Azure • SPRING
5760 / 2000
The Brilliant Failure of Jewish Foreign Policy
Ruth R. Wisse
One winter after an unusually heavy run of funerals, the rabbi of our_ Montreal
synagogue reminded the congregation that in traditional Judaism, dying was
only a minhag (custom); it was not a mitzva. I would like to extend this excellent
observation to political catastrophe, which is likewise not a Jewish obligation.
Like many other Jews I know, I am troubled by the unhappy political record
of the Jewish people, and would like to understand it better in the hope of
effecting some improvement. This inquiry into Jewish political strategy is
devoted to that end.
In the early part of this century the prevailing view among Jewish historians
was that exilic Judaism stood outside politics: The Jewish people in the diaspora
had become a basically non-political entity, demonstrating, in the words of
the historian Salo Baron, ?the independence of the essential ethnic and religious
factors from the political principle.?1 This view was shared by influential
thinkers who were otherwise deeply divided over the nature of Judaism and
the proper course for its future development. Hermann Cohen, the main spokesman
for liberal Judaism in the early years of the twentieth century, maintained
that with the destruction of the Jewish state in 70 c.e. and the elimination
of the political center of gravity in Jewish history, ?the development of
Jewish religion alone has to be presented as the driving cultural force.?2
The consequences, as he explained, were far-reaching:
Religion must become politics insofar as it ought to educate the
citizens in the duty of love of humanity. Likewise, politics must become religion
insofar as every national-political community must revolve around two poles,
one of which is the individual, the other, however, the entirety of humanity.
The opposition between politics and religion is canceled by messianism, which
is both the acme and the root of monotheism.3
Cohen believed that Jews had been freed of the burdens of a state. Since
the universal messianic ideal rather than a political state had become the
binding force of their nationhood, Jews could practice their religion as German
citizens?or citizens of other countries?with the sense that their ethical
national identity had been purified of the dross of politics. The translation
of politics into social ethics seemed to Cohen a giant step forward in human
development.
The same progressive assumption about human development was shared by the
Russian Jewish historian Simon Dubnow, who was otherwise Cohen?s ideological
opposite. Though Dubnow considered the Jews a nation rather than a religion
and championed the evolution of secular Jewish communities throughout the
diaspora, he too thought that the Jewish nation had reached its high level
of maturity thanks to being removed for almost two millennia from national
politics. Dubnow saw history as a ladder of progression moving from the territorial,
political nations at the bottom to the spiritual, cultural nations at the
top:
When a people loses not only its political independence but also
its land, when the storm of history uproots it and removes it far from its
natural homeland and it becomes dispersed and scattered in alien lands, and
in addition loses its unifying language; if, despite the fact that the external
national bonds have been destroyed, such a nation still maintains itself for
many years, creates an independent existence, reveals a stubborn determination
to carry on its autonomous development?such a people has reached the highest
stage of cultural-historical individuality and may be said to be indestructible,
if only it cling forcefully to its national will.4
Dubnow extolled the advantages that accrued to the Jews as a result of having
lost their political independence, forcing them to develop a hardier spiritual
autonomy than nations which relied on their military prowess. Like Cohen,
he thought the Jews could claim preeminence in the modern world not in spite
of, but on account of their lack of political power: ?A nationality which
lacks a defensive protection of state or territory develops, instead, forces
of inner defense and employs its national energy to strengthen the social
and spiritual factors for unity.?5 Dubnow admired the Jews for having transcended
the merely ?egotistical? dimension of power, and believed they could sustain
their national unity through institutions of culture.
At the same time, there were Zionists who believed that the loss of political
sovereignty had been a national disaster, and saw its increasingly deleterious
consequences for the survival of the Jews. One much-quoted Zionist source
is Haim Hazaz?s still riveting story ?The Sermon? (1942), in which the kibbutz
philosopher Yudka takes a most unfavorable view of the kind of uniqueness
that was cultivated in the diaspora: ?We didn?t make our own history, the
goyim made it for us.?6 Struggling to find the right words for his concepts,
Yudka exposes the corruption, as he sees it, of a passive political existence
that turns suffering into a virtue:
Jewish history is dull, uninteresting. It has no glory or action,
no heroes and conquerors, no rulers and masters of their fate, just a collection
of wounded, hunted, groaning and wailing wretches, always begging for mercy.?.
I would simply forbid teaching our children Jewish history. Why the devil
teach them about their ancestors? shame?7
Yudka offers the most negative view of the Jewish diaspora, but one which
agrees with Dubnow and Cohen that it was apolitical. All three maintain that
with the loss of their independence and their removal from the land of Israel,
the Jews ceased to function as a political entity; they differ only on the
moral value of having stepped out of political history.
In the 1970s, however, a different view of Jewish political history came
to the fore. The concept of politics, which had been applied previously only
to that which concerns the state and its institutions, was now widened to
include other manifestations of power. Scholars in Israel and the United States,
including many who had come to Israel from America, began to focus on the
political dimension of Jewish history in the diaspora, examining the record
of internal self-government and ?foreign? relations with other peoples from
biblical to modern times. Daniel Elazar pioneered this revision through his
Jewish Political Studies Review, basing his approach on the assumption that
the Jewish people was a corporate entity by definition and always functioned
as a polity irrespective of its circumstances; that the analysis of the Jewish
polity could be undertaken with the tools of political science; and that Jews
not only continued to function politically throughout their history, but constituted
the oldest extant polity in the Western world.8 (Its closest rival, the Catholic
Church, was 1,500 years younger at least.) From these assumptions, Elazar
tried to articulate a Jewish political tradition centered on the covenant,
the brit, and to analyze the contemporary Jewish body politic as a seamless
continuance of the past.
