To Many Jewish thinkers, the events of the decade leading up to World War II, and the continuing dim perspective of the postwar years, spell the utter collapse of Jewish emancipation, and the hopelessness of any decent future for the Jews in Europe. Even those not so defeatist can hardly avoid re-examining the whole course of modern Jewish history with a view to discovering the roots of the catastrophe, and charting a sounder basis for Jewish freedom and survival in Western civilization. With uncommon insight and imagination, François Bondy here sketches, it seems to us, a most illuminating approach to this whole problem, moreover stressing reciprocal interplay and integration rather than flight.

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It is inevitable that the political question of finding a home for Europe’s displaced Jews should claim the center of discussion. But it is also important—in the face of the general collapse of European culture and its hesitant, lethargic recovery—to raise the question of the moral and cultural value of the Jew to modern society. Indeed, it might be valuable to deal with both questions together. Often it happens that when two broad, indefinite ideas strike against one another, the collision throws off the spark of a single precise insight. . . .

There is a more serious and almost self-evident justification for treating the spiritual and political questions together: in the modern world, the separation of spiritual values from the contingencies of Realpolitik and economics has become impossible.

Through the ages, cultural life was able to survive along the margins of despotism, in the courts of the nobility, as censor, satire, tolerated opposition, ornament. In 18th-century Germany it was able to exist as a sort of humanism in a small, strange world, in which each citizen pretended to be a denizen of Mt. Olympus at the cost of renouncing all part in the social and political life outside. In fact, it is possible to trace, throughout the Christian era, the recoil of enlightened groups as they periodically withdrew from the harsh realities of the political and social life of their times. Such was the attitude of the hermits of the Diocletian period who sought refuge in the desert, sustained only by their mystic vision of a wondrous world. In its own way, this was also the attitude of Montaigne, who, while neither mystic nor visionary, gave up all his social responsibilities in order to isolate himself in his castle, surrounded by the classics, closing his eyes to the grim spectacle of the religious wars, barricading himself behind his scepticism and his teaching of tolerance. The experience of his maternal ancestors, who were Marranos, secret Jews, doubtless contributed to his feeling about tolerance; indeed, through Montaigne this experience entered by a devious route into the consciousness of Western Europe and became part and parcel of its substance. The neoclassic world of Goethe, Schiller, and Humboldt, as well as the lyrical world of the German romantic musicians and poets, was also a refuge and an escape. The inner life of the creative artist flourished only on the fringe of political reality, when it was not in rebellion against it.

Now, can we not compare this proud but modest existence—suppressed yet sullenly rebellious, a culture on the outskirts of political reality—with the Jewish ghettos that existed on the outskirts of the great European national communities from the Middle Ages right down to the middle of the 19th century? There, too, was an inner life, a complete religious, cultural, and mystical world nourished by its own traditions, just as humanism and its preachers were nourished by Greek and Latin culture. There, too, were insulated communities that could influence and be influenced by the outer world only by tortuous paths and with the greatest of difficulty. The dwellers in the ghetto gave little thought to the possibility of playing any real part in the life of the world around them; revolts, wars, and invasions affected them only indirectly and, as it were, by ricochet. In exactly the same way, the cultural elite of the Christian world usually made no attempt to impregnate social and political reality with their humanistic ideas, except through writings about Utopian societies—the counterpart of the messianic dream of the Jew—that made no concrete proposal for the conversion of the world as it was into the world as they wished it to be.

The parallel between the history of Western culture and the history of Judaism was neither accidental nor temporary and has endured to the present-day: each one soared to the same heights, suffered the same crises, has undergone the same catastrophes. In effect, the emergence of the Jews from their physical ghetto kept pace with the emergence of cultural life from its own ghetto—a more pleasant one, it is true, but not less real. The French Revolution represented the fusion, incomplete but full of vitality, of this tiny world of culture—of the salons, studios, coteries, and Utopias—with the greater world of a new political reality, a world in which the masses were stirring, and in which the whole of Europe would soon be encompassed. In 1848 came the second great blow for emancipation, delivered as much for the intellectuals in general as for the Jews in particular, and additional segments of the semi-feudal world crumbled. Finally, far to the East, in Russia, the Revolution of 1917 accomplished, tardily but with so much more Gründlichkeit, the removal of the ghettos both physical and cultural.

