History of the Jews

by Paul Johnson

The murder of six million Jews was a prime causative factor in the creation of the state of Israel.

the great eastern massacres of 1648 led to the return of a Jewish community to England, and so to America, thus in time producing the most influential Jewry in the world, an indispensable part of the geopolitical context in which Israel could be created. Again, the massacres of 1881 set in motion a whole series of events tending towards the same end. The immigration they produced was the background to the Dreyfus outrage, which led directly to Herzl’s creation of modern Zionism. The movement of Jews set in motion by Russian

oppression created the pattern of tension from which, in 1917, the Balfour Declaration emerged, and the League of Nations Palestine mandate was set up to implement it. Hitler’s persecution of the Jews was the last in the series of catastrophes which helped to make the Zionist state.

Ben Gurion thought the aims were compatible: ‘We must fight Hitler as though there were no White Paper, and fight the White Paper as though there were no Hitler.’4 He was right, provided the British would allow the Jews

to fight the war as a coherent unit, which could later be used to determine events in Palestine.

the Jews had one powerful defender: Churchill.

All the same, the British had no intention of reversing their Palestine policy. Overthrowing Hitler impoverished them and made their Middle Eastern oilfields more, not less, important; they had no intention of permitting a level of Jewish immigration which would turn the Arab world implacably hostile. Nor were they ready to move out of Palestine until they could do so in a manner which retained their Arab friendships.

yet another Jewish contribution to the shape of the modern world: the scientific use of terror to break the will of liberal rulers.

It might be called a by-product of the Holocaust, for no lesser phenomenon could have driven even desperate Jews to use it.

If British evacuation had been postponed another year, the United States would have been far less anxious to see Israel created and Russia would almost certainly have been hostile. Hence the effect of the terror campaign on British policy was perhaps decisive to the entire enterprise. Israel slipped into existence through a fortuitous window in history which briefly opened for a few months in 1947-8. That too was luck; or providence.

The events of 1947-8, which established Israel, also created the Arab-Israeli problem, which endures to this day. It has two main aspects, refugees and frontiers,

They left for four reasons: to avoid being killed in the fighting, because the administration had broken down, because they were ordered to or misled or panicked by Arab radio broadcasts, and because they were stampeded by an Irgun-Stern Gang massacre at the village of Deir Yassin on 9 April 1948.

With a total of 567,654, Jewish refugees from Arab countries were thus not substantially smaller in number than Arab refugees from Israel.25 The difference in their reception and treatment was

entirely a matter of policy. The Israeli government systematically resettled all its refugees as part of its national-home policy. The Arab governments, with the assistance of the UN, kept the Arab refugees in camps, pending a reconquest of Palestine which never came. Hence, as a result of natural increase, there were more Arab refugees in the late 1980s than there had been forty years before.

This contrasting attitude towards refugees itself sprang from a fundamentally different approach towards negotiations. The Jews had been for two millennia an oppressed minority who had never possessed the option of force. They had therefore been habitually obliged to negotiate, often for bare existence, and nearly always from a position of great weakness. Over the centuries they had developed not merely negotiating skills but a philosophy of negotiation. They would negotiate against impossible odds, and they had learned to acc...

efforts. The paramountcy of settlement, as opposed to force, was built into their very bones. That was one reason they found it so difficult, even when the evidence became overwhelming, to take in the magnitude of Hitler’s evil: it was hard for them to comprehend a man who wanted no settlement at all with them, just their lives. The Arabs, by contrast, were a conquering race whose sacred writings both inspired and reflected a maximalist position towards other peoples, the despised dhimmi. The very concept of negotiation towards a final settlement was to them a betrayal of principle. A truce, an armistice might be necessary and was acceptable because it preserved the option of force for use later. A treaty, on the other hand, appeared to them a kind of surrender. That was why they did not want the refugees resettled because it me...

rejected the 1950 UN plan for resettlement without discussion. Over the subsequent quarter century they refused even to receive repeated Israeli proposals for compensation. The result was disastrous for the refugees themselves and their progeny. It was a source of instability for the Arab states also. It came near to destroying Jordan in t...

