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since Wed, 26 Dec 2007 20:04:17.
Campus Watch Documents
Documents by: Armin Rosen
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by Armin Rosen, November 11, 2008 - The Columbia SpectatorThe Massad Tenure Battle: Year Two [on Joseph Massad;incl. Nadia Abu El-Haj]
by Armin Rosen, September 19, 2008 - The Columbia SpectatorFreedom or Fealty? [incl. Hamid Dabashi, Nadia Abu El-Haj, Joseph Massad, et al.]
by Armin Rosen, December 7, 2007 - The Columbia Spectator (Columbia University)No Tenure for Massad [on Joseph Massad]
by Armin Rosen, October 12, 2007 - The Columbia Spectator (Columbia University)No More Tenure [incl. Nadia Abu El-Haj, MEALAC]
by Armin Rosen, September 17, 2007 - The Columbia Spectator (Columbia University)Thursday Night Orientalism [on Richard Bulliet, Paul Braken]
by Armin Rosen, April 6, 2007 - The Columbia Spectator
Sphere: Related ContentArmin Rosen's rather garbled and irrelevancy-filled discussion of Joseph Massad's presentation suggests that Massad did quite a good job if only because he appears to have challenged the Zionistically-correct intellectual framework in which Rosen wants Zionism discussed.
Whether one calls the program of the Haskolo enlightenment, reform, or modernization, obviously the standard of enlightenment, reform, or modernization was 19th century European society of some sort, and the leaders were trying to create some sort of partial assimilation at least.
In Germany the Reform movement and the Modern Orthodox reaction of Samson Rafael Hirsch both tried to create Jewish Germans with somewhat different definitions.
Even though Rosen is correct that the vast majority of Maskilim (Enlighteners) in the Czarist Empire were not trying to create a new Jewish Russian, most were trying to develop a modern Russian Judaism for modern Russianized Jews.
As a Maskil Pinsker was exceptional because he belonged to the small genuinely assimilationist group within the Russian Jewish intelligentsia. (See Online biography Leon (Yehuda Leib) Pinsker - Zionism and Israel ...) He became disillusioned after a pogrom in 1871. In response, he wrote Selbstemanzipation.
Pinsker's essay constitutes a remarkable work of self-delusion in the Eastern European context, for it attributes general disrespect of Jews to Jewish statelessness even though many Eastern European ethnic groups like the Polish Tatar Muslim community were highly respected within the szlachta (gentry) without having states of their own.
Pinsker and similar Russian Jewish intellectuals were for the most part denying the obvious when they refused to acknowledge that large segments of the Czarist population were becoming enraged at all Russian Jews because the Russian Jewish intelligentsia included a radical group that since the 1850s had engaged in assassination, terrorism, murder, sabotage and revolutionary conspiracy.
While Selbstemanzipation was proto-Zionist, by 1881 Pinsker had transitioned to true Zionism.
As for the connection of Zionism to anti-Semitism, I have to note that German Studies Professor George Mosse and Jewish Studies Professors like Michael Stanislawski or Jay Harris would hardly deny that Zionist thinking has a lot in common with anti-Semitic political ideologies. Rutgers Professor Yael Zerubavel makes an insightful connection between Zionist ideology and anti-Semitism on p. 19 of Recovered Roots, Collective Memory and the Making of Israeli National Tradition:
"The highly negative perception of Exile often turned from shelilat hagalut (the repudiation of the state of living in exile) to shelilat hagolah (the condemnation of the people who live in exile), the product of its demeaning and regressive lifestyle.
The more informed Professor Massad's scholarship becomes about the Eastern European context, the more important his work becomes -- almost as a corollary of point Professor Said tried to make about Orientalism.
When evaluating the output of Orientalist scholars, we need to understand their social political context just as serious analysis of Zionism must refer to Central and Eastern European intellectual habitat in which the ideology developed.
BTW, I have read most if not all of the writings of Asher Ginzberg (Ahad haAm). His opinions changed over time, and I interpret his early criticism of Zionist behavior mostly as fear that the Zionist settlement was not strong enough in the 1890s to withstand the rage that it could engender.
3 comments:
Firstly: your comment that I have a "poor grasp" of the subject matter only proves my central critique of Massad's argument: that it used ambiguity as proof of historical certainty--i.e., because Zionism is so fraught with contradictions and cross-currents, Massad figured he might as well discuss it as an extension of European racial science. To say that murderous racism is the essence of the Zionist movement is polemic, but it is not scholarly. By that same token, writing that I have a "poor" grasp of the issues displays a fundamental annoyance at the ambiguities of a historical record that *gasp* doesn't support everything you happen to believe--as well as an annoyance at my writing, opinions, etc.