Coming from another discipline and perspective, the historian Ismar Schorsch
objected passionately to Raul Hilberg?s characterization of the Jewish victims
in the Holocaust as the end result of two millennia of Jewish ?passivity?
in Europe. Schorsch objected equally to Hazaz?s indictment of the inert exile,
arguing that political history was defined not by the absence of land, but
by ?legal status and group cohesiveness.?9 He suggested, for example, that
the apparent passivity of Jewish communities in the Middle Ages was in reality
a calculated policy of ?political quietism,? of cooperation with established
authorities on the basis of utility,10 and that such diaspora models of self-government
had provided the pattern for many of the institutions conceived by the modern
Zionists.11 Jewish history in the diaspora was, in this view, ?a vast repository
of political experience and wisdom acquired under the most divergent and adverse
conditions.?12
During this same period, Jewish political thought also came into its own
as an independent subject of academic study. At the Hebrew University, Ezra
Mendelsohn, Jonathan Frankel and Eli Lederhendler were writing a new kind
of Jewish political history, concentrating not on one or another of its ideological
movements, but on the general patterns and problems of Jewish political behavior.13
Various scholars began examining halachic literature to tease out the Jewish
political tradition embedded in the Jewish sources. Inevitably, the lessons
drawn from diaspora politics were applied to the question of how the modern
Jewish state should be governed. Thus, in his foreword to a new, four-volume
anthology, The Jewish Political Tradition, David Hartman summed up the premise
upon which that anthology is based:
Because of national renewal and empowerment, Jews are no longer
living metaphors for the ?other,? the ?stranger,? the eternal victim. They
now wield power in a sovereign state, and so they cannot conceal their moral
failures by blaming others. The rebirth of Israel provides the Jewish people
with a public arena where they themselves must take charge, drawing on the
strength of their tradition to give a direction to political life and a content
to popular aspiration. Now Jewish values must come to grips with Jewish power.14
This analysis holds that the resumption of Jewish sovereignty inverted the
political challenges of the diaspora by saddling the Jews with the problems
of government instead of the liabilities of statelessness. Hence, Hartman
believes that the ?compelling moral vision? of the Jews, so long shaped by
lack of power, is now being tested by the ?compromises that a full political
life requires.?15
Much can be said, then, for the project of studying Jewish politics in the
diaspora, an intellectual endeavor that has helped transform the way Jews
look at their own political heritage. At the same time, however, this project
has not yet come to terms with the way Jews actually practiced politics during
the many centuries of exile, much less with how radically their political
behavior contrasted with the patterns of other peoples. It is not enough to
think of the Jews as the ?other? in someone else?s scheme of governance without
considering how they got to be the ?other? in the first place. Since going
into exile was clearly a consequence of losing successive wars to the Romans,
the Jews continued to be regarded as having been politically acted upon rather
than as acting politically on their own behalf. But within the constraints
of living abroad, they actively tried to further their own political ends.
Once the premise of the diaspora was established, namely, that Jewish communities
would be centered for an indefinite period outside the land of Israel, Jews
had to develop a viable strategy for survival, which meant consolidating their
own forms of power and influence. In that pursuit, the Jews never did ?conceal
their moral failures by blaming others.? Their problem was rather that they
blamed themselves, without examining the political consequences of the strategies
they had adopted.
In this essay I intend to explore the political strategies that Jews developed
through their centuries of exile?strategies that often resulted in remarkable
successes as well as persecutions and expulsions?and also the way they interpreted
their political behavior in solipsistic rather than dialectic political terms.
I suggest that Jewish survival was preserved not through the grace of relatively
benign host countries, but through the Jewish community?s ability to fulfill
local professional and economic needs. This, in turn, created a new kind of
interdependency between unequal political entities which, because they relied
on different, if not opposite, sources of power, cultivated correspondingly
different ideas of victory and defeat. In trying to find a temporary alternative
to national sovereignty, the Jews introduced a new political model that had
extraordinary consequences for their own religious and moral development,
and for the thinking and the behavior of those among whom they lived. These
consequences extended well beyond the creation of Israel. Though the Zionist
movement established an independent government in a Jewish homeland, the State
of Israel could not instantly expunge the political patterns developed through
so many centuries, or the way those patterns affected international affairs.
To this day, the legacy of Jewish politics in the diaspora continues to haunt
the decisionmaking of Jewish leaders in their own sovereign state.
II
Jewish politics in the diaspora can best be understood as one of the_ world?s
boldest political experiments?an experiment as novel as the idea of monotheism
itself. This experiment began in earnest after the Romans destroyed the Temple
in 70 C.E.c.e., taking many Jews off to the European continent and forcing
others to perpetuate their way of life as a resident people in other lands.
Though Jewish communal life resumed in the land of Israel following the last
rebellion of 135 C.E.c.e. and continued until the Arab conquest of the seventh
century, the majority of Jews clustered in centers outside the land of Israel,
and considered themselves to be living in temporary exile. Jews did not self-consciously
design their political strategy of prolonged national life outside the land
of Israel, nor?until modern times?did they develop an ideology committed to
stateless existence. Yet to live abroad meant to thrive as a nation without
three staples of nationhood: Land, a central government and a means of self-defense.
Life abroad required the development of new institutions of self-government,
as well as arrangements with those who allowed Jewish settlement in their
lands. The biblical record of the Babylonian exile, particularly the books
of the Hebrew prophets, suggested that it was possible to lose sovereignty
for several generations and then return to the homeland to take up an independent
national existence. But precisely because the prophets riveted their attention
on returning to the land, they did not provide the political blueprints for
deferred national autonomy. Diaspora Jewry had to remain perpetually alert
and adaptable in trying to maintain itself in exile. This experiment in deferred
sovereignty involved an ever-increasing percentage of the Jewish people until
the end of the nineteenth century, when Zionism began to reverse the trend.
The legends surrounding the historical figure of Yohanan ben Zakai illustrate
the two main foundations of deferred autonomy in exile. Ben Zakai was opposed
to the revolt against Rome, and like Jeremiah in the days of Nebuchadnezzar
or Isaiah in the days of Tillegath-Pilneser III of Assyria, he counseled peace
with the conqueror as the only salvation for the nation. Smuggled out of Jerusalem
in a coffin, ben Zakai is said to have won over Vespasian, the commander of
the siege that brought about the downfall of Jerusalem, by predicting that
he would soon be elected emperor. This legend suggests, first and foremost,
that Jews had to impress and negotiate favorable conditions with foreign authority
in order to prosper under its domination. The second, internal, pillar of
the program is ben Zakai?s request, ?Give me Yavneh and its sages?: Jews were
to study their national law as a way of perpetuating their own civilization,
and of ensuring their moral and institutional independence. Internal Jewish
politics would require the establishment of independent legislative authority,
while external politics?the Jewish equivalent of foreign affairs?would require
securing the protection of gentile rulers.
