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The Third Pillar:
Towards European Jewish Identity
This essay hinges around two
central questions. The first is internal. Can Jews in Europe today come
together to constitute a significant third pole for a postwar Jewish world
mainly established in Israel and America? The second is external and more
fundamental for our concerns. Can Jews in Europe today assert their active
presence in a democratic continent coming to grips with pluralist and
multicultural challenges? In brief, sixty years after World War II and the
Shoah and at the dawn of the 21st century can one speak of or even imagine the
contours of a new European Jewish identity, one which would be enriching and
useful to Jews and non-Jews in Europe and around the world?
The answer in my opinion is, qualified by
the proviso that identities take shape only if there are people who
incarnate them, in this case Jews who feel equally at home in their Jewish
and European roots. It is my belief that only now in the context of a
democratic (or aspiring democratic) and reunited pan-European continent do
we have the premises for such a new Jewish identity.
For a European Jewish identity to emerge a series of major conceptual
obstacles have had and still have to be lifted. The most fundamental is
historical, cultural and ideological: a profound (and not wholly
unjustified) antipathy for the very concept of Europe in a post-Shoah Jewish
world dominated by American Jewry and Israel. The second obstacle was
ideological: only with the end of Communism as a state ideology symbolized
by the fall of the Berlin wall in 1989 could the two halves of the continent
be reconciled and the Jews within them, with their multiple and clashing
pasts be reunited as voluntary Jews. The third obstacle hat had to be lifted
was the silence that surrounded the Holocaust, comfortably cordoned off into
the realm of private Jewish grief or placed on a lofty pedestal of the
„unspeakable" far from the very real life and politics of the continent. The
fourth obstacle could be found in the realm of interreligious dialogue in
particular with respect to Catholicism. Only when the Vatican recently
recognized the State of Israel could one speak of a final normalization
between Jews and Christians without which the past could not be transcended.
The fifth obstacle that is slowly being lifted is the tension and suspicion
which surrounded Western European-Israeli relations in the postwar period in
particular after Israel’s Six day War in 1967, characterized by an infernal
spiral of suspicion and disdain on the part of the Israelis toward the
Continent. Europeans seemed to be bogged down vis a vis Israel in a
psychologically disturbed and most unhealthy blend of silence, guilt,
realpolitikal considerations vis a vis the Arab world, misplaced
international morality and legalistic punctiliousness all of which wrought
havoc with the very idea of Jewish life in Europe.
Only with the lifting of these
obstacles, can one begin to deliniate the contours of any future oriented
European Jewish identity and can Jews calmly confront the challenges ahead
both as Europeans and as Jews. Among the most important I would place the
pluralist democratic challenge, the multicultural challenge, and the Jewish
coming to terms with a new European cultural phenomenon: the Jewish space.
The Sea Change of 1989 Jews around the world however including those in
western Europe, assumed that the fall of the Wall would lead to only one
outcome: the departure of all the Jews from the Communist bloc and thus the
final closing of accounts in the painful chapter of Jewish life in Eastern
Europe. Although hundreds of thousand of Soviet Jews did indeed go to
Israel, many chose to stay behind and many even settled in Germany. Rather
than turning into a definitive graveyard, Eastern Europe was suddenly aglow
with a numerically small but qualitatively vital revival of Jewish life.
Thus did the demise of Communist regimes across Europe set the ground for an
emerging European Jewish identity. For it was only when „captive Jews" were
finally free to leave for Israel that one could identify and count the
"voluntary" Jews who instead chose to remain willingly as Jews inside their
respective homelands and by ricochet in a renewed pan-European setting.
These Jews were coming back to the fold out of forced or voluntary total
assimilation, precisely at the same time as Jews in Western Europe were also
disassimilating and taking on a more confrontational attitude toward their
countrie’s respective pasts during the Holocaust. They could pursue such an
internal distancing with impunity because they were full fledged citizens of
their respective countries and endowed with a self confidence which their
parents had lacked.
