Ph.D. Candidate in History, Harvard University; Graduate Student Affiliate & Seminar Chair, Minda de Gunzburg Center for European Studies, Harvard University
February 9, 2024
2:00pm - 3:30pm
Hoffmann Room, Adolphus Busch Hall
The political and intellectual whirlwind of late-19th Europe produced many of the next century's most controversial national and political movements. In this chapter draft, Nathalie Behrends focuses on two particularly radical new national concepts from that era: the idea of the independent Jewish nation-state, and the revolutionary possibility of some kind of socialist polity. The chapter investigates organized socialism's relationship to the growing Jewish nationalist movement during a crucial development period for socialist theories of statehood and nationality. Focusing on four important regions of socialist organization and Jewish migration in the late 19th century, Behrends analyzes the reception of Jewish nationalist ideas in the intellectual networks of the Second International, and particularly the development of Marxist Zionism as an ideology and the impact of that ideology on the developing concept of the 'socialist nation-state.'