Anyway, I think your discussion of the German and Russian haskalah reveals just how problematic it is to paint the Jewish enlightenment with as broad a stroke as Massad did. It's absurd to present Pinsker's "disillusionment" at the Jews' slow pace of acceptance into European life as somehow insignificant or anomalous; indeed, the development of decidedly non-assimiliationist institutions during the period Massad referred to gave rise to the Bund, the Jewish Theological Seminary, the Yiddish literary circles in Warsaw and elsewhere, and some of the crucial early thinkers of the Zionist movement.
I'm not so concerned that Massad glossed over this complicated history--anyone who's listened to him for more than a few minutes knows that Massad doesn't do "complicated" very well. I'm concerned that this allergy to rigorous analaysis will become the norm in the humanities. Last Friday, Massad's argument was mind-numbingly syllogistic: semiticism is racist, Zionism believes that the Jews are a separate race, therefore Zionism is in league with European racism. Maybe, if you believe that providing a communal alternative to European anti-Semitism is itself anti-Semitic, or if you believe that nationalism, through implying the existence of races in general, is racist against the races or ethnicities it seeks to organize and represent. Is Francophilia really Francophobia in Massad's world? I doubt it, but he's more than willing to make these kinds of absurd, factually groundless statements about Zionism.
Speaking of factual groundlessness: it would be delusional for any Zionist to deny that some aspects of Zionism have something in common with imperialism, or that Zionism shares some of the underlying assumptions of European colonialism. Granted. But it should be--and, in a sane world, it would be--totally de-legitimizing for any scholar to leave their analysis at that. No Zionist can pretend that Jabotinsky didn't exist; by that same token, no anti-Zionist who professes any scholarly authority can pretend that the Pogroms of 1881 never happened, or that there isn't such a book as the Zionist Idea, or that there weren't influential strains of agro-Zionism that didn't aspire to total political domination of the land itself.
Any scholarship that doesn't take these things into account represents a literal dumbing down of the subject matter. It says that theories don't have to be backed by facts, but by pull-quoting facts so selective that they mask the existence of an alternative truth, rather than engaging with the alternative truth that that theory is attempting to supplant. Again, this is not scholarship. It's the appropriation of Fox News-style tactics that no university should condone, tactics that have already polarized and even poisoned the intellectual atmosphere of schools like mine.
We can certainly identify certain fundamental themes in Zionist politics of the 1880s just as we could in German politics of the 1850s even though on many issues parties in German-speaking territories were all over the place.
For example, ridiculous racial theories are all over American and European politics of the late 19th century. Zionism is no different, and all the important early Zionist thinkers embraced racist ideas.
As a second example, all Zionist thinkers agree that Jewish historical rights to Palestine are superior to the rights of the native population.
Was Zionism murderous? What was the example to which most Russian Jewish Zionists harkened. It was Russian expansion in the Caucasus and Central Asia? Was Russian expansionism murderous? It certainly had no problem with expulsions and ethnic cleansing.
I do not know if Massad said anything about Pinsker. In my comment I wrote that Pinsker was denying the obvious.
In any case, the issue was not so much disillusionment "at the Jews' slow pace of acceptance into European life" but was the loss of status Jews had suffered in the transition for Commonwealth Poland to the Czarist Empire.
In Commonwealth Poland Jews lived at the center of a powerful state and were almost members of the Szlachta. In the Russian Empire, without relocating, Jews lived in the styx and were subordinate to the Russian elite like practically everyone else except for the Russian Germans, who filled the political economic niche to which Jews had been accustomed in Commonwealth Poland.
This change in status was probably a major incentive to the E. European Haskolo.
The Bund, Zionism and Yiddishism were all part of the post-Haskolo in E. Europe, and which group was assimilationist is mostly a matter of polemic.
You really should not accuse Massad of simplifying when you appear to have at least as many problems with "doing complicated."
As for Semiticism, I have a problem with Massad's terminology just as he does with mine, but I try to talk with him about it without the insults.
There is a fundamental problem in contextualizing Eastern European Jewish history and taking it seriously, and generally political scientists are wed to certain unsophisticated formulas that do not apply very well to Eastern European Jewish history.
Professor Stanislawski points out, there was a full-fledged Russian Jewish intelligentsia by the 1850s.
What does an intelligentsia do?
It mobilizes.
A very small group within the intelligentsia realized that there were more Jews than Croats or Danes, and that on the whole Jews had more wealth than either group.
