Jews and Power (Jewish Encounters Series) - Hardcover

Wisse, Ruth R.

Hardcover

ISBN 10: 0805242244 ISBN 13: 9780805242249

Publisher: Schocken, 2007

Synopsis

Part of the Jewish Encounter series

Taking in everything from the Kingdom of David to the Oslo Accords, Ruth Wisse offers a radical new way to think about the Jewish relationship to power. Traditional Jews believed that upholding the covenant with God constituted a treaty with the most powerful force in the universe; this later transformed itself into a belief that, unburdened by a military, Jews could pursue their religious mission on a purely moral plain. Wisse, an eminent professor of comparative literature at Harvard, demonstrates how Jewish political weakness both increased Jewish vulnerability to scapegoating and violence, and unwittingly goaded power-seeking nations to cast Jews as perpetual targets.

Although she sees hope in the State of Israel, Wisse questions the way the strategies of the Diaspora continue to drive the Jewish state, echoing Abba Eban's observation that Israel was the only nation to win a war and then sue for peace. And then she draws a persuasive parallel to the United States today, as it struggles to figure out how a liberal democracy can face off against enemies who view Western morality as weakness. This deeply provocative book is sure to stir debate both inside and outside the Jewish world. Wisse's narrative offers a compelling argument that is rich with history and bristling with contemporary urgency.

About this title

About the Author

RUTH R. WISSE is Martin Peretz Professor of Yiddish Literature and Professor of Comparative Literature at Harvard University. Born in Czernowitz (now part of Ukraine) and raised in Montreal, she was the first professor to offer courses in Yiddish literature at McGill University, where she helped found the Department of Jewish Studies in the late 1960s. She lives in Cambridge, Massachusetts.

Reviews

Reviewed by Susan Jacoby

This is the eighth title in a lively and distinguished series, "Jewish Encounters," that has taken a fresh look at such diverse figures in Jewish history as King David, the 12th-century rabbi and physician Maimonides, the 17th-century philosopher Baruch Spinoza and the U.S. boxer and World War II hero Barney Ross.

Jews and Power is a very different sort of endeavor -- an erudite, polemical essay that attempts to encapsulate the entire political history of diaspora Jewry in just 184 pages of text. Ruth Wisse, a professor of Yiddish and comparative literature at Harvard, reveals her ideological position at the outset by writing that democratic governments, "if they are to remain democratic, know they must come in on the side of the Jews, but why is it so hard for them to recognize that it is in their interest to do so?"

Wisse hews to the right-wing mantra that President Bush went to war after 9/11 "against those who attacked his country and those who harbored the terrorists." The Bush administration, in her view, has "articulated more clearly than any of its predecessors the strategic connection between Israel's security and its own." But whether Israel and the United States are more secure as a result of the Bush administration's military actions is, to put it mildly, debatable. What it means to "come in on the side of the Jews" depends on how Jewish interests are defined and on which Jew is supplying the definition.

The central theme of Wisse's narrative, which dips back into the Babylonian captivity of the 6th century BCE but really begins with the destruction of the Second Temple by the Romans in 70 CE, is the way in which diaspora Jews' "harmful pattern" of accommodation to majority power led them to look inward for culpability rather than than outward toward their enemies. For example, Wisse points out that the only contemporary account of the Jewish revolt and the Roman destruction of Jerusalem was written by the Jewish governor of Galilee, who took the Roman side and the name Flavius Josephus. "Having joined the enemy," she writes, "Josephus blamed the destruction on the 'mad folly' of the Jewish zealots." Later rabbinical commentary offered no real challenge to Josephus, and, as Wisse notes, "the Talmud . . . looks for explanations in Jewish rather than Roman behavior."

The author repeatedly uses the phrase "political failure" to describe the Jewish defeat. But what sort of political "success" could possibly have been expected as the result of a revolt by an overwhelmingly inferior fighting force against a Roman emperor determined to keep his empire intact? Had the Jews not revolted, they might have maintained a continuous presence in the biblical land of Israel -- and there would not have been a Jewish diaspora to change the course of Western history.

