The Hebrew Nietzscheans

Promethean ardor, which propels all of modernity, found expression among European Jews as a desire to take control of their history and form it according to their own designs. The Zionist project grew out of the Haskalah, the Jewish Enlightenment movement of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, which was Jewish History’s first modern ideology. Zionism, as a modern national movement, sought to produce autonomous individuals who were not dependent on the favor of landowners and sultans, authentic people with a distinctive identity. One must differentiate between modernity and Enlightenment, the former being man’s attempt to construct himself as a creative subject, and the latter an adaptation of modern life to universal values. Correspondingly, Jews have always had their consciousness divided between the reality they knew and the ideals they imagined. In the minds of Jewish revolutionaries this caused a tension between the historically factual exiled Jewish people, and the politically desirable – Zionism. As the Jewish Promethean passion, Zionism represented a modern secular attempt to recreate the Jewish collective identity.

The torchbearers of the Promethean revolution were the Hebrew Nietzscheans. These were Eastern European Jewish intellectuals at the fin-de-siècle, who fused the interpretations of Nietzsche and Wellhausen together with a Jewish National vision. They refused to surrender to either historical or economic determinism and did not yield to the presumptions of modern anti-Semitism: Returning to Zion was for them a return to history, geography, and sociology. The return to history was a revolt against the passivity of exilic “Jewish time” and a resumption of their responsibility to dictate their own history. The return to geography was a revolt against the foreign place of exile and a homecoming to the simultaneously old and new space of the Mediterranean. The return to sociology meant a change in the old socioeconomic structure. More than anyone else, Friedrich Nietzsche was the philosopher who personified this rebellion and its need for a “new man.”

The first Hebrew essay on Nietzsche, “Nietzsche: An Introduction to the Theory of the Superman,” was written by David Neumark, a rabbi and philosopher, in 1894, and published in From East to West. Neumark was a decade younger than the Zionist theorist Ahad Ha-am with whom he had close ties.¹ He was among the first to join Herzl, and he participated in the First Zionist Congress.² In Berlin, Berdichevsky introduced Reuven Breinin to the group known as the Tzeírim (the young ones). He described Yehoshua Tahon as the Hebrew Hippolyte Taine, Mordechai Ehrenpreis as the Hebrew Georg Brandes, and David Neumark as the Hebrew Kant.³ They were joined by Mordechai Zeev Braude and Zvi Melter. This was a group of students who read Nietzsche enthusiastically and consequently wished to create a revolution in Hebrew literature through the Europeanization of Jewish culture. Breinin declared that the works of “Schopenhauer and Nietzsche are soul-confessions, histories of their spiritual lives,”⁴ and he claimed that Neumark “sought out the inner nucleus of things, their vital and succinct point.”⁵ Neumark sought to fashion what he called the “new Hebrew” in the image of the Nietzschean “Superman.” Reuben Brainin’s comment is relevant in this respect: “The future generation shall not be small and weak, beaten and sickly as is this dwarfish generation, rather shall a strong and mighty generation arise, a generation of giants, a generation which shall inculcate new physical strengths and new mental capacities which we never imagined, a generation of the ‘superman’.”⁶ Neumark was the first to render Übermensch (“Superman”) into the Hebrew, adam elyon (higher man). In this regard, it is interesting to note that the Kabbalistic book, the Zohar, refers to a concept of adam ilaha, which is virtually the same term.⁷

Neumark aptly described the Jewish people in the period of the “national resurrection” of Jewish identity at the turn of the century as a “dwarfish generation” that wanted the new Hebrews to rescue the “old Jews” from the deep crisis they experienced in the last two decades of the nineteenth century and the first two decades of the twentieth. In the same issue of East and West in which the first article on Nietzsche appeared, Berdichevsky first bore witness to the influence of the German thinker: “This new spirit seeks to create new concepts for man and make him a self-reliant being.”⁸ These “new concepts” captivated hundreds of young Jews who abandoned the world of the yeshivas in Eastern and Central Europe and molded a new cultural and national identity. The call for the Europeanization of Jewish culture sought to fuse a European style with Jewish values.

The “European” (not the “German”) Nietzsche held an attraction for the Jewish youths, who rebelled against traditional Judaism, against the oppressiveness of exilic history, against the passive mentality of the Jews and their preference for “books” over “life.” The Jewish people was depicted in the Hebrew literature of the time as an old and decrepit man opposed by defiant, rebellious youths. It is not surprising that Nietzsche’s criticism of the decadence, the sickness, the agedness of Europe and his call for a change of values, for a will-to-power and a renewal of vitality, entranced the young Jews, and many of them began to identify with “Hebraism” rather than “Judaism.” The literary scholar Avner Holtzman explains that the term “Hebraism” took on “the meaning of a new kind of Judaism, indigenous and vital, full of power and bravery, young and fresh, nurtured by the Jewish pre-exilic past, alien to the world of Torah and Halakha, and committed to the Hebrew language and the national revival.”⁹ The historian and the scholar of the Hebrew literature Joseph Klausner (1874–1958), who is well known from his books on the messianic idea, the history of the second temple, as well as Jesus, was a multifaceted character.¹⁰ He greatly influenced the revisionist circles and inspired the Zionist right. Sometimes Klausner used the pen name “Hebrew man.” For him, a “new Hebrew” was a person faithful to the Hebrew language and his Hebrew motherland: “Judaism for them is nothing but the Hebrew language and the land of Israel.”¹¹ At the same time, one should remember that the Hebrew national revival took various forms, and Zionism was only one of them.

Nietzschean concepts, as we have remarked, coined a lexicon that served a wide spectrum of ideologies. The question arises, then, as to how Nietzsche was read by disparate thinkers representing the main currents in Jewish nationalism and how they used him for their philosophical and political objectives. Which Nietzschean principles (the Will to power, the “Superman,” the transvaluation of values, the slave-and-master morality, or the revolt against history) did they choose to emphasize and which to ignore? What was there about the Nietzschean texts that invited so many diverse readings and exerted such influence on wide circles in modern Jewish nationalism? Part of the attraction no doubt lay in his poetical and aphoristic style that can be appreciated by almost all readers. Moreover, Nietzscheanism was radical in both style and content, its metaphorical and symbolic form of expression inviting a multiplicity of interpretations. The distinct aspects of his “philosophy of life” (Lebensphilosophie) – voluntarism, will, vitality, and myth – enabled thinkers who wished to break new ground or to blaze a new path to radicalize their positions.

Nietzsche’s Reception in Hebrew Culture

The themes that marked the rebellion of the “Young Hebrews” led by Berdichevsky and Ehrenpreis were adopted by the Hebrew poets Saul Tchernichovsky (1875–1943) and Zalman Schneur (1886–1959) and creatively reworked in their poetry. They, too, put “life” before “literature.” Their poems include many Nietzschean elements, particularly from his early period when Nietzsche took the Greek myths and the Dionysian paeans to vitality as the antithesis to the paralyzing historical culture of nineteenth-century Europe. Ahad Ha-am published only two of Tchenichovsky’s poems in Ha-shiloah; however, when Klausner took over the helm in 1903, Tchernichovsky began to regularly contribute poems imbued with the spirit of vitalism. His main goal was to find in Judaism parallels for the Greek heroes (“Songs of the Exiles,” “Facing the Sea”), such as Bar-Kochba.¹² “Facing Apollo’s Statue” (1899) is the most Nietzschean of his poems; in this respect, the motif “they bound him in the straps of phylacteries” recalls the stabbing of the bleeding Torah scroll by Berdichevsky’s hero in his unpublished novel The Leave Taker.

Tchernichovsky does not merely suggest “a new function for poetry, but also has a recommendation for a new model of man,” as the literary critic Yehudit Barel puts it.¹³ Kurzweil, who grapples with the dilemma of the “New Hebrew,” stranded with his Judaism but devoid of a living God, argues that “Nietzsche’s anti-Christian effect is now injected by Tchernichovsky into the enlightenment polemics of the Russian-Jewish writer, and great poet Yehuda Leib Gordon.”¹⁴ In this context, it is worth quoting Klausner, who felt that such Jewish enlightenment figurers as Lilienblum, Mendele, and Gordon sought to create a new synthesis between religion and life. But it was a life of intellect and knowledge in keeping with European bourgeois rationalism and liberalism. By contrast, the war against Jewish tradition in the work of Tchernichovsky, Berdichevsky, and Schneur was the war of the mythos against the logos – spirit and knowledge oppose life, and the demand for life implies renewal through mythical and mystical powers.

Zalman Schneur, who, in his poem “On the Banks of the Seine,” wrote that “God is dead, but man has not yet been resurrected,” might be considered the greatest Nietzschean among the Hebrew renaissance poets. As in the case of Berdichevsky and Techernichovsky, one also finds pagan rituals in Schneur’s work (“Hidden Tablets”) and the longing for beauty, in contrast to the culture of the priests and prophets: “What are you doing here, Creator of Beauty? You will never light a spark in the hearts of these shopkeepers.” Schneur’s poem “I Understand” is interesting in its approach to accepting the concept of the “Superman” in his poetry. “The fog cleared for me, and the ape rose up into a man.”¹⁵ In 1920, Yosef Chaim Brenner criticized Schneur’s “heroic” interpretation of Nietzsche, “as that of a militant journalist, who saw Nietzsche’s rear but not his face.”¹⁶ Does Schneur also see the “Superman” as a still unfulfilled promise? Regarding the attempts of Schneur and Tchernichovsky to rewrite Jewish history, the literary critic Menachem Brinker comments: “There can be no doubt that it was solely Nietzsche’s influence that radicalized the conflict between past and present to the point of rejecting the past in the name of the needs of the present. In turn, this rejection led to a rejection of the collective tradition in the name of the cultural and instinctive needs of the modern Jewish individual.”¹⁷

In Europe, the appearance of Nietzsche’s books was a powerful source of inspiration at a time when the universities were dominated by a positivism that left no room for intuition, emotion, or imagination. Nietzsche came as a breath of fresh air into an atmosphere dominated by pessimism, passivity, and a sense of inertia. His calls for “transvaluation” seeped through into visions of a new order. It is hardly surprising that his opponents saw him as a demonic figure, the agent of the devil, a pioneer of immorality and a symptom of degeneration, all of which was asserted in Max Nordau’s book Degeneration (1892), which was translated into Russian a year after it appeared.¹⁸

Nietzschean concepts provided an intellectual framework for psychological and aesthetic speculations current at the time. The duality of his Dionysian and the Apollonian characterizations in The Birth of Tragedy promoted opposition to positivism and utilitarianism. The Dionysian served as a symbol for religious, psychological, and aesthetic urges, becoming a window for the innermost needs of soul and spirit. Symbolists equated the spirit of music with Dionysus, unaware of the fact that Nietzsche had abandoned his admiration of Wagner. Thus Spoke Zarathustra also attracted the symbolists because of its poetic language, aphoristic style, and philosophical tone. The symbolists saw the book as a battle cry for individualism, scorning the masses and rejecting socialization. They saw the artist as the “Superman” – apolitical and asocial, opposing materialism, intellect, positivism, and optimism. For the symbolists, the artist’s duty was solely to his own feeling and vision.

