2 Friday, January 25, - I9130
THE -DEMI/ . JEWISH IEWS
Purely Commentary
Inhumanities of Czarism
Full Heritage of Kremlin
Denials of prejudice do not help the Russian oligarchy.
Their own spokesmen give credence to every evidence of
inhumanities practiced against the protesting forces in the
midst of the Communist dictators.
Jews are not alone among the sufferers. There are
dissidents in all quarters of the Soviet Union. Only the
submissive are safe.
Jews are usually the chief targets of the Soviet hatreds.
In a revealing article in Midstream, "Anti-Semitism and
Soviet Mythology," Michael Heller, a graduate of Moscow
University, now a teacher of Soviet history and literature
at the Sorbonne, Paris, told the following:
Soviet anti-Semitism resembles in many ways
Russian pre-revolutionary anti-Semitism and
that of other countries in the world. But in one
thing it is unique. In 1923, a Russian anti-Semite,
V. Gladkich, having emigrated from revolution-
ary Russia, published a book with a short and
striking title: Yids. The book began with a bitter
complaint:
"In good old Tsarist Russia, people said to me
more than once: 'What! An educated man and still
an anti-Semite!' This exclamation is quite typical.
Our intelligentsia believes sincerely that 'Yids are
people like everyone else.' " V. Gladkich main-
tains: "I hold the opposite opinion — it seems to
me an educated person cannot help but be an
anti-Semite."
In the Soviet Union today, everyone must be an
anti-Semite. Anti-Semitism has nothing to do with
choice, taste, or desire. Today it, like everything in
the Soviet Union, has become the duty of every
Soviet citizen. If you are not an anti-Semite, you
are a dissident. It means you think not as you are
told but independently, and it is well known that,
in the country of mature socialism, this is the
greatest crime.
This is the legacy of hatred. It is the inheritance from
Czarism that is being perpetuated in official Communist
ranks.
On the record, anti-Semitism is outlawed. In practice,
it has remained a means of hating Jews and making them
the scapegoats in Soviet society.
But as the quoted litany of hate indicated, there is
dissidence. There are the rebels who defy the official Krem-
lin codes. Whether the latter will succeed in arousing a
spirit of humanism remains a test for time. It is a test that is
watched with keenest concern by all who are persecuted in
the Soviet Union and all outside the USSR who are battling
for an end to the terror that is Sovietism.
Jacobo Timerman's Credo
for World Jewry: His Definition
of the Basic Zionist Ideals
Jacobo Timerman the Argentinian editor who suffered
from his country's oppression in the Buenos Aires jails and
has recently gained his freedom and settled in Israel, has
become a powerful interpreter of the Zionist ideal. He has a
motto:
"Only the Jews can save Jews. The others can only
help."
Every generation produces its advocates of justice.
They are urgently needed in Jewish ranks. Israel the state
and Israel the people look to these defenders to help
strengthen the ranks, to uphold the hands of the builders of
Zion.
Timerman did not have the Jewish education that is so
much a necessity for the training of the youth to be iden-
tified with their people. He could have been judged an
assimilated Jew. The persecutors trained him to under-
stand, to value a heritage he now cherishes.
He has addressed his messages of faith to many gather-
ings, in Israel and in this country. He tells it eloquently in a
"Coming Home" essay in the New Republic in which he
offers a lesson in the Zionism he advocates. Here is a por-
tion of the "Coming Home" message that should guide the
Jewish people, especially the Jewish youth:
Through the street of many Western cities I
could stroll as a secure citizen, without fearing for
my safety as a man or as a Jew. This is true. But
when I stroll through the streets of Tel Aviv, I do it
as an owner, as the owner of every bit of ground,
of every leaf on the trees. And here lies the dif-
ference between saving and helping. The Jews
made Israel, and they can save me from the
passionate complexities and contradictions of my
Jewish identity. Outside of Israel the others can
only help me to feel no longer persecuted, to live in
safety.
