이스라엘, 팔레스타인, 이란, 터키, 인도, 월남, 쿠바: Dimont CONCLUSION: A CULTURAL MOSAIC

CONCLUSION: A CULTURAL MOSAIC

Concluding the odyssey of the Jewish people through four thousand years of history, venturing a historical explanation of the remarkable survival of this people, which is as modern and intellectually alive today as it was four millenniums ago.

THIRTY

EXILED TO FREEDOM

During the four-thousand-year odyssey of the Jewish people, from the twentieth century B.C. to the twentieth century A.D., they struggled, fought, fell, revived, regressed, and advanced over four continents and through six civilizations, surviving against all odds. After wanderings in Canaan, enslavement in Egypt, destruction in Judah, captivity in Babylon; after contact with the Greeks, strife under the Maccabeans, oppression by the Romans; after surviving as a capitalist class under feudal lords, as a "People of the Book" under Muslim rule, as children of the ghetto in the late Middle Ages, as statesmen, scholars, and concentration camp victims in the modern Age, they returned at the end of a two-thousand-year absence to their ancient homeland as its rulers. Jews, God, and History has been a study of this survival, not in terms of kings, wars, and persecutions, but in terms of ideas generated by the Jews in response to the challenges hurled at them by the ever-accelerating force of history.

How should we evaluate this varied and vexing saga? Is the survival of the Jews a mere accident, their history a meaningless succession of events-all "bunk," as the Henry Ford school of history would contend? Or were there deterministic forces behind their destiny? Should we look to the Marxists for an answer? Was the survival of the Jews shaped, perhaps, by the material conditions of their lives? Did the way they tilled their soil and exchanged their goods give rise to their concept of Jehovah? Did the social systems of Omri and Josiah inspire their Prophetic writings? Or are the psychoanalysts right? Is Jewish history the product of what the Jews repressed in their unconscious? Does this explain Torah and Talmud, Karaism and Kabala, Hasidism and Zionism? Or should we turn to the philosophical historians for an answer? Can Jewish history be explained as a Spenglerian cyclical evolution? If so, why did the Jews not disappear after the usual life span of a civilization? Can Toynbee's "challenge and response" theory explain their survival? Must we accept his version that Judaism as a culture was nothing but a fossil left over from a Syriac civilization? Or have the Jews perhaps been aided by a divine force, according to an as yet undisclosed plan? Can theology give a satisfactory answer?

As it is the task of a historian not only to record the foibles of man but also to venture an explanation of them, we shall offer for those who cannot accept the theory of a guiding divinity, an explanation for Jewish survival consistent with natural law, never forgetting, however, that throughout this colorful panoply of events and ideas there runs a constant thread-the illusion or dream or revelation of Abraham that the Jews are God's Chosen People.

Because we have been taught to view history as Ancient, Medieval, and Modern, we often fail to perceive history in other molds, as, for instance, the ebb and flow of civilization motivated not by fortunes of war but by cycles of ideas. In all history, mankind has failed to produce more than twenty or thirty civilizations. Most of them are now dead, a few still struggle for survival, some are in their formative stages, none are at the height of creativity. How did these civilizations arise? What gave them force? Why did they die? Historians can only speculate. Perhaps the most valid of such speculations are those of two twentieth-century "metahistorians"-the "fatalistic" or "nonfree will" theory of Spengler and the "free-will" theory of Toynbee. Man is powerless to change the course of his destiny, according to Spengler. Man has something to say about his fate, according to Toynbee. An explanation for the paradox of Jewish survival is implicit in the theories of these two men who have relegated Jewish history to a minor footnote. Yet how can Jewish history be explained by and incorporated into these two contradictory theories? Let us examine more closely the theories of each.

Once a people has been impregnated with the sperm of civilization, its future, in the Spenglerian system, is as predictable as the course and results of a pregnancy. We can predict a gestation period, the birth and infancy of a child, its adolescence and maturity, and finally old age and death. Each of these is comparable to a cycle in the Spenglerian evolution of a civilization-a spring phase, giving birth to a new religion and world outlook; a summer phase, culminating in philosophical and mathematical conceptualiza tions; an autumn phase, maturing into "enlightenment" and rationalism; and a winter phase, declining into materialism, a cult of science, and degradation of abstract thinking, leading to senility and death.

