IN THE BEGINNING

For thou art an holy people unto the Lord thy God: the Lord thy God hath chosen thee to be a special people unto himself, above all people that are upon the face of the earth [...]
Thou shalt therefore keep the commandments, and the statutes, and the judgements, which I command thee this day to do them.

 Deuteronomy 7:6,11

15. The Jewish Problem

 In the place where we are right
 Flowers will never bloom
 in the spring.

 The place where we are right
 is troddled and hard
 like a courtyard

 But like a mole, like a plow
 Doubts and love make
 The world crumble
 And a whisper will be heard
 Where once the temple stood
 That was destroyed.

  Yehuda Amichai1

If Prague once had a real Jewish problem, it has been solved by now. The few remaining Jews in the city are largely busy preserving the memories of the far greater number that once were. Centuries of gravestones now crowd the old Jewish cemetery in double layers. The ancient synagogues, the oldest dating from the thirteenth century, have been restored and are now filled with Jewish visitors from France, England, the USA and Israel. The backwards-clock on the Jewish eighteenth century town hall - its hands move anti-clockwise over the gilded Hebrew characters - is now marketed as a tourist attraction in the city quarter of Josefov, once the seat of the oldest and most important Jewish congregation in Europe. The silvery remains of a vanished civilisation are on display in Prague’s fine National Jewish Museum.
For almost a thousand years, Jews lived in Prague, at times welcomed and tolerated, at times persecuted and banished. In 1357 they were honoured with their own flag by the benevolent King Karl IV. In 1389 under a less benevolent successor, most of them were killed in widespread pogrom. In 1648, the Jews of Prague distinguished themselves in the struggle against invading Swedish troops (from whom they expected fierce retribution). Shortly afterwards, as an element in the anti-Reformation campaign by the Catholic church, they were rewarded for their services with a number of fiercely discriminating and segregating laws. In periods of tolerance, Prague’s Jewish culture flourished and in times of persecution it turned inwards and sought escape. Rabbi Judah Loow ben Bezalel, the mystical creator of Golem and the author of important religious works, was active in the gilded age of King Rudolf II at the end of the sixteenth century. The nihilistic Messianic figure of Jakob Frank (see Chapter 8) reached his peak of influence in Bohemia and Moravia during the decades of disfavour in the mid-eighteenth century – in 1745, the Jews were banished from Prague by imperial edict, and in 1754, most of the Jewish quarter was burnt down.
Today, the Jewish life-cycle in Prague has ended. There is an epilogue at the cemetery in Strasnice, where the last flush of Jewish-European experience before the Holocaust has its memorial gravestones. When Prague’s ghetto was demolished at the beginning of the twentieth century to be replaced with modern housing, one of the immortal inhabitants of Strasnice, Franz Kafka, wrote: ”We walk through streets in the newly built part of the city, but our footsteps and our gazes are uncertain. Here too, we tremble, just as in those little old streets surrounded by hostility. Our hearts do not beat for this great clearance. The dirty old Jewish city within us is far more real than the aseptic city out there. Guardedly, we walk in a dream, in the spiritual remnants of a vanished time.”
Another epilogue is written in the old garrison city of Theresienstadt, thirty-six miles north of Prague, where the Jewish cultural elite of Europe allowed itself (and the world outside) to be deceived one last time as the transports rolled on to Auschwitz. The stirring remains of this cultural struggle for survival are exhibited in what was once a home for boys in the Theresienstadt ghetto. Similarly, the building outside the old Jewish cemetery in Prague, previously the home of the Jewish funeral society, hevra kadischa, now houses a permanent exhibition of children’s drawings from Theresienstadt. And in the restored Pinkas Synagogue (of 1535), the walls in one of the rooms are covered with the carefully hand-painted names of tens of thousands of exterminated Jews, including their dates of birth and death.

King Karl IV’s flag for the Jews of Prague, a three-pointed yellow Jewish cap framed by a Star of David, can still be seen in Altneuschul. The ticket to this small synagogue, buried below the sediments of time in the alley between Parizka and Maiselova, is also valid for the Pinka Synagogue, the great synagogue in the City Hall, the Maisel Synagogue (1590), the old cemetery and the Jewish museum. The whole tour takes half a day.
I write about Prague, but I could as well have written about Vilnius, Warsaw or Lodz. To the extent that the Jewish problem presumes real life Jews with a real life Jewish culture, it has also been solved in those places. In the Jewish cemetery in Lodz, lavish stone sarcophagi and marble palaces parade in a growing forest of gravestones and plaques in memory of those murdered in or deported from the Nazi ghetto. In the Jewish congregation of Lodz, located in a derelict house in the centre of town with an entrance from the back yard, elderly Jews are given soup and bread. I try to ask for vanished addresses and names, but the eyes remain vacant. Remarkably vacant too is the gaze of the otherwise obliging director in a worn suit and black skull-cap as I spread out a map of the city on his table and ask him to show me the address where my father’s family lived. He appears to be about seventy and politely asks about my background, my parents and their fate. The street name has been changed, but the building is still there, he says after a while, as his finger vaguely circles over the map.
”You surely realise that we would welcome a small contribution, a tzdaka,” he adds quickly, making a meaningful gesture towards the soup kitchen.
I put a German hundred-mark note down on the table.
”How much is that?” he says without looking at it, and I reply. He gives me a friendly smile and wishes me welcome back.
A week later, from the director of the Jewish cemetery in Crakow, where tombstones are stacked in triple layers, I learn that the director of the Jewish congregation of Lodz is blind.

