Home and Homeland
Margalit, Avishai
Home and Homeland Isaiah Berlin's Zionism AVISHAI MARGALIT The idea of the nation-state is in a grip of two pictures: first, the nation as an extended family; and second, its territory as home....
...Thus, patriotism is a sentiment...
...Ellis's coach had noticed the potential of the new play...
...Note that on the Herder-Berlin account, the stress is on the idea that feeling at home is a condition for being free in the most fundamental way, namely, being freely creative...
...Be a man when you go out," he wrote, "and a Jew at home...
...The national home should be the Land of Israel, since this is the only place to which Jews are attached in such a way that the "return to home" makes almost literal sense...
...The Enlightenment is right in insisting on emancipation, and the counter-enlightenment is right in insisting on the importance of having a sense of belonging...
...Moreover, it is this sense of home that the national movement of the Jews—Zionism—set out to correct by creating a Jewish state in the ancient homeland, in which Jews could feel at home in Herder's sense...
...The fact that he felt anxious to please despite being a "success story" tells you, he thought, all the more what it is like for less-fortunate Jews...
...The question whether knowledge enhances overall freedom has no wholesale answer, according to Berlin...
...Home: Sense and Sensibility Analytical philosophy is concerned with sense...
...The upshot of it is that the Jew is everywhere a guest and nowhere at home...
...Tell them that they really need a sense of home, that they feel too much like strangers in this world, and they may agree with that too...
...Hoffmann...
...There is a story he liked to tell about Tolstoy's visit to Germany on an educational tour...
...So, I asked Berlin, if you are perceived by the Oxford worthies as the ultimate insider, in what sense are you socially uneasy in Oxford...
...But I have good reasons to believe that he not only read Pinsker but that it made a powerful impression on him...
...The teacher became more insistent and kept repeating his question while pointing sternly to the picture of the fish...
...The students were baffled...
...Systematically connecting concepts to sentiments is the realm of sensibility...
...The problem was, "What's wrong with the Jews...
...What kind of freedom does one feel at home that one does not feel in public space...
...The crucial phrase of the declaration is this: "His Majesty's Government views with favour the establishment in Palestine of a national home [the stress is mine] for the Jewish people...
...Everyone remembers Berlin harping on the theme of social anxiety as a trait that all Jews share, whether they live in Marrakesh, Moscow, or Milwaukee...
...Home is where the Rostov family feels free, where they are totally familiar with the way things are and feel very much at ease...
...And they were both naked, the man and his wife, and were not ashamed...
...Tolstoy attended a class in which the teacher showed the students a picture of a fish...
...Jewish existence is the existence of the uncanny...
...In short, home is where humans can feel free...
...Isaiah Berlin's own thoughts on nationalism, and in particular on Zionism, were, I contend, strongly influenced by the two pictures of family and home...
...He thought that it came from an acute sense of social anxiety that he shared with all Jews...
...By contrasting war and peace he contrasted home with the battlefield...
...Land became an essential part of the idea of a Jewish national home, and with this idea the clash with the Arab inhabitants of the land was inevitable...
...Darcy...
...Indeed, for Berlin, living away from home creates disease, and the cure is returning home...
...Needless to say, religious Jews thought that deserting the Torah was what was wrong with modern Jews...
...Being a medical doctor, he treated the Jewish problem as a medical case...
...Both essays had at the core of their concern the use of the uncanny as a literary device—especially in the hands of E.T.A...
...This is rather curious, because totalitarian regimes such as Soviet communism and Nazism were pretty good at organizing elaborate vacations for working people...
...Jews in modern times consider themselves a problem...
...For they are all adulterers, an assembly of treacherous men" (Jeremiah 9:2...
...In contrast, Tolstoy the artist was interested in the feeling of being free...
...Tell any others, not just Jews, that deep down they are socially ill at ease, and they will readily agree with you...
...The good kind is akin to self-knowledge...
...This display of silliness struck Tolstoy, and I hasten to add, Berlin, as an instance of grotesque pedantry...
...The permanent strangers with whom "one does not eat or intermarry"—the merchants, the craftsmen, the entertainers, the entrepreneurs—were "wedded to time, not land: people seen as both homeless and historic, rootless and ancient...
