Europe and the Jews

Have you subscribed to “Habitus: A Diaspora Journal” yet? Twice yearly Josh Ellison (originally of Providence where his parents still reside) and his staff bring forth a journal of essays, fiction, poetry, photographs with a focus on a city in which Jews have or are still playing a major cultural role. Number 7, just out, features Berlin, one of those cities where Jews no longer reside in large number, but you cannot think of the Jews of Europe without also thinking of Germany and its capital. The events of 1933-1945 still resonate. The cancer of anti-Semitism, exploited by the Nazis who found it waiting for their use continues. It’s still part of the “What is a Jew,” or rather, “What is a European” question.

The Jews of Germany had been living their since ca. 1000 CE., a generally impoverished and persecuted minority. But with the coming of the Enlightenment, Jews (some Jews, I have in mind as exemplar Moses Mendelssohn--1729–1786) discovered the beauties of western culture and Germans (some Germans) realized that Jews were people with intelligence who ought to be welcomed into society—either as Jews or as converts. For their part Jews were willing to modify their religion so as better to fit in, to assimilate—the Reform, Conservative, and Modern Orthodox movements have their origins in 19th century Germany. The point is that Jews made a successful transition from pariah to bulwarks of culture, industry and finance. In the end, that’s part of what did them in. How could such a small population rise to control the stock market, the theater, be so prominent in law, science and medicine? It must be that they are using unscrupulous methods. The Jew was seen as an outsider who only pretended to be German!

So under Hitler Germany became judenrein, Jew-free. Most Jews in modern Germany are from the former Soviet Union, their predecessors having escaped before the War or killed during it. There they live with government subsidies, a kind of reparations.

Today in Germany there is a new outsider, principally Muslim, often Turkish. They are not re-living the Jewish experience in that they are new to the country, new to the continent unlike the Jews who resided as a subject race within Germany for centuries and who knew western culture if only by observation. But these new Germans, living in the land for a generation or more can identify with the older group. Jews were rejected; Turks are being rejected.

Zafer Şenocak is a Turko-German. He was born in Istanbul and with his parents moved to Germany when he was child. His native tongue is Turkish, but he writes in German when his themes demand it. In an interview with “Habitus” he concludes, “It is very strange: anti-Semitism describes Jews as less than human. Then you have this anti-anti-Semitism, describing the Jew as something unreachable: good at everything, knowing everything. Jews are just people. They kill and are killed like every other people. In Europe there is no balance on this issue—you move from one extreme to the other. This is the problem with idealization—it’s a broken image. There is no real discourse with the Jewish people. There is no direct contact. Everything has to be deflected. Europe still can’t look the Jews directly in the face.”

It was that last line, “Europe still can’t look the Jews directly in the face” that sent chills down my spine. We are the overachievers who hold the broken distorted mirror in the face of Europeans who killed us, reminding them of what they did. Few are left who organized the slaughter, manned the gas chambers, found and destroyed hiding places. But Europe knows what it’s done, Şenocak reminds.

In Europe, some of us were socialists, others capitalists, some were intellectuals others shop keepers, the gamut of intellectual and economic behavior. All were destroyed, except those few who managed to survive. Here in America, we are in a similar circumstance. We came to a country not our own, a country where Christians were the dominant element bringing with us our strange ways. Many of us have subsequently modified, but we are still strangers in a strange land. When “Americans” are of the left or right they are still Americans. Jews though are Jews of the left or right. And we are caught in the middle between those who have become anti-Semitic through being philo-Palestinian on the left and the gun-totting yahoos on the right, neither of which represents us, both of which might be very happy if we left.

From J'Accuse to Indignez-Vous

How do you argue with a man who helped author the 1948 Universal Declaration of Human Rights, a resistance fighter who managed to escape death at Nazi hands at least twice, a man who in February 2008 denounced the French government’s failure to make funds available to provide housing for the homeless, who frequently uses his prominence to urge younger generations to live by the legacy of the resistance including its ideals of economic, social and cultural democracy, a man who received the UNESCO/Bilbao Prize for the Promotion of a Culture of Human Rights? Here is a man who has dedicated his life to the well-being of his countrymen and to people around the world, particularly in Africa where a foundation he established has sent more than 20,000 hospital beds.

Stéphane Hessel (father Jewish, mother Protestant, refugees to France from the Nazis) has recently published an essay Indignez-vous! (“Be Indignant,” or “Get Angry!”). By year’s end 600,000 copies had sold; 1,000,000 is anticipated. As he has before he argues that the people of France need to get outraged, as when under German occupation. The new enemy is blasé acceptance; me firstism; materialism. He includes in his indictment the growing gap between the very rich and the very poor, France’s treatment of its illegal immigrants, the need to re-establish a free press, the need to protect the environment, the plight of Palestinians, and the importance of protecting the French welfare system.

Whoops.

How did calls to reform France get to include advocacy of Palestinians? Well, this is not Hessel’s first venture into those waters. In August 2006 he made an appeal against the Israeli air-strikes in Lebanon—but the key here is in who sponsored the call—it was published in French newspapers on behalf of the French Jewish Union for Peace.

Two years ago, in January 2009, Hessel decried Israeli military operations in the Gaza strip: “In fact, the word that applies - that should be applied - is ‘war-crime’ and even ‘crime against humanity’”

We’ll pause here for a moment for a necessary headcount. All those in favor of condemning Palestinians to being perpetual victims of Israeli ruthlessness, please raise your hands. Seeing none, I’ll proceed.

The problem with arguing with Hessel is less that he ignores the Arab slaughter of Jews; that he seems not to understand that the Palestinian problem could have been resolved decades ago the same way the Jewish problem in Yemen and Iraq was, but that he brings to the discussion the perspective of a man whose genuine love of humanity, whose attitudes of social reform, of resistance to oppression are unimpeachable. He is not an anti-Semite; he is not pro-terrorist. And in at least one way he is not terribly off the Franco-Jewish mainstream. French Jews have historically never been ardently pro-Zionist. Initial reactions to the movement in the 19th century were that it was a German-Jewish idea, not a French one. Yes, there was the Dreyfus Affair, but on the whole the Jews of France lived a good life with no need to emigrate. (At least one French Jew rejected Zionism wondering what would happen to the native Arabs.) Even after the holocaust there was no mass migration of French Jews to Palestine/ Israel. What anti-Semitism in France is violent is from Arab immigrants, not from traditional Frenchmen. I don’t know how typical of French Jewish feeling it is but Joel Schalit in his blog “the-arty-Semite” reports on the conflict within the French Jewish community. “Coming on the heels of the formation of JCall (the French equivalent of the American JStreet) and the conversion of such figures as JCall founder Bernard-Henri Lévy to routine criticism of Israeli policy, in all likelihood more French Jews find themselves receptive to Hessel’s words than not.” Sigh.

This is Israel’s new burden. Add it to the list—the failure of Labor to keep the promises of the original leaders for an economically just society; the pressure to create a potentially hostile Palestinian state which would surround it; the possibility of an Iranian nuclear bomb aimed at Tel Aviv; Hezbollah in charge in Lebanon; Hamas in Gaza; Jews, some honorable such as Hessel, others whose motives are more obscure, ignore all the above and condemn Israel. I can only tell the Israelis what Moses told my namesake. Be strong and resolute.