Contested Land, Contested Memory

by Jo Roberts

  Biblical scholarship generally agrees that John’s gospel was written towards the end of the first century.[12] By that time the space for cohabitation between Jews and Jewish Christians had been engulfed by the catastrophe that befell Judaism. In 70 C.E., an uprising against Roman rule was crushed with brute imperial power: the Temple was destroyed and Jews were expelled from their city of Jerusalem. Much of the Judean populace was killed or enslaved. Reeling from this onslaught, Judaism needed to protect and assert its own fragile identity, and the followers of this heretical Christian sect were persecuted and cast out of their synagogues. It is against such a background of violence and loss that the fourth gospel was composed.

  Christianity needed Judaism: indeed, it would not have existed without it. Jesus the Christ was a Jew, steeped in the religious tradition of his culture, and his story cannot easily be decontextualized. The very concept of a Messiah comes from Judaism. The Hebrew Scriptures provided Christians with prophecy of his coming, as well as a rich theological legacy in the lives of the patriarchs. Yet the struggling new faith, metamorphosing painfully from sect to religion, needed to distinguish itself from what it had been before.

  Paradoxically, Jews were the Other against which Christianity defined itself. Rejected by their co-religionists, banding tightly together in the face of persecution, the early members of the Church proclaimed in pain and anger their primary identity: that of not-Jews. While Judaism was the root out of which Christianity had branched, what made Christians separate was their unique affirmation of Christ as the (Jewish) Messiah. Jewish denial of Christ’s messianic role gave shape to Christian self-understanding.

  With the conversion of Constantine in 312 C.E., Christianity was no longer one faith amongst many in the vast territories of Rome — it was the imperial religion. The stage was set for Europe’s slow transformation into Christendom, and Christians found themselves in a position of power over Jews. As the centuries passed, historical contextualizing was not available to Christians listening to St. John’s Passion narrative, or to the priests who mediated the gospel for them.

  Five years after his conversion, the Emperor Constantine passed an edict forbidding Jewish proselytizing. In the centuries that followed, certain Christian theologians developed what has been called the teaching of contempt. St. John Chrysostom compared Jews to overfed animals, useless and ready for slaughter. St. Ambrose preached in favour of the burning of synagogues. St. Augustine spoke out forcibly against the killing of Jews, yet for him Jews were primarily a witness to Christ, living progenitors of the “new” Testament. The scattering and affliction of the Jews was a natural consequence of their rejection of the Messiah, and would end with their conversion.

  It is impossible to conceive of medieval Europe without Christianity. It was the organizing principle of an entire society. This was the age of faith, when bishops held as much power as princes, kings ruled by divine right, and society was melded into a pyramid of secular authority that mirrored the cosmological structuring of heaven and hell. In this worldview, the authority of Christ and His Church transcended time. Paradise and the fires of eternal torment were close at hand.

  Jews were a thorn in the flesh of medieval Christian society. Their very existence contradicted the spiritual unity of Christendom and its single theological narrative. Dangerous and outcast, Jews were still central to the Christian story, where their presence was fatal: they had denied the Messiah, and they had killed him. In that story, Jesus’s purity and innocent death were thrown into sharp relief by Jewish perfidy, attested to by the wily, lying priests and the savagery of the mob. The story of Jewish bloodguilt haunted its listeners, and thus the small communities of Jews who lived among them.

  Kings and princes across medieval Europe curtailed the freedom of their Jewish populations, who were, in the words of one Church edict, “subject to perpetual serfdom.”[13] And, time and again, rulers ordered the expulsion of Jews. Once they were forced into transience, in Christian eyes their rootlessness compounded their identity as outsiders.

  Forbidden from owning land, and from joining tradesmen’s guilds, Jews often turned to lending money at interest as a way to make a living. The practice of usury was condemned by the Church, yet needed by wealthy and poor alike as money superceded barter in Europe as the primary facilitator of trade. Moneylenders were not popular. Lay Christians may not have understood the subtleties of theological argument, but they understood that Jews were Christ-killers, and oppressive usurers to boot.

