Historians consider early twentieth-century programs developed by British internationalists that sought alternatives to nation-state nationalism as problematic attempts to preserve imperial power and to suppress anticolonial demands for self-determination. British internationalists, especially those associated with the Round Table movement, called for the transformation of the British Empire into a commonwealth of semiautonomous nationalities.^[1] This process, liberal internationalists promised, would ensure collective recognition of national minority groups, protect liberal principles around the globe, and promote greater levels of integration among diverse ethnic communities.
However, subsequent scholars and practitioners have argued that the idealistic association of depoliticized nationalism with the pursuit of harmony, cooperation, and diversity concealed an ulterior agenda. Internationalism promised to perpetuate imperial political control over vast territories and heterogeneous ethnic populations in the name of human progress.^[2] Indeed, framing theories of internationalism in the language of civilization, liberalism, and humanism belied the strong residue of colonial assumptions and sense of noblesse oblige on the part of the imperial elite. Those considered still in need of social, moral, and political advancement required regeneration before gaining the fundamental individual and national rights espoused by liberalism. Internationalism’s critique of the nation-state paradigm thus reinforced racial hierarchies, maintained economic inequalities, and preserved European exceptionalism. Moreover, separating nation and state served as an effective tool for neutralizing demands for political self-determination among colonialized populations.
The historical account and normative lessons of British internationalism’s critique of national self-determination looks far more ambiguous from the perspective of one of the ideological movements leading voices, Sir Alfred Zimmern (1879–1957). A key figure in the Round Table’s efforts to shape post–World War I British imperialism and the field of international studies, Zimmern’s legacy fits well into a narrative underscoring how self-proclaimed liberal elites applied various strategies and intellectual resources to reinforce the deteriorating status quo of imperial control. He adamantly rejected national sovereignty, popularized a theory of internationalism based on a federation or commonwealth of nations, and drafted sections of the Covenant of the League of Nations. So great was his influence as a scholar and practitioner that fellow political theorists considered him one of “the most influential representatives of our field.”^[3]
Because Zimmern was so illustrative of British internationalism during this period, subsequent scholars have been much less generous in their evaluations.^[4] His central role in promoting a British Commonwealth based on the principles of internationalism makes him a flashpoint for negative assessments of the theoretical program. As one biographer concluded about Zimmern, “the majority of his prewar writings on commonwealth and empire reveal an almost insouciant assumption that full citizenship rights be denied to nonwhite ‘dependencies’ based on their well-understood immaturity.”^[5]
This article does not set out to deny this problematic aspect of Zimmern’s formulations. His concept of internationalism remains deeply tainted by colonialism’s Eurocentric and paternalistic worldview. Instead, my goal is to complicate Zimmern’s legacy by bringing to light a completely overlooked component of his life and thought – his serious grappling with the meaning of his Jewish descent and his considerable theoretical debt to a number of Zionist thinkers.^[6] As an established British intellectual who personally and intellectually engaged with Zionism for over two decades, Zimmern struggled with his sense of belonging to universal and particular, human and national, and civic and ethnic communities. Focusing on his ambiguous relationship with Jewishness and the dilemmas of Jewish integration into the nation-state paradigm offers an alternate perspective for considering the evolution and legacy of British internationalism. His intellectual biography blurs an assumed historical dichotomy between imperial elites and colonialized populations, white privileges and nonwhite exclusion, and political occupation and national self-determination.
Zimmern’s interest in nationalism, internationalism, and the future of the British Empire must also be understood as a response to the fundamental theoretical dilemma that occupied Jewish intellectuals and non-Jewish theorists interested in the Jewish question. How to develop a category of collective identity fluid enough to encompass groups located in diaspora and homeland settings, committed to cultural assimilation and preserving distinct boundaries, grounded in religious beliefs and national solidarity, and dedicated to liberal principles and associations based on descent? Zimmern, following the lead of Zionist theorists, viewed these binary options as false choices imposed by the emerging logic of nation-state nationalism. The search for conceptions of nationalism that would dissolve the exclusivist logic of nation-state nationalism motivated Zimmern’s theoretical interest in distinguishing the concepts of national identity and political citizenship.
