Chapter 15

The Greatest Horror, the Greatest Triumph

In This Chapter

Anti-Jewish violence throughout Western Europe

The Enlightenment brings a message of hope

The rise of nationalism and the new racism

Surviving the Holocaust

Most history books (and news reports) are filled with two kinds of stories: “We kicked their collective butt” (military conquests and defeats) and “However bad your life looks right now, it’s nothing compared to how bad these folks had it.” But each of these stories is only part of a much bigger story of human progress. This is especially true when it comes to Jewish history, which so often focuses on how hard the Jews have had it rather than the periods when life was truly wonderful.

That said, the parts of the Jewish story we are visiting in this chapter aren’t exactly full of good laughs. Jewish history in the past 500 years has been a rollercoaster of events, with thrilling highs and catastrophic lows. Although many of the details in this chapter are sad, the essential strength of Judaism and the Jewish people shines through.

When Poland Was a Heartland

Polish and Lithuanian kings, like many other Christian rulers, invited Jews to settle in their lands during the thirteenth and fourteenth centuries. The Jews brought experience with trade and money lending, and they helped boost the heavily agricultural economies of these Eastern European countries.

Perhaps because Poland and Lithuania were far from the major centers of Western Europe and the Catholic Church, the Jews were relatively protected and allowed to participate in a wide array of career options not available elsewhere. Of course, the Jews suffered times of persecution and the occasional riot, but during the period of expulsions from other lands, Poland and Lithuania offered relative peace.

Over time, the Jews were able to rent land and farm, and as their families grew, the Jews spread throughout Eastern Europe. However, they still usually lived separated from their Christian neighbors, in small villages called shtetls. It’s a measure of how insular their communities were that these Jews spoke a combination of Hebrew, German, Polish, and Russian (which would come to be called Yiddish, see Appendix A), more often than Polish or Lithuanian.

Four lands, one people

Over the centuries of relative freedom, the thousands of separate shtetls around Western Russia, Lithuania, and Poland came to form a federation called the Council of the Four Lands. The Council, which acted like a behind-the-scenes, independent Jewish parliament transcending national boundaries, ruled on legal issues concerning the Jewish people. Surprisingly, the Council was heavily secular, though, of course, it included some rabbis. The Four Lands area was like a haven for many Ashkenazi Jews, much like the Ottoman Empire was for the Sephardim (see Chapter 14), and Jewish life remained reasonably good until the middle of the seventeenth century.

The Chmielnicki massacres

Over time, Poland had slowly annexed increasing portions of the Ukraine. However, many of the Greek Orthodox Christians in the Ukraine weren’t exactly pleased to be gobbled up by a Catholic country. In 1648, the Ukrainian Cossacks rebelled, led by a man named Bogdan Chmielnicki (khmel-nyit-ski). Much like the ethnic cleansing that later occurred in the late 1990s in Serbia and Croatia, the Cossacks tortured and massacred everyone who wasn’t of their religious faith, slaughtering Polish nobles, Catholic clergy, and Jews.

Poland allied with Sweden to fight off the rebellion; the Cossacks allied with Russia. The warfare was intense, and both sides slaughtered the Jews. By some accounts, as many as 100,000 Jews died, and the fighting led countless thousands of Jews to flee to Germany and Lithuania. These areas became major centers for Jewish education and culture over the next 300 years, developing such luminaries as the Ba’al Shem Tov (see Chapter 28) and Elijah ben Solomon Zalman, known as the Vilna Gaon.

The Dawning of a New Age

Outside of Poland and the surrounding areas, the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries were less violent, but in many respects more restrictive. For example, in 1555 Pope Paul IV ordered that all Jews had to live separated from non-Jews, in walled neighborhoods. The first of these communities was placed next to a cannon foundry, called a ghetto in Italian, leading to the name still used today to describe a section set aside for a particular population. The ghettos quickly became overcrowded and disease-ridden.

Some lands, like Germany and Prussia, made it uncomfortable to be a Jew in other ways. Some cities imposed a head tax imposed on all cattle and Jews that entered town. Throughout Europe, Jews were also at a disadvantage because they weren’t permitted to attend secular schools or universities. Wealthy Jews were often given more rights, such as the right to live within city limits and — subject to a difficult permit process — the right to marry.

