How can we escape the sterile confrontation between messianic Zionism and obsessive anti-Zionism? In this diagnostic text, Noémie Issan-Benchimol and Gabriel Abensour suggest a way out of this fatal alternative. What is at stake? Reinscribing the State of Israel in the exilic condition, and thus stripping it of its exceptional character that inflames radical passions.
In the twilight of the 15th century, when the shadow of expulsion hung over Spanish Judaism, Rabbi Isaac Ben Moses Arama sketched a striking definition of the exilic condition in his homiletic collection Akedat Yitzchak. According to him, exile is characterized by a double precariousness: the political and social precariousness of a people deprived of the “respect that is due to them in their society of origin”; and the cultural precariousness of an identity permanently at odds with its environment. This intuition, deeply rooted in Jewish tradition, resonates with us as a matter of course. It has been inscribed in our families since at least the Spanish period.
Our ancestors, who found refuge in Morocco and Tunisia after the tragic expulsion decree of 1492, were among the most active architects of the rebirth of Sephardic Judaism in Fez, Mogador, Gabès and Djerba. Their writings, be they halachic, poetic or mystical, all bear an acute awareness of the fragility of their condition, suspended from the whims of history, the harassment of crowds and the arbitrary benevolence of the powerful. As for their assumed cultural otherness, in a context of structural legal inferiority, this was not synonymous with a radical break. Our forefathers spoke Arabic, but in a dialect peculiar to the Jews, and they shared certain places of worship with their Muslim neighbors, while preserving their own rites. On feasts such as the famous Mimouna marking the end of Pesach, Jews and Muslims enjoyed a joyful complicity, without blurring their distinct roles. In short, they embodied that Jewish différant , to use the neologism coined by Jacques Derrida, himself a Jew from Algeria: an identity built and maintained in the gap.
The notions of diaspora and exile are at the heart of Jewish public and intellectual debate, particularly among those with a heart on the left. These concepts undeniably provide a framework for articulating a specifically Jewish critique of Israeli state violence, and for setting limits to Jewish sovereign power. However, behind the apparent unanimity in celebrating exile and criticizing violence, a fault line emerges between two radically different visions of the diasporic condition. This article thus proposes a conceptual distinction between two contemporary conceptions of Jewish diasporism, which we will call “neo-diasporism” and “continuity diasporism”. We argue that neo-diasporism, championed mainly by American Jewish intellectuals such as Daniel Boyarin and Judith Butler, effectively breaks with the millennia-old exilic experience in order to better embrace progressive American struggles. Conversely, continuity diasporism seeks to revitalize the ethics of exile, both outside and inside the State of Israel.
Beyond the theoretical critique, we will attempt to explain why the neo-diasporist model seems politically untranslatable and, consequently, incapable of delivering the justice it claims to promote for the Palestinian cause. We will argue, on the other hand, that the diasporism of continuity, because it takes into account the dual exilic consciousness of Palestinians and Israeli Jews, is the only one capable of laying the foundations for an Israeli-Palestinian society that has triumphed over absolutist, oppressive and extremist temptations.
Neo-diasporism. Or the abandonment of exile.
The diasporic conception we call “neo-diasporist” claims to be faithful to the thousand-year-old exilic experience, in which it would like to see the truth of Judaism as a cosmopolitan and ethical avant-garde. However, if we scratch the surface, this conception reveals itself to be deeply rooted in the soil of contemporary American society. Spurred on by intellectuals and movements as diverse as Judith Butler, Daniel Boyarin and Jewish Voice For Peace this galaxy, which obviously has its nuances, surreptitiously substitutes a watered-down conception of diaspora for exile. Let’s not forget that at the heart of the Diaspora was Jewish communal and transnational solidarity, whereas these people make it a condition of disassociation with the majority of the Jewish people. This sleight of hand does little to conceal what this theory owes to the political context of American progressivism, and what it does not owe to traditional Judaism. Its central thesis, formulated by Jacob Plitman and others in the columns of Jewish Currents, establishes “hereness” – the anchoring in the here and now of social struggle in the United States – as the cardinal principle of a new Jewishness. This term, modeled on the Yiddish “doikayt” dear to Bundists, articulates “a critical awareness of Israel coupled with a commitment to struggling primarily in the communities in which we live”. While self-sufficiency and indifference to the struggles of other groups is clearly not an ideal, such a commitment as a Jew cannot come at the expense of, and certainly not in opposition to, classic diasporic solidarity.
