Most of the new things the past few days are from the history of Zionism course. Some things that struck me...
Given the gap in experience between Herzl and Eastern European Jews, I continue to be surprised how many showed up for the First Zionist Congress. Granted it was 1897, so the Chovevei Tzion groups were well-established, but it seems like Herzl didn't even have a basic understanding of what life was like for the Jews involved.
Herzl's own view of those Jews was fairly patronizing. He imagined the poor Jews of Eastern Europe moving to Palestine, where their lives would improve and they would establish the state, while more well-off Jews in other parts of Europe would stay put. I think his theory was that the Jewish state would help normalize the situation of the Jews of Europe, by removing most of the sources of anti-Semitism such as the presence of less integrated and "respectable" and productive Jews. Professor Bartal noted that the presence of lower class Jews in Europe made the more bourgeois Jews uncomfortable and embarrassed as well, as an internal factor.
In a sense, as I type that last paragraph, it occurs to me that a first cousin of this happened. Most of the Eastern European Jews ended up in the U.S., and improved their lives here, and achieved a great deal of social and political acceptance and equality (not complete) by the 1960s. Eventually the existence of the State of Israel also helped that process forward for the Jews of the U.S. Though of course right now, many Jews here see themselves in the same boat as the more Western Jews of Herzl's time. (I don't.) All right, more of a second cousin to Herzl's vision of what we would call an Israel-Diaspora dynamic.
I found it interesting that to the extent religious Jews became involved in Zionism, this involved differentiating between a worldly, material sphere where the issue was saving and improving lives, and a messianic layer that political Zionism had nothing to do with in their eyes. So the contradiction with traditional waiting could be pushed away or papered over. At least on the part of the Mizrachi leadership; many of the Chovevei Zion masses did in fact see Herzl's movement in somewhat messianic perspective.
Herzl's attempt to find political support for the Jewish state among the imperial powers went nowhere, so the debate in the Zionist Congress over whether to focus on diplomacy or on building settlements was moot, and the major thrust of the international Zionist movement became material and practical by the late oughts, a decade after the first congress.
The word "colony" was in use within Zionism, it's hard to untangle the meaning of the term then and now. I have some thoughts about it but as I started to write them, I realize I have to do some more reading to check my work and then I'll come back to that. It's obviously the hot bottom topic today, about which I hope I'll get something useful from my review of the course.
Another day of notes was about the Hebrew cultural revival. Over the course of a century or so, the Hebrew language part of the Haskala made its way across Europe somewhat west to east, waxing and waning every decade or two with journals starting up and fading. As the decades went along and as the center of gravity changed, from Germany to Bohemia to Ukraine, the political backdrop changed as well. So the Hebrew language went from being part of a more general Enlightenment reform of Jewish life to becoming part of the nationalist frame, which wasn't necessarily Zionist but included Jewish secular cultural revival in place in Russia and Ukraine. That process was interrupted by the Russian Revolution, which officially clamped down on Jewish expression including the use of Hebrew, so that in practice it was the Zionists who carried forth the Hebrew revival. But I think the point was that the Hebrew linguistic and cultural movement had a logic prior to and bigger than Zionism, at least until World War I.
A brief note about Gov 1170 -- notes about Italy. Italy had essentially two trends, one a weaker version of French development with a longer agricultural tail, and one a weaker version of German late industrialization. Unification occurred in a very strange way, with a much less formed state. Professor Hall noted that Italian political parties for a long time tended to be centered on notables. Though I'm not sure about cause and effect, in practice political organization couldn't do in Italy what it did in Britain, which was to become the central place where social conflict was mediated, or what it did in Germany, which at least helped to organize mass society into coherent social and ideological groups (which didn't help stem conflict or extremism).
In Lit and Arts there was a midterm exam, and it was pretty narrowly defined and easy (phew!).
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