Threads
Here's an argument that is six decades old, yet it remains poignant—as poignant, perhaps, as modernity.[1]
An initial version of this essay was presented to the seminar "Comparative History and Historiography of the Jews" at the Ecole des Hautes Etudes en Sciences Sociales in Paris in January 1996. My thanks to Nancy Green, Directeur d'études, for her invitation to address the seminar. I am also indebted to Brian Morton, Michael Walzer, and Steven Zipperstein for their valuable criticisms of early drafts of this essay.
In March 1935 Vladimir Jabotinsky, father of the Zionist right wing, wrote to David Ben-Gurion, leader of the Zionist Labor movement, that young Jews would in the future not be drawn to the synthesis of Zionism and socialism which had been articulated by the founders of the Zionist left at the turn of the century. Jabotinsky maintained:New generations have now arisen who did not know your soul-searching and did not have any part in your quest for truth. The delicate filibrations of logic that helped you weave two threads into one fabric have been forgotten like Stradivarius's secret. There is in general a new trend in the youth today, Jewish and Gentile: not to go into things too deeply. They incline rather to a direct, simple, primal, brutal "yes" or "no." Of the two threads, they see the thicker, or the shinier one. … To measure or remeasure the proportions of that merger, they call compromise, cowardice or worse.
With what will you fight this brutality, with what balm? Will you try to teach them your art? I doubt whether this generation is capable of understanding it or wishes to understand it. This generation is exceedingly "monistic." Perhaps this is not a compliment, but it is a fact.[2]
Vladimir Jabotinsky to David Ben-Gurion, March 30, 1935, copy in the Jabotinsky Archives and Institute, Tel Aviv.
Copyright © Mitchell Cohen. All rights reserved.
At first Jabotinsky seems to be merely making a practical claim: entwining two ideas in a political program is distracting, dangerously so, when pressing tasks must be done. There is, however, a principled prise de position toward the world in Jabotinsky's words. "Monism," for him, was the converse of shaatnez , a mixing of wool and linen forbidden by Jewish tradition as an inappropriate bringing together of opposites; an amalgam of Zionism with social democracy was a political equivalent to this transgression. A national struggle had to be unidirectional and unidevotional, drawn forth, one might say, as a single taut thread.
For almost a decade Ben-Gurion had been responding to such contentions with a simple claim: attacking shaatnez in politics was a deception, for no national movement was "pure." Any national movement, including that of the Jews, could be good or bad—it all depended on the society it created, the kind of world it envisioned. Jabotinsky's Zionism also exemplified shaatnez for it too incorporated "foreign" ideas. Why was capitalism less "foreign" than socialism? Why, Ben-Gurion asked, did right-wingers complain about shaatnez when the Labor movement asserted its ideals but declared circumstances to be "neutral" when Labor's foes dominated? "When you war against our 'shaatnez,' you don't war against 'shaatnez' in general, but rather against a specific 'shaatnez' you don't like."[3]
David Ben-Gurion to Vladimir Jabotinsky, April 28, 1935. The letter is reproduced in full in Yaakov Goldstein and Yaakov Shavit, Lelo psharot: Heskem Ben-Gurion-Jabotinsky vekishlono (No Compromises: The Ben-Gurion-Jabotinsky Agreement and Its Failure) (Tel Aviv: Yariv/Hadar, 1979), 147-148.
What mattered was not the fact of shaatnez but what came together in the mixture and what resulted from it: in Labor's formulation, a universalism (socialism) combined with a particularism (Zionism). Where Jabotinsky's "monism" placed Jews solely within the circle of particularism, Ben-Gurion situated his movement in the overlap of several intersecting circles. "As citizens of Palestine," he had asserted in a November 1932 speech,
we stand in the circle of the Land of Israel; as Jews we stand in the circle of a nation that aspires to its homeland; as workers we stand in the circle of the working class; as sons of our generation, we stand in the circle of modern history; our women comrades stand in the circle of the working women's movement in its struggle for liberation.[4]
David Ben-Gurion, "Ha-Poel ba-tsiyonut" (The Worker in Zionism), in Mi-maamad le-am (From a Class to a Nation) (Tel Aviv: Am Oved and Keren ha-Negev, 1974), 249.
Exchanging metaphors—circles for threads—one might say that the validity of multi-shaatnez is affirmed here.[5]
In ensuing years the development of Ben-Gurion's notion of mamlakhtiyut (statism), an assertion of the primacy of the category of state over class, brought his ideas closer to those of Jabotinsky in important ways. Since these changes are not vital to my argument here, I have not pursued the subject. On Ben-Gurion's transformation, see Mitchell Cohen, Zion and State (New York: Columbia University Press, 1992), especially Part 3. In my discussion of Ben-Gurion and Jabotinsky in this essay, I draw from chapters 4-10 of this book. In other parts of this essay I have drawn from my "Rooted Cosmopolitanism," Dissent, Fall 1992.
