Embracing Exile: The Case for Jewish Diaspora,  David Kraemer, Oxford University Press, £26.99

There’s an anecdote Isaiah Berlin was fond of telling, sometimes involving himself and a French philosopher, other times involving Chaim Weizmann and the wife of an English aristocrat. What matters in both renditions is that one character is a Jew and the other is not. The Jew is invited to resolve something about Zionism that his interlocutor had always found perplexing. ‘Here is a nation which has a most fascinating history. Their contribution to human culture is unique. Their story is extraordinary. Nobody can rival it. Yet now they want to become like Albania!’ ‘Yes’, the Jew exclaims, ‘we do wish to become Albania, to have a state of our own! For our purposes, for Jews, “Albania” is a step forward.’

Zionists believed that Jewish statelessness was intolerable, and Jewish statehood the only remedy. For the early Zionist thinker Moshe Leib Lilienblum, the dream was of a Jewish Switzerland: calm, uneventful, aloof from the wider world (one thinks here of the line in The Third Man about brotherly love and cuckoo clocks).

Yet once the state of Israel had been established in 1948, some regretted that such a calculation had ever been made. In Philip Roth’s Operation Shylock (1993), a novel which rehearses all the intra-Jewish debates about Israel, George Ziad, a Palestinian, inveighs against the Zionist project. ‘That’s what the persecution and the destruction of the Palestinians will have been for’, he spits: ‘the creation of a Jewish Belgium, without even a Brussels to show for it.’ As so often in that book, one is unsure whether the voice here is the character’s or Roth’s own.

Was the trade worth it, from the Jewish point of view? The entire question hinges on how to appraise those centuries of statelessness. Like any nationalist ideology, Zionism was sustained by a particular version of history, one which blamed diaspora for Jewish suffering. For David Ben Gurion, the defining feature of diaspora was ‘extermination and conversion’ under ‘ever-present contempt, persecutions, and expulsions’. Diaspora, the Zionists believed, was distorting and corrupting. A.D. Gordon wrote in 1911 that ‘the Jewish people has been completely cut off from nature and imprisoned within city walls these two thousand years’; by returning to the land, they would at last resume their natural course. Berl Katznelson, one of Gordon’s successors in the Labour Zionist movement, likewise characterised Zionism as a revolt against the (very capitalist) ‘diseases’ of ‘rootlessness and middlemanship’, with which the Jews had been afflicted during their long exile.

Not only did the Zionists condemn diaspora, then; they condemned the type of Jew that diaspora created. Theodor Herzl had promised that, with the realisation of the Zionist vision, ‘a wondrous breed of Jew will spring up from the earth’. The Zionist philosopher Jacob Klatzkin went further: diaspora Jewry was so miserable as to be ‘unworthy of survival’. That idea was taken to its extreme by the quasi-fascist Canaanist movement in the 1940s, which saw Judaism as being indelibly corrupted by diaspora and sought therefore to dispense with it altogether and erect in its place a ‘Hebrew’ identity rooted in language and land.

As it turned out, mainstream Zionism managed to create the ‘new Jew’ without giving up his Jewishness: there sprung up from the earth the sabra who, having swapped shtetl Yiddish for something manlier, stood tall, won his independence, and made the desert bloom. The State of Israel achieved what Jack Ruby, born Jacob Rubenstein, longed for when he shot Lee Harvey Oswald. It showed the world that ‘Jews have guts’.

This ‘lachrymose conception’ of the history of Jews in diaspora, as the historian Salo Baron called it, is the historiographical handmaiden of Zionism. Baron characterised its classic expression, the mammoth Jewish history of Heinrich Graetz, as a ‘Leidens- und Gelehrtengeschichte‘, a history of suffering and scholarship – the two went hand-in-hand. Graetz was writing in the 19th century: after the Holocaust, the emphasis on Jewish suffering became even greater, and with it the temptation to present all diaspora history as moving inexorably towards Auschwitz.

Yet, as Baron and others contended, there was much in the history of Jewish diaspora to be cheerful about, and much about the diaspora Jew in which to take pride. Diaspora was not a problem crying out for a Zionist solution; it was simply the way Jews had lived for millennia, in which good times were had as well as bad. Such an attitude towards Jewish history remains nowadays on the back foot, but it appeals to anti-Zionist Jews, those who look back on Herzl and Ben Gurion as a wrong turn. This group, though still small, is gaining ground, especially among younger Americans of a progressive bent who are tormented by the war in Gaza.