In keeping with this model, the Jews of the diaspora were not nomads.16
Nomadic peoples move cyclically or periodically, following the food supply
or fulfilling the functions of tinkers and traders. Jews manifested the very
opposite tendency, sinking roots and establishing their institutions wherever
they were allowed to do so. They negotiated their relationship with those
in power, usually through the payment of taxes, trying to work out the most
favorable conditions for permanent residence. Jews became so proprietary about
the places they settled that they invented their own founding myths for their
native cities and countries. According to medieval legends, the city of Grenada
was founded after the destruction of the First Temple of Jerusalem, and received
its name from the Hebrew ger nad (?wandering stranger?) in recognition of
its Jewish origins.17 Jews said that Poland (poyln or polin) got its name
when the Jews arrived in the land, and their leader said, ??Here rest for
the night? (po lin), and this means that we shall rest here until we are all
gathered into the land of Israel.?18 Recent nostalgic documentaries about
the southern United States show the names of Jewish storekeepers etched into
the buildings and sidewalks of towns they obviously intended to inhabit for
generations. Nomadic tribes do not build for permanence. Jews made it clear
that they came to stay.
The diaspora experiment in deferred national sovereignty worked through
what we will tentatively call the tactics of adaptation, which meant accommodating
to local political rule and to prevailing socioeconomic conditions in order
to perpetuate the unique Jewish religious civilization. While Jewish historians
have traditionally emphasized the religious, cultural and social elements
of Jewish autonomy, I will concentrate on the modes of adaptation in order
to isolate the political strategies that are generally underrepresented in
the Jewish story. Look up the synonyms for adaptation or accommodation and
you will see the genius of the Jewish people at work: Elastic, flexible, pliable
and supple, they tried to master the art of proving themselves useful. Under
some conditions this meant money-lending, tax farming, minting and banking.
Elsewhere it meant craftsmanship: They became shoemakers, tailors, carpenters,
glaziers, all the trades that are turned into metaphors in the Yom Kippur
prayer ki hinei kahomer b?yad hayotzer (?Like Material in the Hands of the
Craftsman?). Salo Baron has shown how Jews tried to compensate for their political
weakness with economic strength, even turning dispersion itself into an asset
by developing international trade routes. Werner Sombart, in his writing on
economic history, thought he had found an explanation for capitalism when
he ascribed the modern economic development of Europe to the Sephardi Jews
who had fled the Inquisition:
It is indeed surprising that the parallelism has not before been
observed between Jewish wanderings and settlement on the one hand, and the
economic vicissitudes of the different peoples and states on the other. Israel
passes over Europe like the sun: At its coming new life bursts forth; at its
going all falls into decay.?19
Sombart?s prejudice did not let him see that it was actually the political
patterns of the host countries, their readiness to allow the Jews their freedoms,
that created the optimal conditions for dynamic investment and commerce. Not
the Jews, but the conditions that welcomed the Jews led to the rise of capitalism.
But it is also true that Jews were active agents in economic expansion, and
in the spread of ideas.
The linguistic history of the Jews best exemplifies their unique political
patterns. Jews remained attached to Hebrew by their indelible ties to the
Bible, the national and religious text that is perpetually reread and reinterpreted.
Due to well-entrenched norms demanding universal literacy among Jews, Hebrew
was known not just by the priests, as became true of Latin, but by everyone
who ever sat in heder or studied in yeshiva. Jews used Hebrew as a lingua
franca for trading functions in the Muslim Middle Ages, when Christians and
Muslims did not know one another?s tongues; during the high point of Jewish
self-rule in Poland, when Jews conducted their own communal affairs through
the Council of the Four Lands; and during the Italian Risorgimento, when it
served Jewish messengers as a secret code. At the same time, Jews accommodated
so thoroughly to local conditions that, depending on the degree of socioeconomic
and political integration, they either mastered the languages of the surrounding
populations or developed their own vernacular languages. Judeo-Persian, Judeo-Arabic,
Judeo-Spanish and Judeo-German were all the products of such inter-action,
each developing according to different historical conditions, with the last
evolving into Yiddish, a truly amazing national creation that by 1939 was
used by more than ten million Jews. By the beginning of the twentieth century,
Yiddish had become such a powerful vehicle of Jewish self-expression that
a movement formed to declare it the national language of the Jewish people,
with the political intention of separating modern secular national existence
from the Jewish religious past. Needless to say, this political impulse failed,
and it failed because of the very same patterns of adaptation that had brought
Yiddish into being in the first place. The millions of Yiddish speakers who
immigrated to the Americas adopted the languages of their host countries,
English, Spanish and Portuguese, in place of Yiddish.20 Yiddish had been for
them a vehicle of adaptation, meant to secure their religious way of life
on foreign soil. Though it may have resembled other European vernaculars in
the culture it generated, it did not have the same political function as a
native language on national soil.
Some people may resist the notion of a Jewish strategy of adaptation because
they are accustomed to emphasizing the reluctance, the enforced and improvised
quality of exile. But though Jews may not have planned the stages of the exile,
their behavior was no less strategic on that account. Eli Lederhendler points
out that Jewish political behavior in the medieval European diaspora exhibited
a clear pattern of regularity:
Structurally, the configuration of Jewish politics was defined
by the dependence of the Jews on gentile sources of power. Tactically, political
activity focused on the drive to achieve, enhance, or use to best advantage
a direct relationship with those in power. Ideologically, Jews viewed pragmatic
efforts to maintain the security and the stability of their communities as
consistent with, and therefore legitimized by, their belief that their own
efforts mirrored a divine plan for their people.21
Jews honed their politics of adaptation to suit their conditions of exile,
and, on the whole, they prospered wherever they were allowed to function in
relative freedom. The Jewish sojourn in Spain was called the Golden Age for
its civic and cultural accomplishments. According to a popular Polish adage,
Poland was heaven for the nobility, hell for the peasantry, and paradise for
the Jews.