Under the guise of embodying a transnational diasporic Judaism, federating Jewish communities across borders, what we’re really dealing with is a very specific American political agenda, sprinkled with a pinch of Jewish folklore, itself used against what the majority of Jews in the real world do and are.
Plitman sums up in a few words a program that informs both Boyarin’s writings and JVP’s stances: Jewishness becomes the megaphone of a virulent anti-Zionism, matched by activism in favor of American progressive causes. “Hereness is weird and materialist and queer and fun and angry, and best of all it’s already happening”, enthuses Plitman. That this new catechism is tailor-made for Anglo-Saxon and urban youth, much more than for Moroccan, French or Argentinean Jewry, is hardly surprising. For under the guise of embodying a transnational diasporic Judaism, federating Jewish communities across borders, what we’re really dealing with is a very specific American political agenda, sprinkled with a pinch of Jewish folklore, itself used against what the majority of Jews in the real world do and are. In a telling sign, the binary opposition between “hereness” and “thereness” suggests that genuine solidarity with “our neighbors and allies” would require turning one’s back on the rest of the Jewish people.
Admittedly, thinkers like Boyarin, who calls himself a neo-Bundist and neo-Satmar, can lay claim to existing Jewish traditions: indeed, the anti-Zionist theology of the Satmar sees Jewish statehood as a heretical way of bringing forward the time of redemption and a betrayal of the political passivity expected of Jews, their redemption to come only from Above. The fact remains that for the Satmar, what Boyarin transforms into an eternal ideal is in fact a given historical and religious condition, destined to end by divine intervention. Ask a Satmar what he thinks the end times will look like, and you’ll most likely get a theocratic Jewish polity established in the land of Israel, with a temple in Jerusalem, where political life would not really be a democracy, nor a space of religious freedom for secularists, followers of another religion or even queer people. The Satmars, at least, can look back on a long Jewish tradition of rejecting Zionism on a theological basis (exile being divine punishment, it is intolerable to circumvent it), whereas Boyarin, by making this divine punishment the milieu of the Jew, in the Heideggerian sense where water is the milieu of fish, finds himself in internal contradiction. Reduced to the small portion of a subculture that is certainly fascinating, but very much a minority, Jewish particularism is erased in favor of an unconditional allegiance to progressivism across the Atlantic. It is surprising that the theoretical genius of Daniel Boyarin, whose contributions to the field of critical Talmudic studies and the epistemology of religious science are of the utmost importance, should give rise to such a simplistic political vision.
As far as Judith Butler is concerned, it is important to note a glaring contradiction between the nuanced thinking developed in their book Parting Ways: Jewishness and the Critique of Zionism and their public pronouncements. This discrepancy between a complex and sometimes fascinating thought process and its political conclusions reduced to an activist digest was already present in the case of Daniel Boyarin. In Parting Ways, Butler draws on the ethical resources of diasporic Judaism to open up prospects for peace and cohabitation, showing empathy for both Israelis and Palestinians. However, the complexity of this thinking is shattered by their public statements about Hamas (and their crimes), which Butler included already in 2006 as part of “progressive, left-wing social movements, part of a global left”. Thus, Butler’s political performance appears to be in total contradiction with the ethical principles at the heart of their philosophy. While their philosophy aims to subvert oppressive norms and recognize the precariousness of all lives, their political stance seems to reinforce a violent order that denies life to those same bodies. This internal contradiction, while perhaps explicable in terms of Butler the activist conforming to a certain American progressive zeitgeist, is hardly excusable for Butler the intellectual.
If one had to trace neo-diasporism back to anything, it would be to the liberal Judaisms that emerged in Europe in the 19th century, which were already advocating acculturation to the national values of the host countries. Now that the era of chauvinistic patriotism is over, this neo-rootedness is draped in the trappings of the moment, those of progressive American hereness. The garb changes, the gesture remains the same.
