The idea that young Jews do not support Israel because of Israeli policy in “the occupied territories” is ridiculous.
On May 30, 1806, Napoleon Bonaparte issued an imperial decree calling for an “Assembly of Jewish Notables” to answer questions regarding the loyalty of newly emancipated French Jews to the French state. The assembly, convened two months after the French dictator’s decree was issued, consisted of 112 prominent Jewish businessmen, financiers, rabbis and scholars. Napoleon, among his many questions to the Jewish leadership, asked if Jews were allowed to marry Christians. He also wanted to know if Jews considered Frenchmen “as brethren or as strangers.”
The questions seemed strange to the Jewish leaders, even shocking. Fifteen years earlier, the French state emancipated its Jews, giving them citizenship and equality with all citizens of France. Jews, while not leaders of the French Revolution, did support the overthrow of the ancien regime and fought to defend the newly emerging nation-state against foreign invaders.
Napoleon’s queries into Jewish loyalty were both insulting and demoralizing.
Nevertheless, the Assembly of Notables bent over backwards to prove to the French dictator that French Jews were loyal Frenchmen to the core.
Perhaps the Jewish leaders of France 200 years ago should not have been surprised by Napoleon’s questions.
The French revolutionaries stated the ground rules of the emancipation of the Jews with utter clarity: Everything to the Jews as individuals, but nothing to the Jews as a nation. The ground rules for the granting of citizenship were that Jews had to deny themselves the status of a national group and had to transfer that national allegiance to France.
After 1789, Jewish identity in France was solely religious and a private matter. That was the logic of the revolution: no Jewish law courts, no Jewish self-government, and no Jewish national identity. Every Jew in France was a “French citizen of the Mosaic faith.” There could be no Jewish state within a French state. The public identity of the Jew was his or her French identity.
Most enlightened Europeans expected Jewish identity to wither under the terms of the granting of citizenship.
Why would any Jew want to continue being Jewish if offered the great privilege of equality with the Christian majority? Immanuel Kant, the greatest thinker of the German Enlightenment and a friend of the Jews, expected nothing less than the death of Judaism with the granting of emancipation to the Jews of Europe.
While it is true that most Jews in France embraced citizenship – after years of living as a barely tolerated minority it was clear to them that equality was a blessing – there is little doubt that the agenda of the emancipators was not benign. As the Zionists realized in the century after emancipation, the granting of citizenship to Jews in France was not to benefit the Jews but to fulfill the “logic of the Revolution.” What looked good on paper was not fulfilled in reality. That reality was that Jews had lived as a nation apart from Christians and Muslims throughout the lands of the exile. In the Diaspora, Jews did not possess a homeland and sovereignty. But religious practice and self-government maintained a legal, social and theological bond among Jews, from North Africa to Poland.
Halachah – Jewish law – was the constitution of all Jews, whether in the pagan, Christian or Muslim realm.
Medieval Jews – unlike their modern counterparts – were not plagued by the self-hatred produced by dual identity. As Jews today, none of us want to return to the status of a tolerated and persecuted minority. But as the great Zionist thinker, Max Nordau, stated: The medieval ghetto Jews knew who they were. The medieval ghetto was not a prison, but a psychological refuge.
EMANCIPATION, IN many ways, was a form of imperialism and colonialism. While Jews did not have a homeland to be colonized, the condescension of European Christians toward Jews and Judaism was as racist as the “white man’s burden” of European colonizers in Africa and Asia. The granting of citizenship was not as lethal as King Leopold’s rape of the Belgian Congo more than 100 years ago. But the psychological effects of Enlightenment and Emancipation were devastating.
When 19th-century German poet Heinrich Heine – born a Jew but a convert to Lutheranism – described Judaism as a “thousand-year old family affliction,” he was only expressing the inner torture of the modern Jew who is forced to deny his own age-old identity as an embarrassing fossil and show his love for a superior civilization that is not his own. That so many Jews followed Heine in this form of self-debasement is tragic.
What shocked journalist Theodor Herzl during the framing of Captain Alfred Dreyfus was not the anti-Semitism of Parisians crying “Death to the Jews!” What appalled Herzl was that Dreyfus, like Herzl himself, was a Jew who in every way carried out his end of the bargain in the scheme of Emancipation, but was rejected anyway.
