East and West

Matti Friedman, an iconoclastic commentator on the Israeli scene, once wrote that Americans might find ourselves disappointed in Israel because of something we do not recognize, which is that it is an Oriental country. What he could have gone further and said is that the Jews are an Oriental people. Hegel observed as much. His predecessor, Kant, had viewed the French Revolution as heralding an incipient republicanism that made an advance on the arbitrary rule of monarchs, and in just the same way, Hegel viewed Christianity as an advance on Judaism, making rational and universal what had been partial because reserved to one people.

Nietzsche, who opposed anti-Semitism, but did not forbid himself derogatory remarks about the Jews, likened the God of Israel to an Oriental despot, and the Jews’ self-abasement before Him as akin to rolling around in the dust. After the Holocaust, such remarks are politically unacceptable, but what Friedman is encouraging us to do is to think around the corner of the nineteenth century and the Enlightenment, to a time before Jews could think of ourselves as integrated into the fabric of Western societies, a time when we were still viewed as alien and other and confined to ghettoes. One who has grown up in metropolitan New York and has never left the area can be forgiven for thinking Judaism is normal. But while Friedman sought to encourage us to open ourselves up to those aspects of Israeli culture that are influenced by Jews who immigrated from North Africa and the Middle East, and even to teach us that Israeli culture is predominantly influenced by these Jews rather than those like ourselves, nonetheless, the global effect should be to teach us that we ourselves are of the East, though living in the West. Primarily, we are acculturated to think of democracy as the norm of norms, the form of government superior to all others, and the one historically triumphant over those which existed before it, and which remain alongside it. This acculturation leads us to think those who have come from lands of exile other than the West thoughtlessly disposed towards despotism where expeditious, heedless of the superior nature of democracy. Friedman, I would argue, points the way towards thinking of ourselves, American Jews, rather as hamstrung by an ideology which we cling to because it credentials us as legitimate members of Western society.

Political Zionism emerged in Europe in the nineteenth century as a way for Jews collectively to turn our backs on Europe and try our luck under other circumstances. Geographically, Jews returned to the Middle East; but intellectually, most of the secular Jews who fled Europe remained tied to Enlightenment thinking. If we look at the social purpose such thinking holds of credentialing us as Westerners, apart from the question of the value of democracy, then we are further informed than we would be if we angrily rejected any suggestion that we are different than those among whom we sojourn, and with whom we like to regard ourselves as one.