A Road to Nowhere Jewish Experiences in Unifying Europe

A Road to Nowhere?

Jewish Identities in a Changing World

General Editors

Eliezer Ben-Rafael, Yosef Gorny,and Judit Bokser Liwerant

VOLUME 17

The titles published in this series are listed at the back of this volume, and also at: www.brill.nl/jicw.

A Road to Nowhere?

Jewish Experiences in Unifying Europe

Edited by

Julius H. Schoeps and Olaf Glöckner

in cooperation with

Anja Kreienbrink

LEIDEN • BOSTON2011

This book is printed on acid-free paper.

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

Schoeps, Julius H. ( Julius Hans), 1942– A road to nowhere? : Jewish experiences in the unifying Europe / by Julius H. Schoeps and Olaf Glockner. p. cm. — ( Jewish identities in a changing world ; 17) Includes bibliographical references and index. ISBN 978-90-04-20158-3 (hardback : alk. paper) 1. Jews—Europe—History—21st century. 2. Jews—Europe—Identity. 3. Europe—Ethnic relations. 4. Antisemitism—Europe. I. Glockner, Olaf. II. Title. DS135.E84S36 2011 305.892’404—dc22 2010049726

ISSN 1570-7997ISBN 978-90-04-20158-3

Copyright 2011 by Koninklijke Brill NV, Leiden, The Netherlands.Koninklijke Brill NV incorporates the imprints Brill, Hotei Publishing,IDC Publishers, Martinus Nijhoff Publishers and VSP.

All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, translated, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording or otherwise, without prior written permission from the publisher.

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CONTENTS

Introduction ................................................................................ ix Julius H. Schoeps/Olaf Glöckner

PART I

THE JEWISH WORLD CONTEXT

Jews in Europe: Demographic Trends, Contexts and Outlooks .................................................................................. 3 Sergio DellaPergola The European Jewish Diaspora: The Third Pillar of World Jewry? ...................................................................................... 35 Gabriel Sheffer

Cultural Pluralism as an American Zionist Option for Solidarity and its Relevance for Today’s European Jewry ... 45 Ofer Schiff

PART II

EUROPEAN JEWISH EXPERIENCES

Between Eurasia and Europe: Jewish Community and Identities in Contemporary Russia and Ukraine ................... 63 Vladimir Zeev Khanin

A Dual, Divided Modernization. Reflections on 200 Years of the Jewish Reform Movement in Germany .......................... 91 Micha Brumlik

Ghosts of the Past, Challenges of the Present: New and Old “Others” in Contemporary Spain .......................................... 103 Raanan Rein and Martina Weisz

vi contents

The Dialectics of the Diaspora. On the Art of Being Jewish in the Swedish Modernity ...................................................... 121 Lars Dencik

Does European Jewry Need a New Ethnic Spiritual Umbrella? Reflections ........................................................... 151 Yosef Gorny

Farewell to Europe? On French Jewish Skepticism about the New Universalism ................................................................... 159 Pierre Birnbaum

The Return of the European Jewish Diaspora. New Ethno-National Constellations since 1989 ............................. 179

Y. Michal Bodemann

Reading between the Lines. Assertion and Reassertion in European Jewish Life ............................................................. 189 Antony Lerman

PART III

ANTI-SEMITISM, ISRAEL AND JEWISH POLITICS

Hate against the Others. About the Fatal Chain Creating Xenophobia and anti-Semitism ............................................. 201 Thomas Gergely “Anti-Semites of the Continent Unite!” Is the East still Different? ................................................................................. 207 Raphael Vago

Anti-Semitism or Judeophobia? The Intellectual Debate in France 2000–2005 .................................................................. 221 Denis Charbit

From anti-Jewish Prejudice to Political anti-Semitism? On Dynamics of anti-Semitism in post-Communist Hungary .... 247

András Kovács

contents vii

A Mediterranean Bridge over Troubled Water. Cultural Ideas on How to Reconcile Israel with its Neighbours and with Europe ............................................................................ 269 David Ohana

The Future of European Jewry—A Changing Condition in a Changing Context? ................................................................. 293 Shmuel Trigano

Epilogue

Klal Yisrael Today: Unity and Diversity. Reflections on Europe and Latin America in a Globalized World .............. 299 Judit Bokser Liwerant and Eliezer Ben-Rafael

Notes on the Contributors ......................................................... 335Bibliography ................................................................................ 341Main Index ................................................................................. 363Names Index ............................................................................... 367List of Tables .............................................................................. 371List of Graphs ............................................................................. 373

INTRODUCTION

Julius H. Schoeps/Olaf Glöckner

On the “Old Continent”, blessings and curses were rarely far apart. This was never more evident than in 20th century Europe: from London to Rome, from Madrid to Warsaw, the period was first marked by a euphoric belief in progress: art, science and economy were boom-ing; philosophers and humanists argued about the best means to achieve a just society. But then—as in previous centuries—brutality returned: civilians were slaughtered; racial and political persecution cost countless lives. In this most cherished Europe, two murderous world wars broke out; two-thirds of the Jewish people were extermi-nated; and, after 1945, the front lines of the “Cold War” were estab-lished. It almost seemed as if the Continent would never find peace; in the long-term, worst-case scenario, it could become the staging ground for a nuclear inferno.

Quite unexpectedly, the page did turn, towards the end of the 20th century. With the fall of the hated Berlin wall—for 30 years a symbol of the separation between East and West—the state Social-ist regimes in the Eastern Bloc imploded, narrow-minded national-ism lost its appeal and the reconciliation of long-time enemy states began. There was an overall sense of optimism. Despite all political and economic setbacks, the blue-yellow EU flag has become a symbol of hope for many Europeans. The foundation of a common “Euro-pean House” seems to have been set. But just how stable is the struc-ture’s walls and rooms? Up to now, political scientists, sociologist and ethnologists have ventured only tentative prognoses. The controver-sial question remains: can 87 different peoples and even more ethnic minorities—in all, 770 million Europeans1 including some 1.5 million Jews—learn to build a harmonious co-existence?

Clearly, ethnic, religious and cultural minorities also join in plac-ing great hopes in the unprecedented experiment of the European Union. Never before did minorities in Europe find more favorable

1 Pan and Pfeil, 2006.

x introduction

legal and social conditions. Never before has Christian Western Civili-zation been more open to participation in society and to multi-cultural coexistence. It is even considered more or less “politically incorrect” in some countries to promote assimilation; rather, ethno-cultural self-determination is a widely accepted individual and collective lifestyle.

Is united Europe at the start of the 21st century going through something like a second Modernity, linked today with a stable civil society that sees ethnic, cultural and religious divergences more as a boon than a danger? There is still no consensus: Skeptics say that concepts of multi-culturalism already are falling apart and they see the emergence of “parallel societies” as the negative flip side, with a lack of basic consensus on shared values and general principles. The “car-toon crisis” of 2005–2006 made it brutally clear how quickly cultural misunderstandings and religious fanaticism in Europe (and around the world) can generate a feared “Clash of Civilizations” (Huntington, 1996) and mobilize significant potential for violence.2 Still: more than anywhere else, European society is committed to a common “modus vivendi” that must include all majorities and minorities. German soci-ologist Hartmut Esser was correct to note that all parts of an immi-gration society should contribute to integration, and that integration is a hands-on learning process (Esser, 1980). From the Atlantic to the Urals, from the North Cape to the Strait of Gibraltar, majority popu-lations and minorities still take very different views of the new Euro-pean freedom, based of course on their objectively different cultural and religious traditions, their divergent political approaches and their inter-cultural experiences.

Of all the minorities in Europe today, the Jews—though relatively few in numbers—undoubtedly have the most comprehensive histori-cal experience. Their nearly 2,000 years on the “Old Continent” has had its highs and lows, its breaks and continuities; time and again they

2 The so-called “cartoon crisis” followed the publication of 12 caricatures of the Islamic prophet Mohammed in the Danish daily newspaper Jyllands Posten in Septem-ber 2005. This prompted massive protests by Muslims in early 2006. The protests spread rapidly around the world and in some cities resulted in violent clashes and fatalities. With the destruction of some European embassies, the cartoon controversy became a serious international crisis. Some prominent Muslims later suggested that the series of Mohammed cartoons was a “Jewish-American conspiracy” that had been “financed by Jews”. The largest Iranian newspaper, Hamshahri, promoted a so-called “Holocaust cartoon competition”. Personal attacks on Danish journalists and cartoon-ists continue to this day.

introduction xi

have faced existentially threatening situations. Sometimes the claim of being a member of the faith that “gave birth” to Christianity could save one from fire and the sword, but by far not always. Long before Adolf Hitler came on the scene, the tools of genocide had been pre-pared. Hitler and Auschwitz became the epitome of an unspeakable tradition of European hatred of Jews. The Holocaust claimed millions of lives and also destroyed the long-held dream of a European-Jewish symbiosis. For many, the “Old Continent” after 1945 was—and still remains—simply a large “Jewish cemetery”, and of course the disap-pointment in Germany was the greatest. Leo Baeck, the famous Ger-man rabbi who himself barely escaped death in the Theresienstadt concentration camp, soberly observed after the war: “We believed that the marriage of the German spirit with the Jewish spirit on German ground would be a blessed union. This was an illusion—the era of Jews in Germany is gone forever.” (Gidal, 1988: 426)

In fact, Jewish survivors hardly seemed able to build vibrant Jewish communities again, whether in Germany or anywhere else in Europe. The Holocaust weighed too heavily on them. Almost everywhere on the Continent, once thriving communities now led a “shadow exis-tence” and remained dependent on help from international Jewish organizations such as the American Joint Distribution Committee ( JDC), United Jewish Appeal ( UJA), American Jewish Committee (AJC) and World ORT.

In only a few countries did the Jewish population stabilize or even grow. Among the exceptions were Sweden and England, neither of which had been under Nazi occupation and both of which took in a considerable number of Jewish refugees after World War II. France merits a special reference: due to a large emigration from North Africa in the 1950s and ’60s, France has by far the strongest Jewish commu-nity on the Continent. But doubtless the largest surprise of the past 20 years was the enormous quantitative growth of the Jewish population in Germany, brought about by an unexpected wave of emigration from the successor states of the former Soviet Union.

For Eastern European Jewry, which still formed the largest con-centration of Diaspora population at the close of the 19th century, the situation had worsened gradually after 1945, primarily due to anti-religious—at times also anti-Semitic and anti-Zionist—policies in Moscow as well as in Budapest, Prague, East Berlin and other capitals of the “Eastern Bloc”. So it is hardly any wonder that a confrontation with the facts of the Shoah in Socialist states remained for a long time

xii introduction

fragmentary or completely suppressed—partly because collaboration with the Nazis had been particularly intense in these regions, but also because the state-run and controlled politics of memory did not allow for special attention to Jewish victims. Only after 1989 did Eastern Europe see the start of an unbiased confrontation with the history of the Holocaust.

Even west of the “Iron Curtain” it took some time before the gen-eral public was ready to approach the dark chapter of the Shoah. But by the early 1970s, the persecution and extermination of European Jewry had become a much-discussed theme, whether in universities, schools, media or even in Jewish-Christian associations. The realiza-tion gradually grew that Europe as a whole had been unable or unwill-ing to protect six million Jews from physical destruction by the Nazis and their local accomplices. The German-Israeli historian Dan Diner described Auschwitz as “a rupture in civilization”; his dictum remains widely accepted, and not only by scientists. Holocaust remembrance has received public recognition—for example, through periodic memo-rial ceremonies, exhibits, film series, centrally located memorial sites or large-scale educational programs. And for the first time, factions of the established churches began to look into their role in a nearly 2,000-year history of discrimination and persecution of Jews in Europe. Of course this did little to relieve the suffering and trauma of Holocaust survi-vors, but it did help the Jewish population to regain some of its trust in mainstream Western European societies.3

On the other hand, new fears arose from the fact that right-wing extremist parties achieved some spectacular electoral successes; that arson attacks against synagogues and Jewish community centers were a regular occurrence; that Jewish individuals were targets of physical attacks; and that some prominent non-Jewish politicians and opinion leaders, artists and trade unionists made polarizing, anti-Israel state-ments in connection with the Middle East conflict.

Currently there is practically no empirical research into the question of how secure—or insecure—Jews in Europe feel today, the extent to which they identify with their respective majority societies, and the

3 A similar process of building confidence between non-Jewish and Jewish popula-tions is also feasible in Eastern Europe, but this will require further, more system-atic processing of the events of World War II in the relevant countries. Currently, some Eastern European countries are experiencing a competition over remembrance, accompanied by political disputes, with Ukraine being a particularly clear example.

introduction xiii

degree to which they prefer to trust in their own networks. But how do the fewer than two million Jews on the Continent see their own perspectives as a collective community? From a purely demographic stand-point, European Jewry continues to shrink. Already in the mid-1990s, British historian Bernard Wasserstein uttered a strong warning in his book, Vanishing Diaspora, that this development would amount to self-destruction in the foreseeable future. Wasserstein saw the main causes in a disproportionate aging of the Jewish population, low birth rates, a steady increase in “mixed marriages” and a particularly Western trend toward secularization—a development that, of course, also hits non-Jewish institutions hard, including the Catholic and Protestant churches in Europe.

But what keeps the European-Jewish community together, if the importance of religion is dropping noticeably? French political scien-tist Diana Pinto, who has a much more positive take on the Jew-ish future on the “Old Continent” than Bernard Wasserstein—while omitting the demographic factor—has discovered a completely new dynamism and diversity of Jewish life within and outside the estab-lished communities. Pinto suggests it is important to address a new, self-confident Jewry, which remembers—“daf ka”—its European roots and actively seeks to play a role in building the new European house. More than that: Diana Pinto considers it possible to achieve a “Jew-ish Renaissance” in the heart of Europe and has confidence that, in the long term, European Jewry will form a “third pillar” alongside the American Jewish community and Israel (Pinto, 2000). It seems extremely difficult to back up this kind of postulate. But: if one takes into consideration new pluralistic tendencies in Western and Eastern Europe alone—“grass roots” movements like “Limmud”, the boom in Jewish art and culture in European cities and the rapid development in education, on up to the opening of new Jewish universities—then the question arises not only about European-Jewish consolidation, but also about the expected ripple effect for the rest of Diaspora and Israel.

Such considerations were also the jumping off point for an interna-tional conference that the Moses Mendelssohn Zentrum Potsdam and the research network “Klal Yisrael” (Tel Aviv) presented in May 2009 in Berlin, on the theme of “European Jewry—A New Jewish Centre in the Making?” Researchers from Hungary, France, England, Rus-sia Germany, Israel, Mexico and Canada met in an authentic Jewish site—the former bank of the Mendelssohn family in Berlin-Mitte—to discuss opportunities, limits and dangers for today’s Jews in Europe,

xiv introduction

their specific place in the Diaspora and ideas for the future of the continental process of unification. A considerable number of partici-pants from Israel and overseas offered a welcome guarantee that the conference would not mutate into a “closed” European event, but rather that it would be receptive to important external impulses and considerations.

Based on the Berlin conference, this volume, too, follows a the-matic sequence in which European Jewry is considered first within the context of general developments in the Diaspora; then according to an “insiders’ view” from various European countries; and finally with a discussion about inter-cultural challenges, old and new anti-Semitism and overall future prospects. The book is intended as an interdisciplinary approach to a highly complex issue that is often emo-tionally charged, an issue that contemporary historians, sociologists, political scientists, ethnologists and cultural studies experts are sure to handle intensively over the coming years as well. But the volume also is intended for all those who, whether directly or indirectly, will take part in future “community building” activities. At the Berlin con-ference, Charlotte Knobloch, vice president of the European-Jewish Congress (EJC), touched on an important point when she argued that it was necessary “to quickly start intensifying the contacts among the European communities” and that the first important step would be “to make a thorough stock-taking, a description of the status quo of how the situation looks in the different European states, which needs there are and where there are links for mutual support beyond the borders.” Knobloch also emphasized that “a more exact picture of the general atmosphere than is at present available will have to be in the centre of such a stock-taking.”

The authors assembled in this book are for the most part the same as those who delivered papers in Berlin; here, they present their some-times quite divergent views on the internal and external challenges facing European Jewry. They place different emphases, for example, on the role of religious communities, the connection between Europe and Israel and the fight against anti-Semitism. The search for new collective identities is traced with both skepticism and optimism; the euphoria over European unification is questioned just as critically as are their own strategies for distancing themselves. The theme of a new Jewish self-confidence is raised, together with urgent, unresolved ques-tions within the European (and global ) inner-Jewish discourse.

introduction xv

Sergio DellaPergola provides a detailed review of the latest demo-graphic developments in European Jewry. In his reflections he explicitly includes the communities in Russia, Ukraine and Turkey. DellaPer-gola seeks to prove that the “urbanization” of European Jewry con-tinues apace and suggests that European-Jewish internal migration is strongly correlated with general processes of modernization—with all the associated advantages and disadvantages.

Gabriel Sheffer classifies European Jewry within the general context of today’s “ethno-national-religious” Diaspora communities. He posits the “normalization” of the European-Jewish Diaspora and sees the growth of pluralism within Jewish communities as a strength rather than a weakness. Sheffer also considers the increasing urban concen-tration of European Jews to be advantageous for networking, commu-nication and intra-Jewish solidarity.

Ofer Schiff takes as his starting point the life work of the charismatic American Reform rabbi and committed Zionist Abba Hillel Silver and goes on to discuss the current shape of Diaspora-Israel-relations from a European perspective. To this day, Silver’s work symbolizes the opportunity to identify intensively with Israel and still develop a unique “Jewish agenda”.

Vladimir Zeev Khanin describes the dynamic processes taking place within the Jewish populations of Russia and Ukraine. Khanin outlines the dilemma of the great “exodus” of former Soviet Jews in the 1990s, but also describes the emergence of new Jewish identities among those who stayed. He also provides a transparent portrait of the develop-ment of internationally active Jewish umbrella organizations for Rus-sian-speaking Jews.

Micha Brumlik looks back on 200 years of the Jewish Reform move-ment in Europe, particularly elaborating on the early days of the Reform Jewish School in Frankfurt am Main. Brumlik also provides a detailed analysis of shared elements as well as irreconcilable differ-ences—past and present—with Jewish (neo-)Orthodoxy, and explicitly asks the Reform movement where it stands regarding what he consid-ers a much-needed, substantive renewal.

Raanan Rein and Martina Weisz describe surprisingly positive attitudes of today’s Spanish policies towards a Jewish community that is grow-ing but that has a collective memory of centuries of persecution and expulsion. At the same time, Rein and Weisz present empirical analy-ses showing an increase rather than a lessening of prejudices among Spaniards against Jews and against Muslims as well.

xvi introduction

Lasse Dencik focuses on the Jewish population in Scandinavia—par-ticularly in Sweden—in order to trace how combined identities (such as “Swedish-Jewish”) gain importance in liberal-modern societies. His own surveys in the Jewish communities of Stockholm, Malmoe and Gothenburg show that an intensive connection to the Swedish culture and way of life does not necessarily have negative consequences for Jewish culture and lifestyle—and vice versa.

Yosef Gorny reflects on the search for new (collective) Jewish identities in Europe (and elsewhere in the Diaspora) and emphasizes that one can draw on 20th century Jewish movements and ideologies only to a limited extent. Gorny’s preferred concept of an “Ethnic Umbrella” is based on the model of ethno-cultural unity of the Jewish people that Achad Ha’am set out; his model that remains as meaningful as ever. Within the context of “Klal Yisrael” and the “Ethnic Umbrella,” Gorny considers the state of Israel as a spiritual motherland but not by any means as a dominant centre of Jewish life.

Pierre Birnbaum describes the traditionally close connection of French Jews with the Republic and the State, and the skepticism that most of them feel towards an abstract European constitutional patriotism. Birnbaum contrasts Jürgen Habermas’ credo of a European universal-ism replacing national identities with the critical approach of French-Jewish intellectuals like Alain Finkielkraut and Jacques Derrida, and discovers a much stronger affinity among religious leaders towards “Paris” and “Jerusalem” than to the capital of Europe, Brussels.

Y. Michal Bodemann debunks the myth of a homogeneous European Jewry. Using the examples of recent developments in Germany, he shows how many unusual features have emerged there through rela-tions between non-Jews and Jews. Bodemann suggests that the concept of a shared remembrance of Auschwitz remains illusory; he also shows how non-Jews “judaize” cultural terrain and how German society and the public have created a “sui generis” role for the Jewish commu-nity—including Russian-Jewish immigrants.

Antony Lerman explains how the European-Jewish optimism of the 1990s suffered a marked setback with the events of 9/11, the start of the second Intifada, the new Gulf War and inner-European problems. Nevertheless, he believes that most European-Jewish problems today are “home made” and blames a certain organizational weakness in European-Jewish federations. On the other hand, Lerman sees a grow-ing demand for Jewish culture and education among Jews.

introduction xvii

Thomas Gergely describes social-psychological and group-dynamic mechanisms that repeatedly lead to the exclusion of minorities and in extreme cases to their destruction, in supposedly civilized societ-ies. Gergely even sees an ongoing danger of racist and anti-Semitic extremism in today’s Europe.

Raphael Vago examines the ways in which anti-Semitism in Eastern Europe today differs significantly from that in Western Europe. He finds that various Eastern European countries have persistently failed to confront the facts of the genocide of their indigenous Jewish popula-tions, and he also finds political instability—two factors that continue to leave segments of the population especially vulnerable to popular anti-Semitism. At the same time, Vago points out the danger of a growing network of right-wing extremist movements in Eastern and Western Europe.

Denis Charbit elucidates how a mixture of anti-Semitism and judeo-phobia has alienated the Jews in France since the early 1980ies, but even worse in the first decade of the new century. While the gen-eral Jewish population does hover between outrage, seclusion and thought to emigrate, Charbit reveals the fevered and partly contrarian reactions of the Jewish intellectuals. By introducing notions of Alain Finkielkraut, Pierre-André Taguieff, Nicolas Weill and Michel Wiev-iorka, he outlines principal items of the new debate on anti-Semitism, and how it affects concepts of Jewish-French politics.

András Kovács provides insight into the complicated relationship between Jews and non-Jews in 20th century Hungary. He shows how a subtle form of anti-Semitism was able to take persistent hold in the Eastern Bloc and how a post-Communist, Western-oriented soci-ety could generate a new, popular variety of anti-Semitism. Kovács believes there is a great risk of traditional diffuse anti-Jewish sentiment in Hungary turning into politically oriented anti-Semitism.

David Ohana introduces old and new ideas of cultural Mediterranean-ism (Hebrew: “Yam Tikhoniut”) as an identity-forming element, and perhaps also a reconciling element bridging the gap between Israel and the Arab countries bordering the Mediterranean Sea. “Yam Tik-honiut” could also be a cultural bridge between Israel and Europe. Ohana shows that the concept of Mediterranean identity was already quite prominent in early Israeli fiction.

Shmuel Trigano sets up seven conditions for the consolidation of the Jewish community in Europe as the basis for a new “Jewish Centre”.

xviii introduction

At the same time, he sees contradictions in the coexistence of non-Jews and Jews in today’s Europe and criticizes what he considers an ambiguous attitude on the part of European politicians: on one hand, they promote remembrance of the victims of the Shoah, and on the other hand many tend to de-legitimize Israel as a vital modern Jewish state.

In the epilogue Judit Bokser Liwerant and Eliezer Ben-Rafael offer systematic insights into the growing variety and dynamism of Jew-ish movements, whether religious, political or cultural. New config-urations are evident both inside and outside Jewish communities in Europe, North America and Latin America. The boom of competition compasses religious, cultural, (ethno-)political and universalistic con-ceptions—and has even backlashes on Israeli society. Liwerant makes clear that Latin America has contributed one of the most powerful models of Jewish corporate experience—the ethno-cultural, ethno-national, secularized, cohesive Jewish kehilla. Though, Latin America’s Jewry is undergoing its unique serious transformations, including a new religious revival, strenthening of Mizrahi communities, but also enormous out-migration to North America, Israel and not least to Europe. Similar to Europe, the “Jewish situation” in Latin America differs from country to country.

This volume may only be able to hint at other aspects of the past, present and future of European Jewry, but it also raises the next set of questions. No one seems willing to predict at this point whether Jews in Europe are really building their “common house”, linking more closely together, introducing specific Jewish experiences into the great EU experiment and thus also playing a unique role in the global Jew-ish world of tomorrow. Is the new, mainly culturally determinated pluralism and heterogenity an unmistakable sign of Jewish revival—or just a flash in the pan? Right now, anything seems possible. European Jewry could distinguish itself as a third Jewish center—aside Israel and American Jewry—, and at the best even as a third pillar. On the other hand there has remained certain distrust in European govern-mental politics, fear that home-grown judeophobia becomes the “nor-mal case” and worry that even European Jewish roof organizations get stuck in futile infightings. Notwithstanding new hopes and visions, there is still a risk that the Jews in Unifying Europe run the “road to nowhere.”

PART I

THE JEWISH WORLD CONTEXT

JEWS IN EUROPE: DEMOGRAPHIC TRENDS, CONTEXTS AND OUTLOOKS

Sergio DellaPergola

As part of the broader analysis of the evolving profile and experience of European Jewry, demography constitutes a primordial factor under-lying socioeconomic and cultural change, as well as policy transforma-tions and planning. This chapter aims at providing a basic quantitative framework to the more extended discussion of the Jewish experience in Europe, past, present and future.1

In long-term historical perspective, the Jewish presence in Europe underwent radical spatial, quantitative and social changes that reflected the essence of the deep conflicts, revolutions and reforms that cease-lessly shaped the continent. This was true since the end of World War II no less than before it. Large-scale immigration and emigra-tion, before and after the Shoah, generated more than once significant shifts and replacements in the human capital of European Jewry. Over the last tens of years, growth or stability in the size of Western Euro-pean Jewish communities contrasted with drastic reductions in Eastern Europe. These changes were deeply affected by the radical transitions witnessed by European political systems, in particular the build-up of the European Union and the demise of the Soviet Union.

Changes in size and geographical distribution of Jews in European countries primarily reflected the main migration flows at the inter-continental, international and interregional level. Along with the main geopolitical explanatory factors, a strong connection prevailed between the level and speed of development of different socioeconomic areas in Europe and the respective Jewish presence. Another set of determinants of Jewish demographic change reflected family patterns, marriage, fertility, age composition, and the influence of Jewish iden-tification on these factors.

1 For earlier analyses see DellaPergola, 1983: 19–62; DellaPergola, 1993b: 25–82; DellaPergola, 1994: 57–73.

4 sergio dellapergola

These different variables not only deeply affected the identifica-tional boundaries of the Jewish population, but eventually contrib-uted to some definitional blurring of Jewish peoplehood itself. The rules for defining the target population became the subject of a lively debate between different Jewish authorities competing for leadership of the Jewish public in a public space continuously reshaped by the vastly disparate behaviors of individual Jews and by the continuous reshuffling of community organizations supposedly representing them. Intellectuals and experts, participant observers of the Jewish scene in Europe, also tended to express a great variety of opinions, some of which anchored in systematic empirical work on the ground, some aired as normative hopes and fears.2

In the light of these trends and evaluations, alternative prognoses can be developed for Europe’s Jewish population in the foreseeable future. Based on different assumptions and scenarios, the results of these projections can be compared to trends in the two main areas of the contemporary Jewish presence, North America and Israel. This may provide a sense of the likelihood and limits of the coming age of Europe as one of the major pillars of global Jewish life in the future.

Europe’s Jewish Population: Historical Survey

While the concept of Europe may be clear in the mind of many, the geographical and cultural limits of the continent are a subject for ample debate. Dimensions of time and space cumulate to create a highly variable picture with reference to both the geo-political bound-ary of the socio-cultural aggregate and to the internal variability that has been a central characteristic of the European experience in gen-eral since time immemorial (see DellaPergola, 2006: 215–221). This is especially true when speaking of the Jews whose continuous presence on the continent has lasted more than 2,200 years. Such seniority makes the Jews not only an integral part of European history and cul-ture but actually one of its oldest and pristine components. However, the inherent weakness of a landless and powerless minority vis-à-vis territorially based societies and their constituted powers often histori-

2 See examples of contrasting views in: Wasserstein, 1996; Pinto, 2004: 679–689; Dencik, 2002: 1–34; Jewish People Policy Planning Institute, 2005: 299–368.

jews in europe: demographic trends 5

cally caused a status of dependency and instability, and translated into powerful ups and downs in the Jewish presence. At least on a quantita-tive scale, what is more remarkable in the European Jewish longue durée is its shifting rather than stationary geography (see Lestschinsky, 1926: 1–157; Lestschinsky, 1929/30: 123–156 and 563–599; DellaPergola, 2001b: 15–28; Schmelz and DellaPergola, 2006: 553–572).

After many centuries of scarce if any demographic growth among the overall extant Jewish population, during two and a half crucial centuries between 1700 and the eve of World War II the number of Jews grew from a relatively small total of perhaps one million overall, to the orders of magnitude of ten millions and above known during the twentieth century and at present. This momentous demographic transition primarily occurred in Europe, mostly on the East side of the continent (see DellaPergola, 2001a: 11–33).

It is not exclusively but certainly largely because most of the growth of Jewish population occurred in Eastern Europe, that the world Jew-ish Diaspora became predominantly associated and identified with

Figure 1. World Jewish population by major regions, 1170–2009

0

2,500

5,000

7,500

10,000

12,500

15,000

17,500

1170 1300 1490 1600 1700 1800 1860 1900 1939 1945 1960 1990 2008

Tho

usan

ds World totalDiaspora TotalEurope totalWest EuropeEast Europe


Europe. After the legal emancipation of the Jews during the last por-tion of the eighteenth century, if the leading ideas and leaders in the Jewish religious and civil realm often came from Western and Central Europe, certainly the public that they addressed were primarily located in Eastern Europe. During the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, it thus happened that many important developments that occurred in the religious, social, cultural and political realms and in which the imprint of Eastern European Jewry appeared to be dominant, signifi-cantly reflected the shift in that direction of the geographical center of gravity and critical mass of Jewish life.

Figure 1 also demonstrates the gradual disassociation of world Jew-ish population growth from Eastern Europe during the last years of the nineteenth century and until World War II. The rise of North American Jewry and to a lesser extent of other Jewish communities overseas and in Palestine became the dominant factor, but it should be stressed that the extension of the Jewish Diaspora to new conti-nents and areas was fundamentally fueled by large scale migrations from Europe. Because of the consequences of the Shoah, after World War II the weight of European Jewry sharply diminished while other Diaspora communities remained overall stable and the yishuv in Israel sharply increased. Other demographic factors that will be discussed later also contributed to the overall static share of Jews in Europe out of the global picture.

Figure 2 compares in greater detail the internal shifts of Jewish pop-ulation regional primacy over the last millennium according to eight main areas within Europe. The spectacular total continental growth during the nineteenth century, but also the more catastrophic con-sequences of Shoah affected particularly the complex of Poland, the Baltic States, Russia, Byelorussia, Ukraine and Bessarabia (later partly superseded by Moldova). In the long run, other geo-political regions in Europe displayed periodical rotations as the most significant areas of Jewish settlement: initially it was Spain and Portugal, relieved after the great expulsion by the growth of Central Europe’s Western parts (Germany, Austria, also inclusive here of Switzerland, the Netherlands and Belgium) and Eastern parts (Czechoslovakia, Hungary, Romania), later followed by the growth of North-Western Europe (the UK, here including as well Scandinavia), and more recently by the growth of France. Other regional communities such as Italy and the Balkans also had significant quantitative ups and downs over history but never constituted the main locus of the Jewish presence in Europe.


Looking at these shifts helps to reiterate that the overarching con-cept of Europe cannot hold without referring to its parts separately. And when doing that, we uncover very significant internal dissonance, meaning that the decline of one part often was the underpinning to the rise of another part. The fundamental factor ceaselessly at work was the competition of several major European powers for hegemony over the continent and outside of it. This entailed repeated conflicts, rises and falls of centers of political influence and of economic pri-macy, and significant variations and differences in the nature of local circumstances in each nation. Among the factors to be considered in this last respect was the attitude to local Jewish populations that could range from forthcoming at certain conjunctures of time and place, to very repelling under other circumstances.

Powerfully stimulated by these different attitudes, voluntary or coerced international migrations played a major role in the continu-ous redistribution of Jewish populations within the European conti-nent and in the continuous population exchanges between Europe and other continents. Again in a long-term perspective that spans over a millennium, the main chronology of Jewish migrations in Europe was South-North, West-East, and East-West. And when the movement of people was over, they were quick to absorb the fundamental mores of the new place and to incorporate them within their unique, locally grounded Jewish identity.

Figure 2. Jewish population in Europe by major regions, 1170–2009

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Population Changes since World War II

The Shoah determined the most powerful cleavage in modern Jewish history and radically disrupted what had been up to that moment the continuous build-up and transformation of European Jewry (DellaPer-gola, 1996: 34–51). While Shoah is not discussed here, it must be kept in mind that its after-effects long lingered within Jewish population composition and trends, and in various ways still powerfully determine the meaning of Jewish corporate life in contemporary Europe. The highly differentiated dynamics of Jewish population distribution after World War II is demonstrated in Table 1 that shows regional changes among European Jewry and compares them with other continents and areas for the years 1948–2009.

Table 1. World Jewish population by major regions, 1948–2009

Region Number (thousands) Percent Percent change1948 1970 2009 1948 1970 2009 1948–

19701970–2009

1948–2009

World total 11,500 12,662 13,309 100.0 100.0 100.0 10 5 16Israel 650 2,582 5,569 5.7 20.4 41.8 297 115 757Diaspora, Total 10,850 10,080 7,740 94.3 79.6 58.2 –7 –23 –29Europe, Total 3,750 3,232 1,469 32.6 25.5 11.1 –14 –55 –61Europe, West 1,035b 1,113 1,053 9.0 8.8 7.9 8 –5 2Spain, Port, Gibr 13 10 13 0.1 0.1 0.1 –23 30 0Italy 35 32 29 0.3 0.2 0.2 –9 –9 –17France 235 530 485 2.1 4.2 3.6 126 –8 106Ger, Aust, Swi, Bel,

Neth, Lux146 122 208 1.3 1.0 1.6 –16 70 42

UK, Ireland, Scandinavia

436 419 318 3.8 3.3 2.4 –4 –24 –27

Europe, East 2,715 2,119 416 23.6 16.7 3.2 –22 –80 –85Former USSR in

Europe2,000 1,897 320 17.4 15.0 2.4 –5 –83 –84

Czech, Slov, Hun, Pol, Rom

605 163 68 5.3 1.3 0.5 –73 –58 –89

Bul, Gre, Former Yug, Turkey

110 59 28 0.9 0.5 0.2 –46 –53 –75

Former USSR in Asia

225 262 19 2.0 2.1 0.1 16 –93 –92

Other Asia 365 100 19 3.2 0.8 0.1 –73 –81 –95North Africac 630 92 4 5.5 0.7 0.0 –87 –95 –99South Africa 105 124 73 0.9 1.0 0.6 18 –41 –30North America 5,215 5,686 5,650 45.3 45 42.5 9 –1 8Latin America 520 514 391 4.5 4.1 2.9 –1 –24 –25Oceania 40 70 115 0.3 0.5 0.9 75 64 188

a. Core definition, not including non-Jewish members of households.b. Including 170,000 displaced persons. c. Including Ethiopia.


International migration here again played a very important role but somewhat paradoxically the great migration streams leaving and rejoin-ing Europe in a sense balanced each other off. Soon after the War, large numbers of displaced persons who were precariously hosted in their own Europe as a consequence of the conflict and Shoah for the most part left, primarily to Israel and to some extent to other Western countries such as Canada, Australia and the United States. European Jews were for the majority concentrated in the Soviet Union from where there was little opportunity to emigrate. Highly variable migra-tion policies were implemented by other countries in the Soviet sphere of influence, but eventually most Jews left those countries. In Western Europe the contrary effect of de-colonization was felt. The French de-colonization in particular, but also the retreat of the United Kingdom and Italy from their former colonies, protectorates and metropolitan territories in North Africa and to a lesser extent in Asia, generated wide waves of emigrations among Europeans that had settled those areas. Jews often had played a middleman economic and social role between the colonial powers and the local populations, and under the new circumstances they were put in a position that commanded them to leave nearly in their entirety. In addition to anti-Jewish hostility that to some extent had pre-existed, the crucial factor was the ignition of the conflict between the Arab countries and Israel. Jews, rightly or wrongly perceived as identified with the Israeli enemy, became the target of violence and the complex interaction that they had built through hundreds of years with the non-Jewish environment abruptly collapsed. The natural resort for those who did not choose to go to Israel was to resettle in the former colonial country of which many held the citizenship (Bensimon and DellaPergola, 1984: 436ff.; Del-laPergola, 1976: xvi and 358ff.). A minority settled in other countries throughout Europe.

Between 1948 and 1968, it can be estimated that over 620,000 Jews migrated from Eastern Europe, of which over half a million went to Israel (DellaPergola, 2009a: 213–236). The majority of the others went overseas and only a minority remained in Western Europe. During the same period over 250,000 Jews immigrated to France from North Africa and the total of other Jewish immigrants to Western Europe may have reached 50,000. Overall, the Jewish population of Europe decreased by 14% between 1948 and 1970; it increased by 8% in Western Europe and it diminished by 22% in Eastern Europe. After the Six Day War, emigration from Western Europe to Israel became


more significant. But the main event was the opening of the doors of the Soviet Union that took place in two distinct stages. The first occurred soon after the June 1967 war, when the long suppressed Jew-ish identity of Soviet Jews, boosted by the events in the Middle East, gained wide support in Western public opinion. The second stage was put into motion by the fall of the Berlin wall on November 9, 1989 that symbolically marked the beginning of the end of the Soviet Union.

Since 1968 about 1.7 million Jews left Eastern Europe, of these about one million went to Israel. Of the remaining 700,000, about 120,000 went to Germany plus an equal number of non-Jewish family members. About another 100,000 Jewish immigrants arrived to other countries in Western Europe. The continental migration balance was thus clearly negative. This reverberated on the population balance. Between 1970 and 2009 Europe lost 55% of its Jewish population. In Western Europe there was a minor loss of 5%, and in Eastern Europe a drastic decline of 80% (DellaPergola, 2008a: 569–620). Within the major geographical divisions in Europe, the pace of Jewish population change was different, too. Thus between 1970 and 2008 Germany incurred the highest relative increase, followed by Spain and Portu-gal. Scandinavian countries were overall stable, while Italy, France, and the complex of smaller communities in Western Europe (Benelux, Switzerland, Austria) all experienced some diminution, and the more visible decline occurred in the United Kingdom. In Eastern Europe, the Balkans areas lost over half their initial population in 1970, Cen-tral-Eastern Europe lost nearly 60%, and the former Soviet republics lost 83%. As a consequence of these changes the ranking of major Jew-ish populations in Europe repeatedly shifted (Table 2). Between 1948 and 2009, only five countries appeared consistently among the largest ten: France, Russia, Ukraine, the UK, and Hungary.

Countries that disappeared from the ten majors included Belarus, Moldova, Romania and Latvia. Countries that eventually emerged in the top list included Germany, Belgium, the Netherlands, and Italy. Turkey was in the list in 1948 and in 2009, but not in 1970.

It is worth noting that the largest Jewish population in a single Euro-pean country in 1948 was 808,000 (Russia), diminished to 570,000 in 1970 (also Russia), and again diminished to 485,000 in 2009 (France). The tenth largest in 1948 was Latvia (37,000), in 1970 it was the Neth-erlands (30,000), and in 2009 it was Turkey (18,000). These figures clearly outline the prevailing trend to a shrinking European Jewry. Notwithstanding its much reduced population size, European Jewry


tended to become geographically more concentrated. In 1948 the ten major countries included 85% of the total population in Europe; in 2009, the share of the ten largest had increased to 91%. These changes also meant a drastic shift of the Jewish population’s center of gravity from the East to the West of the continent. Figure 3 demonstrates the changes between 1970 and 2008 through a simplified four-fold typol-ogy. Clearly the main change was determined by the exodus from the former Soviet Union, while countries member of the European Union, as an aggregate, remained overall quite stable. The significant bottom line was that after many centuries of predominance of Eastern over Western European Jewry, the West regained the predominance that it had since the beginning of the Jewish settlement on the European continent.

European Jewish Migrations and Émigrés

As noted, migrations played a very significant role in the restructuring of European Jewry. Large scale immigration compensated and replen-ished the rank and file of European communities for the otherwise negative demographic trends. A particular inflow of immigrants came from Israel, although the estimates often heard about the numbers of Israelis in Europe hardly find support in the available statistical sources.

Table 2. Largest Jewish populations in Europe, 1970–2009

Rank 1970 1989 2009

Country Population Country Population Country Population

1 Russia 807,900 Russia 570,000 France 485,0002 Ukraine 777,100 France 530,000 UK 293,0003 France 530,000 Ukraine 487,000 Russia 210,0004 UK 390,000 UK 320,000 Germany 120,0005 Belarus 148,000 Belarus 112,000 Ukraine 74,0006 Moldova 98,100 Moldova 66,000 Hungary 48,8007 Hungary 70,000 Hungary 57,800 Belgium 30,5008 Romania 70,000 Germany 33,500 Netherlands 30,0009 Turkey 39,000 Belgium 31,800 Italy 28,50010 Latvia 36,700 Netherlands 30,000 Turkey 17,700

Total 1–10 2,891,100 2,176,300 1,337,500Total Europe 3,231,900 2,433,900 1,469,0001–10 as % of total 89.5 89.4 91.0


Data by European governments about the number of foreign citizens in each country point to a continental total of a few tens of thousands, without counting those who emigrated to Israel and returned to the countries of origin after some time. But the fact remains that large numbers of Jews left Europe since World War II. The only country for which such emigration is clearly documented year by year is Israel (see Figure 4), and the emerging overall image provides useful insights regarding the underlying mobility mechanisms.

For the forty years period 1968 to 2008, Figure 4 shows the num-ber of migrants from nine Western and four Eastern European coun-tries along with the total number of immigrants to Israel. To enhance the comparisons, the data for each country are presented in similar graphical display, somehow as if they were percentages, regardless of the magnitude of the actual numbers involved.3 Total immigration to Israel over the past 40 years was clearly dominated by the surge of immigration from the FSU since 1990. Some earlier increase was also visible just after the June 1967 war, but it was quickly superseded by

3 See Israel Central Bureau of Statistics, Statistical Abstract of Israel, Jerusalem (yearly).

Figure 3. Jewish population in Europe, by major geographical divisions, 1970–2008

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the earlier wave of Soviet Jewry in the early 1970s, and by a more modest revival in the late 1970s.

The migration experiences of different Western countries offer an interesting case for comparison because it might be inferred that most of the time they did not reflect particularly strong negative pressures enhancing emigration. The similarities and dissimilarities offer some ground for speculation, after keeping in mind that the absolute num-bers of migrants and their ratios to the total Jewish population were quite low. Clearly the Six Day War offered an occasion for more intense consideration of the Israeli option in all countries, but in some cases (France, the UK, Germany, Belgium, Italy) the response was quicker and relatively more intense than elsewhere (the Netherlands, Switzerland). That more intense stage had concluded by the mid 1970s. A second more modest wave was visible nearly everywhere around 1982–1983, at the time of the first Israeli war in Lebanon, especially in the UK and the Netherlands. Particularly sharp anti-Israeli response at that time might have generated an unpleasant public atmosphere in some of the countries.

A further minor migration wave appeared in the early 1990s, more visible in France, Belgium, and Switzerland. And finally again in the early 2000s most countries, led by France experienced somewhat increased emigration. Such broad co-variation suggests a certain simi-larity in the way of operating of the likely main stimulants to Jewish emigration: experience or fear of anti-Semitism, and temporary eco-nomic recessions.

Turning to some of the major countries of origin in Eastern Europe, the picture is evidently different because of two main reasons. The first is that Jewish emigration was not free but highly regulated whereas periods of relatively high openness to emigration alternated to period of frontier closure. The second reason is that because of large scale emigration, in some cases the remaining Jewish communities were so small that any further emigration was of very little quantitative import. The latter applies especially to Poland and Romania, where most of Jewish emigration occurred between 1968 and the 1980s, and in fact much more had occurred between 1948 and the 1960s. The opposite time schedule is true for the FSU and Hungary where in different measures most of the immigration came from the 1990s and later. But in the case of these two countries, too, emigration was responsible for radical changes in the sizes of the remaining Jewish populations. The


Figure 4. Migration to Israel from European countries, 1968–2008

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Figure 4. Migration to Israel from European countries, 1968–2008


case is clearly shown here for an emigration that was highly regulated in each country by the respective governments.

The large scale Jewish emigration from Europe in the course of the twentieth century was a main determinant of the creation of very significant communities of European émigrés out of the continent. For example, most of the Jews in the United States are of European ori-gin, but looking only at those who in the year 2000 resulted born in Europe their number exceeded 350,000, of which 112,000 were born in Western Europe and 238,000 born in Eastern Europe (DellaPer-gola, 2003: 66ff.). These figures do not include non-Jewish members of Jewish households. In Israel in 2008, the number of European born Jews was 999,000, plus another 697,000 born in Israel of a European-born father, for a total of 1,696,000.4 When we add smaller numbers of European Jews in other extra-European countries, and a full count of those born there of very recent European ancestry, an estimate approaching 2.5 million individuals can be obtained worldwide. All in all, the number of European Jews who live outside Europe is today vastly superior to the number of Jews who live on the continent. In the era of transnationalism, to maintain and nurture a certain mode of Jewish civilization does not need to be strictly tied to territory.

Variable Jewish Population Definitions and Estimates

The population trends outlined here so far were based on numbers that mostly reflected the core Jewish population concept. But it should be acknowledged that among the consequences of the process of increas-ing integration of Jewish communities in the broader societal context, expressed among other things by a rising rate of intermarriage, is the need to build up of a complex definitional approach to the defini-tion of who is Jew. In our practice the core Jewish population includes persons who, in censuses or other social surveys, define themselves Jewish or persons with Jewish parents who define themselves lacking a religious identification; the extended Jewish population also includes per-sons with Jewish background who declare an identification other than Judaism; and the enlarged Jewish population also includes any other members in the same nuclear families without Jewish ancestry. Lack

4 Israel, Central Bureau of Statistics, Statistical Abstract, cit., 2009.


of specification between these different alternative definitions stands at the origin of most controversies about the number of Jews in a given country or area.

Unfortunately there are only few instances in which a complete typology can be specified of the various groups and sub-groups that constitute the broadest possible extension of the relevant subject of investigation. One such example comes from the 2001 Census of Scot-land whose returns are available separately and in greater detail than those of the main part of the United Kingdom (Graham, 2008). In 2001, 8233 persons in Scotland declared that either their upbring-ing or their current religion was Jewish. Of these, 5661 (69%) had both Jewish upbringing and current religion; 1785 (22%) had Jew-ish upbringing but were not currently Jewish; and 787 (9%) had not a Jewish upbringing but were currently Jewish. The total of those with Jewish upbringing thus was 7446, and the number of those currently Jewish was 6448, a difference of 998—a net loss of 13% over the initial number (see Figure 5).

Source: Graham, 2008.

Figure 5. 2001 Census results—Jews in Scotland

Upbringing & current religion: Jewish (5661) 88%Upbringing & current religion: Jewish (5661) 88%

Upbringing:Upbringing:Non-Jewish religionNon-Jewish religion

(317) 5%(317) 5%

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(317) 5%

Secessions (losses)Upbringing: JewishCurrent: Not Jewish(1785) 24%

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Upbringing:Jewish(7446) 115%

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(6448) 100%

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Upbringing:Upbringing:No ReligionNo Religion(129) 2%(129) 2%

Upbringing:No Religion(129) 2%


It is hard to say whether such lifetime negative identificational balance would characterize the whole Jewish population of Europe. It is more likely that the results of such lifetime comparison would be highly diverse in different parts of the continent. Nonetheless, it is highly revealing that the one and only detailed observation available from an official state source should produce such a result. It tends to rein-force the opinion that in a free world where individual choices play an increasingly important role vis-à-vis normative community constraints, a significant turn-around of identities constantly takes place between entering and exiting a positive Jewish identity. And the net result may well be one of a weakened interest to be part, or at least to explicitly state belonging with the Jewish section of total society.

Widely different figures may emerge out of alternative identifica-tional options that refer, for example, to those who ever identified with Judaism, or to those who currently do, or to those who currently do plus their non-Jewish family members. Table 3 provides exam-ples of estimates that may be suggested for 17 selected countries with the largest Jewish populations in Europe. Four types of estimate are reported, reflecting the official national census returns when they exist; our estimates of the core Jewish population based on careful evaluation of all available sources; our estimates of the enlarged Jewish population, including as well the non-Jewish family members, and in a few cases also the Law of Return estimates that also include non-Jewish children and grandchildren of Jews, and the respective spouses.

At a first glance it appears that in some cases census results are significantly higher than the current estimate (Belarus, Latvia, Russia, Ukraine). This simply reflects the continuing emigration and erosion of the Jewish population since the date of census. In several other cases, the census estimate is lower than the core estimate (Austria, Romania, United Kingdom). This reflects the widespread assumption that a cer-tain fringe of the Jewish population preferred not to declare itself as such in the census. These supposed Jewish unknowns need to be rein-tegrated in the overall total. In one case, Hungary, the gap between census and estimate is particularly wide (13,000 as officially reported in 2001, and about 49,000 as estimated in 2009). Core Jewish popula-tions are evaluated with an accuracy rating that takes into account the more or less recent date of the baseline and the method of data collec-tion and updating. Enlarged Jewish populations are obviously larger than the respective core population, but the amount of difference has to be evaluated case by case (see for example: van Solinge and


de Vries, 2001; Kovács, 2004). Finally, the Law of Return potential, which actually is a theoretical notion, is estimated for four countries in Eastern Europe. The assumption is that the number of eligible for the Law of Return may become in the course of time three times or more as large as the original core population. Evidently, undifferentiated use of these various estimates is bound to enhance strong disagreements about the actual Jewish population size. Experience teaches that—inasmuch as the data were collected seriously and impartially, if they exist at all—the ensuing disagreements can be solved by making refer-ence to one unified definitional system.

Regional Development and the Jewish Presence

Describing the main changes in Jewish population size may be useful for a general assessment of continental patterns, and history certainly

Table 3. Main Jewish populations in Europe. Estimates by various sources and definitions, 2009

Country LastNational Census

Core Enlargedd Law of Returnf

Our estimate1.1.2009

Accuracy ratingc

Austria 8,140 (2001) 9,000 B (c)(r) 15,000Belarus 27,800 (1999) 17,000 B (c) 34,000 50,000Belgium 30,500 D 40,000Francea 485,000 B (s) 580,000Germany 120,000 B (r) 250,000Hungary 13,000 (2001) 48,800 C (c)(s) 90,000 150,000Italy 28,500 B (r) 35,000Latvia 14,600 (1997) 10,000 B (c) 20,000Netherlands 30,000 B (s) 43,000e

Romania 6,179 (2002) 9,800 B (r) 18,000Russia 233,600 (2002) 210,000 B (c) 430,000 650,000Spainb 12,600 D 15,000Sweden 15,000 C (s) 22,000Switzerland 17,700 (2000) 17,700 B (c) 25,000Turkey 17,700 B (s) 21,000United

Kingdom266,741 (2001) 293,000 B (c) 350,000

Ukraine 104,300 (2001) 74,000 B (c) 150,000 225,000

a. Including Monaco. b. Including Gibraltar.c. A=Best; B, C = intermediate; D=Poorest; (c) Census; (r) Register; (s) Survey.d. Total members in Jewish households. e. Persons with at least one Jewish parent.f. Jews, children and grandchildren of Jews, and respective spouses, no matter if not-Jewish.


is the prime factor to be considered when trying to provide an overall assessment of the destiny and evolution of European Jewry. But in view of the already noted fragmented character of European history, still the question remains whether it would be possible to find a parsi-monious explanatory key of greater analytic potency to the emerging distribution of Jewish population. Such an explanation, beyond the more explicit and known factors, would be able to detect some lead-ing forces underlying the overall continental experience in its entirety. One important aspect to be considered is the West-East gradient that long prevailed in European politics and to a large extent, though not completely, became superseded with the end of the Cold War and the gradual eastward expansion of the European Union. Significant demo-graphic, economic and cultural structural differences that go back not only to the previous generations but deeper into the past are still vis-ible in the social fabric of the continent. Some of these differences are demonstrated in Figure 6 that shows the spread of two indicators for the total population, the GNP per inhabitant and the net balance of international migration, by major regional divisions within countries.5

In both cases, East European regions display significantly worse conditions than Western regions, as shown by lower GDP and higher emigration frequencies. There also appears to be a positive gradient when moving from the more peripheral to the more central regions of Western Europe. The question under investigation here is the relation-ship between the size of the Jewish presence and the changes therein, and these underlying socioeconomic differences. To operationalize the latter, we use the Human Development Index—a composite measure of health, education and income in real purchase power terms—for each country.6 HDI is a measure of the societal context of Jewish life, not a direct measure of the life quality of the Jewish population itself. However, we can posit it as a relevant measure of the socioeconomic status of Jewish communities in that—if not to the same extent for each individual—the macro-social context does significantly affect one’s own opportunities and sense of wellness. We look at country HDI levels in about 40 countries in the baseline year 1975, and fol-low the changes in Jewish population size between 1970—close the baseline point—and in 2008 (Figure 7). Each point in the figure rep-

5 European Commission, Eurostat, Eurostat Regional Yearbook, Luxembourg, Office for Official Publications of the European Communities, 2008.

6 United Nations, Human Development Programme, Human Development Report, New York, 2009. The Index of Human Development ranges between 0 and 1.


resents one country measured on the combination of initial HDI and Jewish population change, the latter expressed in percentages on a scale between extreme increase and extreme decrease.

It readily appears that a positive relationship exists between the ini-tial quality of life in a country and the subsequent direction of Jewish population development. It can be easily inferred that the causal effect runs from the macro toward the micro, i.e. from the general societal context to the individual circumstances within the Jewish group—and not vice versa.

Most of the single observations seem to follow quite a coherent logic, not far from the interpolated central value of the series of data, with one exception—a very distant outlier on the high side of socio-economic development and at the top of Jewish population growth. That country is Germany, and the increase of 300% between 1970 and 2008 is due to the influx of Jews from the FSU since 1989. Of course, the causes of the particularly German concentration of Jewish population growth in Europe relate to the specific and especially favor-able legal framework for immigration developed in Germany with particular attention to the needs of Jewish migrants (Erlanger, 2007:

Source: Eurostat, 2008.

Figure 6. Major indicators of Europe’s total population, by regions

Net migrationby NUTS 2 religions,average 2001 to 2005

Net migration

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Data source: Eurostat© EuroGeographics Association, for the Administrative boundaries.Cartography Eurostat: GISCO, 05/2008

0 800 km

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Data source: Eurostat© EuroGeographics Association, for the Administrative boundaries.Cartography Eurostat: GISCO, 05/2008


83–88). But it also appears that such special developments are com-patible with the general conceptual framework suggested here, namely the significant sensitivity and response of Jews to changing constraints and opportunities in their countries of residence and in potential coun-tries of destination. As such, this does not point to a special mechanism in the Jewish realm vis-à-vis more general developments among the surrounding population. But given the small size, the socioeconomic concentration, and the peculiar political-cultural profile of the Jewish population, the final effects on population distribution appear far more striking in comparison with the total population.

Better insights on the determinants of the changes in the Jewish presence in Europe can be gathered by disaggregating the Jewish population between two groups of countries, West and East, and two periods of time—1970–1990 and 1990–2008. The intermediate point corresponds with the beginning of the great exodus from the Soviet Union.

The variables compared are HDI change in each of the two time intervals, and Jewish population change in the same periods. Here the findings appear more complex and perhaps somewhat more contradictory. Looking first at countries in Eastern Europe and the

Figure 7. Jewish population change in European countries by initial HDI, 1970–2008

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Figure 8. Jewish population change by HDI change, West vs. East Europe, 1970–1990 and 1990–2008

Balkans, between 1970 and 1989 the relationship between life quality and changes in Jewish population size is not clear, if at all existing. The same relationship becomes instead quite striking between 1990 and 2008. This indicates that with the full opening of the gates of the FSU to migration, the intensity of exodus was definitely and negatively related to the level of development of the respective republics. Other countries in Eastern Europe and the Balkans, where too changing poli-tics and new democratic regimes brought about greater openness to emigration, happened to be more socioeconomically developed than the FSU, and their Jewish populations were relatively more stable, even if declining. In fact in some former Soviet republics, the HDI between 1990 and 2009 not only did not improve, but did actually diminish, the main causal factor being the temporary collapse in health and life expectancy.

West Europe 1970–1990

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The situation in Western Europe was different. The relationship between HDI change and Jewish population change appeared to be negative in both periods examined. This points to the existence of problematic general societal adjustments within the respective coun-tries, and to their negative effects on overall resilience of local Jewish populations. In general, the countries with the lowest improvement in HDI had as a rule somewhat better Jewish population resilience. Dur-ing the later period, the same reverse relationship appears, helped here by the fact that the very fast increase in the number of Jews in Ger-many happened at a time when the country was absorbing the heavy financial burdens of the 1991 political re-union, while also integrating larger masses of immigrants. The noted negative relationship between the major social indicators and changing Jewish population size in the West meant that some of the more developed Western European societies were experiencing a condition of malaise. We have here an admittedly very crude and indirect indication of the difficulties that more advanced societies encounter at keeping their life quality under the challenges of socioeconomic globalization, international migration and socio-cultural change. If protracted in long run, this could gener-ate some emigration and therefore a further readjustment of Jewish population size in the respective countries.

Jews: the Dependent Variable

The argument of dependency of the Jewish presence on regional socio-economic development can be sharpened by returning to the data of Jewish population distribution and arranging them according to the level of socioeconomic development of the respective countries.7 In Table 4, forty countries are distributed in five groups (quintiles) ranked by the respective HDI in 2005. Their overall Jewish population as well as the ratio of Jews to total population are compared in 1970 through 2008.

The evolution over time of Jewish population size was clearly entirely different in the five strata of countries. Countries with the higher level

7 For a discussion of global trends, see: DellaPergola, Rebhun and Tolts, 2005: 61–95; for a similar review of trends in Latin America see Autonomy and Depend-ency: DellaPergola, 2008b: 47–80.


of development were the steadier in keeping their Jewish population, although their estimated total Jews declined somewhat over time. Similar conclusions apply to the second best group of countries. On the other hand, the lower the ranking of the respective countries, the more visible were the losses of Jewish population incurred between 1970 and 2008. As noted above, this was mainly due to emigration from those less socially developed countries. The differences are strik-ing in the bottom quintile that included the republics of the former Soviet Union.

Similar changes appear regarding the percent of Jews out of total population. The results are graphically demonstrated in Figure 9 by country HDI quintiles. While over time this ratio tended to decline constantly and consistently across the board, it was again more resil-ient in countries better equipped from the socio-economic point of view. In the past the relationship between the share of Jews in soci-ety and the development of that society had a U shape, the share of Jews to total population being in 1970 5 per 1000 in the top quintile, 1.3 per 1000 in the middle quintile, and 7.6 per 1000 in the bottom quintile. In 2008 this tended to become a positive relationship, Jews representing 3.6 per 1000 of total population in the top quintile, 0.9 in the middle, and 1.1 in the bottom. This is clear evidence of the dif-ferential action of hold and push factors in the host societies, and of

Table 4. Jewish population distribution in Europe by HDI country quintiles,1970–2008

HDI Quintilesa

Jewish Population Total Population (1000) Jews per 1000 Population

% Ratio 2008/19701970 1989 2008 1970 1990 2008 1970 1989 2008

Highestb 611,600 606,000 566,200 123,257 138,673 156,300 5.0 4.4 3.6 722c 500,100 430,900 489,600 210,049 216,603 228,728 2.4 2.0 2.1 873d 100,300 75,100 63,700 77,391 87,147 89,200 1.3 0.9 0.7 544e 296,400 177,800 47,400 55,565 62,197 57,600 5.3 2.9 0.8 15Lowestf 1,723,500 1,144,100 314,200 226,722 274,170 278,800 7.6 4.2 1.1 14

a) 40 countries divided in five groups of 8 countries each, according to ranking of countries in 2005.

b) Norway, Ireland, Sweden, Switzerland, Netherlands, France, Finland, Spain.c) Gibraltar, Denmark, Austria, United Kingdom, Belgium, Luxembourg, Italy, Germany.d) Greece, Slovenia, Cyprus (including here also Malta), Portugal, Czech Republic, Hungary, Poland,

Slovakia. e) Lithuania, Estonia, Latvia, Croatia, Serbia, Bulgaria, Romania, Belarus.f ) Bosnia Herzegovina, Russian Republic, Albania, Montenegro and Kosovo, Macedonia, Ukraine,

Turkey, Moldova.


pull and repel in the receiving countries, provided there existed free opportunities for international migration.

It is worth recalling here that in a more distant past the Jewish pres-ence tended to reflect mutable political circumstances, including very significantly invitations to settle and expulsions by the ruling powers. The situation in the 1970s still reflected old historical patterns, though significantly modified by the Shoah. Over the last tens of years, a true revolution occurred regarding the Jewish presence in Europe which tended increasingly to become a dependent variable of the quality of environmental circumstances offered by the different national societies.

Jews in Cities

A further illustration of the logic underlying the configuration of Europe’s Jewish population is provided by their distribution across major cities and metropolitan areas. Indeed looking at Jewish popula-tion distribution at the national level may be somewhat misleading when it is clear that most of Jewish community life occurs at the local level. It is therefore important to assess the size of the local commu-nities that constitute the actual frame of reference for people’s inter-

Figure 9. Jews per 1,000 population, by country HDI quintiles, 1970–2008

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action and for service planning in most respects. Table 5 provides a list of the 21 European cities with a current core Jewish popula-tion of 10,000 and above. Together these metropolitan areas included some 900,000 Jews, or 61% of the continental total in 2008. Of these, 480,000, nearly one third of all the Jews in Europe, lived in the Greater Paris (Région parisienne) and Greater London metropolitan areas alone. Such high concentration clearly confirms the analytic hypotheses out-lined in the previous sections, namely the frequent association of Jews with environmental circumstances favorable to their particular needs. These propensities include the presence of higher education institu-tions, cultural facilities and professional activities that are more often available in large cities with a great amount of economic diversity and strong international connections.8 Of these 21 major areas of Jewish presence, 6 were located in France, 3 in the Ukraine, 2 in the UK, Russia, Belgium and Germany, and one each in Hungary, Turkey, the Netherlands, and Italy.

It should also be acknowledged that along with substantial concen-tration in few major national and regional capital cities, a minority of about 39% of Europe’s Jews were highly dispersed in hundreds of localities with Jewish populations ranging between a few thousands to a few individuals. It seems unlikely that an effective Jewish community organization can be developed and maintained in many such locali-ties. We return to this issue in our conclusions.

Family Patterns and Demographic Transitions

Having assessed the impact of mobility on Jewish demography, the other main significant process at work is family formation and child-bearing and its consequences for the age composition of the popula-tion. The great driver of population development in the long term is the birth rate which reflects the average propensity to have children (the fertility level ) and the age composition of a population. The latter is in turn affected by the number of births in previous years, by inter-national migration, and to some extent in contemporary societies also

8 See the monumental work of Leitenberg, 2005. See also DellaPergola, 1989: 303–336.


Table 5. Metropolitan areas in Europe with largest core Jewish populations, 2008

Rank Metro Areaa Country Jewish Population

1. Parisb France 284,000 2. Londonc United Kingdom 195,000 3. Moscowd Russia 90,000 4. Marseilles France 45,000 5. Budapest Hungary 40,000 6. St.Petersburg Russia 35,000 7. Manchester United Kingdom 22,000 8. Lyon France 20,000 9. Istanboul Turkey 16,00010. Amsterdam Netherlands 15,000

Antwerpen Belgium 15,000Kiev Ukraine 15,000Strasbourg France 15,000

14. Bruxelles Belgium 14,00015. Rome Italy 13,00016. Nizza France 12,00017. Berlin Germany 11,00018. Dniepropetrovsk Ukraine 10,000

München Germany 10,000Odessa Ukraine 10,000Toulouse France 10,000

Total urban areas with 10,000 and more 897,000Percent of Europe’s total Jewish population 60.6

a) Most metropolitan areas include extended inhabited territory and several municipal authorities around central city. Definitions vary by country. Some of the estimates may include non-core Jewish population.

b) Departments 75, 77, 78, 91, 92, 93, 94, 95. c) Greater London and contiguous postcode areas. d) City council and district.

by the level of mortality. The circular process between childbearing and age composition is worth of special attention, and indeed plays quite an important role in the case of European Jewry. In addition, the question of Jewish identification of the children of intermarriage has come to play a significant role in the overall pattern of demographic continuity (see Reinharz and DellaPergola, 2009: 218 pp.).

Low birth rates and relatively high rates of intermarriage have long prevailed among some Jewish communities in Europe since the beginning of the twentieth century. After World War II, some West-


ern European countries experienced a prolonged rise in fertility levels, which did not occur in Eastern Europe. This generated larger and, respectively, scantier cohorts born between 1945 and 1965, who in turn reached adulthood and the age of possible parenting between the 1970s and the 1990s. An echo effect of more births might have been expected, but European fertility levels declined sharply since the 1970s. The Jews anticipated somewhat these various developments, resulting in low birth rates all across the board, though with significant internal differentiation according to the religiosity and other social characteris-tics among the Jewish population. Table 6 provides selected examples of the balance between Jewish births and deaths in some countries during recent years.

It can be noted that the number of births identified as Jewish was significantly exceeded by the number of deaths. This gap was strikingly high in Russia and in other European republics of the FSU (Tolts, 2004: 37–63). In Western Europe the negative gap was somewhat smaller, yet consistent. It can be noted that in the UK the most recent data available through Jewish community sources point to a reversal of the trend through some increase of the number of births and a decrease in the number of deaths (Graham and Vulkan, 2008).

While the former is entirely plausible due to periodical changes in age composition and especially the growing share of the Orthodox among the total Jewish population, a decline in deaths of such pro-portions is totally implausible and can be explained only through a significant increase in cases of death of Jews not reported through Jewish burial societies. In Germany the arrival of tens of thousands of Jewish immigrants from the FSU had very little impact on the number of births but a significant impact on the number of deaths—indirect evidence of the aged composition of the more recent arrivals (Zentral-wohlfahrtsstelle, 2008). The case of Israel is reported just to show how dramatically different the demographic situation can be in a commu-nity which is relatively young structurally and where fertility rates are close to 3 on the average, the highest of any contemporary developed society.9

9 Israel Central Bureau of Statistics, Statistical Abstract, cit.


The corollary of age composition is illustrated in Table 7. Data for Eastern Europe at the end of the nineteenth century and the begin-ning of the twentieth show the young structure of a population still affected by high birth rates. In the course of time the process of inter-nal change proceeds through a transitional type, evolving into an age-ing type and finally in what we have termed a terminal type. The latter, especially visible in the FSU, include less than 10% of children below 15 and one third or above of persons 65+. Such a population composition also visibly denounces the non-incorporation within the Jewish population of many children of intermarriages. It is unavoid-ably bound to numerical decline in future years, as in fact has been the case over the past decades.

Table 6. Jewish vital statistics in selected countries, 1988–2008

Country and Year Births Deaths Difference

Russian Republic1988 3,710a 13,826 –10,1162000 613b 8,218 –7,605

United Kingdom1991 3,200 4,500 –1,3002000 2,786 3,791 –1,0052006 3,314 3,107 +207

Germany1990 109 431 –3222002 151 1,000 –8492008 171 1,038 –867

Israel1990 73,851 25,759 +45,0922000 91,936 33,421 +58,5152008 112,803 34,075 +78,728

Source: Tolts, 2004; Graham and Vulkan, 2008; Zentralwohlfahrtsstelle, 2009; Israel Central Bureau of Statistics, 2009.a) Births to Jewish mothers, of which 2,148 to non-Jewish fathers. Assuming as many

births to Jewish fathers and non-Jewish mothers, the total births would be 5,858.b) Births to Jewish mothers, of which 444 to non-Jewish fathers. Assuming as many

births to Jewish fathers and non-Jewish mothers, the total births would be 1,057.


Table 7. Selected Jewish populations, by main age groups, 1897–2007

Country a Year Total 0–14 15–29 30–44 45–64 65+ Median

Traditional typeRussian Empire 1897 100 41 28 16 12 3 19.8Romania 1899 100 40 26 19 12 3 20.8

Transitional typePoland 1921 100 34 30 16 15 5 23.0Palestine 1931 100 33 32 19 11 4 23.0USSR 1926 100 29 34 18 15 4 29.7Israel 2007 100 26 23 19 21 11 30.8United States 1957 100 24 17 21 28 10 36.6Greater Paris 1975 100 21 25 18 25 11 34.1

Ageing typePrussia 1925 100 18 25 24 25 8 34.4Italy 1965 100 18 18 19 26 19 41.7Switzerland 1980 100 18 18 19 22 23 41.1France non-Paris 1978 100 17 28 18 23 14 37.5United Kingdom 1986 100 17 19 19 21 24 41.1United States 2001 100 16 20 19 26 19 41.5United Kingdom 2001 100 16 17 19 26 22 44.2Italy 1986 100 14 23 18 26 19 40.8Russian Republic 1959 100 14 19 23 36 9 41.2Hungary 1995 100 14 18 19 23 26 44.4Germany 1989 100 12 14 22 25 27 46.6Turkey 2002 100 10 16 22 34 18 47.2Yugoslavia 1971 100 10 23 17 29 21 45.0Russian Republic 1970 100 10 16 23 31 20 45.5

Terminal typeRussian Republic 1979 100 8 15 21 31 25 49.2Germany 2007 100 7 14 16 31 32 53.4Ukraine 2001 100 6 10 14 35 35 56.4Russian Republic 2002 100 5 11 14 33 37 57.5Romania 1979 100 5 11 10 34 40 59.1

a) Countries sorted by the descending percentage of population at age 0–14. The largest age group in each population is underlined.

Future Expectations

It is not easy to predict what the future development of European Jewish communities will be because the main determinant may be tied to political developments that constitute a highly volatile part in the complex of European civilization. However medium range pop-ulation projections to the year 2020 that reflect the assumption of


a continuation of the major factors that currently shape European Jewish demography point to a likely further diminution in population size (DellaPergola, Rebhun and Tolts, 2000: 103–146; DellaPergola, Gilboa and Tal, 2005; DellaPergola, 2009b). The FSU republics are expected to loose nearly 150,000 Jews, mostly due to their overaged age composition, while the other countries mostly part of the Euro-pean Union are expected to loose about 80,000. It should be stressed that only minor effects of international migration are included in these calculations as demonstrated by recent data on migration to Israel (see Table 8).

Table 8. Selected indicators on European Jewry, 2009–2020

Country Jewish population (Core Definition)

Jewish Day-school attendance

rate (%)

Recent out-marriage rate (%)

Ever visited Israel (% of Jewish pop.)

Alijhah/ migration to

Israel

2009 Projected 2020

Mostrecent

Mostrecent

MostRecent

2008

World Total 13,309,000 13,827,000 13,681Israel 5,569,000 6,453,000 97 5 100 –United States 5,275,000 5,200,000 25 54 >35 2,019

Europe Total 1,469,000 1,243,000 7,098

Europe,non-FSU

1,149,000 1,070,000 2,598

France 485,000 482,000 40 40–45 >70 1,562United Kingdom 293,000 278,000 60 40–45 >75 505Germany 120,000 108,000 <20 >60 >50 86Hungary 49,000 34,000 <15 60 – 54Other EU 161,000 134,000 10–25 33–75 >50 311Other non-EU 41,000 34,000 5–20 50–80 – 80

Europe, FSU 320,000 173,000 4,500Russia 210,000 130,000 <15 80 – 2,600Ukraine 74,000 25,000 <15 80 – 1,310Other FSU

Europe36,000 15,000 <15 65–75 – 590

Source: DellaPergola, 2009b.


Table 8 also provides a few major social indicators about the major Jewish communities, such as the rate of enrollment in Jewish schools and the rate of out-marriage. As might be expected, some reverse relation appears between these two aspects of Jewish life. This shows that the cycle of Jewish demographic reproduction across generations is sensitive to the amount of exposure to Jewish socialization agents which in turn may reflect the organizational resources and critical mass of a given Jewish community.

Some Conclusions

In the light of the ongoing and expected demographic trends, Euro-pean Jewry in the twenty-first century will not be small, as it will be in any case larger than the population of at least two if not three countries members of the European Union: Malta, Luxembourg, and possibly Cyprus. Jews in Europe will have the potential to develop an attrac-tive, creative, meaningful community framework, and this will surely be significantly different from the ones we knew in previous centuries and generations. The ultimate challenge stands ahead in the ability to preserve not a mere community of presence—driven by and dependent on favorable market forces, but a community of creativity—able to nurture and transmit its own demographic momentum and cultural identity.

A major aspect of the sweeping changes ahead will reflect the ability of the European Jewish community system to address trends affecting each Jewish community in the peculiar ways of the respective geo-political and cultural contexts. To exist as such, a Jewish community must have a critical mass, and this can be demonstrated not only in terms of people but also of institutions. One central commitment of the Jewish community is the education of the younger generation. To do this, the more efficient instrument is a Jewish day-school. In this respect we can conduct an elementary exercise that will demonstrate the dilemmas faced by the Jewish leadership when trying to develop viable programs aimed at ensuring the Jewish future.

Let us assume that a Jewish school in a given city has 12 grades, from first grade to matriculation, and each grade has 20 pupils. This makes for 240 pupils. Assume about half of all the local Jewish chil-dren are enrolled in the Jewish school, and the other half go to public or other private schools. This makes for a total of 480 Jewish school-going children aged 6 to 17. Assume, as in real communities at this


time in European countries that because of the low birth rate of the recent past the 6–17 age segment constitutes about 10–15 percent of the total Jewish population. The resulting total Jewish population would be comprised between 3200 and 4800 people—or an average estimate of about 4000. This means that communities significantly below these standard sizes do not really have a possibility to maintain a viable Jewish schooling system. The argument is highly hypothetic and includes many assumptions, each of which have their own flex-ibility, but such a simple exercise certainly creates a factual baseline for more in-depth discussion of the implications of the presence or absence of a critical mass. One alternative strategy tested by Jewish communities in several cities is the admission of non-Jewish children in Jewish schools. Another strategy might be an educational consor-tium between several small Jewish communities located in the same geographical region. Still another strategy would be the introduction of supplementary Jewish teaching in the framework of existing public schools. The discussion of these and other possible Jewish educational strategies is way beyond the purpose of this chapter, but in any case cannot be entirely ignored when looking at the future of Jewish com-munities in Europe.

We need to theorize, research and understand these and similar issues honestly, away from old myths and new superstitions. In such debate it should be recognized that Jews often depend on circum-stances beyond their control. Nevertheless, a better outcome may with effort be secured by acknowledging the broader situation through sys-tematic and multi-disciplinary research, detecting and fostering broad commonalities across the Jewish cultural spectrum, and building the necessary institutional infrastructure to satisfy the emerging needs. A realistic assessment of where and how Jewish individuals and their institutions can best shape their own demographic and cultural future should combine with a willingness to initiate policy decisions and cooperative processes apt to promote these goals.

THE EUROPEAN JEWISH DIASPORA:THE THIRD PILLAR OF WORLD JEWRY?

Gabriel Sheffer

Most of the older and newly emerging ethno-national-religious Diasporas whose members retain close ties to their countries of origin (“homelands”) are undergoing major changes in the countries where they now live (“hostlands”). These transformations are related to vari-ous factors, such as the sharp spike in number of Diaspora core mem-bers. These dramatic demographic increases and changes have several implications: most Diasporas are not disappearing; their geographic dispersal is expanding (that is, the number of countries with Diasporas in general and with specific Diasporas is increasing); their basic demo-graphic features are changing; their individual and collective identities and identifications are being reaffirmed (that is, their ethno-national-religious identities are being preserved and unabashedly expressed); their organizational structures and activities are improving; their inte-gration into the countries of permanent residence is intensifying; their ties to their homelands are maintained and even intensified; and their patterns of loyalty to the host countries as well as to the homelands are being redefined.

It is clear that like other nations, social entities and Diasporas, the Jewish People, and the Jewish Diaspora, have unique characteristics, but they also demonstrate various similarities to other Diasporas. Like many other ethno-national-religious Diasporas the entire Jewish Diaspora, and the majority of individual Jewish diasporic entities in hostlands, are undergoing significant changes. This article focuses on the European Jewish Diaspora and the changes that influence it. It analyzes today’s European Jewish Diaspora and the direction it should take in order to meet the challenges of the future. The analysis is based on the argument that members and activists in this Diaspora, as well as concerned Israelis, should realize that learning from the experiences of other homelands, Diasporas and diasporans can ensure the survival and redevelopment of the Jewish Diaspora in general and the Euro-pean Jewish Diaspora in particular.

36 gabriel sheffer

Recent Developments

When seen from the abovementioned perspective, the entire Jewish Diaspora and Jewish diasporic communities seem to have become “normal” in recent decades and more similar to other ethno-national-religious Diasporas. This has been the result of two crucial develop-ments: one, globalization, that enables easier migration, travel, and communication, all of which are essential for Diaspora development; two, new trends, that enable members of the Jewish Diaspora to establish stronger links with the host countries and Israel, and adopt transnational approaches that reduce their numbers in the Diaspora, while encouraging them to benefit from a reawakened nationalism and ethnicity. These developments increase their integration into the host society and at the same time bolster their commitment to the Jewish entity. As a result, many Jews in the more liberal European democracies that exhibit tolerance toward Diasporas are not ashamed to identify themselves as Jews and are willing to be active in Jewish diasporic organizations not only for ideological reasons, but also out of self-interests that are quite strongly supported by the community. In addition, the Jews in liberal host states are ready to raise money for the development of their communities and their homeland—Israel—and for dealing with anti-Semitism, anti-Israeli activities, and anti-diasporic incidents. As noted, all these developments are happening in both the Western and Eastern European Jewish entities.

In recent decades, especially after the collapse of the Soviet Union, the realignment of independent states in Eastern Europe and the changes that have occurred in these communities, the question has arisen regarding Jewish communal growth and a unified Jewish Euro-pean community within the framework of a unified Europe. In view of the reemergence and growth of the various European Jewish com-munities, another basic question should be posed: can European Jewry become the “third pillar” of World Jewry, alongside Israel and the American-Jewish Diaspora? This article attempts to answer these fun-damental questions.

Optimistic and Pessimistic Evaluations

A few years ago Professor Bernard Wasserstein published a pessimistic prognosis for the European Jewish Diaspora (Wasserstein, 1996). The book attracted considerable attention, and many diasporic activists and even more experienced analysts are still convinced of the author’s

the european jewish diaspora 37

gloomy outlook. Although Wasserstein mentioned a number of positive developments in the German, French and British Jewish communities, his conclusions regarding the future of Europe’s Jewish Diaspora as an organized entity were fatalistic. One of his main arguments was that the long-range consequences of the Holocaust would lead to the self-destruction, if not wholesale disappearance, of Europe’s Jewish communities. In other words, the fear of another Holocaust forces many European Jews to assimilate or abandon their communities and migrate to non-European hostlands. Wasserstein’s conclusions were based on what he identified as negative demographic development; the ageing of most Jewish European communities; low birthrates; the inclination to assimilate; the inclination to intermarry; and, last but not least, rapidly waning cultural and religious ties to the Jewish People. As stated, a large number of Jewish activists and scholars still accept Wasserstein’s arguments and depict in profoundly pessimistic colors the development and future of the European Jewish Diaspora in gen-eral as well as that of specific communities.

Diana Pinto offers an entirely different view.1 Pinto might be called the “grand lady” of optimism regarding the European Jewish Diaspora and the French Jewish community in particular. Pinto indeed con-tends that European Jewry could become the third pillar of World Jewry, that is, an integral partner in an Israel-American Jewish-Euro-pean triangle. According to her view, the three pillars would cooper-ate and support one another, thus providing continuity to the entire Jewish nation. Diana Pinto and her advocates do not rely solely on the demographics of the European Jewish Diaspora (other scholars disagree with her figures and prognostications).

Optimists like Pinto base their views mainly on historical and contemporary cultural and social developments after the fall of the Soviet Union and in light of the positive processes in East European democracies, such as their entry into the European Union. These ana-lysts’ convictions are based on the following developments: the cul-tural revival of European Jewry; the renewal and expansion of Jewish education in most “host countries” (especially Russia and former Soviet republics); the establishment of a large number of thriving organiza-tions; the Jewish communities’ participation in the cultural, social, and political life of their “host countries”; and social and cultural dialogues

1 Diana Pinto, Towards an European Jewish Identity. In: Golem. Europäisch-Jüdisches Magazin. See http://www.hagalil.com/bet-debora/golem/europa.htm (February 25, 2010).

38 gabriel sheffer

between Jews and Christians and even with Moslems (whose numbers are dramatically increasing in Europe). The optimists argue that a Jewish-Christian-Moslem dialogue is desirable and feasible, and may reduce the recrudescent anti-Semitism in some European countries (especially France and Italy). Furthermore, advocates of this approach claim that many European Jews of diverse personal and social back-grounds are returning to Judaism and renewing their ties with the community along modern and post-modern lines. Modern communi-cation systems have proven very useful in energizing this process. It is important to note that Pinto predicts that with the European Jewish Diaspora’s increased strength it will not only become the third pillar but will also be prepared and even capable of helping Israel.

The Middle Position

As might be expected, some activists and analysts have taken a middle position regarding the current state of affairs and future capabilities of Europe’s Jewish Diaspora. Some of the participants in the Berlin Conference who have contributed to this volume support the interme-diate approach. They recognize the dilemmas and challenges facing the European Jewish Diaspora, and at the same time they cherish the hope that in the distant future it will overcome the many obstacles on its path to unity and emerge as the third pillar.

Intermediate views are based on facts and not a few assumptions. First, some of the analysts question the accuracy of the demographic factors. Be that as it may, the relevant figures show that changes are taking place in certain communities (the estimated number of Euro-pean Jews is between 1.5 and 2 million). The main issue that divides the advocates of the middle-way approach is the definition of Euro-pean Jewish identity. Those who take the formalistic approach toward religious identity base their position on age, rate of intermarriages and birth rate. Their argument is that the community’s size is neither increasing nor decreasing. On the other hand, scholars who take a more liberal view of Jewish identity claim that because of migration trends the number of European Jews is actually increasing.

Second, some scholars contend that the main problems facing European Jews lie not only in their demographic situation but in their difficulty in overcoming historical memories concerning the many


persecutions and their uncertain position in various European states. And these analysts mention again and again the unforgettable memo-ries and the impact of the Holocaust as well as the European Jews’ unstable position, especially in France. In other words, they constantly sense their precarious position. Some of these scholars attach great importance to the burgeoning anti-Semitism and neo-Nazism, and the growing anti-Jewish and anti-Israeli activity carried out by Moslems whose numbers are dramatically growing in Europe. Nevertheless, even these observers are not totally pessimistic about the survival of Europe’s Jewish Diaspora or its prospects for developing into a vital factor in World Jewry.2 Third, some of the advocates of the intermedi-ate view harshly criticize European Jews who feel that the stressful sit-uation in their host countries, France for example, is due to the lack of progress in the Arab-Israeli, Israeli-Palestinian peace process—a direct cause being Israel’s intransigence (Lerman, 2009). In other words, the scholars who are critical of Israel differentiate between Israel’s official position and policy, especially in the Israeli-Palestinian conflict, and the Diaspora’s position on this conflict in their hostlands.

Why the European Jewish Diaspora will Survive

My main argument, which has been mentioned in many of my rele-vant books and articles, is that European Jewry’s “normalization” and increasing similarity to other ethno-national-religious Diasporas will guarantee not only its survival but also its ability to develop and become a vital entity that influences the entire Jewish nation (Sheffer, 2005: 1–35). This argument is based on the fact that the majority of the world’s Diasporas is becoming more established, skilled, and empowered. With the reemergence of ethnicity and nationalism they will undoubtedly flourish and gain increased power and influence (ibid.).

