The History of Galilee, 1538–1949 by M. M. Silver

Author:M. M. Silver
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: LEXINGTON BOOKS
Published: 2021-12-24T00:00:00+00:00

From Galilee of the Gentiles to Galilee of the Zealots

The issue of the Ostjuden was a quintessential feature of the Jews’ Emancipation struggle in pre-Holocaust Europe. Getting all the ducks in a row, and thereby proving to gentiles that there no longer remained an eastern type of traditional Jew unfit for modernity, became an imperative in campaigns to attain citizenship rights and socioeconomic opportunity in European lands.

In this sense, the Galilean outback of Jesus’s New Testament biography was a cautionary tale: given the wrong combination of sociopolitical events, a provincial, ignorantly superstitious, Jewry could cause great damage, just as Galilean Jews who took to Jesus ended up creating a rival religion. In any event, in the writing of figures like Geiger, the pros and cons of Jesus’s Jewishness had weights proportional to the middle class, urbanized, pro-westernization sentiments of Jews who prized emancipation, that is, the attainment of sociopolitical rights and status in Europe or America, above anything else.

However, aforementioned nuanced variation in Graetz’s writing about Jesus pointed to a different way of thinking about the topic, in a nationalist mode. Here, the hands on the Jewish normative compass switched positions, replacing an agenda of social integration in gentile countries in Europe with a demand for resistance to such accommodation and assimilation. On this model, the moral imperative for Jews became the upholding of national honor against the threatening encroachments of a major, foreign power.

In Jewish writing about Jesus, this model became important in early years of the twentieth century, after groups of Jews became disillusioned about the prospects of full Jewish integration in a European continent plagued, from west to east, by frightening realities and symbols of resurgent anti-Semitism, such as the Dreyfus Affair in France (1894–1904) and the Kishinev pogrom (1903) in tsarist Russia. Such Jews joined the Zionist movement, founded by Theodor Herzl and formally inaugurated by the First Zionist Congress in 1897.

At first glance, Zionist writers appear to have been drawn to the image of a Jewish Jesus for reasons not dissimilar to the calculations of pro-emancipation scholars such as Geiger. Theoretically, to prove that the inspiration of Christianity was an actual Jewish person, Jesus, turned anti-Semitism into a kind of super crime, parricide. Yet Zionists found much in the Jesus story which was ignored or repressed when pro-emancipation writers such as Geiger investigated it. For them, the Jesus movement was seen through the prism of Jewish nationalism, and Christianity’s inspiration became connected at least contextually to the fight for Jewish honor against the Romans.

The emancipationist Geiger’s Galilee of the Gentiles became a Zionist’s Galilee of the Zealots. In fact, much as Galilee had served as a marker differentiating between the Jesus biography of a secularized, pro-Christian writer such as Renan, and the Jesus biographical writing of a modernized, pro-Jewish scholar such as the Reform Rabbi Geiger, Galilee now served as a marker differentiating between the Jesus writing of a pro-integration, pro-Emancipation agenda of a scholar like Geiger, and the Jesus biographical writing of Zionists who

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