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]

A REAL JEWISH INTELLECTUAL? INSIGHTS FROM THE KALLEN–ZIMMERN CORRESPONDENCE

Unfortunately, however, the markers offered by Ahad Ha-am failed to satisfy Zimmern’s ambiguous relationship with Judaism and Zionism. Zimmern remained committed to viewing himself as both a “cosmopolitan wanderer” and a Zionist. This tension dominated his relationship with Judaism and Zionism between his visits to the United States in 1910 and Palestine in 1919. An intimate correspondence with Horace Kallen, whom he met while touring America, and a public lecture delivered on his return from Palestine, provide a fairly detailed window into his desire to balance universal values and particular commitments.^[43] The young British scholar met Kallen, the philosopher and American Zionist well-known for introducing the term “cultural pluralism,” on a visit to the United States following the publication of Zimmern’s widely acclaimed book The Greek Commonwealth.^[44]
Of all the American Jewish figures Zimmern met during his trip, Kallen had the most significant impact on the young British scholar’s development.^[45] Their connection was not startling. Both men grew up as sons of Jewish immigrants, integrated fully into their respective societies, gained acceptance to the most elite universities – Oxford and Harvard – and became leading public intellectuals. Both contended with unsettled relationships with their fathers’ Judaism and shared an interest in debates about Jewish nationality and Western political theory.^[46]
Zimmern and Kallen grew close as a result of a chapter of Zimmern’s personal life that has eluded his biographers. For a short period, Zimmern was married to an American woman associated with Kallen’s circle of friends. This relationship is revealed in letters that Zimmern wrote to Kallen after returning to England in 1912.^[47] No other records of this marriage exist; other biographical accounts consider Zimmern’s marriage in 1921 as his first. The marriage faltered almost immediately after Zimmern’s return to England. Suffering from desperation and depression, Zimmern turned to Kallen in 1913 and 1914 for consolation and information about his ex-wife. Zimmern’s emotional need for information about his former wife solidified both a friendship and an intellectual interchange between the two men.^[48]
Zimmern utilized the regular correspondence he had with Kallen between 1912 and 1921 to discuss his interest in Zionism, attitude toward nationalism, and vision for the future of the world political order. Although the two men agreed on a number of issues, their positions diverged in one critical respect: Kallen passionately affirmed his full commitment to Zionism, while Zimmern grappled with the extent to which he felt comfortable aligning himself with the movement.
The back-and-forth perspectives on the relationship between Zionism and cosmopolitanism shed a unique light on Zimmern’s inner negotiations about his Jewish identity. Kallen’s letters from the early 1910s narrate his growing desire to adopt the Zionist cause and relate his “great joy” that he could now place himself “before the world as a Jew.” Zimmern envied Kallen’s willingness to align fully with the Jewish national movement.^[49] The American intellectual’s passionate embrace of this meaningful cause inspired Zimmern. He understood why Kallen became a Zionist, acknowledged that he was “nowhere so much at home as with Jews,” and articulated his hopes of joining his American friend for a visit to Palestine.^[50] “Come over and help me find a connection to such a national purpose,” Zimmern begged Kallen.^[51] Zimmern lamented his own detachment from a national tradition and desired a greater sense of purpose.
At the same time, however, Zimmern expressed his personal hesitations about aligning himself with Judaism and Zionism. “So long as my parents, especially my mother, are alive I cannot cast in my lot with you in the Zionist movement,” he admitted to Kallen.^[52] The sense of guilt aroused by the possibility of rejecting his mother’s tradition formed only one layer of psychological resistance to embracing Zionism. “Nor do I know whether[,] even if I were free, it would take me, the whole of me,” Zimmern admitted. He also fancied himself a “wandering cosmopolitan” who could be “helpful to many causes” from his perch above the fray of particular national movements. He poignantly expressed conflicting passions toward universal humanity (“I am neither Jew nor Gentile, nor English nor German”) and the Jewish people (“I am enough of a Jew to need to reach my life’s work through the mind and the spirit”).^[53] Two systems of values – one calibrated to guarantee Jews complete acceptance in a larger world-order and the other focused on declaring a unique position for the Jews in that order – clashed in these deliberations.
