From the Love for Zion to the Return in Zion: the Case of the first two Jewish-german Utopias between Antisemitism and Secularization (1885-1893)

• In Event: Graduate Student Lightning Session: Comparative Ashkenazi-Sephardi Studies

Abstract

In a short pamphlet, Le sionisme et les colonies juives en Palestine (1899), the Swiss journalist Ilia Grunberg wrote that a National jewish feeling developed itself and circulated before the rise of Zionist movement: it is radiated itself everywhere «intermittently» through poems, novels and reviews by which a new Hope for the restoration of Zion began to take shape. By this way, the Love for Zion was secularized in the literary descriptions of a new Jewish Kingdom. It was the beginning of a new literary genre for the Modern Hebrew Literature: the Utopias of Zion, which was only studied in the Fifties-Sixties by the Israeli scholar Kressel. This utopian production anticipated the rise of Zionism and tried to answer a double question, external and internal to the European Jewish world: antisemitism and secularization. As Israel Joshua Singer wrote in The Family Carnovsky (1943) the Mendelsohnian motto was reversed due to this dual joint process: «Life is a joke, rabbi Carnovsky, it loves to play us some tricks. We wanted to be Jews at home and men on the street, life has come and everything turned upside down: we are goyim at home and jews on the street». In this sense, the Utopias of Zion tried to imagine a way out of this double problem. We will take as an example the case of the first two german-jewish Utopias: Ein Zukunftsbild (1885) of Edmund Eisler and Das Reich Judäa im Jahre 6000 (1893) of Max Osterberg. Two authors that never became Zionists. These utopian novels marked a turning point from the literary Love for Zion to the political Return to Zion and thus confirmed the Zionist debt with the Modern Hebrew Literature, which provides words, visions and secularized concepts to the future Zionist executive class, to the future secularized messianic slogans and so to the nationalist ideology, from the perspective of which these Utopias of Zion were interpreted. This paper will be presented in 20 minutes.

Author

• Stefania Ragaù, Scuola Normale Superiore