‘Jews in Space’. A History of Extraterrestrial Diaspora and the Future of Galactic Jewishness

1 * Correspondence author / Correspondencia a: Lena Kugler. Universität Konstanz. Departamento de Literatura. Universitätsstraße, 10 (78464Konstanz-Alemania)–[email protected]–https://orcid.org/0000-0003-0063-4452. How to cite / Cómo citar: Kugler, Lena (2025). «‘Jews in Space’. A History of Extraterrestrial Diaspora and the Future of Galactic Jewishness». Papeles de Identidad. Contar la investigación de frontera, vol.2025/1, papel317, 1-15. (https://doi.org/10.1387/pceic.24793). Received: april, 2023 / Accepted: october, 2024. ISSN3045-5650 / © UPV/EHU Press 2025 This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Atribución 4.0 Internacional Papeles de Identidad, 2025/1 https://doi.org/10.1387/pceic.24793 ISSN 3045-5650 ‘Jews in space’. a History of extraterrestrial Diaspora anD tHe future of Galactic JewisHness1 ‘Judíos en el espacio’. Una historia de la diaspora extraterreste y del futuro del judaísmo galáctico Lena Kugler* Universität Konstanz (Alemania) Keywords (extraterrestrial) Diaspora Zionism Territorialism ABSTRACT: Following Arendt’s statement in 1941 that the moon was «the only place where we can still be safe from antisemitism», this article explores Jewish extraterrestrial existence as depicted in literature and popular culture, focusing on the intersections of Jewish identity, diasporic narratives, and speculative futures. Using Mel Brooks’ satirical concept of Jews in Space and Martin Salomonski’s lesser-known novel Zwei im andern Land, the text examines how Jewish communities have been imagined in fictional extraterrestrial settings as responses to historical and contemporary challenges. This allows to delve into the way these narratives engage with themes of displacement, belonging, and the search for a permanent homeland beyond Earth, reflecting anxieties and aspirations surrounding Jewish survival and self-determination. Whether on the moon or on any other celestial body: ‘Jews in Space’, as the article argues, appears again and again as a kind of reversible gestalt, alternating between quasi-Zionist and diasporic conceptions of the future. Palabras clave Diáspora (extraterrestre) Sionismo Territorialismo RESUMEN: Siguiendo la afirmación de Arendt en 1941 de que la Luna era «el único lugar donde todavía podemos estar a salvo del antisemitismo», este artículo explora la existencia extraterrestre judía tal y como se representa en la literatura y la cultura popular, centrándose en las intersecciones de la identidad judía, las narrativas diaspóricas y los futuros especulativos. Mediante el uso del concepto satírico de Mel Brooks de Jews in Space y la novela menos conocida de Martin Salomonski Zwei im andern Land, el texto examina cómo se han imaginado las comunidades judías en escenarios extraterrestres ficticios como respuestas a retos históricos y contemporáneos. Esto permite ahondar en el modo en que estas narraciones abordan temas como el desplazamiento, la pertenencia y la búsqueda de una patria permanente más allá de la Tierra, reflejando ansiedades y aspiraciones en torno a la supervivencia y la autodeterminación judías. Ya sea en la Luna o en cualquier otro cuerpo celeste: Jews in Space, sostiene el artículo, aparece una y otra vez como una especie de gestalt reversible, alternando entre concepciones cuasi-sionistas y diaspóricas del futuro. 1 The article has been translated from German into English by Soliman Lawrence. Lena Kugler 2 Papeles de Identidad, 2025/1, 1-15 1. INTRODUCTION Mel Brooks’ History of the World, Part I —nominated the worst film of 1981 shortly after its release— ends with a short trailer for Part II, although filming was not planned2. In addition to a Viking funeral and an ice-skating Adolf Hitler, it features a preview of «Jews in Space». Accompanied by dramatic music, it shows a fleet of Star of David-shaped spaceships (see figure 1) cruising through space, narrowly escaping an enemy attack. In the idiom of bad taste and by parodying the aesthetics of Stars Wars and «Pigs in Space» from The Muppet Show (1976-1981), Brooks’ staging of «Jews in Space» as a necessary chapter in the continuation of the history of the world is not so much a glimpse into the future, nor into world history or film history, as it is part of a now long established tradition —one that remains unbroken as such, for it is rooted in rupture and new beginnings— of exploring extraterrestrial ways of life and survival for future Jewish societies. Retrieved from: https://imgur.com/gallery/CRSKEI8. Last visit: 01/03/2023). Figure 1 «Jews in Space»: the legendary mock trailer in Mel Brook’s History of the World Part I (Imgur by «ElBivo») 2 However, Brooks did release the (Jewish) satirical science-fiction comedy Spaceballs in 1987. Meanwhile, History of the World, Part II, this time as a sketch comedy series, premiered on March 2023. ‘Jews in Space’. A History of Extraterrestrial Diaspora and the Future of Galactic Jewishness https://doi.org/10.1387/pceic.24793 3 At least within the vastness of fictional space, Jews far exceed Vulcans, eagerly greeting each other with the blessing of the Cohanim or in the form of unscrupulous, money-grubbing characters like the slaveholder Watto from George Lucas’ Star Wars I: The Dark Menace (1999), who, most notably, is completely impervious to Jedi power. As Albrecht Koschorke (2003, p. 328f.) has pointed out, it is not only Watto’s amphibian-like appearance in the paraChristological plot of the Star Wars saga that outwardly recalls anti-Semitic caricatures of the century before last, rather the more subtle modes discrimination are to be found in the character itself, for the idea that Jews cannot partake of the sacrament and, consequently, are also not fit for communal life can be read in many anti-Semitic polemics from Achim von Arnim to Joseph Goebbels. It is one thing to point out that the tweet shared by Republican Congresswoman Marjorie Taylor Green in 2018 about Jewish lasers shot from space fits well into an anti-Semitic tradition that is apparently easy to extrapolate into the extraterrestrial3. It is still another to note that the multifaceted nature of Jewish space has not been sufficiently explored through characters like Spock or Watto4. After all, ‘Jews in Space,’ at least according to my thesis, appears again and again as a kind of reversible gestalt, alternating between quasi-Zionist and diasporic conceptions of the future. I would like to expound on this assertion first and foremost through an examination of the —in Philipp Theisohn’s (2021, p. 10) words— «strange novel» Zwei im andern Land [Two in the Other Country], by the Berlin Reform rabbi and writer Martin Salomonski5. The writer and Gertrud Kolmer biographer Dieter Kühn was baffled by the —at first glance— astonishing incongruity of Salomonski’s works, ranging from the dissertation Vegetable cultivation and crops in Palestine at the time of the Mischnah (1911) to texts written in light of his participation in World War I as a military rabbi, Ein Jahr an der Somme (1917) and Jüdische Seelsorge an der Westfront (1918), the partly autobiographical Berlin-based «metropolitan novel» Der geborene Tugendreich (1928), up to his last novel that I am exploring here. Kühn (2008, p. 302) stated that the works were so difficult to reconcile that he seriously questioned whether they all came from the same person or whether he was dealing with a namesake. Of these, Salomonski’s last novel (figura 2) alone is enough to cause lasting consternation. Re-published in February 2021 by Alexander Fromm, it was first published in June 1933 as a serial story in the Berlin Jüdisch-liberale Zeitung under the pseudonym Stefan Reginald Marknes and appeared the following year as a book under Salomonski’s actual name with footnotes by Stefan Marknes, now appearing as a critic. 3 Greene’s tweet speculating on whether the 2018 California wildfires were due to «space» and «laser beams» from «Rothschild Inc» can be read here: https://www.mediamatters.org/facebook/marjorie-taylor-greenepenned-conspiracy-theory-laser-beam-space-started-deadly-2018. Last access: 01/03/2023. 4 Corroboration for this assessment comes from, among other things, the extraordinarily rich exhibition Jews in Space. Members of the Tribe in Orbit, co-curated by the Center for Jewish History and the YIVO Institute for Jewish Research and shown for the first time in 2018. The aim of the exhibition was to tell the story of the Jewish relationship to the solar system. Numerous artifacts from pop culture were also exhibited. 5 Biobliographical information on Salomonski will soon be available in the newly created Digital Archive of Jewish Authors in Berlin, 1933-1945. More details: https://www.kuwi.europa-uni.de/de/lehrstuhl/lw/diaspora/ forschung/lehrstuhlprojekte/projekt0_dajab/index.html. Last access: 01/03/2023. Lena Kugler 4 Papeles de Identidad, 2025/1, 1-15 Retrieved from: https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/de/2/2c/Salomonski_ Zwei_im_andern_Land_Schutzumschlag.jpg. Last access: 01/03/2023). Figure 2 Martin Salomonski‘s novel Zwei im andern Land. Dust jacket of the book edition published in 1934 by Benjamin Harz Verlag The story is strange, not least of all because it takes places in 1953, when there are hardly any Jews left in Berlin while a millennia-old population of Jewish