NN: Judaism and Zionism
And ways we use words for them and their haters
This is part of the sprawling No Nichols complex of posts analyzing the rhetoric and reasoning behind certain sorts of support for Israel.
If you prefer listening to reading, note that there’s a recording at the end of this post that covers much but not all of the content covered in writing.
Identity terms can get tangled, so we need to clearly distinguish four different ideas: 1) religious identity, 2) cultural identity, 3) ethnic identity, and 4) national identity. These four conceptual slots can be filled by four different words, or by one word four times, or anywhere in between. And not all people see all four slots as equally clear or important for their own identity. Plus there is overlap and interplay between the four. So things get tricky!
To offer myself as an example, I am a white dude (#3) from the US (#4) who grew up Christian but isn’t religious now (#1). That leaves out #2, cultural identity... or it answers it already, at least partly. Culture is a broad and porous idea that involves religion and nationality and often ethnicity. But to offer a direct answer to #2 I might say I’m a white working class American millennial from the Midwest.1
Karl Marx was raised Christian in Germany and later became an atheist. His father had converted from Judaism to Christianity. Both his grandfathers had been rabbis.
Compare and contrast Marx with hypothetical Jewish brothers Shane and Able living today in the state of Israel, in a family and a neighborhood rich with Jewish cultural practices. Both brothers speak Hebrew, keep kosher, and keep the sabbath. Shane is deeply religious, while Able has been an atheist for 10 years. So here’s how these three men fit our four concepts:
The state of Israel began in 1948. Israeli law offers citizenship to anyone who can prove they have Jewish ancestors. So someone in America or Argentina or Russia or wherever who has Jewish ancestry can move to Israel and immediately become a citizen, regardless of any Jewish religious or cultural beliefs or practices.
So imagine a woman named Bonnie. She lives in Texas, where she grew up. She was raised Christian, but for many years has identified as not religious but still spiritual. Like many pale-skinned Americans she just thinks and speaks of herself as “white.” Then she gets curious about her ethnic ancestry and does some digging. She learns that she’s half Russian, and half of that Russian ancestry is Ashkenazi Jewish. Before Bonnie learned this she had absolutely no knowledge of, interest in, or connection to any Jewish religious or cultural beliefs or practices. So she is in no sense religiously or culturally Jewish. But she has just learned that ethnically she is one quarter Jewish. And if she wants to become a citizen of the state of Israel she can do so immediately.
Next imagine an Israeli citizen named Clyde. He is one of Israel’s nearly two million Palestinian citizens. In relation to fellow Palestinians in Israel and the Palestinian territories, Clyde and his family do not belong to the Muslim majority, nor to the largest religious minority of Christians, but to the smaller Druze minority.
How do our four concepts apply to Clyde? Well we can’t answer that before unpacking what is meant by “Palestinian.” Palestinians are Arab residents of the land of Palestine, or their descendants elsewhere in the world. They are Arab not in the sense of being ethnically Arabian but in the sense of being culturally and linguistically “Arabized.” And they are at present a nationality without a nation. Which is by no means rare, just ask the Kurds or the Basque or the Quebecois. Or first nations peoples throughout the Americas. Or Jews before 1948 or Turks before 1923.
Before Turks had Turkey they were part of the Ottoman Empire. Under four centuries of Ottoman rule the land of Palestine had an Arab ethnic majority and a Jewish ethnic minority. Let’s imagine an ethnically Arab man named Sid and an ethnically Jewish woman named Nancy in Jerusalem in 1900. Both of them participate in the religious life of their respective communities—the Jewish community for Nancy and the Arab Christian community for Sid—but their closest friends know they are in fact atheists. How would their identities fit our four categories?
More or less. Culture could be answered in different ways. To wrap up this parsing exercise let’s add Nancy, Bonnie, and Clyde to our earlier table for Jewish identity:
Hatred toward Jewish people—known as antisemitism—has a long horrible history. For a bit of an overview check out #6 here. At different times and places the focus of this hatred has varied. Sometimes the focus was ethnic, sometimes it was cultural, sometimes it was religious, and often it was mixed. What has usually been absent from this hatred, though, is hatred based on national identity. Not because anyone was willfully passing up a reason to hate Jews, but for the same reason Jewish national identity was available neither to our fictional Nancy in 1900 nor to Karl Marx in the 1800s. Namely because Jewish nationality didn’t exist until the state of Israel was declared in 1948, in the middle of the violent dispossession of Arab Palestinians.
The movement behind the creation of Israel was called Zionism. It was a complex and diverse movement, but generally today Zionism simply means support for the state of Israel. While anti-Zionism simply means opposition to the state of Israel.
So what’s the relation between anti-Zionism and antisemitism? It depends which of the two you start with. If you start with antisemitism, i.e. hating Jews, then chances are good that you will also hate the state of Israel that was founded by Jews and is filled with Jews.
But what if you start with anti-Zionism? Start with opposition to the state of Israel. For example opposition to its brutality toward Palestinians from 1947 to today. Or just opposition to its gruesome campaign against Gaza since October 7th. Do these sorts of opposition to the state of Israel imply any hatred of Jews?
They pretty clearly do not. They don’t rule it out, so there are indeed anti-Zionists who are also antisemites. But plenty of other anti-Zionists, presumably including many of the large number of Jewish critics and opponents of the state of Israel, are simply not antisemitic. Saying otherwise is simply a lie. But, partly because it can take something as long as this post to untangle and refute, it can be a very useful lie.
Here’s a partially-overlapping recording focused more on anti-Zionism and antisemitism:
(Correction at 3:24: Ghana → Uganda)
Thank you for your interest friends and enemies and internet strangers.
As a non-Jewish white dude from the United States I may not be the most qualified person to understand and explain all this. But as a writer, language nerd, history nerd, and philosophy nerd I am at least a little qualified and am compelled to try.