In an address before the World Zionist Congress, which met last December in Jerusalem, David Ben Gurion reiterated his belief that Jewish life in the Diaspora has a dim future. COMMENTARY invited three prominent American Jewish intellectuals—each of whom speaks out of a different relationship to Zionist ideology—to explore some of the wider implications of Ben Gurion’s speech and of the great excitement which followed upon its publication in the press.
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Oscar Handlin:
At first sight, the worldwide repercussions of David Ben Gurion’s statement chiding the Jews of the Diaspora for their failure to come to Israel, seemed altogether out of proportion either to its novelty or to its implication. Surely it is no news by now that the Prime Minister holds the views he then expressed.
He has never made any secret of his feelings on this matter. Ben Gurion has always been, and remains, convinced that it is the duty of Zionists to migrate to the Promised Land. He doubts that a whole Jewish life can be led outside the borders of the State of Israel. He anticipates, therefore, that the remnant of Jewry who do not take refuge there will disappear in the near future. A gradual process of assimilation will deprive those in the free countries of their identity; and those in the unfree areas of the world simply face extermination. Whatever position others may take, it is therefore the preeminent obligation of Zionists to save themselves by aliyah.
It follows as a matter of course from these assumptions that men for whom survival is a religious duty ought to move to Israel, the only earthly setting in which survival will hereafter be possible. Hence Ben Gurion’s particular reference to Jews with religious commitments. That he had never made this last point as explicitly as now does not detract from the fact that it was nevertheless always present in his thinking and in his public utterances.
In the past, Ben Gurion made no bones about the issue. It was true that shortly after the recognition of the State of Israel he issued a joint statement with Jacob Blaustein which offered a basis for a working collaboration with non-Zionist Jews. But that involved no contradiction with his fundamental assumption about the necessity for aliyah. In the eyes of the Prime Minister, those who are not Zionists have chosen a different road from his own. They may be right, although he thinks that they are wrong. But the risks and the responsibilities of the future rest upon their own shoulders.
It is altogether different when it comes to Zionists. Mere participation in that movement seems to him to involve a commitment which can only be interpreted in one way—migration to Israel. Without that culminating move, Zionism becomes no more than sentimentalism, indistinguishable from the other varieties of humanitarian support the new nation receives. Indeed the Zionists seem less generous in their aid, for they demand as a price the privilege of meddling in the affairs of the State.
Ben Gurion’s conception goes back a long way in the history of Zionism. Even forty years ago it set the Zionists of Europe apart from those of America and led to bitter conflicts. It has been troublesome ever since.
At the Ideological Conference in Jerusalem in August 1957, Ben Gurion participated in a somewhat similar debate. At that time, he looked forward to two movements of population into Israel, from Russia and from the West The first was, he thought, a subject for negotiation at the government level; and he still felt curiously optimistic about the prospects. He expressed the hope that with the opening of the Soviet gates, “at least half of Russian Jewry will come to Israel.” With regard to migration from the United States, he was more qualified in his expectations. There, he pointed out, the “members of the bodies that belong to the Zionist Organization are no different from those Jews who do not belong to that Organization.” But he left no doubt then that proper training would persuade the best of the youth and the intelligentsia to join the builders and the defenders of Israel.
How then can one account for the furor created by this latest reiteration of well-known sentiments? Ben Gurion’s comments, on this occasion, evoked more than the expected protests from non-Zionist or anti-Zionist groups. The American Council for Judaism, of course, saw this as another assault upon the American citizenship of the Jew. The American Jewish Committee regarded this as a repudiation of its interpretation of the Ben Gurion-Blaustein statement. That much was familiar.
More important was the reaction of spokesmen for bodies safely in “the Zionist fold. Despite its long-felt sympathies for Israel, the American Jewish Congress, through its president Joachim Prinz, issued a vigorous denunciatory statement. Rabbi Prinz shortly thereafter announced, “Zionism is—for all practical purposes—dead.” Almost every element in the Zionist organization in the United States joined in the mounting wave of protest. The unanimity of the sentiment critical of Ben Gurion and the force with which it was expressed reveal that, for many American Jews, the issue bore a significance not evident at first sight.
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To understand the reactions to Ben Gurion’s statement it is necessary to consider both the situation in which it was made and that in which it was received.
