The Montreal students were attentive and likable, but they adamantly refused to read anything in English, which, in political science and in the history of modern international relations, created quite a problem. We managed, and they must have been happy with my teaching, as at the end of my last lecture, they solemnly set a box on my desk. I was supposed to open it, which I did, then lift up its contents and show it to all, which I couldn’t do: it was too heavy. The object was a magnificent Eskimo stone sculpture of a fisherman holding a fish. It accompanied me for decades, from one home to another.
In early May 1967, I returned to my native city for the first time since April 1939. A few weeks beforehand, I had received a letter from Czechoslovakia. When I looked at the sender’s name I immediately recognized it: Vlasta Hajnerova, my nanny. She had read the review of a book by a Saul Friedländer translated into Czech and saw that the author was born in Prague in 1932. Could this Saul be the child Paul she had taken care of? She got my address from the publisher and wrote. We met. In my eyes she had not changed much.
We walked and walked for two days: she showed me the small house and garden in Bubeneč where I had spent my first three or four years and the apartment building on the Vltava quay to which we moved later on. Manifestly she had no great fondness for my mother, but as far as I could remember, she had been kind to me. She had taught me Czech songs that I still remember and tried to pass on to me something of her pious Catholicism. Did my parents know? I wonder. After we left, she went to work in the family of a German general. A professional nanny can’t be too choosy.
This reminds me that for my eightieth birthday, one of the children gave me a magnificent photo album of Prague by Karel Plička, published in 1940. I had seen the book many years beforehand and had tried to find it ever since. Well, here it was with its truly extraordinary array of palaces, churches, bridges, gardens, ancient libraries, and all the beauty of the city. I was puzzled, though, to find some ugly modern office buildings in the midst of the Gothic and Baroque splendor. It did not take long to understand that Nazi censorship had erased the photos of the old Jewish cemetery and of the ancient synagogues — in short of any sign of Judaism in the most Jewish city of Central Europe — and replaced them with drab office buildings.
I had barely returned to Geneva when the crisis began that within three weeks would lead to war between Israel and the neighboring Arab states.
PART II
The Unraveling of a Dream
CHAPTER SEVEN
The Footsteps of the Messiah
From every window, every terrace, every coffee shop, radios screamed in unison Uri Zohar’s “Nasser mechakeh leRabin, ai, ai, ai …” (Nasser waits for Rabin, ai, ai, ai …) or launched into Noemy Shemer’s elegiac “Yerushalayim shel zahav …” (“Jerusalem of Gold …”). It was frenzy, an outburst of nationalist elation that knew no bounds.
Much of it was a spontaneous reaction to two weeks of waiting with the darkest forebodings and to the stupendous victory that followed. With the hesitant Eshkol as its prime minister, but with Dayan as newly appointed defense minister in a national union cabinet, Israel struck. In six days, the Israeli forces occupied the Sinai Peninsula, the West Bank of the Jordan River (as King Hussein had joined the anti-Israel coalition), and the Syrian heights overlooking the Sea of Galilee; mainly, it conquered the whole of Jerusalem. Some Israelis were already hearing the footsteps of the Messiah.
The contrast between subdued Geneva and this overheated atmosphere was jarring, but as much as the nationalist elation went against my feelings, the Israeli political attitude appeared reasonable to me at the time. I had just debated at a conference in Geneva with a fiery and eloquent anti-Israel professor from Princeton, Arno Mayer. And, a few days after the end of the war, a “memorable” confrontation took place, this time on French television, between four Israelis and four Palestinians. We were seated in separate studios, as the Palestinians refused to sit together with us. Our group comprised Elie Wiesel, the journalist Yeshayahu Ben-Porat, the Foreign Ministry official David Catarivas, and myself. In the midst of the program, Wiesel and Catarivas left in protest against the Palestinian attitude; Ben-Porat and I battled on.
A few weeks later, sometime in July 1967, we arrived in Israel: I had been offered a one-year guest professorship in history at the Hebrew University in Jerusalem on Talmon’s suggestion.
