What’s love got to do with it? The emotional language of early Zionism

ABSTRACT

This article looks to European Jewry between the mid-nineteenth and early twentieth centuries to illuminate the role of love in a modern nationalist movement. In the third quarter of the nineteenth century, the political activist Moses Hess (1812–1875) and the historian Heinrich Graetz (1817–1891) professed a sentimental love of Jews and of the land of Israel. In the 1880s, the hovevei tsion (Lovers of Zion) movement produced poetry in which attachment to Zion and the Jewish people was more romantic than sentimental, oscillating between a passive, mournful yearning for the land and an active, muscular striving to rebuild it. With the advent of Herzlian political Zionism, the Zionist labor movement, and the Zionist-Palestinian conflict, the more dynamic variety of romanticism became dominant, and it assumed more explicitly erotic and militant dimensions than had previously been the case. Older forms of sentimental love did not disappear, however. Until the end of his life, the Zionist leader Nahum Sokolow (1859–1936) remained convinced that sentimental love was Zionism’s overarching organizing principle.

KEYWORDS:

• Zionism
• Palestine
• Israel
• nationalism
• political emotion
• national anthems

Acknowledgments

I am grateful to Omri Boehm, Idan Dershowitz, Ute Frevert, Todd Hall, Adriana Jacobs, Ruth Harris, Pnina Lahav, Sara Lipton, Yaron Peleg, Orit Rozin, Stephanie Schuler-Springorum, Anita Shapira, and Yaacov Yadgar for their comments on earlier versions of this article.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).

Notes

1. On the need for a more thorough grounding of the history of Zionism within the history of emotions see Baer, “The Rebirth of a Nation,” 243–58. See also Orit Rozin’s pioneering work on the history of emotions during the state of Israel’s early decades, e.g., “Pahad be-tsel totaheihah shel suriyah,” 109–81; and “Infiltration and the Making of Israel’s Emotional Regime,” 448–72.

2. The relative lack of historical attention to positive emotions has been noted by Darrin McMagon “Finding Joy in the History of Emotions,” 103–19. There is a substantial literature on the history of love and friendship between individuals, but sustained treatments of love as a collective emotion are few, e.g., Eustace, 1812: War and the Passions of Patriotism. On collective fear, see Robin, Fear; idem, “The Language of Fear,” 118–31; Bourke, Fear: A Cultural History; Laffan and Weiss, Facing Fear; and Masco, The Theater of Operations. Affect theory, produced mainly by scholars of cultural studies, devotes much attention to fear, e.g., Ahmed, The Cultural Politics of Emotion, 62–81; and Massumi, “The Future Birth of the Affective Fact,” 52–70. On anger and hatred, see Petersen, Understanding Ethnic Violence; Ahmad, The Cultural Politics of Emotion, 42–61, and the special issue on political anger in The European Journal of Social Theory 7, 2 (2004), particularly the articles by Mary Holmes, Peter Lyman, and David Ost.

3. On political emotion, see Steinberg, “Emotions History in Eastern Europe,” and Eustace, “Emotions and Political Change,” in Doing Emotions History, 74–99 and 163–83; and Protevi, “Political Emotion,” 326–340.

4. Ackerman, “The Personal is Political,” 437–58; and van Wolde, “Sentiments as Culturally Constructed Emotions,” 1–24.

5. I cannot provide definitive quantitative evidence of the popularity of these terms, but a Google Ngram of hibat tsion and hovevei tsion in Hebrew texts shows they first appeared in the late 1870s, with increased use until about 1900, and then a rapid decline, only to shoot up exponentially after 1930. In this article I am focusing primarily on the first period, when Jewish nationalists identified themselves in these terms, as opposed to the second, by which time hibat tsion had become a historical phenomenon and the object of commemorative writing.

6. On the power of eros among the immigrant youth of the Second Aliyah, see Boaz Neumann’s important monograph Land and Desire in Early Zionism.

