The European Question
Given the enormity of the losses suffered by European Jewry between 1933 and 1945, the deterioration of Israeli-European relations after the Six-Day War may seem like a quaint afterthought. Or, at the very least, an event that one would expect to have originated in Jewish instead of European circles. After all, Jewry had more than its fair share of reasons to reject European civilization in toto given the tragedy that had just befallen it. As many critical, scholarly analyses of European culture since the Second World War have demonstrated, the Nazi genocide was a perverse by-product of the same historical and social developments that helped define what it means to be Western.
Anti-Semitism was not a foreign import, but European through and through. And it wasn’t backward, a residue of pre-modern Europe, either. No, the racism expressed towards the Jews from the nineteenth century onward, even as it mobilized earlier forms of anti-Semitism, went hand in hand with the outwardly rational forces of modernity. The problem for European Jews, particularly in Western Europe, is that they typically identified with these forces as well, going out of their way to convince themselves that anti-Semitism was the antithesis of modernity.
This conviction added to the difficulty of disidentifying with Europe, even after the Holocaust had demonstrated once and for all that Jews could never hope to be fully assimilated in Gentile society, however modern it seemed. From Theodore Herzl’s Der Judenstaat (“The Jewish State”) onward, Zionist ideology has always regarded Jewish national identity as being culturally European. What “European” meant in this context, however, was complicated. Summing up Herzl’s position in the Socialist Register in 1970, Belgian Jewish Marxist Marcel Liebman argued that Herzl envisioned his Israel-to-come as a European outpost, both for practical purposes – protection from its neighbors – and for ideological reasons.
- Excerpted from Israel vs. Utopia