical loca-
tion and each approach toward Jewish life exerts a gravitational pull on
the other points. Various expressions of Jewish national identity lie on the
curve of the ellipse—some more closely tied to life in the land and some
more to diaspora communities. Following Rawidowicz’s geometrical cal-
culus, the relative weighting of center and periphery disappears in this
metaphor. Communities in the diaspora and the land are thereby trans-
formed into equal partners in cultural production.
Rawidowicz shared Ahad Ha’am’s belief that Jews have a unique rela-
tionship with the Land of Israel. Yet his formulation of local, self-sufficient
communities opposed Ahad Ha’am’s center-periphery philosophy of cul-
tural dissemination.30 In contrast to Zionist readings focused on the pre-
exilic, biblical history, Rawidowicz turned to rabbinic and medieval texts
that focus on God, the Torah, and Israel as primary to the land.31 The land
is sacred, he believed, but Jews living in the land are not superior, nor do
they have a greater ability to create culture, than those living outside it. In
recognizing the homeland as one of the centers of Jewish life, Rawidowicz
also distinguished himself from the autonomism of Dubnow. Dubnow’s
theories viewed the center of national life in the diaspora, by affirming the
value of the homeland community as part of the dyad of Jewish history.
The imagery in Rawidowicz’s later work further decenters the spatial
coordinates of Jewish nationality and display a more nuanced appreciation
for the cultural interpenetration that takes place between Jews and their
surroundings. One such image for describing the relationship between
space and national identity formation is found in Rawidowicz’s appropria-
tion of the rabbinic concept of eruvin, which extends the realm of per-
mitted movement during the Sabbath by creating a legal fiction extending
the private boundaries of a home or city.32 Rawidowicz dedicated an entire
chapter of Babylon and Jerusalem to this concept, an analysis of which
sheds light on the multiple levels at which he wrote and thought.33
Eruvin represented Rawidowicz’s attempt to appropriate a traditional
religious concept as the foundation for a corrective to state-seeking

Zionism’s assertions about the nature of Jewish nationalism. He engaged
the battle for the authentic model of contemporary Jewish nationalism
by searching for traditional symbols to build a counternarrative to Zion-
ism’s historiography. The centrality of eruvin in Rawidowicz’s thought was
reflected in his claim that eruvin “are the ways of the people, the ways of
every man in Israel and Israel itself for all generations.”34
Yet, for Rawidowicz, the importance of eruvin had little to do with the
observance of the Sabbath. He interpreted the institution of eruvin as estab-
lishing a myriad of semiautonomous Jewish communities not directly linked
by geographical proximity or human interaction. Rabbinic law outlined the
process by which members of a courtyard community placed a shared loaf
of bread in the center of their dwellings. This created a self-enclosed collec-
tive without relying on external borders to facilitate communal unity. No
hierarchy privileged certain eruv populations depending on geography or
communal size. By building the eruv boundary, each community created its
own cultural and social center. Acknowledging, and even celebrating, the
independent existence of many self-enclosed centers of national life reveals
a fundamental tenet of Rawidowicz’s nationalism. In order to survive across
geographical, cultural, and political boundaries, Jewish nationalism must
take into account diverse expressions of national consciousness. Each com-
munity, he argued, “creates for itself its life both materially and spiritually;
it forms its Jewish image as much as the reality permits it or demands upon
it.”35 Rawidowicz exploited the flexible nature of the eruv tehumim (bound-
ary eruv), which extended the horizon of local communities to include Jews
outside the courtyard or village in one shared national community.
In addition to rereading rabbinic concepts, Rawidowicz also employed
his creative skills at Hebrew wordplay to map spatial coordinates of the Jew-
ish nation. Taking advantage of the amorphous nature of the Hebrew lan-
guage, still in the process of rapid modernization, Rawidowicz developed
an argument from within the inchoate national tongue to further rethink
nation and territorial homeland. For instance, he referred to the boundaries
uniting Jewish communities as beinartzit (interland),36 inventing this term
instead of using the standard bein le’umit (international), a term referring
to relationships between sovereign nation-states. By replacing the word for
state with the politically neutral land, Rawidowicz implicitly rejected politi-
cal boundaries set by international treatises. This example demonstrates his
sensitivity to the need to undermine the conflation of nationality and state-
hood by depoliticizing the nature of transnational bonds.37
From raising the visibility of Babylon in the Jewish narrative to tweak-
ing linguistic details, Rawidowicz developed a new language for outlining

the contours of a nation that transcended specific territory and a political
order that carved up the map into nation-states. The novel vocabulary came
from a variety of sources in different layers of the Jewish tradition. These
inventions share a sensitivity to the importance of physical space that was
not broken down into geopolitical units. The language and metaphors Ra-
widowicz introduced view space as a crucial backdrop for collective inter-
action. Social proximity is necessary for national identity formation. How-
ever, local relationships and community imbue space with its importance,
not vice versa. The linguistic building blocks of Rawidowicz’s notion of the
nation of Israel establish a very different logic that undermines calls for an
ingathering of world Jewry into one place. Babylon and Jerusalem, eruv
borders, and beinartzit communities introduce terms that expand national
membership to dispersed individuals living in multiethnic environments.
The ambiguous qualities of joining homeland and diaspora as equal
partners, however, create a daunting theoretical challenge. What boundar-
ies replace territory as the glue that unites national groups? Without a cen-
ter it is difficult to ascertain the clear parameters or constituent elements
of a national tradition. A homeland provides a clear set of boundaries, an
imagined rallying point to link members, and a physical location to ensure
social integration that builds national bonds. What would Rawidowicz
propose? He solved this dilemma by replacing territory with a heterodox
understanding of the function of the Hebrew language in creating a liter-
ary culture accessible across space and time.
A Permeable Hermeneutic Community

One of Rawidowicz’s most memorable phrases, which he borrows from
Hebrew literature professor Joseph Klausner, is his critique of Jews living
in the state of Israel as “Goyim shemedabrim ivrit” (Non-Jews that speak
Hebrew).38 The juxtaposition of non-Jews and Hebrew speakers is a per-
plexing concept for a man who dedicated his life to the promulgation of
the Hebrew language. How could a proponent of linguistic nationalism
mock Hebrew speakers as potentially leaving the parameters of the people
of Israel? This phrase forces readers to contemplate widely held and rarely
challenged assumptions. In this case, Rawidowicz questions a basic prem-
ise about the role of language in defining national culture.
As the scholar Benjamin Harshav has pointed out, the renaissance of
modern Hebrew and Zionist ideology provided a means to create a mod-
ern, universal culture that maintained particular boundaries through
form, not content.39 Thus the growth and vitality of Hebrew as the national

language required the transformation of a primarily written form of com-
munication into a spoken language heard from the streets to the halls of
government. The critique of limiting Hebrew to its revival in Palestine, and
later the State of Israel, reflects a fundamentally different (and certainly
unique among both Yiddish and Hebrew advocates of linguistic national-
ism) concept of the relationship between language and national culture.40
Rawidowicz struggled to defuse the spatial preference and spoken func-
tion of the revival of Hebrew that was encoded within Zionist ideology as
well as in Hebrew literature.
With the growing success of Hebrew as a spoken language, combined
with the center of Hebrew literature moving from Europe to Palestine,
Rawidowicz expressed grave concerns about the direction of the Hebrew
revival. The conversion of a written language dedicated to legal, intellec-
tual, and religious topics into the language of daily use, he predicted, would
engender a dramatic change in the role of language.41 Shifting Hebrew to
a spoken language, he felt, would actually deprive it of its multiple layers
rooted in Jewish sources. Language provided critical access to particular
sources of Judaism (from rabbinic literature to medieval commentators to
premodern maskilim). The importance of these sources, Rawidowicz must
have concluded, would be marginalized by efforts to modernize Hebrew by
translating universal texts (such as Greek classics) into the ancient tongue.
There were also pragmatic realities of transforming a written language into
the language of quotidian interactions. Thus, from the beginning of his
publishing career as the founder of the Ayanot Press, Rawidowicz dedi-
cated his energy to popularizing and perpetuating a style of post-rabbinic
Hebrew philosophical and literary texts that interested neither Zionists
nor Orthodox Jews. These texts were considered either too religious (for
the former) or too secular (for the latter).
Why was Rawidowicz, a non-Orthodox Jew and a scholar of Ludwig
Feuerbach (the atheist rationalist who humanized theology), so concerned
with preserving rabbinic, medieval, and early modern religious sources?
His interest in maintaining a transhistorical canon of Hebrew literature
had little to do with a desire to promulgate Jewish law or theological creeds.
In fact, the very assumption that there are distinct religious and secular
strands in Hebrew literature is a binary distinction mapped on sources by
modern thinkers (an approach still far too common in most popular and
scholarly approaches) and implicitly rejected by Rawidowicz. The need to
arbitrarily separate progressive rational strands of Hebrew language and
literature from more primitive religious dimensions in order to fashion a
modern national language was a symptom of a more fundamental break

in the function of Hebrew as the vehicle of national cultural production.
The secularization and removal of historical layers transformed the textual
tradition from an expansive, permeable interpretive community designed
for readers across time and space to a spoken language conceptualized as a
finite boundary delineating one national group from another.
Historical typologies introduced by Sheldon Pollock, a scholar of San-
skrit and Indian studies, provide a helpful theoretical frame for appreciat-
ing Rawidowicz’s concept of Hebrew’s role in shaping collective identity.42
Cosmopolitan languages, such as Sanskrit and Latin, Pollock contends,
have historically created canons of literature, often based in oral traditions,
which circulate freely across space and time. In these traditions, people are
unified by shared modes of literary analysis and familiarity with certain
canons that allow readers from diverse environments to engage in one con-
versation. The need to encompass multiple local experiences ensured that
cosmopolitan languages remained heterogeneous and provided room for
multiple levels of interpretation. The rise of the nation-state transformed
the parameters of cultural belonging through the development of the ver-
nacular. Instead of engendering an ever-expanding audience of readers,
language thus became an instrument for marking spatial boundaries.
Framed in Pollock’s language, the revival of modern Hebrew (as Har-
shav’s earlier observations indicate) was an effort to create a vernacular
tongue that serves primarily to create fixed criteria to distinguish between
Jews and non-Jews.43 Like delineating territorial markers, Zionist ideol-
ogy and ultimately the state would maintain (and enforce) finite border-
lines of national culture that promote a homogeneous membership. The
vernacularization of Hebrew inspired by nation-state nationalism retards
the dynamism and organic nature of languages spread by population shifts
and transnational networks. From Rawidowicz’s perspective, linking the
growth of Hebrew culture with a specific place and political infrastruc-
ture erodes the cosmopolitan nature of Hebrew as the language that was
practiced for centuries. Language promotes national culture by supporting
shared textual canons and modes of literary analysis, which unite read-
ers through the process of interpretation. To accomplish this, cosmopoli-
tan languages require us to think about the relationship between language,
national boundaries, and geography in a very different framework.
In this view, language serves as a permeable membrane that creates Jew-
ish space and provides a nexus between Jews and their surroundings.44
Rawidowicz conceptualizes linguistic boundaries as fluid rather than fixed,
symbolic rather than physical, and process-based rather than content-based.
The earlier discussion of eruvin also provides Rawidowicz with a metaphor

for the ways in which language paradoxically creates and dissolves bound-
aries. He offered eruvin as the rabbinic counternarrative to an alternative
Hebrew term tehum (border), which was preferred by state-seeking Zion-
ist theorists. The eruv, Rawidowicz wrote, “establishes the people’s tehum,
and creates the tehum for Israel.”45 Here he is playing on rabbinic use of a
word that etymologically comes from the root of mixing to construct bor-
ders. Mixing between Jewish communities and between Jews and non-Jews
counterintuitively engenders a more vital national culture than a homoge-
neous environment created by territorial boundaries.
This is another attribute of the rabbinic notion of the eruvin bound-
ary—it (or at least Rawidowicz’s reading of the concept) included non-Jews
as well as their cultural influences within the walls of the Jewish commu-
nity. Rawidowicz refrained from explicitly discussing the rabbis’ conversa-
tion regarding the process for building an eruv when non-Jews or apostates
were present within the courtyard. However, he was certainly aware that
the rabbis enabled an eruv to include non-Jews living in the same neigh-
borhood. By symbolically renting the property for the Sabbath, a Jewish
space could still be formed that included non-Jewish property. Within the
rabbinic context, the eruv constructed an ethnic and religious space that
was not hermetically sealed from the outside community. The institution
of eruvin assumed a high level of integration in what Rawidowicz called
“mixed urban neighborhoods.” Living among non-Jewish cultures thus
provided the intellectual fuel that propelled the tradition forward.
But how does Rawidowicz explain the counterintuitive logic that inte-
gration preserves national culture more effectively than static boundaries?46
This is precisely the paradoxical “secret of the eruv,” the essential process
of creating distinct space by mixing boundaries. The deceptive rigidity of
state boundaries actually represented the greatest threat to the survival
of the Jewish people. Key to understanding this process is Rawidowicz’s
concept of interpretation. He outlined his philosophy of language and
hermeneutic methodology in an essay called “On Interpretation,” pub-
lished shortly before his death in 1957.47 According to his reading, Jewish
sources did not constitute static legal doctrines or religious tenets. The
core values and meaning of the Jewish tradition remained closed to those
who approached sources to find their original intent. Instead, Rawidowicz
described the authentic hermeneutic processes as “an attempt at reshaping
either the ‘document’ interpreted or the world it came from. Here an act
of transference is always involved. An invasion of one system by another
takes place . . . [interpretation] derives its strength both from a deep attach-
ment to the ‘text’ and from an ‘alienation’ from it.”48

Only by creating friction between external systems and the texts them-
selves could an authentic understanding of traditional sources emerge.
Outside stimuli from alien, or perhaps more specifically non-Jewish, influ-
ences facilitated discovering the essence and particular character of Jew-
ish life. The requisite balance between alienation and attachment required
the existence of clear yet permeable boundaries that differentiated Jews
from their surrounding intellectual milieu. Flexible demarcations allowed
for questions that might spark individuals to invade Jewish sources with
relevant challenges. Impermeable boundaries, however, eliminated the
non-Jewish interlocutors—the crucial ingredient for gaining insight into
the depths of the Jewish people. The nation-state context hinders cultural
development in another way as well. The state’s support of a particular lan-
guage and culture erodes a crucial catalyst—the perceived need to protect
and nourish a cultural tradition against external threats.49
The advantages Rawidowicz aligns with diaspora and multinational set-
tings have radical implications for rethinking the geography of cultural
production. Maintaining cultural centers outside the homeland guaran-
teed a crucial conduit by which non-Jewish ideas and developments could
enter Jewish national consciousness. Although lethal in large doses, out-
side influences suppressed by ethnonational conformity fuel the interpre-
tive process that Rawidowicz considered a key to national survival. Coun-
terstate national groups thus have the advantage of not commanding the
political authority and social infrastructure to police cultural boundaries.
Rawidowicz’s iconoclastic notion that national unity not only tolerates but
actually demands diversity rejects the need for static social, intellectual, or
cultural boundaries. National preservation thrives when groups shift their
focus away from explicit boundary maintenance and toward immersion,
without any specific intended outcomes, with the texts, symbols, and nar-
rative history of their traditions.
Global Hebraism imagines bonds created through interpretation rather
than the day-to-day use of a particular spoken language. Hebrew therefore
facilitates the construction of a hermeneutic community dedicated to a
shared canon and commitment to remaining within its boundaries, but
not necessarily the same interpretive conclusions. Moreover, Hebrew is a
mode of generating culture fueled by engagement with the external envi-
ronment. This differs significantly from other ideologies of nationalism,
whose sovereign aspirations make heterogeneity and geographic disper-
sion among members of other nations anathema.
Delving more deeply into Rawidowicz’s global Hebraism reveals that
although the scholar had one foot deeply immersed in an early-nineteenth-

century ideology of linguistic nationalism and its essentialist connection to
delineating fixed collective boundaries, his other foot was gingerly placed
to prefigure formulations of identity that resemble those of recent cultural
theorists. Although language is a central pillar for Rawidowicz, his concept
of cultural production does not assume essentialist or monolithic defini-
tions of nationality. Precisely the opposite is the case. He considers language
to be a form that promotes a diverse cultural matrix capable of encom-
passing a wide spectrum of possibilities. Shifting the role of language from
content to process neutralizes a potential critique of collective boundaries
as imagined, by acknowledging (and endorsing) the constructed nature
of boundary markers. Interpretation engenders fluid boundaries that can-
not be easily enforced by central institutions, ideological agendas, or state
power.
Rawidowicz believed that mixing still maintains clear boundaries. The
tension, especially clear in his metaphor of eruvin, serves as an excellent
counterpoint to notions of hybridity.50 The concept of hybridity views the
constant erasure of boundaries as a reprisal against efforts to police the
boundaries of identity. This approach tends to eliminate conversations
about the value of collective preservation. In this view, hybridity dissolves
collective ties. Eruvin, however, at least as Rawidowicz presented the con-
cept, takes cultural preservation seriously while acknowledging accultura-
tion as a crucial ingredient in the evolution of national culture. The options
available to think about culture—either discredited notions of purity or a
fluid mélange—engender an artificial dichotomy between separation and
assimilation. Rawidowicz grappled with the possibility that national cul-
tures can simultaneously mix and retain their distinction.
Rawidowicz’s efforts to formulate a concept of the Hebrew language as
serving as the permeable and nonspatial boundaries of Israel suffer from
a number of weak points, however. Although the theoretical possibilities
of a Hebrew revival occurring outside the homeland may be invaluable,
it is highly unlikely that diaspora communities could sustain the degree
of language proficiency necessary to create the bonds Rawidowicz advo-
cated. Conversely, the revival and spread of the Hebrew language can be
largely attributed to the role of educational, social, and economic infra-
structure available only in Palestine and later the State of Israel. Rawido-
wicz thus ignored a crucial paradox: the survival of Hebrew as a language
available to more than a small minority of scholars has primarily happened
within the state’s territorial boundaries. Yet this revival has the potential to
endanger the very tradition it purports to be saving. Cosmopolitan lan-
guages may thrive in multinational empires, but they have far less chance

of flourishing in the age of the nation-state and in a time of dominance of
the vernacular.
Rawidowicz’s romantic effort to recapture a premodern function of lan-
guage as an instrument for creating hermeneutic communities directly
challenges efforts in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries to link land,
language, and nation. One could speculate that nostalgia, more than denial,
fueled his own personal reluctance to relinquish his critique of Hebrew
within the nation-state context and to recognize the limitations of linguistic
boundaries within a diaspora setting. The world of rabbinic exegesis—char-
acterized by wordplay, symbolic interpretations, and expansive possibili-
ties—that Rawidowicz entered as a young man was increasingly threatened
as his lifetime progressed. His own relevance and legacy depended on peo-
ple carrying on an approach to Judaism that appreciated and respected the
centrality of interpretation and textual tradition. Maintaining the tradition
was thus a valiant effort to maintain the world he saw disappearing.
The Judaism Rawidowicz had experienced as a yeshiva student in Lithu-
ania, however, could not be created with his undergraduate students at Bran-
deis University. Although his decision led to his marginalization, his persis-
tence enabled him to diagnose the price that the desacralization of Hebrew
would play in transforming the function of the Hebrew language. Rawido-
wicz saw how this desacralization contributed to a rift between the home-
land population dedicated to Hebrew as the language of everyday life and the
diaspora community that viewed Hebrew at best as the language of liturgy.
Perhaps the greatest loss he lamented connected to this desacralization was
the concretization of the mythic dimension of Israel’s national life, specifi-
cally the deferred messianic vision of returning to the homeland in the dis-
tant future, into the political project of Zionism’s state-building enterprise.
Myth and Messianism

Rawidowicz’s Babylon and Jerusalem opens with a stand-alone essay on Jew-
ish history called “Al parashat batim,” which is known in English as “Israel’s
Two Beginnings: The First and the Second ‘Houses.’” Jewish history, as Ra-
widowicz portrays it in the essay, exhibited two basic stages.51 The first peri-
od—symbolized by the First House, the temple in Jerusalem—categorized the
Jews’ experience as a politically sovereign nation living in the Land of Israel.
This era ended, Rawidowicz argued, with the first dispersion to Babylon. At
this point the second period commenced, centered around the rebuilt temple
in Jerusalem, infused with a new textual tradition developed during the Baby-
lonian exile that galvanized Jewish life during the following millennia.52

At more than a hundred pages, this extended analysis offers a synthetic
philosophy of Jewish history that stands alone from the rest of the chap-
ters in Babylon and Jerusalem. The later chapters focus more explicitly
on a contemporary critique of Zionism and American Judaism. Yet this
opening chapter introduces a crucial thematic link in Rawidowicz’s work
between the role of language and myth in shaping the historical develop-
ment of the people of Israel. The key to understanding the centrality of this
essay is in exploring the distinguishing factors between the first and second
periods. The historiographical division sets up a dialectical relationship in
Jewish history between two opposing attitudes toward theology, religious
life, geography, time, and other criteria. The crucial evolution is the devel-
opment of a mythic consciousness, exemplified in the rabbinic notion of a
deferred messianism. Unpacking Israel’s historical commitment to main-
taining a mythic realm, which retains a clear separation between reality
and ideal aspirations, serves for Rawidowicz as both a partial explana-
tion of twentieth-century exclusivist nationalism and an admonishment
to Zionism’s quest for sovereignty. Reading this essay as a contemporary
commentary on the meaning of national identity formation, rather than as
a history lesson, illuminates the integration of history, literature, philoso-
phy, and politics within the theory of global Hebraism.
The First House, which technically encompassed the First Temple
period, reflected Rawidowicz’s understanding of the political and philo-
sophical proclivities of nation-state nationalism. A particular geographical
location and political control define the First House. The people of this
period yearn for a king so they can become a “nation like all other nations.”
These kings, and the prophets who challenged their legitimacy, advocated
a universalist outlook and humanistic concepts of morality. From a philo-
sophical point of view, the chief characteristic of the First House remained
its ability to view the world through “pure vision.” Lacking the mediation
of theoretical or speculative categories, the First House encountered real-
ity directly through the senses. The meaning of place, events, and history
remained limited to what could be directly observed about the object. This
epistemological handicap indicated that the First House could rely only on
concrete markers to delineate its identity from other national groups. At
this stage, boundaries were fixed to place because no more sophisticated
options existed for formulating a shared identity. Without the ability to
create abstract categories, the First House conflated temporal distinctions
between past, present, and future.
The Second House revolutionized Jewish history by discovering the
power of ideas and concepts to order reality. Rawidowicz celebrated the

intellectual transformation sparked by the Israelites’ first experience with
life outside of their homeland. He wrote: “The unfulfilled end of the First
House and the seventy years in Babylon taught Israel a new and great
teaching, a secret of existence which they did not know before, a secret
of secrets. They provided a new reason for existence. That which Israel
learned in those seventy years had no equal in the hundreds of years before
them and after them.”53 What was the secret? The Second House developed
the capacity to understand the world through the lenses of both myth-
making and interpretation. This transformation directly opposed the First
House’s proclivity for political normalcy, homogeneity, and epistemological
monism. Rabbinic hermeneutics generated symbolic and historical analo-
gies to explore the deeper significance of specific events and experiences.
Rawidowicz focused on the development of Jewish law as an example
of this novel approach to reality. Ignoring the theological implications
of the yoke of commandments, he read the rabbinic tradition as mark-
ing and interpreting hidden philosophical truths through ritual acts. The
rabbis during this period discovered the power of revah derekh tzimtzum
(the universal through the particular). The commandments infused the
material world with glimpses of the universal through engaging particular
issues and questions that transcended quotidian reality. Rawidowicz read
the rabbinic concept of messianism, specifically the deferred longing for a
return in the distant future, as one of the most salient examples of Judaism’s
appreciation for distinguishing between the real and the ideal.
The religious imperative to defer political return to a specific home-
land, and to privilege yearning rather than realization, created the basis for
the people of Israel’s philosophical and political orientation. The diaspora
experience galvanized the development of this greater level of philosophi-
cal consciousness—the creation of a chasm between material experiences
and other levels of speculation.54 Without the ability to rely on a specific
place or political union, the tradition was forced to seek national meaning
on a more abstract plane. Following this reconstruction of Rawidowicz’s
philosophical tenets, however, suggests that he regarded this move toward
symbolic boundaries as the richest intellectual development in Jewish his-
tory. Far from being a historical tragedy, exile thus pushed the Jewish peo-
ple to a higher level of self-consciousness and philosophical awareness of
the role of myth in understanding reality.
This chapter in Babylon and Jerusalem reflects an immersion in Jewish his-
toriography and theories of modernity, as well as an effort to challenge these
narratives. On the one hand, the account of the two houses is deeply indebted
to a tradition of Wissenschaft des Judentums (the science of Judaism), an

approach to history committed to locating thematic threads that trace his-
torical progress and development.55 This was part of the modern project of
looking back over history to determine key turning points and define char-
acteristics of national groups. On the other hand, this essay should also be
read as a critique of the Enlightenment project and its political ramifications.
The chapter inveighs against the eradication of myths by focusing on rational
analysis and the limits of knowledge. The critical debunking of myth by rea-
son, science, and history diminished the validity and truth claims encoded
within textual traditions based on myths and symbols.56 Myth, Rawidowicz
wrote, is “a world view in which the rational is not the decisive element.”57
The Second House demands the demythologization of Western philos-
ophy, a position that reflects a curious amalgam of Nietzsche’s return to
Greek myth and postexilic rabbinic literature. Interpretation within mythic
and literary traditions provides a crucial dimension for understanding
reality and moral standards, even if they are not empirically verifiable or
rational according to scientific standards. Myths nourished through forms
of art and literature, and therefore open to infinite interpretations and rein-
terpretations, can illuminate truths without being real.58
The aesthetic and philosophical critiques also have significant political
consequences. Although modernity debunked myths, nationalist ideolo-
gies resurrected many of the myths in a new form, as historical legitimiza-
tions of their national movements. The political process that accompa-
nied national ideology—the resurrection of myths as concrete maps for
political objectives rather than as material for speculation—distorts the
mythic dimension. By appropriating the aesthetic realm, political ideolo-
gies exploited national myths for the purpose of galvanizing the state. Ra-
widowicz addressed this development by contrasting Jewish messianism
with the messianic dreams woven into state-seeking national movements.
The urge for immediate messianic completion and religious redemption
erased the barrier between ideal and real by imbuing the state with a level
of absolute meaning that had always existed as a future goal but never as
current reality in mythic conceptions. Temporal realities, biological char-
acteristics, and national identities acquired a false level of importance as a
direct result of the blurring of these categories. The immersion in unreal-
ized myth eroded the healthy bulwark between inner meaning and mate-
rial manifestations, between present reality and the ideal future. One of the
most disturbing manifestations of this tendency, in Rawidowicz’s mind,
could be found in modern states’ endeavors to wrap their own political
existence within a mantle of religious and redemptive significance.
One can read Rawidowicz’s narrative of the two houses (published in
1957) as part of an ongoing diagnosis of a debilitating disease affecting

nation-state nationalism. He had begun his critique of German national-
ism and work on counterstate formulations of Jewish nationalism decades
earlier. The 1934 series of essays known as “The Endurance of the Diaspora,”
written in installments from Rawidowicz’s new home in London, offers a
detached, scholarly analysis of the historical and philosophical roots of the
rise of fascism in Germany. Rawidowicz did not believe that twentieth-
century German nationalism should be understood as a completely irra-
tional movement devoid of explanation. Instead, the exiled scholar and
Hebraist proposed a historical and philosophical elucidation that linked
Hitler’s rise to power directly with Germany’s political attempts to realize
its messianic urges.
The Germans, suffering from the economic and political humiliation
of World War I, turned toward reviving their internal religious spirit as a
direct response to their predicament. Nazi ideology engendered the mate-
rialization of deep-seated religious and messianic impulses in German cul-
ture and thought. According to Rawidowicz:
In the hearts of the German people, suffering after the war from political
and economic difficulties, lives a messianic dream, a dream connected to
ancient Germany. A dream for revival of [tekuma] a great, dominating and
free Germany, whose freedom will find its expression in total control of
its own land and outside its land. . . . The racial laws flowed directly out of
the dream of freedom and redemption [geulah] of Germany, that lived in
masses, the politicians and the poets of the nation.59
The feeling of German powerlessness, Rawidowicz theorized, triggered

an attempt to project a dream of a utopian Germany onto contemporary
political circumstances. The political state served as an instrument for
the revival of an idealized past that had innocuously survived in fictional
accounts and poetic nostalgia.60 As a result of this fusion of political state
and religionational yearnings, Germany radically altered its definitions
of citizenship and embarked on a policy of territorial expansion. Politics
aligned with messianic fervor completely undermined the basic universal
principles of equality and individual rights that had been championed by
eighteenth- and nineteenth-century idealism.
Rawidowicz developed his concept of the Second House in particular
and global Hebraism in general during the years following his own exile as
an antidote to the loss of a truly mythical dimension. By focusing on the
symbol of Babylon, and the rabbinic theories crafted outside the homeland,
Rawidowicz aligned Israel with a concept of collective cohesion based on
the deferred concept of redemption. According to his reading of Jewish

sources, the realization of redemption actually heralded “the desecration
of messianism.”61 Rawidowicz read rabbinic texts as models of political
philosophy that rejected imbuing political events or entities with theologi-
cal significance.62
The clearly delineated gap between ideal aspirations and concrete pos-
sibility prevented the conflation of literary imagination and political doc-
trine that led to exclusivist and immoral theories of nationalism. Thus, one
of the primary agendas in Babylon and Jerusalem is to deflate the messianic
impulse in Jewish thought to defuse what Rawidowicz viewed as a primary
cause of the discrimination that arises when national myths inform state
policies. At the same time that he admonishes messianic tendencies in
European nationalism, also encoded within the concepts of the two houses
(and more explicitly elsewhere in Babylon and Jerusalem), is the effort to
defuse what he sees as potential parallels between European nationalism’s
use of history and mythic language to articulate political ideologies and the
messianic language of Zionist discourse.
By ignoring these fundamental principles of Jewish thought, political
Zionism and the policies of the newly created Jewish state risked emulating
the inequities implemented by those nations that persecuted Jews through-
out the nineteenth and twentieth century in the name of national unity.
Noting these connections in Rawidowicz’s thought between his critique of
German messianism, his affirmation of Jewish nationalism’s deferred mes-
sianism, and his confrontation with Zionist ideology about the redemp-
tive language does not imply that Rawidowicz equated the State of Israel
with fascism or Nazi ideology. Rather, he was consciously concerned with
the slippage between the liturgical, poetic, and philosophical yearning for
a return to the homeland and the centrality of homeland (and the corol-
lary demotion of diaspora) in modern theories of nationalism as a rhe-
torical tool adopted across many streams of Zionism. His frustration with
the direction of the Zionist movement, particularly after the declaration of
statehood, was fueled by a concern that the mythic aspect of Jewish politics
would be severely undermined by statehood.63
Subsequent chapters in Babylon and Jerusalem offer a far more explicit
critique of Zionism from the perspective of its attitude toward messian-
ism. Confronting these claims of messianic import was so paramount for
Rawidowicz that he included a central chapter entitled “Without Mes-
siah?” in the work. This piece posed a rhetorical question: How could
Zionists confuse the declaration of the State of Israel with the religious
notion of complete redemption? Rawidowicz decried Ben Gurion’s dec-
laration that “we are living in the days of the Messiah.” He also protested

any corollary claims linking this redemptive moment with the ingathering
of all world Jewry in the Land of Israel.64 For Rawidowicz, the state’s use
of messianic language to justify its existence was a manifestation of one of
his fundamental apprehensions about the nature of the new state’s nation-
alism. Without rejecting the centrality of homeland in Jewish sources, he
recovered traditional sources that reveal the alignment between religious
notions of exile/homecoming and state-seeking Zionism.65 The founding
of the State of Israel, along with its attempt to declare partial completion
of the political-religious dream, thus violated traditional restraints against
hastening the end.66
The polemic with Zionism, specifically Ben Gurion’s idea that statism
represented a revolution in Jewish history, implicitly permeates Rawido-
wicz’s concept of the First House. This is a response to Zionist historiog-
raphy that focused on biblical Israel as the highest level of Jewish life, and
postexilic Judaism as turning to religion as a temporary and far inferior sub-
stitute to land, language, and sovereignty. He inverts the negative vector of
Jewish history from homeland to exile but highlights Babylon as the source
of the “secret of secrets” that characterizes Israel. Rawidowicz’s narrative
highlights biblical selections that underscore origins not in the land, but
instead focus on moments in Jewish history when Jews learned to develop
culturally outside the land. The First House, like Zionism, views the present
as the ultimate fulfillment. By couching Zionism’s return to the land as a
completion of the messianic yearning to return to Jerusalem, Zionism thus
moves Jewish nationalism to a more primitive level of development.
These connections between the literary, philosophical, and political
strands of Rawidowicz’s thought delineate myth as a source of truth, cul-
tural vitality, and the primary antidote to the dangers of modern nation-
state nationalism. This indicates the multiple levels upon which Rawidowicz
conceptualized global Hebraism. These connections also raise a question:
How can myth, and a politics of deferred homecoming, be preserved in
the modern period? Although Rawidowicz passionately defends the aes-
thetic realm of myth and yearning, he does so with a modern conscious-
ness that rejects national mythic narrative as historically accurate. Here he
finds himself in a conundrum that plagued a number of his contemporaries,
including the philosophers Franz Rosenzweig and Martin Buber. How does
one construct modern philosophical justifications for returning to pre-
modern narratives? In particular, Rawidowicz’s challenge was to overcome
the debilitating effects of historicism and Enlightenment critiques of reli-
gion that undermine the validity of religious traditions, without embracing
theological dogma or literal textuality of the religious sources. To put this

another way, Rawidowicz struggled to consciously promote national cul-
ture as developing organically to reflect the lived experiences of its mem-
bers. An appreciation for myth as true, but not real, presents a very nuanced
position that lacks the certainty of embracing myth as history or rejecting
the traditional account of Jewish history as primitive myth.
Rawidowicz’s effort to maintain the myth and an awareness of its his-
torically constructed nature provides another angle for understanding his
decision to present his political theory through symbols and metaphors
plucked from traditional sources, rather than directly importing Western
philosophical terms. One avenue for addressing this fundamental chal-
lenge of consciously theorizing a dynamic relationship with the tradition
is to present oneself as writing from within the tradition. Only by following
his own theory of interpretation by remaining within the particular his-
torical dimensions of the textual tradition can he demonstrate the viability
of his theory. Thus Rawidowicz committed himself to a Hebrew style and
Jewish vocabulary that gave the impression of a historical weaving together
of multiple strands of Jewish sources.
Writing in English or in a style less rooted in language, symbols, and
myths would have undermined Rawidowicz’s own efforts by creating a
critical distance between his own work and the interpretive tradition. Thus
his Hebrew style, his rehabilitation of rabbinic symbols, and his hesitancy
to acknowledge modern influences are all part of his conscious effort to
produce a work of interpretation that downplays historical consciousness.
Most of Rawidowicz’s writing suppresses any explicit recognition of his-
torical change or external influences. However, Rawidowicz did not lack a
keen awareness of interactions between Jewish texts and their contexts and
his own efforts to overcome the post-Spinoza crisis of a critical and histori-
cal approach to reading Jewish sources. This creates a tension in Rawido-
wicz’s work between, on the one hand, the theoretical importance of exter-
nal influence and the explicit rejection of external influences and, on the
other hand, a preference for understanding changes in Judaism as com-
pletely internal in nature.67
The tension between Rawidowicz’s commitment to intellectual dialogue
and his strident denunciation of external influences denotes a real struggle
in his thought. Jewish life in the diaspora, Rawidowicz bemoaned through-
out Babylon and Jerusalem, had misunderstood the delicate balance
between bringing outside ideas into the tradition and overwhelming the
tradition with foreign concepts. Facing this reality, Rawidowicz found
himself fighting a two-front battle against what he viewed as the polariza-
tion of modern Jewish life. Toward the state-seeking Zionists he voiced an

argument for the importance and enduring viability of diaspora and the
importance of creating national communities within other cultures and
societies. Toward the American Jewish community he emphasized the del-
eterious effects of allowing outside influences to completely overwhelm
Judaism’s own vocabulary and conceptual framework. Rawidowicz derided
those movements and ideologies that stressed either complete integration
or complete separation. Eruvin, according to his logic, exemplified the
complex equilibrium that the rabbinic tradition espoused.
The success of global Hebraism (and more broadly, counterstate nation-
alism), as Rawidowicz imagined it, thus demands maintaining the veneer
of organic development, while acknowledging the epistemological limita-
tions of the very myths that are supposed to be at the center of national
culture. Perhaps an even greater weakness inherent within Rawidowicz’s
global Hebraism is its incompatibility with the sovereign mold as it devel-
oped during the twentieth century. The final section of this chapter explores
Rawidowicz’s explicit efforts to apply his literary imagination to the political
realities as they drastically shifted during his lifetime.
The Right to Be Different

Here I consider some of the practical implications of how global Hebraism
might interact with the reality of an international order dominated by sov-
ereign nation-states and the existence of a Jewish state. Though not nearly
to the degree exhibited by Mordecai Kaplan and Hans Kohn (the subjects
of chapters 4 and 5, respectively), Rawidowicz did respond to the postwar
reality and the shift in his own political environment after the war and the
events of 1948. The success of global Hebraism, and other transnational
nationalisms, would require the recalibration of the reigning theories of
international relations and nationalism. But with what models of national
sovereignty in general and Jewish statehood in particular is global Hebra-
ism compatible?
Global Hebraism’s approach to the disconnect between national sover-
eignty and transnational solidarity is to promote minority rights and the
value of difference within the state. The clearest expression of this position
is in a piece Rawidowicz wrote in 1945 called “Libertas Differendi.” In this
essay he contends that the four freedoms outlined by President Franklin D.
Roosevelt during World War II—freedom of speech, freedom of religion,
freedom from want, and freedom from fear—were not sufficient for guar-
anteeing liberty. The Jewish intellectual historian insisted upon a fifth free-
dom: The right to be different.68 Democratic governments, he wrote, have

an obligation not only to preserve individual freedoms protecting belief
and physical security, but also to recognize and promote the existence of
minority groups within their own borders and around the world. Rawido-
wicz explained: “One of the shortcomings of proponents of a liberalism
and democracy based on the ideas of the eighteenth century is that they
were unable to recognize the right of groups to differ and grant this right to
the minorities in the world.”69 Modern political thought, with its equation
of shared universal assumptions and uniformity, therefore misrepresented
the meaning of equality.
Rawidowicz presented Israel itself as exemplifying this value of dif-
ference (a critique of liberalism he shared with the counterstate theorists
explored in chapter 2). Jews, in both their insistence on remaining sep-
arate from non-Jewish society and their internal disparate expressions
of Judaism, illustrate the basic paradigm of the right to be different. The
Jews’ political role in the world was to disseminate this political message.
Rawidowicz expounded: “The more a Jewish community in a non-Jewish
environment preserves its libertas differendi at heart and in practice, the
greater a blessing it will be, not only to itself but also to its non-Jewish
environment.”70 Herein lies a formulation of the Jewish political mission
as the bearers of libertas differendi to the world. Rawidowicz even took
the rare step of adopting a “foreign” term to give an authentic voice to this
principle of Jewish nationalism. The term libertas, in a similar fashion to
such terms as civilization (used by Kaplan), served as a bridge between
Rawidowicz’s internal conversation about Judaism and his endeavor to
promote a Jewish nationalism that might influence external political con-
siderations. Even the scholar obdurately committed to writing in Hebrew
and to working within the parameters of the Jewish sources divulged his
understanding that global Hebraism could only work by convincing a non-
Hebrew-speaking audience of its universal implications and advantages.
The demand for integrating libertas differendi as a Jewish principle inte-
gral to the foundation of liberal democracies raises a potential conflict for
Jewish nationalism, however: How does the right to be different play out
in the Jewish state? And what is the relationship between Jewish character
and non-Jewish citizens? Demanding that Israel remain true to its defining
characteristic of libertas differendi, whether as a diaspora community or as
a sovereign power, raised a taboo that even Rawidowicz hesitated to chal-
lenge. The manuscript of Babylon and Jerusalem included a final chapter
called “Bein ever ve’arav” (Between Jew and Arab) that challenged the new
State of Israel’s policies, especially the decisions to refuse repatriation of
Arabs following the War of Independence. However, Rawidowicz decided

to remove this section from the book’s final edition. Examining this text
provides a sense of how Rawidowicz might have applied the concepts of
global Hebraism to policy in the new state.71
Zionism’s efforts to link the state with a particular national–religious
identity troubled Rawidowicz. Commenting about the Law of Return (the
1950 Israeli law that provides automatic citizenship in Israel for Jews inter-
ested in settling in the State of Israel), he wrote: “The idea of a monolithic
[national population] that has ambushed the state [of Israel] . . . teaches
that no state is worthy of its name unless it is composed of one skin (read
as, one nation).”72 This language of one skin contrasts sharply with the right
to be different. In fact, Rawidowicz’s use of the term skin evokes racial con-
cepts of Jewish nationality that promote a purity absent from his notion
of collective boundaries. The passage of laws designed to welcome Jewish
immigrants (the 1950 Law of Return and the 1952 Nationality Law), and to
prevent the repatriation of Arabs who fled after 1948, perturbed Rawido-
wicz.73 These government decisions clearly aimed to create a greater corre-
lation between Jews and citizenship by promoting Jewish immigration and
preventing the return of non-Jewish former residents.
Rawidowicz’s controversial critique of these laws has only become more
of a polarizing topic in modern debates about the future of Israel, the Pal-
estinian Authority, and Palestinian refugees. Considering this critique is
not intended to present a counterfactual historical narrative that ignores
the possible price the nascent state might have faced if it had implemented
Rawidowicz’s suggestions. Valid concerns, especially a sense of existential
threat following the Holocaust, postponed conversations about these ten-
sions. Moreover, absent from Rawidowicz’s analysis is an appreciation of the
Palestinian rejection of the two-state compromise and the potential threat to
Israel of large numbers of refugees returning. Yet sixty years after the found-
ing of the state, Rawidowicz’s questions about the Law of Return and what
the Palestinians now call, echoing Israel’s language, the Palestinian Right of
Return, is a flashpoint in debates about the future of Israel and Palestine.
Rawidowicz grappled with the inconsistencies that marked Jewish
expectations as both the majority population in Palestine and the minor-
ity community in the United States and other countries. As he watched the
nascent state displace those who had lived in Palestine for generations and
then discriminate against those minorities who had remained, he wrote:
“But don’t those who make this claim realize that it actually undermines
the existence of the Jewish Diaspora?”74 Such policies threatened the polit-
ical well-being and ethical justifications for Jews living outside the new
state.75 The Jewish people, he demanded, must advocate a single, consistent

political policy toward minorities. Diaspora Jewish nationalism would lose
its ability to advocate a more tolerant attitude toward minority cultural,
ethnic, or religious orientations if its own political homeland denied the
rights of its Arab minorities. Thus his calls for the “State of Israel to have a
spirit of inter-humanity [bein ha’adamiyut]” demanded the same recogni-
tion of the right to be different that he expected from President Roosevelt
in the United States.76 Global Hebraism thus illuminates a knotty situation
in conceptualizing the meaning of Jewish peoplehood. Preserving a Jewish
ethnoreligious demographic majority and cultural dominance provides a
sense of security and a level of collective preservation. However, these cul-
tural advantages would disappear if the state eliminated any preferences
for Jewish citizens. Rawidowicz highlighted the fragmentation that this
would create by declaring a set of shared collective values for Jews in both
the diaspora and the homeland community.
Global Hebraism anticipated, decades before the term globalization was
coined, the complications of preserving religionational identity through
political boundaries. The bonds of solidarity shared by global communi-
ties would provide a constant thorn in the logic of the sovereign mold.
Although the refusal to allow Arab refugees of the war to return ensured
a sense of security, it may have also underestimated the power of nation-
state nationalism to motivate a return among the exiled population that
could erode long-term stability. Rawidowicz predicted that creating a more
robust federation, or a system of minority rights, in the years immedi-
ately following the state’s creation might have defused the tension. Global
Hebraism is far less threatened by these processes than nationalisms built
on the foundations of the sovereign mold.
Contemporary scholars and communal leaders have begun to observe,
and lament, the decline in the fabric of a shared sense of Jewish people-
hood. Increasing a connection to the State of Israel is assumed as the most
effective treatment for this phenomenon. Rawidowicz’s work, however,
suggests that the forces eroding Jewish collective consciousness arise for
precisely the opposite reason—the prevalence of a narrative of nation-
ality that centers on the state. He mapped the fissures that arise when a
diaspora sense of collective identity is constructed through building a con-
nection to a state. Underneath this assumed shared narrative, he exposed
several actual and potential friction zones—the tacit agreement that the
state serves as the cultural and political center of world Jewry, the differ-
ence between Jewish national culture as specific criteria (such as land or
language) or dynamic process, and the questions of minority rights and the
ethical positions of sovereign and subject communities.

Beyond these specific troubling issues, Rawidowicz also diagnosed a
more fundamental error in the roots of mainstream conceptions of Jewish
peoplehood; that is, the residue of either/or ideological choices in narrat-
ing modern Jewish history and politics. Understanding Jewish identity is
problematic when viewed as a series of choices: religious versus secular,
diaspora versus homeland, nationality versus religion, sovereigns versus
subjects, premodern versus modern. At a crucial point in Jewish history
Rawidowicz questioned the need for such distinct paths. The residue of
these distinctions remains active today, still delineating the mainstream
discourse of Jewish identity and Israel–diaspora relations. But by replac-
ing mutually exclusive possibilities with the conjunction and, Rawidowicz
tried to neutralize what he perceived to be a threat to Jewish peoplehood:
the adoption of nation-state nationalism’s political assumptions as the
building block of Jewish identity formation. Ironically, the ideological dif-
ferences at the poles are actually much more closely related than theorists
might admit. Each extreme is rooted in the same set of assumptions about
identity formation in the modern world as citizens of nation-states have.
Reading Babylon and Jerusalem raises the possibility that the ideological
extremes conceptualized in the either/or logic are actually more closely
linked than many intellectuals think. Global Hebraism was therefore an
effort—certainly from a critical, modern perspective—to illustrate how the
binary choices are colored by the paradigm of the sovereign mold and not
necessarily the language of Jewish tradition.
The way forward, following Rawidowicz’s lead, is to develop a compre-
hensive counternarrative built on a new logic: an attempt to shift the dis-
course of nationality away from the ideological clarity of the either/or par-
adigm toward the fluidity of the both/and model. One of the few American
Jewish thinkers who read Rawidowicz’s work and appreciated his efforts
to fragment the emerging synthesis between Jewish nationality and the
sovereign mold was Mordecai Kaplan, popularly known as the founder
of Reconstructionist Judaism. Folded up and paper-clipped to the inside
cover of Rawidowicz’s personal copy of Kaplan’s landmark work Judaism as
a Civilization still rests a handwritten note in Hebrew from 1936. “I realized
that in a number of ways our outlooks are similar,” Kaplan wrote.77 After
reading Rawidowicz’s article “The Endurance of the Diaspora,” written in
1934, Kaplan thought Rawidowicz would appreciate Judaism as a Civiliza-
tion.78 The two men shared an ambivalent passion for Zionism and rejec-
tion of its trajectory toward linking Jewish nationalism and statism. Yet,
as chapter 4 explores, Kaplan’s immersion in American life and thought
contributed to quite a different approach to counterstate Zionism.

Mordecai M. Kaplan on board the S.S. Excambion working on the first
essay in Judaism in Transition, titled “What to Live for as a Jew,” ca. 1935.
Courtesy of the Archives, Reconstructionist Rabbinical College.

— 4 —
Making American Democracy

Safe for Judaism
Mordecai Kaplan, National Civilization,
and the Morality of Zionism
The book Who Are We? The Challenges to American National Identity (2004)
by international relations theorist Samuel Huntington makes it clear that
the debate about what it means to be an American is still very much alive
today.1 Huntington expresses concern that the “substance” and “salience”
of the “Anglo-Protestant” cultural core of American national identity has
been eroded by a wave of multiculturalism and massive immigration from
Latin America. This recent salvo in the critique of multiculturalism regards
national, ethnic, and even religious diversity as potentially undermining
the fabric of American society. Huntington’s claims—sanitized of explicitly
racial or jingoist overtones—echo anxieties about citizenship popularized
a century ago that resulted in the promotion of Anglo-Protestant confor-
mity and denounced so-called hyphenated identities as antithetical to the
progress of American civilization.
When we consider the tension over the past century between the con-
cepts of America as a unified nation or as a nation of many nationalities,
the ineluctable force of these debates cannot be ignored. Also extraordi-
nary, however, are the ways that notions of American identity and collective
identity among minority communities have changed over the years. Today,
voices like Huntington’s write from a more marginal position in society.
Warnings of the fragmentation of the United States are increasingly on the
defensive against a mainstream that recognizes, and even values, multiple
attachments and loyalties. Elementary school and high school curriculums,
college campuses, and businesses alike welcome and even encourage eth-
nic, religious, and cultural diversity. Entire fields of scholarship—ethnic,
diaspora, multicultural, and transnational studies—have developed since
95 safe: Mordecai Kaplan

making american democracy 95
the 1960s and 1970s to analyze the interplay between minority groups and
the federal government. The rise of these identity politics is often viewed
as the catalyst in this transformation. However, the shift from Ameri-
can nationalism to multiculturalism had roots far earlier in a discourse
(nationalism) and intellectual cohort (those individuals affiliated with Jew-
ish and Zionist concerns) that has rarely been recognized as part of the
central narrative.
This chapter attempts to fill that gap by recovering one such forgot-
ten contributor to the narrative: the influential American Jewish thinker
Mordecai Kaplan. He published, taught, and built institutions over a long
lifetime. Born in 1881 in Lithuania, he died in New York more than a cen-
tury later. Kaplan’s concept of Judaism as a civilization helped ensure his
legacy as one of the twentieth century’s most significant Jewish thinkers
and remains today one of the most influential contributions to modern
Jewish thought.2 Instead of linking Kaplan’s famous concept of civiliza-
tion to religion, however, this chapter places the key term within debates
about nationalism, Zionism, and internationalism. Approaching Kaplan’s
conception of Judaism as a national civilization (rather than the term he
himself made famous, Judaism as a religious civilization) more accurately
captures his lifelong interest in aligning Zionism, and civilization more
broadly, with a counterstate conception of Jewish nationalism.
Kaplan is remembered for his commitment, both theoretical and com-
munal, to Zionism. Jewish historian Arthur Hertzberg has called him “the
Summary of American Zionism.”3 This association belies a far more com-
plex relationship with Zionism, however, as it fails to acknowledge Kaplan’s
deep reluctance about, and even opposition to, statehood. Kaplan’s legacy
as a religious thinker and American Zionist overlooks the two central
motivating objectives of his work: the effort to formulate Judaism as the
example par excellence of ethical nationhood and the attempt to recon-
struct U.S. democracy to reflect the principles of Zionism.
Kaplan defined civilization as the totality of social interactions, cultural
attributes, and religious folkways that historically have created the ties that
bind Jews to one another. As a religious thinker, Kaplan offered the explicit
acknowledgment that the Jewish religion was a cultural system that had
evolved over time in response to internal changes and external contexts.
He famously jettisoned the concept of a supernatural God, challenged
Jews’ self-perception as God’s chosen people, and underscored the need
to consciously reinterpret the tradition to meet contemporary challenges.
During his long life, Kaplan promulgated his message through dozens of
books and articles. He also taught homiletics to generations of rabbinic

students at the Conservative movement’s seminary (the Jewish Theological
Seminary) and served as the founding rabbi of both the Jewish Center and
the Society for the Advancement of Judaism. Kaplan’s program solidified
its position within American Jewry with the founding of the Reconstruc-
tionist movement, known as the fourth denomination of American Juda-
ism, in 1955.4
As the debates about the meaning of nationality and sovereignty domi-
nated the early decades of the twentieth century, Kaplan’s most influential
work, Judaism as a Civilization, was published in 1934. The phrase it popu-
larized emerged from his passion for translating Judaism into an American
context, but also from his belief that U.S. democracy threatened the pres-
ervation of Judaism. To address this predicament, Kaplan formulated the
idea of civilization with a distinct mission in mind: to promulgate a con-
cept of American democracy and ethical nationhood based on his vision of
the Jewish paradigm of collective identity. Civilization therefore theorized
a specific typology of nationalism that would encourage sovereign pow-
ers to promote national diversity within their borders and define moral
parameters for neutralizing any potential tension between nationality and
citizenship. Reconstructing nationalism, both locally and globally, was
thus a crucial first step in the reconstruction of Judaism.
Addressing the relationship between Judaism, nationality, and ethical
progress remained a central theme in Kaplan’s writings—from his first
article, “Judaism and Nationality” (1909), to his final book, The Religion
of Ethical Nationhood (1970).5 Yet the popular and scholarly reception of
his Judaism as a Civilization (1934) into mainstream American Jewish life
has clouded this dimension of his thought. The focus has almost exclu-
sively been on Kaplan as a religious philosopher and institution builder.
His effort to blur the categories of religion and nationhood through the
introduction of the concept of civilization thus largely failed to overcome
the very dichotomy he set out to challenge. The more radical possibilities
he hoped the use of civilization would engender were effectively neutral-
ized by integrating the term into the paradigm of Judaism as a religion and
America as a nation of multiple religious communities (rather than mul-
tiple nationalities).
In contrast to his legacy, Kaplan interpreted civilization not as a theory of
religious philosophy (or more specifically as a program of Jewish renewal),
but as a strategic intervention in conversations about what it means to be
an American and a member of a nation. Using the term Jewish civiliza-
tion provided Kaplan with a conceptual vocabulary to try to dictate, or at
least to negotiate, the terms of discussions about the meaning of American
making american democracy safe: Mordecai Kaplan 97

identity at a moment when the sociopolitical pressures of Americanization
were radically reshaping the realities of Jewish life.6 Kaplan faced the chal-
lenge of trying to translate the multivalent aspects of Jewish collective con-
sciousness into modern social and political thought. His use of civilization
introduced new language to mediate between both the possibilities and
the threats posed by complex intellectual and social forces, including racial
science, exclusivist theories of nationalism, American nativism and anti-
immigration, the promise of Zionism, and religion’s role in middle-class
American identity formation. Historicizing the development of Jewish civ-
ilization within the hotly contested conversations about Americanization
indicates that Kaplan intended that the term be embraced as a paradigm
for making American democracy safe for Jews.
I argue that Kaplan selected a deliberately vague term and refused to
reconcile contradictions in his description of that term for strategic pur-
poses. This ambiguity enabled him to grapple with fundamental tensions
between Jewish national preservation and American citizenship, involv-
ing irresolvable questions such as the relationship between individual
rights and collective recognition, patriotic duty and national loyalty, reli-
gious creed and cultural cohesion, and voluntary association and coercive
bonds. Kaplan thus found a unified term that would address a series of
irreconcilable dilemmas. These strategic silences allowed him to blur the
boundaries between such key categories as nation, religion, race, Ameri-
canism, and Judaism. The expansive connotations of civilization furthered
his ability to appeal to multiple audiences. The fact that a larger audi-
ence never read his work does not undermine the importance of read-
ing civilization as a term designed to teach Americans both about their
own national identity and their obligations to minority groups through
the characteristics of Jewish civilization with American nationalism. This
chapter recognizes the specific intellectual, social, and political pressures
within Kaplan’s historical milieu and his mixed success at creating a cat-
egory to resist these various factors.
My approach to national civilization raises three questions, each of
which is addressed in detail in this chapter. First, how did the term civili-
zation help Kaplan achieve his objectives of reconstructing the relationship
between Americanism and Judaism? Second, how did Kaplan’s formula-
tion of national civilization develop pioneering strategies for legitimating
the morality of national cohesion? Third, how did Kaplan’s conclusions
about nationhood, formulated from the perspective of Jews as a minor-
ity group in the diaspora, shape his understanding of Zionism and Jewish
settlement in Palestine? That Kaplan’s interpreters rejected this dimension

of his political thought underscores his own misjudgment of the limits
of shifting the language and self-perception of the relationship between
American Jews and their host country. Rehabilitating this political and
externally oriented dimension of Kaplan’s work complicates a teleological
reading of the development of the American Jewish synthesis as eschewing
the possibility of Jewish nationhood as compatible with Americanization.
Kaplan’s push for redefining the theoretical language of the Jewish com-
munity, both in America and around the world, has new relevance today as
the popular discourse of American multiculturalism and ethnicity swings
closer to Kaplan’s ideals of civilization.
Kaplan: An Intellectual Biography