The Enlightenment

You may remember seeing the opening scene in the movie 2001: A Space Odyssey. The one where the apes are sitting around and suddenly one realizes that it can use a bone as a tool to break another bone? Every now and then, a shift in consciousness happens on the planet, after which the world will never be the same. That appears to be what happened in the early 1700s, though no single event or person (or even ape) caused the shift.

Philosophers such as Rousseau suddenly started asking questions like, “Why not treat non-Christians the same as Christians? The Jews may have different rituals, customs, and beliefs, but they’re human beings, too.” For most people today, this idea is as obvious as using a tool, but ideas such as these were outrageous for the day and reflected a revolution of thinking that came to be called the Enlightenment.

By the late eighteenth century, a large number of people in the American colonies — people who had built a country with their own hands — felt that they should no longer be beholden to any other government. The American revolution was led in large part by well-read intellectuals like Thomas Jefferson who, upon penning the Declaration of Independence, laid the backbone of the very first government in history that offered the Jews full rights as citizens. Of course, there were only about 2,000 Jews living in the United States at the time, but this freedom would later bring over a million Jews to the American shores.

The question of citizenship

The French revolution of 1789 changed the face of Europe, and the French Declaration of the Rights of Man, which specifically notes that no one should be persecuted for their religion, brought the Enlightenment (or at least many facets of it) to the political arena. However, when a group of Jews soon after asked to be accepted as citizens, the French National Assembly debated the issue for two years before finally agreeing.

Although there were many people in the Assembly who didn’t want to see the Jews given any rights, the question of citizenship echoed inside the Jewish community, too: Were the Jews a separate nation or people, or were they French people (or German people or Italian people, or whatever) who were adherents of a Jewish religion? Napoleon Bonaparte raised this issue once again in 1807 by gathering a number of rabbis and Jewish scholars as a new Sanhedrin (ruling legal body) that would decide important Jewish matters.

As it turned out, this Sanhedrin was only a shallow political gesture. Napoleon called it to assembly only once for the express purpose of asking a series of questions about the Jews’ loyalty to France. Astonishingly, this was the first time in history that a Jewish court of authority officially agreed that Judaism was a religion and not a separate people. The Jews of France first had loyalty to France, they said, not to the Jewish people.

Napoleon was pleased with the result and spread this particular message of Enlightenment throughout the countries he conquered. Other rulers, too, began to be more tolerant of religious differences during this time. The Jews were often allowed to leave their ghettos and attend schools, though most Jews tended to be wary of mixing too much with the non-Jewish population.

Going Beyond the Pale

Most people believe there are two basic kinds of Jews: Ashkenazi and Sephardic (see Chapter 1). However, throughout the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, the European Ashkenazi population became increasingly split between those Jews who participated in the Enlightenment (in countries such as Germany and France), and those who didn’t (in countries such as Russia, Poland, and Lithuania).

In the 1770s, after years of fighting, Poland was partitioned and absorbed by Lithuania, Austria, and Russia. Russia had little interest in the Enlightenment or emancipating the Jews, or just about anyone else, for that matter. Trying to figure out what to do with the hundreds of thousands (perhaps millions) of Jews it had recently acquired, Russia set aside an area, called the Pale of Settlement, inside which the Jews were allowed to live. The region was enormous, but its segregation from the rest of Russia kept contact and trade with Christian communities to a minimum.

The result was a pressure cooker in which the Hasidic and Mitnaggid movements were born (see Chapter 1), creating the “black hat” Jewish culture that has become a fixture of Jewish life in large communities around the world.

Tsar Nicholas I of Russia, not content simply to segregate the Jews, tried various means to convert them to Christianity. He used all the old tactics, like making life as miserable as possible (throwing them out of cities, and so on). Then he created special Jewish schools to teach the “enlightenment,” which to him meant simply eliminating the Talmud. Finally, in 1827, the Tsar instituted a quota of Jewish boys to be conscripted into the Russian army and lowered the minimum age from 18 to 12, sometimes as early as age 8. The term of service was 25 years; many either converted or died due to poor treatment. Such tactics were clearly systematic and cruel attempts to humiliate and punish the Jews into assimilating.

Responses to Enlightenment

Back in enlightened nineteenth century Western Europe, Jews began considering the same issues that many Jews debate to this day: How Jewish can you be and still be part of the modern world? And what does it mean to be Jewish anyway? After all, if Judaism was a religion — rather than a nation or a people — then Jews could choose whether or not to be Jewish. Suddenly, many Jews in Germany and France no longer felt they had to conform to a Jewish culture, resulting in the loss of a strong Jewish community.