Wisse is a brilliant scholar of enviable narrative gifts, and there is much to admire in this essay even if one does not accept its central thesis. Her accounts of theological debates between priests and rabbis in 13th- and 14th-century Spain are particularly compelling. These debates, organized by Catholics, were truly a no-win situation for Jews. If the Jew lost, he lost -- and if he won, he might be killed by a mob. The most celebrated of these confrontations, between a Jewish convert appropriately named Pablo (Paul) Christiani and Nachmanides of Girona, the most famous Talmudic scholar of his generation, took place in Barcelona in July 1263. Nachmanides acquitted himself so ably that he was charged with blasphemy and forced to leave the country.

Much of European Jewish history is compressed into Jews and Power, which moves from medieval Spain to emancipation in France and Germany, through the birth of the Zionist movement in response to a new kind of nationalist anti-Semitism (independent of, though related to, religion) that arose in 19th-century Europe.

Then Wisse gets to her ultimate political point: Historic patterns of self-blame have reasserted themselves in Jewish efforts to reach a settlement between Israel and its Arab neighbors. She regards Israel's signing of the 1993 Oslo accords, which recognized the Palestine Liberation Organization, as a prime example of an overly conciliatory tendency in which "most American Jews and all too many Israelis . . . reverted to the Diaspora strategy of accommodation in a situation guaranteed to quicken and prolong the war against them." Wisse does not think it worthwhile to mention the impact of Israeli Prime Minister Yitzhak Rabin's 1995 assassination, by an ultra-Orthodox Jewish radical, on the course of post-Oslo negotiations.

In conclusion, she charges: "Self-styled political 'realists' argue that if Israel is a liability it should be sacrificed to American priorities in the hope that the Arab-Muslim consortium targeting the Jews would be satisfied by the prospect of that limited conquest."

Who are these unnamed self-styled realists and, more important, who listens to them? Increasingly, realists of many political persuasions, Jews and non-Jews alike, have concluded that if Israel were to disappear tomorrow, it would not materially affect the threat against the West posed by an international Islamist terrorist movement based on 14th-century ideas about religion, culture and human rights.

Even if the historic Jewish strategy of political accommodation were a curse, neither the Israeli government nor the Jewish and non-Jewish neoconservatives who have advocated so forcefully for the Bush administration's foreign policies have inherited it. It is hard to escape the suspicion that the real point of this essay is to brand any Jews (and non-Jews, for that matter) who still believe in the possibility of a negotiated settlement in the Middle East as perpetuators of a ghetto appeasement mentality.

Copyright 2007, The Washington Post. All Rights Reserved.

This survey of Jewish history highlights the political aspect of Jewish experience, beginning with the observation that in the Hebrew Bible, Jewish power came through military heroics. By the time of the Roman conquest in A.D. 70, the Talmudic rabbis changed the narrative, blaming defeat on internal dissension, thus elevating the need for political discipline above military power. A Harvard professor of Yiddish and comparative literature, Wisse is keen to study how the politics of Jews occasions the politics of what she terms anti-Jews. For instance, she asserts that Allied leaders entered WWII not to save Europe's Jews but in order to defeat the Nazis, who were also anti-Jews. Similarly, the author says, President Bush was provoked to fight anti-Jewish terrorists by 9/11. Yet in both cases, isolationists accused the administration of caving in to Jewish demands that damaged American interests. Even the founding of Israel, she implies, has not normalized Jews' political position in the world. Palestinians, she says, have forged a national identity in obsessive opposition to Israel, and other nations have exploited Israel for their own political ends. Although her prose is sometimes opaque, Wisse is in fine form with well-reasoned, self-assured arguments bound to provoke heated debate among interested intellectuals. (Aug. 28)
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Wisse believes that Jews figure more prominently in the study of religion than they do in the study of government or political theory. To address this deficiency, she writes, this book highlights the political aspect of Jewish experience. In particular, Wisse says, she wants to "see how the politics of Jews occasions the politics of anti-Jews. The tendency of Jews to seek fault in themselves is part of the harmful pattern I hope to expose." This is a difficult thesis to examine, but Wisse gets her points across in a clear and convincing way. This is the eighth volume in the Jewish Encounters series, and 18 more titles are forthcoming. Wisse, the author of The Sehlemiel As Modern Hero (1984), The Well, and The Shtetl and Other Modern Yiddish Novellas (1986), is a professor of comparative literature at Harvard University. Cohen, George

Excerpt. © Reprinted by permission. All rights reserved.

