Even in a world where misunderstanding and recrimination between peoples, even the most friendly and allied, are only too familiar, rifts in sympathy and mutual respect between—of all peoples!—the Israelis and the Jews outside Israel have been peculiarly distressing. Maurice Samuel here embarks on a frank discussion of the situation and its threatening implications. Novelist, critic, and outstanding interpreter of Jewish history and culture, one can think of no American Jew whose pen and voice have over the years meant more for Zionism and the up-building of Israel than his. “The sundering” of which Mr. Samuel here speaks, he considers a two-fold one: between contemporary Israel and the Jewish past, and contemporary Israel and the rest of the Jewish world. In this article he devotes himself to an analysis of these two rifts; in a second, which we will publish next month, he considers how these developing gaps may be bridged. Material for both articles are drawn from Mr. Samuel’s forthcoming book on Zionism and Israel, Level Sunlight, which is to be published in October by Alfred A. Knopf.
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The whole disturbing complex of spiritual problems which has emerged for world Jewry with the creation of the Jewish state presented itself to me in sharpest focus in a memorable experience during my last long visit to Israel in the summer of 1952. I sat with a dozen Israeli leaders of public opinion—members of the Knesset, journalists, academicians—and listened to long and earnest discussions of one of Israel’s most urgent needs: reinforcements from the Western lands of freedom; and particularly from the foremost of them, the greatest reservoir of Jewish manpower, America.
Here was a bewildering thing: out of five million American Jews not five hundred a year were inspired to throw in their lot with this miracle of the ages, the reborn Jewish state. A trickle of youngsters had joined the pioneers; a handful of businessmen had transferred their activities. There were a few thousand visitors every year, tens of millions of dollars were contributed to the funds, tens of millions invested in the government bonds; countless meetings were held in America, conventions and conferences passed laudatory resolutions—but of a moderately large movement toward Aretz—“the Land”—no sign. And many factors called imperatively for Western immigration. There were needed: the leaven of a voluntary migration as offset to the vast refugee influx; the skills of the West to instruct the instructors of the primitive masses of the East; the moral declaration, to Israel and to the world, that the reborn Jewish state was something more than an assembly of refugees. And, as much as anything else, there was needed a counteraction to the threat of Levantinization—the mass assimilation of the Jewish state to the undisciplined pretentiousness, the systematic unthoroughness, which is woven into the backwardness of the Near East.
For two long sessions they discussed the reasons for the failure. They suggested that Israel had not been presented to American Jewry as it should have been; the miracle had been diluted in transmission; the Jewish intellectuals of America had been neglected; in the constant—and understandable—solicitation of gift money and investments for Israel the solicitation of personal commitment had gone by default. A renewal of effort must be undertaken; the teachers of American Jewry, the leaders of its public opinion, had to be convened, mobilized, thrown into action. The full meaning of Israel had to be conveyed to American Jewish youth.
The longer I listened the clearer it became to me that I was looking into the heart of one of the great deviations in Zionism. These highly intelligent men were concerned with a single idea: the development of Israel. They thought of Jews everywhere else in the world as material for Israel, and as nothing else. The central Jewish problem everywhere, as they saw it, was the creation of a will to migrate to Israel. They were grateful, of course, for financial and political aid. But for the sake of those Jews—in America and elsewhere—and not only for the sake of Israel, Jewish education and indoctrination had to point in one direction, migration to the Jewish state.
Not once in the long discussions was it remotely suggested that American Jewry had a destiny, too; that these five million Jews would not dissolve without having made a distinctive contribution to Jewish history comparable with that of Babylonian Jewry, or Spanish and Russian Jewries; that for any foreseeable future there would be two great Jewries, Israel and America, with complementary roles; that it was for Israeli Jewry to be concerned with American Jewry as a continuing and evolving force. And naturally it could occur to no one that this summary dismissal of a great Jewry from the stage of history was itself a symptom of a dimmed inspiration from which no effective appeal could issue.
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One met it everywhere: sometimes tactfully implied, sometimes flung down bluntly; sometimes as expostulation, sometimes as warning. It might be:
“Why are you American Jews going through the motions of building seminaries, synagogues, schools, centers, universities’? Don’t you realize that you are assimilating so fast that unless you send us your best today, even they will be lost tomorrow?”
