Zionism(s)

Readers of this blog might notice that I label myself both a Francophile and a Zionist. This is about the latter. I consider myself a Zionist in the same way as I consider myself a feminist: defensively, dare I say conservatively, as in, I think there should continue to be a Jewish state in Palestine (which is not to say there shouldn't also be a Palestinian one - there should. Don't get all excited, everyone.), and I think that women should continue to have rights (an imprecise word I realize, but bear with me) where this is the case, or should be able to acquire them where it is not. I'm not, therefore, a Zionist in the sense in which the word is sometimes used, as in, I do not believe in a Greater Israel or in signing up 100% with U.S. conservative doctrine - contraception bans and all - because Israel Israel Israel, friends of my enemies are my friends, blah blah. Nor am I a feminist in the clichéd sense of rejecting cooking, eyeliner, heterosexuality, etc.

This is all relevant because as I've recently learned (or maybe it's relearned, but this time more definitively), in Jewish Studies, there's such a thing as Zionist historiography. In the context of this field, from what I understand, a "Zionist" is someone who, among other things, blames 19th and early-20th century Diaspora Jews for being so "assimilated", that is, for "fooling themselves" into thinking they were really French, German, etc. Had they only known they were and always would be Jews above all else in the eyes of others, and had perhaps gotten moving on setting up a state of their own, they could have - and it all comes down to this, doesn't it? - avoided the Holocaust.

Simply put, this is not at all how I understand modern French-Jewish history. French Jews were not under the mistaken impression that they were both Jewish and French, they were both of these things. "Assimilation" was not so much an ideology adopted at will, but a long-established reality. French Jews in 1940 were not "assimilated", as though having of their own accord, in their own lifetimes, abandoned some primordial Jewish state in order to get ahead or whatever. They just were French, plain and simple. The idea that assimilation was a path among others only emerged - and then barely - following the Dreyfus Affair. Prior to that, "assimilation" just meant that one was both Jewish and French.

That the Nazi and Vichy regimes decided to define as "the Jews" an arbitrarily-chosen set of people including those with a positive Jewish identity, those who didn't care either way, and even Christians of or presumed to be of Jewish heritage was in fact a part of these regimes' violence. How could anyone blame those with some Jewish grandparents, or with nothing but a vague sense of not being Christian, but no connection to Judaism, for not having preemptively abandoned their French identities for a Jewish one? The other-sense-of-the-word Zionist in me certainly sees how this would have been beneficial, but the part of me that's neck-deep in French-Jewish history cannot see how this would have been the case, and sees any expectations that it might have as anachronistic.

This is a problem for me because I identify as a Zionist, but, apparently, not as a Zionist, depending on the context. I'm definitely not an anti-Zionist, and given how unfashionable even my own not-exactly-Likudnik version of Zionism is these days, I would never want to give that impression. Nor, however, would I want anyone to think I embrace an understanding of history that's anachronistic. Help!