Such Jews reject the ‘lachrymose conception’ and celebrate diaspora Jewry past and present. They are drawn, especially, to Yiddish and the Labour Bund. When secular anti-Zionist Jews in the diaspora attempt to construct a Jewish identity that could rival Zionist claims for fealty, they have Yiddishkeit to hand. This carries the strange implication – strange given the politics typically associated with this type of person – of making a Jewishness more European than that which Israel and Zionism have to offer. Like Hannah Arendt, they seem to dislike Zionism’s insistence upon the ‘non-European character of the Jews’.

There have, of course, always been non-European Jews, against whom Arendt in fact harboured some prejudices: indeed, in Israel, the non-European Jews now far outnumber the Ashkenazim, further widening the cultural chasm between the Jewish state and the overwhelmingly Ashkenazi diaspora. Zionists believed that a narrowly Ashkenazi identity simply would not do: in The Negation of Diaspora (1909), Ahad Ha-Am castigated those Jews whose ‘historical perspective’ seemed to commence ‘from the birth of the Yiddish novel and drama’, rather than the Exodus from Egypt.

In the United Kingdom, we have a representative of the strain of Jewish thought that Ahad Ha-Am was criticising, in the comedian David Baddiel. There is a revealing passage in his Jews Don’t Count (2021), where he addresses the Israeli elephant in the room:

I don’t care about it more than any other country, and to assume I do is racist… my Jewish identity is about Groucho Marx, and Larry David, and Sarah Silverman, and Philip Roth, and Seinfeld, and Saul Bellow, and pickled herring, and Passovers in Cricklewood in 1973, and my mother being a refugee from the Nazis, and wearing a yarmulke at my Jewish primary school – and none of that has anything to do with a Middle Eastern country three thousand miles away.

Observe the prominence of America, and especially New York; this is the centre of Baddiel’s Jewish universe. Observe, too, how his Jewish identity, such as it is, is not holistically Jewish but Ashkenazi: the Jews of Spain or Persia did not tend to eat pickled herring. One of the achievements of Zionism was to provide the foundations for a secular Jewish identity that could encompass all the world’s Jews; without it, and without the religion, one is at sea. There are only two religious elements in Baddiel’s litany, the yarmulke and Passover, and the latter, whether he likes it or not, does have something to do with a ‘Middle Eastern country three thousand miles away’. The story told every Passover is that of the Exodus from Egypt, and the subsequent journey of the Israelites to the Promised Land. Every one of Baddiel’s Seder nights in Cricklewood would have ended with the proclamation ‘next year in Jerusalem’.

Secular anti-Zionism thus appears to lead often to an inward-looking Yiddishkeit. And yet, falling back on the religious aspect is no guarantee of establishing much distance from the Middle East. But there always was a powerful strain of religious anti-Zionism, which, if secularised or watered down somewhat, might address the present moment. David Kraemer’s Embracing Exile: The Case for Jewish Diaspora makes just such an attempt, and appears in good time to meet demand. That it was written with a particular audience in mind is given away by a handful of tics: Judith Butler is a ‘they’, blackness is ‘Blackness’, noses are scrunched up at the ‘melting pot’, eggshells trodden upon over concerns about ‘cultural appropriation’.

Kraemer is a Talmudic scholar by training, and often he adduces religious scripture in support of his arguments. He dislikes those who insist on reading Zionist messages into the Torah. At the very beginning of the book, for example, he describes an experience in the 1970s of reading the biblical book of Ruth with some Americans who had recently made Aliyah (moved to Israel). At Ruth 1:3-5, Naomi and her family depart Bethlehem for Moab, on the other side of the Dead Sea; her husband and two sons promptly die. Why do they die? Because, say Kraemer’s freshly Israeli friends, they had left the Promised Land, and God was punishing them. But Kraemer felt himself American, not Israeli, and had no plans of upping sticks long-term. ‘Were my feelings condemnable in the eyes of Jewish tradition?’ No, he answers, and Embracing Exile explains why. The book attempts to relieve Jewish thought of the grip that Zionism continues to exercise upon it; ultimately, it is an impassioned argument for diaspora and against Zionism.

