History of the Jews (103 page)

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. There was irony in this weapon being used against Zionism, for it was militant Zionists, such as Avraham Stern and Menachem Begin, who had (it could be argued) invented terrorism in its modern, highly organized and scientific form. That it should be directed, on a vastly increased scale, against the state they had lived, and died, to create could be seen as an act of providential retribution or at any rate as yet another demonstration that idealists who justified their means by their ends did so at their peril. The age of international terrorism, created by post-war Soviet-Arab anti-Semitism, effectively opened in 1968 when the Palestine Liberation Organization formally adopted terror and mass murder as its primary policy. The
PLO
, and its various competitors and imitators, directed their attacks primarily against Israeli targets but they made no attempt to distinguish between Israeli citizens, or Zionists, and Jews, any more than traditional anti-Semitic killers distinguished between religious Jews and Jews by birth. When members of the Baader—
Meinhof gang, a German fascist left organization inspired by Soviet anti-Semitic propaganda, hijacked an Air France aircraft flying from Paris to Tel Aviv on 27 June 1976, and forced it to land in Idi Amin’s Uganda, the terrorists carefully separated the non-Jews from the Jews, who were taken aside to be murdered. One of those they planned to kill still had the
SS
concentration camp number tattooed on his arm.
¹¹⁰

Terrorism on the scale and of the sophistication employed by the
PLO
was a menacing novelty. But to the Jews there was nothing new in the principle of terrorism. For terror had been used against Jews for 1,500 years or more. The pogrom was a typical instrument of anti-Jewish terrorism, designed not primarily to kill Jews but to inculcate submissive fear and resignation to ill-treatment, to instil the habitual docility which led the Jews to submit to the Final Solution almost without a struggle. But those days were over. Terrorism was still employed by Jews but no longer with impunity. The planned murder of Jews aboard the Air France aircraft was an instance. The Israeli Entebbe raid which rescued them (all save one old lady, killed by Amin) demonstrated the ability of the Zionist state to aid Jews in peril more than a thousand miles beyond its borders. Israel could and did act directly against terrorist bases also. The greatest of them was the southern Lebanon, effectively occupied by the
PLO
in the years 1970-82. From 6 June 1982 the Israel Defence Forces demolished the bases and cleared the entire area of the
PLO
, which was forced to retreat to a reluctant Tunisia; and even there, in 1985, it was shown that the
PLO
headquarters was not beyond the reach of Israeli retribution. Such Israeli exercises of the right of self-defence were sometimes misjudged or ill executed. They provoked criticism, on occasion from Israel’s friends. The occupation of the southern Lebanon in 1982, which involved heavy Israeli bombing and many Arab casualties and homeless, was a bitter source of discord between Israel and her allies and even within Israel. It was also the background to a slaughter of Moslem refugees, by Christian Falangist Arabs, in the Sabra and Shatilla camps on 16 September. This episode was skilfully exploited by Arab and Soviet propagandists and presented in the Western media as an Israeli responsibility. Begin, then still Israel’s prime minister, commented bitterly to a cabinet meeting three days later: ‘Goyim kill goyim, and they blame the Jew.’
¹¹¹
The Israelis wisely ordered an independent judicial inquiry which established the facts and placed some blame on the Israeli Minister of Defence, Ariel Sharon, for not having foreseen and prevented the killings.
¹¹²

The spectacle of Jews killing, especially killing unjustly, was deeply disturbing to them. The possibility had been foreseen in Judah
Halevi’s
Kuzari
, written in about 1140, in dialogue form between a rabbi and the wise King of the Khazars. Thus: ‘
Rabbi
: Our relation to God is a closer one than if we had already reached greatness on earth.
King
: That might be so if your humility were voluntary. But it is involuntary, and if you had power you would slay.
Rabbi
: Thou hast touched our weak spot, O King of the Khazars.’ Yet the right to kill in self-defence was inherent in the human condition. Every man possessed it. The state merely exercised it vicariously, on the community’s behalf, and on a greater scale. 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.

The need for a secular Zion did not diminish during the first forty years of its history. It increased. It had been created to receive the victims of European anti-Semitism and, in the aftermath of the Holocaust, to house its shattered survivors. It had served to accommodate those expelled from Arab Jewries. These fulfilled purposes alone justified its existence. But new tasks emerged. It became clear, during the post-war decades, that the Soviet regime was no more likely to reach a peaceful accommodation with its Jewish citizens than its Tsarist predecessor. The evidence suggested that they might be in greater collective peril than ever before. So one prime aim of the Israelis was to get their 1,750,000 Russian brethren out of the power of the Soviet system. They had to be prepared, at short notice, to accept a mass migration of the kind that Tsarist cruelties had provoked. They had equally to be ready to move heaven and earth if the hatred of the Soviet regime for the Jews took other forms.

