Bible and Sword (31 page)

Disraeli wrote that speech with real feeling. In contrast with the rest of
Alroy’s
purple prose, decorated with silks and scimitars, Afrites and Cabalists, fountains of quicksilver and voluptuous princesses, it stands out starkly.
Alroy
, its author once said cryptically, represented his “ideal ambition.” Indeed, it would be strange if the young Disraeli, with his pride of race, his burning ambition, standing amid the exalted surroundings where his ancestors had ruled, had
not
dreamed that he himself might be destined to win back nationhood for his people.

If he did, the realities of English politics soon supervened. Four years later he entered Parliament determined to be prime minister, nothing less. (“By God,” said Lord Melbourne, “the fellow will make it yet.”) When next he published an eastern novel,
Tancred
, it shows him on the way to his goal, concerned no longer with a kingdom of Israel, but with an empire for England. He had intended
Tancred
as a novel of “Young England’s” search for spiritual rebirth. The hero, a world-weary duke’s son, has shaken the dust of England from his boots and come to Jerusalem to penetrate the “Asian mystery.” But hero and author soon forget all about that and become immersed in the swirling politics of the Middle East and in the over-all question of how England shall control the road to India.
The Syrian crisis was still fresh; the surging currents stirred up by Mehemet Ali’s bid for a sovereign Arabian state had not been quieted by his defeat. Curiously enough, Disraeli sees England’s opportunity in Arab rather than in Jewish nationalism. Half sardonically but with a foresight that is almost uncanny he pictures the possibilities.

Speaking through the mouth of Fakredeen, the emir of Lebanon, a wily, ambitious Syrian whose only religion is one “which gives me a sceptre,” he says: “Let the Queen of the English collect a fleet … transfer the seat of her empire from London to Delhi.… In the meantime I will arrange with Mehemet Ali. He shall have Bagdad and Mesopotamia.… I will take care of Syria and Asia Minor.… We will acknowledge the Empress of India as our Sovereign and secure for her the Levantine coast. If she like she shall have Alexandria as she now has Malta; it could be arranged. Your Queen is young: she has
avenir.…”
Indeed she did. Thirty years later the author of
Tancred
officially added the title “Empress of India” to the Queen’s other titles.

Tancred
includes other startling glimpses into the future. Two comic characters are discussing world politics:

“ ‘Palmerston will never rest till he gets Jerusalem,’ said Barizy of the Tower.

“ ‘The English must have markets,’ said the Consul Pasqualigo.

“ ‘Very just,’ said Barizy of the Tower, ‘I think of doing a little myself in cottons.’ ” Disraeli was joking, of course—or was he? Farther on a Jew of Jerusalem tells Tancred: “The English will not do the business of the Turk again for nothing. They will take this city; they will keep it.” The English public of 1847 may not have taken
Tancred
seriously, but history did.

So far the people of Israel had taken no active part in the gradual reopening of the path to Palestine. On the occasion of the first return from exile, when Persia was the intermediary power, they were ready as soon as King Cyrus gave the word, and they went back from Babylon forty thousand strong with their basins of gold, their vessels of silver, their servants and horses and camels and asses. But then they were near at hand, and the separation from Zion had lasted only fifty years. The second exile had lasted 1800 years, and its people were scattered over every latitude of the globe, dulled by the desperate effort simply to stay alive,
not
to be absorbed, not to lose their identity. They succeeded—the only people on earth ever to retain national identity without a national territory—but at grim cost. Survival was won only by turning inward, encasing themselves within a hard shell of orthodoxy, concentrating every thought on the only thing they could bring out of their country: its heritage and its code, the Torah and the Talmud, the Law. Other men could plow or build or fight. Without land, such occupations were closed to the Jews. What land could they seed and reap, or build on or fight for? When the Temple was pulled down, according
to an old rabbinical legend, a splinter from its stones entered the heart of every Jew. That stone in their hearts was their only country.

But with changing times it was not to be enough. “Without a country,” said Mazzini, the prophet of nineteenth-century nationalism, “you have neither name, voice nor rights nor admission as brothers into the fellowship of peoples. You are the bastards of humanity—Ishmaelites among the nations.” He was addressing the Italians, not the Jews, but his cry was the spirit of the age, and the Jews began to hear it too.