Part One: The Great Experiment

There was no one left for the soldiers to kill or plunder, not a soul on which to vent their fury; for mercy would never have made them keep their hands off anyone if action was possible. So Caesar now ordered them to raze the whole City and Sanctuary to the ground, leaving the towers that overtopped the others . . . and the stretch of wall enclosing the City on the west—the wall to serve as protection for the garrison that was to be left, the towers to show later generations what a proud and mighty city had been humbled by the gallant sons of Rome. All the rest of the fortifications encircling the City were so completely leveled with the ground that no one visiting the spot would believe it had once been inhabited. This then was the end to which the mad folly of revolutionaries brought Jerusalem, a magnificent city renowned to the ends of the earth.[1]—JOSEPHUS, The Jewish War



The loss of Jewish sovereignty was the defining political event in the life of the Jewish people. Before then, Judea with its capital Jerusalem had been a province of the Roman Empire, paying heavy tribute to Rome yet conducting its affairs with perceived, if not complete, autonomy. Despite intense discord among Judea’s religious and political factions, King Herod had restored the splendor of the Temple, which served as the center of legislative and religious activity. But the capriciousness of Roman rule angered many Jews and provoked them to armed revolt. In 70 CE, following a three-year siege, Titus crushed the Jewish uprising and burned the Temple, leveling the city—as Josephus describes, so that “no one visiting the spot would believe it had once been inhabited.” Sixty-five years later, Rome put down a second Jewish rebellion with a brutality that deterred all further insurrection. Though some Jews always continued to live in the Land of Israel, the vast majority over the next eighteen centuries tried to follow the Jewish way of life outside its borders.

Memory of the national defeat seemed to divide Jewish history into unequal parts: the relatively shorter span when Jews had inhabited their land and the longer stretch of exile when they were ruled elsewhere by others. Mourning the Great Destruction became so intense that it almost rivals praise of God as the central motif of Jewish worship. “Rebuild Jerusalem the holy city quickly in our time,” reads the liturgy incorporated into the grace after meals. Every Jewish ceremony and celebration invoked the Great Destruction and expectation of Return. When a Jew dies, family members are consoled with the words, “May God comfort you among the other mourners of Zion and Jerusalem.” For three weeks of every year, culminating in the fast of the ninth day of the Hebrew month of Av, Jews commemorate the fall of Jerusalem. The annual Passover Seder concludes with the pledge, “Next year in Jerusalem.”

When modern Jewish thinkers began to study the Jewish past, they, too, divided history into before and after. The great historian Heinrich Graetz (1817–1891) separated the “predominantly political character” of the pre-exilic period from the “overriding religious stamp” of the exile. That Graetz was the first Jewish historian since Josephus to attempt to tell the complete story of the nation seemed to substantiate his argument that Jews had lost their political character at the point of going into exile. According to Graetz, Judaism was originally not a religion at all but “a constitution for a body politic”: the idea of God was originally meant to work itself out not theologically but in the living history of the Jewish people. Only after the exile did religious interests gain exclusive control so that “Judaism ceased to be the constitution for a state and became a religion in the usual sense of the word.”[2] Taking politics to mean that which concerns the state and its institutions, historians following Graetz assumed that with the dispersion, Jews had ceased to function as a political people.

Not all Jewish scholars and historians shared Graetz’s regret for the consequences of the exile. Some modern thinkers became convinced that despite its liabilities, the absence of political power had benefited the Jewish people in the long run. Herman Cohen, the main spokesman for liberal Judaism in Germany in the early years of the twentieth century, held that Jews had been able to develop a universal ideal of messianic redemption because they had been freed of the burdens of a state. In his view, Jewish religion alone was the driving force of modern Jewish life, having become more ethically advanced because it was freed of nationalism and a state apparatus. “Religion ought to become more political by educating citizens in the love of humanity, while politics ought to assume the religious tasks of mediating between the individual and the rest of humanity.” Purified of the dross of politics, no longer bound by their own territory, Diaspora Jews could become better citizens of the countries in which they lived.[3] Immanuel Kant’s ethical ideals could be realized more fully by Jews than they could by Christians precisely because Jews were unscathed by the corruptions of power.