But I choose to write about Prague, because it was here that a group of European Jews gathered together fifty years after the Holocaust to plan their future, suddenly realising that perhaps there was a Jewish future to plan after all. For fifty years, to be a Jew it had sufficed to exist. I survive, so I am a Jew. There is a Jewish State, so I know what a Jew is. In those decades Jewishness was an identity defined from the outside. Jewish existence in Europe after Hitler was a life of protest; to define yourself as a Jew was to honour those who were murdered, not to do so was to give in to Hitler.
After the Holocaust and the formation of the state of Israel, the Jewish problem appeared to be solved, admittedly at a terrible price, but solved nevertheless. The Jews had been given a national home and in time would become a people like any other. Thus they were, it was thought, on their way to constructing for themselves a national identity which would provide a modern meaning to being a Jew.
The conference in Prague in the summer of 1995, ”Planning for the Future of European Jewry”, in the drab high-rise Forum Hotel, far away from the teeming streets and alleys of Josefov, was a somewhat late but brave admission that this post-war foundation for Jewish existence had collapsed completely and irretrievably, like the Berlin Wall, and that, had perhaps not been much to build on in the first place. The apparently good-natured title of the conference, with its hint of congregation budgets and membership figures, quickly opened the Pandora’s box of Jewish survival, the unanswered questions and unsolved problems. What is a Jew? What is Judaism? What is the point of the Jewish exile when the Jews have a state, and exile is voluntary? Is there a Jewish identity beyond the Holocaust and Israel? Why should Jews remain Jews?
The eclectic diversity of the assembled delegates already testified to the fragmented complexity of Jewish existence. There were neo-orthodox Jews from Paris and Malmo (upset because the food was not kosher), explicitly secular Jews from Belgium and Holland (who argued that it was possible to be Jewish without Judaism), liberal Jewish social workers from Stockholm, Manchester, Antwerp and Milan whose rapidly ageing congregations was their greatest problem, activist Jews from Poland, Lithuania, the Ukraine, Belorussia and Slovakia, with their newly awakened Jewish identities dug out from under layers of communism, denial and oblivion. There were Jewish demographers, political scientists, historians, philosophers and rabbis from Israel, the USA, France, England, the Czech Republic and Denmark. There were English lords and French legions d’honneurs, American donors and Israeli diplomats.
As a consequence, the discussion was confusing. Everyone seemed to agree that mixed marriages and assimilation constituted a severe threat to Jewish survival, but there was profound disagreement about what was thus threatened. A leading French Jew said that Judaism had to offer a mixed smorgasbord of lifestyles ”based on the products of Jewish history, culture and religion”. Everyone was allowed to be a Jew in his own way. Others argued for a totally self-defined Jewishness. A Jew was anyone who wanted to be a Jew. Judaism was now competing in a market of freely choosing consumers, and consequently had to assume a more market-orientated view of supply and demand. It had to lower the thresholds for entrance, reform archaic regulations governing conversion and inheritance, compete by offering improved care of the old, a richer cultural fellowship and more effective spiritual consolation.
A Dutch community leader stated that, of Holland’s 30,000 Jews, only a third had any contact at all with Jewish congregational life. Others were highly assimilated and their remaining Jewish identity was of a ”social or psycho-social nature”. So a future fellowship between the Jews of Europe had to be built primarily on ”mutual ties of solidarity and physical proximity”.
Solidarity with what? And why?
The Israeli political scientist David Elazar pointed out that one could not at the same time talk about the Jews’ free choice and address free Jews as members of a tribe. ”If you belong to a tribe, you have no choice.”
It was not clear whether Elazar was pleading for free choice or tribe. The choice, he said, is between those ”who want to see Jewish civilisation and life continue, and those who are basically normalisers”.
Are normality and Jewish survival incompatible entities? If so, what is the abnormality that in the future shall characterise the Jewish civilisation? And which is the normality it must shun?
Some speakers tried to approach the core of the problem. What in the collective Jewish experience could serve as a foundation for a living Jewish identity? Or rather, what would be left of Jewish identity when the memory of the Holocaust had faded and the ties to the state of Israel had been loosened? What united orthodox Jews in Bnei Brak or Jerusalem with consciously secular Jews in Amsterdam or Berlin? What was there in common between a peace-loving secularised Jew in Tel Aviv and a land-worshipping settler in Hebron or Ariel? Or a reform rabbi in Los Angeles and a Messianic Lubavitcher chassid in Brooklyn? A definition of Judaism which allowed for all this and more was running the risk of becoming completely meaningless and useless.
David Elazar emphasised that Judaism had to be based on a theological foundation, on an idea of man’s relation to God. To be a Jewish idea, it had to emerge out of the historical sources of Judaism and be linked to them. Jewish pluralism (or freedom of choice) thus had its limitations. Judaism could not be just anything, and Jews could not be just anyone. What a Jewish theology common to orthodox, conservative, reforming and agnostic Jews might look like, Professor Elazar did not enlarge on.
Professor Aviezer Ravitzky from Jerusalem made a brave attempt to clarify the current depth and breadth of the Jewish problem. In a theological sense, he maintained, the Jews had actually returned back to the time of emancipation, the time when the ghettos were dissolved, the time of the historical break between a world revealed by the Torah and a world unmasked by modern enlightenment. For nearly two thousand years, God had spoken to the Jews through the sacred scripts. The Talmud was literally the tie between the Jews and their God. With Voltaire, Rousseau and Kant, Judaism had been driven from this pre-modern paradise. Where once there had been an omniscient and creative God there was now omniscient and creative Man. The Judaism that had developed and periodically flourished on the basis of the conviction that every word of the Torah was given by God was now torn apart by doubts, rationality and acute Messianic expectations.
The crisis in Jewish thinking which arose from the polarisation between the Torah and enlightenment was not solved by emancipation. Since then, says Ravitzky, it has not been solved by anything else either. Not by Zionism. Nor by the Holocaust. Nor by Messianism. The sense of a common Jewish destiny has been upheld by traumatic external events, not by internal spiritual fellowship. The rapid spread of Messianic activism within Jewish orthodoxy (demonstrated by its unprecedented backing of Benjamin Netanyahu’s settler policies in the 1996 Israeli elections) is from that viewpoint a sign of decay. Even at the inner core of Judaism, Man has (if necessary at machine-gun point) pushed aside this omniscient God as the driving agent of cosmos.
Can Judaism be reconstructed, other than as a psycho-social smorgasbord? Or as a mosaic of more or less Jewish sects? Or as a purely national-ethnic affiliation? After two hundred years, the question remains more open than ever. Ravitzky implied the need for a radical re-interpretation and renewal of the treaty between the Jews and God. ”We can only hope that a new Jewish philosophy will arise from the crisis. Meanwhile we have to wait, study and think.”
I remember a chassid story which the Israeli author Yoram Kaniuk loves to tell, and which he says is quite definitely Norwegian:
”An old chassid profoundly absorbed in prayer and thought lost his way in the forest. After a week of starvation and privation, he met a weather-beaten leather-clad man of the forest making his way through the undergrowth. Radiant with joy, the chassid went over to him to ask him the way. I have good news and bad news, the forester replied. The bad news is that I am also a chassid lost in the forest. The good news is that after ten years I know of a great many ways which do not lead home.”
The ”lost” Jew can be most clearly observed in the USA, where the modern smorgasbord theory has been put in practice at a rapid pace. American Jews nowadays assemble the most unlikely combinations of alleged Jewish ideas and traditions, often totally disconnected from their historical and religious contexts. To the extent that any form of religious practice is included in the package, freedom of interpretation is total. Between ”Jews for Jesus” in San Francisco and the Chabad in Crown Heights there is a Jewish dish for every taste and caprice. If not content with the first, choose a second, or cook yourself a third. Or choose a non-Jewish identity. Most American Jews today live outside any kind of Jewish congregation, and the number of mixed marriages has increased from nine to fifty per cent over thirty years.
This process can be illustrated in the story of the two American Jews meeting on a New York street, both immigrants from Eastern Europe and both thoroughly assimilated.
”Well now,” the one says. ”What’s left of Jewishness in you?”
”I still drink tea from a glass,” the other replies. ”And you?”
”I’m still afraid of dogs.”
What has so far kept American Jews together is the State of Israel and the Holocaust. In a society where tolerance and freedom of choice have become the greatest threat to Jewish life, the memory of Auschwitz and loyalty to Israel have worked as counterbalancing and restraining factors.2 The idea of Jewish identity as a kind of commitment has thereby been sustained. Jewish-born young people have been imbued with a sense of belonging to a potentially vulnerable sphere in American society, defined by the notions of anti-semitism, Zionism, assimilation and survival.3 They have been brought up to beware of the temptations of the smorgasbord in the form of mixed marriages and freedom of religious belief. They have learnt to define Jewish solidarity in terms of ”betrayal” and ”loyalty”.
The fragility of this kind of Jewish identity has in time become obvious. Its prerequisites were and are that American Jews define themselves in contradiction to modern America, that the Jews in some respects place themselves outside the American idea of individual freedom. The fact however is that the Jews in the USA are modern, they are actually modernity’s leading, most successful and most enthusiastic advocates. ”American Jews, highly skewed towards membership in the educated urban middle class, are particularly well placed to experience just those aspects of modernity that characteristically draw people out of traditional communities: freedom of choice, individual freedom, psychic and social mobility, separation of private and public worlds.”4

