By Alex Gordon
HAIFA, Israel — At different times Jews have tried to solve the problem of chosenness. It was not easy to carry their own burdens, to be themselves. At the time of emancipation, some Jews put on other people’s togas and carried other people’s burdens of “purifying normality.” The temptation to fit in with the majority and join what was considered a civilized way of life was great.
The struggle for the preservation of traditions, for the identity of the people and its historical preservation required effort. However, it was not easy for a Jew to mold himself in the image and likeness of the surrounding society. Often the dislike of non-Jews was processed by Jews into self-hatred. Joining the oppressive majority was tempting, deprived of dignity, but gave hope of returning to “normality.” Jews sought a way out, some from identity, others from dissolution.
Josephus Flavius and the Talmud kept legends of Alexander the Great’s positive attitude toward the Jews. He founded Alexandria and granted the Jews the rights and privileges of Greek citizens. He left Jerusalem and the Temple intact and did not demand that they give up the fulfillment of the commandments of the Torah. Alexander “emancipated” the Egyptian Jews by not requiring them to serve foreign gods. In Europe, Jews sought equal personal rights with non-Jews, but the Jewish community was not recognized as equal to the Christian community.
In Egypt, from which Jews fled in biblical times, the Jewish community re-established itself a thousand years after the Exodus. Alexandrian Jews celebrated Passover and the Exodus from Egyptian slavery to freedom in the land of Israel. Despite Greek names and a strong affinity for Hellenic culture, the Jews of the Egyptian “polyteuma” (community) knew the Tanakh. In its heyday, the population of the “polyteuma” reached one million, while the rest of the country’s population was seven million. In percentage terms, it was much larger than today’s Jewish community in the United States. It was also as rich as the American community and financially supported the Jews of the Land of Israel.
“Politevma” was strong, independent and enjoyed great influence in the Alexandrian royal court, probably no less than American Jews in the U.S. Congress. Her encouragement sustained Judah. A thousand years after its appearance it disappeared in the struggle with the Greeks, Romans, and Arabs. The second Exodus from Egypt did not succeed.
During the struggle for emancipation, the Jew was faced with a choice: to make his own history or another’s, to remain a chosen people or to become the ferment of other peoples.
During one week in November 1917, two important events took place in the life of the Jewish people: in London, Foreign Arthur Minister Balfour, on behalf of the British government, recognized the right of the Jews to be a normal people, the owner of a national hearth in Palestine. In Petrograd, the Bolshevik Revolution took place – its active Jewish participants were rebuilding a foreign world. At the moment when Jews received the right to establish their own state, they rushed in large numbers to save the Russian state.
In his book Major Trends in Jewish Political Thought, Israeli political scientist Shlomo Avineri writes: “Emancipation was an attempt to offer the Jewish people an individualistic solution – to each according to his ability and capacity. It did not offer a collective solution to the nation’s problems.” The exodus of the Jews from Egypt was an act of collective liberation. The creation of the state of Israel in the new times was a revival of the Jews’ right to a collective self. Emancipation and socialist revolution, if they gave Jews rights, could at best give them only personal civil rights, but not the right to a dignified existence as a nation.
After emancipation, Jews sought to join the way of life and thought of their country of residence, to connect with the culture of their surroundings. Creation for the benefit of other peoples was a tempting endeavor for Jews, tried out in medieval Spain and Germany during the Second Empire and the Weimar Republic. Ze’ev Jabotinsky wrote of it: “In this land it is not for us to play a creative role, and we renounce all pretensions to create other people’s history, […] too many of us, children of the Jewish intellectual circle, are madly and humiliatingly in love with Russian culture.” Under emancipation, equality in rights was often perceived by Jews as assimilation, or in Jabotinsky’s terms, “a humiliating falling in love with Russian culture.” But emancipation also provided another path – a struggle against the ruling, oppressive power.
Jews were accused of belonging to socialism and communism, of making revolutions, of conspiring to seize power over foreign nations, of interfering in the internal affairs of other nations. They were urged to leave the country and take care of their national affairs: only the establishment of a Jewish state alongside other states could eliminate their anomaly.
The Jews established their state and gave up their claim to correct the injustices of the world and decided that the time had come to act for the good of their people in their own country. However, it turned out that the internal affairs of the Jews in their state hurt those who called for the expulsion of Jews from the Diaspora. And although the Jewish state is far from the Old and New Worlds, it attracts Jew-haters and is recognized as a threat to many nations, the same threat that the Jewish people were considered to be when they lived outside the Land of Israel before its resurrection.
The Zionist project is criticized by those who see its implementation as trampling on the rights of another people. It is criticized by those who see in it a decline in the national spirit and a crisis of religious outlook. It is criticized by those who see in it a manifestation of aggressiveness and nationalism. It is criticized by those who see in it an excess of socialism and by those who condemn in it an excess of capitalism. The Jewish state is criticized as much as the Jews used to be criticized for their lack of a state.
Emancipated Jews refused to be in the minority. They saw being Jewish as an unpopular and frightening destiny. They wanted to be the majority. If there was no suitable majority, they labored to create one. They connected proletarians of all countries and revolutionary outsiders, opponents of Western civilization. In Israel, some Jews fear to belong to the Jewish majority, for this affiliation seems to them politically incorrect. Jews gained their freedom, but they themselves and others were enslaved by alien and revolutionary ideas, worshipping the new golden calf.
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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.