By Nigel Thorpe
Senior English Editor
Albawaba
Amman - Jordan
The more Gentile things change, the more Jewish things stay the same. This, until very recently at least, has been true for the last 4,000 years. Praying at the Wailing Wall on the Jewish side of the Temple Mount/Al Haram Al Sharif that has come to symbolize the great ethnic, cultural and religious divide in the Israeli-Palestinian conflict, a rabbi continues a millenium-old tradition that has survived the decline and fall of the Syrian, Egyptian, Roman, British and Russian Empires that once enslaved or oppressed large numbers of Jews. Although ten of their tribes are lost, and the first two of their great temples lie in ruins, the stony ramparts of Orthodox Judaism have remained intact and unchanged. A series of articles published recently on the telegraph.co.uk website, suggests that these defenses are now under both internal and external attack.
Daily Telegraph journalist Graham Turner spent four months talking to Jews in Israel, Britain, and the United States about their beliefs, hopes and fears for what the future may hold. To understand the hidden crisis that Judaism faces in the twenty-first century you must, Turner argues, “understand the unique history of the Jews.”
One of the rabbis Graham Turner interviewed summarized the lessons of past by saying “the Jews’ history has taught us to be insecure, that no place is for ever.”
From their dusty, uncertain origins as a group of desert nomads, the Jews have scattered across the face of the globe during the Diaspora. In spite of losing ten of their original twelve tribes “on the way,” the Jews have not merely survived, they have flourished and produced famous doctors, scientists, philosophers, politicians and artists out of all proportion to their number. As Ed Koch, three times mayor of New York puts it, “there are only about 13 million of us. That is less than a third of one percent of the world’s population, and yet, coming from the loins of the Jewish people you have … Freud, Moses, Marx and Einstein, the seminal thinkers of the modern world. Not to mention 116 Jewish Nobel Prize winners.”
In the United States, the 5.7 million Jews represent only 2 percent of the population, but approximately, 10 percent of the members of Congress are Jewish. Graham also notes that up to “a few years ago, seven of the eight Ivy League colleges which, even in the sixties, were still applying quotas to Jewish student, had Jewish presidents.”
Graham highlights the fact that, over the past 2,000 years, the Jews have been expelled from virtually every European country. They were forcibly expelled from Germany six times, from Italy three times and out of France four times. Besides being exiled, less fortunate Jews were massacred by the Babylonians, the Romans, the Crusaders, the Poles and the Russians. The Holocaust was not a solitary event but the last “of a long and appalling lineage” of persecution.
When not being expelled or massacred the telegraph article describes how they were “vilified and herded into ghettos, whose gates were often locked at night, or into reservations such as the Pale of Settlement. In Venice, the Jews could not even look out on to the city: the outer walls of the ghetto were windowless.”
For many centuries, Jews were not allowed to own land, belong to professional or trade guilds, or go to university. In Germany and Russia, they needed special permission to travel from one “ghetto” or enclave to another. They were also routinely blamed for everything from the “death of Christ” to the Black Death. As Graham puts it “ theirs (the Jews) is surely the most astonishing story of survival against all the odds in the whole of human history.” Over the centuries, the term ghetto became synonymous with a Jewish ‘shanty town’, and the feeling of isolation and persecution was stamped deep into the Jews’ collective unconsciousness. According to the Jewish scholars Graham interviewed, “history has made the Jews ultra-sensitive to hostility and danger.”
The fascinating questions raised by the telegraph’s series of articles is how the Jews managed to avoid the fate of their oppressors. How did “the Jews, this tiny people with no homeland, manage to survive the multiple traumas of two millennia? Some of them put it down to a perpetual miracle, ordained by God, despite catastrophes such as the Holocaust. Others argue that they have been bound together by persecution.”
The crucial factor, the telegraph articles argue, ”is the genius of the rabbis of old who long centuries before their exile from Babylon 2,500 years ago, succeeded in constructing a marvelously shock-proof survival capsule for a religion whose followers had no firm land base.”
“The Jews in Babylon,” the Chief Rabbi in the United Kingdom, Jonathan Sacks, takes up the theme, “reflected long and hard about what it would take to survive in exile. After all, they had already lost 10 of the 12 tribes of Israel, who’d chosen to assimilate when they were conquered by the Assyrians. Generations of rabbis knew well what was at stake because so many of their brothers and sisters had simply abandoned their people and their faith. They came to the conclusion that: ‘We have got to create a survival mechanism that will enable our to keep faith and identity in a Diaspora.’”
Paradoxically, the large majority of the scholars Graham interviewed identified isolation and persecution as the key elements in the Jews’ survival down the centuries. As Professor Geza Vermes commented, “ the (rabbis) fashioned a way of life that is astonishing in its completeness. That way of life also, quite deliberately, set the Jews completely apart from the societies in which they lived. They did not want to live in ghettos, but they did want to be separate and different because their very survival depended on it. Otherwise, they would have been swamped by the hostile ‘majority cultures’ that surrounded them.”
The ancestral rabbis who so carefully crafted Judaism’s survival capsule ensured that their people observed the same strict, isolationist code of conduct wherever they went in the world. Jews everywhere, for example, were required to live within walking distance of a synagogue to ensure that Jewish communities remained closely knit and displayed a united front against external, Gentile influences. For Jews, the family has always been the primary unit of survival and the prime focus of spirituality. This is why, comments Graham, “a great deal of Judaism’s marvelously ornate ceremonial life, in particular, the Sabbath supper every Friday night and the Passover Seder, takes place at home.”
An unbroken chain of rabbinic rule and tradition has piloted the Semitic time capsule from camel skin tents, through the maelstroms of four millennia, into the computer age. Now, at a time when Jews feel they have gained a homeland and are at their strongest, they may paradoxically be at their weakest.
The second part of this article reviews recent developments in Israel, the United Kingdom and the United States that may well be attacking the Semitic time capsule from both without, and within. The State of Israel may well learn, as the Vietcong did before them, that it is all to possible to win the war but to lose the peace. Many Jews are beginning to realize once more that “no place, not even Jerusalem, is for ever.”
