A year ago, my mother, then nearly 98, went into an old folks’
home in England. One of the last things she told me was that she
believed her family background was partly Jewish. Her grandmother’s
maiden name was Dow, and the Dows earlier married into a Brazilian
family of Jews named Da Costa. Not that I think of myself as
Jewish. I was brought up as a Catholic and I try to practice that
faith. But my mother’s comment about her family background
stimulated many thoughts—about Israel.
In fact, I had been pondering them here, years earlier. See, for
example, “The Blindfolded Synagogue” (TAS, February 1988). In response to this
piece I received a letter from Michael Kinsley, saying, in a
friendly way, that I was guilty of philo-Semitism and that was
almost as bad as anti-Semitism. I still have his letter
somewhere.
I was invited to Israel twice and I now have enough thoughts to
fill a book. Maybe I should write it. My most fundamental thought
is this: The rebirth of Israel, almost 2,000 years after the Jews
were driven out by the Romans, has to be seen as a miraculous
event. It gives a shape and meaning to history that it would
otherwise lack. History is shown to be not so much a process as an
unfolding drama, revealing the intervention of God.
This is clearer to us now than it was, say, in the Middle Ages,
or at the time of Blaise Pascal (1623–1662). In his Pensées, Pascal wrote that the Jews are
eminent “not solely by their antiquity,” but also by their
duration. “For whereas the nations of Greece and of Italy, and
others who came long after have long since perished, these ever
remain; and in spite of the endeavors of many powerful kings who
have a hundred times tried to destroy them.”
What would he have said if he had known that 300 years later,
the Jews would return to Holy Land, where the attempts to destroy
them continue?
Isaac Bashevis Singer told an interviewer that “It has never
before happened that a nation has been exiled and then come back
and formed a country. And this, with the return of Hebrew, the
rebirth of the language, proves that the Almighty still has a
purpose for the Jewish people.”
The Catholic inclination has been to believe that the Jews,
although chosen by God, were superseded when they rejected Christ.
But the restoration of Israel in 1948 suggests a more complex
picture. Saint Paul reflects on these matters in his Epistle to the
Romans. The Jews had stumbled at the stumbling block, and by their
fall “salvation is come unto the Gentiles.” But a remnant remains,
“according to the election of grace.” Many Jews had been “blinded,”
but God had not “cast away his people.”
“Blindfolded, the Synagogue still moves forward in the universe
of God’s plans,” wrote Jacques Maritain in The Mystery of Israel (1937). “It is
itself only gropingly aware of its path in history.” A Catholic
(whose wife was Jewish), Maritain said that Israel—meaning the
Jewish diaspora—has a “historic mission,” which he contrasted with
the mission of Christianity.
“Whereas the Church is assigned the task of the supernatural and
supra-temporal saving of the world, to Israel is assigned… the work
of the earthly leavening of the world.” He compared Israel to “a
living yeast mixed into the main body,” which “gives the world no
quiet.” Isaac Singer compared the Jews to salt, which gives flavor
but can also cause “high blood pressure.” Perhaps that is why the
Lord “has set you apart from the nations,” as the book of Leviticus
relates.
The Jews “stimulate the movement of history,” Maritain said,
boldly adding that they are charged with “activating the history of
the world.”
IN HIS BOOK The Israel
Test, George Gilder disagrees with Dennis Prager and
Joseph Telushkin’s Why the Jews?
The Reason for Antisemitism. They attribute it to
Jewish chosenness, and surely that is right. Gilder says more
narrowly that anti-Semitism reflects the hatred toward middlemen,
“entrepreneurs, shopkeepers, lenders, bankers, financiers and other
capitalists.” He also attributes it to “Jewish superiority and
excellence.” If the Jews really are the chosen race, then we might
expect them to be on the whole excellent. So maybe Gilder’s
disagreement with Prager and Telushkin is a distinction without a
difference.
Gilder applauds the good sense of Benjamin Netanyahu and the
(surprisingly recent) rise of capitalism in Israel. I agree, but
for a different reason. He thinks that Israel and the U.S. need to
be joined at the hip. My own belief is that Israel needs to be
friends with but not dependent on the U.S. government, which takes
the State Department view that a lack of Middle East peace is
mostly Israel’s fault. A capitalist and therefore prosperous Israel
will be less dependent on the U.S. and more likely to remain
unmoved by American pressure. Arguably, Israel should politely
refuse all U.S. aid.
Secular Jews are understandably discomfited
by the idea of a “chosen race.” There could hardly be anything more
at odds with the modern egalitarian ideal professed by so many
intellectuals.
Hostility to Israel is widespread and rising, and it comes
increasingly from Islam, and from the worldwide secular
intelligentsia. Jewish intellectuals are among Israel’s foremost
critics. Avraham Burg’s book The Holocaust
Is Over: We Must Rise From Its Ashes might be
considered anti-Semitic if it were not written by a former speaker
of the Knesset. Noam Chomsky has compared Israel’s government to
the Nazis and, lest there be any doubt, he sometimes wears a
Hezbollah cap. Criticism of Israel “is one of the most popular
issues on campus now,” he reports. New
Yorker editor David Remnick shows increasing hostility
to the Jewish state.
The problem may be this: Modern Israel started life as a
socialist enterprise. Ben-Gurion tolerated orthodox Jews, but it
was assumed that they would die out. Today, the influence of the
Haredim, or ultra-orthodox Jews, is growing. One-third of Jewish
babies are now born to them, while the secular Israelis have far
fewer children; the older, socialistic Jews are fading away.
The fantasy of “land for peace” will still be urged by
New York Times columnists but
it is likely to have dwindling appeal in Israel. The ultra-orthodox
understand, even if the seculars don’t, that the Arabs want to see
Israel destroyed.
What did Jesus say? He foresaw a time when “Jerusalem shall be
trodden down of the Gentiles, until the time of the Gentiles be
fulfilled.” (Luke 21:24) In Jerusalem today they will show you late
19th-century photographs of the city in its “trodden down” state.
Mark Twain, on an early guided tour in 1867, wrote that “Palestine
sits in sackcloth and ashes.…Renowned Jerusalem itself, the
stateliest name in history, has lost all its ancient grandeur and
is become a pauper village.” Today it has been rebuilt—the Arab
Quarter less so.
Hebron Jews, by Jerold S.
Auerbach, a professor of history at Wellesley College, is an
inspiring book:
No Jews are as relentlessly reviled as the Jews of Hebron.
Vilified as the pariahs of the Jewish people—“zealots,” “fanatics”
and “fundamentalists” who illegally occupy someone else’s land and
incessantly provoke conflict with local Arabs and their own
government—they are the militant Jewish settlers whom legions of
critics in Israel, in the United States and throughout the world
love to hate. It is seldom noticed that their most serious
transgression, settlement in the heart of the biblical land of
Israel, defines Zionism: the return of Jews to their historic
homeland.
Israel might end up with the whole world against it. The country
needs faith above all—but not in the American Golden Calf. Saint
Paul again: “If God be for us, who can be against us?”
