The epoch-making changes that have taken place in recent Jewish history have caused more than one Jewish historian to reexamine the basic assumptions of earlier writers. Not only does the extirpation of Jewish civilization in Eastern and Central Europe mark a decisive shift in the distribution of the Jewish population of the world, it appears to negate Simon Dubnow’s view that the essence of Jewish history lies in the urge for full Jewish self-expression through autonomous institutions.
The Western Jewries that lived most of their lives within non-Jewish patterns seemed to the Dubnovist school a pale reflection and dry limb of the real Jewish existence of Eastern Europe. Today these Jewries may have come to represent a primary datum, a culminating point, rather than a peripheral and secondary manifestation of Jewish life. And in view of the decline of Jewish cohesion and unity that has taken place in both the democratic West and the Communist East, under circumstances of real or merely formal civil equality, it would seem doubtful whether the historian will be entitled to apply the same terms of reference to the Diaspora history of the future as he did to Jewish history in the still not too distant past—terms like “the community of a special fate,” “identifiable modes of Jewish selfexpression,” “a corporate Jewish contribution or ingredient.”
The emergence of Israel has vindicated the Messianic-nationalist vision and laid for the first time in two thousand years the foundations for a wholly integrated Jewish life. The fact, however, that the majority of Jews, though powerfully affected by the resurrection of Jewish statehood, show every intention of continuing to live outside Israel is bound to bring about a revision of that strenuously dynamic conception, wholly dominated by the category of “becoming,” which treated all of Diaspora history as one long preparation for the Zionist consummation, and hardly acknowledged the force of the inertia of mere “being” here and now.
The main question the future historian must resolve for himself is this: Is it right to consider the problem of Jewish nationhood in Israel, and the problem of the Jews living in the Diaspora among other nations, as one subject?
There are people in the Western dispersion who, afraid of being accused of a dual loyalty, claim that the State of Israel is to them just another little state, the only difference being that most of its inhabitants profess, at least nominally, the Jewish religion. There are some cocksure Israelis who proclaim that the sovereign State of Israel, a country like any other, stands in no special relation to Jews outside its borders. But even if there were no religious or cultural ties between Israel and the Diaspora, this attitude would still be completely at variance with reality. It is just not true that Israel and the Diaspora are becoming so dissociated in the consciousness of Jews and Gentiles as to do away with the deeply ingrained habit of associating all Jews everywhere in common responsibility. Should one of those calamities with which Jewish history is punctuated overtake the Western Diaspora, above all American Jewry, the State of Israel would be shaken to its foundations. On the other hand, should the Jewish state be engulfed by a catastrophe, the legal status and economic position of Jews elsewhere might not be affected at once, but the blow to their self-confidence, the loss of the vicarious prestige which Israel had bestowed upon them in the eyes of the world, and the general disenchantment would be too great to be sustained for long.
Nor can Israel claim that as “an independent state like any other” she has placed herself beyond the reach of those special laws to which the unique Jewish destiny has been subject for so long. The ultimatum addressed last autumn by Marshal Bulganin to Ben Gurion was an eloquent comment on the fact that the handicaps besetting Israel have a dimension additional to and different from the limitations under which other mall states live in our days. In a note to Libya, Sudan, or Haiti, the Soviet leader would never have hinted so darkly yet so directly about their very right to exist as states. The Jewish right to Israel is not taken for granted. One is reminded of the famous words of General Bonaparte about monarchical Europe’s non-recognition of the French Republic—“France is like the sun, she needs no one’s recognition, she is there in blinding splendor.” But Israel needs recognition as no other political entity in a world where the existence of a state is, under international law, proven solely by the fact of its recognition by other states.
Thus, at a deeper level, Israel is still involved in the problematic ambiguity attaching to Jewish existence everywhere and at all times. Abnormality, insecurity, ambiguity, absence of full and unequivocal matter-of-factness and recognition continue to haunt her existence; the refusal of the Arab states to recognize Israel seems a parallel to the European-Christian treatment of Jews as late-comers and aliens. The bitter disillusionment of Israelis with the recent policies of the United States was not a little offset by President Eisenhower’s emphatic statement that since 1948 he had never contemplated that Israeli-Arab problems could be dealt with without accepting Israel as a historic fact and as a country whose problems were like those of any other.
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Jewish Fate and Totalitarian Messianism
Jews of the liberal persuasion were less shaken in their convictions by the Jewish catastrophe under Hitler, in spite of its enormity, than Jews sympathetic to Communism have been by Soviet anti-Semitism. After all, the Dreyfus affair and the persistence of discrimination amid conditions of legal equality had accustomed Jews to the limitations of their situation even under the most liberal of regimes. It was Communist Messianism that inherited in our time the fervent hopes of the early Jewish liberals that a general cure for the evils of mankind would do away with every vestige of the peculiar Jewish predicament.
Many a non-Communist was prepared to overlook the fact that totalitarian Messianism, insofar as it asserted an exclusive doctrine embracing every aspect of human life and social existence, was an uncongenial setting for Jews, who are nothing if not non-conformists. Even those to whom the unity of the Jewish people was an article of faith were willing to accept the separation of the Soviet Jews from the rest of world Jewry on the grounds that, as a church militant surrounded by the city of the devil, the USSR could not permit any part of her population to maintain contact with an international community that had a kind of foreign policy of its own. These “tolerant” Jews knew, of course, that Jewish life shrivels when it is deprived of free channels of communication for ideas, aid, sympathy, and a general sense of kinship, and that it can prosper only in an open society. But the atrophy of Jewish life did not seem to them too high a price to pay for truly equal status.
