(Continued from p.6)
sustained. All too many of those creative figures came, in fact, to the pursuits in which they demonstrated their creativity not as something congruent with their Jewishness but as an alternative to it. They saw other worlds in their future and saw their Jewishness, with all the associated depredations and political failures, as the dispensable past.If Jewishness is to be perceived by the young not as the dispensable past but as an essential, indispensable part of their future, a stable and prosperous Israel must figure in that future.
But what of the argument that for 2,000 years Jews survived as Jews in the Diaspora without the homeland, without a sense of politically potent communality, and typically under much harsher conditions than Diaspora Jews now face? And so, the argument goes, in worse case scenarios regarding Israel, they could do so again. One actually hears this from people, including people very active in promoting those educational and other programs aimed at stemming the high rates of attrition in the American Jewish community. As difficult as it is to be a prognosticator regarding the fate of the Jews, this proposition of Jewish survival without Israel seems very dubious indeed. It also entails a significant misreading of the historical record.
What we have been talking about is the necessity of feeling part of a politically significant community, of a community that had meaning in the world, of feeling bound to that community and valuing those bonds. But if we look, in particular, at the last 1,000 years, the Jewish experience in Christian Europe, the period of the greatest depredations against the Jews, for the most part the large, stable Jewish communities existed under feudal political systems where they enjoyed rights and privileges, status, as chartered communities they had political standing as communities, whatever their vulnerabilities and the outside pressures they experienced, and the individual's legal and political status was defined as a member of the community. Those communities also enjoyed significant legal autonomy and authority over their members. So individuals might lament having lost Eretz Yisrael and having to live under the yoke of non-Jewish rulers and surrounded by often hostile populations, but the community was viable qua community, its members often enjoying advantages over surrounding populations, and the issue of vibrancy or viabililty of the community versus perception of it as a vestigial phenomenon was not an issue of those times and conditions. The stability, viability and validity of communal existence was a fact of daily life. Such questions of meaningfulness might, on the other hand, arise in smaller, less established and defined communities, and in such communities attrition appears to have been typically very high.
But that system of chartered communitiesand beyond the Middle Ages we are talking mainly of Poland and Lithuania, where the overwhelming majority of European Jews livedbegan to break down 350 years ago. It began with the slaughter of the Jews in the Cossack rebellion and invasion of Poland and the weakening of the Polish monarchy in the mid-seventeenth century, and was subsequently affected by the ultimate dissolution of Poland, the disintegration of the Polish nobility, and the determination of successor states to do away with the chartered, special communal status of the Jews. And all the forms of Judaism we see today, from ultra-orthodoxy to reconstructionism, are attempts to adapt to the changes wrought by the dissolution of those old communal arrangements. All are attempts to sustain communal viability in the wake of the loss of the legal, political communal status conferred by those ancient arrangements.
Indeed Zionism itself evolved as much in the context of filling the void of the loss of Jewish communal status as merely mimicking the new European nationalisms. Zionism is often portrayed as a redefining of Jewishness from religion to nation, whereas in fact it was a rejection of the new, largely nineteenth century, redefinition of Jewishness from peoplehood to simply
If Jewishness is to be perceived by the young not as the dispensable past but as an essential, indispensable part of their future, a stable and prosperous Israel must figure in that future.
How did the Jews fare in the years before World War II and before Israel in this effort to sustain a viable communality under the new conditions of the modern era? In what had been Poland and Lithuania, the effort was helped by the fact that Jews lived largely separately, in Jewish shtetls and townlets. Even in the larger towns they very often made up a large portion, at times even a majority, of the population and lived separately from their non-Jewish neighbors. The effort to maintain Jewish communal existence was also helped by the tremendous population boom in the segregated Jewish areas of the East during the late eighteenth and nineteenth century, due largely to improved hygienic conditions. The segregation of the Jews and the high birth rate offset the pressures building on Jewish communality. But as
(Continued on p.10)
April 1999 - 7 - Outpost