The desire to create a new humanity was particularly evident in the German avant-garde. Artists blurred traditional distinctions between left and right, rational and mystical, truth and lies, good and evil; each artist painted his visions in a different political color. Why were artists attracted to Nietzsche? Like them, he saw the world as an artistic creation. “It is only as an aesthetic phenomenon that existence and the world are eternally justified.”¹⁹ The expressionist movement, which was founded in Dresden in 1905, drew its name from a concept that appears in Thus Spoke Zarathustra. Elsewhere, the “Superman” is described as a bridge cast over a ravine. In a letter, Schmidt-Rotluff tells his fellow expressionist painter, Nolde: “To draw together all the revolutionary and vibrant elements; this is what we mean by the word bridge.” For the avant-garde, Nietzsche symbolized the new antihistorical radicalism. As the expressionist manifesto put it: “We, the youth who bear the future, want to create for ourselves physical and spiritual freedom in place of the values of the old establishment generation.”²⁰ Although David Frishman (1859–1922) – writer and critic, aesthete, and translator – supported some of the ideals of the Hebrew revival movement, he rejected the Zionist movement, claiming that the Zionist idea was unworthy of realization. Thus Spoke Zarathustra was published in Hebrew for the first time in Frishman’s translation during the years 1909 to 1911, first in Reshafim and then separately in the collection of Frishman’s works. Frishman saw Nietzsche’s work as a late biblical book – a “Third Testament” after the Old and New Testaments. His understanding was not far removed from that of Nietzsche himself, though the Nietzschean Zarathustra was aimed as a rebellion against Judeo-Christian ethics in order to declare the birth of a new civilization. In Frishman’s translation, the dissonant book became overly harmonic and classical. Aesthetes such as Frishman, who sought to create the “new Hebrew” by placing him in opposition to the “Old Jew,” took as their inspiration Hebrew history as expressed in the Bible, rather than the Diaspora period.²¹

The first poem by poet, playwright, and translator Ya’kov Cohen (1881–1960) was published in Frishman’s journal, Ha-dor, in 1901. Cohen proposed to create the “new Hebrew” and sought to illustrate this idea in the collection of that name, which he edited in Warsaw in 1912. “The ‘New Hebrew’ will be the new human…. The appearance of the New Hebrew will surely be splendid as he walks upright on his forefathers’ land, the fresh, pure skies of the God of Renewal above his head; proud and tall he will walk, like the ancient Hebrew.”²² Brenner would later criticize Ya’akov Cohen’s Nietzschean pretensions in seeking to create the “New man,” writing, “Who is this “New Hebrew?” … Are they really fighting heroes? Is it really in distorted lines from Thus Spoke Zarathustra – we the few, we the geniuses, is this our force as we march to the future – can a war really be fought with such miserable weapons? … Can the Hebrew revolution really be generated under such slogans – to destroy the Diaspora and all that comes from it?” Cohen’s approach in his article “The Hebrew Revolution” (1912) supports modern Jewish nationalism as a renaissance, as the basis of all revival, its symbol and model, together with a return to the historical sources.

On the other hand, the organic nationalist perceptions of Johann Gottfried Herder had little impact on Zionism except for A. D. Gordon and Martin Buber. The Herderian vision did not appeal to Herzl because his worldview was liberal rather than organicist. In both concept and style, he and his followers were far removed from revolutionary or violent radicalism.²³ Herzl mentions Nietzsche only once in his writings, on June 28, 1895. Leo Frankel asked him, “so you are a disciple of Nietzsche?” and Herzl replied, “not at all. Nietzsche is a madman. But one can only govern aristocratically.”²⁴ However, Max Nordau does certainly refer to Nietzsche in his book Degeneration, published in Berlin in 1892. He continued the line of Herzl: “[Nietzsche] is obviously insane from birth, and his books bear on every page the imprint of insanity.”²⁵ More surprising is the fact that Chaim Weizmann expressed his admiration for Nietzsche and warmly recommended his work in a letter to his future wife.²⁶ Ernst Mueller, in the official world organ of the Zionist movement, and Gustav Witkovsky, in a German-Jewish Zionist journal, both referred to Nietzsche in clarifying fundamental issues in Zionism.²⁷

One of the most serious attempts in modern Hebrew literature to deal with Nietzschean problems was made by Yosef Chaim Brenner (1881–1921).²⁸ His heroes observe the meaninglessness of existence and their reflections are full of Nietzschean quotes and themes. In Mi-saviv La-nekuda (Around the Point), Abramson prefers insanity to suicide; Feuerman in Ba-horef (In Winter) expresses the choice as “Lose your mind or kill yourself; therefore choose death.” Yehezkel Hefetz asks in Shachol Ve-Kishalon (Bereavement and Failure): “Will he eventually find enough inner strength to uproot all this miserable hell within through redeeming nothingness?” Two literary characters can be found in Brenner’s stories who have a profound relationship to Nietzsche: Lapidot in Mi-kan U-mikan (From Here and There) is an artistic representation of A. D. Gordon and the ideal of labor Zionism that purifies; Uriel Davidovsky in Mi-saviv La-nekuda (Around the Point) is a portrait of Sander Baum, Brenner’s friend. Baum, Brenner, Hillel Zeitlin, and Uri Nisan Gnessin were the main core of the Nietzsche Circle in Homel at the turn of the century. Their common antireligious inspiration came from the god- slaying philosopher, whom Gnessin eulogized as follows: “The great fighter, who fought his generation, returned his soul to God.”²⁹ The history of this circle is an enlightening example of how each shade of opinion in the group drew its ideological justification from a Nietzschean theme.³⁰

Nietzsche’s influence was evident in the criticism and self-criticism of the Jewish writers and cultural critics in Eastern and Central Europe, both in the atheistic-critical sphere and in the religious sphere. Many of those who thought and wrote after the pogroms of 1881 were self-taught, eclectic, and unsystematic – “reproducing intellectuals,” to use the expression of the sociologist Edward Shields. They read Nietzsche in Russian or German in the intellectual climate of Russia at the turn of the century. To understand the spiritual background, one needs to recall that from the 1860s onward, the Russian intelligentsia had been characterized by extreme atheism. Comments such as “if God exists, then man is a slave” or “the yearning for destruction is also the creative yearning” anticipated similar remarks by Nietzsche. From Pushkin and Lermontov to Tolstoy and Dostoevsky, the main issue in Russian literature was the meaning and purpose of life. Harbingers of Nietzsche can also be found in Dostoevsky’s characters Kirilov and Raskolnikov. Yet it is Konstantin Leontiev (1831–1891) who is considered the quintessential “Russian Nietzsche,” because of his aesthetic and elitist approach, his scorn for democracy, and his amoral attitudes.³¹

Alongside the Russian variant of Nietzschean atheism, there also developed in fin-de-siècle Russia a “new religious consciousness.” Dmitri S. Merezhovsky adopted an apocalyptic interpretation of Christianity that included a Third Covenant or Third Coming. Influenced by the Nietzschean critique of traditional Christianity, Merezhovsky yearned for a new form of the religion that would encourage cultural and aesthetic creativity, individualism, and self-expression. Lev Shestov, a leading figure in the religious renaissance, was attracted for his part by Nietzsche’s “critique of intellect.” In his essay “The Good in the Teaching of Count Tolstoy and Nietzsche” (1900), he attacked philosophical idealism and rationalism.³² Critical of Tolstoy and his moralism, Shestov claimed that tragedy, evil, and suffering are inevitable. In his book Dostoevsky and Nietzsche: The Philosophy of Tragedy (1903), he argued that both thinkers had engaged in a similar attack on rationalism. In later essays, he claimed that there are no eternal truths, that good and evil are always present in humanity, and that the role of philosophy is not to reach a compromise but to stimulate a struggle for the impossible.

Jewish cultural critics wrote and philosophized against the backdrop of this general intellectual atmosphere in turn-of-the-century Eastern Europe, particularly Russia. Hillel Zeitlin (1877–1942) was profoundly influenced by Shestov’s thought. Following his reading, Zeitlin wrote: “If I was asked who is the reader successor of Friedrich Nietzsche, I would unhesitatingly answer: L. Shestov.”³³ Zeitlin, a Yiddish publicist with a tendency to mysticism derived from his Hasidic upbringing, moved to Homel and was sent by the town as a delegate to the Fifth Zionist Congress in 1901. His preference for the people of Israel over the Land of Israel led him to support the Uganda Plan, and four years later he published a comprehensive monograph on Nietzsche in Ha-zman. His work is not just another attempt to inform the Hebrew reader of Nietzsche’s theories (as Neumark had already done), but rather a conscious expression of attraction to his personality that seemed to him that of a great man who had undergone an “inner holy experience.” In 1919, Zeitlin published a further essay entitled “Superman or Supergod” in which he sought to repent his youthful follies by painting Nietzsche’s ideas in a religious and mystical light, remarking, “One should progress from the ‘Superman’ to the ‘Supergod.’”³⁴ In this context, the attraction of religious thinkers and students of Jewish theology to Nietzsche is fascinating. The interest of David Neumark, Hillel Zeitlin, Franz Rosenzweig, Emmanuel Levinas, Rabbi Avraham Yitzhak Hacohen Kook, Martin Buber, Gershom Scholem, and even the marginal case of Arieh Leib Weisfish, a rabbi of the ultraorthodox Jerusalem neighborhood Mea-Shearim, reflects the affinity between religious existential discourse and the father of modern secular existentialism.

