Ismail Faruqi Online

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  • Islam and the Problem of Israel: Zionism, The European Jew’s Counsel of Despair

    Reading Time: 10 minutes

    From Chapter 5: “ZIONISM: The European Jew’s Counsel of Despair” in Ismail Raji al Faruqi, “Islam and the Problem of Israel”, Islamic Council of Europe (1980)

    A. Between the Two Horns of a Terrible Dilemma

    The Jews of Europe found themselves in the second half of the nineteenth century tossed on the horns of a terrible dilemma. If they pursued the gains of emancipation, they must assimilate; and the more they did so, the more their Judaism would have to be reformed, the more dilute it would become, the less Jewish they would finally turn out to be. If, on the other hand, they restricted their pursuit of the gains of emancipation and hence, the less they assimilated and lost thereby their Jewishness, the more they would stand out as strangers in a society bent on not granting them its identity. On either count, they stood to lose. But which loss was greater? Jewishness, or freedom, and often, life? It was not the conservative orthodox Jew of Russia that asked this ominous question, for he had never known freedom and the centuries had taught him that it is his fate to remain true to every letter of the Torah and to suffer — even die — because of it. Rather, it was the Reform Jew of Western Europe who had tasted the joys and acquired the gains of freedom, who enthusiastically accepted the invitation to become English, French or German but, at the same time, had to suffer new waves of persecution and hatred for doing so. Was it possible that Christian Europe had gone mad? The hyphenated Jew (English-Jew, French-Jew, German-Jew, etc.) could not understand what was happening to and around him.

    Such a hyphenated Austrian-Jew was Theodor Herzl (1860-1904), a correspondent of the Vienna-based Neue Frei Presse newspaper. Herzl belonged to Reform Judaism and was completely Westernized. The dilemma of Jewish existence did not haunt his mind, convinced as he was that his personal destiny as well as that of his people was ‘Europe.’ Certainly, he knew of many lapses by Jews of their Judaism, and by Christians of their tolerance. But these did not bother him. Assigned to cover the tiial of Dreyfus in Paris, he travelled thence with the intention of discovering new ways for Jewish-Christian cooperation and understanding. The facts glaring out of the case, however, taught him otherwise. The Dreyfus case established beyond doubt that the Christians were not at all committed to accepting the Jews in their midst no matter how Europeanised they may become. Who could suspect Dreyfus’ Frenchness? his loyalty to the Republic? And yet, the very guardians of the Republic were precisely the first to reject him. Adding insult to injury, Maurice Barres, leader and spokesman for this anti-Jewish sentiment, had boldly defined patriotism as love of the past, France as a “collective being” which lives and speaks in the conscience of its sons, and national identity as communion of personal will with this Hegelian God-state and as harmony with it.

    B. Zionism: Attempted Escape from the Dilemma

    The Dreyfus episode, the upheaval it caused in France and Europe, and the awesome popularity of the anti-Jewish sentiment, left Herzl utterly dazed and dismayed, his hopes shattered and his ideal in ruins. It convinced him that the “European-Jew” ideal is impossible and futile. Since he himself was a European, educated under the same Hegelian romanticism dominating the university and cultural life of Europe, he really believed that the tendencies reflected at the Dreyfus trial were real and necessary forces of history which could not be stopped. No amount of assimilation was going to win for the Jew a European identity as long as he remained something to be assimilated, i.e., a Jew. In that direction, only conversion to Christianity would do, provided the milieu still believed in Christianity. Where that milieu had become scientific, skeptical and atheist, where it had replaced God with the state or “la nation,” the ultimate base was blood and soil from which the Jew was excluded ex hypothesi. On the other hand, no amount of self-preservation could guarantee the Jew’s survival in the midst of lands infested with this enemy mentality.

