History of the Jews

by Paul Johnson

  The Jerusalem rabbis had a collateral reason for taking a strict line on this issue. They wanted to discourage, in the minds of ordinary Jews, any equation of Zionist military triumphs, such as the recapture of the Old City, with messianic fulfilment. The same argument also applied to proposals to rebuild the Temple itself. Any such scheme would of course have run into violent opposition from the entire Moslem world, since the Temple platform was occupied by two Islamic structures of immense historic and artistic importance. Nevertheless the idea was argued through with characteristic rabbinical thoroughness. Did not the Jews, by divine command, rebuild the Temple on the return from their first, Babylonian Exile, and was not this a precedent to follow now the great Exile was over? No: the precedent applied only when the majority of Jews ‘live upon the land’, and that had not yet happened. Yet at the time of Ezra was not the Temple rebuilt even though the number of Jews returning from Babylon was smaller than today? True, but no divine command has been received; the Third Temple will be erected in a supernatural manner by God’s direct intervention. But this argument was once used against Zionism itself, was it not, and falsified by events? And the first Temple, undoubtedly built by Solomon, was also ascribed to God. It was; on the other hand, the Temple could not be built in David’s time because he was a man of war; it had to wait until Solomon’s time of peace. So today: not until a final peace comes could a Third Temple be built. Even then a true prophet would be required to inspire the event, if for no other reasons than that the details, given by God to David in His own hand, were lost.63 Yes, they were: but details of the Third Temple are given in the Book of Ezekiel. Perhaps; but leaving aside the technical arguments, the present generation was neither prepared nor willing to restore the Temple and its mode of worship: to become so would require a religious awakening. Exactly: and what better way of creating one than starting to build the Temple again?64 So the arguments went on, leading to the majority conclusion that nothing could yet be done. Even a proposal to offer a ritual sacrifice of the paschal lamb was dropped because the exact site of the altar could not be discovered, there was doubt about the priestly lineage credentials of present-day Cohens or Kohanim, and (not least) too little was known of the priestly garments to recreate them exactly.65

  The Temple, and the arguments surrounding it, symbolized the religious past which was a living, binding force in the new Israeli community. But there was a secular past too, to escape from which the Zionist state had been created. There the symbol was the Holocaust: more than a symbol indeed, an awesome reality which had overshadowed the state’s creation and which, rightly, continued to be the salient fact in the nation’s collective memory. Judaism had always been concerned not only with the Law but with (in human terms) the ends of law, justice. An endlessly recurrent and pitiful feature of Jewish history in the Exile had been the injuries inflicted on Jews as Jews and the failure of gentile society to bring their perpetrators to justice. The Jewish state was, in part at least, a response to the greatest injustice of all. One of its functions was to be an instrument of retribution and display to the world that Jews at along last could strike back and execute their Law against those who wronged them. The Holocaustal crime was so gigantic that the Nuremberg trials and other machines of justice operated by individual European countries, which we have already described, were plainly not enough. As early as 1944 the research department of the Jewish Agency’s Political Office, then run by the future Prime Minister Moshe Sharett, had begun to collect material on Nazi war criminals. After the foundation of the state, tracing the guilty and bringing them to justice was part of the duties of several Israeli agencies, some secret. The effort was not confined to Israel. Many Jewish organizations, national and international, including the World Jewish Congress, joined in. So did the survivors themselves. In 1946 Simon Wiesenthal, a thirty-eight-year-old Czech Jew who had survived five years in various camps, including Buchenwald and Mauthausen, set up with thirty other camp inmates the Jewish Historical Documentation Centre, which eventually found a permanent home in Vienna. It concentrated on the identification of Nazi criminals not yet tried and sentenced. The Holocaust was intensively studied for academic and educational as well as retributive purposes. By the 1980s there were ninety-three courses in Holocaust studies in United States and Canadian universities alone and six research centres entirely devoted to the subject. At the Wiesenthal Center for Holocaust Studies in Los Angeles, for example, the latest technology was invoked to create what was called a ‘multi-screen, multi-channel-sound, audio-visual experience of the Holocaust’, using a 40-foot-high and 23-foot-long screen in the configuration of an arch, three film projectors and a special Cinemascope lens, eighteen slide projectors and pentaphonic sound, all linked to a central computer for simultaneous control. This dramatic recreation of the event might not seem excessive at a time when anti-Semites were beginning to make determined attempts to prove that it had never taken place at all or had been grotesquely exaggerated.66

