Is there a Jewish political tradition? The Jewish entity has existed for over 3,000 years and has ranged over several continents and many cultures. Inevitably, Jews have accumulated political experiences and have had political thoughts. But do these add up to a political culture or tradition that is coherent and distinct?
There is no canon or set of texts that can be identified as a coherent, systematic political literature. There is not even a single text that one can point to and say THAT is the classic Jewish political text (cf. Plato's Republic and Aristotle's Politics, or the American constitution as a foundational document, or a set of thinkers that would constitute the "canon" of Western political thought, or a particular ideology, such as Marxism, with central texts and many interpreters).
Second, as re institutions, what we can take as foundational texts-and they are religious-do not yield a clear, unambiguous, consistent preference for institutional forms (cf. Plato's ideal republic; Aristotle's assessment of constitutions; Declaration of Independence assertion of inherent rights and rejection of autocratic government; Leninist texts rejecting bourgeois forms of governance and justifying dictatorship of the proletariat; the 1961 Program of the Communist Party of the USSR; the Action Program of the Czechoslovak CP in spring 1968; and a host of other foundational/basic statements).
In Jewish history there is both normative and empirical variation. Jews have lived under a variety of forms of government and have been able to maintain their identities and express their culture, historically largely in religious terms, under a variety of political regimes and systems, though when they did not have sovereignty-which is to say, for most of their existence-they fared much better under tolerant and, even better, democratic regimes (explain difference), When enjoying sovereignty, they have experienced something like theocracy, oligarchy, a loose system bordering on anarchy (shoftim), monarchy, democracy. Sovereign Jewish states have been highly decentralized (Biblical period) and highly centralized (Israel today).
One thread that runs through almost all of pre-modern Jewish thought is what I have called a "quest for utopia," a striving to create the best possible state (similar to Greek endeavors). This urge survives into the modern and secular period since Zionism is perhaps the only nationalist movement that has a universalist streak, namely, the idea that the Jewish state will be an ideal one to be imitated by others ("light unto the nations"-Isaiah). While there is no ideal polity in classical Judaism, there is an insistence on rulers being bound and guided by moral and ethical standards-there is no unlimited power of a ruler. The greatest of Jewish rulers or leaders are reproved by higher authority: Moses is castigated for the seemingly trivial act of striking a rock rather than speaking to it; Saul has his kingship taken away; David is severely reprimanded and denied the privilege of building the Holy Temple; his son Solomon is punished explicitly so that his children do not unequivocally inherit the monarchy, but are challenged. The Jews are charged with being a "holy" people, not just a people among nations, and they are charged with improving, repairing the world (tikun olam).
But on fundamental questions such as the form of government, there is no clear Biblical, prophetic or rabbinic mandate. Note the hedges around the notion of monarchy (Deuteronomy 15:14-20 and then Shmuel 8:1-22). Constitutional monarchy at best. Later, Rambam considers establishment of a monarchy as a mitzvah. Mishneh Torah, Book 14, Laws of Kings and Wars, the first words are: "3 commandments to be carried out on entering Israel were enjoined upon Israel: to appoint a king?to destroy the seed of Amalek?and to build the sanctuary."
The opposing view most often cited is that of Don Isaac Abravanel (Abarbanel).
Born 1437 Lisbon (d.1508), long line of wealthy, politically well connected ancestors expelled from Seville by Christians. Close to Portuguese King Alfonso V (and his father) but successor Joao II suspected him of maintaining loyalty to House of Braganza, purged Abravanel in 1483 and he fled to Castile. Entered service of Ferdinand and Isabella, pleaded unsuccessfully against 1492 expulsion and fled to Naples and then Venice. In all, he served six kings as financier and diplomat. Abravanel seems to advocate a form of mixed gov't:
1) Synhedrion representing the aristocracy and not elected by the people. Has legislative as well as judicial power;
2) 4 councils for each tribe or region, elected by the people; 3) lower courts, which seem to have legislative power as well, in every city and town, elected by people.
In sum, on one hand, there is no "classical" guideline as to what a Jewish government should look like. On the other hand, that may have enhanced Jewish adaptability to the many forms of government under which they have lived since they could not point definitively to one or another as being preferred or being anathema. The lack of consensus on political ideals also means that there is a certain secularization of the subject in that politics is seen as a worldly occupation, an arena for autonomous human endeavor.
