Education raised immense complexities. Under the mandate there were four kinds of Jewish school: General Zionist (secular), Histadrut (secular-collective), Mizrachi (Torah-secular) and Agudah (Torah only). The 1953 Unified Education Act conflated these into two types: government-secular and government-religious schools. Agudah withdrew its schools from the system, but found it lost its government grants if it failed to devote sufficient time to secular subjects. Secularists complained that Agudah schools devoted eighteen periods out of thirty-two a week to Bible, Talmud and Hebrew (girls getting more Bible, less Talmud, than boys), at the expense of science, geography and history. Religious Jews complained that state schools gave only eight out of thirty-two to religion, three of which were Hebrew, and that the Bible was taught in a secular spirit, as myth, except for certain bits presented as early Zionist history.⁵³ In the late 1950s, a muddled cabinet compromise plan, to promote ‘Jewish consciousness’ in secular schools and ‘national-Israel consciousness’ in religious schools, led to more trouble.54 In 1959 there were riots in three places against secular propaganda among the children of Orthodox orientals, one of whose rabbis complained bitterly:

[They] raised the youth that was lacking in wisdom to the heights, and clothed them with pride, while casting in the dust the elders who had acquired wisdom. They taught the child at school that here–in the land of Israel!–there was no need to observe the commandments of the Torah. When the boy came home from school and his parents told him to pray, he answered that the teacher said it was unnecessary or that the instructor had called it nonsense. When the rabbi came and told the boys to observe the Sabbath, they would not listen to him because the club was organizing a football match or the car was waiting to take them to the beach…if the Rabbi pleaded and wept, they laughed in his face, because that was what the instructor had ordered…. Sages of the Torah were thrust into a corner while boys rose to greatness because they held party cards.⁵⁵

The Orthodox were also outraged over the way in which many institutions broke the ancient rules over segregation of the sexes. Near centres of Orthodoxy there were angry scenes over dance-halls and mixed bathing. Over the conscription of girls into the army the Council of the Great Men stigmatized the law as one to be defied even at the risk of death. That was one of many battles the religious element won.

They also won on the central issue of marriage. The secular state of Israel was obliged to forego the institution of civil marriage. It imposed Orthodox law even on secular unions, under the provisions of Sections 1 and 2 of the Rabbinical Courts Jurisdiction (Marriage and Divorce) Law of 1953. Secularist members of the Knesset voted for the law because otherwise Israel would gradually have split into two communities which could not intermarry. But the law led to hard cases and protracted litigation, involving not only non-Jews and secularized Jews but Reform rabbis and their converts, since the Orthodox rabbinates enjoyed the sole right to recognize conversions and would not accept Reform ones. The Orthodox marriage and divorce experts, quite legitimately from their point of view, subjected entire categories of Jewish immigrants to the strictest tests. Thus in 1952 the divorce practices of 6,000 Bene Israels (Jews from Bombay) were scrutinized as irregular (though eventually validated) and the marriages of the Falasha Jews from Ethiopia were queried in 1984.

There were many bitter disputes over remarriage and divorce. Deuteronomy 25:5 imposes levirate marriage on a childless widow and the brother of the deceased husband. The obligation is ended by the halizah or refusal of the brother-in-law. But if he is a minor the widow must wait. If he is deaf and dumb and cannot say, ‘I do not wish to take her’, she may not remarry. This case actually occurred in 1967 in Ashdod; moreover, the deaf and dumb man was already married. So the rabbinate arranged a bigamous marriage and supervised the divorce the next day.56 Hard cases also arose when one party to a marriage refused a divorce. If the refusal came from the woman, a divorce became difficult but if it came from the man it was impossible. In a 1969 case, for instance, a husband was sentenced to fourteen years in prison for six indecent assaults and three rapes. The wife sued for a divorce, the man refused and the couple remained married under rabbinic law, the wife having no civil remedy in Israel. On such cases, Rabbi Zerhah Warhaftig, a former Minister of Religion, took a relaxed view: ‘We have a legal system which has always sustained the people. It may contain within it some thorn that occasionally pricks the individual. We are not concerned with this or that individual but with the totality of the people.’⁵⁷

The point might have been better put but it contained the truth, to which the difficulties of the new state drew attention, that Judaism is a perfectionist religion. It contains the strength of its weaknesses. It assumes that those who practise it are an elite since it seeks to create a model society. That made it in many ways an ideal religion for a new state like Israel, despite the fact that its law was in process of being formed about 3,200 years before the state was founded. Because of Judaism’s unique continuities, many of its most ancient provisions were still valid and observed by the pious. They often reflected the form rather than the content of religious truth but it must be stressed again that ‘ritualistic’ is not a term of reproach for Jews. As Dr Harold Fisch, the rector of Bar-Ilan University, put it:

The very word ‘ritual’ in English carries a pejorative quality derived from the Protestant tradition. The word in Hebrew is Mizvot (religious command) and these have the same moral force whether involving relations between man and man or between man and God. It is the latter part of the code that embodies the so-called ritual commandments and these are on any proper appraisal as indispensable as the ethical commandments.⁵⁸

The essence of the ritual spirit is punctilious observance, and that again is a Judaic strength particularly well adapted to a new state. All states need to hallow themselves with the dignity of the past. Many of the hundred or more countries which became independent after 1945 had to borrow institutions and traditions from their former colonial rulers or invent them from a past which was largely unrecorded. Israel was fortunate because her past was the longest and richest of all, was copiously chronicled and kept fresh by absolute continuities. We have noted that the Jewish genius for writing history lapsed between the time of Josephus and the nineteenth century. Once the Zionist state was founded it expressed itself not merely in history but above all in archaeology. Statesmen and generals, like Ben Gurion, Moshe Dayan and Yigael Yadin, and thousands of ordinary people, became passionate archaeologists, both amateur and professional. The study of deep antiquity rose to the height of an Israeli obsession.

That was an important element in creating an organic nation. But it was insignificant compared to the living force of a religion which had formed the Jewish race itself and whose present custodians could trace their rabbinical succession back to Moses. The Jews had survived precisely because they were punctilious about their rituals and had been prepared to die for them. It was right and healthy that the respect for strict observance should be a central feature of the Zionist community.

The outstanding example was the attitude of the Jews towards the Temple Mount, when courage and providence at last restored it to them, along with the rest of the Old City, during the Six Day War of 1967. It was a simple decision to restore the ancient ghetto, from which the Jerusalem Jews had been driven in 1948. But the Temple posed difficulties. It had been completely destroyed in antiquity. But no less an authority than Maimonides had ruled that, despite the destruction, the site of the Temple retained its sanctity, for all time. The Shekinah never departed, and that was why Jews always came to pray near the site, especially at the Western Wall, traditionally believed to be close to the west end of the Holy of Holies. Since the Temple site retained its sanctity, however, it also required Jews to be ritually pure before actually entering it. The purity rules surrounding the Temple were the strictest of all. The Holy of Holies was banned to all except the high-priest, and even he entered it only once a year on the Day of Atonement. Since the Temple area was equated with the Mosaic ‘camp of Israel’ which surrounded the sanctuary in the wilderness, the purity provisions of the Book of Numbers applied to it.59 In this book, God defined to Moses both the causes of impurity and its cure. A person became defiled by touching a corpse, a grave or a human bone, or by being under the same roof as any of these. Then it adds: ‘And for an unclean person they shall take of the ashes of the burnt heifer of purification for sin, and running water shall be put thereto in a vessel: And a clean person shall take hyssop, and dip it in the water, and sprinkle it upon the tent, and upon all the vessels, and upon the persons that were there, and upon him that touched a bone, or one slain, or one dead, or a grave.’60

The heifer had to be red and ‘without spot, wherein is no blemish, and upon which never came yoke’. Most important of all, the critical part of the operation had to be carried out, to avoid defilement, by Eleazar, the heir-apparent of Aaron. When he had produced the mixture, it was stored ‘in a clean place’ and kept for when needed. The authorities insisted that the heifers were rare and costly: if only two hairs of the animal were not red, its ashes were invalid. They disagreed on how many heifers had been burned. Some said seven. Others said nine. After the destruction of the Temple it was impossible to prepare new ashes. A supply remained, and it was apparently used to purify those who had been in contact with the dead as late as the Amoraic period. Then it ran out, and purification was no longer possible until the Messiah came to burn the tenth heifer and prepare a new mixture. Because the purity rules, especially over the dead, were and are so strict, rabbinical opinion agrees that all Jews are now ritually impure. And, since no ashes exist for their purification, no Jew can enter the Temple Mount.⁶¹

The Law of the Red Heifer has been cited as an outstanding example of hukkah, a Judaic statute for which there is no rational explanation but which must be strictly observed because divinely commanded in the clearest possible manner. It is just the kind of rule for which gentiles always derided the Jews. It is also the kind of rule which Jews insisted on observing whatever the disadvantages, and so retained their Jewish identity. So, from 1520 at least, Jews prayed at the Western Wall but not beyond it. After the Jewish quarter of Jerusalem fell in 1948, Jews were prevented by the Arabs from using the Western Wall or even from looking at it from afar. This denial lasted nineteen years. With the recapture of the Old City in 1967, the Wall was available again and on the first day of Shavuot that year a quarter of a million Orthodox Jews tried to pray there at once. The entire area in front of it was then cleared and a fine, paved open space created. But nothing could be done about Jews entering the Temple Mount itself. All kinds of ingenious rabbinical arguments were put forward to allow Jews to enter at least part of the area. But in the end the consensus of rabbinical opinion was that the entire site had to remain out of bounds to Jews who really believed in their faith.⁶² So the Chief Rabbinate and the Ministry of Religions put up notices forbidding Jews to go on the Mount under pain of Karet (‘extirpation’ or loss of eternal life). The fact that thousands of Jews ignored the warning was cited as evidence of the impotence of the rabbis. Its observance by large numbers of pious Jews, despite their intense anxiety to enter the area, was equally if not more significant.