refugees is living on the moon, but also because each of its three storylines seems in its own way to come to nothing ( Theisohn 2021); eventually getting lost in the vastness of space, as it were. The first storyline begins with something that seems consistent with science fiction, the patenting of a technical invention. The copywriter Victor Arago lives in an alternate version of Florida in the hypercapitalist near future and comes up with a design for a «sound film» machine that makes it possible to retrieve any memory, no matter how hidden, from the «storeroom of the brain» and project it in moving images onto a screen. The ingenuity and, at the same time, danger of this highly coveted invention is emphasized several times and is the reason that Victor is kidnapped by a group of young women who call themselves «the Club of Decent People». Instead of this storyline developing further, however, it increasingly fades into the background until the reader learns, rather incidentally, that «the question of the patent (…) is anyhow dead in its tracks»6 (Salomonski, 2021, p. 163). 6 Here and in the following: translated by Soliman Lawrence. ‘Jews in Space’. A History of Extraterrestrial Diaspora and the Future of Galactic Jewishness https://doi.org/10.1387/pceic.24793 5 The second storyline involves the stormy beginning of a love and family story between Victor and his kidnapper Mica. At least from an earthly perspective, their marriage is literally made in heaven, namely on the moon. They travel there during a lunar eclipse without the help of any technical contraptions, guided instead solely by the strong hand of God. Despite these extremely favorable conditions, this romantic love story suddenly comes to a surprisingly quick end. Back on Earth, Mica, now pregnant, comes to learn of her recently wedded husband’s infidelity and, although she does not renounce all attachments per se, she does declare her marriage to be over. And then there is third storyline, the real subject of the novel: The moon and what it stands for. The moon in the Jewish tradition, as is well known, is a planet that is especially important in terms of time. The Jewish calendar is a lunisolar calendar and observance of the various holidays and prayers is dependent on the knowledge of its respective position. In contrast, Salomonski’s novel —which contains a footnote on modern lunar fictions à la H. G. Wells and Desiderius Papp— is particularly concerned with the moon in spatial terms, namely as a Jewish territory that can serve as a refuge and home for persecuted Jews and possibly even Jews the world over. After their sudden and divine transfer to the moon, Mica and Victor are welcomed by a delegation of Jewish lunar inhabitants, whose leader —how could it be otherwise— turns out in the end to be Mica’s father, who was believed dead. He explains to them: «We are Israel’s children and back in ancient times when Samaria’s glory and Zion’s temple fell into ruin, we were brought here by God Himself (...) carried from the bondage and persecution of the world by His strong arm. (...). Four times over 2.500 years, new settlers have come here: when Titus sacrilegiously destroyed Jerusalem once more, when the Crusades and the persecutions of the Black Death tried to exterminate us, when Spain and Portugal forced half a million Jews to the funeral pyres and into emigration. People came up to us even a short time ago. I set foot on the moon myself only nineteen years ago (…).» (Salomonski, 2021, p. 78) Although it is stated explicitly that the Jews remaining on Earth in the present time of the novel’s plot in 1953 «did not lack civil law» and that their lives were quite tranquil and comfortable, there is repeated mention of the fact «that not many of Israel’s tribe had remained behind in Germany and in Berlin, and that there were hardly any youth left there». Back on Earth, however, it seems to Mica not only that German Jewry, but even world Jewry, is increasingly «doomed to fade away» (Salomonski, 2021, p. 154). Together with Victor as her ally, she gathers together an ever-growing group whose goal is to «break away from all peoples —somewhere in the world— in a completely different country (…) to get serious about the complete reorganization of the Jewish people» (ibid., p. 167f). Petitions and appeals are written. The united powers of Europe and the United States of America and finally even the Pope urgently implore the Jews to please stay. At the same time, they are granted a territory on the north coast of Africa for their «exclusive and free disposal» (ibid., 176) and, under international media attention, there begins an exodus of almost the entire world Jewry to