Ben Gurion did not arrange to speak before the World Zionist Congress simply to make known his sentiments; he and his audience were by then fully acquainted with each other’s views. His appearance and his speech were, in the first instance, tactical moves, but beyond that, they were also gestures with a ritual quality.
The Zionists were not eager to supply him with a platform and yielded only under pressure because they knew that he intended to continue his long struggle against the world organization. The government of Israel has for years regarded that body as an embarrassment. It does nothing, the Prime Minister thinks, that could not be better done by some branch of the Israeli government or by more comprehensive non-Zionist associations. It has therefore been no secret that Ben Gurion would like to see the Zionist Organization disband and hand its functions over to the State. On the other hand, the entrenched bureaucracy of the Organization, as well as many of its dedicated lay leaders, resist a change that would diminish the importance of their role both in Israel and in the Diaspora. Their capacity for resistance is sustained by institutional inertia, by sentiment, and by the credit they assume for the financial aid raised among American Jews.
In recent years it has become increasingly difficult to find the polite formulae for covering up the irreconcilable differences of attitude represented in this stalemate. On the eve of the twenty-fifth congress of the World Zionist Organization it seemed to some observers that this might be its last assembly. That danger was deflected by a prior understanding between Ben Gurion and Nahum Goldmann which extended its lease on life in return for an undertaking to make training for aliyah its central objective.
It was to drive home the meaning of that understanding that the Prime Minister spoke as he did. He has long been accustomed to belaboring the recalcitrant Zionists for their unwillingness to migrate. He has challenged Goldmann, for instance, to surrender the security of his American passport in order to throw in his lot with the State. No doubt, therefore, the members of Ben Gurion’s audience had grown hardened to the taunt that they remained in “exile” out of fondness for its fleshpots. So much was but a familiar gambit in a familiar game.
Yet there was added to Ben Gurion’s accusation an acerbity in the reference to the Orthodox that expressed the pent-up bitterness of his own frustrating situation. The events of the past year in Israel account for much of the passion with which he spoke.
Ben Gurion, of course, is by now accustomed to some kinds of failure. The total impasse in relationships with the Arab nations that has turned Israel into a garrison state has become a painful but accepted condition of existence. The inability to open channels through the Iron Curtain for the emigration of Eastern European Jews is beyond anyone’s control. But setbacks within the country itself are doubly disappointing, for they bring with them self-doubt and self-reproach. Could they have been avoided?
During the course of 1960 the aging Prime Minister could see all too many evidences at home of that very lack of idealism and of the willingness to sacrifice for which he has berated the Zionists of the Diaspora. Ben Gurion has suffered through months of painful debate engendered by the failure to elect a new Chief Rabbi. The conflict endangered the precarious arrangement by which the religious parties participated in his government; and it raised unwelcome problems about the future relations of church and state in Israel. Through it all, the Orthodox Jews overseas were not in the least backward about making their views known in the matter.
Then, too, the exposures of the disastrous Lavon affair were just coming to a head. The resultant deterioration of the party situation that ultimately led to Ben Gurion’s resignation was bad enough. But the incident also had more general, dismaying implications. It cast a sad light upon the nature of military-civilian relationships and upon the administration of justice in a democracy. It seemed to show that Ben Gurion’s role had itself been ambiguous. And it threatened the careers of the young men of promise upon whom his greatest hopes of future leadership rested.
Again and again, the Old Man must have asked himself, what had happened to the creative idealism of the first years of the State’s existence? Why were Israeli young people reluctant to embark upon a pioneering life in the Negev? Why did they prefer the transient mundane pleasures of the city and absorb themselves in selfish concern over the details of their own petty careers? No task was more important than that of reversing the trend. Indeed, highly-placed Israelis have privately expressed the hope that the Eichmann trial would remind Jews of the Nazi episode which was largely responsible for the creation of Israel and would rekindle the emotional reactions that brought tremendous support to the State in its infancy.
Under these conditions it is tempting to find a scapegoat in the outsiders, particularly if one is still dependent upon them. The Israelis know all too well the American tourist who burbles with enthusiasm over the gallantry of the kibbutzim while comfortably making inroads upon the pastries of the King David Hotel. Certainly there is resentment of those who think that they can earn the thrill of pride in the State’s achievements without personal involvement other than by financial contributions. And it is easy to fall into the trap of supposing that it would all have been different had the Jews of the West come in their hundreds of thousands, bringing with them their skills and their capital. The reflected disappointments in Ben Gurion’s jibes thus focused on the Zionists overseas, although the deeper cause of his own frustration may well be the discrepancy between his dreams and what has become of them.
