The negation of the Diaspora (Hebrew: שלילת הגלות|shlilat hagalut or Hebrew: שלילת הגולה|shlilat hagolah|link=no) is a central assumption in many currents of Zionism. The concept encourages the dedication to Zionism and it is used to justify the denial of the feasibility of Jewish emancipation in the Diaspora, arguing that Diasporic life leads either to discrimination and persecution or Jewish national decadence and assimilation. A more moderate formulation says that the Jews as a people have no future without a "spiritual center" in the Land of Israel.[1]
The earliest publication of the concept in Zionist discourse was in a series of public exchanges between Simon Dubnow and Ahad Ha'am, beginning in 1901. Ha'am's 1909 Hebrew-language essay שלילת הגולה (shlilat ha'golah, Negation of the Diaspora) fixed the phrase in Zionist public terminology.[2]
According to Eliezer Schweid, in the early twentieth century, Yosef Haim Brenner and Micha Josef Berdyczewski advocated an extreme form of the concept. In his literary work, Brenner describes Jews in the Pale of Settlement as poor, mentally, morally and spiritually disfigured, panicky, humiliated, disoriented, with no realistic view of life, depressed, despised, slovenly of dress, lacking taste, unwilling to defend themselves against violence, desperate, and feeling at the same time inferior and part of a Chosen People. According to Schweid, Brenner thought that that despair was good, as it would leave Zionism as their only option.[3]
Yehezkel Kaufmann saw Jews in the Diaspora as territorially assimilated, religiously segregated and in other matters semi-assimilated, with even their Jewish languages often a mixture of Lashon Hakodesh and the local language. Kaufmann viewed this Diaspora culture as flawed, misshapen, poor and restricted. Although Diaspora Jews could assimilate more easily now that ghettos had been abolished and the larger cultures were becoming more secular, the culture of Europe remained essentially Christian.[4]
Ahad Ha'am and A. D. Gordon held a more moderate view in that they still saw some positive traits or possibilities in life in the Diaspora. As he thought the creation of a homeland in Palestine would take several generations, Ahad Ha'am wanted to improve life in the Diaspora by creating a "spiritual center" in Palestine. This would give Jews more self-confidence and help them resist assimilation, which he saw as a deformation of the personality and a moral failing in regard to family and people. He believed Jews should feel historical continuity and organic belonging to a people.[5] Gordon perceived nature as an organic unity. He preferred organic bonds in society, like those of family, community and nation, over "mechanical" bonds, like those of state, party and class. Since Jews were cut off from their nation, they were cut off from the experience of sanctity, and the existential bond with the infinite. In the Diaspora, a Jew was cut off from direct contact with nature. Jews in exile, Gordon wrote, had reached a point where:
The poet Hayyim Nahman Bialik wrote:
And my heart weeps for my unhappy people ...How burned, how blasted must our portion be,If seed like this is withered in its soil. ...
According to Schweid, Bialik meant that the "seed" was the potential of the Jewish people, which they preserved in the Diaspora, where it could only give rise to deformed results. However, once conditions changed, the "seed" could still give a plentiful harvest.[6] Schweid says the concept of the organic unity of the nation is the common denominator of Ahad Ha'am's, Gordon's and Bialik's views, which prevents them from completely rejecting life in the Diaspora.[7] Zeev Sternhell distinguishes two schools of thought in Zionism. One was the liberal or utilitarian school of Theodor Herzl and Max Nordau. Especially after the Dreyfus affair, they held that antisemitism would never disappear and saw Zionism as a rational solution for Jews. The other school, prevalent among the Zionists in Palestine, saw Zionism as a project to rescue the Jewish nation and not as a project to rescue Jews. Zionism was a matter of the "Rebirth of the Nation". In "Rebirth and Destiny of ISRAEL", a collection of speeches and essays by David Ben-Gurion, he describes his horror after discovering, shortly after he arrived in Palestine in 1906, that a moshava (a private Jewish agricultural settlement) employed Arabs as guards: "Was it conceivable that here too we should be deep in Galuth (exile), hiring strangers to guard our property and protect our lives?"[8]
The question of security, apart from the shame of the Jewish inability to defend their lives and honor during pogroms, was not central to their thinking. For instance, in 1940, Berl Katznelson wrote about Polish Jews in areas conquered by the Soviet Union: "[They] are unable to fight even for a few days for small things like Hebrew schools. In my opinion that is a terrible tragedy, no less than the trampling of Jewry by Hitler's Jackboots."[9]
