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By Dr.Fred Reiss
 WINCHESTER, California—There is a story told of a college student who went to visit his Tante (Yiddish word for Aunt) Ruth on Erev Rosh Hashanah. She greeted warmly and welcomed him in. When she went into the kitchen to get him a cold drink, he walked around the living room and found a number of newspapers and magazines from skinhead and Nazi organizations. A moment later she returned and he confronted her, “Tante Ruth, how can you be reading this stuff, “he asked, as he held up a newspaper?
“Don’t be silly,” she said with a laugh. “The Jewish newspapers tells me how the Muslims want to kill us, and the how the world hates us. These newspapers make me feel good. They say how the Jews are rich, own the TV and radio stations, and are taking over the world.”
Jews and Power by Ruth Wisse, a professor of Yiddish literature and comparative religions at Harvard University, exemplifies this story. History tells of the often misdirected brutality against the Jewish people, while Jews and Power show how the Jews, interacting with the power establishment, survived, and even prospered, through the millennium.
Judaism and the Land of Israel are so intertwined that a reasonable person might have predicted the demise of Judaism each time that the Jews were exiled to a foreign country. Yet, a retrospective look, as guided by Jews and Power, shows that the Jewish people were actually sovereigns in their own land for only a fraction of their existence.
Throughout most of their history, Jews have been politically subservient to a stronger alien power.
About four hundred years passed between the occupation of Canaan (about 1350 BCE), and the time of Abraham’s birth (1750 BCE). But, the inhabitants of Canaan were not subdued until the time of King David around 1000 BCE. The First Monarchy, a time in which the Israelites ruled themselves, lasted until the Babylonian Captivity in 586 BCE. The Jews were denied self-rule until their return seventy years later, and the beginning of the Second Monarchy Period. The Jews once again ruled themselves for two centuries, from 538 BCE until the conquest of Israel by Alexander the Great in 333 BCE. The occupation and control of Israel by a foreign power existed until the Maccabean Revolt in 166 BCE. Again, self-rule lasted but a brief period because the Romans annexed the Land of Israel in 66 BCE. Because of two failed revolts, one in 70 CE and one in 135 CE, the Jews never again had a chance to rule themselves until the establishment of the State of Israel in 1948.
The Jews, believing in an all powerful God, looked inward to
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explain their defeats. If they could only get the proper way to follow God’s laws correctly, God would restore the land to them. Until that time, the Jews needed to survive.
Jews and Power delves into the success of the Jewish people interacting with various power structures during those times when the Jews could not defend themselves with a national military. Wisse clearly builds a strong foundation to show that the key to the success of the Jews lay in their ability to make themselves indispensible to the ruling elites. Wherever they lived, the Jews learned the language of the land, followed its laws, and through acculturation, adopted many of the customs. But, when their skills were no longer needed, they were jettisoned. For example, in the thirteenth century King James I invited the Jews to settle in Barcelona, and King Boleslaw of Poland granted generous legal and political rights to the Jews. In the same century, Edward I forced out the Jews from England, and France expelled their Jews, too.
European emancipation, beginning with the French Revolution in the late eighteenth century, changed the rules. Jews no longer had to appease the ruler in exchange for protection. On one hand, freedom leveled the playing field, and on the other it gave rise to anti-Semitism. The Damascus Affair, a blood libel accusation in the 1840s, was directed against the Jews in Syria. This “Affair” showed that the politics of competing influence in the Middle East by European powers took precedence over the plight of the Jews. Within half a century the French army falsely accused Alfred Dreyfus, a Jewish army officer, of treason. But, the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries were not the Middle Ages. The Jews longed for a return to the homeland, and Zionism emerged as a Jewish political movement.
Wisse recounts the political history of the early Zionists and the fight for their own country. She shows how the internecine struggle within the Zionist movement, reminiscent of the in-fighting among the Jewish generals in Jerusalem in the first century CE, which led to the capture of Jerusalem and the destruction of the Temple, nearly repeated itself in the years immediately following World War II.
With a homeland of the own, Israeli Jews had to shift their thinking from a landless, detested minority without defenses to the ruling class with a mighty army. Wisse wonders if the lessons learned during the last twenty centuries, under circumstances far different than today, will be enough for Israelis to manage the country’s Arab minority and conclude a long-lasting peace with its Muslim neighbors. If not, are the Jews perspicacious enough to learn the political lessons gleaned by the various nations over centuries of trial and error, or will their bickering and political naiveté once again be the seeds of their own destruction?
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