These Western European Jews reacted to the enlightenment in several ways. Some, finding Western society and culture more exciting than the Judaism they had grown up with, decided to convert to Christianity. Of course, most of these Jews didn’t believe in Christian theology any more than a Jewish one. For example, the poet Heinrich Heine, who as a Jew was unable to get a permit to live in Germany’s capital, converted, noting “The Baptismal certificate is the ticket of admission to European culture. Berlin is well worth a sermon.”

Reform

Instead of converting, some Jews responded by demonstrating that Judaism could conform to what they saw as the advances of modern secular life. Believing that being Jewish wouldn’t be so “bad” if it weren’t so obviously different, these Jews radically recoiled from traditional Judaism, creating the Reform movement. Here are some highlights of the movement:

Early Reform Judaism insisted that there was no such thing as a Jewish people; Judaism was only a religion. They later reversed their position on this.

When religious scholarship began to recognize that Judaism had always evolved over time, the reformers felt that all sorts of changes were possible. For example, they replaced references to Jerusalem and the Messiah with prayers for justice and brotherhood for all humanity.

They tried to make their observance look like those of their Protestant Christian neighbors. They played organ music on Shabbat (against Jewish tradition, which reserved music for the ancient Temple), they spoke in the dominant language (mostly German) instead of Yiddish, and some congregations even attempted to celebrate Shabbat on Sunday!

They instituted Jewish schools that emphasized secular studies over Talmudic studies, and they generally taught that Jewish law (Torah and Talmud) was less important than the ethical teachings of the Prophets.

The Reform movement reacted in large part to what they considered empty ritual and dogma. We can certainly understand the need for more spiritual fulfillment, but in the early years, the Reform movement tended to drop Jewish observances rather than actually reform them. The result was fulfilling for some, and just as empty and disillusioning as strict traditionalism for others. As we discuss in Chapter 1, the Reform movement has slowly been shifting back to increased observance and more attention to spirituality.

To change or not to change

Many Western European Jews rejected the Reform movement’s policies; some even tried to get the government to stop them. However, the traditional orthodox world also split into two camps. Some Jews wanted to continue living as they had in the ghetto, speaking Yiddish and having little to do with the modern world. For them, maintaining tradition meant never changing with the times. These are the folks whom today we tend to call “Ultra-Orthodox.”

Other rabbis felt the necessity to change with the times but refused to strip away the millennia of Jewish tradition. Rabbi Samson Raphael Hirsch, who laid the foundation for much of Modern Orthodox or Neo-Orthodox Judaism, said, “Judaism is not a religion; the synagogue is not a church; and a rabbi is not a priest. Judaism is not a mere adjunct to life. To be a Jew is the sum total of our task in life.”

However, the neo-Orthodox movement agreed that Jews should learn the language of the land and have both religious and secular education. Hirsch led his prayer services in Hebrew but gave his sermon in German (not Yiddish). He argued that while it was important to be a part of the world, halakhah (Jewish law) was to be followed even if it meant less acceptance by the non-Jewish world, even including the loss of a job.

Between Reform and Orthodoxy, a number of other movements sprang up in the 1800s. For example, the roots of Conservative Judaism, which would have a major impact in America during the twentieth century, were laid by Zachariah Frankel (1801–1875), who accepted that the Jews were a people but rejected the literal truth of the Torah (see Chapter 3).

The Rise of Nationalism and Racism

The nineteenth century saw the growing zeal of nationalism around Europe, and large nationalist groups in Germany and France became increasingly powerful. All nationalist ideology rests on an “us-versus-them” mentality, whether it’s “our country is better than theirs” or “our pure white race makes this country great, and impure racial stock weakens us.” In an us-versus-them mentality — no matter how ludicrous or simple-minded — the Jews were slated to be on the losing “them” side. The Jews, especially those who believed that as they assimilated they would be increasingly accepted, had a rude awakening.

The return of anti-Jewish policies

It quickly became clear that many people didn’t care whether or not the Jews considered themselves a separate nation, or even whether or not the Jews were fiercely nationalistic French or German citizens. In some countries, such as Austria, politicians began running — and winning — on specifically anti-Jewish platforms.

