THE DIASPORA AS THE FOSSILIZED “SURVIVAL” OF JUDAISM AND JEWRY
1.
IN THE OPINION of Mr. Toynbee, Jewish history, as well as the history of Judaism, came to an end in 69-70 C.E., when the Roman legions destroyed Jerusalem and the Jewish people were scattered over the face of the earth. The catastrophe, we have seen him maintain, was due to the spiritual failure of Jewry to appreciate the significance of the message of Jesus, which offered the only solution to the problems of the times. As to the Jewry that has survived to this day, the most pleasant thing he can say is that it is “the debris” of a “devoted Syriac people,” which existed once upon a time; that it represents nothing more than “a pulverized social ash.”1II/286. In the latter volumes of his work he is much less genial. In other places, of course, he is more definite and calls the “pulverized social ash” a fossil. What exactly he means by these various appellations is not easy to ascertain. As we have so often had opportunity to observe, eloquent ambiguity and a luxuriant literary inexactitude are the most distinguishing features of the Toynbean style; and so they remain in the case of the “Jewish fossil.”
Surveying the various extant civilizations, Toynbee “discerns” Jewry as one of the two sets “of what appear to be fossilized relics of similar societies now extinct.” Having once “appeared” to be fossil, soon Jewry becomes “manifestly” a fossil—without any reason being given either for the appearance or for the manifestation.2I/35 and ibid., 90. At this early stage of the Study one might assume that Toynbee does not mean to convey more than that Jewry does not really belong to the West, or to the other dominant civilizations of the East, although it once did belong to a civilization of a category similar to the now “living” ones; there is therefore something “abnormal” about Jewry. He is, however, much more insistent, and still more obscure, in other places. At times, Jewry is the fossil; at others, it is Judaism. Judaism, again, “is a fossil of the extinct Syriac Civilization.” But not always: sometimes Judaism is “a fossil of Syriac religion as it was before the Hellenic impact.…”3II/55, footnote 4; ibid., 235, 402, and 405 footnote. But a fossilized community is not the same as a fossilized religion; nor is it understandable how Judaism may be, at the same time, a fossil of a civilization as well as that of a religion—especially in view of the fact that one of the important points of the Study is the interpretation of the essential difference that exists between a Civilization and a Higher Religion.4See the whole of Vol. VII. When an author is so unchaste in his language, one cannot help suspecting that beyond his desire to be negative and censorious he has little to contribute to the understanding of the subject which he pretends to discuss. Let us see what meaning—if any—might be attributed to both the idea of a fossilized Jewry and that of a fossilized Judaism within the context of the Toynbean scheme of history.
What could be meant by fossilized Jewry? How can human beings, who breathe and live and work and hope and aspire, be fossils? Even assuming that Jews, by “resting on their oars” and rejecting Jesus, lost their creativity, are people who are not “creative” not alive? And, as long as there is life, may a faculty once lost never again be regained? Or does creativity and life depend exclusively on faith in Jesus? If so, why does Toynbee not say so? Why does he not state without equivocation, and with the courage of conviction—for which one could respect him, even though one might not agree with him—that all men, Jew or Gentile, are fossils unless they accept Jesus as the “Son of God?” Occasionally he writes with great fervor of the “sacrosanctity of each single soul in the eyes of God.”5See, e.g., IX/8. How then can Jews be fossils? Have they no souls? Or does Toynbee here too follow the Church Father, Chrysostom, who taught that every Jew was a temple of the devil and “I would say the same things about their souls”?6The Foot of Pride, by Malcolm Hay, Beacon Press, Boston, 1950, p. 28. But even so they would still be alive, and as long as there is life there is hope that the “temple of the devil” might yet be turned into a temple of God.