    The solution of this dilemma readily presented itself to Herzl, the European romantic. There could be no return to the ghetto of the past. Therefore, the Jew must pick up his roots from Europe and leave. He must find for himself a place on this globe where he could be both a Jew and a free man; where he could exercise his Jewish identity in security; where he could allow his peculiar ethnic genius to blossom and maintain his dignity. For Herzl, it did not matter where this Jewish state was to be. In fact, he thought the Jewish state could be founded in Argentina; and he seriously considered Uganda, as well as Russian Central Asia, as possible sites. Palestine did receive a mention but on par with all those other possible areas of the world. Any place on earth or on the moon would do, provided it assured security and freedom for the Jew to be a Jew. The Jewish state which Herzl envisioned was not based on religion. It was to be a copy of the European secular national state, the only state he knew. Such a state would carry its own mystique, like the European original; it would enthrone a Jewish collective, and pursue a Jewish community-destiny (Schicksalsge-gemeinschaft). A religious state, or a messianic restoration a la Isaiah of the Kingdom of David, was at the farthest possible remove from his mind. He expressly denied that the present predicament of the Jews in Europe was caused by Christianity. Though true of the past, this was not true of the present attitude which Herzl regarded as due in the main to the socio-economic success of the Jews in the modern industrialised city. It is the Europeans’ persecution of the Jews, he held, that makes the Jews a people; their persistent hatred of the Jews that creates the cohesiveness of the Jewish people. Herzl’s Jewish state was an ideal born out of the gentiles’ hatred and persecution of the Jews and the Jews’ acculturation by the gentiles’ romantic, nationalist, secularist God-state idea which dominated Europe at the time. His famous statement, “The [Jewish] state is already founded, in essence, in the will of the people of the state” is a perfect embodiment of that gentile, non-Semitic, indeed pagan god-state idea. This was equally the way Max Nordau, Herzl’s successor, thought. “Zionism,” in A. Hertzberg, ed., The Zionist Idea, New York, Atheneum, 1971)

    It is difficult to say which of the two parent conditions gave more than, or was prior to, the other in bearing Zionism as a solution to the tragedy of the European Jew. Certainly, persecution and hatred are negative. What they give birth to is of the nature of a reaction; and it is natural herd-feeling to withdraw into the group in face of danger. Necessarily, this is not creative; it is an “un-vision.” It is otherwise with the God-state, collective being idea of romanticism. It is a vision of reality, new and positive, which has the power to fascinate as well as to transform. It spread in Europe like wildfire; and the Jew, in his effort to Europeanise himself, fell into it with gusto. Herzl’s mind which first articulated the vision of a Jewish state was thoroughly trained in it. But the first to envisage it were those Jews who lived in areas of Europe where the craving for a national entity was at its fiercest — namely, the Balkans and Poland. Yehudah Alkalai witnessed the movements of the Balkan peoples for national independence and sovereignty and envied them for their success. Zvi Kalisher participated in the struggle of the Poles and convinced himself that the Jews ought to do likewise to achieve an identical goal. The revolutionary movements of the mid-century which called for social justice in the name of national collectivism inspired Moses Hess, another leading Zionist thinker, to mix up the Jew’s yearning for egalitarian justice with a fatherland on the European model. Running against the grain of all Semitic wisdom through the ages in its assertion that “the People” has always meant solely the humans composing it, Moses Hess declared that “A common native soil is a precondition for healthier relations between capital and labor among the Jews”. “Comments,” in The Zionist Idea, p. 136

    The same despair which characterised Herzl and the Jews of Western Europe filled the hearts of Eastern European Jews after the pogroms of 1871 and 1881. Peretz Smolenskin, while advocating with one side of his mouth that “every Jew is a citizen of the land in which he dwells, and it is his duty to be a good citizen … {a citizen upon whom fall] all the obligations of citizenship like all other nationals,” advocated with the other side of his mouth the theory that the Jews already had a “national identity” whose essence was culture. He claimed that the Jews “have always been a spiritual nation, one whose Torah was the foundation of its statehood.” After 1881, Smolenskin dropped the European citizenship idea to advise his fellow countrymen to pull out their roots and emigrate to Palestine, for “only in the Land of Israel…can the Jews find truth and lasting peace”.“Let Us Search Our Ways,” in The Zionist Idea, p. 151

    Likewise, Leo Pinsker advocated more than any Russian the total russification of the Jews of Russia, and founded societies to bring about such assimilation. His dedication to the task and devotion to Mother Russia was noticed – and rewarded – by the Czar himself. Indeed, he was so blindly committed to Russification that even the pogroms of 1871 did not shake him. But the pogroms of a decade later did it. His assimilationist ideal was shattered and he fell headlong into abandonment of Europe for the sake of a Zionist kingdom-to-be.

    C. Europe’s Failure of Nerve

    The above-mentioned cases leave no room for doubt that the emancipation of the Jews was, as far as the Europeans are concerned, a half-hearted affair. It came “too little,” and “too late” to establish itself securely in the legal and political systems of Europe whose people had been only “half-baked” by the Enlightenment. As to those Europeans who used their reason and were convinced of emancipation as a necessary corollary of their rationalism, their hearts were never won. For too long, the European stood unaffected by any sentiment of universal humanity or fraternalism. Equally, the emancipation of the Jews had come too late; for, the forces of ethnocentrism, nationalist self-assertion and egotism were too deeply impressed upon the European soul for the Enlightenment to undo. Though temporarily silenced by the military and political might of Revolutionary France and fastened securely by legislation, this European ethnocentrism reacted violently once these stops were removed by the retreat of Napoleon.

