TIDE and Zionism — An Unresolved Tension

This post was extracted from the TIDE WhatsApp group.

https://chat.whatsapp.com/FNbFs4JEXZkIzVNLJx3HuM 

The word "Zionism" did not exist when Samson Raphael Hirsch was alive. It was coined by Nathan Birnbaum in the 1880s, and Hirsch died in 1888, just before the movement coalesced into the organized political force that would reshape Jewish history. Yet Hirsch's position on the central question Zionism would later pose — whether Jews should actively work to establish a national home in the Land of Israel before the messianic era — is not difficult to reconstruct. He stated it clearly, and the tradition he founded carried it forward with considerable force.

The clearest statement came in his response to Rabbi Zvi Hirsch Kalischer, an Orthodox German rabbi who in the 1860s was advocating for organized Jewish settlement in the Land of Israel as a religious obligation and a prelude to redemption — a position historians now classify as proto-Zionist. Hirsch refused to cooperate, and according to a reported Breuer family testimony published in Jewish Action, what appeared to Kalischer as a mitzvah appeared to Hirsch as "nothing less than an aveira." Hirsch also wrote directly on the matter in a letter in Hebrew, published in a collection called Shemesh Marpeh, which remains one of the primary sources for understanding his position. The argument turned not on hostility to the Land of Israel — Hirsch affirmed that the totality of Torah-shaped Jewish life reaches its fullest flowering there — but on the nature of the return. Organized, activist settlement, undertaken through political and social means rather than through the divinely ordained process of redemption, was, for Hirsch, a transgression of the proper boundaries of Jewish agency in history.

This position placed Hirsch squarely within the camp that Zionism's own architects recognized as their opponents. Norman Lamm, in his 1984 assessment, described TIDE as "decidedly anti-Zionist" and closer to the Agudah than to Mizrachi. The Satmar movement, the most uncompromising anti-Zionist strand of twentieth-century Orthodoxy, recognized the kinship: Der Yid, the Satmar-published Yiddish newspaper, ran a tribute to Hirsch on his hundredth yahrzeit that expressed great reverence for his legacy — seeing in his anti-Zionism a point of genuine ideological overlap, even while the two traditions differed sharply in other respects. Rabbi Domb of Neturei Karta used respectful language about Hirsch and his son-in-law Rav Shlomo Breuer as well, though he attacked subsequent members of the Breuer family, especially Isaac, for what he regarded as their departures from principle.

The figure of Isaac Breuer — Hirsch's grandson, Rav Shlomo Breuer's son — is where the tension becomes most interesting and most unresolved. Isaac Breuer was the most intellectually sophisticated heir of the Hirschian tradition in the twentieth century, and he modified the tradition significantly in response to the realities of his age. Unlike his father, who insisted after the Balfour Declaration that the Three Oaths be upheld and treated the World Zionist Organization as forbidden territory under the principles of Austritt, Isaac Breuer came to engage with the question of the Land of Israel in a different register. He remained anti-Mizrachi — even the most Zionist Hirschian could not legitimize that organization's structure — but he grappled seriously with the theological significance of Jewish history moving in the direction it was moving, and with what it meant that God seemed to be giving the Jewish people a state. His position was not his grandfather's, and this gap within the tradition itself has never been cleanly resolved.

The establishment of the State of Israel in 1948 confronted the entire Hirschian tradition with a reality Hirsch himself never had to face. His writings could not have addressed it directly. The question of how a Hirschian should relate to a sovereign Jewish state — not to a movement or an ideology but to an existing political reality with implications for every aspect of Jewish life — is one the tradition has not answered with a single voice. Some hold that the theoretical anti-Zionism of the Hirschian framework shifts necessarily when there is a functioning Jewish state: the relevant question is no longer whether to support a Zionist project but how Torah should shape Jewish sovereignty. Others insist that the core Hirschian commitments — Austritt, the Mensch-Yisroel ideal, the primacy of Torah over nationalist ideology — require a position of careful distance from a state whose founding ideology and institutional character remain, in significant ways, at odds with Hirschian principles.

What is notable is that the trajectory of the debate within the Hirschian world has run toward engagement rather than rejection. The tradition's most serious twentieth-century heir engaged with the question of the state seriously and thoughtfully, even while remaining outside the Zionist consensus. Whether that engagement constitutes a modification of Hirsch's position or a legitimate application of his principles to new circumstances is itself a matter of ongoing dispute — and it is precisely the kind of question that a living Hirschian tradition must be prepared to address, rather than to defer indefinitely.