The PLO and the Pittsburgh Platform: Palestinian Nationalism’s Reform Judaism

• In Event: Who Speaks for the Jews? Unconventional Claims about the Jews as Religion and Nation

Abstract

When in 1885 Reform Jews in the United States declared “We consider ourselves no longer a nation, but a religious community, and therefore expect neither a return to Palestine, nor a sacrificial worship under the sons of Aaron, nor the restoration of any of the laws concerning the Jewish state,” their message was meant to reach a variety of audiences: their fellow Jews in America and back in Europe and their Christian neighbors who may have questioned Jews’ loyalty to the countries in which they resided. One audience these nineteenth century Reform Jews likely did not imagine as they penned these words in Pittsburgh was the PLO, an organization that would be founded nearly eighty years later. But the PLO’s intellectual leadership was indeed fascinated by the Pittsburgh Platform and the classical Reform ideology that it embodied.
This paper opens with a consideration of the history of Palestinian Arab interest in Reform Judaism beginning in the Late Ottoman period followed by a study of the role of classical Reform ideas in the PLO’s ideological battle against Zionism. The paper focuses particularly on the work of the PLO Research Center (founded in Beirut in 1965) and its engagement with Reform principles and personalities, especially the idiosyncratic 20th century American anti-Zionist rabbi Elmer Berger. While the rabbis in Pittsburgh were necessarily unaware of the mid-twentieth century implications of their words, Berger was acutely aware of these implications and stressed them in his collaboration with Palestinian nationalist contemporaries.
Ultimately, this paper suggests new directions in research on the relationship between religion and nationalism by studying how one nationalism may combat another not by delegitimizing the latter’s associated religion but by privileging a brand of that religion.

author

• Jonathan Gribetz, Princeton University