The following are eleven key parallels between the Jewish Diaspora and other ethno-national-religious Diasporas. 1. The Jewish Diaspora developed as a result of exile as well as voluntary migration due to

2 Compare the Introductory chapter of this volume by Julius H. Schoeps and Olaf Glöckner.

40 gabriel sheffer

cultural, social and political forces. Voluntary migration has been enlarging Jewish communities in certain European countries, like Germany and Spain and even in Portugal. 2. Jewish immigration to European countries is coming not only from the homeland, Israel, but as well from the secondary and tertiary movement of Jews from other hostlands, such as from the former Soviet republics to the United States and Western Europe. 3. The identity of Jewish Diaspora core members and some peripheral members (especially those who have been well integrated into their host societies) is based on non-essen-tialist primordial factors such as genetic factors, the memory of the historical founders of the Jewish nation, collective historical factors, ethno-national-religious-cultural factors, religious observance, ethnic affiliation, and psychological loyalty to the nation. Such identity bases guarantee that the Diaspora’s numbers remain stable and its com-munities intact. 4. Many Jews actually benefit from their affiliation with the Jewish diasporic entity since it offers them the promise of protection from hostile individuals and groups, and cooperation in operating various kinds of legal and illegal businesses, etc. Although these practical benefits are rarely discussed they unite the core mem-bers (and some peripheral members) and are necessary for the survival of a dispersed people like the Jews. 5. The Jewish People is spread out in many host countries and geographical regions. This has had both positive and negative consequences. One positive consequence, for example, has been that if problems arise in one host country, the Diaspora may be able to move to another country. A negative con-sequence is that too scattered a dispersal makes it more difficult to unite the various communities or maintain workable ties among their members. 6. The entire Jewish Diaspora, including the European Diasporas, is not a homogeneous entity; it is a highly heterogeneous entity made up of a myriad of groups and movements, such as reli-gious and secular Jews, nationalists and individualists, leftists and right-ists. Unlike the popular view that this “quilt fabric” breeds communal discord, such communal “legitimate” divisions are in fact increasing membership in the Diaspora. 7. The close ties that diasporic Jews maintain toward their host countries, country of birth, and other non-Jewish ethnic groups in the host countries and elsewhere is done via traditional means of communication (visits, snail mail, line phones) as well as via modern communication technologies (cellular phones, TV, Internet, and Skype). The number of Diaspora chat rooms is constantly growing. 8. The historical consciousness of members of the


Jewish Diaspora parallels that of other Diasporas, such as the Chinese, Indian, and Armenian. 9. The Jewish Diaspora, like other ancient and historical Diasporas, has had to cope with many adversaries (in the Jewish case, especially anti-Semitism in its fluctuating levels of inten-sity). All Diasporas, Jewish and non-Jewish, have learned to overcome these problems. 10. Loyalty to the hostland or homeland (in the Jew-ish case, Israel ) is not automatic and is not universally accepted by the entire Diaspora. Thus, heartfelt loyalty may be given either to the homeland or hostland, may be divided between the two, or may exist in juxtaposition in the form of dual allegiance. In the Jewish case, the majority exhibits dual allegiance, while most ultra-Orthodox and left-wing Jews in the Diaspora have no sense of loyalty toward Israel. 11. Most Diasporas are well organized. Europe’s Jewish communities are currently establishing or revitalizing their organizations. The num-ber of Jewish Russian Diaspora organizations, for example, is impres-sive and constantly on the rise. 12. The Jewish Diaspora also exhibits a vacillating interest in returning to the homeland. Given the abundance of parallels between the Jewish Diaspora and other ethno-national-religious Diasporas, we may assume that like all these other Diasporas also the European Jewish Diaspora will not disappear. For this reason, Jewish activists and academics should try to learn from the strategies of other Diasporas and apply this knowledge to the rapidly growing Jewish Diaspora in Europe.

The Revival and Reorganization of the European Jewish Diaspora

When reevaluating the renaissance of the European Jewish Diaspora and the likelihood of it becoming the third pillar of the Jewish Peo-ple, the main changes it is undergoing should be studied and men-tioned very carefully. The three main changes are: 1. The geographic dispersal of the Diaspora after the breakup of the Soviet Empire. According to the most reliable data, which, as stated, not all scholars agree on, most European Jewish communities are concentrated in a number of urban centers (prior to World War II most Jewish com-munities were located in the periphery). Today’s urban concentra-tion has obvious advantages for cementing ties, creating solidarity and facilitating communication. 2. Parallel to the geographical changes, demographic changes have also taken place. In many cities and urban centers the number of younger Jews who remain in close contact with

42 gabriel sheffer

the community is increasing. 3. Given the extent of geographical and demographic changes, there is a growing tendency and demand toward both formal and informal membership and involvement in the communities.

Despite these changes, further reorganization in the communities is urgently needed. Reconstruction and reorganization depend to a large extent on the ability to raise sufficient funds for the cultural, social, political and economic development of the European Jewish Diaspora. Despite the current economic crisis and difficulty in acquir-ing the required sums, it seems that the Jewish communities and orga-nizations will succeed in obtaining them, to an extent with the support of American Jewry.

One of the most serious problems facing the European Jewish Diaspora in its regeneration and effort to become the third pillar in World Jewry is the lack of ideological, organizational, and pragmatic harmony between Jewish individuals and communities. This drawback is related, inter alia, to globalization (that facilitates the adoption of transnational ideas and patterns of activities) and the adoption of vari-ous outlooks that are not conducive to diasporic existence. The lack of harmony is also linked to Liberalism, post-modernism, indifference, ignorance of Jewish historical cultural traditions, and the absence of the need to identify with the Jewish People. The upshot has been increased ambiguity toward Jewish identity.

Moreover, the heterogeneity of the European Jewish Diaspora (that is similar to the heterogeneity of the American and Israeli communi-ties) has had an impact on one of the major factors in group affilia-tion: the abandonment of religious identity. Religion was one of the basic elements of Jewish identity up until World War II (in the United States, for example, now forty-five percent of the Jews declare them-selves “ethnic” rather than “religious” Jews). Unfortunately there are no accurate figures concerning European Jewry but one may assume that a similar situation exists and contributes, in part, to the difficulty in determining the exact numbers of European Jews and the true nature of their identities.

Other significant (and frustrating) developments have been described by some analysts. They have noted the tension-laden, aggressive, con-flictual relation between the Jewish Diaspora in Europe and other ethnic groups and Diasporas: North African Moslems in France, Palestinians in Germany, certain European governments, and radi-cal ideological groups such as neo-Nazis and anti-Semites. Last but


not least is the problematic relationship between individual Jews and Jewish groups, on the one hand, and Israel, on the other. The most difficult area in this relationship is European Jewry’s attitude toward the ultra-Orthodox and national-religious Jews, on the one hand, and Liberals and leftists, on the other. The main issues dividing these groups are the status of religion in Israel and the Arab-Israeli and Israeli-Palestinian conflicts. All of these changes and developments pose major challenges to Diaspora activists and concerned individu-als who are sincerely interested in reviving and expanding European Jewish communities.

The Main Challenges

If indeed the European Jewish communities plan on developing, orga-nizing and becoming the third pillar of World Jewry, then, in addi-tion to coping with “local” challenges, they will have to begin dealing with some of the most difficult issues and challenges confronting now the Jewish People. Scholars like Diana Pinto have taken note of these challenges. Pinto has listed four major issues: European Jewry’s “com-pulsive” need to act and appear like “ordinary” European citizens; their need to adapt their behavior to the social frameworks and norms in pluralistic democracies (this applies especially to East European Jews); coping with multiculturalism that is spreading across Europe and generating a European unifying process; and the fourth challenge, according to Pinto, is the growth and strengthening of Jewish People’s cultural, social and political presence in various European states.

These are not the only challenges facing the reawakening Jewish Diaspora in Europe. I would like to add additional challenges and factors. First of all and most importantly there is an urgent need to redefine a common Jewish identity. This redefinition should refer to assimilation and social integration, or separation and autonomy. Israel and other Jewish communities should also be involved in this process. The second major challenge is the redefinition of the social boundar-ies of each European Jewish community. This means that there is a need for carefully defined criteria for inclusion or exclusion of those who want to be part of these communities. These last two issues are connected to abstract questions of identity and identification. The following issues relate to the structure, organization, and processes that should be adopted and applied by the communities. Talented,

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motivated, and efficient leaders and activists must be found; greater resources must be sought for the maintenance and development of local, state, and regional communities and their ability to deal with the abovementioned challenges. This might affect the support for Israel.

In addition, Jewish communities should determine their own poli-cies. It is their prerogative to decide on the centralization or decentral-ization of their structure and organizations. They have to decide on the establishment of a “Jewish ethnic umbrella”3 or “superstructure of Klal Yisrael”. Another pressing challenge is the need for strategic deci-sions on the nature of the connection between the European Diaspora, Israel, and other Jewish communities if European Jewry really intends to become the third pillar. Finally, given the pronounced heterogene-ity of all the European Jewish communities and their considerable dif-ferences, a large amount of intellectual and practical efforts will have to be invested in coordinating their activities toward traditional as well as new goals of a unified European Jewish Diaspora.

Conclusions

If European Jewish communities hope to survive, flourish, and attain greater clout in Europe and World Jewry they will have to be much more active and invest greater efforts and resources. This is essential in light of the major social and political divides that still exist between European countries. The unification of Europe is still a far off reality. Given the transition that European states and their Jewish communities are going through, and the difficulties they face, all of which determine the communities’ status among World Jewry, it is impossible to assess whether a unified European Jewish community will emerge, let alone form the third pillar of World Jewry, anytime in the near future. But if European Jewry deals effectively with the challenges it faces, then in the distant future it just might become the elusive third leg of the triangle, a key partner in the Jewish triumvirate. My approach may be defined as not categorically pessimistic, but rather guardedly optimis-tic. And this guarded optimism about the future of Jewry applies also to other Jewish communities worldwide.

3 See Yosef Gorny’s article in this volume.

CULTURAL PLURALISM AS AN AMERICAN ZIONIST OPTION FOR SOLIDARITY AND ITS RELEVANCE FOR

TODAY’S EUROPEAN JEWRY

Ofer Schiff

For the last few decades the European Jewish community is struggling to regain some of its past glory, and to become a so-called third Jew-ish pillar—that is a vibrant Jewish entity which can be compared in its strength and viability to the two centers of Israel and the American Jewish community. However, the European community that emerges from the ruins of World War II and the Holocaust must deal with a very different Jewish world than the pre-Holocaust one—a Jew-ish world which is greatly affected by the growing dominance of the sovereign Jewish State of Israel. In this post-1948 Jewish world, the close relations and identification with the cultural and political life of Israel are an essential component of any attempt to develop and empower a vital Diaspora Jewish existence. However, the Jewish State and its dominant Zionist ideology are still very much influenced by the shelilat ha’galut (negation of the exile) attitude, and as such pres-ent a fundamental challenge to any long-term attempt to establish a viable Diaspora Jewish existence. The question to be reckoned with is whether the acknowledgment of Israel as the cultural and political center of today’s world Jewry clashes with the current desire of the European Jewish community to establish itself as a vibrant and self-contained community—one which is not entirely dependent on the external and sometime Galut-hostile Israeli outlook, but rather stands on its own resources and inner creativity.

The coping of the American Jewish community with this same dilemma during the early years after Israel’s foundation may serve as an important case-study in answering this question. This is especially true in regards to the then important group of American advocates of Diaspora Zionism, who during the last few years preceding the founda-tion of Israel were the most powerful force within American Jewry, and during the 1950s—soon after Israel’s establishment—suffered a severe decline in their power, and were struggling in vain to preserve their autonomous status vis-à-vis Israel. Their most important ideological

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struggle was to prove that a strong attachment to the Jewish State may serve as a sound basis for a long-term flourishing Jewish exis-tence in the Diaspora. In their eyes, it was a response both to the challenge posed by Israel’s growing dominance, and to the simmering anxiety regarding the prospects of Diaspora Jewish continuity within its non-Jewish surroundings—a possible framework that would enable Diaspora Jewry to pursue integration without fear of assimilation. It is the purpose of this paper to present and analyze the suitability of this Diaspora advocacy—originally intended for the American Jewish community of the 1950s—for today’s European Jewish community.

The most important and charismatic leader of this group was Abba Hillel Silver. A Reform Rabbi of one of the largest synagogues in the United States, he was a passionate advocate of a religious variant of “cultural pluralism”, assuming to present it as a Diaspora option for Jewish solidarity. The uniqueness of his brand of Diaspora advocacy lies in its conception of Jewish nationalism and statehood as merely a scaffolding (albeit a supremely important one) for the construction of an independent religio-cultural identity, capable of integrating with its non-Jewish surroundings; and seeing itself as a beginning stage of an inter-religious and intercultural federation for social justice and univer-sal freedom in the spirit of the Jewish prophets.

This Diaspora approach to Jewish nationalism led to an ongo-ing conflict with the major Israeli approaches of the time. The lat-ter, though they also viewed Jewish nationalism and statehood as the means for establishing a model society in the spirit of the prophets, held a different order of priorities with regard to the Jewish sovereign-state interest and the goals of Jewish universalism. The disagreement was between those who, like Silver, felt that the national-Israeli agenda should be subordinated to the broad, universalistic, Diaspora-Jewish agenda, and those who sought to subordinate the universal social goals of justice and equality to the agenda and interests of the Israeli state-hood endeavor. The power struggle between these two approaches simmered just below the surface during the period in which the State of Israel’s establishment was being fought for, but it erupted full-force immediately upon the founding of the State. The five years that followed 1948 witnessed an ongoing clash between the two camps regarding the definition of Judaism’s long-term objectives: should the whole Diaspora Jewish agenda be determined solely by the sovereign Jewish center in Israel, and be entirely subordinated to that center’s interests, or should the importance of the State of Israel hinge on its

cultural pluralism as an american zionist option 47

ability to invigorate an universalistic-based Jewish existence in both the Diaspora and Israel?

During the early years of the State, it quickly became clear that Silver’s political struggle vis-à-vis the dominant Israeli state agenda had no chance of succeeding, even within the American-Jewish arena. Once the futility of his endeavor emerged, Silver was ousted from all positions of influence; in retrospect one discerns a sharp discrepancy between Silver’s key role in pre-state Jewish discourse, and his mar-ginality in the post-1948 one. This essay, then, deals with a version of Diaspora advocacy that suffered a nearly unconditional defeat within the post-1948 Jewish and Zionist political arenas—a version whose implied ideological and political option has been long forgotten and, to all appearances, rejected.

One main reason for Silver’s relegation to the margins of Jewish history was the internal tension that characterized his approach to Israel—the tension between an ideological commitment to exalt the State of Israel and affirm its centrality, and a countervailing obligation to impose restrictions and conditions upon this centrality, so it will not prevent the developing of an independent Diaspora Jewish existence. Once the State had been established this tension grew twofold, and came to be regarded as the embodiment of an internal threat. This perception of threat grew even stronger in the context of the need to unconditionally mobilize on behalf of Israel’s existential struggle dur-ing the decade following its establishment; it continues, even today, to perturb those who, while regarding identification with Israel as fac-tors crucial to Jewish existence, wish nevertheless to condition and restrict Israel’s importance. From this point of view, one may see the struggle that resolved on the political-Zionist plane during the early 1950s as the reflection of a much broader ideological struggle between Israel and the Jewish Diaspora, one that is still relevant and has yet to be resolved. From this perspective, the present essay is not merely concerned to do historical justice to a defeated and forgotten version of Diaspora Jewish advocacy, but rather to provide a forum for air-ing arguments in favor of a Diaspora option that is, at least below the surface, still relevant, and which continues to address the dilem-mas faced by any Diaspora Jewish community in the era after Israel’s independence.

Moreover, Silver’s Diaspora advocacy has a special relevancy when discussing the re-emergence of the European Jewish community. The core Diaspora universalistic ideology, which was presented by Silver

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and his colleagues as an alternative to the Israel-centered negation of the exile version of Zionism, was based in large parts on the pre-Holo-caust universalistic tenets of the Jewish Reform movement—a doc-trine that originated in nineteenth century and pre-Holocaust Europe and of which Silver, a leading Reform Rabbi, was an integral part. Recounting Silver’s struggle to base Jewish Diaspora existence on the revival of these Reform tenets should thus be seen as an early attempt to revive pre-Holocaust European originated Reform doctrine, and to advance them as a sound basis for Diaspora Jewish existence in a Jewish world where the Israeli Jewish center constantly gains strength and dominance.

An ongoing Conflict with Israel

For the first five years after Israel’s foundation, Silver (and many of his American Zionist colleagues) felt that in order to assert his brand of Diaspora advocacy, he must confront the Israeli leadership with its narrow anti-Galut definition of Zionism. Silver expressed this attitude in a speech that may be titled the “Two Centers Speech”, and which was given repeatedly in various versions between 1948 and 1952.1 The main claim in his speech was that the most creative and flourishing periods during the 2,700 years of Jewish history were those in which a vibrant Diaspora Jewish center existed alongside the Jewish center of Eretz-Israel. He criticized the anti-Diaspora patronizing tone he found in Ben-Gurion’s definition of Zionism, insisting that a new brand of Zionism—one that is not limited to Alijha (immigration to Israel ) must be pursued after Israel’s foundation. He warned against the secular Israeli-Zionist model—describing it as a serious danger to Jewish existence. He explained that only a continuous dialogue between the Jewish centers of Israel and the Diaspora may ensure the necessary integration of religion and Jewish nationality—an integration that in his view was the desired content of the new post-1948 Zionism, and the key to the long-term existence of Judaism.2

1 Three early versions of this “two centers speech” are: Silver, November 1948; Silver, 1967: 163–168; Silver, 1950: 358–373.

2 Silver described the synagogue as an institution that may best exemplify the Diaspora’s historic contribution to Jewish civilization. For a similar discussion on the necessity in formulating a “New Zionism” after Israel’s foundation, see: Kaplan, 1948;


Silver did not limit himself to sermons and speeches, but pursued his two-center advocacy also in the world Zionist arena and in the Israeli one, attempting to force the Israeli leadership to acknowledge Ameri-can Judaism as an equal and independent power. His first attempt occurred already in August 1948, at the Executive Committee of the Jewish Agency, which was convening at that time in Jerusalem. He and his loyal colleague, Emanuel Newman, demanded a reorganiza-tion of the Jewish Agency, calling office holders in the Israeli govern-ment to resign from their posts in the Jewish Agency, and presenting it as a way to ensure the independent power of the world Zionist move-ment. Silver’s second attempt to implement his two-center advocacy occurred in 1951 during the 23rd World Jewish Congress, when he and his American Zionist colleagues demanded of the government of Israel to grant a special status to a Diaspora-based Zionist movement, both in the Diaspora and in Israel.3

In both instances Silver and his colleagues argued that the reorga-nization steps must be accompanied by a radical change of the Zionist dominated Jewish discourse. They maintained that the Zionist move-ment must adapt itself to a new post-1948 reality, in which most of Diaspora Jewry will keep their present citizenship, but at the same time will seek a strong emotional and ethical commitment to Israel as a democratic and enlightened Jewish center. In both instances Silver and his colleagues won a victory in the votes, but found, almost imme-diately, that their victory was in vain, and that soon after it turned into a frustrating defeat. In January 1949, only a few months after most of the Israeli leaders, who were nominated to serve in the Israeli government (including Ben-Gurion), were forced to resign from their offices in the Jewish Agency, Silver suffered his most serious defeat ever. Losing all his influence on the vast financial resources of the United Jewish Appeal (UJA) to a new alliance between Ben-Gurion and the non-Zionist Henry Morgenthau Jr. (the former U.S. Secretary of the Treasury in the Roosevelt administration), he and the Ameri-can Zionist movement also lost their chances for independence, and hence he had no choice but to resign from all his posts in the Jewish Agency and in the Zionist movement. Similarly, in August 1951, after

Kaplan, 1955. For a discussion of the American Zionist attempts to lay a new ideo-logical foundation after Israel’s foundation, see: Urofsky, 1978: 243–249.

3 Regarding the 23rd Zionist Congress’ resolution, see: The 23rd Zionist Congress, Stenographic Report, Jerusalem, 1951, pp. 583–584.

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the special status resolution was adopted, against Ben-Gurion’s will, by the 23rd Zionist Congress, it became clear that it was entirely up to Ben-Gurion and the Israeli government how to word the status law. It was also clear that they had no intention of giving up their dominance vis-à-vis the Jewish Diaspora. After a year of discussions within the Israeli government and parliament, the “special status” resolution was worded in such a way that it limited the role of the Jewish Agency and the Diaspora-based Zionist movement to being only a so-called tool of the Israeli government in the absorption of new immigrants to Israel. Rather than giving special status and independence to the Diaspora Zionists, the new law in fact made sure that they had no authority of their own, not even among Diaspora Jewry.

This refusal to grant any legitimacy to an independent and self-conscious Diaspora movement was true also on the personal level. Despite repeated direct and in-direct requests, Ben-Gurion refused to meet Silver, and when he finally invited him for tea (together with Newman, soon after the 23rd Zionist Congress), he refused to speak politics, and limited himself to a conversation about the philosophy of Baruch Spinoza, thus singling out his refusal to acknowledge Silver even as a political adversary. At the same time, Ben-Gurion was ready to grant his acknowledgment and attention to Jacob Blaustein (head of the American Jewish Committee). Silver found himself helpless against a strong and continuous alliance between Ben-Gurion and Blaustein, who as a non-Zionist had no intention of invigorating the cultural or national Diaspora self-awareness of American Jewry.

Silver ended this period of controversy defeated and frustrated. He had to contend with a growing discrepancy between his popularity and high general American standing (he had strong political ties within the Republican Party, and after Eisenhower and his new Republican administration came into power, he was the first Jewish cleric ever to officiate at the inauguration of the new president), and the continuous cold shoulder he and the American Zionist movement got from the Israeli leadership. It was clear to him by that time that his goal of using the identification with Israel as an essential cornerstone in the building of a viable Diaspora Jewish community cannot be achieved by openly challenging the dominance of Israel and its leadership.

In retrospect, one can describe Silver as one of the first among a long line of Diaspora Jewish leaders who found their Diaspora Jewish leadership entangled in growing controversy when choosing to criti-cize Israel. From this respect one can perhaps draw a connecting line


between Silver and Jonathan Sacks, current Chief Rabbi of Britain, who despite his known attachment and affinity to Israel found himself in the midst of a public outcry in the British Jewish community, follow-ing his criticism of Israel’s conduct in the second intifada (Palestinian revolt). Sacks, like Silver before him, quickly learned that being in a position of Diaspora Jewish leadership obliged him to defend Israel and to try to improve its image even in cases where he deeply objects to its conduct and policies. Like Silver, he had to find a way that both embraces Israel, and affirms his own independent and autonomous Diaspora Jewish agenda.

“The best way to destroy an enemy is to make him a friend.” (Abraham Lincoln)

During the last decade of his life, Silver repeatedly used the above quotation, particularly doing so in two main contexts: in regard to America’s Cold War policy and its relations with Russia, and in regard to the relations of American Jewry with Israel (See Silver, 1972a: 107). In both contexts, his use of this quote signified a new, much less con-frontational, tactic, and in both cases this moderate tactic did not sig-nify any fundamental change in his ardent religious-democratic and universalistic belief. On the contrary, in Silver’s eyes the moderate and tolerant tone was an expression of his unshakable semi-religious belief in the ultimate victory of the democratic and pluralistic way of life of the Western World and its Jewish Diaspora. This was exemplified most clearly in Silver’s opposition to the Cold War. He was convinced that the democratic system is superior to any other political system, and that in periods of peace and economic development this inherent superiority becomes most apparent. It was therefore the West’s vital interest to prevent war and to stop the anti-Communist hysteria, and instead to encourage economic and cultural developments even within the Soviet Union. He believed that ultimately these developments will destroy Communism and all other dictatorships from within (see for example Silver, April 21, 1953; Silver, February 12, 1961; Silver, October 15, 1961).

Silver held similar views in regard to the role and position of the Diaspora Jewish agenda vis-à-vis Israel. In contrast to his early con-frontations with Israel, after 1952 he pursued an almost submissive posture, stressing again and again his loyalty to Israel and avoiding any appearance of involvement in its internal politics. This was a gradual

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change, and it reached its first peak in 1955, when Silver accepted the position as the head of the Israeli Bonds—the same non-assuming (Diaspora-ideology wise) position which was previously held by Mor-genthau. In 1948–1949 Silver was ousted from the UIA (United Israel Appeal ) and the UJA, because of his insistence on using them to pursue his Diaspora viewpoint, even when it clashed with the Israeli one. Now, in 1955, he accepted a position which was devoid of any Diaspora advocacy, and which was solely dedicated to serve the eco-nomic interests of Israel, no matter what its internal or international policies were.

This change of attitude reached its second peak in 1956–57, during the Sinai War and the political international turmoil hence after. In his private correspondence Silver expressed great reservations regarding Israel’s aggressive military retaliation policy during the Sinai War and the preceding years,4 however, publicly he gave his full and uncondi-tional support to this policy. When soon after the Sinai War, Israel struggled in vain against the American administration’s ultimatums that demanded a full withdrawal from the Sinai Peninsula and the Gaza Strip; he took upon himself to serve as Israel’s most loyal and vocal supporter and emissary. In effect, he accepted a passive role of blind support and admiration of Israel, with no presumption to interfere in its policies. Soon, this changed attitude had its “rewards”. Contrary to Ben-Gurion’s earlier antagonistic attitude toward him, now that he posed no ideological challenge, Ben-Gurion and the Israeli leadership were ready to embrace him and to acknowledge his past contribu-tions to the Zionist endeavor. This could first be seen in March-April 1956 when Silver visited Israel and was received by the Israeli leader-ship with open arms. Even before his arrival, the Israeli newspapers were tipped about a historic meeting that is due to take place between Ben-Gurion and Silver. The meeting itself took place in the Prime-Minister’s office in Tel-Aviv, and before it ended Ben-Gurion invited Silver to his daughter’s wedding. Two days later the Prime Minister came in person to give the keynote speech in the opening celebration of Kfar Silver—an agricultural educational farm in southern Israel which was built in Silver’s honor. In sharp contrast to his degrading attitude toward Silver in previous years, now, in 1956, he described

4 See for example, Silver’s private correspondence with Elias Sourasky on January 24, 1956, AHSP I, 767.


Silver as the greatest Diaspora Zionist leader since Henrietta Szold. With this new tone, the rest of the Israeli leadership embraced Sil-ver, and contrary to an almost total boycott by Israeli officials dur-ing Silver’s previous visit in 1951, now he was invited to personal meetings with the President, Yitzhak Ben Zvi, with the Chairman of the Israeli Parliament, Yoseph Shprinzak, with the Foreign Minister Moshe Sharett, and to a special reception in his honor by the Finance Minister, Levi Eshkol. On his part, Silver announced in a press confer-ence that he is not interested in any position in the Zionist Congress or in the Executive Committee of the Jewish Agency, and he clarified that in his meeting with the Prime Minister there was no discussion of political issues related to the Zionist movement.5

It is my contention that this dramatic change in Silver’s conduct toward Israel is a telling example to the un-confrontational posture and position which is forced upon almost every Diaspora Jewish leader in the post-1948 era. The question still remains as to the means avail-able to Diaspora Jewish leaders, seeking to enhance a vital and flour-ishing Jewish existence which is committed to Israel and its policies, and yet, at the same time, has its own Diaspora Jewish agenda.

Israel’s Survivalist Role as a Basis for the Spiritual Role of the Diaspora

Similarly to his anti-Cold War advocacy, Silver’s un-confrontational attitude toward Israel did not signify any ideological retreat on his part. Quite the contrary, he described his brand of Diaspora Zionism as a spiritually superior stage than the basic Israeli survivalist one. He likened the re-construction of Jewish sovereignty to a struggle to secure the flow of oxygen needed for Jewish life. As long as this free flow of oxygen was interrupted or threatened, the Jewish people could not help but to devote all their energies to the existential need of breathing. However, after Israel’s foundation, the flow of oxygen was secured, and now it became clear that despite its crucial importance, the oxygen itself was only a means to survival and does not represent the destiny and mission of Jewish existence. In accordance with this

5 The information about Silver’s visit (March 21, 1956–April 5, 1956) appeared in the opening pages of all the major Israeli newspapers. About Silver’s press conference, see for example: HaBoker, April 5, 1956, p. 3.

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metaphor, Diaspora Jewry’s most important and active role was not in presuming to lead the struggle of merely securing Jewish existence. In this crucial but most basic area it had to accept a secondary role, and to follow Israel’s leadership almost blindly. Diaspora Jewry’s main role was in leading a secondary more spiritual endeavor focusing on the content and mission of Jewish existence.

Following his own advice regarding these two different assigned roles of Israel and of Diaspora Jewry, Silver avoided any direct confronta-tional challenge to Israel in its leadership of the Jewish struggle for survival, and instead focused on the commitment of Diaspora Jewry to make use of Israel’s accomplishments and to see it as a basis for its own spiritual Jewish endeavor. One intriguing example of this tactic was his speech in the opening session of the ZOA (Zionist Organi-zation of America) Conference, which took place in New York on September 14, 1957, and which celebrated the 60th anniversary since the first Zionist Congress in Basel.6 The speech was quoted in the Israeli oppositional newspaper, HaBoker, and was described there as a renewed challenge by Silver to the Israeli government’s narrow defi-nition of Zionism.7 A comparison between the original text and the one in HaBoker indicates that although the quotation was accurate, the Israeli newspaper ignored its context and misunderstood its meaning. Silver did criticize the Israeli attempt to limit Zionism to a personal commitment to Alijha, but insisted that this internal ideological debate within the Zionist movement would have no effect on the uncondi-tional American Jewish support for Israel’s well being and existential struggle. The duty of American Zionists, according to Silver, was two-fold: on the one hand unconditional support of Israel’s struggle for survival—seeing it as the main focus of American Jewish identification; on the other hand, teaching the “true” religious and social universalis-tic meanings of Israel’s mission.

Silver devoted most of his speech to the above second goal, and already in the opening paragraphs (which were not quoted in HaBoker) focused on the universalistic context and optimistic meaning of Israel’s founding. He described the 60 years since the first Zionist congress as a period that witnessed the exciting modern revolutions of nationalism

6 See: Silver, September 14, 1957. See also under: Silver, October 1957: 4–5.7 HaBoker, October 4, 1957. (HaBoker was the organ of the oppositional “General

Zionist” party with which Silver was identified in the early 1950s).


and enlightenment, but also the agonizing crises of human suffering and intolerance which came in their footsteps. The role of Israel’s foundation was to serve as an optimistic counterweight to these cri-ses and suffering. It showed that although suffering the most from the social and political changes in modern European society, the Jewish people were successful in bringing an impressive national and religious-cultural awakening. It thus served as a living example of the human ability to overcome the most formidable hardships and failures in a way that leads to the ultimate victory of the universalistic values of enlightenment and democracy.

This universalistic and optimistic description of Israel became even more self-evident in two other speeches, which were given by Silver in honor of Israel’s tenth anniversary. Silver gave the first speech in his synagogue, the Temple, in Cleveland, soon after he returned from another visit to Israel (Silver, May 4, 1958). He chose to describe this visit as a religious pilgrimage, and in doing so he elevated Israel’s con-tinued struggle for survival to a revered status. However, by doing so, he also distanced himself from the day-to-day Israeli reality, and in a way went back in time to the pre-Zionist period, when the sacredness and spiritual significance of the land of Israel and its Jewish inhabit-ants, and not any real involvement in its everyday life, served as the focus of Diaspora Jewish identification. Differently from the involve-ment and criticism of his early post-1948 attitude towards Israel and its politics, he now limited himself to an admiring description of the spiritual universalistic atmosphere which he found at the dedication ceremony of the Hebrew University’s new campus in western Jeru-salem. The light that spread from the thousand candles held by the participants in the dedication ceremony symbolized in Silver’s eyes the victory of enlightenment over the forces of darkness. Ben-Gurion quoted the famous biblical phrase: “Not by might, nor by power, but by my spirit, says the Lord” (Zech. 4:6), and Silver interpreted and explained that despite of Israel’s need to rely on its military strength in its fight for survival, the real power and destiny of the Jewish people lies in its spiritual aspirations and achievements.

Two months later, in a second event celebrating Israel’s tenth anni-versary (Silver, June 26, 1958), Silver elevated Israel to an even higher plane. He suggested that the foundation of Israel was not a local event with limited importance, but rather an event equal in its significance to the few great revolutions that had a fundamental impact on human history. Among these ground-breaking historical revolutions were the

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great scientific discoveries of the time (the discovery of nuclear power and the voyage to space), the revolutions that heralded modernity and enlightenment (the Renaissance, the American Revolution and the French Revolution) and the central watershed events in Jewish his-tory (the exodus from Egypt, the giving of the Torah, the emergence of the prophetic movement, the return to Zion and the victory of the Maccabees).

However, this context of great revolutions served not only to elevate Israel’s foundation and to emphasize its importance, but also to devoid it of any particularistic and pessimistic interpretation. The “Zionist redemption” (as Silver named the foundation of Israel ) was presented as a beginning stage of a long process of great revolutions, whose main importance is not limited to one specific location or one concrete peo-ple, but to its ability to open the way to new and even more daring revolutions. Silver explained that the trauma of the Holocaust makes this universalistic and humanistic role of Israel especially outstanding. The founding of Israel saved the Jewish people from the deep despair and disbelief in humanity, which was brought on by the Holocaust. It boosted a sense of national pride, which was not focused on Israel’s physical might but on its universalistic heritage and mission.

Silver chose to finish his speech by quoting a previous speech that he himself gave about twenty years earlier in the Reform 1937 Colum-bus CCAR (Central Conference of American Rabbis) convention. This conference is famous for being the first Reform convention to adopt an alternative platform to the anti-Zionist Pittsburgh Platform of 1885. It is less known that the Reform movement insisted in its 1937 Columbus Platform on presenting the Jewish national commit-ment as only one aspect of the core Jewish religious commitment to the principles of enlightenment and progress. In 1937 Silver directed this universalistic emphasis against his anti-Zionist Reform colleagues, who saw an unbridgeable gap between the universalistic message of the Jewish religion and between Jewish nationalism. Now, in 1958, he used this same speech in order to present an alternative brand of Diaspora religious-national solidarity—one that sees Israel’s founding not as a goal in itself, but as merely an intrinsic part of Judaism’s uni-versalistic religious commitment.

Although no longer confrontational, this approach was very differ-ent from the Israeli one. The difference was clearly demonstrated in Silver’s response to the Israeli “who is a Jew” political turmoil. The crisis broke out between the Israeli ruling labor party and its religious


Orthodox coalition partners in June 1958, after the Israeli government approved a previous ordinance of the interior minister, allowing every citizen to register as a Jew based on a personal declaration, even in cases contradicting Halachic Jewish law. In an attempt to resolve this crisis, Ben-Gurion wrote to 50 Jewish spiritual leaders from Israel and the Diaspora, asking their opinions on this issue.8

Although he was among the 50 leaders approached by Ben-Gurion, Silver chose not to answer him directly. He devoted one of his weekly sermons to explain his refusal, and explained that he does not want to interfere in Israel’s internal political affairs (Silver, December 7, 1958). Talking to his congregants he did not hide his opinion regard-ing the need for separation between state and religion in Israel as the only solution for the political turmoil there, but this, according to Silver, was an internal Israeli issue, and it was not the religious agenda that should concern world Jewry as a whole. He attempted to explain the larger general Jewish agenda by bringing an American-Reform Diaspora interpretation of the Maccabean struggle. Differ-ently from the common Israeli-Zionist version which interpreted the Maccabean struggle as a national struggle against external enemies, Silver presented this struggle as a religious-moral one that was directed against the Hellenistic Jews. The Maccabees had to contend with a phenomenon of Hellenistic Jews who formally (according to Halachic law) were considered as Jews, but in every other aspect behaved as pagans and turned their back on the Jewish code of moral life and commitment to social justice. This behavior represented a most seri-ous internal threat to the Jewish universalistic moral code, and thus, in the eyes of the Maccabees, there was no choice but to fight against it. The criterion used by the Maccabees in order to determine “who is a Jew” was not based on formal Halachic categories, but rather on the commitment to Jewish universalistic values. The real challenge for world Jewry was therefore not the political and Halachic question of “who is a Jew?” but the question of how to become better Jews, how to conduct one’s life in accordance with the universalistic moral ideals of the Jewish Torah.

This interpretation of the “who-is-a-Jew”-question was a daring and challenging Diaspora Zionist advocacy—one that did not give priority

8 AHSP I, Oct. 10, 1958, 322/5-1-25; Ben-Rafael, 2002; Don-Yehiya, 2002: 88–143.

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to internal Israeli political agenda, but to a continuous moral-religious spiritual revolution that takes place within each individual Jew—pre-paring him for a bold and persistent struggle in the service of the Jewish prophetic mission.9 Silver claimed that the real importance of Israel’s founding was that it enabled a new understanding of Diaspora Jewish existence—not as a problematic or as a disadvantaged reality but rather as an ideal model for the accomplishment of the Jewish moral vision and universalistic mission.

His last Hanukkah sermon (before he passed away) was a most illu-minating example for this intriguing integration between post-1948 Diaspora advocacy and nineteenth century, European originated, Reform religious doctrine (Silver, 1972b: 83–88). Using a common Zionist motif, he emphasized the importance of the struggle of the few against the many, usually identified in the Israeli-Zionist discourse with the national struggle of the Maccabees against their Greek oppressors. Significantly differently from this last interpretation, Silver equated this Maccabean struggle with the minority status of Diaspora Jewry. Quoting Will Durant who claimed in his monumental book, The Story of Civilization, that human progress is always the product of the select few, he claimed that the mission of the Jewish people is closely related to their Diaspora minority status, and that now, with the foundation of Israel, the Jewish Diaspora has an opportunity and an obligation to fulfill this sacred destiny.

Silver described Jewish history as a long universalistic journey of a small Jewish minority through the pagan, the Christian and the Islamic worlds. He suggested that their great contributions to civilization were not in spite of their minority status but rather because of it:

For it is true that the precarious position of a minority, and the many disadvantages which its status imposes upon it, forces its members, if they wish to survive, to mobilize their best talents, and to rely upon their single intellectual and spiritual energies and inventiveness. Members of a minority group are prone to develop independence of judgement and a valuable patience and persistence. Because of what their group experi-enced, they are likely to entertain a greater passion for social righteous-ness, for brotherhood, for humanity, for peace (ibid.: 85).

Rather than lamenting the fact that one belongs to a minority group, the Jewish people should embrace this status and turn it into a social-

9 For another example of this Diaspora Zionist doctrine, see: Silver, July–Septem-ber 1963.


religious commitment. They must look back to their history with pride, understanding it as a heroic history of a people who were always faced by unfavorable odds, but were never fazed by it. They must understand that the minority status is in fact a universal reality, for almost every person may feel disadvantaged by adverse circumstances (race, religion, environment, lack of education, looks, convictions…), and when the odds are against him, he must take heart from the life experience of the Jewish people who never rejoice in adversity, but were never daunted by it:

Bravery in wartime is commonplace. Faced with the threat of death, men will often counterattack with heroic abandon . . . But courage in the face of day-long, year-long and life-long frustrations, injustices and dis-crimination is of an even higher order. To be fenced in on all sides by untoward circumstances, whether social, economic, racial or otherwise, and yet to remain unconfined and unimpaired in mind and spirit . . . that is to display manhood at it noblest (ibid.: 88).

Examining these last quotations, one may conclude that Silver did not abandon his earlier determination to challenge Israel’s centrality, but chose to do it in an entirely new way. Instead of his early attempts to challenge Israel’s policies, he offered new Diaspora-centered univer-salistic interpretations to the traditional Zionist motifs of Jewish pride, Jewish heroism and the long-held Jewish minority status. Doing so, he hoped to establish a basis for a vital Jewish Diaspora, that although identifying with Israel and unconditionally supporting its continuous existential struggles, pursues its own autonomous Jewish agenda.

The question to be reckoned with, in the context of this paper, is whether Silver’s Diaspora advocacy can be seen as an early model of giving Israel two different, but complimentary, roles: as a symbol of the Jewish struggle for survival and a focus of strong Jewish Diaspora commitment and identification, and, at the same time, as a means to declare Diaspora Judaism’s own independent and autonomous status. It is my contention that this dual role of Israel becomes more visible and more critical in every instance that a post-1948 Diaspora Jewish community seeks to establish or reconstruct its own independent and autonomous status within the Klal Israel framework. This was true in the case of the American Jewish community upon its emergence in the 1950s as a powerful new and invigorated Jewish center, which inher-ited the vacant place of the destroyed and demolished pre-Holocaust European center. This may also prove true when discussing the pros-pects of reconstructing the European Jewish community as the third pillar of modern twenty-first century Judaism.

PART II

EUROPEAN JEWISH EXPERIENCES

BETWEEN EURASIA AND EUROPE: JEWISH COMMUNITY AND IDENTITIES IN CONTEMPORARY

RUSSIA AND UKRAINE

Vladimir Zeev Khanin

Since the late nineteenth century the life of Russian Jewry was domi-nated by two contradictory trends: on the one hand, large-scale migra-tion and resettlement (both abroad and in the major industrial and cultural centers of Russia/the USSR/the FSU); and on the other hand, attempts to (re-)establish a full Jewish life locally and to adapt it to the changing conditions. In fact, it was the Pale of Jewish settlement of the Russian Empire (contemporary Byelorussia/Belarus’, Moldova, Baltic States, as well as the most of Ukraine, Poland and some “proper Russian” areas) that at the threshold of the nineteenth and twentieth

centuries was the major “reservoir” of the European and world Jewry—more than 5.5 million persons. Their massive emigration in that period formed the core of the leading Ashkenazi Jewish population centers of the modern world, especially in North America (more then 2 million), the Great Britain (200,000) and the Land of Israel/Palestine (110,000), as well as greatly affected the strengthening or even recreation of some of the Jewish communities in other West European countries, that almost disappeared by the end of the Middle Ages.

In later periods both attempts of the Russian Jews (in geographical meaning of the term) to adapt their organized and general life to changing social, economic and political conditions of the Eastern Europe, and emigration trends experienced growth and decline, but never terminated. Both trends got a new quality after the Perestroika and the destruction of the Soviet Union in 1991, which was followed by a new huge wave of Russian Jewish emigration (“second Soviet Jewish”, or so called “fourth Russian emigration of the modern times”). Since then, about 1.9 million Jews and their family members left the post-Soviet space for Israel (more then a half of them) and elsewhere outside the former Soviet Union (FSU) (Tolts, 2008a).

Concerning all this, two questions may be asked. First, whether “Russian” Jews may again, like it happened in the past, be called to participate in the contemporary re-establishment of a new Jewish center

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in Europe? And second, would their demographic resource, as well as identity, current culture trends, as well as organizational dynamics and political interests make them available for this project?

Demography, Ethnicity and Identity

In the decades passed since the end of the World War II the USSR Jewish population experienced constant decline, due to low fertility, aging, assimilation and emigration. Before the start of the first big Jew-ish emigration wave from the then Soviet Union in 1970 there were about 2.15 million “core” Jews (by self-identification).1 Due to negative demographic trends, this number decreased to 1.5 million by 1989.

The “extended” Jewish population of the Soviet Union (meaning both “core” Jews and their family members of non-Jewish and mixed origin, eligible to immigrate to Israel according to the Law of Return)2 was almost twice as large—about 2.2 million persons, including 910.000 in the Russian Federation, 660.000 in Ukraine, 155.000 in Byelorussia (Belarus’) and 445.000 in other USSR areas. This popula-tion decreased by more then two fold by the end of the last century, mostly due to emigration. As a result, the three million-large Russian Jewish entity is currently almost equally divided between three major centers: Israel, the Anglo-Saxon world (first of all, the USA and Canada), and Eurasia. While the first two groups are now involved in various ethnic, national and community processes in their new host countries, the third one is still “on the move” and their future prospects are uncertain. So, it is legitimate to ask, in what ways it may serve as a resource for strengthening the European Jewry.

From this point of view, one may talk about three subgroups within this later category of Russian Jews. Two of them are already a part of the European Jewish enterprise. The first are Russian Jewish immi-grants and their family members that in the 1970s, and in much larger

1 This term is applied to “ethnic Jews proper”, meaning persons of Jewish (in the majority of cases) or mixed origin who in the course of Soviet and post-Soviet popula-tion censuses defined themselves as Jews.

2 Theoretical aspects of the concept of “extended Jewish population” are discussed in the article by Sergio DellaPergola in this Volume. The concept of “extended Jewish population” was first applied to the post-Soviet reality by Evgenii Andreev, Alexan-der Sinelnikov and Mark Tolts. See relevant estimations in Tolts, 2006: 5–23 and Sinelnikov, 1994: 91–99.

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numbers, since the early 1990s immigrated from the USSR/CIS to the countries of the Western, Central and East Central Europe. The overwhelming majority of them, or some 200 thousand people settled in Germany; the estimated 3 to 5 thousand USSR and FSU Jewish (mainly Bukharan Jewish) immigrants composed the “Russian” Jewish community of Austria (Tolts, 2008b: 87–90), and other groups, each of a few hundred to a few thousand people, now live in London, Prague, Budapest, as well as big cities of Benelux and some other places. The second substantial subgroup is post-Soviet Jews and their immediate family members, who reside in the Baltic states of Lithuania, Latvia and Estonia and number 30 to 35 thousand persons. These people became a part of the European Jewry in 2005, when these three ex-USSR republics formally joined the European Union.

However, the third, much larger sub-group of “potential Jewish Europeans” still resides beyond the current EU borders. This is the “extended” Jewish population of the Commonwealth of Independent States (CIS), which is estimated at about three quarter million persons, and which can be seen as a potential both for emigration and local Jew-ish communal activities. This entity includes some 420 to 440 thousand persons that compose the “ethnic core” of this community.3

Theoretically, all these people, which’s overwhelming majority is concentrated in Russia (about a half million) and Ukraine (some 200 thousand), could be prospective “candidates” for joining the Euro-pean Jewry either as new immigrants to the EU member states, or due to further extension of the European Union eastward, or by identifying with, and promoting the “European choice” in an political, economic, cultural and civic approach of their courtiers of residence. But does this expectation meet the reality?

As it is known, for a number of reasons the mass acculturation of the Jews of the Soviet Union to the Russian environment did not lead to

3 Tolts, 2007: 283–311. Russian demographers however argue that the Israelis underestimate the real numbers of the FSU Jews. According to Mark Kupovetsky, not less than one million persons of Jewish and mixed origin currently live in Russia alone; Kupovetsky, 2009. See also Ryvkina, 2005: 45. Experts of the Association of Jewish Organizations and Communities of Ukraine also believe that the relationship between the extended population and the ethnic core is not 2:1, as Tolts asserts, but at least 4:1 or even 5:1. Therefore, even though only a little over 103,000 people declared that they were Jewish in the population census of Ukraine in 2001, Ukrainian Jewry leaders estimate that its “Jewish population” numbers are somewhere between 400,000 and 450,000 people; Zissels, 2002: 63–67.


their abandoning their Jewish identity. Rather, it led to the shaping of a special model of the Soviet Jewish identity type. However, the con-struction of this identity was never completed, and initially included historical or even “civilization” differences between three major groups that composed 6, 12 and 82% of the Soviet Jewish population, respectively. There were non-Ashkenazi Jewish communities (such as Georgian, Bukharan, and Mountain Jews); Ashkenazi Jews from regions annexed to the Soviet Union on the eve or at the end of World War II (and who between the two World Wars maintained a large degree of cultural autonomy) and “genuine” Soviet Ashkenazi Jews, who had lived in the Soviet Union since its establishment in 1924. Some researchers go so far as to claim that new sub-peoples developed in the course of the twentieth century in various republics of the Soviet Union, such as Russian Jews (Yuhneva, 2004: 475–496) and Ukrainian Jews (Petrovsky-Shtern, 2004: 519–580; Petrovsky-Shtern, 2009).

The disintegration of the Soviet Union, opening gates for mass emi-gration and re-immigration of Jews to the post-Soviet states, together with relatively free movement of various Jewish networks, concepts and ideas, even further complicated this picture. In the course of the years since the disintegration of the Soviet Union, during which most of its Jews have left for Israel and the West, fundamental changes have also taken place, concerning the self-awareness of the Jews remaining in the post-Soviet states. New groups have sprung up that have no parallel in the previous periods in the history of the Jews of Eastern Europe.

During our research conducted in 2003–2004, we managed to iden-tify at least 14 Jewish identity groups that now exist in the post-Soviet space (Khanin and Chernin, 2004: 17–34).

1. Traditional Soviet Jewish Identity, which was developed from the tra-ditional Eastern European Ashkenazi identity under the conditions of the Soviet regime. Their characteristics included attribution of high importance to registering the Jewish nationality (ethnic affiliation) in official documents; no significant influence of Jewish religion (beyond a negative attitude to conversion); as well as an important role of the Yiddish language and the remnants of its culture as ethnic symbols of identity. During the decades of Soviet history, this Jewish identity type gradually distanced itself from the traditional Eastern European Jew-ish identity type, parallel to the development of cultural and linguistic assimilation, and nowadays is typical primarily of the elderly. How-ever, the high average age of the Jewish population, especially of its


ethnic nucleus, obliges us to acknowledge the influence of this identity type in the post-Soviet states.

2. Hebrew Jewish Identity, that was imported into the post-Soviet region through the cultural and educational activity of Israeli elements, and is partly influenced by local Zionist frameworks. The roots of this identity type can be identified in the activity of the few underground Zionist groups in the Soviet Union back in the 1970s and 1980s. The main ethno-identity symbols of this identity type are the State of Israel and the Hebrew language, and it is characteristic of members of the younger and intermediate age groups. In contrast to the traditional Soviet Jewish identity, the Hebrew Jewish identity type has vigorous support outside the borders of the former Soviet Union. However, it is not the leading one in the FSU due both to mass Alijhah from among its ranks, as well as to a pronounced demographic imbalance among post-Soviet Jewry, most of whose members typically belong to the older age groups. This identity type is not identical to the Israeli Jewish identity type. Rather, it is its Diaspora reflection.

3. Traditional Identity of the Oriental Jewish Communities living in the CIS (the Bukharan, Caucasian and Georgian Jews), which are character-ized by a low degree of assimilation, relatively strong degree of daily religiosity, as well as by high level of communal and ethnic solidarity. The Jews of Bukhara and the Caucasus region speak Jewish languages that are unique to them and that are well-preserved in the interme-diate age groups and, partly, even among the young. Their ethnic identity is discernible at several levels—ethnic Jewish, Russian Jewish, and general Jewish. Due to the mass migration of the Oriental Jewish communities from their traditional places of residence to the big cities of Russia—in particular, to Moscow and St. Petersburg—they turned from a marginal, even exotic, element into a very major one in these key communities.

4. Separatist Ethnic Identity, which is common among the non-Ash-kenazi Jewish groups in the CIS, such as Karaites and, to a lesser extent, the Krymchak community. It is characterized by the desire to emphasize the community’s cultural and ethnical uniqueness, even going so far as to deny that it is a part of the Jewish people. In the past this approach also prevailed among the elite of the Caucasian Jewish community, and was aggressively supported by the Soviet authorities. Due to the dramatic changes in the social and political environment after the USSR destruction, the area of influence of this separatist


ethnic identity type has dropped, however, it has not yet completely died out in the CIS.

5. Neo-Yiddishism, that can be viewed as a continuation of the tra-ditional Soviet Jewish identity type, since both view Yiddish and its culture as symbols of nationality and identity. However, in contrast to most members of the Soviet Jewish identity group, the partisans of the Neo-Yiddishist identity model belong to the intermediate and younger age group, where it is more widespread than one would normally expect. Its advocates prefer to regard themselves as the heirs of secular Ashkenazi Jewish culture as a whole, and not as the heirs of Soviet Jewish culture. This identity model is largely influenced by the ideology of the modern Yiddishist movements in the West, and in particular in the USA. It can be viewed as an attempt to create a new secular Diaspora Jewish identity, so as to deal with the danger of assimilation without the need to have resource to Zionism or to lead an Orthodox religious life. Moreover, Yiddish culture is perceived as a deep-rooted local Jewish culture, not as one imported from Israel.

6. Ultra-Orthodox Jewry—small but highly influential communities of non-Zionist ultra-Orthodox Jews, leading a devout religious lifestyle, that have sprung up in the CIS and the Baltic states in the last fifteen years. These communities are not a continuation of the few ultra-Orthodox communities that survived Communist suppression. Rather, they are composed of foreign citizens living in the territories of the former Soviet Union, as well as newly religious local Jews, many of whom were educated in religious educational institutes that operate in the CIS with foreign funding. The model for these communities are existing ultra-Orthodox communities in Israel and worldwide, and one of their main features is interest in Yiddish and a desire to make it their spoken language, as a kind of opposition to Hebrew, which is perceived in these circles as a “Zionist language”. Most members of these ultra-Orthodox communities are not interested in making Alijhah, and some are anti-Zionist.

7. Religious Zionist Identity is represented among rare, predominantly Jewish groups in the CIS, due to the high rate of their emigration for Israel. However, in the recent years the religious Zionist ideology niche became of obvious demand, especially by the young generation of the post-Soviet Jews looking for a suitable religious and ideological identity.

8. Non-Orthodox Religious Identity is represented by the Conservative and Reform Movements, and is a new phenomenon in the CIS, which originated in the Perestroika era. It is mainly active among the young,


who have no religious tradition at all and treat Reform Judaism as a natural, legitimate form of Judaism. In Russia, Ukraine and some other CIS states non-Orthodox groups to some extent serve as a form of the local Jewish youth’s subcultures.

9. Spiritual Judaism is another new phenomenon in the CIS, existing almost exclusively in the capital cities, first of all in St. Petersburg, among several dozen intellectuals of Jewish and non-Jewish origin. The members of this identity type have no formal organizational framework, do not accept the authority of the ultra-Orthodox lead-ership and view religion and moral commandments as the essence of Judaism, with nationality taking second place. They are not anti-Zionist. However, they totally reject practical Zionism and Alijhah as a religious and national duty.

10. Subbotnik Converts, represented by thousands of veteran converts to Judaism, generally known as “Subbotniks”, who live in the CIS, especially in Russia, and some have made Alijhah. Neither their position according to Halacha, nor their eligibility for Israeli citizenship accord-ing to the Law of Return, is completely clear. Some have converted to Judaism while others Judaize—that is lead a Jewish way of life.

11. Assimilative Identity, featured by Jews and descendants of mixed marriages that have been fully absorbed into Russian culture and society. Nevertheless, they remain conscious of their unique origin. Members of this Jewish identity type have no special organizational frameworks, although they themselves are numerous and very influen-tial, and often formulate their essentially anti-Zionist attitude with the help of the slogan, “Jews are the intelligentsia of Russia”.

12. Adoption of Christian Customs by many Jews and children of mixed marriages in the CIS, who try to combine their Jewish awareness with dif-ferent forms of Christianity, sometimes even observing the rituals of both religions. There are also organized groups, such as “Jews for Jesus”.

13. Post-Assimilative Identity, which is a widespread phenomenon among many young people in every Jewish group, whether religious or secular, Zionist or non-Zionist, who did not learn about their connection to Judaism at home, and discovered it on their own or under the influence of the activity of Jewish organizations. The children and youngsters who participate in any Jewish activity become a factor that reinforces the Jewish identity of their parents, or even of their grandparents.

14. The Israeli ‘Yordim’ (Hebrew for “people who descend”)—Jewish citizens who emigrated from Israel and are largely concentrated in the


big cultural and industrial centers of Russia and Ukraine, where they can be viewed as belonging to the ethnic core of the extended Jewish community. For instance, some 30,000 Jews with Israeli citizenship live in Moscow alone. Accordingly, they represent over a tenth of the total Jewish population in the Russian capital, where the largest Jewish community in the whole post-Soviet states is concentrated.

The “extended” Jewish population

The answer whether these identity types could also be applied to the CIS “extended Jewish population”, which besides the ethnic Jewish core includes the descendents of the mixed marriages and non-Jewish members of Jewish households, is not obvious.

According to the American researcher Zvi Gitelman, precisely the children of mixed marriages who adopted a non-Jewish identity can be considered as assimilated in the full sense of the word, in contrast to “pure ethnic Jews” (the offspring of two Jewish parents), who were not fully assimilated at the end of the Soviet era (Gitelman, 1991: 4–5). This can be seen from official Soviet statistics. Thus, according to the population censuses of the Soviet Union, only 2% to 5% of the members of this group (according to a selective census of 1985, about 7%) were registered as Jews in official documents. The excep-tion to the rule was Lithuania, where nearly 12% of all the children of mixed marriages were registered as Jews in the nationality clause (Konstantinov, 2007: 53). Mordechai Altshuler, who investigated the matter, is of the opinion that the children of mixed marriages who were registered as non-Jews usually adopted a non-Jewish identity, too (Altshuler, 1987: 236).

Nevertheless, it should be mentioned that many members of this group acknowledged their Jewish roots in various ways, irrespective of what appeared in the nationality clause in their documents. It is a common knowledge that in the current political, economic and social conditions of Eastern Europe, many non-Jewish spouses and children of mixed marriages prefer to be connected to Jewish communities and to avail themselves of their services in the fields of education, infor-mation, culture and welfare (Khanin, 2002b). All this provides fur-ther legitimization for the majority of local Jewish leaders to see these people as a target group for the community activity which, according to the present procedure, is open to everyone defined as eligible for


Israeli citizenship according to the Law of Return (that is, not only to Jews by Halacha, but also to second and third generation descendants of mixed marriages, as well as to the non-Jewish spouses of these three groups). Sometimes, this community activity extends even beyond these broad boundaries (to include fourth generation descendants of mixed marriages).

As Chairman of the Ukrainian Jewish Va’ad (Association of Jewish Organizations and Communities) Joseph Zissels noted, the post-Soviet situation is “pushing many of the children of mixed marriages to search for their religious and national roots—not only in order to make Alijhah or to receive aid, but also in order to attain a certain mental balance by creating a revived set of traditional values.” (Zissels, 2002: 63ff.) Thus, affiliation to the Jewish cultural community is viewed as positive by this group—despite the fact that, as emerges from the population censuses conducted in the years 1999–2002, this affiliation is not always perceived by the descendants of mixed marriages and the non-Jewish spouses of Jews as first and foremost in their list of priori-ties, from the point of view of their national identity.

In any event, we face here a realistic phenomenon—the shaping of a socio-cultural environment that can be defined as kindred to Juda-ism, a type of unique sub-culture. The agents of this phenomenon are the local and foreign Jewish organizations, the sharp rise in the status of the Jewish community following the changed social and political situation as of the end of the Soviet era and after, and the emigra-tion options open to anyone who is defined as Jewish (Nosenko, 2004; Shaiduk, 2007: 241–252).

Thus, processes of developing unconventional identity models, which, for all that, do not constitute complete assimilation, are occurring among the Jewish and Judaizing communities, although they have not yet found material frameworks for expression. Hence, a more detailed cultural identity structuring of the extended Jewish community must be made than the simple division between such categories as “Jewish”, “half-Jewish”, “quarter-Jewish”, and “non-Jewish”.

It was already mentioned in the academic literature that Jewish identity in the former Soviet Union is primarily ethnic, rather than religious, cultural or any other phenomenon (Gitelman, Chervyakov and Shapiro, 2000: 52–86; 2001: 210–244; Ryvkina, 1996; Ryvkina, 2005; Khanin, 1998a: 120–150). The survey of the Jewish popula-tion (in the wide meaning of this term) of five Russian and Ukrainian cities conducted in late 2003 and 2004 by Velvl Chernin and this


author confirmed this once again.4 Thus, in their answers to the ques-tion what, in their opinion, did being Jewish mean, the respondents chose, in the first three places, precisely those ethno-cultural values connected to national identity—a feeling of belonging to the Jew-ish people (73.5%), pride in Jewish culture (65%), and observance of Jewish tradition, rites and culture (58.1%). However, only a quarter of the respondents said that being Jewish meant keeping the Jewish reli-gious commandments and going to synagogue, or aspiring to receive, or give children a Jewish education (places 10 and 11 respectively in the scale of 14 values). Mastery and use of the Jewish languages, Hebrew and Yiddish received the ninth and fourteenth (last) places respectively in their list of priorities (see Table 1).

In other words, the extended population’s identity contains a wide gap between the symbolic nature of its ethno-cultural and ethno-genetic values and the actual implementation of the latter in every-day life—a situation that has remained practically unchanged since the Soviet era. During the latter period, Jewish identity was preserved in spite of the practical lack of material identification factors, in the setting of what Zvi Gitelman defined as the “imposed national identity”, which was “forced on the Jews by the authorities.” (Gitelman, 2003: 54–55)

Of course, this phenomenon was not entirely artificial: It was con-nected to objective processes that started occurring among the Jews of Russia already at the end of the nineteenth century. Being connected to the remnants of cultural tradition, this phenomenon ultimately became institutionalized in the form of the model of Soviet Jewish identity that was described above.

This also holds true not only in relation to the “strong ethnic Jew-ish core”, but also for the part of CIS Jewry consisting of the offspring of mixed marriages. These facts confirm our hypothesis that the eth-nic core and the ethnically mixed components of the extended Jewish population in the former Soviet Union (and partly in the new Russian Jewish Diaspora created outside its borders, too) have been undergoing a more complex process of socio-cultural interaction than previously

4 The study was conducted in late 2003 and early 2004. On the basis of their results, a standard questionnaire was compiled that was presented to 470 respondents from five cities in Russia and Ukraine who identify with the Jewish community to some extent or other. The respondents were chosen from two capital cities (Kiev and Moscow) and from three administrative centers (Vladimir, Samara, and Zaporizhia). For details see Khanin and Chernin, 2007.


presumed, and that their ethno-cultural and identity borders do not pass between these components—rather, they pass through them.

Moreover, a more detailed analysis shows that the traditional Jew-ish identity types are being reinforced and new ones are being shaped in the post-Soviet states within the setting of a more dynamic and more complex division into cultural identity groups, in both the Jew-ish and non-Jewish components of the extended Jewish population. These boundaries are neither fully identical with the simple models of Jewish identity described above nor with the identity types of the offspring of mixed marriages, that were described in the literature (see, for instance, Nosenko, 2001: 18–33).

In the course of our research, we managed to identify at least four such cultural identity groups, all of which come under the influence, to some degree or other, of both the local organized Jewish community (in its wider sense) and of their closer and more distant periphery:

1. Universal Jews: People with an overall Jewish identity containing a strong national (and nationalistic) component. Their affiliation with this group stems from the determination that “all Jews are one people”.

2. Ethnic Jews: People with a communal (sub-ethnic) identity, who define themselves as “Russian Jews”, “Ukrainian Jews”, etc. A considerable proportion asserted in the course of our survey that “Ukrainian/Russian Jews have more in common with Ukrainians/Russians

Rating Characteristic Values %

1 Feeling of belonging to the Jewish people 73.52 Pride in the culture of the Jewish people and its heritage 64.93 Observance of Jewish tradition, rites and culture 58.14 Having Jewish parents 42.85 Helping the members of your people 41.36 Being a patriot of the Jewish State 40.17 Fighting anti-Semitism 35.78 Participation in community life 34.89 Mastery and use of the Hebrew language 28.6

10 Keeping the Mitzvot, attending synagogue 27.711 Aspiring to receive, and give children, a Jewish education 26.512 Being married to a Jew/Jewess 23.313 Living in the Land of Israel 18.914 Mastery of Jewish languages (Yiddish, Judeo-Bukharan,

Judeo-Caucasian, etc.)14.7

Table 9. Symbols of belonging to the Jewish people


than with the Jews of other countries”. However, the same people often see themselves as a part of the “global”, Russian Jewish entity, which is not necessarily limited by the borders of the national states, and has a “transnational” character, but at the same time is different from other ethnic types of world Jewry.

3. Post-modern (double identity) Jews: People with mixed ethnic and sometimes also religious identity, who define themselves as “both Russians/Ukrainians/etc. and Jewish”.

4. Non-Jews: People with a non-Jewish identity, who do not deny their con-nection to the organized Jewish community or to its direct periphery.

These groups are obviously interrelated, but not totally intersect with our respondents groups, who in the course of the interviews demon-strated inclinations towards “Israel-centrist”, “the Diaspora-centrist”, “world”, and “sub-ethnic” understandings of Jewishness (see table 10).

If we use the methods of Leshem and Ryvkina for estimating the numerical ratio between the different versions of stable and unstable Jewish identity among “those eligible for Israeli citizenship according to the Law of Return” (the Jewish community in its widest sense), our sample, too, will show a two third to one third ratio—which is very close to the overall picture, obtained in the course of our 2003/2004 study. Almost the same ratio was shown by our other studies, con-ducted in 2004, 2007 and 2008 in Russia and Ukraine (Khanin, 2004; Khanin, 2008a; Khanin, Epstein and Likhachev, 2009), as well as among FSU immigrants in Israel in 2009 (Mutagim Agency Sample, March 2009).

Rather than in quantity correlations between four identity groups, however, we were interested in discovering the fundamental differ-ences between them with regard to their social, political and cultural priorities and values. That includes the question, whether and in what way these various ethnic identity patterns may found a common

“Agree with these opinions . . .” %

Israel is the only country where a Jew can feel Jewish. 43.7You can be a good Jew in the Diaspora, too. 69.5The Jews of the whole world are one people. 79.3Russian (Ukrainian, etc.) Jews have more in common with

Russians (Ukrainians, etc.) than with Jews of other countries.32.1

Table 10. The respondents’ opinions on the nature of Judaism


ground with two other basic Jewish identity models in the Western world—religious and a nation state-oriented (so called “Zionism of the Diaspora”) (see Arnow, 1994: 29–36; Charmé, 2000: 133–155; Fishman, 1993).

Religion and Ethnic Identity

During practically the whole of the Soviet era, the authorities disrupted religious rites, and severely limited the activity of religious institutes. Soviet society was offered, in exchange, a “civil religion” in the form of Communist ideology, a “new Soviet identity” and “Socialist inter-nationalism” (all this occurred parallel to the development of “Soviet Socialist nationalities”). Judaism, which was perceived by the authori-ties as the “stronghold of bourgeois Jewish nationalism”, was perse-cuted more severely than all the other religions, with synagogues and Jewish educational and cultural institutions being frequently targeted.

Eventually, a secular Jewish identity gathered strength in the Soviet Union, although any external manifestation of it was severely suppressed. It was an ethnic symbol that lacked any actual significance, and was almost totally cut off from the roots of Jewish cultural and reli-gious traditions (Chervyakov, Gitelman and Shapiro, 1997: 280–305; Khanin, 1998b: 73–91). Moreover, in spite of the fact that this, latter, reinforced secular Jewish identity was perceived as conflicting with other ethnical identities, this did not hold true for the “Juda-ism/Christianity” antithesis. In principle, the remnants of traditional Jewish identity of Soviet Jews, although generally secularized and acculturated in Russian environment, promoted a negative approach to “excised apostates”. After the disintegration of the Soviet Union, the scene became complicated due to:

The revival of dozens of informal religious Jewish organizations • (starting with Habad, and objectors to Hasidism, through to religious Zionism), against the background of reinforced nationalism follow-ing the victory of the State of Israel in the Six Day War. The adoption of new models of religious Jewish identity at the end • of the Soviet era and during the post-Soviet era. Hundreds of thousands of people of mixed nationality, including • people without any Jewish roots, participated in organized “Jewish” community work (including plans for making Alijha). These people


did not have to distance themselves from their religious, cultural and national awareness. The spread of post-modern attitudes in post-Soviet society, legiti-• mizing religious and ethnic cultural identities that were different.

Researchers are deeply divided in this matter. Rozalina Ryvkina in her research on the religiosity of the Jews of Moscow found that between the years 1995–2004, the percentage of people who defined them-selves as religious grew by 300%—from 20% to 59%. In 1995, the percentage of people leaning towards the Russian Orthodox Church was 150% higher than the percentage leaning towards Judaism. This trend was reversed in 2004, with 35% defining themselves as believers in Judaism, 24% as believers in the Russian Orthodox Church, and 38% not affiliating with any religion (Ryvkina, 2005: 117–121). On the other hand, the Muscovite ethno-demographer who investigated the religious affiliation of the residents of Moscow, Alexander Sinel-nikov, found that among roughly 25% of the Jews of Moscow who responded that they were religious, 50% said that they were Christians and 50% said that they were Jewish. All the other Jewish interviewees defined themselves as “atheists, as believers in other religions or as people who did not believe in any religion”. At any rate, both sociolo-gists agree that the data attest to the “absorption of the Jews into the Russian culture” (ibid.).

The data obtained in our research are closer to those of Sinel-nikov: 23% of the interviewees responded positively, 46.5% responded negatively, and a little over 30% found it difficult to respond to the question, “Do you perceive yourself as a religious person?” In fact, we were not interested in the level of religiosity of the Jewish community; rather, to gain an understanding of the religious component in “sym-bolic ethnicity” of the post-Soviet Jewry. Therefore, we formulated another question: “Which religion (regardless of the level of religiosity) is perceived by the interviewees as their religion?” Ultimately, some 60% chose Judaism, over 25% chose Christianity or both Judaism and Christianity, while 14.5% (only 33% of all the “non-religious”) declared that they were atheists. Most of the interviewees were aware that they belonged to the Jewish group in one way or the other.

However, there were significant differences between the ethnic identity groups with regard to this question, too. Over 80% of the “universal Jews” and over 55% of the “sub-ethnic ethnic Jews” per-


ceived themselves affiliated with Judaism as the “religion of their own”. However, only 33% of the people with the double identity (those who feel belonging to both Jewish and another people) viewed themselves this way. On the other hand, the representatives of the latter group had the highest rate of members who also viewed themselves as both Jewish and Christian from a religious and cultural point of view. A high ratio of Russian/Ukrainian Jews also split their identity between the cultures of Judaism and of the Russian Orthodox Church (28.5%). Non-Jews who participated in the activities of the Jewish communities viewed the question as purely religious. Consequently, the group was divided equally between Christians and atheists. Some interviewees who viewed themselves as Christians or atheists in other categories had an inverted relationship with regard to the degree of the stability of Jewish awareness.

Thus, our data indicate that the religious element is quite impor-tant, perhaps even increasingly so, for communal and national Jewish identity as a whole. Is this a result of the friendly political and social atmosphere, which is helping arouse dormant (latent) Jewish traditions, or the result of the activity of external religious Jewish organizations? We believe that the first factor mainly influences the older generation, while the Jewish organizations primarily influence the younger and intermediate generations. In any event, at least three attitude patterns towards religion are competing with one another, with the cooperation of the Jews in the post-Soviet region.

The first pattern presents a classic (neo-traditional) aspect of Judaism as a union of ethnicity and faith, or of community and faith. Accord-ingly, Judaism as a religion becomes the core of Jewish identity, and the members of its institutions can not be atheistic, and certainly not believe in other religions. The second pattern stems from a secular concept shaped in the Soviet era, with Jews being perceived as an ethnic class, as a national group. In this pattern, the Jewish religion primarily plays a symbolic, positive ethnic, role, but lacks significance in everyday life. This, indeed, leads to negative feelings towards believ-ers in other religions, but does not cut them off, a priori, from the Jewish community, in the wide sense of the term.

The third, post-modern, pattern, views multiculturalism, mixed eth-nicity and diversified religiosity positively. In a certain sense, it even views them as desirable elements of Jewish life, as well as of community life. We may assume that although the approach of the FSU Jewry to


the status of religion in the Jewish identity complex is still different to one among Western Jewries, there are no irresolvable contradictions between two paradigms either. Especially if one would agree with the assumption that like in Eastern Europe, in many Jewish communities in the West, too, religion plays the role of a “facade for ethnicity” (see Sarna, 1991: 91–103; Gitelman, 2009: 1–5).

Israel and Post-Soviet Jewish Identity

Post-Soviet and Western, including the European Jewries have even more in common in their vision of the Land and the State of Israel and their place in Jewish public consciousness. It is well known, that the Jewish population of the “Russian Eastern Europe” was the birth land of the various streams of practical Zionism of the early twentieth century, and played a crucial role in constructing the political systems, economic infrastructure, and cultural codes of the Jewish National Home in Palestine and the State of Israel. Soon after the Bolshevik revolution in Russia, however, Jews who remained there became sepa-rated from Zionist activities, as well as from Israel and the rest of the Jewish world for fifty years.

Nevertheless, Zionist feeling was widespread among Soviet Jews, predominantly as an inner, emotional tie to Israel. This form of popu-lar Zionism, in many ways a product of public and state anti-Semitism, was integral to the value system that nurtured the Jewish national and ethnic consciousness. Characteristic of popular Zionism was an expa-triate mentality, a view that Jews living in the USSR would always be seen by the local Slavic population as strangers and that their real homeland was Israel. That also included the memory of the Holocaust and the interpretation of its consequences as the source of the crisis of the European Jewry and the State of Israel as a means of resolving the crisis. Both factors by the end of the Soviet era merged into a national consciousness that actively absorbed the vestiges of national tradition and filled the void of Soviet Jewish identity.5 Those were Russian Jew-ish intellectuals, who already in the 1970s developed their own new Zionist concept—so called “Russian neo-Zionism”, a sort of combin-ing of the ethnic Russian Jewish values (high educational, cultural and

5 For more detailed analyses of this trend see Khanin, 2005: 183–203.


technical progress-oriented standards and post-Six Day War Russian Jewish nationalism) with the Zionist political identity of Israel and its central role in the Jewish world.6

In the post-Soviet period the Jewish State, by the very fact of its existence, continues to serve as one of the basic elements of CIS Jew-ish identification. However, contrary to the “popular Zionism” of the late Soviet era, the current generation of Russian-speaking Jews and their intellectual, cultural and political elite demonstrate more sub-stantial diversity in Israel-related ideology. With all that and despite the presence of a few anti-Zionist groups—a new phenomenon that was described above—for the overwhelming majority of the CIS Jews Israel remains a very positive value.

Our research showed that feelings of solidarity with Israel are still predominant among three out of four culture identity groups of Jews in Russia and Ukraine (80 to more than 90 percent), as table 11 shows. However the fourth group, i.e., persons of Jewish and mixed origin, who insist on their predominantly non-Jewish identity, falls out of this picture. Only one third of them are ready to give Israel their unques-tionable support, while two third of them were much less enthusiastic over this question.

It can be assumed, that on the abolishing of the “state anti-Sem-itism” (which in the Soviet times included also official anti-Zionism) and with the establishment of normal diplomatic relations and grow-ing cooperation between the State of Israel and the USSR successor

6 On “Russian Neo-Zionism” see Nudelman, 2000: 67–84; Belenkaya and Zinger, 2005: 29–77; Khanin, 2005: 187–193.

The Opinion Yes No/Do not know

Total

Feel as a Jew 96,0% 4,0% 100,0%Feel as Russian/Ukrainian Jew 90,7% 9,3% 100,0%Feel as Jew and as a member of

another nation 81,4% 18,6% 100,0%Feel as a member of another

ethnic community 33,3% 66,7% 100,0%Total 89,6% 10,4% 100,0%

Table 11. Feeling solidarity with Israel


states, former Soviet Jews found themselves in a new political situation. In fact, only now they face the “dual loyalty” dilemma similar to their North American and West European counterparts, which naturally is absolutely different from “pro-Israeli expatriotism” vis-à-vis “anti-Zionism” opposition of the Soviet times. During two post-Soviet decades the status of Israel in Russian and Ukrainian Jewish identity became as diverse as in the West.

That can be illustrated by one of the findings of our study. More then 40% of the participants noted the need to be a patriot of the Jewish State as one of the signs of belonging to the Jewish people. However, only 18.9% thought it was essential to live in Israel. The difference between the basic culture identity groups on these issues proved to be significant as well.

In the course of our study, respondents with the “universal” Jew-ish identity demonstrated the centrality of Israel in their identification complex (table 12): about 57% of them agreed, that “interests of Israel for a Jew are above all”, and just a bit more then 15% believed, that “Jews first of all must be patriots of the country they were born and live now”. Contrary to them, the share of supporters of both opinions among the respondents with the local (ethnic and sub-ethnic) Jewish identity, i.e., those who defined themselves as Russian or Ukrainian Jews, was almost equal. Furthermore, respondents with the double (both Jewish and non Jewish) identity, showed more definite inclina-tion towards local, rather than Israeli patriotism. Finally, “unquestion-able Israeli patriots” were not found at all among Jews and persons of

“Jews first of all must be patriots of the country

they were born (Russian, Ukraine etc.)”—Agree.

“Interests of Israel for a Jew are above all.”—

Agree

Feel as a Jew 15,4% 56,8%Feel as Russian/Ukrainian Jew 34,0% 38,0%Feel as Jew and as a member of

another nation 50,9% 36,4%Feel as a member of another

national community 80,0% 0,0%Total 32,4% 42,8%

Total samplePearson Chi-Square: df=6, Value 32,556; significant, α<0.001.

Pearson Chi-Square: df=6, Value 32,556; significant, α<0.001.

Table 12. Respondents’ position about Jewish patriotism


mixed origin, who felt belonging to a non-Jewish entity as their first identity option.

In general terms, however, more then 40% of our respondents dem-onstrated strong identification attitudes towards the State of Israel. Comparing this data with our 1993 and 1995 surveys of Ukrainian Jewish population (Khanin, 1998a: 120–150) we can acknowledge that in the course of the past years Israeli-centered aspirations of the post-Soviet Jewry experienced a dramatic grow. That may be explained with the difference of the political situation at the threshold of the Soviet and post-Soviet period and nowadays. While at the start of the establishment of USSR ethnic national successor states, local and pro-Israeli patriotism still might had been seen as mutually exclusive, ten years later Jews of Russia and Ukraine see apparently no controversy in between Jewish patriotism, pro-Israeli attitudes, and loyalty to their “host” state. In any event, in the post-Soviet Jewish context, Israel still enjoys the status of a symbol giving significance to the notion of Jewry as a separate socio-cultural and historical entity, which is quite similar to parallel trends in many of the Jewish communities in North America and Europe.

Transformation of Organized Jewish Community Structures

Since the late 1980s, a process of searching for adequate models for Jewish communal organization and political institutionalization in the local public sphere is taking place in the post-Soviet states and in the new Russian Jewish Diaspora (i.e., Israel, the U.S, Canada, and Ger-many). This process occurred under the impact of three basic factors. The first involved the internal resources and needs of the local Jewish communities. The second was connected to official Jewish policies and relations with authorities, as well as the non-Jewish environment of the communities. The third related to the position of the Jewish world, including the relations of international and Israeli organizations to the “new” Jewish communities. All these factors brought about the estab-lishment of numerous Jewish organizations, mainly during 1989–1991, which was a period of increased Jewish emigration from the USSR.7

7 For detailed analyses of the revival of the organized Jewish life in the post-Soviet space, see Khanin, 2002a: 5–28.


Already in the early 1990s their main hierarchical levels had appeared. At the base of this pyramid were the numerous functional Jewish organizations. There were culture societies, various educational institutions (day and Sunday schools, study circles, academic, public enlightenment, and pedagogical societies, etc.), humanitarian institu-tions (charitable societies and welfare foundations), synagogues and religious communities (Orthodox, Reform, and, to a lesser extent, Conservative), memorial societies, youth, women’s and sports groups, and Jewish media. The majority of these organizations were very small, with intense rivalry between them. The role of these Jewish institutions, which dominated the Jewish movement between 1988 and 1992, decreased by the mid-1990s, and most of their functions later on were inherited by Jewish city federations and communities. These territorial or municipal communities represented the middle level of Jewish communal structures in the CIS, which in a time absorbed various Jewish organizations as their professional subdivisions.

Community-building was one of the slogans of the USSR Jew-ish dissident movement during the underground period, and former underground Zionist and human rights activists tried to revitalize their communities under the new conditions created during the Gorbachev liberalization. These activists formulated the dominant principles of Jewish communal life: communal independence, the service (non-ad-ministrative) character of communal activities, and the idea that equal attention should be paid to Alijha and to the founding of institutions of Jewish national-cultural autonomy in the Diaspora.8

The municipal community became a widely-recognized phenom-enon of local organization of Jewish life in the FSU in the 1990s, and presents different models of uniting Jews and/or their structures. Among them one can note a more traditional model, where the synagogue functions as the foundation stone for Jewish communal life in a city. In other cases this role may have been taken over by a local Jewish school. In some places, mainly in Ukraine and the Baltic States, city and regional Jewish councils have assumed the function of central Jewish communal organs (Khanin, 2008b: 57–82). Ukraine, as well as Belarus and some Russian (and Kazakhstan) cities, suggested

8 Quoted in the materials of the first Riga round-table conference of the USSR Jewish organizations in Vestnik Evreiskoi Kul’tury (VEK), [ Jewish Culture Herald], Riga, Nº 2 (1989): 1–5.


a model of Jewish municipal community as an association of all (or most) of the local Jewish organizations, united by the town’s coordi-nating body. Not a few communities were created on a regional or provincial basis.

Local chapters of international Jewish organizations, especially JDC-sponsored Hesed welfare funds and Jewish community centers ( JCCs), also play an important community-creating role. This proc-ess is being assisted by the Jewish Agency, which early in the 2000s began an ambitious project of promoting Jewish communal, educa-tional, cultural, and identity-building institutions in the FSU. In addi-tion, in places such as Moscow, Kiev, Minsk (Russian, Ukrainian and Byelorussian capitals, respectively), as well as in Dniepropetrovsk, and Kharkov, there is a model of Jewish community similar to the Jewish federation found in American and Canadian cities.

Finally, the top echelon of post-Soviet Jewish organizations was comprised of Jewish umbrella organizations, which first appeared during perestroika and post-perestroika times. The first were the Jewish Va’ads, or associations of Jewish organizations and communities, as well as the short-lived Zionist federations, that back to the late 1980s and early 1990s were founded by former members of Jewish national and human rights movements. A concurrent trend was represented by pro-government umbrella organizations such as the Jewish Council of Ukraine ( JCU), created in 1992 by the loyalist faction of the Ukrain-ian Jewish elite, and the Central Body of Jewish Cultural Autonomy of Russia, established in 1997–98 by former activists of the legalist faction of the local Jewish cultural movement.

Almost simultaneously, associations of Jewish religious organizations appeared, mostly founded by foreign-born Rabbis representing differ-ent streams of Judaism (mainly Hasidic and modern Orthodox, but also Reform and Conservative). The most prominent of these were the Association of Jewish Religious Organizations and Communities of Ukraine, the Confederation of Jewish Religious Organizations and Communities of Russia (FEROOR), and the Federation of Jewish Communities (Habad). The political advancement of Jewish religious leaders started in the mid-1990s, and in the second half of the decade, Rabbis headed Jewish municipal communities in a number of CIS cities, replacing, or incorporating representatives of both the “loyalist” and “independent” clusters of local Jewish leadership.

The end of the 1990s also witnessed the creation of another type of Jewish umbrella organization—the Jewish congresses. The initiative


for their creation came from a new elite in the Jewish movement—an influential group of Jewish businessmen, including local, foreign, and those who had returned after emigration for Israel or the USA. The motives for entering the Jewish political arena of these people, most of whom had previously paid little attention to Jewish communal affairs, were both national and personal, including physical and political security, as well as entering the club of world-caliber Jewish leaders. The creation of the Russian Jewish Congress in January 1996, as well as the All-Ukrainian Jewish Congress in April 1997, and the Jewish Congress of Kazakhstan in November 1999 followed a more or less similar model: an international financial, industrial, and media tycoon became its moving force, while Rabbis initiated and inspired it.

With the creation of these congresses, the Jewish movement was joined by a new influential group of politicians (commonly known as “oligarchs”), that were financially independent of the international Jewish organizations, and thus ready to suggest, or even impose, their own rules of the game (for details see Khanin, 2000: 205–220). Post-Soviet Jewry, still numerous and possessing a developed network of communal institutions, by the 1990s had become almost totally dependent on external material resources. As a result, the entering of Jewish businessmen ready to invest in the Jewish movement initially did not meet with serious opposition, and in the first decade of the new century this group and their umbrella structures consciously took over the function of “donor-controller” for other local Jewish organi-zations. In fact, the Congresses were pretty soon reduced to being a financial-political overseer, which looked as the most adequate way of implementing the business and political interests of their leaders.

The “European periphery” of the Russian and Ukrainian Jewish Politics

On the national level this new generation of Jewish umbrella organiza-tions and municipal communities’ leaders was very careful to distance the organized Jewish movement from the official politics; however they enjoyed a considerable political influence through the use of per-sonal (i.e., patron-client) connections with key government figures.9

9 On the “oligarchic” phenomenon in Russian and Ukrainian politics see Braguin-sky, 2009: 307–349; Guriev and Rachinsky, 2005: 131–150.


In their turn, post-Soviet elites since the early 2000s demonstrate an obvious interest to use Jewish businessmen, who also became politi-cians to promote their interest both locally and, through international Jewish organizations, on the world arena. Thus, it was not surprising that in the recent years both European and the CIS Jewish organiza-tions, as well as “transnational” Russian Jewish umbrella structures (such as the World Russian Jewish Congress and the Eurasian Jewish Congress) became a field of the competition between various cent-ers of power among communal-political and business elites of Russian and Ukrainian Jewry, who, in turn, are affiliated with certain interest and power groups (“political clans”) in the political and bureaucratic establishment of these courtesies.

