Jewish Sovereignty

In an age of institutional decay and transactional politics, could a Jewish sovereign wealth fund offer a path to autonomy and security?

At a conference last weekend, someone suggested I read the Sapir Journal article “The Need for a Jewish Sovereign Wealth Fund: A new model of self-reliance.” by Jordan Chandler Hirsch, the editor of the journal. It’s an interesting Jewish interaction with and response to many of the social trends and themes I’ve highlighted in my work.

Hirsch leads off by saying:

The golden age of American Jewry is indeed ending—and the Jewish community can’t see past its fading reflection. The institutions upon which American Jewish flourishing once relied are crumbling. It’s time for American Jewry to build new foundations for its next phase of achievement, and to build them stronger than before.

He says that Jews, a small diaspora minority, adopted a strategy for community survival called shtadlan (intercessor). This model involves currying favor with incumbent power structures, and having a key interlocutor figure who represents the Jewish community in the king’s court. He highlights the Biblical example of Joseph in Egypt as a prototype.

On its face, shtadlanut was a way of securing de facto Jewish rights in lands where Jews were denied such rights de jure. At its core, it was the art of indispensability, to both the Jewish community and its non-Jewish overlords. The shtadlan was part courtier, part financier, and part counselor to non-Jewish rulers, who, in turn, guaranteed Jewish rights.

He argues that this model continued into the modern American era, albeit in an updated form:

In their attempts to become Americans par excellence, Jews not only amassed unprecedented economic, political, and cultural capital via the prestige institutions of American life—universities, newsrooms, civic clubs—but modeled their own institutions on them. The American Jewish Committee, for example, began in 1906 as essentially a shtadlan cooperative of influential and well-respected American Jews and ultimately fashioned itself into the “State Department of the Jewish people.” Rather than end the era of shtadlanut, these organizations institutionalized it, employing what Breger called “a form of postemancipation Jewish politics” concerned “with the protection of the civil and political rights of individual Jews.” The strategy of intercession, far from extinct, adapted to the political structure of American democratic liberalism, much as it had adapted to the particular circumstances in different parts of Europe.

The problem with this strategy is that, as Hirsch points out, when there’s a change in the regime of power, this leaves Jews exposed. They are seen as part of or collaborators with the old regime.

This experience is hardly limited to Jews. Think of the Christian community in Syria, for example. It more or less sided with the Assad regime in return for protection. With the fall of Assad, they are now exposed to reprisals.

By aligning so closely with incumbent power structures, Hirsch notes that Jews also sacrificed community autonomy in the process.

Hirsch argues that this is the very process that is playing out in America, writing:

Yet perhaps because of a historically conditioned impulse for security, Jews eventually tend to prioritize institutionalization above autonomy—and when they do so, enmeshment risks exposure. During anti-institutional epochs, Jews do not merely face concomitant collapse—the very accomplishment that once secured them serves as grist for persecution. American Jews face such a moment today.

Much as in 1640s Poland, American Jews have become identified with the United States’ institutional authority and its core characteristics—among them, meritocracy, expertise, and prosperity—at precisely the moment when that authority is fading. Where our ancestors courted dukes, we endowed universities; where they befriended bishops, we cultivated editorial boards; where they built self-governing institutions that interfaced with royal authority, we founded nonprofits and advocacy groups engineered to mirror American power structures. Other minorities press their concerns, to be sure—such is the beauty of American democracy—but no other community has fused its fate so completely with establishment institutions. If anything set American shtadlanut apart, it was America itself: Jews believed that, thanks to its republican creed, the United States would treat its embrace of the Jews not as barter but as principle. We placed our faith in a kind of civic loyalty.

Yet the institutions we invested in are crumbling.

Trust in government and media is at a historic low. Confidence in higher education has similarly plummeted. Almost no institution in American public life remains broadly admired. As top-tier talent fled these bodies, their husks have been occupied in many cases by second-rate, navel-gazing functionaries, cosplaying radicals, and clenched-fisted commissars. In turn, Americans are rejecting the collective order that governed the country for decades.

…

We’re not just losing influence; by communally clinging to institutions, we confirm every anti-establishment suspicion that we are paragons of a discredited order. [emphasis added]

Hirsch makes the case that in today’s ongoing catabolic collapse of institutions, Jews need a new strategy.

To survive in this new world, we must rid ourselves of the enmeshment currency and trade autonomy for something better: sovereignty.

What does sovereignty mean in this context? In a sense, it is rather similar to what the anti-institutional forces are calling for. Many of them, especially on the political Right, call for a cold reassessment of inherited entanglements with allies and nongovernmental and intergovernmental organizations.

