Chapter 4
Politics
When Aristotle famously declared in his Politics that “man is by nature a political animal,” he thought of the capacity of humans to distinguish between right and wrong and good and bad. This quality was not only valuable for the individual, but was a key ingredient, he thought, in making both a household and a city-state.
While often lacking a state, Jews have been decidedly political animals throughout their history. They have demonstrated the ability to leverage the assets they possess to frame a strong sense of communal identity, as well as to thrive in challenging environments.
Some have suggested that the fact that Jews did not have sovereignty for two thousand years meant that they did not have a political history at all. This claim cannot be sustained. Jews had a rich political history, both in their homeland and in the diaspora, in their own state and beyond. To be sure, earlier eras demanded of the Jews a more muted and subordinate political voice compared to the modern age, but Jews constantly refined the skills of negotiation and accommodation through interactions with political powers in ancient and medieval times. And while they may not have had a state of their own, they linked their security and well-being to the fortunes of states, which largely served them in good stead.
Meanwhile, the modern era enabled a wider range of Jewish political expressions and deeds than ever seen before. A key point of entry into the modern political universe was the debate over whether Jews should be accorded full rights of citizenship by the emerging nation states of Europe. Perhaps most famously, Count Clermont-Tonnerre, a young aristocratic delegate, asserted in the midst of a discussion in the French National Assembly over the emancipation of the Jews in 1789: “The Jews should be refused everything as a nation, but granted everything as individuals.” To gain full entry to the enlightened French state, he insisted, Jews would have to undo the strong bonds that tied them to their co-religionists and to Judaism’s traditional norms.
Clermont-Tonnerre’s oft-quoted prescription elicited an array of responses over the course of the nineteenth century. Some Jews reacted by hastening their efforts to leave behind traces of their Jewishness in order to “pass” into the Gentile world. Others set out to negotiate between the demands of the new political order and the desire to retain some of their traditional habits and affiliations; they became active in the state-sponsored religious communities that were newly established. Still others railed against the structures of power that denied to Jews—and others—full equal rights. This latter group of Jews often supported radical change in their host countries and beyond, focusing on the downtrodden at large rather than on Jews in particular.
Meanwhile, by the end of the nineteenth century, a group of Jews began to question the reliance of Jews on Gentile hosts. They altered the rallying cry of Jewish activists from “emancipation” to “auto-emancipation,” as the Russian-Jewish doctor Leon Pinsker titled his 1882 manifesto. It was time, Pinsker declared, for Jews to recognize that despite their dispersed condition, they were not merely a loose band of individuals, but a nation deserving of the respect incumbent on that status. The physician Pinsker went on to offer a striking diagnosis: Gentiles were afflicted with a disease, “Judeophobia,” that made Jews strangers everywhere they dwelt. To overcome this fate, Pinsker and fellow Jewish nationalists proposed different schemes and sites. Some sought to solve the problem by fortifying the Jewish nation in the diaspora. Others focused their efforts on restoring the Jews to their ancient homeland in Palestine, a project that eventually lead to the establishment of the State of Israel in 1948.
That seminal event in the history of the Jews had many consequences, one of which was to bring to fulfillment the long-standing hope of a return to the homeland. The aspiration to return was connected to the restoration of political sovereignty, which, traditionally, was linked to the coming of the Messiah—in line with the Talmudic declaration that “there is no difference between the present world and the messianic days other than an end to political subjugation.” Although many leading Zionists eschewed traditional religious sensibilities, and even saw their movement as a renunciation of them, their vision of a reborn Jewish state was wrapped in grand historical and even messianic terms. That said, they would no longer wait for a messiah figure to redeem them, instead choosing to take action themselves to change the course of Jewish history.
The Zionist effort to restore Jewish sovereignty in the homeland was one of the main threads in the history of Jewish politics, but not the only one. Jewish politics in a broader sense also includes the kind of ongoing social adaptation that Jews undertook to ever-changing circumstances, frequently in settings in which they were a small minority. In those cases, Jews sought not sovereignty, but often a narrower form of communal autonomy. To gain a clearer picture of the range of Jewish political activity, this chapter will explore three defining relationships that have engaged and left a deep imprint on Jews as political actors.
Jews and the community
Because of their sparse numbers, the Jews had to make utmost use of their political skills. They parlayed their economic utility and cultural versatility into a grant of toleration that allowed them to maintain a rich communal life. A key to their success was knowing how to position themselves within a triangle of power of which they were one leg, along with the sovereign and the general populace. Typically, they aligned themselves with the ruling regime, mindful of the fact that there were clear benefits, as well as risks. Nevertheless, over the course of centuries, Jews’ recourse to “vertical” or “royal” alliances with the ruling power was an effective strategy for guaranteeing their physical protection.