Currently there are three major groups of the FSU Jewish busi-ness politicians who seek the European Jewish leadership status for their organizations (and, as believed, a promotion for their “sponsors” in Russian and Ukrainian ruling establishments). The first faction is headed by a former president of the Russian Jewish Congress, billion-aire and philanthropist Viacheslav-Moshe Kantor. In 2007 he used his substantial influence and financial resources in order to become presi-dent of the European Jewish Congress (EJC)—an umbrella structure of 42 European Jewish communities. This step of Viacheslav Kantor, who is believed to be patronized by one of the closest associates of former Russian President, and now Prime Minister Vladimir Putin, was warmly, abet informally welcomed and supported by Russian leaders.10 On the other hand, in April 2008 Ukrainian Jewish financial and media tycoon and president of the All-Ukrainian Jewish Congress Vadim Rabinovich, who is know to be very close to influential Kiev-based business political groups, was elected as vice-president of the European Council of Jewish Communities. This organization unites Jewish communities of the 27 member states of the Council of Europe and competes with Viacheslav Kantor’s EJC.

The third faction is represented by the camp of a member of the Council of Federation (Russian Parliaments Upper House) and a noted businessman Boris Shpigel, who since 2007 chairs the World Congress of Russian-speaking Jewry (WCRJ)—an international organization

10 This information was obtained in the course of the author’s confidential inter-view with a top-rank official of the Administration of the Russian President, Moscow, September 2008.


pretending to unite Russian-speaking Jewish organizations world-wide. While Viacheslav Kantor aimed to strengthen his power within the official European Jewish structures, Boris Shpigel was interested to gain maximum tools of influence on more than two million origi-nally Soviet Jews, during three recent decades re-settled in the West, with special reference to Germany, the USA and Israel. The WCRJ ideological principles in relation to Europe were clearly defined at the round-table conference of the European branch of the WCRJ that was held 22–28 September 2008 in Berlin. The first was the declaration of the need to search for “identification of Russian-speaking Jews in Europe as an independent part of the European Jewry”. The second was the quest for “lobbing of Russian Jewish interests in Europe” since according to the meeting participants, they are “forcefully alienated from public and political process in their respective countries”. Finally, the WCRJ was proclaimed as the most adequate organizational frame-work for these activities.11

Evidently, the competition at the European ground between three CIS Jewish leadership groups and their organizations became an important factor of internal political cleavages in Russia and Ukraine, as well as of political and diplomatic conflict between the two countries (see Siegel, 2008; Ruby, 2005; Khanin, 1999: 85–108). These Russian-Ukrainian controversies increased after the anti-authoritarian (and to some extent, also anti-Russian) “Orange revolution” in Ukraine, and had very much to do with both bilateral relations and fight for the presence of their political and economic elites in the European political landscape.

For instance, in his new capacity as an “all-European leader” Vadim Rabinovich made a few obvious PR affords in the interests of the “Western-oriented” administration of Ukrainian President Victor Yuschenko, in opposition to the “neo-authoritarian” Putin/Medvedev regime of Russia. In the presentation at the convention of the Euro-pean Council of Jewish Communities, that on Rabinovich’s initia-tive was held on October, 26 2008 in the Ukrainian capital of Kiev, he accented the “liberal character” of the contemporary Ukrainian political system, and declared the Ukrainian Jewish community as a van-guard of integration of Ukrainian society into the European structures

11 Press-release of the World Congress of the Russian Jewry “Resolution of the Round-table Conference ‘Russian-speaking Jews in Europe—Common Problems, Common Solutions’, Berlin, 22–28 September 2008”.


(quoted in Dorizo, 2008). From their side, Kantor and Shpigel, as EJC and WRJC presidents, respectively, also used their international status in order to improve (as some observers believe, “by request of their Russian Government patrons”) the Kremlin’s international image and fighting their political opponents in the post-Soviet space. Viacheslav Kantor, as organizer of the Luxemburg Forum for Pre-venting Nuclear Catastrophe, which is an authoritative international forum of experts in the field of nuclear non-proliferation, obviously used this platform to defend Moscow’s policy in this sensitive issue and especially to explain Russia’s nuclear cooperation with the very problematic regime of Iranian Islamic radicals.

In addition, both Kantor and Shpigel have never missed an oppor-tunity to use the European platform to criticize, as they consistently put it, Ukrainian authorities’ steps “towards the heroic interpretation of the image of Ukrainian nationalist collaborators of Nazi Germany during the World War II” and “anti-Semitic trends” in contemporary Ukrainian politics.12 In his presentation at the WRJC-initiated Inter-national Conference on “Lessons of the Second World War and the Holocaust” that was held in Berlin in December 2009, Boris Shpigel went even further, putting the Ukrainian president Victor Yuschenko into the same camp as Iranian president Mahmoud Ahmadinejad who demanded that “Israel must be wiped off the map”.13

In their turn, representatives of the organized Ukrainian Jewish movement often address the European public opinion with the accusa-tion of the Russian Government and their Jewish associates for playing the “Jewish card” in order to interfere into Ukrainian domestic affairs and undermine the pro-Western trend in its foreign policy.14 Thus, executive vice-president of the Eurasian Jewish Congress and president of Va’ad (Association of Jewish Organizations and Communities) of Ukraine, Yosef Zissels defined the Berlin Conference on “Lessons of the Second World War and the Holocaust” and Shpigel’s presentation on it as a “natural prolongation of [Russian President Dmitry] Medvedev’s cynical and unjust observation of current Ukrainian leadership”

12 “International forum raps attempts ‘to represent Nazism in heroic light’ ”, in: Kyiv Post, December 16, 2009.

13 Boris Shpigel’s presentation at the International Conference “Lessons of the Second World War and the Holocaust”. Press-release of the World Congress of the Russian Jewry, 16 December 2009.

14 See, for example, Moses Fishbein, “The Jewish card in Russian special operations against Ukraine”, http://eng.maidanua.org/node/977, February 28, 2010.


and a “huge provocation against the democratic, Atlantic and Euro-pean choice of Ukraine, consciously planned on the eve of Ukrainian Presidential elections.”15 However, whatever reasons, ambitions and interests stand behind these or other steps of Russian and Ukrain-ian Jewish politicians who gained the leadership of national, transna-tional and international Jewish organizations, the very existence of such structures demonstrates the desire of the post-Soviet Jewry to go beyond the local community agenda and their readiness to accept the organizational paradigms and the rules of the game that were devel-oped in the West.

Conclusion

All discussed above may bring us to a few important conclusions. Firstly, Russian and Ukrainian Jewry, as well as the Jewish population in the rest of the USSR successor states, in terms of their identity, self-organization and strategic choice, even twenty years after the end of the Cold War still are on the cross-road. In fact, the four relatively sta-ble FSU Jewish culture identity types that we identified in the course of our study showed that these Jews are still “open for suggestions”. That means, that they may choose between

the Western option, including the integration into European Jewish • structures; the Eurasian option, meaning the reintegration within the borders of • the former Soviet Union and the “reinvention” of the Soviet Jewish identity; a “global Jewish option”, with predominant orientation toward the • State and/or the Land of Israel; the “transnational” ethnic Jewish option, meaning consolidation of • the world Russian Jewish community, and the sub-ethnic community option, meaning the creation of sepa-• rate Jewish entities within the borders of independent post-Soviet countries.

15 Quotations from the “Open letter of the president of Ukrainian Jewish Va’ad Yosef Zissels to Stefan Kramer, Executive Director of the Jewish Community of Ger-many” (Received by e-mail on Friday, December 11, 2009).


Each of these options is currently represented by various CIS Jew-ish umbrella structures and their organizational affiliates in “remote foreign” (beyond the FSU borders) countries. Secondly, the internal diversity of the CIS Jews remains not less important, and includes both original diversity of Soviet and post-Soviet Jewry, that is a sub-ject of the culture area, sub-ethnic/communal and identity differences between various subgroups of this population, and the diversity that was “imported” to Eastern Europe due to the activities of the foreign Jewish organizations. Thirdly, it is obvious however, that Russian and Ukrainian Jews gradually move towards a more organic combination of ethnic identity patterns, which are still basic for the local Jewish society, with Western Jewish religious and nation state-oriented “Zion-ism of the Diaspora” models. That makes these Jews suitable partners for the (re-)creation of a European Jewish center. Fourthly, now—like in the past—for the post-Soviet Jewry Israel is still an important identification symbol giving significance to the notion of Jewry as a separate entity. This identification, however currently does not nec-essarily demand, like it was in the USSR times, opposition to local political regimes, and has very much to do with a sort of a “dual loyalty” dilemma, that until recently was experienced by many Jews of North America and Western Europe. Finally, fifthly—the growing competition between CIS Jewish leadership groups and their organi-zations became an important factor of local, regional and world poli-tics, which will continue to impact international, including European Jewish organizations.

A DUAL, DIVIDED MODERNIZATION. REFLECTIONS ON 200 YEARS OF THE JEWISH REFORM

MOVEMENT IN GERMANY

Micha Brumlik

The dawn of the nineteenth century saw Europe in transition: wars that the Russian Empire, Prussia, Great Britain and the Austrian Empire had conducted against revolutionary France ended with a French victory; in 1799, France came under the leadership of its first con-sul, Napoleon Bonaparte. At the same time, the Treaty of Luneville, which codified the peace with Austria in February 1801, several German territories on the left bank of the Rhine fell under French rule, while on the eastern side, the absolutist regions of Prussia and the Archduchy Brunswick came under considerable domestic political pressure to reform.

Among the first results of this pressure was the nationalization of Church property and of aristocratic privileges, as well as the rigor-ous secularization of most German states. This secularization was a political expression of Enlightenment philosophy, which had rejected both the non-rational concept of divine absolutism and the idea of a revealed higher truth. Therefore the seminal philosophy of Enlighten-ment that had circulated among the educated classes in the German states ever since Kant, Mendelssohn and Lessing could only view the truth of religion—of all religions—as the poetic expression of a higher moral principle accessible to all; a principle that—as Lessing’s Nathan had demonstrated—could take on quite varied forms, none of which was clearly distinguishable. This view found its most distinguished pro-ponent in Moses Mendelssohn, who as an Orthodox Jew nevertheless sought to base his faith on reason. For him, Judaism exemplified the epitome of a higher moral stance, which was however not expressed through the numerous Jewish ceremonial instructions. Mendelssohn resolved this issue in his 1783 text, Jerusalem, with the assumption that the Torah as revealed at Sinai was not so much a revelation of faith but rather of secular law. Judaism as a faith contained nothing less than the core of truth that lies at the heart of every religion based on reason. By drawing a sharp distinction between religions based

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on reason and those laws and customs of merely temporal relevance, Mendelssohn created, notwithstanding all his personal adherence to tradition, the basis for the further development of Judaism:

Doctrines and laws . . . were not bound to words and written characters that remain unchanged for all people in all times despite all revolutions in language, morals, lifestyle and conditions; words and characters that always present the same rigid forms into which we cannot force our concepts without destroying them.1

Mendelssohn’s writings and his German translation of the Bible first reached a narrow audience of educated, successful and materially com-fortable Jewish families who, as court agents or financiers, enjoyed a certain tolerance in the German states: the Veitel and Kaulla families, the Herzes and Friedlanders, the Bendavids and Jacobsons. These Jews, who had achieved the closest contact to contemporary educa-tion, had hoped that the new rational interpretation of religion would bring two benefits: first of all, civic equality, tolerance and acceptance in a still largely Christian society, and secondly a triumph over forms of Judaism that they themselves found incomprehensible and alienat-ing. The early Jewish reformer David Friedlander, a wealthy textile manufacturer who in 1783 was the general deputy of Prussian Jewry, gave the clearest expression to this attitude, giving free rein to his discomfort in a letter:

We are born to Jewish parents and are educated in the Jewish reli-gion . . . In our earliest years we were presented with the Talmud as a textbook—perhaps even before we were given the Holy Scriptures . . . Thus the religion we were taught was full of mystical principles . . . The characters, types of people and feelings of those who appear in the Scriptures were not merely puzzling to us in their expression; they were also to a large extent contrary to our own feelings, expressions and modes of action. In our father’s home, ceremonial laws were observed with punctilious anxiety. This estranged us from ordinary company; as empty customs, without any influence on our other activities, they pro-duced no effect other than to make us feel shy, embarrassed and often uncomfortable in the presence of relatives of other religious persuasions, or even in front of servants.

This feeling most likely also affected Israel Jacobson, who was born in 1768 in Halberstadt and in 1795 was appointed “court banker and rabbi of the Weser district”. Inspired by the writings of late-Enlightenment

1 Translated from “Schriften,” p. 420.

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reformers, including those of the famous Prussian jurist Christian Konrad Wilhelm Dohm, who sought to improve the civic status of Jews, Jacobson saw the professional training of Jewish boys as a prom-ising means to overcome poverty and social marginalization. While Jewish learning traditionally is regarded as study for its own sake, and whereas the primary task of Jewish women had been to work so that their husbands could pursue lifelong study of the scriptures, Jacobson—in what we would now call a “qualification offensive”—drew on the rabbinic tradition of late antiquity, according to which scholars should also pursue a trade.

Accordingly, in 1801 he founded a charitable school for Jewish and Christian boys in Seesen, at his own expense—four years before the founding of the Frankfurt Philanthropin [a Jewish humanist school]—supported by the spirit of Enlightenment. In keeping with the spirit of the day, the institution was called a “Religious and Industrial School”. In June 1801, Jacobson had requested from his Duke “sovereign pro-tection and concession for the establishment of an educational institute for poor Jewish children of our state” in Seesen and explained: “I have long desired to help the young Jews of the countryside—as much as I could—to improve their moral character and make them more useful to the land in which they reside.”

When it opened, the Seesen school had 12 Jewish pupils, and these were initially taught by five Jewish and four Christian teachers. Starting in the first grade, pupils learned—in addition to science and the arts—Hebrew, including grammar; Bible; “Maimonides”; and Torah. Tal-mudic studies were later added. The boarding school, which included both a “German” and a “Hebrew” school, even had a synagogue where the Jewish children—after reciting a German prayer together with their Christian classmates—chanted the usual morning prayers in Hebrew. Unfortunately, it is not possible to tell from contempo-rary sources whether the Hebrew and Talmud classes were also open to Christian students. But in general, there appears to have been no significant differences between Jewish and non-Jewish students, accord-ing to a report from the geographer Karl Ritter:

Twelve sons of local citizens sit and learn freely among them: even the superintendent and town preacher sends his son to the Jewish school. But you will not be able to distinguish the Christians from the Jews boys; they all receive an education: a non-Jewish education in language, management and way of life. We were really surprised about this extra-ordinary aspect: only the faces of some students recalled the individual character of their nation.

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Jacobson, who became a citizen of the Duchy of Braunschweig in 1804, had used his influence to have the degrading custom of the Leib-zoll, a special tax on Jews, removed from Braunschweig in 1803 and from Baden in 1806. As a keen observer of his time, with a rabbinic training and religiously involved, Jacobson was appointed as “Doctor honoris causa” in 1807 by the University of Helmsted. There is no doubt today that his philanthropic educational foundation paved the way towards a vigorous policy of Emancipation in all realms of edu-cation. In those years, Enlightened Jews of Europe looked longingly toward revolutionary France, which had ended the connection between Church and state, recognized the choice of religion as personal, free and not subject to discrimination, and thus in 1791 achieved the civic equality of Jews: their emancipation.

On 30 May 1806, Napoleon convened an assembly of several prom-inent Jews in Paris; they were to examine the compatibility of the Jewish faith with secular law. One result of this assembly, which con-tinued its work for more than half a year, was Napoleon’s decision to organize the Jews in governing councils, or consistories, along the lines of a centralized, church-like structure, financed through a compulsory tax. Jacobson wrote an enthusiastic letter to Napoleon on the occa-sion of the opening of this meeting, urging the Emperor to establish a new Sanhedrin based in Paris—under the oversight of a patriarch. His letter reads in part:

The German Jew would be happy, were you to allow him to earn a living honestly and to enjoy human and civil rights in all countries, espe-cially this inalienable, sacred right to make use of his abilities and talents in an honest trade. He would definitely be happy, were you to impart to his religion a shape and form of practice compatible with the enjoyment of all civic duties without deviating from Jewish laws.

But in order to achieve this goal, one must: 1) create a supreme Jew-ish council under the chairmanship of a patriarch, located in France; 2) divide the entire community into districts, each of which receives its own synod to decide on all matters concerning religion and to appoint rabbis under the supervision of the French government and the supreme Jewish Council; and 3) in the end, the chief of the aforementioned coun-cil must grant the necessary freedoms to every Jew so that he may fulfill his civic duties in all countries.

That same year, Jacobson published his book, The first steps of the Jewish nation toward their good fortune under the auspices of the Great Monarch Napoleon. Of course, Jacobson was unable to carry out his far-reaching plans before August 1807, after Napoleon’s triumphant victory over Russia


in Tilsit—old Prussia already had collapsed at the battle of Jena and Auerstadt in 1806—Napoleon’s rather less intelligent brother Jerome, popularly known as “King Immerlustick” (Always Cheerful), was now King of Westphalia, replacing the previous ruler and Jacobson’s patron, the Duke Karl Ferdinand. The nevertheless tolerant Jerome adopted a constitution on 15 November 1807 that granted civic equal-ity to the 15,000 Jews of Westphalia, in contrast to the reintroduction of tougher laws in France.

In February 1808, as Orthodox Jews looked on mistrustfully, Jacob-son organized a council that opened a consistorial school and syn-agogue in Kassel in 1809, where parts of the service were sung in German. In July 1810, this “temple” at Seesen was dedicated with pealing bells as well as prayers sung in German, to organ accompani-ment. Jacobson appeared at this service in the garb of a Protestant preacher. The historian Isaak Markus Jost, who taught at the Frank-furt Philanthropin and who supported the Reform movement in his writings, described the opening ceremony in 1858:

The dedication of this house of prayer on July 17, 1810, with a cer-emony that drew a vast number of curious as well as invited statesmen, scholars, artists, priests and school headmasters, rabbis and teachers, made an incredible impression, especially on the Christian guests, sev-eral of whom gave enthusiastic vent to their feelings in German, Latin and Hebrew songs. Great expectations were associated with this pro-cess, but they collapsed, just as the Kingdom did; and these expectations would never have been realized, even under a longer period of foreign rule, as would become evident. The entire construct of the Consistorial-activity rested on the sandy bottom of a vast plain, without hills or rocks and streams, on which one could stroll undisturbed. This construct was merely cloaked in a resplendent cover, somewhat burdened by a craving for admiration. . . . The most minor decrees of the consistory met with stiff resistance even in the smallest Jewish communities, which the consis-tory had no power to overcome.

After the fall of Napoleon and the division of the Kingdom of West-phalia, Jacobson went to Berlin, where he opened a Reform syna-gogue in his own house in 1815. The romantic-reactionary Prussian government banned these services soon afterward. After some debate, the nascent Reform liturgy was finally banned in 1823, at the insti-gation of Jewish Orthodoxy. Disappointed and broken in both body and soul, Jacobson, who always held fast to his philanthropic efforts, died in 1828. As in the case of Moses Mendelssohn’s family, most of Jacobson’s children from his two marriages were later baptized.

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When it came to the professional training of Jewish boys, Jacobson’s “qualification offensive” program proved the most successful means of approaching social emancipation. Not long after the founding of the “Religious and Industrial School” in Seesen, the Frankfurter Philan-thropin school followed in its footsteps. Its founding was supposedly the result of an unusual encounter between the future head of the House of Rothschild, Meyer Amschel and a poor Jewish street musi-cian. As legend would have it, this court agent from Hesse-Kassel came across a Polish Jewish boy in Marburg who eked out a living by singing Hebrew melodies. This chance meeting profoundly impressed Rothschild, who charged his attorney, Siegmund Geisenheimer, with founding an association for the establishment of the “Philanthropin for poor children of the Jewish nation”, conceived of as a free school for poor Jewish boys.

By May of 1804, 260 members of the Jewish community had joined the association, and by November 1804, the classes, initially held in a room in Wollgraben, had moved its four students into two rented rooms on Allerheiligengasse. The unforgettable Paul Arnsberg, whose monumental three-volume history of Frankfurt’s Jewish community going back to the French Revolution provides an accurate portrayal of events, was justified in describing the Philanthropin school as “a unique cultural phenomenon: from the progressive-liberal standpoint it was seen as the realization of fruitful Reform ideas, while the tradition-ally religious minority opposed it as paving the way towards ‘Entju-dung’ ”—the removal of Judaism.

Rothschild’s attorney, the autodidact Siegmund Geisenheimer, born in 1775 in Bingen, had already completed an apprenticeship in Düsseldorf at the age of 13. He co-founded the Frankfurt Masonic Lodge, “Zur aufgehenden Morgenröthe” [The Rising Dawn] and—in addition to founding the Philanthropin school—was tirelessly active as, for example, founder of a health insurance program for Jewish men and women. The reputation of the Philanthropin school (which moved to Schäfergasse in 1806) as an exemplary educational institution—even in the opinion of non-Jewish pedagogues, who especially prized its lessons conducted in German—developed further in 1807, with the appointment of the then 24-year-old Michael Hess and the simultane-ous entrance of the Catholic Freemason Dr. Joseph Franz Molitor, into what Arnsberg called a “cultural centre on a European scale”.

The school grew rapidly: in 1810, when there was still no general education in Frankfurt, which was at that point under electoral Mainz


rule, the Philanthropin opened a “school for girls”; in 1813 this was expanded into a “primary and secondary school”, which the Kassel school faculty confirmed in 1889 as an official “secondary school of the Jewish community” (Philanthropin). After moving in 1813 to Kom-postellhof and in 1845 to a modern building in Rechneigraben, the Philanthropin finally settled in 1908 in the building that would ulti-mately house the school of the present Jewish community—after a 62-year caesura precipitated by the Nazis.

Looking back today on more than 200 years, we have every reason to examine closely the beginnings of Reform Judaism, but no reason at all to either canonize or condemn this entity, which has become thor-oughly historicized. Reform and Liberal Jewish communities around the world are now celebrating the bicentennial of Reform Judaism without always having to stress that it was specifically the version of Reform Judaism conceived of by outstanding scholars, from Abraham Geiger to the present day Michael Meyer, that decisively historicized the perspective on Judaism and its liturgy. In retrospect it is clear that Reform Judaism drew just as much on civic emancipatory impulses as on assimilationist ones: its theological themes referred less to the writings themselves than to the philosophy of the Enlightenment and the emerging, historically oriented social sciences; and its liturgy was essentially a copy of an educated middle-class Protestantism, founded on aesthetics and human dignity.

Without at first being anchored on a critical mass of believers, Reform Judaism also resembled, with its efforts at centralization, the absolutist-Jacobin form of politics, which provided a key impetus toward the establishment of civil and human rights in France. The liturgical changes that allowed both the halachically acceptable recitation of some prayers in the secular language but also permitted the playing of the organ and the relocation of the Torah pulpit from the middle of the prayer room at his face, as well as the renaming of the synagogue [to temple] were of paramount significance. Orthodoxy rejected the playing of musical instruments not so much because of the ban on work during festivals and holidays, but rather because of mourning over the destruction of the Temple, where the performance of uplifting music—as is mentioned in the Psalms—was of great importance. By choosing to read the Torah in front of rather than at the centre of the congregation, the Reform movement adopted the Protestant principle of clerical control over the revealed truth, taking it out of the hands of the congregation. By calling their houses of prayer “temples” instead

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of using the customary term “synagogues”, the Reform congregations proclaimed their roots in the Diaspora and renounced any desire for a return to Zion and the rebuilding of the Holy Temple. Prayers of longing for the Land of Israel seemed incompatible with the lives of fully integrated Jewish citizens. It was said that Reform Judaism thus came into existence as an ethical monotheism, a universalist faith for all citizens.

How modern and how forward-looking are these positions today, 200 years later? At the latest in 1967, after the Six Day War, the offi-cial organization of American Reform Judaism abandoned its critical attitude toward Israel and Zionism, established a branch of its cen-tral teaching facility in Jerusalem—Hebrew Union College—and thus essentially reformed its Diaspora-centered theology. In any case, the catastrophe of the industrial mass extermination of six million European Jews by Nazi Germany left no room for a more progressive theology of history. Obviously, the establishment of Israel also presented serious challenges to the assimilationist Reform theology in practice.

Thus it becomes clear that European Jewry was from the very out-set, since the dawn of the age of Enlightenment, inextricably inter-twined with political aspirations, and included political implications in all its manifestations—in this case, Reform Judaism—despite the fun-damentally correct analytic distinction and institutional differentiation between politics and religion. The situation appears hardly different today. Reform Judaism, which before 1933 was virtually the dominant liturgical movement in Germany’s Jewish communities (even here there are minor differences) played no role at all for decades in post-war Germany. The new communities emerging within the Western zones were predominantly composed of more traditional Polish Jews, who wanted—especially after the Holocaust—to maintain the unity and inviolability of religious life.

Until the German reunification in 1990, Jews in West Germany who wanted to attend Conservative or Reform services found these alternatives in religious institutions that had been established by Jew-ish members of the U.S. Army. After the withdrawal of American troops, these Jews tried to create new opportunities. Thus small groups of Jews began to organize regular Conservative or Liberal religious services in some West German universities, as well as in some larger communities. These groups were characterized by an unusually high proportion of academics, women and potential converts or those who already had converted to Judaism. It was only a matter of time before these essential groups began to connect with each other.


A few years later, with significant support in particular from the World Union for Progressive Judaism, these groups created the “Union of Progressive Jewish Communities and Congregations in Germany, Austria and Switzerland” as an alternative to the united communi-ties under the umbrella of the Central Council of Jews in Germany. By now, many communities that were part of this union in the state of Lower Saxony have received the coveted status of a “corporation received by public law”. I cannot and will not go more deeply into issues of communal politics per se at this juncture, but rather wish to dedicate more attention here to the specific issues facing Reform Juda-ism after 200 years.

It was Reform Judaism that—starting with Mendelssohn, Fried-lander, Bendavid and Jacobson, followed by Abraham Geiger and others—first of all reduced a faith that had been handed down unquestioningly over centuries to a few moral principles, always citing Talmudic evidence along the way; and that secondly—and this can no longer be reconciled with the essentially adaptable rabbinic Judaism to which the conservative movement in particular adheres today—did not consider the de facto transformation of the faith itself to have been willed by God, but rather saw it as dependent on a specific historical situation.

With the God of Judaism and of all humanity thus stripped of any particularist context in Jewish history and in the land of Israel, God changed from a personal entity to a rather impersonal moral principle, becoming the foundation of what is commonly referred to as “ethi-cal monotheism”. Reform Judaism thus represents both a dual and divided modernization: since, according to Reform Judaism, belief is not dependent on a sense of itself, or in other words on an under-standing of history and existence, but rather on morality, the move-ment was in danger of sinking into mere moral inspiration, just like all Enlightenment religions. By consistently universalizing, Reform Juda-ism became an appropriate religion for modern citizens of a nation state, but in so doing it lost its specific historical form and thus its existential depth.

This loss was corrected through Jewish theologies of the 1920s, with the philosophies of such thinkers as Leo Baeck, Franz Rosenzweig and Martin Buber. But it took a long time before their teachings made their way into the theology of Reform Judaism. Ultimately, the shock of the Shoah followed by the establishment of Israel forced a recon-struction of the movement’s theological foundations, just as today we can observe a cautious return to stronger liturgical connections. But

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at any rate Reform Judaism, with its orientation towards humanistic principles, was the first of the liturgical movements to take on the seminal question of the emancipation of women, giving them an equal role in religious services and appointing them as Rabbis and cantors, and thus anticipating what the Conservative movement later gradually achieved, always within the framework of halachic interpretation.

The challenges that still face Reform Judaism today are the expres-sion of a religious attitude that may well be regarded as neo- or ultra-Orthodoxy, but that actually is far from the old, original Judaism and is essentially just about as modern as Reform Judaism itself. Aris-ing at the same time as Reform Judaism, in opposition to it, Modern Orthodoxy can be strictly described as reactionary, both systematically and politically: it, too, arose under the protection of political power, though in this case under the protection of the reactionary states of Prussia and Austria, which forced revolutionary France to its knees. In the figure of Moses Sofer (1762–1839), a contemporary of Jacobson who was born in Frankfurt and worked mainly in Bratislava, where he established the largest yeshiva since Babylonian times, an opposi-tion arose that the Reform movement still fights today. Sofer, who opposed the Reform movement uncompromisingly, using all means of propaganda and publicity, coined the truly reactionary principle of “Hehaddasch assur min ha Torah”: the Torah forbids innovation.

Sofer deliberately distanced himself from Jewish emancipation efforts, advocated the use of the Hebrew language and the return to the land of Israel. He was utterly modern in that he attempted to replace the thoroughly casuistic rabbinic religion with a general principle—“innovations are banned!”—and used modern means of publicity, propaganda and political agitation to promote his opposi-tion to Reform Judaism.

To this day, the conflict between Reform and Orthodoxy turns on the question of the historicity of Judaism. While the Reform movement paradoxically presents itself in its relative modernity as historically unsurpassable, Modern Orthodoxy has—probably against its own will, but in line with biblical sources—accepted its own particularity and historicity with the partly disastrous political consequences of a deliber-ate fundamentalism. The mediation efforts of German neo-Orthodoxy influenced by Samson Rafael Hirsch, which sought to bring the ideas of an eternally valid revelation in line with an at least culturally mod-ernized lifestyle, failed to settle the dispute that has tormented Jewish people today. By the way, the principle of the unified community that


secular authorities imposed on Jewish communities in the nineteenth century, which has absolutely no roots in tradition and today is under attack, seems to be the principle most able to fruitfully withstand such disputes, as long as the united community is seen as linking Jews of all denominations, and not as a community with a single liturgical direc-tion. Today, essentially, the united community embodies the principle of “Klal Yisrael”, a unity of Jews in their diversity. A Reform Judaism that still sees itself as a confessionalized religion of the people may be consistent within itself, but it is neither reconcilable with the experi-ences of the twentieth century nor with the challenges of a twenty-first century religion that is no longer solely grounded in morals.

GHOSTS OF THE PAST, CHALLENGES OF THE PRESENT: NEW AND OLD “OTHERS” IN CONTEMPORARY SPAIN

Raanan Rein and Martina Weisz

Several weeks after the conclusion of the war in Gaza, rather infelici-tously codenamed Operation Cast Lead, we were invited to dinner at the home of the Spanish ambassador to Israel. We were surprised to see the tightened security around the house, a direct result of the politi-cal tensions between the two countries. One Spanish diplomat told us about a meeting with Israeli business people at which he was surprised to be asked whether it was safe for Israelis to go to Spain. A few days later the Israeli ambassador to Spain was called a “Jew dog” as he was leaving a Real Madrid-Barcelona soccer match in the Spanish capital (Ravid, 2009). On the same day a Spanish judge announced that he would move forward with a criminal investigation of seven Israeli offi-cers and politicians concerning a 2002 air strike in the Gaza Strip that killed a Hamas militant and 14 civilians (Harel and Zarchin, 2009).

These anecdotes underscore the fact that relations between Israel and Spain have always been dogged by misunderstanding. The roots of the problem can be traced back to the long absence of any mean-ingful Jewish presence in Spain, from the expulsion of Jews in the late fifteenth century to the late nineteenth century when a small number of Jews resettled in the Iberian Peninsula (Lichtenstein, 1962; Arons-feld, 1979; Caro Baroja, 1978; Gonzáles García, 1991; Lisbona, 1993). Spain’s neutrality in World War II and the fact that not only did it not participate in the Jewish Holocaust but it actually helped save the lives of thousands of Jews supposedly absolved the country of any guilt concerning the Jews.1 In addition, the absence of diplomatic relations between Spain and Israel until January 1986 contributed to Spaniards’ relative ignorance about Jewish and Israeli issues.2 This brief paper

1 On Spain’s position during the Second World War and on its policies concerning Jewish refugees, see, among others, Payne, 2008; Avni, 1982; Bowen, 2000; Rother, 2005.

2 On Spanish-Israeli relations, see Rein, 1997; Marquina and Ospina, 1987; González García, 2001; Lisbona, 2002; Rein, 2007.

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makes two arguments. First, there is a huge gap between public dis-course and social realities. While Spanish media and politicians often express a hostility towards Israel that borders on anti-Semitism, this has not hindered the development of Jewish life in Spain.3 Nowadays Jews, both individually and collectively, enjoy a richer and more pros-perous life in Spain than at any time during the past century. Second, and even more important, Spanish attitudes towards Jews must be viewed within two wider contexts: recent demographic changes and the struggle to reshape Spanish collective identities, both of which require a comparative approach. Accordingly, we should analyze Spanish society’s attitudes towards the three traditional “others” in Spain: Jews, Muslims and Latin (or Hispanic) Americans—a departure from Jewish historians’ traditional tendency to look at Jews as the prime victims in any given context. In fact, Islamophobia, much more than anti-Semitism, is a source of concern for many inside and outside Spain; and while in recent years there have been several cases of violence against Muslims in Spain, and even a few against Latin Americans, there have been practically none against Jews.

Identity, Demography, and Politics

No other European country seems to have experienced such passionate public debates over its “national essence” and “destiny” as Spain. For centuries, the discussions on nation and identity in Spain were mostly inward-looking. This was true, for example, of the famous debates of the so-called Generation of ‘98, following the Spanish-American War of 1898 and the consequent loss of the remnants of the Spanish empire. To a large extent the debates were between Spanish nationalists and regional nationalists, and between liberal civic nationalists and conser-vative national Catholics. The participants included intellectuals, writ-ers, journalists, and politicians (Ramsden, 1974; Shaw, 1975; Rein, 2005: 211–225). The debaters are the same today, but the discussion is no longer inward-looking. The transition to democracy, with the con-sequent cessation of state efforts to impose homogeneous identities, as well as Spain’s integration into the European Union, stimulated new

3 On Israel’s image in the Spanish media, see Baer, 2007; López Alonso, 2007: 145–169.

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or renewed soul-searching about collective identities. Such meditations aroused anxiety among españolistas, who feared even a partial loss of national sovereignty or any threat to the Spanish “essence”. Some of them saw the opportunity the European Union provided for the inter-national representation of regional nationalisms as a threat to national identity because it offered alternative, or at least multiple, identities to Spaniards (Balfour and Quiroga, 2008).

In recent years the Spanish political system has become polarized over a variety of issues but none more so than the question of nation and collective memories. The José Luis Rodríguez Zapatero govern-ment’s efforts to lay the ghosts of the Spanish Civil War (1931–1939) by righting the wrongs of the Francisco Franco dictatorship and memorializing its victims—encouraging, in this way, attempts to find and re-open mass graves from the Franco era—have contributed to this polarization (Espinosa Maestre, 2006). As we all know, representa-tions of the past necessarily have an impact on the present. After all, the past is often the arena where contemporary political and ideo-logical struggles are waged. National narratives are always embedded in collective identities and world views. Spain has also undergone dramatic demographic changes in recent years. The country that for centuries saw millions of its own leave to seek a better life in far-off places has now become the destination of choice for many immigrants. Immigration since the advent of democracy has resulted in a signifi-cant ethnic and cultural transformation of the national profile. In fact, Spain has become one of the main immigrant-receiving countries of the European Union. Although the number of immigrants is relatively small compared to the figures for some other European countries, and probably represents less than 10 percent of the total population, the foreign-born population in Spain still more than doubled during the first five years of this century. Excluding illegal immigration, the number of immigrants increased eightfold between 1996 and 2006, to almost 4 million. Traditional economic and cultural ties with North Africa and Spanish America have encouraged immigration from these regions to Spain. According to various sources, the largest groups of immigrants in Spain today are from Latin America (more than one-third) and Africa (more than one-fifth).4

4 Between the years 2000 and 2005 some 5 million Latin Americans left their sub-continent, and Spain was their second most preferred destination, after the United


This extraordinary rise in immigration to Spain over the last few years has contributed to a sense of lost identity. It poses a major challenge to traditional narratives of national and/or collective iden-tity at both national and regional levels. Responses have ranged from xenophobia and anti-Semitism to Islamophobia, and from calls for assimilation to multiculturalism projects. The current debates are rem-iniscent of the intellectual polemics in Spain during the late 1940s. In 1948, the pro-Republican philologist Américo Castro published the pioneering book España en su historia, in which he argued that Spain’s national identity had been shaped by the interactions between Jews, Muslims, and Christians during the medieval period (Castro, 1948). In other words, Castro saw Spanish collective identity as essentially pluralist, and believed that Jews and Muslims should not be con-sidered foreigners, but rather autochthonous Spanish minorities. Castro’s arguments were contested a few years later by the medievalist Claudio Sánchez Albornoz in his work España, un enigma histórico (Sánchez Albornoz, 1956). Sánchez Albornoz posited the existence of a homo hispanicus from the era of the celtíberos in pre-Roman times. Arabs and Jews were, in his view, essentially different from Spaniards. Sánchez Albornoz’s perspective has in fact probably been the domi-nant view throughout most of Spanish history, but Castro’s ideas seem to be far more influential in modern Spain.

Still, for many Spaniards the new social reality is apparently not at all desirable. An opinion poll carried out by the Centro de Inves-tigaciones Sociológicas (CIS) in December 2006 revealed that 59.2 percent of all Spaniards considered immigration to be their country’s biggest problem, while data published by S.O.S. Racismo that same year showed that three out of four Spaniards blamed the arrival of immigrants for the increase in delinquency in the country.5 These results coincide with the findings of a couple of Pew attitudes survey in 2006 and 2009, according to which Spanish opinions of both Muslims

States. Ecuador and Colombia contributed the two largest groups of Latin American immigrants to Spain. See Tedesco, 2008.

5 See Centro de Investigaciones Sociológicas, Barómetro septiembre 2006, Pre-gunta 5, http://www.cis.es/cis/opencms/-Archivos/Marginales/2640_2659/2654/e265400.html, September 30, 2009. See also Federación de Asociaciones de SOS Racismo del Estado Español, Informe anual 2007 sobre el racisme en el Estado español, 9, http://www.sosracisme.org/reflexions/pdfs/IA2007_DossierPrensa.pdf, September 30, 2009.


and Jews deteriorated sharply since 2005.6 In the aftermath of the terrorist attacks in the United States on September 11, 2001 and the March 11, 2004 bombing in Madrid, immigration has also become increasingly linked to security, encouraging an emphasis on immigra-tion restrictions instead of policies designed to improve immigrants’ social integration. Hostility towards all Muslims has increased noticeably.

Another important reference here is Henri Zukier’s article on the function that anti-Semitism fulfills in the construction of Western collective identities (Zukier, 2003: 118–130). Zukier highlights the fact that “the Other”, the “outsider”, is psychologically constructed as the projected image of the negations and repressions of every society. Having been constituted on this basis, and having undergone a process of demonization, the Other becomes an emotionally charged object that may be “manipulated, preserved and called up at will” by the members of the group, and that has the capacity to trigger powerful “mechanical” feelings and reactions. Zukier’s article is relevant to the analysis of Spain’s official discourse and policies concerning three ethnic groups that have played a central role in the country’s history and collective identity since the late fifteenth century: Jews, Muslims and Latin Americans. While major advances have been noted in Span-ish attitudes towards these three groups since the return to democratic rule in the mid 1970s, the expedient nature of the official discourse—a self-congratulating myth of tolerance and pluralism—does not always foster positive change.

In Spain, the past has not been put to rest either culturally or ideo-logically—particularly the immediate past of the Civil War and the Franco dictatorship (1939–1975). Ignoring the often traumatic past and present experiences of different social and ethnic groups—in this case Jews, Muslims, and Latin Americans—and their own perspectives on their relations with the Spanish state, is in fact an obstacle to reconcilia-tion and the de-essentialization of the Other in contemporary Spain.

6 See Pew Global Attitudes Project, Unfavorable Views of Jews and Muslims on the Increase in Europe (Sept. 2008), http://pewglobal.org/reports/pdf/262.pdf, September 30, 2009.


Renewed Jewish Life in Spain

Up to the eighteenth century, no significant political group contested the assumption that the Spanish collective body had to be protected from the “contaminating” influence of both Muslim and Jewish blood by such means as the Blood Purity Statutes (Estatutos de limpieza de sangre) and the Inquisition. The advent of the Enlightenment broke this con-sensus, although it did not call into question the self-identification of the vast majority of Spaniards with Catholicism. Even the Spanish liberals and reformists of the nineteenth century, despite their strong anti-clericalism and vehement repudiation of anything hinting of Catholic integrism, perceived Spain as a Christian state. In fact, they considered that both the Inquisition and the Blood Purity Statutes betrayed the essence of the Spanish people precisely because toler-ance was one of the core values of Christianity. This attitude persisted at least through the first half of the twentieth century. According to Christiane Stallaert, Spaniards’ ethnic identification with Catholicism was not only a fundamental belief of the Francoists during the Civil War of 1936–39, but was also widespread among the Spanish “reds” (Socialists, Communists, and Anarchists) (Stallaert, 1998: 48–49, 52–53; Álvarez Chillida, 2002: 308–310). Furthermore, at least some of these revolutionary Spaniards interpreted their Christian identity as the negation of the Moor/Jew, in spite of the pluralistic and philo-Semitic policies of the Second Republic (1931–1936).7 Despite these traditions, there have also been some important transformations in the way Spaniards perceive both Jews and Muslims.

With the establishment of democracy after Francisco Franco’s death in November 1975, Spain laid the institutional and political bases for a multiethnic and multireligious state. In something like the spirit of Américo Castro’s ideas, the government expressed its desire for repa-ration and reconciliation through a series of official acts, such as a declaration that Judaism, Protestantism, and Islam were “religions that clearly had deep roots in Spain” (“de notorio arraigo”) (see Valls, 1989; Bastante, 2004: 48–49). Certainly the resolve of successive democratic Spanish governments to reconnect Spanish culture and identity to their Jewish and Muslim-Arab roots has been reinforced by Spain’s entry

7 On the Spanish Republic and its attitudes towards Jews, see González García, 2004.


into the European Community, given the New Europe’s emphasis on pluralism, multiculturalism, and respect for human rights.

Despite having settled in the Peninsula at an early point in history—during the Phoenician era—and having enjoyed periods of relative greatness there, the Jews of Spain have also suffered a long history of persecution and martyrdom. They were gone for nearly four centuries, starting with the expulsion decreed by the Catholic monarchs in 1492, although later, despite their physical absence, “Jewish elements” popu-lated the popular imagination and artistic creation (Álvarez Chillida, 2002). In the mid-nineteenth century Jews began returning to Spain (during the Spanish-Moroccan War of 1859–1860). Only 406 people identified themselves as Jewish in the national census of 1877, but several waves of immigration later the number of Jews reached the current figure of over 40,000.

Spain’s current Jewish population is concentrated in Madrid and Barcelona, followed by Malaga. Smaller communities are found in Alicante, Benidorm, Cadiz, Granada, Marbella, Majorca, Torremoli-nos, and Valencia. Spanish North Africa has Jewish communities in Ceuta and Melilla. Today’s Jewish community is relatively new, largely a product of post-World War II migration. The first significant wave of Jewish immigrants arrived in 1956, after Morocco’s new indepen-dence from French and Spanish colonial rule triggered Jewish fears of oppression by the new Muslim government. The Six Day War in 1967 prompted a similar exodus of North African Jews. Other Jews came from the Balkans and other European countries, and, most recently (in the 1970s and 1980s), from Latin America, especially Argentina.

Speaking to The Jewish Press correspondent a couple of years ago, the Chief Rabbi of Madrid, Rabbi Ben Dahan, pointed out the dyna-mism of the small Jewish community in Madrid: “Although this is a small Jewish community, we have a dedicated congregation which has a vibrant schedule for shiurim, gemilut chasadim and a very active youth wing which networks with the Jewish youth in Portugal and is very active in pro-Israel activities.” (Matzner Bekerman, 2006)

Indeed, one of our arguments here concerns precisely the gap between public discourse and social reality. We would like to borrow the concept of “cultural code”, a term Shulamit Volkov coined in 1978 in the context of the historiography of German anti-Semitism (Volkov, 1978: 25–46). The term reflected the idea that late nineteenth-century anti-Semitism did not solely express an antagonism, Christians toward Jews, but rather signaled a political identity with the German right.


Volkov’s interpretation viewed anti-Semitism as a cultural way of marking political space. It also supported a contextual explanation for anti-Semitism, emphasizing its function in given historical constella-tions instead of regarding it as an unchanging, ahistorical enmity. In 1930s Spain, right-wing nationalists targeted the Jews as part of their campaign against Communism, regional separatism, and masonry, all supposedly conspiring together to destroy the Spanish state. Nowadays, an anti-Israeli discourse, with certain anti-Semitic overtones, appears to be central to the identity of the Spanish left—an identity forged in the decades-long struggle against the Francoist dictatorship and its main political ally, the “imperialistic” United States. In other words, in order to achieve distance from the political right, the political left, especially the Communists and the Socialists, gradually became anti-Israeli. There is some irony to this, since Israel rejected Franco’s efforts to establish diplomatic ties between the two countries in the late 1940s, and joined forces with the countries in the United Nations calling for a diplomatic boycott of the Spanish dictatorship, which had been estab-lished with the help of Hitler and Mussolini (Rein, 1997: Chaps.1–2).

Contemporary Spain has undoubtedly made significant steps toward pluralism and tolerance. This implies, naturally, a fundamental change in the attitude it has shown toward three of its historical Others: Jews, Muslims, and Latin Americans (Gypsies and Africans are similar cases, but are outside the scope of this paper). This new attitude is also driven by important political and economic interests, since Spain aspires to serve as a bridge between Europe and the Arab world on the one hand and between Europe and Latin America on the other. Accordingly, there is some danger that this new outlook may prove to be mostly a means to an end. Ultimately, the true scope of the change will be measured by the abandonment of the extensive self-celebratory monologue on the basis of which the Spanish elites have historically constructed their Others.

Given Spain’s historical identification with Roman Catholic Christi-anity, the construction of the Jew as a Spanish Other cannot be sepa-rated from the Catholic Church’s official accusations of deicide against the Jewish people from earliest times until the Nostra Aetate declara-tion in 1965. Considered guilty of a crime of cosmic magnitude, the Jews came to be perceived as the incarnation of Satan’s desires, as the physical manifestation of Evil, against which every good Christian should fight indefatigably.

Naturally, the Jew as Other has, through the centuries, played a central role in constructing the image that both Christians and Span-


iards had of themselves. Jews became the physical, psychological, and emotional receptacle for the collective projection of all those attributes considered to be essentially antagonistic to Christianity. Identifying Evil and everything associated with it with Judaism lay the ground-work for the proclamation of Catholic Spain as the representative of good on earth, and invested it with a providential evangelizing role. Today, in post-Franco Spain, although the 1978 Constitution guaran-tees the state’s non-confessional status and the freedom of religion and belief (Article 16), the Catholic Church retains a privileged standing in the country’s public institutions. A survey carried out in Decem-ber 2006 showed that 77.1 percent of Spaniards viewed themselves as Catholics. Four months later, 19 percent of the total population asserted that the Jews were responsible for the death of Christ.8 With-out a doubt, secular Christian anti-Semitism, reinforced by modern anti-Semitic movements in other European nations, continues to influ-ence the image of the Jew in Spain. A survey conducted in October 2002 determined that 34 percent of Spanish interviewees held mostly anti-Semitic beliefs, a higher percentage than the figures recorded in France, Germany, Italy, or Poland. A more recent ADL survey, car-ried out in the midst of an international financial and economic cri-sis and published in February 2009, detected similar perceptions; in that survey more than 50 percent of Spanish respondents believed that Jews held too much economic power.9 Such prejudices, still alive in present-day Spanish society and popular culture, also affect Span-iards’ opinion of the Jewish state, Israel, especially since many of them strongly believe that European Jews are more loyal to Israel than to their home countries.

At the same time, the process of democratic transition initiated with the death of the dictator Francisco Franco in late 1975 laid the politi-cal and institutional bases for the construction of a democratic and pluralistic state. In addition to the establishment of the Spanish state’s

8 Centro de Investigaciones Sociológicas, Barómetro diciembre 2006, Pregunta 28, http://www.cis.es/cis/opencms/-Archivos/Marginales/2660_2679/2666/e266600.html March 29, 2010. See also Anti-Defamation League, Attitudes Toward Jews and the Middle East in Five European Countries (May 2007), http://www.adl.org/anti_semitism/European_Attitudes_Survey_May_2007.pdf March 29, 2010.

9 Ynet, 11 Feb. 2009. See also the interesting information about racist attitudes in Spanish schools gleaned from a survey undertaken by the Spanish Ministry of Education. Moroccans and gypsies appear to be the main victims of discrimination: Castedo and Berdié, 2008.


secular status, a series of institutional gestures recognized the contri-butions of Jews and Muslims to Spain’s culture and history. These included the official declarations made in 1984 and 1989 establishing that both Judaism and Islam were deeply rooted religions in Spain, and the inclusion of Sefarad (the Hebrew name of Spain) ’92, a work-ing group for the “rediscovery of Spain’s Jewry”, and Al-Andalus (the Arab name of Spain) ’92 programs in the celebrations of the “Fifth Centenary of the Discovery of America” in 1992. Naturally, this move was strengthened by the significant emphasis that the European Union placed, at least ostensibly, on pluralism, multiculturalism, and respect for human rights as basic values.

The magnitude of the rehabilitation of the image of Jews in Spain over the last decades should not be underestimated. However, one pivotal area has showed virtually no progress, notably the Spanish state’s official whitewash of relations with its Jewish minority through-out the centuries. According to the official line taken by Spanish diplo-macy during the commemorative ceremonies of 1992, the process of “rediscovering Jewish Spain” would take place under the “concilia-tory banner of coexistence and the cultural fusion that formed the backbone of the Hispanic nation”, and anxiously sought to avoid “negative elements like the memory of the expulsion, the inquisitorial persecution, intolerance, the negative aspects of the colonial past, etc.” (Lisbona, 1993: 351–352). This stance is reflected in the words used in the description of the Prince of Asturias Friendship Prize awarded to the Sephardic communities worldwide in 1990, in the speech that King Juan Carlos delivered in Madrid’s synagogue in 1992, and most of the publicity surrounding Expo Sevilla ’92—words such as “reen-counter”, “friendship”, “distancing”, “mutual respect”, “tolerance”, “pluralism”, “dialog”, and “bridges”.10

Several years ago the Spanish philosopher Manuel Reyes Mate referred to the politics of the memory of the Spanish Civil War: “The past is used as ammunition for the politics of those who rule. They are politics of memory that . . . juxtapose and merge the victims’ past and the executioners’ past in a nice family portrait.” (Reyes Mate, 2002) To be sure, this type of proximity does not dismantle “otherness”, but

10 Lisbona, 1993: 349–370. See also Harvey, 1996: 62; López Alonso, 2007b: 7. For King Juan Carlos’ speech see “Palabras de Su Majestad el Rey a la comunidad israelita”, Casa de SU Majestad el Rey, http://www.casareal.es/noticias/news/2100-ides-idweb.html, March 29, 2010.


merely readjusts its terms, maintaining the centuries-long monologue that constructed the Jews as a function of Spain’s identity needs. In present-day Spain, the Jews (among others) appear to be a politically expedient means of strengthening, for both political and financial reasons, the country’s national image as a bridge between different cultures and as a symbol of tolerance and pluralism. To a certain extent, this is the aim of Spain’s official “reencounter” with its Jews. Nonetheless, these initiatives have also given cultural legitimacy to expressions that are more critical, and more representative of the experiences and perspectives of Jews themselves regarding the role they were forced to play in Spanish history. It is precisely the cultural dimension that provides the key for breaking down the image of the Jew as the Spaniards’ metaphysical Other.

Diana Pinto has already pointed to the centrality of the Shoah in the construction of the New Europe: “the Holocaust [is . . .] becoming the filter through which a new reading of European identities is being fashioned.” Pinto went even further, asserting that, for the first time in 2,000 years of European history, “Jews and their collective history are thus entering into a dialogue with the various national pasts . . . The ‘Jewish space’ has penetrated into the heart of European national identity.” (Pinto, 1996: 11)

Even so, Spain has been slower than its European partners in undertaking a policy of memorializing the Holocaust. This delay has been explained by Manuel Reyes Mate and Alejandro Baer by the intertwining of the memory of Auschwitz and that of the Republican victims during the Spanish Civil War of 1936–1939. In their opinion, the Spaniards have had more difficulty in confronting the memory of the Holocaust because they spent 39 years under the rule of a dicta-tor who achieved power with the help of Nazi Germany and Fascist Italy. Indeed, the collective disavowal of the victims of the Nazis has intrinsically been linked not only to the disavowal of the Republican victims of the Franco régime, but also to the fact that the history of the Spanish Civil War and the Franco dictatorship is an indissoluble part of the history of European authoritarianism. That is why Baer bluntly asks: “How could a culture of the memory of the Holocaust exist, if there is no culture of the memory of the Spanish tragedy?” (Baer, 2006: 238)

Nevertheless, Spain is slowly but steadily institutionalizing the mem-ory of the Holocaust. One landmark in this advance has been the first public commemoration of the Holocaust, realized in 2000 under the auspices of an official Spanish institution, the Madrid Assembly.


Another important event was the governmental declaration, in 2005, of January 27 as the “Official Day of the Memory of the Holocaust and the Prevention of Crimes against Humanity”. In 2006, one of the two official commemorations was headed by the Spanish monarchs and the Spanish prime minister. The ceremony included speeches by the president of the Federation of Jewish Communities of Spain, Jacobo Garzón, and the president of the Roma Union, Juan de Dios Ramírez Heredia, as well as a message from Jorge Semprún, a Span-ish Buchenwald survivor and a leading intellectual who can be consid-ered one of Europe’s “voices of conscience”.11

At the same time, recent years have witnessed an accelerated reval-orization of the cultural and historical legacy of the Jews of Spain. The 1992 celebration of the 500th anniversary of the “discovery” of the American continent became the framework for undertaking some important political, legal, and cultural steps leading to what David Grebler, president of the Sefarad ’92 National Jewish Commission, has rather bombastically described as the “complete normalization of the Jewish element in Spanish society.” (Lisbona, 1993: 13)

The Spanish monarchs contributed greatly to the creation of this rosy atmosphere. Since 1970, even before Don Juan Carlos was pro-claimed king, the royal couple had been cultivating good relations with the Jewish community both in Spain and abroad. This was in keeping with their firm commitment to the political principles of democracy and religious freedom. In 1990, their heir, Prince Don Felipe de Borbón, put into words the sentiments of the royal house during the ceremony awarding the Príncipe de Asturias prize to the Sephardic communities around the world: “In the harmonious spirit of today’s Spain, and in my capacity as heir of those who five hundred years ago signed the Decree of Expulsion, I welcome you with open arms, and with great emotion.” (ibid.: 357)

The 1992 events contributing to the normalization of Jewish life in Spain included the visit of the king and queen to the Madrid Synagogue on March 31 (the first such visit in the history of Spain); the signa-ture of the first cooperation agreement between the Spanish govern-ment and the formal organization of the Spanish Jewish community (Federación de Comunidades Israelitas de España) in September; and

11 See Ministerio de Asuntos Exteriores y de Cooperación (2006). For a more detailed account of the Spanish process of “memorializing” the Holocaust, see Baer, 2006.


the implementation of Sefarad ’92, a special program aimed at “redis-covering Jewish Spain” (Lisbona, 1993: 303–370).

Modern developments have by no means been uniformly positive, however. The beginning of the second millennium witnessed the con-version of the Holocaust into an instrument for demonizing the Israelis in vaguely anti-Semitic terms. The Israeli government’s performance during the second Intifada, the second Lebanon War, and the Gaza operation has repeatedly been interpreted as ultimate proof of the Jewish people’s inherent viciousness and of their stubborn unwilling-ness to learn the lessons of the Shoah.

The Growing Presence of Muslims

Many of the points mentioned in our discussion of Spain’s Jews are equally relevant to any analysis of the role played by Muslims and Latin Americans in today’s Iberia. Muslims are the most “visible” immigrant group owing to their religion, language, and skin color, and their pres-ence has given rise to conflicts of all sorts. By various estimates, there are more than one million Muslims in Spain.12 The majority of them are from Morocco, the largest immigrant nationality in Spain, repre-senting 1 percent of the total population and 18 percent of the immi-grant population.13 Recent years have witnessed a number of social conflicts involving Muslim immigrants. In the year 2000 a riot against Moroccan immigrants erupted in southeastern Spain, in the town of El Ejido. The pretext was the murder of a young Spanish woman by a mentally unbalanced Moroccan immigrant, but the affair quickly deteriorated into violence against anything and anyone Moroccan (Zapata Barrero, 2003: 523–541). In 2006 there were reports of racist attacks on mosques and Muslim religious centers in various cities and towns, including Córdoba, Huesca, and Girona. Slogans like “Moors out” or “No Moors” were painted on buildings. That year saw wide protests in Catalonia against building mosques in the region. As a con-sequence, Muslim religious practices had to be conducted in makeshift accommodations in garages or small commercial centers.

12 Observatorio Andalusí, Estudio demográfico de la población musulmana (Dec. 2007), http://mx.geocities.com/hispanomuslime/estademograf.doc, November 18, 2008.

13 See Ministerio de Trabajo y Asuntos Sociales, Informe estadístico, 31 Dec. 2006; López García and Briane, 2004.


It should be remembered that “the Moors”, no less than the Jews, were Spain’s perennial foreign Other. It was a cultural stereotype against which Spain could define its own identity in its invention of the past and the present, from the Arab “occupation” of Christian Spain for seven centuries to the colonial wars in Northern Africa during the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. Over the centuries, representa-tions of the Moor, usually laden with racist and religious connotations, became embedded in popular culture. Muslims, like Jews, were often represented as unclean, treasonous, cruel, cowardly, and the like. Yet in the mid-1930s, when Franco’s Nationalists brought Moroccan mer-cenaries over to fight against the “godless” Republic, their propaganda depicted the Moor as a defender of religious faith in the common struggle against Spanish Republicans, atheists, Communists, Jews, and freemasons, all of whom were bracketed together as the foreign Other (Balfour, 2002: 193–198, 283–286). Today, however, negative stereotypes of Muslims are again widespread, although not politically correct. One Muslim activist stated in a survey that democratic Spain had adopted a double and contradictory standard towards his people: On one hand, Islamic and Moorish culture are being reclaimed and valued as part of the Spanish cultural heritage; on the other hand, the inclusion of Islam in the construction of contemporary Spanish identity is clearly out of the question.

Like the Jews before them, Muslims and many of their brethren who had converted to Christianity under pressure (the moriscos) were definitively expelled from Spain in 1609. In the case of the Muslims, however, the long years of physical absence from Spanish territory were shaped and defined not only by the memory of the eight centu-ries of the so-called Reconquista, but also by Spain’s expansionist politics in northern Africa, especially from the fifteenth to seventeenth centu-ries, and from the nineteenth to twentieth centuries (part of Morocco became a Spanish protectorate in 1912). In addition, the important strategic alliance that Spain built with the Arab nations (known as the “traditional Hispano-Arab friendship”) during the Franco years con-tributed to a rather schizophrenically constructed image of the Muslim peoples. As a matter of fact, the ambivalent policies of Franco’s regime, which supported the Arab nations’ wars of independence against both French and English colonial rule at the same time that Spain fought to retain its own protectorate in Morocco, can be explained by a relatively simple psychological mechanism plainly described by Eloy Martín Corrales: On one hand, Spaniards retained a “very negative”


image of Moroccans; on the other, they cherished “a more or less idyllic perception” of the other Muslim nations—nations that had the additional advantage of geographical distance, making ongoing con-tact or disturbing incidents less likely (Corrales, 2002: 49).

Thus, in this respect, Muslim “otherness” is rooted in historical conflicts and clashes of interest between Christian Spain and specific members of the Arab-Muslim world (the Nazar dynasty and the Moroccan independentistas, for example), generating changing levels of Islamophobia; the negative images and stereotypes have not always dominated. Despite these ambivalences, however, the image of the “Moor” as essentially inferior has played a fundamental role not only in galvanizing an ethnic Christian consciousness, but also in legitimiz-ing Spanish expansion and colonial occupation in the Maghreb. That is why the negative stereotypes have not vanished with the resolution of the conflicts that gave rise to them. As explained by Henri Zukier, once the Other is constructed and the demonization process is con-cluded, this Other becomes an emotionally charged object with the ability to trigger powerful emotions and reactions automatically.

In present-day Spain, the age-old negative images of the “Moor” continue to affect reality. A school survey carried out among young people between the ages of 13 and 19 in 1997 revealed that 24 per-cent were in favor of expelling the “Arab-Moors” from the country. According to another study, the proportion of Spaniards holding a positive view of Muslims decreased from 46 percent in 2005 to 29 percent in 2006 (The Pew Global Attitudes Project, 2006: 10).

Not So Invisible: Hispanic Americans in Contemporary Spain

As for the last group we will examine, the Latin American population, their “otherness” is supposedly both the most invisible and the least problematic of the triad. After all, most Latin Americans share a lan-guage (Spanish) and a religion (Catholicism) with most Spaniards. The clearest example of this fact is the Spanish Congress’s 1987 decision to establish October 12 (the day Columbus arrived in America) as the country’s National Day. Although the representatives of democratic Spain agreed to abandon Dictator Franco’s “Hispanidad Day”, which celebrated the militant, conservative religious spirit of Spanish colo-nization in America, the “otherness” of Latin America’s indigenous populations implicit in this ideological pillar of Francoism remained


intact. To be sure, the terms employed by the new law to validate the selection of October 12 as the founding episode in the building of Spanish national identity, seeking to avoid any imperialistic or evan-gelizing connotation, refer to the “beginning of a period of linguistic and cultural projection beyond European borders.”14 The “otherness” of the Amerindians is clearly implied in this description. By denying the fact that these peoples perceived the Spanish conquest and colo-nization as ethnocide and exploitation, Spanish officials relegate them to what Simone de Beauvoir called “the unessential” (De Beauvoir, 1949: I:17). Spanish official discourse neutralized every opportunity of achieving a genuine dialogue, replacing it with what Edward Sampson defines as a “self-celebratory monologue” that ostensibly ignores the experiences and viewpoint of the Other (Sampson, 1993: 3–16).

This attitude was also evident in the official characterization of the Seville World Expo of 1992, for instance, which was dedicated to “the Era of Discoveries” and was thus linked to the Spanish “discovery” of America (Harvey, 1996: 61, 74; Aguilar and Humlebæk, 2002: 139). The Expo was a huge success, visited by almost 42 million people, including 43 heads of state and 26 prime ministers. But it also exposed the fact, as mentioned earlier, that Spain’s past, both the distant and the more immediate, has not been resolved culturally or ideologi-cally. The commemoration of 1492 gave rise to sharp polemics along-side the traditional celebrations in Seville. There was even a violent demonstration in that southern city protesting the distorted historical representation of the “discovery”.

With respect to the construction of “otherness”, the concepts of “dis-covery” and “encounter between two cultures” speak for themselves. Essentially, the only Latin Americans whose existence is recognized by official Spain are those who voluntarily participate in Spain’s self-celebratory monologue. At the same time, those Latin Americans who believe that when such an intimate “encounter” occurs against the will of one of the two parties involved it should really be called a “rape”, are denied any formal legitimacy by the Spanish state.

The Spanish attitude was reinforced during a cycle of conferences, carried out under the aegis of the Royal Academy of History, that culminated in 1997 with the publication of España: Reflexiones sobre el ser de España (Spain: Reflections on Spain’s Being). In this book, histo-

14 Law 18/1987, October 7, establishing 12 October as Spain’s National Day, Boletín Oficial del Estado 241 (1987): 22831.


rian Gonzalo Anes wrote of the second half of the eighteenth century: “No-one believed that that great whole—the one created by Spain and the Indies—should and could be separated” (Real Academia de la Historia, 1997: 240, our emphasis). Obviously, the indigenous popula-tions who during this period continued to fight Spanish domination were deliberately ignored. The same attitude was apparent in an article by Demetrio Ramos, which, referring to the continuities between “las Españas de ultramar” (“the Spains overseas”) and the beginnings of the Latin American emancipation movements, affirmed:

the fact that the same attitude of the overseas Spains was something that lived fundamentally in the spirit of the people, and was not an artificial fact created by the administrative projection of metropolitan designs. The kingdom existed in the blood of the people. That is why it remained valid when its unity broke apart, until it mingled in today’s partisan reality (ibid.: 274).

At the social level, there were many clashes of all sorts between local Spanish populations and Latin American immigrants. All too often people identify these immigrants with the increasing rates of delinquency in Spain. A major controversy arose in Madrid in late 2006 over the legalization of the armed youth gang Latin Kings after a similar measure was taken in Barcelona, where a gang of some 250 members was legalized as a cultural association, on condition that members ceased all violent activities. A few months later, fights broke out between Spanish and Latin American youths in a Madrid suburb, Alcorcón. This clash received wide coverage in the media, adding fuel to a xenophobic protest by some thousand youngsters against Latin American immigrants. Extreme right-wing groups tried to take advan-tage of the situation for their own political purposes.

Conclusion

The achievements and contradictions inherent in the process of build-ing a democratic, pluralistic identity for contemporary Spain can only be fully grasped in the light of perceptions of the three ethnic groups that have historically played the fundamental role of Other in the public discourse on Spain’s national identity from the end of the fifteenth century onward: Jews, Muslims (Moors), and Latin Ameri-cans. Contemporary Spain has taken major steps toward breaking down the “otherness” of Jews and Muslims, although the same cannot


be said concerning Latin Americans. Unfortunately, in contrast to the rehabilitation of Jews and Muslims, the dismantling of Latin American otherness in present-day Spain has not even been given lip service. Yet this is an increasingly imperative task, not only for the obvious moral and historical reasons, but also for more practical ones. We refer here both to the significant flow of immigrants from Latin America who are increasingly being absorbed into Spanish society, and to the growing political clout that the indigenous populations of America are finally beginning to achieve in their native countries, after long centuries of suppression and exclusion.

Despite this progress, the most difficult task lies ahead. Only a genuine dialog that legitimizes the experiences and perspectives of those for-merly constructed as Others will dismantle the artifice of “otherness”. Although painful, the experience of opening our souls to the gaze of the Other is unavoidable if we are to achieve reconciliation with that part of our own selves that has been repeatedly projected outside. The effort is definitely worthwhile, since, as Edward Sampson articu-lates: “The gift that the other gives us is our own selfhood.” (Sampson, 1993: 155)

THE DIALECTICS OF THE DIASPORA. ON THE ART OF BEING JEWISH IN THE SWEDISH MODERNITY

Lars Dencik

Jews in Sweden represent an ethnic and cultural minority which has preserved and developed a special ‘Jewish’ relationship to life. This article will provide a perspective on what “a Jewish way of relating to life” builds upon and signifies. From this the question of how the specific Jewish traditional frame of mind and its understanding of the concepts of religion and identity, and particularly the predicament of living as a minority in Diaspora, have rendered the Jewish group capable today of being at the same time a distinct national minority in Sweden and firmly integrated in the modern society.

Religion and Peoplehood

Being Jewish means belonging to a particular ethnic category—a people with a particular history, particular cultural traditions, customs and language. Judaism is a religion, however in a decisive respect unlike the other so called Abrahamic religions in our part of the world: Chris-tianity and Islam are not linked to a special people. Christianity does not require that a Christian is Swedish, a Christian can just as well be Danish, English, German, American or Palestinian. Nor does Islam require that a Muslim be Arab, some Arabs are Christian while most Muslims are not Arabs.1 Whoever has Judaism as religion, whether or not practicing it, is always a Jew in the sense of being part of the Jew-ish people. Thus it is possible and quite common today to be a Jewish

1 But e.g. Pakistanis, Indonesians, Turks or Malays (from Malaysia). Within Islam there is however the concept of the Umma, which includes all the Muslims in the world.

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atheist2 or ‘secular’ Jew,3 but it is almost a contradictio in adjecto to speak of a ‘secular Christian’ or a ‘Muslim atheist’.

The majority of today’s Jews in the world live in Diaspora,4 i.e., as a people among other peoples.5 They represent an ethnic, religious and cultural minority in a country where the majority and leadership do not share their origins, history, religion and/or cultural customs. This is true not least in Sweden where the Jewish group since the law of Apri1 1, 2000 is one of five officially recognized national minorities.6 Living in Diaspora means that elements of one’s perspective, idiosyn-crasies and peculiar sensibilities in relation to society in some way distinguish themselves from the rest of the population. A Diaspora Jew can be, e.g., American, Hungarian or Swedish. But never merely that, he or she is also always and simultaneously ‘Jew’—however that may be interpreted.

Unlike, e.g., Christianity and Islam, Judaism is not a proselytizing religion—it is sometimes described as a “tribal religion”. An individual not born Jewish can after rabbinical examination convert to Judaism. Conversion to Judaism is much more than simply selecting a religious faith, for the individual conversion to Judaism—rabbis are generally restrictive and initially discouraging—is in principle and concretely a

2 That is how the scientist and author George Klein describes himself in the book Ateisten och den heliga staden (The Atheist and the Holy City, 1987). The French philosopher André Comte-Sponville has captured an attitude rather typical for many Jews: “I am a faithful atheist because I do not believe in any God; faithful because I acknowledge my adherence to a certain tradition, and to some values that we have inherited from our forefathers.” (Comte-Sponville, 1999)

3 A little more than every third member of a Jewish congregation in Sweden responds that he/she is not religiously observant or that he/she is “just Jewish”. If one adds an almost equal number of Jews in Sweden who have chosen not to be members of a Jewish congregation it would be safe to conclude that the proportion of ‘secular Jews’ constitutes substantially more than half of all Jews in Sweden. Cf. Dencik and Marosi, 2007.

4 The word Diaspora means “a scattering [of seeds]” (Greek, from speiro, to sow and the prep. dia, over). In its original meaning, while talking of peoples, it referred to migration and that a people, like the Jewish, is living “dispersed among other peoples”. The Hebrew word galut means the same thing, that you live in exile (i.e. “outside your home country”), but the Hebrew word has clearly more negative connotations than the Greek diaspora.

5 To put it more clearly: to speak about a Christian or Muslim Diaspora is hardly meaningful, while the Jewish Diaspora is a well known historical and sociological fact.

6 The four other officially recognized minorities are Roma, Sami (also an indig-enous people), Swedish Finns and Tornedalers (a people living in northern Sweden bordering to Finland where they use the language mienkäli).

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question of a fundamental mental and social transformation.7 For this is not purely a matter of “religion”—an occidental concept without a precise correspondence in Hebrew—but equally a matter of becoming a part of the Jewish people (Hebrew: am yisrael ), i.e. sharing in their traditions, history, sensitivity, and perspective. In brief in a sense being ‘Jewish’ in attitude.

When those Jews, having elected to register as members in the Jewish congregations in Sweden, previously called “Mosaiska församlingar” (“Congregations of the Mosaic creed”), were questioned in the early 2000s on how they regard the Jewish group in Sweden, 4.5% regarded the group in Sweden “primarily as a religious group” while many more (65.3%) regarded the group “primarily as a part of the Jewish people” (Dencik and Marosi, 2007). What is the background for this? How can despite living in the world’s most modern and most secular country (Pettersson and Esmer, 2008), in the democracy which more system-atically than any other has institutionalized individualism (Berggren and Trädgårdh, 2006), that more than others is committed to equality between various groups, a country that has accepted more law and conventions against all kinds of discrimination than most other coun-tries and which also stronger than most is devoted to the protection of citizens’ equal and human rights—that Jews in such a country, Jews that to a great extent share these values, continue to regard themselves as an ethnically separate group and from that develop a particular “Jewish” way of relating to life? With this background I shall attempt to investigate two connected questions in this article:

What in Judaism and the Jewish cultural heritage has been espe-• cially decisive for the Jews’ preservation and development of Jewish cultural traditions while at the same time becoming a well integrated part of modern society?

7 A prototype is the Biblical story about Ruth (Ruth 1:16–17). The majority of converts to Judaism are individuals who have some personal relationship to Judaism, e.g. by being the child of a Jewish father (but not a Jewish mother) or by living together with a Jewish partner. After conversion the fact that he or she is a ‘proselyte’ may not be of any significance in Jewish connections or may not even be mentioned. Even if this is the rule in actual practice it occurs that converted Jews are socially not quite accepted as ‘real Jews’ by born Jews. Estimates made from a material I and Karl Marosi collected for a questionnaire during the years around 2000 among members of the Jewish con-gregations in Sweden (successively reported in the magazine Judisk Krönika 2000–2003) show that slightly over 10% of members have converted to Judaism.

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What does it mean for a people such as the Jews to live in Diaspora? • And more specifically, what does this mean for the development of attitudes towards power holders and social power generally?

The analysis is built partially on my own empirical research of identity, habits and attitudes among the members of the Jewish congregations in Sweden today (Dencik and Marosi, 2007) and upon other studies of Jewish life and thought in today’s world (inter al. Bredefeldt, 2008; Fisher, 1996; Gitelman et al., 2003; Goldscheider and Zuckerman, 1984; Gruber, 2002; Jakubowski, 1993; Lustig and Leveson, 2006; Schnapper, 1980).

Conditions for “a Jewish way of relating to life”

Plus ça change, plus c’est la même chose—The more things change, the more they stay the same. In a world characterized by rapid change not changing becomes synonymous with condemning oneself to being anachronistic, old fashioned, outmoded and obsolete. From this per-spective the preservation of one’s identity and survival as a culture results from the art of changing oneself in order to remain the same. In the light of this insight one can regard the Jewish group’s road to cultural survival. Judaism is one of the world’s oldest still practiced religions and Jewry one of the ethnic groups longest considered as such. In distinction from many other of history’s religions and ethnici-ties Judaism and Jewry have neither been absorbed by other faiths and people or—despite impressive attempts—been exterminated. Against this background we shall in what follows approach the question of whether there is a specifically “Jewish” attitude to power, vulnerability and survival which can explain this.

What then can “a Jewish way of relating to life” mean? It does not automatically follow that born Jewish one has “a Jewish way of relating to life”. Neither is a “Jewish way of relating to life” identical with having Judaism as one’s religion—some of those who most persis-tently imagine and present themselves as Judaism’s, that is the Jewish religion’s, representatives on earth; e.g. some so called settlers on the West Bank, are characterized precisely by not demonstrating “a Jewish way of relating to life”. Thus one can be born Jewish and a religiously observant Jew without having what I have described as a “a Jewish way of relating to life”—even if most of those defining themselves as Jews in Diaspora to a greater or lesser extent have such an attitude.


A Jewish attitude is more culturally than genetically and/or reli-giously conditioned: it depends on the extent the individual’s or the group’s perspective of life and daily habits are based upon the histori-cal experience of the Jews as a people over 2000 years in Diaspora. The origin of this history still has a deep symbolical meaning: imme-diately before the center of Jewish life at that time, the temple of Jeru-salem, was destroyed by the Roman conquerors, one of the leading learned of the Jewish nation—in modern vernacular we would say one of the “intellectuals”—Jochanan Ben Zackai, was smuggled out from the besieged city in a coffin.8 Within the city ruled the Zeal-ots, the political fraction among the besieged Jews promoting war. Jochanan Ben Zackai had realized that such a policy would lead to the destruction and collapse of both the city and the people and thus Judaism. By taking himself out of the city with all his knowledge, his Jewish learning and tradition into ‘Diaspora’, all this would survive. Jochanan settled in the small town of Javne and established the first Jewish academy (yeshiva) and thus laid the foundation for the survival of Judaism. “The moral sense in this story”, writes Jackie Jakubowski in the introduction to Spår av lamed (“Traces of Lamed”, 2009, p. 9), is that “there is more strength in knowledge than in physical force”. In the Jewish Diaspora’s first academy the principles for Jewish life outside Israel were formulated—how tradition and cultural peculiarity could be sustained within a non-Jewish community.

To the Zealots in the besieged and soon conquered Jerusalem, Jochanan was a deserter and traitor. However in Talmud, the com-prehensive and most important collection of learned discussions, commentaries and exegesis (more about that in the following) in post-Biblical time, Jochanan Ben Zackai is hailed for his pragmatism and search for consensus which also constitute the guiding principles. In Jakubowski’s summary:

Characteristic of Jochanan Ben Zackai and Talmud is the emphasis on the importance of knowledge. But also pragmatism and an insight that cooperation and compromise with an at times hostile environment, more than soldiers and futile armed struggle, in the long run is a guarantee for Jewish survival. The persistence of the Javne model in the Diaspora over the past two thousand years is remarkable (ibid.: 10–11).

8 The Romans did not allow any living Jew to leave the city—only the dead could be brought out for burial.

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One consequence of this has been that the Jewish learning tradition strives to interpret and re-interpret Jewish tradition and basic Jewish texts in accordance with their contemporary circumstances. Within the Jewish tradition of textual interpretation the surface of the text is never taken for granted. Here we always see several learned men dis-puting the text, penetrating the surface of the text, asking, what does this mean? Why is it written this way? Those asking and suggesting various answers or interpretations obviously do not agree—otherwise they could not and would not be required to pursue this continu-ous debate. Talmud consists of precisely such arguments for alternate and often contradictory interpretations of various textual portions.9 The open acceptance of disagreement, the questioning of every unchallenged authority (including God), has been the starting point of precisely that which could be called, with an overstated solemn terminology, “Jewish thinking”. That does not promote joining ranks, but supports the courage to be different; it does not lead to obedience, but demands reflection.

This constant reflection is the force behind the fact that the Jewish tradition is a living tradition. From this follows the insight that tradi-tions are passed on through history—not by persistence, remaining and meaning the same, independently of every social situation, which fun-damentalists of various faiths prefer to believe, but on the contrary by the acceptance of changing conditions for living as e.g. a Jew. Through commentaries departing from the experience of lived reality and new interpretations of old, sometimes ancient texts, a tradition can be kept alive and adjusted. Then the seeming paradox emerges that the cul-tural tradition, in this case the Jewish tradition, is preserved through constant change. Tradition is, with the words of the Jewish-American literary theorist Harold Bloom, the mask of continuity that cultural change assumes (Alter, 1991: 89). Or, in other words: the condition for a tradition to be kept alive is that it can be a dynamic response to the passing of history. Walter Benjamin, a European intellectual influenced by Jewish thought in the interwar period, said shortly before he died in 1940 while trying to escape persecution by the Nazis:10 “In every era the attempt must be made anew to wrest tradition away from a

9 Shamai and Hillel are two of the most well known adversaries in Talmud.10 Walter Benjamin committed suicide on September 25, 1940 by taking an over-

dose of morphine after his attempt of escaping to the USA had been stopped by the guards in Portbou, on the French-Spanish border.


conformism that is about to overpower it.”11 Benjamin and his close friend and intellectual sparring partner Gershom Sholem12 shared the view that every text contains many secret truths which can be reached only by commentaries demanded by every new historical situation. In this way Jewish tradition, by continuous new textual commentary, has indeed become a force for at times radical change.

One decisive social factor in this context is the circumstance that Jews in Diaspora always have constituted a minority. In that sense Jews are different from most immigrants and refugees arriving in a new country such as Sweden or Denmark. When for instance in the Danish debate about the integration of Muslims who have arrived from Mediterranean countries, they are reproached for not “becom-ing Danes” (Espersen, 2009)—just like the Jews who in the begin-ning of the twentieth century found refuge from pogroms in the Baltic countries—then one leaves without recognition the fact I would like to point to: that Jews, wherever they have lived and wherever they have moved, always since the destruction of the Temple of Jerusalem in 70 C.E. have been a small minority living in Diaspora—and thus over 2000 years developed a particular attitude or mentality based on what one might call a diasporaic minority awareness. This in distinction to e.g. Muslim Arabs from the Middle East who have arrived in Denmark, Sweden or some other European country, from areas where they have been members of a hegemonic religious and cultural majority.

Aside from the predicament of being constantly and everywhere a religious/ethnic/cultural minority of society, Jewish historical expe-rience includes repeated occurrences of cultural oppression and life threatening persecution. Within Jewish culture memory is of central importance. Perhaps like no other occidental culture Jewish culture strives to cherish and keep alive memories of historical events. Narra-tion, to relate to one’s children, to keep alive experience from genera-tion to generation is a religious imperative as well as a basic element in Jewish cultural tradition. This includes mythological events such as the Exodus from Egypt (The Biblical narrative Exodus) as well as

11 Tes VI in Über den Begriff der Geschichte, posthumously published, first in a small edition in 1942 by Institut für Sozialforschung, exiled to New York after the war, and in 1950 to a wider audience in Germany.

12 Gershom Sholem became a Zionist and moved from Germany to Palestine (the mandate) where he laid the foundation for modern academic research on Jewish mysticism and Kabbalah.

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factual historical events. The persecutions during the Spanish inquisi-tion and the expulsion of the Jews from the Iberian Peninsula dur-ing the Middle Ages, the recurring pogroms in Russia, Ukraine, the Baltic countries and Poland during the past centuries and the German extinction factories in Nazi Europe during the emergence of moder-nity are thus living memories of exposure and powerlessness which has made deep imprints on what I call a “Jewish way of relating to life”. Three additional factors play a decisive role in Jewish culture for what I call “a Jewish way of relating to life”:

Talmud, or rather to have a talmudic relationship to life and reality. Talmud is a very comprehensive and peculiar “record of discussions” covering centuries of interpretations and commentaries to various biblical portions—as well as interpretations and commentaries to the interpretations and commentaries. Discussions may concern any aspect of daily life. In Talmud nothing is too small or too obvious to be taken for granted. Talmud does not offer a certain interpretation or view as more valid than the other; arguments—frequently subtle and with an intriguing construction—are often raised against other arguments without reaching any definite conclusion; the question is left open for renewed interpretation and new arguments that arise from new cir-cumstances experienced or referred to by a new commentator.13

Most contemporary Jews have probably never studied Talmud. Nonetheless the manner of asking questions, reasoning, and disput-ing characterizing Talmud has been handed down from generation to generation in the Jewish world being transposed to deal not only with portions of the Bible but anything in the real world and not least in society.14 It is open to virtually incessantly comment and question per-ceived facts: —What does this mean? Why is it like this? and similar questions are the basis of an attitude which in modern form has led to

13 Talmud exists in two versions, the Palestinian Talmud (Yerushalmi ) and the Baby-lonian Talmud (Bavli ), which is more than three times as comprehensive and has come to dominate Jewish tradition. The first comprehensive collection, the Palestinian Talmud, was completed in the second century B.C.E. The Babylonian Talmud was compiled during a period up to the sixth century C.E. More than half of the Baby-lonian Talmud consists of narratives, ethical discourses and various allegories; it is written in Rabbinic Hebrew and Aramaic. When Jews say “study the Torah” they usually mean Talmud.

14 I myself grew up in a secular Jewish family; my parents had not studied Talmud and did not know much about Jewish texts—but later in life I realized that our daily very lively discussions at the dinner table and a constant arguing about anything that we might have encountered was a culturally conditioned schooling into what I today would describe as a secular-Talmudic attitude.


Jews contributing to development, social debate and cultural life, as, e.g. journalists, innovators, entrepreneurs, authors, philosophers, sci-entists and creators in various disciplines and arts (Bredefeldt, 2008).15

This leads us to the second factor, which departs from the Jewish concept of man as a co-creator with God. God, the creator of Uni-verse, created the world but he/she/it needs man to complete his cre-ation. Individual man is therefore morally obligated to try to improve and repair the world through his own actions and creativity—Tik-kun olam is the Jewish concept. This principle has like the Talmudic attitude survived secularization and been transposed into the attitudes of modern Jewry. Obviously all Jews are not creating in the genuine meaning of the word within arts, science or business, but nonetheless this is a cornerstone in the Jewish idea to strive in various ways, if only modestly, for creativity and thus contribute to an improved world.

Judaism has no saints or holy places.16 ‘Holiness’—to the extent one mentions it within a Jewish context—is attributed to God and to every human being. In Mishna, the oldest and most central part of Talmud, one can find two propositions which can be recited by every one every day:

I am no more than a grain of sand and dust17

andThe world was created for my sake

In some way this is another cornerstone of a Jewish way of relating to life. Judaism’s religious rules are primarily devoted to the sanctification of everyday life and its recurring activities: the preparation of food, the meals, love life etc. Life itself is the most holy.18 In order to save a life

15 A classical Jewish anecdote: the Jewish boy returns home after his first day in school. His father asks “Well, how was school?” The boy happily answers, “I could answer all the questions.” His upset father replies, “Well now! But did you have any question that the teacher could not answer?”

16 This may seem to contradict the frequently heard expression “The Holy Land” or the notion of Jerusalem as the “Holy City” for Jews (and Christians and Muslims as well) or that the Wailing Wall (ruins of the Temple of Jerusalem) nowadays is a “holy place” to pious Jews. The fact that some people, Jews and non-Jews, think they are holy places—occasionally with dramatic political consequences—does not substantiate the belief that there is a Jewish idea about the holiness of certain places. This may be a more or less deliberate misuse of religious terminology for political purposes.