But here we come to the other side of Jewish political strategy, which _in
non-democratic society depends by definition on the policies of local rulers.
Adaptation or accommodation implies interaction between the Jews and those
who govern. What we have tentatively called adaptation was really a politics
of complementarity, whereby the Jews attempted to win protection by supplying
local needs. Although the particulars of Jewish accommodation varied from
place to place, Jewish activities always depended on the right to conduct
them. Thus, the more the Jews sought to benefit from the protection accorded
them by the rulers, the greater the rulers? power over them.
The political arrangements between the Jews and local rulers differed widely
from place to place, but common to all was the protective custody on which
the internal autonomy was based. The Gaon, head of the yeshiva, was the highest
religious, communal and juridical authority among Jews in Arab lands at the
end of the tenth century, but the real power behind the Gaon under classical
Islam lay, as Shlomo Goitein puts it, ?with the guns, the government with
the military and police behind it.?22 In Catholic Spain and Portugal the powers
of Jewish self-rule were confirmed?or withheld?by King and Queen. The Polish
Jews of the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries were protected by the shlachta,
by the nobility; after the partitions of Poland, the Jews of Russia were the
wards of the Tsar; later, under Communism, of Lenin and Stalin. Even Jewish
smugglers depended on being able to bribe the guards or police. It was the
combination of apparent Jewish strength and essential dependency that characterized
Jewish politics in the diaspora. The impression of Jewish autonomy, bolstered
ideologically by the national covenant with Almighty God and sustained in
everyday life through vigorous economic, social and cultural activity, was
wholly at variance with the community?s dependency on the controlling powers
of the rulers. This discrepancy between discernible individual success and
collective exposure made the Jews a perennially attractive political target,
because they were unable by definition to defend themselves from those on
whose protection they relied.
The historian Gerson Cohen once gave a dazzling summary of the Zionist diagnosis
of Jewish history. Starting with the obvious, namely, that ?the safety of
the Jews will always depend upon a society in which their interests are guaranteed
and maintained,? he demonstrated that any _breakdown of the machinery that
maintains social discipline will expose _the Jews to mass upheaval and resentment.
Cohen wanted to emphasize that attacks on the Jews were launched not only
by the reactionary ruling classes, but through an eruption of the populace
that the rulers and clergy might be powerless to check. He opened his analysis
with the Jewish community of Elephantine in Upper Egypt, which was destroyed
in _411 B.C.E.b.c.e.:
The Jews had been brought to Elephantine by the Persian government in order
to secure the southern border of Egypt, but when there was no longer any need
for their services and when, therefore, it no longer paid to defend them,
they were abandoned. Similarly, the riots against the Jews in Alexandria in
37 C.E.c.e. occurred as a result of the Roman decision to abandon the best
friends they had in Alexandria?. [The] Romans operated on the simple principles
that politics is the art of the possible, and that the first thing the politician
must do is to weigh where the present advantage lies.23
Cohen cited additional examples from the Crusades of 1096, the Spanish riots
of 1391 and the Ukrainian pogroms of 1648-1649 to show how the Jews were sacrificed
by their erstwhile protectors to the violence of the mobs. The Jews had visible
power and goods to tempt their assailants, but no means of protecting that
power and goods once their political shield was withdrawn. Without protection
from above, violence against the Jews was always profitable, and always without
consequence. Jews had improvised political tactics to maintain their autonomous
way of life, but their tacit strategy had inadvertently turned them into a
no-fail political target.
III
T he Jew?s ultimate dependency on higher powers was interpreted very _ differently
by Jews and non-Jews, with consequences that ultimately proved disastrous
for the Jews.
Nowhere was this more apparent than in the realm of Jewish and Christian
theology. As Eli Lederhendler points out in the passage quoted above, Jews
understood their political efforts as mirroring a divine plan for their people.
Their covenantal agreement with God encouraged Jews to situate themselves
politically not only in relation to the powers that be, but in relation to
the Supreme Power. Jewish politics were predicated on the assurance that God
would someday honor the covenantal treaty and restore his people to Zion;
the historical purpose of Jewish civilization was to hasten the coming of
the messianic age, which would be heralded by a reversal in Jewish political
fortunes. Jews interpreted their postponed political sovereignty in the light
of God?s will, and in doing so they made God the guarantor of their power.
The liturgy ascribes incredible authority to God the Eternal of Hosts, the
Almighty, Ruler of the Universe, King of Kings. It holds that since Jews are
the living proof of God?s dominion, their ultimate sovereignty was assured
by the ultimate Guardian: ?The Eternal reigns, the Eternal has reigned, the
Eternal shall reign forever and ever. The Eternal shall grant his people strength,
the Eternal shall bless his people with peace.? Because their primary covenantal
obligation was to fulfill God?s commandments, Jews cast themselves as the
human heroes of a divine struggle for redemption that depended on their ability
to satisfy the perfect Judge.
But the people among whom Jews lived drew the opposite theological conclusion
from Jewish statelessness, which they regarded as confirmation of the moral
failure of Judaism. Christians did not see that the Jews were subservient
to God, but subservient to them, and claimed that God was punishing the Jews
for the killing of Christ. Religion on both sides reinforced opposite interpretations
of Jewish political dependency. Jews accepted their share of blame for their
political disabilities as a function of their special status in the scheme
of all-powerful God, while Christians (as well as Muslims) took Jewish imperfections
as proof of Jewish iniquity and of their own truer religious claims.
