The Jews’ mistake: not knowing how to defend themselves …not even against the Nazis

The Jewish story is so problematical, irritating and provocative that every consideration of it confronts us with problems so complex that historians never can come up with satisfactory answers. Why didn’t the Jews understand, for example, that the Shoah was monstrously imminent? Why did they adapt (even if, at that time, Zionist warriors in the Palestine Yeshuv were fighting for their Land against the Arabs) to an unacceptable reality by either moving into mortifying ghettos or sometimes even helping their executioners with deportations?

The explanation can be found in a small but dense book by Yosef Hayim Yerushalmi, who died in 2009, after having given the world some of the best studies of Jewish culture. Now Giuntina has had the intelligence to publish the work of this wise man, who, as David Bidussa explains in his lovely introduction, recounts how the Jews, “to receive protection, sought vertical alliances” and, since they usually obtained them, did not have the slightest idea of what was about to happen in the territories under Nazi occupation. They just went on thinking, up until the Shoah, that “the king,” or his counterpart, would save them, at least from mass extermination. In this regard, they were, as the title somewhat maliciously says, “Servants of the King and Not Servants of Servants” (subtitle: Some aspects of the political history of the Jews. 72 pp. Euros 10). “Servant” is not a pretty word today, no matter who is being served -- much less established authority. In the end, says Yerushalmi -- echoing Hannah Arendt, always more hypercritical of her own people than she was of the Nazis who made her a refugee – the Jews appealed to the highest authority and ignored any connection with ordinary people. Bidussa explains that the perception of ever present danger -- and, consequently, requests for the King’s help -- comes from a sort of imprinting by certain Biblical verses (just think of the Book of Esther and Haman’s rescue from the peril of extermination because Esther interceded with the King!)

Yerushalmi shows how the story reinforced the faith of the Hebrews in the sovereign who protected them in the Middle Ages from the wrath of the little people who saw the Jews as the assassins of Christ. This protection gave them with a fragile legal wall against un-punishable homicide and extermination, going so far as to try to make Jews a useful instrument of royal power by creating the character of the court Jew. Yerushalmi recounts similar episodes that show how the sovereign and the Popes tried to help the Jews when they were subject to strong anti-Semitism, which, in fact, they never combatted and, even, provoked. But Yerushalmi does admit that there are many exceptions to his theory: Spain in 613 and later in Portugal in 1506 or the expulsions from England in 1290 or the banishment from Spain in 1492 and from Portugal in 1506 or the persecution by the Polish nobility who, as of the 16^th century blamed the Jews, who had, in fact, become a force in the country. Actually, perusal of any history of the Jewish people clarifies a couple of things. First, it made very practical and non- ideological sense for the Jews to seek any legal means to protect themselves, since their safety was repeatedly and violently under attack by fanatic mobs, Cossacks and so on and so forth. The simplest and most efficient recourse was the sovereign, who, in turn, had a vested interest in protecting his or her court Jews. The second important thing to recognize is that the threat of the Shoah was truly underhanded. It took a long time (for everybody, not just the Jews) before it became possible to understand that the Shoah was a final Apocalypse that left no room for negotiation. So, part of the Jewish world thought it could be avoided with conversation and compromises. And these words, in quotation marks, should give rise to reflection, particularly in view of current Iranian threats to exterminate the Jews and the global certainty that these threats can be contained with words.

A third consideration concerns the fact that the habitual search for protection was rooted, also, in a deficiency. Today the State of Israel exists. In the Middle Ages, in 1492 and even at the start of the Shoah, it did not. This represents, therefore, a relevant variable factor, which, in our opinion, still has not been absorbed by the Diaspora, which is still very tied to the concept of protection by respective national authorities. Finally, Hannah Arendt often pointed out how the Jews (even a megalomaniacal and probably cruel lunatic like Chaim Rumkowski) were largely to blame for their own cruel fate -- despite the “banality of evil” which she applied (developed but never discussed) to somebody like Eichmann who used his banality for far from banal purposes,

Concentration camp leaders and the confused and fearful leaders of the community, who looked for escape in improbable ways, were, in fact, protagonists of the same type of shock that led the Jews to risk making requests for help, mostly in vain. All it took was a Polish peasant or a young SS for the King game to be over. As a result, “royal” protection is no longer possible. The Jews would have been better off looking for ways to defend themselves. But that has not been possible for so long.