Kehilla: the traditional form of Jewish self-government in the diaspora
Any system that emphasizes law must necessarily stress community and organization, for law is the means of social self-regulation. Since Judaism places so much emphasis on regulated activity, much of which is private but much of which is also public, it is to be expected that considerable attention would be paid to community and its organization. Already in the Mishna we have such adjurations as "al tifrosh min hatsibur." The Talmud discusses the rights that townspeople have as a communal body. These include the right to sell sanctified land and holy objects (Megillah, 4:1) and to coerce individuals to perform public works (Bava Batra, 1:6). Townspeople can also control and regulate prices, measures and wages.
{Menachem Lorberbaum, Politics and the Limits of Law, 94 ff.} But it is from the mid-10th century to the mid-15th century that rabbis in North Africa, France, Germany, France and Spain made rulings that cumulatively created public law as a distinct body of halacha. This involved conceptualizing the community as a unique legal entity and the creation of special legal procedures governing its transactions. The community is called the kahal, a biblical term that can mean the congregation of worship. So it is a religiously defined community (sometimes referred to as K"K, kehila kedosha). This religious cast gives the institution authority, because the Jews no longer have power (no sovereignty). This is critical to understanding why self-governance worked for Jews: religious authority, backed by very little power but by the power of social opprobrium and pressure, could be effectively invoked in order to keep community members in line. The kahal was made a distinct legal persona not at one fell swoop by a single act of legislation, but by a cumulative process of arrogation of religiously sanctioned enactments. (takanot)
This actually reflects practices in medieval Christian Europe and is enabled by them. In 12th-13th century Europe legislation was enacted not by a monolithic central government but by manorial courts, papal courts, royal, urban, and mercantile courts. The medieval state viewed society as compartmentalized into different groups and made no attempt to integrate them. Second, it was not an activist but a minimalist state. Thus, education was left entirely in the hands of the religious authorities. Rulers were relatively content to permit Jewish communal autonomy-a state within a state.
Takanot encompassed all areas of life: fiscal affairs, zoning laws, welfare, education, taxation, marriage, guard duty, and a fascinating kind of laws called sumptuary which regulated dress and public display of wealth. Examples: a) Forli, Italy 1418: no Jew or Jewess shall wear a fur-lined jacket, unless it is black and not lined with silk. No woman should wear a belt whose silver weighs more than ten ounces. b) Krakow, Poland, 1615: one is permitted to wear only 2 rings on weekdays, 4 on the Sabbath, 6 on holidays. Neither men nor women are allowed to wear precious stones, except for pregnant women who can wear a diamond ring because of its curative powers; c) Lithuania, 1637: people are spending too much on festive meals (weddings, circumcisions) so the number of guests will be regulated by the community. Similar edict issued among ultra-Orthodox in 2002 in New York.
One important Spanish rabbi, Solomon Ben Adret [Rashba] (1235-1310), who wrote more than 11,000 responsa while leading an active public life, goes so far as to endorse the kahal's activities beyond the norms of Biblical law. For example, while according to Biblical law court testimony from a woman or a minor is inadmissible, the kahal authorities may admit such testimony if they believe the witnesses are truthful. Rashba explains this by saying that the kahal court is judging not according to religious law but as a political body and enforcing communal enactments (tikunei hamedinah). "Whoever is responsible for the ordering of the polity does not judge according to the actual laws written in the Torah, but rather according to what he must do, given the times, with the [Gentile] government's license." Maimonides had earlier asserted that ensuring political order may sometimes take precedence over the demands of the Torah. Rashba and R. Nissim Gerondi, among others (Meiri), can be seen as advocating a secularizing attitude toward politics and that gives both the non-Jewish state and the kehilla or kahal their legitimacy.
Kahal
Authority that it had gave it some actual power. 1) hefker bet din: local community court could claim jurisdiction over a particular matter; 2) Takanot;
3) herem bet din and the lesser punishment of nidui (social isolation, shunning). 4) herem hayishuv: community could exclude people from legal residence. Sometimes people would move in, refuse to accept jurisdiction of kehilla, and form their own kehilla w/in it. Lubavitch today. 5) could collect taxes, in EE on Sabbath candles, meat; 6) conducted foreign relations with the local ruler; 7) supervise local welfare and educational institutions and appoint their functionaries (rabbi, ritual slaughterer, teachers, cantor, etc.)