Christian polemicists demonstrated just this point in the public disputations
that were forced upon the Jews. Thus, in the disputation at Barcelona of 1263,
the convert to Christianity Pablo Christiani used political evidence to demonstrate
that the Jews had betrayed their faith when they denied Jesus. Citing Jacob?s
deathbed prophecy, ?The scepter shall not pass away from Judah, nor the ruler?s
staff from between his feet; so that tribute shall come to him, and the homage
of peoples be his,?24 Christiani pointed out that the very opposite had happened,
which proved that the Jews had betrayed their holy mission: ?Since, therefore,
it is certain that in Judah there is neither scepter nor leader, it is certain
that the messiah [i.e., Jesus] who was to be sent has come.? The Jews? representative,
Nahmanides, parried this attack with great wit and rational argument. He countered
that the scepter had not been removed from Judah, but merely suspended, as
it was in the time of the Babylonian captivity. But this did not convince
the Christian, and according to the Christian account of the disputes:
It was proved to him [Nahmanides] that in Babylon they had the heads of
the captivity with jurisdiction, but after the death of Christ they had neither
leader nor prince nor the heads of captivity such as those attested by the
prophet Daniel, nor prophet nor any kind of rule, as is manifestly plain today.25
Thus, in the Christian account, Nahmanides is forced to admit that Jews
had not had their own rulers for the last 850 years. And taking their power
over the Jews as proof of their ascendancy, these Christians were convinced
they had nothing to fear theologically from aggressing against the Jews. (Fittingly,
despite having been given assurances of immunity for taking part in the disputation,
Nahmanides was tried for blasphemy and forced to leave Spain.)
Just as the theology of Jews and their overlords reinforced opposite interpretations
of Jewish political dependency, the folk mythology of Jews and gentiles went
in opposite directions as well. The Jewish myth of survival in the diaspora
seemed to grow with each new expulsion, massacre and inquisition. As Tisha
B?Av, the day commemorating the destruction of the First Temple, came to incorporate
successive national disasters that occurred (or were said to have occurred)
on the same day, so each new catastrophe could be interpreted in the light
of the ones before it. David Roskies, a modern anthologist of the literature
of destruction, shows how Jewish responses to catastrophe recycled the same
archetypes and rituals, each generation commemorating its own tragedies in
the imagery and prooftexts of the generations before it.26 Paradoxically,
the long history of Jewish tragedy was experienced by those who survived it
as proof that _they were indomitable. In the Passover Hagada we read: ?In
every gen-eration they stand up against us to destroy us, and the Holy One
saves us from their hand.? The emphasis of this prayer falls not on the repetitive
aggressions, but on the fact that some segment of the community survives.
In the Jewish day school that I attended as a child, we learned the Yiddish
poem ?Eternal,? by H. Leivick, in which the suffering Jew triumphs over every
kind of humiliation and agony:
The world rings me round with its barbed hands _
And bears me to the fire, and bears me to the pyre; _
I burn and I burn and I am not consumed?_
I lift myself up and stride ever onward.27
Leivick casts the Jewish people as the burning bush, as if the perennial
pyre had become proof that the Jews would never be consumed.
But those encircling the Jews with their barbed hands drew much more obvious
conclusions from the same body of evidence, namely, that the Jewish people
could be persecuted with impunity. The political usefulness of the Jews as
targets of aggression increased with each successive expulsion, massacre and
relocation. As the Jews were forced to move from place to place, their myth
became more potent, representing to gentiles the opposite of what it did to
the Jews?the myth of a people destined for abuse. In popular Christian legend
Ahasuerus the Wandering Jew is doomed to live restlessly until the end of
the world because he had taunted Jesus on the way to the crucifixion.28 So,
too, the reputation of the Jews spread with them, from land to land across
the Middle East and the continent of Europe, until they became the people
with the largest international image, the image of a people whom everyone
could attack without fear of reprisal.
Emancipation, in recognizing the dignity of the individual, was meant to
enhance human opportunity and freedoms. The decline of autocracy and the granting
of individual rights meant that Jews would no longer be defined as a separate
estate, but would share in the obligations that citizenship conferred on all
individuals alike. When the gates of the ghettos were duly flung open, many
Jews eagerly entered the general society. But instead of easing the Jewish
political predicament, the beginnings of democratization brought the crisis
to a head. The Jews had conducted their politics by adapting to local power,
but once that power moved into the hands of ?the people,? how were Jews to
satisfy the needs and expectations of a public that did not uniformly know
its own mind? Political strategy among the Jews was now complicated by the
breakdown of communal authority, as some Jews continued to seek corporate
protection from the elites, while others pursued liberalization or revolution.
But within each national polity, the gentiles who were engaged in the struggle
for power often saw their greatest opportunity as stemming from opposition
to the Jews. The autocrat rules either well or badly by virtue of the power
invested in him, but the democratic power to rule must be won and maintained
by an open and competitive appeal to the masses. The elected politician needs
political catchwords that can unite diverse constituencies, and perhaps, above
all, explanations that can assure those constituencies that their problems
can be solved. The democratization of politics proved a mixed blessing for
the Jews, because, as Gerson Cohen hinted in his analysis, the liability of
the Jews as the most conspicuous minority in Europe made them attractive targets
from below as well as above. The modern period saw the Jews trying frantically
to satisfy gentile expectations while many gentiles dodged their problems
by blaming them on the Jews.
By the end of the nineteenth century, Jews had become the ideal political
tool of the demagogue, the politician who pretends to greater power than he
actually wields. Because of their exaggerated image and evident accomplishments
the Jews could be cast as a major adversary by politicians who knew perfectly
well that this ?powerful people? could offer no actual resistance. The usefulness
of the Jews as an organizing target of politics turned anti-Semitism into
one of the most prominent ideologies of Europe. Nationalists had a field day
with the Jews, who were everywhere the most notorious resident people, and
who served as the perfect example of who was not a Frenchman, not a German,
not a Russian or a Pole. Karl Marx had singled out the Jews as the agents
of capitalism in a stunningly aggressive attack on the Jewish religion (?The
bill of exchange is the Jew?s actual god?), setting the tone for the Left?s
opposition to Judaism over and above opposition to religion in general.29
The success of individual Jews became a political liability for the group.
Their visibility made it easy to blame the Jews for the major problems and
anxieties troubling the electorate: They were charged with cramping the economy,
undermining the national spirit or polluting the blood. Hitler famously credited
the Jews with being both capitalists and Bolsheviks, appealing simultaneously
to fears of the Left and of the Right. Since Jews had to win protection by
proving their social value, or at least their harmlessness, potential aggressors
knew they were taking no risk in directing their attacks against them. Far
from rendering them inert and innocuous, the strategy of accommodation had
turned the Jews into the chief instrument of gentile politics.