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By the same token, the cries of outrage which greeted the statement reflected both the tactical dilemma and the underlying frustration of the American Zionists. For more than a decade they have been searching for a reason for their being and for an ideology. The problems that could be left unresolved as long as the struggle for national existence was paramount came back to haunt them once the State was a reality and once the way was open to aliyah. They have no easy answer as Zionists to Ben Gurion’s demand that they migrate. To justify their unwillingness to move or to send their children, they must argue that a sound Jewish life is indeed possible in the Diaspora—and that negates a fundamental tenet of earlier Zionist thought.
Above all, they are not themselves sure of where they stand; and they resent inquiries that reveal the ambiguities of their position. They, like other American Jews, continue to absorb the values of the middle-class society within which they find themselves. In the relative security of their own suburbs they are developing a style of life increasingly remote both from its European antecedents and from its Israeli counterparts. Comfortable as they are, however, they cannot evade two nagging questions.
They wonder, first of all, whether the institutions they have created here are adequate to assure the survival of the group in the face of the assimilative tendencies of American culture. Well-grounded or not, the suspicion that these may not be enough leads them to seek in Israel a counterweight that will compensate for their own suspected deficiencies.
And in regard to Israel, they would like to thrust aside the question of whether financial support, no matter how generous, is all that their Zionism demands of them. It is because Ben Gurion persists in raising the question they would rather not confront that they turn in rage against him.
From the start, the danger implicit in the relationship of the Jews of Israel to those of the United States has been the tendency of each group to use the other as a counter-image, to seek in the other the means of offsetting its own failings. The Prime Minister’s comment touched this sensitive spot. Hence the outcry.
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Milton Himmelfarb:
In his speech to the World Zionist Congress in Jerusalem in December 1960, Prime Minister Ben Gurion said many things. Some aroused passionate resentment, especially in the United States. Yet the most interesting and problematic thing about that speech was what he did not say, might have been expected to say, and could have said with greater confidence now than a few years ago—that in the more or less near future many Jews, even outside the Soviet and the Arab spheres, will have to leave the countries in which they live and of which they are citizens.
Ben Gurion might have been expected to say this because a major purpose of his speech was to stimulate immigration to Israel and because by temperament and style he is a Zionist in Herzl’s tradition. (Of all the founding fathers he invoked Herzl, Herzl’s precursor Pinsker, and Weizmann.) The essential themes of Herzlian Zionism are that anti-Semitism is inevitable wherever Jews are in a minority and that a Jewish state is the only way out. Even Weizmann, who was cool to the mystique of statehood, was convinced that the Jews carried anti-Semitism in their luggage. Yet, aside from asking whether there can be any assurance that what happened to the Jews under Hitler in Europe cannot happen again somewhere else, and recalling the persecution of Jews in the Soviet Union and the Arab lands, Ben Gurion did not say that it would be necessary for Jews in other lands to leave. Instead, his speech was in the opposing tradition in Zionist thought, that of Ahad Ha’am. For Ahad Ha’am, Zionism and a Jewish center in Palestine were the answer not so much to the political and economic problems of the Jews as to the psychological and cultural problems of Judaism, or Jewishness.
It is this last purpose or function of Israel that Ben Gurion prefers to stress. In his speech Israel is primarily the place where Jews can live without a division in their souls, which straightens the backs not only of its citizens but also of Jews abroad, and from which alone can emanate a life-giving Jewish education and influence. We customarily think of Herzlian Zionism as hard and of Ahad Ha’am’s Zionism as soft, but Ben Gurion’s harsh, almost jeering portrait of Jewish life in emancipated countries is not Herzlian. Ahad Ha’am’s famous essay on “Slavery in Freedom,” about French Jewry seventy years ago, is harsher.
