Zionism's Greatest Conceit

particularism is central to Jewish and Zionist history, and basic point of contention over the character of Israel. Was the Jewish state to be a state like other states by which advocates usually meant something on the progressive European model? Or was it to be something uniquely Jewish, an expression of the Jewish people's own history, traditions, and way of life? Or some synthesis of the two? Though rejecting assimilation, Zionism was reaction to the particularism of Jewish life. The movement for Jewish state was very much part of the currents then sweeping Europe. In copying the nationalism of other peoples, proponents of Jewish state were revolting against the powerlessness, passivity, and pious quietism they associated with the ghettoized Jewish life of recent centuries. Zionism was an act of assertion against ageold patterns of Jewish existence, and an attempt to establish normal social, political, cultural, and occupational patterns that would make Jews more like other nations. The fact that many early Zionists sought to divorce themselves from Jewish history does not, however, mean that they always succeeded in disentangling themselves from its grip. In fact, the illusion that Zionism could escape the legacies negative and positive of the Jewish past, through an exercise of sheer ideological will, may have been the greatest conceit among the necessary self-deceptions of the founding generation. One of the great contributions of twentieth-century Jewish historians has been to challenge the notion that Jews have no political history, and that Jewish history is lamentable chronicle of persecution, suffering, and powerlessness. Salo Baron attacked the lachrymose depiction of the Jewish past already in I1928; David Biale recently argued that Jews were not powerless, but exhibited a wide spectrum of persistent and on-going political activism.' To survive two millennia of hostility, emerging with an undiminished sense of self-identity, required not only spiritual strength, but also capacity for organization and for the assertion of collective interests: in