In the wake of the Holocaust, the political thinker Hannah Arendt questioned whether, in the Nazi era, this alliance had turned from a source of security to a writ of execution for Jews, who were lulled into excessive dependence on the state and went passively to their deaths. Many have challenged Arendt’s sharp claim, suggesting that nothing in their previous experience could have prepared Jews for the genocidal nature of Nazism.
Indeed, it is instructive to see that premodern sovereigns, who belonged to competing religions, were prepared to guarantee the survival of the Jews and accord them control over their religious affairs. One might have expected that the tradition of granting latitude to Jewish religious observance under Babylonians, Greeks, and Romans would have come to an end with the rise of Christianity, given its vexed relationship with Judaism. In fact, Christian rulers largely continued and at times even expanded the practice of allowing Jews to regulate their communal and religious affairs.
That would have been impossible were it not for a major theological innovation by Church Fathers in the fourth century. The question they faced was simple enough: how to justify the survival of the Jews in light of the fact that they were held culpable for the ultimate capital crime—the death of Jesus.
St. Augustine developed his view of the Jews as a “witness people,” whose dispersion and debasement reflected their rejection by God, but who should be kept alive as witnesses to the truth inhering in the Old Testament. Once it was determined that allowing the Jews to survive was theologically acceptable and even necessary, Church officials had to pair their desire to convert them with the obligation to protect them. For example, Pope Gregory the Great, who served from 590 to 604, issued a famous edict that declared that the Jews “ought to suffer no prejudice” and, in fact, could not be forcibly baptized, even though he and his successors fervently hoped for their conversion. As keepers of the Church’s orthodoxy, popes were more likely to uphold this restrained principle of tolerance than the Christian rank and file, which was more inclined to act on its enmity in violent ways. Here too was a version of the triangle of power insofar as Jews dwelt between the strictures of Church doctrine and the sensibilities of their local neighbors.
This status required them to develop a prudent and savvy attitude toward the non-Jewish world. They did not have the luxury of cutting themselves off completely from that world; their very economic survival depended on extensive interaction. Conversely, their commercial skills, contacts, and acumen were valued by non-Jewish rulers. Christian sovereigns in medieval Europe invited Jews into their realm, granting them special charters, or “privilegia,” that spelled out their rights and obligations to the sovereign. The charters granted a good deal of internal autonomy to Jews. On this basis, the designated leaders of the community, both lay and rabbinic, could regulate the religious and economic affairs of the community with relatively little interference from the outside. That is not to say that relations were always harmonious within the community—for example, between rabbis and businessmen, or even within either of those groups. But Jews for the most part managed their own affairs quite well, boasting their own executive and judicial bodies that oversaw most communal matters.
It is striking to see how committed some medieval Christian sovereigns were to the welfare of Jews in their realm. One of the most far-reaching examples comes from Duke Boleslaus of Greater Poland, who issued a charter in 1264 known as the Statute of Kalisz. The statute not only provided for the settlement of Jews in his realm, but also offered extensive protections to them, including a fine on Christians who failed to heed the cries of Jews in the middle of the night as well as a prohibition on municipal officials from intervening in the affairs of the kehilah.
Versions of the kehilah were found throughout the entire Jewish world, from the judería in medieval Spain to the ghetto of early modern Venice to the Jewish millet in the Ottoman Empire. And yet, it was in eastern Europe that communal autonomy reached its most developed form. Although regarded in modern times as the site of unremitting hostility—because of a string of violent outbreaks on its soil culminating in the Holocaust—eastern Europe was a far more multidimensional home to Jews. Not only were they able to build strong local communities, but they also created, beginning in the sixteenth century, regional federations of communities to represent their expanding interests. The largest and most successful example was the Council of Four Lands (Greater Poland, Little Poland, Ruthenia, and Volhynia). The council arose out of the annual market in Lublin, Poland, where merchants assembled, joined by Jewish jurists who came to discuss and adjudicate legal matters that could not be resolved at the local level and required a higher court of appeal. Over the course of its nearly two centuries of existence, the council featured both a supreme court and a legislative assembly that met at the markets at Lublin and the Galician city of Yaroslav. From the perspective of the Polish kingdom, the council’s regional reach made it, at least for a time, a more effective organ of tax collection than appealing to a large number of individual kehilot (communities). With the development of a more centralized state apparatus in the eighteenth century, however, the utility of the council diminished, and it ceased to exist in 1764.
