THE STORY OF THE JEWS
Volume 2
Belonging: 1492-1900
By Simon Schama
Illustrated. 790 pp. Ecco. $39.99.
Simon Schama’s “Belonging: 1492-1900,” the second volume of his panoramic study of Jewish life, “The Story of the Jews,” is in fact an account of serial exile. Jews never belong enough anywhere to avoid vilification as parasites, vultures, usurers and traitors. “They have clung to us like leeches,” wrote the French polemicist Georges-Marie Mathieu-Dairnvaell in the 1840s, and were no more than “vampires, scavengers of nature.”
This is the standard lexicon of Jew hatred during the period Schama covers in “Belonging.” Loathing flares — from Mantua to Prague, from London to Lisbon, from the Vatican to Berlin — with scant variation. Degradation amounts to the Jews’ “perpetual punishment for the sin of the Crucifixion,” Schama writes. They are the Christ killers, fit principally for the ghetto, unfit for citizenship.
The book begins around the time of the Spanish Inquisition and ends with the Dreyfus case, a 400-year round trip back to the same Jewish question. Theodor Herzl finally answers that question with his Zionist vision of a “home that is destined to be a safe haven for the Jewish people.” The homeland, for Herzl, whose pamphlet “The Jewish State” was published in 1896, was needed because it had proved “useless” for Jews to be “loyal patriots.” Only in their own state would they not be potential pariahs.
Continue reading the main storyIt is difficult to read the 800 pages of “Belonging” and not reach the same conclusion. No Jewish patriot, rich or poor, was secure. The fate of Alfred Dreyfus, a loyal French officer falsely convicted of treason, was always possible. To think otherwise was indeed useless, an exercise in delusion. Expulsion, imprisonment or worse lurked — a constant threat.
A century before Herzl, in 1789, the French Revolution and the Declaration of the Rights of Man had seemed to signal a new era. That year, Mirabeau, an aristocratic philosophe, argued that “in church men are Catholics, and in synagogue, Jews, but in all civil matters they are patriots of the same religion.” Stanislas de Clermont-Tonnerre, another French “ex-aristo,” as Schama puts it with his trademark vernacular brio, declared that “prejudices should be silent in the face of the language of the law.”
Jews heard the liberating message. For a time, Napoleon’s army carried it forth. Out of the shtetl and into the mainstream of European life the new citizen-Jew duly emerged. Throughout the 19th century, Jews rose in business and the professions, becoming physicians and lawyers, even politicians and army officers, only to discover that half-acceptance into Christian society could be more dangerous than nonacceptance.
In retrospect, the ardent patriotism of European Jews had a pathetic, plaintive quality. Assimilation, even conversion, would do them no good when the tide turned. In a passage with eerie echoes of today’s reactionary xenophobic fever, propagating itself a little more than a quarter-century after the euphoria that accompanied the fall of the Berlin Wall, Schama writes:
“The timing of Jewish emancipation had been terrible for its beneficiaries, albeit not of their choosing. For it came about exactly when Enlightenment cosmopolitanism, the universal brotherhood, that short-lived little flame, had burned out. By the second quarter of the 19th century, resistance to the dominion of the machine took the form of a militant cult of history, religion, nature and nation, against which the Jews seemed to personify the opposite: a people — a dynasty like the Rothschilds — indifferent to borders, a race who were everywhere and nowhere.”
Liberating flames died. Scapegoating returned. Nothing under the sun was quite as it seemed. “Belonging” is not, then, an ironic title. It was the core dilemma of the Jews across these four centuries. It was their constant quest (and equally constant worry), neither quite attainable nor, it seemed, definitively out of reach.
Here and there — in the 17th-century Dutch Republic for example, or in 19th-century Britain — a sense of belonging did take hold. The Jews of Amsterdam in the 1640s could feel “simultaneously autonomous and yet integrated into the life of the Dutch Republic,” because there was “no monolithic sense of ‘Dutchness,’” religious or dynastic, against which Jews could be judged alien. The British, almost six centuries after the banishment of the Jews in 1290, would elect Benjamin Disraeli (whose father had however deemed it prudent to get his son baptized) as prime minister. Yet the stories gathered here point to a single conclusion: Precariousness is the inescapable Jewish condition.
