Who Speaks for the Jews? Unconventional Claims about the Jews as Religion and Nation

Session Submission Type: Panel Session

Abstract

Scholars of nationalism continue to debate the relationship between nationalism and religion. Was nationalism a rebellion against religion or an outgrowth of religion? Should nationalism be regarded as a form of religion? How might perceptions of another group’s religion inform one’s perception of that group’s nationalism? This panel engages with these questions as they relate to Jews in the 19th and 20th centuries in a variety of geographic, national, and religious contexts—from France to Eastern Europe, and from Ottoman Palestine to the PLO’s Beirut.
Each paper undertakes a rich intertextual reading to reconsider a story about nation and religion in a manner that defies its time-worn account. Katherine Eade explores how an important 19th century French Jewish woman, in her regular column in the French Jewish press, utilized a French nationalist reading of the Book of Esther to argue for the religious emancipation of women. Daniel Mahla examines the tensions between religion and nationalism in the platform and press of the early Orthodox Agudat Yisrael movement, suggesting that the standard narrative of increasing nationalization does not pay enough attention to the interplay of religious and national affiliations within the organization’s outlook, and thereby misses important aspects of what its leaders sought to achieve.
The final two papers consider how nationalists imagined the other’s religion. Hanan Harif’s considers the ways in which early Zionists in Europe conceived of not only their own religion but drew upon Islam to make an argument for the viability of Jewish-Muslim coexistence and, by extension, of the Jewish national project in Palestine. Jonathan Gribetz, finally, shifts the focus to Beirut in the latter half of the 20th century and examines the Palestine Liberation Organization’s conception of classical Reform Judaism, especially the Pittsburgh Platform, and the relationship of the American anti-Zionist rabbi Elmer Berger with Palestinian nationalist intellectuals.

Sub Unit

• Modern Jewish History in Europe, Asia, Israel, and Other Communities

Chair

• Ethan Katz, University of Cincinnati

Individual Presentations

• Emancipating the Jewess: Queen Esther’s Unfinished Business in Modern France - Katherine Eade Guenoun, University of Wisconsin-Madison

• Countering Zionism: Agudat Yisrael Between Religious Affiliations and the Nation - Daniel Mahla, Columbia University

• Religious Tensions within Zionist Thought: Judaism and Islam - Hanan Harif, Hebrew University

• The PLO and the Pittsburgh Platform: Palestinian Nationalism’s Reform Judaism - Jonathan Gribetz, Princeton University