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Let us stop at this crucial year, 1917-1918. It marks the collapse of the last of the empires basically absolutist, bureaucratic, or semi-feudal; Turkey, Czarist Russia, Austria-Hungary, Germany. It marks the completion of the work of the French Revolution, the establishment of democracy, equality before the law, total emancipation, and the end of the ghetto.

In Czechoslovakia, a philosopher, Masaryk, becomes head of the state. In Germany, an assimilated Jew, the great industrialist and tormented thinker, Walter Rathenau, is to direct foreign policy. In Russia it is still the heyday of the revolutionary intelligentsia, in part Jewish, the Trotskys and Zinovievs—the day of Litvinov, the League of Nations, and Léon Blum is still to come.

Let us never forget that all those liberties for which the European underground fought in the war just past, and which all the people of Europe today struggle to regain, were once well known to Europe. The Jews of all Europe were able to come and go, free of any legal restraint. Their intellectual elite was able to play to the full its role, often a considerable one, in economic, scientific, technical, literary, and political life. Further, during this short period every Jew was able to make his own individual personal decision—to become part of the capitalist world or of the socialist world, to support the chauvinists, or even to seek a Jewish nationalism of his own in Zionism.

Among the Jews who contributed in many different ways toward the creating of this epoch of liberalism and progress, outstanding were Marx, Disraeli, Bergson, Einstein, and Freud. To link such names as these may seem strange and arbitrary, but it is characteristic of all problems touching assimilated Judaism that any common denominator will appear absurd, any linking of names and tendencies artificial. By here naming a revolutionary, a conservative, a philosopher, a scientist, a psychoanalyst, I mean to show the very diverse domains in which the Jews were able to contribute to modern intellectual and political life. It is not a question of claiming—it is unnecessary to insist on this point—that international socialism, modern British imperialism, idealist metaphysics, relativity, and psychoanalysis were the work of these five men. These theories, these actualities, would all have come into existence even if these men had not lived. But that is not the question.

The fact remains that it was through them and others that the Jewish spirit—what might be described as a Jewish forma mentis—was able to help to bring into being these actualities, was able to crystallize these ideas; and this same spirit gave to these creations a stamp which, among many other tendencies, bears the imprint of the Jewish spirit, of the historic experiences and modern needs of Judaism. In all these fields, these Jews—as they strove to extend the breakdown of their ghetto—simultaneously played decisive roles in movements which tended to shatter the airtight compartments of Western civilization. In the infinitely complex process of this larger emancipation of Western man, this Judaistic common denominator is, I think, one of the essential factors; and it is one of the elements necessary to a proper understanding of the problem of the interpenetration between the Jewish and the Western spirits. Thus the tolerance of Montaigne marks but a first meeting point between two historical experiences, two cultural necessities.

But to return to the five men of Jewish origin who helped to create the intellectual and political framework of the world of 1918. In the first place Marx, with his prophetic messianic mind, searching for social justice, employing a strict and abstract dialectic, while turning his back on specifically Jewish problems brought into the Western world a way of thinking, an aspiration which I would call almost Biblical. Consider how he prophesied the inevitable, apocalyptic collapse of a world devoted to the cult of the golden calf, worshiping the material wealth which in itself it despises—and which is a vision so familiar to the ancient prophets. Consider his messianism without a messiah, which designated a social class—the proletariat—as saviour. Consider, above all, that in his early works this vision antedated the structure flung up by scientific thought, and that his materialism was steeped through and through with a troubled, religious spirituality, and with a truly ethical aim.

Disraeli, Prime Minister to her Majesty Queen Victoria, who made her Empress of India and realized in his foreign policy the wild dreams of his early novels. This was the Disraeli who at Berlin got the better of Bismarck, and became a conservative disguised as a political reformer. He was one of the great builders of the British Empire, which with all its faults, weaknesses, and inconsistencies has remained to this very day one of the most solid institutions of the modern world.

