For Brenner, the central axis around which the themes of his book are organised is the tension between Jewish exceptionalism and universality, uniqueness and ‘normalisation’, or, in its biblical expression, the aspiration to be ‘a nation like all other nations’ versus ‘a light unto the nations’. While Theodor Herzl might have balked at these religious ideas as the basis for his nationalist vision, Brenner argues that Zionism could never escape its prophetic vocabulary, even in its secularised form, suppressing what Herzl’s neighbour on Berggasse in Vienna, Sigmund Freud, might have called ‘the returns of history’. Brenner writes how this tension winds itself as a thread through debates that continue to inform social and political fissures in Israel today.

In an era when Israel’s long-serving prime minister, Benjamin Netanyahu, insists on Palestinian recognition of the Jewishness of the state, readers of Brenner might be surprised to learn how contentious the concepts of Jewishness and statehood were in the writings of Zionism’s early progenitors. Herzl, for example, moved from his messianic dream of leading Jews to the baptismal font at St Stephens Cathedral in Vienna to the idea of a ‘Judenstaat’. It is a word that is variously translated as a Jewish State or a State for Jews. The difference between the two is more than semantic hair-splitting. Brenner illustrates that there was very little that was Jewish about Herzl’s vision for an Altneuland – ‘Old-New Land’: the lingua franca for Jews would be German; the state would be named the Seven-Hour-Land for its innovative workday; Arabs would be given equal rights and could be elected as leaders. As Brenner quotes Herzl: ‘Let me tell you that neither I nor my friends make the least distinction between one man and another. We don’t ask about anyone’s race or religion. It is enough for us that he is human.’ As for Jews who remained in the Diaspora, they would evaporate through a process of radical assimilation.

Brenner also relays that when Herzl gathered followers to the first Zionist Congress to lay out his cards in a casino in Basel, other ideologies were competing for attention to solve the growing plight of Jews born of poverty and pogroms. The Bund rebirthed Yiddish from a vernacular to a literary language that would mobilise the masses in a socialist movement that gave expression to Jewish national autonomy, or what the historian Simon Dubnow called Diaspora Nationalism. Simultaneously, a Territorialist movement grew under the aegis of the English writer and politician Israel Zangwill to establish a homeland for Jews in other territories, be it Argentina, South Rhodesia, South Africa, and, later, the Kimberley desert of Western Australia, and Tasmania. While most Jews simply sought an escape route to the New World, Brenner argues that all these ideologies shared a secular conception of the Jews as a nation, a product of both the rise of nationalist autonomies granted to ethnic groups in the crumbling empires of fin-de-siècle Europe, and, after World War I, of the new nation-states and Minority Treaties forged to protect national groups. Even Herzl contemplated his Judenstaat being located in Argentina, and later in Uganda, but these notions were rejected by East European Zionists led by Ahad Ha’am, who aspired for an entity that would be a spiritual centre for a Jewish renaissance of language and secular culture – an antidote to assimilation – one that would also nurture the Diaspora rather than extinguish it.

David Ben Gurion flanked by the members of his provisional government reading the Declaration of Independence, 14 May, 1948 (Wikimedia Commons)

On the question of sovereignty, Brenner reminds us that the idea of partitioning Palestine to make way for two states was only articulated during the Holocaust. Until then, Zionists limited their aspirations to arrangements other than full sovereignty: a national homeland (the language of the Balfour Declaration of 1917), an ‘association of citizens’, or a Society of Jews that would transcend statehood, a loose federal structure composed of cantons or districts, or a protectorate under the British commonwealth. A group of intellectuals that included Martin Buber argued on principle for a binational state, while even the founding ideologue of the Revisionist Likud Party, Vladimir ‘Ze’ev’ Jabotinsky, initially proposed ‘a loose federal state rather than a full-fledged nation-state’ in which Jews and Arabs would hold equal civil rights.

The homeland for Jews only found its name in 1948 at the last moment after David Ben-Gurion’s declaration of statehood following the UN partition plan: the State of Israel. In telling us this, Brenner makes an important contribution that compels us to reflect on other roads that might have been taken. Instead, the forces of history followed the logic of choices made, steered also by serendipity and chance, to unleash the suppressed biblical roots of the Old state buried in the New one, leading after 1967 to an occupation that has not ended. As an historian of the Zionist idea, Brenner has no obligation to present Palestinian voices and the impact of the occupation on their lives. He might have chosen Hertzberg’s path sixty years earlier to focus on the Zionist idea as an abstraction and to ignore the contemporary realities of each of their times. Yet Brenner has committed himself, and the reader, to a history that measures the present through the lens of the past. While his book succeeds in its search for the idea of Israel, it falls short in drawing serious attention to the failings of its founders. Hertzberg chose to write about his disillusionment after the publication of his book, and for that he was excoriated by the American Jewish establishment. Brenner’s innovative book, which endeavours to present an idea and critique its actualisation, will face no such criticism, for its neutrality positions it as part of a landmark birthday celebration.