By the 14th/15th centuries regional self-governing bodies appear in Spain, Italy and Germany. They are call vaadim or committees. They were federal in principle (localities made up a regional vaad) and consensual in practice, so that power rested with the local kehillas. But in the mid-17th century a powerful vaad or Council of the 4 Lands emerges [actually, as early as 1581, and in later form in 1623. Lasts until 1764] (Greater Poland, lesser Poland, Podolia and Volhynia). 1623-Vaad Liteh appears [explain Liteh] with Grodno, Brest, Pinsk. In 1651, a Council of Bohemia and Moravia. Meet twice a year at the great fairs.
Vaad and Kehilla were very modern institutions, proto-welfare states, but they were not democracies. Vilna Kahal was typical of the most important. In addition to welfare and religious functions, it also looked after the water supply, insured the streets were clean supported refugees and ransomed POWs, had its court of law with a jail and pillory. An assembly elected the communal officials, but the assembly consisted of men only who had been married at least 6 years, who held the honorary title of moreinu or haver (denoting religious piety and scholarship), who had certain wealth, and belonged to a family of good repute-and who paid a fee. In 1750 in Vilna there were 120 members, in 1787, 196. This was an elitist institution with a highly elaborate legislative/executive system and a rather complex organization chart.
Typical welfare institutions: schools (heder, Talmud Torah, yeshiva); burial society; bridal dowry society to enable poor brides to marry; hekdesh or infirmary; charity for the poor; hospitality for travelers; interest free loans. (Note how we have these all today)
Class struggle emergent: 1) 17th century rise of Hasidism, seen by some as a revolt of the poor and unlettered against the coalition of wealthy and learned in the kahal. Hasidic groups are good examples of separatist kehillas that formed w/in cities and towns; 2) revolt of the poor in the 19th century, perhaps beginning with the Cantonist episode (Nikolai I, 1827-55). Quota system and khappers who would take the n'er-do-wells, the poor kids for 25 yr terms in military, sometimes preceded by years of pre-military training. Marxist historians see this as the beginnings of class struggle in Jewish communities.
Mid-to-late 19th century emergence of professional guilds (long in existence) as proto-trade unions. Mutual assistance through lai un shpor kasses. Craftsmen and later workers begin to organize. Pits them against kehilla which is dominated by the wealthy (owners, merchants).
The religious cast of the communal organization and the community as a whole became an issue in the late 19th century when there was a struggle for the "democratization" (expanding the franchise) of the kahal or kehilla, [kahal is the actual governing body, Kehilla is the community as a whole] and for its transformation into a secular body, that is, an organ of ethnic communal autonomy, which might include religious functions but only as a part of its larger purview of governance. Of course, one implication of such a transformation would be that leadership is no longer necessarily religious.
Jewish politics began to change in the middle of the nineteenth century with the sharpening of social conflict and the emergence of both the Haskalah movement among Jews and radical politics in the larger society. The changes in Jewish political life, which culminated in the founding of the Zionist and Bundist movements in 1897, may be summarized as follows:
1) from the oligarchical politics of the kehilla to the mass politics of parties and movements.
2) from religious politics, such as the clash between Hassidim and misnagdim (their opponents), to secular and ideological politics.
3) from concerns only with Jewish issues to concern with general issues such as economics, political rights, civil rights.
4) from shtadlones to assertiveness and demands for rights.
5) These changes naturally led to the emergence of a new kind of leadership: alongside the traditional leaders of the community, the wealthy and the learned, a new type of leader emerged whose credentials were knowledge of the larger world, the ability to organize, and the ability to mobilize the masses. Knowledge of non-Jewish languages and mores is what enabled acculturated and even assimilated figures such as Vladimir Medem of the Bund, and Zionists such as Theodor Herzl, Leon Pinsker, and Vladimir Zhabotinsky, to assume the mantle of leadership (none of them had a traditional J bkgrnd).