Constructing an European Jewish
identity implies above all abolishing the new pecking order inside European
Jewry which replaced the old pre-Shoah order. In pre-Nazi Europe, Jewish
„elites" were those that were most assimilated, while the „Ostjuden" were
perceived as „inferior" and at times even threatening to Western European
Jews because of their religious obscurantism, traditional life style and
essential refusal of assimilation and modernity. The vast majority of the
„Ostjuden" were exterminated during the Holocaust but it was their Judaism
that appeared in retrospect to have been the most legitimate, along with its
lay dialectical opposite, Zionism. Both had forcefully eschewed the hopeless
illusion of Jewish integration or a ssimilation inside European societies
and the Shoah seemed to have justified them beyond appeal.. The pecking
order inside the postwar Jewish world thus gave highest status to the
Zionists and to a lesser degree to the religiously orthodox, even though
they were essentially perceived by others as guardians of a spent world. The
great losers were the assimilated humanistic and modern Jews that had
predominated in Western Europe.
Positing a European Jewish identity
implies paradoxically retracing one’s steps backward and reentering the lost
world of humanistic European Jewry supposedly killed at Auschwitz to look
for living embers rather than ashes. This is a major challenge. Postwar
American Jews are convinced that they carried off the last spark of European
Judaism into the terrestrial Jerusalem of the New World far from spent
Europe, and for most of the postwar period, it seemed undoubtedly so. Today
however, the surviving embers of the past are coming back to life in Europe
itself, fanned by the winds of pluralist democracy and by the healing powers
of history and with the help of American Jewish institutions The comparison
that comes to mind is with the California vines that were sent back to
Europe after the phyloxera epidemic of the 1870’s had destroyed Europe’s
most prestigious vineyards, so as to bring them back to life. The California
vineyards had of course originally come themselves from Europe. European
Judaism will be the product of a similar grafting.
Of course Jewish life in Europe can
only have a future if it is rooted in Europe itself and if it confronts its
own very special challenges, first and foremost among which the legacy of
the Holocaust. It can do so now precisely because the Holocaust is slowly
coming to rest where it belonged from the start, not only in the circles of
Jewish sorrow but above all on the shoulders of the countries and societies
that abetted it, i.e, not just on guilty Germany but on Europe as a whole.
Europe’s New Jews
In the Israeli and in the American
imagination, naturally enough, Europe’s Jews today are perceived very much
as the inheritors of the history and the weaknesses of their pre-Shoah
forefathers whose civilization purportedly went up in smoke at Auschwitz.
Yet nothing could be further from the truth for a series of crucial
structural reasons. Today’s Jews in Europe are qualitatively different and
very much „new" compared to those of the prewar past. First of all, in
Western Europe, many are simply geographically new thanks to the important
migrations of the postwar period. French Jewry was renewed through the
arrival of North African Jews, above all from Algeria in the early 1960’s.
But the same was true for Italian Jewry that received Jews, as Great Britain
and Switzerland, from Lebanon, Syria and Egypt, while the Scandinavian
countries received Jews from Poland, Austria received many Jews from Hungary
while West Germany welcomed Jews from Poland, Hungary and Romania and most
recently and most spectacularly Jews from Russia.
Equally important, those Jews who were
the descendants of the long established pre-Holocaust Jewries of Europe were
themselves transformed by historical events into a new type of Jew. The old
assimilated Jewries of Western Europe may have retained a national loyalty
but they could no longer muster the same kind of unconditional patriotism as
in the past, especially among the younger generations who were better
informed about the greyness of their national antecedents. In eastern Europe
Communism assimilated Jews forcefully, turning them into citizens like
everybody else at the expense of their own often fragile identitites. The
postwar Polish Jews had little in common with their prewar predecessors,
just as few postwar French Jews continued to be the equivalent of the
assimilated „Israelites" of the past. Furthermore in France, the survivors
of the Ostjuden who had immigrated after World War I and who were never part
of the old French Jewish elites, have taken up their own identity in the
postwar period with a vengeance, next to the Sepharad Jews. In countries
with virtually no Jewish populations such as Spain or Portugal, new Jews
arrived which were a mix of German exiles, Ashkenazi immigrants from Latin
America, and local Jews that emerged often from clandestinity, true
Marranos, although the term was now also used to evoke Poland’s „new Jews".
To these Jews must be added the
relative cohorts of Jews stemming from mixed marriages and actively choosing
to espouse a Jewish identity whereas in the past, they would have been
nothing in religious terms or members of the majoritarian religion. These
"half Jews" pose a most disturbing historical question. Indeed, many of
today’s active and voluntary Jews in Europe would not even have been born
had their own parents not survived because they were the children of mixed
marriages.
To this mix must also be added two
other categories of Jews not from Europe: American Jews living as
expatriates in Europe who played a crucial role in helping to set up
voluntarist communities often of a liberal sort and taught the notion of
grass roots community organization; and Israelis abroad who have brought
with them their own national culture but also a renewed interest in Hebrew
literature beyond the religious texts.
