JWSR v12n1 - Complete Issue




Assimilating to Power in Two Different World-
Systems: An Analysis of Paul and Herzl

journal of world-systems research, xii, , july , –
http://jwsr.ucr.edu/
issn 1076–156x 
© 2006 Khaldoun Samman

i. race and the modern orientalist world-system

Like any set of durable ideas, Orientalist notions inf luenced the people 
who were called Orientals as well as those called Occidental, European, or 
Western.

 Edward Said

The majority of non-Jewish citizens—no, all of them—declare that they do 
not recognize us as Austro-Germans ... All right, we shall move away; but 
over there, too, we shall only be Austrians.

 Theodor Herzl

The State of Israel is part of the Middle East only in geography.
 David Ben-Gurion

As Immanuel Wallerstein, Anibal Quijano, and the late Edward Said have all argued, modernity, at its very root, is a highly racialized global system 
(Quijano and Wallerstein 1992; Quijano 2000; Said 1979). I’d like to identify this 
global order as the Modern Orientalist World-System to describe a world which 
is politically, economically, and culturally stratifi ed, with race constituting the 
very epicenter of the stratifi cation with the “West” and “whiteness” ranked as the 
superior race/civilization, signifying all those qualities and characteristics in a 
manner exactly opposite to the Orient (Said 1979). In this conception, the racial-
ization of the binaries constructed by the Orientalist world-system produces 
the opportunity for a sector of the racialized groups (the constructed Orientals) 

This essay concerns two Jewish men from 
different historical formations: the Apostle 
Paul, a Jew living in the Roman Empire in 
the first century and one of the founding fig-
ures of Christianity, and Theodor Herzl, a 
Jew living in late-nineteenth-century Austria 
and the founding father of Zionism, a Jewish 
nationalist movement. My central argument 
is that both men employed an assimilationist 
strategy that linked their identity to power-
ful social forces of their time, strategically 
restructuring their identity so that they 
could move into the most powerful centers of 
their social system—Paul navigating himself 
towards Rome and Herzl setting his gaze west 
even while physically moving east. My objec-
tive here is to demonstrate how these two 
Jewish figures used Christianity and Zion-

ism, respectively, to assimilate towards those 
who hold real power, each of them appropriat-
ing the ideology of his movement in order to 
join the most powerful sector of his “world.” 
Yet I also intend to demonstrate that, while 
they both shared a desire to assimilate to 
power, the strategies they implemented to 
reach their goals were radically different: Paul 
using a universalistic discourse, what I shall 
call “Israel in the spirit,” whereas Herzl chose 
the particularistic discourse of “Israel in the 
f lesh.” This is due, I argue, to the fact that 
both of these great historical figures were 
reacting to the social and political forces of 
their times, Paul to the centripetal forces of 
ancient world-empires and Herzl to the cen-
trifugal forces of the modern world-system.

abstract:

Khaldoun Samman 
Department of Sociology
Macalester College
1600 Grand Avenue
St. Paul, MN 55105
samman@macalester.edu
http://www.macalester.edu/sociology/

Khaldoun Samman

http://jwsr.ucr.edu
mailto:samman@macalester.edu
http://www.macalester.edu/sociology


Khaldoun Samman4 Assimilating to Power in Two Different World-Systems 

to racially reconstruct themselves from one side of the dichotomy (the Orient) 
to the other side (the Occident). Th at is, in the process of being placed on the 
losing end of the racist discourse, I argue in this essay, a sector of the “Orient” 
pursues an aggressive policy of assimilating towards power by reproducing the 
racialized discourse of the modern Orientalist world-system. As we will see with 
Th eodor Herzl, there is a desire in Jewish nationalism to remove the “Orient” 
from the self by whitening and Occidentalizing the Jew, usually at the expense of 
an Orientalized “Other,” with the ultimate goal of producing an Occidentalized/
modern Jew. 

Since the majority of the research produced to describe and analyze the 
modern world-system rarely incorporates race, religion, identity, and culture as 
a central organizing feature of modernity, we fi nd it of utility to add the adjec-
tive “Orientalist” to our notion of the contemporary world-system so that we 
as researchers of this global system are made more aware of the centrality of 
race in the production and reproduction of core-periphery relations. Indeed, the 
dichotomous structure of the binaries of Orientalism, as described by Edward 
Said (1979), is a constitutive part of the modern world-system. Moreover, these 
constructed binaries are not simply the by-product of the economic interna-
tional division of labor, forming the “superstructure” of a mode of production, 
but rather constitute those very same social relations. Without the racialized con-
struction of core-periphery relations, the systemic unequal relations found in 
the global order would dissipate overnight. Hence, without the racialization of 
diff erence, or the Orient/Occident, black/white dichotomies, the actual function 
of core/periphery relations would be diffi  cult to maintain, to say the least. Race 
is the world-system, making possible capital accumulation on a global scale, with-
out which the core would have diffi  culty monopolizing global resources. It is the 
racialization of people, as an “ideological” construct, that lubricates commodity 
chains, the colonization of land, people, and natural resources and the diff usion 
of military personal and resources throughout the global south. Behind, inside, 
and informing the modern Orientalist world-system is a racial discourse that 
makes it possible to imagine the “Other” as unworthy of a fair and just distribu-
tion of the global resources, with race providing a rationale based on a notion of 
a superior race, culture, and religion. 

What I would like to do in this essay, therefore, is to argue that the overrid-
ing feature of the modern Orientalist world-system is the production of a new 
nationalized and racialized paradigm of ethnic, racial, and religious identities that 
had not existed under the old historical social formations (see Winant 2004; 
and Stavrianos 1997). In the process of becoming peoples, nations, and races, 
Jews and Arabs, Greeks and Turks, North African Arabs and South Saharan 
Africans, and blacks and whites have all been torn apart from one another by 

the interjection of the modern Orientalist world-system into their earlier inter-
twined social relations, causing a drastic transformation in the identity of peoples 
around the globe. Indeed, many of the confl icts that look religious or cultural 
in character, stemming from time-immemorial, are actually a product of a very 
recent development (Samman 2005). Modernity, in a sense, restructured every 
aspect of the world, from its class make-up and trade patterns to its formal politi-
cal structure. Religious, gender, and ethnic identities were especially impacted by 
this new reality. 

To better understand the complete reconstitution of race in the modern 
Orientalist world-system, this essay will compare two Jewish men from diff er-
ent historical formations: the Apostle Paul, a Jew living in the eastern Roman 
Empire in the fi rst century and one of the founding fi gures of Christianity, and 
Th eodor Herzl, a Jew living in late-nineteenth-century Austria and the founding 
father of Zionism, a Jewish secular nationalist movement. 

In what follows I hope to demonstrate that both of these fi gures employed 
an assimilationist strategy that linked their identity to powerful social forces of 
their time, strategically restructuring their identities so that they could move into 
the most powerful centers of their social systems, with Paul navigating himself 
towards Rome and Herzl facing west even while physically moving east. My 
objective here is to demonstrate how these two Jewish fi gures used Christianity 
and Zionism, respectively, to assimilate towards those who held real power, each 
of them appropriating the ideology of his movement in order to join the most 
powerful sector of his “world.” 

Yet I also intend to demonstrate that, while they both shared a desire to 
assimilate to power, the strategies they implemented to reach their goals were 
radically diff erent: Paul using a universalistic discourse, what I shall call “Israel 
in the spirit,” whereas Herzl chose the particularistic discourse of “Israel in the 
fl esh.”¹ Th is is due, I will argue, to the fact that both of these great historical 

¹. Israel in the fl esh and Israel in the spirit are terms that Paul used to assert his 
theological revision of Judaism and the justifi cation for a new reading of the symbol of 
Christ, with the fl esh representing the particularistic practices of his Jewish community, 
especially dietary restrictions, circumcision, and the rest of the Law. Israel in the spirit, 
on the other hand, symbolizes for Paul the transcendence of those practices and ritu-
als that are specifi c to the Jewish community, replacing them with the fi gure of Christ, 
so that Gentiles (non-Jews) are welcomed into Christianity without having to become 
Jewish fi rst. Inspired by the brilliant work of Daniel Boyarin (), I am using this ter-
minology to describe the diff erence between particularistic and universalistic identities, 
Christianity being universalistic (“Israel in the spirit”) and nationalist-Zionism being 
particularistic (“Israel in the fl esh”).



Khaldoun Samman6 Assimilating to Power in Two Different World-Systems 

unlike the conversion Paul experienced on the road to Damascus, except that 
whereas Paul converted to an Israel in the spirit, a universalistic identity tran-
scending particularism, Herzl turned in the opposite direction, that is, toward 
Israel in the fl esh, a particularistic identity shedding universalism for the sake of 
creating a homeland for a specifi c group. 

