"The true liberalism of zionism": Horace Kallen, Jewish nationalism, and the limits of American pluralism

American Jewish History

Volumn 94, Issue 4, 2008, Pages 299-329

  Pianko, Noam ^a  

^a NONE

Author keywords

[No Author keywords available]

Indexed keywords

EID: 77952020235     PISSN: 01640178     EISSN: 10863141     Source Type: Journal    
DOI: 10.1353/ajh.0.0093     Document Type: Article

References (95)

1. Horace M. Kallen, "Democracy Versus the Melting-Pot: A Study of American Nationality," The Nation, Feb. 18 and 25, 1915, 190-94, 217-20
2. See Werner Sollors, Beyond Ethnicity: Consent and Descent in American Culture (New York: Oxford University Press, 1986), 183
3. Historian David Hollinger develops a parallel critique of Kallen as a progenitor of trends in ethnic studies that view membership as heavily based on biology rather than dynamic individual decisions. See Hollinger, Postethnic America: Beyond Multiculturalism (New York: Basic Books, 1995), 162
4. More recently, historian Jonathan Hansen has discussed Kallen's position among a group of liberal intellectuals debating pluralism during the early decades of the twentieth century. See Hansen, The Lost Promise of Patriotism: Debating American Identity, 1890-1920 (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2003)
5. A further discussion of Hansen's analysis of Kallen can be found below. Phillip Gleason highlighted the "racialist dimension" of Kallen's thought in his essay "American Identity and Americanization," in Concepts of Ethnicity, ed. William Peterson, Michael Novak, and Phillip Gleason (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1982), 101
6. John Higham, Send These to Me: Jews and Other Immigrants in Urban America (New York: Atheneum, 1975), 208
7. Even though Gleason refers to the "racialist dimension" of Kallen's thought, he also shares Higham's perspective that Kallen's cultural pluralism suffered for its lack of clear boundaries between various groups. "Kallen silently included assimilation in his theory," Gleason writes, "by postulating a degree of consensus adequate to assure cooperation and harmony among all elements in is contemplated federation of nationalities." See Gleason, Speaking of Diversity (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1992), 52
8. The standard account of Kallen's early intellectual biography and theoretical contributions accentuates his rapid acculturation and rejection of Judaism. For example, Moses Rischin writes of Kallen's break from the "oozing genteel pieties and a chill abstract Judaism as comfortless as the rigid ghetto Orthodoxy of his father." See Rischin, "The Jews and Pluralism: Toward an American Freedom Symphony," in Jewish Life in America: Historical Perspectives, ed. Gladys Rosen (New York: Ktav, 1978), 74
9. A parallel biographical account of Kallen appears in Sarah Schmidt, "Messianic Pragmatism: The Zionism of Horace M. Kallen," Judaism 25 (Spring 1976): 217-29
10. More recent accounts, such as the one presented by Daniel Greene, also emphasize Kallen's "hostile" feelings toward Judaism. See Greene, "A Chosen People in a Pluralist Nation: Horace Kallen and the Jewish-American Experience," Religion and American Culture 16 (Summer 2006): 165
11. William Toll's narrative is a notable exception to this trend. He makes clear that Kallen's rejection of his father's orthodoxy had little impact on his passion for Jewish life and close relationship with his family. See Toll, "Horace M. Kallen: Pluralism and American Jewish Identity," American Jewish History 85 (Mar. 1997): 61
12. Historians such as Naomi W. Cohen conclude that Kallen "dismissed the theories of Ahad Ha'am." See Cohen, American Jews and the Zionist Idea (New York: Ktav, 1975), 18, 220
13. The engrained assumption that Kallen and other American Jewish intellectuals dismissed Ahad Ha-am reflects a larger bias that this seminal cultural-Zionist thinker had little influence in American Jewish circles. Instead, Kallen's interest in Judaism and Zionism is attributed to his passionate immersion in American intellectual thought, which he imbibed in the classrooms of Harvard University, and that after rejecting the parochial practice of his father, Kallen rediscovered Judaism under the tutelage of his Harvard professors-philosopher George Santayana, religion theorist William James, and literary historian Barrett Wendell. John Higham writes that Wendell enabled Kallen to find his "own people enshrined within the self-image of New England's founding fathers." See Higham, Send These to Me, 72