I do not believe that those countries that offered
me refuge, or those individuals and democratic
_ institutions that assisted me, should take offense
at this attitude. Some consider it patronizing or
aristocratic. But it is the aristocracy of freedom,
Czarist Inhumanities Being Perpetrated as a Legacy
of the Kremlin ... Jacobo Timerman's Credo Assumes a
Definitive Aspect as Historic Evaluation of Zionism
of total and definitive freedom accepted without
reserve.
We may approach the issue from another angle.
There is a genre of speculative political fiction
similar to science fiction. For example, there was
a book several years ago about the first black
president of the United States. Or imagine a pope
chosen by the Kremlin. Political fiction may
transport us through many adventures of the im-
agination: what if Hitler had invaded Britain?;
what if a Nazi were elected to the White House?;
etc. One theme of such speculative works often is
the consequence such an event would have for
Jews. But no political fiction could ever imagine
that a Jew could be persecuted as such, as a Jew,
in Israel.
I believe that I may
never find the words
that will adequately
express what this
feeling means to a
Jew. But it is what I
feel. And it is what
democratic people
must understand.
Perhaps this way
they will also under-
stand Israel's insis-
tence on many mat-
ters that affect its se-
curity as a state. This
insistence — or stub-
bornness, if you wish
— troubles demo-
JACOBO TIMERMAN
cratic countries such
as France and Germany, which have resolved
their border problems after many centuries of
constant war.
For this reason I again insist that only Jews can
save the Jews. That is a simple sentence, nothing
original, even boring. But when considered from
the perspective I have been trying to explain, it is
easy to understand. If certain Jews in the Dias-
pora feel uncomfortable with this sentence, it is
because they feel obliged to make a great dialecti-
cal effort to explain that the Diaspora should con-
tinue to exist. And if many non-Jews do not
understand this sentence, it is because Jewish
and Zionist organizations do not often enough ac-
cept the task of keeping alive, and in the open, the
fundamental principles of Jewish identity. In
those countries where Jews have a clear perspec-
tive and firm conviction concerning their identity,
as in the United States, this sentence should not
arouse anxiety.
In other words, I now have my own home, a
homeland. This affirmation frightened the
Judenrat in Argentina: it may be supposed in the
Diaspora that a homeland cannot be found. The
historical meaning of my affirmation is greater
than the particular events of my own experience.
The Israeli newspaper Maariv recently pub-
lished letters from Argentinian political leaders
pointing out that the annulment of my Argenti-
nian citizenship should not disturb me, that it was
a decision taken in peculiar political circum-
stances. And so in fact it was. And I have no doubt
that justice, and the political future in Argentina,
will permit me again to obtain Argentinian citi-
zenship if I ask. But I will not ask. Never. And this
must not be understood as a negation of the
Argentinian people, or of the 50 years that I lived
there. My act is an affirmation, not a negation. It is
the affirmation that there exists a Jewish history
that is legitimate, a Jewish historical memory that
cannot be discarded. It is the affirmation of that
process of national liberation called Zionism
which goes beyond my own story. It matters little
what happens to me personally. What matters is
that in the face of any eventuality that may befall
any Jew, in any part of the world, for just or un-
just reasons, Israel remains a homeland to which
he or she can come without explanations. And
here that Jew is as much the master as those
thousands of Jews whose families have lived here
for generations, many of them as long as or longer
than most of the Arabs who inhabit other parts of
Palestine. Even those countries that are most
open to refugees present certain conditions: they
ask to know about background, education,
health, and so on. Only Israel presents no condi-
tions in its offer of a homeland.
Zionism is not a movement of persecuted
people; it is a movement of free people. It is in the
democracies, in the countries from which Jews do
not need to escape, that Zionism develops most
strongly, and where it has its best results. This is
precisely because Israel offers much more than a
By Philip
Slomovitz
refuge. It offers a unique possiblity for the perfec- -
tion of man: the development of his identity to its
furthest and most profound conclusions.