In my view their two conversions tell us much about the radically diff er-
ent “worlds” these two major Jewish fi gures lived in. Th eir “worlds” are what 
Immanuel Wallerstein identifi es as a world-empire and the modern world-
system. Wallerstein cleverly reminds us that historical social systems have vary-
ing time-space vectors and, as social scientists, we have to be cautious of the term 
world, for world is a relative term that cannot be reduced to mean the whole globe. 
Th e latter meaning is not found before the nineteenth century when, after many 
expansions and contractions, the modern capitalist world-system fi nally incorpo-
rated the entire globe. Prior to this historical breakthrough the world coincided 
with world-empires or even smaller units like tribes or clans, which Wallerstein 
identifi es as mini-systems. What is a “world” is thus relative to the unique compo-
sition of the time and space that we are speaking of (Wallerstein 1991: 135–48).² 
It is only in the modern period that the world-system is truly global, for it is only 
at this time in history, beginning with the long sixteenth century, that we may 
say our unit of analysis is neither a tribe, a clan, a city-state, nor an empire, but a 
system of multiple political units unifi ed by one world-economy. World-empire, 
on the other hand, is characterized by a political center with a simple division of 
labor and multiple cultures that are syncretically interlinked by a unifi ed imperial 
order. Th is formation is radically diff erent from the modern world-system, where 
the absence of a political center together with a complex, yet singular, interna-
tional division of labor, is the defi ning feature (Wallerstein 1984: 153).³ Th ese are 
the two world-systems that Paul and Herzl must navigate when negotiating their 
identities, and they each inform the social context for our comparisons of these 
two great Jewish historical fi gures. 

Wallerstein’s distinctions are a useful starting point for our attempt to show 
how Paul and Herzl negotiated their identities in two radically diff erent worlds: 
Paul in a vibrant world-empire and Herzl in our modern world-system. In the 
age of world-empires, identities functioned in a world characterized by unifi ed 
political structures, with the inhabitants feeling great pressure to construct iden-
tities of a universalistic type. Christopher Chase-Dunn and Th omas Hall, in 

fi gures were reacting to the social and political forces of their times, Paul to the 
centripetal forces of ancient world-empires and Herzl to the centrifugal forces of 
the modern world-system. 

Both Paul and Herzl experienced conversions that clarify the analysis we 
wish to make here, off ering clues to the way identities were experienced in these 
two diff erent historical systems. Daniel Boyarin, in his A Radical Jew (1994), 
describes Paul’s conversion to Christianity in the mid-fi rst century thus:

An enthusiastic first century Greek-speaking Jew, one Saul of Tarsus, is 
walking down a road, with a very troubled mind. The Torah, in which he so 
firmly believes, claims to be the text of the One True God of all the world, 
who created heaven and earth and all humanity, and yet its primary content is 
the history of one particular People—almost one family—and the practices it 
prescribes are many of them practices which mark off the particularity of that 
tribe, his tribe…. Not only he but many Jews of the first century shared this 
sense that something was not right. [The event of the Resurrection of Christ] 
provides the answer to the dilemma that Saul is facing. The birth of Christ as 
a human being and a Jew, his death, and his resurrection as spiritual and uni-
versal was the model and the apocalypse of the transcendence of the physical 
and particular Torah for Jews alone by its spiritual and universal referent for 
all. At that moment Saul died, and Paul was born. (p. )

Compare Paul’s conversion then to that of Herzl some eighteen centuries later. 
As Jacques Kornberg (1993) tells us, in June of 1894: 

The state idea had taken hold of him. He felt possessed; elaborations of the 
idea raced through his mind out of control while at work, walking, when in 
a conversation. Gripped by an obsession, he feared he was losing his sanity. 
Everything came together for him in the notion of a Jewish state…. Eliminat-
ing Jewish defects through emancipation…making Jews independent, mas-
ters of their own fate. From this experience he would put down his idea of 
a Jewish State, a national home for the Jews that would one day remake the 
Jews “on the gentile model…gaining honor in the eyes of Gentiles.” (p. )

Like his predecessor Paul some two millennia earlier, Herzl was a Jew living 
among Gentiles, feeling pressure to assimilate to the cultural environment in 
which he lived. But unlike Paul, who inherited a world that despised living in 
the fl esh, Herzl encountered a world in which particularistic identities were seen 
as an essential part of the cultural life of all the peoples of Europe. For what is 
most interesting about the life of Herzl is that, after not being permitted to live 
as a German or a European by the Gentiles around him, he experienced a con-
version on the streets of Germany in which he envisioned a return to an Israel in 
the fl esh, concluding that the Jew, like the other “civilized Gentiles,” must have a 
state of their own. Indeed, his conversion from assimilation to Zionism was not 

².  See also Christopher Chase-Dunn and Th omas D. Hall (: –).
³.  Wallerstein’s clearest discussion of this topic is his chapter “Th eoretical Reprise” 

(: –).



Khaldoun Samman8 Assimilating to Power in Two Different World-Systems 

their book Rise and Demise: Comparing World-Systems (1997), provide a clear 
explanation of what may have informed this pressure towards universalism for 
a person like Paul in the fi rst century. Th ey argue that trade diasporas during 
this period were linked to trade ecumenes, a world Paul is clearly a part of as we 
will shortly discuss, whom in the process become agents of  “a cross-cultural inte-
grating force,” performing as a “specialized ethnic group.” As such, they became 
infl uential social actors, establishing “cross-cultural understanding…suffi  cient to 
underwrite long distance trade” (p. 168).⁴ In the modern world-system, on the 
other hand, characterized by an interstate system with multiple national identi-
ties, the inhabitants are under great stress to produce a particularistic identity, 
since an ideology of race and diff erence dominates. Once each “people” had been 
constructed as naturally, racially, and culturally belonging to a specifi c group, the 
idea of a state, at least for those perceived to be most civilized, followed soon 
thereafter. After years of painful eff orts to be included as a rightful member of 
the “civilized” world, Herzl realized that, if Jews were to be regarded as “civilized,” 
a Jewish state was essential. Th is realization, I believe, is what informed his con-
version-like episode and gradually pushed him towards his desired Israel in the 
fl esh.

In the next section, I begin the analysis with Paul in the age of world-empires, 
proceeding on to Herzl in the age of the modern world-system in the third sec-
tion, with the intention of comparing the patterns of identity formation in these 
two radically diff erent world-systems. Th is analysis will allow us to understand 
the manner in which these two fi gures negotiated their identities so as to assimi-
late towards power, with Paul using the symbol of Christ to shed his Jewishness 
and thereby assimilate into a universalistic Hellenistic culture, and Herzl using 
Zionism to shed his “Orientalness” and thereby assimilate into European cul-
ture. 

ii. negotiating identity in a world-empire: paul and the 
jewish question in the roman empire

There is no longer Jew or Greek, there is no longer slave or free, there is no 
longer male and female, for all of you are one in Christ Jesus.

Apostle Paul

Understanding Paul’s Conversion to Christianity in the Context of the 
Greco-Roman Empire

At the time of Paul’s conversion on the road to Damascus in the latter half of 
the fi rst century of the Common Era (c.e.), the Roman Empire was undergoing 
major political and economic changes. Later in this period the old pagan, plu-
ralistic cults of the Roman empire would begin to decline. Th e period has been 
described as an “age of military anarchy” when, in an attempt to beat back the 
enemies of Rome, emperor after emperor restructured the empire. As a result, 
the state apparatus was radically transformed from one based on a multiple-city-
state foundation to that of a centralized bureaucratic state.⁵ Without the tradi-
tional federation of city-states, each of which was a partially self-governing unit 
within the larger Roman orbit, the old theological view of the world was coming 
into crisis. Th e offi  cial cultus was essentially bound up with the institutions of 
the city-state, and now that the latter had lost their quasi-independent status, 
the state was in danger of being left without any religious foundation. It was 
this crisis that would fi nally push the elites of the empire to look favorably on 
a religious movement that was more in touch with the new socioeconomic real-
ity, a movement that would culminate in the conversion of Constantine several 
centuries after Paul. I maintain that the emerging Jewish Christian movement, 
led by Paul, would eventually fulfi ll the needs of the emerging social structure. As 
Christopher Dawson (1954) points out:

The new unitary state required a religion of a more universal character than 
the polytheistic cults the city-state possessed, and, as a matter of fact, we 
observe…a tendency towards a vague semi-philosophic monotheism in pagan 
society…. The Church was the one living creative force in the spiritual life of 
the age. It brought to society just those elements…of which the Empire itself 
stood most in need. (pp. –)

Geoff rey Barraclough, in his book Th e Medieval Papacy (1979), makes this 
point even more forcefully, when he argues that “[Christianity] was an instru-
ment of cohesion, a pillar of the imperial structure, a ‘state religion’ to underpin 
[the] government,” which did “not wish to leave schism or division in any place” 
(pp. 21–22). I argue below that, as a Diasporic Jew having witnessed fi rsthand the 
limits of the old structure, Paul was pulled into and attracted toward the emerg-
ing idea of a unifying Deity, a universal Christian God. 

⁴.  Chase-Dunn and Hall are here referring specifi cally to the Muslim trade dias-
pora. But I think the similarities between the Jewish Diaspora of the fi rst century and 
that of the Muslims in the seventh century allow for a more general statement on trade 
diasporas. See for example the work of Jerry H. Bentley (). ⁵.  Th is is the thesis of Christopher H. Dawson (: –).



