I'm Jon Spira-Savett, rabbi at Temple Beth Abraham in Nashua, New Hampshire. This website and blog is a resource for Jewish learning and Jewish action. It is a way to share my thoughts beyond my classes and weekly Divrei Torah. You'll find blog posts, standing resource pages with links and things to read, and podcasts as well.
I did finish looking at my class notes for the second semester of my first year of college a while ago, but haven’t written about it yet. Here’s a bit on one of the courses – Empire and Art.
The last few weeks were not as distinctive as the earlier part of the class. The main thing I took away this time was the move from major items to smaller things, even by the kings, and a decline in I guess the 1100s or so in the overall quality of works produced particularly representive the rulers. Materials and craftsmanship were not quite as good, corresponding with a decline in the fortunes of the kings, emperors such as they were. There were one or two kings who asserted power and consolidated rule, but mostly the figures and dynasties were not as great as in the century or so after Charlemagne.
It looks to me like freshman Jon may have trailed off a bit in his/my ability to assimilate more and more pieces of art as time went on in the course. I feel like my notes are more vague toward the end, like I did better earlier. Though maybe that was the course’s momentum and not mine.
I wrote my final paper on being “in the shadow of greatness”, looking at works from all periods back to the post-Constantine period and forward through the end of the early middle ages. I’m a bit tickled to see that I used that phrase back then; it’s something I picked up again and used for a piece of Torah later on, about the blessing of being “like Ephraim and Menashe.” I have no recollection of making a connection between the two; something like twenty years (?!) separates the two writings!
I do have to say that I’m questioning a bit of this part of the course after having just visited in Paris the Musee Cluny, which is a museum of the middle ages. Granted, most of the works there both architectural and decorative are from the 1300s on, but already in that time it seems like in France there was some of the sophistication I associate with the 1400s and 1500s. There were painted scenes of faces with emotion, and carved pieces also with real human form and facial expression. The museum talked about the economics of parts of France and I think northern Italy, which made better artistic materials available and the excess wealth to put it to use. So I’m not sure how that fits with the stagnation at the level of the Holy Roman Emperors. And of course some of the incredible cathedrals in France come from as far back as the 1200s.
I do think this course was a valuable one for me. When I go to art museums, I have an orientation to centuries of sculpture and representation, when I am in medieval cathedrals I do as well. The history, though in broad strokes, helps me understand some of both general European and Jewish history, in its own time and as a basis for the developments of the 1600s-1700s. I have a bit of additional understanding of at least the politics of the medieval Catholic church. This was I guess the last formal art history course I ever took, and it was done in a way that worked and works for me. As I've mentioned before, I know that I'm limited by my need to link art to concepts and ideas and history, but at least I can do that and Professor Nercessian helped me. So I'm grateful to her for helping me continue to have access to and enjoyment from the kinds of things I saw through this course.
Most of the new things the past few days are from the history of Zionism course. Some things that struck me...
Given the gap in experience between Herzl and Eastern European Jews, I continue to be surprised how many showed up for the First Zionist Congress. Granted it was 1897, so the Chovevei Tzion groups were well-established, but it seems like Herzl didn't even have a basic understanding of what life was like for the Jews involved.
Herzl's own view of those Jews was fairly patronizing. He imagined the poor Jews of Eastern Europe moving to Palestine, where their lives would improve and they would establish the state, while more well-off Jews in other parts of Europe would stay put. I think his theory was that the Jewish state would help normalize the situation of the Jews of Europe, by removing most of the sources of anti-Semitism such as the presence of less integrated and "respectable" and productive Jews. Professor Bartal noted that the presence of lower class Jews in Europe made the more bourgeois Jews uncomfortable and embarrassed as well, as an internal factor.
In a sense, as I type that last paragraph, it occurs to me that a first cousin of this happened. Most of the Eastern European Jews ended up in the U.S., and improved their lives here, and achieved a great deal of social and political acceptance and equality (not complete) by the 1960s. Eventually the existence of the State of Israel also helped that process forward for the Jews of the U.S. Though of course right now, many Jews here see themselves in the same boat as the more Western Jews of Herzl's time. (I don't.) All right, more of a second cousin to Herzl's vision of what we would call an Israel-Diaspora dynamic.
I found it interesting that to the extent religious Jews became involved in Zionism, this involved differentiating between a worldly, material sphere where the issue was saving and improving lives, and a messianic layer that political Zionism had nothing to do with in their eyes. So the contradiction with traditional waiting could be pushed away or papered over. At least on the part of the Mizrachi leadership; many of the Chovevei Zion masses did in fact see Herzl's movement in somewhat messianic perspective.
Herzl's attempt to find political support for the Jewish state among the imperial powers went nowhere, so the debate in the Zionist Congress over whether to focus on diplomacy or on building settlements was moot, and the major thrust of the international Zionist movement became material and practical by the late oughts, a decade after the first congress.
The word "colony" was in use within Zionism, it's hard to untangle the meaning of the term then and now. I have some thoughts about it but as I started to write them, I realize I have to do some more reading to check my work and then I'll come back to that. It's obviously the hot bottom topic today, about which I hope I'll get something useful from my review of the course.
Another day of notes was about the Hebrew cultural revival. Over the course of a century or so, the Hebrew language part of the Haskala made its way across Europe somewhat west to east, waxing and waning every decade or two with journals starting up and fading. As the decades went along and as the center of gravity changed, from Germany to Bohemia to Ukraine, the political backdrop changed as well. So the Hebrew language went from being part of a more general Enlightenment reform of Jewish life to becoming part of the nationalist frame, which wasn't necessarily Zionist but included Jewish secular cultural revival in place in Russia and Ukraine. That process was interrupted by the Russian Revolution, which officially clamped down on Jewish expression including the use of Hebrew, so that in practice it was the Zionists who carried forth the Hebrew revival. But I think the point was that the Hebrew linguistic and cultural movement had a logic prior to and bigger than Zionism, at least until World War I.
A brief note about Gov 1170 -- notes about Italy. Italy had essentially two trends, one a weaker version of French development with a longer agricultural tail, and one a weaker version of German late industrialization. Unification occurred in a very strange way, with a much less formed state. Professor Hall noted that Italian political parties for a long time tended to be centered on notables. Though I'm not sure about cause and effect, in practice political organization couldn't do in Italy what it did in Britain, which was to become the central place where social conflict was mediated, or what it did in Germany, which at least helped to organize mass society into coherent social and ideological groups (which didn't help stem conflict or extremism).
In Lit and Arts there was a midterm exam, and it was pretty narrowly defined and easy (phew!).
I'm catching up on the whole week, after preparing for and celebrating Purim.... The week's notes in Lit and Arts were a lot about the successors of Charlemagne, and the disjuncture between the disintegration of their authority and their realm, and their self-representation in Christian books and architecture as Christ's designated earthly power. As I wrote before, in trying to picture Europe from 1000 years ago, I am surprised to see how much awareness and connection there was by these kings in Aachen to Italy and Byzantium. They regarded their authority as tied to those places and the legitimacy they could gain by succession to them, claims to rule in Italy or support by the pope. How did that work, and how did that kind of political thinking flow down to peasants? During this time, Charlemagne's empire was not only divided by his successors, but also quite quickly fragmented into tiny principalities.