Before examining these complex issues, let us begin with a brief look at
Kaplan himself. The spectrum of theoretical positions incorporated within
his civilization concept reflects his own personal struggle between his
accommodationist reading of the reality of American Jewish life and his
maximalist yearnings for a return to the romantic notion of premodern
Jewish diaspora autonomy. Because he grew up deeply steeped in Jew-
ish life, Kaplan intuitively grasped the power that religious communities,
practices, and texts have in shaping allegiances. He believed that his pro-
gram for the reconstruction of American Jewry—imbued with the Amer-
ican ideals of democracy, pragmatism, and progress—had something in
common with Simon Rawidowicz’s Hebrew ruminations on the endurance
of the diaspora (which Rawidowicz had written in response to European
Zionism and German nationalism).7 The two men shared affinities in how
they thought about the role of Jewish nationalism in transforming modern
political thought, possibilities for minority national rights at a moment of
political transition, and a vision of counterstate Zionism. Both men were
also open to viewing religion and nationhood as intimately related con-
cepts, rather than as rapidly polarizing categories of group identity.
Kaplan’s sense of kinship with Rawidowicz’s ideas has roots in their paral-
lel life experiences (although the two probably knew about these overlapping
contexts, it is difficult to determine if they surely did). Fifteen years apart in
age (Kaplan was born in 1881, Rawidowicz in 1896), both thinkers were born
into families that had been influenced by the intersection of traditional Jew-
ish learning and innovations linked to the integration of secular studies and
Zionism. One of the representatives of this intellectual and political foment
was Rabbi Isaac Jacob Reines. Reines stirred controversy in two ways. First,
he founded the religious Zionist party known as Mizrachi and was one of the

early Orthodox rabbis to promote the Zionist movement and settlement in
Palestine. Second, the yeshiva Reines founded in Lida in 1905 combined rab-
binic training, specifically Talmud study, with secular subjects. Israel Kaplan
(Mordecai’s father) and Chaim Isaac Rawidowicz (Simon’s father) were both
ardent, learned devotees of Reines’s heterodox efforts to integrate Orthodoxy,
nationalism, and secular studies. Reines was the local rabbi in Sventzian,
where Mordecai Kaplan was born and lived until age seven. Kaplan’s father
had been a close friend of Reines and offered his house (with Mordecai play-
ing in another room as a toddler) as a place for the yeshiva’s first meetings.8
Rawidowicz’s father had served as a delegate of the Mizrachi Zionist party
(although he opposed Reines’s vote at the 1905 Zionist congress to support
the British offer for a Jewish homeland in Uganda).
Rawidowicz and Kaplan each had brief, direct interactions with Reines
and his ideology: Kaplan traveled to Lithuania in 1908 during his European
honeymoon to receive rabbinic ordination from Reines, and Rawidowicz
spent a year studying at the Lida Yeshiva in 1910. Indirectly, however, the
approach of fusing Torah and science championed by Reines influenced
both men through their particularly close relationships with their fathers.
Both fathers personally took charge of their sons’ Jewish education, study-
ing rabbinic texts with them throughout their formative years (and in
Kaplan’s case, until the end of his father’s life).9 From an early age, both
Kaplan and Rawidowicz emerged from an intellectual environment that
viewed the integration of nationalism, religion, Jewish texts, and secular
studies as enriching rather than threatening. The possibility of weaving
these poles together remained foundational for both Rawidowicz’s global
Hebraism and Kaplan’s national civilization.
Another similarity was that Kaplan and Rawidowicz both rejected the
binding authority of Jewish law that characterized the Judaism of their
fathers and Rabbi Reines. They shared the lifelong intellectual challenge of
articulating the immersion in Jewish sources and the passion for settlement
in Palestine, which had dominated their fathers’ approaches, with a far more
critical reading of Judaism informed by secular studies. Each thinker grap-
pled with translating his father’s inchoate sense of emotional attachment
into theories of identity formation that had to explain his own intimate, and
not always logically consistent, sense of belonging to an increasingly dimin-
ishing number of Jews with similar educational experiences.
The contingent winds of early-twentieth-century Jewish history moved
these two figures in disparate directions at different moments in history.
Kaplan’s journey was shaped by his immigration in 1889 at age eight to the
United States.10 Rawidowicz remained in Eastern Europe until he entered

the university in Berlin at age eighteen and immigrated to the United
States in 1948 after spending over a decade in England. It is one of the
telling ironies of American Jewish history that Kaplan, whose rejection of
a supernatural God led to his condemnation as a heretic by the Ameri-
can Orthodox community, emigrated to America as a result of the U.S.
Orthodox community’s effort to bolster religious observance and learning
in the new world. His father was brought to America as part of Rabbi Jacob
Joseph’s entourage.11 Facing increased pressure to acculturate, a group of
Orthodox New Yorkers had invited the rabbi to nourish the area’s dwin-
dling observant community. Kaplan’s father was brought along to serve
on the rabbinical court. Shortly after Rabbi Joseph’s arrival, however, his
tenure abruptly ended, and Israel Kaplan was left with plenty of time to
oversee his son’s Jewish education. Mordecai received as close to a tradi-
tional Jewish education as a young man could find in the United States at
that time. He studied the Talmud daily with his learned father, enrolled
at a yeshiva that had been established to provide an East European–style
immersion in traditional subjects, and took courses in Jewish studies at the
Jewish Theological Seminary from age twelve until twenty-one.12
Kaplan would spend his life theorizing about the ideal of “living in two
civilizations”—an East European world of Talmudic learning and the prag-
matism of the Progressive Era, which was reflected in his own upbringing.
He attended City College, where he learned Greek and Latin, philosophy,
and logic. He entered a master’s program at Columbia University in 1900,
where he took courses with the sociologist Franklin Giddings and other
scholars who inspired him with their optimistic belief in the powers of sci-
ence, evolution, and rational thought. Kaplan decided to dedicate his life
to articulating a program of Judaism that would bridge Americanism and
Judaism. Recreating this equilibrium required what he began calling the
“reconstruction of Judaism,” a program first articulated in a 1927 article in
the Menorah Journal.13 This process, he argued, required the reconceptu-
alization of Judaism to expand its definition from a creed to the totality of
social, cultural, and political components.
By 1934, Kaplan had clearly defined and outlined his program in a book
named after that very concept: Judaism as a Civilization: Toward a Recon-
struction of American-Jewish Life. For another four decades, he reiterated
many of the arguments popularized in his magnum opus. The central theme
running through all of these works was his effort to understand and con-
ceptualize the status of Jews (a national group unified by their connection
to a homeland, shared language, folkways, and sacred values) and the pur-
pose of Judaism (to reveal the possibilities of personal and collective self-

fulfillment and salvation). One of the most untapped resources in under-
standing Kaplan’s intellectual development in general, and his concept of
civilization in particular, are the thousands of pages of journal entries that
he kept meticulously and regularly throughout his lifetime. The journals
portray a man swinging between a haughty sense of self-importance and
a searing self-criticism, a certainty of mission and an insecurity about his
own abilities. They reveal Kaplan’s yearning for a private place to explore
intimate feelings and the need for additional platforms to construct his
own image for a public audience. The existence of such a unique window
into the private considerations of this intellectual’s public positions is an
invaluable tool for Kaplan’s biographers, for intellectual historians, and for
students of American Jewry in general.
The journals narrate developments in American Jewry from the posi-
tion of a man intimately connected to leading figures, central institutions,
and decisive intellectuals for almost three-quarters of a century. They offer
an unparalleled glimpse into the intertwined relationship between Kaplan’s
personal concerns and the concepts promulgated in his published work.
The positions he publicly championed obfuscate a mind obsessively focused
on evaluating the complexities of integrating reason and ritual, humanistic
values and particular preservation, and pragmatic calculations and objec-
tive truths. Kaplan entertained the opposing possibilities of socialism and
Jewish nationalism, passion for Zionism and rejection of the movement as
“godless,” and a desire to lead a secular movement of religious reform and
to spark a Jewish renaissance.
These internal contradictions are particularly apparent in Kaplan’s debates
about Jewish observance. Despite his “heretical” theology, his journal
bespeaks the deep bond that he continued to feel toward Jewish ritual and
observance. His intellectual critique of traditional Jewish ritual and theology
was out of step with his own emotional commitment to the Jewish religion.
On one Friday evening in 1919, after the start of the Sabbath, for example, he
realized that he had forgotten to write his weekly note to his mother. Torn
about what to do—violate the prohibition against writing on the Sabbath
or fail in his commitment to his regular update—Kaplan locked himself in
the bathroom and penned a letter.14 On another occasion, he acknowledged
in his diary that he would consider moving the Sabbath from Saturday to
Sunday to increase participation. A short while later, however, he wrote a
scathing report about a congregation outside New York City that considered
sponsoring a carnival following Sabbath services.15
Examining Kaplan’s personal diaries reminds scholars to avoid project-
ing a consistent or rational position across this thinker’s oeuvre (or even

within the same text). Kaplan confidently drew clear distinctions in places
without readily apparent logical justifications, and these distinctions could
shift within a matter of days. His writings grappled with systematizing and
categorizing his own experiences of reconciling the ambiguities of living in
two civilizations. The product was far from systematic, but Kaplan’s diary
entries trace the theoretical and practical difficulties of articulating the
spectrum of emotional attachments that he held toward various aspects of
his American and Jewish influences.
Kaplan’s journal illuminates the development of his key terms and con-
cepts, specifically the cross-fertilization of ideas that he wove together in
his own writings. His reflections on books he read or comments on texts
he picked up in the library while researching sermons outline an intellec-
tual field wider and more diverse than one might expect from a thinker
so deeply rooted in a particular American milieu. Kaplan’s theory of civi-
lization, which one can gain important insights into by including his per-
sonal diaries and his footnotes in an analysis, illustrates the transatlantic
exchange and the ways in which American thought translated and recon-
figured these notions. Diverse intellectual streams—from European Zion-
ism to British imperialism to American pragmatism to the social gospel
movement—are assembled and added into the medley of approaches that
Kaplan’s civilization directly and indirectly emulates, resists, and rear-
ranges. Piecing together these diverse conversations that formed his intel-
lectual matrix suggests contextualizing civilization in debates about Amer-
ican democracy and theories of nationality.
Reconstructing Judaism, Reconstructing America

Published when Kaplan was already fifty-three, Judaism as a Civilization
met with great success. The book won a prestigious prize and quickly went
into a second printing. After years of frustration that his program for Jew-
ish reconstruction would fail to influence American Judaism, Kaplan felt
validated by the positive reception of his text. Surprisingly, however, he
denied a publisher’s request to reprint the book a third time during the late
1930s. Twenty-five years later, when he finally permitted a third printing of
the book that had become a classic text of American Judaism, he explained
his hesitancy: “Nationhood,” one of the key terms he had used in Judaism
as a Civilization, “had come to be closely identified with statehood, and
was, therefore, in need of being replaced.”16 This conflation led Kaplan in
later years to replace the term nationhood with numerous alternatives in
subsequent publications.17

Kaplan’s need to find alternate language signifies far more than a termi-
nological shift. The centrality of the term nationhood in his mind places
the evolution of civilization within the early-twentieth-century discourse
of nationalism. If nationhood is central, why did he choose civilization, as
opposed to nation or nationhood, as the book’s primary category? How
did he perceive the relationship between two words—nation and civili-
zation—that both provide vocabulary for categorizing collective groups?
Civilization was intended to describe a specific typology of nationhood
pioneered by Jews and critically needed by the United States and other
sovereign states around the globe. Long before Kaplan settled on the term
as the book’s foundation, he had diagnosed the problem it would have to
address: namely, “political movements like democracy and nationalism.”18
In 1918, Kaplan recorded his inner struggle about whether to accept a
rabbinic position with a new synagogue in New York City called the Jewish
Center. His extensive diary entries during this period reflect long delib-
erations over whether he could overcome disagreements—over a range
of issues from mixed seating, institutional affiliation, and Zionism to the
order of the service and the role of biblical criticism—with his poten-
tial congregants.19 When it came down to making the decision, Kaplan
accepted the position and justified his move by explaining that the center
would function “to make democracy safe for Judaism.”20 This is a puzzling
statement coming from one of the great synthesizers of Americanism and
Judaism, a man whose work adopted fundamental themes of American
democracy to define Judaism. The explosion of nativism and the mono-
cultural nationalism of early-twentieth-century American history help
explain Kaplan’s pressing concern (see chapter 2 for a detailed discussion
of the social and political currents in early-twentieth-century America).
One of the touchstones of the shifting concepts of what it meant to be
an American at this time was the notion of the melting pot. In the play
The Melting Pot (produced in 1908), Israel Zangwell, an immigrant Jewish
intellectual with close ties to Jewish nationalism, popularized this meta-
phor of the United States as a great cauldron that would smelt away the
differences that fragmented European societies. Zangwell’s melting pot
imagined the country as a society open to the various talents of immigrant
groups melding together in a radically new environment. Yet, as the his-
torian Philip Gleason has pointed out, a transition in the meaning of the
melting pot occurred during World War I. The cauldron idea shifted from
a pot welcoming multiple groups to one whose objective was to strip away
the impurities of immigrants and to enforce conformity to Anglo-Saxon
norms and racial purity.21

A circle of Jewish and non-Jewish pluralists countered that America was
a nation of nationalities. Three of the most vocal champions of this mes-
sage for a more pluralistic and tolerant view of what it means to be an
American were Horace Kallen (discussed in chapter 2), Randolph Bourne,
and John Dewey. Through publications such as the Nation, written for a
general audience, and the Menorah Journal, intended for a more specifi-
cally Jewish audience, Kallen and Bourne promulgated the message that
the United States had the potential to fulfill Europe’s inability to integrate
multiple nationalities. They argued for a greater appreciation of difference
and immigrant groups, without undermining a sense of shared American
national cohesion.22 Jewish and specifically Zionist concerns helped shape
this first wave of American pluralism. Their rhetoric constructed a cos-
mopolitan pluralism that yearned for difference under the umbrella of the
Americanization process.
The Menorah Journal served as a central node for the intellectual com-
munity to redefine American democracy. The publication promoted Zion-
ism and Jewish nationalism as the model for democracy and American-
ism. The theories of nationality developed by such thinkers as Kallen
and Bourne—transnational America, cultural pluralism, and civilization
nationality—would serve as the antidote to President Franklin Roosevelt’s
“new nationalism” and its demands to dissolve so-called hyphenated
Americans. Kaplan’s early writing and the evolution of his civilization
concept were integrally connected in both content and rhetoric to these
attempts to fill in the conceptual gaps in increasingly contentious public
debates about the nature of American nationality. The backdrop of efforts
to resist the process of Americanization provides an important setting for
Kaplan’s early publications, a series of articles published in the Menorah
Journal between 1915 and 1916.
Kaplan clearly viewed his work as participation in the discourse of mak-
ing U.S. democracy safe for minority groups in general and for Jews in par-
ticular. The primary catalysts for the evisceration of Jewish life, he argued,
were the political and social trends that dominated American nationalism
and democracy during the early twentieth century. He expressed his anxiety
that U.S. national life was suffocating the Jewish community. Kaplan’s arti-
cles provide a crucial key for understanding the underlying factors motivat-
ing his innovative philosophical, theological, and religious contributions to
modern Jewish life. Furthermore, they illustrate that the concept of “Judaism
as a civilization” found its earliest expression in external political debates as
much as in internal theological discussions. A study of these articles indicates
that Kaplan breathed new life into Judaism not only to defend it against the

threatening spiritual challenges of science and progress, but also to invent a
political shield to parry the thrusts of American national unity.
Kaplan’s Menorah Journal essays identified two diametrically opposed
trends in American nationalism that threatened Jewish preservation: (1)
the legal recognition of individuals rather than groups, and (2) the pres-
sure to conform to a Christian model of American national culture. In
his article “How May Judaism Be Saved?” Kaplan highlighted the mod-
ern political structure as the greatest hindrance toward spiritual peace.
Modern democracy, he decried with passion, “is the principal cause of
the undoing of Judaism.”23 Instead of considering the United States as the
political entity that guaranteed Jews freedoms that had been unavailable
to them in Europe, Kaplan admonished his readers that American democ-
racy actually threatened to accelerate the demise of Jewish life. Prefigur-
ing Bourne’s fears of European nationalism (published the following year),
Kaplan’s gravest concern focused on the possibility that U.S. nationalism
might emulate European models.
From this perspective in 1915, Kaplan considered the United States liable
to debilitate Judaism through the ultimate fulfillment of European liberal-
ism. He even deemed Jews in America as potentially worse off than those
in European nations. Unprotected by any attachment to a particular land
and overwhelmed by the pressures of immigration, he believed, national
minority groups in the United States would succumb to the power of dem-
ocratic nationalism far more quickly than their brethren in Europe had.
American nationalism, he pessimistically asserted, promised a deadly blow
for American Jewish life. Such “nationalism based upon the democracy of
individuals,” he averred, “is bound to prevent Jewish communal life from
ever evolving to that degree of social autonomy which is indispensable to
Jewish consciousness.”24 Theories of liberalism portended the dissolution
of Jewish life by ignoring communal affiliations.
The development of a strong national identity in the United States,
based heavily on religious notions, severely compounded this challenge
associated with the atomization of liberal societies. According to Kaplan,
a growing national self-consciousness—deeply rooted in religious motifs,
language, and ideas—permeated the population and acted as a unify-
ing agent. The nation’s slow transformation into the role of religious icon
and provider would ultimately lead to the loss of power among particular
churches. Separating church and state, Kaplan asserted, represented only
a temporary step toward a far more insidious predicament. The state, for-
merly the protector of diverse religious communities, “has become ambi-
tious to develop its own soul and its own religion.”25

This new fusion of nation and religion would ultimately replace the old
boundaries between church and state. Kaplan even referred to the new reli-
gious language inherent in U.S. life as “the new nationalism,” echoing the
language Roosevelt had used a few years earlier to describe his political
platform. Given this pervasiveness, Kaplan contended, “America will prob-
ably lead the way among the Western nations in the substitution of a home
religion for an imperial one.”26 The traditional room for religion in liberal
societies, guaranteed under the language of separation of church and state,
would soon disappear in the United States under intense demands to meld
national–religious identity with citizenship. Without halting this excessive
trend in American nationalism, Kaplan held, no religious reform or theo-
logical innovation would be able to rescue Judaism.
Collective group consciousness was thus under attack from two oppos-
ing poles—liberal individualism and a homogenizing religious national-
ism. Negotiating a middle-ground theory of nationality would have to
emulate these extremes by affirming individual rights and religious col-
lectivity but would also provide space for recognizing multiple substatist
groups, such as the Jewish community. Kaplan’s early essays present Jew-
ish nationalism as an alternate path of Americanization that neutralizes
both the individualism and collectivism that simultaneously eroded space
for “being Jewish” within American life. The tradition most clearly suited
for guiding this transformation was already being developed by Kaplan.
As early as the late 1910s, he had conceived of Jewish political thought,
embedded within its religious tradition, as part of the process of reforming
American nationalism.
Not all religious traditions engendered national communities with the
same quality of political aspirations or moral inclinations, Kaplan argued
in his Menorah Journal essays. Some religions, particularly Christianity,
had a tendency (both historically and currently), he felt, to retard human
progress by enforcing a cultural and political imperialism on other reli-
gious communities. But some other religions, notably Judaism, propelled
the forces of moral progress by striving to reach a telos of multiple national
civilizations thriving in relationship with one another. Following a histo-
riographical approach motivated by contemporary political considerations,
Kaplan reduced Christianity and Judaism to mutually opposing political
predilections: one inclined toward imperialism and the other, national-
ism. Christianity had demonstrated itself as “a collective consciousness
with imperialism for its method.”27 By celebrating the universal equal-
ity of humanity, Kaplan continued, Christianity actually threatened the
rights of groups to declare their individual freedom. In contrast, Judaism’s

fundamental contribution to world history, he contended, was the political
and moral ability to withstand the pressures of Christianity to guarantee
the possibility of otherness in European society. From its historical origins,
Judaism had “showed itself as a collective consciousness with nationalism
for its method.”28 Judaism’s inveterate struggle against imperialism indi-
cated the tradition’s recognition of the “vain delusion” of elevating cosmo-
politan visions above particular national divisions.29
The specific terminology and general program Kaplan used for con-
structing Jewish nationality as an alternative to Christian imperialism and
American nationalism shared a strategy and vocabulary with other intel-
lectuals who regularly published in the Menorah Journal—namely, Bourne
and Kallen. They held similar views about Jewish nationalism being an anti-
dote to American nationalism. Bourne, a non-Jew, even championed Jew-
ish nationalism as the most highly developed form of transnational cohe-
sion. He aligned Jews with the “ardent effort for that progressive democratic
reconstruction in America which is the ideal of all true Americans, no matter
what their heritage.”30 Kallen defined the Jews’ global mission as the catalyst
for ensuring that political states would recognize federations of minority
national groups within their political and territorial boundaries. Enacting
this political transformation pioneered by the Jews would thus enable the
world to progress toward a higher level of civilization. This utopian vision of
civilization elevated diversity, distinction, and transnational communities
over the uniformity of states grounded on ethnoreligious criteria.
It is interesting to note that such a diverse group of figures—Jewish pro-
fessionals, deracinated Jewish public intellectuals, and non-Jewish antiwar
activists—shared the opinion that Zionism would contribute to a post-
nation-state era. At a moment of possibility, the end of World War I, Jewish
nationalism was amorphous and malleable enough to provide an appeal-
ing theoretical platform for Jewish and non-Jewish intellectuals interested
in transforming the relationship between nation and state. But why write
about this issue through the lens of Jewish nationality instead of just writ-
ing about American nationality? Writing about the universal through the
particular demonstrates the need to actually justify the Jews’ ability to
integrate at a time when they were being pushed out of the boundaries of
American identity. The pressure to justify the tolerance of Jews within the
acceptable boundaries of American identity necessitated a distinct expla-
nation of how the Jews’ very difference actually fostered their ability to
integrate into American society.
In chapter 2 we discussed the use of civilization in the Zionist inter-
nationalism of Kallen and Zimmern. Both used civilization to describe a

federation of nationalities that would maintain their distinct identities as
citizens under the political control of a shared political entity. Note the
relationship here between the key term civilization, the commitment to
reformulating the nation-state model, and the unique role that Jewish
nationalism has in transforming America into a state of nationalities.
Jewish intellectuals were not alone in selecting civilization to serve the
polemical purpose of challenging the increasingly monolithic definitions
of American self-identity in the postwar years. The historian Gail Beder-
man has analyzed the ways in which disenfranchised intellectuals in the
early twentieth century turned to the rhetoric of civilization as a strategy
of resistance against the hegemony of racial, religious, and ethnic puri-
ty.31 Such intellectuals and civil rights activists as W. E. B. Dubois and Ida
B. Wells used similar discourse to reformulate the terminology so central
in denying their community’s full acceptance into American society. By
“inverting the discourse” of civilization, these intellectuals challenged the
term’s meaning and proposed alternative definitions.32 Instead of equating
civilization with Anglo-Saxon, Protestant uniformity, they offered a coun-
terdefinition that not only tolerated but actually celebrated the value of
multiple national identities. The prevalence and parallel function of the
term civilization in the works of Kallen, Zimmern, and Kaplan suggest that
these Jewish thinkers adopted a similar strategy.33
In 1928, the year before he embarked on writing Judaism as a Civili-
zation, Kaplan enthusiastically recorded the breakthrough that led to
his adoption of the term civilization as the centerpiece of his book. He
explained that he had finally found an important “new thought tool” that
would address the need for a solution capable of “the deliberate attempt to
modify the environment or reckon with it, even more than upon a repen-
tant mood on the part of the Jews.”34 He sensed the polemical power of the
word to transform the grounds of national cohesion from state and terri-
tory to elements compatible with dispersed populations and supportive of
multiple nationalities. His theory of national cohesion was built on two
pillars: first, he articulated a moral argument that viewed particular attach-
ments as the most effective path toward guaranteeing individual rights and
creating harmony between different groups. He thus turned the meaning
of progress on its head by juxtaposing civilization with national diversity,
not ethnocultural uniformity. Second, Kaplan viewed religious folkways, a
connection to the Jewish homeland, social and legal institutions, and cul-
tural engagement as the collective boundaries for minority communities.
This link between nationhood and civilization crystallizes in the sec-
tion of Judaism as a Civilization entitled “The Nationhood of Israel,” where

Kaplan defines nationality (directly citing Zimmern’s essays) as a “body of
people united by a corporate sentiment of peculiar intensity, intimacy and
dignity, related to a definite home-country.”35 Zimmern’s influence suggests
a parallel use of both terms, civilization and nationhood. Zimmern’s theory
of nationality contrasted two paradigms: a civilization and a Kultur typol-
ogy (see chapter 2 for a more detailed discussion of Zimmern’s model). The
two approaches to nationality stood for opposing concepts of the bonds of
nationhood and the relationship between nation and state. The approaches
are distinguished by a set of opposing characteristics—cosmopolitan and
particular, ethical and nonethical, and pluralistic and exclusivist. The Kul-
tur model, associated by Zimmern’s World War I writings with Prussian
nationalism, defined an exclusivist nationalism that linked nationhood
with statehood. Citizenship demanded conformity to specific ethnona-
tional criteria enforced by the state.
A civilization, however, created national bonds that thrived across
political boundaries and eschewed a hierarchy of various ethnoreligious
groups. Instead, it provided a cosmopolitan vision of difference that views
the tolerance of other groups and the affirmation of particular identi-
ties as a defining characteristic of progress toward recognizing the moral
possibilities of humanity. A national civilization thus becomes a conduit
toward achieving a greater degree of universal integration. Kaplan’s notion
of civilization, as this fruitful comparison with Zimmern suggests, should
not be read as introducing a unique category of identity. Rather, the term
embodies what Kaplan considers the most progressive and ethical typol-
ogy of nationality.
Delineating the civilization model of nationalism is a defining theme of
Kaplan’s Judaism as a Civilization. Despite being seen primarily as a theo-
logical and sociological reformulation of Judaism, the work includes exten-
sive discussions about nationalism in general and American democracy
in particular. Although they are not as plainly articulated as Zimmern’s
comparison between civilization and Kultur, Kaplan also outlined the
contours of two typologies of nationhood in his magnum opus. The more
pernicious stream, however, is not represented by German Kultur but by
American democracy. Kaplan presented an unenthusiastic evaluation of
U.S. “democratic nationalism” throughout the text. Paralleling Zimmern’s
and Bourne’s critiques of Kultur nationalism, Kaplan considered contem-
porary expressions of American nationalism problematic due to burgeon-
ing efforts to fuse the notions of nation and state.
Kaplan wrote: “Current concepts of nationalism are deeply problematic
because they are based upon the misleading assumption that nationhood is

synonymous with statehood, which makes it impossible for a people to be
considered a nation unless it is represented by a state.”36 This fusion caused
“every modern nation [to] expect[s] all its citizens to identify themselves
completely with it, to accept its cultural values and to further its social aims
and ideals.”37 Kaplan daringly compared American “democratic national-
ism” to European völkisch nationalism—this only one year after Hitler’s
rise to power in Germany. “With the organization of modern nations”—in-
cluding American democracy—“there has been a return to the sub-human
principle of the herd.”38 From Kaplan’s perspective, then, the difference
between German theories of völkisch nationalism and the American melt-
ing-pot concept was only a matter of degree (ironically, although Kaplan
rejected elements of German notions of nationalism, he simultaneously
decided to place the concept of Volk at the center of his civilization model).
His repeated references to the growing similarities between American and
European models of nationalism indicate that he regarded opposition to
these theories as a core objective.
National civilization served as the antithesis of völkisch nationality by
creating boundaries for a “new type of nation” that is “international” in
scope.39 This interpretation of Jewish political thought supported Kaplan’s
conclusion that “the notion that allegiance to a state precludes identifica-
tion with more than one nation will therefore have to be scrapped.”40
National civilization required grounds of cohesion that would distin-
guish it from the exclusivist, militant, and illiberal typologies of nation-
ality that Kaplan sought to replace. Kaplan accomplished this objective
through a number of innovations that distinguished his criteria for cohe-
sion from those developed earlier by Zimmern and Kallen. Kaplan’s cri-
tique of national sovereignty rejected notions of descent, culture, or spirit
as the primary criteria of membership and turned to religion as the basis
of national solidarity. Although Zimmern and Kallen had rejected sover-
eignty as the primary criterion for nationality, a position that put them
against the current of theoretical and practical developments in theories
of nationalism, they adopted other dominant aspects of defining nation-
ality. This first generation of pluralists in the United States relied on the
language of descent and culture to describe group boundaries (although,
as explored in chapter 2, they undermined the essentialist implications of
this language).
Kaplan continued the trajectory begun by figures such as Kallen and
Zimmern to distinguish national markers from racial characteristics. Yet
Kaplan went even further in maintaining a clear distinction between the
biological grounds of cohesion and the ties that linked co-members of a

national civilization. Developing his theories at the high-water mark of
racial science in the 1920s and 1930s, Kaplan was more consciously seeking
an alternative to race than his predecessors. Taxonomies of race pushed
Jews to the boundaries of whiteness.41 On the one hand, race served as a
powerful force for maintaining identity markers within the United States.
On the other hand, however, writing after the 1924 immigration restric-
tions, the rise of discrimination at a variety of institutions, and the efforts to
categorize Jews as Hebrews rather than as Caucasians, Kaplan recognized
that the cost of racial otherness would inevitably diminish the standing
of that group. As a result, Kaplan calibrated national civilization to offer a
nonracialized discourse of difference that would share the robust and even
involuntary boundaries of difference suggested by racial categories without
the negative stigma and coercive nature of racial nationalism. Civilization
would thus help transform American nationalism from a nation of races to
a nation of civilizations.
Reversing the approach to civilization by looking at its function rather
than its content helps explain Kaplan’s definition of the term as well as the
ambiguities he leaves unresolved. The constituent elements of a civiliza-
tion are enumerated as such: land; language and literature; mores and laws;
and folkways, folk sanctions, and folk arts.42 Perhaps most important are
the elements that are absent from this list: statehood, spirit or culture, and
descent. However, Kaplan’s notion of civilization also fails to fully discard
these concepts. The elements stand in limbo between rejecting certain cri-
teria and trying to reassert modified versions of them.
Kaplan’s real focus is on the more dynamic elements of the modes in
which a civilization operates. Social interactions produce traditions and
mores that unite members of historical civilizations. National civilization
generates cohesion through shared commitment to certain sancta, or prin-
ciples, that are reflected in historical sources, practices, and communities.
Civilization is fluid, and the constituent elements are expansive enough
to include Hebrew and non-Hebrew speakers, homeland, and diaspora.
Moreover, most of the key elements are actually processes for affirming,
and when necessary, changing, collective ideals and values. The term thus
provides a shell that introduces a theory with positive connotations of the
epitome of progress and humanity without delineating clear parameters
of membership.
Kaplan’s development of folkways provides an interesting example of
this process of addressing the dilemma of advocating for distinct national
attributes without claiming fixed attributes. Folkways, as he defines them,
represent the range of “social practices” by which groups express their

“collective being.”43 One significant aspect of Kaplan’s selection of this
term is his implicit rejection of culture to define this category.44 As a
general term, one prevalent among European thinkers and popularized
within American Jewry by the essays of theorist Israel Friedlaender, cul-
ture would have served as a far more obvious choice either to replace civi-
lization as the general description of Jewish nationhood or in the specific
discussion of folkways.
Yet culture would have suggested that the content of Jewish national
cohesion was an abstract set of characteristics imbued within Jewish his-
torical progression. Culture also connoted exclusivity—that is, one was pri-
marily a member of one culture over another. But folkways, a term Kaplan
most likely learned from Yale sociologist William Graham Sumner, are
social norms and mores shaped by society.45 One term stands as an a priori,
innate quality, while the other affirms fluidity and external construction.
Kaplan’s selection of folkways, however, did not completely relinquish the
concept of essential characteristics of particular civilizations. Ironically,
the term originates in German nationalism’s concept of the innate spirit
that unifies members of a particular group.
In addition to downplaying descent and culture, Kaplan affirms the cen-
trality of religion as the primary cohesive basis of national solidarity. One
might read his juxtaposition of religion with civilization not as innovative,
but instead as an indication of his ultimate kowtowing to expectations of
the American Jewish synthesis. As a realist and pragmatist, he certainly
knew that the recognition of religious groups remained far more compat-
ible with American political realities than the acceptance of national cor-
porate minorities.46 Acceptance into middle-class American society was
increasingly defined by affiliation with religion. In some ways, the recogni-
tion that religion would serve as the most effective language for difference
and acceptance in America anticipated the theorist Will Herberg’s classic
Protestant, Catholic, Jew: An Essay in American Religious Sociology.47 The
more radical claims of nationality were thus mollified by juxtaposing reli-
gion with civilization.
Despite Kaplan’s efforts to advocate a separation of nation and state in
America, he still operated out of the basic assumption that difference in
the United States is expressed through religious paradigms. He pushed
hard for Jewish identity to transcend religious boundaries in America. At
least implicitly, though, he acknowledged the limitations of this approach.
Kaplan recognized that paradigms of minority nationality explicitly based
on a multinational state model would have little success in the United
States.48 Yet the role of religion and its relationship to civilization and

nationality is more complex than reading its use as a way of neutralizing
Kaplan’s maximalist efforts to create a new typology of nationality.49 The
use of religion in Kaplan’s concept of national civilization has multiple
functions and serves as another example of how he formulated terminol-
ogy vague enough to support conflicting objectives and to negotiate, rather
than resolve, complicated dilemmas.
Why did Kaplan risk undermining his clear desire to make a mark
on theories of nationality by linking civilization and religion? Juxtapos-
ing these ideas reflected Kaplan’s personal connection to Jewish religious
practice and themes as well as his calculated efforts to appeal to certain
audiences by using the concept of religion. It was an effort to appease his
potential audience, but it also reflected his own personal engagement with
Jewish observance, themes, and cultural components. Kaplan’s intellectual
critique of traditional Jewish ritual and theology was out of step with his
own emotional commitment to the Jewish religion. To some degree, this
gap explains his insistence on emphasizing religion as the building block
of national identity. Bonds formed through religious ritual and narrative
are deeply personal and command observance. Out of a combination of his
own psychological attachments and guilt at breaking from the past, Kaplan
therefore needed to anchor his Judaism in religious categories, even if he
had stripped away many of religion’s defining characteristics.
This reflected Kaplan’s strategic realization of his Jewish and American
audiences and the optimal path for rethinking the synthesis between Juda-
ism and Americanism. Kaplan’s sensitivity to the pragmatic reality of reli-
gion as the accepted category of otherness for American Jews led him to
express his theory in a language that would resonate.50 Kaplan knew his
audience well enough to know that couching his program as a religion
would gain him readership, but he underestimated their interest in explor-
ing the political implications of his definition of religion on the American
Jewish synthesis.
Once Kaplan made the case for the category of religion, however, he
translated the core of Jewish religion to reflect his larger political agenda.
Religion itself served the functional purpose of providing the philosophical,
and even theological, justification for the existence of particular national
communities that operated outside nation-state categories. When we study
Kaplan’s conclusions about God, the Torah, and Israel, we see that the clas-
sic categories of Jewish religion suggest that not only intellectual but also
political concerns fueled some of his more radical assertions. For Kaplan,
a crucial shaper was the political question of resetting the equilibrium of
Jews and their non-Jewish neighbors. The motivations for his theory of

religion are best understood as a response to his concerns about the status
of Jews within American society as well as that of Jews in the homeland.
The centrality of these concerns is evident in Kaplan’s formulation of
such primary concepts as God and salvation. One of his most well-known
(and controversial) contributions to twentieth-century Jewish theology is
the declaration that God was “the process that makes for salvation.” Phil-
osophical or theological discussions of the strengths and weaknesses of
Kaplan’s soteriology ignore the political and historical meaning of the term
salvation, however.51 Kaplan envisioned God as the political and social
structure that would elicit the most rewarding type of communal life. The
“God idea,” he explicitly acknowledged, “functions . . . as an organic accep-
tance of certain elements in the life and environment of the group, or of
reality as a whole in relation to the group, as contributing to one’s self-
fulfillment or salvation.”52 The divine infused the world through creating
a healthy intergroup and intragroup equilibrium. The task of religion thus
“consists in rendering that milieu efficacious in eliciting from its adher-
ents the best that is in them.”53 From Kaplan’s perspective, there can be no
greater priority for religious thinkers than constructing political visions for
their religion’s adherents. Healthy national life remains the fundamental
purpose of religious traditions and the prerequisite for salvation. Religious
salvation would then emerge at the moment when the proper equilibrium
between Jews and their host society would be restored.
The content of religious life existed solely as a tool to galvanize a higher
level of communal solidarity. To support this claim, Kaplan reinterpreted
the Torah, the central symbol of the Jewish tradition, as a detailed map
outlining the ideal political structure of nationalism. The Torah, he con-
cluded in Judaism as a Civilization, “especially as developed in practice
and interpretation, is the full equivalent of what we understand by national
civilization.”54 Kaplan applied a functionalist approach to determining
the meaning of each individual religious belief or action outlined in the
Torah. He also relied on the same lens to understand religion itself. Reli-
gion operated primarily as the glue that created and sustained the bonds of
civilization nationhood. To put it another way, the folk religion of nations
constituted the instrument by which “civilization reaches the point of self-
consciousness essential to its perpetuation.”55
At the same time that Kaplan used religion to promote distinct national
groups, he also used it as a way of drawing parallels between the Jewish and
the American nation. The source of this fusion reflects his observations
about the relationship between religion and state in America. Kaplan’s
use of religion allowed him simultaneously to bring Jews closer to and to

distance them from Americans. This model emulates the prevalent dis-
course advocating for the Christianization of America. Although the years
in which Kaplan wrote Judaism as a Civilization corresponded to the final
years of the social gospel movement (which reached its apogee in the first
two decades of the century), the fluid boundaries between political reform
and religious fervor continued to inform his intellectual and social context.
In addition to the strong strains of racial nationalism that gained political
strength after World War I, liberal Protestantism (particularly the social
gospel movement) embraced progressive politics as a vehicle for Christian-
izing America and thus ensuring the social salvation of the entire nation.56
The influence of predominantly religious figures such as Washington Glad-
den, Richard Ely, and Walter Rauschenbusch transcended church meetings
and Bible study groups and influenced the national political and cultural
scene. These leaders contended that only a Christian America could bring
about religious salvation.
Kaplan mirrored the political implications of salvation developed by
the social gospel movement and applied these concepts to his notion of
Jewish civilization. This move had the benefit of creating parallel reli-
gious traditions dedicated to the concept of salvation. Of course, Kaplan
had to tweak the specific aspect of salvation—from a universal accep-
tance of Christian doctrine to the embrace of national diversity. Emu-
lating the approach of his Christian contemporaries accomplished two
important polemical tasks. First, it gave Judaism legitimacy by translat-
ing Jewish nationalism into a form compatible with the discourse of the
United States as a Christian nation. Second, it transferred the true carrier
of national authenticity from Protestant Christianity to Judaism. Judaism
was thus transformed from a community hindering American progress
toward unification to the nation best empowered to implement the ideals
of the Progressive period. Religion remained central for Kaplan—not to
promote any particular Jewish praxis or belief, but to put Judaism on par
with Christian nationalism, and ultimately to replace the conflation of
America and Christian salvation (aligned with homogeneity) with Jewish
salvation (characterized by heterogeneity).
“Can Nationalism Be Other Than Bellicose?”

After reading a 1933 New York Times article about Nazi propaganda min-
ister Joseph Goebbels, Kaplan posed a question in his journal that reaf-
firmed his commitment to identifying the moral dangers of advocating
for national preservation. He also raised the question of how to justify his

own efforts to advocate for Jewish nationality at a moment when national-
ist rhetoric was being used to justify the revocation of Jewish citizenship in
Germany (two years earlier, as we shall learn in chapter 5, a lecture by Hans
Kohn sparked a similar set of questions in response to the Arab revolt in
Palestine). Kaplan wrote:
The fundamental question is: Can nationalism be other than bellicose?

If nationalism is—as [Reinhold] Niebuhr maintains in his recent book
“Moral man in an Immoral Society”—irredeemably militant and hostile
what does the world gain by the Jews’ creating another source of group
hatred and militancy? By retaining their nationhood they are bound to act
as a corrective of the brutal and bellicose aspect of nationalism and are cer-
tain to serve the course of cosmopolitanism and international peace as they
never could if they were to become assimilated internally.57
Clearly this was a burning question for Kaplan. Could affirming national
boundaries be moral? In his 1932 book Moral Man and Immoral Society,
Protestant theologian Reinhold Niebuhr, who taught at Union Theologi-
cal Seminary across the street from Kaplan’s home institution, the Jew-
ish Theological Seminary, argued that national preservation was “selfish”
and antithetical to individual rights and concerns. Niebuhr’s work dis-
tinguishes between the “moral and social behavior of individuals and of
social groups.”58
Kaplan’s diary reflects the attraction that he had to the universalist ide-
als promised by socialism and communism. In considering his follow-up
to Judaism as a Civilization, Kaplan privately considered two alternatives
in 1934: “the completion of the book on ‘The Creed of the Modern Jew’
and the formulation of a system of religious Communism.”59 He ulti-
mately decided to pursue the former project, which became his Meaning
of God in Modern Jewish Religion. However, from his perspective, the God
idea in Judaism—the process that makes for salvation—was fully com-
patible with the ideals of universal humanity espoused by socialists and
Marxists (Kaplan dropped his interest in Marxist ideology after reading
a pamphlet called “Lenin and the Jewish Question,” which argued that
Jewish national culture and international culture are incompatible).60 The
interest in finding ethical language to talk about national survival was a
central concern for him. The concept of national civilization was an effort
to negotiate between these potentially conflicting possibilities of nation-
alism and internationalism, parochialism and humanism, and moral and
immoral actions.

The necessity of formulating a new nationalism only gained greater
urgency for Kaplan after his 1934 publication of Judaism as a Civilization.
His subsequent personal ruminations and publications clarify the distinc-
tion he endeavored to make between various typologies of nationality.
One might assume that Kaplan’s two-year sojourn in Jerusalem between
1937 and 1939 might have caused him to reconsider his emphasis on the
value of national diversity and the centrality of sovereignty. Amid growing
Arab–Jewish hostilities in Palestine, the early indications of mass killings
of Jewish communities in Europe, and the fervor of Zionist ideology and
clamoring for independence, however, Kaplan only reaffirmed the viability
of Jewish national minorities in the diaspora and the need to redefine theo-
ries of nationalism to make space for such communities.
Spurned by a 1939 discussion at Hebrew University on the meaning of
Jewish nationality, Kaplan spent several weeks commenting on the topic in
his diary. He explained his intense interest in nationalism in general and its
relationship to Judaism in particular:
The main task which confronts Jewish leadership today, is to define anew
the meaning of nationality and national consciousness in terms that will
not only render tenable but will invest with purpose and dignity, the sta-
tus of the Jews who must indefinitely remain scattered among the various
nations of the world. They must point the way to a conception of Jewish
nationhood that would make it compatible with unquestioned loyalty to
whatever non-Jewish nation they cast their lot with.61
In this project of defining anew, Kaplan questioned the assumption that

each people required sovereignty to fulfill their national aspirations. He
contested this by distinguishing between a “nationalism which insists on
one’s nation being sovereign . . . and recognizes no higher law than its own
will and needs, and internationalism which, admitting a high degree of
autonomy to each nation, advocates the submission of each nation to a sov-
ereignty higher than its own and representative of a group of nations but
preferably of all nations.”62 Kaplan refers to the second type of nationality,
the one compatible with multinational states, as ethical nationhood rather
than civilization nationhood. Although he had already used the term ethi-
cal interchangeably with civilization in a few instances, the switch in termi-
nology indicates a shift in his focus.63 Whereas Jewish civilization allowed
him to address notions of nationality through the medium of the meaning
of Judaism, ethical nationhood more directly confronted the need to rede-
fine nationality without the mediation of a program for Judaism.

Ethical nationhood rejects political control and territorial possession
as criteria for group affiliation. Instead, it argues that the former will most
likely lead to homogenizing demands and totalitarian means of enforce-
ment. In his Future of the American Jew, Kaplan wrote about the moral
dangers of connecting nation and state. “The doctrine of ‘absolute national
sovereignty,’ with its assumption that the interests of one’s own nation must
always override those of other nations, is responsible for the international
anarchy of the modern world, and is liable to bring about a catastrophe
that will destroy the very foundation of human civilization.”64 (Note the
enduring opposition in Kaplan’s thought between human civilization and
absolute national sovereignty.) Writing in the late 1930s, Kaplan certainly
had German nationalism in mind when composing this trenchant cri-
tique. Nazi nationalism, however, was not a qualitative perversion of mod-
ern theories of Western nationalism; rather, the totalitarian regime repre-
sented the logical conclusion of theories of national sovereignty.
Ethical or civilization nationhood therefore offered the antidote to the
impending disaster engendered by ascribing shared ethnic, cultural, or bio-
logical characteristics to a polity. Kaplan’s correction envisioned a global
order of multinational states or commonwealths consisting of a patchwork
of national communities with members dispersed across political and ter-
ritorial boundaries. The flourishing of such communities would fragment
the sovereign political power’s ability to enforce membership in one privi-
leged national culture.
In order to juxtapose the ideals of ethical nationhood, Kaplan grappled
with the question he posed in his diary: Can nationalism be other than
bellicose? He responded to Niebuhr’s claim indirectly throughout his sub-
sequent essays by developing three arguments to demonstrate that man is
most moral when attached to a particular national group. Kaplan asserted:
(1) that corporate groups actually provide the most effective path toward
ensuring individual ethical behavior; (2) that there are grounds for legal
protections for specific groups within liberal democracies; and (3) that
minority groups can practice a form of voluntary coercion to highly encour-
age membership without negating the free choice of their members. Such
recent works as Robert McKim and Jeff McMahan’s The Morality of Nation-
alism, Yael Tamir’s Liberal Nationalism, and David Miller’s On Nationality
indicate that the basic challenge Kaplan faced—to justify the moral probity
of national affiliation—had moved from the margins of political theory to
the center of conversations about nationality in a global era. The assump-
tion that liberalism and nationalism clash had evolved from a constella-
tion of modern cosmopolitan political and intellectual currents. National

identification confronts liberalism’s deeply rooted concerns about promot-
ing public expressions of difference.65
Maintaining partiality toward a particular group reflects clannish
tendencies, often motivated by irrational and even erroneous fictional
national narratives, and galvanizes feelings of superiority that inflame
global ethnoreligious strife and war. Acknowledging particular loyalties
threatens universal rights and individual autonomy. Expressions of cul-
tural difference and national partiality rub against the commitment to
uniformity around a shared set of political principles and shared values.
Liberal advocates for national partiality face the theoretically daunting
task of justifying collective cohesion as fully compatible with free choice
and opposed to national hierarchies.
This is precisely the challenge in which Kaplan engaged in constructing
the theory of Judaism as a national civilization as an ethical alternative to
the dominant theories of nationality. He entered this gray area of modern
political thought when few theorists blurred the clear divide between eth-
nic, or clannish, nationality and cosmopolitan visions that equated nation-
ality with Enlightenment universality (in fact, his contemporary and the
subject of chapter 5, Hans Kohn, who was struggling with the same tension
between nationalism and humanism, would soon popularize the norma-
tive distinction between civic and ethnic paradigms with the publication
of The Idea of Nationalism in 1944). Kaplan was keenly aware of having
to negotiate between the poles of irrational, familial preferences and the
impartial principle of human equality.
His strategy transforms the latter into an instrumental force calibrated
to engender the former. In other words, collective affiliation ensures the
highest degree of moral and pragmatic value. Only through the partic-
ular, Kaplan suggested, could universal ethical ideals be fully realized.66
Accordingly, nationhood “qualifies the human being not only for the
group but for human life, and, though the means are necessarily particu-
laristic, the aim is universal.”67 In order for individuals to contribute to
humanity, they must gain through religious education a deep self-aware-
ness of their distinct identity as “other.” Individuals are most effective as
moral agents when they remain embedded within particular human net-
works that connect them through shared narratives. Promoting unifor-
mity therefore actually diminishes the ability to react to the needs of an
undifferentiated universal humanity.68
Just as individuals have a natural affinity toward family, Kaplan asserted,
so too is it fully justified to prioritize obligations to a specific group over
equal affection for all humankind. “An obligation to the members of one’s

nationality,” Kaplan explained, has no less moral validity than “cosmopoli-
tanism which recognizes no such priority.”69 The overlap of cosmopolitan-
ism and civilization is interesting because it suggests a parallel to the litera-
ture on cosmopolitanism that has been recently used to negotiate between
particular nationality and universal concerns.70 The universal connota-
tions of cosmopolitanism have enabled such theorists as David Hollinger
and Kwame Anthony Appiah to make particular claims without under-
mining their compatibility with ethical or moral issues that transcend a
specific group’s preservation.71 Even though the nationalist scholar David
Miller does not use the specific term, he reframes Kaplan’s inchoate argu-
ment far more clearly by culling from recent ethical theory that distin-
guishes between an ethics of particularity and an ethics of universality. By
endorsing the potential moral value of expanding the familial metaphor to
include a much larger collective, ethical particularism promises to ensure
the greatest level of moral efficacy.
Kaplan turns the charge of clannish particularity on its head by insisting
that cultural rootedness actually creates the “milieu in which the individual’s
right of life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness may be realized.”72 Obligat-
ing oneself toward a particular community facilitates individual autonomy
and freedom—principles highly valued by liberal thought.73 Communal
ties create the structure that individuals require to imagine their possible
choices and the context for deciding on their actions and beliefs. Remov-
ing these cultural contexts strips away individuals’ capacities for making
meaningful choices. National civilization, as defined by Kaplan, adopts a
similar strategy to neutralize liberalism’s critique of minority group rights.
The theories also share a notable side effect acknowledged by the politi-
cal philosopher Will Kymlicka. Liberalism can support minority cultures
provided group identity serves an instrumental role in strengthening an
individual’s autonomy and commitment to universal rights. Thus, in jus-
tifying the preservation of national tradition, Kaplan erodes the authority
of divine revelation by elevating individual choice and freedom as the ulti-
mate criteria for delineating the outer parameters of behavior and belief.
The need to answer the charge that nations are bellicose had an impor-
tant corollary impact on Kaplan’s thought—namely, the elimination of
any hierarchies between various collective groups. Kaplan insisted that
one nationality “cannot advocate superiority over other nations” and that
no nationality has exclusive “possession of salvation.”74 In the language of
Anthony Smith, a scholar of nationalism, Kaplan advocated for a “polycen-
tric” as opposed to “ethnocentric” theory of nationality.75 Polycentric the-
ories view the world as divided into autonomous communities of equal

status. Ethnocentric communities, by contrast, focus solely on preserving
each nation’s culture at all costs and consider other groups inferior. Kaplan’s
emphasis on ethical nationhood as polycentric and voluntary reflects the
association of ethnocentric criteria with illiberal political expectations.
This explanation of Kaplan’s need to eliminate any specific claims about
the relative merits of one nation over another sheds new light on under-
standing his rejection of the concept of “the chosen people.” Harmonizing
national partiality with individual right pushed him into direct conflict
with this key principle. His diary acknowledges the tension between his
ideal of ethical nationhood and the tenet of divine election as well as the
acceptance of the Torah as the commanded path toward salvation. Thus
the elimination of the notion of chosenness—one of Kaplan’s most influen-
tial and contested contributions to Jewish thought—emerged as the neces-
sary by-product of equating Jewish nationality with ethical nationhood.
There is an interesting parallel between the theory of liberal nationalism
(as, for example, in the work of Israeli political philosopher Yael Tamir)
and Kaplan’s implicit decision to eliminate chosenness to make the claim
that Jewish nationhood was ethical. Tamir explicitly identifies the same
boundary in her effort to reconcile Jewish and liberal nationalisms. She
singles out the theme of divine election as an example of a claim “that can-
not be justified” in a theory of nationalism.76 Like Tamir, Kaplan jettisons
this aspect of Judaism: “We find it necessary to reject as obsolete the kind
of nationalism taught by our tradition.”77 He was not willing to completely
reject the unique contribution that Jewish nationality offers, however.
Instead, he adopted a back-door approach to continuing to argue for the
unique relevance of Judaism—specifically, that Jewish political thought
offered the most developed path toward the next wave of nationalities that
would facilitate toleration and cosmopolitan values.
The juxtaposition of civilization and nationality captures this paradox
perfectly. Instead of siding with religious or leftist advocates of dissolving
national bonds or Nazi efforts to affirm bellicose models, Kaplan adjusted
the definition of both “ethical” and “nationhood” to argue for their full
compatibility. This move had a clear disadvantage as well, however. The
content of Jewish civilization was shackled by the need to justify its uni-
versal moral efficacy. The solution represented a collectivist twist on the
mission theory that had been popularized in Reform ideology. Kaplan
believed that Jewish nationhood “should also contribute toward the elimi-
nation from nationhood of its dross of collective selfishness and sacred
egoism and render it essentially a means of social creativity and individual
betterment.”78 This left him with a tenuous, and somewhat tautological,

justification for advocating for the continuity of the Jewish people. In this
view, Jewish national identity deserved continued adherence because it
was the most effective path toward the universal mission of reforming
modern political thought. National culture is reduced to an instrumental
position as a facilitator for undermining the distinct elements of those
cultures that might clash with universal ethical norms. To put it simply:
Jews could be different, as long as they shared universal ethical norms
with the rest of humanity.
Kaplan recognized but refused to acknowledge fully the implications of
this statement for promoting and requiring participation in Jewish national
life. The tension between the demands of ethical behavior and particular
preservation is most evident in his ongoing debate about whether mem-
bership in the Jewish nation is voluntary or coercive. Following from the
logic of a cosmopolitan expression of national difference, Kaplan had to
insist on voluntary membership in order not to violate the free choice of
individual members and to fully demonstrate his belief that all particular
groups are equally valid. At the same time, however, he hoped to erase
volunteerism from Jewish civic involvement. Instead, he insisted that the
Jewish community restore the power of coercion over its members. Fully
embracing volunteerism would erode what he called the “true index of a
living civilization,” defined not by its “ability to advise but its authority to
command.” As he confided in his diary, “the very freedom which will be
won for the Jews will help to put an end to Judaism.”79
This yearning for a level of social and cultural autonomy that Jews had
enjoyed before their emancipation attempted to overturn the problems
associated with volunteerism. These problems had eroded the authority of
Jewish communities since the Enlightenment thinker Moses Mendelssohn
had insisted in the late eighteenth century that only the government (and
not the church) has the power to coerce its members. Mendelssohn had
relinquished communal autonomy and turned civic legal matters into the
hands of the state. At the same time, he desperately attempted to retain
some communal authority for enforcing the ceremonial law by claiming
that the Sinaitic revelation continued to be compulsory for the Jewish
people. Kaplan overturned this formula. He rejected the historical bind-
ing power of revelation but attempted to return the civil power of coer-
cion to the Jewish community. Without the theological basis of revelation,
Kaplan’s only recourse for challenging the voluntary nature of membership
was to promote some degree of civic or communal coercion.80
Burdened by the measuring stick of defining an ethical nationhood,
however, Kaplan remained unwilling to violate the basic premise of

individual free choice to opt in or out of a community. Members, he con-
ceded, at all times retain “the moral right to surrender such member-
ship [in a nation] and become a member of another nation.”81 Violating
an individual’s freedom to choose his or her affiliations represented the
clear boundary beyond which an ethical theory of nationality could not
operate. That Kaplan was aware of this bind was evident from his private
efforts to explore possible exceptions to the voluntary criteria of ethical
nationhood: “When the nation to which one belongs is attacked then it is
regarded as an act of treason to try to escape one’s responsibilities to it, by
becoming a citizen of another nation.”82 The global situation of Jews puts
them in this category. They are thus exempt from the voluntary nature of
nationality on account of the existential threats facing their community.
No harmonious synthesis to resolve the tension between these conflicting
convictions evolved in Kaplan’s work. Instead, he let them rub up against
one another. The best theoretical solution he could ever hope for would
be a paradoxical arrangement of voluntary coercion, whereby individu-
als agreed to commit themselves to following the dictates of a minority
national community. He did, however, consider more practical solutions
that could make space for minority national groups without undermining
their ethical mission.
Ensuring “social autonomy as a permanent factor in American life,”
Kaplan opined in 1916, would be possible “on the assumption [that] the
American nation will prove to be a federation of nationalities.”83 Given
Kaplan’s personal experiences with the New York Jewish community dur-
ing the previous decade, this statement advocating for social autonomy
seems to reflect a romantic nostalgia for an East European model of self-
government rather than a realistic analysis of the possibilities for distinct
space within American democracy. Kaplan would have known the diffi-
culties in advocating for communal autonomy by 1916. For ten years he
had joined Rabbi Judah Magnes’s effort to recreate a European model of
Jewish self-government, the Kehillah, in New York City.84 The Kehillah
“envisioned a democratically governed polity which would unite the city’s
multifarious Jewish population.”85 The Kehillah experiment failed for a
number of reasons, however, including accusations that the organization,
based on a voluntary model of membership, was a body with too much
power and control.86
Despite the failure of this experiment (the organization was defunct by
1922), Kaplan continued to express a desire for Jewish space within Ameri-
can political and social life that would ensure some degree of distinction.
The absence of any mention of the Kehillah in his Judaism as a Civilization

suggests that Kaplan struggled to come to terms with the implications of
this failure on his more maximalist aspirations. His book not only made
no reference to the Kehillah’s demise, but it also advocated for an even
more centralized and authoritative communal structure than that of the
initial Kehillah. Kaplan continued to entertain programmatic and theoreti-
cal plans for creating distinct social and political space within U.S. soci-
ety. For instance, he looked to the administration of certain “civic types
of organization,” specifically Jewish courts that would have the power to
enforce their rulings on members of the Jewish community, to reinstate
such political boundaries.87
In a 1927 Society for the Advancement of Judaism Bulletin editorial,
Kaplan indicated that such a distinct legal sphere should certainly include
the right to adjudicate on matters of marriage and divorce.88 He responded
to the U.S. government’s refusal to recognize the validity of a Jewish divorce
by claiming that “this business of refusing to give civic recognition to mar-
riage and divorce laws of a group that is united by historic and religious
association” was unreasonable. This implies that he envisioned two parallel
legal systems that fully recognized one another’s decisions as binding. Cre-
ating a dual system of courts, Kaplan continued, would help eradicate the
“continual friction between the two loyalties which most people nowadays
profess, loyalty to a religion and loyalty to a country.”89
By maintaining such a separate legal network, Kaplan hoped, the Jewish
community would no longer constitute merely a voluntary organization
but would regain the power to enforce legal decisions. He ignored many
of the difficult questions of negotiating the boundaries between two such
systems.90 Nettlesome issues remained unanswered—for example, which
court would have ultimate authority or jurisdiction in particular cases, or
how the U.S. legal system could handle a series of alternative judicial sys-
tems in other areas of civil or criminal law. Kaplan’s analysis of the pos-
sibility of a separate legal track lacked sophistication and legal expertise.91
However, despite his limited legal acumen and his frustratingly amorphous
ruminations on this topic, his proposal of a separate legal sphere represents
a noteworthy attempt to resist the state’s legal power—one more manifesta-
tion of the enforcement of Americanization.
In other writings, Kaplan admitted that unifying such a variegated group
of Jews into one polity and demanding some degree of official recognition
proved a completely unrealistic goal. The demands of American confor-
mity and unparalleled possibilities for integration made him realistic about
the possibilities of autonomy within U.S. citizenship. He acknowledged that
citizenship required limits to the demands of minority group recognition

and cultural difference.92 The political and cultural autonomy advocated
by European diaspora nationalists, Kaplan felt compelled to admit, had
no place in an American context.93 Moreover, he appreciated liberalism’s
dichotomy between the public political and private religious spheres that
ensured Jewish acceptance into American society.
This appreciation required a delicate dance that Kaplan engaged with-
out ever fully staking a clear position. No doubt, the ambiguity of his posi-
tion exposes his limitations as a political theorist. Yet Kaplan’s failure illus-
trates his tenacious desire to address an intractable dilemma. Once again,
Kymlicka’s recent work on multicultural citizenship clarifies the middle-
ground balance over the limits of diversity within liberal democracies.
Kaplan’s concept of civilization anticipated the distinction Kymlicka makes
between “self-governing” and “polyethnic” rights. “Self-governing rights,”
Kymlicka states, demand some form of political autonomy or territorial
jurisdiction. “Polyethnic rights,” however, are “group specific measures . . .
intended to help ethnic groups and religious minorities express their cul-
tural particularity and pride without it hampering their success in the . . .
institutions of the dominant society.”94
Kaplan exhibited a tempered yearning for the former but demanded
only the latter. He suggested that the minority national community pri-
marily seeks recognition as a collective community with specific behaviors
and practices that the state should not hinder. His Future of the American
Jew calls on the state to extend “the principles of equality from individu-
als to groups.”95 In Kymlicka’s language, Kaplan expects polyethnic rights,
specifically the legal support to protect cultural and religious diversity.
Kaplan wrote: “The principle of group equality must be translated into
legal enactments prohibiting the propagation of racial and religious hatred,
and removing all unjust discrimination in the treatment of members of
religious and racial minorities.”96
Note that Kaplan’s call for legal recognition shares a second aspect with
Kymlicka’s theory of minority rights—namely, “external protections” with-
out “internal restrictions.” The state can and should, Kymlicka argues,
ensure that members of minority national groups demand external pro-
tection for their cultural practices. However, polyethnic rights and even
self-governing rights do not extend to illiberal practices that would in any
way restrict an individual’s rights, specifically freedom of choice. Kaplan
anticipated the importance of limiting his call for external protections with
the affirmation that ethical nationhood, best exemplified by Jewish nation-
ality, is fully consonant with liberal practices. “As convinced Jews and loyal
Americans,” he wrote, “we should seek to incorporate in American life the

universal values of Judaism and to utilize the particular sancta of Jewish
religion as an inspiration for preserving these universal values.”97 Under
pressure to restrain his demands to the confines of liberal theory and citi-
zenship, Kaplan posited that minority rights are fully contingent on the
liberalization of those particular national cultures. Jewish nationality—the
exemplar of ethical nationhood in Kaplan’s thought—must therefore dem-
onstrate its full adherence to the political objectives of liberal democracy.
Kaplan’s theory legitimates multiple national communities within the state;
however, legal protections and recognition only apply to those sharing spe-
cific political and moral guidelines.
Kaplan left his own questions unanswered about the nature of the
boundaries between communities and their level of political indepen-
dence. Nonetheless, exploring the contradictions between entertaining the
possibility of separate legal systems and accepting the primacy of U.S. cul-
ture suggests a more complex view of Kaplan’s approach to Americaniza-
tion.98 While Kaplan as the pragmatic communal leader understood the
popular resistance any form of segregated civic life might have incited in
the Jewish community, Kaplan the critic of liberalism espoused a Jewish
civilization that commanded the devotion of its members.
National Civilization and Kaplan’s Hopes for Zionism

