The Israeli Century?

The phrase itself is a provocation: The Israeli Century. The first sentence is another one: “The Israeli Century has been the most dramatic period in all of Jewish history.” Then, there are the provocative lines sprinkled throughout the book. Lines such as “a deep moral crisis among liberal American Jews, who search for a new Jewish, moral, universal foothold in the face of assimilation.” Or this one: “Firmly anchored in a country of their own, Israelis travel the world with pride, making a mockery of centuries-old Christian hatred and of cosmopolitan Jews.” Professor Yossi Shain has written a long and ambitious book, “The Israeli Century: How the Zionist Revolution Changed History and Reinvented Judaism.” And he clearly did not intend it to be a doorstop. It is scholarly, yet jazzy. It is demanding, but a joy to read.

Prof. Shain is a known commodity in Israel and beyond. He is a professor of Political Science at Tel Aviv University and the Head of the Abba Eban Program of Diplomacy; a professor of Comparative Government and Diaspora Politics at Georgetown University and the Founding Director of the Program for Jewish Civilization; the President of the Western Galilee College. But today, we are becoming acquainted with Prof. Shain, the politician. In fact, as Shain himself admits, he should now be described as Member of Knesset Prof. Shain, the MK title now exceeding all others. He spent five years writing the book, and when the book was published, he was suddenly catapulted into a political career as a member of the Yisrael Beiteinu party.

“This juncture of Jewish existence, when sovereignty is basically the most important tenet and definition of the Jews, defined and will define the Jews for the foreseeable future.” – Yossi Shain

His book presents a simple thesis, and then attempts to prove its validity. He described it to me with these words: “This juncture of Jewish existence, when sovereignty is basically the most important tenet and definition of the Jews, defined and will define the Jews for the foreseeable future.” Shain believes that Zionism shifted the Jewish political paradigm and is making for a new “Israeli-based polity” that impacts Jewish existence around the world. He also argues that this is not at all surprising. “Whenever the Jews had sovereign existence,” he told me in an interview, “this became the main tenant of their culture.” 

Simply put, there are two basic arguments laid out in the book. 

The less controversial is that Israel is thriving. But this is almost an afterthought.  “It is not my aim to paint Zionism as an unalloyed success,” Shain writes. It is not his aim, it seems, because he sees its success as obvious and in need of no further proof.

The more controversial argument is that the success of Zionism made “Israeliness” the main feature of contemporary Jewishness.

The more controversial argument is that the success of Zionism made “Israeliness” the main feature of contemporary Jewishness. Not because of some competition for supremacy that Israel “won” and Jews in other places “lost,” but rather because that’s the way it had always been and that’s the way it’s supposed to be. “You cannot in any way or fashion disengage from Israel even if you disapprove of Israel’s behavior,” Shain said. Those who try are going to fail either in their attempt to disengage, or in their quest to disengage from Israel while still maintaining a strong Jewish identity.

The book makes this case in a detailed way, not an easy task. In Jewish history, periods of national sovereignty are few and only sketchily documented. What we know about Jewish or Israelite existence before the first exile is, at best, unsettled. And the first exile, as Shain himself admits, “served to change the basis of Jewish identity, from being a political nation—the ‘Seed of Israel’—to a religious congregation, defined as the ‘the Holy Seed.’ It weakened the ethos of the Jews as an ancient ethnic community and thus created a conflict between two approaches: one prized the return to the Land of Israel as the fulfilment of the religious imperative to live in the Holy Land; the other emphasized political control in the homeland as the only guarantee of national survival.” 

Reading these lines, one should feel a bit strange. Is it not what the Jews still debate, twenty-five hundred years later?  

Of course, they debate other things as well. For example, does Israel have the right to speak on behalf of all Jews? When Israel was born, it had to pretend, for a while, that it was willing to accept a formula of supposed degrees of separation. In August 1950, Israeli Prime Minister David Ben-Gurion exchanged remarks with Baltimore community leader Jacob Blaustein, in an attempt to establish a framework for Israel-diaspora relations. The so-called Blaustein-Ben-Gurion agreement became quite famous, especially among American Jews. They are the ones who took more seriously the commitment by Israel’s leader that neither American nor Israeli Jews would speak on behalf of the other.

