Yes, of course, sorry.
I was merely responding to Czarcasm’s ignorant questioning of my claim that he was an atheist. I probably should have said “secularist”, but I agree that these are well known basic facts for anyone minimally familiar with the history. I think a better analogy would be someone pointing out that George Washington was not, in fact, religious.
Rabbinic Judaism didn’t “give up on” animal sacrifice, it claimed that it would return in some distant utopian future, when the Jews were miraculously returned to Israel with the Temple rebuilt and a descendant of David on the throne. The important point is that none of this required any active effort on the part of the Jews.
The Bible is very clear that God will miraculously lead righteous Jewish armies to victory, even against impossible odds. That was no doubt a great morale boost when we were fighting the Philistines and Edomites, but became a recipe for national suicide when we were up against the Roman Empire. The Rabbis therefore had to re-interpret that belief to the point that it became irrelevant to real life.
You do realize that a hundred years ago, my description of Zionism as “a modern ideology invented by atheists, which is profoundly anti-Jewish and wants the Jewish people to abandon Judaism in favor of a secular ethnic nationalism” would have been enthusiastically endorsed by the vast majority of rabbinic authorities from across the theological spectrum? If Zionism is so Jewish, why did the leaders of the Jewish community hate it so much? (Or, in other words, who cares what the Jewish people have been saying about ourselves for 2000 years, some wannabe German nationalist dude says we’re doing it all wrong)
And it’s certainly true that, once the idea of nationalism evolved, it was inevitable that some Jews would pick up on it. The problem is that nationalism turned out to be a REALLY BAD idea.
As a Jew, I thank you for your thoughtful comment and will give it all the consideration it deserves.
They 1,000,000% would never have described Zionism as “profoundly anti-Jewish”. No one except the most fundamentalist of fundamentalist Jews (people who are fundamentalist enough that they’d be Taliban or Westbro Baptist if they weren’t Jewish) and modern anti-Zionist Leftists would ever have described it as “profoundly anti-Jewish”.
Why did the leaders and elites of the Jewish diaspora hate the idea of a movement that would make Jewish diaspora leadership a lot less important? Gee, I wonder why?
Anyways, “leaders of the Jewish community” were certainly not united in a disdain for Zionism, and many supported it.
According to who? I wouldn’t be alive if it wasn’t for nationalism; all of my ancestors’ non Zionist relatives (Bundists and the like) died in the Holocaust. It seems to me that Nationalism was a fantastic thing, because it meant they lived and were no longer second class citizens.
Xenophobic ultra-nationalism is a really bad idea; nationalism as a whole is a fantastic one. Just like how cooking is great even if deep frying Twinkies is a terrible idea.
Ditto for your “corrections”.
The Jewish people have suffered many (spiritual) plagues — the Sadducees, Karaites, Hellenisers, Shabbatai Zvi, Enlightenment, Reform and many others. But the strongest of them all is Zionism. - R. Chaim Soloveitchik
It is an obligation upon every Jew whose soul stood at Sinai to pray for the downfall of Zionism while saying the prayer “Velamalshinim.” – R. Menachem Tannenbaum
The Zionists have committed horrible actions; that they have always slandered and spoken libellously against the Jewish people to other nations, and have even incited non-Jewish leaders against the Jewish people to convince them to expel Jews from their countries. The Zionists believed that this strategy would make it easier to take over the Holy Land and establish their State there. – R. Yoel Teitenbaum
The Zionists are dead limbs of our people, which cause the entire body to rot. – R. Yisrael Hakohein, bka the Chafetz Chaim.
Since the days of the Tower of Babel, there has been no defilement in the world like the defilement of Zionism. – R. Shalom Dov Ber Scheerson
I got all these quotes from the archives here, and picked those because they are from the most prominent and well-known Orthodox rabbis of the age, the Judaic Hall of Famers.
Of course the number of religious leaders who supported Zionism in the pre-State era wasn’t literally zero, but if you seriously want to claim that it wasn’t a tiny minority, I’m going to need some cites.
When did I say anything about religious leaders?
Do you think the only Jewish leaders of the era worth hearing out are the religious ones? Your question didn’t specify Jewish religious leaders, and the leaders of Jewish communities were not always religious, certainly in places like Western Europe where the Haskalah movement (the Jewish Enlightenment of the late 1700s through the 1800s) had taken hold.
Yes. That is clearly a major source of our differences.
Are you particularly religious? I really can’t imagine why a secular Jew, as I assumed you are, would feel that way.
I’m not Orthodox, but I am definitely religious. I agree with Mordecai Kaplan that the Jews are a unique nation in that we are fundamentally a religious civilization. We didn’t assimilate in the Diaspora like any normal people would have, we found a way to organize a society that didn’t depend on having a government or army, and we made great intellectual and moral advances. Obviously we were also horribly persecuted much of the time, but I question whether it was worth it to abandon our unique heritage in order to become one more small country on the map.
I want to be humble here…I think it is WAY too soon to pass any judgment on whether Zionism was ultimately good for the Jews or not. I have my misgivings, but your arguments are certainly strong and may prove correct in the end.
My only real purpose in the present debate is to clarify the historical record and remind everyone that Zionism was historically a revolutionary break with Jewish tradition. Whether that was a good thing or not shall stand unresolved.
Also, to clarify, I was quoting all those rabbis not to express unqualified agreement with them, but merely to address your claim that no mainstream, respected rabbi in history would ever have used extreme or inflammatory language to denounce Zionism.