...Home: The Familiar and the Uncanny Freud made famous the idea of the uncanny, that which is both familiar and yet utterly strange...
...He was keenly interested in behavior that is unstudied, simple, direct, arising from natural inclination, unscripted, socially at ease, unaffected, innocent, free from formality and awkwardness—in short, free from embarrassment...
...A fish," answered the students...
...Jürgen Habermas claims that the enemies of the Enlightenment opposed its main emancipatory impulse with an overpowering conflicting impulse: the longing to belong...
...The Bible starts with the idea that naturalness permeates the Garden of Eden...
...Pinsker had hoped that the Jews would find home in a liberal Russia, but his hopes were shattered by the pogroms of 1881...
...In the wave of nostalgia in Germany for life in the former East Germany, memories of vacations loom large...
...If the unambiguous familiar is the Heimlich (the homely), then its contrast, the uncanny, is the "Unheimlich" (the un-homely...
...Yet years before Freud and Jentsch wrote their respective essays, Leo Pinsker, a russified Jew who became a Zionist, had had this very idea...
...Sentiments are sophisticated emotions: they are felt only by creatures with language...
...I don't think that Berlin was engaged in the project of "bringing back the id to the Yid," as in the quip of Philip Roth...
...What was most important was the ability to behave naturally, spontaneously, and without the paralyzing effect of being overly self-conscious...
...Feeling at Home Here is a brief citation of Berlin's interpretation of Johann Gottfried Herder's notion of feeling at home: "Whoever does not feel at home cannot create naturally, freely, generously, unselfconsciously, in a manner Schiller called 'naïve' and that Herder, whether he admits it or not, most admires and believes in...
...Part of the explanation for this attraction is his belief that liberalism may have the right moral politics, but it has the wrong psychology...
...Having a home may cure this kind of un-freedom...
...Feeling free does not amount to being free...
...National Home For Berlin, as well as for many other Zionists, the constitutive document of the Zionist movement was the Basel Program of the First Zionist Congress...
...Later in the Bible, prophets escaped society and corruption not by a return to Eden but by flight to the austere desert...
...It is a curious phenomenon, yet nevertheless true, that one can fall in love with a fictional character, such as Natasha Rostova or Mr...
...it was the negation of social life...
...Zionism, with its shift from the Enlightenment's effort to make Jewish life a private matter— which is the sense of home in the Enlightenment slogan—to an effort to form a collective home for the Jews in Palestine was another...
...History-based philosophy is concerned with sensibility...
...He feels not just the yoke of everything being determined, but he feels a radical fatalism—the sense that whatever he does, the outcome will be the same...
...Many agrarian and pastoral societies contained groups of permanent strangers who performed tasks that the natives were unable or unwilling to perform...
...It is exactly this sense of feeling at home that Jews, in Berlin's opinion, lacked in exile...
...From the Sheikh Mohammadi of eastern Afghanistan to the Yao of Lake Malawi to Armenians, Nestorians (Assyrians) or Overseas Indians, Lebanese, and Chinese, they all led an uncanny mode of existence in the midst of the native agrarian society...
...Tolstoy the thinker did not give much weight to the feeling of freedom...
...Tolstoy and Berlin sided with the bemused pupils...
...Resolving the ambiguity makes a lot of sense if our only interest is in the sense of home...
...Vacating Home and Freedom In Hebrew, the words for "vacation" and "freedom" share the same root...
...He believed that the Jews suffer from acute social or, perhaps better, psychological un-freedom by being permanent aliens in the eyes of the Gentiles...
...What makes social freedom so elusive, however, is that the pressure brought to bear on individuals in a society does not always have recognizable agents...
...I don't believe that he moved from philosophy to history...
...And can this sense of home be extended to the freedom felt by a collective in its homeland...
...How ironic that just over two hundred years after Hofer described the symptoms of nostalgia as sickness or rather "homesickness," the founding conference of the Zionist movement took place in Basel (1897), dedicated to returning the Jews to their land...
...But the term national home retained a strong flavor of home, and this is, in part, the nature of its allure for Jews everywhere, even if the declaration didn't explicitly promise a full-fledged state...
