Political Realities of Israel

To discuss Hirsch and Krochmal with regard to a modern Israel is to note that their intellectual work must be regarded as foundational. Much that is now presumed to be philosophically sound and generally accepted by Jewish tradition regarding the rationale for a Jewish homeland was by and large unthinkable in the early 19th century, when they were elaborating their views of Judaism. Indeed, neither Hirsch nor Krochmal can be discussed without special reference to the Emancipation, the name given to the laws that formally opened the Jewish ghettos throughout Europe in 1791, as an indirect consequence of the French Revolution.1 This did not bring a complete end to Jewish persecutions, and it was not until 1870 that the first Zionist settlement was made in Palestine at Petah Tiqwa.2 Nevertheless, by examining the views of Krochmal and Hirsch, and even while noting the antipathy toward Zionism either expressed or implied in their work, one may come closer to the philosophical underpinnings of Zionist culture in its earliest elabo

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sm is even more a metahistorical phenomenon, the importance of which lies in its spiritual content and in particular in the degree to which its followers enact the principles of its spiritual content. The subtext allows Hirsch to explain the Israelites' loss of the historical kingdom of David and Solomon, as well as the absence of a phenomenological presence of a state of Israel in subsequent periods. It was to become holy not by participating in the worldly activities of other nations, but by preaching the sanctity of humanity by the example of its own life. The Torah, the fulfillment of God's will, was to be its soil, its basis and its purpose. Israel's existence as a nation, therefore, was neither dependent upon, nor conditioned by transitory things, but eternal as the spirit, as the soul and as the Word of the Eternal.28 This is the central argument of The Nineteen Letters, combining a view of Judaism's spiritual essence with a view of the social and political position that the properly spiritual Jew holds, not only in Germany but also in the rest of the world. Nation building, on this view, not only is but also must be a function of spirituality, not the vicissitudes of nation-state politics and frontiers and boundaries. Ka
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Approximate Word count = 7061
Approximate Pages = 28 (250 words per page)

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