No one is more closely associated with the Hebrew University than the American Reform rabbi Judah Magnes. Magnes, who played a crucial role in its founding in 1925, was the institution’s all-powerful Chancellor during its crucial inaugural decade before becoming its president, a title he held until his death in 1948. In what might seem a paradox for contemporary critics of Zionism, Magnes was also—alongside this contribution to Zionist institution building—an advocate of Arab-Jewish reconciliation, ranking among the leading visionaries of the binational model in Mandatory Palestine. This stance underwrote his opposition to UNSCOP’s 1947 partition resolution, actively opposing what, by the 1940s, had become the most obvious political desire of the Yishuv, Palestine’s Jewish community: the historical goal of achieving a Jewish state.
In a last-ditch attempt to stop partition, Magnes traveled to the United States in March 1948, in the midst of the war, to promote an international trusteeship for Palestine. Following this unsuccessful attempt, he observed from afar the departure of the British and the establishment of the State of Israel. This marked the demise of his Arab-Jewish binational state model, rooted in the notion that Palestine’s sanctity destined it to be a shared homeland rather than exclusively Arab or Jewish. Once Israel became an undeniable reality, though, Magnes refined his vision, adjusting his one-state solution to a confederation of two separate states, the “United States of Palestine.” But by then it was too late. Magnes lived neither to return to Palestine, nor to see the end of the war. He died in October 1948 in New York at 71 from heart failure.
This tragic final chapter of Magnes’ life fits his depiction in David Barak-Gorodetsky’s 2021 biography, The Prophetic Politics of a Religious Binationalist. Barak-Gorodetsky pushes heavily for his portrayal as a prophet of doom, a self-assumed role for which he paid a high personal price, shifting him from a position of influence to marginality. As a “religious political biography,” it sets itself apart from previous works dedicated to his life, which include Norman Bentwich’s 1954 biography and Daniel Kotzin’s 2010 biography, as well as a political biography in Hebrew by Joseph Heller (2003). Barak-Gorodetsky, a historian and Reform rabbi himself, sets out to identify the distinct religious (and American) influences that shaped Magnes’s politics, distinguishing him from the small circle of binationalists in Mandatory Palestine, most of whom were of Central European origin. At first glance, this task may seem like a case of “narcissism of small differences,” and one might reasonably question the value of tracing the ideological roots of a figure who, as Barak-Gorodetsky himself acknowledges, was no systematic thinker. Yet the book’s significance lies in its contemporary resonance. Its central thesis is that Magnes’s politics were not merely compatible with his religious beliefs, but in fact derived from them. Magnes’s opposition to partition and subsequent support for binationalism, for example, grew out of his conviction that the land’s sanctity “precludes the exclusive realization of either Jewish or Arab nationalism in Palestine” Barak-Gorodetsky downplays the fact that Magnes was not alone in this respect: his binational milieu also included other “religious humanists,” such as the philosophers Martin Buber and Hugo Bergmann. Still, the book powerfully challenges the assumption—pervasive in contemporary Israel—that religious commitment necessarily points toward settlement and exclusivist sovereignty.
More broadly, and beyond Magnes himself, the book retraces the place of religion within the story of Zionism. To contemporary observers of Israel, this task might appear redundant: religion seems inseparable from the country’s history and politics. Yet for decades, under the hegemonic leadership of the Labour movement, Zionism cultivated an image of itself as a hyper-secular revolutionary project. In contrast to this, Barak-Gorodetsky reinforces scholars who argue that Zionism is, and always was, secular in name alone. The pioneering zeal of early Zionists was itself steeped in religiosity. They sanctified the land, the exclusivity of the Hebrew language, “Hebrew labor,” and even the secular nature of the Zionist movement; its passionate and uncompromising nature was evoked, for example, in Boaz Neumann’s Land and Desire in Early Zionism and fictionalized in Meir Shalev’s The Blue Mountain. Whereas proponents of Zionism as a secular movement could easily dismiss the settler–religious right as a deviation from “real Zionism,” this infusion of “political theology” into Zionism’s early history suggests otherwise. From the outset, Zionism was charged with religious and theopolitical undercurrents. The implications of this thesis are far-reaching: the religious messianism that surged after 1967 was no aberration. Indeed, sociologists like Baruch Kimmerling have long pointed to the continuities between the settlement practices of the secular labor movement and those of the religious right in the occupied territories post-1967.
Besides religion, the book also underscores the importance of Magnes’ American identity in shaping his worldview. Here, Barak-Gorodetsky’s argument is even more convincing: as an American, Magnes’s marginal politics drew on different ideological sources than those that animated his predominantly Central European milieu.
