Herzl would recognize all too well the tragic fantasy of assimilation. Op-ed.
By Melanie Phillips
(JNS) A perverse feature of the Jewish people is that they make one particular mistake over and over again. They are persecuted. They frantically try to assimilate into their host community in the belief that this will avert future persecution. They are persecuted again. They frantically assimilate again.
This week saw the publication of the first collected works of Theodor Herzl, the founding father of modern Zionism. The set initiated the Library of the Jewish People, a new series of works by classic Jewish writers issued by the Koren publishing house.
Publishing this now is particularly fitting because of striking similarities between Herzl’s time and today.
Gil Troy’s masterful introduction to the collection draws attention to the complexities of Herzl’s tortured life. This rings a loud contemporary bell, not just about the persistence of antisemitism but about the current attitudes of Diaspora Jews.
Assimilated and sophisticated, Herzl had an ambivalent attitude towards his Jewishness. Infatuated with the German high culture that was dominant in Europe, he refused to circumcise his son and lit Christmas tree candles for his children.
Jews had risen to the highest levels of German and Austrian political, professional and cultural society. Yet at the same time, Germany and Austria were becoming more and more pathologically hostile to the Jews.
Herzl was caught in a permanent identity crisis—a conflict between his “enlightened” Europeanized self and the Jewish culture whose fundamental importance he only gradually came to understand.
As he reeled from one antisemitic shock after another, he repeatedly tried to reconcile the high degree of assimilation achieved by European Jews with the fact that, for non-Jewish Europeans, the Jews were unassimilable.
In 1895, he was shattered by the conviction in Paris of the Jewish officer Capt. Alfred Dreyfus on a trumped-up charge of treason, with the profound Jew-hatred of the French on naked display. That year, he was further unnerved by the election of the vicious antisemite Karl Lueger as mayor of Vienna—a city described by Amos Elon in his book The Pity of It All as culturally dominated by Jews.
Realizing after the Dreyfus affair that the Jews would never be safe except in their own homeland, Herzl’s thinking nevertheless remained framed by his assimilationist mindset. As Elon writes, he thought the site of the new Jewish national home would be chosen by a committee of rational and scientific geographers and economists, and it would be a multicultural, multilingual state like Switzerland.
The echoes of all this today are unmistakable. In Britain and America, antisemitism has reached record levels. Yet their Jewish communities have their heads in the sand or are looking the other way entirely.
In America, a majority of Jews have embraced universalism and intersectionality. Although these ideologies are antithetical to the inherently particularist values of Judaism and fuel antisemitism and anti-Zionism as a result, “progressive” American Jews tell themselves they represent Jewish values.
For days, there’s been uproar over former President Donald Trump hosting two profound antisemites at his table: the rapper Ye and the white supremacist and Holocaust denier Nick Fuentes. Such criticism of Trump for helping legitimize antisemites, not least through his failure to denounce them and admit the magnitude of his error, is entirely justified.
But progressive Jews gloating over Trump’s behavior have themselves connived at the promotion of antisemitism. In particular, they have failed to condemn the “Squad” of Jew-bashing congresswomen.
Ye draws upon the ideology of Nation of Islam leader Louis Farrakhan, who has spent decades vilifying the Jews as “satanic.” Yet former President Barack Obama had previously helped with Farrakhan’s organization, former President Bill Clinton shared a stage and a smiling handshake with him and the Democratic establishment has remained silent about his Jew-bashing.
In Britain, Labour Party leader Sir Keir Starmer has gone to great lengths to demonstrate his commitment to rid the party of the antisemites who openly infested it under the former hard-left leader Jeremy Corbyn.
Yet Starmer had previously campaigned vigorously for Corbyn to become prime minister. Starmer’s current deputy, Angela Rayner, was a leading Corbyn acolyte. His foreign affairs spokeswoman, Lisa Nandy—who says she is a Zionist—has promised in the past to oppose what she called “the illegal occupation of Palestine” and the “blockade of Gaza,” and supported the Palestinian Arabs’ “right of return.”
Starmer has been extremely careful to press all the right buttons in his charm offensive to reassure Britain’s Jewish community. It’s worked. “Progressive” British Jews now think it’s safe to vote Labour again.
This is wishful thinking. Anti-Zionism and antisemitism still course through the left.
This week, the journalist John Ware won his third victory in the libel courts. He had sued the Labour party and certain individuals who falsely claimed that in his 2019 BBC “Panorama” program “Is Labour Antisemitic?”, Ware had knowingly exaggerated the scale of antisemitism in Corbyn’s Labour party.
In this week’s case, Ware had sued a retired TV producer named Paddy French.
Among French’s supporters were the hard-left film director Ken Loach and Roger Waters, the co-founder of Pink Floyd who was French’s main financial backer. Waters, who has a long record of antisemitic remarks, said that Ware was “entirely controlled by the oligarchs … bought and paid for.”