The intellectual origins of national civilization are integrally connected
to Kaplan’s interest in formulating a counterstate variation of Zionism.
Kaplan understood progress as the replacement of territorial, racial, and
statist nationalisms with collective cohesion tied to religious traditions,
shared values, and connection to a homeland. He endeavored to create an
alternate, ethical ideal of nationhood that would affirm national partial-
ity without undermining universal principles of individual rights, human
equality, and free choice. One of Kaplan’s inherent challenges in present-
ing civilization as a counter model to sovereign models that emphasize the
intimate connections among nation, state, and territory was integrating
his Jewish national civilization with Zionism. How to reconcile the ideo-
logical development of Zionism and the founding of the State of Israel was
one of Kaplan’s greatest intellectual and personal difficulties. Although he
is remembered for his support of the Zionism movement, he had a major
investment in creating a theory of Jewish nationality that would directly
challenge Zionism’s articulation of Jewish nationalism. A journal entry
from 1924 proclaims: “The dream of my life . . . [is] to work out a clear
formula for Judaism as a civilization both in Palestine and in the Diaspora,

before my mental powers will begin to wane, which I understand is nor-
mally the case at 55.”99
Kaplan’s mental powers lasted far longer than age fifty-five; he contin-
ued to work on this dream for more than half a century. His last work, Reli-
gion of Ethical Nationhood, published in 1970, was dedicated to precisely
this problem. It is difficult to appreciate that there was such a deep tension
between the conflicting pressures of imagining a typology of nationality
that would apply to Jews in both the homeland and the diaspora, given
Kaplan’s popular legacy as the “summary of American Zionism.” He was an
ardent supporter of Zionism, and the centrality of building Jewish national
life in the homeland was a central component of both his Judaism as a
Civilization and the Reconstructionist weekly magazine he edited.100 Yet, as
Kaplan himself admitted: “I realize fully the vacillating and paradoxical
character of my attitude toward Palestine.”101
Kaplan’s relationship with Zionism and the developments in Palestine
were far more contested than his passionate support for Zionism might
suggest.102 This tension indicates Kaplan’s conscious effort to reconcile
opposing definitions of Jewish life into one shared category that would be
compatible with both diaspora and homeland experiences. He must have
been reminded of the difficulty of realizing his dream on a boat to Palestine
in 1925, en route to the inaugural ceremony of the Hebrew University in
Jerusalem. Kaplan discussed the importance of the Mediterranean Sea with
Chaim Weizmann, then president of the World Zionist Organization and
future president of the State of Israel. This conversation left Kaplan quite
distraught about Zionism’s future prospects. According to Kaplan, Weiz-
mann declared the Mediterranean to be “a Jewish sea.” Kaplan recorded his
negative reaction to Weizmann’s “imperialistic attitude” in his journal. He
retorted that “imperialism in the mouth of a Zionist has a hint of the chau-
vinism which reigns among modern nations.”103 Kaplan read into Weiz-
mann’s reasonably innocuous statement the same language of imperialism
that Judaism as a Civilization had aligned with American nationalism.104
Developments in Palestine, specifically the Arab riots of 1929, further
inflamed Kaplan’s frustration with the Zionist movement. “The Balfour
Declaration,” Kaplan wrote in his diary that year, “has been like a foreign
body in the system of Jewish revival, causing irritation and liable to set
up a dangerous poison.”105 His volatile opposition to the declaration of a
“national homeland in Palestine” highlighted the raw emotional conflict
that the Jewish settlement in Palestine had sparked in his thinking. The
abundance of such critical comments in Kaplan’s journals during the 1920s
and 1930s toward the political developments of Zionism suggests that such

observations should not be disregarded as merely capricious reactions to
disturbing contemporary events.
These reflections represent Kaplan’s growing awareness that his moral
argument for Jewish nationalism as an important corrective to American
nationalism directly contradicted the political claims and military actions
of Zionist leaders. Unlike Justice Louis Brandeis, whose Zionism was
based on the claim that “to be good Americans meant being good Jews
which meant becoming Zionists,” Kaplan believed (although he certainly
would never have voiced this in public) that to be a good Zionist meant to
be a good Jew which meant to challenge America’s own concept of nation-
alism.106 For Kaplan, Zionism was not a reflection of the ideals of Amer-
ica. On the contrary, he believed that America should transform itself to
reflect the model of nationalism being developed within Zionism.107 Yet,
he realized, Jewish nationalism could only succeed in challenging the he-
gemony of American nationalism as long as the Jewish settlement in Pal-
estine remained solely a religious or cultural homeland. In his mind, the
coercion of religious and ethnic minorities by Jews morally tainted the act
of settlement in Palestine; therefore, Jewish civilization ceased to represent
the apotheosis of national community.
As Kaplan’s reaction to Weizmann’s remarks on the steamer made clear,
his faith in the Zionism movement was shaken. Kaplan’s concept of Juda-
ism as a civilization could only remain compatible with a Zionism that
eschewed the doctrine of absolute sovereignty. He asserted this view up
until the 1948 publication of The Future of the American Jew, which he fin-
ished writing shortly before the establishment of the state: “But the fore-
going objectives of Zionism do not and need not require the sort of irre-
sponsible and obsolete national sovereignty that modern nations claim for
themselves. This doctrine of ‘absolute national sovereignty’ . . . is respon-
sible for the international anarchy of the modern world, and is liable to
bring about a catastrophe that will destroy the very foundations of human
civilization.”108 (Note the exact repetition of Horace Kallen’s language of
associating national sovereignty with international anarchy discussed in
chapter 2.)
As the leaders of the Jewish community faced the realities of Arab
nationalism in Palestine and the Zionist movement became increasingly
focused on political statehood, Kaplan found himself straddling two
concepts of nationalism that could not be bridged. Desperately trying to
illuminate a path toward a new nationalism, one that would guarantee a
homeland to serve as a unifying center for world Jewry and would model
the moral powers of national civilization, he sought a number of practical

resolutions to this conundrum. In one passage in Judaism as a Civiliza-
tion, he even imagined a situation in which Palestine would be “included
and subordinated to a world state.”109 Such an international body would
allow the Jewish transnational nation to have a cultural homeland, without
necessitating the inevitable moral sacrifices that arise when nations marry
states and strive to create a monolithic cultural and social identity.110
Setting aside the fact that Kaplan’s world state idea had failed to mate-
rialize, this hypothetical proposition sheds light on his vacillating feelings
toward Zionism. The notion of a world state represents one attempt to offer
a potential solution to his own fundamental conflict concerning Zion-
ism. How could the same definition of Jewish nationalism encompass
both diaspora Judaism’s historical role as the obstinate defender against
political and cultural coercion as well as the political realities of building
a sovereign Jewish state in a land with an indigenous population claiming
national recognition? Only by dramatically altering the political realities
of the international political order could Kaplan envision his concept of
transnational nations. Just as addressing the Jewish question in America
required adjusting ideas of American nationalism, so too would setting
Zionism on the correct track involve adjusting the “equilibrium” between
nations and states on a global level. However, in lieu of a political alteration
of the global order, Kaplan’s amorphous civilization concept incorporated
the potential paradox of supporting both Zionism and diaspora national-
ism. The parameters of civilization encapsulated the same conflict between
advocating for the cultural benefits of political sovereignty in Palestine and
for the separation of nation from state in the American context. As a Jew-
ish thinker constantly reflecting on the implications of his work in two
political milieus, Kaplan yearned for the benefits of a Jewish homeland that
might come without the price of undermining his own justifications for
diaspora Jewish life.
Reading Kaplan’s theories as American Zionism par excellence dissolves
the role of civilization as a nexus between American Jewish and Zionist
categories of group solidarity. His perceived legacy as a Zionist, despite his
ambivalence toward the movement, reflects Jewish historiography’s ten-
dency to conflate Jewish nationalism, Zionism, and national sovereignty.
National civilization grapples with the inconsistencies dividing concepts
of diaspora religion and statist Zionism. Supporting the yishuv and under-
scoring Zionism’s role in the reconstruction of American Jewry was not a
summary of American Zionism, but a criticism of efforts by both Ameri-
can Jews and Zionists to agree to disagree on the status of modern Judaism
and the merit of life in the diaspora. Like Simon Rawidowicz before him,

Kaplan dreamed of an overarching status that would define national civi-
lization as a cohesive force that would operate for Jews as both sovereigns
and subjects, demographic majority and minority.
Kaplan’s Legacy and the History of American Pluralism

Viewing Kaplan’s national civilization as an effort to reconstruct both Zion-
ism and Americanism offers rich dividends for historians and political the-
orists alike. The theory developed by Kaplan fills an important gap in trac-
ing the evolution of ethnonational diversity in the United States. Kaplan
tried to salvage a comprehensive definition of Judaism as more than a reli-
gious creed at a moment when such a multifaceted and all-encompassing
reality was rapidly disappearing. How could Kaplan accurately translate
the many aspects of Jewish collective life into the restricted categories of
modern political thought? He diagnosed the problem correctly as first and
foremost a limitation of the category of nationality. The introduction of the
new term civilization would expand the discourse of difference by Jews’
refusing to have their status dictated to them.
Torn by conflicting pressures to downplay nationalism in order to fit
in as an American religious minority, coupled with his desires to com-
pete directly with American religious nationalism, Kaplan refused to
choose between the two very different paths. On the one hand, the term
was intended to claim the status of nationhood for Jews and to use Jew-
ish nationhood to decry the homogenizing force of American nationalism.
When used for this objective, the language of civilization allowed Kaplan
to compare American and Jewish nationalism on the same plane. By taking
advantage of the amorphous meaning of civilization, he laid the ground-
work for applying his assumptions concerning Judaism’s political values
to American nationalism as well. On the other hand, use of “religious civ-
ilization” played an opposing function: to strongly temper the claim for
national status for diaspora Jews by replacing the language of nationality,
laden with connotations of separatism that Kaplan knew would alienate
American Jewry, with religion and civilization. These terms were far more
compatible with American Jews’ interest in promoting their ability to inte-
grate and to share the universal, civilizing mission of their host country.
Kaplan allowed these contradictions to thrive within the protean param-
eters of national civilization.
Kaplan’s national civilization presented a cosmopolitan multicultur-
alism that bridges early-twentieth-century cultural pluralism with more
recent concepts of cosmopolitanism. His view of Jewish civilization

imagined membership grounded in consent rather than descent, shared
memories rather than shared territory, liberal values rather than exclusiv-
ist claims, and social interactions rather than religious creed. His use of
civilization thus anticipates the need to define a liberal theory of minority
rights that specifies the balance between minority group recognition and
the guarantee of individual rights. Unlike contemporary political theo-
rists, whom Kaplan both echoed and anticipated, he probed the underthe-
orized area between religion and collective consciousness. His experience
of Judaism as a living religiocultural system, rather than as a private creed,
recognized the practical fallacy of Enlightenment thought’s attempt to rel-
egate religion to the private sphere. His view appreciated the fluid rela-
tionship between theology and politics—considerations that twenty-first-
century theorists and practitioners will certainly have to reevaluate given
the increasingly central role that religion has played in eroding national
boundaries.
Civilization ran aground in Kaplan’s inability to escape the orbit of the
external political possibilities and social forces that exerted tremendous
theoretical and practical pressure on his program. Civilization navigated
between religion and nationhood by appropriating both terms to describe
Jewish collective consciousness. Integrating these terms into the parame-
ters of civilization allowed Kaplan to reach multiple audiences and to draw
parallels between the Jewish and American contexts. This same strategy,
however, also undermined the efficacy of a new key term by defining it
based on the foundations of existing notions, whose connotations remained
dominant. Judaism as a national civilization thus records Kaplan’s desire
to erase any tension between particular preservation and universal inte-
gration. Kaplan himself was struck by the daunting task of constructing
categories that affirmed both poles. The recognition that he could not sys-
tematically reconcile voluntary and involuntary, familial bonds with cos-
mopolitan compassion, and self-government with citizenship led him to
adopt a term fluid enough to affirm his competing aspirations.
Hans Kohn was also dedicated to linking these opposing forces of
nationalism and humanism. Unlike Kaplan, however, Kohn decided,
after years of active involvement in the Zionist movement, that reconcil-
ing Jewish nationalism with universal humanism was a naïve hope. He
ultimately turned his scholarly abilities toward what he saw as a more
achievable goal: to integrate his vision of Zionism into scholarly defini-
tions of Western European and American nationalism. Kohn’s political
writings on Jewish nationality became the foundation of the study of
modern nationalism. Kaplan correctly sensed the importance of shaping

the external discourse as the primary goal in addressing internal Jewish
concerns. What he did not fully accept, however, was the fact that a book
on Judaism was the wrong vehicle to engage the ideas of Americanization
and the nationalisms he hoped Jewish civilization could ultimately influ-
ence. Jewish concerns would have to be packaged in less parochial lan-
guage to reach a general audience. Kohn’s success can be partially traced
to this very factor. He wrote for a general audience and translated his early
writings on Jewish political thought into a narrative that only gave the
smallest hint of its beginnings in the philosophy of Martin Buber and a
small circle of German Zionists.

Hans Kohn sitting with a book at his desk in Jerusalem, 1925.
Courtesy of the Leo Baeck Institute, New York.

— 5 —
From German Zionism

to American Nationalism
Hans Kohn, Cultural Humanism, and the
Realization of “the Political Idea of Judaism”
On December 21, 1931, Mordecai Kaplan met Hans Kohn at a small gath-
ering of American Zionists who had invited the visiting scholar to speak
about the history of Arab nationalism in the Middle East.1 Although Kohn
agreed to speak to the group on the condition that he would not directly
discuss the impact of Arab nationalism on Zionism, he eventually was com-
pelled to address this issue directly. Kaplan’s journal entry from that eve-
ning illustrates the tremendous impact that Kohn’s “passionate condemna-
tion of the Zionist futilities” had on Kaplan’s feelings about the development
of Jewish settlement in Palestine. Kaplan lamented, “I became convinced by
his main talk that we Jews are in an awful mess with prospects in Palestine.
. . . As I was walking home the thought occurred to me that the Jews have
gotten themselves into such a tangle . . . by persisting to stand out as a dis-
tinct group.”2
Kohn’s lecture brought Kaplan to one of the lowest points of despair he
expressed in his journal. Surprisingly, Kohn, an expert on Arab national-
ism from Jerusalem and the sharp critic of “official Zionism,” had been,
until a few months earlier, the director of propaganda for Keren Hayesod
(the fund-raising arm of the World Zionist organization). He had been a
vocal proponent of Zionism and had contributed to leading journals and
newspapers throughout Europe and Palestine. Kaplan encountered Kohn
precisely in the midst of the activist’s fascinating intellectual and biograph-
ical metamorphosis.
Inspired by the vision of Zionism as a movement dedicated to the cul-
tural and spiritual renewal of Judaism promulgated by such figures as Ahad
Ha’am and Martin Buber, Kohn embraced Jewish nationalism in the second
135 nationalism: hans kohn

from german zionism to american 135
decade of the century. After World War I, he traveled around Europe as a
representative of Zionism and moved to Palestine in 1925 with the hopes
of fulfilling his vision of Palestine as a place of international cooperation
and peace. His pacifist conception of Zionism as an alternative to chauvin-
istic expressions of nationalism clashed with rising tensions and violence
between Jews and Arabs there. Following the Arab riots of 1929, Kohn
resigned from his official position within the movement and, a few years
later, left Palestine for the United States. Failing to realize his vision of Jew-
ish nationalism as an instrument for spreading universal humanism within
the laboratory of Palestine, the German Zionist transformed himself into a
leading American scholar of nationalism.
Kohn’s prolific writings on the history of nationalism, both the con-
cept in general and its development in specific geographical locations,
and his broad appeal to popular audiences had a lasting impact on Ameri-
can scholarship and public opinion. Kohn wrote more than forty books
(translated into many languages, including Italian, Japanese, and Korean),
published hundreds of articles, shaped opinions through dozens of ency-
clopedia articles, and contributed to textbooks required for students of
nationalism.3 His books, especially The Idea of Nationalism (1944), received
immediate recognition as pathbreaking contributions to historical schol-
arship.4 The New York Times declared the book as “without hyperbole, the
most brilliant, all-inclusive and incisive analysis of the ideological origins
of nationalism which has yet appeared in any language.”5 More than half
a century after the publication of his magnum opus, leading scholars of
nationalism, including Benedict Anderson and Anthony Smith, continue
to regard Kohn as one of the “founding fathers” of academic scholarship on
nationalism.6
Kohn’s scholarship focused on defining nationalism as a historical force
for spreading universal principles, liberal ideals, and human integration.7
This appears to represent a dramatic shift from the German Romantic
conceptions of organic ties binding blood communities that characterized
Kohn’s Zionism in the 1920s. As one Kohn scholar has pointed out, Kohn’s
views on many issues—including liberalism, pacifism, socialism, colonial-
ism, and the United States—changed radically.8 Kohn’s texts written after
his immigration to the United States strike readers as far less sensitive to
groupness and national culture than those written while under the influ-
ence of concepts in the early twentieth century.
Kohn’s scholarship accentuated this break by popularizing a theoretical
dichotomy between the ethnocentric nationalism of non-Western varie-
ties and the civic, liberal nationalism of the West. This still widely accepted

binary rubric of nationalism (discussed in chapters 1 and 2) located his
nationalism as the antithesis of the tribal, ethnic, and cultural bonds that
had shaped his intellectual development within the multinational context
of the Hapsburg Empire. Moreover, his endorsement of a civic nationalism
that eschews groupness based on historical grounds has little explicit inter-
est in, and even potentially undermines the validity of, preserving Jewish
solidarity. Kohn’s Jewishness and Zionism appear less relevant because of
his zealous universalism and challenges to the official positions adopted
by the Zionist movement (especially regarding the goal of establishing a
sovereign Jewish state in Palestine).
Kohn’s personal disillusionment with Zionism and his theoretical dis-
tancing from his intellectual roots in Romantic, völkisch nationalism
suggest a radical break between his careers as a German Zionist and an
American scholar. As a result, like many émigré intellectuals, his intellec-
tual development is bifurcated into two distinct stages.9 Yet a close look at
his scholarship reveals striking parallels with, and in some cases even exact
translations of his earlier work into his American scholarship. Underneath
the new heroes and histories, the fundamental content of Kohn’s historical
narrative remained consistent.
This chapter draws on Kohn’s personal correspondence and publica-
tions from his involvement with Zionism to narrate the fascinating devel-
opment of his formulations of nationalism and the biographical journey of
this peripatetic polymath. He became a significant intellectual in Europe,
Palestine, and then the United States over a period that spanned half a
century. Tracing the origins of these scholarly innovations to Kohn’s youth
in Prague highlights a surprising source for his theories of nationalism.
Remarkably, the foremost critic of ethnic, Romantic nationalism, par-
ticularly the Central and East European variety, developed his concept of
political nationalism directly out of the assumptions and methodology of
German biological and cultural nationalism. My goal in establishing the-
matic continuities in Kohn’s intellectual biography is to correct a common
misreading of his pioneering contributions to the study of nationalism.
Interpreting Kohn’s later work as a theory of liberal, humanistic, or civic
nationalism overlooks his continued sensitivity to many of the concepts
he promoted as a Zionist activist. Kohn’s experiences as a Jew and a Zion-
ist made him just as weary of cosmopolitan universalism as of chauvin-
istic nationalism. Both extremes engendered totalitarian ideologies that
threatened Jews’ individual and collective rights. Kohn responded to this
observation by focusing his theoretical efforts on reconciling, rather than
drawing a sharp opposition between, the commitment to national ties that
from german zionism to american nationalism: hans kohn 137

shaped his formative years and the focus on humanity that characterizes
his legacy.
This chapter highlights this aspect of Kohn’s scholarship by focusing
on two arguments that appear, although to varying degrees, across Kohn’s
careers as Zionist activist and American scholar: 1) equating nationalism
with the recognition of human solidarity and a historical trajectory toward
social integration; 2) contending that this vision is fully compatible with
the recognition, and even promotion of, counterstate national ties, rooted
in culture and historical allegiances. Cultural humanism, the term I use to
refer to Kohn’s conception of Zionism and nationalism, more accurately
captures this dialectical tension that distinguished his life and thought.
The fact that Kohn’s criticism of Zionism had such a powerful impact
on Kaplan at his 1931 lecture (and that Rawidowicz expressed similar con-
cerns about state-seeking Zionism and its implications for Arabs in Pal-
estine) suggests that Kohn’s formulations of Jewish nationalism are more
closely linked to other counterstate theories of Zionism than it initially
appears.10 The first part of this chapter attempts to contextualize Kohn’s
cultural humanism within the transnational context of interwar Zionism
that included Kaplan’s national civilization and Rawidowicz’s global Hebra-
ism. These expressions of Zionism constituted parallel responses to similar
historical events, intellectual influences, and debates within Zionism.
The three Jewish nationalisms developed from two basic assumptions.
First, Jewish nationhood constituted an advanced form of nationalism
committed to finding alternatives to sovereignty as the basis for Jewish
cohesion. Second, Jewish concepts of national cohesion paved the most
ethical path toward affirming human commitments. Thus, instead of view-
ing Kohn’s nationalism as categorically different from religious civiliza-
tion and global Hebraism, it is more historically accurate and conceptu-
ally beneficial to view these theories as delineating a spectrum of Zionists
theorizing different solutions to a shared set of fundamental dilemmas.
Although global Hebraism, religious civilization, and cultural humanism
posit decreasing levels of separation and increasing degrees of integration,
they all identify Jewish political thought as a site for negotiating the rela-
tionship between nation and state and between particular and universal
allegiances. The second section of the chapter probes ways in which Kohn’s
counterstate Zionism continued to shape his pioneering view of nation-
alism. Indeed, reintegrating the disparate components of his intellectual
biography highlights the way in which important aspects of his theory,
especially his bifurcation between civic and ethnic nationalism, have been
misunderstood.

Kohn: An Intellectual Biography
Born in 1891 to assimilated Jewish parents, Hans Kohn grew up in Prague.
He attended the Altstädter Deutsches Gymnasium, the same school that
Franz Kafka had graduated from the year before Kohn entered in 1902.
Kohn grew up in a highly acculturated family and had little interest in
his personal connection to Jews and Judaism.11 The growing affirmation
of national pride and ethnolinguistic factionalism within the Hapsburg
Empire sparked his interest in Zionism.12 Kohn, like other young accultur-
ated Jews, got involved with the Prague Jewish student organization, the
Bar Kochba society, beginning in 1908. He soon fell under the spell of phi-
losopher, historian of Hasidism, and Zionist Martin Buber, who delivered
a series of lectures between 1909 and 1911 to the society. These speeches,
later published as Three Addresses on Judaism, called for a “renewal of Juda-
ism” that emphasized the tradition’s striving for unity and exemplifying a
national ethical spirit dedicated to “interhuman” relationships.13
These lectures ignited a Zionist flame among many members of the Bar
Kochba association of Jewish university students, especially Kohn. Buber’s
vision of Judaism and Zionism appealed to a young generation obsessed
with the neoromantic possibility of creating Gemeinschaft (organic com-
munity) and pulled between competing national movements. Buber’s
Zionism focused on the spiritual revival of the Jewish people and Judaism’s
humanistic vision inspired by prophetic writings. For Kohn, the lectures
“constituted a turning point in all my views.”14 Indeed, he would remain
a lifelong disciple of Buber and published an intellectual biography of his
teacher in 1930 (a new edition was published in 1961).15
Galvanized by Buber’s Zionism, Kohn, along with his lifelong friend,
journalist Robert Weltsch (the future editor of the Zionist newspaper
Jüdische Rundschau), soon became a leader of the Bar Kochba society
and edited an important collection of essays on Judaism and the future
of Jewish nationalism called Vom Judentum: Ein Sammelbuch (Judaism: a
collection of essays) in 1914.16 Kohn’s introduction to this series of essays
by prominent intellectuals—including Buber, the non-Marxist socialist
Gustav Landauer, and the philosopher Hugo Bergmann—demonstrated a
deep desire to redirect the “destiny” of the Jewish people and to place Jew-
ish renewal within a larger context of worldwide change. However, before
he had the opportunity to further clarify his ideas, World War I broke out.
The Austro-Hungarian army drafted him only a few months after the pub-
lication of Vom Judentum. Shortly thereafter, the Russian army captured
the young officer and sent him to the Carpathian foothills. From 1915 until

1920, he traveled throughout the Russian Empire as a prisoner of war. From
Poland to Siberia, Kohn walked, rode, and sailed through the great expanse
of the empire and personally witnessed the destruction of the land during
the 1917 revolution.17
Following the revolution, Kohn was stranded in Siberia. His letters from
this period indicate that he spent his time as a Zionist organizer among fel-
low former prisoners of war: “We have organized here in Siberia a very vivid
Zionist spiritual life,” he boasted in a 1919 letter.18 Nevertheless, Kohn was
anxious to return to Central Europe, but he had no money for the journey.
Desperate to secure transportation, and possibly even a new job, he turned
to his old Prague friends, some of whom had already gained important posi-
tions in the Zionist movement. In a letter from Irkutsk to Leo Hermann, an
older member of the Bar Kochba Society and a leader of the World Zionist
Organization, Kohn pleaded for Hermann to “take him as a ‘Zionist worker’
to Europe or Palestine,” since it would be terrible to “sit here in Siberia.”19 In
the hopes of proving his Zionist credentials, Kohn continued in his newly
acquired English language skills, “I began to work here as Zionist leader I
can say with great success. I have grown up to be a very good orator and I
have worked in many towns of Siberia and I’m well known in this country
among the Jews. . . . The war once finished it is hard to be here when the
building up of the new commonwealth in Palestine begins.”20
With the help of Hermann, Kohn moved to Paris in 1920, and soon
after, to London in 1921 to work as an employee for Keren Hayesod. The
job entailed traveling around Europe, galvanizing interest in settlement in
the Land of Israel and soliciting donations. His letters back to the central
London office of Keren Hayesod illustrate his methodical analysis of the
local Jewish community and detailed plans for maximizing contributions
to the Zionist movement. Internal letters from Keren Hayesod executives
indicate that Kohn was their most valuable fund-raiser and communal
organizer (his boss referred to him as a “heavyweight” fund-raiser and
propagandist).21 In addition to his work at Keren Hayesod, Kohn contrib-
uted regular articles about Zionism, Jewish life, and nationalism more gen-
erally to Buber’s important Zionist publication, Der Jude.22
At the same time, Kohn aligned himself with international socialism and
cosmopolitan pacifism (specifically the socialist French Clarté movement,
which proposed internationalism as an alternative to militant nationalism
and capitalism). Writing under the pseudonym Paul Colin, he contrib-
uted regular columns from 1919 to 1922 on developments in the social-
ist internationalist movement for the movement’s paper, Clarté.23 Kohn’s
articles reviewed trends in the internationalist socialist’s struggles against

imperialism in various European countries. In addition, Kohn participated
in socialist conventions and advocated for pacifism.24
The decision to write under a pseudonym suggests that, at least in his
public persona, Kohn sought to preserve a clear distinction between his
Zionist and pacifist activities. Yet, internally, he clearly viewed these two
commitments as fully compatible ideologies. The peaceful integration of
national groups outside of the nation-state framework and Zionism’s call
for the renaissance of the Jewish people were mutually consistent ideolo-
gies. But why align universal and particular programs? Why didn’t Kohn
reject his Zionist associations and fully align his utopian dream of a new
paradigm of human integration with movements and ideologies that
eschewed national cohesion completely? One reason may have to do as
much with financial and social realities as with ideological decisions: his
network of Zionist associates had helped rescue Kohn from Siberia and
find him a stable job with the movement.
However, there was a more personal and practical reason as well. A letter
Kohn wrote to his friend, the writer Berthold Feiwal, helps explain his attrac-
tion to Zionism as an outlet for his hopes of achieving universal integration:
I and a group of friends saw in Zionism a moral-spiritual movement, in

which we could realize our universal human convictions, our pacifism, our
liberation and humanism. We were often criticized that amidst the Euro-
pean people we could not solely stand up for pacifism or ethical politics, or
else we would be labeled as foreign people, as traitors. Zion was to be the
site of fulfillment of our universal strivings.25
Kohn thus turned to Zionism as the medium for his universal vision because
he felt excluded as a Jew within European social and intellectual contexts.
Even internationalism’s universalism struck Kohn as failing to fully wel-
come Jews. His autobiographical experience of the exclusionary possibili-
ties of both nationalism and humanism made an enduring mark on Kohn’s
theoretical engagement. It helps contextualize the ambiguous relationship
between the particular and the universal that characterized his future career.
The paradoxical formulation of national ties as the catalyst for human inte-
gration directly mirrored his own lifelong struggle to reconcile Paul Colin’s
exclusion from European cosmopolitanism and Hans Kohn’s frustration
with state-seeking Zionism. He sought to reconcile theories of nationalism
and humanism because he never felt fully at home at either pole.
In 1925, Kohn moved to Palestine to work in the Keren Hayesod office
in Jerusalem. After advocating for Zionism and settlement in Palestine for

almost a decade, the transition to Palestine was still a difficult one for Kohn.
He acknowledged in his letters that he had found a nice house and had
many visitors, but that he was also underwhelmed by the general quality of
life in Palestine.26 Yet he had great hopes for Palestine and the role of Jewish
nationalism in transforming the land into a model of universal cooperation.
Kohn viewed Palestine as the laboratory for the development of a form of
nationalism that would unify, rather than divide, humanity. He rejected the
concept of Palestine as a territorial homeland that the Jews had historical
rights to reclaim. Nor did he yearn to ensure a Jewish majority in Palestine.
Instead, Kohn imagined a spiritual homeland that would facilitate Zion-
ism’s role as the vanguard force spreading the Jewish political ideal at the
crucial meeting point of the nationalisms of the East and the West.
Kohn’s involvement in Zionism and the affairs of the yishuv went beyond
his official capacity at Keren Hayesod. With a tremendous amount of dedi-
cation and zeal, he published numerous articles on Zionism, Judaism, and
world affairs in such newspapers as the Labor Zionist Hapo’el hatza’ir (The
Zionist worker) and the Palestinian periodical Filastina.27 He was particu-
larly concerned about the Arab question in Palestine and throughout the
Middle East.28 Palestine’s Arab population provided Kohn with the perfect
opportunity to highlight the revolutionary possibilities of unadulterated
Judaism. “The fact that there is already a large non-Jewish population,” he
wrote in 1924, “poses an added challenge for the creation of the collective.
The solution of which could be meaningful for the population that suffers
from a nationalism delusion. Herein lies an element of the hardship, which
is both a blessing and a curse.”29
While few Zionist thinkers were even willing to acknowledge the exis-
tence of Arab nationalism, Kohn dedicated his scholarly energies toward
evaluating the potential pitfalls of Jewish settlement in an area with a non-
Jewish majority.30 His research furnished a historical justification for his
belief that ultimately the existence of two national groups in the same ter-
ritory would be a blessing. He dedicated his scholarly energies toward trac-
ing the evolution of Arab nationalism.31 Kohn also attempted to advocate
for his vision of a binational state in Palestine by participating in the cre-
ation of Brit Shalom, a small yet influential circle of intellectuals created
to advocate for a binational state that would provide cultural and religious
autonomy for Jews and Arabs alike.
The Arab riots of 1929 jolted the Jewish community in Palestine. For the
majority of Zionist leaders there, this rude awakening galvanized a renewed
political and military effort to pressure the British to implement the Bal-
four Declaration and to consider new ways of defending the yishuv against

the threats of the Arabs in Palestine. The riots hardened the positions of
liberal Zionist leaders, such as Chaim Weizmann and Brit Shalom founder
Arthur Ruppin. They replaced their hope in the ability of the two com-
munities to coexist peacefully with a more pessimistic vision of the future
of these two peoples. The riots forced members of Brit Shalom to address
the tensions between their vision of Zionism and the realities of Jewish
settlement in Palestine. Instead of dissolving differences and diminishing
particularities, the yishuv in Palestine had planted the seeds of a deeply
divided national conflict. Moreover, their demands for a binational state
were attacked in the wake of the riots as tantamount to treason. Kohn’s fel-
low members of Brit Shalom, including his collaborator Hugo Bergmann,
remained silent in response to these criticisms. Kohn, however, refused to
relinquish his push for continued dialogue with the Arab population. His
stance brought a public outcry directly upon him that pressured him to
resign from his position in the movement.
Kohn penned a letter of explanation to Buber concerning this decision
to quit his post. In a moving remark, he wrote: “Zionism as it is today . . .
is unacceptable. . . . I am not concerned about Ishmael, only about Isaac,
that is, our aims, our life, our actions. I am afraid [that] what we support
we cannot vouch for. And because of false solidarity we shall sink deeper
into the quagmire. Either Zionism will be pacific or else it will be with-
out me. Zionism is not Judaism.”32 Kohn expressed his deep disappoint-
ment and anguish in this letter and a number of others written during this
period. Zionism’s effort to solve the tragic failings of nationalism created a
more militaristic manifestation of Jewish nationalism. Whereas Kohn had
hoped that the movement would become the ultimate bearer of the Jewish
political idea, he felt betrayed by the perversion of the tenets he considered
central to Judaism. Buber, who considered Kohn one of his prize pupils
and certainly empathized with elements of Kohn’s frustrations, found
Kohn’s resignation disappointing. Buber considered Kohn’s “basic moral
position to suffer from a ‘doctrinaire idealism.’ ”33 Moral idealism, Buber
averred, had to be balanced with real-world political considerations. For
Buber, Zionism’s inability to realize his idealistic vision of creating a peace-
ful coexistence between Orient and Occident did not undermine the entire
project. Kohn, however, had intricately linked his Zionism to the fulfill-
ment of a utopian dream that clashed with political realities and dwindling
support for Arab–Jewish dialogue within the yishuv.
Still unaware of what his next step might be, Kohn spent the next four
years living in Palestine and traveling throughout Europe, America, Rus-
sia (where he served as a correspondent for the Frankfurter Zeitung), and

the Middle East. One of his speaking engagements brought him to the
United States, where he delivered the talk Kaplan attended. Thanks to his
old friend Judah Magnes, the American-born Zionist who served as one
of the founders of the Hebrew University in Jerusalem, Kohn received an
invitation in 1934 to teach history at Smith College in Massachusetts. His
new position as a scholar of nationalism in the United States enabled him
to explore the possibility of expanding the idea of Judaism, expressed by
Jewish thinkers, to a much wider audience.
Kohn reinvented himself as a leading American scholar of nationalism
who would go on to publish important works on the history of nationalism
and the nature of American nationalism. With astounding flexibility, Kohn
replaced Moses, the Baal Shem Tov, and Buber with the Sophists, Rousseau,
and Jefferson as the prophets of modern nationalism. The German-educated
scholar mastered an entirely new corpus of historical material in under a
decade. Biblical sources and Zionist ideologies were swapped for an in-
depth intellectual history of England, France, and the United States. Kohn
downplayed his past activism in the Zionist movement in his publications
on nationalism. Over the next forty years, Kohn taught history at a number
of American universities, including Smith College (1934–1948), City College
of New York (1948–1961), and Harvard Summer School, where he served
periodically as a visiting faculty member for over two decades (1935–1958).
Kohn was a popular teacher and an incredibly prolific writer.34
As the historian Hagit Lavsky has pointed out, Kohn himself character-
ized his move to the United States as a “break” with Zionism that would
give him the opportunity to find “completely new paths.”35 Recent schol-
arly interest in Kohn’s intellectual biography tends to accept this assertion
of discontinuity between the German Zionist and the American scholar
of nationalism.36 Was it a complete break, as he himself claimed? If not,
how did the concepts and research endure in his work? Before address-
ing this question, it is necessary to explore Kohn’s understanding of Zion-
ism and its affinities with other interwar counterstate theories of Jewish
nationalism.
“Nationalism as the Ultimate Ordering Principle Is Dead”

In a 1921 article, “Nationalism,” Kohn predicted: “The time will come when
‘national sovereign independence,’ the goal of the age of political national-
ism, will vanish because mankind will have realized that . . . the noninter-
vention of the ‘foreigner’ in ‘our’ affairs, is a dangerous phantom that, under
the suggestiveness of the myth of the nineteenth century, has become an

article of faith.”37 Kohn’s essay, published in the influential Zionist journal
Der Jude, presented a scathing critique of European “egoistic” national-
ism and a profound antipathy toward the claims and actions of European
nation-states. The equation of nation and state, he contended, created an
exclusivist logic that engendered belligerent actions toward other states
and threatened the individual rights of citizens. His critique of national-
ism, however, did not lead him to reject the historical or normative impor-
tance of national identity. Although “nation and state are distinct,” Kohn
insisted that “the nation in its vital utterances, in its culture and develop-
ment must be protected even without national independence, without the
national state.”38 Kohn’s task as an interpreter of Jewish political thought
and a Zionist was to advocate for the depoliticization and deterritorializa-
tion of concepts of nationalism, past and present.
During the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, Kohn argued, nation-
alism played an important role in the historical development of Enlighten-
ment ideals. The nation-state spread humanistic values across large popu-
lations and thereby enabled world history to proceed to a higher level of
ethical development. However, as political leaders appropriated national-
ism for their own ends, the antipathy stirred by nationalism led to the vast
destruction of World War I. This historical cataclysm actually represented
the end of a more primitive stage of nationalism and signified the begin-
ning of a new period in human history. The epoch would enable more
authentic, humanistic strains of national identity to shine forth.
Kohn’s historical schema suggested that such historical turning points
required transition periods. During this intermediary epoch, Kohn con-
tended that a particular nation would model the future typology of ethi-
cal nationalism. Such a nation would “announce the future road, the new,
purified, primarily human value of the nation, its release from politics and
from suggestiveness, and its elevation into clarity . . . it [the nation] knuck-
les under to moral laws, eternal valuations; it dares to look into its own eyes
with ultimate clarity.”39 The advanced stage of national identity, purified of
the dross of political greed and moral indifference, would eventually cata-
lyze a transformation eliciting a worldwide “feeling of social unity.”
According to this narrative, “state-nationalism” defined as “the attach-
ment of a sovereign people to a specific territory that it owned and pos-
sessed” would disappear and a more authentic national solidarity based on
“a context of a group of people held together through a common descent
and common or similar historical destinies” would reshape the political
order.40 Kohn contrasted those authentic national groups that exempli-
fied a cohesion based on culture and “natural ties” with those that made

dubious political claims based on historical claims to land and collective
identity.41 Creating a new “pure” nationalism served in Kohn’s periodiza-
tion as the transitional mechanism for ensuring the transformation from
the age of malevolent nation-states to his vision of a more cosmopolitan
world order. The authentic nation unified by moral probity and organic
social bonds would serve as the corrective to the völkisch extremism of
European nation-states.
This antipathy toward privileging states’ political ends over moral con-
cerns echoed contemporary discussions among German-speaking intellec-
tuals about the relationship between right and might in political thought.
In 1924 Friedrich Meinecke, for example, the founder of German politi-
cal intellectual history, published The Idea of Reasons of State.42 This book
traced the historical development of the relationship between ethics and
realpolitik from Machiavelli through World War I. In his conclusion, Mei-
necke critiqued the notion of the “power state” and denounced the “false
idealization of power politics.”43 Kohn adapted Meinecke’s admonition
against the use of force or moral coercion as the basis for political entities.
Kohn’s distinction between cultural or moral and political expressions
of nationalism reflects another example of how significantly early-twenti-
eth-century German thought shaped Kohn’s formulations. His dichotomy
between organic and political ties reflects sociologist Ferdinand Tönnies’s
distinction between two types of groups—Gemeinschaft (community cre-
ated by organic bonds between members) and Gesellschaft (societies united
by instrumental relationships between individuals). These were categories
highlighted by Buber in the so-called Prague lectures that Kohn helped
organize before the Great War.44
Other romantic conceptions and imagery—such as Blut (blood), Kul-
tur (culture), and Volk (people)—also reverberate through Kohn’s descrip-
tions of the ties that bind members of national groups. “National senti-
ment, detached from its territorial state-faith,” Kohn averred, “will help
determine the destiny of mankind through the power of the traditions of
blood.”45 Yet this statement also illustrates his tension with the very intel-
lectual milieu that shaped his vocabulary and concepts of nationalism.
Kohn internalized the terminology of organic national bonds at the same
time that he employed these concepts to undermine the historical impor-
tance of the nation-state as the optimal carrier. By separating nation from
state, Kohn subverted the fusion of the two concepts that even liberal inter-
war intellectuals such as Meinecke viewed as destined to come together.
Indeed, Kohn’s historical narrative applied the tools of German idealist
historiography to challenge the integration of nation and state as the final

stage in the development of political theory (a narrative shaped by such
seminal German intellectuals as the philosopher Hegel). Kohn’s periodiza-
tion and analysis of the rise and (he hoped) fall of national sovereignty was
a polemical call for the normalization of stateless national groups, such
as the Jews. This emphasis was far different from that of such influential
German thinkers as Ernst Troeltsch, who defined the spirit of German cul-
ture (Kultur) as a concept advocating for the national freedom of the state,
rather than the liberal freedom from the state.46 Jewish national culture
signified the future type of nationalism that retained the higher moral sta-
tus associated by German thinkers with the völkisch emphasis on the col-
lective over the individual. However, it rejected the centrality of the state,
or the fatherland, in guiding the national spirit through history.
Kohn undermined the assumptions of an organic hierarchy of national
spirits in another way: he neutralized the exclusivist connotations increas-
ingly linked with völkisch expressions of nationalism. National identity was
not a reflection of historical objectivity or ascriptive characteristics. Kohn
called such “myths” of collectivity based on past traditions and character-
istics “subjective” illusions that create a false sense of unity.47 His definition
of Jewish nationalism reflects this important critique: “Zionism is not a sci-
ence, not a logical conceptual system; it has no racial theories of definitions of
people.”48 Judaism focused on dynamic unity in the present, thus avoiding the
danger of reifying particular criteria of inclusion and diminishing the tension
between national autonomy and international integration. Kohn adopted the
antiliberal language of German political thought. In particular, Kohn inter-
nalized the terminology associated by his German-speaking contemporaries
with the rejection of Western European concepts of freedom from collective
authority. As a result, his theoretical basis differs from the counterstate Zion-
ists associated with the Allied powers during World War I.
Horace Kallen, Alfred Zimmern, and Mordecai Kaplan all aligned
themselves with British civilization, with its emphasis on individual rights
and equality, over the authoritarian demands of Prussian or Kultur nation-
alism. Kohn identified Jewish nationalism primarily with German Kul-
tur and opposed (at least until the mid-1920s when he aligned his idea of
nationalism with Western civilization against German nationalisms) the
liberal individualism and freedom associated with British civilization.49
Yet the alignment of Zionism with opposite intellectual traditions is not
quite as sharp as the bifurcation suggests. Counterstate Zionists on both sides
of the civilization–Kultur debate appropriated their political milieu’s highest
conception of nationalism, separated this theory of nationalism from sover-
eignty, and associated its true fulfillment with Zionism. Moreover, Zionists

on both sides sought to find compromise positions that reconfigured the
stark dichotomy between individual and collective freedoms. Kohn’s early
writings focus on equality, universal concepts of justice, permeable national
boundaries, and minority rights far more unequivocally than his German
nationalist contemporaries. Conversely, Zimmern, Kallen, and Kaplan all
integrated the language of spirit and culture into their formulations to dem-
onstrate the compatibility of liberalism and communal recognition.
Kohn’s personal correspondence contextualizes the existence of this par-
allel. Counterstate Zionists engaged Jewish and general concepts of nation-
alism as a response to their personal experiences as Jews of the limits of
nation-state nationalisms, in both their liberal and ethnic variations. Reveal-
ing his own awareness as a Jew of the source of his interest in nationalism,
Kohn wrote: “Our [Jewish] tensions are stronger, our sensitivity stronger, our
homelessness deeper than among others. . . . Scattered throughout the world,
we carry the suffering of all mankind.”50 His anxiety about the position of
Jews as the primary victim of the totalizing logic of nation-state nationalism
motivated his early engagement with Zionism and remained a driving force
throughout his career. Solving the Jewish question within the parameters
of nationalism demanded a middle-ground approach that sought areas of
compromise between liberal individualism and völkisch collectivism. At the
same time, their very anxiety about ethnic exclusion motivated Jewish think-
ers to align themselves with precisely the discourse that had the potential to
alienate them in order to fit in. As a result, figures from various intellectual
milieus expressed Jewish political thought through competing perspectives
on nationalism but ended up with far more in common than their identifica-
tion with one pole or the other might suggest. One such area of overlap was
the creation of a synthesis of Zionism and humanism.
Jews: A Nation One with Humanity

Kohn’s lifelong interest in demonstrating nationalism’s role as the primary
carrier of the principle of a shared human solidarity through history origi-
nated in his understanding of Zionism. Hungry for a transformation of
Judaism and the extant social and political order, he believed that Zion-
ism constituted an integral part of a larger change in the basis for social
integration within European society. Kohn wrote in 1913: “Today, there is a
general yearning of the individual to go beyond the individual, to prepare
oneself for the superindividual connection. All the indications are that in
our day a change is coming, not only for Judaism but for all of mankind.”51
These “superindividual connections” would transcend biological, national,

religious, and linguistic categories. Jewish national culture signified the
first step toward spreading the human spirit. Kohn developed his concept
of the Jewish idea of nationalism through constructing a sacred history of
the Jewish people, from biblical prophets to the prophets of Zionism. He
developed these in a number of works, including a 1924 German pamphlet
called Die Politische Idee des Judentum (The political idea of Judaism) and
the two-volume Hebrew book, Perakim letoldot hara’ayon hatzioni (A his-
tory of Zionist thought), which was published in 1929.52
Die Politische Idee des Judentum interpreted Jewish sources as prescrib-
ing the fundamental principles of the future stage of humanistic, counter-
state nationalism described in his 1921 “Nationalism” essay. To demonstrate
the core principles of Jewish ethical, humanistic, and integrative national-
ism, he highlighted three pillars of the Jewish political idea in this work:
covenant, humanity, and messiah. The covenant signified the acceptance
by both individual Jews and the larger community of an absolute sense
of justice rooted outside of the selfish concerns of other individuals or
the state. Kohn claimed that the Israelites distinguished themselves in the
annals of history as the first nation to spread their own divinely inspired
social legislation toward all of humanity.
The most important pillar for Kohn, the messianic principle, tracked
Jewish and early Christian calls to build the messianic kingdom within the
extant political order. Kohn cited the prophets, and particularly his favor-
ite Jewish prophet, Jesus, as evidence of the centrality of the call for this-
worldly redemption (Kohn does clearly reject Jesus as the Messiah; instead,
he interprets the founder of Christianity as a Jewish activist in line with
other Hebrew Bible prophets). In this reading of salvation, freedom and
equality would dissolve national boundaries, bringing about the crowning
achievement of the Jewish idea. From Moses to Isaiah, Kohn documented
the gradual proliferation of the divine in the world as an evolving politi-
cal recognition of universal brotherhood. According to Kohn, the doctrine
of Israel taught that “in the last reason, all are the same, all are related.”53
By tracing the biblical stories of the Garden of Eden and the Flood, Kohn
contended that the Bible recognizes that ultimately all people come from
the same stock. This ability of divine justice and universal love to perme-
ate quotidian reality through an enlightened political structure constituted
the core of Kohn’s idea of Jewish messianism. He traced the political idea
of Judaism to the Bible’s calls for higher levels of integration and a greater
consciousness of the underlying unity that binds humankind.
This understanding of the political idea of Judaism and its relationship
to theories of nationalism outlined in his “Nationalism” article illustrates

Kohn’s tremendous intellectual debt to his teacher Martin Buber. The
“Nationalism” article borrowed almost directly from Buber’s famous 1921
speech, with the same title, which was delivered at the Twelfth Zionist Con-
gress. Buber’s lecture made a similar distinction between false nationalism,
which “exceeded the function it was destined to” and has “become too sick
and thus [is] beginning its decline,” and Jewish nationalism, whose task is
to point the nations toward a “super-national sphere.” “We live in the hour,”
Buber concluded, “when nationalism is about to annul itself spiritually.”54
Buber introduced the concept of a supernational Jewish nationalism as
the conduit between false nationalism and a future without nationalism,
which reappeared as the central theme in Kohn’s subsequent essay.
Buber linked these political claims to his reading of Judaism and religious
thought. Underlying the apparent duality of the world, Buber averred, lies
a deeper spiritual unity that integrates humanity. It is the Jewish obligation,
he wrote, to “strive for unity within individual man; for unity between divi-
sions of the nation and between nations,” and to turn “the Jewish question
into a human question.”55 Buber expressed Judaism’s cosmopolitan appre-
ciation through his interpretation of the core concepts of unity, the messi-
anic future, and deed. These same three principles of Judaism appeared in
slightly altered form in Kohn’s Die Politische Idee des Judentum as covenant
(which paralleled Buber’s deed category by promoting the commitment to
act in the political realm), humanity (a call for equal justice based on the
unity of all mankind), and messiah.
Yet Buber balanced his vision of a supernational nation and human
integration with an emphasis on the cultural and religious revival of Juda-
ism and vibrant Jewish communities.56 Kohn, in contrast, transposed this
religious vision into a political plan that primarily utilized the cosmopoli-
tan implications of Buber’s philosophy. One direct example of this move
manifested itself in Buber’s and Kohn’s varying interpretations of messian-
ism. Messianic fulfillment, Buber argued, paradoxically served as a goal
to orient action in the world and yet remained forever unreachable. The
messianic moment remained “eternally remote and eternally immanent.”57
Buber maintained an appreciation for the power of messianic deferral at
the same time that he highlighted its central role in Judaism. Kohn com-
pletely overlooked this dialectical vision central to Buber’s messianism. For
Buber, religious unity existed as a religious and theoretical ideal, not as an
immediate political program.
Disregarding these important hesitations, Kohn read the messianic
future as a utopian social and political blueprint that demanded immediate
realization. The prophets, he claimed in a clear departure from Buber, “see

the coming of the messianic reign as a historical act, carried out in a living
generation.”58 Not particularly interested in the philosophical or religious
dimensions of Buber’s thought, Kohn appropriated one pole of his teacher’s
work to serve as the foundation for a universal humanism based on Jewish
nationalism. Kohn’s Jewish nationalism served a primarily instrumental
purpose: to spread the political idea of Judaism to the other nations. When
it finished its mission to the world, the Jewish idea would eliminate the
need for a Jewish nation (a political analogue to Reform Judaism’s concept
of ethical monotheism).
Kohn fused his political idea of Judaism with the evolution of mod-
ern Zionist ideology in Perakim letoldot hara’ayon hatzioni. This analysis of
the history of Zionist thought presented an intellectual counternarrative to
the Zionist idea as it was playing out in Palestine.59 Foregrounding Zion-
ist theoreticians usually relegated to the boundaries of the Zionist narra-
tive, Kohn claimed that all of these thinkers, beginning with Moses Hess,
recovered the ancient message of Judaism that had been lost in the wake of
the Emancipation. In Kohn’s interpretation of modern Jewish intellectual
history, the Emancipation distanced Jews from the Jewish political idea.
Ironically, Jews had lost their particular identity in the modern period by
ignoring Judaism’s universalistic core. Kohn lionized Hess as the first Jew-
ish intellectual to reconnect Judaism with its commitment to humanity.
Jewish nationalism emerged from Hess’s work as the return to Judaism’s
authentic role as the unifier of humankind. Subsequent chapters of Kohn’s
treatise linked the growing unity between Jewish nationalism and human-
ism through the work of Joseph Salvador, Nathan Birnbaum, Martin Buber,
and A. D. Gordon.
The book’s final chapter transformed the mystical and land-connected
Zionism of A. D. Gordon into the pinnacle of Kohn’s political idea of Juda-
ism.60 Gordon had gained cult status among young Zionists for his mys-
tical appreciation of labor and land. Kohn, however, focused his analysis
on Gordon’s concept of nationalism and particularly on the notion of am
adam (people-mankind). This Hebrew wordplay equated the two con-
cepts that Kohn had desperately been trying to fuse since the conclusion
of World War I: humanity and nation. Kohn found Gordon’s “synthesis of
the national foundation and the human foundation” inspiring, and defined
the profound significance of the term in the following manner: “am adam:
the name is new, the idea is old. It is the message that the nation of Israel
brings to the world. From our prophets until our own period we have not
lost the faith that man, as he is man, fulfills the cosmic task, the task that
was imposed upon all those who were created in the image of God, and

because of this creation the unity of all humanity comes before differences
of nations, race and religion.”61
Zionism, the highest stage of national development, took the grouping
principle that had united nations and elevated the sense of cohesion to all
humanity. Kohn praised Gordon in the conclusion of his history of Zionist
thought for his understanding that “the nation is the natural pipe, the life
that creates human life.”62 This pipe infused each individual with a cosmic
connection that sparked love for the other and eliminated the desire to
wage war. Kohn considered am adam to be Zionist thought’s ultimate real-
ization of the Jewish political message—the centrality of the national group
in promoting human solidarity.
In order to mold Gordon’s Zionism to fit his comprehension of human
history, Kohn overlooked one of the most important elements in Gordon’s
work—the centrality of the Jewish land. The connection to humanity in
Gordon’s thought emerged through labor on Jewish soil. Am adam thrives
when the nation exists on its own land. Kohn exploited Gordon through his
political idea of Judaism. As with his appropriation of Buber’s work, Kohn
focused on Gordon’s mystical concept of humanity and ignored his pre-
requisite of connection to a particular people or place. The idea remained
the distorting lens through which Kohn read nuanced theories of Jewish
nationalism as clear declarations of a humanistic vision that mitigated cul-
tural or religious differences.
Kohn’s polemical efforts to synthesize Judaism and humanism can also
be understood as a motivating factor in his groundbreaking research into
Arab nationalism. From his arrival in Palestine, Kohn distinguished him-
self even from his Brit Shalom colleagues in his idealistic and unwaver-
ing commitment to addressing the Arabs living in Palestine.63 The Zionist
movement would have to make two crucial concessions in preparation for
realizing Kohn’s lofty aspirations: renouncing their calls for a Jewish major-
ity and agreeing to a binational state. Kohn’s letters fulminated against
attempts to increase immigration so that a Jewish majority in Palestine
might be obtained. He believed that the Arabs had no inherent antipa-
thy toward the Jewish settlers; instead, they feared that the Jews would
take over Palestine completely. If only the Zionists would limit immigra-
tion and recognize Arab national claims, the Arabs would embrace their
arrival. Jews and Arabs would then build a binational federation with com-
plete cultural autonomy under British protection.
In 1926, Kohn published a book called Toldot hatenu’ah hale’umit
ha’aravit (A history of the Arab national movement). This book, one of the
first on Arab nationalism in any language, let alone in Hebrew, documented

the recent development of national self-consciousness of the Arab popu-
lation in Palestine, Syria, Trans-Jordan, and Iraq. Kohn maintained that
the Arabs constituted a primitive “Oriental” society whose tribal organiza-
tional structure, economic development, and legal statutes required Euro-
peanization. In spite of the problematic expressions that plagued European
nationalism, Kohn firmly believed that the Arab population had to pass
through the stage of nationalism to gain the moral, economic, and legal
lessons espoused by the European Enlightenment. Jewish settlers in Pal-
estine, Kohn suggested, would shepherd the Arabs through this process
toward a higher level of national consciousness. This symbiotic relation-
ship, at least in Kohn’s eyes, would not only spread harmony between two
disparate nations, but would also bridge the economic, industrial, and
political chasm separating the Orient from the Occident. Analyzing Arab
nationalism served as a platform for Kohn to present Zionism as an inte-
grating force of tremendous importance.64
Kohn’s analysis was both prescient (Zionism did in fact catalyze Arab
nationalism) and naïve (Jewish settlement in Palestine led to increased
tensions between Jews and Arabs—although, to be clear, Kohn did believe
that Jews would have to curtail immigration and remain a minority com-
munity for the envisioned cooperation to take place). From a historical
perspective, the relevance of Kohn’s engagement with Arab nationalism at
this point in his career is twofold. First, his Orient-modernizing narrative,
a topic that would remain a central theme in his subsequent scholarship on
nationalism, developed out of his efforts to support a vision of Zionism as
a humanistic enterprise. He had a vested interest in highlighting the rapid
development of nationalism in the Middle East to validate Zionism. Zion-
ism’s mission was contingent on a parallel process of national renaissance
in the region (later in this chapter, we will return to the ways in which
this idea played out in his subsequent dichotomy between civic and eth-
nic nationalism). Second, Kohn’s explanation of Jewish nationalism’s role
as a modernizing force in the Middle East integrated tropes of European
Orientalism and colonialism. He borrowed aspects of the European civiliz-
ing mission to explain Zionism’s role relative to Arabs in Palestine and the
Middle East. In 1925, for example, he commented, “it will take many years
of education work in many fields until the Arab nation can find its place
among the cultured nations of our time.”65
One also needs to mark important differences between Kohn’s affinity
with European views and the category of Orientalism as defined by postco-
lonial theorists.66 First, Kohn himself decried European colonialism, espe-
cially its deleterious and deadly effects in Africa. Second, his view of the

East was not completely negative. Kohn, following Buber’s lead, had credited
the ancient Oriental civilization with imbuing Judaism with a number of its
fundamental characteristics. He viewed aspects of Eastern culture, specifi-
cally the organic communities, as models for correcting the individualism
of Western societies. Third, Kohn also lacked the political will-to-power that
postcolonial scholars such as Edward Said argued motivated the construc-
tion of European Orientalism. Kohn claimed no metropol, or imperial state,
that he hoped to see profit from his venture in the Middle East. With his
insistence on allowing only a small number of Jews to settle in Palestine, he
clearly had no claims to any sort of colonialization program. Furthermore,
his goal was not to enslave or persecute the Arab population in any way.
Kohn’s published and personal writings indicate that he remained
deeply motivated by a utopian impulse to act in this world to end the moral
inequality and political egoism generated by nation-states. Moreover, the
civilizing mission (shared with other Zionists such as Kallen and Zimmern)
was complicated by Jewish intellectuals’ own perception of alienation and
outsider status. Aligning Jewish nationalism with European civilizing force
normalized the Jewish people by demonstrating their own ability to inte-
grate into the status of an elite racial, ethnic, or national group within a
ranking system that increasingly marginalized Jews. One effective path up
the ladder of colonial hierarchies was to adopt the very logic of classification
against the standard of European civilization used to disenfranchise Jews as
not ready for citizenship within the European context. Counterstate Zion-
ists exhibited a complex relationship to colonialism and imperialism that
demanded more analysis than other expressions of European Orientalism.
Palestine as the Model of the State of Many Nations