7. Much of the literature on the history of emotions focuses on elite texts. William Reddy’s pioneering study The Navigation of Feeling draws largely on novels, life writing, and political and legal texts. Barbara Rosenwein, Generations of Feeling offers an in-depth examination of the conceptualization of emotion in the writings of the likes of Cicero, Augustine, Alcuin of York, Thomas Aquinas, Margery Kempe, Jean Gerson and Thomas Hobbes. Reaching out to a larger pool of subjects, Ute Frevert’s ongoing research aims to capture the emotions of the literate bourgeoisie in modern Europe. See her concise overview Emotions in History – Lost and Found and the fruits of her collaborative research project with eight other scholars: Emotional Lexicons. Frevert builds upon, but employs a more precise methodology and analytical framework than, the pioneering four-volume study by Peter Gay, The Bourgeois Experience: Victoria to Freud (especially v. II, The Tender Passion and v. III, The Cultivation of Hatred). Ingenious readings of elite texts in order to capture popular sensibility are offered by Freedman, “Peasant Anger in the Late Middle Ages,” and, mutatis mutandis, Rosenberg, “Reading Soldiers' Moods,” 714–40.

8. Seidman, The Marriage-Plot. The quotation from Seidman is on 32. See also Litvak, Haskalah: The Romantic Movement in Judaism, 136–45.

9. Mapu, The Love of Zion, 11–12.

10. Ibid., 27.

11. Ibid., 70.

12. Ibid., 84.

13. Ibid., 267.

14. Hess, Rome and Jerusalem, 43.

15. Ibid., 44.

16. Ibid., 86.

17. Ibid., 125.

18. Ibid., 141.

19. Ibid., 148.

20. Ibid., 157–59.

21. Ibid, 227.

22. Graetz, Tagebuch und Briefe, 7 (year-end entry for 1834/35).

23. Ibid., 70 (entry for May 27, 1839).

24. Ibid., 99 (entries for December 31, 1840 and January 3, 1841, 98–100).

25. Blutinger, “Writing For the Masses,” 55.

26. Ibid., 45.

27. Pyka, Jüdische Identität bei Heinrich Graetz, 234.

28. Reproduced in Pyka, Jüdische Identität, 251.

29. Blutinger, “Writing For the Masses,” 261.

30. Heinrich Graetz, “The Rejuvenation of the Jewish Race,” 148.

31. Heinrich Graetz, Geschichte der Juden vom Beginne, vi.

32. Graetz, Tagebuch und Briefe, 322.

33. Graetz, Volkstümliche Geschichte der Juden, 1.

34. In the twentieth century, these concepts from ancient and medieval Jewish civilization would become a staple of religious-Zionist thought. See Netta Cohen, “Jews and Climate Science in Palestine,” 15, 138.

35. Graetz, Volkstümliche Geschichte der Juden, 8.

36. Ibid., 11.

37. On the significance of Heine’s poem in modern European and Hebrew literature, see Jacobs, Strange Cocktail, 112.

38. Graetz, Volkstümliche Geschichte der Juden 13.

39. Ibid.

40. “When I saw the green fields, the budding trees in the Mikwei [sic] Israel, when I witnessed the delight that our young brethren took in their work and their anxiety to learn, when I reflect on the hope that the industrious Jews place on this colony and on the interest that it has awakened in Europe, I somewhat dread lest it should all end in nothing.” Graetz to Anglo-Jewish Association, October 25, 1872, Tagebuch und Briefe, 325.

41. Graetz to Pinsker, January 30, 1885, Tagebuch und Briefe, 403.

42. The Structure of Jewish History and Other Essays, 124.

43. Vital, Origins of Zionism, 111–24; and Yossi Golstein, “The Beginnings of Hibbat Zion,” 33–55.

44. Pinsker, “Auto-Emancipation.”

45. Karen Grumberg, Hebrew Gothic. Thanks to Professor Grumberg for allowing me to read the unpublished book manuscript.

46. Reproduced in Shumsky, Beyond the Nation-State, 45.

47. Quotations are taken from the English translation in Schoeps, Pioneers of Zionism, 122–25.

48. Lilienblum, “’Al tihiyat yisrael ‘al adamat avotav,” 69 and 31. See also his essay “Ha-regesh ve-ha-mitzvah be-‘inyan ha-yishuv,” 207–27, in which he juxtaposes the hovevei tsion’s vibrant “national feeling” with the allegedly cold instrumentalism of rabbinic Judaism, which views Eretz Israel primarily as a site for the performance of certain religious commandments.