Toynbee stubbornly refuses to pay any attention either to the part that Jews have played in the history of Western civilization or to the internal life of Jewry in the midst of Western Christendom. Typically, he acknowledges only “the whole-heartedness and virtuosity with which all Jews in the West—Ritualists, Liberals, and Zionists alike—participated in the secular activities of the Western Gentile World on the economic plane.”7VIII/599. No mention is made of the significant contribution by Jews to the culture and civilization of all Western nations through the ages. There is no need to list all the outstanding Jews who have creatively participated in the secular activities of the West on the literary, cultural, artistic, scholarly, and political plane. All the nations of the earth have been enriched by their life work.8See, e.g., Jewish Contributions to Civilization, by Joseph Jacobs, The Jewish Publication Society of America, 1944; and The Jewish Contribution to Civilization, by Cecil Roth, East and West Library, London. One of Toynbee’s greatly admired masters, Henri Bergson, whose ideas are responsible for important sections of the Study, was—as is well known—a child of the Jewish people. Spinoza, Heine, Disraeli, Mendelssohn, Meyerbeer, Paul Ehrlich, Rathenau, Stephan Zweig, Freud, Einstein, to mention only a few and at random, were all Jews. Of course, it may be easy to say that these men of genius were Jews only by birth and “Gentiles” by culture. But keeping in mind what modern psychology has taught us about the importance of early impressions and influences on the entire life of a human being, how are the Jewish fathers and mothers, the Jewish home, the Synagogue, the Jewish community, and the Jewish ethos to be separated from the bearers of these great names? Who will dare to say where the Jewis influence ends and the Gentile one begins? What sense does it make to call a community fossilized that counts such men among its children? The Nazis declared them all “bloody Jews,” Mr. Toynbee tries to “embezzle” them.
As to the internal life of the Jewish community, it makes still less sense to speak of fossilization. All through the long and dark centuries of the Diaspora there was the Jewish family, the cornerstone of the Jewish community. The ethical standards of Jewish family life have been for many centuries among the highest in the Western world. Toynbee himself cannot but agree that “the loftly conception of family life … had, of course, been derived by the Christian Church from a Jewry that has been its matrix …. This high standard in the sphere of family relations had been one of the most striking features by which the social life of the Jews in the diaspora had been distinguished, to its credit, from the contemporary life of a post-Alexandrine Hellenic Society.…”9II/24, footnote 2. He would have remained still within the boundaries of historic truth had he made the comparison not only with “the post-Alexandrine Hellenic Society” but even with the post-Constantine Christian Society. Concubinage, adultery, and prostitution were hardly known in the Judengasse; whereas wife-beating was permitted by canon law in the twelfth and thirteenth centuries, in the rabbinical Responsa of the time one finds that “this is a thing not done in Israel.” Wife-beating was considered by the Rabbis as sufficient ground for divorce.
All through the centuries of the Diaspora there existed a carefully worked-out system of general and public education. The historian Cecil Roth of Oxford has written of the educational system in the European Diaspora:
Enrollment for either sex was free. The number of pupils in each class was regulated. The elements of the vernacular were taught as well as Hebrew. Meals were given to those who required them. Boots and clothing were distributed to the most needy in winter. A community of less than 1000 souls, in the eighteenth-century Italy, would maintain a school of this type, with no less than six teachers and assistants. The scheme of education was not restricted (as might be imagined) to quasi-theological studies, but, by reason of the wide humanity of Judaism, necessarily extended to every field of human interest. When Germany, for example, had hardly emerged from barbarism, there were in the Rhineland Jewish schools, to which students streamed from every part of the world, hardly distinguishable from the primitive universities which Christian Europe was beginning to develop at this period … in 1466, the handful of Jews living in Sicily … received formal license from the King to open their own properly-constituted University, with faculties of Medicine, Law, and presumably the Humanities. Twenty-four years later, the idea was revived in Northern Italy.11Cecil Roth, The Jewish Contribution to Civilization, East and West Library, London, pp. 35-7.
No less well developed and highly organized were the charitable and welfare institutions and services of the Jewish Ghetto These associations took care of the poor in all emergencies from childbirth to burial. To quote again the words of Mr. Roth:
Every Ghetto had its Lodging House for indigent strangers, which was also used as hospital (the institution is found at Cologne as early as the eleventh century); every community had its salaried physician, so that medical attendance was available for all. There was, too, a free educational system, supported by voluntary subscriptions, and open to every child.… As early as the fourth century, the Emperor Julian, when he ordered the institution of inns for strangers in every city, referred with admiration to the example of the Jews, “the enemies of the Gods, in whose midst no beggars were to be found.”12Ibid., 288-9. It is a coincidence that the reference to Julian is also made by Toynbee, who quotes the passage from the Emperor’s letter extensively but with the intention of applying it to the “Early Christians.” See Vol. V, p. 584. In that weird annex, Toynbee claims credit for whatever good there may be in Communism on behalf of early Christianity. He can do so by expropriating the social principles and ethics of the Jewish Essenes, from whose ranks were recruited many of the early Judeo-Christians.
