During a short stay in New York last year, I was invited by a group of Jewish students at Columbia University to speak to them about literary life in Israel. I agreed to come, and I prepared a descriptive lecture full of information about recent trends and developments in Israeli literature, which is what I had supposed they wanted to hear. But after talking for about half an hour, I began to sense a certain restlessness in the audience, and I suddenly realized that these young students were growing impatient with all the facts I was feeding them. They had expected something quite different, something more stimulating, something that would raise the big questions about the role of art in society and that would make the deep connections between Israeli literature and the state of the modern world. They wanted me to summon up a total picture of Israeli cultural life, one that would help them formulate their own personal relation to Israel—and perhaps to everything else under the sun as well. In short, they wanted the truth, and they did not consider it unreasonable to expect truth to be revealed in one short lecture.
Looking at their tense young faces, I was reminded of how I too, while still a student in the early 40’s, used to feel the same ardent yearning at any lecture I attended, and I was powerfully struck by the realization that this yearning scarcely exists any longer among young Israelis. In lecturing to Israeli students, I very seldom see that special look which it seemed to me shone so unmistakably in the eyes of my audience at Columbia. Nor am I usually compelled by Israeli students to undertake the difficult job of trying to expose the intricate relations between the books we discuss together and the Whole spiritual condition of modern man. Young Israelis today are either indifferent to such questions or, if they do happen to care about the relevance of the special subject they are studying to other aspects of culture and society, the demands of their professional training tend to make them forego this interest as a gratuitous luxury. And unlike the students I met at Columbia, Israeli undergraduates rarely leave a lecture on any subject to engage in a heated argument over what they have just heard. They take notes, they collect information, and they consider their time well- or ill-spent depending on the amount of useful data they have been able to get.
What is true of the students is also true of their immediate elders. One seldom meets any Israeli between the ages of twenty and forty who resembles the intellectuals of an earlier day in Israel. The tradition of Jewish intellectualism—a term to which I shall try to give more specific meaning as I go along—still exists among the older writers, teachers, and scientists, and even among people Who are not professionally concerned with intellectual matters (like workers, clerks, and politicians). But it has virtually disappeared among Israelis under the age of forty. Which means that it may in time vanish altogether from the Israeli scene.
I was, however, startled to discover that this tradition was still very much alive in America (or at any rate in New York), where; I admit, I had never really expected to find it. Needless to say, it exists in rather a different form from the one I knew years ago in Israel, but there are, I think, enough points of resemblance to make a comparison worthwhile.
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The Israeli intellectual of the 30’s and 40’s (and, I am sure, of earlier periods too) was characterized, first of all, by his passionate interest in the inter-relations—obvious and hidden alike—of all fields of human activity, in the past and in the present. This was not merely an abstract interest. On the contrary, the most obvious quality of Israeli intellectualism as I encountered it in my university days was its tendency to treat all of history as though it existed to prove the justice or injustice, the benefit or uselessness, the validity or vanity, 6f a particular cause or movement. I do not mean to imply that all discussion of abstract problems was reduced to the level of the practical. Indeed, the interest of these young intellectuals in abstract philosophical problems, or even wild speculation, was quite genuine, and never was there a deliberate intention of turning ideas simply into “weapons.” Nevertheless, behind their impulse to think of the whole of world history as a monistic entity which revealed itself in a multiplicity of phenomena, there was evident a desire to invoke this entity as the source or the justification of a given cause. Most of the students in the 30’s and 40’s, of course—even those whose major passion was science, philosophy, or literature—were directly involved in a political cause, whether they liked it or not. Zionism, the building bf a Jewish homeland in Palestine, was the most urgent reason for any activity in those days—cultural, academic, or political—and everyone had to be concerned With the Jewish fight against the Nazis or, later, the struggle with the British and the Arabs. But I do not believe that this in itself can explain the Special quality of their intellectual life. Some of the students, for example, called themselves non-Zionists, and insisted that they cared far more about the fate of the World as a whole than about the fate of the Zionist movement. This group, I think, was merely making explicit what everyone else really felt—that history was guided by certain laws which were leading toward Universal redemption and that these laws must direct the workings of any political or social movement if that movement was to be just. In short, the young intellectuals of that period were animated by what can only be called a messianic fervor.
