The Power of Authenticity: Individualism, Gender, and Politics in Early German Zionism

Abstract

Within the field of German-Jewish studies in general, and Zionist thinking in particular, the discourse of authenticity is of central importance. This article critically examines the functions and effects of the ideas of “the authentic Jew” and “the authentic Jewishness” or “Judaism” within early German Zionism. It will trace the skillful marking of “authentic” and “inauthentic” entities in German-Zionist thinking. Certain figures and a certain habitus are referred to as unambiguously “inauthentic”— usually summarized in the slogan “assimilation,”—and Zionism is constructed as the only authentic form of being. By focusing on this concept in early German-Zionist discourse, this essay aims to reassess and modify conventional research which usually projects “authentic Judaism” or “Jewishness” solely onto Eastern Europe. Accordingly, most studies about Jewish nationalist authenticity deal with the East--West discourse or orientalism and stress the image of the “authentic Eastern Jew.” In his 1982 classic, Brothers and Strangers, Steven E. Aschheim wrote that in Western Zionism the eastern European Jew became “the embodiment of Jewish authenticity” and an “exemplar of the unfragmented self.” David A. Brenner explained in his innovative 1998 study, Marketing Identities, how the stereotypical representation of a “western Jewish enlightened identity” was opposed to an “eastern Jewish traditional identity” as a means to create an “ethnical pan-Judaism.” Michael Brenner also refers to the “Jew as oriental” and uses the rhetoric of the “authentic eastern European Jew.” Interpretations of German-Jewish history in general, however, and German Zionism in particular, alternatively carry the connotation of inauthenticity, an attitude that we also come across in early Zionist discourse. This article will reevaluate these statements, and point out