A Controversy of Zion – V
“The problem was the denial of fundamental human rights.
It was part and parcel of
the same onrushing forces of darkness
which sent hundreds of thousands of Catholic and Protestant faith out of their homes and countries,
and which finally precipitated the war.”
***
“The followers of Judaism look upon Palestine as the cradle of their faith,
but they regard the world as their domicile,
so that, together will all other God-revering men and women,
they may work out a way of life which shall bring justice and peace to all.
The Jews are essentially a religious community,
whose mission is to lead themselves towards,
and co-operate with others into, the way of righteousness.”
As the fifth of its series of six articles covering the opposition to Zionism – in the context of the late 1942 establishment of the American Council for Judaism, and, opposition to the Council by pro-Zionist Rabbis from across the religious spectrum of the Jews of the United States – on January 8, 1943 the Jewish Exponent granted the Council an opportunity to discuss and elaborate upon its beliefs and aims. This came in the form of an essay by Rabbi Hyman J. Schachtel, who at the time was Rabbi at Congregation Shaaray Tefila in New York City.
Rabbi Schachtel’s essay is well-written, sensibly laid out, and, clearly explains the ACJ’s attitude toward pro-Zionist activism, the perception of the place (for lack of a better word) of the Jewish people historically and theologically in Europe in particular and in Western civilization in general, the origin and nature of the unprecedented crisis then facing the Jews of Europe, and, ultimately, the postwar future of the Jewish people. Yet, regardless of the quality and forcefulness of the Rabbi’s essay in literary and emotional terms – and yes, it is well written – several aspects of it are striking: They kind of “jump out”, whether “now”, in the hindsight of eighty years, and I’d think even “then”, in early 1943.
First, I find it more than disconcerting that Rabbi Schachtel introduces the essay by describing pro-Zionist activity in terms of being a blitzkrieg. The word can be understood as an ostensibly neutral term simply pertaining to military tactics – combined arms engaged in a rapid movement and force concentration designed to break through a foes defenses over a changing front, ultimately aimed at a decisive defeat (this is derived from Wikipedia). But, it’s the very 1943 timing of Schactel’s essay, and the association of the term blitzkrieg with the Wehrmacht in the opening phases of WW II (though the word dates back to the 1920s) that disparages Zionism by indirectly and subtlely associating Jewish nationalism with the worst manifestation of nationalism then prevalent in the West. (Though of course Nazism was foremost national socialism.) It’s just one word.
But, the symbolism of words can carry great weight.
Of greater import, the essay reveals astonishing naivete and misunderstanding about the existing predicament of the Jews of Germany, and Europe in general, even as the Shoah was ongoing. Schachtel’s, “…onrushing forces of darkness which sent hundreds of thousands of Catholic and Protestant faith out of their homes and countries,” were emphatically not identical to those prevailing against the Jews of Europe in origin, magnitude, and relentlessness. To write so – as with other assertions in the essay – reveals a remarkable level of provinciality; a way perceiving the (then) present through the prism of the past, let alone a past that never genuinely existed; or a striking example of denial.
However, the essay is correct in respect of being consistent with the foundations of Reform (and now “Progressive”) Judaism: Reflective of currents of thought prevailing with the advent of the Enlightenment and, Jewish political emancipation particularly as the latter emerged and spread from Napoleonic France, the Jews are seen – through the window of a kind of christological secularism – as a purely religious body, unmoored from place and time, fated to dissolve – a la Immanuel Kant’s “Euthanasia of Judaism” – into the hoped for and quietly nullifying comfort of a universalist future.
History has shown differently.
It will continue to do so.
An Anti-Zionist Leader States the Position of His Group
WE REJECT ZIONISM
By RABBI HYMAN J. SCHACHTEL
The Jewish Exponent
January 8, 1943
In recent weeks a group of anti-Zionist Rabbis have formed an organization called the American Council for Judaism, whose purpose is to combat Zionism and to hinder the establishment of a Jewish Commonwealth in Palestine. An opportunity is here afforded to Rabbi Schachtel of New York, a member of this group, to state its position. As a background to this article, some sentences from the recent address of former President Herbert Hoover may be in point. In reviewing the prospects for peace and stability, he said: “Idealism must have a balance wheel of realism – that is, if the day’s work is to be done. We cannot ignore the wickedness of the human animal and the wickedness of some dynamic forces. Every realist knows that the dynamic forces of nationalism, of economic interest, of ideologies, of militarism, of imperialism, of fear, hate, revenge and personal ambition have not died out in the world.”
American Jewry is being subjected to a blitzkrieg by the political Zionists. They fill the press and platform. They miss no opportunity to try to convince us that we are Jews by race and nationality. Palestine is our hope and salvation, they insist. Not until a Jewish State in Palestine is a fact, they declare, will we stop anti-Semitism and end what they call our tragic sense of homelessness.