Khaldoun Samman10 Assimilating to Power in Two Different World-Systems 

But before we discuss this we need to understand the diffi  cult fi rst-century 
world in which Paul lived.⁶ Th e hostility of the Greco-Roman world in the fi rst 
century of the Common Era must have been stressful to the Jews of the Diaspora. 
During this fi rst century, as was the case earlier, there were “many Jews travel-
ing the highways and trade routes,” traveling long distances and visiting major 
cities, not only in the Hellenistic east, but “as far west as Italy and North Africa” 
(White 1990: 60). Th ese Jews, accustomed to the larger Greco-Roman culture, 
must have been unsatisfi ed with maintaining a strictly Judeocentered interpreta-
tion of the Law, especially an interpretation that did not permit them to wor-
ship their deity as members of the larger communities with which they were 
in regular contact. Indeed, as was the case with many cities outside of Palestine 
that contained a large Jewish population, there tended to be a relaxed attitude 
to Jewish Law, where Greeks, Romans and Jews intermingled in worshipping 
the God of Israel together in the same synagogues (Meeks 1984). No doubt this 
was a response of the Jews of the Diaspora to the fact of “living as aliens, as an 
ethnic and religious minority, in the dominant culture of urban life in the Greek 
east and then Rome itself ” (White 1990: 60). But running parallel to this nega-
tive pressure was the diffi  cult issue a strict interpretation of the Law presented 
to the Jews of these Greco-Roman cities, especially those Laws that insisted on 
maintaining a clear separation from the gentiles in worshiping “the God of Israel.” 
Something had to give, and the result was the eventual break between Judaism 
and Pauline Christianity.

Th is was especially true for Paul, who found unacceptable the idea that par-
ticipation in any given community ought to exclude all other people and only be 
available to those defi ned as insiders. As noted in the Gospels’ account of Paul’s 
struggle with the Jewish-Christians of Palestine, Jews that practiced “those rites 
that are special, performed by and marked in the body,” were misled by their 
shortsighted commitment to maintaining their religion as “an aff air of a particu-
lar tribal group, ‘Israel in the fl esh.’ ” As Boyarin (1994) remarks on this theme:

The insistence on the literal, the physical, is a stubborn resistance to the uni-
versal, a tenacious clinging to difference. By substituting a spiritual inter-
pretation for a physical ritual, Paul at one stroke was saying that the literal 
Israel, “according to the f lesh,” is not the ultimate Israel; there is an allegorical 
“Israel in the spirit.” The practices of the particular Jewish people are not 
what the Bible speaks of, but faith, the allegorical meaning of those practices. 
It was Paul’s genius to transcend “Israel in the f lesh.” (pp. –)

In Paul’s interpretation of the Torah, from circumcision and dietary regula-
tions to Sabbath observance and other practices, the laws were no longer appli-
cable to the faithful, for faith in Christ Jesus had overturned all those practices 
that were once the property of a particular ethnic group. Th e laws had been 
replaced with a universal message for all of humankind. Th us for Paul faith in the 
Resurrection of Jesus was a revolutionary moment that had theologically over-
turned those Laws that were applicable only to the Jews. “It remains, after all, a 
valorization of diff erence,” according to Boyarin’s provocative observation, one 
that Paul sought to transcend, and  “is precisely the motivating force behind Paul’s 
entire conversion experience and mission” (Boyarin 1994: 54). Rather than cling-
ing to diff erence, Paul preached its erasure, maintaining a strong stance against 
all those Jewish Christians, especially the messianic Christian Jews in Jerusalem. 
His persistence on this issue was due to his desire to subordinate the ideal of dif-
ference, found in the notion of a “chosen people,” the Jews, and replace it with the 
ideal of human unifi cation. Th e Christ event, the Resurrection of Jesus, was “the 
vehicle for this transformation of humanity” (Boyarin 1994: 106). 

Th e early Jewish Christian community at the time of Paul adopted strate-
gies early on that were pertinent to its future success. Th e one in which I am 
interested here is the manner by which this early Jewish-Christian strategy 
transformed Jewish monotheism from one of being identifi ed with a specifi c 
community (the Jews) to another, more abstract monotheism having no affi  lia-
tions to any one group of any kind (see Long 1991; and Strange 1991). I will focus 
on fi rst century Pauline Christianity, where this innovation became incorporated 
into the Christian ethos, making it fi nally possible for a person like Paul to live 
an identity that is more conducive to living in a world-empire. Th is period inter-
ests me insofar as it will clarify the process by which the early Jewish Christian 
community in the fi rst century c.e. radically altered the traditional Jewish under-
standing of the sacred. In doing so, this diverging Jewish sect turned Judaism 
on its head and changed forever the relationship of the one chosen people to 
God, temple, and land. After such changes, land and people were reshaped by the 
Christian movement, in eff ect making monotheism more palatable to empire and 
its Greco-Roman inhabitants. 

What is most interesting to keep in mind is the fact that, no matter how 
universalistic a message the Hebrew Scriptures off er, it is obvious that they rep-
resent the victory and success of those redactors who are interested in portraying 
the struggles and aspirations of a particular people under great stress.⁷ Th e uni-

⁶.  In discussing Paul in this section, I draw heavily on my forthcoming essay, “Th e 
Social Origins of Universalistic Monotheism: A Comparative Analysis of Paul and 
Muhammad.” Journal of Religion and Society (forthcoming, Summer ).

⁷.  Redactors are the unknown author(s) who assembled, selected, and edited the 
Pentateuch, otherwise known as the Five Books of Moses; see the recent book by Richard 
Elliott Friedman (). Th e fact that there were redactors is an interesting topic in it-



Khaldoun Samman12 Assimilating to Power in Two Different World-Systems 

provided the foundation on which the Israelites built their nation” in the face of 
international realities (Long 1991: 21). Th us one can say that “God’s promise to 
favor the Israelites in return for their allegiance and obedience helped form them 
into a people by setting them apart from others,” especially from the empires that 
looked for every opportunity to incorporate them formally and directly (Long 
1991: 21).

Indeed, it was these so-called “peculiar practices” that Tacitus and other writ-
ers of the ancient world despised. Tacitus’s statement is revealing in this respect: 

[ Jewish customs], which are at once perverse and disgusting, owe their 
strength to their very badness…. Among themselves they are inf lexibly 
honest and ever ready to show compassion, though they regard the rest of 
mankind with all the hatred of enemies. They sit apart at meals, they sleep 
apart, and though, as a nation, they are singularly prone to lust, they abstain 
from intercourse with foreign women; among themselves, nothing is unlaw-
ful. Circumcision was adopted by them as a mark of difference from other 
men. Those who come over to their religion adopt the practice, and have this lesson 
first instilled into them, to despise all gods, to disown their country. (cited in Simon 
; emphasis added) 

Living amongst people with these attitudes, it is not surprising that Hellenized 
Jews and their early Christian converts took on the project of adapting Judaism 
to bring it more in line with the larger world they lived in and, in the process, 
made the Jewish notion of the One God more attractive to their Greco-Roman 
clientele. Th e fact that they emphasized more and more the universal strand of 
monotheism at the expense of the particular can be seen, therefore, as an adapta-
tion to Greco-Roman philosophical and religious ideals (Boyarin 1994: 58). By 
calling into question the particularity of Judaism to the Jews, they fi ne-tuned 
their message for an already existing Greco-Roman community that had similar 
ideas about God (Boyarin 1994: 58).

But elements of a non-particularistic form of monotheism were already 
quite visible before the emergence of the Christian sect. Greek culture, as early 
as the fi fth century b.c.e., claimed Zeus to be the God who goes by many names. 
Th e Romans also were well on their way to framing an offi  cially syncretis-
tic form of political universalism, as James Strange (1991) convincingly argues. 
Martin Hengel has also shown that, immediately preceding the emergence of 
the Christian movement in the second half of the fi rst century c.e., there already 
existed a great appreciation for the Jewish notion of monotheism on the part of 
Greek philosophy. Th e alleged abstraction of the Godhead greatly appealed to 
many literate Greeks and Romans. He concludes from this:

versalists, although present throughout ancient Israel (the best example can be 
found in the Hellenistic period as many authors have shown),⁸ lost the struggle 
and remained marginal within the Hebrew Scriptures. It is only with the rise of 
Christianity and Islam that we see the universalists succeeding and transforming 
the meaning of the Hebrew Scriptures in their favor. 