One could understand why Ben Gurion could want to adopt the Ahad Ha’am tone if the only Jews within the effective reach of his voice were those of the United States, or Canada, or England, or even perhaps France. He is one of the Israeli Zionists who concede what used to be called on the left the thesis of American exceptionalism—in Zionist terms, America’s exemption from the workings of an iron law of anti-Semitism—and he may extend that to include some other Western countries as well. But there are almost 700,000 Jews in Latin America and more than 500,000 in Africa, including well over 100,000 in sub-Saharan Africa. For them a Herzlian diagnosis can no longer be dismissed out of hand as irrelevant ideologizing. The Jews of Africa and Latin America have reason to be fearful of the future. For many, the present is already intolerable.
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The large majority of the Jews of Africa, more than 400,000, are in the Arab north, from Morocco in the west to Egypt in the east. Their difficulties are usually thought to have arisen from the conflict between Israel and the Arab states. That is true, but not wholly true; just as it is true but not wholly true that Arab coldness or hostility to the United States arises from the Arab-Israel conflict and the Arab view of the United States as a supporter of Israel. The United States is not especially popular even where there is no Arab emotion about Israel. Since the Indonesians, Guineans, Ghanaians, and Latin Americans are not much better disposed than the Arabs to the United States, it is unlikely that the United States would enjoy Arab respect and affection even if there were no Israel. It is similarly unlikely that the Jews in the Arab countries would be secure if there were no Israel. Their situation is not essentially different from that of the Jews in the rest of Africa or in Latin America.
Less than a year ago there were about 2,500 Jews in the Belgian Congo (mostly from Rhodes), and now there are practically none. Two years ago there were 11,000 in Cuba, and now it is said that the 20 per cent of the Jewish population who accounted for 50 per cent of the communal leadership and support have gone. If Castro remains in power, nearly all the remaining Jews will leave in the next few years, given the chance. Neither Nkrumah nor Castro is anti-Semitic or cares deeply one way or the other about the Arab-Israel conflict. It is simply that their kind of social and national revolution, or simply upheaval, squeezes out the Jews—incidentally, in passing, as a side-effect, but not less effectively than if the revolutionary program called for their expulsion.
Domestically, Nasserism and Fidelismo have in common something characteristic of the programs of all the modern-minded leaders of colonial, semi-colonial, and ex-colonial peoples: nationalization of the society, the state, and the economy. Nationalization is both a nationalist and plebeian matter, deposing “foreigners” and cosmopolitans from their positions of social and cultural leadership and bringing to the fore the “real” people. In Egypt, the revolution has penalized the effendis, the Gallicized or Anglicized upper class, and the Copts, Greeks, Armenians, and Jews, and has promoted the Moslem peasantry and lower middle class, or their representatives; in Cuba, the urban bourgeoisie, those with an American orientation, and those who pride themselves on their Hispanidad, on the one hand, and the Afro-Cuban peasantry, on the other.
Nationalization also means suppressing communalism—the organization of philanthropy, education, and social life according to religion and national origin. Bourguiba in Tunisia, the most attractive leader of any of these movements, sees it as his prime duty to create a modern, secular, and unitary state. He is impatient with any significant institutions of a communal character that do not directly contribute to secular nationalism and to the consolidation of the state, whether Moslem institutions of the traditional sort or Jewish schools or charities. He means it sincerely when he says, “We are all Tunisians together,” but there is a chilling impatience and compulsion about that slogan—not to mention the actual discriminations against Jews with which it seems to be compatible.
Economically, nationalization means both a transfer of strategic positions to the representatives of the “real” people and discouragement of the private sector and emphasis on the public sector. Between the two world wars, Poland and Lithuania were right-authoritarian and state-capitalist, and the anti-Jewish character of their economic policies was not tempered by any lack of anti-Semitism. The dominant trend in Africa and Latin America is left-authoritarian and semi-socialist and is not necessarily accompanied by anti-Semitism, but the ground is being removed from under the Jews all the same. The attraction of Fidelismo extends far beyond the borders of Cuba, and in greater or lesser measure most of the Latin American countries are susceptible to it. At the other end of Latin America there has been Perón, and though Perón is rightist and Castro leftist, they appeal basically to the same needs, emotions, and classes. Nor is anti-Semitism absent in some of those countries, to add to the objectively anti-Jewish effect of plebeian and nationalist revolution.
