Ambiguous Semantics - Dan Diner

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T H E J E W I S H Q U A R T E R L Y R E V I E W , Vol. 98, No. 1 (Winter 2008) 89–102

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Ambiguous Semantics:Reflections on Jewish Political Concepts

D A N D I N E R

T H E H IS T OR Y O F J E W I S H P O L I TI C S is a notoriously complex and

complicated issue insofar as it deals with a subject matter that is tradition-

ally thought to be external to the Jews as a Diaspora population. Although

diasporic populations are obviously familiar with the implementation of various forms and practices of influence, of persuasion, and intercession,

the core instruments of power, generally deriving from the ability to exer-

cise force or threaten its use, are seemingly alien to them. Power is, by

and large, the dubious privilege reserved to territorial entities—to states

and nations. In the past, during the high days of historicist thinking in

the nineteenth century, when states (and nations) were perceived as the

most exalted subjects in history, the existence of the Jews as a diasporic

population was—if at all—of interest only to Jews. Yet since that time, the modes of historical thinking have changed. And with this transforma-

tion, key concepts, methods, and subject matter have also changed. Its

formerly privileged subjects—state, power, and rule—have lost their pre-

dominance. After the dominant, even exclusive, importance of the state

declined in historical inquiry in favor of sociologically based inquiry, in-

terest in the Jewish experience grew; and this interest became more pro-

nounced when even softer concepts—the concepts of memory and

culture—advanced to the forefront of historical investigation.

Nonetheless, we still find that the state—and with it, power, domina- tion, and the threat and use of force—remains with us in the world. And

this brings us to the main question of modern Jewish political history.

Namely, how and to what extent can we conceive of a political history of

the Jews at all—if we understand the Jews as the ultimate diasporic

population beyond and above the nation-state? Can we apply the still

regnant concepts of politics and power to the Jewish experience? I ques-

tion such a presupposition and argue that it is very difficult, even pre-

sumptuous, to apply the conceptual apparatus of political history proper to the Jews.



90 JQR 98.1 (2008)

Resisting the political historical mode can be traced back to the time

of emancipation.1 The founding fathers of modern Jewish studies were

extremely cautious, overtly hesitant, indeed even to apply the term ‘‘his-

tory’’ to the Jews. Leopold Zunz and his contemporaries obviously pre-ferred the more traditional, neutral, and philologically oriented Wissenschaft

des Judentums—the German Jewish translation for the traditional enter-

prise of h . okhmat Yisra’el. He and others were intuitively aware of the fact

that ‘‘history’’ implied a secular reinterpretation of the world, and that

historical thinking as such accelerates the rate of profanation. This pro-

cess could endanger the eternal connotation of ‘Am Yisra’el (the Jewish

people) whose existence rests on sacred time and sacred law. History

with a capital ‘‘H’’ challenges Jews and Judaism twice: in its profaneunderstanding of the human condition and of human development; and

in its association with categories and concepts of power, state, territory,

and nationhood. In contrast to the core concepts of modern historical

inquiry and to the meaning of profane time and concrete place in modern

politics, Diaspora existence is highly related to sacred time.

What does this mean for modern Jewish politics and for Jewish politi-

cal action? In order to do justice to our object of interest—the Jewish

experience in this world—one has to acknowledge the limited value of

applying concepts drawn from territoriality and statist nationality. Insuch cases, the Jews as a fundamentally diasporic population would be

burdened with false expectations or even falsely blamed for massive devi-

ance or clear anomalies.

More dramatically than ever before, the disparity between the di-

asporic existence of Jews, on one hand, and the expectations placed on

Jews by the political semantics of nation, state and power, on the other

hand, was greatest in the most radical crisis faced by the Jews—the Sec-

ond World War and the Holocaust. In those days of profound eclipse,Jews were compelled to react to situations whose sheer extremity and

enormity dwarfed everything Jews had ever been called on to confront.

And this crisis dramatically exposed the grand and fundamental misjudg-

ment of transposing notions from the conceptual world of nationhood, of

territoriality, of physical power and the semantic fields related to it onto

the diasporic realities of the Jews.