Given our experiences as non-ashkenazi, non-American Jews, the blindness of neo-diasporists to the historically and geographically situated nature of the values they espouse is surprising. Far from Arama’s definition, the “diasporism” they profess resembles a new form of post-exilic being-in-the-world, entirely shaped by the zeitgeist of contemporary America. If one had to trace its origins, it would be to the liberal Judaisms of 19th-century Europe, which advocated acculturation to the national values of the host country. Now that the era of chauvinistic patriotism is over, this neo-rootedness is draped in the trappings of the moment, those of progressive American hereness. The garb changes, the gesture remains the same. The fact that most neo-diasporist authors mobilize little more than modern Jewish sources, reducing centuries of creativity to a handful of Bundist slogans or quotations from Arendt and Benjamin, is revealing in this respect. Even a scholar and eminent Talmudist of Boyarin’s caliber cannot escape this flaw, when they claim to summarize the Jewish experience as a great leap from the Talmud to the Bund – a shortcut as simplistic, in its willingness to overlook everything that doesn’t fit in with anti-Zionist doxa, as that practiced by the socialist Zionism of yesteryear, which thought it was moving seamlessly from the Bible to the Palmach.
Enemy twins: neo-diasporism and religious Zionism
More than an in-depth reflection on the diasporic condition, neo-diasporism has striking structural similarities with messianic Zionism, whose latest exponent today is religious Zionism. Beyond their superficial antagonism, these two ideologies share a common post-exilic vision, whether through an exclusive, maximalist and irredentist rooting in Israel or in American hereness. Each sees the Jewish experience of those not on their side as a degraded, morally compromised condition, betraying a true Judaism that they each postulate in ways totally disconnected from what existing Jews do. But their most striking commonality is undoubtedly the exaggerated, even metaphysical, place they accord to the Hebrew state in their worldview. For religious Zionists, Israel is the sole vehicle of redemption, while neo-diasporists see it as the ultimate symbol of damnation, stamped with the seal of original sin from its modern rebirth. In both cases, the Jewish state is given an ontologically abnormal status, whether it is adorned with the trappings of messiahship or the trappings of apostasy.
For lack of space, we can only note in passing the profoundly Ashkenazo-centric common ground of these two specular projections. Their common taste for a rhetoric of authenticity, which invokes Mizrahi Jews at every turn without ever deigning to listen to them, is revealing in this respect. The Jewish Voice for Peace website, for example, uses ventriloquism to present its anti-Zionist struggle as also being waged on behalf of Mizrahi and Ethiopian Jews, while modestly concealing the majority opinions of these groups (critical of certain Israeli policies, but ardent defenders of Israel as a shelter and refuge state). Boyarin comes close to epistemic dispossession, when he takes up the term “judaïté”[1]. coined by Tunisian thinker Albert Memmi (but without taking up Memmi’s theory of judéité, judaïsme and judaïcités), and empties it of its dual anti-colonial and… Zionist charge. Butler, for their part, dissertates sovereignly on the identity of Arab Jews, in a staggering ignorance of the lived experience of these Jews of which we are a part. These neo-Orientalist postures, long denounced by Israeli Mizrahi activists, are flourishing in certain religious Zionist circles who believe that the Oriental Jew is their “good savage”[2].
Each sees the Jewish experience of those who are not on their side as a degraded, morally compromised condition, betraying a true Judaism that they each postulate in a way that is totally disconnected from what existing Jews do. But their most striking commonality is undoubtedly the inordinate, even metaphysical, place they accord to the Hebrew state in their worldview.
In all cases, the Mizrahi has no right to speak unless he obediently embraces ideological constructs that are often alien to him.
A diasporism of continuity
In the face of these impasses, a third way is emerging, which we shall call “diasporism of continuity”. While it bears some resemblance to the neo-diasporism of rupture analyzed above, it differs first and foremost in that its project is not based on a social and cultural engineering of discrimination (between anti-Zionist pneumatic Jews and Zionist hylic Jews, to borrow a distinction from gnosis) representing no significant position within the Jewish people. On the contrary, it’s a question of naming, conceptualizing and revalorizing a traditional existence that doesn’t need to be forced by an abstruse ideological construct. Its proponents also place exile at the heart of the Jewish condition, with all the theological and ethical implications that implies, but they extend their conception of exile to Israel. They, too, note a certain cultural and moral drying-up, and they, too, see in the excesses of religious Zionism a fascistic territorialization. But unlike the ultra- and anti-Zionists, they put the existence of the State of Israel in its rightful place, freeing it from the ontological condition of anomaly that is the common bedrock of radical ideologies.