Some enemies of the Jews came to see the council as “a nation within a nation”—and thus as conclusive proof that Jews were capable of loyalty only to their own, and not to the host government. Meanwhile, Jewish nationalists in the twentieth century regarded the council as a model of inspiration. They sought to recapture the spirit of collective cohesion that premodern Jewish life possessed, while asserting more aggressively the need for Jews to take control of their own fate. For Diasporist nationalists such as Simon Dubnow, Yisroel Efroikin, and Vladimir Medem, the goal was two-staged: first, to acknowledge and fortify the very idea of a Jewish nation; and second, to create a realm of “national cultural autonomy” within the framework of an existing state in which Jewish linguistic, cultural, and educational norms would reign. Most advocates of this form of nationalism had in mind a Yiddish-speaking enclave in eastern Europe where the largest number of Jews in the world lived. In the period following the First World War, a number of political parties and even government ministries (for example, in Lithuania) were founded to promote the ideal of Jewish autonomy. During that time, the newly established Soviet Union conceived of and then established in 1934 a Jewish Autonomous Region in Birobidzhan close to the Russian-Chinese border. This concept of a Soviet Yiddish autonomous center never succeeded in drawing the masses, although it did attract a small number of Jews from around the world. That said, the ideal of an autonomous Jewish enclave in the diaspora has continued to excite literary imaginations, animating the work of writers such as Philip Roth in Operation Shylock (1993), in which a fictional protagonist named Philip Roth advances a doctrine called “Diasporism” that encourages Jews to leave Israel to return to their diaspora homes, and Michael Chabon in The Yiddish Policemen’s Union (2007), whose setting is a Yiddish-speaking enclave of Jewish cultural autonomy in modern-day Alaska.
Although they did not develop a successful and long-standing example of Jewish cultural autonomy, Jews did endeavor to foster strong communal institutions in the modern age. The emancipatory bargain that Count Clermont-Tonnerre attempted to strike—citizenship rights in exchange for a diminution of Jewish group affiliation—did not suppress their longstanding communal impulse altogether. Moreover, European nations in the nineteenth century, especially those with a recognized state religion, often allowed for representative bodies to serve on behalf of religious communities. In the Jewish case, such centralized bodies as the French consistoire or the German Gemeinde could draw dues from and maintain some measure of discipline over their members, although still considerably less than the medieval kehilah.
Vestiges of this institutional model survived into the twentieth century in the form of the British Board of Deputies and Jewish Leadership Council, the French CRIF, and the German Zentralrat; similarly, beyond the European continent bodies such as the Argentine AMIA and DAIA, the Australian ECAJ, and the South African Board of Deputies could be found. By contrast, the pattern of centralized and often state-sponsored communal leadership that prevailed in Europe never took hold in the United States, where the joint traditions of disestablishment of religion and voluntary associations dominated. In the United States, a large and influential Jewish community did arise, but it was never represented by an official or single institutional body. Rather, the community was made up of a thick web of local, regional, and national organizations, among the most prominent of which were the American Jewish Committee, the Anti-Defamation League, B’nai B’rith, and the Hadassah/Women’s Zionist Organization.
Jews and the state
Just as Jews have been able to preserve a strong measure of communal identity over centuries, so too they have constantly sought out and aligned themselves with state power. In fact, the two developments are closely connected, since Jews have almost always required state support and authorization to constitute their communities.
This reliance is one of the main facets of the long relationship between Jews and the state. The other is the Jews’ own quest for state sovereignty, which has a long history. The origins of this latter impulse extend back to the late eleventh and early tenth centuries bce, when the institution of kingship was introduced in ancient Israel. Saul, the first king of Israel, had a tense relationship with his son-in-law, David, whom he had once tried to kill. Upon ascending the throne, David moved the capital of the fledgling Israelite kingdom from Hebron to Jerusalem. David was said to have many talents—as giant-slayer, warrior, poet, musician, unifier of the tribes. But because he had spilled so much blood in battle, he was not permitted, according to the Bible, to build a suitable edifice to house the Ark of the Covenant that contained the Ten Commandments. That task fell to his second son, Solomon, who built the Holy Temple in Jerusalem.
The completion of the Temple in the mid-tenth century created a major new Israelite cult shrine, although it was not the only Israelite shrine in Palestine. Local sites of sacrifice were spread throughout the country. Over time, the Temple’s reach expanded, and it became a chief destination for religious pilgrims outside of Jerusalem, especially after the destruction of the northern kingdom of Israel by the Assyrians in 722 bce. The subsequent period was marked by internal dissension and external threat from a variety of local powers. It also featured the increasingly bold voice of Israelite prophets, who offered both hope and admonition over Israel’s sins up to—and then after—the destruction of the Temple in 586 bce.
