A. J. Toynbee’s remarks, in his monumental Study of History, about Jewry past and present, Diaspora and Zionist, continue to trouble the minds of thinking Jews both here and abroad. We continue the discussion in these pages with a second article on the subject. The first, by Franz Borkenau, appeared in our May 1955 issue under the title “Toynbee’s Judgment of the Jews.”
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In June of this year the Oxford University Jewish Society invited Professor Arnold Toynbee to speak on the “Jewish Role in History” at the Oxford synagogue. Other lecture halls were available, but the Jewish students felt that the synagogue would be the most appropriate place for Professor Toynbee to defend his views—views that have hurt Jewish feelings greatly because of his relegation of Judaism to an obscure corner of culture and history as a “Syriac fossil” and his equating of Zionist terrorists with Nazis.
The Jewish synagogue in Oxford mainly serves the needs of the university students. It has withstood the attempts of previous generations to turn it, as they tried to turn every synagogue, into a respectable Jewish church, and it is still frequently used as an assembly room, and also as a dining and lecture hall as well as house of worship and religious study. On the particular evening in June that Toynbee faced an expectant audience of Jewish and Gentile students, along with many Jewish and Gentile guests, the tense anticipation of an academic tournament not unlike the medieval religious disputations pervaded the place This time, however, the roles were somewhat reversed. The learned “rabbi” of the Gentiles was facing Jewish scholars and students unfriendly to him because of his “heretical” views. Like the Jewish rabbis of the Middle Ages, he did not recant. Toynbee spoke softly, calmly, cautiously, as a critical historian who went about his task “without friends.” He withdrew nothing he had written, yet he developed a consistent and important interpretation of the historical role of the Jewish Diaspora. It was, I say, important, not because it threw new light on the Jewish past, but because it provoked fresh thought about the present and future role of the Diaspora.
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Toynbee’s starting point was the phenomenon of Jewish survival from the 6th century B.C.E. onwards. The other “Syriac” states completely vanished under the impact of the collision with Babylonians and Greeks. Having lost state and country, most of the Syriac peoples lost their ethnic identity too. The Jews, however, did not. They succeeded in developing a new mode of communal existence which enabled them to preserve their identity under alien rule. Jew and Gentile alike regarded that preservation as unique and miraculous. It was, however, nothing of the kind in Toynbee’s view. There were other “fossils” of the Syriac civilization; the Iranian Parsees and the Nestorian and Monophysite Christian communities were able to survive by replacing political ties with religious forms of social cohesion and finding new commercial skills to make good their lost life on the land. In fact, this communal structure—the millet system of the Ottoman Empire—became the rule rather than the exception everywhere but in the West, where the intolerant nation-state arose with its demand for the complete ethnic assimilation of all people within its borders to the majority group. Nonetheless, in some Western countries that were more tolerant of corporate diversity, like the United States, one could, and can, still find many religious and ethnic diasporas deriving their communal identities—for example—from the Huguenots, from 17th-century Scotland, from 19th-century Poland, from Protestant sects of Northwestern Europe, and so on.
The nation-state is now, according to Toynbee, moribund as a political form. The diaspora or millet, not the nation-state, is destined to be the political form of the future. The world community to come will be composed, not of sovereign national states, but of communities. The ever increasing mobility fostered by the industrial revolution works to disperse over the earth the members of every nation, and hence to create new diasporas. These, Toynbee feels, possess a greater survival value than the nation-state and offer greater cultural opportunities to every description of religious, ethnic, and racial community.
In the past the diaspora form of life was an essential element in the phenomenon of Jewish survival, and the Jews were the pioneers in a mode of life destined to become the precedent for many more diasporas to come. At the present time, however, while other diasporas are still in their formative phase, the spiritual content of the Jewish Diaspora, the hope of the return to Palestine, has become problematical. Toynbee holds that the Jewish Diaspora can no longer live on that tradition of hope because, for the first time since the Roman conquest, it now can be realized by a call at the nearest travel bureau. The prayer for “next year in Jerusalem” loses fervor when one is able to fly to Lydda airport the next day. Those Jews who prefer to remain in the Diaspora, and to live the lives of Jews there, will have to look for a new psychological basis upon which to do so. They cannot build their lives on a hope which their own acts have shown not to be sincere. They cannot pray for something they do not wish to be fulfilled.
So, at a time when the diaspora as such offers the prototype of a new kind of global community, the original Diaspora, that of the Jews, is caught up in a fateful spiritual dilemma.
So much for Toynbee’s ideas. But do they stand up under close examination?
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His definition of the spiritual content of the Jewish Diaspora is certainly too narrow and one-sided. Indeed shockingly so. If Jews in the dispersion were a distinctive group merely by virtue of nostalgia for their homeland, they would be little different spiritually from ordinary exiles and refugees. How could Toynbee overlook the fact—which even fanatical anti-Semites have acknowledged—that the Jews are bearers of religious ideas and have through the ages maintained a concept of God and of the universe that can still hold up in the 20th century? The Jewish concept of God remains relevant and significant because it implies cosmic order and the spiritual unity of the universe; without these, science as well as religion would collapse. It also implies a moral purpose in the existence of man and the development of his society without which we would degenerate into technological savages and end up in self-destruction.