...That he himself and his forefathers were born in the country does not alter the fact in the least...
...For Berlin, by contrast, nature starts and almost ends at home...
...It is at home that humans behave naturally, spontaneously, and authentically...
...Yuri Slezkine is definitely right to argue that "There was nothing particularly unusual about the social and economic position of the Jews in medieval and early modern Europe...
...Its images of ancient Israel evoked in its readers a strong sense of an ancient Jewish national home...
...But self-consciousness in the bad sense of being acutely aware of and embarrassed by the feeling that others observe you critically is, according to Berlin, a tremendous impediment to one's freedom...
...But it is a condition of being creative in a particular way: naturally, generously, and unselfconsciously...
...The contrast is the uncanny (Unheimlich), that is, the eerie, weird, ghostly, and fearful...
...He is a Professor Emeritus at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem and the Israel Prize winner in Philosophy, 2010...
...Self-consciousness as Un-freedom For Berlin, to be at home means not being overly self-conscious...
...Moreover, the stereotype of such nomadic service tribes is also almost invariably the same: greedy, devious, crafty, pushy, clannish, crude, acquisitive, and deeply indecent...
...the alienating gaze of the others gives Jews the acute social uneasiness of not being at home...
...Vacation derives from vacances—upper-class French families vacated their houses to spend time in summer houses...
...Avishai Margalit is the George Kennan Professor at the Institute for Advanced Study, Princeton, New Jersey...
...It is not even the coziness or the warmth that Herder-Berlin stresses, although these traits contribute to what is most important about feeling at home...
...But he definitely thought that being ghostly guests made Jews restrained and constrained, and that, by internalizing the Gentiles' shaming gaze, Jews suffered from acute psychological un-freedom...
...that I might leave my people, and go from them...
...He wrote that if the Jews were willing to stop behaving like strangers among the Gentiles, then they would be met with the greeting "Our brother," and the welcoming Gentiles would purge from their hearts their hatred toward Jews...
...And then there is creativity in changing and deviating from the rules, like the use of metaphorical poetic language that was made famous by the Romantics...
...It wasn't the yearning for a home in Palestine that made the clash between Jews and Arabs inevitable, but rather the idea that home has a distinctly agrarian meaning— namely, owning the land...
...Oh that I had in the wilderness a lodging place of wayfaring men...
...This article is adapted from a lecture delivered at the "Berlin in Riga" Centenary Conference held in Riga, Latvia, birthplace of Isaiah Berlin, in June 2009...
...It is important to remember that in the history of Zionism the political idea of a national home for the Jews was rivaled by another notion of home, a cultural notion that played an important role for the generation that preceded the foundation of the Zionist movement...
...The strength of the idea of home hinges precisely on its being caught in a systematic ambiguity between representation and reality...
...Labor Zionists diagnosed the Jewish problem as a case of people being removed from productive work for far too long, cut off from nature and from toiling the soil...
...For Berlin, it is not vacation but daily life at home that is the stage for freedom...
...I would say much the same about Berlin himself: whether or not he admits it, he believed in and cherished the idea of feeling at home, much as he thought Herder did...
...The idea of a home for the Jewish people was reiterated in the Balfour Declaration of 1917...
...it is a condition for emancipation...
...Knowledge, even in the good sense, does not always liberate...
...With this fine disregard for the rules of football," as a monument at the Rugby School has it, the game of rugby was born...
...Pinsker and Berlin had little patience with transcendental homelessness, in the sense in which Lukâcs used this expression—as a desire to be at home everywhere...
...The answer should be given on a retail basis, case-by-case, and it is empirical: no amount of piety about the importance of knowledge will do as an answer...
...The high hopes of the Jewish Enlightenment were shattered by the pogroms of 1881...
...The analysis of concepts is in the realm of sense...
...But it is of relatively recent coinage, by the Swiss doctor Johannes Hofer...
...If that is what they say, they don't know a thing about me," Isaiah muttered...
...I was very suspicious of the use of clinical terms for diagnosing the plight of the Jews...
...Berlin played a well-documented role in the emergence of analytical philosophy in its Oxford "ordinary language" guise...