In his highly readable history of Judaism, Bernard J. Bamberger makes the observation that in the eighteenth century, Moses Mendelsson was the first Jew to give a definition of Judaism.5 That, of course, depends on what you mean by definition. In one sense the post-biblical tradition of interpretation constituted an continuous definition of Judaism. Medieval thinkers such as Maimonides and Judah Halevi undeniably wrote works which both defined and influenced the essence of Judaism.
In one respect, however, Bamberger is right. Moses Mendelsson was probably the first Jew to define Judaism in non-Jewish terms. (Baruch Spinoza had actually done so a hundred years earlier, but in that way forfeited his position as a Jew and was banished from the congregation.) With Mendelsson, it was for the first time possible - and thus necessary - for a Jew to observe Judaism from an outside perspective. What had recently been inherited dogmas, sometimes so naturally interwoven into life that they were difficult to see, let alone to examine critically, now appeared as more or less arbitrary mental constructions. Before Moses Mendelsson, Jews had defined Judaism within the framework of a given Jewish universe. With Moses Mendelsson, for the first time the Jews stepped out of that universe and tried to understand what it was that they had departed from.
In this process, different Jews rapidly understood different things. Within the course of a few decades, the self-generating world view of Judaism collapsed into a throng of competing and contradictory external definitions. Out of the collision between Judaism and modernity, no new and modern Judaism was born, only a Judaism in permanent crisis and self-doubt. The questions Moses Mendelsson asked and tried in vain to answer had to be rephrased over and over again, only to reveal new and more difficult questions behind every new answer. That overshadowing answer which ultimately led to the establishment of a Jewish state in Palestine was in this respect no better than any other.
The formation of the State of Israel naturally put the Jewish problem into a new historical light. For the first time since the destruction of the temple, to the extent that they regarded Israel as the State of the Jewish people, the Jews of the world could fulfil the most central and most concrete of the dogmas of Judaism; that there should be deliverance from exile and return to Zion. The ritual Passover toast ”next year in Jerusalem” could now be transformed into immediate action. The hitherto formative contradiction of Jewish existence – between exile and redemption – was suddenly revoked and centuries of prayers and invocations fulfilled. The revolutionary significance for future Jewish life seemed obvious and the Jewish choice apparently inescapable: leave exile or leave Judaism.
And yet there was a tremendous commotion when Arthur Koestler in 1950 worded the choice in just that way.6 A few years later, in an essay entitled Judah at the Crossroads, he maintained his standpoint. Judaism’s most distinguishing feature, he wrote, was its connection with a historic nation and a historic territory. Judaism was fundamentally a tribal ethnic religion, not a universal faith. If the ethnic element was taken out of Judaism – the covenant, the people, the exile and the land – there was no Judaism left. Or rather, what was left was not unique to Judaism. For a Jew, it was not enough to profess certain doctrines or ethical principles. He also had to adhere to the historic people with whom God had entered into a covenant. Judaism was by nature self-segregating. It inevitably created its own cultural and ethnic ghettos. Judaism’s distinction between Jews and non-Jews, goyim, was archaic and unbridgeable. ”The Jew’s religion sets him apart and invites him to be set apart.” Jews who tried to assert that Judaism was like any other religion, a private faith of the same nature as Christianity or Islam, connected to neither politics or race, were either ”hypocritical or self-contradictory”.7 The Jews who distanced themselves from the particularistic element in Judaism, who wanted to convert Judaism into a collection of ethical principles, were in practice not Jews and might just as well admit it.
The foundation of the State of Israel in 1948 had, according to Koestler, created that moment of truth in which such an admission was both possible and necessary. Those who still wished to define themselves as Jews now could and should take the particularistic consequences of this and move to Israel. Those who did not ought, for the sake of honesty and out of consideration for their children, to give up their Jewish heritage, stop believing in a separate Jewish destiny, cease promoting ethnic separateness and cultural isolation, and merge with their surroundings:
“Before the resurrection of Israel, to renounce Jewry meant to deny solidarity with the persecuted and might have been regarded as a cowardly capitulation. The Jews could not vanish from the scene of history in an anti-climax. But with the rebirth of the Jewish State, a climax is reached, the circle closed. It is no longer a question of capitulation but of free choice.”8
To Arthur Koestler, Israel was a final solution to the Jewish problem, roughly of the kind Herzl or Jabotinsky had envisaged: a geographic end-station, a national self-fulfilment, an exit ”from the stage of history”. It was a solution that was to put an end to exile, free the world from the Jews and reassemble the Jewish people in their normal place and in their natural social guise. It was a solution which assumed that there would not be any Jews other than those of Israel: ”The mission of the Wandering Jew is completed; he must discard the knapsack and cease to be an accomplice in his own destruction. The fumes from the gas chambers still linger over Europe: there must be an end to every calvary.”9
Koestler himself did not think much of Judaism. In fact he strongly disliked it. In full agreement, he quoted Arnold Toynbee’s characterisation of Judaism as merely ”the fossilised remnant of a once independent culture”. He maintained that the archaic tribal element in Judaism, its self-selected outsiderism, continually promoted anti-semitism on the same archaic level. ”No amount of enlightenment and tolerance, of indignant protests and pious exhortations, can break this vicious circle.”
He respected the ever smaller number of Jews who adhered to the Torah-bound faith and commands, just as one respects an Indian tribe in the Amazon. He despised the ever increasing number of Jews who ”hold no religious convictions, were indifferent to Zionism, regarded themselves as a hundred per cent Americans or Englishmen, yet clung together, tied by shared habits and tastes. by an inert tradition voided of all spiritual content”. The former, now that the opportunity was there, should have the sense to set off for the goal of their prayers. The latter should have the sense to cease exposing their children to the destructive and now unnecessary strain of Jewish outsiderism. With the creation of the State of Israel, there was a choice, and the choice had to be made now. To Koestler personally, the choice was obvious. In a subsequent interview, he was asked whether he still considered himself a Jew. His answer conveyed both the logical strength and the inner weakness of his view of the Jewish problem:
“In so far far as religion is concerned, I consider the Ten Commandments and the Sermon on the Mount are as inseparable as the root and the flower. In so far as race is concerned, I have no idea and take no interest in the question of how many Hebrews, Babylonians, Roman legionaries, Christian crusaders and Hungarian nomads are among my ancestors. I consider it a chance occurence that my father happened to be of the Jewish faith, but I felt that it committed me morally to identify myself with the Zionist movement as long as there was no haven for the persecuted and the homeless. The moment that Israel became a reality, I felt released from this commitment, and free to choose between becoming an Israelite in Israel or a European in Europe. My whole development and cultural allegiance made Europe my natural choice. Hence to give a precise answer to your question: first and foremost I regard myself as a member of the European community, secondly as a naturalised British citizen of uncertain and mixed racial origins, who accepts the ethical values and rejects the religious dogmas of our Helleno-Judæo-Christian tradition. Into what pigeon-hole others wish to put me is their affair.“ 10