Or else:
“Can you, after what has happened in the last fifteen years, continue calmly with far-reaching plans for yourselves and your children and your grandchildren? Even if we don’t accept the extreme view, if we don’t talk of a second Hitler episode, this time not in Germany, hasn’t the first one left you shaken? Isn’t it enough for you that the very question should exist? Can you be content to suffer, for the foreseeable future, the equivocal status which attaches to the very word ‘Jew’? Can you remain in the midst of the world which even witnessed—let us not say participated in, let us forget the failure to protest—which even witnessed the degradation of the Jewish name and identity?”
But “left”-wing Mapam and Hashomer Hatzair do accept the extreme view. They know America is going fascist. They know that the fate of European Jewry awaits American Jewry. The quality of their conviction about that which is going to happen almost puts the event in the irrevocable past. “Columbus discovered America, Napoleon lost the battle of Waterloo. America is going fascist and will massacre the Jews. Let them get out: it’s now or never.”
Which Jews? The five million of them? Practically. How can we get five million, or even two million Jews into Israel in the next ten or fifteen years? When you ask this question you are answered in proverbs and allusions: where there’s a will there’s a way. We’ve done the impossible before.
In one manner or another, on one level or another, whether in warning or expostulation, they were all writing off American Jewry, consigning it to history’s rubbish heap.
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This negativism toward world Jewry, this tacit assumption that world Jewry is done for, physically or morally, or both, expresses itself differently on the different levels; and with every group it has its special mixture of motivations.
The leaders of public opinion whose conferences I attended were of middle age or beyond. All had been born outside Israel. They had been in the country anywhere from fifteen to fifty years, years of intense experience which had re-centered their personalities. They were passionately concerned with the urgent problem of immigration from the free West. They could not understand this massive reluctance on the part of Western Jewry. It was so obvious to them that Israel alone mattered to the Jewish people and that Israel alone could be relied on, that they blamed themselves for not being able to make it clear to others. They were, moreover, under harassing pressure. Israel needs Western Jews and needs them now, and it is every man’s illusion that his need ought of itself to create someone’s willingness to help him. Therefore they could not think of a destiny for American Jewry. It was an interference—at best a dangerous delay in their planning, at worst a total negation of their faith. So the discussions went on, intelligent, impatient, and baffled.
TheExile young people in Israel, native-born or childhood immigrants, take a simpler view. In their eyes it is evidence of delinquency and decay that an American Jew should not want to settle in Israel. The “Exile” is a uniformly disgraceful thing, in principle if not in actuality. One country may be tolerant of Jews, another may practice discrimination, a third may massacre them; the degree does not affect the quality—it is all galut. Exile. And Jews who do not want to leave the Exile when they can, hardly deserve to be received when they must. For these youngsters the notion of a positive destiny for American or any other Diaspora Jewry is not even intelligible. For them no exilic Jewry of the past has had a destiny. The two thousand years of Jewish experience between the crushing of Bar Kochba and the creation of the Republic of Israel were a disreputable episode called “Exile.” Jews could not be blamed too much for enduring it when there was no alternative. But that they should choose its continuation now, with freedom theirs for the asking. . . . Again one does not raise the question:
“What would you do if all free Jews wanted to come to little Israel?“ The fact is, very few of them do. Therefore they are not really Jews any more; the Exile has turned them into something neither Jew nor Gentile.
No distinction is made between gradations of Jewish self-identification, of Jewish knowledge, sympathy, cooperation. Now it is quite true that there are hundreds of thousands of Jews in America and elsewhere who are neither Jews nor Gentiles. But there are hundreds of thousands of Jews who cling to part of their heritage, and hundreds of thousands more who are conscious if imperfect carriers of the Jewish life-view. To the young Israeli these gradations are irrelevant in the face of a refusal to migrate into the Jewish state. He would even say that a pretension to Jewish loyalty, or Jewish learning, whether of a religious or cultural tinge, only makes the case worse. Of course it is good to have Jews throughout the world helping the Jewish state with funds and political influence; but such help would not be necessary if the immigration into Israel did not consist entirely of penniless and broken refugees—that is, if the immigration contained a fair proportion of the Jews of the free and affluent West. So even the philanthropic Jews are only buying themselves out from their primary duty, and their contributions to Israel are bribes to their own conscience. And in any case, if it is a question of philanthropy, the Jews of America are getting away with mere money contributions, while the Jews of Israel must submit to a long regime of the most rigorous austerity—and the end not yet in sight—in order to make room for the newcomers. And again if it is a question of philanthropy, why are the Jews of Israel more responsible for the threatened Jews of Iraq and the Yemen, and the ruined survivors of Europe, than are the Jews of America?