These approaches can be summed up by a double rejection: neither a backward-looking response (we must go back to before the creation of the State, in other words, call for and hope for its disappearance), nor a hyperactive response (we must transform the seeds of redemption constituted by the creation of the State of Israel into total redemption, via total war if necessary). This sensibility is embodied in two recent books: End of Days: Ethics, Tradition, and Power in Israel by Mikhael Manekin and Biblical Consciousness, Mishnah Consciousness by Amnon Raz-Krakotzkin. The former, a committed Orthodox activist, offers a moral and religious reflection calling for the infusion of Jewish ethics into Jewish political practices. The second, a seasoned historian, traces with erudition the genealogy of two competing relationships to the land of Israel, exile and redemption. Beyond their differences in approach, these thinkers are united in their refusal to set up the Hebrew state as the pivot of contemporary Judaism, and their desire to refresh Jewish thought in the light of the premodern rabbinic tradition.
Unlike ultra and anti-Zionism, diasporic continuity puts the existence of the State of Israel in its rightful place, freeing it from the ontological condition of anomaly that is the common bedrock of radical ideologies.
For the proponents of a diasporism of continuity, it is precisely because Jews are ontologically in exile that the State of Israel must be understood as a political reality among others, and not as a radical rupture. In other words, to reject messianic Zionist teleology is to deny it as the alpha and omega of Jewishness in the 21st century. This change of perspective is accompanied by a return to the premodern sources of tradition, too often neglected by contemporary thinkers. With this in mind, Raz-Krakotzkin sees in the 16th-century Safed school an alternative Jewish model to the Zionist one. It was in this bubbling hotbed, where Sephardic Jews and Jews of Arab culture converged, that the Lurianic Kabbalah flourished, Joseph Karo wrote his halachic masterpiece and Shlomo Alkabetz composed his famous hymn, the Lecha Dodi. Far from being a coincidence, the simultaneous emergence of these spiritual gems reflects a collective project from which emerges a central figure, that of the exiled Shechinah wandering the land of Israel. Rather than breaking with exile, settlement in the Holy Land would, on the contrary, reveal its painful truth: it is here, and nowhere else, that the wound of exile is most keenly felt, and the Divine Presence lies in the dust, waiting to be lifted up. Thus, the existence of a Jewish political life in the land of Israel can be thought of outside the opposition between exile and redemption: there is no outside of exile.
As Raz-Krakotzkin points out, this theological revolution did not go unchallenged: it permeated the Judaisms of Eastern Europe and the Mediterranean basin right up to the dawn of the 20th century. However, political Zionism erased all traces of it, preferring the grand narrative of a material redemption. Manekin, who proposes a religious reflection based on tradition, is not as aware as Raz-Krakotzkin of the history of Safed and its heirs. But it is to the same tradition that he refers, invoking in particular Musar literature and Hasidut. And yet, the Mussar works that Manekin cites are almost all from the Safed school, just as the Hasidut was largely inspired by the Kabbalah. In authors like Cordovero (Safed, 16th century), Manekin finds an uncompromising virtue ethic, which focuses on the development of a person’s moral character and dispositions, rather than on the establishment of universal rules of action.
It is precisely because the State of Israel is neither redemption nor damnation that it must be viewed in a dispassionate way, and its moral drifts condemned for what they are, not for what they represent in the imagination of maximalists.
In ethical terms, there is a profound and concrete gap between the neo-diasporist approach and that of continuity diasporism. For the former, it is the State of Israel itself, and its claim to bring secular deliverance to the Jews, that is transgressive. Consequently, the real sufferings of Palestinians living under the yoke of Israeli occupation are relegated to the background. Between the lines, we understand that for a neo-diasporist like Boyarin, even an Israel at peace with the Palestinian people would not have the right to exist. Conversely, for the proponents of a diasporism of continuity, it is precisely because the State of Israel is neither redemption nor damnation that it must be viewed in a dispassionate way, and its moral drifts condemned for what they are, not for what they represent in the imagination of maximalists. Is it by chance that Manekin is a long-standing anti-occupation activist, or that Raz-Krakotzkin is one of the thinkers behind Israeli-Palestinian binationalism? We believe, on the contrary, that it is their diasporic approach to the state that enables them to see the very real suffering of the Palestinians and to want to bring an equally concrete solution to it, even if it doesn’t satisfy purists who prefer a hard-line posture. Diasporic continuity opens the way to a lucid analysis of the conflict and its possible outcomes, far removed from messianic fantasies or ideological anathemas.