17 Cf. the well known “Earth to earth, ashes to ashes, dust to dust”, a phrase from the funeral service.

18 The Hebrew word for “Cheers!” is l’chaim which means “to life!”

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violation of all other religious commandments is permitted.19 A very large portion of the Jewish commandments—the Jewish bible contains according to rabbinical estimates 613 commandments (mitzvot) which define what an observant Jew must or must not do20—aims at regulat-ing everyday life, especially human interaction. Within Judaism human conduct and interaction are central, especially in relation to family, everyday life and society. Eschatology, i.e. questions about a life after death, heaven and hell, attract very little attention. Jewish tradition focuses on life here on earth, with and among other human beings.

In every creed, be it religious, ideal or political, orthodoxies and groups emerge who consider themselves as guardians and defendants of the ‘true’ teaching, this has also happened within Judaism. By others these more extreme and obvious exponents of a cultural phenomenon or creed are frequently regarded as their most ‘authentic’ representa-tives. The implicit idea is then that reformed, modern etc. variants of e.g. Jewish life are diluted forms of the religion or ideology; that those living that way do so for comfort, or even worse are false representa-tives of a ‘true teaching’ ( Judaism, socialism, Islam, Christianity etc.). When we consider Judaism at least, this is a totally inadequate idea. Judaism has one founding text—the Hebrew bible—but that text does not speak directly to the individual. What is written should always be interpreted in the perspective of one’s actual situation. There is no Jewish theology similar to the Christian. God is—period. According to the philosopher Baruch Spinoza21 of the seventeenth century God has once and for all revealed himself at Mount Sinai and then handed humanity his teaching, the Torah—called the “Old Testament” by the Christians.22 It is the duty of man to uncover the rest.

19 This rule is called pikuach nefesh in Hebrew. It means e.g. that a person who is about to die from starvation, as in a concentration camp, to save his life may eat pork, which otherwise is not permitted for a Jew (it is not kosher), or if necessary, to carry a weapon in order to defend one’s life on a sabbath when it is prohibited to carry anything at all according to halakha.

20 248 of the mitzvot are positive and thus acts that a Jew is obligated to perform, e.g. to light the sabbatical candles. 365 of them are negative and thus acts that are forbid-den, e.g. to eat pork. 7 of the commandments are so called Noaitic, and they govern not only Jews but all mankind. Among them are the prohibitions to kill, to steal, and the admonition to sentence according the law and in a court, etc.

21 One of the few to be banned from a Jewish congregation for heresy was Spinoza, who lived and worked in the Spanish Netherlands.

22 This designation is not accepted by Judaism as it does not accept the “New Testament” as a holy scripture. From a purely linguistic point of view one might well call the “Old Testament” the “primary” and the “New Testament” the “secondary”,


Within Judaism there is no hierarchy of bishops, archbishops, car-dinals and popes with privilege to explain the will of God and its meaning. Neither are there any persons considered to be God’s special messengers. Religious officials and scholars of the Scriptures may teach differing interpretations, but Judaism leaves it to every individual to study the Torah and find his or her solution through an ongoing dis-cussion with the many and often contradictory commentaries found in Talmud.

In Jewish tradition the word and the text are authorities, but they are always challenged. In the word and in the texts, for some even in the letters23, knowledge is supposed to be concealed, insights that are not immediately obvious, but that have to be inferred and then related to actual circumstances. In this way the central and bearing tradition of textual interpretation in Judaism24 leads to a surprisingly open and non-authoritarian relationship to God, as well as to a plu-ralism of interpretative traditions existing side by side—which is very important in this context—, a flexibility which makes possible change of habits and attitudes over time and with changing circumstances. It is thus possible always to be modern without lacking tradition. And it is possible to disagree—and there is frequent disagreement—without ani-mosity. Within Judaism the concept of Einheitsgemeinde is used to denote a Jewish congregation, as e.g. in Stockholm, which includes within itself different religious strands25 with their own forms of worship etc.

The first volume, Authority, of the series The Jewish Political Tradition, edited by the American political philosopher and analyst Michael Walzer (2000) discusses the views on controversies and conflicting points of view within Judaism. The views held by a minority always must be noted and discussed with the same respect as those held by

but then the value connotations would obviously shift. According to the legend God handed Moses (and humanity) His teachings at Mount Sinai. The teaching was writ-ten in the “Old Testament”, and equally important but not written in the so called “oral Torah”. When the Hebrew designation Tanach is not used Jews prefer to say “the Hebrew Bible”.

23 Within Kabbalah, the Jewish mysticism, and parts of Talmud every letter in the Hebrew alphabet is ascribed certain numeric, mystical and holy qualities.

24 See the chapter “The power of the Text” in: Alter, 1991.25 The Great Synagogue of Stockholm belongs to the so called Masorti movement,

a modern non-orthodox Judaism, but there are two smaller orthodox synagogues within the congregation and one so called progressive Jewish group with a more lib-eral interpretation of Jewish rules of life than the others within the Stockholm Jewish Einheitsgemeinde.

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a (for the moment) dominant majority—the entire history of struggle between different interpretations in Talmud is an illustration of pre-cisely that (the tract Sanhedrin). Jewish tradition also maintains a doc-trine of “the rebellious elder”, who—after a decision by the Sanhedrin, the Supreme Court—in his local congregation follows a path differ-ent than that defined by the Supreme Court. The rebellious elder is granted the freedom to express his divergant meaning and also to teach his students about it, but he can not turn it into law (i.e. create a competing Torah).

Talmud is very clear on this point: even if you must surrender to law your right to intellectual freedom must not be violated. There is moreover an even more radical interpretation of this Jewish tradition that says that rebellion at times may be morally prescribed: if one of the elders in a congregation does not follow his convictions but only follows a conventional order, then obedience itself is a moral crime. This is especially actual in the Jewish Diaspora. The tract Yevamot 14 of the Babylonian Talmud clarifies how congregations in various towns can—and have the right to—adapt varying rules and interpretations according to circumstances, and also that it is possible to have dif-ferent rules and interpretations within a town (congregation) without any being considered as ‘rebellious’. You start from and act within the same tradition, you read and comment the same commentaries, you disagree about the interpretation of the same text. And that is fine.

In conclusion: within this framework you have on the one hand free-dom of interpretation and acknowledgement of the positive traits of this pluralism, and on the other hand a preservation of unity. According to the sages a clever student should be able to find 49 good argu-ments for a certain interpretation, and also 49 arguments against this interpretation. This is not considered sophism within Judaism; on the contrary, the Biblical text, as Talmud sees it, is always open to new interpretations and disagreements as well as an agreement that agree-ment is not necessary. This is also a crucial element in what I have called “a Jewish way of relating to life”.

In the following we will investigate how the elements I have described as basic for “a Jewish way of relating to life” may explain a particular relationship to power, exposure, integration and survival developed by the Jewish group in modern Western societies. As a beginning we shall acquaint ourselves with the Jewish community of today in Sweden.


The Contemporary Jewish Scene in Sweden

How to “count the Jews” is a very delicate question. Results vary greatly according to the criteria selected. Whatever the criteria it is clear that only a relatively small portion of the Jews in Sweden are registered as members of any of the three congregations in Sweden, in Stockholm, Gothenburg and Malmoe.26 All in all there are about 7,000 members paying for activities within the congregations.

In 1953 an umbrella organization was created, the Official Council of Swedish Jewish Communities, to care for common concerns. The Jew-ish congregation of Stockholm has more than twice the number of members than the other two congregations combined. All three con-gregations are what in European Jewish tradition is called Einheitsge-meinde, that is they are open to all Jews27 according to criteria selected by every congregation. Demographic studies estimate28 that at most half of the numbers of Jews who qualify according to the strict rules of orthodox congregations have decided to become members of any congregation. To this sum should be added considerably more who through parentage, relations and family ties have some connection to Jewish life and experience. The number of Swedish citizens who according to this broad criterion could be considered as being affected by ‘the Jewish’ can be estimated to about twenty times the number of members in the Jewish congregations. In other words: around 150,000 persons in Sweden have some kind of connection with Jewish culture and tradition, although most of them would not consider themselves to be “Jewish”. To be recognized as a Jew one has to have close personal ties to the Jewish people and Jewish tradition and in addition describe oneself as such. In this meaning the number of Jews in Sweden today is somewhat fewer than 20,000. They constitute what I would call the Jewish population of Sweden.

26 There are also Jewish societies in Uppsala, Norrköping, Borås, Helsingborg, Västerås, Eskilstuna, Lund, Varberg and Härnösand.

27 According to halakha, the Jewish law practiced by orthodox rabbis, he/she is a Jew who was born by a Jewish mother or who has converted to Judaism after exami-nation by a recognized orthodox rabbi. The Jewish congregation in Stockholm also accepts membership of persons with a Jewish father but not a Jewish mother. Criteria for membership vary between the congregations.

28 By Sergio DellaPergola, professor of Jewish demographics at the Institute of Con-temporary Jewry, the Hebrew University, Jerusalem (DellaPergola, 1999a).

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In contrast to other European countries29 where the Jewish popula-tion was decimated in the Holocaust, more Jews live in Sweden than ever before.30 Most of them are well educated; they have a secular orientation and are clearly identified as Jews. It is rather more a his-torically determined cultural involvement with ‘the Jewish’ than reli-gious commitment that constitutes the basis for Jewish life in Sweden today. The initial paralysis that had resulted from the Holocaust has now, in the younger generation, begun to abate while at the same time Jews in the Diaspora, and in Sweden as well, more positively accept their cultural specificity and independence in relation to Israel, a con-nection that was natural for many Jews during the first decades of Israel’s existence.

During the first years of this millennium an investigation was con-ducted under my supervision (Dencik and Marosi, 2007). The subjects were a group of Jews registered as members of the three Jewish con-gregations. It emerged that almost all members of this group have a strong Jewish identity and that this above all derives from a feeling of belonging to the Jewish people and sharing the Jewish cultural heri-tage. The ethnic-cultural element is very strong in their Jewish iden-tification. The question “How important are the following aspects for your ‘feeling Jewish’?” was answered by a majority with “the feeling of being Jewish deep inside (e.g., as a personality, way of thinking, etc)”, “loyalty with my Jewish heritage” and “community with other Jews”.

Something similar to a Jewish cultural renaissance has swept over large parts of the Western world during the past decades. This is a matter of partly a new and modernistic cultural production which in various ways depicts Jewish experience and perspectives, and partly a revitalization of traditional culture such as klezmer music, now popu-lar also in non-Jewish circles. All over Europe new Jewish museums have been constructed, not only to provide knowledge about Judaism and Jewish history, but as manifestations of Jewish creativity, like the Jewish museum in Berlin. There is also an active Jewish museum in Sweden, a Jewish library, a Jewish film festival, a Jewish theater, a Jew-ish publisher, a Jewish cultural magazine ( Judisk krönika) etc. All these

29 Possible exceptions are France and Spain.30 At the time of the Nazi Machtübernahme in Germany the number of Jews in Sweden

was about 7000.


institutions are directed not only to the Jewish community but to the entire Swedish population.31

The Jewish community in Sweden satisfies all the criteria commonly used when defining a functioning civil society. One has voluntarily established a small, relatively autonomous society within society. One has a democratically elected governing body. One organizes and man-ages social welfare for members; there are daycare centers, schools and additional education. One also cares for religious, ritual and spiritual needs and there are clubs for e.g. youth, women, sports, and institu-tions; there is an intense cultural activity directed to the group as well as to the general public. Jewish cultural initiatives and activities during the past decades have been presented, not without a measure of proud self-consciousness, also to a wider public outside the inner circles of an initiated audience. This signifies a breach with a traditional Jew-ish attitude to stay ‘within the pale’ and to ‘lay low’ with respect to society in general. Part of the explanation for this can be found in a break-through for a pluralist cultural attitude resulting from the fact that Sweden has become much more multicultural.

From Mosaic Majority-embracing to Jewish Minority Consciousness32

Today the Jewish group in Sweden is one of five officially recognized “national minorities”. The road there displays an interesting line of development mirrored i.e. in the history of the Jewish magazine Judisk Krönika ( Jewish Chronicle). The magazine JUDISK (with capital letters) Krönika was founded a little more than seventy-five years ago, and at that time the Jewish congregations were called Mosaic congregations. The name signified much more than a different religion from that of the Christianity of the majority. In 1932 there were only ca. 7,000 Jews in the entire country. All of them were obligated to register as members of a Mosaic community—unless they converted and became

31 In this context it should be pointed out that because of the exposure to anti-Semitic attacks and other politically motivated threats even in Sweden, cultural events arranged by Jews or with an explicit Jewish content demand special security arrangements in order to be conducted with some safety for performers and audience. Together with harsh criticism of Israel this has contributed to a considerable decline of the revitalization that begun in the 1990s.

32 This portion is based upon my contribution to the 75th anniversary issue of Judisk Krönika (Dencik, 2007b).

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members of the Church of Sweden, a state church (which was not abolished until 2000, and into which ‘ordinary Swedes’ were born). Up till 1952 a Swede was obligated to be a member of a recognized religious community, that is either a Mosaic or a Christian congregation. The Swedish state church had their Christ, that is why they called themselves ‘Christian’. How then could Jews match this, especially as leading persons at that time (and many years before as well as after) at any price wished not to be seen as ‘Jews’, i.e. to be seen as a group of people unlike the majority (which in the end was something that happened, anyway)? Well, one had no Christ but a Moses—and that is how the group named themselves “Mosaic” in analogy with “Christian”. To emphasize to be “Jewish” rather than e.g. “believer in the Mosaic faith” at that time, as the newly founded magazine did, meant that one positively accepted one’s own cultural and ethnical distinction. This was something that Jewish leading circles and well-meaning—today we would say “politically correct”—non-Jews would not accept.

In one of the first issues of Judisk Krönika (May, 1933; shortly after Hitler’s Machtübernahme in Germany) we find an article titled “Nation eller konfession?” (Nation or confession?), in which it is stated “the question about the character of the Jewish community is one of the most discussed problems of our time”, and further that “only when the Enlightenment gradually had led to the emancipation of Jews in various countries, this Jewish problem emerged. At what price would the Jews in different countries buy a human existence?” The author’s answer was

what happened at that time may have been one of the largest self decep-tions in world history, when large numbers of the Jews wished to elim-inate the concept of a Jewish people and conjure away our national existence from the real world, when attempts were made at transforming the plurality of Jewish life into the superficial concept of a Jewish confession ( Judisk Krönika, Årg. 75, Nºs 5-6: 53).

In 1936 it is said in Judisk Krönika:

descent from another tribe has nothing to do with patriotism and citizen-ship. If that were so, a Lapp could not be a good Swedish citizen—as Jews we have to acknowledge that in no state in the world do we belong to the majority tribe. The Jews in France are not Gauls, Jews in England are not Anglo-Saxons, and the Jews in Sweden are not Vikings even though they might wish to be ( Judisk Krönika, Årg. 4).


The last phrase, that Swedish Jews might wish to be Vikings, was not far-fetched. This was in 1936. The temptation was great to hide one’s Jewishness considering what was already known about the anti-Jewish policies of Germany—a deeply understandable temptation. But as we now know, futile.

The question about “double loyalties” has frequently surfaced dur-ing debates about what we might call the ‘Jewish question’, also among Jews and in Judisk Krönika, even after the devastating war and the Holocaust. In an article (Nº 7, 1950) Ernst Benedikt approaches the question. With a series of historical examples he rejects the argument that Jews while accepting their national distinction would find them-selves in “the so called double loyalty problem”. This idea involves the notion—once again current among critics of today’s multicultur-alism—that the unity of a society is threatened by a diversity of ethnic groups among its citizens.

In the wake of the Jewish disaster in Europe, among a Jewry which—not least in Germany (in many ways also a model for the Swedish Jewry)—had followed a long road of self-effacement and assimilation, a new Jewish consciousness began to take shape. After what has happened to the Jews in Europe the Jewish group in the democratic Sweden will not be put off with just “sausage warmed up over a fire of hatred”, Judisk Krönika wrote 60 years ago ( Judisk Krönika, Årg. 75, Nº 5–6: 53).

From this point a position has developed, now established in Jew-ish Sweden, that Jews be considered not only, or even primarily, as a religious group among others, but that the Jewish group in Sweden is an ethnic/cultural/national minority with not only religious freedom but also with the rights to a civil life centered around an ethnic and cultural identity. This is a turning point for European Jewish self-con-sciousness. Neither Ghetto Judaism (whether imposed or voluntary) surviving from pre-modern times nor modern assimilationist Judaism had been a feasible way to survival, on the contrary. How then to move forward?

This turning point can be connected to the break-through of the idea of emancipation expressed by the Enlightenment and to the con-solidation of democracy in Europe. As was pointed out in Judisk Krönika already in 1933: “only with the effect of Enlightenment that Jewry was emancipated in different countries did the Jewish problem arise.” To be considered and to see oneself as a minority has completely differ-ent meanings and potential consequences during different phases of

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European history. In pre-democratic and pre-emancipatoric societies the minority status means that you are subject to the grace of the ruler and to his and the majority’s discretion. All Jews know that—the pogroms in Russia have left living imprints in Jewish awareness. The acceptance of a minority status is to choose exposure; instead one strived for equality in general, unconditional citizenship and equality before the law, frequently draped in the red flags of socialism. Even if that meant a certain measure of self-denial—which is quite under-standable.

The equation changes with unconditional citizenship and equality before the law and authorities, that is during post-emancipatory cir-cumstances. Acceptance of one’s cultural (or ‘ethnic’ or ‘national’—the words refer to the same fact) distinction and to demand the same respect as others enjoy, means that another step is taken, a qualitatively different step toward authentic equality. This is what has happened and still happens when Jews have been recognized as, and perceive themselves as a national minority in contemporary Sweden.

Excursus: Assimilation or Integration?

Assimilation and integration are concepts frequently used and frequently deliberately misused in the debate about immigrants and minorities. I will therefore give some short definitions. Assimilation means that an individual is included in an existing social community by becoming in socially significant respects the same as the others in this community. There are two processes of assimilation: one ‘osmotic’ or automatic assimilation whereby the individual gradually and without apparent social friction is absorbed and becomes as the others. An imposed or forced assimilation means that the individual is compelled by society—e.g. through upbringing, education or even violence or threats—to behave according to actual norms. Today in Sweden very few, with the exception of representatives of the tiny right-wing populist party Sverigedemokraterna (“the Sweden Democrats”, SD), openly recom-mend assimilation. Over an extended period of time however poli-cies toward immigrants and ethnic minorities have de facto aimed at assimilating, by various means, the ‘strange’ as much as possible into the national majority culture. In political rhetoric measures purely aimed at assimilation are often called integration policy. But integra-tion is something quite different. Integration implies a social process


whereby an individual may be included in a coherent social unity as an equal part while at the same time preserving his/her personal and cultural integrity.

Integration policy thus contains two elements: to work for the cre-ation or preservation of a unity, an ‘integrated’ whole, while new members are introduced and at the same time demonstrate respect and guard their individual and collective personal and cultural integ-rity. When individuals fail to assimilate or are not permitted to inte-grate into society, they become marginalized. While striving to assimilate to the norms and the lifestyle of the majority, persons with an ethnic-minority or immigration background lose their connections to their original group. In some cases it may happen that their ‘new’ man-ners and attitudes lead to such a strong distance from their original group that they are more or less excluded even there. At the same time they are not accepted as equals by the majority because of their obvious alienation. Such an individual then finds himself in a situa-tion where he is at the same time both outside his original culture and kept outside the majority community and is thus doubly marginal-ized. Exactly this is currently occurring for large groups of immigrants e.g. in Denmark—with devastating consequences both for the affected who find themselves in a normative limbo (with gangs developing their own, frequently harsh rules outside governing law and moral, express-ing itself in violence and criminality, often legitimized or mixed up with political and/or religious fanatism)—and for the majority who have to live side by side with these ‘outlaws’ and with the ensuing threats against security in general. In Denmark the policy of the past decade has resulted in such a double marginalization for relatively large groups of immigrants and refugees.

In contrast we have the results from a Swedish doctoral disserta-tion (Sterner-Carlberg, 1994) studying the integration of Jewish chil-dren into the Swedish society. Mirjam Sterner-Carlberg demonstrates that an opposite mechanism which she calls “double-integration” has been successful in integrating this Jewish group in the Swedish society. The Jewish children, mainly children of survivors from the Holocaust, were offered solid ties to their own culture while at the same time they were treated as equal members of the majority community. This laid the foundation for attitudes that have served the members of the group as well as society at large. The experience of a preserved integrity has developed alongside the experience of acceptance and integration into the Swedish society. The way the Jewish group preserved its own

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cultural distinction has been a sine qua non for its cultural survival and at the same time served as an important factor for the successful integra-tion of the Jewish community in Sweden. Bredefeldt (2008) has stud-ied economy, identity and assimilation among Jews in Stockholm and the Nordic countries during the decades before and after the turn of the century 1900. She reaches similar conclusions—“the Nordic Jews were different, yet the same.” (p. 200)

Jews and non-Jews

How do Swedish Jews perceive their relationship with the majority population of Sweden? To what extent is their social life affected by their being Jews? How do they relate to ‘others’, that is the now-Jewish people they live together with in the Swedish society? In a study based on a questionnaire performed in the beginning of the 2000s among the members of the three Jewish congregations in Sweden we included the following questions:33

– Could you in principle be married to a non-Jew?– How do you respond to the statement “A Jew ought to marry a Jew”?– How do you respond to the statement “If I had a son wishing to marry

a non-Jew I would do anything in my power to try to prevent that”?– How do you respond to the statement “If I had a daughter wishing to

marry a non-Jew I would do anything in my power to try to prevent that”?

– How do you respond to the statement “Assimilation is a greater danger to Jewry than anti-Semitism”?

33 In agreement with The Official Council of Swedish Jewish Communities and Institute for Jewish Policy Research in London who have coordinated similar investigations, and in cooperation with the then chairman of the Jewish Congregation in Gothenburg, Prof. Sigvard Rubenowitz, the sociologist Karl Marosi and I formulated the questionnaire Questions about Jewish life. The questionnaire was the basis for an investigation we pur-sued during the years around 2000 among members of the three Jewish congregations in Sweden. The questionnaire encompasses a little less than one hundred questions, of which several with sub-questions are concerned with how one experiences being Jewish, daily habits and experiences, and one’s attitude both to specific Jewish con-cerns and to more general personal and social issues. Cf. Dencik and Marosi, 2007.


At Christmas time• —do you have anything related to Christmas in your home?

a. Christmas gifts? b. Christmas food? c. Christmas decorations? d. Advent calendar? e. Christmas tree? f. Advent candles?

Do you believe there are attitudes, values and characteristics that are • more common among Jews than among others? What do you think is more common among Jews, and more common among others?

a. Care of the elderly b. Self consciousness c. Paranoia d. Intelligence e. Materialism f. Tolerance and respect for others g. Showiness h. Parsimony i. Leftist orientation

Sometimes you can hear that Jews are different from the majority • population in certain respects. What do you think are differences between the Jewish group and the rest of the population?

a. Strong feeling of belonging together b. Deep religious conviction c. Respect for law and order d. Support for the rights of women e. Racial prejudice f. Questionable business ethics g. Concern for the environment h. Divorce

Do you believe that Jews, because they are Jews, to a higher degree • ought to . . .

a. . . . contribute to charity? b. . . . aid victims of discrimination?

– How do you respond to the statement “In critical situations Jews can only trust other Jews”?

– How often do you find reportage in mass media biased or unfair with respect to Jews?

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– Do you believe that racism has increased or declined or is unchanged in Sweden over the past five years?

– Looking at anti-Semitism in particular—do you believe that it has increased or declined or is unchanged?

– Have you personally been exposed to anti-Semitism in Sweden during the past five years?

– How do you respond to the statement “Some Jews’ behavior may provoke anti-Semitism”?34

The exact distribution of responses to these questions can be found in Dencik and Marosi, 2007. In general the responses demonstrate that members of the Jewish congregations in Sweden have an open attitude to their non-Jewish surrounding, even though many have personally experienced anti-Semitism in Sweden. Even if assimilation is considered a threat, one participates to a certain extent in non-Jewish customs such as Christmas activities. When it concerns most of personal and human qualities one experiences no apparent difference between ‘the others’ and Jews—but somehow that there is a little more of everything among Jews and that there is a special responsibility, just for Jews.

Significantly more responded “yes” than “no” to the question if they in principle could consider marriage to a non-Jew. Even if more than half of the respondents could consider being married to a non-Jew, a nearly equally large portion considers it desirable for a Jew to marry another Jew. Thus the norm that a Jew ought to marry a Jew appears to be an ideal, but one which one regards rather pragmatically. This is emphasized by their attitude towards the possibility of their children wishing to marry a non-Jew. One in four would attempt to prevent this, while on the contrary double so many would reject engagement in the child’s choice of partner.35

34 The question whether the behavior of some Jews can contribute to anti-Semitism was regarded as so provocative by the Jewish congregation in Gothenburg that they did not wish to include the question there. But it could be asked of the members of the two other congregations. Interestingly two thirds of the members in Stockholm and Malmoe agreed with this statement.

35 Gender is not significant for the parents’ position. The reason why we asked about sons and daughters separately is that this is of significance for the grandchil-dren’s status as Jews. According to halakha (the traditional Jewish law) he/she is a Jew who has been born by a Jewish mother, not ‘only’ by a Jewish father. Therefore for some parents it could be more significant to prevent their sons from marrying non-Jewish women, because then their grandchildren would not be automatically Jewish.


However, even if parents in today’s Sweden accept the right for children to select partners and careers nearly half regard assimilation a greater threat than even anti-Semitism. It also demonstrated that those living together with a non-Jewish partner—approximately 1/3 of members of the Jewish congregations in Sweden—and in particu-lar those who have children with a non-Jew, to a large extent have adopted one non-Jewish custom such as e.g. recognize Christmas cel-ebration. Christmas gifts are distributed in about 20 percent of families where both partners are Jewish, and in over 70 percent of families where one of the partners is a Jew. You find a Christmas tree and advent calendar among very few families where both partners are Jew-ish, but among ca. 40 percent where one partner is Jewish. You find similar proportions regarding Christmas food, Christmas decorations and advent candles.

The questions concerning differences with respect to values and per-sonality between Jews and non-Jews, a majority of the respondents see no difference in eight of the specified areas: parsimony, showi-ness, tolerance and respect for others, materialism, leftist orientation, intelligence, paranoia, and self consciousness. The respondents see a marked difference when it comes to care of the elderly; two thirds of the members believe that this is more common among Jews, while almost no one thinks it is more common among others. There is a similar proportion albeit a little less pointed regarding self-conscious-ness, intelligence, showiness, and parsimony. Paranoia and tolerance and respect for others are considered to be more typical of Jews than others, but there is also a smaller number who think that those traits are more common among others. Leftist orientation is considered to be more common among non-Jews by a significant proportion of the respondents.

In several areas concerning one’s relationship to others a large majority is of the opinion that there is no difference compared to the rest of the population. Here we have issues such as questionable busi-ness ethics, concern about the environment, respect for law and order, support for women’s rights, racial prejudice, and deep religious con-viction. A significant part thinks that a strong feeling of belonging together is characteristic for Jews. Deep religious conviction is con-sidered by members to be more common among Jews than among others, while concern about the environment, support for women’s rights and, in particular, divorce is considered to be more characteris-tic among other than the Jewish population.

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A majority of respondents is not of the opinion that Jews, just because they are Jews, to some certain extent should contribute to charity; neither should they more than others assist persons who are victims of discrimination. However as many as between one third and a half do think that Jews just because they are Jews have a special responsibility and especially to assist victims of discrimination.

The feeling of belonging together holds an exceptional position among members. This is congruent with what we already have noticed, that being a Jew primarily is defined as being member of a people. Does that also mean that members think that they can trust only other Jews in critical situations? No, in fact many more distance themselves from this proposition than agree. It is also clear that those who have relatively few Jewish closer friends disagree to a larger extent than those whose friends are mostly Jews, which is not surprising. Among those who have relatively few Jewish friends only one in five agrees that in critical situations Jews can trust only Jews.

In distinction to how members perceive that the press treats Israel they generally do not think that Jews are unfairly treated by mass media. Only one in five thinks that this happens frequently while over 70 percent answers that this happen occasionally, rarely or never. Most of the respondents are of the opinion that racism has grown in Swe-den together with anti-Semitism. However, the number of members who think that anti-Semitism has grown is smaller than the number of those thinking that racism in general has grown in Sweden. None-theless do as many as every two member of the Jewish congregations in Sweden report that they have personally been exposed to anti-Semitism at some occasion. Half of them, that is every four member, has experienced this during the past couple of years.

The Dialectics of Diaspora

Judaism can be described as a “religion of the law”. “Religion” as one in Sweden calls it with a language influenced by Christendom is a concept that does not exist in biblical Hebrew. In Jewish texts it is denoted as “the teaching” or “the law” alternatively. In the Torah, that is the Five Books of Moses, which is the central part of the Hebrew Bible, you can find, as has already been mentioned, 613 mitzvot, com-mandments—obligations and prohibitions. Their main purpose is to regulate daily life, especially human interaction. In Judaism human


conduct and interaction are central, especially in relation to family, everyday life and society here on earth.

At the same time you live in a world where laws are written by others: the emperor, king, dictator, or the political representatives elected by the ethnic-cultural majority—who also oversee that these laws, which at times contradict Jewish laws,36 are respected. These are the givens—where do they take us? It is not far-fetched to assume that Jews in Diaspora always have constituted a religious and culturally distinct minority and in that position have developed a peculiar rela-tionship to power holders in society and political power. The signifi-cance of living in Diaspora, and its future is discussed fervently within contemporary Jewry (cf. Arendt and Feldman, 1978; Aviv and Shneer, 2005; Bauman, 1998; Ehrlich, 2009; Marienstras, 1975; Vital, 1990; Wasserstein, 1996; Wettstein, 2002). Many of these works are mainly pessimistic with respect to the Diaspora as a form of life capable of survival. But in recent years analyses have been presented which on the contrary point to special and positive qualities and perspectives offered by an existence in Diaspora, not only for the Jews in Diaspora but also for society, in particular the European society in general. One of them is Milan Kundera, the non-Jewish Czech author who in a noted essay “The Stolen West or The Tragedy of Central Europe” (1983) writes about the role of Jews in the Central-European culture before the Holocaust. To Kundera the Jewish presence in this Europe is the symbol of the best within the entire European cultural tradi-tion: “No part of the world has been so profoundly imprinted with the Jewish genius as Europe. Strangers everywhere and everywhere at home, standing above national disputes the Jews have been the most important cosmopolitical and integrating element in Europe in the 1900’s, its intellectual plaster, a condensation of its spirit, creator of its spiritual unity.” (Kundera, April 24, 1984)

A central maxim in the tract most consequently devoted to ethi-cal questions, Pirkei Abot (The Wisdom of the Fathers37) which is also

36 Cf. the Swedish prohibition to slaughter animals in accordance with Jewish ritual rules (shechita). The law was introduced in 1937, and Sweden is today the only country within EU to maintain the prohibition.

37 Pirkei Abot is a collection of rabbinical sayings and maxims from the Mishnaic period. Mishna is the first written redaction of what is called the “Oral Torah” (the law or teaching) which according to legend was handed to Moses by God at Mount Sinai at the same time as he received the Tablets with the written Torah. The Oral Torah contains explanations of the written Torah and both texts are equally valid. Mishna

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extensively discussed in Talmud, says: “Love work, hate lordship, and seek no intimacy with the ruling powers.” The part telling the reader (the Jew) to hate lordship and not be too intimate with power is of special interest in this context. It has always been a temptation and a risk for the Jews in Diaspora to approach the holders of worldly power. One explanation offered by Talmud is that those who come too close to power holders attract their attention and consequently become sub-ject to their whims; thereby they may lose both their possessions and lives. Another interpretation says that a person favored by power may easily become proud of himself and tempted to believe he belongs among the rulers. But rulers are treacherous, according to one com-mentary in Talmud; “even if they open their doors for him (the Jew) this may in the end be fatal for him” (Goldin, 1957)

As the quotations above demonstrate one element in the Diaspora-Jewish attitude is a suspicion towards holders of power—not nec-essarily the present rulers, but in principle and over the long run. Another element of the relationship to worldly power is humility. Not because it is attractive or so, but simply because one is aware that as a small minority one will never have such power and it would be futile to try and use power to arrange society according to one’s own ideals and values.38

Instead of striving after power the result is that peaceful forms for cooperation with the rulers should be established. Already Jeremiah tells the Jews in the Babylonian captivity “And seek the best for the city whither I caused you to be carried away captive, and pray unto the LORD for it; for in the welfare thereof shall ye fare well” (29:7). The first Jewish sages in the Babylonian exile spoke of this as dina de-malkhuta dina—the law of the kingdom is the law, that is, the laws of the worldly rulers are also the laws of the individual Jew. By later rabbis this principle was raised into a Jewish law. Thus they offered a halakhic (according to Jewish religious law) foundation for the Jews to obey non-halakhic laws. In this way the exercise of power was not only left

contains rabbinical discussions from the first centuries of Diaspora (ca. 70–200 C.E.). Mishna is the central portion of Talmud and further rabbinical discussion of Mishna during the following three centuries were redacted as the Gemara, incorporated in Talmud.

38 Simon Dubnow, Russian-Jewish historian and Diaspora-theoretician, expresses this in his essay Autonomism, “. . . In view of its condition in the Diaspora, Jewish nation-ality cannot strive for territorial or political isolation, but only for social and cultural autonomy” (quoted from Mendes-Flohr and Reinharz, 1980: 337).


to non-Jewish rulers—Jewish law also legitimized it. Michael Walzer et al. maintain in The Jewish Political Tradition that this “gave rise to what might be called a theory of submission” (Walzer et al. 2000: 432). From that on the question is not whether “the law of the kingdom rules” but how far this maxim can be stretched in every situation and how to draw the line. Not to fight for power, but tactically find a space in which it is possible to control one’s submission.

To gain support and acceptance for this among the Jews—something that was considered necessary already among the classical rabbis—worldly rule should be brought to be founded on at least a minimum of righteousness. Herein were included two aspects: first that the laws or the principles for ruling be explicit—in contrast to arbitrary—so that the subjects know what to observe; secondly that the laws should be equal for all—in contrast to being openly discriminatory. Only on these conditions could the principle of dina de-malkhuta dina be valid. More could not be demanded by a small Jewish minority—in fact, one could usually not expect more from non-Jewish power holders.

In conclusion: rather than to try to gain power the typical Diaspora-Jewish attitude to the power of society has been to establish a working relationship to it; rather than to seek conflict the typical approach has been to cherish a good relationship; conversation before confrontation; to compromise and find a modus vivendi rather than to perish in heroic death. A minority dependent on the grace of ‘strange’ rulers always finds itself in a precarious situation. What can be done to attain a secu-rity as comprehensive as possible? How to establish a good relation-ship with the rulers? Those were the questions of the Jews in Diaspora. Frequently the answer was: to find positions as useful, needed, con-tributing to societal welfare and development. Sometimes as finan-ciers of expansion and the wars of the rulers, at times as specialized craftsmen and advisors, as openers of new trade relations, introducers of industrial and technological novelties and later, in modern times as entrepreneurs and contributors to science and culture. The Jewish tradition of strongly emphasizing learning and study has to a large extent contributed to this.

To be obligated or perhaps forced to follow the “law of the king-dom” in issues that are not central in the halakha is not a real problem. But what happens when the “law of the kingdom” is in direct conflict with the law of the “King of Kings”, that is God? That is, when the non-Jewish ruler/law maker extends his jurisdiction from the secular sphere to the religious and tries to govern the religious life of the Jews?

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If so happens—and it has happened several times in history—Jews are compelled to commit isura, the Hebrew term for what is religiously forbidden. In the worst of cases to completely abandon their Jewish faith through forced conversion to the religion of the dominant people. When this was imminent flight was the only solution—if that was pos-sible. Jewish history covers many such events. The best-known and decisive example even for our times is the expulsion of the Jews from al-Andalus in 1492.39 In the times of Ghetto-Judaism, that is before the Enlightenment and the emergence of the nation-state forced isura was not a common problem; within the Ghetto Jews were usually allowed to follow their own laws.40 With the emergence of the modern nation-state and later the birth of democracy the power of the state was to extend to the civil life of social groups to a larger extent than ever before. In a significant speech to the French National Assembly on December 23, 1789 (during the French revolution), Count Clermont-Tonnerre said “We must refuse everything to the Jews as a nation and accord everything to Jews as individuals” (Mendes-Flohr and Rein-harz, 1980: 104). As an individual the Jew should be granted the same civil rights as all citizens. But the Jews are denied the right as a com-munity to care for and express their ‘national’ (in this case meaning ‘cultural’) distinction.

In connection with national modernization projects during the 1800s and in the beginning of the twentieth century general conscrip-tion to the army (in which it would be hard to observe the religiously conditioned Jewish rules of life) was introduced in many nation-states as well as civil laws for marriage and divorce etc. and this gave the rabbis large problems. Where should the line be drawn for the secular power to legitimately regulate the life of an individual Jew? During the ongoing modernization project the line between the power of the state

39 As when large numbers of Jews hastily were forced to leave the Iberian Peninsula to escape the Castilian queen Isabella’s conquests and the demands for Jewish con-version to Christianity. The Jews found refuge in North Africa and in the Ottoman empire where they frequently preserved their medieval-Spanish mother tongue, Ladino and developed their own Sephardic (in distinction to the Ashkenazi = German/Eastern-European) culture. In the same year, 1492, Christopher Columbus launched his exploration which would ‘discover America’. According to some theories (cf. Wiesen-thal, 1973) in reality this was an attempt by the ‘hidden Jew’ Columbus to discover a new refuge for his desperate countrymen.

40 However frequently exposed to insults and anti-Jewish riots—not least during social unrest and Christian holidays such as Easter when anti-Jewish sentiment was aroused and often funneled into assaults upon the Ghetto or the shtetl (village/small town).


and a relative autonomy for various groups of citizens was increasingly unclear. With the establishment of the modern secular welfare state and of the democratic system the principle of dina de-malkhuta dina was also extended.

That does not mean that the Jewish group has stopped claiming its rights to cultural distinction and a certain civil autonomy. Under modern social relations the method to gain and maintain this is nego-tiation with the secular state apparatus41 and with non-Jewish power holders in society. In critical situations when the “law of the kingdom” truly conflicts with that of “the King of Kings” a Jew in the final instance has to accept the “law of the kingdom”. The most important for Jewry, more important than to follow divine laws, even for pious Jews, is to save lives. If that means to break the “law of God” it is not only right to do so, it is an imperative. This principle is called Pikuach nefesh (to save a soul, to save a life). To save a human being (also one’s own life) is a priority above all, also above that to follow “the law”, if necessary.

In his book Shulamits väg. Om makt och frihet i judiskt perspektiv (Shulam-it’s way. About power and freedom from a Jewish perspective, 1998) the Swedish mathematician and writer Per Molander explores “the possibilities of the weaker part in a power relationship to survive with his integrity intact” and he notices “A large number have survived by giving up their integrity” (ibid.: 7). Molander works himself through history and finds that the relationship between the Jewish people and their social environment illustrates with clarity the inherent instability in every power relation. The Jewish experience is of course extreme, Molander says, but from “the various and usually successful Jewish strategies in relation to superior powers all of us have something to learn.” (ibid.: 8) The central question is “how, in spite of oppression and fragmentation, has the Jewish civilization survived with an intact integrity? How has this been possible? How has this, in most encoun-ters the weaker part, been able to find his way?” (ibid.: 265) Molander gives the answer: “Mobility is the key word. The necessity of geograph-ical mobility has over the centuries cultivated an inner, intellectual mobility . . . rootlessness was forced and mobility the given response.” (ibid.: 281)

41 For an international discussion about the political significance of secularism cf. Kosmin and Keysar, 2007.

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Here we find the source of what I would call the dialectics of Diaspora. It is through this that the Jewish relationship to power, exertion of power, powerlessness and exposure has developed and turned into a kind of generalized and internalized Diaspora-Jewish attitude. An attitude that over time also has laid the foundation for the relatively good integration in modern society, as in today’s Sweden. Molander points out that mobility has become one of the most important assets of the Jewish people, and that is one of history’s ironies. It has been conditioned by, and in turn leads to

the fundamentally open structure of Jewish belief and culture, in sharp contrast to the often far-reaching and rigid rules for the organization of every day life. The critical attitude has permeated relations to superior powers and been inherent in procedures governing the development of the rules. Outer organization has been polycentric, which has contrib-uted to a capacity to learn among the believers. Rigid rules governing the daily life have above all served to strengthen identity. This strange combination of flexibility in what is important and rigidity in details explains the survival of Judaism (ibid.: 271).

The strategy for survival has been standing on two legs: alliance and mobility. Interaction between the two has lead to what I have called “the art of being Jewish” in the title of this article. Such an attitude has not only survived, it has been the condition for survival and in today’s society it has even become a general necessity for many groups other than the Jewish. “The world has . . . become more Jewish” is Molander’s final statement (ibid.: 315).

Another more general way to say this would be that in today’s soci-ety the distinction between power and powerlessness is less obvious and unambiguous, more flowing than it has traditionally been. All of us have to be more mobile, more open to new alliances, more flexible and therefore more careful to protect our integrity than ever before. In short: live according to the dialectics of Diaspora.

DOES EUROPEAN JEWRY NEED A NEW ETHNIC SPIRITUAL UMBRELLA? REFLECTIONS

Yosef Gorny

The title of this presentation is an outcome of the concept of Klal Yisrael which directed the intentions and initiatives of organizing this confer-ence on European Jewry. Traditionally and verbally this term means Am Yisrael—the Jewish people. But at the beginning of the twentieth century it became a political slogan of those who demanded the unity of the Jewish people in Russia in their struggle for equal citizenship and political rights. The demand for ethno-national unity was rejected at that time by the ultra Orthodox Jewry and the ultra Socialist secular Jewish party—the Bund. This rift symbolizes that in the last century Klal Yisrael was covered, in its rainy and shiny days, by four confront-ing spiritual, ideological and political “umbrellas”: the religious, the liberal ethnic, the Zionist political, and the Socialist national. Not to mention the deep split in the religious concept between the Orthodox, Reform and Conservative Jewish versions.

Historically, these diverging splits in the Jewish society were moti-vated by several progressive developments in the modern Western general society since the French revolution, such as: Liberalism, nationalism, Socialism, political self-determination, political equality, and others. For all these historical phenomena with their positive and negative meaning the Second World War became a border-line from different well known aspects: most of them concerning the existence of the Jewish people in positive or negative ways; meaning, the rise of the new Jewish centers in the USA and especially the founding of the State of Israel on one hand, and the Shoah and the new anti-Semitism on the other hand.

Altogether the new Jewish world situation can be defined as one that solved the problem of the individual Jew, and raised a question about the Jewish collective entity. The individual Jew now potentially enjoys the double freedom of an equal citizenship in the country he lives in, or in the Jewish state in Israel, or even in both of them. But for the Jews as a collective entity in the different open and liberal soci-eties the definition is much more complicated. This difficulty brings

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up the question, in modern, political and sociological terms, who are the Jews: a transnational Diaspora, as Eliezer Ben-Rafael explains? An ethno-national religious entity, as Gabi Sheffer indicates? Or both of them, as a unique historical Jewish phenomenon, as I would like to suggest (see Ben-Rafael and Sternberg, 2009: 1–25; Gorny, 2009: 237–249; Sheffer, 2009: 375–396).

Actually, I doubt whether there are principal differences between those three terms, because from the historical approach they are com-pleting and negating each other in parallel. We may find a support to this assumption in the opening remarks for this conference made by Charlotte Knobloch, the Vice President of the European Jewish Congress (EJC). She indicated the mission of the Congress as a fight against anti-Semitism and the support of the security of Israel, based on the assumption that the future of European Jewish identity “will depend to a high degree on the fact of how far the communities will succeed with religious integration of their members.” This opinion of one of the important political personalities in the Jewish public life in Europe brings me to the topic of my presentation—the future of the European Jewry as a collective entity.

Since I am a historian and not an expert of the present “Jewish situation” in the European community, I have more questions than answers. My main question starts with the future developments in the European community: for example, will they bring in the long-run a creation of a multi-national and multi-cultural Europe? Then the question concerning the Jews will be: who are they—a religious group or a united ethno-religious-national entity?

The question is unique for the European Jewry because the Euro-pean Federation is based on national cultural states and not on admin-istrative units as in the USA. Here it must be indicated that in the last hundred years the European Jewry went through two different and confronting developments: on the one hand, the cultural, political, and economic integration, and on the other hand, the ethno-national sepa-ration which was caused by anti-Semitism and its tragic outcome—the Holocaust. In other words, one process diminished gradually the Jewish collective exceptional existence, and the other intensified it. But it is important to signify that all the Jewish political and cultural modern movements, between the two World Wars, were preaching the integration in the general society as a collective ethnic entity. The Bund believed in the future Socialist multi-cultural proletarian society; and the national liberals supported the democratic cultural national autonomy in the new democratic society.

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The most complicated and interesting approach was the Zionist one, because of negating in principle the Exile morally, and at the same time accepting it pragmatically. It is interesting to underline that the most important Zionist thinker, Ahad Ha’am, clarified the difference between the subjective spiritual and psychological negation of exile (Shelilat Ha’galut) by the majority of the Jews and its objec-tive acceptance as a possible necessary autonomous way of life at the same time. It should be indicated that the difference between the two rival friends—the historian Dubnow and Ahad Ha’am—was on the question, how far is the Jewish national autonomy in Eastern Europe dependent on the national center in Eretz Israel, then Palestine. For Ahad Ha’am the Hebrew center in the historical land was indispen-sable for the future national, political, and cultural existence in exile. As for Dubnow, he didn’t deny the importance of the Hebrew center in Palestine, but only for a certain small elite of Jewish intellectuals, while for the predominant Jewish majority he believed that the Yid-dish language and culture protected by a political autonomy was the only way to fortify the national continuity of the Jewish people in the Diaspora—Galut, in his terms.

It should be pointed out that the term national-cultural-autonomy had a universal meaning as an important principle of the progressive national and Socialist ideologies. This trend, intended to bring to an end the Jewish almost complete exceptional existence by integrating them in the general modern political trends, became even stronger between the two World Wars. The most prominent and eloquent political defender of this idea was the Zionist leader in Poland—Yitzhak Greenbaum. He was also one of the central figures in the European Minorities League. For Greenbaum as for the right-wing Zionist leader Ze’ev Jabotinsky the solution for the Polish Jewry was only partly by emigration. Their suggestion—in the 1930s—was that only one million of the Jews would be able to immigrate to their home in Palestine, which meant that the predominant majority of Jewish people would have remained in Poland, and of course in Europe. It should be mentioned that at this time the Soviet Jewry who went through an intensive integration process was on its way to lose com-pletely its Jewish collective exceptional being.

As a result of the Second World War, the Holocaust of European Jewry, and the founding of a Jewish state in Eretz Israel—the hope arose that the phenomenon of Jewish exceptional existence came to its historical end by the human tragedy and by the national achievement. The remains of the Jewish people in the flourishing Western countries

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were very rapidly integrated in the general society. Even the emigra-tion of most Soviet Jews to Israel and to the Western countries was a step towards the end of Jewish singularity.

In the late decades, since the large European community was estab-lished, the status of European Jewry might change. Assuming that in the future the united European countries will form a multi-ethno-national and multi-cultural-political entity, a question comes to mind: what will be the status of the Jewish European people? The dilemma is, will it be a kind of trans-national Diaspora like the North-African and the Turkish Moslem entities—or will a different status be needed for them?

First of all, it should be underlined that in spite of the tragic his-torical experiences the Jews are a part of Europe since more than a thousand years! Secondly, the Jews are not a one dimensional cultural, lingual, and economic singular entity like the Moslems. On the con-trary, as individual intellectuals, politicians, and economic entrepre-neurs they are deeply rooted in the general European society. And hopefully this situation will not change in the future. So the concern should be not the position of an individual Jew but the status of Jews as an ethnic group in the future European community. Without this collective ability the Jews might become again an exceptional entity in the new European society. The paradox is that at the present the Jewish pluralistic entity has many features of the present European society, like cultural and even religious variety. But this kind of plural-ism will be exactly the Jewish problem in the future Europe, because it will be composed by the ethno-national cultural territorial entities, and not by individual citizens like in the USA. So what is the possible outcome of this unique Jewish collective problematic question? My answer, from the ideological and theoretical point of view, is embodied in the metaphor “ethnic umbrella”.

This emphasizes the unique need compared to other ethnic nation-alities and Diasporas in Europe. But the meaning is not a separa-tion from the European society but a collective integration in it, as an ethnic entity. Actually, the Jewish “ethnic umbrella” should be a compensation for the lack of a national language and territory. And it symbolizes the idea of Klal Yisrael in the present time. And it should be said openly and clearly that in our time Klal Yisrael is identical with the Zionist spiritual idea, as Ahad Ha’am, from the beginning, and even Dubnow, a few years before the Second World War, conceived it.


Among the modern Jewish ideological and political movements Zionism represented the Klal Yisrael phenomenon more than the others: the Bund was mainly a Socialist party of the East European workers. The folk party influenced by Dubnow’s national autonomist theory was an East European middle class liberal party. The Reform and Conservative modern religious movements were based mostly in the United States of America, and partially in different versions among the middle class in Central and Western Europe.

Zionism, on the opposite, although not representing the majority of the Jewish people was the biggest, most pluralistic, and multi-cultural democratic spiritual and political Klal Yisrael movement. Even in the present time, when Zionism isn’t any more an inspiring ideological and political movement in the Diaspora and in Israel, its Klal Yisrael principle is still needed for the collective existence of the Jewish peo-ple. At this point it is needed to state that the idea of Klal Yisrael in its Zionist version expresses the principles of sociological and political theories concerned with the phenomenon of the post-modern socie-ties. First of all, it was trans-national because of its intention to repre-sent the Jewish dispersed people. Secondly, it indicated the connection between the Jewish Diaspora and its homeland—Eretz Israel at the beginning, and later the State of Israel. Thirdly, because of the concept of a national permanent union between Diaspora and homeland.

Julius Schoeps has in his opening lecture at this conference correctly underlined that in the future the most exciting question for Europe’s Jews will be “the link to Israel and the American Jewish community, as well, what will possibly divide them”. But in principle, the relations between the three centers are different. The American and European Jewish centers are Diasporas, with trans-national ethno-religious fea-tures, but Israel is a homeland in the historical and present aspects. Does it mean that the State of Israel is the center of world Jewry? I doubt it, because of the universal nature of the global society that tends to be more and more universal and multi-cultural than self-sufficient Diasporas. In face of these tendencies a center or even centers are not accepted anymore, and any peripheral status is rejected.

Regarding the particular Jewish aspect, it should be noted that the Jewish people are divided into two main different societies beyond the differences in their political status and cultural contents. The Jewish Diaspora, in the present and for the future, expresses first of all the greatest individual achievements in Jewish history. On the other hand,

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Israel is the greatest collective achievement in modern Jewish history. In contrast, it has to be underlined that in the Diaspora the belonging to any Jewish collective frame is a personal choice, while in Israel, on the opposite, it is a citizen’s obligation. This diverse nature of the two Jewish phenomena—the state and the Diaspora—raises the question: what is the present meaning of the ideological and political term Klal Yisrael ?

First of all, the term center has to be replaced by the term centrality. A center can be defined by a combination of several components: military power, economic wealth, and cultural richness; each, together with its dependent periphery makes the center a predominant and hegemonic factor in human history at certain periods. On the other hand, centrality, in my opinion, is a more vague combination that does not include political power, but does express a complex of psy-chological attachment, spiritual motives, religious belief, historical memory, personal longings, and cultural ties. The centrality principle should be the value-oriented and mutual motivation basis of the Klal Yisrael concept. This mutuality, in spite of various and even different political interests, must be based first of all on the feelings of Jewish fraternity and the principles of mutual commitment; as well as on the recognition that the Jews as a historic people have not only the right for collective existence, not only as an existential collective principle, but as a moral obligation as well.

From this point of view, the traditional Jewish and Zionist nega-tion of exile—Shelilat Ha’galut—changes from objective understand-ing into subjective feeling, in the sense that those Jews who wish to maintain their national “togetherness” will stand up against the objec-tive disintegrating process among the Jewish people in the Diaspora and in Israel as well. This diverging objective process, in our time, for subjective “Shelilat Ha’galut”, is meaning not that the Galut endan-gers the lives of Jews; not because they are discriminated in their host societies as individuals and as a group; not because of their economic distress; and not because in the present they are victims of severe anti-Semitism. The opposite is true. Their situation has changed com-pletely and therefore they are in danger of shrinkage and disintegra-tion. European Jewry is the one that faced this kind of danger more than the Jews in USA and in Israel. And the reasons are clear, as follows. European Jewry, although its majority belongs to the Euro-pean community is the most divided Jewish center. It is multi-lingual, multi-cultural and divided by local political interests.


Paradoxically, the state of Israel that expressed the hope of Jewish unity is in the present a divided society, as an outcome of its achieve-ment to ingather the various Jewish cultures. But this is not the issue of our conference and the purpose of my presentation. So, to sum up, I may say the following: I accept the optimistic view of Ben-Rafael and Sheffer about the future collective existence of European Jewry. At the same time I share Schoeps’ hesitation about the possibility of creating a Jewish center in the European community. My aim was the concern about the future status of the Jewish collective entity in the united multi-ethnic European society. And that brings me to the real objective Jewish collective need, to strengthen its political and cultural ties with the spiritual motherland—Israel—in the same way as the European nations. By doing so the European Jewry will be a normal part of this new political society, and not, once again, an exceptional entity inside this society. So, paradoxically, in the future to be a natu-ral part of Europe, the Jewish community should be an active part of the world Klal Yisrael, with Israel in the center, although not being its center.

FAREWELL TO EUROPE?ON FRENCH JEWISH SKEPTICISM ABOUT THE

NEW UNIVERSALISM

Pierre Birnbaum

Philip Roth’s double, a tireless advocate of the Jews’ return to Europe, negotiates with Lech Walesa, who declares in the name of Solidarity: “Poland needs Jews.” Roth’s usurper insists, “Virtually everything we identify culturally as Jewish has its origins in the life we led for centu-ries among European Christians.” He predicts the “resettlement of the Jews to Europe” and, “in the year 2000, the pan-European celebra-tion of the reintegrated Jews” will be held in Berlin to celebrate their return, their flight from Israel, which is like a “Jewish Belgium” with all its faults but without even a “city like Brussels” to show for it. The real Philip Roth, who can hardly believe his ears, exclaims, “that’s the best idea yet! The Germans particularly will be delighted to usher in the third millennium of Christianity with a couple of Jews holding a welcome-home party at the Brandenburg Gate.” (Roth, 1993: 31, 42, 126, 137) Indeed, the history of the Jews since time immemorial has been largely intertwined with the destiny of Europe, and with this astonishing desertion they would resume their normal place in the continent, justifying Nietzsche’s dictum that, “They themselves know best that a conquest of Europe or any kind of act of violence on their part is not to be thought of, but they also know that at some future time Europe may fall into their hands like a ripe fruit if they would only just extend them.”1

Yet it was serious doubt about such assimilation into European soci-eties that aroused the scornful condemnation of thinkers like Ahad Ha-am or Simon Dubnow, who regarded entry to the modern univer-salist mode of emancipation as the highest stage of servitude: in their view, French Jews then became complete slaves. Ha-am and Dubnow, in contrast, meant to promote the return to Zion or the renewal of

1 Quoted by Pierre Bouretz in his fine book: Bouretz, 2009: 51. English trans. Ansell-Pearson and Large, 2006: 203.

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popular Jewish consciousness. Gershom Sholem’s departure for Pales-tine alone expresses the refusal of assimilation to European modernity, the negation of a symbiosis regarded as futile but pursued by many European Jewish intellectuals, and the distrust of academic or artistic success seen as artificial, arbitrary, and designed to arouse torments of the soul as well as suspicion. In this sense, the destiny of Europe and of the Jews is fundamentally intertwined. It is in Europe, too, that the Jews experienced violent and humiliating expulsions, whether from Spain to Germany or England to France; it is there that they encountered radical anti-Semitic hatred provoked by the refusal of their presence as The Other, a uniquely alien presence at the heart of deeply Christian societies; it is in Europe, too, that anti-Judaism, alongside anti-Semitic racism, found their chosen terrain, and finally, it is there where, from the inquisition to the Holocaust, with many pogroms along the way, they faced the ultimate tragedy.

Can contemporary Europe once again become a place where Jew-ish life can flourish, a new “pillar” alongside the USA and Israel,2 a continent of plenty for the “new Jews”? (Avid and Shneer, 2005) Is this renaissance a dream, a fulfillment—or a tragic result of Philip Roth’s nightmare? Will it be judenrein, a place where all that survives are the museums and memorial sites visited by busloads of tourists attracted by a vanished history? Nowadays these questions assume a particularly dramatic aspect for French Jews, the key actors in an eventual renewal of European Judaism, at the heart of this immense arena of 27 nations where the Jews comprise a tiny minority of around a million and a half inhabitants. This is partly because French Jews currently repre-sent the most important Jewish population in Europe and their history symbolizes a paradigm example of universalist assimilation through a strong state, an example that clashes directly with the representation of a postnational European sphere. It is also because France embodies a vision of the Enlightenment as more radical, more rationalistic and hostile to national identities, a kind of utopia of embodied reason initi-ated by apparently disembodied citizens, and exported across Europe by force of arms in the name of a messianic vision for which it merely became the innocent instrument of every strategy for conquest. France symbolizes an open place for the Fools of the Republic who have reached the pinnacle of the state, but also a centralized sphere highly condu-

2 On this topic, see Bodemann, 2008.

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cive to Jewish studies, to an autonomous, active community life which has survived for a long period under strict state control.

More or less confined to its own backyard, French society continues pursuing its universalist dream embodied by its state à la Max Weber, a strong state with extreme differentiation of identities that hardly fits the logic of transnational Europe with its essential horizontal solidar-ity that is emerging now. Consequently, from the viewpoint of French Jews, does Europe constitute an opportunity to reaffirm their values that have been jeopardized by etatist logic, to create an opening towards other Jews in the transnational logic of a Europe now open to horizontal solidarity? Or does it represent a danger, a challenge of a unique history shaped by a strong state that sees itself being progres-sively smothered? Does it symbolize absolute evil, determined to solve the “Jewish question” at all costs? French Jews confront these issues much more heatedly and radically than other European Jews, who are concerned with their original fate.

Day by day, Europe is becoming more of an issue in Franco-French disputes, particularly because the exceptionalism of French society, both in its intransigent Catholic and its radical republican version, makes it remote from an European idea that would threaten the very paradigm of the nation-state to which each version is attached, for opposite reasons. French Jews display a very special attachment to this nation-state, from which they expect assistance and protection. When, during their Babylonian exile and in accordance with Jeremiah’s rec-ommendations, Jews of all countries prayed fervently for the health of their king or emperor, if they sang the praises of the absolutist Spanish kings or authoritarian emperors who do not spare them, if they prayed for Queen Victoria of democratic England, if on each Shabbat or at royal occasions they extolled the virtues of their sovereigns, struck up litanies and recited poems soliciting the help and divine intervention of the King of Kings (Sapperstein, 1996), in France these blessings were invested with much stronger significance. They were seen as proof of attachment to this exceptional nation-state with its unique attributes of power, a strong state that could protect the Jews better than any other. In this sense, the royal alliance assumed an almost unique meaning in France, illustrating the very strength of the institutionalized and differentiated state that extended its protection to the Jews as it did to all its subjects or—later—citizens. In exile, the entire submission to a particularly powerful state seems to justify this vertical alliance by fear of people, the mob, neighbors. From this perspective, as Yosef

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Yerushalmi shows, it is better to be “servants of kings and not servants of servants” (Yerushalmi, 2002), in the hope, despite numerous disap-pointments, of surviving in very uncertain conditions.

From Louis XIV to Napoleon or Louis-Philippe and Napoleon III, the Jews sanctified their sovereign’s name with passion, devotion and even idolatry, loving their formidable kings and emperors passionately. Particularly from the Jews’ standpoint, “the law of the kingdom is the law”, and they submitted to it gladly because it was supposed to pro-tect them from the prejudices and jealousy of the masses. The Jews venerated the body of the king or emperor and implored the Everlast-ing to watch over him, protect him, and help him win his battles. Thus the Jews prayed for Charles X in the synagogue of Notre Dame de Nazareth in Paris in 1824:

French Israelites! Under the wing of a wholly paternal government and under the auspices of just and protective laws, there are no excuses for any of us to stray from the path of honor . . . we ask the King of Kings that after a very long and happy life, a Bourbon will always succeed a Bourbon. This is a request to the bountiful God to grant everlasting happiness to the beautiful country of France.

Of course, the advent of the Republic changed things considerably. Nowadays, the prayer for the Republic is recited:

Eternal God, Lord of the world, your providence embraces the heavens and the earthYours is the strength and the power: you alone make everything grow and become strong. From your holy dwelling place, oh Lord, bless and protect the Republic of France and the French People . . .Let the rays of your light shine on those who preside over the destinies of the state so that order and justice may prevail in our country (quoted in Birnbaum, 2005: 69, 122).

These days French Jews pray both for the republican state and the French people, which have become sovereign and to which they belong as equal citizens. However, in France the predominance of the state, even in its republican form, has long been unquestionable to the point that its citizens almost invariably identify with it and appeal to it to regulate their disputes, resolve social conflicts and ensure the basis of consensus. The very militant concept of citizenship makes the bond so secure that the public sphere is practically identified with a state sphere whose unity fits poorly in the European sphere.

For whom, then, should we pray in a context so profoundly alien to the French-style strong state? The fact that Jews in France always


recite prayers for the Republic directly begged the question of a prayer for Europe, and European Rabbis drew up the text. On June 5, 2008, at the inauguration of the Great Synagogue of Brussels, Chief Rabbi Albert Guigui made the following speech:

I would like to begin by addressing Mr. José Manuel Barroso, president of the European Commission. Mr. President, I would like to thank you for your constant help and support. . . . Thank you for agreeing that our synagogue should bear the title ‘The Great Synagogue of Europe’. We shall shortly recite two prayers. The first, Yizkor, invites us to commemo-rate our six million fellow Jews exterminated in the Shoah . . . because Europe lost itself in the horror there; I will say, and I will not cease to repeat: never again. The second prayer will be dedicated to Europe. It invites us to consider the nature of religious or ethnic communities in a multicultural society. The prophet Jeremiah expressed the most beautiful words on this subject 2700 years ago. Jeremiah defined forever what it meant to belong to a religious minority living in a foreign community. ‘Work for it. Contribute to its development. Consider its well-being as your own’, he explained. If there were such a thing as a European Jew-ish message, as a Jew I would say that this message of Europe should be a message of inclusion, not assimilation . . . Europe today is the site of a puzzle where all the different pieces are necessary but none is suf-ficient to define the identity of what is being built. Well, Judaism, with its long experience of this, identifies very strongly with the European construction.

Here we have a prayer for Europe recited in Brussels in the presence of representatives of European institutions and diplomatic corps. How-ever, it lacks the force and intensity of the near-idolatrous prayers that illustrated the strength of the bonds between the French Jews and their king, their state; and Mr. José Barroso is certainly not the incarna-tion of one of those powerful monarchs of bygone days. Indeed, more recently, at the official investiture of Chief Rabbi Gille Bernheim as Chief Rabbi of France on February 1, 2009, he gave a lengthy speech at the synagogue in the rue de la Victoire, and declared:

I am aware, Madame Minister, of all the attention the president of the Republic, the prime minister and yourself give the Jewish community of France, and of your great concern that the Jews, who have been a very old and very loyal component of our nation for centuries, feel secure, appreciated and listened to among the many identities that make up the rich human resources of our country. Be assured that, for my part, I will not spare any efforts to make the French nation proud of its Jews. . . . For the Jews were once proud of France! The French Jews, and the whole world . . . until the terrible fracture of the Shoah and Vichy. Nobody can underestimate the consequences of the Shoah, not just for the Jews but for the whole of the West.

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In fact, Europe as such is entirely absent from this recent speech, which demonstrates the strong, perduring bond between French Jews and their nation-state, even though the Shoah and Vichy have changed many things. Europe does not figure on the horizon of Chief Rabbi Bernheim. At the end of the ceremony, the prayer for the Republic and the prayer for Israel were both recited in Hebrew and French. No trace of the prayer for Europe. Its omission in this ceremonial context is striking: French Jews still pray for the state, but not for Europe. They do not seem to expect anything from Europe, nor hope for any special protection from it. Given the fracture caused by the Shoah and Vichy, the vertical alliance remains the only strategy for Jews. Not only do they fail to recite the prayer for Europe—it also seems to be missing from their political imagination.

The advent of Europe brought profound changes. A new “imagined community”, the symbolic European system with its flags, its single currency, a passport that dispenses with the states’ internal borders, and its legal and judicial system, is gradually affecting people’s mental-ity. An immense distance is emerging in relation to this potential Euro-pean State, and the sparse presence of Jews in the corridors of Brussels cannot serve as a functioning substitute for their privileged links to the national state. In the same way, the “Fools of the Republic” who personified the symbiosis between the Jews and the French-style state can only disappear at the European level, for the European bureau-cracy operates different rules of recruitment. The end of the Jews of state in Brussels illustrates the reversal of the relations that bound the Jews to their state for so many centuries in France (Birnbaum, 1994. [Engl. trans.: Birnbaum, 1996]). The royal alliance similarly loses any meaning, because the Brussels bureaucracy and the various European institutions are now so remote, anonymous and unreliable: lacking any real forces for maintaining order, and apparently absent, they would be unable to protect the Jews, unlike the French-style strong state.

Jürgen Habermas’ conception of the European public sphere, which presupposes the decline of the nation-state and the transfer of loyalty to European institutions capable of transformation into a federal state3 poses formidable problems for Jews, particularly those like the French Jews who are deeply attached to the logic of the nation-state. Haber-mas has emerged indisputably as the philosopher of the new Europe

3 See, e.g., the contributions by Rouban and Déloye, 1998: 169–197.


that has succeeded a Europe guilty of Auschwitz. Consequently, his thought reflects the link between the European public sphere and Jew-ish destiny: to avoid a repetition of the Holocaust he invented “nega-tive nationalism”, the “postnational constellation” whose creation “after the state” gives rise to a cosmopolitan citizenship implying the end of the nation-state. Unfortunately, it took Auschwitz to make a commitment rooted in convictions favorable to universal principles in the cultural nation of Germans after—and through—Auschwitz. (Piper, 1993: 43) For Habermas, “Auschwitz . . . can and should remind the Germans of something else: that they cannot count on the continu-ities of their history. Because of that horrible break in continuity, the Germans have given up the possibility of constituting their identity on something other than universalist principles of state citizenship.” (Hab-ermas, 1998a) Moving away from the logic of the nation-state blamed for Auschwitz, he argues for a “constitutional patriotism”, meaning that citizens transfer their loyalty to their own state to Europe. For Habermas, “in the new conditions of the postnational constellation, the national state cannot regain its former power by adopting the hedgehog strategy. . . . The European Union, of course, offers an initial example of a form of democracy beyond the nation-state.” (Habermas, 2001: 76)

From Habermas’ standpoint, the constitutional patriotism that forms the basis of Europe presupposes a fracture between the particu-lar cultures of each society and the new political culture that forms the basis of the European public sphere: “This fusion has to be broken. It is necessary for the level of common political culture to be dissociated from that of subcultures and their identities formed at the pre-political level.” (Habermas, 1998b: 129–153) Inspired by the logic of a French-style nation-state that provided the “model” in which “citizenship was always independent of national identity”, Habermas emphasizes that, “the dissolution of the semantic link between citizenship and national identity takes account of the fact that the passage of the European Union to a political union dissolves the classical form of the nation-state.” Consequently, “the ethical integration of groups and subcul-tures each with its own collective identity has to be decoupled from the level of a more politically abstract integration that encompasses all citizens of the state.” Moreover, nowadays in France the disso-ciation is becoming evident between a common political culture and local cultural identities, whereas in Switzerland or the USA a consti-tutional culture coexists easily with strong cultural pluralism and, as

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a result, a multicultural society (ibid.). Habermas’ perspective is clear: “The painful process of decoupling must not rend the society asunder into a multiplicity of subcultures closed off from one another.” (ibid.) In other words, the rupture between political culture and multiple cul-tural identities remains compatible with the maintenance of strong internal cultural pluralism; and religions, for example, participate in this if they are compatible with constitutional norms based on the Kantian perspective on human rights that respects the new rule of law. Indeed, this would be a challenge to the state system following the Treaty of Westphalia (1648), and Jews dread this return to a kind of Middle Ages, a medieval regime with strong dispersion of power through reformulation of territorial alliances, where the localities, regions, towns and mini-sovereignties would dominate, allowing for a return to strong local identities fostered by the withdrawal of the state. This neo-medievalism analyzed by Andrew Linklater (Linklater, 1998. See also Burgess, 1997) recalls fateful memories, expulsions, massa-cres, and lack of protection. Although Salo Baron has attempted to show that the Middle Ages were actually a good period in Jewish history (Baron, 1928) this time span retains its tragic dimension in the minds of Jews, particularly in France where feudalism was taken to an extreme, far more than in Germany, Italy or England. Indeed, this radical feudalism unexpectedly resulted in the birth of a particularly strong absolutist state commensurate with the extreme feudalism that it brought to an abrupt end. In this sense, returning to a kind of Mid-dle Ages in France would only create terror and fear, and the desire to maintain the royal alliance and ignore the European context.

Of course, enthusiastic supporters of the European idea can be found in some quarters in French Jewish intellectual circles. Diana Pinto, for example, believes that Jews cannot remain “single-mindedly devoted to the state . . . it is important for Jews in Europe to realize that if they can be protected by the state they can also be annihilated by it . . .” As citizens, Jews can demand respect for their laws, their prac-tices, their costumes, and their calendar, because today, “European national identities are not frozen or carved in stone. . . . The Jews can and should constitute a transnational network at the heart of Europe.” (Pinto, 1996. See also Pinto, 2004: 679–691) For Pinto, a committed pro-Europe activist in French Jewish organizations, the Jews can no longer feel “the same kind of fervent patriotism as their ancestors, essentially after the Shoah but also after the Six Day War in 1967.” Consequently, these “new Jews are in the process of conquering new


places at the heart of their civil societies and above all, do not want to be confined to the old protective (or sometimes suffocating) niches of the state”; in this sense, “the Jews of the Republic belong to the past.” These disassimilating “new Jews” are simultaneously “insiders” and “outsiders” who will proclaim their identity and serve as the “bridge” to others in multicultural Europe, where they enjoy a genuine “success story”.4 In this spirit, the Jews will indeed leave the royal alliance with the state and, playing the game in a pluralist and multicultural Europe, will form “bridges”, alliances with other groups, strengthened by their own transnational union. Far from menacing them, this medieval-type pluralist Europe will ultimately appear as an encouraging context for them to flourish within civil society, beyond the protective and “suf-focating” state. The universalist “decoupled” public sphere of cultures envisaged by Habermas or John Rawls with his “veil of ignorance” metaphor will prove positive for their “success story” within the civil society they previously feared because of its prejudice and outbursts of rage. Having become a “bridge” between Jews and non-Jews in the spirit of Habermas, the Holocaust is undergoing a sort of “Euro-pean inscription” that facilitates reconciliation between all Europeans. Consequently, “If Jews can live voluntarily in Europe then it means that there is no essential historical and unwashable European ‘evil’ . . .” (Pinto, 2001: 54). Contemporary Europe will seem like a haven of peace once the Jews have separated from their age-old alliance with the state and overcome their “fear of freedom”.

This optimistic vision of Europe differs radically from deeply pes-simistic interpretations like that of the former Chief Rabbi of Israel, Meir Lau, who regards European Jewish history as being close to extinction. “I see the end of the diaspora Jews of Europe”, he has said.5 It also differs from the analysis of Jean-Claude Milner in France, who sees democratic Europe through its own “criminal inclinations”. For Milner, “since the Enlightenment, Europe, informed by modern science and rational politics, has sought a final solution to the Jew-ish problem. . . . Nazism is a continuation of this paradigm . . . for the name ‘Jew’, I repeat, it is old Europe that is the cause of everything that once existed, but also of what still exists.” (Milner, 2003a: 13, 15)

4 Pinto, 2001: 54, 55, 56, 62. For an equally positive view of the ability of European Jews to form alliances with other minorities, see the compilation in: Contact, April 2007. See also Benbassa and Gised, 2002.

5 Haaretz, December 3, 2004.

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With the Enlightenment excluding reference to religion, French Jews, to wipe out any sign of their existence, would be integrated into an elite culture in which, says Milner, “the name ‘Jew’ would become a fossil” and the “Jewish problem” thus “resolved”; just as, after ‘45, “the Ashkenazim were dead and, with them, the Jewish problem”, and Europe was able to construct itself as a “blank page” (ibid.: 50, 63, 65) that no longer tolerates a distinctive Jewish difference at all, based on a universalist modernity that has no truck with the name ‘Jew’. According to Milner,

the only thing to understand is that nobody in Europe is interested in the Jews any more. . . . The first duty of the Jews is not, as Herzl imagined it, to free Europe of the Jews. The first duty of the Jews is to free them-selves from Europe. Not by ignoring it (a thing only the United States can afford to do) but by knowing it thoroughly, as it was—criminal by deed—and as it has—criminal by boundless omission (ibid.: 129–130).

In Milner’s view, “in the sphere of thought, the Jews really wanted to be embraced by European culture. This movement has never been paid back, or very little. . . . Finally, this reception often took the form of dejudaization. . . . Jewish affirmation has no need of Europe.” (Milner, 2003b) Whether they are Jews of knowledge, like the Jews in Germany at the turn of the century, or Jews of power, Jews of the Republic, as in France, the bearers of the name Jew are always deprived of any future in this Europe of the Enlightenment, which is peace-loving and shocked by the power of the State of Israel, and objects to the state’s persistence in constructing a sphere for peace. Milner adds, “the name ‘Jew’ continues to be an encumbrance, but it encumbers in a different way; these days it has emerged on the international scene in the state system; Europeans are still unable to get rid of it, but the problem is no longer entirely their business; the bearers of the name ‘Jew’ con-tinue being unable to forget Europe.” Conclusion: “The name ‘Jew’ remains. Its bearers have gradually yielded to the seductions of the facile world. They have already paid very dearly . . . they will pay very dearly again.”6 If, for other contemporary commentators, it is not

6 Milner, 2006: 184, 221. Here we may refer to the polemic initiated by Alain Badiou, who argues against Milner but adopts his vocabulary; even if he does not cite the author, he criticizes those who argue, “that there is a sort of transcendence of destiny that bears the name ‘Jew’. . . . Another approach to this type of fictive tran-scendence is historical. It claims to show that the ‘Jewish problem’ defined Europe at least since the Enlightenment era, such that there would be a criminal continuity


the Enlightenment but instead the counter-Enlightenment, shaped by intransigent Catholicism or scientific racism that causes the “genocidal passion” of Europe fatal to the Jewish presence (Bensoussan, 2006), we can conclude that Milner’s iconoclastic standpoint condemning the European Enlightenment without qualification or real compara-tive analysis is a response to similar analyses by commentators like Jacob Talmon, who already strongly challenged the Enlightenment; in a more radical way it also evokes the criticism of the French-style mode of emancipation initiated by the Jacobins and Abbé Grégoire, which smothered Jewish identity according to the universalist values of the Enlightenment (Talmon, 1966; Hertzberg, 1968).

Certain French Jewish philosophers radically contradict the basic optimism expressed by Habermas or Alain Touraine—who has no hesitation in declaring, “we are all European Jews” (Touraine, 2001)—

between the idea Europe has of itself and the Nazi extermination, and demands the immediate disappearance of the name ‘Jew’ contingent on a universalism that has to extend to everybody. . . . Less rational still is the claim that we can find means in the Nazi gas chambers with which to confer on the colonial state of Israel (set up in the Middle East, and not in Bavaria . . .) some special status, a status other than the one that all colonial states have. . . . The name of the Jews is endangered by the ‘Jewish state’ which is not a state because it is not ‘cosmopolitan’.” (Badiou, 2005: 10, 11, 13, 15.) [Engl. trans. in: Badiou, 2006.] Rather like in Philip Roth’s fable, it now becomes like an urgently desired policy for the Jews of Israel to return to “Bavaria” (why Bavaria?) and blend in to a cosmopolitan complex where they will voluntarily abandon the name “Jew” and any collective identity before effacing themselves in the name of respect for the universal. This will be the ultimate defeat of the Nazis, who made the name “Jew” into an absolute: “the ‘name’ Jew is a creation of Nazi politics, that has no pre-existing reference at all.” (ibid.: 40) In this sense we must “forget the Holocaust” (ibid.: 98–99) in order to finally liberate the Jews from their name and their archaic identity before reintegrating them into the universal. Again, Badiou writes, “what does the small faction want that proprietarily proclaims itself by the word ‘Jew’ and its usages? Based on the tripod of the Shoah, the State of Israel and the Talmudic tradition, the SIT, where is it aiming when it stigmatizes and demonizes anybody who argues, perhaps quite logically, in support of a universalist and egalitarian acceptance of the word ‘Jew’?” (Badiou, 2006: 733) In the same issue, see the reply to Claude Lanzmann’s attack by Cécile Winter, who co-authored the book with Badiou. She writes, “ever since Lanzmann, the work of the Nazis has been exalted and even sancti-fied under the name of the Shoah”, so as better to justify the Zionists who receive the ‘famous moral pension’; for her, Lanzmann “expresses the Nazi point of view” (ibid.: 103, 105, 120). See also the vehement response by Marty, 2007. We might argue that this treatment of the “word” or “name” Jew recalls Jean-Paul Sartre’s highly external approach to the Jews in his essay Réflexions sur la question juive, where he wrote of the Jews being defined by how others saw them. See Birnbaum, 2003b. In a Europe oriented towards universalism that no longer tolerates the maintenance of collective identities regarded as ethnic or archaic, the Jews, presented as deprived of history, of interiority, of values, of their own culture and the “Talmudic tradition”, find them-selves forced to blend in to the community of citizens shaped by reason alone.

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with both of them pointing out the close relationship between universal Jewish values and European ideals. These French philosophers do not accuse Europe of “criminal inclinations” in relation to Jews, or of “a genocidal passion”, but they do regard it as undermining the national context, or conversely, too closely restricting the cosmopolitan citizen-ship with which Jews identify. Alain Finkielkraut and Jacques Derrida both challenge Habermas’ paradigm of “constitutional patriotism”, the former in the name of defense of the nation rooted in its own culture, and the latter by starting from a vision of extreme cosmopoli-tanism, ignoring all borders and offering everyone “hospitality”. Alain Finkielkraut became the defender of the nation; rejecting charges of a return to “tribalism”, he defended the Croats and mocked those who, rushing to rescue Bosnia in the name of “its ontological purity and multinational innocence”, wanted to transform it into “the symbol of cosmopolitanism”. He rejected the argument advanced in 1932 by Julien Benda in Discours à la nation européenne, where Benda declared his support for a Europe “less wicked than the nation”, and attacked “the planetary man” and Europe (Finkielkraut, 1996, Ch. 6). Arguing against a Europe disdainful of small nations, Finkielkraut writes, “It is, however, an old, old tribe, condemned very early, and it has survived well. The New Covenant has beautifully outdated the old, and the Jews would not listen.” (Finkielkraut, 2002: 28). Assuming the role of the spokesman of all nations, of their culture and diversity, he opposes Habermas’ postnational vision:

It is today’s Germany where the idea originates of necessarily cutting off republican loyalty and common destiny. It is German philosophers who, in the name of “constitutional patriotism”, advocate redefining cul-tural relationships to gain approval for institutions and political symbols related to the universalizable. It is Jürgen Habermas who has stressed the absolute obligation not to refer any longer to a common origin or even a narrative identity, but instead to abstract procedures and principles to ensure the integration of citizens. . . . In the new ideological configuration of Europe, the most French thinkers, the super-French thinkers are now Germans. Super-French, because they are today’s athletes of the intangi-ble. It is they who give lessons on universalism to men entangled in their various heritages. . . . Harking back to Auschwitz, Germany preaches the new Gospel of post-nationality to all peoples . . . this new Aufklärung pleads urbi et orbi for socialization and public commitment unhampered by any compromise of principles on identity (ibid.: 123).

The charge against Habermas that his universalist postnational vision was conceived largely in the name of Auschwitz to distance Germany forever from its history highlights the ambiguity of the Habermas model.


In challenging historians like Nolte, Habermas, who had his own per-sonal experience of the Nazi tragedy, wanted to definitively prevent it happening again by diverting Germany from its own history. In this sense, as Dominique Schnapper points out, these are the abstract prin-ciples of ‘89 extended to the whole of Europe by the “super-French” to reopen the common question of Germany’s own destiny (Schnapper, 1992–1993: 832). Finkielkraut objected to remarks by Robert Badinter who believes, in the spirit of Habermas, that Auschwitz is “one of the founding events of the European community”. For Finkielkraut,

to say that Europe was born at Auschwitz is to empty it of meaning for the benefit of a boundless universality. . . . Europe was not born at Auschwitz. We should not make Hitler a gift of that. We do not have to sacrifice Europe’s history on the altar of the memory of Auschwitz. This sacrifice is causing it, in the name of cosmopolitanism, to dissolve itself in the vastness and, in the name of human rights, to take refuge in a totally sterile patriotism in the present ( Finkielkraut, 2005).

In fact, Finkielkraut’s battle against the dangers of uniformity in the world and the disappearance of nations leads him to reject Habermas’ universalist optimism. For Finkielkraut, the Republic was built in the specific context of a nation: “I am not at all sure”, he writes, “that we can build a postnational republic.” ( Finkielkraut and Plenel, 2000) Small nations have to reject this decoupling, persist in their culture, and remain true to their history, whether they have a territory like France or Croatia, or are scattered across the continent, like the Jews. Recalling the dictum of the Polish Jewish historian, Bronislaw Geremek, “Have no fear of nations”, he finds, like other left-wing thinkers, including Jews and writers such as David Miller in Britain, that the nation remains the essential context of democracy (Miller, 2000). Alain Finkielkraut thus agrees with many commentators on Habermas’ work who think that Europe, as well as the nation, cannot be purely civic in the logic of constitutional patriotism, that it is embodied in a history, a culture, traditions, language, and a shared solidarity based on kindred values that cannot be “decoupled” from the political context. Like the civic nation, one might suggest that civic Europe is just as much a “myth”, ( Yack, 1996; Laborde, 2002: 591–612) that constitutional patriotism is only the acceptable face of a civic nationalism that cannot account for the diversity of cultures that continues to shape nations.7

7 Baumeister, 2007: 483–503; see also, John Hall’s article in which he argues against Habermas and defends the idea of permanence of nations from the perspective

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At first glance, Jacques Derrida’s perspective appears equally hos-tile to the constitutional patriotism proposed by Jürgen Habermas, although it differs radically from Alain Finkielkraut’s positive proposi-tions about the nation, since Derrida is demarcating his differences with the author of Défaite de la pensée (The Defeat of The Mind ) in the name of cosmopolitanism. Derrida wrote,

I do not support the “constitutional patriotism” that Habermas speaks of so problematically. It is not that I do not subscribe to the political inten-tion it expresses. I understand and endorse it, but the word “patriotism”, because of its old ambiguous connotations, does not seem to me the most appropriate way to designate the new political behavior . . . behavior or commitment because in fact, like Habermas, I believe necessarily in a new European citizenship (Derrida, 2007).

Although Derrida, like Habermas, rejects the sovereigntist conception “of all the European countries that are in need of sovereignty because they are still dreaming of allowing this nostalgia to affect them, or of working to rebuild a sovereign nation-state”, he writes nonetheless:

Will there be another Europe, one that I dream of without the slight-est Eurocentrism . . . another Europe that, without renouncing realism or anything vital to an economic, military, scientific and technological superpower, could draw on its unique memory, on its most illustrious memories (philosophy itself, the Enlightenment, its revolutions, the his-tory that is open and still believes in human rights), but also its darker memories, the most guilty ones, the most penitent (the genocides, the Holocaust, colonialism, Nazi, fascist or Stalinist totalitarianism), all the other kinds of oppressive violence and even the forms of violence today that appear modern and democratic, such as a neo-Berlusconian type of capitalist-media authoritarianism—in fact, another Europe, the one I dream of finding in its two memories, the best and the worst, the politi-cal force of an other-worldly politics capable of challenging or redirect-ing all the authorities controlling the globalization process today (ibid.).8

of the Jewish sociologist Ernst Gellner (Hall, 2006); finally, see the collection published in Constellations, 2007, especially the articles by Michel Rosenfeld, “Habermas’s Call for Cosmopolitan Constitutional Patriotism in an Age of Global Terror” and Simone Chambers, “How Religion Speaks to the Agnostic: Habermas on the Persistent Value of Religion”. See also, Foret, 2007.