Th is social context is absolutely crucial for our analysis of the emergence of 
this new Jewish Christian sect in relation to Paul’s teachings, for it will produce 
a strategy that positions itself in opposition to the victors of this early struggle, 
with the end product being a universalistic monotheism that performs extremely 
well in a world-empire social environment. According to the biblical account, 
from the moment of the conquest of the territory of Canaan to the destruction of 
the Second Temple in Jerusalem in 70 c.e., a period of roughly twelve centuries, 
the Israelites ruled their territories outright for only a fraction of that time. For 
most of it they were, at best, vassals of the great superpowers that surrounded 
them. Th is is a profoundly signifi cant fact that is all too easily left out when 
discussing this biblical period. Even those moments when they enjoyed outright 
“independence,” their status depended largely upon the balance of power of the 
great superpowers of the ancient Middle East. Indeed, it was usually the case 
that when this balance of power disintegrated and was replaced by one major 
power, as was the case with the Assyrians in the eighth century b.c.e., with the 
Babylonians in the seventh and sixth centuries b.c.e., and with the Romans in 
the fi rst century c.e., the Israelites found their world turned upside down with 
their lands dispossessed and their people sent into exile.

Th e social context in which the Hebrew Scriptures came to fruition, there-
fore, made possible the peculiar religious meaning that the land, and specifi cally 
Jerusalem, would come to symbolize in Jewish social and religious discourse. It 
is “improbable that the Hebrew prophets would have asserted their view of the 
chosen people and the Holy Land so clearly if the Assyrians, Egyptians, and other 
great powers of the time had not existed” (McNeil 1991: 162). Consequently, the 
Israelite production of what came to be known as the Torah, with its historical 
account of a unique people who have made a contract, or covenant, with the One 
God, has to be contextualized in this political environment. 

Th e most signifi cant “peculiar” practices of the Jews were, undoubtedly, the 
covenant and the Promised Land. Both were based “on a particularistic idea and 

self. Obviously they selected and edited scrolls that accommodated their contemporary 
social and political concerns.

⁸.  For further elaborations on this theme, see M. Hengel (); and Lee I. Levine 
(: chapters –).



Khaldoun Samman14 Assimilating to Power in Two Different World-Systems 
The universal religious attitude of learned men which developed in the Hel-
lenistic period through “theocracy” regarded the different religions as in the end 
only manifestations of the one deity. Thoughtful Greeks … may have acknowl-
edged Jewish belief in its unfalsified form to be a high stage of spirituality, 
and Greek philosophy with an interest in religion had long been on the way 
to monotheism…. (Hengel : ) 

Th e Stoics as early as the fourth century b.c.e. succeeded in pushing their 
empire towards monotheism. According to Zeno in Citium of Cyprus (335–263 
b.c.e.), the whole universe was governed by divine reason, “and men should there-
fore live in conformity with it and with the order of nature established by it.” A 
saying of Zeno also presents the view “that men should not live in a state of divi-
sion according to separate cities and peoples and diff ering rules of justice; rather 
all men should be viewed as belonging to one state and community and sharing 
one life and order.”⁹ Chrysippus (280–207 b.c.e.) would extend this vision to 
the word polis by equating it with the universe so that god and humans were in 
harmony. 

Th is had a powerful spiritual eff ect throughout the empire, one that Hellenized 
Jews would soon hear loud and clear. Indeed, a comparison of Plutarch’s writings 
with Paul’s demonstrates just how infl uential the idea of universalism was to the 
literate population of Rome. Compare these two well-known verses: Th e fi rst 
belongs to Plutarch, who argues that the gods of Egypt should be preserved as 
“our common heritage” and not made the peculiar property of the Egyptians:

Nor do we regard the gods as different among different peoples nor as barbar-
ian and Greek and as southern or northern. But just as the sun, moon, heaven, 
earth and sea are common to all, though they are given various names by the 
varying peoples, so it is with the one reason [logos] which orders these things 
and the one providence which has charge of them, and the assistant powers 
which are assigned to everything…. (cited in Griffiths : ) 

Paul’s address to the people of Athens, narrated in Acts, is remarkably similar:

Paul then stood up in the meeting of the Aeropagus and said: “Men of 
Athens! I see that in every way you are very religious. For as I walked around 
and looked carefully at your objects of worship, I even found an altar with 
this inscription: to an unknown god. Now what you worship as something 
unknown I am going to proclaim to you.” (Acts : –)¹⁰

Again Paul returns to the same theme, this time making a direct connection:

Is God the God of Jews only? Is he not the God of Gentiles too? Yes, of Gen-
tiles too, since there is only one God….You are all sons of God through faith 
in Jesus…. There is no longer Jew or Greek, there is no longer slave or free, 
there is no longer male and female, for all of you are one in Christ Jesus. 
(Galatians : –)

Notice the commonality between Plutarch’s statement that we do not “regard 
the gods as diff erent among diff erent peoples nor as barbarian and Greek and as 
southern or northern” and Paul’s assertion that “there is no longer Jew or Greek, 
slave or free, male and female, for all of you are one in Christ Jesus.”

Hence, the Christian conception of the One God having no affi  liation to any 
particular group or location or place fi ts Paul’s drive to simplify deity worship 
quite nicely. After the Jewish notion of a chosen people had yielded to the univer-
sal “brotherhood of man,” and the ties with the older Jewish center in Jerusalem 
had been broken, the Deity of this Christian Jewish sect, pushed aggressively by 
Paul, was placed in an excellent position to receive the attention of Hellenized 
Jews looking to assimilate into the larger world they called home.¹¹ Paul, a 
Hellenized Jew himself, must have felt these same anxieties; his theological inno-
vations and his peculiar reading of the Christ event support this interpretation 
and were, I believe, his way of dealing with this fact. For Paul, this meant taking 
the message not only to Jews on the margins of the Greco-Roman world, but also 
directly to its center of power, to the land of Gentiles stretched throughout the 
empire and into the imperial city of Rome itself. Th is was his way of assimilating 
to power in the age of world empires.

Paul and Jerusalem: The Logistics of Sacred Sites in a World-Empire

Before bringing Christianity to Rome, though, Paul had to revise the strong 
bond established by Jewish discourse between the covenant and land, particu-
larly the city of Jerusalem, with its connection to a specifi c people, in this case, 
of course, the Jews.¹² W.D. Davies asked the legitimate question whether Paul 

⁹.  Th e last two citations are from Griffi  ths (: –).
¹⁰.  Th e Paul of Acts repeats this theme regularly, as this example illustrates: “We 

also are men, of like nature with you, and bring you good news…[of ] a living God who 
made the heaven and the earth and the sea and all that is in them. In past generations 

he allowed all the nations to walk in their own ways; yet he did not leave himself with-
out witness, for he did good and gave you from heaven rains and fruitful seasons….” 
(Acts :–).

¹¹. For an extended analysis of how Christians transformed the meaning of Jerusalem 
and sacred space, see Samman (). 

¹².  Rodney Stark provides a very useful analysis of this process in his book Th e Rise 
of Christianity (). For an analysis of a similar experience in our modern world, see 
Steinberg ().



Khaldoun Samman16 Assimilating to Power in Two Different World-Systems 

as is well known.¹⁵ Paul, of course, was a central fi gure in this early struggle 
of the church. As his letters testify, the tensions between him and Palestinian 
Jewish-Christians take up much of his writing space. But there were many others 
who would come to share his desire to accommodate Christian theology to the 
larger Roman world. Origen (185–253) of Alexandria, one of the fi rst great theo-
logians of Christianity writing in the early third century, for instance, would 
follow in Paul’s footsteps and build on Paul’s writings on Jerusalem and the Holy 
Land.¹⁶ Th ese early Christians would slowly develop a route that led them not 
to Jerusalem, the sacred center of the Jews, but straight into that other, imperial 
sacred center: Rome.

Land is essential to this transcendence of diff erence. Th e thought of the land 
in Judaism is inextricably bound up with that of the Temple and Jerusalem. Th e 
a-territoriality of the Apostle Paul’s treatment of the Jewish people seems to 
reemerge in his interpretation of the “church as the temple of God: holy space 
seems to have been ‘transubstantiated’ into a community of persons, the Body 
of Christ” (Davies 1974: 185–86). But nowhere is this clearer than when Paul 
brings into the Temple courts an uncircumcised Greek. Here he is overturning 
the older Jewish linking of Temple with ethnicity. In the Old Testament, as dis-
cussed above, we learn that the Temple was closed to the Gentiles, where only 
those who were circumcised were permitted to enter. Paul consciously disregards 
this prohibition and as a result is attacked, denounced, arrested, and fi nally exe-
cuted:

When the seven days were nearly over, some Jews from the province of Asia 
saw Paul at the temple. They stirred up the whole crowd and seized him, 
shouting, “Men of Israel, help us! This is the man who teaches all men every-
where against our people and our law and this place. And besides, he has 
brought Greeks into the temple area and defiled this holy place.”… The whole 
city was aroused, and the people came running from all directions. Seizing 
Paul, they dragged him from the temple, and immediately the gates were 
shut. (Acts : –) 

I believe this was Paul’s way of protesting the equation of the Temple with a 
particular people. As a Hellenized Jew, born and raised in Tarsus, he would have 
known that sacred sites were rarely the property of a single people, but rather 
were open to any who chose to enter them. But this example also illustrates the 
diff ering cultural practices between the Hellenized Jews of the Diaspora and the 

was the earliest Jewish-Christian to develop the view that the Christian com-
munity had now replaced the Jerusalem Temple as the dwelling place of God. As 
a Jewish-Christian he seems radically to reject the Holy Sanctuary at Jerusalem. 
Th e church for Paul:

is the fulfillment of the hopes of Judaism for the Temple: the presence of the 
Lord has moved from the Temple to the Church. It is easy to conclude that 
there was a deliberate rejection by Paul of the Holy Space in favor of the Holy 
People—the Church. He conceived the presence of the Divine apart from 
holy space. Whereas the Temple in Jerusalem was seen as central to many of 
the Jews of his time, for Paul it was important to stress that the Divine pres-
ence is not confined to the Temple but found in every place. (Davies : 
)¹³

Hence, the a-territorial quality that it shared with paganism, unconfi ned by a 
specifi c place and, most of all, free of any affi  liation to an ethnic group, was a 
method that Paul and some of the early Jewish-Christians used to move their 
newly founded Jewish sect in a new direction, one that would fi t well with the 
Greco-Roman practice of Temple worship.