“The State of Israel speaks for the Jewish people. It is the only country the Jewish people have. That is a fact.” — Moshe Sharett

Obviously, Ben-Gurion never took it seriously. He said what he had to say to retain the support of nervous Jewish organizations, but as Shain documents in the book, “Prime Minister Ben-Gurion and Foreign Minister Moshe Sharett vehemently disagreed” about the notion that Israel could not represent world Jewry. “The State of Israel speaks for the Jewish people,” Sharett argued. “It is the only country the Jewish people have. That is a fact.” Indeed, Shain also believes it’s a fact. Seventy years after the prompt ending of Sharett’s political career (he was pushed out by Ben-Gurion in 1956), the “fact” still stands. “Today,” says Shain, “nobody can seriously compete with the State of Israel as the definitive spokesperson for the Jewish people.”

Of course, this annoys many Jews—some of them because of their hope for having at least two great communities, Israel and America, who stand on equal footing. Others dislike the idea that the main expression of Jewishness is sovereignty. Still others just dislike the way Israel represents them, rejecting the impact of the country on their image. Thus, the debate is both practical and ideological. It is a debate about Israel’s actions and a debate about Israel’s right to take certain actions, and it is a futile debate, as its conclusion was already settled before it even began. “Whenever the Jews enjoyed national sovereignty, this always overshadowed Jewish life and created the fundamental context of Jewish self-definition everywhere. When they didn’t have a state of their own, its absence never stopped exerting its pressure across time, on both their political realities and their constantly changing sense of self, community, and religion.”

But Shain is not blind to the fact that many Jews aren’t yet convinced that the tenets of their identity were transformed. In fact, he probably wrote the book, at least partially, to battle against those Jews who reject Zionism as the proper path for a thriving Jewish future. “In recent decades,” he writes, “anti-Zionists have made an ideology of championing the paradigm of dispersion as ‘normal’ instead of as a failure of national self-determination.” He even mentions by name a few ideological warriors such as Daniel Boyarin, who sees “national existence as a diversion from Judaism’s true, universalist foundations.” 

Nothing new here, Shain suggests. While mentioning Boyarin he reminds his readers that “during the Hasmonean period, nationality and sovereignty played a decisive role in the life of the Jewish people and the shaping of their identity and weakened the centrality of the Diaspora. Of course, not everyone was happy about this … Two thousand years later, David Ben-Gurion declared the independence of a Jewish state and downplayed the importance of the Diaspora. Like the Hasmoneans, he believed that the driving force behind Jewish history was the result of the actions of Jews in the Land of Israel, while the Diaspora played second fiddle.”

When the book was published in Hebrew almost two years ago, such statements barely rattled anyone. Israelis, by and large, are Zionists. They believe that a Jewish future depends on the success (or failure) of Israel. They believe that the ideal place for Jews to live is in Israel. And while they have matured in the sense that they no longer see Jews elsewhere as people who betray their destiny by not making aliyah—as was a more common belief among early Zionists—they still see a clear Jewish hierarchy of significance. What happens in Israel truly matters; what happens in other Jewish diasporas is of lesser importance to the future trajectory of Jewish civilization.

“The forces of religion and nationalism in twenty-first Israel represent an open challenge to the cosmopolitan spirit of liberal American Jewry.” -Yossi Shain

America is not Israel, and hence, the translation of the book and its American publication is a much more delicate affair. Shain added additional chapters to the English edition of the book, and in some places amended the language (that’s also because Israelis are more accustomed to brutal discussion, while Americans tend to take more offense when they encounter provocative statements they dislike). Still, the main thesis of the book is a challenging one for a Jewish American. “The forces of religion and nationalism in twenty-first century Israel represent an open challenge to the cosmopolitan spirit of liberal American Jewry,” writes Shain.

In my interview with Shain, I asked him about the expected emotional response to his book. “I hope they don’t get depressed,” he laughed. And yet, his projection for the future of American Jewish existence is not quite optimistic. “Modern Jews of the diaspora are wrestling with maintaining community, they are wrestling with maintaining cohesion.” Then again, his projection is not great only for those for whom Jewish existence is of great importance. There are many Jews for which America is home, where they live a good life, and that is fine with Shain.