The Nazi destruction of European Jewry decades after the Dreyfus Affair only confirmed that Emancipation was a terrible, deadly and tragic delusion.
Jews in America did not have to undergo the process of Emancipation – they were granted equal rights as citizens and were given religious freedom from the creation of the Republic. But it would be a mistake to believe that the “New World” was totally immune from the realities of the Europe.
Founding Fathers such as John Adams and Thomas Jefferson were sons of the Enlightenment and were inheritors of its prejudice against Judaism. Adams looked forward to the day when Jews would “wear away” certain “asperities and peculiarities” and become “liberal Unitarian Christians.” Jefferson, in a letter to fellow American patriot William Short in 1820, described Judaism as a “superstition” and Jews as a “bloodthirsty race” who worshipped the “local God of Israel.”
Of course, Jefferson was referring to the Jews of the time of Jesus. His support of religious freedom for Jews earned him the loyalty of many Jews in early America. But one can hear the echoes of “the white man’s burden” in the Founding Fathers’ condemnation of Judaism as a primitive religion of Revelation. It should come as no surprise that American Jews are the most secular of all this country’s ethnic groups – the roots of the degradation of their faith is deeply embedded in American history. When identity is based on ethnic food, ethnic culture, ethnic pride – and in a country where politics has supplanted religion for most Jews as the source of their identity – Judaism is at a distinct disadvantage.
The idea that young Jews do not support Israel because of Israeli policy in “the occupied territories” is ridiculous.
We suffer from the alienation born of self-hatred and inferiority, despite all our successes. Our malady as American Jews is systemic. It is rooted in the reality of our modern history. We are the heirs of Heine.
The author is rabbi of Beth Ami Congregation in Boca Raton, Florida.
yamit82 Said:
You and TX might brothers!!!!!!!!!!! When drives he follows that adage,scary!!!!!! I have learned not scream, it anoys hin.
CuriousAmerican Said:
Handsome,sexy,and ruggged men[like TX, Yamit82,Ross and Shy Guy} suite me just fine. Also chocolate and listening tto coyotes singing. New born caves bawling, I like that too. A my dear sweet Christian friends who love Israel and NEVER attemp to convert me.
@ yamit82:
Love it, thank you. My Grandfather did tailoring for Buffalo Bill. GF was a sharpshooter in the Russian Army and he and BB would have shooting contests. According to family legeons, Gramps won!!!!!!!!!!
Not at all envious. Just observant of unnecessary complaining.
If you are telling me that Emancipation and Equality are colonialism, then you are playing the victim card far too much.
Inequality does not suit you.
Equality does not suit you.
What does suit you? Honeybee.
Admit it, nothing suits you honeybee.
@ yamit82:
“Out West they have a sayin. Once you know where your a goin’, just climb in the saddle and stay on the trail ’til you get there.”
@ honeybee:
Yiddle Joe From Vest of Ft. Lauderdale, Oye!: By William Rabinowitz
“For most folks, American Jewish Western history is the West of Cowboys and Indians, somewhere West of the Mississippi River. Not too many people know about Jews and the American West, maybe because the Jews of the East were far more numerous and wanted to be Top Dog in the story. But, yes there was a real history of Jews in the West, even if there were not a lot of us.
Jews were mountain men, the Jim Bridger type, who lived in the Rockies, hunted for fur and melded with the Indians and the Land. Jews were pioneers, explorers like Solomon Carvalho, wagon train masters, like Dr. Snow who settled in Placerville, California, high up in the Sierras looking for gold. Jews were Indian fighters, even Indian Chiefs. Go figure, a Jewish Indian Chief, Solomon Bibo, a nice yiddisher boychik from Poland was a Jewish Indian Chief in New Mexico. Jews were frontier soldiers, recipients of the Congressional Medal of Honor – Simon Suhler, David Goodman, Jacob Trautman, for bravery in the Indian Wars. Jews were ranchers – one even had his own cattle brand – a Star of David.
In 1860 San Francisco estimates place the number of Jews at 5,000, another 500 in Sacramento and about a 100 in the dusty nothing of a town further South, Los Angeles.