I keep remembering an impressive wartime application of Zionist analysis by Eliezer Livneh (then Liebenstein) in Keneset Bialik, an annual miscellany published in Tel Aviv in those years. It was a prediction of what awaited the surviving Jews in Eastern Europe after the war. Poland and its neighbors would be socialist, he said, but would have as little room for the Jews as in the bad old days. If Livneh’s article were a Biblical text, it would be suspected of being prophecy after the event. Now, in 1961, no special boldness is needed for a prediction of Jewish emigration from Latin America in the years ahead.
In Tunisia, with a government that for that part of the world is very liberal, it is not only Jews who are in an uncomfortable position. Frenchmen are leaving too. In Algeria, the rebel authorities feel it necessary to give assurances that when independence is won, no part of the population will be discriminated against. They may honestly mean it, but can they deliver? During General de Gaulle’s recent visit the Arab masses quickly turned “Algerian Algeria,” the official rebel slogan, into “Moslem Algeria.” As for Morocco, Israel accelerated and intensified the dangers now weighing on the Jews there, but it did not create them. If Tunisia is uncomfortable for the Jews and Morocco dangerous, that is because the Tunisia of Bourguiba is generally more liberal and humane than the Morocco of Mohammed V.
In the rest of the African continent, especially South Africa, the prospect for the Jews depends on the prospect for multiracial—i.e., multigroup—societies. The odds are poor. The American Negro Louis E. Lomax, in his recent The Reluctant African, records his dismay about the depth of nationalist-racist feelings among the African elite in countries still under white rule. Verwoerd’s Afrikaner followers may feel that they have their backs to the sea, with no way out, but the British and the Jews in South Africa are of a different mind. Psychologically they already have their baggage packed for the time when they need to make a quick getaway.
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Why was Ben Gurion silent about all these things? To be sure, much of the new pressure for Jewish emigration does not arise from anti-Semitism, and the Herzlian tradition in Zionism stresses anti-Semitism. But that should present no great difficulty to a champion of Zionist thought. Classical Zionism, while emphasizing anti-Semitism, viewed it as a particular case of the more general phenomenon of national and group conflict; and the difficulties of the Jews in Africa and Latin America are certainly related to national and group conflict. Ben Gurion could easily have said that some of the specific features of classical Zionism are no longer applicable, but that its general principles are as valid as ever.
Many psychological explanations for Ben Gurion’s silence suggest themselves, but they are flimsy. One may speculate, for instance, that once Ben Gurion had brought himself to admit that classical Zionism is outmoded, he could not go back on the admission. But Ben Gurion seems to be much more the sort of man who makes concessions grudgingly, awaiting the moment when he can abandon them as no longer necessary.
The probable explanations are political. A good part of Ben Gurion’s speech was about the rise of the new states and the Israeli government’s desire for their friendship. Israelis speak jestingly of their African empire—their specialists on technical missions to the new republics. The Israeli government assigns a high priority to courses, conferences, and training programs for Affricans and Asians. It tries to be on the best possible terms with Latin American governments and opinion, for aid and comfort in the international political jungle. Ben Gurion was not going to say anything that would offend those people, and to say that the future was not promising for the Jews of Africa and Latin America might offend them.
On the Zionist side there was equally good reason for silence. Zionism offers both a diagnosis and a therapy. Africa and Latin America might be held to confirm the Zionist diagnosis, but would Jews accept the therapy? In recent years Jews who have had to emigrate have not characteristically gone to Israel, given a choice. There has even been a steady Jewish emigration from Israel. Of the substantial Jewish emigration from Algeria, nearly all has been to France; Algerian Jews are French citizens. Suppose Jews begin to emigrate from South Africa in large numbers. Are they likely to go to Israel when, as British subjects, they can go to England as of right? Latin American candidates for immigration to the United States are in a relatively favored position. That being so, will most Latin American Jewish emigrants go to Israel?
Hence, Ben Gurion must have thought, talk about immigration to Israel, by all means—but in Ahad Ha’am’s language, not Herd’s. A moral-psychological appeal cannot compete very effectively with the automobile, job, and fine apartment that Ben Gurion admits are easier to get in other lands, but it is better than any other appeal he could make.