Two generations later, Bergson, almost lyrical originator of a metaphysics of the spirit which was, in his last great work, to contrast the open society with the closed society, therewith presenting us with one of the capital problems of our day.

Einstein, who freed scientific thought horn the dogmatic materialism of Newton—already weakened though it may have been—by his general theory of relativity; who shattered the accepted notion of the privileged position of time and space, just as in the political sphere was shattered the notion of privileged men and classes.

Freud finally, who descended into the lower depths of our industrial society, who wished to extend science and logic even into the dream. Without going back as far as Joseph in the science of dreams, we may observe that the method of rationalizing and bringing out into the open even what is most personal to the subconscious is closely akin to the technique of Talmudic dialectics.

In these ways various Jews, thoroughly integrated into the culture of Western Europe, have contributed to raising the frame of a more rational, more equitable, and perhaps a freer society. Even in physics and metaphysics, this great movement destroyed the barriers of ghettos both literal and figurative, burst through absolute space and time, through the closed society, ruptured the screen between the conscious mind and that subconscious area which had hitherto been excluded from spiritual reality.

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But this world, more rational and democratic than any before it, which after a long period of gestation finally came into being in 1918, crumbled almost immediately. It fell into political, social, and economic turmoil, and proved to be every bit as incapable of solving its problems as all the less emancipated and less enlightened societies preceding it. Undermined by a sort of creeping paralysis, it fell prey to a violent attack on the part of all those forces which it believed to have mastered or permanently abolished.

The one system which, for better or worse, did resolve these problems—the new Soviet system—did so by rejecting the complicated machinery of democracy, parliamentarianism, individual liberties, and freedom of thought. It acted through the dictatorship of a small revolutionary elite, who between 1934 and1938 were destroyed to be replaced not by a “Thermidorian” liberal bourgeoisie, but by a new absolutist state, which still continues to solve the main problems of the group, but cares naught for either spiritual or civil liberties. If this was to be the fate of the Russian people, which, having passed through profound crises, faced up relatively well to its problems, and which at least abolished national oppressions, ghettos and pogroms, the West was to meet a destiny still more tragic. In Italy it was fascism, while in other countries it was a series of dictatorships, semi-fascist and reactionary regimes from Poland to the Balkans and Spain. It was also the death, less by assassination than by suicide, by internal decomposition, of the German Republic, Austria, even France.

The fact is that the religion of progress which for two centuries had been the religion of the majority of thinking people, and particularly of all the assimilated Jews who saw before them a future of uninterrupted ascent, suffered one severe blow after another. Just compare the slow rise and the tedious maturation of all the religious, civil, national, and social liberties from 1789 to 1918, with the brusque and total destruction of their bases from the moment when, instead of being the fount of opposition, they came to constitute the very source of statist power itself. An extreme generalization, one might object; yet this internal crisis of the new republics was not merely the crisis of the German Republic and its democratic parties, not only the failure of the more resistant and better directed tiny Austrian Republic. In almost all of Eastern Europe we observe in different degrees this incapacity of the new elite, democratic or socialist, to create new forms of government and of communal life. Everywhere, even before the hostile forces inflicted a defeat upon them, we see among these elites an internal abandonment and renunciation of democratic values, as if they themselves were not convinced that those values were good enough to govern by. We have only to think of the nationalist auction sale of 1932 in Germany, in which the left wing parties tried to compete with Nazism. In France, the political and social crisis of democracy came later; as a victorious nation which had held on to the normal state forms, France did not enter its crisis until the advent of the Popular Front, which corresponded to the socialist phase of the German Republic. But basically her evolution was no different.

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One of the fundamental causes of this bankruptcy of the principal continental democracies may be seen in the fact that they were incapable of realizing that democracy can develop properly only in a supranational democratic milieu, and never in the restrictive framework of absolute national sovereignty. For all the major problems of Europe overstep this framework, can find no satisfactory solution within it. The first submission to the fact of sovereignty contained the germs of all future defeats. But it was not the sole causal agent; the crisis of liberty went still deeper.