According to Frankel, some Zionists of the Second Aliyah, like Ya'akov Zerubavel, advocated a new Jewish mentality that would replace the old one. The old mentality, the Galut (exile) mentality, was one of passivity, of awaiting salvation from the Heavens. According to Zerubavel, after the final defeat of Simon bar Kokhba by the Romans began "the tragedy of our passivity." For him, to work the soil in the Land of Israel, to settle the country and to defend the settlements, was a complete break with Exile and meant picking up the thread where it had been dropped after the national defeat by the Romans in the first century CE. The Jew with the new mentality would fight to defend himself. According to Ben Gurion, "to act as guard in Eretz Israel is the boldest and freest deed in Zionism." Zerubavel wrote that the remark by which a fallen guard, Yehezkel Ninasov, was remembered, revealed the image of being guard in all its glory. Ninasov had once said: "How is it that you are still alive and your animals are gone? Shame on you!". According to Brenner, "[the pioneers in Palestine are] a new type among the Jews".[10]
In an address to the youth section of the Mapai political party in 1944 Ben-Gurion said:
According to Sternhell, the Zionist views underlying the negation of the Diaspora, e.g., the view of the Jews as a parasitic people, were often quite similar to the views underlying modern European antisemitism.[11]
Negation of the Diaspora is the complementary facet to developing the Sabra ethos. This facet is part of the secular counterculture that was the basis for the rise of the original Israeli culture and Israeli national identity. Ideologically, the negation of the diaspora explains the deep disgust towards Yerida. From an economic standpoint, the negation of the Diaspora appears as the abandonment of the Jewish middleman minority economy as an unproductive business, colloquially known as an "air business" or "luftgeschaeft", and switching to productive professions.[12]
According to Itamar Even-Zohar, in the late 19th century, secular Jews in Eastern Europe saw Jewish culture as in a state of decline or even degeneration. Some wanted to assimilate completely. The Zionists sought a return to the "purity" and "authenticity" of the existence of the "Hebrew nation in its land", a pastoral vision reflecting contemporary Romantic ideals.[13]
This vision manifested itself by counterposing "new Hebrew" to "old Diaspora Jew" in various ways. Even-Zohar mentions several:[14]
This rejection of the diaspora, for some such as the Canaanists (who originated from Revisionist Zionism), extended to the rejection of the close and intimate ties between the culture practiced by most self-identified Jews, and the reclaiming of Jewish culture as a "Hebrew culture" that would become agnostic to religious affiliation, rely upon the land of Israel and its ancient cultures as a prime factor in self-identification as a Hebrew rather than as Jew, and even seek for assimilation of the Arab residents into the larger Hebrew culture. This extreme negation of both the Diaspora and Judaism would not become popular among even secular Zionists, but it would continue to resurface in nationalistic thought to the present day.
The saying,"Eliminate the Diaspora, or the Diaspora will surely eliminate you" is often wrongly attributed to Ze'ev Jabotinsky, the founder of Revisionist Zionism in a dispute with Ben-Gurion. It was actually the historian Joseph Klausner who formulated the remark in these terms, in a speech he gave in Jerusalem in 1942. [15]
According to Schweid, since about 1970, the idea of the negation of the Diaspora was removed from the basic premises guiding national education in Israel. One reason for this was the need of the State of Israel to "reconcile" itself with Jews in the Diaspora.[16]
In 2007, the Israeli government started a campaign to encourage Jews in Germany from the former Soviet Union to emigrate to Israel, in order, according to the decision of the Israeli Cabinet, to "counter [their] dangerous assimilation".[17]
The anti-Diaspora position is present within the Israeli literature to this day, with A. B. Yehoshua being considered chief of this sentimental strain; Yehoshua has often been recorded or cited as critical of Diaspora Judaism as being inauthentic and rootless in comparison to Israeli Judaism, and the Judaism-tinged Diaspora existence as being stifling to the identity and conviviality of secular Jewish culture.[18]
. H. R. Diner . David Engel (historian). Zionism and the Negation of the Diaspora. The Oxford Handbook of the Jewish Diaspora . Oxford University Press . Oxford handbooks . 2021 . 978-0-19-024094-3 . 151–165. 2023-07-07.