History of the Jews

by Paul Johnson

  The last assertion was a restatement of Maimonides’ belief that there are two complementary ways of perceiving truth, reason and Revelation. However, Einstein was much closer to Spinoza, whom he greatly admired, in dismissing Revelation as such. What he did say was that intuitive thinking was essential to the formulation of a great scientific concept, a sort of blind leap into a huge theoretical generalization.237 Here he had a great deal in common with the French Jewish philosopher Henri Bergson (1859-1941), who shared Einstein’s stress on the mystical and intuitive element in science (and the interaction of time and matter).238 But in Einstein’s view and work, once intuition created the elements of an idea, science and reason took over. ‘I want to know how God created this world,’ he said—almost a mystical aim. But the knowledge had to be acquired by mathematical formulation, verified by astronomy. In a sense, Einstein was doing what the kabbalists had attempted, to describe creation by numbers. But whereas their numbers were intuitive, magic and unverifiable, his were rationally conceived and validated by telescope. There was magic, in the sense that it amazed him to be able to discover that the universe, instead of being chaotic, as one might a priori have supposed, was in fact orderly, governed by laws of space-time, which might have to be modified occasionally, as he had modified Newton’s, but which were fundamentally accessible to the human intellect. Herein, he said, ‘lies the “miracle”, which is becoming increasingly deep with the development of our knowledge’.239

  Einstein believed that the macrocosmic and the microcosmic must be governed by the same laws and that his General Theory of Relativity would ultimately become merely part of a unified theory governing all electromagnetic fields. Every physical relationship of the material world could then be accurately described in a few pages of equations. He felt a deep kinship with Spinoza, who was likewise ‘utterly convinced of the causal dependence of all phenomena, at a time when the success accompanying the efforts to achieve a knowledge of the causal relationship with natural phenomena was still quite modest’. He, coming 300 years after Spinoza, might succeed. The quest was peculiarly Jewish, in that it was impelled by an overwhelming need for an enveloping truth-law about the universe, a scientific Torah. The alternative to a general theory was indeterminacy, a concept especially abhorrent to the Jewish mind, since it seems to make impossible all ethics, or certainty in history, politics and law.240 Hence Einstein’s forty-year search, ultimately inconclusive. Like Maimonides, who in his code, his commentary and his Guide was trying to reduce his vast Judaic inheritance into a modest-sized, clear and rational body of knowledge—a Judaic summa—Einstein was seeking a stark and monumental simplicity, a scientific summa which would make plain sense of the universe.241

  In fact, his achievement stopped with the establishment of relativity theory. The truth of that has been demonstrated many times and it has been for the past sixty years or more a central part of the scientific corpus of knowledge. In the general mind, however, it introduced not a great new simplicity but a great new complexity, for relativity was confused with relativism, and especially with moral relativism. The conjunction of Einstein and Freud, at least in the popular perception, struck a devastating blow at the absolute certainties of Judaeo-Christian ethics, in which Einstein, at any rate, profoundly believed.242 That was another heavy debt added to the Jewish account in many dark minds. The arrival of relativity theory was the point at which a great many educated and intelligent men gave up trying to keep abreast of scientific discovery. The Jewish literary philosopher Lionel Trilling (1905-75) noted the consequences:

  This exclusion of most of us from the mode of thought which is habitually said to be the characteristic achievement of the modern age is bound to be experienced as a wound given to our intellectual self-esteem. About this humiliation we all agree to be silent; but can we doubt that it…introduced into the life of mind a significant element of dubiety and alienation which must be taken into account in any estimate that is made of the present fortunes of mind?243

