Abstract
In late-Habsburg Prague, in the years before the Great War, the members of the Zionist Student Association Bar Kochba were remarkably ambivalent regarding the “objective” constituents of “genuine” nationalism claimed by the national movements of that place and time: territoriality, “blood,” distinctive cultures, national languages, etc. As Zionists, they desired such “objective” national attributes for themselves, even as they remained fully aware that these were ultimately inapplicable to their Jewish reality. The article illustrates this complexity by examining how these Prague Zionists theorized the concepts of national lands, national homelands, and national rootedness. Their deep-seated ambivalence toward the territoriality of nations, then, has been in response to Jews’ particular condition in the Diaspora. It does, however, expose a broader tension manifested in some shape or form in other national movements: many of the concepts of what nationhood is are adopted from alien cultures and often from the very culture from which the national movement seeks to dissociate.
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Notes
Kohn left a larger, more comprehensive, archival collection in the Leo Baeck Institute Archives, NY (AR 259). Kohn’s Klau Library collection—preliminarily cataloged, and divided into two boxes only—deals exclusively with Kohn’s collaborative Zionist work. Kohn’s Zionist works and documents in the the other archival collection (at the Leo Baeck Archives) tend to document his personal refelctions, publications and correspondences, rather than Zionist collaborative efforts he participated in.
It also echoes Buber’s bold claim (for example, in his addresses “Renewal of Judaism” and “Spirit of the Orient and Judaism”) that the Occidental is “a sensory-type man,” while the Oriental (and the Jew qua Oriental) is “a motor-type man” (Buber, 1967: 56–78, 34–55, esp. 44–49, 57–60).
This, of course, is a vast and multidimensional topic in itself. See for example Conforti (2010), Frankel (1992), and Lowenstein (1997). Both Mathias Acher (i.e., Nathan Birnbaum) and Robert Weltsch took this East-West dichotomy into the Jewish world in their respective Bar Kochba talks in winter 1911, Acher on Eastern and Western Jewry and Weltsch on Zionism and the Western Jew; on these, see (Activity Report of Bar Kochba Association, 1911: 5).
Other ubiquitous “objective factors” of nationhood include common institutions, and common economic life. The most famous “materialist” definition of nationalism is probably that of the young Joseph Stalin: “a nation is a historically constituted, stable community of people, formed on the basis of the common possession of four principal characteristics, namely, a common language, a common territory, a common economic life, and a common psychological make-up manifested in common specific features of national culture.” (Stalin, 1994: 18).
Hugo Bergmann’s 1910 Palestine visit was the exception to the rule.
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I thank Jason Kalman and the two anonymous readers for their helpful and thoughtful suggestions and comments.
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Gordon, A. Bar Kochba’s Homelands: Prague Zionists on National Soil and Rootedness. Int J Polit Cult Soc 30, 157–169 (2017). https://doi.org/10.1007/s10767-017-9254-x
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s10767-017-9254-x