The class tensions of kehilla politics were paralleled by tensions between acculturated elites and more ethnically conscious and loyal masses. Thus, for example, in the Zionist movement the East European masses, motivated as much by traditional yearnings for Zion as by modern romantic nationalism or the calculations of realpolitik, rejected the Uganda plan the British had offered and which Herzl was prepared to entertain. In the Bund, it was the rank-and-file Yiddish speakers who pushed the Russified leadership to demand national-cultural autonomy and press for Jewish cultural rights.i As one of those early, Russified leaders acknowledged, "We were for assimilation; we did not even dream of a special Jewish mass movement...Our task was developing cadres for the Russian revolutionary movement."ii
The shift from mass to elite politics and the broadening of the political agenda democratized Jewish politics. Many more people were now involved and the issues of economic welfare, cultural development, national defense and collective and individual rights were the kind that most people could understand on some level.
Modern democracy is a system of government that meets three essential conditions: 1) meaningful, extensive and non-violent competition for power at predictable intervals; 2) the opportunity for all to participate in politics; 3) civil and political liberties "sufficient to ensure the integrity of political competition and participation."iii What differentiates democratic governments or organizations from others is that anyone can aspire to leadership, can dissent from leadership, and leadership is responsive to the rank-and-file.
Democracy, like other forms of government, should not be seen as an absolute, but as a spectrum. There are more and less democratic governments and organizations. The Bund was far from a perfectly democratic organization, but it was far more democratic than the kehilla, certainly than the East European regimes, and even more so than other socialist movements such as the Bolsheviks. The Bund's achievement in democratization was broadening the political arena to include women and people who were not wealthy or learned, and establishing more democratic forms of decision-making. The former became a permanent change in Jewish politics and has survived the demise of the Bund, which has not been credited with this revolutionary change that affected all of Jewish political life, in Israel and in the diaspora. Whether more democratic forms of decision-making have become a permanent feature of Jewish life is far less clear.
It might be argued that Zionism shares in having made these changes, but as regards the broadening of the social base of Jewish public life, it is not clear how far the Russian Zionist movement went. While the Zionist movement did not exclude people on the grounds of their class origins, it did not represent the lower strata of the Jewish population commensurate with their proportion in the population as a whole, and those strata were more sympathetic to Bundism, though after 1906, with the establishment of the Poalei Zion, a serious working class Zionist movement emerged.
The participation of women in public affairs seems not to have been as prominent an issue then, nor is it today in the former Soviet Union, as it is in the United States. Nevertheless, the fact that women began to participate in politics did not go unnoticed. As one religious polemic against Zionism put it, "Public affairs must never be the subject of idle chatter of the crowd or of women. There is no greater disaster for the nation than the transfer of its business from the private domain of individual leaders to the public domain, where youngsters and even girls are free to meddle."(Landa and Rabinovich, Sefer Or Layesharim, Warsaw, 1900)iv I have no data on the gender composition of the Zionist movement as a whole, though it is obvious that women participated less than men in the movement, as they did in all political movements. Using the photographs of delegates to the congress of the earliest Russian Zionists, the Hovevei Tsiyon, and the national congresses of Russian Zionists (1896-1909), I calculate that of 1,249 delegates, 79, or 6.3 per cent, were women.v Puah Rakowski (1865 Bialystok-1955 TA) was principal of a girls' Hebrew school in Lomza and because her husband would not divorce her, threatened to convert to Christianity and baptize their two children (which she did not intend to do). Her grandfather, rabbi of Mariampole, forced her husband to divorce her and she then founded a Hebrew gymnazium, Yehudiyah, in Warsaw. Her proposal to found a women's branch of the Jewish National Fund met with resistance from men. "It was high time, I told them, for us to stop being errand girls for our male comrades. Our participation in practical work was actually much greater than theirs, but they took the credit?.As long as we have the same duties, we demand equal rights?.The older men looked up this as an assault of the biblical precept "and he shall rule over you." But the organization, B'not Zion, was founded. Rakowski notes, "However extraordinary it may sound, some 40 yrs ago Jewish women, and young women too, who had been brought up on the old fashioned notion that "kvod bat melech pnima" never felt as comfortable at general meetings as they did in the women's federations. Rarely did a woman have the courage to speak publicly. Most had not liberated themselves of the absurd notion that nay man was allegedly wiser than a woman. Nor did the contemptuous attitude on the men's part encourage them. Yet, despite the difficulties, the Daughters of Zion grew and in a few years had thousands of members in 70 branches in Russian Poland."
