The Jewish Story: Heralds of Zion, part V: Ahad Ha’am, Nordau and the New Jew

some people say that taking a break can lead to breakthroughs frankly i'm not interested this isn't goal-oriented behavior and you can quote me on that one because i'm rob mike foyer and this is the jewish story apparel design part five max nordau and the new jew hi folks it's rob mike before you get going on this live series i want to invite you to put your money where your ears are and help make season four happen you can go right now to my website www.jewishstory.co and you'll see our button in the upper right hand corner there you can click on it become a patron and give a little bit of per podcast support or you can contact me at rob mikefoyer gmail.com or find me at facebook at rob mike foyer and i'll happily share with you the details of how you can support in other ways if you want to hear that content which helps you understand past and present and gives you the inspiration for building the future put your money where your ears are right now and help me make season four happen as always i want to thank the parties institute pards.org dot io for helping to make this class happen okay folks here we are class five of the herald of zion series we've looked at the religious roots of zionism right with rav kalasher and um they spoke about this sort of innovation of culture and of course alkali and talked about that innovation of um the natural path to redemption and how that itself was a he douche was an innovation for religious zionism for the roots of religious zionism we talked about the tension between the cosmopolitan and the the national which is going to return to us today that was in the person of moshe hesse who wrote really arguably the first nationalist tract as well as being a collaborator with marx and engels in the early days of the communist movement um then we moved on to leon pinsker right pinsker who really was the sort of first voice of political zionism and that sort of vision of a mass return to territory we spoke about the link between the haskalah the jewish enlightenment and some of the sort of assimilationist roots of emancipation and how that played in and last but certainly at least last week we um we introduced theodore herzl we spoke about why is it that herzl merited to be called the father of zionism if we can sort of like find all these other heralds and i want to remind you that the two elements that i tried to push in conclusion um were number one his ability to capture the imagination right um both in his stature and charisma uh also in his timing right and and that that leads us to the second which is there's something ineffable which is happening in the world as a whole at this point in history and um i had a discussion with someone here recently or at least an email exchange about the difference between causality and history and uh teleology in history and it's one of the things that i i want to keep sort of squarely in view right now um what's the difference causality in history goes all the way back to herodotus right the the greek father of history and the idea that the purpose of a historian is to gather enough factual information in order to understand what makes what happened happen what are the causes which we determine to be the drivers of the effects right the classic example is what who started world war one right so i'm sure enough there's enough education out there that a number of people might say right gavrilo princip who was of course the serbian assassin who killed archduke ferdinand right there was a single gunshot that literally killed tens of millions of people at the same time that's a little bit of a facile answer to say that one gunshot started world war one because when you start looking at the deeper causes you can talk about the balance of power in europe you can you know talk about the tension between germany and france which had existed since the sort of the franco-prussian war we could go quite far so causality is a useful tool for understanding history can unearth quite a bit another one for the americans out there if you ask someone what caused this civil war in america right if you ask somebody in boston what caused the civil war when you ask someone in savannah georgia what caused the civil war you're likely to get very different answers and that leads us to one of the problematics of causality is that that since there's an infinite frame we could dig forever and unearth ever more sort of what are called proximal and distal causes near and far then the decision of what is a true cause has more to do with me and my analytical frames than it has to be necessary with the absolutes of history so looking backwards is useful in understanding what caused herzl we spoke about the rising forces of nationalism anti-semitism as a political force as it was linked to that right the deterioration of the sort of uh cultural structure within western europe assimilation acculturation right also the concentration in this sort of hebrew renaissance in eastern europe and the birth of a national consciousness those are all certainly causes but they're insufficient to explain why it is at the turn of the 20th century there was an eruption of jewish national spirit and that offers us a sort of a different frame which is teleology teleology is the perspective that that um a process is going somewhere it has an end goal a purpose and therefore it's the purpose the end goal which defines the process as opposed to the origins and cause right and of course you know we as a people have a belief that there was a promise by god to avraham that our national mission nay the mission of creation if you go all the way with it is bound up with the re-embodiment of the jewish people in the land of israel which means that's a you know from the divine perspective it's an inevitable process and what i want to look at today is not so much about the process and how it happens but who do we need to be in order to make it happen because one of the big bones i have to pick i just did it actually myself one of the big bones i have to pick with jewish nationalists and i consider myself one of them is the confusion between jewish and israel because the jew as many of us had a chance to learn together over the course of the last two years in many ways is a product of exile right there are no jews in the torah there are no jews in the bible until very late stage mordechai is the first person called yehudi he and daniel really give birth to this idea of a jew which is a shrinking down and restructuring of the vision of israel as conceived by the torah and so therefore the quite natural sort of transposition of well we're the jews we talk about jewish history this is the jewish story right i am because the last two thousand years we've been the jews don't misunderstand me but the transposing of the jews coming back to the land of israel is a little bit uh what they're looking for i'll go as far as say dangerous it's a little bit dangerous because without the expansive vision of what it means to be israel the responsibilities and the obligations and the nature of the relationship between israel and the world as opposed to the jews in the world what you can end up with is a very narrow nationalist project which i mean not gonna do the analysis for you guys here but i personally believe that many of the challenges we face as both an internal society as well as in our relationship to the world around us has to do with the confusion of what it means to be am israel and the fact that we are the jews and are we doing the work to become more than we already are in order to merit to the great gift as i see it that we've received in being here so that's a longer discussion but i want you to keep in mind because what we're going to talk about today which is a somewhat long-winded introduction is this concept of the new jew because we've spoken about personalities and the underlying sort of cultural intellectual streams that heralded zionism now i want to talk a little bit about the end goal because what we're going to see today is that the return to zion as a physical return is only one stream within the zionist vision because for many many of the zionists that return itself was linked and perhaps was even preceded or or superseded by the vision of giving birth to a new jew that that in order to be the people who would merit the land we had to become something more something other than what we were in exile and that's what we're going to speak about today if you're not familiar with it by the time we're done you'll see that you're actually familiar with it even if you've never sort of heard that sort of like um fun phrase the new jew and we're going to do that primarily through the narrative once again we're going to return to herzl and a couple of the characters that i referenced briefly around him but but um first just a little bit more clarity because we're gonna if you look if we sort of did a full course as opposed to this point by this point survey we would have seen that the early zionists found very little satisfaction in the new judaism that was sort of growing in europe in the day whether it was in western europe in the reform movement or even in eastern europe in the sort of uh haskell of the enlightened the zionists just they they felt that no matter how progressive or or pluralistic or emancipated it was it there was something missing what they wanted was a new jew and because of the pressures that they perceived and remember we've talked about how anti-semitism is a growing driver for this story and and you know whether we're going to talk about causality or not i like to think of drivers it is certainly a driver one of the things that gives momentum to the zionist story is no question it's the rise of political anti-semitism and since we know the history we know how the history of the jews of europe i don't want to say ended because they're still jews in europe well let's say we know how it