Kohn did not leave his idealist hopes for Zionism, and its role in facilitat-
ing the interaction of East and West in Palestine, to theoretical scholar-
ship. He also explored the potential political structure of a binational state
in a series of articles that appeared in the socialist Zionist paper Hapo’el
hatza’ir in 1926.67 Kohn envisioned the future “political shape of the Land
of Israel” as a society that would recognize cultural, religious, and linguis-
tic differences and encourage cooperation and tolerance between different
groups. The government of Palestine would take the form of a multitiered,
binational federation, roughly organized around a canton system. Since
the majority of villages, cities, and regions in Palestine already had divided
populations, the local inhabitants would democratically elect represen-
tatives. Above the local political structure, Kohn proposed two “general

autonomous institutions” (mosdot ha’otonomi’im) that would concentrate
on developing national social and cultural life. These institutions would
operate independently and would have the power to control personal, reli-
gious, and civil law, to oversee education, and to tax citizens. A democratic
national council would serve as the liaison between these institutions and
the British authorities. The British would retain the power to supervise
foreign policy and security.68 Kohn hoped to adjust the political realities of
Palestine to match his high expectations for the realization of the idea in
Palestine by using this complex formulation for ensuring productive coex-
istence between the two groups.
For Kohn, this model of a binational state in Palestine was not an excep-
tional political compromise, forced by the demographic reality of a large
Arab population. Instead, it was to serve as the vanguard of a federative
model of internationalism that would usher in a transition from a world
divided into national states to one organized by states of many nations.
Moreover, these national groups, exemplified by the Jews, would retain
cultural autonomy across geographic and political territories. Thus Kohn
demanded an “interterritorial solution to the Jewish question” that strongly
affirmed the national status of Jews as minority citizens.69 Unlike Ahad
Ha’am, Kohn did not see the preservation of the diaspora as a fact, but as
part of his global vision of national solidarity. “When Ha’am partially said
yes to the exile,” Kohn wrote, “he did it out of weakness of the unbelieving,
out of lack of consequence. . . . When we say a partial yes today, we do it
with belief in the creative power of the entire people.”70 Kohn’s decentered
vision of Jewish national culture resembles the vision Rawidowicz was
developing at this moment. However, Kohn did not see the existence of
national centers around the globe as a way of preserving Hebrew culture.
He did view Zionism as a model of multinational existence that demon-
strated how integration was not tantamount to assimilation.
There are a number of possible sources for Kohn’s interest in multina-
tional federations as a political model. One approach, explored by the his-
torian Yfaat Weiss, is to link Kohn’s interest in binationalism to his exposure
to the multinational Hapsburg Empire of his youth.71 Kohn had witnessed
the possibility of creating a federation of nationalities in the context of
the multinational Austrian Empire, where various successful attempts at
national autonomy had taken place (certainly an explanation that would
apply to Rawidowicz, who had been born into the multilinguistic backdrop
of late imperial Russia as well).
While Kohn’s formative experiences should be taken into account, it
is also worthwhile to note that he began to identify his understanding of

a federation of nationalities with the British model of a commonwealth
and internationalism. During the mid- to late 1920s, a strong anglophile
tendency emerged in Kohn’s essays. For instance, the “Commonwealth of
India Bill” serves as the blueprint for Jewish and Arab autonomy in Pales-
tine, England exemplifies the “minority country that supplies humanity to
the world,” and Great Britain should remain in charge of foreign policy and
border policing.72
Even though Kohn saw the limitations of imperialism, he also believed
that the nation-state was not an option. This left him with little choice:
only a supranational power could ensure political order and secure collec-
tive rights outside of national sovereignty. Some variation of imperialism
remained the only alternative to the inconceivable options of demolishing
national solidarity or seeking a Jewish nation-state. Such a system would
recognize the practical and moral necessity of separating political power
from the development of national culture. Caught between the exclusivism
of nation-state nationalism and the risk of imperialism’s excesses, Kohn
sided with the later, imagined as a benevolent and ethical imperialism.73
The synthesis of Zionism and forms of internationalism based on a
supranational political power (especially the British Empire) was not atyp-
ical, or limited to Zionists who had grown up in the Central European con-
text. The promise of an international federation based on the British com-
monwealth paradigm appealed to counterstate Zionists discussed earlier
in the book, specifically Zimmern, Kallen, and Kaplan. From Kohn’s corre-
spondence, we can conclude that it is highly likely that Kohn was aware of
Anglo-American Jewish intellectual circles, especially conversations in the
Menorah Journal discussed in chapter 2.74 There is evidence that Kohn read
Zionism and World Politics (Kallen’s 1921 book critiquing national sover-
eignty and highlighting the promise of internationalism) and knew about
Zimmern’s essays on nationalism and the British internationalist’s 1920
translation of Buber’s lectures (the same ones that had such a profound
effect on Kohn in the second decade of the century) into English. These
connections between intellectuals indicate affinities and even shared con-
versations about the implications of Jewish political thought for interwar
political organization.
Within a few months of each other, Kohn, Kallen, and Zimmern each
attempted to introduce the lessons they attributed to cultural Zionism
to wider audiences: their works included Kohn’s Nationalism: Concern-
ing the Meaning of Nationalism in Judaism and in the Present (1922), Kal-
len’s Zionism and World Politics: A Study in History and Social Psychol-
ogy (1921), and Zimmern’s 1923 article in Foreign Affairs, “Nationalism and

Internationalism.” All three thinkers understood (and shaped) the revival
of Jewish nationalism and the ideas they attributed to their mentors, Ahad
Ha’am and Buber, as “a general discovery of the being of Nationalism.”75
Zionism promised to normalize the Jewish people by ushering in an age of
international federations and multinational states, rather than promulgat-
ing the identity logic of national sovereignty. This overlapping vision shared
by Kohn (the head of propaganda for the Jewish National Fund in Pales-
tine), Kallen (a leading American Zionist and an adviser to Judge Louis
Brandeis, the head of the Federation of American Zionists), and Zimmern
(the world’s first professor of international relations and an adviser to the
British government) reflect the capacious boundaries of interwar Zionism.
In particular, Jewish communities in Palestine and the diaspora did not
signify groups with opposing schools of thought, but necessary partners
for underlining the possibilities of nation beyond state in a world of inter-
national federations. Ironically, as Kohn moved westward, his affinities
with his earlier British and American Zionist contemporaries grew far less
obvious. Yet the positions Kohn developed during this Zionist period in
his intellectual development remained an anchor for his later scholarship.
The Idea of Nationalism

In 1931, at the start of his trip to America, Kohn lamented to his friend, the
philosopher Hugo Bergman, from a Chicago hotel room: “But I don’t like
the USA and I don’t really like the type of people here. I don’t want to live
here. Jerusalem is preferable for me.”76 Kohn’s disparaging comments do
not convey a particularly positive first impression for a man who would
soon hail America as a “new type of nation, apparently without past or
precedent, but endowed with a great future.”77 As these quotations sug-
gest, Kohn did not immigrate to America out of ideological commitment
or even a desire to live there. He could no longer support himself and his
family after he left his job in the Zionist movement, and German pub-
lishers refused to print his articles and books when Hitler came to power.
Kohn sailed for America with his wife and son primarily out of economic
necessity.78
Kohn’s attitude toward America changed drastically when he returned
to the United States two years later as a new immigrant. A few months after
arriving in New England, he admitted to Buber, “strange that I should call
America homeland . . . that a new life begins in many aspects. In midlife:
Vita nuova [new life]. . . .” 79 On both a social and emotional level, Kohn
embraced his new life in the United States. America provided him with the

academic position, financial wherewithal, and audience that he lacked in
Palestine, where his scholarship and political activism had alienated him
from mainstream Zionist circles. Kohn was particularly frustrated by his
rejection for an academic chair in peace studies at the Hebrew University.
In a letter encouraging Weltsch to follow him to America, Kohn admitted
that he was tired of being a martyr for Jewish nationalism in Palestine.80
At Smith College, Kohn was extremely well liked by his students; he
found publishers for his articles and books, and enjoyed a community that
was similar to “the circle of friends he had found in Palestine.”81 He gained
a sense of security and acceptance in America that he had never received in
his forty years of wandering throughout Europe, Asia, and the Middle East.
Kohn’s burgeoning personal appreciation for the United States translated
directly into his scholarship. He transferred the political transformation he
fought for in Palestine into his new career as an American academic. This
substitution of America for Palestine was evident in a letter to Weltsch. “In
spite of all the problems,” Kohn wrote, “there is no other land in which peo-
ple endeavor towards liberal grounds. . . . Here it is possible and permissible,
to educate a new generation in a new spirit. . . . Here there is hope that a new
ideology can be successfully created. . . . In Palestine there is no hope.”82
For Kohn, Palestine had failed to produce the new nationalism. Amer-
ica, however, exhibited the proper political potential and remained open to
a new spirit. Kohn even invited Weltsch to join him in defining and spread-
ing this new spirit in America; however, Weltsch declined and continued
his work as editor of the German Zionist paper, the Jüdische Rundschau,
and moved to Palestine in 1938. If Zionism would not support Kohn’s ideal-
ization of Judaism, America would have to serve as Judaism’s proxy. In less
than a decade, Kohn would resurrect a generalized version of his under-
standing of Zionism’s political mission as the idea of nationalism, with
American nationalism embodying the former role of Zionism.
Backdrop, details, and context would all change dramatically. However,
three areas remain that anchor Kohn’s subsequent contributions to the
study of nationalism: first, a counterstate definition that equates national-
ism with an integrating force rather than a political or territorial bound-
ary; second, an analysis based on the role of a particular national group
that carries this concept of nationalism through each epoch in history; and
third, a subtle but important contention that preserving national cultural
distinctiveness outside of statehood strengthens human solidarity.
A close comparison of Kohn’s most influential contribution to Ameri-
can scholarship, The Idea of Nationalism (1944), with Kohn’s Zionist writ-
ings indicates that the new spirit exemplified by American nationalism was

not new at all. Instead, the idea of nationalism echoed many aspects of his
understanding of the political idea of Judaism and mirrored the concept
Kohn had developed under the mentorship of cultural Zionists Ahad Ha’am
and Martin Buber in Europe and later in Palestine. As the name of the book
suggests, The Idea of Nationalism focused on the progressive evolution of
an “idea-force” that manifested itself in models of political integration that
transcended tribal, geographic, and religious boundaries. Through the ebb
and flow of this idea in time, Kohn discerned the clear development of
national groups that exemplified the integration of individuals around “a
political idea, looking towards the common future that would spring from
their common efforts.”83 The narrative suggested that the Enlightenment
and early stirrings of seventeenth-century national movements signified
the realization of these ancient yearnings toward unity. Despite the situa-
tion in Europe in 1944, Kohn retained his belief in a historical trajectory
from tribalism to universalism.
The object of Kohn’s historical analysis had clearly widened its scope
from Judaism and Zionism to world history. Nevertheless, the approach
paralleled his earlier texts, especially Die Politische Idee des Judentum and
Perakim letoldot hara’ayon hatzioni, in its vocabulary, methodology, and
content. The repetition of the language of the idea remained the most obvi-
ous link to Kohn’s earlier efforts. Heavily influenced by the German intel-
lectual tradition, Kohn viewed his role as interpreting, not chronicling, the
significance of historical events. “The historian,” Kohn later commented,
“should represent on the one hand the consciousness, the self-awareness
of an epoch or of a people, and on the other hand its conscience.”84 This
approach demanded that Kohn imbue his vision of the past with his own
historical schema for narrating the past and projecting it toward the future.
His methodological emphasis on the historian’s role in elucidating the par-
ticular nature of a period or people provided the key for understanding
how Kohn discovered such similar ideas permeating different epochs. As
long as his fundamental ideal of nationalism as the humanizing historical
force remained his historiographical compass, he had to discover examples
of its manifestation in the past.
Kohn also retained the paradoxical claim that true nationalism expresses
itself through promoting solidarity with those beyond its particular bound-
aries. He had previously singled out Jewish nationalism as the primary
example of this conception of nationalism. By 1944, Kohn equated the gen-
eral category of national consciousness with what had previously been the
foundation of the political idea of Judaism—“the love of humanity or of the
whole earth.”85 National identity did not erect boundaries between people,

but instead bridged the superficial and primitive claims of biological, cul-
tural, and religious adherence. Nationalism, as the carrier of the idea of unity,
galvanized populations to appreciate their human connections. In language
that echoed his discussion of Gordon’s am adam, Kohn summed up his “idea
of nationalism” as follows: “Nationality, which is nothing but a fragment of
humanity, tends to set itself up as the whole. Generally this ultimate conclu-
sion is not drawn, because ideas predating the age of nationalism continue
to exercise their influence. These ideas form the essence of Western civiliza-
tion—of Christianity as well as of enlightened rationalism; the faith in the
oneness of humanity and the ultimate value of the individual.”86
Notice the new addition of Christianity and Western civilization to
the basic concept of nationality and humanity familiar from his Zionist
period. This important addendum reflected Kohn’s effort to universalize
the source of the idea and to make it palatable for an American audience.
At the same time, he demonstrated a continued attachment to his own
intellectual roots in the Jewish tradition, a tradition that continued to rep-
resent a critical stage in the development of the idea of nationalism. In
“Israel and Hellas: From Tribalism to Universalism,” the second chapter
of the book, Kohn contends that Jews and Greeks were the only people of
antiquity that had developed “an attitude of universalism and humanism
which left behind it all difference of race and national civilizations.”87 This
chapter commences with an analysis of the ancient Hebrews’ understand-
ing of covenant, humanity, and Messiah. These categories and the rest of his
description of the Jewish understanding of the idea of nationalism closely
resemble the description of Judaism in Die Politische Idee des Judentum.88
This similarity resulted from the fact that Kohn incorporated large sec-
tions of his previous work on Jewish nationalism into this classic study
of nationalism. The most substantial differences between the pieces, writ-
ten twenty years apart and for radically different audiences, lie in Kohn’s
attitude toward Hellenism. In the earlier work, Kohn used the Greeks as
a foil to illustrate the merits of the Jewish idea. For example, he directly
contrasted the Jewish conception of justice with that of the Greeks, whose
conception he considered “far more limited,” and he criticized the Greeks
for making a distinction between themselves and the “barbarian” others.89
By 1944, Kohn decided to include the Greeks as partners in the early evolu-
tion of humanistic nationalism. By updating the earlier text through elimi-
nating sentences that explicitly presented Greek philosophy in opposition
to biblical wisdom and adding a few paragraphs praising the later Greek
tradition, Kohn included Athens in his narrative.90 Clearly, he felt the need
to universalize the origins of his Jewish political idea and to diminish the

centrality of Judaism. However, these cosmetic changes only superficially
altered his early thoughts and writings on Zionism.
Kohn made few other explicit references to the role of Judaism in The
Idea of Nationalism. However, the historical teleology followed the pro-
gression outlined in his 1920s work. For Kohn, “the age of nationalism
represents the first period of universal history.”91 By spreading concepts
of universal justice, individual rights, and shared philosophical assump-
tions, the nation ushered its citizens toward higher levels of transnational
integration. National sovereignty was only a temporary stage in the devel-
opment of nationalism. The final stage of national identity eschewed cohe-
sion based on political or territorial ties.
Kohn himself admitted this debt to his earlier formulations. “[The
1921 essay] ‘Nationalism’,” he acknowledged in the preface of The Idea of
Nationalism, “contained already in outline form some of the main conclu-
sions of The Idea of Nationalism.” 92 Probably aware that few readers of his
1944 book would have the wherewithal or the interest to locate and read his
German article, Kohn overlooked a fundamental difference. The 1921 essay
concluded with the suggestion that Jewish nationalism, on the basis of its
political tradition, would model transformative nationalism. In his later
formulation, Kohn implied that Western nationalism, with Britain and the
United States at the forefront, would stimulate a new world order. The Jew-
ish mission persisted, but the centrality of Zionism faded away.
One of the most significant and lasting historiographical contributions
of Kohn’s The Idea of Nationalism constituted his distinction between two
typologies of nationalism: the illiberal, ethnic nationalism of non-West-
ern traditions and the liberal, Western, civic model. Kohn recognized that
national groups shared certain linguistic, biological, cultural, social, or
religious similarities as a result of living in proximity. However, he flatly
rejected these criteria for national identity by claiming that these ethno-
graphic groups may define tribes or clans but did not delineate national
groups.93 Politicians, historians, and intellectuals who gave absolute value
to any of these criteria misled themselves and their followers by confusing
irrational myths and primitive conceptions of reality with absolute politi-
cal principles. These “ethnographic” groups masquerading as nations were
in actuality merely ephemeral communities whose precise identities fluc-
tuated throughout time.94 Kohn demoted culture, language, and biology
from unifying criteria to stumbling blocks to authentic nationalism.
One of the great contributions of Kohn’s scholarship on the history of
nationalism, which distinguished his work from that of his contemporary,
historian Carleton Hayes, was a critique of such ties based on an analysis of

the historically constructed nature of essentialist distinctions between vari-
ous national groups.95 Politicians and scholars who valued any of these cri-
teria misled themselves and their followers by confusing irrational folklore
and archaic conceptions of reality with absolute political principles. Kohn’s
theory of nationalism thus transposed the ideal type of nationalism from
categories of descent to voluntary membership, from cultural identification
to political will, and from organic unity to universal social contract.
When Kohn’s more nuanced, Zionist-inspired critique of völkisch
nationalism is taken into account, his apparent transformation is not as
stark. As discussed earlier, Kohn’s antipathy toward essentialized defini-
tions of nationalism had deep roots in his Zionist writings. In 1919, Kohn
(demonstrating his own conflicted relationship with Ahad Ha’am, whom
he celebrated for introducing the idea of an ethical Judaism) critiqued
Ahad Ha’am’s notion of a Jewish spirit because it did not go far enough in
affirming the dynamic nature of Jewish life. The unique aspect of the Jew-
ish political idea for Kohn could be found in its universal orientation and
ability to overcome particular cultural, historical, or religious identities.
This same understanding of Jewish nationalism served as Kohn’s paradigm
for defining the Western nationalism of England, France, the Netherlands,
and the United States.
Another parallel with his earlier work is the very concept of a dichotomy
between good and bad expressions of nationalism. The opposing typol-
ogy of nationalism—referred to as “Eastern European and Asian”—can be
linked to Kohn’s view of Arab and Oriental nationalism. Clearly, the dis-
tinction between Occident and Orient, as represented by Jews and Arabs in
his history of Arab nationalism (Toldot hatenu’ah hale’umit ha’aravit), did
not map directly onto the non-Western typology of nationalism that had
made Kohn famous a few years later. Arab nationalism merely required
European support to reach the next level of national existence. German
nationalism, on the other hand, epitomized an irredeemable theory of
nationalism, the antithesis of Western nationalism.
Yet once Kohn left Palestine and Hitler took over Germany, the problem-
atic nation par excellence shifted westward from Arabia to Germany. The
non-Western variety described in The Idea of Nationalism mirrored his cri-
tique of the tribal bonds in Arab society that had prevented the Arab popula-
tion from embracing European Enlightenment values. The basic dichotomy
of East and West, Occident and Orient, which was so central for Zionist intel-
lectuals in the orbit of figures such as Buber, permeated Kohn’s more mature
work. For Kohn, Palestine served as the bridge between advanced political
conceptions and primitive social organization. Jewish nationalism, based in

this critical location, would catalyze rapid growth in Eastern nationalism
toward the Western model. The specific geographical location diminished in
importance for Kohn; however, the fundamental mission of Jewish national-
ism remained to transform nationalism from tribalism to universalism.
America, Kohn’s New Canaan

Before immigrating to the United States, Kohn exhibited a Eurocentric
disdain for what were perceived as America’s inferior cultural and politi-
cal characteristics. A series of published and unpublished critiques in the
1920s of America as emphasizing economic success, parochial interests,
and assimilationist tendencies reflected this unflattering perception.96 By
the time he published The Idea of Nationalism, however, Kohn presented
the country in a very different light. America, or “the new world,” emerged
as the carrier of the historical idea of nationalism Kohn had developed two
decades earlier in Palestine. He posited, “One thread runs through the his-
tory of the New World from its beginning to the present day: to be a new
Canaan for those who wished to throw off the yoke of Egyptian oppres-
sion, to seek the haven of liberty in escaping authoritarianism.”97
References to America as the promised or holy land have clearly res-
onated throughout American intellectual history. Kohn could have been
appropriating his language from these traditions; however, the direct link
with Kohn’s intellectual biography made these references to Canaan and
Jewish history particularly significant. Still attached to the geographic and
mythical vocabulary of Jewish nationalism, Kohn used this imagery to
convert the United States into his new Canaan. American nationalism per-
mitted him to continue dreaming about the possibility of creating the form
of national integration and freedom he had failed to achieve in Palestine.
As the reference to America as a new Canaan suggested, American
nationalism increasingly took on the role previously assigned to Zionism
in Kohn’s narrative as the “idea-type” of collective solidarity. The clearest
expression of the transformation of German Zionism to American nation-
alism is seen in Kohn’s 1957 book, American Nationalism: An Interpretive
Essay. Direct links to Judaism, Zionism, or the Hebrew political tradition
cited in The Idea of Nationalism have been almost completely excised from
this text (I discuss the one exception below). Instead, the source of Ameri-
can nationalism is said to have emerged directly out of English political
philosophy, not the Bible. The American Revolution, Kohn argued, enabled
the United States to realize the humanistic ideals of English national-
ism. By rebelling against England, the colonists were actually fighting to

implement the “tradition of rational liberties” that the English nation had
created but failed to actualize fully.98
The new United States was able to overcome the rigid social hierarchy of
European social life and create a country with levels of social equality impos-
sible even within England. “In that sense,” Kohn claimed, “the United States
has been from its beginning, and is today, the frontier land of both the Eng-
lish tradition of liberty and modern Western civilization.”99 The American
Revolution transferred the beacon of international light across the Atlan-
tic.100 By rising up in defense of universal liberty, the American colonists
created the binding philosophy, the political idea, of a revolutionary nation.
America constituted “a universal nation . . . in the sense that the idea which it
pursued was believed to be universal and valid for the whole of mankind.”101
Kohn wove an intellectual narrative documenting the development of
American political thought that has different historical turning points and
philosophical sources than his writings about Jewish nationalism. Never-
theless, the content of American nationalism and its role in history remains
identical to the way he described the attributes of Jewish nationalism. For
instance, the argument that the United States constitutes a “universal
nation” directly reflects an almost direct translation of Gordon’s am adam
that Kohn highlighted as the culmination of Zionist thought in his earlier
intellectual history of the movement into the key principle of American
identity.102
Kohn’s attempt to read his ideal of nationalism through U.S. history
manifested the same weakness that characterized his earlier work. This
dedication to tracing the idea through historical events and intellectual
trends forced Kohn to avoid or reinterpret realities that deviated from his
master vision for world progress. In a discussion of the rise of American
nativism at the end of the nineteenth century, Kohn hesitantly admitted
that “America did not escape this general [European] current although the
radicalization of the intellectual climate did not go so far as in continental
Europe.”103 The United States did diverge from the trajectory of its idea.
However, he insisted, the minor deviation from its political idea paled in
comparison to the ongoing distortion of the idea prevalent in Europe. Kohn
refused to reconcile The Idea of Nationalism in America with the scars left
by slavery and segregation. In American Nationalism, he addressed the
“Negro-problem” by pointing to recent civil rights legislation and court
rulings that further indicated the ethical progression of the idea.
This evaluation of the state of U.S. civil equality was particularly stark
in comparison to Kohn’s contemporary theoretician of American national-
ism, Gunnar Myrdal. Unlike Myrdal, who coined the notion of “American

Creed” in 1944 as a corrective to the sorry state of race relations in Amer-
ica, Kohn traced U.S. history as the very model of his idea of nationalism.104
By explaining fundamental moral flaws in the fabric of American life as
“occasional aberrations” in U.S. history, Kohn kept his universal-oriented
trajectory in place. He hailed America as the inheritor of the European
Enlightenment project without acknowledging America’s own penchant
for racial, gender, and religious prejudice, suppression of minorities, and
inequality. This historical account of nationalism appeared blind to the
possible weaknesses of American political life that abounded in the past
and continued to surround Kohn even up to the years of the book’s publi-
cation. His “doctrinaire idealism,” critiqued by Buber in 1929, continued to
define Kohn’s scholarship throughout his life.
At first glance, one major change between American nationalism and
German Zionism in Kohn’s work is his tendency to focus on cultural assimi-
lation within the state, rather than on the preservation of minority groups
or counterstate nations. Kohn’s Zionism emphasized humanism and fulmi-
nated against the nation-state paradigm of nationalism; yet, following his
mentors Ahad Ha’am and Buber, it also recognized the particular ties that
bind national groups outside political or territorial boundaries. Kohn had no
desire to turn Palestine into a melting pot, at least not in the immediate future.
Palestine would serve as a model for human integration through building
international relationships, rather than dissolving ethnonational solidarity.
As discussed, Kohn dedicated considerable energies to constructing a system
of government in Palestine that would recognize national autonomy.
In contrast to Kohn’s writings in Europe and Palestine, his theory of
American nationalism adopts the melting-pot idea to describe the coun-
try’s success at integrating immigrants from diverse backgrounds. The
melting-pot metaphor provided Kohn with a concrete example of Amer-
ica’s commitment to humanistic nationalism. A discussion of the French-
American farmer Hector St. John de Crèvecoeur, originator of the term,
figured prominently on the first page of the book and remained a theme
throughout. Kohn even dedicated a few paragraphs in his work toward sup-
porting the immigration restrictions of the early twentieth century. These
severe restrictions served as necessary measures to ensure that the melting
pot had the “required time to operate.”105 Kohn also applauded legislation
aimed at denying citizenship to those immigrants who might disturb the
assimilation process of the American political idea.
Kohn’s narrative emphasized America’s success in integrating different
religious, ethnic, and cultural groups around the idea of nationalism in a
way that Zionism had never been able to achieve. A biting comment at the

end of American Nationalism (the only explicit allusion to Jews or Juda-
ism in the book) hinted that Kohn’s strong rejection of particular cultural
identification in American nationalism remained connected to correcting
what he saw as the failure in Palestine. Kohn jabbed at his old Zionist com-
rades with the comment that “in spite of the call from Israel, few American
Jews left their country to settle in a land where their ancestors probably
lived two thousand years ago.”106 Instead, they came to America and devel-
oped a strong sense of belonging to the United States and the American
political idea. The American idea of liberty has “proved a stronger national
cement and a more secure basis for ordered liberty and economic prosper-
ity than bonds of a common blood or religion or the uniformity of a closed
society.”107 Kohn insisted that American nationalism would fulfill the role
of transforming nationalism from primitive tribal bonds to enlightened
political ideals. Ultimately, the United States succeeded in welcoming Jews
and fulfilling the Jewish idea in a way that Zionism never could.
Kohn also made an explicit point of differentiating his concept of the
American idea of nationalism from the most well-known opponent of the
melting pot, Horace Kallen, whose concept of cultural pluralism advocated
for the retention of ethnonational identity within the state. Kohn took Kal-
len to task for “practically demanding the introduction of the rights of
national minorities as they existed in central and eastern Europe, on the
basis of an ethno-linguistic nationalism unknown to the Anglo-American
tradition.”108 This reading of Kallen’s famous essay “Democracy versus the
Melting-Pot” indicated that Kohn considered Kallen’s claims threatening
to the vitality of American nationalism. The fruition of the national idea,
Kohn suggested, was at odds with the division of social or cultural life into
particular national groups. Such a fragmentation threatened to undermine
the primacy of individual rights by fueling ethnonational tensions.
Kohn’s adoption of the melting pot as a term for describing American
nationalism, and his discrediting of the notion of cultural pluralism, directly
contradict his own earlier statements published in the Hebrew press. A 1924
Hapo’el hatza’ir article denounced American Jewish immigrants invested
in the “melting pot of the cultureless general Americanness.”109 Instead,
Kohn insisted that the retention of national identity in general and Jewish
solidarity in particular was important in the diaspora, as well as in Pales-
tine. Kohn’s specific language on the melting pot, and his awareness of a
growing interest in Jewish topics by a group of intellectuals associated with
the Menorah Journal, suggest that he read Kallen’s “Democracy versus the
Melting-Pot” and supported his vision of America as a nation of nationali-
ties. Kohn’s professed rejection of autonomous cultural or national spheres

within the political idea represented a shift from his activism in Palestine,
where he advocated the construction of autonomous national cultural
communities in the Land of Israel.
Did Kohn make a clear break from his earlier views, especially around
the question of the role of group solidarity in promoting ethical progress
and humanism? If so, it would be quite easy to understand his hesitation to
define America as a nation of nationalities. The stubborn refusal of ethnic,
religious, and national bonds to dissolve their sense of solidarity undermined
his vision for Zionism and peaceful integration in Palestine. Despite his ide-
alistic blinders and tremendous faith in the power of the idea—the force that
strips away differences by upholding the cohesive power of unity—Kohn
had witnessed its limitations. The realization of the idea of nationalism, he
concluded after witnessing a failed experiment in Palestine, demanded the
eradication of particular solidarity, not national cultural autonomy.
Promoting counterstate nationalism threatened the universalizing tra-
jectory of the idea of nationalism. Unlike Kaplan and Rawidowicz, Kohn
no longer championed the paradoxical conclusion that national cohesion
outside of statehood paved the way for human integration. America would
avoid the error of Zionism by discouraging the retention of multiple eth-
nic, historical, and religious groups that might challenge the principles of
liberal democracy as primary grounds of national cohesion. Jettisoning the
theoretical contortions necessary to reconcile Jewish nationalism with uni-
versal integrationism—a logical inconsistency that remained unresolved
in Kohn’s Zionism—would have most likely brought welcome relief. Kohn
would have been able to fully embrace the conclusion of the classic political
thinker John Stuart Mill that ethnonational uniformity within the polity is a
necessary condition for establishing and safeguarding liberal principles. In
America, the cultural nationalist became a cosmopolitan humanist. Such a
reading also fits well into Kohn’s reputation as the founder of a civic nation-
alism that stands in direct opposition to ethnic, or cultural, varieties. Kohn,
this narrative suggests, redefined American nationalism in direct opposi-
tion to the cultural basis he had championed during his Zionist stage.
“A Nation of Many Nations”:

Kohn’s Enduring Commitment to Cultural Particularism
Kohn’s apparent journey from being an advocate of ethnonational diversity
within the polity to promoting the melting pot was not a complete reversal
of his earlier position on the importance of national solidarity at a substate
level. American Nationalism (and other writings from the last two decades

of Kohn’s life) includes a subtle counternarrative that nuances an association
of Kohn with a level of complete assimilation suggested by the melting-pot
concept. Indeed, comments throughout American Nationalism suggest a
vision of diversity in the United States that was quite close to Kallen’s nation
of nationalities that Kohn described as “going far beyond anything envis-
aged by the American national idea.”110 Kohn retained a proclivity toward
ethnocultural diversity within the framework of the state. The tension-filled
link between particular cultural solidarity and universal political rights did
not disappear in his work. It is Kohn’s very ambiguity about the relationship
between the particular and the universal that demonstrates the continuity
with his similarly conflicted relationship with Zionism.
Only a few pages before rejecting Kallen’s vision of America as a nation
of nationalities, Kohn defined the character of America as “a land with
open gateways, a nation of many nations,” characteristics that “became
as important for American nationalism as its identification with the idea
of individual liberty and its federal character.”111 Indeed, the book’s penul-
timate chapter, “A Nation of Many Nations,” highlights the centrality of
multiplicity in his concept of American nationalism. To support his claims
about the importance of national diversity, Kohn cites one of Kallen’s closest
conversation partners, fellow Zionist Sir Alfred Zimmern. “The people of
the United States,” Kohn quotes Zimmern as writing, “awoke to the strange
reality that, in spite of all the visible and invisible agencies of ‘assimilation,’
their country was not one nation but a congeries of nations such as the
world has never seen before within the limits of a self-governing state.”112
A “congeries” implies a far less organized mix of national groups than the
“federation of nationalities” language that Kallen included in his “Democ-
racy versus the Melting-Pot.”113 Yet anyone familiar with Zimmern’s writ-
ings on nationalism would have linked the comments about the congeries
to his broader vision of creating commonwealths or federations of nation-
alities that would recognize collective groups and secure individual rights
as the basis for international cooperation.
Kohn’s enduring appreciation for the position that denounced assimila-
tion and instead viewed national diversity as a necessary condition for the
spread of liberalism is evident in his emphasis on British liberalism as the
tradition he associated with the idea of nationalism.114 Kohn’s allusion to
Zimmern as a “British student of nationalism” accompanied other direct
references to British political thought as the bedrock of American nation-
alism. Kohn reminds his readers that, in opposition to the progressive pub-
lic intellectual Randolph Bourne’s concept of American nationality, “the
foundation of American national life was not a new cosmopolitanism but

the universalization of the English tradition of liberty.” The anglophilic ten-
dency in Kohn’s discussion of liberalism represents a critique of homogeni-
zation and uniformity and an enduring yearning for a federated approach
to international integration.
The British model (along with Swiss nationalism), he explained a few
years later in his autobiography, “has set an example of an affirmative
nationalism that emphasizes cohesive collective power, and yet is com-
patible with the preservation of individual liberty and a non-militaristic
society.”115 Two models that occur throughout Kohn’s post-Palestine career
are the British commonwealth period and Swiss federalism—both exam-
ples of governments that recognized the enduring relevance of nationality
outside of the state-seeking paradigm. They are precisely the two models
that a number of interwar counterstate cultural Zionists, including Kallen
and Zimmern, highlighted as the most progressive and ethical typologies
of nationalism.116 Kohn remained enamored with the models that served,
in addition to his earlier interest in Zionist binationalism, as exemplars of
nonstatist national autonomy within a multinational setting. References
to Zimmern, Kallen, and Bourne—all active participants in debates about
Zionism and internationalism in the early 1920s—suggest that Kohn’s
thinking about the United States remained shaped by the reference points
and intellectual positions that advocated for the preservation of national
identity in the United States, Europe, and Palestine.
Why does Kohn explicitly reject cultural pluralism as a pillar of democ-
racy and liberalism, while integrating aspects of its message and even ref-
erences to thinkers he must have known shared many of Kallen’s views?
One possibility is that Kohn viewed the United States as exceptional—a
country that did not need to pass through the temporary stage of a federa-
tion of nationalities necessary for other political entities to reach a higher
level of integration. I suggest an alternate possibility: Kohn intentionally
downplayed his support for the preservation of minority groups. This
move makes sense within the historical context within which he published
American Nationalism. Written in 1957, the book was formulated imme-
diately after the McCarthy era. Kohn’s having experienced these official
probes of “un-American” activities made him realize that this was a deli-
cate moment to advocate for ethnonational diversity as a challenge to a
unifying principle of U.S. nationality (especially for a Jewish thinker who
had identified with socialist circles in the 1920s).
Kohn’s critique of Kallen and his integration of the popular notion of
the melting pot provided cover to make a muted argument against ethno-
national conformity and to endorse a vision of pluralism within the United

States. Kohn strategically aligned the melting-pot concept with sharing
common political ideals instead of cultural or ethnic ties. As a result, the
outcome of social integration was not ethnic, religious, ideological, or cul-
tural uniformity. The melting-pot concept in the political sphere left open,
and even encouraged, preserving the collective consciousness of minority
groups.117 Kohn transvalued the melting-pot idea to more closely match
his own idea of nationalism as unity through multiplicity, rather than uni-
formity. The distinction between political and cultural expressions as the
basis for American democracy and nationalism was far closer to the dis-
tinction articulated in Kallen’s classic “Democracy versus the Melting-Pot”
than Kohn acknowledges.
Kohn’s expression in his later work of nationalism as political, rather
than cultural, seems to represent a complete reversal of his earlier position.
Yet the value of cultural diversity, while certainly muted, remains visible in
his formulations. It is evident in Kohn’s ambiguous position regarding the
role of counterstate national groups. Whether strategically thought out or
unconsciously included as a reflection of his own internal ambivalence, this
tension underscores an important dimension in Kohn’s political thought.
He is not opposed to cultural diversity; he is against nationalism that leads
to a “distortion of perspective and to the over-valuation of the distinctive-
ness of national history and of national character.”118 This is a subtle distinc-
tion, clarified by viewing Kohn in the larger context of his lifelong sense of
allegiance to the Zionism of Buber and Ahad Ha’am.
Kohn’s association of nationalism with liberalism, universalism, and
civic principles does not entail cultural uniformity. Nor does the replace-
ment of tribal ethnonationalism by political civic nationalism imply the
elimination of groupness and cultural diversity. Universal political ties
uniting citizens of the state and the preservation of particular cultural ties
are not either/or positions.119 Collective attachments, as the cultural Zion-
ists had taught, promoted moral ends. Making this differentiation in his
later work is crucial because it prevents the error of linking rejection of
Zionism with a rejection of the importance of preserving groupness out-
side of statehood. This was Kohn’s understanding of the lasting relevance
of such thinkers as Ahad Ha’am, who taught that one could live “fully and
freely only as a member of a nation.”120 Even though Kohn describes Ahad
Ha’am as “equal to Mill,” he makes a clear distinction in the implications of
Ahad Ha’am’s liberalism as distinct from Mill’s variety.
Cultural diversity across political and territorial boundaries was a key
ingredient in preserving individual freedom. Gone from Kohn’s references
to Zionism are the references to “blood,” but, at the same time, he shows far

stronger appreciation for Jewish peoplehood, historical links, and religious
community. Kohn’s position on Ahad Ha’am in 1962 was even more sensi-
tive to the need of preserving a particular historical and religious culture.121
Ahad Ha’am’s message—promoting a liberalism that recognizes, and even
endorses, counterstate nationalism—remained relevant until the end of
Kohn’s career.
Kohn never fully resolved the tension between universal political prin-
ciples and national cultural attachments. But his unwillingness to consis-
tently distinguish between the competing outlooks represents a funda-
mental continuity with his earlier work and reflects the enduring mark of
his efforts to square Jewish nationalism with humanism. The theoretical
challenge of creating an inclusive, tolerant, and progressive paradigm of
nationalism prevented the construction of a systematic reconciliation of
particular and universal allegiances. Instead, the Zionist Hans Kohn and
his internationalist alter ego Paul Colin tugged the cosmopolitan wanderer
in opposing directions throughout his career.
A New Perspective on Kohn’s Legacy

By the end of his career, in defining his ideals of Zionism and American
nationalism Hans Kohn appeared to have taken intellectual paths diamet-
rically opposed to those of Mordecai Kaplan or Simon Rawidowicz. Kohn’s
emphasis on replacing religious, ethnic, or racial concepts of American-
ness with an affirmation of individual equality (as opposed to European
ethnic nationalisms) contributed to a narrative of what it means to be an
American. In contrast to Europe, the United States would promise its citi-
zens an unprecedented degree of tolerance by promoting integration and
dissolving “groupness.”
The distinction between civic nationalism and ethnic nationalism gen-
erated a dichotomy that questioned the moral efficacy of national attach-
ments other than those of citizenship and civic rights. Kohn’s formula-
tion of universal humanism as the basis for American nationalism in 1957
helped set the foundation for Jewish communal life in the United States
as a religious minority group with full individual rights.122 Kaplan and
Rawidowicz sought narratives of liberalism and nationalism that would
empower American Jews to imagine their own collective status outside the
limited personal sphere of religious creed. Ironically, Kohn’s integration of
a stream of German Zionism committed to breaking the sovereign mold
contributed to shaping a discourse that would suppress the possibility of
Jewish collectivity by aligning patriotism and particularism.

Clearly there were other major differences between these thinkers. Kohn
lacked the same attention to the experiential, day-to-day attributes of group
life and national culture. His theory suffered from a relative insensitivity
to the power that religious and cultural bonds hold over individuals. As a
result, he considered it possible to externalize his own cosmopolitan ability
to effortlessly travel between various linguistic and cultural worlds as a citi-
zen of the world. His interest in national cohesion was primarily theoreti-
cal (the idea of collective ties) and instrumental (providing security against
totalizing claims of nationalism). This difference certainly reflects the bio-
graphical contrast between Kohn, Kaplan, and Rawidowicz. From their
formative years of studying Judaism with their fathers, both Rawidowicz
and Kaplan developed strong personal and familial ties to Jewish life. This
attachment nourished their enduring commitment to national boundaries
even in the face of strong humanistic impulses that challenged the moral
validity of particular preservation.
These emotional and psychological attachments to Judaism motivated
an intellectual project to develop a concept of nationalism that also cel-
ebrated particular tribal differences as an integral component of fulfill-
ing the Jewish political mission. As the child of highly acculturated Czech
Jews, Kohn lacked the connection to Jewish traditions and Jewish commu-
nity that anchored Kaplan’s (and also Rawidowicz’s) universal visions of
Jewish communal life. Kohn lacked the historical pull, emotional attach-
ment, or religious convictions that characterized the particular connec-
tions instilled in Rawidowicz and Kaplan.
But Kohn also expressed sentiments in the last fifteen years of his life that
suggest an additional dimension of his understanding of Jewish peoplehood
than the one implied by his legacy. Far from getting further detached from
the question of Jewish nationalism as time passed from his earlier involve-
ment in Zionism, Kohn reengaged with the Jewish nationalism that had
shaped his formative thoughts. He tempered his own earlier declarations
of rejecting Zionism (expressed in letters and comments written immedi-
ately after the painful process of leaving Palestine) with the insight that his
subsequent scholarship owed a debt to his Zionist mentors. Kohn contrib-
uted articles to the Menorah Journal and Commentary on Zionism, Jewish
nationalism, and Israel. He edited and introduced a volume of essays on
Ahad Ha’am, and reprinted (with a new foreword) his biography of Martin
Buber—the two Zionists who shaped his earliest writing.123
Writing for Jewish audiences, and through the mediation of discussing
the intellectual history of Zionism, Kohn acknowledged the central role
that Zionism had on his political thought. In a new 1961 edition of his

Buber book that notes that even though Kohn (he refers to himself as the
“author”) parted ways with Buber, he nonetheless acknowledges the impact
of “this unique Jewish German teacher upon him and all the generation.”124
Two years earlier he had written an article in Commentary about the rel-
evance of Ahad Ha’am that concluded:
But there cannot be any doubt that this little-known Hebrew writer belongs
in the age of nationalism to the small company of men of all tongues who
in their unsparing search for truth and in the sobriety of their moral real-
ism are the hope of the future. Perhaps none has expressed their attitude
better than he did as far back as 1907 when few other men recognized these
danger signals as clearly as he.125
The relevance of the prophetic, ethical Zionism promulgated by Buber and

Ahad Ha’am did not dissipate in importance.
These later ruminations on Jewish nationalism shared noteworthy par-
allels to the ongoing efforts by Kaplan and Rawidowicz to reorient post-
1948 Zionism. Kohn used the introduction to his essays on Ahad Ha’am
to demonstrate the validity, and enduring relevance, of his 1919 call for
an “interterritorial solution to the Jewish question.”126 Kohn commented:
“Might not perhaps the ‘abnormal’ existence of the Jews represent a higher
form of historical development than territorial nationalism? The Diaspora
has been an essential part of Jewish existence.”127 Kohn went on to exhort:
In both Israel and the Diaspora, the need to re-define this puzzling relation-
ship, to insure that it neither becomes narrowly political nor degenerates into
a vague sentimental attachment, has become increasingly pressing. Ahad
Ha’am’s type of compromise may someday be reached between the Diaspora’s
desire to be a free and equal partner in the making of modern Judaism, and a
Zionist Israel’s claim to historical and religious uniqueness.128
Kohn still believed in the value of affirming a Jewish peoplehood that

transcended homeland and diaspora settings. His vision of Zionism in this
1962 piece envisions a type of Zionism not so radically different from the
concept articulated in Kaplan’s New Zionism (1955) and Rawidowicz’s Bab-
ylon and Jerusalem (1957). All three thinkers focused on the disconnect
between the theory of statist Zionism and the reality of Jewish peoplehood
around the globe. Nation-state nationalism did not solve the Jewish ques-
tion. Kohn, echoing Rawidowicz’s concerns about the process of desacral-
izing the Jewish tradition, lamented that the Israeli-born youth “no longer

feel any particular affinity with the Jewish past.”129 Even though Kohn
framed his comments in the context of explaining Ahad Ha’am’s position,
his emphasis on a “free and equal partnership” implicitly rejected the cen-
ter-periphery model advocated by the cultural Zionist (reflecting the same
frustration Kohn had had with Ahad Ha’am since the 1910s).
The passionate connection that Kohn retained with the Zionists that
inspired his intellectual journey suggests that, from his perspective, Zionism
moved away from him far more radically than he moved from it. Despite
Kohn’s marginalization from the organized Zionist movement, he remained
passionate about spreading his understanding of Judaism and its political
message. As Kohn himself wrote about his teaching plans shortly after offi-
cially breaking with the Zionist movement, “I wish to give the basis for a
deeper understanding of the eternal forces, of the spiritual and ethical values
of Judaism.”130 Although Kohn felt that Zionism could not be the rightful
bearer of the political idea of Judaism, he still believed that his interpretation
of the Jewish political idea, shaped by the cultural Zionism of Ahad Ha’am
and Buber, had an important role to play. Note Kohn’s willingness to distin-
guish between his frustration with the direction of the Zionist movement
and his enduring commitment to the thinkers and ideas he had associated
with Zionism. While breaking from the former, Kohn would continue to
align himself with many of the teachings espoused by the latter.
This bifurcated relationship to Jewish political thought reveals itself in
Kohn’s nuanced understanding of his relationship to Zionism, which is far
more subtle than the assumption that his departure in 1929 signified a radi-
cal break. At various points in his post-Palestine writings, Kohn uses Jew-
ish nationalism itself to represent both sides of the dichotomy between
good and bad nationalism. He did not reject Zionism; rather, he rejected
“the pseudo-messianism and modern nationalism [that] had gained the
upper hand over the realism and the ethos of Ahad Ha’am’s Zion.”131 Kohn
continued to make a distinction that became less and less relevant as coun-
terstate Zionism moved beyond the parameters of Zionism. There is a lot
at stake for historians in considering to what degree Kohn’s two careers (as
a German Zionist and as an American nationalist) represent intellectual
continuity or discontinuity. Figures like Kohn are the most difficult to inte-
grate into Zionist history. Borderline cases, who might not have been so
borderline in their own lifetime, raise questions about the ideological clar-
ity of Zionism in the prestate period. Understanding Kohn as abandoning
Zionism and going in a radically new direction reinforces a historical pic-
ture of Zionism neatly defined as a state-seeking ideology in all its pre-1948
expressions.

Kohn’s case has an interesting parallel in understanding another émigré
German Jewish intellectual, the influential political theorist and Zionist Han-
nah Arendt. As the Jewish historian Steven Aschheim has explained, until
rather recently Arendt’s intimate relationship with Zionism had been largely
erased from the Zionist narrative as well as from the history of her political
thought.132 When Kohn arrived in America, he found in Arendt a thinker
who shared both his passionate connection to Zionism and a frustration
with developments in the yishuv. In the early 1940s the two worked together
to prepare a volume of essays dedicated to Judah Magnes, one of the found-
ers of Brit Shalom. They were both involved in the Judah Magnes Founda-
tion, which promoted the ideas of Ihud, the organization that succeeded Brit
Shalom in advocating for a binational state solution for Palestine.
Although Kohn was about fifteen years Arendt’s senior, the two shared
a similar path from German Zionism to American scholarship. Arendt
never moved to Palestine; however, she became interested in Zionism in
the early 1930s (precisely the moment that Kohn officially left the move-
ment), as the Nazis rose to power in Germany. Her work on totalitarian-
ism shared Kohn’s critique of “tribal nationalism” and hailed the “decline
of the nation-state.”133 Her liberal nationalism and critique of national sov-
ereignty was, as the historian Amnon Raz Kotzkin has explained, inte-
grally connected to her views on Zionism. “She developed her binational
views as she thought about and wrote The Origins of Totalitarianism,” wrote
Kotzkin, “and should thus be considered as part of the same project, an
attempt to implement the conclusions of her historical analysis in a con-
crete realm.”134
Kotzkin’s conclusion about the intimate relationship between Arendt’s
Zionism and her contributions to modern intellectual history (part of a
larger trend in Arendt historiography to underscore the role of her Jewish
experiences in her work) recovers the importance of considering ethnic
concerns in the production of mainstream scholarship. Intellectual biogra-
phy is crucial for revealing the personal experiences and intellectual rela-
tionships that shaped Zionist thinkers, even those who ultimately differed
with the direction of the movement. A more expansive view of historical
Zionism provides the opportunity to trace the far wider circles that Zionist
thought touched, precisely among those figures whose concepts of Zion-
ism needed to find alternate areas after Zionism marginalized their own
position. Failed visions of Zionism developed into highly successful theo-
ries of nationalism, modernism, and political history.
Reintegrating Kohn’s career has important normative implications out-
side of Jewish history in the field of political theory. The continuities in

Kohn’s concept of nationalism correct a misconception associated with his
legacy. Kohn is remembered for a sharp refutation of cultural nationalism.
As a result, a number of recent works have been written partially as cor-
rectives to the dichotomy associated with Kohn’s legacy. For example, John
Hutchinson’s study of cultural nationalism specifically attacks Kohn for
engendering a deep scholarly antipathy toward cultural nationalism. Kohn
undermined the importance and moral attributes of cultural nationalism,
Hutchinson argues, by insisting that tribal or cultural bonds remained far
less sophisticated grounds for national identity than the cosmopolitan
premise of political nationalism. In opposition to Kohn, Hutchinson cites
cultural nationalism’s roles as “moral innovators” in the modern struggle
for ethical progress.135 Another sharp critique of Kohn considers his idea of
universal progress as misleading and ultimately detrimental for achieving
his own vision of equality.136
The legacy of the Kohn dichotomy between civic and ethnocultural con-
cepts overemphasizes the categorical distinction between universal bonds
nourished through citizenship and particular bonds that transcend state
and territorial boundaries. Indeed, Kohn grappled with precisely the core
issue of contemporary theories of nationalism—the yearning to under-
stand the place of groupness within the liberal polity. His legacy got caught
in precisely the choice he avoided (often by retaining contradictory claims)
between cultural autonomy and integration, national chauvinism and uni-
versal humanism, diaspora and homeland, and liberalism and nationalism.
It is a great historical irony that Kohn popularized the conceptual termi-
nology that erased the ambiguities he upheld until the end of his life.
Associating Kohn’s legacy with cultural humanism more accurately
reflects Kohn’s interest in reconciling what have become oppositional
poles. Kohn did erode the historical legitimacy of certain assertions made
by national groups—particularly those linked to territorial or biological
claims. He did not, however, believe that retaining national culture and
solidarity was antithetical to liberal principles or greater levels of human
integration. Establishing an opposition between civic and ethnic typolo-
gies erases this crucial distinction in Kohn’s thought.
If Kohn’s legacy is connected to a dichotomy, it should be one that differ-
entiates between counterstate and statist conceptions. For Kohn, counter-
state nationalism was an important protection against the totalizing threat
of national sovereignty, whether grounded in an ideology of universalism
or particularism. Zionist thought, and the personal experience of alien-
ation Kohn encountered as a Jew in early-twentieth-century Europe, left
him with an appreciation for the limits of both liberalism and Romantic

nationalism. Preserving a categorical distinction between nation and state,
rather than blurring the lines between the political and cultural concepts,
would ensure an appropriate balance between diversity and equality. Kohn,
like Rawidowicz and Kaplan, understood Zionism as a framework for
contesting the sovereign mold and affirming the morality of counterstate
nationalism. The lessons learned from these three approaches to address-
ing the dilemmas of nationality are the subjects of the final chapter of this
exploration of Zionism and the roads not taken.
from german zionism to american nationalism: hans kohn 17 7

— 6 —
Zionism, Jewish Peoplehood,

and the Dilemmas
of Nationality in a Global Era
In 1955, only a few years after the establishment of the State of Israel,
Mordecai Kaplan lamented the absence of a “concept of a uniting bond
which so far has not received official recognition, nor achieved general
understanding.”1 In order to address this pressing problem, Kaplan urged
those reading his book A New Zionism to heed his call for a future world
conference that would agree on a particular category “as the appropriate
one for the Jewish corporate entity to assume.”2 Unwilling or unable to
settle on one specific recommendation, Kaplan proposed a number of pos-
sibilities, including “people,” “corporate entity,” “international group or fel-
lowship,” “transnational group,” “spiritual organism,” “ethical nation,” and
“national civilization.”3
Why was Kaplan so desperate to introduce, and legitimate through a
world conference, a new language of Jewish collectivity a few years after
the creation of a Jewish state? Why not speak of Jewish nationalism or
Zionism as the key terms for describing Jewish unity in the new age of
statehood?
The establishment of the state left Kaplan deeply conflicted. Until the
United Nations passed a resolution in 1947 calling for the establishment of
a Jewish state (and even throughout the War of Independence), statehood
was not certain and the ideological parameters of Zionism remained mal-
leable. The signing of the Israeli Declaration of Independence presented
a major obstacle to the hope that Zionism would introduce a radically
different model of nationalism, a new political program, into the world.
Kaplan, and other theoreticians of Zionism who had pioneered alternate
collective boundaries (such as shared language, religious folkways, and
178 zionism and 178

the roads not taken
civic principles) now had to contend with a plot of land and national sov-
ereignty. The conceptual vocabulary of Zionism as it was now understood
would no longer provide enough ambiguity to highlight the unique politi-
cal mission of Judaism as a national civilization.
As a result, Kaplan needed to alter his strategy for disarticulating nation
and state as the universal message of Zionist ideology. Only by distinguish-
ing state-seeking Zionism from his counterstate variety could Kaplan real-
ize his vision of reconfiguring the relationship between Americanism and
Judaism and between Jews living inside and outside the borders of the State
of Israel. Thus, despite the title of his book (A New Zionism), Kaplan’s con-
ception of Zionism was not new at all. What was new was his perceived
need to differentiate his own understanding of Jewish nationalism from
the now victorious state-seeking paradigm. The struggle to theorize appro-
priate terminology to preserve national status for Jews (as well as the cen-
trality of the Jewish homeland) as Zionism’s association with sovereignty
solidified occupied him for the rest of his career.
Broader historical trends further compounded Kaplan’s search for a new
language of Jewish collective identity. World War II eroded the remnants
of multinational empires that had continued to maintain political control
of diverse populations through the so-called mandate system. Moreover,
the economic and political influence of the Cold War superpowers rein-
forced the doctrine of national sovereignty as the dominant organizing
principle of international relations. States, supported by one of two super-
powers, exerted political control over their own populations and muffled
the nationalist claims of ethnic minorities. These forces further eroded
the analytical distinction between nation and state. Without conversation
partners in American and European political thought, Kaplan not only had
to alter how Jews thought about national identity, but also had to confront
the greatly constricted meaning of nationalism in political thought more
broadly.
As fellow proponents of the ideal of counter-state nationalism, Kohn
and Rawidowicz also experienced similar moments of recognition that
the roads they envisioned Zionism taking—namely, working toward the
distinction between nation and state—had been blocked. Their interwar
visions of a third road in Jewish life, one that navigated between national
assimilation in the diaspora and national autonomy in the homeland by
formulating boundaries of Jewish national membership as a form of cohe-
sion distinct from political bonds and territorial boundaries, could not
bridge the historical and ideological ruptures of the mid-twentieth century.
But few others shared their concerns. No meeting to find a vocabulary for
zionism, jewish peoplehood, and dilemmas of nationality 179

the “Jewish corporate entity” ever took place. Few practitioners cared as
deeply as they did about theorizing nation beyond state in the 1950s.
Would it make sense to convene such a conversation today as the corre-
lation between nation and state has once again become increasingly blurry?
Yes, this conclusion argues. Global Hebraism, national civilization, and cul-
tural humanism decades ago addressed what remains a key question: What
does national identity, or more broadly, a primary sense of solidarity and
allegiance to a particular group, mean when disconnected from the purely
political objective of self-government? In addition to anticipating many of
the issues and strategies now being explored by scholars and politicians,
these formulations of Jewish nationalism also reveal important weaknesses
and limitations of the contemporary discourse of difference. Moreover, one
specific strategy utilized by Rawidowicz, Kaplan, and Kohn for negotiating
dominant categories of identity is still in use. All three contested categories
of Western political thought by constructing theories of Judaism and Zion-
ism. This program reveals a subterranean strategy in modern Jewish politi-
cal thought that endures in the writings of a number of leading American
Jewish and Israeli public intellectuals today. Finally, rehabilitating global
Hebraism, national civilization, and cultural humanism offers a diagnos-
tic tool and sample road map for considering a new language of Zionism
and Jewish peoplehood that meets present realities. Before addressing these
issues, let us return briefly to Rawidowicz, Kaplan, and Kohn to explore the
insights gleaned by analyzing the fate of their legacies in Jewish and non-
Jewish thought during the second half of the last century.
What Happened to the Roads Not Taken?

