The Jewish diaspora and Israel: belonging at distance?

The involvement of diasporas in the advent of modern nationalism is not a new phenomenon: already in the 19th century some diasporas wanted to ‘normalise’ their national existence by building a state of their own. However, with the growing globalisation trend in the 199'0s , especially in the areas of transportation and communication, Benedict Anderson put forward the idea of long‐distance nationalism (LDN), as a new way of linking diasporas and the national project and thus creating a more intense sense of belonging. LDN has been characterised by him as having two main features: its unaccountability which allows for intense political radicalism, and its instrumental function for strengthening ethnic identity in the diaspora and thus a sense of belonging. I will test those hypotheses in the case of the archetypal Jewish diaspora.     

Alliance of the Hebrews, 1863–1875: The diaspora roots of an ultra-Orthodox proto-Zionist utopia in Palestine

In 1873, Akiva Yosef Schlesinger (1837–1922), a young Hungarian rabbi who combined ultra-Orthodox militancy with Jewish nationalism, published a remarkable booklet in Jerusalem that anticipated features of later Zionist utopias. It derived its original inspiration not from the active messianism that drove other religious “forerunners of Zionism,” but rather from harsh critiques of Orthodox society and culture in Hungary. Only later were Messianism and the Holy Land grafted on to the remedies he proposed for the ills of Orthodox society in the diaspora. In Palestine, his vision expanded to encompass a utopian blueprint for a revitalized, authentic Jewish society and a vision of a Jewish state.