the «enormous tent city» that has been erected there, which, however —and now the novel’s expected punch line— turns out to be far from their actual «migration destination» (ibid., 181f). In any case, one morning all the Jews have disappeared from this huge tent camp and while the world is still puzzling over where they are, only the readers of the novel know: Where else but the moon? Lena Kugler 6 Papeles de Identidad, 2025/1, 1-15 2. THE ‘JEWISH QUESTION’ FROM THE PERSPECTIVE OF THE MOON Salomonki’s novel about the Jewish exodus to the moon was advertised as a «futuristic novel about the solution to the Jewish question» and the text itself also explicitly mentions the so-called ‘Jewish question’. Without going into detail here about its history, which begins in the 18th century and is connected with the Enlightenment belief in the ‘improvement’ and emancipation of the Jews, even the very linguistic structure of the term is unsettling, not only because it is not clear whether we are dealing here with a question of or about Jews, but also, as Alexander Fromm has noted, because questions usually have to be answered and not solved7, whereby the so-called ‘Jewish question’ has referred from the outset to a Jewish problem and often enough to the problem that Jews have when non-Jews have a problem with Jews. Without dwelling any longer on the plausibility of the question, Salomonski’s novel, precisely due to the very improbability of the moon as an extraterrestrial foreign country, quite obviously offers —to use the words of a contemporary critic— a «sham solution» to this so-called ‘Jewish question’ while at the same time also exploring «many solutions» (Götz, 1933 & 1934). Thus, Salomonski’s travel itinerary to the moon does not so much constitute an actual design of contemporary concepts of Jewish life and survival so much as an astonishingly precise sketch of the space in which such topics are thought and discussed. Upon her return, Mica is presented with the options available to the Jewish people, which she considers —seen, as it were, from the perspective of the moon— already no longer possible: «Either we should have dissolved and regrouped ourselves so that we could no longer be perceived, then our achievement as a religious people would benefit the present, like an invention whose creator has finally been forgotten and it no longer matters (...). But the half-measure of wanting to assert oneself as a race only to be left standing as a fully valid element through different epochs and in the midst of a myriad of nations, that is more than a mistake, that is delusion and indebtedness. I can be only one. The bird ruiseñor [nightingale] neither switches with the peacock nor the ostrich nor the hummingbird. He wants to be himself! And the lion would give thanks for being called tiger if names mattered in the animal kingdom. Even mixtures that are related are unhealthy, perhaps even hermaphroditic.» (Sa lo monski, 2021, p. 151f) With her biologistic-zoological departure from the concept of species, Mica refers (indeed, dismissively) to the project of radical assimilation as formulated and advocated by Walther Rathenau in 1871 with his demand for a Jewish «metamorphosis» and «Anartung»: «So what must happen? An event without historical precedent: the conscious selfeducation of a race to adapt to foreign requirements. Adaptation not in the sense of Darwin’s «mimicry,» which means the art of some insects to adopt the color of their environment, but an adaptation in the sense of tribal traits, which, whether good or bad, have been established as abhorrent by fellow countrymen and are thus discarded and replaced by more suitable ones.» (Rathenau, 1897, p. 93) Although distorted by the vocabulary of race, she also refers critically to Simon Dubnow’s concept of a Jewish diasporic nationalism, according to which the Jewish people form a distinct «national unity» and are thus «not a state within a state but a nation among nations, 7 Fromm wrote the following in his epilogue to Salomonski work: «It is striking that there is always talk of solving the Jewish question, never of answering it; generally speaking, questions are answered and problems are solved» (2021, p. 212). ‘Jews in Space’. A History of Extraterrestrial Diaspora and the Future of Galactic Jewishness https://doi.org/10.1387/pceic.24793 7 a spiritual-historical nation in the midst of political nations» (1907, p. 40 and 54f). And, of course, Mica also «follows the developments in Palestine with utmost excitement, where, however», she says, «it has not progressed beyond a home for the Jews». For despite considerable successes in construction, the «opposition between the Arab population