ended mid 20th century right and so therefore it's it wasn't an illusion in their minds that the pressure was on and because the pressure was on it's going to become a discussion of revolution as opposed to evolution right there's going in in the and the difference if people have followed revolutionary movements throughout time is that revolutionary movements have a tendency to be willing to sacrifice a lot of human beings for the sake of humanity they tend to be idealistic movements right and in this case zionism is the re-embodiment of a nation and therefore the people are the material at hand for that project and if you know a bit about the very difficult decisions that were made between the zionist project and the jews of europe particularly in the process leading up to the holocaust you might understand further how it could be that people who were avowedly committed to the survival of ammi israel the jewish people might actually be willing to sacrifice jews particularly the jews don't fit the mold of what they felt would carry the story of the jewish people into the next chapter of the future right and so now when we're talking about revolution it's not just the sort of catastrophic and sort of an idealistic willingness to sacrifice you guys understand what how i'm using the word idealism there in the sense that there is an ideal of what the jew ought to be and this jew or that jew etc may or may not match it so therefore i'm willing right to sacrifice in pursuit of the goal of creating a new jew a lot of the jews themselves not necessarily pushing them off a cliff but i might make hard decisions educationally politically socially financially which will which will save a core that will be transformed and sacrifice what i deem to be the periphery and i see someone commented in the chats here racial nationalism that is coming in our story quite quickly um so okay so we've seen the other element of the revolutionary personality which is it's always important to remember that literally the word revolution means come back around to where you were because though i say new jew there will always be an element of returning as we say the crown to its original glory this sense that that the the revolutionary is actually fixing the problems which have accumulated over time we're getting back to who we were always meant to be we saw this in khasidut those of us who got to learn a little bit about it together in the claim to be a return to the prophetic origins of torah and in its sort of anti-clerical break with a lot of sort of the rabbinic structure it's a classic element of kassidu you see it in shabtai's fees movement where we first encounter this idea of shli latta galut the negation of exile that that in order to really be redeemed we don't have to just physically leave exile we have to leave everything which exile has created within us that's going to become a major pillar of zionist thought and culture we see it we didn't have this full discussion but you see it if you look in the historical critical perspective which underlined underlies jewish science and the reform movement this idea of stripping away that which is an accidental or incidental or just a reaction to historical circumstance to get to the purified judaism that was a big thing in sort of like western intellectual judaism that gave birth to the reform movement notice stripping away that which is a product of historical process and getting at the true essence we're going to see it and we're going to re-encounter it today in the hebrew renaissance this idea that a return to the ability to express oneself in the mother tongue is an essential element of the revolution so all of these elements are going to be in the mix because the zionists certainly saw the return to origin is the path to the future from israel i mean classically right return to origin physically but what i want to speak about today is um another element of reconstruction we're going to hit the language today we're going to hit a little bit about culture but we're gonna hit a third piece which uh avraham nodded to there in his racial nationalism comment a third piece of of a reconstruction almost of the physique of the jewish people you guys may be familiar with a phrase which was quite um popular at one time in understanding the mentality of the ben-gurion style zionism which was right the tanakh being of course the hebrew bible the palmach being the striking arm of the haganah the underground army which was representative of the sort of left labor movements of the early state which became the backbone of course of the tabahagan ali israel the israel defense force but that phrase from the tanakh to the palmach means and nothing in between it's an idea that in order to sort of uh move forward to the ability to exercise power once again as a people to be a free people in our land as herzl phrased it we have to return to our biblical origin mighty warriors re-embody it in modern guerrilla warfare the palma and we need to skip everything in between and and if we were going to do a full sort of analysis of that stream within zionist thought as opposed to just putting it on the board as part of our whole mosaic so we could talk quite a bit about the impact that it has on literature on what's known as zionist historiography anybody here grow up in the israeli school systems now my kids are are all born here and it's shifting but you can look that up until quite recently in the history of israel um the the um the frame for history was basically like classic biblical and then like the dreyfus trial onwards the idea that there was a rich 2000 year history in multiple countries et cetera was was painted over at best and usually usually portrayed as just endless suffering and torture by the glam so who wants to know about it anyway but a question here is that does that mean goodbye to the tanakh no it's a good question it doesn't when mila tanaka doesn't mean goodbye to but it means a framing of the tanakh as a national physical history and a mythos and not as the roots of religious rabbinic culture it's a reclaiming people may or may not be familiar that many of the sort of foundational figures of this country um ben gurion certainly i mean bacon was much more traditional but ben gurion famously had a tanakh study group in his home with some of the greatest minds of the generation which should not be dismissed but in the frame of it was what's called uh even in schools today tanakh the gov if people are familiar with this idea that like you literally mean the goldeneye means like looking at it i die as opposed to the religious posture of sacred text it's like no we're going to come to this and we're just going to look at it like we look at any other book which in my humble opinion actually has a lot of um powerful insights which can be gained but has some cultural complications for people who are really more of a product of the book than a book which is a product of us so this is the frame for the new jew first of all it's a revolutionary movement and that means in its idealism it's willingness to sacrifice what is toward what what must be is quite high and and number two it's a sense of coming back around to origin which means it has to find a new relationship to everything which lies in between and that relationship maybe chuck it maybe reprocess it repackage it but however it's going to be done it's not going to be what i would call the evolutionary cumulative which is that i am a product of all my experiences it's going to be an idealistic attempt to strip away the past in order to create something new you have to phrase it i would say as a national historical piece and also as like a mythos i mean it doesn't have to be historical in the literal sense like these events happen but like greek mythology these are our heroes these are the archetypes which again that i'm not criticizing that viewpoint as one of several ways of relating to the tanakh but certainly you need to strip it of its sacred status back into our story you remember i think i commented to you that that herzl's first pamphlet um was the jewish state was published in 1895 and it was really a pamphlet even though it did have a practical element to it and it was published before the um first zionist congress in basil in 1897. i got it peter um but i practiced that um but his true vision was the book alt-noyland the old new land and in that you can already hear this need to come to new relationship between past and future the old new land right um it was published in 1902 published of course originally in german because that was the sort of sophisticated language of the time plus it's what herzl spoke um amongst other things it was actually interestingly enough uh translated into hebrew by uh nakhon sakholov uh and the title in hebrew was tel aviv hill of spring which is itself a quote from the book of and that was the inspiration for the naming of the modern city tel aviv um but but old noiland is a utopian novel it's a it's fictional it's like a it's got it's actually a novel structure i'm not going to go into the analysis of the book if you haven't read it it's it's worth reading it's not actually in my opinion so well written but that's its own issue it's certainly an important uh historical piece but but what's important for us is that it presents a vision of the society that herzl dreams of being built here in the land of israel and it's essentially an ideal european society transplanted into the middle east right it's elite are wearing white gloves to the opera they speak german and french and they pride themselves on the technologically advanced and socially progressive society that they've built all the great ideals that that that herzl had absorbed within elite cosmopolitan european society are now being given their full and sort of appropriate in his eyes form within this alt noi land this old new land at the same time the temple stands at the center of it now granted the temple is not on the temple