Outside the university, the situation was much the same. In the youth movements, in the kibbutzim, in the military underground there were scores of intellectuals (though they never thought of themselves as intellectuals and would have been offended by the name) who exhibited a similarly messianic caste Of mind. Recalling those years, I can testify that there was almost no difference between the discussions held on the campus of the Hebrew University and those Conducted in the barracks of the concentration camp for political prisoners in Latrun, where the British police had established, so to speak, an informal university for the underground movements. Both were marked by the same ardent quest for the general—or perhaps absolute Would be a better word—truth, the large system, the laws governing history. Plato and Marx, Freud and Nietzsche, Lenin and Bergson, were not merely figures of academic interest, but witnesses to the truth or falsity of some Weltanschauung that also provided the criteria by which the daily conduct of individuals and nations could be judged.
Of course, much of this talk was naive, and more of it suffered from the typical defects of fanatically ideological thinking. It tended to ignore the variety and complexity of things; it was often dilettantish; and it showed insufficient regard for the rigorous requirements of the various disciplines. Yet there was also real intellectual curiosity; there was the feeling that no matter what a man’s “field” might be, he was responsible for worrying about culture, history, and politics; and there was a genuine belief that “nothing human is alien to me.” All this was bound to lead to superficial conclusions and hasty generalizations, but it also helped to cultivate fire and zeal—a zeal to find the right way for one’s self, one’s people, and the world as a whole.
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As I have already implied, there was, something very Jewish about this hunger for absolute truth and this effort to discover the right way for the entire world. Though most Israeli intellectuals of the 30’s and 40’s were ardently repudiating their Jewish heritage—some of them even going so far as to declare that they did not belong to the Jewish people at all but rather to a new Hebrew nation—and were determined to show how very different they were from their ancestors, nevertheless they were the true heirs of those denied ancestors in more than one way. Even their denial of the Jewish heritage, marked so often by self-hatred, was very Jewish, as was the fantastic bitterness with which “mere” theoretical disagreements were argued. Thinking back on those arguments, it seems to me that they resembled the disputes between Hasid and Misnaged, not least in the fact that they rarely issued in physical violence, though they often ended in mutual “excommunication.” Typically Jewish, too, was the belief of those young people that there was only one road to the redemption of the world, a road everyone must choose if he considered himself a responsible man—and the area of responsibility was all-embracing.
By contrast, the young Israeli student of today—whether he is studying literature, philosophy, science, or history—is practical, utilitarian, and narrowly professional. He knows exactly what he wants to be, and all his energies are directed to that goal. He has very little curiosity about subjects other than his own, and he tends to regard ideologies as so much nonsense, for politics to him means administration, not the pursuit of the good society. He may, for example, take African or Far Eastern studies at the university, knowing that Israel has a role to play in those parts of the world and that he ought to prepare himself for participating in that role. But he does not “fool” with the implications of Israel’s involvement with the underdeveloped countries, and he even tends to mock people who attempt to see this involvement in broader terms. Or, to take another example, he may be very proud of the achievements of the young scientists at the Weizmann Institute, but he has not even begun to think about the moral and cultural obligations of science in the modern world. Nor does he care about the discrepancy between the high level of scientific achievement in Israel and the low estate of the arts. By and large, he is content with imported books, plays, and ballets—not first-rate, most of them—and he tends to act more like a provincial consumer of culture than someone engaged in establishing a living connection with spiritual activity in other parts of the world.
The general intellectual atmosphere in Israel today is marked by a similar narrowness. Writers, for example, no longer seem to consider their work as one aspect of the whole search going on around them for the meaning of things. So too with politicians, army officers, engineers, and the newer members of the kibbutz movement, none of whom would dream of asserting the existence of some relation between the “spiritual” world and their daily life and work.