Rawidowicz would have sympathized with Kaplan’s call to introduce new
language for defining the “Jewish corporate entity.” As discussed in chapter
3, Rawidowicz expressed his terminological concerns directly to David Ben
Gurion by denouncing the prime minister’s decision to name the new state
Israel—a choice heavily influenced by Ben Gurion’s need to link nationhood
and statehood (whether or not Rawidowicz would have been interested in
attending Kaplan’s conference is another question. I imagine he would have
still considered Kaplan far too much of an adapter of the American concept
of religion and not sufficiently committed to the diaspora as a complete equal
to Jewish life in Palestine to have joined Kaplan’s plan for a conference).
Prime Minister Ben Gurion, even with the duties of running the young
country, took time out to write a handful of responses to Rawidowicz indi-
cating his firm belief that Israel was in fact the appropriate name for the
state (see chapter 3). Other than the retort directly from the prime minister,

Rawidowicz’s opposition to the name of the state fell on deaf ears. Few
today would even realize that the name of the state was ever up for dis-
cussion, let alone an ideologically charged decision with repercussions for
what it means to be a member of the nation of Israel.
Rawidowicz’s decision to leave the final chapter of Babylon and Jerusa-
lem unpublished indicates that by the 1950s he already recognized that his
questions about the state’s legal efforts to limit the Arab population were
touching an emerging communal taboo. Rawidowicz conceded that his
own ideal of holding Jewish theories of nationalism to the same standards
regarding minority populations was already far outside the parameters of
either an Israeli or American audience.
But Rawidowicz was less willing to acknowledge that it was not only his
particular criticism of the new state that marginalized his views. Indeed,
Babylon and Jerusalem’s vision of a Hebrew-speaking, textually rich Jewish
culture with centers in the homeland and diaspora was itself completely out
of synch with the ideological direction of American Jewish and Zionist pol-
itics. For opposite reasons, both communities had deeply vested interests in
aligning Jewish nationhood with statehood. The statist paradigm strength-
ened both communities’ developing self-narratives as Israeli sovereigns and
American Jewish subjects. Recognizing that the vast majority of the Jewish
nation had no intention of moving to the new state, Prime Minister Ben
Gurion responded by creating an ideology that overcompensated for the
exceptional characteristics of Jewish nationalism,4 and sought a term that
more closely linked the state to the existential condition of the Jewish peo-
ple.5 The concept of statism affirmed that the state was not only instrumen-
tal for promoting national culture and integrating members of the nation,
but was actually the most significant criterion for Jewish nationhood.
Why did the American Jewish community welcome Zionism’s post-1948
ideological opposition to the concept of nation beyond state? Ben Gurion’s
pronouncements about the risks of diaspora life and the centrality of ali-
yah (immigration to Israel) certainly did not appeal to American Jewish
immigrants, the majority of whom had no desire to leave the opportunities
the United States afforded them. Nation-state logic did appeal to American
Jews’ interest in denationalizing Jewish identity. The more closely Zionism
was aligned with the new state, and not with a national community in the
diaspora, the easier it would be to assuage anxieties about dual loyalties
and to promote a program of Americanization.
Focusing on the state normalized the construction of American Jewish
identity in a second way. A recognized national homeland supported claims
that American Jews had parallel experiences to those of other immigrant
groups, such as Irish, Polish, and Italian people. Echoing the rhetoric of

Israel as homeland—despite the obvious fact that the vast majority of Jews
had emigrated from European countries rather than from Palestine—bol-
stered the American–Jewish synthesis by facilitating the construction of an
ethnic identity linked to a homeland.6 Internally, support for the State of
Israel as the center of Jewish national life provided another benefit as well:
it became a symbol of the shared agenda of the community that galvanized
philanthropy and collective ties among a diverse population of American
Jews. Embracing a Zionism that rejected the notion of nation beyond state
matched the ideological agenda of both models of Jewish life. Both Ameri-
can Jewish and Israeli leaders had a vested interest in defining Zionism
through the logic of nation-state nationalism.
The legacies of Kaplan, Rawidowicz, and Kohn demonstrate the pro-
found effect that these narratives had on shaping popular and scholarly
memory in such a way that it erased, or domesticated, formulations of
counter-state nationalism in modern Jewish thought. Of the three, Ra-
widowicz was least interested in compromising his position, especially
on Hebrew language, in order to have an impact on a wider audience. As
a result, his global Hebraism was firmly outside the parameters of either
diaspora Judaism or state-seeking Zionism. Rawidowicz’s considerable
distance from either ideological pole left his reputation completely absent
from both camps.
A more complex process of interpretation characterized the reception
of both Kohn and Kaplan—two figures whose work was far too central to
American Judaism and Americanism to ignore fully. However, their lega-
cies have been cleaned up and reshaped to fit precisely the rigid categories
of Zionism and Americanism they struggled to complicate. Kaplan’s pre-
eminence as the American Jewish religious thinker par excellence and his
vocal support for Zionism erase his painful struggle with the definition of
Jewish nationalism espoused by state-seeking Zionists and his keen inter-
est in reforming American nationalism.
Kohn’s reception was fashioned in the opposite direction. The ambi-
guity in his work between universal integration and particular solidarity
chronicled in chapter 5 had little impact on the lessons learned from his
scholarship. Instead, Kohn’s success at replacing religious, ethnic, or racial
concepts of Americanism with an affirmation of individual equality (as
opposed to European ethnic nationalisms) contributed to a narrative of
assimilation as the hallmark of liberal nationalism. Instead of confounding
the dominant narratives of the American–Jewish synthesis or of American
liberalism and civic nationalism, Kaplan and Kohn stand as paradigmatic
examples of these ideological trends.

Interwar Zionism and Identity Politics Today
Assessing the shared quandaries that Rawidowicz, Kaplan, and Kohn faced
and contrasting the responses they formulated reveal the dilemmas of defin-
ing, legitimating, and negotiating categories of difference that arise when
what has become a fundamental assumption of nationalism—the one-to-
one correspondence between nation and state—disappears. The theoretical
benefit of the nation-state paradigm is its ability to provide concrete bound-
aries—such as citizenship, border controls, educational systems, cultural
policies, and language requirements—that mark expectations of national
membership. The nation-state model tends to diminish the relevance of
maintaining more than one primary national allegiance. An individual can
simply be categorized as a member or not. Identifying grounds for national
cohesion beyond the material characteristics typically underscored by the
doctrine of national sovereignty compels theorists to identify grounds of sol-
idarity outside geopolitical criteria. But what cohesive grounds delineate the
boundaries of national membership beyond these concrete features?
One of most interesting aspects of Zionists seeking to define nation
beyond state is their pioneering effort to grapple with this question. Their
theoretical challenge was compounded by the need to differentiate between
Jewish nationality and other potential categories of group difference, such
as religion and race. The process of translating the imprecise grounds
of what it meant to be a historical member of the people of Israel failed
to clearly match the established categories of Western political thought.
Nationality, at least in the minds of Rawidowicz, Kaplan, and Kohn, had
semantic elasticity that mirrored geographical diversity, complex connec-
tions to the Jewish tradition, and commitments to the particular and uni-
versal. Thus, all three theories sought hybrid categories sensitive to diverse
components of collective identity formation. For instance, they grappled
with finding theoretical vocabulary to explain psychological allegiances,
sociological attachments, and dimensions that could not be neatly divided
into religious, cultural, or ascriptive categories.
In articulating substitute conceptions, Rawidowicz, Kaplan, and Kohn
faced a language and logic problem: how to reconcile the positions they
regarded experientially as compatible with categories that regarded their
conflicting yearnings as incompatible. They responded by attempting to
alter the logic of national cohesion. This logic, especially as seen in dichoto-
mies such as religion versus nation, diaspora versus homeland, and human
versus particular allegiances, remains deeply embedded in the discourse of
nationalism and liberalism to this day.

Indeed, these categories continue to make it difficult for Jewish think-
ers to define collective boundaries that negotiate the poles of autonomy or
assimilation. The fact that Jews remain exceptions from categories of col-
lective exceptionalism indicates the enduring dominance of racial and ter-
ritorial criteria for articulating the grounds of difference. This is not merely
an issue for Jewish thinkers and leaders seeking a language for describing
Jewish collective solidarity. It also highlights a much more general bias that
fails to fully address the ties that bind communities not based around these
limited criteria.
With the ascendancy of multiculturalism, ethnic identity, and criticism
of cultural homogeneity, interest in rethinking the boundaries of group-
ness has grown dramatically. Ethnic studies have expanded the narrative of
American history in important ways. However, Jews’ perceived position of
privilege and racial integration places the Jewish case on the boundaries of
ethnic studies and the history of American pluralism. Trained during the
1960s and 1970s, the founders of ethnic studies justified the new field by
mapping hierarchies of power within the United States and giving voice to
disenfranchised communities. By the 1970s, American Jews had reached a
mainstream position. Because of this success, identifying the Jewish case as
exceptional helped distinguish the new field of ethnic studies from main-
stream American historiography.
Defining group identity through oppression, race, and class has been
a way to correct for historical mistreatment among minority groups. But
the tendency to focus on categories of identity as formulations constructed
to control or categorize certain populations severely limits the ability of
scholars and practitioners to justify grounds for solidarity other than vic-
timization or resistance.7
Scholars such as David Hollinger, Werner Sollors, and Kwame Anthony
Appiah have attempted to conceptualize group boundaries beyond the
racial paradigm so dominant in scholarship and public discourse today.
But Jewish collectivity once again finds itself in an awkward position vis-
à-vis models that advocate for “post-ethnic” groups formed by voluntary
engagement rather than descent-based criteria. In Judaism, there has
always been a tradition defined by both descent (through maternal line)
and consent (conversion). The Jewish case falls through the cracks of eth-
nic and multicultural studies: Jews are too well integrated into the main-
stream for consideration as a minority group, but too attached to descent
models for inclusion within the post-ethnic conceptions of difference.
There is a parallel problem raised by the specific criteria for collective
preservation and national identity proposed by one of the leading scholars

of multiculturalism, Will Kymlicka. Kymlicka, a strong supporter of minor-
ity rights, draws a clear distinction between immigrant groups and groups
whose territory has been disposed by an occupying power. Although the
latter may demand self-government, the former groups are expected to
integrate into their new homelands. Substantial differences may be socially
and legally tolerated; however, the ties that bind immigrants or religious
groups to one another remain secondary to patriotic uniformity. This is
a definition that does not apply well to the Jewish case, characterized by a
population divided by geography and language.8
Neither, surprisingly, do Jews have a clear place in the new field of
Diaspora Studies. Whereas immigrant Jews are too landless for Kymlicka’s
model, American Jews’ associations with the State of Israel leave them
on the margins of Diaspora Studies. Diaspora Studies has grown rapidly
in the last decade as a result of the tremendous interest in understand-
ing the identity construction of increasingly robust stateless communi-
ties. Diaspora constructions of identity tend to be defined in contrast to
those engendered by state models. Diaspora has come to represent identity
grounded in ethical bonds rather than state power, and geographically dis-
persed networks rather than territorial homelands.
By defining itself in opposition to nation-state nationalism, diaspora is
actually the flip side of assumptions about nationalism.9 The binary con-
struction of diaspora theory as the antithesis to national sovereignty thus
paradoxically limits the construction of diaspora to the very discourse it
attempts to overcome. Even scholarly usage of the term diaspora is actu-
ally a reflection of the same logic that creates a distinction between home-
land and periphery. This rubric leaves Jews perceived as linked to Zionism’s
nation-state identity, rather than identities of stateless and disenfranchised
populations.
Making the case for Jewish boundaries between national autonomy and
assimilation is quite difficult even at this moment of great interest in diver-
sity. On the one hand, Jews face the same challenges as other groups in
justifying particular preservation outside territorial and political bounda-
ries. The critique of essentialism and tribal allegiances undermines the his-
torical and moral basis for retaining particular solidarity. Yet Jews face an
added challenge. Categories of otherness that have moved into mainstream
scholarship and popular discourse to address the particular concerns of
certain groups, largely those linked by racial or geographic bonds, do not
apply to the Jewish case.
Global Hebraism, national civilization, and cultural humanism suggest
four ways to think differently about difference that would more accurately

reflect Jews and the increasing number of other groups whose collective
identities will endure despite challenges to their historical narratives. New
conceptual possibilities will continue to become more important as histor-
ical forces lead more groups to confound the rigid categories of difference
still based on racial and territorial distinctions.
First, the unmasking of essentialist claims that associated particular
characteristics with each national group does not necessarily erode collec-
tive consciousness. The historical turn in scholarship has contributed to a
severe critique of static collective boundaries or essentialist claims. This
trend undermines the validity of delineating collective borders and advo-
cating preservation of particular communities. Decades before the histori-
cal turn, and the consequent analysis of nationality as historically con-
structed, imagined, and invented, Kaplan, Kohn, and Rawidowicz challenged
notions that groups’ identities are constant, pure, and distinct.10 Their aware-
ness of this issue can most likely be traced to two factors: direct experience
of the exclusionary tendency of essentialist definitions of nationality, and a
long-standing intellectual commitment to historicism. Jewish political
thought, each contended, exemplified the possibility of balancing between
fixed and dynamic characteristics. Kohn established nationalism as the cor-
rective to descent-based definitions. The centrality of evolution in Kaplan’s
description of Jewish national civilization and Rawidowicz’s interest in
hermeneutic communities linked by dynamic interpretation rather than
established boundaries demonstrate both men’s attention to this dilemma.
All three arrived at a parallel strategy: the particular spirit that defines Jew-
ish collectivity is the process of dynamic change.11
As a systematic justification for national preservation, this paradoxical
definition of dynamism as the essence of Judaism has serious limitations.
But it demonstrates a desire to create a theoretical framework capable of
establishing the importance of national cohesion above other attachments
(such as citizenship or geographic proximity) and disabuses primordial
claims of changeless characteristics or fixed criteria of membership. The
lived experience of primary collective attachment has little to do with the
collective’s historical truth claims or the degree of acculturation, blurring
clear distinctions between groups that claim unique genealogies. Global
Hebraism, national civilization, and cultural humanism suggest the mov-
ing of nationalism studies beyond deconstructing the historical validity
of nationalists’ claims. Studying the Jewish experience demonstrates the
importance of evaluating the political role that constructions of nation-
alism actually play in negotiating the relationship between majority and
minority populations, the psychological reality of particular allegiances

even for cosmopolitan intellectuals, and the enduring social power that
collective allegiances hold on individuals.
Second, religion has the potential to sustain primary allegiances across
nation-state boundaries. One of the clearest aspects missing from conver-
sations about nationalism, ethnicity, and multiculturalism is religion. Many
political theorists today minimize the role that religion plays as a funda-
mental element in imagining national identity.12 Despite the increasingly
political, social, and cultural role that religious communities play in today’s
world, the enduring and robust ties that religious communities create are
largely underappreciated within debates about the politics of difference.13
The marginalization of religion is even more apparent within the discourse
of nationality, which rarely considers religion as one of the primary criteria
defining national consciousness. The hesitancy to fully take into account
the potential cohesive power of religious traditions illuminates a limita-
tion in Western political thought’s dichotomy between religion and nation.
Religious traditions, such as Judaism, have the potential to construct cul-
tural, social, and legal norms that promote bonds of solidarity that tran-
scend personal creed, voluntary associations, and territory.
The theory of national civilization reflects Kaplan’s interest in blurring
the categorical boundaries erected to distinguish between religion and
nationality. He championed religion not only as the unifying criterion of
the Jewish nation but also as the determinative element in any national def-
inition. For him, religion served as the basis for national identity because
he felt that religion fuels a far greater sense of shared identity than models
that rely on territorial cohesion or descent. The rigid dichotomy between
religion and secular nationality reflected Western political thought’s com-
promise with the theological–political dilemma. The characteristics dis-
tinguishing these two categories, as imagined by political theorists of the
time—private and public, this-worldly and next-worldly, coercion and
voluntary, secondary and primary—failed to match Kaplan’s experience of
Jewish collective identity. In reducing religious communities to voluntary
groups unified by private creed and moral education, religious bonds lose
the power of coercion and the possibility of demanding primary allegiance
from their constituents.
Rather than opposing categories, Kaplan posits religious traditions as
the cohesive core of national groups. This use of religion reflects his desire
to reconfigure the theological–political underpinnings of modern Jewish
thought and political thought more generally. Instead of accepting a sep-
aration of church and state, Kaplan saw the coexistence of parallel reli-
gious civilizations. By bridging religion and nationhood in this way, he

demonstrated that the separation of religion and nationality into distinct
categories, with the latter creating more powerful cultural and political
ties, was a rather arbitrary division that failed to match religion’s claims in
many social, political, and cultural aspects. At the same time, he internal-
ized the limited role of religion that he struggled to overcome. Judaism as a
religious civilization could at best expect its members to submit to volun-
tary coercion.
The overlapping rather than mutually exclusive relationship between
religion and nation in Kaplan’s thought anticipated the lasting force of
religious communities as consequential challenges to the nation-state’s
authority. The specific path that the fusion of religion and collective ties
would take, however, has not developed as Kaplan predicted. His civiliza-
tion model augured an increasing link between religion and nationhood
that would affirm the cosmopolitan, pluralistic, and constructed nature of
both categories of group identity. However, in overcoming the dichotomy
created following the Enlightenment, an illiberal model of religious ties
has erupted to challenge the dominance of nationality as a primary alle-
giance. Kaplan deeply underestimated the role that a commanding, anti-
modern, and particularistic God would play in fracturing the theologi-
cal and political compromise that had been worked out in the eighteenth
and nineteenth centuries. Considering religion as an integral component
in galvanizing collective solidarity complicates efforts to synthesize lib-
eralism and nationalism. Yet, to ignore religion’s cohesive power, which
transcends race, citizenship, and space, undermines nationalism’s ability to
address an increasingly critical basis of individual allegiances to minority
communities and transnational groups.
Third, territorial models must be replaced by global conceptions of
national networks. Diaspora Studies itself remains too integrally linked to
the sovereign mold to consider the possibility of erasing the concept of
center-periphery based on geography. Neither position fully escapes the
assumptions of the sovereign mold: one must either accept its assumptions
or define itself in direct opposition to those assumptions. Although the
conceptual vocabulary for considering nationality is quite large, the pos-
sibility of a nationality that views diaspora and homeland as equal partici-
pants in the national drama remains a neglected area of study.
Counterstate Zionists, particularly those adhering to the theory of global
Hebraism, offer another approach that more accurately reflects the inter-
connectedness rather than the unidirectional movement of social, intellec-
tual, and political networks. Rawidowicz rejects a categorical distinction
between homeland and diaspora as a false dichotomy. Space and territory

contribute to national membership. But he also affirms the possibility of
creating such spaces in multiple locations that eschew hierarchies based on
center and periphery criteria. This model of heterogeneous, fluid, and local
communities, rather than a fixed territorial center, offers a conception that
has few analogues in contemporary political theory. The spatial dimension
of national cohesion does not necessarily reflect an all-or-nothing choice
between total national life in the homeland and attenuated national cohe-
sion in the diaspora. Collective cohesion can be experienced, as it was by
Rawidowicz, through more local and permeable boundaries. Acknowledg-
ing the links between homeland and diaspora communities is necessary
for formulating an organizational principle of collective identity.
Finally, one must reconsider the link between liberalism and national-
ism. The tension between these was not avoidable for counterstate Zionists
writing during the interwar period. Nationalism held out the promise of
collective recognition for Jewish minority populations, but also the threat of
promoting exclusive loyalties among the host population that could under-
mine Jews’ individual rights. Conscious of both audiences, all three think-
ers constructed Jewish political thought on a precarious theoretical foun-
dation that affirmed national solidarity as a primary allegiance for Jews,
without relying on grounds of national inclusion, such as coercive criteria
or ascriptive characteristics that might jeopardize liberal principles.
Rawidowicz, Kaplan, and Kohn developed a basic strategy for ratio-
nalizing this somewhat precarious theoretical position: Jewish national-
ism has always distinguished itself by espousing a particularism dedicated
to promoting equality and tolerance. The national mission of the Jewish
people was paradoxically rooted in the shared commitment to individual
rights, universal equality, and free choice of associations. Jewish particular-
ism stood on the vanguard of progress toward higher degrees of individual
autonomy and freedom from discrimination. Following this logic, Western
theories of liberalism and nationalism would have to adapt to more closely
reflect the Jewish model of ethical nationalism.
Rawidowicz and Kohn shared Kaplan’s conviction that national partial-
ity was fully compatible with an allegiance to humanity. For all three men,
their sense of Jewish national cohesion was intimately linked to their pas-
sion for addressing human concerns. The centrality of bridging the univer-
sal and particular through theories of national solidarity is evident in the
key terms they introduced. Rawidowicz’s right to be different, Kaplan’s ethi-
cal nationhood, and Kohn’s idea of nationalism all focused on the juxtaposi-
tion of universal ideals (rights, idea of ethics, and civic duties) as fully com-
patible with particular allegiances. This synthesis is one that liberal political

theorists remain hesitant to adapt. Zionism’s exploration of nation beyond
state anticipated one school of communitarian thinkers who have tried to
justify collectivity not through concrete boundaries of territory, descent, or
language, but through the moral efficacy of collective solidarity.
Global Hebraism supported the compatibility of liberalism and nation-
alism by critiquing the association of universal rights with universalism.
Rawidowicz viewed the preservation of the particular web of relationships
nourished by national bonds as a necessary component of individual deci-
sion making and freedom. Highlighting language and interpretation as the
basis of national membership made his conception of boundaries perme-
able and dynamic enough to avoid the exclusivist claims of illiberal nation-
alism. Language and textual immersion provided a robust apparatus for
uniting individuals, without building impermeable or coercive bounda-
ries. Rawidowicz’s strategy failed to take into account the erosion of the
linguistic fabric of collective life in the United States, however.
National civilization operated in the middle of the spectrum, in what
scholars now tend to call liberal nationalism or liberal multiculturalism.
Yet Kaplan struggled with a central conclusion articulated by subsequent
theoreticians: the severe restrictions on the internal authority of minority
groups to erect cultural or social signs of distinction. As discussed above,
the contemporary political theorist Will Kymlicka, for instance, has
rejected national rights for immigrants, and the nationalism scholar David
Miller has eschewed any efforts of “radical multiculturalism.” Miller cites
Jonathan Sacks, the chief rabbi of Great Britain whose book The Dignity of
Difference advocates for tolerance of religious differences, as his example
of minority communities making “unrealistic demands upon members of
the majority group.”14 Similar to immigrant groups, as opposed to colo-
nialized populations or oppressed racial groups, Jews fall into a category
that even theories of multicultural citizenship and liberal nationalism
have a difficult time granting anything more than a public sphere free of
discrimination. Kaplan’s move to national civilization may also have been
influenced by the knowledge that within the logic of immigrant accul-
turation, religious traditions have a much clearer claim on maintaining a
distinct status than other markers, such as homeland, language, or specific
cultural practices.
Kaplan fell into a bind symbolized by the blurred boundaries between
patriotism and cultural or social autonomy. There is no reason that a def-
inition of ethical nationhood should be defensive about acknowledging
the embrace of a particular language, culture, or even legal system. Yet the
forces of cultural uniformity as the measure of political unity continue to

dominate liberal theories of minority rights. Kaplan may have had a better
appreciation for the psychological power of cultural and linguistic reten-
tion among immigrants than those writing about ethical nationhood today.
As global demographic shifts continue to accelerate, communications and
travel improvements allow groups to retain a strong sense of interconnect-
edness. Kaplan’s pushing the acceptable limits of cultural difference within
the rubric of individual rights suggests the development of more robust
theories of multiculturalism that encourage particular ties and recognize
separate rights for minority groups.
Is this a sustainable balance? At the end of a century that has seen nation-
alist rhetoric fuel expansionist territorial claims, aggressive programs of
homogenization, and even ethnic cleansing, the morality of nationalism,
and especially religious expressions, remains a subject of much debate
today.15 Is it possible to argue that collective cohesion engendered princi-
ples of toleration and equality? Can one be a member of a particular group
and remain committed to the liberal principles of individual rights and
equal opportunities?
The Kohn dichotomy between ethnic and civic nationalism has been
interpreted as providing the theoretical basis for answering these questions
with a resounding no. Yet although Kohn did as much as any other mod-
ern scholar to solidify the dichotomy between particular and universal,
he himself was deeply ambivalent about their absolute opposition. Kohn’s
conclusion can be read as a cautionary tale about reifying the very delinea-
tion between civic and ethnic typologies of nationality that he introduced.
On a personal level, the civic and ethnic were integrally linked and shaped
his scholarship. His own experience as an intellectual able to simultane-
ously publish theories of Jewish nationalism in Hebrew and international
socialism in French demonstrates that formulations of collective cohesion
and universal integration coexisted quite amicably for interwar intellec-
tuals. Kohn’s biography may ultimately have far more to teach about the
compatibility of an enduring connection to a particular group and a com-
mitment to humanity than his theoretical musings on a clear dichotomy
between ethic nationalism and civic nationalism.
“Make Room for Us”:

Jewish Concerns and the Shaping of Nationalism
One of the most noteworthy lessons gained from analyzing global Hebra-
ism, national civilization, and cultural humanism is the opportunity to
better understand the relationship between Zionism and mainstream con-

ceptions of American identity and theories of nationalism. Particular for-
mulations of Zionism were calibrated to shape the meaning of key terms to
make space for Jews within the discourse of citizenship and nationalism.
National civilization, global Hebraism, and cultural humanism should not
be read as formulations attempting to overcome their proponents’ mul-
tiple allegiances, geographic dislocation, or conflicting attitudes toward
the state; rather, these theories negotiated, legitimated, and normalized
them.16
Thus, Jewish intellectuals did not passively translate Judaism into the
existing social and political spaces delineated by the state, concepts of lib-
eral democracy, or expectations of American nationalism. Zionist thought
has to be understood not only as the emulation and internalization of
dominant paradigms of identity formation but also, counterintuitively, as
a calculated strategy for resisting and reshaping external categories. Mar-
ginal voices motivated by ethnic concerns thus played an integral role in
constructing the mainstream discourse of Americanism and narratives of
nationality more generally.17
The fluid interchange between Jewish concerns and specifically Jewish
and specifically non-Jewish theories of collective identity allows a more
complex appreciation for the ways in which Jewish thought is shaped by
external categories permitted to Jews as minority groups in the United
States or citizens of a Jewish state. We can also see more critically how
mainstream counterproposals have reflected the perceived needs of the
Jewish community.
But why respond to these perceived limitations in notions of Ameri-
can political thought and launch complex negotiations about the mean-
ing of minority collective recognition within the state by theorizing about
Zionism or Jewish political thought? Turning to the sources of Judaism
is not the most obvious path toward advocating for greater space within
the sociopolitical framework of the host country. Rawidowicz, Kaplan,
and Kohn each had the training, interest, and opportunity to contribute to
general political theory without writing directly about the Jewish case.
Despite their ability, and at times their interest, in writing directly for a
non-Jewish audience, these thinkers (including Kohn, at least until he
moved to the United States) opted for a strategy of subverting mainstream
political thought through the specific lens of Judaism.
As noted within the preceding chapters, as much as global Hebraism,
national civilization, and cultural humanism claimed to emerge directly
from Jewish sources, in reality each theory imputed various ideological
positions and existing political vocabularies to Judaism. Challenging the

parameters of American nationality or augmenting the boundaries of Jew-
ish solidarity was far from a declaration of separatism or a rejection of the
existing paradigms. Indeed, the gravitational force of the desire for inte-
gration kept each theory tethered to the language and assumptions it ulti-
mately hoped to subvert. At the same time, Jewish nationality is portrayed
as the exemplar of the next stage in the development of nationality. This
creates an effective straw-man position that can resist dominant theories
of nationality by universalizing the Jewish experience.
Would anyone outside the Jewish community have paid attention to a
book on Jewish civilization as a serious work of scholarship on national-
ism? Rawidowicz’s and Kaplan’s inability to gain even the attention of the
Jewish community as political theorists indicates the difficulty of finding
an effective balance between highlighting and erasing Jews as an alternate
model of national cohesion. Kohn’s successful penetration, and the absence
of Kaplan or Rawidowicz from considerations of the evolution of Ameri-
can national identity or pluralism, also reflects this reality. Ultimately,
Kohn was the most successful at translating his vision of Jewish nationality
into public and scholarly debates. Yet his intellectual commitment to the
Jewish political tradition is only visible to readers aware of his earlier work
or cognizant of his placement of Jewish and Greek nationality as the pro-
genitors of what he considered the idea of nationality. To gain mainstream
acceptance, Kohn understood, Jewish intellectuals must downplay specifi-
cally Jewish concerns and present their work as addressing general issues.
This leads to a counterintuitive strategy for those intent on promoting Jew-
ish political thought as a vehicle for outlining additional space for Jewish
concerns within the liberal state: the optimal path to make room for us, it
seemed to Jewish intellectuals like Kohn, is to write for and about them.
This subterranean strategy—explored decades ago by Kaplan, Kohn,
and Rawidowicz to varying degrees of success—has created an enduring
stream of modern Jewish political thought. This stream of thought can be
observed among the disproportionate number of American Jewish and
Israeli political theorists whose Jewish concerns are evidenced by their
strong desire to bring Jewish political thought to a larger audience. The
explosion of interest in Jewish political thought among scholars indicates
a parallel quest for a new conceptual vocabulary of Jewish nationalism in
the theoretical literature.
Political theorist and public intellectual Michael Walzer provided a
glimpse into this rarely acknowledged phenomenon when he was asked
in 2006, “How does your interest in Jewish political studies relate to your
other research?” Walzer joked that he found Jewish studies an excellent

“escape” from the “endless business of studying John Locke.” He then con-
tinued: “All my writing about group attachment, cultural pluralism, and the
different ‘regimes of toleration,’ is, whatever else it is, an effort to develop
and defend a picture of the political world that makes room for us—specif-
ically, for a stateless people.”18
Walzer’s response suggests that the interwar intellectuals committed to
remapping the relationship between nationality and statehood left a para-
doxical legacy. The specific typologies of Zionism developed by Rawido-
wicz, Kohn, and Kaplan have been forgotten; however, the strategies they
pioneered for addressing the dilemma of reconciling national and human
allegiances have reemerged in new forms at the center of today’s debates
about identity formation. One of the primary vehicles for reshaping the
landscape of sovereignty, nationalism, and citizenship is theorizing about
the Jewish experience and its relevance to twenty-first-century scholarship
and politics. Making the case for how and why liberal societies can be more
sensitive to preserving minority groups is often argued by referring directly
to Jewish political thought as an alternate paradigm of national cohesion.
Walzer is part of a small, but highly influential, group of Israeli and Ameri-
can Jewish scholars seeking to disarticulate nation and state both inside
and outside of Jewish studies. Walzer has played a seminal role in promot-
ing this view through his editing, along with Israeli scholar Menachem
Lorberbaum, a four-volume compendium of sources and commentaries
that explore various aspects of Jewish political thought.19 Walzer’s stature
in the field helped him assemble a group of well-known political theorists
(including Harvard University professors Michael Sandel and Hilary Put-
nam, as well as political scientist and University of Pennsylvania president
Amy Gutmann) whose participation in the project gives it unique validity.
The compendium also gives validity to Jewish political theory as a tradi-
tion worthy of general scholarship.
The ambitious four-volume series, The Jewish Political Tradition, has
gathered an unprecedented anthology of writings on this topic. The diverse
selections, contextualized with commentaries by leading Jewish thinkers
and political theorists, provide a counternarrative to the ineluctable link
between centuries of Jewish political life and thought and statehood. The
volumes highlight the rich historical examples of Jewish polity in diaspora
communities, such as the existence of the Council of Four Lands that orga-
nized East European life for centuries. These sources demonstrate that
Jews in the diaspora were in fact political actors who developed sophisti-
cated strategies for preserving boundaries and communal polities outside
of concrete spatial and political borders.

Walzer’s explicit attempt to introduce the Jewish political tradition as
a relevant paradigm is not a phenomenon limited to such explicit efforts.
Indeed, parallel, yet slightly more subtle, examples of underscoring the
unique aspects of Jewish history and collective solidarity can be found in
the works of the disproportionate number of Jewish and Israeli intellec-
tuals theorizing about nationalism, liberalism, and communitarianism.
This cadre includes figures such as the author of Liberal Nationalism, Yael
Tamir (known in Israel as Member of Knesset Yuli Tamir), leading com-
munitarian advocates Amitai Etzioni and Shlomo Avineri, and national-
ism scholars Chaim Gans, Leah Greenfield, and Aviel Roshwald.20 These
individuals, many with clear links to Jewish or Israeli concerns, play a lead-
ing role in developing vocabulary for categorizing shared identities, cri-
tiquing liberalism’s focus on the individual at the expense of the collective,
promoting theories of nationalism that recognize enduring ties of solidar-
ity, and advocating for the pragmatic and moral necessity of nourishing
distinct collectives within democracies. Linking these public intellectu-
als with mid-twentieth-century Jewish intellectuals and their theories of
nationality raises fascinating questions about how Jewish concerns shape
mainstream scholarship in ways that make space for stateless communities
within liberal democracies.
What unifies this field of intellectual inquiry is a common interest in
probing ambiguous areas that push the conceptual vocabulary of both
nationalism and liberal political theory. In particular, these theorists erode
core assumptions of national sovereignty by questioning many of the same
dichotomies closely scrutinized by Rawidowicz, Kaplan, and Kohn, such as
sovereign versus subject, homeland versus diaspora, and patriotism versus
particularism. Jewish intellectuals formulate more expansive definitions
of religion that blur the boundaries between national and religious soli-
darities and reconcile the invented and historically constructed nature of
national solidarity with the preservation of group identity.21 Another com-
mon thread is the implicit claim that the Jewish political experience is uni-
versally relevant as a model for collective cohesion as the forces of glob-
alization accelerate the erosion of national communities within political
boundaries.22 The adoption of Jewish political thought echoes the efforts
of Kaplan, Kohn, and Rawidowicz to normalize Jewish tradition by trans-
forming its exceptional qualities into universally applicable models.
But why is there a resurgence of Jewish intellectuals interested in break-
ing the sovereign mold at a moment when the Jewish question has been
resolved? Walzer’s perceived need in 2007 to make room for us is a surpris-
ing echo of Kaplan’s call almost a century earlier to make American

democracy safe for Judaism. Surely U.S. democracy has proven itself quite
safe for Jews since Kaplan penned his warning. Moreover, there are far
more theoretical avenues for fragmenting the claims of national homoge-
neity than the interwar period during which Kaplan, Kohn, and Rawido-
wicz wrote. A rich discourse of multiculturalism, minority rights, and plu-
ralism now exists to categorize groups and to challenge monocultural
claims. Walzer’s reference to Jews as a stateless people is also perplexing,
now more than sixty years after the establishment of the State of Israel.
Thus neither the explosion of interest in the politics of difference nor the
establishment of a Jewish state has successfully addressed the question of
Jewish collective membership in an age of two thriving, and fundamentally
different, Jewish polities.
Although Jews are not the only stakeholders in this conversation, sev-
eral characteristics of the Jewish population—such as the split between
homeland and diaspora, the centrality of a religious tradition, the high
degree of social and economic integration, and the categorization as
white—marginalize Jews from the scholarly discourse of difference. The
case of Jewish collective identity within the liberal state is doubly margin-
alized. First, American Jews do not fit the model of a diaspora community
who emigrated directly from the homeland. Second, the Jewish experi-
ence does not fit clearly into rubrics of multicultural citizenship and ethnic
identities.23 Making space for Jews requires forging concepts of “otherness”
that reflect these attributes. Jewish intellectuals bring specific concerns to
debates about boundaries and identity formation. There is thus a theoreti-
cal bridge between Jewish thinkers’ efforts to break the sovereign mold in
the interwar period and American multiculturalism today. The formula-
tion and promulgation of a Jewish politics of difference recognize Jews as
a collective group in U.S. society, without the stigma and biases connected
to marking specific groups as “other.” Jewish political thought endeavors to
formulate a politics of difference that is both more cosmopolitan and more
particularistic than formulations proposed by other stakeholders.
The effort to bridge the human and the national represents a cosmo-
politan multiculturalism with two seemingly conflicting agendas: on the
one hand, Jewish intellectuals embrace liberal principles and democracy.
Difference, they argue, is not a rejection of universalism, but instead is the
most effective path for realizing Western political ideals. Finding universal
justifications for the particular serves to engender the construction of fluid
boundaries, such as religion, culture, and psychological attachment, rather
than the potentially separatist categories of race or ethnicity.24 At the same
time, however, we can also notice the opposite trajectory—imagining more

vigorous categories of difference that advocate for particular preservation.
Communities with deep historical roots, including religious associations,
have a legitimate interest in preserving more robust social and cultural net-
works. The boundaries of Jewish collective identity may be permeable, but
they remain authentic, distinct, and reflective of how acculturated indi-
viduals continue to experience strong ties.
Historicizing the relationship between Zionism, Jewish nationalism,
and Western political thought thus also sheds light on the subtle, yet con-
sequential, relationship between ethnic concerns and mainstream identity
categories. The historical strategy traced through this book of expressing
Jewish concerns through general theories of nationality has defined the
subsequent discourse of difference. Twentieth-century Jewish ideologies
forged a largely undetected intellectual tradition that has shaped (and con-
tinues to shape) central narratives of national identity and citizenship. Stu-
dents of American Judaism and American history alike might be surprised
to find significant vestiges of Jewish political ideologies—often stripped
and sanitized of their more separatist, idealistic, or explicitly nationalist
claims—embedded in the writings of American Jewish thinkers and lead-
ing public intellectuals never explicitly connected with Jewish nationalism.
Late-twentieth-century Jewish intellectuals, inspired by particular ethnic
concerns, have had a decisive impact on the transformation from nation-
state nationalism to multicultural citizenship. That Jews have largely
been erased from a discourse they themselves pioneered and continue to
shape is more than a historical irony. In reality, Jews’ tremendous success
at translating Jewish identity into the sovereign mold after World War II
by creating American Judaism and Israeli nationalism has left them out
of mainstream conversations about difference in the twenty-first century.
This reflects the limited language of difference that characterizes scholarly
and public conversations about identity today.
“What Will Become of the Jewish People?”

Since the late 1990s, the fragmentation of Jewish peoplehood has been
perceived as a pressing issue in Jewish communal discourse. “What will
become of the Jewish people?” was the topic of conversation at the United
Jewish Communities General Assembly in 2007, which included the com-
ments by A. B. Yehoshua that sparked the controversy discussed in chapter
1. A year earlier, sociologist Steven Cohen and historian Jack Wertheimer
asked, “Whatever happened to the Jewish people?” in a provocative arti-
cle lamenting an attenuated sense of collective solidarity among today’s

American Jews.25 Jewish and Israeli communal leaders drew up a covenant
declaring the “enduring ties that bind” the two centers of world Jewry.26
Most recently, the chancellor of the Jewish Theological Seminary, Arnold
Eisen, highlighted the promotion of a sense of peoplehood as one of the
primary goals of his tenure. There is a palpable anxiety about a diminish-
ing sense of ties that bind Jews to one another, and a concerted effort to
address what is perceived as a pressing issue in Jewish identity formation.
But what does peoplehood mean and how is it measured?
Kaplan never succeeded in organizing a conference to define the lan-
guage of Jewish collective organization. Yet he did succeed in contribut-
ing the term peoplehood that has gained rather widespread currency as
the term for referring to Jewish solidarity and collectivity. However, his
term has been adopted today without a historical consciousness of Kaplan’s
hesitancy about statehood and his desire to promote a theory of nationality
compatible across the diaspora–homeland divide. As discussed at the start
of the chapter, Kaplan proposed peoplehood to stand in for nationhood
after his initial term became too closely associated with statehood. There
is a telling historical irony in the fact that one of the primary barometers
of peoplehood today is measured by interrogating diaspora Jews about
their sense of connection to the Jewish state. This shift in the connota-
tions of peoplehood—from an alternative to nation-state nationalism to
a partial measure of American Jewry’s support of the state—reflects a his-
torical process that demonstrates the influence of the sovereign mold on
both American Jewish and Israeli notions of Jewish solidarity. It is also
another example of how Kaplan’s legacy has been sanitized to reflect syn-
thesis rather than fragmentation in the American–Jewish and Judaism–
Zionism historical narrative.
Kaplan’s interest in replacing, rather than emulating, the nation-state
logic of post-1948 Zionism provides a fresh perspective for considering
“what happened” to and “what will become” of the Jewish people. In reject-
ing the validity of nation beyond state as an organizing principle for Am
Yisrael, Zionism actually contributed to the attenuation of Jewish people-
hood. Contemporary conversations about Jewish collective identity remain
rooted in theories of peoplehood shaped by state-seeking Zionism, rather
than conceptions made possible by clearly demarcating political citizen-
ship from national consciousness. As a result, there are limited theoretical
and practical resources to define the meaning of Jewish solidarity outside
the terms established by Ben Gurion’s statism and American Jews’ accep-
tance of many of its fundamental tenets. To thrive, collective notions of
Jewish identity must confront the primacy of the State of Israel (without

fully negating its existence), affirm the value of diaspora consciousness in
the construction of national culture, and posit alternatives to land and lan-
guage as the sine qua non of Jewish nationalism.
The creation of the State of Israel and the state-seeking Zionism that
crystallized in its wake engendered the creation of two distinct organiza-
tional structures for Jewish political life: hereafter, Jews would either con-
stitute an ethnoreligious minority group in liberal states (America) or a
sovereign nation within the Jewish state (Israel). This split reinforced a
clear distinction in the cohesive parameters of Jewish identity. Citizens of
Israel would possess passports with Israeli written under their nationality.27
Their Jewish identity would be intimately linked to a civic religion, to the
Hebrew language, and to patriotic defense of their homeland. American
Jews, however, could voluntarily decide to affiliate with a Jewish commu-
nity as a religious minority group. American Jewish and Israeli narratives
of themselves and each other have actually contributed to increasing the
rift between the two centers of Jewish life, thus retarding efforts to galva-
nize strong ties between diverse Jewish communities.
Zionism generated opposing identity constructions for immigrants to
Israel and the United States, who came from similar places and shared
exposure to the same range of modern Jewish religious and political move-
ments. The process of acculturating into two distinct organizational princi-
ples offered by the sovereign mold—the dominant national population or a
religioethnic minority in a liberal state—constructed hierarchies of values,
identity categories, and communal narratives that had distinct and at times
even mutually exclusive agendas. The very meanings of Judaism and Jews
were refracted through these disparate lenses as well. American Jews, com-
mitted to understanding Judaism as a religion rather than as the basis for
a national group, marginalized political elements of textual and historical
tradition to emphasize the compatibility of Judaism with minority citizen-
ship and ethical behavior. American Jews envisioned Jewish associations as
voluntary communities built around religious institutions, thus champion-
ing an ethical creed committed to equal justice.
Zionist ideology formulated a definition of Judaism that emphasized
national culture, language, a pioneering labor ethos, self-defense, and self-
determination. Historians and politicians turned to biblical narratives to
underscore precedents for statehood within the biblical tradition, elimi-
nating two thousand years of political thought from relevance. Criteria for
the new Hebrew national culture actively rejected characteristics perceived
to be associated with Jewish life in the diaspora—religious practice, passive
victimhood, and lack of control. These distinct typologies reflect a set of

dichotomies already noted as by-products of the sovereign mold, such as
nation and religion, diaspora and homeland, universal and particular.
There was a tremendous hesitancy to address the theoretical and prac-
tical wedge created by aligning each community with both sides of the
sovereign mold. In fact, in 1950 two Israeli and American Jewish leaders,
Ben Gurion and Jacob Blaustein, even made an agreement to disagree on
the meaning of Judaism and Zionism. Ben Gurion promised to mitigate
his rhetoric of aliyah and negation of the exile in exchange for the support
of the American Jewish community. Given the historical circumstances,
the decision to suppress prickly differences made sense at the time. After
decades of tremendous dislocation, demographic transformation of the
global Jewish community, and unprecedented persecution, both Jewish
communities had a vested interest in focusing on bolstering their own situ-
ations rather than debating their ideological and practical differences. The
immediate exigencies of building a state and securing the American Jewish
position after the Holocaust justified suppressing unresolved issues. More-
over, the existence of close family ties and the euphoria of the establish-
ment of a Jewish state that transcended ideological differences diminished
the need to address such challenging questions.
Historical forces in the decades after 1948 reinforced the tacit contract
to agree on the centrality of the sovereign mold but to disagree on the
implications of equating Jewish nationhood with statehood. The Cold
War—specifically its effect on the concepts of nationalism, religion, and
America’s policy toward Israel—contributed to the solidification of the
unifying rhetoric and divergent underlying paths. The Jewish state gained
legitimacy as the increasing control of two superpowers enforced the inti-
mate link between nation and state around the globe, suppressed minority
national voices, and reinforced the perception of an intimate link between
citizenry, nationality, and state. For American Jews, the fight against “god-
less communism” united the Jewish community around viewing itself as a
religious group and led to the disappearance of the diverse streams of secu-
lar, national, and socialist Jewish organizations that had thrived during the
first half of the century.28
The pride American Jews felt about Israel as their homeland was boosted
through the popular and political transformation of Israel’s image in the
United States. The 1960 film Exodus (starring Paul Newman) popularized
the notion that Israel’s founding reflected core American values of freedom
and liberation as well as the drive to overcome oppression. A lightning
military victory in the Six Day War, as the United States was facing its
own morass in Vietnam, elevated Israel’s military and moral status among

American Jews. As Israel became a central ally of the United States, the per-
ception of the State of Israel as the national homeland of the Jewish people
grew stronger. These developments legitimated American Zionism’s claim
(popularized by the Supreme Court justice and American Zionist leader
Louis Brandeis throughout the second decade of the twentieth century)
that Israel reflected America’s highest values. Attachment to the State of
Israel supported a narrative that emphasized unity, synthesis, and close ties
rather than addressing the divergent paths, conflicting definitions of Juda-
ism, and unresolved differences between the communities.
This shared acceptance of the slogan “We Are One” as the premise of
Jewish peoplehood as reuniting the Jewish nation with political sovereignty
masked systemic differences between these two organizational structures
of Jewish life that would flower in future decades. Despite scholarly claims
and social-scientific data sets demonstrating that the two centers of world
Jewry—Israel and the United States—have developed “divergent Jewish
cultures,” leaders from both communities continue to articulate a strong
rhetoric of unity.29 Strategically ignoring these unresolved issues may no
longer serve as an effective strategy for articulating the ties that bind the
global Jewish community.
As the sovereign mold diminishes in import around the world, its effec-
tiveness as the cohesive glue that binds Jews to one another will also likely
decrease. The economic and social forces of globalization have eroded
Israel’s ability to control all aspects of Jewish national life, an integral part
of Zionism’s vision of mamlakhtiyut. Although present-day forces accentu-
ate the divergent paths, they are merely symptomatic of the more systemic
issue of diagnosing what happened to Jewish collective consciousness. Part
of the answer to Cohen and Wertheimer’s question is that the ideologi-
cal assumptions of the sovereign mold, espoused by both American Jews
and Israelis, hindered the development of a robust and global language
for articulating Jewish solidarity. Although creative explorations of Jewish
political thought have developed as a way for Jewish intellectuals to intro-
duce ethnic concerns into the discourse of difference and national identity,
they have not made nearly as strong inroads into Jewish communal life.
One area where cracks appear in this popular overlay of unity, revealing
inner contradictions and tensions, is in the assumption of the centrality of
the state in defining national consciousness. The center–periphery hierar-
chy between homeland and diaspora is one aspect of the sovereign mold
that continues to shape American Jewish life. When teaching adult Jewish
education courses about the Israel–diaspora relationship, I ask students
to participate in an exercise. I hand out several short quotations about the

nature of the relationship as written by historical figures—Ben Gurion,
Ahad Ha’am, and Rawidowicz, as well as by such contemporary scholars as
Jacob Neusner and David Hartman. I ask them to read, discuss, and then
decide which perspective most closely reflects their own position. Some
gravitate toward Ben Gurion’s claim that the goal of Zionism is to make an
end of exile, others appreciate Rawidowicz’s model of the ellipse with two
foci, and a few sheepish participants select Neusner’s statement that the
United States is the promised land for Jews.
But a significant number of my (American) students always look toward
Ahad Ha’am’s statement that “Zion is a cultural center radiating life-giv-
ing impulse to an ongoing Diaspora . . . a symbolic circle with a center in
Israel and a circumference in the Diaspora.” They see this view as the one
that most closely mirrors their own. I tend to press them by asking a few
questions: Have they visited Israel? Do they have any exposure to Israeli
culture? Can they understand any Hebrew? Inevitably, a few have visited
Israel; far fewer have extensively engaged Israeli music, literature, or film;
and hardly any speak Hebrew with enough fluency to engage with Israeli
culture outside of translations. In reality, Israeli culture is completely for-
eign to most American Jews. Nevertheless, they believe that Israel remains,
at least in their conscious perception, the cultural center of their Judaism.
Although this is only a tiny anecdotal sample, the results of this classroom
exercise suggest the enduring internalization of Yehoshua’s assertion that
national identity can only thrive within the state. Despite American Juda-
ism’s tremendous accomplishments in various aspects of Jewish religious,
cultural, and intellectual life, American Jews hesitate to acknowledge the
United States as a Jewish cultural center.
The residue of Zionism’s negation of the diaspora ideology is deeply
ingrained in the self-definition of American Jews and reflected in the most
visible projects in the American Jewish community.30 Since its inception
in 2000, for example, the organization known as Birthright Israel has sent
more than 150,000 young Jewish adults (between the ages of eighteen and
twenty-seven) on an all-expenses-paid, ten-day trip to Israel. This program
is one of the most revolutionary and innovative developments in American
Jewish life. It has reached a tremendous number of Jewish young adults at a
crucial time in their development, provided them with the opportunity to
visit Israel, and sparked conversations about Jewish identity. Yet the logic
behind the program arises from a vision of Jewish solidarity that views the
homeland as the catalyst for the survival of Jewish life in the diaspora. The
rhetoric employed by such programs as Birthright Israel propagates the idea
that Jewish experiences and Jewish continuity for diaspora communities

require a shot in the arm of a pilgrimage trip to the state. Engagement with
Israel arises from the perceived need to use it as an educational backdrop
for diaspora Jewry’s failure to sustain Jewish continuity.
A brief thought experiment will drive home the hierarchical connota-
tions of associating a Jewish birthright with a trip to Israel. Can one imag-
ine the response to funding a birthright trip for Israelis to visit American
Jewish communities after their army service? Such a plan would appear
absurd to Israeli and American Jews alike because it contests the unidi-
rectional model of influence from homeland to diaspora. Having solved
the question of Jewish identity, Israelis believe they have little to learn
from American Jews (although they typically have a lot of interest in other
aspects of U.S. society). Jewish life in the diaspora is perceived as irrelevant
to the self-identity of most Israeli Jews. The mismatch, promoted by the
educational systems of both communities, maintains at best a symbolic
connection between diaspora and homeland communities that reflects the
perceived needs of each community rather than a desire to develop mutual
partnerships.
Despite its internalization, analyzing Jewish life through the prism
of the homeland–diaspora dichotomy has limited precedent in the Jew-
ish tradition and was not a foreordained development. Returning to the
interwar period, and specifically to theories such as global Hebraism and
national civilization, allows us to historicize the dichotomy between home-
land center and diaspora periphery. Of the two theories, Kaplan’s national
civilization remained far more invested in the centrality of the homeland.
Heavily influenced by Ahad Ha’am, Kaplan envisioned Zionism as a global
movement whose success in Palestine would invigorate members of the
Jewish civilization in the United States. He acknowledged that the realities
of the American Jewish setting would limit its ability to compete with Jews
in Palestine for national creativity. However, he attempted to distinguish
between the possibilities for the culture center and negating Jewish life in
the United States. Kaplan had great hope (and also felt many frustrations)
for American Jewry and viewed possibilities for national culture in Pales-
tine and beyond.31
Global Hebraism (perhaps the theory discussed in this book that
remained most firmly rooted in an early-twentieth-century European
milieu of linguistic nationalism) articulated an understanding of cul-
ture most relevant to a post-ideological age of hybrid identity forma-
tion. Rawidowicz exploited his textual and historical training to insist on
the replacement of the homeland–diaspora model, rather than advocat-
ing Kaplan’s modifications. There are two primary limitations of basing

national identity on geography. First, the emphasis on spatial coordi-
nates and political structure emerged as a way of weighting the validity of
national life rather recently with the rise of Zionist ideology. Rawidowicz’s
work reminds readers that the closest categorization of place within Jew-
ish sources, Babylon and Jerusalem, lacked the elevation of one territory
over another. In fact, over time the Babylonia tradition entered the rab-
binic canon, while the rabbinic literature developed in the Land of Israel
largely disappeared. Moreover, other dichotomies not based on geography
or political organization had far greater currency historically. Taxonomies
for categorizing Jewish communities included language (speakers of Yid-
dish, Judeo-Arabic, Ladino, and so on), geographic origins (Ashkenazi and
Sephardic), and religious traditions (Hasidic, Mitnagdic, and Musar).
More important than the recognition of the historicity of a center–
periphery model are the potential limitations Rawidowicz highlighted of
such a model to promote national life and reflect the reality of cultural
development. The very concept of one center influencing peripheries,
Rawidowicz argued, failed to capture the local, fluid, and temporal nature
of cultural production. National culture, he insisted, could not be gener-
ated in one location and exported to other places. His perceptive analysis
of the risks of Ahad Ha’am’s hierarchy between diaspora and homeland
suggests the possible corrosive effect of such an assumption. Cultural life,
Rawidowicz insisted, cannot be imported or exported but instead must be
developed locally. The nature of collective culture in America will therefore
differ from developments in Israel or other geographies. The flow nour-
ishing diaspora Jewish life through the cultural production of the home-
land community will not answer local needs. Israeli culture cannot sustain
Jewish life built on a foundation of voluntary membership and without
the language resources to participate in Hebrew. His prognostication was
correct: the Hebrew culture created in Israel has had almost no impact
on American Jewish life. The vastly different demographic, political, and
social reality of Jews living within an autonomous territory necessitates the
existence of multiple national cultures. But Rawidowicz underestimated
the enduring power of the idea of a center without actual social, cultural,
or intellectual ties. Israeli Hebrew culture would thus not translate into
American Jewish life; however, the very existence of such a culture could
sustain collective solidarity among American Jews.
What relevance does Rawidowicz’s analysis have today? Global Hebra-
ism points to several strategies for minimizing the role that spatial and
territorial considerations play in the construction of national cohesion. A
basic principle is the promotion of local Jewish centers, rather than the

outsourcing of American Jewish vitality to a distant homeland. The notion
that Jewish culture thrives only in the homeland clashes with the reality
that centers of Jewish culture exist outside Israel. The self-negation of Jew-
ish vitality outside the state has the potential to obfuscate the existence
of innovative cultural production. As a sense of solidarity erodes among
American Jews, the logical response is to renew emphasis on a unifying
center. Although such a strategy may have short-term advantages, over the
long term it will only accelerate the attenuation of collective solidarity. The
dissolution of a sense of peoplehood outside the homeland thus becomes
a self-fulfilling prophecy as a distant center is conceived as the preserver
of diaspora life and resources are directed to nourishing a culture that will
have minimal relevance in the diaspora. Relying on a symbolic homeland
disempowers local initiatives to galvanize sustainable models of commu-
nal affiliation. Moreover, it drains creative energy and financial resources
that could invigorate local, self-sustaining cultural centers.
Recognizing multiple centers does not mean that Israel would no lon-
ger be an anchor point in the global Jewish community. As the home to
the largest Jewish community, and in the not-so-distant future the major-
ity of the world’s Jews, Israel will surely constitute a core of Jewish life.
However, there are no gated communities in a global world that produce,
create, and sustain cultures. In a global era, spatial location has far less con-
trol on identity formation. Decentering national identity formation would
facilitate the creation of subgroups within the national community that
have parallel interests, rather than seeking a unified national culture that
emanates from the homeland to the rest of the globe. Jewish nationalism
in a global era can be imagined like a computer network—multiple nodes
with a variety of paths connecting those nodes. Such a model not only dis-
regards a geographic center, but also ignores a corollary assumption that
the notion of center suggests—namely, the existence of a unified national
culture.32 The overlay of one particular master narrative or cultural center
ultimately detracts from possibilities of unity. Rawidowicz’s oft-repeated
statement “the two that are one” reinforces this paradox about collective
identity: collective cohesion is maintained only if local groups sustain a
sense of larger community in particular fashions.
The primary advantage of moderating the state’s centrality in construct-
ing national culture is the possibility of facilitating mutual exchanges that
bridge diverse expressions of Judaism. One of the most crucial subjects
Jews in America and Israel can learn from each other is how to expand
their rather limited conceptions of Judaism. When it comes to Judaism,
the majority of American Jews and Israelis have little to say to one another

beyond recognizing a shared history of persecution. This is a tragic by-
product of the shaping of Judaism to meet the demands of the sovereign
mold. A false dichotomy has developed between Judaism as a religious
faith and Judaism as the basis of a secular national identity. The distinc-
tion, as discussed earlier, emerged from theoretical and practical forces
that motivated both communities to create their definitions of Judaism
based on historical and political expectations. Thus, American Jews after
World War II embraced the mantle of a religious community, even if many
of its members most likely viewed membership as transcending theologi-
cal assumptions. And the creation of Israel’s new Jew negated the perceived
religious nature of diaspora Jewish life.
Jewish communities and institutions emerged that reflected these dis-
tinctions. American Jews built houses of worship, defined affiliation by
membership in synagogue communities, and highlighted holiday obser-
vances and coming-of-age rituals as markers of Jewish identity. Religion in
Israel, however, took two distinct paths regarding the relationship between
religion and the state. For the majority of Israelis, Judaism became the basis
of a civil religion that shaped the calendar and public rituals of the new
state.33 At the same time, Ben Gurion’s status quo agreement in 1952 estab-
lished Orthodox authority in all matters of personal status law in Israel. In
all three instances Judaism was shaped, either directly or indirectly, by the
state’s expectations. In one case a secularized Judaism served as the basis
of the cohesive national glue of the state, and in the other cases a depo-
liticized Judaism described a community fully compatible with the liberal
state under the doctrine mandating the separation of church and state.
National civilization and global Hebraism viewed the religious–secular
nationalists’ vocabulary as a problematic distinction with limited prece-
dents within Jewish sources. The distinction confounded their own experi-
ence of Judaism and formalized a categorical distinction between Jewish
communities. Instead, both Kaplan and Rawidowicz invented terminology
and conceptual possibilities that rejected these divergent interpretations
of Judaism. As a sociologist, Kaplan recognized that social networks and
communal ties would each play central roles in constructing group bound-
aries. The sovereign mold, as well as Western Enlightenment thought,
polarized secular national and religious expressions of Judaism. From the
Hebrew Am Yisrael—an ambiguous term that refers to a community with
theological, cultural, tribal, and historical bonds—emerged a rather sim-
plistic mode for interpreting Judaism into two mutually exclusive catego-
ries. Individuals grouped as religious Jews, a category that includes a spec-
trum of Jewish ideologies from ultra-Orthodox to Reform, often have less

in common with one another than they might have with those considered
representative of the opposite category of secular nationalism.
Despite Kaplan’s and Rawidowicz’s warnings about the danger of defin-
ing Judaism as either a religion or a nation, historical and ideological cur-
rents have reinforced very different definitions of Judaism. Building a sense
of shared experience and collective attachment across the religious–secular
nationalists’ divide is a challenge that needs to be addressed. I believe put-
ting aside the need to equate Judaism with either religion or secular nation-
ality will encourage innovation in both communities. A program for global
Jewish nationalism following the logic of Kaplan’s and Rawidowicz’s Zion-
ism will catalyze these trends by promoting mutual learning opportunities.
American Jewry can learn a tremendous amount about the possibilities
for Jewish culture, including Hebrew language, through learning from the
Israeli model. Sparked by trends in spirituality, Israeli Judaism would ben-
efit from a concerted effort to share the innovations of liberal Judaism with
a population that has very little exposure to this great innovation in modern
Jewish life. Jewish national cohesion will benefit greatly from a shared inter-
est in mining the sources of Judaism—from ancient to modern—as a set of
shared materials to debate, create, and engage.
There are already signs that such changes are taking place. New Israeli
institutions provide venues for Israelis to engage with the Jewish textual tra-
dition. In the United States, vibrant Jewish cultural expressions are flourish-
ing.34 These changes will be slow, because they go against the grain of basic
assumptions that have become second nature for both Israeli and American
Jewish communities. However, blurring the religious–secular divide has the
potential to reinvigorate both communities and build new bridges across
the binary categorization that previous generations developed.
Perhaps the most enduring, yet difficult to address, rift preventing
efforts to theorize Jewish collective solidarity is a fundamental divide
between American Judaism and Israeli nationalism when it comes to the
relationship between Jewish and universal concerns. American Jews, par-
ticularly the majority affiliated with liberal denominations, emphasize the
universal liberal values of social justice, equality, and tolerance as the fun-
damental message of Judaism. Hence the concept of tikkun olam (repairing
the world) is one of the most widely articulated definitions of Jewish val-
ues. From its origins in European cosmopolitan ideologies, Zionism (and
later the State of Israel) saw itself as promoting universal and democratic
values.35 The realities of creating a Jewish state, however, created existen-
tial threats that made the practice of realizing the ideal of preserving both
Judaism and democracy a complicated endeavor.