Fears about his own authenticity as a Jew further hindered Zimmern’s embrace of Zionism. Lacking “pure” Jewish bloodlines or background in Jewish culture or languages, he failed to meet the criteria espoused by an increasingly racially defined conception of collectivity. For Kallen, descent constituted a fundamental component of Jewish identity.^[54] In a memorable line in his “Democracy and the Melting Pot,” Kallen opined “[Men] may change their clothes, their politics, their wives, their religions, their philosophies, to a greater or lesser extent: they cannot change their grandfathers.”^[55] Zimmern, on the other hand, had a far more questionable biological status as a Jew. The biological simplicity of Kallen’s model forced “half-Jews” such as Zimmern, whose grandfathers were not both Jewish, into national-identity limbo.
The resulting sensitivity to the limitations of descent as the primary measure of Jewishness may explain Zimmern’s tendency in his publications to eschew race as the basis for national consciousness. Instead, as discussed above, he integrated Ahad Ha-am’s alternate criteria of spirit and connection to homeland as substitutes for descent. Yet even Ahad Ha-am’s categories for national identity failed to assuage Zimmern’s own doubts about his personal authenticity as a Jew. After meeting with Ahad Ha-am in 1914, Zimmern wrote to Kallen:

“He is the real Jewish intellectual. I felt oddly at home with him, though I fear I was the Oxford man to him. My older Frankfurt relations were just like that. We did not talk much, but he seemed pleased with my stuff.”^[56]

This reaction to Zimmern’s long-awaited opportunity to meet his mentor reveals the uncertainty that simultaneously attracted and distanced him from Judaism. Ahad Ha-am represented the authentic Jewish figure who reminded Zimmern of his own relatives in Germany, presumably his father’s Jewish kin. He felt “at home” in this Jewish milieu and sought the approval of the cultural Zionist. At the same time, he discounted the possibility that Ahad Ha-am could fully accept him as a Jew due to his acceptance within British intellectual circles. The “Oxford man” could never become a “real Jewish intellectual.”^[57]
Ahad Ha-am, writing in Hebrew for an East European audience, argued that the Jewish national spirit would retain its distinct spiritual character even while assimilating elements of other national movements. Following his Jewish colleagues and operating within the parameters of early twentieth-century thought, Zimmern imagined clear, essentialized (though, as we shall shortly discuss, not racialized) boundaries between groups. Unlike Ahad Ha-am, who had a rooted connection to Hebrew, Jewish sources, and the religious tradition, Zimmern was unable to tap the potential benefits of a connection he never fully experienced. Clear group boundaries remained in constant tension with the fluid nature of his own attachment to Jews and Judaism. As a result, his own engagement with Zionism failed to achieve what he imagined would be the spiritual, moral, and social benefits of authentic attachment.^[58] Zimmern developed a theory with conflicting claims that both affirmed national boundaries and recognized ambiguous biological, ethnic, or religious allegiances.
This crisis of identity that confounded Zimmern during the teens crystallized on his visit to Palestine. After a number of failed attempts to explore the Holy Land, he finally sailed in 1919 with Louis Brandeis, the future Supreme Court justice and leader of American Zionism.^[59] The details of Zimmern’s sixteen days in Palestine are somewhat hazy. The most detailed historical record of his journey can be found in a lecture he gave to the London office of the Zionist Organization upon his return.^[60] The talk reveals a man still torn between defining himself as an “outsider” and as someone who is “sufficient of a Jew to put what I have to say into a theoretical framework.”^[61]
The lecture’s contradictory conclusion that Jewish settlements in Palestine were both too infused with European thought and too parochial mirrors his equivocal relationship with Zionism. Zimmern admonished that the development of national culture threatened to distance Jews of Palestine from the international community. The Hebrew-speaking students in Jaffa struck him as “barbarians” for their lack of “European Civilization.”^[62] At the same time, the Jews in Palestine, Zimmern reported, failed to generate a distinct, unified, and what he imagined as an authentic Jewish national culture. In order to generate a less-fragmented Jewish national identity, he argued, the Jewish pioneers in Palestine would need to construct a culture more connected to the land and not directly imported from Europe. The agricultural settlers exemplified Jewish national life for Zimmern far more authentically than the urban dwellers, whose cultural outputs continued to emulate European standards. The Jaffa Gymnasium, Zimmern vociferously insisted, should be a “Jewish Institution” and not merely a “Hebrew version of a European institution.”^[63] In his idealized view, Zionism would somehow reconcile the conflicting pulls that characterized his own failed efforts to find an intellectual and national home.