The destruction of European Jewry was the culmination of a system of complementarity
that had gathered political momentum in Europe over many centuries. I much
prefer Lucy Dawidowicz?s exact term, the war against the Jews, to such religiously
shaded words as hurban, sho?a and Holocaust, because it precisely designates
the political aspect of what was a supremely political event. Though Hitler?s
obsession with eradicating the Jews eventually interfered with his prosecution
of the war, in its earliest stages his anti-Jewish policy gained him allies
in consolidating German rule over Europe: Getting rid of their Jews was, in
effect, the gift that Hitler offered to every country that he conquered, a
political bonus for the indignity of subjugation. If the Jews had thought
they could create a temporary alternative to self-government in the land of
Israel through a strategy of peaceable accommodation abroad, they and everyone
else now knew how the process worked itself out in history.
I cannot emphasize too strongly that my analysis casts no aspersion on the
Jewish political experiment itself, which was vigorous, noble, even exalting.
There is no shame in experimentation: The Jews invested tremendous faith not
only in God, but in themselves and their fellow man when they perpetuated
their demanding way of life among the nations. Nor are the Jews altogether
singular in their role of targeted outsiders. Hostility toward other alien
populations, like the Armenians, or like the Chinese in Malaysia or Indonesia,
sometimes follows some of the same patterns I have outlined here. But in trying
to sustain themselves for so long without a home territory or defensive powers,
the Jews had unwittingly proven that no people can hope to flourish collectively,
spiritually and materially, without securing its own forms of self-protection.
The Jews had tried to make a virtue of adapting to foreign power in order
to perpetuate their own way of life with the least interference. Instead,
their deferment of power engendered unique conditions for genocide.
IV
Much of what I am saying was understood by the Zionist movement, _ and by
those who established the State of Israel. Zionism recognized that in a time
of nascent nation-states and populist politicians, Jews could no longer afford
to depend on others for their security. They had to reclaim their own territory
and become subject to their own political authority, so that among other manifestations
of national independence they could militarily protect themselves. The Zionist
historian Ben-Zion Dinur described the process as follows:
The revolt against the Galut was like a huge river into which flowed all
the smaller streams and tributaries of the Jewish struggle down the ages.
It incorporated into itself? all the various methods of resistance ever adopted
by the Jews against their oppressors and persecutors, together with the stubborn
persistence displayed by them in their hard struggle for survival?. So powerful
was the impetus of the revolt against the Galut that it forced the historical
course of the nation back into its original channels and recreated the character
of the modern Jew in the likeness of his ancient ancestors.30
Dinur underscores the negative judgment on the diaspora that fueled the
difficult task of reconstruction, yet he uses a language of natural evolution
to suggest how organic, how inevitable, was the return when it occurred. To
Dinur, Zionism was categorical proof of just how dynamic Jewish political
strategy in the diaspora really was, since without an indigenous political
tradition, no such movement of self-emancipation could have developed, matured
and achieved its goal in so short a time.
The Zionist diagnosis might have saved the world much damage had it been
implemented sooner than it was. (I say, saved ?the world? rather than merely
?the Jews,? because if my analysis is accurate, the violence that erupts as
part of the politics of complementarity is destructive for the perpetrators
as well as for their victims.) I think history will confirm that the establishment
of Israel was the most extraordinary political feat of the twentieth century,
providing a model of collective responsibility in the midst of unspeakable
degradation and malice. Jews around the world responded to the murder of one-third
of their people through an act of unprecedented national resolve, counteracting
the uniqueness of the destruction of European Jewry by a unique determination
to change their political fate. Through the establishment of the State of
Israel, the Jewish people hoped to move from a politics of complementarity
to a politics of reciprocity, whereby the Jews would achieve unexceptional
status in the family of nations, behaving and being treated according to international
customs and laws.
That might have happened had the Arabs accepted the partition of Palestine
as voted by the General Assembly of the United Nations on November 29, 1947.
It might have happened had the Arabs accepted the outcome of Israel?s War
of Independence in 1948. But the Arab-Israel conflict did not turn out to
be?as so many people still pretend it is?the struggle of two peoples over
one land. Arab opposition to Israel was not a ?normal? territorial dispute
over how much land was owing to each, but an ideological assault on the legitimacy
of an independent Jewish polity, encouraged by the image of the subject Jew
of the diaspora. Ironically, the same war that had convinced the Jews they
must take power for themselves had convinced the Arabs that the Jews were
ultimately ripe for conquest. Bluntly stated, Hitler had demonstrated the
utility of hostility to the Jews by making it the centerpiece of his internal
and foreign policy. Although he was defeated in all his other aims, Hitler
did succeed in eliminating most of Europe?s Jews. He was beaten, but not for
having killed the Jews.
The Jews who built Israel, including the Revisionists, expected the Arabs
to react to them ?normally,? if not by immediately accepting them as neighbors,
then by accepting the outcome of war. War is the final arbiter of international
disputes, the way of settling otherwise intractable political conflicts. When
the Americans won their War of Independence, the British soon thereafter recognized
the freedom of the colonies. When Algeria won its War of Independence, the
French accepted the terms of disengagement. Israelis were convinced that once
they began to function as a sovereign nation, they would be treated as such
by the rest of the world. But though the Jews also won their War of Independence,
their victory was not credited by those whom they defeated. Given their vast
demographic and political advantage, the Arabs were convinced they would reconquer
Palestine in time. The efforts of the Hashemite king to strike a deal with
David Ben-Gurion were thwarted by the followers of the Mufti of Jerusalem,
who had openly joined Hitler during World War II. And even as the Israelis
resettled hundreds of thousands of Jewish refugees from Arab lands, those
same Arab countries refused to dismantle the refugee camps, so that the Arab
refugees should remain the festering protest and the human weapon against
the Jewish state.
