Nietzsche and Zion

"Nietzsche's ideas were widely disseminated among and appropriated by the first Hebrew Zionist writers and leaders. It seems quite appropriate, then, that the first Zionist Congress was held in Basle, where Nietzsche spent several years as a professor of classical philology. This coincidence gains profound significance when we see Nietzsche's impact on the first Zionist leaders and writers in Europe as well as his presence in Palestine and, later, in the State of Israel."—from the IntroductionThe early Zionists were deeply concerned with the authenticity of the modern Jew qua person and with the content and direction of the reawakening Hebrew culture. Nietzsche too was propagating his highest ideal of a personal authenticity. Yet the affinities in their thought, and the formative impact of Nietzsche on the first leaders and writers of the Zionist movement, have attracted very little attention from intellectual historians. Indeed, the antisemitic uses to which Nietzsche's thought was turned after his death have led most commentators to assume the philosopher's antipathy to Jewish aspirations. Jacob Golomb proposes a Nietzsche whose sympathies overturn such preconceptions and details for the first time how Nietzsche's philosophy inspired Zionist leaders, ideologues, and writers to create a modern Hebrew culture. Golomb cites Ahad Ha'am, Micha Josef Berdichevski, Martin Buber, Theodor Herzl, Max Nordau, and Hillel Zeitlin as examples of Zionists who "dared to look into Nietzsche's abyss." This book tells us what they found.

Nietzsche and Zion presents an interpretation of Zionist thought showing that the impact of Nietzsche was far more complex than is generally acknowledged., Nietzsche's repudiation of anti-Semitism is well known. What has been less well appreciated, until now, is the extent to which founding proponents of Zionism incorporated Nietzschean motifs into their thinking. In this fine book, veteran Nietzsche scholar Golomb examines the presence of the German philosopher's ideas in the thinking of six early Zionists. Recommended. Upper-division undergraduate and above., The list of Zionist thinkers who were also Nietzscheans reads like a Who's Who of early Zionism. Golomb explains that the 'existential transfiguration' from 'the last Jew to the first Hebrew' (as Yosef Berdichevski put it) was in great measure influenced by Nietzsche's thought. Thus, Golomb reconstructs the Zionist narrative in opposition to the deconstruction of the new historians.

Jacob Golomb is Professor of Philosophy at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem. He is the author of Nietzsche's Enticing Psychology of Power and In Search of Authenticity. He is editor of Nietzsche and the Austrian Culture and coeditor of Nietzsche and Jewish Culture; Nietzsche, The Godfather of Fascism?; and Nietzsche and Depth Psychology. He also acts as the Editor of Philosophy at the Hebrew University Magnes Press and is director of the Center for Austrian Studies at that university.