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Charles E. Shulman:
A single remark in an otherwise undistinguished address delivered by Israeli Prime Minister David Ben Gurion has pointed up the sharp differences in outlook that now prevail among Jews in Israel and those living in lands outside Israel. Ironically, the remark was only an esoteric quotation from the Talmud: “Whosoever lives outside the land of Israel is considered to have no God.” There are many statements in the Talmud which clearly contradict this quotation, and in the context of Ben Gurion’s lengthy discussion, it appears as a relatively harmless and insignificant sentence. But it took on unusual importance for Jews living abroad not only because it was featured in the press, but also because it seemed to climax a long series of denigrations of Jewish Diaspora life. Ben Gurion happens to be the most articulate among those who believe that the Diaspora Jew is doomed to assimilation and oblivion. (But in this, as in many other views which he expresses publicly, he represents Israeli public opinion.) When Ben Gurion spoke at Brandeis University, the first Jewish-sponsored institution of general learning in the modern world, his review of Jewish history had no praise for the Jewish experience during the past two thousand years of the Diaspora:
When we went into exile, we continued to live, in our hearts and minds, within the bounds of our biblical heritage; but we did not continue to create anew save for the multiplying of the making of in interpretations and interpretations of interpretations about our sacred writings. Our spiritual lives, like our material lives, were impoverished and shrivelled. And if at the commencement of the modern Renaissance period in the seventeenth century a great eagle—Baruch Spinoza—rose from our midst, and in his lofty thought ascended to the skies, he was cast out of our nest and shed his light on others, uttering his profound words in another tongue. We lived in a political, an economic, and also a spiritual ghetto. This was not because our creative power was atrophied—had this been so it is doubtful if we could have maintained our identity—but because we had been torn from the roots of our people’s vitality, from homeland and independence.
It could hardly have been flattering to Brandeis University to hear this distinguished recipient of its honorary degree declare before a convocation which included a national television audience that during the past two thousand years Diaspora Jewry produced but one great personality—Spinoza—and nothing of lasting spiritual value. His estimate of the Jewish future in the Diaspora is not much higher. In an address before the Hadassah convention in Jerusalem he told a large assembly of American delegates:
Never was such a great Jewish community in danger of gentle extinction as American Jewry today. If this great historic miracle had not taken place in our lifetime and the State of Israel had not risen, the majority of the Jews in the United States would have been left without any bonds to Judaism.
The total emphasis of Israelis on the concepts of what Ben Gurion calls halutziut—the spirit of pioneering in the land of Israel—and on its by-product aliyah—immigration to Israel by Jews now living in the Diaspora lands—as the instruments of Jewish survival in the modern world, has tended to cloud the relationship of Israelis with Jews abroad. And the failure to take into account the temper of the Diaspora mind has resulted in a psychological gulf between those Jews within and those outside Israel’s borders which has been widening ever since the establishment of the State thirteen years ago. Evidence of this fact may be seen in the adverse reactions in America to Ben Gurion’s latest comments among Jews of every shade of opinion, from Zionist supporters of Israel to the anti-Zionist members of the Council for Judaism. Most of the protests indicated resentment, and not a few, like the following editorial comment, revealed the great frustration of Diaspora Jews:
We think Mr. Ben Gurion’s posture is symptomatic of the unfortunate attitude of the Israeli community toward American and world Jewry. We hear constantly reiterated pleas from American leaders for understanding on the part of American and other Jewries for the aspirations, needs, uniqueness of the people of Israel. Our observation is that this already exists—on a high and splendid level. The appeal should be addressed in the opposite direction; for an understanding and appreciation on the part of Israelis of the role, the function, the very relationship of American and world Jewry both to Israel and to its own variegated history.
Necessary as it is for Diaspora Jews to realize this spiritual position of Israel in today’s total world Jewish complex, it is no less important for Israel to understand the Diaspora Jewish mind. For though the Diaspora Jew created Israel and now supports Israel far beyond his fund-raising efforts, he is at the same time not inclined to uproot himself. Nor will he accept aliyah as an indispensable condition of his spiritual fulfillment.
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Eighty years ago two waves of immigration proceeded out of Europe, One was the great exodus which brought two million Jews to American shores in the decades preceding the First World War. The second, much smaller wave consisted of Jews who went to Palestine to lay the foundations of the State of Israel. These latter settled among the Arabs and suffered hardships and privations while they worked at draining the malarial swamps, establishing the kibbutzim, and organizing the unique Histadrut labor movement. Many of them (who followed earlier religious settlers) embraced socialism in place of the Jewish religion they abandoned. They had dedicated themselves to a single cause—the creation of a free and independent homeland for the Jewish people. For they firmly believed that there was no future for the Jew in the Diaspora. Their cure for all Jewish ills was geographical.