Hannah Arendt, probably the most significant political thinker of the

cataclysmic twentieth century, calls attention to this development in hernotorious polemic on the Eichmann trial. As we know, she accuses the



AMBIGUOUS SEMANTICS—DINER 91

Jewish leadership in general and the Jewish Councils (the Judenrate) in

particular of collaboration and treason. However, what she accuses them

of is a despicable inactivity, a kind of complicity of nonaction. Moreover,

Arendt was pleased by the evidence given during the trial by activists of the militant Jewish resistance; persons, mostly, even exclusively, belong-

ing to the youth movements of different Jewish and Zionist parties.2 In

their rhetoric, Arendt notes the appearance of semantic elements associ-

ated with the conceptual arsenal of the nation, especially the repeated

emphasis on the taking of arms.

This interest in the rhetoric of a nation involved in armed struggle can

be traced to Arendt’s interventions as a political writer during the war.

In 1941, in an article in the German Jewish Aufbau published in New York, she enthusiastically supported the demand for the establishment of

a Jewish army.3 This article came in the wake (and vortex) of the Berg-

son group of Revisionist Zionist dissidents in the United States led by

Hillel Kook, whose spiritual and political leader, Vladimir Jabotinsky,

had put forward a similar idea in 1940. 4

Arendt’s political semantics concerning the Jewish experience requires

a closer reading insofar as she reveals in her writings that her perspective,

her epistemic vantage point in looking at the twentieth century, was

deeply affected by her Jewish awareness and her personal and politicalinvolvement in the fate of the Jews. It was the Jewish experience that

imposed on her the relevant questions for her future thought and writing:

namely, the question of emancipation and assimilation; the question of

human rights and minority experience; the crisis of the nation-state; anti-

Semitism and imperialism as originating in totalitarianism; the archipel-

ago of the camps; and last but not least, the destruction of the Jews. Here

she depicts herself as a person who believes in Jewish nationhood. In-

deed, in all of her writing on Jews and Jewish questions, Hannah Arendtdoes not hesitate to impose on the Jews the concept of a people, of a

Volk—while lamenting the lack of a collective awareness by Jews of

power, politics, and political action. That is the core of her argument in

support of a Jewish army to fight Hitler. Not only will it empower the

Jews; it will give them dignity and recognition. It will draw the Jews

closer to the requirements and obligations of collective responsibility. Her

2. Hannah Arendt, Eichmann in Jerusalem: A Report on the Banality of Evil (Lon-

don, 1963), 109.3. Hannah Arendt, ‘‘Die ju ¨ dische Armee—der Beginn einer ju ¨ dischen Poli-



92 JQR 98.1 (2008)

fundamental dictum that Jews have to react as Jews when attacked as

Jews positions her and her Jewish political thought in proto-Zionist

terms.5 Proto-Zionist insofar as she accepts the proposition of a Jewish

people in political terms, while rejecting the establishment of a Jewishstate and instead supports a Jewish homeland in a common framework

with the Arabs of Palestine—in her words, a so-called federal resolution

of the Jewish-Arab conflict.

Arendt’s critique of abstract universalism and her tendency toward a

position I have characterized here as proto-Zionist is the result of her

experience as a Jew in dark times. In the face of the spread of radical

nationalism with its exclusionary consequences, universally enshrined

human rights are an empty pledge, and not only in Arendt’s thinking. Without the protection of state power—i.e., of politically guaranteed citi-

zenship—one is exposed to the forces of inequity. In her bitter critique

of universal rights without proper defense, she liked to quote the most

dedicated conservative of opponents of the French Revolution, Edmund

Burke, who, as we know, ironically declared that he properly knows what

the rights of Englishmen are, but human rights? Of that concept he had

never heard before.

In her sarcastic critique of the concept of universal human rights,

Arendt heavily relies on her own experience as a stateless person inFrance.6 There she became bitterly acquainted with the increasingly com-

mon experience in interwar Europe, whereby states established after

World War I, composed by and large of ethnic and national minorities,

were determined to relinquish their obligations under the minority trea-

ties stipulated at the Paris Peace Conference in 1919. They were seeking

to purify their population as much as possible of those ethnic populations

which did not belong to the core nation. The logical result of such an

exercise would be the expulsion of myriads of human beings. Withoutcitizen rights, without any collective protection, without proper means of

livelihood, they would turn into human dust. Exposed and defenseless,

they were an easy target for petty harassment and organized state perse-

cution. Even America—the clear alternative to the Old Continent in

terms of political openness—would close its gates to immigrants in a

world of political strain and economic contraction. Instead of open doors,

immigration would be regulated by a rigid quota system; and Jews as

Jews—that is, as members of a national collective—were not accorded




any special privilege beyond citizenship in their time of greatest need.

