Secular Jewish messianism
Belief in the age of modernity and assimilation.
Whenever I read or write anything about zionism, I’m always surprised how the secular Jews that created Jewish nationalism based their whole “secular” narrative on a bunch of religious myths (which they, being secular, had supposedly rejected) and then spun them into a “real” history of the Jewish people. To me it always seemed like the early secular nature of Jewish nationalism was a kind of ruse, hiding what was in essence a new type of modern Jewish religion — a religion that melded the myths of Judaism and a new type of faith that had emerged in the 19th century: nationalist ideology, the belief in races…
I’m reading a book now on Jewish history and zionism that confirmed this for me and explained the religious quality of secular zionism very succinctly — much better than I have ever been able to formulate it.
In Original Sins, Benjamin Beit-Hallahmi, argues that at its core zionism is secularized Jewish messianism — a messianism that has built into rabbinical Judaism, a religion of the Jewish diaspora that has been practiced for more 1,800 years.1
As he wrote:
Jewish religious practices are notably lacking in mysticism, as compared to other traditions. The worldliness of rabbinical Judaism permits only one concession, in the form of the idea of a Messiah. According to Jewish eschatology, human history is a battlefield between good and evil. This battle will end with the coming of the Messiah, who will bring the course of history to a stop. This will mean the end to Jewish victimization, revenge on the Gentiles, Judgement Day for all humans, and universal recognition of God and His law. For many generations, Jewish mystics were busy deciphering hidden messages in sacred texts, to determine the exact date of Jewish redemption. But the Messiah never came.
Whenever some kind of calamity hit the Jewish people, messianic fervor went through the roof and some Jew would emerge either claiming to be the messiah or claiming to know when the messiah will come. It happened after Jews were expelled from Spain, it happened after Bohdan Khmelnytsky’s massacres of Ukrainian Jews… To diaspora Jews raised on the promise of the messiah coming, a big bout of suffering would be interpreted as a sure sign that God was finally about to deliver, and Jews would finally end their exile and return to the Land of Israel.
Despite zionism emerging as a secular ideology, Jewish messianism was the world from which it came. That was the deep culture in which is was born. And this messianism continued in zionism, transmuted into a modern, non-religious concept.
Benjamin wrote:
Zionism has intended to create a new stage in Jewish history, and indeed it reflected and expressed a major upheaval. The environment that made Zionism possible included the rise of liberal capitalism in Europe and the corresponding decline of the Jewish community. European nationalism, colonialism and imperialism transformed utopian Zionism into political Zionism, capable of creating the state of Israel.
Zionism became a possibility, and an urgency, when many Jews lost their historical patience. They could no longer just wait passively for the Messiah to come and transform the whole world. Jews lost this great patience, which had maintained their identity and their communities for many generations, when non-Jews around them were giving up their own patience and passivity.
With the rise of the modern world, modern secular zionist Jews became the messiahs. They themselves would wrench into existence the world that God had for so long promised but failed to deliver. I guess you could say that the secular Jewish nationalism that took over for Judaism for a big subset of European Jews was an expression of the Enlightenment — God was dead, but we human beings have taken over and will do the job that useless slacker couldn’t do.2
I think most of us use the concept of religion too narrowly. Secular zionism is a type of religion, a modern modification of diaspora Judaism for which the coming of the messiah, the end of Jewish suffering, and the return of Jews to Israel had been bound up for generations. Of course now ultra-religious practitioners of Judaism have built on top of what was initially a secular zionist idea and have melded it into their own religious worldview. Now they see the creation of Israel by secular Jews in straight messianic terms. The End will come when all of Israel is properly settled by Jews, and the Biblical Age will be upon us again. For them zionism has gone full circle and again become again rooted in the old religion.
For me it helps to think about secular zionism among diaspora Jews as a type of faith. It puts things into perspective and helps understand why they react the way they do to any criticism of zionism or any support for Palestinian rights. For them it’s basically a war on their God. No matter how secular they think they may be, a zionist is fundamentally a believer.
—Yasha Levine
PS: I wrote about this a little earlier, but I think about it every time I write about this topic.3 Zionism provides a wholistic, basically religious identity. It gives Jews a very clear cosmology, a sense of belonging and in an age of modernity and alienation, a transcendental vision of history and their place in it. But anti-zionism, although growing among popular among secular Jews, especially the young, doesn’t have that kind power. It’s just a moral anti position, built mostly around the negation of the Jewish nationalist idea and the violence that’s necessary to keep it alive. I don’t see it offering much in the way of a positive identity. As a secular Jew whose identity was formed in the Soviet Union, I don’t know what to offer here, but we anti-zionist Jews do need something beyond “being against” if we want to have any power. What will it be? I’m not sure. But Evgenia did hint at one possibility in her last essay, “Born Again Communists.”
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