The Jerusalem rabbis had a collateral reason for taking a strict line on this issue. They wanted to discourage, in the minds of ordinary Jews, any equation of Zionist military triumphs, such as the recapture of the Old City, with messianic fulfilment. The same argument also applied to proposals to rebuild the Temple itself. Any such scheme would of course have run into violent opposition from the entire Moslem world, since the Temple platform was occupied by two Islamic structures of immense historic and artistic importance. Nevertheless the idea was argued through with characteristic rabbinical thoroughness. Did not the Jews, by divine command, rebuild the Temple on the return from their first, Babylonian Exile, and was not this a precedent to follow now the great Exile was over? No: the precedent applied only when the majority of Jews ‘live upon the land’, and that had not yet happened. Yet at the time of Ezra was not the Temple rebuilt even though the number of Jews returning from Babylon was smaller than today? True, but no divine command has been received; the Third Temple will be erected in a supernatural manner by God’s direct intervention. But this argument was once used against Zionism itself, was it not, and falsified by events? And the first Temple, undoubtedly built by Solomon, was also ascribed to God. It was; on the other hand, the Temple could not be built in David’s time because he was a man of war; it had to wait until Solomon’s time of peace. So today: not until a final peace comes could a Third Temple be built. Even then a true prophet would be required to inspire the event, if for no other reasons than that the details, given by God to David in His own hand, were lost.63 Yes, they were: but details of the Third Temple are given in the Book of Ezekiel. Perhaps; but leaving aside the technical arguments, the present generation was neither prepared nor willing to restore the Temple and its mode of worship: to become so would require a religious awakening. Exactly: and what better way of creating one than starting to build the Temple again?⁶⁴ So the arguments went on, leading to the majority conclusion that nothing could yet be done. Even a proposal to offer a ritual sacrifice of the paschal lamb was dropped because the exact site of the altar could not be discovered, there was doubt about the priestly lineage credentials of present-day Cohens or Kohanim, and (not least) too little was known of the priestly garments to recreate them exactly.⁶⁵

The Temple, and the arguments surrounding it, symbolized the religious past which was a living, binding force in the new Israeli community. But there was a secular past too, to escape from which the Zionist state had been created. There the symbol was the Holocaust: more than a symbol indeed, an awesome reality which had overshadowed the state’s creation and which, rightly, continued to be the salient fact in the nation’s collective memory. Judaism had always been concerned not only with the Law but with (in human terms) the ends of law, justice. An endlessly recurrent and pitiful feature of Jewish history in the Exile had been the injuries inflicted on Jews as Jews and the failure of gentile society to bring their perpetrators to justice. The Jewish state was, in part at least, a response to the greatest injustice of all. One of its functions was to be an instrument of retribution and display to the world that Jews at along last could strike back and execute their Law against those who wronged them. The Holocaustal crime was so gigantic that the Nuremberg trials and other machines of justice operated by individual European countries, which we have already described, were plainly not enough. As early as 1944 the research department of the Jewish Agency’s Political Office, then run by the future Prime Minister Moshe Sharett, had begun to collect material on Nazi war criminals. After the foundation of the state, tracing the guilty and bringing them to justice was part of the duties of several Israeli agencies, some secret. The effort was not confined to Israel. Many Jewish organizations, national and international, including the World Jewish Congress, joined in. So did the survivors themselves. In 1946 Simon Wiesenthal, a thirty-eight-year-old Czech Jew who had survived five years in various camps, including Buchenwald and Mauthausen, set up with thirty other camp inmates the Jewish Historical Documentation Centre, which eventually found a permanent home in Vienna. It concentrated on the identification of Nazi criminals not yet tried and sentenced. The Holocaust was intensively studied for academic and educational as well as retributive purposes. By the 1980s there were ninety-three courses in Holocaust studies in United States and Canadian universities alone and six research centres entirely devoted to the subject. At the Wiesenthal Center for Holocaust Studies in Los Angeles, for example, the latest technology was invoked to create what was called a ‘multi-screen, multi-channel-sound, audio-visual experience of the Holocaust’, using a 40-foot-high and 23-foot-long screen in the configuration of an arch, three film projectors and a special Cinemascope lens, eighteen slide projectors and pentaphonic sound, all linked to a central computer for simultaneous control. This dramatic recreation of the event might not seem excessive at a time when anti-Semites were beginning to make determined attempts to prove that it had never taken place at all or had been grotesquely exaggerated.66

But the primary object of Holocaust documentation remained justice. Wiesenthal himself was responsible for bringing over 1,100 Nazis to prosecution. He supplied much of the material which allowed the Israeli government to identify, arrest, try and sentence the man who, after Himmler himself, was the chief administrator-executant of the Holocaust, Adolf Eichmann. He was arrested by Israeli agents in Argentina in May 1960, brought to Israel secretly, and charged on fifteen counts under the Nazis and Nazi Collaborators (Punishment) Law, 1950.67 For a number of reasons the Eichmann trial was an important event, actual and symbolic, for the Israelis and for the entire Jewish people. It demonstrated in the most striking manner that the age of impunity for those who murdered Jews was over and that there was no hiding-place for them anywhere in the world. It was covered by 976 foreign and 166 Israeli correspondents and, because of the nature of the indictment, embracing the Holocaust as a whole as well as events leading up to it, it was a process of education for millions in the facts of mass murder. But it was also a meticulous demonstration of Israeli justice in this most emotional of fields.

Eichmann’s first reaction to capture was to admit his identity and guilt and to concede the Jewish right to punish him. He said on 3 June 1960: ‘If it would give greater significance to the act of atonement, I am ready to hang myself in public.’⁶⁸ Later he became less co-operative and fell back on the defence familiar from Nuremberg that he was a mere cog in the machine executing the orders of someone else. In the event, then, the prosecution faced an active, cunning and obstinate, if ignoble, defence. The Knesset passed a law allowing a foreigner (the German counsel Dr Robert Servatius) to defend Eichmann and the Israeli government provided the fee ($30,000). The trial was a long and thorough affair and the judgment, delivered on 11 December 1961, went to great trouble to assert and argue the competence of the court and its right to try the accused despite the circumstances of his arrest, as well as the substance of its findings. The overwhelming evidence made the verdict inevitable. Eichmann was sentenced to death on 15 December and his appeal dismissed on 29 May 1962. President Yitzhak been Zvi received a petition for clemency and spent a day in solitude considering it. Israel had never executed anyone before (or since) and many Jews, there and abroad, wanted to avoid the rope. But the great majority believed the sentence was right and the President could find no mitigating circumstances whatever in the case. A room in the Ramla Prison was specially converted into an execution chamber, with a trap-door cut in the floor and a gallows above, and Eichmann was executed near midnight on 31 May 1962, his body being burned and the ashes scattered at sea.⁶⁹

The Eichmann affair demonstrated Israeli efficiency, justice and firmness, and went some way to exorcising the ghosts of the Final Solution. It was a necessary episode in Israel’s history. But the Holocaust continued to be a determining fact in Israel’s national consciousness. In May 1983 the Israeli polling firm Smith Research Center conducted an exhaustive survey of Israeli attitudes to the Holocaust. This revealed that the overwhelming majority of Israelis (83 per cent) saw it as a major factor in how they saw the world. The Center’s director, Hanoch Smith, reported: ‘The trauma of the Holocaust is very much on the minds of Israelis, even in the second and third generations.’ The view of the Holocaust, indeed, went right to the heart of Israel’s purpose. An overwhelming majority (91 per cent) believed that the Western leaders knew of the mass killings and did little to save the Jews; only slightly fewer (87 per cent) agreed with the proposition: ‘From the Holocaust we learn that Jews cannot rely on non-Jews.’ Some 61 per cent considered the Holocaust the main factor in the establishment of Israel and 62 per cent believed its existence made a repetition impossible.70

Hence, just as the collective memory of pharaonic bondage dominated the early Israelite society, so the Holocaust shaped the new state. It was, inevitably, pervaded by a sense of loss. Hitler had wiped out a third of all Jews, especially the pious and the poor, from whom Judaism had drawn its peculiar strength. The loss could be seen in secular terms. In the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries the world had been immeasurably enriched by the liberated talent streaming out of the old ghettos, which had proved a principal creative force in modern European and North American civilization. The supply continued until Hitler destroyed the source for ever. No one will ever know what the world thereby sacrificed. For Israel the deprivation was devastating. It was felt at a personal level, for so many of its citizens had lost virtually all their families and childhood friends, and it was felt collectively: one in three of those who might have built the state was not there. It was felt spiritually perhaps most of all. The supreme value Judaism attached to human life, to the point where the Israeli nation debated long and anxiously before it deprived even Eichmann of his, made the murder of so many, especially of the poor and the pious, whom God specially loved, an event hard to comprehend. It required another Book of Job even to state the problem. It was touched on by the great Judaic theologian Abraham Joshua Herschel (1907-73), who had been fortunate to get out of Poland just six weeks before the disaster. ‘I am’, he wrote, ‘a brand plucked from the fire of an altar of Satan on which millions of human lives were exterminated to evil’s greater glory, and on which so much else was consumed: the divine images of so many human beings, many people’s faith in the God of justice and compassion, and much of the secret and power of attachment to the Bible bred and cherished in the hearts of men for nearly 2,000 years.’71 Why had it happened? The new Zion began with an unanswered, perhaps unanswerable, question.