14. A very similar claim was made in Kallen's obituary: "Barrett Wendell, professor of English literature at Harvard, showed how the Old Testament had affected the Puritan mind and traced the role of Hebraic tradition in the development of the American character." See New York Times, Feb. 17, 1974, 66
15. For a similar explanation of the American roots of Kallen's Zionism, see Rischin, "The Jews and Pluralism: Toward an American Freedom Symphony," 72
16. Based on this reading, Kallen's Judaism absorbed American ideals to reflect the highest aspirations of American intellectual and social currents. This narrative reflects two historiographical assumptions: the exceptional development of American political thought and Zionism's role as an ideological catalyst of integration. On Ahad Ha-am's influence on certain strains of American Zionist thought, Evyatar Friesel, "Ahad Ha-amism in American Zionist Thought," in Jacques Kornberg, At the Crossroads: Essays on Ahad Ha-am (Albany: SUNY Press, 1983), 133-41;. see footnote 31 below
17. Zimmern, "Theodor Herzl and the Jewish Renaissance," The Outlook, Sep. 23, 1905, 395-96
18. For further biographical information, specifically Kallen's involvement in the Zionist movement, see Sarah Schmidt, Horace M. Kallen: Prophet of American Zionism (Brooklyn: Carlson, 1995)
19. Schmidt, "The Zionist Conversion of Louis D. Brandeis," Jewish Social Studies 37 (Jan. 1975): 18-34
20. See also Modern Judaism 4 (May 1984), which features a special forum exploring Kallen's work
21. Although historian Phillip Gleason notes the large number of Jewish thinkers involved in debates about pluralism, he dismisses the significance as largely a matter of timing. See Gleason, "American Identity and Americanization," 108
22. David Hollinger has been one of the few American historians to take the Jewish identities of his subjects seriously. For example, see Hollinger, In the American Province: Studies in the History and Historiography of Ideas (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1985), 56-74
23. Morris R. Cohen and the Scientific Ideal (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1975), 19-43, 201-217
24. In his work on Kallen, however, Hollinger does not discuss Kallen's Jewishness or his writings on Jewish nationalism. See Hollinger, Postethnic America: Beyond Multiculturalism, 79-104
25. Recent articles by American Jewish historians have begun to bridge the historiographical gap between Kallen's contributions as a Jewish and American thinker. Daniel Greene considers the relationship between Kallen's "cultural pluralism" and notions of chosenness. See Greene, "A Chosen People in a Pluralist Nation," 161-94
26. William Toll helps situate Kallen's notion of descent within the American Zionist's personal Jewish journey. See Toll, "Horace M. Kallen: Pluralism and American Jewish Identity," 57-74
27. As I discuss below, my own approach to reading Kallen as directly engaging American political and social thought most closely follows Eric L. Goldstein's discussion in The Price of Whiteness: Jews, Race, and American Identity (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2006), 179-81
28. Hansen's The Lost Promise of Patriotism complicates, but in the end affirms, the well-established image of Kallen as representing one ideological pole of the descent-consent spectrum. Though Hansen does describe Kallen as the exemplar of a group of liberal intellectuals "determined to rescue American democracy from retrograde race theorists," he ultimately suggests that in continuing to rely on racial thinking and by regarding "cultural identity as indelible," Kallen gave credence to the racial schema as the primary criterion for delineating between groups. Based on this analysis, Hansen distinguishes Kallen from other "cosmopolitan patriots" who rejected ethnoracial identity for more voluntary, and universally oriented, concepts of group allegiance. Indeed, Kallen's refusal to repudiate racial thinking, Hansen concludes, reflects the pluralist's tendency to ignore "the war's evidence of the peril of compacts struck between cultural, or national, rivals." See Hansen, The Lost Promise of Patriotism, 92, 107
