History of the Jews

by Paul Johnson

Indeed, the underlying assumption beneath the Arab refusal to negotiate, that time was on their side, not Israel’s, and the misleading analogy with the medieval Crusader states which they were fond of adducing, were both falsified by the first forty years of Israel’s existence. Israel had become a successful maximum-security state without sacrificing her basic aim or freedoms, and while retaining the negotiating flexibility and empiricism of her founding fathers. Time had proved to be on the side not of the Arabs but of the Israelis. Moreover, the very fact that the Arabs continued to prefer the option of war encouraged the habit of thinking, to be found even among Israeli empiricists, in terms of Israel’s historic frontiers.

In its first quarter-century, largely through immigration, Israel’s population rose from the initial 650,000 to well over three million. Receiving, housing, educating and employing the new arrivals became a priority second only to basic security and, after defence, the biggest item in Israel’s budget.

In the business of blending this new national community together the two most important instruments were the army and Hebrew.

Israel inherited from the mandate many British political, constitutional and legal institutions. But in one respect it was quite unlike Britain. It drew from the socialist parties of eastern Europe the notion of the party becoming the state. In this respect it was more like the Soviet Union.

Israel was a party state though never a one-party state. The most important decisions were not necessarily taken inside the cabinet.

The Labour movement as a whole formed an agricultural-industrial settlement complex

It dominated, through its own machinery, huge areas of what would normally be government functions:

Ben Gurion and, to do him justice, he tried to fight the party system. He had been a professional party activist all his life and he remained, to the last, an aggressive political bruiser. But as Prime Minister he did his best to effect a separation between party and state, to rescue the state from the party grip, to fight the Labour movement machine (most of which he had created himself) over policy, appointments, and not least the investigation of abuses. He wrenched the Prime Minister’s office, the Defence Ministry, the army and the schools out of the party’s possession. But he failed with the health system, which the Histadrut in effect retained. In the end he grew disgusted with his political colleagues, created a new party of his own (1965) and, when it failed, retired to an angry internal exile at his kibbutz of Sedeh Boker.

Unlike Herzl, Weizmann and even Jabotinsky, Ben Gurion did not see himself as a European but as a Jewish Middle Easterner. He placed his trust in the sabras, the Israeli-born natives of pioneer stock, who would transform Israel from a European colony into a genuine Asian state, albeit one which was unique.

Yet the animating spirit of the Labour movement remained European socialism.

After Ben Gurion’s retirement the Labour movement’s dependence on European-stock support, a diminishing asset, became more pronounced.

By contrast the new arrivals from the Arab territories drifted towards the opposition.

More serious was the chasm between the secularity of the Zionist state and the religiosity of Judaism itself.

The demands of the Law and the demands of the world produced tensions in any Jewish society. They broke to the surface in open conflict immediately Jews were given charge of their own affairs. That was why many pious Jews believed it was preferable for Jews to live under gentile sovereignty. But this left them at the mercy of gentile goodwill. The experience of modern times showed that it could not be relied upon.

In short the situation was fundamentally the same as in the prophet Samuel’s day. Then the Israelites were in danger of extermination by the Philistines and had turned to monarchy to stay alive. Samuel had accepted the change with sorrow and misgivings because he saw clearly that the monarchy, or as we would say the state, was in irreconcilable conflict with rule by the Law.

The Zionist state was simply a new Saul.

Orthodoxy varied in the degree to which it acknowledged Zionism. Just as Zionists used Judaism to create their state, so some pious Jews believed the Zionist national spirit could be exploited to bring Jews back to Judaism. Abraham Isaac Kook (1865-1935), appointed European Chief Rabbi with Zionist support, took the view that Torah observance could be fuelled by the new patriotic spirit among Jews provided observant Jews organized themselves.

the first religious political party, the Mizrachi, came into being to fight for the Torah within Zionism.

it worked with the Zionists throughout the mandate and was a partner in government from the inception of the state. It was instrumental in avoiding a complete breach between secular and religious Jews in Israel but it tended to be more of an intermediary between the two camps than a religious force in itself.

In response to the ‘treason’ of Mizrachi, the Orthodox sages founded the Ag...

In eastern Europe it was extremely powerful, with its own press and lobbies, and remained strongly anti-Zionist. But in Palestine it was forced to compromise after the rise of Hitler set up a panic demand for immigrant visas.

Agudah did not know how to maintain its principles in the face of Hitlerism.

Breuer’s eventual argument, that the state was Heaven’s gift to martyred Israel and could be ‘the beginning of the Redemption’ provided it was developed under guidance from the Torah, became the basis of Agudah’s ideology.

The state had to be secular. On the other hand the Agency agreed to bow to the religious viewpoint on the Sabbath, food laws and marriage, and to allow full religious freedom in the schools.

In short, Agudah pledged itself to use Zionism to complete the ingathering and transform the result into a theocracy.