Much of what I have been describing is obviously not peculiar to Israel, for the complaints I have been making about Israel have also been made by critics of the young generation in America, England, France, and Germany. But the Israeli situation does have certain special features of its own. First of all, the revolutionary stage, which demanded unlimited commitment to the cause of establishing a state, is over, and professionalism is now needed rather than ardent ideological devotion. Whereas in the 30’s and 40’s the air of Palestine was filled with visions of a new society, today it is dominated by a preoccupation with how to make an already existing society work. In this atmosphere, the young Israeli is conditioned to think of the state and its immediate needs as the supreme end, and he tends to learn not only a new set of obligations, but also the “spiritual” and personal advantages of a practical attitude toward life, society, culture. The process is analogous to what has happened in America as a result of the cold war, which has fostered its own kind of statism among young people.
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Secondly, there is the new attitude toward the relation between Israel and the Diaspora. This subject has been discussed from many points of view, but I do not think that sufficient consideration has been given to its implications for the young Israeli’s general attitude toward culture and spiritual values.
Whether or not the young Israelis regard themselves as Jews, they do not really feel an attachment or a commitment to Jewish history and fate. They are certainly much less fanatic in denying and condemning the Diaspora and its heritage than their fathers or older brothers were. But a “liberal” attitude toward Jewish history, or even toward other Jewish communities, does not necessarily involve a deep feeling of kinship with that history or those communities. On the contrary, the early deniers of their Jewish heritage were much more attached to it—spiritually, psychologically, and even practically—than the tolerant young of today. By their attempt to redeem the tragic fate of 2,000 years of Jewish history, the first generations of Zionists not only showed the depth of their involvement in that history, but also carried forward the traditional Jewish dream of redemption. The young Israeli, on the other hand, neither hates nor denies this heritage; he simply does not know what to do with it. He is often told from childhood of the glories of the Jewish past, and it has even become fashionable to celebrate the East European shtetl, once the symbol of everything Zionism felt to be crippled and warped in the Jewish character. But all this is unreal to the young Israeli, since he neither lives by the past nor has to fight against its deadening hand. Unlike many young American Jews of the same generation whom I met in New York, he is unconcerned, either intellectually or emotionally, by the fact of his Jewishness. He knows much more about Jewish history, culture, religion, and literature than his American counterpart, but he is comparatively untouched by what he knows.
One can of course say—as many Israelis do—that this is a sign of the “normalization” of Jewish life in Israel. The Israeli is wholly a Jew, whether he “breaks his head” over it or not. He lives among Jews, he has no need of justifications for being Jewish, and he has no cause for ambiguous feelings about his Jewishness. His language, culture, literature are Jewish, even if he chooses not to define them as such. And he is the citizen of a state whose proclaimed raison d’être is to be an open refuge for every Jew in need of refuge. Thus—so the argument runs—it is mere sentimentality and nostalgia to lament the loss of “Jewish feeling” among the young Israelis.
Yet, be it a blessing or a curse, one cannot deny that this “normalization” has had certain unfortunate consequences. While it is true that the young Israeli is a Jew quite as a matter of course, it is also true that he is only an Israeli Jew, which means that the scope (both in time and in space) of his national identity is confined within the limits of a tiny Middle Eastern country. This fact necessarily exercises a severely narrowing influence upon all his cultural and intellectual activity, and upon his moral attitudes in general. Since he believes that the establishment of the State has by itself solved the historical problems of Jewish existence, he has released himself from a profound involvement in these problems and is thus driven into a frame of reference limited exclusively to the present. Deep in his heart, however, he still regards himself as more than merely a citizen of a small country—that is, the fact of his Jewishness ironically provides him with a Sense of self-importance that being an Israeli could never give him—and therefore his cultural provincialism is not so “normal” as it may seem. Here and there one already detects signs of an awareness that the present situation is unhealthy. But as yet there has been no conscious rebellion against the provincialism that has come to define the cultural atmosphere of Israel, and certainly no awareness that the young Israeli’s attitude toward his Jewishness is a major factor in the situation.
