On Antisemitism

CHAPTER 1

God, Nation, Eternity

After being introduced [Professor Cohen] said, "I have been asked to speak on the Jewish problem. Gentlemen, there is no Jewish problem"-and thereupon he sat down.

A Tribute to Professor Morris Raphael Cohen,
Teacher and Philosopher

CQ: Perhaps mention the speaker:

Dr. Judah L. Magnes, memorializing the life of Professor Morris Raphael Cohen, 1927.

Idealist conceptions of Zionism are naturally inseparable from the dogma of eternal antisemitism.

Abram Leon, The Jewish Question: A Marxist Interpretation

Nineteenth-century nationalists projected the idea of their People deep into a distant past. Struggling for independence, Greeks dreamed of the ancients, Italians of Rome. As for Germans, some opted for the Teutonic tribes, while others preferred the less brutish-sounding Aryans. It was this particular pseudo-racial pedigree that-as an anonymous French journalist reported shortly after the Franco-Prussian War-provided inspiration for a new political movement. "An anti-Jewish party formed . . . and was called the antisemitic party," he wrote in 1881. He went on to explain that

in Germany, everything has an essentially scientific allure. . . . Today when the progress of comparative linguistics has made the names of the Aryan races more or less popular . . . people know too that the Aryan races are opposed in the name of grammar and ethnology to the Semitic races which have no close kinship with them at all. . . . To call the Jews Semites is to underscore their foreign origin, to indulge the Teutonism currently in vogue, in short to excite the national fiber so sensitive whenever it rubs up against whatever is not German.

A recently unified Germany, the new insights of scientific racism, nationalist sensitivities: The invention of the concept of antisemitism in and around 1880 was part of the birth of the modern. It was in fact a reaction against modernity itself, which portrayed the Jews as single-handedly responsible for pretty much every grievance contemporary life presented and did so using the preeminently modern vehicles of the popular press and party politics. As the movement spread it attracted critical attention. Liberals saw it as an outrage to reason and a spur to educate public opinion; the revolutionary Left saw it as a mistaken diagnosis of a real problem-capitalism-and regarded it as a "socialism of fools." For both, it was a mark of modernity gone astray.

But one group of thinkers was not surprised and saw nothing very new in what was happening. Zionism emerged around the same time as many of its European nationalist counterparts and like them it was a modern political phenomenon that encompassed a vast range of ideological possibilities. It too turned traditional religious faith into a political aspiration: Embracing the Romantic nineteenth-century attachment to territory, with stunning boldness its leaders advocated the Holy Land, where generations of devout Jews had aspired to go to die, as a place for Jews to live. And like other European nationalisms of the time, Zionism thought about the future with and through history. It saw the Jews not merely as those who shared a common faith but as a national unit, a People who had been plunged into exile before they were to be redeemed through restoration-under one political dispensation or another-to their ancestral land. Nothing short of a miraculous combination of a positive and a negative force had kept them together through their many centuries of wandering and misery: The positive force was the promise of Israel's return to Zion; the negative was antisemitism. "Who can tell us," wrote Josef Hayyim Brenner in 1914, "whether, had there been no universal and understandable hatred of such a strange being, the Jew, that strange being would have survived at all? But the hatred was inevitable and hence survival was equally inevitable!"

The first Zionists generally argued that legal and civic equality alone would never truly end anti-Jewish prejudice since freedom for Jews was impossible so long as they lived amid societies that hated them. National independence would finally bring them normalcy and perhaps even allow the genuine international cooperation that they dreamed of like so many nineteenth-century nationalists. "The legal emancipation of the Jews is the crowning achievement of our century," wrote the activist Leo Pinsker in 1882.

[But] the civil and political emancipation of the Jews is not sufficient to raise them in the estimation of the peoples. The proper and only remedy would be the creation of a Jewish nationality, of a people living upon its own soil, the auto-emancipation of the Jews; their emancipation as a nation among nations by the acquisition of a home of their own.

