PREFACE TO THE ENGLISH-LANGUAGE EDITION A premise of this book is that the losers of history may have just as interesting a story to tell as the winners, who are usually the ones telling it. The story of Marcus Ehrenpreis (1869–1951) is indeed, on the face of it, the story of a loser. His vision for a Zionism aiming at the spiritual and cultural renaissance of Judaism lost out to a Zionism aimed at making the Jews a nation like all others, with a state like all others. His vision of the Jews as an emblematic and exemplary minority, living as a nation amid nations, heralding a world in which minorities and majorities would learn to coexist in peace and prosperity, was rendered tragic, if not naive, by murderous antisemitism and the destruction of European Jewry. And not least, his vision of Judaism as a nonnational force for universal peace and brotherhood was irrevocably challenged by the emergence of a fiercely nationalist and messianic-territorialist interpretation of Judaism, made historically possible by the reemergence of a Jewish nation-state in Palestine.
Undeniably, then, to enter the world of Marcus Ehrenpreis is to revisit ideas and visions that have been deemed unviable by the court of history. And to meet with a generation of thinkers, writers, rabbis, and activists who saw a future for Jews and Judaism that is no longer for us to see, and who, to the pressing Jewish questions of the time, provided answers that were shown to be illusory.
Nevertheless, the questions they hoped to answer are back to haunt us, as are the human forces that gave rise to them. Wars and conflicts are again ripping our societies apart, authoritarianism, nationalism, xenophobia, and antisemitism are again on the rise, ethnic cleansing is again à la mode, and what Marcus Ehrenpreis termed “the question of Israel” remains as pressing as ever. Not only has its national answer, a Jewish nation-state in Palestine, failed to deliver on its main promise, to solve “the Jewish problem” once and for all, but it has arguably contributed to a plethora of new Jewish conundrums and challenges.
When grappling with “the question of Israel” in an essay written in 1943, knowing full well that “the entire people of Israel” was about to be “swept from the face of the earth,” Marcus Ehrenpreis concluded that if there were ever to be a solution to “the Jewish problem,” it must go hand in hand with a solution to the wider human problem he had had to confront as a European-Jewish leader in a time of aggressive nationalism, malignant antisemitism, and incessant ethno-national wars. “Peace must be made, not only between the world and the Jews,” he wrote, “but more widely, between the weak and the strong, between minorities and majorities, between the oppressed and the oppressors. […] The strengthening and cementing of minority rights is a sine qua non for a lasting peace, and an imperative requirement for both Jews and other minorities.”
Where others saw a new Jewish answer to the question of Israel appearing, Marcus Ehrenpreis saw an ancient question remaining.
This book began with a gift from a friend, a series of neatly bound volumes of a Swedish-Jewish monthly magazine,
Judisk Tidskrift, covering the period from 1928 to 1951. As I began to peruse its yellowing pages, volume by volume, I found myself entering a Jewish universe brimming with ideas and visions, essays and poetry, sermons and lectures, reviews and reports, discussions and reflections, and, not least, hope. Not unbridled hope, of course—this was a time when the European skies were darkening, and antisemitism was poisoning the air, and a Jewish disaster was looming—but nevertheless a time when a multitude of Jewish venues still seemed open, and Judaism in its many manifestations still seemed to have a European future.
The founder and editor of the magazine was Marcus Ehrenpreis, and as I ventured further into his life and work I got sight of a European-Jewish personality of a larger stature than I had imagined, having played a more significant role in European-Jewish life than I had known, having been more instrumental in the efforts to aid and rescue the Jews of Nazi-ruled Europe than I had been led to believe. In fact, his memory and legacy had been tarnished by malign allegations that he had not done what he could have done to save Jewish lives that could have been saved.
At this time, I had just finished writing my childhood memoir,
A Brief Stop on the Road from Auschwitz, a book about me and my father and the shadows of the Holocaust in my life. In a previous book I had woven together a history of Zionism and Israel with my years as a teenage pioneer in the young Jewish state, which was a book that began where my childhood ended, with the death of my father and our
aliyah to Israel in 1962. And thus, the idea came to me that I would continue my writing journey backward in time, into the vanished European-Jewish world from which I had been born, setting out to explore a Jewish heritage that had become mine by contingency and history, hoping to find a Jewish heritage that I could make mine by choice and affection.