8 He repeats this in almost the same terms in: Derrida, 2005: 42–44. Derrida adds: “it is not desirable to establish a Europe that would be another military superpower, protecting its market and acting as a counterweight to the other blocs, but a Europe that would sow the seed of a new, other-worldly politics . . . in the Age of Enlighten-ment, Europe was engaged in continual self-criticism, and this legacy for improvement offers future possibilities. At least I would hope for that, and this is what fuels my


Derrida argued against the idea of a distinct European patriotism based solely on respect for the constitution, as envisaged by Habermas. Unlike for Habermas, the Europe Derrida dreamed of was not one that simply and essentially turned its back on Auschwitz, but a Europe that equally rejected any kind of Stalinism (an equivalence opposed by Habermas), colonialism, or capitalist-media authoritarianism dominat-ing a public sphere that Habermas always conceived as the place for debate but which barely existed for Derrida. Derrida was very critical of Habermas’ inherent “communicative action” because of the imposi-tion of “press consortia” on “norms of discussion, models of discourse” (Derrida, 1991: 55). Derrida’s Europe would promote anti-globaliza-tion politics hostile to the G 8 and the “totalitarian market”, the World Bank and the IMF—it would be a Europe that would pursue “univer-sal hospitality” while putting an end to the “wolf ” that is the state, that “sort of robot, monster animal”, that “gigantic prosthesis destined to amplify, by objectifying it outside natural man, the power of the living, the living man that it protects, that it serves, but like a dead machine, or even a machine of death, a machine which is only the mask of the

indignation against discourses that decisively condemn Europe as if it were merely the scene of its crimes” (ibid: 47). This was evidently Derrida’s response to the attack by Jean-Claude Milner. Moreover, can we match Derrida’s “cosmopolitanism” with the “cosmopolitanism” of Badiou?—neither of them leave much room for the collec-tive Jewish identity in the universalist, deconstructed Europe, although Jacques Der-rida repeatedly and very movingly evoked his own Judaism, and could only protest against Badiou’s discourse on the name or the word, “Jew”, conceived simply as an inherent characteristic defined and imposed by the Nazis, which he therefore rejected. Derrida liked to think of himself as openly Jewish: “This evening”, he said, “I will not reach such anamnesis regarding the arrival of ‘Jew’ in my language, of this word that remains incredible to me, deeper and more profound in me than my own name, more elementary and more indelible than any other in the world . . . closer to my body than an article of clothing, than my body itself.” (Bergo, Cohen and Zagury-Orly, 2007: 9) Let us briefly recap here how Derrida challenged the Sartrean distinction between authentic and inauthentic Jews. He wrote, “I insist on saying ‘I am jew’, or ‘I am a Jew’, without ever feeling authorized to clarify whether an ‘inauthentic’ or above all, an ‘authentic’ Jew—neither in Sartre’s limited and very French sense, nor in the sense that some Jews who are more assured of their belonging, of their memory, their essence or their election might understand, expect or demand of me. Willing or pretending to be neither an inauthentic Jew nor an authentic Jew (although I share much, not everything, of the experience analyzed by Alain Finkielkraut under this title), referring myself to a history that is not the ‘quasi-history’ of which Sartre speaks, in the name of what and by what right can I call myself jew (or jewish)? And why do I hold onto it, even as I am not even sure of the appellation to which I thus respond, not sure that it is addressed to me . . .?” (ibid.: 30).

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living, like a machine of death can serve the living.” (Derrida, 2007. [Engl trans. in: Derrida and Bennington, 2009: 29])

Rather oddly and inconsistently, Derrida admitted that, “in many contexts, the state might be a better protection against certain forces and dangers. And it can assure the citizenship we spoke of ”,9 recover-ing in turn the centrality of the state in the Jewish tradition. In conclu-sion he wrote, “But ultimately, these necessary transactions must not obstruct a deconstruction of the state form which should, one day, no longer be the last word of the political. This movement of ‘decon-struction’ did not wait for us to begin speaking about deconstruction; it has been underway for a long time and it will continue for a long time.” (ibid.: 131) Like Habermas, Derrida was hostile to the state, which he blamed for terrible catastrophes; however, he elaborated a conception of an other-worldly Europe without foreign borders as an alternative to Habermas’ public sphere where “communicative action” triumphs, a Europe that would not be “closed in on its own identity and would advance in an exemplary way towards that which it is not it, towards the other cape or the cape of the other.” (Derrida, 1991: 33) For Derrida,

duty also dictates that we open up Europe from the cape that divides it because it is also a shore: to open Europe to that which it is not, has never been and never will be. The same duty also dictates that we not only welcome the stranger to integrate him, but also to recog-nize and accept his otherness . . . the same duty also commands us to tolerate and respect all that is not placed under the authority of reason (ibid.: 75–77).

This vision of Europe differs entirely from that of Habermas, although more recently, in the context of the Iraq war and what Habermas saw as the emergence of a transnational public sphere of opposition to the US intervention, their conceptions of Europe began to converge more closely. Habermas moved towards adopting Derrida’s language, as shown in a text that was signed jointly but edited by Habermas alone, in which they attacked the World Bank, the IMF and US unilateral-ism. This statement presents Europe as a form of “governance beyond the nation-state which could set a precedent in the postnational con-stellation.” Furthermore, in their opinion, “for decades, European

9 Borradori, 2003: 131. Derrida added, “Once again, the state is both self-protecting and self-destroying, at once remedy and poison.” (ibid.: 124).


social welfare systems served as a model . . . future political efforts at the domestication of global capitalism must not fall below the standards of social justice that they established. . . . Why shouldn’t Europe issue a further challenge: to defend and promote a cosmopolitan order on the basis of international law against competing visions?”10 As we can see, Habermas retained his conception of the postnational constellation, which he mentioned in another passage, “the European identity was born in the daylight of the public sphere”. However, he returned to the long-abandoned language of his youth to condemn Capitalism in the spirit of the Frankfurt School, while supporting the cosmopolitan agenda advocated by Jacques Derrida that presupposed the opening of the European public sphere. Derrida was then able to observe quite rightly that, “whatever disagreements may have separated us in the past, our views on the future of the institutions of international law and the determination of new political responsibilities for Europe essen-tially intersect at many points, as is the case here.”11 In this fundamen-tal text we should also note that it is no longer a question of Auschwitz as the foundation of the new postnational European identity. In fact, the Jewish dimension of the construction of this postnational Europe faded under the dominating influence of Derrida, the Jew from the periphery who saw himself as “someone who is not quite European by birth, since I come from the southern coast of the Mediterranean, considers himself, and more and more so with age, to be a sort of over-acculturated, over-colonized European hybrid . . .” (Derrida, 1991: 13) Elsewhere, he wrote, “Even if you are alone and the last to be Jewish at this price, look twice before claiming a communal, even national and especially state-national solidarity, and before speaking, before taking sides, and taking a stand as a Jew.” (Bergo, Cohen and Zagury-Orly, 2007: 7)

What ultimately remains is the inevitable question of the nation. Habermas, for example, evaded it in the name of German guilt for Auschwitz and, to ward off demons, committed himself completely to the construction of a European postnational sphere in which the Jews would never have to fear a return of the Holocaust. Milner also attacked Germany, but reserved equal criticism for the France of the

10 Derrida and Habermas, 2003 [Engl. trans. in: “February 15, or What Binds Europeans Together: A Plea for a Common Foreign Policy, Beginning in the Core of Europe”, in: Constellations, Vol. 10, Nº 3, 2003: 294].

11 Ibid. On this unexpected rapprochement, see Heffernan, 2005: 570–575.

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Enlightenment so lavishly praised by Habermas. These two nations that may embody the “criminal inclinations” of Europe might put an end to the name “Jew” in different ways; yet Milner does not share the European optimism propagated by Habermas for a new Jewish des-tiny in this constitutional and postnational context, and has a wholly negative attitude to contemporary Europe. As a Jew who rejected the national sphere, Jacques Derrida felt too enclosed in the heart of Europe with its borders that restricted cosmopolitanism, “hospi-tality”, transnationalism and free circulation in general, and which were not sufficiently representative of other-worldliness. As for Alain Finkielkraut, in contrast to Habermas and Derrida he takes the role of the hero of the tribe, of the nations, of respect for their history; while turning his back on Habermas’ constitutional patriotism and Derrida’s cosmopolitanism, he completely rejects Milner’s virulent attacks against nations. In L’ingratitude, Finkielkraut rediscovered the conservative inclinations of Hannah Arendt and endorsed the way she acclaimed the thought of Burke, who was hostile to the abstract Enlightenment of the Jacobin revolutionaries. Arendt believed that membership of a nation was vital—she felt that all the immigrants without identity papers in the interwar period had suffered a tragic experience. For Finkielkraut, “the man who is nothing but a man is still a human being: Edmund Burke’s argument against the thought of the Enlightenment was advanced in dark times” (Finkielkraut, 2002: 155); and he concludes by quoting Arendt: “the ironical bitter and belated confirmation of the famous arguments . . .”12

In fact, Arendt, the philosopher of reason, rehabilitated Burke’s thought and attacked a negative philosophy of the nation pursued in the name of abstract human rights, a philosophy that would be inca-pable of protecting individuals deprived of their roots as citizens within a nation—it is only the state that protects the citizens of its nation, the state that can extend a helping hand across borders. Arendt thus plays the role of the proselyte of the nation-state who would look favorably on the metaphors of constitutional patriotism as the cosmopolitan day-dreams of a world open to endless globalization that effaces borders and languages. In this sense, she recognizes the logic of the nation-state as protector of the Jews; she rediscovers, without mentioning it,

12 Arendt, 1966: 177. On Arendt and Burke, see Legros, 1985; Cohen, 1996: 164–186; Birnbaum, 2002.


the traditional royal alliance, the vertical alliance that can only be real-ized in the context of the state or even of the empire, but which would be incapable of functioning beyond borders, let alone for the benefit of cosmopolitan citizenship without any particular ties to a state. Arendt would have rejected the analyses of thinkers like Jean-Claude Mil-ner and Jürgen Habermas, but also Jacques Derrida, and would only have felt kinship with the firm defense of nations advanced by Alain Finkielkraut, Bronislaw Geremek or David Miller. It would remain for them to consider the state more explicitly as an institution in charge of its nation, to reflect on the nature of this state as a differentiated and institutionalized authority that maintains not least privileged ties to a culture from which it could not be radically “decoupled” even if it is the instrument of reason and law. Another issue to work on is the development of the state weakened by European unification, by transnational exchanges that evade its control, by the multiple loyal-ties that bind citizens of our times, and to question the strategy of the Jews between the state and Europe, between the royal alliance with all its weaknesses, and the universalist European sphere in which the Jews would again constitute a transnational minority without a privi-leged relationship to the state—a sphere which surely brings them the protection that cosmopolitan citizenship would be unable to provide, but in which they would clearly have to face the hazards of horizontal alliances.

THE RETURN OF THE EUROPEAN JEWISH DIASPORA. NEW ETHNO-NATIONAL CONSTELLATIONS SINCE 1989

Y. Michal Bodemann

The Israeli sociologist Natan Sznaider has recently declared that in Europe today “. . . there may be again a presence of Jewish individuals, but there is nevertheless no Jewish presence by a far stretch . . . (Europe) will remain nothing but a big cemetery. There are Jews in Europe, but there is no Jewish language, no Jewish consciousness and no autono-mous Jewish politics.” (Sznaider, 2009) This is not a particularly origi-nal statement. Bernard Wasserstein (1996) wrote about the Vanishing Diaspora over a decade ago, and it fits with numerous analogous pro-nouncements especially from North America, but also from Israel, even from the highest levels of state—witness former Israeli president Ezer Weizman’s call on German Jews to leave “exile” for their true home in Israel. In this regard, German Jewry is really only the prime case for the Western European situation at large and the deprecia-tion of Jewish Diaspora life. Israelis and Americans initially organized the March of the Living to Europe as the continent of death, and the otherwise laudable birthright program taglit implicitly at least erases 2000 years of Jewish life in Europe, once de facto home of the Jews (Weingrod and Levy, 2005).

In contrast, America as Diaspora was, as the “goldene medine”, largely exempt from that devaluation of Diaspora despite rampant dis-crimination against Jews in Canada and the US deep into the 1950s. American Jews see themselves as big brothers to Israelis or as virtual Israelis tout court. Of course, on account of their overwhelming num-bers alone, North America could elaborate a Jewish culture that is no longer possible in most of Europe.

Reactions against that astonishing devaluation of especially the European Diaspora—a devaluation that began in early pre-war Zion-ism, but set in not long after the founding of the state of Israel and intensified after the Six Day War 1967—came first perhaps from Daniel and Jonathan Boyarin’s 1993 essay, Diaspora: Generation and the Grounds of Jewish Identity in which they attempted to question Israel’s hegemonic discourse over the Jewish world altogether:

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The solution of Zionism—that is, Jewish state hegemony, except insofar as it represented an emergency and temporary rescue operation—seems to us the subversion of Jewish culture and not its culmination. . . . Cap-turing Judaism in a state transforms entirely the meanings of its social practices (ibid.: 712–13).

Especially in the years since Rabin’s assassination, a great deal of disil-lusionment about Israel has set in especially with younger generations of Jews who are disenchanted with Israeli politics and, moreover, also have less and less in common with their Israeli counterparts. This has brought about an—albeit often cautious—re-evaluation of diasporic life. Some of that is expressed, for example, in Caryn Aviv and David Shneer’s 2005 book, New Jews where, however, the baby is being thrown out with the bath water when they advocate already in their subtitle “The End of the Jewish Diaspora” in favor of some form of globalised Jewishness in a mode of postmodern collective Jewish iden-tity. Undoubtedly, mobility has increased today, with Jewish families from Germany or France celebrating weddings at Sde Boker in the Negev desert or bar/bat mitzvahs in London. The power of the state, however, contrary to general perception, has not been substantially decreased in this regard: witness the fact that Holocaust commemora-tion takes quite different forms in various countries, those of Europe included. In Germany, the Netherlands or Austria, for example, the forms assumed by Holocaust commemoration are quite different from each other, and closely tailored to the respective national narratives. This holds also for the spectrum of religious practices and orientations, attitudes towards Israel, and of course self-definitions in relation to the countries Jews are living in. In that respect we can speak, at best, of diverse European Jewish Diasporas, not of one single or even Euro-peanising European Diaspora.

Nevertheless, the national articulations of Jewish identities in Europe and in North America notwithstanding, there are some features that might permit us to ask whether there are not some developments all these Diasporas have in common. In order to examine them in detail, I will discuss the German case and ask to what extent similar charac-teristics can be separably observed in Jewish communities elsewhere in Europe and beyond. I see six aspects that need to be looked at in some detail: (1) the political role of Jewish communities in the national context in which they are embedded; (2) the question of Jewish immi-gration (and emigration); (3) the impact of Muslim immigration to Europe; (4) the question of a liminal Judaising periphery; (5) character-

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istics of Jewish demography and internal structuration and (6) the role of Israel and of the Holocaust for the European Diaspora.

First, to the question of the political role. Like other ethno-national or ethno-religious minorities, the Jews, where they are more than a quan-tité negligéable, will be politically cathected, that is, they will provide some form of ideological labor for the state they are residing in. By ideological labor, I mean that in their political, social and economic practices, negatively or positively, voluntarily or not, they take part in legitimatory national discourses. Jews in France, accordingly, with a Jacobin tradition and the idea of the citoyen, perform a very different form of ideological labor compared to, say, Jews in Canada where together with other ethnic groups they play their part in representing Canada’s national narrative of multi-culturalism. Nowhere else, how-ever, with the possible exception of Austria, is the Jewish role as politi-cally charged and pronounced as in Germany. As auxiliary guardians of memory, Jews perform ideological labor central to the national nar-rative of the glorified century preceding Nazism, and of course in rela-tion to Auschwitz itself. No one, US presidents included, have spoken like Angela Merkel of Israel’s right to exist, as the German reason of state (“deutsche Staatsraison”), with its corollaries regarding Jews liv-ing in Germany today. As has often been observed, this political cathe-xis at the high levels of state reaches deeply into German civil society at large, which turns individual Jews into exotic objects, hypostatizing the body as a Jewish body.

Conversely, it magnifies and intensifies Jewish identity and conscious-ness. Witness the following episode: The day before Rosh Hashana, a young Jewish woman working in a Jewish institution alongside a majority of non-Jewish colleagues is being told by her office neighbor, “N., as you know, since tomorrow is Rosh Hashana, you can really go to synagogue, you need not come to work!” Nowhere with regard to other ethnic groups is ethnic particularism as welcome as in the Jewish case. Thus while Turks and other immigrants are being accused of living in “parallel societies”, that accusation has never been leveled against Jews in Germany, despite similar phenomena among the DPs in the post-war period or among Russian speaking Jews in Germany today.

Second, the immigration issue, and here as well, Germany plays a particular role. While most other Jewish communities in Europe have suffered enormous losses on account of the Shoah as well, down to the 80s Eastern European survivors have de facto—albeit often under


German Jewish leadership—reconstituted the Jewish community of Germany. Today, only an estimated 5% of Jews living in Germany may be of the old German Jewish stock. Moreover, the influx of mostly Russian speaking Jews has brought a fivefold increase in the Jewish population—inside and outside the Jewish communities proper. In other words, within little more than our lifetime, the contents of the German Jewish vessel have been almost completely exchanged for a second time—from the old stock German Jewry up until the Shoah, to the largely Polish Jewish one after the War and to the Russian Jewish one today, each bringing with it its own habitus and cultural and social capital into that community and German society at large, and into an environment in which, as mentioned, Jews perform a particularly central political role. While they are immigrants to Germany like all others, the social and political institutions of Germany have imposed upon them a structure and a role entirely sui generis.

Third, a three-way conversation: the Muslim/Turkish factor. Up until the time when Turkish guest workers were transformed or transformed themselves into Muslims ( Yurdakul, 2009), Jews were the only signifi-cant minority of long standing in Germany. For the past two hundred years and even earlier, Jews confronted the question of recognition of otherness in German society, and Germans—not unlike with the case of Muslims today—were preoccupied with the question of how Jews could be drawn out of their alleged parallel society and, with Konrad Dohm’s “civic improvement of the Jews” ( Die bürgerliche Verbesse-rung der Juden) and others such as Bruno Bauer later on, how the Jewish religion could be done away with, or at least be “humanized” in accordance with the civilized character of the Christian churches. Precisely the same policies of “civic improvement” are being imposed upon German Muslims today. In short, the Jewish-German discourse has been a two-way conversation, but for the past two decades, that discourse has been turned into a three-way conversation instead, where both Jews and Muslims have to evaluate their respective posi-tion in Germany vis-à-vis that of the respective other minority. The respective status: the historically and politically charged position of Jews here, the demographically/electorally far weightier position of (Turkish) Muslims there, has produced an ambivalent relation where Jews and Turks compete with one another, but where they are also forced to collaborate, especially in regard to threats of racism.

This brings me, fourth, to the question of a liminal Judaising periphery, an idea that I began to think about after reading Jacob Katz’s por-


trayal of Prussian Jews at the time of the Jewish salons where for the first time in the modern period Jews and non-Jews could meet socially in shared space and conversation, even if that space was on Jewish, not Gentile premises. Katz described that space as semi-neutral territory.

While there has probably always been some measure of a Jewish/non-Jewish fringe—consider the Netherlands at the time of Rem-brandt and Spinoza—where Jews and Gentiles could encounter each other in terms of intellectual/theological exchanges and in terms of culture, that liminal Judaising periphery has taken on an entirely new character in Germany and elsewhere in Europe in the decades follow-ing the Shoah. Earlier, I have described what evolved especially from the late 1970s onwards as a “Judaising terrain” where non-Jews not only began to be interested in Jewish culture and Jewish concerns, but in a form of mimicry began to engage in Jewish culture themselves—not only in the cultural, but even in the religious domain: witness the influence today of Jewish religious thought and of Israel on the Protes-tant and Catholic churches, and in these religions’ terms even via the process of conversion to Judaism.

These activities to a large extent began as inauthentic practices, which is why Ruth Ellen Gruber in her influential book could speak of a “virtual Judaism”. In the meantime, however, that “virtual sphere” has morphed, has assumed an authenticity in its own right. It is a sphere, first of all, in which Jewish culture is being consumed by non-Jews and following that, where non-Jews themselves have been pro-ducing what might be considered Jewish culture. Examples here are non-Jewish Klezmer musicians or writers dealing with Jewish subjects, from Martin Walser (negatively) to W.G. Sebald (positively—see Leslie Morris’s (2008) insightful analysis), or again German scholars teach-ing and writing about Jewish theology in proliferating Jewish Studies departments. That phenomenon, moreover, extends to other minori-ties as well. In Germany, for example, German-Turkish authors such as Zafer Senoçak, Yadé Kara, Emine Sevgi Özdamar, Feridun Zaimo-glu and a non-Turkish Muslim, Navid Kermani, have been intensely concerned with Jewish themes.

Indeed, I would argue that this joint Jewish/non-Jewish production and consumption of Jewish culture is an entirely new, European phe-nomenon not found in North America, in Russia, in Australia or in Argentina, for that matter. Indeed, without it, the Jewish community in Germany as well as in such countries as Sweden, Spain, Italy and the Netherlands (and its clear beginnings in Poland today) would not


only be well-nigh invisible, but the production of Jewish culture itself would be insignificant—who would be there to buy Jewishly themed books by Jewish authors, listen to Klezmer music or attend Jewish and Israeli art shows? Only the French case seems largely different on account of the demographic make-up of French Jewry, mostly post-war Mizrahi migrants from the Maghreb with an entirely different habitus and cultural traditions.

Another, glaring examples are the Jewish museums in virtually all major and even smaller cities in Germany. Jewish museums, while often under the directorship of Jews, are largely staffed by non-Jewish specialists who, jointly with Jews, and sometimes even without them, are producing exhibits or are creating Jewish museums in the first place. It is apparent that the role of Jewish culture, by virtue of the passive and active participation of non-Jews—active as producers, copiers, enablers of Jewish culture, and passive as its consumers—is magnified to an extraordinary extent. Here as elsewhere, then, we can no longer speak of a “virtual Judaism”. It is a genuinely new form of what Diana Pinto and others have described as “Jewish space”, with an authenticity of its own. While, as argued above, some of this influ-ence is felt even in the religious domain, cultural production should be distinguished here from religious practice which remains by and large a purely Jewish domain.

That co-production and co-consumption of Jewish culture by Jews and non-Jews alike radically alters the ethno-national constellations of European Jewry and with it, of Jewish politics and Jewish identity, by intensifying, even reifying it. Compared to the Turkish minority in Ger-many, for example, Jewish communities are being privileged in terms of financial support, Jews being appointed to influential positions, for example to the Rundfunkrat (media council ) and by NGOs—a con-sideration which the Turkish community could only dream of. Most importantly, without that magnification of German Jewry, Jewish immigration from the former Soviet Union would probably not have been possible. The Jewish community, then, unlike Muslims/Turks, has been greatly protected against outside hostility. Witness the firing or severe sanctioning of public figures who have made ill considered and not even anti-Jewish remarks. Faruk Sen and IFO president Hans-Werner Sinn come to mind; the latter did no more than comparing criticism of managers with anti-Semitism; consider this in contrast to open hate speech against Muslims such as by Thilo Sarrazin, now with


the Bundesbank, formerly a member of the Berlin’s Senate, who got away with a simple apology.

Fifth, we have enormous changes in the Jewish demography and internal structure. If we compare the occupational structure of Jewish communities in Europe today with that of eighty to one hundred years ago, it is apparent that it has been immensely diversified. The notion of the Jewish small storeowner or the Jewish stockbroker in Europe is as much a thing of the past as that of the proverbial Jewish news paperman, lawyer, or doctor. Today, most Jews in Europe have post-secondary education, are in very diverse professional fields, and relatively few Jews, France excepted, are below the poverty line or are lower class in the first place; conversely, few are comparably high bourgeois compared to their predecessors before 1933. That substan-tial diversity, together with the disappearance of discrimination and traditional forms of anti-Semitism which often forced Jews to stay together in mutual support and defence, has also, as Shmuel Eisenstadt and others have pointed out, brought about unprecedented pluralism in the Jewish community—from diverse forms of Jewish Orthodoxy to religious liberalism, agnosticism or strong commitment to the state of Israel, or in turn, forms of post- or anti-Zionism. It is this diver-sity itself, rarely if ever openly acknowledged by German-Jewish offi-cials (or Jewish officials elsewhere for that matter), that has loosened the fabric of the community and has opened it up to the non-Jewish world—one variable that has made the Judaising periphery possible in the first place.

That loosening of the community, together with, paradoxically, the intensification of Jewish identity on the other, has substantially re-shaped the new Jewish Diaspora. Whereas in previous generations, individuals of mixed Jewish/non-Jewish background or individuals in mixed marriages have by and large turned away from Judaism, this is no longer the case. We can see how many more persons, Jewish, mixed or living in mixed Jewish/non-Jewish households, are practic-ing some forms of Jewish tradition, from celebrating Jewish holidays, candle lighting on Shabbat or participating in Jewish cultural affairs. It is therefore quite appropriate that Jewish demographers (Calvin Goldscheider) no longer think in terms of who is Jewish according to Halacha, but rather in terms of concentric circles, all the way to mixed households with only tenuous attachment to Judaism.

My sixth and last point addresses the role of Israel and of the Holo-caust for the European Diaspora. There is no question that for all


of Diaspora Jewry, including that of Europe, the State of Israel and remembrance of the Holocaust have assumed significant importance as an ersatz or civil religion. I have shown some of that with regard to the Holocaust Remembrance Day for the case of Toronto, Canada, where in the past 25 years, that remembrance in the Jewish commu-nity has increased by leaps and bounds. A similar point can be made for the situation in Europe. At the 2009 Berlin Jewish Film Festival, of 21 films shown, one half (10 films) had the Holocaust as theme. For Jews in Europe—and this may be a homogenizing element—the memory world of Jews is irrevocably different from that of non-Jews—it is what the Boyarins mean by “generation”—it was after all Jewish relatives, even if distant ones, who perished, and non-Jews are excluded by definition from that memory even if they, as they obviously and manifestly do, remember the Holocaust on their own terms. Israel, similarly, is (still ) of great symbolic significance to European Jewry. Yet as far as the younger generation is concerned, there is a clear split between those who strongly adhere to the one or other version of that civil religion, and those who reject both Holocaust remembrance and Israel as their symbolic home. For the German case in particular, I would argue that Holocaust remembrance among young Jews may play a less significant role because it is a field that has been so strongly occupied by Germans. Israel on the other hand, partly on account of its geographical proximity, may play a more important role for many Jews in the younger generation even if others are turned off by Israeli politics.

Is Germany then, and by extension Europe, a “new Jewish centre in the making?” While there have indeed been, as I have argued, revivals of Jewish culture and some remarkable innovative and indeed unique developments throughout Eastern and Western Europe, it would be farfetched, for reasons of demography alone, to predict European Jewry turning into a third pillar equal to Israel and North America. Figures are deceptive here, regarding the high number of Russian Jewish immigrants to Germany—but the many elderly Russian immi-grants are rarely productive immigrants in the new environment. Nor will Europe turn into one unitary Jewish center—national idiosyncra-sies (such as those of France, Britain and Germany) will remain too strong for a long time to come. Witness for example that the European Jewish Congress spends virtually all its energy on combating anti-Semitism and defending Israel, but no one seems to have considered organizing all-European Jewish summer camps or other channels for


Jews from different European countries to meet other than as top level Jewish functionaries or at occasional scholarly conferences.

It is equally true, however, that there is a new dynamism here and that new paths across Europe—witness the Limmudim annual weekends of Jewish learning—are being opened up. Europe is neither a vanish-ing Diaspora nor is it a Jewish cemetery anymore; indeed, after 1945, it has never been.

READING BETWEEN THE LINES. ASSERTION AND REASSERTION IN EUROPEAN JEWISH LIFE

Antony Lerman

It is 20 years since the revolutions of 1989, the year in which it became possible for the first time since the end of the Second World War to think about European Jewry in terms of “A new Jewish center in the making”. Not that this concept was suddenly on everyone’s lips as the Communist regimes collapsed. There was certainly great relief that the Jewish communities beyond the Iron Curtain were now free from the oppressive restrictions imposed on them by the Communist authorities. But what preoccupied the Jewish world initially was the anti-Semitism that came bubbling to the surface in these countries and the fear that many of the post-Communist regimes would embrace political anti-Semitism. This issue was so high on the international Jewish agenda that the World Jewish Congress (WJC) succeeded in persuading a host of presidents, prime ministers, renowned intellectu-als, writers and academics to attend a 1,500 strong world conference on anti-Semitism in Brussels in 1992.1 I suspect that hardly anyone knows about or, if they were there, remembers this huge jamboree. The first major international Jewish gathering of the post-Communist world—in Europe—reflected fears about the future, not the hopes for a revival of European Jewry.

The ambivalence of the time was captured in the introduction to the Survey of Jewish Affairs 1990, written by its Editor, William Frankel: “It was too early to judge what concrete dangers this antisemitism would pose to Jews and Jewish communities . . . But the fact that any antisemi-tism surfaced at all made it necessary to judge the events of 1989 more soberly and critically than the instant adulation and rejoicing initially allowed.”(Frankel, 1990: x) Nevertheless, the same introduction had already spoken of 1989 as shattering the image of a Europe whose importance for Jews was “derived almost entirely from the past”.

1 See, e.g., Jay Bushinsky, “Anti-Semitism parley adds Jesse. Role on program draws protests”, in: Chicago Sun-Times, 3 July 1992, and articles on 7 and 8 July.

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Summarizing the significant positive changes that had already occurred in the Jewish communities of Central and East Central Europe, Fran-kel wrote: “Suddenly . . . these communities had futures, however small their size and however debilitating had been the decades of repres-sion.” (ibid.: ix)

Three essays in the volume fleshed out the changes. Surveying the overall position in Eastern Europe, Maria Balinska wrote: “The changed political map of post-1989 Central and East Central Europe did indeed give its Jewish communities the chance to revive what was left of the rich Jewish cultures that once existed there.” (Balinska, 1990: 185) Stephen J. Roth focused specifically on the revival of Jewish life in Hungary, which actually predated the collapse of the Communist sys-tem (Roth, 1990: 202–222). And Simon P. Sibelman’s essay on France drew attention to the fact that Western European Jewish communities were undergoing their own process of renewal:

Two centuries after emancipation French Jewry was experiencing per-haps its most active and creative era . . . [ It] was projecting a proud, posi-tive image of itself to the host society which had frequently demonstrated a lethal ambivalence to the Jew . . . The changes of the past quarter cen-tury, especially those of the 1980s, seemed to offer hope that the world’s fourth largest Jewish community would be able to address the crucial problems facing it as it enters the twenty-first century (Sibelman, 1990: 232–233).

Acknowledging revival and renewal in 1990 was one thing; the deve-lopment of a vision for European Jewry from Ireland to the Carpathi-ans, which saw it as an emerging “center” of Jewish life capable of challenging the Israel-America bi-polarity of world Jewry and consti-tuting a “third pillar of world Jewish identity”, only crystallized a few years later. Made possible by the end of the Cold War, the signing of the Oslo Accords in 1993 and the role being played by the European Union as champion of diversity within unity, this vision was not the work of the established international Jewish and Zionist organizations, or of the political umbrella body of European Jews, the European Jew-ish Congress (EJC), or of the national Jewish leaderships of the major communities in Europe; France, the UK and Germany. It derived from the practical needs of activists responsible for reviving the com-munities of the East who turned to their Jewish counterparts in the West for help. And from the academics, researchers, policy planners and thinkers who saw the wider picture.

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The yearning of European Jews to cooperate in working for a con-tinent-wide regeneration of Jewish life was first fully expressed at the conference on “Planning for the Future of European Jewry” organized by the Institute of Jewish Affairs (IJA), the American Jewish Commit-tee (AJC), the European Council of Jewish Communities (ECJC) and the American Jewish Joint Distribution Committee ( Joint) in Prague from 3–5 July, 1995. (This was the first pan-European Jewish confer-ence of its kind, albeit with heavyweight American Jewish involvement, since the immediate post-war period.) As the summary of the proceed-ings confidently puts it: “With the collapse of Communism, European Jewry is poised to unite and take its full place alongside Israel and the American Jewish community as one of the three pillars of the Jewish world.” (IJA and AJC, 1996) It was there that Diana Pinto, the Paris-based intellectual historian, spoke of the potential for European Jewry to become the “third pillar” of world Jewry, a theme she expanded on in a policy paper she wrote for the IJA’s successor body, the Institute for Jewish Policy Research ( JPR), and published in 1996:

Europe is not Australia. It is a place where Jewish history, culture and creativity have been rooted for more than two thousand years. That his-tory cannot be reduced to a mere episode of colonization in an Israeli rewriting of history; nor should it become a latter-day version of post-1492 Spain in which Jews exist primarily as a symbolic memory. It is up to us, as Europeans and Jews to turn Europe into the third pillar of a world Jewish identity at the cross-roads of a newly interpreted past, and a pluralist and democratic future (Pinto, 1996).

This vision of what was possible for European Jewry remained very influential, though not universally supported by European Jewish political leaders, for the rest of the 1990s, the period which Diana Pinto has called “the Jewish decade”, because of the favorable condi-tions for Jewish life in Europe that prevailed during those years. Pub-lished in 1999, Ilan Troen’s edited volume on Europe, Jewish Centers and Peripheries, gives the flavor of the well-grounded hopes and expec-tations of the time. “Conditions in Europe”, he wrote, “may now be sufficiently benign for a re-emergence of the European diaspora. The current turn towards democracy, pluralism, multiculturalism, multiple-identities, and the legitimization of diasporas have increased this pros-pect.” (Troen, 1999: 21) Although he rather overestimated the degree of “interest and commitment on the part of both Israeli authorities and American Jewry to abet the process of European Jewish revival”

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(ibid.: 22), he had a clear idea of what the revival might amount to: “With the continuing evolution of Jewish life, it is not unrealistic or unimaginable to see European Jewry reemerging as a ‘center’. The dispersals of Jews and of centers of Jewish life on all continents is radically different from what it was at the beginning of the twentieth century.” (ibid.: 23) And anticipating the accelerated changes to come in the twenty-first century, brought about by globalization and the Internet revolution, he wrote: “To imagine Jewish continuity and even a renaissance of Jewish life in Europe is to acknowledge the possibility of new forms of identification and unanticipated relationships among the distinct communities of a dispersed international people.” (ibid.)

There is no doubt that the revival of Jewish life in Europe in the 1990s was variegated and unorthodox. By certain traditional mea-sures, it was even possible to see strong evidence of decline. But a four-country mapping study carried out by JPR and published in 2002 provided incontrovertible evidence both of the dynamic and growing presence of Jewish cultural activity in Europe and of the “valuable role that Jewish culture plays for people across the spectrum of the Jewish community”. It also emphasized “the unique and symbolic role that Jewish culture plays in contemporary Europe, both within the Jewish communities themselves and in mainstream European society.” (Schischa and Berenstein, 2002) In a lecture at the Central European University organized by the Jewish Studies Program in 1999, Diana Pinto said: “Never has the timing been more propitious both in terms of the interest of the outside world and the possibilities of the world within” (Pinto, 2000: 201).

Within a year or so, as the new millennium got underway, it became increasingly clear that the higher aspirations for the future of European Jewry had taken something of a knock. It had looked as if nothing could impede the progress of the Jewish revival, but with the outbreak of the second intifada, 9/11, the launching of the Gulf War, rising disenchantment with European integration and enlarge-ment and the fear that Europe, and the world more generally, was experiencing the rapid rise of a “new anti-Semitism” making it unsafe for Jews to walk the streets in Europe’s major cities, the gains of the 1990s began to look less secure. At a weekend round-table in Nor-mandy for a group of 25 European Jewish intellectuals, which Diana Pinto and I organized in March 2003 to discuss the Jewish position in Europe, Konsanty Gebert, one of the leaders of the Polish Jewish revival, summed up a general feeling of consternation: “It feels like this


is a conference of liberals mugged by reality. The Jewish world was conned into believing in the end of history. 1989 was a turning point, creating a dramatically new and hopeful atmosphere. But 1989 also opened a can of worms.”2 As Professor Zygmunt Bauman put it:

Before the collapse of the Communist block, the contingent and wayward nature of the global state of affairs was not so much non-existent, as it was barred from sight by the all-energy-and-thought-consuming day-to-day reproduction of the balance between the world powers. By dividing the world, power politics conjured up the image of totality . . . With the Great Schism out of the way, the world does not look like a totality any more; it looks rather like a field of scattered and disparate forces, con-gealing in places difficult to predict and gathering momentum which no one really knows how to arrest (Bauman, 1998b: 58).

But the fact is that while the deteriorating international context upsets assumptions about the possible path of European Jewry, most of the problems that European Jews now faced were of their own making or the making of Jews from elsewhere.

First, the pan-European Jewish bodies that should have fulfilled the role of creating the structures of cooperation for the transfer of resources, expertise, personnel and advice across Europe proved hope-lessly inadequate (Lerman, 2008).

Second, the official Jewish leaderships in France, the UK and Ger-many failed to respond to the direct appeals for assistance from the Central and East Central European communities. They thought that encouraging Jewish life in these countries was treasonous for Zionism, distasteful because of perceived endemic, genocidal anti-Semitism, and wasteful of precious resources. Moreover, since they were the key players in the pan-European bodies, their perfunctory involvement in them was the principal reason for the failure of those organizations.

Third, these fatal weaknesses in European Jewish leadership allowed non-European Jewish agencies, like the Lauder Foundation, the AJC, the Jewish Agency ( JAFI) and Chabad, to operate in Europe with hardly any consultation with national and pan-European Jewish lead-ers. Some of these organizations provided both vision and valuable practical help, but some have been more concerned with their own agendas and did not operate in the interests of European Jewry.

2 Author’s notes.

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Fourth, we need to remember that many local Jewish leaders, espe-cially those in the Israel-oriented organizations and the Orthodox reli-gious groups, were never comfortable with the new atmosphere of openness, multiculturalism and respect for diversity which provided the essential conditions for the Jewish revival. Marginalized during the 1990s, these leaders seized the opportunity of the worsening political and social climate to come to the fore again in their communities and pursue a more defensive, ethnocentric, inward-looking agenda, putting fighting anti-Semitism and demonstrating solidarity with Israel first. And some Jewish writers and thinkers were quick to foster a new pes-simistic interpretation of the post-Second World War period, which was based on the perception that European governments were now abandoning their always rather lightly-worn protective role vis-à-vis Jewish communities because of the need to appease the growing Mus-lim presence in their societies and to attract their votes (Lappin, 2007; Trigano, 2007).

Finally, despite the much-vaunted new, non-negationist attitude to the Diaspora on the part of Israelis and a more sympathetic under-standing of the authenticity of Jewish life in Europe on the part of American Jews, powerful voices in both countries were saying exactly the opposite. A notorious article by the Israeli journalist Ari Shavit in Ha’aretz predicted that such was the inevitability of decline, by the end of this century, “Here and there a nature reserve of Jews will exist, here and there a ghetto of some sort.” There will be nothing left but “the last Jews. The last Jews of Romania. The last Jews of Bulgaria. The End of the Road.” (Shavit, 2001) In December 2004, the former Chief Rabbi of Israel, Meir Lau, predicted that European Jewish his-tory is nearing its end (Barkat, 2004).

Failure to achieve the four goals of becoming an effective third pil-lar, developing a ‘European Jewish identity’, creating effective pan-European organizations and delivering sustained support to the com-munities in former Communist countries makes the question mark at the end of the title of this conference stand out in stark relief. It may be, of course, that these goals are unattainable, or undesirable, or cannot be achieved in 20 years. On the other hand, it could be argued that in each area there has been some progress. But what makes it difficult to answer the question which the conference faces is that there is a very marked disconnect between the picture we see of European Jewry in the mainstream Jewish media, and the statements


and activities of some Jewish leaders, and what is happening on the ground, or between the lines of the dominant narrative.

First, there seems to be no diminution of the kind of bedrock Jewish activity that originally signaled the Jewish revival in Europe. Professor David Shneer, who is sensitive to these developments, only last year spoke of Europe becoming “a vibrant social and economic home for global Jewry.” (Shneer, 2008) Jon Boyd, who ran the Joint’s Europe-based International Center for Community Development until the end of 2008, wrote about his experience of Jewish communities across Europe and highlighted remarkable initiatives taking place in Tallinn and Budapest (Boyd, 2008). The phenomenal rise of the Limmud concept, which has now been rolled out across Europe, and which attracts record numbers to its yearly UK winter event, is evidence of a continuing and growing appetite for Jewish cultures, in both breadth and depth.

Second, although the stock of the EU project has fallen and even the recession has not re-engendered a spirit of communautaire coopera-tion, there are good reasons to believe that in the medium to longer term, the Europe of 27 is a fundamentally benign environment for European Jewish aspirations. Steven Beller made a powerful case for this when he argued in a 2008 JPR Policy Debate paper:

Whether they liked it or not, Jews have been a pluralizing element in Euro-pean history. The Jewish world was about connection and exchange, not exclusion and boundaries . . . The potential for Jews to be regarded both as Jews and as full members of the wider community has now been largely realized in today’s Europe. Jews can be Jews and European and, for example, British (even English) without any conceptual or logical discomfort. . . . It is European Jews’ diasporic, critical-pluralist tradition that chimes with the best, pluralist elements in both Jewish and Euro-pean history, and is by far the best way forward for Jews, Europe (Beller, 2008: 3).

And if some see Europe’s identity wars and the pressure of assimila-tion, mostly focused on the continent’s Muslim population, as inimical to that “critical-pluralist tradition”, Zygmunt Bauman sees it differ-ently. He argues that the “agony and splendor” of assimilation has come to an end in Europe, both for Jews and other groups. “On that northwestern peninsula of the Asiatic continent called ‘Europe’, iden-tity is no longer the front line along which coercion and freedom, imposition and choice, inclusion and exclusion confront each other in a war of attrition.” (Bauman, 2008: 6) The life-and-death pressures to

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homogenize are no longer there. “In our part of the world ‘identity’ has become, for all intents and purposes, an ‘identainment’: it has moved from the realm of physical and spiritual survival to that of recreational amusement.”

Third, we are fortunate to have some recent data on the thoughts of European Jewish leaders and opinion formers on the future of Jew-ish life in Europe. More than half of those asked to participate in an online survey conducted by Gallup for the JDC’s International Centre for Community Development—251 from 31 European countries—completed the survey.3 To begin with, there was overwhelming agree-ment on the question that “someone can just as easily be a good Jew in Europe, as they can in Israel”. Most Jewish leaders and opinion formers who completed the survey had strong views on the specificity of the European Jewish community: 9 out of 10 agreed that it was very important to strengthen relationships between Jews living in different parts of Europe and 8 out of 10 agreed that European Jewry had a unique and valuable perspective to share with world Jewry.

Nevertheless, some doubts were raised about the meaning of the term “European Jewry”. Respondents were split over whether Europe-ans had as much in common with non-European Jews as they did with one another: half agreed compared to a third who disagreed. Simi-larly, half of the respondents agreed that the term “European Jewry” was meaningful only insofar as it described Jews from a particular geographical region, compared to 4 out of 10 who disagreed with this statement, implying a more substantive definition. Two-thirds felt that their community was very much a part of European Jewry, but 3 out of 10 doubted whether this was true. Regarding the future, half agreed that the future of European Jewry was vibrant and positive while 4 out of 10 disagreed with this proposition.

Levels of commitment to Israel were high, but almost half also declared themselves as being sometimes “ashamed” by the actions of the Israeli government. Three-quarters also agreed that events in Israel sometimes led to an increase of anti-Semitism in their country. Particularly striking was the response to the question: “ What are the most serious threats facing your communities?” They ranked anti-Semitism 9th in a list of 12 items. The first 8 threats were all inter-nal: for example, loss of Jewish identity, lack of Jewish knowledge and

3 http://www.jdc-iccd.org/pressrelease.asp ( February 6, 2010).


declining numbers. This finding has to be set against another piece of data which shows that, asked to say what causes are the top communal priorities, respondents ranked combating anti-Semitism 4th in a list of 13 items, behind Jewish education, supporting Jews in need and sup-porting the state of Israel, but this is still some considerable distance away from received ideas of the unprecedented nature of the threat of anti-Semitism in Europe.

In spite of all the caveats that must apply to a survey which was not based on a scientifically constructed representative sample, there are very good grounds for concluding that European Jewry still has very strong potential to reassert itself and is “not destined to disappear as a result of assimilation or annihilation” (Sheffer, 1999: 62). But we need to think of ‘centers’ in the making rather than one ‘center’.

Conclusions

This does not mean we can put the clock back and imagine that we are still in the 1990s. There are important lessons to be learned from the last 20 years which require that we make some significant changes in our thinking. Apart from the fact that we expected too much and did not account for contingent events, the flaw in thinking about Jewish Europe was to assume that the category “European Jewry” was then a workable collective unit. While asserting Europe’s autonomy within the Jewish world represented a questioning of the “collectivizing” ten-dencies of most thinking about the idea of the “Jewish people”, it did not go far enough. We now know that the Jewish revival in Europe is about “people” and not “places”. We are devaluing and missing what is going on through the homogenizing effect of thinking about the Jews of Europe as one entity, which is more generally the fundamental flaw in the overarching language of “Israel-Diaspora”. As Jon Boyd writes in an article published jointly by New Jewish Thought and the American Jewish magazine Zeek: “The language of Israel-Diaspora diminishes our view of Diaspora, and turns millions of vibrant, varied and valu-able Jews into a singular and amorphous mass.”4 Whilst there are signs that something distinctly ‘European-Jewish’ can emerge, it has to come from the bottom up, not from the retrogressive collectivizing

4 http://www.jewcy.com/post/new_jewish_thought_dispatch_uk (March 29, 2010).

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tendencies represented both by Zionist thinking and the current fash-ionable notion of ‘peoplehood’. To quote Jon Boyd again, “the new paradigm . . . no longer positions the land or the state of Israel at the center of the Jewish world, because, sociologically at least, that notion is becoming increasingly meaningless” (Boyd, 2008).

Europe has not lost its symbolic significance. Indeed, that signifi-cance has probably intensified over the last 20 years and we ignore it at our peril. Europe is the place Jews are being asked and told to flee from, yet Europe is the place many Israelis are queuing up to be citizens of, and Israel may even queue up to join. It’s the place where the Holocaust is going to happen again, but the place where Jews have an unprecedented opportunity to shape social and political real-ity through participation in civil society. Europe is the old border, the gate to Auschwitz; and Europe is the new border, the new frontier, perhaps the gate to a new paradigm of Jewish existence. These con-tradictions make it difficult to see Jews in Europe as they really are. Even bodies like the Jewish People Policy Planning Institute, which claims to understand that outdated Israeli attitudes to the Diaspora must be abandoned, find it very difficult to demonstrate this in their own work, as the section on “The Jews of Europe 2000–2007” in its yearly assessment of the Jewish world published at the beginning of 2008, so clearly and depressingly shows (Tal, 2007).

It may be very difficult for many people to put aside their ideo-logical predilections when discussing the Jews of Europe today, but I believe we must try. I suggest we should take as our example Profes-sor Hedva Ben Israel, the Hebrew University historian of national-ism and Zionism, who, despite being a staunch Zionist, acknowledged in 2007: “All forms of Jewish existence continue to exist, and some extreme forms are getting stronger. The Jewish people is more split than ever on nationalism and Jewish universalism. History triumphed over Zionism and not the other way round.”5 She deplored this state of affairs, but had the guts to admit it was accurate. What is happen-ing to Jewish Europe reflects her assessment. We need to deal with the reality of what Jews in Europe are today, not look at this reality through ideologically-tinted spectacles.

5 Remarks made at the conference, held in honor of Professor Gideon Shimoni, “The Contemporary Peoplehood of Jews: Myth or Reality?”, 2–4 January, 2007, Beit Maiersdorf, Mount Scopus, Jerusalem.

PART III

ANTI-SEMITISM, ISRAEL AND JEWISH POLITICS

HATE AGAINST THE OTHERS. ABOUT THE FATAL CHAIN CREATING XENOPHOBIA AND ANTI-SEMITISM

Thomas Gergely

As we all do know the two thousand years long history of the Jews has seen the longest vindication any group of people has ever been subjected to. History can be seen here as a laboratory to show us how some terrible dynamics regularly lead people, living for a long period of time peacefully alongside each other, to suddenly swoop down on their neighbours and ill-treat/molest or even butcher them. Anti-Semitism—might it be religious, political, or racial—seems upon ana-lysis to be part of a wider phenomenon that could touch at any time any other groups of people; an attitude growing from incidental cases of aggression into a towering rage. It is about the five or six factors of this phenomenon I will describe and later on I will include the par-ticular case of the Jews.

The problem starts with what we could call “the hatred of what is different”. We regularly witness that someone is rejected or hated because of being different. A different colour (“How can one be so black?”); a different race, allegedly visible as difference (“How can one have such a big nose?”); a different belief (“How can one not believe in the coming of the Messiah?”) or a different dress (“How can one wear a fur hat in summer or a long coat?”). And then, of course, different ways of acting in daily life: “Why doesn’t my neighbour eat pork? One doesn’t die from it.”—“Why doesn’t he speak my language?”—“Why does he pronounce it so badly?”—“What a typical accent! What grammatical mistakes, what pidgin!”—“I do not understand a word! It is all Chinese or Hebrew, to me!” And on top of all that, the other can be poor—or on the contrary, rich—, “how does he dare? How can he cook those stinking dishes?” Undoubtedly, this is the hatred of the immigrant. His mother tongue is very different, and the national language is spoken with difficulty and a heavy accent. Be it Arab, African, Polish, or German for certain Jews. It is about hatred for what is different.

When we now look at a group of different individuals amidst a majority group, frustrated by for instance feelings of economical or

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military inferiority, the majority group will often try to balance out its situation by claiming the inferiority of the minority group—especially when different. The Germans during the period between the two World Wars suffered from being defeated after the war of 1914–1918, and trying to recover their supposedly lost dignity, proclaimed the Slavs to be inferior, the Gypsies even more so and the Jews just good enough to be gassed, like rats.

Thus, the cursed chain of hatred is being forged. We already have two links: hatred of what is different and considered inferior. And now the steps to balance out the situation can take place. As we know the mass is easier mobilised against something than for—and easier mobi-lised for hatred than for friendship. Some grew into masters of mobi-lising the feelings of antagonism adding hatred of what is different and inferior to inflame: “Let’s attack!” As an example, think of the skinheads, imitating old Nazi methods and exploiting regularly the latent feelings of antagonism amongst the masses. This then invites to put in place “ratting-out” techniques or worst the pogrom, used to put all responsibility onto the scapegoats. These techniques can only be applied because the masses are happy to accept extremely simple solutions to their problems.

There are so many examples across history. During the Middle Ages the Plague in Europe was thought to be caused by the Jews having poisoned the city wells. The Jews were of course drinking the same water! Or to put it theologically: Christians were punished by the Plague for allowing the Jews—considered as the murderers of Christ—to live amongst them. All around Europe bonfires flared up without the Plague ever been stopped. Centuries later when Nazism started to gather pace, the German defeat of 1918 was explained as the suppos-edly betrayal of the Jews. In the same line we also know that revolu-tions and wars are often blamed on world spanning conspiracies: the Catholics via Opus Dei, the Free Masons via their lodges, the Jews via complots (as accused in the Protocols of the Elders of Zion). The fatal chain becomes longer and longer as we have now mobilisation against a minority, called inferior because of being different and considered responsible of ills befalling the majority.

Violence as part of the pogrom technique is highly efficient because it offers immediate relief of feelings of frustration. It is destruction that offers an almost instant satisfaction whereas construction is always a slow and laborious process and its results are uncertain. Day by day we see images projected on our screens of rioters ransacking, lynching, setting

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on fire and loudly screaming their satisfaction. All this can happen because of the ready co-operation of some groups in acts of “pogroms”, looting and wars against generally peacefully living neighbours.

Where is this process leading to? We state mobilisation against a neighbour—often belonging to a minority—, called inferior because of being different and held responsible for the ills befalling the nation. We state readiness to eliminate the other group in order to relieve own feelings of frustration. Nothing seems to hinder acts of oblitera-tion anymore. But here a crucial question comes up: how can we attack this neighbour with whom we lived intelligently and peacefully for so long? Only by including this neighbour in a general judgement that has nothing to do with past experience. Past experience would deny the fantasies leading to the pogrom. So it can only be done by a synecdoche generalisation. Innocent when used in the sense of “the Belgian likes French fries”. Wrong of course, because not all Belgians like French fries, but not important because the consequence of this way of thinking is futile.

However following this figure of speech replacing the individual by the general, leads us astray in expressions such as:

“Arabs are terrorists.”—“Blacks are cannibals.”—“Japanese are cruel.”—“Jews are usurers.” And so on, and so forth. The door to justification of crime has been opened. These final links of the chain now give us the dramatic structure announcing mobilisation against inferior beings (“Untermensch”, under-person), different, considered responsible for the ills of the nation (“Die Juden sind unser Unglück”—“The Jews are our misfortune”). The nation will rapidly diffuse its frustration by destroy-ing this peaceful neighbour (“Ausrottung der Juden”—“extermination of the Jews”), while mobilized with all possible infectious fantasies (“Jews assimilated with rats”, as presented in the Nazi propaganda movie “Der Ewige Jude”—“The eternal Jew”).

Hatred of what is different, feeling of inferiority, antagonistic drives, tendency to simplify, scapegoat techniques, abusive generalisation, these are the ingredients of the general dynamics to drive people against each other. The hatred of the Jews is fuelled by these general factors and there are more specific ones to be added. In the chain of anti-Semitism the first historical link is based on the religious, anti-Jewish tradition. Present both in the Christian and Islamic culture, its virulence has diminished significantly after the Shoa, though not every-where in the world. This tradition can easily be mobilised. For Chris-tians the anti-Jewish tradition is based on the non-acknowledgment

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by the Jews of Jesus as Messiah. For the Moslems it is based on the non-acknowledgment of Mohammed as prophet incarnating the ulti-mate truth.

These anti-Jewish traditions are leaning on the accusation of being alien, foreign, being different from the values of the majority. Behind this accusation hides the idea that there is a one-dimensional identifi-cation between a state and a specific ethnic group. This is the thinking that leads to slogans like “Patagonia for the Patagonians”, “Lapland for the Laplanders”, and so on. Still, in many countries Jews have been seen or are being seen as foreigners, even after having been part of the nation since tens and tens of years, sometimes centuries—even when born on the spot or naturalised. Hence some enlighten verbal confusions when confronting, for instance, Belgians and Jews instead of confronting Belgians of different religions.

The accusation of being “foreign” is often and strongly expressed, underlined again in the religious differences. Because of the 2000 years lasting conflict opposing Jews and Christians, for certain Christian hardliners the Jew is more or less unfaithful, and thus more or less lost for heaven! How can he be saved if he does not confess to Jesus Christ and if he does not celebrate the Christian holidays (“shocking isn’t it?”) but other, mysterious ones? Mysterious because the essence and mean-ing are unknown for the crowd. This different behaviour shocks even more because coming from a religious minority group, giving thus the impression of challenging the majority. In combination with the differ-ence and strangeness, the impression of challenge given by the minor-ity group creates fear (of the other)—and this fear then leads (the other) to hostility. This hostility can be quite violent because—contrary to other minorities—the Jews even when fully integrated, seen their long history, stick more than others to their original identity, thus maintain-ing their singularity. Why, after 2000 years of emancipation, naturali-sation, born here, do they not give up these characteristics that make them different from the majority? This perception of singularity leads to rejection and even hostility.

The problem of singularity or strangeness even becomes more com-plicated because of being fed by ignorance. In the Western world, concerning the Jews, only the Bible is known in translation by the majority. The remaining part of Jewish literature is inaccessible for the masses. Thus, the ignorance concerning the Jews can be exploited by hallucinating stories sometimes as crazy as the accusations of ritual murders that raged from the Middle Ages to the beginning of the

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twentieth century. On top of all this we should add the factor of rivalry and competition. In many European countries, after the emancipa-tion of 1792, Jews could freely chose their profession and earn their living. In Germany many Jews sacrificed themselves even on the bat-tlefields of World War I from 1914–1918, devoted to Emperor Wil-helm. When later these countries entered the economical crisis, the scapegoat techniques accused the Jews of doing the jobs of others. And of course there were countries where even after the emancipation Jews had no free access to all professions. In those countries, the Jews out of necessity specialised themselves in certain areas like jewellery or textiles. But in fact, Jews were soon accused there of monopolising the jobs of the others.

How, in the face of all this, can we escape, becoming aware of anti-Semitism? Even the most idealistic Jew cannot escape. The problem is that the awareness is making the solidarity within the group stronger—and this, in turn, reinforces tendencies of anti-Semitism. The question we have to ask is what to do about this phenomenon. Well, for a start, be alert to signs announcing the wave. And yes, there are signs. Here some of the most important: one of the most significant is the instability of nations. Often we see violence and anti-Semitism crop up in the heart of insecure nations, looking for their own identity. In the nineteenth century, Germany was freshly created by Bismarck. And looking for its own unity and identity, it attacked its neighbours and laid the ideological basis for racial anti-Semitism.

Another forebode of anti-Semitism is the weakening of democracies. In fact dictators do need to point out would-be culprits in order to make people forget their own violent manners. And this works only to jus-tify and present themselves as providential saviours. A weakening of democracies is a forebode of attacks against the Jews, being the easy and traditional scapegoats. We also should be aware those times of economic crisis call for strong leadership, often anti-Semitic. So an economic recession is also a sign not to be overseen.

Especially economic crises often lead to war. But in wars, people die—and that has to be justified. And so after the wars, those who lost are looking for a scapegoat to explain the defeat, and those who won are also looking for a scapegoat in order to explain why they entered the war and why so many lives are lost. Who doesn’t know Hitler’s speeches pretending it were the Jews that forced him into war? After the wars anti-Semitism also erupts regularly. Especially because at the end of wars, migration movements start, and immigration stirs

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up hatred of the other—and so anti-Semitism. The “other” is part of a minority, perhaps belonging to a minority religion. And when-ever a country has a state religion, it will by nature support strong forms of government, and Judaism will find itself in a poor position. Fortunately, on the other hand, anti-Semitism diminishes when the alluring powers of dictatorship do not succeed and ensuing corruption has been reacted upon. Better of course to avoid the whole situation altogether.

In short: the anti-Semitic danger appears in instable countries, looking for strong political leadership, often during an economi-cal downturn, unable to exorcise old pains and rancour’s, incapable of integrating allochtone populations, tempted by state religion and structured in too rigid a way. When the winkers light up, danger is imminent and it should be forbidden to ignore it.

Being warned and sensitive is one thing we should have learned from history. But what can we hope for? We can of course fight this plague by issuing laws, and by education. However we do know that these measures are not enough. Only dealing with these problems on a global scale, with a better perception of the other in general, can assure us a regression of this phenomenon. Of course anti-Semitism is seriously pre-occupying the Jews, because they are the cause, like mar-riage is the cause of divorce, but in the end it is everybody’s problem. That is what I have been trying to explain.

“ANTI-SEMITES OF THE CONTINENT UNITE!” IS THE EAST STILL DIFFERENT?

Raphael Vago

The expanding scholarship and public discussions on the emerging patterns of a “European Jewish identity” mostly focus on the revival of Jewish life in the former Communist countries, including the former Soviet Union, and the impact of such a revival on the ties and contacts between the Jewish communities on both sides of the continent.1 In most of these discussions and researches less attention is paid to the various forms of anti-Semitism in Europe, especially from the point of view of present differences between the two parts of Europe, and the future of such differences. The evaluation and an analysis of the various patterns of anti-Semitism is essential for the understanding of the agenda of the various Jewish communities, and their tactics and strategies in combating local and worldwide anti-Semitism.

This article is aimed at presenting anti-Semitic motifs and activities in the former Communist countries (outside the former Soviet Union) as compared to Western Europe, the focus being the differences between the “East” and the “West”. The major working assumption of the paper is that the Eastward expansion of the EU and other struc-tures of European and Western integration, as NATO, will gradually have to blur the differences between the “East” and the “West”. On the other hand, the working assumption is also based on the still exist-ing differences, even twenty years after 1989, between both sides of the continent, as evidenced by differences in the anti-Semitic “agenda” in the various countries. In other words, the study of anti-Semitism in Europe may also serve as a case study in the research of European integration, as the eventual emergence of a “unified” European anti-Semitic discourse—of course still taking into account local motifs—will indicate the level of success of European integration. In this case it

1 For a review of the basic issues of European Jewish identity, see Gruber, 2001; Weinberg, 2002: 91–120; Pinto, http://www.hagalil.com/bet-debora/golem/europa.htm, March 31, 2010.

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will represent a very negative and unfortunate development of more practical coordination, greater “exchange of information and experi-ence.” While presenting the different situations and different forms of anti-Semitism existing in the former Communist countries the paper will attempt to evaluate if such trends are expected to have a longer life-span or they will diminish gradually as part of the respec-tive countries’ integration in the EU, and into the Western norms. The difference between “short” and “long” life span motifs and forms of discourse may indicate the existence of “native” and local forms of anti-Semitism, specific to the area, in contrast to “all-European” forms.

Paul Hockenos, one of the earliest analysts of the post-Communist rise of the extreme right, wrote in Newsweek, October 12, 2009, that “on a deeper level . . . the democratic cultures of these countries (Cen-tral Europe) still lag behind the rest of the continent . . . On the right, some profoundly illiberal nationalist forces—even openly bigoted extremists—are disconcertingly popular.”2

The major factor that distinguishes the former Communist space from Western Europe is the legacy of the Communist regimes—in many respects a legacy that created a “black hole” in the coping of the respective societies with the Jewish past, anti-Semitism in the region, and the memory of the Holocaust. It seems that the distortion of his-torical memory in the former Communist states remains one of the dividing lines between both sides of the continent. The Communist states’ attitudes towards anti-Semitism remains a complex issue, still a topic that is of great research interest since archives have been avail-able in the past years. The Communist states have pursued different policies towards the Jews, the Jewish past and the Holocaust, with differences among themselves and pursued different policies between 1945 and 1989. Generally speaking, all states have declared that “there is no anti-Semitism, and no-ethnic, racial, religious discrimination”. In fact the discussion of Jewish topics, Jewish legacy, and the Holocaust became a taboo, largely until the 80s, when with the gradual demise of the regimes a more open attitude was pursued. Furthermore, during the last years of Stalinism, as during the Slansky trials, and even after that in Poland and Czechoslovakia a strong anti-Semitic, anti-Zionist,

2 Newsweek, October 12, 2009; for the emergence of post-Communist extremism, see Hockenos, 1993.

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anti-Israeli campaign, as in 1968 and later on, contributed to the fur-ther ignorance of the new generations. Thus, anti-Semitic stereotypes not only survived the Communist era, but were reinforced by strong waves of anti-Israeli propaganda in various periods, a fact that was exploited with the emergence of post-1989 anti-Semitism.

Following 1989 there was an outburst of Holocaust denial and anti-Semitism feeding on the new expression of the “freedom of speech” which rapidly turned into what Paul Hockenos termed as “freedom to hate”. It seems that the new anti-Semitism that followed the collapse of the Communist systems rapidly tried to make up time lost during the Communist regimes in expressing those aspects of anti-Semitism that the Communists rejected, as justifying fascist ideologies, revival of traditional nationalist and religious anti-Semitism, and the denying of the Holocaust. Thus one major emerging difference between pat-terns of anti-Semitism in the West and the East was the process of a “new beginning” in the East, while in the West the post-war genera-tions, and especially in Germany tried to cope with the past, the Holo-caust was introduced, albeit late in the West, but was being learned, and the legal mechanism in the different Western countries coped with various manifestations, physical and verbal, of anti-Semitism.

There were several features and types of activity in the former Com-munist countries that were different from the West. It is important to note here the emergence of new and influential extremist political groups and parties, often publishing popular newspapers and journals, reinforced since the 1990s with the growing electronic media, carry-ing anti-Semitic messages. The Greater Romania Party, led by former Ceausescu lackey, Corneliu Vadim Tudor; the MIEP (The Hungarian Life and Justice Party) led by Istvan Csurka, have passed the elec-toral threshold and were represented in the new parliaments. Similar groups and movements sprung up in the Czech Republic, Slovakia and Poland. A common feature between the various movements was that that they are “anti-Western” in the sense of being anti-liberal, by which they identify “Socialism” and “Liberalism” as basically Jewish values, and they oppose the “rule of the EU”, while at the same time they have growingly learned to use the European Parliament for their purposes.

The major difference between the West and the East was and to a large degree remains some twenty years after the collapse of the regimes, that these movements represented a major feature of the process of “return to history”. Using the classification of Michael

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Shafir, several movements in Eastern Europe represented the “radical return” pattern of a revival of ideas and the worship of personalities and regimes that cooperated with Nazi Germany.3 Throughout the region there was a sense of urgency among the extreme anti-Semitic right to spread their ideas, as some of the veterans of those movements have raised their head or returned from years of exile in the West. From the adherents of the right-wing Polish nationalist movement, the NSZ (National Armed Forces), to the cherishing of Tiso’s regime in Slovakia, to the rival pro-Horthy vs. pro-Szalasi, Arrow Cross adherents, the similar competing factions of the Iron Guard between their own internal divisions, and with the adherents of Antonescu, to the heirs of the Ustasha in Croatia—post-Communist reality had to confront the living ghost of the past, a process largely over by then in the West. Thus the East European nationalist, xenophobic, racist, and anti-Semitic discourse had to reinvent itself, to fight for its place in the shaping of post-Communist collective memory. To add to this complex situation, again to use Michael Shafir’s models, we have to add the movements of “radical continuity”—in the case of Roma-nia, where the Greater Romania Party falls into this category—where extremism was staffed by members, especially of the Party and security apparatus of the Communist regime. Some patterns of “red-brown” coalition—also evident in Russia—, were unlike anything in the West, and represented not only an ideological confusion of the first post-Communist decade and even more, but also the emergence of specific forms of East European anti-Semitic discourse, based on the specific issues related to the problems of post-Communism.

In the past few years there seem to be some changes which indicate the impact of the Eastward expansion of the EU. Right wing extrem-ists, even if they have not tried to enter the local parliaments yet, or were ousted in local elections, are turning more to the European Par-liament. In the 2008–2009 elections to the European Parliament (EP), East European right wing movements from Bulgaria, Romania and Hungary have strengthened the extremist bloc in the EP. The Hun-garian Jobbik movement sent three EMP’s and gained parliamentary representation in the general elections in Hungary in 2010. Romania’s

3 Among the numerous publications of Michael Shafir dealing with the nature of Holocaust denial and forms of post-Communist anti-Semitism, see Shafir, 2004: 195–226; Shafir, 2002.


Greater Romania Party is represented in the EP but it failed at local elections in Romania. Thus, there are forums for the growing coop-eration between extremists on both sides of the continent, focusing on issues as immigration, their anti-Roma positions, lowering, per-haps as a tactical step, the anti-Semitic discourse, in order to focus on pan-European issues, as immigration and the future of the “European way of life”, at the moment in the eyes of the extremists seems less threatened by Jews.4 It should be emphasized, that in almost every individual country, especially in Eastern Europe, the anti-Semitic ele-ments still are riding high on the myth of the Jew destabilizing society and national values.

An interesting type of cooperation between the far-right on both sides of the continent is the formation of a branch of the extremist Hungarian Jobbik in London, aimed at the Hungarian community in Britain, as reported by the Times Online on December 5, 2009. Yet, such a step has a more important significance, beyond the penetration of Jobbik into the Hungarian community, as it represents a trend of the development of further ties among the European far-right. Jobbik had already ties with the British National Party (BNP) led by Nick Griffin. It should be noted that Krisztina Morvai, the leader of Jobbik was to address a rally in London in November 2009, but was forced to cancel it after protests from anti-fascist organizations. Commenting on the Jobbik and BNP cooperation, the anti-BNP website Nothing British’s Director, James Bethell said that “Jobbik are a revolting and extrem-ist party with close links to Nick Griffin and whose leaders regularly incite hatred against minorities.” Jobbik has also ties with the Austrian Freedom Party (FPÖ), and the foreign affairs spokesman of the FPÖ, Johannes Hubner received a representative of Jobbik in the Austrian Parliament.5

Holocaust denial in Eastern Europe is different on several forms from its Western patterns. In those countries which collaborated with the Nazis, as in Slovakia, Hungary, Romania, Croatia, Holocaust denial takes the form of “whitewashing” historical truth, by minimiz-ing the role of the local population and authorities in the extermi-nation of their Jewish population. Romania which for years claimed that there “was no Holocaust in Romania” had to face in 2004 the

4 “The Right-Wing Resurrection”, in: Newsweek, May 12, 2008.5 Der Standard quoted by HVG, January 29, 2010 (www.hvg.hu).

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Final Report of the International Commission of Historians on the Holocaust in Romania, and the bitter truth on the fate of Romanian Jewry in Transnistria (see Final Report, International Commission on the Holocaust in Romania, 2005). Anti-Semitic propaganda has tried for years before and after 2004 to deny the Romanian role, as likewise the cult of Antonescu, Tiso, Szalasi, Horthy, the Ustasha tried to deny the role of the leaders and the movements in the destruction of the local Jews. The Jews were accused of manipulating historical truth in order to blackmail the poor nations of the area for their own economic needs in order to demand compensation and return of properties.

In the case of Antonescu, for years the Romanian nationalist version has been that he was a true Romanian patriot, who fought against the Soviet Union in defending Romania’s rights—disregarding the fact that the Soviet Union occupied in 1940 Bessarabia and Northern Bukovina as a result of the Ribbentrop-Molotov Treaty of 1939—and Antonescu never intended to destroy the Jewish community. In this context, Romanian Holocaust deniers as Ion Coja, an academic, are openly publishing articles and studies denying that there was a Holo-caust in Romania, carried out by the Romanian authorities. In one of his tirades on the eve of the International Holocaust Day he wrote on the “so called Holocaust Day” and that in “Romania there was no Holocaust”.6

The same type of “defensive offensive” is used by Slovak revision-ists, where Tiso’s regime is defended by several historians, as Milan S. Durica, who, in a similar line to the defenders of Antonescu in Romania, manipulating historical facts, claim that in fact Tiso “saved” Jews, and that he acted both as a “true Christian and staunch anti-Bolshevik”, thus promoting not only Slovak national interests, but also those of Western civilization. Thus, historical revisionism is based on the allegations that not only there was no active cooperation with the Nazis, and if there were some evident “signs” for it, such as the deportation of Slovak Jewry to the death camps by the Tiso regime, it was done under “German pressure”. On the other hand, the impor-tance of the so called “Independent Slovak State” is so crucial in the

6 See the yearly reports of the Stephen Roth Institute for the Study of Contempo-rary anti-Semitism and Racism, Tel-Aviv University, www.tau.ac.il/Anti-Semitism/annual-report.htm (March 6, 2010); furthermore Mestan, 2000; Mestan, 2002; Coja, 2010; also see, Romania 2010—The International Holocaust Remembrance Day, MCA Romania—The Center for Monitoring and Combating Anti-Semitism in Romania, January 27, 2010.


post-Communist narrative that the fate of the Jews is best to be over-shadowed by the achievement of “national independence” during the war-time collaborationist regime. Thus, one may conclude from the Slovak revisionist publications that to some extent handing over Jews to the Nazis, was a price that the war-time Slovak state “had to pay” for its alleged independence.

Croatia has made much headway in trying to limit historical revi-sionism, but still the legacy of the Ustasha has not disappeared, as it raised its ugly head after the independence in 1991, fuelled by the anti-Serb sentiments during the wars following the disintegration of Yugoslavia.

In contrast to the West, where French and German Holocaust deniers have tried in the past to deny the very existence of gas cham-bers and the true character of the extermination camps, in the East such allegations were rare, focusing more on minimizing the number of victims and the role of the national authorities in the fate of the Jews. The emerging anti-Semitic discourse attempted to deny any local participation to whatever happened to the Jews, or to present, as in the Ukraine and the Baltics, the collaborators with the Nazis, as “freedom fighters” against Communism, and against the Soviet Union whose repressive machinery was staffed and supported by the Jews.

It seems that in the past few years both in the former Communist states in Eastern Europe, and parts of the former Soviet Union, his-torical revisionism has not been on the decline, and in spite of the disappearance of the war-time generation, of the victims and the per-petrators, the trend is still evident and even gaining some momentum, fuelling the nationalist sentiments of the post-Communist genera-tion, a feature that lost whatever ground it had in Western Europe, except in the case of Germany, where neo-Nazi sentiments have not disappeared.

Developments in Ukraine and the Baltics, especially in Lithuania, may have an encouraging impact on historical revisionism in East-ern Europe and vice versa. As outgoing Ukrainian President, Victor Yuschenko conferred the title of Hero of Ukraine to Stepan Bandera in January 2010, it was met with tough opposition from Jewish groups as well as from Polish leaders, including President Lech Kacynski.7 The rehabilitation of the Organization of Ukrainian Nationalists

7 See “In Ukraine a debate over history” ( January 6, 2010), in: The Washington Post; Haaretz, February 5, 2010; Montreal Gazette , February 3, 2010; Kyiv Post, February 5, 2010.

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(OUN-UPA), and the role of the units and of Bandera in killing and massacring thousands of Jews and Poles, indicates not only the usage and manipulation of nationalism for current political motives, but the acceptance of such steps by segments of society, and the continuing “battle for memory” in the area, an ongoing process in which the fate of the Jews plays an important role, and is used for current purposes, in even such allegations that on the eve of the second round of Presi-dential elections in Ukraine in February 2010, hundreds of thousands of leaflets have appeared calling “not to vote for the Jewess, Yulia Timoshenko”, whose father was allegedly of Jewish origin.

An important twist to the allegations on the Jewish role in the “Red Holocaust” was provided by the ongoing debates in Europe on the comparison between the crimes of Nazism, and those of Communism, especially under the Stalin years. In June 2008, the OSCE published the Prague Declaration, which branded together the crimes of the two totalitarian regimes, and called for a process by which the EU should adopt a new “European Day of Commemoration of Nazi and Soviet crimes”, a call that was made in April 2009. A tough declaration by the Wiesenthal Center in October 2009, exposed these efforts for a new day of commemoration as “a new form of anti-Semitism emanat-ing from East-Central Europe” and a “Project to Delete the Holocaust from European History”, as the real purpose of this step is to “sup-plant Holocaust Memorial Day in Europe”.8

Criticism was leveled against Lithuanian Foreign Minister, Vigau-das Usackas, at a major conference on anti-Semitism in Jerusalem in December 2009, where his words were interpreted as yet another attempt to equate between the sufferings of the Jews and the crimes committed by the Communists, and in fact to minimize the war time collaboration of Lithuanians with the Nazis (see Zuroff, 2009; Porat, 2010: 143–145). The case of the ongoing nationalist revival in the Ukraine and the Baltics, and attempts to turn cooperation with the Nazis as part of their struggle against Soviet bolshevism, is one of the major features that are still fueling anti-Semitism in the former Communist space—both in Eastern Europe and the parts of the former Soviet Union. Marches of veterans in the Baltics—albeit, in dwin-dling numbers each year, representing former local SS units and other collaborationist formations—have been turned into demonstrations

8 Simon Wiesenthal Center, News Release, October 12, 2009.


glorifying the pro-Nazi legacy, and thus providing more space and occasions for the Holocaust revisionists. The removal of Soviet war memorials, especially in the Baltic republics, and renewed attempts to do so in Budapest, by the Jobbik movement in early 2010, indicate that the nationalist anti-Communist rhetoric is not losing its ground, as almost every year there are new incidents and new forms of struggle over historical memory.

While these ongoing trends of historical revisionism have some spe-cific post-Communist features connected and influenced by the past and the present of the region, the danger is all-European, as was mani-fested by a major international conference in Berlin in December 2009 on the “Legacy of World War Two and the Holocaust” organized by the World Congress of Russian Jewry and supported by Jewish organizations in Europe.

In a broader perspective indeed there are specific features still evi-dent in both sides of the former Iron Curtain, which are not only a result of the Communist regimes and their legacy, but are also based on the historical and cultural background of the area, and the local pat-terns of anti-Semitism, and collaboration with the Nazis during World War Two. While this paper argues more for the gradual “Europeiza-tion” and “unification” of the anti-Semitic discourses and motives, the existing divisive pattern of the “culture of memory” between the two sides of the continent should not be overlooked, due to the specific local conditions and historical legacies.

A strong argument stressing the continuing divisions in Europe’s culture of memory was brought by Heidemarie Uhl, namely that “it seems that with few exceptions, only to the West of the former Iron Curtain is the Holocaust embedded in social memory (one may argue of course to what extent), while in the post-Communist Eastern Europe, it is Communism that it is the ‘hottest issue’ of the politics of memory” (Uhl, 2009: 60; see also Lebow, Kansteiner and Fogu, 2006). This phenomenon marks, in her view, competing positions of European memory, and she asks whether they “recreate the former borders between ‘East’ and ‘West’—borders which were to have been overcome, and even eliminated, by the project of a common European memory.”

Combating Holocaust denial and coping with ignorance has made important headway in the past decade or more. Here one can also observe the emergence of a more all-European model, than a specific East European one. While the local features of Holocaust denial have

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not disappeared—and it seems they will have a longer life span in the historical memory of parts of the populations of the former Commu-nist states—, the forms of combating features of Holocaust denial and in coping with the past have assumed more common forms. All the former Communist countries are participating in different educational projects aimed at teaching about the Holocaust and anti-Semitism on the various levels of the educational system, and are members of the International Task Force for Holocaust Education. Some of these programs are held in Yad Vashem in Jerusalem and others at various institutions and university centers in the respective countries. The introduction of such programs into the former Communist states has raised the level of teaching and gradually of local research—along with the emergence of a younger, post-Communist generation of scholars—to the level of Western Europe, thus another feature where differences between East and West are diminishing, in spite of continuing local motifs.

The Jewish role in the Communist regimes as also previously men-tioned, is yet another specific East European allegation, and could be indeed considered as in the words of Heidemarie Uhl, as the “hottest issue” of the politics of memory. One of the most prevailing East Euro-pean myths about Jews is their role in introducing the Communist regimes into the area, thus the idea of the “Zydokomuna” became a specific motif in the area. The role of leading Communists of Jewish origin is always highlighted, as Berman in Poland, Slansky in Czecho-slovakia, Rakosi, Gero and of course Bela Kun in 1919, in the Hun-garian case, Ana Pauker and others in Romania, while neglecting the role of the local ethnic Communists.

Furthermore, Jews were accused of the “Red Holocaust”—the Communist period, yet another form of the relativization of the Hol-ocaust. Such arguments, perhaps have toned down somewhat in the past twenty years, but were kept alive by the attacks on those public persons who represent the “father and son” continuity, the Jewish-Communist father, with the post-Communist son, or other family members, as in the case of the well known political scientist and ana-lyst, Vladimir Tismaneanu in Romania.

The attacks on the role of Jewish-Israeli capital and business in Eastern Europe are specific to the area. The shrewd Jewish capital-ist is presented as the same stereotype that introduced capitalism in the nineteenth century, nowadays, as then, exploiting the local poor and cheap labor, destabilizing the national economy by introducing globalized economy. This feature also created a common ground


between the extreme right and the left. Both sides are targeting the Jews as exploiting the emerging post-Communist economies. Such claims further blur the clear distinction between the “right” and the “left”, and by using a populist tone, both sides are manipulating the frustrations of those “left behind” in the past two decades.

The study of the social composition of the anti-Semitic, extremist groups is in its developing phases among researchers, and perhaps the expression of those “who have been left behind” in the transition from Communism, is a convenient formula, for a phenomenon that appeals to broader segments of society, not so much in the number of people active or participating in various extremist groups, but to the range of social groups. If in the early 1990s, there were percep-tions that the extremists represent the fringes of society, and the skin-heads were presented in such a context, in the past decade or so, more sober evaluations have appeared. An interesting approach was presented in Slovakia in an analysis not based on empirical findings, but the observations seem to apply to the post-Communist space as a whole. The Slovak Spectator presented the profile of extremists in Slo-vakia, focusing on the Slovenska Postpolitost (Slovak Community), which in 2009 was under the process of being outlawed, and other neo-Nazi groups (The Slovak Spectator, October 15, 2007). According to this analysis, the neo-Nazis are not “some abstract groups and persons, representing a sub-culture that may eventually will die out”, but they “are teachers, computer experts, shopkeepers, musicians. They are not just unemployed, alienated youth, they might be your neighbors, even colleagues.” Such an approach may well serve as a warning sign, that the extremists are “here to stay” and even may intensify their presence and activities and penetration into segments of society. This recogni-tion, that the extremist are not (only) a “lunatic fringe” but have a larger and potential appeal into segments of society than previously recognized, may also help the relevant authorities in trying to under-stand the dynamics and appeals of extremism in its various forms, and to combat it by legal and educational means.

Thus, the allegations that Jews “are controlling the economy”, and are to blame for the real estate prices, and for luring the people into the “shopping plazas” built by Jewish and Israeli investors—an allegation that does not exist in such a form in Western Europe—, may capti-vate and convince, what the Slovak paper has termed “your neighbors and even colleagues.” In a typical fashion, the Magyar Forum wrote in August 2000 on the “Expanding Israel in Budapest”, as the “Budapest

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real estate market is being swallowed up by Israeli and Jews from other countries”—deals supported by the Hungarian authorities, while at the same time as they are promoting Israeli and Jewish interests, they do not care as “the Hungarian population in Budapest is moving away in panic from neighborhoods which are dirty, smelling of human and canine excrement, and filled with Gypsy squatters.”

From such claims, the connection to the anti-globalization arguments is very close and it draws closer such forces from the West to those in the East, as significant parts of the European anti-globalist posi-tions are gradually penetrated by anti-Israeli and anti-Semitic rhetoric. Certainly this aspect indicates a growing convergence between similar positions in the East and West. While in the West there are no allega-tions of the “inflow of Jewish capital” and of alleged Jewish plans to take over the economies of Western Europe, a favorite argument of the nationalist movements in the East, the common ground is on the Jew-ish financial role in world economy. Furthermore, anti-Americanism, although less emphasized in the former Communist countries, which still have a form of “fatal attraction” to the American way of life and values, is gaining gradually ground among the extremists who present the USA as a servant of Israeli interests, for example by operating in Iraq.

An interesting meeting ground between the West and East is the literary sense of the meeting. Since 1989, the border areas of the Cold War, as between Poland and Germany, Hungary and Austria, within the Czech Republic, and gradually spaces inside the East European area, have become sites of neo-Nazi, extremist, racist hate groups, usu-ally in rock concerts, where the Western ones could enjoy the relative freedom provided by the local authorities for such events. This trend started with the growing fraternity between skinheads of both sides of the former Iron Curtain, very popular in the early 1990s. Further-more, Western groups and radical persons, usually visit the former Communist states, as David Irving invited by Csurka’s MIEP move-ment in Hungary, or the attempt in 2009, foiled by the Hungarian authorities to commemorate in Hungary the birthday of Rudolf Hess as an international event.9 A form of “cross border” cooperation also takes place in the cyberspace, where in the borderless space, Western

9 See: MTI, August 10, 2009 on the planned neo-Nazi march and the counter-demonstrations.


servers, especially US ones, may serve as a haven to sites that may be legally banned in Eastern Europe.

Perhaps the economic crisis since 2008 has also contributed to the convergence of ideas between the East and the West, being in different forms affected by the new situation. Anti-Semites have yet to find an explanation how come that Jews who have also invested lost millions, often emblazed by other Jews, as the Madoff scandal—unless it is a proof for the “cunning Jewish” character who would cheat his fellow Jews. While the world economic crisis is not yet attributed to the Jews, eventually some formula will emerge which will link Jewish interests in the crisis.

With the growing process of European integration on the one hand, and the growing mutual interests of nationalists and extremists on both sides of the continent on the other hand, it seems that in the forthcom-ing years anti-Semitic discourse and forms of activity will converge between the two halves of Europe, and gradually the unique aspects of anti-Semitism in the former Communist countries will be more blurred. If so, “united European anti-Semitism” will become one of the least expected and undesired by-products of European integration.

ANTI-SEMITISM OR JUDEOPHOBIA? THE INTELLECTUAL DEBATE IN FRANCE 2000–2005

Denis Charbit

In an interview published at the end of a collective volume entitled Les Antifeujs (Against Jews)1 and subtitled “A white paper on anti-Semitic violence in France since 2000”, Marek Halter, a well-known and popu-lar Jewish novelist, proclaimed with an optimism that contradicted the alarming tone of the book that he had no worries about the future:

Even if we are now three generations after Vel d’Hiv, this tragic event is still part of collective memory. Generally, memory protects. The schools of the Republic perform their civic duties. So I’m not afraid. There will not be a pogrom tomorrow in France. Do you remember what hap-pened in Carpentras? It was no more than a symbolic aggression, and there were five hundred thousand persons, including the President of the Republic himself, and all the Church leaders came out to demonstrate in the streets of Paris. So imagine what would happen if a Jew is killed only because he is a Jew.2

Seven years later in February 2006, in a chilling response to this prophecy, a Jew named Ilan Halimi was tortured and murdered sim-ply because he was Jew—but the reaction was not at all what Halter so confidently predicted. The Jewish community was traumatized by the event and organized a demonstration in which however most of the participants were Jews: the French Jewish community was alone and felt terribly alone.