Hasidism and the Kabbalah were two modern attempts to revitalize Judaism by renewing it through myth. Martin Buber and Gershom Scholem are each related to one of these historic phenomena, granting a central status to myth in their research. The revolutionary nature of their approach is reflected mainly in their critique of the assumption that saw Judaism as an essentially antimystical religion, resolved, as Gershom Scholem put it, to eliminate myth. Both scholars broke with tradition by perceiving myth as an innovative factor in traditional Judaism. Nietzsche exerted a significant influence in shaping the approach of Buber and Scholem to myth, rehabilitating it as a vital and creative element in all societies. It is instructive to read Scholem’s comments regarding Nietzsche’s influence on Buber: “Alongside his analysis of mysticism as a social factor in Judaism, Buber developed a no less keen interest in its mythical foundations which related to a change in appreciating the vital nature of myth. This change of assessment, common to many of Buber’s generation, was the result of Nietzsche’s influence.”³⁵ It is possible that Gershom Scholem may here be revealing something about himself. In his youth diaries Scholem wished to be a “Zarathustra for the Jews,” and on June 23, 1914, he wrote to a friend: “Sometimes I start to think that Friedrich Nietzsche is the only one in modern times who has said anything substantial about ethics.”³⁶ Scholem, too, assigned Nietzsche a central role in reevaluating myth. In this context, it should be noted that Scholem, together with the historians of religion Mircea Eliade and Henry Corban, participated in the “Eranos Circle,” which, inspired by the depth psychologist Carl Gustav Jung, stressed the centrality of myth in understanding religious and cultural phenomena.³⁷

Nietzsche’s well-known declaration about the “Death of God” does not contradict the religious dimension of his thought. Zarathustra itself is written in a biblical vein. Nietzsche, who sought to create “new tablets of the law,” placed Dionysus in opposition to Jesus, at the same time enthroning the “Superman.” The theologian Hans Galwitz, who combined Protestantism with Nietzscheanism, even asserted that the combative values of Nietzsche were the very heart of authentic Christianity. Gallwitz entitled his essay “Friedrich Nietzsche as an Educator for Christianity.” Albert Kalthoff (1850–1906) was an even more fervent advocate of the absorption of Nietzsche into the Protestant Church. Primitive Christianity and Nietzsche shared, he believed, the common radical urge of seeking to change all values.

In 1895, the young Martin Buber, like many of his generation, was no less excited by Nietzsche’s writings, even translating into Polish the first section of Thus Spoke Zarathustra.³⁸ Buber wrote: “This book did not influence me as a gift might but as an invasion which robbed me of my liberty and it was a long time before I could free myself from it.” Indeed, the importance of Nietzsche for Buber extends through his life, evidenced by his essay on “Nietzsche’s Theory of Man” [Gilyonot, 1937] and the chapter “Feuerbach and Nietzsche” in his Hebrew book, The Faces of Man.³⁹ Again, as with many of his generation, Buber’s enthusiasm for the First World War was due in part to his attraction for Nietzsche’s Lebensphliosophie. It should be remembered that together with Goethe’s Faust and the New Testament, Zarathustra became one of the most popular works in Germany during the war. In 1917, 40,000 copies of the book were sold. Ironically, Zarathustra took its place on the battlefield alongside the Bible, and thus the author of The Anti-Christ found himself once more side by side with the Holy Scriptures.

Buber, Scholem, and Shmuel Hugo Bergman were all members of the pacifist Palestinian Jewish organization Brit Shalom, which advocated a binational state. Bergman wrote a number of articles on Aaron David Gordon that show Nietzschean influences, the first of which was entitled “A. D. Gordon’s Polemic with Nietzsche.”⁴⁰ Gordon, the labor Zionist ideologue of the second Aliya, joined in the debate about Nietzsche that was taking place in Hebrew culture at the beginning of the twentieth century. In a letter to Brenner, he had ironically declared himself a member of the nation that invented the morality of slaves. In his article “Assessing Ourselves,” Gordon attacked Ahad Ha-am for neglecting to draw the logical conclusions from his debate with Berdichevsky. “Ahad Ha-am failed to finish what he had started; he moved over to the ‘morality of Judaism’ and ended up with ‘Torah from Zion.’” A. D. Gordon condemned those Hebrew writers who, “hypnotized by Europe,” wished to become like the others: “Berdichevsky comes along and confounds not Nietzsche’s position – far from it – but fathers his own. Instead of studying the way of Nietzsche the individual, instead of discovering new horizons, depth and light, he simply accepts Nietzsche’s theory, like all those who accept a theory from anyone who would give them one and with all his soul he becomes no more than an interpretation of Nietzsche’s ego.”⁴¹

A. D. Gordon believed that Nietzsche had above all set a personal example and had cast a new light on higher morality. To the extent that Gordon was influenced by the psychology and philosophy of the unconscious laid out by Jung and Henri Bergson, as well as by Kabbalistic or transcendental phenomena, he spoke as a mystic and not as psychologist. Gordon developed a new ethics that represented a transition from the Nietzschean “Superman” to the Gordonian version of the “Holy Man.” In his concept of the “religion of labor,” Gordon linked the creative man with this creation, and in his concept of the “man-nation” (a social extension of the notion of the “superholy man”) he linked the creative Jewish man with his human destiny.⁴² Gordon expanded his interpretation of the Nietzschean “Superman” into a Zionist social framework with a national and universal goal. Gordon had fled from the decadence of European bourgeois culture at the age of forty-seven to begin a new and creative life in the Land of Israel. He argued that the purely intellectual consciousness was sovereign only over an artificial culture, and that the old standards of bourgeois morality that Nietzsche was so eager to destroy had become bankrupt. Henceforth, man would be judged by a new standard: expansion or contraction. The “vital consciousness” is aware of the fact that man or society, especially in crisis, longs for the solution of authenticity – the desire to return to one’s own people, the wish to be at home with oneself. Gordon and Brenner both attempted to realize this conception, in a practical way, through pioneering activity in the Land of Israel.

Pioneers of the Second Aliya, in responding to Nietzsche, were mindful of the precarious nature of their own existence. Unlike the “young Hebrews” in fin-de-siècle Europe, A. D. Gordon felt, for example, that existence could not be based solely on “smashing the old Man,” because this was just a slogan and an escape from authenticity. Nietzsche would remain an important thinker for some Zionist socialists coping with the crisis of values in society, with the proper balance between individualism and collectivism within the kibbutz, and with the need for a theory of will. Nietzsche was studied intensively by members of the leftist movements Ha-shomer Ha-tzair and Gedud Ha-avoda (Labor Battalion). There was also a “Nietzsche Circle” that functioned within the literary societies of the kibbutzim even in the 1970s.⁴³

Significant Nietzschean themes can equally be found in Revisionist Zionism, including in the writings of its leader Ze’ev Jabotinsky, the nationalist poet Uri Zvi Greenberg, and the right-wing ideologue Israel Eldad. Nietzsche’s name crops up frequently in their discussions. In his autobiography, Jabotinsky noted the enormous influence exerted by European culture on himself and the “Hebrew Circle” in which he participated as a youth, and where “we used to debate Nietzsche and moral questions – not the future of Judaism.”⁴⁴ In 1899, Jabotinsky confessed his admiration for Maxim Gorky – “an echo of Nietzsche’s theory in Russian garb” – a theory that brought “glory to men of will and action and scorn for those enslaved by the sterile reflex which stunts any act of daring.” Jabotinsky recounted how a group of friends, gathered at a summer resort, had to choose ten books to be saved from a fire. One of the group said: “I confess that among the ten books to be saved from the fire there must be one written by a harbinger of the strong personality…. Therefore we should prefer Gorky.” The selection of the books served as the pretext for a discussion of forceful personalities. “We all indulge in dreams of a strong, dominant personality; we are all longing for its arrival on the stage of history … so that each individual can, on the new soil, develop into a bold personality.”⁴⁵ Needless to say, Nietzsche’s name was raised in the debate and accompanied the discussion of the strong personality.

Extensive evidence can be found in Jabotinsky’s writings of his deep affinity with Nietzsche’s innovative philosophy. In his article “On America,” he poses the question: “Who in our youth was the teacher and prophet of all the troublemakers, who carries the blame (or the credit) for all the fires now burning down the fences of our world?” He immediately answers his own question. “His name was Nietzsche. He emerged from the narrow straits not in terms of conscience and experience, but in the domain of morality, duty, good and evil.”⁴⁶ Elsewhere, Jabotinsky writes: “A long line of great thinkers and intellectuals paved the path away from the attitude that everything is ‘alright’ [Jabotinsky uses the English term] to the approach which now prevails, of wondering, experimenting, changing. This line includes such giants as Nietzsche, Ibsen and Bergson.”⁴⁷ There are just a few of the instances where Jabotinsky’s respect for Nietzsche is evident; the writings of the father of Revisionist Zionism include such obviously Nietzschean themes as the tension between power and morality, the centrality of ceremony and drama, the aesthetic experience of might, and the desire for a new man.

Another Nietzschean was Uri Zvi Greenberg, the great Hebrew poet, who immigrated to Palestine in 1924. Two years later, at the age of thirty, he published his book Ha-gavrut Ha-olah (The Rising Masculinity). In contrast to Great Fear and Moon and his early Yiddish poetry, in which he rejected his Judaism, The Rising Masculinity is a collection of existential poems praising Jewish values and symbols. “While there I turned my back on my earlocked Jewish brothers…. Here, from a distance, during the days of Hebrew purification on the land of this race and amidst the divinity of Jerusalem, here, by God, I shall not turn my back on my earlocked brothers.” Uri Zvi Greenberg despised Christian Europe and hated the Latin script. “What if I saw Nietzsche’s vision of the Superman in these letters?”⁴⁸ His poetry is saturated with the Nietzschean Lebenphilosophie, although unlike Berdichevsky and the “Young Hebrews,” who sought to Europeanize Jewish culture, in the case of Greenberg the central thrust is directed against European culture. Elsewhere, in his poem “Shir Ha-Ugavar” (Song of the Organist”) Greenberg’s yearning rises above mountains and lights, seeking to turn in Nietzschean fashion the Jew into the most elevated of beings.