  Hence the net result of this furious intellectual activity and cultural innovation at the turn of the century, an activity in which Jews were perceived to be taking a leading part, was to produce not merely an arms race between progressives and conservatives but a widespread feeling of bewilderment and anxiety. The new Jewish secular intellectuals felt this as strongly as anyone, even while they contributed to it with their work. The yearning for remembered certitudes is one of the great engines of Proust’s masterpiece, À la Recherche du temps perdu. In the work of Franz Kafka (1883-1924) the entire governing principle appears to be incomprehensible displacement. ‘I am here,’ one of his stories ends, ‘more than that I do not know, further than that I cannot go. My ship has no rudder, and it is driven by the wind that blows in the uttermost regions of death.’244 Schönberg felt the same, summing up his life in one weird metaphor: ‘I had the feeling as if I had fallen into an ocean of boiling water, and not knowing how to swim…. I tried with my legs and arms as best I could…. I never gave up. But how could I give up in the middle of an ocean?’245 The expressionist poet Jacob von Hoddis, formerly Hans Davidsohn, epitomized and aggravated the bewilderment by producing in 1910 a short set of verses, ‘Weltende’ (‘The World’s End’) which briefly became the most famous and notorious poem in Germany. He read it at the poetry-cabaret organized by the expressionist leader, Kurt Hiller, who claimed to be a descendant of the Rabbi Hillel. It began, ‘The hat flies off the bourgeois’s pointed head’, and for reasons now obscure it immediately seemed to sum up modernism both for its proponents and for its enemies, reducing the latter to incoherent rage.246 In 1914 the young poet went insane, followed immediately after by virtually the whole of Europe, in a vast dance of destruction from which both the prospects and the predicament of the Jews emerged dramatically transformed.

  PART SIX

  Holocaust

  On 9 November 1914, in a speech at London’s Guildhall, the British Prime Minister, Herbert Asquith, announced dramatically: ‘The Turkish empire has committed suicide.’ Germany’s wooing of Turkey, which had led the Kaiser to abandon his active support of Zionism, had finally succeeded. The sultan had committed himself to a German victory and was about to launch a jihad against Britain. Asquith wished to prevent the 100 million Moslem subjects of Britain’s own empire from joining it. Hence his speech, committing Britain to breaking up the Ottoman empire at last, and giving freedom to its peoples.1 But, in making it, he was unconsciously adding another crucial piece to the jigsaw of the Zionist state. For if Turkish rule were removed from Palestine, among other places, there might be nothing to prevent a Jewish national home from moving into the vacuum.

  The notion that Jews would benefit from a German defeat in the fearful conflict now beginning would have struck most of them, at the time, as absurd. The mortal enemy of the Jews was Tsarist Russia, which the German army was now trying to tear to pieces. In London’s East End, Jews were reluctant to volunteer to fight the Germans for this very reason. Everyone associated Jewish cultural leadership with Germany. Except for the pacifists of the far left, all the leading German-speaking Jewish intellectuals, led by Max Liebermann, signed a petition supporting Germany’s war aims—Einstein was almost the only one who refused.

  When the German troops, having defeated the Russian army at Tannenberg, pushed into Russian Poland, the Jews hailed them as saviours. One who did so was Ze’ev Dov Begin, father of a future Prime Minister of Israel. In addition to Hebrew and Yiddish he spoke German, in preference to Polish which he called ‘the language of anti-Semitism’. He told the young Begin and his sister (later Mrs Halperin): ‘You see, the Germans will come, it is a different culture, it is not Russia.’ The Russian army, withdrawing, rounded up entire Jewish communities and drove them, under the lash, to Siberia—a sinister adumbration of Stalin’s minorities policy. The Begins watched the Cossacks burn down Jewish villages. When the Germans arrived, Mrs Halperin later recalled, they ‘treated the Jews marvellously…. They gave each child sweet
s and biscuits. They were different Germans, a different period.’2

  Even in the Jewish settlements in Palestine, German tended to be the lingua franca. Many of the settlers wanted German, rather than Hebrew, to be the language of instruction in Jewish schools. It was accepted, without debate, as the official language of Zionist congresses. The Zionist office in Berlin saw itself as the headquarters of the world movement, and its members were calling for a German protectorate over the Jews, as well as over Islam. Many believed it was the big Jewish community of Salonika which had helped to push Turkey into the war on Germany’s side.3