THE SYNTHESIS OF ZIONISM AND INTERNATIONALISM

Zimmern’s experience of grappling with the competing tugs of national cultural autonomy and universal citizenship shaped his vision for the future of Zionism, the British Empire, and the global political order. The Jewish people, he argued, represented the apotheosis of the concept of nationalism. Thanks to their history of dispersion, they had best learned how “to eschew the misleading confusion of nationality and statehood and to avoid the pitfall of considering the nation-state as the normal and final unit of government.”^[64] The Jewish population in Palestine would prove the viability and efficacy of the commonwealth as the basis for peaceful coexistence between nationalities. Writing to an American Jewish audience, Zimmern proclaimed,

“[The Balfour Declaration] is the pioneer of a new era—an era which will see the world divided, for political purpose, into super-national states or commonwealths, and ultimately unified, but cherishing a large number of national individuals, centers of national tradition and inspiration, which will save the soul of mankind from the deadening influences of materialism and uniformity.”^[65]

This quotation demonstrates the link between Zionism, the critique of cultural uniformity, and the creation of a political order organized by commonwealths. Zionism recognized and promoted the moral benefits of nationality and opposed the argument that each nation required its own state. British imperialism, Zimmern opined, could provide a political framework that would harmonize the preservation of shared collective consciousness with the individual rights assured by Western constitutions. Jewish nationalism and the British Empire would cooperate. The Empire would ensure political equality, and Zionism would demonstrate the possibility for national coexistence within the Empire’s domain. Zimmern viewed the British Empire’s postwar mission of creating a commonwealth, and the establishment of a Jewish homeland as intimately linked practical and theoretical projects.^[66] Jews, the pariahs of the nation-state era, emerged in Zimmern’s political thought as the normative model for the post–nation-state moment.
The synthesis of Jewish and British nationalism had a double function. On the one hand, Zimmern aligned Jewish civilization with national diversity and pluralism, rather than homogeneity with the nation-state. Jewish political thought thus contested cosmopolitanism and policies of cultural uniformity. On the other, the construction of a partnership between Zionism and internationalism also promoted Jewish integration. Tracing out the concept of Jews’ contribution to political thought elevated Jews by suggesting a basic affinity between British and Jewish ideals of nationalism. Jews demonstrated their compatibility with British politics by affirming their distinct national status both inside and outside the homeland.^[67]
Exposing the connection between this British political theorist and Zionist intellectuals underscores recent accounts by Jewish historians, such as Michael Stanislawski, who interpret Zionism as an ideology calibrated to promote the integration of Jews and Jewish nationalism into European fin de siècle life and thought.^[68] Zimmern’s Zionist internationalism adds to this historiographical narrative by emphasizing the differences, rather than similarities, between Jewish nationalism and political thought more broadly defined.^[69] Zimmern served as a node in a subterranean discourse that attempted to create space for stateless minority groups by offering Jewish political thought as an alternative to the nation-state paradigm.
The discovery of this fascinating function of Zimmern’s Zionist internationalism suggests a historical irony. The ideological movement often criticized today for enforcing a monocultural national identity and limiting national minority rights served for Zimmern as the inspiration for creating a liberal theory of minority national rights. Yet at the height of his interest in their symbiotic relationship, personal and historical forces eroded his developing synthesis of Zionism and internationalism.

ZIMMERN’S BREAK WITH ZIONISM

“I will pull my life together and give Palestine a big place in it,” Zimmern promised his friend, the Zionist advocate and Jewish philosopher Hugo Bergman, in 1921.^[70] This promise never materialized. Instead, at the apex of Zimmern’s personal commitment to Zionism, he suddenly distanced himself personally and publicly from the movement. The regular correspondences with Kallen, as well as German Zionists with whom he had developed a relationship such as Hugo Bergman and Martin Buber came to an abrupt halt, and Zimmern’s publications after that point no longer explicitly mention the work of Ahad Ha-am. Despite efforts by a number of Zionist leaders and Jewish intellectuals, Zimmern completely distanced himself from the circle that had captured his passion during the teens and early twenties.
