The first of these arguments was of particular significance because of the force with which it spoke to Jews in the liberal societies of the West, especially Germany and Austria. In Herzl’s The Ghetto and in his depiction of Viennese Jewish society in Altneuland, as in Max Nordau’s play Dr. Kohn, Jewish life in the open society is depicted as inherently tragic, not because of any physical threat but because its promise of social advancement is dependent on a renunciation of one’s Jewishness in a manner irreconcilable with the commitments of character. Such societies lay down what may seem to be reasonable rules regarding the pursuit of status, wealth, and power, but these rules conceal a hidden dilemma. For one can succeed in the game only by adapting himself to the tastes of gentile society, and this can be done only at the cost of disloyalty to one’s family and people. One might decide to change his name or outward appearance, another to adjust his opinions or his religion, yet another to avoid too close an association with other Jews—but it is all of a piece. Every such concession contains within it a capitulation in the same place where one’s forefathers stood firm at great cost, and therefore an element of betrayal. The selfsame act that for a gentile might be utterly innocent—the changing of a strange-sounding name, for example—is for the Jew a significant failure of character. Nor is it likely to be the last, as a Jew who finds himself willing to forgo his honor in this way when it seems socially advantageous may well find many additional ways in which to benefit from such lapses.¹⁹

The literature of Zionism is replete with treatments of precisely this sequence of considerations. Max Nordau, who had himself married a gentile and changed his own name (from Sudfeld) before being won over to the cause of the Jewish state, came to see the steadfast refusal to accept baptism or a change of name as a leading indication of character in a Jew. Thus the tragic hero of his Dr. Kohn is a young mathematician who has long since lost all affinity for Jewish customs and ideas, but who is nevertheless willing to give up his life—in the end he does so—rather than betray his people by changing his name to make himself more acceptable to German society. When a baptized Jew asks Kohn sarcastically whether he considers it an honor to wear such a name, he responds in anger:

It is striking that despite his alienation from the beliefs of his more traditional parents, Kohn nevertheless sees it as a point of honor to be known by a Jewish name; whereas the abandonment of this ancient token of Israelite priesthood at the instigation of German Christians is not only a dishonor but “self-mutilation”—the introduction of a permanent deformity into one’s character. As Kohn explains, this deformity starts from the decision to allow fear to dictate the degree of one’s loyalty to family and people, but its effects run much deeper. It ultimately breeds an endless bondage to this fear, which, having triumphed once, continues to dictate the course of one’s life forever. In revolting against such a prospect, Kohn describes life as a baptized Jew as the antithesis of the character he seeks for himself:

The Zionists sought relief from this dilemma in the creation of a Jewish society on a national scale, which, by virtue of its size and independence, would permit a Jew to pursue personal success in every field without having to break faith with his past. The Jewish state was to be the one arena in which the quest for advancement—whether in politics or business, scholarship or art—would be in full concordance with the demands of personal loyalty and character, since in such a society every success gained by the individual would by the same token bring honor upon one’s parents and one’s people. As Herzl wrote: “We, too, want to work for the improvement of conditions in the world. But we want to do it as Jews, not as persons of undefined identity…. We shall thereby regain our lost inner wholeness, and along with it a little character—our own character. Not a Marrano-like, borrowed, untruthful character, but our own. Only then shall we vie with all other righteous people in justice, charity, and high-mindedness; only then shall we be active on all fields of honor and try to advance in the arts and sciences.”²² Indeed, once liberated from the shackles imposed upon it by European society, Herzl believed that the Jewish spirit could become nothing short of magnificent:

This use of the image of the Maccabees was hardly restricted to Herzl. There was virtually no Zionist leader who did not, as one of them put it, “remember Mattathias the Priest, that national hero who turned his back in scorn and loathing on the Syrian officer, with his promises of life and wealth and glory, and sacrificed himself and his family for the honor of his people and his religion.”²⁴ In fact, Mattathias and the Maccabees were understood by Zionists as archetypes of the strong Jewish character they wished to resurrect—to the point that the holiday of Hanuka, celebrating the victory of the Maccabees, was adopted throughout Europe as an unofficial holiday of the Zionist movement.

Much of this adulation of the Maccabees was of course related to the hope that a restored Jewish character would return to the Jews their ability to defend themselves, which had been lost during centuries of dispersion. But there were other interpretations of what a restoration of Jewish character would mean. That of Ahad Ha’am is, I think, of particular significance today, and therefore worth considering more carefully. Among the great hebraist’s most famous essays is “Slavery in Freedom” (1891), in which he argues that the most pernicious form of servitude afflicting the Jews in the diaspora is what he calls their “intellectual slavery”—the tendency, especially of Western Jews, to reshape the ideas of Judaism so as to make them more acceptable to gentile society. For Ahad Ha’am, the Maccabees are indeed a symbol of maintaining one’s commitments under conditions of adversity, but it is principally intellectual commitments that concern him. After all, he writes, what moved Mattathias was the desire “that the Jews might be able to remain separate from the nations in their inner life,and develop in their own way as a distinct and individual people.”²⁵ The restoration of Jewish character, then, was to have its most significant impact on the ability of Jews to maintain their bearing in the face of duress in the realm of culture and ideas.

But what would a steadiness of the spirit look like in the realm of ideas? As suggested earlier, conditions of chronic weakness seldom permit the tempering of the spirit; instead, such conditions tend to give rise to a character that dissolves before a display of strength, or else to one that responds to superior power by swelling with a counterfeit sense of self-righteousness and self-importance. If we consider this matter, we can see that these twin aspects of a poor character have their rough equivalent in two familiar Jewish responses to the gentile civilization that surrounds us: First, that response which holds that there is little of real significance to be learned from the nations, and so finds endless reasons to avoid contact with non-Jews, their ideas, and their ways; and second, that which supposes the nations to be the source of virtually all good, and so finds endless reasons for avoiding any too-obvious identification with Jewish ideas and ways. Both of these approaches were endemic to Jewish life in Europe during the century prior to the establishment of Israel, and each did much to strengthen the hand of the other: The fear of resembling the Jews of the ghetto provided Jews seeking to integrate into general society with a potent motive for drawing away from all things Jewish; and the pronounced departure of Jews in general society from Jewish norms fueled the fear of inundation that characterized exclusionary Jewish society. By the middle of the nineteenth century these effects had become so extreme that rabbis in Germany were wearing white collars and observing the Sunday sabbath, while rabbis in Russia fought to prevent children from learning arithmetic.