A historian of the Bund notes that by the 1890s, "Women formed a substantial segment of both the intelligentsia and the kase-organized working force....It was not unusual by now for the daughters of the assimilated bourgeoisie to attend state schools and universities. But among lower-class Jewish families the very idea of educating women, beyond the minimum needed for prayer, was out of the question. In these families the break with the older generation was excruciating. It is easy to imagine the shock of parents on learning that their daughters had attended secret meetings late at night or on the Sabbath....The gradual move toward the emancipation of women shook the very foundation of Jewish social life."vi
Since the Bund was a clandestine organization, its earliest records are incomplete. Using the data available, I examined the lists of delegates to Bundist national conferences and congresses (1897-1922), and of the members of the Bund's Central Committees. Of 201 delegates/members, 20 were women. This is a higher percentage (10%) than among the Zionists. Moreover, women were prominent in the Bund's leadership from its inception, though, curiously, their role in the leadership seems to have declined over time. Among the "Vilna Pioneers" of the Bund were five men and two women, and at its founding congress, among the thirteen delegates, two were women. By 1919-1922, however, only one woman--Esther Frumkin, who later became a leading figure in the Jewish Sections of the Communist Party and who died in a Soviet labor camp--was in the three Central Committees elected in that period.vii One of the early Bundist women leaders suggests that women were more prominent in the illegal period of the Bund because "illegal work demanded a great deal of faith, devotion, self-sacrifice," whereas the legal movement needed "speakers, writers, political activists and organizers with a broad horizon. Life did not prepare a large number of women of this type. Women adjusted slowly, with difficulty, to the new forms of the movement."viii In any case, it is clear that it was through both the Zionist, and especially the Bundist, movements that women entered Jewish public life and political activism.
As compared to the politics of the pre-1897 period, political life in the Bund, and likely in the Zionist movement as well, was conducted in a far less oligarchic and more inclusive manner. In fact, the internal procedures of both movements probably were no less democratic than those in political parties in Western democracies today.
The last political innovation of the Bund and the Zionists was that they cooperated with non-Jewish political movements and parties. In the case of the Bund, inter-ethnic cooperation was an ideal, in addition to serving the needs of the Jews. For most Zionists, cooperation with other peoples and their political spokesmen seem to have been largely pragmatic, alliances of convenience. The principle was established that Jews were no longer always the supplicants begging for political handouts from more powerful political bodies, but could be partners in mutually beneficial arrangements.
Modern Politics and Modern Culture
Both the Bund and the Zionists modernized Jewish life in another major respect. Both made it clear, to their own constituencies and to the outside world, that culture is a political issue, as several chapters in this volume demonstrate. Each movement built schools, published newspapers, sponsored theaters, inspired music, and undertook other cultural activities, all of which were designed to articulate, promote and disseminate the ideals of the movement. Religious Judaism had done the same in many respects, but whereas it continued culture and traditions, Zionism and Bundism created or at least supported them, whether it was the secular Yiddish school or the modern Hebrew school, the Yiddish theater or the Hebrew theater.
Both movements made a second kind of cultural innovation. Each created a kind of counterculture and counter-community to the historically dominant religious culture and communities of Eastern Europe, just as the Narodniki and later the Marxists created not just a political movement but a counterculture. This was especially true of the Bund because its break with the past was sharper than that of the Zionists. But even the Zionists had their own synagogues--but it was still a synagogue--whereas Bundists had no synagogue at all. Beyond promoting a literature and language, the movements created cultural and social communities within which one could lead one's social and cultural life. Parallel to the life of the Orthodox Jew, one's every activity could be carried out within the movement, which, like halacha (Jewish law), had its prescriptions and proscriptions, its traditions and mores. As with religion, there were the more and less observant, the more and less involved, but Zionism and Bundism each offered an all-encompassing, intensive, largely secular alternative to the traditional way of life, unlike in America where, Jewishness for most is a sometime activity, pursued at leisure and by choice, and limited to well defined spheres of activity.