A speculative analysis of possible factors contributing to this mysterious and sudden break attributes it to the growing distance between Zimmern’s notion of Jewish nationalism and the discourse of Zionism as well as the capricious impact of his personal relationships on his intellectual commitments. One possible catalyst can be traced to Zimmern’s journey to Palestine in 1919. In processing his trip to Palestine, perhaps he concluded that his own imagination of the Zionist project reconciling national and human allegiances would never materialize. The ideal of fusing a particular identity and liberal principles clashed with the historical current that swept Zionism toward statehood and political thought, toward recognizing sovereignty as the basic foundation of international relations. Although Jewish nationalism had stamped a dramatic imprint on the worldview that Zimmern would continue to espouse as a theory for the rest of his career, he realized that Jewish nationalism would not serve as the most effective instrument toward achieving this goal.^[71]
Another event in Zimmern’s life, his marriage in 1921, also potentially contributed to his estrangement from the movement. After the war, he established a new field of academic study when he accepted a post as the Woodrow Wilson Chair of International Relations at University College of Wales. There, he met and fell in love with Lucy Barbier, the wife of one of his new colleagues. Their marriage, and the ensuing scandal, forced Zimmern to resign his post and may have had a significant impact on his commitment to Zionism. Lucy’s former husband, André Barbier, had been British Zionist leader Chaim Weizmann’s colleague at Manchester University. Weizmann knew both Lucy and André quite well from Manchester and clearly did not care much for the couple. “It’s awful!” Weizmann responded to news of Zimmern’s marriage in a letter to his wife. The horror expressed by Weizmann reflects not only personal disdain for Zimmern’s new wife but also a layer of political concern. Lucy, Weizmann confided to his wife, was a vocal opponent of Zionism. Upon the resignation of Jean de Menasce, a well-known supporter of the Zionist organization, Weizmann insisted on July 22, 1925, “[T]his is the work of Mrs. Zimmern.”^[72] Given the ongoing controversy with Brandeis and the lack of corroborating evidence, it is difficult to determine precisely the extent to which Weizmann accurately described Lucy as an anti-Zionist force in Zimmern’s life or merely had a personal dislike for her, her former husband, or Zimmern (possibly as a result of his relationship with Brandeis).^[73] However, Weizmann’s own hunch that Zimmern’s new wife brought about the end of his flirtation with Judaism and Zionism must be seriously considered as part of the multiple personal and theoretical intrigues fueling his rapid withdrawal from Zionist activities.
Whatever the precise causes of his disassociation with the movement, Zimmern rarely publicly or privately discussed Zionism or Judaism during his subsequent career as head of the Geneva School of International Studies, Oxford professor of international relations, or as director of an adult education program in International Studies in the United States. By the time he died in 1957, Zimmern had officially converted to Christianity and severed all ties with the “blood and tradition” that had so deeply influenced his thoughts on nationality.^[74]

BETWEEN LIBERALISM AND NATIONALISM: THE LESSONS OF ZIONIST INTERNATIONALISM

In retrospect, Zimmern’s hopes for British imperialism and Zionism had little chance of succeeding given the historical forces at play following World War I. The variegated discourse of nationalism and Zionism had already begun to congeal into the mold of the nation-state during the teens and twenties. As historian Carol Fink illustrates, the victorious powers hesitated to include a scheme for protecting minorities within the Charter of the League of Nations because they feared challenges to their own sovereign authority.^[75] The League underscored the importance of universal human rights and national self-determination, rather than minority national recognition. The Peace Conference established a trajectory toward the international recognition of nation-states as the building blocks of the global political order that was accelerated by the start of the World War II.
At the same time, the Balfour Declaration and Zionist political gains at the Peace Conference reinforced the creation of a Jewish state as the primary objective of the Jewish nationalist movement. These events ensured the dominance of a theoretical vocabulary that distinguished between concepts such as diaspora and homeland, national partiality and human rights, and national solidarity and secondary forms of collective attachment. Zimmern’s conception of Zionism and nationalism thus moved rapidly from the center of political and popular discourse to the ideological margins.
