Book contents
- When Politics Are Sacralized
- When Politics Are Sacralized
- Copyright page
- Contents
- Figures
- Maps
- Tables
- Contributors
- Preface and Acknowledgments
- 1 A Comparative Perspective on Religious Claims and Sacralized Politics
- Part I Israel
- 2 Religion and Nationalism in the Jewish and Zionist Context
- 3 Religious Claims and Nationalism in Zionism
- 4 On the Uses and Abuses of Tradition
- 5 The Relations between the Nationalization of Israel’s Politics and the Religionization of Its Military, 1948–2016
- 6 Sacralized Politics
- Part II India
- Part III Sri Lanka
- Part IV Serbia
- Part V Iran
- Part VI Saudi Arabia and Wahhabism
- Part VII Northern Ireland
- Part VIII Palestine
- Index
- References
2 - Religion and Nationalism in the Jewish and Zionist Context
from Part I - Israel
Published online by Cambridge University Press: 10 June 2021
Book contents
- When Politics Are Sacralized
- When Politics Are Sacralized
- Copyright page
- Contents
- Figures
- Maps
- Tables
- Contributors
- Preface and Acknowledgments
- 1 A Comparative Perspective on Religious Claims and Sacralized Politics
- Part I Israel
- 2 Religion and Nationalism in the Jewish and Zionist Context
- 3 Religious Claims and Nationalism in Zionism
- 4 On the Uses and Abuses of Tradition
- 5 The Relations between the Nationalization of Israel’s Politics and the Religionization of Its Military, 1948–2016
- 6 Sacralized Politics
- Part II India
- Part III Sri Lanka
- Part IV Serbia
- Part V Iran
- Part VI Saudi Arabia and Wahhabism
- Part VII Northern Ireland
- Part VIII Palestine
- Index
- References
Summary
This chapter explores the relationship between secularism, nationalism, and religion in relation to Zionism. It maintains the centrality of the political-theological aspect in defining and forming the Israeli state, insisting that it is the theological with its apocalyptic dimension that stands at the heart of the definition of Israel as a Jewish state. It argues that to discuss Jews and Zionism in the context of religion and nationalism means to integrate two different perspectives: first, the historical analysis of the Jewish existence as a “problem” for modern secularism. The second perspective is the one provided by Zionism as a project of Westernization of the Jews. Accordingly, it argues that the Zionist theological perspective is unique in its direct relation to Jewish-Christian messianic images and biblical images of Palestine. Thus, the Israeli case stands out due to the relationship between messianism (and its political interpretations) and nationalism. Consequently, the analysis of Zionist discourse reveals the colonial dimension inherent to the process of secularization in the West in general, and nationalization of the Jews in particular. It also tries to point out to options of decolonization to be found in religious terminology.
- Type
- Chapter
- Information
- When Politics are SacralizedComparative Perspectives on Religious Claims and Nationalism, pp. 33 - 53Publisher: Cambridge University PressPrint publication year: 2021
References
Abu El-Haj, Nadia. 2001. Facts on the Ground: Practice and Territorial Self-fashioning in Israeli Society. Chicago: University of Chicago Press.Google Scholar
Almog, Shmuel. 1998. “Religious Values in the Second Aliya.” In Zionism and Religion, edited by Almog, Shmuel, Reinhartz, Yehouda, and Shapira, Anita, 285–300. Hanover, MA: Brandeis University Press.Google Scholar
Anderson, Benedict. 1991. Imagined Communities: Reflections on the Origin and Spread of Nationalism. London: Verso.Google Scholar
Anidjar, Gil. 2007. Semites: Race, Religion, Literature. Stanford: Stanford University Press.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Asad, Talal. 1993. Genealogies of Religion: Disciplines and Reasons of Power in Christianity and Islam. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press.Google Scholar
Asad, Talal 2003. Formations of the Secular: Christianity, Islam, Modernity. Cultural Memory in the Present. Stanford: Stanford University Press.Google Scholar
Balibar, Etienne. 2004. We, the People of Europe: Reflections on Transnational Citizenship. Translated by James Swanson. Princeton: Princeton University Press.Google Scholar
Barnai, Jacob. 1995. Historiography and Nationhood: Trends in the Study of Eretz-Israel and Its Jewish Community, 634–1881 [in Hebrew]. Jerusalem: Magnes.Google Scholar
Bartal, Israel. 1984. Exile in the Holy Land [in Hebrew]. Jerusalem: Mossad Bialik and the Zionist Library.Google Scholar