Thus came to an end the first period of Israelite sovereignty, which yielded to an era of “diaspora politics” in which there was not a single center. From that point forward, the desire to return to the land, rebuild the Holy Temple, and restore Israelite kingship became a matter of daily recitation and fervently held prayers. This ambition was partly realized during the time of the Hasmonean dynasty in the second and first centuries bce, followed by the Romans’ Jewish vassal king, Herod. The subsequent destruction of the Second Temple reignited the aspiration for sovereignty. But for much of late antique and medieval times, that desire floated on a distant and otherworldly plane of time, in contrast to the everyday needs and expectations that shaped the Jews’ sense of the present. According to that second domain of time, sovereignty was a far-off goal. The tangible short-term objective was communal autonomy for a minority living under majority rule. This more limited quest did not entail an absence of politics. On the contrary, Jews were able to make use of the political wisdom they had accrued from the time of their exile in Babylonia to safeguard their self-interests by aligning with the state.
Of course, the alliance with state power was not infallible. The fact that Jews, because of their particular and exacting rituals, received certain dispensations that other groups did not made them the targets of hostility and periodic violence. One notorious instance was in Alexandria in 38 ce, when lingering resentment by both Egyptian and Greek residents of the city toward Jews, fueled by the agitation of the local governor, Flaccus, broke out into violent riots. The prominent philosopher Philo subsequently wrote a condemnation of him, Against Flaccus, that made clear that this episode was an exception to the rule of peaceable relations between diaspora Jews and their ancient hosts. At the same time, the episode highlighted the vulnerabilities Jews experienced as part of the complex triangle of power.
Arrayed against those vulnerabilities were the extensive protections that local and regional rulers granted Jews under both medieval Christendom and Islam. In addition to the charters of Christian sovereigns, Muslim rulers adopted a policy of measured toleration toward Jews. An important early affirmation came in the Constitution of Medina, a pact forged by Muhammad in 622 ce. The constitution was an attempt by the Muslim prophet to assure peaceable relations among warring groups, including Jewish tribes, in the Arabian Peninsula. Among its clauses were several that guaranteed non-Muslims the same political rights as Muslims, as well as according them religious autonomy. These principles were reiterated in the Pact of Umar, a legal document of uncertain provenance, that came to regulate relations between Muslim rulers and non-Muslim “protected people” or dhimmi, including Jews. Under its terms, Muslim rulers were obligated to provide protection and allow religious autonomy to those dhimmi who upheld the pact. At the same time, it enumerated a number of restrictions on Jews and Christians, including the prohibition on building new houses of worship and the obligation to maintain a deferential attitude toward Muslims and Islam. Over time, Muslim rulers also required dhimmi to pay a special poll tax known as the jizyah. This kind of contractual relationship reflected the status of Jews as a tolerated, but subservient religious minority in the Middle Ages, under both Muslim and Christian regimes. To be sure, there was considerable variation, both between Christian and Muslim regimes and within each. Actual living conditions depended on a mix of factors—the temperament of the ruler, the mood of the populace, the economic climate of the day, and even the presence of influential Jewish court advisors who lobbied on behalf of their community.
If medieval sovereigns evinced varying degrees of toleration for the Jews, the hope arose that a new political principle, equality, would become the hallmark of modern regimes. Jews believed that they had amply demonstrated the trust required to earn rights of citizenship, although the charge of “dual loyalty” frequently arose. To assure himself on this account, the newly declared French emperor Napoleon Bonaparte convened in 1806 a distinguished group of Jews in Paris, posing to them a set of questions intended to determine whether the deepest affinities of Jews lay with the French or the Jewish collective. The group, which was named the Paris Sanhedrin in evocation of the great ancient body of sages, responded in somewhat convoluted but positive terms. For example, it affirmed that a Jew could marry a Christian under French civil law, and that the bonds of loyalty to the fatherland, France, were stronger than those between two Jews of differing nationalities. To a great extent, the Sanhedrin’s formulations marked a decisive inversion whereby halakhah assumed a position of secondary significance to civil law in the lives of Jews.
This inversion signaled, in turn, the Jews’ enthusiastic devotion to the states of which they were now or soon to become citizens. In general, one of the central lessons of their long journey through history—at least up to the twentieth century—was that the alliance with state power, with all its vagaries, was the best bet for security and well-being. This was one of the reasons why major Jewish financiers such as the Pintos, Rothschilds, Warburgs, Sassoons, and Loebs invested heavily in the economies and governments of the countries in which they lived.