Let us consider, for the moment, all those confident hopes that the majority of Jews had placed in this course of progress—some united in their confidence in bourgeois progress, others in that socialist progress which is at bottom only the consequence and continuation of the movement for civic emancipation initiated on all levels by the bourgeoisie. Let us face, if we have the strength and imagination to do so, what, after twenty-four years, happened to this naive optimism, this faith in progress, this very Europe, so free, intelligent, appreciative of all spiritual values—with its Jewish values now intermingled with the work of other thinkers and protagonists of the West.

It is certainly no longer the hour for prophets of good tidings, but the hour of the true prophets, of Jeremiah, of Micah:

And the prophets thereof divine for
money;
Yet will they lean upon the Lord, and
say:
“Is not the Lord in the midst of us?
No evil can come upon us.”
Therefore shall Zion for your sake be
plowed as a field
And Jerusalem shall become heaps,
And the mountain of the house as the
high places of a forest.

It is the hour of Ezekiel who prophesied countless whitened bones, for a great stink of ill-buried corpses still rises over Europe, and where life does go on the ghettos are seen rising once again.

But we must not limit ourselves to looking at the fate of the Jews, most tragic of all; we must see how, on every side, there are being re-established those same buttressed citadels that our fathers thought destroyed; how culture has been subdivided into intellectual specializations, scientific, technical, narrow; how the sorely wounded nations have withdrawn into themselves and nurture a national pride proportionate to the humiliation they have undergone. See how the world of victorious reason has so easily given way to unreasonable and illogical myths, while rationalism and humanism are denounced in their turn as myths without substance as against the “realities” of race and infallible intuitions. It is still and again the common disaster of Western culture and Judaism, always bound together.

But let us not halt at apocalyptic visions, at the terrifying irony of history; let us try to think it out in spite of all this, faithful to the spirit of Spinoza, “Not to laugh, not to weep, but to understand.”

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Let us try to explain the collapse—temporary, perhaps, but so thorough—of all those values of progress, of civilization. The first thing we see is that the evil is still somewhat circumscribed: it has to do with a specifically European and, more specifically, a German catastrophe. The Anglo-Saxon world in its internal social and cultural structure has been spared it. The torments in which writhe the Asiatic world, China, and India, are bound up in part with other values and other immediate problems. The tragedy of Judaism coincides with the tragedy of the collapse of freedom on the European continent, just as the progress of Judaism was bound up with the achievement of a more liberal society in Europe.

But first we must recognize that this close connection between the fate of Judaism and the fate of European liberty does not dispense with our obligation to see or pose the specific problem of Judaism.

It is a great error, and one too often made, to believe that it will suffice to solve such-and-such a great problem of a world economy, for instance, or of international political organization, for all problems, including “the Jewish problem,” immediately to be solved “automatically.” Problems hardly ever are solved automatically. Great problems can be solved only through the patient solution of a whole series of minor special problems, as well as by the general attitude taken toward all these “special” cases. We must understand at the same time the special Jewish problem and its context, the situation in which it comes up. Also we must appreciate at the same time to what extent it comes up for reasons which have specifically to do with Judaism per se, and to what extent as a by-product or derivative of other problems of the surrounding world. These two aspects, the tragedy of the non-Jewish world and the inner tragedy of the Jewish world, are inextricably intertwined. Nevertheless, they must be temporarily separated to be understood.

Just what was it that went awry in our conceptions of liberty to make possible such a disaster? We must also inquire into just what motive has placed the Jewish question at the center of the catastrophe; just why Judaism has been chosen as the sacrificial goat; just why, in totalitarian eyes, it has represented, according to the needs of the moment, plutocracy, political liberalism, socialism, the “Jew-dominated” Vatican, the “Jew-infested” Hapsburg dynasty, and so on.

Perhaps we have not sufficiently emphasized how violently Judaism, from the time of its emancipation, plunged into the movements of intellectual, social, and cultural advance. But it is never Judaism as such, with its feeling of community and solidarity, of its own particular ideas, which has manifested itself in Western Europe; it is always individual Jews, hundreds of thousands of Jews, yet “individual cases,” particularly in their own eyes. In the artificially segregated community of the ghetto there came an explosion, an eruption out of its stifling world. Individuals burst the bonds of their unbearably backward and narrow past, and tried to penetrate into a new community. It often happened that they remained in a state of disequilibrium between the two communities, and thereby supplied a type which Europe was later to supply in great numbers: the uprooted individual, dependent on his own intelligence or resourcefulness. This disequilibrium was sharpened by the fact that the very society toward which the Jews were turning was itself in growing internal disequilibrium.