Yet there were some ways in which the world position of the Jews had been fundamentally improved since the days before the Holocaust. The Jewish national state had been established. That did not end the Exile of course. How could it? The Exile, as Arthur Cohen observed, was not an accident of history corrected by creation of a secular, national state; it was, rather, a metaphysical concept, ‘the historical coefficient of being unredeemed’.⁷² Most of Jewry remained outside the state. That had been so ever since the Babylonian Exile. The Third Commonwealth, like the Second, contained only about a quarter of all Jews. There was no sign, as Israel completed its fourth decade, of a fundamental change in this proportion. All the same, realization of a secular Zion gave to world Jewry a living, beating heart it had not possessed for two millennia. It provided a focus for the global community which the old pious settlements and the idea of Return, however cherished, had not supplied. The building of Israel was the twentieth-century equivalent of rebuilding the Temple. Like the Temple under Herod the Great, it had unsatisfactory aspects. But it was there. The very fact that it existed, and could be visited and shared, gave a completely new dimension to the diaspora. It was a constant source of concern, sometimes of anxiety, often of pride. Once Israel had been established and proved it could defend and justify itself, no member of the diaspora ever had to feel ashamed of being a Jew again.

This was important because even near the close of the twentieth century the diaspora continued to maintain its characteristics of extremes of wealth and poverty and baffling variety. Total Jewish population had been nearly 18 million at the end of the 1930s. By the mid-1980s it had by no means recovered the Holocaust losses. Of a total of 13.5 million Jews, about 3.5 million lived in Israel. By far the largest Jewish community was in the United States (5,750,000) and this, combined with important Jewish communities in Canada (310,000), Argentina (250,000), Brazil (130,000) and Mexico (40,000), and a dozen smaller groups, meant that nearly half world Jewry (6.6 million) was now in the Americas. The next largest Jewish community, after the US and Israel, was Soviet Russia’s, with about 1,750,000. There were still sizeable communities in Hungary (75,000) and Rumania (30,000), and a total of 130,000 in Marxist eastern Europe. In western Europe there were a little over 1,250,000 Jews, the principal communities being in France (670,000), Britain (360,000), West Germany (42,000), Belgium (41,000), Italy (35,000), the Netherlands (28,000) and Switzerland (21,000). In Africa, outside the South African Republic (105,000), there were now few Jews except in the diminished communities of Morocco (17,000) and Ethiopia (perhaps 5,000). In Asia there were still about 35,000 Jews in Persia and 21,000 in Turkey. The Australian and New Zealand communities together added a further 75,000.73

The history, composition and origin of some of these communities were of great complexity. In India, for instance, there were about 26,000 Jews in the late 1940s, composed of three principal types. About 13,000 formed the so-called Bene (Children of) Israel, living in and around Bombay on the west coast. These Jews had lost their records and books but retained a tenacious oral history of their migration, put into written form as recently as 1937.⁷⁴ Their story was that they had fled from Galilee during the persecution of Antiochus Epiphanes (175-163 BC). Their ship was wrecked on the coast about 30 miles south of Bombay, and only seven families survived. Though they had no religious texts and soon forgot Hebrew, they continued to honour the Sabbath and some Jewish holidays, practised circumcision and Jewish diet and remembered the Shema. They spoke Marathi and adopted Indian caste practices, dividing themselves into Goa (whites) and Kala (blacks), which suggests there may have been two waves of settlement. Then there were the Cochin Jews, about 2,500 at one time, living 650 miles further south down the west coast. They had a foundation document of a kind, two copper plates engraved in old Tamil, recording privileges and now dated between 974 and 1020 AD. There were certainly several layers of settlement in this case, the Black Cochin Jews being the earliest, joined by whiter-skinned Jews from Spain, Portugal and possibly other parts of Europe (as well as the Middle East) in the early sixteenth century. Both black and white Cochin Jews had sub-divisions and there was a third main group, the Meshuararim, who were low-caste descendants of unions between Jews and slave-concubines. None of the three main Cochin groups worshipped together. In addition, there were about 2,000 Sephardi Jews from Baghdad, who arrived in India during the decade 1820-30, and a final wave of European refugee Jews who came in the 1930s. These two last categories associated with each other for religious (not social) purposes, but neither would attend the same synagogues as the Bene Israel or Cochin Jews. All the white-skinned Jews and many of the blacks spoke English, and they flourished under British rule, serving with distinction in the army, becoming civil servants, tradesmen, shopkeepers and craftsmen, attending Bombay University, studying Hebrew, translating the Jewish classics into Marathi and graduating as engineers, lawyers, teachers and scientists. One of them became Mayor of Bombay, the centre of all Jewish groups of India, in 1937. But independent India was less congenial to them and with the creation of Israel most chose to migrate, so that by the 1980s there were not much over 15,000 Bene Israel and only 250 Jews on the Cochin coast.75

That such groups should survive at all testified not to the proselytizing power of Judaism but to its tenacious adaptability even in the most adverse circumstances. But it cannot be denied that the cataclysmic events of the twentieth century virtually destroyed dozens of Jewish communities, many of them ancient. The post-war Communist regime in China, for instance, imposed its own final solution on China’s Jewish population, much of it a refugee exodus from Soviet Russia and Hitler’s Europe, but including descendants of Jews who had been in China from the eighth century onwards. All fled or were driven out, Hong Kong alone, with about 1,000 Jews, and Singapore with 400, constituting lonely outposts in the Far East.

Throughout the Arab world, during the late 1940s and 1950s, the historic Sephardi communities were reduced to a fraction of their pre-war size or eliminated altogether. In large parts of Europe, the Jews who survived or returned after the ravages of the Holocaust were winnowed further by emigration, especially to Israel. Salonika’s Ladino-speaking population, 60,000 strong in 1939, was a mere 1,500 in the 1980s. Vienna’s vast and fertile Jewry, perhaps the most gifted of all, shrank from 200,000 to less than 8,000, and even the mortal remains of Herzl himself, buried in the city’s Doebling cemetery, left for reinterment in Jerusalem in 1949. Amsterdam Jewry, nearly 70,000 in the 1930s, was scarcely 12,000 forty years later. The Jews of Antwerp, who had made it the diamond centre of the West, continued to work in the trade but the city’s Jewry had fallen from 55,000 to about 13,500 in the 1980s. The ancient Frankfurt Jewry, once so famous in finance, fell from 26,158 in 1933 to 4,350 in the 1970s. In Berlin where, in the 1920s, nearly 175,000 Jews had made it the cultural capital of the world, there were in the 1970s only about 5,500 (plus another 850 in East Berlin). The most desolate vacuum of all was in Poland, where by the 1980s a pre-war Jewish population of 3,300,000 had dropped to about 5,000. Scores of towns there, once rich in synagogues and libraries, knew the Jew no more.

Yet there was continuity too and even growth. Italian Jewry survived the Nazi era with remarkable tenacity. The 29,000 left at the end of the German occupation rose slowly in the post-war period to 32,000; but this was due to emigrants reaching Italy from the north and east. A study by the Hebrew University of Jerusalem in 1965 showed that the Italian community, like many others in the advanced countries, had a vulnerable demographic profile. The birth rate for Italian Jews was only 11.4 per 1,000 compared to 18.3 for the population as a whole. Fertility and marriage rates were also much lower; only the mortality rate and the average age (forty-one against thirty-three) were higher.76 In Rome, the core of the Jewish community still lived in what, until 1880, had been the old ghetto area in Trastevere where Jews had eked out a precarious existence, as ragpickers and pedlars, since the time of the old kings of Rome. Here, rich Jews lived virtually next door to the very poorest, as they always had done. The thirty chief families, the Scuola Tempio, could trace their ancestry back to the time of the Emperor Titus 1,900 years ago, when they had been brought to Rome in chains after the destruction of the Temple. The Roman Jews had lived in the shadow of the majestic church that had in turn exploited, persecuted and protected them. They had sought both to defy and to blend with it, so that their principal synagogue, in the Lungotevere Cenci, just outside the old ghetto gates, was a spectacular exercise in Italian church baroque. There, in April 1986, Pope John Paul II became the first pontiff to attend a synagogue service, taking turns with the Chief Rabbi of Rome to read the psalms. He told the Jewish congregation: ‘You are our dearly beloved brothers, and in a way you are our elder brothers.’ The intention was good, the stress on ‘elder’ a little too apposite.

