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PARTISAN REVIEW
pronouncement, not an analysis at all. Jewish nationalism is distinct
from others not because it is very ancient-though ancient it assuredly
is, far, far older than any existing European polity, and far less oppor–
tunistic in its grounding. The European nation-state and its latter-day
imitators everywhere had as their motive a territorial consolidation of
language and ethnicity, often accompanied by ferocious animosity
toward rival territorial consolidations. Ethical visionariness had no part
in these national independence movements, which represented not ideas
but triumphalist clans.
Jewish nationalism-Zionism-is distinct because it is inextricably
bound with a coherent concept of the moral obligations of civilization:
land cannot mean land alone, land bare of civilized purpose, land bare
of law. No one can charge Deuteronomy with being a product of
nineteenth-century European nationalism, and it is Deuteronomy which
maps out the fusion of nation and law: "Judges and officers shalt thou
make thee in all thy gates....That which is altogether just shalt thou
follow, that thou mayest live, and inherit the land which the Lord thy
God giveth thee." Nor can Isaiah be charged with being a scion of the
nineteenth-century European nation-state when he speaks of Jerusalem
as "the city of righteousness" and reveals the soul of Jewish national–
ism: "Out of Zion shall go forth the Law, and the word of the Lord
from Jerusalem." Bare land is not the inheritance; the inheritance is land
ingrained with the idea of civilization.
Jewish nationalism is not another version of the nation-state as it
developed in Europe; it is the opposite. It is not merely the collectivity
of the clan; it is not a society organized solely for the sake of language,
soil, and rule. Language, soil, and rule may make a bare nation-state,
but they will not suffice to fashion a civilization. And if the term "civi–
lization" springs up again and again, it is because it is an aspect of holi–
ness, the humanly responding half of the Covenant; the collective
imagining of human justice.
Historically, there are a handful of nation-states that have in fact
striven to replicate the Jewish model, wherein sovereignty is allied to a
moral purpose. The United States in its Constitution, for instance, mind–
ful of Deuteronomy and Isaiah, "in order to form a more perfect
union," vows to "establish justice," out of which will flow "domestic
tranquility. "
But when land is stripped of principle, when heritage is reduced to
bare soil, when Jerusalem is laid low by the absence of Jewish primacy,
what follows? The Emperor Hadrian leveled Jerusalem and destroyed a
generation of sages and scholars, the guardians of Jewish principle; he