There are many Jews for which America is home, where they live a good life, and that is fine with Shain.

Shain doesn’t stop at making claims about Israel’s role in the world of all Jews, but also addresses the way Israel must deal with its own role as a Jewish state. “The question of who gets to define the Jewish mission and Jewish ethics has become a major bone of contention between the State of Israel and Diaspora Jewry,” he writes, but “this question is also at the heart of quarrels and power plays inside Israel over the nation’s character.” The Jews have no relevant contemporary experience in running a state; they have no clear guides for running a state, and surely no such guide for how to run a Jewish state. 

Jews in diaspora communities, and especially in the U.S., tend to emphasize Judaism as a moral way of life. In the most recent Pew study of American Jewry, as well as the one from 2013, a clear picture emerges of Jews who rank moral behavior as a main characteristic of what they also consider Jewish behavior. Seven out of ten U.S. Jews (72%) say that leading a moral and ethical life is essential to their Jewish identity. Slightly more than half (59%) also say that working for justice and equality in society is essential. Far fewer (15%) consider observing Jewish law to be an essential element of what being Jewish means to them.

Back in 2016, when the Pew researchers compared what Jews in America versus Jews in Israel see as essential to their identity, they found that “far more American than Israeli Jews say ‘leading an ethical and moral life’ (69% vs. 47%) and ‘working for justice and equality’ (56% vs. 27%) are vital to being Jewish.” And yet, Shain argues that “the moral parameters of Judaism will be defined mostly by the power struggles inside Israel and the battles over the country’s future, borders, identity, and institutions.” 

Jewish ethics developed over many generations, “first as a tribal-sovereign code of morality, then as religious-communal ethics, and in the modern era, as two competing visions: universal morality versus Zionist state ethics,” he writes. Before modernity, the Jews were “not a people, except in their Torah,” as medieval philosopher Rabbi Saadia Gaon stated. Their values were based mainly on ethnic kinship and a commitment to halacha. 

Sociologist Max Weber thought that following the Babylonian exile, the biblical prophets developed a new type of Jewish morality—a school of thought that he called “ethics of the subjugated.” This new type of morality for people with no power replaced the morality of the fallen Hebraic kingdom—a time when the Hebrews still had power. The morality of the prophets was based on a “realistic recognition of the external political situation.” Or, to put it bluntly, it was an ethics developed for a people with no power, whose two main interests were to convince the powerful that the less powerful deserve humane treatment, and also to excuse the meager state of the Jews as a just punishment by God for their misdeeds.

“Israel wants to appear, for its own sake and in the eyes of others, as a particular nation that never abandoned its universal calling.” -Yossi Shain

 Israel, curiously, declared—in its mission statement, the Declaration of Independence—that “it will be based on freedom, justice and peace as envisaged by the prophets of Israel.” Alas, it cannot. The prophets prophesied in a world devoid of Jewish sovereignty. Israel must operate in a world of Jewish sovereignty. And anyone expecting it to stick with the “ethics of the subjugated” ought to prepare for disappointment. “Today,” writes Shain, “Jewish morality in Israel is defined above all by Israel’s dominance and needs as an independent nation-state. It prides itself on having ‘the most moral army in the world’ and providing humanitarian assistance during emergencies around the world. Israel wants to appear, for its own sake and in the eyes of others, as a particular nation that never abandoned its universal calling. Yet this does not change the fact that its foremost imperative is its own raison d’etat, and it does not wish to sacrifice its soldiers in the name of a universal morality.”

Naturally, that’s one wedge issue that makes it difficult for some American Jews to contend with Israel’s actions and policies. A diasporic Jew can more easily retain the high moral ground, as he usually is not the one to bear the responsibility for running a country (only in recent decades were more Jews able to become prominent in devising American policies). “But the hope that a state, which must always operate under raison d’etat, might successfully operate by universal and non-territorial principles was doomed to failure—especially in the jungle that is the Middle East,” writes Shain. Then he adds the following bold, and highly crucial, statement: “The Israeli Century, therefore, threatens to terminate the idea of ‘Jewish morality’ as a liberal, universal code of ethics.” 

Get used to that. Get ready for that. Know it’s probably coming, it may be already here, and there’s nothing you can do to change it. 

Did I mention that this is a provocative book?