  But the primary object of Holocaust documentation remained justice. Wiesenthal himself was responsible for bringing over 1,100 Nazis to prosecution. He supplied much of the material which allowed the Israeli government to identify, arrest, try and sentence the man who, after Himmler himself, was the chief administrator-executant of the Holocaust, Adolf Eichmann. He was arrested by Israeli agents in Argentina in May 1960, brought to Israel secretly, and charged on fifteen counts under the Nazis and Nazi Collaborators (Punishment) Law, 1950.67 For a number of reasons the Eichmann trial was an important event, actual and symbolic, for the Israelis and for the entire Jewish people. It demonstrated in the most striking manner that the age of impunity for those who murdered Jews was over and that there was no hiding-place for them anywhere in the world. It was covered by 976 foreign and 166 Israeli correspondents and, because of the nature of the indictment, embracing the Holocaust as a whole as well as events leading up to it, it was a process of education for millions in the facts of mass murder. But it was also a meticulous demonstration of Israeli justice in this most emotional of fields.

  Eichmann’s first reaction to capture was to admit his identity and guilt and to concede the Jewish right to punish him. He said on 3 June 1960: ‘If it would give greater significance to the act of atonement, I am ready to hang myself in public.’68 Later he became less co-operative and fell back on the defence familiar from Nuremberg that he was a mere cog in the machine executing the orders of someone else. In the event, then, the prosecution faced an active, cunning and obstinate, if ignoble, defence. The Knesset passed a law allowing a foreigner (the German counsel Dr Robert Servatius) to defend Eichmann and the Israeli government provided the fee ($30,000). The trial was a long and thorough affair and the judgment, delivered on 11 December 1961, went to great trouble to assert and argue the competence of the court and its right to try the accused despite the circumstances of his arrest, as well as the substance of its findings. The overwhelming evidence made the verdict inevitable. Eichmann was sentenced to death on 15 December and his appeal dismissed on 29 May 1962. President Yitzhak been Zvi received a petition for clemency and spent a day in solitude considering it. Israel had never executed anyone before (or since) and many Jews, there and abroad, wanted to avoid the rope. But the great majority believed the sentence was right and the President could find no mitigating circumstances whatever in the case. A room in the Ramla Prison was specially converted into an execution chamber, with a trap-door cut in the floor and a gallows above, and Eichmann was executed near midnight on 31 May 1962, his body being burned and the ashes scattered at sea.69

  The Eichmann affair demonstrated Israeli efficiency, justice and firmness, and went some way to exorcising the ghosts of the Final Solution. It was a necessary episode in Israel’s history. But the Holocaust continued to be a determining fact in Israel’s national consciousness. In May 1983 the Israeli polling firm Smith Research Center conducted an exhaustive survey of Israeli attitudes to the Holocaust. This revealed that the overwhelming majority
of Israelis (83 per cent) saw it as a major factor in how they saw the world. The Center’s director, Hanoch Smith, reported: ‘The trauma of the Holocaust is very much on the minds of Israelis, even in the second and third generations.’ The view of the Holocaust, indeed, went right to the heart of Israel’s purpose. An overwhelming majority (91 per cent) believed that the Western leaders knew of the mass killings and did little to save the Jews; only slightly fewer (87 per cent) agreed with the proposition: ‘From the Holocaust we learn that Jews cannot rely on non-Jews.’ Some 61 per cent considered the Holocaust the main factor in the establishment of Israel and 62 per cent believed its existence made a repetition impossible.70

