Prof. Paul Eidelberg
Despite the fact that Abraham, the father of the Jewish people, was a warrior
as were Joshua, Gideon, Samson, and King David above all, Jewish history during
the last two thousand years has concentrated on the “martyrdom”
and intellectual pursuits of the Jews, and not at all on their military exploits.
This prompted the eminent Jewish historian Salo W. Baron to coin the title of
this article.
Writing in 1951, Professor Baron, who was also a rabbi, notes that we know very
little of the military exploits of Judah the Maccabee and his brethren from
the talmudic record. “The very festival of Hanukhah was long celebrated
only as a religious memorial to the rededication of the temple with some more
or less desultory liturgical references to the staunch faith of Mattathias and
his sons.” Mattathias himself has been extolled as a defiant martyr. This
“overstressing the idea of Jewish historic martyrdom,” say s Baron,
“neither squared with the facts nor was of service to our generation.”
He admits, however, that painting Jewish history in the blackest possible colors
had valid sociological reasons. Suffice to mention how Zionist leaders disparaged
the past with its suffering, wandering Jews and promised to restore Jewish dignity
and security in a Jewish homeland. And yet, insofar as political Zionism has
failed to restore Jewish dignity and security in the State of Israel, a basic
reason will be found in its failure to emphasize the glorious heritage of the
Jewish people! ISRAEL’S “POST-ZIONISTS” ARE THE RESULT OF
ZIONISM’S MELANCHOLY VIEW OF JEWISH HISTORY.
Baron foresaw that the rebirth of Israel on secular foundations would “lead
to a revival of the lachrymose conception of history under a new, even more
dangerous guise.” Contrasting the unhappy “exilic” centuries
of the Jewish people with the happy lot of the Jew living on his own soil, Zionism
spawned the idea that the “galut” Jew suffers from some spiritual
or mental malady. By propagating a “normal” nationalistic view of
Judaism while portraying the religious view of Jewish history as bleak and pathetic,
Zionism has not only restored the lachrymose conception of Jewish history, but
has alienated Israeli youth from the Jewish heritage. It is in this light that
we are to understand post-Zionism.
Moreover, secular Zionism’s negative portrayal of Jewish history has also
undermined Jewish pride among Jews in the Diaspora. Zionism aside, what can
be more melancholy than the various Holocaust museums? Can such museums inspire
Jewish youth with pride in their heritage or with new vistas of Jewish greatness?
Consider, too, American Zionists preoccupied with Israel’s security. Note
the lachrymose image they evoke of Israel’s “land-for-peace”
policy. Admittedly, this policy is pathetic as well as suicidal. But notice
how critics of this policy often refer to Jews as historically if not genetically
damaged, as suffering from a victimization syndrome. One seldom finds among
Zionist publications reference to the extraordinary contributions of the Jewish
people to human civilization.
The heroic exploits of those who made the deserts of Palestine bloom and who
fought in Israel’s war of Independence are not exceptional in Jewish “exilic”
history. Baron offers many previous examples of Jewish heroism. In 1848, Rabbi
Nordhamm of Alsace organized a group of eighty young men to beat back French
pogromists and then went on the offensive, seized some of the ring leaders and
turned them over to the authorities. Similar feats of Jewish heroism occurred
in Czarist Russia. And we have we to be told “in full and illuminating
detail the story of the great civilizing and pioneering function which Jewish
merchant adventurers played in opening up the American frontier.”
Baron also mentions the exploits of innumerable Jewish fighters in the various
western armies during the emancipation era. He refers to a small Jewish businessman
from Mississippi whose name (Max Frankenthal) became proverbial for extraordinary
courage among his Confederate comrades. One may even find in Jewish history
Jewish counterparts to Robin Hood!
Even more significant: “What courage it must have taken for Jews to settle
in the capital of Khazaria or Yemen and even try to persuade the rulers of these
remote lands that Judaism was superior to all other creeds!”
Baron does not minimize the Great Catastrophe. But he warned, in 1951, of a
new assimilation generated by political Zionists. By replacing the saint and
the scholar with the pioneer and the hero, these Zionists cast a shadow on the
Jew’s religious heritage. By so doing they exposed themselves and others
to “a deeper and more far-reaching assimilation of non-Jewish ideologies
than that usually ascribed to extreme ‘assimilationists.’”
Notice how Israel’s post-Zionists have surrendered traditional Jewish
values to those dominate in the democratic West, above all, INDISCRIMINATE EGALITARIANISM,
an egalitarianism that logically spells Israel’s doom as a Jewish state.
This egalitarianism -- the most beguiling and dangerous form of assimilation
-- has obtained strategic power in Israel, now that Yossi Sarid is Minister
of Education and Yossi Beilin is Minister of Justice, while Aaron Barak remains
ensconced as the President of Israel’s Supreme Court.