Denmark had a fairly respectable colonial empire in those days. Why couldn't the Jews have their own? And thus the Zionist Virtual Colonial Motherland was born even if the leaders did not fully understand what they were creating.
What was in it for Western Jewish Wealth? Herzl was clever in using to the Dreyfus Affair for scare-mongering, and Zionism plugged into the oil politics of Western Jewish investors.
The situation today hardly differs from back then, and just as in the early days of the Zionist movement, the important Zionist politics belongs to interactions of the hyperwealthy Zionist political economic Oligarchs, the Zionist intelligentsia, and the bureaucracy that they employ.
The State of Israel has become the keystone in a vast Zionist imperial system, whose effective GDP is about $2 trillion (bigger than the UK), but Israeli politics itself is not particularly important. See Peninsulares Versus Criollos.
This perspective is much more helpful in explaining both US domestic and foreign politics than the constructs common in policy circles.
Unfortunately, most scholars studying the ME simply do not have the background in European and American Jewish history to address the mechanisms and systems that underlie the visible interactions between the US, Europe, and the Middle Eastern states.
I have the impression that the Said retrospective may have suffered from this problem as well.
Columbia's Commentariat is also hosting this conversation here.
BTW, there was a typo and an incorrect hyperlink in the previous comment.
Here is a corrected version.
We can certainly identify certain fundamental themes in Zionist politics of the 1880s just as we could in German politics of the 1850s even though on many issues parties in German-speaking territories were all over the place.
For example, ridiculous racial theories are all over American and European politics of the late 19th century. Zionism is no different, and all the important early Zionist thinkers embraced racist ideas.
As a second example, all Zionist thinkers agree that Jewish historical rights to Palestine are superior to the rights of the native population.
Was Zionism murderous? What was the example to which most Russian Jewish Zionists harkened. It was Russian expansion in the Caucasus and Central Asia. Was Russian expansionism murderous? It certainly had no problem with expulsions and ethnic cleansing.
I do not know if Massad said anything about Pinsker. In my comment I wrote that Pinsker was denying the obvious.
In any case, the issue was not so much disillusionment "at the Jews' slow pace of acceptance into European life" but was the loss of status Jews had suffered in the transition for Commonwealth Poland to the Czarist Empire.
In Commonwealth Poland Jews lived at the center of a powerful state and were almost members of the Szlachta. In the Russian Empire, without relocating, Jews lived in the styx and were subordinate to the Russian elite like practically everyone else except for the Russian Germans, who filled the political economic niche to which Jews had been accustomed in Commonwealth Poland.
This change in status was probably a major incentive to the E. European Haskolo.
The Bund, Zionism and Yiddishism were all part of the post-Haskolo in E. Europe, and which group was assimilationist is mostly a matter of polemic.
You really should not accuse Massad of simplifying when you appear to have at least as many problems with "doing complicated."
As for Semiticism, I have a problem with Massad's terminology just as he does with mine, but I try to talk with him about it without the insults.
There is a fundamental problem in contextualizing Eastern European Jewish history and taking it seriously, and generally political scientists are wed to certain unsophisticated formulas that do not apply very well to Eastern European Jewish history.
Professor Stanislawski points out, there was a full-fledged Russian Jewish intelligentsia by the 1850s.
What does an intelligentsia do?
It mobilizes.
A very small group within the intelligentsia realized that there were more Jews than Croats or Danes, and that on the whole Jews had more wealth than either group.
Denmark had a fairly respectable colonial empire in those days. Why couldn't the Jews have their own? And thus the Zionist Virtual Colonial Motherland was born even if the leaders did not fully understand what they were creating.
What was in it for Western Jewish Wealth? Herzl was clever in using to the Dreyfus Affair for scare-mongering, and Zionism plugged into the oil politics of Western Jewish investors.
The situation today hardly differs from back then, and just as in the early days of the Zionist movement, the important Zionist politics belongs to interactions of the hyperwealthy Zionist political economic Oligarchs, the Zionist intelligentsia, and the bureaucracy that they employ.
The State of Israel has become the keystone in a vast Zionist imperial system, whose effective GDP is about $2 trillion (bigger than the UK), but Israeli politics itself is not particularly important. See Peninsulares Versus Criollos.
This perspective is much more helpful in explaining both US domestic and foreign politics than the constructs common in policy circles.
Unfortunately, most scholars studying the ME simply do not have the background in European and American Jewish history to address the mechanisms and systems that underlie the visible interactions between the US, Europe, and the Middle Eastern states.
I have the impression that the Said retrospective may have suffered from this problem as well.
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