Shmuel Ettinger, Anti-Semitism, and ‘The Thesis beyond Zionism’: Historiography, Politics, and Class

Abstract

Despite the marginality of his scholarly contribution in terms of both publications and impact, Shmuel Ettinger shaped the studies of modern Jewish history in Israel from the mid-1960s to the late-1980s. While this paradox is generally explained by his many academic administrative duties, this article suggests that Ettinger’s poor scholarly performance resulted from an inherent contradiction between essentialist-primordial and contextual-modernist analyses, which underlies his writings. This contradiction thwarted his pretense to formulate ‘the big concepts’ of modern Jewish history, which he described as the goal of his historiography.

This contradiction – overlooked by existing research – is the result of the subjection of Ettinger’s historiography to his political agenda. Indeed, his return to public activity in 1965 was marked by a turnabout in his theory of the origins of modern anti-Semitism, considered to be his major contribution to historical research. Until 1965, using his original contextual-modernist analysis, Ettinger pointed to a constant improvement in the Christian attitudes towards Jews with the advance of capitalism. After 1965, however, while adopting an essentialistprimordial approach, he argued that an anti-Jewish stereotype that originated in the Hellenistic era has actually turned the phenomenon of anti-Semitism into a constant factor in the Jews-Non–Jews relations throughout Europe.

Although Ettinger was closely associated with the ‘Jerusalem School’ in Jewish history, his new historical approach was in opposition to the concepts of Ben-Zion Dinnur, his teacher and co-founder of the ‘Jerusalem School’. While Dinnur, as a socialist, emphasized the importance of the masses and social factors in historical analysis, Ettinger, as a liberal, underlined that of the elites and intellectuals. Ettinger further used his new theory of anti-Semitism to criticize what he considered to be the Zionist pretense to solve the problem of anti-Semitism, and he replaced Zionism with anti-Semitism as the framework of Israeli collectivity. In this way, Ettinger challenged the ideology of ‘Mamlachtiyut’ that underlined Israeli Statism. One should note, in this regard, that Ettinger’s approach chronically coincided with the struggle that the Israeli professional elite was waging at the time to keep its advantageous status and to free itself from the State’s control, whose mechanisms, they suspected, favored the masses – mainly the Oriental ones – which Ettinger considered to be a risk for the liberal character of Israel.

The conclusion of this article is that in opposition to the widespread convention that perceives Ettinger as the embodiment of Zionist historiography, his criticism of Zionism and his disapproval of Mamlachtiyut actually turn his work into a link between the Zionist and post-Zionist historiography.