We turn then to the Zionist state as such, the territory which in practice Jews could acquire, settle, develop and defend. This empirical approach was the one the main Zionist bodies adopted and which became in practice the policy of the state itself.

This brought about a fundamental reappraisal of the nature of the Zionist state. The secular pioneers had seen it as a pacifist, collectivist Utopia. The religious pioneers had seen it as a holy theocracy. Now both were alike obliged to invest their energies in a maximum-security state.

peace with Egypt was possible. What prevented it was Egypt’s bruised sense of military honour. But this was healed by her initial success in 1973, which time and propaganda could make seem more substantial than it was.

Hebrew succeeded as a modern tongue, where many other linguistic revivals, such as Irish, failed, partly because Judaism, working in Hebrew, had always dealt in infinite detail with practical matters: work, housing, cooking, lighting and heating, travelling and living. Of course its main power was as a language of prayer, but it was also a language of conduct.

Hebrew worked because the new army spoke it. The army worked because it spoke Hebrew. Thus Israel went against all the laws of modern linguistic sociology and made the revival into a self-sustaining process.

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. The new Zion had been conceived in response to nineteenth-century anti-Semitism and born in the immediate aftermath of the Holocaust. It was not a blueprint for a Jewish theocracy but a political and military instrument for Jewish survival. 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. In the end he was proved right. The Law was defied, God angered, and the Babylonian Exile followed. The Second Commonwealth ran into exactly the same difficulties and likewise perished. Thus the Jews went into the diaspora. It was the essence of Judaism that the exile would be ended by a metaphysical event, in God’s good time, not by a political solution devised by man. The Zionist state was simply a new Saul. To suggest it was a modern form of the Messiah was not only wrong but blasphemous.

But just as Samuel agreed to anoint Saul, so religious Jews had to recognize the existence of Zionism and take up attitudes towards it. There were several streams of thought, each modified over time.

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.

By the last quarter of the twentieth century, the notion of the ‘Jewish lobby’ in American politics had become to some extent a myth.

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;

Hence it became hard to distinguish specifically Jewish elements in American culture. They had become an integral and harmonious part of it.

There was the diaspora Jew, there was the ingathered Jew and, in America, there was the possessing Jew.

One of the lessons we learn from studying Jewish history is that anti-Semitism corrupts the people and the societies possessed by it.

when the Tsars were replaced first by Lenin, then by Stalin, the control of the Jews

was extended to the control of the entire population, and the model became the whole.

Another disturbing factor was the close resemblance between Soviet anti-Jewish propaganda and similar material put out by Russia’s allies in the Arab world. The difference was more of form than of substance. The Arabs were less thorough in their use of ideological jargon and they sometimes openly used the word ‘Jews’ where the Russians were usually careful to employ the code-term ‘Zionists’. Where the Russians drew from the Protocols of Zion without acknowledgment, the Arabs published it openly.

One of the principal lessons of Jewish history has been that repeated verbal slanders are sooner or later followed by violent physical deeds. Time and again over the centuries, anti-Semitic writings created their own fearful momentum which climaxed in an effusion of Jewish blood. The Hitlerian Final Solution was unique in its atrocity but it was none the less prefigured in nineteenth-century anti-Semitic theory. The anti-Semitic torrent poured out by the Soviet bloc and the Arab states in the post-war period produced its own characteristic form of violence: state-sponsored terrorism.

Jews, perennially preoccupied, almost obsessed, with the sanctity of life, found the killing role of the state hard to accept. To them

it was the curse of Saul. It had cast a shadow on the life of their greatest king, so that David, being a man of blood, could not build the Temple. But between the curse of Saul and the reality of Auschwitz there could be no real choice. The Jews had to have their state, with all its moral consequences, to survive.