Zimmern’s engagement with his Jewish identity and his unresolved association with Jews and Judaism between 1905 and the 1920s reveals a prescient critique of nation-state nationalism and liberalism as ideologies both too particular and too universal to address the ethical and practical realities of populations spread across political and territorial boundaries. Zimmern’s pioneering exploration of the permeable boundaries, moral limits, and psychological power of national consciousness provides a new perspective on one key thinker’s intellectual biography and the forgotten synthesis of Zionism and internationalism in the decades before the establishment of the State of Israel.

NATIONALISM BEYOND THE NATION-STATE PARADIGM

The conception of nationalism developed by Zimmern puts his definition outside the contemporary usage of the term. The emergence of a global political order based on the foundation of the nation-state over the past half-century has created a tendency in both scholarly debates and popular vocabulary to equate the conceptual terms nation and state. Although the literature on nationalism is quite diverse and contentious, scholars from various schools of thought tend to share Ernst Gellner’s assumption that “the political and the national unit should be congruent.”^[7] The logic of nationalism presumes that citizens’ primary national identification must be singular and must match their patriotic loyalty to the state. The victory of the nation-state paradigm downplayed expressions of nationalism that eschewed self-determination. Historical ideologies that established analytical distinction between national and political allegiances have been marginalized by nationalism’s association with political sovereignty over a culturally homogeneous homeland.
The dominance of the nation-state model was not a foreordained conclusion, however. When Zimmern was born in 1879, the semantic and conceptual definitions of nationality and sovereignty were still largely open for debate. The Great War fueled the disintegration of the multinational empires that had shaped nineteenth- and early twentieth-century European politics. Indeed, the disintegration of imperial rule and the gradual process of decolonialization created a brief window during which theorists and activists promulgated various alternate possibilities for envisioning the future of nationalities and the global political order. These historical conditions created the perception among political theorists of a blank slate of political possibilities.
Members of the Round Table group exploited this situation to advocate for internationalism as the desired outcome of postwar reconstruction efforts. Zimmern and his colleagues at the Round Table averred that the doctrine of national sovereignty presented the most destabilizing threat to the international order. Liberal internationalists disagreed with the doctrine’s fundamental premise – that each ethnonational community had the right to self-determination and territorial sovereignty – on both practical and normative grounds. This equation of national collectivity with a sovereign polity would fuel enduring strife between nation-states committed to their particular concerns.
From an ethical perspective, remapping the globe in accordance with nation-state boundaries would impede progress toward the spread of universal justice and equality by erecting boundaries rather than promoting integration through education, social interaction, and economic cooperation. Liberal internationalists contended that the antidote to the militarism and belligerent nationalism engendered by national sovereignty was the creation of a federation of nationalities that the Round Table referred to as a commonwealth.^[8] However, the Round Table’s articulation of the deficiencies of national sovereignty was not tantamount to the rejection of nationality. Liberal internationalism viewed the ties that bind national groups as enduring and capable of transcending class relationships. Moreover, the particular historical, cultural, and social grounds of cohesion served as a catalyst for educating moral citizens, and even, paradoxically, created a greater degree of integration between disparate populations.
But how would this theoretical commonwealth of national groups operate? The federation of nationalities would promote some degree of national autonomy under the political sovereignty of a benevolent, multinational state committed to recognizing collective and individual rights of its citizens. Yet, the details remained vague. Possibilities for the type of government or sovereign power that would preserve this vision of integration and peaceful coexistence ranged from the creation of a world-state to the development of a League of Nations that would promote interaction between ethnonational groups rather than sovereign states.