The problem with Koestler’s argument was his polemical roughly-hewn image of Judaism. Where others had been quite able to discern a transcendent view of Man and God, Koestler could only perceive tribal customs and ethnic self-righteousness. The fundamental tension in Judaism between particularism and universalism he ignored or underestimated. He seemed unaware of the cosmic and spiritual dimensions of Zion and the Return, and thus of the symbolic-religious meaning of Exile. He did not take note of, and would never have understood, the fierce orthodox resistance to the State of Israel, i.e. the conflict between Israel as a political project and Israel as a divine utopia. He apparently did not wish to recognise that there was more than a coincidental link between the Ten Commandments and the Sermon on the Mount, just as there was more than ethnic chance that linked the ethics of Baruch Spinoza to the communist manifesto of Moses Hess. In Koestler’s eyes, all that was good and universal in Judaism had been adopted by the world outside, while what remained could be reduced to an ethnic-religious emigration programme which, once carried through by those who believed in it and abandoned by those who did not, would solve the Jewish problem within the course of a few generations. The Jews in the world would become citizens like everyone else, the State of Israel a nation among many, and Judaism a geographically bound religion.
As if, in a modern and eventually post-modern society, only the Jewish identity was a problematic one? As if the State of Israel were an uncomplicated and uncontradictory fulfilment of Judaism’s particularistic dream? As if Judaism were actually nothing but an ethnic emigration project? With the perspective of fifty years, the cracks in Arthur Koestler’s view of Judaism have become clearly visible.
Hard to explain also was the revolutionary fervour with which Koestler addressed those who insisted in not accepting his choice of destiny, the enlightened people in Europe and the USA who continued to unite as Jews despite the fact that they neither had to nor any longer needed to. They were the remaining sand in the machinery, the annoying spanners in the works of a historical process that was finally about to eliminate the conflict between the Jews and the world outside. Complex human considerations, interactions and reactions were reduced to a question of clear-sightedness and logic.
The elitist feature in Koestler’s solution to the Jewish problem was noticed by the philosopher Isaiah Berlin in a subsequent newspaper polemic: ”To protest about a section of the population merely because it is felt to be an uncosy element in society, to order it to alter its outlook or get out [...] is a kind of [...] petty tyranny and derives ultimately from the conviction that people have no right to behave foolishly or inconsequently or vulgarly, and that society has the right to try and rid itself by humane means, but rid itself nevertheless, of such persons, although they are neither criminals nor lunatics nor in any sense a danger to the lives or liberties of their fellows.”11
In a response, Koestler insisted that the choice he had given the Jews was logically inviolable, that it was his task as a writer to have people behave wisely instead of foolishly, and that if the Jews did not behave wisely, they had no right to expect wisdom from their non-Jewish surroundings (with implied devastating consequences). It never occurred to Arthur Koestler that the very premises of his Jewish choice might have been flawed and insufficiently elaborated.
The strength of Koestler’s attack lay in his critical exposure of that hollow Jewish identity which had abandoned its spiritual roots, had been deprived of its cultural and social environment, and which was now living off fragments of traditions, fading memories of persecution and surviving ethnic reflexes. That was an identity which in the post-war period acquired its diffuse contours in an atmosphere of collective grief and impotence, national rebirth and self-assertion and ethnic persecution mania. It was a Jewish fellowship which had had its genetic limits brutally staked out by Hitler and whose genetic-national component now was reinforced by Zionism and the State of Israel. Jewish identity became more a question of heritage than of environment.
In this post-war identity there was a continued element of moral selection: the murdered victims in Auschwitz and Treblinka, the survivors in Europe and the USA, the soldiers and pioneers in Israel were all incorporated into a great new story of Jewish meaning and mission. To remain a Jew was to shoulder a historic and civilising responsiblity to carry the biblical torch. But where once living religious roots had formed and nourished the moral mission, it was now nourished by more or less minor biological notions of the peculiarity of ”the Jewish people”. Baruch Spinoza, Heinrich Heine, Felix Mendelsohn, Karl Marx, Gustav Mahler, Marcel Proust, Franz Kafka, Albert Einstein, Danny Kaye and David Ben-Gurion were all incorporated into the historic proof-chain of Jewish chosenness. With no Jewish people, the world would produce fewer talents. With the loss of the Jewish people, the world would lose something essential.
These were naturally exorbitant, intellectually untenable arguments against anything as commendable as marriages across ethnic and religious borders, and in favour of something as trivial as ethnic-national separateness. They could be explained as a reasonable, defensive reaction to nazism’s biological war of extermination, but could scarcely defended as the basis of a meaningful and positive Jewish existence. When solicitude for genetic and national survival had been detached from or had become only formally attached to the moral and religious system of Judaism, there remained, as Koestler so rightly observed, nothing but the ties of tribe and blood. With what authority could Jews who did not profess Judaism or who professed something they hardly knew, still maintain a distinct moral Jewish destiny? Was morality a matter of genes?
The idea of the inherited moral and intellectual peculiarity of the Jews was reminiscent of Ahad Ha’am’s theory that through the centuries the Jews had developed a stronger sense of morality than other people (see Chapter 6). But while Ahad Ha’am sought the origins of a moral sense in the centuries-long striving of rabbinical Judaism for moral perfection and made its survival conditioned on a thorough spiritual renaissance of Judaism, it was now presumed that the Jewish genius could reproduce itself through an affinity that was mainly biological and ethnic-national in character.
The explosion of Jewish talent and creativity that characterised Europe after the Jewish emancipation in the late eighteenth century had in fact far more prosaic and mainly tragic causes. In a society where conditions for social survival often turned out to be harder than those of the ghetto, and where Jews were regularly forced to compensate for discrimination with excellence, innumerable Jewish children were pressured into achieving to the extremes of their abilities. The Russo-Jewish writer Isaac Babel tells in ”The Story of my Dovecote” how in 1904 when he was nine, he applied to the middle school in Nikolajev, a small town in the Odessa area. Out of forty students to be admitted, two at most were allowed to be Jews, and olympic expectations had been erected around little Isaac. From the age of six he had been made to read every textbook his father could find, the family went to the expense of doubling his preparation classes, for safety’s sake he learnt three books by heart, and if he passed the test, his father had promised him what he most of all desired, a dovecote. ”He absolutely tortured me to death. I fell into a state of permanent daydream, into an endless, despairing, childish reverie. I went into the exam deep in this dream, and nevertheless did better than everybody else.”
In another childhood story, Babel writes about Mr Zagursky’s factory for the production of musical child prodigies, ”a factory for Jewish dwarfs in lace collars and patent leather boots”. From the raw material of a hundred or two hundred dwarfs with violins was produced a Jascha Heifetz or a Mischa Elman. ”Infant prodigies brought wealth to their parents, but though my father could have reconciled himself to poverty, fame he must have.”12 Isaac Babel put Turgenev and Dumas on Mr Zagursky’s music stand and thus became a genius of another kind, but the social principle of the Jewish miracle of talent he had made depressingly clear. The excelling proofs of the existence of a specific Jewish contribution to mankind were in fact the forced result of highly specific and mainly unhappy social circumstances.
What Arthur Koestler had feared and criticised was the emergence of a Jewish ethnicity without ethos, a shell without a core, a moral mission without a God, an external destiny without an inner meaning. In polemic response to Koestler, the editors of the Jewish Chronicle maintained that Jews ”in whatever country we may dwell” were called upon to promote ”the Jewish ideals of righteousness and brotherhood among the nations”, and that it was not ”easy to share Mr Koestler’s satisfaction that modern civilisation stands in no need of this Jewish contribution”. Koestler replied that he saw nothing specifically Jewish in these ideals, nor the sense of an idea which implied ”that Messrs Ben-Gurion and Mendes-France [the French prime minister], Comrade Kaganovitch [Stalin’s Minister of Industry] and Henry Morgenthau [Roosevelt’s Treasury Secretary], Albert Einstein and Louis B. Mayer of Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer, [were] all commonly engaged in carrying out a specifically Jewish mission”. It is precisely this kind of ”turgid bombast” he wrote, ”which gives rise to the legend of the Elders of Zion and keeps suspicions of a Jewish world conspiracy alive”.13
The idea of an continuous Jewish mission in the world was also to be central in the emerging Christian fundamentalism in the USA, with its beliefs in the Apocalyptic battle at Armageddon and the coming Day of Judgement, and there it would give rise to exactly those conspiracy theories about which Koestler had warned. Behind the American evangelist and presidential candidate Pat Robertson’s smarmy solicitudes for Israel and the Jewish people lurked the most preposterous ideas about Jewish power and cohesion (as stated in his 1995 book The New Millenium).
Koestler wished to dispose of the Jewish mission by pronouncing it fulfilled through the establishment of the State of Israel. That assumed that Judaism could actually be reduced to a national tribal religion, and the Jewish choice of way to a choice of geographical domicile. Neither assumption held good. Koestler was wrong about Israel, but he was right about the mission. If the Jews did not get rid of the mission, the mission would sooner or later get rid of the Jews.
Could there be a Judaism which did not wish to save the world? Could there be pious Jews who saw themselves not as means but as goals? Could there be a Jewish-dominated Israel which did not regard itself as a tool of history?
Had Arthur Koestler asked those questions, he would not have had such a prompt and all-solving answer at hand.

