By Ira Sharkansky
PRAGUE–Ten days away from the busyness of hourly news reports allowed some reflection about the bigger picture. Insofar as we were in places that used to be Jewish centers, however, it was not possible to get away from stories of great change, and what they mean for continuing danger.
One can remain an optimist despite visits to what had been Jewish neighborhoods of Prague and Budapest. The Jewish condition has never been as good as it is now since the death of King Solomon. But my wife Varda’s father had similar thoughts during his youth in Dusseldorf.
The Jews have known their place since those problems long ago with Babylon and Rome. The exodus story makes good accompaniment to singing and eating, but it may be mythic. There is evidence in Babylonian sources of a nuisance at the edge of its empire. Jeremiah and Lamentations consider it more important. Titus’ arch in Rome indicates that there was something impressive to carry away, despite Muslim efforts to minimize to virtually nothing a Jewish presence in Jerusalem.
Rabbi Yohanan ben Zakai is given much of the credit for recognizing the disaster of resisting Rome (and other great powers down to Washington), leading the Jews away from power and toward withdrawal, study, and a concern to learn from the vagueness of Torah the rules for their community. Actually the process had been underway for at least 200 years before ben Zakai. The Greeks were here before the Romans, and often kept the Jews on a short leash.
Europe is well populated with grand statues of heroic figures.
There are no comparable depictions of Jews in Israel. Our legacy is the Hebrew Bible, what some rebels put into what they called the New Testament, tons of commentary on religious law, along with the work of modern writers, scientists, and other academics. The Torah provides one pillar on the shelf of Jewish history, and Nobel Prizes stand at the other edge of what continues to grow.
The Koran is not without humane concerns, but they are not the prominent features of Islam that trouble us. Force and a sense of having a monopoly of truth and justice are what leads and limits our neighbors in this region, and many of their compatriots who have moved elsewhere. One need not be an Islamophobe to recognize the danger. The threat to us appears in a great deal of rhetoric against Islam, some of it wild enough to be put in the bins of Jewish and Christian junk. No less important is the danger to Muslims from the same traits. In a situation where their force is not about to defeat Christiandom or even this little Jewish country, preoccupation with the rightness and sanctity of their doctrines and their political claims gets in the way of progress in science and politics. Searching for the facts of reality, learning to be modest, and knowing when to concede have long been central to Jewish history, and have come to the fore in Europe during our lifetime.
Today’s headline from the Arab League–demanding a total freeze of Jewish construction in areas of the West Bank and Jerusalem, and insisting that the United States and the United Nations recognize a Palestinian state under Arab terms–is one illustration of political bombast that leads nowhere.
Both Prague and Budapest had thriving Jewish communities. The Germans preserved its landmarks in Prague, according to one story in order to display their capacity to change history. The jumble of gravestones one on top of another in an old cemetery not allowed to expand is at the center of several sites that attract a lot of tourists. What is now the Czech Republic had about 90,000 Jews before the war. Now it may have 6,000, some of them recent migrants from the former Soviet Union.
Most of the visitors we saw at Jewish sites did not have Jewish faces.
The Germans got to Budapest only late in the war, and the city was allowed to remain as a center of Jewish education during the Communist period. Hungary’s Jewish population declined from 650,000 pre-war to about 150,000 now. In both Czech and Hungarian countries, Jewish emancipation and liberal rulers produced economic and cultural wealth from the mid-19th century to the 1920s. Then there were alternating waves of limitation, repression, and liberalism on both sides of the Holocaust until the fall of the Communist regimes. Jewish sites in both cities have benefited from impressive restoration, and decent explanations of bad times and good. What used to be Jewish is good for tourism.
Both cities have spectacular shopping opportunities that would not be out of place on 5th Avenue, Oxford Street, or the Champs-Elysees. Prague has more tourists and fewer spots in need of a face lift than Budapest.
The monuments of both cities cause me to wonder about their histories. Grandeur or comic opera? The Parliament Building of Hungary looks like a place that could have ruled the world.
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Sharkansky is professor emeritus of political science at Hebrew University of Jerusalem