This vision of liberal internationalism suffers from two fundamental problems subsequently underscored by scholars and practitioners. First, as proponents of the realist school of international relations claimed, the notion of cooperation between various national groups within one shared polity or international organization was an idealistic and naive vision. A more viable approach to international relations demanded the maintenance of strong sovereign nation-states as the basis of international organization. In the absence of universal standards, the most effective path toward peaceful relations is to recognize each state’s pragmatic interests in self-protection and survival.
A second concern reflects the enduring residue of colonial assumptions in the Round Table’s vision for the future of the world political order. Zimmern developed his critique of nation-state nationalism in the context of a cadre of British intellectuals seeking to revitalize the British. Internationalism mitigated the rapidly eroding British sphere of influence by (1) neutralizing the claims of anticolonial nationalism, and (2) distinguishing its own interests in preserving its global political power from those of Germany, England’s wartime rival. Replacing national sovereignty with an international system based on the principle of multinational polities provided a theoretical veneer for the preservation of national and imperial interests under the guise of liberal precepts.
As a result, Round Table theorists only applied the language of liberal ideals and of individual rights to specific groups deemed ready for self-government and civilized behavior. The widely accepted quasi-colonialism encoded within the new concept of commonwealth was thus an effective tool for rejecting the demands of colonialized populations for independence on the basis of the rhetoric of progress and civilization. Advanced national groups had the obligation to prepare less civilized nationalities – especially non-European and nonwhite groups – for receiving certain privileges. The near-term restriction of individual and national rights could thus be justifiably extended as part of the process of preparing non-European subjects for receiving equal treatment at some point in the future.

ZIMMERN’S THEORY OF INTERNATIONALISM

As a theorist and activist, Zimmern shaped and promoted the Round Table’s position by serving as an employee of the Ministry of Reconstruction and drafting Great Britain’s Peace Conference proposal as a member of the British Foreign Office. His relationship to his colleagues in the Round Table society is evident in his general understanding of nationality as distinct from statehood, which he laid out in a widely circulated collection of essays called Nationality and Government (1919).^[9]
While Zimmern shared many of his fellow internationalists’ ideas, his personal vision of nationalism stands out from his contemporaries in three key ways. First, he added a more theoretical critique of the concept of nation-state nationalism based on a negative appraisal of liberalism’s emphasis on individual, rather than group, rights. For example, he contested the claim by British liberalism’s founding father, John Stuart Mill, that liberal values are best realized through aligning nationality and citizenship. The “boundaries of government should,” Mill prescribes, “coincide in the main with those of nationalities.”^[10] As far as Mill was concerned, only a homogeneous national culture would ensure the equal treatment of all citizens and create the shared sense of collective membership necessary to establish a successful state. Mill recognized the possibility that substantial minority communities might exist within political boundaries. As a solution to this likelihood, Mill advocated the complete “merger” and “absorption” of minority national groups into the dominant national culture.
Zimmern was especially sensitive to Mill’s assertion that the liberal state demanded national conformity. In one passage, Zimmern directly attacked Mill’s position, the classic formulation of liberal nation-state nationalism introduced above. Zimmern retorts:

“I believe from the bottom of my heart that Mill’s idea is fundamentally wrong—wrong in fact, and wrong as an ideal, and that all forward-looking men who desire better international relations and a better political organization of the world must rest their hope, not in the Nation-State, which is only a stage, and in the West an outworn stage, in the political evolution of mankind, but in states which, like the great governing religious systems of the past, like mediaeval Christendom and Islam, find room for all sorts and conditions of communities and nations.”^[11]

As a riposte to Mill, Zimmern developed a series of arguments explaining why a group’s collective consciousness could not, and in fact should not, mirror political or territorial boundaries. The conception of the nation-state was problematic because global trade, population shifts, and communication technologies would prevent the possibility of mapping homogeneous national groups on political or territorial boundaries. In order to create a uniform national identity, whether for functional or ideological purposes, the state would have to enforce a particular national culture for all its citizens. Such forced conformity violated the “freedom to do the things which your corporate freedom leads you to desire, whether it is to talk dialect or to wear a kilt, or to keep Saturday instead of Sunday…”^[12] Only “false nationalisms” limited the public expression of distinctive behaviors, dress, practice, or language. “True” nationalism, on the other hand, promoted the preservation of minority groups’ particular ethnonational identity. Historical progress demanded the end of the nation-state and the beginning of a new stage in international relations that recognized trans-statist collective communities.