In France, the post-war period saw undeniable growth, in both numbers and intensity. The Nazis and their Vichy allies had killed 90,000 of France’s pre-war Jewish population of 340,000, and the tragedy had been envenomed by the knowledge that France’s established and highly assimilated native community had in some ways collaborated in deporting the refugee element. But this loss was more than made good by a huge influx of Sephardi immigrants from the Moslem world in the three decades after the war: 25,000 from Egypt, 65,000 from Morocco, 80,000 from Tunisia and 120,000 from Algeria, as well as smaller but substantial numbers from Syria, the Lebanon and Turkey. As a result, French Jewry more than doubled to over 670,000, and became the fourth largest in the world.

This huge demographic expansion was accompanied by a profound cultural change. French Jewry had always been the most assimilationist of all, especially since the French Revolution had allowed it to identify almost completely with republican institutions. The vicious behaviour of many Frenchmen under Vichy had produced some loss of confidence, and one index of it was that six times as many French Jews changed their names in the twelve years 1945-57 as in the entire period 1803-1942.77 Even so, the number was small, and ultra-assimilation remained the distinguishing characteristic of French Jewry even in the post-war period. Writers like Raymond Aron stood at the very centre of contemporary French culture and the quiet, unostentatious, highly sophisticated Jewish upper-middle class provided notable prime ministers, such as René Mayer and Pierre Mendès-France under the Fourth Republic, and Michel Debré and Laurent Fabius under the Fifth. Nevertheless, the influx of Sephardis from Africa greatly intensified the Jewishness of French Jewry. Francophone most of them might be, but a high proportion of them read Hebrew. French Jews of the nineteenth century had a ‘theory of three generations’: ‘The grandfather believes, the father doubts, the son denies. The grandfather prays in Hebrew, the father reads the prayers in French, the son does not pray at all. The grandfather observes all the holidays, the father Yom Kippur, the son no holidays at all. The grandfather has remained Jewish, the father has been assimilated, and the son has become a mere deist…if he has not become an atheist, a Fourierist or a Saint-Simonian.’⁷⁸ In post-war France this theory no longer worked. The son was now just as likely to return to the religion of his grandfather, leaving the father isolated in his agnosticism. In the south, the influx of Algerian Jews resurrected the dead or dying communities of the Middle Ages. In 1970, for instance, the celebrated composer Darius Milhaud laid the foundation-stone of a new synagogue in Aix-en-Provence–the old one having been sold in the war and turned into a Protestant church.⁷⁹ Nor were new synagogues the only sign of a revived Jewishness which was both religious and secular. In the 1960s and 1970s the leaders of the old Alliance Israélite Universelle tended to be practising Jews with militant attitudes to Jewish causes at home and abroad. A much higher percentage of Jews observed the Law and learned Hebrew. The continuing existence of a residual anti-Semitic movement in France, though weaker than in the 1930s, tended to reinforce Jewish militancy. When it found parliamentary form, as with the Poujadists in the 1950s or the National Front in the 1980s, Jewish organizations reacted vigorously and asserted their Jewish convictions. The bomb attack on the Liberal synagogue on the Rue Copernic on 3 October 1980, one of several at that time, served to stimulate Le Renouveau Juif as it was called. French Jewry, even as enlarged by immigration from Africa, remained strikingly resistant to Zionism as such: French Jews would not actually go to Israel to live in any numbers. But they identified themselves with the survival of Israel in 1956, 1967, 1973 and again in the early 1980s. They reacted strongly against French government policies which were inimical to Jewish and Israeli interests as they saw them. They constituted, for the first time, a Jewish lobby in France, and in the 1981 elections the Jewish vote was an important element in replacing the Gaullist-right-wing regime which had governed France for twenty-three years. A new and far more vigorous and visible Jewish establishment was emerging in France, conscious of its numerical strength and youth, and likely to play in the 1990s a more significant role in forming opinion throughout the diaspora.

A strong French voice in the diaspora could be welcome, particularly since the German voice was virtually silenced as a result of the Hitler age. Necessarily in recent decades, and particularly with the decline of Yiddish, the voice of the diaspora has been English. Indeed, it is some measure of the importance of the return of the Jews to England in 1646 that more than half of the world’s Jews now speak English, 850,000 in the countries of the British Commonwealth (plus South Africa) and nearly six million in the United States. The real British moment in the history of the Jews came and went with the birth of modern Zionism, the Balfour Declaration and the mandate. British Jewry became and remained the most stable and contented and the least threatened of the major Jewries. It took in 90,000 refugees in the 1930s, to its great enrichment, and expanded from about 300,000 just before the First World War to well over 400,000 at the end of the Second. But, like Italian Jewry, it developed demographic weaknesses which became progressively more marked in the 1960s and 1970s. In the years 1961-5, for instance, the English synagogue marriage rate was an average of 4.0 per thousand compared to a national average of 7.5. The total number of Jews slipped from 410,000 in 1967 to below 400,000 in the 1970s and probably to below 350,000 in the second half of the 1980s. There was no lack of energy in modern British Jewry. Jewish enterprise was active in finance, as always, and it was of critical importance in entertainment, property, clothing, footware and the retail trade. It created national institutions like Granada TV. The Sieff dynasty turned the successful firm of Marks & Spencer into the most enduring (and popular) triumph of post-war British business, and Lord Weinstock transformed General Electric into the largest of all British companies. The Jews were vigorous in the publishing of books and newspapers. They produced the best of all diaspora journals, the Jewish Chronicle. In growing numbers they adorned (if only occasionally) the benches of the House of Lords. There was a time, in the mid-1980s, when no fewer than five Jews sat in the British cabinet. But this impressive energy did not take philoprogenitive forms. Nor was it collectively exerted to constitute a leading influence within the diaspora or on the Zionist state. In this respect British Jewry behaved, and perhaps was obliged to behave, like Britain herself: it handed over the torch to America.

The expansion and consolidation of United States Jewry in the late nineteenth and twentieth centuries was as important in Jewish history as the creation of Israel itself; in some ways more important. For, if the fulfilment of Zionism gave the harassed diaspora an ever-open refuge with sovereign rights to determine and defend its destiny, the growth of US Jewry was an accession of power of an altogether different order, which gave Jews an important, legitimate and permanent part in shaping the policies of the greatest state on earth. This was not fragile Hofjuden influence but the consequences of democratic persuasion and demographic facts. At the end of the 1970s the Jewish population of the United States was 5,780,960. This was only 2.7 per cent of total US population but it was disproportionately concentrated in urban areas, particularly big cities, which notoriously exert more cultural, social, economic and indeed political influence than small towns, villages and rural districts. Towards the end of the twentieth century the Jews were still big-city dwellers. There were 394,000 in Tel Aviv-Jaffa, over 300,000 in Paris, 285,000 in Moscow, 280,000 in Greater London, 272,000 in Jerusalem, 210,000 in Kiev, 165,000 in Leningrad, 115,000 in Montreal and 115,000 in Toronto. But the most impressive urban concentration was in the United States. Metropolitan New York, with 1,998,000 Jews, was by far the largest Jewish city on earth. The second largest was Los Angeles with 455,000. Then followed Philadelphia (295,000), Chicago (253,000) Miami (225,000), Boston (170,000) and Washington DC (160,000). Altogether there were sixty-nine American cities with a Jewish population of over 10,000. There was also a demographic concentration in key states. In New York State 2,143,485 Jews constituted 12 per cent of the population. They formed 6 per cent in New Jersey, 4.6 per cent in Florida, 4.5 per cent in Maryland, 4.4 per cent in Massachusetts, 3.6 per cent in Pennsylvania, 3.1 per cent in California and 2.4 per cent in Illinois. Of all the great American ethnic votes, the Jewish vote was the best organized, the most responsive to guidance by its leaders and the most likely to exert itself effectively.

However, it was possible to exaggerate the direct political impact of Jewish voters, however well schooled. Since 1932 the Jews had voted overwhelmingly Democratic, sometimes by as high a proportion as 85-90 per cent. There was no clear evidence that Jewish influence on Democratic presidents or policy was proportionately decisive. In fact during the 1960s and 1970s the continuing fidelity of the Jewish voter to the Democratic Party appeared to be based increasingly on emotional-historic grounds rather than on a community of interests. In the 1980s most Jews, somewhat to the surprise of psephologists, still voted Democrat, though the majority fell to around 60 per cent. In the 1984 election they were the only religious group (apart from atheists) to give the Democratic candidate majority support, and the only ethnic group (apart from blacks). The Jews voted as they did not for communal economic or foreign policy reasons but from a residual sympathy for the poor and the underdog.80 By the last quarter of the twentieth century, the notion of the ‘Jewish lobby’ in American politics had become to some extent a myth.