Events have given the lie to the claim that a Communist regime would do away with the disposition of the non-Jewish world to bracket all Jews in a joint responsibility and guilt by association. The Moscow “doctors’ plot,” the execution of Jewish writers and artists and other manifestations of official and social anti-Semitism in the Soviet world are, like all other evils, now blamed by the Communists on Stalin or Beria. But this is to evade the fundamental issue.
It used to be confidently said that the triumph of socialism would not only eliminate all the conditions making for social and racial conflict, but that it would inaugurate the reign of fully scientific and deterministic laws of social development under which human arbitrariness and individual or group perversity would be ruled out. If such terrific effectiveness is now ascribed to the personal arbitrariness of one man, surely this is to deny the fool-proof scientific determinism of the Communist system and to open the door to all those psychological and other influences which remain conditioned, but are rarely negated, by social and economic factors. And it is indeed these influences which constitute the core of what has been called the Jewish problem.
Those historians whom faith in dialectical materialism or left-wing sympathies had led to ascribe all anomalies of Jewish existence to its peculiar socio-economic structure, and therefore to hope that these would be conjured away in a classless society, may well now come to see that the top-heavy socioeconomic structure of the Jews was ultimately itself an outcome of their initially exceptional character. The Jews were different and were regarded as such, and therefore went—and were driven—into special occupations. In a sense, the experience of the Communist countries goes to confirm a “law” of Jewish history: a new society, regime, or economic system welcomes Jews as pioneers, but thrusts them out unceremoniously as soon as the “natives” are ready to take over the Jewish functions. This was the case in the early days of urban colonization in Europe, in the first stages of laissez-faire capitalism, and the same development appears to have taken place in Russia since the October Revolution.
Under the most dissimilar historical circumstances, the Jewish fate remains very much the same. At the end of the Second World War the Soviet troops were bound to appear as saviors to Jewish survivors emerging from the forests, bunkers, and caves of Eastern Europe. The Jews had every reason to cooperate with the new regimes, and could offer them cadres of trained personnel and even leadership. But then came the Stalinist drive against “cosmopolitanism,” against Jewish intellectuals and Jews in general; and today the resurgence of the Poles, the Hungarians, and others under Soviet Russian domination hit Jews from the other side insofar as they were regarded as collaborators of Stalinism. In brief, fate seems always to prove more potent than any human resolve to change things by imposing new, man-willed and man-guided laws.
The historian need not be ashamed to use so heavily charged a word as “fate.” The fate of a nation, like that of a person, may be the working out of the traumas of early childhood, the outcome of some basic and decisive experience. The Jewish psyche received a traumatic twist when the Jewish belief in chosenness sustained the terrible shock of national disaster and exile. This made most Jews impervious to the assimilating influences of Hellenism and Rome. And they could hardly be absorbed by the amorphous barbarians in whose midst they found themselves in the early Middle Ages. Not only were they the bearers of a higher and more ancient civilization, by then they were burdened with the charge that they had killed Jesus. Their status as never wholly assimilable strangers in the midst of the European nations was thus determined for centuries to come, and there is little evidence as yet that in the New World, where all are strangers and newcomers, the Jew has ceased to be regarded as more alien and more different than all other newcomers.
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Content and Scope of Jewish History
What will be the subject matter of the Jewish historian of the Diaspora of the future, when Jewish life will have lost its old cohesion and the individual Jew will be living most of his life within non-Jewish patterns; when religious observance will often have been reduced to a minimum or ceased altogether, and Jewish learning will have assumed the character of a philological and antiquarian interest; and when communal activities will not amount to more than care for synagogue and cemetery, charity balls, and youth clubs?
How shall we pick out the slender threads which weave themselves into a Jewish collective pattern distinct from the so much more salient non-Jewish patterns? How shall we detect, in the behavior and actions of seemingly unconnected individuals, features significantly Jewish? To what extent shall we be justified in pronouncing these a Jewish contribution or ingredient?
We are here confronted with that supreme difficulty which Chaim Weizmann used to call Jewish “ghostliness.” The world is scarcely large enough to contain the Jews and they are said to possess all the wealth of the earth, and yet when you strain every nerve to fix them in a definition they elude you like a mirage. It seems impossible to lay a finger on anything tangible and measurable in the Jew’s Jewishness; yet an ailing, all-devouring self-consciousness comes like a film between him and the world. Not taken into account when things are normal and prosperous, he is seen as ubiquitous, all-powerful, sinister when there is blame to be apportioned. I believe the links holding Jews together—in the words of Edmund Burke—to be as invisible as air and as strong as the heaviest chains, and the Jewish ingredient to be as imperceptible to the senses yet as effective in results as vital energy itself. Such things, however, are too subtle for the historian’s customary crude techniques and his far from subtle instruments.
Jewish impulses and reactions, attitudes and sensitiveness, Jewish modes of feeling and patterns of behavior call for the intuition of the artist, and indeed can only be intimated by symbols, conjured up by poetic incantation, and communicated by the art of the novelist. In brief, the Jew is part of a collective destiny, even when he does not know it or is unwilling to share in it. To consider as Jews only persons who explicitly affirm their Judaism by positive participation in Jewish activities would be tantamount to approving the statement made in the 1920’s by a German Jewish Social Democratic leader: he maintained that he was no Jew because he had sent a letter of resignation to the Berlin Jewish community—upon which he was asked by a Gentile British friend whether he thought that Jews were a club. Even when they live their entire life in a non-Jewish milieu and have little contact among themselves, Jews still bear within them the imprint of a centuries-old community whose members were regarded by themselves, and by the outside world, as responsible for one another: a community that lived apart, within a hermetically closed framework of laws and regulations, climatic conditions, and economic pursuits, and that was imbued with an intense self-consciousness because it believed in its own special destiny on the one hand, and was discriminated against and persecuted on the other.
