A History of Zionism by Walter Laqueur Read Free Book Online Page A

Christianity. What binds me to Judaism is a feeling of duty, of reverence. I am tied to this religious party in the same way as I am bound to my mother, my family, my fatherland. Such feelings should not be dissected with the anatomical knife; one should not trace the deeper underlying motives, it does not help us to become better men.
    There are no exact statistics about Jewish conversions; Rahel’s statement in 1819 that half of the Berlin community had converted during the last three decades was no doubt exaggerated. * But equally there is no doubt that in Germany at the time, the most gifted in every walk of life, and above all the leaders, were affected: the intelligentsia in fact, those who had attained social, economic or political status and prominence. In some communities almost all the leading families converted; frequently the parents hesitated to take the fateful step but had their children baptised at birth. It was not a totally unprecedented phenomenon in Jewish history; it had happened before in Spain in the Middle Ages, and Jewish communities in some countries had vanished altogether. With the disappearance of the intellectual elite and social establishment it seemed that only the downtrodden and uneducated, the backward elements in the community, would remain. The theologian Schleiermacher, Rahel’s friend, announced that Judaism was dead; von Schroetter, the Prussian minister, took a more cautious view: he gave it another twenty years. Few Jewish intellectuals of that generation did not on one occasion or another play with the idea of baptism. They established sundry cultural and social circles ‘to search after truth, to love beauty, to do good’. But what was specifically Jewish in this praiseworthy endeavour? All of them wanted to Europeanise Judaism, to purge it of its archaisms; ‘Away from Asia’ was one of their main slogans. There were suggestions to ban Hebrew and the Talmud. The introduction of the German language into the synagogue became fairly general. Ben Seev, one of Mendelssohn’s pupils and close collaborators, complained of the gradual disappearance of Hebrew and put equal blame on enlightened parents and conservative rabbis. The parents wanted their children to learn only subjects that would assist them in their professional career: languages, mathematics, the sciences. The orthodox rabbis on the other hand banned worldly subjects altogether, opposing religion to science. Thus different sections of the Jewish people were gradually drifting apart; some were still devoting their best years to the study of Hebrew, but Hebrew for them was mainly a tool for the study of the Talmud. David Friedlaender, another of Mendelssohn’s pupils, came out squarely against traditional Jewish education. Writing to his brother-in-law, in a little Silesian town, who had asked for advice concerning the education of his son, he stated flatly that there was no room for half measures and compromise. The son would become a yeshiva bocher , convinced of the exclusivity of the Jewish people and of the great superiority of his studies over all other kinds of human endeavour. He would not touch any book in German but he would know the answers to all sorts of questions - whether, for instance, the daughter of a high priest who had been whoring should be stoned or burned. A compromise was not possible - a man wearing on one foot a riding boot and on the other a dancing shoe would be able neither to dance nor to ride.
    In Mendelssohn’s days Jews were still Jews and everyone referred to a Jewish nation. But in 1810 Sulamit , the leading German-Jewish periodical, changed its subtitle to Israelit , and a few years later many Jews began to refer to themselves as of the ‘Mosaic confession’. By the 1830s the Me’assef , the Hebrew journal established by Mendelssohn’s pupils, had ceased to appear. The knowledge of Hebrew among the general public was by then restricted to a few prayers and some colloquial phrases;