On the art side, and of course I'm just reading written notes and remembering bits of images vaguely, one thing that stands out is the combination of stylization with intense emotion. Spiritual commitment by the king was being represented, and moments in the Bible were being selected for their cosmic drama, and also the frontespieces and lettering identified the sovereign with not just stability in the face of the opposite politically in reality, but strong and intense rule. It's such a foreign visual language, not only to our times or the heyday of realism, but even to the Renaissance or the period just before then. I think I found those images in the Gospel manuscripts anything from disorienting to disturbing, really just because I couldn't parse them (not that I'm so great at understanding visual "language" anyway).
Gov was focused on Germany, to describe the trajectory of the 1800s and to use that to interrogate some theories of political modernization. The main thread was the Junkers, the artistocracy, and how they were able to maintain both their own position and a feudal organization of society for so long. They stood in the way of initial economic changes that would have weakened their social position, and they were stronger than any of the states vying for influence in German-speaking lands. Their military strength enabled them to crush developments in 1848 that might have led to some kind of liberal unified state, and then they were able to impose German unification 20-plus years later on their own terms, setting up institutions that they could dominate. Junker control of iron and railroads made sure that economic development did not create a separate strong bourgeoisie.
Professor Hall posed the question of whether institutional or cultural factors were at the root of the German path. Obviously it wasn't economics that dictated, since unlike Britain and France which commercialized and industrialized differently from each other but still found their way to democratic institutions in the late 1800s, Germany had arguably the most advanced economy by that time or the strongest one, but no democracy.
I look at the notes and wonder about the contingent factors of personages like Metternich and Bismarck. Usually the "great man" theory is one to dismiss, and I generally do. Bismarck was responsible for a balancing act that squashed socialism and bought off the working class by a generous welfare state. He managed a tariff and industrial policy that benefited the Junkers and bought their support for his version of the state or at least its policies. He continued to make it impossible for other power centers to emerge. He played groups off of each other, made Catholics and socialist and Jews into enemies of the people and often each other.
In Germany, political parties emerged unlike in Britain as mass movements, which helped organize society and not just interest groups, yet none or no coalition emerged that was more moderate, or radical for that matter. In the end, says this week's notes, Bismarck's approach to the workers in particular would eventually backfire and take down the regime at the end of World War I, and leave no basis for even a French-Third-Republic-style regime to take over with any strength, thus paving the way quickly toward fascism, so Professor Hall said.
It was interesting to look at the Zionism notes against this same backdrop. Most of the action this week was just to the east, in Poland and Ukraine and Russia. Professor Bartal noted how much of traditional Jewish society and authority patterns had changed by the late 1800s. Already earlier, the rise of Chasidic sects and misnagdish yeshivot and Haskalah circles had weakened the sense of a unified, centrally led kehillah. Now, Chibat Zion chavrot were yet another kind of social form, along with mass political parties more on the German model of ideology, education, and social organization all in one.
Backing up a bit, Jews not only had frequently been left out of the nationalist movements; many were the contractors who built the railroads on behalf of the authorities or the aristocracy. This led to Jews being disproportionately urbanized all of a sudden, compared to many of the peasants (I think); at the same time, Jews became a pauperized proletariat as well. Russian regime policy lurched back and forth toward the Jews -- encouraging them to move to the cities, then blocking them from certain types of work in the cities, etc.
All of this opened the door to socialism as well. In the last couple decades of the 1800s, Jewish socialist theorists in Russia like Ber Borochov were trying to figure out a role for Jews in the Marxian scheme or to propose their own version of either utopian socialism or a Marxian-utopian hybrid. For example, since there was no Jewish polity, there might be a necessity to jump the Marxian process, to go straight from a lower class to a post-bourgeois order somehow, or to prototype that in Eretz Yisrael and advancing the local Arabs along in that process. Also among many Jews was a sense that the only answer to "the Jewish question" would come from the socialist transformation the world over. Some Jews would therefore throw in with the Russian socialists, and others would become socialist Zionists. The social debate in Russian became the dominant matrix for Zionist ideology, much more so than the Ahad Ha-Am school.
I'm obviously noticing the obvious, which is that up to here Zionism and Jewish history generally is being presented as mainly an Ashkenazi story centered in Europe, and there isn't much at the moment of the Jews already in Palestine or in Arab lands, and their influence on how Zionism developed. There had been some of these in the earlier weeks and I'm curious how they will return. I guess I'll see how that's told in the coming weeks.
I was also just tickled to see that there were socialist versions or take-offs on traditional Jewish texts. Like a piece of Marxist theory printed in the format of a Talmudic page, which could be hidden in a book during traditional study. Or a socialist take on Pirkei Avot, interpreting the famous "three things the world stands on" as science, work (avodah understood that way and not as spirituality), and charity to the workers. I had completely forgotten about that!
I am noting that in the Lit and Arts course, what seems to be easiest for me to understand (and was back then too?) is architecture. I'm not spatial, generally, and geometry was my weakest part of math. But the layout of churches seems to be intelligible to me. Charlemagne's church architecture has a logic to it, defining what a Christian ruler is and his relationship to his people, the clergy, and Christ. I noticed in the notes that Professor Nercessian compared Aachen to the Jerusalem Temple, as a representation of divinely created order within the chaos of life at that time. I find myself wondering what things like "order" and "standardization" were like related to before Charlemagne and in comparison to the hyper-organization of life today (not that we don't have our types of chaos).
In Government, Professor Hall noted about Britain in the 1800s two things -- the switch in the bourgeoisie's alliance from the commercial aristrocracy to some part of the working class; and how that alliance was mediated through or really because of the durable legacy of parliamentary stability, such that social conflict was in politics and not raw class conflict.
In France, the 1800s saw a succession of regimes, as monarchism and for a time a strong presidency kept coming back and then being undermined, and the question is why. Among the underlying factors Professor Hall pointed out were the fact that while Britain had a certain democratic ideology and corresponding institutional framework for more than a century, France's democratic ideology was only ten to twenty years old when industrialization began. The slow industrialization meant that the bourgeoisie was not large enough to be an independent force, and the peasantry remained large. Both groups, the peasantry more so, responded to monarchist offers -- strong top-down leaders coopted the language of democracy and the supposedly democratic plebiscite to woo the peasants. The working class leadership never coalesced because much of it was killed during rebellions, and the political system did not even in the late 1800s offer an avenue of influence for socialist parties. Consequently labor was not a parliamentary force and turned toward either more radical revolution or demands for working conditions outside politics. Thus the Third Republic, which endured for about 70 years finally, did so by performing relatively limited functions -- catalyzing a certain amount of industrialization but not anything like in Britain or even Germany, and nothing more major than that, and preserving for the most part the social class arrangement in France as it had been.
Two things that struck me in the notes -- One was the description of political parties in France as being based on locales and notables, such that they did not provide the durable mediating, aggregating, and compromise mechanisms that define British or American politics. (I think this is still a legacy somewhat in France today?). The other was Professor Hall's discussion of the Dreyfus Affair, and how little attention he paid to the function of antisemitism, which I still don't know enough about, other than to note that nationalism was a fissure point in French politics in a way that weakened the Third Republic.
In the Zionism course, Professor Bartal talked about how the all the religious reform movements within Eastern European, non-westernized Jewish society, all weakened the traditional authority structure of the community without disturbing the daily practice of religious tradition. He didn't really draw a line from this to Zionism, other than to suggest that at some margin this made the move into Chibbat Tziyon easier for traditional Jews. Some of the moves of the Eastern European Haskalah, such as the publication of newspapers and journals, were copied from the more Western maskilim and made it possible for traditional Jews to learn about new trends.