Jews were shop keepers, bankers, farmers, good guys and bad guys. Jim Levy, until he met his end at the barrel of a gun one dark night in Tucson, was a gunfighter. We had Jews fighting for Texas Independence with Sam Houston. Adolphus Sterne ran guns to Houston’s little army through Mexican lines.
There always was something about the West that resonated freedom to the Jewish American. Jews did experience anti-Semitism in the West but it was never anything like the institutionalized anti-Semitism of Europe.
The first Jewish governor came out of the American West, Moses Alexander from Idaho. The first Jewish female Rabbi, Rachel Franks came from the American West. Jews argue exactly who or what is a Rabbi, even in the West. Jews argue if someone’s mother wasn’t Jewish or was Jewish, it all depends on who wants the credit. For that matter, if we trace matrilineal descent as being the sole arbitrator of being Jewish over the generations, Elvis Presley was Jewish. His matrilineal line was clearly Jewish, though Christian in practice until him. Is someone a half Jew, a full Jew, a quarter Jew, a gastronomic Jew, a Jew by choice, all the meshugas you can imagine, we fought about it. Is a Jew white, black, red, yellow or just someone crazy enough to want to be Jewish?
It is true, that there were not a lot of Jewish girls on the frontier. Some guys like Sol Starr, the mayor the Wild West Gold town of Deadwood, South Dakota simply did not marry. Others married the local ladies, sometimes Christians, and sometimes even Indians. They waited for the first good rain storm to go out and find a flowing creek for their own self conversions. To the horror of some of the Orthodox, these self converted folks had the nerve to raise their kids as Jews. Today, who knows anymore? In the West there were all sorts of blends. In the East, we just pretend that everyone went to a Beit Din and a Mikveh and that true Jews are all white.”
yamit82 Said:
@ honeybee:
Retail Encounter in the Mother Lode -1863
A great, two fisted Irishman, intending to buy a pair of kid gloves of our Hebraic friend, Mr. Fridenberg, insisted on first trying them on! The merchant objected to the magnitude of the glove stretchers, whereat the fellow called him a Jewish son of a bitch. He was ordered out, and when outside, he dared the merchant to come out and get licked. Mr. Fridenberg, who is some on the shoulder, went out, and then the Irishman shot at him. It was then that Israel went up against the Ammonite, prevailed mightily, threw him down, took the pistol away from him, and was about to take the top of his head off, when others interfered and let the fellow off. That is the third pistol which that unoffending and worthy citizen has forcibly taken from ruffians who had shot at him.
The American Flag, Sonora, California, October 8, 1863 (Some on the shoulder in the 19th century meant he was a “big bruiser.”
KILLED BY THE APACHES – 1886
Benson, Arizona Territory – M. Goldbaum, a merchant of this city, who left here two weeks ago to prospect in Whetstone Mountain, was found murdered by Apaches sixteen miles south of here yesterday.
A CRESCENT CITY, CALIFORNIA PIONEER -1918
A host of friends will mourn the loss of Wolf Moms, one of the early settlers in Northern California, who died Friday night [May 31, 1918] at his home, 1388 E. 17th Street [Los I Angeles]. The funeral was held last Sunday afternoon. Rabbi Isidore Myers officiated. Burial was at the Home of Peace Cemetery.
Mr. Morris was born in Russian Poland eighty-five years ago, came to America by sailing vessel, went by boat to Panama, crossed the Isthmus on horseback and came to California by boat, settling in Crescent City, Del Norte County. He sold merchandise by horseback through Montana and Idaho forty years ago, and was several times attacked by Indians. For the past ten years he had lived in Los Angeles.
He leaves a Widow and eight sons and daughters – Samuel, and Abraham, of the Morris Hardware Company; Isidore, a lawyer; Jesse, in the army; Mrs. Rachel Livingston and Mrs. Jennie Livingston and Fannie and Frances Morris.
Help for Jews of Morocco from North San Juan, California, 1860
The Hebrew citizens of this place have contributed $28 towards the relief of the persecuted Jews of Morocco. Mr. A. Weil collected the amount and forwarded it to the San Francisco agency. We observe that a vessel was about to sail from New York stored with supplies for the sufferers.
