Ethnic and Racial Studies Essay

In the next decade Herzl was to arrive at the same compendium in- dependently, for he did not know of the existence of Pinskers work when he wrote The Jewish State. In his diary, and on several public occasions, Herzl, indeed, made the beau geste of saying that he would not deem written his book had he been aware of Pinsker. On the other hand, Ahad Ha-Am, Herzls great antagonist, devoted a lengthy essay to analyzing Pinsker (whose pamphlet he translated into Hebrew) in order to deny that Pinsker was a political Zionist of Herzls stripe.Obviously neither Herzl nor his opponent Ahad Ha-Am was engaged in self-delusion. Pinskers thesis, that anti-Semitism must henceforth be the determining consideration of a modern Jewish policy, indeed is central to Herzls conception and, even though less apparent, it is equally at the core of Ahad Ha-Ams philosophizing. Nonetheless, the intent and direction of Pinskers construction are significantly different from those of both his successors, and t he definition of that difference is of great importance.Pinskers analysis of anti-Semitism, despite its surface rationalism, is, in reality, far more pessimistic than Herzls. He mentions the Christ- killer accusation with greater emphasis as a symptom of the basic malaise, which is national conflict, and his terminology, in which anti- Semitism is called a psychic distortion demonopathy the fear of ghosts, shows an intuitive awareness of its unplumbable and un- manageable depths that is not equally evident in Herzls work.The more or less important difference between the two, however, appears in their conceptions of the role of the gentile world in the founding of the Jewish state. The most that Pinsker hopes for is its grudging assent to an effort that really depends, in his view, on the summoning up of the polish desperate energies of the Jew. Almost every page of Herzls volume contains some reference to his confidence that the occidental nations will collaborate in creating the state he envisaged and some further proof of the great benefits his visualize would confer not only on the Jew but on high society as a whole.As a west European who had grown up in relative freedom, Herzl could assume even at the end of the century that a world of liberal nationalism is attainable, and he imagined Zionisms solution of the Jewish problem as a major contribution to such a future of international kind peace and tranquility. For Pinsker, writing in Odessa in the midst of pogroms, the focus was almost entirely on the woes of the Jew, on removing him from the recurring and inevitable nightmare.Pinskers generation had far less stake in the political and complaisant structure of Europe than did Herzls, even at its most disenchanted, but there is one level on which it was indissolubly involved in modernity. These Russian Jews had, indeed, never lived even a day as equal citizens of their aborigine land, but, nonetheless, they had been schooled by westward culture a nd were creations of its spirit. Conclusion Though the Jew must evacuate the terribly hostile world those value have created, Pinsker can imagine no alternate to modern civilization.Ahad Ha-Am is, therefore, wrong in attempting to agree Pinsker a forerunner of his own basic notion of a cultural renaissance, a reinterpretation of the old values of Judaism in terms of modernity. What Pinsker reflects is the rent in the heart, the torment of a man who cannot believe in the unplayful will of the general society whose faiths he shares. As the horizons of the Jew kept darkening in recent decades, this exonerate loss of trust in society, which began in 1881, was to lead to serious and fundamental questioning of the very foundations of western culture.Pinsker, and not Herzl, is the ultimate ancestor of the profoundly pessimistic strain in Zionism. With him there begins a advanced age in modern Jewish thought, the era of recoil from the values of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. As a result, after the various transmutations lost their initial elan, a conflict of interest ensued between the makers of the revolution and those Jews who accepted or followed it.It was useful to the newly powerful to discard the label of subverters of society and become legitimized as true heirs of the past emancipated Jewry, on the other hand, especially in its messianic segment, needed a utopia based on reason, i. e. , it required a true revolutionary break by all of society with its past. Here we stand at the threshold of the ultimate paradox in the relationship between the Jew and modernity.His defending schools of thought have found themselves coming to terms with ideas and social structures which were outrunning them, and the more messianic doctrines soon acquired a certain shrillness, for they inevitably assumed the unwanted role of keepers of the conscience of the main modern movements. The last doctrinaires of the reasonableness and what followed after, the epigones o f the true faiths as opposed to their sullying compromises with the world, are to be found in modern Jewish thought.BibliographyBulmer, M. and Solomon, J., Conceptualizing multi ethnic societies. Ethnic and Racial Studies 24 6 (2001), pp. 889891. Esses, V. M. , Dovidio, J. F. , Jackson, L. M. and Armstrong, T. L. , The immigration dilemma The role of perceived group competition, ethnic prejudice and national identity. Journal of Social Issues 57 3 (2001), pp. 389412. Goldberg, G. , Changes in Israeli voting demeanour in the municipal elections. In D. J. Elazar and C. Kalchheim, Editors, Local Government in Israel, Jerusalem, Jerusalem Center for Public personal matters (2001), pp. 249276.