The ?Melting Pot? in Zionist Thought

Abstract

JTjLt the start of the new millennium, the Jewish population in Israel numbered almost five million, the optimal threshold foreseen 60-70 years ago by three utopian visionaries: David Ben-Gurion, Ze ev Jabotinsky, and Mordechai Bentov. This demographic revolution contains immense historical significance. It means that, in the Land of Israel, a new Jewish center has been established identical in size with that of pre-WWI Czarist Russia and greatly exceeding that of Poland between the two world wars. In many aspects the Israeli center differs from its earlier counterparts by its use of Hebrew, ethnic fabric, political status, socio economic structure, and geographic location. It resembles the older Jewish European communities, however, in its national aspirations and even surpasses them in its historical significance. Sovereign Israel is a social reality in which Jews, for the first time since the sixth century a.D., have become a territorial majority in their ancestral homeland. This demographic phenomenon realized both a quantitative and qualitative ambition. The reconstitution of the Jewish people in their homeland raised questions of how the admixture of diverse immigrations would cohere and coalesce into one society. The operating metaphor often employed is borrowed from the American experience: the ideal of the melting pot. It is the purpose of this essay to explore the various nuances of how that idea was constructed by Zionist theoreticians and to what extent the melting pot was realized in Zionist experience. In pursuing this inquiry, the use of melting pot in the Zionist context calls for clarification of two sets of related terms. The first is the classic distinction between civilization, in the sense of a comprehensive realization of all political, material, and technological life; and the term culture, which embraces the multiplicity of ideas and values by which society lives and to which it adheres. Although this differentiation has lately come under criticism?and

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