mount because rehearsal was smart enough to know that you could just if you're already messing with history and everything culture you don't have to knock down the dome of the rock and cause all the thousands of years of conflict that people are worried about so he just moved the temple but it's there he didn't have to put it there at all he specifically cites the jubilee cycle you know the 57 times we just read about it in last week's parsha and bahar right as a as a foundation for the economic structure and he spends a significant amount of time presenting the passover seder in detail within the book as part of it so there's a tension within the book about whether what he's looking at is indeed just simply a progressive western european society planted the middle east and that accusation against herzl that he was simply an assimilated acculturated jew for one reason or another just like jumped on the bus of jewish history or is he actually envisioning the temple's there they're celebrating passover that the jubilee is actually been revived and is the basis for the economy without getting into the details of rabbinic law etc or is he actually struggling to say the only way to move forward in jewish history is to take the past and apply it to the future right now there were people who loved although land and there are people who hated it one of its chief critics was asher ginsberg we're going to know him shortly as ahad which was his hebrew pen name meaning one of the people but ginsburg wrote a review of alt noiland in his um periodical hashiloah and we're going to tell ginsberg's story shortly this is just our narrative hook um he wrote and basically the opening line was the cat is out of the bag because he said that this zionist leader remember 1903 we're only six years after the foundation of the zionist movement and we'll talk about ginsberg's reaction to to the first zionist conference when we get his story but so it's only six years later he says now this zionist leader has finally revealed his conception of the messianic age which is around the corner and what's that conception it's not jewish says ginberg now is it not jewish anything which seems to be jewish accuses ginsburg is basically just window dressing which is meant to conceal the truth from the ignorant which is that this new zion is just europe in a new location right and in in usher ginsburg's eyes herzl was doing the worst possible sin he was aping the culture of his oppressors who had now become his emancipators remember and and this is going to lead us when we get to ginsburg's story to one of the fundamental tensions which culturally really still exists within israel today although the sort of uh polls have shifted between what was at the time western european jewry and eastern european jewry because ginsburg represents eastern european jury where we spoke last week or even two weeks ago with pinsker about how the cultural um integrity was far more intact in eastern europe because of the solidarity breeded by the created by oppression remember in the pale that solidarity that comes from oppression plus simply the geographic concentration you know the pale will become 40 of world jewry you know and as opposed and furthermore they the emancipation that they were experiencing at the end of the 19th century was new as opposed to western european jewry who beginning with the french revolution in 1789 1791 really with the national assembly but we have begun a process of emancipation which at this point in our story is over 100 years old right so so these two polls are going to play a very important role today by the way if you just want to understand those polls have been replaced really by ashkenazi versus safari in a lot of the cultural discourse that the that the idol is the communities who are descended from those who who left north africa and the middle east will often take the position of having a more sort of deep cultural integrity as opposed to the ashkenazi germans and eastern europeans have been lumped together you know again it's broad gross generalization but and in representing a much more european ideal outlook it's a it's a something which deserves its own discussion but for our purposes ginsburg accuses herzl of revealing himself in alt-noyland as doing the ultimate sin right he is what what ginsburg calls in one of his famous essays that we'll mention uh mental and spiritual slave because he's aping the culture of his suppressors who have become his emancipators so in order to really appreciate the critique we have to understand the critic so who was osha against osha city ginsburg is born in 1856 in a small town near kiev that's in the pale of course his parents are both pious hasidim and fairly well to do and those two things of course are going to have a major impact on the young boy growing up he attends haiter up until age 12 right but he branches out quickly shows himself this is the classic story he's a young genius especially adept at languages and because his parents are wealthy they're able to provide them with the private tutors which are completely unavailable to the vast majority of jews in eastern europe remember in western europe they're already being put into secular sort of german and french speaking schools in eastern europe if you want a non so let's call it a secular education but it's really a non-jewish education then it's got to be provided to you privately and and osha ginsburg's father can do so you know and the stories that after all at eight already he taught himself to read russian and then he masters friends english and german as well and this of course brings him into the larger world of 19th century uh emancipation thought right and because of that he loses faith in the traditional hasidic perspective and lifestyle while he's still an adolescent if you recall i mentioned to you like the sort of uh foundational conflict between khasi doot and the eastern european life the eastern european emancipation right and and we didn't really um flesh it out fully but for our purposes now remember the accusation of the masculine of the enlighteners was that the cinema are obscurantists it's one of those words which never gets used but it's actually quite accurate the point being that if you want to live a satisfying life you have to just obscure the enlightenment knowledge the critical historical perspective you have to obscure the fact that we are living in a state of oppression and and need to take some agency and fix it and if you're willing to do that give fault you can live a good life you can have a deep spiritual life you can have you can have profound social fabric you can have a sense of faith and meaning which permeates every aspect of but say the masculine you just have to do it by putting blinders on and that is exactly the most giving we're either unwilling or unable to do and so at this young age ginsburg has the blinders removed through his capacity to read multiple languages he never really gives up the romanticism however which also lies at the heart of classic pacific thought and we're going to see that that actually has a deep impact on um on his story and the brand of zionism which he eventually in many ways fathers um so he goes from adolescence to sort of declaring allegiance to the law which was at that point by you know like the 1860s already 1860s 1870s really at its inflection point amongst eastern european jewry and then his early thirties he caught the nationalist bug which as we saw was in no way contradictory within the haskalah to the more enlightened pinsker we spoke about the fact that he both believed you should be a true son to your people and to the motherland of russia so that those things didn't contradict necessarily in his day he became quite involved in the growing hibachi on movement the culver vaccine right we spoke about was the precursor to the official zionist movement and we spoke about pinsker's role in really um uh bringing that together at the katowice conference if you remember in all these little groups of people who had just declared themselves joseon lovers of zion came together in 1884 at katowice which is either in poland or germany depending on whether you have to poll or a german um the and and they had an official conference and created privacy on as a movement and they elected pinscrees the president so ginsburg was there he went but he didn't go as some sort of like starry-eyed follower of pinsker some sort of um uh romantic nationalist um i see avraham you asked him did he totally reject religion he rejected ritual life we'll see that he didn't reject a religious world view um so he went to katowice ginsburg went nowhere as a starry-eyed follower and that's some of the things you have to know about him he was the official and self-appointed crank and critic of eastern european jewry right he went with the um critical approach that the territorial solution to the jewish problem was off base remember that was pincer's whole thing auto emancipation the jews are like a ghost amongst the nations the problem is judeophobia as he called it and the solution is to reconstitute ourselves look at people like all others and then um will be normal as if the jews could ever hope for such a thing right um but but ginsburg was not buying it he had his own ways about how you should love zion and what the solution to the jewish problem was in fact he had a different definition of the problem as we'll see right um see because he didn't think the jews first of all two things number one he didn't think the jewish question that the solution to the jewish question depended on seizing some piece of the planet not even zion it was insufficient answer number two he didn't think that the jews could be saved piecemeal through sort of like buying one farm here one farm there or even through mass colonization even of that ancient homeland why because he despite the fact that he'd left the ritual life behind his abram ass right he still was a hasid in his