If I Am Not For Myself - Mike Marqusee

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of the teacher and the other kids turn on me. They were used to my spouting radical opinions, but this time I had gone too far. Angrily, the teacher told me I didn’t have any idea what I was saying and that there would be no discourtesy to guests in his classroom. The young Israeli ranted bitterly about Arab propaganda and how the Israelis treated the Arabs better than any of the Arab rulers did.

      I can’t remember how long it was after that that I decided to share this experience and my thoughts on it with my family. This was something I was usually encouraged to do and for which I usually received approbation. We were sitting around the dinner table—all seven of us—so it must have been a weekend, because during the week my father rarely made it home from the city in time to eat with us. I launched into my story about the Israeli in Sunday school and how what he said was racist. I had been thinking about the matter and now added, for my family’s benefit, a further opinion. It was wrong for one country to take over another, or part of another, by military force. If the US was wrong in Vietnam—and that was a given around our dinner table—then Israel was wrong in taking over all that Arab land. I was reasoning by analogy, and nobody had yet told me that some analogies were off-limits.

      For some time I remained unaware that my father was listening to me not with approval but with rising fury. When he barked, “Enough already!” the shift was disturbingly abrupt. Like my Sunday school teacher, he made me feel that I’d said something obscene. Then he drew a breath, turned to me and seemed to soften. “I think you need to look at why you’re saying what you’re saying,” he said, and then the softness vanished. “There’s some Jewish self-hatred there.”

      I felt then, and still feel now, when I look back on it, deeply and frustratingly misunderstood. My motives had nothing to do with self-hatred or any feeling about being Jewish. Nor did they have anything to do with compassion for a people—the Palestinians—about whom I knew nothing. I was merely following, as best I could, and in typical fourteen-year-old fashion, what seemed to be the dictates of logic. If in following them, the results appeared to defy assumptions, then that just made them more curious and compelling. Judging people by their color or religion was wrong. Racism, making a generalization about a whole people, stereotyping a whole people, was wrong. Taking over other countries was wrong, even if they attacked you (it was years before I learned that it was Israel that had launched this war, justified at the time by Abba Eban, American liberal Jewry’s favorite Israeli, as a “pre-emptive” strike). Among the shibboleths I was brought up on was the belief that “my country right or wrong” was wrong. No one liked to insist more than my dad that if you really loved your country you criticized its flaws. Surely that also applied to religion, and “my religion right or wrong” must also be wrong. I was only trying to apply general principles to a particular case. It was an exercise in logic, an exercise in teenage stubbornness. I was unprepared for the response, with its implication that I did not know myself, coming from my father’s lips. An attack on my selfhood.

      I was startled and bewildered by the phrase “Jewish self-hatred.” I didn’t know what it meant. I hadn’t imagined that Jews would hate themselves, or that anyone would think that I hated myself. The charge seemed so farfetched, yet so personal. And so bitterly unfair. Burning from head to toe, I threw down knife and fork and left the table in a huff, pounding up the stairs to my room, where I hurled myself on my bed and wrestled with my frustration.

      Some might by now have concluded that the roots of my anti-Zionism lie in Oedipal trauma. For sure, this was a deeply distressing incident. Later, I looked back on it as my first political disagreement with my father, later still as one of a number of raw episodes in our relationship, most of which had nothing to do with politics. Now, looking again at the history behind the incident, I see more clearly why the opinions I was expressing would have infuriated nearly everyone in my father’s milieu in those days. To me, they were a logical development from the agreed shared ground of democratic liberalism, but to liberals of my father’s generation they were an insolent abrogation of that shared ground. Israel was a just cause and a Jewish cause, those who opposed Israel were anti-semites, and the only Jew who could fail to recognize these truths was a self-hating Jew. Without in the least intending to, I had breached a taboo.

      4

       The Emancipation of the Jews

      What is the great task of our age? It is emancipation. Not only that of the Irish, the Greeks, the Frankfurt Jews, the blacks in the West Indies and such oppressed peoples; it is the emancipation of the whole world, especially of Europe, which has come of age and is now tearing itself free from the iron leading-strings of the privileged class, the aristocracy.

      Heinrich Heine, Pictures of Travel1

      In Sunday school, we learned about Spinoza and Moses Mendelssohn, two in a long series of Jewish geniuses, and about Napoleon tearing down the ghetto walls. But overall the story of Jewish emancipation in Europe was sadly neglected. Compared to the saga of Israel or the memory of the shtetl or the progress of the Jews in the USA, not to mention the chronicles of the Bible, it was a footnote. More time was spent on Chasidism than Haskalah. Yet here we were, the beneficiaries of emancipation, Western Jews sitting in a Reform synagogue whose history was inseparable from that development.

      In popular Jewish consciousness, Jewish emancipation has steadily lost ground. There are a number of reasons for this. It’s a protracted, fragmented process, beginning in the mid-eighteenth century, and for the next 150 years moving in small eddies back and forth across the European continent. There is no emancipation proclamation, no moment of freedom at midnight, no May 15, 1948. Though individual Jews and Jewish groups played a significant role in shaping it, there was no mass Jewish agitation for emancipation until the Bund. The deliverers of Jewish emancipation were wars and revolutions, crises and upheavals in which, for the most part, the Jews themselves played only a marginal role.

      The awkward fact about emancipation is that it was always in part a struggle within Jewry, a struggle against Jewish authority, against rabbis, who even in our Reform milieu were treated with a deference that rarely appears in the literature of the Haskalah. Most significantly, emancipation has become tainted by association with “assimilation” and “self-hatred.” The story is not only one of the emancipation of Jews from the legal restraints imposed on them for centuries, but emancipation of Jews from the rule of other Jews, and even sometimes from the constraints of Judaism or Jewishness.

      In 1655, even before he’d published a word, Spinoza was accused of heresy (materialism and “contempt for the Torah”), and at the age of twenty-four he was excommunicated from the Amsterdam Synagogue. Spinoza was the son of Portuguese Jews, a lens grinder who wrote in Latin and spoke Dutch, Hebrew and Ladino, and his view of Jewishness was of a piece with his broader rationalism, with his insistence that “no one is bound to live as another pleases, but is the guardian of his own liberty.” In 1660 the synagogue petitioned the municipal authorities to declare Spinoza a “menace to all piety and morals.” In his Tractatus Theologico-Politicus, denounced by the Calvinist Church Council as a “work forged in Hell by a renegade Jew and the Devil,” he argues:

      As men’s habits of mind differ, so that some more readily embrace one form of faith, some another, for what moves one to pray may move another only to scoff, I conclude . . . that everyone should be free to choose for himself the foundations of his creed, and that faith should be judged only by its

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