In England, no Jew could be inducted into Parliament because he would have to take an oath “on the true faith of a Christian.” Over an eleven-year period in the mid-1800s, the wealthy and influential Lionel de Rothschild was elected to Parliament six times by his London community; however, he was forced to withdraw each time until the government finally found a way to let him take his oath as a Jew, using the Hebrew Bible.

France, once the bastion of Enlightenment, showed its continuing deep distrust of the Jews in 1894 when a high-ranking official in the French army, Alfred Dreyfus, was framed for treason because he was Jewish. Surprisingly, Dreyfus was extremely assimilated and didn’t even show interest in Judaism. Nonetheless, at his public trial mobs repeatedly chanted “Death to the Jews.”

Around this time many nationalists began embracing the concepts of “race” and “racism” that were part of the emerging anthropology and theories of evolution. Suddenly, even converting to Christianity was no longer a reasonable alternative for the Jews because they were perceived not as a nation or as a religion, but as a race — and one inferior to the dominant whites. (As we say in Chapter 1, the idea of Judaism being a race is clearly absurd — there are African Jews, Asian Jews, Indian Jews, and so on. Even the racial characteristics of Ashkenazi Jews and Sephardic Jews are different.)

The pogroms

In the 1880s the Russian government began tolerating and even sponsoring pogroms (massacres, or literally “riots”) directed at the Jews. At the time, over half the world’s Jews lived under Russian rule. Over the next few decades, hundreds of thousands of Jews were killed or maimed in these massacres.

In large part, the sadistic pogroms were a policy tool of the government, helping to turn anger away from the nobility toward the “other” in their midst.

Although the word “pogroms” conjures up visions of “the old country” a long time ago, the pogroms continued into the twentieth century.

Getting Worse and Getting Out

After the assassination of Tsar Alexander II in 1881, the Russian pogroms became significantly worse, and tens of thousands of Russian Jews decided that things wouldn’t get better anytime soon. Granted, it wasn’t just the violence; poverty and general economic conditions also worsened drastically. Between 1880 and 1920, about two million Jews (about a third of the Jews in Europe) decided enough was enough, and they emigrated.

Some rugged individualists — like those cowboy types who settled the “Wild West” of America — moved to Palestine (which was ruled by the Ottoman Empire until 1917). Others simply moved to other Western European nations. The vast majority, however, moved to the United States of America, where the Constitution defended people’s rights, and, it was said, “the streets were paved with gold.”

Passage to Palestine

Among the many journalists who attended the trial of Alfred Dreyfus (see The return of anti-Jewish policies earlier in this chapter) was a man named Theodore Herzl. Herzl was, like so many other Jews of the time, nonreligious and very assimilated. So when he saw the French crowd almost riot with bloodlust, shouting “Death to the Jews,” he was deeply unnerved. Herzl, shocked and horrified that in this modern civilized country such a travesty of justice could take place, became convinced that Jewry was doomed in Europe. The only solution, Herzl decided, was for the Jews to have their own homeland, a country that would always take them in.

Although he was nonreligious, Herzl became obsessed with Zionism (the movement promoting a Jewish state), and today he is known as the father of modern Zionism. After the First Zionist Congress in 1897, Herzl tried to talk the Sultan of the Ottoman Empire into giving up Palestine, to no avail. He discussed the problem with Pope Pius X, who told him, “The Jews have not recognized our Lord, therefore we cannot recognize the Jewish people.”

As pogroms became increasingly bad in Eastern Europe, Herzl approached England for assistance. Their offer: Jews could use Uganda as a temporary refuge until Palestine worked out. However, as bad as the violence against the Jews became, the vast majority of the Zionist Congress insisted that only Palestine would do.

Many Jews did sneak into Palestine, where they were able to buy land and build settlements. By 1909, the Jews bought enough empty land on the Mediterranean coast that they founded a new city, the first all-Jewish city in Palestine, called Tel Aviv.

Close, but not quite there

When World War I erupted in 1914, Jews enlisted in every country where they were allowed to serve. Many people don’t remember that there were Jews in the French military, American military, and — notably — the German military, where they fought and died wearing German insignia. After the Ottoman Empire entered the war, Britain and France conquered much of the Middle East, and in 1917 England gained control of Palestine.

England almost immediately issued the Balfour Declaration, which advocated a Jewish state. Unfortunately for the Zionists, because of the political realities of the day, it would be another 31 years until the English actually handed over the power of the province to the Jews.