Quite different is the philosophy of Toynbee, who, in essence, contends that nature constantly presents new and unanticipated challenges to man. If people do not respond to the initial challenges, they remain unhistoric, like the Eskimos or the Hottentots, unable to harness their destiny to the chariot of history. If people respond to the initial challenges, but fail to continue with adequate responses, their civilizations become either fossils of history or cliff-hangers left to rot with time. The sphinx of Toynbee's history never volunteers an answer to her riddles. If a civilization responds with the right answers to such challenges, it has the implied possibility of everlasting life.

Though the Jews have successfully answered the sphinx of history for four thousand years, both Spengler and Toynbee regard Judaism as an "arrested civilization" and exclude it from their lists of civilizations. Why? Because the Jews did not fit into their definitions of a civilization. But it is precisely in this paradox of Judaism as an "arrested civilization" responding successfully to the challenges of history that we can find the secret of Jewish survival. This paradox will be clarified if we define Judaism as a "culture" instead of a "civilization." The difference between these two concepts is clearly stated by Amaury de Riencourt in the introduction to his book The Coming Caesars.

Culture predominates in young societies awakening to life ... and represents a new world outlook. It implies original creation of new values, or new religious symbols and artistic styles, of new intellectual and spiritual structures, new sciences, new legislation, new moral codes. It emphasizes the individual rather than society, original creation rather than preservation and duplication, prototypes rather than mass production, an aesthetic outlook on life rather than an ethical one. Culture is essentially trailblazing.

Civilization, on the other hand, represents the crystallization on a gigantic scale of the preceding Culture's deepest and greatest thoughts and styles, living on the petrified stock forms created by the parent Culture, basically uncreative, culturally sterile, but efficient in its mass organization, practical and ethical, spreading over large surfaces on the globe, finally ending in a universal state....

Civilization aims at the gradual standardization of increasingly large masses of men within a rigidly mechanical framework-masses of "common men" who think alike, feel alike, thrive on conformism, are willing to bow to vast bureaucratic structures, and in whom the social instinct predominates over that of the creative individual.

In other words, culture, according to de Riencourt's definition, corresponds to Spengler's spring, summer, and autumn phases. The winter phase represents, in de Riencourt's terms, the civilization which feeds off its parent culture.

The Jews began their historic existence in the full Spenglerian sense-with a spring ushered in by a new religion and a new way of abstract thinking, which formed the nucleus for an emerging Judaic culture. In Toynbeean terms, they then responded to the challenges of nomadic existence, to the conquest of Canaan, to the establishment of a state. They responded to the challenge of survival in Babylonian captivity, and returned to Palestine, there to evolve into the autumn phase of their emerging civilization. But they never "progressed" to the decline of their winter phase-that is, they never made the transition from "culture" to "civilization." They remained suspended, so to speak, at the height of their culture, between their autumn and winter phases. What had freed them? As Spengler himself so perceptively observed, "Vespasian's war, directed against Judea, was a liberation of Jewry." The wars with Rome freed the Jews from the fate awaiting them as a civilization, by dispersing them into the Diaspora. The Jews were exiled to freedom. Into the Diaspora

they carried with them a highly developed culture, packaged for export by Prophets, saints, and scholars. The Diaspora took them to many lands, to many civilizations. If a civilization went under, as the Islamic one did, the Jews went under with it. But even as one civilization was swallowed by history, another one always emerged, and the Diaspora Jews within the emerging civilization rose with it. The Jews could set up shop in any land and unfold their culture in any civilization. Their firm belief that they were God's Chosen People gave them the will to survive, the Torah nourished that will to survive, and their men of learning designed the tools for their survival-but it was the Diaspora itself that freed the Jews from time, from history, and from death as a civilization.

They had stumbled on the secret of eternal cultural youth. With the Diaspora, the Jews became the civilization hoppers of history.

