The Chosen People (Page 4)

Although Howard Sachar's A History of the Jews in the Modern World covers some of the same territory, it is vastly different in its tone and conclusions. Where Slezkine goes out on a limb, Sachar plays it safe by telling us the story in a way that most people will find agreeable. Consensus history of this sort is fine when the consensus is right, but not so fine when it isn't. He tells us, for example, that "the largest numbers of Russian Jews had never adopted a Bolshevik political agenda" before the October Revolution because their petit-bourgeois economic position rendered them ill disposed to a program of mass expropriation. This is what Sachar's American readership would like to believe, and it is even true to a degree, although it ignores the extent to which Jews were dissatisfied with their position, aware that it was increasingly untenable and all but primed, consequently, to respond positively to a more sweeping and radical program when it finally seemed practical. He tells us that Jews were anti-Bolshevik in 1917 because they favored the Jewish cultural autonomy that Lenin opposed. Again, this may be accurate as a snapshot of Jewish attitudes at a particular moment, but it does not explain why millions of Jews abandoned cultural autonomy at the first opportunity a few years later, moving to Leningrad, Moscow and other large cities and taking salaried positions in the expanding Soviet technocracy. Whatever sense cultural autonomy may have made in a period of czarist stagnation, it made no sense whatsoever amid the "bonanza of upward mobility," as Sachar describes it in nearly the same breath, triggered by Soviet industrialization.

Such lapses are unfortunate, because much of A History of the Jews in the Modern World is judicious and balanced. Sachar's discussion of the interwar period in Central and Eastern Europe is especially impressive. The problem, as he shows, was all too simple. The Treaty of Versailles had given rise to a slew of bankrupt authoritarian states straight out of The Merry Widow or, better yet, Duck Soup. With roughly one citizen in four a member of one or another beleaguered minority, their ethnic policies were as vicious as their economic policies were comical. Hungarians in Romania, Ukrainians in Poland, Germans in Czechoslovakia--all were made to feel like unwanted stepchildren. And of course the most unwanted stepchildren of all, the ones all other stepchildren despised, were the Jews. The three great liberal powers--Britain, France and the United States--made fitful efforts to encourage a modicum of good behavior. Treaties were imposed on Poland, Czechoslovakia, Serbia and a half-dozen other states, requiring them to extend full civil rights to all citizens regardless of religion or ethnicity. Greece would be for the Greeks, but also somehow for the Jews, Turks, Bulgarians and others falling within its borders. Poland would be the same for Ukrainians and Jews. American Jews were jubilant. As Louis Marshall, president of the American Jewish Committee and a key adviser to Woodrow Wilson who helped negotiate such treaties, told an overflow crowd at Carnegie Hall in July 1919:

For the first time, the nations of the world have recognized that, in common with all other peoples, we are entitled to equality in law.... It has now become an established principle that any violation of the rights of a minority is an offense not only against the individuals but against the law which controls all of the civilized nations of the earth.

But such treaties were not only impossible to enforce; the very fact that the imperial powers had imposed them made the agreements all the more resented. A dangerous dynamic was put in place in which the only way Poles, Czechs, Romanians, etc. could demonstrate their national independence with regard to London or Paris was by abusing all those non-Poles, etc. London and Paris were urging them to protect. The Depression and concomitant rise of anti-Semitism in the imperial West didn't help matters; neither, needless to say, did the Nazi takeover in Germany. Much like--dare we say it?--today's Palestinians, Jews found themselves with nowhere to go. The only thing that squabbling nationalists could agree on was that they should leave and that someone else should take them in. Singing "Hail, Freedonia!" the Marx Brothers were Jews cavorting on the edge of the precipice.

As one might expect, Sachar ends his book with a tribute to Israel, whose military prowess, he says, has led to a net improvement in conditions for Diaspora Jews from Western Europe to Argentina. This may indeed be the case, although, as he also admits, the situation has hardly been as clear-cut for Jews in the Muslim world and the former Soviet bloc, where Israel's role may have been to their net detriment. But conditions have changed since the 1950s and '60s, when Israel was seen as a model social-democratic state, filled with sunburned kibbutzniks and Soviet-style pioneer youth. As Palestinian resistance has stiffened, Diaspora Jews have found their fortunes tied to a heavily militarized right-wing state whose ethnic policies are increasingly reminiscent of interwar Poland or Romania. If Jews benefited from the good will shown toward Israel before the 1967 war, the question is whether they will suffer from growing revulsion felt for it afterward. Anti-Semitism is the anti-Zionism of fools, but there are a lot of fools in the world, and all too many of them are falling into it already. It is morally catastrophic that a people who once allied with the most advanced, democratic currents in the world should now find themselves in bed with the most backward, e.g., all those "Christian Zionists" running around in Bush's America. Remarkably, the Jewish question is no closer to resolution at the start of the twenty-first century than it was at the start of the twentieth.

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