heart and he knew rahman alibaba or that god wants the heart god wants the heart and if you take a bunch of people who don't know what it means to be a jew and you drop them in zion they're just going to be a bunch of confused people in zion they're not going to be a people right um and he felt that so long as the love of zion hibazio remember he's at the cadwitz conference right was seeking its outlet solely in agriculture or building uh refuges from anti-semitism it would never really be an answer to the underlying jewish question right he felt that the focus of the whole cribacion movement because we're before the zionist conference should be first and foremost on preparing the hearts of the people for its own nationality now this is a very big shift and it's a very important understanding is that ginsburg is arguably the first person certainly to articulate a program and he might have really been the first to raise the issue that it's just not a given that the jews are a nation i mean you can speak in idealistic terms yes the jews are nation the torah calls amisrael and blah blah blah but functionally ginsburg says when you look around at this jew that jew and that jew the jew in western europe the jew in eastern europe the jew who's now moved to north america et cetera we don't have any national sentiment it's not like the germans who like you know you sing a song and you play a marching band he says and like there's a whole section of this of the society of the culture that starts to um oh you froze so it's not like other nations in europe like the germans who are the classic nationalist group where if you play the right song or the quote the right um if you play the right song and quote the right poet the national sentiment stirs and the key is of course not as an end unto itself but you can get them to act because ginsburg didn't disagree with the idea of resettling the land of israelites we'll see the problem is that if you just drop a bunch of european jews in the middle east they're going to be a bunch of confused european jews in the middle east they're not going to be a people right um so so his solution as i said is preparing the hearts of the people for its own nationality what the jewish people need is what he called a cultural awakening right they had to stir the national the spirit and the primary means for this as we're going to see is what's called the hebrew renaissance right and we'll speak a little bit about his approach to language so basically at kerowitz 1884 the the founding conference that brought together all the little bits and pieces of the hoave see on the lover's design movement into a full movement at catoats he really began a battle against political zionism that would last to his dying day and in fact continues as a split within jewish thought today right political zionism sees the problem of the jewish people as anti-semitism and therefore the solution is repatriation right and in particular it kind of splits between pragmatic which is like okay repatriation but we're going to do it one goat at a time one farm at a time or sort of classic political zionism we're gonna get the powers of the world to grant us a large chunk of land but either way they identify the problem as anti-semitism and the solution as repatriation cultural zionism as it will be called identifies the problem as assimilation as a culturation as a loss of national spirit therefore the solution will be a re revival of national spirit which of course the physical land of israel is an important component of that but it's not an end unto itself there will be others if you're familiar with labor zionism and and a.d gordon's coming etc like and if we had more time we would speak about everybody but for now i want you to appreciate the difference between cultural and political um he you know ginsburg continues within the rivazion movement he even forms his own like secret society that he calls the the the binet moshe i think it's called the nemo show everybody knows here um yeah the name moshe you know it's just such a wonderful issue i love to have this image that you have a small handful of russian jews meeting in secret thinking that that they're going to by through propagating their vision of a national spiritual awakening they're going to bring redemption even though it's secular redemption right it sounds crazy right except if you listen to the names of the original benemotion was um you know ash against himself yahushua ravnitsky if you're familiar with him probably lesso heim weitzman mayor disengoff may sound crazy but all those men have names that streets of in tel aviv name for them probably in jerusalem too so like you know crazy is but but um it's a fairly impressive effort so the the banane moshe was really um it was it didn't really go anywhere in itself except when you just look at the membership but it did have an important expression in in sort of ginsburg's seminal essay in 1889 again this is before herzl 1889 essay which is this is not the way um and it's really the essay that transformed ashore tv ginsburg into achad this sort of like culture figure that i am one of the people and speaking as one of the people i'll tell you which is a good way and which is not um he says for many centuries the jewish people sunk in poverty and degradation has been sustained by faith and hope in divine mercy the present generation has seen the birth of a new and far-reaching idea which promises to bring down our faith and hope from heaven and transform both into living and active forces making our land the goal of hope and our people the anchor of faith notice that's hibazion which would become political zionism and he's not opposed he's just worried about the time frame and the fact that the essential flaw of political zionism and this is important to appreciate his one of the big differences between aharam and say pinsker herzl etc he says it's the focus on individual well-being as a motivation for building what was destined to be a national home now it's often missed that there's a very sort of bourgeois almost colonial spirit in early political zionism and if you look uh like in in both the jewish state and in alt-noyland hit uh hitler whoops herzl is um yeah i know awkward awkward uh freudian slip there all right rehearsal is selling a vision of the good life and one of the things that ginsburg will make multiple trips to the early settlements within ottoman palestine sort of like fact-finding missions he was a person that would never write about something unless he actually knew what he was talking about we no longer have people who will keep their mouth shut unless they actually know what they're talking about right um the the and he went multiple times to to ottoman palestine and came back with the impression that life was miserable and that people were being sold a lie that you were gonna like sort of like move to the land of israel and plant some orange groves and live like a king on arab labor it's like it's just not gonna happen later if people are familiar with the the history of zionism there's going to be a complete shift within the pragmatic realm of political zionism toward labor as an end unto itself that heal the land and heal yourself jewish labor that's on the horizon right now there's political zionism and there's cultural zionism and um the idea that you're gonna sort of catch the wave of immigrants who are fleeing europe for america remember we talked about the storms in the south from 1871 to 1881 and the vast disruption that from basically from 1881 to 1920 that two million plus jews leave europe for america and a lot of the sense of urgency amongst the early zionists was like we want to divert that stream and just imagine it's impossible but just imagine if two million eastern european jews had fled the pale settlement for the land of israel in pre-world war two it was really pre-world war one it was a fundamentally different history right but it didn't happen it was that urgency to sort of catch that wave which was which was then expressed to attempt to sell a colonial dream of like profitable homesteads lucrative business opportunities thriving jewish villages none of which existed and so ginsburg was pointing out not only is that just dishonest it's a failure because in an attempt to sell individual well-being as a motivation for what needs to be a project of national real awakening he says until the jews awake to themselves as a nation individual accomplishments will not last he says all the laws and ordinances all the blessing and curses of the law of moshe and hear abraham as a bit of your answer to whether he ceased to be a religious person right all the torah tori says has one unveiring object the well-being of the nation as a whole in the land of its inheritance the happiness of the individual is not regarded it's often missed by the way even by people who say shema twice a day that god is not promising you or me that if i do what's right that the rain will fall and the crops will grow and the sun will shine god is promising whatever your theology is just from a narrative standpoint god is promising the people when he says the individual israel is treated as standing to the people of israel in the relation of a single limb to the whole body the actions of the individual have the reward in the good of the community and this is where one takes it always a hazard once you see this language that every jew is a limb of the whole body right this is someone who has learned who also probably knows thomas devorah the classic sort of moral ethical mystic text of moshe cordovero and that's a language he probably took straight from the torah devore but anyway so so verify so he says the way ahead is not this immediate cultivation of the soil of land of israel but a cultivation of the national soul within the people of israel he says we ought to have made our first objective to bring about a revival inspire men with a deeper attachment to national life and a more ardent