The Forgotten Polymath Who Almost Succeeded in Creating a Ḥasidic-Zionist Alliance

Born in Hamburg in 1843, Ahron Marcus received substantive Jewish and secular educations, then—following an apparent adolescent religious crisis—left Germany for Galicia, studied in a ḥasidic yeshiva, married a ḥasidic woman, and found himself a ḥasidic rebbe. He went on to author works of biblical and talmudic scholarship, in addition to books and articles (some in Hebrew, some in German) on Josephus, the relevance of recent archaeological discoveries in Egypt and Mesopotamia to the Bible and Talmud, and the application of contemporary psychological theories to Ḥasidism, as well as the first-ever scholarly history of the movement. In the 1880s, he became a leading figure in the pre-Herzlian Zionist movement Ḥibbat Tsiyon, as Shlomo Zuckier writes:

Marcus’s Zionism reached its peak . . . upon his reading Theodor Herzl’s Der Judenstaat in 1896, on which he lectured in the following year. Breaking with Maḥzikey ha-Dat, [Galicia’s dominant] Orthodox communal organization, Marcus spent the next four years in lengthy correspondence and personal friendship with Herzl, discussing theoretical matters but, most importantly, the possibility of bringing East European traditionalists into alliance with the Zionist movement. . . . Marcus spent significant energies endeavoring to forge an alliance between . . . David Moshe Friedmann, the Czortkower rebbe, and Herzl’s Zionist movement, toiling in vain to set up a personal meeting between the two.

Ideologically, he combined a certain messianic view idealizing the potential restoration of the Jewish homeland with a down-to-earth position focused on uniting European Jewry around pragmatic alliances. Zionist nationalism should be uncontroversial, Marcus argued, because nationalistic loyalty is simply based on the extension of familial ties, and the ties of the Jewish family are strong. . . .

Unfortunately, the ḥasidic-Zionist alliance was not meant to be. The meeting between Herzl and Rabbi Friedmann never took place. By 1900, several ḥasidic leaders explicitly opposed Herzl and his project, Marcus despaired of his great plan, and in 1912 was among the founders of [the ultra-Orthodox party] Agudat Yisrael.

Read more at Lehrhaus

More about: Galicia, Hasidism, History & Ideas, Theodor Herzl, Zionism

What a Strategic Victory in Gaza Can and Can’t Achieve

On Tuesday, the Israeli defense minister Yoav Gallant met in Washington with Secretary of State Antony Blinken and Secretary of Defense Lloyd Austin. Gallant says that he told the former that only “a decisive victory will bring this war to an end.” Shay Shabtai tries to outline what exactly this would entail, arguing that the IDF can and must attain a “strategic” victory, as opposed to merely a tactical or operational one. Yet even after a such a victory Israelis can’t expect to start beating their rifles into plowshares:

Strategic victory is the removal of the enemy’s ability to pose a military threat in the operational arena for many years to come. . . . This means the Israeli military will continue to fight guerrilla and terrorist operatives in the Strip alongside extensive activity by a local civilian government with an effective police force and international and regional economic and civil backing. This should lead in the coming years to the stabilization of the Gaza Strip without Hamas control over it.

In such a scenario, it will be possible to ensure relative quiet for a decade or more. However, it will not be possible to ensure quiet beyond that, since the absence of a fundamental change in the situation on the ground is likely to lead to a long-term erosion of security quiet and the re-creation of challenges to Israel. This is what happened in the West Bank after a decade of relative quiet, and in relatively stable Iraq after the withdrawal of the United States at the end of 2011.

Read more at BESA Center

More about: Gaza War 2023, Hamas, IDF