If the Jews in the past consciously visualized an active role for themselves in history, it was as servants of the Kingdom of God, as laborers preparing “in the desert a highway for our God”—to use Isaiah’s words. The idea of the highway and of its ultimate goal in redemption was further developed by the German Jewish philosopher Hermann Cohen early in this century. He believed that every generation of Jews contributed its section to the highway. The final goal, the Kingdom of God, as Cohen saw it, functioned as a social polar star. Though never attainable, it could guide each generation on its way. Therefore the role of the Jews was, and should continue to be in future, to uphold the goal idea. If the fundamental concept of the Jews as workers on the highway is still accepted today—as I think it is by many of us—then the idea that a ticket on the El Al airline can buy redemption or the realization of the goal is seen to be rather far-fetched.
Of all this, Professor Toynbee had nothing to say. But if so keen an observer as he has failed to perceive the true spiritual content of Jewish life, does it altogether reflect on his own judgment, or could it be that contemporary Jewish life is much too preoccupied with speculation about Mr. Beigin’s tactics or the success of the Claims Conference? Were Toynbee more aware of the extent to which religious and ethical thought remains alive for some Jews of today and of how dynamically it contributes to Western ideas, he would not, one feels, have as readily applied the term “Syriac fossil” to the Jewish community. It is not for me to say whether in fact there ever existed such a thing as the “Syriac civilization” and what precisely it meant to the peoples who formed it. However, when used to characterize a community still in existence, the word fossil implies that it is petrified and worth merely a respectable niche in a museum. Hence we Jews have good reason to resent Toynbee’s remarks.
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A high measure of traditionalism has indeed characterized Jewish life and thought in the past. Still, that is only half the picture. The other half, which has been equally characteristic, is the large measure of nonconformity encouraged by the absence of a clerical hierarchy and by the practice of scholarly discussion. Jewish thinkers like Maimonides were traditionalists and nonconformists at once. With Maimonides, systematized tradition went hand in hand with ideas about the nature of God and after-life that were greatly at variance with those held by his Jewish contemporaries, and for a long time after his death Maimonides had fierce opponents as well as fervent supporters among the Jews. If today he is exalted by both Conservative and Liberal Jews, it is for different reasons that are inherent in his blend of tradition and dissent. This blend has, in fact, characterized great Jewish thinkers ever since.
Though Baruch Spinoza made the love of God and the unity of the universe the sup porting pillars of his philosophy, he was also the first to apply historical criticism to the Bible. Moses Mendelssohn, too, combined the old and the new, the Bible and Hebrew with German and the spirit of the Enlightenment. And how fascinating was that blend of Jewish thought and personal insight in Albert Einstein, who did not reject tradition but advocated its intelligent use and adaptation. He himself held that a personal God who could intervene in natural events or deal out personal rewards and punishments was untenable, but he did uphold the Jewish traditions of the ultimate goal, of the meaningfulness of history, and of the spiritual unity of the universe. “Syriac fossil” obviously makes no sense when applied to a people that produces men like these.
Nor would it be unfair to expect Professor Toynbee to pay some heed to men like Franz Rosenzweig, and be aware of the impact of Martin Buber’s religious thought on Christian theologians before pronouncing any verdict on contemporary Jewry, let alone the whole history of Diaspora Jewry. The conclusion is inescapable that Toynbee is largely ignorant of Jewish intellectual history at its most creative and interesting—which makes his comments on Jewry all the more presumptuous.
Had he been more familiar with that history, he could hardly have asserted that the hope of the return to Palestine, as the core of the Diaspora’s ethos, had become a problem only recently. In fact, it was extensively debated by Jews in the West in the first decades of the 19th century. After the Jews of Western Europe, starting with the deputies of French Jewry assembled in Paris in 1806, had formally decided to regard themselves as citizens of the states in which they lived and had been granted full civil rights, rabbinical meetings and the first Jewish periodicals in Germany dwelled at great length on the point of eliminating from religious services and from Jewish prayer books all references to a return to Palestine. What was decided in theory over a hundred years ago was demonstrated in practice after the establishment of the State of Israel, when the seven million Jews of the West elected to stay in their native countries. This decision was momentous and historical, but not new. Its originators were those Furtados, Friedlanders, Jacobsons, and Abraham Geigers who a century and more back began laying the theoretical and practical foundations for a Jewish Diaspora that would be integrated in the Western world. Much has changed since then, but fundamentally their order of things still obtains, and is accepted in practice by many Jews who do not even know the names of these men. No one can simply shut out these past one hundred and fifty years of Jewish history, least of all a historian.
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On the other hand, where Toynbee insists on the survival value of the Diaspora, he has historical evidence on his side. The wider the Jews spread the less became the risk of their total disappearance or extermination. The over-concentration of Jews in East Europe had become a problem long before Hitler. Conflict and bloodshed on a large scale continuously threatened in countries like Poland before the advent of the Nazis, as every student of Poland between the wars knows. Had 90 per cent of world Jewry continued to live in Europe, and had not America provided the opportunity of building up a new and prosperous Diaspora, there would not have been a Balfour Declaration in the First World War, and the Second would have had an even more devastating effect upon us. Who can make so bold as to assert that history has no future disasters in store, and that survival might not depend once more on the American or another Jewish Diaspora?