Second, Zimmern’s ambivalence about territorial homeland differentiated his theoretical focus from other proponents of nonstatist nationalism. He viewed the connection to a particular territory as an integral component of national identity, but also promoted the existence of national populations in the diaspora.^[13] A third aspect of Zimmern’s thought is his adoption of the concept of national “spirit” as the cohesive basis of collective solidarity. The term, central in völkisch notions of national identity linked with organic and familial ties, suggests the influence of German idealism and romantic nationalism.^[14]
Zimmern’s critique of Mill’s liberalism, his interest in diaspora communities, and his adoption of German romantic vocabulary presents an idiosyncratic fusion of competing political traditions. This observation suggests he not only adopted but also adapted various mainstream ideologies in constructing his theory of nationalism. For instance, he equated the language of spirit with the liberal principle of human equality and freedom, instead of descent or other essential characteristics. He sought a hybrid paradigm that justified national boundaries outside of territory and sovereignty without championing the illiberal principles of racial membership. Why was Zimmern so interested in navigating between ethnic solidarity and individual rights within his theory of internationalism? If his primary agenda concerned addressing colonial populations outside of Europe, he would have been far less interested in theorizing about nationalism outside the homeland, or questioning the role of defining the national spirit. A closer look at Zimmern’s biography suggests that these considerations reflect his sensibilities as a person coming to grips with his own Jewish descent and his belief that Zionism should serve as the model for British imperialism.

COMMEND AHAD HA-AM TO BRITISH IMPERIALISTS

There are two roadblocks for historians interested in excavating Zimmern’s synthesis of Zionism and British internationalism. First, equating theoretical attempts to distinguish national identity from political and territorial claims with Zionism is difficult to conceptualize today. The creation of the State of Israel, and the shaping of Zionist history to reflect a clear path toward this goal, has marginalized the diversity of interwar Zionisms. Supporters and detractors of Zionism often share an understanding of the movement as the realization of Theodor Herzl’s vision for a Jewish state.^[15] Herzl’s logic of political normalization has also endured – only the establishment of a state would overcome the abnormal conditions of Jewish national identity, such as their geographic dispersal, religious orientation, and lack of political power.
Yet a now-forgotten strategy of Jewish normalization also thrived within the expansive scope of Zionism in the 1920s and 1930s. Zimmern’s engagement with Zionism (discussed below) occurred during a period when the marketplace of Jewish nationalisms was quite diverse and statehood was not inevitable (or even the most likely outcome given strong opposition from various political authorities). An emerging counter-narrative of early twentieth-century Jewish political thought is expanding the scope of Zionism to include opponents of national sovereignty.^[16]
Jewish intellectuals viewed the postwar period as an opportunity to assert the Jewish case, with its unique characteristics split between homeland and diaspora, as the exemplar of the most progressive form of national identity. The goal remained normalization. However, the process was reversed, so that non-Jewish national groups would shift their orientation from self-determination to cultural, ethical, and pluralistic visions of particularism. Zionism, key Jewish political theorists believed, would engender this transformation in the meaning of nationalism both within the Jewish community and in partnership with other parties. As a result, liberal internationalists stood out for many Zionists as ideal partners in the effort to make stateless nations the norm. Transforming other categories of national identity to match the particular stateless characteristics of the Jewish case would neutralize Jews’ alien status.