One might also say that Ben-Gurion was responding, albeit implicitly since he was a politician and not a philosopher, to basic questions posed by modernity to the Jews: Can a people dwell alone? Should it try to live solely by its "own" ideals, regarding them, moreover, as if they were a singular whole? Ben-Gurion and Jabotinsky clashed, of course, at a time
when existence, rather than dwelling, was immediately at stake. Yet the issues underlying their duel remain acute today, both for a Jewish state and for any diaspora that would participate in Western liberal societies and not seek refuge in ghettolike insularity.
Let me present it starkly: Shaatnez or monism? This is the great intellectual question of Jewish modernity and no less, if you will, of Jewish "postmodernity." Shall Jews and their culture(s) be entwined with, open to, and engaged by the world or shall they turn inward defensively? An ethnocentric vision, as K. Anthony Appiah observes, always implies "an unimaginative attitude to one's own culture."[6]
K. Anthony Appiah, In My Father's House: Africa in the Philosophy of Culture (Oxford and New York: Oxford University Press, 1992), 92.
Appiah, an intellectual of mixed African-English parentage who lives in the United States, has written a penetrating book, In My Father's House, examining African cultures and identities. He arrives at some important values that are strikingly akin to those articulated four decades earlier by Hayim Greenberg, the Bessarabian-born American Labor Zionist thinker. The source of commonality is clear: both wrestle with contesting demands made of their identities.In late 1948 Greenberg published an essay entitled "Patriotism and Plural Loyalties." His aim was to defend the legitimacy of plural loyalties in democratic polities. One source of his meditation surely was anxiety that the recent birth of a Jewish state might provoke accusations that diaspora Jews had "dual allegiances." But his argument extends far beyond these trepidations. Greenberg was a man confident in his Jewish culture—he had no fear of its engagement with the world—and especially in his political commitments, which, democratic socialist and Zionist, were plural. A multiplicity of commitments was legitimate in his view simply because human beings have multiple dimensions. Take, he proposed, an Italianspeaking Swiss citizen. Surely this man is a bundle of conflicting fealties and therefore of prospective betrayals. As the citizen of a state, he owes Switzerland fidelity, but he also will be a patriot of his canton. Though Swiss, he surely has deep cultural ties to Italians in Italy, and if he is Catholic, he has bonds to Catholics around the globe and accepts a certain "sovereignty" of the Vatican.
Now for a "monist" this fellow embodies the worst of all worlds, precisely because he embodies many worlds. How can he be truly Swiss if his Swissness is potentially diluted by or perhaps in conflict with his Italianness or his Catholicism? Greenberg's response was first to argue that the "right to be different" was essential to any democracy; he specified "not only the right to hold different opinions and beliefs than the majority, but to be different." And then he insisted that democracy—
a liberal democratic temper, we might add—implied accepting and indeed prizing "pluralistic-social relationships, attachments, sentiments and loyalties."[7]
Hayim Greenberg, "Patriotism and Plural Loyalties," The Inner Eye: Selected Essays (New York: Jewish Frontier Association, 1953), 1:179-180.
This stance, of course, requires an imaginative attitude toward one's culture, or rather cultures. We can see this illustrated by Appiah's description of his father, a man of "multiple attachment to his identities." He was an Asante, a Ghanaian, an African, a Christian, a Methodist, and he was able to draw on all of these without "significant conflict." Hence he could be "a model for the possibility of a Pan-Africanism without racism, both in Africa and in its diaspora."[8]
Appiah, In My Father's House, ix.
The aspiration is much like Greenberg's, that is, to cosmopolitanism and particularism at once: Pan-African, not Afrocentric in one case; Labor Zionist, not ethnochauvinist in the other. Both Appiah and Greenberg are open to the world, to the varied and various threads of human diversity; they are even open to civilizations that oppressed them. "For us to forget Europe," Appiah says to Afrocentrists, "is to suppress the conflicts that have shaped our identity; since it is too late for us [Africans and Europeans] to escape each other, we might instead seek to turn to our advantage the mutual interdependencies history has thrust upon us."[9]Ibid., 72.
One can easily imagine Greenberg nodding his assent. And while he might recall that Jewry suffered unspeakable savagery, especially in this century, in the lands of Western Christian civilization, he would have nonetheless found it absurd to engage Goethe, for instance, not by his poetic vision but as a dead Christian German. And Greenberg would have had no need, pace Jabotinsky, to rediscover Stradivarius's secret in order to assent. He would need only to point out that a single string has limited range, however fine the violin's wood. Try as he might, the monist cannot play a sonata on a solo string; certainly he will be incapable of harmonies or of recognizing disharmonies, whatever and wherever he plays.