In the summer term 2025, the Mosse Lectures will be dedicated to the currently much-discussed topic of Zionism. In view of the intensity of the recent debates surrounding the Middle East conflict, the new series of lectures aims to provide clarification and insight into the history of Zionism beyond the narrow definition of the term as the project of founding a Jewish nation-state and by including Palestinian perspectives. The aim is to outline a history of Zionism before 1948, in which perspectives from philosophy, Jewish studies and historiography make it clear that there was no such thing as the Zionism. Its history is polyphonic, plural and circuitous. It can be understood as the history of the »personal and ideological diversity« (Shlomo Avineri) of a national movement whose internal tensions characterize Israel’s prehistory.

As clearly as the Zionist project began at the end of the 19th century with the dual opposition to antisemitism and the »addiction to assimilation«, with concepts of »self-emancipation« and »Jewish renaissance«, the form of its political realization was not self-evident. One of the fundamental challenges facing the Zionist movement from the very beginning was the internal Jewish conflict between the declared goal of establishing a Jewish nation state and the traditions of Judaism as a »people in exile«, which Hannah Arendt formulated in 1945 as a dual loyalty – and identified as an unavoidable problem for the Zionist project. In addition to the question of Palestine, one of the main sites of this tension since the early twentieth century has been the diaspora in the United States, where many Jews were sceptical about the project of founding a state and, above all, about the idea of emigrating to it, and where terms such as »exile« or »galut« had positive connotations. A look at the history of Zionism opens up a multitude of narratives, drafts and objections, among which cultural Zionism in particular was a vital alternative to the project of founding a state in the early twentieth century. The aim of the series is to make this diversity visible. 

PLEASE NOTE: The Mosse Lectures take place in the Senatssaal of Humboldt University (Unter den Linden 6). The room is barrier-free. Registration at info@mosse-lectures.de is required to attend the events.