The liberalization movements in the Austro-Hungarian Empire and in Poland and Ukraine, multiethnic polities, often found Jews on the side of the state rather than the nationalists, because the state was the champion of reform based on multiethnic rule while the nationalists had no room for the Jews as a people regarded as not part of the "nation." In Russia up until the early 1880s, Jews had hopes that the czar and his reforms would be beneficial for Jews, but the violence following the assassination of the czar squeezed Jews from both directions. The people rejected or suspected the Jews, and the czarists also made up stories that the Jews were responsible. With the failure of emancipation already in Western Europe, there was no room for hope of acceptance in the Russian realm.
A large part of the Chibat Tziyon movement in this phase was small-scale and for self-help and education; there was no plan yet for migration to Eretz Yisrael. A schism arose between those focused on the practicalities of changing the Jewish situation, and Ahad Ha-am, who argued that a cultural and intellectual-spiritual transformation was the primary thing that needed to happen before the Jews could make any social change or migration succeed.
It has always been hard for me to find a way to interact with art that isn’t verbal. I want to think and talk about the concepts that are artistically represented, to interpret them. There’s nothing wrong with that, but it seems incomplete. As I go over Lit and Arts, I’m thinking about this but also realizing the course is about contextualizing art in a period period in history, to see what we can learn about history, politics, and religion through art. I’m not sure yet if I would have learned the same things without the artistic pieces, as a straight history course.
The last few classes have been about Charlemagne, and some of the manuscripts, churches, and monasteries from his reign. Artistically, there is something about I think Germanic stylized nature forms, vines and animals that aren’t meant to evoke a scene or a landscape and aren’t traditionally classic or Roman or Christian. Professor Nercessian talked about some ways that Gospel manuscripts were organized, and how the lettering was meant to set a standard for the educated classes that Charlemagne was trying to develop as an elite ruling class.
There is the prominence of the X-R (“chi-rho”) page in manuscripts, about Christ as King. It’s not entirely clear to me if the blending of earthly rule and spiritual supremacy is pretty new or a continuation of Byzantine motifs. But I think the imagery of Christ as a ruler jumped to a new level in this time, and even when there wasn’t a parallel image of the emperor, just the vibe of Christ as imperial was a contribution to imperial power.
It is interesting, thinking about my preconceptions of the early Middle Ages, that Charlemagne was trying to consolidate his rule over much of Europe through culture. I hadn’t realized just how real was the touch of a common culture at this time, as far as the islands of Scotland and Ireland – maybe not as a dominant culture but at least a palpable presence. Charlemagne and the pope seemed to use each other, since the church was the only other entity with pockets of authority and ownership of vast lands. Charlemagne coopted that, and the pope coopted Charlemagne. I don’t know if the emperor felt that Christianity was a worthwhile culture for his realm, or just a useful one. There was a special Professor Nercessian talked about the gospel codices as standards for copymaking.
There was a transition from a roaming court, which was one way to exemplify rule over a large area, to a center in Aachen with a magnificent church and other palaces and buildings. If I read the notes right, Charlemagne emulated and advanced prior Roman/Byzantine emperors in incorporating adoration for the emperor into the traditional basilica or enhanced basilica (my term, not a scholarly one).
The Book of Kells is a thing I remember.
In Gov 1170, there was a brief comparison of industrialization in Germany and Italy with Britain, and why the path of the first two set the stage for fascism. In Britain, industrialization was funded largely by economic activity itself, so that a strong state was not originally necessary and both industrialists and commercial landowners developed power. In Germany and northern Italy, the late-starting industrialization required concentration of capital in investment banks, and railroad and infrastructure building by the state, so the state drove the empowerment of groups and not vice-versa, and there was not the same multiplicity of power centers.
Which is not to say that Britain developed without massive dislocation. Eventually the requirements of capitalism drove people from the rural land toward cities, into conditions of both squalor and lack of traditional social structures. When the poor did try to organize or rise up, it tended to be in a mode of restoring old social structures, rather than pressing for revolutionary new ones, and the aristocracy could coopt that part of the agenda.
Political conflict in Britain in the 1800s was primarily between the new bourgeoisie and the aristocracy. At key points, Parliament served as an effective mediating institution – there was bargaining over tariffs and poor relief, there were strategic concessions to the new monied class and also times when the more commercial aristocracy saw an alliance with industrialists as in their interests. Professor Hall suggested that the legacy of parliamentary compromise which ended the Glorious Revolution continued to have an impact, and the most effective sources of change were by those who could organize into interest groups for concrete changes. Some of those changes were constitutional – the expansion of the franchise, reorganizing city governments, reduction of rotten boroughs. These came about through somewhat traditional parliamentary processes. The lower classes were shut out from driving these processes, unless it was in the interest of another class and in concert with them.
Professor Bartal taught that the messianism was a matrix for an early Zionism in the mid-1800s, from a couple directions. The stall of integration of Jews was accompanied by a small but significant trend in Christian millenarian circles in Britain and the U.S., which saw the development and improvement of the Holy Land as a redemptive step. Jews’ separate existence, in this light, was viewed as a positive, a way of positioning Jews for a role either as returning Jews or as new Christian converts in the Holy Land.
Some prominent wealthy British and French Jews allied with this Christian movement, to fund settlements in Palestine as initially part of the reform and education of more backward Jews, most of which was taking place in the home countries. British and American Christian authorities and philanthropists in turn green-lit these enterprises by people like Montefiore and Cremieux.
The messianic trends within Kabbalistic Sephardi and Chasidic Judaism also became a frame for a small number of Jewish religious proto-Zionists to view settlement in the Land of Israel. Some mystics looked to the year 1840 as a date for the Messiah, as some Christians did for the second coming. To these Jews, the small steps of Jewish self-improvement in the context of incomplete integration were also signs of the beginning of a messianic era. (There was a fascinating piece I hadn’t remembered about some Jews seeing Cremieux, Montefiore, and Rothschild as encoded in some messianic verses of Torah and prayer.) The stall of integration could be seen as a positive – the preservation of Jewish distinctiveness was good, and the improvement of Jews, which was driven by negative stereotypes, was also in service of making us more fit for redemption or a redemptive era.
In the secular stirrings before the 1880s, language and culture were understood as more central than religion (of course) and even land sometimes. Professor Bartal mentioned some interesting perspectives on Hebrew. One was that unlike Eastern European nationalisms, which took languages of lower status and elevated them, Ben Yehudah-style Haskalah looked at Hebrew as an originally elevated language that had been displaced by lower vernaculars like Yiddish and needed to be restored. Interestingly, Ben Yehudah looked to Arabic to generate new modern words and my notes say that 25% of modern Hebrew comes from Arabic.
Zionsim, such as it was in the middle of the 1800s, was a small movement alongside three main well-defined Jewish responses to modernity – reform of Judaism, whether religious or in a Haskalah vein; Orthodox rejection of the Reform impulse; or a passive integrationism.
Professor Hall started his course with a terrific introduction, setting out the goal of the course: to figure out why in particular Great Britain, France, and Germany entered the modern age from similar medieval conditions but took such different political routes. Britain had a relatively nonviolent transition toward democracy. French made the transition with violence and setbacks. Germany was the one which had fascism. He said we would review the history and assess different factors and theories, using a comparative perspective to try to isolate factors which made the key difference in these trajectories. He named some of the major theorists and theories of modernization that I would come to really only begin to get the following year in Social Studies 10, such as Marx and Weber and Durkheim.