Th is theological presentation of Paul’s vision of the Holy Land is impor-
tant for our discussion because it sets in motion an important development in 
Christian thought that would allow a more universalistic identity to fi t in line 
with a world-empire. Paul adopted a type of monotheism that could accommo-
date itself to the network of imperial cult worship that was widespread through-
out the Greco-Roman landscape. Such an analysis is useful for any attempt to 
answer the perplexing question of how the new Jewish-Christian sect over-
took the imperial cult and became the religion of empire, a process that is all 
the more baffl  ing given the fact that this religious movement had its beginnings 
in a peripheral corner of the empire. Th e early Jewish Christian sect mobilized 
Roman pagan strategies as a way to present Judaism in ways familiar to the non-
Jewish, Greco-Roman culture.¹⁴ 

Paul’s project was the initial major step in this direction. Such accommoda-
tions would come at a high price, causing many confl icts between the Apostles 

¹³.  As Davies argued, “it is ubiquitous, unconfi ned by space” (: ).
¹⁴.  I found the following books especially useful in explaining the process of synthe-

sizing Judaism with the religions of pagan Rome: Rodney Stark () and the earlier 
writings of Adolph Harnack, especially his Th e Mission and Expansion of Christianity in 
the First Th ree Centuries (); Arthur D. Nock (); Ramsay MacMullen (); 
and Robert Wilken ().

¹⁵.  For this theme see the overview of early Christianity by W.H.C. Frend, Th e Rise 
of Christianity (: chapters –) as well as Paula Fredriksen ().

¹⁶.  Robert Wilken () provides an overview.



Khaldoun Samman18 Assimilating to Power in Two Different World-Systems 

more conservative wing of this emerging sect, with the latter, not surprisingly, 
living in the vicinity of Jerusalem.

Th is development in early Christianity included, among others, a theology 
of a land that is hostile to anything resembling the Jerusalem of this world. Th e 
emphasis here was on refocusing the attention of the Christian community away 
from any “Jewish contamination”; this included the land of Judea itself, which 
was too closely identifi ed with the Jews for the taste of the new, increasingly 
Gentile movement. Indeed, we may go so far as to say that, for the fi rst three 
centuries of Christianity, Jerusalem and the land of Palestine, except for a few 
curious travelers, was insignifi cant to the Christian imagination (Walker 1996). 
What mattered were Greco-Roman cities like Antioch, Corinth, Galatia and, of 
course, Rome itself, where real power lay. For the new Jewish Christian sect to be 
successful in this Gentile-dominated empire, to sell its brand of Judaism, it had to shed 
the skin of its Jewishness and clothe itself with a more Gentile-friendly (Greco-Roman) 
vision. Th e “fl ight” away from Jerusalem was an important part of this shedding. 

As a result, Paul and early Christianity broke decisively with the Jewish com-
munity and slowly disappeared into the Greco-Roman world, only to re-emerge 
several centuries later as the rulers of the empire. For the early Jewish-Christians 
the practices of the Jews in the pre-Resurrection period had to be overturned. 
In other words, “Israel in the fl esh,” for these Hellenized Jewish-Christians, was 
now viewed as a nuisance that must be overcome. 

Th us, as an example, for the Christians of the fi rst three centuries c.e., 
“Jerusalem below,” as one early Gentile Christian pilgrim remarks, “was worthless 
now because of the Jerusalem Above.”¹⁷ Christians in this early period “thought 
holy places were what Jews and pagans had; Christians knew better” (Markus 
1994: 258). Jesus, after all, promised to his followers a “much greater land, truly 
holy and beloved of God, not located in Judea.” On this point, the Gospel of 
John is very explicit; in chapter four Jesus is having a discussion with a Samaritan 
woman:

“Sir,” the woman said, “I can see that you are a prophet. Our fathers wor-
shipped on this mountain, but you Jews claim that the place where we must 
worship is in Jerusalem.” Jesus declared, “Believe me, woman, a time is coming 
when you will worship the Father neither on this mountain nor in Jerusalem.” 
( John : –)

Indeed, no clearer distinction can be made than the way the New Testament 
overturns, quite consciously one might add, the Hebrew Bible’s understand-
ing of land. “In the Old Testament,” as Connor Cruise O’Brien reminds us, “it 
is God who off ers land to Abraham, and Abraham accepts”; but “in the New 
Testament it is Satan who off ers land to Jesus, and Jesus refuses” (O’Brien 1987: 
3–4). Moreover, for these Gentile Christians “Jerusalem was now the Guilty City 
because it had rejected Christ” (Armstrong 1997: 171). Paul’s mission to tran-
scend “Israel in the fl esh,” together with his desire to accommodate Judaism to 
his Gentile way of being, had come full circle and was now fully completed, even-
tually even turning the heads of the most privileged and powerful sectors of his 
world-empire. 

iii. negotiating identity in the modern world-system: 
theodore herzl and the jewish question

We will have a university and an opera [in the Jewish state], and you will 
attend the opera in your swallow-tailed coat with a white gardenia in your 
button-hole.

Theodore Herzl¹⁸

Unlike Paul’s experience of living in a world-empire where identity felt most 
at home when it took on a universalistic quality, Th eodor Herzl would experience 
a radically diff erent world. As mentioned above, in our modern world-system 
identity is much more at home when it takes on a particularistic character. Here 
we will deal with the transformations of the modern period, where we see the 
development of revived and powerful particularistic forces that are antithetical 
to the universalistic visions of the older world-empires such as the one that Paul 
lived under. In a sense, Israel in the fl esh comes back with a vengeance here, chal-
lenging the very same forces that for centuries relegated its particularistic faith 
to the margins. Only this time Israel in the fl esh is not the weakling of the old, 
struggling for its existence among powerful empires, but is itself the driving force 
of modern history, a small yet powerful piranha eating away the big white whale. 
To gain cultural power in the modern world, a reimagining of Israel in the fl esh, 
especially the type found in the core of this social system, was absolutely essen-
tial, a message that Herzl clearly recognized after his conversion of 1894.

Th e old world-empires of Paul’s time have come and gone, and in their place 
we see a radically transformed world by the time Herzl invented Zionism. By this 

¹⁷.  Th is pilgrim was one of the few early Christians to make a pilgrimage to 
Jerusalem; see Karen Armstrong (: –). For pilgrimages in this early period see 
John Wilkinson (). ¹⁸.  Citation from Kornberg (: ).



Khaldoun Samman20 Assimilating to Power in Two Different World-Systems 

time in world history, the ecumenical nature of world-empires had disintegrated 
both materially and politically, before disappearing entirely in the nineteenth cen-
tury, producing in its wake a drastic transformation in the structure, philosophy, 
and identity of those living in the world of multiple states. Universalistic identi-
ties similar to Paul’s broke up into fragments in which ethnic and religious affi  n-
ity became outwardly the basis of identity. Modernity, as it were, attacked the 
central nervous system of world-empires, spreading through their bodies like a 
cancer, and in the process leaving no organ untouched.¹⁹ Modernity restructured 
every aspect of the old social order, from its class composition and trade patterns 
to its formal political structure and religious, gender, and ethnic identities. As a 
result of this decapitation, entities such as the Holy Roman Empire or the Dar 
al-Islam, were slowly and surely hacked to pieces, and in their place we begin to 
see the rise of French, German, Greek, Arab, Turkish and other nationalists.²⁰

So what did this modern world-system look like from a biographical point 
of view? Let us explore Herzl’s biography for clues about how the new world 
order aff ected this fascinating Jewish fi gure. As it was in Paul’s time, living as a 
Jew in modern Europe must have been quite stressful. Whereas Paul negotiated 
his Jewish identity within a world-empire context, however, Jews in the modern 
period had to negotiate their identity in a world where “Israel in the fl esh” domi-
nated. For in the modern world-system, as Wallerstein has persuasively argued, 
the old world-empires, with their one political center, have been eradicated in 
favor of multiple states with multiple cultures (Wallerstein 1974b). Th us Herzl 
found himself in a radically diff erent context from the one Paul experienced. Paul 
was shedding his Jewishness so that he could feel at home in a world-empire that 
favored Israel in the spirit over Israel in the fl esh. Herzl, by contrast, in his quest 
to feel at home in the modern world, had returned to Israel in the fl esh the better 
to accommodate himself to a world that was more at ease living with a particu-
laristic identity than with a universalistic one, an identity that fi t with the modern 
world, especially when it came fl avored white and European. 