29. For a discussion of the changing discourse of race in the United States and, more specifically, its impact on American Jewish conceptions of identity, see Matthew Frye Jacobson, Whiteness of a Different Color: European Immigrants and the Alchemy of Race (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1999)
30. Goldstein, The Price of Whiteness
31. Madison Grant argued that although Jews successfully adopted the language of the "native American . . . they seldom adopt his religion or understand his ideals and while he is being elbowed out of his own home the American looks calmly abroad and urges on others the suicidal ethics which are exterminating his own race." See Grant, The Passing of the Great Race: Or, the Racial Basis of European History (New York: Charles Scribner's Sons, 1921), 91
32. See also Edward Alsworth Ross, The Old World in the New: The Significance of Past and Present Immigration to the American People (New York: The Century Co., 1914)
33. Kallen, Judaism at Bay: Essays toward the Adjustment of Judaism to Modernity (Binghamton, NY: Bloch Publishing, 1932), 79
34. Kallen, Individualism: An American Way of Life (New York: Liveright, Inc., 1933), 11
35. Ross, The Old World in the New, 165
36. This reality is quite different from the one often portrayed by historians of American multiculturalism. For example, Ronald Takaki claims that Jews represent an exception to immigrant patterns in American history because of their unique historical experiences prior to immigrating and the privileged position they achieved shortly after their arrival. See Takaki, A Different Mirror: A History of Multicultural America (Boston: Little, Brown and Company, 1993), 10
37. See Grant, Passing of the Great Race, vii, viii, 49
38. See Goldstein, Price of Whiteness, 179
39. This reading of the grandfather thesis is further supported by a more explicit rejection of the parent's direct role in passing along biologically determined attributes. A year after the publication of "Democracy Versus the Melting-Pot," Kallen insists: "We do not suck in Judaism with the mother's milk. We learn it in the Talmud Torah and the Sunday school, and if we don't like it we start a reformed sect or abandon it altogether." See Kallen, Judaism at Bay, 82
40. This quotation suggests that Kallen was moving from a biological to a dynamic cultural conception of Jewish identity. There is also an interesting gender subtext. Kallen himself explicitly supported the granting of full rights to women and saw the egalitarian direction of Reform Judaism as one of the movement's few redeeming characteristics. Yet, reference to identity passing through the grandfather, rather than mother, suggests that the male line (even removed by a generation) is more dominant in transmitting Jewish identity (directly challenging the Jewish law, which defines Jewish membership through the maternal line)
41. Twenty years later, a variation of Kallen's grandfather metaphor gained popularity thanks to the Norwegian American sociologist Marcus Hansen. "Hansen's Law" states that "what the son wishes to forget the grandson wishes to remember." See Marcus L. Hansen, "The Problem of the Third Generation Immigrant," Commentary 14 (Nov. 1952): 492-500
42. Handlin helped popularize Hansen's concept by publishing "The Problem of the Third Generation Immigrant" in Commentary magazine with his own introduction and explaining the relevance of Hansen's article to the Jewish case 14, 1952:492-500 (see citation above)
43. See also Nathan Glazer, "America's Ethnic Pattern: 'Melting Pot' or 'Nation of Nations'?" Commentary 15 (Apr. 1953): 401-08
44. Herberg discusses Hansen in. Protestant, Catholic, Jew: An Essay in American Religious Sociology,30, 1955 (repr. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1993)
45. Kallen, "The Meaning of Americanism" (1916), reprinted in Kallen, Culture and Democracy, 51. The article was originally published in The Immigrants in America Review 1 (Jan. 1916): 12-19