Before the barbarous destruction of European Jewry the oldest educational and welfare systems and the longest history of a civilized and humane communal organization in Europe belonged to the Jews. The accomplishment was the greater since it was not supported by any state authority and was inspired and sustained through the centuries, and even at the darkest times of persecution, by the voluntary, self-imposed social, ethical, and religious discipline of the Jewish people. The record of the internal life of Diaspora Jewry seems to suggest a vitality which is impressive—and which bears no likeness to fossilization.
2.
If the term “fossil” is senseless in its application to the living community of the Jews, may it not have validity in connection with Judaism? Here we seem to find firmer ground; Toynbee, for a change, does indicate what he means. After the “transformation” of Judaism by the Maccabees into a political instrument, this higher religion “lost its message for Mankind and has hardened into a ‘fossil’ of the extinct Syriac society.…”13V/126. Here, at least, a reason is given for the fossilization. However, assuming that the Toynbean interpretation of the Maccabean period is correct, one recalls that the failure of the Maccabees has been repeated and, indeed, surpassed by the four living religions of Toynbee. Islam was “politically debauched” by its founder, and the other Higher Religions experienced the tragedy of “political debauchery” at later stages. Like the other Higher Religions, Christianity was overtaken by the same tragedy when “it incarnated itself in a Republica Christiana or when the modern Protestant variation of the same Western Christianity … allowed itself to become the established religion of this or that secular parochial successor-state of the abortive ecclesiastical commonwealth of Pope Gregory VII and Pope Innocent II.”14VII/493. Nowhere does Toynbee indicate that any of the “Big Four” living religions hardened into a fossil because it was “transformed into a political weapon.” Of course, he is quite right; for whatever the sins of even the prophets and the highest ecclesiastics of a religion may be, they will certainly never be visited on the message of that religion. Whatever truth there is in the message, if remains valid, no matter to what use frail human beings may put it. Toynbee is right in refusing to identify the failure of Mohammed with that of Islam or those of Christendom with that of Christianity. He is wrong when he gives up this position of sanity and insists that the Maccabean sins led to the fossilization of Judaism. The vitality of a Higher Religion is of the Spirit; it can never become fossilized. There may always be “ears that do not hear and eyes that do not see.” Thus the precepts “Thou shalt love the Lord, thy God….” or “Love thy neighbor as thyself,” or “Righteousness, righteousness thou shalt pursue,” or “The works of My hands are drowning in the sea and you dare sing My praise,” may “lose their message for mankind.” But the religious and ethical validity of the message can never be vitiated by human shortcomings.
Toynbee’s systematic expropriation of Jewish concepts for the benefit of Christianity, which we have had occasion to observe, is in itself a proof of the vitality of Judaism. Numerous are the cases in the Study which show that, even when dealing with the most acute problems of man, the guidance of the Jewish Bible is still indispensable. We have also noted that Toynbee’s cherished idea of the “heavenly harmony” in which the four living religions are component parts was “not in Christian terms,” whereas it might well have been in Jewish, i.e., Pharisaic, terms. Let two examples illustrate to what extent even an anti-Judaic and anti-Jewish author like Mr. Toynbee is subject to the influence of the Judaic Spirit.