The Joseph of Genesis, for example, is made to be ‘emblematic of what a Jew can accomplish in exile’. One almost forgets that he only ends up in exile because his brothers sell him into slavery (Poor, Poor Joseph!) and, what is more, that his descendants are persecuted and enslaved the moment there ‘arose up a new king over Egypt, which knew not Joseph’ (Exodus 1:8).

Kraemer makes much of the fact that the prophet who undid this calamity, Moses, ‘never stepped foot in the Promised Land’. In his words, ‘the liberator from Egypt, the receiver of Torah, the lawgiver, was himself a “diaspora Jew”’. Well, Joshua and company progress into the Land of Milk and Honey just fine, as God desires, and Moses’ sorry fate befalls him for a reason: ‘Because ye believed me not, to sanctify me in the eyes of the children of Israel, therefore ye shall not bring this congregation into the land which I have given them’ (Numbers 20:12). ‘What greater affirmation of exile could there be?’, asks Kraemer. One, we might reply, which makes of ‘exile’ more than punishment for faithlessness.

There are other examples of Kraemer giving us what are, at best, half-stories. According to the book of Esther, he says, ‘Jews triumph in exile’ – but, it must be admitted, only after coming within a hair’s breadth of total destruction. He also omits some of the more straightforward instances in scripture of Jews fighting for their national homeland. That the books of Maccabees are non-canonical is of no great import; he is happy to cite the book of Tobit when it suits his purposes. The Maccabees story is of primary significance not only to Zionism – Herzl concluded The Jewish State (1896) with a rousing cry that ‘the Maccabees will rise again’ – but also to contemporary mainstream Jewish culture, commemorated each year at Hanukkah. I doubt any but the most learned Jews, meanwhile, have heard of, let alone read, Tobit. When Zionists read the Torah, they have more on their side than Kraemer lets on: one needn’t be Rav Kook or Bezalel Smotrich to regard the central point of the entire story as the divinely ordained relationship between a people and its land. Kraemer’s readings of scripture thus appear every bit as motivated as the Zionist exegesis he sets out to rebut.

The post-biblical history of the Jews is treated in a similar manner. The Portuguese converso Samuel Usque wrote his Consolation for the Tribulations of Israel in order to ‘comfort Jews for those sufferings’ up to, and including, the Inquisition. Kraemer glosses the book as follows: ‘it is as much a recounting of Jewish flourishing in exile as it is an account of Jewish suffering’. There seems to be another way of summing up its message, however: that no matter how comfortable Jews feel, their prosperity is fleeting and their position precarious. It is this sense of precarity, of constant dependence upon the goodwill of others – goodwill, which, for example, Joseph eventually received from his pharaoh, but Moses and Aaron were denied from theirs – that made diaspora history ‘lachrymose’. It was dependence, as much as actual suffering, that the Zionists wanted to escape.

Kraemer is on sturdier ground, however, in his attempt to revive a more practical tradition of Jewish ‘diasporism’. There is a long history of Jews regarding diaspora not as a curse, but rather the key to national survival. R. Oshaya in the Talmud declared God ‘righteous’ in scattering the Jews; dispersion made destruction impossible. This argument was taken up in the 15th century by the great philosopher Abarbanel. He treated Moses’ misfortune never to enter the Promised Land less evasively than Kraemer, explaining it thus: ‘if the Jews all were together in one corner of the world, an enemy who ruled over them wrathfully would be able to wipe all of them off the face of the earth’. But ‘while they are scattered to all corners’, he reasoned, some at least will survive the darker moments.

One of Abarbanel’s biographers – a scholar of some repute named Benzion Netanyahu – chided him for, in effect, failing to grasp the Zionist idea four centuries before Herzl. He had not ‘propagated a realistic course’ amidst the Inquisition; he cocooned himself in messianic reveries instead of formulating a ‘plan of regaining the Promised Land by settlement and colonisation’. Abarbanel would, however, have had good reason not to want to settle and colonise Palestine, even if such a mad idea had ever occurred to him.

Industrial modernity made the old Abarbanel argument redundant. Zionism emerged, and gained ground, around the time when a Holocaust-type event – a continent-wide, transnational genocide – became a practical possibility. Decades before the Holocaust, Lilienblum understood this. Whereas ‘in the Middle Ages the Jews were, for the most part, persecuted at a given time and place’, he wrote, ‘now it is different; communication is rapid’. The family of Anne Frank, let us say, or Edith Stein, followed the Abarbanel logic: there was a flare-up of antisemitism in Germany, but that was just Germany; Holland, they thought, would be safe.