The biting comments of Chaim Weizmann in the late 1930s that for Jews

the world has split in two—into countries eager to get rid of their Jews

and countries that did not want to take in the Jews—were indeed close to the mark.7

Hannah Arendt was drawn to this discourse. She was well informed

about the crumbling state of minority protection and engaged in Jewish

politics in the framework of the recently established World Jewish Con-

gress as the successor organization of the Comite des de le gations juives

at the Paris Peace Conference. Thus, supporting the idea of a Jewish

army was a logical conclusion of the national Jewish policy she pursued

in the 1930s in Europe.Hannah Arendt’s plea for a Jewish army, a claim put forward in the

Aufbau article from 1941 in the wake of the Nazi assault on the Soviet

Union, is, according to its modes of argument, still situated squarely in

the world of 1940. At that time, the European war was still perceived as

a struggle between conventional powers, of states and nations—and thus

continuous with traditional continental struggles over territory and he-

gemony. This war was not yet the Second World War in terms of its

form, scale, and the unlimited and indiscriminate execution of force and

violence. And it was not yet the war that the Nazis took advantage of inorder to implement their ‘‘Final Solution.’’ Even in a later article in the

Aufbau, published in 1942 and entitled ‘‘The Annihilation of the Jews,’’

Arendt was still not able to identify the particular details of this event. In

her understanding, the ongoing deportation of the Jews was an opening

to much greater atrocities, atrocities which would involve millions of

Dutch, French, Czechs, and others. She seemed intent on depicting the

fate of the Jews as something that was by no means exceptional.

That fitted well with her call to Jewish arms. This claim still belonged to a former world—a world in which stateless peoples, striving and strug-

gling for recognition and independence, formed separate armed units in

foreign armies in order to earn the right to participate in international

diplomatic forums as peace conferences and similar congresses. Here they

could be heard and perhaps achieve some of their national demands.

That, by the way, was the very intent of the different ‘‘legions’’ estab-

lished by national groups without a state in the framework of the armies

of great powers during World War I—such as Pilsudski’s Polish Legion, the notorious Czech legion, or even Jabotinsky’s Zion Mule Corps. This



94 JQR 98.1 (2008)

historical model, that is, the intent to participate in war in order to gain

respect by larger powers and obtain the privilege to participate in a clos-

ing peace conference, can be seen already in the involvement of the Pied-

mont expeditionary corps during the Crimean War in the mid-nineteenthcentury in support of the English and French war effort against Russia.

The Italian troops were dispatched there by Cavour.8 Interestingly, it was

precisely the Italian national project, the Risorgimento embarked on by

Mazzini, that served as the historical model on which Jabotinsky based

his vision.

Although Hannah Arendt enthusiastically embraced the idea of a Jew-

ish army not only to defend Jewish Palestine but to fight Hitler every-

where, her Jewish nationalism remained reluctant. She hesitates tosupport in full Jewish territoriality and, by consequence, a Jewish state.

And she seeks to avoid any unbounded Jewish national feelings. Her

intellectual reserve and emotional distance from Jewish national feelings

seems to have a much deeper meaning—one that relates to an unresolved

question of Jewish political thought and language. That question is: How

impregnated are the notions and concepts of Jewish political language by

the impact of the sacred? Arendt might have intuitively felt the dangers

involved in the transformation, the conversion of hidden sacred mean-

ings, into the world of the mundane. They could easily descend into therealm of political theology. Once there, they could prove completely inad-

equate or even dangerous, especially if applied to the realities of a di-

asporic population that lived for centuries beyond the requirements of a

political law.

This entanglement can be deciphered and uncovered by the rhetoric of

the famous exchange between Hannah Arendt and Gershon Sholem in

the wake of the Eichmann controversy. As we know, Sholem had blamed

Arendt for lack of ahavat yisra’el , love for Israel. Sholem, the foremostscholar of Jewish mysticism, who always claimed to be a nonbeliever,

introduced into the polemics a term heavily loaded with sacred connota-

tions. And what is much more important in this context, it was a term

obviously comprising a dual meaning. Traditionally, ahavat yisra’el meant

the adoration of God (by Israel). However, the term’s meaning was

changed under the weight of secularization, shifting from adoration of

the God of Israel to love of the people of Israel. Such a transformation

emptied the term of its original religious meaning. Instead it evoked a politico-theological understanding that Arendt intuitively rejected.