No doubt the Arabs might have offered equal resistance to any other new
sovereign entity in their region, but opposition to the Jews included special
political opportunities. No other people could have provided the Jewish combination
of visible achievement, magnified images of potency and a demonstrated ideological
disinclination to aggress. The unwelcome presence of a Jewish state in an
Arab region became the rallying cry for Pan-Arabism, uniting Arabs, as Arabs,
against an ethnic and religious enemy. Just as anti-Semitism had once functioned
on the European continent as the one unifying passion of otherwise vying Christian
nations, so anti-Zionism became a feature of modern nationalisms in countries
as different as Iraq and Iran. Indeed, the Palestinians are the first people
whose nationalism consists primarily of opposition to the Jews, and the Palestinians
have been aided by their fellow Arabs only to the extent that they are useful
in opposing Israel. It is clear from the political behavior of the Arab countries
that the desire to secure a Palestinian homeland has been merely the excuse,
not the reason for anti-Zionism, a sentiment which grows arguably stronger
as Israeli concessions reconfirm the image of the accommodating Jew.
Humiliating as it may be for Jews to see themselves as the tool, the instrument,
of other peoples? politics, the predicament of the State of Israel cannot
be understood without grasping its function in the politics of other nations.
The Arab alliance with the Soviet bloc demonstrated how the old kind of opposition
to the Jews as a resident minority (in Russia) could combine with the new
kind of opposition to the Jewish state to forge a practical partnership that
may have had other common objectives, but was cemented by common hostility
to the Jews. The resolution equating Zionism with racism that prevailed during
the years of this alliance came straight out of the arsenal of Soviet Communism,
and proved of incalculable benefit to the Arabs by associating their language
of rejectionism with the Left rather than with the Right. Although the fall
of the Soviet Union shattered that alliance, the eventual revocation of the
resolution did not erase the potency of its charge, which held Israel morally
responsible for the aggression leveled against it, and undermined Israel?s
credibility as a liberal cause. Anti-Jewishness has been a rallying point
for Islamism, even beyond the borders of the Middle East, and it provides
the link, whenever necessary, between religious militants and secular nationalists.
Opposition to Jews is used by Islamic extremists to win converts among American
blacks, tapping into the anti-Jewishness in Christianity, which is otherwise
waning in America. In sum, anti-Zionism functions in Arab politics in the
same way that anti-Semitism did in Europe, as an explanation for whatever
frustrates the population. And, as in Europe, the usefulness of the Jewish
presence as a political target dictates the ferocity of the war against it.
Having come to appreciate the Jews as a no-fail target, Israel?s enemies
continue to treat the country as the Jews had been treated in the diaspora.
This is not to deny that significant changes have taken place, and it is certainly
not meant to encourage a sense of fatality. Israel has won recog-nition from
most of the nations in the world. Its international status has steadily improved.
The UN recently agreed to include Israel in the WEOGweog (Western Europe and
Other Governments) group, removing the final bar-rier to its complete ?legal
equality.? The International Red Cross is on the point of extending recognition
to the Magen David Adom. The signed peace treaties with Egypt and Jordan at
least establish the possibility of political reciprocity, even if the goal
of mutual respect is now honored by the Arabs mostly in the breach.
But over time, the protracted Arab siege led many of Israel?s leaders and
thinkers to revert to the traditional Jewish politics of complementarity,
and to attempt to use accommodationist politics under the conditions of sovereignty.
The whole fantasy of ?peace? is based on Israel?s judgment that the surrender
of territory will pacify resolute aggressors, although political history yields
no such evidence, and plenty of evidence to the contrary. The Oslo accords
of 1993 made Israel the first sovereign nation in memory to arm its declared
enemy with the expectation of gaining security. In the vision he set forth
in The New Middle East, Shimon Peres declared that at the turn of the twenty-first
century, ?national political organizations can no longer fulfill the purpose
for which they were established?that is, to furnish the fundamental needs
of the nation.?31 Peres is dismissing the ideal of national self-reliance
in favor of the internationalism that so many Jews cultivated before the birth
of the state, and this in the face of Arab nationalism of which the Palestinian
variety is merely the most proximate and vocal. Clearly, the familiar sensation
of being overpowered is eliciting from Israelis the old strategies of self-adaptation,
without thought that these strategies have been discredited beyond a doubt.
Because the politics of adaptation and accommodation are the cause of the
unique kind of hostility that is leveled against the Jews, nothing is better
guaranteed to stimulate that hostility than such a strategy of accommodation.
The moral problem facing the Jews is thus exactly the opposite of what David
Hartman claims in his rendering of the Jewish political tradition. The unique
political experiment of the Jews has made them subject to an opposite set
of temptations from the ones that confront their neighbors. Other nations
may worry about the corruption of power; the Jews have to worry about the
corruption of powerlessness. Other nations may suffer from the urge for political
conquest. The Jews are defined by their hunger for acceptance. In order to
fulfill the moral challenges of statehood without falling prey to the temptations
of political dependency, Israel has to use Jewish power on behalf of national
interests until her enemies learn to relate to her as a sovereign power. Israeli
citizens and Jews around the world have to accept that political independence
requires them to function as a competitive polity that has to hold on to the
precious bounty of land and sovereignty against adversaries who may never
cease wanting what they possess. Clearly, if peace is really the goal, Jews
have to convince the world that they expect others to accommodate to them.
The Jews stand between two massive political failures?the destruction of
their sovereignty at the hands of Rome, and of the diaspora experiment at
the hands of the Germans. They cannot return to the politics of exile, but
must somehow learn to hold on to their piece of soil. A people with so weak
a political record must attend to its political behavior above all else, and
learn to test its idea of morality first and foremost against the standard
of political sanity. Zionism was the beginning, not the end of a process.
The same people that launched the experiment of adaptation has the creative
ability and energy to learn from its failures, and to craft a new politics
of responsible autonomy that will insist on political reciprocity as its natural
right. Even patterns of centuries are not impossible to change. The political
revision that Zionism began is for the Jewish people to continue.
Ruth R. Wisse is professor of Yiddish and Comparative Literature at Harvard
_University. This essay is adapted from the Zalman C. Bernstein Memorial Lecture
in Jewish Political Thought, which the author delivered in Jerusalem on January
20, 2000.
Notes
1. Salo Wittmayer Baron, The Jewish Community: Its History and Structure
to the American Revolution (Philadelphia: Jewish Publication Society, 1948),
vol. 1, p. 28.