For most Zionist thinkers, the hatred Jews faced from those around them was to be expected: Jews, they preached, were bound to be seen as alien by non-Jews. It was "a general law," wrote Pinsker, "that no people, generally speaking, has any predilection for foreigners." The historian Lewis Namier stated baldly that it was a fact of life that "nations do not like each other": Antisemitism was in his telling merely another form of national animosity, analogous to the enmity between, say, Germans and Poles. Others said that hatred of Jews was different because it was unique and timeless. Either way most Zionist thinkers agreed that antisemitism was part of the natural order of things with an obvious remedy: a Jewish state. What that state would look like was unclear: Few imagined a politically independent entity of the kind that eventually emerged, and fewer still that the great Jewish heartlands of central-eastern Europe could ever be wiped out. But the benefits of Jewish self-government were largely unquestioned: Bring that into being, preferably in Ottoman Palestine, Jews would surely emigrate there, and antisemitism would vanish. Why it had taken until the late nineteenth century for God to reveal this solution was a problem they did not dwell on.

For Zionism's Jewish critics, this approach conveyed a complacency toward-and even an acceptance of-antisemitism. "Throughout the 40 years of Zionism's existence, the following rule has practically always held: the darker the world, the brighter it gets in the Zionist tent; the worse for Jews, the better for Zionists," wrote Henryk Erlich in an article in the New York Yiddish press in October 1938. Erlich was a leader of the left-wing Jewish Labor Bund, the largest Jewish political party in interwar Poland. The Bund's supporters believed in what they called "hereness"-the need to fight for a future where Jews actually lived-not the "thereness" of Zionism, which in their view was likely to re-create in Palestine the very intolerance Jews wanted to vanquish in Europe. Erlich warned of an inherent contradiction in the Zionist program.

When Zionists speak to the non-Jewish world, they are outstanding democrats, and they present the conditions in today's and future Palestine as exemplary of liberty and progress. But if a Jewish state is to be founded in Palestine, its spiritual climate will be: an eternal fear of the external enemy (Arabs), unending fighting for every little piece of land, for every scrap of work, against the internal enemy (Arabs). . . . Is this the kind of climate, in which freedom, democracy, and progress can flourish? Is this not the climate, in which reactionism and chauvinism typically germinate?

The Bund-a onetime rival to Zionism in the Russian lands-was to meet a tragic end as a political force, effectively crushed between the dual enmities of the Nazis and the Communists, and Erlich himself was murdered on Stalin's orders while held in Soviet captivity during the war. Yet there was a striking prescience in what he wrote. After the establishment of Israel, the journalist William Zukerman, a kindred spirit, pondered upon the connection between antisemitism and the new state. "Without anti-Semitism," he wrote, "Israel would be but another small state, like Ireland, Greece, Denmark and Lebanon. With anti-Semitism, it is a state with special Messianic mission to redeem all Jews." For Zukerman, it was thus not only Zionism but also Israel that somehow needed antisemitism in the world to justify itself-the same Israel that the country's leadership promised would make Jews safe by allowing them to escape antisemitism's hold over them. Could antisemitism in fact really be brought to an end in this way? Or would it simply be replaced, as Erlich had warned, by a new enmity created by the establishment of a Jewish state in Arab lands?

As if to bear out Zukerman's insight, the idea that antisemitism was a hatred that held the key to understanding the Jewish past shaped professional scholarship in Israel's early years: A group of nationalist historians-the so-called Jerusalem School-framed the centuries of Jewish life in Europe as the story of "a people apart," doomed to persecution so long as they remained "in exile," endlessly beset by what one termed "the longest hatred" of them all, a visceral Gentile loathing that might vanish from view for a time but must always reemerge. In their telling, history turned into an eternal cosmic drama in which "neither Jew nor antisemite changes, only the masks the antisemites wear." It was a kind of Jewish history that highlighted not so much, as it were, our achievements and doings but rather a set of unremitting feelings, stereotypes, and ideas that they have had about us. (This view in the works of a historian of the Spanish Inquisition called Benzion Netanyahu would influence the outlook of his son, Israel's longest-serving prime minister.)