The second obstacle hindering historians from appreciating Zimmern’s incorporation of Zionist thought is the assumption that his support for the Balfour Declaration (a fact generally acknowledged by Zimmern’s biographers) had little to do with his own personal or theoretical journey – an assumption implied by scholars who trace Zimmern’s ideas to German idealism or Christianity, but not Jewish nationalism.^[17] This reading of Zimmern is quite understandable. On first glance, Zimmern fits the description of the cosmopolitan son of a Jewish immigrant who succeeded in becoming a deracinated member of the Church of England. Adolph Zimmern, Alfred’s father, was a banker and merchant of Jewish parentage who immigrated to England from Heidelberg, Germany, after the revolution of 1848. There, Adolph converted to Christianity and raised his son, born in 1879, within the Protestant faith of his wife, Matilda Sophia Eckhard.^[18]
Zimmern’s privileged upbringing southeast of London indicates the extent to which his family had gained acceptance within the upper echelons of British society. He attended elite educational institutions – Winchester College, a venerable school, and New College, Oxford. As an Oxford student, he developed an interest in classics and received the honor of serving as a fellow and tutor from 1904 to 1909. His book The Greek Commonwealth traced key ideas in Western political thought to Athens rather than Jerusalem. Over the next few decades, Zimmern garnered an international reputation as a scholar, government official, and public intellectual whose biography exhibits few public points of intersection with Jewish organizations or the Zionist movement.^[19]
Nevertheless, Zimmern’s personal and theoretical struggle with the dilemmas of Jewish identity construction in the interwar period was not a marginal concern during the period of his greatest public influence and theoretical contributions. On a personal level, he identified with the sense of alienation that Jewish intellectuals, even those who had converted or rejected their Jewish roots, encountered in their efforts to integrate into their host societies. The discrimination against Jews, and especially Jewish immigrants, made Zimmern wary of universalist visions of equality that explicitly overlooked ethnoreligious differences, yet still used these categories to exclude certain groups. On a theoretical level, he shaped his views on nationality in dialogue with figures now firmly situated within the master narrative of mainstream Zionism such as cultural Zionist Asher Ginzberg, a Russian Jewish thinker who wrote under the pen name of Ahad Ha-am (“one of the people”), and Horace Kallen, a leading American Zionist and public intellectual.
Zimmern did not hide his own debt to Judaism and Zionism. In a 1915 lecture called “True and False Nationalism,” he noted his own sense of detachment from English nationalism and affirmed the impact of his “Jewish blood and tradition”:

“I learnt to value Nationality, not from reading Mazzini’s essays… nor from sympathizing with European Nationalist movements… but from realizing, as I grew to manhood, that I was not an Englishman, and from my sense of the debt I owe to the heritage with which I am connected by blood and tradition. But to have discovered that I was not an Englishman in the deeper side of my nature and that yet my opinions on public affairs corresponded with those of my fellow-citizens, and that my working life would be spent in England—this carried me beyond the facile philosophy held by the ordinary Englishman, that citizenship and nationality are co-extensive terms.”^[20]

Understanding this dimension of Zimmern’s journey requires a blurring of the disciplinary boundaries separating Jewish history from political theory, and Zionist politics from diasporist ideologies. Once these historiographical categories have been removed, Zimmern’s essays, and the letters preserved in his Jewish interlocutors’ archives, reveal the central role of Judaism and Zionism in his work.^[21]
Zimmern commenced a personal quest to learn more about Judaism and Zionism in 1905, while serving as a tutor at Oxford University. It is difficult to determine precisely what sparked his curiosity, but it is apparent that his relationship with Harry Sacher, the future British Zionist leader and a fellow classmate at New College, played some significant role. After beginning a correspondence about Judaism and Zionism in 1904, Sacher urged Zimmern to attend the Seventh Zionist Congress. In July of the following year, Zimmern traveled to Basel, Switzerland, as a journalist to cover the Congress.^[22] The decision not to attend as a participant most likely reflected Zimmern’s intense ambivalence about acknowledging his Jewishness and his need to explore Jewish nationalism as a dispassionate, objective observer.^[23]
Zimmern’s early essays and letters indicate that his hesitation about exploring Jewish nationalism related to an internal tension between contesting anti-Semitic tropes in British politics and a commitment to cultural conformity. One early incident was clearly a defining one for Zimmern. The Alien’s Act of 1905 sought to curtail immigration to England. The law specifically targeted East European Jewish immigrants as undermining the moral fabric of British society. In response, Zimmern wrote an article called “Challenge to the Alien’s Act,” which denounced the immigration restrictions. The controversial position Zimmern took in a public forum indicates that he felt personally affected by the popular sentiments against Eastern European Jews. As someone whose Jewish descent could not completely be erased even by his father’s conversion, Zimmern found the rhetoric of the alien’s act offensive and could not ignore its implications for his own sense of belonging within British society.