In the first phase of the transition from feudalism, there were two major sets of trends. One was economic. Each society had a distinctive "crop", which shaped how commercialization could occur. In Britain it was wool, which would require the consolidation of land for pasture. In France it was grapes, which was labor-intensive and gave the patterns of the peasantry a tremendous inertia. In Germany it was grain. The other trend was political, and shaped how the institution of the state and the monarchy would change in the age of absolutism. In Britain, the new economy of grazing and "putting out" generated a new class of gentry, distinct from traditional artistocracy. In France, the monarchy created a bureaucracy to enforce the collection of taxes, a new set of nobility distinct from the traditional landed nobles. In Germany, which was not yet a unitary state, what political authority existed relied on the traditional aristrocracy, the Junkers.
I hadn't known how consequential the commercialization of agriculture was as a phase before the market and industrial revolutions of the late 1700s and 1800s. Professor Hall did a nice job presenting us a ton of detail, organizing it, stopping to talk about big theories of these changes like Marxism and critiquing them and refining them, and also introducing what he called the question of structure vs. voluntarism, meaning the role that factors in the moment, decisions by political actors, and ideas played in addition to structural constraints.
I certainly hadn't really thought of or maybe even known that Britain had experienced a revolution in the 1600s, or two -- though it occurs to me now to question whether the same term is appropriate for Britain as for the U.S. and France. I will say now what I think about a lot too, which is that I know really nothing about the backdrop of non-European societies and whether any of this analysis of the transition to modernity applies. I don't think Professor Hall claimed that it does; I just know that like a lot of people, I carry the implicit notion that Western modernization is the norm, or that the British/American experience is in some sense an ideal to which others should be compared. It's a gap in my learning I still have not addressed.
One thing I note about the French Revolution is that it doesn't stand pat for a single explanation. Professor Hall labeled its different phases -- driven at different times by different groups in society, sometimes peasants, sometimes bourgeois, sometimes aristocrats, sometimes urban sans-culottes. He made note of the terror as both a new kind of state action, and an ideology identifying the state itself as a source of virtue and authority, distinct from society or the king who ruled. He also talked about how in France, the Revolution tore apart so many institutions, set the state against the church, did not succeed in reconciling the interests of peasants in earning enough from their crops and city-dwellers in having affordable food. So the French state would continue to convulse, and the Revolution and the Napoleonic period created a strong state with an army but not a modern land economy or a modern social class powerful enough to move the nation into a strong and stable next phase.
In Britain, Professor Hall noted that industrialization took off first even though Britain lagged France and Germany in innovation or education. What Britain had was an alignment between the state and new economic actors, who adopted the technology of the factory and accepted patterns of the city and both internal and international trade and who could propel them forward. There was social transformation and suffering, a complete overturning of the logic of land, labor, and capital within a hundred years or less -- and while there were upheavals they did not overwhelm the political system the way that France experienced.
Germany was still fragmented into separate governments in a looser economic alliance well into the 1800s, and while Britain made the leap from textiles to steel, Germany was still much more rooted in grain for far longer, so industrialization was impeded until later the new state would push it ahead in a convulsive way.
In the Zionism class, Professor Bartal to my surprise on reread referenced contemporary Palestinian nationalism in the first class. This was a year and a half before the first intifada. I think from him I learned the idea of the Jews as a medieval "corporation" -- a recognized legal-social entity with its own parameters from the rulers. I didn't remember two things from the early lectures. One is that before the Enlightenment period, during the age of European absolutism, the Jewish of particularly Central and Eastern Europe were experimenting with a kind of parallel process of consolidation, such as the "Council of the Four Lands." Already in other words the purely local, self-contained corporate community was experiencing some stresses in the 1600s. Also he said that again before the period of political change, there was a certain shift toward the Atlantic, to some degree even in Jewish migration, as opportunities in the commercial and mercantilist centers began to draw Jews away from the Ashkenazi centers.
Professor Bartal portrayed some of the Wissenschaft scholars as documenting historical processes within Jewish reality that might be leading to the end of separate Jewish existence as it had been known. I don't remember that then or hearing that since. I am struck my how small the window was in the 1800s between the offer of citizenship to the Jews in liberalizing countries and the turn toward modern anti-Semitic attitudes. I don't know how Bartal saw it, but there is both an incredible creativity in Jewish movements like Haskalah and self-critique/reinvention/reform of Judaism and also a tremendous pressure from the outside, from romantic-era attitudes toward Jews and about nationhood while the Jews were still assimilating earlier Enlightenment, liberal ideas. That mismatch would crash all over Europe in the late 1800s, from France to Russia.
In one lecture, Professor Bartal tried to answer why anti-Semitism became such an important feature of 19th century social thought and reform discourse, including among leaders and thinkers for whom traditional anti-Jewish attitudes were not important. I hadn't remembered that he pointed out how anti-Jewish attitudes morph to absorb whatever the core issues or critiques of the time area, and in that sense continuous in energy with medieval anti-Judaism even though the content in completely different. He said that some of the ways Jews were described are true, but don't carry the weight that anti-semitism assigns them. Even thinkers who viewed Jews positively overemphasized the features they admired (e.g. that Jews embodied the spirit of capitalism). All of these are commonplaces I think today; maybe they were back then and I just didn't get it. Ultimately, what made anti-semitism so potent, he argued, was a combination: the failure of political equality and liberal ideas to achieve enough equality of social status for Jews in the eyes of others; plus the romantic essentialism of nationalism in the later 1800s, which defined nationality rigidly and could not fit Jews in. Then when Jews turned to nationalism in response to this exclusion, that itself fed into the anti-semitic nationalism of others.
Professor Bartal also took a lecture to trace how messianism had been spreading within the Jewish world in a particular way even right before modernity. In its kabbalistic form, Jewish messianic suggested a cosmic process unfolding toward redemption, helped along by the spiritual acts of individual Jews. The movements that embraced this kind of messianism created a spiritual energy separate from the authority of traditional halacha and the rabbis whose authority came with that. I think what he was saying was that by the 1800s, with the wide spread of Hasidut, the Jewish world was ripe in this religious way for another change movement which was not built on traditional authority and which saw redemption as a possibility in the foreseeable future. But I haven't read ahead yet....
Meanwhile, in art, we are at the other end of the Middle Ages. What's interesting is how Charlemagne adopted forms and traditions and ideas from the Roman Empire, which is so unrelated to where he came from. He continued a pattern of new rulers incorporating pieces of prior monuments into his own, of making sure to be represented as both militarily strong and fundamentally just in his rule, as an embodiment of piety and the heavenly. Like other turning-point figures in later Roman history, Charlemagne turned back to Augustus as a model of representation to imitate. It's fascinating that rather than simply obliterate the Roman legacy he took it on, and that the papacy saw it as in its interest to ally with and crown Charlemagne as a continuation. One particular thing that strikes me in the notes, again not realizing I had seen it then, is the Christian shift from pagan temples, where priests are within but most people are outside, to the church as basilica, a public architecture where the people are within even as they may be wowed by grandeur.
Okay, it’s second semester of my first year of college in this plan I'm doing, and already I’m a week and a half behind. I will catch up this week and then do the project the way I intended, which is a day at a time.
“This semester”, I am taking first of all Introduction to Psychology with Jerome Kagan. I was trying to take some courses that would meet requirements in majors I was considering, otherwise I might have skipped to some other less intro course. I did know somehow that Professor Kagan was a major scholar, and he was a great teacher for the intro class. I can’t yet find my notes, so I may have to settle for some general memories later on, plus the one paper I do have.