In 1919, Germany, the biggest aggressor of the war, was defeated and forced to sign the Treaty of Versailles. The loss of territory and incredible reparations they had to pay pushed the country into a terrible economic and emotional depression in the early 1920s. Germany seemed to go from super-power to super-shame overnight.

Hitler’s rise to power

In the minds of some Germans, the loss of the war was a flaw of emancipation. Rather than blaming the German nation and the German people, they blamed the Jews — seen as an insidious race of foreigners — for sapping the German spirit. By the early 1930s, much of the world had fallen into an economic depression. In Germany, a man who claimed to have the answer for the country’s problems rose to power: Adolf Hitler.

Hitler’s National Socialist party (which was known by the contraction “Nazi”) offered glory, prosperity, purpose, and a solution to Germany’s “Jewish problem.” Hitler was democratically voted in as Chancellor of Germany in 1932. (He won the most votes, but it wasn’t a majority of the populace). A year later, he dismantled the German democracy and became a dictator.

The Jews, Hitler believed, were responsible for Germany losing the war, for the economic depression, for the communist revolution in Russia, and for every other problem imaginable. He turned rationality on its head, arguing that racial purity was the key to success. The Nordic Aryans were the most pure, the Slavic peoples were less pure, black people were near the bottom of the list, and the worst were the Jewish people, a race that he considered genetically criminal and by its very nature eroding to the fabric of society.

Hitler’s original plan was simple: Make life so bad for the Jews that they would leave the country. But by 1940, Hitler had changed his tune: The only way to succeed, he felt, was to murder every Jewish person in his expanding empire.

The Holocaust

We can’t do justice to the enormity of what is today generally called the “Holocaust” and, by many Jews, the Shoah (Devastation). The Shoah is just too big. Here, we attempt to briefly tell what happened and explain how this nightmare became reality.

In the mid-1930s, the Nazi party instituted laws that were meant to make the Jews miserable enough to emigrate. Laws prohibited Jews from work for the government, placed boycotts on their businesses, expelled their children from schools, and so on. The government created concentration camps to hold anyone, Jewish or non-Jewish, considered dangerous: political activists, communists, members of trade unions, Romani (gypsies), homosexuals, Jehovah’s Witnesses, and many Jewish journalists, lawyers, and community leaders. These concentration camps were basically prisons and were different than “death camps,” which appeared later and were specifically designed to kill people. Some concentration camps also became death camps, but some were simply sources of slave labor for the Germans.

Too little, too late

Finally, in 1935, the Nazis instituted the Nuremberg Laws, which stripped Jews of their citizenship and prohibited mixed marriages. The Jews had no choice of converting; the Nazis considered anyone who had Jewish blood (meaning at least one grandparent was Jewish) to be racially impure.

Many Jews left Germany during this time. Other well-off, assimilated Jews were optimistic enough to believe that their enlightened neighbors would never stand for this kind of behavior for very long. However, many thousands of Jews couldn’t leave simply because no other country would take them in. As Chaim Weizmann, who later became the first president of Israel, said in 1936, “The world is divided into places where [the Jews] cannot live and places into which they cannot enter.”

For example, England reversed its position on Palestine in the 1930s, issuing the infamous “White Paper,” which effectively stopped Jewish immigration to the area. Similarly, when one Canadian official was asked how many Jewish refugees his country could take, he answered, “None is too many.” When the ship S.S. St. Louis was turned away from Cuba (even though its 937 German Jewish passengers held valid Cuban visas), America not only refused their entry but even fired a warning shot to keep them away from Florida’s shores. The ship finally had to return to Europe, where over a quarter of the passengers were later killed in death camps.

The final straw for most German Jews came on November 9, 1938, which will forever be known as Kristallnacht (“night of broken glass”). That evening, a nationwide pogrom was unleashed against the Jewish community, smashing windows, burning buildings, killing 91 Jews, and arresting 30,000 others who were taken to concentration camps. To add insult to injury, the German government then imposed a billion mark fine on the Jews, arguing that the pogrom was their own fault.

Immediately, most Jews in Germany tried desperately to escape, selling their homes and businesses for a pittance. But for most of them, it was too late.

The war against the Jews

“Where one burns books, one will, in the end, burn people.”

