True Grit

Whether in reference to Yonatan, the fallen hero of the raid on Entebbe, or Bibi, the present Prime Minister of Israel, the Netanyahu name has long evoked an image that is both gutsy and altogether original. But even before the sons, it was their father, Benzion, who with his path-breaking work first bestowed the Netanyahu name with its daring inflections. Indeed, with this week’s passing of Dr. Benzion Netanyahu at the age of 102, the field of Jewish history has lost one of its most important and iconoclastic scholars. Netanyahu’s scholarship ranged from a book-length biography of the famed fifteenth-century Spanish scholar and statesman Don Isaac Abravanel, to a 1400-page tome on the origins of the Spanish Inquisition, to recent surveys of foundational Zionist thinkers. His contributions are important not just for their breadth and depth, but because of the boldness with which he called on historians to reconsider long held assumptions. As impressive as his scholarship, his interests transcended mere academic inquiry; in his writings, one can sense that Netanyahu’s believed his observations about the Jewish yesteryear to be consequential for the Jewish present and future. Early in his career he served as secretary to Ze’ev Jabotinsky, the leader of the Revisionist Zionist movement and ideological godfather to the secular right wing of Israeli politics.

Given the impossible task of summarizing such a career in one sermon, this morning I want to focus on one scholarly claim Netanyahu made, a claim that at first may seem trifling and perhaps even insignificant, but will show itself to raise profound and vexing questions for all of us living in the shadow of this towering historian of blessed memory.

Until Netanyahu, there was basically one dominant theory about the Marranos of 15th century Spain. Forcibly converted to Christianity, the Marranos – also known as Christianos Nuevos (New Christians) – were believed by historians to have, at great personal risk, continued to practice Judaism in secret. The Spanish Inquisition, in a sentence, was understood as the effort to ferret out these crypto-Jews unlawfully practicing the faith of their ancestors.

In examining the evidence, Netanyahu arrived at a different assessment. While state pressure may well have resulted in the forced conversions of the Jews, the Marranos were not only not practicing their Judaism secretly, but they were sincere Christians – totally detached from Judaism and delightfully immersed in their Christian faith. Contrary to what had previously been claimed, the Inquisition and its auto-da-fés arose not to eradicate suspected Jewish heresy, but rather because the old Christians saw that these New Christians, in acclimating to Spanish society, were now rising to distinguished positions. The persecution of the Jews, according to Netanyahu, had nothing to do with investigating and punishing covert observance of Judaism. Rather it was a racially motivated attempt to rid the Iberian peninsula of anyone of Jewish origin and blood.

Netanyahu drew on both Jewish and non-Jewish literature from his time. One fortuitously timed example comes from this week’s parashah – the commandment in Leviticus 18 that the Israelites should copy neither the practices of the Egyptians whence they had come, nor those of the Canaanites whither they were headed. Altogether telling is the comment made by our previously mentioned 15th-century commentator, Don Isaac Abravanel, who, in explaining this verse, cites Maimonides’ understanding of human nature that it is in the nature of people to be drawn into the thoughts and deeds of their neighbors and the norms of their nation. Netanyahu understood that in the ancient Israelites, Abravanel saw a cautionary precedent for the behavior that he himself witnessed in his own days, the tug to assimilate into the dominant culture. As Abravanel, who lived through the Inquisition and Expulsion understood all too well, Netanyahu would contend that despite the Jews’ feeling at home in their host culture and faith, the host culture and faith would never feel comfortable hosting a people who in their eyes would forever be interloping Jews.

And here, of course, we enter into the heart of the matter. My “aha” moment on Netanyahu came when I was reading a short introduction he wrote not about Abravanel or the Spanish Inquisition, but about the 19th-century Russian Zionist thinker Leon Pinsker. Netanyahu explained that in 19th-century Russia, unlike 15th-century Spain, the path to Jewish assimilation came not by way of forced conversion, but by way of enlightenment and emancipation. Nevertheless, as in Spain, the Russian Jewish community would receive a rude awakening by way of persecution – pogroms that reminded the Jews that try as they might, Jews would never find acceptance in the Diaspora. As Netanyahu tells it, Pinsker’s brand of Zionism represented the belief that it was those Jews who deluded themselves into thinking that that they would be accepted by their enlightened hosts who would receive the rudest and most painful wake-up call. To use the image offered by Pinsker’s hero Israel Zangwill, at the time of the Kishinev pogroms, it was the Jews who sought to protect themselves by putting Russian sacred images in their windows who would be the people especially chosen for persecution.

