Dear b—,

In the absence of a letter from you I am reading those of the “father of Zionist socialism,” Moses Hess—the ones that make up his 1862 book Rome and Jerusalem.

Hess is immensely appealing. He seems to have discovered Zionism quite on his own, in the course of rejecting the racism of conservative Germans and the ideological anti-Semitism of European revolutionaries. I like the very homey, unsystematic thrust of his argument in the letters, promoting the cause of a revitalized nation in the organic imagery of seeds and flowers rather than in the capitalized abstractions favored by his German philosophical contemporaries. When he speaks of the human family, he explains that his image of it grows straight from his mother’s love, which is not only the emotional but the fructifying intellectual origin of his own love for mankind:

Judaism has never drawn any line of separation between the individual and the family, the family and the nation, the nation and humanity as a whole, humanity and the cosmos, nor between the creation and the Creator. . . . Judaism is rooted in the love of the family; patriotism and nationalism are the flowers of its spirit, and the coming regenerated state of human society will be its ripe fruit.

You once told me of your bar-mitzvah teacher, who demonstrated that all men are brothers by drawing a stick figure of the biblical Adam at the top of a page and a geometric progression of his offspring beneath. Hess is similarly convinced that the Jewish idea of loving wholeness—whose highest philosophic interpreter he believes to be Spinoza—can inspire the fraternal reform of human society.

From his innocent enthusiasm about this project you would not guess that Hess was trying to defuse an explosive idea. He knew that this view of the Jews as an organic family had begun to gain threatening force in Europe. The robust family of his description was perceived by others as a conspiring clan, like the ubiquitous Rothschilds who were building their international banking empire across otherwise divided frontiers. “The German hates the Jewish religion less than the race,” he wrote with unnerving sobriety. “He objects less to the Jews’ peculiar beliefs than to their peculiar noses.” Even after the Jew had done everything to accommodate himself to the surrounding majority—shaved his beard, adopted local dress, mastered German, proved himself an outstanding musician/philosopher/businessman—the Germans still objected that he was only trying to camouflage his essential and ineradicable Jewishness.

Nothing daunted by this accusation, Hess cheerfully agreed that the Jews could never become good Germans. The Germans’ abstract passion for “pure human nature” was really an excuse to seek domination over all other races, and made them the most dangerous people in Europe. As for the French, who had struggled for liberty, equality, fraternity, they represented to Hess the ideal of brotherhood. Then there was Italy, and specifically the resurrection of Rome as the capital of a reawakened modern Italian nation, which inspired Hess with a model for the resurrection of Jerusalem. But his optimism about nationalism in general derived from his idea of a reconstituted and deeply ethical Jewish nation that would illumine the international arena.

And buoyant he was, the sunny forecaster of a reawakened people that would rebuild its homeland in the land of Israel. He thought that the national movements gaining force in Europe were not only compatible with humanism but a guarantor against the leveling tendencies of technology and conformism. Many nice people of Europe were mistakenly trying to establish closer ties among all the nations of the world by denying the typical, creative characteristic of each. Against this destructive uniformity he appealed to the original organic community—the Jews.

To Hess, the history of the Jews proved that nations were not so easily dissoluble, and that the moral energy of their survival was a force for good, not evil. As a child he had seen his grandfather, in the synagogue, mourning the destruction of the ancient temple in Jerusalem, and had heard him pray for the return of the Jews to Zion. He had been told the story of Mother Rachel weeping at her tomb in Hebron when the soldiers of Nebuchadnezzer drove the children of Israel into exile after destroying the holy city. This parental love had sustained the children of Israel through centuries of dispersion and ensured their eventual return. Hess championed the restoration of the Jewish state less as an antidote to European anti-Semitism than as the harbinger of a variegated world community.

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You can see why even at this historical remove the letters of Rome and Jerusalem are so inspiring. The courage it took to stand up to Karl Marx on the one flank and the German-Jewish reformers on the other—to the radicals and liberals of his day who were also his peers and his friends—thrills me no less than does the rare manifestation of such courage in our own time and place. Yet I have to confess that Hess’s mixture of politics and metaphysics also makes me uneasy, especially when applied to a people already the subject of too much mystification. The quality of national character can have nothing to do with a nation’s right to exist, and, unless you are God, the argument for a national homeland dare not be made on grounds of national merit.

