"Non-Zionist Traditions" - Brown University February 2-4, 2025 - Opening Remarks

My opening remarks to the conference

Preamble. On Feb 2-4, 2025 a group of scholars from the US and Israel gathered to engage questions of Zionism, non-Zionism, and anti-Zionism in the Jewish tradition. We received considerable resistance from various circles but persevered. The conference was sold out for both days. Below are my opening remarks that I thought some of you might be interested in. As always, I welcome your responses.

Opening Remarks to “Non-Zionist Traditions” – Brown University, February 2-4, 2025

Shaul Magid, Harvard University

This conference on Non-Zionist Traditions has evoked considerable resistance from a variety of circles in different media. Much of it was predictable, even expected, including the intentional elision of “Non-Zionism” and “Anti-Zionism,” and then the accusation of anti-Zionism without any definition of what that might mean, ignoring the fact that the participants here span the spectrum from what I would call liberal Zionists to anti-Zionists. That was once called pluralism. American Jews have been very good at religious pluralism. Jewish political pluralism today? Not so much. Pluralism on Zionism today has become, like the famous line from film “The Blues Brothers,” “I like country…and western.”

Through all this, I did find one very thoughtful critique that I want to spend a few minutes unpacking, a tweet by a person I do not know, Haviv Rettig Gur. His questions on X were legitimate and worthy of a response: in short, why revive traditions that history has proven untenable. Why dig up the graves of individuals or ideas that no longer resonate with the present state of affairs and have been, as some argue “disproven by history” (itself a very problematic locution as history is not a stable term). In short, what is to be gained and what is to be learned by excavating the annals of Jewish history for sources and figures that largely disappeared through historical erasure?

I begin with the Mishna is Edyout 1:5 that asks why the sages record opinions of those whose positions were rejected. The Mishna’s response is somewhat cryptic but generally suggests that not only were these rejected opinions not “wrong,” (although they may not have been accepted at a specific time) but that future courts may find them useful. The history of the 20th century could arguably render non- or anti-Zionist opinions no longer relevant, but history is not a straight line and as significant, we are no longer in the 20th century.

What Zionism achieved in the 20th century is certainly laudable if also problematic in implementation. But in the wake of the massacre on Oct 7th and the subsequent devastation in Gaza (and even before) as an iteration of Zionism (and justified by many/most Zionists) and, on my reading, hyper-nationalism and base survivalism that has infected Jews worldwide, many of us have concluded that something has seriously and tragically gone awry and, as scholars, excavating the past, re-evaluating lost causes, re-visiting the Jewish graveyard of ideas, is part of what we call “the production of knowledge.”

Let me cite three examples among many upon whose shoulders we stand: Wissenschaft des Judentums, Scholem’s research on Sabbateanism, and, ironically, Zionism itself. By introducing historicism Wissenschaft des Judentums re-wrote the Jewish past and, in many ways, irrevocably altered the Jewish tradition. Reviving Sabbateanism, whose intentional erasure left a gaping hole in the story of Jewish modernity, Scholem changed the way we understand the tradition. And Zionism, that not only rejected the “covenant of exile” that permeated Jewish life and letters for over 1,500 years but returned to a re-writing of history and heroes, largely lost or forgotten, from the Hasmonean revolt to Bar Kokhba, re-inventing them as models of Jewish existence thereby altering our idea of the Jewish collective self.

But nothing lasts forever, and what we are doing today is no different than what they did in their time. We will hear a variety of lost voices, lost causes, forgotten stories that Jewish nationalism intentionally erased from collective memory. Are we disinterested scholars? My answers is no, in fact we are here because we are most-interested scholars. Most of us come here because while we may disagree on a lot of things, we agree that with all that has been accomplished, something has gone very wrong with the Jewish people today, with the dogma of Jewish nationalism, with the state of affairs as it relates to the project of Jewishness and Judaism in the 21st century.

To Mr. Gur I would say, “your criticism has in fact made our case. We are trying to do exactly what you think we are trying to do. But we begin with different assumptions. The course of the Jews has not been settled. The 20th century has not proved to us anything more than the 18th century proved to Jews of the 19th century. In fact, many of us are here, including you Mr. Gur, because Jews in the 19th century rejected the notion that the 18th century settled the Jewish case.”

As Ernst Renan wrote in his 1882 essay “What is a Nation?” an essay that inspired many who became the architects of the Zionist idea, “Nations are not eternal, they have beginnings, and they will end.” This is obviously not directed at a Jewish state, but any state. Renan believed “nations” or “states” were a positive transition reaching beyond itself, but they were not an end in themselves. Or as Israeli historian Yuli Tamir wrote in her book Liberal Nationalism, “The ideal of a nation-state therefore should be abandoned in favor of another, more practical and just.”

This is all to say, we at this conference welcome the resistance we have received as a sign that what we are doing is precisely what we should be doing. And the interest and full room to whom I am speaking attests to that (we had a significant waiting list of people who wanted to attend). We may or may not agree with conclusions each of us draw, but I think we can all agree that serious excavation and exploration, that is, the practice of invested scholarship, is both timely, and necessary.