At the same time, however, Zimmern’s counterproposal demanded that immigrant groups dissolve their particular national cultures and religious loyalties in England. The state would have the right to turn away immigrants, he contended, “who are unable to mix on equal terms with its own population.”^[24]Jews would mix freely with the English population because they differed from other groups less capable of integration. Jewish immigration should be permitted as long as the immigrants would (following his own family’s biography) “Anglicize” through intermarriage and assimilation. This commitment to assimilation as a prerequisite for immigration was not limited to his public pronouncements. His personal letters to Sacher written during the same time critique his friend’s desire to preserve the observance of Jewish holidays and customs.^[25]
These concerns notwithstanding, Zimmern’s curiosity about the Jewish tradition and the Zionist movement prompted him to prepare for the Congress as an insider as well. His letters peppered Sacher with questions: Where could he find a good Yiddish primer? What books should he read to learn about the history of Zionism? What were the feelings in Zionist circles regarding Israel Zangwill’s plans for a South African territory? Sacher patiently answered his questions and complimented his friend on “the eagerness with which you are hunting after knowledge of your subject.”^[26]
The trip to the Congress, and more specifically Zimmern’s visit to the accompanying book fair, helped him to begin formulating ideas that would become the basis of his mature theories of nationality and international relations. The publication that caught his eye among the various books displayed was the American Zionist Israel Friedlaender’s German translation of Ahad Ha-am’s Hebrew writings. Ahad Ha-am, the leading voice of cultural Zionism and adamant critic of Theodore Herzl’s political program, conceived of Judaism as a collective group nourished through a shared ethical spirit, connection to a homeland, and the Hebrew language.^[27] Upon his return, Zimmern published two articles that highlighted Ahad Ha-am’s work and proclaimed the cultural Zionist as “one of the most penetrating political thinkers of his time” who should be “commended to British Imperialists.”^[28]
This unexpected assertion reflects Zimmern’s belief that theories of Jewish nationalism could serve as a blueprint for reconfiguring the British Empire. Even fifteen years later, Zimmern, by then a famous scholar recognized for his mastery of Greek and his vision for the British Empire, still identified himself in print as a “grateful disciple” of this East European Zionist who dedicated his life to preserving Hebrew culture and Jewish national spirit.^[29] What did a thoroughly acculturated Oxford classicist find so compelling in the work of a Hebraist and advocate for reviving Jewish national culture and international relations?
The partnership of Zionism and British imperialism offered a program that Zimmern found particularly well-suited for a dramatic turning point in European history. A clue toward understanding his attraction to the cultural Zionist can be found in his post-Congress proclamation: “Ahad Ha-am showed Jews that Judaism is neither a parasite among the nations nor an obsolete survivor, but that it has its own appointed place in a modern world.”^[30] The quotation indicates that Ahad Ha-am addressed precisely the dilemma that Zimmern encountered at the start of his exploration of Judaism. Zimmern struggled to reconcile the preservation of a minority group’s distinct national culture with pressure to integrate individuals around a shared set of universal principles. Reading Ahad Ha-am as a European political thinker theorizing on minority rights, and not as a Jewish nationalist, provided Zimmern with the explanation he needed to justify the promotion of Jewish national identity in the diaspora.