Bar-Yosef, Etan. 2005. The Holy Land in English Culture, 1799–1917: Palestine and the Question of Orientalism. Oxford: Oxford University Press.Google Scholar
Batnizki, Leora. 2011. How Judaism Became a Religion. Princeton: Princeton University Press.Google Scholar
Bentwich, Norman, and Shaftesley, John M.. 1966. “Forerunners of Zionism in the Victorian Era.” In Remember the Days: Essays on Anglo-Jewish History Presented to Cecil Roth, edited by Shaftesley, John M., 207–39. London: The Jewish Historical Society of England.Google Scholar
Benvenisti, Meron. 2000. Sacred Landscapes: The Buried History of the Holy Land Since 1948. Berkeley: University of California Press.Google Scholar
Ben Yisrael, Hedvah. 2004. The Nation: Essays and Articles on Nationalism and Zionism [in Hebrew]. Beer Sheva: The Ben-Gurion Research Institute for the Study of Israel and the Ben-Gurion University Press.Google Scholar
Berger, Peter, ed. 1999. The Desecularization of the World: Resurgent Religion and World Politics. Washington, DC: William B. Eardmans Publishing.Google Scholar
Casanova, José. 1994. Public Religions in the Modern World. Chicago: University of Chicago Press.Google Scholar
Casanova, José 2006. “Rethinking Secularization: A Global Comparative Perspective.” The Hedgehog Review 8, no. 1–2: 7–22.Google Scholar
Casanova, José 2008. “The Problem of Religion and the Anxieties of European Secular Democracy.” In Religion and Democracy in Contemporary Europe, edited by Motzkin, Gabriel and Fischer, Yochi, 63–74. London: Alliance Publishing Trust.Google Scholar
Chatterjee, Partha. 1998. “Secularism and Tolerance.” In Secularism and Its Critics, edited by Bhargava, Rajeev, 345–79. New Delhi: Oxford University Press.Google Scholar
Don Yehiya, Eliezer. 1980. “Secularization, Negation and Integration of Elements of Traditional Judaism and Its Concepts in Socialist Zionism.” [In Hebrew.] Kivunim 7: 29–46.Google Scholar
Dubuisson, Daniel, and Sayers, William. 2007. The Western Construction of Religion. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press.Google Scholar
Friedman, Menachem. 1977. Society and Religion: The Non-Zionist Orthodox in Eretz-Israel, 1918–1936. Jerusalem: Yad Ben Zvi.Google Scholar
Gelber, Nathan Michael, and Koebler, Franz. 1956. The Vision Was There: A History of the British Movement for the Restoration of the Jews to Palestine. London: Lincolns-Prager.Google Scholar
Harrison, Peter. 1990. “Religion” and the Religions in the English Enlightenment. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.Google Scholar
Harrison, Peter 1998. The Bible, Protestantism and the Rise of Natural Science. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.Google Scholar
Hastings, Adrian. 1997. The Construction of Nationhood: Ethnicity, Religion and Nationalism. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.Google Scholar
Hertzberg, Arthur. 1968. The French Enlightenment and the Jews. New York: Columbia University Press.Google Scholar
Hill, Christopher. 1993. The English Bible and the Seventeenth-Century Revolutions. London: Allen Lane.Google Scholar
Hutchison, William R., and Lehmann, Helmut, eds. 1994. Many Are Chosen: Divine Election and Western Nationalism. Minneapolis: Fortress Press.Google Scholar
Ilany, Ofri. 2012. “From Divine Commandment to Political Act: The Eighteenth-Century Polemic on the Extermination of the Canaanites.” Journal of the History of Ideas 73, no. 3: 437–61.Google Scholar
King, Richard. 1999. Orientalism and Religion: Postcolonial Theory, India and “the Mystic East.” London: Routledge.Google Scholar
Lehmann, Hartmut. 1996. “The Germans as a Chosen People: Old Testament in German Nationalism.” In Religion und Religiosität in der Neuzeit: Historische Beiträge, edited by Lehmann, Hartmut, 205–58. Göttingen: Vandenhoeck und Ruprecht.Google Scholar
Lewis, Donald M. 2010. The Origins of Christian Zionism: Lord Shaftesbury and Evangelical Support for a Jewish Homeland. New York: Cambridge University Press.Google Scholar
Marrus, Michael. 1980. The Politics of Assimilation: The French Jewish Community at the Time of the Dreyfus Affair. Oxford: Clarendon Press.Google Scholar
Masuzawa, Tomoko. 2005. The Invention of World Religions: Or, How European Universalism Was Preserved in the Language of Pluralism. Chicago: University of Chicago Press.Google Scholar
Matar, Nabil I. 1987. “Milton and the Idea of the Restoration of the Jews.” Studies in English Literature 27, no. 1: 109–24.Google Scholar
Matar, Nabil I. 1989. “Protestantism, Zionism and Partisan Scholarship.” Journal of Palestine Studies 18, no. 4: 52–70.Google Scholar