T f ti f t f t d t l b t i t ldl




meaning are part and parcel of the process of secularization and profana-

tion. And they are of significance for the emergence of the foundational

concepts of Western political thought that emerged in the early modern

period. Take, for instance, the meaning of the sovereign. Its transcenden- tal meaning was relocated from God in heaven to the people on earth.

In his 1922 essay for the commemorative volume for Max Weber enti-

tled ‘‘Political Theology,’’ the politically dubious, yet intellectually chal-

lenging legal scholar Carl Schmitt formulates the emblematic dictum that

all key concepts of modern legal and political theory were secularized

theological concepts.9 The theological concepts evoked are of course an-

chored in the Christian tradition. However, it is to ask how and in what

forms concepts of Jewish tradition were secularized and transformed into political concepts, and how they underwent a change in meaning as a

result of their full or even only partial secularization.

What would this mean for our inquiry into the modes and meanings of

political concepts and political language of the Jews, the language of po-

litical self-awareness, and the language of political action? How does this

language and its historical semantics relate to those common, secularized

concepts in the West that derive, for the most part, from Christian tradi-

tion? By transposing Western concepts rooted in the world of territorial-

ity, state, and nation to diasporic Jewish phenomena, real friction, evenirritation, may result. This kind of conceptual misapplication moves on

two levels of signification, separate in their meaning and yet intertwined

in political practice. One stratum reveals an authentic confusion in the

semantics of the meaning of the term nation in the era of emancipation.

The other stratum goes further and deeper. It points to shifts in concep-

tual and verbal signification of previously sacralized Jewish semantics

under the conditions of creeping secularization.

The first stratum of the term nation can easily be decoded, and this because of its character as an icon of common Jewish historical discourse,

although it is more politically inflated than properly understood. Here I

have in mind its meaning as denied to the Jews by the French Revolution

in the midst of their being granted civic equality.10 In the process of the

term’s radical transition from its former understanding as a premodern

estate into a modern body politic, this concept retained its ambiguous

9. Carl Schmitt, ‘‘Soziologie des Souveranitatsbegriffs und politische Theo-

logie,’’ in Hauptprobleme der Soziologie—Erinnerungsgabe fu r Max Weber, by G. vonSchulze-Gaevernitz et al. (Munich, 1923), 2:2–36.



96 JQR 98.1 (2008)

nature. One has to bear in mind that it belonged first and foremost to the

conceptual world of the ancien re gime, and thus signified above all corpo-

rate rights and privileges. Seen in this sense, the Revolution did not deny

the Jews qua natio something that was granted to others. Rather, workingunder the core principle of civic equality, it sought to curtail all corporate

privileges associated with estate—both of the Jews and others. The con-

cept of the nation in the French sense connoted, in that era of entangle-

ment, both the idea of the third estate and the idea of ‘‘nation’’ in the later

and modern sense of the word: that is, the all-embracing and yet particu-

lar body politic of belonging. True, in the political language of the Middle

Ages, the meaning of natio could well have embraced different compo-

nents of belonging. It could have meant genus, mores, lingua or leges—origin, common custom and practice, a common language, and a common

legal order.11 Consequently, it was not an unprecedented twist when, in

the early modern period, the former corporatist significance of the word

natio, evidently in use for a diasporic population as the Jews, was succes-

sively submerged by a concept of nation possessing increasingly more

powerful and pronounced ethno-political connotations.

What becomes obvious regarding the Jews is the three-fold meaning

of nation: first the traditional, seemingly sacred meaning of the Jewish

people as a religious nation, a nation under the sovereignty of God, ‘Am

Yisra’el ; second, the premodern corporate meaning of the Jews as natio;

and third, the more modern meaning of nation in the sense of ha-‘am

ha-yehudi , the Jewish people in an ethnic sense, analogous to emerging

nationalities (according to Central and East-Central European patterns)

and including the idea or possibility of statehood. In reality, all three

meanings are entangled in different contexts, and this according to the

various cultures, civilizations, and locations in which different Jewries

were historically embedded. Thus, the meaning of what may be under-stood by the term ‘‘Jewish people’’ is manifold. Ultimately, its use re-

quires cautious clarification, with close attention to rather specific

situations.