    Furthermore, there is no room for doubt that the Emancipation of the Jews came too little and too late as far as the Jews were concerned. It came too little because the Europeans could not sustain it for more than a generation; and where they did sustain it at all, they did so reluctantly. The Jewish claim is certainly sound that whatever gains the Jews acquired were achieved by superior Jewish effort, never gratuitously given; that Jewish superiority in the various fields of endeavor was only the obverted facade of the Jews’ ever-denied equality. On the other hand, the Emancipation came too late because the ghetto had reshaped the Jewish soul beyond the possibility of universalist reform; even beyond that of relaxing ethnocentrism to enable the Jews to coexist with their European hosts. The ghetto had built separatism into their flesh, as the diaspora had built it into their bones; and Biblical ethnocentrism had built it into their marrow. It was inconceivable therefore that Emancipation would efface Jewish collectivism, or that this would happen within a generation.

    The European thought he had fooled the Jews. When he began to discover that he was fooled by them, he lost his temper! He thought he could wipe the Jews off the map of Europe by Europeanising them; but he did so only for a moment, and he seems never to have been truly convinced of it. The Jew, too, thought he could wipe off European hatred by merely changing his name and language; but he did everything he could, working thrice as hard as anyone, to achieve quick mastery over his fellow Europeans, both as affirmation of his racial superiority and protection against insecurity. Each of them knew in his depth that the other was only fooling. The European’s loss first of his “Enlightenment” nerve and, subsequently, of his “reason” in the romantic outbreak, convinced the Jews that their fears- which never left them – were certainly justified. Hence, the disillusionment and despair on both sides.

    If, under the circumstances, the Jew opted for the Zionist solution of pulling out his roots and exiting from Europe, his decision is certainly understandable, though we may criticise it as one of despair. The plain truth was that the European soul was sick. The cure did not lie in a Jewish exodus. Europe had nursed and sustained the ideal of the universal community for a millennium of Church ascendancy. This left an indelible, though temporarily submerged, mark upon its soul. What it needed was a restrengthening of the Enlightenment nerve that failed it. That is what the emancipated Jews of Europe should have helped restore and promote until it could blossom forth again. What they did, however, was the reverse. From their new positions of leadership in European life, they helped fan the very fires of romanticism which were later to consume them and ruin Europe.

    No one will doubt that romanticism made the souls of Germany, France, Belgium, Holland, Italy, Poland and the Balkan countries sing and dance with delight — nay, intoxication! No one will doubt that the arts of Europe blossomed as if in a hothouse; or that romanticism did something to promote science and technology under the heat of national defense; or to institute accord and harmony, social justice and welfare, between the members of the national group. Nor can it be denied that these were in some sense human gains as well, indirectly relevant to the welfare of humankind.

    But it cannot be denied that from the purview of human history, these songs and dances of romantic Europe were macabre; that the hothouse atmosphere engendered by romanticism detracted the soul of Europe farther away from God and His law. Romanticism dethroned God and apotheosised the state and the nation. It granted absolute priority to the common will because it is “common” and “actual.” It agreed with John Stuart Mill that the only evidence that a thing is desirable is that it is desired, and went on to mix up the success of nationalist egotism with divinity. It relativised all past history and destroyed its normativeness, while it absolutised the present which is no less dated than the past. With Schleiermacher, it dethroned “reason” and replaced it with “feeling.” The religiously oriented were relieved that the new base of “feeling” and personal ineffable experience provided far sounder support for Christian dogma, then in peril from the attacks of rationalists as well as scientists and other secularist “despisers of religion.” The secularly oriented, on the other hand, saw in “feeling” a new epistemological base for their romantic claims. They were thus emboldened to absolutise their particularist theses for “Volkstum,” “national genius,” race and Historismus, and they sought inspiration in a mystical experience of empirical nature. The innate contradictions of human tendencies and passions were enthralled as visions of the sublime. Romanticism asserted that the highest and ultimate expression of the human soul was a tragedy — and Wagner! Fascism was romanticism’s proudest offspring; secularism was his throne. Hitler came down in the very flames it quickened, but not before Europe lay scorched and in ruins.

    The greatest pity is that the victims of romanticism’s holocaust of the last one hundred years, namely, the Jews, had become infected with the disease, and helped fan its flames by their literary, artistic and philosophical contributions. But the pity that is greater than the greatest is that their walking skeletons should emerge from the Nazi ovens singing — as Zionists — an adapted romantic song of their own, whose materials may perhaps be Jewish but whose essence is Romanticism all over again, both a la Treitschke and a la Wiesel!