Nietzsche’s name even became involved in the controversy that engulfed the Jewish community in Palestine following the murder of Lord Moyne, British minister of state in the Middle East, who was assassinated by Lehi activists on November 6, 1944. Five days later, at a meeting of the inner cabinet of the Zionist Executive, Eliyahu Golomb (1893–1945), chief Labor man and leader of the Jewish defense forces in Palestine, linked the assassination to the admiration felt by Lehi for the Nietzschean concept of the “Superman.”⁴⁹ It will be noted that the Nazi Holocaust was at that time going on in all its horror. He said, “Nazism and fascism – I still remember an article which appeared in praise of the Nazis saying that there was only one thing wrong with them, and that was that they were anti-Semites. In the journal The Last Front I saw something similar, not in connection with the Nazis but with a philosopher on whom the Nazis depend – the Stern group have become Nietzscheans…. They say, there is no such thing as the masses; the masses are a herd. There have to be ‘supermen’ who are able to impose their authority on this herd.”

The fate of the Hebrew Nietzscheneans in Hebrew culture had some parallels to that of Nietzsche in European thought – both became a public myth in the collective memory. This makes it easier to understand how Nietzsche and the Hebrew Nietzscheneans could have been adopted by diverse ideological camps who sought to create the “Superman” or the “new Hebrew” in their own image. The efficacy of Nietzsche was due mainly to his style, his radicalism: That is probably the key to his enormous influence on Hebrew writers, thinkers, and artists. In this sense, Nietzsche was an inveterate modern, because modernism is “more a search for style than any particular style.”⁵⁰ Most of the Hebrew Nietzscheneans eventually abandoned Nietzsche, just as one discards a ladder that is no longer needed. The literary critic, Fishel Lahover, relates that Berdichevsky was grateful to him for cleansing him of his “original sin with Nietzsche.”

A chronological and thematic examination of the influence exerted by Nietzsche, one of the major philosophers of modern times, on the emergence of Zionism may hold important lessons for grasping the pattern of its ideological development. In the history of the reception of Nietzsche in modern Hebrew culture, one may concentrate on fundamental debates: tradition versus innovation, particularism versus universalism, individualism versus collectivism and the “new Hebrew” versus the Jew. Such tensions accompanied modern Jewish nationalism from the outset and fuelled the development of myths which were often refined in the crucible of Nietzschean categories.

I now focus on three case studies of Hebrew Nietzscheans who exemplified the fascination of the Nietzschean motif from the end of the nineteenth century to the end of the twentieth. We will find a historical and thematic line of thought that placed the realization of the “new Hebrew” in the Canaanite space.

Berdichevsky: From the Last Jew to the First Hebrew

Nietzsche’s prominence as the philosopher of nihilism and of the Will to Power did not go unnoticed in the Hebrew cultural revival that was taking place in Europe at the turn of the century. This culture had evolved through the European form of Jewish national particularism. Like its European counterparts, Jewish national ideology drew on romantic tradition, attempting to restore the distant national past in order to legitimize a separate group identity. The emerging nationalism sought to justify itself through history. Ahad Ha-am was the most outstanding exponent of this historicist trend, which emphasized that past generations had served to pave the road toward national redemption and progress. Another dimension of western cultural influence on Ahad Ha-am’s Zionist thought was the humanistic nationalism of the mid-nineteenth century, which endeavored to integrate a sense of national destiny with the longing for universality. This romantic vision of a national brotherhood, each with its own unique mission, was shared by the nationalists Giuseppe Mazzini and Adam Mickiewicz. To Mazzini’s “Third Rome,” with its Messianic echoes, and Mickiewicz’s vision of Poland as “the Christ of Nations,” Ahad Ha-am added a higher sense of ethics as the universal destiny of Jewish nationalism.

Ahad Ha-am believed there was a direct line that led from the sages of Yavneh, nearly two thousand years earlier, to the modern Judaic concept of Israel’s role among the nations. In his article “Good Advice,” he developed the concept of “Jewish Nietzscheanism,” which, as Berdichevsky claims, was not revolutionary but rather another strata in Jewish evolution: “If, therefore, we agree that the purpose is the Superman, we must then also agree that an integral part of this purpose is the Supreme People: that there exists in the world one people that is enabled by spiritual characteristics to be more ethically developed than other peoples.”⁵¹ Ahad Ha-am sought to create a synthesis between the concept of the Superman and the moral singularity of the Jewish people, distinguishing between the “human” and the “Aryan” aspects of Nietzschean philosophy. The human aspect, which could be accepted, should call, as he put it, for “the ascendancy of a human type among the chosen of the species to be above the general level.” The Aryan aspect, which he rejected, was the belief in physical might and beauty. Possibly Ahad Ha-am’s Nietzschean language was used here as a polemic weapon. What is certain is that he did not share Nietzsche’s radical individualism and that he was skeptical about the Zionist vision of a “new man.” His approach was one in which individuals exist for the nation rather for themselves, something far removed from Nietzsche or the “new Hebrew Nietzscheans.”

Berdichevsky, like some other intellectuals, artists, and critics at the turn of the century, represented another trend, closer to Nietzsche’s existential philosophy. Berdichevsky had discovered Nietzsche for the first time during his studies in Berlin in 1893. In a letter to Shkapniuk written in the same year, Berdichevsky wrote: “This summer, I read much written by Friedrich Nietzsche, the man is creating such commotion throughout Europe. Perhaps you could obtain his book, Beyond Good and Evil, which has made a stronger impression on me than any other book I have read – He is now in a lunatic asylum.”⁵² During the next two years, which he spent in Switzerland, Berdichevsky saw himself as a pure Nietzschean, defining this concept according to the criteria of power and individualism. In a letter to a friend, he wrote: “As I believe you are aware, I am a Nietzschean … and know only might, power, power!”⁵³ During the years 1897 to 1899, he began to change his priorities, placing a greater emphasis on the historical Jewish collectivity rather than on the individual who sanctifies his liberty. Berdichevsky did not, however, completely abandon his German master: Witness the fact that when, in 1897, he translated Sefer Hahasidim, he gave it the title The Wanderer and His Shadow (Der Wanderer und sein Schatten, 1880) – the very same title as the second part of Nietzsche’s Human, All Too Human. Toward the end of his life, when he gathered together all his work, Berdichevsky was careful to remove the Nietzschean quotes and themes. In 1905 he wrote in his diary: “Nietzsche’s theories were not the starting point of my ideas, except insofar as I distance myself from tradition and pointed out the damage which traditional morality causes a nation per se; it was as though, on the path to transvaluation, I met him along the way.”⁵⁴

Like many of his contemporaries, Berdichevsky was exposed to the late-nineteenth-century European intellectual revolution that sought to reveal and unravel the experiences of modern human consciousness. Gustave Le Bon’s psychology of the masses, George Sorel’s sociology of myth, Henri Bergson’s philosophy of time, the rediscovery of Gambatista Vico’s theory of ricorso (renewal), and renewed interest in Edward von Hartman’s view of the unconscious were all part of this intellectual revolution. With its new sociological, psychological, and aesthetic concepts, this upheaval exercised an important influence on the emergence of radical national consciousness in the first decade of the twentieth century. Friedrich Nietzsche’s antihistorical revolt stood in the vanguard of this revolution. Historicism, romanticism, and liberal ideas of progress had emphasized throughout the nineteenth century a view of man determined by historical development. Nietzsche sought to introduce an original anthropological approach according to which the new man as an expression of existential nihilism is the product of eternal recurrence.⁵⁵

Ahad Ha-am and Berdichevsky represent two opposing traditions (Hegelian and Nietzschean) with respect to the concept of time in the historical culture of the nineteenth century. Ahad Ha-am followed Hegel in arguing that if time is infinitely open, then perpetual improvement is a viable concept; thus, the idea of progress is based on the assumption of improvement from the lowest point toward the highest. Berdichevsky, like Nietzsche, negated this value-based imposition on history, which he saw as being beyond good and evil. In his view, the idea of progress was a variation of the attempt to imbue a process with inner meaning; if the main point about the Will to Power is to overcome and to intensify, then the important thing is not completing the historical process, but engaging in it. Life understood as the Will to Power is the real and central need, or as Berdichevsky puts it, “a powerful life, a courageous life.”⁵⁶ Enlightenment and education are not goals in their own right, but subject to the authority of life itself.

The new Hebrew, following the European new man, offers an unmediated view of the modern world as an aesthetic experience that should be affirmed. Because reality is dynamic, the human being must not rest on his laurels. He must identify with the rhythm of the world, which is the Will to Power, with himself as subject. This radical existentialism adopted by Berdichevsky, in the footsteps of Nietzsche, contained a new form of individualist ethics that emphasized the relation of man to himself rather than to his fellow man.⁵⁷

Berdichevsky’s voluntarist, revolutionary conception of the past was critical of the approach taken by the “science of Judaism” as represented by the German Jewish historians Leopold Zunz and Zachariah Frankel. He respected, however, Abraham Geiger, “who with all his great and tempestuous spirit would have desired to renew Israel in the present, rather than making do with its life in the past as did Zunz and his faction.” Within his dynamic conception of the present, Berdichevsky, following Nietzsche, abandoned the guiding hand of historicism, romanticism, enlightenment, and progress. Instead, he preferred the dimension of the actual present, the existential experience as such, over historical understanding.