Nor can it be denied that other diasporas are emerging everywhere. Aliens have penetrated en masse into provinces of countries whose capitals alone knew colonies of foreigners on a large scale in the past. Europe has more refugees than ever. Britain now has substantial diasporas of Poles, Italians, Cypriote, West Indians, Indians, and Africans. The sight of a colored driver or conductor has become a familiar feature in the provincial towns of England. NATO is developing an American and British diaspora on a large scale, and one that is not of quite as temporary a nature as may appear. Never before in the history of the United States have so many of her citizens lived abroad, gone to school abroad, and got married abroad. The Israeli diaspora, the community of Israelis abroad, is perhaps the latest dispersion; its members, as American and European observers have been quick to notice, form a group apart and distinct from the “native” Jewish diasporas in many countries.
In the United States, Toynbee finds not only a strong and prosperous Jewish community, but also other thriving communities that are religious and ethnic in character and yet manage to weave the strands of their own traditions into those of American society at large. In fact, the picture of America as a plural society has inspired his belief in the possibility of a United States of the Earth organized as a global community of communities. There is, however, some misunderstanding here on Toynbee’s part, and it is a significant one.
A plural society is not what the fathers of the American Constitution, whom Toynbee commends for their political wisdom, intended. They envisaged a new society of free and equal individuals, not a society of free and equal communities. It took the 20th century, with its group catastrophes and its systematic study of social psychology, to discover that the 18th-century image of a nation composed of individuals was perhaps a false ideal, and that the normal individual wants the social comfort and security offered to him by a closer, more intimate group.
Toynbee’s picture of American society as a plural one turns out to be almost as distorted as his rather empty picture of the Jewish Diaspora. The concept of the melting pot is 18th-century in spirit if not origin, and deliberately ignores the right of any ethnic group to maintain its identity and cultural autonomy. From the point of view of an outright “Americanizer,” Cubans, Poles, Italians, Jews, Mexicans, Chinese, Puerto Ricans are mere residues that have not yet been melted down, but whose eventual disintegration as groups is both desirable and certain.
American literature and social studies abound in problems of social friction, prejudice, and pressure groups. Though it was in the United States that the terms “community” and “community center” first won wide circulation (it was during the first decade of this century), and though America has been in the forefront in group psychology and sociological field work, American thought still clings largely to the “self-evident truths” of 1776. The numerous apparently distinct groups surviving in the United States today are not there because of American ideals—though American liberty and democracy have something to do with it—but despite them. Thoughts about the future of the Jewish Diaspora in America must take account of that fact. Actually, Toynbee seems to have transferred the concept of a plural society to the United States from the British Commonwealth, where it happens to be much more popular, and for good reason.
In Britain—as some readers unfamiliar with English usage might not know—the word state means nothing; national anthem is a misnomer because “God Save the Queen” is not one; nor is there a national flag or a national language. The idea of an English “melting pot” has never arisen and, in fact, the nation-state, which Toynbee regards as a typical product of Western civilization, has never existed in his own country, and the British Commonwealth is actually much nearer his ideal of a community of communities than the United States. (Consequently, a Jewish Diaspora in the United States faces psychological problems of integration which are different from those of the Jewish Diaspora of the British Commonwealth. If Western Jewry is to develop healthy communities these problems will have to be given careful study.)
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Toynbee had nothing to say in his talk about the social and economic functions of the Jewish Diaspora. Was their dispersion not an essential pre-condition for the activity of Jews as economic and cultural middlemen? Eighteenth-century observers in Britain and in France marveled at the phenomenon of the Jewish Diaspora and its survival. The first French Encyclopédie in 1772 attributed to the Jews the function of providing international contacts; they enabled the remotest nations “to converse and to correspond.” Something of that role survives today, and not so very long ago it was made a criminal offense in Communist countries, where the press used the term “cosmopolitan” as an expletive and synonym for Jew. Yet the promotion of international contacts is a task which the Jewish community should regard as even more imperative today than in the past. And if hostile critics, fascist or Communist, regard the Jews with suspicion because they are citizens of the world, this should only strengthen the Jew in his belief that he is true to his old historical role.
Few will deny that the time has come to give more thought to the spiritual and physical foundations of the Jewish Diaspora. We owe Professor Toynbee a measure of gratitude, not for pronouncing us the pioneer diaspora-builders, a title we did not deserve in the past and do not deserve as yet in the present. In the past our communities modeled their structure to fit their environment. Today the shortcomings of our communal and inter-communal organization are too glaring to permit the contention that the Jewish should serve as model to other diasporas. But we owe Professor Toynbee gratitude nevertheless for calling our own attention to the historical distinctiveness of the diaspora form of social, political, and religious life. He has jolted and angered us in doing so, but if he will have provoked us thereby to a new and more critical examination of the forms of communal life under which we Jews live in the Diaspora we shall be content.
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