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Nevertheless, the Jewish historian would be quite mistaken to direct his attention to every single Jew, even one who had never had any ties with Judaism, on the assumption that all the activities and associations engaged in by every person of Jewish extraction came within the purview of Jewish history. Nor should encouragement be given to the presentation of Jewish history as a collection of biographies of persons of Jewish ancestry who made good in the world. History addresses itself to social patterns; the individual—whatever the ultimate uniqueness of every human being—is significant as a representative type. In the absence of an all-embracing Jewish life of the kind that existed in Eastern Europe, the historian’s attempt to isolate specifically “Jewish” associations and activities such as attendance at services, charity campaigns, intercession on behalf of suffering brethren abroad, absorption of immigrants, and even Jewish scholarship (of mainly philological or antiquarian character) will prove depressingly unrewarding and jejune.
When the elusive yet extremely potent Jewish patterns of thought, feeling, and behavior that have crystallized around an extremely tenacious nucleus of race and religion no longer receive—outside Israel—integrated and limpid expression in autonomous and closely knit communities, the nature of these patterns will perhaps best be brought into relief by constant confrontation with general, non-Jewish patterns, and by turning our attention upon the encounter between Jew and Gentile. The earlier historians were naturally inclined to pursue their quest for meaning in Jewish history from within. The future historian of the Jews may prefer to operate from the vantage point of general history. The older historians were impressed by the uniqueness of the history of a people dwelling apart. The newer ones are likely to be struck by the paradox that it is precisely in the uniqueness of a clannish, marginal community dispersed around the world that the secret of the universal significance of Jewish history lies.
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Jewish History as a Part of Universal History
An attempt to sort out the elements of an interpretation of Jewish history from the point of view of world history must nowadays take cognizance of two facts. One is of far-reaching significance: the shift of balance which has been taking place between the West and the non-white civilizations. The other is of a more topical and probably ephemeral nature: the treatment of the Jews in Arnold Toynbee’s Study of History, the most ambitious world-historical synthesis so far undertaken in the 20th century. The two facts are, in my opinion, closely connected.
I believe that the lack of respect and the air of irritation, if not downright hostility, which mark Professor Toynbee’s approach to Jewish history are on a par with his violent reaction against Europe-centrism, and that both are derived from a deep sense of guilt toward the colonial peoples and a corresponding collapse of European self-confidence. What a distance divides Toynbee from Macaulay, who was so cheerfully sure that “a single shelf of a good European library was worth the whole native literature of India and Arabia,” and to whom the peoples of the East were simply candidates for admission to Western civilization!
In Western Christian civilization’s vision of history, the Jew occupied a vital or at least a unique place. To the multitudes of eastern and southeastern Asia, Jews are an unknown, incomprehensible, and negligible factor. The Jew in the West might be persecuted, reviled, despised, expelled, and massacred, but he was indissolubly connected with the central event in the history of Christendom. He constituted a terrific problem. He embodied a great mystery. Immense effectiveness was ascribed to him, for good or evil. He appeared to be a factor of significance out of all proportion to his numbers.
The Jews have a long, terrible, and bloodstained account with the Christian West. I venture to suggest, however, that the rise of non-European powers is already beginning to make the record look somewhat different and less straightforward than was the case even in the recent past. For one thing, no Jewish historian, whatever his evaluation of the various factors involved in the restoration of Jewish statehood, can ignore the fact that Zionism would never have had a chance of success if centuries of Christian teaching and worship, liturgy and legend had not conditioned the Western nations to respond almost instinctively to the words “Zion” and “Israel,” and thus to see in the Zionist ideal not a romantic chimera or an imperialistic design to wrest a country from its actual inhabitants, but the consummation of an eternal promise and hope. The Far Eastern civilizations, however, show no trace of Jewish associations. Their record is clean of anti-Semitism—but it is also empty of Jews.
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Toynbee and the Jews
The whole centuries-long relationship of the West to the East is made to appear by Toynbee as one of sustained aggression, motivated by insatiable avarice, against essentially contemplative and pacific civilizations. Church militant, European nationalism and racialism, modern imperialism, acquisitive capitalism, and—in some of its aspects—revolutionary Communism are only phases and versions as it were of the sin of self-centered pride and arrogance. Far from having its cause in intellectual or spiritual superiority, the victory of the West over the Eastern and other non-European peoples, Toynbee believes, is due to one single factor—technological mastery. The Western absorption in techniques is evidence that Western man was much less anxious to know the truth than he was eager to turn discoveries and inventions into instruments of self-aggrandizement and dominion. The Chinese fathomed some of the mysteries of science long before the Europeans, but remained indifferent to the possibilities of science’s utilitarian application.
The sin of pride has always carried its own punishment with it. Hubris prepares its own undoing. Greed expanding and conquering generates irreconcilable social cleavages and antagonisms within the victorious society, and bitter resentment among the conquered. The internal proletariat, alienated from the body politic, feels a common resentment with the external proletariat of the enslaved nations. Together they evolve a system of values—a new religion—to match and oppose the values of the conquerors and to act as a sublimating compensation for the enjoyments from which they are debarred. Dominant society, which has waxed fat and sluggish and succumbed to the malaise of the satiated, is pervaded by the new religion and simultaneously destroyed by the combined blows administered from within by the internal proletariat, and from without by the external proletariat. Western civilization—with Communism corroding it from within and closing in on it from the outside—having now reached this stage, it can be saved only by a new universal religion based on a synthesis of the four great creeds—Christianity, Islam, Buddhism, and Hinduism. Such a universal religion, Toynbee holds, will redeem it from the cancer of aggressive egotism by enabling it to achieve blissful reconciliation with the eternal order of things.