I also remembering shopping a class called Psychobiology, which perhaps today we would call neuroscience. The lecture was about the corpus callosum, and what was learned from people for whom the connection between the two halves of the brain had been compromised. For some reason I decided the hard science of the course would be too demanding for me, maybe too much memorizing things I didn't think I was good at? Or maybe that I would go back and take the class if I chose psychology as a major, but only if that happened. This is the second example of a class I remembering shopping and not taking but where I remember the first lecture vividly. I’d looked at a class called Conceptions of Human Nature first term, and the first lecture talked about Freud and Marx, I remember, as dramatic contrasts in views of the basic premises of what a human is like.
I took a Government course, Political Development of Western Europe, with Professor Peter Hall. This was recommended as both a good background for and a taste of the Social Studies concentration. Professor Hall got great ratings in the student course evaluation guide. I wasn’t going to take the course because of the 300ish pages of weekly reading, but when I mentioned this to my parents my mom said, “Are you afraid of taking a class with a lot of reading?” I said, “No,” and then took the class. Thanks Mom! Also I guess I was considering majoring in Government, and maybe this would also be a way to get a requirement done, though I can't remember how much that was in my calculation.
I don’t think I was considering history as a major too seriously, but I did want to take another Jewish Studies course, and a visiting Israeli professor named Israel Bartal was offering a course on the history of Zionism. I think I knew a lot of the timeline from my Muss program in 11th grade, and then reading Sachar’s History of Israel and a bunch of other things related to Israeli history in high school, some of them over and over. Obviously this would be a deeper, more critical dive.
I needed a Core course, and something less demanding. I ended up with a Literature and Arts C course, Empire and Art in the Medieval West I think it was called, with Professor Nora Nercessian. My neighbor Terry took it too. I guess I liked that it might touch on religion a bit, maybe, and also that it wouldn’t stray too far from history I knew something about from high school. I was always intrigued in high school by the notion of the Holy Roman Empire, for some reason. Not positive about that or what else I considered there in choosing this course, or which other options I discarded.
The first couple classes in the art class were about how the Germanic rules starting with Charlemagne claimed succession to the Roman imperial crown in some sense. Professor Nercessian reviewed some of the Roman imperial self-representations, in sculpture and a bit in architecture, focusing on Augustus, Trajan, Diocletian, and Constantine. There were nuances revealing their perceptions or backdrops of order vs. chaos in the world, dominance as an emperor, human power verging sometimes into a kind of chosenness by God. Charlemagne and successors would consciously imitate some of this, though they did not have access to the quality of materials or craftsmanship that the Roman and Byzantine emperors had.
For the non-Zionists or anti-Zionist in my circle, a sincere set of questions from a Zionist.
I’m actually looking to understand where you are coming from, so these aren’t gotcha questions. I’ve been working on this for a week or more, but held off posting so as not to intrude on people’s marking Yom Hazikkaron, Yom Ha’atzmaut, or Nakba Day. This all came to me after I posted a comment to someone else's Facebook post, and that back-and-forth got me thinking.
I’m not looking for comments here from Zionists (other than myself). I will delete comments that are Zionists’ critiques of anti-Zionism (other than my own), and please don’t take that as a judgment of whether I agree or disagree. I am experimenting in a particular kind of exploration here – a Zionist convening a conversation with non- and anti-Zionists. I am trying to use those labels neutrally and you can tell me which one you prefer, or something else. I think this will be helpful (at least for me and maybe for some who “listen in”), among other things to get a clearer view of the the anti-Zionism-and-anti-Semitism issue.
I worried briefly that by writing these things down I might be giving air to “dangerous” ideas or commitments. But I realized first that I don’t have that kind of power. Everything I am writing is already out there, there is not an original idea here, and it’s better to be in a discussion about them even if I’m not going to change my mind today and neither are you. One of the problems with some of the campus protests is the notion that by even letting someone speak an opposing idea you are normalizing it. It’s all normalized already.
I am also not trying to use a conceptual discussion to divert myself from war, suffering, and moral accountability for myself or anyone else. I hope this might serve in a small way to advance peace.
So first, to check if I understand the bottom line:
An anti-Zionist holds that the entire area in dispute should be governed by either one state based on Palestinian nationality, or by one neutral state based on equal rights for everyone who lives there. (Obviously both those formulations beg a bunch of questions too.) Israel should ideally be replaced by one of those two things immediately or soon or eventually.
I am using the term “state” to refer to a sovereign governmental entity, and “nation” to refer to a specific group that has a common background and is tied to a territory.
Have I got it right so far?
If so, it seems to me there are various arguments one could make for why one or both of these non-Zionist scenarios is superior to the existence of Israel even as one of two states. Which one or ones of these below are your position? Am I missing anything or any nuance or variation? Here’s what I’ve got so far, in no particular order:
#1 Jews are not allowed by God to establish a sovereign state until the Mashiach (Messiah) comes. Unlike Israel, that state will be led by a descendent of King David.
#2 Zionism is bad for Judaism. Whether Judaism is a religion or a culture or whatever it is, as soon as it is wrapped up with nationalism it becomes corrupted and unable to sustain the Jewish people in our ethical, spiritual, or cultural quests and obligations.
#3 Nationalism is inherently problematic for anyone anywhere. It either is or tends toward racism or some form of supremacy. No state should be defined on the basis of any primary nationality.
#3a Zionism/Jewish nationalism is the paradigm case of racist nationalism.
#3a.1 Zionism is both the paradigm of and the prime feeder for racism and racist nationalism in other places.
#4 Unlike #3, a nation is a correct basis of a state (maybe: a nation is the best basis of a state). However, Jews are not the kind of group we mean when we use the term nation.
#4a Some Jews in Israel-Palestine could be defined as a national group, but the Jews who came after some point, maybe 1917 (Britain’s Balfour Declaration during World War I), never had the right to be there and are not part of a legitimate nation. They are or are descended from settler-colonialists.
#4b Jews are and continue to be a national group, but their claim to nationality is not as strong as the claim of Palestinians.
#5 The nation-state paradigm is particularly bad for territories with multiple national groups where one is not the clear majority and/or where there is a history of conflict between two or more groups. The paradigm of a majority with rights for the minority doesn’t work well enough in most such places, nor do arrangements that divide up and assign powers at the wholesale level between specific groups. Therefore no nationality should be the basis for sovereignty in any part of this particular land.
#6 A nation-state can be legitimate at one point but forfeit its legitimacy. Zionism was at some point no better or worse than any other nationalism, but Jews have forfeited the right to a nation-state based on their actions since then. (This might be the same as #3a above.)
#6a Zionism is the paradigm of a nation-state that has forfeited its right to statehood.
So again to pause and check, have I got all the varieties of anti-Zionism? If not, in the comments add a #7 or a variation of one of the others. I’m trying hard to be calm as I write these things down.
What’s next are my follow-up thoughts and questions on each of the above. Again, looking for someone who holds any of these positions to respond and make the case for any of those statements and against my critiques where I have them below. I’m a Zionist and you writing back are not, and we are not going to persuade each other today. If you don’t want to see my critiques or questions, but just respond to my formulations so far, that’s fine and thanks for reading up to here! If it’s more comfortable to message me privately that’s good also.
Probably you’ll have to scroll back and forth to follow my thoughts. I’ll give a capsule of each argument as I go but they are better explained above.
#1 (no Jewish state except by divine intervention) is the forceful position of religious Jewish groups such as Neturei Karta. I think there is a version of this among charedi (“ultraorthodox”) Jews who treat Israel as the regime that they live under and whose laws they follow, but who do not regard the state itself as having Jewish significance.