desire for national well-being and at the end of his essay this is this seminal essay this is not the way he throws down the gauntlet and basically declares the entire practical program of hebrazion a mistake he says this then is the wrong way the heart of the people that is the foundation on which the land will be regenerated and the people is broken into fragments and then he quotes right so i'll see it but not now i'll behold it but not nine he knew that you couldn't rush an evolutionary process and that the revolutionary desire to just uproot the people and plant them in the land of israel was going to fail now notice he's messianic as well because if you look at the end of that pasuk if the star has gone forth from yaakov and uh staff meets rallies he hasn't given up he's it at heart but he has a different sense not only of pace but of course of focus and method now there's one more piece here before i'll pause for a second and we'll get a little bit into the um the hebrew renaissance they they it's important to note that that asher ginsburg was not just as much as he liked to cast aspersions at his opponents that they were projects of non-jewish thinking he of course was also a product of the enlightened thought of his day and in the this idea that culture develops inexolubly in an evolutionary process is a hallmark of what's known as social darwinism now social darwinism is one of the most influential and least sort of uh paid attention to there's probably a better way to say that the streams of of uh late 18th sorry late 19th early 20th century thought social government right people are familiar with if i said to you who who coined the term survival of the fittest most people would tell me darwin so it's not clear that darwin ever said such a term but herbert spencer the father of social darwinism absolutely did and social darwinism in a very simplistic fashion is is the application of the ideas of evolution to societies and cultures and the reason that spencer puts the emphasis on survival of the fittest is because he had an image of world cultures at war and that strong cultures survive weak cultures are destroyed or at least subsumed and much of the racial theory and the sort of ideological justification for european domination which will play itself out in the north americas as well right has its roots in spencer's thought that being said he had a few very important ideas that ginsberg had certainly absorbed right number one that human societies are a type of organism by the way this is not unique dispenser if people are familiar with hagel's thought was also a very important part of hegelian thought but they're the type of organism and they're products of mostly of slow and mostly unconscious development right through which they become more complex and well adapted that's both provided that they survive to become the fittest right and furthermore every society as an interlocking system of all these parts means that if you find one piece and shift it you can transform the society as a whole now ginsburg is not interested so to speak in the the the survival of the fittest nature red tooth and claw domination stance he's interested in the question of how do you shift an organism right what's the piece in this complex matrix of society of jewish culture that he can shift and therefore push an evolutionary process toward a deeper attachment to national spirit and the answer he's going to give his language but i'm going to pause there because i'm going to talk a little bit about the hebrew renaissance and then we'll come back to uh who is his what we call bar pluta who was his opponent in this process of the new jew so um questions comments things you guys want clarified um or deepened so far in ginsburg and this idea of cultural zionism as opposed to political zionism he will come eventually to formulate his approach which we will come to later but i'll just say it now as to the land of israel as a net yeah the question was is it clear that he actually believed that zion that the land of israel needed to be the center point because if you recall there were other people amongst them who were what we call territorialists they just felt like there needed to be some home no ginsburg is a tax design and he sees it as a natural a national spiritual center ultimately he develops whole vision about an elite portion of the jewish people who will live there and develop the culture and that will radiate outward awaken the national spirit amongst the masses and then eventually he does believe in all the jews returning to the land of israel he's not an opponent to the zionist project he's an opponent to political zionism's mechanism and their identification with us sorry um anti-semitism is the problem and the sense of a rush that that's producing as opposed to assimilation is the problem it is a much slower more gradual process to shift the culture than it is to sort of like hold off the bad guys uh peter and aviva guys had a question there uh well first of all the american american indians and slavery it would be post-facto uh you know a lot of that doesn't need an intellectual underpinning it's just brutal survival i would say like if chris when spencer looked at the way things had been done he said well it's clear that european culture is superior because they were able to do these things but yes social darwinism will become the underpinning for much of what's known as racial theory in the sort of late 19th and into the 20th century which comes which itself serves as justification for for jim crow laws in particular not so much slavery because slavery had already been in existence for a long but the jim crow law this idea that is a legal justification for the inferiority of african americans and therefore they should be kept in a subservient legal position right and then ultimately yes the eugenics and the racial theory of the nazis will draw quite quite deeply from spencer one of the problems is that spencer also was an incredible social observer and had i think personally very important insights on the natures of societies and their evolution but um similar to the whole question of whether it's like morally repugnant to use the medical information gap that the nazis gathered within the camps there's also a really deep question can you really separate spencer's observations from the conclusions which were drawn and the reality which you created in the world that's a longer discussion but it's worth it and you're going to see by the way the in max nordau is going to be some quite resonant elements with that darker side of spencer okay other questions comments before we get moving yeah we're going to see that discussion when it when when he argues with nordau and of course he was affected by it but but but he fundamentally felt that the problem listen the jews have been suffering for 2000 years with all due respect to the the programs of russia they were bad but but it wasn't a fundamental shift it wasn't the holocaust right so and so therefore he felt like the urgency of political zionism was a little bit self-serving again the way a person who sees every problem sorry a person who's only tools a hammer sees every problem as a nail right and so his whole argument is that political zionism has already decided the only solution is to get the jews physically back to the land of israel therefore the only real problem is anti-semitism whereas he sees the solution as we awaken the national spirit and he identifies the problem as assimilation you know i mean listen these guys all travel around they were complex individuals attached to many cultures that's i mean there's a cosmopolitan element even in i would say okay other other um other questions or comments clarifications before we we get back in the flow okay if people something comes up don't be try to write it down in the chat stream i'll try to relate to it as i can so so like i said within spencer's thought this idea that every society every culture if you will is an intel so there's an organism of interlocking parts and and if you could figure out which one is the proper lever that you could actually shift the culture and in a haram's case you could awaken this national spirit that he was after um led him to the conclusion that language is the keystone component of culture he was not alone in this we've mentioned several times that language plays a critical role in late 19th century philosophy certainly in romantic nationalism right um and so he's certainly not only haram but like just one of the world at this point in that sense um because you know no matter how heterogeneous a society is if they share a language then they share some commonality of concepts and values that draws them together and and so he wrote in fact a very important observation in my humble opinion that language functions by processing experience on unconscious level and making it available on a conscious one it's an important point i just want to clarify for my own purposes that the primary sort of function of language is not communication it's conceptualization that that they and and therefore language is way more than a technical tool for establishing connection between people or delivering information it is the way in which we construct our world so therefore if we want to live in the same world which is his goal we must share a same language right um i mean i have a lot of uh a lot of observations here i'm not going to get totally into it let's let's talk history um that uh it's together with this is a deep believer from the hegelian and certainly spencer's standpoint that um every nation has an essential nature which is meant to find sort of expression through its evolutionary process and therefore the language that a nation has is not just a record of its development but it is the repository of its national spirit and there is hegel that people are familiar with him sort of in his classic form and therefore a people that ceases to use its language for everyday