Toynbee appears to trace the original sin of the West, self-idolatry, back to the “arrogant” Judaic idea of a Chosen People. Hebrew society was according to him only a parochial, marginal community within a much wider Syriac civilization. Judaic religion evolved in the encounter between the Syriac exiles in Babylon and the proletariat of Mesopotamia, just as Christianity arose out of the meeting between the Jews oppressed by Rome and the proletariat of Hellenistic-Roman society.
That the tribal god Yahveh, and not any one of his so much more powerful rivals within “Syriac civilization,” came to be accepted as the One God of the Universe is attributed by Toynbee to the all-devouring jealousy of Yahveh, who would not brook other gods and incited his believers to destroy all idols and images.
Obsessed by its tribal exclusiveness, Judaism failed to seize the chance, offered it by incipient Christianity, of becoming a universal religion, and instead rose against Rome in a nationalist uprising. When the Jewish revolt was crushed, Judaism’s role was played out. The subsequent two thousand years of Jewish history represented the meaningless perdurance of a fossil. The Jews’ only response to the challenge of exile and persecution, Toynbee says, was to maintain a hermetically closed, highly intricate ritualistic framework, and to accumulate great financial power.
At the end of this long period of fossilized existence, Zionism marked another outburst of tribal arrogance. Yielding to the essentially Western passion for archaization, the Jews, instead of keeping their hopes fixed on miraculous Divine deliverance, launched an attack on the Arab inhabitants of Palestine, succeeded in expelling them, and set up a tiny statelet of their own which in its crude aggressiveness combined all the disagreeable features of a military garrison and the Wild West.
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Imbibed by the Christian West, the Judaic spirit acted as a potent evil factor in the history of Western civilization. The intolerant militant exclusiveness of the Church—a primary Judaic legacy—was in due course transformed into the self-idolatry of parochial nationalisms like the English and the French. Taught by the example of Joshua’s extermination of the pagan Canaanites, Puritan settlers felt no qualms about annihilating the Red Indians. Believing themselves to be the heirs of the Jews to whom the earth had been promised as an inheritance, European imperialist nations went out to conquer and enslave the non-European races. Having turned their backs on the One God, they abandoned themselves completely to Mammon: all their energies were applied to perfecting the means of accumulating wealth and reaching the highest degree of rational utilitarian efficiency. In brief, the West underwent—in the words of Toynbee—a process of “Judaization.”
At the other end of the scale, socialism and Communism were nothing but a version of the Judaic apocalypse, except that the final consummation was again looked for, not in the intervention of the Almighty, but as the result of social cataclysm and a violent uprising of men.
So much for Toynbee’s definition of the Jewish ingredient in Western civilization. How will the Jewish historian, coming from general history, define it?
There is every justification, it seems to me, for the view that finds a distinctive Jewish ingredient at the very core of Western civilization. This is the measure of the paradox: an essentially marginal group said to be the most clannish of all communities, the Jews have in their tribal seclusion in Palestine as well as in their worldwide dispersion, as spirit and as flesh and blood, played a powerful part in making a collection of tribes, communities, and countries into a civilization. Needless to add, they were not alone in the field and their influence has not been invariably beneficial.
I shall not labor the obvious: that Judaism was the parent of Christianity, and that therefore almost the whole of Jewish history till Jesus, and on into the first centuries of Christianity—the period in which the latter received its shape either within the Jewish community or in the course of debate with Rabbinic Judaism, and spread through the Jewish communities along the shores of the Mediterranean—constitutes a vital chapter in world history. One can well imagine a future Israeli historian undertaking to write the history of Western Christian civilization as the story of the Judaic kernel in its encounter with Greek philosophy and art, the mystery religions of the Orient, the institutions and laws of the Roman Empire, the Germanic traditions, the facts of European economy, etc., etc.
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The Idea of the Chosen People in Western Civilization
I shall take up only the one idea which Professor Toynbee thinks to be the most distinctive and effective Jewish ingredient in world history—the idea of a Chosen People. I agree as to its paramount importance. But my reasons for thinking that Western civilization (and consequently universal history) would not have been the same without it are altogether different from his.
To Dr. Toynbee, the whole concept of chosenness signifies mere tribal exclusiveness and a conceited claim to racial superiority. He omits the attributes of “a holy nation,” “a people of priests.” I believe that the uniqueness of ancient Judaism did not consist so much in the monotheistic conception, traces of which we can find among neighboring peoples, or in moral precepts whose similitudes we can find in Greek philosophy and the teachings of the Stoa—it consisted in the idea of a whole people’s recognizing, as its sovereign, God alone. The laws under which it lives are not dictated by a ruler, are not derived from the will of the people, are not a utilitarian contrivance. Hence what Matthew Arnold called the Hebraic passion for right acting, as distinct from the Greek passion for right seeing and thinking in order to know, experience, and dominate the world around.
Here we have the secret of the victory of parochial Yahveh over Helios, the god of the sun, and all the other pagan deities, and indeed over Hellenistic philosophies like the Stoa. The uniqueness of Judaism did not lie, as Toynbee says, in the devouring jealousy of Yahveh, but in the total and one-sided absorption of a whole people—not a sect of the chosen or a monastic order—in the service of an impersonal idea. The teachings of other Near Eastern religions were more tolerant, more open to sweetness and light—and left very many things outside their scope. This is why they failed to revolutionize history. The Hellenistic systems are incomparable in their broad humanity, but they were addressed to and absorbed by individuals as counsels of personal perfection. Not conclusions of close discursive reasoning, but the living model and the all-absorbing passion proved so effective in the Jewish case. From that point of view, Toynbee’s attempt to dilute the sharp identity of the Judaic source by pointing to a wider Syriac context of ideas and beliefs is hardly relevant.
