What the Record Shows

Fifth in the series “Seek the Peace of the City,” on what Judaism teaches Jews about the countries they live in. Earlier installments are here: Part 1 | Part 2 | Part 3 | Part 4

The first four articles in this series described what the Jewish tradition teaches: seek the welfare of the city, keep its laws, pray for its government, and deal honestly with its people. A fair reader will want to know whether any of it made a difference, because teachings are one thing and the conduct of real communities over real centuries is another.

The historical record is far too large for one article to cover. What follows are four episodes, each well documented, in which the question of Jewish loyalty was put directly and the answer can be checked.

A letter to the President

In August 1790, President George Washington visited Newport, Rhode Island. The small Jewish congregation there, a traditional Sephardic community whose synagogue still stands, sent him a letter of welcome. It was written by the congregation’s warden, Moses Seixas.

The letter thanked God for a government “which to bigotry gives no sanction, to persecution no assistance,” and asked Heaven’s blessing on the President and the new nation. Washington’s reply used Seixas’s own phrase and has become one of the founding documents of American religious liberty. In it he wished that the “children of the stock of Abraham” who lived in the land might “continue to merit and enjoy the good will of the other inhabitants,” and that “every one shall sit in safety under his own vine and fig tree, and there shall be none to make him afraid.”

Two things stand out in the exchange. The congregation addressed the President in the language of prayer and blessing, exactly as the tradition taught. The President answered by quoting the Hebrew prophet Micah back to them.

Napoleon’s questions

In 1806, Napoleon Bonaparte summoned an assembly of Jewish leaders from across France and its territories and put twelve questions to them. Several of the questions were about loyalty, and they were put bluntly. Did Jews born in France regard the French as their brothers? Did they regard France as their country? Were they bound to defend it and to obey its laws?

The assembly, which included rabbis, answered yes to each. The following year a council of rabbis and laymen, which Napoleon called the Grand Sanhedrin, confirmed the answers. In support, the rabbis cited the principle discussed earlier in this series, dina d’malchusa dina: the law of the kingdom is the law. They also pointed out that Jews were already serving in the French army, and that in the wars of the time Jews were fighting in opposing armies, each for his own country.

The assembly met under pressure from an emperor who expected particular answers, and historians have long debated how freely it spoke on some of the other questions. On the questions of loyalty, though, it said nothing new. It repeated what Jewish law had taught since the Talmud.

The count of 1916

History recorded the test most clearly in Germany during the First World War. About a hundred thousand German Jews served in the Kaiser’s army, and about twelve thousand of them were killed. Many were decorated for bravery.

In 1916, amid accusations that Jews were avoiding the front, the German War Ministry ordered a special count of Jewish soldiers to find out how many were serving in combat and how many behind the lines. The Jews of Germany took the count as a humiliation, which it was. The results did not support the accusation, and the ministry never published them during the war.

The episode shows what the dual-loyalty charge so often was. The officials who ordered the count already believed the accusation and went looking for proof of it. When the count failed to provide that proof, they kept the accusation and hid the count. A generation later, the country those soldiers had died for turned on their families.

A handbook for soldiers

The fourth episode comes from inside the Torah world itself. Rabbi Yisrael Meir Kagan of Radin is known by the title of his most famous book, the Chofetz Chaim, and was recognized as one of the foremost Torah authorities of his generation. In 1881 he published a book called Machaneh Yisrael, “The Camp of Israel.”

He wrote it for Jewish soldiers serving in the army of the Russian czar, a government that treated its Jews with open hostility and conscripted them under harsh conditions. The book was meant to help those soldiers keep the commandments while in uniform: how to pray, how to keep kosher as far as possible, how to keep the Sabbath under military discipline. It did not tell them to desert. It assumed they would serve the country that had drafted them, and it helped them remain faithful Jews while they did.

That was the attitude the tradition taught. A Jew gave his country its due, even a country that gave him little in return, and he kept faith with God the whole time.

What the record does and does not prove

None of this proves that every Jew in history was a model citizen. Jewish communities, like all communities, had their share of people who broke the law, avoided taxes, or evaded military service. Under governments like the czar’s, many Jews did whatever they could to keep their sons out of the army. The tradition does not ask anyone to pretend otherwise.

What the record shows is narrower and more useful. Whenever the loyalty of Jews was put to the test, whether by a President’s visit, an emperor’s questions, or a war ministry’s count, the Jewish tradition gave the same answer it had given since Jeremiah. Jews were to be faithful citizens of the countries where they lived. Where they fell short, they fell short of their own law. The charge that their real allegiance lay somewhere else was never supported by the evidence.

That makes the next part of the story all the stranger. In the late nineteenth century, a new movement arose that told Jews they were strangers in every country but one, and that their true homeland lay elsewhere. The next article looks at how Zionism took up the oldest accusation against the Jews and turned it into a program.