#2 (Zionism is bad for Judaism) is an argument that in my view only Jews can make. It’s for Jews to decide what the role of Zionism is or should be for us.
Now immediately I ask myself: Am I consistent here with relation to the Christian nationalism that affects me in the United States? As a Jew I guess I can’t argue that a Christian isn’t being true to their Christianity when they say that the U.S. is a Christian nation. That’s an argument Christians can have among themselves. I can argue against that as a statement about the U.S. but not as a statement about Christianity.
Back to the Zionism part of this, I will note that the past few years have been the first time I have spent significant time talking with Jews who hold this #2 position about Judaism and Zionism.
#3 (nation-states are inherently bad) is a principle I understand based on a lot of examples. Already in the 18th century, this question was very hot in political theory, both within the classical liberal and utilitarian tradition and in the Schmidtian critique of that tradition.
This #3 is something I find hard to apply consistently in the world of today. Even though I live in the U.S., which is not a nationality-based state, very many of the countries in the world are. (Side issue – some on both the anti-racist left and the blood-and-soil or Christian nationalist right argue that the U.S. is or functions as a nation- or faith-based state, and that’s a terrible thing or a great thing. I disagree with both versions of the premise.)
I tend toward what I think I’ve heard Michael Walzer argue, which is that the nation-state is in most but not all places today the best imperfect way to secure human life and prosperity, and in many places human rights as well. The nation-state is certainly not universally just, so this is a sociological question worth asking here and anywhere. To me it’s a pragmatic question, not one of universal principle.
#3a (Zionism is the paradigm of racist nationalism) is the position that has been widely identified with anti-Zionism in the world since the 1960s. It is the version of anti-Zionism that I think people have foremost in mind when labeling anti-Zionism as anti-Semitic. If this is your position, say more, because I can’t understand it as an objective comparison of nations and nationalisms. There are so many nation-states (and other states) which are violent or biased against some group within them or some outside group, with consequences at least as bad as in Israel-Palestine.
I would also note that the mirror version of #3a is what some Jews have said about Palestinian nationalism – that it has been uniquely violent in its actions and rhetoric, in both its nationalist and Islamist forms. I have worked hard to overcome this in myself as a characterization of Palestinian nationalism and nationality. The equation of Arab and/or Muslim with “terrorist” in American culture and politics is horrendous. Using “Zionist” as a slur is the same thing and it’s an anti-Semitic slur.
#4 (Jews aren’t really a nation) is a cousin of #2. To me it is also one of those things non-Jews can’t say. National groups are the ones who attest to their own experience of the things that define nations – common land, language, culture, history, etc. This is the very mistake that many Jews have made toward Palestinians when we have claimed that there is no such thing as Palestinian nationhood or that Palestinian nationhood was invented only recently. I can’t make that argument vis-à-vis Palestine, and others can’t tell Jews that they/we/some of us don’t have the right to define ourselves as a nation.
#4a (Israelis are settler-colonialists) -- a few types of thoughts, and maybe too much to put on this theme in this post, but I will anyway.
One is that groups are more than their individuals, and Jews have had a presence in the land continuously for more than three thousand years, and a consciousness of that presence and a longing for the land even when the numbers of Jews there has been small. If a people have roots in a land, they have roots in a land. To deny a universal Jewish connection to the Land of Israel would be anti-Semitic.
Second, Jews are not in Israel primarily as a Western project. Yes, there are Western Christians who have come to believe there is a role for the Jewish return in their Christian story. Yes, some Western powers have at different times supported Zionism, though not all of them and not all the time. Every single Middle Eastern group has had an imperial or imperial-style power allied with it or against it in the past two centuries.
But Zionism is a Jewish project. Jews drove the migrations to Israel on our own, because of our own ideas and situations. Jews were rejected in Europe as un-European, un-white, un-Christian, etc. They were not organized by the European authorities, but often in spite of them. British policy during the Mandate supported the Jews’ immigration for maybe half the years of their administration, and then turned against the Jews.
The other empirical thing, which I think goes here but I’m not sure, is that the flow of people and groups in and out of the land in question is something that has happened throughout its history since biblical times. Groups have gotten bigger and smaller and bigger again. Significant numbers of Arabs from elsewhere immigrated into Mandate Palestine between the wars, and became Palestinian at that point. Not as many as Jews from elsewhere, but somewhere from 100,000-200,000 Arabs. That doesn’t make them non-Palestinian. I think this kind of argument about who came when works better as a rationale for reuniting Palestinians in Palestine than for removing Jews from Israel or cutting some of them off from Israel.
And in the particular case of Israel-Palestine, coming up with objective indices of indigeneity is even harder. One study found that DNA found by archaeologists from biblical Canaanites correlates more of less the same to Arabs in and around Palestine and to Jews including Ashkenazi Jews (Jews who lived for centuries in part of Europe). Take that for whatever it’s worth ethically or scientifically.
I will say that the rhetoric of expelling Jews from Palestine is not generally what I have heard from the pro-Palestinian activists in my local community. More so in the campus protests. I’d like to know how this point plays in your own non-/anti-Zionist thinking or circle.
#4b I am not sure if I’ve heard this argument articulated much. If it’s your position I’d love to hear more.
I will say that there is a mirror of this argument made by some Jews about Palestinians, and it’s wrong in that direction just as much. When people say that the Arabs have all these countries and why do they need one more, or that Jordan is already the Palestinian state because of its large Palestinian population -- that’s a way of saying the Palestinians aren’t enough a nation to warrant their national rights. The argument doesn’t work for either Jews or Palestinians.
#5 This is a position like #3 (not #3a) that I take more seriously.
It’s one of the reasons I actually am for the two-state principle, with rights for the minorities who remain in the territory for either state. Two states are an attempt to make sure each nation is in a state where they are the vast majority, in order to reduce though not eliminate the tensions between groups. That was a rationale of the 1947 UN partition plan.
You could say #5 is also a critique of two states, linked to argument #3. That neither state will work with any minority within it, given the history and that a completely neutral state is best.
I would also say that if #5 is an argument against Zionism, it could equally be applied to Lebanon, Syria, Iraq, and possibly Jordan. Each has a different constitutional arrangement and some are not functioning well at all. I wonder if those who hold #5 as the main anti-Zionist rationale have thoughts about those other countries or are as upset by the carnage and death in those places in recent years.
Lebanon is a state that for a long time has tried to assign specific powers to each of its major subgroups, and it has not worked to generate a unified or functioning state. I don’t think any of us, Zionist or not, recommend it as a model for other places.
#5 can be a serious sociological and political science argument and I don’t see anything anti-Semitic about raising its questions. To push that only Israel among the nation-states of the world should give itself up unilaterally as a real-world test of this kind of argument, that’s one of the things one could argue is anti-Semitic or at least unfair.
#6 (Israel has forfeited its prior legitimacy as a nation-state) seems to me like one of the main arguments fueling the intensity of anti-Zionism right now. But tell me if I’m wrong.
If #6 is a good argument, then other states like Germany or Turkey would have long ago forfeited their right to exist and would have been replaced. That is not how the world ever saw it, though it’s true that Germany had a probationary period before essentially getting its independence back. But in fact Israel itself beginning in the 1950s established a relationship with the Federal Republic of Germany, so close to the end of the Shoah (Holocaust). One of the things that gives me hope about Israel-Palestine is the ongoing and uniquely positive relationship that Israel and Germany have.