What had happened, in the relationship of Jewish citizens to America as a whole, was something quite different and much more important: the transformation of the Jewish minority into a core element of American society. Throughout the twentieth century American Jews continued to take the fullest advantage of the opportunities America opened to them, to attend universities, to become doctors, lawyers, teachers, professional men and women of all kinds, politicians and public servants, as well as to thrive in finance and business, as they always had. They were particularly strong in the private enterprise sector, in press, publishing, broadcasting and entertainment, and in intellectual life generally. There were certain fields, such as the writing of fiction, where they were dominant. But they were numerous and successful everywhere. Slowly, then, during the second half of the century, this aristocracy of success became as ubiquitous and pervasive in its cultural influence as the earlier elite, the White Anglo-Saxon Protestant. Jews ceased to be a lobby in American society. They became part of the natural organism itself, a limb, and a powerful one. They began to operate not from without the American body inwards, but from within it outwards. With their historic traditions of democracy, tolerance and liberalism, they assumed to some extent the same role in America as the Whigs had once played in England: an elite seeking moral justification for its privileges by rendering enlightened service to those less fortunate. In short, they were no longer a minority seeking rights but part of the majority conferring them; their political activity switched imperceptibly from influencing leadership to exercising it.

Hence it became hard to distinguish specifically Jewish elements in American culture. They had become an integral and harmonious part of it. It was still harder to identify American policies which were in response to supposed Jewish interests. Such interests tended to become increasingly coterminous with America’s as a whole. This principle operated forcibly in the case of Israel. It was no longer needful to argue America’s leaders into guaranteeing Israel’s right to survive. That was taken for granted. Israel was a lonely outpost of liberal democracy, upholding the rule of law and civilized standards of behaviour in an area where such values were generally disregarded. It was natural and inevitable that Israel should receive America’s support and the only argument was about how that support could be most judiciously provided. By the 1980s the realities of the world were such that Israel would have remained America’s most reliable ally in the Middle East, and America her most trustworthy friend, even if the American-Jewish community had not existed.

Yet that community did exist and it had achieved a unique status in the diaspora not merely by its size but by its character. It was a totally assimilated community which still retained its Jewish consciousness. Its members thought of themselves as wholly American but as Jews too. Such a phenomenon had never existed before in Jewish history. It was made possible by the peculiar circumstances of America’s growth and composition. The Jews, the eternal ‘strangers and sojourners’, at last found permanent rest in a country where all came as strangers. Because all were strangers all had comparable right of residence until the point was reached when all, with equal justice, could call it home. Then too, America was the first place in which the Jews had settled where they found their religion, and their religious observance, an advantage, because all religions which inculcated civic virtue were honoured. Not only that: America also, and above all, honoured the umbrella religion of its own, what might be called the Law of Democracy, a secular Torah which Jews were outstandingly well equipped to observe. For all these reasons it became perhaps misleading to see the American Jewish community as part of the diaspora at all. Jews in America felt themselves more American than Jews in Israel felt themselves Israeli. It was necessary to coin a new word to define their condition, for American Jews came to form, along with the Jews of Israel and the Jews of the diaspora proper, the third leg of a new Jewish tripod, on which the safety and future of the whole people equally depended. There was the diaspora Jew, there was the ingathered Jew and, in America, there was the possessing Jew.

American Jewry formed the mirror-image of Russian Jewry. In America a Jew helped to own his country; in Russia he was owned by it. The Soviet Jew was possessed, a property of the state, as he had been in the Middle Ages. One of the lessons we learn from studying Jewish history is that anti-Semitism corrupts the people and the societies possessed by it. It corrupted a Dominican friar as effectively as it corrupted a greedy king. It turned the Nazi state into a heaving mass of corruption. But nowhere were its corrosive effects more apparent than in Russia. The ubiquitous petty corruption engendered by the Tsarist laws against the Jews has already been noted. More important in the long run was its moral corruption of state authority. For in harassing the Jews, the Tsarist Russian state became habituated to a close, repressive and highly bureaucratic system of control. It controlled the internal movements and residence of the Jews, their right to go to school or university and what they studied there, to enter professions or institutes, to sell their labour, to start businesses or form companies, to worship, to belong to organizations and to engage in an endless list of other activities. This system exercised monstrous, all-pervading control of the lives of an unpopular and underprivileged minority and a ruthless invasion of their homes and families. As such, it became a bureaucratic model, and when the Tsars were replaced first by Lenin, then by Stalin, the control of the Jews was extended to the control of the entire population, and the model became the whole. In this system, in which all were harried and all underprivileged, the Jews were further depressed to form a sump or sub-class in which the degree of state control was deliberately intense.

Stalin’s use of anti-Semitism in the leadership struggles of the 1920s and the purges of the 1930s was characteristic of him. His wartime creation of the Jewish Anti-Fascist Committee and publication of the Yiddish magazine Aynikayt (‘Unity’) were merely tactical moves. Stalin’s daughter Svetlana has described his personal connections with Jews. He had some Jews in his household, including the foreign ministry official Solomon Lozowsky. When Svetlana, then seventeen, fell in love with a Jewish scriptwriter, Stalin had him deported. Later she succeeded in marrying a Jew, Gregory Morozov. Her father accused him of evading military service: ‘People are getting shot and look at him–he’s sitting it out at home.’ Stalin’s oldest son Yakov also married a Jewish wife and, when he was taken prisoner, Stalin claimed she had betrayed him. ‘He never liked Jews,’ Svetlana wrote, ‘though in those days he wasn’t yet as blatant about expressing his hatred for them as he was after the war.’81

There was really no pause in Soviet anti-Semitism, even during the war. It was very marked in the Red Army. ‘Anti-Semitism in the Soviet Union’, a former army captain stated, ‘is rampant to an extent that it is impossible for anyone never having lived in that accursed country to imagine.’82 Towards the end of the war, some government departments, notably the Foreign Ministry, were largely cleared of Jews and no more Jews were accepted as trainees. The post-war attack, of which the murder of Mikhoels in January 1948 was a foretaste, began the same year in September. It was signalled by an Ilya Ehrenburg article in Pravda–Stalin often made Non-Jewish Jews the agents of his anti-Semitism, rather as the SS used the Sonderskommandos–denouncing Israel as a bourgeois tool of American capitalism. The Jewish Anti-Fascist Committee was disbanded, Aynikayt closed and the Yiddish schools shut down. Then began a systematic attack on Jews, especially writers, painters, musicians and intellectuals of all kinds, using terms of abuse (‘rootless cosmopolitanism’) identical with Nazi demonology. Thousands of Jewish intellectuals, including the Yiddish writers Perez Markish, Itzik Fefer and David Bergelson, were murdered, as was any Jew who happened to catch Stalin’s eye, such as Lozowsky. The campaign was extended to Czechoslovakia, where on 20 November 1952 Rudolf Slánsky, the Czech party general secretary, and thirteen other leading Communist bosses, eleven of them Jews, were accused of a Troskyite-Titoist-Zionist conspiracy, convicted and executed. Supplying arms to Israel in 1948 (actually on Stalin’s own orders) formed an important element in the ‘proof’.⁸³ The climax came early in 1953 when nine doctors, six of them Jews, were accused of seeking to poison Stalin in conjunction with British, US and Zionist agents. This show-trial was to have been a prelude to the mass deportation of Jews to Siberia, as part of a Stalinist ‘Final Solution’.⁸⁴

Stalin died before the doctors came to trial and the proceedings were quashed by his successors. The plan for a mass deportation came to nothing. But it was significant that anti-Semitism was not one of the aspects of Stalin’s behaviour Nikita Khrushchev denounced in his famous Secret Session speech. As first secretary in the Ukraine he shared the endemic anti-Semitism there and, immediately after the war, had stopped returning Jewish refugees from claiming their old homes. ‘It is not in our interests’, he stated, ‘that the Ukrainians should associate the return of Soviet power with the return of the Jews.’⁸⁵ Indeed there were several post-war Ukrainian pogroms under Khrushchev’s rule. Once in power, he switched the thrust of anti-Jewish propaganda from spying to ‘economic criminality’, large numbers of Jews, their names prominently displayed, being convicted and sentenced to death in nine show-trials. He closed down many synagogues, their total falling during his rule from 450 to sixty. He permitted the publication, by the Academy of Sciences of the Ukrainian Soviet Republic, of the notorious anti-Semitic tract, Judaism Without Embellishment, by the Communist Rosenberg, Trofim Kychko. The Khrushchev era witnessed an outbreak of blood libels, anti-Semitic riots and synagogue burning.