  “To mistreat the Jews is considered a deed pleasing to God,”[14] observed the theologian Peter Abelard, with dismay. Crusaders marching through the Rhineland on their way to Jerusalem destroyed Jewish communities along the Rhine. Blood libel, the false accusation that in re-enactment of the crucifixion some Jew had kidnapped and ritually murdered a Christian boy and used his blood for religious rites, was repeated again and again, sparking local pogroms across Europe. Outbreaks of plague, often blamed on Jews’ having poisoned the water supply, provoked a similar result.

  By 1242, King James I of Aragon was ordering Jews into churches and giving friars free rein to preach in synagogues, and Louis IX of France was publicly burning the Talmud. By the fourteenth century, mass conversions of Jews were igniting fears that the purity of Christendom was becoming tainted. Toledo passed an ordinance banning anyone with Jewish ancestry from office, and in 1478 the Spanish Inquisition began its deadly work of hunting down false converts — Jews who had accepted baptism to save their skins but continued practising Judaism in secret. Thousands were deemed guilty and burned at the stake.

  The convulsions within European Christianity that led to the Reformation brought other, new heretics to the Inquisition’s pyres. Jews were generally safer in Protestant areas, but Christian anti-Judaism spanned the divide between Catholic and Protestant, as evidenced by Martin Luther’s tract “The Jews and Their Lies.”

  In the middle of the sixteenth century, the head of the Inquisition was elected Pope. As Paul IV, he affirmed Toledo’s blood purity statute, forbade Jews to own property or hire Christian servants, enforced the ancient ruling that they should wear distinctive badges, and added the prescription that henceforth Jews should live segregated from Christians. He imprisoned Roman Jewry within the walls of a ghetto, and exhorted other rulers to follow suit. The walls of Rome’s Jewish ghetto would not finally fall until the nationalist unification of Italy in 1861.

  As the concept of blood purity began to take hold, and being Jewish came to be defined by ancestry as well as religion, the ever-present escape route of renouncing one’s faith and accepting Christian baptism offered only a fragile security. Some Jews responded with a deeper embrace of the dangerous faith of their ancestors. As the theological certainties of Christian Europe began to fracture in religious wars, and the early shoots of secular humanism became visible, some few Jews held positions of influence in courts and city governance, as in earlier times, and some few banking families were wealthy and influential. But there was no ultimately safe place for Jews as Jews within Christian society. Always a minority, living without refuge, Jews were unable to formulate a collective political response to their suffering.

  With the emergence of Zionism in the late nineteenth century, that finally changed.

  “The longing to return to Zion and in Zion to renew the independence of Israel was ever in the hearts of the Jewish people,” wrote David Ben-Gurion in his history, The Jews in Their Land. “But in the last quarter of the 19th century there was a fundamental change in the nature of this aspiration. Till then, the focus of the longing had been a mystic faith in the coming of the Messiah. Till then, Jewish farmsteads had continued to exist in the Land, especially in Galilee, but they had attracted no newcomers.… Now Jews began to settle and cultivate the land itself.”[15] The animating force that inspired the new immigrants, and which led eventually to the foundation of a Jewish state, was Zionism.

  This shift from Messianic hope to political reality was born of the
political and philosophical developments in nineteenth century Western Europe. The French Revolution had marked the end of the old social order. This dethroning was a victory for the long-percolated ideals of the Enlightenment: for reason over faith, civic rights and liberties over the absolute authority of dynastic kingship, power in the hands of citizens rather than European princes and the princes of the Church.

  Given their demonized role in the collective memory of Christendom, Jews could only benefit from this reordering. In 1791, the new legislative body of revolutionary France granted full citizenship to Jews for the first time in European history. As Napoleon Bonaparte’s soldiers marched into Rome in 1798, he ordered them to tear down the walls of the Jewish ghetto.‡

  But Jew hatred had become deeply ingrained in the cultures of Europe. Other nations were slow to follow France’s lead: British Jews were not emancipated until 1856, and Spain waited until 1910.§ Public accusations of blood libel were made as late as 1891 in Germany, 1899 in Bohemia, and 1911 in Russia. The language of anti-Semitism was, as Hannah Arendt described it, “long familiar and never quite forgotten.”[16]