Today, France has the third largest Jewish population in the world (after the US and Israel ) and the largest in Europe, with an estimated population of 491,500 (3.8% of the total population). If indeed the future of French Jewry is in jeopardy, the hopes for a Jewish-European

1 In French slang since the 1980s, words are pronounced backwards to form new words (i.e., juif=feuj).

2 U.E.J.F., 2002: 198. In the historic Carpentras cemetery, 34 graves were upturned and defaced with anti-Semitic symbols during the night of May 8–9, 1990. A recently buried body was dug up and placed face down on a grave. After numerous political accusations, the case was only resolved 6 years later when a young neo-Nazi decided to confess to the police.

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center may well collapse. Is the French community still a paradise or has this optimistic feeling been permanently replaced by a profound sense of unease?

The history of anti-Semitism in the French post-Emancipation era can be summed up by a series of keywords: Napoléon’s more judaico, Toussenel’s Les Juifs, rois de l’époque, Drumont’s bestseller La France juive, the Dreyfus Affair and Le Monument Henry, L’Action française, La Ligue antisémitique, Maurras, Jules Soury et le marquis de Morès, the Stavisky affair, Céline’s Bagatelles pour un massacre, Gringoire, Je suis partout, the Vichy Government’s Statut des Juifs, Drancy, Pithiviers, Beaune-La Rolande and le Camp des Mille.3

Since the liberation, French anti-Semitism can be divided into three main periods: from 1944 to 1967, anti-Semitism as a political platform was no longer a real threat to the Jewish community. Some hatred was however voiced when Mendès-France relinquished Indochina in 1954 and prejudices were still prevalent in 1966 when Roger Peyrefitte, a second-rate author, published Les Juifs which turned out to be a best-seller. Anti-Semitism seemed to be and was considered marginal.

In terms of demography, between the two World Wars, the Jew-ish community grew with the arrival of immigrants from Central and Eastern Europe (primarily, Romania, Poland and Russia). However, 75,000 people—one fourth of the community—perished during the Holocaust, but survivors came back to France to rebuild their own lives and the community. At the end of the war, a new infrastructure emerged made up of three complementary institutions: the Consistoire for the religious affairs, the CRIF for public relations and represen-tation and the FSJU for the social and educative arena. Starting in the 1950s, the number of Jews increased under the impact of baby-boom renaissance and was further boosted by the decolonization of France’s North African protectorates. The Jewish population rose to almost 200,000. The North African Jews were all French-speaking and among them, the Algerian Jews that fled to France in 1962 after the proclamation of Algeria’s independence, were already French citizens as a result of the 1870 Crémieux decree.4

3 The literature dealing with French anti-Semitism is enormous. A few major titles are cited here: Poliakov, 1973; Sternhell, 1978; Lacroix, 2005; Winock, 1998.

4 On the Jewish community after 1944, see Wieviorka, 1998.

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French Jews were very well integrated in the social, economical and cultural spheres. They held key positions in national administration, business, academia, politics, and especially in the liberal professions. They formed an integral part of the French nation and society. They were proud of their achievements and were very deeply involved in the progress and development of society and well represented among the French social elites. Their collective narrative was considered a success story of internal and external integration (among Jews from different backgrounds, and with their fellow French citizens), and at times is seen as a model that operated differently from the diasporic American one.

After the Six-Day War, French Jews felt that they are entitled to develop a more assertive sense of Jewish identity. It was clear that Juda-ism in France was blooming as confirmed by quantitative indicators such as the number of private schools, synagogues, Jewish shops and kosher restaurants, Jewish literature, art and neighborhoods. The cul-tural and intellectual scene is the best illustration of the phenomenon: it suffices to mention such famous names as Raymond Aron, Georges Friedmann, and Albert Memmi in sociology, Wladimir Jankélévitch and Jacques Derrida in philosophy, Pierre Nora, Pierre Birnbaum and Benjamin Stora in history, Jean Daniel in journalism, Georges Perec and Patrick Modiano in literature; and last but not least, Emmanuel Levinas.5 They were not only Jews that professionally were on the top. Unlike their elders, their Jewishness was no more concealed as a discrete or even hidden identity. The rebirth, or perhaps the birth in France of a Jewish Orthodox community is also worthy of note.6

Between 1967 and 2000, the Jewish community’s major accom-plishment was to save the memory of the Holocaust from the rapidly fading recollections of the survivors and to put in squarely on the national and public agenda. Its greatest achievement was the establish-ment of an annual Holocaust Remembrance day for the French Jews who perished during the Shoah that takes place in July 16th, to mark

5 My comments on Jewish French culture in the twentieth century are taken in part from an article entitled “Déclinaisons du franco-judaïsme”, that I published in the French version of Biale, 2005: 1003–1042.

6 With the exception of Raschi and the rabbis of Provence in the Middle Ages, France was never a Jewish religious center but was known for its liberalism. This meant that there was no need to create a form of French Reform Judaism, which in fact has only started to emerge as a reaction to the strength of the dominant Orthodox community.

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the terrible Vel d’hiv’s mass arrest and deportation of Jews. A founda-tion devoted to the transmission of the memory of the Shoah was created (FMS); the Holocaust Research Institute (CDJC) was given greater funding and a vast amount of publications and pedagogical activities on the subject were developed regularly. Finally, trials of the remaining living collaborators such as Paul Touvier, Maurice Papon and René Bousquet were held.7 A genuine French Jewish-Christian dialogue that began after World War II also took a considerable step forward during Vatican II by expunging the notion of ‘deicide’ from the official Church canon and the traditional “teachings of contempt” as coined by the French historian Jules Isaac (who was invited by Pope Jean XXIII to present his research and his advice). In 1997, the French Catholic Church was the first institution in France to ask for forgiveness from the Jewish community for its collaboration with the Vichy Regime. Dislike of the Jews was repressed and eliminated from the public sphere and from political discourse. France seemed to be the best of all possible worlds for European Jewry. Naturally, this picture of perfect harmony had its momentary breaches.

The first blow came in the middle of 1967 from the conservative right which was at power when President de Gaulle decided to with-draw France’s traditional support of Israel and unilaterally to end the informal alliance between the two states. Twenty-two years only after the Holocaust, to the shock and dismay of the French Jewish com-munity, de Gaulle portrayed Jews in Israel as in the rest of the world as “an elitist people, sure of himself and dominating”. Even though the alliance at that time was over for both France and Israel, rather than adopting a friendly parting of a mature couple, the two states were embarked in the path of rude and crude divorce proceedings. The reversal of the alliance was carefully adhered to by his succes-sors, Pompidou, Giscard d’Estaing and Chirac and their governments adopted a distant, at times hostile, attitude towards Israeli policies and diplomacy. France was highly critical of Israeli policy towards the Pal-estinians, even during Mitterrand years, in spite of its friendship with Israeli Labor leaders and the first presidential visit he made to Israel in March 1982. This was particularly true during the Israeli incursion into Lebanon in 1982 and the first Intifada in 1987.

7 Rene Bousquet was murdered a few days before the opening of the trial.


The right wing parties’ negative attitude toward Israel was also echoed by the Left: from the Communist party aligned to Moscow’s hostile line towards Israel to “Green” parties (the Verts) and New Left circles. Although the New Left was not officially represented in politi-cal institutions, it had considerable influence in intellectual circles, academia and mass media. After the student revolt of May 1968, the Palestinian fedayin definitively replaced the Sabra libertarian kib-butznik of Israel as the focus of sympathy among youth, teachers and journalists. The pro-Zionist position defended by Sartre was rebuffed by the Palestinian stance of Jean Genet that appeared in his fiction as his leaflets.

Since the mid-1980s, the main cause of concern has been for the French Jewish community the rise of the far right Front National. Although initially it was assumed that the FN would have remained a one-single issue party focused on putting an end to foreign immi-gration from France’s former colonies to protect the French national “ethnic identity”, Jean-Marie Le Pen, the head of the FN, unabashedly voiced the fact that he despised Jews. Thus, Holocaust denial found its particular French voice. Previously, claims of this nature delivered by diehard Vichy’s supporters such as Maurice Bardèche or eccentrics like Paul Rassinier were considered marginal. But, by the end of the 1970s, Holocaust denial had once again raised its hoary head but this time as well from New Leftists members such as Robert Faurisson, Serge Thion and Pierre Guillaume.8

Finally, during this same period, Jews as Jews became targets of murder. In 1980, a bomb was thrown at the Copernic liberal syna-gogue and four persons were killed. Two years later, in August 1982, at the peak of the first Lebanese war declared by Israel, a bomb was thrown by another Palestinian terrorist faction at a popular kosher res-taurant in the heart of the Jewish quarter of Paris, on rue des Rosiers, killing six people.9

All these political and ideological undercurrents prior to 2000 might not have had the same impact on the Jewish community if French soci-ety had not also gone through a massive demographic change in the composition of its population. Today, France is the place of residence

8 On French Holocaust denial, I recommend Finkielkraut, 1994; Fresco, 1999.9 In these two cases, dissident Palestinians groups were the perpetrators, although it

was presumed that French neo-Nazis were behind the Copernic bombing.

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of five, or by some estimates, six million Muslims. Unlike the previous period of full employment that enabled social mobility, the long lasting economic and social crisis opened the door to marginal and a-social behavior in both schools and the cities (primarily the congested sub-urbs) that laid the groundwork for radical Islamism in France. The bootstrapping that helped new immigrants to take their place in the fabric of French society was no longer operational. The collapse of the French Communist party that provided the alternative of a class identity rather than ethnic or religious affiliation, and the decline of the once strong national educational system that imbued its students with a shared civic and cultural education based on French literature and French history disrupted classic forms of cultural integration. Naturally many immigrants found jobs and were willing to embrace the French language, culture and values, and hence distanced themselves from religious practice or confined it to the private realm. Although there is some debate as to the proportion of immigrants who are assimilated, there is nevertheless a consensus that steps toward cultural assimila-tion are more difficult today than before. French policy and society has been unable (or perhaps has been unwilling) to assimilate these immigrants or to acculturate them to French democratic, liberal and secular values.

Is There a New anti-Semitism? The Intellectual Debate

A few days after the outburst of the second Intifada in Israel, the West Bank and Gaza Strip in September 2000, and until the end of the year 2005, French Jews were the target of 3,462 incidents including on persons, synagogues and cemeteries, at schools (private Jewish as well as public institutions), universities, at home and at work.10 This figure translates roughly to 700 incidents per year, or about 2 per day. But the issue is not only quantitative. This new climate made a durable impression on the French Jewish community and was mani-fested, first and foremost, by increasing attitudinal disarray. Instead of the Jewish elite acting to moderate the Jewish street, these two sectors of Jewish society both began to consider that the “good old days”

10 Commission Nationale Consultative des Droits de l›homme (CNCDH), Rapport d’activité 2004, quoted by Rosenbaum, 2006: 9.


were over, and that they would have to cope with a more uneasy and worrying era. Some left France and went to Israel: the number of applicants for Alijhah has risen to two and as much as three thousand a year.11 Pupils are often moved from public to private Jewish schools or even to private Catholic schools because parents fear for their chil-dren’s safety. Difficulties are encountered by history teachers when they teach the subject of Holocaust to a classroom made up primarily of immigrants.

Can it really be said that a new type of anti Semitism first reared its head in 2000? What if anything made it new? How did it differ from previous waves of anti-Semitism? Was it the number of incidents? The methods? The actors? The French attitude—both official and societal? The perpetrators’ motivations? The reaction of the Jewish community and its leadership? A fierce debate has elicited much commentary in France on the intellectual scene. It is important to draw attention to their positions because of the prestige intellectuals enjoy in France. Four essays published in the last decade were particularly enlight-ening and the discussion about them will be the core of this article (Finkielkraut, 2005; Taguieff, 2004; Weill, 2004; Wieviorka, 2005).12

Although these intellectuals voiced their own positions, some of them were in a sense perceived as representatives of the Jewish com-munity and speaking on its behalf. The second part of this article deals with the community’s (fairly receptive) attitude towards their opinions. With the exception of Wieviorka, the works cited here are essays. Their goal was to prompt public debate by taking a critical retrospective look at the nature and the impact of the anti-Semitic incidents that rocked France in the 2000s. They all analyze the immediate and more deep-seated causes of these incidents, the underlying rationales, the reaction of the government and policy makers, and the media coverage (more precisely, the lack thereof ) and end with their prognosis for the future of this new type of anti-Semitism.

All four writers acknowledge that there had been no comparable upsurge of anti-Semitism since World War II. They describe the new features of this nascent anti-Semitism which all consider to be differ-ent and not an exception to the rule. This provided the theoretical

11 The number of Jews who have immigrated to other destinations is not known.12 This list is not exhaustive. The debate also includes writings by Benbassa, 2004;

Milner, 2003a and Trigano, 2003.

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and normative basis for defining it by a different concept, which is precisely what Taguieff argues in his work. Taguieff replaces the well-known concept of anti-Semitism with Judeophobia. He did not coin the word and it may seem atavistic to characterize this new wave of anti-Semitism by an existing, albeit rarely used word. Leo Pinsker, one of the first theoreticians of Zionism introduced the word in 1882 in the wake of the pogroms and anti-Semitic policies decreed by Czar Alexander III. One hundred and twenty years later, Taguieff chose this word in the aftermath of the anti-Semitic onslaught in France. Is there a relationship between the 1882 pogroms and the incidents in 2000, such that the latter would be a turning point in the history of anti-Semitism just as the former had been equally decisive? Regardless of the response, Targuieff and Pinsker use the term for different pur-poses and do not define it in the same way. Judeophobia, for Pinsker, refers to hatred of the Jews which he called a “psychic aberration” and a “hereditary disease”. However, as a physician, Pinsker thought that Judeophobia could be cured if the Jews became an independent people with a homeland of their own and were masters of their own fate. Then and only then could the Jews repay the hospitality of other nations on an equal basis. Pinsker argued that the Jews are hated because they elicit fear (the original meaning of phobos in Greek is fright or fear) and they will continue to do so as long as they remain a homeless, wandering people.

Obviously, Taguieff uses the term Judeophobia in a completely dif-ferent context. His prime concern is greater scientific accuracy and makes the point that the reference to “race” as an explanation for the hatred of Jews is now obsolete (Taguieff, 2004: 25–26): Jews are no longer hated because they are Semites. The prefix “Judeo” has the advantage of designating the object of the hatred—the Jews—no more as a race, but as a social group—whether it is defined as an ethnic community, a religious minority, a cultural identity or a nation. In Taguieff’s opinion, the prime characteristic of this new wave of anti-Semitism is its magnitude and strength, which as such contradicts all earlier analyses predicting the decline of anti-Semitism that had shrunk to a few die-hard nostalgic unrepentant groups, soon followed by its complete extinction (ibid.: 19). After showing how the center of gravity of the production and consumption of anti-Semitic writing is located today in the Arab-Muslim world, he delivers a scathing attack on the false pretense put forward by certain ill-intended Arabs that it is absurd to call them anti-Semitic because they too are Semites (ibid.: 27).


In Taguieff’s words, they can always profess not to be anti-Semites—a race is a race—but they cannot deny that they are Judeophobic. Ana-logically, Judeophobia is to the Arab-Muslim world as anti-Semitism is to Europe: a home-grown invention. Through copious quotations and in-depth footnotes, Taguieff applies his specific methodology to depict the numbers, themes and trends characterizing this radical Judeopho-bic Islam. Nevertheless, he makes the point that Judeophobia is not only a political ploy disseminated in Moslem countries. Beyond its first circles of believers in the Arab-Muslim world, radical Islam exports and recycles these repulsive myths to other groups in Europe with whom it has formed a coalition which Taguieff feels will strengthen in the long term.

By combining their respective rhetoric, platforms and myths which place Israel in the forefront and the Jew in the background as the absolute enemy, neo-Christian humanitarian trends and revolution-ary third world and anti-globalist groups constitute excellent launch pads for the dissemination of militant anti-Semitism which goes hand in glove with anti-Americanism and critiques of the West. This also results in a new feature. Traditional anti-Semitism targeted Jews in general but Judeophobia has a specific target—the State of Israel, which is guilty in their eyes of war crimes, rampant genocide or geno-cide pure and simple, and Zionism which is its root cause and is con-sidered to be the last ideological incarnation of racism, colonialism and apartheid.

At this juncture it is worth stepping back to take an analytical look at the controversy between those who claim that anti-Zionism and anti-Semitism are one and the same, and those who insist on differ-entiating them. On the one hand, there are any numbers of examples linking the two, such as Ossama Bin Laden’s recorded messages or Hamas manifestos which attack Jews in general as often as Jews living in Palestine. On the other hand, there are numerous other instances where the two are clearly separated and in which the Diaspora, home-less Jew is championed to better denigrate the Jew who has opted for the Zionist vision of a sovereign nation.

However these two extreme stances are found less frequently and are the least characteristic of Judeophobia in Europe when voiced by those other than Islamic groups and their supporters, such as Dieudonné or Alain Soral in France. In most cases an intermediate stance is taken and this ambiguity in itself is disquieting. This Judeophobia is first and foremost Israelophobia. Nothing is gained by denying it: through

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words and images, Israel is being vitiated. The swastika is never used to depict the behavior of Diaspora Jews but rather to denounce Israeli policies. However those who make a distinction between anti-Zionism and anti-Semitism while claiming they are innocent of the latter do not deserve the benefit of the doubt, for at least two reasons.

Anti-Semitic and at times anti-Jewish myths often pepper commen-tary about Israel. Shmuel Trigano shows how medieval accusations of Jewish ritual murder are being used today against Israel when the State is called a “child killer”. Beyond simple recycling, there are other ways in which anti-Semitism fuels anti-Zionism. Today, the distinction between Diaspora Jews and Israeli Zionists that served as the basis for anti-Zionism is weakening: except the minority who are resolutely opposed to everything Israel represents, the Diaspora is almost entirely composed of Jews who primarily support the State of Israel without restriction. This is precisely where Judeophobia is more than a new form of anti-Zionism directed against an ideology, a country, Israel, and its Jewish inhabitants: virtually, all the Diaspora Jews are Zionists and stalwart defenders of the State of Israel. Hence, the argument goes: they are racists and colonialists like the country they support, and deserve to be hated in the same way (ibid.: 12). Israel only exists because it is supported, financially and morally, by the Diaspora, so that it is fully responsible like Israel for the Palestinian suffering. Thus, by extension, they are also justifiable targets. This negation of the dis-tance between Israel and the Diaspora constitutes the ambiguity of this attitude and accounts for its proliferation.

Because Israel is on the front line, in the forefront and on cen-ter stage, Judeophobia can take hold and can reach out far beyond its original audience. It is precisely because its terminology empha-sizes and refers almost exclusively to anti-Zionism that Judeophobia can enmesh itself so easily into the European social fabric. Similarly, because the Diaspora is in the background, a background which is second but not secondary, this anti-Semitism can target Jews indis-criminately. Going one step further, solidarity between Diaspora Jews and Israel is no longer seen as a stance or a trivial manifestation of support but is viewed as proof of complicity, which can explain why young people take Jews as targets to vent their frustration at what is happening in Israel. Taguieff discusses what he calls the “euphemiza-tion” of anti-Semitic discourse which consists of attributing to Zionism and Israel what is not considered to be politically correct to say about Jews in general.


Are people aware of this euphemistic process? Is it deliberate? One cannot totally discount the fact that individuals who scream anti-Israeli slogans may be attempting to break the taboo that still surrounds anti-Semitic discourse. However many of these people were also the first to express their shock when the French writer Renaud Camus said that there were too many Jewish journalists on an intellectual French radio program, who failed because of their origins to understand fully the French soul, or when the Pope agreed to reintegrate a Holocaust-denier priest. If there really is a new type of anti-Semitism, it can be found in those who proclaim loudly and clearly that they condemn Zionism and the State of Israel but reject any claims that they are anti-Semitic. However, although the anti-Israeli dimension is neces-sary but not sufficient to create Judeophobia, the missing ingredient is the accusation that the Diaspora is complicit with Israel.

Alain Finkielkraut, in his short essay In the name of the Other claims this wave of anti-Semitism is unprecedented not because of the num-bers of incidents or the perpetrators’ background, but because of its new ideological base: hatred is no longer racial, Christian and xeno-phobic. Rather it claims to draw on the love of others, human rights, universalism and universal compassion. After centuries of right-wing anti-Semitism nurtured by jingoistic passion and the fantasies of a pure ethnic nation by petty bourgeois who only love those like themselves, today, anti-Semitism is grounded on love for the Other, the praise of a mixed society, the ideal of human rights and multiculturalism. The new anti-Semitism, by making the claims of radical anti-Zionism the centerpiece of its discourse, bases its rejection of Israel on human rights. However this new yardstick crosses a ‘red line’: by grounding itself on human rights, anti-Semitism is legitimized in a way that has not been seen since World War II. The days of shame and blame are over: anti-Semites can express themselves publicly to general acclaim provided that they restrict themselves to denouncing Israel. Jews and Judaism have been replaced by Israelis and Zionism. Unlike the model of the classic far right that trumpeted its anti-Semitism, it is now an object of denial. Therefore, they declare they are only anti-Zionist, even if they overtly blame the Jews in France for supporting Israel (ibid.: 87).

Although anti-Jewish hatred can be expressed more easily, the task of those who combat it has become more difficult. This is because it is no longer enough to single out anti-Semitic statements; rather a whole strategic process must be deployed to disclose how criticizing the State

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of Israel masks actual anti-Semitism. For these reasons, Finkielkraut rejects the idea that anti-Semitism has made a comeback and argues for a new type of anti-Semitism although he identifies certain tradi-tional features: after being linked with the Far Right, anti-Semitism is once again, as it was before the Dreyfus affair, the “socialism of the silly” and has been fueled by an alliance of radical Islam and secular Leftists. Even in terms of ancient history, this stigmatization of Jewish singularity and the purported exclusiveness of those who cling to the nation when everyone else turns away is suggestive, in Finkielkraut’s eyes, of the Apostle Paul’s criticism of the Jews in his Epistle to the Romans: Jews were the only ones to proclaim faith in a Jewish God and a Jewish book, thus excluding themselves from the community and the communion of the faithful who saw Jesus as the messiah and the Gospel as salvation (Finkielkraut, 2005).

Psychologically, the collective effect on the Jewish community has been tangible. Nicolas Weill refers to “estrangement”, “inner immigra-tion” and “discreet marginalization”. Diana Pinto speaks of “existen-tial languish” to describe the mood not only of French Jews but of Jews throughout Europe (Pinto, 2004: 680). “The Jews have heavy hearts and for the first time since the war they are afraid”, Alain Finkielkraut writes at the beginning of his essay, thirty years after having made his triumphant entry onto the French intellectual scene by declaring that in Europe, anti-Semitism was part of the past (Finkielkraut, 2005: 10). Their main concern is the indifference of the French, and, in line with the same apathy, the fact that the state has not used its author-ity to condemn wrongdoers immediately and publicly prefers denial, accommodation, compromise and appeasement to restore calm even at the expense of Jews and their moral well-being. Jews feel betrayed because anti-Semitism is no longer stigmatized. Taguieff criticizes what he terms “selective anti-racism” on the part of organizations whose formal goal is to condemn any form of racism across the board. More generally he expresses his anxiety over the lack of “intellectual and political resistance” (Taguieff, 2004: 11, 91).

What happened to French public opinion in the years spanning the profanation of the cemetery in Carpentras to the murder of Ilan Halimi? The question is not only why it occurred, but more specifi-cally why French society seems unwilling to fight this wave of anti-Semitism convincingly. One possible answer is that this new hatred is no longer sponsored and amplified by official power: there is no question of a numerus clausus, Nuremberg laws, a new statut des juifs or


the obligation to wear the yellow Jewish star. The new wave of anti-Semitism will not lead to the destruction of Jews, at the most, to their de-legitimization as group. For this reason, comparisons with World War II or even to the period between the two World Wars fail to con-vince. As Nicolas Weill points out, the anti-Semitism of the 2000s did not endanger either the principle or the reality of Jewish Emancipation (Weill, 2004: 28). Emancipation remains irreversible, which was not taken for granted (and rightly so) in the 1930s, as history has proven.

Even the analogy between the French situation at the time and Nazi anti-Semitism, as excessive as it might seem, was less aimed at equating two series of events than to alert public opinion to escalating dangers through the use of a shocking comparison. Judging by the reaction of society as a whole, the objective difference between these two periods of anti-Semitism was, in fact, received too well: today, French society condemns anti-Semitism only when it comes ‘from the top’ and is initiated, implemented and orchestrated by the state (for example, the Vichy regime). Although it inflicted damage and injury to people and property and prompted unease in those who suffered from it directly, the anti-Semitism that has erupted in France is a clearly societal phenomenon, ‘from the bottom’, and thus has led to less indignation. Thus, the societal attitude is that from now on, any act that is not on a par with Nazi extermination is not worth getting excited about (ibid.: 39).

There has been a palpable gap between the perception of those who called for protests and combat and those who recommended dis-cretion and circumspection because it was an example of social and ordinary anti-Semitism. The Jewish community felt the absence of its traditional allies who provided it with support and solidarity as it had for Copernic and Carpentras, and was forced to turn inward in a skit-tish solitude which would be held against it. The gap between the two in fact became even greater. The Jewish community felt the need to fight the root causes of anti-Semitism, as of its earliest manifestations, regardless of the perpetrators and their reasons, adopting Sartre’s defi-nition that anti-Semitism is not an opinion. By contrast, French society viewed these incidents as an exception by applying its anti-Semitism ‘from the bottom’. The only form of anti-Semitism which elicited indignation was the one generated by nationalistic, Catholic far-right or Holocaust-deniers political movements.

In the hierarchy of anti-Semitic acts, the fire-bombing of synagogues in the year 2000 could not be rated on the same level as Crystal Night

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in 1938. When the comparison with Nazi anti-Semitism no longer holds, the act was then judged on another scale of measure in which anti-Semitism hardly counts at all: namely, racism in France. Here as well the Jewish community has trouble making itself heard: outbreaks of anti-Semitism rarely strike a chord in those sensitized to anti-Arab or traditional anti-Black racism, in that whereas anti-Semitic inci-dents are characterized by attacks on persons and property—which could elicited an emotional response and generalized compassion—they remain infrequent and are seen as contingent and isolated events directly linked to a circumscribed period of unrest in time and in space. By contrast, anti-Black and anti-Arab racism is not generally violent but is seen as an ordinary occurrence manifested by real or perceived discrimination.

In other words, when placed in the context of general xenophobia, anti-Semitism appears to be a blip on the radar screen compared to the long-term racism which has become a structural given in France. The gap between the cautious societal response and the emotion of the Jewish community finally becomes a chasm when the cutoff point for evil is placed extremely high (anti-Semitism is not serious unless it reaches an extreme) but is set very low when it involves Israel. What the vast majority of the Jewish community consider to be appropriate measures taken by the State of Israel in the frame-work of conflict management and the struggle against Palestinian and Islamic terrorism, is perceived as out of proportion and illegitimate. However, Nicolas Weill rejects the idea that the Middle East conflict has been the triggering factor. In his view, the second intifada is only a “pretext” (ibid.: 9–10), and the alliance between the extreme Left and Islamic militants from the suburbs is a diversion. Simplifying the issue to a progressive-Islamist facet has the problematic consequence of exteriorizing the problem (ibid.: 64). France does not feel concerned, because the handful of Islamist radicals and leftist supporter groups are marginal at best. The argument that takes only these two groups into account disregards the burden of history. It ignores the anti-Semitism of the Far Right which is still alive and kicking, and exonerates French society from scrutiny of its apathy.

The crux of the matter, for Weill, is elsewhere or rather within: for the first time, the traditional structures the Jewish community depended on when faced with an anti-Semitic incident failed to respond; the media was not alerted, ordinary citizens were not outraged and the government did not switch gears. Together or separately, they did not


rise up to assist the Jewish community when it was grappling with an unprecedented situation. This indifference may have been the most disturbing message the French community could send to the Jewish community. Clearly, for Weill, the core issue is not the birth or rebirth of anti-Semitism, the severity of the incidents, their number or their growth, but rather the tendency not to identify and to underestimate anti-Semitism when it is denounced, and the rush to condone it. Why did French society refrain from acknowledging the reality and the severity of these incidents and attacks? Because they were perpetrated by young people? Because it involved disadvantaged, drifting adoles-cents who were marginalized and unable to avail themselves of the cultural and societal capital that would have allowed them to express their aggressiveness in other ways than through violence? For the first time in France, the perpetrators were, in most cases, young ‘beurs’ (North African backgrounds) with enormous problems of school, job and societal integration of their own. As one Socialist party member stated frankly, carefully sidestepping the existence of a wealthy form of Islamism supported by oil income: “Islam is still the poor. And it feels sh..ty to strike out at the poor.”13 In short, one doesn’t condemn the victims of the system.

The social status and the ethnic and religious identity of the pre-sumed perpetrators clearly played a role in the muted reaction to the severity of the incidents by the media, the government and social actors. Their attitude had little in common with the indignation nor-mally prompted by anti-Semitism, probably because the memories of Dreyfus and Auschwitz have been displaced by France’s colonial and social guilt. Thus the judgments of many who feel that anti-Semitism arises from the ranks of the well endowed are skewed by the fact that these juvenile anti-Semitic aggressors were themselves the victims of racism and discrimination. The deeds they are accused of were both reprehensible and unlawful, but because they were committed by young victims of social discrimination whose parents were before sub-jected to the brutality of colonial rule, indignation is withheld.

The social identity of the perpetrators was one of the main causes of the political and media torpor, but there was yet another factor involved: the cause or the pretext for the attacks. French citizens, the media and the government all had something in common with the

13 Quoted by Taguieff, 2004: 99–100.

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perpetrators and this accounted for their meek and mild mannered reaction; namely, their outrage at what they view as Israeli repression. The difference of course was that their disapproval was verbal and non-violent whereas in the case of the perpetrators, the indignation turned into action. In one of many telling examples, Hubert Védrine14 condemned the incidents but nevertheless found it opportune in his statement to say he “understood” it given the level of violence of Israeli “aggression”. Because discourse is mainly directed against Israel and Jewish institutions that support Israel, it is more difficult to assign blame and reveal prejudice: it is more a matter of opinion. It is argued that while Israel is inflicting actual suffering, their actions are limited to speech and their violence is symbolic. The fact that the incidents were claimed to be a reaction to events which took place in Israel and not in France accounts for this tolerance. It does not acknowledge the fact that the victims of these incidents were only attacked because they were Jewish and hence thought to be involved in what happened. It fails to acknowledge that they were attacked for their feelings, their opinions and their presumed political beliefs while synagogues were torched because they are Jewish places of worship. The severity of the transition from words to deeds was not recognized as signifying that real or presumed support for a cause is a sufficient reason for aggres-sion. This is clearly a step backward. In addition, the Jews who were attacked did not have the profile of a victim: since Jews are no longer the victims par excellence, there is less of a reason to show solidarity or take steps in cases of anti-Semitism.

In short, the Jews are not what they once were. We are back to the Dreyfus era, or more accurately the period that preceded its peak, when Jules Guesde, the French socialist founding-father leader, did not understand why the fate of Dreyfus should concern the working class since the (unjustly accused) captain was part of the military elite. In this sense, the Jews’ success story in terms of integration has turned against them since because of their social position they no longer deserve the compassion of all. Irony of fate, it was the inability of the Left to denounce anti-Semitism out of principle, independently of any advantage it could glean, which precipitated the rupture of the histori-

14 Hubert Védrine was Foreign Minister in the Left government of Lionel Jospin from 1997 to 2002.


cal political alliance between the Jews and the Left in France after a century of close ties.

Weill is a careful observer of the changes taking place on the level of collective representations. These changes are not only applicable to Israel, now a Goliath rather than a David, but for Jews as such. In his view, the course of the Israeli-Arab conflict may change, but attitudes will persist long after tensions subside in the Middle East. These atti-tudes are even more durable in that they are contradictory and hence interchangeable: in the past the Jew was a target of hatred because he represented the revolution. Today’s Jew represents the evils of global liberalism to be combated by an Intifada that has reached a planetary level. The Intifada in Palestine is the avant-guard, the first awaken-ing, which explains why its symbolic force goes beyond the Jewish-Palestinian conflict (ibid.: 20). Thus for diametrically opposite reasons, Israel is denigrated because it incarnates the preservation of the nation state and its corollary, the military, in an era when borders and land transfers are being abolished. Thus, the Jew is either too liberal or too nationalistic, free from attachment or too concerned with his own wellbeing. Weill also points to a new mutation in the evolution of Holocaust denial. Deniers no longer stop at denying the extermina-tion of the Jews; rather, they apply the Holocaust to Israel. Whereas during World War II the Holocaust never existed, now the Jews who thus never underwent it are subjecting others—the Palestinians—to it (ibid.: 16).

Michel Wieviorka’s essay differs from the other three in that it is a sociological study written for the general public and aimed at evaluat-ing the impact of the ‘anti-Semitic temptation’. Wieviorka draws on his field studies to shape his conclusions. His data come from several milieus where anti-Semitism has a solid hold such as schools, universi-ties, and suburban hot zones, but also in cities like Marseille and Stras-bourg (for purposes of comparison) and even prisons (a fertile terrain for Islamic proselytism). Rather than pinpointing one main cause, like Finkielkraut or Taguieff who point to the collusion between progressive movements and a form of Islamism that defends the Palestinian cause by diabolizing Israel, Wievorka argues that anti-Semitism in the 2000s was due to a combination of local, social, media, national, ideological and international and even global factors (Wieviorka, 2005: 437). The issue is local and social because the perpetrators are mostly unaffiliated minors without ties to Islamic networks, but are nonetheless spurred

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on by the speeches and harangues recorded on cassettes and above all by onslaught of satellite images of the Israeli-Palestinian conflict.

The impact of these images is indicative of the unwillingness or absence of social institutions such as schools, the family, neighbor-hood associations to filter such information, a failure that facilitates anti-Semitic deeds (ibid.: 88). The problem is also ideological to the extent that violently anti-Semitic and anti-Israeli political stances are rampant on college campuses. It also has a weighty media and inter-national dimension since a conflict taking place thousands of miles away also unfolds “in our living rooms, at dinner time” and plays a major role when reinforced by selective community support.

Wieviorka refrains from drawing hasty conclusions. Although anti-Semitic incidents are on the rise, this recrudescence does not neces-sarily mean that society as a whole is more anti-Semitic. In this sense he echoes Nicholas Weill who considers that societal indifference is synonymous with greater laxity and a greater permeability of anti-Semitism. There is a difference between being an anti-Semite and condoning anti-Semitism, but in the last few years there has been a noticeable change: self proclaimed anti-Semites who in the past were discreet about their beliefs find it much easier today to express their prejudices (ibid.: 27). Wieviorka centers on the impact of the Holo-caust: for 50 years, the memory of the Holocaust protected the Jewish community symbolically, as Alain Finkielkraut also points out in his book Le Juif imaginaire. This is no longer true today: reference to the Holocaust no longer delegitimizes, or to paraphrase Bernanos, it no longer dishonors an anti-Semite with anathema.

From the Intellectual Debate to Institutional Jewish Politics

Although their intention was not to depict the feelings and opinions of the Jewish community, the essays described here all show empa-thy and goodwill towards those who were directly affected by anti-Semitic incidents. The authors encourage solidarity from the reader or at least a better understanding of what went wrong. How should Jewish politics handle these problems? What was the response to these new outbursts of anti-Semitism and how did it contribute or fail to contribute to the handling of the situation? In fact, none of the essays reconstruct the timeline of the events as they were perceived by com-munity leaders. This was not their purpose. Only Nicolas Weill and


Michel Wieviorka deal with the attitude of Jewish institutions. In fact, the community’s reactions can be summarized in four points: the state is the only interlocutor for the Jewish community; anti-Semitism is a longstanding cultural code which almost all countries experience in one way or another; support for Israel is unconditional and cannot be questioned in any way or form; remembrance of the Holocaust is a duty to those who perished, to the living, and it behooves the Jewish community to be vigilant for the sake of future generations.

The Jewish leadership obviously turned to the state to fulfill its duties. French Jews demanded French neutrality to preserve the secular (aka Napoleonic) model of separation. Two of the four authors, Finkielkraut and Taguieff, turn to the Republic not only out of ideological convic-tion but also because they acknowledge the prime role of institutions in a centralized state with a Jacobin tradition like France. These two writers are convinced that diabolizing Israel masks an underlying more covert but no less destabilizing effort to derail the nation state and the republic, and more broadly Western values. This is why it is so crucial to restore authority to the Republic.

By contrast, Michel Wieviorka and Nicolas Weill are critical of sole reliance on the state. In their opinion the French Republic no longer has the supremacy that Finkielkraut and Taguieff appeal to so nostal-gically. Rather, an efficient attitude needs to be grounded in reality, not in terms of principles which have been severely shaken. Isn’t an appeal to the Republic, and why not, to the French Revolution a ritual gesture? Naturally, Jewish intellectuals can and do proclaim civic val-ues, but this credo no longer carries weight in France itself. Weill and especially Wieviorka are aware of the State’s weakness at the present time. Instead of seeing it as the community’s sole partner, they suggest toning down the confrontation to attempt to find allies in the Mos-lem camp who are forward-thinking and liberal. In other words, they propose solving a societal problem by addressing the community itself directly at the grassroots level. This strategy is grounded on incremen-tal steps from bottom to top, and not through the traditional centralist approach. There are moves in this direction, but they have been made outside official institutions: Jews and Moslems pray together or give lectures at schools to show that they can overcome their mutual preju-dices. Instead of pointing, for example, to the differences between the two religions, they stress common themes and rely on open-minded and liberal Moslem theologians fighting for a modern European Islam such as Mohammed Arkoun or Abdelwahab Meddeb. They support

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attempts to find integrationist forces within the Moslem community. They differentiate between the more assimilated Moslem population and the radical separatist minority. The problem is that the separatist line has its greatest appeal in the underclass Moslem suburban popu-lation that is thirsty for revenge. The integrationist majority does not necessarily see itself as Arabs or as Moslems but as French. They may be excellent partners in an informal dialogue, but it is unlikely that suburban youth will listen to them. Nevertheless, this is clearly a more subtle approach that will give the Jewish community more autonomy in today’s more complex institutional landscape. In addition, appeal-ing solely to the Republic is somewhat contradictory since the Jewish community itself has distanced itself for years from an assimilatory position and proclaims its collective identity publicly; and not only as a religion. Naturally, the state is the guarantor of its safety but there seem to be few valid reasons to return to a strict political model that no longer reflects the needs of the Jewish community itself.

Besides, the forces that preserve this Republican creed are secular militants. Are the Jews ready to fight for strict secularism as in the times of Franco-Judaism? The Jewish community has reinforced its internal cohesion. But even when the state is required to intervene, this does not affect the image of a community that positions itself as a community. When public opinion fails to follow suit, this lack of con-cern increases the community’s feeling of isolation and it turns inward on its own fears. This has also prompted French Jews to have less faith in a democracy which had always come to their defense. Since the right to vote provides the most political clout to the largest number, the Muslim community may be in a position to influence both domes-tic and foreign policy in future governments through its elected repre-sentatives, despite the democratic political tradition in France which is opposed to parties representing religious or ethnic communities.

Although there is no doubt that state anti-Semitism is much more dangerous than societal anti-Semitism, it elicits the same level of fear as though it had emanated from the state (Stern, 2006: 73). It can be inoffensive because it does not have the coercive power of the state, but at the same time is more insidious because it can spread to ever-growing sectors of society. The weakness of the power of the state combined with the growing clout of segments of society can give this anti-Semitism even more damaging visibility because it appears to be directed toward the State of Israel and Israelis although French Jews are the first to bear the brunt physically and above all morally.


At the leadership level, the problem is that Jewish community lead-ers find themselves with little or no room for maneuver when they are called to assess a situation. They cannot behave like sociologists but rather as advocates of their outraged community. Whether it is termed “never forget!” or “a call to vigilance”, their sworn duty is not to reproduce the errors (if not the sins) of their elders between the two World Wars who were unable to see, predict, or alert others to the impending catastrophe. They do not have the right to succumb to the natural tendency of their predecessors and to count on such mottos as “eternal France”, “the triumph of democratic ideals”, “ordinary people’s common sense” or “the victory of reason”. To avoid falling into the trap of being either naive or blind, they are programmed to ring the alarm bell every time anti-Semitism rears its head. They are always tempted to dramatize the situation; they will always choose to overestimate the implications of an incident rather than run the risk of underestimating it. This strategy is desperate and has the tendency to exaggerate the phenomenon and to see anti-Semitism everywhere. The main argument is that anti-Semitism is a cultural and structural code. Anti-Semitism has a long history, and its roots are profound. There is no alternative except war or retreat, and it makes Jews the final bastion against Islam. Thus the problem with this strategy is its pessimism: basically, it says that the battle has been lost, that between Europe and Islam, the die has been cast. Hatred is based on emo-tional appeals and the Israeli-Arab conflict has become an eschato-logical struggle between the forces of good and evil. French society is no longer a homogeneous society but in fact a heterogeneous and multicultural mix in a precarious equilibrium. It makes Jews vigilant in denouncing what Bat-Yeor calls “Eurabia” but it never asks whether it is a smart thing to lead the crusade. Besides, it is problematic to trans-late this mission into a politically effective alliance, except with the Far Right. Complaining night and day about radical Islam is very often interpreted as a stigmatization of the whole Moslem community and as proof of Islamophobia. This alternative explanation of anti-Semitism via contextual factors is rejected by Nicolas Weill and Pierre-Andre Taguieff on the basis of the political use of this explanation. They both stress the dangers of a culture that condones and cloaks itself in sociology to deal with the problem of anti-Semitism. They suspect that those who use this type of excuse are giving a veneer of respectabil-ity to ongoing laxism in the name of “angelic sociologism” (Taguieff, 2004: 174) that involves understanding and excusing the perpetrators

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of anti-Semitic acts (Weill, 2004: 84). In the final analysis, this comes down to blaming the victims. Michel Wieviorka is the only one to take a middle path: he adopts the contextual sociological explanation which is justified heuristically without being subject to political leanings.

Unconditional Solidarity with Israel?

There is no question that the most virulent anti-Semitic outbreaks take place when there is a conflict in the Middle East. The condemna-tion of Israel is extended to the Jews of France and the Diaspora in general because of their unconditional support of Israeli policies. This unconditional support does not necessarily involve total approval of specific aspects of Israeli policy but rather translates a suspension of judgment, a form of restraint which many but not all Jews willingly accept given their emotional attachment to Israel.15 They share the feeling that there are demands on the State of Israel that make it different from all other nations in the world, in particular Arab coun-tries. None deny that media images of the conflict play a decisive role in fueling tensions and attacks.16 They believe that anti-Semitism can spiral out of control: although it is fueled by images of the conflict, it can rapidly extend beyond them and perpetuate itself with no direct ties to events in the Middle East.

However, escalation on the ground has obviously led to a rise in anti-Semitic attacks. After Ariel Sharon announced that Israel was withdrawing from the Gaza Strip, Judeophobia was deprived of a pretext for action. Anti-Semitism can manage without Israel, but not Judeophobia. Of course, hatred can also act in a political vacuum: no event in the Middle East played a role in the murder of Ilan Hal-imi. Wieviorka believes that less violence in the Middle East will lead to fewer incidents against Jews. In other words, he sees a direct link between the Israeli-Palestinian conflict in the Middle East and attacks on Jews. Peace in the Middle East will reduce considerably the scope and the dissemination of anti-Semitism. However, this strategy is

15 For the majority of French Jews Israel has become a family affair in the sense that they have next of kin living in Israel.

16 Wasn’t the campaign against Charles Enderlin based on the televised images of Mohammed Al-Dura which prompted the initial outbreak of violence against Jews in France?


somewhat flawed since the key is not in the hands of the French Jew-ish community. Jews and Moslems in France may agree on a two-state solution but they do not have the means to implement it. It is useless to fight New Left radicalism; it will be best fought when peace between the two sides will prevail.

Should the Jewish community make efforts to tone down its soli-darity and support of the State of Israel? Should it stop suspending judgment? This would be a reversal of a position that Jewish institu-tions could never accept because it would rock its membership and because it would mean admitting a form of blackmail. Weill takes the most vehement stand as regards this retreat. He reiterates that Jews have the right to voice their identification with Israel freely, because if they could not do so, self-censorship would say a great deal about free speech in France and the impact of intimidation. The subtle pressure on the Jewish community to limit its manifestations of solidarity with Israel prompts Weill to question whether there is really anything new in the anti-Semitism of the 2000s. He considers it to be a disquiet-ing return to a bygone period many felt would never resurface where Jews needed an entry pass before they were fully considered integrated (ibid.: 68). In the past it was considered good breeding to distance one-self from the Ostjuden; today admission to the club takes the form of politically correct criticism of the Israeli government and Zionism.

Because of the close connection between the conflict in the Middle East and anti-Semitism, Israel may be considered as part of the prob-lem, and not part of the solution. Some want Israel to reconsider its interests in the Diaspora beyond its traditional focus on Alijhah and the Law of Return. In other words, Israel should be aware of the fallout of its policy on the Jewish community in the Diaspora. How to differen-tiate between a recrudescence of anti-Semitism and legitimate, albeit crude criticism of Israeli policies? Where does one draw the line? For partisans of the official line, the question is irrelevant. The denial and diabolizing of Israel are a sufficient reason not to change its traditional position of unconditional support. For the compromisers, the ques-tion is meaningful but they have no answer as to how to distinguish between support of Israel and freedom to criticize its policies.

Only Wieviorka and Finkielkraut directly raise the issue of com-parative victimhood, and express concern about a situation that has evolved such that the memory of the Holocaust has become counter-productive today. The institutionalization of the Holocaust through ceremonies, memorials in schools but also the frequent depiction of

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the experiences of French Jews during the Occupation in books, mov-ies and on TV have apparently led to the conclusion in some sectors of society that the Jewish community has benefitted culturally and politi-cally from its ties with the government as compared to other groups of people whose appeals fall on less favorable ears.17 The memory of Holocaust has been diluted such that the specificity of the Holocaust is misused as a way to minimize colonialism and slavery (the notorious “competition between victims”). In addition, reference to the Holo-caust is no longer taboo, which has freed anti-Semitic discourse and also works against the Jews because the Jews are accused of being the perpetrations or the accomplices, whether Israeli or not, of a genocide where the Palestinians are the victims.

Nicolas Weill takes a diametrically opposed position as regards this issue. He disputes the validity of the claim that this excessive institu-tionalization of the memory of the Holocaust has pernicious effects. Rather, he claims that sensitizing people to the Holocaust helps dis-credit anti-Semitism. Jewish institutional bodies clearly have played a preponderant role in demanding recognition of the Armenian geno-cide, solidarity with the victims of Rwandan genocide (memorial days for displaced persons were organized by the Association of Jewish Stu-dents of France; the UEJF) and the Darfur victims. In other words, efforts to preserve the memory of the Holocaust are not only centered on Jewish victims but incorporate solidarity with all victims—something that is often overlooked outside the Jewish community.

Conclusions

Using the conflict in the Middle East as a springboard, hatred of Jews was concretized by new actors, approved by Leftist protesters, fueled by the media and quietly acknowledged by the authorities who failed to correctly evaluate its nature or scope. Rather than being a circum-scribed set of events, anti-Semitic incidents coupled with one-sided media and political attitudes towards Israel have all increased the com-munity’s feeling of social isolation. The French media coverage of the Al-Aqsa Intifada in the West Bank and Gaza Strip was pro-Palestinian

17 The most recent opinion of this type was voiced by Régis Debray in his latest book: Debray, 2010.


and this anti-Israeli stance may have encouraged if not authorized Arab youngsters to direct their violence against their Jewish neigh-bors who were held collectively responsible for the most controversial aspects of Israeli policy.18 A certain amount of anger had also been accumulating for years, sustained primarily by watching the Jewish community’s steady economic success, presented as a model they had failed to mirror. This social tension could also have been triggered by identification with the Palestinians, both on national (Arab) and on religious (Muslim) grounds. Was the wave of anti-Semitic incidents following the outbreak of the Second Intifada merely an anomaly, or as many observers quickly foresaw, the beginning of a new era in the history of the French Jewish community? Only history will provide the answer. However it is clear that the end of the second Intifada did not put a definitive end to this ‘anomaly’ that began in Septem-ber 2000. There is evidence that these incidents have declined since 2004, but the pervasive feeling among French Jews is that the seeds of discord have been sown and the basic issues have not really changed. The atmosphere today is less tangible, but the uneasiness remains and resurfaces every time there is an outbreak of violence in the Middle East: this splendid isolation reached a new peak during the Iraq War when public opinion as a whole and politicians across the board were against the war, with the exception of the Jewish community that took sides with the US and Israel. But again, with the Second Lebanon War in July 2006, Israeli operation Cast Lead in Gaza in January 2009, and, recently, the flotilla raid in June 2010, the feeling has returned: it is more difficult today to be a Jew in the French public sphere.

18 On the French media coverage of the Arab-Israeli conflict, see Bourdon, 2009.

FROM ANTI-JEWISH PREJUDICE TO POLITICAL ANTI-SEMITISM? ON DYNAMICS OF ANTI-SEMITISM IN

POST-COMMUNIST HUNGARY

András Kovács

A large part of Hungarian society—both Jewish and non-Jewish—believes that anti-Semitism has increased in Hungary since the fall of Communism.1 What is said on the street, written in newspapers, heard on the radio and, especially, appears on the internet can and does give rise to anxiety. And such anxiety does not just affect Jews: even people who are not personally affected by this ancient hatred rightly fear anti-Semitism, because they are aware of its history. They know that if anti-Jewish or any other type of prejudice becomes a means of expressing or manifesting social, political or spiritual conflicts in the public sphere, then this could jeopardize not only political culture but also the country’s further integration into the community of West-ern democracies. But are the fears legitimate? Do our observations since 1989 provide grounds for such anxiety? And has anti-Semitism already reached an alarming level in Hungary?

According to surveys conducted between 1993 and 2009, approxi-mately 10 percent of Hungary’s adult population is extremely anti-Semitic, while a further 25 percent nurtures anti-Jewish prejudice to some degree.2 The percentage of the population that is bluntly preju-diced has hardly changed during the period under inquiry. The per-ception of rapidly growing anti-Semitism was evidently strengthened by the immediate and unanticipated advance of anti-Semitism after 1989. Until then, many people had believed—not without reason—that anti-Semitic language had been eradicated from the Hungarian

1 According to a survey conducted in 1999–2000, almost two-thirds (63 percent) of Hungary’s adult Jewish population considered that hostility towards Jews had increased in recent years: see Kovács, 2002: 149. In 2002, 23 percent of the total Hungarian population thought that anti-Semitism had increased, 49 percent that it was unchanged, and 15 percent that it had declined. In the 1995 survey, 33 per-cent of respondents thought that anti-Semitism had increased, 32 percent that it was unchanged, and 22 percent that it had declined.

2 The results of the consecutive surveys I conducted in this period were analyzed in detail in my book (Kovács, 2005a). See also Kovács, 1999; Kovács, 2008: 377–398.

248 andrás kovács

public discourse by the enforced silence of decades of Communist rule, the almost complete taboo surrounding Jewish topics, legal sanctions against anti-Semitism, and a ban on anti-Semitic utterances. It was thought that anti-Semitic cognitive and emotional patterns had been removed from the social memory of the masses and, in particular, from the memory of those who had never even had the opportunity of interacting with Jews because of the destruction wrought by the Shoah. It seemed to people at the time, therefore, that anti-Semitism was appearing from nowhere and spreading at an alarming rate. Today, we know more about the manner in which the “Jewish question” was in fact sustained during the post-war decades. Documents, memoirs, literary pieces, and oral history works, have demonstrated the continu-ous existence of anti-Jewish sentiment—of varying content and emo-tional intensity—in the historical memory in post-war-Hungary.3 In this “private history” traditional clichés and stereotypes did survive, albeit rather dimly and with a gradual loss of shape. Still, the clichés and stereotypes proved easy to mobilize when subjected to certain external stimuli.

The “Jewish question” was also present in the struggles of intellec-tual lobbies, whose disputes were rationalized in terms of antagonism of “urban” and “narodnik” intellectual groups. Communist policy-makers consciously promoted and manipulated such conflicts, thereby seeking to preserve them. However, this was but one aspect of the policy of sustaining the “Jewish question” and anti-Semitic clichés after World War II. As we know, anti-Semitism—packaged in an anti-Zionist rhetoric—was from time to time a part of government policy in various countries of the Soviet bloc. Anti-Zionist campaigns in the Soviet Union, Czechoslovakia and Poland influenced the “Jewish pol-icy” pursued by other Soviet-bloc countries. In the 1950s, “Zionist” legal suits were created even in Hungary, ending with political show trials. In the decades after the revolution in 1956, the Jewish insti-tutions and important actors of the Jewish community were placed under constant surveillance by the domestic security forces. The offi-cial bodies in charge—the State Office for Church Affairs, certain departments of the Central Committee and the Ministry of Interior—regularly elaborated plans of action on political issues that were linked

3 Without being exhaustive, the following are some examples: Standeisky, 1956: 26–39; Ungváry, 1990: 244–250; Lángh, 2003: 108; Engel, 2001; Závada, 2004: 401.

from anti-jewish prejudice to political anti-semitism? 249

(or perceived to be linked by the apparatus of the party state) with Hungarian or foreign Jewry. Although official politics in the public realm adhered to the definition of Jews as a religious community, nevertheless in party and state documents concerning Jews and Jew-ish institutions the country’s Jewish population was generally treated as a national group, a national minority or an ethnic group. Official measures reflected such treatment. Indeed, Communist-style politics constantly recreated the “Jewish question” and associated issues. It did so even while it refused—at least in Hungary—to tolerate overt anti-Semitism. In Czechoslovakia and Poland, the secret police drew up lists of Jewish residents (using the “Nuremberg definition” to decide whether somebody was a Jew or not). Recently discovered documents show that even in Hungary, Communist party and government organs took note of whether individuals falling under their scrutiny were Jew-ish or non-Jewish. Whenever Jewish origin was considered to be a risk, the individuals involved were subjected to discriminative mea-sures based exclusively on their descent.4 Thus, anti-Semitism did not simply emerge out of nothing after the fall of Communism. Anti-Semitic stereotypes, patterns and attitudes had been present beneath the surface of Hungarian society throughout the post-war decades. After 1990, such attitudes could be expressed without hindrance in the public sphere.

While our survey data have not substantiated that the reemergence of anti-Semitic prejudice was so abrupt, and the speed by which it interpenetrated the society was so enormous, we still need to ask how

4 For the Polish lists, see Checinski, 1982: 239–240. As far as I know, to date no documentary evidence has surfaced proving the existence of the lists, but aside from secondary evidence, their existence is rendered probable by the fact that the docu-ments of the “Action Spider”, which aimed at creating a full list of Czechoslovak Jews, have emerged from the archives of the political police. This campaign—after prior events going back to the 1950s—was recommenced in 1971 and was still underway in the late 1980s. See Kovács, 2005b: 290–294. One cannot exclude the possibility that these campaigns were undertaken in a coordinated manner in the countries of the Soviet bloc under Soviet instruction. In Hungary, documents have yet to be found concerning a decision to establish such lists, but lists of people associated with Jewish institutions and membership lists of Jewish organizations have already surfaced from the archives of the Communist political police. In view of the relatively large size of the Jewish population in Hungary, it is possible that the authorities focused on Jews that were in “sensitive” positions (the Czechoslovak document ordering the compi-lation of a list places emphasis on fields such as mass communication, science and education, health, and domestic and foreign trade). For “Jewish politics” in Hungary see Kovacs, 2004: 124–156.

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to evaluate and interpret the data collected during our investigations. How intensive is the hostility towards Jews in Hungary compared with other European countries? Is the number of anti-Semites in the coun-try greater or smaller than the average in other European states?

In recent years, many different surveys have been conducted on anti-Semitic prejudice in Europe. In 2002, the Anti-Defamation League arranged for surveys to be conducted in various countries. Each survey posed the same questions to representative samples of the adult population.5 The table below shows, for the various countries, the percentage of respondents agreeing with statements used to mea-sure anti-Semitic prejudice.

By aggregating the responses, the researchers found that 25 per-cent of the total adult population of the ten countries surveyed was anti-Semitic.6 A further survey conducted in the fall of 2003—with other, more extreme anti-Semitic statements—found that 23 percent of Germans were anti-Semites.7 Caution should be applied in com-paring the results of surveys conducted with different questions, but we can say that these findings are not very different from the data obtained in Hungary. This conclusion is confirmed by a comparison of the responses made to several similar questions: In 2002, 10 percent of respondents in a French national sample placed themselves in the group that “does not like Jews”8 (the corresponding figure in Hungary in 2002 was 12 percent, in 2009 10 percent). In 1999, 17 percent of

5 For further information on the surveys and for data, see http://www.adl.org/main_Anti_Semitism_International/Default.htm.

6 Respondents who expressed agreement with at least two statements were consid-ered to be anti-Semites. Total anti-Semitic responses by country were as follows: Bel-gium—39 percent, Germany—37 percent, France—35 percent, Spain—34 percent, Italy—23 percent, Switzerland—22 percent, Denmark—21 percent, Austria—19 percent, United Kingdom—18 percent, Netherlands—7 percent. The survey was repeated in 2004 and a decline was recorded in each country apart from the United Kingdom (23 percent) and the Netherlands (9 percent). The decline was the greatest in France (25 percent) and Spain (24 percent). In 2004, anti-Semites accounted for on average 21 percent of the population in the 10 countries. In 2007 with a somewhat modified set of questions 28 percent of those surveyed in six European countries (Aus-tria, Belgium, Hungary, the Netherlands, Switzerland, United Kingdom) believe that at least three of the above statements are “probably true”, 21 percent of Hungarian respondents and 17 percent of Austrian respondents believe that all four of the state-ments are “probably true”. The Hungarian respondents supported the two statements about “Jewish power” in business and finance high above the average.

7 See research conducted by the Forsa Institut for the German magazine Stern; http://www.hagalil.com/or/200xxxxx4/01/antisemitismus-studien.htm (April 16, 2010).

8 http://www.csa-tmo.fr/dataset/data2002/opi20020404a.htm, February 6, 2010.


Tab

le 1

3. A

ttitu

des

tow

ards

Jew

s in

10

Eur

opea

n co

untr

ies

(Per

cent

age

of r

espo

nden

ts a

gree

ing

with

sta

tem

ents

)

Bel

gium

Den

mar

kFr

ance

Ger

man

ySw

itzer

land

Uni

ted

Kin

gdom

Spai

nIt

aly

Aus

tria

Net

herl

ands

“Jew

s do

n’t

care

w

hat

happ

ens

to

anyo

ne b

ut t

heir

ow

n ki

nd.”

2516

2024

3010

3430

2915

“Jew

s ar

e m

ore

will

ing

than

oth

ers

to u

se s

hady

pr

actic

es t

o ge

t w

hat

they

wan

t.”

1813

1621

2111

3327

28 9

“Jew

s ar

e m

ore

loya

l to

Isr

ael t

han

to

this

cou

ntry

.”

5045

4255

4634

7258

5448

“Jew

s ha

ve t

oo m

uch

pow

er in

the

bu

sine

ss w

orld

.”

4413

4232

3521

6342

4020

252 andrás kovács

a Czech sample and 16 percent of a Slovak sample did not want Jew-ish neighbors (the figure for the Hungarian sample was 12 percent), while 23 percent of Czechs and 25 percent of Slovaks agreed with the statement that Jews were exploiting the memory of the Holocaust for selfish ends—in Hungary, roughly one-third of respondents agreed with a similar but slightly less blunt statement.9 The statement “Jews still talk too much about the Holocaust” received the agreement of 58 percent of German, 57 percent of Spanish, 56 percent of Austrian, 52 percent of Swiss, 46 percent of French, 43 percent of Italian, 38 per-cent of Belgian, 35 percent of the Dutch, 30 percent of Danish, and 23 percent of British respondents.10 In 2007 58 percent of the Hungarian respondents accepted the same statement, while in 2009 40 percent of respondents thought that the subject of the Holocaust should now be taken off the agenda—less than in the previous years.

These figures show that in Hungary and the other countries under investigation—that is, the old member states of the European Union (excluding the Netherlands) as well as some of the new members—approximately one-quarter of the adult population exhibits anti-Semitic prejudice to a greater or lesser extent, and that differences between individual countries are not particularly great. Can we state, therefore, that as far as anti-Semitic prejudice is concerned there is no essential difference between the populations of most European countries?

Researchers of anti-Semitic phenomena exactly know that anti-Jewish prejudice is just one element of the complex phenomenon known as anti-Semitism. If we wish to study the function and dynam-ics of anti-Semitic prejudice, then—although the extent of anti-Semitic prejudice is an important piece of data—we need also to form an impression of whether or not anti-Semitism functions as a “language”, “code system” or “culture” in the given society used to interpret issues and disputes which are otherwise unrelated to the place and role of Jews in society, and whether or not this anti-Semitic culture has an immediate political function. The possibilist theory of anti-Semitism is based on the assumption that the three factors—prejudice, the

9 The surveys in the Czech Republic and in Slovakia were conducted on national representative samples for the American Jewish Committee in August and September 1999. There were 1166 Czech and 1057 Slovak respondents. For the survey data, see www.ajc.org. The Hungarian surveys were conducted by me on national representa-tive samples in 2002, 2003, 2006 and 2009.

10 See the cited survey of the Anti-Defamation League. The 2009 survey was car-ried out by the author.


development of an anti-Semitic culture, and the formation of an anti-Semitic political ideology—do not necessarily arise in conjunction, but that their simultaneous presence is the consequence of external and mutually unrelated historical factors. At the turn of the nine-teenth and twentieth century, anti-Semitism was probably stronger in France than in Germany, and yet it was in the latter that it became the most destructive political ideology of the twentieth century. The number of anti-Semites in any given society need not be particularly great for diffuse prejudice to be transformed by circumstances into a dynamic political ideology. According to Shulamit Volkov, this is what happened in Germany in the latter third of the nineteenth century (Volkov, 1978: 25–45).

Volkov explains the development and dynamic growth of modern anti-Semitism in imperial Germany as accidental coincidence and consequence of the combined effect of four preconditions. One of the historical preconditions was indisputably the presence of anti-Jewish prejudice. But in order for anti-Jewish sentiment to grow dynamically, there also needed to be intellectuals willing and able to establish a cognitive link between anti-Jewish prejudice and major societal prob-lems. That the anti-Semitic ideology established in this manner could become a worldview accepted by a large section of society was because German society included a relatively large group of people for whom anti-Semitism provided an opportunity for social integration, while there was also the political will to mobilize anti-Semitic prejudice. In other words, the anti-Semitic group in question was sufficiently impor-tant to the various groups competing for political power that some of these groups made anti-Semitism a part of their political ideology.11

What is the context of anti-Semitic prejudice in today’s Hungary? Should we expect prejudice to gain ground dynamically and become a political factor? Indeed, should we fear anti-Semitism becoming the dominant factor in Hungarian politics owing to the combined effect of the various consequences of Hungary’s democratic transformation? Empirical findings of our research demonstrated that hostility towards Jews is certainly present in modern Hungarian society. While com-paring the various pieces of research carried out at different points in time, we found that the system of anti-Semitic prejudice had actually

11 According to Volkov, in the second half of the nineteenth century, artisans com-prised this section of society in Germany. See Volkov, 1990: 37–53.

254 andrás kovács

become more coherent over time: in the last years it was more closely linked with political ideologies and political preferences, and the inten-sity of political anti-Semitism became also stronger (Kovács 2008: 377–398). Behind this development we identified a social group—of relatively high social status—for whom hostility towards Jews was no longer simply a means of compensating for social frustration but had become a code of political identity. Does this all mean that prejudice has already set off on the path towards becoming a cultural system and political ideology? Is there a risk of anti-Semitism departing from the intellectual field and finding a social group for whom anti-Semitic ideology could perform a function similar to the one it played in impe-rial Germany?

After the fall of Communism it was as part of the intellectual dis-course that the “Jewish question” first appeared. The main reason for this was that among the intellectuals—to which most survivors and offspring of survivors belonged—the vocabulary and language of the “Jewish question” had remained intact throughout the post-war decades. Much has been written on the different manner in which Jewish and non-Jewish intellectuals related to the post-1945 era and on the mechanisms how difference contributed to the reproduction of group boundaries.12 The difference was not that one of the groups was well integrated and the other poorly integrated into the Communist system or that one side gave more support and the other side less sup-port to the system, but that the motives for supporting, accepting or rejecting the system were different among the two groups—in accor-dance with their different historical experience and memory. During the decades of Communist rule, there arose around these differences (and the elements of identity constructed out of them) lobbying net-works in various intellectual professions. Such informal networks were products of enforced adaptation to the monolithic institutional sys-tem of the party state,13 and at the same time Communist politics used them as means of manipulation. These networks traced their ori-gins to the competing “urban” and “populist”—meaning Jewish and

12 For several examples, see Kovács, 1984: 3–32; Kovács, 1992a: 97–113; Kovács, 1992b: 262–288; Kovács, 1993: 3–5; Karády, 2001a: 62–65; Karády, 2001b: 77–96. On Poland, see Smolar, 1987: 1–31; Schatz, 1991; Krajewski, 1999: 115–130.

13 Cf. Kovács, 1984: 22–23; Karády, 2001a: 62–65. Regarding the use of the term “Jewish” and “non-Jewish” lobbies, an important point is made by Karády: “. . . these terms are usually of merely symbolic rather than empirical content, . . . they juxtapose groups in which Jews and non-Jews provide the underlying tone . . .” (ibid.: 63).


non-Jewish—middle-class intellectual groupings that existed between the two World Wars and explained and justified themselves by claim-ing that they were only exercising legitimate defense against the other lobby group. Thus, their cohesion was created by the need for “self-defense” against “Jewish solidarity” or “self-defense” against “anti-Semitic exclusion”. This identity was constructed by a discourse using the notions of the “Jewish question”—although in its public form it was undertaken in exceptional circumstances and only in coded lan-guage. It was in this language, sustained in the intellectual milieu for the duration of the Communist era, that the stereotypes and the anti-Semitic or anti-anti-Semitic discursive schemes were conserved until the period of political change in the late 1980s, surfacing amid the conflicts of the post-transition period.

This intellectual discourse very quickly emerged at the level of poli-tics. Viktor Karády even opined that although the divisions of post-transitional Hungarian politics could not be traced back to the “Jewish question”, nevertheless the issue was present in the divergent options of the left wing and right wing. “These two options contain, in dis-guised form, different plans for society: the one side accepts without reservation the Western development model of an open society, while the other side supports ‘third way’ ideas and concepts.” Since, how-ever, Jews have historically played an important part in the implemen-tation of Western development in Hungary, “(in this) wider context, therefore—one that goes well beyond antisemitism—. . . the relation-ship towards Jews appears, after all, to be one of the main sources of current ideological divisions.” (Karády, 2001: 67–69)

In my view, however, we probably have to look elsewhere to find an explanation for this impression. One explanation is that the various political groupings in post-Communist Hungary were unable to offer voters radically alternative social visions and, therefore, they used pre-eminently historical and ideological symbols to distinguish themselves from each other. Another factor is that the political parties appear-ing on the scene after the fall of Communism suffered from a grave lack of legitimacy: they could not fall back on an established party history; nor could they count on the support of well-defined and dis-tinguishable social groups. They were compelled, therefore, to estab-lish their identities in the symbolic domain, and this domain became the principal arena for constructing party identity. The preferred field of discourse for establishing identity was history and the lead-ing participants of these discourses were the professional exponents

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of all memory discourses—the intellectuals. These debates on identity politics were held in the language of the intellectual groups. They were concerned primarily with the past rather than the future, and they reflected the struggle among intellectuals for influence and power as well as the cleavages of the intellectual subcultures. As a consequence, the language of the “Jewish question”—which, as mentioned before, already in previous decades had served to express beneath the surface the self-identity of the various intellectual camps—soon became the language of the identity-discourses and rapidly became embedded into political context. This set in motion the process leading to a renewal of anti-Semitic language as a cultural code—a process that is strength-ened still further if people who otherwise oppose anti-Semitism use the vocabulary of this language to express their rejection of the total cultural content—not just hostility towards Jews—that the anti-Semitic code represents.

But what code does today’s anti-Semitism represent, what is encoded in the anti-Semitic language? According to Volkov’s analysis, modern anti-Semitism in the nineteenth century was a code system capable of the expression of the same relationship—rejection—with the most diverse phenomena manifesting the essential aspects of modern West-ern civilization; that is to say, it was the code of anti-modernity. How-ever, this is no longer self-evident today. Although one still finds, in anti-Semitic works published in Hungarian, the classical elements of the traditionalist cultural critique (Kulturkritik) of modernity, nevertheless if divisions between the political camps are also expressed in their rela-tionship towards the “Jewish question”, then this relationship clearly does not form the boundary between modernity and anti-modernity. One cannot say that those who rediscover the “Jewish question” in contemporary Hungarian society are those who also reject the the-ory of market rationality, modern urban life, mass consumption, the rule of law, parliamentary democracy, modern technology, the use of cyberspace, rock music, and many other things that are the products of the modern world—and who, moreover, consider themselves to be a part of another coherent culture in opposition to all this. When analyzing the anti-Semitic discourses of the post-Communist period, we found that the mainstream anti-Semitic discourses were in fact direct and almost undisguised expressions of status conflicts among intellectuals—presented as essential political alternatives. Thus, some of the intellectual groups that played an important role in the political debates at the time of the political transition used the language of the


“Jewish question” and the rhetoric of “national self-defense” for the political rationalization of its group conflicts. The “Us” and “Them” dichotomy did not denote modernist and anti-modernist cultures but definable intellectual groups as well as parties and political group-ings that such intellectual groups wished to form in their own image or which they considered to be their opponents. It seems, therefore, that what took place in Hungary after the fall of Communism was in certain respects similar to what happened in imperial Germany: the “Jewish question” received a coded significance. On the other hand, it functioned as a code of political identity rather than as a cultural code of anti-modernity. And so it may be referred to as post-modern anti-Semitism in contrast to the modern anti-Semitism of the nineteenth century.

But does this code have any significance beyond the relatively nar-row circle of intellectuals that actively use or merely understand the language of the “Jewish question”? This is the most important question when evaluating the dynamics of anti-Semitism. In nineteenth-century Germany the ideologues of anti-Semitism linked the “Jewish question” to problems which affected and mobilized major social groups—such as the “social question” and “the essence and existence of the nation”. Although in comparison the construction of political identities appears to be a rather particularistic problem, the fact that the groups instru-mentalizing the “Jewish question” use the rhetoric of national self-defense for this aim, renders the anti-Semitic discourse part of a more universal language.

The rhetoric of national independence, interest and self-defense has had a strong legitimacy after four decades of the Communist political system in which the use of such language had a symbolical meaning since it expressed opposition to the prevailing system. Even if this lan-guage had elements traditionally associated with anti-Semitic views, after such a long period of prohibition such associations had probably grown weaker among many societal groups, particularly the young. For them, following the collapse of Communism, using this language served merely to express the refusal of the old system. It was this cir-cumstance that anti-Semitic intellectuals recognized and exploited after the political changes, when they strove to establish a close association between the legitimate language of national consciousness and the ille-gitimate language of the “Jewish question”—thereby raising the latter into a legitimate field of discourse. To this end, the old anti-Semitic structures were transformed for the simplification and rationalization

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of new political conflicts. The tensions caused by economic and cul-tural globalization were portrayed as a conflict between cosmopolitan and national interests, the consequences of joining the process of inter-national integration as the loss of national sovereignty, and the social consequences of the economic and political transition as the result of being at the mercy of colonial masters. Meanwhile, either covertly, in coded form, or overtly, the image of the Jew as destroyer of the nation was evoked as the domestic agent of the colonizing Foreigner—thus the old cliché of a Jewish conspiracy. It is this construction that appears with considerable linguistic power in the writings of István Csurka, a writer, and prominent representative of extreme right anti-Semitism in the 1990s: “It’s a war now, a domestic Hungarian Cold War, between the Hungarian people and the domineering foreigners” (Csurka, March 23, 1995: 2).

They’ve forced a financial system and a colonial financial management administration on us which . . . aims to establish a secure zone, refugee camp and hinterland for the perpetual war in the Middle East. For all this to happen, the primary need is that others rather than Hungarians should dispose of Hungarian assets, or Hungarians who are reliable as far as the Middle East is concerned and who profit from the transaction (Csurka, July 20 1995: 2).

The “. . . final aim is the extermination of Hungarians. Not by using weapons or poison gas, but by financial policy means, by removing livelihood opportunities, and by leading them towards self-destruction” (Csurka, February 5, 1998: 2).

Of course, these are merely words. As far as the dynamics of anti-Semitism are concerned, the establishment of a linguistic field in which certain political agents can portray themselves as patriotic opponents of the power-hungry domestic Foreigner, the anti-national force rep-resented by the Jew, and present all political and social disputes as a struggle between these two forces can be of marginal significance. It becomes threatening only in case, if the society includes sizeable groups who can be persuaded that the cause of their diffuse feeling of vulnerability is that the whole nation is threatened, the reason of their feeling of losing orientation is the destruction of national traditions, and the explanation for their deprivation is the irrepressible advance of a merciless Foreigner. Historical research on nineteenth-century anti-Semitism has identified various such groups in the society of the day which subsequently constituted the foundation of anti-Semitic politics:


an impoverished artisan class (Volkov, 1990; Lichtblau, 1994), urban retailers and craftsmen (Bunzl and Marin, 1983), students from lower middle-class backgrounds (Kampe, 1987), and intellectuals with strong ideological motivations (Pulzer, 1988: 272–281). Such historical analy-ses have also demonstrated that social layers living in extreme poverty were not necessarily the most receptive to anti-Semitic ideology. Not poverty was the shared characteristic of the groups identified as anti-Semitic; nor was it a similar economic and social position. Instead, all the groups identified felt that their social status had been under-mined and were worried that they would lose their status. As Bunzl and Marin have shown, the factual proletarization of certain groups in Austria during the final decades of the nineteenth century increased the level of support for the social democrats, while people’s fear of proletarization tended to benefit the strongly anti-Semitic Christian socialist movement (Bunzl and Marin, 1983: 21). “Antisemitic slogans which laid all blame for social decline and failure on Jewish scape-goats found a receptive audience at a time in history when the former social frameworks had collapsed and uncertainty and dissatisfaction were widespread”, wrote Klemens Felden in an analysis of the sud-den increase in anti-Jewish hostility.14 Thus, it was not just downward social mobility that led individuals and groups towards the anti-Semitic movements but the strong fear of becoming a déclassé.

Such fear stemmed largely from the fact that the groups in ques-tion were incapable of integrating into the great “societal milieus” of German (and—with some differences—Austrian) society—as Rainer Lepsius called such forms of integration, which were later referred to as “pillars” (Lepsius, 1966: 371–393). These “milieus”—conservatism, Liberalism, social democracy, and Catholicism—had their own politi-cal representations, ideologies and (sub)cultures. Still, as Volkov has shown, German society also contained a heterogeneous and diverse group that for various reasons was incapable of adjusting to the various forms of integration—such as, for instance, traditional artisans in the Protestant northern parts of Germany and in areas of mixed religion (Volkov, 1990: 51). This group was sufficiently large to endanger the integration of German society and to create political crises. For this reason, Bismarck “. . . for several decades adhered to the tactic of using

14 Felden, 1963. Cited by Lichtblau, 1994: 17.

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the image of a permanent enemy of the nation in order to maintain the internal cohesion of society. In this context, it is easy to interpret antisemitism. . . . In contrast to the Jews namely, minor artisans and other social groups were indisputably a part of the glorious German nation.” (Volkov, 1990: 52) Therefore, these groups, though pushed to the margins by Germany’s social and political development, could regard themselves—in contrast to Jews—as true Germans and Chris-tians, and could feel themselves to be a part of the German nation. Indeed, this was the only way that they “could be reintegrated” into the political and social sphere.

Thus, antisemitism functioned as a supplement to nationalism, and it is only in this context that the relationship between the two phenomena may be understood. . . . When linked with extreme nationalism, antisemi-tism served to mitigate the identity crisis of those people who otherwise felt that they were isolated from other parts of German society and from the leaders of the German state, who rejected them and even looked down on them (ibid.).

Anti-Semitism mitigated, for such people, a permanent feeling of exclusion. And it also served as a means of dealing with a conflict that threatened to upset social cohesion. As we have seen, in today’s Hun-gary too the “Jewish question” functions, in anti-Semitic publications, as a code for a dividing line between what is “national” and what is “anti-national”. The question is whether or not modern Hungarian society contains a group for which this ideology fulfils a function simi-lar to the one it performed in imperial Germany. Does there exist, in Hungary’s post-Communist society, a social group which experiences the emergence of new institutions, norms and regulations as a loss of status, a threat, a loss of orientation, and a hopeless erosion of normal-ity, and at the same time is it capable of developing forms of collec-tive behavior that could cause perceptible damage to the functioning of the systems underlying economic, political, and social integration? And if such a group does exist, could nationalism combined with anti-Semitism, as well as identification with the political groupings that rep-resent this mix, offer the group psychological relief and the possibility of a return to the political and social mainstream?

Our research findings as well as the data of other investigations do allow for some conjecture. We can only state hypotheses, whose valid-ity is necessarily limited, further research is required in order to com-plete the picture. Research on elections and voter behavior since 1990 has shown without exception that between 1990 and 2002, Hungarian


voters were characterized by uncertain party loyalties and significant voter volatility, with a relatively large number of voters failing to take part in elections. In his analysis of shifts among voters and non-voters, Zoltán Fábián demonstrated (Fábián, 1996: 95–111) that during the initial five years of Hungary’s parliamentary democracy a large major-ity of voters (74 percent) did not remain loyal to the parties that they originally chose as their first or second preference and that just 12 per-cent of voters gave their support to the same party at the first two elec-tions. The party preference data prove that between 1990 and 1995, more than two-thirds of the total population failed to vote on at least one occasion. As they tried to explain people’s rapidly changing party preferences, the researchers identified a group that rejected to a lesser or greater degree all the ideologies promoted by the various political parties. Based on a national representative sample of 1.000, Róbert Angelusz and Róbert Tardos examined, in early 1990, how poten-tial voters could be classified based on their views on the Communist system, liberal market economy, social issues, and national sentiment (Angelusz and Tardos, 1991: 182–208). The largest of the various “ideological” groups formed was the so-called “pragmatic” group—with 31 percent of the total population. This group did not support the previous political system, nor was it attracted to economic Liberalism, nationalist ideology or religiosity. Thus, the group—which could also be referred to as the group with no attitudes or diffuse attitudes—rejected all of the ideologies used by both supporters and opponents of the previous system to express their support for a particular worldview and political camp. As far as its voting attitudes were concerned, the majority of the “non-attitude” group comprised non-voters and voters of radical, anticommunist groups. This group was distinguishable from the average of the population by a higher degree of anomie signifying social disintegration.15

Electoral research has shown that during the twelve years after the first democratic election the above group, which was identified as early as 1990, migrated between the two sides of politics—the government and the opposition—or simply rejected participation in elections. It is probable that members of this group supported a radical right-wing party in 1998, the Hungarian Justice and Life Party (MIÉP), which

15 This indicator was developed from questions measuring fear of crime and vio-lence, confidence or lack of confidence in others, and general (dis)satisfaction with life.

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occupied the most extreme position on the political scale, and managed to get into the Hungarian parliament for the next four years.16 Indi-cators suggest that for this shifting group the most important motive for choosing a party was its distance from the government in power, rather than the problems and solutions it wished to address. It seems likely that the “no attitude” groups, for whom rejection and protest were the prime motives for voting, were particularly likely to mani-fest this form of electoral behavior, that is, to switch back and forth between the political parties. This is also implied by the composition of the groups: according to the available data, people aged around 40, semi-skilled workers and urban dwellers were significantly overrepre-sented in the “no attitude” groups and among abstaining and protest voters. Such attitudes and behavior, therefore, characterized primarily a section of society that was not the poorest but which contained many people who were the “losers” of the transition, that is, people, who lost the chances of upward mobility and were threatened by losing their former status—those who appeared as personally frustrated and anomic in our surveys (see Kovács, 1999; Kovács, 2008: 377–398), and among whom anti-Semites were overrepresented.

Electoral research thus identified an anomic group with “no atti-tudes”, weak political allegiances, and a tendency to submit a protest vote. And the group’s characteristics were strikingly similar to those of the anomic anti-Semitic group identified in the course of research on anti-Semitism in the last years. It is not baseless to suppose that the two groups included many of the same individuals. When analyzing the findings of the surveys, we noticed that whereas in 1995, anomie had resulted directly in prejudice, in 2002, among this relatively young and urban group, prejudice was not directly related to social despair and a mistrust of the political leaders, but was linked with strong national sentiment and support for radical national demands. It was not in itself the high level of anomie that distinguished this prejudiced group from non-prejudiced or less prejudiced groups, but the fact that anomie was accompanied by overt nationalism. Anti-Semitic prejudice was there-

16 According to a survey conducted in April 1997 by Szonda-Ipsos Public Opinion Research Institute based on a national representative sample of 30,000 subjects, one in four voters for the Hungarian Justice and Life Party (MIÉP) in 1997, had voted for the Hungarian Socialist Party or the Alliance of Free Democrats (SZDSZ—a left-liberal party) four years earlier, i.e. parties on the other side of the political spectrum, while an additional 27 percent had not taken part in the earlier election.


fore directly associated with a political attitude. As an explanation for this phenomenon, we hypothesized that overt nationalism could be a means of compensating for an anomic relationship with the world of politics and society. In this group, therefore, the “rationalization” of anomie was in an advanced state.

The results of the studies I carried out in 2006 and 2009 basically confirmed this observed tendency. In 2006 the strongest predictor of anti-Semitism was still xenophobia, but nationalism and (low) status strongly contributed to the explanation of it, as well.17 It seems that in 2006 the anti-Semitic segment of the population consisted of two groups: a (conservative and anomic) low status group and a strongly nationalist group which was neither socially deprived nor strikingly anomic. Though the members of the last group typically did not trust in the democratic institutions of the new system, they displayed high trust in (certain) politicians and in the efficacy of political action. Whereas the first subgroup was dominated by young and socially deprived persons, the second one was explicitly of higher social status, older and Budapest-based.

Can we, thus, assume that we have found the poorly integrated and anomic group in Hungarian society that disposes of considerable political weight in view of its influence on the outcome of elections and which—as an analogy of the German example—may find a new path to its social integration by means of nationalist and anti-Semitic political organizations? Do our findings indicate that extremist political entrepreneurs have already established the link between their agenda and the urge of anomic groups to rid themselves of the tensions caused by their poorly integrated status? There are without doubt signs of such a development, since it may well be that the identified anomic groups constitute the social group with weak party allegiances that has played a decisive role since 1994 in determining which political group forms the parliamentary majority in Hungary.

Indeed, since 2006 this group has seemed to appear as a separate political force on the Hungarian political scene in the form of the newly organized, dynamically growing extreme right party, Jobbik (“For a Better Hungary”), led by relatively young radical politicians who rec-ognized the political potential identified by sociological investigations.

17 Regression analysis, stepwise method; Anti-Semitism factor (PC): R2 = 11 %; Beta coefficients: xenophobia: .219; nationalism: .171; status: –.161.

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The supporters of this party display very similar attitudes to the group we characterized above: strong anomic feelings towards the existing institutional system, and at the same time a strong conviction that the “rotten establishment” can be changed by quasi-revolutionary politi-cal means.18 The political weight of this group has grown in the last couple of years, since it has absorbed those young age groups19 who were not able to find their way in the post-Communist society and do not identify themselves at all with the new republic, which they consider to be the result of a selfish compromise between the old Com-munist and the new post-Communist elites (Vásárhelyi, 2010). These age groups, always ready for violent clashes with the authorities, have developed intense anti-establishment sentiments, which have then been effectively exploited by the political entrepreneurs of the emerg-ing extreme right.