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What distinguishes mature Christian civilization from other civilizations is to be sought not so much in particular tenets of Christianity, to which parallels of some kind may be found in other religions, but in the fundamentally and peculiarly Western relationship between church and state. There was no example of it in antiquity, and none to my knowledge in Islam or the Eastern Asiatic civilizations. And this ingredient is substantially Jewish. The church means in this respect the universality of believers, “the people of priests,” and not merely the hierarchy. The members of the ecclesia are actuated by a consciousness that, as a “holy nation” and a “people of priests,” they belong not to the earthly state alone, but to a community of transcendental laws and aims.
The permanent tension between church and state, as long as neither proved able to absorb the other, is to my mind the source of the essentially Western obsession with the problem of the legitimacy of power. It is not enough that the law is promulgated by the authority which is recognized to have power to legislate. King, parliament, the sovereign people, even pope and council, must all the time exhibit their credentials in the face of divine or natural law. Natural law is, of course, of Hellenistic and Roman provenance. Yet it is fair to say that without its being amalgamated with divine law, it would have failed to become the great formative influence that it did.
One should not underestimate the other factors which have shaped Western ideas of state, law, and legitimacy, such as the Germanic traditions, feudalism, the guild system, the changes in methods of production. Yet I believe with Lord Acton that none of these was so effective as the tension between church and state, which was the greatest and most important vehicle of ideas and controversies and which, as it were, enveloped all the others and set the tone. When political theorists of the West spoke of Oriental despotism, what they meant was that the Orient did not know the problem of the legitimacy of power. Power to them was a datum, a fact of nature, an elemental, amoral force to be taken for granted like sunshine and rain, storm and plague. It need not always be tyrannical and malign, it might be as benign as one could wish. But it is given, it is there, and we have to bow to it.
Now it is the tension between church and state, based on the idea of a chosen holy people, that gave the history of European nations its highly dynamic quality in comparison with the early stagnation of the non-European civilizations. Thanks to the Judaic concept the Papacy never could, and perhaps never really wished to, reduce the body of lay believers to mere receivers of grace through the instrumentality of sacramental mystery and miracle. The task of realizing the Kingdom of God was never restricted to the ecclesia docens. It always continued to rest with the whole body of believers. Hence the sense of dignity and awful responsibility of a Christian nation. It could not accept easily an evil king any more than a corrupt pope. For Christianity could never quite be reduced to a matter of personal ascetic discipline and unworldly holiness, and it could not divest itself of all responsibility for this world on the ground that its kingdom was wholly of another. It was thus bound to feel the permanent challenge to realize its high calling here and now. If this be true of the Catholic Church at all times, it is especially true of Calvinism and the Puritans in Britain and America.
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There is, I submit with Dr. Toynbee, a direct line from the Church Militant permeated with the Judaic idea of a holy nation of priests, to modern nationalism with its ideology of a chosen people. We are only too painfully aware in the 20th century of the terrible ravages wrought by nationalism run wild. Yet it would be wrong for the historian to forget that in the first half of the 19th century, the national idea in the mouth of a Mazzini, and indeed even of a Fichte, not to speak of the Polish Mickiewicz, was a prophetic clarion call for spiritual regeneration. Far from proclaiming tribal war on neighbors thought inferior, it imposed a special mission, a particularly strenuous obligation on one’s own nation within the scheme of mankind’s endeavor toward higher things and universal freedom. It is indeed most strange to read today Fichte’s boast that the German nation, the Urvolk of Europe, would not demean itself by joining the general bloody scramble for territories and colonies, and would take no part in the squalid game of political and mercantilist rivalry. The only truly original nation in Europe, since all others had their thoughts and feelings shaped by an acquired language—whether Latin or German—the Germans were destined to maintain, with brows furrowed and spirits keyed to the highest pitch of concentration, a special communion with eternal values.
Everyone is familiar with the religious, Messianic overtones of Mazzini’s philosophy of nationalism, with such slogans as “God and the people,” “nationality is a mission,” “nation means sacrifice”; with Mazzini’s conception of patriotism as a counterpart to selfish utilitarianism and moral self-indulgence; with his vision of a federation of free peoples, each with its own mission, under the inspiring guidance of Roma Terza—Rome of the people—the first Rome having been that of the emperors and the second that of the popes. Mickiewicz, like Mazzini, consciously drew on Biblical ideas and imagery in describing Poland as the suffering Remnant of Israel, destined to atone for the sins of other nations and redeem them through her self-sacrifice.
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Self-surrender and Self-assertion
Professor Toynbee wrings his hands over the horrors wrought by modern nationalism and its evil offspring imperialism, seeing in them nothing but irredeemable evil, pride, and hubris, which stand in such crass contrast to the broad, quietist tolerance of the Eastern religions and civilizations.
It seems to me that in his prostration before the East and self-flagellation as a Westerner, Dr. Toynbee has missed a truth of awful import, a mystery of tragic grandeur—the ambivalence with which the whole of the Western achievement is charged from the start. It is an infinitely tragic fact that great good is somehow always mixed up with terrible evil, that the worst seems always to be the degeneration of the best, that some Hegelian List der Vernunft, a trick of Universal Reason, complicates in a sardonic manner the yearning for self-surrender with the craving for self-assertion.