The state of Israel acquired an even more sombre purpose. It was the sovereign refuge of the imperilled Jew anywhere in the world. It was the guardian of gathered Jews already within its borders. It was the only physical guarantee that another Holocaust would not occur. The unremitting campaign of violent anti-Semitism by its Soviet and Arab enemies suggests that separately or conjointly they might seek to impose another Final Solution if they got the opportunity. Israel had to assume such a possibility, and arm against it. It had reliable promises of United States protection but in the last resort a sovereign state must look to its own defences. Hence Israel had to possess the means to inflict unacceptable damage on a would-be aggressor, however
powerful. If David had to meet Goliath, he must possess a sling. During the Second World War Jewish scientists had played a critical part in making the first nuclear weapons. They had done so because they feared Hitler would develop an atomic bomb first. In the 1950s and 1960s, as Soviet and Arab hostility to Israel grew, Israeli scientists worked to equip the state with a means of deterrence. In the late 1970s and 1980s they created a nuclear capability, whose existence was secret but understood in the quarters where it would have most effect. Thus Israel was in a position to fulfil the second of the two new tasks which circumstances had placed upon her.

But it would be wrong to conclude a history of the Jews on this grim note. Jewish history can be presented as a succession of climaxes and catastrophes. It can also be seen as an endless continuum of patient study, fruitful industry and communal routine, much of it unrecorded. Sorrow finds a voice while happiness is mute. The historian must bear this in mind. Over 4,000 years the Jews proved themselves not only great survivors but extraordinarily skilful in adapting to the societies among which fate thrust them, and in gathering whatever human comforts they had to offer. No people has been more fertile in enriching poverty or humanizing wealth, or in turning misfortune to creative account. This capacity springs from a moral philosophy both solid and subtle, which has changed remarkably little over the millennia precisely because it has been seen to serve the purposes of those who share it. Countless Jews, in all ages, have groaned under the burden of Judaism. But they have continued to carry it because they have known, in their hearts, that it carried them. The Jews were survivors because they possessed the law of survival.

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 thy God is with thee whithersoever thou goest.’
¹¹⁴

In his
Antiquities of the Jews
, Josephus describes Abraham as ‘a man of great sagacity’ who had ‘higher notions of virtue than others of his time’. He therefore ‘determined to change completely the views which all then had about God’. 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 rationalized the pantheon of idols into one Supreme Being; then began the process of rationalizing Him out of existence. In the 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 ghettos, they once more transformed human thinking, this time in the secular sphere. Much of the mental furniture of the modern world too is of Jewish fabrication.

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 quintessential ‘strangers and sojourners’. But are we not all 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 antiquity, trying to combine the moral excellence of a theocracy with the practical demands of a state capable of defending itself. The dilemma has been recreated in our own time in the shape of Israel, founded to realize a humanitarian ideal, discovering in practice that it must be ruthless simply to survive in a hostile world. But is not this a recurrent problem which affects all human societies? We all want to build Jerusalem. We all drift back towards the Cities of the Plain. 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. But if the Jews have this role, who wrote it for them?

Historians should beware of seeking providential patterns in events. They are all too easily found, for we are credulous creatures, born to believe, and equipped with powerful imaginations which readily produce and rearrange data to suit any transcendental scheme. Yet excessive scepticism can produce as serious a distortion as credulity. The historian should take into account all forms of evidence, including those which are or appear to be metaphysical. If the earliest Jews were able to survey, with us, the history of their progeny, they would find nothing surprising in it. They always knew that Jewish society was appointed to be a pilot-project for the entire human race. That Jewish
dilemmas, dramas and catastrophes should be exemplary, larger than life, would seem only natural to them. That Jews should over the millennia attract such unparalleled, indeed inexplicable, hatred would be regrettable but only to be expected. Above all, that the Jews should still survive, when all those other ancient people were transmuted or vanished into the oubliettes of history, was wholly predictable. How could it be otherwise? Providence decreed it and the Jews obeyed. 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. Therein, perhaps, lies the key to their story.