One of the best things John Updike ever said was at the beginning of a lecture on Melville when he said, All Melville scholars please leave the room. He was about to take his crack at an important literary question (Melville's withdrawal from the world in his 30s) and didn't want to be confused by the facts. In Updike's spirit I say, All scholars of Jewish history, please leave the room.
This morning I was reading Herzl's diaries from 1902, when he was negotiating with the Russians for the deliverance of the Jews. It was clear that the Russian officials feared their Jews because the Jews were oppressed, and the Jews were an essential component of the Communist unrest. The Russians were willing to work with Herzl to gain a Jewish emigration, especially of the poor. Though they wanted to hang on to the Jewish brains. I've written before in this space of the ways that my own ancestors were delivered from Russia to the U.S. through the efforts of the Jewish lobby of that period, which included Herzl, and Jewish bankers in the U.S.
All visions of Jewish deliverance have been responses to Jewish oppression.. Herzl pioneered Zionism as a political response to anti-Semitism in Europe. The Shabbatai Zevi, the Jewish mystical would-be messiah of the 17th century, gained a following among Mediterranean Jews because of the Spanish expulsion of the preceding century, and because he promised deliverance to Jerusalem. (Till the Ottomans put an end to him, by forcing his conversion). The Communists promised deliverance from the shtetl and the pogrom.
This explains the neoconservatives. They are recognizable figures to Jewish society: they are visionaries who promise deliverance. In their case, the vision was about remaking the Arab world as democratic so as to make it hospitable to Israel, which had fought endless wars with Arabs. This was nuts; they were as crazy as the Shabbatai Zevi, and they have been as discredited as the Shabbatai, but the failure of Jewish liberals to denounce the neocons stems from the recognition of them as Jewish prophets who were going to save the Jewish people.
Herzl was also a prophet with a crazy vision. His labors destroyed him in his early 40s, 40 years before the vision came to pass. In his diary he is constantly raging against "Jewish bankers." He means all the complacent conservative Jews in European society who are alarmed by his vision, including his own editors. What the Jewish bankers say to him is that his ideas are undermining their own "patriotism" in western societies, and also that his ideas are threatening the Holy Places of Jerusalem, which must be open to all people.
The bankers were right in the end: Jewish nationalism has threatened western patriotism (because Jews are compelled to act out of concern for Israel's security, raising the dual-loyalty problem), and the Holy Places are now under the governance of the Jewish state– which was enough to keep Arafat from signing the deal in 2000, and which is a concern to Jimmy Carter and Barack Obama too (who has probably been listening to Jimmy Carter). Obama spoke of an open Jerusalem at his speech in Cairo. Netanyahu then offered his vision, which was essentially religious, with Palestinians as bystanders in the Jewish dream. He's out of step with history.
Today the Jewish bankers don't know where to go. That is the achievement of J Street. They are getting big donations, and eroding AIPAC. J Street is surely attracting the young Jews. Tomorrow night, the Jewish Community Center in Manhattan is having a conference for young Jews on the question, "Love, Hate and the Jewish State." On that site, Nicole, a teacher, says:
"One
of the major tenets of the Jewish faith is that we should seek justice
and pursue it, and I think the state of Israel needs to take that more
to heart."
I'm an integrationist Jew. I want Jews to integrate into western societies. As Jews, as whatever– but to be part of the western societies that we have helped transform with our Jewish gifts, thereby ending the Jewish Question. All the Jewish visionaries to this point have been against integration (which was called assimilation). Herzl was against it, the Shabbatai Zevi was, and so are Elliott Abrams and the neocons. And yet: we are now fully integrated. Maybe the vision can come after the fact this time round…