So one critique of this argument, from the anti-Semitism angle: Since this has never been applied, even in the worst cases, why is it applicable only to the Jews?
#6a The labeling of Israel as a genocidal state across the generations is a way of saying this is the most evil, worst form of nationalism imaginable. This justifies on its terms singling out Israel as the one state on the planet that should not be a state.
I do not regard Israel’s actions as genocide. If you do, I don’t expect me to persuade you otherwise in a paragraph. I do understand why Palestinians are worried about their continued existence as a people and I don’t question the urgency with which this is raised and pressed. When I say it’s not genocide, I mean that I do not see Israel trying to annihilate all Palestinians, eliminate the Palestinians from the land, or remove all traces of their culture. To be clear, I do think Israel is guilty of very serious wrongs against individual Palestinians and the collective. It is also clear that there are powerful Jewish figures who dehumanize Arabs and do in fact want to remove Palestinians from part or all of the land. From within my own Zionism and Judaism, I have to work against those things.
Terms like “genocide” and “anti-Semitic” are meant to be descriptive, or at least to sound descriptive. They aren’t always. They can be ways to justify shutting down conversation, or delegitimizing or radically othering. So I’m in the position of both acknowledging why people raise the issue of genocide, and why it’s a conversation I have to be willing to have with people -- and also wanting others to see why calling Israel a genocidal state lands as an anti-Semitic move to single out Zionists/Jews in a threatening and dangerous way.
And again, I am noticing the ways many Jews single out Palestinian nationalism as having a uniquely cruel and violent history of terrorism that justifies turning away from all Palestinian national claims. If I turned around what I wrote in the previous paragraph, I would say both that Palestinians have what to answer for morally and politically, and also that other groups in the world who have fought for self-determination have engaged in horrible violence and yet their opponents have acknowledged them and made agreements with them, and coexistence has been possible despite the violent history (e.g. Northern Ireland).
So, there you have it. That’s my attempt as a Zionist to understand the arguments against Zionism, and some of my commentary on anti-Zionism. Your turn now, anti-Zionists and non-Zionists, speak to me if you like. Whether you are Palestinians or linked most directly to Palestinians, whether you are Jewish, or however you’ve come to that position in a way that is urgent for you. Thank you for listening so far, and reply to me or engage with me if you wish.
This is what I said at the ceremony of lighting candles at the end of our annual Holocaust Remembrance Program in Nashua which the Jewish community holds at Rivier University in conjunction with the school, our Catholic partner in remembering. After the thank you's I said this:
We came here this evening to learn and to mourn. We learn to pick up lessons, and charges -- but we mourn just because. Not because everyone whose memory we honor was righteous or heroic or resilient. But just because they were ours.
We comfort each other, and we comfort especially those who are mourning a loved one whom you knew, or whom you might have known if not for the Shoah.
How many candles we could light. If we wanted to recite the names of every Jew who was lost and began today and did not stop, we would be here until the start of next spring. We honor the memory of six million Jews and millions more – Roma, LGBTQ+, disabled, political opponents of the Nazi regime. We weep for every person who lost a life, and we weep for those who survived but lost loved ones, or whose body or soul was wounded forever by those who acted and those who stood by.
As Jews we are grateful for you who have come to sit with us and around us as we grieve. Because alas, even our mourning has become contentious. We Jews have been told this year by too many that we cannot simply mourn our dead. That we cannot share the names and faces of our dead and our captives. That our pain is not significant enough. Among the many shattering things about last October 7 is that survivors of the Shoah had to go through it or see it, in Israel and here. So it is precious to have not just our own Jewish place but a public place, where we can mourn.
This year the charge of genocide is being directed against us. Jews in Israel are not engaged in genocide against the Palestinian people. Jews here are not supporting a genocide against Palestinians.
I am an educator and a member of the state Commission on Holocaust and Genocide Education, so for those who say something else than what I jsut said and want to talk about it I offer myself to listen, to hear the pain of others and not just hear it but acknowledge it and the mourning and anger with it, and also to explain why I just said that the death and terrible suffering in Gaza is not genocide. If you need to have that conversation, or know someone who maybe does, if you have a young person in your life for instance, please come get my number or share it.
We often ask ourselves as Jews how much to devote our energies to the safety of Jews everywhere and to anti-Semitism, which has increased in all directions, and how much to work as allies to other groups who experience bias and intolerance and more, and need us with them. There is yet another part: As Jews we have to deal with the racism and Islamophobia and anti-Arab bias within us.
I have them, in ways I know and in ways I continue to discover. We have people within our Jewish collective who are powerful who dehumanize Arabs and who do not hide their wish actually to remove Palestinians from their communities in many parts of the Land of Israel. We have to take responsibility for that. We have to live with the knowledge that in our hands are the lives, dignity, and freedom of another people. Not in our hands only, to be quite sure -- but still, much of it in our hands.
We have been insistent that the people of this country learn to see anti-Semitism is not just its overt forms but its most subtle forms, not just its physical forms but also its ideological ones. We have achieved support for that at the highest levels of American society and government. We have succeeded in passing a law in New Hampshire that every young person explore these things, even if they know not a single Jew personally, just because they are American. How could we not ask the same kind of thing of ourselves.
We have set a high standard for observation and nuance. We cannot be the one group not in the kinds of conversations everyone is having, with that level of nuance, even though we are in such pain and it is so hard.
Nor should we want to be. Looking at ourselves, doing our teshuvah, is not a reward to terrorists. It has absolutely nothing to do with them. It is on the contrary about who we see when we look at ourselves with the glorious third eye that sees us as the Divine sees us. It is how we know after the Shoah that we are still here. It is how we know, after everything, who,we, still, are.
We came here tonight for hope, in the story of people who were here for us when that took tremendous courage. We have heard a story that makes us less lonely as Jews, and it’s a story that might inspire us to be more courageous ourselves. This is an evening to see glimmers and sparks and beacons, not only in the past. To feel love and understanding across difference in this very room.
And we came here tonight to remember, to light candles because flame is both destruction and light. Let us light these candles, and bring to light again the beloved souls we are remembering here.
This is a slightly revised version of a D'var Torah I gave on the Shabbat that was the last day of Pesach in 5782 (2022).
Right before Pesach in 2022, a bunch of people mentioned to me an article they had seen from the New York Times by Rabbi Sharon Brous. Her piece referenced a book known as the Slave Bible, or as its inside title page says “Select Parts of the Holy Bible for the Use of the Negro Slaves in the British West India Islands.” This version of the Bible was published in 1807, and it was used in the Caribbean islands under British rule at that time to teach slaves to read and to teach them Christianity. As Rabbi Brous writes, this Bible is unique in that it has deleted the entire story of the Exodus. It jumps from Joseph’s uniting with his brothers all the way to the revelation of the Ten Commandments at Mt. Sinai, and then from there to the sternest and most warning parts of Deuteronomy, and that’s it for the Torah.
There are in the Deuteronomy section brief references to having been brought out of Egypt but no mention at all of being slaves there. So this was truly a Bible without an Exodus, and a Bible suffused in fact with justifications of slavery from various points in Genesis, as well as other parts of the Old Testament and New.
Rabbi Brous asks us to imagine how it’s possible to have a text without Exodus, without slavery and oppression and liberation, and call it a Bible. What kind of biblical religion could really be true to the Bible without that story -- it’s absurd. Yet that was the Bible and the biblical religion, quote-unquote, being fed to slaves in at least part of the English-speaking world into the 1800s.