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In Contemporary European society, which is itself on the road to disintegration into a fine spray of individuals, Jewish assimilation too often signified the loss of that sense of community which is the responsibility toward a group, the total and indefinable commitment of man to those values which transcend his individual destiny.

Detached from this uniting force of the community, the special historical attributes of the Jewish spirit—even its deepest values, its Messianic quest, its thirst for complete social justice, its prophetic universalism, and still more the shortcomings bequeathed to it by centuries of the ghetto—have had explosive force, a force which in a certain sense has been a force of decomposition. I do not hesitate to use this term, so dear to Hitler’s propaganda. For it is vital to face the fact that the great strength of the Nazi lies lay precisely in the partial truths included in them. It was decomposition in the sense that it tended to carry to its final conclusions the movement of the bourgeois world toward atomization, toward individualism (which should be sharply distinguished from “personalism”), and in the direction of an “absolute progress” in which we desired only too strongly to dissolve the specific Jewish problem and see it vanish.

Nevertheless, Judaism showed itself plainly in all the individualities of the assimilated Jews, if not consciously at least as a sort of feeling of remorse. If we may burden the past with our retrospective intentions, instead of remaining halfway between two forms of community the Jews might better have taken full cognizance of their ambivalent situation and dual responsibility. In itself, in a “normal” contemporary society the belonging to two or more circles, the multiplicity of attachments—political, religious, or cultural—is not at all abnormal; it is even the rule. It is as absurd to speak today of an antithesis or conflict between a Jew and a Frenchman as it is to pose to a Frenchman the alternative of good unionist or good patriot, or to a German Catholic the alternative of true believer or true citizen. The multiplicity of differing connections in which the political, the religious, the national, the cultural do not precisely coincide, is the most important characteristic of a free society; it is one of the conditions of liberty and of the development of the integrated personality.

It is times of crisis that give birth to those alternatives: patriot or internationalist, true believer or true citizen, Jew or German, and the like. But it is impossible to transcend the crisis without at the same time transcending those sharp alternatives to which it gave birth, and understanding why those alternatives were posed and why that “complexity” which is not normally noticed as such, was forced to give way to simplifications which are more and more radical, arbitrary, and in the long run unrealizable.

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This “why” leads us to the general causes of the crisis itself and to the crucial year 1917-18, which, even more than the year 1914 or the year 1939, marks its high point.

A preliminary remark, and important enough to excuse its banality: a value or an idea is never good or bad, useful or harmful, in itself. Everything depends on the whole system with which it is connected, and on the place it has in this system. Thus, those values of liberty—considered negatively as simply an absence of annoying hindrances—which the movement of liberal and secular culture succeeded in achieving, and in the establishment of which the Jews had a certain definite part, could rapidly and completely change into their opposites because they were isolated: they were values of individuals, of economic units, of national units; they were not bound up with the values of any new great human community, with responsibility toward society as a whole.

This is the reason why these economic and political liberties were victims of their own success. The rights of individuals, programs of national autonomy were excellent programs of opposition when it was a question of making the absolutist state forms more flexible. But in themselves they did not constitute more viable forms; they did not constitute a living society.

When the great problem of order, of unity of the group, is already more or less solved by existing state forms, we may speak of liberty in the singular, and liberties in the plural. But when for liberals, or for those socialists who are only left-liberals, it is a question of actually governing, then the values of opposition programs are not enough. True, one does not live by bread alone, but as Whitehead has said of the century of Enlightenment, one lives still less by disinfectant alone, by critical sense, by reason.

