When Boundaries Are Relative(s): Conversion, Intermarriage, and the Amorphous Boundaries of the Zionist Movement

Early political and cultural Zionism professed the goal of mobilizing and/or creating a secular national Jewish identity independent from (if not influenced by) Judaism. This paper is part of a wider project on early Zionist discourse and policy on religious conversion – both into and especially out of Judaism – that shows how changes of religion could in fact impact allegedly non-religious Jewish ethnic or racial identity. Not only could conversion call Jewish ethnic or national membership into question, it oftentimes also revealed fissures in the Zionist movement regarding the boundaries and content of Jewish national identity. By examining conversion in nationalist movements and in Zionism in particular, we are able to analyze how changes in religion alter, sharpen, or blur nationalist concepts of state, ethnicity, and nation.

This paper provides examples of conversion in the bourgeoning Zionist movement and early state of Israel, and will demonstrate that Zionism did not consistently maintain either ethnic or civic nationalism. Specifically this paper addresses cases of and discourse about intermarriage of Zionists and non-Jews who did not convert to Judaism. The first set of cases will be from the beginning, theoretical stages of the movement in Europe, when prominent Zionist leaders Israel Zangwill and Max Nordau married non-Jews. The second case is from Palestine several decades later, when a non-Jewish husband of a Jewish refugee from Nazi Germany joined the Haganah (and was later buried in a Jewish cemetery despite the fact he never converted). These examples, as well as the broader project on conversion and early Zionism as a whole, show how the Zionist case may (or may not) illumine the relationships between religion and nationalism in other nationalist cases.