I don’t know enough about Spanish or Russian Jewish history to weigh in on the particulars, but let me connect the dots as I see them. Netanyahu’s characterizations of Spanish and Russian history were not just about Spain and Russia, but about his own moment, 20th-century Jewish history. Netanyahu lived before, during and after the atrocities of the Holocaust. He knew exactly what had happened to European Jewry. He had seen their delusional hope for acceptance, and he lived to see “the pity of it all.” Netanyahu held a grand and cyclical understanding of our people’s history. Jews in the Diaspora are the proverbial frog in the frying pan; the heat may gradually increase, but we stay right there, thinking we can adapt and adjust until we succumb and die. Furthermore, there is a direct line between Netanyahu’s observations about Diaspora Jewry and his service to Jabotinsky’s brand of Zionism. For Jabotinsky, the Diaspora yields one of two possible outcomes, assimilation or persecution. Jabotinsky himself prophetically proclaimed to Diaspora Jewry of 1937, “Eliminate the Diaspora, or the Diaspora will surely eliminate you.” As for the stories Diaspora Jews like to tell about the Marranos and their descendants lighting candles generations later – they are sentimental, self-serving and delusional. The Diaspora is better described as an ironclad melting pot that will make Jews either indistinguishable from or insufferable to the goyim, or more likely, both.

Netanyahu’s assessment is, to say the least, a difficult pill to swallow. All of us in this room have staked our future on the viability of a Jewish life in the Diaspora and nobody wants to be told that one’s life’s work and reason for being is a lost cause.  But just because it is an uncomfortable question doesn’t permit us to avoid it. After all, can you name a single Jewish Diaspora community in the last 3000 years that did not end either with assimilation or persecution? Because in Netanyahu’s schema, these are the only options: assimilation, nationalism, or rejection…persecuted even as we proclaim ourselves at home among those who shun us.

I don’t have an easy answer, but perhaps we can begin with the acknowledgment that Netanyahu’s version is only one of many tellings of Jewish history, each one with an ideological ax to grind. You see, a historian’s ordering of the past, like that of a teenager stumbling home long past curfew, is an act of self-justification that can have as much (or as little) to do with the truth as suits his or her purpose. Krochmal, Geiger, Graetz, Dubnow, Buber, there are as many versions of history as there are historians. One great example to counter Netanyahu is Simon Rawidowicz,who wrote an essay called “Israel – the Ever Dying People.” He contended that anyone “who studies Jewish history will readily discover that there was hardly a generation in the Diaspora that did not consider itself the final link in Israel’s chain.” The First Temple, the Second Temple, Rabbi Akiva, Brenner, Berditchevsky – for thousands of years, every Jewish generation has believed that it is the final generation of Jews, only to discover: yesh tikvah l’aharitekh, there is hope beyond you. The last 60-plus years in America have been some of the most intellectually, culturally, politically and economically exciting and curious years of Jewish history – period. Synagogues, UJAs, seminaries, JCCs, Jewish studies departments, entire universities…The Beastie Boys. Even were you to exclude the miracle that is the modern State of Israel, it is accurate to say that to be a Jew in America today is to know blessings that no Jew at any other time of Jewish history could have imagined possible. The fact that this era comes immediately in the wake of the Holocaust – the darkest moment of our people’s history – only makes it that much more remarkable. Are there problems? Of course there are. But anyone with an inkling of the road we have traveled knows that the problems we face are the kind of problems that any other generation would have loved to have.

So who is right? Netanyahu? Ravidowicz? Is the bottom about to fall out, or are our brightest days just around the corner? Whose version of Jewish history more accurately describes our present?

The truth is that neither Netanyahu nor Rawidowicz, nor any historian of the past is entrusted to do what you and I are entrusted to do – to define the Jewish future. As Mordecai Kaplan taught: “The past or its proxies can no more pass judgment upon the present than the child can sit in judgment upon the man.” (Judaism as a Civilization, 404.) Grand theories of history, appealing as they are, have the effect of eliding both the challenges and opportunities that define the particularities of the present. The concurrent blessings of America and the modern State of Israel make ours a sui generis moment. Given the choice, when it comes to the Jewish future, I would rather bet on the educated choices we make here in this room over recommendations garnered from wise and well meaning reflections on the past. True courage, true grit, true heroism of spirit lies in the belief that every Jew and every generation of Jews gets to write its own chapter, learning from our history but not being overwhelmed by it. Or as Margaret Mead would have said had she been Jewish: “Never doubt that a small group of thoughtful committed Jews can change the world…it’s the only thing that ever has.” It is not what happened 500 or 100 years ago that will determine the Jewish future, but what is done today – by you, by me, by all of us, equal stakeholders in our people’s fate. May each of us be up to the task, blessed to be alive at this, the very moment that our destiny is knocking at our door.