Revisionists framed Diaspora Judaism as a feminized spiritual defense mechanism

Evidence

Dov Chomsky, writing for the Beitar Guide, similarly argued that Zionism must try to dissociate the Jewish nation from the term that came to symbolize it in the Diaspora: Am ha-Sefer (the People of the Book). The reduction of the Jewish experience to that of the messengers of the moral teachings of the biblical prophets, he claimed, was but an attempt to justify the anomaly of the Jewish condition in the Diaspora in which a nation that had lost its territorial base had had to relinquish its historical self. Judaism in the Diaspora had to reinvent itself as a spiritual (feminine, defensive) entity devoid of any nationalistic or territorial aspirations. Zionism, then, in order to overcome this deviant historical condition must cease to emphasize the spiritual (and holy) nature of the Jewish people and instead cultivate its nationalistic and virile heritage. — Ivan Davidson Kalmar, Derek Penslar, Orientalism and the Jews, 527

Categorization

• XREF: Connects to the ‘Complaints About Immodesty’ article on gendered/political signaling, and to broader scholarship on colonial gendering of the colonized as feminine.
• BMF: The portrait of a nation forced to reinvent itself as a ‘spiritual (feminine, defensive) entity’ echoes the subjugation-rewrites-identity theme in Achebe’s Things Fall Apart, where colonized Igbo culture is recast as primitive/childlike.
• DEFINE: Clarifies the Revisionist redefinition of ‘Am ha-Sefer’ as a term to be rejected rather than celebrated.