...It was not just any "skin" he was interested in, but the thin skin of the Jews...
...But then we might think that, as with cholesterol, there are two notions of self-consciousness: good self-consciousness and bad self-consciousness...
...Whereas for Berlin and Pinsker the desire of normal people is not to go round but to be at home somewhere, not everywhere...
...The book was called Ahavat Zion (Love of Zion, 1853) and set in biblical times...
...Berlin stressed the external impediments when he wrote about political liberty...
...The pogroms followed the assassination of Tsar Alexander II of Russia and the subsequent rumors that the Jews were behind the assassination...
...In conversation, he talked mainly about internal impediments, about psychological and social freedom...
...Gentiles would answer, "Everything...
...dogs can only be fearful...
...Freud is a latecomer to the conceptual scene of the uncanny...
...The Garden of Eden was an enclave of natural behavior, a nudist colony, until the idea of a gap between how things are and how they ought to be "popped in" via the distinction between good and evil...
...Late Nostalgia The term "nostalgia" rings archaic, almost Homeric...
...Yet Ryle's position seemed a bit fishy to Berlin...
...Freud, citing the dictionary, is quick to point out that Heimlich is the idea of belonging to a house, of not being strange, of being familiar, tame, friendly, intimate, comfortable, agreeable, restful, and secure...
...More important, Berlin's core idea of psychological freedom, as distinct from political liberty, is coupled with the idea of the homeland as home...
...For him the sensibility of a concept (like freedom) comprises not just an account of its sense, be it negative or positive, but an appeal to such scenes as the end of Fidelio, when the prisoners sing "Hail to the Day," and the minister, Don Fernando, announces an end to tyranny...
...Yet a great deal of analytical philosophy is focused on the distinction between word and object, between representation and reality that the teacher tried to force on his pupils...
...Then the teacher said in a triumphant, Teutonic voice: "It is not a fish...
...Labor Zionism, the leading Zionist movement, developed the idea of redeeming the Jews by making them toil the land...
...Once, while being wined and dined at one of Oxford's high tables, I asked the question, Who in Oxford is "in...
...The good kind is good for human freedom...
...Among the Romantics, nature, as opposed to society, set the stage for freedom, the realm of natural and authentic behavior...
...He wrote a pamphlet called "Auto-Emancipation," which was a formative statement for Jewish self-understanding...
...It is hard to exaggerate the importance of those pogroms for the history of modern Jewry: the acceleration of the massive emigration to the United States was one reaction to the pogroms...
...He also was familiar with Ryle's position to the effect that "unnoticed systematic ambiguities" are the main source of philosophical confusions and philosophic problems...
...So there is nothing unique about ascribing these nasty traits to the Jews...
...Berlin adhered to Tolstoy the artist who made home the locus of freedom as much as he rejected Tolstoy the philosopher of history...
...His essay is from 1919...
...No," said the teacher...
...A story—too good to be false—has it that the sixteen-year-old William Ellis, while playing football, picked up the ball in his hands, ran to the posts of the opposing side, and grounded it there...
...In the poem "Awake, My People," he heralded the dawning of enlightenment in Europe...
...The way they overlap is relevant to the sense of freedom that I believe Berlin entertained...
...On the battlefield, Prince Andre Bolkonsky feels utterly un-free...
...He writes, "Thus the world saw in this people the uncanny form of one of the dead walking among the living...
...A national home is not a recognized political category—unlike, for example, home rule, which means self-government as part of a larger political unit...
...All nomadic service communities shared them in abundance...
...Consider that one historically important sense of freedom is self-determination, and one expression of self-determination is shaping one's will in accordance with one's knowledge (rather than one's emotions...
...So the idea of a national home was far from alien to Berlin...
...It is this kind of behavior that he believed manifested psychological freedom...
...Since the Jew is nowhere at home, nowhere regarded as a native, he remains an alien everywhere...
...The Jew became a metaphor for modernity...
...He was more invested in this project than he later cared to admit, acknowledging only his ambivalence toward it...
...The issue for us to sort out is what is the meaning of home...
...The Jewish Enlightenment, or Haskalah, was guided by the slogan, "Be a Jew at home, but a man [Mensch] outside...
