Karl Popper’s Anti-Israel Bias

In 1945, during the final days of World War II, the Austrian-British philosopher Karl Popper published his magnum opus, The Open Society and its Enemies.

Popper’s work was a triumphant restatement of liberalism in the face of the horrors of the Holocaust and in the dawn of the Cold War – a defense of liberalism against the twin threats of fascism and communism that has stood as the canonical linchpin of the liberal project from its publication until today.

Popper’s book was as much a revolution within liberalism as it was its defense. It reframed liberalism as a political project opposed to “historicism” – which he defines as “the doctrine that history is controlled by specific historical or evolutionary laws whose discovery would enable us to prophesy the destiny of man.”

Popper associated historicism with both fascism and Marxism, arguing that it’s the precursor to totalitarianism — a system that organizes society authoritatively, violating individual rights in pursuit of some supposed historical destiny or law.

Accordingly, the struggle of liberalism against totalitarianism is fundamentally seen as a struggle against historicism itself. In this way, liberalism was recast as an anti-historicist ideology, categorically rejecting the notion of a predetermined law or “end of history.”

Before Jacques Derrida or Michel Faucolt, it was Popper who first rejected objectivity, officially beginning the intellectual phenomena of postmodernism.

While it’s been argued my some Jewish scholars that postmodernism is a deeper and more developed perspective that more closely aligns with our Torah, Popper’s specific rejection of objectivity in history, rejecting any kind of historical law of development, and therefore any end or goal of history, introduced a form of historical ambivalence – or even nihilism – that would only later permeate psychology, sociology, anthropology, and broader culture.

His divorce of history from rhythm, direction, or inherent meaning made possible similar ruptures across academic and cultural fields.

In the very first chapter of The Open Society and its Enemies, before critiquing Benito Mussolini or Karl Marx, or even Plato or Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel (whom Popper identified as particularly pernicious promulgators of historicism), Popper took aim at the oldest example of historicism – Israel’s Torah.

“Historicism, which I have so far characterized only in a rather abstract way, can be well illustrated by one of the simplest and oldest of its forms, the doctrine of the chosen people. This doctrine is one of the attempts to make history understandable by a theistic interpretation, i.e. by recognizing God as the author of the play performed on the Historical Stage. The theory of the chosen people, more specifically, assumes that God has selected one people to function as the instrument of His will, and that this people will inherit the earth. In this doctrine, the law of historical development is laid down by the Will of God… Theistic historicism shares with these other forms the doctrine that there is a developmental law which can be discovered, and upon which predictions regarding the future of mankind can be based.” (Popper, 6-7)

Popper’s characterization of the Jewish civilizational worldview as a historicist doctrine is accurate. Hebrew teachings certainly recognize the Creator as the “Author” of history and the people of Israel as “one people to function as the instrument of His will;” this is the meaning of the verse “this people I formed for Myself that they shall recite My praise” (Yeshayahu 43:21), which  HaRav Avraham Yitzḥak HaKohen Kook cites as the fundamental character and function of Israel (Orot, Yisrael u’T’ḥiyato 1).

Jewish teachings certainly assert therefore that “this people will inherit the earth,” not only in the sense that the land of Israel is called “the earth” (ha’aretz) or that the cited verse “the meek will inherit the earth” (Tehillim 37:11) is understood as a restatement of the Divine promise that the children of Israel inherit the land of Israel (Midrash Tanḥuma, Bamidbar 10:3), but that the entire world will come to recognize the Oneness of HaShem and all of creation through Israel.

“The many peoples and the multitude of nations shall come seek HaShem of hosts in Jerusalem and entreat the favor of HaShem… they will take hold of every Jew by a corner of their cloak and say, ‘let us go with you, for we heard God is with you.” (Zekharia 8:22-23)

The Torah itself is certainly a “developmental law that can be discovered” – a series of actions and consequences, rewards and punishments, for collective behavior, discoverable through prophetic disclosure and its study, “upon which predictions regarding the future of mankind can be based.”

The Hebrew understanding of historical development as guided by the Creator and mediated by Israel, on the basis of a historical law of action and consequence legislated by HaShem and disclosed through the prophets of Israel, is certainly an historicist doctrine in Popper’s framework and therefore an enemy of his open society.

This is the basis of spiritual conflict between postmodernism and Israel’s Torah. It appears to be a zero-sum contest between historical nihilism and Israel historic mission, which serves as the germ of this disease.

Israel and the world stand in this crossfire, between the meaningless dirge of aimless nothing that the liberal project has come to champion, and the reunification of humanity under the Oneness of HaShem that Israel’s national rebirth is destined to usher in.