Our historical memory, the memory of many
holocausts past, and the idea that nobody can
guarantee the impossibility of holocausts in the
future, however remote they seem, is an integral
part of Zionism. It is only one part, and perhaps
the decisive part. But the crucial feature of
Zionism is national liberation, identity. There
may be those who wish to portray this as the nega-
tion of the Diaspora. But it is something more
important: it is the affirmation of the future. I am
here in Israel to be part of the future. Not to be the
the
result
u c l ot boofTi
j a
not exclude non-Jews from the
Timerman
ranks of libertarians. He does not negate the importance of
the just and righteous Christians who are valued by Jewry
as the Hasidei Umot HaOlam, as the saintly among the
nations of the world. Yet it is primarily the Jew who can
help, can protect the Jew. It is in the principle of Self-
Emancipation, as defined by Leon Pinsker in his famous
essay under that title, written prior to Theodor Herzhs
founding of political Zionism and the World Zionist Con-
gresses. Let the message of Jacobo Timerman serve as a
guideline for action by the youth of Jewry, as well as their
elders, everywhere.
Patriotism: The Challenge
to Conscionable Citizens
Samuel Johnson's excoriative definition, "patriotism
is the last refuge of a scoundrel," may become applicabl e
when those who presently burn the flag of their country
panic over their loss of faith in their people. Normally, the'
patriotic spirit has roots in self-respect.
It is true that one must never submit blindly to every-
thing that heads of state may dictate. Human values would
perish if the people did not strive for improvement, for
abandonment of injustice, for the aim to make people free
with the right to assert themselves.
But the burning of one's own flag means the destru, -
tion of the symbolic in one's life.
It has happened and is happening again, and what
puzzles Americans especially is that at a time when their
diplomatic representatives are shackled in Teheran there
are the few who take sides with the hoodlums (students:' •
and abuse and accuse their elected leaders who are faced
with the gravity of a situation that involves the very lives of
hostages in the hands of fanatics.
It's sad that in a time that required unity George Bail
finds a victim in Henry Kissinger. Yet the nation is united
in basic principles — that one must never submit te
blackmail, that religious fanaticism is not the permissible
medium for hatred.
Somehow, the people's will will persist. Somehow. pa-
triotism will retain the glory of identification in attaining
national unity.
Some references to patriotism are worth quoting. For
example, Joseph Trumpeldor's last words before he was
killed by Arabs while defending a Jewish settlement in
Palestine were, "It is good to die for our country."
In "Rome and Jerusalem," Moses Hess, the eminent
Socialist who was a famous precursor of Theodor Herzl in
proclaiming Zionism as an ideal for Jewry, wrote in 1862:
"The Jewish religion is, above all, Jewish patriotism. -
Especially notable is this quotation from "The Song of
the Spanish Jews" by the eminent young Jewish writer
Grace Aguilar, Avritten in 1850:
0, dark is the spirit that loves
not the land
Whose breezes his brow have in
infancy fanned;
That feels not his bosom
•
responsively thrill
To the voice of her forest, the gush
of her rill.
When Loyalties Conflict and
Right to Differ Is Endangered
While the current crisis created by Iranian insanities
could not possibly relate to the tragedies that made the
United States a divided camp during the Vietnamese con-
flicts, some have fallen into the error of judging Adminis-
tration action as leading this nation into a situation
analagous to the horrors of the 1960s.
The fact is that President Carter has been very cau-
tious in his actions and demands, and whatever criticisms
have developed have been on the score that he has been too
should have acted more force-
patient, too
m
toothp
prudent,
t b
, tehgi
a t n
the very beginning.
Therefore, that which is called patriotism is now ap -
proached as a new sting in questionable loyalties.
Yet, there is more of loyalty to presidential policies.
greater patriotism than has been experienced in this coun-
try in more than a generation. There are times when loyal-
of
a
ties
occasion. necessities in the l ife
m atii se aacia
atriio
assertions
a a
nation.