During his stay in Weimar, Berdichevsky visited Nietzsche’s home several times. In this twilight period of the father of the Will to Power, Nietzsche’s sister forbade visitors to come to their home. In a letter from 1898 to Yosef Melnik, Berdichevsky writes, “There, at the periphery, live Nietzsche and his sister. The guilt of this great man will always be with me.” His son, Emanuel Ben-Gurion, writes in his memoirs, Reshut Ha-yahid (The Private Domain):

Out of this kind of existential experience, the new man emerged: He is not motivated by rational assumptions and abandons accepted ethical distinctions of good and evil. The rebel against history identifies with a world that is the fruit of his own labor, and he thereby becomes authentic rather than decadent. Indeed, one of the main characteristics of the new man is the quest for authenticity – a search that was common to philosophers at the turn of the century. Authenticity was a response to the alienation that existed between the individual and his world. Berdichevsky bemoans the fact that “there is nothing that unites us in all the corners of our souls, in our characteristics. There is no total or perfect unity.”⁵⁹ Turn-of-the-century modernism cultivated the personal style of the new man, basing itself on the Nietzschean theory of perspectivism, which argued that there are no facts, only interpretations.

Berdichevsky continued in the steps of Nietzsche when he wrote “There is no single currency, no single class and no single horizon. We do not face two paths, but hundreds of paths; not one way of living, but hundreds of ways.”⁶⁰ Berdichevsky, however, also misunderstood Nietzsche when he wrote in a naturalistic language, “Return to Nature, return to your Mother, to all that is alive and note that precisely as you drew nearest to Nature, to the sanctuary, you are as tall and broad as they are.”⁶¹ Nietzsche did not in fact advocate the destruction of culture and a return to a natural or primitive state. Rather he sought to eliminate the dichotomy between intellect and life. Intellect must become nature and nature must be shaped by the new man. Transvaluation is one of the merits of the new man. In 1882, Nietzsche wrote to Loui Andreas Salome: “First, man must liberate himself from chains and lastly he must also liberate himself from this liberation.” Berdichevsky’s “new Hebrew” is also marked by transvaluation and self-legislation: “A man gives himself commandments and treads his own path.”⁶²

In common with the Nietzschean critics of culture at the turn of the century, who sought to transform Zarathustra into a political militant, Berdichevsky faced the problem of translating an esoteric philosophy into sociological language. How could a link be forged between the individual and a revolutionary movement? This is the classic problem of intellectuals who wished to shape a new man – in the final analysis, they coalesced with militant avant-garde groups and with elite movements that remained aloof from the masses. Berdichevsky’s “new Hebrew” eventually joined those who, like him, fomented revolution. “Days of change are coming for the nation and the individual when they shall weary from carrying their arid burden and gather strength with which to shake the foundations of their heritage and create new values, according to which a man shall feel himself to be a new creation with a new soul; man must wake from his slumber and abrogate those things which he was hitherto careful to maintain.”⁶³

The tradition of heroism in nineteenth-century European culture, celebrated by Thomas Carlyle, prepared the hero to represent a new type of human nurtured by national movements at the beginning of the twentieth century.⁶⁴ Berdichevsky saw the individual as a partner in this movement for renewal, realizing the fundamental principle of nationalism and symbolizing the new society to be established on the ruins of the old. At the turn of the century, many intellectuals and artists had already turned their backs on conservative nationalism, which relied on the tradition of generations, privilege, and rank. They constructed instead a revolutionary nationalism based on the present, on action, and on the primacy of the individual. Similarly, Berdichevsky developed a secular existentialism that entailed a new perception of nationalism, emphasizing the individual rather than the community, the present rather than the past, and aesthetics rather than ethics.

In his dissertation, “On the Relationship between Ethics and Aesthetics,” written when he was thirty, Berdichevsky notes: “We have become accustomed to thinking of action in the context of ethics, whereas in the context of aesthetics we think only in terms of observation or passive action.”⁶⁵ The old ethical norm of “substance” and “content” makes way for a new aesthetic principle of “manner” and “form.” In this sense, Berdichevsky adapted the Nietzschean existentialist concept of the Will to Power for his own purposes. Macht (power) became Kraft (force). Thus Berdichevsky joined a long line of culture critics who, at the turn of the century, used Nietzsche freely, drawing on him for their own nationalist purposes. Berdichevsky writes, “There comes a time for an individual and for a people, to live by the sword, by power and by the fist, by the vitality of being. This is the time of existence, of life – life itself. The sword is not a concept divorced from life or separate from it; it is the incarnation of life in its vitality and essence.”⁶⁶

The new man is alienated from historical culture and does not see himself as part of it. In Berdichevsky’s words: “The living man takes precedence over the heritage of his forefathers.”⁶⁷ If progress that is the outcome of the rationalist ideals falls, then myth rises. Myth, the fruit of existentialist perception, regulates the correct relationship between man and his world, between ethics and aesthetics, between the transient and the eternal. The new discourse has moved from the intellectual and historicist dimensions to that of the mythical and the aesthetic. Myth is preferred to paralyzing history, because it encapsulates the unity of modern man and his world in an aesthetic and existential experience. This modernism was the result of early-twentieth-century thought that made a revolutionary use of myth.⁶⁸ The “new Hebrew” builds his modern world not through belief in progress (a kind of Jewish “evolutionism”), but rather through a new myth. Berdichevsky sought to renew myth, to revolt against Ahad Ha-am’s historicism, in order to achieve a revitalization of Jewish history. This explains why Berdichevsky devotes so much space in his work to Jewish mysticism – the Kabbala and Hasidism – as original syntheses of myth and Judaism. Ahad Ha-am, by contrast, represented the traditional conception defined by Gershom Scholem as “the general trend of classic Jewish tradition: the trend towards the destruction of the myth as the central spiritual force.”⁶⁹

As the anthropologist Yonina Talmon pointed out, mythical time is essentially different from historical time.⁷⁰ Shmuel Verses demonstrated this very well when he distinguished between psychological and chronological time in Berdichevsky’s writings. To these distinctions, I would add that there is a dialectical connection between mythic time and historic time, and that each “time” designs the other in its own image. Time in myth tends to legitimize and preserve, whereas historical time tends to innovate in keeping with current changes, although, in order to do so, it necessitates the rewriting of time mythically. In many cultures, whether they include historiography or not, one may discern the events of the past, whether these are relevant to the present or not. As far as the living are concerned, there is no value in preserving tales of events that have no significance for the present in the collective consciousness. It is the myths that are important, not history. To quote Nietzsche: “Without myths, history loses its natural and healthy creative force. Only when the cultural horizon is comprised of myths does the process of cultural creation reach internal consolidation.”⁷¹

In the case of Berdichevsky, the mythological-synchronic past and the historical-diachronic past merge dialectically. The mythological past that Berdichevsky reveals, as a critic of culture, is intended to empower modern history – the period of the Hebrew renaissance – through the heroic myths of the past: “The people’s heroes from past ages and their deeds, will serve as a symbol and a source of power for the generation to come, wherever they go and whatever they may have to overcome. The main thing is not simply to know one’s origin, but to use this origin as the driving force in social and national life.”⁷² This is not the unity of continuity, but rather the unity of rebellion.

Berdichevsky not only turned to the world of folk tales, of Hasidism and the Kabbala, but he was also attracted to the ancient Hebrews. In view of his secularism, his rebellion against Jewish history, and his yearning for ancient myths, Berdichevsky could be seen as the father of the Canaanite movement (“Young Hebrews”). Indeed, as the Hebrew literary critic Baruch Kurzweil pointed out, the Canaanite movement was nothing more than the logical and consistent conclusion of spiritual and aesthetic yearnings that have been present in Hebrew literature for one hundred years. Kurzweil, however, scorned the paradoxical attempt to blend modernity and myth, writing of the Canaanites: “Those who fight a bitter war against Judaism, in its entirety, in the name of modern progressive thought place themselves in a strange situation when they attempt to prove their realistic and practical sensibilities by mythological argumentation.”⁷³

Berdichevsky and the Young Hebrews were the targets of attack long before Kurzweil appeared on the scene. One of the main protagonists was the critic Michael Rabinovitz, who published an article entitled “Judaism and the Superman” in Ahad Ha-am’s journal, Ha-shiloah, in 1912. Rabinovitz wrote: “Nietzsche’s theory, which captivates many hearts with its innovation, has reached our circles in recent years through our young writers who make frequent and impassioned use of Nietzsche’s questionable innovations in order to make a new voice heard within the Jewish people. In so doing, they adopt a ‘total transvaluation’ in our historical life.”⁷⁴

The Hebrew Nietzschean, threatening a total transvaluation to the point of the nihilization of Jewish themes, was the target of many counterattacks. The waves of controversy did not abate, and the attacks were soon taken up by writers and public figures as well as cultural critics.⁷⁵ On the other hand, there were also critics who did not regard Berdichevsky as the Hebrew Nietzsche. Brenner refused to see him as “Nietzsche’s student” merely because he used the term “transvaluation” – “a comparison which is like a broken vessel.”⁷⁶ Similarly, Ya’akov Rabinowitz wondered: “Was he really a disciple of Nietzsche? What does this tent-dweller have to do with the ‘blond beast’? He learned from Nietzsche to negate, but he did not accept Nietzsche’s positive views.” Rabinovitz clarified in his essay “Wellhausen’s Theory” the affinity between the Wellhausenian thesis and the Hebrew national revival, which connects “between the new Hebrew and his ancient epoch.”⁷⁷ Many literary critics rejected the comparison between Berdichevsky and Nietzsche, but it is difficult to deny that Berdichevsky’s double-edged message of antihistorical radicalism and the new Hebrew were the main axis of the Young Hebrew’s revolt.

National Existentialism

The Nietzschean Canaanism of Israel Eldad was expressed in the following insight concerning the future: “There is a certain wisdom to the idea of distinguishing between ‘Hebrews’ and ‘Jews,’ and the time will undoubtedly come at last when it will be interpreted correctly.”⁷⁸ The radical existentialism of Berdichevsky, echoing that of Nietzsche, had an effect on the Hebrew existentialism of nationalist circles in the culture of the Jewish revival in Eastern Europe, and on the political culture of Eretz Israel and the state of Israel. A fascinating example for this national existentialism is the radical intellectual, Israel (Scheib) Eldad (1910–1996). As Eldad’s proposal to write his dissertation on Nietzsche was not accepted, he completed his doctorate on “The Voluntarism of Eduard von Hartmann, based on Schopenhauer” at the University of Vienna.⁷⁹ When World War II broke out, Scheib escaped from Warsaw together with Menachem Begin, who became Israel’s prime minister in 1977.⁸⁰ After Lehi (the Hebrew underground against the British before the founding of the state of Israel) founder Avraham Stern was killed by the British, Eldad became one of a triumvirate of Lehi commanders. When the war of 1948 ended, Eldad began to publish a revolutionary journal, Sulam (Ladder), and was known as the doyen of Israeli nationalists. Prime Minister David Ben-Gurion, who was afraid Eldad would imbue the students with his Lehi ideology, intervened and had him dismissed. Eldad turned to literary work, and in 1988, he was awarded Israel’s Bialik Prize for his contributions to Israeli thought and especially for his translation of the works of Nietzsche.