I think I understand how the two became fused in the mind of someone like Moses Hess, who had for a long time been under the exclusive influence of Western European thought, and who was stung by the assumptions of German superiority. Ashamed of having once judged his own culture by the standard of those who wanted only to destroy it, and freshly convinced of the moral grandeur of Jewish civilization, he wanted to reveal the power of the Jewish national idea. He had also to make his fellow Jews admire the achievement of their own culture if they were to embrace their legitimate national existence. The admirability of Jewish achievement was hence offered as evidence of Jewish national legitimacy—a fatal mixture, since it appeared to make the legitimacy contingent on the admirability.

This remains the Jewish humanist’s—and in this case, the Jewish socialist’s—very special, very deadly temptation. Once he feels, or regains, a measure of national confidence he tends to be so dazzled by his moral force that he would just as soon be judged on his merits as accepted for an equal. He does not believe in the religious basis of Jewish election, but in a secular echo of its special claims, or because the demonic image of his enemy seems to require of him a rebuttal in kind, he tries to prove his moral prowess instead of demanding his due. He is like the son of a murdered tightrope walker who insists on waiving the net to prove his nerve, forgetting that his father was killed not through lack of skill but by the rival who cut the rope. I don’t have kind thoughts for Jews who do the moral strut.

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Last Wednesday I found myself at a veritable Strutters’ Ball. For my cousin Gaby’s fiftieth birthday her husband had invited a group of us to the restaurant Tournant de la Rivière just outside Montreal, where with the porch to ourselves and a very long evening through five courses, we drifted from the delightful world of French cuisine into our own. The flow of our conversation into its habitual current was as simple as the turn of the river beyond our window.

We were talking tennis, Gaby of a set she had won from me earlier in the day and the men of some new-style rackets, when someone brought up Israel’s new line of tennis players: how about their Davis Cup win over Czechoslovakia! You can probably fill in the rest. After Czechoslovakia, Israel had to play India, which had refused Israel admission a year earlier when it hosted the table-tennis tournament. So we expressed indignation over India’s discriminatory practices, and satisfaction that this time India had decided to abide by the rules. But this was not enough. By the time we were through, it was not India’s but Israel’s behavior that had become the subject, with the main issue being whether Israel should have spared India the embarrassment by agreeing to play in a third country, and thereby demonstrated to the world that Jews are above its petty politics.

How often have you seen this Jewish sleight of hand, the almost imperceptible shift from the moral failings of others to our own putative moral strength? We were discussing sport, whose charm is the guaranteed equality of rules within which individuals or teams can compete. Suddenly we are brought up short and reminded that even in this charmed sphere the Jewish state is not guaranteed equality. India panders to Arab hatred of Israel by excluding Israel whenever it can (to no great international outcry), admitting it only when faced with disqualification. Israel is singled out for the crime of its existence, and made to test the principles of equality on which international sport, like international law, depend. But certain Jews are prepared to turn discrimination into a test of the Jewish state, a chance to show off the vaunted Jewish moral superiority.

To see how dangerous this reflex can be, consider the aftermath of the massacres at the Palestinian camps of Sabra and Shatila in September 1982. On the facts of the massacre itself there seems to be agreement: while Israeli troops were still in Lebanon, Christian militiamen killed 460 people, about half of them women and children, in the two refugee camps near Beirut. It needs to be said that the slaughter was an act of retaliation for earlier massacres by Palestinian terrorists, and also that these terrorists deliberately placed women and children in their military bases as a tactic of moral intimidation. But no provocations by the PLO could justify the militia’s hand-to-hand killing of civilians, and the ensuing swell of outrage in the West was a reasonable expression of its disgust.

Israelis may have felt a special horror. These marauding Lebanese Christians were, after all, the potential “ally” of Israel in the peace settlement it had been seeking in the Middle East, and its real ally during the 1982 invasion of Lebanon. One had had higher hopes than this for Christian forces. There was also the troubling question of indirect responsibility. If the Israelis were in temporary military control of the area in which the massacre occurred, they had to wonder about sins of omission, a failure to foresee and to prevent it.

But others had actually committed the murders. Where are the killers now? Has anyone put a price on their heads? Why are they not hunted down so that they might be brought to trial and given the punishment they deserve? If the outrage was so great and the crime so brutal, where was the call for justice?

In truth, there was no moral outrage and no desire for retribution. The massacre was morally interesting only as a moment of reckoning with the Jews, an opportunity to apply that tired but still vigorous double standard according to which Jews should be “more Catholic than the Pope,” and which insists on monitoring them for their purity. As soon as the government of Israel agreed to investigate its failure to prevent the massacres, real evil was welcome to run free.