  Nevertheless, the more perceptive realized the immense significance of the British decision to carve up the Ottoman rump. One was Chaim Weizmann, who since Herzl’s death had become the most effective proponent of Zionism in the West. ‘The time has now come’, he wrote with satisfaction after Asquith’s speech, ‘to speak openly—to point out to the world the attitude of the Jews to Palestine.’ Weizmann was one of the noblest and most important figures in Jewish history. As a Zionist leader he was just as skilful as Herzl in handling world statesmen but in addition he could speak for the Ostjuden rank and file—he was one. The atmosphere of his home, in the Pripet Marsh town of Motol, was entirely traditional. His father, who cut timber and floated it down to the Baltic, knew Caro’s Code by heart and his favourite book was the Guide of the Perplexed. It is true that, on the walls of their home, next to Maimonides, was the portrait of Baron Hirsch, but ‘the Return’ was seen as religious: the local rabbi told Weizmann: ‘One has to do much, learn much, know much and suffer much before one is worthy of that.’4

  Certainly, Weizmann had to suffer much just to acquire a modern education. There were no newspapers in his home. His schoolmaster, a secret maskil, had to smuggle in a Hebrew textbook on the natural sciences under cover of teaching the Prophets. Then there was the Tsarist state, whose numerus clausus rules allocated a maximum 10 per cent of the grammar-school places to Jews even in towns where they were over 50 per cent of the population. Everything was done to prevent Jews getting to university. Weizmann later wrote: ‘as one read, year after year, the complicated ukases which poured from St Petersburg, one obtained the impression that the whole cumbersome machinery of the vast Russian empire was created for the sole purpose of inventing and amplifying rules and regulations for the hedging in of the existence of its Jewish subjects’. So education involved ‘ceaseless chicanery, deception and humiliation’.5 Weizmann acquired monumental patience and persistence, as well as industry, and managed to get to the Berlin Polytechnic, one of the three best science schools in Europe, and later to Switzerland, where he obtained his doctorate in chemistry at Freiburg (1899).

  But it was in England, where he came to teach biochemistry at Manchester University, that Weizmann found his life-task: to exploit the existence of the British empire, and the goodwill of its ruling class, to bring the Jewish national home into existence. Weizmann, who became a British subject in 1910, always accepted the British at their own valuation, as tolerant and fair-minded, loving freedom and justice. He banked all his emotional coin in their hearts and on the whole drew a decent dividend. In the years before 1914 he set about cultivating them. He met C. P. Scott, the powerful editor of the Liberal Manchester Guardian, and through him such Lancashire MPS as Arthur Balfour, leader of the Conservatives, and Winston Churchill. Scott also introduced him to his closest political friend, Lloyd George. All these men became staunch supporters of Zionism.

  Weizmann found an unexpected ally in the Liberal MP Herbert Samuel. He was a member of the Jewish establishment at a time when it was overwhelmingly, sometimes venomously, anti-Zionist. His father had founded the immensely successful banking firm of Samuel Montagu, and his first cousin in the firm, Edwin Montagu, was also in politics and a leading anti-Zionist. Samuel had been to Balliol, that nest of atheism, and was forced to confess to his mother that he lost his faith there. But he conformed outwardly, continued to pay his synagogue dues, and proudly called himself a Jew. So when he got into the cabinet in 1909 he was the first Jew to serve there. He had also done political work in Jewish Whitechapel, and the appalling scenes of poverty and degradation he witnessed there made him a Zionist. This was confirmed by his marginal involvement in the 1911 Marconi case, where he experienced for himself the cruelty of anti-Semitism, even in tolerant Britain.

