Summary
Shelilat ha’galut, the Zionist doctrine, held by the entire spectrum in Brenner’s account, that exile existence itself was the root cause of anti-Semitism: Diaspora Jews were parasitic on their ‘hosts’, urban, alienated from manual labour, and themselves responsible for the hatred directed at them, so that only ingathering in Palestine could make Jews a normal, healthy people (Zionism in the Age of the Dictators: A Reappraisal, PDF p.19-21).
Details
- The doctrine’s tenets: Jews lived parasitically off their ‘hosts’; there were virtually no Jewish peasants in the Diaspora; Jews were alienated from, or shunned, manual labour and preoccupied with intellectual or commercial concerns; their patriotism was hollow as eternal wanderers; and as socialists they were still middlemen of the revolution, fighting other people’s battles (PDF p.19).
- It was argued vigorously in the Zionist press with a hostility to the entire Jewish people that would make a reader assume the pieces came from the anti-Semitic press; Hashomer Hatzair’s Weltanschauung (1917, republished 1936) called the Jew a caricature of a normal, natural human being, physically and spiritually (PDF p.19-20).
- Yehezkel Kaufman, a Zionist opponent of the theory, culled its Hebrew classics in Hurban Hanefesh (1934): for Berdichevsky the Jews were not a nation, not a people, not human; for Yosef Chaim Brenner, filthy dogs; for A. D. Gordon, parasites, people fundamentally useless (PDF p.20).
- Labour Zionism’s version held Jewish workers marginal in ‘host’ economies and capable of a healthy class struggle only in their own land; Chaim Greenberg admitted in March 1942 that Labour Zionist speakers had declared that to be a good Zionist one must be somewhat of an anti-Semite, and that the Return to Zion was preached as purification from economic uncleanliness (PDF p.20-21).
Related pages
Zionism in the Age of the Dictators: A Reappraisal, Zionism, Antisemitism, Racism, Zionist Federation of Germany