But the blitzkrieg has failed. Only fifty thousand are members of the Zionist Organization of America. Even in this comparatively small number there are many who have given their support to developments in Palestine without by any means subscribing to the Zionist political platform. Of course this does not stop the zealous political Zionist from making it seem as if this legitimate philanthropic concern embraces a completely defeatist pessimism for the Jews in the postwar world; makes acceptable a concept of mass immigration; approves political objectives unrelated to the strictly humanitarian considerations.
I, for one, differ from political Zionists in their historical appraisal of the Jews in Europe. True, the last two decades have been bitter ones in some countries, but those decades were only part of a stream of history which in the last century and a half has shown enormous progress in the expansion of freedom. The development and achievement of the Jews in Europe in the last 150 years are not to be measured only by a recapitulation of their disabilities and advantages. It is no more accurate to make that stress than it is to describe the history of the Jews in Palestine only in terms of the tensions of the last 20 years, the friction between Arab and Jew, the outbreaks and pogroms against the Jews. That is not history. That is a partisan portrait.
There are in particular two points that seem to me to need emphasis. The first relates to the political Zionist’s lack of faith. For to maintain that postwar Europe will be eternally and unchangeably hostile to the Jew is to call the objectives of the United Nations so much poppycock and to imply that the world tomorrow will only carry on the evils of the world of yesterday. It is to accept a barren philosophy of defeatism to believe that while the Axis will be defeated, the Axis ideology will be triumphant. It is to grant Hitler NOW his victory in making Europe “Judenrein (without Jews)”.
In such a world it appears to me that it is a little naïve to assume that Jews who cannot be safe in Europe can be safe in Palestine. By what flight of the imagination can we see a world where the climate of public opinion is so hostile to the Jews up to the Eastern Mediterranean as to force his emigration; but from that point on, the climate miraculously changes so as to offer a peaceful home for millions of Jews?
The second point that calls particularly for refutation is the so-called historic homelessness of the Jews which the political Zionist continually stresses. Here I must confess I don’t know what they mean. We American Jews are not homeless. The British Jews fighting valiantly for Britain do not regard themselves as homeless. Nor do the Russian Jews shedding their blood along the 2,000-mile-front. Nor do the Polish Jews fighting with their Christian fellow-citizens in the ranks of the Polish army. If there are Jews who feel homeless, that emotion derives not from an abstract philosophy but from the reality of persecution. Palestine itself has had within the last 10 years a large increase in its Jewish population. But it was no mystical concept of homelessness that brought them there. Quite the contrary; it was lack of democracy, it was fascism that sent thousands of Jews to Palestine from Germany and neighboring countries, just as it sent thousands of them to other parts of the world. The problem was the denial of fundamental human rights. It was part and parcel of the same onrushing forces of darkness which sent hundreds of thousands of Catholic and Protestant faith out of their homes and countries, and which finally precipitated the war.
If Europe is emancipated – if Europe after the war has a new birth of freedom, there will be no need for artificial lands of refuge for forced migrants. And if Europe and the world are not so emancipated then there is refuge nowhere.
The followers of Judaism look upon Palestine as the cradle of their faith, but they regard the world as their domicile, so that, together will all other God-revering men and women, they may work out a way of life which shall bring justice and peace to all. The Jews are essentially a religious community, whose mission is to lead themselves towards, and co-operate with others into, the way of righteousness.
God bless the Jews who have settled in Palestine. May they find there, and we shall help them to do so, the fullest development of their religious, economic and cultural aspirations. After the war we hope that as many Jew who so desire may go to Palestine and there become free Palestinians whose religion is Judaism even as we here are, and shall continue to be, free Americans whose religion is Judaism. But what we want for Jews after this war is what we want for all people. We want a world in which Jews, wherever they live, are free citizens entitled to the same privileges and subject to the same responsibilities as all other free citizens.
It is because the majority of American Jews believe in this that they reject Political Zionism. No amount of paid advertisement in the press with their long list of endorsements by well-meaning, yet misled Christians will change our mind. Nor will the Zionist spokesmen, who claim to speak for all Jewry, persuade us.
The political Zionists have looked backwards too long. Let them turn around and see the future: let them open their hearts to confidence and faith that this war of the United Nations will end in the triumph of the Atlantic Charter, and in the reassertion everywhere of the dignity of all human beings.
And to conclude: January 15, 1943: “The “Bogey” of Zionism”, by Rabbi Simon Greenberg
Rabbi Hyman Judah Schachtel, at…
… Texas State Historical Association
This video, from Howard Mortman’s YouTube channel, shows Rabbi Schachtel at the inauguration of President Lyndon Johnson in 1965.