  Hence, just as the collective memory of pharaonic bondage dominated the early Israelite society, so the Holocaust shaped the new state. It was, inevitably, pervaded by a sense of loss. Hitler had wiped out a third of all Jews, especially the pious and the poor, from whom Judaism had drawn its peculiar strength. The loss could be seen in secular terms. In the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries the world had been immeasurably enriched by the liberated talent streaming out of the old ghettos, which had proved a principal creative force in modern European and North American civilization. The supply continued until Hitler destroyed the source for ever. No one will ever know what the world thereby sacrificed. For Israel the deprivation was devastating. It was felt at a personal level, for so many of its citizens had lost virtually all their families and childhood friends, and it was felt collectively: one in three of those who might have built the state was not there. It was felt spiritually perhaps most of all. The supreme value Judaism attached to human life, to the point where the Israeli nation debated long and anxiously before it deprived even Eichmann of his, made the murder of so many, especially of the poor and the pious, whom God specially loved, an event hard to comprehend. It required another Book of Job even to state the problem. It was touched on by the great Judaic theologian Abraham Joshua Herschel (1907-73), who had been fortunate to get out of Poland just six weeks before the disaster. ‘I am’, he wrote, ‘a brand plucked from the fire of an altar of Satan on which millions of human lives were exterminated to evil’s greater glory, and on which so much else was consumed: the divine images of so many human beings, many people’s faith in the God of justice and compassion, and much of the secret and power of attachment to the Bible bred and cherished in the hearts of men for nearly 2,000 years.’71 Why had it happened? The new Zion began with an unanswered, perhaps unanswerable, question.

  Yet there were some ways in which the world position of the Jews had been fundamentally improved since the days before the Holocaust. The Jewish national state had been established. That did not end the Exile of course. How could it? The Exile, as Arthur Cohen observed, was not an accident of history corrected by creation of a secular, national state; it was, rather, a metaphysical concept, ‘the historical coefficient of being unredeemed’.72 Most of Jewry remained outside the state. That had been so ever since the Babylonian Exile. The Third Commonwealth, like the Second, contained only about a quarter of all Jews. There was no sign, as Israel completed its fourth decade, of a fundamental change in this proportion. All the same, realization of a secular Zion gave to world Jewry a living, beating heart it had not possessed for two millennia. It provided a focus for the global community which the old pious settlements and the idea of global community which the old pious settlements and the idea of Return, however cherished, had not supplied. The building of Israel was the twentieth-century equivalent of rebuilding the Temple. Like the Temple under Herod the Great, it had unsatisfactory aspects. But it was there. The very fact that it existed, and could be visited and shared, gave a completely new dimension to the diaspora. It was a constant source of concern, sometimes of anxiety, often of pride. Once Israel had been established and proved it could defend and justify itself, no member of the diaspora ever had to feel ashamed of being a Jew again.

  This was important because even near the close of the twentieth century the diaspora continued to maintain its characteristics of extremes of wealth and poverty and baffling variety. Total Jewish population had been nearly 18 million at the end of the 1930s. By the mid-1980s it had by no means recovered the Holocaust losses. Of a total of 13.5 million Jews, about 3.5 million lived in Israel. By far the largest Jewish community was in the United States (5,750,000) and this, combined with important Jewish communities in Canada (310,000), Argentina (250,000), Brazil (130,000) and Mexico (40,000), and a dozen smaller groups, meant that nearly half world Jewry (6.6 million) was now in the Americas. The next largest Jewish community, after the US and Israel, was Soviet Russia’s, with about 1,750,000. There were still sizeable communities in Hungary (75,000) and Rumania (30,000), and a total of 130,000 in Marxist eastern Europe. In western Europe there were a little over 1,250,000 Jews, the principal communities being in France (670,000), Britain (360,000), West Germany (42,000), Belgium (41,000), Italy (35,000), the Netherlands (28,000) and Switzerland (21,000). In Africa, outside the South African Republic (105,000), there were now few Jews except in the diminished communities of Morocco (17,000) and Ethiopia (perhaps 5,000). In Asia there were still about 35,000 Jews in Persia and 21,000 in Turkey. The Australian and New Zealand communities together added a further 75,000.73