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Sense and nonsense are closely interwoven in all of these views. It is true that the miracle of the reborn Jewish state has not been presented to American and other Western Jewries as it should have been. But that it can be presented as it were from the outside, by enthusiasm, by propaganda, by dramatization, is not true. Such appeals have their place and purpose, but their limitations must be understood. The deeper effect of the rebirth of Israel must work itself out with the simultaneous acquisition, by American Jewry, of its own character, its regionalist form of Judaism. Until that has happened—and it is now in process—personal commitments to Israel, migration, pioneering, will be minimal and symbolic.
It is true that assimilation is at work in American Jewry. But it is equally true that there is a profoundly significant recoil from assimilation. There is a falling away, but there is also a reconcentration.
It is true that even in America and England the word “Jew” still touches off equivocal reactions. But the very heart of the Jewish problem, as it interlocks today with the world problem, is precisely the distinction between the free and totalitarian worlds which the blanket warning ignores. To a tired or confused mind one may appeal easily with these phrases: “The Jews of America feel safe? Well, so did the Jews of Germany. These think that America is ‘different’? That’s what the others thought about Germany.” Thence one deduces: “Because the Jews of Germany were so tragically deceived, the Jews of America will also be tragically deceived.” The conclusion ignores the fundamental fact that such a deception implies a world collapse, a world in total ruin. An America thus totalitarian-fascist-minded must meet a totalitarian-Communist-minded Russia in a head-on collision which will obliterate the Jewish problem—and the State of Israel—together with all other human problems.
Something more is implied, of course: namely, that in so far as it relates to Jewish survival, the struggle between East and West is meaningless! The West will go fascist and exterminate the Jews; the East is Communistic, and in Communistic countries there is no reason why Jews should go on existing as a separate people. Such is Mapam’s analysis of “fact,” though it repudiates the implication of indifference, insisting that it is better—as it is indeed inevitable—that the East should triumph. Yet the amoral implication is unavoidable: in the most fateful decision which has ever faced the human species, Judaism apparently has no stake!
The inexorable unveiling of the anti-Semitic motif in leftist totalitarianism will perhaps introduce new verbalisms into Mapam and Hashomer Hatzair propaganda. Mapam’s warnings of American Jewry’s impending extermination were muted even before the Prague trials. Some time ago I pointed out to Mapam leaders in Israel that their emissaries to America were defeating their own purposes: looking for pioneers, and for communal encouragement of pioneering to Israel, they developed the theme of America as the prospective graveyard of five million Jews. “You cannot,” I said, “move a community to great action by playing its funeral march.” The Mapam leaders admitted the pedagogic error, and assured me that it had been corrected. But the fundamental view had not changed. The tactical readjustment on the American scene has had no effect on the general propagandistic strategy. Mapam still concentrates on the death sentence which American fascism has pronounced against American Jewry. It forced itself on me that this furious concentration on America’s fascist and anti-Semitic role was a trick to deflect attention from the condition of two to three million Jews behind the Iron Curtain—this, again, still before Prague. Screaming about five million American Jews, Mapam wanted to deafen us to the muted cry of the Jews who were agonizing under the pressure of leftist forcible assimilation. But this forcible assimilation having failed of its objective, and the Communist world now resorting to the physical measures of rightist totalitarianism, Mapam will have to find new rationalizations. But whatever the new mythology, and the new developments in the position of the Jews behind the Iron Curtain, one certainty remains: for Mapam too (and for its own special reasons), all of Jewry’s future is contracted to the confines of Israel; no framework of reference projects the attention of Israeli Jewry to values other than those it possesses at the moment.