46. See Kallen, "The Ethics of Zionism," Maccabaean 11 (Aug. 1906): 61-71, as quoted in Goldstein, Price of Whiteness, 179
47. Kallen's shift away from a purely racial or biological approach to Jewish identity was already apparent in 1910, when he commented that whether the Jews have "racial unity is properly enough disputed." See Kallen, "Judaism, Hebraism, and Zionism" (1910), reprinted in Kallen, Judaism At Bay, 38
48. For example, see Kallen's 1923 essay on antisemitism at institutions such as Harvard in Judaism at Bay, 138-49
49. This is an implicit rejection of racial thinking about Jews. Kallen attempts to recast the source of antisemitism from biology to theology. A theological approach provides a strategy for contesting the claims of Christianity, rather than engaging the far more intractable claims of racial science
50. Kallen, The Structure of Lasting Peace (Boston: Marshall Jones Company, 1918), 34
51. See Hansen, The Lost Promise of Patriotism, 93
52. For an excellent analysis of Ahad Ha-am's life and thought, see Steven Zipperstein, Elusive Prophet: Ahad Ha-am and the Origins of Zionism (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1993)
53. Ahad Ha-am introduced the idea of "imitation" in an 1894 essay, "Imitation and Assimilation." An English translation can be found in Selected Essays by Ahad Ha-Am, ed. Leon Simon (Philadelphia: Jewish Publication Society of America, 1912), 111-12
54. The article distinguishes between a positive and negative expression of imitation. The later, "selfeffacing" imitation, seeks to copy the "spirit" and "personality" of the dominant nation. In the former model, "competitive" imitation, "the whole desire of the imitator is to reveal his own spirit or personality. He therefore endeavors to change the original impress, according as his personality or his position differs from that of his model." Kallen may have been convinced of the relevance of Ahad Ha-am's concept of imitation by Alfred Zimmern, who integrates the competitive model into his discussion of Ahad Ha-am and the importance of promoting national communities. See, for example, Zimmern, Nationality and Government with Other War-time Essays (New York: McBride and Company, 1918), 98
55. Kallen's debt to Ahad Ha-am is evident in his reference to the cultural Zionist's definition of nationality in 1921: "Each nationality, Ginsberg [sic] holds, is characterized by a spirit, an essence, a central spontaneity, which expresses itself in all the inverse forms of the national life: economic, social, political, religious, literary, and so on." See Kallen, Zionism and World Politics: A Study in History and Social Psychology (Garden City, NY: Doubleday, Page, and Company, 1921), 76
56. A few historians have documented the influence of Ahad Ha-am on certain strains of American Jewish thought. See Evyatar Friesel, "Ahad Ha-amism in American Zionist Thought," in Jacques Kornberg, At the Crossroads: Essays on Ahad Ha-am (Albany: SUNY Press, 1983), 133-41
57. Michael Meyer, "American Reform Judaism and Zionism: Early Efforts at Ideological Rapprochement," Studies in Zionism 7 (Spring 1983): 49-64
58. From the transcript of the speech Kallen delivered at the Third Menorah Convention, printed in the Menorah Journal 1 (Apr. 1915): 132
59. Menorah Journal 1, 1915,132, Ibid
60. Kallen, "The Meaning of Americanism," 51
61. Kallen's appreciation for the blurry line between the universal bonds of civic nationalism and racial conceptions of Americanization is evident in his rhetorical question at the start of "Democracy Versus the Melting-Pot": "If all that [the common interests of the Anglo-Saxon nations] is not ethnic nationality returned to consciousness, what is it?" Kallen, "Democracy Versus the Melting-Pot," 194
62. Kallen, Zionism and World Politics, 38
63. Kallen, "Zionism: Democracy or Prussianism?" The New Republic, Apr. 5, 1919, 311-13
64. Kallen echoed precisely the same argument about the compatibility of nationalism and liberalism in an essay in which he defines the "true liberalism of Zionism" as the movement's demand for the "the same freedom of development and expression as for the individual." See "Zionism and Liberalism" (1919), reprinted in Kallen, Judaism at Bay, 114