Although Kaplan, Kohn, and Rawidowicz sensed a potential conflict
between the self-definition of American Judaism and Israel’s deteriorating
relationship with Arab minorities and neighbors before 1948, their concerns
were largely ignored. The American Jewish community was able to fully
embrace Zionism precisely because of the argument that the Jewish state
espoused the same set of liberal values that American Jews had championed.
Several factors have raised the tension between the two ideals—national and
the human—in popular and academic circles. Israel’s position as an under-
dog in a belligerent part of the world between 1948 and the 1970s has been
challenged. A younger generation of American Jews, raised on pictures of
Israeli troops in tanks patrolling Gaza and the West Bank rather than the Six
Day War, experienced a clash between two narratives. The war in Lebanon
and the First Intifada complicated the perception of moral clarity. Occupa-
tion and systematic restrictions on the collective rights of Arab-Palestinian
Israelis have the potential to create a conflict between a commitment to Juda-
ism’s mission as spreading universal ideals and Israel’s responses to policies.
Israel’s increasing position as a flashpoint in popular and scholarly
debates about the morality of nationalism further engenders rifts in theo-
rizing shared grounds of Jewish national cohesion inside and outside the
state. Liberal scholars and activists disproportionately select Israel to illus-
trate the limits of national sovereignty and the excessive power of Jewish
lobbying groups. These claims have generally failed to evaluate Israel in a
comparative perspective or to appreciate the ways in which other states
disenfranchise certain populations by their national, religious, or cultural
expectations. Nevertheless, it has become a politically charged moment to
think about the limits of the sovereign mold as the basis for envisioning
Jewish collective identity.
Theorizing a shared basis for Jewish collective identity cannot avoid this
issue, but we must also recognize the explosive nature of raising difficult
questions about the potential conflicts between repairing the world and
maintaining a Jewish state. Kohn presented an excellent example of why
engaging the relationship between the particular and the human is a risky
topic to address. His focus largely shifted to creating nationalism centered
solely on human values and the erosion of other particular bonds. His
decision, based on the incompatibility of Zionism and his perception of
Judaism as a force of integration and harmony, adumbrates one potential
repercussion of opening this conversation. To this day, many cosmopolitan
Jews in prominent intellectual positions have followed Kohn’s decision.
It would be wrong, however, to let Israel’s critics silence internal Jewish
conversations about divergent, and even potentially conflicting, attitudes

about minority rights and Jewish obligations toward non-Jews. Such an
approach will ultimately create greater fragmentation in the Israeli–
American Jewry relationship. A central component of Israeli life is debating
the tensions between protecting the Jewish state and recognizing claims of
its minority citizens and populations under the control of the Israeli gov-
ernment. These tensions shape the political and social fabric of Israeli soci-
ety. Silencing debates about these strains distances American Jews from
their Israeli counterparts, who live in a society that openly debates these
questions.
Kaplan and Rawidowicz provide a middle-ground option for con-
structing theories of Zionism that look seriously at the potential conflicts
between Jews as a minority community sensitive to individual rights and
a majority community sensitive to security and preservation. Both men
made controversial stands about whether certain policies of the yishuv or
the state toward Arab minorities were justified.36 Nevertheless, engaging
different objectives did not lead them to reject Zionism or (once it was a
fact) statehood. Kaplan and Rawidowicz grappled with how to reconcile
principles and claims across very different political milieus. This is cer-
tainly a road that risks further alienating Jews from Zionism and the State
of Israel. The price of ignoring a gap between commitments to social jus-
tice as a minority community and preserving the ethnonational identity of
a state as the sovereign power may increase superficial levels of allegiance,
but it will also hinder a fully open and meaningful relationship.
The paths explored in this book provide fertile theoretical ground for
rethinking Zionism’s historical and normative possibilities. Rawidowicz,
Kaplan, and Kohn mined the Jewish traditions to defend very different
claims about Jewish nationalism than those that eventually determined its
accepted meaning. While we may or may not agree with their conclusions,
their visions remind us of the relatively recent and historically conditioned
nature of what have become fundamental, and rarely questioned, tenets of
Jewish identity.
Expanding our vision of the past to include the wide range of state-
seeking and counterstatist varieties discussed in this book inspires a more
pluralistic approach to reconsidering what it means to be a Zionist today.
Indeed, the future of Zionism, and a sustainable model of Jewish people-
hood, depends on reengaging the basic principle of Zionism’s roads not
taken—the distinction between the Jewish nation and the Jewish state—as
well as the accompanying questions of what boundaries can substitute for
the state in defining membership in Jewish national life.

n ot e s
1. Breaking the Sovereign Mold

1. From A. B. Yehoshua’s speech given on May 1, 2006, at the American Jew-
ish Committee’s centennial annual meeting in Washington, D.C. A full transcript of
Yehoshua’s comments, as well as articles written by more than a dozen leading Ameri-
can and Israeli scholars and other leaders who have been moved to respond to Yeho-
shua’s claims, are in “The A. B. Yehoshua Controversy: An Israel-Diaspora Dialogue
on Jewishness, Israeliness, and Identity,” available online at www.ajc.org.
2. For more information on Ben Gurion’s ideology, see Kedar, “Ben Gurion’s
Mamlachtiyut”; and Eliezer Don-Yehiya, “Political Religion in Israel: Ben Gurion’s
Mamlachtiyut,” in Israel: The First Decade of Independence, ed. Ilan Troen and Noah
Lucas (Albany: State University of New York, 1995), 171. Pnina Lahav, “A ‘Jewish State
. . . to Be Known as the State of Israel’: Notes on Israel Legal Historiography,” Law and
History Review 19 (2001): 387–88.
3. “The A. B. Yehoshua Controversy: An Israel-Diaspora Dialogue on Jewishness,
Israeliness, and Identity.”
4. See David N. Myers, “‘Beyond Statism’: A Call to Rethink Jewish Collectivity,”
lecture delivered at the University of Washington, October 10, 2006.
5. One important scholarly exception is a recent collection of essays edited by
Deborah Dash Moore and Ilan Troen, Divergent Jewish Cultures.
6. My own interest in expanding the historical record of early-twentieth-century
Jewish nationalism and Zionism builds on several recent studies. Steven E. Aschheim,
in his Beyond the Border, has highlighted Zionists, such as Hannah Arendt and Hans
Kohn, who challenged statehood as the primary goal of Zionism. For a more general
discussion of the diversity of early-twentieth-century views on Zionism and Jewish
nationalism, see Myers, “Can There Be a Principled Anti-Zionism?” Michael Stanis-
lawski, in his Zionism and the Fin de Siècle, has focused on the surprising relationship
between cosmopolitanism and nationalism in the works of several leading Zionists.
7. For example, see cultural theorist Stuart Hall’s equation of Jews with Zionism
211 nationalism: hans kohn

from german zionism to american 211
and his conclusion that therefore Jews have no place in the discourse of diaspora. Stu-
art Hall, “Cultural Identity and Diaspora,” in Identity: Community, Culture, Difference,
ed. J. Rutherford (London: Lawrence & Wishart, 1990), 235.
8. There is a growing polarization between diaspora theorists who challenge the
moral validity of the nation-state and supporters of national sovereignty who advo-
cate for the state’s right to promote particular ethnic or religious communities. This
polarization politicizes efforts to foreground the fluid continuum of nationalities that
existed between statist and nonstatist or diasporist positions during the first half of
the twentieth century. Jewish leaders and scholars, facing a perceived attack from
anti-Israel advocates, may be hesitant to promote the importance of a political tra-
dition that complicates the conflation of Zionism and Jewish nationalism. See Judt,
“Israel: The Alternative”; and Wieseltier, “Israel, Palestine, and the Return of the Bi-
National Fantasy.”
9. The historian Steven Aschheim has argued that it was only in the 1940s that
“political statehood became the official goal of the Zionist movement.” See Aschheim,
Beyond the Border, 9.
10. See Myers, Between Jew and Arab, 23 and 249n5.
11. For example, Gideon Shimoni defines a pillar of Zionist ideology as the “territo-
rial ingathering of Jews” seeking homeland sovereignty. See his The Zionist Ideology, 85.
12. This does not constitute an exhaustive list of thinkers within the broad orbit of
Zionist intellectuals in the early half of the twentieth century who were dedicated to
conceptualizing nationality outside of statehood. Other thinkers include the pioneer-
ing Jewish educator Samson Benderly, the rabbi Abba Hillel Silver, the philanthropist
Jacob Schiff, the communal leader Louis B. Marshall, and the World Jewish Congress
executive Nachum Goldman.
13. On February 2, 1929, Robert Weltsch wrote to Kohn and asked him to review
an article by Rawidowicz for the Jüdische Rundschau. Weltsch reports that Rawido-
wicz was particularly pleased that Kohn would be reviewing his article. See AR 6908
1/1, Hans Kohn–Robert Weltsch Correspondence, Weltsch Collection, Leo Baeck
Archive, New York City. Kaplan reports meeting Kohn at a lecture in his December
21, 1931, diary entry; see Kaplan, Communings of the Spirit, 464. Folded up and paper-
clipped to the inside cover of Rawidowicz’s personal copy of Kaplan’s landmark work,
Judaism as a Civilization, still rests a handwritten note in Hebrew from 1936: “I real-
ized that in a number of ways our outlooks are similar,” Kaplan wrote. See chapter
3 for more information. In Babylon and Jerusalem, Rawidowicz praised aspects of
Kaplan’s book, New Zionism (see p. 672).
14. For a discussion of recent scholarship on Rawidowicz, see chapter 3, note 7.
15. See, for example, Charles Liebman, “Reconstructionism in American Jewish
Life,” in American Jewish Yearbook, ed. Morris Fine and Milton Himmelfarb (Phila-
delphia: Jewish Publication Society of America, 1970).
16. For more on Kohn’s legacy, see chapter 4.
17. Here I follow historian Michael Stanislawski’s caution against a “teleological
retrojection that effaces the complexity of human thought and development” (see
Stanislawski, Zionism and the Fin de Siècle, xx).
18. Seton-Watson, Nations and States, 1.
19. Gellner, Nations and Nationalism, 1. Within the field of nationalism studies,
there are a few exceptions to the tendency to conflate nationhood with statehood.
212 212 notes

zionism and the
to pages
roads6–13
not taken
One of the first scholars to underscore the limitation of the doctrine of national sov-
ereignty as a description of nationality was the historian Walker Connor. Connor
claimed that this phenomenon distorts the realities of national attachments, which
in his thinking have little to do with political independence or geographic borders.
Instead, Connor suggested a category of ethnonationalism that acknowledges the
nonpolitical ties that bind national groups outside of political and territorial borders.
One problem with the terminology Connor uses, however, is that his conception of
ethnic ties pays insufficient attention to the relationship between nation and state. See
Connor, Ethnonationalism. On the importance of separating the cultural and political
aspects of nationality, see also Hutchinson, Dynamics of Cultural Nationalism.
20. Hobsbawm and Ranger, Invention of Tradition. The scholars Elie Kedourie,
Anthony Giddens, and John Breuilly have also contributed to make the modern-
ist paradigm the dominant approach to nationalism since the 1970s. See Kedourie,
Nationalism; Giddens, The Nation-State and Violence; Jon Breuilly, Nationalism and
the State (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1982). See also Anderson, Imagined
Communities, and Anthony D. Smith, Theories of Nationalism. Political theorist David
Miller’s On Nationality expands the constitutive core of nationality to include sev-
eral additional elements, such as common beliefs and historical experiences. Yet even
his conclusion favors “national self-determination” as the most effective structure for
preserving national identity (see p. 98).
21. Smith, Nationalism and Modernism, 24.
22. Scholars of nationalism, such as Anthony Smith, who views the nation as
“perennial,” are more sensitive to theorizing the nation as a cultural community with
ethnic, or historical, roots in the premodern period. See, for example, Smith, Nation-
alism and Modernism.
23. Hans Kohn, the subject of chapter 5, popularized the scholarly distinction
between Western civic and Eastern ethnic strains of nationalism. See Kohn, Idea of
Nationalism. Kohn envisioned the ethnic path as a strain that diverged from the West-
ern trajectory oriented toward increasing levels of integration and shared universal
principles. The enduring influence of these two categories, as well as the biases linked
to each typology, can still be found in the work of such scholars as Anthony Smith. The
influential theorist adopts, with a few important caveats, Kohn’s distinction between
rational and organic versions of nationalist ideology. See Anthony D. Smith, National
Identity: Ethnonationalism in Comparative Perspective (Reno: University of Nevada
Press, 1991), 81. Popular accounts of nationality also reflect the notion that these two
paths lead to good and bad nationalisms. See Ignatieff, Blood and Belonging.
24. John Stuart Mill, “Of Nationality, as Connected with Representative Govern-
ment,” in his Considerations on Representative Government (1861), chapter 16, quoted
in Vincent P. Pecora, ed., Nations and Identities (Oxford: Blackwell, 2001), 145.
25. Taylor has questioned whether Gellner was right to make the “state focus defi-
nitional for modern nationalism.” He concludes “we gain nothing by excluding this
phenomenon from our purview by definitional fiat” (see Taylor, “Nationalism and
Modernity,” 35). Kymlicka is another example of a theorist sensitive to national iden-
tity at the substatist level, but only for communities rooted in territorial attachment
who were displaced by settlers. Yet both Taylor and Kymlicka (who are Canadian
scholars) focus on language and land (characteristics of the Québécois) as alternate
criteria for national cohesion. See chapter 6 for a further discussion of why this is a
from german zionism

notes
to american
to pages 13–14 213
nationalism: hans kohn 213
definition that does not apply well to the Jewish case, characterized by a population
divided by both geography and language. Two scholars with ties to Israel, Gans and
Roshwald, advocate attributes that transcend land and language by focusing on non-
statist nationality grounded in culture, history, and the psychology of collectivity. See
Gans, Limits of Nationalism, and Roshwald, Endurance of Nationalism.
26. Brubaker, Ethnicity without Groups, 145.
27. Jewish historian Ezra Mendelsohn’s concise overview of modern Jewish politics,
On Modern Jewish Politics, provides an excellent example of this rubric. The historio-
graphical distinction between nationalist and integrationist paths can be found in his-
torian Jonathan Frankel’s classic study of Eastern European nationalism as a postliberal
phenomenon (see Frankel, Prophecy and Politics). In attempting to blur the distinction
between national particularism and liberal integration, my investigation resembles his-
torian Ben Nathans’s study of Russian liberal jurists who advocated for Jewish minor-
ity rights during the early decades of the twentieth century. See Benjamin Nathans,
“The Other Modern Jewish Politics: Integration and Modernity in Fin de Siècle Russia,”
in Gitelman, The Emergence of Modern Jewish Politics. Social historians, particularly
those focused on the immigrant experience, have also demonstrated the limitations of
the integrationist versus nationalist binary by exploring Jewish subcultures and social
networks that enabled Jews to mitigate the pace of acculturation. Jewish intellectuals
were not uprooted from their social and intellectual contexts, but instead they relocated
and created a dialogue between European theories and their American environment.
See Hyman, Gender and Assimilation in Modern Jewish History, and David Sorkin, The
Transformation of German Jewry, 1780–1840 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1987).
28. See Mendelsohn, On Modern Jewish Politics, 6–36. Mendelsohn does acknowl-
edge that some “Diaspora Zionist leaders” did not clearly fit into the mainstream
rubrics. He briefly mentions such figures and calls them “centrists” and “moderates.”
My book attempts to expand on the characteristically brief mention of such thinkers
whose positions do not clearly match the ideological poles. See ibid., 35.
29. For a concise overview of major themes in Zionist historiography, see Penslar,
“Narratives of Nation Building.” Diaspora nationalism has a variety of expressions in
addition to Simon Dubnow’s autonomism, such as territorialists, who advocate for
a Jewish political autonomy, but not necessarily in Palestine; diaspora nationalists;
and Bundists, socialists who considered national Jewish organization as the first step
toward international proletariat revolution.
30. The historian David Myers has described Rawidowicz as “continually travers-
ing the border between Zionism and diasporism.” This description applies to a far
greater group of interwar Jewish nationalists that includes Kohn and Kaplan. See
Myers, Between Jew and Arab, 55.
31. I provide an in-depth example of this phenomenon in chapter 2, by exploring
the affinities between the diaspora nationalist Simon Dubnow and several early-twen-
tieth-century Zionist thinkers.
32. On Ahad Ha’am, see Zipperstein, Elusive Prophet; for more information on
Ahad Ha’am’s influence in American Jewish thought, see Zipperstein, “On Read-
ing Ahad Ha’am”; Friesel, “Influence of American Zionism on the American Jewish
Community.”
33. Indeed, this is precisely how the American Jewish historian Arthur Goren has
defined Kaplan, whom he considers a “cultural Zionist.” Goren is correct to designate
214 214 notes

zionism and the
to pages
roads14–16
not taken
Kaplan as a Jewish thinker deeply involved in cultural Zionism. However, this stance
diverts attention from an analysis of Kaplan’s political challenges to American nation-
alism by underscoring Kaplan’s Zionism as focused on cultural or religious innova-
tions. See Goren, Politics and Public Culture of American Jews, 148. Zionist historian
Evyatar Friesel’s distinction between “inward” and “outward” Zionism creates an even
deeper, and more misleading, gap between political and cultural Zionists. According
to this dichotomy, American Zionists could be divided into two camps: those who
focused their efforts on preparing Zionism for its presentation to a non-Jewish audi-
ence and those who dedicated their energies toward injecting elements of cultural
Zionism into the American Jewish community. Such figures as Brandeis and Kallen
fit into the first category, while Jewish communal activists like Kaplan and Fried-
laender constitute the “inward” group. This false bifurcation suggests that those Zion-
ists interested in transforming Judaism operated within the narrow confines of the
Jewish community and made no effort to influence the American community. I chal-
lenge this claim, particularly in the case of Kaplan, in chapter 4. See Friesel, “Influence
of American Zionism on the American Jewish Community,” 143.
34. Here I disagree with Hagit Lavsky, who views Kohn’s reading of Ahad Ha’am as
sui generis. See Lavsky, “Hans Kohn: Nationalism between Theory and Practice.” As
the subsequent chapters in this book argue, especially the discussion of Zimmern and
Kallen in chapter 2, a number of leading Zionists viewed Ahad Ha’am as an influential
figure in their efforts to disengage nation from state. The quotation is from Kohn, Liv-
ing in a World Revolution, 55.
35. The historian Samuel Moyn has captured this approach to interpreting theories
of Jewish nationalism. He writes: “Collective identity is partly invented from within,
partly imposed from without, and is best considered as a field of conflicting forces”
(see Samuel Moyn, “German Jewry and the Question of Identity Historiography and
Theory,” Leo Baeck Yearbook [1996]: 291–308).
36. Jewish historian Amos Funkenstein’s concept of the “dialectics of assimilation”
guides this reading of theories of nationality as a dialectical process between assimila-
tion and self-assertion. In particular, Funkenstein has pointed out that even language
explicitly oriented toward asserting the difference between Jewish and non-Jewish
traditions is generally deeply rooted in the language of the particular intellectual
context. See Funkenstein, “Dialectics of Assimilation.” More recently, David Myers
has written about the importance of organizing historical research around the “crite-
ria of interaction and exchange” within a specific milieu. See David Myers, Resisting
History: Historicism and Its Discontents in German-Jewish Thought (Princeton, N.J.:
Princeton University Press, 2003), 166. My goal is to extend this historiographical
approach to modern Jewish political thought in general and to theories of nationality
in particular.
37. Such postcolonial theorists as Partha Chatterjee have pioneered a shift in the
study of nationality away from focusing on political movements. Instead, Chatterjee
has argued that expressions of nationality served as a rhetorical instrument for disen-
franchised intellectuals attempting to mitigate coercive political or cultural demands.
See Chatterjee, Nation and Its Fragments. The development of Jewish nationalism is
not fully analogous to anticolonial varieties; European and even Russian Jews were
not subject to the levels of enslavement, violence, and land confiscations that Euro-
pean imperial powers inflicted on the indigenous populations of Africa, Asia, and the
from german zionism

notes
to american
to pages 17–19 215
Middle East. However, it is still fruitful to explore the applicability of postcolonial the-
ory on the Jewish experience. One of the most interesting explorations of the Zionist–
colonial comparison can be found in chapter 5 of Penslar’s book Israel in History.
38. Theories of both liberalism and nationalism implicitly undermined efforts to
preserve corporate identity and at their logical extremes defined difference as anti-
thetical to their fundamental projects. That the universalist claims of liberalism cover
up a compassionate theory of elimination for particular groups is a theme touched on
by scholars from a variety of fields. See, among other works, Smith, Spinoza, Liberal-
ism, and the Question of Jewish Identity (New Haven, Conn.: Yale University Press,
1997); Gilroy, Black Atlantic (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1993); and
Jeff Spinner-Halev, The Boundaries of Citizenship: Race, Ethnicity, and Nationality
in the Liberal State (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1994). The threats
posed by völkisch or ethnic strains of nationalism are more readily apparent. Explic-
itly prioritizing the state’s primary role as preserving a particular national tradition
diminished the validity of individual freedom for all citizens. See chapter 2 for a more
detailed discussion of the challenges posed by liberalism and nationalism.
39. See Brubaker, Ethnicity without Groups, 10.
40. The historian Malachi Hacohen has argued that historical narratives tracing the
evolution of modern political theory are too often constrained by “nationalist claims to
an authentic closed tradition.” See his “The Limits of the National Paradigm in the Study
of Political Thought: The Case of Karl Popper and Central European Cosmopolitan-
ism,” in The History of Political Thought in National Context, ed. Dario Castiglione and
Iain Hampsher-Monk (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2001), 247.
41. Cohen, American Jews and the Zionist Idea, 26.
42. Immigrant Jews, social historians have shown, navigated paths of integration
that allowed them to balance between Americanizing and preserving a distinct iden-
tity. Historians of Jewish political thought, however, have been far less interested in
applying the same principle to document the ways in which Jewish thought took a
stand against the state and its expectations of citizenship.
43. As a number of scholars have pointed out, at the turn of the twentieth century
the Atlantic was very permeable indeed. Examples include Gilroy, Black Atlantic, and
Daniel T. Rodgers, Atlantic Crossings: Social Politics in a Progressive Age (Cambridge,
Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1998).
44. Matthew Frye Jacobson has described this general phenomenon quite well. He
writes: “Part of the gravitational pull into this essentially nationalist orbit, as I have
said, is accounted for by the citizenly concerns of many of the scholars involved, and
the extent to which scholarship on immigration—like that in African American Stud-
ies or Ethnic Studies—invariably represents an engagement in a civic politics and a
discourse of diversity, inclusion, exclusion, social equity, and the like, which itself is
inflected or even fully bound by the logic of the nation-form” (see Jacobson, “More
‘Trans-,’ Less ‘National,’” 79).
45. Mendelsohn has urged historians of modern Jewish politics to “make the con-
nection between politics and geography” (see Mendelsohn, On Modern Jewish Politics,
37). Key distinctions that emerge between locations are the rather striking disjunctures
when it comes to the influence of nationality. Scholars of American Jewish history, East
European Jewish history, and Zionism agree that theories of Jewish nationality gained
little traction in the United States. See Cohen, American Jews and the Zionist Idea, xvi;
and Shimoni, Zionist Ideology, 395. Gideon Shimoni does not include any American
216 216 notes

zionism and the
to pages
roads19–23
not taken
thinkers in his book, however, and mentions only two theorists who did not move to
Palestine: Moses Hess and Yaakov Klatzkin. Hans Kohn appears in Shimoni’s book, but
only for his later work as a theoretician of nationalism. The fact that Kohn was also an
active member of the Zionist intellectual circles is overlooked. In contrast, Arnold Eis-
en’s study Galut deals extensively with Kaplan and briefly considers Rawidowicz. See
also Gitelman, Emergence of Modern Jewish Politics, 183. Another example of evaluat-
ing American Zionism on the criteria of aliyah (immigration) and the negation of the
exile is Evyatar Friesel’s claim that American Zionism’s inability to galvanize aliyah to
Israel represents a failure of the Zionist movement (see Friesel, “Influence of American
Zionism on the American Jewish Community,” 130–48).
46. This shift toward emphasizing transatlantic continuities has emerged in a
number of recent works by American Jewish historians and American historians. See
Michels, A Fire in Their Hearts; King, The Liberty of Strangers; and Kobrin, “When a
Jew Was a ‘Landsman.’”
47. Several scholars across multiple disciplines have discussed this phenomenon.
For example, see Appadurai, Modernity at Large.
48. One of the most vocal prognosticators for a postnational political order is the
anthropologist Arjun Appadurai, who has argued that media and migration have
shifted the centers of cultural production from the homeland to various diaspora cen-
ters (see ibid.).
49. In addressing the relationship between the sovereign state and minority popula-
tions, such political theorists as Yael Tamir, Chaim Gans, David Miller, Will Kymlicka,
and Charles Taylor have introduced definitions of sovereignty that differentiate between
nation and state. Theories on multicultural citizenship, liberal nationalism, and people-
hood have pushed for varying degrees of recognition for minority groups, from a set of
legal protections for minority groups to more substantial systems of autonomy, includ-
ing self-government. These theorists debate the limits of ethnonational diversity, the
role of the state in preserving a shared national culture, and the criteria that delineate
minority national groups from other allegiances. See Kymlicka, Multicultural Citizen-
ship; Nina Glick Schiller and Georges Eugene Fouron, Georges Woke Up Laughing: Long-
Distance Nationalism and the Search for Home (Durham, N.C.: Duke University Press,
2001); Hollinger, Postethnic America; Appiah, Ethics of Identity; Tamir, Liberal National-
ism; McKim and McMahan, Morality of Nationalism; and Gans, Limits of Nationalism.
Such scholars as Paul Gilroy have strongly advocated for considering diaspora commu-
nities, with their dynamic interaction with disparate cultural contexts, as a paradigm for
understanding modernity (see Gilroy, Black Atlantic, 29).
2. “Sovereignty Is International Anarchy”

1. Kallen, Structure of Lasting Peace, 34. According to the book review in The
Nation magazine, although Kallen “traverses the familiar ground of Wilsonian liber-
alism,” his account differs in a crucial way: “It discusses a pluralistic and non-sover-
eign state, the divorce of the Idea of freedom of nationalities from that of individual
political statehood, international guarantee of the rights of minorities, and the release
of education from governmental control” (see The Nation, November 23, 1918, 629).
2. See chapter 1 for a discussion of counterstate nationalism.
3. See Frankel, “An Introductory Essay—the Paradoxical Politics of Marginality.”
4. Ibid., 4.
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5. According to Carole Fink: “The most ardent nonstate proponents of interna-
tional minority protection during this period were the Jews of Western Europe and
the United States” (see Carole Fink, Defending the Rights of Others, xvii). Ultimately,
the victorious powers refused to include a formal policy within the League of Nations’
charter because they feared challenges to their own sovereign authority. Instead of
obligating member states to guarantee minority rights, the League underscored the
importance of universal human rights.
6. I am indebted to the historian Steven Beller for highlighting the “either/or”
logic of nationalism in his discussion of the relationship between anti-Semitism and
European nationalism. Beller, “Is Anti-Semitism an Eternal Hatred?” lecture deliv-
ered at the University of Washington, January 27, 2009.
7. Taylor, “Nationalism and Modernity,” 40.
8. Smith, National Identity: Ethnonationalism in Comparative Perspective, 8. The
notion that ethnic nationalism represents a dangerous and divergent path can also be
found in journalistic accounts of nationality. See Ignatieff, Blood and Belonging.
9. Yack, “The Myth of Civic Nationalism.”
10. See Rogers Brubaker’s critique of the ethnic–civic dichotomy in his Ethnicity
without Groups, 132–147.
11. The American Jewish historian Jonathan Sarna has discussed the unique
aspects of the American Jewish experience in the introduction to his American Juda-
ism, xii–xx.
12. See Gerstle, American Crucible, 104.
13. Ibid.
14. As Matthew Jacobson, an American Studies scholar, has illustrated in his book
Whiteness of a Different Color, the increasing forces of nativism during this period man-
ifested themselves in the invention of new categories of whiteness. Jews were certainly
included in these changing taxonomies of race, which pushed them to the fringes of
whiteness. See Jacobson, Whiteness of a Different Color. For a more recent discussion of
Jews negotiating racial categories in America, see Goldstein, The Price of Whiteness.
15. Hector St. John de Crevecoeur, Letters from an American Farmer (London: T.
Davies, 1782), Letter III.
16. Sollors, Beyond Ethnicity, 83.
17. See R. Jeffrey Lustig, Corporate Liberalism: The Origins of Modern American
Political Theory, 1890–1920 (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1982); Martin J.
Sklar, The Corporate Reconstruction of American Capitalism, 1890–1916 (Cambridge:
Cambridge University Press, 1988); James Weinstein, The Corporate Ideal in the Lib-
eral State: 1900–1918 (Boston: Beacon Press, 1968); and Eldon J. Eisenach, The Lost
Promise of Progressivism: American Political Thought (Lawrence: University Press of
Kansas, 1994).
18. Smith, “Beyond Tocqueville, Myrdal, and Hartz,” 549.
19. Eisenach, Lost Promise of Progressivism, 7.
20. Croly’s work is discussed in David M. Kennedy, Progressivism: The Critical
Issues (Boston: Little Brown, 1971), 39.
21. Higham, Strangers in the Land, 198.
22. The “100 percenters” are discussed in David M. Kennedy, Over Here: The First
World War and American Society (New York: Oxford University Press, 1980), 69.
23. See Handy, Social Gospel in America, 12; Robert T. Handy, A Christian America:
218 218 notes

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to pages
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not taken
Protestant Hopes and Historical Realities, vol. 2 (New York: Oxford University Press,
1984); and Robert T. Handy, “Protestant Theological Tensions and Political Styles in
the Progressive Period,” in Religion and American Politics from the Colonial Period to
the 1980’s, ed. Mark A. Noll (New York: Oxford University Press, 1990).
24. Handy, Social Gospel in America, 135.
25. Hollinger, Postethnic America, 91.
26. Friedlaender, Past and Present, 389.
27. See Article 11 of the Kadet Party program, quoted in Weeks, Nations and State
in Late Imperial Russia, 24.
28. Dubnow himself used these two terms, among others, to refer to Jewish nation-
ality in a series of letters he published between 1897 and 1907. Known as the “Letters on
Old and New Jewry,” these writings outlined Dubnow’s philosophy of nationalism. A
translated compilation of the letters appears in Dubnow, Nationalism and History, 143.
29. For more on the Folkspartei and its journal, see David Fishman’s discussion
in David Fishman, The Rise of Modern Yiddish Culture (Pittsburgh: University of
Pittsburgh Press, 2005), 79. For more on Dubnow’s political thought, see Weinberg,
Between Tradition and Modernity.
30. Dubnow, Nationalism and History, 86.
31. Writing in Russian, Dubnow directly addressed an East European audience.
However, his essays engaged the literature on nationalism written by the leading Cen-
tral and West European nationalists, including the French scholar Ernst Renan, the
Austrian Marxist Karl Renner, and the German nationalist Johann Gottlieb Fichte
(see ibid., 79, 87).
32. Hacohen, “The Limits of the National Paradigm in the Study of Political
Thought,” 247–79, 251.
33. For a more detailed discussion of Renner’s model, as well as the contemporary
implications of early-twentieth-century theories of substate nationalism, see Nimni,
National Cultural Autonomy and Its Contemporary Critics.
34. Ibid., 27.
35. Ibid., 28.
36. Ibid., 25.
37. See Friedrich Meinecke, Die Idee der Staatsrason (The idea of reasons of state)
(Berlin: R. Oldenbourg, 1925).
38. Ibid., 500.
39. See Weiss, “Central European Ethnonationalism.”
40. See Mendes-Flohr, Land of Two Peoples.
41. Examples of this phenomenon include Herbert Samuel, member of Parliament
and first High Commissioner of Palestine; Sir Montague Burton, successful business-
man and internationalist (he funded the chair in international studies at Oxford, later
held by Zimmern); Sir Matthew Nathan, an elite member of the Colonial Service; Sir
Hersch Lauterpact, one of the leading legal theorists of the past century; and Sir Louis
Namier, the historian and British government official.
42. For more on Zimmern’s biography and theories of internationalism, see Rich,
“Alfred Zimmern’s Cautious Idealism: The League of Nations, International Educa-
tion, and the Commonwealth”; Carr, The Twenty Year Crisis, 1919–1939; Markwell, “Sir
Alfred Zimmern Revisited: Fifty Years On”; and Morefield, Covenants without Swords:
Idealist Liberalism and the Spirit of Empire.
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43. Zimmern, Nationality and Government, 65.
44. Zimmern, “Jews and Nationality,” 1915, MS Zimmern 177, folio 13, Sir Alfred
Zimmern Papers, Bodleian Library, Oxford University, Oxford.
45. Overall, Jewish historians have overlooked Zimmern. One of the few excep-
tions is Philippa Stroum’s brief mention of Zimmern in the context of the relationship
Zimmern forged when accompanying Judge Louis Brandeis on his first trip to Pales-
tine. See Philippa Stroum, Louis D. Brandeis: Justice for the People (Cambridge, Mass.:
Harvard University Press, 1984), 240–43.
46. Evidence suggests that Kallen served as an intermediary between Zimmern and
the Menorah Journal. Zimmern wrote: “I had a cable from Hurwitz [the editor of the
Menorah Journal]. . . . Would you mind sending the enclosed on to him. My Menorahs,
with the address are out of reach before the mail goes” (manuscript collection #1, Box
32, File 20, Horace Kallen Collection, American Jewish Archives, Cincinnati, Ohio).
47. Zimmern corresponded regularly with Kallen for more than a decade follow-
ing his return, on issues ranging from international relations to Zionism and personal
concerns. The Kallen–Zimmern correspondence is in ibid. I would like to thank Fred
Krome of the American Jewish Archives and Colin Harris of the Bodleian Library for
their help in locating Zimmern’s archival material.
48. Kallen, “Zionism and the Struggle towards Democracy,” 379.
49. Kallen, “Democracy versus the Melting-Pot.”
50. The phrase has appeared as the title of several studies tracing the development
of Zionism in America and reflects a theme that permeates the narrative of American
Jewish history. One prominent publication that popularized this phrase is Halpern’s
“The Americanization of Zionism, 1880–1930.” For a more recent example, see Cohen,
Americanization of Zionism.
51. See chapter 1, note 41.
52. Recently, American Jewish historians complicated the notion of the American
Jewish synthesis by highlighting the cracks and fissures that existed underneath the
rhetoric of a harmonious process of integration. My interest in probing the relation-
ship between American Zionists and American Jewish exceptionalism was sparked
by a conference paper given by the historian Tony Michels at the University of Wash-
ington on February 28, 2008.
53. American Jewish historians have begun to bridge the historiographical gap
between Kallen’s contributions as both a Jewish and an American thinker. Dan-
iel Greene has considered the relationship between Kallen’s cultural pluralism and
notions of chosenness. He concludes that Kallen rejected Jewish exceptionalism as
a necessary compromise for including Jews within conceptions of American plural-
ism. See Greene, “A Chosen People in a Pluralist Nation: Horace Kallen and the Jew-
ish-American Experience.” William Toll has helped situate Kallen’s notion of descent
within the American Zionist’s personal Jewish journey. See Toll, “Horace M. Kallen:
Pluralism and American Jewish Identity.”
54. This was not only a phenomenon involving Jewish intellectuals. A number of
non-Jewish intellectuals also adopted the position that Zionism represented the paragon
of national identity. See, for example, Bourne, “The Jew and Trans-National America.”
55. Edward Alsworth Ross, The Old World in the New: The Significance of Past and
Present Immigration to the American People (New York: The Century Company, 1914),
165.
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not taken
56. Kaplan enumerated the constituent elements of Jewish civilization nationalism in
his Judaism as a Civilization (see chapter 4 in this book for a more in-depth discussion).
57. Dubnow, Nationalism and History, 94. See also p. 87.
58. Zimmern, “Nationality in the Modern World,” 210.
59. Ibid., 211. Kallen’s debt to Ahad Ha’am for his central concept of Hebraism is
evident in the clear overlap between the concept of Hebraism quoted in the text and
the explanation of Ahad Ha’am’s theory offered by Kallen in 1921: “Each nationality,
Ginsberg holds, is characterized by a spirit, an essence, a central spontaneity, which
expresses itself in all the inverse forms of the national life: economic, social, political,
religious, literary, and so on . . . no Jew of modern times has had so profound an influ-
ence upon the Jewish people [as] Achad Ha’am” (Kallen, Zionism and World Politics,
76). Despite these claims, however, such historians as Naomi Cohen have concluded
that Kallen “dismissed the theories of Achad Ha’am” (see Cohen, American Jews and
the Zionist Idea, 18 and 220). The ingrained assumption that Kallen, like other Ameri-
can Jewish intellectuals, dismissed Ahad Ha’am reflects a larger bias that the cultural
Zionist had little influence in American Jewish circles as a political thinker.
60. Ahad Ha’am introduced the idea of imitation in an 1894 essay, “Imitation and
Assimilation.” The article distinguished between a positive and negative expression
of imitation. “Self-effacing” imitation seeks to copy the “spirit” and “personality” of
the dominant nation. In the former model, “competitive” imitation, “the whole desire
of the imitator is to reveal his own spirit or personality. He therefore endeavors to
change the original impress, according as his personality or his position differs from
that of his model.” Zimmern integrated the competitive model into his discussion
of Ahad Ha’am and the importance of promoting national communities. See Ahad
Ha’am, “Imitation and Assimilation,” in Selected Essays of Ahad Ha’am, ed. Leon
Simon (Philadelphia: Jewish Publication Society, 1894), 111–12.
61. Ahad Ha’am, Selected Essays by Ahad Ha’Am, 112.
62. Zimmern, “Theodore Harzl and the Jewish Renaissance,” 23.
63. Kallen, “Nationality and the Jewish Stake in the Great War,” Menorah Journal 1,
no. 2 (1915): 113.
64. Kallen, “Democracy versus the Melting Pot,” 218.
65. Ibid., 220.
66. Both Hollinger and Sollors have developed parallel critiques of Kallen as a
progenitor of trends in ethnic studies that view membership as heavily based on
biological grounds, rather than on dynamic individual decisions. Kallen, Hollinger
concludes, wants “to reduce the United States to an administrative canopy under
which a variety of old-world clans could perpetuate themselves” (Hollinger, Posteth-
nic America, 162). Note the derogatory connotations of clans and old world. These
words suggest a blind adherence to a set of antiquated allegiances incompatible with
the fluidity of identity in a society based on the liberal values of free choice and cul-
tural amalgamation. Sollors defines Kallen’s position as “most given to considering
descent-based identifications eternal and static” (see Sollors, Beyond Ethnicity, 183).
Sollors also argues that Kallen’s notion of cultural pluralism engenders “a biological
insiderism” that rejects a “shared history” and minimizes “human empathy” (ibid.,
151). Sollors criticizes what he perceives as a biological rhetoric of difference, which
he fears promotes a false sense of collective authenticity and obscures shared interests
across group boundaries.
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67. Kallen, Structure of Lasting Peace, 34.
68. Dubnow, Nationalism and History, 126.
69. Ibid., 127.
70. Ibid., 122.
71. Dubnow’s footnotes in his Nationalism and History indicate that he was aware
of an even more explicit rejection of Jewish national minority status. He referred
directly to an 1883 essay by Renan called “Judaism as a Race and a Religion.” Renan,
an architect of civic nationalism and clearly one of Dubnow’s influences throughout
his essays, penned this essay about the Jews who rejected their national character and
concluded they will “of necessity assimilate with other nations” (see ibid.).
72. John Stuart Mill, The Collected Works of John Stuart Mill, ed. F. E. K. Priestley,
vol. 19 (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1977), 547.
73. Zimmern’s vehement disagreement with Mill is clear from this critique: “I
believe from the bottom of my heart that Mill’s idea is fundamentally wrong—wrong
in fact, and wrong as an ideal, and that all forward-looking men who desire better
international relations and a better political organization of the world must rest their
hope, not in the Nation-State, which is only a stage, and in the West an outworn stage,
in the political evolution of mankind, but in states which, like the great governing
religious systems of the past, like mediaeval Christendom and Islam, find room for
all sorts and conditions of communities and nations” (see Zimmern, Nationality and
Government, 64).
74. Smith, Spinoza, Liberalism, and the Question of Jewish Identity, 26.
75. Ibid.
76. Jewish nationalism’s analysis of liberalism’s failure to recognize an individual’s
ties to a particular group context, as articulated by Dubnow and other counterstate
theorists, anticipated the communitarian critique developed over the past decade.
See Etzioni, New Communitarian Thinking; Avineri and De-Shalit, Communitarian-
ism and Individualism; and Walzer, “Communitarian Critique of Liberalism.”
78. Ibid., 77.
79. Ibid., 15. See also his “Nationality in the Modern World.”
80. Kallen, “Zionism: Democracy or Prussianism.”
81. Kallen himself made the precise link between his melting-pot critique of the
United States and the typology of German Kultur developed in Zimmern’s writings
in 1924. The introduction to a book of Kallen’s essays, including a reprint of “Democ-
racy versus the Melting-Pot,” explicitly contrasted his vision of America with German
Kultur (see Kallen, Culture and Democracy in the United States).
82. Morefield, Covenants without Swords, 219.
83. One recent collection of essays explores the tension between liberalism and
nationalism. See McKim and McMahan, Morality of Nationalism.
84. Morefield, “A Liberal in a Muddle: Alfred Zimmern on Nationality, Interna-
tionality, and Commonwealth,” 105.
85. “All aristocrats have one motto—it is noblesse oblige. This must be the motto of
the Jew.” Horace M. Kallen, “Address to the Third Menorah Convention,” The Meno-
rah Journal 1, no. 2 [1915]: 130.
86. Kallen, Zionism and World Politics, 294.
87. Kallen as cited in Rafael Medoff, Zionism and the Arabs: An American Jewish
Dilemma, 1898–1948 (Westport, Conn.: Praeger, 1997), 29.
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not taken
89. Neither did Kallen implement his vision of equality and diversity in the Ameri-
can context. African Americans, for example, had no clear place in his orchestra of
humankind. See Gleason, “American Identity and Americanization,” 107.
90. Kallen, Zionism and World Politics, 294. It is important to note that a degree
of bicultural appreciation accompanied Kallen’s sense of noblesse oblige. For instance,
Kallen advocated for the creation of a “Department of Arabic Life and Letters” in the
future Jewish university to promote Jewish–Arab understanding. Given his attitude
about the Arab inhabitants of Palestine, however, the bicultural learning program was
most likely a tool for catalyzing the process of integration, rather than maintaining
two distinct national cultures within the Jewish homeland.
91. By the time Kallen published this program for Palestine in 1921, the Arab
national movement had already made vocal claims contesting Jewish immigration
and advocating for Arab national autonomy. Yet these developments did not, at least
publicly, deter Kallen’s optimism that the indigenous population would voluntarily
and enthusiastically embrace Jewish culture.
93. Zimmern’s article critiquing the 1905 British Alien Act makes clear his own
awareness of the marginal status of Jews as a national group worthy of inclusion
within British civilization. See Alfred Eckhard Zimmern, “The Aliens Act: A Chal-
lenge,” Economic Review 21, no. 2 (1911): 195.
94. One prominent example of a counterstate theorist who explicitly rejected
the national status of Jews was Austrian cultural autonomist Otto Bauer. See Jack
Jacobs, “Austrian Social Democracy and the Jewish Question in the First Republic,” in
Austrian Socialist Experiment: Social Democracy and Austromarxism, 1918–1934, ed.
Anson Rabinback (Boulder, Colo.: Westview Press, 1985).
95. The Zionist philosopher and publisher Yaakov Klatzkin articulated one of the
classic expressions of the negation of the diaspora ideology in Tehumim, his collection
of essays published in 1928.
96. Zimmern, “Nationality in the Modern World,” 210. For a slightly different vari-
ation of Zimmern’s definition of nationality, see Zimmern, Nationality and Govern-
ment, 52: “a body of people united by a corporate sentiment of peculiar intensity,
intimacy and dignity, related to a definite home-country.”
97. Horace Meyer Kallen, Judaism at Bay, 40.
99. Kallen only selectively affirmed his appropriation of Ahad Ha’am’s long-dis-
tance link to another territory. Sensitive to the possibility of bolstering attacks on
the patriotism of American Jews, Kallen downplayed the importance of the national
homeland in the conception of nationality published for non-Jewish audiences. His
article “Democracy versus the Melting-Pot,” for instance, completely ignored the
concept of the homeland, which played a critical role in the concept of nationality
outlined in articles published in the Jewish press. Kallen’s self-censorship reflects the
delicate balance between the need for a broad appeal to legitimate differentiation as
an American value, and making claims that would further fuel nativist attacks on the
dual allegiances of American Jews. Transforming U.S. public opinion to recognize the
value of pluralism in general and Jews in particular demanded the strategic silencing
of certain elements of his understanding of Jewish political thought.
100. Kaplan, Judaism as a Civilization, 245.
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3. Text, Not Territory
1. Rawidowicz, State of Israel, Diaspora, and Jewish Continuity, 198.
2. Ibid., 188. The longer Hebrew version of this article sent to Ben Gurion appeared
under the title “Yisrael,” in Metzudah 7 (1954): 11–61. Although he published under the
Hebrew name “Shimon Rawidowicz,” for the sake of consistency, I use the English
name “Simon Rawidowicz” throughout this book.
3. Ibid., 194. Ben Gurion and Rawidowicz exchanged several letters between Octo-
ber 1954 and May 1955. An abridged English translation of these letters, compiled by
Benjamin Ravid, appears in Rawidowicz, State of Israel, Diaspora, and Jewish Continu-
ity, 194. The complete Hebrew correspondence was published by Rawidowicz in Baby-
lon and Jerusalem, 872–909.
4. Ibid. For information on the debate over the name of the state and its rela-
tionship to Ben Gurion’s theory of statism, see Kedar, “Ben Gurion’s Mamlachtiyut”;
Eliezer Don-Yehiya, “Political Religion in Israel: Ben Gurion’s Mamlachtiyut,” in
Israel: The First Decade of Independence, ed. Ilan Troen and Noah Lucas (Albany: State
University of New York Press, 1995), 171; and Pnina Lahav, “A ‘Jewish State . . . to Be
Known as the State of Israel’: Notes on Israel Legal Historiography,” Law and History
Review 19 (2001): 387–88.
5. Jewish historian David Myers has called Rawidowicz “one of the twentieth
century’s great and neglected Jewish thinkers” (see Myers, “A Third Guide for the
Perplexed?” 75). Scholarship on Rawidowicz primarily relates to his research on the
medieval philosopher Moses Maimonides, historian Nachman Krochmal, diaspora
nationalist Simon Dubnow, and poet Haim Nahman Bialik—and occasional refer-
ences to his well-known essay “Israel: The Ever-Dying People.” See, for example, the
discussion of Rawidowicz’s work on Krochmal in Harris, Nachman Krochmal. See
also Sarna, American Judaism, 17. A number of essays were written after the publica-
tion of “Israel: The Ever-Dying People” in 1988. See Gordon Tucker, “Israel, Canaan,
and the Diaspora,” Judaism 37 (1988): 364–75. Myers’s publication, Between Jew and
Arab, is the most recent contribution to recovering Rawidowicz’s thought, specifically
an unpublished chapter from Babylon and Jerusalem that analyzes the Israeli govern-
ment’s treatment of the Arab question. See note 7 below for a list of other recent stud-
ies of Rawidowicz’s life and thought. I am particularly indebted to Professor Benjamin
Ravid, Rawidowicz’s son, for taking the time to speak with me about his father, to
review earlier drafts of this chapter for factual accuracy, and to provide me with access
to his private collection of archival material.
6. Rawidowicz, Babylon and Jerusalem, postscript. Translated in Rawidowicz,
State of Israel, Diaspora, and Jewish Continuity, 204.
7. For an account of Rawidowicz’s life, see Israel: The Ever-Dying People and Other
Essays, 13–50, and reissued in paperback under the title of State of Israel, Diaspora
and Jewish Continuity. For a more detailed Hebrew version and a bibliography of
Rawidowicz’s major writings, see Iyunim bemahshevet yisrael, 1: 17–82 and 83–92
(Hebrew pagination), respectively. Myers’s Between Jew and Arab includes a com-
prehensive biographical sketch that places Rawidowicz’s life and thought in the con-
text of wider intellectual and historical developments. Unfortunately, Between Jew
and Arab appeared too late for me to fully integrate Myers’s analysis and translation
of Rawidowicz’s unpublished essay into this chapter. I have, however, tried to pro-
vide some references in the notes to relevant sections in Myers’s book. More general
224 224 notes

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information about Rawidowicz can be found in Ravid, “The Human Dimension of
Wissenschaft des Judentums: Letters from the Rawidowicz Archive,” in Studies in
Arabic and Hebrew Letters in Honor of Raymond P. Scheindlin, ed. J. Decter and M.
Rand (Piscataway, N.J.: Gorgias Press, 2007), 99–144; and the entry “Simon Rawido-
wicz,” in Metzler Lexikon Juedischer Philosophen, ed. A. Kilcher and O. Fraisse (Stutt-
gart: Metzler, 2003), 389–91.
8. Rawidowicz edited and published two scholarly editions that were particularly
well received: an edition of Sefer hamada, the first book of Maimonides’ Mishneh
torah, and the publication of Nachman Krochmal’s Moreh nevukhei hazman (Guide
to the perplexed of the time). The release of the Krochmal volume constituted the first
annotated edition of this nineteenth-century historian’s work. The work, together with
Rawidowicz’s introductory chapter on Krochmal’s intellectual biography, contributed
to the revival of this important historian, who had died before his major work was
completed. Harris (see his Nachman Krochmal) has acknowledged the importance of
Rawidowicz’s work in Krochmal scholarship.
9. Rawidowicz, Babylon and Jerusalem, 784.
10. Simon Rawidowicz, “Book Review: A Theory of Jewish Nationalism,” New
Judea, September 1938, 194.
11. Simon Rawidowicz, “Simon Dubnow in memoriam.”
12. Rawidowicz met his future wife, Esther Eugenie Klee, the daughter of the Ger-
man Zionist leader Dr. Alfred Klee, in one of his Hebrew courses. For more informa-
tion on his circle in Berlin during the early 1920s, see Brenner, Renaissance of Jewish
Culture in Weimar Germany, 209–210. Rawidowicz’s personal account of this period
can be found in A. Ravid, “From the Letters of Simon Rawidowicz” and Rawidowicz,
Sihotai im Bialik.
13. According to Rawidowiz’s explanation in his Sihotai im Bialik, he declined the
offer, however, because Bialik, concerned about competition from Rawidowicz’s other
editorial and publishing work, demanded that Rawidowicz relinquish his position at
his own press, Ayanot.
14. The reasons for this shift in the center of Hebrew literature were both ideologi-
cal and economic. Hebrew publishing actually benefited greatly from the rapid infla-
tion in Germany that allowed foreign funds to make such publishing economically
viable. The end of this rapid inflation diminished the economic advantages of pub-
lishing in Germany. Rawidowicz’s relationship with Bialik during the 1920s and early
1930s provides a good barometer of how attitudes shifted during this period. Bialik
told his protégé in 1932 that Jews “do not need a homeland” and claimed that Hebrew
culture was possible wherever a minyan was present. (From Merriam-Webster’s 11th
Collegiate Dictionary, a “minyan” refers to the quorum required for Jewish commu-
nal worship, consisting of ten male adults in Orthodox Judaism and ten adults, male
or female, in Conservative and Reform Judaism.) See Rawidowicz, Sihotai im Bialik
(Conversations with Bialik), 47. Bialik clearly changed his position after his arrival
in Tel Aviv: “There is no Hebrew literature outside of the Land of Israel,” he wrote to
Rawidowicz in 1929 (ibid., 92).
15. Rawidowicz to his brother, February 5, 1930, Iyunim bemahshevet yisrael, vol. 1,
32–33.
16. Myers suggests that despite Rawidowicz’s very strong credentials, he was only
considered as an alternate candidate for the Hebrew University position. See Myers,
Between Jew and Arab, 51.
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17. Benjamin Ravid reports that his father decided not to stay in Palestine in 1925
for two reasons. First, he wanted to complete his doctoral degree (and book on the
philosopher Feuerbach) in Berlin. Second, as mentioned above, Rawidowicz had
failed to obtain a faculty position at the Hebrew University in 1933. Despite these
setbacks, Rawidowicz remained committed to eventually moving to Palestine. In fact,
Rawidowicz purchased land in Palestine as an investment property. He thought that
the income from several rental units on the property would be sufficient to support
him and his scholarly endeavors in Palestine. Unfortunately, the plan failed to gener-
ate sufficient income. Conversation with Benjamin Ravid, May 8, 2009.
18. Rawidowicz’s colleagues and friends in his circle of Zionist writers and speak-
ers did not appreciate his enduring affirmation for Hebrew language in the diaspora.
Rawidowicz’s position led to his marginalization from the very organization and
movements he had founded. For example, Rawidowicz’s name disappeared from the
masthead of the Hebrew World Union, the Hebrew-speaking organization he created.
There is even some evidence that the poet Haim Nahman Bialik had a role in eras-
ing Rawidowicz’s founding position. Rawidowicz’s dismay that his name was pushed
off the masthead is expressed in Sihotai im Bialik (Conversations with Bialik), 14.
Another reference to these events is found in a student’s recollection of a conversation
with him (see Greenbaum, History of the Ararat Publishing Society, 68).
19. See, for example, Rawidowicz’s series published in Ha’olam in December 1931.
See Rawidowicz, “Law and Practice: Remarks on the Hebrew Conference in Berlin,”
Ha-Olam 19 (1931): 936–37, 958–59, 978–79, and 998–99. These articles argue that
Hebrew in the diaspora is necessary for Jewish survival. They also introduce the idea
of two centers, specifically Babylon and Jerusalem, which remained a central theme
(and symbols) for Rawidowicz through the publication of Babylon and Jerusalem in
1957.
20. As quoted in Myers, Between Jew and Arab, 59. The original can be found in
“Le’irgun hagolah ha’ivrit’,” Moznayim 3, no. 10 (1931): 3.
21. Myers, Between Jew and Arab, 67.
22. See Amos Oz, A Tale of Love and Darkness (Orlando, Fla.: Harcourt Books,
2005).
23. See Rawidowicz, Ludwig Feuerbachs Philosophie (Ludwig Feuerbach’s philos-
ophy). The book was reprinted in 1964, indicating its scholarly significance. In the
future Rawidowicz would turn away from his earlier interest in German philosophy.
According to his son Benjamin Ravid, Rawidowicz later regretted the fact that he had
published a book in German.
24. The essay was published as fourteen chapters between 1933 and 1934. See Simon
Rawidowicz, “Kiyum hatefutzah” (Endurance of the diaspora), Moznayim 3, no. 2
(1934): 125–39, 265–76, 581–609.
25. The word choice of Rawidowicz’s essay title suggests a polemical response to
Yaakov Klatzkin’s 1914 essay “Ha’galut bat kayam” (There is no future for the exile), in
Klatzkin, Tehumim, which had by then become an influential tenet of political Zionist
ideology. See note 45 for a longer discussion of the relationship between Rawidowicz
and Klatzkin.
27. Benjamin Harshav, a scholar of Hebrew literature, has contended that attitudes
about place, time, and identity tended to polarize toward extreme, often mutually
226 226 notes

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not taken
exclusive, formulations. Perhaps the most well-known dichotomy grew out of the
clear distinction between here (diaspora) and there (the Land of Israel). See Harshav,
Language in the Time of Revolution. The historian Ezra Mendelsohn has made a simi-
lar claim in his work On Modern Jewish Politics.
28. Rawidowicz wrote a series of articles in the Hebrew Journal Ha’olam that
directly criticizes Ahad Ha’am’s conception that life in Palestine can contribute to
national culture in the diaspora. See, for example, Rawidowicz, “Leshem hidush
sifruteinu” (Toward the renewal of our literature).
29. Only by fully separating from the hopeless reliance on the state’s ability to pro-
duce relevant formulations of Judaism will “Torah [emerge] from the State of Colum-
bus” (Rawidowicz, Babylon and Jerusalem, 259).
30. Rawidowicz had been making this argument against Ahad Ha’am for many
years. One of the earliest examples of this debate is found in a 1931 speech inaugurat-
ing the Brit Ivrit Olamit. The motto for the organization directly challenged the ideo-
logical schisms. Adapting one of Rabbi Hillel’s famous dictums, Rawidowicz declared
this motto: “If not here—where? If there is nothing ‘here’ there is nothing ‘there.’ Here
and there, there and here—this is the law of partnership between the land and the
dispersion.” The speech was published as Rawidowicz, Im lo kan hekhan (If not here,
where?).
31. Rawidowicz claimed that his reading follows the interpretation of Maimonides.
See Rawidowicz, Babylon and Jerusalem, 783.
32. The third chapter of Babylon and Jerusalem, “Eruvin,” refers to Masechet eru-
vin, a volume of the Talmud dealing with two rabbinic institutions permitting certain
behaviors normally forbidden on the Sabbath. First, the eruv hatzerot (“the courtyard
eruv”) is a legal argument that permits items to be carried between private domains
and public realms. Eruv tehumim (“the boundary eruv”) constitutes the second cat-
egory. This legal loophole extends the distance an individual can walk outside the
boundaries of a residential neighborhood on the Sabbath by placing a small amount
of food on the outskirts of his town to symbolically extend his dwelling place. Ra-
widowicz quoted Maimonides’ Mishneh torah to define the process by which families
sharing a courtyard could enlarge their permitted sphere for carrying on the Sabbath
by bringing a set amount of food to one communal place. Thus, Maimonides contin-
ued, “all those who contribute food are all joined in one property” (see Maimonides,
Hilkhot Eruvin 1:6). For basic information on the eruv, see “Eruvin,” in Encyclopedia
Judaica (Jerusalem: Keter Publishing, 1973).
33. Rawidowicz based his explanation of eruvin on these two rabbinic typologies;
however, he adapted the general concept for his ideological purposes and disregarded
its legal details, especially its relevance for the Sabbath and holidays.
35. Ibid., 265.
36. Ibid., 198.
37. Rawidowicz’s effort to establish the term interland instead of interstate would
parallel an effort in the English language to change the term transnational to trans-
statist. This shift would overcome the confusion that a transnational group describes
a community whose national bonds transcend state boundaries.
38. Although Rawidowicz adopts this term from Klausner, he contends that Klaus-
ner misunderstands the source of this phenomenon. For Rawidowicz, the goyish
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element stems from the “rejection of all of the galut-continuity.” See Israel, the Ever-
Dying People, 178.
39. Harshav, in his Language in the Time of Revolution, understands language as a
“way of assimilating content by altering form,” 41.
40. Although the language wars of the early twentieth century pitted Yiddishists
and Hebraists, both implicitly agreed with the assumption that social autonomy and
linguistic modernization were necessary for national culture.
41. See, for example, the article “Leshem hidush sifruteinu,” which laments the
negative impact that spoken Hebrew had on the written language.
42. Pollock, The Language of the Gods.
43. This point is one of the major differences between Rawidowicz’s conception of
national culture and Mordecai Kaplan’s conception of Jewish peoplehood (discussed
in detail in chapter 4).
44. Rawidowicz claimed that “the eruv is so powerful that it actually overcomes
space” (Rawidowicz, Babylon and Jerusalem, 198).
45. Although Rawidowicz did not make this explicit link, there are a number of
clues demonstrating eruvin’s purpose as a challenge to Zionist rhetoric. The play
between the terms eruvin and tehumim (boundaries) in this chapter certainly hints at
a polemic against leading European Zionist ideologue Yaakov Klatzkin’s emphasis on
defining Israel’s tehumim. Klatzkin published a collection of his essays called Tehu-
mim in 1928. He insisted that the Jewish nation’s only hope for survival was a return
to its “natural tehumim: land and language” (see Klatzkin, Tehumim, 54).Perhaps
Klatzkin, the son of a Talmud scholar, adopted the term to indicate the centrality of
fixed spatial demarcations in traditional Jewish law. Applying this principle to politi-
cal discourse, Klatzkin translated the notion of tehumim into the basic boundary for
a modern nation-state—territorial sovereignty. In direct opposition to Klatzkin, who
viewed territorial boundaries as the key to Jewish survival, Rawidowicz used the con-
cept of eruv to challenge the assumption made by Zionist theorists that nation-state
tehumim remain the sine qua non of Jewish nationalism.
46. A recent article analyzing the origins of the rabbinic concept of the eruv by the
Talmud scholar Charlotte Fonrobert in fact highlights the eruv’s role “as a project of con-
structing, maintaining and re-enacting a collective identity in relation to the residential
space of the mixed urban courtyard” (Fonrobert, “From Separatism to Urbanism,” 32).
47. Rawidowicz, “On Interpretation.” A revised version of the essay appears in
Rawidowicz, Studies in Jewish Thought, 45–80. Myers offers an in-depth analysis of
this essay in his “Third Guide for the Perplexed?”
48. Rawidowicz, “Interpretation,” in his Studies in Jewish Thought, 47.
49. See Rawidowicz, “Toward the Renewal of Our Literature,” 994.
50. The scholar Mitchell Cohen has picked up on a similar metaphor in his discus-
sion of shaatnez (a Torah prohibition against wearing garments made of wool and
linen) as a model for Jewish politics in multicultural America. See Cohen’s essay “In
Defense of Shaatnez” in Biale, Galchinsky, and Heschel, Insider/Outsider, 34–55.
51. Myers has suggested that Rawidowicz’s choice of the term house instead of tem-
ple might indicate his desire to move these categories away from their roots in religious
institutions (see Myers, “Third Guide for the Perplexed?”). Indeed, Rawidowicz uses
the term house to refer to a period longer than that of the First and Second Temple.
52. Rawidowicz’s periodization—which categorized the return to Jerusalem and
228 228 notes