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Sometimes the nonsense is precipitated out in a heap, and appropriated by a special group. Then we perceive a definitely pathological condition. Such a group, styling itself the “Canaanites,” issues a weekly publication called Alefh. Their cry is: “What does our government mean by flooding the country with a rabble of refugees who carry the name of Jews? Who is this mob which assumes the right—in which our corrupt officials, for reasons of their own, concur—on the basis of a fiction of kinship, to crowd out the natives? What special business is it of ours that persons listed as ‘Jews’—whatever that means—are persecuted somewhere? Many peoples are persecuted in this bad world, but no one asks us to surrender our land, our character, our Future, to their need. Much less do we concede their right to this territory, or even their right to associate their identity with ours.”
In this “Canaanitism” there are overtones of neo-paganism reminiscent of the German hankering for the ancient gods when Luden-dorff and Baldur von Schirach were representative figures. But here the gods are the Baalim of pre-Judaic Canaan; and one even hears rumors of rites celebrated in “groves and high places,” after the manner denounced by the Hebrew prophets thousands of years ago.
This is going native with a vengeance. The “Canaanites” are not, as might be supposed, eighth- or ninth-generation Palestinians. They are the sons and daughters of immigrants. And they see themselves as autochthons. They are the Canaanites. To them even the refugees whom Moses brought into the country would therefore count as Foreigners. Nay, Abraham himself would be an intruder, in flight from Nimrod’s religious intolerance. It is all completely mad, of course; and it is confined to an esoteric coterie—the circulation of Aleph is five hundred at most. Perhaps there is in it a certain amount of pose. Nevertheless, to this as to all other pathological social phenomena, there is a wider background of susceptibility. Even before the creation of the State of Israel we already had youth associations with names like Yelide Aretz—Native Sons. They had their social philosophy—invariably reactionary—and their special attitude toward immigrants, even such as came from choice, and not under compulsion. With these “Mayflower” Jews Zionism had climaxed as a slightly comical, slightly sinister local chauvinism from which world Jewry was completely excluded.
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A Phrase in wide currency among the youth of Israel today is “Al tekashkesh tzionut,” which, colloquialism for colloquialism, means: “Don’t give me that Zionist claptrap.” That Zionist claptrap! If it referred to the windy speeches of Zionist orators, to pretentious idealism and political bombast, it would be a healthy sign. But it refers to something else, namely, to the rebirth of world Jewry, to the Jewish state as an organic part of the Jewish ideal, as the effort of the Jewish part of the Jewish people to renew itself. It is an intolerant assertion that the Jewish state is a thing in itself, self-justified, self-explanatory; it is a demand not to be burdened with Jewish history and tradition and larger significances.
It will do us no good to address reproaches and pleas to the youth of Israel; it does not merit the first, will not respond to the second. Its character is sound; if its views are narrow the blame belongs elsewhere, in part to the violence of the struggle which it has sustained, in part to the false values which we of the older generation introduced into its education. To some extent its touchy spiritual isolationism is the passing reflex action of recent excitements; where it is deeper it calls for long-range revaluation of Zionist concepts, or, rather, a return to the original regenerative impulse of Zionism.
This sundering from Diaspora Jewry, this severance of life-transmitting connections, is a pervasive thing. In certain ways, it is most pronounced in the kibbutzim, but it is characteristic of Israel as a whole.
It may be defined as the collapse of Zionist perspective. As the range of their responsiveness shrinks, as the seven or eight thousand square miles of their homeland assert a more and more exclusive dominion over their spirit, the Israelis find it progressively harder to lift themselves to new efforts of creation and endurance. There is interaction, of course; the more exhausted they become, the harder it is to push back the limits of perspective. However we apportion the causes, this fact remains central: the Jewish state as a thing in itself, self-justified, self-explanatory, has not the power to move tens of thousands of people to great creative action. And again we may put it conversely: when the renewal of Zionist action will come, it will be accompanied by a reestablishment of the connections, an expansion of responsiveness.