  The history, composition and origin of some of these communities were of great complexity. In India, for instance, there were about 26,000 Jews in the late 1940s, composed of three principal types. About 13,000 formed the so-called Bene (Children of) Israel, living in and around Bombay on the west coast. These Jews had lost their records and books but retained a tenacious oral history of their migration, put into written form as recently as 1937.74 Their story was that they had fled from Galilee during the persecution of Antiochus Epiphanes (175-163 BC). Their ship was wrecked on the coast about 30 miles south of Bombay, and only seven families survived. Though they had no religious texts and soon forgot Hebrew, they continued to honour the Sabbath and some Jewish holidays, practised circumcision and Jewish diet and remembered the Shema. They spoke Marathi and adopted Indian caste practices, dividing themselves into Goa (whites) and Kala (blacks), which suggests there may have been two waves of settlement. Then there were the Cochin Jews, about 2,500 at one time, living 650 miles further south down the west coast. They had a foundation document of a kind, two copper plates engraved in old Tamil, recording privileges and now dated between 974 and 1020 AD. There were certainly several layers of settlement in this case, the Black Cochin Jews being the earliest, joined by whiter-skinned Jews from Spain, Portugal and possibly other parts of Europe (as well as the Middle East) in the early sixteenth century. Both black and white Cochin Jews had sub-divisions and there was a third main group, the Meshuararim, who were low-caste descendants of unions between Jews and slave-concubines. None of the three main Cochin groups worshipped together. In addition, there were about 2,000 Sephardi Jews from Baghdad, who arrived in India during the decade 1820-30, and a final wave of European refugee Jews who came in the 1930s. These two last categories associated with each other for religious (not social) purposes, but neither would attend the same synagogues as the Bene Israel or Cochin Jews. All the white-skinned Jews and many of the blacks spoke English, and they flourished under British rule, serving with distinction in the army, becoming civil servants, tradesmen, shopkeepers and craftsmen, attending Bombay University, studying Hebrew, translating the Jewish classics into Marathi and graduating as engineers, lawyers, teachers and scientists. One of them became Mayor of Bombay, the centre of all Jewish groups of India, in 1937. But independent India was less congenial to them and with the creation of Israel most chose to migrate, so that by the 1980s there were not much over 15,000 Bene Israel and only 250 Jews on the Cochin coast.75

  That such groups should survive at all testified not to the proselytizing power of Judaism but to its tenacious adaptability even in the most adverse circumstances. But it cannot be denied that the cataclysmic events of the twentieth century virtually destroyed dozens
of Jewish communities, many of them ancient. The post-war Communist regime in China, for instance, imposed its own final solution on China’s Jewish population, much of it a refugee exodus from Soviet Russia and Hitler’s Europe, but including descendants of Jews who had been in China from the eighth century onwards. All fled or were driven out, Hong Kong alone, with about 1,000 Jews, and Singapore with 400, constituting lonely outposts in the Far East.

  Throughout the Arab world, during the late 1940s and 1950s, the historic Sephardi communities were reduced to a fraction of their pre-war size or eliminated altogether. In large parts of Europe, the Jews who survived or returned after the ravages of the Holocaust were winnowed further by emigration, especially to Israel. Salonika’s Ladino-speaking population, 60,000 strong in 1939, was a mere 1,500 in the 1980s. Vienna’s vast and fertile Jewry, perhaps the most gifted of all, shrank from 200,000 to less than 8,000, and even the mortal remains of Herzl himself, buried in the city’s Doebling cemetery, left for reinterment in Jerusalem in 1949. Amsterdam Jewry, nearly 70,000 in the 1930s, was scarcely 12,000 forty years later. The Jews of Antwerp, who had made it the diamond centre of the West, continued to work in the trade but the city’s Jewry had fallen from 55,000 to about 13,500 in the 1980s. The ancient Frankfurt Jewry, once so famous in finance, fell from 26,158 in 1933 to 4,350 in the 1970s. In Berlin where, in the 1920s, nearly 175,000 Jews had made it the cultural capital of the world, there were in the 1970s only about 5,500 (plus another 850 in East Berlin). The most desolate vacuum of all was in Poland, where by the 1980s a pre-war Jewish population of 3,300,000 had dropped to about 5,000. Scores of towns there, once rich in synagogues and libraries, knew the Jew no more.