Until 1800 the centuries had gone by in passive waiting for supernatural intervention. The prayer “Next year in Jerusalem” had marked the passing of each year since 70 A.D. like the dripping of water on a stone. But now it began to dawn on first one and then another that only their own hands on their own bootstraps would pull Israel out of exile. “The Jewish people must be their own Messiah,” wrote the historian Heinrich Graetz in 1864. Many forces were at work in the nineteenth century to produce this revolutionary idea.

It is almost impossible to attempt even the briefest survey of the modern resurrection of the Jewish people without getting hopelessly mired in internal Jewish controversies and external European politics. Europe in the wake of the French Revolution brought the Jews into the period of the “Enlightenment” and emancipation, but also into a period of religious and social conflict that tore apart the unity of Judaism, so fiercely hugged over the centuries of imprisonment, only to be lost forever in the emerging struggle for freedom, citizenship, and finally statehood. The background is the history of Europe under Napoleon, then the reaction to the disappearance of Napoleon, the futile attempt by the Holy Alliance to clamp down autocracy, the revolutions of 1830 and ‘48, the rise of Nationalism, Liberalism, Socialism, the Commune in France, Bismarck and Pan-Germanism, the convulsions of Russia in
the last stages of Czarist senility. All these forces acted upon the Jews as the spasms and contractions of labor pains, driving them into the painful process of rebirth as a nation.

The process begins with the “Enlightenment” initiated by Moses Mendelssohn in eighteenth-century Germany, which shattered the protective shell of orthodoxy and opened the way to acquaintance with Western culture and participation in Western affairs. The reign of the Talmud and the rabbis was broken. All over Europe the shuttered windows were flying open. Jews read Voltaire and Rousseau, Goethe and Kant. The Reform movement followed, shedding the old rituals, trying to adjust Judaism to the modern world. Civil Emancipation became the goal. In 1791 the French Constituent Assembly had decreed citizenship for the Jews; Napoleon confirmed it wherever he had dominions. Reaction rescinded it, and thereafter it had to be fought for separately in each country. Civil Emancipation was won around the middle of the nineteenth century, and if it had been a success, Judaism would have ended there. But it was not; and in the process of discovering why not, the Jews discovered nationalism. They became aware that Judaism was dying; on the one hand petrifying into a dry husk of rabbinical mumbo jumbo, and on the other dissolving in the open air of Western “enlightenment.” If it were to be kept alive, it was in urgent need of a new soul. Nationalism provided it. From then on the movement toward Palestine slowly, hesitatingly, unhappily got under way, not out of enthusiasm but out of necessity. It was never a single movement along a straight line: it was an infinite splintering off of contradictory tendencies and groups: Reform against orthodoxy, nationalists against assimilationists, both against anti-Zionists, and, on the heels of all, the baying of the hound of anti-Semitism.

Political anti-Semitism was a creature of the nineteenth century. It rose like a black phoenix from the ashes of the
Napoleonic conquest, with Germany, it is no surpise to learn, as the scene. The “Hep! Hep!” that resounded through the streets of Heidelberg and Frankfort in 1819 to the accompaniment of riots and pillaging of Jewish homes went on down the century through the Damascus affair, through the May laws, the Pale and the pogroms of Russia, through the Dreyfus case to the ultimate holocaust of Hitler. Always it was pushing, pushing the Jews, some toward nationalism and Palestine, others toward escapism and assimilation.

This pressure was what proved enlightenment and emancipation illusory. Despite the nineteenth century’s fervent and touching belief in Progress, anti-Semitism did not disappear. The orthodox had once believed that they had only to wait long enough and the Messiah would appear and miraculously restore them to Zion. The assimilationists now believed that they had only to wait long enough and that if they were quiet, well-mannered, and cultivated, if they bothered no one, anti-Semitism would inevitably disappear in a haze of Progress and the brotherhood of man. But somehow it didn’t. Neither did it vanish before the magic wand of Marxism and the Socialist International. The Jews twisted and turned, seeking a solution in a dozen different directions, striving to be ordinary citizens of whatever country they lived in, yet still to be Jews; to find an escape for their persecuted brothers in the East, yet to keep their own hold on the measure of freedom and of the good life that they had found in the West. These pulls and tugs produced a tragic factionalism in Jewry unknown since the last days of the Temple, when Pharisees, Sadducees, and Zealots fought one another while the city fell about their ears. Divisions deepened, splinters multiplied, internal antipathies increased, hampering the effort toward nationhood as they hamper the nation today. But the baying of the hound kept the movement going. Herzl hearing it in enlightened France went home in agony of mind to write the
Judenstaat
and to call the Zionist Congress
that was to launch “the vessel of the Jewish state upon its way.” But fifty years earlier Moses Hess had heard it at Damascus.