Challenges to this historical lesson inevitably appeared. One of the most notorious examples was the “Dreyfus Affair” of 1894 in which a French army office, who happened to be Jewish, was falsely accused of espionage for the hated Germans. The rapidly escalating uproar surrounding Captain Dreyfus provoked the French masses on both side of the issue, pro-Dreyfusards and anti-Dreyfusards, to give loud voice to their opinion about whether Jews were capable of loyalty to their state. Observing the unfolding spectacle on the Paris streets was a visiting Jewish journalist from Vienna, for whom it was unimaginable that here in the French capital, where the first decree of Jewish emancipation was granted in 1790, crowds were chanting “death to the Jews.” The sight shocked the journalist, an assimilated Jew named Theodor Herzl, who previously had considered leading a group of Jewish children to the baptismal font as a reflection of his belief in the virtues of full social integration. Beholding the angry masses on the streets, Herzl now came to the conclusion that Europe was no longer hospitable to Jews. In a feverish pitch in 1896, he authored a short pamphlet in German called The Jewish State (or more accurately, The State of the Jews) that called for Jews to take control of their own historical destiny and leave Europe to create a state of their own. One year later, Herzl organized and presided over the first Zionist Congress in Basel, Switzerland. At the end of that gathering in the summer of 1897, Herzl recorded in his diary that he had set in motion an inexorable process leading to the establishment of a state.
It took fifty-one years for a Jewish state to come into existence. During that period, Zionists of many different stripes—socialist, religious, left-wing, and right-wing, among others—expounded their vision of what a Jewish national society in Palestine should look like. By the second decade of the twentieth century, the main focus of Zionist activity had shifted from Europe, where the World Zionist Organization was founded, to Palestine itself. Already by that point, Zionists had come to understand that the country of their dreams was inhabited by a large native Arab population that looked on with growing suspicion at the arrival of the new Jewish settlers. Tensions over land, labor, and overall political aims rose between Jews and Arabs, each of which regarded itself as the true heir of the ancient land. Following a particularly explosive conflagration at the Western Wall in 1929, in the wake of which more than one hundred Jews were killed by Arab rioters, Zionist leaders homed in with new intensity on the goal of creating a Jewish state in Palestine with a Jewish majority. This aim gained particular urgency in the 1930s, with the rise to power of Adolf Hitler in Germany and his increasingly realistic plans to rid the world of Jews. In the face of that grave threat, the leader of the Zionists in Palestine, David Ben-Gurion, had to make difficult choices about where to allocate the limited resources at his disposal. He exhibited a combination of steely resolve, ideological commitment, and strategic pragmatism in guiding Zionism to the realization of its goals.
A huge step toward that objective came with the vote by the United Nations General Assembly on November 29, 1947, to partition Palestine into Jewish and Arab states. The Zionists accepted the vote, while the local Arab population and neighboring Arab countries rejected it and the underlying premise of partition. They could not imagine surrendering a majority of the land of Palestine to a group of recent arrivals that amounted to one-third of the population. Ben-Gurion, for his part, took no time to celebrate the UN decision, assuming that armed hostilities were not far away. And indeed, already in early December, local Arab attacks commenced in Jerusalem, soon to break out into a wider conflict between Jewish and Arab forces in the next year. The war of 1948 passed through various stages: a first phase between local Arab and Jewish forces; and a second phase, after the Zionist leadership proclaimed the State of Israel on May 14, 1948, when the armies of neighboring Arab states invaded.
5. Jews throughout the world, though especially those in Palestine, greeted news of United Nations General Assembly Resolution 181 on November 29, 1947 with great celebration. The resolution called for the partition of Palestine into Arab and Jewish states, which Zionists regarded as definitive international recognition of their claim to sovereignty.
6. In the midst of the armed struggle between Jews and Arabs in 1948, Palestinians took flight and sometimes were expelled from their homes in towns and cities such as Jaffa. They tried to bring with them whatever possessions they could as they fled to neighboring countries, such as Jordan, Lebanon, and Syria, where many of their descendants remain as refugees to this day.
The various rounds of battle led to two dramatic and intertwined results. First, the Zionists, fighting what they saw as a war of survival, gained the upper hand and achieved independence for the new State of Israel. The result was dramatic: the restoration of political sovereignty to the Jews in their homeland after two thousand years. Jews the world over, including many who were agnostic or even hostile to Zionism before, now expressed joy at this epochal event. The stakes of the war in Palestine were particularly high, coming a few short years after the murder of millions of Jews in the Holocaust. The newly created state quickly became a magnet for Jewish immigrants in need, both Holocaust survivors and Jews displaced from Arab lands. For these Jews, the arc of their life journey had curved from exile to homeland. More broadly, Jews had regained control over their collective fate.