65. Steven B. Smith, Spinoza, Liberalism, and the Question of Jewish Identity (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1997), 26
66. Kallen's theory of nationalism challenged what would soon emerge within nationalism scholarship as a normative distinction between civic and ethnic typologies. While civic nationalism created a sense of collectivity based on the affirmation of shared principles, ethnic conceptions highlighted the nation's familial ties or links to a particular homeland. This distinction was not nearly as obvious to Kallen, however. Like other Jewish intellectuals, Kallen viewed the universalizing demands of civic nationalism as potentially as threatening as the particularist demands of the ethnic variety. Ironically, the man who would later be seen as developing this dichotomy, scholar Hans Kohn, was himself a Zionist, an advocate for internationalism, and a strong supporter of Kallen's implicit rejection of the ethnic-civic dichotomy. See my discussion of Kohn and his relationship to Kallen in Noam Pianko, Zionism and the Roads not Taken: Rawidowicz, Kaplan, and Kohn (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2010), chap. 5
67. Gary Gerstle, American Crucible: Race and Nation in the Twentieth Century (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2001), 5
68. See Charles Taylor, "Nationalism and Modernity," in The Morality of Nationalism, ed. Robert McKim and Jeff McMahan (New York: Oxford, 1997), 66-74
69. See Carole Fink, Defending the Rights of Others: The Great Powers, the Jews, and International Minority Protection, 1878-1938 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2004)
70. The State of Israel's first prime minister, David Ben-Gurion, reinforced the conflation of nation and state as a pillar of Zionist thought with his conception of "statism." For an in-depth discussion of Ben Gurion's use of this term, see Mitchell Cohen, Zion and the State (New York: Basil Blackwell, 1987), 201
71. See my effort to expand the scope of early twentieth century expressions of Zionism in Pianko, Zionism and the Roads not Taken
72. Why did Kallen introduce the term "cultural pluralism" as a replacement for nation of nationalities in 1924? Kallen's pre-1924 intervention into the terminological discussion of concepts of nationality reflects the unclear definitions of "nation" and "state" in this moment of rapid political development and transformation. The precise meaning of these terms remained open for debate, and therefore a great deal was at stake for those who could define, and thus shape, the lexicon of political organization and solidarity. By the mid-1920s, Kallen recognized the failure of internationalism and the victory of the nationstate model of nationalism. Given these developments, he realized that it had become far more difficult to construct a nonstatist definition of collective solidarity from within the discourse of nationalism. The term "cultural" (which he still understood through the liberal approach of Ahad Ha-am) would serve as an alternate vocabulary, distinct from national sovereignty, to define the permeable, dynamic, and nonterritorial boundaries of collective groups
73. Zimmern's letters to Kallen and some of Kallen's responses can be found in the Horace Kallen Papers (hereafter cited as Kallen Papers) at the Jacob Rader Marcus Center of the American Jewish Archives (AJA) in Cincinnati. I would like to thank Fred Krome of the AJA for his help in accessing this collection and Colin Harris of the Bodleian Library in Oxford, England, for his assistance in locating Zimmern's archival material
74. Alfred Eckhard Zimmern, The Greek Commonwealth (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1911). For a biographical account of Zimmern, see D. J. Markwell, "Sir Alfred Zimmern Revisited: Fifty Years On," Review of International Studies 12 (Oct. 1986): 279-92
75. For an overview of Zimmern's thought, see Paul Rich, "Reinventing Peace: David Davies, Alfred Zimmern and Liberal Internationalism in Interwar Britain," International Relations 16 (Apr. 2002): 117-33
76. Jeanne Morefield, Covenants without Swords: Idealist Liberalism and the Spirit of Empire (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2005)
