This chapter shows how antisemitism built on Christian anti-Judaism, including blood libel accusations but also the appearance of Christian philosemitism. Documents show Zionism was a reaction to antisemitism as well as to the rise of nationalism and also benefited from Christian restorationism.

An unofficial ban on Wagner’s music has existed in Israel since Kristallnacht in 1938. This chapter places the ban, its adherents, and its detractors, into the context of the early Zionists during the 1890s, and specifically their relation to Wagner’s music. Theodor Herzl, father of modern political Zionism and author of The Jewish State (1896), wrote of the inspiration he took from Wagner’s music for advancing his project, opening the Second Zionist Congress in 1898 with the overture from Tannhäuser. Wagner’s regeneration writings, the discourse of secular Jews in Vienna in search of ‘the soil’ for an independent state outside Europe, and Nietzsche’s advocacy of freedom from religious or dogmatic identities all combined in unfamiliar ways to advocate a future that abandoned a European past, with Wagner in tacit support.

Reluctantly crowned the national poet of the nascent Jewish state at the beginning of the twentieth century, Haim Nahman Bialik – a poet, essayist, and editor who spent most of his life on the margins of the Russian Empire – wrote a series of influential poems of wrath in the prophetic mode famously read as the expression of a crisis of secularism. In Bialik’s most affecting prophetic poetry, the almost imperceptible “wobble” in his teacher Ahad Ha’am’s style turns into a great storm of doubt, rage, sorrow, fragmentation, and loss. If Ahad Ha’am tried to construct a strong prophetic spirit as an educational tool, Bialik paradoxically uses prophetic failure and weakness to summon and goad his audience into a new kind of subjectivity. Reading Bialik’s crisis of secularism in a new light, I argue for a weak prophecy common to both Bialik’s poems and the biblical text.

Genuine, refined, and updated scholarship in recent decades has gradually refuted the view of nationalism as a strictly modern phenomenon. That view in general had tended to interconnect nationalism with the industrial revolution and capitalism. According to this approach, the objective emergence of national markets combined with subjective manipulations by interested capitalists served to mold, often invent, nationalism; the conspicuous political expressions of this modern process are – per the modernists – the national states of western Europe. By contrast, my approach criticizes this dogmatic, often Marxist and Eurocentric, view, and is closely related to the new keen scholarship, which explores nationalism and nationhood, also beyond Europe, deep into antiquity, and aspires to avoid dogmas which ignore the rich, variegated, and eventful history of ethnopolitical identities. The Jewish nationalist case, as we shall see, conspicuously fits into the meaningfully nuanced long history category.

This chapter is dedicated to the Wilhelmine Empire (Kaiserreich), an era that saw the apex of German imperial expansionism. It was a period ripe with numerous intersecting visions of supersessionism, expansion, and domination. A major challenge for Baeck was Adolf Harnack’s turn-of-the-century popular lectures and subsequent book titled The Essence of Christianity. Harnack presented a pure and positive essence of Christianity against a legalistic and negative Jewish tradition. Baeck’s first major work, The Essence of Judaism (1905) responds to Harnack and subsequent challenges from the History of Religions School. Yet this type of response was shaped by the heydays of German imperialism, both abroad and in the attempts to colonize the former Polish territories. This is a formative phase for Baeck’s thought and many of his ideas, including the distinction between state power (Macht) and spiritual energy (Kraft), his views on Jewish missionizing, as well as his relation to Zionism. All these emerge in this period and continue to play a role in his thought throughout his life.

This last chapter presents Baeck’s imperial imagination in the postwar era. Baeck developed a bifocal view of Jewish history in this period, describing it as an ellipse circling around two poles. Whereas earlier these were, for example, the Northern and Southern kingdoms or Sepharad and Ashkenaz, in the postwar era Baeck locates the two centers in the United States and Palestine, and later the young state of Israel. In this new constellation, both needed each other. American Jews needed the State of Israel in order to be reminded of their particularity; the State of Israel needed American Jews to serve as a guard against nationalism and deification of the state. The Cold War brought with it new geopolitical constellations. Baeck imagined the United States as Atlas carrying the world. It played an important role not only in fostering Jewish life, but in serving as a bulwark against communism, and leading the United Nations in a more religious direction.

The current countries in the Middle East and North Africa were all formed, or transformed, in the nineteenth and early twentieth century by processes of partitioning and territorialization propelled by European colonial expansion and local responses to those interventions. As the region’s political topography was remapped before and after the First World War, collective identities were activated, reimagined, and mobilized within and across these newly delineated units. From Northern Africa to the Iranian plateau, an array of nationalisms emerged over the course of this transformation, pairing notions of peoplehood and political sovereignty in new frameworks of identity. For the Middle East and North Africa, the related questions “what is a nation?” and “when is the nation?” are best answered by focusing on a third question: how has the nation (and nationalism) worked in the region over the past two centuries?

This chapter approaches the historical entanglement of Jewish and Palestinian diasporas as one structured by incommensurability and inextricability. It takes up the writings of Stuart Hall on the diaspora concept to consider the limits and possibilities of framing this entanglement relationally. In his own method of argumentation, Hall repeatedly held his notion of diaspora at arm’s length from a set of historical, political, and cultural concerns regarding Palestine and Israel. The chapter argues that Hall’s pattern of relational refusal precludes a more fulsome engagement with diasporic relationality, and seeks to stretch Hall’s own insights beyond their own self-imposed limitations.

This chapter focuses on the quest for the Ten Lost Tribes in modern Asia. It reveals the deep connection between early religious proto-Zionist thinking regarding the search for the Lost Tribes in Asia and the activities of present-day religious Zionists among the Bnei Menashe of eastern India. The issue of the Ten Lost Tribes of Israel and the finding of the remnants of the 2,700-year-old exile raises significant questions regarding the nature and future of Judaism and the Jewish ethnos in the global era, questions that clearly deserve further research. As such, the chapter concludes, the process of acceptance into the larger Jewish community is fraught with many obstacles.

This chapter gives an overview of the four different Jewish groups that have inhabited the Indian subcontinent during the modern era: the Cochin Jews in southwest India; Bene Israel; the Paradesi Jews; and the Baghdadi Jews. The chapter focuses on their encounter with modernization and their subsequent identity formation. It suggests that the main conflict these Jews have faced, both as a group and as individuals, was how to reconcile between Indian nationalism and Zionism.

Economic nationalism became a dominant, and often destructive, discourse in the interwar period. This manifested itself in the rise of economic antisemitism in Nazi Germany, as well as in the corporatist dictatorships ruling Italy, Romania and Brazil. These autocracies were promoted in the writings of Mihail Manoilescu, who believed that dictatorship could spur growth even in autarky. In other ways, however, the interwar period saw a sharpening of existing nineteenth-century trends. Anti-imperialist movements remained powerful, especially in China, where Sun Yat-sen conceived of a powerful protector state that would manage foreign investment. Multi-ethnic contexts, as in Mandatory Palestine, encouraged isolationist approaches, this time from Zionist nation-builders. These efforts at nation-building encouraged economic segregation and ultimately inter-communal conflict. Even Britain, the erstwhile beacon of free trade, attempted to transform its Empire into a self-sufficient trading block during the Great Depression.