For a Jewish state as a thing in itself is not a Jewish concept at all. It was not so to the teachers of antiquity, who have left their denunciations of it—and of those Jews who nourished it—as the classic and imperishable “literature” of Judaism. It was not so throughout the Jewish Exile; and, in spite of aberrations, it was not so in the time of classic Zionism. Israel’s turning away from world Jewry is a turning away from the Prophets’ subordination of statism to the Idea which transcends the State. It is therefore a turning away from the sources of Jewish strength. There is a pathetic struggle of self-contradiction in the search of Israeli leaders for a return to the old standards of Zionist idealism within Israel; they have narrowed the vision and expect a wider response; they call on the people to lift itself up but they offer it only the restricted horizon which is visible five feet from ground level.
I have repeatedly used the phrases “isolation from world Jewry,” “sundering from world Jewry.” But I must also emphasize again the paradoxical fact that no other Jewish community is as sensitive as the Israeli to attacks on other Jewish communities. Leaving out the “Canaanites,” whom I cannot understand except as unhinged people whom one studies for their condition, not their views; leaving out the penumbra of their sympathizers; allowing also for the subdued feeling that Jews who suffer in countries which they could have left for Israel deserve their suffering; taking it all in all, Israeli Jewry responds more swiftly, more instinctively, more profoundly, than any other community to manifestations of anti-Semitism anywhere in the world. And yet the response does not disturb the conviction that world Judaism has—and perhaps ought to have—no future. Which, then, is the more significant, the more enduring: the sensitivity or the conviction? The answer is not analytical but dynamic; for neither the splitting up of world Jewry, nor its reunification, is an inevitability. The issue waits on developments which self-criticism, understanding, and foresight will help us to control.
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The sundering from world Jewry and world Judaism has another aspect, having to do with time rather than space. Israel is cut off from the past. This will be an astounding assertion to many; for if Israel is anything at all, it is—one would insist—the most remarkable historic instance of the past made present. But it is necessary to point out that while this is a correct description of classic Zionism, it need not be one of Israel.
Less than a decade ago—but the war had kept me away from Israel for some years prior to that—I wrote, in Harvest in the Desert: “For the children [who would grow up in the Jewish homeland] Hebrew would be natural in a profound sense. The land into which they would be born had acquired its imperishable name through Hebrew-speaking men and women. The language was one with the land, if we think of that land not merely as random territory but as the theater of the unique utterances of the Bible. Hebrew could not be a secondary language to the new generation, if the bond between it and the land was to be enduring. And it turned out as the Zionists had planned. The associations which to me, for instance, are a cultural acquisition, are to the children of the Emek, the valley of Jezreel, an immediate experience. I have seen little tots come out of the kindergartens of Nahalal and Ain Charod and Beth Alpha to play in the morning sun, and they have looked up at Mount Gilboa, or at the Carmel range, or at the hills of southern Galilee; and I have heard them clamor, as children do everywhere, for a story. What better stories could their teacher tell them than the one about King Saul and Jonathan and David and the wars against the Philistines (and there was Mount Gilboa, where Saul and Jonathan were killed, right before them); and the one about Elijah and the prophets of Baal and the wicked King Ahab (and there on the other side was Mount Carmel, where the contest took place between Elijah and the false prophets); and the one about the Prophet Jeremiah, trailing through this very valley after the Jewish prisoners being carried into the Babylonian captivity; and all of it told in the language of the record, in Hebrew. The triple cord of people, land, and language was woven into their minds, and a triple cord shall not easily be broken. To these children the Bible is not only sacred; it is the source of their first awareness of their childhood surroundings.”
It sounded reasonable and compelling to me ten years ago, and yet its implication is—as I now perceive—only a dangerous half-truth. To begin with, I was at fault in belittling “the associations which are a cultural acquisition.” If we think of “cultural acquisition” in the all-important sense of transmitted tradition, father-to-son bond, continuity of spiritual identity, we are close to a definition of civilization itself. Land and language and peoplehood lose their meaning without a fourth strand; and the fourth strand is time.
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In The old days, before the embitterment of our relations with the Arabs, I used to go to Palestine by way of Egypt; and I would break the journey there to linger for a few days in the museum of Cairo or at Mena House opposite the pyramids. I never ceased to marvel at the discontinuity of Egyptian life. Records and remains and monuments which attracted visitors from every part of the world were without meaning to the local population. There was simply no connection between the glories of the Pharaonic ages and the spirit of the Egyptian people. There was a reason, of course. It is not the same people; it is not the same language. The Egyptian is an Arab; his roots are in another world; his presence in the land of the Pharaohs is pure accident. There is no lever which, resting on the fulcrum of a common tradition, can enable the past to lift up the present.