— Heinrich Heine, nineteenth-century German-Jewish poet

By the end of 1939, emigration out of Germany was nearly impossible for the Jews, and the German government decided it was time to change their policy from terror to murder. Many Jews were routinely tortured and shot both in Germany and Poland (which Germany had annexed), and the Nazis killed more than 250,000 Jews in their communities within a few months. Other Jews were forced to move into ghettos (they were shot if they left the walled neighborhoods), where they were kept in a state of perpetual starvation. The Germans, like the Romans 2,000 years earlier, conscripted thousands of Jews to work as slave labor for the war effort, where they were worked so hard and fed so little that most died within a year.

As World War II broke out, the Nazis instituted the same policies wherever they conquered — Hungary, the Netherlands, Czechoslovakia, Greece, Italy, and so on. The governments and people of some countries (often called “Righteous Gentiles”) were clearly opposed to the anti-Jewish persecution and refused to cooperate. For example, the people of Denmark helped transport almost every Danish Jew to Sweden, where they were safe. Years later, when the Jews returned, they found that the Danish people had even saved their property from vandals and promptly returned it to the rightful owners.

On the other hand, the Nazis found that many people in other countries were all too willing to help. Many French citizens enthusiastically rounded up Jews to offer to the Germans. Some French citizens were clearly more compassionate, but try asking any Israeli over age 70 what they think of the French (but get out of the way fast in case they spit).

After Germany invaded the Soviet Union in 1941, the Nazis accomplished even larger-scale murders. Squads of trained killers, typically with the help of the local non-Jewish community (whether Ukrainian, Russian, Latvian, Lithuanian, Romanian, or whatever), rounded up Jews, Romani (gypsies), and communist officials and killed them, typically by machine gun, drowning, or asphyxiation with truck exhaust. In a single September weekend in 1941, on Rosh Hashanah (see Chapter 19), the Germans and Ukrainians murdered over 33,000 Jews in the town of Babi Yar.

The death camps

To most people today, a little over 70 years later, the Nazi machine makes no sense at all. How could Germany, the center of rational thought, suddenly unleash such centuries-old irrational anti-Semitism? But the greatest villains never think of themselves as evil. The Germans seemed to feel that they were being sensible; they seem to have truly believed that the Jews were subhuman parasites that would destroy the world if they weren’t wiped out.

In 1942, Hitler met with a group of high-ranking officials to prepare what they considered “the final solution of the Jewish problem.” They would now systematically kill them, as efficiently as possible. The goal: The “extermination” of every Jewish person in Europe (and ultimately, the world).

The Nazis had already turned some concentration camps into death camps. For example, at Ravensbrük, an all-women’s camp, they began using lethal gas to kill Jewish women who were pregnant or chronically ill. They had also added crematoria to several camps in order to more easily dispose of the large number of people who were dying. Now, they devised methods to murder not just thousands, but millions, of Jews. Typically, a group of 700 or 800 Jews were brought to a facility to be “deloused,” and, believing that they were going to get showers, they dutifully undressed and entered a large room. The door was closed behind them and the room was filled with Zyklon-B gas, an extremely toxic insecticide that killed every person after four or five excruciating minutes. The bodies were then buried in giant pits or cremated.

Unbelievably, the Germans actually forced other Jewish prisoners to perform most of this work. Those who refused were killed immediately. Those who did the work were typically killed after a month or two, anyway.

Jews who had escaped Germany to other European countries were captured and killed. Entire communities that had prospered for hundreds of years — like the incredible Sephardic community of Salonika, Greece, with over 65,000 Jews — were wiped out. Thousands of well-educated men and women — lawyers, accountants, housewives, bankers, architects — of Russia, Germany, France, Poland, and other countries not only stood by silently in the face of the death camps but actively rounded up whole communities of Jews, forced them at gunpoint to dig large pits, and then machine-gunned them into their own graves.

Those who survived often became the subjects of insane tortures. Nazi doctors injected Jewish men and women with slow-acting poison or placed them in freezers to test how long it would take for them to die. Some surgeons tried to create conjoined twins by sewing people together.

Jews endured so many other horrors — each one as sad and frightening as the last — that we can’t describe them in this short space. If you get a chance to visit Yad Vashem in Jerusalem, the National Holocaust Museum in Washington, D.C., or the Simon Wiesenthal Center in Los Angeles, you’ll get a better idea of the scope of this horror. Among the artifacts there are letters from people who knew their fate but were powerless to stop it, and many of them wrote of their greatest fear: that their lives and deaths would simply be forgotten by future generations.