The galaxy of diasporist thinkers is not limited to these two authors. Philosopher and specialist in Jewish mysticism Haviva Pedaya, for example, argues that the notions of exile, concrete homeland and imaginary homeland, and the aspiration towards the latter, have always been at the heart of Jewish experience. According to her analysis, the creation of the State of Israel marks a paradigmatic inversion, transforming the imaginary homeland into a concrete one, without however being able to completely extirpate the exilic heartbreak from Jewish consciousness. If we dispense with the academic prejudice that only academic intellectuals have the right to be quoted, we can add names as diverse as Rav Elazar Shach, Rav Ovadia Yossef and Rav Shimon Gershon Rosenberg (known by the acronym Shagar). These rabbis belonged to distinct sociological circles, each with a different relationship to Zionism. Shach was a Litvak opposed to Zionism, Yossef was a Sephardic with a rather pro-Zionist outlook, Shagar belonged sociologically to religious Zionism, while developing a post-Zionist theology. Beyond their sometimes irreducible differences, these personalities shared a willingness to subject Zionist messianism to a critical examination informed by the categories of classical rabbinic thought. They all saw exile as the ontological state of the Jews, sometimes with extremely concrete political consequences. These included Yossef’s support for peace agreements based on territorial exchanges, or his unwavering support for the release of hostages, even at the cost of heavy political and security concessions. All these decisions were based on the same principle: that of Jewish brotherhood in exile, above all other political considerations.
Not surprisingly, many rabbis adhere to a de facto diasporic continuity. Indeed, another dividing line between these two forms of diasporism probably lies in the profoundly secular nature of neo-diasporism and the manifestly religious character of the other. For neo-diasporists, diaspora is, in essence, a secularized version of exile, just as Zionism is a secularized version of Geula or redemption. Both camps agree that no liberating God will intervene in history, that no messiah will appear. With Judaism thus freed of its transcendence, only two possibilities remain: either to work towards the long-awaited deliverance in an act that is both self-emancipating and substitutes the nation for God; or to transform exile into diaspora, i.e. to preserve the form of the multi-millennial Jewish existence while emptying it of the metaphysical breath that accompanied it.
Conversely, the religious character of diasporic continuity makes the diasporic form of Jewish life inseparable from its exilic essence. This religious character is not linked to the degree of halachic observance of these thinkers – religious Zionism reminds us that it is possible to practice a Judaism that is both halachic and highly secularized – but rather to the place that God and divine service occupy in their writings. Completely absent from the thinking of the neo-diasporists, they are at the heart of the thinking of the diasporists of continuity. Raz-Krakotzkin’s latest book, for example, gives pride of place to the Shechinah and the Kabbalists of Safed. The latter are not analyzed as mere objects of study, but rather as the founders of a school, a tradition and a Jewishness in which the author inscribes himself. For Manekin, the focal point of ethical reflection and political activism is Avodat Hashem (service to God), making the book a manual for the contemporary believer. It is because this is deeply religious thought that the political activism that flows from it takes on an autotelic value, similar to the notion of “Lishma” at the heart of the traditional Jewish vision of divine service.