I actually found that comment of yours quite odd. I would have thought the near-universal fierce opposition of the rabbinic establishment to Zionism was, like Herzl’s secularism, an uncontroversial fact known to anyone with a basic knowledge of the history.
Or watched the '81 film The Chosen.
Oh, based on the Chaim Potok book? I didn’t know a movie version existed.
Babale and the other Zionists routinely soft-pedal that Herzl very openly equated Zionism with colonialism, what makes you think they wouldn’t apply the same cognitive dissonance to attitudes towards his secularism?
Well, forgive me for assuming.
I don’t really view Zionism as an abandonment of Judaism’s unique heritage (obviously), although I do find criticism of national Zionism from cultural Zionists (like Ahad Ah’am who is a truly fascinating figure in his own right) more persuasive than criticism from more conservative religious sources.
I do view Zionism, and the Haskalah movement as a whole, to have been transformative; but then again, Judaism had transformed beforehand, obviously with Rabbinical Judaism but also many times since then. I think that transformation was sorely needed, much as the Enlightenment was very necessary for Christianity.
I certainly wouldn’t have argued with you on that if I knew you meant religious leaders. I find that as the 19th century wanes, the importance I place on the views of religious figures compared to secular ones wanes as well. When you talk about the “leaders and elites of the Jewish community” in the context of the 1800s, most of the people I think about are not rabbis.
@Thing.Fish, on rereading some of the posts, I do see that you were more explicitly talking about religious authorities in your post. I missed that, and I apologize for that.
Part of the reason why I missed that is that in this era I view religious authorities as less an less significant (in both Judaism and in the wider world), and I think that trend has been an incredibly positive one (again, both for Judaism and in the wider world).
That perspective colored the way I read your post and that’s why I missed that you were referring to religious authorities specifically.
That being said, I do consider the more secular leaders who were more supportive of Zionism even if they weren’t eager to take part themselves to be both more representative of and more productive for the Jewish people of the era.
And I do have to agree with others, saying that a secular Jew isn’t “good at” being Jewish is quite distasteful. It’s the sort of thing the Ben Gvirs and the Smotritches of the world love to say about secular Israelis.
Yes, but the difference is that I would also say it about Ben Gvir and Smotrich! 
Actually they are far, far worse than some secular Jew who ignores Torah and mitzvot but isn’t actively disgracing the reputation of the Jewish people.
I don’t want to unnecessarily offend anyone, but from my POV Judaism is essentially not a belief system or a nation, but a set of behavioral norms. Accordingly, it’s possible to objectively judge people according to the degree of their adherence to these norms. Like basketball or carpentry, Judaism is a thing that it’s possible to be bad at.
And like those things, being bad at it doesn’t make you a bad person. And it certainly doesn’t make you less Jewish. Conversely, it is possible to be rigidly adherent to every detail of Jewish law, while nevertheless being a complete shitbag (speaking of Ben Gvir).
Certainly many secular Jews are wonderful, highly ethical people who have made tremendous contributions to society, and I fully respect anyone’s right to not be religious. But I do think that “secular Jew” is not going to be a sustainable identity in the long run. If you’re going to be secular, why bother being Jewish? At that point, it just becomes an ethnic identity, which will lose importance over time.
And I’m sure they’d say it about you, and probably about each other if they drove all the secular Jews out. I’m not a big fan of any of that sort of dogmatism.
You’re welcome to that opinion, but THAT is clearly a far more revisionist perspective than Zionism is. From a religious perspective, the Hebrew people were a nation first (the descendants of Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob, and of the twelve sons of Jacob who dwell in Egypt and multiply into a nation while living there first as refugees from a famine in Canaan and then as slaves) and only received the Torah later, after they were already forged into a Nation by captivity and their escape from Egypt. From a historical perspective, Judaism dates back to a time when ethnic identity and religious identity were completely entangled.
First, I would argue that it is impossible for Judaism to become an ethnic identity, because as noted, it has always been one.
Second, with regards to the value of a secular Jewish identity, I’ll refer you once more to the writings of Ahad Ha’am and other cultural Zionists. I think they make a lot of worthwhile critiques and arguments of national Zionism. I think in hindsight it is quite clear that Cultural Zionism would not have been able to survive without National Zionism, but I also think that Israel would not be what it is today had Herzel and the National Zionists not had to take criticism from Cultural Zionists into account. For example, Herzel didn’t think reviving Hebrew was practical (even though the revival of Hebrew was already well underway when he thought so).
Clarification: The Jewish People are a nation. Judaism is a set of behavioral expectations. The former ought to adhere to the latter, but do not lose their status as a nation by failure to do so.
In ancient Israel, sure, ethnicity and religion were basically identical, but during the Exile, the Jews became an ethnically, culturally, and linguistically diverse nation united only by religion (they had the Hebrew language in common, but nobody spoke it as their first language). If Jews stopped being religious, they stopped being Jews and assimilated into the majority culture.
Now with the founding of the State of Israel, it is arguably possible to maintain a secular Jewish identity across generations in a way it hadn’t previously been. We’ll see how that works out.
I am frankly not terribly familiar with the thought of Ahad Ha’am and will have to look into it. Personally, I feel it would have been better if Israel had adopted Yiddish as the national language and allowed Hebrew to retain its status as a language used only in religious contexts.