Marx, Muhammad, and the War on the Nation
German psychologist Erich Fromm was born in Frankfurt in 1900 to Orthodox Jewish parents. He studied under Talmudic teachers and was active in Jewish student organizations and Zionist youth groups, advocating in his early years for Zionism and Jewish national restoration. The young Fromm was not drawn to Zionism as a secular nationalist project on the European model, a people simply wanting a state, a seat at a table of nations. He understood Zionism as restoration: the Jewish people reconstituting its own national life on its own soil, under its own law. It was national particularity.
But Fromm turned away from Zionism, because, according to him, it conflicted with what he called his ideal of a universalist Messianism and Humanism. A messianism, a hope for the final redemption of the world, that had simply stopped being about the redemption of a particular people and started being about the redemption of humanity as such.
Once Fromm’s highest moral commitment became the human being as such, not his people specifically, but humanity as a whole, every smaller loyalty started to look like a kind of theft. A person only has so much devotion to give, and if all of it is already owed to humanity in general, then giving any of it to one particular nation means taking something that belonged to everyone else and handing it to a part. Even one’s own people. That is what made national loyalty, for Fromm, a moral problem rather than a neutral fact of life.
Fromm called nationalism “group narcissism,” the mechanism by which a person’s sense of worth transfers onto his collective, and “idolatry,” the worship of something less than God, given the devotion only God is owed.
What possibly could have caused a passionate Zionist who once advocated for the restoration of the Jewish nation to become an enemy of nationalism itself?