After the third person mentioned this Bible to me, I found myself putting into focus an idea that’s been eating slowly at me for a while. I found myself thinking that there is a mirror-image Bible, not exactly a Bible but a book based on the Bible, and in this particular Bible the Israelites are continually being redeemed, over and over.
In this Bible, every mention of slavery and Pharaoh disappears quickly into a celebration of rescue and protection from not just oppression but hunger and pain and disilusionment.
In this version, God operates the world in every moment with compassion for every last creature, and has in every moment since the beginning of time, and God never naps from this concern and care for a moment, and never lets any creature fail to find at least a word to say or sing to describe this world.
In this version, the Sea is not a dangerous thing to try and cross, but a gushing out of gratitude.
In this version of the Bible, even our bones -- the least articulate part of our body, the part of us that can’t see out into the word at all -- even our bones proclaim Mi Chamocha, the words of the Song we sang at the Sea -- "Adonai Mi Chamocha, Who is like you, who rescues the powerless from the one who is stronger."
This Bible, where the liberation from slavery in Egypt is amplified and exaggerated -- it is the Siddur. It is our prayerbook. I’ve just been paraphraising for you most of pages 104-105 in our version of the Siddur, the prayer we call Nishmat Kol Chai after its first words, “the breath of all that lives.”
In recent years with all that has been happening in the world, I have been especially fascinated by what I will call the Nishmat Bible, which is the opposite of the Slave Bible. Part of my fascination is the flat-out contradiction between some of the words of the Nishmat prayers and what’s in our Torah. I mean the Torah is very clear that while Shifrah and Puah and Miryam and Yocheved were saving the lives of babies one by one, and while Moshe was taking matters into his own hands quite literally, God had to be reminded of the Israelites after some long period of time, finally snapping into action and setting a bush to burning. I mean: Is that the God who, in the words of the Nishmat prayer, “does not sleep and does not slumber”?
But that’s not even what fascinates me; it’s not a point of theology. What I’m amazed at is our ancestors of the year 1550, or pick another year like that, who sang these words in a medieval world where they had been oppressed for hundreds of years, who had a tradition of singing these words for least six or seven centuries and possibly more than a thousand years, when most Pharaohs in that time were not defeated and the many Jewish exits were not to promised lands.
The Jews of 1550 sang these words every Shabbat against all evidence to the contrary. What was that like? What did it feel like? What kinds of thoughts were they thinking about these words? Even as late as 1550, Jews had no idea that within a hundred years there might be the beginning of some kind of liberation in this world, in Amsterdam or Brazil or the North American colonies. And for most Jews in most places even in 1650 or 1750 or 1850 this was still the case. And yet they sang this Bible where “from the beginning of time to the end” without exception every moment God is taking care of them and “besides You we have no God who redeems and saves.”
I’m just gobsmacked. I can see in 1947 naming a ship Exodus, with Jews in peril still in Europe and in Palestine but it seems like a time that you could feel is those first chapters of the book of Exodus, where something may be coming and you’re in that fight.
I can see in churches in the 1950s and 1960s telling and singing about the Exodus, with protests and actions gaining energy if not always gaining momentum. I can see how in the 1960s and ‘70s and ‘80s we made “let my people” go a real watchword in solidarity with our people in the Soviet Union, when there was already liberation for Jews in this country and the State of Israel.
It’s easy to see how you make the Exodus a present story when the moves are happening and it’s more than a midwife here and an upstander there but history itself seems in the making.
It’s easier to see how you tell this story after we relocated to America, not only a land of freedom but a land that sees itself as another version of the Exodus story.
But for centuries and centuries our ancestors sang these songs, and made the already Exodus-filled Torah into a turbocharged Exodus Bible through the Siddur. Especially on Shabbat when they sang Nishmat, but also every regular day morning and night. Twice a day Mi Chamocha, the Song of the first moment of freedom. In the morning every weekday it’s “protector and savior for their children in every generation”; in the evening every night it’s the power “Who redeems us from the hand of every earthly power.”
What was it like to sing the Nishmat Bible? How did they do it? When there was no end in sight to oppressions, to crimes against humanity; when there was no debate and no media to show anyone else what was happening to us -- our ancestors kept being the stewards of the story of Yetziat Mitzrayim, the Exodus. Against all the evidence of the actual world. There was no way anyone could have pulled a Slave Bible over them. The Siddur is even more Exodus than the Torah itself.
(And of course, the Slave Bible was no match for the people over whom it was lorded in the 1800s.)
It is those centuries and centuries of stewarding this story, protecting it and retelling it and sometimes adding to it and exaggerating it in profound ways and just crazy ways, that have made other Exodus stories and realities possible in the past centuries. We talk about the power of stories, but it’s more than the story and its content. A story stored up and charged with spiritual energy for that long becomes more powerful at some point than any powerful tyrant or tyranny. That’s what I mean each time I hand the Torah scroll to a BMitzvah and say: You can feel all the noise and energy of our ancestors talking about it; their energy is in here and when you add that up it’s just so much power. Enough to power our liberations in Israel and here, the first modern revolutions, and lest we forget the dramatic fall of the Iron Curtain and the collapse three decades ago of the longest and widest single brutal system of oppression in human history. So many have understood these as Exodus stories.
As real as the Slave Bible was in its time, it is really no match. At an interfaith gathering during Pesach one year, our congregation’s friend Olga Tines, the music minister at the New Fellowship Baptist Church, talked about the power of the Exodus in her own legacy as an African-American. She reminded us that Christianity was not the religion that her people brought with them from Africa to North America, but once the white slaveholders began to use Christianity they couldn’t keep those Exodus parts quiet. And like us, the slaves created a hyper-Exodus-Bible of song and prayer, in spirituals like “Go Down Moses” and in sermons. And things happened in the real world because of that, and when other things happened they had faith already because the liberation of slaves was a real thing.
I know it seems like we have discharged some of the energy in the Exodus story. There is so much Pharoah, isn’t there; he keeps coming back. I don’t have to recite the topical litany. A couple of years ago I was working with one of our BMitzvah kids, Benjamin, and we were studying another part of the Torah, the story of Noach, and Benjamin’s view was that we have not advanced at all since the time of the biblical Flood.
And I tried to come back to him with the scholar Steven Pinker and his objective, statistical study The Better Angels of Our Nature: Why Violence Has Declined. I don’t know if Ukraine or Burma or Afghanistan changes the calculus but Pinker said the world is less violent and more peaceful than ever before. Benjamin was having none of it.
I’m not blaming him. To make the world more free takes empirical things but it doesn’t happen without stories and without being captured back into those stories. That’s why we need more Exodus even when we might not entirely be feeling it.
If our ancestors for hundreds and hundreds of years, in their situation that was more like Israelite slaves than like anyone else in the story -- if they could keep singing the Nishmat Bible and studying the Exodus story, we certainly can from our position on the other side of the Sea as modern Jews. We can --with our memories of the past century or two in our own lives and the lives of our families. This is not a time to go mellow on Exodus, but to crank it higher. And not just talk about Pharoah and not just about midwives and sprouts, but the splitting Sea and the full-on redemption out ahead.
That’s why we’re here as Jews. You can’t cut those things out of the Bible, and if anything as a Jew you have to multiply them. Somehow, we were the first people who had this story of the Exodus, of Yetziat Mitzrayim. We’ve had it the longest, it changed us and it’s changed the world already. It’s our job in the world to be stewards of this story, pour our energy into it no matter what is happening, and keep bringing it out over and over. And, as we say at the Seder, everyone who uses the Exodus to tell more and more stories is to be praised.