The European tragedy was that after 1918, after the collapse of the imperial states, people had to govern who had never seriously thought about the great problem of state order, of hierarchy, of values, of responsibilities in the social order and to the social order, of the difficulties of imposing an idea, not as one would hope to, in a Utopian way, at one stroke and by a great overturn, but day by day, with infinite patience and persistence in a stubborn, real world. In this supreme test of idealism—i.e., power—it was precisely the Utopians and the ideologists who, finding no connection between their ideas and the astonishing realities, fell back most quickly into routine, and held on to those principles, even to those functionaries and to the functioning of the government apparatus left by their predecessors, which were most outdated.

This is a generalization which will perhaps seem exaggerated, but is it really so? For the Europe of 1918, the “Wilsonian religion” represented the hope of millions of men directed upon the American president who bore a message of justice and liberty. But Wilsonism—and Wilson himself, who was the first sincere convert to Wilsonism—ran askew all along the line. Faced with covetousness, hatred, rancor, secret treaties, the whole European “climate,” Wilson—the author of erudite works on law—soon was forced to capitulate. He thought that the truths he bore were so strong and convincing that it would be necessary only for him to appear and to speak, and everyone would be carried away and persuaded. The realism of Clemenceau, Lloyd George, Venizelos, and Benes took him completely by surprise. And before this realism, so complex and so resistant, his idealism collapsed. He was indeed an intellectual for whom the world of the university and books had constituted a ghetto, and who was never able to reconcile his beautiful thoughts with grim political realities.

In the bosom of the European republics, the same tragedy was repeated in miniature: the tragedy of Masaryk who, although head of a state, was unable to influence the politics of the minorities; the tragedy also of Léon Blum, who like Wilson was uplifted by the great faith of the masses and left behind him the memory of a great disillusionment, knowing neither how to reconcile his programs with actualities, nor how to leave the arena in proper time, and thus exposing his failure to all eyes. The great fault with these minds arose from the fact that apparent power and real power turned out to be different things, and that while these men of the party seemed to govern, actually they were at the mercy of circumstances and did not govern anything at all.

Among the democrats there was at the same time too much and too little idealism, just as in the new Europe there was too much and too little liberty. What was needed was an idealism which was more realistic, a liberalism more conscious of the great problems of power and of the social framework that liberty needs—the framework which harmonizes rights and duties, which proportions liberties to responsibilities.

These newcomers were ignorant of the fact that the Anglo-Saxon world—the model of continental democracy—is united by a national group consciousness so strong that it has no need to affirm it in speeches; it is united through a thousand invisible bonds—cultural, religious, communal, federal—by institutions which form a counterpoise to “total” liberalism, and to individual atomization. Continental Europe had merely beaten down all the obstacles, all the barriers to progress, and in their place installed the anarchy of nations, large and small, which would not submit to the discipline of a supra-national rule; the anarchy of great economic groups which would not submit to the needs of society as a whole, but solely to the laws of a free market which they perverted inevitably by their own trusts and cartels; the anarchy of different social groups within the nations themselves, all leaning towards a strong State which would protect their profits, take care of their losses, or guarantee them work or a protective tariff.

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This individualism of groups within Europe itself—nations, trusts, parties—was the consequence of the erroneous exaggeration of the idea of individualism beyond immediate human reality; and even there it could make sense only against a background of strong bonds, duties, responsibilities, and agreements. It was the anarchy produced by a surfeit of irresponsible individualism—without a sense of proportion or scale of values, without faith in an objective truth which alone is able to uphold such a scale of values—that has produced or called forth reaction. To liberty without an idea of order, we saw counter-posed a system of order without an idea of liberty; to the scattering of wills into millions of atoms, we saw in reply the grouping of millions of atoms around a single will; and to logical reason without any social dynamic we saw a social dynamic without logical rationale.

The Jews found themselves in the bloody center of this catastrophe, owing both to the strength and weakness in the character of European Jewish society. Since they were the last to be emancipated, tradition was still strong enough so that they were the first ones to find their position destroyed.

The Jews had been thoroughly involved in that movement for emancipation and liberalism which led to—or at least was unable to prevent—a deep social crisis. And so when the time came that liberty began to seem to the great masses of people as nothing more than a tendency toward social disintegration, as a world of material insecurity and intellectual anarchy, the Jews—who had put all their own values and their energy at the service of this very liberty—were inevitably compromised. For too long they had been preaching the gospel of progress for the priests of the new mythology not to recognize in them their most obvious and vulnerable antagonists. And at the same time attacks also began to be made against some of the traditional Judaic values which many, indeed, most of the Jews of Western Europe, had wanted to ignore. So ironically, in spite of themselves, they became martyrs to ideas which had passed them by and which they scarcely even understood.

