| Part ofa series on |
| Aliyah |
|---|
 |
| Concepts |
| Pre-Modern Aliyah |
| Aliyah in modern times |
| Absorption |
| Organizations |
| Related topics |
"Negation of the Diaspora" (Hebrew:שלילת הגלותShlilat ha-Galut orשלילת הגולהShlilat ha-Golah) is a concept inZionism that asserts that Jews living inthe Diaspora—that is, outside of theLand of Israel—are in an environment that inherently causesJewish assimilation, particularly throughdiscrimination andpersecution, and which must be fixed to ensure the survival and the cohesion of theJews as a people. A more developed formulation of the idea further argues that the Jewish people have no future without amassing at their "spiritual centre" in theLand of Israel, which is partly represented by the modernState of Israel.[1]
Aliyah (עֲלִיָּה,lit. 'ascent [toZion]'), the historic Hebrew term for an expatriate Jew's immigration to the Land of Israel, is an act that fulfills this Zionist tenet by enabling the "gathering of Israel" and thus undoing any perceived Jewish assimilation.Yerida (יְרִידָה,lit. 'descent [from Zion]'), the historic Hebrew term for a Jew's emigration from the Land of Israel, is the exact opposite—it is now widely understood as referring toIsraeli Jews who live outside of their country.
The earliest publication of the concept inZionist discourse was in a series of public exchanges betweenSimon Dubnow andAhad Ha'am, beginning in 1901. Ha'am's 1909 Hebrew-language essayNegation of the Diaspora fixed the phrase in Zionist public terminology.[2]
According toEliezer Schweid, in the early 20th century,Yosef Haim Brenner andMicha Josef Berdyczewski advocated an extreme form of the concept. In his literary work, Brenner describes Jews in thePale of Settlement as poor; mentally, morally, and spiritually disfigured; panicky; humiliated; disoriented, with no realistic view of life; depressed; despised; slovenly of dress, lacking taste; unwilling to defend themselves against violence, desperate; and simultaneously feeling inferiorand part of aChosen people. According to Schweid, Brenner thought that their despair was good, as it would leave Jews with Zionism as their only option for ethnic, cultural, and religious revitalization.[3]
Yehezkel Kaufmann saw Jews in the Diaspora as territorially assimilated and as religiously segregated yet semi-assimilated, with even theirJewish languages being the result of mixing theirsacred Hebrew with local language. Kaufmann viewed this Diaspora culture as flawed, misshapen, poor, and restricted; althoughDiaspora Jews in Europe found it easier to assimilate onceghettos were abolished and as the larger cultures around themsecularized, the fact was thatEuropean culture remained essentiallyChristian.[4]
Ha'am andA. D. Gordon held a more moderate view in that they still saw some positive traits or possibilities of life in the Diaspora. As he thought the creation of aJewish homeland inPalestine would take several generations, Ha'am wanted to improve life in the Diaspora by creating a "spiritual centre" in Palestine, whereJewish civilization andJudaism could be revived, giving Jews more self-confidence and helping them resist foreign assimilation, which he saw as a deformation of the personality and as a moral failing with regard to family and people. He believed thatJews should feel historical continuity and organic belonging to a people.[5] Gordon perceived nature as an organic unity. He preferred organic bonds in society, like those of family, community, and nation, over "mechanical" bonds, like those of state, party, and class. Since Jews were cut off from theirnation, they were cut off from the experience of sanctity and the existential bond with the infinite. In the Diaspora, a Jew was cut off from direct contact with nature. Jews in exile, Gordon wrote, had reached a point where:
[W]e are a parasitic people. We have no roots in the soil, there is no ground beneath our feet. And we are parasites not only in an economic sense, but in spirit, in thought, in poetry, in literature, and in our virtues, our ideals, our higher human aspirations. Every alien movement sweeps us along, every wind in the world carries us. We in ourselves are almost non-existent, so of course we are nothing in the eyes of other people either.[6]
The poetHayim Nahman Bialik wrote:
And my heart weeps for my unhappy people ...
How burned, how blasted must our portion be,
If seed like this is withered in its soil. ...
According to Schweid, Bialik meant that the "seed" was the potential of the Jewish people, which they preserved in the Diaspora, where it could only give rise to deformed results. However, once conditions changed, the "seed" could still provide a plentiful harvest.[7] Schweid says the concept of the organic unity of the nation is the common denominator of Ha'am's, Gordon's, and Bialik's views, which prevents them from completely rejecting life in the Diaspora.[8]
As a pupil in an elementary school inPalestine I was imbued with this contemptuous attitude. Everything “exilic” was beneath contempt: the Jewishshtetl,Jewish religion, Jewish prejudices and superstitions. We learned that “exilic” Jews were engaged in “air businesses” – parasitical stock exchange deals that did not produce anything real, that Jews shunned physical work, that their social setup was a “reverse pyramid”, which we were to overturn by creating a healthy society of peasants and workers. [...]
Everything good and healthy was Hebrew – the Hebrew community, Hebrew agriculture, Hebrewkibbutzim, the “First Hebrew City” (Tel Aviv), the Hebrew underground military organizations, the future Hebrew state. Jewish were “exilic” things like religion, tradition and useless stuff like that.