  For many Jews, taking up their equal rights of citizenship meant assimilation. Many chose to live secular lives; many took Christianized names. Some converted to Christianity — baptism still being, as the German-Jewish poet Heinrich Heine pointed out, the “entrance ticket into the community of European culture.” The glass ceiling of assimilation, however, becomes all too visible in Proust’s observation:

  … in a French drawing-room the differences between these [Semitic] people are not so apparent, and an Israelite making his entry as though he were emerging from the heart of the desert, his body crouching like a hyaena’s … completely satisfies a certain taste for the oriental.[17]

  In the new political paradigm of Europe the concept of a nation state took on a primary role, not least in terms of the formation of a collective identity. If a state was to be based on the will of the people rather than that of an all-powerful ruler, then how that people was constituted became of greater and greater importance. Often, as in Germany, citizenship was defined by ethnicity. In other places, like France, a citizen was anyone who accepted exclusive loyalty to the state. Whichever way those boundaries were defined, Jews were suspect.

  Jews, it seemed, could always be fingered as the cause of social disharmony, whatever your political persuasion. That harbinger of social chaos, Karl Marx, was Jewish: Jews were revolutionaries. Some few wealthy financiers, such as the Rothschilds, were Jewish: Jews were greedy capitalists. And, as Captain Alfred Dreyfus was to discover in 1894, Jews were traitors.

  Dreyfus, a talented and ardently patriotic French army officer with a promising career ahead of him, was accused of spying for Germany. The evidence against him consisted of a letter to the German military attaché in Paris, a letter he denied he’d written. He was convicted and sent to Devil’s Island. Despite the discovery of new evidence, and an army officer’s forgery confession (and suicide), Dreyfus’s retrial in front of a military tribunal ended in a second conviction.

  The veneer of political liberalism in late nineteenth-century France was shattered by the Dreyfus Affair. Anti-Jewish riots broke out across the country, and the press erupted with anti-Semitic invective. “The Jew is behind it all!”[18] fumed Edouard Drumont, publisher of one of the two mainstream Catholic newspapers that led the anti-Dreyfusard charge. Drumont’s words foreshadow what would be written by government propagandists in Germany a few decades later. Condemning Jewry as “a nation within a nation,”[19] he wrote that “The Semite is money-grubbing, greedy, scheming, subtle, sly; the Aryan is enthusiastic, heroic, chivalrous, disinterested, frank, trustful…. The Jewish Semite … can live only as a parasite in the middle of a civilization he has not made.” The social upheaval of the times had led to a resurgence of Catholic piety, and priests and press alike at times shamelessly played on anti-Semitism as a lowest common denominator to draw lapsed Christians back into the fold. On top of everything else, Drumont reminded his readers, the Jews were still the killers of Christ.

  Nine-tenths of world Jewry was then living in Europe. Theodor Herzl, a Viennese journalist, was in Paris covering the Dreyfus Trial. As he witnessed the public degradation of Dreyfus — his military insignia ritually slashed from his uniform and his sword broken in two — and mobs of French citizens screaming “Death to the Jews,” he began to rethink what it meant to be Jewish in Europe. “It has been established,” he noted, “that justice could be refused to a Jew for the sole reason that he was a Jew.”[20] Clearly the nations of Europe did not want to include Jews within their self-definition. Assimilation was a failure — Dreyfus “signifies a strategic position which … is already lost.”[21] What Jews needed, then, in this climate of nationalism, was their own state. “The Jewish question exists wherever Jews live in perceptible numbers,” he wrote in his manifesto, The Jewish State. “Where it does not exist, it is carried by Jews in the course of their migrations. We naturally move to those places where we are not persecuted, and there our presence produces persecution.… I think the Jewish question is no more a social than a religious one, notwithstanding that it sometimes takes these and other forms. It is a national question.”[22]

  Zionist migration to Palestine had begun in the 1880s. For some migrants, the primary goal was to re-establish Zion as the religious and cultural heart of world Jewry. For Herzl, though, the only solution to the “Jewish Problem” was a Jewish nation-state. Earlier writers had made similar proposals, but Herzl had the drive and charisma to begin to make this dream a reality. “If you will it, it is no fable,” he wrote of Altneuland, his Utopian novel of a Zionist “New Society” in Palestine. In 1897, Herzl convened the First Zionist Congress in Basel, and together the delegates agreed that “Zionism seeks to establish a home for the Jewish people in Eretz­Israel secured under public law.”[23] Despite Herzl’s early death the movement flourished, and increasing numbers of Zionist Jews made the journey southeastward to Palestine. Each of their growing communities brought the birth of a Jewish state closer to fruition.

