\nYale University Press<\/a> 2023
\nISBN 9780300251289<\/p>\n
<\/p>\n
Jonathan Ofir<\/h4>\n
<\/p>\n
Daniel Boyarin\u2019s newest book, The No-State Solution<\/em>, is quite the departure from his usual work. A well-known historian of Judaism and early Christianity, Boyarin has written a \u201cJewish manifesto\u201d \u2014 as his book\u2019s subtitle puts it \u2014 for Jews today. He very much seeks to encourage \u201ccontinued Jewish existence\u201d and \u201cvitality,\u201d but not within the framework of a Jewish nation-state.<\/p>\n Long known for his criticism of Israel, Boyarin recounts how and why he turned against the Jewish state, which he had embraced in his teen years. Given that, in today\u2019s world, a majority of Jews consider Zionism \u2014 Jewish-state-nationalism \u2014 a major element of Jewish identity, this component of Boyarin\u2019s manifesto is somewhat radical. Yet the author does not argue that those Jews who consider themselves a nation are incorrect. If anything, he wants to strengthen the belief in Jewish nationhood at the expense of the sometimes-competing claim that Jews are members of a religion.<\/p>\n For Boyarin, nationhood \u2014 and not religion \u2014 should be the uniting element among otherwise disparate Jews. This is for historical reasons as well as the fact that the nation is more inclusive than faith. In the chapter \u201cThe New Jewish Question,\u201d he argues that \u201cthe name religion seems not to entail any particular historical, linguistic, or cultural indices or identifications, but rather a set of beliefs and practices conditioned by those beliefs.\u201d As we shall see, Boyarin considers nationhood much more capacious.<\/p>\n Crucially, however, he wishes to sever Jewish nationhood from what many would consider its logical outcome: a nation-state. For Boyarin, the Jews are a diasporic and scattered nation, and should perceive themselves as such. Paradoxically, however, the Jewish relationship to a land is very strong in his conceptualization, and very romantic. \u201cThe name \u2018nation,\u2019\u201d he writes, \u201cseems to imply a shared history, material culture, language and literature, and, above all else, sovereignty, a land to call one\u2019s own, whether existing now or merely aspired to and longed for.\u201d Thus, the land aspect is central to Boyarin\u2019s belief in the \u201cJewish nation,\u201d even if he does not give it a practical application as an exclusive Jewish nation-state.<\/p>\n The idea of Jews as a nation without a specific state \u2014 let alone a Jewish one \u2014 is not new; it was the essence of the Bund, a Jewish socialist movement in Lithuania, Poland, and Russia that existed from the end of the 19th<\/sup> century until its near-total eradication in the Nazi Holocaust. The Bund\u2019s central motto appears in a Yiddish-language poster reproduced on one of the first pages of Boyarin\u2019s book. It reads: \u201cWhere we live \u2014 that is our homeland.\u201d This is known as Doikayt<\/em>, or \u201chere and now.\u201d It is clearly a strong inspiration to Boyarin, although he seeks new ways to apply it in today\u2019s world.<\/p>\n Boyarin is also inspired by another aspect of the Bund and its cultural milieu: Yiddish, the Hebrew-influenced German language that, in its heyday, was spoken by millions of Russian and Eastern European Jews. The author pointedly reminds readers that \u201cYiddish\u201d means \u201cJewish\u201d \u2014 including the many who immigrated to the United States. Analyzing the Yiddish-language poem \u201cMay Ko mashme-lon\u201d by Avrom Reyzen over some six pages, Boyarin shows how the title phrase is borrowed from the (Aramaic-language) Talmud and put to use in modern poetry. The author cites this as \u201can excellent example in literary form of what Sarah Bunin Benor calls \u2018the transfer of Hebrew and Aramaic loanwords from rabbinic texts to the study of those texts and then to everyday speech.\u2019\u201d For Boyarin, the poem is an exercise in modernization and new practical application, and also a \u201cstand against<\/em> nostalgia, idealization, and romanticization.\u201d<\/p>\n I feel, though, that it is precisely such nostalgia, idealization, and romanticization that animate Boyarin\u2019s advocacy for a particular kind of Jewish belonging. And, speaking of the Talmud, the author\u2019s entire argument concerning Jewish identity is, to me, too \u201cTalmudic\u201d for its own good. Sometimes it is so convoluted and hermetic that it comes across as little more than navel-gazing. Consider this passage:<\/p>\n I have striven to recover here some measure \u2014 problematic and partial as it will be \u2014 of knowledge of Jews, not \u201cJews,\u201d of some historical possibilities for the ways that Jews have lived their collective lives and imagined them and some future historical possibilities for the continuation of the Jews, not \u201cthe Jews\u201d or \u201cthe jews,\u201d but the Jews.