Zeev Sternhell

Born Severin Sternhell in Przemyśl, Poland, in 1935, Sternhell was the son of Ida and Adolf Sternhell.[7] His family was Jewish and affluent; his father died before the deaths of his mother and sister in the Holocaust.[8][2] After the Nazi occupation, the family was confined to the ghetto.[9] His mother and sister were murdered, while his aunt and uncle, Klara and David Ehrenfreund, helped him escape to Lviv, also known as Lwów.[7][9] There he lived with them under the guise of a Catholic and survived until the end of the war.[9]

Sternhell later recalled the liquidation of the ghetto as a succession of hunts for its Jewish inhabitants.[10] A 2014 Jewish Review of Books article, discussing the Holocaust recollections presented in Ari Shavit’s My Promised Land, quoted him saying: “The ghetto was liquidated in stages, and each time it was a different sort of hunt.”[10] The recollection concerned his childhood in Poland in 1941.[10]

In 1946, Sternhell traveled to France on a Red Cross children’s train and lived with relatives.[9][8] He studied at a secondary school in Avignon before leaving France for Israel.[7][2] In 1951, before completing his studies, he immigrated alone through Youth Aliyah and attended a Youth Aliyah institution in Magdiel.[2] He later connected that decision both to his family’s Zionist history and to his desire to participate in building a Jewish state.[2] He recalled that the War of Independence had fired his imagination.[2]

Sternhell described the establishment of Israel as producing in him an “almost religious exaltation.”[11] After a short period at Kibbutz Usha, he moved to Haifa and lived independently.[9] He completed three years of high-school study in two years.[9] His subsequent military service included an officer’s commission in the Golani Brigade, where he served as a second lieutenant and commanded a platoon during the 1956 Sinai Campaign.[9][1]

In 1957, Sternhell began studying history and political science at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem.[7] He completed an honors bachelor’s degree in 1960 and an honors master’s degree in political science in 1964.[9] He then pursued doctoral research at the Institut d’Études Politiques in Paris, examining the social and political ideas of Maurice Barrès under the supervision of Jean Touchard.[7] He received his doctorate in 1969, and his dissertation appeared that year as a book on Barrès and French nationalism.[9]

Sternhell returned to Israel and joined the Hebrew University’s political science department as a lecturer in 1969.[9] During the 1970s he chaired the department and, from 1975 to 1977, directed the Levi Eshkol Institute for Social Research.[2][1] He became a full professor in 1982 and received the university’s Leon Blum Chair in Political Science in 1989.[1] He retired in 2003.[1]

His academic work also included sustained editorial responsibilities.[1] He became co-editor of Jerusalem Quarterly in 1976 and remained in that position until 1990.[1] In 1989 he joined the editorial board of History and Memory, and in 1996 he joined the editorial board of the Journal of Political Ideologies.[1] These positions accompanied a research career that combined political science, history, and political philosophy.[1]

Sternhell held research fellowships or visiting appointments at institutions in Europe, Israel, and the United States.[2] They included the Institute for Advanced Studies at the Hebrew University, Sciences Po in Paris, St Antony’s College at Oxford, France’s National Centre for Scientific Research, and UCLA.[2] Other appointments took him to the Institute for Advanced Study at Princeton, the Woodrow Wilson Center in Washington, the Netherlands Institute for Advanced Study, and New York University’s Remarque Institute.[2] His books and articles, many written in French, were translated into Hebrew and numerous other languages.[7]

Beginning in the mid-1970s, Sternhell concentrated on the radical right and the intellectual formation of fascism.[9] The Revolutionary Right challenged conventional distinctions between the political left and right, an approach he developed further in Neither Right nor Left and The Birth of Fascist Ideology.[9] His interpretation treated fascism as a coherent ideology rather than an opportunistic assortment of slogans.[9] The ideological content of anti-liberal and anti-democratic movements consequently occupied a central place in his research.[9]

Sternhell’s account placed fascism’s intellectual and ideological roots in France, while locating its later consolidation as a mature political movement in Italy.[9] He described it as a “neither right nor left” phenomenon that challenged Enlightenment rationalism and drew upon complex currents in late-19th-century Europe.[9] His work on Barrès thus preceded a broader examination of the ideological combinations through which fascism developed.[9] The English translation of Neither Right nor Left: Fascist Ideology in France, translated by David Maisel from Ni droite, ni gauche, appeared from the University of California Press in Berkeley around 1986.[12]