The first leaders of the new Jewish state were repelled by this depressing view of the past. They frowned upon discussion of the Holocaust lest it perpetuate the idea of Jews as weak; obsessing over antisemitism, they felt, could only accentuate the old story of passivity and powerlessness. In their view, the establishment of Israel was supposed to mark the moment when antisemitism ceased to matter, or more precisely, when it mattered solely as a motivation for the Jews of the diaspora to return from their "exile." The historians of the Jerusalem School, however, disagreed: Antisemitism would never cease to matter. Not only was it the European past they painted in dark tones; they argued that such a deep-rooted phenomenon as antisemitism could not have ended with the Holocaust, and they discerned it around them in Stalin's Soviet Union and the United Nations, metastasizing into a global force with footholds in the Middle East and the Muslim world. For these scholars, Arab hostility in particular was neither the kind of natural reaction to the fact of Israel's existence that the Bundists had warned about nor the reflection of a sense of ethnic or religious solidarity with the dispossessed Palestinians. It was all much simpler than that: It was the latest incarnation of the hatred that would never die. This interpretation fundamentally turned diplomacy into a holding action or a fool's errand-for what could be done in the face of an eternal antipathy other than to remain permanently vigilant? Any peace would only be temporary. It was, at heart, a view that abolished the room for political thought and left only the figure of the immortal enemy.

If we were to ask how it was that Zionism-whose original dream had been to restore the Jews to political normalcy if not to turn them into a beacon for other nations-came to adopt such a bleak view, we would have to say that in this case as in others it was drawing upon ideas it had inherited from the religious tradition. In particular the Hebrew phrase sinat Yisrael (hatred of Israel) was a well-established axiom in rabbinic thought that non-Jews invariably hate Jews. Insofar as we can tell, this trope became entrenched somewhere between the end of late antiquity and the early medieval period as part of a larger process that was taking place of conceptually demarcating the boundary between Jews and non-Jews. Since then, many generations of rabbis have accepted it as a truism. "One of the unique aspects of our history," noted the leading Talmudist and Orthodox Rabbi Joseph B. Soloveitchik, "is surely our capacity to evoke sinat Yisrael, the persistent and ever-present hostility which humanity directs at us as a people; it is a strange and inexplicable fact of our history."

Actually the evidence suggests that in ancient times Jews had accepted that nations were of different kinds and that not all of them were necessarily hostile; the starker and simpler view came later. Nonetheless many commentators look to the Bible to confirm their own vision of a Jewish nation surrounded by hostility, citing in particular the Old Testament story of Esau, the brother who was cheated out of his birthright by Jacob, losing the primacy that should have been his. In theological terms, the antipathy of non-Jews for Jews may thus be said to stem from the fact that, as the Bible tells us, "Esau hates Jacob." In short, sinat Yisrael offers a religious rationalization of antisemitism as the price to be paid by the Jews for God's favor.

Such a view has not been confined to the rabbis. The view that the Jews are-in the words of the Bible-a "people that dwells alone" has become a commonplace for many Israeli public figures and a corollary perhaps of the equally axiomatic view that Jews have a special obligation to love and look out for one another. There were, to be sure, more positive alternatives-that the Jews were destined to become a "light unto the nations," for instance, or that there was, in nineteenth-century philosemitic terms, some special "mission of Israel" to the world that God had stored up. But that sinat Yisrael may be balanced by counterviews, also biblical in origin, that testify to ideals of peaceful coexistence does not diminish its significance. Prime Minister Yitzhak Shamir often invoked the phrase; the erudite diplomat Yaakov Herzog advanced a formidable defense of it. At various times Yitzhak Rabin both embraced and rejected it and eventually came to see it as an impediment to peace.

How sinat Yisrael might be interpreted historically is not an easy question to answer because the theological idea that it is so closely connected with-the uniqueness of the Jews-poses a special problem when thinking about the past. The historian Yosef Yerushalmi, in a classic work, identified this as a central paradox that faced his profession. "Jewish historiography," he wrote, "must stand in sharp opposition to its own subject matter, not on this or that detail, but concerning the vital core: the belief that divine providence is not only an ultimate but an active causal factor in Jewish history, and the related belief in the uniqueness of Jewish history itself." In other words, to identify the Jewish experience as conditioned by some unique relationship to God is to accept a premise that not only lies outside history itself but in some sense contravenes it.