By Alex Gordon
HAIFA, Israel — One of the obstacles to Jewish self-determination seems to have been a tradition deeply embedded in the people’s self-consciousness: Jews are responsible for each other; a Jew who does a good deed does it for the good of the entire Jewish people, and, on the contrary, a Jew who does a bad deed brings harm to the entire people. Jews subconsciously joined in the merits and wrongs of complete strangers to their tribesmen, taking on someone else’s responsibility. The same Jewish idea is “adopted” by antisemites: all Jews are to blame for the bad deeds of some Jews.
Although most Jews are not religious, they have firmly internalized the approach of the collective responsibility of a nation for all the deeds of its members. The French physician and sociologist Gustave Le Bon advanced a racialized theory of the collective soul of nations. Secular Jews have no other way of acquiring national substance than by borrowing the collective soul. The break from the Tanakh has weakened Jewishness. Tanakh not only contains faith in God, but also gives the Jew faith in himself. The second commandment of the Torah forbids Jews to serve foreign gods.
There are Jews who wish that Jewish history did not exist. Life is already so hard that they do not want to carry the additional burden that unknown ancestors brought and placed on the soul of a not so long ago born Jew, who was not guilty of anything. Without the burden of Jewish history, without solidarity with Israel, these Jews will appear more “progressive” in the eyes of the non-Jewish majority than their tribesmen in the Diaspora and in Israel. The largest number of such “uninvolved in the history of their people” Jews reside in the United States, where “progressives” get rid of not only Jewish history but also American history.
This desire to disconnect from the Jewish people is not new. It is known in the emancipation era of the 19th and 20th centuries. There are Jews who would like to start Jewish history with a clean slate, as if black designs and black deeds toward the Jewish people did not exist and do not exist.
As a result of emancipation, a hostile world opened up to the Jews outside of the Pale of Settlement and beyond the walls of the ghetto, which they wanted to conquer. The struggle for a place in European civilization created and exposed the psychological complexes of the Jews rising from the bottom of European society. Two opposing tendencies struggled in them: dissolution among other peoples and isolation in the national culture and Jewish religion.
In the fourth letter On Old and New Jewry from a series of letters written in 1897-1907, the historian Shimon Dubnov noted: “In our recent history I do not know a more shameful phenomenon than this fear of two or three generations of Jewish intellectuals before the reproach of national ‘isolation.’ Say with a look of reproach to a Prussian Pole that he does not become Germanized, despite all the efforts of the Prussian Junkers, or to a Ruthenian in Galicia that he does not become a Pole – and they will answer you that your reproach does honor to their national fortitude. And the European-educated Jew retreats in horror before the reproach that he is not yet German, French, or Russian. Worst of all, such Jews have accustomed even liberal Christians to see assimilation as something obligatory for the Jew, as the equivalent of his civil equality.”
Many Jews came out of the ghettos and the Pale of Settlement with a desire to rid themselves of their national heritage as a Jewish solution to the Jewish question.
After the end of World War I, Jews were granted equal rights in Germany, Austria-Hungary, later Austria, and Russia. In Germany, Hungary, Bavaria and Russia, the Jews did not content themselves with equal rights, but began a struggle for power by means of socialist revolution. In the search for a way out of the Jewish stalemate, a new anthropological variety of Jew emerged: Jews for the sake of all, Jews above nations and religions, who criticized the unjust world from the “height of eagle flight” and saw the Jewish problem as vanishingly small in comparison with universal problems; they were the petrels and creators of revolutions, the demiurges of new worlds.
On January 20, 1918, Dubnov predicted the sinister role of Jewish activity in the emergence of a new kind of antisemitism in Russia – the protest against the terror of Soviet power: “We will never be forgiven for the role played by the Jewish figures of the revolution in the Bolshevik terror. Lenin’s associates and collaborators – the Trotskyites and Uritskyites – cast a shadow even over him. […] Then they will speak about it openly, and antisemitism will be deeply rooted in all strata of Russian society.” In Hungary and Bavaria, the Soviets were destroyed by nationalists. It was in Munich, where the Bavarian Republic was led by Jews, that the Nazi Party was founded shortly after the failed socialist revolution.
Coming out of the ghettos and localities of the Pale of Settlement, the Jews embarked on a path in which the divine faith in man was weakened and the inclination to serve other people’s gods and cultivate other people’s fields increased. An ambivalent attitude toward their own people arose, an unrequited love of the Jews for the countries of Europe, for Europe as “fatherland,” for the proletariat and for humanity, for the third world of the offended and insulted. With this attitude toward Jewish identity, powerful inferiority complexes and national neuroses developed. Cases of abandonment of Jewishness became more frequent. A passionate desire for “normalization” emerged.
Outside the old Jewish forms of existence, the ghettos and the localities of the Pale of Settlement, new human traits are emerging, traits characteristic of unsettledness- dynamism, a craving for non-religious education, a critical attitude toward Jewishness, a desire to master other people’s values and to improve the world created by other peoples, Jews have made a giant leap toward a secular way of acting that has strengthened and weakened them.
In the spirit of 19th and 20th century emancipation, some American Jews are making a “purge” of Jewish history and embracing “progress,” “justice,” “decolonization of Palestine,” and even socialism. They think they are moving forward, but this supposed new movement “forward” is similar to emancipation, known in Jewish history for its deplorable results.
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Alex Gordon is professor emeritus of physics at the University of Haifa and at Oranim, the academic college of education, and the author of 10 books.