Professor Toynbee is filled with reverence for those Eastern civilizations whose religions are a syncretistic synthesis of various, often heterogeneous, strands, and are ultimately the concern of the individual only, and whose churches know no intolerant militancy. He is attracted by those vast conglomerations of men who are not primarily political animals at all, and whose passion for power is held back by a highly developed capacity for contemplative communion with the invisible world and the attainment of that peace which passeth understanding—a peace for which we all strain in vain, and of which only very few in our midst ever catch a glimpse.
Nearer home Dr. Toynbee selects the Ottoman Empire for special commendation. That was a system in which racial, linguistic, and religious communities lived as millets side by side on a completely non-political basis. He is not worried by the fact that the Turkey of the sultans was a byword for despotism, corruption, and bribery, that even the Ullema, the supreme Moslem court of experts in Islam, was most of the time unable to restrain the cruel vagaries of personal despotism; that under such a regime there could be no individual rights and no corporate consciousness or self-respect; that only a palace plot or the assassin’s dagger, and at a lower level bribery and flattery, could avert the pure arbitrariness of brute power; and that consequently complete stagnation overcame all cultural endeavor and spiritual vitality under the Ottoman Turks. In the vast empires where there is no political life and no popular passion, the individual may at times attain a very high degree of personal, unworldly perfection. But it is at the cost of the vitality and the moral advancement of the body social.
It is a curious thing that a man so sensitive to any sign of arrogance and pride, and who over acres of self-analysis recording his visitations makes such tremendous efforts to be humble, should at the same time be so fascinated—as Dr. Toynbee is—by colossal dimensions, the mighty barbarian conquerors wading in blood up to their knees, building sky-high pyramids of the skulls of their slaughtered foes. England and France, on the other hand, Professor Toynbee again and again calls parochial, puffed-up little countries.
The finest flowering of culture never occurred on the vast expanses of steppe and desert but in tiny, overcrowded, noisy, and proud communities such as Athens, Jerusalem, Alexandria, Florence, and Amsterdam. Why damn vitality by calling it arrogance? The truth of the matter is that an ambitious undertaking like Toynbee’s to embrace all ages and all civilizations in one system, with the help of tidy schemata, sweeping generalizations, and quantitative measurements, can afford little room for the understanding of the unique phenomenon, the local idiom, and the particular concatenation of data and circumstances; little room for the exquisite miniature; and nothing of that feeling for the specific situation, limpid and throbbing with real life, which comes from long meditation and loving immersion in it.
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The Jewish Ingredient in Industrial Civilization
In the last two centuries Western history has indeed become universal history. The non-European civilizations, sunk in languor or atrophy, have had their fate shaped by the expansion of Western capitalism, which turned the whole world into one economic and cultural unit. In our own day the essentially European ideologies of nationalism, democracy, and Communism—not the organic growth and inner dialectic of their own heritage—stimulated the Asiatic and African peoples to assert themselves and seek self-determination.
I agree with Dr. Toynbee that in the forging of the various instruments for the unification of the world by the West—or if one prefers, by Western imperialism—the Jewish ingredient played the role of a powerful catalyst. Jews as living men, and not merely the Jewish spiritual legacy, moved onto the center of the stage of world history in the 19th and 20th centuries. One need not belittle the part Jews played in maintaining international trade almost alone in the early Middle Ages, in interpreting and transmitting for Christian scholarship the classical wisdom preserved in Arab translations, and as a lever in early urban colonization. Whether you call them rapacious usurers or bankers—as one calls the more respectable because richer Christian Medicis and Fuggers, Lombards, and Templars—whether the Jews went into business from their own choice or because all other avenues were closed to them, they kept up through centuries a rudimentary credit system in Europe.
Nevertheless, I hold the somewhat chilling view that the history of most European countries, with the exception perhaps of Spain, Poland, and Holland, would not have differed very significantly had there been no Jews—but only the Judaic heritage—in Europe between the end of the Crusades and the 18th century. Indeed, for most of that time they had been expelled from a number of the European countries. The living ghetto comanded too little respect to influence directly a society so highly stratified as European society was for centuries.
Only in the last hundred and fifty years was it again given to Jews to affect the structural framework of universal history.
I believe it legitimate for the universal historian to call the age ushered in by the French and industrial revolutions the “era of industrial civilization based on contract.” This formulation takes account of the two most salient features of the period—industrialism and democratic growth. Furthermore, it implies that capitalism and the various forms of socialism and Communism are only two poles of the same development, and not phenomena on different planes. The formulation postulates a type of spiritual-cultural superstructure evolved from the essentially universal and cosmopolitan character of industrial civilization. The main point to be borne in mind is the transformation of a society based on status and on more or less rigid patterns into a society based on contract—in other words on individual and social mobility. This meant an entirely new situation for Jews, and one of unlimited possibilities.
Nuanced thinking and formulation are required here in order not to overstate our case. None of the early inventors of the industrial revolution was a Jew, and there were to my knowledge hardly any identifiable Jews among the early captains of incustry. Werner Sombart’s attempt—in imitation of Max Weber’s connecting of the Puritans with the rise of capitalism—to make the Jews of the 17th century bearers of early capitalism has long been discredited. Yet it is true that in the building of the sinews of the modern international capitalist economy, the part of the Jews, especially on the Continent, was that of pioneers and catalysts par excellence. International credit, banking and exchange, joint-stock companies, telegraphic news agencies, railway networks, chain stores, methods of mass production and mass marketing, the media of mass entertainment, experimentation in new techniques—in brief, the lifelines of a universal economy—were in very many cases laid down and set working by Jews, who thus played, in the words of Joseph Addison, the part of “pegs and nails” in the world economy.