2. Hermann Cohen, ?Graetz?s Philosophy of Jewish History,? in Alan L. Mittleman,
The Scepter Shall Not Depart from Judah: Perspectives on the Persistence of
the Political in Judaism (Lanham: Lexington Books, 2000), p. 35.
3. Cohen, ?Graetz?s Philosophy,? p. 38.
4. Simon Dubnow, Nationalism and History: Essays on Old and New Judaism, ed.
Koppel S. Pinson (Philadelphia: Jewish Publication Society, 1958), p. 80.
5. Dubnow, Nationalism and History, p. 99.
6. Haim Hazaz, ?The Sermon,? trans. Ben Halpern, in Robert Alter, ed., Modern
Hebrew Literature (New York: Behrman, 1975), p. 274.
7. Hazaz, ?The Sermon,? p. 275.
8. Daniel J. Elazar, ?The Themes of the Jewish Political Studies Review,?
in Jewish Political Studies Review 1:1-2, Spring 1989, p. 1. He dates the
beginning of modern Jewish political studies from the appearance of the first
bibliographical essay in the American Jewish Yearbook 1969.
9. Ismar Schorsch, ?On the History of the Political Judgment of the Jew,?
in Ismar Schorsch, From Text to Context: The Turn to History in Modern Judaism
(Hanover: University of New England, 1994), p. 121.
10. Schorsch, ?Political Judgment of the Jew,? p. 122.
11. Schorsch, ?Political Judgment of the Jew,? p. 128.
12. Schorsch, ?Political Judgment of the Jew,? p. 129.
13. Mendelsohn?s compressed handbook, On Modern Jewish Politics, provides
a new terminology for discussion of that history. Ezra Mendelsohn, On Modern
Jewish Politics (New York: Oxford, 1993). Eli Lederhendler?s work is especially
valuable in the way it builds a conceptual model of Jewish political development,
and integrates the study of internal institutions with Jewish ?diplomatic
and foreign relations.? Eli Lederhendler, The Road to Modern Jewish Politics:
Political Tradition and Political Reconstruction in the Jewish Community of
Tsarist Russia (New York: Oxford, 1989). See also Jonathan Frankel, The Damascus
Affair: ?Ritual Murder,? Politics and the Jews in 1840 (Cambridge: Cambridge,
1997).
14. David Hartman, ?Foreword,? in The Jewish Political Tradition, vol. 1:
Authority, eds. Michael Walzer et al. (New Haven: Yale, 2000), p. xiv.
15. Hartman, ?Foreword,? p. xiv.
16. Werner Sombart gave an ingenious, or disingenuous, explanation of the
Jewish racial character when he wrote that ?the Jew?s inherent ?Nomadism?
or ?Saharism? (if I may coin the words) was always kept alive through selection
or adaptation. Throughout the centuries? Israel has remained a desert and
nomadic people.? Werner Sombart, The Jews and Modern Capitalism, trans. Mordechai
Epstein (New Brunswick: Transaction Books, 1982), p. 328.
17. Jane S. Gerber, The Jews of Spain: A History of the Sephardi Experience
(New York: Free Press, 1992), p. 39.
18. Sholom Ash, Kiddush Ha-Shem: An Epic of 1648, trans. Rufus Learsi (Philadelphia:
Jewish Publication Society, 1926), p. 64.
19. Sombart, The Jews and Modern Capitalism, p. 13.
20. The linguistic record of modern Jews may be represented by the ten percent
of Nobel Prize winners for Literature in this century who were born Jews.
Only two wrote in Jewish languages, S.Y. Agnon (1966) in Hebrew and Isaac
Bashevis Singer (1978) in Yiddish. Of the others, Paul Heyse (1910), Nelly
Sachs (1966) and Elias Canetti (1981) wrote in German; Henri Bergson (1927)
in French; Boris Pasternak (1958) and Joseph Brodsky (1987) in Russian; Saul
Bellow (1976) and Nadine Gordimer (1991) in English.
21. Lederhendler, The Road to Modern Jewish Politics, pp. 33-34.
22. Shlomo Dov Goitein, ?Political Conflict and the Use of Power in the World
of the Geniza,? in Daniel J. Elazar, ed., Kinship and Consent: The Jewish
Political Tradition and Its Contemporary Uses (Washington: University Press
of America, 1983), p. 177.
23. Gerson D. Cohen, ?Changing Perspectives of Jewish Historiography,? in
Gerson D. Cohen, Jewish History and Jewish Destiny (New York: Jewish Theological
Seminary, 1997), p. 172. The talk in which these paragraphs figure was delivered
in 1971. Some years later, I heard Gerson Cohen deliver a much fuller lecture
on these ideas in Montreal, but to the best of my knowledge, it was never
published.
24. Genesis 49:10.
25. Hyam Maccoby, ed. and trans., Judaism on Trial: Jewish-Christian Disputations
in the Middle Ages (East Brunswick: Associated University Presses, 1982),
_p. 149. Maccoby?s translation from the Latin is based on the Christian account
of the Barcelona disputation as edited and translated by Y. Baer, Tarbitz:
A Quarterly Review of the Humanities 2:1, October 1930, pp. 187-172. [Hebrew]
26. See David G. Roskies, The Literature of Destruction: Jewish Responses
to Catastrophe (Philadelphia: Jewish Publication Society, 1989).
27. H. Leivick, Complete Works by H. Leivick (New York: Shoulson, 1940), pp.
93-94. [Yiddish]
28. See George K. Anderson, The Legend of the Wandering Jew (Hanover: Brown
University, 1991).
29. See Karl Marx, ?On the Jewish Question,? in Karl Marx, Early Writings
(New York: Vintage, 1975), pp. 211-242; Julius Carlebach, Karl Marx and the
Radical Critique of Judaism (London: Routledge and Kegan Paul, 1978), especially
ch. viii, pp. 148-184.
30. Ben-Zion Dinur, Israel and the Diaspora, trans. Merton B. Dagut (Philadelphia:
Jewish Publication Society, 1969), pp. 141, 145.
31. Shimon Peres with Arye Na?or, The New Middle East (New York: Henry Holt,
1993), p. 80.