The first part of the book follows Magnes’s early life. Born in 1878 in Oakland, California, he attended prayer services alongside the future novelist Gertrude Stein—later to quip about Oakland that “there is no there there.” As Barak-Gorodetsky notes, Magnes and Stein were both shaped by a distinctly Californian liberal upbringing that emphasized the pursuit of individual liberty. In 1894, Magnes enrolled as a rabbinical student at Hebrew Union College in Cincinnati. While he embraced the Reform movement’s universalist outlook, he was deeply troubled by the threat of assimilation, which he feared was eroding Judaism and might ultimately erase it in America. In clear deviation from the Reform position of the time, which defined Judaism as merely a religion and rejected Jewish nationhood, Magnes embraced Zionism. In his 1896 article “Palestine or Death,” the eighteen-year-old Magnes argued that the establishment of a Jewish “Church and State” in Palestine was “the only salvation of our present-day Judaism” (p. 21).
Like many Americans of his generation, Magnes continued his studies in Germany, the birthplace of the modern research university and, at the time, the global capital of academia. He attended the renowned Higher Institute for Jewish Studies in Berlin and earned a PhD at the University of Heidelberg. There he met the young Joseph Klausner. The two would meet again decades later at the Hebrew University, by then representing opposite poles of the university’s politics: Klausner, the nationalist historian and supporter of Revisionism; Magnes, the religious binationalist. Despite these ideological differences, on a personal level, they remained close. This was typical of Magnes, whose fierce critique of Revisionist politics did not prevent him from using his influence as university president to secure the release of Revisionist students arrested by the British.
After completing his studies in Germany, Magnes settled in New York City in 1904, serving as a rabbi for several Reform congregations, including the affluent Temple Emanu-El. His criticism of the Reform movement, influenced by the founder of Conservative Judaism, Solomon Schechter, led to frequent clashes with the movement’s lay leadership. Compared to earlier biographies, Barak-Gorodetsky’s work sheds new light on Magnes’s New York chapter, especially his distinct Christian influences. Magnes’s religious socialism, which developed through his philanthropic work in New York’s poorest neighborhoods, drew heavily on nineteenth-century liberal Protestantism, which viewed morality as the core of religion. He was also influenced by the Social Gospel movement and grew close to Quaker circles during the First World War, from which he emerged as a committed pacifist. He threw himself into wartime political activism with full force, paying a steep price: he became an outcast in Jewish circles and among the broader American public alike. This chapter in Magnes’ life supports the book’s underlying thesis that Magnes’ self-proclaimed position as a prophet shifted him from positions of influence to the margins, in New York and Palestine alike, adding to his depiction as a tragic hero.
This personal and political upheaval may help explain why, in 1922, the Magnes family settled in Palestine, a highly unusual move for an American Jew at the time, when most immigrants to Palestine were Eastern European. Before long, Magnes joined the Jerusalem planning committee of the Hebrew University. His connections with prominent American Jews helped him secure a crucial donation from the banker Felix Warburg, which enabled the university’s opening in 1925. Consequently, he was appointed its first Chancellor.
In these first years, Magnes largely refrained from overt political activity. While Magnes cultivated close ties with Brit Shalom, he never formally joined the association. According to Barak-Gorodetsky, Magnes viewed the Arab-Jewish conflict primarily as a religious conflict: a clash between Judaism and Islam. No surprise, then, that he only entered the political arena in earnest following the 1929 disturbances, which began as local riots at the Western Wall before escalating into unprecedented bloodshed across multiple locales.
Magnes’s 1929 pamphlet Like All the Nations marks his first systematic attempt to spell out his political program. At its heart stands the sanctity of the land: “What is Palestine to us? It is the Land of Israel, our Holy Land” (p. 160). In contemporary Israel, belief in the land’s sanctity is often associated with ultra-religious nationalism. Magnes, by contrast, drew the opposite conclusions. His ultimate vision was to build an ethical community in Palestine. In practical terms, he believed that Jews should be allowed to immigrate and settle in the country and—clearly inspired by Ahad Ha’am’s notion of a “Jewish spiritual center”—to build a vibrant Hebrew culture there. For Magnes, neither Jewish immigration nor the creation of a spiritual center required a Jewish state. Herein lies his political distance from the Yishuv: he was prepared to relinquish sovereignty and even the goal of securing a permanent Jewish majority, one of the few premises shared by the otherwise divided Yishuv.
In 1942, Magnes founded the Ihud association, which rejected the Zionist movement’s now-explicit demand for a Jewish state. Ihud (“unity” in Hebrew) proposed establishing a binational state in Palestine in which Jews and Arabs would enjoy equal rights and political representation, with each community maintaining its cultural autonomy. The binational state Ihud envisioned was based on parity—equal representation for each national community regardless of population share, a mechanism designed to halt the demographic race. This Arab–Jewish binational state would be embedded within a regional Middle Eastern federation built on economic and political cooperation with Transjordan, Syria, and Lebanon, nested within a broader Anglo-American federation of free nations that had stood with the Allies during the Second World War. Barak-Gorodetsky highlights the impact of Magnes’ American background on this vision, noting that he understood binationalism primarily as an institutional arrangement. Inspired by the American political system, Magnes believed that political institutions, including a constitution, should structure daily relations between Jews and Arabs. Ironically, it was a German Jew, Hannah Arendt, whom Magnes came to know in his final years, who legitimized these American influences for him. Convinced that the era of the nation-state was drawing to a close, Arendt predicted that it would be supplanted either by imperial formations or by federal arrangements. Wary of great-power tutelage, she considered the latter more suitable for the Jews. Her influence is evident in Magnes’s proposal for a “United States of Palestine,” a confederation of two independent states. As Magnes emphasized, in a confederation, member states retain more sovereignty than they would in a federation such as the United States. For its religious significance, Jerusalem would become a neutral, demilitarized corpus separatum, echoing the original UN Partition Resolution of 1947.