<\/p>\n Well, this Jew (me) has read the above passage several times and failed to grasp it. It\u2019s just too intricate.<\/p>\n Nevertheless, it is instructive to compare Boyarin\u2019s take on Jewish identity with that of historian Shlomo Sand in his book The Invention of the Jewish People<\/em><\/a>. For Sand, Judaism is an ancient religion that continues to exist today, whereas the idea of a \u201cJewish people\u201d (or nation) is a modern invention, one that revives ancient tribal concepts of \u201cpeoplehood\u201d in order to justify the creation of the self-declared Jewish nation-state \u2014 Israel. Boyarin, on the other hand, forcefully rejects the idea that \u201cJews are a religion,\u201d so much so that one of his early chapters is titled \u201cBad Faith: Why the Jews Aren\u2019t a Religion.\u201d He claims that religion is a concept formed by the Enlightenment, and thus both newfangled and Western. As a result, for Boyarin, \u201cit becomes very difficult to imagine how a Jewish religion could possibly exist as such before any religion did.\u201d<\/p>\n This argument strikes me as unconvincing. First, its main ideological frame is Jewish nationhood, even though the concept of a nation is, as Sand and countless historians have shown, itself a product of modernity. Second, if Judaism cannot rightfully be regarded as a religion because the latter is a recent construct, hardly any religion could be called such. Finally, Boyarin\u2019s rejection of Judaism as a religion is rather muddled, if not outright self-contradictory. For example, his definition of a Jew as someone born of a Jewish mother is derived from Halacha<\/em>, or Jewish law; it is a religious belief.<\/p>\n Boyarin\u2019s attachment to Jewish law does not end there. Consider, for example, his wading into the increasingly charged subject of male circumcision, and his tendentious characterization of those who wish to place restrictions on the practice. This occurs in the subchapter \u201c\u2018Freedom of Religion\u2019 and the Offense of Circumcision\u201d \u2014 note Boyarin\u2019s mockery of the concept of freedom of religion in his use of quotation marks around the term.<\/p>\n Boyarin\u2019s main argument for circumcision consists of rebuffing those arguments against it as undue interventions. He cites the example of a court in Cologne, Germany that banned involuntary circumcision, and claims that its decision was informed by the idea that \u201cby circumcising the child, he is allegedly prevented from choosing to be or to become a Christian or an unbeliever when he grows up.\u201d As though that weren\u2019t enough, he resorts to outright hyperbole:<\/p>\n That is, according to the Cologne court \u2014 explicitly \u2014 the wicked Jewish parents of their male infant are allegedly depriving this monad individual of his freedom to choose freely to believe in the Incarnation and Resurrection because, after all, this poor child has been circumcised \u2014 as Jesus and Paul both were.<\/p>\n Boyarin is suggesting that the court is motivated by Christian anti-Semitism. This is quite an outrageous exaggeration. The court based its ruling not on allowing the child to choose Christianity, but to choose in general<\/em>, including whether to have his foreskin cut off once he is older and capable of making an informed decision. \u201cThis change,\u201d the court stated<\/a>, referring to circumcision, \u201ccontravenes the interests of the child to decide later on his religious beliefs.\u201d<\/p>\n The freedom to choose is important, and I think all Jews as well as others who practice ritual circumcision should ponder it in good faith. For Boyarin, however, Judaism is not a choice. \u201cThere’s no way to stop being Jewish, no escape from Jewishness. No one born Jewish is given a choice not to be Jewish.\u201d And in Boyarin\u2019s book, if you\u2019re a male, being born Jewish has to come with circumcision.