usage for their collective engagement of the world as it were they don't just they don't lose their literature that's written down in books on shelves right but what they lose is sort of the living nerve cells of memory that ability to connect the past into the present that gives you some sense of guidance for the future and that's what after he's after the ability to sort of speak our world into being together not as german jews french jews american jews but as israel right bialik who was arguably one of his chief students or a disciple probably a better way to say it he says the following and this great by the way a wonderful essay called language pains by bialik i highly encourage you to read this is a truly living language is produced by life and life's literature it does not detain its offspring in the womb rather is fruitful and multiplies constantly and of itself releasing creative power in its due season a truly dead language has nothing but the writing on tombstones work done by the stone cutter at a time of dire need not so our language now he's speaking about hebrew a pseudo-living language that gives birth to very little and leaves much tucked in her womb it is our role to induce the birth and this in many ways expresses this dilemma that that these poets of what's called the hebrew renaissance really felt wasn't a poet he was an essayist but uh um they were struggling with this sense that they didn't have a language within which they could articulate their present day experience one one of the ways you could look at this is um i have here a quote from uh chernikovsky who if you're familiar with the the history of hebrew literature tchaikovsky is a difficult figure he's a difficult figure people look at some people look at him as a hero hebrew literature because he freed it from his particularism some people see him as a traitor because he introduced like non-jewish conceptual frameworks and ideas into hebrew literature but but tchaikovsky says i a mute person will stand and listen what is for me who is for me a foreigner a stranger in their world a foreigner only narrowly plotting my path his experience is he's a stranger in the non-jewish world but he's only narrowly plotting his path because the language he wants to use to become himself is so underdeveloped you know in in that same essay what he speaks about is that what it's like to grow up as a poet commanding a language which can describe the temple in jerusalem which has a complex angelology and can tell you about the habits of demons but has no words for the trees he's looking at in the forest around him it can't describe the undergrowth that he's walking through just think about the sense of alienation there that if if he wants to reach back into an ancient mythic past he has a rich vocabulary if he wants to experience the present he's got to be a foreigner to himself and of course he's seen as a foreigner to the native speakers of that language that sense of alienation is exactly where haram is going to push he's going to push on it deeply through his classic periodical hashilock but if we're really going to talk about the hebrew renaissance i should probably give credit where credit is due and um at least recall of course eliezer yitzhak perlman who is also known as come on folks eleazar ben yehuda eliezer ben yehuda so so this is the time i'm bringing in a lot of personalities here so i don't want to lose the general picture we're talking about the new jew what do i care about that right now we need we need to just get the jews we got and put them get them safe and put them into the land of israel or frankly into uganda or some piece of territory granted in the end of the day they were committed to zion as zionism but but not as a as a sort of a redemptive vision but rather as a pragmatic approach to solving the problem of anti-semitism has a sense oh if someone asks how to get the name that's what he called himself that was his pen name um the says no no that'll never work as an end unto itself the problem is assimilation and the solution therefore is awakening the national spirit and we have to create a new jew of the jew that has learned to speak his native language and therefore by reaching into the roots of his linguistic past can create a present which will get us to the future we want and and he himself benefited directly from the efforts of a titanic individual in the history of the hebrew language which is eliezer ben yehuda so briefly because because i don't want to sort of like lose the string just you know he was born in 1858 eleazar bennuta he was born as elizabeth perlman in belarus once again to a hasidisha family much like osha svgensberg and like he began his education in in the world of tradition and of course encountered the enlightenment actually for him it was his roshi shiva who was a secret enlightener who like started slipping him all these sort of like like you know sort of a secret philosophical works um he eventually learns russian which frees him in many ways he goes on to of course to mary is his tutor right young jewish woman who taught him russian mary's his tutor um he wakes up at a certain point to the nationalist spirit again i'm just showing the ark of so many of these people and because he wakes up to the nationalist spirit he realizes that the hebrew language is the only way that we will become a people again you know and and unlike most of the other characters of the hebrew renaissance he picks up and he moves to israel right he says that basically there's only one way that we'll ever be a a people again and language is the means for national redemption and the the land of israel will become a center for the entire people right and the only way to make that happen is to immigrate in 1881 very early in the story eliezer ben yehuda moves the land of israel he comes to he gets to jerusalem right he changes his name to eleazar bennu once he gets there and um basically swore together an oath with his wife never to speak anything other than hebrew in their home they said all kinds of crazy stories about him his children were the argue of the first sort of like hebrew speaking kids you know solely hebrew speaking kids you know for for quite some time had no one to play with because he wouldn't let anyone who didn't speak hebrew to them play with them he was this crazy character who who who grew pay out and and dressed in traditional garb so they could go to the to the different vote in about the middle in jerusalem to try to clarify the meaning of words he was consumed by this idea that the rebirth notice he didn't he didn't create the hebrew language he wanted to to rebirth it as a vernacular and that's critical just remember chernakovsky and that's when people speak about hebrew and hebrew was a was a living language in its day people you know jews from germany who wanted to communicate with jews from yemen or or like it was a language in which there was a cross-cultural but but most of that communication wasn't about the world in which we lived it was reaching into the roots of our past to find some means of communication chernikovsky could describe the angels and he could describe the temple he couldn't talk about the forest he lived in unless he was made himself a foreigner to his own tongue so so ben yehuda goes back people saw through his disguise they knew he was a heretic but nevertheless he was tolerated in jerusalem apparently even though at one point he was excommunicated but his efforts bore fruit killed him by the way he dies of quite young of tuberculosis right um in he began the publication of a dictionary which in the end was a 17 volume set of the complete dictionary of ancient modern hebrew didn't finish until well after his death but he created the academy of hebrew language which still exists today and he dies in 1922 only one month after the british authorities actually declared hebrew to be the official language of the jews of palestine which was not a small feat if we were going to tell the whole story going forward the fact that hebrew actually became the official language of what was known as the shu of the jewish settlement in in then british mandatory palestine was not given by any means um so let's get back to haraham i just again i just want to throw that in there as a sense of the importance of hebrew renaissance because we can't do everything but if we're going to talk about the new jew you can't put too much emphasis on the rebirth of the hebrew language so so actually just pause since i raced through a massive part of zionist history in the in the in the renaissance i'll pause before i keep racing ahead for questions comments clarifications about the importance of language here and i want the emphasis the piece i want you to take is that that language is not just a means for communication it's a means for conceptualization it's the way in which we know our world and so therefore if you want to take people from disparate cultures uh disparate life experiences desperate national arts and awaken a national spirit and fight assimilation which ought to be the primary problem there's no greater tool than language okay questions comments before we encounter yet another personality so we're gonna we're gonna move that i have about 25 minutes and again what i want you to sort of be taking is this broad picture of of a need to transform linguistically and not just physically a cultural awakening in which by the way the the future which emerges isn't necessarily a contin well it's a continuity with the past but not necessarily a linear one okay so let's go back to the first zionist congress um so you know because aham didn't just uh serve as the official crank of the katowice conference remember that founding conference of the ho vezion he went of course to the first zionist conference as a delegate from the jovezio and in his own words for the three days of rejoicing he was like a mourner at a wedding feast why because the the focus on physical salvation of