There was a brief respite for Soviet Jewry after Khrushchev’s fall in 1964. But, following the Six Day War in 1967, the campaign was openly resumed and intensified. In some respects Soviet anti-Semitism was very traditional. The Soviet rulers, like early medieval societies, like the Spaniards until the late fourteenth century, employed Jews in the economy until sufficient non-Jews had acquired the skills to replace them. The top Jewish Bolsheviks were nearly all murdered in the 1920s and 1930s. Thereafter Jews remained over-represented in the bureaucratic elites but never at the top political level: like the court Jews, they were allowed to help but never to rule. Even in the 1970s a Jew occasionally got as far as the Party Congress–there were four in 1971 and five in 1976–and it was not unknown for a Jew to be on the Central Committee. But such men had to earn their jobs by violent anti-Zionism. In 1966 Jews accounted for 7.8 per cent of academics, 14.7 per cent of doctors, 8.5 per cent of writers and journalists, 10.4 per cent of judges and lawyers and 7.7 per cent of actors, musicians and artists. But in every case the percentage was being pushed down by party and bureaucratic action. Thus Jews provided 18 per cent of Soviet scientific workers in 1947, only 7 per cent by 1970. As under the Tsars, the squeeze was applied particularly at the university level. The number of Jewish students declined in absolute terms, from 111,900 in 1968-9 to 66,900 in 1975-6, and still more heavily relative to the population as a whole. In 1977-8 not a single Jew was admitted to Moscow University.86

Soviet anti-Jewish policy, like Tsarist–and even Nazi policy in the 1930s–showed some confusions and contradictions. There were conflicting desires to use and exploit the Jews, to keep them prisoners, and also to expel them, the common factor in both cases being an anxiety to humiliate. Thus in 1971 Brezhnev decided to open the gates, and during the next decade 250,000 Jews were allowed to escape. But with every increase in emigration there was a sharp rise in trials of Jews, and the actual exit visa procedure itself was made as complex, difficult and shameful as possible. The need for a character-reference from the applicant’s place of work often led to a sort of show-trial there, in which the Jew was publicly discussed, condemned and then dismissed. So he was often jobless, penniless and liable to be gaoled for ‘parasitism’ long before the visa was granted.⁸⁷

The exit procedures became more onerous in the 1980s, recalling the labyrinthine complexities of Tsarist legislation. Fewer visas were granted and it became common for a family to wait five or even ten years for permission to leave. The procedure could be summarized as follows. The applicant had first to get a visov, a legally attested invitation from a near-relative living in Israel, with an Israeli government guarantee to issue an entry visa. The visov entitled him to go to the Emigration Office and be issued with two questionnaires for each adult member of the family. The applicant filled these in, then added the following: an autobiography, six photographs, copies of university or other diplomas, a birth certificate for each member of the family, a marriage certificate if married, and, where parents, wife or husband were dead, the appropriate death certificates; a certificate showing possession of a legal residence; an officially certificated letter from any member of the family being left behind; a certificate from their place of work or, if not working, from the House Management Office of their place of residence; and a fee of 40 roubles (about $60). When all these had been handed in, the decision whether or not to grant a visa took several months. If a visa were granted (but not yet issued), the applicant had then to resign from work (if not already dismissed); get an official estimate of the cost of repairing his flat; pay the estimate; pay 500 roubles a head ($750) as a penalty for giving up Soviet citizenship; surrender his passport, Army Registration Card, employment record book and his flat-clearance certificate; and pay a further 200 roubles ($300) for the visa itself. Applicants refused a visa had the right to apply again at six-month intervals.88

The Soviet campaign against the Jews, after 1967 a permanent feature of the system, was itself conducted under the code-name of anti-Zionism, which became a cover for every variety of anti-Semitism. Soviet anti-Zionism, a product of internal divisions within the east European Jewish left, was in turn grafted on to Leninist anti-imperialism. At this point we need to retrace our steps a little, in order to show that the Leninist theory of imperialism, like Marx’s theory of capitalism, had its roots in anti-Semitic conspiracy theory.

The theory arose from the development of South Africa from the 1860s onwards, the outstanding example of the application of large-scale capital to transform a primitive into a modern economy. South Africa had been a rural backwater until the discovery of the diamond fields of Kimberley in the 1860s, followed by the goldfields of the Rand twenty years later, opened up its interior and mineral wealth. What made South Africa different was the use of a new institution, the mining finance house, to concentrate claims and to raise and deploy enormous capital sums in high-technology deep mining. The institution itself was invented by an Englishman, Cecil Rhodes. But Jews had always been involved in precious stones (especially diamonds) and bullion, and they played a notable part both in the South African deep-level mines and in the financial system which raised the capital to sink them.89 Such men as Alfred Beit, Barney Barnato, Louis Cohen, Lionel Phillips, Julius Wehrner, Solly Joel, Adolf Goertz, George Albu and Abe Bailey turned South Africa into the world’s largest and richest mining economy. A second generation of mining financiers, led by Ernest Oppenheimer, consolidated and expanded the achievement.⁹⁰

The rapid fortunes made (and sometimes lost) on the Rand by Jews aroused great jealousy and resentment. Among their critics was the left-wing polemicist J. A. Hobson, who went out to South Africa to cover the outbreak of the Boer War in 1899 for the Manchester Guardian. Hobson regarded the Jew as ‘almost devoid of social morality’, possessing a ‘superior calculating intellect, which is a national heritage’ allowing him ‘to take advantage of every weakness, folly and vice of the society in which he lives’.⁹¹ In South Africa he was shocked and angered by what he saw as the ubiquitous activity of Jews. The official figures, he wrote, stated there were only 7,000 Jews in Johannesburg but ‘The shop fronts and business houses, the market place, the saloons, the “stoops” of the smart suburban houses are sufficient to convince one of the large presence of the chosen people.’ He was particularly disgusted to find that the stock exchange was closed on the Day of Atonement. In 1900 he published a book, The War in South Africa: Its Causes and Effects, which blamed the war on ‘a small group of international financiers, chiefly German in origin and Jewish by race’. British troops were fighting and dying ‘in order to place a small international oligarchy of mine-owners and speculators in power in Pretoria’. ‘Not Hamburg,’ he wrote in disgust, ‘not Vienna, not Frankfurt but Johannesburg is the new Jerusalem.’⁹²

Hobson’s explanation of the origin of the war was false. The fighting, as was foreseeable, was disastrous for the mine-owners. As for the Jews, the whole of modern history proved them strongly pacific by inclination and interest, especially in their capacity as financiers. But Hobson, like other conspiracy theorists, was not interested in facts but in the beauty of his concept. Two years later he expanded his theory into a famous book, Imperialism: A Study, which revealed international finance capital as the chief force behind colonies and wars. His chapter, ‘Economic Parasites of Imperialism’, the heart of his theory, contained this key passage:

Those great businesses–banking, brokering, bill discounting, loan floating, company promoting–form the central ganglion of international capitalism. United by the strongest bonds of organization, always in closest and quickest touch with one another, situated in the very heart of the business capital of every state, controlled, so far as Europe is concerned, chiefly by men of a single and peculiar race, who have behind them many centuries of financial experience, they are in a unique position to control the policy of nations. No great quick direction of capital is possible save by their consent and through their agency. Does anyone seriously suppose that a great war could be undertaken by any European state, or a great state loan subscribed, if the house of Rothschild and its connections set their face against it?93

When Lenin came to write his own thesis on the subject, at Zurich in the spring of 1916, he complained of a shortage of books. ‘However,’ he wrote, ‘I made use of the principal English work on imperialism, J. A. Hobson’s book, with all the care that, in my opinion, this work deserves.’⁹⁴ Hobson’s theory, in fact, became the essence of Lenin’s own. The result, Imperialism: The Highest Stage of Capitalism (1916), laid down the standard doctrine on the subject for all states under Communism, from 1917 to the present day. Leninist theory, in one form or another, likewise formed the attitudes of many Third World states towards imperialism and colonialism, as they acquired independence in the 1950s and 1960s.

Granted the theory’s anti-Semitic roots, it was not difficult to fit into it the concept of Zionism as a form of colonialism and the Zionist state as an outpost of imperialism. There were, it was true, the awkward historical facts of Israel’s birth, with Stalin acting as one of the principal midwives. These in themselves demolished the Soviet theory of Zionism completely. But like many other facts in Soviet history, they were buried and forgotten by the official propagandists. In any case the entire history of anti-Semitism demonstrates how impervious it is to awkward facts. That ‘Zionism’ in practice stood for ‘the Jews’ became quickly apparent. The 1952 Slánsky trial was the first occasion in the history of Communism that the traditional anti-Semitic accusation of a world-wide Jewish conspiracy, with the American Jewish Joint Distribution Committee and the Israeli government constituting the modern Elders of Zion, was put forward officially by a Communist government–an ominous milestone. The reality behind the scenes was even worse. The Jewish Deputy Foreign Minister Artur London, sentenced to life imprisonment but released in the ‘Prague Spring’ of 1968, was then able to reveal the anti-Semitic fury of the chief prosecutor, Major Smole: ‘[He] took me by the throat and in a voice shaking with hatred shouted: “You and your dirty race we shall exterminate it. Not everything Hitler did was right. But he exterminated Jews and that was a good thing. Far too many of them managed to avoid the gas chamber but we shall finish where he left off.” ’95

From the early 1950s, Soviet anti-Zionist propaganda, growing steadily in intensity and comprehensiveness, stressed the links between Zionism, the Jews in general, and Judaism. ‘Judaic sermons are the sermons of bourgeois Zionists,’ announced a Ukrainian-language broadcast from Korovograd, 9 December 1959. ‘The character of the Jewish religion’, the Kuibyshev newspaper Volszhskaya Kommuna wrote on 30 September 1961, ‘serves the political aims of the Zionists.’ ‘Zionism’, wrote Kommunist Moldavia in 1963, ‘is inseparably linked to Judaism…rooted in the idea of the exclusiveness of the Jewish people.’⁹⁶ Hundreds of articles, in magazines and newspapers all over the Soviet Union, portrayed Zionists (i.e. Jews) and Israeli leaders as engaged in a world-wide conspiracy, along the lines of the old Protocols of Zion. It was, Sovietskaya Latvia wrote, 5 August 1967, an ‘international Cosa Nostra’ with ‘a common centre, a common programme and common funds’. The ‘Israeli ruling circles’ were only junior partners in its global plots.⁹⁷

