שלמה אבינרי

Shlomo Avineri was born as Jerzy Wiener in Bielsko, Poland, 30 August 1933. He has recently passed away, at the age of 90, in Israel, on November 30, 2023.
Avineri was an outstanding political scientist and historian, author of a number of books on Karl Marx and the history and ideas of Zionism. His The Making of Modern Zionism (1981) remains a reference till today, and his more recent Herzl’s Vision – Theodor Herzl and the Foundation of the Jewish State (2013) is the most up-to-date biography of the founder of the Zionist movement.

Herzl’s Vision (2013)

A saying circulated during the French Revolution: ‘How beautiful was the Republic – under the monarchy.’ Visions of an ideal future seldom live up to the expectations of the prophets who dream them. Such was the case in the French Revolution, when the ideals of liberty, equality, and fraternity transmogrified into the Jacobin Reign of Terror; the same thing happened with the Enlightenment ideas of the American Founders, who declared that ‘all men are created equal’ but produced a constitution that protected slavery. Neither would it be hard to make a long list of the disparities between Herzl’s vision of his Old-New Land and the realities of Israel. But it is impossible to understand the European cultural and political context out of which Zionism emerged and the enormous energies that went into the Zionist project and the establishment of the Jewish state without considering the phenomenon of Theodor Herzl. His broad intellectual horizons, his tireless energy, his political instincts and insights meant that he, more than any other person, was responsible for turning the Zionist idea from a dream into a dynamic, organized political movement with a solid institutional foundation. Those who seek to close the gap between today’s Israel and Herzl’s vision, to turn the sometimes flawed terrestrial Israel into a heavenly Altneuland, would do well to take to heart Herzl’s insistence on human agency in his epigraph: ‘If you will it, it is no dream.’ (Herzl’s Vision, p. 261)

The Making of Modern Zionism (1981)

« Religion determined the status of the Jew: being what he was by virtue of his religious commitment, he naturally could not be part of the body politic, which was defined in religious terms. Since Christian society viewed its political organization as expressing the religious tenets of a Christian state, the Jew had to be excluded. He could, of course, be tolerated in the sense that most Christian societies in most periods allowed Jews freedom of worship: but the price for that toleration was apartness and clearly defined and legitimized discrimination. […]  The Jewish community, the kehilla, organizing the religious and social lives of these marginal men and women, became the quasi-political organization of this minority.
In this unequal and hierarchical equilibrium, Judaism was able to exist for almost two millennia. The basic principles of this equilibrium and the apartness of the Jews as a distinctive religious community were internalized by both Jews and Gentiles. Persecution, forced conversions, pogroms, burnings at the stake, and expulsions often shattered this balance. But the theological underpinnings of Christianity’s attitude toward the Jews ultimately legitimized this tolerance based on discrimination—a tolerance very different from the modern, liberal concept based on equality of all.
It was this equilibrium, even with all its occasional and horrifying breakdowns, that enabled the Jews to survive in a basically hostile environment. It also enabled them to internalize their inferior status—legitimized in the Christian community through triumphalism and in the Jewish community through the theology of exile.
Enlightenment and the reverberations of the French Revolution throughout most of Europe disrupted this equilibrium. Secularization and liberalism opened European society for Jews as equals. For the first time since the destruction of the Temple, schools, universities, the public service, politics, and the professions were opened to Jews as citizens. Equality before the law and the relegation of religion to the realm of private concerns meant that the state no longer viewed itself as Christian but as encompassing every citizen regardless of his religious beliefs or lack of them. It was this revolution that catapulted the Jews in most European countries from their marginal and peripheral status in the early part of the nineteenth century to their central and salient positions toward the end of the century. It was the most tremendous revolution in the position of the Jews since Vespasian’s times.
Yet it was precisely this opening up of non-Jewish society which created a completely novel set of dilemmas and problems for which the traditional framework of the kehilla was wholly inadequate, based as it was on the legitimized and mutually accepted separation and discrimination of the Jews in a Christian society. »

His expertise covered also general international politics, and his quote about two visions of Amerian foreign politics became cult:
“Kissinger opted for a strategy of accommodation with Moscow, while Brzezinski, claiming that the very nature of Soviet ideology and policies prevents stability, sought strategies for undermining the Soviet system. Brzezinski was proven right and Kissinger was wrong.” —Shlomo Avineri