political zionism was a failure from the get-go he'd been fighting it since the early days of the hebatzion movement and he called herzl a false messiah who'd somehow enchanted the jews in the same way that shabtai tv had done only 200 years before him those are fighting words by the way um he he writes just like he wrote this is not the way zolowa derek after the katowice conference after the basil conference the first zionist congress right uh 1897. um so uh haram writes an essay called the jewish state and the jewish problem and he says only a fantasy bordering on madness can believe that so soon as the jewish state is established millions of jews will flock to it and the land will afford them adequate sustenance right he says land acquisition is a distraction a national bank is just financial small-mindedness the idea that the consent of the nations needed to be gained was irrelevant in his eyes tangible goals are not what builds a people but this is critical to understand and and by the by the proof of the matter is that until the holocaust in the war 48 which caused the expulsion of all the adulthood all the jews of the north african middle east the vast majority of jews normally didn't come to israel they were opposed to coming to israel and this is exactly what haram warned about he said that if if you create it they will they will not necessarily come it's all if you build it they will come he says no there has to be some awakening of a national spirit that people then see this as a means for the embodiment and the progress remember he's looking for evolution political zionists are trying to solve a problem he wants to to realize a national ideal so um there are plenty more zionist congregation congresses sorry after the first one ahadam never returns he never goes back right however um he does have a group of followers within the zionist movement who form sort of an informal opposition to herzl that's basically like being against the messiah um they call themselves the democratic faction which finds its rebirth in modern left-wing israeli politics if you're following the names it's very interesting um the the and one of its leaders is the young heim who will go on to be not only a critical leader of the zionist movement of course but the first future president of israel so meaning voice he himself is gone but his voice is quite loud um and they will push his vision from within the zionist congress advocating basically that the whole goal that um to the land of israel would come first jewishness and then the jews and that's if you want to like like sort of like understand his relation to the physical product of zionism as well as the cultural project is that to the land of israel will come first jewishness and then the jews right um and he says until in his words after several generations it will have achieved its goal the creation in the land of israel of a national spiritual center for jewishness that is loved by the entire jewish people and binds it together notice the center of knowledge and here's part of your answer to abraham a center of torah study of the hebrew language and its literature of the purest of bodies and souls a true miniature of the jewish people as it should be right and um it's interesting that hana um is seen you know like political zionism succeeded you know failed et cetera if you think about the struggles of what the what the state of israel is trying to do today who are we meant to be in relationship to world jewry his ideas with plenty of caveats and criticisms etc but his ideas in my humble opinion are more relevant today than ever because today we actually have a thriving physical state and the question which plagues us is what to do with it what does it mean how is it an expression of a greater sort of progress of jewish vision however you understand progress right i i really believe that most people are progressive in their own way they just have a difference on what we're trying to get to um the most not all uh more heavily invested you are in the current situation probably the less progressive you are but that's a discussion so um the but but this idea that to the land of israel come first jewishness and then the jews in all fairness herzl wasn't necessarily opposed to this in his keynote speech at bazel the first zionist congress he had said we've returned home as it were zionism is a return to jewishness even before there's a return to the jewish land right um but haram just called him out and he said personally even if he meant that and it wasn't just propaganda which it might have been might have just been him like you know there were a lot of religious delegates at the basil conference who saw herzl as a dangerous figure but eve let's let's let's be don the cafeteria let's judge him favorably but haram's whole point was that herzl doesn't know what it means to be a jew he's a product of the what he calls the the mental slavery remember that their oppressors have become their emancipators out there in western europe and therefore they are trying to just imitate the freedom and enlightened emancipated culture which first oppressed and then emancipated them whereas wants to figure out what it really means to be a jew now rehearsal was pretty hurt by haram's criticism both in the wake of the first uh first zionist congress and then in the wake of the publication of alton land but he knew that um his status as a leader was only going to be undermined if he sort of entered into a literary struggle with him not out of fear of losing but you know a leader should not descend into conflict he should accept criticism and and move on wait marcia are you raising your hand there if you have a question that would help me if you could just um the you could uh just write it down there if you could just write unless there's something that i that you didn't understand if you have a question it's helpful if you could write it down um the so so but even though a leader shouldn't just descend into sort of like like in slinging mud um nevertheless the hanam's criticisms needed to be answered so herzl turned to the last character we're going to meet in the last 15 minutes which has plenty of time i think to end one more element of this new jew he turned to max nordau in order to answer aham's criticism um nordau was his was hersl's first convert and was a literary big gun he was in personality the biggest personality at that first science conference so he was bringing out this sort of heavy artillery in order to fight a khadam so i want to tell you who max nordau was and a little bit about what he represents in this quest for the new jew yes political zionism although i mean people like jabotinsky will claim that actually he betrayed herzl that's a that's a whole longer discussion of what happens in political zion nordau and jabitinsky feel that climb weissmann was was no uh yes yes but my point is that that is the way the story is told by heim weizmann and his disciples but the the revisionists the sort of counter narrative of zionist history cecime weizmann is having betrayed the fundamental principles of political zionism that's a longer discussion i can't get into but so you're qui but your your question is yes and there's a lot more to that story um you're not you are not incorrect it's just there's one narrative in conflict with another there other clarifications things people want to ask or say okay so so who was max nordown why does he matter for our story of the new chu and why did herzl davka pull out the big guns from him so nordau was born as simcha sutfeld that's a big switch from simple suit fell to right he's born um in 1849 in the city of pest he's a few years before herzl um and his father was an orthodox jew and hebrew poet a rare combination in those days but he's again he's part of this this um sort of hebrew renaissance which is just starting to bubble at the time like herzl north gets his early education in jewish elementary school but he moves on to a catholic grammar school and eventually to medical school at the university of budapest in 1872 which is pretty early for a jew to be graduating um he so in the classic story sim concerto changes his name flees his home city starts to travel europe making a living as a journalist in 1880 he settles in paris where he actually remains until world war one um and in replace in in place of the traditional worldview in which he'd been raised he and then abandons nordau takes upon himself this pan-european cultural assimilationism as his heritage he's poly-lingual he's liberated from what he sees to be not only his own traditionalist past but the patriotism of bourgeois society as he calls it he defines himself as an elected intellectual he's a citizen of the world he's certainly not a jew right he lives by practicing medicine but his real passion is as cultural critic and that's how he gains his name in 1883 nordau drops a bomb on europe or in cultural europe with uh a work called the conventional lies of our civilization i've been thinking that a similar book needs to be written today although i don't think anybody would be surprised but then in 1883 um he was he was living in europe and sorry in paris at this point um in 1883 he writes this book the the table of content says it all it says um the live religion the live monarchy and aristocracy the political lie the economic lie the matrimonial lie right the importance and abuse of power of the press etc you get the point right he just basically opens up on every social institution that exists and by 1890 he'd become a household name right his books were in scores of edition dozen of language critic philosopher novelist you name it sociologist he is everything and his primary critique was his belief that modernist culture that was captivating europe was a sign of decay and not growth um oh thank you peter for that insight i didn't actually know that um the the uh so so to nordau at this stage of his life science is the highest of human endeavors he is a