The seven volumes translated to Hebrew in the 1960s and 1970s established Eldad as a major Israeli scholar of Nietzsche. Not only was Eldad a brilliant translator, he was also an innovative commentator.⁸¹ His instructive reading of Nietzsche made a decisive contribution to the propagation of Nietzschean discourse in Israel. Eldad was considered a radical intellectual of the Israeli right and had a Messianic vision of the future of Israel. His outlook was influenced deeply by the Nietzschean Lebensphilosophie.

In the article “Schopenhauer and Judaism” (1937), one may see the first expressions of Eldad’s Nietzschean outlook: “Nietzsche … is full of praise for Judaism because of the strong sense of life that is in it; … Nietzsche affirms life despite its purposelessness and suffering.”⁸² In the same year, Eldad’s article “Berdichevsky the Rebel” exposed the Hebrew-Nietzschean principles that reached their full development in the idea of national existentialism: “Berdichevsky took his manifesto for the revolt of the Hebrew people from the school of the German scholar, Nietzsche.”⁸³ Two thousand years of exile upset the balance between will and reason in the Jewish people and emasculated Hebrew vitality. “We must shake off the burden of the past, of exile, of sadness. Burn the rotten old before the entry of the new.” Some thirty years later, Eldad dealt with the “Hebrew revolt” once again. In linking Nietzsche and Berdichevsky, Eldad wished in his article “Micah Joseph Berdichevsky, Between Egypt and Canaan” (1971) to show how harmful Ahad Ha-am’s historiosophy had been to Jewish life and how beneficial Berdichevsky’s historiosophy was to Hebrew life. Berdichevsky, according to Eldad, put the Jews before Judaism, the concrete before the abstract, existence before essence. Eldad sided with the national existentialism of the Berdichevsky school of thought: “Not universality … but the idea of the specific, belief in [God’s] national character, in the rebuilding of the city of His majesty, Jerusalem.”⁸⁴ Eldad adopted Nietzschean motifs from Berdichevsky to support his national-existential outlook, and like him pointed to the currents of opposition that always existed next to mainstream Judaism: Opposite the “true” prophets, one had the “false prophets”; opposite the Pharisees one had the Sadducees; and there were the Kairites, the “false” Messiahs, and Spinoza. For Eldad, Berdichevsky symbolized this “opposing current” in Judaism. It was not only a matter of demonstrating the many-sidedness of Judaism, but also of supporting the rebellious and belligerent parties: “For, behold, war is the mother of all that lives, as we learn from Heraclitus … and life is war.”⁸⁵ In Eldad’s opinion, Yavne (which symbolizes the priority of spiritual Judaism over national considerations at the time of the revolt against Rome), was not representative of Judaism’s Will to Power: The national morality was expressed in the fighting Jerusalem.

Eldads’s Nietzschean starting point was a nationalism not derived from ressentiment (introverted and repressed sense of animosity) or from a consciousness of others, but was based on “the positive and very physical foundation of the national entity.” Berdichevsky’s revolutionary proposition was to turn the last Jews into the “first Hebrews.” In Eldad’s opinion, this phrase “became the progenitor of the new Hebrew ideology, or, to give it its more extreme title, the ‘Canaanite ideology’ in Israel.” The origins of the anti- Zionist Hebrew “Canaanism” of the Canaanite poet Yonatan Ratosh and of the Jewish-Hebrew Messianic nationalism of Lehi were the same, but their ramifications were different. The Hebrew ideology of Avraham Stern (1907–1942), the leader of Lehi, was Zionist-Messianic, not Canaanite.⁸⁶ In 1941, relations between Ratosh and Stern were broken off, but after Stern’s murder by the British during the period of the British mandate in Palestine, Ratosh saw him as a tragic hero sacrificed for the revival of the Hebrew kingdom. Lehi used the Hebrew discourse a great deal and spoke of “Hebrew lordship,” “the Hebrew people,” and the “Hebrew freedom movement.”

Baruch Kurzweil saw how Nietzsche’s influence infused these “Hebrew” tendencies. It represented an attempt to revive a “Hebrew Hellenism.” The original Hebrews were seen as “the generation which conquered Canaan in a whirlwind,” in the words of the Hebrew poet Saul Tchernikovsky. Julius Wellhausen, as I mentioned earlier, had a direct influence on Nietzsche’s thinking and admired the ancient biblical Judaism for its natural, spontaneous, belligerent, and “barbaric” character; he considered the growing dominance of the priesthood a sign of degeneration.⁸⁷ Romantic primitivism, which rejected abstract Judaism and admired the ancient Israelites (distinguishing between Jews and Hebrews), attracted many: It began with Tchernikovsky, included the scholar of the ancient Orient Adolph Gourevitch Horon (1907–1972) – who decisively influenced Ratosh’s Canaanite ideology – and ended with Eldad and a wide circle of Lehi. Berdichevsky, who called for a transformation “from abstract Jews to Hebrew Jews,” wrote in response to the Jewish thinkers Moritz Lazarus and David Neumark (his fellow student in Berlin): “They have both forgotten that the early Hebrews preceded the advent of Judaism and had a different path from that of Judaism.”⁸⁸ The romantic-primitive dichotomy between nature and civilization was adopted by Eldad and was common to all the Hebrew Nietzscheans, and first of all to the Canaanites.

Eldad took a further step toward Berdichevsky’s Canaanite interpretation, seeing it as having a religious basis. The Nietzschean amor fati, which hints at the “existential formula” as Eldad described it, throws light on certain passages in a diary written by Berdichevsky: “Judaism is my fate which I carry with me, but despite this I am free to act.” This is where the paths of the “Hebraism” of Eldad and Ratosh separate. Unlike Ratosh, who called for a Hebrew revolution that would sever the umbilical connection between Judaism and Hebraism, Eldad respected the Jewish religion, which had preserved the Jewish culture, and he therefore called on everyone in Israel to honor the Jewish religion even if they were not observant.

Eldad’s new Hebrew sought to achieve a seemingly impossible fusion between Nietzscheanism and Hebrew nationalism. In the days of the Lehiunderground, Eldad called on Hebrew youth to rise “to the heights of Zarathustra, that clear and bracing air – not only for aesthetic enjoyment but in order to learn – the concept of the free man.”⁸⁹ In his opinion, the Hebrew exemplar of Nietzschean individualism was Berdichevsky, “in whose heart the motive-forces of Judaism ran deep. This Nietzschean was both very old and very new, very late and very early.” The original ideology of Lehi was crystallized by Avraham (Ya’ir) Stern in the manifesto of the Jewish renaissance, Principles of Rebirth, but Eldad took it upon himself to give them a broad interpretation. Despite the difficult atmosphere, with the closing of the gates of Palestine to Jewish immigrants and the victories of Rommel, Stern sought to impart an optimistic tone to the Lehi manifesto, which had eighteen points and aimed, in his words, “at rearing a generation of fighters who would be true to the idea of the revival of the kingdom of Israel.”⁹⁰

Eldad and the national radicals intended the Principles of Rebirth – steeped in Nietzschean concepts as well as those of Berdichevsky and the ultranationalist poet Uri Zvi Greenberg – to be a turning point in the history of the Hebrew people, who had been corrupted by the influence of the Haskalah (the Jewish Enlightenment), cosmopolitanism, liberalism, and socialism. Eldad sought to transpose Berdichevsky’s revolt from the literature of rebirth at the turn of the century to the Hebrew national struggle in the mid- twentieth century. Eldad wished to revive the image of the ancient Hebrew. The will to existence is the motivation behind the right to the Land of Israel. From the war against the British conquerors of Palestine there would arise a new and strengthened Hebrew race whose aim would be the revival of the kingdom. It is the organized will of the return to Zion that underlies the conquest of the homeland.

There was a Nietzschean ring to Eldad’s words “The idea of the lordship of man-the-creator is a Hebraic idea.”⁹¹ A year later, in his article “The Nietzsche Polemic: Between Degeneracy and Madness” (1950), Eldad wrote that what attracted the Hebrew youth to Nietzsche was not his positive attitude to the life-affirming spirit of Israel or his aesthetics beyond good and evil. Rather, “The secret of this attachment to Nietzsche lies in the enormous fascination of innumerable Jewish youths with life, with manifestations of power. These latent forces were aroused in contact with the sun-rays of Zarathustra.”⁹²

Both Nietzsche’s translators – Eldad in Hebrew and Walter Kaufmann in English – found in him an admiration for the Will to Power of historical Judaism, both biblical and exilic. But Eldad also made the original and surprising claim that Nietzsche’s admiration for the Old Testament was a product of this classical philologist’s admiration for the culture of ancient Greece.⁹³ He quoted section 72 of Daybreak, where Nietzsche wrote, “The Jews, a people which clung to life … like the Greeks and even more than the Greeks.”⁹⁴ Even the Greeks could learn from the heroic image of the Hebrew patriarchs.

The Israeli People

On Zayith, an inhabitant of the settlement Maaleh Edomim in the occupied territories, who comes from a religious background and who is on the staff of Nekuda, the organ of the settlers in Judea and Samaria, concocted a Nietzschean-Canaanite confection in his book The Israelite People – The Lost Culture (1991).⁹⁵ In the book there were both elements of the political theology of the Greater Land of Israel and of neo-Canaanite elements envisaging a “state of all its citizens.” Zayith’s mythical historiography advanced the cause of the nation of the ancient Israelites that was obliterated by the Jewish civilization. He argued that the reconstruction of the image of the heroic past of the ancient Israelites was necessary to national renewal at the present day: “[R]enew our days as of old,” as it were. A rebirth of the present Israeli people could not take place among a normal people on a normal plot of land. A precondition for it taking place would be the revitalization of the nation through the creation of a new Hebrew people in the large area that opened up after 1967. The renewal of the Hebrew nation would come about with the annexation of the sociological groups outside the Jewish community who are now in the territory of the Greater Land of Israel. Zayith’s demand for the “Hebraization” of the Arab inhabitants and the annexation of Judea and Samaria is not based on economic or demographic considerations. In his schemes, the neo-Canaanite approach to the nation that derived from the Nietzschean Hebrew radicalism of more than a century ago reaches its climax: Zayith merely gives it a right-wing political coloring. According to him, the Hebrew Prometheanism will be re-created if geography and mythology derive their inspiration from the magnificent past of the Israelite nation.