Do I hold Israel responsible for the escape of the murderers as others wanted to hold it responsible for the murders themselves? Of course not. Yet who can deny that the publicized inquiry into Israeli complicity helped to obscure the traces of the killers and the cycle of violence that continues? Israel, instead of demanding that its own inquiry be linked to a serious pursuit of the murderers, instead of asking Christians and Muslims to see to their morality, responded to the accusation of criminality by providing a convenient diversion, agreeing to stand alone in the dock. “I am glad to be held to a higher standard,” says the moral supremacist, as though his morality rather than theirs were the legitimate concern of the world. As though even the highest standard of Jewish behavior could be a substitute for the decency of others. The transference to the international arena of a people’s desire for holiness is a tragic mistake with potentially tragic consequences. By assuming even a fraction of the guilt that is not rightly his, the moral supremacist betrays the cause of righteousness in which he says he labors.

Of course I know what would have greeted me had I tried this line of argument at Gaby’s party. “Don’t you believe that Jews ought to aspire to exemplary morality?” “Why, in fact, should we not hold the Jewish state to a higher standard of behavior? Aren’t we supposed to be ‘a light unto the nations’?” Strutters do not appear to recognize the difference between moral striving (the direction of which, in politics even more than in private life, is always open to debate) and political scapegoating. In politics it is not God who holds Israel to a double standard, but fellow states which refuse to credit its legitimacy. Jewish morality is no more likely to win over the enemy than Jewish immorality ever occasioned his enmity in the first place. Yet the moral strutters think they recognize a continuity between the Jew’s election to carry the burden of the Law at Sinai and the choice of the modern Jew as a prime target of international discrimination. They want Israel to prove its holiness to India and the world the way we Jews once undertook to prove our holiness to the Supreme Judge.

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Unfortunately, this attitude has deep roots. I think it has been with us since modern Jewish thinkers began to ascribe to their ideologies the same claims to election they had formerly professed as devout Jews. Moses Hess, for example, could not accept religious election as the continuing source of Jewish morality because he no longer believed in a God of revelation, or in a God Who mattered. At the same time, his respect for Jewish civilization—for the consequences of the Jewish contract with God through the millennia—made him eager to preserve his people’s historical mission. The Jews mattered even if God did not. So he tried to identify the moral core of Jewishness with the emergent socialist faith in an egalitarian, responsible state that would be a new earthly example to the nations.

The resulting idea of Jewishness, when undertaken by someone as richly endowed as Hess was with sensitivity, sympathy, and knowledge, could be morally persuasive and, for one generation at least, even culturally satisfying. But there are serious flaws in the argument. As long as the Jewish claim to election had rested on the Jew’s acceptance of Halakhah, a way of life that derives from the granting of the Law at Sinai, it was open to all people alike. The Torah was a “tree of life” to all who clung to it, and everyone prepared to cling to it could become a Jew. Ruth the Moabite serves as the model for all proselytes to Judaism, who are invited to recognize a sign of their authenticity as Jews in the divine promise that the messiah himself will descend from her lineage.

But how, other than through Jewish birth, can you become a Jewish socialist or a Jewish humanist? And if you cannot become a Jewish socialist, is it not a form of racism to claim that Jewish socialists or a Jewish socialist state are potentially “a light unto the nations”? Do Jewish socialist parents in Israel or elsewhere teach their children that they are expected to be more moral than French or Danish socialists because they were born to them rather than in France or Denmark? In any case, if their ethics derive from a political program, then the program rather than the accident of their birth must be the source of their moral education and hence the determinant of their moral actions. The rational basis of socialism precludes any claim for the superiority of the Jews.

With one apparent exception: when Jews are singled out for mistreatment. The idealistic young Jews who opposed the autocratic abuses of the czarist regime in Russia, Moses Hess who defended the Jews against the Teutonic will to crush them, cloaked themselves and their politics in the language of prophetic righteousness. Our friends think they see the same pattern at work when India discriminates against the Jewish state, thereby giving it an opportunity to lead the struggle for decency. But the parallels are quite false. The ancient Jews were fighting for a way of life that set them apart. Their claim to morality was not inherent in their struggle, much less in themselves, but in their vision of God, their acceptance of God’s Law, and in their determination to obey it. They had to maintain this way of life, which was inherently Jewish, against all who would crush it, crushing God’s will.

