Writing in September 1944, after she had fled Europe, Hannah Arendt acknowledged that the Jewish people were “invariably the innocent victims of a hostile and sometimes brutal environment.” Nonetheless, she denounced what she regarded as the “false notion of the non-European character of the Jews.”
Convinced that Palestine and the Mediterranean Basin “always belonged to the European continent, geographically, historically and culturally,” Arendt still thought that making “every country in Europe home [to Jews] without at the same time surrendering Jewish identity” was “an authentic possibility.”
A more “romantic idealization of Jewish Diasporas,” David Kraemer points out, is difficult to imagine.
That said, in his book Embracing Exile: The Case for Jewish Diaspora, Kraemer – librarian and professor of Talmud and rabbinics at the Jewish Theological Seminary in New York City – seeks to provide a “fuller picture” of issues related to Jewish identity, place, and home.
Kraemer challenges traditionally-held views on Diaspora
In this learned, provocative, and certain-to-be-controversial history of “the diaspora idea in Judaism,” Kraemer presents alternatives to strongly held views that exile was God’s punishment for sins that would end with repentance, redemption, and a return to the Land of Israel.
Over thousands of years, and especially after the destruction of the Temple, Kraemer demonstrates, many prophets, rabbis, sages, political theorists, novelists, and cultural critics embraced Diaspora as a powerful – and legitimate – source of Jewish identity, prosperity, pride, and creativity.
The Torah, Kraemer points out, is thought to be the product of exile in Babylon. “With land, temple, and king gone,” one scholar has noted, “only one contact with the holy was left: the divine word.” The biblical text “was well adapted for the needs of dispersed people.”
Anticipating that the exiles of Judah would not return to the Land of Israel for 70 years, Jeremiah told them to build houses and gardens, marry and have children, and pray to the Lord for peace in the city “because if it prospers, you will also prosper.” Since God accompanied them in their wanderings, in their synagogues and academies, Ezekiel declared, Babylon could be home. It became one of the most enduring Diasporas in Jewish history.
God acted “righteously” in scattering Jews, the Talmud announced, because doing so rendered their destruction virtually impossible. Much the same argument would be made by Samuel Usque and Don Isaac Abarbanel during the period of Spain’s expulsion of Jews.
Kraemer also claims that, understood ironically, the Amidah, a rabbinic prayer, “may even be seen as a kind of diaspora-affirming ritual.” Although prophesying that Jews will return to the land from which they had been exiled on an unspecified, miraculous day, the emphasis is on the hope, not the return, giving tacit approval to staying put, with God’s covenant with his people still in force.
In the 12th century, Judah Halevi, a beloved figure of the “golden age” in Spain, who lived most of his life in the Christian north and Muslim south, longed to return to the Holy Land and worried that Diaspora Jews would be attracted to foreign customs and norms. Nonetheless, Kraemer writes, Halevi’s poems imply that in the real world, without a Temple in Jerusalem, Egypt and Babylon were “closer to paradise than exile.”
Hassidic rabbis, Kraemer reminds us, taught their followers, who in the first half of the 20th century were concentrated in Eastern Europe, that without a Temple, God is not confined to the Land of Israel, and “there is no difference between the Land and outside the Land.”
Those who prayed in the prescribed way, Joel Teitelbaum, the Satmar Rebbe emphasized, will be spiritually transported to the Holy Land. Even as the Nazis were closing in on their communities, Teitelbaum, an ardent opponent of Zionism, did not encourage hassidic Jews to immigrate to Palestine.
Other anti-Zionists included Diaspora Jews who saw themselves as part of a religious community, not a secular political nation, as well as those who believed that an autonomous state, which often bred tribal aggressiveness, was not essential to the achievement of a culturally and spiritually rich Jewish nationalism.
The dynamic between Zionists and their Jewish critics changed dramatically, of course, as the horrors of the Holocaust became widely known and the State of Israel was established in 1948. Most Jews agreed that only a powerful Jewish state in the Land of Israel could guarantee that safety. That view was reinforced with Israel’s victory in the 1967 Six Day War.
The euphoria, Kraemer writes, did not last all that long. Criticism of Israel’s treatment of Palestinians, restrictive definitions of Jewish identity, and privileges granted to ultra-Orthodox Jews led to “rethinking the relationship between Israel and the Diaspora” as well as “the centrality of the Promised Land in Jewish experience.”
Reconsideration is, of course, ongoing, in the context of climate changes and political unrest that is making refugees of hundreds of millions of people. The Jewish diasporic experience, Kraemer concludes, offers “an abundance of lessons.” The most important of them is that a group of exiles does not necessarily form a Diaspora. But if it does, they need not “give up on the hope of returning home someday.”
Nonetheless, as they “long for ‘home,’ they must also make a home.” Without separating themselves from their neighbors, they must also “maintain a sense of community with a distinct identity.” Meanwhile, the “dominant” population must resist demanding assimilation or rejection.
And the next generation of immigrants must recognize that just as intolerance, prejudice, and violence erupted in the past, these ugly forces will appear again. In fact, they already have.
The writer is the Thomas and Dorothy Litwin Emeritus Professor of American Studies at Cornell University.
- EMBRACING EXILE: THE CASE FOR JEWISH DIASPORA
- By David Kraemer
- Oxford University Press
- 232 pages; $35