1
A year after our last visit, we discovered a different country. Along with the nationalist outburst, Israel reveled in an entirely new sense of power, almost of “superpower.” For Israelis and for many Jews in the Diaspora, this was a previously unknown feeling. Droves of tourists filled the country and its “empire.” The economy suddenly turned around and a boom followed the stagnation of previous years. Within a few months, the very sight of the country had changed: everywhere, Arab workers from the occupied territories bustled on thousands of new building sites; on city streets, the smells of new restaurants wafted in the summer heat. In the spring of 1968, on the twentieth anniversary of Israel, the first national television channel was inaugurated. As for peace, it was nowhere in sight. Israel would not move from the occupied territories as long as the Arab countries rejected all negotiation, which they did at the Khartum conference, at the end of 1967.
During the year we spent in Jerusalem, there wasn’t the least difficulty in visiting, shopping, or eating in the Old City (the mostly Arab part of Jerusalem), or traveling anywhere else in the occupied territories from Sharm el-Sheikh at the southern tip of the Sinai Peninsula, to the Saint Catherine Monastery in the middle of Sinai, to the souk (the covered market) of Hebron or the slopes of Mount Lebanon. You were received with open arms, business was brisk: the buyers made money (prices were extremely low at the outset), the sellers made even more money. Occupiers and occupied were happily coexisting — or so it seemed.
We loved to stroll in the Arab quarter of the Old City, particularly in the souk. Most of the stalls, taken singly, were not overly impressive, but the jumble of hundreds of them on both sides of the crowded narrow path that led downhill from Jaffa Gate — or across the souk from the Damascus Gate (Shechem Gate in Hebrew) — offered a display of colors and a pungent smell of spices that assailed and overwhelmed the senses and made you slightly dizzy — or rather, dazzled — from the richness of it all.
From the souk, you could follow a side alley and within minutes you reached the Holy Sepulcher. The church with its multiple additions over the centuries had none of the beauty of European cathedrals. Once you entered, you couldn’t help being taken aback as monks of diverse and mutually hostile Christian rites pulled you, each to his own corner of the church, to show you “their” burial site of Jesus. You quickly forgot all this awkwardness, however, on the occasion of some of the grand ceremonies, particularly on Easter week. During this first stay, we attended the Holy Fire celebration of the Greek Orthodox Church, and although we got only brief sights of the fire, we were soon surrounded by thousands of burning candles that the throngs of faithful had lit from that holy fire and were holding in an ecstasy of devotion.
If you followed the main path through the souk, down from Jaffa Gate, you reached the Western Wall and, dominating it, the Temple Mount, with its two magnificent mosques, the Dome of the Rock and the Al Aqsa Mosque. In 1967–68, the absence of the vast square cleared years later enhanced the majesty of the Wall; the huge stones arose literally a few feet away from where you stood: they overwhelmed you not so much (as far as we were concerned) by a feeling of holiness but rather by the weight of history they carried.
One of our preferred and most frequent excursions — when the weather allowed it from the autumn on — was the drive from Jerusalem down to Jericho or straight to the Dead Sea for wading in water not ideal for swimming (not for me in any case, even if it was supposed to carry you). The road from Jerusalem to the Dead Sea inspired awe. At first you only saw the dozens of burned-out tanks, armored cars, and trucks of the Jordanian army that dotted both si
des of the highway. Very soon, however, a different sight took over. The barren hills that surrounded you in both directions did not look desolate; they arose there, wrapped in an almost unnatural stillness, displaying an austere beauty that did not remind you of any landscape you carried in memory or imagination. It was Ernest Renan, if I am not mistaken, who linked that surreal bareness to the birth of monotheism. And if you traveled down in late afternoon, the mounts of Moav, on the far side of the Dead Sea, turned violet just before becoming a dark barrier on the background of a fading, cloudless sky. But then if you chose Jericho and settled under the pergola of a restaurant, the pita, the hummus with tahini, and the beer tasted better than anywhere else, precisely because you had just undergone such a “spiritual” experience.
And, although nothing much remained of my Catholic adolescence, I nonetheless liked to visit the sites of a story I literally once knew by heart (in the seminary, during the Passion Week, we had to memorize — in Greek — the story of the Last Supper and the events leading to the Crucifixion, according to the Gospel of John).