In the ninth volume of the Study there is an interesting chapter on the relation of “Law and Freedom in History.”15IX/167. The riddle of the relationship between the Law of God as manifest in God’s Creation and the freedom of the human soul is recognized as “the most difficult and the most crucial of all questions.” Significantly enough, it is only now that Toynbee discovers that God is not only Love but also Power, “as revealed in the Gospels,” says he—and, one might add, as known to every half-educated Jewish teenager from the Jewish Bible. Indeed nothing could be more childish than to say, God is Love, and not Power, in the face of the crushing manifestations of His “Power” in the universe. The Toynbean answer to the riddle of human freedom as opposed to the Law of physical nature is that “Love suspends the fiat of Omnipotence in order to transmute a command into a challenge which confronts the human recipient of it with a free choice between Good and Evil and between Life and Death.”16IX/382. We doubt that Toynbee has succeeded in solving the problem of free will and rather think that not much sense may be associated with the suspension of the fiat of Omnipotence by Love. However, the idea that man stands before the choice between Life and Death, equipped by God with the freedom, and therefore also with the responsibility, to choose Life, not only is based on a famous text from the Jewish Bible17Deuteronomy, XXX/15-19. but has been fundamental in Judaism from the beginning of Jewish history to this day. On the other hand, while Toynbee’s description of the choice as a spiritual struggle “between an aspiration towards Grace and a gravitation towards Original Sin” is couched in Christian terminology, the very idea of man’s freedom to choose between Good and Evil was rejected by outstanding representatives and schools of Christian tradition and theology. It is not easily reconciled with the words of the Christian apostle Paul: “The good that I would I do not: but the evil which I would not, that I do.”18Romans, VII/19. As is well known, the Pauline standpoint became the basis of the theories of predestination espoused by such later Christians as Augustine and Calvin. For Luther too, the very idea of Original Sin excluded the possibility of free will. According to a rich vein in Christian tradition, salvation can never be deserved by man; it is a pure act of Grace on the part of God, and no one can say why some are saved and others damned. It is true that, especially in Catholicism, salvation depends on works as well as on faith; yet in all Christianity—as became apparent in the Pelagian controversy—free will has found rather uncomfortable accommodation side by side with Original Sin. Whenever it is maintained “that human freedom springs from an encounter in which Man is summoned to respond to a challenge presented by God,” people are attempting to solve their problems in terms of basic Judaism.
The other illustration of Judaism’s undiminished vitality, as demonstrated by Mr. Toynbee’s own “Jewishness,” one recognizes in connection with the Toynbean concept of Transfiguration.19See above Ch. I, sections 1 and 2. Again we are inclined to believe that Toynbee himself is not quite sure what he means by the mystery of Transfiguration. It is a kind of overcoming of this world and, when it happens, the most important event in the life of a man. Whatever it may be, there is a “reckoning of spiritual values” which corresponds to it and which remains unknown without it. The basic principle of this “transfigured” reckoning of values was revealed by Jesus, when he said: “For what shall it profit a man, if he shall gain the whole world, and lose his own soul?” The new reckoning of values was, nevertheless, anticipated by “the first and greatest and most Christian of all the Hellenic philosophers,” Plato, from whose various writings one may compose this quotation: “… we must not allow ourselves to be carried away by anything in the World—not by honors, not by riches, not by power, and not by poetry either. For none of these things is worth the price of neglecting Righteousness and the rest of what constitute Virtue.”20VI/167. Actually, there was no need to compose a Platonic quotation from various separate passages of the philosopher. This same “reckoning of spiritual values” was given expression in much more powerful and passionate language, almost three centuries before Plato and more than six centuries before Jesus, by the Jewish prophet Jeremiah, when he proclaimed:
Thus saith the Lord:
Let not the wise man glory in his wisdom,
Neither let the mighty man glory in his might,
Let not the rich man glory in his riches:
But let him that glorieth glory in this,
That he understandeth and knoweth me,
That I am the Lord which exercise mercy,
Justice, and righteousness, in the earth:
For in these things I delight,
Saith the Lord.21Jeremiah, IX/22.
The Jewish prophet is much more specific than Plato and goes far beyond him; nor has anyone since the days of Jeremiah improved on this ranking of values. The Pharisaic tradition in the Midrash has rightly recognized in this passage the most conclusive summary of the highest good in Judaism; and the great Jewish philosopher of the Middle Ages, who was also one of the greatest codifiers of the Law, Moses Maimonides, found the ultimate issue of his entire philosophical system expressed in these words of the prophet.22Bereshit Rabba, XXXV/3, the interpretation of Rabbi Aha, in the name of Rabbi Tanhum, the son of Rabbi Hiya; see also Maimonides, Moreh Nebuhim, Part III/54. In his “reckoning of spiritual values” Toynbee only proves the potency of Judaism, even though he may be too ungenerous to acknowledge his indebtedness to it. In contrast to Toynbee, the Nazis recognized that the spirit of Judaism, far from being fossilized, was all-pervading; there was no escaping it, without throwing overboard the Jewish “reckoning of spiritual values.”