The fall of the Third Reich

The idea of killing the Jews wasn’t a secondary objective during the Second World War; the Germans were so obsessed with the Jews that they threw resources at this goal even when it was tactically stupid to do so. For example, trains that should have been used to help German soldiers retreat in the final months of the war were directed instead to transport more Jews to their deaths. Army officials who suggested that they put military aims over anti-Jewish actions were demoted. While the world was at war with Germany, Germany was at war with the Jews.

Many Jews did fight back against the Nazi machine through guerilla action or by working with the resistance movement. One of the most important battles the Jews fought began on April 19, 1943 in the Warsaw ghetto. There, young Jews who had smuggled in a small stash of arms fought off the German army. The Germans burned the ghetto down, and after several weeks, killed all the Jews. But news of the battle spread and was an inspiration to Jews in other communities, even in the concentration camps.

The German army, weakened by the long war and fighting in Russia, finally fell in 1945. Adolf Hitler, still raging against the Jews in his final days, committed suicide as the Allied forces marched on Berlin. The American, English, and Russian soldiers who liberated the concentration and death camps were shocked and sickened at what they found. While rumors had spread for years about what the Germans were doing to the Jews, the “final solution” had largely been kept a secret from most of the world.

In the year following the war, many Jews, perhaps forever optimistic, returned home to their villages in Poland and the Ukraine. Sadly, killing the head of the beast didn’t kill the spirit of the people, and many of these Jews were murdered by their old neighbors.

In the end, some 6 million Jews — over a million and a half of whom were children — brought three new words into modern common language. The first word is genocide, the extermination of an entire people, which had never been attempted on this scale before. The second word is Holocaust, which, two millennia earlier, had been used to describe the ancient sacrificial offering that was completely burned when offered at the Temple. Even later, the tragedy became known by the Hebrew word, Shoah, which means “devastation.” Today, Yom Ha-Shoah, Holocaust Remembrance Day, is marked each year in the spring.

Founding a New Jewish State

Theodore Herzl (see Passage to Palestine earlier in this chapter) knew where Europe was headed 35 years before the rise of Nazi Germany when he wrote, in 1896, “The Jews have but one way of saving themselves — a return to their own people and an emigration to their own land.” Zionists would spend the next 50 years trying to create just such a country, a Jewish state, a refuge for Jewry around the world, and a foundation on which to rebuild after the Holocaust.

Although Jews had been moving to British-held Palestine for many years, the numbers threatened to explode in the 1930s, as anti-Jewish persecutions intensified in Germany. Thousands of Jews reached Palestine, often with the help of the Hagganah, a Jewish military organization that during World War II fought as a British brigade against the Axis powers. The Hagganah — the precursor to the Israeli army — secretly smuggled Jews out of Europe and into Palestine, and it later fought in the battle of Israeli independence.

After the war, the British turned their attention once again to figuring out what to do with Palestine. A second Jewish military group, called the Irgun, was fanatically anti-British; the Irgun carried out various violent acts against the Brits, once killing 91 British soldiers when they blew up a wing of the King David Hotel in Jerusalem.

Neither the Arabs nor the Jews wanted the British in Palestine, and in 1946, the British government dropped the decision of what to do in the lap of the United Nations. On November 29, 1947, the United Nations voted for a plan to partition Palestine into two states: a small independent Jewish state of Israel and a larger Arab state (see Figure 15-1). (We say “Arab state” here rather than a “Palestinian state” because at that time the Jews were also called Palestinians. After all, they were citizens of Palestine.) Because of its global importance, the plan called for Jerusalem to be monitored by the United Nations as an “international city.”

On May 14, 1948, the British mandate over Palestine ended, and David Ben-Gurion read a Proclamation of Independence over the radio — an announcement most interesting because while it declares an independent Jewish state, it never once mentions the word “God.” The State of Israel had become a reality in large part from the work of secular Jews who insisted on a homeland for their people.

Figure 15-1: The 1947 United Nations partition plan.

While the United States immediately recognized the new country, Israel’s Arab neighbors were less hospitable. The following day, six countries — Lebanon, Syria, Jordan, Egypt, Saudi Arabia, and Iraq — attacked Israel. Very few people expected Israel to survive this onslaught, but within weeks the Jews had actually captured a significant amount of land, and within months, the Arabs — while not defeated — agreed to a cease-fire.

After 1,877 years, the Jews once again ruled over their own country. Figure 15-2 shows the state’s boundaries in the year 2012.

Figure 15-2: Israeli boundaries in 2012 CE.