Free The Wandering Who: A Study of Jewish Identity Politics by Gilad Atzmon Page A

But this can never be achieved, and this is exactly where ‘hate politics’ starts to play its part.
    If you don’t know who you are, just find yourself an enemy. In other words, ‘tell me who you hate and I will tell you who you are.’
    Mendelssohn must have understood the intrinsic clash between the ‘cosmopolitan man’ and the ‘Jewish home’. He must have realised that universalism and tribalism are opposing categories. Being trained as a rabbi, Mendelssohn offered a pragmatic and practical solution – but this solution led to false and deceptive behaviour. Either you pretend to be a cosmopolitan while in the street or you lie to your creator at your dwelling. This behavioural code, though being very pragmatic, happens to be non-ethical by definition. It is based on deception – both self-deception and deceiving the other.
    As we know, it was Mendelssohn’s insight that was the cause of many Germanic Jews eventually converting to Christianity or just departing from any connection with Jewish collectivism, Jewish life or culture. Ethically, at least, Mendelssohn’s middle way between orthodoxy and modernity failed to provide an answer. The third category Jewish leftwing activist falls straight into Mendelssohn’s trap. They try desperately and unsuccessfully to bridge the gap between tribal commitment and the universal call. Like Mendelssohn, they are doomed to failure.

Chapter 7
    The Dialectic of Negation
    Here are some quotes that reveal what early Zionist ideologists thought of their brothers, the Diaspora Jews, those for whom they were developing a nationalist project based on a philosophy of racial ethnic identity:
‘The Jew is a caricature of a normal, natural human being, both physically and spiritually. As an individual in society he revolts and throws off the harness of social obligations, knows no order nor discipline.’ ( Our Shomer ‘Weltanschauung’ , Hashomer Hatzair, December 1936, p.26. As cited by Lenni Brenner 36 )
‘The fact is undeniable that the Jews, collectively, are unhealthy and neurotic. Those professional Jews who, wounded to the quick, indignantly deny this truth are the greatest enemies of their race, for they thereby lead them to search for false solutions, or at most palliatives.’ (Ben Frommer, The Significance of a Jewish State, Jewish Call, Shanghai, May 1935, p.10. As cited by Lenni Brenner 37 )
‘The enterprising spirit of the Jew is irrepressible. He refuses to remain a proletarian. He will grab at the first opportunity to advance to a higher rung in the social ladder.’ (The Economic Development of the Jewish People, Ber Borochov, 1916 38 )
‘The emancipated Jew is insecure in his relations with his fellow-beings, timid with strangers, suspicious even toward the secret feeling of his friends. His best powers are exhaustedin the suppression, or at least in the difficult concealment of his own real character. For he fears that this character might be recognised as Jewish, and he has never the satisfaction of showing himself as he is, in all his thoughts and sentiments. He becomes an inner cripple, and externally unreal, and thereby always ridiculous and hateful to all higher-feeling men, as is everything that is unreal. All the better Jews in Western Europe groan under this, or seek for alleviation. They no longer possess the belief which gives the patience necessary to bear sufferings, because it sees in them the will of a punishing but not loving God.’ (Address at the First Zionist Congress, Max Nordau, 1897 39 )
    Early Zionist ideologists were pretty outspoken when it came to the ‘Diaspora’ Jewry. Ber Borochov eloquently diagnosed the inherent Jewish non-proletarian tendencies. Max Nordau didn’t spare words when confronting the intrinsic post-emancipated Jewish social incompetence. In the eyes of Hashomer Hatzair, the Diaspora Jew is nothing but a caricature and, for Ben Frommer, it is nothing less than neurosis we are dealing with. Yet, they were