In this landscape, he believes one vehicle for the pursuit of Jewish communal sovereignty is the creation of a Jewish sovereign wealth fund.

The anti-institutional world is less wood-paneled boardroom than open-air bazaar. Institutional America was relational, running on shared values and social mores that fostered trust. Anti-institutional America, by contrast, is transactional, with everyone haggling at arm’s length—ad hoc, opportunistic, often devil-may-care. To prosper in the coming transactional disorder of anti-institutionalism, the Jewish community must disentangle itself from the institutions. Instead of investing so much financial and political capital in lobbying efforts to preserve our establishment station, we should invest that money in something we directly control: a Jewish sovereign wealth fund.

A Jewish sovereign wealth fund would represent a new form of Diaspora power, suited to the transactional age. Much like the wealth funds of other nations, it would wield capital as statecraft on behalf of Jewish interests, without apology or pretense. [emphasis added]

He sees the sovereign wealth funds of the Middle Eastern states as a model.

Consider the recent success of the Gulf states in transactional America. Rather than build grassroots advocacy organizations, they invest in U.S. infrastructure, from AI data centers to critical minerals. Rather than lobby for favorable coverage, they buy sports teams and entertainment properties that shape cultural narratives. Rather than appeal to shared values, they generate mutual profit. They build political alliances not through pleading but by creating dependencies.

Hirsch makes the key point that rather than just another tool to be deployed, the logic of the sovereign wealth fund represents a fundamental shift in mindset, away from reliance on institutions toward self-reliance.

Reorienting around the concept of sovereignty autonomy would signify a shift toward self-reliance. Institutionalized shtadlanut in America depended on building up others’ resources—namely, those of lawmakers and taxpayers—to secure Jewish protection. A transactional approach, by contrast, would require insourcing rather than outsourcing Jewish security. Instead of building political patronage and pushing for resources through mediating institutions, the Jewish community would ask no one to spend on its behalf and would openly invest its own capital in pursuit of its own interests—indeed, its own happiness. [emphasis added]

Also key: this is designed to build up Jewish sovereignty but not to become antagonistic towards other people. It’s intended to be a clear-eyed, realistic response to a changed world, but one that continues to allow the Jewish community to work with and invest with others where there’s an overlap of interests and opportunity. It would just do so on a different basis than today.

A wealth fund would allow the Jewish community to invite allies and skeptics alike into mutually beneficial investments. It could help key players solve their problems and achieve their goals, thereby securing support for ours. Skeptics who distrust our institutionalism might respect our show of independence. Anti-establishment forces might welcome Jewish capital that strengthens their projects. Most important, a wealth fund could transform both our psychology and our posture—from supplicants seeking protection into partners offering opportunity. Despite its corporate veneer, a wealth fund would not merely reproduce institutionalism. If shtadlanut sought seats at the institutional table, a wealth fund would build its own table and invite others in.

He sees his proposal as revolutionary.

The implications of this proposal are monumental. Metaphorically speaking, it is a call to change the currency of Jewish politics, exchanging intercession for sovereignty as the currency of power. It is a call for the Jewish community to exercise its economic and political power openly, in pursuit of its own interests, as any sovereign people would—measured in real-world security rather than cocktail-party applause. [emphasis added]

I am not Jewish and neither endorse or reject Hirsch’s proposal. I find his engagement with our cultural trends interesting. First, he sees the same institutional decay that’s widely observed by many. He judges it to be a serious problem that requires a serious response, namely resetting how Jews in America secure their future.

A lot of people today bemoan the decline of institutions and social cohesion, but appear not to consider that a particularly big problem. I say that because if they did think it was a big problem, they would be talking about major changes that need to be made to adjust to this new institutional landscape.

Hirsch is not one of those people. He sees the problem, believes it is a problem, and lays out the case for major changes to deal with it. He may be wrong in both his diagnosis and prescription, but he is proposing a solution that measures up to the scale of the problem he sees.

His focus on sovereignty and a more transactional approach to society is similar to what I’ve argued for evangelicals. A pursuit of more ownership is a form of working towards sovereignty. So it’s interesting to see someone independently develop similar ideas (though of course I’ve never mentioned his core idea of a sovereign wealth fund).

This sort of serious engagement with what it would really mean to live in a world where the current trends continue forward is something I expect to see much more of in the future.

Cover image: Le triomphe de Joseph by Hilaire Pader, photographed by Archaeodontosaurus/Wikimedia, CC BY-SA 4.0.