The abstract, rational nexus holding together concrete, disparate detail was grasped more quickly by people with a long training in intellectual speculation. Not place-bound, the emancipated and de-tribalized Jew was unhampered by routine and conservative attachments, and his international connections helped him to forge the hinges of new artificial frameworks. It is in the nature of a marginal community, especially one living in metropolitan centers, to acquire the refined sensitivity of an exposed nerve and to be the first to detect the trend and shape of things to come. Hence the disposition and the courage to experiment. Emancipated formally, but not really or fully admitted as equals, lacking the prestige of lineage and long establishment, while eager for a place in the sun, and restless and ill at ease as people in ambiguous situations are, the Jews threw all their pent-up energies into the two avenues of power open to them: economic activity and intellectual prowess. Centuries of disciplined living and sober calculation prevented ambition from dissipating itself in a haphazard, chaotic manner. Vitality turned into a strictly rational instrument of power designed to obtain maximum results at the lowest cost.
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Revolutionary Messianism
As for the Jewish ingredient in revolutionary Messianism, the other pole of industrial civilization, I have come to the conclusion on somewhat closer study that it was to a large extent the Jewish Messianic vision of history that made the industrial revolution appear, not merely as another crisis and another bad spell, but as an apocalyptic hour leading to some preordained final denouement. It was the Jewish Messianic tradition that was responsible for the fact that the social protest of the victims of the industrial revolution did not take the form of another desperate, elemental jacquerie, but became part of the preparation for a Day of Judgment, after which justice and peace would reign supreme and history really begin as it were with all conflicts and contradictions resolved.
The earliest prophet of socialist transformation in 19th-century Europe, Saint-Simon, was quite explicitly linked with the Jewish Messianic expectation. Jews were the leading spirits in his fascinating and influential school, and they emphatically voiced the conviction that they were carrying on the perennial Messianic mission of Judaism. Their future city of universal harmony was to be guided by technicians and bankers who were at the same time artists and priests, and was to rest on a universal religion of humanity, Nouveau Christianisme, with the old division into state and church, matter and spirit, theory and practice done away with for ever. It is most significant that Jewish Saint-Simonists, the Rodriguezes, Pereiras, d’Eichthals, should have in the course of time become the architects of France’s industrial and financial revolution and of much of Europe’s banking and industry.
The deeply ingrained experience of history as the unfolding of a pattern of judgment and deliverance makes it almost impossible for the Jew to take history for granted as an eternal meaningless cycle. Time must have a stop. History must have a denouement. At the same time his lack of roots in a concrete tradition, with its instinctive certainties and the comfort of smooth, almost automatic procedures, combines with the absence of experience of practical government to turn many a Jew into a doctrinaire and impatient addict of schemes of social redemption. When he is of a prophetic temperament, as in the case of a Karl Marx, a torrent of relentless denunciation issues forth. A terrific, fiery over-simplification reduces everything—human laziness and thoughtlessness, the weakness of the flesh and the heterogeneity of impulse, peculiarity of tradition and complexity of situation—to greed, falsehood, and hypocrisy, a kingdom of the Devil that will be overthrown in the imminent future by a kingdom of God. Suspended between heaven and earth, rejected and excluded, tormented by the humiliations, complexities, and ambiguities of his situation, many a young Jew threw himself with the deepest yearning and passion into the arms of the religion of revolution.
We all know the inhumanities practiced by capitalism at the height of its imperialistic expansion, and the perverse denial of traditional morality and of man’s freedom and dignity which accompanies the attempt to satisfy the Messianic longing for salvation by a totalitarian system. This erosion of ideals has no particular relevance to Judaism as such, for it is rooted in the tragic condition itself of man, in the essential ambivalence of things human and social—as the Christian would say, in original sin. It is at the same time not to be denied that the fact of a surplus of intensity among Jews, such as is peculiar to a marginal minority in constant need to justify its separateness by selfassertion, has its own polar ambivalence: besides idealistic self-dedication to causes and things of the mind, there is a particularly harsh, shrill, and unscrupulous style of Jewish self-seeking.
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Cosmopolitan Culture
We come now to the Jewish ingredient in the universal or cosmopolitan culture characteristic of an industrial civilization based on contract instead of status, and sustained by media of mass communication.
It is one of the commonplaces of Jewish apologists to emphasize that Jews have enriched the life and culture of every country in which they have lived. Yet, as I have said, I do not believe that the culture of England, France, Italy, or even of pre-l9th-century Germany would have been significantly different if there had been no Jews in those countries. Modern universal civilization is, however, unthinkable without Marx, Freud, or Einstein, who have molded the consciousness of modern mankind.
Isaiah Berlin has given an acute explanation of the contrast between the superb achievements of Jews in the sciences and music, and their rather inferior showing in literature. Jewish writers have excelled in biography and the biographical novel (André Maurois and Stefan Zweig). They have written in highly stimulating fashion on the complexities and dilemmas of the contemporary human situation (Arthur Koestler, Arthur Miller, and Ilya Ehrenburg). In this they were helped by their psychological acumen, which their race acquired from its agelong need to understand and adjust to others, as well as by their being at the very nerve center of metropolitan life and at the same time detached and over-sensitive. Yet, while being often stirring and provocative, their writings in no sense represent great literature. It is not enough to be able to penetrate, even lovingly, the inner springs and hidden recesses of men and societies. Vigor and intimacy come to the novel from subtle, almost unconscious and automatic associations, which are not acquired with the algebraic language of science but are imperceptibly experienced within a concrete, long-established tradition. This is why Yiddish literature has such vigor as well as warmth.
The literature produced by Jewish writers in non-Jewish languages in centers like old Vienna—where Jews as producers as well as consumers often formed a nucleus of the most cosmopolitan vanguard—served despite its lack of greatness as a barometer and stimulant of universal significance.
