mbs: only in the most superficial sense. I'll defer to others more expert on the prominence of what you call the "chosen people myth" in Judaism, but it sounds like b.s. to me.
weren't the early Zionists appealing for membership to populations that the orthodox wanted to hold onto?
mbs: I doubt it. I think they were appealing to secularists like themselves.
I think you may be right in the last sentence, but still, didn't Zionism regard orthodoxy as old-hat and not up to addressing the threat of modern anti-Semitism?
mbs: perhaps, but so what?
As I recall, Herzl's turn towards Zionism came when, as a journalist, he covered the Dreyfus trial and concluded that founding a Jewish state was the only way. In other words, he, the orthodox, and, of course, the anti-Semites all shared a view of Jews as "a people"
mbs: they were a people. common language, religion, culture, geography. everything but a state. That doesn't establish any meaningful connection between zionism and traditional orthodoxy.
and he decided the only useful approach to the problems that implied was to ape the racial nationalism then prevalent in many bourgeois circles in Europe, particularly to the East.
Ironically, the eventual outcome of the Dreyfus Affair tended to vindicate modern democracy as a guarantor of human rights.
mbs: and I can imagine jews of that time saying in unison, thanks for nothing! that's what I would have said.
. . . Admittedly it took years, poor Captain D languished on Devil's Island for an unconsciounable period of time, and so forth, but he did survive, and was reinstated in the French army. The Dreyfus affair deserves re-examination in light of the current importance of patriarchal monotheist religious ideologies both in the US and elsewhere, e.g. Al Quaeda, etc. Christopher Rhoades Dÿkema
mbs: this has come up before. Present company excepted, the impulse to delineate a thread from the Old Testament to Herzl and Jabotinsky is ahistorical. It uproots political Zionism and Israel from history in favor of some primordial, retrograde line of thinking unique to The Jews.