7. In June 1967, Israel won a quick and overwhelming victory over Arab states, following which it came to occupy new territories, including the West Bank, where it initially placed army posts and then civilian settlers. In September 1967, Israeli prime minister Levi Eshkol and defense minister Moshe Dayan took a helicopter tour of the new army installations in the West Bank.
A second major outcome of the 1948 war moved in the opposite direction. In the course of fighting, it is estimated that more than 700,000 Palestinian Arabs fled or were expelled from their homes in what they referred to as the Nakba (catastrophe). This event was a searing and defining moment in Palestinian national consciousness. The ongoing legacy of this displacement is the presence of millions of Palestinian refugees outside of Israel/Palestine who remain at the core of the ongoing conflict between Jews and Arabs to this day. While this conflict has not prevented Israel from growing into a powerful and technologically advanced society, its perpetuation may well pose a substantial political, economic, and moral burden on the Jewish state in the future. In similar fashion, Israel’s conquest of territory with a large Palestinian population in the 1967 Six-Day War, particularly the West Bank of the Jordan River, has led to an ongoing occupation that endangers the long-standing Zionist ideal of a Jewish state with a Jewish majority.
Jews and the self
To the extent that Jews had an active political life prior to 1948, it came about not through a state of their own but rather in small communities embedded in non-Jewish regimes. It may well be that the dispersion of Jews in these communities the world over, instead of being concentrated in a single country, was an important factor in their survival.
Much of Jewish political activity has been devoted to the preservation of the collective. But this work would have been unimaginable without the active intervention and guidance of individuals. In the case of Zionism, the ambition of reviving the Jewish nation in Palestine required the skill and vision of individuals, ranging from the founding ideological forefathers, Theodor Herzl, Ahad Ha-am, and Nachman Syrkin, to committed implementers, such as David Ben-Gurion, Berl Katznelson, Golda Meir, and Chaim Weizmann.
Individuals served as key interlocutors on behalf of communal interests much earlier in Jewish history. The Hebrew prophets, beginning with the towering Moses and moving forward to Amos, Isaiah, and Jeremiah, among others, mediated between human and divine realms, striving to translate God’s imperatives into graspable terms. They insisted that their audience, the children of Israel, pursue justice as a fulfillment of the principle that human beings were crafted in God’s image. Their charge that “Justice, justice, thou shall pursue” survived well past the end of prophecy, becoming an important inspiration for Jewish social activism, often of a manifestly secular nature, in Europe and the United States in the twentieth and twenty-first centuries.
Meanwhile, the Middle Ages pushed to prominence the role of the Jewish intercessor with the non-Jewish world. In Muslim Spain, the figure of the court Jew came on the scene. The Jewish courtier was often a man of substantial means, fluent in multiple languages, conversant in a dizzying array of intellectual topics (from poetry to astrology), and closely aligned to the king. Court Jews performed the double task of acting as trusted advisors to the sovereign and as representatives of the interests of the Jewish community with the court. This figure also played an important role in central Europe between the sixteenth and eighteenth centuries. Some scholars suggest that early modern court Jews, through their money-lending and banking capacities, played a key role in the rise of the modern nation-state, for example, by helping to finance the new institution of a regular standing army that could assure constancy of support for the regime. At the same time, because of their close ties to the sovereign, court Jews could become targets of resentment and hatred from an angry populace. One especially well known court Jew, the early-eighteenth-century financier Joseph Süß Oppenheimer, was so loathed for alleged corruption and tax gouging that, on the death of his patron, in 1737, the Duke of Württemberg, he was immediately arrested and subsequently executed. The Nazi propagandist Joseph Goebbels seized on the story and arranged for the production of a movie based on Oppenheimer, “Jud Süß,” that became one of the most notorious pieces of anti-Semitic agitation in modern times.
The court Jew of early modern Europe was one variant of a broader vocation of Jewish intercession known by the Hebrew term shtadlanut (whose practitioner was a shtadlan). The shtadlan promoted the interests of the Jewish community with the sovereign, ensuring that taxes be paid promptly and, concomitantly, that the promised protections and autonomy be provided. Shtadlanim were communal liaisons who came to be trusted precisely because they and fellow Jews were deemed to have no political aspirations of their own, that is, no desire to establish their own state, and thus were able to pledge full loyalty to the sovereign. Although most who filled this role were men, perhaps the best known court Jew of all was a woman, Doña Gracia (Mendes) Nasi, who was born a Christian in Portugal in 1510, reclaimed her family’s Jewish heritage after leaving her home country, and ended her life as a wealthy businesswoman and enormously influential communal leader at the Sultan’s court in Ottoman Turkey.