If American Jewry with the opening of
Eastern Europe has gone into an immense nostalgia trip for their roots in
the world of „Yiddishkeit", Jews in Eastern Europe, coming out of
assimilation, feel no similar need. Their search is for viable modern roots
inside the Judaism of their forefathers, for a useable as opposed to a
mythical past. These „new Jews" who are disassimilating both East and West
are searching for a compromise, for unlike their prewar ancestors, they are
not marginal insiders who in reality were outsiders but true insiders who
seek to keep an identity foot „outside" by recuperating or rather
reinventing a Jewish tradition and identity for themselves. They are living
Jews, who are conquering for themselves places within civil society, no
longer confining themselves in niches within the protective (or often
stifling) structures of the State. One can no longer speak about
„Anglo-Jewry", French Jacobin Jews, or Jewish Italian patriots, much less of
old German Jews as in the past. What is emerging before us are new personae:
Jews with multiple loyalties who are rather like free electrons inside newly
defined state and cultural perimeters.
Toward a new America-Israel-Europe
Triangle
Europe’s Jews were peripheral and
negligible quantitites, second class assistants in the great Jewish play
unfolding in Israel and in America,-with the added misfortune of performing
on a lateral and badly lit stage with an indifferent public.
In the last two decades, this black and
white vision of each side of the triangle has become less clear cut, more
open to reflection and even more relativized. American Jewry, so proud of
its power, has turned inward to contemplate its own inherent diasporic
fragility: declining numbers, mixed marriages, a loss of commitment and
ideals as its members moved up the social ladder , virtually disappearing
into a WASP elite condition in the space of just three generations, from
ghetto to national power. In the great multicultural jockeing for power,
America’s Jews stand uneasily among the power elite, having still barely
recovered from the struggles and tensions of their relations with the Black
community after the initial honeymoon of the civil rights period. Europe’s
historical victims could not make a similar claim for „victimhood" inside
the American body politic whose quintessential historical victims were
either the American Natives dispossessed of their land and identity or the
descendants of the Black slaves - the only group not to have come
voluntarily to the New World. In this context, one can better understand the
recent American Jewish fixation on the Holocaust as a world historical event
that could restore for them a sense of historical victimhood by proxy, one
that could be enshrined in the very heart of the American liberal and
democratic conscience - all the more easily that the historical culprits of
the horror lay elsewhere, in Germany.
Similarly, Israel also has experienced
a major transformation that has eroded its original ideological power,
historical purity, and progressivism. As the most powerful country in the
region, Israel has experienced the reality of state power with its
concomitant realpolitical choices, errors and injustices, in particular
toward the Palestinians. Paradoxically, it has achieved its quest for
normality and should not be surprised if it treated as such in the
international arena. More important , the tiny democracy in the Middle East
has developed its own internal enemies in the ultra-orthodox nationalist
camp, whose beliefs are at the antipodes of social democratic Zionism,
bordering on a Jewish version of „blood and soil" fascism, religious
intolerance and ethnic purity. Internal strife, deadly tensions, and a
growing feeling that Israel, like all of the western world, but Europe in
particular, still had democratic lessons to learn, has given Israelis a new
humility. A major role was played in this sense by the revisionist
historians who underscored the inherent European like ethnic nationalism
that underlay the foundations of the Jewish State in its behaviour to its
historic „others’ , the Arabs. In other words, Israel was much more a part
of Europe than its Zionists ideology claimed. It too is having to retool its
national identity to take democratic pluralism into account. Thus its
challenges are far closer to those of Europe at present. The gap between the
old world and the new Israel is narrowing rather than expanding.
The relativization of the three sides
of the Jewish triangle is only slowly emerging today but it will have an
undoubtedly crucial impact on future European Jewish life, in that it will
disengage it from the need to be the equivalent of Israeli ambassadors
abroad, in order to resume its own Jewish tasks inside the continent. Israel
will need a strong Diaspora in Europe not just as a messanger but far more
importantly as a democratic and pluralist counterweight to the State’s own
inevitable realpolitik and political choices which can only lead to
compromise with the ultra religious camp. In this context, it will be
neither in the interests of Israelis nor of European Jews to speak of poor
or even "dying" European cousins at the hands of a haughty historically
self-contained and self-confident Israel. The relationship will be mutually
beneficial and reciprocal. In the future, European Jewry may well end up
being a point of equilibrium between the Israeli and the American poles of
world Judaism.