In the twenty years after the 1967 Six Day War, the Soviet propaganda machine became the main source for anti-Semitic material in the world. In doing so it assembled materials from virtually every archaeological layer of anti-Semitic history, from classical antiquity to Hitlerism. The sheer volume of the material, ranging from endlessly repetitive articles and broadcasts to full-scale books, began to rival the Nazi output. Trofim Kychko’s book, Judaism and Zionism (1968), spoke of the ‘chauvinistic idea of the God-chosenness of the Jewish people, the propaganda of messianism and the idea of ruling over the peoples of the world’. Vladimir Begun’s Creeping Counter-Revolution (1974) called the Bible ‘an unsurpassed textbook of bloodthirstiness, hypocrisy, treason, perfidy and moral degeneracy’; no wonder the Zionists were gangsters since their ideas came from ‘the scrolls of the “holy” Torah and the precepts of the Talmud’.⁹⁸ In 1972 the Soviet embassy journal in Paris actually reproduced parts of a Tsarist anti-Semitic pamphlet put out in 1906 by the Black Hundred, who organized the pre-1914 pogroms. In this instance it was possible to take action in the French courts, which duly found the publisher (a prominent member of the French Communist Party) guilty of incitement to racial violence.⁹⁹ Some of the Soviet anti-Semitic material, circulated at a very high level, almost defied belief. In a Central Committee memorandum of 10 January 1977, one Soviet anti-Semitic expert, Valery Emelianov, claimed that America was controlled by a Zionist-masonic conspiracy ostensibly led by President Carter but actually under the control of what he called the ‘B’nai Brith Gestapo’. The Zionists, according to Emelianov, penetrated goy society through the masons, each one of whom was an active Zionist informer; Zionism itself was based on ‘the Judaic-masonic pyramid’.100

The keystone of the new Soviet fantasy-edifice of anti-Semitism was provided in the 1970s, when the charge that the Zionists were the racist successors of the Nazis was ‘proved’ by ‘evidence’ that Hitler’s Holocaust itself was a Jewish-Nazi conspiracy to get rid of poor Jews who could not be used in Zionist plans. Indeed, it was alleged, Hitler himself got his ideas from Herzl. The Jewish-Zionist leaders, acting on orders from the millionaire Jews who controlled international finance capital, helped the SS and the Gestapo to herd unwanted Jews either into the gas ovens or into the kibbutzim of the Land of Canaan. This Jewish-Nazi conspiracy was used as background by the Soviet propaganda machine to charges of atrocities against the Israeli government, especially during and after the Lebanon operations of 1982. Since the Zionists were happy to join with Hitler in exterminating their own discarded people, wrote Pravda on 17 January 1984, it was not surprising that they were now massacring Lebanese Arabs, whom they regarded as sub-human anyway.¹⁰¹

These sinister developments in the anti-Semitic policy of the Soviet government were more than a reversion to traditional Tsarist practice, though they included most of the familiar Tsarist mythology about Jews. For one thing, Tsarist governments always allowed the Jews escape through mass emigration. For another, the Soviet regime had a record second only to Hitler’s in exterminating entire categories of people for ideological purposes. The equation of Jews with Zionism, a capital offence in Soviet doctrine, would make it the easiest thing in the world for the Soviet leadership to justify in ideological terms extreme measures against Russia’s 1,750,000 Jews, such as reviving Stalin’s 1952-3 plan to deport them en masse to Siberia, or even worse.

Another disturbing factor was the close resemblance between Soviet anti-Jewish propaganda and similar material put out by Russia’s allies in the Arab world. The difference was more of form than of substance. The Arabs were less thorough in their use of ideological jargon and they sometimes openly used the word ‘Jews’ where the Russians were usually careful to employ the code-term ‘Zionists’. Where the Russians drew from the Protocols of Zion without acknowledgment, the Arabs published it openly. This tract had circulated widely in the Arab world, published in innumerable different editions, ever since the early 1920s. It was ready by such diverse Arab leaders as King Feisal of Saudi Arabia and President Nasser of Egypt. The latter evidently believed it, telling an Indian journalist in 1957: ‘It is very important that you should read it. I will give you a copy. It proves beyond a shadow of a doubt that three hundred Zionists, each of whom knows all the others, govern the fate of the European continent and that they elect their successors from their entourage.’102 Nasser was so impressed by the book that yet another Arab edition was published by his brother in about 1967. Extracts and summaries were used in Arab school textbooks and in training material for the Arab armed forces.¹⁰³ In 1972 yet another edition of it appeared at the top of the Beirut best-seller list.

All these editions, it should be added, were specially edited for Arab readers and the Elders were presented in the context of the Palestine problem. The Protocols were not the only anti-Semitic classic to live on in the post-war Arab world. Blood-libel material, published in Cairo in 1890 under the title The Cry of the Innocent in the Horn of Freedom, resurfaced in 1962 as an official publication of the UAR government called Talmudic Human Sacrifices.¹⁰⁴ Indeed the blood libel periodically reappeared in Arab newspapers.¹⁰⁵ But the Protocols remained the favourite, and not only in Arab Islamic countries. It was published in Pakistan in 1967 and extensive use was made of it by the Iranian government and its embassies after the Ayatollah Khomeini, a fervent believer in anti-Jewish conspiracy theory, came to power there in 1979. In May 1984, his publication Imam, which had already printed extracts from the Protocols, accused the British task force in the Falklands of conducting atrocities on the advice of the Elders of Zion.¹⁰⁶ Khomeini’s propaganda usually portrayed Zionism (alias the Jews), which had been at work ‘for centuries everywhere, perpetrating crimes of unbelievable magnitude against human societies and values’, as an emanation of Satan. Khomeini followed the medieval line that Jews were sub-human or inhuman, indeed anti-human, and therefore constituted an exterminable category of creature. But his anti-Semitism hovered confusingly between simple anti-Judaism, Islamic sectarianism (Sunni Moslems ruling his enemy Iraq were Zionist puppets as well as devils in their own right) and hatred of America, ‘the great Satan’. He found it difficult to decide whether Satan was manipulating Washington via the Jews or vice versa.

Arab anti-Semitism too was an uneasy blend of religious and secular motifs. It was also ambivalent about the role of Hitler and the Nazis. The Grand Mufti of Jerusalem had known of the Final Solution and welcomed it. Hitler told him that when his troops reached the Middle East they would wipe out the Jewish settlements in Palestine.107 After the war, many Arabs continued to regard Hitler as a hero-figure. When Eichmann was brought to trial in 1961-2, the English-language Jordanian newspaper, Jerusalem Times, published a letter congratulating him for having ‘conferred a real blessing on humanity’. The trial would ‘one day culminate in the liquidation of the remaining six million to avenge your blood’.¹⁰⁸ On the other hand, Arab anti-Semitic propagandists often followed the Soviet line that Jews and Nazis had worked hand-in-glove, and that the Zionists were the Nazis’ natural successors. Particularly in their propaganda directed at the West, Arab governments compared the Israeli air force to the Luftwaffe and the IDF to the SS and Gestapo. At one time or another (sometimes simultaneously) Arab audiences were informed that the Holocaust had been a fortunate event, a diabolical plot between Jews and Nazis, and had never occurred at all, being a simple invention of the Zionists. But when had anti-Semitic theorists ever been disturbed by internal contradictions in their assertions?

The quantity of anti-Zionist material flooding into the world, from both the Soviet bloc and the Arab states, was augmented first by the 1967 Six Day War, which acted as a powerful stimulant to Soviet propaganda against Israel, then by the oil-price revolution following the 1973 Yom Kippur War, which greatly increased Arab funds made available for anti-Zionist propaganda. Inevitably the scale and persistence of anti-Israeli abuse had some effect, notably in the United Nations. The old League of Nations had shown itself singularly ineffective in protecting Jews during the inter-war period. But at least it had not actively encouraged their persecution. The 1975 session of the United Nations General Assembly came close to legitimizing anti-Semitism. On 1 October it received in state President Idi Amin of Uganda, in his capacity as Chairman of the Organization of African Unity. Amin was already notorious for his large-scale massacres of the Ugandan population, some of which he had carried out personally. He was also well known for the violence of his anti-Semitic statements. He had sent a cable to the UN secretary-general on 12 September 1972 applauding the Holocaust, and he announced that, since no statue to Hitler had been erected in Germany, he proposed to set one up in Uganda. Despite this, or perhaps because of it, he was well received by the General Assembly. Many UN delegates, including the whole of the Soviet and Arab blocs, gave him a standing ovation before he began his speech, in which he denounced the ‘Zionist-American conspiracy’ against the world and called for the expulsion of Israel from the UN and its ‘extinction’. There was frequent applause during his grotesque philippic and another standing ovation when he sat down. The following day the UN secretary-general and the president of the General Assembly gave a public dinner in his honour. A fortnight later, on 17 October, the professional anti-Semites of the Soviet and Arab publicity machines achieved their greatest triumphs when the Third Committee of the General Assembly, by a vote of 70 to 29, with 27 abstentions and 16 absent, passed a motion condemning Zionism as a form of racism. On 10 November the General Assembly as a whole endorsed the resolution by 67 to 55 with 15 abstentions. The Israeli delegate, Chaim Herzog, pointed out that the vote took place on the thirty-seventh anniversary of the Nazi Kristallnacht against the Jews. The US delegate, Daniel P. Moynihan, announced with icy contempt: ‘The United States rises to declare before the General Assembly of the United Nations, and before the world, that it does not acknowledge, it will not abide by, and it will never acquiesce in this infamous act.’109