The second stratum of elucidating political terms in modern Jewish

history—the shift of traditional sacral Jewish semantics into an appar-

ently desacralized political language—is by far the more complex process.

Because of a lack of institutionalization, unification, and a common politi-

11. See Hans Dietrich Kahl, ‘‘Einige Beobachtungen zum Sprachgebrauch




cal language for and among Jews in the variety of diasporic settings, we

can identify an intertwining of sacred and secular meanings in the various

concepts and notions of the political. This occurs in the quite existential

sphere of political action which is at the core of our inquiry.Let me present a historical example, which brings us back to the most

radical crisis Jews ever experienced—World War II and the Holocaust.

This crisis dramatically exposed the limits of political concepts and politi-

cal language in general, and its Jewish variations in particular; it also

revealed the unavoidable misapprehension of the approaching reality.

I’ll proceed from a somewhat notorious quote from Ben-Gurion, which

was presented by Yoav Gelber with a certain polemic intention in an

article years ago entitled ‘‘Zionist Policy and the Fate of EuropeanJewry.’’12 Aside from its polemical content, this notorious remark by Ben-

Gurion has, as far as I know, not yet been interpreted with respect to its

deeper meaning.

On December 7, 1938, less than a month after the November 9 pogrom

in Germany, Ben-Gurion, speaking before Mapai (Labor Zionist) activ-

ists in Tel Aviv, commented on the British willingness to take in a larger

number of Jewish children from Germany. He said: ‘‘If I knew it was

possible to save all the children in Germany by taking them to England

and only half of the children by taking them to Erets Israel, I wouldchoose the second solution. For we must take into account not only the

lives of these children, but also the history of the people of Israel.’’

Pretty strong language by any criterion. And according to the wording

of this quote, it would seem that Ben-Gurion was prepared—for the sake

of the possible immigration of Jewish children to Palestine, and thus for

the future of the Zionist project—to leave just as large a group to their

horrendous fate in Nazi Europe. The fact that Ben-Gurion, by using the

language of saving and rescue, was apparently alluding to a prospectiveannihilation lends credence, at first glance, to Tuvia Friling’s conclusion

that Ben-Gurion was repeatedly writing and speaking in the 1930s about

the threat of the physical destruction of European Jewry.13 Given such

an apparent certainty on Ben-Gurion’s part regarding the coming de-

struction, his statement above seems scandalous, even despicable.

But let’s not simply look at this quote in its surface meaning. Rather,

it is instructive to explore more carefully the political semantics beneath

the surface and become better aware of its specific historical meaning.

12. Yoav Gelber, ‘‘Zionist Policy and the Fate of European Jewry,’’ 169–210.



98 JQR 98.1 (2008)

First, in the quote, a word appears which is of central importance: Ben-

Gurion speaks about rescue, of hatsala. The word hatsala, especially in

the context of the Second World War and the Holocaust, has assumed

the meaning of physical rescue from annihilation . All the measures taken by Jewish institutions and organizations relied on this discourse and its

core word. However, it is still questionable whether the term, in its origi-

nal meaning, really signified physical rescue from annihilation and death.

In 1938, the quote points to another possible interpretation and, indeed,

to a much more convincing reading. That is to say, despite the later Holo-

caust, which even the Nazis who later implemented it did not foresee and

conceptualize in 1938, something else was likely meant here: the word

hatsala, ‘rescue’, was saturated, infused and impregnated by a sacredmeaning. Of central concern was the preservation of the Jewish sense of

belonging of these children, their Judaism, in the sacralized and sacred

Land of Israel—and this in juxtaposition, even opposition, to the presup-

posed dangers of assimilation in a non-Jewish environment. When the

real Holocaust occurred (in contrast to the context in which Ben-Gurion

uttered this quote) such an assertion would of course appear highly prob-

lematic. Politically, it would mean placing on one side of the scales the

lives of many Jewish individuals and on the other side, the preservation

of a sacredly infused Jewish collectivity.The words hatsala and matsil do not stand in isolation. They belong