true social darwinist in that the development of civilization is a pro is the process by which man furthers life of rational unity with his fellow human beings and frankly he believes that if any society sticks it out they basically become enlightened europe at this point he sees enlightened europe not the decay he sees modernity as the end goal of human society he's certainly not a nationalist at this stage he's a cosmopolitan which means that the unit of measure of society is the individual i have a bunch of great quotes from him but nevertheless he comes into our story um in 1895. at this point he's a well-known cosmopolitan uh social critic he's also a psychologist where does he come into our story because one of herzl's friends who's a little worried after the jewish state has been published and herself seems to be somewhat unbalanced at this point reid on fire and completely consumed by his ideas and perhaps nuts so herzl's friend recommends he goes to see nordau and see if norada will take him on as a patient because he needs some rest and perhaps get some balance back but the story goes that instead of recommending it cure right that after three days of conversation and argument nordau says to herself if you're insane then we're insane together you can count on me now again is that did that actually happen there's a whole argument amongst historians but the point is is that once they meet naruto becomes herzl's almost overnight biggest convert he helps him organize the first zionist congress he gives the secondary keynote speech as certainly a world famous personality right um and he's the one who picks up the pen against in defense of political zionism now the conversion element here is quite profound to go from sort of european cosmopolitan intellectual to budding jewish nationalists he never really gives up and succeeds in totally reconciling between his con politician and his nationalism a lot of it really just is summed up in the reply he gives to his critics who love to throw up his anti-nationalist previous anti-nationalist stance into his face he basically says go tell it to romanian and russian jews and they'll answer but we have to eat somehow meaning he's become a believer and nordau writes in very very alarmingly about the imminent catastrophe which he sees coming to german jewry in ways in which are just in 2020 hindsight and all but are are just downright frightening but for our story nordau points out that he sees aharaam as a narrow-minded bigoted nationalist because all about the jewish spirit and the intrinsic and he accuses as wanting to recreate a ghetto within the land of israel notice the it's like the you nordau doesn't want the new jew to be a reawakening of the old jew or repackaging of this khasitisha spirit teaching torah etc he wants the new jew to be a cosmopolitan citizen of the world but a world which is broken into nations a people like any other and so therefore he accuses of a retrograde instinct that if assimilation is the problem we have to become more jewish that he basically is accusing of worshiping the um of worshiping the ghetto but for ours that's the narrative conflict between them and you can imagine that the two of them wrote pretty stunningly against each other but the last piece i want to touch here and it's a perhaps the most profound part of the new jew which has a deep effect on our culture today is an idea that nurdau first introduces at the second zionist congress in august of 1898. he invents a term he says that zionism awakens judaism to new life he's echoing a little bit and achieves this morally through the rejuvenation of the ideas of the volk but that he actually uses that notion of this national spirit and corporally meaning physically through the physical rearing of one's offspring in order to create a lost muscular judaism once again that nouredao becomes an advocate and he writes further the first sort of complete expression of this idea is in an article in the jewish gymnastics journal who knew there was such a thing at the time right it was it was the central sort of uh literary organ of the barcode gymnastics association he writes history is our witness that such once existed but for long all too long we've engaged in the mortification of our flesh right he says i'm expressing myself in precisely it was others who practice mortification on our flesh and with the greatest success evidenced by the hundreds of thousands of jewish corpses in the ghetto church squares highways of medieval europe in the narrowness of the jewish street our poor limbs forgot how to move joyfully in the dimness of our sunless homes our eyes developed a nervous blink that what we need is a muscular judaism he goes on to praise barkhaupa as a person was willing to either come home carrying his shield or carried on it right which is an old greek expression of like either win or die in battle right he he praises the name of the choice of this gymnastic association as the barcode association and he says the bachelor was a hero who refused to suffer any defeat and when victor was denied him he knew how to die and he was the last embodiment listen to this in world history of a battle-hardened and bellicose judaism battle-hardened and bellicose judaism is what you have in israel today love it hate it you need to understand that it was max nordau from a philosophical perspective who realized that without muscular judaism neither cultural judaism nor so now the cultural zionism or or political zionism would ever work because whatever your vision was you needed to fight for it in the world and it was it was norada who basically single-handedly revives barkova he doesn't just revive him he uh he sort of redeems and reject he he regenerates him but today for many people is seen as a national hero this whole zionist educational approach to koko as a national hero that's not how the gemara looks at him you read the ushami he is not a good person right and yet it's nordah who begins a process of placing barcode as a central figure in zionist thought muscular judaism right he's looking for uh he says without a generation of physically fit nationally minded and militarily oriented jews that any territory that the world powers grant us is going to be lost to the brutal nature of the times and the reality is that one of the questions about the new jew which needs to be asked is how is it possible that within the space of one generation that you can that the jews as a people can go from being fuel for the ovens of europe to defeating the combined armies of the arab world and liberating the city of jerusalem whatever you may think about what comes after in politics etc that simple fact in less than 20 years to undergo that transformation wasn't because max nordau said we need in muscular judaism he understood that again political zionism which saw anti-semitism as the problem and repatriation is the solution or cultural zionism which saw assimilation as the problem and the reawakening of the national spirit of solution neither of them would have any reality in the world to nor doubt without a muscular zionism a muscular judaism that was truly a process of re-embodiment and i got news for you that um that the sense of shame and even loathing that many of these sort of uh secular more military-minded physically oriented whether it was the the um part of this movement which engaged in the labor movement of the of the early 20th century or whether it's the more military elements of it by the mid-20th century and sort of like 1950s et cetera right the very difficult relationship which exists to this very day between the israeli secular military structure and the embodiment of the old jew in the haredi world much of it has its roots in these conflicting images of is there a new jew which is a necessary element for the reconstruction of the zionist project and this new jew speaks hebrew is muscular has an awakened national spirit and has been physically embodied in the land right under his own agency right or or actually is that a deviation from the path of torah and mitzvot and service of god and a relinquishing of the process of redemption to where it so to speak rightfully belongs in in the hands of god and the messiah being hereby right um you can hear that at this point i was three minutes left and i feel like um though there's a lot at the end i just want you to appreciate all these elements of a struggle to create a new jew in many ways they're much more foundational than the physical or sorry philosophical questions of um like how should it best be done or what's the ideal and this is the place where nerdau has much more impact in many ways than any other thinker of his day he understood that whatever your ideas may be if you're not willing to carve out the space and fight for it in the world certainly in the day in which he stood then then you will never see them reach fruition so i'm going to stop there i really appreciate you guys focus and attention and the and the hard work that's been done this whole series just to remind everyone that the series is all up and online on par dace's wonderful elmod platform so if you didn't get to hear some of the earlier classes or you want to listen to them again all you got to do is it's just a click away i'm sure deborah who's here with us now once again is more than happy to help you with information and thank you everybody i want to thank a few folks before i sign off i want to thank the folks who give their hard-earned money for making the show happen keeping it free and widely available i want to invite you to join them go to www.jewishstory.co find that button in the upper right hand corner and click on through the little bit of per podcast support put your money where your ears are people and help make season four happen or send me an email rob mike foyer gmail.com or personal message on facebook and i'll happily share with you the details of how you can support in any other way i want to thank part a institute pards.org