Courage
I have been reading books by Maurice Samuel (1895-1972). He was born in Roumania, taken to England at the age of five, grew up and was educated there, and emigrated to USA during the First World War. Samuel was arguably the best 'public intellectual' involved in Jewish affairs during his time, which extended from the Balfour Declaration (he became a friend of Weizmann) to his death. His most popular work was The World of Sholom Alecheim", written in 1943, just as that world was being eradicated. As this will suggest, he cared and thought deeply about Jewish values/history/religion-- a single coherent topic, as he would insist.
Samuel speaks to me. He speaks with a special eloquence about that single issue--Jewish values/history/religion--which has always been and still is the central issues of the Jewish people: why do they form a whole, how is the whole to mutually evolve, what has it been, and what should it be. Thus, just below the surface of the news, his topics are as important today as when they were written, and I want to quote him here and in future posts in that spirit: just as if here were writing today.
He wrote the following at the end of a chapter in his book The Professor and the Fossil, speaking of Jewish endurance and survival in the Middle Ages:
We need not speak of the courage it needed to die for one's faith at the stake, or to become for its sake a wanderer in a hostile world. More impressive in its way was the ability to stand up to the choreography and decor of humiliation which the Middle Ages added to their economic and physical maltreatment of the Jew: the ghetto, the yellow badge, the spitting ceremonials, the insults, the naked foot-races, the blood libels, the accusations of poisoning the wells. Hundreds of thousands of little people accepted the verdict of an ever-renewed malevolence without a thought of purchasing security and comfort by defection. And escape was so easy, so simple! The "racial" rejection of the Jew was unknown in the Middle Ages. It was all a matter of belief. The Churchmen were eager to win souls; the conversion of the Jews was an ideal; and there were prelates of a genuine Christian disposition who, protecting the Jews in times of popular bloodthirstiness, made the offer of Christianity in a spirit that was particularly tempting. The answer of the faithful was No. The Jewish people had a task to complete and would not quit in the middle.
It would be so easy to give in, to be welcomed by all the progressive peoples of the world, just as our forbears were welcomed by the genuinely Christian prelates--so easy to take the drug of acceptance and die as a people. Israel would sink slowly and peacefully (perhaps) into being another Levantine state--the Jews like the Christians in Lebanon. It is hard for me to believe that that courage of which Samuel speaks has been finally beaten out of the Jewish people. Was all that sacrifice so meaningless?