  Until the mid-1940s, the belief that Jewish settlement in Palestine would naturally coalesce into a Jewish state was by no means uncontested. Political organizations such as the influential Marxist-Zionist Hashomer Hatza’ir party and its successor party Mapam, and a loose grouping of intellectuals based at the Hebrew University in Jerusalem, saw Jewish presence in the land primarily in terms of Jewish cultural values attached to the specific geographical site of Judaism’s early history — a place where Jews could build a just society, and find shelter when needed. Critical of a Zionism they felt was based more on European ideas of nationhood than the ethical concepts of Judaism, many expressed support for a binational political solution. One of the most prominent was the religious existentialist philosopher Martin Buber, who in 1921 told the Zionist Congress that the Jewish people should announce “its desire to live in peace and brotherhood with the Arab people and to develop the common homeland into a republic in which both peoples will have the possibility of free development.”[24] ,¶

  In a similar vein, Judah Magnes, chancellor of Hebrew University, wrote to World Zionist Organization president Chaim Weizmann in 1929:

  [This] imperialist, military and political policy is based upon mass immigration of Jews and the creation (forcible if necessary) of a Jewish majority, no matter how much this oppresses the Arabs meanwhile…. In this kind of policy the end always justifies the means. The policy, on the other hand, of developing a Jewish spiritual center does not depend … upon depriving the Arabs (or the Jews) of their political rights for a generation or a day but in the contrary, is desirous of having Palestine become a country of two nations and three religions, all of them having equal rights.…[25]

  But in the face of the Shoah, and the nations’ disinclination to accept Jewish refugees, resistance to the concept of a Jewish state withered. The voices of the few remaining anti-nationalists were drowned out by the polit
ical realities of Partition and the 1948 War. Nationalist and non-nationalist Zionists alike were convinced that a Jewish state was a necessity.

  “And then the victim became the aggressor,” Oren Yiftachel told me.[26] We were sitting in the cafeteria of the Ben-Gurion University of the Negev, in Be’er Sheva. “Only it’s a chain reaction, it doesn’t connect. Now the Palestinians are the victims.” Oren is a professor at Ben-Gurion, a political geographer, who in his writing has described Israel as an “ethnocracy,” a state that privileges (Jewish) ethnicity over democracy. He lost a previous academic post because his work was seen as too contentious.

  Oren told me he’d given a talk at the Khalil Sakakini Cultural Centre in Ramallah, in the West Bank. He’d started off by saying, “I’m with you politically, I do a lot of work for Palestinian rights, but I’m going to give a talk that will make you very angry. The Jews are a nation of refugees.” For his Palestinian audience, living with the brutal realities of Israeli occupation, with over a million Palestinians still confined in refugee camps, this was a dissonant perspective. Many were angered by it, but they were also curious, and they gave Oren a hearing.

  Oren explained his argument:

  Israel is like a bully child born of a rape. The Palestinians just wish it would disappear. But its been born, it has legitimacy, and nobody has the right to kill it. Restrain it, yes. But not to destroy it.

  What was the phenomenon of Zionism? The narrative is that Jews had longed for generations to return to their homeland, and then they did. Most Arabs say it was the British Empire that planned and helped execute that. Both narratives, I think, miss the point: you need the bodies, the people, the desperation to do it. And this was what actually happened. It was only a small minority that had this dream. In the elections in the Jewish communities in Eastern and central Europe, Zionists rarely ever won, it was usually the socialist Bund, which was working for Jewish autonomy there, where they were living. By 1936, only 3 percent of world Jewry was in Palestine. Zionism would have been a footnote in history, like other messianic attempts in Jewish history.