A 2022 Jewish Review of Books essay associated Sternhell and historian Michael Curtis with an interpretation identifying Maurice Barrès, Charles Maurras, and Georges Sorel as intellectual precursors of fascism.[4] In that account, their attacks on Enlightenment ideas and democracy, together with their exaltation of violence, nationalism, and unreason, helped establish an ideological blueprint that later acquired mass support.[4] The essay presented this interpretation jointly, rather than as an argument belonging exclusively to Sternhell.[4]

Sternhell extended his examination of European political thought in The Anti-Enlightenment Tradition.[13] He argued that an anti-rational tradition developed alongside the Enlightenment, rejecting natural law and human rights.[13] His account included J. G. Herder and Edmund Burke among that tradition’s founders and traced its contribution to the weakening of modern liberalism and, ultimately, to fascism.[13] David Maisel translated the English edition, published by Yale University Press around 2010.[13]

The distinction in this later work was not simply between modernity and opposition to modernity.[9] Sternhell instead described a conflict between two forms of modernity: one rationalist and grounded in universal values, the other grounded in value relativism and the rejection of parts of the Enlightenment inheritance.[9] He followed this conflict from the 18th century through at least the middle of the 20th century.[9] The argument connected his research on radical nationalism with a longer history of disputes over reason, universalism, and political values.[9][13]

In the 1990s, Sternhell turned to Zionism and the history of the Jewish community in Palestine.[9] His study Binyan Uma o Tikkun Hevra—Nation-Building or Social Reform—examined the Israeli Labor movement and was his only book written in Hebrew.[7] Its English version, The Founding Myths of Israel: Nationalism, Socialism, and the Making of the Jewish State, was published by Princeton University Press in 1998.[5] The book closely examined Mapai and the socialist ideals claimed by its founders.[5]

Sternhell argued that the Labor movement had achieved its national objective without setting comparably ambitious goals for social transformation.[9] In his interpretation, Mapai’s founders understood universalist socialism to be poorly suited to the requirements of state-building nationalism.[5] After the War of Independence, the party struggled to move from particularistic nationalism toward the social changes associated with socialism.[5] His account nevertheless recognized that Mapai’s communal ideology sustained the state into the 1970s.[5]

Alongside his university career, Sternhell remained an active military reservist.[1] He fought in the Six-Day War in 1967 and returned from Oxford to join his unit during the Yom Kippur War in 1973.[9][1] He also participated in the 1982 Lebanon War.[1] His military service therefore continued across the same decades in which he established his academic career and developed his major studies of the radical right.[9]

Sternhell belonged to the Israeli political left, first participating in the Labor Party and later in Mapam.[7] Within Labor he founded the academic group Circle 77, and he helped organize institutions for discussion among left-wing intellectuals.[7] He regularly wrote for Al Hamishmar and Haaretz, and also contributed columns to Davar.[7][2] He understood an intellectual’s social role to include criticism of government and the identification of social defects.[9]

A prominent peace activist, Sternhell opposed Israel’s continued presence in the West Bank — known by its original, indigenous Jewish name of Judea and Samaria — and criticized the settlement movement.[14][15] He argued that retaining territory captured in 1967 threatened Israeli democracy.[8] In a passage published in 1998, he contrasted what he called the essential conquests associated with Israel’s establishment with the effort to retain the conquests of 1967, which he said had “a strong flavor of imperial expansion.”[8] These distinctions formed part of his own political assessment of Israeli statehood and territorial policy.[8]

Sternhell also distinguished antisemitism, anti-Zionism, and criticism of Israeli policies.[16] He maintained that anti-Zionism “in the form of ‘a-Zionism’ and in the form of anti-nationalism, is not an antisemitic phenomenon.”[16] At the same time, he regarded anti-Zionism as immoral when its purpose was to delegitimize Israel’s existence.[16] His formulation differentiated opposition to nationalism from an intention to deny the legitimacy of the Jewish state.[16]

On September 25, 2008, a pipe bomb exploded as Sternhell opened the door of his West Jerusalem home, wounding him.[6] His injuries included a wound to his leg.[2] Public Security Minister Avi Dichter considered the bombing an ideologically motivated terrorist act committed by radical Jewish extremists with the intention of killing Sternhell.[15] During the initial investigation, security officials feared that an organized Jewish underground might have been responsible.[15]