to a wider circle of notions possessing physical as well as metaphysical

connotations, such as concepts like ge’ula (redemption) or pidyon shvuyim

(liberation of captives) . Together they belong to a broader semantic field

deeply saturated by the sacred. In the tradition both of Scripture and

halakhah, the act of rescue by the matsil is an act of physical rescue. But

it is above all an act of preservation of God’s people by the Creator. Ben-

Gurion and his contemporaries, by transposing the concept of rescuefrom its pristine religious meaning onto the worldly meaning of political

action, were placing God’s sovereignty into human hands, effecting a shift

from ‘Am Yisra’el to ha-‘am ha-yehudi . However, this transformation was

not complete—indeed, it could not have been completed owing to the

diasporic existence of the Jews. The use of sacredly impregnated con-

cepts in a more mundane political rhetoric could only have blurred re-

ality.

It becomes apparent in the course of time how strongly political per-ception was determined by the sacred meaning of place, namely, the Land

f I l F B G i h tl i d it l




pushed Palestine beyond this world. When the German tanks were ap-

proaching Egypt in order to break through the British lines and to pro-

ceed through Palestine and the Fertile Crescent in the direction of the

Caucasus, the distinction between Palestine and other locations whereJews happened to dwell was invalidated. Rescue in a physical sense could

not be provided by Erets Israel as such.14 It too was under dire threat.

That it can appear this way in retrospect is due to an event that sprang

from historical accident. That is, the Yishuv was spared from destruction

thanks to a historical contingency, keenly diagnosed by Yaakov Zeruba-

vel at the world congress of the Poalei Zion-Left in January 1945.15 Ac-

cording to his words, the Jews of Palestine, of the Yishuv, were saved by

an accident which bore the name Montgomery and not by Zionism, asmost claimed. Historically, the reasons for this derive from the British

decision in the mid-1930s, so catastrophic in its consequences for Euro-

pean Jewry, to give preference to the empire over continental obligations.

The policy of putting ‘‘Empire First’’ was necessarily accompanied by

appeasement on the European continent. Thus, while Palestine, like the

fortress of Singapore (that surrendered to Japanese military success in

February 1942) was part of the British imperial defense perimeter, the

Jews of Europe, the Jews of the Continent, dwelt on the dark side of

strategic choices and preferences; they were in effect abandoned, left to the horrors of fate that bear the name of Hitler.

It is the resonant echoes of the sacred that surround Erets Israel with

the aura of rescue, of hatsala. In point of fact, hundreds of thousands of

Jews evacuated by the Soviets in 1941 or who had fled on their own to

Central Asia were rescued from the grips of the Nazi onslaught as well.

They were relatively out of danger either because of geography and/or

the military efforts of the Allies. But that rescue has a solely physical

meaning, detached from the rhetoric and site of the sacred. For that rea-son, they evaporated from the historical memory of the Jews.

After the war, when the remnants were counted and the dimension of

the genocide became evident, something unprecedented in history oc-

curred, something that, according to Hannah Arendt, should not have

14. Ilan Troen and Benjamin Pinkus, eds., Organizing Rescue: National JewishSolidarity in the Modern Period (London, 1992)

15. ‘‘Is it admissible to build everything on this catastrophe? And isn’t it pure

chance that we have survived in Palestine? Wasn’t Hitler at the gates of thecountry? . . . Hitler did not plan to annihilate only the diaspora, but Jewry, all



100 JQR 98.1 (2008)

happened, something that transcended politics and political concepts: a

peculiar form of collective recognition was accorded the Jews. I do not

refer here to the establishment of the state of Israel, based on the United

Nations Partition Resolution of November 1947, which did not relate to the diasporic Jewish people as such but rather to the settled Jewish

population living there. I refer rather to a unique transformation caused

by the very nature of the genocide: the transformation of heirless individ-

ual Jewish property into the ownership of a collective—the collective of

the Jewish people.

According to the traditional rules of international customs and law,

only states are entitled to indemnifications, retribution, and restitution.

