Zionism and the Jewish Question: Marx, Durkheim, and the Crisis of Jewish Solidarity
Jonathan Brown
Abstract
This article interrogates the modern identification of Zionism with Judaism by tracing the historical, sociological, and ideological conditions that enabled Zionism’s rise to hegemony within global Jewish life. Challenging the “unbroken chain” thesis that presents the State of Israel as the inevitable culmination of ancient Jewish destiny, the paper argues that Zionism emerged not from timeless religious longing but from the specific crises produced by the transition from feudalism to capitalist modernity. Drawing on a theoretical synthesis of Karl Marx’s historical-materialism and Émile Durkheim’s structural– moral sociology, the study situates Zionism alongside other nineteenth- and early-twentieth-century Jewish responses to the “Jewish Question,” including Reform assimilationism, Orthodox restorationism, and revolutionary socialism. Through this framework, the article elucidates how the disintegration of the medieval kehillah, the erosion of mechanical solidarity, and the restructuring of Jewish economic life under capitalism generated competing visions of emancipation. The paper contends that Zionism’s eventual dominance– solidified after the Holocaust and institutionalized through Israel’s extra-territorial claims over world Jewry– was neither natural nor inevitable but the product of geopolitical alignment with Western imperial power. By recovering the suppressed socialist and diasporic alternatives eclipsed by Zionism, the article seeks to reopen the historical question of Jewish solidarity and to challenge the ideological conflation of Judaism, Jewry, and the Zionist state.
Keywords
Marxism, Zionism, Judaism, Jewish Question, historical materialism, Durkheim, Marx, capitalism, modernity, kehillah, mechanical solidarity, Jewish emancipation, Reform Judaism, Orthodox Judaism, Jewish socialism, diaspora, Holocaust, imperialism, nation-state, Jewish identity, political Zionism, Jonathan Brown
