History of the Jews

by Paul Johnson

There were four principal reasons why Jews, once they began to take part in general politics, moved overwhelmingly first to the liberal and then to the left end of the spectrum. In the first place there was the Biblical tradition of social criticism, what might be termed the Amos Syndrome. From the earliest times there had always been articulate Jews determined to expose the injustices of society, to voice the bitterness and needs of the poor, and to call on authority to make redress. Then too there was the talmudic tradition of communal provision, which itself had Biblical origins, and which adumbrated modern forms of state collectivism.

Here we come to the second force pushing emancipated Jews to the left: demography.

Just as the teeming ghetto, in its day, force-fed Jewish popular religion, so now the crowded industrial quarters of the new or expanded towns, where traditional Jewish life was struggling to survive, bred an intense secular Jewish redicalism.

The third reason was that the Jewish sense of injustice was never allowed to sleep.

so in the nineteenth century an act of injustice to Jews anywhere stirred emotions in the growing Jewish urban centres.

Such events fed a determination among young secularized Jews to combat

injustice not just towards Jews but to mankind, and to take advantage of the growing political opportunities to end them for ever.

the Tsarist regime epitomized for radicals everywhere the most evil and entrenched aspects of autocracy. For Jews, who viewed it with peculiar loathing, it was the fourth, and probably the most important, of the factors driving them leftwards.

While baptized and smart Jews did well, the code impoverished or criminalized others, so ethnic Russians ended by both envying and despising the race, accusing Jews of being, at one and the same time, perfumed and filthy, profiteers and beggars, greedy and starving, unscrupulous and stupid, useless and too ‘useful’ by half.

The growing mood of despair among assimilated Jews was reinforced by the anti-Semitic penetration of politics. In the 1870s anti-Semitism was fuelled by the financial crisis and scandals; in the 1880s by the arrival of

masses of Ostjuden, fleeing from Russian territories; by the 1890s it was a parliamentary presence, threatening anti-Jewish laws.

The notion that religious and secular Zionism were two heads of the same coin is quite false. To religious Jews the return to Zion was a stage in the divine plan to use the Jews as a pilot-scheme for all humanity. It had nothing to do with Zionism, which was the solution of a human problem (Jewish unacceptability and homelessness) by human means (the creation of a secular state).

the end of the nineteenth century, there were three distinct traditions among the religious Jews of central and eastern Europe. There was the hasidic strain of Ba’al Shem Tov. There was the strain of musar or Moralism, based on the writings of the Orthodox Lithuanian sages, reinvigorated by Israel Salanter (1810-83) and spread by the yeshivoth. Then there was the strain of Samson Hirsch, ‘Torah with Civilization’, which attacked secularization with its own weapons of modern

learning and (in Hirsch’s words) worked for the kind of reform which ‘elevated the age to the level of the Torah, not degraded...

In the uproar that followed the riots, Lloyd George made a fatal error. Seeking to appease the Jews, who claimed that British troops had done little to protect Jewish lives and property, he sent out Samuel as high commissioner.

he wanted to promote a Jewish national home without offending the Arabs. The thing could not be done. It was inherent in the entire Zionist concept that the Palestine Arabs could not expect full rights within the main area of Jewish settlement. But the Balfour Declaration specifically safeguarded the civil and religious rights of the ‘existing non-Jewish communities’ and Samuel took this to mean that the Arabs must have equal rights and opportunities.

The difficulty for the Zionists was that, in the troubled days of the early 1920s, they were

finding it very difficult to sustain the effort of settlement at all and had little energy and resources for gestures towards the Arabs. In any case, while giving them such advice Samuel’s other actions ruled out the possibility of taking it. He believed in equivalence, in being even-handed. He did not grasp that, just as there was no place for equivalence as between a Jew and an anti-Semite, so you could not be even-handed between Jewish settlers and those Arabs who did not want them there at all. His first act was to amnesty the 1920 rioters. The object was to release Jabotinsky. But equivalence meant a pardon for the Arab extremists who had started the riots in the first place.

Then Samuel, in turn, made a fa...

One difficulty the British experienced in dealing with the Arabs was that they had no official leader, King Feisal’s writ running no further than the Jordan. So they i...

This appointment to what was regarded as a minor post in an unimportant British protectorate turned into one of the most tragic and decisive errors of the century. It is not clear whether a Jewish-Arab agreement to work together in Palestine would have been feasible even under sensible Arab leadership. But it became absolutely impossible once Haji Amin became Grand Mufti. Samuel compounded his initial misjudgment by promoting the formation of a Supreme Moslem Council, which the mufti and his associates promptly captured and turned into a tyrannical instrument of terror. Still worse, he encouraged the Palestinian Arabs to make contact with their neighbours and promote pan-Arabism. Hence the mufti was able to infect the pan-Arab movement with his violent anti-Zionism.