<\/p>\n Perhaps The No-State Solution<\/em>\u2019s strongest suit is its general stance against Zionism as manifested today in a Jewish nation-state. Boyarin, who was born in 1946, recounts his upbringing as a teenager in a \u201cZionist socialist group\u201d that gave him a\u00a0deep and thrilling absorption in Jewish history and culture, together\u00a0with a passionate desire that they continue, and an equal enthrallment\u00a0with the idea of social justice for everyone. Support for Israel was very much part of the package. Despite certain reservations, Boyarin clung to Zionism well into his 40s. He received a rude awakening when, during the First Intifada (1987-1993), news reports circulated<\/a> that Israel\u2019s then-defense minister, Yitzhak Rabin, had stated that \u201cthe breaking of the arms and legs of children throwing stones was necessary to preserve the state.\u201d That\u2019s when Boyarin decided he had had enough of Israel and its founding ideology.<\/p>\n Today, and in this book, the author claims that Zionism wasn\u2019t at first conceived of as necessarily resulting in a nation-state such as Israel, not even by the movement\u2019s founder, Theodor Herzl. He maintains that the early Zionists saw in their minds a kind of Jewish autonomy that didn\u2019t have to lead to an exclusivist nation-state or discrimination against Palestinian Arabs or anyone else. (He doesn\u2019t cite Herzl\u2019s favored solution<\/a> to the presence of Palestinians, which was to \u201cspirit the penniless population across the border\u201d). But Zionism became what it became, and Boyarin sees the rot. He advocates creating a future beyond Zionism by re-forging a national Jewish awareness that is diasporic in nature \u2014 even, seemingly, for Jews in Israel\/Palestine, who would be part of the diaspora. In this context, Boyarin returns to the Doikayt<\/em> concept, stating, \u201cDoikayt signals or indexes another vital moment: stewardship of the land, not the Land of Israel (although that too), but the planet.\u201d<\/p>\n Intriguingly, though he maintains that Jews (or Judaism) are not a religion, he never once mentions a major, and very famous, antithesis to his claim of Jewish nationhood. I\u2019m referring to \u201cThe Anti-Semitism of the Present Government,\u201d a memorandum issued by Edwin Montagu<\/a> in response to the British government\u2019s Balfour Declaration<\/a> of 1917, which promised the Jews of the world a \u201cnational home\u201d in Palestine. Montagu, the British government\u2019s Secretary of State for India at the time, and a Jew himself, vehemently disputed the notion that Jews are a nation:<\/p>\n I assert that there is not a Jewish nation. The members of my family, for instance, who have been in this country for generations, have no sort or kind of community of view or of desire with any Jewish family in any other country beyond the fact that they profess to a greater or less degree the same religion. It is no more true to say that a Jewish Englishman and a Jewish Moor are of the same nation than it is to say that a Christian Englishman and a Christian Frenchman are of the same nation: of the same race, perhaps, traced back through the centuries \u2014 through centuries of the history of a peculiarly adaptable race. The Prime Minister and M. Briand are, I suppose, related through the ages, one as a Welshman and the other as a Breton, but they certainly do not belong to the same nation.<\/p>\n Montagu went further. He provided sound reasoning as to why endorsing Zionism could be dangerous. \u201cWhen the Jews are told that Palestine is their national home,\u201d he maintained, \u201cevery country will immediately desire to get rid of its Jewish citizens, and you will find a population in Palestine driving out its present inhabitants, taking all the best in the country.\u201d<\/p>\n The first scenario Montagu envisaged (worldwide pressure on Jews to leave their countries for the Jewish homeland or state) occurred only in some extreme scenarios, such as the Nazi-Zionist Transfer Agreement<\/a> of 1933 and the 1950 collaboration between the Iraqi government and newly created Israel<\/a>, but the second is an accurate description of what is happening today. Israel operates an Apartheid regime of Jewish supremacy from the Jordan River to the Mediterranean Sea, as the prominent Israeli human rights organization B\u2019Tselem<\/a> articulated it a couple of years ago. Several international human rights organizations have independently reached the same conclusion. Victimization of Palestinians is by far the main problem with Zionism. Secondarily, this victimization is a problem for those Jews who are Zionists \u2014 although many of them seem to fail to see it \u2014 as they have turned themselves into aggressive supremacist colonizers, or enablers of colonization, in the name of their religion or perceived ethnicity (or both).<\/p>\n![\"\"](\"https:\/\/themarkaz.org\/oldsite\/wp-content\/uploads\/2023\/08\/the-no-state-solution-cover-boyarin-9780300251289.jpg\")
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