The further dissolution of Jewish identity in the decades to follow has only accentuated Koestler’s approach to the problem. In the field of tension between annihilation and Zionism, secularisation and ethnic self-awareness, cultural pluralism and the post-modern crisis of identity, the inner ”ethical” ties of Jews have loosened ever more while the external ethnic affinity has become ever more important and ever more elusive. A comprehensive investigation into the social and political attitudes of British Jews in the 1990s showed that ”levels of religious observance are far more related to ethnic identity than to strength of belief. For most Jews therefore, religious observance is a means of identifying with the Jewish community rather than an expression of religious faith.”14
The British survey also confirmed the dramatic changes in Jewish life previously demonstrated in corresponding American surveys: an accelerating Jewish assimilation via mixed marriages (44% in Great Britain, 52% in the USA), a Jewish identity less founded on religious identification and increasingly based on vague ethnic reflexes, as well as an increasing gap in attitudes and values between the diminishing group of Jews defining themselves as more Jewish than British, and the vastly dominant group of Jews defining themselves the other way around. A growing number of Jews were found to be Jewish for sentimental reasons, or by chance or from habit, not from active choice. The majority worried more about the increase in general racist attitudes in British society than about any increase in specifically anti-Jewish attitudes.
The respected American-Jewish historian Arthur Hertzberg has even dared to raise the idea, wholly revolutionary in contemporary Jewish self-perception, that modern anti-semitism has actually peaked. Just like Antiquity’s view of the Jews as arrogant iconoclasts, and Christianity’s dogma about the Jews being the murderers of God, the present-day myth about the Jews as a race of world conspirators will too, eventually, be undermined by social and political development. Anti-semitism will indeed continue for a while, if necessary without Jews, as in Poland and Slovakia, and it has to be constantly fought against, but in all likelihood it will lose more and more of its social force, and it can only regain strength if and ”when it is re-defined”.
What is the next phase? According to Hertzberg, a diffuse and general hatred not specifically directed against Jews, but against all strangers, ”especially if the stranger belongs to another nationality: Turks in Germany, Arabs in France, Muslims in the former Jugoslavia, or Hungarians in Slovakia”.15 The Jews in Europe are no longer the most obvious and obliging target for popular discontent and frustration. Jews are rapidly becoming an established and indistinguishable segment of secularised and multi-cultural societies. In his study of post-war European Jewry, the historian Bernard Wasserstein concludes that the only remainders of Jewish life in Europe will be a few ultra-orthodox enclaves in the larger cities (Paris, Antwerp, London) and a growing group of people with increasingly vague, increasingly arbitrary and increasingly folklorist relations to their Jewish origins.16
Perhaps Hertzberg is wrong about anti-semitism, and Wasserstein about the retreat of European Jewry. Perhaps there is enough social energy around for yet another anti-Jewish outburst, sometime, somewhere. But what kind of Jewishness can possibly sprout from the role of potential victim of a coming disaster?
A more activist and constructive idea for a new Jewish identity in Europe has been suggested by the French-Jewish historian Diana Pinto who argues that European Jews can and should become the transnational avant garde of an emerging European culture. The historically complex identity of the Jews, their unfathomable mixture of religion, nation, culture and ethnicity, their tradition of ”multiple loyalties”, are elements of exactly the kind of identity a democratic and pluralistic Europe must foster in its citizens: ”In a pluralist democracy with a strong civil society, individuals are not just abstract citizens plus religion; they are infinitely complex beings with multiple identities.”17
However, it turns out that Pinto has a far easier task in telling us what Jews are not (ethnic group, religious minority, nationalists, Zionists, Israelis in exile), than in telling us what unites them. If what is specifically Jewish can be reduced to a talent for flexible identities and multiple loyalties, then what we should rather expect instead is perhaps an accelerated dissolution of Jewish bonds and ties, and the increasingly unruly influence of non-Jewish identities. Pinto seems unwilling to grade or evaluate different Jewish identities, but she nevertheless attributes to the ultra-orthodox Jews (whose undemocratic disposition and general intolerance she disapproves of) the important task of anchoring Judaism ”in a living Talmudic faith. Without them, Judaism as a whole would be immeasurably impoverished.” Why should it?
What Pinto actually hopes to formulate is a new Jewish destiny (after the Holocaust and the State of Israel). She energetically attempts to tie it to a secular European venture, but inevitably comes up against the Koestler dilemma: if living Talmudic faith is central to Judaism, should Jews not all be characterised by that? And if increasing numbers of the world’s Jews do not allow themselves to be so characterised, but on the contrary react with fury to the political and social utterances of ”living Talmudic faith”, to what extent are they then Jews? Jews demanding to live a ”totally Jewish life” are by Pinto referred to Israel. But if Israel offers everyone who wants to be a Jew the whole cake, why are so many preferring crumbs?
Naturally there may be a thousand respectable reasons for wishing to define oneself as a Jew of a more ambivalent and compound variety, but it is reasonable that there should be some connection between being associated with a specific Jewish destiny and the content of Jewish identity. At some degree of Jewish dilution, talk of a comprehensive Jewish fellowship and mission becomes either racist or meaningless. If ”Jew” can mean anything, logic demands that Jews cannot be expected to think and act in any particular way. A common Jewish destiny demands a common Jewish view of the world. The historic condition of this world view and its lasting source of strength has been a faith in the covenant of Sinai, a belief that the Torah is the word of God and trust in the universal signifcance of the suffering and the redemption of the Jewish people. To what extent can and should the notion of a specific Jewish destiny be upheld, when the Jewish view of the world has cracked?