But the Jews were not an internationally recognized body politic. They were citizens, if at all, of the states they dwelled in. Jewish lawyers and

specialists in international law, working since the late 1930s on Jewish

property claims against Nazi Germany, could only hinge their claims on

private law. When in 1942–43 it became more and more obvious that

an event was unfolding that prompted Raphael Lemkin to introduce the

neologism ‘‘genocide,’’ such claims evaporated.16 If all or nearly all Jews

of Europe fell victim to extermination, who could claim, after the cata-

strophic event, their lawful assets? Their property would lay heirless and

unclaimed in the countries in which the murdered legal owners had lived. Would it be right to allow those states to appropriate this heirless prop-

erty according to the law of the land? Would it be imaginable to leave the

stolen property to those who had committed the crimes or profited from

them? Or should a body be constructed to reclaim this property? But in

whose name should this property be reclaimed? The answer proposed

was in the name of the Jewish people. The transformation of private

property owned by Jews into collective Jewish property seems to have

been a logical consequence drawn out from the new reality of genocide.The persons and personalities dealing with these questions at the New

York–based Institute for Jewish Affairs were by and large familiar with

questions of collective Jewish politics. Most of them had participated

in discussions over minority rights at the League of Nations or acted

as Jewish representatives to the International Congress of National Mi-

norities, led by Leo Motzkin, who in the interwar period attempted to

establish something like a universally recognized Jewish citizenship.

Motzkin’s successor in the Jewish world was Nahum Goldmann, theJewish statesman without a state who founded the World Jewish Con-




gress. Goldmann was the person to make the claim about Jewish prop-

erty belonging to the collective diplomatically possible.

Two written statements were introduced in preparing for such a claim:

first, the book of Nehemia Robinson of the Institute for Jewish Affairs, published on behalf of the American Jewish Congress and the World

Jewish Congress with the title Indemnification and Reparations: Jewish As-

pects;17 second, a smaller booklet published in Tel Aviv by the former

leading German Zionist and senior German civil servant Siegfried Moses,

under the German title Die ju dischen Nachkriegsforderungen.18 Both accounts

were published in 1944 and focused on heirless property as the material

base for the construction of collective Jewish legal claims.

However, an analysis of these two calls for a collective Jewish body politic in the realm of restitution reveals some major differences. The

Zionist Siegfried Moses, who was in charge of implementing the Ha’av-

ara Transfer Agreement of 1933, and who later became the first Israeli

State Comptroller, tied the right of representing the Jewish collective to

the Jewish Agency, that is, the Executive of the World Zionist Organiza-

tion. By contrast, Nehemia Robinson sought the establishment of a new

agency that operated beyond national territorial boundaries. As we know,

a compromise was found between the diasporic and the Palestine-based

inclinations. In Holland and later in Luxemburg, where the agreement with the Federal Republic of Germany was signed in 1952, the Jewish

delegation was composed of two groups: the government of the State of

Israel and the Jewish Material Claims Conference against Germany.

The resolution of restitution claims was the last big question of Jewish

politics and diplomacy. It became a model for other ethnic groups and

minorities which claim restitution for injustices committed in the past.

The Jewish experience serves as a repository of knowledge and memory

for other diasporic populations—especially in a postmodern world where the core concepts of the territorial state and its homogenous ethnic com-

position are in continuous flux and even decline.

And what about Jewish history, especially the history of Jews and

Jewries in the cataclysmic twentieth century? Are we equipped with the

proper categories, notions, and concepts to understand and interpret the

diverse histories of a diasporic population whose fate was so dramatically

inscribed into modernity? Indeed, conceptual sharpness is imperative if

the great questions of the history of the Jews in the twentieth century



102 JQR 98.1 (2008)

are to find suitable historical description and analysis. That is true not

only for the historiography of the Holocaust but also for others spheres

in the history of the Jews—for instance, questions concerning the role

played by Jews in the Bolshevik Revolution or in the service of established communist regimes.19 Were these Jews acting as Jews? Can Jews

be blamed for crimes committed by others Jews? Is there collective re-

sponsibility along with collective rights? How far, if at all, does the politi-

cal meaning of a Jewish collectivity extend? Do the traditional, sacredly

inflected expectations by Jews of other Jews have any political validity?

Do concepts that spring from the arsenal of modern state-based political

theory have any validity for Jewries that are diasporic in nature? All

these questions remain open—and as such, call out for a history of Jewsin the twentieth century based on systematic clarification.

Ambiguous Semantics - Dan Diner

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