The sombre achievement of the Grand Mufti was to open a chasm between the Jewish and Arab leadership which has never since been bridged.

in the long run it was the failure to

negotiate directly with the Jews, forcing them into unilateral action, which lost the Arabs Palestine.

All the same, there was an inherent conflict of interest between Jews and Arabs which pointed not to a unitary state, in which both races had rights, but to partition in some form. If this fact had been recognized from the start, the chances of a rational solution would have been much greater. Unfortunately, the mandate was born in the Versailles ear, a time when it was widely assumed that universal i...

The Arabs already constituted several states; soon there would be many. The Jews had none. It was an axiom of Zionism that a state must come into existence where Jews could feel safe. How could they feel safe if they did not, in some fundamental sense,

control it? That meant a unitary, not a binary, system; not power-sharing but Jewish rule.

the whole future of Palestine turned on the issue of Jewish immigration.

immigration soon became the issue. It was the point on which Arab resistance increasingly concentrated. Nor was this surprising, since the Jews resisted the British desire to develop representative institutions as long as they were in a minority.

the Jews failed to take advantage of this background to create the rapid build-up of the Yishuv which the 1917 Declaration had made possible. Why? One reason was that the Jewish leaders were divided among themselves on both objects and

methods.

Nachman Syrkin (1868-1924), an early socialist Zionist, insisted that the Jews were a separate people with their own destiny but argued it could only be achieved in a co-operative, collectivist state: therefore the national home must be socialist from the start.

Ben Gurion

three salient principles remained constant. First, Jews must make it their priority to return to the land;

Second, the structure of the new community must be designed to assist this process within a socialist framework.

Third, the cultural binding of the Zionist society

must be the Hebrew ...

concern of

Jabotinsky. His absolute priority was to get the maximum numbers of Jews into Palestine at the earliest possible moment, so that they could be organized politically and militarily to take over the state. Of course it was right, as Weizmann said, to push forward specific educational and economic projects. But numbers must come first. It was right too, as Ben Gurion urged, to settle the land. But numbers must come first. Jabotinsky treated with scorn the notion, held strongly by Weizmann and Ben Gurion, that they should distinguish between types of settlers. Ben Gurion wanted the chalutzim, the pioneers, willing to do the back-breaking

manual work, to get away from any dependence ...

Jabotinsky thought this of secondary importance. Numbers had to come first. He was not content to see Weizmann and the British government manage matters at their own pace, to ensure that Jewish Palestine was a nation of chalutzim even if it took hundreds of years to create it. He wanted rapid growth, and it must be said, in retrospect, that he had a stronger instinct for ugly realities than either of the other two.

But now there was an additional cause of hostility–the Jewish identification with Bolshevism. For this the Jews bore some responsibility; or

rather, the particular type of political Jew which had emerged in radical politics during the second half of the nineteenth century: the Non-Jewish Jew, the Jew who denied there was such a thing as a Jew at all.

The Broadway musical, radio and TV were all examples of a fundamental principle in Jewish diaspora history: Jews opening up a completely new field in business and culture, a tabula rasa on which to set their mark, before other interests had a chance to take possession, erect guild or professional fortifications and deny them entry.

The outstanding example, however, was the movie industry, which was almost entirely put together by Jews. It is a matter of argument, indeed, whether or not it was their greatest contribution to shaping the modern age. For if Einstein created the cosmology of the twentieth century and Freud its characteristic mental assumptions, it was the cinema which provided its universal popular culture.

The Marx Brothers provided an underdog view of the conventional world, rather in the way Jews had always seen majority society.

The movie, which became the pattern for TV later, was thus a giant step towards the consumer society of the late twentieth century. More urgently than any other institution, it brought to ordinary workers the vision of a better existence. Hence, contrary to what Attorney-General Palmer and Madison Grant had imagined, it was Jews, from Hollywood, who stylized, polished and popularized the concept of the American Way of Life.

Even in America, a Jew, however rich, influential and well connected he might be, could be pushed back into line; and it was this more than anything else which kept the community together.

For Germany to turn on the Jews was not just mass murder; it was, in a real sense, mass parricide. How did it happen? Attempts to provide an explanation are already filling whole libraries, but in the end they always seem inadequate. The greatest crime in history remains, to some extent, baffling. All the same, the chief components can

be summarized. The most important, probably, was the First World War. It had the effect of stunning the German nation. They entered it confidently just as their ascent to greatness was reaching its apogee. After fearful sacrifices, they lost it, conclusively. The grief and fury were unhinging; the need for a scapegoat imperative.