The Hydraulic Press, North San Juan, February 11, 1860
A Nevada Justice of the Peace – 1892
Virginia City, Nevada – Mr. Louis Loebenstein was elected Justice of the Peace at the late election, the first time a Jew has ever been elected to the office. Mr. Loebenstein is a son of the late Jonas M. Loebenstein, of Baltimore, Maryland.
The American Israelite, Cincinnati, December 8, 1892
Salvation in Portland -1905
David Solis-Cohen, formerly of this city (San Francisco but he actually lived in Oakland), but now of Portland, who originally came from Philadelphia has been furnishing an interesting story about a Chinese vegetable gardener and peddler who became Christianized. He had been very friendly with a Jewish customer, but upon his conversion, told her that he was very sorry she and her family were bound to go “Hellee,” unless he could induce them to be saved as he had been. But later when his newly-arrived boy was attacked by a snowballing hoodlum, and the brave little son of the customer drove off the assailants, while the mother of the defender bound up the injured boy’s wounds, the Chinese father changed his opinion. He said he would say to the Sunday school teachers, when they told him the same old story and sought to embitter him
against his Jewish customers, “Me from Missouli; show me.”
A Yosemite Fable by I.N. Choynski -1898
The only foothold the Jews ever got in any country after being expelled from Spain, was in Calaveras County, this State, when a number of Marranos drifted into the slough of Stockton, and tramped up to the wonderful geysers, looking or a resting place, after a perilous voyage of several months from the inhospitable shores of Spain, whose Ferdinand and Isabelle spoiled the Egyptians – they came in sight of the marvelous cataract, and a child of nature told those wandering exiles – believing they wanted to know his name , that it was Yo Semite – meaning I am a Jew; and sure enough the Indians in that region are the very pictures of Jews.
Public Opinion, San Francisco, March 12, 1898.
Marriages in Red Bluff, California -1861
A perfect marrying stampeded has taken place, or is about to, among the Hebrews in this section. In less than six months, more than two-thirds of the single ones will have laced their necks in the matrimonial noose.
Red Bluff Beacon, quoted in the Marysville Appeal, April 27, 1861
My comment to curious was spam filtered
CuriousAmerican Said:
A stiff-necked people! If you don’t like us !!!! ieave!!! Esta Ud. envidioso.
Is there no end to the kvetching?
You complain if not treated equal.
You complain when you are treated equal.
I could find Jewish views of Christianity analagous to Jefferson’s/Adam’s views of Judaism.
From what I seen, you are more criticial of Christianity than either Jefferson or Adams were criticial of Judaism.
The granting of freedom was NOT sinister. It was just the granting of freedom.
CuriousAmerican Said:
Yes!!! Many if not most orthodox rabbis were opposed to emancipation and equality. They saw the dangers inherent in assimilation and would become a threat to Judaism itself which history has now vindicated their fears. As long as Judaism had not left the ghetto, it underwent no fundamental ideological crisis. The ideological crisis of the Jews began when we went out into the Gentile world. While religious emancipation may have been rewarding to some individual Jews not so for the Jewish collective and Judaism. We were meant to be a nation apart. Actually the Ghetto Jews of Europe had more rights and religious freedom as Jews than they do anywhere in the West today. They were exempt from military service, had their own religious courts and were mostly self sufficient. One could say they enjoyed a great deal of national and religious autonomy within the countries they lived in.
In Poland Jews lived in ghettos as they did everywhere in Christendom, but was it oppression? More likely than not, Jews opted to live in ghettos to preserve the Jewish way of life; Jews shielded themselves from Gentiles, not the other way around. Just before the major wave of pogroms shook seventeenth-century Poland, Jews enjoyed many privileges and held lucrative administrative and commercial positions. Jews were exiled from Spain largely in response to the exploding influence of the Marranos, the converted Jews. As Christian converts, they encountered no restrictions and almost took over Spanish society.
The extermination of Jews in the twentieth century followed their emancipation. In Ukraine, Jews broke out of the quarantine zones allocated to them by the tsarist government, and just two years later 200,000 of them lay horribly murdered. In Germany, Reform Judaism and communism trumpeted the assimilation of Jews into German society; a decade after the Weimar Republic, Jews were on the road to annihilation. Stalin was preparing to exterminate Soviet Jewry in 1953 in response to Jewish influence in Soviet society.