This positioning within Jewish tradition has various political implications. One example is offered by the activists of the “Bnei Avraham” group, the oldest left-wing Jewish group working in Hebron against the Israeli military occupation. In parallel with their action in solidarity with the local Palestinian population, these activists recently distributed the Kabbalist Moshe Cordovero’s ethical treatise “Tomer Devorah” to Israeli soldiers on the spot, calling for introspection and ethical self-improvement. R. Avraham Oriah Kelman writes in his introduction: “In this generation in which we have returned to our Holy Land, where we have reinvested in the work of the soil and the art of war, we all carry within us something of Cain, that ploughman and warrior of the origins. That’s why it’s our duty to carry out the great reparation (Tikun) taught by the holy Ari: not to harm any living thing or creature, and a fortiori not to harm any human being”. This symbolic approach is doubly subversive. On the one hand, it appropriates the practice of offering amulet books to soldiers, by proposing the work of an eminent Kabbalist, inviting them to reflect critically on military duties. On the other hand, the text itself subverts the secular, Western conception of conflict, looking to the heart of Jewish tradition for a different approach to power, human relations and the relationship to the land. Inspired by the exilic tradition, where Cain represents the rooted landowner, the mission of the Jew is to develop a relationship where Jews and Palestinians belong to the cherished land without possessing it. Cohabitation is no longer envisaged in terms of shared secular sovereignty, but from a religious and ethical perspective that opposes human impulses for domination and oppression. Ultimately, the believer is called upon to fulfill the precept of imitatio Dei. Kabbalah teaches us that God diminished Himself to enable the existence of human beings. In His image, it’s up to us to make our own sovereign Tzimtzum, so that all the inhabitants of this earth can live in dignity.
All too often, inter-Jewish intellectual debate boils down to a sterile opposition between messianic Zionists, ready to sacrifice existing Jews on the altar of an idealized state, and specular anti-Zionists, who obsessively target a demonized state while neglecting the immediate needs of the two populations living on this plot of land, or even demanding that they sacrifice themselves to a mortifying ideal.
As we can see, the maximalist and hard-line versions which, out of ideological purity and Gnostic momentum, sacrifice the real groups, Israeli or Palestinian, in the name of an Idea, are both based on utopian solutions, whose theoretical simplicity does little to conceal their tragic practical implications in human terms. Both think of the situation in terms of a zero-sum game. For to think in terms of redemption (Geula) is to think above all that one’s own Geula implies the destruction, the Hurban of the other. This eradicative background is unfortunately a daily feature of discourse on the Israeli-Palestinian conflict. All of them regard as inauthentic, falsified, the claims of the real players in the conflict, Israeli and Palestinian, whether they deny the Palestinians their existence as a national group worthy of political self-determination, or deny the Israelis more or less the same, in the name of Talmudic, Khazar, Bundist or other Judaism. The diasporic path of continuity, which is a path of tragedy and composition, cannot find favor in the eyes of these maximalists. No peace without justice! they chant. But the justice to which they aspire rejects compromise and does not know peace made with clenched teeth, the kind that has as its horizon the best life for all: it is basically a quest for the absolute, in a kind of quasi-Platonic reductionism that precludes the prospect of real peace. Accused of softness, depoliticization, renunciation, of being no more than a leftist fantasy incapable of defending Israel’s security, or worse. Yet peace has only winners (and losers, but they are the same). The tragedy is that many are encouraging from a distance those they consider their team to continue claiming exclusivity and totality “from the river to the sea”.
Today, the demanding path of a diasporism of continuity is struggling to find its way. All too often, inter-Jewish intellectual debate boils down to a sterile opposition between messianic Zionists, ready to sacrifice existing Jews on the altar of an idealized state, and specular anti-Zionists, who obsessively target a demonized state while neglecting the immediate needs of the two populations living on this plot of land, or even demanding that they sacrifice themselves to a mortifying ideal. From Jerusalem to Ramallah and from Gaza to Sderot, however, the experience of exile, of exiles, is more present than ever. While no one is likely to put a total end to these now intertwined exiles, a pragmatic and humane vision, aware of the indissociable link that now unites Palestinians and Israelis, which knows how to circumscribe the messianic passions of one side or the other, that refuses to feed the eradicatory dreams of either side (no one is going to leave, no one is going to disappear and no one is going to win), that takes into account the traumas and rights of all, to security and dignity, is the only one that will perhaps be able to alleviate the suffering of these two exiles, in this land and elsewhere. This is both a call and a hope.
Gabriel Abensour and Noémie Issan-Benchimol
Notes
| 1 | With the added confusion between judéité et judaïté |
| 2 | See on this subject in K. ““Arab Jews”: Another Arab Denial?”, by Noémie Issan-Benchimol and Elie Beressi |