Early modern court Jews performed a range of important functions. They also marked out, through their behavior, the advent of a new attitude and comportment that can be called modern. In the pursuit of their assignments, which often included socializing at court, they could be less scrupulously observant in upholding Jewish law than the rest of their co-religionists. The license they may have taken in indulging in non-kosher food or drink, for example, was justified in the name of performing communal service. The new liberty of the court Jew highlights a broader trend: the desire of Jews in the eighteenth century to make their way out of the tight-knit and inward-looking kehilah. By modifying the social and ritual practices of Jews, the court Jews opened the door to the outside world and, as one notable scholar wrote, “prepared the way for a new era.”
This era was marked by a new emphasis on the individual. Up to this point, the focus has been on individuals working on behalf of the Jewish collective, from prophets to court Jews. The modern era upended the priorities of previous epochs, transforming the individual’s well-being into an end in itself. This was not solely or even primarily due to the fact that some court Jews slipped from full observance into a more lax state. It was a pillar of the new Enlightenment worldview that placed great emphasis on the rational faculties of individuals. The new political theory that accompanied this belief regarded the individual no longer as a tolerated subject, but rather as the citizen of a state to whom both rights and responsibilities devolved.
8. Doña Gracia Nasi Mendes was one of the most powerful Jews in the sixteenth century. Born into a Roman Catholic family that had been forcibly converted from Judaism in Portugal, she then “returned” to Judaism, using her business acumen and wealth to support other Jews (and especially other former conversos) to excape the scrutiny of the Inquisition in Antwerp, Venice, and Ferrara, Italy. Eventually, she made her way to the Ottoman Empire, where she joined forces with her nephew and son-in-law, Don Joseph Nasi, to continue her business and charitable activities.
Jews, who had been constantly placed at the margins of Christian European society, were now included in this vision but on the condition that they surrender, as Clermont-Tonnerre demanded, a good portion of their communal identity. One French Jewish leader of the day, Beer Isaac Beer from Lorraine, internalized this demand when he urged his fellow Jews in 1791 to “divest ourselves entirely of that narrow spirit, of Corporation and Community, in all civil and political matters.”
Beer’s call points to one of the great challenges of the Jews’ entry into modernity: how to realize the benefits of the new individualism without abandoning their Jewish roots altogether? This was a challenge of which Beer’s German contemporary, Moses Mendelssohn, was keenly aware. In the face of constant calls to convert, Mendelssohn steadfastly held on to his scrupulous Jewish observance. And yet his observance was different from that of his forebears in one regard: it rested on a view of religion as a matter of rational choice rather than of rote obligation or coercion. Consistent with this view, Mendelssohn did not believe that rabbis should have the power of excommunication. Jews should be free to think and practice as they choose, indeed, to exert their personal autonomy.
Mendelssohn’s life and thought left behind a complicated legacy. At the most personal level, his mix of ritual observance and commitment to personal autonomy proved to be a difficult balance to uphold for his family; four of six of his children ended up converting to Christianity. In terms of intracommunal politics, his challenge to the supremacy of rabbinic authority coaxed into existence the early-nineteenth-century movement to reform Judaism, which then triggered the reactions that led to the rise of Orthodox and Conservative (or Positive-Historical) Judaism. These denominational camps would leave a deep imprint on modern Jewish life, especially in the United States. Meanwhile, Mendelssohn’s advocacy for full civic rights for Jews inspired several generations of Jewish political activists in Europe ranging from the Polish-born Frenchman Zalkind Hourwitz to the German activists Gabriel Riesser and Ludwig Börne. Whereas Hourwitz’s France granted Jews rights in 1790–1791, it was not until 1871 that Jews gained full political emancipation in Mendelssohn’s native German lands.
The staggered pace of emancipation had a good deal to do with the political map of Europe in the nineteenth century, which was redrawn on numerous occasions, for example, after the Congress of Vienna (1815) and the Franco-Prussian War (1870–1871). It also had to do with Europe’s lingering ambivalence toward the Jew. Even when Jews had gotten rid of “the narrow spirit of Corporation and Congregation,” even when they had abandoned the language, rites, and dress of their pious forebears, they were often received with skepticism and lack of warmth. Caught between worlds old and new, European Jews adopted a variety of strategies, ranging from conversion to renewed religious commitment to political radicalism.