Even if it had succeeded, Zimmern’s fusion of Zionism and the imperialist assumptions of British internationalism would have had highly problematic repercussions. One of the strategic benefits of Zimmern’s internalization of the logic of internationalism was the theoretical justification for the preservation of individual and collective rights for Jews in the diaspora with the deferral of the same promise to Palestine’s indigenous Arab population. Zimmern’s life and thought in his Zionist stage suggests a warning about the ability of minority intellectuals and leaders to impose a double standard – embracing principles of diversity and individual rights when situated in the diaspora and denying these same principles when considering the importance of preserving a particular ethnoreligious characteristic in the homeland.
Yet failed programs, even those partially used to deny the very ideals they articulated, contribute invaluable insights for those interested in probing the fascinating transformation from multinational empire to sovereign nation-state. Equating nation and state engenders a predisposition to question the motivations of those opposed to this model. Zimmern’s critique of national sovereignty places his legacy in the category of an imperial thinker dedicated to quelling the claims of colonial populations. But this reading misses his critique of the nation-state nationalism and liberalism – two ideologies that left Jewish communities with the untenable choice of political autonomy or assimilation. The slippage between nation and state ran the risk of excluding minority groups by privileging a certain national group, religion, or language. Liberalism, on the other hand, threatened to undermine the freedom to identity primarily with a substatist allegiance by focusing on the individual rather than the collective. Zimmern, and other Zionist intellectuals, recognized that nationalism, liberalism, and the reconciliation of these two concepts in the nation-state paradigm, created expectations that were both too universal and too particular for stateless national groups.
Only by sharply delineating national identity and political citizenship could Zimmern challenge nationalism’s tendency to equate particularism with patriotism. A commonwealth provided another option. The recognition of multiple nationalities would act as a check against the ethnonational claims of the majority. Normalizing the stateless nation would also secure individual rights beyond the insufficient level of a social contract between the citizens of the state. Nations of many states, rather than the nation-state, promised a third way for solving the Jewish question – a path that navigated between the poles of integration as a religious minority in the diaspora or political self-determination in the homeland.
Zimmern’s exploration of this still undertheorized area of political thought has much to offer present-day inquiries into the meaning of nationality and collective identity formation. The evolving system of nation-state nationalism left Zimmern without a viable vocabulary for articulating a national identity that affirmed particular and universal principles, recognized multiple national loyalties, and celebrated diaspora membership. A century after Zimmern’s earliest attempts to plug this gap in modern political thought, the theoretical language for defining minority groups has increased significantly. However, the basic limitations underscored by his work remain unresolved.
Forces of globalization have paradoxically both spread cultural integration and preserved particular allegiances within and across state boundaries. From ethnic tensions in the former Soviet Union, Muslim immigrants in Europe, and Latino populations in the United States, dispersed national communities maintain a sense of shared solidarity disconnected from political attachments. Such communities often demand increasing levels of collective recognition and group rights despite state-building efforts to assimilate them into the national culture. Contrary to theories of nationalism and modernization, these social and political trends suggest the gradual erosion of the nation-state as the primary arbiter of ethnic, cultural, and religious affiliation.
This phenomenon poses a dilemma for scholars and politicians alike: How to define nationality and sovereignty given the increasingly visible disconnect between loyalty to the state and allegiance to a nation? Until recently, theories of nationalism have lacked the vocabulary for addressing this pressing issue. Conceptions of nationality that eschew statehood or territory (or the desire for such geopolitical borders) as the primary basis for national cohesion are viewed as exceptional and marginal formulations.^[76] Those who study this peripheral category tend to define nonstatist conceptions as “ethnic” strains that threaten liberal principles and human equality.^[77]
Within the past decade, a growing number of scholars have begun to reconsider these biases and to suggest alternative conceptual vocabularies (such as long-distance nationalism, liberal nationalism, rooted cosmopolitanism, and multicultural citizenship) that more accurately reflect the shared sense of cohesion that unites populations dispersed around the world.^[78] This promising flood of interest in reconsidering the meaning of national identity, however, has ignored important potential conversation partners for those dedicated to furthering this inquiry. Theories of internationalism, Zionism, and even modified theories of imperialism, considered the limits of sovereignty, probed the tensions between particular and cosmopolitan loyalties, and theorized substitute criteria for national solidarity decades before the recent preoccupation with this topic.
