Formidable

Eighth and final in the series "The Two Thousand Year Argument," on what the Jewish people did with exile. Earlier installments are here: Part 1 | Part 2 | Part 3 | Part 4 | Part 5 | Part 6 | Part 7

This series began with a picture most people carry without having chosen it. In that picture, the Jews of the Bible lose their land to Rome, spend two thousand years scattered and helpless, and are finally rescued by the modern state of Israel in 1948. The centuries in between are an empty waiting room.

Seven articles later, it is fair to ask what is left of that picture.

What the record showed

Start with the facts, because the argument rests on them, not on sentiment.

When Jerusalem fell, the leading sage of the generation asked the Roman general for a school instead of a city, and the transmission of the Torah went on without a break. Torah academies in Babylonia answered legal questions from three continents for roughly five centuries. Jewish communities from Spain to Poland ran their own courts, welfare funds, burial societies, and schools, and kept a single body of law for centuries with no power to enforce any of it. When the modern states of Europe took away that self-government, the law went on being kept anyway, and it still is.

The centuries of persecution produced Rashi, Maimonides, the Shulchan Aruch, and the mystics of Tzfat, very often written by refugees who had just lost everything. Jews lived continuously in the Holy Land the whole time, building study halls and burying their dead there, and never once organized to sieze control of it, because the tradition that taught them to long for it also taught them Whose act the return would be. Then, in the nineteenth century, a movement arose that needed all of this forgotten, and taught the world to remember the Jews of the exile as a pitiable people waiting to be cured.

Set those facts side by side, and the waiting room disappears. What appears instead is a civilization.

What kind of strength this was

Here a reasonable reader may still have a question. Granted, the Jews of those centuries built remarkable things. But they had no army, no territory, no power. Surely that is weakness, whatever else it may have been?

The answer depends on what strength is supposed to accomplish. If strength means the ability to hold territory and defeat enemies in the field, then the Jews of the exile had none, and nobody claims otherwise. But if strength means the ability to survive, to keep one's identity, one's law, and one's way of life intact across centuries and continents, then the record points the other way.

Consider who the Jewish people outlasted. Babylon, which destroyed the First Temple. Rome, which destroyed the Second. The Persian dynasties, the great caliphates, the medieval kingdoms that expelled them, the Russian Empire. Every one of those powers had armies, capitals, and borders. Every one of them is gone, and the people they ruled over are still keeping the same Sabbath, laws, and customs, studying the same texts, and saying the same prayers.

Few peoples in history have done anything comparable. A great many nations with far more power than the Jews ever held have vanished entirely, their languages unspoken and their gods forgotten. The Jews did it without a single soldier, carrying what they needed in their books and their homes.

That is certainly a kind of strength. It is simply not the kind that nineteenth-century Europe knew how to recognize, which may be why Europe's nationalists, and the Jews who learned from them, mistook it for weakness, and set out to "cure" it.

The objection from the twentieth century

There is another obvious objection, which deserves a direct answer. The twentieth century brought the destruction of European Jewry, the worst catastrophe in Jewish history. Does that not prove that the stateless people this series has praised were, in the end, defenseless?

But the Torah tradition never claimed that exile would be safe. It described it from the start as a hard and dangerous condition, and Jewish history contains no shortage of massacres and expulsions, several of which this series has named. What the tradition promised was something different: that the Jewish people would endure, and that their covenant with God would not be broken. That promise was tested more severely in the twentieth century than ever before.

And here the record speaks again. The survivors rebuilt. Out of the ashes of European Jewry came new academies in America, in the Holy Land, and in Europe itself, communities that today teach more students than the pre-war yeshivos ever did. Leaders who had lost their families and their entire world opened schools within a few years of arriving on new shores. The same pattern this series traced through Spain, the Rhineland, and Poland repeated itself one more time, on the largest scale in history. The disaster came first, and the rebuilding followed.

None of that diminishes the catastrophe. But it does show the strength of the people suffered it.

What the inheritance is

So what, in the end, is the reader looking at when he sees a Jew today?

He is looking at the heir of the most successful stateless civilization the world has known. Its institutions, its law, and its literature have been maintained over two thousand years by people with no government behind them, and they are still functioning in countries around the world. The inheritance came down through the generations in study halls and at family tables, not through government ministries or armies, and it belongs to no government.

That last point is the practical one, and it is the reason this series was written. A people that kept its identity without a state does not draw its identity from a state. The Jews who carried the Torah through Babylon and Córdoba and Vilna did not need anyone's flag to know who they were, and their descendants who still live that way do not need one now. When a modern state claims to speak for every Jew on earth, it is claiming an inheritance it did not build and does not own. When critics of that state hold Jews everywhere responsible for its conduct, they are accepting the same false claim from the other side.

The record offers a better way to see the Jews than either of those. Not as a pitiable people rescued in 1948, and not as the representatives of a government. As the bearers of a covenant, keeping it the way their ancestors did, in whatever country they happen to live, for as long as it takes.

That is what the two thousand years actually were. Anyone who wants to check can open the books. They have been on the shelf the whole time.