...His attraction to the counter-enlightenment bothered him as much as it amused him...
...Astrologists, like graphologists and personality testers, thrive on such traits...
...My father's generation, for example, was immensely moved and felt tremendous yearnings for Zion, after reading a book written in biblical Hebrew by an author from Lithuania (then a part of Russia) named Abraham Mapu...
...More and more agrarian societies, "first in Europe and then elsewhere, had to become more like the Jew: urban, mobile, literate, mentally nimble, occupationally flexible, and surrounded by aliens...
...Fishy or not, home and homeland are systematically ambiguous terms that oscillate between the real place and its representation...
...For Berlin, if you are not moved in the right way by the prisoners' song, then you miss the sensibility of freedom, even if you know everything about its sense...
...It is hard to know what Isaiah Berlin read in earnest and what he absorbed by osmosis...
...Isaiah Berlin's move from analytical philosophy to the history of ideas is well known, but not well understood...
...The nation as an extended family is a metaphor for an ethnic nation, whereas a civic nation is guided by a different picture, by the metaphor of contract...
...Feeling at home is not a condition of being creative...
...What is it...
...Humans can be patriotic...
...Pinsker viewed the fear of ghosts as the mother of the fear of Jews, who lead a ghostlike existence both familiar and uncanny...
...only the traditional way of life could cure Jews from a confused and inau-thentic modernism...
...Pinsker and Berlin object to the contrast between home and freedom...
...He thought of the longing ( algia) to return home ( nosts) as a disease...
...Social and Psychological Un-freedom Social freedom is freedom from social pressure, which is different from the coercion exerted by government agencies...
...Jews, because of their role in the formation of Christianity and Islam, were more mythologized than the others—so that the shift from agrarian societies to urban industrial societies made the Jews an emblem of modern existence...
...For Berlin, "to be free" is to be unimpeded by external constraints, but no less important, to be unimpeded by internalized constraints from outside forces that are alien to one's true nature—especially the gaze of one's detractors, which, in extreme cases, creates the phenomenon of Jewish self-hatred...
...The bad kind involves excessive preoccupation with oneself, especially with the impression one makes on others...
...Like Pinsker, Berlin thought that the Jews wander in this world with an indelible stigma...
...A great deal of human ambivalence dwells between these two poles: a sense of home on the one hand and a sense of the uncanny on the other...
...Indeed, the profile of the service nomads, who observe dietary restrictions, who are endogamous, and who retain a "secret" language of their own, though typical of Jews, is by no means confined to them...
...The bitter irony is that when the Jew became the model for modernity, Zionism, with its longing for home, adopted the agrarian mode of existence as its model...
...the bad kind is bad for human freedom...
...The students became more bewildered...
...Berlin believed that knowledge, including self-knowledge, sometimes increases freedom and sometimes hinders freedom...
...When Berlin and I talked about this sore subject, I raised the possibility that social anxiety is nothing but a horoscope trait, a description so vast and vague that each individual believes that it is tailor-made for him or herself...
...Isaiah Berlin had his own diagnosis: Jews suffer from the lack of a sense of home and of the freedom that one feels by being at home...
...One can be deterred from projects by being too aware of one's shortcomings while someone who lacks such knowledge may launch and on occasion succeed with those very projects...
...And it is this kind of freedom that Jews (outside Israel) lack...
...The main stress in the Herder-Berlin notion of "feeling at home" is on freedom—creativity in art is merely a particular manifestation of it— not on the more obvious traits associated with the idea of home: a sense of security and unconditional belonging...
...The names that were tossed around were Isaiah Berlin and John Sparrow— but then people got stuck...
...The Jewish yearning for the Land of Israel was not a disease but rather it was meant to cure the disease of exile...
...We may credit Michel Foucault for making social freedom the center of our worries about freedom...
...I believe that he moved from sense-centered philosophy to sensibility-centered philosophy...
...Similarly, a representation of home and homeland can elicit feelings of tremendous longing...
...Fear is an emotion...
...Home does not stand in the way of emancipation...
...Isaiah Berlin admired Tolstoy the artist of War and Peace...
...For Berlin, however, feeling free is a very good reason to believe that we are free...
