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Jews & the Japanese. Ben-Ami Shillony
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isbn 9781462903962
Автор произведения Ben-Ami Shillony
Издательство Ingram
Japan adopted Western techniques with a speed that astonished foreign observers. In 1855, one year after opening the country to intercourse with the West, the Tokugawa government built its first Western-style ship. Five years later, a Japanese crew commanded by Kimura Yoshitake and Katsu Kaishu first sailed a Japanese ship, the Kanrin maru, across the Pacific Ocean. In 1871, three years after the Meiji Restoration, which turned Japan into a centralized state, a postal system was established; and in 1872 the first railway, between Tokyo and Yokohama, was inaugurated. By the end of the nineteenth century Japan had become the most modern country in Asia, boasting a thriving light industry, a victorious army and navy, a sophisticated educational system from compulsory elementary schools to an elite university, a vigorous press, a dedicated bureaucracy, a sound banking system, a constitution, and an elected House of Representatives. In 1905 Japan defeated the mighty Russian army and navy and became the strongest local power in East Asia.
The Western notion of the Japanese as a nation of imitators incapable of original thinking derived from the fact that quite often the Japanese would adopt foreign techniques and institutions down to the minutest level. But this was true only at the initial stage. It would have indeed been foolish to try to develop an original modern technology or original modern institutions when Western techniques and institutions were working well and available. Yet, within a short time the Japanese started modifying and improving on what they had learned from the West, making their own contributions in various fields.
In 1888 a Japanese engineer, Shimose Masachika (1859-1911), developed a new and more powerful gunpowder, which later helped his country win the war against Russia. The Japanese too were attracted to German medicine and excelled in the fields related to it. In 1889 Kitazato Shibasaburo was the first to discover the bacterium which causes tetanus, and five years later he discovered the bacillus which causes bubonic plague. Kitazato's Institute for Infectious Diseases soon became one of the world's leading institutes in that field. His disciple Hata Sahachiro helped the German-Jewish immunologist Paul Ehrlich to develop a drug against syphilis. In 1901 the Japanese chemist Takamine Jokichi was the first to isolate adrenalin, and nine years later Suzuki Umetaro was the first to extract vitamin B.
7
Master or Genius?
THE JEWS and the Japanese joined the modern West with an ambition to excel, but because their traditions and historical experiences differed, the ways in which they proved themselves also differed. The basic Jewish position vis-a-vis the world had been one of nonconformism. As a small monotheistic people in an ocean of pagan culture and later as a small non-Christian or non-Moslem community in an ocean of Christendom or Islam, Jews had become accustomed to challenging accepted customs and values. Their survival as a nation and a religious group depended upon courage to adhere to beliefs and modes of behavior that differed from the majority of those among whom they lived. The Japanese, on the other hand, did not develop such a tradition. Confucian morals and bushido (the ethical code of the samurai) stressed the importance of conformism and obedience to accepted standards. Success and advancement were achieved not by dissenting but by outperforming. When the Japanese adopted Chinese civilization in the first millennium C.E., they showed their ingenuity not by challenging concepts and standards of that civilization, but by striving to implement them in what they believed was a more efficacious way.
There was considerable intellectual freedom in premodern Japan. Different schools existed for almost every cultural activity, from flower arranging to martial arts and philosophy. Although each school prescribed its own way of doing things, there was little animosity between them. Choosing a particular school, like choosing a game, was a matter of taste rather than of conviction, but once a school was chosen, one had to abide by the rules of the game; like in sport, success depended on performing well according to set rules. Accomplishment was a matter of rigorous training combined with personal style.
When the Japanese decided to adopt the Western culture, they went about it in the same sportsmanlike manner. Previous games were not discarded, but anyone wishing to play the Western game had to abide by its rules. Copying details was the only way to learn the new rules. All of Japan's accomplishments in modern times have been attained by outperforming the West according to the rules established by the West. Thus, when Japan defeated czarist Russia in 1905, it was not the victory of an Oriental power over an Occidental one, but rather the victory of a more modern Japan over a less modern Russia. Japanese industry, military, commerce, education, law, bureaucracy, and parliament were all established on Western principles. Traditional elements were incorporated, but the basic rules were Western. Consequently, when the Japanese acquired their first colonies, Taiwan and Korea, they ruled them as ruthlessly as the Western powers ruled their own colonies at that time.
The enthusiasm for practical solutions and disinclination to engage in theoretical polemics was evident in social and political thought. The Meiji-period (1868-1912) leaders who built the new Japan set pragmatic goals: a rich country and a strong military. They had no intention of creating the "new man" or of offering new formulas for the solution of the world's problems. They did not give their policies theoretical names and had little interest in providing a model for other countries to follow. Japan built a successful modern state and a dynamic and orderly modern society without formulating a new theory of how a state or a society should be maintained or managed. Japan is probably the only country in the world that has transformed itself quickly without recourse to any grand ideology, and the Japanese leaders are probably unique in not having any "-isms" or doctrines associated with their names.
The Jews excelled in Western culture through a different course. Their historical position as nonconformists and challengers of accepted truths, and their long tradition of theoretical argumentation produced an emphasis on creativity rather than on accomplishment. Whereas the Japanese tried to outperform their Western competitors, the Jews sought to revise, redraw, and replace the basic tenets of the West. The epitome of Japanese achievement was the master, at the pinnacle of Jewish success was the genius.
The nineteenth and twentieth centuries have seen Jewish "geniuses" appear in numbers out of all proportion to the Jewish population. While Jews in modern times have constituted only about two-tenths of one percent of the world population, about 20 percent of the recipients of the Nobel Prize in physiology, medicine, and physics have been Jews. It is difficult to imagine the world today without the contributions of Karl Marx, Leon Trotsky, Sigmund Freud, Alfred Adler, Albert Einstein, Franz Kafka, Marcel Proust, Emile Durkheim, Henri Bergson, Claude Levi-Strauss, and many other Jewish scholars, writers, philosophers, and scientists. Most of these eminent persons were iconoclastic geniuses. They had detached themselves from Orthodox Judaism and some even converted to Christianity, but they all shared the Jewish trait of zeal in challenging accepted truths and searching out new ways of understanding the world. Carrying on the tradition of nonconformism and argumentation, they came to shatter accepted doctrines and to offer new theories and concepts.
Karl Marx was the grandson of a rabbi and a descendant of a line of talmudic scholars; his uncle was the chief rabbi in his native German town of Trier. Marx was baptized at the age of six and later heaped scorn on the Jews, accusing them of being capitalist manipulators, but his audacity in challenging philosophical assumptions and in offering a new way of achieving human salvation was rooted in the Jewish tradition of dissent and in the Jewish belief in a future redemption. Sigmund Freud was born in Vienna to a Jewish family that had emigrated from eastern Poland. Unlike Marx, Freud never abandoned Judaism, even though he was not a practicing Jew. Albert Einstein, however, was a proud Jew and an active Zionist; in 1952 he was offered the post of the president of the State of Israel, which he declined. Japan had no equivalents to Marx, Freud, or Einstein, because its society and value system were not structured to encourage opponents of conventional wisdom.
Many Jews who entered European society became wealthy and, although many more of them remained poor, it was the rich who captured the attention of the gentiles. The wealthy Jew is not a modern phenomenon. As moneylenders and merchants, Jews had already gained the reputation of being rich in the Middle Ages. But as long