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not taken
the rebuilding of the temple and Jewish autonomy in the Land of Israel as part of
the Second House period—closely mirrored Krochmal’s breakdown of Jewish history
(see Harris, Nachman Krochmal).
54. The focus on the importance of myth had a philosophical analogue for Ra-
widowicz in the erosion of philosophical idealism at the start of the twentieth century.
He lamented specifically “a new generation in Germany arose that knew not Kant,
Goethe, Luther, humanism and idealism.” He concluded that the need to revitalize
utopian visions of the past had eroded the central distinction in German thought,
separating the theoretical values of humanism and liberalism from such concrete cat-
egories as blood, land, leader, and state. This strict Kantian separation between the
real and the ideal had guaranteed two crucial safeguards that heavily influenced the
status of Jews in modern European society. Positing the existence of universal, a priori
moral criteria—even if they did not always manifest themselves in the concrete reali-
ties of quotidian interactions and political affairs—served as an orienting ethical force
in human affairs. Idealism, the notion that real and ideal are separated, serves the
parallel purpose to myth in religious traditions. See Rawidowicz, “Kiyum hatefutzah,”
131.
55. Despite the Hebrew terminology and specific historical context, Rawidowicz’s
categorization of the philosophical developments of the First and Second Houses
corresponded quite closely to Hegelian accounts of historical idealism. The Second
House, to translate Rawidowicz’s thought back into secular philosophical discourse,
developed an epistemological approach that integrated the divine spirit into history.
The rabbinic tradition strove to discern the absolute within historical developments.
Their idealism manifested a level of philosophical self-consciousness of the dialectical
relationship between current reality and ultimate historical meaning.
56. Rawidowicz wrote that myth has become “materialized” by the “stamp of prag-
matism and positivism” (see Rawidowicz, Studies in Jewish Thought, 419).
57. Ibid., 418.
58. This effort to remystify the tradition echoes what the intellectual historian Allan
Megill has termed the aesthetic dimension in Nietzsche. See Allan Megill, Prophets of
Extremity (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1987).
59. Rawidowicz, “Kiyum hatefutzah,” 128.
60. The cultural historian Carl Schorske has made a similar argument about politi-
cal developments in Europe at the turn of the twentieth century. See Carl E. Schorske,
Fin-de-Siècle Vienna: Politics and Culture (New York: Vintage, 1980).
62. The Hebrew literature scholar Sidra Ezrahi has articulated a parallel argument
regarding the dangers inherent in Zionism’s move to equate the political return to the
Land of Israel with literary expressions of homecoming. Ezrahi explores the intersec-
tion of fiction and reality in twentieth-century Jewish literature. See Sidra Ezrahi,
Booking Passage: Exile and Homecoming in the Modern Jewish Imagination (Berkeley:
University of California Press, 2000).
63. This illuminates Rawidowicz’s grievance that the new state “consists of a new
foundation that is a complete reality: the State of Israel—from Judaism was taken . . .
the foundation of foundations: the foundation of the messiah in its hidden form” (see
Rawidowicz, Babylon and Jerusalem, 182).
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64. For a discussion of Ben Gurion’s messianic claims, see Eliezer Don-Yehiya and
Charles Liebman, Civil Religion in Israel: Traditional Judaism and Political Culture
in the Jewish State (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1983), 86. Rawidowicz’s
generalizations about the centrality of the messiah in Zionist ideology appear reduc-
tive and disingenuous, particularly from a sophisticated secular thinker. Rawidowicz
reduced the complexities of Zionist thought to create a straw-man position for his
argument that Jewish messianism eschewed political realization. In doing so, how-
ever, he ignored the complexity and range of views within the Zionist movement itself
toward the historical and religious import of the founding of the state. Ideas of mes-
sianism certainly reverberated through both secular and religious theories of Zion-
ism, but not all of these visions embraced 1948 as ushering in the messianic moment
in Jewish history. Such highly visible thinkers as Gershom Scholem joined Rawido-
wicz in the efforts to “neutralize the apocalyptic sting” of messianism. See Gershom
Scholem, The Messianic Idea in Judaism and Other Essays on Jewish Spirituality (New
York: Schocken Books, 1971).
65. For more on the distinction between political and religious exile in Jewish
thought, and its multiple interpretations in the modern period, see Eisen, Galut.
66. According to Rawidowicz’s interpretation of rabbinic and philosophical tradi-
tions, a political return to the Land of Israel had to be integrally linked with meta-
physical, or messianic, redemption. In an attempt to prove the fallacy of messianic
claims, Rawidowicz listed the political compromises forced on the nascent state—
the lack of massive aliyah (immigration) from the Western diaspora and the interne-
cine tensions stirred up by the return of large numbers of Jews to the Land of Israel.
The founding of the state thus failed to fulfill the primary criteria for redemption as
described in the Jewish sources. For an extended discussion of the tension between
Jewish sources and Zionism, see Aviezer Ravitzky, Messianism, Zionism, and Jewish
Religious Radicalism (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1996).
67. Rawidowicz experienced the need to warn against external influences because
he worried about the complete dissolution of traditional sources and knowledge.
Judaism, he stressed throughout his work, operated with little influence from non-
Jewish sources. He first introduced this methodological approach in his pathbreaking
essay on Krochmal, which argued that the great Jewish historian was not influenced
by Hegel’s philosophy of history. His defense of Krochmal’s intellectual purity was
part of his battle against integrating words and concepts he considered foreign into
Jewish life. Rawidowicz wrote that the role of Zionism is to engage in a “battle against
lo’az” (that is, foreign language). He explained the resonances between Jewish thought
and other intellectual currents as proof that Jewish sources already contained the
seeds of later philosophical and religious innovations. See Rawidowicz, Babylon and
Jerusalem, 261. Unlike his younger contemporary, Gerson Cohen, who insisted on the
productive effects of adopting new forms and ideas in his 1966 address “The Bless-
ings of Assimilation,” Rawidowicz had little patience for the extent to which Western
philosophy had undermined a familiarity and respect for traditional Jewish sources.
Cohen’s speech was first delivered at the Hebrew Teacher’s College commencement
in 1966. For a reprint of the lecture, see Gerson D. Cohen, “The Blessing of Assimila-
tion in Jewish History,” in Great Jewish Speeches throughout History, ed. Israel For-
man (Northvale, N.J.: Jason Aronson, 1994), 183–91. Rawidowicz’s own perception
of the relationship between contemporary ideas and events and the Jewish tradition
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not taken
remained far more nuanced. Other aspects of his work clearly indicate the impor-
tance of dialogue between text and context in his thought.
68. See Simon Rawidowicz, “Kiyum lelo tenai,” Metzuda. The English translation
remained unpublished, but Rawidowicz used it as a text for lectures. A revised English
translation based on Rawidowicz’s original is in Rawidowicz, State of Israel, Diaspora,
and Jewish Continuity, 118–29.
69. Rawidowicz, State of Israel, Diaspora, and Jewish Continuity, 124.
70. Ibid., 128.
71. See ibid., 43. Special thanks to Benjamin Ravid for making the unpublished
Hebrew manuscript of this chapter available for my use. The full translated text of this
essay has recently been published for the first time by Myers in Between Jew and Arab.
Myers translates the title of the essay “Between Jew and Arab” (rather than a more
literal Between Hebrew and Arab) to reflect Rawidowicz’s expansive use of the word
Hebrew to refer to the Jewish people. Myers speculates on Rawidowicz’s motivations
for censoring the chapter, but concludes that the actual reason remains a mystery. See
Between Jew and Arab, 24–31.
73. Myers includes full translations of these laws in his appendix in Between Jew
and Arab, 194–202.
74. Rawidowicz, “Between Hebrew and Arab,” 15a. Rawidowicz, “Bein ever ve’arav”
unpublished manuscript, 15a. Translation quoted from Myers, Between Jew and Arab,
154.
75. Rawidowicz also offered a number of practical problems arising as a result of
preventing the return of the 1948 Arab refugees. He noted that the refugee problem
would be a blessing for Arab states that hoped to destroy Israel. Rawidowicz argued
that six hundred thousand Arabs outside Israel were far more dangerous than six
hundred thousand inside the new state (see ibid.). Striving for a particular ethnona-
tional makeup, at the price of exiling those who had occupied the land, struck him as
ethically out of line with his understanding of Jewish nationalism. He wrote: “where
are the commandments of the ‘ethical nation’ in whose name Zionism waved its flag?
Isn’t the first command of all chosen people: Thou shalt not uproot man from his land,
whether a member of your people or not?” (see ibid., 21).
77. The handwritten note is addressed to Rawidowicz and signed by the author,
Mordecai Kaplan. This copy of Judaism as a Civilization can be found in the Simon
Rawidowicz Archive, Newton, Mass.
78. Rawidowicz, “Kiyum hatefutzah.”
4. Making American Democracy Safe for Judaism

1. Samuel Huntington, Who Are We? The Challenges to American National Iden-
tity (New York: Simon & Schuster, 2004).
2. See Sarna, American Judaism, 247.
3. See Arthur Hertzberg, The Zionist Idea (Philadelphia: Jewish Publication Soci-
ety, 1997), 536. Hertzberg acknowledges Kaplan’s fundamental differences with politi-
cal Zionism, such as his affirmation of diaspora life as a creative value and his insis-
tence on a more “tradition-minded” community in the Land of Israel. These important
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distinctions, however, fail to acknowledge Kaplan’s deep reluctance about, and even
opposition to, statehood.
4. The Reconstructionist movement joined the Reform, Conservative, and Ortho-
dox movements as the fourth major denomination of American Judaism.
5. Kaplan, “Judaism and Nationality,” 61–63; and Kaplan, Religion of Ethical
Nationhood.
6. This reading of civilization is meant to complement recent scholarly interest
in identifying the influences shaping Kaplan’s thought. An article by Deborah Dash
Moore and Andrew Bush has drawn parallels between his adoption of the prominent
position of the term and the language of civilization present in two influential works
by American intellectuals published in the years preceding the publication of Judaism
as a Civilization in 1934: John Dewey’s Philosophy and Civilization (1931) and Charles
and Mary Beard’s The Rise of American Civilization (1927). By adopting the popu-
lar use of civilization, these interpretations suggest, Kaplan succeeded in translating
Judaism into the language of American thought and in elevating Jewish history to the
same status as American history. See Moore and Bush, “Kaplan’s Key.” Such readings
support the claim that Kaplan turned to the use of civilization as part of his efforts to
rewrite Judaism in an American key. This scholarship warrants serious consideration.
As even a cursory glance through Kaplan’s journal or footnotes indicates, Kaplan read
widely and had most likely encountered the well-known definitions of civilization
that had been offered by Dewey and the Beards.
7. This was not the first time that Kaplan had encountered Rawidowicz’s work.
His diary entry from June 9, 1927, refers to reading the edition of Krochmal’s Guide
for the Perplexed of the Time, which was edited and introduced by Rawidowicz. See
“Mordecai Menahem Kaplan, 1881,” box 1, vol. 3, File ARC 65, Kaplan Diaries and
Papers, Jewish Theological Seminary, New York.
8. See Scult, Judaism Faces the Twentieth Century, 25.
9. Benjamin Ravid’s biography of his father, Simon Rawidowicz, claims that the
name Rawidowicz was “derived from the position of an ancestor, who had served in
the capacity of Rosh Av Bet din (head of rabbinical court)” (see Rawidowicz, State of
Israel, Diaspora, and Jewish Continuity, 13). Ravid relates that Rawidowicz’s father was
deeply committed to the education of Simon, whom he wanted to become a rabbi.
Father and son would awaken before dawn every day to study together (see ibid., 15).
Kaplan’s father was considered a “brilliant and erudite” young scholar and received
rabbinic ordination from Rabbi Naphtali Zvi Judah Berlin, known as the Netziv, and
the rabbi of the Volozhin Yeshiva, one of Lithuania’s most prestigious institutions of
religious learning in the nineteenth century.
10. Scult, Judaism Faces the Twentieth Century, 30. Kaplan spent one year in France
with his mother en route to New York City.
11. Ibid.
12. Ibid., 39. Kaplan, Communings of the Spirit, 108.
13. Kaplan, “Toward a Reconstruction of Judaism.”
14. Kaplan, Communings of the Spirit, 170.
15. Diary entry, August, 24, 1914, “Mordecai Menahem Kaplan, 1881,” box 1, vol. 1,
File ARC 65, Kaplan Diaries and Papers.
16. The preface to the 1957 edition appears on page xxvii of the 1994 edition of
Kaplan’s Judaism as a Civilization. See Kaplan, Judaism as a Civilization, xxvii.
232 232 notes

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not taken
17. One of those replacement terms—peoplehood—became intimately linked
with Kaplan’s legacy. Thus a term closely associated with civilization did not actually
appear in his initial formulation of the concept and obfuscates his intentional use of
the language of nation in his magnum opus.
18. Kaplan, “How May Judaism Be Saved?” 41.
19. See Mel Scult, ed., The American Judaism of Mordecai Kaplan (New York: New
York University Press, 1990), 156.
20. Diary entry, July 22, 1918, “Mordecai Menahem Kaplan, 1881,” box 2, vol. 1, File
ARC 65, Kaplan Diaries and Papers. This is not the first time Kaplan mentioned prob-
lems with democracy in his diary. An entry from March 30, 1913, argued: “democracy
threatens the very integrity of the Jewish social group” (ibid.).
21. See Gleason, Speaking of Diversity.
22. See Kallen, “Democracy versus the Melting-Pot”; and Bourne, “The Jew and
Trans-National America.”
23. Kaplan, “How May Judaism Be Saved?” 38.
25. Kaplan, “Future of Judaism,” 160.
26. Kaplan, “Judaism and Christianity,” 112.
27. Ibid.
28. Ibid., 115.
29. Ibid.
30. Bourne, “The Jew and Trans-National America,” 284.
31. See Bederman, Manliness and Civilization.
32. Ibid., 57.
33. For a broader discussion of Kaplan’s use of civilization in the context of
expressing the Jewish contribution to civilization, see Biale, “Louis Finkelstein, Mor-
decai Kaplan, and American ‘Jewish Contributions to Civilization’”; and Myers, “Dis-
courses of Civilization.”
34. Scult, Judaism Faces the Twentieth Century, 261.
36. Ibid., 233.
37. Ibid., 20.
38. Ibid., 413.
39. Ibid., 234.
40. Ibid.
41. See Jacobson, Whiteness of a Different Color.
42. This list of criteria for the elements of a civilization was not thoroughly consis-
tent across Kaplan’s various publications, but he never strayed too far from the list that
he introduced in the third section of his Judaism as a Civilization.
44. Kaplan does not completely avoid the term culture in his discussion of folk-
ways, however. He distinguishes between two levels of folkways—cultural and reli-
gious. See ibid., 433.
45. Kaplan links his definition of civilization as a paraphrase of William Graham
Sumner’s definition of ethos, from his book Folkways: A Study of the Sociological
Importance of Usages, Manners, Customs, Mores, and Morals (Boston: Ginn, 1907).
See Kaplan, Judaism as a Civilization, 535.
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nationalism: 233
46. The political theorist Michael Walzer has made a similar move in his analysis
of religious community as the basis for his model of thick difference that exempli-
fies multicultural citizenship. See, for example, Walzer, What Does It Mean to Be an
American? and his “Multiculturalism and the Politics of Difference.”
47. Will Herberg, Protestant, Catholic, Jew: An Essay in American Religious Sociol-
ogy (Garden City, N.Y.: Doubleday, 1955).
48. Kaplan mentions the incompatibility of the diaspora nationalist Simon Dub-
now and the project of East European diaspora nationalism for American Jewish
life. See Kaplan, The Future of the American Jew. Interestingly, as mentioned earlier,
Kaplan ultimately aligned himself far more closely with Ahad Ha’am’s cultural Zion-
ism than with Dubnow’s diaspora nationalism.
49. This is precisely the argument correctly made by such scholars as Charles Lieb-
man: that Kaplan, despite his claims to the contrary, articulated a theory of Judaism
that was not so dissimilar from concepts of Judaism as a religion (such as the Reform
ideology) that he inveighed against. See Liebman’s “Reconstructionism in American
Jewish Life.” Similarly, Kaplan scholar Arnold Eisen has noted that Kaplan “demanded a
‘maximalist Judaism’ of his readers but then, under pressure from the ‘reality principle,’
quickly retreated to the recognition that every maximum would be a function of what
the surroundings would allow and the individual would undertake” (see Arnold M.
Eisen, “The Problem Is Still with Us,” Conservative Judaism 56, no. 2 [2004]: 21).
50. Ultimately, the concept of religious civilization resonated too clearly with
Kaplan’s followers, however. The religious component of his work, rather than the
theory of nationality, is remembered.
51. Harold Schulweis, “A Critical Assessment of Kaplan’s Idea of Salvation,” in
Scult, American Judaism of Mordecai Kaplan.
53. Ibid., 322.
54. Ibid., 259.
55. Ibid., 342.
56. See Richard Wightman Fox’s critique of Protestant historiography that “mis-
construes the depth and character of the linkage between secular and religious forces
throughout this period,” in his article “The Culture of Liberal Protestant Progressiv-
ism, 1875–1925,” Journal of Interdisciplinary History 3 (Winter 1993): 645.
57. Diary entry, May 10, 1933, “Mordecai Menahem Kaplan, 1881,” box 2, vol. 7, File
ARC 65, Kaplan Diaries and Papers.
58. Reinhold Niebuhr, Moral Man and Immoral Society (New York: Charles Scrib-
ner’s Sons, 1932), xi.
ARC 65, Kaplan Diaries and Papers.
ARC 65, Kaplan Diaries and Papers. However, he was still enamored with the commu-
nist movement a year later, when he wrote in his journal: “Because of my keen desire to
see it survive I cannot conscientiously advise against joining the Communist movement
on the ground of anything that Judaism teaches.” (Diary entry, March 9, 1935, “Mordecai
Menahem Kaplan, 1881,” box 2, vol. 7, File ARC 65, Kaplan Diaries and Papers.) See also
V. I. Lenin, Lenin on the Jewish Question (New York: International Publishers, 1934).
61. Diary entry, February 18, 1939, “Mordecai Menahem Kaplan, 1881,” box 3, vol. 8,
234 234 notes

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62. Ibid.
63. Kaplan continued to use the terms interchangeably in his writings until the
publication of his last book, Religion of Ethical Nationhood.
64. Kaplan, Future of the American Jew, 125.
65. Will Kymlicka has explained the challenge clearly when he states his goal of
demonstrating “how minority rights coexist with human rights” (see Kymlicka, Mul-
ticultural Citizenship, 6).
66. One of Kaplan’s 1939 diary entries says that Jewish nationhood “should also
contribute toward the elimination from nationhood its dross of collective selfishness
and sacred egoism and render it essentially a means of social creativity and individual
betterment.” (Diary entry, February 7, 1939, “Mordecai Menahem Kaplan, 1881,” box 3,
vol. 8, File ARC 65, Kaplan Diaries and Papers.)
68. This strategy is strikingly similar to the defense of national cohesion outlined
by the political theorist David Miller. Miller, drawing from recent ethical theory, dis-
tinguishes between an ethics of particularity and an ethics of universality (see Miller,
On Nationality).
69. Diary entry, February 19, 1939, “Mordecai Menahem Kaplan, 1881,” box 3, vol.
8, File ARC 65, Kaplan Diaries and Papers.
70. See Hollinger, Cosmopolitanism and Solidarity: Studies in Ethnoracial, Religious,
and Professional Affiliation in the U.S.; Appiah, Ethics of Identity; Mitchell Cohen,
“Rooted Cosmopolitanism”; and Carol A. Breckenridge et al., eds., Cosmopolitanism
(Durham, N.C.: Duke University Press, 2002).
71. Appiah, The Ethics of Identity.
73. Kymlicka has adopted the approach of linking liberal values with national iden-
tification. The commitment to freedom of choice and personal autonomy, he argues,
“is not only consistent with, but even requires, a concern with cultural membership
. . . [I]ndividual choice is dependent on the presence of a societal culture, defined by
language and history, and . . . most people have a very strong bond to their own cul-
ture” (see Kymlicka, Multicultural Citizenship, 8).
File ARC 65, Kaplan Diaries and Papers. Kaplan, Future of the American Jew, 154.
75. Anthony D. Smith, Theories of Nationalism.
76. Tamir, Liberal Nationalism, 80.
79. Diary entry as cited in Kaplan, Communings of the Spirit, 102.
80. Kaplan himself acknowledged this predicament: “Since they can no longer
claim the right to cultivate a corporate Jewish life on the traditional basis of being the
sole possessors of supernatural revelation, they must be able to base that right on their
interpretation of nationhood” (see Kaplan, Judaism as a Civilization, 251).
82. Ibid.
83. Kaplan, “Future of Judaism,” 170.
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84. Kaplan supported the Kehillah and served as a member of the education com-
mittee. The Kehillah had a number of small successes, including Kaplan’s work in the
bureau of Jewish education. However, by 1922 the organization was defunct; see Scult,
Judaism Faces the Twentieth Century, 116–19. For an in-depth account of the failure of
the Kehillah experiment, see Goren, New York Jews and the Quest for Community.
85. Goren, New York Jews and the Quest for Community, 3.
86. Scult, Judaism Faces the Twentieth Century, 116.
87. Kaplan, Judaism as a Civilization, 293. In addition, Kaplan insisted, “if Jewish
life is to exercise an educative influence upon the character of the Jew, it must possess
the instrumentality of Jewish self-government and opportunity of law-making” (ibid.,
468).
88. Mordecai M. Kaplan, editorial, Society for the Advancement of Judaism Bulletin
7, no. 12 (1927): 3.
90. Kaplan accepted the limitations of Jewish legal courts within the U.S. system
by suggesting that even though Judaism wished to “exercise authority in the matter
of separation and divorce it cannot afford to ignore the superior power of the state.”
Nevertheless, he still insisted that “Judaism can so adapt its laws that its authority will
be felt” (ibid., 424).
91. The anthropologist and lawyer Jonathan Boyarin’s ruminations on the possi-
bility of promoting the recognition of “genealogical and diasporic loyalty” in U.S.
constitutional law provide a more nuanced contemporary example of an argument
for separate legal spheres within the courts. While Kaplan envisioned a parallel legal
system, Boyarin analyzes the far more plausible possibility of altering the extant legal
approach to adjudicate based on the specific needs of particular diasporic commu-
nities rather than applying standard rulings to all citizens as equal individuals. See
Boyarin and Boyarin, Powers of Diaspora, and Goren, New York Jews and the Quest
for Community.
92. For instance, Kaplan acknowledged the fact that a U.S. citizen “derive[s] his
political values, his language, literature and the arts from the civilization embodied in
the state” (see Kaplan, Judaism as a Civilization, 234).
93. Kaplan directly talked about the difficulty of creating the right to self-govern-
ment in his discussion of Dubnow (see Kaplan, Judaism as a Civilization, 25). He also
acknowledged that the Jewish community can no longer demand “full legal jurisdic-
tion” (see ibid., 109).
94. Kymlicka, Multicultural Citizenship, 27.
96. Ibid., 158.
97. Ibid., 129.
98. Goren’s conclusion that Kaplan “acknowledged the prior lien of America and
its civilization on the individual’s loyalty and interest” underestimated Kaplan’s tor-
mented relationship with the process of acculturation (see Goren, Politics and Public
Culture of American Jews, 16). Goren has also commented that “living in two civiliza-
tions the American Jew, in Kaplan’s celebrated analysis, subordinated the Jewish to the
American” (ibid., 160).
99. Diary entry, December 14, 1924, “Mordecai Menahem Kaplan, 1881,” box 1, vol.
2, File ARC 65, Kaplan Diaries and Papers.
236 236
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100. There is no doubt about the centrality of homeland in Kaplan’s concept of
nationalism. He asserted that land remained a “constituent element of Judaism as
a civilization” and insisted that the Bible has “in it a perfectly recorded deed to the
possession of Eretz Yisrael” (see Kaplan, Judaism as a Civilization, 186 and 264). The
masthead of his own Reconstructionist magazine read: “dedicated to the advancement
of Judaism as a religious civilization, to the upbuilding of Eretz Yisrael, and to the
furtherance of universal freedom, justice and peace.”
101. His concerns about Zionism ranged from the pragmatic (Jews historically were
able to develop a “far stronger bond of unity” than nations “living unmolested on
[their] own native soil”) to ethical (“I became convinced that we Jews are in an awful
mess with prospects in Palestine. . . . Jews have gotten themselves into such a tangle
. . . by persisting to stand out as a distinct group”). See Kaplan, Communings of the
Spirit, 465; and Judaism as a Civilization, 190.
102. Goren’s article “Spiritual Zionists and Jewish Sovereignty” (in Goren, Politics and
Public Culture of American Jews) acknowledges and analyzes Kaplan’s wariness toward
statehood. My argument builds off Goren’s important research by delving more deeply
into the specific characteristics of Kaplan’s formulation of ethical nationhood.
103. Kaplan, Communings of the Spirit, 201.
104. Kaplan’s ire at Weizmann’s statement is particularly interesting given Weiz-
mann’s history as a founding member of the Democratic Faction and a man quite
sympathetic to the Arab plight in Palestine. See Lavsky, “German Zionists and the
Emergence of Brit Shalom.” Kaplan’s emotional bond to the Zionist project and its
potential was reflected in the journal entry that immediately preceded his diatribe
against Weizmann. He described the tears that welled up in his eyes while singing
“Hatikvah” in Italy and conveyed his joy and excitement at “the effort of our people to
come back to life” (Kaplan, Communings of the Spirit, 201).
105. Kaplan, ibid., 377.
106. Goren, Politics and Public Culture of American Jews, 16.
107. This reading of Kaplan’s Zionism as a corrective to the Americanization process
directly challenges historian Ben Halpern’s claim that Kaplan’s Zionism “produced
the most thoroughly American variant of Zionism” (see Ben Halpern, “The Ameri-
canization of Zionism, 318–36).
110. Kaplan’s vision of a world state that would ensure the peaceful coexistence of
distinct national groups fits squarely into the idealistic hopes of the left wing of the
internationalist movement during the interwar years. Nevertheless, it must have been
seen as woefully utopian only a few years after the publication of his magnum opus.
5. From German Zionism to American Nationalism

1. For Kaplan’s full description of the meeting, see Kaplan, Communings of the
Spirit, 464.
2. Ibid., 465.
3. For example, Kohn scholar Ken Wolf has pointed out that the 1970 edition of
the Britannica contained the following articles by Kohn: “Atlantic Charter,” “Commu-
nism,” “Fascism,” “Theodor Herzl,” “National Socialism,” “Nationalism,” “Minorities,”
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“Pan-Germanism,” “Pan-Slavism,” “Pan-Turanism,” and “Zionism.” Kohn also con-
tributed to the Britannica Book of the Year and the Encyclopedia of the Social Sciences.
See Wolf, “Idea of Nationalism,” 353. A full list of Kohn’s publications is listed in ibid.,
321–53. Another bibliography of Kohn’s publications appears in Kohn, Reflections on
Modern History: The Historian and Human Responsibility, 357–59.
4. Koppel S. Pinson hailed the book as “an epoch-making work in American his-
toriography,” and the New England Quarterly considered the book “the most signifi-
cant contribution that has yet to be made to the study of the subject.” See Koppel S.
Pinson, “Book Review: The Idea of Nationalism,” Journal of Modern History 16, no. 3
(1944): 224; and Solomon Willis Rudy, “Book Review: The Idea of Nationalism,” New
England Quarterly 17, no. 3 (1944): 468.
5. Frederick L. Schuman, “Review of Hans Kohn, The Idea of Nationalism,” New
York Times Book Review, April 30, 1944, quoted in Liebich, “Searching for the Perfect
Nation.”
6. See Anderson, Imagined Communities, 4. Anthony Smith regularly refers to
Kohn’s theory as “the best-known example” of the “influential distinction between
‘Western’ and ‘Eastern’ nationalisms.” (See Smith, Nationalism and Modernism, 16.)
Kohn’s historical narrative, and especially his distinction between two varieties of
nationalism, made him, in the words of the political scientist Craig Calhoun, “the
most influential source of both the opposition of civic and ethnic nationalism and
of its association with a parallel opposition between western and eastern varieties of
modernity” (Craig Calhoun, “Foreword,” in Kohn, Idea of Nationalism, ix). See also
Kohn, Idea of Nationalism, and Ignatieff, Blood and Belonging.
7. The first, and for many years only, sustained scholarship on Kohn’s theory of
nationalism was produced by Ken Wolf. See Wolf ’s “Idea of Nationalism” and “Hans
Kohn’s Nationalism.” Scholars of nationalism, such as Craig Calhoun and Andre
Liebich, have recently demonstrated renewed interest in Kohn’s work (see Liebich,
“Searching for the Perfect Nation,” and Calhoun, “Foreword” in Kohn, Idea of Nation-
alism). Jewish historians Hagit Lavsky, Steven Aschheim, Shalom Ratzabi, George
Mosse, and Yfaat Weiss have contextualized Kohn’s theory of Zionism within a larger
context of German Jewish Zionism, European nationalism, and the Brit Shalom circle
in Palestine. See Weiss, “Central European Ethnonationalism and Zionist Bination-
alism”; Lavsky, “Hans Kohn: Nationalism between Theory and Practice”; Aschheim,
Beyond the Border; Mendes-Flohr, Land of Two Peoples; and George Mosse, “Central
European Intellectuals in Palestine,” Judaism 45, no. 2 (1996): 134–43. Also of rele-
vance is Adi Gordon’s dissertation; see “New Politics in an Old Key: Arnold Zweig,
Hans Kohn and the Central European Jewish Generation of 1914.”
8. Adi Gordon, “The Serial Convert and the ‘Mythology of Coherence’: The Con-
tradictory Hans Kohn and His Multiple Metamorphoses,” lecture delivered at the
Legacy of Hans Kohn conference, March 11–12, 2009, Jerusalem.
9. Narratives written by scholars of Zionism tend to abruptly end with Kohn’s deci-
sion to leave Palestine in 1933. Analysts of Kohn’s later work, such as Wolf and Calhoun,
include details about Kohn’s involvement with Zionism; however, they focus on the dis-
continuities in Kohn’s intellectual development between the two stages of his career.
10. One can even read Judaism as a Religious Civilization, which Kaplan was writ-
ing at the same time that he attended Kohn’s lecture in 1931, as a response to Kohn’s
challenge. As Kaplan’s subsequent works (specifically Religion of Ethical Nationhood)
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suggest, however, Judaism as a Civilization did not fully satisfy his own continued
need to grapple with the critique of Jewish nationalism as universal humanism.
11. Kaplan recalled hearing Kohn describe his childhood relationship to Juda-
ism during his lecture as follows: “[u]ntil the age of eighteen Judaism meant noth-
ing to him [Kohn] because he had come from an assimilationist background. At
every Christmas there was a Yule tree in his home and they sang Christmas songs.”
Although many acculturated Hapsburg Jews had Christmas trees, Kohn’s decision to
share the information in the context of explaining the level of his family’s accultura-
tion demonstrates his lack of connection to Judaism before his introduction to the
Bar Kochba Society in 1908. Kaplan, Communings of the Spirit, 466.
12. Weiss, “Central European Ethnonationalism and Zionist Binationalism,” 100.
13. The three essays were published under the title Drei Reden über Judentum
(Three addresses on Judaism). For an English translation of the lectures, see Martin
Buber, On Judaism. For recent scholarship exploring Kohn’s involvement with Prague
Zionism, see Shumsky, “On Ethno-Centrism and Its Limits: Czecho-German Jewry
in Fin-de-Siècle Prague and the Origins of Zionist Bi-Nationalism,” and Zohar Maor,
“Mysticism, Regeneration, and Jewish Rebirth: The ‘Prague Circle’ in the Beginning
of the Twentieth Century.”
14. See Nahum Glatzer and Paul Mendes-Flohr, eds., The Letters of Martin Buber:
A Life of Dialogue (New York: Pantheon Books, 1991), 130.
15. Hans Kohn, Martin Buber: Sein Werk und seine Zeit, Ein Versuch über Religion
und Politik.
16. Kohn et al., Vom Judentum.
17. Kohn provides a rough account of this journey in his autobiography; see Kohn,
Living in a World Revolution.
18. Hans Kohn to Leo Hermann, October 3, 1919, Collection KH1, Folder 674, Cen-
tral Zionist Archives, Jerusalem.
19. Ibid.
20. Ibid.
21. Letter from the New York office of Keren Hayesod to Leo Hermann, February
18, 1922, Collection KH1, Folder 245, Central Zionist Archives, Jerusalem.
22. See, for instance, Kohn, “Das kulturelle Problem des modernen Westjuden”;
Kohn, “Zur Araberfrage”; and Kohn, “Nationalismus.”
23. Copies of Kohn’s regular contributions to Clarté, written under the pseudonym
“Paul Colin” in 1920 and 1921, can be found Box 28, Folder 2 on Reel 26, AR 259, in the
Hans Kohn Collection, Leo Baeck Archive, New York.
24. For example, he gave a speech entitled “Aktiver Pazifism” at the “Zweiten Kon-
ferenz der Internationale der Kriegsdienstgegner auf dem Sonntagsberg” (Second
conference of the international pacifists) in July 1928. A copy of the speech is in Box
2, Folder 9 on Reel 2, AR6908, Hans Kohn–Robert Weltsch Correspondence, Weltsch
Collection, Leo Baeck Archive.
25. Hans Kohn to Berthold Feiwel, November 21, 1929, ARC 376, Folder 224, Jew-
ish National and University Library, Jerusalem.
26. See Kohn–Leo Herman correspondence from October 2, 1925, and June 26,
1926, File KH1, Folder 674, Central Zionist Archives.
27. Copies of Kohn’s articles in Filastina are in File A 187 Folder 36, the Central
Zionist Archive.
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28. For an in-depth look at Kohn’s writings on the Arab question, see Anya Sieg-
mund, “German and Prague Zionists and Their Idea of Verständigung with the Arabs
in Palestine, 1918–1948,” Ph.D. diss., University of Munich, 2005.
29. Kohn, Politische Idee des Judentum (The political idea of Judaism), 45.
30. Historian Anita Shapira has written, “[t]he Arabs remained outside the perim-
eter of awareness and engagement of the Jews both as individuals and collectively . . .
the Jews in Palestine were . . . creating a separate entity—to which the Arabs remained
external” (see Anita Shapira, Land and Power: The Zionist Resort to Force, 1881–1948,
trans. William Templer [Stanford, Calif.: Stanford University Press, 1999], 142).
31. Kohn, Toldot hatenu’ah hale’umit ha’aravit (A history of the Arab national
movement).
32. Glatzer and Mendes-Flohr, Letters of Martin Buber, 96.
33. See Buber, Land of Two Peoples.
34. Kohn’s personal files are filled with admiring notes from students who viewed
their teacher as an intellectual inspiration and even a father figure. “Students Flock to
Listen to Lectures” declared the headlines of a September 26, 1958, article about Kohn
in the City College newspaper. See Box 2, Folder 9 on Reel 5, File AR259, Hans Kohn
Collection, Leo Baeck Archive.
35. Lavsky, “Hans Kohn: Nationalism between Theory and Practice,” 206. Lavsky
quotes at length from a November 21, 1929, correspondence.
36. See Weiss, “Central European Ethnonationalism and Zionist Binationalism”;
Lavsky, “Hans Kohn: Nationalism between Theory and Practice”; Aschheim, Beyond
the Border; Mendes-Flohr, Land of Two Peoples; and George Mosse, “Central Euro-
pean Intellectuals in Palestine.”
37. Kohn, “Nationalism,” 27. Kohn’s “Nationalismus” essay was originally published
in Der Jude 6 (1921): 746–64. The essay was later republished in a collection of Kohn’s
essays (see Kohn, Nationalismus). The essay has been translated into English and can
be found in Arthur C. Cohen, The Jew: Essays from Martin Buber’s Journal, Der Jude.
38. Kohn, “Nationalism,” 29.
39. Ibid., 27.
40. Ibid., 21, 22.
41. Kohn lays out the distinction in ibid., 24.
42. See Friedrich Meinecke, Die Idee der Staatsraison (Berlin: Oldenburg, 1925).
43. Ibid., 500.
44. See Ferdinand Tönnies, Gemeinschaft und Gesellschaft (1897; reprint, Leipzig:
Fues’s Verlag, 1912).
45. Kohn, “Nationalism”, 29. Kohn’s immersion in Buber’s concepts of Kultur and
blood is evident throughout his articles in the 1910s and early 1920s. Kohn associated
nationalism with Kultur in 1921, when he wrote: “Nationalism must be human nation-
alism, human cosmopolitanism, which emphasizes the traditional Kultur unity” (see
Kohn, “Aufgaben der Stunde” [1921], in Kohn, Nationalismus, 93). In another example
from a personal correspondence, Kohn commented to Hugo Bergmann in 1922: “The
nationalism of the diaspora is not a territorial or a power nationalism but a cultural
and blood nationalism” (see Kohn to Hugo Bergmann, August 29, 1922, ARC 40,
Folder 1502/1561, Jewish National and University Library, Jerusalem).
46. See, for example, Ernst Troeltsch, “Der Geist der deutschen Kultur in
Deutschland und der Weltkrieg” (The spirit of the German culture in Germany and
in the World War), ed. Otto Hintze et al. (Leipzig: G. G. Teubner, 1916).
240 240
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47. “Nationalism,” 22.
48. “Geleitwort” (Preface), in Kohn et al., Vom Judentum 8, and “Der Geist des
Orients” (The Spirit of the Orient), in ibid., 13.
49. Kohn’s association of Zionism with Kultur, rather than civilization, paralleled
the dichotomy popularized among German-speaking intellectuals by Thomas Mann
in 1914, and reversed the moral connotations of civilization and Kultur. See “Gedan-
ken im Krieg” in Thomas Mann, Friedrich und die grosse Koalition (Berlin, 1915). Mann
viewed the war as one of opposing principles between “morally oriented Germans and
politically oriented nations” (see Hannelore Mundt, Understanding Thomas Mann
[Columbia: University of South Carolina, 2004], 100). Kohn’s later work reversed the
opposing principles and aligned good nationalism with “civilization.” For example,
in The Idea of Nationalism, Kohn characterized the dominant political struggle of
his day as “the deep gulf and unending struggle between Western universal civiliza-
tion and German culture” (Kohn’s Idea of Nationalism, 355). In championing Western
civilization, rather than German Kultur, as the most ethical stage in the development,
Kohn flipped the reference points but preserved the underlying structure of a hierar-
chy of good and bad nationalisms.
50. Kohn, “Nationalism,” 30.
51. Kohn, Nationalismus, 11.
52. Kohn, Perakim letoldot hara’ayon hatzioni.
53. Kohn, Political Idea of Judaism, 54.
54. Buber, Land of Two Peoples, 51–54.
55. Buber, “Judaism and Mankind,” in Buber, On Judaism, 27 and 25.
56. Buber’s involvement in Judaism and Zionism was multifaceted and ripe with
tensions. As a young man, he was raised by his grandfather, Solomon Buber. The elder
Buber was the scion of a rabbinic family and a well-known scholar of rabbinic litera-
ture in his own right. Throughout the younger Buber’s involvement in contemporary
philosophical and political movements, he remained connected with the sources and
experiences that defined his childhood. For example, the same Buber that advocated
for new forms of nationalism was simultaneously engaged in a radical new Bible
translation; the existential writer of I and Thou, a book that makes no references to
particular religious traditions, was at the same time the editor of Der Jude, a journal
committed to the renaissance of modern Jewish life. Buber’s life work swung between
particular commitments and universal yearnings. Kohn, whose childhood education
consisted of more Greek than Hebrew and more philosophy than Midrash, lacked the
visceral connection with a living community that exemplified the dialectical tension
between particular and universal in Buber’s work.
57. Martin Buber, “Renewal of Judaism,” in Buber, On Judaism, 50.
58. Kohn, Political Idea of Judaism, 61.
59. See Kohn, Perakim letoldot hara’ayon hatzioni, 2.
60. For an in-depth discussion of Gordon’s work, see Einat Ramon, “God, the
Mother: A Critique of Domination in the Religious Zionist Thought of A. D. Gor-
don,” Ph.D. diss., Stanford University, 2000.
61. Kohn, Perakim letoldot hara’ayon hatzioni, 57.
62. Ibid.
63. Lavsky has pointed out that Kohn was interested in a binational state not as a prag-
matic reality, but instead as an ideological belief that it represented the fulfillment of Zion-
ist aims (see Lavsky, “Hans Kohn: Nationalism between Theory and Practice,” 196).
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64. Once again, Buber’s work played a key role in supplying the groundwork for
this Orient–Occident distinction. Buber’s article, “The Spirit of the Orient in Juda-
ism,” provided a methodological approach for Kohn’s political analysis of national-
ism. Buber also argued that Jews in Palestine faced the crucial task of bridging the
fault lines between East and West. See Martin Buber, “The Spirit of the Orient and
Judaism,” in Buber, On Judaism, 78.
65. Kohn, Toldot hatenu’ah hale’umit ha’aravit, 47.
66. See Edward Said, Orientalism (New York: Vintage Books, 1994). Zionist histo-
rian Derek Penslar has written extensively on the Zionist–colonial comparison (see
Penslar, Israel in History).
67. Hans Kohn, “The Political Shape of the Land of Israel,” Hapo’el hatza’ir 19, no.
33 (1926): 11–12.
68. Ibid., 12.
70. Ibid., 20.
71. Weiss has argued that “the views Kohn developed of the future autonomy of the
two peoples . . . in a unified Palestine were the direct result of his European insights,”
specifically the model of the “former Austrian state” (see Weiss, “Central European
Ethnonationalism and Zionist Binationalism,” 102).
72. Kohn, “Political Shape of the Land of Israel.”
73. Kohn argued that the “Land of Israel does not need to be a Jewish state, rather,
a community, in which two equal people will live together completely in their rights,
without one ruling nation that can dominate the will of the other” (see Kohn, Toldot
hatenu’ah hale’umit ha’aravit, 34).
74. Kohn was a reader of the Menorah Journal and was familiar with the work
of Randolph Bourne, Horace Kallen, and Alfred Zimmern. Kohn’s correspondence
with Buber indicates that Kohn worked in the early 1920s to convince the editor of
the Menorah Journal to print Buber’s writings in translation. Kohn also certainly
knew about Randolph Bourne’s work. In fact, one of Kohn’s articles in Clarté shared
a page with a review of Bourne’s writings. Kohn did read Kallen’s Zionism and World
Politics by 1928 (he mentions Kallen’s book in the bibliography of his 1928 book,
Geschichte der Nationalen Bewegung im Orient [A History of Nationalism in the
East]); however, it is unclear if he read it before or after writing his own chapters
on the history of Zionism. See Hans Kohn, Geschichte der Nationalen Bewegung im
Orient (Berlin: Kurt Vowinckel Verlag, 1928). Kohn expressed his interest in meeting
Kallen in a November 17, 1931, letter to Robert Weltsch, Arc 350, Folder 1561A, Martin
Buber Archives, Jewish National and University Library, Jerusalem. Zimmern’s writ-
ings also appealed to Kohn. In an October 26, 1924, letter, Kohn called Zimmern “a
prominent public man in the League of Nations movement . . . prompted [to trans-
late Martin Buber’s essays] by sheer enthusiasm and love of the beauty of Judaism
and of Dr. Buber’s theories.” ARC 350, Martin Buber Archives, Jewish National and
University Library, Jerusalem. Special thanks to Romy Langeheine for bringing this
letter to my attention.
75. Kohn, Martin Buber: Sein Werk und Seine Zeit, 94.
76. Hans Kohn to Hugo Bergmann, November 20, 1931, ARC 40, Folder 1502/1561,
Hugo Bergmann Archives, Jewish National and University Library, Jerusalem.
77. Kohn, American Nationalism, 51.
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78. Hans Kohn to Martin Buber, April 29, 1933, ARC 350, Martin Buber Archives,
Jewish National and University Library, Jerusalem.
79. Hans Kohn to Martin Buber, February 13, 1934, ARC 350, Martin Buber
Archives, Jewish National and University Library, Jerusalem.
80. Hans Kohn to Robert Weltsch, July 2, 1936, Weltsch Collection, AR 6908, Box
2, Folder 1, Leo Baeck Archive, New York.
81. Hans Kohn to Hugo Bergmann, February 14, 1935, ARC 40, Folder 1502/1561,
Hugo Berman Archives, Jewish National and University Library, Jerusalem.
82. Hans Kohn to Robert Weltsch, July 2, 1936, Weltsch Collection, AR 6908, Box
2, Folder 1, Leo Baeck Archive, New York.
83. Kohn, Idea of Nationalism, 351.
84. The quotation is from the introduction of an unpublished 1962 work called
“Historian and Human Responsibility.” The text is in AR6908 Box 2, Folder 1, Leo
Baeck Archives, New York.
86. Ibid., 20.
87. Ibid., 35.
88. Kohn’s Nationalism: Its Meaning in History also singled out the Hebrew tradi-
tion as the pioneering contributor to the development of nationalism. “The idea of the
nation-state was unknown to them [the Hebrews] but they had the strong conscious-
ness of a cultural mission” (see Kohn, Nationalism: Its Meaning and History, 11).
90. A close comparison of the Idea of Nationalism and the Political Idea of Juda-
ism (Die Politische Idee des Judentum) reveals a number of examples in which Kohn
slightly altered the text to include the Greek tradition as equal to the Jewish tradi-
tion. For example, both texts share the statement, “the main current of Greek political
thought, both with the leading philosophers and with the general public, remained
aloof from humanitarian ideals down to the end of the fourth century bc” (see ibid.,
56; and Kohn, Political Idea of Judaism, 50). However, Kohn left out the following line
from The Idea of Nationalism, which directly contrasted the two traditions: “the Jew-
ish legislation recognized the rights of the poor, the free, the slaves, animals and all
of Nature. In contrast, Greek justice was not oriented towards the Absolute, the eter-
nal God, it is therefore temporal and limited” (Kohn, ibid., 50). In another example,
Kohn copied a section from Die Politische Idee des Judentum that contended that the
Jewish God, unlike Zeus, was a god of history who imbued time with meaning and
order. However, in the English version, the sentence in the middle of the paragraph
that distinguished Zeus from the “Jewish God” did not appear. In another location,
Kohn took paragraphs that initially dealt solely with Jews and added an introductory
sentence that read, “The Jews and the Greeks were the peoples of Ancient Times with
a sense for history” (see Kohn, Idea of Nationalism, 34–35; and Kohn, Politische Idee
des Judentum 16–17). Analyzing Kohn’s original essay clearly indicates that the Greeks
were added much later to include them as progenitors of the Idea of Nationalism, but
without changing any of the original content.
91. Kohn, Idea of Nationalism, vii.
92. Ibid., vi.
93. See ibid., 13.
94. Ibid.
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95. This concept radically extended the definition of nationalism in a cosmopoli-
tan direction. Unlike his fellow American scholars, such as Carleton Hayes, Kohn did
not attempt to delineate the particular characteristics that constituted national iden-
tity (see Carleton J. H. Hayes, Essays on Nationalism [New York: Macmillan, 1926]).
96. For example, Kohn expressed his feeling that the people he met in the United
States lacked intellectual depth and sophistication in a letter to Robert Weltsch dur-
ing a visit to America. See Hans Kohn to Robert Weltsch, November 17, 1931, Weltsch
Collection, AR 6908, Box 2, Folder 1, Leo Baeck Archive, New York.
99. Ibid.
100. In another statement of American triumphalism, Kohn wrote, “[i]n the U.S.
all nations, all churches and sects, all the good and evil powers of the old world, meet
without blows or bloodshed; and while Europe began with paganism and barbarism,
American begins with the results of Europe’s two thousand years’ course of civiliza-
tion” (see ibid., 153).
101. Ibid., 144.
102. Ibid.
103. Ibid., 93.
104. See Gunnar Myrdal, An American Dilemma: The Negro Problem and Modern
Democracy (New York: Harper & Row, 1944).
106. Ibid., 175.
107. Ibid., 154.
108. Ibid., 170.
109. Hans Kohn, “Yehudim americanim,” Hapo’el hatza’ir 1–2 (October 12, 1924): 26.
111. Ibid., 135.
112. Ibid., 167.
113. See Kallen, “Democracy versus the Melting-Pot.”
114. Kohn’s writings on Zionism and nationalism from the period before he moved
to Palestine do not mention liberalism or British political theory in a positive light.
However, his attitude toward British liberalism begins to change in the mid-1920s
and continues to play a central role in his subsequent thought. Kohn’s most sustained
exploration of British nationalism can be found in Hans Kohn, “The Genesis and
Character of English Nationalism.”
115. Kohn, Living in a World Revolution, 143.
116. Like Zimmern and Kallen, Kohn also used Switzerland in the 1920s as a model
for describing the ideal type of national federation. Kohn assures his readers that the
question of majority population in Palestine “will cease to be an issue, its importance
will decline, like Switzerland.” Kohn, History of the Arab National Movement, 34.
117. Kohn leaves this possibility open in his definition of the American idea of liberty
as the “recognition of diversity in origins and religious background,” which has “proved a
stronger national cement and a more secure basis for ordered liberty and economic pros-
perity than bonds of common blood or religion.” Kohn, American Nationalism, 149.
118. Ibid., 233.
119. The Age of Nationalism, published five years after American Nationalism, pro-
vides an additional example of Kohn’s commitment to the vision of states of many
244 244
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162–170
not taken
nations. He advocates for “pluralistic federalism,” precisely the idea he challenged in
American Nationalism, which reappears as the form of government that “may over-
come many tensions” of integrating diverse ethnic groups. See Hans Kohn, The Age of
Nationalism: The First Era of Global History (New York: Harper & Brothers, 1962), 155.
120. Ahad Ha’am and Kohn, Nationalism and the Jewish Ethic, 16.
121. Absent from Kohn’s introduction is any reference to his earlier critiques of
Ahad Ha’am as too focused on the specific cultural content of Judaism and not giving
enough emphasis to the messianic, and universalistic, core of Judaism.
122. Kohn was not the only Jewish intellectual active in mainstream scholarship
who shaped the contours of the American Jewish synthesis during the 1950s. In 1952,
the historian Oscar Handlin published The Uprooted (Boston: Little, Brown, 1973),
which transformed U.S. history from one concerning a small number of native elites
to a story that involved millions of immigrants coming to America. In 1955, Will Her-
berg, a sociologist of religion, published Protestant-Catholic-Jew. The book helped
place Judaism, the religion of a tiny minority of Americans at the time, as one of three
foundational faiths in the country. For a recent exploration on the role of Ameri-
can Jewish thinkers in the shaping of American concepts of psychology during this
period, see Andrew Heinze, Jews and the American Soul: Human Nature in the Twen-
tieth Century (Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 2006).
123. For example, Kohn, “Ahad Ha’am: Nationalist with a Difference”; and his “The
Jewish National Idea.”
124. Kohn, Martin Buber: Sein Werk und Seine Zeit, 5.
125. Kohn, “Ahad Ha’am: Nationalist with a Difference,” 566.
127. Kohn, “Jewish National Idea,” 45.
128. Ahad Ha’am and Kohn, Nationalism and the Jewish Ethic, 33.
129. Ibid.
130. Letter in File AR 259, Hans Kohn Collection, Box 3, Folder 1, Reel 7, Leo Baeck
Archive, New York.
131. Kohn, “Jewish National Idea,” 40.
132. Aschheim, Beyond the Border.
133. See Arendt, The Origins of Totalitarianism.
134. Aschheim, Beyond the Border, 167.
135. See Hutchinson, Dynamics of Cultural Nationalism.
136. Taras Kuzio has written that Kohn’s work “did not reflect historical reality and
is out of step with contemporary theories of nationalism.” See Kuzio, “Myth of the
Civic State,” 1.
6. Zionism, Jewish Peoplehood,