With the decline of rabbinic authority two hundred years ago, an archaic and potentially self-destructive contradiction within Judaism was brought to light: the conflict between particularism and universalism, between ethnic chosenness and ethical mission. In the living post-biblical Jewish tradition of interpretation, this inbuilt tension was in equilibrium and could at times have an energising function: the particular Jewish existence (and self-imposed demands) was the divine condition for universal redemption. When the walls of the ghetto were pulled down and the particular order came into conflict with the universalist vision of emancipation, Moses Mendelssohn tried to reconstruct the equilibrium of the conflict in a reformed and ”universalised” Jewish identity – but without success. On one day it was demanded that the Jews gave up their particularity and on the next they were nailed firmly to it against their will. One day they were citizens like everyone else, the next they were bearers of a particular destiny and mission. This conflict provided material for the racist and conspiracy myths of modern anti-semitism, and it was to this conflict that Zionism (and, in its spirit, Arthur Koestler) promised a final solution. The return to the Land of Israel would free Jewish existence from its long-lasting ambiguity. The reborn Jewish nation was now to be the particular expression for the universal mission of the Jewish people. A nation like all the others - and yet not. The continued existence of an independent Jewish diaspora and the growing contradiction between Israel’s particular politics and the universal impulses of Judaism - essentially between two totally contradictory and incompatible views of the role and character of Judaism and the Jewish state - shows however that the conflict remains and is continually deepening.
In an essay titled The Future of the Jews, David Vital, one of Zionism’s most influential historians, draws the harsh and bitter conclusion that in all likelihood they have none, anyhow not as ”a discrete people [with] its various branches bound to each other by common ties of culture, responsibility and loyalty”. The destructive factor, he maintains, is ironically enough the emergence of modern Jewish nationalism and the establishment of a Jewish state. The ever increasing dominance of one particular Jewish community, distinct in ”its character and ethos”, separating itself from all others, with its own interests, its own culture, and even its own army, ”has gone far already”, says Vital, ”to deprive the Jewish people of one of its central myths – the myth of unity”. Against the ”clearly defined body of a sovereign state” the attempt by the various Judaisms of the diaspora to reconstruct a common Jewish destiny is doomed to failure:
“Where there was once one single if certainly scattered and far from monolithic people - indeed, a nation - there is now a sort of archipelago of discrete islands composed of rather shaky communities of all qualities, shapes and sizes, in which the island of Israel as it were, is fated increasingly to be in a class by itself. In sum, the old unity of Jewry, however fragile, however problematic, essentially a function of the old sense and yes, the reality of a nationhood, lies shattered today, almost beyond repair.“18
The Jews of Israel, says Vital, will go their own way, the Jews outside Israel will go their thousands of ways – and get lost. Within a few decades, Israel will be housing a majority of the world’s Jews. If there is a Jewish destiny after the establishment of Israel, then it is in Israel and nowhere else.
Has the Jewish destiny thus been nationalised? And is the Jewish problem thereby solved? Koestler surely believed and hoped it would be, since he had located the problem in the diaspora. What he could not foresee was the emerging contradiction between Nation and Diaspora, between the particular Jewish people as particular destiny and the universal mission of Judaism, assuming a wholly new and increasingly fatal expression within the Jewish state itself. What had previously been bitter but none the less purely theoretical and theological disputes about the purpose and meaning of being a Jew now turned into an irreconcilable battle over the role and character of the Jewish state. For a long time, this internal Jewish tension has been held in check by overwhelming external events, but during the 1980s and 1990s, forces have been unleashed which threaten to splinter both the Jewish diaspora and the Jewish state. Israel’s Jews do not, as Vital implies, go their own way. They go two ways – incompatible and colliding. The State of Israel did not solve the conflict in Jewish life – but released it at full power.
In the centre of the conflict now stands the state itself, and the controversial question is: has the Jewish state a universal mission, or is it a state like all others? Koestler (and for that matter Herzl) had hoped that the Jewish state would be a state like all others, and the Jews a people like the Germans or the Serbs or the Norwegians. Moses Hess, Ahad Ha’am, A. D. Gordon, Abraham Kook, David Ben-Gurion, Vladimir Jabotinsky and other important framers of the Zionist self-image had a more Messianic vision of the Jewish society in Palestine. From widely diverse and at times incompatible starting points, they were all convinced that the Jewish state must express a universal Jewish destiny, that it must serve a higher mission than the mission of its citizens, and therefore that it must not be a state like all others.
The State of Israel was formed largely by the Messianic self-image, which during the decades of state-building was persistently nourished by momentous external events: the miracle of survival, the drama of colonisation, the blooming of the desert and the birth of the free Jewish human being. That was a time when very few doubted that the gain for Israel was a gain for every Jew, and when it was difficult to imagine a conflict of interest between Israel as a particular solution to the Jewish problem and Israel as an expression of the universal mission of Judaism.
With apparently relentless logic, the Messianic self-image has since then acquired increasingly strong particular features. Alleged universal ambitions have been confined to selected quarters of Jerusalem and Hebron and have there taken on ethnically racist, religiously intolerant and nationalistically aggressive forms of expression. The mission of the Jewish people was transformed into military occupation and ethnic cleansing. The Jewish state has been placed in the same archaic conflict with the non-Jewish world as the Jewish people of the Bible once were.
”What kind of civilisation [the Israeli Jew] will produce one cannot foretell,” Arthur Koestler wrote in Promise and Fulfilment, ”but one thing seems fairly certain: within a generation or two, Israel will become an entirely ‘un-Jewish’ country.” This was what Koestler hoped for, and this was the prerequisite for his solution of the Jewish problem. Had he been able to imagine ”fossilised” Judaism developing into uncompromising settler Messianism, he would presumably have been more pessimistic about the possibilities of solving it.
Against the national-Messianic view of Israel stands more and more clearly the demand for a normalisation of the Jewish state and the Jewish destiny. Against the idea that Israel has to serve higher aims, the idea is growing that Israel’s highest aim is to serve her citizens. Against religious settlers and secular territorialists have gathered a variegated alliance of Israeli citizens who want to separate the state from religion, give Israel a democratic constitution, exchange territory for peace and recognise the national rights of the Palestinians.

Since September 13, 1993, this profound Jewish conflict can no longer be concealed in rhetorical proclamations about national unity and Jewish solidarity. With that handshake in Washington, not only was a new epoch inaugurated in the relationship between Israeli Jews and Palestinian Arabs, but also in the relationship between Jews and Jews. With increasing bitterness and irreconcilability, and since 1995 with political assassination as a weapon, the battle rages about the goal, meaning and future of the Jewish destiny. From this perspective, the election of a new Israeli prime minister in 1996 was not a choice between two nuances in the view of the Jewish state. It was a choice between two views of the world.
One can see this most clearly in the contents of two personal and programmatic declarations published in 1993, with only a few months in between, by Shimon Peres and Benjamin Netanyahu. It is sometimes hard to believe that these two knowledgeable, intelligent and well-argued books were written by two leading politicians of the same country. It is certainly not the same country they describe, and their authors do not seem to inhabit the same world.
In Shimon Peres’ version of The New Middle East, with a photograph of himself, Bill Clinton and Yassir Arafat at the handshaking ceremony in Washington on the jacket, a leading Israeli politician is for the first time making a demonstrative break with the Messianic view of Israel and openly professes the view that Israel is and should be a nation like any other. References to the historic and religious mission of the Jewish people are almost totally lacking, and instead prospects are held out for a new and ”un-Jewish” future for Israel as the Singapore of a new peaceful and economically integrated Middle East. The book is full of detailed plans for regional collaboration, cross-boundary infrastructural ventures, multi-national investments in canals, railways, airports, water projects, high technology and tourism. A gradual and mutual military disarmament is said to ”foster trust among co-operating nations”, while ”particularist nationalist aspirations” risk transforming the Middle East into another Balkans of violence and hatred. Peres rejects a territorial interpretation of the concept of Eretz Israel, i.e. that the Promised Land of the Jews is to be a matter of square kilometres, and he quotes approvingly ”the great Jewish thinker” Yehezkiel Kaufman: ”There is no connection between secure boundaries and the true land of Israel; nor between them and the ideal land and the ideal state to which the nation has aspired in historic times.”19 He warns against the ”fanaticism, fundamentalism and false Messianism” born in the tracks of war and hatred.20 He points to the irony in the settler’s name for the occupied areas, jesha, the Hebrew word for salvation and an acronym for Judea, Samaria and Gaza.21 He writes polemically against the idea of an Israel predestined to live in military, political and religious conflict with her neighbours. Military occupation of another people, he writes, is in direct contradiction to the democratic values enshrined in the Declaration of Independence of the State of Israel, and eventually corrupts its institutions and its people. That kind of Israel is awaiting a fate similar to that of the warring nation in Thomas More’s Utopia, quoted by Peres: ”The war corrupted their own citizens by encouraging their lust for robbery and murder; and the laws fell into contempt.”
To the veteran Shimon Peres, the world has radically changed. Old dogmas must be re-appraised, and the position of Israel re-defined. He does not say it directly, but the whole book is permeated with a longing to uncouple the Jewish state from the links to a predestined historical fate and to normalise Israel’s view of herself and her relations with the world. Concepts such as diaspora and Jewish redemption are not part of his vocabulary. He writes as the benevolent father of his people in a land like all the others, with the same dreams and aspirations as everyone else.
“One of the traditions common to Judaism and Islam is that of scholarship. I believe that by studying our historical experience we can lay the foundation for a better future for Jews and Arabs, for Israelis and Palestinians, in the land so dear to each of us. We can wash this blood-soaked land of conflict with living water, we can grow flowers on the battlefield of the past and bring smiles to Jewish and Arab children - indeed, to all our children who will inherit our land and live there in happiness and peace.”