Translated into the contemporary discourse of identity, Zimmern’s theory of nationality attempted to articulate a position between the conceptual terms “nationality” and “ethnicity” or “multiculturalism.” The scholarly discourse of nationality, as argued earlier in this article, assumes that an individual’s primary collective allegiance overlaps with his patriotic duty to the state. Expanding the definition of nationality to recognize nonmaterial boundaries clashes with a lingering scholarly bias that considers national attachment, when distinct from civic patriotism, as undermining central principles of liberal thought. One of Zimmern’s most recent interpreters, Jeanne Morefield, accuses him of being a “liberal in a muddle” because he adopts the language of spirit to describe the cohesive bonds shared by co-nationals. Morefield argues that the term spirit employs organic, family metaphors that reflect primordial, descent-based attachments. Bonds of this type, she suggests, potentially hinder free choice, undermine universal human rights, and engender chauvinistic attitudes.^[79] Preserving such a hierarchy of national identity, from primordial or cultural varieties to more advanced civic formulations, prevents the consideration of collective solidarity outside statist boundaries as an expression of anything more than irrational and primitive attachments.
Terms such as ethnicity and multiculturalism, on the other hand, have created space for minority communities and mitigated pressure toward cultural conformity. However, the dominant logic of nation-state nationalism still restricts the potential claims that ethnic identity has on its members. Even those liberal theorists most sensitive to the value of particular attachments, such as Will Kymlicka, David Hollinger, and Mitchell Cohen, espouse a hierarchy of allegiances that places ethnicity below nationality.^[80] Ethnic groups, they theorize, forgo the power of coercion, create porous boundaries consisting largely of nostalgia or symbolic acts, and dissipate as immigrant groups acculturate. These characteristics fail to explain the stubborn endurance of minority group consciousness. Moreover, the emphasis on voluntary criteria for membership undercuts efforts by communal leaders to promote the preservation of distinct identities as obligations that transcend individual self-fulfillment. Zimmern’s nationality rejected the either/or logic imposed by nation-state nationalism. The Jewish paradigm posited “thick” or substantive bonds affirmed by conceptions of nationality; at the same time, however, the ties that bind global nations share an important characteristic with ethnicity – the ability to thrive within and across geopolitical borders.
Three theoretical recommendations for probing this gray area of modern political thought can be gleaned from analyzing Zimmern’s personal experiences and vision of Zionism as promoting states of many nations. First, attachment to one nationality is not monolithic, nor does it preclude the existence of unconditional obligations to other groups. Second, substantial ties grounded in amorphous characteristics, such as a psychological sense of belonging or connection to religious traditions, create bonds of national solidarity potentially as strong as those delineated by shared traits or borders. Third, universalistic motivations and cosmopolitan aspirations spark particular loyalties that adhere to liberal ideals.
The perception that immigrant or minority intellectuals face a clash between mutually exclusive national allegiances belies the ease with which Zimmern embraced multiple loyalties and ambiguous boundaries (he refused to let Zionism take “the whole of me”). His engagement with Zionism and his dedication to British civilization coexisted without generating any great philosophical contradictions. Zimmern, reflecting his personal experiences, envisioned national communities with overlapping memberships that would ensure that each group would benefit from cultural, social, and political dialogue. Jewish nationalism would generate Oxford graduates who would also be fully at home in a distinct Jewish culture. Integrating multiple identities would create Jewish farmers capable of carrying on intellectual conversations about European literature, Hebrew-speaking pioneers also fluent in Greek, and a Jewish national culture cosmopolitan enough to embrace Jews, Arabs, and Europeans alike. Zimmern’s narrative suggests that highly individualized and dynamic situations create national allegiances with little regard for clear hierarchies or uncontaminated, discrete memberships.
Zimmern further questions assumptions about national boundary maintenance by undermining the idea that the possession of certain attributes – such as territory, language, or culture – delineates national populations. The biographical journey documented above reveals a disconnect between theories of national identity based on specific characteristics and the reality of national cohesion that may have little to do with these traits. Zimmern yearned to identity himself as a Zionist, despite his involvement within British political thought, his minimal knowledge of Hebrew, and his complete disinterest in moving to Palestine. This case indicates that a strong sense of national cohesion can easily overcome geographic dispersion, polyglot communities, and cultural diversity.