The existence of a Diaspora, then, has been the one essential condition for the cultural survival of the Jews beyond the normal life span of a civilization.

Had they not been exiled, had they remained in Palestine, they probably would be no more of a cultural force in world history today than the remnants of the Karaites. Today, as once before, we have both an independent State of Israel and the Diaspora. But, as in the past, the State of Israel today is a citadel of Judaism, a haven of refuge, the center of Jewish nationalism where dwell only 3,750,000 of the world's 17,500,000 Jews. The Diaspora, although it has shifted its center through the ages with the rise and fall of civilizations, still remains the universal soul of Judaism.

Will the Jews continue to survive? If they maintain their will to survive as Jews, if they continue to fashion new tools for survival in response to new challenges, and if the Diaspora continues to be a constant factor in their history, then the Jews will continue to survive as a culture-producing people. But the will to survive and the ability to respond to challenges will not be enough without a permanent Diaspora. The Diaspora must be an ingredient in their history.

Where will be the next center of Diaspora Judaism? That will depend upon the historic forces that continually rearrange the patterns of Jewish dispersion. The United States could continue to be that center for the next two or three centuries, but the American citadel too may prove to be transitory. If Spengler is right, Western civilization-in which the American civilization is contained-may be in its winter phase, whereas the Slavic and Sinic civilizations may be in their spring. Should Western civilization decline, a Jewish Diaspora culture could spring up in Russia or in China.

Though the position of the Jews in Russia today is as anomalous as it was in Catholic Spain in the fifteenth century, it is not beyond belief for history to establish a Diaspora center there. In fact, the Jewish position in Russia today closely resembles that of the Marrano position in Spain. Though constituting but 1.5 percent of Russia's population, in 1970 Jews were an estimated 12 percent of Russia's top scientists, intellectuals, and scholars. With the demise of communism, Russia seems, for the moment, an unlikely site for the next dominant civilization. But we cannot know what fifty or five hundred years will bring. Since 1967 almost a million of Russia's Jews have gone to Israel and to America, but some will remain, and only time will tell how strongly the spark of Judaism burns among the ostensibly agnostic Russian-Jewish youth.

Nor is it beyond possibility that a Diaspora center could establish itself in China. In the tenth century, China played host to a flourishing Jewish community in Kaifeng, important enough for Marco Polo to mention. This community fell into decay by the nineteenth century, when history severed its ties with the Western Diaspora. Should a world civilization once again arise in China, it is no more farfetched for a Jewish Diaspora center to emerge in that vast nation than it was for Diaspora centers to be established in pagan Babylonia, Muslim Spain, or Catholic Poland.

A fourth possible center of world Jewish Diaspora could be South America, where the present history of the Jews resembles their early history in the United States. South America's Jews are today as dependent on the ideas and culture of the Jews of the United States as the latter were dependent upon the ideas of European Jewry before 1900. Although Judaism in South America today is diffused and decentralized, it would take only a sudden flare-up of intellectual life to make that continent a Diaspora center.

There still remains the question, Have the Jews been divinely chosen to fulfill a mission, or have they chosen themselves to fulfill a divine mission? Do we have a hint of the nature of this mission in Isaiah, who prophesies the brotherhood of man in the days to come? Will it be the function of the Jews to establish such a brotherhood of man and, having fulfilled such a predestined role, to disappear? Has Spinoza prepared us for this with his pantheistic theology for universal man? We cannot know. We can only speculate.

Let us view Jewish history as the unfolding of a vast Kabalistic drama in three acts, each act two thousand years long. In the first act-the tzimtzum, or "thesis" a succession of Jews, like heroes in a Greek tragedy, are cast by a Divine Director in predestined roles. Without a firm conviction in his preordained role as the progenitor of the Chosen People, Abraham would have been a tragic figure. His faith makes him heroic. In this first act, God continues to assign roles-to Moses, to lead the Jews out of Egyptian bondage and to give them the Law; to Joshua, to take them to the Promised Land; to the Prophets, to enlarge the Jewish concept of God into a universal Deity; to Ezra and Nehemiah, to make sure that the Jews are not swallowed up in this new universality. Within the external strife of Jewish history develops the thesis of a Jewish destiny, binding the Jews together into a people. This internal unity is then shattered with the appearance of a Christian sect that claims Jesus as the messiah. Just before the curtain descends, the Christians boldly declare that the role of the Jews as God's Chosen People is over.

