In last month’s COMMENTARY, Midge Decter pointed out how the American Jewish cultural “renaissance” has in one area given renewed life to some questionable ideological tendencies (“Belittling Sholom Aleichem’s Jews”). Judd L. Teller, looking into Nathan Ausubel’s Pictorial History of the Jewish People (Crown Publishers, 346 pp., $5.00), finds a similar case of Jewish glitter that is something less than gold.
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In the current intensive revival of interest in Jewish history and culture, there has too often been a tendency to accept as authentic anything that comes along labelled “Jewish,” attractively packaged, and sanctioned by some recognizable professional Jewish names. A case very much in point is Nathan Ausubel’s Pictorial History of the Jewish People.
Mr. Ausubel’s book is not, as its title suggests, a pictorial history in the accepted sense. Jewish history predates pictorial recording. The nature of the Jews’ labors, centered on spiritual experience rather than action, and their rigid adherence until fairly recent times to the Biblical rule against making images, have precluded such recordkeeping. A good portion of the illustrations in this book are contemporary, therefore—portraits of Jewish celebrities down to Al Jolson and Arthur Miller, and the kind of action shots produced by the Jewish National Fund, JDC, and UJA for purposes of fundraising. This, then, is simply an abbreviated history of the Jews, with illustrations.
A historian must have direction. Mr. Ausubel moves in two opposite directions simultaneously. His book is, first, apologia in the old tradition. But it also reflects the tendentious Weltanschauung of a man whose apprenticeship as historian was spent as English-language columnist on the Communist Yiddish daily, Freiheit, and staff writer on the Communist monthly Jewish Life. In his role as apologist, Mr. Ausubel is at pains to prove that there have always been Jews on all sides of every issue, and thus is preoccupied primarily with listing the Jewish big names in all fields of human endeavor. To swell his roster of formidable reputations, he includes half-Jews, quarter-Jews, and persons reputedly descended from Jews. As a “progressive” historian, on the other hand, his heart is always with the rationalists in Jewish culture, and with the radical and mass movements on the world scene, which latter, he implies, were always on the side of the Jews. He is wrong on all scores.
Before their emancipation, the Jews were wholly neutralist in politics—as for example during the German Peasants’ War of 1525 when they were caught between the millstones of Luther and Hubmaier-Muenzer and suffered from both camps. Since their Emancipation, the Jews have in their majority been middle-of-the-roaders, as for example in Germany and Russia, where they were neither for absolutist monarchy, nor for socialism, but for a laissez faire society. Mr. Ausubel contends that the motion to grant equality to the Jews, long under consideration in the National Assembly in France, was finally “decided [in the Jews’ favor] by pressure from below—the people,” and he cites the referendum in which fifty-three arrondissements of the Paris Commune voted for extension of equality to the Jews. It is doubtful that this referendum was solely decisive, and, at best, it only counterposed other pressures “from below—the people”: e.g., the demand of the populace in Alsace-Lorraine that the Jews be exempt from the application of the principles enunciated in the Declaration of the Rights of Man. In Hungary, Mr. Ausubel writes, “with the revolution triumphant, at Kossuth’s urging, the National Assembly legislated full equality for the Jews.” The legislation came about in the last gasping days of the abortive revolution, and Kossuth had previously admonished the Jews to make themselves “worthy” of equality before they dared petition for it; like Napoleon, he found them too steeped in “superstitions.”
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In his section on the American Civil War, Mr. Ausubel writes that the “sentiment of American Jews in the North, where the great majority lived, was overwhelmingly behind Abolition”; there were, however, especially “among the wealthy with business connections in the South, [some] who openly took a pro-slavery stand”; Rabbi Morris Raphall “soon became the spokesman for the small pro-slavery faction,” and Rabbis Isaac M. Wise and Isaac Leeser, of the Reform and Conservative camps respectively, “approved [Raphall’s pro-slavery] sermon.” The fact is that the majority of Jews in the North, to judge from their publications and the rabbinical sermons, were, like Lincoln himself, unhappy with slavery, yet placed the integrity of the Union and the need to avoid fratricide above Abolition. The Jews were all the more wary of Abolitionism because some of its self-righteous organs saw nothing incompatible between championing the Negroes and traducing and baiting the Jews. Wise and Leeser maintained that the individual Jew was responsible on this issue to his civic conscience, but that the group as a whole would only suffer from unqualified identification with one cause or the other. Raphall’s sermon did not endorse slavery. He stated simply, and accurately, that the Bible had not proscribed slavery. However, he added, the Bible did set forth the obligation to treat slaves with the dignity that is the right of all men; slaves were so treated by the ancient Hebrews, he said, but were outrageously abused by the slaveholders of the South. It is obvious that Mr. Ausubel’s misinterpretation follows closely the leftist “historian” of American Jewry, Morris U. Schappes.
