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Zionism and Judaism
| Article
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14160 |
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Section : |
MODERN THOUGHT
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| Issue
Date : |
1 / 1988 |
3,524 Words |
| Author
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Jacob Neusner
Jacob Neusner is University Professor at Brown University and
author of Death and Birth of Judaism and other books. |
Zionists maintain that Zionism is the same as Judaism or is part of Judaism. What they mean is that the conception that the Jews form a people, one people, and that they have the right and duty to build a Jewish state in a particular place, which they call "the land of Israel" (a.k.a. "Palestine"), is intrinsic to the religion, Judaism. And, as a matter of fact, Zionists are right. Zionism in its critical propositions stands squarely in the center of normative Judaism. The real question is, why is that the fact? The answer derives from the character of the first Judaic system, which is the one presented by the Pentateuch, produced around 450 B.C.E.
As a matter of fact, Zionism forms a critical component of the first Judaism, as it was set forth in the Pentateuch. For the very structure of that first system, the one expressed in the Five Books of Moses, assembled by Ezra in Jerusalem, took as its premise precisely the datum of Zionism. It is in those books that the existential norm of Israel, the people, comes to full expression in its relationship to Israel, the land. Therefore, when people say, "Zionism is Judaism," they express what I shall show is a simple fact of the history of the single most important Judaism of all time, the Judaism of the Pentateuch. That authorship set forth a Judaism that took as normative in Israel's experience the encounter with exile and return, thereby placing at the center of Judaic existence the relationship with the land.
That, of course, forms the datum of Zionism. Both the pentateuchal system of Judaism and modern and contemporary Zionism in all forms and all definitions concur that the right place for Israel, the Jewish people, is the land of Israel. Other Judaisms have not concurred--among them, all versions of American Judaism. But Judaism and Zionism do agree that the history of the Jews finds meaning in the relationship of the people to the land. These premises, we shall now see, come to original expression in the particular framing of a Judaism worked out in the pentateuchal system. What gives these premises consequence is that they derive from the selection among things that happened in the sixth and fifth centuries B.C. to a particular group of people who wished to make a statement of a distinctive and original character. It was a group that selected, out of an infinite range of things that happened, those events that proved systemically expressive of their view of history.
The Creation of a Paradigm
The reason I see the pentateuchal system as a set of choices, the work of system
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