The Russian Jewish historian Simon Dubnow, Cohen’s ideological opposite in all other respects, agreed that as a consequence of exile Jews had become a spiritual nation, purified, reborn for new life.[4] Jews were for him primarily a nationality, not a religious group. Encouraged by the model of a multiethnic Austro-Hungarian empire, he believed that Jews were already ahead of the curve in transcending the grosser demands of statehood. “A nationality which lacks a defensive protection of state or territory develops, instead, forces of inner defense and employs its national energy to strengthen the social and spiritual factors for unity.”[5] Locating Jewish strength precisely where materialists would have sought its weakness, Dubnow believed with Cohen that Jews could claim preeminence in the modern world not in spite of but on account of their lack of political power. He expected Jews to remain strong national minorities wherever they lived in sufficient numbers, maintaining their national distinctiveness through language, culture, education, and social institutions. His most radical proposal was that the kahal, the medieval Jewish community council, could be reconstituted as a secular institution of Jewish autonomy as part of a federated European state.

Dubnow’s hopes for Jewish minority status in Europe were sorely tested by his own experience; he was forced to flee from St. Petersburg to Berlin after the collapse of the tsarist empire, then from Berlin to Riga after the rise of Nazism, and was driven to his death from the Riga Ghetto on December 8, 1941. It would be unfair to say that he paid the price for his optimism, since the Germans arranged the same ending for all Jews, irrespective of the ideas they had held. But some of his fellow intellectuals had been warier of establishing a politically viable autonomy in Europe, warning that Jews must first be granted their natural rights as Jews, not merely as citizens, as a precondition for their national recovery. In 1873 the Yiddish and Hebrew novelist known by the pen name of Mendele the Book Peddler (Mendele Moykher Sforim) had described a pack of dogs and a gang of boys beating an old mare to the point of death. When the bloodied creature is discovered in the ditch—behold! She speaks, claiming to be of noble birth, transformed centuries ago by the sorcerers of Pharaoh into her present lowlier state. Briefly restored to human (and male) form by the Wonder Worker who led her out of Egypt, she was forced back into servitude by her enemies and kept in that servile condition for “as long as the Jewish exile.” The Wandering Mare of this allegory reveals to her modern Jewish interlocutor that she will be able to regain human form only if she is released from her curse by the (Gentile) powers that damned her.

Others reformers went further: in response to Russian pogroms of 1881, Leo Pinsker issued a call for Jewish self-emancipation, arguing that exile had turned Jews into a nation of zombies. Wandering like corpses among the living, they frightened Gentiles, who were afraid of ghosts.[6] The Hebrew poet Haim Nahman Bialik excoriated his fellow Jews for allowing themselves to become the targets of slaughter:

Upon the mound lie two, and both are headless—
A Jew and his dog.
The self-same axe struck both, and both were flung
Unto the self-same heap where swine seek dung.[7]

Wasting no sympathy on the victims, Bialik ignored instances of Jewish self-defense in order to magnify his indictment of Jewish submissiveness. Self-liberation became a watchword for those in the Diaspora who were determined to chart their own future.



NOTES
[1] Josephus, The Jewish War, trans. G. A. Williamson (Harmondsworth, Middlesex, England: Penguin, 1959), 339.
[2] Heinrich Graetz, title essay in The Structure of Jewish History, trans., ed., and introduced by Ismar Schorsch (New York: Jewish Theological Seminary, 1975), 63-124. Quotations on pp. 70 and 84.
[3] Herman Cohen, "Graetz's Philosophy of Jewish History," in Alan L. Mittleman, The Scepter Shall Not Depart from Judah: Perspectives on the Persistence of the Political in Judaism (Lanham: Lexington Books, 2000), 35.
[4] Simon Dubnow, Nationalism and History: Essays on Old and New Judaism, ed. Koppel S. Pinson (Philadelphia: Jewish Publication Society, 1958), 80.
[5] Ibid., 99.
[6] Leo Pinsker, "Auto-Emancipation: An Appeal to His People by a Russian Jew," trans. David Blondheim, in The Zionist Idea, ed. Arthur Hertzburg (Philadelphia: Jewish Publication Society, 1959), 181-98.
[7] Bialik, "In the City of Slaughter," trans. A. M. Klein, in David G. Roskies, ed., The Literature of Destruction: Jewish Responses to Catastrophe (Philadelphia: The Jewish Publication Society, 1989), 161.

Edition details

• Publisher: Schocken
• Publication date: 2007
• Language: English
• ISBN 10: 0805242244
• ISBN 13: 9780805242249
• Binding: Hardcover
• Edition number: 1
• Number of pages: 256