Th e fascinating thing about Herzl is that he initially attempted to remove his 
Jewishness so that he could accommodate to the other particularistic identities 
around him (see Kornberg 1993: 13–34). Before his revelation of a Jewish state, 

as we will see below in greater detail, he did all that he could to be Austrian and 
a member of “European civilization” in the same manner that Paul attempted, 
quite successfully one might argue, to assimilate to his Hellenistic world. But 
those who identifi ed as Austrians, French, Germans, and so on viewed the Jews 
as utterly alien and would have nothing to do with them. To feel at home in this 
world, therefore, Herzl could not appropriate the same strategy as his predeces-
sor Paul. His revelation would have to be of a very diff erent sort. Th e “Gentiles” 
in Herzl’s world often felt an urgency to return the Jews to biblical Palestine, not 
as a means of safeguarding the Jews, but on the anti-Semitic assumption that 
they should be deported to “where they belonged” (Sharif 1983). Th ere was abso-
lutely no space for accommodation in a world where living in the fl esh was taken 
as the naturalized and nationalized order of things. In this naturalized world of 
diff erence, the Jew was placed outside of the Austrian, European self and identi-
fi ed as belonging to an “Oriental other,” a race geographically and culturally far 
removed. As such, the Jew needed to be physically removed from the Austrian 
and Western body and placed in his natural habitat, the Orient. 

 Th e otherness of the European Jew in nineteenth-century Europe has been 
thoroughly discussed elsewhere (e.g., Cheyette 1993; Gilman 1996; Mosse 1985; 
Th eweleit 1989), but it may help the reader to revisit the issue with a quick over-
view. It should be noted that many Europeans identifi ed the Jew as essentially 
a radically alien, Oriental outcast living in the midst of the Western world. A 
case in point is the nineteenth-century debate that emerged around Benjamin 
Disraeli’s policy toward the Ottoman Empire. Disraeli’s attempt to delay the dis-
memberment of the Ottoman Empire was seen by his opponents in the British 
Parliament as “Jewish” because they felt that, as a Jew, he was “bound to rally 
automatically to the Turkish side” (Rejwan 1999). Nissim Rejwan, the author 
of a recent book that deals with this topic, makes the following observation: “A 
Jew, even a baptized Jew, they argued, remained an Oriental, and therefore, in the 
struggle over the Eastern Question, Disraeli’s loyalties were necessarily with Asia 
against Europe, with Islam against Christendom” (Rejwan 1999: 115). He cites at 
length one of Disraeli’s most bitter opponents, T. P. O’Connor:

[T]here has been among large sections of the Jews the strongest sympathy 
with the Mohammedan peoples…. In the time of the Crusaders, the Jews 
were the friends who aided the Mohammedans in keeping back the tide of 
Christian invasion which was f loating against the East, and in Spain the Jews 
were the constant friends and allies of the Moorish against the Christian 
inhabitants of the country. [Disraeli’s] general view then upon this question 
of Turkey is that as a Jew he is a kinsman of the Turk, and that, as a Jew, 
he feels bound to make common cause with the Turk against the Christian. 
(cited in Rejwan : )

¹⁹.  See Wallerstein () for an analysis of the last remaining world-empires in the 
nineteenth century as they became incorporated into the capitalist-statist system.

²⁰.  For a theoretically sophisticated account of how the incorporation of the 
Ottoman Empire into the capitalist world-economy aff ected the social structure of the 
late t century and early t century, see Çaglar Keyder (). Th e fi rst chapter of 
Keyder’s book is especially useful. See also the insightful selections of essays on specifi c 
nationalisms in the Middle East in Fatma Muge Goçek ().



Khaldoun Samman22 Assimilating to Power in Two Different World-Systems 

the process of defi ning themselves out of the Orient and into the Occident had 
repercussions for the perception not only of European Jews but also of Eastern 
Jews (Segev 1998; Shohat 1988) and the now very orientalized Arabs (Said 1992). 
Zionists thus took it upon themselves to embrace and adopt the Western racist 
discourse about the “Oriental other” by strategically placing the Jew and his inter-
ests as European.

Th is assimilation can be clearly observed in Zionism’s best known person-
ality, Th eodor Herzl. Indeed, his life work seems to have been marked by an 
obsession to resolve the otherness of the Jew, to fi nd a new mode of assimilation 
that would bring Jews self-respect and honor in the eyes of Gentiles (Kornberg 
1993: 160). Th e resolution of this Jewish dilemma came to him in the notion of 
the Jewish state. To remake the Jew on a Gentile model, and fi nally to solve the 
“Jewish Question,” Herzl proposed the notion of a separate and independent 
Jewish state. He blamed the fact that Jews had been despised and entangled in 
a web of Oriental-like characteristics on their statelessness (Herzl 1988 [1896]). 
Th eir rejection by Europe was thus viewed as a natural consequence of the fail-
ure of the Jews to develop their own society, to empower themselves through the 
vehicle of the state. In order to negate this European rejection and to solve this 
Jewish dilemma, Herzl viewed it as essential to create a state in which Jews could 
fi nally pull themselves out of an Oriental-like existence. 

For Herzl, the central objective of creating a future state was not only to 
emancipate the Jews from the grip of the ghetto, pogroms, and other forms of 
persecution, but also to create and fashion a new Jew on the model of a European. 
Only then could the Jew fi nally be recognized as the equal of his European col-
leagues. After the election of 1895 in Vienna, for instance, Herzl declared: “In 
the election the majority of non-Jewish citizens—no, all of them—declare that 
they do not recognize us as Austro-Germans…. All right, we shall move away; 
but over there, too, we shall only be Austrians” (Herzl, cited in Kornberg 1993: 
178). Th is inverted logic made much sense to Herzl, for it captured his desire to 
be accepted by his beloved Germans. As a contemporary biographer of Herzl 
explains, “Only by evacuating Europe would Herzl come to be recognized as an 
Austro-German. Concurrently, only by leaving would Jewish bitterness toward 
their European homelands dissipate and turn once more into love” (Kornberg 
1993: 178). Departing from Europe, therefore, was Herzl’s way not of renounc-
ing Europe and claiming his diff erence from the German and European self, but 
rather of identifying as a European in order to eliminate once and for all the 
distinction between Jew and Gentile. Kornberg’s remarks on Herzl are telling 
in this respect: “Even spit and polish ‘Aryans’ now admired Jews” (1993: 179). Th e 
new Jewish state, as Herzl envisioned it, would not make a decisive break with 
Europe. On the contrary, its establishment would bring Jews respect and would 

Th e equation of the Jew with the Orient was so taken for granted that the British 
author of a book published in 1877 could confi dently complain: “Th roughout 
the East, the Turk and the Jew are leagued against the Christian….Th roughout 
Europe, the most friendly Turkish part of the press is largely in Jewish hands. 
It may be assumed everywhere, with the smallest class of exceptions, that the 
Jew is the friend of the Turk and the enemy of the Christians” (Rejwan 1999: 
115). Major European intellectual fi gures shared these same ideas. Herder, for 
example, called the Jews “an Asiatic people alien to our continent.” Schopenhauer 
repeated this anti-Semitic idea by claiming, “they are and remain an alien, orien-
tal people, and must therefore count only as resident aliens.” Sombart later would 
appropriate the same view into his own work by calling the Jews “an Oriental 
folk transplanted into an environment both climatically and ethnically strange, 
wherein their best powers came to fruition.” Finally, Rathenau perceived the 
Jewish people residing in Europe as “an Asiatic horde on the sands of the Mark.”²¹ 
Many Jews residing in Europe also accepted this anti-Semitic notion. Arnold 
Zweig, for example, argued that Jews were unsuited to European life: “We cannot 
do without Asia. We shall never be redeemed until we are back home there.” For 
him, a Jew assimilated to Europe had betrayed Asia, “the inner Orient in which 
he is rooted” (Robertson 1999: 437). In his book, Th e Face of the Eastern Jew, 
Zweig further expanded on this idea by arguing that the customs and habits of 
Jews regarded as strange in the Occident would only become intelligible if seen 
as Oriental: “Anyone who was ever allowed into a mosque in an Islamic country 
during prayer will recognize the Jew as an Oriental” (Robertson 1999: 430).

Th e emergence of Zionism, therefore, needs to be understood in this con-
text. Zionism as practiced by its best known proponents—who were respond-
ing to this European anti-Semitic conception—was strategically positioned to 
resolve the outsider status of the Jew, to transform the Jew from an Oriental 
other to a respectable and civilized inhabitant of “Western civilization.” In the 
case of every Zionist leader, the objective was to search for ways by which the 
Jew could look and feel European, shed his Oriental skin, and receive an entrance 
ticket into European civilization. As the example of Disraeli suggests, the identi-
fi cation of the Jew as Oriental must have been quite unsettling for the emerging 
Zionist movement; indeed it was the concept of the Jew as outsider that the early 
Zionists aimed to change. Th e consequences of this cannot be overestimated, for 

²¹.  Th e citations of Herder, Schopenhauer, Sombart, and Rathenau are all taken 
from Ritchie Robertson (: ). 



