ABSTRACT
In modern times, Jews have often been portrayed as the quintessential cosmopolitans. The failure of the Revolutions of 1848 and the exile of political activists helped consolidate further the connection between Jews, modernity and cosmopolitanism. In connecting Jews and cosmopolitanism, many focused on the role that Jews supposedly played in different revolutionary movements as forces of internationalism. Marr helped forge the link between antisemitism and anti-cosmopolitanism, two terms that would soon become almost interchangeable in the reactionary, anti-modern imagination. Although often associated with the antisemitic campaigns of the Stalinist era, the image of "revolutionary Jewish cosmopolitanism" was already part of the Polish and Russian national discourses at the turn of the centuries. For those who conceived of a renewed Jewish homeland as the "negation of the diaspora," cosmopolitanism was little more than a shameful expression of the very rootlessness and powerlessness that Zionism and the Jewish State were meant to ameliorate.