  • Islam and the Problem of Israel: The Romantic Relapse of Europe

    Reading Time: 6 minutesFrom Chapter 4: “The Romantic Relapse of Europe” in Ismail Raji al Faruqi, “Islam and the Problem of Israel”, Islamic Council of Europe (1980)

    A. Russian Pogroms

    The prognosis of the last paragraph (Chapter III) was the reality on the American scene. Most of the rabbis ministering to the Jews of America were educated in the Reform seminaries of Europe, and the first seminary in America (Cincinnati, Ohio) belonged to the same group. The absence of persecution and of ghettos and the religious freedom guaranteed by the American Constitution promoted acculturation and assimilation of Jewish immigrants from Europe. In America, it was hard to be anything but a Reformed Jew. The voice of orthodoxy, of traditionalism, was certainly present; but it was overwhelmed by the universalism and secularism of American society in the matter of religion. The situation radically changed in the nineties when a wave of pogroms in Russia and Eastern Europe sent a flood ofjewish immigrants to America. The demography of American Jewry was turned upside down. In a decade, American Jewry became overwhelmingly orthodox and the voice of Reform Judaism became that of a minority. What happened in Russia to bring about this Jewish exodus happened in various degrees in the rest of Europe.

    The Enlightenment never took root in Russia. Enlightenment ideas relevant to science, to trade and industry, did. These ideas mixed with deep mystical hopes for national restoration and produced the Europeanising industrialisation of Peter the Great. The outcome of this nineteenth century process was a surge of “Mother Russia” feeling coupled with a secularising will to progress. As to the Jews who up till then were living as strange aliens in city and village, the surge could only lead to their Russification. The movement produced some strong advocates — Peretz Smolenskin, Leo Pinsker, etc. — to persuade the Jews to russify themselves — a transformation as difficult to achieve for the Russian Jews, as it was for Russian Christians to promote perseverently.

    The main reason why the Enlightenment proved to be a very indigestible novelty was the unpreparedness of the Russian mind. Russian experience was radically different from that of Western Europe. At last as far as the intelligentsia is concerned, if not the majority of the people, the Russian Church was as guilty as the Catholic Church in the exercise of her dominion. That is why the forces of progress could countenance neither courtship nor alliance with the Church. Moreover, the Church – saw – and did so rightly – that the new movement for progress threatened her own power and therefore did everything it could to oppose and retard it. That is why the new movement leaned farther away from the Church, toward secularism. Furthermore, Christian Russia had no tradition of religious reform, no tradition of Renaissance, scholastic, Cartesian or Enlightenment rationalism. Whatever Enlightenment ideas the Russians of the nineteenth century had were borrowed from Western Europe. And since the whole of Napoleonic Europe was pitted against Russia, the borrowed ideas had to be adopted if and only after they have been fused into the overall “Russia” feeling. As for the Jews, the overwhelming majority of them were, like their Christian neighbors, still living in the crass ignorance of the Dark Ages. It was as if modernity had suddenly burst upon them. It is not surprising therefore that they neither understood nor accepted the Christians’ half-hearted emancipation of them. The event of modernism was dazzling to both Christian and Jew.

    This context explains why the Russian Christian’s demand for Russification was not an “invitation,” not an “emancipation,” but rather an ultimatum. When heeded, it brought quick results, as when Jews quickly rose to highest rank in the service of Czar and country. But when it was received with hesitancy, no time was lost in patient acculturation. The Enlightenment’s ideas of tolerance and reasonableness were quickly transformed into resentment and hate. In little time, even as the Jews were russifying themselves, the most violent pogroms broke out against them without apparent reason or cause. This sad Russian outcome was equally that of Jewish emancipation in Western Europe, but not for the same reason.

    B. European Persecution

    1. The Ideational Groundwork

    Ever since it triumphed over paganism, the Christian Church had stood for the ideal of the universal community. It expanded itself as religion as well as wordly dominion under the aegis of that ideal; and, in fact, it was well suited toward that objective ever since Jesus had decreed: “God is indeed capable out of these stones to raise children unto Abraham” and Paul, “By one Spirit are we all baptised into one body, whether we be Jews or Gentiles, whether we be bond or free”Matthew 3:19; I Corinthians 12:13. The Reformation gave the coup de grace to Christianity’s ideal of the universal community. In fact, the Reformation was the result of a storm which, gathering long before, was only triggered by Luther’s proclamation of the 95 theses. The numerous peoples of Europe rallied around their princes in order to shake off the authority of the Catholic Church, an authority which had become a “Byzantine” yoke, full of corruption, full of evil, bearing little or no resemblance to the universalist ideal it claimed itself to be.