McCutcheon, Russell T. 1997. Manufacturing Religion: The Discourse on Sui Generis Religion and the Politics of Nostalgia. Oxford: Oxford University Press.Google Scholar
Nandy, Ashis. 1995. “An Anti-secularist Manifesto.” India International Quarterly 22, no. 1: 35–64.Google Scholar
Nandy, Ashis 1998. “The Politics of Secularism and the Recovery of Religious Tolerance.” In Secularism and Its Critics, edited by Bhargava, Rajeev, 321–44. New Delhi: Oxford University Press.Google Scholar
Nelson, Eric. 2010. The Hebrew Republic: Jewish Sources and the Transformation of European Political Thought. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press.Google Scholar
Netanyahu, Benjamin. 1993. A Place among Nations: Israel and the World. New York: Bantam Books.Google Scholar
Oz-Slazberger, Fania. 2008. “The Political Thought of John Locke and the Significance of Political Hebraism: Then and Now.” In Political Hebraism: Judaic Sources in Early Modern Political Thought, edited by Schochet, Gordon, Oz-Salzberger, Fania, and Jones, Meirav, 231–56. Jerusalem: Shalem Press.Google Scholar
Pinson, Koppel S. 1934. Pietism as a Factor in the Rise of German Nationalism. New York: Columbia University Press.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Ravitzki, Avi. 1989. “Exile in the Holy Land: The Dilemma of Haredi Jewry.” Studies in Contemporary Jewry 5: 89–125.Google Scholar
Raz-Krakotzkin, Amnon. 2005. “Zionist Return to the West and the Mizrachi Jewish Perspective.” In Orientalism and the Jews, edited by Kalmar, Ivan and Pensler, Derek, 162–81. Waltham, MA: Brandeis University Press.Google Scholar
Raz-Krakotzkin, Amnon 2013. “Exile, History and the Nationalization of Jewish Memory: Some Reflections on the Zionist Notion of History and Return.” Journal of Levantine Studies 3, no. 2: 37–70.Google Scholar
Schechter, Ronald. 2003. Obstinate Hebrews: Representations of Jews in France 1715–1815. Berkeley: University of California Press.Google Scholar
Schechter, Solomon. 1908. “Safed in the Sixteenth Century: A City of Legalists and Mystics.” In Studies in Judaism, Second Series, edited by Schechter, Solomon, 202–85. Philadelphia: Jewish Publication Society of America.Google Scholar
Scholem, Gershom 1971. “Towards an Understanding of the Messianic Idea in Judaism.” In The Messianic Idea in Judaism and Other Essays on Jewish Spirituality, edited by Scholem, Gershom, 1–36. New York: Schocken Books.Google Scholar
Scholem, Gershom (1973) 2016. Sabbatai Ṣevi: The Mystical Messiah, 1626–1676. Translated by R. J. Zwi Werblowsky. Princeton: Princeton University Press.Google Scholar
Shapira, Anita. 1998. “The Religious Motifs of the Labor Movement.” In Zionism and Religion, edited by Almog, Shmuel, Reinhartz, Yehouda, and Shapira, Anita, 251–72. Hanover, MA: Brandeis University Press.Google Scholar
Sharif, Regina. 1983. Non-Jewish Zionism: Its Roots in Western History. London: Zed Books.Google Scholar
Shavit, Yaacov, and Eran, Mordechai. 2007. The Hebrew Bible Reborn: From Holy Scripture to the Book of Books. Translated by Chaya Naor. Berlin: De Gruyter.Google Scholar
Sheehan, Jonathan. 2005. The Enlightenment Bible. Princeton and Oxford: Princeton University Press.Google Scholar
Sheehan, Jonathan 2009. “Sacrifice before the Secular.” Representations 105, no. 1: 12–36.Google Scholar
Simon, Uriel. 1999. “The Place of the Bible in Israeli Society: From National Midrash to Existential Peshat.” Modern Judaism 19, no. 3: 217–39.Google Scholar
Smith, Anthony D. 2004. Chosen Peoples: Sacred Sources of National Identity. Oxford: Oxford University Press.Google Scholar
Smith, Jonathan Z. 1998. “Religion, Religions, Religious.” In Critical Terms for Religious Studies, edited by Taylor, Mark C., 269–84. Chicago: University of Chicago Press.Google Scholar
Stroumsa, Guy G. 2010. A New Science: The Discovery of Religion in the Age of Reason. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.Google Scholar
van der Veer, Peter, and Lehman, Helmut, eds. 1999. Nation and Religion: Perspectives on Europe and Asia. Princeton: Princeton University Press.Google Scholar
Weidner, Daniel. 2005. “Secularization, Scripture and the Theory of Reading: J. G. Herder and the Old Testament.” New German Critique 94: 169–93.Google Scholar
Werses, Shmuel. 1988. Haskalah and Sabbatianism: The Story of a Controversy [in Hebrew]. Jerusalem: Zalman Shazar Center for Jewish History.Google Scholar
Yelle, Robert A. 2013. The Language of Disenchantment: Protestant Literalism and Colonial Discourse in British India. New York: Oxford University Press.Google Scholar
- 5
- Cited by