Just as Mizrachi’s compromises produced Agudah’s, so Agudah’s in turn produced a rigorist group which called itself the Guardians of the City (‘Neturei Karta’). This broke away from Agudah in 1935, opposed the foundation of the state root-and-branch, boycotted elections and all other state activities, and declared that it would rather Jerusalem were internationalized than run by Jewish apostates.

The group was comparatively small and to the secular mind extreme. But the whole history of the Jews suggests that rigorous minorities tend to become triumphant majorities. Like Judaism itself, moreover, its members exhibited...

Zionism was ‘a rebellion against the King of Kings’ and it was implicit in their theology that the Jewish state would end in a catastrophe worse than the Holocaust.

Hence from its inception the secular Zionist state faced a tripartite religious opposition: from within the government coalition, from outside the coalition but within the Zionist consensus, and from outside the consensus but within the country.

The Israeli state, like its Hellenistic and Roman predecessors, faced a section of the population, especially in Jerusalem, easily and often unpredictably outraged by minor and unconsidered government decisions.

Education raised immense complexities.

central issue of marriage.

the Holocaust shaped the new state. It was, inevitably, pervaded by a sense of loss.

The Third Commonwealth, like the Second, contained only about a quarter of all Jews. There was no sign, as Israel completed its fourth decade, of a fundamental change in this proportion.

This has changed!

The very fact that it existed, and could be visited and shared, gave a completely new dimension to the diaspora. It was a constant source of concern, sometimes of anxiety, often of pride. Once Israel had been established and proved it could defend and justify itself, no member of the diaspora ever had to feel ashamed of being a Jew again.

Throughout the Arab world, during the late 1940s and 1950s, the historic Sephardi communities were reduced to a fraction of their pre-war size or eliminated altogether. In large parts of Europe, the Jews who survived or returned after the ravages of the Holocaust were winnowed further by emigration, especially to Israel.

The expansion and consolidation of United States Jewry in the late nineteenth and twentieth centuries was as important in Jewish history as the creation of Israel itself; in some ways more important. For, if the fulfilment of Zionism gave the harassed diaspora an ever-open refuge with sovereign rights to determine and defend its destiny, the growth of US Jewry was an accession of power of an altogether different order, which gave Jews an important, legitimate and permanent part in shaping the policies of the greatest state on earth.

the transformation of the Jewish minority into a core element of American society.

during the second half of the century, this aristocracy of success became as ubiquitous and pervasive in its cultural influence as the earlier elite, the White Anglo-Saxon Protestant. Jews ceased to be a lobby in American society. They became part of the natural organism itself, a limb, and a powerful one.

They began to operate not from without the American body inwards, but from within it outwards. With their historic traditions of democracy, tolerance and liberalism, they assumed to some extent the same role in America as the Whigs had once played in England: an elite seeking moral justification for its privileges by rendering enlightened service to those less fortunate. In short, they were no longer a minority seeking rights but part of the majority conferring them; their political activity switched imperceptibly from influencing leadership to exercising it.

It was a totally assimilated community which still retained its Jewish consciousness. Its members thought of themselves as wholly American but as Jews too. Such a phenomenon had never existed before in Jewish history.

it became perhaps misleading to see the American Jewish community as part of the diaspora at all. Jews in America felt themselves more American than Jews in Israel felt themselves Israeli.

Outdated, if ever true…

It was necessary to coin a new word to define their condition, for American Jews came to form, along with the Jews of Israel and the Jews of the diaspora proper, the third leg of a new Jewish tripod, on which the safety and future of the whole people equally depended. There was the diaspora Jew, there was the ingathered Jew and, in America, there was the possessing Jew.

the murder of Mikhoels in January 1948 was a foretaste, began the same year in September.

systematic attack on Jews, especially writers, painters, musicians and intellectuals of all kinds, using terms of abuse (‘rootless cosmopolitanism’) identical with Nazi demonology.

Thousands of Jewish intellectuals, including the Yiddish writers Perez Markish, Itzik Fefer and David Bergelson, were murdered, as was any Jew who happened to catch Stalin’s eye,

extended to Czechoslovakia, where on 20 November 1952 Rudolf Slánsky, the Czech party general secretary, and thirteen other leading Communist bosses, eleven of them Jews, were accused of a Troskyite-Titoist-Zionist conspiracy, convicted and executed. Supplying arms to Israel in 1948 (...

The climax came early in 1953 when nine doctors, six of them Jews, were accused of seeking to poison Stalin in conjunction with British, US and Zionist agents. This show-trial was to have been a prelude to the mass deportation of Jews to Siberia, as part of a Stalinist ‘Final Solution’.84

But it was significant that anti-Semitism was not one of the aspects of Stalin’s behaviour Nikita Khrushchev denounced in his famous Secret Session speech. As first secretary in the Ukraine he shared the endemic anti-Semitism there

there were several post-war Ukrainian pogroms under Khrushchev’s rule.