When the curtain rises on the second act of our Kabalistic drama-the shevirath ha-keilim, or "breaking of the vessels"-Jerusalem has been destroyed and the Jews scattered in the Diaspora. Having acted for two thousand years as God's Chosen People, however, they are not prepared to relinquish their former roles. We now observe a succession of rabbis, philosophers, and scholars fashioning new tools of Jewish survival-the Talmudism of the ivy-league yeshivas, the philosophy of Maimonides, the interpretations of Rashi, the poetry of Halevi, the codification of Caro, the mysticism of the Kabala, the humanism of the Haskala, and finally, near the end of the act, the nationalism of Zionism, which reunites a segment of the Diaspora Jews in Israel. The "vessel," broken for two thousand years, has been mended. The curtain has fallen on the twentieth century. The second act is over.

Has our drama ended, or is this only an intermission before the third act-the tikkun, or "restoration"-in the Kabalistic cycle? Are the Jews destined to survive another two thousand years to fulfill an as yet unrevealed role?

Throughout the centuries, the trinity of Jehovah, Torah, and Prophets, by accident or design, evolved two sets of laws, one to preserve the Jews as Jews, the other to preserve mankind. In their first two thousand years, the Jews used that third of the Torah and Talmud which deals with priesthood and sacrifice to maintain themselves as a Jewish entity in a world of pagan civilizations. In their second two thousand years, they used that third of Torah and Talmud which deals with ritual and dietary restrictions to maintain their ethnic unity even as they spread the universal aspects of Judaic humanism. Left now of Torah and Talmud are the universal contents only-the third that deals with morality, justice, and ethics. Does this progression suggest that Judaism is now prepared to proselytize its faith in a world ready to accept its prophetic message? Is this to be the destiny of the Jews in the third act?

If man views the Jewish achievement through materialistic eyes, seeing only an insignificant minority in possession of a little land and a few battalions, this will seem improbable. It will not seem improbable if man discards the blinkers of prejudice and views the world not as a "thing" but as an "idea." Then he may see that two thirds of the civilized world is already governed by the ideas of Jews-the ideas of Moses, Jesus, Paul, Spinoza, Marx, Freud, Einstein. Will the world in the next two thousand years embrace the morality of the Torah, the social justice of the Prophets, the ethics of the Jewish patriarchs? If so, then in the words of Isaiah, there will be "Peace, peace, to him that is far off and to him that is near."

===

The existence of a Diaspora, then, has been the one essential condition for the cultural survival of the Jews beyond the normal life span of a civilization. Had they not been exiled, had they remained in Palestine, they probably would be no more of a cultural force in world history today than the remnants of the Karaites. Today, as once before, we have both an independent State of Israel and the Diaspora. But, as in the past, the State of Israel today is a citadel of Judaism, a haven of refuge, the center of Jewish nationalism where dwell only 3,750,000 of the world's 17,500,000 Jews. The Diaspora, although it has shifted its center through the ages with the rise and fall of civilizations, still remains the universal soul of Judaism.

Let us view Jewish history as the unfolding of a vast Kabalistic drama in three acts, each act two thousand years long. In the first act-the tzimtzum, or "thesis" a succession of Jews, like heroes in a Greek tragedy, are cast by a Divine Director in predestined roles. Without a firm conviction in his preordained role as the progenitor of the Chosen People, Abraham would have been a tragic figure. His faith makes him heroic. In this first act, God continues to assign roles to Moses, to lead the Jews out of Egyptian bondage and to give them the Law; to Joshua, to take them to the Promised Land; to the Prophets, to enlarge the Jewish concept of God into a universal Deity; to Ezra and Nehemiah, to make sure that the Jews are not swallowed up in this new universality. Within the external strife of Jewish history develops the thesis of a Jewish destiny, binding the Jews together into a people. This internal unity is then shattered with the appearance of a Christian sect that claims Jesus as the messiah. Just before the curtain descends, the Christians boldly declare that the role of the Jews as God's Chosen People is over.