The title of Benjamin Netanyahu’s book, A Place Among The Nations: Israel and the World, suggests a similar plea for normalisation and integration, but the chapter headings - ”The Betrayal”, ”The Trojan Horse”, ”The Wall”, ”The Demographic Demon”, ”The Question of Jewish Power” - indicate quite another story.
Consequently, this is a book which from the first page sees Israel in the context of a national and religious chain of events, the links of which are chosenness and persecution, weakness and power, destruction and resurrection. It is maintained that the return to the Land of Israel is the core of Judaism, and that it is the concrete attachment of a particular people to a particular place that distinguishes Judaism from all other religions: ”Catholics, for instance, do not pray ‘Next year in the Vatican’.” The State of Israel is the completion of the Jewish odyssey.22
To Netanyahu, the Jews’ right to the land of Israel is of a historic-religious nature, and although he skilfully garbs the historical argument in security policy terms, the Messianic perspective is never far away:
“I believe the rise of Israel can only be understood in a much broader historical perspective, a millenial one.The Jews are one of the oldest nations on earth, and they are distinguished by their capacity for remembrance. In its essence, the rise of Israel is the conscious attempt to wrest redemption from the grip of unrelenting agony - by weaving into the future the enduring threads of collective will and purpose originating in a heroic past.“23
The State of Israel is argued to be the historic turning point of Jewish destiny: leading from attempts to retrieve what had been lost, to the securing of what has been retrieved. ”It is a task that has barely begun and its outcome is of profound import, not only for the fate of the Jews, but for all mankind. [...] The fallen tent of David has indeed risen again”, the Jews ”are rebuilding their promised land”.24
The universal importance of the Jews assuming ”their rightful place among the nations”, according to Netanyahu, is that national weakness can be overcome. It has been for everyone to see how the Jews have been transformed from helpless victims to a people ”strong enough to pilot its own destiny.”
Physical strength and military power are central elements in Benjamin Netanyahu’s Jewish destiny, just as they were in his ideological prototype, Ze’ev Jabotinsky’s revisionist Zionism (see Chapter 7). In the State of Israel, the Jews have again become what they once were: a people of ”remarkable military and political figures”, prepared to defend their distinctive character and their independence against far greater and stronger empires. With the advent of Zionism and the State of Israel, the world has again, as in Antiquity, learnt to respect the Jews, ”marvelling anew at the resolve, the resourcefulness and audacity shown by the Jewish army, changing for millions their conceptionsof the Jews, or at least of some of them”.25 In the last saving clause, Netanyahu exposes his contempt for those who do not appreciate the weight of Jewish power, who believe that Israel can achieve a state of conclusive peace and harmony with her neighbours, who still suffer ”from this Jewish inability to reconcile oneself to the permanent need for Jewish power”.26
Benjamin Netanyahu’s Jewish destiny is an eternal struggle against external violence and evil - ”you cannot end the struggle for survival without ending life itself”. And as violence and evil will be imposed on the Jews for the foreseeable future by their neighbours in the Middle East, Jewish survival will, in Netanyahu’s world, demand territories, settlements, arms and a Jewish majority. The ”historical and moral right” of the Jews to the whole of the land of Israel has to be ensured and defended through ”strategic control of Judea and Samaria”.27 Netanyahu’s plan for ”lasting peace” with the Palestinian Arabs stipulates Jewish authority in the whole territory, limited local Palestinian autonomy in four of five towns on the West Bank, and eventually a Palestinian state in Jordan. He reckons on continued voluntary Arab emigration from the occupied areas (”West Bank Arabs have been emigrating voluntarily ever since 1950”) and the continued immigration of Jews to their historic homeland. A strong nation of eight million Jews, permanently threatened but militarily and economically strong (”a substantial force on the world scene”), is Benjamin Netanyahu’s vision of Israel at the beginning of the next century, and the final goal for the Exodus from Egypt.28 The State of Israel, nothing else, represents the collective destiny of Judaism.29

In Israel, it takes twenty minutes by car between the world of Shimon Peres and that of Benjamin Netanyahu, between the two warring camps of the Jewish destiny. The road from Kfar Saba in Tel Aviv’s crowded city region to the town of Ariel with its stunning view over the olive-clad hills of Samaria is wide and asphalted and on election day, 29 May, 1996, the border between the two is scarcely noticeable. In the Arab village of Bidya, where the shops in the small shacks along the road have signs in Hebrew, commuters from and to Ariel can stop and buy toys for their children (with a microscopic risk of being attacked, but a risk none the less), and the outdoor cafe in the car-free modern centre of Ariel serves a quite excellent espresso. The air buzzes with Russian, Hebrew and English, and the crowd is reminiscent of Kfar Saba or any other Israeli middle class town.
What on this particular day distinguishes Ariel from Kfar Saba is the fact that in Ariel it is impossible to find a single picture of Shimon Peres. Not one single election poster for the Labour Party. Not a single electioneer exhorting votes for the ruling government. In the town that was once initiated by the Labour Party, over ninety per cent of voters will vote for Netanyahu as prime minister. In the religious settlements around, even more. Bati and Yechiel Atar, who keep watch over their children in the crowded communal outdoor baths, let their gaze sweep out beyond the lawns and fences, over the summer-misty scenery of the Jewish homeland, where fresh excavation wounds from newly built dwellings and roads gleam yellowish white. They moved here eighteen years ago for economic reasons, but now believe they are holding the destiny of the Jewish people in their hands. ”If Jews are not allowed to live here, Jews will not be able to live in Tel Aviv either,” they say. ”This election is about the survival of the Jewish State.”
On the same day in Kfar Saba and Tel Aviv, another view of the world and thus another choice is formulated: Democracy or theocracy. Peace or occupation. Openness or isolation. Civic equality or ethnic discrimination. For me too, it is becoming clear that the choice between Peres and Netanyahu is not just a choice of government, but also a choice of state. Of a state like any other. Or a state with a higher mission. The one state hands over the Jewish destiny to the Jew as an individual. The other takes it away from the individual, and reinforces its collective character and its all-embracing national and Messianic purpose. The drama in the decision is emphasized by the increasingly vociferous alliance between the parties of secular Jewish nationalism and the rabbis of religious Messianism, and by that same dark rhetoric which only months earlier had triggered the assassination of the prime minister. Peres tries to win the election by toning down the drama, which turns out to be factually incorrect and politically disastrous. The Jewish drama of Ariel narrowly outvotes the common all-human drama of Kfar Saba.
A few days after the election, a certain Israeli professor, Arieh Zaritzky, explained why he and fifty thousand secular or moderately religious Jewish citizens voted for the national-religious settler party. With the death of secular Labour-Zionism, he wrote in a newspaper article, more and more previously socialist pioneers had begun to regard Israel as merely a ”citizens’ state” and not as a distinctively ”Jewish State”. The only antidote to this decay and the only way to keep alive the Zionist dream of a Jewish State was to bind nation and religion together, to strengthen the influence of religion on politics, education and culture. Even secular Jews had to be inoculated with the symbols and values of the national religion. ”The dividing line between Jews and Jews”, wrote Professor Zaritzky, ”does not run between religious and secular Jews, but between Zionists and post-Zionists.”30
I believe Professor Zaritzky is right in principle, but that the dividing line of the Jewish world can be better characterised as an existential choice. Is Jewish life to be an end in itself or a means to something else? Are Jews to regard themselves as collective bearers of a historic responsibility, or as individual bearers of a moral idea? Is Judaism a particular mission or a universal concept of good and evil?
The traditional and hitherto prevailing existential interpretation is unambiguous. To be a Jew is to enter into and hold in trust a covenant with God, and with that take upon oneself a mission that distinguishes Jews from non-Jews, and the Jewish people from other peoples. This Jewish self-image has, even in its benign, sometimes magnificent, often tragic expression, been the source of problems – not in the least to the Jews themselves. Arthur Koestler wished to confine the problem to Israel, and thereby disarm it. That was a mistake – at least as far as the disarming is concerned.
Can the mistake be undone? Can the Israeli-Jewish cycle of ethnic separateness, national self-sufficiency and Messianic energy be broken?
The answer, I think, must in the end be sought in Judaism itself.