But in later years I made my visits to Palestine and Israel via Rome and Athens; and I lingered at these stations, too; particularly at the first, for the sake of a Renaissance novel I was planning. Here the languages of past and present have much in common; one passes easily from Italian to Latin, while there is no passage from Arabic to Coptic. There is a strong strain of the Italian peoples of the Imperial time in the modern Italians, despite intervening admixtures. Moreover, Italian school children study the history of Imperial Rome as their own history; the monuments of the splendid past are more numerous than those of ancient Egypt: its literature, unlike that of the ancient Egyptians, is copious and fascinating, a universal cultural necessity. But between the Rome of Augustus and Marcus Aurelius, of Virgil and Tacitus, and the Rome which swarmed about me, there was no living connection; they were as far from each other as the magnificence of the Foro Romano and the forum of Trajan, at which the ruins hinted, is from the Corso and the Palazzo di Justitia. The Fascist evocation of ancestral greatness was a windy futility. The people I talked to, even the cultivated, did not feel a continuity between themselves and a far-off exalted past. The tumultuous Roman streets and squares stand away from the reminders of antique achievement which are inescapably imbedded in them almost as if actively disclaiming kinship.
Even more striking is the sense of discontinuity in Athens. I remember how I stood in the bow of the ship approaching the Piraeus, and saw for the first time the Parthenon and the Lycabettus towering over the still concealed inland city. I thought of Athenians of old returning from a journey, and of ancient Romans making their pilgrimage to the birthplace of Western civilization; and I thought how they, too, must have caught the first glimpse of their destination in these landmarks. But passing through the streets of Athens to the Acropolis, I asked myself how it was possible for these descendants—partial at least—of the most gifted people of all history to be so indifferent to the suggestion of these memorials. It was the question which Byron asked in “The Isles of Greece”; and thousands of others have asked it, too. For though there is much boasting in modern Athens about a glorious past, there is no organic nexus between the glory and its panegyrists. Yet they speak Greek, and are a people, and have inherited the land.
True, their Greek (I am told) is remoter from Plato’s than our modern Hebrew is from Isaiah’s; as remote as the Italian of modern Rome from the Latin of Virgil. But the triple cord is there, land, people, language, even if the last is slightly frayed. What, then, is lacking?
I can see now that there is lacking the bond of the intermediate generations. There is no channel of filial communication. The fourth strand has been snapped and cannot be rewoven. The past is a legend, pot a reality, because the sons did not receive from the fathers the heritage of the grandfathers.
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These are the two dangers and frustrations in Israel at the present time; the sundering from world Jewry, and the concomitant sundering from historic Jewry.
Partly because they are crushed by burdens which we of the wealthy West do not lighten as we should, partly because of the cyclical decline which characterizes all creative movements, partly because we have committed errors, the Israelis no longer feel themselves to be, as once they did, the expression of the latent will and destiny of the whole Jewish people. Their struggles take place on the limited stage of contemporary Israel. No tide of historic and worldwide significance, the lift of the Jewish people in time and space, carries them today. It may be a cruel thing to suggest, and yet it thrusts itself on the mind, that their special sensitivity with regard to oppression of Jews everywhere is in part a reflex of the feeling: “That human material belongs to us.” It is Israel that is wounded and threatened with loss; Israel, and not the Jewish people at large. And so, as they struggle with their moral problems, of discipline, of production, of overconsumption, of doctrinaire rigidity, they become more and more intent on their own salvation, and move toward the isolation which is the enemy of salvation.
To most of the internal problems of Israel there are no purely technical answers. Neither will answers come from party programs strategically reformulated. Both Israel and world Jewry must turn back to the sources of Zionist strength, to the vision which made the Jewish homeland an instrument, not an end. Even the discovery of good technical ideas depends on mood, and the change of mood now needed must have a common source and purpose in Israeli and world Jewry.
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