But by then it was already too late. Magnes published his confederation proposal in late 1948, after the State of Israel had already become a fait accompli, rendering Ihud, and Magnes himself, politically irrelevant. During the last decade of his life, as the book’s third part recounts, Magnes and his circle found themselves increasingly marginalized. His standing in particular suffered a decisive blow when he sought, amid the 1948 war, to prevent the establishment of the Jewish state, traveling to the United States to urge the Truman administration to support a temporary international trusteeship in Palestine. While Barak-Gorodetsky does not add new archival revelations regarding this episode, he does clarify its motivations. He argues that as Magnes grew increasingly hopeless about the conflict in Palestine, he became more religious and less Zionist, effectively returning to an earlier understanding of Judaism as a religion rather than as a form of nationalism. In this view, Judaism remained tied to Palestine, and he believed that anyone who could immigrate there should do so, since it was difficult to live a Jewish life in the diaspora. Yet in Palestine itself, he argued, only a minimal level of communal self-rule was necessary, as a means rather than an end; full political independence and sovereignty were, in his eyes, unnecessary. For Magnes, a Jewish community defined by religion—not by nationalism or statehood—was sufficient.
This late theological turn also sharpened his critique of Zionism itself. Disillusioned with nationalism altogether, Magnes came to see Zionism, which had been inseparable from his Judaism since youth, as a form of idolatry. He attributed this misplaced sanctification of the state particularly to the Yishuv’s leadership, notably David Ben-Gurion. His criticism of the direction of the Zionist project has shaped his attitude toward both nationalism and religion, as well as toward Palestine and the diaspora. “The idea of the state,” he wrote in 1947,
has taken over the vast majority of Jewry… we are all guilty – Including the American Jews who remained silent… The sanctification of these means has made it so that it is difficult to be a Jew among one’s people… will bring about our ruin. (p. 224).
Barak-Gorodetsky is at his best as a historian of ideas, tracing Magnes’s intellectual inspirations and placing him in dialogue with a wide range of thinkers, from Carl Schmitt to Hermann Cohen. Readers primarily interested in political or social history, however, may find the book less satisfying. Those seeking Magnes’s Arab interlocutors will be disappointed. His negotiations with Musa Alami and the British Orientalist John Philby (father of the communist spy Kim Philby) have been explored by earlier biographers and receive scant attention here. The question of whether there was ever a viable Palestinian counterpart for negotiations has long been the Achilles’ heel of the Zionist left, and it helped crush that camp after Ehud Barak’s infamous 2000 declaration that “there was no Palestinian partner.” If religion is indeed crucial for understanding Magnes’ binationalism, one might ask whether it could also serve as a basis for dialogue with Muslim and Christian Arab nationalists. Such an exploration would certainly be in the spirit of rabbi Menachem Froman, from the West Bank settlement of Tekoa, who in his efforts to promote interfaith dialogue was willing to meet even Hamas leaders. Beyond gesturing to abstract calls for cooperation among Jews, Christians, and Muslims, the book does not pursue this line of inquiry. Nor does it exploit the rich holdings of Hannah Arendt’s estate in the Library of Congress, relying instead on Arendt’s published writings and existing biographical work. Finally, non-Hebrew readers may find the book frustrating at times, as it frequently cites secondary literature in Hebrew even when English translations are available.
The renewed interest in Magnes reflects the post-Oslo disenchantment with the “two-state solution” and its premise of a clean territorial division between Israelis and Palestinians. That disenchantment has only deepened since October 7. In both camps, political imagination has largely reverted to a zero-sum logic: in Israel, support for a Palestinian state, once backed by a solid majority, has plummeted, while in Palestinian circles—especially outside Israel/Palestine—the idea of “one democratic state” has gained new prominence. The language of “one state” and “binationalism” is sometimes used interchangeably, and some advocates of this one-state solution occasionally invoke Magnes. Yet Magnes was primarily interested in creating a model Jewish society embedded in binational institutions; he sought to recognize and institutionalize the national rights of both peoples. By contrast, most versions of the “one democratic state” proposal envision a unitary state whose character is determined by a single majority, effectively a Palestinian state with a Jewish minority. One may well ask whether such a vision would differ in any meaningful way from the de facto “one-state solution” that Israel represents today.
While Barak-Gorodetsky rightly warns against idealizing Magnes’s vision as an easy fix to the messy Israeli–Palestinian conflict, he downplays alternative frameworks beyond the two-state paradigm. A Land for All, a joint Israeli–Palestinian movement, has advanced a confederative vision that has much in common with Magnes’s ideas. Perhaps Magnes’s most compelling contribution to contemporary debates, however, is more basic still: challenging the connection between sanctity and sovereignty.