We had rented an apartment on Aza Street (Gaza Street), a ten-minute drive from campus; we soon got acquainted with our very friendly neighbors and, in short, became true Jerusalemites. Eli, who had turned seven on the eve of our arrival, went to grade school in the fall and, as we spoke Hebrew at home, had no problem in adapting. I assume that we sent three-year-old David to a preschool; I am sure that we didn’t just leave him to his own devices.
I often think of my nonchalant attitude in 1967–68 regarding the ongoing national exaltation. As I said, I didn’t like the “noise” it made but I have to admit that in my heart of hearts I shared the euphoria. Obviously I did not share the messianic dreams or the sudden devotion to the “whole land of Israel” that well-known leftist writers such as Moshe Shamir and Haim Guri suddenly discovered and proclaimed; but I was not shocked. Nothing shocked me yet. My private euphoria was in the order of things and I didn’t hear many voices that warned of inherent dangers.
And yet, that I, who of all people should have understood what occupation does to the occupied and to the occupier, didn’t see any “writing on the wall” embarrasses me in hindsight. How didn’t I perceive that notwithstanding the economic benefits enjoyed by many Palestinians (the term was not yet commonly used), humiliation was lurking and that it was just a matter of time for humiliation to turn into a thirst for revenge, a need to inflict pain on the occupier by any available means? It would lead to repression that would intensify the anger and turn it into rage. This is, as we know, the disastrous course that events were to follow. The only thing that I perceived soon enough was the danger of a moral degradation that the occupation could foster within Israeli society.
The Six-Day War has turned into a crucial landmark in the history of Israel; it became the end of an epoch and the beginning of a fateful evolution, the outcome of which cannot yet be surmised, particularly today (2015). It isn’t only the occupation of Palestinian or other Arab territory that caused the change. Rather, the victory of those days activated a deep, preexisting impulse within Jewish history, albeit shared only by a small minority at first: closure to the surrounding world and the nurturing of a fanatical, messianic identity, whether in strictly religious terms or in its extreme nationalist equivalent after the rise of Zionism.
2
We were taken in by a small group of German Jews, mostly living in the Rehavia area of Jerusalem, all more or less linked to the university. This was a remnant of Weimar Germany, presided over by the already mentioned member of the pacifist movement Brit Shalom, the world-famous historian of Jewish mysticism, Gershom Scholem, and his wife Fania.
Why the Scholems invited us to their house as frequent guests, I do not know. Perhaps the master had read and liked my book on Pius XII? I vaguely remember something else: we met the Scholems at Justice Haim Cohen’s home and, over tea, I asked Scholem whether he knew the real identity of Thomas Mann’s Chaim Breisacher, the crazy Munich Jew portrayed in Doktor Faustus. Of course Scholem knew, and he happily started describing the revolutionary mystic and indeed crazy Jew, Oskar Goldberg. I had probably passed the test that I had unintentionally set for myself. The Scholems’ door opened.
You entered a small apartment on Alharizi Street, with book-lined walls on all sides. And here were the Scholems. You couldn’t look at them without smiling to yourself. While Fania was small and chubby, Gershom was tall, thin, slightly stooped from talking to people shorter than he was, with a somewhat triangular face and a long, pointed nose. Large ears widely spread sideways framed it all. I don’t know whether he could move these remarkable ears at will, but it wouldn’t have surprised me.
Scholem had strong likes and dislikes; Fania followed suit. Beyond specific individuals, his dislikes extended to entire domains: sociology and Freudian analysis, for example. As I had just completed my Geneva analysis with what I then considered a measure of success, I expressed my disagreement regarding that issue (I had no desire to fight on two fronts and in any case had nothing much to say about sociology). I don’t recall how Scholem reacted; had there been a discussion I would have remembered it. What followed either immediately or within a few minutes was the story he loved to tell: how, in 1916, he fooled the head of one of the military draft commissions in Berlin, the psychoanalyst Karl Abraham, by simulating schizophrenia, and thus escaped the draft.