Khaldoun Samman24 Assimilating to Power in Two Different World-Systems 

initiate a new era of “forgiveness, peace, and reconciliation” between Gentile and 
Jew. 

In his utopian novel Old-New Land, Herzl portrays several distinguished 
“Aryan” characters admiring Jews for their great achievements in a once-barren 
land. Th e novel begins with two characters, a German Jew and a German 
Christian, visiting Palestine in 1902; upon their arrival at the Port of Jaff a, they 
are repulsed by the miserable condition in which it lies. Th e port is described 
as an Oriental backwater, a place of dirt, squalor, idleness, and fi lth: “Th e alley 
was dirty, neglected, full of vile odors” (Herzl 1960: 42). Th e inhabitants are not 
only poor but dark and repulsive as well: “Poor Turks, dirty Arabs, timid Jews 
lounged about—indolent, beggarly, hopeless. A peculiar, tomblike odor of mold 
caught one’s breath … Th e inhabitants of the blackish Arab villages looked like 
brigands. Naked children played in the dirty alleys” (Herzl 1960: 42). So dis-
pleased is the Jewish character by these sights that he proclaims “If this is our 
land…it has declined like our people.” Th e German Kingcourt agrees: “Yes, it’s 
pretty bad…. But much could be done here with aff orestation, if half a million 
young giant cedars were planted—they shoot up like asparagus. Th is country 
needs nothing but water and shade to have a very great future.” Th e Jew, intrigued 
by his statement, asks the German for a clarifi cation: “And who is to bring water 
and shade here?” Th e German replies, somewhat annoyed by the obvious: “Th e 
Jew!” (Herzl 1960: 43). Th en after twenty years of Jewish productivity and hard 
work within Palestine, the European characters return to the same port and fi nd 
a completely modern, magnifi cent city, one very similar to any found in Europe: 
“Kingcourt, big things that we don’t know about have happened while we’ve been 
away … What happened to old Palestine? … How changed it all is,” cried the Jew 
Friedrich:

There’s been a miracle here…. Thousands of white villas gleamed out of 
luxuriant green gardens…. A magnificent city had been built beside the sap-
phire-blue Mediterranean. The magnificent stone dams showed the harbor 
for what it was: the safest and most convenient port in the eastern Mediterra-
nean. Craft of every shape and size, f lying the f lags of all nations, lay sheltered 
there. (Herzl : –)

Stunned by this complete turnaround, the two characters are satisfi ed by how 
closely the new Jewish state resembles the European civilized world: “Th e 
people…seem more civilized than we do…. Just look up at the cosmopolitan 
traffi  c in the streets. And all the well-dressed people!” Th e cosmopolitanism and 
diverse population of the renovated port, however, do not distract the visitors 
from its now very European-like semblance: “Brilliant Oriental robes mingled 
with the sober costumes of the Occident, but the latter predominated. Th ere were 

many Chinese, Persians and Arabs in the streets, but the city itself seemed thor-
oughly European” (Herzl 1960: 59–61; emphasis added).

In his other writings, Herzl clearly indicated that he wanted to transport 
the very idea of Europe to the Levant, where along with football and cricket, “I 
shall transport over there genuine Viennese cafes. With these small expedients 
I ensure the desirable illusion of the old environment.”²² In his Jewish State he 
expands on this point by reassuring his readers that living in an Oriental sector 
of the world does not mean that “we” have to give up “our” European habits, cus-
toms, and comforts:

Whoever has seen anything of the world knows that these little daily customs 
can easily be transplanted everywhere…. There are English hotels in Egypt 
and on the mountain-crest in Switzerland, Viennese cafes in South Africa, 
French theatres in Russia, German operas in America, and the best Bavar-
ian beer in Paris. When we journey out of Egypt again we shall not leave the 
f leshpots behind. Every man will find his customs again in the local groups, 
but they will be better, more beautiful, and more agreeable than before. 
(Herzl  []: )

Dull brains might…imagine that this exodus would be from civilized regions 
into the desert. That is not the case. It will be carried out in the midst of 
civilization. We shall not revert to a lower stage, we shall rise to a higher one. 
We shall not dwell in mud huts; we shall build new more beautiful and more 
modern houses. (Herzl  []: )

A discussion with his German Jewish friend Richard Beer-Hofmann shows how 
fully he envisioned his new Jewish state to be a European transplant: “We will 
have a university and an opera [in the Jewish state] and you will attend the opera 
in your swallow-tailed coat with a white gardenia in your button-hole” (cited in 
Kornberg 1993: 179).

Notice the systematic way in which Herzl projects the Jew into the European, 
civilized, modern construct and always at the expense of the “Oriental” other, 
a strategy that we see in the very similar case of the Irish immigrants upon 
entering the U.S. in the nineteenth-century when, as Ignatiev (1995) reminds 
us, they constructed themselves in opposition to the black slaves in an assimi-
lationist project “to enter the white race…” (p. 2). Herzl and the movement that 
has come to be known through his work as Zionism clearly positioned the Jew 
as a member of the Occident and sharing no qualities with the Oriental and 

²².  Citation from Geoff rey Wheatcroft (: ).



Khaldoun Samman26 Assimilating to Power in Two Different World-Systems 

thinking of himself and his interests as European.²³ By fusing the Jew with the 
German/European/Western/civilized amalgam, Zionism established a prec-
edent that would help cement its newly acclaimed Occidental status.²⁴ In this 
way, the state of Israel would come to be seen as a fl oating space in an ocean of 
barbarism, one that was somehow geographically located in the Orient while 
remaining in Europe. Although embedded physically in the hard, tough soil of 
the East, its Geist was somehow oblivious of this environment, belonging instead 
to “Western Civilization.” Ben-Gurion’s statement that “the State of Israel is a 
part of the Middle East only in geography” recalls the image, described by G.H. 
Jansen (1971), “of the hydroponically-reared plant, its roots fl oating in a chemical 
solution, not embedded in the earth” (p. 219).²⁵ Th e problem, however, is that 
Israel is on earth, just not in the Orient according to Zionists like Herzl.

Appropriating this discourse in their quest to create a Jewish state, Herzl and 
the Zionist movement accepted only half of the equation of their anti-Semitic 
Gentiles: the need for the Jewish people to return to the “Promised Land.” 
Ironically, they readily accepted the highly anti-Semitic notion of Jews as alien 
to any Western nation along with its corollary, that Jews have a natural, national 
identity of their own: Israel in the fl esh. What they rejected, however, was iden-
tifi cation with the “Oriental other.” After settling in what they regarded as an 
ocean of barbarism, they worked tirelessly to negate their “Oriental” stigma and 
to construct an identity informed by European supremacy over the “Oriental” 
(Khazoom 2003). For Zionism’s most signifi cant thinkers, the European 

Jewish settlers constituted a nation like France or Germany, radically unlike the 
“Oriental” inhabitants of the region they wish to remove. Th e “Jewish Question,” 
therefore, was resolved by placing the Jews as a race in a nation of their own 
away from Europe while still holding onto the idea that the Jew belonged to the 
Western, or civilized, world. It is by this means that Herzl and his Zionist fol-
lowers transferred the Jew from a status outside the Western concept of the self 
to one inside, a change that is clearly apparent in Herzl’s writings. Th is is also, I 
believe, the route that was most readily available in his time, for as Wallerstein 
(1998) has argued, national identities “are the invention of the contemporary 
imagination,” the product of a very recent development stemming from the insti-
tutional requirements of the modern world-system (p. 55).²⁶ One has to make 
sure, however, that such an invention is of a type that buys one the right kind 
of cultural capital, an idea that Herzl heard loud and clear and acted upon with 
great energy.

iv. conclusion and analysis

Th e similarities that emerge between Paul and Herzl from our analysis are 
stunning. Both Paul and Herzl, living under circumstances that were diffi  cult 
for minorities, attempted to assimilate to the dominant group of their respec-
tive world-system, their eff orts culminating in Christianity and Zionism respec-
tively. Paul focused on the Resurrection event as a way of making his Jewish 
identity more palatable to the elites of the Greco-Roman world. Herzl similarly 
adopted the state idea in order to make his Jewish identity respectable to the 
Gentiles of Austria and Europe. Each man chose a strategy that allowed him to 
move away from Israel in the fl esh, Paul becoming more Hellenized and Herzl 
becoming more Occidentalized. Th at is, Paul aggressively pursued a strategy 
of assimilation after his conversion to Christianity by radically reinterpreting 
Jewish Scriptures such as to provide a base for his newly found sect to fl ourish in 
the Greco-Roman world. Likewise, Herzl attempted to eradicate what he saw as 
a defect in the Oriental-like quality of the stateless Jew, proposing a disciplinary 
state that would produce a new Jew in the image of the civilized West. For both 
men such strategies articulated a discourse of mobility that they believed would 
provide their imagined community with the means to join the privileged sectors 
of their world.