From what I had learned about Marcus Ehrenpreis, he promised to be the Virgil I would need for such a journey. Not only had he lived a remarkable life and played a significant role in shaping the European-Jewish world from which I came, but he had done so by bringing forth a Jewish heritage, a line of traditions and values, that appealed to me. I knew full well that with my choice of Virgil I would be guided by a loser of history, but as I came to see the world through the eyes of Marcus Ehrenpreis, I was struck by the continued relevance of the questions he had raised and the answers he had hoped to inspire.
This became even more striking to me at the shocking turn of history on 7 October 2023, in the wake of the Hamas-instigated massacre and hostage-taking in Israel, and the unhinged Israeli response of mass killing and mass devastation, leading to yet another round of displacement and ethnic cleansing, and thereby to the final collapse, morally and politically, of a “winning” answer to the question of Israel. The Zionism that in 1948 had promised to create a Jewish state based “on freedom, justice and peace as envisaged by the prophets of Israel” had not only produced an ethno-national fortress based on suppression, injustice, and war, but had also failed on its existential promise, to provide a safe haven for the Jews of the world. Paradoxically, the least safe place for Jews to be in at this juncture of history might be Israel itself.
The young Marcus Ehrenpreis had played a central role in the planning of the First Zionist Congress in Basel in 1897, writing and cosigning the Hebrew invitation together with Theodor Herzl (the charismatic leader of the nascent movement), appearing on the stage of the congress to introduce a discussion on the cultural aims of Zionism.
However, the Zionism of Marcus Ehrenpreis would soon turn out to be of another kind than Herzl’s, and Ehrenpreis’s apprehensions about a Zionism aimed at making the Jews a nation like all others, in a state like all others, would remain strong even as it seemed to realize its aims. At the heart of Ehrenpreis’s Zionism was instead the strengthening of Jewish life everywhere by creating a Jewish cultural and spiritual center in Palestine, and at the heart of his Judaism was the conviction that it had a significant contribution to make in the struggle to save the threatened spirit of humanity in humankind.
Or, as he wrote in 1934, as he witnessed the spirit of humanity being extinguished all around him, in words that sound eerily familiar today:
A wave of hatred wells through the countries, and not only against the Jews. A world order built on the foundations of humanity has been shaken. Terrible forces are set in motion to break the unity of the human race. Confused and anxious, we stand before the ruins of a world that was our common home.
And here we are again, confused and anxious, in yet another momentous turn in Jewish history. Although it’s too early to gauge the full significance of the calamitous events following 7 October, they mark the end of the State of Israel as a unifying symbol for Jews and Judaism. They also bring into sharp light the inherent conflict between Zion and Diaspora, between Jews as a national community dwelling in a Jewish nation-state and Jews as a historical, cultural, and spiritual community dwelling among the nations. This conflict, which was all-pervasive in the time of Marcus Ehrenpreis, appeared for a while to have been resolved in my time, albeit tragically, by the near-annihilation of the Jewish Diaspora in Europe and the founding of a Jewish nation-state in Palestine. In the course of Israel’s existence, however, it has become increasingly apparent that the ideal of a state based on ethnic-religious dominance must be at variance with the ideal of a state based on ethnic, religious, and cultural diversity. To Marcus Ehrenpreis, the latter was an ideal based on the sources of Judaism itself, and the sine qua non for Jewish spiritual and cultural life to develop and flourish.
At a time when this ideal is again being derided and maligned, and the “never agains” of the postwar era are fading into oblivion, we may contemplate the somber words of Marcus Ehrenpreis, written in 1946, after the near-destruction not only of the European-Jewish world whence he came, but of the larger European world of cross-cultural diversity and creativity which he had strived toward:
The question was then—and still is today—and will become even more pertinent tomorrow: Can the world be reordered so that ethnic and territorial borders will be made to coincide? And if this cannot be done—and hardly anyone in his right mind believes that it can—should any country have the right by divine and human law to deprive the minorities living within its borders, or within provinces conquered by war—peoples of a different historical origin and of a different faith from that of the ruling majority—of their freedom and life opportunities?
Needless to say, the question remains as pertinent today as in 1946, although had Ehrenpreis posed it today it would also have been perceived as a criticism of present-day Israel. However, Ehrenpreis could not imagine that Jews in a Jewish state would become a majority oppressing a minority, and even less that the tenets of Judaism would be used to justify it.
The Zionism and Judaism of Marcus Ehrenpreis were indeed of another kind, and although both of them may be deemed losers of history, this book is written in the conviction that the losers of history need not necessarily have been in the wrong.
Copyright © 2025 by Göran Rosenberg. All rights reserved. No part of this excerpt may be reproduced or reprinted without permission in writing from the publisher.