In the beginning was the Exodus from Egypt and the covenant with God at Sinai. During the trials and wonders of the desert wandering, the ”Jewish people” was moulded, and by the commandments, laws and rites given by God through Moses the Jewish faith and destiny were shaped. The story of the Exodus, argues the American-Jewish rabbi Michael Goldberg, is the ”master story” of the Jewish people. The five books of Moses, the Torah, convey both the ethnic story of the Jewish people and its ethical credo: ”See I have set before thee this day life and good, and death and evil”31 Not only is the God revealed at Sinai the God of the Jews but the Jews are the people who are to reveal him, they are to be ”a kingdom of priests and an holy nation”.32 The destiny of the Jews is to be unlike all others, in order for all others to see and learn. ”If thou shalt hearken diligently unto the voice of the Lord thy God, and to do all his commandments which I command thee this day, that the Lord thy God will set thee on high above all nations of the earth.”33
Consequently, in the master story of Judaism, moral selection and ethnic isolation go hand in hand. In one instance rules and rulings are promulgated which are permeated with a radical pathos of justice and a universalistic view of mankind: ”for the Lord your God is the God of gods and the Lord of lords [...] which regardeth not persons nor taketh reward. He doth execute the judgement of the fatherless and the widow and loveth the stranger, in giving him food and raiment. Love therefore the stranger: For ye were strangers in the land of Egypt.”34
Immediately following this an ethnic seclusion is imposed that appears to disregard all human considerations. ”An Ammonite or Moabite shall not enter into the congregation of the Lord .”35 The slightest mixing with rival peoples of the region is deemed a threat to the covenant. ”Neither shalt thou make marriages with them. Thy daughter thou shalt not give unto his son, nor his daughter shalt thou take unto thy son. For they will turn away your son from following me, that they may serve other gods: so will the anger of the Lord be kindled against you and destroy thee suddenly.”36
From this fateful link between the ethnic and the universal, there is no way out in the master story of Judaism. The particular separateness is and remains a condition of the covenant with God. It is indeed true that the Jewish tradition of interpretation admits conversion, and that both the Bible and history provide examples of individuals and people from outside who have become affiliated with Judaism (the Moabite woman Ruth, the Kazars), but by doing so they have also become affiliated with the particular history and destiny of the Jewish people. (Ruth 1:16: ”thy people shall be my people, and thy God my God.”) The covenant’s distinction between Jews and non-Jews, between ”God’s peculiar people” and others, cannot be dissolved without a radical re-interpretation of the master story of Judaism.The post-biblical competition and struggle between Judaism and Christianity made for a certain hardening of Jewish positions vis-à-vis the non-Jewish world, as they were interpreted in the evolving rabbinical tradition.
The more dominating and encroaching their surroundings became, the stronger were the barriers of defence erected round the Jewish covenant. The pettiest communication with the outside world was regulated in fine detail. It is not difficult to find statements in the Talmud or in the writings of Maimonides which are fiercely critical, not to say discriminating, against non-Jews and non-Jewish institutions. So the oral tradition makes a distinction, for instance, between the value of a Jew’s life and a Gentile’s: ”if a Gentile is seen falling into the sea, he shall not be rescued, for it is written ‘neither shalt thou stand against the blood of thy fellow’, but the Gentile is not thy fellow”.37
The never-ending Christian demonisation and persecution of the Jews also strengthened the purely anti-Christian sentiments within Judaism, naturally rooted in the once inner-Jewish conflicts between Paul and the Pharisees about the arrival of the Messiah and the character of the covenant. As the Jews were made the murderers of God in the master story of Christianity, the Christians were turned into worshippers of idols in the master story of Judaism. Just as Christianity’s inherent anti-Jewishness cannot be undone unless its master story is rewritten, Judaism cannot stop defining its idea of the covenant in opposition to Christianity. Two religions are mirroring each another - and each is seeing the enemy. This not only has created a Jewish problem, but also a Christian one.
From this perspective, I should like to formulate the Jewish problem as a series of questions: Does the master story of Judaism have to be ethnic-particularistic? Does the idea of moral chosenness (the adherence to a covenant with God) have to be realised in an ethnic-national community? Does Judaism have to define itself in opposition to the outside world? Does the State of Israel have to be a state unlike all the others?
Or could the Exodus from Egypt and the covenant at Sinai, this great Biblical parable of persecution, liberation, trial, chosenness and fulfilment, be given a new and non-ethnic significance? Can the union of the twelve Hebrew tribes be widened into a union with no tribal boundaries? Can ”God’s peculiar people” come to denote a purely moral fellowship with no genetic or ethnic distinctions? Can the Promise be separated from the Land? The Promised Land from its geographic and historic bonds?

In essence, this is a question of whether Judaism will be able to break the continuous polarisation between spiritual trivialisation and extreme particularistic forms of religious nationalism, ethnic racism and national Messianism.
One condition for the discussion of this Jewish problem is that Jews should be prepared openly to formulate and debate it. Another is that Christians should be capable of formulating a corresponding Christian problem. The understanding of the common destiny of the Jewish people is today firmly tied to Christianity’s historical view of the Jews and Judaism. For this destiny to be modified in character and shape, Christianity will have to re-examine its story about it; it will have to mobilise the will and courage necessary to recognise its Jewish heritage, to acknowledge the Jewish link to the covenant at Sinai, to accept Judaism as a legitimate expression of this covenant, and to revise its master story fundamentally in these respects, i.e. to retract its view of the role of the Jews in the suffering and the death of Christ.
Judaism has to make at least as major a revision: in the end it has to re-define the covenant at Sinai in non-ethnic terms and to interpret the idea of chosenness as a purely moral fellowship. Judaism has to demonstrate that it has something essential to convey to the Gentile, to the Stranger, to the ”the Other”. It will have to refute Arthur Koestler’s thesis that what is universal in Judaism has been taken over by others.
It is true that Judaism and Christianity are not centrally ruled, hierarchical religions, that the range of interpretations is almost unlimited, and that no binding changes are possible. But it is also true that the master story of both religions is unambiguous and fundamental. They are also helplessly linked to each other, which means that the one can hardly be changed unless the other is. The two religions must learn to mirror each other - and discover a lost world.
Perhaps they will thereby jointly discover a Land other than that which was once promised, and perhaps thereby more will be gained than lost.
Personally I wish that the whisper from the place ”where once the temple stood that was destroyed” will sound far more loudly than the blast of horns from its rebuilt walls.