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BETWEEN LIBERALISM AND JEWISH NATIONALISM: YOUNG ISAIAH BERLIN ON THE ROAD TOWARDS DIASPORA ZIONISM

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  12 June 2007

ARIE DUBNOV
ARIE DUBNOV
Affiliation:
History Department, Hebrew University of Jerusalem
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Abstract

This essay examines Isaiah Berlin's ambivalent relationship with the ideas and practices of Jewish nationalism and the ways in which this ambivalence shaped some of the key premises of his political thought. Drawing upon extensive archival research in his unpublished letters from the mid-1930s to the late 1950s, this essay reconstructs Berlin's attempt to reconcile himself with the national idea. This attempt forced him to enrich his liberalism, and pushed him to develop “Diaspora Zionism” and adopt the Jewish normalization discourse. In the course of those intra-Jewish debates Berlin also began to conceptualize freedom as an opportunity concept, an idea that would later become central both in Berlin's famous negative concept of freedom and in his pluralism. Adopting a dual perspective, which considers Berlin as both a British liberal and a Russian-Jewish émigré intellectual, I therefore offer to see the Jewish Zionist writings as complementary rather than secondary to Berlin's “liberal” enterprise.

Type
Articles
Information
Modern Intellectual History , Volume 4 , Issue 2 , August 2007 , pp. 303 - 326
Copyright
© 2007 Cambridge University Press

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Footnotes

I would like to express my sincere gratitude to the George L. Mosse Program in History and its manager, John Tortorice, and to the B.-Z. Dinur Center for Research in Jewish History at the Hebrew University for enabling me to pursue the research upon which this paper is based. I would also like to thank Henry Hardy, Merav Segal and the staff of the Chaim Weizmann and Isaiah Berlin archives in Rehovot and Oxford for their assistance. My gratitude belongs to Steven E. Aschheim, Joshua Cherniss, Malachi Hacohen, David Sorkin and Bernard Wasserstein for their useful and insightful comments on earlier versions of this essay. Needless to say, the responsibility for the final version is entirely my own.