and the Jews (...) has not ceased, so that there could be no talk of a refuge in the land of the fathers for the fifteen million Jews of the globe» (Salomonski, 2021, p. 155). Although Salomonski officiated as a Reform rabbi, and generally Reform Judaism in Germany was shaped by a strong sense of national loyalty and was thus at first staunchly anti-Zionist (Meyer, 2000, p. 302f. & 463-475), a fundamentally anti-Zionist attitude cannot be found here. On the contrary, it is the heterogeneous history of Zionism and so-called territorialism that is being invoked when Mica further emphasizes: «The entirety of all Jewry cannot make their home in any country that belongs to others (...). We must begin a life detached from all peoples —somewhere in the world— in a completely different country.» Or, to use another example, when Mica consequently demands for the Jewish people «a large territory that belongs to no one,» (Salomonski, 2021, p. 167) or finally, as the novel’s plot develops, when a desert area in North Africa is then granted by the world nations. This is hinted at in a footnote, unfortunately left out of the new edition of the novel, in which the figure of the critic states that he cannot decide whether the author of the novel is now a «radical Zionist» or whether it is possibly «the old Uganda project» he has in mind and merely does not dare to «mention the name» (Salomonski, 1934, p. 178). In this way, Salomonski alludes via his alias Marknes to the British proposal put forward in 1903 by Theodor Herzl himself to establish a Jewish refuge in colonial British East Africa, in an area that is now Kenya. There followed two years of bitter disputes between opponents and supporters until the seventh Zionist Congress in 1905, shortly after Herzl’s death, where not only the so-called Uganda Plan itself was rejected but even all future discussions about projects outside Palestine were in principle forbidden; this became the founding hour of the ITO, the Jewish Territorialist Organization, headed by the British writer Israel Zangwill, which by no means saw itself as anti-Zionist (Alroey, 2011/2012, p. 6ss). As research in recent years has increasingly made clear (ibid.; Rovner, 2014; Brenner, 2017) the Zionism that has since been realized in Israel represented for many at that time only one of many options, and was neither the most desirable nor the most probable. In his early Zionist manifesto Autoemancipation, from 1882, Leo Pinsker stated: «The goal of our present endeavors must be not the ‘Holy Land’, but a land of our own. We need nothing but a large tract of land for our poor brothers, which shall remain our property and from which no foreign power can expel us. There we shall take with us the most sacred possessions which we have saved from the ship-wreck of our former country, the God-idea and the Bible. It is these alone which have made our old fatherland the Holy Land, and not Jerusalem or the Jordan.» (1916, p. 15)8 Herzl (1896, p. 28), too, could well imagine various territorial solutions and, as is well known, not only took Palestine into consideration in Der Judenstaat [The Jewish State], his policy draft for Jewish sovereignty, but also Argentina. Be that as it may, the list of promised lands before Israel is, according to Rovner (2014, p. XV), astonishingly long, extending over the whole globe and to every continent, except Antarc8 For further discussion, see: Alroey, 2011/12, p. 3. Lena Kugler 8 Papeles de Identidad, 2025/1, 1-15 tica. Besides Palestine, Argentina, and today’s Kenya, the feverish search that took place between 1820 and 1948 for Jewish homelands found hope, among others places, on Grand Island, a small island in the middle of the Niagara River, but also in Surinam, Angola, Madagascar, Australia, and Tasmania. Whereby Birobidzhan, formed near the Chinese border in 1934 by the Soviets, was never a sought-after Zion but rather a Zion decreed by Stalin, a Zion that to this day still exists under than name the Jewish Autonomous Region and is characterized above all by the absence of a prosperous Jewish population9. According to Alroey (2011/2012, p. 10), the main argument for a pragmatic solution to the problem of territorialism was that the plight of Jews was increasing exponentially while the projects being realized in Palestine were only progressing arithmetically, i.e., there was simply not enough time to save Jewish life with Palestine alone. Moreover, and this is also mentioned by Salomonski, the territorialists had immense doubts that it was at all possible to build an autonomous Jewish homeland in Palestine given the Arab population already living there. Indeed, because, in Zangwill’s words, the «legend that Palestine was empty and derelict» was simply not true. «Palestine proper,» Zangwill never tired of emphasizing, «already has its inhabitants» (apud Rovner, 2014, p. 83). As is well known, however, every single territorialist group, whether the ITO or later the Freeland League, failed to find somewhere in the world a «great territory» for the Jewish people, something that even Mica could desire, much less «that belongs to no one» (Salomonski, 2021, p. 167). That the globe alone might not be sufficient for the project of a Jewish territory was illustrated by a cartoon postcard by Mikhail Liubashka in 1907 (figure 3), proposing Mars instead of the moon: Retrieved from: https://yivo.org/Other-Zions. Last access: 01/03/2023. Figure 3 With Australia no long a possible Jewish homeland, Mars is offered as a new territory. Postcard with drawing by Mikhail Liubashka (1907), YIVO online exhibition Other Zions 9 On the history of Birobidzhan, see for example: Weinberg, 1998, and also Gessen, 2016. ‘Jews in Space’. A History of Extraterrestrial Diaspora and the Future of Galactic Jewishness https://doi.org/10.1387/pceic.24793 9 Francis Montefiore’s assertion «that a politically virgin territory can be found only in the moon» was countered by Zangwill himself with the remark: «Not even there, I fear. For there is a man in the moon, and he is probably an anti-Semite» (1907, p. 13). In an article published in 1941 on the question of a Jewish fighting force of its own against Hitler, Hannah Arendt, in turn, stated: «Just as significant as Zionism’s moral effect on individuals, just as tremendous as the conquest of Palestine by hard work, is the catastrophic effect of no one’s having ever found a political answer that addresses what for Jews is the principal political movement of our time: antisemitism. (…) But the moon is the only place where we can still be safe from antisemitism; and Weizmann’s famous statement that the answer to antisemitism is to build up Palestine has proved to be dangerous lunacy.» (2007, p. 142f) For Arendt, this resulted in three insights in 1941, namely, first, that anti-Semitism could only be fought if Jews, and indeed as a European people, fought Hitler with weapons in hand, and, second, that: «Palestine can be regarded solely as an area of settlement for European Jews. In other words, that Palestine’s politics are to be derived from the larger politics of European Jewry and not vice versa, whereby Palestinian politics cannot determine Jewish politics as a whole. For, third, the solution to the Jewish question is not to be found in one country, not even in Palestine.» (ibid., p. 143) Salomonski’s novel, published shortly after Hitler’s rise to power, also points to the catastrophic lack of an overall political response to the growing anti-Semitism. This is depicted, for one thing, with the gaping void around which the text constantly circles: The complete lack of a characterization of the early 1930s, when, according to Mica’s father, the fifth and, for the time being, last exodus to the moon is supposed to have taken place. Nowhere is a remotely plausible explanation ever given as to the nature of the persecutions and how it came about «that not many of Israel’s tribe had remained behind in Germany and in Berlin» (Salomonski, 2021, p. 154). While on the other hand, however, this lack also finds expression in the fairytale-like story of colonizing the moon as the only safe Jewish home and refuge. As Michael Brenner (2017, p. 116) has pointed out, Vladimir Jabotinsky, founder of revisionist Zionism and later commander-in-chief of the Irgun, had described the Jewish land beyond Palestine, which had been so feverishly and repeatedly sought in vain, as a «Fata-Morgana-land»; for Salomonski anyway, it was only to be found in the extraterrestrial. Two in the Other Country can therefore at best be understood as an extra-territorialist novel and not simply a phantasmagorical rendering of the early territorialism advocated by the ITO. For while the latter aimed to a certain extent at abolishing the Jewish diaspora by demanding an autonomous Jewish territory even outside Israel and, by contrast, the Freyland Liege, founded by Isaac Nahmann Steinberg in 1935, was designed from the outset to emphasize cultural autonomy rather than state-political autonomy10, there is no question of any such dismissal and negation of the Jewish diaspora in Salomonski’s novel. On the contrary. For, firstly, the moon as a sphere of Jewish life and creation remains strangely vague and is reminiscent of a version of an early Zionist kibbutz, constructed and Orientalized out of thin air, 10 For detailed treatment, see Alroey (2011/2012, p. 18ss).