There remains, in Abarbanel’s formulation, a grim logic at play, undergirding an argument for, if not ‘embracing’ exile, then at least resigning to it. It is an argument that weighs heavily on Israeli minds. That half the world’s Jews are compressed in such a small area is, among other things, a strategic liability. The reason Israelis were so anxious about Iran developing nuclear capacity is that they feared the Ayatollah could accomplish at the tap of the finger what took Hitler 12 years.

‘Horrendous as Hitler was for us, he lasted a mere 12 years, and what is 12 years to the Jew?’, says Roth’s radical ‘diasporist’ alter ego Moishe Pipik in Operation Shylock, to which Kraemer devotes several pages. Israel, he continues, ‘has become the gravest threat to Jewish survival since the end of World War Two’: either it would be destroyed by its enemies, or it would destroy them, and with them its own moral foundations. ‘I think you would agree’, Pipik continues, ‘that a Jew is safer today walking aimlessly around Berlin than going unarmed into the streets of Ramallah’. ‘What about the Jew walking around Tel Aviv’, comes the rejoinder, but Pipik isn’t much persuaded. What about the Jew in the Gaza Envelope, we might now say, the Jew still partying into the early hours at the Nova Festival, the Jewish peace activist at Kibbutz Be’eri, the Jewish Holocaust survivor at Kibbutz Holit?

It was often remarked that 7 October 2023 was the deadliest day for Jews since the Holocaust: so often that its force never really sunk in. Let us now dwell on it for a moment. A single day took as many Israeli lives as the first and second intifadas combined; 7 October 2023 dwarfs 4 July 1946, when 42 Holocaust survivors were murdered in a blood libel pogrom at Kielce in Poland; even if Stalin’s antisemitic paranoia had not been checked by his death in 1953, it is unlikely that he could have posed the Jews quite so much danger.

The day of 7 October was deadlier than any of the attacks on Jews in Morocco or Algeria or Iraq. It was deadlier, even, than the most infamous pogroms that occurred before the Holocaust and before the foundation of Israel, pogroms whose names live in infamy in Israel and the diaspora: 49 Jews were killed in Kishinev in 1903; 67 in Hebron in 1929; 378 Israelis – not all, but mostly, Jewish – were murdered in 2023 at Nova alone. The deadliest day for Jews since the Holocaust occurred in Israel, the state whose whole raison d’être was that no such thing would be possible. And where else in the world but Israel could it have occurred?

The day of 7 October was not only a breach in the social contract between Israel and its own citizens, but a rift in Israel’s relationship with the Jewish diaspora, one which until then had largely, if naïvely, accepted the Zionist premise that the Jews need a sanctuary, and only Israel could provide it. The day laid bare like nothing else what Alain Finkielkraut called the ‘glaring contradiction’ in Zionism: ‘Israel’s fundamental affective state is the risk of death; the affective state of the Diaspora – at least in the West – is peace of mind.’

Still, Zionism obtained its monopoly over mainstream Jewish thought, the monopoly which Kraemer and others now resent, because it was comprehensively and brutally vindicated by the events of the 20th century. The Holocaust meant that the Zionists won and the ‘diasporists’ lost. Roth’s most effective riposte against Pipik is: ‘But Hitler did exist’; the Jews who went to Palestine lived and the Jews who remained in Europe did not. More Jews might have been saved, in fact, if only Zionism had won the argument sooner. Such a thought haunted the Marxist Isaac Deutscher later in life: ‘if instead of arguing against Zionism in the 1920s and 1930s I had urged European Jews to go to Palestine, I might have helped to save some of the lives that were later extinguished in Hitler’s gas chambers’.

The State of Israel, once founded, provided Holocaust survivors, and hundreds of thousands of Jews from the Islamic lands, with somewhere to go. If it is difficult or impossible, now, for Jews to construct a Jewish identity that does without Israel, that might well be a price worth paying. Zionism, in any event, did not abolish diaspora: a Jew can perfectly well choose to ‘embrace exile’ insofar as he or she can, just as diaspora Jews often choose to embrace Israel by making Aliyah. It probably has been good for the Jews, overall, that the Jewish state exists. But Israel is not, and never could be, ‘Albania’.