Trilling Lionel - The State of the Jews: A Critical Appraisal

Copyright 2012 by Transaction Publishers, New Brunswick, New Jersey.

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Library of Congress Catalog Number: 2011032331
ISBN: 978-1-4128-4614-1
Printed in the United States of America

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

Alexander, Edward, 1936

The state of the Jews : a critical appraisal / Edward Alexander.

p. cm.

ISBN 978-1-4128-4614-1

1. JewsHistory. 2. JudaismHistory. 3. JewsPolitics and government20th century. 4. JewsPolitics and government21st century. 5. Jews in literature. 6. Trilling, Lionel, 19051975Political and social views. I. Title.

DS117.A618 2012

305.8924dc23

2011032331

IN MEMORIAM

Lucy S. Dawidowicz

Emil and Rose Fackenheim

Sol and Lizzie Fox

Josef Hadar

Anna Levy

Lew and Rose Levy

Roy and Dagmar McClement

Bernard and Eleanor M. Saffran

Marie Syrkin

The hand of the LORD was upon me, and carried me out in the spirit of the LORD, and set me down in the midst of the valley which was full of bones

And he said unto me, Son of man, can these bones live? And I answered, O Lord GOD, thou knowest

Then said he unto me, Prophesy unto the wind, prophesy, son of man, and say to the wind, Thus saith the Lord GOD; Come from the four winds, O breath, and breathe upon these slain, that they may live.

So I prophesied as he commanded me, and the breath came into them, and they lived, and stood up upon their feet, an exceeding great army.

Then he said unto me, Son of man, these bones are the whole house of Israel: behold, they say, Our bones are dried, and our hope is lost: we are cut off for our parts.

Therefore prophesy and say unto them, Thus saith the Lord GOD; Behold, O my people, I will open your graves, and cause you to come up out of your graves, and bring you into the land of Israel.

And ye shall know that I am the LORD, when I have opened your graves, O my people, and brought you up out of your graves.

And shall put my spirit in you, and ye shall live, and I shall place you in your own land; then shall ye know that I the LORD have spoken it, and performed it.

Ezekiel, 37

Contents

Preamble: A Walk through the Table of Contentsand a Linguistic Alert

My old teacher Lionel Trilling mischievously entitled one of his collections of essays A Gathering of Fugitives , by which he meant that they were in flight from unity, as perhaps all collections of essays, going back to Montaignes Essais of 1580, must be in some degree. I have arranged the essays and reviews in the present collection in four sections, not logically parallel to one another. Because so much of the present ideological assault on Israel and Zionism emanates from liberals, the very people Thomas Carlyle used mockingly to call friends of the species, I begin the book with a lengthy background essay that examines antisemitic and philosemitic strains in three prominent and influential Victorian liberals: Dr. Thomas Arnold, his son Matthew Arnold, and John Stuart Mill. Those terms, as applied here, are anachronistic. Both are German coinages of the 1870s, and both, as Gertrude Himmelfarb has pointed out, were invented by antisemites, antisemitism used approvingly, philosemitism disparagingly. had been an unqualified antisemite; and Jewish editors of the Bible text (like J. H. Hertz) who occasionally annotated it with his readings were justified in doing so. (Arnold was also the first serious critic of the Bible as a literary work, and held that Isaiah was equal in literary power to Homer, superior to Shakespeare and Milton.) John Stuart Mill was neither antisemite nor philosemite, but a tertium quid foreshadowing a political type of more immediacy to my subject than the two Arnolds themselves.

The main body of the book is divided according to genre: history, politics, and literature; the books subtitleA Critical Appraisalis meant to invoke Matthew Arnolds famous definition of criticism as the endeavour, in all branches of knowledge, theology, philosophy, history, art, science, to see the object as in itself it really is. It is not the endeavor to destroy the object. Here too I write in defense of language as well as the Jews, and seek to reclaim and rescue the word criticism from the ravages of Israels ideological enemies. These linguistic desperadoes (who appear often in the pages that follow) have long done battle with that straw man they call Zionists who want to silence all criticism of Israel, mythical creatures nobody has ever been able to identifyunless we agree that calls to throw Israel into the sea, or to turn the Mediterranean red with Jewish blood, or to shoot settlers dead (thus the English poetaster Tom Paulin) or (this the linguistic enlargement of a Jewish leftist named Derfner) to kill Israelis generally are to be accounted criticism, as their authors claim.

I also emulate Arnold in removing the qualifier literary from the term criticism. Given the unity and integrity of knowledge, the criticism of literature leads naturally, and I hope tactfully, into the discussion of history and politicscreating the organic filaments that bind together the books three sections.

Note

1. Gertrude Himmelfarb, The People of the Book: Philosemitism in England, From Cromwell to Churchill (New York and London: Encounter Books, 2011), 5.

Acknowledgments

For help and suggestions of various kinds that I received in writing this book, I am grateful to Rebecca Alexander, Paul Bogdanor, David Brumer, Werner Cohn, Joel Fishman, Irving Louis Horowitz, Menachem Kellner, Isi Leibler, Steve Plaut, and Doug Wertheimer.

I am grateful to the following journals for permission to reprint articles and reviews, in whole or in part.

Claremont Review of Books

First, Survive, Fall 2008.

Standpoint

The Unfinished Journey of Lionel Trilling, August 2008.

The Weekly Standard

History Defiled, May 30, 2011.

Modern Judaism

Review of Benjamin Balint, Running Commentary , February 2011.

Harvard University Center for Jewish Studies

Daniel Deronda : The Zionist Fate in English Hands and The Liberal Betrayal of the Jews in Arguing the Modern Jewish Canon: Essays on Literature and Culture in Honor of Ruth R. Wisse (Harvard University Press, 2008).

Society

John Stuart Mill and the Jews, 38, November/December 2000.

Midstream

The Antisemitism of Liberals, September/October 2007.

Nativ

Tom Paulin: Poetaster of Murder, April 2004.

Jewish Press

Jewish Israel-Bashers and Dead Grandmothers: A New Mormonism? January 28, 2011.

Judaism

Dr. Arnold, Matthew Arnold, and the Jews, Spring 2002.

Academic Questions

Review of Mary Lefkowitz, History Lesson: A Race Odyssey, Fall 2008.

Chicago Jewish Star

Review of Jennie Lebel, The Mufti of Jerusalem: Haj-Amin el-Husseini and National Socialism, April 18, 2008.