On the contrary—Ware’s stand was heroic, particularly because he acted alone and with no financial support from the BBC or anyone else. Despite the record damages of £90,000 awarded to him this week, Ware risks being left badly out of pocket if French is unable to pay up, due to the high costs of the case.
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Between 1970 and 2020, Europe lost 59% of its Jewish population through a combination of antisemitism, the collapse of Jewish communities and assimilation.
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Ware’s victory won’t stop French or Waters—with the rocker’s 550,000 Twitter followers—from pushing vicious falsehoods about Israel and the “world Zionist conspiracy” on social media.
Antisemitism will still roar out of control because it’s being fueled by defamatory lies about Israel. It’s not just the hard-left but the softer “progressives” who push this narrative, which is the cause of causes for Western liberals.
In both Britain and America, the Jewish community seeks ways of denying this reality in their overwhelming anxiety to fit into the dominant power structure. In order to pretend they aren’t different from everyone else, they tell themselves there are no barriers between them and non-Jewish Brits or Americans.
In a similar vein, Herzl and the Jewish communities of Germany and Vienna tried to rid themselves of characteristics that made them separate, telling themselves that assimilation made them as German or Austrian as everyone else. Such acceptance wasn’t true then and it’s not true now. The Jews are in the Diaspora on sufferance.
Last month, Israel’s Committee for Immigration, Absorption and Diaspora Affairs discussed a report published by the London-based Institute for Jewish Policy Research. It showed that between 1970 and 2020, Europe lost 59% of its Jewish population through a combination of antisemitism, the collapse of Jewish communities and assimilation.
The committee’s chairman, David Bitan, said, “In Europe, Jews are forced to conceal the Jewish characteristics. They are afraid to walk through the streets wearing a kippa, and the synagogues are guarded by local police.”
Dr. Dov Maimon of the Jewish People Policy Institute said, “There is no positive scenario for European Jewry due to the economic decline and the rise of Islamization.” Yet more than 80% of European Jews aren’t even thinking about leaving.
Antisemitism may be more widespread and violent in mainland Europe than in America and Britain, but the same baleful trends are all too obvious there too. Obvious, that is, for those with eyes to see.
If Herzl were around today, he would surely marvel at the astounding strength and vigor of the State of Israel; but he would also surely grieve that, for “assimilated” Diaspora Jews, little seems to have changed.
Melanie Phillips, a British journalist, broadcaster and author, writes a weekly column for JNS. Currently a columnist for The Times of London, her personal and political memoir Guardian Angel has been published by Bombardier, which also published her first novel, The Legacy. Go to melaniephillips.substack.comto access her work.
@Edgar
It was very kind of you to inquire of my great-grandfather, of blessed memory. You have actually stumbled upon a tale which I have rarely related, even to members of my own family.
I was named in my great-grandfather’s memory, and I came to spend a great deal of my teenage years pouring over his journals, which were a mix of personal, historical and philosophical tales detailing Chicago in the early 20th Century. I borrowed one of his journals from my grandmother as part of a school project as I recall, but reports he shared were so captivating that it led me to read each volume in turn, and this included a great many, though I don’t recall the number. He was quite detailed in some of his reports and led me to gain a greater appreciation of the history of the depression and WWII from a more personal perspective than I had learned from any other books I read. I recall his vivid description of frantically seeking his brother who had lost a tidy fortune in the ’29 crash, and feared that he would join the desperate souls jumping from windows to their death, which almost did happen. He also detailed the fall of the Republicans from power in Chicago, and, as a bedrock Republican and a major member of one of Chicago precincts, he related a great deal of the scuttlebutt relating to the shenanigans which took place on both sides of the aisle during his politically active career. I recall his hand writing was characteristically poor while he related the tale of sending his son and nephews to war and also upon learning of the horrors of the Holocaust. He also related the added tragedy of my grand uncle, who was present when the US forces freed some of the camps, and carried the scars of that event for the rest of his days with great difficulty. He shared his great excitement at the founding of Israel and his great fury when his own president, Eisenhower, when he stabbed Israel in the back – he counted the days with great excitement leading to when Nixon might replace Ike as president, only to pass away in ’59, a premature death due to his great distrust of doctors and “their bag of tricks”. He was a remarkable man, a prolific diarist, and I ironically count him as being one of my closest associates, though he never knew me.
Indeed, his journals came to carry a terribly important influence on me in a number of ways, but even more profoundly, it gave me an ever greater understanding of my own family as his perspective of his children and grandchildren was added to that of my own of my parents, aunts, uncles, and grandparents – I hardly recognized his impression of some of them while for others his assessment was quite similar to that of my own. And of course it gave me a deep and personal familiarity with a man I never met, but with whom I felt as if I had journeyed thru the best and worst of the twentieth century, right alongside him.