Yet, strangely enough, Scholem took Jungian concepts seriously and regularly participated in the annual Eranos conferences in Ascona, which were of a decidedly Jungian hue. All in all, he harbored strange ideas at times. When Philip Roth’s brilliant and hilarious Portnoy’s Complaint was published, Scholem wrote a letter to Haaretz, warning that the book would trigger anti-Semitism in the States and beyond.
Although I was flattered to be included in Scholem’s circle, I didn’t feel at ease in it. I was impressed by the kind of German scholarship that appeared to me so much deeper, so much more gründlich than my own patchwork learning. At times, among the Scholems, Simons, Samburskis, and other “Yekkes,” I felt like an impostor who would one day be unmasked. It’s a feeling that has surfaced from time to time, from before that year in Jerusalem and to the present day.
Some of Scholem’s blind spots frankly annoyed me. I was irritated by his flaunting in conversation and in writing the story of his faked schizophrenia; it even appeared in his memoirs. He knew as well as I did that the main anti-Semitic argument used in Germany during the First World War and afterward was that Jews shirked their duty and escaped the draft by using one dirty trick or another. In reality there was no statistical difference of any significance between the military service of Jewish and non-Jewish Germans. Of course, in the 1960s nobody in Germany or elsewhere would criticize Scholem for this story, but I found that stressing it and being openly proud of it was in bad taste, to put it mildly. Or was I wrong after all?
3
At the university, I gave a lecture course on the history of international relations between the two world wars and a graduate seminar on Nazism in which I dealt extensively with Nazi anti-Semitism and some aspects of the Holocaust.
At that time — notwithstanding the strongly increased awareness of the Holocaust in Israeli society (beyond the community of survivors) as a result of the Eichmann trial in 1961 and of the prewar “waiting period” of May–early June 1967, which awakened many dormant fears of extermination, the Hebrew University did relatively little to encourage the teaching of the subject. One researcher and teacher of the history of the Shoah in the department of contemporary Jewry, Shaul Esh, died in 1968 and was not replaced for quite some time. One full-fledged professor of contemporary Jewish history, Shmuel Ettinger, dealt intensively with modern anti-Semitism, but not with Nazi anti-Semitism as such. One couldn’t dismiss the impression that the Shoah was not salonfähig (socially acceptable) in a serious scholarly institution such as the Hebrew University.
It took me some time to understand that the reticence regardi
ng open “academic acceptance” of the study of the extermination came from the same German-Jewish scholarly elite that had taken us in: the Scholems and their group. I realized, during our stay in Jerusalem, that the institution that dealt with the history of German Jewry, in Jerusalem, London, and New York, the Leo Baeck Institute, did not research or publish anything belonging to the Nazi period; this would change only in 1985. In short, the German Jews who could have been considered the mentors of the Hebrew University well into the sixties were unable (or unwilling) to recognize that much of German culture and society, their cradle and their intellectual compass, had also been the cradle of Nazism. They were torn. In the early sixties, Scholem declared that there had never been a “German-Jewish symbiosis,” but he took this back later on. Wasn’t he in many ways a typical product of that symbiosis?
Thus, the study of the Shoah was left to the memorial and documentation center Yad Vashem, established in 1953 but kept mostly at arm’s length by the academic world. The Israeli scholars soon to become recognized names in the study of the Holocaust (Yisrael Gutman, Yehuda Bauer, Dov Kulka, and others) were still working on their doctorates or were very junior faculty on the morrow of the Six-Day War, as they all had resumed their studies at a relatively late age.
I can’t recall with any certainty when I decided that if I were asked to return to Jerusalem, my history seminar would deal essentially with European fascism, with Nazism, as well as with modern anti-Semitism and the Holocaust. After writing the Gerstein biography and after my intensive involvement with the issues swirling around Pius XII’s attitude during the war, I knew that notwithstanding my dwindling but still existent emotional distance from the Shoah, it would be the domain to which I would devote my main scholarly efforts, at least for a few years. Little did I know that the history of the Holocaust would not only become the focus of my academic interest for some time but would in fact come to virtually dominate my entire scholarly life.
When Memory Comes Page 11