Perceived decline of Jewish civilization According to
Eliezer Schweid, in the early 20th century,
Yosef Haim Brenner and
Micha Josef Berdyczewski advocated an extreme form of the concept. In his literary work, Brenner describes Jews in the
Pale of Settlement as poor; mentally, morally, and spiritually disfigured; panicky; humiliated; disoriented, with no realistic view of life; depressed; despised; slovenly of dress, lacking taste; unwilling to defend themselves against violence, desperate; and simultaneously feeling inferior
and part of a
Chosen people. According to Schweid, Brenner thought that their despair was good, as it would leave Jews with Zionism as their only option for ethnic, cultural, and religious revitalization.
Yehezkel Kaufmann saw Jews in the Diaspora as territorially assimilated and as religiously segregated yet semi-assimilated, with even their
Jewish languages being the result of mixing their
sacred Hebrew with local language. Kaufmann viewed this Diaspora culture as flawed, misshapen, poor, and restricted; although
Diaspora Jews in Europe found it easier to assimilate once
ghettos were abolished and as the larger cultures around them
secularized, the fact was that
European culture remained essentially
Christian.
Restoration of Jews and Judaism in Palestine Ha'am and
A. D. Gordon held a more moderate view in that they still saw some positive traits or possibilities of life in the Diaspora. As he thought the creation of a
Jewish homeland in
Palestine would take several generations, Ha'am wanted to improve life in the Diaspora by creating a "spiritual centre" in Palestine, where
Jewish civilization and
Judaism could be revived, giving Jews more self-confidence and helping them resist foreign assimilation, which he saw as a deformation of the personality and as a moral failing with regard to family and people. He believed that
Jews should feel historical continuity and organic belonging to a people. Gordon perceived nature as an organic unity. He preferred organic bonds in society, like those of family, community, and nation, over "mechanical" bonds, like those of state, party, and class. Since Jews were cut off from their
nation, they were cut off from the experience of sanctity and the existential bond with the infinite. In the Diaspora, a Jew was cut off from direct contact with nature. Jews in exile, Gordon wrote, had reached a point where: The poet
Hayim Nahman Bialik wrote: And my heart weeps for my unhappy people ... How burned, how blasted must our portion be, If seed like this is withered in its soil. ... According to Schweid, Bialik meant that the "seed" was the potential of the Jewish people, which they preserved in the Diaspora, where it could only give rise to deformed results. However, once conditions changed, the "seed" could still provide a plentiful harvest. Schweid says the concept of the organic unity of the nation is the common denominator of Ha'am's, Gordon's, and Bialik's views, which prevents them from completely rejecting life in the Diaspora.
Ze'ev Sternhell distinguishes two schools of thought in Zionism: one was the liberal or utilitarian school of
Theodor Herzl and
Max Nordau, who argued that
antisemitism, especially after the
Dreyfus affair, would never disappear and thus looked to Zionism as a rational solution for Jews; the other, prevalent among
Palestinian Zionists, saw Zionism as a project to rescue the Jewish nation (the "Rebirth of the Nation") and not as a project to rescue Jews.
David Ben-Gurion, in a collection of speeches and essays known as
Rebirth and Destiny of Israel, describes his horror after discovering, shortly after he arrived in
Ottoman Palestine in 1906, that an
agricultural Jewish settlement had employed
Arabs as guards: "Was it conceivable that here too we should be deep in Galuth [exile], hiring strangers to guard our property and protect our lives?"
Antisemitism and the "new Jew" The question of security, apart from the shame of the Jewish inability to defend their lives and honour during
pogroms, was not central to their thinking. For instance, in 1940,
Berl Katznelson wrote about
Polish Jews who were living in regions that had been conquered by the
Soviet Union: "[They] are unable to fight even for a few days for small things like
Hebrew schools. In my opinion that is a terrible tragedy, no less than the
trampling of Jewry by Hitler's Jackboots." According to Frankel, some Zionists of the
Second Aliyah, such as
Ya'akov Zerubavel, advocated a new Jewish mentality that would replace the perceived old one. The old, exilic mentality was one of passivity, of awaiting
salvation from the Heavens. According to Zerubavel, after the
Bar Kokhba revolt began, "the tragedy of our (Jews') passivity." For him, to work the soil in the Land of Israel, to settle the country and to defend
the settlements, was a complete break with the exile and meant picking up the thread where it had been dropped after the
Jewish national defeat to the Roman Empire. The Jew with the new mentality would fight to defend himself. Ben-Gurion says, "To act as a guard in Eretz Israel is the boldest and freest deed in Zionism." Zerubavel wrote that the remark by which a fallen guard named Yehezkel Ninasov was remembered had revealed the image of being a guard in all its glory. Ninasov had once said: "How is it that you are still alive and your animals are gone? Shame on you!" According to Brenner, "[the pioneers in Palestine are] a new type among the Jews." In an address to the youth section of the Jewish political party
Mapai in 1944, Ben-Gurion stated: According to Sternhell, Zionism's views underlying the negation of the Diaspora (e.g., the view of the Jews as a parasitic people) were often quite similar to the opinions underlying modern
European antisemitism. Negation of the Diaspora is the complementary facet to developing the ethos of the Israeli
sabra. This facet is part of the secular counterculture that was the basis for the rise of the original
Israeli culture and Israeli national identity. Ideologically, the negation of the diaspora explains the deep disgust towards emigration from Israel. From an economic standpoint, the negation of the Diaspora appears as the abandonment of the Jewish
middleman minority economy as an unproductive business, colloquially known as an "air business" or "luftgeschaeft", and switching to productive professions.
Hebraization and Canaanism . Between 1930 and 1940 According to
Itamar Even-Zohar, in the late 19th century,
secular Jews in
Eastern Europe saw Jewish culture as in a state of decline or even degeneration. Some wanted to assimilate completely. The Zionists sought a return to the "purity" and "authenticity" of the existence of the "
Hebrew nation in its land", a pastoral vision reflecting contemporary
Romantic ideals. This vision manifested itself by counterposing "new Hebrew" to "old Diaspora Jew" in various ways. Even-Zohar mentions several: • the transition to physical labour, mainly agriculture or "working the land", as it was called; • self-defense, and the concomitant use of arms; • the supplanting of the old, "contemptible" Diaspora language (i.e.,
Yiddish) with the new "authentic" tongue of
Modern Hebrew, adopting the
Sephardi pronunciation rather than the
Ashkenazi pronunciation; • discarding traditionally
European dress and adopting other
Middle Eastern fashions, like those of the
Bedouin Arabs and the
Circassians; and •
dropping Eastern European family names (often based on
German or
Russian) and adopting
Hebrew names instead. This rejection of the Diaspora, for some, such as the
Canaanists (who originated from
Revisionist Zionism), extended to the rejection of the close and intimate ties between the culture practiced by most self-identified Jews and the reclaiming of Jewish culture as a "Hebrew culture" that would become agnostic to religious affiliation, rely upon the Land of Israel and
its ancient cultures as a prime factor in self-identification as a Hebrew rather than as Jew, and even seek for
assimilation of the Arab residents into the larger Hebrew culture. This extreme negation of both the Diaspora
and Judaism would not become popular among even secular Zionists, but it would continue to resurface in nationalistic thought to the present day. The saying, "Eliminate the Diaspora, or the Diaspora will surely eliminate you," is often wrongly attributed to
Ze'ev Jabotinsky, the founder of Revisionist Zionism, in a dispute with Ben-Gurion; it was actually the historian
Joseph Klausner who formulated the remark in these terms during a speech he gave in
Jerusalem in 1942. ==After 1948: the State of Israel==