A few months ago, Yale University Press published a study by Dmitry Shumsky of the Hebrew University of Jerusalem that challenged the history of Zionism. Shumsky contradicts the prevailing belief that Zionism always aspired to establish a Jewish state. According to the researcher, major figures in the Zionist movement – from Theodor Herzl and Zeev Jabotinsky to David Ben-Gurion – first envisioned various models of a binational state, a federation, and Jewish autonomy under the Ottoman Empire. A Jewish state was never at the top of their agenda, he says.
Most of the evidence Shumsky lays out is not new. Historians who study Zionism are familiar with it, but tend to view it as compelled by the spirit of the times. The first Zionists seemed like dreamers when they talked about Jewish autonomy or a federation in the Land of Israel. It is not hard to understand why they were careful about expressing their aspirations when a sovereign state was so far from being a reasonable hope. Shumsky has described himself as identifying with the positions of the Arab-Jewish communist party Hadash, and his political leanings are open and obvious.
Purim is a good time to put this discussion in an appropriate historical context. The Book of Esther says that around the time the First Temple was destroyed, the Persians defeated the Babylonians and founded an empire that stretched from India to what is today northern Sudan. We know that the empire's borders were established quickly and it was divided up into about 20 huge satraps, each one of which was divided into administrative districts, which were sometimes sub-divided.
The Land of Israel was a tiny part of the fifth satrapy, Eber-Nari or Aramea. A few "district-states" existed in our region, among them Samaria, Ashdod, Moab, and Qedar. Judea was also a district state, and following the Edict of Cyrus, Jews liberated from Babylonian captivity made their way there.
In an international system like that, the Jews couldn't even dream of sovereignty. Nevertheless, a rich trove of Persian-era coins found in the greater Jerusalem area in the past few decades that are imprinted with the words "Yahad" or "Yahud" – indicates that Judea enjoyed a certain administrative independence, and moreover, points to the dreams of the residents of Judea. Archaeologists have pointed this out as a unique phenomenon, as no other Persian district states printed their names on coins, and cite it as part of a consistent effort to express that the administrative district – with its clipped wings – was the ancient Kingdom of Judea, whose glorious memory was still alive in the hearts of the Jews who returned to Zion from Babylon.
Their wish to renew Jewish sovereignty could not be openly expressed as a rebellious manifest against the Persian Empire, which was good to them, but their national consciousness was well-preserved in the words of the Book of Nehemiah: "Behold, we are slaves this day; in the land that you gave to our fathers to enjoy its fruit and its good gifts, behold, we are slaves … And its rich yield goes to the kings whom you have set over us because of our sins. They rule over our bodies and over our livestock as they please, and we are in great distress." (Nehemiah 9:36-7)
When one understands their determined struggle, even if only as a weak declaration of independence in a recalcitrant reality, it's hard to read the Book of Esther and remain detached from those dramatic political events. This is why midrashic commentators described Mordechai as a Jew liberated from Babylon who wanted to return to Zion, and Haman as a representative of the foreign population in Judea, who objected to Jewish aliyah. Their journey to Shushan, the capital of the empire, began as an arduous trip to lay out their cases before the Persian king. Other commentaries describe the results of the story of the Book of Esther – King Darius (Cyrus) II, who renewed the Edict of Cyrus to rebuild the Temple in Jerusalem, is identified as the son of Esther and Ahasuerus.
The Persian era teaches us that when we try and understand the dream of the Jews and the hopes of the Zionist movement, we cannot base our arguments on work plans created in whatever historical circumstances existed in the 19th or early 20th centuries. Sometimes, the writing on a coin, prayers, dreams, and poems better describe the motives of a mass movement. In those days, at this time.