  Samuel was chilly, silent, reserved; he kept his views to himself. Not even Weizmann knew he was a Zionist. But he had privately conceived a plan to exploit the Turkish intervention, and on the day Asquith made his speech Samuel called on Sir Edward Grey, the Foreign Secretary, at the Foreign Office and held a critical conversation there. What about a national home for the Jews? Grey said ‘the idea had always had a strong sentimental attachment to him…[and he] would be prepared to work for it if the opportunity arose’. They discussed details. Samuel warned that the area of the national home could not include ‘Beirut and Damascus since they contained a large, non-Jewish population which could not be assimilated’. Hence, he added, ‘it would be a great advantage if the remainder of Syria were annexed by France, as it would be far better for the state to have a European power as neighbour than the Turk’. The idea took shape for an Anglo-French carve-up, the British getting Palestine, the French Syria-Lebanon, on the lines later drawn in the Sykes-Picot secret agreement, implemented at Versailles. But that did not yet mean the Jews would get their home. Later the same day Samuel strolled across to the Treasury to enlist the help of Lloyd George, now Chancellor of the Exchequer. He ‘said to me he was very keen to see a Jewish state established there’.6

  So Weizmann and Samuel set the campaign in motion. The Fabian New Statesman, in a plea for a British protectorate enshrining a Jewish national home, argued: ‘The hopes of the Zionists have suddenly passed from an ideal into a matter of practical politics.’7 In fact there was a long way to go. Asquith, a drawing-room anti-Semite, looked on in disdainful amusement when Samuel put his plan to the cabinet and it was hotly resisted by his anti-Zionist cousin Montagu. The Prime Minister relayed their encounters in his daily letters to his girlfriend Venetia Stanley. ‘[Samuel] thinks’, he wrote (28 January 1915),

  we might plant in this not very promising territory about 3 or 4 million Jews, and that this would have a good effect on those (including I suppose himself) who were left behind…. It reads almost like a new edition of Tancred brought up to date. I confess I am not attracted to this proposed addition to our responsibilities. But it is a curious illustration of Dizzie’s favourite dictum that ‘race is everything’ to find this almost lyrical outburst proceeding from the well-ordered and methodical brain of H.S.8

  Again, on 13 March 1915 he referred to Samuel’s ‘almost dithyrambic memorandum’ on Palestine, ‘into which the scattered Jews could in time swarm back from all quarters of the globe and in due course obtain Home Rule (what an attractive community!). Curiously enough the only other partisan of this proposal is Lloyd George, who I need not say does not care a damn for the Jews’—merely wishing to keep the ‘agnostic, atheist French’ out of the ‘Holy Places’. Four days later, the Prime Minister told Miss Stanley that ‘Cousin Montagu’, or ‘the Assyrian’ as he called him, had hit back with a ‘racy memorandum’ in which he accused ‘Cousin Herbert’ of being incapable of translating into Hebrew a single phrase of his plan, which was ‘a rather presumptuous and almost blasphemous (!) attempt to forestall Divine Agency in the collection of the Jews’. Asquith confessed that the language used by his quarrelling Jewish colleagues ‘rather amazes me’.9 His doubts were confirmed when the War Minister, Lord Kitchener, the only minister who had ever been there, said, ‘Palestine would be of no value to us whatsoever.’

  However, events moved steadily in the Zionists’ favour. Kitchener was forced to relinquish the munitions portfolio to Lloyd George, which brought him into direct professional contact with Weizmann, now working on the war effort. Then Kitchener was drowned on a trip to Russia and Lloyd George took over th
e War Office completely. This marked the beginning of a transfer of resources to the eastern Mediterranean, making a British conquest of Palestine more likely. Weizmann found it easier to get to see senior members of the government. At the Foreign Office on 18 August 1916 he made a conquest of Lord Robert Cecil, who recorded:

  He said with great truth that even in this country a Jew always had to give an explanation of his existence and he was neither quite an Englishman nor quite a Jew, and that the same thing was equally true with much more serious results in other countries…. Perhaps a phrase he used may convey something of the impression which he made. He said: ‘I am not romantic except that Jews must always be romantic, for to them reality is too terrible.’