On the political level, the passionate patriotism of a Benjamin Disraeli, a Walter Rathenau, a Léon Blum had perhaps greater intensity and depth than the devotion of an ordinary British, German, or French statesman to his country. It was conditioned by an agonized yearning for something romantically idealized which was not a simple datum to be taken for granted. This kind of Jewish patriotism betrayed a deeper and more articulate understanding of the national tradition and its peculiarities than could the patriotism of a “normal” leader, for whom the national tradition was a matter of spontaneous reflexes. And the patriotism of Jews was always more universal (or more imperial, as in the case of Disraeli) in its awareness.
Far from lending support to any doctrine of race in the biological sense, our argument has been concerned, throughout its latter part, with a spiritual legacy and the facts of history and social psychology on the one side, and the individualistic mobility of industrial civilization on the other.
Indeed, the fate of Jews under Hitler may in this respect be seen as a focal point of 20th-century history—and not merely because of the enormity of the crime and sufferings inflicted on them with the help of scientific long-term planning and execution, and not only because the mass violation of the sanctity of human life was not calculated to stop with the Jews but was bound to undermine the most vital foundations of our civilization and initiate general race slaughter. Hitler’s racialism signified an attempt to reverse the main trend of modern Western civilization, and to return from individualistic contract to deterministic patterns of race, caste, and tribe through a denial of the unity of mankind. It is no accident that Nazism found it necessary to reinterpret the whole of history as a permanent life-and-death struggle between Nordic Aryanism and the Jewish spirit, attributing to Jews a significance and effectiveness which the most extreme Jewish chauvinist would not dream of claiming.
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Israel and the Diaspora
Some of my readers may have begun to feel a certain surprise that there has been relatively little reference so far to Israel in this survey. Our theme has been Jewish history from the point of view of universal history. Although the Palestine problem has been one of the focal points of international politics, and albeit that little country of such strange destinies is once more a center of world attention, it is still too early to say whether the return of Jews to Zion (which coincides with the general retreat of Europe from Asia: an extraordinary fact, highly charged with symbolism) will mean more than the establishment of another little state among the dozens of new states which have come into existence in the 20th century.
In Professor Toynbee’s violent condemnation, Zionism figures as an integral part of Western imperialistic rapacity. The music of Messianic hope kept alive for two thousand years; the saga-like quality of the return to Zion; the historic perspectives and vistas opened by that event; the awful tragedy that the restoration of Jews to Israel had to be effected through a terrible conflict with the Arab world—all this fails to strike a chord. We have instead Dr. Toynbee’s nonsense about Jews taking over the Western “heresy of archaization”; his tasteless, sermonizing censure of Jews for not trusting in God’s miraculous deliverance, and for demeaning themselves with such unworthy things as a state, a flag, an army, and postage stamps; a selective method of presenting facts which amounts to untruth—as, for instance, the failure to mention the decision of the United Nations, as representative of world conscience, on partition, or to refer by a single word to the invasion of Palestine by five Arab armies. We then get the horrifying comparison of the treatment of the Arab population by the Jews with the extermination of six million Jews by Hitler, and finally the crowning sanctimonious blasphemy: the prophecy that on the Day of Judgment the crime of the Jews hall be judged graver than that of the Nazis.
There are one or two pointers to be borne in mind by the universal historian meditating on the future of Jews within the scheme of world history. There seems to be something almost providential in the way in which the two new centers, Israel and the United States, were as it were prepared just on the eve of the catastrophe which put an end to European Jewry’s history of some fifteen hundred to two thousand years. There is also a striking analogy between the present relations between Israel and the Anglo-Saxon Jewish communities, especially American Jewry, and the relations that obtained at the time of the Second Temple between Jewish Palestine and the Mediterranean Jewish communities of the Roman Empire on one side, and the Jewish conglomeration in Mesopotamia on the other. It is a fact of very great importance that English has come to be the language of the majority of the Jewish people.
The problems that faced the Palestine-Mediterranean axis were very similar to those of the Israel-Anglo-Saxon axis today, including all those needs which had to be met by an annual United Jewish Appeal, the problems of assimilation, mixed loyalties, and so forth. The encounter of Judaism and Hellenism, and the synthesis of the two in the Alexandria of Philo, paved the way for the triumph of Christianity. Is it too fanciful to suggest that the New York of today may be destined to play the part of a Jewish Alexandria of the 20th century? There is much food for speculation in the fact that tiny Israel, on the troubled eastern shore of the Mediterranean, has a kind of counterpart in what is the most vital country in the world today, and the one which seems destined to set the tone in the years to come.
If it was given to the Jews to make some mark on world history, it was not because God, as someone has said, was kind to the Jews in scattering them among the nations, but because they had fashioned their real contribution—the Judaic heritage—in their own country, and were dispersed only after they had been molded into a unique phenomenon. . . .
No historian, I believe, can be a complete rationalist. He must be something of a poet, he must have a little of the philosopher, and he must be touched just a bit by some kind of mysticism. The sorting out of evidence, the detective’s skill in ferreting out inaccuracy and inconsistency, are of little help when the historian strikes against the hard residue of mystery and enigma, the ultimate causes and the great problems of human life.
The Jewish historian becomes a kind of martyr in his permanent and anguished intimacy with the mystery of Jewish martyrdom and survival. Whether he be Orthodox in belief or has discarded all religious practice, he cannot help but be sustained by a faith which can neither be proved nor disproved.
I believe that notwithstanding all the vexations and entanglements caused by emergency and inescapable necessity—all so reminiscent incidentally of the times of Ezra and Nehemiah—Israel will one day be spiritually significant and, in conjunction with the Jewish Diaspora, spiritually effective in the world.
History would somehow make no sense otherwise.
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