Those who adopted this last path sought to translate the historical experience of Jews as a persecuted minority into a commitment to a more equitable society for all. Perhaps the most significant critic of the injustices of society was Karl Marx, born a Jew and baptized as a child, who agitated in the latter half of the nineteenth century for a sweeping human emancipation that would overturn the existing economic and political orders. Marx spawned several generations of radicals, who included prominent Jews such as Kurt Eisner, Rosa Luxemburg, and Leon Trotsky in Europe as well as Abe Cahan, Emma Goldman, and, later, Gus Tyler in the United States. Brandishing this commitment to fight injustice, Jews became important allies of African Americans in the civil rights struggle in the United States; leaders in this struggle ranged from the wealthy businessman Julius Rosenwald in the early part of the century to the legendary Rabbi Abraham Joshua Heschel in the 1960s. So too in the anti-apartheid struggle in South Africa, Jews including Ronald Kasrils, Albie Sachs, and Joe Slovo played prominent leadership roles. In related fashion, Jewish women initiated and led movements devoted to women’s rights, from the Germans Bertha Pappenheim and Regina Jonas in the early twentieth century to the Americans Betty Friedan, Gloria Steinem, Sally Priesand, and Blu Greenberg in the late twentieth century.
This roster of figures makes clear that not all modern Jews imagined themselves as close allies of the state; rather, some chose to swim against the current of establishment politics. But given their historical proclivity for the “royal alliance,” it should come as no surprise that Jews have distinguished themselves in positions of political leadership in Europe, the United States, and elsewhere. A highly selective list of Jewish state officials includes Benjamin Disraeli (nineteenth-century British prime minister,) Matthew Nathan and Herbert Samuel (British colonial officials), Louis Brandeis (early-twentieth-century U.S. Supreme Court justice), Walter Rathenau (early-twentieth-century German foreign minister), Léon Blum and Pierre Mendès-France (twentieth-century French prime ministers), Ana Pauker (mid-twentieth-century Romanian foreign minister), John Key (New Zealand prime minister from 2008), Madeleine Albright (late-twentieth-century U.S secretary of state), Helen Suzman (long-standing South African parliamentarian), André Azoulay (senior advisor to the royal court of Morocco), Joseph Lieberman (U.S. senator and candidate for vice president in 2000), and Bernie Sanders (U.S. senator and candidate for president in 2016).
These individuals continued the long-standing Jewish practice of investing hope in the possibility of positive change through the state. To one side of them were the Jewish rebels who devoted their lives to fighting the inequality found in established states; and to the other side were those who felt as strangers in a Gentile world and aimed to establish a self-standing Jewish state. The path of the latter group, the Zionists, led to the attainment of sovereignty, an act that has served as an anchor of Jewish political life in the twentieth and twenty-first centuries. Indeed, the state of Israel has not only been home to its citizens; it has also become a source of pride, attention, and support for Jews who choose not, or are unable, to immigrate to it. Israel’s symbols and leaders—from Ben-Gurion to Menachem Begin to Yitzhak Rabin—were and are revered in much of the Jewish world. In that regard, association with the sovereign state of Israel has become a prominent—and in many circles, dominant—form of Jewish identity, even for those who live beyond the country’s borders.
At the same time, modern Jewish life revolves around another axis of sovereignty, one that is the natural outgrowth of Moses Mendelssohn’s vision of autonomy. It is what a pair of Jewish scholars, Steven Cohen and Arnold Eisen, called in 2000 “the sovereign self,” referring to the typical Jewish individual who decides on her life path without excessive fealty to the weight of the past or to established communal institutions. This form of “sovereignty” rests on the proposition that there are many portals, not just one, through which to enter into Jewishness—and that the decision rests entirely in the hands of the individual.
The contrast between these two forms of sovereignty is striking. One is rooted in Israel, the other in the diaspora, especially in North America; they represent the two main demographic and political centers in the Jewish world. One emphasizes a collective vision of identity and speaks in defense of communal obligation, whereas the other heralds the individual and his right to personal autonomy.
And yet, this contrast between communal and individual politics should not be overstated. After all, the American Jewish community, where the culture of personal autonomy has sunk deep roots, has also been an exceptionally strong supporter of Israel within the American political system, in which it exerts an influence well beyond its numbers. Whether that advocacy will continue as before—given shifting demographic currents in American Jewry and the growing drift between Jewish and Israeli political values over the Israeli-Palestinian conflict—remains an open question. Several outcomes are imaginable: it is possible that the tension between the two regnant forms of sovereignty will become more pronounced in coming decades. It is also possible that a deeper sense of the benefits of a mutually reinforcing relationship will develop, in line with Jewish philosopher Simon Rawidowicz’s notion of an equal “partnership” between the two Jewish centers. And it is possible that a significant realignment in the balance of power will occur as Israel continues to grow demographically and North America declines. Whichever of those scenarios—or another—will prevail, it is important to note that the founding of the State of Israel and the growth of the North American Jewish community represent two of the most noteworthy chapters in the long political history of the Jews.