There seems to be a correlation between Jewish assimilation and pogroms. The writer Bernard Malamud said: “If a Jew forgets that he is a Jew, the Gentiles will remind him” Hitler didn’t claim as in past that the Jews were too alien and not German enough his claim was that the Jews alien non Aryans were too German.
yamit82 Said:
My Mother wanted me to join the Unitarian Church. I tried to go explain to her that the Unitarians and I were not a match . She countered,as always,” why not, the Unitarian don’t believe in anything”.
By ELI KAVON, The Jerusalem Post 2009.
“perhaps we should realize that America, as a nation, addresses our needs as Americans, but is indifferent to our fate as Jews”.
“Thomas Jefferson and James Madison fought for a separation of religion and state that in our own time allows us to worship our God in freedom.”
“Although Jews comprised a small part of the population of colonial America, the country’s Founding Fathers realized the importance of freedom of worship for even this small minority. George Washington’s 1790 letter to the Touro Synagogue in Rhode Island affirms the American commitment that bigotry would have no place in the US and that Jews would not be a tolerated minority but would “possess alike liberty of conscience and immunities of citizenship.””
“Adams wrote to an American-Jewish admirer in 1819. In the letter, Adams endorses the return of the Jews to their homeland in Israel. This proto-Zionist impulse sounds wonderful on the surface — but then Adams explains the reason for it: Once Jews return to the Land of Israel, they will “wear away some of the asperities and peculiarities of their character and possibly in time become liberal Unitarian Christians.””
“It is clear that Adams, like all of America’s Founding Fathers, supported the Jews’ right to worship their God in peace and prosperity. But as a typical man of the Enlightenment, Adams expects Jews to “see the light” and to leave Judaism. Jews embrace Enlightenment and Emancipation even today, without realizing its ground rules. The American and French revolutionaries granted Jews citizenship and equality but did so fully expecting that Jews would assimilate into the majority culture. And, in fact, that is what is happening in America today. Assimilation and intermarriage are eroding American Jewry and sapping its vitality. Today’s ethnic pride and multiculturalism are not forces that are strong enough to stem the tide of the phenomenon of “the vanishing American Jew.”
“In a letter to William Short, Jefferson claimed “Moses had bound the Jews to many idle ceremonies, mummeries and observances, of no effect towards producing the social utilities which constitute the essence of virtue.” It was Jesus, Jefferson wrote, who “exposed their futility and insignificance.””
” The reality that most of the founders only knew Jewish reality through the “Israelites” of the Hebrew Bible and had little understanding of Jewish history, belief and culture as they all developed in the Diaspora. The granting of religious freedom was not done with an understanding of the rich heritage of Judaism. Rather, this freedom was given with the understanding that it would be used to negate traditional Jewish identity. It was simply the logical outcome of political ideology, not love of Jews.”
CuriousAmerican Said:
Ya’betcha cowboy, my Old Testament can beat your New Testament!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!
I have met ONLY 1 Jew in my life with an inferiority complex. She came from an abusive family. Inferiority does not seem to be a Jewish trait.
This letter makes no sense.
Are you complaining about Emancipation and Equality?!
You are making a good thing look bad.
The French would elect the first practicing Jewish Prime Minister in Western History. Leon Blum.
Damned if you do. Damned if you don’t.
That is insane. Insane whining.
Emancipation was good, NOT bad.
As for Jefferson complaining about Jews; you should see what some of the comments he made about the Christian Bible.
Jefferson was egalitarian in his observations.
Napoleon was actually the first modern Zionist.
It was the British who sank that plan when they armed the Turks to defeat Napoleon at Acre.
Napoleon actually thought the Jews deserved their own state and that they would ultimately attain it.
That’s not a thought in fashion these days but sympathy for the hope of Jewish national restoration was widespread among the greatest minds of the 19th Century. What other peoples found, it would also be fulfilled among the Jews.
Zionism is a national liberation movement. No amount of lies and hate can conceal this profound truth.