But what bond, either real or imagined, connects such diverse communities? Zimmern’s life narrative and writings on nationality provide a hint. Feelings of allegiance and shared membership have far more to do with psychological attachment than concrete beliefs, actions, or experiences. Loyalties emerge from a human need to identify with particular communities.^[81] Moreover, this desire to affirm otherness often arises in individuals deeply integrated into a universalistic milieu. This phenomenon, which Charles Taylor has named the “call to difference,” suggests a paradoxical correlation between the homogenizing forces of modernity and demands for particular recognition.^[82] The pressure to conform to a particular national culture exerted by the state tends to spark a curious reaction: the construction of new categories of difference by intellectual elites with marginal connections to the minority communities they claim to represent. To accurately reflect this trend, theories of nationality must evolve to reflect a strong sense of membership that may endure (and even burgeon) despite the apparent acculturation of minority communities.
Zimmern sought to prove that affirming particular ties outside the nation-state can be tolerated and even encouraged on the same liberal grounds so often called upon today to denounce their validity. Although he adopted the language of spirit, he consciously adjusted this terminology to downplay racial overtones and to reflect liberal values. Dissenting from his colleagues, he expressed his wish that the “word ‘race’ could be deleted once and for all from our political vocabulary.” “National characteristics can be acquired and transmitted,” Zimmern affirmed.^[83] In addition to neutralizing the potentially coercive attributes of organic or family metaphors for nationhood, he also insisted that national partiality created the necessary environment for promoting toleration and even free choice. Particular bonds served as the necessary foundation for inculcating and reinforcing universal human values.^[84]
Zimmern pushed the moral limits of advocating special responsibilities toward a particular community without undermining the tenet of universal human equality. In doing so, he anticipated a strategy for addressing the primary theoretical challenge facing advocates of national partiality. Almost a century after his pioneering efforts, intellectuals such as Anthony Appiah, Yael Tamir, and Jeff McMahan have developed far more robust arguments that posit the “morality of nationalism.” For instance, Tamir’s “liberal nationalism” and Appiah’s “rooted cosmopolitanism” distinguish between universal rights granted by the state and special duties engendered by personal obligations.^[85] Appiah’s claims that “the political doctrine that the state should show equal concern toward its citizens has been mistaken for a moral imperative that persons should show equal concern to one another” or that “humans live best on a smaller scale” both echo and clarify Zimmern’s claims.^[86]
These examples demonstrate that significant strides have been made in developing more sophisticated language for promoting the moral and psychological basis of national identification outside of sovereignty. Yet Zimmern’s appreciation for the power of religion as grounds for primary attachment sheds light on a dimension neglected even in recent conversations about collective identity. The persistent myth of secularization continues to limit the role of religion to private, nonpolitical categories of individual belief with few claims toward collective solidarity. The spread of global religious networks and their increasingly explicit clashes with patriotism and nationalism indicate the need to reconsider the social and political cohesion created by religious communities.
The conscious back-and-forth between Zimmern’s self-categorization as “Zionist” and “cosmopolitan wanderer” reflects the poverty within scholarly and popular idioms, past and present, for defining and promoting collective identity beyond mutually exclusive poles of national and human allegiances. Although rejected as an “idealist” political theorist in the mid-twentieth century, Zimmern anticipated the limits of the nation-state decades before demographic shifts, electronic communication, and transnational networks transformed this question into a pressing reality around the globe. His exploration of collective identity formation in the modern era merits recognition for presciently envisioning a moment in which the state’s role in preserving ethnonational identity is increasingly challenged as the dominant form of membership.
As this phenomenon spreads, the limits of national sovereignty will become more apparent and new paradigms of national identity will need to consider mechanisms for acknowledging greater demands for cultural heterogeneity within political boundaries. Jewish political thought, too often marginalized in the historical and present-day discourse of multiculturalism, ethnic studies, and liberal nationalism, and early twentieth-century internationalism, associated with the last vestiges of colonialism and imperialism, both promise to contribute historical contextualization and relevant insights for reconfiguring the relationship between national boundaries and global integration.