The Centrality of Class Imagination in Early Jewish Nationalism

Abstract

This article examines the centrality of ideas of class and status in the formative years of Jewish nationalism. Based on a close reading of a variety of sources, the article illuminates the dominance of these ideas and provides a new conceptual framework for understanding the roots of the Jewish national idea in general and of proto-Zionist and early Zionist ideas in particular. In the first decades of the era of modern Jewish nationalism, national longings were often expressed as class aspirations. These two types of discourse were intertwined and mutually nurturing, often making it difficult to distinguish between them. The underpinnings of the class-nationalist discourse of the period were bourgeois-liberal and even bourgeois-conservative aspirations, and therefore these elements are presented in the article as key to understanding the formation of the modern Jewish national idea.

Although the influence of social-class discourse on the shaping of early Jewish nationalism has been discussed in the literature, it has usually been presented as background, rather than as a key component in the emergence of the national idea. Unlike other studies that have focused on the question of class within Jewish nationalism by investigating the role of socialist ideology and party perspectives or which have explored the subject in a specific context, this article investigates the link between Jewish nationalism and class ideas on a broader scale—as a definitive element in proto-Zionist and early Zionist thought. Finally, the article highlights the transition from the language of class, which characterized the first decades of modern Jewish nationalism, to the language of vitalist nationalism, which became dominant during the classical period of Zionism.