Ze'ev Sternhell distinguishes two schools of thought in Zionism: one was the liberal or utilitarian school ofTheodor Herzl andMax Nordau, who argued thatantisemitism, especially after theDreyfus affair, would never disappear and thus looked to Zionism as a rational solution for Jews; the other, prevalent amongPalestinian Zionists, saw Zionism as a project to rescue the Jewish nation (the "Rebirth of the Nation") and not as a project to rescue Jews.David Ben-Gurion, in a collection of speeches and essays known asRebirth and Destiny of Israel, describes his horror after discovering, shortly after he arrived inOttoman Palestine in 1906, that anagricultural Jewish settlement had employedArabs as guards: "Was it conceivable that here too we should be deep in Galuth [exile], hiring strangers to guard our property and protect our lives?"[10]
The question of security, apart from the shame of the Jewish inability to defend their lives and honour duringpogroms, was not central to their thinking. For instance, in 1940,Berl Katznelson wrote aboutPolish Jews who were living in regions that had been conquered by theSoviet Union: "[They] are unable to fight even for a few days for small things likeHebrew schools. In my opinion that is a terrible tragedy, no less than thetrampling of Jewry by Hitler's Jackboots."[11]
According to Frankel, some Zionists of theSecond Aliyah, such asYa'akov Zerubavel, advocated a new Jewish mentality that would replace the perceived old one. The old, exilic mentality was one of passivity, of awaitingsalvation from the Heavens. According to Zerubavel, after theBar Kokhba revolt began, "the tragedy of our (Jews') passivity." For him, to work the soil in the Land of Israel, to settle the country and to defendthe settlements, was a complete break with the exile and meant picking up the thread where it had been dropped after theJewish national defeat to the Roman Empire. The Jew with the new mentality would fight to defend himself. Ben-Gurion says, "To act as a guard in Eretz Israel is the boldest and freest deed in Zionism." Zerubavel wrote that the remark by which a fallen guard named Yehezkel Ninasov was remembered had revealed the image of being a guard in all its glory. Ninasov had once said: "How is it that you are still alive and your animals are gone? Shame on you!" According to Brenner, "[the pioneers in Palestine are] a new type among the Jews."[12]
In an address to the youth section of the Jewish political partyMapai in 1944, Ben-Gurion stated:
Exile is one with utter dependence—in material things, in politics and culture, in ethics and intellect, and they must be dependent who are an alien minority, who have no Homeland and are separated from their origins, from the soil and labour, from economic creativity. So we must become the captains of our fortunes, we must become independent—not only in politics and economy but in spirit, feeling and will.[13]
According to Sternhell, Zionism's views underlying the negation of the Diaspora (e.g., the view of the Jews as a parasitic people) were often quite similar to the opinions underlying modernEuropean antisemitism.[14]
Negation of the Diaspora is the complementary facet to developing the ethos of the Israelisabra. This facet is part of the secular counterculture that was the basis for the rise of the originalIsraeli culture and Israeli national identity. Ideologically, the negation of the diaspora explains the deep disgust towards emigration from Israel. From an economic standpoint, the negation of the Diaspora appears as the abandonment of the Jewishmiddleman minority economy as an unproductive business, colloquially known as an "air business" or "luftgeschaeft", and switching to productive professions.[citation needed]
According toItamar Even-Zohar, in the late 19th century,secular Jews inEastern Europe saw Jewish culture as in a state of decline or even degeneration. Some wanted to assimilate completely. The Zionists sought a return to the "purity" and "authenticity" of the existence of the "Hebrew nation in its land", a pastoral vision reflecting contemporaryRomantic ideals.[15]
This vision manifested itself by counterposing "new Hebrew" to "old Diaspora Jew" in various ways. Even-Zohar mentions several:[16]
This rejection of the Diaspora, for some, such as theCanaanists (who originated fromRevisionist Zionism), extended to the rejection of the close and intimate ties between the culture practiced by most self-identified Jews and the reclaiming of Jewish culture as a "Hebrew culture" that would become agnostic to religious affiliation, rely upon the Land of Israel andits ancient cultures as a prime factor in self-identification as a Hebrew rather than as Jew, and even seek forassimilation of the Arab residents into the larger Hebrew culture. This extreme negation of both the Diasporaand Judaism would not become popular among even secular Zionists, but it would continue to resurface in nationalistic thought to the present day.
The saying, "Eliminate the Diaspora, or the Diaspora will surely eliminate you," is often wrongly attributed toZe'ev Jabotinsky, the founder of Revisionist Zionism, in a dispute with Ben-Gurion; it was actually the historianJoseph Klausner who formulated the remark in these terms during a speech he gave inJerusalem in 1942.[17]
According to Schweid, since about 1970, the idea of the negation of the Diaspora was removed from the basic premises guidingIsraeli national education. One reason for this was the need ofIsrael to "reconcile" itself with Jews in the Diaspora.[18]
In 2007, the Israeli government began a campaign to encourageJews from the former Soviet Union who were living inGermany to emigrate to Israel, in order to "counter [their] dangerousassimilation."[19]
The anti-Diaspora position is present withinIsraeli literature to this day, with Israeli authorA. B. Yehoshua being considered chief of this sentimental strain; Yehoshua has often been recorded or cited as critical ofDiasporic Judaism as being inauthentic and rootless in comparison toIsraeli Judaism, and the Judaism-tinged Diaspora existence as being stifling to the identity and conviviality ofsecular Jewish culture.[20]
