PSYCHE OF THE ABUSED (Continued from p.3) no longer living as a minority or sharing the millennia-old vagaries of life in exile. There are obvious difficulties in trying to define precisely to what extent a particular embrace by Jews of the accusations against them can be attributed to this mechanism of seeking to create and sustain a sense of control in a painful situation over which they have no real control. Jewish communities through the millennia of exile have often, of course, not been as helpless in the face of bigotry and oppression as the abused child is in the face of parental persecution. Steps to propitiate their neighbors, to reform in a manner consonant with the indictments against them, can be seen as having been in some instances effective pragmatic adaptations and not merely a self-deluding embrace of the accusations of their tormentors. Still, the corrosiveness of chronic exposure to bigotry and persecution, even in more subtle and less physically dangerous forms, its potency in warping one's sense of oneself and eliciting self-indictment, has invariably played a role in shaping the Jewish response to hostile environments. For example--taking instances of that most radical accommodation of Western bigotry and abuse--conversion to Christianity by segments of the community in medieval Europe to avoid martyrdom, or by some in nineteenth century Europe to gain the perquisites of baptism, may be seen as simply a pragmatic, often effectively pragmatic, step (even if at times such people were still subject to persecution for their supposedly Judaized manners or their tainted blood). Nevertheless, there is much to support the view that the impulse to such steps was often bolstered and rationalized by an absorption of the larger society's anti-Jewish bias; that, beyond the pragmatic attractions, these people felt they were divesting themselves of something bad' and embracing something better. Recurring instances of Jewish converts subsequently becoming leading purveyors of Jew-hatred, from the thirteenth century French Jewish convert Nicholas Donin, to the sixteenth century Nuremberg Jew Josef Pfefferkorn, to Marx in the last century, are just particularly extreme and ugly examples of this much more general phenomenon. Similarly, the moves by many Jews in Europe to avail themselves of the opportunities offered by the Enlightenment and accompanying political changes, to leave the ghetto, immerse themselves in the new secular learning, and enter the partially opened doors offered by the wider society, were no doubt impelled in large measure by the intellectual allures of the new learning and the desire to be part of a larger world. But such steps were

also very often reinforced and scarred by an absorption of the larger society's anti-Jewish bias and a sense not simply of broadening one's intellectual and social repertoire, adding something to one's cultural and religious inheritance, but rather of exchanging a legacy that was defective and tainted for something more whole and more wholesome. The special embarrassment, so widely noted, of the acculturated Jews of Western Europe and the United States vis-a-vis those immigrants that followed them from the East at the end of the last and beginning of the present century, is one symptom of the absorption of the larger society's anti-Jewish animus. That Jews, gaining a political voice in modern Western societies, should become advocates of a sharp separation of political from religious jurisdictions, and of an even broader secularization of civic life, is hardly surprising and obviously adaptive given the history of anti-Jewish persecution in the name of religion. Yet Jewish advocacy of a broader secularization of society has, for many, reflected also a wish to distance themselves from their own, tainted, religious and communal roots. The anti-Jewish strains in this political and social predilection among Jews are reflected in the frequently observed phenomenon of secularized Jews being much more sympathetic to the practice of other religions than to the practice of their own. The widespread attraction of Jews to modern political movements related to the evolving secular culture in the West can also be seen as having been in many respects adaptive and pragmatic. That Jews in the nineteenth century should be disproportionately drawn to the new liberal idea of the Nation State, European liberal nationalism, and should play a role far exceeding their numbers in, for example, the unification of Germany and of Italy, made some political sense at the time. It was in large part a pragmatic embrace of movements that promised to disestablish the political role of Church hierarchies and end the special political prerogatives of traditional social establishments--both of which had been vehicles for the persecution and exclusion of Jews--and to replace them with a system that promised citizenship, and equality before the law, to all. Other Jews were uneasy with all nationalisms, saw in all of them strains of older, exclusivist and anti-Semitic, political allegiances, felt their fears confirmed by the course of European history through the end of the nineteenth and into the twentieth century, and embraced, again disproportionately to their representation in the population, internationalist movements. This too can be seen as in some respects a potentially pragmatic response to the lessons of history. The disproportionate attraction of Jews to the radical restructurings promised by socialism and communism--the embrace of a radical egalitarianism that would put an end to traditional economic classes--can likewise be seen as reflecting in large part an adaptive assault on what had traditionally been for Jews structures of persecution and exclusion. But, again, beyond the pragmatism of these (Continued on p.5)

Outpost               - 4 -               December 1996