Knowing of my love of books and personal fondness for her father’s journals, my grandmother left his book collection to me in her will when she passed away about a decade ago, but sadly, the journals were not to be found among them, and their fate was never discovered. So my reading of them as a young teen, and my memory of them, such as it is, is all that remains of his efforts to share a record of his perspective as a lawyer, cantor, father, friend and faithful philosopher with future generations, and I have always counted this as an honored burden just as it was a very great personal tragedy.
You will have to forgive me, as I seem to have gone on a bit here, but no one has ever inquired of this tale before, and I really had a hard time keeping it this brief – a trait which is likely related to my great-grandfather’s prolific nature.
@PELONI-
Thank you for your compliments. Not as deserved as you may imply, being mostly ,I hope, common knowledge. However, you were also able to include a very attenuated (Hillel-like) couple of your own supporting views, right to the points. I totally agree. Your ancestor’s comment is truly an axiom.
You mention your great-grandfather’s “commentary”.
Do we take that to mean that he was a literary figure who made commentaries on the issues of the day.?? Or did you mean “comment”.??
I am interested to know more.
@Edgar G.
I’ve been wondering – why don’t we do what the others always accuse us of (and what they never fail to do for themselves), namely, band together (which we seem incapable of doing) and work solely for our own interests.
Let’s say we will stop spending money in the Diaspora on:
– the politicians,
– the poor, suffering, traumatized, eternally angry Jew-hating minorities who cannot wrap their minds around the problem of why in the world Jews are giving them money,
– on Holocaust museums which teach the public what can be done with Jews,
– all sorts of other museums,
– universities,
– libraries,
– hospitals,
– theaters,
– schools – there is even a Jewish organization (I forgot which state it is in) which every school year buys backpacks for the indigent students at a local school – I am sure the parents of the children also cannot wrap their minds around it,
– most Jewish organizations, especially the ones who “fight antisemitism”, and anti-Israel and pro-Arab NGOs, except for those who support the low-income or indigent Jews (YES, they exist!) and the true Zionist ones (the ones who know that Zionism = aliyah and act on it),
zillions of Jewish publications whose articles are just a lot of blah-blah-blah.
I think the above would free up a great deal of cash to use to support Israel and the Jewish people.
@Edgar
As always, a very thoughtful and elaborative comment. As a response to @stevenl’s question, I was going to quote Santayana
and reference my great-grandfather’s commentary that
But in your usual manner, you provide a far more detailed encyclopedic response which is likewise far more elucidating and explanative to the reader. Well done, as per usual.
READER-
I totally agree with you that Jews everywhere are aliens, (except in Israel)
Not only ARE but are made to feel that they are.by the goyim.
The “dual loyalty|” canard is still strongly believed, especially in The Goldina Medina these days -as always.
@steven1.
I have come late into this and will merely answer your question.
Perhaps there is really no specific point for History. But it it the concentrated desires of humanity to know what has gone before. The natural capacity of the enquiring human mind. We WANT to know what our ancestors were doing.
And, of course the major influence on the enquiring world was The Torah, a History of the Jewish People and its many offshoots. Of course the orah came late in a historical sense, but had the most influence.
,
Even before this there was Hammurabi, and historical accounts sprung up
independently in widely separated countries. Inevitable that people WANT to know who they are, where they came from, and what was happening 100, 200, 2,000 years ago.
The ancient world was a world of conquerors. THEY wanted their world to know what they had accomplished, and so they left records. Rameses 2 was notorious for this. Evne Mesha, with his “Moabite Stone” got into the act.
“The Ipuwer Papyrus” is now regarded by many, as being an account of certain events, instead of formerly being thought to be just an imaginative story.
Velikovsly, in his fascinating “Ages In Chaos” makes a very good explanation of it
Then there are the Tel El Amarna Tablets…..And the grandfather of all, the Sumerian clay tablets, tens of thousands of them. They must go back at least 5000 years or even much more.
You may know that there are history “cycles”. I mean that it was found in the early Middle Ages that noticeable historical events repeated themselves, not exactly but rough equivalents,, about every 400 years. There are larger and smaller cycles, but the 400 year cycle is mostly the one discussed.
For example, Nostradamus used this 400 year cycle to form his “prophesies”. .Because the events were not exact, so his prognostications were mystical and also inexact. many of his “prophesies” like predicting Hitler, and NOW it seems predicting the advent of Trump, are deliberately false, faked, and totally make out of whole cloth.
In other words he was a SUPER con-man 4 centuries before Barnum.,.
Side note; One of the very few beneficial things Barnum did was to bring Jenny Lind and her beautiful voice to the American public. It, of course was an unintended coincidence, as his only object was to make a fortune from the series of concerts he’d arranged.