Hence the historian must also bear in mind that Judaism has always been greater than the sum of its adherents. Judaism created the Jews, not the other way round. As the philosopher Leon Roth put it: ‘Judaism comes first. It is not a product but a programme and the Jews are the instruments of its fulfilment.’113 Jewish history is a record not only of physical facts but of metaphysical notions. The Jews believed

themselves created and commanded to be a light to the gentiles and they have obeyed to the best of their considerable powers. The results, whether considered in religious or in secular terms, have been remarkable. The Jews gave the world ethical monotheism, which might be described as the application of reason to divinity. In a more secular age, they applied the principles of rationality to the whole range of human activities, often in advance of the rest of mankind. The light they thus shed disturbed as well as illuminated, for it revealed painful truths about the human spirit as well as the means to uplift it. The Jews have been great truth-tellers and that is one reason they have been so much hated. A prophet will be feared and sometimes honoured, but when has he been loved? Yet a prophet must prophesy and the Jews will persist in pursuing truth, as they see it, wherever it leads. Jewish history teaches, if anything can, that there is indeed a purpose to human existence and that we are not just born to live and die like beasts. In continuing to give meaning to creation, the Jews will take comfort

from the injunction, thrice repeated, in the noble first chapter of the Book of Joshua: ‘Be strong and of good courage; be not afraid, neither be thou dismayed: for the Lord...

One way of summing up 4,000 years of Jewish history is to ask ourselves what would have happened to the human race if Abraham had not been a man of great sagacity, or if he had stayed in Ur and kept his higher notions to himself, and no specific Jewish people had come into being. Certainly the world without the Jews would have been a radically different place. Humanity might eventually have stumbled upon all the Jewish insights. But we cannot be sure. All the great conceptual discoveries of the intellect seem obvious and inescapable once they have been revealed, but it requires a special genius to formulate them for

the first time. The Jews had this gift. To them we owe the idea of equality before the law, both divine and human; of the sanctity of life and the dignity of the human person; of the individual conscience and so of personal redemption; of the collective conscience and so of social responsibility; of peace as an abstract ideal and love as the foundation of justice, and many other items which constitute the basic moral furniture of the human mind. Without the Jews it might have been a much emptier place.

Above all, the Jews taught us how to rationalize the unknown. The result was monotheism and the three great religions which profess it. It is almost beyond our capacity to imagine how the world would have fared if they had never emerged. Nor did the intellectual penetration of the unknown stop at the idea of one God. Indeed monotheism itself can be seen as a milestone on the road which leads people to dispense with God altogether. The Jews first rational...

ultimate perspective of history, Abraham and Moses may come to seem less important than Spinoza. For the Jewish impact on humanity has been protean. In antiquity they were the great innovators in religion and morals. In the Dark Ages and early medieval Europe they were still an advanced people transmitting scarce knowledge and technology. Gradually they were pushed from the van and fell behind until, by the end of the eighteenth century, they were seen as a bedraggled and obscurantist rearguard in the march of civilized humanity. But then came an astonishing second burst of creativity. Breaking out of their ghet...

The Jews were not just innovators. They were also exemplars and epitomizers of the human condition. They seemed to present all the inescapable dilemmas of man in a heightened and clarified from. They were the quin...

such on this planet, of which we each possess a mere leasehold of threescore and ten? The Jews were the emblem of homeless and vulnerable humanity. But is not the whole earth no more than a temporary transit-camp? The Jews were fierce idealists striving for perfection, and at the same time fragile men and women yearning for flesh-pots and safety. They wanted to obey God’s impossible law, and they wanted to stay alive too. Therein lay the dilemma of the Jewish commonwealths in antiq...

It seems to be the role of the Jews to focus and dramatize these common experiences of mankind, and to turn their

particular fate into a universal moral.

Jewish society was appointed to be a pilot-project for the entire human race.

The historian may say: there is no such thing as providence. Possibly not. But human confidence in such an historical dynamic, if it is strong and tenacious enough, is a force in itself, which pushes on the hinge of events and moves them. The Jews believed they were a special people with such unanimity and passion, and over so long a span, that they became one. They did indeed have a role because they wrote it for themselves.