    Instead of this worthy Christian ideal, the emerging Protestant leadership tilted toward Congregationalism to justify its breaking away from the Mother Church. But Congregationalism itself needed justification, and this was sought in something outside the Church when ecclesiastical history could not be found to support it. The Renaissance had already impressed the leadership with naturalism and the road lay open for a justification of the new religious autonomy with values intrinsic to the congregation as a distinct and separate human unit. These feelings constitute the germs out of which nationalism grew in Europe. In its prince and dynasty, each new autonomous Protestant congregation began to see a focus around which the people could rally to form the “nation” as a super-entity destined to carry out a “holy” mission of self-realisation. This contributed heavily to the growth of the centralised monarchies, and, in turn, gave the social cohesion necessary to keep the burgeoning European city together and its population attached to the “national” government. European nationalism grew as the universalism of the Church receded; and, by the end of the eighteenth century, it was strong and mature enough to give the Enlightenment and its political offspring — the world-order of the French Revolution — the most violent counter-action.

    The Enlightenment preached its rationalism to Europeans already committed to Christian dogma as well as to Renais¬sance naturalism. These were too ingrained in Europe’s consciousness for pure rationalism to succeed. Hence, practically all Enlightenment thinkers compromised rationalism to make room for both the Christian faith and naturalism. If this compromise could not be effected on the level of pure reason, then it was done on that of practical reason and judgment. Immanuel Kant, the prince of the Enlightenment, lectured on geography and international relations where universal rationalism did not stop him from predicating a “natural” inferiority to the Asian races, nor from asserting that to be black is an argument. Instead of purging it of such compromise or aberration and hence making the Enlightenment more viable and stronger, the next generation of Europeans suspected and repudiated it altogether. Theirs was a failure of nerve; for they could not countenance what lay at the end of the road the Enlightenment opened, namely rationalist repudiation of Christian dogma along with the Church’s authority which the Reformation had attacked, and universalist repudiation of ethnocentrism in favor of a world order founded on the equality of all mankind. Against the Enlightenment therefore, they levelled argument after argument which sought to redefine man in terms of ethnic history, language and race. Blood or life, the earth with its plains, mountains, rivers and forests, and a vague past in the myths and legends of the Middle Ages, became the elements out of which the new ideology was constituted.

    Evidently, such elements are not properly conceived by reason. They are the object of feeling and human instinct. A worldview built upon reason has no room for them; but one built upon them cannot only satisfy the trend toward naturalism (what could be more empirical than nature?) but allow plenty of room for accommodation of Christian dogma on the experiential basis of immediate feeling. The genius of Friedrich Schleiermacher was one of exchanging a crumbling foun¬dation of the faith — universal reason — for the solid one of per¬sonal experience, of ineffable feeling. The “Romantic” revolution was in full swing. The arts — literature, painting, sculpture and music — were already filling the European mind with visions of a new order in which each ethnic group saw itself as the vortex of human history, a manifestation of the absolute on earth. Pregnant with the hopes engendered by a century of rationalism and universalist humanism, the conscience of Europe welcomed the Revolutionary army of Europe as a genuine “emancipating” force. But it turned cynical when that force disclosed the ugly head of France’s imperialism, and surrendered itself with spite to its romantic enemy. The national wars which engulfed Europe in the sequel were the insane attempts of a sick man trying to cure himself of his disease with more of the same.

    How could the Jew fit into this new order? Under a universalism based on reason rather than religious affiliation, the Jew was given a place where he could contribute to the public welfare, the commonwealth or universal utility. But under a nationalism based on the romantic feeling of unity, of sharing in a mystical experience of common history, of communion with a particular “mother earth,” of participation in a Chris¬tian tradition of values, he was most definitely an alien. The European Jew himself oft led and contributed to this romanticism, for its affinity with an age-old ethnocentrism of his own, the “Chosen People” complex. But his service only accelerated his own doom. For in the eye of the European Christian, the forces of a new rejection of the Jew as a foreign body were gathering momentum. It was only a matter of time before these would explode into political action. The transformation brought about by romanticism presented the European to himself as rooted in a given blood and soil and grown under a legacy of Christian values. Whether believer, secularist or atheist, he acknowledged the legacy to be constitutive, regard substance, nor to return them to their ghettos devoid of civic liberties, but of bringing about a “final solution” to their problematic existence in Europe.