Haviv Rettig Gur, writing at the Free Press: The Jews Who Saw Around History's Darkest Corner
At the start of the 20th century ...the Zionists were a minority. Right up until they weren’t. Right up until Europe itself left Jews with no other choice.
Put very simply: Zionism, alone among Jewish movements and cultural worlds of the diaspora in the 19th and early 20th centuries, knew what was coming.
The early Zionists saw only dimly, vaguely, the bloodletting that would come. But this foreknowledge rested on serious analysis and theory, and recommended clear action. This was true across the political spectrum of the Zionist movement, from socialists to liberals to right-wing Revisionists.
I found it immediately interesting that this was not driven by political ideology, but by observation. However the Zionists concluded, intuited, or received the idea that the coming destruction was far greater than everyone else was assuming, it did not come from their political or religious priors. It is not impossible in the world to say "this group's ideas are wrong but their predictions have been right," but it certainly should signal to us that we might be talking pure nonsense.
Christians are the most persecuted religious group in raw numbers on the planet at present, and by a large margin. But there are also far more of us that there are Jews, so we get into knots trying to see what Most-persecuted might mean in a percentage sense. Their problems are not our problems, yet Christians remain fascinated by what happens to them. There have been Christians who would have rejoiced to see the elimination of all Jews. There probably still are. Christians now run the gamut between loyalty to the nation of Israel which exceeds most Jews in the Diaspora to those who believe we should attend no more to their actions and troubles than to the Bahai or residual native animisms.
We may see our reflections in them.
1 comment:
I've read a fair sampling of early Zionist literature and do not recall any premonitions of genocide. The dominant fear was disappearance of the Jewish nation through assimilation once, secularization removed religious segregation and taboos. The dominant hope was that the Jewish nation would no longer be deformed by filling a narrow economic niche. Pogroms were of course frequently mentioned, but I don't recall mention of a coming pogrom to end all pogroms.
Spinoza once wrote that there would be no Jewish nation without persecution, since persecution short of extermination hardens a group that understands its persecution in the right way. Raising the cost of membership boils off the fainthearted. They persecute us out of envy feeds ethnic pride. But you are right that Christians are not prepared for serious persecution because they still think and act as if Christianity were normative and hegemonic. This is why they need to study Jews and learn how to survive as a despised minority. And not just survive--actually thrive under and because of moderate persecution.
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