...For Berlin, the best explanation of why we feel free is that we are free...
...Pinsker was wrong, and so I believe was Isaiah Berlin, in believing that being permanent strangers, eternal wanderers, is something unique to the Jews...
...Only when my father arrived in Palestine did he discover that the Jordan River of his yearning was nothing like the Vistula of his home in Poland, but more like the pathetic Rubicon in Fellini's Amarcord...
...There are two types of creativity: creativity guided by rules, like the linguistic creativity of each and every speaker of a natural language, who can produce novel sentences according to a given, limited set of rules (as Noam Chomsky famously argued...
...He blamed himself for his anxiousness to please...
...the teacher asked...
...The prime movers behind the declaration were Chaim Weizmann, to whom Berlin was particularly attached, and the German-born First Viscount Milner, who actually drafted the declaration...
...He used to tell me that he hadn't read Freud apart from obligatory bits and pieces...
...Eden was not an undress rehearsal for social life...
...There are some famous answers: right-wing revisionists claimed that lack of military power brought about the loss of a sense of dignity and of national pride among Jews, to be cured by a Jewish state with a Jewish army...
...This slogan was an adaptation of a line by the foremost poet-prophet of the Jewish Enlightenment, Judah Leib Gordon...
...But retaining the ambiguity is essential if we are also interested in the sensibility of home...
...He found my glib skepticism, about social anxiety and home as a cure for it, a demonstration of Israel's success in creating a new breed of Jews who failed to recognize the symptoms of what troubled him and his fellow Jews in exile...
...Anti-Jewish riots lasted for four years...
...It declared, "Zionism seeks to establish a home (Heimstatte) for the Jewish people in Eretz Israel secured under public law...
...So self-consciousness in the good sense is in the service of freedom...
...Berlin had learned from Gilbert Ryle that, in this example, the word "fish" is a systematically ambiguous term referring both to the real fish and its picture...
...So vacation as a manifestation of ideal freedom was not associated with home but with its summer substitute...
...He was troubled by Tolstoy the historiographer, who advocated a strict determinism and who denied the role of free human choice in history...
...The adverbs "naturally," "spontaneously," and "authentically" are not synonyms, but they overlap...
...The cure is a national home...
...Both are wrong in not realizing that home is a condition for emancipation...
...The ghostlike apparition of a living corpse, of a people without unity or organization, without land or other bonds of unity, no longer alive, and yet walking among the living—this spectral form without precedence in history, unlike anything that preceded or followed it, could not but strangely affect the imagination of nations...
...Home and Freedom Isaiah Berlin was genuinely puzzled by his fondness for writers who stood for the opposite of everything he believed in...
...It is a picture of a fish...
...Ernst Jentsch had published his essay "On the Psychology of the Uncanny" in 1906...
...Indeed, for many people the concrete sense of freedom is what they have on vacation...
...Berlin had very little to do with Freudian explanations, yet I believe that he suspected that sense without sensibility is the kind of defense mechanism that Freud dubbed "intel-lectualization"—removing oneself from an emotionally charged situation by focusing on logic and facts...
...After all, when Jews in the long exilic centuries prayed for rain, they did not mean rain in Spain, Smolensk, or San'a, but rain in the Land of Israel...
...It is what unwelcome guests feel, and only the intimacy of home emancipates one from that feeling...
...It afflicted Swiss mercenaries, and so it was also called, among other names, the Swiss disease...
...Each one believes that deep down one is not at ease among strangers...
...Berlin does not subscribe to the line "And ye shall know the truth, and the truth shall make you free" (John 8:32...
...But Jews became more discerning...
...For Lukâcs this is what makes Enlightenment philosophy go round...
...The Jews, like hunchbacks, have the feeling that their stigma is constantly watched...
...It is the reveries of Rousseau's solitary walker, far away from the corrupting society, that express authenticity...
...Berlin was interested in the way society "gets under one's skin...
...He suspected that the counter-enlighteners had a better grasp of human psychology than liberal Enlightenment thinkers...
...Israel, he believed, for all its shortcomings, relieved Jews of this acute anxiety...
Vol. 57 • July 2010 • No. 3
