A Few Thoughts On Jewish Disappointment
You suffer because you are a Jew; you would stop being a Jew if you stopped suffering; and you would stop suffering only if you stopped being a Jew. This is, undoubtedly, a great burden. But this is why there is nothing to be done: Judas will agonize until the end of time. — Nae Ionescu
There is an anecdote about one of my favorite Romanian writers, Mihail Sebastian. An up-and-coming young novelist and playwright, part of the vibrant, bon-vivant interwar intelligentsia of Little Paris (as Bucharest was then known), Sebastian idolized Nae Ionescu, a blustery and charismatic Philosophy professor with a German Ph.D. In 1934, when preparing to publish his novel For Two Thousand Years, whose protagonist is a secular Jewish student reacting to the increasing antisemitism surrounding him, Sebastian sent Ionescu an advance copy and asked him to write a foreword. Ionescu took the opportunity to write a lengthy treatise on the immutability of Jewish identity and Jewish people’s unavoidable and well-deserved eternal suffering. Jews failed to accept Jesus as the Messiah, and thus they are destined to roam the Earth in perpetual agony:
Iosef Hechter, (Sebastian’s given name) you are diseased. You are fundamentally diseased, because you can only suffer; and your suffering is endless. We all suffer, Iosif Hechter; us Christians suffer, too. But we have an exit, because we can be saved. I know, you have faith; you have faith that your Messiah will arrive on a white horse and you will then rule the Earth. Keep your faith, Iosef Hechter. It’s the only thing you have left.
Although deeply shocked and hurt, Sebastian took a few days and then told his publisher to go ahead and print Ionescu’s foreword.
I’ve been thinking about that a lot.
In the wake of 10/7 I, like many other secular, assimilated, small-l liberal American Jews, was shocked by the ease with which anti-Jewish, not to mention anti-Israeli sentiment, took over the mainstream. We had BLM Chicago posting a paraglider meme within, what, less than a day?
Over the past three months, we’ve seen Ivy League university presidents prevaricate on whether antisemitism is okay a) never; b) sometimes; c) often; or d) it depends. We’ve seen the President’s spokesperson answer a question about anti-Jewish crime with a tidbit about anti-Muslim crime. We’ve seen the New York Times uncritically repeat outrageous Hamas talking points featuring astoundingly accurate casualty numbers acquired at night, during a catastrophic bombing, within less than 90 minutes. We’re continuing to see folks unconvinced that a corpse with legs spread, undergarments torn, and extensive genital trauma is evidence of rape, because “there are no first person accounts.”
This is all very disappointing. American Jews fought in Europe in WWII. They marched alongside Blacks for civil rights. They championed women’s liberation. And yet here we are: it only took a generation after the Holocaust for the elites to turn on the Jews.
A story as old as time.
This may surprise some folks, but Jews haven’t always had uncontested control of the levers of power. The Jews who were around in Jesus’ time, Roman citizens or subjects, slowly died out as the Holy Roman Empire crumbled. It took new (male) arrivals from the Middle East having babies with Central European women a little less than 1,000 years ago to give birth to the vast majority of Jews that we know today. Withstanding war, pestilence, and prejudice, these people grew from roughly 300 souls in 1250 to more than 500,000 in the 1,600s. And once the Dark Ages retreated from the advancement of reasoned thought, this nerdy, bookish people, raised on a tradition of arguing with everyone, especially God, found a niche for themselves among the technocrats and philosophes of the age of Enlightenment.
Non-Israeli Jews today (which is to say, most of the world’s Jews), owe their distinct yet integrated identities to the Haskalah movement. Towards the end of the 1700s, around the time when human prosperity began increasing exponentially in the wake of the Industrial Revolution, a Jewish Enlightenment started sweeping Central and Eastern Europe. The Maskilim, as the adherents of the movement were known, wanted to leave the insular world of old-timey, isolated, Rabbinically-ruled settlements and become part of society — but without losing their Jewishness. Tevye the Dairyman from Fiddler on the Roof is an excellent witness to Haskalah: he is an old-timey Jew with Maskilim daughters, whose struggle is whether or not to accept that joining Gentile society is compatible with being Jewish. (Shalom Aleichem, who created Tevye’s character, was himself a late-generation Maskil.)
Haskalah was an incredibly effervescent movement: Jewish children started enrolling in Gentile schools; Jews joined their respective countries’ civil service; an entire canon of Yiddish and Hebrew literature was written in the span of roughly 80 years. Maskilim created a vibrant Yiddish press, and an immensely popular Yiddish theater. Haskalah created secular Jews as we know them today.
And then, in 1882, the May Laws put this fire out. Tsar Alexander III’s “temporary” regulations confined Jews to the geographic area of the Pale of Settlement, curtailed Jewish property rights, and instituted quotas for the admission of Jews into Gentile schools.
I can only imagine the disappointment. Jews who had actively sought to be part of their countries’ culture and society, who had often incurred the loss of family or friends for their decision to leave the shtetl, were unequivocally told they weren’t wanted. Over the next few decades, those who could leave (for the US, Argentina, or Palestine), left.
50 years later and a bit to the West, the Nurnberg Laws were a similarly shocking blow, made perhaps even more egregious by the fact that most Western European Jews had, for several generations, been living lives indistinguishable from those of their Gentile neighbors.
I don’t quite know what to make of this. I like looking at the past because it’s informative, but it’s not predictive. Are we heading towards an American Holocaust? It’s very unlikely, for many reasons, paramount of which is that the American population has the right to bear arms. But we’re probably going to see violent clashes at some point in the near future.
I’m a lot more uncertain and confused about the perception of Jews as a … class? group? people? It does seem that young Americans are a lot less sympathetic to the notion that world Jewry went through an extinction-level event less than 80 years ago, and that a feeling of insecurity among the descendants of survivors is not unreasonable. Not to mention the fact that the Jewish state has not existed in peace since its foundation. In the victimhood culture that Gen Z is growing up in, being successful necessarily means being an oppressor, and oppressors must be defanged.
Nae Ionescu’s claim that “Judah’s destiny is to suffer” as punishment for not recognizing Jesus as the Messiah is obviously demented. And yet, Jews have a consistent track record of being expelled or violently persecuted at the exact moment when a cosmopolitan Jewish elite had begun to thrive. I sure hope that American Jews can remain both American and Jewish — but I am bracing for disappointment.