Peasants, Sons of Kings: Class and Status in Early Jewish Nationalism
Published in 2026 by the Ben-Gurion Institute for the Study of Israel and Zionism at Ben-Gurion University of the Negev, in Hebrew. 296 pages · ISBN 978-965-510-166-9. The book was supported by grants from the Center for Libraries and Literature in Israel and the Jewish Studies Program at Cornell University.
Publisher page · Table of contents (PDF, Hebrew)
About the book
Who is the ideal “national Jew”? Why did some of the leaders of Zionism place an aristocratic — even monarchical — order at the head of the utopian Jewish state, and how did the figure of the peasant become so central to the Zionist movement?
Peasants, Sons of Kings examines the influence of social ideas on Jewish nationalism in general, and on Zionism in particular, during its first decades. Reading writings and central events from the years 1881–1904, Rhona Burns shows how national ideas were shaped by conceptions of class, and how social aspirations came to be given national expression.
Jewish nationalism gave rise to a wide range of interpretations and hopes. Many groups within Jewish society — men of capital, migrants, intellectuals, students, and rabbis — gave it different meanings and saw in it an answer to their own ambitions. Through the essays, letters, and memoirs of contemporaries, the utopias they composed, and even the charters of their settlement associations, the book uncovers how Jewish nationalism grew, and the blurring and tension between circles of class and national identity and belonging.
At the base of the class ideals that characterized the Jewish national outlook stood, almost always, bourgeois culture — at once revolutionary and conservative, striving for national change while attaching importance to preserving religious institutions, a stratified social order, and an elitism of rule. At the beginning of the twentieth century, however, the ethos governing the Jewish national movement turned: political ideals of another kind, grounded in non-bourgeois and even anti-bourgeois social and political thought, marked a new direction, with the new tiller of the soil and the laborer at its center. They embodied bodily and spiritual redemption, personal and collective, and signaled social renewal alongside political and economic radicalism.
The social ideas that developed in nineteenth-century Europe shaped both class and national discourse, Jewish and general alike — and they continue to shape Jewish nationalism and politics, and the modern State of Israel, to this day.
English edition
An adapted English version of the book is in advanced stages of preparation, tentatively titled Respectable Utopias: The Jewish National Idea through the Perspective of Class and Status.