In pursuit of their program they established hachsharah, or “preparation,” camps in Diaspora countries to recruit Jewish youth for settlement in Palestine, creating conditions in these camps similar to those the trainees would find in their new home. The prospective young settlers sang the songs of the Palestinian Jews, studied Hebrew, and absorbed the socialist philosophy prevailing among those with whom they were to share their lives. (It was their children who later formed the core of the Haganah armies that were to win freedom for the Jews in the land of Israel.)
Meanwhile, the Jews who came to the United States were also aware of the insecurities of European Diaspora life. Anti-Semitism had motivated their leave-taking from Europe, just as it did for those who went to Palestine. Yet though many of them found integration into American life hard, they looked upon America as a permanent home. They were sympathetic to the Herzlian program for the establishment of a Jewish homeland, and maintained a lively interest in the progress of the Zionist movement. Some of their children even enrolled in the hachsharah camps and prepared to settle in Palestine. They attended the mass rallies addressed by Zionist leaders from abroad. But for all their interest and sympathy, they never adopted the view of the Palestine Jewish community (the Yishuv) that the Diaspora was only a way station on the road to permanent life in the land of their fathers.
The difference in outlook between these two communities inevitably grew wider as time passed. To the Yishuv, the Jewish homeland and the Jewish people could not be separated. To American Jews, the separation was both possible and necessary. Always aware of a world Jewish problem, these Diaspora Jews certainly continued to support the Zionist movement, but going to Palestine was for others, who needed it. Justice Brandeis stated this viewpoint eloquently in an address called “The Jewish Problem and How to Solve It”:
Let us clearly bear in mind what Zionism is, or rather, what Zionism is not. It is not a movement to remove all the Jews of the world compulsorily to Palestine. It is essentially a movement to give the Jews more, not less freedom; it is to enable the Jews to exercise the same right now exercised by practically every other people in the world; to live at their option either in the land of their fathers or in some other country. . . . Indeed, loyalty to America demands that each American Jew become a Zionist. For only through the ennobling effect of its strivings can we develop the best that is in us and give to this country the full benefit of our great inheritance.
American Jews were shocked and saddened by the Jewish tragedy in Europe, they protested against British immigration policies in Palestine, and they were proud of the outnumbered and underequipped Haganah forces which fought the battles for Israel’s freedom. Still there was no question in the minds of American Jews regarding their option. Like Justice Brandeis, they saw no inconsistency in multiple loyalties and looked on the Zionist Organization as a bridge between the Diaspora and the Jewish homeland—as indeed it was. But as time went on, their personal attachment to the concept of peoplehood grew weaker. They were appalled by Nazi atrocities, but they could not respond like the Palestine Jewish community. In those years, it was to Palestine that the great body of Jewish refugees streamed. American Jews began to contribute more and more of their means, and less and less of themselves, through the United Jewish Appeal and similar philanthropic organizations. Zionism as a personal attachment to the fate and destiny of the Jewish people was on the wane in America long before the establishment of the State of Israel.
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The present conflict represented by the response to Ben Gurion’s comment, then, is but an extension of a continuing difference of emphasis that was overlooked in years past. The American-born Jew gradually lost the vision of the peoplehood of Israel. He came to regard religion as the only special bond that tied him to other Jews, sharing as he did with his Christian neighbors the language, culture, and customs of the country. As for the sabra, so far did he become alienated from Diaspora Jewish life that the alarmed Israeli ministry of education instituted “Jewish consciousness” courses in the schools to give the young Israelis a sense of continuity with the Jewish past and a sense of unity with Jews living abroad. Dr. Mordecai Kaplan has given us a clear picture of the difficulties which ensue when bonds that once tied the Jewish communities of the world together are dissolved.
