The Story That Replaced the Story

Seventh 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

Six articles into this series, a fair question comes up. If the record is as clear as these articles say, and the academies, the codes, the charity networks, and the continuous presence in the Holy Land are all documented and anyone can check them, why does almost nobody know about it?

The popular picture of two thousand years of Jewish helplessness didn't form by accident, and it didn't form by itself. Somebody taught it. The Zionist movement needed that picture, built it, put it in schoolbooks, and repeated it until it became what everyone assumes.

This article is about how that happened.

A doctrine with a name

The early Zionist thinkers were quite clear about how they saw the centuries before them. They had a formal doctrine for it, usually rendered in English as "the negation of the exile."

The doctrine held that everything between the loss of the land and the rise of the movement was one long degradation. It wasn't treated as a chapter of Jewish history with achievements and failures like any other. It was treated as a disfigurement. In their view, the Jews had been bent out of shape by powerlessness, and had grown cowardly, physically weak, parasitic in their economics, and unable to live a normal national life. The exile had produced a damaged kind of person, and the new movement existed to replace him.

The founders put this in language that is startling to read today. David Ben-Gurion called the economic life of European Jewry "a corrupt existence of middlemen." A. D. Gordon wrote that the Jewish people had been cut off from nature and imprisoned within city walls for two thousand years, and that only working the soil could make them normal again. The writer Reuven Breinin promised that future generations would no longer be small and weak, beaten and sickly, which is how he described the Jews of his own time. Micha Yosef Berdyczewski asked whether it was any wonder the Jews had become "a non-people, a non-nation."

Read those descriptions and ask yourself where you've heard them before.

They are the antisemites' portrait of the Jew, nearly point for point: the parasite who produces nothing, the physical weakling, the city creature with no tie to the soil or to honest work. Europe's Jew-haters had been drawing that caricature for centuries. The Zionist movement's founders, filled with and driven by their negative self-image, accepted it as accurate and set out to "cure the patient."

Why the old Jew had to be pitiable

The doctrine had a job to do, and once you see the job, you see why it had to be so harsh.

A movement that proposes to replace a three-thousand-year-old religious civilization with a modern nation-state has to answer an obvious question: why? If the Jews of Vilna and Baghdad and Marrakesh were living meaningful lives inside a working tradition, producing scholarship, raising families, running their own courts and schools and charities, then what exactly needed fixing?

"Nothing in particular, we just prefer nationalism" was not an answer that would recruit anyone. So the earlier centuries had to be rewritten as a disaster. The scholar bent over a page of Talmud had to become someone to pity instead of someone who had accomplished something. The communities had to become ghettos in the figurative sense, places where nothing was built. Everything this series has described had to be boiled down to one word, and the word was helplessness.

Only then does the new Hebrew look necessary instead of being one option among several. A movement that offers a cure first has to persuade people that they are sick.

How a story becomes common knowledge

Ideas like this don't spread through argument. They spread through repetition, and the movement had the means to repeat it.

It had schools, and it wrote what they taught. Generations of children in the new settlements, and later in the state, learned Jewish history as a line that ran from the biblical kingdoms, down through a long dark valley of persecution and passivity, and back up into the national revival. The centuries in between showed up mostly as a list of things done to Jews of Jewish victimhood.

It had a literature and a press, and in time a national culture that celebrated the farmer and the soldier and said very little about the scholar, other than as a type that had been left behind.

After 1948 it had a state, with everything a state can do: ceremonies, holidays, textbooks, museums, and an official account of where the country came from and what it had rescued its people from. That story wasn't taught only to Jews. It was taught to everyone. The world's press repeated it, and it became the background assumption of ordinary people with no special interest in the subject.

That is why a reader today, Jewish or not, can know nothing at all about Rav Saadia Gaon or the responsa network or the Old Yishuv, and still be quite sure that Jewish history between Rome and 1948 was mostly suffering and waiting.

What the pity story costs

So much for how it happened. The harder question is what the story does now, and there are two costs worth naming.

The first cost falls on the Jewish past. Here was a civilization that ran courts on three continents, kept a legal system working with no power to enforce it, schooled all its boys in an age when most people couldn't read, and produced works still studied every day in a hundred countries. It gets remembered as one long cringe. That is an injustice to the people who lived it, and nobody would accept a history of any other group written that way.

The second cost falls on Jews living today, and it is the reason this publication keeps coming back to the subject. If the Jews were helpless until a state rescued them, then the state is all that stands between them and helplessness, and the two can never be pulled apart. Criticizing the state becomes a threat to Jewish survival itself. A Jewish family in Chicago or Manchester becomes an outpost of a foreign government, answerable for what it does, because the story says they would be defenseless without it.

Both costs rest on the same foundation, and the foundation is a claim about history that doesn't hold up once you look at the record.

The record was never hidden

One last point matters more than it may seem.

Nothing in this series is a new discovery. The academies, the codes, the responsa, the communities in Tzfat and Jerusalem, the charity networks, the eighteen centuries of continuous presence: all of it has been documented all along, in books that never went out of print, and studied without a break in the same study halls that produced them. The communities that kept this history never stopped keeping it, and they would have told anyone who asked.

The story that replaced it didn't win by disproving it. It won by being repeated more often, in more places, with more power and money behind it, to an audience that had no reason to check.

Checking isn't hard. That is what this series has been for.

The last article asks what follows from all of it.