PSYCHE OF THE ABUSED (Continued from p.5) because their supposed offenses are largely irrelevant-- their Otherness is all. Thus, they have been singled out for persecution for being too attracted to atheistic communism and other revolutionary movements and for being too religious, for adhering too rigidly to atavistic beliefs and not embracing modern humanism; for being too self-segregating, keeping too much to themselves, and for trying too much to enter the broader society, to pretend to be what they are not; for being too conservative and for being too liberal; for being too successful and for being too poor and a burden on the broader society; for helping each other to succeed instead of succeeding by individual merit, and for succeeding too well by merit and insisting too much on meritocracy; for not being loyal enough and for being loyal with a zeal that must reflect some unwholesome ulterior motive; and so on and so on. One can see an absorption of the canards of the Jew-baiters also in the early disputes between Zionists and anti-Zionists. Jewish leaders who were anti-Zionist early in the present century often opposed the creation of a Jewish national home as a refuge for persecuted communities out of fear that such a move would undercut the newly won civil status of Jews in Western countries and raise questions about Jewish loyalties, as though the self-denial of a safe haven for fellow Jews would effectively counter such indictments and satisfy the haters. Moreover, would these Jews have begrudged any other ethnic group a loyalty to the homeland of its origin, as they were begrudging their coreligionists? Nor were the early Zionists immune to the anti-Jewish bias. There obviously was, and is, much to support the argument that a Jewish homeland and refuge could be the most effective counter to Jewish vulnerability, and that a more normal civic life in a state where they were not a minority could help address a number of threats, physical and spiritual, assaulting the Jews. But even as Zionist writers vigorously countered anti-Semitic indictments as lies, insisted on the innate nobility of the Jewish people, and asserted that a restored nationhood would enable Jews to cultivate once more that nobility, there was also much in these writers' observations on the effects on Jews of two thousand years of exile and

persecution that reflected the imbibing of anti-Jewish canards. Max Nordau, for example, an articulate and impassioned defender of the Jews and the Zionist enterprise, wrote in 1902 of Jewry in exile as "physically degenerate proletarians...town-bred hucksters..." Jews are variously characterized as having become too cosmopolitan, too focused on trade, too unrooted, too insular, too religious. What does "too" mean, beyond echoing anti-Jewish cant? Or consider the discussions of working the land as being in itself redeeming, as shaping a New Jew who would cast off all that has been deforming in life in the Diaspora. The concept of Redemption through working the Land has both Jewish, particularly Biblical, and European, particularly Romantic, roots, but as it appears in the early Zionist literature it also reflects an absorption of the anti-Semitic canard that Jewish concentration in occupations unattached to the land is a sign of Jewish degeneracy and unwholesomeness. (The Jewish adoption of this bigoted and unsavory thesis also ignores the fact that in eastern Europe, in the areas where the overwhelming majority of Jews lived, a large proportion survived by subsistence farming.) The Zionists' defining of their New Jew in terms that adopted anti-Semitic litanies of what was wrong with the Old Jew has had corrosive consequences that did not end with the success of the Yishuv and the founding of Israel. It has engendered much of the disdain with which many Israelis, from the nation's earliest decades, have looked upon the Jews of the Diaspora, and the disdain with which many have looked upon religious Jews, both those abroad and those among their fellow citizens. Still more significantly, ascribing to the Jews of the Diaspora the `faults' laid to them by their indictors and baiters has set up an enervating and potentially destructive syllogism: The New Jew, living in his own nation, by freeing himself of all the disfiguring baggage of exile and becoming "normal," would, according to the Zionist promise, win full acceptance as an equal citizen in the family of nations. What did it signify, then, when that acceptance was not forthcoming? When Israel became the "Jew" among nations? For many Israelis, the response has been again an absorption of the indictments of the haters. It has been to see the fault within themselves and to look to how they must reform to win the acceptance of the indictors. And this response seems to have been most prominent among those groups in Israel, mainly on the political Left, who most emphasized in their images of themselves the break with the Jewish past and have been most inclined to view the Diaspora Jew through the lens of anti-Semitic caricatures. (Part 2 will appear in the next Outpost.) Kenneth Levin is a psychiatrist and historian who writes frequently on the Middle East. A Hebrew-language version of this article appeared in the September 1996 issue of Nativ.

Outpost               - 6 -               December 1996