Benny Zayith was born in Jerusalem in 1959 and grew up in a national-religious framework: He attended a religious high school, and then, after his military service, he became a member of the religious moshav (cooperative settlement) Ramat Magshimim in the Golan Heights, which were conquered by Israel in 1967. As an autodidact, he developed doubts about his identity when engaging in biblical research, “and this,” he said, “destroyed my faith in the reliability of the Bible.”⁹⁶ When he studied mathematics and computer science at university, he removed his skullcap and chose the pen name “On,” which symbolized Nietzschean power.

In his biblical researches, which he conducted for seven years, he arrived at a typology that distinguished between an “Israelite” culture that existed up to the destruction of the First Temple and a “Jewish” culture beginning with the period of the exile. This cultural dichotomy corresponded to two different types of men: the “Israelites,” who were “living and highly active people, building and destroying, fighting and loving, creating great movements and events,” and the “Jews,” identified with the rabbinic period, and who represented a “pale world, a miserable world of little men … as if man were a golem (robot) devoid of any spirit of life.”⁹⁷ The first group embodied vitalistic Nietzschean qualities such as a Will to Power, an aspiration to life, inherent freedom, and self-construction, whereas the second group expressed a will to decadence, an acceptance of subjection, and a resignation to death. He later learned that the distinction he made between the Israelites and the Jews was shared by Nietzsche and Wellhausen. Nietzsche’s inspiration was evident in every page of the book.

The Nietzschean concepts of “ancient beginnings,” “new peoples,” and an “earthquake” were in keeping with Zayith’s search for a new national myth, and, as is usual with mythical thought, he re-created the past in order to form the present – he sought his foundations in the distant past and drew his inspiration from the starting point. Zayith’s selective biblical researches were not so much a scientific investigation of the history of the Jewish people as a subversive attempt to gain an understanding of the present identity crisis of Israelism by seeking a suitable model in the ancient Israelites. “The reconstruction of the historical truth is a matter of immediate practical interest,” wrote the sociologist of myth Georges Sorel, who himself was a creator of twentieth-century political mythology.⁹⁸ Zayith turned to the past to find answers to the questions that preoccupied him in his own time. How can one renew the vitality and force of the Israeli nation? Where can one find a theoretical and historical justification for the possession of the entire Land of Israel by the people of Israel, apart from the usual arguments of the religious right? In other words, Zayith proposed a historiographical narrative that combined neo-Canaanite religious and national elements with neo-Canaanite secular and civil elements.

Until then, the starting point of the Canaanite position had been completely secular. With Zayith, whose background was religious and whose chief occupation had been practical settlement, the Canaanite option provided a scheme of action for settlers that combined religious faith with a right-wing outlook. Zayith is an additional, special link in the chain of the mythical historiography of the secular intellectual current influenced by nineteenth- century Bible criticism, and which disapproved of the replacement of the ancient Israelites by rabbinic Judaism. In the 1930s this radical criticism was taken up by the political right and was seized on by Revisionist Zionism, which stressed the secular, heroic, and aesthetic aspects of the Hebrew revival movement and consequently painted a mytho-historical picture of the past. Zionism based itself on the affinity between the history of the Jewish people and the geography of the Land of Israel, and Canaanism wanted to obliterate this affinity between history and geography and to ignore the exilic period; it saw itself as a purely territorial nationalism. The Canaanites even demanded the imposition of Hebrew nationhood on all the peoples of the region, the “subjugation” of the Muslim space in the whole Fertile Crescent. Zayith, however, was content with the “Hebraisation” of the Land of Israel alone, which meant the absorption of alien ethnic elements into the Israeli nation.

Zayith’s thinking was influenced by an early work of Nietzsche, The Birth of Tragedy (1872). Nietzsche preferred Greek mythology to classical philosophy and wished to find in it inspiration for his own time. It was not a longing for ancient Greece or a search for scientific truth that inspired his historico-mythical essay: Nietzsche wanted to understand his decadent period by seeking evidence in Greece that would serve as a foundation for a cultural myth as a solution for his age.⁹⁹ Inspired by the German philosopher, his young Israeli disciple likewise did not carry out a biblical investigation in accordance with scientific criteria, but mobilized the biblical narrative for the purpose of creating a political myth for our time.

Nietzsche’s historiographical-mythical ideal was a “depiction that was an artistic truth, not a historical truth.”¹⁰⁰ A reconstruction of the historical past, according to him, requires “great artistic skill, an overview of the facts.” In similar words, Zayith described the mythical picture he painted of the past: “Every living description uses the ‘facts’ as raw material … the picture painted in our minds is not a picture of the reality as it is but a rough interpretation by our minds of signs they receive from the outside.”¹⁰¹ In this respect, The Israelite People – The Lost Culture adopts the Nietzschean model as Wellhausen interpreted it: a kind of idealization and romanticization of the ancient Israelite people. From the time of Moses, who formed the character of the Israelites as an anarchistic society, a society without a government, without a transcendental God, and without a formal legal system, to the time of David, the Israelites, according to Zayith, created a utopia unequaled in the history of mankind.

Zayith’s picture of the heroic and aesthetic past of the Israelites in the Bible was derived from the insights of Nietzsche, “the greatest of heretics,” who based his thinking on the Dionysian forces he found in the ancient Greeks and likewise in the ancient Israelites.¹⁰² His attention was caught by a scene in The Birth of Tragedy that described the feelings of a servant of the Greek god Dionysus during a procession. The man who is freed from “deceptive” rationalism expresses himself in song and dance that circumvent reason, and thus he joins his liberated brethren. He is now a member of a privileged community, “and he feels himself to be a god…. The man is no longer an artist: he becomes a work of art.”¹⁰³

Devoid of metaphysical overtones, Zayith adopted and internalized Nietzsche’s revolutionary concept, the Superman, who gave birth to himself in a creative act. This was the essence of the intellectual revolution that Nietzsche carried out in the second half of the nineteenth century in proclaiming the change from ethics to aesthetics in western philosophy. The crown of the Nietzschean revolution was the birth of a new man among the ashes of God. Like his spiritual progenitor, Zayith sought to create a new man, but this new Hebrew man, whose source was in ancient Israelite mythology, could only realize himself and find his modern sphere of activity with the establishment of the Israeli nation in the ancient Hebrew space.

In “the release of the Dionysian principle in man and his resuscitation,” as Zayith expressed it, man, the creation of God, feels just like his maker.¹⁰⁴ Zayith thought that the Dionysian experience resembled the Jewish experience. Dionysius gave joy to the ancient Greeks and filled them with strength and the feeling that they had superior powers, that “they were able to rise to a divine level of creativity.”¹⁰⁵ The believer loses his own being and in this way unites with the god. Zayith finds a parallel between the Dionysian rites and the Jewish faith. The bull, the symbol of Dionysius, also represents the Jewish people; the desire for a direct contact between man and Dionysius is the same as the Israelites’ approach to Jehovah; their expressions in poetry, music, and wild dance are similar; the prophets of Dionysius are a copy of the prophetic bands in Israel; the Dionysian processions are parallel to the Jewish celebrants with their palm branches. The description in the Book of Samuel of the ascent of the ark of the covenant to Jerusalem in which “David danced with all his might before the Lord” is a biblical example of a similar ecstatic experience. These signs and indications show, according to Zayith, that Dionysius was the Greek version of the ancient Israelite God, and earlier writers, according to him, already believed in a common source for Jehovah and Dionysius, despite the differences between them. It is therefore not surprising that the translators of Nietzsche, Israel Eldad into Hebrew and Walter Kauffman into English, found in David’s wild dance a confirmation of Nietzsche’s insight concerning the “Greek” vitality of the ancient Hebrew people.¹⁰⁶

Zayith saw Nietzsche as the main source of enlightenment for an understanding of the secret of the vitality of the Israelites. At the beginning of the first part of his book, he gave a quotation from Thus Spoke Zarathustra concerning prevailing will.¹⁰⁷ Zayith directed his readers to a passage in Beyond Good and Evil, a hymn of praise to the elevated style of the people of the Bible: “In the Jewish ‘Old Testament,’ the book of divine justice, there are men, things and speeches of so grand a style that Greek and Indian literature have nothing to set beside it. One stands in reverence and trembling before these remnants of what man once was.”¹⁰⁸ Like Israel Eldad before him, Zayith was enthusiastic about the fact that Nietzsche, in The Genealogy of Morals, found in the Bible special people that constituted a nation: “All honour to the Bible! I find in it great people, a landscape of heroism and something precious and very rare on earth…. I find a nation.”¹⁰⁹ In a reference to The Antichrist, Zayith showed that Nietzsche revealed the decline in the history of Israel, for which the priests, “godless scoundrels,” were responsible.¹¹⁰

Zayith’s Nietzschean conclusion was that the study of history is a pragmatic means to an intensification of life. The study of history in a broad perspective shows that the historical greatness that once existed must surely be possible again. Next in importance to Nietzsche, in his opinion, was “the second witness, Julius Wellhausen, a German scholar, the greatest investigator of the history of Israel,” who for better or worse had a profound influence on Bible scholarship for more than one hundred years. This is how Zayith wrote about Wellhausen, who made the distinction between the ancient Israelite ethos and its questionable Jewish successor: “Nothing is more noticeable in the history of the ancient Israelites than the extraordinary vigour of their instincts and productions. Those who act always act in accordance with the necessity of their nature, men of God no less than murderers and adulterers. Figures like this can only develop in a free atmosphere. Judaism, which developed the law of Moses, did not leave any field of activity to personality.”¹¹¹

Wellhausen, so highly regarded by Zayith, was criticized by him for not identifying the turning point in which Jewish civilization replaced the Israelite culture. The Spenglerian distinction between autonomous “culture” and alienated “civilization” lies at the heart of Zayith’s analysis. Wellhausen’s claim as interpreted by Zayith led him to the conclusion that the “Jewish stratum” of the Bible was created in a period after the First Temple. Zayith thought that Wellhausen postdated the end of the ancient Israeli culture by about 350 years, an error that led to a series of distortions in the reading of the Bible.