77. Julia Stapleton, Political Intellectuals and Public Identities in Britain since 1850 (Manchester, England: Manchester University Press, 2001), 91-112
78. For over a decade following his return, Zimmern corresponded regularly with Kallen on issues ranging from international relations to Zionism and personal concerns. The Kallen-Zimmern correspondence can be found in box 32, file 20, of the Kallen Papers
79. Zimmern to Kallen, Oct. 3, 1913, box 32, file 20, Kallen Papers
80. Kallen, "Nationality and the Hyphenated American," Menorah Journal 1 (Apr. 1915): 79-86
81. Zimmern to Kallen, Oct. 3, 1913, box 32, file 20, Kallen Papers. Zimmern's use of "to us" suggests that he viewed Kallen as an ally in his efforts to identify nonstatist grounds of national cohesion as early as 1913
82. See, for instance, Michael Walzer, "Multiculturalism and the Politics of Difference," in Insider/Outsider: American Jews and Multiculturalism, ed. David Biale, Susannah Heschel and Michael Galchinsky (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1998), 88-100
83. Kallen's bifurcation of typologies of nationalism echoed the analysis introduced in the wartime writings of Zimmern and other Round Table members. Zimmern distinguished between two typologies of nationalism: the civilization and kultur paradigms. The former, represented by Great Britain and Zionism, recognized the reality and value of multiple national groups. Zimmern contrasted the vision of internationalism with the kultur nationalism of Germany. German nationalism demanded national conformity that married territory, citizenship, and the state. During the period in which the United States remained a neutral party in World War I, Kallen avoided highlighting the war's two main actors-Great Britain and Germany-in his own presentation of these ideas, focusing instead on Switzerland and the Austro-Hungarian Empire. Once the United States entered the war as an ally of Great Britain, however, Kallen directed his criticism more explicitly at the German kultur paradigm of nationalism
84. Kallen, The Structure of Lasting Peace, 73
85. Kallen also refers to Switzerland as an "exemplary paradigm of democracy" in "Democracy Versus the Melting-Pot," 220
86. C. A. Mitchell, review of Kallen, The Structure of Lasting Peace, in The Nation, Jun. 29, 1918, 629
87. J. R. M. Butler, Lord Lothian (Philip Kerr), 1882-1940 (London: Macmillan, 1960), 58
88. Quoted in Butler, Lord Lothian, 56
89. Perhaps the most well-known example of the appropriation of the term "civilization" as an adjective to describe Jewish nationalism is Mordecai M. Kaplan's seminal 1934 work, Judaism as a Civilization
90. Kaplan, who had also read Zimmern's essays in the Nationality and Government Collections, framed his concept of Jewish nationalism in opposition to national sovereignty, and referred to Judaism as a religion of internationalism. See Noam Pianko, "Reconstructing Judaism, Reconstructing America: The Sources and Functions of Kaplan's 'Civilization'," Jewish Social Studies 12 (Winter 2006): 39-55
91. Kallen, "Nationality and the Hyphenated American," 85
92. Kallen, "Zionism and the Struggle Towards Democracy," 379
93. Takaki's multicultural history of the United States provides an example of this phenomenon. Takaki reminds readers of "the unique history of Jewish immigrants, especially the initial advantages of many of them as literate and skilled" and notes that including the Jewish case "minimizes the virulence of racial prejudice rooted in American slavery." These comments underscore American Jewish exceptionalism in comparative studies of the experiences, relevance, and self-construction of minority communities. Jews' perceived position of privilege and racial integration have placed them on the boundaries of ethnic studies and the history of American pluralism. See Takaki, A Different Mirror, 10
94. Hollinger, Postethnic America, 19-50
95. Certain minority communities, such as African Americans, Native Americans, and Latino Americans share many of these qualities. However, the fundamental basis of their inclusion in ethnic studies is their perceived status as "racially" different