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Just what values are these? First, there is the spirit of collective solidarity with the group to which the individual is responsible and which in turn feels responsible to the individual. Although the majority of the Jews disclaim this collective destiny, it still exists and is strongly enough resented by the non-Jewish world so that it takes on—precisely because of its un-avowed presence—the appearance of a conspiracy. But in the long run, whether it is understood or not, this kind of solidarity within a human community is a positive value, a counterpart of any freedom we can imagine—though it be affirmed only in common persecution and in common graves, instead of being a solidarity freely assumed and aggressive, as it was so gloriously in April, 1943, behind the last barricades in the Warsaw ghetto.

The second Jewish value is the urge towards a supra-national framework for modern political, economic, and cultural life. The Jews are the incarnation of such a supra-nationalism. They have made it felt above all by the presence in every country of the same irritating Jewish problem, and by that same solidarity of Jewish destiny, manifested so clearly in times of crisis. In so far as the Jews have aspired toward a more international society which would dissolve, after so many other ghettos, the ghetto which is the modern state, they expressed a need which they had in common with modern culture and with all the fundamental demands of present-day spiritual and material life. Here again is a community of interest between modern culture and Judaism which is neither a coincidence nor a surprising parallel, but only a plain demonstration that the true values of human dignity are always bound up together, and that a society which does not have room for all dignities and liberties will in the long run not have room for any.

Thus it is that the very presence of the Jews, their shifting about, the waves of immigration from Galicia, maintained—in spite of the wishes of the assimilated Jews, always more or less anti-Semitic with regard to the Jews from countries further East than their own—the supra-national aspect of the Jewish question. At a time when Europe was withdrawing into absolute nationalism, and was rejecting those international values which the peoples had no idea how to put to use-since no actual supra-national structure was present to concretize and support them—at that moment the Jews became a source of worry and uneasiness. Whether they liked it or not, they represented an embodiment of supra-nationalism, and constituted a problem in international law.

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So we can see that it is for profound reasons, and by no mere accidental mischance, that Judaism has had to play its role of victim and of “crystallization point” of hatreds and disorders. At bottom it symbolized, nay, more, it was the incarnation of the exasperating complexity of the world’s problems in the face of the great, rude simplifications for which the masses thirst. The Jews have been thrown across history like a dike to raise the sea-level, as Léon Bloy has said so magnificently. This great truth is now only manifest through its contrary, since history, in order to lower its level, has demolished and laid low the dike.

Thus the Jews have been witnesses and martyrs, but they have often failed to realize which God they were serving through their suffering and humiliation. It is only through this suffering that the sense of history becomes sharpened, and that the consciousness of true values and their hierarchy is created. That sense of responsibility which goes beyond the individual, the sense of justice, the prophetic sense of the insufficiency of all the petty values of narrow and exclusive nationalism—those ideas which the prophets preached against the materialism of the kings of Israel and have been part of the fate of the people of Israel itself—these are the values with which we must renew our ties. In the necessity for a kind of federated European community in a world where international law has been established; in the framework of a community of great duties, of rights which are limited but which are the same for all, and of total responsibility, Judaism can again find those elements which are valuable in its aspirations toward progress, the great human aspirations which have been submerged in the present catastrophe.

The fate of a Judaism conscious again of its own deep solidarity and its own values, both individual and collective, while at the same time conscious of its responsibilities and its duty towards a world which must be made more human, but in which irrational imponderables and not only the logical and rational surfaces must be recognized—this Jewish fate will in the future as in the past remain united with the fate of Western culture. And it is through the comprehending of its specific immense, sorrowful burden and its constructive world responsibility that Judaism can contribute to that deepening of man’s inner conscience and that development of new forces in political and social life which are the two complementary roads towards a more authentic and perhaps more lasting freedom.

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