In the modern period, being singled out for mistreatment was something altogether different for Jews who no longer believed in their divine election or in Jewish religious observance. Could anti-Semitism be an occasion for improving the world if the Jews against whom it was directed no longer followed a superior way of life? Two antithetical movements said Yes. One sought the enlistment of the modern Jew in a cause “higher” than his own, in a modern ideological system that went beyond the teachings of the rabbis; the other insisted on the Jew’s own national legitimacy as part of the fabric of a modern pluralistic world community. Both movements held that the Jewish struggle, sublimated in the first instance, self-affirming in the second, could still be interpreted as an assertion of the good against oppressive powers.

These alternatives did not prove equally benign. The sublimated striving for righteousness led straight to hell. True, there were Jewish idealists who pioneered the trade unions and remained democrats. But the Jewish revolutionaries, Communists, and pro-Communists who justified expropriation, violence, and murder in the name of higher egalitarian ideals should disabuse us once and for all of the notion that Jews are innately more moral than other peoples. The readiness of so many individual Jews to serve and to justify the most repressive political system in the world exposes the false claims of any “Jewish” morality apart from the morality of the Jewish Law. When it comes to Jewish enthusiasm for the great egalitarian project, I think we may be grateful that we are such a small people.

For its part, the Jewish struggle for self-determination did remain an agent of liberalization, even within the revolutionary movement. When, for example, the members of the Jewish Socialist Bund insisted on their national legitimacy, they were resisting Lenin’s concentration of power, whether or not that was their stated intention. This is why he opposed them so strenuously, and had them crushed in the Socialist International. Yet something of their independent spirit survives in the Soviet Jewish refuseniks of today. These Jews are called refuseniks because they were refused their request to emigrate to Israel, but their refusal is also active, not passive: like the gnat in talmudic legend that made its way into the brain of Titus and drove him insane with its buzzing, they refuse to be intimidated in a system that depends for its power on the ability to impose firm order on all. The Jewish will to be Jewish implicitly defies totalitarian hegemony. Since the Soviet Jew can hardly control the larger political forces that he serves, he can vouch for the morality of his cause only when he acts on his own behalf.

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Zionism was on even sounder moral ground than Bundism in its insistence on national self-determination—as long as it did not fall into the trap that Hess had unwittingly set for it, which was to combine the political ideal of a state with the secularized ideal of a holy nation. The fraudulence of Hess’s original conception was exposed almost at once. Hess predicated his idea of a holy Jewish people on the model of the illustrious French! He wrote: “The Jewish nation . . . must not hesitate to follow France in all matters relating to the political and social regeneration of nations, and especially in what concerns its own rebirth as a nation. . . .”

What a bitter joke on the idea of a national character! Some thirty years after Hess extolled the brotherliness of the French, to him the essence of their collective political identity, the Dreyfus case inspired Theodor Herzl to create a state to save the Jews from the French. France was the model, all right—the model of the fate that would befall Jews if they remained dispersed throughout Europe in a period of emerging nation states. Hess certainly proved prescient in his generalization about the Germans, but it is worth remembering that his high-minded prophecies were based on correspondingly erroneous generalizations about the French.

Initially, of course, France had also seemed to the young Theodor Herzl the guarantor of European enlightenment and emancipation. He, too, coming from Vienna, had found in France the ideal modern state, which, in enfranchising the Jews, also set them an example of democracy, of tolerance, of refuge from political oppression. Hence his shock at the sight of the Paris mob shouting “Death to the Jews!” He would not have felt the humiliation so keenly had France not figured earlier as his promised land.

The crowd’s hysteria threatened Herzl’s deepest liberal faith. He wrote in his diary: “One Jew an alleged traitor and down with all the Jews? And where? In republican, modern, civilized France, 100 years after the Declaration of the Rights of Man!” Listen to his stunned disbelief. He was dazed not so much by the threat to the Jews as by the threat to himself, the civilized cosmopolitan, for whom the Declaration of the Rights of Man was the new Ten Commandments, the new Sermon on the Mount. Watching that frenzied anti-Semitic mob, he must have felt as Moses did when, coming down from the mountain with the perfect law for an exalted people, he found them dancing around a golden calf. When the shock began to wear off, however, Herzl went back up the mountain: Zionism was his revised attempt to rescue the liberal faith.

Because Herzl is the founder of the modern Jewish national movement, Jews inevitably parochialize his legend. Frightened, they say, by the intensity of European anti-Semitism, Herzl determined to save his people from destruction. This is true from the point of view of the Jews, but not true enough. Herzl’s people were the Europeans, among whom he was keen to include his own tribe, the Jews. Zionism was his proposed solution not merely to the Jewish problem but to the European problem: if anti-Semitism could call into question the rational premises upon which French democracy rested, one would have to strengthen its rational premises by eliminating the anti-Semitism.

