Adam Rovner is Associate Professor of English and Jewish Literature at the University of Denver. He holds an M.A. from The Hebrew University of Jerusalem and a Ph.D. from Indiana University-Bloomington. His articles, essays, translations and interviews have appeared in numerous scholarly journals and general interest publications. An accomplished public speaker, Rovner has addressed a variety of audiences in Canada, England, Israel, and the U.S. His short documentary on Jewish territorialism, No Land Without Heaven, has been screened at exhibitions in New York, Paris, and Tel Aviv. He is a dual American-Israeli national and currently lives in Denver, Colorado.
This exchange focuses on Professor Rovner’s book, In the Shadow of Zion: Promised Lands Before Israel. Part one can be found right here.
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Dear Adam,
Thank you for your thoughtful response. It cries for a follow up.
You have no patience for inevitability explanations of history. I get that – and sympathize with that. And the conclusion that follows is straight forward: if only the rabbis didn't object to New York, if only the Russian delegation did't object to Uganda in the sixth Zionist Congress – Jews could have built their homeland elsewhere and not in Israel. In fact, you write, some of “the proposals the Territorialists explored made better sense—geo-politically, scientifically, demographically—than did Palestine.”
But would you agree that none of them made more sense. religiously and culturally, than Palestine — and that culture and religion are what matters most with such endeavours like building a homeland?
If you don't — please explain why. If you do, please expand on the role of culture and religion in making the territorial plans less successful than the less sensible (your description) plan of Palestine.
Best,
Shmuel.
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Hi Shmuel,
I guess you are right—I do tend to be impatient about using “inevitability” to explain history. That’s not a great characteristic for me to possess since elucidating history requires patience. Your point is well-taken, so I’ll try to come at this from another angle.
My position does indeed seem to imply the “if only…” notions you mention. Let’s examine one of the possibilities you alluded to in your question, which goes something like this: “If only the British and French rabbinic leaders hadn’t objected to Mordecai Noah’s plan to settle European Jewry in upstate New York in the 1820s, then there might today be a Jewish city-state near Buffalo and hundreds of thousands—if not millions—of Jews would have had a sanctuary to flee to during the horrors of the 20th century.” This too is a kind of determinism not all that different from the “inevitability” doctrine. We have to be very careful not to replace one deterministic view of history with a counter-factual determinism. To put it more plainly, my efforts to minimize the notion that the rise of Israel was inevitable should not necessarily imply another kind of inevitability, which states that an alternate Zion would have been founded on some distant continent.
What I wanted to do in my book was to highlight the contingencies of history. To paraphrase Kant, I wanted Promised Lands to evoke ‘the extreme haphazardness of events.’ I enjoy musing about what a Jewish state in the Niagara River might have looked like, or whether Jewish refugees from Nazi Germany would have made good whalers in Tasmania, or what sort of culture Yiddish-speaking pineapple farmers in Suriname would have created. This sort of imaginative focus on history is fun for the average reader, at least I hope it is. But I also want to prompt serious reflection. We all need to remember that history is not a labyrinth offering only one path to reach the present day, even if it appears as such in retrospect. In fact, at any given moment in time a vast array of possibilities are open to us. On an individual level, one often considers the choices one makes and wonders whether another course of action would have been better (or worse). This common psychological reflection helps individuals evaluate their actions and orient themselves toward the future. And on a societal level, we should remember that we have choices, options, possibilities we can take advantage of and pursue (or not). To recall this essential freedom of action creates the imaginative space for acting towards the future in both the private and the public spheres.
You ask about the role of religion and culture in state-building, and here things get particularly complicated, not least because Judaism is a fractious religion that possessed and continues to possess multiple cultures. I won’t side-step the question with too many qualifications, however. I get it. I really do. You want to know whether any place but the biblical land of Israel could have galvanized Jews to launch the re-establishment of a Jewish nation-state. Fair enough. Mordecai Noah came to believe that the land of Israel was the right territory upon which to focus nationalist aspirations. Theodor Herzl, though he wavered significantly over time, seems to have believed that Palestine was the right place to found a utopian Jewish society. Noah and Herzl ultimately understood the mythopoesis of the ancient homeland. They saw that the narratives of the past—the Hebrew Bible, Jewish legends and sentiments, liturgy and tradition—were powerful means of promoting Jewish national regeneration. For them, the practicality of using the land of Israel as a motive force outweighed the ostensible geo-political practicality of other territories, whether in New York or east Africa. For Israel Zangwill, Alfred Doeblin, Melech Ravitch, and Isaac Nachman Steinberg—writer-activists who sought to carve out Jewish homes in Angola, Madagascar, Tasmania, and Suriname respectively—the geo-political pragmatism of other territories carried the day. They misjudged the hold the mythopoesis of the land of Israel had on Jews and on Christian friends of diaspora Jewry. These talented writers who could craft attractive worlds with words and move people to action were in fact less imaginative than the Zionist publicists and technocrats who declared an unwavering loyalty to the land of Israel as the future site for national revival. And that is the remarkable lesson Jewish re-territorialization has for students of nationalism: geo-political interests, scientific evidence, demographic concerns, and sober assessments of possible success are not what move people to act. The future belongs to those who are not disillusioned by facts.
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