Hess, like Herzl after him, was an “emancipated” Jew-one of the early German socialist leaders who thought of themselves as socialists first, Germans secondly, and Jews last if at all. Suddenly the Damascus affair hit him like an unexpected blow from behind. It showed that Jews could still be imprisoned and tortured and a whole community despoiled over a pretense dug up from medieval superstition. It spread a black shadow over every Jewish community from New York to Odessa. “Then it dawned upon me for the first time in the midst of my socialist activities,” Hess wrote later, “that I belong to my unfortunate, slandered, despised and dispersed people … and I wanted to express my Jewish patriotic sentiment in a cry of anguish.” But he was not content with anguish. He wanted a solution. There was only one. “Without a country … you are bastards of humanity”—Mazzini’s yet unwritten dictum was already inescapable. Emancipation was emptiness. No matter how bitter the truth, it had to be spoken. In 1862 Hess published
Rome and Jerusalem
, subtitled
The Latest National Question
. “The hour has struck,” he wrote, “for resettlement on the banks of the Jordan.” Country was a necessity. “With the Jews, more than with other nations, which, though oppressed, yet live on their own soil, all political and social progress must necessarily be preceded by national independence. A common native soil is a primary condition.…”

But he knew what the Shaftesbury enthusiasts never asked: that his people were far from ready. The Jewish masses were still locked behind rabbinical shutters that must be broken open from within; the “progressive” Jews were hiding behind vain hopes that would only be shattered “by a blow from without, one which world events are already preparing.” It was clear that “the main problem of the Jewish national movement is … how to awaken the
patriotic sentiment in the hearts of our progressive Jews and how to liberate the Jewish masses by means of this patriotism from a spirit-deadening formalism.” Only when this is achieved will “the restoration of the Jewish state find us ready for it.”

Hess went on from there to outline plans for colonizing Palestine. He hoped for the support of the powers in purchasing the Holy Land from the bankrupt Porte; but it was France in particular, where he was then living and where Louis Napoleon was already hungering after dominion in Syria, that he thought of as the intermediary power. With French support he foresaw colonies “extending from Egypt to Jerusalem and from the Jordan to the Mediterranean.”

While Hess was working out his solution a very different type of Jew was coming to the same point independently. Rabbi Hirsch Kalischer of Thorn in Prussia, an admired scholar of the old school, suddenly announced from the pinnacle of his Talmudic authority the doctrine of self-help. “Let no one imagine,” he wrote in 1860, “that the Redemption of Israel and the Messiah will suddenly appear from heaven and that amid miracles and wonders he will gather the Israelites of the Diaspora to their ancient inheritance. The beginning of the Redemption will take place in a natural way by the desire of the Jews to settle in Palestine and the willingness of the nations to help them in their work.”

In the same year he assembled a conference of rabbis and community leaders at Thorn to promote revival work in Palestine. Although little physical progress was made, Kalischer’s
Quest of Zion
, like yeast in a lump of dough, began to take effect. Other orthodox rabbis joined in the new attitude toward the Return, and through his disciples and associates Kalischer’s ideas began to penetrate the shadowy life inside the Pale. Only the Jews’ own efforts on the desiccated soil of Palestine, he taught, would make possible the final Redemption. He wanted Jewish soldiers
to guard Jewish settlers. He had no great belief in the benevolence of the Western powers. He preferred help from his own kind. He wrote letters to Montefiore and the Rothschilds urging them to finance colonization societies, to buy land, transport immigrants, settle those who knew farming on free tracts of land, employ teachers to train the others, make loans until the settlements became self-supporting, establish a police system, a military guard, an agricultural training institute.