What was the Orthodox response in EE to these two movements? Overwhelmingly negative and for obvious reasons: 1) Bundism and much of the Zionist camp was indifferent to religion, at best, or hostile to it. Bundists saw the rabbis as collaborators with the tsarist regime, while the rabbis saw revolutionaries not only as heretics but as people whose actions would bring down the wrath of the government on all Jews. One exception might have been R. Yitzhak Elchanan Spektor, Kovno, matzes are trayf because they are made with blood of women and children; 2) the kehilla and rabbinate were supported by the wealthy, with whom they intermarried, and the call for democratization and secularization of the kehilla threatened rabbinic power; 3) rabbinic power was already declining (Adam Teller says it was happening in Poland already in 16th/17th centuries) and the emergence of new types of leaders, those who went beyond shtadlones and could operate successfully in the secular world, threatened rabbinic and kehilla leadership.
To counter this, rabbis developed the doctrine of da'as torah. In the words of a contemporary AY supporter, this is "a special endowment or capacity to penetrate objective reality, recognize the facts as they really are and apply the pertinent halakhic principles, it is a form of ruah hahokesh?which borders, if only remotely on the periphery of prophecy" (Bernard Weinberger, Jewish Observer, October 1963). As one scholar observes, this notion is radically opposed to the whole process of reasoned halakhic pesak. While pesak always leaves room for more discussion, for further analysis and for responsible criticism, the whole purpose of daas Torah is to close off and suppress discussion. It enables one person or one group to impose, ex cathedra, a personal, particular viewpoint on all persons or all groups." (L Kaplan, Tradition, 18/3, Fall 1980, 246) Doctrine of papal infallibility emerges at about the same time-Church is also a threatened institution.
Contrary to what Haredim would have you believe, this concept was invented only in the late 19th century and was formalized with the establishment of the AY Moetzet Gdolay Hatorah in 1912 (still exists in Israel, and has parallel with Ovadiah Yosef and Shas). Whatever its halachic consequences, the political consequences of the doctrine of daas Torah have sometimes been catastrophic. Hofetz Haim, Nidhei Yisrael, Jews should not immigrate to America or S. Africa (di shtainer in Amerikeh zaynen traif). In the late 1930s Haredi rabbis paskened that the Hildesheimer Rabbinical Seminary of Berlin should not move to Palestine, and luminaries such as Reb Chaim Ozer Grodzensky and Elchanan Wasserman continued to rail against Zionism. I don't know whether AY literature and the hagiographies published by Art Scroll/Mesorah deal with these consequences of Daas Torah. This doctrine was a rear guard action by a threatened establishment, understandable but with very dangerous implications (Jeffrey: If your rosh yeshiva told you the world is flat, would you believe him? "I would have to.")
Conclusion
All these changes taken together constitute a shift to modernity. They lasted throughout the twentieth century in some form. They were the basis for the Israeli political system and for some diaspora communal institutions, though many of the latter are based on kehilla models. Both the "winner" and "loser" of twentieth century Jewish politics made enormous and decisive changes in Jewish life. Those of Zionism are obvious: it created a state with all the implications thereof. It is a source of pride and identity for Jews and it provides them with the capability of self-defense. It has been a haven for European "Displaced Persons," North African and Middle Eastern, Soviet, Iranian, and Ethiopian Jews. In the view of some, it provides the only viable alternative to religion for those Jews who seek to preserve and transmit Jewish ethnicity.
Orthodoxy has also survived, part of it by adopting aspects of modernity such as secular education, and part of it by rejecting most aspects but adapting technology from the outside world in order to better insulate themselves from its influences (tapes, internet shiurim, satellite broadcasts and telecasts, etc.)
The Bund's contributions are less obvious and it is largely forgotten. Yet, it profoundly changed the structure of Jewish society, politics and culture. While its two main aims, socialism and a secular Yiddish culture, failed or are out of fashion, the process of struggling for them left an indelible mark on Jewish life. Any scientist knows that we often learn as much from failed experiments as we do from successful ones. The tragedy of the Bund is not just that its experiment failed, but that the murder of most of its adherents deprived it of the chance to compete. The other movements were more successful in transplanting themselves to new soils where they continue to nurture the variety of plants that constitute contemporary Jewish life in Israel and the diaspora.