There was a Jewish people during the centuries that Jews lived in forced dispersion. The almost unbroken uniformity of belief and practice that obtained in the past made possible indivisible unity. We did not need our enemies to unify us—without our consent. Came the emancipation and enlightenment and wrought havoc with the unity of the Jewish people. Emancipation has led to the integration of Jews with the body politic of the nations of which they are citizens. As a result, each local aggregate of Jews develops its own communal characteristics that render it incommunicable with ever) other geographic Jewish community.
The result of the present crisis in Israeli-Diaspora relations may be more injurious to Israel’s future than is now realized by those guiding the destiny of the Jewish State. For, without the Ideological purpose once supplied by Zionism, the Diaspora approach to Israel may be limited to fund-raising and the like. Immediately before the rise of the State of Israel huge numbers joined the Zionist movement in America. But the new recruits were not committed to the Zionist philosophy; they joined to protest British measures against helpless Jews seeking entry into Palestine. The main concern of these Zionists was to find a home for the homeless Jews. Then, after the State of Israel was established, the Zionist ranks dwindled rapidly and American Jews chose different means of manifesting their interest in Israel. They continued to contribute generously to the United Jewish Appeal, and supported a host of activities devoted to the development of the economic, cultural, and social life of the new country.
The gradual change of emphasis did not escape the Israelis who began to recognize in American Jewish philanthropic endeavors for Israel the marks of an ideologically distinct community. This recognition can perhaps explain Ben Gurion’s denigration of the Diaspora mind, but it cannot explain his seeming indifference to the problem of dealing with it, or explain his rejection of the World Zionist Organization—the only agency composed of interested Diaspora Jews from all countries which offers any channels of communication between the two communities and is capable of restoring to Diaspora Jewish thinking the temporarily lost concept of the unity of the Jewish people. The resolutions of the recent congress of the World Zionist Organization carry little weight, since their fulfillment depends upon people who now consider themselves at home in their Diaspora environment and have no desire to settle in Israel. Because the Israelis have not yet penetrated to the thinking of the Diaspora mind it remains doubtful whether the Diaspora youth can be prevailed upon to spend even a limited number of years in Israel.
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Israelis should consider the possibility that the elimination of the World Zionist bodies might isolate them still further from the Diaspora which they hardly know. Their notion of Jewish life in western democratic countries probably derives from the tourists who visit Israel, and tourists are not necessarily the bearers of the best in Jewish culture. As for the masses of settlers from other lands, practically every group which has come to live in Israel during the past quarter of a century has consisted of refugees bearing the mark of suffering. They have been survivors of death camps, impoverished and sick immigrants from Arab countries, and people violently uprooted from lands of their birth. Thus, the Israelis may not be aware of a Diaspora Jewish life that is normal, creative, and satisfying. Perhaps, because of the kind of Orthodoxy they have seen in Israel, they cannot conceive of a religion which can be a unifying force in Jewish life. They may, therefore, be unable to comprehend why a stray Talmudic quotation equating godliness with residence in Israel (even though it was intended solely for Orthodox Jews abroad, as Ben Gurion explained later) should arouse such widespread resentment among members of all shades of Jewish belief in the Diaspora—who could interpret it as an appeal to tribalism and nothing more. Jewish religious thinking in the Diaspora has long been concerned with the problem of unity. Mordecai M. Kaplan, for one, has observed that we cannot rely on anti-Semitism to maintain the unity of Jews in Israel with the Jews in the Diaspora, and that without a unifying purpose which only mature religion can provide, Jews in the Diaspora are likely to lose interest in the Jews of Israel, even as Israelis have already begun to lose interest in the Diaspora. (Indeed, Israelis today are no more interested in the religion of the American Jews as a unifying element than American Jews are interested in the Israeli concept of peoplehood.)
There is much in Diaspora Jewish life that calls for realistic reappraisal today. But there is nothing in it to warrant the belief that (in the free world at least) it is far on the road to extinction. Its roots, as the late Simon Rawidowitz pointed out in his posthumously published book Babylon and Jerusalem, are sunk deep in contemporary civilization. Rawidowitz opposed the tendency in Israel to elevate the heroic and state-building element in the Jewish tradition above the traditional spirit of the Diaspora, which kept the Jewish people alive throughout the centuries when it was without a homeland. Today Jerusalem and Babylon—Dr. Rawidowitz’s symbols for Israel and the Diaspora—are equal components of the whole of Jewish life. The Diaspora has known golden ages of Jewish culture before and may know such ages again.
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