The key concept that appealed to Zimmern was Ahad Ha-am’s notion of “imitation.”^[31] “Imitation” promoted a middle path between the twofold dangers of self-effacing assimilation, on the one hand, and radical national separation on the other. The path toward progress and international cooperation, Ahad Ha-am contended, lay in enabling discrete national groups (often dispersed across political boundaries) to engage in intellectual and cultural conversations. This process of national groups interacting with one another within a shared polity “widens its scope, and becomes intersocial or international.”^[32] Ahad Ha-am paradoxically concluded that preserving minority national identity, based on a unique spirit and a link to a shared homeland, offered the most effective program for the realization of greater levels of human integration. This counterargument to the assimilationist logic of mainstream theories of nationalism transformed the diaspora Jewish community from an anomalous collective entity to the group Zimmern labeled the “best exponent of nationalist theory in modern times.”^[33]
That this theoretical concept inspired a dramatic transformation in Zimmern’s work is clear in the essays he published in Nationality and Government. He argues repeatedly across the speeches and essays included in the volume that diversity paves the path toward unity. Uniformity, the position Zimmern defended only a decade earlier, erodes the moral fabric of society. The failure to preserve distinct cultures and social networks engenders “moral degradation,” “drab cosmopolitanism,” and “spiritual atrophy.”^[34] Assimilation may result in great material profit, but will certainly eviscerate man’s “strength to keep his own soul alive.” To Zimmern, a “Boston Jew from a Russian ghetto” who “apes the manners and customs of New England” also represents the problematic by-product of the nation-state’s policy of cultural homogeneity.^[35] Instead, Zimmern, like his teacher, recognized diaspora Jewish life as a permanent fact and an integral part of national life. The creation of a homeland in Palestine, Zimmern contended, was not intended “to get rid of the Jews from the west,” but instead to “deepen and dignify their corporate life.”^[36]
By 1915, Zimmern took his arguments about the importance of national diversity and diaspora life to their logical conclusion. In a letter, he wrote, “I have been thinking a good deal about nationality… I… now… think that we ought to emphasize its social rather than its political importance.”^[37] But eschewing political or statist definitions of nationality generated a theoretical problem: What alternate cohesive force would unify national groups without sovereignty or territory? Zimmern adopted Ahad Ha-am’s solution for this question as well. The cultural Zionist argued that a small settlement in Palestine would serve as a unifying hub for integrating Jews separated by territorial and political boundaries.
This center–periphery model of nationality as the basis of internationalism permeates Zimmern’s essays. The shared corporate sentiment, he states, must be “related to a definite home-country.”^[38] Yearning for a national center replaced living in a territory or proclaiming political sovereignty as the basis for national unity.^[39] The Nationality and Government essays represent Zimmern’s translation of Ahad Ha-am’s conception of a territorial center uniting diaspora communities for a non-Jewish audience.^[40]
Along with a relationship to a homeland, Zimmern assumed that a shared spirit linked members of national groups. Nationality, he wrote, is a “spiritual principle of peculiar force and dignity, springing from the intimate life of the soul, and embodied in a distinctive corporate mode of life and related to a particular homeland.”^[41] Organic metaphors and idealist philosophy formed the foundation of Zimmern’s efforts to formulate a cohesive national bond. The unifying spirit among Jews, for instance, included characteristics such as intelligence, intellectual curiosity, and scholarship (note the close resemblance to his own qualities as an academic and public intellectual). Zimmern contended that such principles caused Jews to “feel” different from Gentiles. Thus, Ahad Ha-am provided him with the theoretical vocabulary to draw boundaries outside of territory and sovereignty. Zimmern’s political theory built on the cultural Zionists assertion that minority groups should be preserved because the “the path toward internationalism… lies through nationalism.”^[42]