49. Zipperstein, Elusive Prophet, 199–200.

50. Hacohen, “’Al harerei tsion,” 226–27.

51. The poem’s Hebrew text is available at https://benyehuda.org/bialik/bia001.html.

52. Barzel, Toldot ha-shirah ha-‘ivrit mi-hibat tsion ‘ad yameinu, 128.

53. Meshorerei hibat tsion, 6. My translation, with thanks to Yaron Peleg for assistance.

54. Hacohen, “’Al harerei tsion,” 233–42.

55. Meshorerei hibat tsion, 9–11. My translation, with thanks to Orit Rozin for assistance.

56. Cited in Lithman, The Man Who Wrote Hatikvah, 86.

57. Reproduced in Master of Hope, 334–35.

58. Bialik, “Birkat Ha-Am.”

59. Seroussi, “Hatikvah,” 9. See also Bloom, “Imber, His Poem, and a National Anthem,” 317–36.

60. Seroussi, “Hatikvah,” 14.

61. Thanks to James Loeffler for sharing with me his draft article manuscript, “When Hermann Cohen Cried.”

62. Hacohen, “Al harerei tsion,” 245–46.

63. Die Welt, March 1900, 26 (my translation).

64. On the history of the song and for links to several recordings of it, see Seroussi, “Dort Wo die Zeder.”

65. “Sehnsucht,” in Selbst-Emancipation! No. 18 (1885), 9 (my translation).

66. Penslar, “Between Honor and Authenticity,” 276–96.

67. Ela Bauer, “We Call Him Mister (Pan) Editor,” 85–104; and idem, Between Poles and Jews; and Shtiftel, Ha-megasher.

68. Die Welt 1912, Nr. 2, 43–45.

69. Sokolow, History of Zionism, I, 283, 309–11.

70. Nahum Sokolow, Hibbath Zion, 3.

71. Ibid.

72. Ibid., 13.

73. Ibid., XXVII.

74. Ibid., 339.

75. Ibid., XXIII–XXIV.

76. Ibid, XXIV, XXVI, 170.

77. Ibid, 163.

78. Ibid., 41.

79. Ibid., 179.

80. Ibid., 167.

81. Sokolow marveled at “the depth, tenderness, and sincerity of the love [Herzl] bore his nation, his passionate yearning for the achievement of the great object before him – these found expression in every word he uttered and every action he undertook. These noble sentiments, together with the magnetism of his personality, accounted for his tremendous influence over so large a section of modern Jewry. He sacrificed his whole being and all his possessions in furtherance of that ideal which he faithfully upheld … ” History of Zionism I, 264.

82. Ibid., 332.

83. Arendt, “Eichmann in Jerusalem,” 241–42.

84. Penslar, “Guilt and Gelt,” 69–77. I am preparing a scholarly article on this subject.

85. For an important exception, see Brian Porter’s astute and pioneering book When Nationalism Began to Hate.

86. For an important exception that integrates love into political emotion, see the work of Martha Nussbaum, e.g., Upheavals of Thought and Political Emotions.

87. See note 3 above.

88. William Reddy’s The Navigation of Feeling (Note 8 above) includes love in its analysis of the passions in 18^th- and 19^th-century France, but his concept of the emotional regime assumes that the group that constructs that regime is territorially delimited and has governing institutions (“a set of normative emotions and the official rituals, practices, and emotives that express and inculcate them; a necessary underpinning of any stable political regime.” [129]).

89. Anderson, Imagined Communities, 141. In 1984, Tina Turner released her chart-topping version of “What’s Love Got To Do With It?” written by Terry Britten and Graham Lyle.

Additional information

Notes on contributors

Derek Jonathan Penslar

Derek Jonathan Penslar is the William Lee Frost Professor of Jewish History at Harvard University. His most recent book is Theodor Herzl: The Charismatic Leader (2020).