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Mr. Ausubel’s ideological preoccupations are even more evident in his treatment of contemporary history. His roster of American Jewish celebrities includes almost every fellow-traveling writer of any significance, yet omits mention of such a figure as Abraham Cahan, founder of the Forward, novelist, trade unionist, socialist, anti-Communist crusader. Chaim Nachman Bialik, the authentic poetic voice of Zionism, is called “an introspective misanthrope.” Abba Hillel Silver is described as having “led the opposition in the Zionist organization against hinging Zionist policy on British political interest.” The controversy between Weizmann, on the one hand, and Ben Gurion and Silver on the other, was over tactics. None except anti-Zionists of the left, and the extreme Palestine underground, ever charged that Weizmann “hinged” Zionist policy on “British political interest.”
This author’s errors of fact are as incredible as they are innumerable. His description of Hadassah as an affiliate of the Zionist Organization of America can only invite a smile from those familiar with the struggle for prestige between these two organizations. Equally amusing is the listing of Agudath Israel and Poale Agudath Israel among the Zionist groups. Rachel, more accurately a folksinger than a poetess, and several decades dead, is listed among Israel’s leading living writers. Doar Hayom, discontinued several decades ago, is listed among Israel’s leading dailies. Mr. Ausubel is unaware that the American Jewish Conference expired six or seven years ago. Preoccupied in fellow-traveler fashion with American anti-Semitism, he writes that anti-Semitism in recent years caused the Jews to feel “the need of achieving unity and common action” and that “this has given rise to the American Jewish Conference.” The Conference, in fact, when it existed, was not concerned with American issues: its purpose was to speak for American Jewry on postwar issues affecting European Jewries and the Palestinian Yishuv.
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In no section of his work is Mr. Ausubel as evasive and ambiguous as in the section dealing with the Soviet Union. Conceding that the Soviet authorities carried on a war against religion which had disastrous effects on the Jews, he adds blandly that “in a literal sense, however, freedom of religious worship remained unaffected, nor were any of the congregations molested or suppressed.” He is also master of the unobtrusive insinuation: the anti-religious campaign as directed against Jews “was especially combative during the 1921-23 period when Jews were drifting back into private trade permitted under the temporary NEP policy.” The religious Jews and Zionists in Russia, he tells us, were “a hard core of opposition to the Soviet Government” who insisted upon “complete religious-cultural autonomy for the Jews.”
The real fact is that the religious Jews never asked more than the right to pursue their worship and observances without interference by the authorities; this right was denied them. The Labor Zionists included elements emotionally committed to the Soviet experiment. There were even Zionist collective farms at one time. These people were persecuted not because of their opposition to the government, but because of the government’s opposition to all non-conformity.
Mr. Ausubel’s pretended innocence is sometimes almost engaging. “It has been said,” he writes, “that a large number [of Zionists] were imprisoned or exiled to remote parts of the country [USSR] and that several were executed as counter-revolutionaries.” His passage dealing with Soviet anti-Semitism and the crusade against Yiddish is prefaced with the following observations: “Little of a reliable nature is known as to what actually took place. There appeared increasingly uncomplimentary references in the Russian newspapers and periodicals to those Soviet Jews still under the influence of ‘Jewish bourgeois nationalism, ’ ‘Zionism, ’ and of ‘cosmopolitanism.’” The anti-Semitic campaign in the Soviet Union is blamed, implicitly, on Israel: “. . . no sooner did the Government of Israel begin to abandon this policy [of neutralism] for one of closer collaboration with the West, and especially with the United States, than the old war against Zionists and Zionism was resumed by the Soviet Government. . . .”
The Jews who left the satellite countries for Israel were all of the middle class, he tells us, possessing no “useful” skills; what he omits to mention is that even at the high point of their “benevolent” relations with Israel these states refused exit permits to skilled workers. Emigration was stopped in 1951, he reports, when “the orientation of the Jewish State turned toward the West.” Emigration was curtailed, in fact, early in January of 1949, long before Israel’s change of policy. The persecution of Yiddish writers in Moscow began in the fall of 1948.
Mr. Ausubel writes pithy sentences, befitting a pictorial history. Yet he can be strangely abstruse in a highly disconcerting fashion. Of the satellite countries, he writes: “While Zionist and Jewish religious culture was taboo in the Marxist atmosphere, Jewish culture in Yiddish was encouraged so long as it had a socialist and working class content and was in harmony with Government policy.” Mr. Ausubel’s definitions of the terms “Zionist,” “Jewish religious,” and “Jewish culture in Yiddish,” as well as “socialist” and “working class,” might be helpful in interpreting this passage, but he offers no definitions.
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However, it is not my obligation or purpose to enumerate all the ambiguities and evasions in this book.
At the end of the volume, there is a page devoted to acknowledgements, where the author renders thanks for their “careful reading of the manuscript” to a number of prominent persons in Jewish life who obviously do not share his views or methods. He might have spared them embarrassment by omitting their names. Crown Publishers undoubtedly hopes that this distorted history of the Jews might become a popular gift for Bar Mitzvahs, graduations, and similar occasions. We can only hope the publishers are mistaken. The editors at Crown may perhaps be forgiven for not having detected the author’s illiteracy in Jewish history; it is hard to believe that they could be so unperceptive as to have failed to detect the tendentiousness of his text.
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