The discourse aiming at the political mobilization of this group is not very different from the radical nationalist discourse of the 1990s analyzed above. The decisive difference between the two periods is that the present-day discourse has succeeded in transgressing the boundaries of the elite groups, and seems to have found its way to the disappointed people of the street. A recurring formula of the pres-ent extremist discourse is to set “our kind [of people]” (the in-group) against “your kind”—outsiders that malign the country. It is because of these outsiders that “. . . we cannot feel at home in our own country”; the task is to reconquer Hungary from those who “do not recognize common values and common principles”. “Decisions made by your kind [of people] are always dictated by whatever happens to ‘pay off ’ at a particular point in time, whatever is profitable for you, that is, whatever results in money or power. Common values are replaced by antifascist slogans and anti-Hungarian sentiment, and other ways of bringing our kind [of people] under control”. “Your kind (intend us to be) obedient subjects, servants and domestics, in an impoverished and

18 The electoral results of the Jobbik show a permanent increase in the support of the party: in the parliamentary elections in 2002 the party received only 2,2 percent of the votes (119,007 votes) and could not take the 5 percent threshold for entering the parliament, however, in the European elections in 2009 Jobbik received 14,77 percent (427,773 votes) and, finally, in the parliamentary elections in April 2010 16,67 percent (855,436 votes).

19 The electorate of the Jobbik is significantly younger than that of the other par-ties, including the center right Fidesz which emerged from the radical anti-Communist youth movement of the pre-transition period.


maimed Hungary that has been turned into a third-world colony.” The discourse leaves little doubt about the identity of the “Other”:

If, after the fifty years of your communism, there had remained in us even a speck of the ancient Hungarian prowess, then after the so-called ‘change of regime’ your kind would not have unpacked your legend-ary suitcases, which were supposedly on standby. No. You would have left promptly with your suitcases! You would have voluntarily moved out of your stolen . . . villas, and . . . you would not have been able to put your grubby hands on the Hungarian people’s property, our factories, our industrial plants, our hospitals. . . . It would be nice if there were just a tiny little bit of truth to the supposed fear that the likes of you feel, owing to the alleged antisemitism and fascism etc. raging here. . . . On the contrary, your kind visibly do not fear at all. . . . We will not put up with this indefinitely. . . . This is our country; we are at home here and it is here that we are at home. We shall take back our homeland from those who have taken it hostage!20

However, the anti-Semitism of the extreme right has still not been transformed into a political ideology. Political racism appears in the extreme right’s program in the form of concrete anti-Roma demands, like cutting and restricting welfare services for Roma, the legaliza-tion of segregation in schools and elsewhere, the introduction of strict police controls in Roma settlements. This is not by chance: in a society where, as we have seen, anti-Roma sentiments are extremely wide-spread, these demands are perfectly suitable for mobilizing substantial social groups, while the efforts of the earlier extreme right groupings to use anti-Semitism for the same purpose were much less successful.

This does not mean that anti-Semitism is absent from the rhetoric of the radicals, but that it does not take the form of anti-Jewish politi-cal demands. For the typical anti-Semitic commentator today, “the Jew” does not designate a specific individual or group, but has become a symbol for something. A fundamental difference from the pre-World War II situation is that today most Hungarians have never even met a Jew. And even if they have met one, they were very likely to have been unaware of the individual’s Jewish identity. Many people harbor anti-Semitic stereotypes about Jews; they may have seen Jews—or people they thought were Jews—on television, but the stereotypes concealed

20 All citations are from Krisztina Morvai, a lawyer, university professor who headed the party’s European election list and was elected to the European Parlia-ment in June 2009. See her page on www.barikád.hu 2008–08–20; www.barikád.hu. 2008–08–27; www.barikád.hu 2008–10–05; www.barikád.hu 2008–11–12.

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in the crannies of social consciousness and memory, which may be reactivated at times, offer little guidance even to such people with regard to specific everyday social conflicts. If certain groupings were now to demand anti-Jewish measures, a large part of Hungarian society would have no idea how—against whom—such measures should be implemented. The masses mobilized by anti-Semitic politicians prior to World War II knew what they wanted from Jews: social positions and resources. Today, people would be unlikely to discover in similar anti-Jewish political demands effective tools for solving their everyday problems. Few people would expect their situation to be improved by the forced emigration of Jews or the expulsion of Jewish investors. Naturally, this is not to say that the shrill anti-Semitic voices heard since 2006 are no threat. They may well prepare the ground even for everyday violence. Nevertheless, anti-Semitic language currently serves primarily as a medium for establishing extreme rightwing identity—similarly to the language of the “Jewish question” in the elite sphere. This anti-Semitic language can be used to express who is “our kind” and “your kind”, who is “part of our crowd”, who is “with us”. Those who speak in “our language” belong “to us.” The language creates a collectivity; it expresses a belonging to a community. The communica-tive function of anti-Semitic clichés is that those speaking recognize: “Aha, you think the same way as I do”—but not just about Jews. For it is far from certain that among users of the anti-Semitic language the political common denominator is established by what they think of Jews. Quite possibly, it is in some completely different field that they perceive a shared fate, which places them on the same side. In this sense, those who occasionally use the anti-Semitic language may not necessarily be anti-Semites. Nonetheless they know that in certain situ-ations and milieus they have to use this language in order to show that they are a part of the group. On the other hand, just as one does not have to be an anti-Semite to use this language, so not all anti-Semites seize every opportunity to speak publicly in this language. The surveys show that people nurturing anti-Jewish prejudice can be found in all segments of Hungarian society and politics. Still, such prejudice does not necessarily play an important role in their political choices or in how they live their lives. Of course, these anti-Semites are also aware of the communicative function of the language of anti-Semitism, but since they do not regard themselves as members of anomic and poorly integrated groups, they will be hesitant to voice their prejudices outside


the private sphere. Thus, those nurturing anti-Jewish prejudices and people using anti-Semitic language do not perfectly overlap.

In view of the events of recent years, is there a danger that anti-Semitic politics could gain ground in Hungary? Evidently, determin-ing anti-Semitism’s future role in Hungarian politics is beyond the scope of sociological analysis. The general circumstances—Hungary’s integration into the European and Euroatlantic structures, its deepen-ing involvement in European politics, the basic policy positions of the country’s mainstream political forces, and many other factors—render a development which would elevate political anti-Semitism into a cen-tral position unlikely. Nevertheless, the country’s future course depends in large part upon its political actors. Based on the knowledge acquired by means of sociological analysis, we may state that the presence of anti-Jewish prejudice in society has already encouraged certain politi-cal forces and cultural groupings to attempt to transform the prejudice that once affected the margins of Hungarian society into a language, culture and ideology—that is, into an “ism”. Still, historical studies remind us that, in the modern era, it is the political and cultural elite that determines whether or not anti-Semitism becomes a culture and a political factor. For anti-Semitic political forces to acquire significant influence, there has always been a need for members of the norm-setting elite to actively espouse an anti-Semitic interpretation of events—as a framework for explaining perceived social and political conflicts—and for other members of the elite to accept such an interpretation. If, as it marks out the boundaries of legitimate and illegitimate debate, the elite discourse fails to classify the anti-Semitic framing of crucial events as illegitimate, and such an appraisal acquires validity in the public sphere, then a dangerous historical adventure may result.

A MEDITERRANEAN BRIDGE OVER TROUBLED WATER.CULTURAL IDEAS ON HOW TO RECONCILE ISRAEL

WITH ITS NEIGHBOURS AND WITH EUROPE

David Ohana

The Mediterranean Sea links together three continents, three religions, and thousands of years of civilization, and has thus been a channel of mutual influences and cultural exchanges. These processes have formed the destiny of large Jewish communities. The historian Joshua Prawer drew attention to an interesting fact: “It should be pointed out that, without any causal relationship, the period of the closure of the Med-iterranean was—in relationships, in the exchange of ideas and in trade—the period of the greatness of Judaism . . .” (Prawer, 1990: 9). According to the historian Shlomo Dov Goitein, the Jews lived along the coasts of the Mediterranean, and were an open, mobile people that were not closed up in their own world but, in the countries where they lived, inherited the culture of Greece and Rome and adapted it to Islamic culture. In his monumental five-volume work A Mediterranean Society, Goitein described a Jewish society of the Middle Ages that lived within the framework of Mediterranean geography and culture (Goitein, 1967–1988).

Goitein, as the first Hebrew University lecturer in Islamic studies, focused in his pioneering work on early Arab literature and society, and only later in his life began to concern himself with the medieval Jewish communities. His original project was to investigate the trade with the Indian Ocean, but his academic starting-point was the inves-tigation of the Cairo genizah: “In the summer of 1958 I abandoned India and turned towards the Mediterranean.” (Lassner, 2005: 23) In the documents of the genizah he examined, there was no special term for the “Mediterranean Sea”, and the Arabs generally called it “the Sea of the Romans”, “The Sea”, or “The Salt Sea”. Unlike Henri Pirenne, who saw a division in the Mediterranean, Goitein revealed an extensive Mediterranean trade between Christians and Muslims from the eleventh to the thirteenth century. In his opinion, the division in the Mediterranean took place with the spread of the tribes from Central Asia and the Caucasus to the Islamic countries. After the

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Mamelukes and the crusades, the Europeans regarded the Mediter-ranean as a hostile area. Goitein’s geographical sociology, which deci-phered the documents of the genizah, portrayed the Jews of the Middle Ages as a Mediterranean people that developed its sources, dissemi-nated its wisdom and was prominent in trade and the liberal profes-sions in the countries of the Basin. His research depicted a Jewish society that was pre-modern in all respects: day-to-day life, commerce, law and way of thinking. It was an exemplary model for the study by Peregrine Horden and Nicholas Purcell, The Corrupting Sea (2001), which added to the net-like Braudelian structure of the macro, alterna-tive micro-networks of areas and sub-areas, in the same way as Goitein. The precise reconstruction of the area of the Mediterranean between Tunisia and Egypt was revealed as a total history, a history of the mentality of the medieval Jews, and a historical sociology of the world-wide, country-wide and communal organization of the Jews, with a description of synagogues and prayers, the system of education, the legal system, the development of the nuclear family, and the women’s world. The status of the Jews was perceived as a central axis in the Middle Ages between the Mashrek and the Mahgreb (the eastern and western areas of North Africa). Goitein himself became aware of Fer-nand Braudel’s book only at the end of his researches: “I immediately regretted I had not done so earlier.” (Kremer, 1990: 9)

Braudel was preceded by a year by Nahum Slouschz (1871–1966), a writer and a philologist of the Oriental languages, in his study The Book of the Sea: The Conquest of the Seas—An Aspect of the History of Civiliza-tion, published in 1948. It is impossible not to notice the similar dispo-sition, the Mediterranean compass and the creative imagination common to Slouschz and Braudel. Slouschz wrote:

The life-force in the land of life overcomes everything: the farmer who has nothing in Southern Italy, the penniless fisherman in the Isles of Greece, the ploughman in Provence and the peasant living on vegetables in the Balearic Islands have never changed their social form. They have remained steeped in light, full of charm and devoted to an ancient joie de vivre . . . (Slouschz, 1948: 28).

With the same expansiveness, Braudel poeticized:

In this book, ships sail, the waves repeat their melody, the vines descend from the Cinque Terre to the Genoa Riviera. In this book, olives are harvested in Provence and Greece, the fishermen draw their nets from the silent lagoon of Venice or the canals of Djerba, and the carpenters

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still build ships similar to those of yesterday. . . . And at the sight of all this, we are outside time (Braudel, 1985: 1).

In Slouschz’s work, the connection of the “new Jew” to the Mediter-ranean is very important, and as David Remez (1886–1951), an Israeli political leader and a writer, says in his introduction to The Book of the Sea, “Our world was planted on the shores of the Mediterranean, the great sun of world culture.” According to Slouschz, the attractiveness of the Mediterranean still derives from the biblical sources: “Zevulun will live long on the shore”, “Asher with his havens”, “Dan will live on ships”. This way of thinking draws inspiration from the past: “The actions of our forefathers were a sign for their descendants when the first ones wished from the beginning to restore the seas of our land to their original splendor as international conduits fusing the expanses of the east with the farthest regions of the west . . .” (Slouschz, 1948: viii). According to Slouschz, the young Hebrew Yishuv (the Jewish-Zionist community in Palestine prior to the state of Israel) had the same task as the ancient Israelite society, and one therefore had to “renew the youth of our land as one of the strengths of the sea, commanding its ways and linking together countries and islands against the background of trade and the kinship of peoples.” One had to vanquish hearts before one conquered the seas, and hence a Mediterranean conscious-ness and education through a sea-approach to Israel were essential to the crystallization of the Hebrew consciousness, as opposed to the con-ditions of exile: “The sea, a substance of much water in itself, as against the evil waters of exile that distance those who are near.” (ibid.) As a result of this ideology of the Jewish people as a Mediterranean one, Slouschz developed a historiography and a historical philosophy that emphasized his knowledge of the past of the Jewish people on the sea, and stressed the way of life and activities of the Jewish communities in the Mediterranean Basin. He characterized the Mediterranean Jew as follows: “A Mediterranean person of this kind is first of all a social person, one link in a great chain of similar people, who does not rep-resent life outside the community in which he was born and in which he was raised.” (ibid.: 27) Unlike the people of the north “who walk in darkness”, the “heroes of the bright horizon of the Mediterranean” like Samson and David, Alexander and Socrates, Hannibal and Napo-leon, were first and foremost natives of their cities, part of their envi-ronment, and felt comfortable in nature or in the public space.

David Ben-Gurion, the founder of the Israeli state, already at the ninth Zionist Congress in 1935 called for the Mediterranean character

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of the state-in-the-making to be developed (Aronson, 1978; Karmon, Shmueli and Horowitz, 1983). Ben-Gurion persisted in his Mediter-ranean orientation, and even adopted the Canaanite narrative con-cerning the Hebrews as pioneers of Mediterraneanness, preceding the Greeks and Romans: “The fathers of seafaring, prime instrument of economic progress and the spread of culture for three millennia now, were Semitic tribes, speaking Canaanitish Hebrew and dwelling of old on the shores of Palestine - in Tyre and in Sidon and their off-shoots. Canaanite became a synonym for merchant and the word kina a syn-onym for wares.” (Ben-Gurion, 1954: 299) Ben-Gurion outlined a maritime historiography of the people of Israel, quoted the Book of Ezekiel on the wealth and maritime power of Tyre and described the commercial relationships of the tribes of Zebulun and Asher with the people of Tyre. He said that the inhabitants of Israel and Judah did not learn seafaring from the people of Sidon because those living on the shore, the Canaanites to the north and the Philistines to the south, blocked their path. Throughout the period of the First Temple there was no Jewish harbor on the shores of the Mediterranean. There were no sailors in Judah and Israel until Solomon needed his friend Hiram, the king of Tyre, and afterwards there were a few maritime ventures in the time of Jehoshephat, who built ships at Etzion Gaber. Only in the days of the Hasmoneans did the Judeans succeed in reaching the shore and conquering Jaffa, the first Judean port and the only one on the Mediterranean in the late Second Temple period. The nautical history of the land of Israel brought Ben-Gurion to the conclusion that in ancient times, in the Middle Ages and in our own time, most of the wars in world history were decided by the maritime powers.

The Jewish people was not a nautical people in the periods of the First Temple and the Second Temple. The land of Israel was situated on two seas, the Mediterranean to the west and the Red Sea to the south, but it never had the use of the two seas. Only with the founding of the State of Israel, said Ben-Gurion, was the biblical promise—“I will set thy bounds from the Red Sea even unto the Sea of the Philis-tines” (Exodus 23:31)—fulfilled for the first time. The State of Israel is the only one of the Mediterranean countries to have an outlet on both the Atlantic Ocean and the Indian Ocean without needing the Suez Canal (this was said, of course, before the opening of the canal to Israeli shipping). “This settlement on the shores of both seas is the thing that is unique to the third return to Zion.” On the return from Babylon, the Jews returned from the East and on land, but in the pres-


ent return to Zion, the Alijhah is from the West, via the sea. This con-nection with the sea has a political, military and economic importance. Without the sea, Israel would be a “city under siege”; without sea-power, strong land and air forces would not be effective. The sea is a convenient and cheap means of transport that contains foodstuffs and raw materials. The understanding and foresight of Ben-Gurion were indeed far-reaching: “The sea contains unlimited possibilities of settle-ment, and this is not a paradox. The sea is not a desert of water, as many people think.” Ben-Gurion combined a maritime philosophy with a Promethean vision:

The sea covers the part of the surface, it has no frontiers, it is free. It is not divided among the State and the peoples that are on land, there are no partitions between the oceans, no barriers or confining bounds. A people with a territorial base and port may sail the world over and sound every sea, it may put a girdle about the globe and seek out every folic and speech. Land severs the nations, the sea unites them and brings them close, it advances the unity of mankind, opening new horizons and spaces invisible to us that stand on shore. Our forefathers, who had never sailed its length as their kin-folk of Sidon did, called the Mediter-ranean the Great Sea, but it is just a land-girt lake with a narrow exit to the Atlantic. On the broad bosom of the ocean man sees the elemental immensity of nature, for the mightiest man-made vessel imaginable is no more than a minute speck of sand in an illimitable expanse of water. He also learns his own greatness and the tremendous strength that is in him to control natural forces and rule the vastly deep. The man who bridges gigantic oceans in a frail craft of his own making proof that quality transcends quantity, that the human spirit is superior to nature’s mea-sureless wealth of matter in the raw (Ben-Gurion, 1954: 311–312).

Ben-Gurion once again mobilized science not in order to understand the laws of the universe but in order to control nature and to harness it in the service of humanity. Not only did he not consider the Medi-terranean a “lake” whose importance had to be diminished or which did not need to be recognized at all, but he said that “just as we have come here to make the desert bloom, so we have come here to con-quer the expanses of the sea.”

The “Canaanite group” was a cultural movement founded in 1939 by the poet Yonatan Ratosh (1908–1981) which called to separation between the Hebrews (Canaanite) who lived in Palestine and the Jews in the Diaspora. The Canaanites, more than any other ideological faction, had the idea that in their past the Hebrews were Mediterranean in their character and activities. Already in 1915, Itamar Ben-Avi

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(1888–1943), an Israeli journalist and Zionist activist, in his article “Our Future is Also on the Sea” described the “glorious maritime past” of the Hebrews, and claimed that only “if the Jews will again be people of the sea, only if many of our new tribes again become Canaanite Zebuluns, will there be a complete resolution of our hopes.” (Ben-Avi, 1930: 68) The Canaanites were also influenced by Jeremiah Halperin (1901–1962), Jabotinsky’s adjutant in the defense of Jerusa-lem, responsible for the nautical section of Betar, captain of the ship “Sarah A”(Aaronsohn) and the formulator of a Hebrew nautical ideol-ogy as against the Socialist ideology that sanctified the soil (Amir, 2000). He regretted the fact that, among all the Mediterranean peo-ples, all of whom were sailors and owners of ships, Israel was absent. This was not because the Hebrew fleet was of a lower standard in the history of early ships than that of the other Mediterranean peoples, but because exilic Judaism (with some exceptions) did not provide the pos-sibility of participating in the nautical profession, which was consid-ered an aristocratic profession in the countries bordering the sea (Halperin, 1970). Halperin referred to the book of Raphael Patai, (1910–1996, a Jewish ethnographer and anthropologist) The Children of Noah: Jewish Seafaring in Ancient Times (Patai, 1938), in which it was claimed that the development of ships and seamanship is a criterion of cultural development, and it declared, “the Hebrew people wrote one of the most glorious pages in the history of the seamanship of the Mediterranean peoples.” Moreover, the Jews, who had fourth place among the coastal peoples before the Second World War and were known for their talent in trade, their initiative and their capacity for international organization, would know how to exploit this geograph-ical advantage in order once again to take their proper place. The idea of the resurrection of Hebrew seamanship is connected here with the Mediterranean character of the Hebrew state.

Halperin based himself in his findings on the researches of “the young scholar in Paris who called himself ‘El Raid’.” One can learn about this pen-name of the researcher of the ancient East Adia Horon (1907–1972), the intellectual father of the Canaanite movement, from an article by Zeev Jabotinsky (1880–1940), the leader of the Zionist Revisionist movement. The article “Israel and Carthage”, based on a series of articles that Horon published in Rassviet, the revisionist Rus-sian-language journal, in Paris under the pseudonym “El Raid” (in Arabic, the Observer). Jabotinsky claimed that the Phoenicians were kith and kin of the Hebrew people, and extended their culture as far


as Carthage. Hannibal was one of the great Hebrew heroes and the lingua franca of the Mediterranean Basin was Hebrew. Jabotinsky also saw Carthage as a kind of inscription on a potsherd: that is, one piece of evidence among many of the Semitic origin of the Mediterranean idea. At the Betar Congress in Danzig in 1931, Jabotinsky gave his blessing to Adia Horon who founded the “Alliance of Youth of the Sea—Zur Rodei Gal” (the Association of the Rulers of the Waves, known as Rodei Gal), a movement to prepare the youth of Betar for a life of seamanship. A nucleus of the movement was founded in Tunis next to the ruins of Carthage, a sailing ship was acquired, a nautical periodical Le Cran was published, and there was even a fantastic plan to overrun the islands of the Straits of Tiran as a first stage for the conquest of the whole of Palestine (Halperin, 1965). The Canaanite source of the Hebrew attraction to the Mediterranean Sea is to be found in the writ-ings of Adia Horon, and it continues until today in the writings of the poet Aharon Amir (1923–2008), one of the Canaanite leaders. Amir stated in his article “The Sea, the Last Sea” which appeared in 1996 for the inauguration of the “Forum for Mediterranean Cultures”, that the Mediterranean (“the Philistine Sea”, “the Last Sea”) is an organic part of the infrastructure of the Hebrew culture and its world-view (Amir, 1996). The bearers and revivers of the Hebrew cultural heri-tage should not in his opinion feel themselves to be guests in the ancient sea but should be full partners and equal citizens in the Medi-terranean Basin. In one place, Amir points out three potential dangers in the Mediterranean option: an idealization and sentimentalization of the Mediterranean, which is “one of the seas most steeped in blood in the history of mankind” (Amir, 1985: 6); a dependency on the history, true in itself, of the Jewish Diaspora in the Mediterranean Basin; and a community-based ideology of the type of the “oriental heritage”, which can interfere with a comprehensive national view of Israel as a Mediterranean nation.

The poet Erez Biton, editor of Apirion—Mediterranean Journal and founder of “The International Mediterranean Centre in Israel”, also sees an affinity between the Canaanite group and the Mediterranean ideology:

The Canaanite teaching of Jonathan Ratosh also sought, in the final analysis, to give an Eastern dimension to Israeli existence, and it too received a death-blow with the founding of the state, precisely because of that oriental basis. Therefore, strangely enough, we, the oriental Jews, can find a common denominator with the Canaanite teachings in the

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common attempt to give a special content to our reality here (Biton, 1983: 4).

Adaptation to a comprehensive Mediterranean entity would in his opinion give the Israelis an authentic force of existence, and “would rescue us from the comparison with the crusaders, who were here for only a short time.” A semantic distinction or distinction of meaning between “Mediterranean” and “Middle Eastern” or “Oriental” is made in various contexts, and Biton chooses to make a tactical use of the first formula: “It seems to me that the difference between ‘Mediterra-neanism’ and ‘orientalism’ is only a semantic difference, and especially in the case of my use of the formula Mediterraneanism, because this formula can be easily accepted in the very polarised society in which we live.” (ibid.) Poet Natan Yonatan (1923–2004) shared this view:

Why do I sometimes prefer to use the concept ‘Mediterranean culture’, or similar concepts? I cannot support this with any argument or any scientific justification, but I want to bring it about that the people who will listen to me or who will think about the things I say about culture will try to think about culture in concrete, realistic terms. . . . In my opin-ion, to say ‘Mediterranean culture’ is a good way of speaking about our culture, our literature (Yonatan, 1983).

The cultural critic Gabriel Moked stresses another aspect:

In my opinion, we must distinguish between the Mediterranean cultural world and the Middle Eastern cultural world. . . . The Middle Eastern Muslim culture is to a great degree very fanatical and far from any true symbiosis with the West. As against this, the Mediterranean culture is basically pluralistic, impregnated with the various influences of ‘Mare Nostrum’. It is partly European and partly Levantine . . . Mediterranean-ness means among other things openness and refinement, cultural vari-ety and possibilities of dialogue between different religions, and cultures that are not homogeneous (Moked, 1985: 6).

The Israeli-Palestinian poet Mohammed Ghanayem points out the dialectical aspect of the Mediterranean option:

One must speak about a cultural synthesis that cannot turn into a cul-tural invasion, even if the result is a cultural operation that brings together worlds that are different and even opposite to each other. In this respect, Israel can provide a good example of a broad spread of civilizations if it relates on an equal basis to the cultures of the minorities within it, Arabs and Jews, Ashkenasis and Sephardis, all of whom can make up a new Israeli cultural identity that can save the region from an expected cultural desolation (Ghanayem, 1985: 6).


It is an interesting fact that many of the Israeli poets, writers and art-ists wrote and produced in Israel as if they had never heard the sound of waves lapping the Eastern shore of the Mediterranean, as if the people of the mountains and desert had overcome the people of the sea and the shore. But a few poets nevertheless stand out, and first among them Saul Tchernikovsky (1875–1943), who wrote about the wanderings of the Hebrew poet and his longing to reach the Mediter-ranean: “I wandered from sea to sea all the days of my life/and it was my desire to reach the southern sea/and my way was fenced around with mountains . . .” (Ohana, 2000: 141). Uri Zvi Greenberg (1896–1981) cursed the fate that decreed that he should be born in Christian Europe, and in 1929 chose the Mediterranean, his poetic mentor, the landscape of his chosen motherland: “And I learn the teaching of the rhythm of the water:/I have chosen you among the teachers, O Med-iterranean, as my teacher of poetry!/The salt of your waters is the salt of my blood and my tears./Forgive, for I was wrongly not born on your shores.” (Greenberg, 1979: 101) The poet Harold Schimmel came from beyond the sea, beyond the Atlantic Ocean, and in a short poem he listed his Mediterranean heroes: “Abra(ha)m/Or-phe-us/Jesus/A-ppo-lon-ius.” (Schimmel, 1933: 36) Ayin (Omer) Hillel (1926–1990), one of the leaders of the new Hebrew poetry before the found-ing of the state and after it, sang a hymn of praise, “The Voice of Many Waters”, to a pagan melody in the manner of Tchernikovsky and Schneur: “I stand and wonder at the sea/and my body stirs like the expanse of the sea/the sea, the idolatrous sea/mighty as rebellion/like a mass of men exultant in strife and battle,/and its roar is hot and blue and overwhelming/as a nightmare is overwhelming./The mighty sea abundant in power.” The most Mediterranean Israeli poet is undoubtedly Israel Pinkas, who describes his wanderings on the sea-shore, and concludes, in his poem “Mediterranean Song”, “In our ancient sea/there is nothing new/Only the wind changes.” (Pinkas, 1999: 7) Pinkas experiences the Mediterranean in Braudelian stretches of “extended time”, ignoring the ravages of time and the tragedies of history. The Florentine merchant who wanted to sell red-tinted glass in the year 1401 still does the same today. This freezing of time gives a sense of stability.

The Tel-Aviv poets Natan Zach, Moshe Dor and Moshe Ben Shaul also have their private moments facing the Mediterranean (Zach, 1974; Dor, 1965; Ben Shaul, 1966), and only Meir Wieseltier in his poem “Depths of a Bottle” (1976) declares that the heavy weight of

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ideology and history in the Mediterranean area are like compresses defiling the blood of the individual (Wieseltier, 1976).

Wieseltier was nevertheless sympathetic to the first Hebrew city, situated on the seashore. The sociologist Maoz Azaryahu, in his book Tel Aviv, Mythography of a City (2005), entitled the Mediterranean chap-ter “The Most Beautiful Place in Tel-Aviv: the Seashore”. However, Meir Dizengoff, the first mayor, reacted as follows to reservations about his plan to create an industrial area on the shore of the city: “Jews have no interest in sea-bathing. Industry is more important.” (Azaryahu, 2005: 273) As against this, the novelist and poet Shalom Asch (1880–1957) expressed enthusiasm for the seashore: “Every Jew, and I among them, ask two things of God: a place in paradise in the next world and a place on the seashore in Tel-Aviv in this one.” (ibid.: 278) The opposite attitudes of Dizengoff and Asch represent the whole spectrum of ideas about the relationship of the city and its institutions to its Mediterranean location. The sentiments expressed by Asch cor-respond to the geography of collective redemption in which the Tel-Aviv shore represented the new liberated Jewish existence. It was precisely because the shore was free of elements of national renewal and building the land that it revealed in the most extraordinary way the normality of the life lived by the Jews which, in the final analysis, was the purpose of the Zionist vision. Dizengoff ’s remark anticipated (and perhaps was a kind of self-fulfilling prophecy of ) the repeated criticism, formulated by the critic Hedda Boshes, for example, that “the streets of Tel-Aviv run away from the sea as if they were fright-ened of it and of the dangers that lurk there.” (Boshes, 1978) Azaryahu quoted from a story in a children’s book published on the eighteenth anniversary of the foundation of Tel-Aviv. In the story it was asked, “Why was the first Hebrew city built with its back to the sea?” The reason given was that the founders and builders of the city were fright-ened of the monsters living in the sea. In fact, the architects of the city failed to pay enough attention to the sea. The main roads run parallel to the sea and do not give onto it; the big hotels obstruct the sea view. Because of the lack of a planning tradition, the planners of the city “ignored the sea, [and that fact] showed that the position of the city on the shores of the Mediterranean had a far-reaching influence on the character of Tel-Aviv.” (Azaryahu, 2005: 305)

Despite the criticism, however, the sea played a decisive role in the mental and cultural geography of Tel-Aviv, and an expression of this is the reference to the sea and the seaboard in the iconography of the


city. The Zionist outlook that saw Tel-Aviv as a haven for the Jews is reflected in the symbol of the city, in the center of which stands a lighthouse. The promenade and the shore as boundaries separating while also joining the city and the sea personify the sea and the city as complementary opposites (Feige, 2006).

Only recently did Israeli literature open a window on the Mediter-ranean. Y. B. Yehoshua is rightly considered the Mediterranean Israeli author par excellence, but the path to the Mediterranean of Amos Oz, who initially did not wish to go there, is also interesting. The young Oz, who was of the school of thought of Micha Josef Berdyczewski (1865–1921), believed that vital creative powers were the main thing, and not the local form, which was seen as sentimental and provincial. Later, Oz depicted the Israeli society-in-formation as one with char-acteristic Mediterranean qualities: warm of heart and temperament, hedonistic, life-loving and emotional. Israel will continue to develop as a Mediterranean society, he concluded, for better or worse, if its con-flict with its neighbors is resolved. He saw Ashdod as the national Mediterranean profile coming into being before his eyes. He looked at the town of Ashdod with resignation, with the sadness of a house-holder whose dream has evaporated like the dreams of those Socialist world-reformers, the fathers of the kibbutz (Oz, 1986–1987; Oz 1990). Here he surprisingly broke forth as follows in 1998, in his book The Same Sea, not as a romantic beginning or as a fanfare, but describing a sea, olives and cheese. This poetic novel takes place by the Mediter-ranean—not in Jerusalem and not in Hulda but in Bat-Yam and Tel-Aviv (and also in Tibet). It is not surprising that critics compared The Same Sea to Natan Alterman’s Summer Festival, which also took place in a Mediterranean city, Jaffa. Among his contemporary Israeli charac-ters, bereft of dreams, living an everyday existence, there are figures who reflect the sea, and there is even a “Mediterranean philosophy”. And as if all this were not enough, Oz’s Mediterranean “repentance” is expressed in a play in the form of a poem-chapter, “Exile and King-dom”, that suggests a closeness, admirable if late, to Albert Camus, the lyrical prosaist of the Mediterranean (Oz, 2001).

“With its back to the sea”—that is how the art critic Gideon Ofrat describes the relationship of Israeli art to the sea in general and the Mediterranean in particular. Joseph Zaritsky (1891–1985), the forma-tive modernist painter who is the target of post-Zionist catapults, “stood with his back to the sea and painted the distant hills of Ramat-Gan . . . and behind him, right below him, was the sea. To go there,

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yes. To paint it, no!” (Ofrat, 2004: 37) It was the same with the painter from Jerusalem Arieh Aroch (1908–1974), or Zvi Meirovitch (1911–1974), the painter from Haifa, who looked more at the plants of the Carmel Range than at the sea at the foot of the mountains. It is true there was Nahum Guttman (1898–1980), but in general the sea was absent from Israeli painting, and a visitor who happened to stop over in Israel would find it hard to believe he is in a country bordering the Mediterranean. There are dark and mysterious surrealist depictions, but not the sea light and not maritime landscapes. The contemporary painters do with Israeli painting what the big hotels in Tel-Aviv have done: they block out the sea. Why do they ignore it? “From our very roots, it may be that the Jewish genes, which never liked the sea, recoiled from it . . . also, the generation of the founding-fathers of Israeli culture was a generation that had lived in little Jewish shtetls far from the sea-shore . . . a ghetto-experience too closed in for the Jewish artist coming to the country to adapt to the open sea.” (ibid.) One is bound to admit, Ofrat began his analysis of the historian of the Israeli litera-ture Hanan Hever, that Zionist self-realization required land but not sea! However, if the Israeli painters today do not paint the sea, they also ignore the valleys, the mountains, the streets and the buildings. The door of the studio is locked against the outside world. “Israeli art remains relatively cut off, but it is perhaps the beginning of a long process of Mediterranean colourisation.” (ibid.: 47)

Unlike the Israeli writers, poets and painters who hesitated on the shore uncertain of their identity, the musicians were the first to leap into the Mediterranean. Perhaps the reason is to be found in the sen-sitive, direct medium, the ear open to the sound of a ceaseless melody. In her article “Israel and the Emergence of the Mediterranean Iden-tity: Expressions of Locality in Music and Literature” (2006), the cul-tural researcher Alexandra Nocke suggested that the new Mediterranean identity could be a solution to the identity-crisis of the Israelis, who had exhausted all the old ideological models that no longer corre-sponded to the needs, problems and requirements of Israeli society (Nocke, 2006). Mediterraneanness, as a non-exclusive point of view, is in fact a real and attractive possibility for many elements in the popu-lation. The Mediterranean discourse, which was random and frag-mentary until the end of the 1990s, gained impetus in the 1990s and found an echo in cultural practices and in daily life. Because of the geographical proximity of Israel to countries like Greece and Turkey, music was instrumental in bringing together the musical affinities of


different ethnic communities, creating a Levantine-global combina-tion, to use the expression of the musician Kobi Oz, who saw Mediter-ranean music as a synthesis of Tunisia and MTV: that is to say, of the local and universal. Thus, Mediterranean music was a highly effective agent of cultural cohesion. Until the 1980s, the idea did not corre-spond to the situation: from the 1990s onwards, theory and practice have gone together. The fall of the Soviet bloc and the end of the confrontation between East and West, the shift of Europe towards the Mediterranean Basin and the rise of multiculturalism encouraged regional connections and fostered a multicultural dialogue in Israel. The academic discourse and that in the media gained added validity with the fusion of the ethos with the different affected groups (Malkin, 1997: 29–33).

For many years, the Mediterranean identity was a neglected option in Israel. The Jewish Israelis had a suspicious and hostile attitude to the sea (there was no sea in the towns of Eastern Europe or Iraq), perhaps because it was associated with wandering, or perhaps because the Israelis had an ethos of conquering the land. The historian Irad Malkin has an interesting explanation for this. His theory is that whereas the Israelites came out of the desert and settled in the land as in the biblical myth of the exodus from Egypt, in modern times the Jews came to the country via the Mediterranean and settled mainly along the coasts. This change had a demographic significance and political and ideological consequences. Until the 1940s, the existence of the Jews along the coast did not result in territorial ambitions of annexing parts of the biblical heartland. After the conquest of the West Bank in the Six Day War there was a strengthening of the con-sciousness of settling the hills and the inner parts of the country on the part of those on the political right, but the normative “coastal exis-tence” remained as it was and became even stronger. Malkin expects the Mediterranean idea to be important in the future, perhaps without any need to resurrect the past and reinvent it, through the sheer force of reality, through social and cultural circumstances. Israel, after all, is much closer in its way of life to Greece, Italy and Spain than to coun-tries like Holland, Germany or Poland. Open-air cafés, a bustling night-life, articles of food like baguettes, croissants and Tunisian sand-wiches, many “taverna” programs on the Israeli television channels, economic and touristic links with the Mediterranean countries, and the acceptance in literary circles of Mediterranean images—all these are the first signs of a Mediterranean culture. In the opinion of many,

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the Mediterranean option is not a call for ethnic isolation or a return to roots, but a striving for a common cultural platform that would smooth out separate tensions and identities. The Mediterranean ethos is too ancient, important and central to be yet another reason for ethnic seclusion, for advancing sectional interests, folkloric tendencies or sentimental yearnings. Malkin concludes:

Ever since it was founded, the State of Israel has been faced with the question: should it be European or oriental? Should one create here a “Vienna on the banks of the Yarkon” or should one create a new “Levant”, or even choose “Canaanism” and partnership in a “Semitic space”? Today more than ever, there is a need to encourage a cultural process and to clarify Israel’s place in the Mediterranean context.

Precisely because it has no strong national ideology, the Mediterra-nean offers Israel a richly-textured cultural orientation, drawing on the extensive Mediterranean and other connections of the people of Israel in the past together with the challenging Mediterranean and interna-tional reality of our own day. Moreover, the Mediterranean provides Israel, which is a multicultural society grappling with the ideological consequences of the melting pot, a multicultural model nourished by cross-fertilisation. The Mediterranean is not only a geographical or his-torical area but also a metaphorical entity with frontiers and a variety of cultures and identities, which came into being through an incessant dis-course among them. All these have helped to preserve its unique char-acter. The perpetual interaction between them has created a culture that is basically multicultural (Malkin, 2005: 12).

According to the critic Yoram Bronowski (1948–2001), a reinterpreta-tion of Israel’s place in the area is required:

I am convinced, like many others, that the dream to which Israeli society should be directed, to which it can direct itself, is the most ancient of humanity’s dreams—the Mediterranean dream. A sort of Mediterra-nean Scroll of Independence with Mediterranean inflections rings all the time in my ears: “On the shores of the Mediterranean, the Jewish people arises, etc.” I think of the connections and ancient contexts—Phoenicia, Crete, Greece, all maritime countries—and those that came after them. And I dream of Israel as one of the centres of neo-Mediterraneanism, just as it was a centre and one of the sources of the ancient Mediterra-neanism (Bronowski, 1987).

There has been a notable tendency on the part of many Israelis to develop a strategic policy of supporting a regional culture that permits a dialogue between the peoples of different countries and between the different peoples in the Mediterranean Basin, especially at its Eastern end. Many people in Israeli society have begun to call for a strength-


ening of the peace process in the Middle East following the Oslo Accords through an expansion of the cultural links between the states of the Mediterranean Basin and through a removal of the barriers between peoples. The Mediterranean option is put forward not only as a cultural proposition but as strategic geopolitical aspiration in its own right. Have the intensification of the Israeli occupation and the rise of Islamic fundamentalism made Mediterraneanism redundant?

An early proponent of the Mediterranean Basin as the proper sphere for Israel to relate to was Abba Eban (1915–2002), the first Israeli minister of foreign affairs. Already in 1952 he discerned two distinct advantages in the Mediterranean option: the chance of breaking Isra-el’s political and cultural isolation (for in the Muslim and Arab Middle East, Israel was the exception), and the exploitation of the commercial and cultural connections that Israel had with most of the countries of the Mediterranean Basin:

If the State of Israel seeks to find its own way within the area as a whole, if it wants to find itself a world that would be more fitting for the expres-sion of its political relationships and cultural affinities, I think the concept “Mediterranean” would be the most suitable: Israel, not as a Middle Eastern country but as a Mediterranean country. The Mediterranean is the only channel of intercourse between Israel and the rest of the world. All Israel’s trade and connections pass through that sea. If this is true as a geographical fact, it is all the more true from a historical and cultural point of view (Eban, 1952: 7).

The first sign of a partnership between Europe and the Mediterranean countries could be seen in the Barcelona Conference that was held on the 27th of November 1995, and that was attended, apart from the fifteen countries of the European Union, by twelve countries of the Mediterranean Basin, including Israel. There was a considerable accel-eration of the process from 1989 onwards, with the end of the Cold War and the collapse of the Soviet Union, for at that time the Euro-pean Union began to direct its efforts southwards towards the coun-tries of the Maghreb and the Mediterranean in accordance with models whose success had already been proved in Eastern Europe. Towards the end of 1994 an explicit policy began to be formed of encouraging links between Europe and the Mediterranean countries. The “Barcelona process” had three main objectives: a political and security partnership that would create an area of peace, democracy and human rights; an economic partnership that would create an area of free trade; and a cultural and social partnership that would develop

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a civil society and encourage relations between the countries of the European Union and the Mediterranean partners and between the countries of the Union themselves. The main obstacle to a partnership between Europe and the Mediterranean countries was the conflict in the Middle East. The peace process in the Middle East in the 1990s permitted the implementation of the first steps of a new Mediterra-nean policy, including the invitation of Israel to regional forums, a large majority of whose participants were from Arab countries. Although the El-Aqsa intifada and the Second Lebanese War slowed down many of these developments, Israel, like the European Union, still has a strong interest in promoting political and economic stability in the area and stopping fundamentalism (Lerman, 2007). Many peo-ple think the Mediterranean option would contribute to this.

The Mediterranean Moment

Even after a decade of fruitful discourse devoted to discussion of the Israeli Mediterranean identity, it is hard to rid oneself of the persistent hegemonic relationship implicit in the title of the article “Jewish Med-iterranean Culture, Semantics and Metaphors”, in New Jewish Time: Jewish Culture in a Secular Age—An Encyclopaedia View (Shavit, 2008). The hegemonic culture creates the “other” in relation to which or in con-trast to which it defines itself, and at the same time it implies that in the “other” there is something lacking or missing. A good example of this historiographical deficiency is the Mediterranean option.

Some Israeli historians have claimed that a Mediterranean culture is a fabricated idea, an invention, that was not created by the peoples of the Mediterranean but by others, tourists and travelers, who at the end of the eighteenth century first visualized the Mediterranean world as a single geographical and cultural entity with its own distinctive character. Prominent among these is the historian Yaakov Shavit, edi-tor of the collection A Mediterranean Anthology (2004), which appeared in the Mediterranean series of the project of the Centre for Mediterra-nean Culture in Tel-Aviv University. Shavit sees the Mediterranean region from the outside, so adopting the ideological perspective of the northern Europeans who in the time of the Enlightenment gave descriptions of the Orient and Southern Europe. Although the collec-tion mainly consists of direct quotations from authors, historians and anthropologists of European culture, this, he claims, does not demon-


strate any “Europocentricity” on his part but the “historical fact”, as he puts it, that “Mediterraneanness” is not a spacial identity of the inhabitants of the Mediterranean Basin. In his opinion, it was the Europeans, especially the “northerners”, who created the idea of the Mediterranean as a natural environment and a human environment and conceived of the Mediterranean region as a world-in-itself: “The development of Mediterraneanness is a chapter in the intellectual-cultural history of Europe in the dialogue it created with the Mediter-ranean world.” (Shavit, 2004: 31) Only in the twentieth century, he maintains, did some inhabitants of the Mediterranean Basin adopt the idea that they lived in a special area that was the cradle of human culture. According to this Europocentric point of view, it was only when the modern Greeks and Italians were exposed to the discoveries of the North Europeans that they first became aware of their classical heritage! The Mediterranean idea, the essence of which was is the recognition that the riches of world culture originated in the area around the Mediterranean Basin, was withheld from the local inhabitants, and they needed the north European “other” to define for them their spa-cial identity, their special contribution and their universal culture.

If this is the case, the Mediterraneanness of the local inhabitants is inauthentic, an imaginary identity proposed, dictated, planted and dis-seminated by “others”. What is demonstrated in Shavit’s critique is a “theoretical colonialism” similar to the “cultural colonialism” of pre-sumed white superiority in Africa, the “pedagogical colonialism” of the British in Asia, and the “religious colonialism” of the Christians in Africa and South America. Today, the Muslim immigrants in Europe practice a “reverse colonialism”, saying, “Yesterday you came to us and tried to condition and direct our identity; today we come to you and seek to prescribe your identity.” The Mediterranean idea set in motion a dialectical process of far-reaching significance in welding a geo-cultural area into a single entity that included both “East” and “West”. But when Shavit attempted to examine the validity of the Mediterranean idea as applied to Israel, he took his Europocentric approach and adapted it to the Israelis. In his opinion, the Israelis who favor the Mediterranean option have adopted an external approach like the North Europeans: “Those who long to be rooted in the natu-ral Mediterranean landscape look at it with the eyes of visitors from outside.” (Shavit, 1996) He sees the Mediterranean idea as “a harmless entertainment which can be presented as another ingredient in the sought-after recipe for ‘identity’, if not its very essence.” There is a

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total rejection here of Jacqueline Kahanoff’s idea of culture (Ohana, 2006: 239–263), and in the words of the Tel-Aviv historian, “In this entertainment, even ‘Levantinism’ is rescued from its stigma of shallow superficiality and puts on a garment of fruitful cultural openness.” (ibid.) The idea of a Mediterranean identity, he claims, is unsustainable in itself: it is either an attempt to be “oriental” in Mediterranean fancy-dress or a sophisticated way of remaining in “Europe”. In the year 2007, Shavit once again ridiculed the Mediterranean idea, and wrote: “Mediterraneanness is bluff, but harmless bluff that does not hurt anyone.” (Shavit, 2007b)

Unlike Shavit, the historical geographer Meron Benvenisti thinks that the Mediterranean option for Israel was invented not in order to disengage from Western culture, the one the Israelis favor, but as a Levantine replacement that would enable them to avoid a real encoun-ter with Islamic culture and the Arab neighbors. The connection with the sea is a roundabout route to a land connection: it is easier to stretch one’s hands across the sea than to turn towards the continent, where there are Palestinians. “The creators of the ‘Mediterranean option’ have reared neo-Canaanites” (Benvenisti, 1996), writes Ben-venisti, who on his own admission supports a coexistence between the two sons of the land, and has always hoped that their sense of belong-ing to a common homeland would prove stronger than their enmity as hostile neighbors. The title of Shavit’s article, “An Entertaining but Illusory Idea”, and of Benvenisti’s article, “Escapism that Ends with a sip of Arak”, shows how critical and skeptical the two of them are about the Mediterranean option for Israel. The two articles were pub-lished in a special supplement to the newspaper Ma’ariv, which bore the title “Pergola and Rosemary, or We and Mediterraneanness”, and appeared in 1996 with the founding of the Mediterranean Forum in the Van Leer Institute. The journalist Haim Hanegbi, the editor of the supplement, expressed himself cynically about the founders of the forum, saying that they wanted to

make life on the shores of the Mediterranean into a thriving and agree-able culture. No more isolation but openness; no longer a reservation but a wide-open space, a release from the ghetto. For a moment it has seemed that our geography, an abiding natural condition since the foun-dation of the world, has become before our eyes a cause for rejoicing. Israel is no longer a widower among the peoples of the sea, for they are about to embrace one another in order to renew their days as of old and restore to this Basin, the oldest sea on the planet, the glory of its youth (Hanegbi, 1996).


The poet Salman Masalha also joined in the criticism of the “flight” from the Middle East:

Israeli society, which specialises in inventing detours, starting with the bypass roads in the occupied Palestinian territories and ending with the parliamentary bloc at the Knesset, is trying to lay another bypass road in the form of a Mediterranean culture, a road that bypasses the new Middle East. The Jewish-Israeli tribe is ready to bypass the heart and go as far as Morocco, Tunisia and Algiers in order to run away from the real struggle, not only with the place, here and now, but also with the local inhabitants (Masalha, 1996).

And as if these body-blows to Mediterraneanism were not enough, Hanan Hever comes along and adds to the assertion that the Mediter-ranean idea is a North European invention, the claim that the Medi-terranean is a projection of Western Zionism. For him, the hegemonic Zionist culture is also a Europocentric narrative in the form of a jour-ney from West to East, from exile to redemption, from one territory to another, with an obliteration of the sea, a cleansing and purifying contraction of the middle distance. The sea has no value itself, but is only a means of transition to Zion, the hoped-for land, the true utopia. The sea is the land’s “other”, the “other” that has to be crossed, to be left behind (Hever, 2000: 181–195). It is not surprising that the Zion-ist-Israeli tale “With His Own Hands: Alik’s Story”, written by the writer Moshe Shamir in memory of his fallen brother Alik, begins with the classic sentence “Alik came out of the sea.” The ultimate Sabra is not a native of the history-laden Israeli territory but the product of a new experience, free from all traces of the past. The emergence from the sea is an act that cleanses the birth of the Sabra. There is an ideologization of the sea as an experience bereft of ideology. The sea is the opposite of the heavy-laden Zionist content of the land. The sea is nothing, an obliterated area between the negativity of exile and the positivity of Israeliness, between “there” and “here”, between Europe and the Levant. The Mediterranean Sea has no status of its own, no affirmative presence: only in the sea can something come out of noth-ing. The birth of Alik the Sabra is an ex nihilo myth that is doomed to extinction: from the water he has emerged and to dust he shall return. His end is known in advance, in the same way as that of Shamir’s other hero, Uri, in the play He Walked in the Fields, whose actual body and whose metaphysical image were blown to pieces.

The repression and obliteration of the sea and the placing of the land in opposition to the sea was in Hever’s opinion a form of imagery

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that represented an exclusive meta-narrative: i.e. there is no land except Zion, and everything around it is repressed and obliterated. The sea is a national covering metaphor that conceals the Zionist ter-ritorial violence and the Palestinian and oriental “other” by represent-ing “others” as citizens and human beings from north or west of the Mediterranean Basin (Hever, 2007). The sea-crossing of Zionist immi-gration signifies a change of identity (rite of passage), an ideological pilgrimage and a utopian venture by means of a ship. Zion in place of the “other” requires a reductive leap: one must leap over the sea. As against the Zionist utopia there is the heterotypical narrative of the oriental Jews in Israel, whose immigration, in Hever’s words, embodied the “accepted, symbolic, normative crossing of the sea.” (ibid.) At the same time, Hever contradicted himself and claimed that all the orien-tal Jews crossed a contiguous body of territory represented by the ter-ritorial contiguity of the Middle East. He made even the immigration of the North African Jews which took place across the Mediterranean fit this one-dimensional ideological interpretation. The trouble with comprehensive historiographical theses is that they are ideological meta-narratives that subordinate all the facts to a single explanation.

East and West

The architect and the theoretician Sharon Rotbard continued the line of thought of Benvenisti, and to a certain degree of Shavit and Hever, seeing the Mediterranean option as an ideological proposition in which the Mediterranean Sea “is the ultimate place of escape, escapism per-sonified. . . . More than it is a fantasy, it is an ideology that I might call ‘Mediterraneanism’.” (Rotbard, 2005a) On the one hand, it represents the invention of a Mediterranean entity that fuses together many iden-tities, a variety of types and periods into an ideal generality, and on the other hand it represents an obliviousness to the tensions that exist in the Basin. This obliviousness takes the form of a flight from the blood-bath in the Middle East to the cradle of Mediterranean culture, from “the horrors that have made the Mediterranean what it is” to its depiction as “a sort of decorative cover of a cookery-book.” The Medi-terranean, here, is a selective recollection involving both a short period—seasonal memories of the annual vacation, the sensuality of summer—and a long period, universal and archaeological: “What is the Israeli-Palestinian conflict next to the eternity of the Mediterra-


nean? . . . and in this respect, in this project of Mediterraneanism, in creating an approved area of agreement, a kind of public domain of memory, culture and history, there are undoubtedly some positive ele-ments.” (ibid.) Rotbard suggests, however, that we should treat this ideology, whose expressions can be banal and kitchy, with suspicion. In his opinion, it is “a sort of cultural religion of openness and love of life and people”, whose architectural equivalents are logos like “Club Met”, “Pueblo Español”, “Givat Andromeda” and “Hotel Lutraki” in Greece.

There has never been a critical discussion of the political and moral significance of the Mediterraneanisation of Israeli culture. The aim of such a discussion, says Rotbard, would be to expose the colonialist nature of projects like the restoration of the Arab Israeli village Ein Hod, the restoration and renovation of the Old City of Jaffa and the creation of the Irgun Museum, Beit Gidi, in Jaffa. The desire to belong gives birth to “a culture that is basically not only alien to its environ-ment but to a large degree hostile to it.” (ibid.) Domination of the East was achieved through a typical process of colonization like the physical expropriation of a place: the dispossession of the local inhabitants drew them into the Western socio-economic context. For instance, Jews were the owners of the properties of the Arabs of Jaffa who still lived in their houses; Israeli architects were the preservers of the Jaffa style of building. The most outstanding example of this geographical and historical dissonance is “Beit Gidi at Menashiya, a museum in the shape of a glass box of the school of the architect Mies van der Rohe, one of the leaders of the Bauhaus, built over the remains of an old Jaffa stone house.” Beit Gidi “is an example of an aesthetics and rhet-oric of ruin and destruction, an example of how to commemorate death and obliteration.” “Mediterraneanism” is mobilized in the ser-vice of the Zionist ideology: “The whole natural cycle of obliteration, destruction, extermination and making the desert bloom is simply the necessary background for the real allegory of Mediterraneanism, which is to be found with us in Altneuland /Tel-Aviv.” (Rotbard, 2005b)

This view of “Mediterraneanism” was shared by Sami Abu Sheha-deh, an inhabitant of Jaffa who conducts subversive tours of his city in reaction to the celebration of the “white city”, Tel-Aviv. “Tel-Aviv did not grow out of just anywhere;” he said, “it sprang out of Jaffa. It rebelled against its maker, and cast out and obliterated Jaffa, and it still tries to do so today.” (Zandberg, 2004) Thus, for example, in the famous photograph of the lottery for building plots in “little Tel-Aviv”

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in 1909, two political narratives are represented: the “Zionist” camera documents people set against deserted sands on the seashore, whereas the Palestinian perspective insists on what is missing, stressing the fact that the camera’s lens did not capture—and did not intend to cap-ture—nearby Jaffa and the surrounding Palestinian villages with their orchards and vineyards. The architect Zvi Elhyani, in his article “Sea-front Holdings” documented the history of Menashiya, the area between Tel-Aviv and Jaffa, from the time it was a Muslim village in the nineteenth century to its conquest by the Irgun in the War of Independence, its period of neglect when it became a Jewish slum and the plans for immovable property connected with it from the 1960s onwards. The article is accompanied by an appendix of photographs from 1967: “Yizkor [Memorial Prayer] for Menashiya” (Elhayani, 2004: 104–116).

In a similar way to Rotbard and Abu Shehadeh, the journalist Esther Zandberg called Beit Gidi “a Palestinian ruin transformed into a monument to those who destroyed it.” (Zandberg, 2004) In her arti-cle “Dreams of an Island”, she examined the catalogue of the Israeli exhibition “Back to the Sea” held in 2004 in the architectural Biennale in Venice, which dealt with the Tel-Aviv Jaffa coastline. In the Zionist vision, the boundaries of the Mediterranean coastal strip were not seen as final boundaries but were subject to continual negotiation, natural conditions and political circumstances. Architects and engineers, plan-ners and politicians put forward schemes for a “spacial engineering” of the Mediterranean vision, and in their feverish minds constructed a fantasy “of the rosy future of Tel-Aviv and the State of Israel that can-not be realised on the existing soil.” Ever since the founding of the “white city” on the sands, a casino, an Olympic village, luxury hotels, buildings and towers were planned and imagined. The audacious dream of all of them was to build artificial islands opposite the shores of the city, “the fantasy of building on land liberated from the shackles of a complex history, and to depict an Israeli soil which no people lays claim to and that represents a new horizon, efficient, planned and bet-ter.” Indeed, this may have represented “the hope of getting away from the existing reality and of creating an alternative, utopian real-ity.” (ibid.) The debate on the Mediterranean option is a continuation of the debate that took place in the culture of the Hebrew renaissance on the East as an object of longing or as a place that threatened the Western mentality of the Zionist thinkers.


The “new Hebrew” faced two directions: he looked to the East but he also had his back to it. Zionism was characterized from its earliest days by its ambivalent attitude to the East. The positive attitude to the East was first expressed by figures such as Moses Lieb Lilienblum, Mordechai Zeev Feierberg, Itamar Ben-Avi, Nahum Sokolov, Yitzhak Ben-Zvi and David Ben-Gurion. Lilienblum saw the European Jews as aliens: “We are alien to our own race. We are Semites among the Aryans, sons of Shem among the sons of Japhet, a Palestinian tribe from Asia in European lands.” Feierberg declared to the Jews in his famous essay Whither?, “And you, my brethren, as you now go east-wards, you must always remember that you are orientals by birth.” Itamar Ben-Avi declared “We are Asiatics”, Sokolov wanted to create “a great Palestinian culture” (Rubinstein, 2000: 71–103), and Ben-Gurion said in 1925 that “the meaning of Zionism is that we are once again becoming an Oriental people.” (Ben Ami, 1998: 331)

The negative attitude was expressed in an a priori rejection of the Eastern option. Herzl declared in The Jewish State, “For Europe we can be part of the defensive wall against Asia; we can be outposts of culture against barbarism.” (Herzl, 1997) The historian Joseph Klausner saw his culture as a superior one, as he said in his article “Fear” (1905): “All our hope that we shall one day possess the land of our ancestors is not based on the sword, nor on the fist, but on the collective advan-tage we have over the Arabs and Turks.”Is this attitude of some of the thinkers of Zionism in its early stages an outstanding example of the orientalist thesis put forward by Edward Said? Were certain varieties of Zionist perception of the East an exam-ple of a paternalistic relationship of the West to the East, or, more precisely, to the area of the Eastern Mediterranean? Here we have something much more complex than the out-and-out European orien-talism because the East was seen not only as the site of the ancient history of the Jewish people but also as the supreme object of the people’s return to itself according to its vision; but to the same degree that the East was seen as the cure for the national distress of the Jewish people and the insignia of its national identity, it represented the “other”, it was external to the Zionist Jew, and was perceived as “there”, whether as a strange or even alien entity or as an object of insatiable longings. The growing attraction of the East for the nineteenth-century European romantics may be ascribed to a longing for ancient and authentic roots and to a common feeling among the intelligentsia that the West was in decline. It was this attraction that impelled Jews of

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Zionist inclination to see the East not only as the cradle of their national identity or as a place of refuge but also as a source of values, strength and moral renewal for their people.

Zionism was born in Europe, and paradoxically the main choices of identity and cultural options for Israeli society—Socialism, national-ism, secularism, Messianism, Canaanism, “Crusaderism”—originated not in the Holy Land, but in Europe. Mediterraneanism as a cultural idea is also a theoretical option for Israeli identity. The Mediterranean idea has been effectively promoted in a number of Mediterranean countries as a program of collective ethos, suggesting directions of action, formulations of policy and cultural activities. The Mediterra-nean option is a possible bridge between Israel and its Arab neighbors, between Israel and Europe and between the Israelis and European Jewry.

THE FUTURE OF EUROPEAN JEWRY—A CHANGING CONDITION IN A CHANGING CONTEXT?

Shmuel Trigano

Before asking ourselves whether a new Jewish center is appearing in the European community, there is a need to define the notion itself. What were the characteristics of the Jewish centers which developed in different places of the world through the ages? A comparison between them would show that their constitution depended on a set of previous conditions. Seven “requisites” were necessary to make the constitution of a Jewish center possible:

1. A sufficient demographic concentration of Jewish population.2. The appearance of a new power which is not yet consolidated nor

institutionalized.3. The demand for the Jews to help in shaping this power in its rising

phase, to organize themselves, for two reasons: a) As a minority, the Jews are a prey to a global hostility and

that situation secures a total fidelity that the new power cannot expect from the majority population.

b) As a world network, the Jews have useful connections for this new power throughout the world.

4. A Jewish center will appear when a rising new Jewish elite will bring about a top cultural production concerning Judaism or linked to Judaism.

5. A Jewish center will appear when it will federate under its umbrella, as Dubnow theorized it, a network of Jewish lesser centers in other countries.

6. The Jewish center will last as long as a new elite of a same (ethnic-religious) origin within the new power elite has not appeared.

7. As soon as this elite will be constituted, the decline of the Jewish center will begin and the Jewish elite will be driven away from its positions.

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A Strategical Approach

These are the various criteria which permit to assess if a new Jewish center is in the making in Europe. Without dismissing such a possibi-lity, I will express my perplexity, not only when I consider the state of European Jewry today (but I won’t do this examination here, it is indeed a secondary element) but especially when I consider the strate-gical landscape of nowadays Europe. I will take as a basis the presenta-tion of the leaflet presenting our conference. The idea that Europe is on the way to a “coherent entity” seems to me a pious wish, especially when this coherence is defined in the words of a “political unification”. The axis of any strategic interpretation of the state of things in the united Europe is the conjunction of two developments:

a) The destructuration/deconstruction of the European nation states and national identities upon which the European international structure was built.

b) The coming of a significant Arab-Moslem immigration, connected with a religion which did not go through the process of moderniza-tion.

Against this background, the Jewish condition has undergone a very problematic change of strategic status. It is important to remember its genealogy from the 1950s.

1. The Shoa has been a turning point and the sign of the end of the Emancipation era, that is to say of a status according to which the Jews were recognized as individual and unidentified, anonymous, citizens. The Shoa was the tragic outbreak of the collective and not voluntarist fate of the Jews transcending the frontiers of the Euro-pean national states (Trigano, 2009).

2. A Jewish life has been again possible on this continent (on a vol-untary basis in the free Europe and a de facto imposed basis in the Communist Europe), only according to the lesson (most of the time unconscious) drawn from this cataclysmic event. Jewish life was reconstructed on the basis, I won’t say of “communities”, but of communal identities: the French Jewry case is from this view-point the most illustrative case of the Jewish condition not in de facto empires like the USSR but in Western nation states, that is to say in Western Europe.

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The element of the Jewish collective destiny has been re-integrated into the emancipated Jewries as a datum of Jewish existence and also as a value (not only a tragedy, except for assimilated Jews re-discovering their Jewishness because of the Shoa). These identities took again on themselves the responsibility for the Jewish people, without abandon-ing or neglecting nevertheless the citizenry. They necessarily and nat-urally leaned on the new State of Israel and more largely Zionism which constitute today the only instance of an assumed, positive and constructive collective Jewish destiny, contrasting with Jews’ fate in the Shoa. This development was assumed with no problem by Western European states so that it found its place without a problem.

The Societal Change in Europe

This situation totally changed from the beginning of the 1990s (2nd Gulf war 1990–1991). A double development explains it: a societal one and a social one. The societal change concerns the political structure of Europe. The progress towards the unification of European states weakened the existing framework of the nation states. The national identity they produced has been plunged into a vacuum and confu-sion. At the same period occurred a huge immigration which stressed the consequential disorientation and loss of the usual points of refer-ence. This double phenomenon had dire consequences for the Jew-ish communities and for the integration of the immigrants. Indeed, the framework of the after-war Jewish communal identities has been shaken. Their identity has been built onto the national identities and one of their efforts has been to maintain a symbolical equilibrium: to balance their link with a Jewish people on their loyalty to their nation state. With the decline of the European nation states this type of iden-tity has been ruined.

The leaflet of our conference presents the Jewish community as a minority in a landscape defined according to the criteria of ethnic and religious minorities. That is indeed what is at stake. Is the status of minority desirable for European Jews? I am not sure: they will lose the protection of the democratic citizenship which compensates for their numerical weakness, especially when confronted with another powerful minority. The majority’s choice will be done quickly and easily. Such a possibility has been proved since the beginning of the 2000 years. One of the lessons of those years was that the prevailing ideology of

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muticulturalism is not a positive factor in the recognition of a Jewish “minority” but, on the contrary, an incentive to anti-Semitism.

Concerning the immigrant populations, the absence of a clear model of integration, because of the decline of the nation states identities, has not helped their integration and perhaps will not permit it totally in the future. We might witness the constitution of an important semi-national Arab-Moslem minority in the new Europe.

Last but not least, if the nation states have been shaken by the European unification it is not yet clear what sort of state will be this United Europe. I can only see it as a new empire, but where is the emperor? There were no empires during history without an emperor and a dynasty, a sacrosanct figure, who, by his charisma, was able to unify a chaos of peoples and languages.

The Social Change in Europe

These structural changes went hand in hand with the second Gulf war in 1990–1991 and worsened with the burst of the war in Iraq and especially the second intifada. A virulent anti-Americanism burst out in Europe and the second intifada was globalized on a world wide scale. From now on, the “Arab street” passes through the European cities. These were favorable circumstances for the Arab-Moslem minority to climb on the European political stage. The abusive criticism of Israel that developed in Europe was a point of agreement between the new minority and European public opinion. It was not only in fact a mat-ter of opinion. A real terrorist threat has been coming from the global Jihad, as the Madrid and London attacks afterwards proved. The Jews felt that the condemnation of Israel and the lenience concerning the anti-Semitic attacks were a sort of appeasement related to this threat. Under these circumstances, they understood that civil society in a number of European countries and at least the European Union had chosen the Arab camp. This choice can be illustrated as much for the medias as for European diplomacy.

The New Atmosphere in Europe

The present failure of the immigrant populations’ integration led to a new situation: the European inner problems became spontaneously international and global problems. The anti-Semitism coming from

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the Arab-Moslem milieu is not fought as it ought to be because there are threats on Europe coming from outside. If it is possible to condemn harshly Israel and the Jewish communities, a very cautious discourse is used to protect the Moslem world opinion. An Orwellian language has even been invented not to name the things as they are.

The hate of the Jews became the meeting point between the extreme right, the extreme left and Islamic fundamentalism. Globally the larger parts of the Western European elites are anti-Zionist, the politically correct term for the new anti-Semitism. Anti-Zionism cannot define the criticism of the Israeli government’s policies. It concerns the essence itself of the existence of the State of Israel, its legitimacy.

Concretely, in Europe, what we have said of the post World War II development showed that what is at stake with Zionism for European Jewries is the Jewish people identity. To delegitimize the moral right of existence of Israel as a state and as a Jewish state is to undermine the basis of the restoration of a Jewish life in Europe after the Shoa and because of the Shoa.

To summarize, Israel and the Jews appear today in Europe as the main obstacle to the inner peace in Europe. This is confirmed by all the European scale surveys of public opinion.

All these causes explain why the hypothesis of an ascent of a Jewish center in Europe seems to me unlikely. There is no opportunity that the Jews will become a privileged minority that the upcoming Euro-pean power will need to impose itself for improving inner stability and power on the remains of previous nation states (in the same way as the new European nation states, according to Hannah Arendt in On Antisemitism, needed in the nineteenth century, a Jewish people to help them to realize their major public projects).

The Third Symbolical Change

The development I tried to outline is not so clear to everyone. The situation is ambivalent. This ambivalence is also one of the charac-teristics of the new anti-Semitism. The current delegitimization of the State of Israel in European public opinion, indeed, goes hand in hand with the celebration of the “Memory of the Shoa”. This ambivalence explains how the new anti-Semitism can accuse Israel on behalf of this memory.

In order to understand this dialectical ideology it is important to understand the major symbolical change that occurred in Europe

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during these 20 last years. After a long latency period of psychological and intellectual repression, the memory of the Shoa has been institu-tionalized and became even state-controlled. A sanctuarization of the memory of the Shoa occurred and this new deal constitutes a major symbolical-ideological turning point for European Jews.

If it is possible today to delegitimize the State of Israel on behalf of the Shoa, it is because this sanctuarization-sacralization was only possible at the expense of the main lesson of the Shoa: the assump-tion of the Jewish destiny as a people’s destiny. This state-controlled memory in museums, memorials, foundations has untied the so called “universal” victims from their Jewishness and from the exterminated Jewish people. It seems that it was the necessary condition to honor and celebrate them. The celebration of a late Jewish people.

From now on, Jewish existence was identified with the exclusive condition of victim and martyr, till suffocation. The consequence was the de-politicization and transfiguration of the Jewish people in the European perspective: a dead people, a people of victims but not a sovereign people, not an actor among the actors of human history, that is what the State of Israel incarnates. The Jewish communities became the repository of the memory of the Shoa so that their con-crete life became an excess, a reprehensible abuse. The celebration of a dead people opened the way to the delegitimization of a living people.

The question which is asked to Europe is to know what type of Israel will it recognize in the Jews. When Zionism was born it was to find a solution for the Jewish people which did not find a place in the modern political order after being excluded for religious reasons under the Ancien Régime. In the Shoa this people was destructed. After World War II, all the Jewries in Arab-Moslem states were expelled or excluded so that there are no remnants of them in those lands. Today when there is a State of Israel which incarnates the Jewish collective destiny, will Europe recognize it as a living and legitimate people or as a dead and celebrated people?

KLAL YISRAEL TODAY: UNITY AND DIVERSITY. REFLECTIONS ON EUROPE AND LATIN AMERICA IN A

GLOBALIZED WORLD

Judit Bokser Liwerant and Eliezer Ben-Rafael

Judaism and Jewish identity have never been homogeneous, a state-ment all the more true today. Internal differentiations, divergent sym-bols of identification and differences in the meanings ascribed to them, as well as enduring dialogues and debates, have unfolded within the changing perimeters of the Jewish world in various spatial, geopoliti-cal, and socio-cultural contexts. The present recovers and reshapes old and new historical conditions: religion coexists with secularization processes; peoplehood develops hand in hand with national existence; ethnicity and civic commonalities reaffirm one another, and collective belongingness interacts with assimilation trends, while new forms of cohesiveness find their way into the private and public realms of a diversified Jewish existence.

Contents and structures, interactions and borders, all define col-lective Jewish life and identities. Primordial and symbolic referents derive from a wide cultural spectrum that must never be seen as unitary, indivisible, or organic, but always as an assemblage of dis-parate ideas, elements, patterns, and behaviors (Berlin, 1991). Jewish life and identity(ies), then, are built, internalized, created, and trans-formed within a context of diversity. Rather than homogeneous totali-ties expressing essentialist a-historical contents, identities stretch and reshape themselves beyond their original definitions. Their complexity and their historical character relate to social and communal realms wherein structural and cultural dimensions interact (Ben-Rafael, 2002; Bokser Liwerant, 2008b).

Jewish identities and Jewish life presently split along two major dimensions: the transnational dimension, referring to clusters of approaches bearing on the contents of Judaism, and the spatial dimen-sion, drawing spaces within the Jewish world conditioned by place and territory. In today’s globalized world, both singularities and shared features reflect how national, regional, and global dimensions interact, and also the various modalities in which they intermingle with the new

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and specific transnational circumstances of the Jewish people. Though these dimensions are analytically distinct, Jewish life in the United States, Israel, Europe, and Latin America shows that they result in both divergences and convergences.

The interaction of collective identities, changing external conditions, inner dilemmas, and diverse settings has resulted in a pluralization of approaches to Jewishness within the wide ethno-cultural-religious-national frameworks. A gamut of Jewish identities has emerged, dynami-cally inhabiting an increasingly differentiated space, though still resting on shared basic elements that allow us, even today, to refer to all of them as Jewish identities (Ben-Rafael and Peres, 2005). Elaborating on Wittgenstein’s concept of ‘family resemblance’, we may assume a shared Jewish condition despite identity differences: “Even if they do not furnish similar answers to the basic questions of identity, they must at least address the same questions” (Schatzki, 1996: 100). Provided they do so, they cannot be considered entirely alien to one another. Thus, following Appadurai’s (1996) concept of flows or streams, the main flows of Jewish identity may be discerned according to their answers to distinct aspects of the identity structure. In the same vein, Sergio DellaPergola (1999b) emphasizes that differences in the identifi-cation patterns that develop and prevail in the Jewish world are more a matter of intensity and composition than the product of an intrinsi-cally different typology.

In today’s changing world, however, Jews may not only formulate different answers to the same questions but may also ask different questions. The place and the role of Judaism’s different dimensions as well as their various meanings may shape discontinuities and disunity. Symbols, regardless of the differences in their referents, do indeed pro-vide a solid substratum for unity and integration, but they can also have the opposite result (Liebman and Cohen, 1990). Identities must thus be seen as fluent junctures wherein the past, the present, and the future coalesce. They are built around contents and identification referents that imply both an individual sense of belongingness and collective-relational behaviors.

Transnationalism: A Historical Dimension

The transnational dimension essentially refers to shared historical clus-ters of approaches concerning the contents of Judaism, both in their past and present configuration and dynamics. The concept of transna-

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tionalism has acquired multiple meanings, according to diverse theo-retical approaches and to their specific focus on the variables of space and time. The transcendence of borders and the temporal dimension have elicited a debate that seeks to clarify if its current expressions are related to new contemporary dynamics and/or if historical precedents or analogues can be traced. Aware of the concept’s multidimensional nature, we aim to underscore its centrality for the understanding of both past trends and ongoing changes in Jewish life. The relevance of the concept to the past is enhanced by the transnational consti-tuted ethnic, cultural, and socio-religious spaces interacting with one another as the main characteristic of Judaism and Jewish life. Indeed, transnationalism is one of the main defining characteristics of the Jew-ish ethno-national Diaspora, shedding light on the flows of interactions and relationships that have developed despite international borders and all the laws, regulations, and national narratives they represent (Kahgram and Levitt, 2008; Vertovec, 1999: 1–20).

The concept points to complex patterns of shared values and norms, of social belongingness and collective identities, highlighting the dynamics of encounters and articulations that transcend national frontiers. Transnationalism has proved itself as a fruitful concept for describing conditions and experiences associated with migratory flows of Diaspora communities, which have shaped the historical Jewish condition worldwide. Thus, it allows tracing both the common and the singular, the shared and the specific of the different processes of Judaism, built through continuity and ruptures.

Jewish identities elaborate on the codes of traditional Judaism, which has implied a triple commitment—to the Jewish People, to the singularity perceived as embodied in the Torah, and to the Land of Israel. Historical or traditional Judaism always maintained borders and markers that mustered this three-dimensional core, which Jewish thought has emphasized. The shared foundations of all formulations included a solid connection to God and to the Torah, a belief in the existence of a Jewish people, and a reference to the Land of Israel, viewing any other place of residence as “exile” (Ben-Rafael, 2008: 35–47; Bokser Liwerant, 2008a: 81–108).

This model became outdated with modernity and clusters of new versions appeared, each one focusing on one of these three facets and disentangling their essential nexus.

Post-traditional outlooks regard these deep structures of Jewish iden-tity as questions that not only could but should receive new answers. These transformations would ultimately construct the space of modern


Jewish culture, identities, religious streams, and ideologies. All three elements were open to queries and quandaries regarding the role and place of religion amid secularization processes; the criteria and modes of belonging to the Jewish people, hence its borders, and the place of the Land.

The religious/ethnic/spiritual/national dimensions of the Land, together with the complexity of the changing symbolic and material nature of its centrality would later define most of the diverse answers to be offered. At the center of the process wherein Zionism built its hegemony vis-à-vis other modern national ideologies, its proclaimed aggiornamento, renaissance, and renewal goals were intertwined with the concept of return—not only to history but also to the Land, recovering its symbolic spiritual-religious meaning (Vital, 1980).

In sum, modernity resulted in the diversification of the contents and referents of the singular foundational Brith in all its dimensions—theological and sociological, religious and national, ethnic and cultural—as well as of the markers of Jewish ways of being (Elazar, 1989). Nor-mative-traditional flows, religious streams and orthodoxies, as well as trends defined by ethno-national and ethno-communal parameters, coexist with distinct cultural and/or spiritual options marked by an absence of identity consciousness and also with new ways of aware-ness. Individual, inner-oriented, and non-communal orientations have gained prominence, especially for younger generations (Cohen and Eisen, 2000).

Thus, radical modernity and current globalization processes have definitely challenged prevailing shared values and, paradoxically, have deconstructed certainties and reconstructed belongingness. The legitimacy granted to heterogeneity and diversity validates a myriad of approaches as expressions of new ways of being. Contents, sym-bols, and markers have pluralized. However, the diverse flows allow to be clustered according to the specific deep structure to which each one first refers and around which orders its formulation: the ultra-Orthodox flow stands out by the paramount importance its constituent formulations grant to faith; all formulations grouped in the ethno-cultural flow emphasize above all the notion of ‘Jewish People’ as a culture-producer collective; the national flow addresses primarily the notion of ‘Land of Israel’ and the building, on this territory, of a new Jewish nation.

Overall, ultra-Orthodox formulations may be said to seek the con-tinuity of the communal past. Viewing the Torah as the heart of


Jewishness, they evince Halakhah’s normative value and the collective mission of Jewry. Beyond the differences between schools of thought—from the traditional Lithuanian Mitnagdim (‘opponents’ of Hasidism) to the various Hasidic sects—all subscribe to the idea that Judaism and religion are synonymous. As part of a generalized revival of “strong religions” (Sivan, Almond and Appleby, 2003), some of these groups have spread globally, as epitomized by Chabad. In recent decades, Sephardic ultra-Orthodoxy, Shas, has also joined this cluster. A close examination, however, shows a subdivision into two camps: one aspires to be the direct continuation of East European tradition whereas the other, though closely associated with the first, experiences new—and essential—emphases in the context of its being a part of Israeli society.

Ethno-cultural formulations share a universalism associated with “Jewish peoplehood”, its history, and the culture it bears. This flow consists of versions that stress the ‘People of Israel’ dimension, and view it as the carrier of singular symbols and a peculiar history, but also of universal cultural values. Supporters of these versions seek integration with modernity and aspire to crystallize the contribution of Judaism to contemporary civilization. The best criterion for classifying the many versions of the ethno-cultural flow is their stance vis-à-vis the religious dimension. The ethno-cultural cluster is characterized primarily by a flexible approach to social boundaries. Jewishness is thus secondary to local national identities, in contrast not only to the ultra-Orthodox but also to the national cluster.

National formulations emphasize collective preoccupations, viewing Israel as the Jewish motherland and Hebrew as the cradle of a new Jewish culture. The national flow includes versions of Jewish identity whose common denominator is the importance they grant to the third facet of the original basic structure, the Land of Israel, and that draw from this assessment the aspiration to a non-Diaspora Jewish real-ity. This flow too includes several formulations. Some of them stem directly from Zionist ideology, and others are generated by the Israeli reality that, in some cases, may question fundamental statements of the original national program.

Interacting with the previous ones, the ethno-national cluster is associated with Diaspora consciousness. Its main markers are iden-tification with the Jewish national state as a focus of identity and institutional communal building. Historically, it unfolded through the dialogue among secular ideologies and developed as a strong Diaspora nationalism under Zionist hegemony, but has increasingly sought to


incorporate contents of cultural local renaissance and guarantees con-nectedness to the Jewish world.

Individual, inner spiritual options have developed as part of general and particular overlapping trends of decline in the religious organized world, accompanied by new and thriving expressive forms of religios-ity (Eisenstadt, 2009: 29–46).

Each identity cluster is signaled by contrasting markers. Needless to say, the profuse ultra-Orthodox markers are strikingly different from those of any other style. The ethno-cultural cluster emphasizes the learning of surrounding languages and adapting Jewish symbols to actual societal contexts. Strong markers of the national cluster are the nationalization of biblical symbols, and the cultural impacts of specific life conditions. The ethno-national has combined the previous clusters while trying to bridge national and Diaspora existences.

The differentiation of options or of domains of identity building derived from identification processes and from structural frame-works that channel collective belongingness has been further speci-fied according to identification foci and realms of expression. From a complementary perspective, then, the diverse flows also converge and diverge accordingly: the normative/traditional option centers on reli-gious rituals and norms; diverse sorts of ethnicity are oriented towards the family/friend circles as organized around the lifecycle, while the realm of education focuses on socialization and learning. The com-munity/organization referent is based on and fosters voluntarism and philanthropy, the culture/history formulation includes politics and the memory of the Shoah, while the option of mutual responsibility refers to local needs and Israel (DellaPergola, 2009b).

This textured, multifaceted world suggests that the normative core on which consensus and family resemblance have been constructed seems to have narrowed, posing the question about the nature(s), scope, and frontiers of the collective. Contradictions as well as oppor-tunities are to be sought in the diversification of the Jewish experience, expressed through different ways of understanding and embodying the ‘Jewish self ’, both individually and collectively as well as along several axes—religious-secular, Orthodox-liberal, national-Diasporic, inclusive-exclusive—and extending from support to critical distance, and from solidarity with to abandonment of the real or imagined Jew-ish community.

Family resemblance is not exclusively a natural given and, as stated, elective dimensions also reshape primordial definitions. Norms and


rules are thus to be built as well. Accordingly, Jewish identity is not to be seen mainly or exclusively in terms of plural agencies but in terms of multiple social constructions and structures, which may weaken or enrich Jewish diversity. Thus, the communal, institutional sphere is also significant for identity building. Diversity, therefore, can be approached in terms of the mechanisms that may provide institutional options appropriate to a world of exponential diversity. Institutions can shape and provide neighborliness norms even to families that need to remember/redefine resemblances, and can allow adjudication of conflicts in particular contexts and situations (Katznelson, 1996).

Jewish life is defined today by unprecedented challenges and oppor-tunities bearing on the inner axes and the changing profile of different Jewish centers. The cohesion and solidarity derived from the histori-cal continuum of shared memory, ideas, tradition, loyalty, religion, and nationalism—be it spiritual, cultural, territorial, or political—are embodied in the notion of Klal Yisrael, the worldwide ‘commonwealth’ of the Jewish people that involves different arrangements, positions, and certainly diverse levels of awareness of it (Ben-Rafael, 2008: 35–47; Gorny, 2008: 35–46).

In an intricate interplay of continuities and ruptures, unity and diver-sity, Jewish life opens up to new local, regional, and global arrange-ments. The Jewish world has been affected by processes that have promoted new identities, assigning renewed importance to primordial components in the shaping of global, national, and local spaces and in the re-ordering of territorial and even communal spaces. At pres-ent, this dual dimension of identity building processes, both elective and primordial, is highly determined by globalization processes. Old and new identities thus oscillate in a tense fluctuation between the moment of the unique and the universal, the moment of the common and the particular. Globalization processes are not uniform, since they vary according to time and place, and they are multifaceted because they bring together economic, socio-political, cultural, and religious aspects as well as their mutual influences and interdependences; they can be simultaneously reflexive and unintentional. Globalization pro-cesses involve the de-territorialization of economic, social, cultural, and political arrangements, meaning they do not depend on distance or borders, nor do they have the same influence on the final shaping of institutions and social relations (Giddens, 1994). Social and com-munal interactions may thus be organized and structured with a global dimension as their horizon. The location of countries and the borders


between states become more diffuse and porous, with possibilities of fast travel serving to intensify global connections. Consequently, the domains where collective identities develop are radically transformed by a series of factors: the uncertainty following from the speed and intensity of global flows; the transformations that states are undergo-ing, particularly the loss of their monopoly in the building of national shared values, social images, and representations, and the presence and strength of transnational, supranational, or global actors and insti-tutions as well as old and new Diasporas.

Transnationalism emerges as a new extended phenomenon: com-munities and identities that go beyond national borders are reconsid-ering and reconnecting the links between the national and the global. It then, refers not only to the historical condition of flows that has defined Judaism, but also to the new conditions, deriving from changes in the geographical mapping of migration and to the changing geo-graphical dynamics. Thus, transnationalism relates to interests and allegiances as well as to identities connecting diverse spatial milieus. It includes relationships running across states and societies established through new flows of migration, both collective and individual, that may be related to political upheavals or economic crises, known as migration crises, or to the search for better opportunities for mobil-ity. Emigration from the FSU after the fall of the Wall or from Latin America during recent decades, for instance, have thus placed new models of identity-building and of interactions at the forefront.

The indisputable historical complexity of Jewish life has reached unprecedented scale today due to external and internal transforma-tions and their close interrelations. The historical global people and its new transnational profile confront new realities, both in its voluntary communal settings and in its sovereign existence.

The Spatial Dimension: National and Regional Contexts

Jewish collective identities are built in different institutional arenas—territorial, communal or religious, national or cultural—and in differ-ent political-ecological settings—local, regional, national—in a global world wherein they interact, intersect, and overlap, and their com-ponents re-link (Eisenstadt, 1998: 245–265). In turn, the differential impact of the manifold scenarios explains the increasing diversity and


complexity. The clusters of Jewish identities appear in varying forms in the different loci of world Jewry. Along this spatial dimension, one distinguishes today mainly the Jewries of Israel, the U.S., Europe, and Latin America, with different weight, roles, and changing profiles.

Israel: Return, History and Space

All transnational clusters are present in Israel, though most versions belong to the national cluster and are pervaded by allegiance to Israel as the primary element of Jewish identity. A secular Israeli culture has developed that diminishes the centrality of Jewish law “even if it affirms a collective Jewish civic consciousness”, and a civil religion has emerged that has “programmatically and creatively” borrowed from traditional Judaism (Dash Moore and Troen, 2001: 4; Liebman, 1990: 187–190).

