MUST READ: The Jewish Mystique by Ernest van den Haag – Preface & Epilogue

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PROLOGUE
I propose to write about Jews without hostility or apologetics, and with affection and seriousness, although my temperament makes me unable to resist occasional irony.
 
I hope to be accurate. But I should deceive myself were I to believe that accuracy in detail, and veracity about matters as a whole, are enough. For too many centuries the Jews have been used as a Rorschach blot by Gentiles, who attribute to them sometimes the most, and more often the least, desired traits of their own personalities. And for too many centuries the Jews have incorporated the image of themselves created by others and added it to their self-image. Under these circumstances any description will displease many who miss their favorite vices, virtues, and characteristics—or find those they prefer to ignore.
 
If this causerie be anywhere near as engaging as its subject, I shall have exceeded my most arrogant ambitions; if it be only half as ambiguous, I shall have done better than I feared. However, I shall be satisfied if it be recognized that I wrote sine ira et studio, and with apprehension.
EPILOGUE
I have tried to suggest throughout what makes the Jews so Jewish— what their essential characteristics are and how they came to acquire and preserve them. The characteristics which identified and unified Jews, despite world-wide dispersion, were at least in part reactions to the non-Jewish environment and to its unremitting and often hostile pressures. But not altogether. The character and fate of the Jews were already distinctive when they invaded Canaan, long before their defeat and expulsion from Palestine by the Romans. Judaism (and anti-Semitism) existed long before Christianity, and there was a distinctive Jewish character before Jews became the scapegoats of the Western world. Belief in one God, in there being no others, and belief in the moral requirements of this God and in their chosenness set Jews apart from the beginning of their recorded history, long before their rejection of Jesus made them outcasts.
 
Reentry in Israel certainly will not reduce endogenous Jewish characteristics which distinguished Jews independently of ghettoization. It will, however, cause the Jews to be shorn of those traits of their character—mythical or actual—which were acquired in reaction to living among alien and usually hostile populations. Often these characteristics have identified “Jewishness” in the eyes of Jews and non-Jews alike.
 
Thus, some visitors (including Arthur Koestler, as well as French and American sociologists) have already remarked that the Israelis do not seem very “Jewish”: they are bereft of ghetto characteristics and of those acquired from living as a marginal group among an alien majority. The observation is true, and it is fraught with ambivalence: thank God we are no longer exceptional; we no longer have to bear the special burden of Jewishness. But also: my God, have we lost our special destiny? are we no longer the chosen people? with our special burdens and sorrows—and our ultimate salvation?
 
In most minds the special destiny which made for Jewishness was related to, if not identified with, the status of Jews in the Gentile world. Surprise, even shock, and certainly nostalgia are among the reactions to Israel that one must expect—as well as pride and relief. As a nation among nations, the Jews can be special only in the sense in which each nation is. They no longer are a special element within all nations, nor a universal leaven.
 
The Jews who have returned to Israel are not the Jews who were compelled to leave thousands of years ago; nor is the country the same. These Jews have not created, therefore, a Middle Eastern kingdom such as existed in Biblical times, nor one akin to those organized in the Arab world, nor a theocratic state. They have created a modern parliamentary democracy. They are on the way to industrialize the country. Israel, although in the Middle East, essentially is a Western country, sharing the values, the ideas, the social, economic, and the political systems prevalent in the West.Israel will differ from other countries in the same way in whichItaly differs from Germany, or France from England. Which is enough for some, but disappointing to others. The Israeli Jews will remain Jews, but Jews who have shed many old characteristics and acquired new ones.
 
The two principal groups of Jews remaining in the Diaspora are in the Soviet Union and in the United States. Those in the Soviet Union are not allowed to leave, although many clearly would like to. Those in the United States could leave but do not want to. Chances are that Soviet Jews will continue to resist the governmental efforts to stamp out their culture, their life style, and their religion. They will, in all likelihood, succeed no less, and perhaps more, than other Soviet nationalities—despite major Soviet efforts directed toward destroying their identity and their religious beliefs. Jews have survived such attempts before, although with great losses and much suffering each time.
 
Unless present trends are reversed, chances are that Jews in theUnited States will assimilate themselves out of existence. This may happen through a combination of intermarriage, secularization, and social integration. Each of these elements reinforces the other. The reduced impact of religion necessarily reduces endogenous cohesion and identification, and the reduction of external pressure reduces the exogenous element that contributed so much to Jewish survival in the past. As Jewish children mingle more freely with Gentile ones, as Jews are less and less restricted externally and find less and less reason in their religion to restrain them from integration with the non-Jewish world, that integration will spread. In the next few generations American Jews will become hard to distinguish from other Americans. They will also lose their own feeling of distinctiveness. This will not occur at the same pace throughout. And orthodox sects may well succeed in maintaining a separate Jewish life-style in America by insisting on segregating themselves, as some orthodox Protestant sects did. And some Jews will go to Israel. But for most American Jews, the trend is unmistakably toward disappearance as Jews.
 
That much about the trend. Prediction as distinguished from prophecy must always be base on the visible trends, as qualified by foreseeable counter-trends, or obstacles. Yet history in the past has not shown itself to be easily predictable. Often the one prediction that has been correct has been that predictions, however sensible, cannot be relied on—history abounds with unforeseen elements which, by definition, cannot be predicted and which can make nonsense of the most rational prediction. Who could have predicted Hitler in 1920—fifteen years before he started killing Jews? Who in 1930 did foresee what he would actually do? What the past teaches is that the future is all unknown. Who, therefore, would be presumptuous enough to predict the fate of the Jews from now on? 
E. V. D. H.
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