Schama is a remarkable storyteller. His approach is cinematic. He sets scenes with great vividness and writes, from street level, with an unflagging verve. His overarching title is “The Story of the Jews,” not “The History of the Jews.” Few statistics, let alone big-picture summaries, encumber, or anchor, the cascading, virtuoso narrative. The effect is kaleidoscopic, if occasionally disorienting.
Like the Jewish peddler with his cart and wares, ever in search of a livelihood and a home, we shift from place to place. Our companion may be Leone de Sommi, a 16th-century Italian Jewish showman, or Daniel Mendoza, an 18th-century British Jewish pugilist of “long lashes fringing wide brown eyes.” Each tells a story of creative straining toward fragile, often ephemeral acceptance. The reader is ushered into a galaxy of Jewishness, from the Ottoman court to faraway China by way of Cochin in India. What emerges is a riveting picture, gorgeously rendered, of the stubborn, argumentative miracle of Jewish survival against the odds.
In the late 18th century, a German Jew by the name of Moses Mendelssohn, the pupil of a rabbi from Dessau, grappled with the thorny Jewish dilemma. In his “Jerusalem, or On Religious Power and Judaism,” he argued that nothing in Jewish precepts and ethics made it impossible for, as Schama puts it, “an observant Jew to be also a conscientious citizen of wherever he or she lived.” Mendelssohn wrote: “Let everyone be permitted to speak as he thinks, to invoke God after his own manner or that of his fathers and seek salvation where he thinks he may find it as long as he does not disturb the public peace and acts honestly according to the civil laws. Let no one be a searcher of hearts and judge of thought.”
In such expressions of liberalism, with their debt to Locke and Hobbes, the impact of the Enlightenment is palpable. Yet tolerance remained elusive. For Christian Europe, the Jew was ever the outsider. The United States was another story. The Constitution, and in particular the First Amendment, seemed to set Jews free. For Uriah Levy, a Jewish naval officer who bought Jefferson’s Monticello in 1834 (what greater symbolism of Jewish emancipation could there be?), “the Constitution had made an independent America the first true ‘sanctuary’ of the modern world.” Washington himself celebrated “a government which gives to bigotry no sanction.”
That, of course, was not the whole truth; America’s original sin of slavery would cast a terrible shadow. Nor did anti-Semitism die overnight in the New World. Schama describes as reeking of Old World prejudice Ulysses Grant’s Order 11 of 1862, expelling all Jews from his military jurisdiction on the flimsy ground that they were smuggling goods to the Confederacy. “If commercial treason was being committed against the Union, the order implied, it must be the notoriously shady Jews who were to blame.” The order, which appalled Lincoln when he discovered it, was never carried out.
Millions of European Jews flooded into the United States in the late 19th and early 20th centuries, fleeing pogroms and seeking opportunity and protection under the law. They could not know what would befall the continent they left behind. But Herzl had a strong intuition. For Zionism to take hold, he wrote, “we shall have to sink lower, shall have to be even more insulted, spat on, mocked, whipped, plundered and slain.”
In Austria, Herzl, who lived much of his life in Vienna, foresaw that “the people will let themselves be intimidated by the Viennese rabble and deliver up the Jews. There you see the mob can achieve anything once it rears up.” He concluded: “They will kill us.” These were the grim, prescient ruminations that preceded Herzl’s writing of “The Jewish State” and the first Zionist Congress of 1897 in Basel.
Not even Herzl, however, could have foreseen the industrialized mass murder of the Holocaust, the unspoken shadow that hovers over these pages. Nor could he have imagined the fulfillment in 1948, with the foundation of the modern state of Israel, of his dream. Nor how the Zionism he described in Basel as a “moral, humanitarian movement” would be prodded over time toward messianic nationalism by the violent, still unresolved confrontation with the Arabs of Palestine; nor how the Jewish exercise of power, rather than Jewish subjection to its cruel whim, would test the very ethics that bound Jews to their formless, faceless God during the millenniums of tribulation in the diaspora.
In the end the price of Jewish statehood has been heavy: the exile of another people, the Palestinians. More than a half-century of occupation of the West Bank has corroded Israeli democracy. This was not inevitable and is still not irreparable. No doubt, these themes will be prominent in Schama’s next volume. At a time of facile anti-Zionism spilling sometimes into outright anti-Semitism, Schama has made an eloquent and a far-reaching case for why Jews needed a small piece of earth they could call home.
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