Historically, the broad and diverse range of problems Zionism sought to address deeply marked its inner diversity. It defined itself as a movement of national liberation seeking to achieve territorial con-centration and political sovereignty, and as a movement of national reconstruction and cultural renewal expressed in a secular and mod-ern normative call to shape Jewish life wherever it was and would continue to be (Avineri, 1981; Katz, 1986). Therefore, its global goal of generating an overall aggiornamento in Judaism resulted in the coexis-tence between the denial of the Diasporic condition and the aspiration to renew Jewish life as a whole (Vital, 1980; Almog, 1982).

The secular mainstream in Israel stands for forms of updated Zion-ism. This trend confronts the local ultra-Orthodox, who refer primar-ily to their own cluster but still raise halakhic demands on the state to assert its “Jewish character”, and thus also somehow situate themselves within the state. The national-Orthodox are fervent nationalists who rely on their reading of Scripture as justification for settling the occu-pied territories of Judea and Samaria.

Israeli Jewishness branches out into ethnic formulations as well. Communities populated by Mizrahi Jews retain a traditionalism that would launch the ultra-Orthodox Shas movement donning the garb of the Sephardic legacy. Antipodal to Shas, Russian immigrants are mostly secular and view Russian culture and language as the marks of their cultural sophistication. They do learn Hebrew and have become


increasingly familiar with Jewish-Israeli culture but, after three gen-erations under a hostile regime, they set out from a relatively weak starting point in this respect.

Historically, sub-ethnicities and social class had acted as axes of social stratification, but religion and political stands have acquired growing relevance. The escalation of the regional conflict leaves an imprint on various dimensions of individual and collective life in Israeli society. One of the most prominent relates to the breaking of the consensus on national security, which is central to collective self perception and reflexive consciousness and became an issue of pub-lic debate. Although the Arab-Israeli conflict has several aspects, it is the inter-communitarian one between Palestinians and Israelis that became the most relevant and visible, directly affecting the perception of Israeli society. The use of military force against a civilian popula-tion became increasingly controversial. Since the end of the 1980s, the weakened conviction in the necessity of war as a means for survival paved the way for its definition as optional and avoidable.

The presence of a significant Arab population in the occupied ter-ritories confronts Israel with a basic dilemma of political and cultural identity, which has been formulated in terms of the challenge to main-tain the dual character of the state as both Jewish and democratic. If the Arab population in the occupied territories were granted equal rights in the name of democracy, Israel’s Jewish character would be lost. But if the rights of this Arab population were denied in the name of maintaining a Jewish state, Israel’s democratic character would be lost (Walker, 2004: 28–35).

As part of the deconstructionist approach of postmodernity, groups of intellectuals call today for the “de-Zionization” of Israel. They claim that Israeli Jews, like Jews everywhere, make up an ethnic entity that should not prevail in the definition of the state. This Israeli version of Jewish ethno-culturalism constitutes, in this context and unlike in other loci, a radical protest against Israel’s definition as a Jewish state.

These caveats notwithstanding, the national cluster definitely pre-vails in Israel and seeks to marginalize post-Zionism and accommo-date ultra-Orthodoxy.

Israel claims to be center in terms of objective population concen-tration, of sovereignty status, and of Klal Yisrael responsibility. And yet, its expectations are currently facing new challenges in light of changes in the one-center/Diaspora model.


More Jews now live in Israel than in any other single place in the world. Over 40% of all Jews, and over 55% of all Jewish children under the age of fifteen, live in the State of Israel (DellaPergola, 2009b). Although this demographic configuration points to the multi-dimensional and non-linear historical movement of “return”, the real-ity of more than seven million Jews living in Diaspora communities, over five and a half million in the U.S. alone, has led to a redefinition of the negation-affirmation antinomy.

Together with migration flows shaped by transnationalism, Israel is now experiencing new forms of Alijhah, such as the “commuting” of the French Jewish community and its translocalism, in terms of both space and allegiances. Another phenomenon is emigration from Israel among professionals and well-educated members of the middle class looking for better economic opportunities (Rebhun and Lev Ari, 2010). How, then, will Israel fulfill its role as the “center” of the Jewish world while defining new shared goals, agendas, rules, and mecha-nisms required by Diaspora communities concerning identity and con-tinuity? This question needs to be approached in terms of the complex scenarios arising from the overlap of the transnational-content and transnational-spatial axes. Both these axes interact beyond territorial constraints, as expressed by convergences and divergences that reflect transnationalism and differential existential conditions.

North American Jewry: The Other Center?

The singularity of North American Jewry rests on its numbers and its visibility in the public sphere, closely related to the process of nation-building in the United States. Since its inception, this process has implied the incorporation of the different groups into a collective higher order, while the right to self-fulfillment viewed normative sup-port as part of the national ethos. American society promoted indi-vidual gratification, which in fact lead to the toleration of communal diversity (Sarna, 1997; Sarna, 2004). Jewish life too encompasses a profusion of formulations. While ethno-cultural flows are the majority, religion has played a pervasive and meaningful role in ascription and self-ascription; religious organizations found wide space in the civil society and have influenced different trends of Judaism. Even though Conservative and Reform movements have a central place, ultra-Orthodoxy has strengthened its position.


At the other end, the Zionist idea and movements had to deal with the claim that challenged the Zionist diagnosis of exile. North Ameri-can Jewry and its intellectuals rejected the equation of the United States with Galut and Israel with Zion. A diversity of perceptions developed within different currents, but a consensus has prevailed regarding the concepts of home and centrality, insisting on the exceptionality of American Jewish reality (Eisen, 1986).

While Zionist segments encouraged Alijhah and saw themselves as actors in the national project, Alijhah in the last few years has brought to Israel mainly religious individuals and groups. Although the major-ity cluster is ethno-cultural, Modern Orthodox may be seen as par-tially belonging to this cluster since they consider themselves part of the modern world and aspire to reconcile it with halakhic exigencies and community life. They are not too far from but still unfriendly to non-halakhic Judaism, which is not committed to rigorous religious observance. The Reform movement was the most radical in this stance, but secular humanistic Judaism has gone still further by rejecting the relevance of the theistic principle in world affairs altogether. Despite their differences, all share the reference to Judaism as a culture and a historical experience conveyed by Jewish “peoplehood”. This reference grounds their solidarity with the Jewish world and their socio-cultural dynamism, as expressed in the multiplicity of Jewish institutions in the United States and the structuring of community life along congrega-tional lines. Additional factors such as mobility and internal migrations had a serious impact on communal institutionalization, evident both in steady congregational spaces and in changing communal organization (Waxman, 1983).

North American Jewry has also known new ways of defining iden-tity through a search of collective though disaffiliated spaces as well as individual and inner domains (Cohen and Eisen, 2000). Recalling Jack Wertheimer’s (1993) memorable expression, “a people divided”, the question emerged of whether Judaism in the years ahead will be characterized by religious polarization or by a return to the “vital center” in Jewish life. Jewish life is going through significant organiza-tional and communal changes, including in its relationship with Israel and the Jewish world. Oscillating between identity redefinitions, col-lective endeavors, reinterpretation of mitsvoth and common solidarity, new trends redefine the profile of American Jewry.

A recent work addressing American Jewish identification (DellaPer-gola, Levy, Rebhun and Sagi, 2009: 305–318) found that Jews who


define themselves as Orthodox have the strongest attachment to Israel. Ranking second in their degree of attachment were Jews who prefer a religious denomination other than Orthodoxy and belong to a Jewish organization of any sort. Non-Orthodox Jews by religion who are not members of a Jewish organization display a much weaker attachment to Israel. In this study, the innermost identification core includes the primary indicators of Jewish peoplehood: feeling Jewish, importance of being Jewish in life, feeling part of the Jewish people, importance of being part of and supporting Jewish organizations, having a rich spiritual life, and giving children a Jewish education.

Identification maps for the entire American Jewish population were compared with similar maps for Jews in Israel (Levy, Levinsohn and Katz, 2002; Levy, Levinsohn and Katz, 2004: 265–284; Levy and Rebhun, 2006: 391–414). The two maps do not address possible differences in behavioral or attitudinal frequencies, but portray the relative positions of the various domains within the overall identifica-tional space. The authors affirm that, perhaps contrary to expectations, perceptions in the two countries are very similar. Notably, a feeling of belongingness to the Jewish people occupies the same central position as the organizing synthesis of other domains of Jewish identification that, in turn, occupy very similar radial positions in both countries. The only two plausible differences are that concerns for Jewish cul-ture and politics among American Jews parallel participation in the civil society for Israeli Jews; and, respectively, responsibility for Isra-el’s needs parallel personal fulfillment of life in Israel (DellaPergola, 2010). The relationship between these two Jewries, however, has been the object of an ongoing debate, formulated in terms of the “distanc-ing” hypothesis. It has stressed non-Orthodox and younger sectors as the main groups whose attachment to Israel has diminished (Sasson, Kadushin and Saxe, 2007; Cohen and Kelman, 2009).

“Oneness” may also be considered at the regional/national level. Thus, although expressed differentially, both in Israel and in the U.S. religiosity is a matter of degree rather than a polarized dichotomy and belonging to the Jewish religion also means belonging to the Jewish people (Ben-Rafael and Peres, 2005). Therefore, whereas ultra-Orthodoxy and secularism may be seen as polarized extremes, there is a buffer zone inhabited by intermediate categories such as traditionalist and religious groups. This pattern tends to recur throughout the Jewish world, thereby also raising a question of ongoing trends and future trans-generational changes.


Europe: “Another Diaspora” or a “Third Pillar”?

Underlying the radical changes that European Jewry is experiencing are both external processes and inner trends. Liberalization, democ-ratization, and multiculturalism have impacted Jewish communities in different and even contradictory ways, modifying the relationship between the public and private spheres as domains for building and expressing Jewish life. The turning point was the end of the Soviet bloc, the democratization of most of its previous components, and, at a later stage, several countries joining the European Union.

1989 was a crucial turning point in modern European history. This was the year that marked the end of the Cold War and was followed by the breakup of the Eastern Bloc. Several countries regained their independence to become autonomous actors, and democracy replaced a series of authoritarian regimes. In most places, moreover, this spec-tacular transformation took place more or less peacefully, and West-ern, Eastern, and Central Europeans could now communicate on a new basis. A few years later, after several post-Soviet countries joined the European Union, this revolution would be completed through the emergence of this unifying—if not unified—democratic Europe as a brand new international actor of importance.

Quite paradoxically, it is precisely as a European Union is in the making and as borders between this Europe and the one not included in the Union draw closer that segmentation tendencies in national states become discernible (Wagstaff, 1999: 4–18). Threats of splits resonate from Spain to Belgium, as particularisms seem to profit from the protection provided by all-European institutions to weaken their ties with national frameworks. In a way, it is the very evolution of Europe as a new type of supra-national entity that encourages separat-ist aspirations, which gain strength and assert themselves on the Euro-pean scene. These tendencies to expand the multicultural dimension of national and all-European realities are still fueled by globalization processes that target this old-new continent. People from all over the world aspire to settle in it to form new segments of the population (Ben-Rafael, Sternberg, Bokser Liwerant and Gorny, 2009).

Democracy offers these new groups opportunities to express them-selves in politics, to form constituencies attached to cultural and linguistic symbols of their own, and to raise claims regarding the organization of the social order. The conjunction of globalization and democracy offers these groups possibilities of retaining strong ties with


their homelands and mobilizing resources to build communities, as well as of becoming political actors that may hope to see their special claims addressed by the political elites. These groups of immigrants join forces with the particularistic regional movements that aspire to institutionalize their distinctiveness and to the consequent reorganiza-tion of center-periphery relations.

However dramatic these changes may have been, they have been much more so for Jews. Two million Jews were suddenly re-linked to the Jewish world after eighty years of silence. The large majority of this new tribe left en masse and reconfigurated world Jewry including, and especially, Europe’s (Ben-Rafael, 2006). As a result, and more than ever, European Jewry can today be described as highly heterogeneous and divided, not only by the internal diversity of each community but also by its dispersion in numerous national societies, languages, and cultures. When most of Europe is becoming increasingly integrated in the EU, the warranted question concerns the relationships that might develop among the various components of this newly reshaped and numerically significant Jewry and between them and the rest of the Jewish world, mainly Israel and American Jewry.

The impact of these developments has proved radical for at least two Jewish communities. The Jewish-Israeli population grew by one-fifth over ten years with the arrival of more than one million immigrants from the former Soviet bloc. At the same time, more than 200,000 immigrants joined the 20,000–25,000 Jews in Germany and created an opportunity to set up a new viable German Jewry. In a develop-ment somewhat less drastic in its significance but still important, nearly half a million Russian-speaking Jews strengthened the American Jew-ish community. Overall, Russian Jews are now about twenty percent of the world’s Jews. Moreover, in the new circumstances now prevail-ing in some of the post-Soviet countries, many communities that had been well-known participants in the Jewish world but had remained invisible for decades resurfaced in Hungary, the Czech Republic, Romania, and even Poland. Last but not least, with the split of the Soviet Union, Jewish communities reorganized in Ukraine, Russia, the Baltic countries, and other previously Soviet new states.

In the context of the dynamics unfolding in Europe and in the Euro-pean Union, these newly organized Jewish communities naturally join French and British Jewries as well as the smaller Jewish communities in Italy, Belgium, or the Scandinavian countries. A new Jewish Europe is springing up in a continent that had been the cradle of Diaspora


Judaism, where Jews had been present for nearly twenty centuries. In the first decade of the twenty-first century, between two and two and a half million Jews represent the continuation of a 2,000 years-old historical Jewry that had traditionally been the backbone of Jewry as a whole. This Jewry too includes all the three main clusters of Judaism and, as in the U.S., the ultra-Orthodox and the national clusters rep-resent only minorities. The major trends of European Jewry set them in the ethno-cultural cluster, displayed in the intense activism of num-berless community publications, websites, clubs, museums, university programs of Jewish studies, and Orthodox and liberal synagogues. All these resemble the U.S., although without involving a formal affiliation requirement.

Worth noting are also the complex dynamics of secularism, paral-leled by a revival of religiosity mixed with, and redefining, sub-ethnic belongingness. Thus, the historical French model of individualized citizenship as the significant relationship between Jews and the state has been modified and reshaped by a steady process of communitar-ization, first brought about by the massive arrival of North African Jews (Birnbaum, 2003a). More than an exclusively national or regional trend, this process became part of the tendency reflecting the growing role and visibility of religion and of global ultra-Orthodox movements such as Chabad and Shas. This development involves local communi-ties joining a transnational community of believers under a superior authority usually located outside the region—the Lubavitcher Rebbe, Rabbi Ovadiah Yosef.

European Jewry shares common trends and also expresses national diversity. Unlike the changing French model, the Belgian Jewish com-munity has developed a duality of perspectives, searching both a com-mitment to integration and the maintenance of social particularism, mainly allowed by the characteristics of the political and legal order of Belgian society. A strong attachment to Israel and the memory of the Shoah, as well as the coexistence of religious and secularization processes, mark its inner life (Schreiber, 2006: 27–31).

The reshaping of German Jewry, as stated, has been essentially determined by Russian Jewish emigration. The presence of the Rus-sian Jews points to a significant revival of Jewish life while posing seri-ous problems of integration, in a dilemma that pits the government’s immigration policy against the group’s own expectations (Schoeps, Jasper and Glöckner, 2006: 36–42).


Europe’s Jews are mostly secular and shy away from the congrega-tional model. They see Jewishness, above all, as a matter of individual choice. Prominent scholars dominate the cultural scene, ranging from Leo Strauss to Levinas, but individualism and voluntarism dominate Jewish self-identification. Frequently, Jews are reluctant to systemati-cally assert their Jewishness in front of non-Jews. Even among the more assertive, Jewishness is often associated with a type of knowl-edge that is far removed from the traditional sources. European Jewry has indeed excelled in many areas of activity—arts, literature, cin-ema, popular music, academia, the liberal professions, the media, busi-ness, or politics. This pattern is but another expression of the high social mobility of this group, generating jokes like the Parisian one: “What is the difference between a tailor and a psychoanalyst? One generation, of course!” This paradox invites reflection on Thorstein Veblen’s (1919) discussion of Zionism when he first heard about the Jews’ national project. He wrote a special piece where he confronted the question of the Jews’ outstanding contribution to modern science and knowledge. His contention was that Jews in the modern era had left Jewish tradition without assurance of full integration in the gen-eral society and in non-Jewish culture. As such, they were free from any commitment to sterile conventions and able to see reality without a priori biases, a position allowing them to offer intellectual leader-ship and leading to genuine achievements.1 In the context of Europe’s norms of “political-correctness”, expressions of anti-Semitism short of political violence are not necessarily condemned too strongly. Ten-sions around Jews also draw on Israel’s bad press in major media and political circles. One outcome, certainly not unprecedented, is that some Jews adopt the “good Jew” syndrome—admitting to Jewish origins but being highly critical of Israel. In this vein, scholars of Jew-ish origin assert that Judaism is essentially Diasporic and that Jewish statehood is detrimental to Judaism.

In all these respects, European Jews do indeed represent a unique Jewish experience that sets them apart in the Jewish world. Neverthe-less, and despite their particularism, they still find themselves targeted,

1 Veblen concluded that Zionism would create for Jews the same societal and cul-tural conditions of commitment to conventions prevailing in other countries, bringing an end to their special creativity. In brief, Zionism might undoubtedly benefit the Jews but will also mean a loss for humanity.


like other Jewries, by versions of Judaism seeking to find a recognized and/or dominant place and legitimacy for their convictions. Hence, in Berlin, London, Moscow, and Paris, as in Jerusalem or New York, one finds B’nai B’rith lodges, Zionist movements, Agudat Israel, Chabad, liberal, Orthodox, and ultra-Orthodox synagogues. One also finds here, as everywhere else, sustained interest in the Middle East drama where forty percent of the world’s Jews confront, insofar as most of them can see, the continuation of Jewish history. As in all other Jewish spaces, in Europe too, the diversity of these phenomena expresses both the solidarity of the Jewish world and its deep divisions. The diversity indicates how uncompromising the endemic conflicts of Jews are and what still holds them together. It conveys that many Jews throughout the world share different ideals and ideas about Jewishness, but attach importance to having their views shared by Jews worldwide. Hence, we may speak of many ways of being Jewish, yet we cannot speak of different ‘Jewish Peoples’. The Klal Yisrael code is still a potent drive among Jews, including in Europe.

European Jewry also has two significant characteristics entirely of its own. The first is that, except for French Jews of North African origin, and unlike Israeli, North-American, and Latin-American Jews, the Jews living in Europe today belong to their continent’s longstand-ing history. In many cities, old Jewish quarters and many other rem-nants signal their longstanding presence in this space, a history rich in events that fuels feelings of belongingness but also a martyrology that culminated in the Shoah. Survivors of the Shoah and their offspring on European soil have been forced to accommodate their memory and their non-Jewish environment.

What remains as factors of identification with Judaism when consid-ering the superficiality of most Jews’ acknowledgement of their legacy and their openness to the non-Jewish environment, are two foci of overwhelming importance wherein European Jews rejoin Jews every-where. These foci are the memory of the Shoah and the preoccupation with the ongoing conflict in Israel. When looking today at Jewish pub-lic life in Brussels, Paris, London, New York, Berlin, or Jerusalem, the memory and commemoration of the Shoah will be found at the heart of Jewish concerns, a statement particularly true of European Jews, for very good reasons (Trigano 2005). Here, the Shoah is always present and close to any discussion of Jewish matters. This preoccupation is concretized throughout Europe in many memorials, commemoration days of specific related events, publications, and communal activities.


Seemingly, Europe’s Jews can continue to live in this continent only on the condition that they prove to themselves they “have not forgot-ten”. The centrality of the Shoah in defining Jewish existence may therefore be viewed in terms of a “culture of memory” (Gergely, 2006: ix–xiii). Although this dimension is one they certainly share with all other Jewries, it assumes particular acuity in the European context. This concern has evoked some impatience among non-Jews, who have often expressed—on the pages of the most respected newspapers—their irritation with the “Jews’ obsession with the Shoah”, some even calling it “obsolete”, “redundant”, and “excessive”.

The second major concern for Jews in Europe, as in other places in the Jewish world, is the preoccupation with the Israeli-Arab conflict. Whether from a sympathetic or a critical standing, whether from a pro-Zionist or a decidedly Diasporic perspective, Israel is at the focus of attention for most Jews living outside its borders. Rarely are Euro-pean Jews completely indifferent to what happens in the Middle-East. Though these issues do stir up the Jewishness of Europe’s Jews, to say they bring them closer to other Jewries does not tell the whole story (Cliff 1998: 20–22; Pipes 1988: 21–75). European Jews also see in their immediate environment the rapid growth of a Moslem population. At the same time that Europe builds new institutions and adopts a new flag, creating a brand new configuration in international relations, it is also experiencing a profound and drastic change in its demography (Reinharz and Shavit, 2010). Muslims are now nearly ten percent of the population in some parts of Europe and growing, a figure that, in a democracy, is not far from granting them a veto in a variety of issues touching on their interests. In London, Paris, and Berlin, mosques are being built and new communities are emerging, with organizational networks serving the youth, women, or the elderly, which constitute the backbone of political constituencies and participate in institutions aspiring to represent the Muslim population as a whole (for France see: Hajii and Marteau 2003).

One consequence of these developments is that Europe’s nation-states become, de facto if not de jure, more multicultural than in the past, that socio-cultural differences gain saliency and recognition, and that new groups become legitimate political actors. Many European Jews partially support his pattern. True, this development does allow Jews greater freedom to express themselves as a group and to openly voice claims significant to them, such as national commemorations of the Shoah or policies sympathetic to Israel. The problematic aspect of this


development for Jews is that the growing Muslim minority in Europe also becomes entitled to express freely, and sometimes vehemently, its indiscriminate identification with the Palestinian cause and its align-ment with the Arab world’s animosity toward Israel. This identifica-tion translates into a reaction to every single event taking place in the Middle East and incites what Taguieff (2004) describes as neo-anti-Semitism, which begins with hostility toward Israel and is generalized to all Jews.

Latin America: From Central to Peripheral Alterities

Latin America represents another case of the contemporary character of Jewish life, wherein unity and continuity are extraordinarily interwo-ven with the pluralization and fragmentation of identities, institutional forms, values, ascriptions, and self-ascriptions. Jewish communities are characterized by common grounds while also encompassing much diversity in their experiences. Overall, transnational conditions and a sense of belonging to Jewish peoplehood marked the experience of Latin American Jewish life from its very beginning, both in its flows of identification and in its organizational patterns.

Initial relations with external centers were colored by a dynamics simultaneously evincing strong transnational solidarity and the depen-dent or peripheral character of communities in the making (Senkman, 2008: 125–150; Bokser Liwerant, 2007: 355–386; Bokser Liwerant, 2008a: 81–108). This dual characteristic was sustained through suc-cessive re-definitions and changing formulations attempting to cope with objective conditions and behavioral consequences, in a pattern of solidarity and cohesion built on unequal terms of exchange (Schen-kolewski-Kroll, 1993: 191–201; Bokser Liwerant, 2005: 168–183; Sen-kman, 2008: 125–150).

The founding immigration waves as well as the future development of Jewish life in the region were marked by a constant attachment to various external Jewish centers, both real and imaginary, concrete and symbolic: institutions and communities in the Jewish world; countries of origin; the Zionist idea and the State of Israel, and other centers of contemporary Jewish life. Latin American Jews shaped their com-munal life, built their associational and institutional profile and their collective consciousness as part of a broader feeling of peoplehood and


a sense of belongingness, which expressed itself in inner differentiation and global political interactions.

Historical conditions in the late nineteenth and early twentieth cen-turies compelled the organized Jewish world to look for new places of residence. Colonization and immigration led collective efforts to chan-nel Jewish life to Latin America.2

Host societies offered different frameworks of normative search for homogeneity and tolerance towards ethnic minorities, which influenced integration processes. In Euro-America, multiethnic societies de facto tolerant towards minorities counterbalanced the primordial, territorial, and religiously homogeneous profile that the state aspired to achieve. By contrast, in Indo-America, the conception of national identity was based on an ethnic-religious cultural model—mestizaje—defined by fusion, assimilation, and the complete merging of Spanish-Catholic and indigenous populations. As a resource for identity-building and national integration, this model became a central criterion for evalu-ating the full incorporation of minorities.3 Both Argentina’s liberal-ism and Mexico’s mestizaje involved differing and common scenarios of national homogeneity. Generally speaking, Latin America’s search for national identities rejected diversity as a menace to its recurrent aspiration for national unity, which was understood as synonymous with national integration, and thus interpreted as part of the essential and repeated Latin American quest to enter modernity. Its distinc-tively modern character was built through a permanent if contested and ambivalent link to Western centers. The cultural program of

2 The Argentine and Mexican cases represent initiatives that resulted in a strong local communal life, while remaining connected and interacting with the transna-tional space, understood as territory and as social domain. The Jewish Colonization Association (ICA) of the Baron Maurice Hirsch in Argentina and international Jewish organizations in combination with the North American Jewish community of Texas, in the Mexican case, acted as external centers that fostered and supported Jewish life in these two Latin American countries (Avni, 1991; Bokser Liwerant, 1991).

3 Significant differences exist between Indo-America, with countries such as Mexico, Peru, Ecuador and Bolivia, among others, where limited immigration emphasized the indigenous highly hierarchical composition of their populations, and Euro-America, with countries such as Argentina and Uruguay, which attracted mass immigration in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. In both categories, we may draw further distinctions between, for example, the homogeneous mestizo population of Chile and Colombia, as opposed to Brazil, Cuba, and some Caribbean areas, which are complex multiracial societies with a pronounced Afro-American element (Eisenstadt, 1998: 245–265; Avni, 1999).


modernity, which entailed ‘promissory notes’ that sought to define in new terms the meaning of human agency and its role in building social and political orders, acted permanently as a critical orientation vis-à-vis the center(s) (Eisenstadt, 2000: 1–30; Wittrock, 2000: 31–60). Its principles of freedom, equality, and individual autonomy as the substratum of association and community belongingness, reflexivity as the basis of tolerance and pluralism, and the centrality of public spaces for citizenship building, confronted Latin Americans with common and distinctive ways of becoming modern. Western modernity acted as a project to follow and to challenge. Approaching it through the lens of multiple modernities may allow a better understanding of ambiva-lences and conflicts (Eisenstadt, 2000: 1–30).

The way Jews perceived and internalized the modernity program became part of the interplay between narratives and reality, between self-ascription and social representation. Within diverse national para-digms, Jewish life confronted the challenges of integration and conti-nuity through equally diverse patterns of collective organization and identification. A rich array of communal spaces, associations, and institutions developed in almost all the central fields of Jewish life. The challenge of building a Jewish community was the driving force behind the collective energy that sought to satisfy material, spiritual, and cultural needs, leading to self organization and the creation of institutions that became a source of identity. Continuity seemed to be the overall choice, and integration mediated by communal life was the strategy. The ideal of immigrant absorption and institution-building resonated widely with Latin American Jews.

Regions and countries of origins were defining organizational crite-ria, and Sephardic and Ashkenazi Jews developed their own spaces and institutions. Sephardim developed communities around their countries of origin, reflecting the fragmented character of this complex ethnic group, which was textured by different sub-groups: Sephardim from Turkey and the Balkan countries; Middle Eastern Jews from Aleppo, Damascus, Lebanon, and Palestine; North-Africans from Morocco and Egypt, and small groups of Sephardim from Italy and other countries in Europe (Bejarano, 2005: 9–26).

Eastern European Jews established ‘replicas’ of the European kehilot. Founded by secularists but seeking to answer communal and religious needs, these communities were cast in the mold of modern Diaspora nationalism and emphasized the secular collective dimension of Jew-ish life, its inner ideological struggles, organized political parties, and


social and cultural movements (Bokser Liwerant, 1991). The dominant pattern was a continuous drift toward secularization and politicization. Many ideological, cultural, and political movements were a vigorous presence: Communists and Zionists; Yiddishists and Bundists; liberals and assimilationists; secularists and traditionalists.

The communal domain, while prompting continuity, functioned also as the substitute for limited participation in the national life and as the basic framework for identity shaping. Thus, Latin America has been able to contribute one of the most powerful models of Jewish corporate experience: the ethno-cultural, ethno-national, secularized, cohesive Jewish kehillah. The model offers clarity in defining bound-aries, a richness of institutions, and unmistakable Jewish contents, coupled with significant acceptance of the surrounding society’s social norms and priorities. These were the shared patterns, though the host societies differed in their perceptions of the general role of ethnicity and social stratification.

A singular common trait of Jewish life developed in the region: close interaction between ethno-cultural identity and the national dimension, in the mold of Diasporic Jewish nationalism under progressive Zion-ist hegemony. The links between an ideological, political, and public center and a Jewish community conceived as Diaspora entailed pro-found ambiguities. The reliance of this relationship on the wider idea of a national project for the renewal of Jewish life sparked recurrent ambivalences. On the ideological and organizational planes, Zionism worked toward the enhancement of a one-center-model while, simul-taneously, tacitly affirming Diaspora existence. Awareness of the cen-trality of the State of Israel did not cause the Zionist dream ‘to come true’ but, in fact, perpetuated activities and obligations in the life of the community. Per Gideon Shimoni’s conceptual differentiation, a ‘sub-stantive centrality’ of Zionism and Israel developed in Latin America, and in time became circumstantial (Shimoni, 1995: 11–36).

Latin America’s communities are undergoing radical changes. Today’s changing profile reflect both national/regional transforma-tions as well as Jewish transnational trends. Economic liberalization and democratization have brought pluralism and multiculturalism to the forefront of societies while a perverse dynamics has developed, resulting in the persistent pairing of democracy building and eco-nomic crisis. The dynamics of globalization, while fostering political change, brought about an overall decline in the standard of living: low incomes, recession, unemployment, under-employment, and the


growth of an unofficial informal economy. Close to half the popula-tion of Latin America now lives below the poverty level. The top five percent enjoy 25% of the total national income, while the bottom 30% receives less than 8% (Kliksberg, 2002).

The Jewish communities of the continent have certainly felt the impact of this crisis. Its scope and intensity varies according to the size of the middle class, the place of the community in the social and national arenas, and the ability of groups and leaders, both national and communal, to maneuver in each country.4 The impact of the crises has led to changes in the role and the performance of their organized frameworks, which have increasingly adopted the profile of NGOs oriented to the provision of welfare and social policies.

Globalization and democratization processes have brought Jews a new visibility in the national and public spheres. The prevailing con-cepts of national identity have been redefined to expand receptivity to multiple identities. Simultaneously, identity politics and multicul-turalism have reinforced the revival of collective identities, expressed mainly in an essentialist indigenous code that has potential exclusion effects on other minorities, certainly on Jews. Recognition and redis-tribution claims enhance these effects even further.

Amid the ambivalences of transitional processes, however, cultural diversity has opened up a discussion on the nexus of culture, soci-ety and politics through which minorities gained legitimacy. Thus, in Argentina, pluralistic identity politics have accepted the notion of an ethno-national and cultural collectivity together with full assimilation into the civic nation in construction. While the Jews’ transnational connections with Israel and with the Jewish world have gained new visibility and legitimacy, a new discourse fits the oxymoronic logic of ‘assimilated ethnicity’ (Anagnostou, 2003: 279–328). Jews take an interest in democratic political culture and in becoming full citizens in order to participate in the public sphere, but maintain their ethnic difference. This interest does not imply belief in the global desirability of individual assimilation, but concern with the civic commonality; its

4 In Argentina, Jews who had typically belonged to the middle class in a soci-ety where the middle class was dominant experienced severe downward mobility, resulting in an unprecedented “new poverty” (Kliksberg, 2002) that had far-reaching impact on communal life, weakening its institutional order. In Mexico, the majority of Jews belong to the upper and middle classes, which together constitute less than 10% of the general population, but the previous relative consequences of the region’s economic trajectory have recently been reverted.


limits are related to the persistence of a homogeneous model of the “Argentine Nation” in important sectors of the society.

In Mexico, the transition to democracy brought legitimacy to com-munal collective identity, seen and understood mainly in religious and socio-economic terms. Simultaneously, Jewish communities, related in the national imaginary mainly to Israel, have been growingly perceived as part of a Jewish transnational world whose networks and potential support have been clearly recognized. These external nexus gained recognition during the process of rapprochement with the Northern neighbor, and were clearly set in motion during negotiations on the Free Trade Agreement in the late 1980s, and have since intensified. In Argentina, these became evident in inner social support during the economic crises, and in external political support for demands for jus-tice associated with the two terrorist attacks at the Israeli embassy in 1992 and at the AMIA communal building in 1994.

Profound changes in external conditions and inner associational variations are reflected in the changing identity patterns of Latin American Jews. A complex dynamics of individualization and affirma-tion of collective belongingness portrays a diversified world of iden-tities, partly fragmented and fluid, partly hard-cored and with well defined borders.

Among the changes that have taken place, we may point to the rise of religion as part of identity-formation processes and of orga-nized community life. The emerging pattern may be seen in different ways: as part of changing trends in the Jewish world and also of the general relevance that religion has gained as a result of the so-called ‘de-privatization’ (Casanova, 1994). It may also be described as disap-pointment with the secular and political alternatives available, but also as questioning the basic paradigm of peaceful integration into the local national-civic mainstream of being equal while preserving considerable latitude for communal Jewish autonomy. Thus, again, the question: is the religious revival a process whereby the local community joins a transnational community of believers led by a superior authority usu-ally located in the U.S. or in Israel, as noted, or is it rather directed from within the local community?

Historically, religion played a minor role in what were basically secular communities. This trend was reinforced by the scarcity of religious functionaries, dating back to the earliest days of Latin Ameri-can Jewry (Elazar, 1989). In the 1960s, the Conservative movement began to spread to South America and provided the first model of a


religious institution not brought over from Europe but ‘imported’ from the United States. As the Conservative movement adjusted to local conditions, the synagogue began to play a more prominent role, both in community life and in the society in general. The Conservative movement has mobilized thousands of otherwise non-affiliated Jews, bringing them to active participation in Jewish institutions and reli-gious life.5

In recent years, in tandem with changing trends in world Jewish life, ultra-Orthodox groups have formed new religious congregations. Today, the spread of the Chabad movement and the establishment of Chabad centers in both small and large well-established communi-ties is striking. Close to one hundred rabbis are currently working in more than fifty institutions. The growing presence of Mizrahi commu-nities, which outnumber the Ashkenazi sectors in Mexico, Venezuela, and Panama, also explains the expanding influence of Shas. Extreme religious factions and strategies of self-segregation are still marginal to Jewish life as a whole in the continent and, as in other regions of the Jewish world, intermediate categories that neutralize polarization prevail.

The interplay between the historical ethnic components of iden-tity and the new religious flows has different behavioral manifestations throughout the region. Thus, South American communities epitomize the paradigm of Chabad’s growth due to changing socio-economic and cultural conditions. Religious developments answered the need for reconstituting the social fabric and also the noted need for cultural and spiritual transformation.

The changes analyzed so far have affected the centrality of Israel. While their precise direction is still unclear, they may be reformulated in terms of the changing meanings of Israel’s centrality as well as in terms of the pluralization of centers. Indeed, Israel’s actual place is not necessarily mediated by the classic Zionist paradigm(s). It bears emphasis, though, that a search for new types of interactions is under way, altogether replacing the mediation that organized Zionism used

5 Proof of the lack of religious leadership to which Elazar refers, and of the impor-tance of such leadership to religious development, is the success of Rabbi Marshall Meyer. Rabbi Meyer assumed the task of training a new rabbinical leadership, and he established the Seminario Rabínico Lationamericano in Argentina. Today its gradu-ates serve throughout Latin America and beyond. Their presence in communities in the United States is not only due to the lack of opportunities in local communities, but also reflects the new phenomenon of regional migration.


to offer through institutions and individual leaders. The changing role and meaning of Israel is also evident in its importance to different age groups. Thus, while among members of the Mexican Jewish commu-nity aged 70 and over, 97% declared that Israel is of utmost impor-tance, in the 18–29 age group the proportion reporting such feelings declines to 77%. These figures are still much higher than those in other communities in the region, such as Argentina, where this per-centage stands at 57% ( Jmelnizky and Erdei, 2005).

The impact of Israel’s image in public opinion, which has been influenced by ideologies dominant in the region represented mainly by anti-imperialist and anti-neo-liberal trends, must also be taken into account. Negative images intertwined with old and new stereotypes and prejudices are recovered and constructed in the media discourse, steadily nourishing a process of symbolic violence. Notwithstanding, Latin America still shows, relative to the population, the highest rate of youth participation in regular learning trips to Israel, recently expanded through the government-JAFI initiatives of Taglit and Masa.

Besides serving as a sovereign and creative cultural center, Israel has functioned for Latin American Jews as a vital space for those in need. Necessity and ideology interact at present as they have since the dawn of the Jewish state. Migration waves and their chosen destination point to this dynamics.6

Simultaneously, the central role of Zionism and Israel in the educa-tion system has gone through radical changes. The historical, politi-cal, and ideological currents that led to the original differentiation of schools have been replaced by more defining criteria, mainly com-munitarian and religious. These criteria now dominate the dynamics of educational development, as measured by the constant and impres-sive growth of the student population in religious and ultra Orthodox schools.

6 For Argentine Jews, Israel became a central destination. Today, however, when asked about their country of preference in case of emigration, 27% chose Spain and only 24% opted for Israel, followed by 14% that pointed to the U.S. The emigra-tion trend among Mexican Jews in terms of preferences shows a reduction of Israel’s importance, even though 84% have visited it at least once (CCIM, 2006). Among Jews in Caracas asked in 1998–1999 (before the recent dramatic change of regime) about their moves facing a crisis, 14% stated they would go to Israel, the same percentage would prefer the U.S., 9% would choose another country, and yet 63% would remain in Venezuela (DellaPergola, 2003). Overall, 29% felt very close to Israel, 53% close, 11% indifferent, and 5% distant or very distant. These data did not necessarily predict what actually happened under the stringency of the more recent political mutations.


From the perspective of identity diversification, new referents have gained a meaningful role. As identity focus, the Shoah has become increasingly relevant. Holocaust memory is not only the ghost that inhabits fortresses, in the terms of Zygmunt Bauman’s postmodern discourse, but also a resource for the search after common values that will foster integration. It is a singular and specific memory that aspires to establish itself in those who bear it as a code of inclusion and not of exclusion, of membership and not of foreignness, as the sign of bind-ing historical experiences of repression and impunity (Bokser Liwer-ant, 2005: 168–183; Goldstein, 2006: 41–64). Thus, in the course of democratization processes in Argentina, the Jews’ public political action aiming to bring about serious investigation of the 1992 and 1994 terrorist attacks became intertwined with the fight against the impunity enjoyed by the former military regime. Particularistic Jew-ish values essentially connected with the Shoah experience, such as mourning and memory, became a battle cry in Argentine society. For Jews in Argentina, memory became an identity paradigm. Differing from the Israeli-centered identification pattern, one may wonder if current narratives, in which the present is subdued by the moment of destruction, express an ‘unexplainable uneasiness’ with state power and are also more consonant with postmodernist trends (Bokser Liwer-ant, 2006: 79–102; Bokser Liwerant, 2007: 355–386).

The strength of the memory axis for Jewish identity may also be seen in its dynamics of contest with Israel as identification focus. The memory axis as a transnational dimension, however, has also gained unprecedented centrality within Israel, thus cautioning against hasty conclusions about differentiated or alternative poles.

This widening of identification options among Latin American Jews requires an expanded focus, able to encompass the social and geopolit-ical spectrum of individual and collective life that has extended beyond the region. Although Latin American Jewry has its origins in large scale immigration, during recent decades migration has tended to flow outwards, from Latin America mostly to the United States, Israel, and, to a lesser extent, Western Europe (mainly Spain), and Canada.

Migratory trends reveal a demographic profile characteristic of ongoing global as well as regional and local patterns. In the past thirty years, the number of Jews in Latin America has dropped from 514,000 in the 1970s to the current 394,000. Whereas violence and authori-tarianism were determinants of regional and international emigration and political exile in the Southern Cone in the 1970s, a decade later,


re-democratization was a pull factor for Jewish exiles to return to their homeland. But during the late 1980s and early 1990s, economic cri-ses and/or security problems moved Jews into a global international migration trend. Since the 1990s, this tendency has grown. The latest phases of accelerated globalization processes have shown a significant increase in the number of Latin American migrants, and new centers of relocated communal life (Bokser Liwerant, DellaPergola and Senk-man, 2009).

Sharing trends of the changing map of dispersion with other Jewries while also exhibiting their specificity, Latin American Jews have been exposed to the impact of worldwide migration crises driven by macro-level political and economical forces. Migration crises provoked the outward relocation of people pushed by structural transformations as well as inward movements shaped by choices of destination grounded on individual/familial options for better economic and life chances considerations (Bokser Liwerant, DellaPergola and Senkman, 2009; Van Hear, 1998). From an overall historical perspective, then, the transnational dimension of Latin American Jewry may be seen as a key condition for approaching its past as an ethno-national Diaspora and its present as a community marked by migration patterns and by relocation in new settings.

Transnational trends influence the restructuring of life both within the region and in the new centers (Ben-Rafael, Sternberg, Bokser Liwerant and Gorny, 2009). Narratives and parameters of Jewish iden-tities unfold in a context of identity revival. Novel spatial interactions have affected the shaping of institutions, social relationships, and iden-tities, and cultural/geographical identity moments of the transnational world can be traced in Latin American Jews in four continents (Bokser Liwerant, DellaPergola and Senkman, 2009). Processes of reconsti-tution of identities under the impact of relocation, migration, dual residency, the decline of nation-state imaginaries and the emergence of new ones take place. Reconstitution of institutional communal life is also at stake.

Jewish migration involving Latin American countries has not been exclusively uni-directional. Return migration, repeated and circular migration, and bi-local migrants contribute to the diffusion of trans-national networks and identities, reflecting essential links with glo-balization processes. The changing modes and strategies of collective organization among the Jewish migrants who aim to retain cultural traits related to the community of origins and tend to integrate into the


communal fabric of the new countries of residence both express and shape the redefinition of flows of identities. Consider the paradigm that obtains in Florida or California. On one level, the newcomers seek to strengthen their relationship with the Jewish world, both the known and the new one. On another level, an old-new dynamics unfolds in the affirmation of their national-Latin American-Jewish belongingness to the Latino world, which also opens doors to the U.S. Latino world. The complex awareness of convergences and divergences between Latin American Jews and the Jewish world on the one hand, and the Latino non-Jewish world on the other, has recurrently been referred to as a new transnational consciousness.

Homeland and the elected new places of residence, then, widen the scope of Jewish life and of reciprocal influence. The current changes may shed light on the suggested reading of current Jewish history as the experience of the frontier, understood as a space of accommoda-tion and confrontation; the frontier not as a periphery but as a concep-tual and physical space where groups in motion meet, confront, alter, destroy and build (Gilman, 1999: 1–25; Gilman, 2003). In other terms, the expansion and renewal of the frontier experience.

New interactions have evolved between ethnicity, religion, and national belongingness. While, for instance, sub-ethnicity belonging-ness as a criterion of organization has not played a determinant role among Mexican or Venezuelan Jewish immigrants at their arrival, it has recovered a meaningful place as a subsidiary-interactive attribute of religiosity. Orthodoxy has thus been the defining element in the establishment of a Halebi community in San Diego (Bokser Liwer-ant, DellaPergola and Senkman, 2009). In the course of transnational migrations, religion constitutes a key field for the development of new discourses, practices, and spatial scales, when “trans-migrants” rede-fine old subjectivities and identities and build new ones (Vertovec, 1999: 1–20; Vazquez, 2008: 151–184).

The reconfiguration of old and new transnational communities of Latin American Jews in the region and abroad thus simultaneously reflects and shapes global Jewish existence. The Sephardization of Latin American Jewish communities and their growing religiosity are part of these trends, endowing the role and place of Israel with new meanings.

Changing relations between these referents are also to be seen in the communities of origin, on which migration has certainly had a substantive quantitative and qualitative impact. It is not only a matter


of declining numbers or dwindling communities but also of the selec-tive socio-economic, demographic, and ethnic impact of those who have left. Note that globalization has had an impact not only on the deterioration of the region’s Jews economic standing but also on seg-ments of the higher middle classes that have entered the most devel-oped and transnational sectors of finance, services, high tech, finance, etc. Multilocalism is ubiquitous in these sectors. The changing profile of the transnational moment points to a further diversification and pluralization of life, to a “world of identities”.

Epilogue: Towards Unity and Diversity?

Our analysis focused on European and Latin American Jewries from the perspective of the transnational and spatial dimensions that condi-tion their existence. A multifarious picture of specificity and diversity emerged. These two dimensions enabled us to trace the contours of a Jewish world marked by convergences and divergences, shared fea-tures, and singularities.

Globalization processes, past patterns of Diaspora transnational conditions, and new migratory trends, have enhanced the apparent contradictory processes of assimilation of Diasporas and ethnicitiza-tion (Appadurai, 1990: 1–24). Global spaces give a new density to the closed and the specific, the characteristic and the particular, and encourage the building of collective identities on institutional bases, spaces, and frameworks radically different from those known in social theory.

In today’s Jewish world, the abandonment of historical criteria of belongingness coexist with the revitalization of Jewish life. On the one hand are declining rates of ethno-religious marriages and of predomi-nantly Jewish social networks, and declining percentages of Jews in the total population. On the other hand is a sustained ongoing effort to promote what the organized Jewish community calls ‘continuity’ and ‘renaissance’. It is indeed undeniable that, at least so far, Klal Yisrael has held together. Many Jews throughout the world do attach impor-tance to their Jewishness and, despite the many variations, inhabit a wide shared space of identity.

In actual fact, all formulations still widely draw their symbols and myths from the same trove of customs and narratives, and distinguish themselves from one another mainly by the degree of their interest


in the ancestral legacies and by their specific interpretations of them. This means that every (or nearly every) formulation continues to be recognizable to all.

Israel has developed a national Judaism conditioned and shaped by its own sociological reality, defined by Jewish majority and state sovereignty. A new Hebrew culture and Jewish multiculturalism devel-oped hand in hand, and are reflected in the autonomous Jewish pub-lic sphere. Secularism and religious revival take place in the national and transnational dimensions. Countervailing the tensions derived from inner diversification are identification processes nourished by the external conflict. North American Jewry finds its main parameters in the Americanness from which Jewishness is defined and reshaped as a primordial identity. Its main paradigm of ethnic-religious com-munity is shaped through a recognized inner diversity of flows, with a permanent tension prevailing between growing levels of assimila-tion and collective affirmation. The legitimacy and place of the Jewish community as a vital component of the national scene enhance the collective presence in the public sphere, where its solidarity/attach-ment to Israel is manifested. Its congregational and religious structural profile points to a well-organized Jewish life coexisting with a loose communal system.

Europe represents a plurality of national, cultural, and linguistic identities that define a reality of different settings and common grounds. The multicultural continental horizon implies new and serious risks to the pluralism resulting from migration movements and from a growing Islamic presence. Jewish collective identity finds its limits when facing the public sphere. European Jewry experiences inner diversity, but its main characteristic is a pattern combining secularism, individualism, and cultural ethnicity. The affirmation of collective ethno-religious identity has acquired new forms of private/public expression. Anti-Semitism and hostility towards Israel have posed new challenges to organized Jewish life and to intellectual voices.

Latin American Jews also represent a reality of unity and continuity interwoven with a pluralization of identities and institutional forms. Historically built as ethno-national communities with a secular, insti-tutionalized Judaism, they are today experiencing a religious revival and new cultural flows. Community organizations provide the realm wherein identity flows find expression and continuity is guaranteed. Democracy has brought new public visibility though its presence in


the public sphere is still limited. Further identity diversification and relocation in Jewish life resulted from migration waves.

Thus, this global and transnational world has developed and main-tained a consciousness of belonging to one Jewish world despite its inner diversity. Awareness of Klal Yisrael and a sense of peoplehood are expressed in strong solidarity with the Jewish world as a whole. Shared religious and historical symbols and historical awareness cross the different spatial realities, their changing meanings notwithstand-ing. Every or nearly every formulation still accepts that, in various ways and under different congregational umbrellas, membership in the Jewish people implies accepting some basic requirements, includ-ing religious aspects that cannot be completely ignored or replaced by the social dimension, be it community, peoplehood, or nationhood. These common denominators, we contend, somehow counterbalance the tensions that prevail between the three core elements, notwith-standing the transformations that Jewry has undergone during the last centuries.

Equally representative of convergences in the Jewish world is the memory of the Shoah, which has become a polyvalent component of Jewish life. The Shoah embraces historical consciousness and acts as a meaningful nexus between past and present, stating a claim for uni-versal integration and identification as well as for the singularity and uniqueness of the Jewish path. The significance of the identification/symbiosis with Israel, and less so with other Jewish communities, is also worth noting. National, regional and global dimensions interact in different patterns, raising the question of the role and place of a/the center. In this regard, as in other questions, the Jewish collective faces new challenges that could jeopardize its unity.

The issue of one or several centers is vital. The one-center model emerged with the Zionist project. The State of Israel did indeed become the center and succeeded in becoming home to the largest Jewish community, partly as a result of its reliance on this normative claim. The current existential collective reality of a sovereign state vis-à-vis voluntary societies has led to a search for new ways and terms for defining interdependency in the Jewish world. Globalization processes and their multidimensional nature, together with increasing degrees of complexity, lead to a pluralization of centers. Obviously, objective factors mix with aspirations and self-ascriptions, though transnational trends push to redefine the classical binary model of center-periphery.


Decentralization and the emergence of social spaces that supersede particularistic national places have impacted the Jewish world too.

In light of the differentiated objective and subjective perceptions of centrality, it bears emphasis that European Jewry has viewed itself and has been studied as a ‘different Jewry’ (Ben-Rafael, 2002). Such perceptions imply the existence of another reality that operates as a frame of reference, a role usually played by North American Jewry in the Diaspora context and by Israel in the Klal Ysrael context. Today, the question of whether becoming a third pillar is indeed a feasible option.

Latin American Jewry’s ascription has also been labeled as “differ-ent,” again relating to Israel and to the U.S. as centers of reference. Europe had been foundational for Latin America in the past, both generally and specifically for Jewish life. The Latin American aware-ness of difference, however, is expressed in terms of singularity rather than in terms of a center consciousness, whether past or present, con-trary to the European aspiration-vision of becoming a center, not to say a third pillar. We may therefore distinguish degrees of otherness, central or peripheral alterities that may change according to the spe-cific position in space and time.

Disputes about predominance intertwine with questions as to what best represents Jewishness today—religious, ethnic, or intellectual element/s, or rather the sovereignty dimension. Religion, as noted, became a central axis, both in the definition of borders and in shap-ing the foundations of cohesion. Thus, the place of religion and its interaction with the ethno-national and ethno-cultural profiles of Diaspora existence becomes a contested focus. Related to territories and borders—physical, social and cultural—religion is one of the main actors in the unbinding of culture from its traditional referents and boundaries and its re-attachment in new space-time configurations. The dialectic of de-territorialization (and re-territorialization) entails the loss of the natural relation of culture to geographical and social territories, but also leaves room for the territorial relocation of old and new symbolic productions.

Generally, local cultures—and in our case spatial configurations—become relativized in the encounter between cultural units that had previously been relatively segregated. In turn, locality is reaffirmed in the form of radical responses that often use the tools of globaliza-tion. Religion plays a major role in the “particularistic revitalization of a tradition in the face of relativization” because, along with ethnic-


ity (and nationalism), it is central in the creation/maintenance of the inter-subjective world where meaning, identity, a sense of place, and belongingness emerge (Beyer, 1998: 79–94).

One may therefore ask how, in these new scenarios, ultra-Orthodox Jewish movements such as Chabad and Shas, which aim to enhance a transnational religious consciousness of Diaspora, challenge/coexist with a Zionist ethno-national attachment centered in Israel. Both these options, moreover, share the space with a growingly diversified range of identity options. Other dilemmas are at stake when considering the density and intricacy of the Jewish world and its quest for unity in diversity. Among them are dilemmas related to openness and to the influence of the external milieu and the potential weakening of Jewish cohesion, all closely tied to the dynamics of exclusion vis-à-vis belong-ingness to the non-Jewish world.

Thus, pluralism leads to a need for mechanisms that will regulate differences and enable dissent. In a differentiated culture, we will prob-ably need to develop ways of approaching multicultural environments while developing familial and/or neighborly relations wherein insti-tutional rules, sites, and arrangements strengthen convergences and provide venues for the fostering of life patterns involving both identity and difference.

NOTES ON THE CONTRIBUTORS

Eliezer Ben-Rafael is Emeritus Professor of Sociology, University of Tel Aviv. His main research interests focus on the sociology of Juda-ism, immigration, ethnicity, multiculturalism and language. Professor Ben Rafael is also a preeminent researcher on Kibbutzim and on the Russian Jewish Diaspora in Israel, Germany and the USA. He is co-founder and co-director of the Klal Yisrael Project.

Pierre Birnbaum has been teaching as Professor of political sociology at the Sorbonne. He published several books on the theory of the State and on the relations between Jews and the State. Among them ‘Sociology of the State’ (with B. Badie, Chicago U. Press), ‘The Idea of France’ (Farrer, Strauss and Giroux), ‘The Jews of the Republic’ and more recently, ‘Geography of Hope’ (both published by Stanford U. Press).

Y. Michal Bodemann is Professor of Sociology at the University of Toronto. He has been Visiting Professor at the Free University Ber-lin, the Humboldt University Berlin, the University of Potsdam and the Universities of Haifa and Tel Aviv. His main research foci are on Classical Sociological Theory, German-Jewish Relations and Holo-caust Remembrance. He also serves as the Director of the European Institute of the University of Toronto in Berlin.

Micha Brumlik is an international well know educationist and social scientist, lecturing at the Johann Wolfgang Goethe University in Frankfurt am Main. From 2000–2005, Professor Brumlik served as the director of the Fritz Bauer Institute Frankfurt, a Research and Documentary Centre on History and Impacts of the Holocaust. His main foci of research are moral socialization, philosophy of education and Jewish cultural and religious philosophy.

Denis Charbit is a Senior Lecturer of Political Science at the Open Uni-versity of Israel, Raanana since 2002. He also teaches French culture at Tel-Aviv University and Bar-Ilan University. His fields of research are contemporary French intellectual history, Israeli politics and Zio-nist thought.

336 notes on the contributors

Sergio DellaPergola is the former Chairman and Professor of Population Studies at the Hebrew University’s A. Harman Institute of Contempo-rary Jewry, where he is the incumbent of the Shlomo Argov Chair in Israel-Diaspora Relations. He has published numerous books and over one hundred papers on historical demography, international migra-tion, the family, Jewish identity, and population projections in Israel and in the Diaspora.

Lars Dencik is Professor of Social Psychology at Roskilde University, Denmark, doing research on welfare, family and social development of children in modern societies. Aside this, he is conducting studies on identity processes and especially Jewish life in modern societies such as Sweden. Professor Dencik is also member of the Academic Committee of Paideia, the European Institute for Jewish Studies in Stockholm.

Thomas Gergely is Professor of Communication at the Université Libre de Bruxelles. He was the head of the department and is now the Director of the Institute Martin Buber in Jewish Studies in the same University. He has published in the areas of didactic linguistics and the Jewish culture of memory. He is also Associate Professor at the Institute for the Study of Religions and Secularism at the Free Uni-versity of Brussels.

Olaf Glöckner is Historian and Project Assistant at the Moses Men-delssohn Centre of European Jewish Studies in Potsdam. He is spe-cialized in contemporary Russian Jewish Immigration to Israel and Germany and in European Jewish Developments after 1989.

Yosef Gorny is the Head of the Institute for the Study of Jewish Press and Communications at Tel Aviv University. His publications in Hebrew and in English do mainly deal with the Jewish national movement in its Zionist and anti-Zionist expressions, like the Labor movement Zionism in Palestine, the non-Zionist Dubnowist and anti-Zionist Bundist ideologies. His recent research deals, among others, with the Jewish press during World War II. Yosef Gorny is also Co-founder of “Klal Yisrael”.

Vladimir Zeev Khanin is an expert on FSU politics, Russian Jewish poli-tics and society in Israel and the Diaspora. He lectures Political Stud-ies at Bar-Ilan University and is a Visiting Professor in Israeli Politics

notes on the contributors 337

at the Moscow State University, Russia. His publications deal mainly with Russian Jews, Israel, East European, Jewish and African societ-ies. Currently, he is also the Chief Scientist of the Israeli Ministry of Immigrant Absorption.

András Kovács, sociologist, is Professor at the Nationalism Studies/Jewish Studies program at the Central European University (CEU) in Budapest. He is also a Senior Researcher at the Institute for Eth-nic and Minority Studies at the Hungarian Academy of Sciences. He has published widely on Jewish identity and anti-Semitism in post-war Hungary, on memory and identity, on socio-economic attitudes and political choice.

Antony Lerman was the Director of the Institute for Jewish Policy Research in London from 1996 to 1999 and from 2006 to 2009. From 1999 to 2006 he was founding Chief Executive of Hanadiv Chari-table Foundation (now the Rothschild Foundation Europe). He is cur-rently an Honorary Fellow at the Parkes Centre at the University of Southampton.

Judit Bokser Liwerant is professor of Political and Social Sciences and Head of the Graduate School in Political and Social Sciences at the National Autonomous University of Mexico. She is a member of the Mexican Academy of Sciences and has published extensively on Latin American Jewry and Zionsim, multiculturalism, and collective iden-tities. She also heads the Academic Committee of the Universidad Hebraica.

David Ohana teaches European History, Zionism, Israeli Identity and Mediterranean Culture at the Ben Gurion University of the Negev, and he is a Senior Researcher at the Ben Gurion Research Institute at Sede Boker. Professor Ohana was the founder and the first Academic Director of the “Forum for Mediterranean Cultures” at the Van Leer Jerusalem Institute.

Raanan Rein is the Sourasky Professor of Latin American and Spanish History at Tel Aviv University and the Director of its S. Daniel Abra-ham Center for International and Regional Studies. His numerous books focusing on South America and Spain are published in English, Spanish and Hebrew. http://www.tau.ac.il/~raanan/

338 notes on the contributors

Ofer Schiff is a Senior Lecturer at the Ben-Gurion Research Institute, where he served as Director from 2001 to 2004. Among his topics, the most prominent are studies on American-Jewish copings with the Holocaust and comparative research on Israeli and American-Jewish Zionist advocacies. His most recent book, “The Defeated Zionist, Abba Hillel Silver and his Attempt to Transcend Jewish Nationalism”, was published in March 2010.

Julius H. Schoeps is Emeritus Professor for German-Jewish History at the University of Potsdam, where he lectured from 1991–2007. He is the Director of the Moses Mendelssohn Centre of European Jew-ish Studies in Potsdam. He has specialized in German-Jewish history and Zionism, and since the 1990ies also in Migration Research (Rus-sian Jews to Germany), modern anti-Semitism and Art Looting during Nazi Rule in Germany and Europe.

Gabriel Sheffer is Professor at the Political Science Department of the Hebrew University in Jerusalem. His main research foci are on Israeli politics, ethnic politics and ethno-national Diasporas, including the Jewish Diaspora, and civil-military relations.

Shmuel Trigano is Professor for Sociology of Religion and Politics at the Paris University. He was the founding director of the College of Jew-ish Studies at the Alliance Israélite Universelle (AIU) in 1986. He is also the founding director of “Pardès”, a European Journal of Jewish Studies and Culture, and of “Controverses”, Journal of Ideas. In 2001, Professor Trigano founded a Research Centre devoted to the analysis of contemporary anti-Semitism.

Raphael Vago is a Senior Lecturer at the Department of History, Tel Aviv University. His main topics of teaching and research are Mod-ern History of Central and Eastern Europe, Modern anti-Semitism, Holocaust and Holocaust Denial, nationalism, minorities, ethnicity and human rights, European Integration and Minorities in the new Europe. He is a member of the International Commission of Histori-ans on the Holocaust in Romania.

Martina Weisz studied Political Science and International Relations at the Universidad Nacional de Rosario, Argentina. She holds an M.A.

notes on the contributors 339

in International Relations from the Hebrew University of Jerusalem, Israel, and is currently writing her PhD dissertation at the same Uni-versity. She is a Research Coordinator at the Vidal Sassoon Interna-tional Center for the Study of anti-Semitism.

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MAIN INDEX

Al-Andalus 112, 148Albania 25Alcorcón 119Alijhah 32, 48, 54, 67–69, 82, 71, 75,

243, 309–310Am Yisrael 123, 151American Jewish Committee (AJC) xi,

50, 191American Joint Distribution Committee

( JDC) xiAmsterdam 28Ancien Régime 298anti-Semitism xiv, xvii, 13, 36, 38–39,

41, 78, 104, 106–107, 109–111, 140, 142–144, 151–152, 156, 184–186, 189, 192–194, 196–197, 201, 203, 205–209, 214–216, 219, 222, 227–244, 247–249, 252–254, 256–258, 260, 262–263, 265–267, 296–297, 315, 330, 337–339

Antwerp 28Archduchy Brunswick 91Argentina 109, 183, 319, 322–323,

325–326, 339Arrow Cross Movement 210Association of Jewish Organizations and

Communities (Va’ad) 87Association of Jewish Students

(UEJF) 244Auschwitz xi–xii, xvi, 113, 165,

170–171, 173, 175, 181, 198, 235Austria 6, 10, 18, 65, 91, 99–100,

180–181, 218, 259

Babylonian Talmud 128 n. 13, 132Barcelona 109, 119, 283Barcelona Conference 283Belarus 10, 18, 63–64, 182Belgium 6, 10, 13, 27, 312–313Berlin ix, xiii–xiv, 10, 38, 86–87, 95,

134, 159, 215, 299, 316–317, 335Bosnia Herzegovina 25Braunschweig 94Brussels xvi, 163–164, 189, 316Budapest xi, 65, 195, 215, 218, 337Bukhara 67Bukovina 212Bulgaria 210

Canada xiii, 9, 64, 81, 179, 181, 186, 326

Caracas 325Cartoon Crisis xCentral Conference of American Rabbis

(CCAR) 56Chabad Lubawitsch 193, 303, 314,

316, 324, 333Clash of Civilizations xCold War ix, 20, 51, 88, 190, 218,

258, 283, 312Commonwealth of Independent States

(CIS) 65Confederation of Jewish Religious

Organizations and Communities of Russia (FEROOR) 83

Consistoire for the Religious Affairs 222

Córdoba 115Core Jewish Population 16, 18, 27Croatia 171, 210–211, 213Cyprus 33Czech Republic 209, 218, 313Czechoslovakia 6, 208, 216, 248–249

Denmark 127, 139Dina de-malkhuta dina 147, 149Dniepropetrovsk 28Dreyfus Affair 222, 232

East Berlin xiEastern Bloc ix, xi, xvii, 312El Ejido 115England xi, xiii, 160–161, 166Enlarged Jewish Population 16, 18Estonia 65European Council of Jewish

Communities (ECJC) 85–86, 191European Jewish Congress (EJC) xiv,

85, 152, 186, 190European Union ix, 3, 11, 20, 32–33,

37, 65, 104–105, 112, 165, 190, 252, 283–284, 296, 312–313

Extended Jewish Population 16, 64–65, 70, 72–73

Fedayin 225Finland 25

364 main index

Former Soviet Union (FSU) xi, 11, 25, 63, 67–68, 71–72, 88, 184, 207

France xi, xiii, xvii, 6, 9–10, 13, 27, 38–39, 42, 91, 94–95, 97, 100, 111, 136, 160–168, 171, 175, 180–181, 185–186, 190, 193, 221–229, 231, 233–237, 239–244, 253, 317

Frankfurt am Main xv, 335Frankfurter Philanthropin School 96

Gaza Strip 52, 103, 226, 242, 244Germany xi, xiii, xvi, 6, 10, 13, 21,

24, 27, 29, 40, 43, 65, 81, 86, 98–99, 111, 136–137, 166, 168, 170–171, 175, 180–184, 186, 190, 193, 205, 209, 213, 218, 253–254, 257, 259–260, 281, 313, 335–336, 338

Gibraltar x, 19, 25Girona 115Gothenburg xvi, 133Great Britain 63, 91Greece 269–270, 280–282, 289Gulf War xvi, 192, 295–296

Halberstadt 92Hamas 103, 229Helmsted 94Hesed 83Holocaust xi–xii, 37, 39, 45, 56, 78,

87, 98, 113–115, 134, 137, 139, 145, 152, 160, 165, 167, 172, 175, 180–181, 186, 198, 208–209, 211–216, 222–225, 227, 233, 237–239, 243–244, 252, 326, 335, 338

Holocaust Denial 209, 211, 215–216, 225, 237–238

Holocaust Research Institute (CDJC) 224

Huesca 115Human Development Index (HDI)

20Hungary xiii, xvii, 6, 10, 13, 18, 27,

210–211, 218, 247–250, 252–253, 255, 257, 260–261, 263–265, 267, 313, 337

Institute for Jewish Policy Research ( JPR) 191, 337

Institute of Jewish Affairs (IJA) 191International Task Force for Holocaust

Education 216

Intifada xvi, 51, 115, 192, 224, 226, 234, 237, 244–245, 284, 296

Ireland 190Iron Curtain xii, 189, 215, 218Islamophobia 104, 106, 117, 241Israel xiii, xviii, 4, 6, 9–12, 16, 29, 32,

36, 38–41, 43–59, 63–64, 66–69, 74, 78–81, 84, 86–89, 98–100, 103–104, 110–111, 125, 134, 144, 151–152, 154–157, 160, 164–179, 180–181, 183, 185–186, 194, 196–198, 221, 224–227, 229–234, 236–237, 239–240, 242–245, 271–277, 279–286, 288, 290, 292, 295–298, 300–304, 307–311, 313–318, 321–326, 328, 330–333

Istanboul 28Italy 6, 9–10, 13, 27, 38, 111, 113,

166, 183, 270, 281, 313, 320

Javne 125JDC’s International Centre for

Community Development (Survey) 196

Jerusalem xvi, 49, 55, 98, 125, 214, 216, 274, 279–280, 316

Jewish Agency for Israel ( JAFI) 193, 325

Jewish Community Centers ( JCC’s) xii, 83

Jewish Council of Ukraine ( JCU) 83Jewish People Policy Planning

Institute 198Jewish Reform Movement xv, 48Jobbik Movement 210, 215Judea and Samaria 307Judeophobia xvi–xvii, 228–231, 242

Kassel 95–97Kehilla xviii, 321Kharkov 83Kiev 83, 85–86Klal Yisrael xiii, xvi, 44, 101, 151,

154–157, 305, 308, 316, 329, 331, 335–336

Latin America xviii, 105, 109–110, 120, 300, 306–307, 318–319, 321–322, 325–326, 332

Latvia 10, 18, 65Lebanon 13, 224, 320Limmud xiii, 195Lithuania 65, 70, 213

main index 365

London ix, 65, 180, 211, 296, 316–317

Longue durée 5Luxembourg 33Lyon 28

Macedonia 25Madrid ix, 107, 109, 119, 296Maghreb 117, 184, 283Malmoe xvi, 133Malta 33Manchester 28March of the Living 179Marseilles 28Mexico xiii, 323–324Middle East xii, 10, 127, 234,

237–245, 258, 283–284, 287–288, 316–318

MIEP (The Hungarian Life and Justice Party) 209

Minsk 83Mitnagdim 303Mitzvot 130, 144Moldova 6, 10, 63Monaco 19Montenegro and Kosovo 25Moriscos 116Moscow xi, 67, 70, 76, 83, 87, 225,

316Munich 361

Netherlands 6, 10, 13, 27, 180, 183, 252

Nizza 28North America xviii, 4, 63, 81,

179–180, 183, 186Norway 25Nostra Aetate Declaration 110

Odessa 28Organization of Ukrainian Nationalists

(OUN-UPA) 213–214Oslo Accords 190, 283

Palestinian Talmud 128 n. 13Panama 324Paris xvi, 94, 162, 221, 225, 274,

316–317Pikuach Nefesh 130 n. 19, 149Poland 4, 13, 63, 111, 128, 153,

159, 183, 208–209, 216, 218, 222, 248–249, 281, 313

Portugal 6, 10, 40, 109

Prague xi, 65, 191Prague Declaration 214

Reconquista 116Ribbentrop-Molotov Treaty 212Romania 6, 10, 13, 18, 194, 210–212,

216, 222, 313Rome ix, 269Ronald S. Lauder Foundation 193Russia xiii, xv, 6, 10, 18, 27, 29, 38,

51, 63, 65, 67, 69–70, 72, 74, 78–79, 81, 83, 86, 94, 128, 138, 151, 183, 210, 222, 313

San Diego 328Sanhedrin 94, 132Scandinavia xvi, 6Scotland 17Seesen 93, 95–96Sefarad 112, 114–115Serbia 25Seville 118Shas Movement 307Shelilat ha’galut (Negation of the

Exile) 45, 153, 156Shoah xi–xiii, xviii, 3, 6, 8–9, 26,

99, 113, 115, 151, 163–164, 166, 181–183, 223–224, 248, 304, 314, 316–317, 326, 331

Slovakia 209–211, 217Slovenia 25Spain 6, 10, 40, 103–120, 160, 183,

191, 281, 312, 326Spanish Civil War 105, 112–113St. Petersburg 67, 69Stockholm xvi, 131, 133, 140, 336Strasbourg 237Sweden xvi, 131, 133, 140, 336Switzerland 6, 10, 13, 99, 165

Taglit Program 179, 325Tallinn 195Tel Aviv xiii, 52, 277–280, 286,

289–290Tikkun Olam 129Toronto 186Toulouse 28Transnistria 212Turkey xv, 10, 27, 280, 320

Ukraine xv, 6, 10, 18, 27, 63–65, 69–70, 74, 79, 81–83, 86–88, 128, 213–214, 313

366 main index

United Israel Appeal (UIA) 52United Jewish Appeal (UJA) xi, 49United Kingdom (UK) 9–12, 17–18United States of America 155Ustasha Movement 210, 212–213

Venezuela 324Vichy Government 222

Warsaw ixWorld Congress of Russian Speaking

Jews (WCRJ) 85–86World Jewish Congress (WJC) 49, 189World ORT xi

Yad Vashem 216Yam Tikhoniut xviiYordim 69

Zionist Organization of America (ZOA) 54

NAMES INDEX

Birnbaum, Pierre xvi, 162, 223Biton, Erez 275–276Blaustein, Jacob 50Bloom, Harold 126Borbón, Don Felipe de (Prince) 114Bousquet, René 224Boyd, Jon 195, 197–198Braudel, Fernand 270–271Bronowski, Yoram 282Buber, Martin 99Burke, Edmund 176

Camus, Albert 279Camus, Renaud 231Castro, Américo 106, 108Chirac, Jacques 224Clermont-Tonnerre, Count 148Coja, Ion 212Corrales, Eloy Martín 116–117Csurka, István 209, 218, 258

Dahan, Ben (Rabbi) 109Daniel, Jean 223DellaPergola, Sergio 64 n. 2, 133

n. 28, 300, 336Derrida, Jacques xvi, 170, 172–177,

223Dieudonné, Jean 229Diner, Dan xiiDios Ramírez Heredia, Juan de 114Dizengoff, Meir 278Dohm, Christian Konrad Wilhelm 93,

182Dor, Moshe 277Dreyfus, Alfred 235–236Dubnow, Simon 14 n. 38, 153–155,

159Durant, Will 58Durica, Milan S. 212

Eban, Abba 283Eisenhower, Dwight D. 50Eisenstadt, Shmuel 185Elhyani, Zvi 290Enderlin, Charles 242 n. 16Eshkol, Levi 53

Ahad Ha’am 153–154Ahmadinejad, Mahmoud 87Al-Dura, Mohammed 242 n. 16Alexander III. (Czar) 228Alterman, Natan 279Amir, Aharon 274–275Anes, Gonzalo 119Angelusz, Róbert 261Antonescu, Ion 210, 212Appadurai, Ian 300, 329Arendt, Hannah 145, 176–177, 297Arkoun, Mohammed 239Arnsberg, Paul 96Aroch, Arieh 280Aron, Raymond 223Asch, Shalom 278Azaryahu, Maoz 278

Badinter, Robert 171Baeck, Leo xi, 99Baer, Alejandro 113Bandera, Stepan 213–214Bardèche, Maurice 225Barroso, Manuel José 163Boshes, Hedda 278Bauer, Bruno 182Bauman, Zygmunt 145, 193, 195, 326Beller, Steven 195Ben Avi, Itamar 273–274, 291Ben-Gurion, David 48–50, 52, 55, 57,

271–273, 291Ben Israel, Hedva 198Ben Shaul, Moshe 277Ben Zackai, Jochanan 125Ben Zvi, Yitzhak 53, 291Beauvoir, Simone de 118Benda, Julien 170Bendavid, Lazarus 92, 99Benedikt, Ernst 137Benjamin, Walter 126–127Benvenisti, Meron 286, 288Berdyczewski, Micha Josef 279Berman, Jakub 234Bernanos, Georges 238Bernheim, Gille (Rabbi) 163–164Bethell, James 211Bin Laden, Ossama 229

368 names index

Fábián, Zoltán 261Faurisson, Robert 225Feierberg, Mordechai Zeev 291Finkielkraut, Alain xvi–xvii,

170–172, 176–177, 231–232, 237–239, 243

Franco, Francisco 105, 107–108, 110–111, 113, 116–117

Friedlander, David 92, 99Friedmann, Georges 223

Garzón, Jacobo 114Gaulle, Charles de 224Gebert, Konsanty 192Geiger, Abraham 97, 99Geisenheimer, Siegmund 96Genet, Jean 225Geremek, Bronislaw 171, 177Gero, Erno 216Ghanayem, Mohammed 276Giscard d’Estaing, Valéry 224Goitein, Shlomo Dov 269–270Grebler, David 114Greenbaum, Yitzhak 153Greenberg, Uri Zvi 277Grégoire, Abbé 169Griffin, Nick 211Guesde, Jules 236Guigui, Albert (Rabbi) 163Guillaume, Pierre 225Guttman, Nahum 280

Habermas, Jürgen xvi, 164–167, 169–177

Halimi, Ilan 221, 232, 242Halperin, Jeremiah 274–275Halter, Marek 221Hanegbi, Haim 286Herzl, Theodor 168, 291Hess, Michael 96Hess, Rudolf 218Hever, Hanan 280, 287–288Hillel, Ayin (Omer) 277Hirsch, Maurice (Baron) 319Hitler, Adolf xi, 110, 136, 171, 205Hockenos, Paul 208–209Horden, Peregrine 270Horon, Adia 274–275Horthy, Miklós 210, 212Hubner, Johannes 211

Irving, David 218Isaac, Jules 224

Jabotinsky, Ze’ev 153, 274–275Jacobson, Israel 92–96, 99–100JAFI ( Jewish Agency for Israel ) 193Jankélévitch, Wladimir 223Johannes XXIII. (Pope) 224Jost, Isaak Markus 95Juan Carlos (King) 112, 114

Kacynski, Lech 213Kahanoff, Jacqueline 286Kant, Immanuel 91Kantor, Viacheslav-Moshe 85–87Kara, Yadé 183Karády, Viktor 255Katz, Jacob 182–183, 307, 311Kermani, Navid 183Klausner, Joseph 291Knobloch, Charlotte xiv, 152Kun, Bela 216Kundera, Milan 145

Lau, Meir (Rabbi) 167, 194Le Pen, Jean-Marie 225Lessing, Gotthold Ephraim 91Levinas, Emmanuel 223, 315Lilienblum, Moses Lieb 291Lincoln, Abraham 51

Malkin, Israel 281–282Masalha, Salman 287Mate, Manuel Reyes 112–113Meddeb, Abdelwahab 239Medvedev, Dmitry 86Meirovitch, Zvi 280Memmi, Albert 223Mendelssohn, Moses xiii, 91–92, 99Mendès-France, Pierre 222Merkel, Angela 181Meyer, Marshall (Rabbi) 324 n. 5Meyer, Michael 97Miller, David 171, 177Milner, Jean-Claude 167–168, 175–177Mitterrand, François 224Modiano, Patrick 223Moked, Gabriel 276Molander, Per 149–150Molitor, Franz 96Morgenthau, Henry jr. 49, 52Morvai, Krisztina 211, 265 n. 20Mussolini, Benito 110

Napoleon Bonaparte 91Newman, Emanuel 49–50

names index 369

Nietzsche, Friedrich 159Nocke, Alexandra 280Nora, Pierre 223

Ofrat, Gideon 279–280Oz, Amos 279Oz, Kobi 281Özdamar, Emine Sevgi 183

Papon, Maurice 224Patai, Raphael 274Pauker, Ana 216Perec, Georges 223Peyrefitte, Roger 222Pinkas, Israel 277Pinto, Diana xiii, 37–38, 43, 113,

166–167, 184, 191–192, 232Pinsker, Leo 288Pompidou, Georges 224Purcell, Nicholas 270Putin, Vladimir 85–86

Rabinovich, Vadim 85–86Rakosi, Matyas 234Ramos, Demetrio 119Rassinier, Paul 225Ratosh, Yonatan 273, 275Rawls, John 167Rembrandt van Rijn 183Remez, David 271Ritter, Karl 93Rosenzweig, Franz 99Rotbard, Sharon 288–290Roth, Philip 159Rothschild, Meyer Amschel 96

Sacks, Jonathan 51Said, Edward 291Sampson, Edward 118, 120Sánchez Albornoz, Claudio 106Sarrazin, Thilo 184Sartre, Jean-Paul 173, 225Schimmel, Harold 277Schnapper, Dominique 124, 171Schoeps, Julius H. 155, 157Sebald, W.G. 183Semprún, Jorge 114Sen, Faruk 184Senoçak, Zafer 183Shamir, Moshe 287Sharett, Moshe 53Sharon, Ariel 242Shavit, Ari 194

Shavit, Yaakov 284Shehadeh, Sami Abu 289–290Shimoni, Gideon 198 n. 5, 321Shneer, David 145, 160, 195Sholem, Gershom 127 n. 12Shpigel, Boris 85–87Shprinzak, Yoseph 53Silver, Abba Hillel xv, 46–59Sinn, Hans-Werner 184Slansky, Rudolf 208, 216Slouschz, Nahum 270–271Sofer, Moses 100Sokolov, Nahum 291Soral, Alain 229Spinoza, Baruch 50Stora, Benjamin 223Strauss, Leo 315Szálasi, Ferenc 210, 212Sznaider, Natan 179Szold Spinoza, Henrietta 53

Taguieff, Pierre-André xvii, 227–232, 237, 239, 241, 318

Talmon, Jacob 169Tardos, Róbert 261Thion, Serge 225Timoshenko, Yulia 214Tismaneanu, Vladimir 216Tiso, Jozef 212Touraine, Alain 169Touvier, Paul 224Trigano, Shmuel 230, 294, 316Tchernikovsky, Saul 277Tudor, Corneliu Vadim 209

Usackas, Vigaudas 214

Védrine, Hubert 236

Walesa, Lech 159Walser, Martin 183Walzer, Michael 131, 147Wasserstein, Bernard xiii, 36–37, 145,

179Weber, Max 161Weill, Nicolas xvii, 227, 232–235,

237–239, 241–244Wertheimer, Jack 310Wieseltier, Meir 277–278Wieviorka, Michel xvii, 227, 237–239,

242–243Wittgenstein, Ludwig 300

370 names index

Yehoshua, Y.B. 279Yonatan, Natan 276Yosef, Ovadiah (Rabbi) 314Yuschenko, Victor 86–87, 213

Zach, Natan 277Zaimoglu, Feridun 183Zandberg, Esther 289–290Zapatero, José Luis Rodríguez 105Zaritsky, Joseph 279Zissels, Josef 71, 87Zukier, Henri 107, 117

LIST OF TABLES

Table 1: World Jewish population by major regions, 1948–2009 ................................................................ 8

Table 2: Largest Jewish populations in Europe, 1970–2009 ................................................................ 11

Table 3: Main Jewish populations in Europe. Estimates by various sources and definitions, 2009 ...................... 19

Table 4: Jewish population distribution in Europe, by HDI country quintiles, 1970–2008 ................................... 25

Table 5: Metropolitan areas in Europe with largest core Jewish populations, 2008 .......................................... 28

Table 6: Jewish vital statistics in selected countries, 1988–2008 ................................................................ 30

Table 7: Selected Jewish populations, by main age groups, 1897–2007 ................................................................ 31

Table 8: Selected indicators on European Jewry, 2009–2020 ................................................................ 32

Table 9: Symbols of belonging to the Jewish people ............. 73Table 10: The respondents’ opinions on the nature of

Judaism ..................................................................... 74Table 11: Feeling solidarity with Israel .................................... 79Table 12: Respondents’ position about Jewish patriotism ....... 80Table 13: Attitudes towards Jews in 10 European countries ... 251

LIST OF GRAPHS

Figure 1: World Jewish population by major regions, 1170–2009 .................................................................. 5

Figure 2: Jewish population in Europe by major regions, 1170–2009 .................................................................. 7

Figure 3: Jewish population in Europe, by major geographical divisions, 1970–2008 ............................ 12

Figure 4: Migration to Israel from European countries, 1968–2008 .................................................................. 14

Figure 5: 2001 Census results—Jews in Scotland ..................... 17Figure 6: Major indicators of Europe’s total population, by

regions ........................................................................ 21Figure 7: Jewish population change in European countries,

by initial HDI, 1970–2008 ........................................ 22Figure 8: Jewish population change by HDI change,

West vs. East Europe, 1970–1990 and 1990–2008 ... 23Figure 9: Jews per 1,000 population, by country HDI

quintiles, 1970–2008 .................................................. 26

JEWISH IDENTITIES IN A CHANGING WORLD

General Editors:Eliezer Ben-Rafael, Yosef Gorny,

and Judit Bokser Liwerant

1. Jewish Identities: Fifty Intellectuals Answer Ben-Gurion, Eliezer Ben-Rafael, Volume 1, 978-90-04-12535-3

2. Contemporary Jewries: Convergence and Divergence, Edited by Eliezer Ben-Rafael, Yosef Gorny and Yaacov Ro’I, Volume 2, 978-90-04-12950-4

3. Explorations in Jewish Historical Experience: The Civilizational Dimension, S.N. Eisenstadt, Volume 3, 978-90-04-13693-9

4. Survival Through Integration: American Reform Jewish Universalism and the Holocaust, Ofer Shiff, Volume 4, 978-90-04-14109-4

5. Is Israel One?: Religion, Nationalism, and Multiculturalism Confounded, Eliezer Ben-Rafael and Yochanan Peres, Volume 5, 978-90-04-14394-4

6. Jewry between Tradition and Secularism: Europe and Israel Compared, Edited by Eliezer Ben-Rafael, Thomas Gergely and Yosef Gorny, Volume 6, 978-90-04-15140-6

7. From Binational Society to Jewish State: Federal Concepts in Zionist Political Thought, 1920-1990, and the Jewish People, Yosef Gorny, Volume 7, 978-90-04-15529-9

8. Identities in an Era of Globalization and Multiculturalism: Latin America in the Jewish World, Edited by Judit Bokser Liwerant, Eliezer Ben-Rafael, Yossi Gorny, and Raanan Rein, Volume 8, 978-90-04-15442-1

9. Jewish Subjects and Their Tribal Chieftains in Kurdistan: A Study in Sur-vival, Mordechai Zaken, Volume 9, 978-90-04-16190-0

10. The Lure of Anti-Semitism: Hatred of Jews in Present-Day France, Michel Wieviorka. Translated from the French by Kristin Couper Lobel and Anna Declerck, Volume 10, 978-90-04-16337-9

11. The Place of the Mediterranean in Modern Israeli Identity, Alexandra Nocke, Volume 11, 978-90-04-17324-8

12. Argentine Jews or Jewish Argentines?: Essays on Ethnicity, Identity, and Diaspora, Raanan Rein, Volume 12, 978-90-04-17913-4

13. American Israelis: Migration, Transnationalism, and Diasporic Identity, Uzi Rebhun and Lilach Lev Ari, Volume 13, 978-90-04-18388-9

14. Politics and Resentment: Antisemitism and Counter-Cosmopolitanism in the European Union, Edited by Lars Rensmann and Julius H. Schoeps, Volume 14, 978-90-04-19046-7

15. The Stranger at Hand: Antisemitic Prejudices in Post-Communist Hungary, András Kovács, Volume 15, 978-90-04-19194-5

16. Jews and Jewish Education in Germany Today, Eliezer Ben-Rafael, Olaf Glöckner, and Yitzhak Sternberg, Volume 16, 978-90-04-20117-0

17. A Road to Nowhere?: Jewish Experiences in the Unifying Europe, Edited by Julius H. Schoeps and Olaf Glöckner, in cooperation with Anja Kreienbrink, Volume 17, 978-90-04-20158-3

A Road to Nowhere Jewish Experiences in Unifying Europe

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Transcript of A Road to Nowhere Jewish Experiences in Unifying Europe