One of the principal lessons of Jewish history has been that repeated verbal slanders are sooner or later followed by violent physical deeds. Time and again over the centuries, anti-Semitic writings created their own fearful momentum which climaxed in an effusion of Jewish blood. The Hitlerian Final Solution was unique in its atrocity but it was none the less prefigured in nineteenth-century anti-Semitic theory. The anti-Semitic torrent poured out by the Soviet bloc and the Arab states in the post-war period produced its own characteristic form of violence: state-sponsored terrorism. There was irony in this weapon being used against Zionism, for it was militant Zionists, such as Avraham Stern and Menachem Begin, who had (it could be argued) invented terrorism in its modern, highly organized and scientific form. That it should be directed, on a vastly increased scale, against the state they had lived, and died, to create could be seen as an act of providential retribution or at any rate as yet another demonstration that idealists who justified their means by their ends did so at their peril. The age of international terrorism, created by post-war Soviet-Arab anti-Semitism, effectively opened in 1968 when the Palestine Liberation Organization formally adopted terror and mass murder as its primary policy. The PLO, and its various competitors and imitators, directed their attacks primarily against Israeli targets but they made no attempt to distinguish between Israeli citizens, or Zionists, and Jews, any more than traditional anti-Semitic killers distinguished between religious Jews and Jews by birth. When members of the Baader–Meinhof gang, a German fascist left organization inspired by Soviet anti-Semitic propaganda, hijacked an Air France aircraft flying from Paris to Tel Aviv on 27 June 1976, and forced it to land in Idi Amin’s Uganda, the terrorists carefully separated the non-Jews from the Jews, who were taken aside to be murdered. One of those they planned to kill still had the SS concentration camp number tattooed on his arm.110

Terrorism on the scale and of the sophistication employed by the PLO was a menacing novelty. But to the Jews there was nothing new in the principle of terrorism. For terror had been used against Jews for 1,500 years or more. The pogrom was a typical instrument of anti-Jewish terrorism, designed not primarily to kill Jews but to inculcate submissive fear and resignation to ill-treatment, to instil the habitual docility which led the Jews to submit to the Final Solution almost without a struggle. But those days were over. Terrorism was still employed by Jews but no longer with impunity. The planned murder of Jews aboard the Air France aircraft was an instance. The Israeli Entebbe raid which rescued them (all save one old lady, killed by Amin) demonstrated the ability of the Zionist state to aid Jews in peril more than a thousand miles beyond its borders. Israel could and did act directly against terrorist bases also. The greatest of them was the southern Lebanon, effectively occupied by the PLO in the years 1970-82. From 6 June 1982 the Israel Defence Forces demolished the bases and cleared the entire area of the PLO, which was forced to retreat to a reluctant Tunisia; and even there, in 1985, it was shown that the PLO headquarters was not beyond the reach of Israeli retribution. Such Israeli exercises of the right of self-defence were sometimes misjudged or ill executed. They provoked criticism, on occasion from Israel’s friends. The occupation of the southern Lebanon in 1982, which involved heavy Israeli bombing and many Arab casualties and homeless, was a bitter source of discord between Israel and her allies and even within Israel. It was also the background to a slaughter of Moslem refugees, by Christian Falangist Arabs, in the Sabra and Shatilla camps on 16 September. This episode was skilfully exploited by Arab and Soviet propagandists and presented in the Western media as an Israeli responsibility. Begin, then still Israel’s prime minister, commented bitterly to a cabinet meeting three days later: ‘Goyim kill goyim, and they blame the Jew.’¹¹¹ The Israelis wisely ordered an independent judicial inquiry which established the facts and placed some blame on the Israeli Minister of Defence, Ariel Sharon, for not having foreseen and prevented the killings.¹¹²

The spectacle of Jews killing, especially killing unjustly, was deeply disturbing to them. The possibility had been foreseen in Judah Halevi’s Kuzari, written in about 1140, in dialogue form between a rabbi and the wise King of the Khazars. Thus: ‘Rabbi: Our relation to God is a closer one than if we had already reached greatness on earth. King: That might be so if your humility were voluntary. But it is involuntary, and if you had power you would slay. Rabbi: Thou hast touched our weak spot, O King of the Khazars.’ Yet the right to kill in self-defence was inherent in the human condition. Every man possessed it. The state merely exercised it vicariously, on the community’s behalf, and on a greater scale. Jews, perennially preoccupied, almost obsessed, with the sanctity of life, found the killing role of the state hard to accept. To them it was the curse of Saul. It had cast a shadow on the life of their greatest king, so that David, being a man of blood, could not build the Temple. But between the curse of Saul and the reality of Auschwitz there could be no real choice. The Jews had to have their state, with all its moral consequences, to survive.

The need for a secular Zion did not diminish during the first forty years of its history. It increased. It had been created to receive the victims of European anti-Semitism and, in the aftermath of the Holocaust, to house its shattered survivors. It had served to accommodate those expelled from Arab Jewries. These fulfilled purposes alone justified its existence. But new tasks emerged. It became clear, during the post-war decades, that the Soviet regime was no more likely to reach a peaceful accommodation with its Jewish citizens than its Tsarist predecessor. The evidence suggested that they might be in greater collective peril than ever before. So one prime aim of the Israelis was to get their 1,750,000 Russian brethren out of the power of the Soviet system. They had to be prepared, at short notice, to accept a mass migration of the kind that Tsarist cruelties had provoked. They had equally to be ready to move heaven and earth if the hatred of the Soviet regime for the Jews took other forms.

The state of Israel acquired an even more sombre purpose. It was the sovereign refuge of the imperilled Jew anywhere in the world. It was the guardian of gathered Jews already within its borders. It was the only physical guarantee that another Holocaust would not occur. The unremitting campaign of violent anti-Semitism by its Soviet and Arab enemies suggests that separately or conjointly they might seek to impose another Final Solution if they got the opportunity. Israel had to assume such a possibility, and arm against it. It had reliable promises of United States protection but in the last resort a sovereign state must look to its own defences. Hence Israel had to possess the means to inflict unacceptable damage on a would-be aggressor, however powerful. If David had to meet Goliath, he must possess a sling. During the Second World War Jewish scientists had played a critical part in making the first nuclear weapons. They had done so because they feared Hitler would develop an atomic bomb first. In the 1950s and 1960s, as Soviet and Arab hostility to Israel grew, Israeli scientists worked to equip the state with a means of deterrence. In the late 1970s and 1980s they created a nuclear capability, whose existence was secret but understood in the quarters where it would have most effect. Thus Israel was in a position to fulfil the second of the two new tasks which circumstances had placed upon her.

But it would be wrong to conclude a history of the Jews on this grim note. Jewish history can be presented as a succession of climaxes and catastrophes. It can also be seen as an endless continuum of patient study, fruitful industry and communal routine, much of it unrecorded. Sorrow finds a voice while happiness is mute. The historian must bear this in mind. Over 4,000 years the Jews proved themselves not only great survivors but extraordinarily skilful in adapting to the societies among which fate thrust them, and in gathering whatever human comforts they had to offer. No people has been more fertile in enriching poverty or humanizing wealth, or in turning misfortune to creative account. This capacity springs from a moral philosophy both solid and subtle, which has changed remarkably little over the millennia precisely because it has been seen to serve the purposes of those who share it. Countless Jews, in all ages, have groaned under the burden of Judaism. But they have continued to carry it because they have known, in their hearts, that it carried them. The Jews were survivors because they possessed the law of survival.

Hence the historian must also bear in mind that Judaism has always been greater than the sum of its adherents. Judaism created the Jews, not the other way round. As the philosopher Leon Roth put it: ‘Judaism comes first. It is not a product but a programme and the Jews are the instruments of its fulfilment.’113 Jewish history is a record not only of physical facts but of metaphysical notions. The Jews believed themselves created and commanded to be a light to the gentiles and they have obeyed to the best of their considerable powers. The results, whether considered in religious or in secular terms, have been remarkable. The Jews gave the world ethical monotheism, which might be described as the application of reason to divinity. In a more secular age, they applied the principles of rationality to the whole range of human activities, often in advance of the rest of mankind. The light they thus shed disturbed as well as illuminated, for it revealed painful truths about the human spirit as well as the means to uplift it. The Jews have been great truth-tellers and that is one reason they have been so much hated. A prophet will be feared and sometimes honoured, but when has he been loved? Yet a prophet must prophesy and the Jews will persist in pursuing truth, as they see it, wherever it leads. Jewish history teaches, if anything can, that there is indeed a purpose to human existence and that we are not just born to live and die like beasts. In continuing to give meaning to creation, the Jews will take comfort from the injunction, thrice repeated, in the noble first chapter of the Book of Joshua: ‘Be strong and of good courage; be not afraid, neither be thou dismayed: for the Lord thy God is with thee whithersoever thou goest.’114