The challenges we refer to here are of
a political and cultural nature, and not in the spiritual arena. Jewish
religious life interests us only as far as its manifestations succeed or
fail in espousing the leading values of our age, pluralist democratic
tolerance. While the ultimate „internal" Jewish challenge is to lead an
integral and holy Jewish life, what interests us here are the far more
terrestrial challenges of Jewish life inside the wider polis and in the
cultural agora. These challenges exist everywhere, including in Israel and
in America. But in Europe, perhaps because they are spelled out for the
first time across the continent, they take on a special significance and
even symbolism.
Accustomed to millenia of
discrimination and exclusion, followed by the maelstrom of emancipation and
its apparent traumatic finale, the Holocaust, Jews in Europe, have yet to
come to terms with their condition as full fledged citizens of their
respective countries able to pursue the Jewish identity of their choice in
the freest of possible manners. The three challenges that will confront them
in the future are the pluralist democratic challenge, the multicultural
challenge, and the Jewish presence inside Europe's growing Jewish Space.
Meeting the pluralist challenge implies finding an equilbirium between the
pluralist ideals of the outside world and the manifold incarnations of an
often traditional and hierarchical Judaism, a Judaism whose internal
equilbriums had been greatly facilitated in the past by the external
unifying pressure of often hostile surroundings. Confronting the
multicultural challenge implies reflecting on the political and cultural
implications of a Jewish identity inside Europe's historically laden
nations. Should Jews become „outsiders" prodding a new multicultural
tolerance for their traditions and rituals? Should they invoke the same
tolerance instead as „insiders" dismantling from within millenial prejudices
but in the name of equality rather than in that of special as though
„exotic" treatment? The third and most difficult challenge is the Jewish
Space: how should Jews approach and intervene in Europe's growing Jewish
spaces, increasingly initiated, populated and even administered by non-Jews?
Toward a European Jewish identity?
Whether such an identity will really
crystallize depends ultimately on the continents own Jews. The internal and
external challenges are all there waiting to be seized creatively. However,
no amount of American and Israeli intervention and funding can make such an
identity exist if it does not possess and develop its own dynamic. During
this past decade as Europe embarked on its own sea change, international
Jewish support was crucial to the establishment of new communities, to the
rebirth of Jewish life especially in Eastern Europe, and to the financing of
encounters. Now that the Jewish actors of the new Europe are gradually
putting themselves in place, the ball will be increasingly in the European
camp, a camp defined in the largest possible sense, one that by no means
excludes and instead welcomes Jewish contributions from elsewhere. In this
context it is significant to see that the heirs of the old German Jewry to
be found mainly in the States but also in Israel are increasingly attracted
to the growing Jewish Space in Germany. They come to it not only for the
sake of their own past, but very much as an international Jewish stake for
the future. The past is only now coming back to life in Germany whereas it
had been preciously preserved in exile whether in New York or in Jerusalem,
most notably through the Leo Baeck institutes. The prognosis so far seems
good. Everywhere throughout Europe „new Jews" from Portugal to Russia are
developing their own symbioses, agendas and cultural life. Never has the
timing been more propitious both in terms of the interest of the outside
world and the possibilities of the world within but with one proviso. Jewish
life can fully blossom in an open Europe only if Jews learn to master the
fear of freedom in order to develop a Judaism which no longer has to face
debilitating external constraints.
European Jews in the future if they are
to flourish must above all not be guardians of a static and finalized
pre-Holcoaust heritage. They must not become the museum keepers of world
Jewry. They must cease to think of themselves as a dying species, obsessed
with declining numbers. Rather they should infuse Jewish life in the numbers
they have and welcome inside the Jewish ranks those who want to join the
Jewish people. By the spreading of Jewish religious values, history,
philosophy and ethics, and culture (well beyond its facile ethnic
components) Jews should take on a leading role in Europe’s coming to terms
with itself. The invisible voices at the conference on the Balkans should at
last feel free to express their own multiple identitis and values. The
ultimate victims of yesterday have become Europe's most impressive postwar
success story. They are increasingly towering over the crossroads of the
continent's past, present and future, very much on center stage. May we,
Europe's „new Jews" have the collective wisdom to use this symbolic power
with openness, modesty and justice.
[golem@hagalil.com]
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