Moses Hess, troubled by the same problem, had blamed anti-Semitism on the German national character and found his solace in the higher national tolerance of the French. The Germans made him see the need for a Jewish homeland; the French made it seem less urgent. For Herzl, who witnessed the moral collapse of France, no refuge was left. But no more than Hess was he prepared to surrender his optimistic belief in the perfectibility of human society through the rational acts of men and women.

This optimism was the source of what otherwise strikes us as Herzl’s chutzpa or madness—his confidence that Gentile rulers and assimilated Jews alike would come to his assistance. He trusted them to join him in the crusade to cure Europe of its hatred because he was convinced of the benefit that would accrue to all once the target of hatred was removed. Zionism was the last hope of European civilization, for unless Europe could find a rational and just solution to the Jewish problem, Europe itself could no longer pretend to be liberal, rational, or just. This leads one to think that had they been able to save themselves, the European Jews might have saved liberalism too.

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Here, then, is the rub: Zionism was a movement not of pure but of tempered optimism. From its birth in troubled secular Europe, it required an acknowledgment of the destructive as well as the creative impulses of modern society, of the hateful as well as the benevolent impulses of human beings. This is where it ran into trouble at the start, and where it flounders still. Those really infected by hatred cannot confront their own base prejudice, while those who dream of a benign world order do not want to face the daily manifestation of malice and evil. Like Herzl before them the defenders of the state of Israel today who insist on the rightful place of the Jews in the world are forced into perpetual confrontation with those who deny them that place. Jewish self-affirmation has never been an exercise for the weak, and in this respect, at least, the modern Jew who fights for Israel has something in common with his ancestor who refused to abandon his God.

Even posthumously—I mean not after Herzl’s death but after the destruction of European Jewry—there are still liberals who resent the realism that Jewish nationhood introduces into the modern world. Some object, on philosophical or psychological grounds, to admitting the fact of so much hatred, while others resent the effort required in standing up for the Jews. One may feel sorry for their timid souls, except that any pity wasted on them may result in the real death of Jewish children, sooner or later.

Aggression against the Jews can become an occasion for liberal affirmation (liberal in the older sense, I mean), but only if one is prepared to fight for the legitimate rights of the Jews—as Jews, as imperfect Jews. This, of course, our moral strutters are least inclined to do.

You and I have often discussed the concept of normalcy or normalization that has plagued Zionist thinkers and modern Jews. Rome and Jerusalem finally consolidated my inchoate discomfort with the word “normalization.”

As a political term, “normalization” points in the wrong direction. The hope of political Zionism was not for Jewish conformity to the standards of other nations, because the very basis of the Zionist enterprise was to conserve and renew Jewish national distinctiveness, in one form or another. Politically, Zionism aimed rather for unexceptionalism, a concept which puts the emphasis not on the adjustment of the Jews to the norms of other nations, but on the adjustment of other nations to the normative existence of the Jews. Insofar as certain international standards of the law, diplomacy, reciprocity, and convention do exist among nations, they were to apply, unexceptionally, to the Jewish nation in the Jewish state.

The emergence of nation-states in the 19th and 20th centuries necessitated the creation of a Jewish homeland to save the Jewish remnant from European barbarism. The same process, rampant now throughout the East and West alike, required the rescue of Jews from Arab lands no less than from continental Europe. For the Jews to insist on their right to an unexceptional existence in the community of nations, to the unexceptional legitimacy of their polity, and to their unexceptional treatment as human beings, is to discharge an obligation to the world as much as to themselves—at least if one wishes to continue believing in the world as a habitable human sphere. Faith in the world is predicated on the world’s ability to accept the political unexceptionalism of the Jews, who will have been a light unto the nations when they are no longer required as a scapegoat.

As for the substance of Jewish nationhood, the extent and definition of Jewish normalcy, that is a matter for the Jews to decide. Some nations have refined themselves, and others have befouled themselves, and it isn’t clear which we ought to consider the norm. But the content of the national existence is independent of its legitimacy, which is all that Zionism sought to guarantee. The scandal of Arab rejectionism forty years after the creation of the state of Israel is great enough; the scandal of Jews who accept this outrage as a sign of their own moral election is an affront not only to Jewish life but to any moral life worth living.

In the spirit of Sholem Aleichem, let’s now turn to more cheerful subjects. What’s the current rate of inflation in Israel, and have you figured out the deductions on your first pay check?

With Love—

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