Has our drama ended, or is this only an intermission before the third act-the tikkun, or "restoration" in the Kabalistic cycle? Are the Jews destined to survive another two thousand years to fulfill an as yet unrevealed role?

APPENDIX

THE RECENT HISTORY OF PALESTINE/ISRAEL

Peace in the Middle East is essential, as both Arab countries and Israel realize. Their numerous wars, Arab-Israeli and Arab-Arab, have not solved the problems. Circumstances arising out of an incredibly tangled and complicated past have increased the dangers in the area.

Now, in the last decade of the twentieth century, Israelis and Arabs-with misgivings on both sides are searching, face to face, for a way to live together in peace. No comprehensive discussion of these peace talks has been included in the text of the book, since neither their historical implications nor their possible results can even be guessed at.

Who is sitting at the table? On the one hand, a new nation with an old history-democratic, determined a nation that would not have been born, much less survived, if it had had to rely on foreign guarantees or international support. Asked about U.S. guarantees, Golda Meir responded, "By the time you get here, we won't be here."

On the other hand, there is a people that has never been a nation, supported (and often enough mistreated) by an array of Islamic nations, each with its own agenda-none democratic nor united with the others, and with vast economic, geographic, and social differences among them.

The following Chronology is by no means comprehensive. It is not intended as a basis for a final conclusion about the subject, nor is it intended to apportion praise or blame among the parties. Rather it is hoped that by pointing out some past efforts, disappointments, and frustrations, by describing some of the baggage that each side brings to the negotiating table, it will suggest to the reader the complexity of the problems with which the parties have had to deal and emphasize the magnitude and the fragility of the recent agreements, which, it is to be hoped, will be the opening of a new bright chapter in the thousands of years of history recounted in this book.

CHRONOLOGY

JEWISH HISTORY

Jerusalem "mournful, dreary, and lifeless. Palestine sits in sack cloth and ashes." (Mark Twain, 1867)

Religious Jews come to die and be buried in the Holy Land. First and second large waves of Jewish immigration. City of Tel Aviv established 1909.

World War I begins; Balfour Declaration (1917) supports Jewish homeland.

1914 to 1945

ARAB HISTORY

Before 1914

Palestine* not a separate political or administrative entity; part of the Ottoman Empire (1517-1917).

Arab population in 1882 is 260,000; most live in mud huts without sanitation; farms average 25 acres.

Sykes-Picot Agreement (1916), secret French-British pact for postwar division of Holy Land. Britain encourages Arabs to revolt against Ottoman Empire with promises of political independence.

*"Palestine" includes the present states of Israel and Jordan until noted otherwise.

Arab attacks against Jews. Jews defend Jewish communities but do not retaliate against Arab villages.

Peel Commission Report (1937) recommends that Palestine be partitioned into Jewish, Arab, and British zones.

Churchill's 1939 White Paper sets immigration limits; forbids sale of most Arab lands to Jews.

Secret talks between Ben-Gurion and Arab leaders. Jews reject White Paper because of need to offer asylum to Jews fleeing Nazi persecution.

Arabs from neighboring countries infiltrate to attack Jews: Arab uprisings against British (1936-39). 800 Arab victims.

Palestinian Arabs and most Arab states (except Transjordan) reject Peel Commission Report; renew violence against Jews.

Demand end to Jewish immigration and land purchases.

White Paper promises Arabs most of what they want; Higher Arab Committee rejects White Paper. Arabs unite against Jewish claims to Palestine; violence reaches level of open war.

When Arab National Defense Party tentatively accepts White Paper for negotiation, a member of the party is slain by Mufti terrorists. Arab leaders in Lebanon, Syria, and Palestine talk with Jewish leaders.