I do not wish to create the impression that I consider the loss of “Jewish feeling” an unmitigated disaster. Not only is the process I have been trying to describe inevitable; it has also helped to remedy some of the traditional defects of the Jewish character. What I am saying, however, is that it may yet go too far and deprive the young Israelis of even those elements of their Jewish tradition that can and should be maintained in Israel (though I would not venture to say how this might be done). Let us not forget, too, that this very “normalization” itself participates in the deterioration of standards throughout the World—against which, I still believe, Jewishness can serve as a useful protection.
The third special feature of the Israeli situation has to do with the Arabs. Only a few years ago, the problem of Arab-Israeli relations dominated the minds of all Israeli intellectuals. Everyone saw it as a problem for which a just solution must be found, and therefore they were forced into taking a moral stand. Today, however, very few young Israelis feel a personal duty to commit themselves on this issue. To the young Israeli the conventional terms and slogans in which the problem used to be discussed sound hypocritical or, at best, idle and irresponsible. He believes that he has no control over, and no moral stake in, the solution of this problem, which has been created by “forces” too remote and complicated to affect—a belief that is reflected in his attitude toward politics in general. For him, politics is a practical technique and the domain of specialists; it has no intellectual interest or moral implication, and any attempt to discuss politics in terms of moral or intellectual considerations strikes him as a foolish waste of time.
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What impressed me, then, about the young Jewish students and the other Jewish intellectuals I met in New York was that many of them were much more Jewish than their opposite numbers in Israel. By this I do not mean that they looked or talked or behaved in conformity with Jewish stereotypes. Nor do I mean that they were more explicitly committed to Judaism or the Jewish community than their Israeli counterparts. Most of them, in fact, showed very little interest in Jewish history, culture, and religion, and no interest at all in the official Jewish community—except to the extent that they were preoccupied with the question of what being Jewish can mean to a thoroughly assimilated American intellectual. What makes them more Jewish than their contemporaries in Israel, it seems to me, is the fact that they still maintain a broad intellectual curiosity joined with a sense of personal, moral obligation to history which expresses itself in the feelings of guilt that afflict them when they are not attached to some “messianic” cause, when they arc not actively giving a messianic meaning to their lives. (But let me make it perfectly clear that I do not consider broad intellectual curiosity to be typically Jewish unless it is mixed with the other qualities I specified above.)
I must add, however, that while the Jewish intellectuals I met in America reminded me of those I knew in Israel ten or twenty years ago, there were also some sharp differences. The university students of the 40’s, the political prisoners at Latrun, the kibbutznicks, the members of the Palmach, talked about the same things and in the same way (though with much less erudition), but their discussions were animated by a sense of actual commitment that seemed to me lacking among the American intellectuals. The Israelis of the 40’s really thought that they could solve the problems that concerned them and they really tried to live by the solutions they found. So far as I could tell from my brief encounter with intellectual life in New York, no such naive belief in the immediate relevance, applicability, or efficacy of ideas exists there. I was as much impressed by the air of detachment, even of aloofness, that surrounds intellectual discussion in New York as I was by the wide scope of interests and the great sensitivity to politics and morality that the American intellectuals exhibited. Is it, I wonder, that American intellectuals are afraid of the corrupting effects on the life of the mind of engagement? Or is it that they feel powerless to change the drift of the times? Whatever the case may be, this detachment of theirs does rob their thinking of the urgency that was so marked among Israeli intellectuals in the 30’s and 40’s.
My contact with intellectual life in New York made me realize when I returned to Israel how much I missed the old type of Jewish intellectual. This is not merely a personal loss, for I am sure that Israel needs the Jewish intellectual today no less than it needed him a few years ago. His absence has made itself felt everywhere—in art, in education, in politics, in culture. I cannot say that I know how to bring him back. Yet I feel that his disappearance from Israel ought to concern every Jewish intellectual, wherever he happens to live. Which is to say that I myself am rather an old-fashioned Jew who still believes in the mutual responsibility of the Jews. And I also believe that the roots of the phenomenon I have been trying to describe are—or ought to be—a matter of concern to everyone throughout the world who considers himself an intellectual.
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