@Reader Reminds me of the joke I came up with during the most recent bout of collective madness of 2020:
“I remember being asked to write an essay about what I wanted to be when I grew up in school in grade school or thereabouts,( thenabouts?, maybe circa)
‘ If I had known then what I know now, I just would would have written one word:
“Oppressed.” 😀
@Sebastien Zorn
You ARE a member of an oppressed racial group, you just don’t realize it because of the Jewish denial.
Jews are aliens with citizenships.
Even Israel is an alien country (or a country of aliens?)
@ Reader I said people said I was easy to identify too which is why I feel like a member of an oppressed racial group.
@Sebastien Zorn
It’s because they are easy to identify.
@stevenl Marx – I forget whether it was Karl or Groucho – said History repeats itself, the first time as tragedy, the second as farce.
Maybe it’s just that God has a wicked sense of humor?
Could it be that comedy really is sacred? I just realized that if you rearrange the letters of sacred you get scared.
@stevenl https://youtu.be/_7iXw9zZrLo
@stevenl I give up. What’s the answer? 😀
What is the purpose of history if history keeps repeating itself?
Skeezix Truly said.
@Sebastien
Perfectly stated!
Thank you for so succinctly describing this.
@Skeezix
Sure, in speeches, but most of the victims of physical attacks these days are the ultra-Orthodox though that hadn’t always been the case. I used to be singled out and I am completely secular and assimilated. Fact is, being religious won’t protect us any more than being irreligious will. Being feared will. Just like what the mafia did for the Sicillians and the IRA for the Irish (Catholics, anyway.) A strong, independent, proudly Jewish Israel helps Jews everywhere. When we doubt ourselves, the world will never give us the benefit of the doubt but will use our own words against us.
Skeezix seems to have nail it. If you want to be religious and live in America, you can. Will some dislike you, mistreat you, talk behind your back and so forth, Sure!. But if you want to walk upright with Hashem and remain faithful to the torah you can. Sure, some of the rules and rabbinic decrees will cause you some problems in this day and age, but do the best you can and move forward. If you sin repent and do better tomorrow.
If you go along to get along. You’re not being faithful to Hashems commandments. The world is not perfect, neither is any of us, but we must struggle every day to be faithful and observant. It’s one thing to try and serve God when you’re not even Jewish, but if you know your Jewish and refuse to serve God……. I piety the Fool.
Jer. 16:14-16. The fishers come first and that will be/is easier than the second wave of hunters. It’s time for the Jews to return to God Torah and Israel.
Also, these days Israel is starting more and more to resemble the British Mandate – when antisemitism in the Diaspora grows to terrifying proportions, Israel decides to make very, very sure to limit aliyah “to ensure the Jewish character of the state” by, in fact, setting up the Diaspora as an easy prey to Jew-haters.
@Skeezix
Yes, you are “good” and most of the other Jews are “bad” – it is nice to know whose fault everything really is and blame it on the victim.
Here is the biggest cause of the Jewish assimilation in the Diaspora – most Jews have to obtain secular education and work to survive, and the Orthodox Jewish community simply will not be able to provide all the Jews with jobs in that miraculous case when all the local Jews become Orthodox but the outside world is not kind to those Jews who want to hold regular jobs and observe mitzvot at the same time (I don’t think so, I KNOW so).
On top of that, most Orthodox Jews are not that keen on mixing with the “secular” – the only ones who keep trying to introduce Torah to the “other” Jews are the Chabadniks.
Less than 100 years ago, the properly Orthodox were exterminated also just like everybody else, so actions do have consequences but often not the consequences we expect.
Skeezix
wow… wow… the true analysis of antisemitism of today world…
most of the jews today became nihilists… in renouncing your GOD you renounce your humanity…
Who is at the “Tip of the Spear” in America for Jew Hatred.. which ignites like Gasoline.. at the slightest spark?
Hollywood Jews, Wall Street Jews, Powerful Rich Jews…
Left Leaning Democrat Jews..
Who are these Jews?
80-90-100 Percent of these Jews, are Jewish by having a Jewish Mother.
They are am haaretz – they do not keep Shabbat, nor do most of them know care or keep the Torah…
Funny, that they are the ones that are constantly pointed out by Jew haters…
One summer – I studied 2,000 years of Jewish history, post Diaspora…
In country after country – again and again and again.. same pattern
Liberal Intelligentsia Jews want to leave behind Torah and Assimilate…
The nations react..
Jew hatred grows…
God tells us in the Torah again and again and again..
Jews have one job, one purpose..
Live modestly and pursue all aspects of Torah knowledge and Life.
God tells us -Middah Keneged Middah
Actions have consequences.
No exceptions