Auto-emancipation
Autoemancipation is an anonymous, early Zionist essay by Judah Leib Pinsker , which the latter wrote under the impression of the pogroms in 1881 after the assassination attempt on Alexander II in the Russian Empire . The German original was published on January 1, 1882, as a warning to his tribesmen by a Russian Jew .
Pinsker writes that in a state that not only tolerates but even promotes anti-Semitism, a state that uses pogroms to solve domestic political problems, a life for Jews is impossible. But pogroms are not the real reason for founding a Jewish state. Pinsker speaks rather in a positive sense of a national rebirth, of the restoration of national honor. In this sense, his approach also affects the Jews of Western Europe.
He defines the Jewish question as follows:
“In the bosom of the peoples among whom they live, the Jews actually constitute a heterogeneous element which no nation can tolerate well. The task now is to find a means by which this exclusive element of the association of peoples can be touched in such a way that the Jewish question is forever removed from the ground. "
background
Auto-emancipation was written 15 years before Theodor Herzl's Der Judenstaat . Along with Moses Hess ' Rome and Jerusalem, it is one of the most important writings of early Zionism . The writing led to the establishment of so-called “Friends of Zion”, groups of which some even made their way to Palestine, but overall it was granted little political success.
Pinsker was a fully assimilated Jew, but after violent pogroms raged in Russia in 1871 and 1881, he became a proto-Zionist. He was strongly influenced by the thoughts of Moses Lilienblum and the Chibbat Zion movement. Pinsker published the work after a trip to Europe, during which he received little approval from the Jewish leaders, who, of course, were not faced with the same problems.
content
The script has a motto from Rabbi Hillel : “ If I don't help myself, who will? And if not today, when? "
According to Pinsker, the diaspora is no longer sustainable and assimilation is not possible. He also rejects the religious interpretation of the Diaspora as silent suffering in anticipation of the Messiah . Because the Jews do not have a state like other peoples , what is missing here is " the basis of that mutual respect that is usually regulated and secured by international law or treaties ". In a world in which the national feeling of the peoples is awakening, the Jews must also come to their rights and find themselves. A normal people would be inconceivable without a common language and customs, without spatial belonging, without a center, without its own government or representation. The Jews are " present everywhere and nowhere at home ". That's why he says:
- “ We have to prove that the misfortune of the Jews is primarily based on their lack of need for national independence, but that this need must necessarily be awakened and kept alive in them if they do not want to be abandoned to an eternally shameful existence; in a word: that they must become one nation. "
He considers anti-Semitism to be an almost natural reaction of the peoples:
- “ This ghostly appearance of a walking dead, of a people without unity and structure, without land and ties, which no longer live and yet walk among the living; this peculiar figure, which is hardly to be found again in history, who is without a model and without a copy, could not fail to produce a peculiar, strange impression in the imagination of the peoples. "
Pinsker did not define a specific location for a Jewish state in Auto-Emancipation, but named Palestine, Syria, North America and Argentina as possibilities, although the idea of Palestine was not very promising. However, he later changed his mind and advocated Palestine despite the troubles he still saw.
literature
- Love of Palestine: Leon Pinsker, Anti-Semitism and the Beginnings of the National Jewish Movement in Germany , ed. by Julius H. Schoeps, Berlin [u. a.]: Philo, 2005, ISBN 3865725309
- Scott Ury: Autoemancipation. In: Dan Diner (Ed.): Encyclopedia of Jewish History and Culture (EJGK). Volume 1: A-Cl. Metzler, Stuttgart / Weimar 2011, ISBN 978-3-476-02501-2 , pp. 209-213.
