ANOTHER ZIONISM, ANOTHER JUDAISM

Wide-ranging look at a theologian who resisted the idea of “a Zionism aimed at making the Jews a nation like all others.”

An immigrant to Sweden and chief rabbi of its main Stockholm synagogue, Ehrenpreis (1869–1951) believed that, just as the Jews of Sweden were, all Jews around the world should be “an emblematic and exemplary minority, living as a nation amid nations.” His view was in the minority among Zionists committed to Theodor Herzl’s vision of a reborn Jewish homeland, and when World War II broke out late in Ehrenpreis’ life, it spoke to the utopian nature of his own vision in a Europe bent on destroying its Jewish population. That did not keep Ehrenpreis from holding to it, for, as he argued, “the fate of Judaism in the world is the fate of the minority par excellence.” Though criticized for assimilationism and a certain complacency born of living in neutral Sweden, Ehrenpreis worked with Raoul Wallenberg to attempt to deliver relief and rescue; still, the charge that Sweden’s Jews did not advocate strongly enough for that rescue “for fear of antisemitism” had some force. It is also true that, despite some mildly perfunctory objections to the deportation of Norway’s Jews to the death camps, “the [Christian] ecclesiastical authority in Sweden did not raise its voice any more than that.” Ehrenpreis has faded into history, but Rosenberg here ably revives him as a contrarian voice who speaks to present events, for he would surely have opposed, in the author’s words, “a Judaism that could be invoked for territorial conquest, military occupation, minority oppression and ethnic cleansing.”

A capably told life of a religious leader who envisioned the whole world as a safe haven for his people.