The Lost Cause of Ashkenazi Nationalism

Zionism is not synonymous with Jewish nationalism. The Zionist revolution that meant to uproot diaspora culture is more accurately termed Hebrew nationalism. Like all revolutions, the Zionist revolution was forced to compromise with the (Jewish) establishment to achieve its goals; thus the current identity crisis of the state of Israel. Israel's secular socialist and nationalist pioneers would look in horror on the millennialist settlers who have a strangehold on contemporary Israeli politics. Radical Zionism meant to create a new Jew, not provide a home for the old one. Yet history had other plans, as Israel emerged after the Second World War as the de facto home for all Jews.

And yet I've always been intrigued by the lost alternative to Hebrew nationalism: Yiddishism, or Ashkenazi nationalism. Here are some excerpts from a book review that deals with the topic:

Yiddishism can be defined as a romantic nationalist ideology in which Yiddish reflects the Jewish spirit--a concept taken from early nineteenth century German romantics. Language was a means of both binding the nation and staving off the natural tendencies of assimilation into the host culture. . . . Yiddishists realized that such an endeavor needed the social support of a mass Yiddish speaking/reading base, and thus they wanted to establish Yiddish-language institutions in autonomous territories. In other words, Yiddish would become the language of, to use the words of Benjamin Harshav, a secular poly-system, in which a high literary culture cultivates a language while an institutional network establishes a social base and a mass of speakers of that language.

Pre-war European Jewish culture was vital enough to contain more than one nationalist ideology, more than one socialist ideology, more than one religious orthodoxy. Zionism, Marxism and Hasidism had their rivals in Yiddishism, Bundism and German neo-orthodoxy, among others. Hitler put an end to this vibrancy, as well as the "mass Yiddish speaking/reading base" that the Yiddishists dreamed of mobilizing.

If there was a core of intellectuals dedicated to making Yiddish the language of a secular poly-system, why did Yiddishism fail to achieve in Eastern Europe what Hebraism did successfully in Palestine? The failures, in fact, were clear at the Czernowitz conference itself: religious Jews found the movement too secular; Bundists, too nationalistic and lacking in class content; and most staunch Jewish nationalists became Zionists and, in general, Hebraists. Yiddishism, then, fell between socialism and nationalism. Later, the social base of Yiddishism began shrinking as the Jewish working class rose in economic and social status in Eastern Europe, leading to linguistic assimilation. Most devastatingly, though, the Holocaust wiped out the entire social base and high cultural elite for Yiddish in Eastern Europe. . . .

Goldsmith argues that the ideology of Yiddishism was bankrupt from the beginning, because in his estimation, language cannot unify the Jewish people alone. Goldsmith takes this argument further. In his words, "The secularism of the Yiddishists was, for the most part, a dogmatic illusion which detached them from the deepest emotions of Jewry and robbed them of the sustaining power of the religious regimen and religious symbolism." In other words, without religion, or at least religious symbolism, no Jewish ideology can succeeded in uniting Jews. His argument, however, does not explain why Zionism, for example, succeeded where Yiddishism failed, even though both movements faced a similar criticism.

The "sustaining power of the religious regimen and religious symbolism" was already failing when Jewish nationalisms emerged to fill the gap. Surely language cannot unify the Jewish people alone, but was that what the Yiddishists were really arguing? We do Jewish civilization a disservice by discounting the alternate strands it contains. Rabbinic Judaism isn't the only model of Jewish religion, and Zionism isn't the only model of Jewish nationalism. Perhaps Galicia could have become a European Jewish homeland, and Palestine a pan-Semitic state. Perhaps a Karaite or Sabbatean revival would have swept the Pale of Settlement. We cannot know, but we can dream: and we can respect our ancestors' dreams enough not to call them bankrupt from the beginning - especially as it was Hitler who robbed them.