The time of the ancient Israelite people was described by Zayith as a noble era and as a period of continual growth. At first, as a band of wanderers, the people were weak and unable to conquer the land of Canaan, but after some 250 years the Israelite people became the greatest power in the Fertile Crescent. It was Moses who made the covenant between the tribes, created a new people with a culture of their own, coined the name “Israel,” and reinvented the name of its God: Jehovah. In that society, there was a constant direct connection with its God, who was an immanent force for every individual. This supra-moral society had no need of an external authority, and its strength derived from an anarchistic harmony, self-awareness, and heroic ethos. And who was it that destroyed this culture? Whereas Nietzsche saw Socrates as the fomenter of the intellectual revolution that overthrew the heroic Homeric culture, Zayith saw Solomon, “the wisest of men,” as the destroyer of the ancient Hebrew culture. The Jewish counterrevolution carried out by Solomon repressed the true philosophy of life; it distorted the concept of integration with the neighboring peoples; it upset the Dionysian-Apollonian equilibrium exemplified in David; it replaced a healthy, harmonious society with a system of laws, administration, and taxes; it set up the Temple in place of the tabernacle; and it created a small religious sect of submissive believers in place of the proud, free, and authentic Israelites.

Moses displayed a revolutionary capacity to create a people, a force that would conquer a large country, and gave the Hebrew tribes a new culture, at the heart of which was a type of man who was strong, healthy, and free. It was a culture without idols, without a monarchy, without temples, and without a priesthood – a degree of freedom unprecedented in human history. Zayith describes a religious utopia without laws and an authority that obeyed only Jehovah. The Israelite culture was a rebellion against Egyptian culture that was based on life after death. Moses’ revolution was crystallized in a national entity, and like every cultural revolution it required a new codification. The name “Israel” appears to have been given by Moses; the bull was the symbol of the early Israelite people. The wild bull, the greatest creature in the Canaanite space, symbolized this people on whom no external rule could be imposed, that could not tolerate the yoke of authority, and that could not be domesticated or tamed. On the cover of The Israelite People appeared the letter aleph in its archaic form, “bull’s horns” as Zayith called it, the yellow symbol of the “Canaanite group.” He placed it on a red and blue background, the three colors of the movement representing Yonatan Ratosh’s ideology. Like all proper revolutions, the Israelite revolution created its own calendar, containing only seven months.¹¹²

The invasion of Canaan was planned and executed as a national mission. Egypt was abandoned because it was considered unsuitable for the implementation of the Israelite vision. The Canaanite space, which includes modern Israel, Sinai, Jordan, Syria, and Lebanon was chosen as the “land of heart’s desire.” After two and a half centuries of Egyptian rule that was now in process of disintegration, the Israelites came to the conclusion that they were no longer faced with a united force and that local elements would desert and join them. In fact, large groups – families, towns, and tribes – were integrated into the tribal organizations of the Israelite alliance, which was based on a national approach favorable to mixture and integration. The idea of exterminating the peoples of Canaan was abandoned and replaced by the idea of adapting the Canaanites to the Israelites. The concepts of adaptation and fusion helped Zayith to crystallize his Canaanite outlook, which distinguished between the Israelite nation and the Jewish people:

Zayith considered the ancient Israelite alliance, as the basis of a unified power, to be a national model for our own time. It constituted a demographic model for extending the nation of Israel to the large Canaanite space, because “a culture that wants to ensure its existence cannot depend on a segregated tribal unit. A living culture increases this existential openness by providing opportunities for foreign elements, and even formerly hostile elements, to join it and participate in building and being built in it.”¹¹⁴ Unlike the closed-up Jewish community that became desiccated, ancient Israelite culture was extraordinarily open, from Moses who married a Midianite to David, the great- grandson of Ruth the Moabite. An Israeli culture of this kind, if it existed, would be characterized by the Hebraization and absorption of foreigners from the whole of the Canaanite space.

The period of decadence of the Israelite people began with the kingdom of Solomon. Moses was a revolutionary who gave birth to the Israelite people, and Solomon was the father of the counterrevolution. “Moses and Solomon were two revolutionary personalities whose teachings succeeded in guiding a whole people into new revolutionary paths, two creators of new religions and new gods by whom religion was used as a means to social and national ends.”¹¹⁵ Yet a chasm lay between them and between the value systems they represented. Zayith described Solomon’s motives in Nietzschean terms of ressentiment, bearing a grudge. Solomon, seeing that he could not equal the revolutionary achievements of Moses, which caused humanity to progress, or the military and political achievements of his father, David, decided to poison the Israelite culture. He revolutionized the old Israelite ethos, which he replaced with foreign elements from the house of Bathsheba, the wife of Uriah the Hittite.

The Israelite culture until Solomon was set up as an ever-expanding alliance that attached local peoples to the Israelite tribes. From the time of Solomon onward, this culture was unable to absorb a foreign kingdom or tribe within the Israelite tribal system because an integral nationalism was beginning to emerge. The conditions of reception into the Israelite people, which was seen as being like the membership of a family, prevented elements not born within the national family from joining. Solomon’s policy took the Israelite people backward. Zayith’s conclusions, relevant both then and now, were as follows:

Solomon’s counterrevolution necessitated a change of symbols. The Israelite tabernacle that embodied the immanent godhead in the heart of each Israelite was replaced by a Jewish temple that symbolized the transcendence of a distant God. Solomon’s Temple expressed the Jewish-idolatrous anti-Israelite idea that one has to obey an external God outside man. Solomon wanted to take Jehovah out of the Israelites, to harm their autonomy, to convince them that they were a submissive community of slaves and not a free and independent people. He emphasized their sins in order to perpetuate a feeling of guilt and placed them under an absolute authority so that they would obey God’s commands unquestioningly.¹¹⁷

The biblical literature connected with Solomon was rewritten in accordance with the dictates of the counterrevolution. The psalms expressed a sense of the wretchedness of man and his spiritual abasement in the face of the new transcendental power. The moral preaching and demand for obedience to the precepts of morality were intended to produce an obedient type subservient to Solomon’s moral laws. Wisdom was represented as the opposite of heroism and as a replacement for it. Ecclesiastes, the most anti-Nietzschean book in the Bible, was a manifesto of despair that denied any taste to human life: It was nihilism devoid of any Will to Power: “I hated life…. I hated all my labour which I had taken under the sun.” Ecclesiastes lost his vitality and spontaneity despite his wisdom and because of it. He so much envied the vital Israelite type and so much wanted to make his readers hate life that he tried to convince them that life was tasteless, and it was better not to be born. The Jewish “sages,” who hated life, brought this nihilistic spirit into the scriptures. Israelite society, which absorbed the Jewish morality, was stricken with madness and disintegrated. The living lion became a dead dog.¹¹⁸

The Solomonic religion slew the Israelite culture and replaced it. Zayith, in a Nietzschean spirit, lamented the “era in which living people disappeared and became dead people and increasingly resembled human shadows.”¹¹⁹ In place of the Israelites, who represented “the highest human type,” Rabbinic Judaism arose, which got itself “the name of a segregated and fearful religious community, the name of a people like tame hedgehogs … a people of bookworms subjected to ridiculous laws … men like scarecrows who saw reality through a thousand veils of mouldy books of laws and casuistry.”¹²⁰ That “book,” which had arisen to replace “life” was a symbol for the course of Israelism. The time has come, said Zayith, for a new Hebrew culture to arise.

In his article “The Israelite Solution,” published in Nekuda in 1991, Zayith’s views concerning the ancient Israelites were applied to the Israel of today.¹²¹ According to the organic concepts of the school of Spengler, there is growth and decay in the history of peoples just as there in plants and animals. Zayith supported this theory with evidence from as far away as America and Australia, which also passed through the stages of crystallization and decay, to affirm the neo-Canaanite doctrine of a renewal of the Israelite nation: “In the last hundred years a new national entity has arisen in our country: let us call this entity ‘The Israelite people.’”¹²² Although, according to Zayith, the Jews created the “Israelite” nation, it is not identical with the Jewish citizens of Israel. The Druze and Bedouin are included in the national entity whereas some ultra-Orthodox Jews feel themselves not to be part of it. The Jews of the world who do not participate in defense do not belong to the new Hebrew nation. As long as the existence of the “Israelite nationality” is not internalized, the process is still in its early stages.

Zayith said it was precisely the settlers in Judea and Samaria who were the first to decide to bring to the country the “Christianized” Ethiopian Jews. Kiryat Arba, despite its religious character, was the first Jewish settlement to open its doors to non-Jewish local inhabitants, who helped with security matters. The settlers in Judea and Samaria who cleared the way for their reception into the Israelite nation played the part of an avant-garde. Hebraization, according to Zayith, must be applied to the whole of the Land of Israel. Only thus, he said, can there be “a significant change in the bitter struggle that has taken place amongst us since 1967 between those who wish to abandon Judea and Samaria and those who wish to strike root there.”¹²³ Zayith proposes broadening the compass of the Israelite people on three conditions: loyalty to the state and acceptance of the national Israelite identity, acceptance of the Hebrew language, and military or other national service.

The “Israelite solution” seeks to circumvent the problem of the territories conquered in the Six-Day War through a new definition of the nation. The process whereby Israel absorbs the territories with their Palestinian inhabitants is already in full swing, so why not exploit it as a means of renewing the days of the great Israelite people? In that way, there will be no opposition between the Land of Israel and the state of Israel. In that single space there would be only a single people, the Hebrew one, without any expulsion (in Zayith’s lexicon, “Hebrew” and “Israelite” are synonymous). Thus, there will be a “state of all its citizens” in the entire Land of Israel.