Investigators found nearby pamphlets offering 1.1 million shekels to anyone who killed a member of Peace Now, a left-wing Israeli organization.[15][6] The flyers called for a new state in the West Bank based on Jewish religious law.[6] One pamphlet declared, “The State of Israel, our 2000-year-old dream, has become a nightmare,” and called for “the Kingdom of Judea.”[15] These declarations were the attackers’ associated propaganda, not Sternhell’s words or political views.[15]

The bombing’s attribution developed over the following years.[14][3] In November 2008 the perpetrators had not been identified, and the investigation included suspicions of an organized extremist group seeking to incite others to violence.[15] By November 2009, Yaakov Teitel was suspected of planting the explosives that had wounded Sternhell.[14] In 2013 Teitel was convicted of planting the bomb among other crimes and was sentenced for crimes that included Sternhell’s attempted murder.[1][3]

After the attack, Sternhell said he would continue expressing his views and would not change his life because of the bombing.[17] Speaking from his hospital bed, he warned that if the attack represented a political persuasion rather than an isolated individual, it could mark the beginning of democracy’s collapse.[3] His response combined a refusal to be intimidated with his longstanding concern about threats to Israeli democratic life.[3][17]

Sternhell received the Israel Prize for political science in 2008 in recognition of his research on political thought and ideologies.[9] His studies of the radical right, fascism, and anti-democratic movements were central to that recognition.[9] He had also received French honors in 1991 and 2003 for his contributions to culture.[9] In 2010 he was elected to the Israel Academy of Sciences and Humanities, and in 2016 to the American Academy of Arts and Sciences.[1]

His international scholarly standing rested particularly on his studies of fascism and modern nationalism.[7][1] His publications circulated in numerous languages and were used by researchers and students beyond Israel.[7][1] The connection between political ideas and radical movements remained a defining concern across work that joined historical research to political science and political philosophy.[9][1] His books addressed both European intellectual history and the national and social priorities of the Israeli Labor movement.[7][9]

Sternhell’s work also entered university teaching on Israeli historiography and modern Jewish intellectual life.[18][19] A seminar on major debates in Israeli historiography assigned pages 3–46 of The Founding Myths of Israel for a session titled “Histories of Class and Ethnic Conflict.”[18] A course on Jewish intellectual responses to modernity assigned the introduction and chapters 7–8 of The Anti-Enlightenment Tradition.[19] These readings placed his work in teaching about both Israel’s social history and wider arguments concerning modernity.[18][19]

Sternhell died on June 21, 2020, at the age of 85.[1] His personal archive was permanently deposited by him and his heirs at the National Library of Israel.[7] Its cataloged contents span 1919–2021 and include drafts of research, articles, and books, correspondence concerning his academic and public activities, and materials relating to his personal and family life.[7] The collection preserves documentation of both his scholarship and his involvement in Israeli public affairs.[7]

Sternhell’s interpretation of fascism provoked heated academic disputes, particularly in France.[9] His placement of fascism’s intellectual roots in France and his challenge to conventional left–right categories were central points of disagreement.[9] The interpretation subsequently received academic recognition there, but its early reception included substantial criticism.[9] His account in The Anti-Enlightenment Tradition, linking a long intellectual tradition to radical nationalism and the weakening of democracy, likewise constituted a debated historical interpretation rather than a general scholarly consensus.[13]

His study of the Labor movement also generated significant historiographical debate.[9] The argument that Labor had fulfilled its national mission without pursuing an equally ambitious social transformation challenged the movement’s presentation of its socialist commitments.[9][5] His analysis of nationalism and socialism in Mapai was therefore both a study of the party’s historical development and an intervention in debates about the foundations of Israeli society.[9][5]

The decision to award Sternhell the Israel Prize in 2008 prompted a court petition from the Legal Forum for the Land of Israel.[20] The petitioners alleged that he had legitimized Palestinian terrorism and sought to have the award revoked.[20] The state argued that controversy surrounding a recipient did not provide sufficient grounds to cancel the prize, while Sternhell called the demand “disgraceful and absurd.”[20] The available account of the petition does not establish the court’s final disposition.[20]

Sternhell’s statements about settlements and Palestinian armed resistance also attracted criticism.[2] He clarified that one disputed passage about armed resistance was an analysis of what he believed would serve Palestinian interests, not an expression of his own moral position.[2] His later criticism of the Netanyahu government remained forceful: a 2017 Jerusalem Center for Security and Foreign Affairs commentary reported that, in a Le Monde opinion column, he called the government “more extreme than the National Front in France.”[21] The same commentary reported his appeal to the French president to resist Netanyahu’s demands to forgo establishing a Palestinian state.[21]