²³.  Th is idea comes from David Roediger (: ): “White labour does not just 
receive and resist racist ideas but embraces, adopts and, at times, murderously acts upon 
those ideas. Th e problem is not just that the white working class is at critical junctures 
manipulated into racism, but that it comes to think of itself and its interests as white.”

²⁴.  For a contemporary view of what I call Occidentalization, see Th omas Cahill’s 
recent book Th e Gift of the Jews (), in which he continually refers to the Jews as the 
inventors of Western Civilization: “By ‘we’ I mean the usual ‘we’ of the late-twentieth-
century.” He directly links “we” with “our” Western civilization on numerous occasions, as, 
for example, here: “Th e people of the Western World, whose peculiar but vital mentality 
has come to infect every culture on earth, so that, in a startlingly precise sense, all hu-
manity is now willy-nilly caught up in this ‘we.’ For better or worse, the role of the West 
in humanity’s history is singular. Because of this, the role of the Jews, the inventors of 
Western culture, is also singular” (p. ).

²⁵.  Indeed, Ben-Gurion wrote an article for the French paper Le Monde in , 
titled “Israel, État Occidental.”

²⁶.  As the French philosopher Ernst Renan has said, “A nation is a group of people 
united by a mistaken view about the past and a hatred of their neighbors” (cited in Avi 
Shlaim : xiii).



Khaldoun Samman28 Assimilating to Power in Two Different World-Systems 

In short, we can say that both Paul and Herzl reoriented their identities by 
defi ning the Jew and his interests as European or Hellenic. Herzl was the more 
explicit of the two, in that on multiple occasions he referred to the practical pur-
pose that the Jew, if given a state, would serve for the Western colonial powers, 
as a famous statement of his makes clear: By creating a state in the Middle East, 
he asserted on behalf of the Jews, “We should there form a part of a wall of 
defense for Europe in Asia, an outpost of civilization against barbarism.”²⁷ Th e 
discourse of “the Jewish protecting the West from the Eastern, primitive world” 
became one of the central strategies that Zionists would employ, never tiring of 
reminding the West of their all-important role in holding back the barbarians of 
the East.²⁸

Yet the fact that Paul and Herzl were both Diaspora Jews who lived as 
minorities in their two world-systems produced a desire within them to reconcile 
their diff erence, to negotiate an identity that, instead of eliminating them from 
the dominant society, would fi nally resolve their identity dilemma by “normal-
izing” the self in the eyes of the larger, dominant “world.”

But the strategy of moving toward the power holders had to be negotiated 
diff erently in the two historical systems. As discussed earlier, by the time Herzl 
came on the scene in the late nineteenth century, the consolidation of the nation-
state form, at least in Europe, had been largely completed. Along with this pro-
cess we also begin to see the fi nal disintegration of that large body of territory 
referred to as the world-empires of the past. As Wallerstein (1974a) suggests, 
it was in the initial formation of the modern world-system, “that not only were 
the boundary lines decided but, even more important, it was decided that there 
would be boundary lines,” represented by a “fundamental change in the political 
structure of western Europe” (p. 32). John Ruggie (1993) similarly argues that, 
before the modern period, the idea of “external” and “internal” political realms, 
diff erentiated by clearly marked borders, made little sense. In premodern times, 
he argues, “there were only ‘frontiers,’ or large zones of transitions.” Th is for him 
is due to the fact that such a world “had none of the connotations of possessive-
ness and exclusiveness conveyed by the modern concept of sovereignty” (Ruggie 

1993: 150). But from the point of view of this essay, the more important outcome 
of the earlier period is that it sustained a vision of unity, enforced by common 
bodies of law, religion, and custom, all of which were devised to create an inclu-
sive, universal moral community (Ruggie 1993: 150). Th at universal community 
is what came to an end with the eventual rise of the modern world-system and 
the demise of world-empires.

Th is, then, is where the diff erences between Paul and Herzl are most strik-
ing. Paul and Herzl negotiated identities that were the inherent expression of 
two diff erent forms of world-systems. Paul, living in a world-empire, negotiated 
his diff erence by negating those elements in his Jewish culture that were anti-
thetical to the larger Hellenistic culture, thereby constructing a sect that permit-
ted him and his followers to move culturally towards Rome. Herzl followed a 
similar strategy in his attempt to move West, but this time he had to go one step 
further—to create a Jewish nation, without which he feared the Jews would remain 
utterly diff erent and pre-modern (read: Oriental). To move towards Paris, Herzl 
believed he had to create a Jewish state with the capacity to produce Jews in the 
image of Gentiles. For Paul the transition from Jerusalem to Rome was much 
simpler, since no Jewish state was required. Instead, eliminating Jewish practices 
that marked communal diff erence was enough. Th e Christ-event and the removal 
of markers like dietary restrictions, circumcision, and attachment to one special 
land were enough. Herzl also felt compelled to transform his Jewishness, to create 
the “new Jew,” one who is rational, productive and, most of all, modern. But in 
order to produce that change in the Jew, a secular, “manmade” power would have 
to be called upon: not Christ, but a territorial state, where the Jew could work the 
land, produce wealth from real, direct production, and most importantly, remove 
those Diaspora characteristics from himself that Herzl believed had kept the Jew 
in a primitive, Oriental-like existence. 

In his context, Herzl was doing what was expected of all “civilized” people: 
constructing a nationalist identity that aspired to an imagined community 
which has at its basis a territorial, fi nite quality to it. As Anderson argued in his 
seminal work, Imagined Communities (1995), “Th e nation is imagined as limited, 
has fi nite, if elastic, boundaries, beyond which lie other nations” (p. 7). At its 
most basic level, in its modern conception, “state sovereignty is fully, fl atly, and 
evenly operative over each square centimeter of a legally demarcated territory” 
(Anderson 1995: 19). But the most signifi cant aspect of this notion of commu-
nity, for us, is the fact that “no nation imagines itself coterminous with man-
kind.” Hence, these identities impose an absolute claim of membership on a very 
specifi c and precise portion of mankind. Paul, on the other hand, constructed 
an identity that was radically diff erent, universalistic in character, belonging to 
a vision of the world more congruent with world-empires. Rather than imag-

²⁷.  Th is Zionist discourse also goes back before Herzl, at least to Moses Hess sev-
eral decades before Herzl: “Jews have a great calling to be a living channel of communi-
cation to the primitive people of Asia,” so that the colonizing/civilized West may “open 
the roads that lead to China—those unknown regions which must be thrown open to 
civilization.” Both citations are from Stavrianos (: –).

²⁸.  For an example of this strategy in action, see Benjamin Netanyahu’s () book 
appropriately titled Terrorism: How the West Can Win.



Khaldoun Samman30 Assimilating to Power in Two Different World-Systems 

ining his identity as fi nite, possessing distinctive ethnic markers, he sought to 
encompass all mankind: “Th e most messianic nationalists do not dream of a day 
when all the members of the human race will join their nation in the way that…. 
Christians…dream of a wholly Christian planet” (Anderson 1995: 7). By con-
trast, “in the older imagining, where states were defi ned by centres, borders were 
porous and indistinct, and sovereignties faded imperceptibly into one another” 
(Anderson 1995: 19). Th is was the world that Paul lived in, where identities were 
much more fl uid, much less place-oriented than the nationalist, particularistic 
types experienced by Herzl. 

It is as though we have here two major representations of the “world.” Th e 
fi rst is a Herzlian vision, which is characterized by rigid structural rules based on 
formal political-legal distinctions and qualifi cations separating men and women 
into watertight compartments. Th e second is a universalistic vision, character-
ized by Paul’s analogy of Israel in the spirit, where the structural properties of 
locality and nation are held at bay and formal allegiance to any political-legal 
authority is disregarded. It is a vision that is, as Victor Turner (1995) states, “an 
unstructured or rudimentarily structured and relatively undiff erentiated comita-
tus, community, or even communion of equal individuals who submit together to 
the general authority of the ritual” (p. 96).

Belonging to the universal community of believers and to an ecclesiastical 
vision of the world, Paul would overturn any form of identity that bound him 
to a particular group, land, or ritual. He belonged to a vision of the world over 
which a particularistic identity had little, if any, moral or cultural hold. But faced 
with the encroaching modern world-system, Paul’s universalistic type of iden-
tity became entangled in fi erce confrontations with nationalist movements that 
were on the verge of completely destroying the old social order. World-empires 
were gradually fragmented, pluralized, and territorialized, leaving in their path 
an older world of overlapping, syncretic identities that eventually gave way to 
the more sanitized, racialized, nationalized form of identity that we know all 
too well today. In the end, Herzl’s Israel in the fl esh replaced Paul’s Israel in the 
spirit. Now we must wait to see how our struggles today will negotiate between 
these two forms of identities, and whether a possible synthesis, or third way, may 
be on the horizon. 

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