Heterodox Zionism

Martin Buber’s, Hugo Bergman’s and Gershom Scholem’s political theology of disenchantment

Authors

• Orr Scharf The University of Haifa

Keywords:

political theology, Zionism, Martin Buber, Hugo Bergman, Gershom Sholem

Abstract

The article seeks to show the contiguity of the theorical and practical modes of a position I call Dissident Zionism as generated by a mood that three of its formulators, Martin Buber, Hugo Bergman and Gershom Scholem shared in relation to Jews’ presence in Palestine: disenchantment. The article begins by exploring some of the relevant resonances of the term and moves on to present the individual forms of disenchantment in Buber’s, Bergman’s and Scholem’s critiques of Statist Zionism, as straddling the theoretical and practical modes of political theology.