and the Dilemmas of Nationality in a Global Era
1. Mordecai Kaplan, A New Zionism, 25.
2. Ibid., 108.
3. See, for example, ibid., 22, 25, 99, and 108.
4. The emphasis that Ben Gurion placed on this concept reflects, as Kedar points
out, his own recognition of the “asymmetry between Jewish nation and the state.” See
Kedar, “Ben Gurion’s Mamlachtiyut,” 125.
5. See ibid.; see also Cohen, Zion and the State, 201. As Cohen has pointed out,
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Ben Gurion’s definition of statism far surpasses the definition common in the 1930s.
The term “statism” was defined in the late 1930s as “the sum of organizations and
institutions by which the political aspects of life common are made possible” (from
Cohen, Zion and the State, 201). He quotes from a 1939 report on nationalism by the
Study Group of the Royal Institute of Internal Affairs.
6. The historian Matthew Frye Jacobson has examined the process by which eth-
nic groups Americanized through their attachments to their homelands. See Matthew
Frye Jacobson, Special Sorrows.
7. Takaki reminds readers of “the unique history of Jewish immigrants, especially
the initial advantages of many of them as literate and skilled,” and notes that includ-
ing the Jewish case “minimizes the virulence of racial prejudice rooted in American
slavery” (Takaki, A Different Mirror, 10). Whether or not historical claims about Jews’
whiteness and economic training are accurate is certainly worth debating—Takaki’s
short disclaimer about his decision to distinguish Jews from other groups ignores
the contested racial position and limited economic experience of many of the immi-
grants. Moreover, it is anachronistic to view Jews as economically and racially inte-
grated from the start of their immigration until the middle of the twentieth century.
For more on the contested racial position of American Jews, see Goldstein, The Price
of Whiteness.
8. See Kymlicka, Multicultural Citizenship. Similar expressions of the temporary
and voluntary nature of immigrant and ethnic group associations, as well as the state’s
minimal responsibilities for recognizing specific group rights, can be found in such
works as Hollinger, Postethnic America; and Cohen, “Rooted Cosmopolitanism.”
9. See Clifford, “Diasporas”; Hall, “Cultural Identity and Diaspora”; Boyarin
and Boyarin, “Diaspora: Generation and the Ground of Jewish Identity”; Tölölyan,
“Rethinking Diaspora(s): Stateless Power in the Transnational Moment.”
10. Anderson’s notion of “imagined communities” acknowledges this limitation to
a certain degree. But, Anderson describes relatively rigid parameters (the state) and
the modern historical factors that engender such categories. Nor does it mean that a
strong sense of collective cohesion did not predate the specific connotations of mod-
ern nationalism. A few scholars, such as Aviel Roshwald and Avishai Margalit, have
written of the need to expand the study of nationalism to include a greater apprecia-
tion for the psychology of national ties. Their approach has helped me identify the
importance of Kaplan’s, Kohn’s, and Rawidowicz’s formulations for a larger audience
of scholars interested in understanding the ties that bind members of national groups.
See Roshwald, Endurance of Nationalism, and Margalit, “The Moral Psychology of
Nationalism.”
11. Benedict Anderson’s reference to Kohn at the start of his now classic study of
nationality, Imagined Communities, indicates his awareness that Kohn’s most signifi-
cant contribution to the study of nationalism was his attack on the notion that each
national group has a particular “essence” or “spirit.” See Anderson, Imagined Commu-
nities, 4.
12. Liberal multiculturalists, such as Canadian theorist Will Kymlicka, have
downplayed the role of religion in considering various categories of multicultural
citizenship. Although Kymlicka has argued for religious toleration, he groups reli-
gious groups with ethnic communities as immigrants who have decided to leave their
national community to enter another society. Thus, religious ties are secondary to the
246 246
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notes
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182–187
not taken
national bonds formed through such criteria as language and territory. See Kymlicka,
Multicultural Citizenship. Unlike most political theorists, scholars of religious stud-
ies, such as Talal Asad, have contributed to blurring the bounds between religion
and legal/political communities by describing how a Protestant definition of religion
colors perceptions of Western thinking about religious categories that do not apply
to such legalistic religions as Islam. See Talal Asad, Genealogies of Religion: Discipline
and Reasons of Power in Christianity and Islam (Baltimore, Md.: Johns Hopkins Uni-
versity Press, 1995).
13. The ongoing prevalence of this concept of religion appears, for instance, in
David Miller’s On Nationality, when he explains religion as a passive, static, and pri-
vate belief as opposed to a public or political identity. He writes that active identity,
such as nationality, “does mark out nations from other kinds of grouping, for instance
churches or religious sects, whose identity is essentially a passive one in so far as the
church is seen as responding to the promptings of god.” See Miller, On Nationality, 24.
When religious communities demand primary allegiance or coercion, they are often
categorized as fundamentalist.
14. See Miller, On Nationality.
15. A number of recent works have attempted to argue that national allegiance
is fully compatible with liberal principles and universal morality. See McKim and
McMahan, Morality of Nationalism, and Tamir, Liberal Nationalism.
16. “Interview with Michael Walzer,” AJS Perspectives (2006): 10.
17. My argument about Jewish intellectuals’ efforts to make space for Jews mirrors
the phenomenon that the theorist Paul Gilroy has described for black intellectuals.
Gilroy has argued: “Successive phases of struggle by blacks in, but not completely of,
the West have pushed at the very limits of what Euro-American modernity has delin-
eated as the approved space for politics within its social formations.” See Gilroy, The
Black Atlantic, 114.
18. See R. Laurence Moore, Religious Outsiders and the Making of Americans (New
York: Oxford University Press, 1986).
19. Walzer et al., The Jewish Political Tradition. Walzer edited another volume on
the Jewish political tradition that is also intended for a general scholarly audience.
The book appears as part of a series in comparative ethics. See Michael Walzer, ed.,
Law, Politics, and Morality in Judaism (Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press,
2006). A new journal, Hebraic Political Studies, aims to “evaluate the place of the Jew-
ish textual tradition, alongside the traditions of Greece and Rome, in political history
and history of political thought” (see Hebraic Political Studies 1, no. 2 [2006]).
20. See Tamir, Liberal Nationalism; Gans, The Limits of Nationalism; Roshwald,
The Endurance of Nationalism; David Novak, The Jewish Social Contract: An Essay in
Political Theology (Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 2005).
21. See Michael Walzer, What Does It Mean to Be an American? and Roshwald, The
Endurance of Nationalism.
22. See Gans, The Limits of Nationalism, and Walzer et al., eds., Law, Politics, and
Morality in Judaism.
23. A few non-Jewish intellectuals have also focused on the Jewish case as a group.
For instance, David Hollinger, John Higham, and Paul Gilroy have noted the impor-
tance of considering Jewish history and thought in understanding the development
of categories of difference. See David Hollinger, “Jewish Identity, Assimilation, and
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nationalism: 247
Multiculturalism,” in Creating America’s Jews, ed. Karen Mittleman (Hanover, N.H.:
University Press of New England, 1998). See also Gilroy, The Black Atlantic.
24. The distinction Walzer introduces between interest and identity demonstrates
his own effort to propose a politics of difference that shifts the grounds of solidarity
from race and victimization to voluntary attachment. See Walzer, “Multiculturalism
and the Politics of Difference.”
25. See Cohen and Wertheimer, “Whatever Happened to the Jewish People?”
26. A declaration, signed during the meeting of the General Assembly of North
American Jews in 1998, reiterated decades of public rhetoric among American Jewish
and Israeli leadership expressing the sentiment that “we are one.” See Julia Goldman,
“Israelis, North Americans Sign Covenant on Unity, Shared Values,” Jewish Telegraph
Agency, November 20, 1998.
27. Until quite recently, the identity cards of Jewish Israelis listed “Jewish” as the
individual’s nationality.
28. The historian Jonathan Sarna has detailed the rise and fall of such secular move-
ments. See Jonathan Sarna, “The Rise, Fall, and Rebirth of Secular Judaism,” Contem-
plate: The International Journal of Cultural Jewish Thought, no. 4 (2007): 6–13.
29. A number of scholars have discussed the diverging paths of American and
Israeli Jewry. See Deborah Dash Moore and Ilan Troen, Divergent Jewish Cultures,
and Zvi Ganin, An Uneasy Relationship: American Jewish Leadership and Israel, 1948–
1957 (Syracuse, N.Y.: Syracuse University Press, 2005).
30. This bias also endures in Israeli scholarship. Historian Yosef Gorny has evalu-
ated the implications of the split between Israel and Diaspora Jews as follows: “The
success of Israel as a collective has transformed the existence of a unique Jewish entity
into a natural phenomenon, whereas individual Jewish success in the United States is
endangering the continued existence of the same Jewish entity and calls for extraor-
dinary effort for the preservation of its distinctiveness.” See Yosef Gorny, The State of
Israel in Jewish Public Thought, 3.
31. In reviewing his own thoughts about Jewish nationalism during his stay in
Palestine from 1936 to 1938, Kaplan acknowledged how closely his own work on
Jewish nationalism was influenced by Ahad Ha’am’s formulation. On June 14, 1939,
Kaplan wrote in his diary, “As I am now reading Achad Haam’s essays again for the
lecture on Jewish nationalism, I see how little I realized what an Achad Ha’amist I
was when I wrote Judaism as a Civilization.” (“Mordecai Menahem Kaplan, 1881,”
box 3, vol. 9, File ARC 65, Kaplan Diaries and Papers, Jewish Theological Seminary,
New York.)
32. Caryn Aviv and David Shneer advocate for a decentered model of Jewish
national life in their New Jews: The End of the Jewish Diaspora.
33. See Charles S. Liebman and Elihu Katz, eds., The Jewishness of Israelis (SUNY
Press, N.Y., 1997).
34. New venues for Jewish culture, art, and music in the United States have begun
to attract a significant following of the younger generation of Jews looking to express
Judaism outside of synagogues and federations. See Ari Y. Kelman and Steven M.
Cohen, “Cultural Events and Jewish Identities” (New York: National Foundation for
Jewish Culture, 2006). A number of Israelis, many trained in the United States and/
or funded by U.S. philanthropies, have created opportunities for secular Israelis to
engage with aspects of Judaism. These opportunities include text study at institutions
248 248
zionism
notes
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the
pages
roads
196–207
not taken
like Almah, Elul, and Beit Avi Chai as well as other explorations of Jewish liturgy, such
as the piyyut project.
35. For a study of the intimate link between nationalism and cosmopolitanism
within the Zionist movement, see Stanislawski, Zionism and the Fin de Siècle. Anita
Shapira has discussed the tension within the Zionist movement over the decision to
resort to force. See Shapira, Land and Power (Stanford, Calif., Stanford University
Press, 2000).
36. In Kaplan’s case, see for example, Kaplan, Communings of the Spirit, 464. Ra-
widowicz asked: “Where are the commandments of the ‘ethical nation’ in whose name
Zionism waved its flag? Isn’t the first command of all chosen people: Thou shalt not
uproot man from his land, whether a member of your people or not?” (Rawidowicz,
Babylon and Jerusalem, 21).
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se l e c t e d b i b l i o graphy
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Baeck Archive, New York City.
Horace Kallen Collection. Manuscript collection #1. Box 32. American Jewish
Archives, Cincinnati, Ohio.
Hugo Bergman Archives. File ARC 40. Jewish National and University Library,
Jerusalem.
Martin Buber Archives. File ARC 350. Jewish National and University Library,
Jerusalem.
Mordecai Menahem Kaplan, 1881. File ARC 65. Kaplan Diaries and Papers. Jewish
Theological Seminary, New York City.
“Palestine Foundation Fund (Keren Hayesod) Head Office, London.” File KH1. Cen-
tral Zionist Archives, Jerusalem.
Sir Alfred Zimmern Papers. MS Zimmern 177. Bodleian Library. Oxford University,
Oxford.
“Robert Weltsch.” File A167. Central Zionist Archives, Jerusalem.
Simon Rawidowicz Archive. Newton, Massachusetts.
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i n de x
Page numbers in italics refer to illustra- minority rights and, 54–55, 91–92,
tions. Passages that discuss the three 208–209; post-1948 Arab-Israeli rela-
featured authors collectively are indexed tions, 208–209; Rawidowicz on, 91–92,
under the heading “Rawidowicz-Kaplan- 181, 231n75, 248n36; repatriation of,
Kohn.” 91–92, 181, 231n75; riots of 1929, 128,
136, 142–43; role in Kohn binational
acculturation. See assimilation; Palestine, 154–55, 166–67, 169, 241n63,
integrationism 242nn71,73; two-state compromise
Ahad Ha’am: in classroom Zionism exer- plan, 91. See also Israel; Palestine
cise, 201–202; on collective solidarity, Arendt, Hannah, 175, 211n6
170–71; on Hebraism, 221n59; home- Asad, Talal, 246n12
land discourse and, 56–57, 72–73, 155, Aschheim, Steven E., 175, 211n6, 212n9
204; on imitation, 46, 221n60; interter- assimilation: Ahad Ha’am theory of
ritorial initiative, 173–74; as post-WWI imitation and, 46, 221n60; cultural
intellectual influence, 8, 45, 135–36, homogeneity and, 50–51; dialectics
156–57, 165, 170, 248n31; spiritual Zion- of assimilation, 215n36; dissimila-
ism of, 16–17, 45–47, 162, 215n34, 234n48 tion compared with, 46; homeland
Am Yisrael (people of Israel), 61–62; Bab- discourse and, 181–82, 246n6; Jew-
ylon as symbol for, 63, 65; sovereignty ish intellectualism and, 230n67; in
and, 206–207; statehood association Kohn theory of American national-
with, 2, 92, 198–99. See also collective ism, 165–68, 182; language assimila-
solidarity; peoplehood tion, 190, 228n39; religion as resistant
American Jewish Committee, 66 marker, 190. See also individualism;
Anderson, Benedict, 136, 246nn10,11 integrationism
Appadurai, Arjun, 217n48 autonomism (diaspora nationalism),
Appiah, Kwame Anthony, 121, 184 38–39, 73, 214n29, 219n28
Arab Palestinians: Arab nationalist Avineri, Shlomo, 194
movement, 142, 152–53, 162; cultural
pluralism and, 57–58; European views Babylon (as symbol for the Jewish peo-
of, 53–54, 153–54; Kallen view of, 53–54; ple), 63, 65, 72, 75, 81–87
263 263
index
Balfour Declaration, 26, 29, 128, 142–43 premodern narrative, 87; “renewal of
Bar Kochba society, 138–40 Judaism” initiative of, 139, 150; Tönnies
Bauer, Otto, 223n94 influence on, 146
Beard, Charles, and Mary Beard, 232n6 Bundism, 214n29
Bederman, Gail, 109 Bush, Andrew, 232n6
beinartzit (interland) concept, 72, 74–75,
227n37 Calhoun, Craig, 238n6
Beller, Steven, 218n6 center-periphery paradigm, 57–58,
Ben Gurion, David: Blaustein Zion- 72–74, 173–74, 201–204
ism disagreement, 200; in classroom Chatterjee, Partha, 215n37
Zionism exercise, 201–202; Jewish chosenness, 122–24, 220n53
peoplehood and, 198; as Jewish politi- Christianity: American social gospel
cal philosopher, 66; messianic views Protestantism, 35–36, 116; humanism
of, 86–87; on the name “Israel,” 61–62, principle in, 160; inclination toward
180–81; statist ideology of, 1, 61–62, religious nationalism, 106–107; mes-
180–81, 198–99, 245n5; status quo sianic principle in, 149
agreement, 206 citizenship: cultural and religious
Benderly, Samson, 212n12 demands on citizens, 35–36; minor-
Bergmann, Hugo, 139, 143, 157 ity citizenship in nation-states, 31–32;
Bialik, Haim Nahman, 7, 68–69, participatory citizenship as essence of
225nn14,18 religious identity, 1; “territorial prin-
Birnbaum, Nathan, 151 ciple” of citizenship, 39. See also civic-
Birthright Israel, 202–203 versus-ethnic contrast
Blaustein, Jacob, 200 civic nationalism: absence of historical
Bourne, Randolph, 105–106, 108, 110, solidarity in, 137; American Judaism
168–69, 242n74 and, 33, 182; intolerance fostered by,
Boyarin, Jonathan, 236n91 32; melting-pot discourse and, 34–36,
Brandeis, Louis, 129, 157, 201, 220n45 41–43. See also civic-versus-ethnic
Brit Shalom, 7–8, 175 contrast; ethnic nationalism; Kohn,
British internationalism: Ahad Ha’am Hans
as model for, 46; Arab Palestinian civic-versus-ethnic contrast, 11; Brubaker
minority rights and, 54–55; impe- critique of, 17–18; cosmopolitanism
rialist oversight of multinationalist and, 244n95; Jewish political experi-
experiments, 155–56; Kohn on, 140–41, ence and, 52–53; Kohn presentation of,
155–56, 169; liberalism principles of, 161–62, 167, 169–71; legacy of, 176–77,
52–53; Round Table, 40–41; sover- 191; theories of nationalism and, 31–32,
eignty advocated in, 40 120; Western vs. non-Western culture
Brubaker, Rogers, 14, 17 and, 136–37, 213n23, 238n6, 242n64;
Buber, Martin: biographical sketch, Zimmern approach to, 50–53. See also
241n49; critique of sovereignty, civic nationalism; ethnic nationalism;
39–40; cultural Zionism theory and, Kohn, Hans
16–17; as Der Jude editor, 140; influ- civilization. See national civilization
ence on Kohn, 7, 133, 135–36, 139, 143, Cohen, Gerson, 230n67
149–52, 153–54, 156, 159, 162–63, 165, Cohen, Mitchell, 228n50
170, 172–74, 240n45; Jewish national- Cohen, Naomi, 21, 221n59
ism theory of, 149–50; Orientalism Cohen, Steven, 197–98
influences on, 242n64; as post-WWI Colin, Paul (Hans Kohn pseudonym),
intellectual influence, 156–57; on 140–41, 171
264 index
collective solidarity: as basis for indi- nationalism as, 108–109; Babylo-
vidual freedom, 121; as basis for Jew- nian Talmud as symbol for, 63; both/
ish nationalism, 18, 215n35; commu- and vs. either/or paradigm and, 93;
nitarianism and, 222n76; in cultural contemporary counterstate trends,
humanism, 11; deferred messianism 193–95, 207–208, 248n34; dialectics of
and, 82–83; descent-based identity assimilation, 215n36; Dubnow theory
and, 47–48, 146–47, 162, 184; equality/ of diaspora nationalism and, 38–39,
tolerance as component of, 50; false 73, 214n29, 219n28; ethical national-
dichotomies of Jewish identity, 44, ism and, 48–50; Kallen nation-of-
56, 93; folkways as basis for, 112–13; nationalities approach, 26–27, 41–43,
homeland discourse and, 204–205; 168; Kohn approach to, 39–40, 147–57,
inadequacy of sovereignty for, 23–24, 165–71, 176–77, 179; Meinecke critique
185–87; in Kohn theory of American of the “power state,” 39, 146; post-
nationalism, 145–48, 161–62, 166–69, 1948 counterstate approaches, 178–79;
171–72; Kohn transnational solidar- postnationalism and, 38–39, 57, 108,
ity, 159–60; language as source of, 10, 217n48; Renner critique of the “terri-
76–81, 112, 190, 204; in national civi- torial principle,” 39; Romantic nation-
lization, 111–12; organic vs. political alism and, 44–45; statist resistance to,
ties (Gemeinschaft vs. Gesellschaft), 212n8; Swiss nationalist model, 169,
139, 146–47; post-1948 “Jewish corpo- 244n116; symbiotic national-collective
rate entity,” 178–80, 183–84; religion loyalties, 48–49. See also cultural
as source for, 96, 111–12, 113–16, 127, humanism; global Hebraism; Jew-
131–32, 187; spatiality relationship ish nationalism; national civilization;
with, 75; statehood effect on, 92, 201; stateless nationalism
victimization discourses and, 184, Croly, Walter, 35–36
246n7; “We Are One” campaign, 201, cultural humanism, 4, 138; civic-versus-
248n26. See also Am Yisrael (people of ethnic contrast and, 176; collective
Israel); peoplehood; Romantic nation- tolerance and, 50; counterstate nation-
alism; spiritual Zionism alism and, 180, 185–86; Greek political
colonialism: center-periphery paradigm philosophy and, 160, 243n90; intel-
and, 57; European Orientalism and, lectual influences on, 11, 27, 148–49,
153–54, 162; Jewish leaders in colonial 151–52, 238n10; Jewish humanism as
governments, 40, 219n41; liberalism as basis for, 148–52, 160–63, 189–90; Jew-
deflection of anticolonial initiatives, ish nationalism and, 191–93; Kohn
52–53; as model of stateless commu- pacifism and, 140–44; political dichot-
nity, 40; nationalism as anticolonial omies and, 15; sources of universal
resistance, 215n37 principles, 158–60, 164–67, 171–72;
communism, 117, 234n60 universal human rights, 52. See also
communitarianism, 222n76 individualism; Kohn, Hans
community. See collective solidarity cultural nationalism, 137, 167, 176
Connor, Walker, 212n19 cultural pluralism: American Jewish
corporate groups, 35–37, 113–14, 119–22, nationalism and, 108–109; American-
216n38 ization campaign and, 105, 107, 125;
cosmopolitan languages, 77, 80–81 Arab Palestinians and, 57–58; cho-
cosmopolitanism, 48–50, 120–21, 167–69, senness incompatible with, 220n53;
244n95 eruvin as preservation of cultural
counterstate nationalism, 14–16, 26–27, space, 78–80, 89, 227n32; homeland
212nn12,19, 213n25; American Jewish discourse and, 223n99; immigration
index 265
restrictions in the U.S., 34, 112, 165; intellectual influence, 8, 59; Rawido-
Kallen principle of, 41–43, 50–51, 105, wicz relationship with, 67; Romantic
156–57, 220n53, 221n66, 223n89; Kohn nationalism and, 44–45
critique of, 166–71; Zimmern “conge- Dubois, W. E. B., 109
ries of nations” approach, 168. See also
ethnicity; minority national groups Eisen, Arnold, 198, 216n45, 234n49
cultural Zionism. See spiritual Zionism Ely, Richard, 116
Enlightenment, 83–84, 87, 132, 164–67,
deferred messianism, 10, 81–89, 149–52, 188, 193–94. See also democracy
163–64, 229nn54,63, 230nn64,66 Eretz Yisrael, 61–62
democracy: individual rights in Palestine eruvin (extended permitted movement
and, 54; insufficiency of individual during the Sabbath), 64, 72–73, 75,
liberty, 54, 89–91; Kallen theory of 77–80, 89, 227n32, 228nn44–46
civilization nationalism and, 41–43, ethical nationalism: as alternative to
46–47, 51–52, 54; Kaplan theory of nation-state model, 38; British and
national civilization and, 10–11, 104, Swiss models, 169; cultural uniformity
110–11; patriotism and, 35–36. See and, 190–91; Dubnow concept of, 38,
also Enlightenment; freedom; liberal 48–50, 52, 222n71; Kaplan national
nationalism civilization and, 96–97, 110, 118–24;
Dewey, John, 105, 232n6 symbiotic national-collective loyalties,
diaspora nationalism (autonomism), 48–49. See also liberal nationalism
38–39, 73, 214n29, 219n28, 234n48 ethnic nationalism: descent-based
diaspora paradigm: anti-sovereignty identity and, 47–48, 146–47, 162, 184;
reaction to Yehoshua, 2, 23–24; center- Jewish political advocacy of, 52–53;
periphery paradigm, 57–58, 72–74, minority rights and, 31–32; national
201–204; deferred messianism and, civilization as counter to, 98, 111–12;
82–87; diaspora communities in global Romantic nationalism and, 44–46,
Hebraism, 71, 75; diaspora studies and, 52; Russification initiative, 38; totali-
185, 188; diaspora vs. statehood advo- tarianism and, 175; universalism and,
cacy polarization, 212n8; emancipated 189–90, 216n38. See also civic nation-
national culture and, 72–74, 155, 204; alism; civic-versus-ethnic contrast;
European diaspora nationalism, 21–22; Romantic nationalism
integrationist assumption in, 5–6; ethnicity: ethnic studies and, 184–85;
Jews as normative post-nation-state “ethnopolitical entrepreneurism”
model, 38–39, 41; political solidarity of as nationalist counterdiscourse,
diaspora communities, 24–25; Russian 18–20; in Kohn theory of American
experiments with, 37–38; uniqueness nationalism, 161–62; melting-pot
of Jews as diaspora population, 71; vul- discourse and, 34–36; multicultural-
nerability of post-WWI stateless Jews, ism and, 95–96, 246n12; polycentric
29; Zionist negation of the diaspora vs. ethnocentric nationality, 121–22;
and, 201–203, 206, 212n8, 223n96, self-governing vs. polyethnic rights,
248n30. See also counterstate national- 126–27; theory of cultural pluralism
ism; multinational state paradigm and, 41–43. See also cultural pluralism;
dissimilation, 46 minority national groups; race
Dubnow, Simon: on diaspora nation- Etzioni, Amitai, 194
alism, 38–39, 73, 214n29, 219n28, Europe: Babylon as symbol for European
234n48; on ethical nationalism, 38, Jewish settlements, 63; ethnic nation-
48–50, 52, 222n71; as post-WWI alism as model in, 21–22, 33; European
266 index
Orientalism, 153–54, 162; Jewish com- 225n14; political dichotomies com-
munal life in, 33 pared with, 15; religious symbolism
Exodus, 200–201 in, 71–73; role of myth in, 81–89;
Ezrahi, Sidra, 229n62 Romantic nationalism and, 46; spiri-
tual Zionism compared with, 46–47.
Feiwal, Berthold, 141 See also Rawidowicz, Simon; stateless
Feuerbach, Ludwig, 69, 76 nationalism
Fichte, Johann Gottlieb, 32, 45 globalization, 24–25
Fink, Carole, 30, 218n5 Goebbels, Joseph, 116
Folkspartei political party, 38 Goldman, Nachum, 212n12
folkways, 112–13 Gordon, A. D., 151–52, 160, 164
Fonrobert, Charlotte, 228n46 Goren, Arthur, 214n33, 236n98
France, 162 Gorny, Yosef, 248n30
Frankel, Jonathan, 28–30 Goyim shemedabrim ivrit (non-Jews who
freedom: collective attachment as fun- speak Hebrew), 75–76, 227n38
damental to, 50, 121; insufficiency of Greene, Daniel, 220n53
individual liberty, 54, 89–91; right- Greenfield, Leah, 194
to-differ principle, 50, 89–91, 189–90. Gutmann, Amy, 194
See also democracy; Enlightenment;
minority national groups Hacohen, Malachi, 216n40
Friedlaender, Israel, 8, 37–39, 113, 214n33 Hall, Stuart, 211n7
Friesel, Evyatar, 214n33, 216n45 Halpern, Ben, 237n107
Funkenstein, Amos, 215n36 Handlin, Oscar, 245n122
Harshav, Benjamin, 75–76, 226n27,
Gans, Chaim, 14, 194, 213n25, 217n49 228n39
Gellner, Ernst, 13, 213n25 Hartman, David, 201–202
geography. See territoriality Hayes, Carleton, 161–62, 244n95
German Romanticism. See Romantic Hebrew language and literature: in Baby-
nationalism lon and Jerusalem, 70, 88, 90; in global
Germany: absolute national sovereignty Hebraism, 9–10, 64; Goyim shem-
in, 119, 162; anti-Jewish initiatives, edabrim ivrit (non-Jews who speak
116–17; German Zionism as intel- Hebrew), 75–76, 227n38; Hebrew liter-
lectual source, 11, 32, 137, 158, 163, 171, ature, 68, 76–81; homeland discourse
174–75; Hebrew literary renaissance in, 229n62; language wars, 228n40;
in, 68; philosophical idealism in, linguistic nationalism and, 46–47,
229nn54,55; Rawidowicz history of 67–68, 76–81; national civilization
German fascism, 85. See also Nazism and, 112; “Second House” symbol and,
Gerstle, Gary, 33 82–84, 229n55; as source of solidarity,
Gilroy, Paul, 217n49, 247n17 10, 76–81, 112, 190, 204
Gladden, Washington, 116 Hebrew Renaissance (1920s Weimar
Gleason, Philip, 104 Germany), 9, 68
global Hebraism, 4, 64, 203–204; coun- Hegel, Georg Wilhelm Friedrich, 32,
terstate nationalism and, 9–10, 138, 229n55
167, 180, 185–86, 188–89; diaspora Herberg, Will, 113, 245n122
communities in, 71, 75; intellectual Herder, Johann Gottfried von, 32
influences on, 27; Jewish nationalism Hermann, Leo, 140
and, 191–93; legacy of, 182, 204–205; Hertzberg, Arthur, 96, 231n3
Palestine settlement effect on, 68, Herzl, Theodor, 29
index 267
Hess, Moses, 151, 216n45 216n42, 220n52, 236n98; dialectics of
Higham, John, 36 assimilation, 215n36; dissimilation
Hitler, Adolf, 69 compared with, 46; eruvin as pres-
Hollinger, David, 36, 47, 121, 184, 221n66 ervation of Jewish space, 78–80, 89,
Holocaust, 29, 91. See also Nazism 227n32; failure of interwar European
homeland discourse: American Jewish integration, 29; hybridity as model of,
homeland discourse, 181–82; assimila- 80; Jewish minority status and, 5–6,
tion and, 181–82, 246n6; center-pe- 184–85, 196, 214n27; in Kohn theory of
riphery paradigm, 57–58, 72–74, 201– American nationalism, 165; melting-
204; cultural pluralism and, 223n99; pot discourse and, 34–36, 41–43; out-
deferred messianism and, 82–87; sider views of Jewish nationalism and,
desacralization of Hebrew language 43. See also assimilation
and, 81; diaspora studies and, 185; Iraq, 153
effect on diaspora identity, 204–205; in Israel (people of Israel). See Am Yisrael
Hebrew literature, 229n62; pilgrimage (people of Israel)
trips and, 202–203; Rawidowicz global Israel (State of Israel): aliyah (immigra-
homeland argument, 72, 188–89, 204– tion to Israel), 181, 200; American Jew-
205; religious civilization and, 128, ish experience and, 181–82, 200–206;
236n100; self-determination and, 56. critique in Babylon and Jerusalem, 71;
See also statehood founding of, 178–79, 200–201; home-
humanistic nationalism. See cultural land discourse and, 56–57; Jewish peo-
humanism plehood and, 173–74, 198–99; naming
Huntington, Samuel, 95 of, 61–62, 180–81; personal status law,
Hutchinson, John, 176 206; Rawidowicz critique of, 90–91,
hybridity, 80 229n63, 230nn64,66. See also Pales-
Hyman, Paula, 214 tine; self-determination; sovereignty;
statehood
identity. See collective solidarity; ethnic-
ity; individualism; minority national Jacobson, Matthew Frye, 216n44, 246n6
groups; race Jerusalem (as symbol for the Jewish peo-
Ihud, 175 ple), 63, 65, 72, 75, 81–87
individualism: as American Zionism Jewish Center, 97
component, 21–22; as compassionate Jewish nationalism: American Jewish
elimination, 49; corporate nationalism nationalism as counterstate paradigm,
conflict with, 35–37; individual rights 108–109; British internationalism and,
in democracies, 54, 89–91, 106; indi- 54–55, 223nn93,94; collective solidar-
vidual rights under British Interna- ity as basis for, 18, 215n35; as distinct
tionalism and, 54–55; Jewish identity from racial/religious categories, 183;
conflict with, 17–18; in Kohn theory of false dichotomies of Jewish national-
American nationalism, 171–72; partic- ism, 44, 56, 93; as Kohn influence,
ularism as basis for, 121, 132; political 160–64, 172–73; as “making space” for
nationalism and, 13–14; Rawidowicz Jews, 191–97, 247n17; outsider views
critique of the Enlightenment, 83–84; of Jewish nationalism, 43; Palestine
repressive nationalism and, 117. See effect on, 226n27; as political resis-
also assimilation; cultural humanism tance, 215n37; scholarship on, 211n6;
integrationism: Ahad Ha’am theory of statelessness influence on, 194, 196;
imitation and, 46, 221n60; Ameri- subterranean strategy for, 180, 193;
can Jewish integration, 22, 33, 165–67, Zionism as counterstate nationalist
268 index
paradigm, 2–3, 6–7, 38–39, 41, 145, Kaplan, Israel, 100–101
154–58, 161–63, 195–96 Kaplan, Mordecai: Ahad Ha’am influence
“Jewish question”: fears in U.S. of Jewish on, 203, 234n48, 248n31; biographical
immigration and, 43; post-WWI opti- sketch, 8, 96–103, 172–73; counterstate
mism for, 29; relevance for contempo- views of, 97–99, 178–79, 198, 231n3;
rary global minorities, 6 critique of the Zionist movement, 118,
Jewish Theological Seminary, 97, 101 127–31, 237n101; on ethical national-
Joseph, Jacob, 101 ism, 118–24, 190–91, 235nn65,66,68;
Judaism: adaptations of American Juda- internationalist views of, 122–25, 156;
ism, 199; biblical rejection of primitive Kohn compared with, 171–72; Kohn
behavior, 53–54; chosenness, 122–24, influence on, 135, 138; legacy of, 182;
220n53; coercive authority in, 122–26; on minority rights, 104–108, 209,
dynamism as essence of Jewish collec- 236nn84,90,91; national civilization
tivity, 186; in global Hebraism, 9–10; approach of, 104, 109–10, 147–48; on
God as basis for organic society, 115; Palestine, 118, 128–31, 237n104; on
Jewish intellectual purity, 88, 230n67; peoplehood, 198, 233n17; photo of,
Jewish political philosophy, 66; Jewish 94; on post-1948 Jewish collectivity,
textual tradition and, 66–67, 73; Juda- 178; Rawidowicz connections and
ism as basis for collective solidarity, parallels, 93, 99–101; Reconstruction-
96, 111–12, 113–16, 127, 131–32, 187; Kal- ist movement and, 97, 101; on reli-
len anti-sovereignty and, 26–27, 41–43, gious civilization, 96, 131, 138, 187–88;
156, 217n1; Lida Yeshiva secular teach- spiritual Zionism of, 58–59, 214n33,
ings, 100; Orientalism influences on, 237n107; theory of Judaism of, 234n49;
153–54, 242n64; rabbinic tradition in Zimmern influence on, 41, 109–10
the “First and Second Houses,” 83–87, —Works: “Judaism and National-
228n51, 229n55; salvation as goal of ity” (1909), 97; “How May Judaism Be
nationalism, 116; taxonomies of Jew- Saved?” (1915), 106; Menorah Journal
ish communities, 204; theological series (1915–1916), 105–108; Society for
basis for Kohn’s nationalism, 149–52, the Advancement of Judaism Bulletin
160–64 editorial (1927), 125; “Toward a Recon-
struction of Judaism” (1927), 101; Juda-
Kadet Party (Russia), 37–38 ism as a Civilization (1934), 10, 58–59,
Kafka, Franz, 139 93, 97, 101–103, 109–10, 118, 124–25,
Kallen, Horace: Ahad Ha’am influence 128–30; “The Nationhood of Israel”
on, 17, 46–47; anti-sovereignty stance (in Judaism and Civilization, 1934),
of, 26–27, 41–43, 156, 217n1; on Arab 109–10; “What to Live for as a Jew”
Palestinians, 53–54, 223nn90,91; on (in Judaism in Transition, 1935), 94;
British and Swiss models, 169; on The Meaning of God in Modern Jewish
civilization nationalism, 108–109, Religion (1937), 117; The Future of the
147–48; cultural pluralism and, 41–43, American Jew (1948), 119, 126, 129; A
50–51, 105, 156–57, 220n53, 221n66, New Zionism (1955), 173, 178; The Reli-
223n89; German Kultur influence gion of Ethical Nationhood (1970), 97,
on, 51, 222n81; on Hebraism, 46–48, 128
221n59; homeland discourse and, See also national civilization;
57–58; Kohn critique of, 166–68; as Rawidowicz-Kaplan-Kohn
post-WWI intellectual influence, 8, Kehillah self-government experiment,
59, 156, 242n74; Romantic nationalism 124–25, 236n84
and, 44–46 Keren Hayesod, 135, 140, 141–42
index 269
Klatzkin, Yaakov, 69, 216n45, 223n95, history of Zionist thought; 1929), 11,
228n45 149, 151, 159; Martin Buber (1930), 139,
Klausner, Joseph, 69, 75, 227n38 172–73; The Idea of Nationalism (1944),
Kleinman, Moshe, 69 11, 120, 136, 158–61, 162–64, 243n90;
Kohn dichotomy. See civic-versus-ethnic “Ahad Ha’am” (1951), 173; Nationalism
contrast; Kohn, Hans (1955), 243n88; American Nationalism
Kohn, Hans: biographical sketch, 7–8, (1957), 11, 163–69; The Age of National-
139–44, 157–58, 172–73, 238n9, 239n11; ism (1962), 244n119; newspaper and
legacy of, 182; pacifism of, 140–44; journal writings, 140, 142, 172
photo of, 134 —Zionism: binational Palestine
—Intellectual influences: Ahad model, 154–55, 166–67, 169, 241n63,
Ha’am, 17, 165, 170, 173–74; Arendt, 242nn71,73; German Zionist influ-
175; Bourne, 242n74; Buber, 133, ences, 11, 32, 137, 158, 163, 171, 174–75,
135–36, 139, 143, 149–52, 153–54, 156, 241n49; on humanist-Zionist incom-
159, 162–63, 165, 170, 172–74, 240n45; patibility, 208; transnational Zionism,
English political philosophy, 163–67, 173–74; views of Palestine, 117, 135–36,
168–69, 244n114; European colo- 140, 141–44, 152–54, 165–67
nialism, 153–56; German Kultur, See also civic nationalism; civic-ver-
240n45, 241n49; Jewish nationalism, sus-ethnic contrast; cultural human-
160–64, 172–73, 191–93, 243n88; Kal- ism; Rawidowicz-Kaplan-Kohn
len, 242n74; Swiss nationalism, 169, Kotzkin, Amnon Raz, 175
244n116; Zimmern, 168, 242n74 Krochmal, Nachman, 228n52
—Nationalism: on American Kultur, 50–51, 110, 146–48, 222n81,
nationalism, 157–58, 162, 163–69, 240n45
244nn100,117, 245n122; collective soli- Kymlicka, Will: on minority group
darity and, 145–48, 161, 166–69, 171–72; rights, 121, 184–85, 190, 235nn65,73; on
counterstate approach of, 39–40, multicultural citizenship, 126, 217n49,
147, 165–71, 176–77, 179, 211n6; good 246n12; on nonstatist nationality, 14;
vs. bad nationalism, 162–63, 175–76, on substatist identity, 213n25
241n49; Greek political philosophy
and, 160, 243n90; on Jewish human- Landauer, Gustav, 139
ism, 148–54, 160–61; on multinational Lavsky, Hagit, 144, 215n34, 241n63
federations, 154–55, 244n119; on liberal nationalism: chosenness incom-
Romantic nationalism, 136–37, 161–62, patible with, 122–24; communitari-
175–76; sovereignty as evolutionary anism and, 222n76; as counterstate
stage toward, 161; transnational soli- nationalism, 25; cultural uniformity
darity, 159–60; typology of national- and, 190–91, 216n38; ethnocultural
ism, 159–61 belonging and, 30–31; individualism
—Works: “Nationalism” (1921), 144, and, 48–50; Jewish nationalism as
149–50, 161; Nationalismus (National- counterpoint to, 193–94; particularist
ism; 1922), 156–57; Die Politische Idee humanism compared with, 189–90;
des Judentum (The Political Idea of public vs. private sphere in, 126, 132.
Judaism; 1924), 11, 149–50, 159, 160, See also democracy; ethical national-
243n90; Hapo’el hatza’ir series (1926), ism; minority national groups
154, 166; Toldot hatenu’ah hale’umit libertas differendi (right to differ), 50,
ha’aravit (A history of the Arab 89–91, 189–90
nationalist movement; 1926), 152–53; Liebman, Charles, 234n49
Perakim letoldot hara’ayon hatzioni (A linguistic nationalism: cultural Zionism
270 index
and, 46–47; form vs. content in, 75–76, 25; immigrant vs. displaced minori-
228n39; global Hebraism and, 67–68, ties, 184–85, 246n8; interwar minority
75–81; interpretation vs. everyday rights initiatives, 30; Jewish marginal-
usage as source of solidarity, 79–81; ization in ethnicity discourse, 184–85,
national civilization and, 112. See also 196; Kaplan theory of democracy and,
Hebrew language and literature 10–11; Kohn critique of cultural plural-
lo’az (non-Jewish influence), 9–10 ism, 166–71; League of Nations stance
long-distance nationalism, 25. See also on, 218n5; minority rights under Brit-
minority national groups ish Internationalism, 54–55; minor-
Lorberbaum, Menachem, 194 ity rights under liberal democracy,
30–31, 89–91, 104–106, 190–91; moral
Magnes, Judah, 8, 124, 144, 175 value of diversity, 48–50; multicultural
Maimonides, Moses, 66, 227n32 citizenship, 25, 190, 234n46, 246n12;
Mann, Thomas, 241n49 multiculturalism, 95–96, 126, 184, 196,
Margalit, Avishai, 246n10 228n50; multinational state paradigm,
Marshall, Louis B., 212n12 37–38; nationalism/sovereignty and,
Marxism, 117 118–22; nativism and racial national-
maskilim, 67, 76 ism in the U.S., 33–34, 218n14; Nazi
Mazzini, Giuseppe, 41 anti-Jewish initiatives, 116–17; racial
McKim, Robert, 119 assumptions in civilization national-
McMahan, Jeff, 119 ism and, 53; religious nationalism and,
Meinecke, Friedrich, 39, 146 107–108, 113–16, 127; right-to-differ
melting-pot discourse: Americanization principle, 50, 89–91, 189–90; Romantic
campaign, 34–36; civic nationalism nationalism and, 44–45; self-govern-
and, 41–43, 169–71; Kallen critique ing rights and, 124–27; sovereignty
of, 46–47, 50–51; in Kohn theory and, 8–9, 118–22, 217n49; symbiotic
of American nationalism, 165–71; national-collective loyalties, 48–49;
national civilization and, 104; Pales- voluntary membership, 33, 35, 119,
tine as setting for, 54 122–25, 248n24. See also civic-versus-
Mendelsohn, Ezra, 214nn27,28, 216n45, ethnic contrast; cultural pluralism;
226n27 ethnicity; race
Mendelssohn, Moses, 123 Mizrachi party, 99–100
Menorah Journal, 51, 101, 105, 156, 220n46 modernism: colonial power differen-
messianism, 10, 81–89, 149–52, 163–64, tials and, 52–53; in Kohn theory of
229nn54,63, 230nn64,66 nationalism, 153; Rawidowicz critique
Michels, Tony, 220n52 of, 83–84; teleology of difference and,
Mill, John Stuart, 13, 49, 167, 170, 222n73 18, 50
Miller, David, 119, 121, 190, 217n49, Moore, Deborah Dash, 232n6
235n68, 247n13 Morefield, Jeanne, 52–54, 59
minority national groups: Ahad Ha’am Moyn, Samuel, 215n35
theory of imitation for, 45–46, 221n60; multicultural citizenship, 25, 190, 217n49,
American Jewish nationalism and, 234n46, 246n12
108–109; anti-essentialist conceptions multiculturalism, 95–96, 126, 184, 196,
of, 185–86, 246n10; Arab Palestinian 228n50. See also minority national
minority, 54–55, 91–92; communi- groups
tarianism and, 222n76; dissimilation multinational state paradigm: Ahad
and, 46; ethical nationalism and, Ha’am theory of imitation and,
119–24, 190–91; globalization and, 46, 221n60; experiments with
index 271
multinational federations, 37–38, with, 198, 233n17; polycentric vs. eth-
155–56; global national identity and, nocentric nationality, 121–22; statism
56; Kallen cultural pluralism and, as popular paradigm for, 2–3, 103;
41–43, 50–51, 105; Kaplan federa- as term in Judaism as a Civilization,
tion of nationalities, 122–25, 156, 167; 103–104. See also collective solidarity;
Kohn binational Palestine model nation-state paradigm
and, 154–55, 166–67, 169, 241n63, nation-state paradigm: as cause of WWI,
242nn71,73; Kohn critique of cultural 30; false dichotomies of Jewish nation-
pluralism, 166–71; national civilization alism, 44, 56, 93, 183–84; “First House”
and, 118–22; Zimmern theory of inter- symbol and, 82–87, 228n51; German
nationalism and, 40–41, 50–53. See fascism as articulation of, 85; nation-
also British internationalism; diaspora state analytical distinction, 12–13; as
paradigm; transnationality normative post-WWII paradigm,
Myers, David, 2, 63, 69, 211n6, 214n30, 58–59, 103; theoretical benefits of, 183;
215n36, 228n51 theories of nationalism and, 30–31;
Myrdal, Gunnar, 164–65 WWI effect on, 8. See also “sovereign
myth, 64, 81–89, 229n54 mold” principle
nativism, 33–34, 98, 218n14
Nathans, Ben, 214n27 Nazism: absolute national sovereignty in,
national civilization, 4, 10–11, 96–97, 203; 119, 122; anti-Jewish initiatives, 116–17;
chosenness incompatible with, 122–23; German völkisch nationalism and,
civilization nationalism and, 50–51; 111; Rawidowicz history of German
“civilization” term in, 104, 109–10, fascism, 85; Zionist negation of the
131–32, 232n6; counterstate nationalism diaspora, 29, 69. See also Germany;
and, 180, 185–86; function vs. content Holocaust
in, 112; homeland discourse and, 128, Netherlands, 162
237n100; intellectual influences on, Neusner, Jacob, 201–202
27; Jewish nationalism and, 96, 111–12, Niebuhr, Reinhold, 117, 119
113–16, 127, 131–32, 191–93; “nation-
hood” concept and, 103–104, 109–10; otherness: American Zionist philosophy
political dichotomies compared with, and, 37; in contemporary diversity
15; religious collectivity importance in, discourse, 185, 196; eruvin as boundary
10, 187, 190; repressive nationalism and, creation, 78–80, 89; European views
116–22; in the U.S. civil rights move- of Palestinian Arabs, 53–54, 153–54; in
ment, 109; völkish nationalism and, Greek vs. Jewish philosophy, 160–61;
111; voluntary membership, 122–26; as in Kohn theory of American national-
Zionist approach, 128–31, 138 ism, 162; normative citizenship and,
nationhood: cosmopolitan languages 35–37; philosophical critique of, 19;
and, 77; counterstate vs. state-seeking self-as-other as ethical principle, 120
typologies of, 14–15, 26–27; “ethnopo- Oz, Amos, 69
litical entrepreneurism” as counter-
discourse, 18–20; historical narrative Palestine: Arab riots of 1929, 128, 136,
and, 216n40; invented nationhood, 142–43; Balfour Declaration, 26,
13; Kohn definition of, 159–61; minor- 29, 128, 142–43; binational plan
ity national groups and, 118–22; in for, 152–56, 166–67, 169, 241n63,
national civilization approach, 109–10; 242nn71,73; Dubnow opposition to
nation-state analytical distinction, Jewish centralization, 38; in global
12–13, 146–47; peoplehood compared Hebraism, 9–10; as Hebrew language
272 index
center, 68, 75–81, 225n14; history of in the U.S., 33–34, 116, 218n14; in Nazi
Jewish settlement, 57–58, 99–100; Jew- ideology, 85; parallel between black
ish national culture and, 226n27; Kal- and Jewish intellectuals, 247n17; racial
len bicultural model for, 223nn90,91; assumptions in civilization national-
Kaplan views of, 118, 128–31, 237n104; ism, 53; Romantic nationalism and, 45;
Kohn views of, 117, 135–36, 140, 141–44, slavery in the U.S., 164; victimization
152–54, 165–67; national civilization discourses and, 184, 246n7; whiteness
relevance for, 10–11; Rawidowicz fam- (of diaspora Jews), 5–6, 218n14, 246n7.
ily relocation to, 68; world state pro- See also ethnicity; minority national
posal for, 129–30; Zionist approaches groups
to settlement, 19–20. See also Arab Rashi, 66
Palestinians; Israel Rauschenbusch, Walter, 116
Paris Peace Conference, 26, 29, 30 Ravid, Benjamin, 226nn17,23
particularism: Jewish humanism and, Rawidowicz, Chaim Isaac, 100
148–52, 160–63, 189–90; Kaplan Rawidowicz, Simon: on Arab Pales-
ethical nationalism and, 119–21, tinians, 91–92, 181, 231n75, 248n36;
235nn65,66,68; Kohn pluralism biographical sketch, 7, 62–63, 65–70,
approach and, 167–68, 176–77; 172–73, 214n30, 223n99, 226nn17,18,23,
national civilization and, 121, 132; uni- 232n9; in classroom Zionism exer-
versal through the particular (revah cise, 201–202; critique of Ahad Ha’am,
derekh tzimtzum), 83, 196–97. See also 72–73, 227nn28,30; on dichotomy
universalism in Jewish identity, 56, 93; on eman-
patriotism, 31, 35–36, 190–91 cipated national culture, 72–74, 155,
Penslar, Derek, 215n37 204–205; Jewish political tradition
peoplehood: global Hebraism and, and, 66, 191–93; Jewish textual tradi-
92–93; interwar Zionist development tion and, 66–67, 73–81, 227n38; Kaplan
of concept, 3, 23–24; Jewish diaspora connections and parallels, 93, 99–101;
peoplehood, 56, 173–74, 198–99; Kohn compared with, 171–72; on
Kaplan’s use of term, 197–98, 233n17; minority rights, 89–93, 209; on myth
Kohn’s transnational view of, 173–74. and messianism, 81–89, 229nn54,63,
See also Am Yisrael (people of Israel); 230nn64,66; on the name “Israel,”
collective solidarity 61–62; photo of, 60; rejection of secu-
pluralism. See cultural pluralism lar terminology, 10; on the “right to be
political Zionism, 16–17, 214n33, 231n3 different,” 50, 89–91, 189–90; theory of
Pollock, Sheldon, 77 territoriality, 72, 188–89
post-nation-state paradigm: Jewish col- —Works: “Kiyum hatefutzah” (The
lective as, 38; postnationalism, 38–39, endurance of the diaspora; 1934), 69,
57, 108, 217n48; Rawidowicz theory of 85, 93; “Libertas Differendi” (1945),
collective solidarity and, 10, 79–80; 89–90; “Al parashat batim” (Israel’s
stateless nationalism as post-nation- Two Beginnings: The First and Sec-
state ideal, 57, 194, 196 ond “Houses”; 1957, from Babylon and
progressivism, 35–36 Jerusalem), 81–87, 228nn51,52, 229n55;
Putnam, Hilary, 194 Babylon and Jerusalem (1957), 65,
70–71, 81–83, 86–89, 173, 181, 227n32;
race: civil rights movement, 109, 164; “Bein ever ve’arav” (Between Jew and
descent-based identity and, 47, Arab; 1957, unpublished manuscript
146–47; melting-pot discourse and, chapter from Babylon and Jerusalem),
104; nativism and racial nationalism 90–91; “On Interpretation” (1957), 78
index 273
See also global Hebraism; Roosevelt, Theodore, 35–36
Rawidowicz-Kaplan-Kohn Rosenzweig, Franz, 87
Rawidowicz-Kaplan-Kohn: American Roshwald, Aviel, 14, 194, 213n25, 246n10
scholarly community as audience Ross, Edward Alsworth, 43
for, 193; biographical comparison, Round Table, 40–41
7–8, 12, 22, 172–73; concerns over Ruppin, Arthur, 143
Arab Palestinian minority, 208–209, Russia, 37–38, 214n27
248n36; counterstate approach of, 16,
26–27, 183–84; critique of essentialist Sacks, Jonathan, 190
discourses, 185–86; cultural Zionism Said, Edward, 154
associated with, 16–17; intellectual Salvador, Joseph, 151
influences, 8–9, 59, 212n13; normative Sandel, Michael, 194
statelessness approach of, 19–20; post- Sarna, Jonathan, 218n11
WWII views of nation-states, 89; split Schiff, Jacob, 212n12
with state-seeking Zionism, 58–59. See Scholem, Gershom, 230n64
also Kaplan, Mordecai; Kohn, Hans; self-determination: homeland discourse
Rawidowicz, Simon and, 56; independence movements in
Reconstructionist movement, 97, 101 colonized populations, 53; marginal-
Reines, Isaac Jacob, 99–100 ization of alternative approaches and,
religion: American nationalism and, 4–5; nation-state paradigm and, 14;
165–72, 182; as collective solidarity, Romantic nationalism and, 44–45.
96, 111–12, 113–16, 127, 131–32, 187–88, See also “sovereign mold” principle;
246n12; in contrast to active national sovereignty
ties, 247n13; Kultur and, 51; liberalism Seton-Watson, Hugh, 12–13
and, 49–50, 87–88; minority rights Shimoni, Gideon, 212n11, 216n45
and, 126; national civilization and, 187; Silver, Abba Hillel, 212n12
salvation as nationalism, 116; trans- Six Day War, 200–201
nationality and, 5, 187; in U.S. “new Smith, Anthony, 13, 121–22, 136,
nationalism,” 35, 107; U.S. separation 213nn22,23, 238n6
of church and state, 106–107, 187–88; Smith, Rogers M., 35
voluntary vs. organic ties in, 1, 33, Smith, Steven, 49
123–25, 184, 187–88, 235n80, 248n24. socialism, 117, 140–41, 214n29
See also Christianity; Judaism; reli- Society for the Advancement of Juda-
gious civilization ism, 97
religious civilization, 96, 131, 138, 187–88. Sollors, Werner, 34–35, 47, 184, 221n66
See also national civilization “sovereign mold” principle, 8–9; British
Renan, Ernst, 49, 222n71 internationalism and, 40; counterstate
Renner, Karl, 39 nationalism and, 89, 92–93; Diaspora
Romantic nationalism: civic and ethnic Studies and, 188; either/or logic and,
paradigms for, 31–32; folkways derived 65; historical overview of, 195–201,
from, 113; German Volk/völkisch 205–206; Jewish nationalism as coun-
nationalism, 52, 111, 147; idea/spirit/ ter to, 18–19, 24, 171; “Land of Israel”
culture principle in, 44–45; Kohn meaning and, 62; Zionist ideology
articulation of, 136–37, 161–62, 175–76. and, 11–12. See also nation-state para-
See also collective solidarity; ethnic digm; self-determination; sovereignty;
nationalism state-seeking nationalism
Roosevelt, Franklin D., 89–90, 92, 105, sovereignty: as evolutionary stage toward
107 transformative nationalism, 161;
274 index
international destabilization fostered 73–74; Holocaust relationship with, 29;
by, 40; Kallen anti-sovereignty, 26–27, homeland discourse and, 87; messian-
41–43, 156, 217n1; in Kohn theory ism and, 84, 229n63, 230n66; people-
of nationalism, 145–46, 161; minor- hood and, 198–99; resistance to coun-
ity national groups and, 8–9, 118–22, terstate solutions, 212n8; territoriality
217n49; national civilization and, 111, role in, 56, 78; Zionist movement
129; as prevailing Zionist principle, adoption of, 15–16, 174, 179, 212nn9,11.
5–6, 11–12; “territorial principle” of See also “sovereign mold” principle;
citizenship and, 39. See also self-deter- sovereignty; statehood
mination; “sovereign mold” principle statism. See “sovereign mold” principle;
spatiality. See territoriality sovereignty; statehood; state-seeking
spiritual Zionism: descent-based iden- nationalism
tity and, 47–48, 146–47; Hebraism Stroum, Philippa, 220n45
compared with, 46–47; Kaplan for- Sumner, William Graham, 113
mulation of, 58–59, 214n33, 234n48, Swiss nationalism, 169, 244n116
237n107; political Zionism compared Syria, 153
with, 16–17, 214n33; Romantic nation-
alism and, 44–45. See also collective Takaki, Ronald T., 246n7
solidarity Tamir, Yael (Yuli Tamir), 119, 122, 194,
St. John de Crèvecoeur, J. Hector, 34, 165 217n49
Stanislawski, Michael, 211n6 Taylor, Charles, 14, 31, 213n25, 217n49
statehood: adoption as Zionist objective, Tchernichovsky, Shaul, 69
15–16, 212nn9,11; Am Yisrael (people territoriality: Ahad Ha’am interterrito-
of Israel) as basis for, 2; basic principle rial initiative, 173–74; alternatives to
of, 1; diaspora vs. statehood advocacy territorial taxonomy, 204; center-
polarization, 212n8; effect on collective periphery paradigm, 57–58, 72–74,
identity, 92, 201; failure of interwar 173–74; cosmopolitan languages and,
European integration and, 29; global 77; decentered identity and, 204–205;
national networks compared with, eruvin as preservation of Jewish space,
188–89; political vs. ethnic national- 78–80, 89, 227n32, 228nn44–46; ethi-
ism and, 13–14; state absorption of cal nationalism and, 119; “First House”
religious ideas, 35–36, 106–107, 116; symbol and, 82, 87, 228n51; geographi-
tehum (border) concept and, 77–79. cally grounded political theory, 23,
See also homeland discourse; state- 216n45; global national networks
seeking nationalism; territoriality compared with, 188–89; Gordon land-
stateless nationalism: as counterdis- connected Zionism, 151–52; here/
course to nationalism, 19–20; eman- there dichotomy, 226n27, 227n30; in
cipated national culture, 72–74; prev- Kohn theory of nationalism, 145–46;
alence of nation-state thinking and, Kohn transnational solidarity, 159–60;
58–59; Walzer views of post-1948 nation-state paradigm and, 183; in
Zionism and, 194–96. See also coun- rabbinic literature, 204; self-governing
terstate nationalism; global Hebraism rights and, 126–27. See also statehood
state-seeking nationalism: Babylonian tikkun olam (repairing the world),
exile and, 63; Ben Gurion advocacy 207–208
of, 1, 61–62, 180–81, 198–99, 245n5; Toll, William, 220n53
counterstate vs. state-seeking typolo- Tönnies, Ferdinand, 146–47
gies of, 14–15, 17–18, 26–27, 57, 59, totalitarianism, 119, 175
88, 169, 182; eruvin compared with, Trans-Jordan, 153
index 275
transnationality: Ahad Ha’am interter- nationalism, 163–69; multicultural
ritorial initiative, 173–74; in American identity in America, 95–96, 228n50;
and Israeli Judaism, 205–206; bein- national civilization relevance for,
artzit (interland), 72, 74–75, 227n37; in 10–11, 98; post-WWII McCarthy era,
global Hebraism, 72, 188–89; global- 169; race relations in, 109, 112, 164–65;
ization effect on, 24–25; Jewish trans- Rawidowicz family relocation to, 70;
national peoplehood, 20, 56, 173–74, Reconstructionist movement and, 97,
198–99; Kohn transnational solidarity, 101; religious vs. corporate minorities
159–60; post-1948 counterstate views in, 113–14; threats to American Jews,
of, 179–80; religion as source for, 5, 106–108; U.S.-based homeland dis-
187; scholarly inclinations against, course, 181–82
216n44; Zionism as a transnational universalism: cultural humanism and,
movement, 3–5. See also multinational 160, 164–67, 171–72; Dubnow critique
state paradigm of, 48–50; ethical nationalism and,
tribal nationalism. See ethnic 120–23; misrepresentation of minority
nationalism peoples and, 90; national civilization
Troeltsch, Ernst, 147 and, 122–24; universal through the
particular (revah derekh tzimtzum),
Uganda, 100 83, 196–97. See also particularism
United Kingdom: center-periphery para-
digm, 57; English political philosophy, völkish nationalism. See ethnic national-
163–67, 168–69, 244n114; interwar ism; Romantic nationalism
anti-sovereignty views in, 40; model
of nationalism in, 162; Rawidowicz Walzer, Michael, 193–96, 234n46,
family relocation to, 69–70; role in 248n24
Kohn binational Palestine, 154–56. See “We Are One” campaign, 201, 248n26
also British internationalism Weiss, Yfaat, 39–40, 155, 242n71
United States: adaptations of American Weizmann, Chaim, 128–29, 143, 237n104
Judaism, 199; alternative legal systems Wells, Ida B., 109
in, 124–27, 236nn84,90,91; Ameri- Weltsch, Robert, 139, 158
canization campaign, 35–36, 98–99, Wertheimer, Jack, 197–98
107, 125; Americanization of Zionism whiteness (of diaspora Jews), 5–6, 218n14
thesis, 42–43, 220n50; Christianiza- Wilson, Woodrow, 29, 35–36
tion of the state in, 35–36, 106–107, 116; world government initiatives, 30
cultural pluralism and, 41–43, 166–70,
221n66; ethnic studies importance in, xenophobia, 35–36
184; exceptionalist depiction of civic
nationalism, 33; homeland discourse Yack, Bernard, 32
and, 200–206; immigration restric- Yehoshua, A. B., 1–2, 23–24, 197–98,
tions, 34, 112, 165; individual rights as 211n1
characteristic of, 54; individualism in Yiddish language, 67–68, 228n40
American Zionism, 21–22; interwar
nativism in, 33–37; Jewish integra- Zangwell, Israel, 34, 104
tion in, 22, 33, 165–67, 216n42, 220n52; Zimmern, Alfred: on American plu-
Kehillah self-government experi- ralism, 168; Brandeis and, 220n45;
ment, 124–25, 236n84; Kohn views on British and Swiss models, 169;
of, 157–58, 162, 163–69, 244nn100,117, on civilization nationalism, 50–51,
245n122; as model of humanistic 108–109, 147–48; Ha’am influence on,
276 index
17, 221n60; homeland discourse and, destruction-of-the-diaspora theo-
57–58; Kallen and, 41, 220nn45,46; ries, 29, 69; diaspora Zionists and,
Kultur model of, 50–51, 110–11, 222n81; 214nn28,29; failure of interwar
as post-WWI intellectual influence, 8, European integration and, 29; focus
40, 59, 242n74; racial assumptions in, on national culture, 42, 199–200,
53; Romantic nationalism and, 44–48; 220n54; inward vs. outward Zionism,
theory of internationalism of, 40–41, 214n33; Kaplan critique of, 118, 127–31,
50–53, 59, 156–57, 222n73 237n101; Mizrachi party, 99–100; nega-
Zionist movement: adoption of statist tion of diaspora ideology, 201–203,
objective, 15–16, 174, 179, 212nn9,11; 206, 212n8, 223n96, 248n30
index 27 7
vi acknowledgments
Noam Pianko is the Samuel and Althea Stroum Assistant Professor of Jew-
ish Studies and International Studies in the Jackson School of International
Studies at the University of Washington, where he also serves as the under-
graduate program adviser for the Jewish studies program. His research
interests include Jewish political thought, modern Jewish intellectual his-
tory, Zionism, and American Judaism. He has published in Jewish Social
Studies, American Jewish History, American Studies, The Encyclopedia of
Religion in America, and Ab Imperio.
index 279

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C on t e n ts

1. Breaking the Sovereign Mold:

2. “Sovereignty Is International Anarchy”:

3. Text, Not Territory: Simon Rawidowicz,

4. Making American Democracy Safe for Judaism:

5. From German Zionism to American Nationalism:

6. Zionism, Jewish Peoplehood,

Growing up, I spent a tremendous amount of time under a huge mural

Breaking the Sovereign Mold

2 zionism and the roads not taken

breaking the sovereign mold 3

4 zionism and the roads not taken

breaking the sovereign mold 5

Three (Exceptional?) Roads Not Taken

6 zionism and the roads not taken

breaking the sovereign mold 7

8 zionism and the roads not taken

breaking the sovereign mold 9

10 zionism and the roads not taken

Rethinking the Meaning, Function, and Scope of Nationality

breaking the sovereign mold 11

Including Counterstate Paradigms in the Study of Zionism

12 zionism and the roads not taken

breaking the sovereign mold 13

14 zionism and the roads not taken

breaking the sovereign mold 15

16 zionism and the roads not taken

breaking the sovereign mold 17

The Strategic Function of Zionism

18 zionism and the roads not taken

breaking the sovereign mold 19

Global and Interdisciplinary Perspective

20 zionism and the roads not taken

breaking the sovereign mold 21

22 zionism and the roads not taken

Jews, Zionism, and Contemporary Politics of Difference

breaking the sovereign mold 23

24 zionism and the roads not taken

breaking the sovereign mold 25

“Sovereignty is international anarchy” is not a claim one might expect

26 26 roads not taken

“sovereignty is international anarchy” 27

World War I and the Question of Nationality

28 zionism and the roads not taken

“sovereignty is international anarchy” 29

The Logic of Nationalism: A Transatlantic Concern

30 zionism and the roads not taken

“sovereignty is international anarchy” 31

32 zionism and the roads not taken

“sovereignty is international anarchy” 33

34 zionism and the roads not taken

“sovereignty is international anarchy” 35

36 zionism and the roads not taken

From Nation-States to States of Nations

“sovereignty is international anarchy” 37

38 zionism and the roads not taken

“sovereignty is international anarchy” 39

40 zionism and the roads not taken