3. TOYNBEE’S NEED FOR THE ZIONIST ARCH-CRIMINAL
1.
Messianism is of the essence of Judaism and until the rise of Jewish emancipation, chiefly in the 19th century, it was inseparable from the return to Zion. It is therefore rather surprising to find Toynbee insist that Messianism was “finally extinguished” in the defeat of Bar Kokba in 135 C.E. True, our author explains in a footnote: “The word ‘finally’ holds good, notwithstanding the recent rise of Zionism; for Zionism is a nemesis of the contemporary Nationalism of the Western World and is not a revival of Jewish Futurism which was extinguished at last in the blood of the followers of Bar Kokaba.…”14VI/123, footnote 5. One is impressed by a man who has given so many proofs of his ignorance of Judaism, who yet has the audacity to judge what is and is not Jewish. Great and saintly Jews were Zionists, but Toynbee “knows” that the only Jewish attitude is that of the Quietist Agudath Israel, which leaves the return to Zion entirely to God. Actually, as far back as the third century C.E. we find among the leading teachers of the Talmudic era representatives of both the activist and the quietist schools of thought; there were those who considered it a religious duty to leave Babylon and to settle in the Holy Land, as there were others who believed that one had to await the coming of the Messiah in exile. The great codifiers of the Law listed the injunction to live in Erets Israel as one of the 613 commandments of the Torah.15See Talmud Babli, Ketuboth, 110/B and 111/A and Maimonides, Mlahim, V/12. But assuming that Zionism is altogether a secular movement and contrary to the Will of God, would it not have been logical to associate it with similar mundane movements in the history of Jewry? Especially, if it is indeed—as Toynbee pretends to believe—nothing but militancy, could it not be a new outburst of the old Maccabean and Zealot ethos of violence? How can he be so sure that Jewish Futurism was finally extinguished in the blood of the followers of Bar Kokba? Might it not have been latent all the time, waiting for the first opportunity to come out into the open?
Presently one realizes that one is once again faced with an assertion that has no basis in history and issues only from Toynbee himself. It is so because it has to be so, by order of the magician Toynbee, whose fertile imagination is tireless in prescribing for history the course it ought to follow. The authentic Jew has always taken the continuity of Judaism and of Jewish history for granted; Toynbee, however, maintains that there is no continuity, for there is no history. How, indeed, could a fossil have history? There is no possibility in Jewry for a renaissance of anything, not even of the mistake of Jewish Futurism. There can be no kind of revival for a fossil. It is interesting to note that the only exile of Jewry which Toynbee recognizes is the Babylonian one. Whereas Judaism and Jewry have for centuries spoken of the Galut, Toynbee speaks only of Diaspora. Exile implies continuity, a past and a future; a Diaspora may have memories of the past, but it has nothing to look forward to. It is for this reason that the historic Jewry is the Diaspora; and the essence of Jewishness, a masterly adaptation to it. According to the requirements of the Toynbean system the other Jewry died when the Diaspora began. Because there can be no return to the past, the Jew is at home in the Pale and the Ghetto—and is therefore uprooted when, urged on by Zionism, he moves to Erets Israel. All this, of course, flies in the face of everything that Judaism has ever taught and Jewry ever believed and lived for. It worries Toynbee not a bit. He must distort the facts in order to meet the requirements of his premises.
2.
Toynbee’s approach to Zionism is a priori negative. For him Zionism is what it has to be, if Mr. Toynbee is to be permitted to continue to cling to his fossil theory of Jewry. He cannot acknowledge the historic connection between the Jewish people and Erets Israel; a fossil has no historic connections that may be translated into a claim or a right. There can therefore be no return of the Jews to an ancient homeland. What the Zionists call return is nothing but robbery and, as far as the West is concerned, a compensation granted for Jewish suffering at the expense of the Arabs, who have done the Jews no wrong. But we have still to find the cause of the Toynbean fury against Zionism. For instance, one may understand Toynbee’s description of Zionism as a rejection of the historic religion of Israel, even though one may not agree with it. But what is it that motivates him to make the preposterous allegation that the Zionists base the Jewish people’s title to Erets Israel “on the physical ground that they were a master race in virtue of ‘having Abraham for their father’ ”; that they caught the “psychic infection from their Nazi persecutors” in ascribing a rigidly racial significance to the historic distinction between the ‘seed of Abraham’ and ‘the Goyim’ ”?16VIII/601 and 576, footnote. There is nothing anywhere in Zionist literature or in Zionist policy to lend the slightest justification to such a statement. On the contrary, mundane Zionism sees no virtue whatever in having had “Abraham for their father.” It has been its declared objective from the beginning to “normalize” the Jewish people by abolishing the historic distinction between “the seed of Abraham” and “the Goyim,” which is usually associated with the religious concept of the covenant between God and Israel. Even if we granted the premise that Zionism was nothing but an imitation of Western nationalism, is all Western nationalism identical with the master-race theory?
The outstanding feature of Toynbee’s condemnation of Zionism is the obsessive need to equate Zionism with Nazism and to declare it even more abominable than Nazism. But even he cannot accomplish such a feat on the mundane plane of history. He compares “the fall” of the Gentiles with that of the Zionist Jews. The Zionist crime is so much more heinous because it has to be measured “by the degree to which the sinner is sinning against the light that God has vouchsafed to him”; it is for this reason that the Zionists are worse than Nebuchadnezzar, Titus, and Hadrian, worse even than the Spanish and Portuguese Inquisition. “On the day of Judgment the gravest crime standing to the German National Socialists’ account might be, not that they had exterminated a majority of the Western Jews, but that they had caused the surviving remnant of Jewry to stumble.”17Ibid., 290. All this is, of course, very nobly said; yet it has no meaning in the context of the political history of the nations. Toynbee, having reached the conclusion that history is meaningless except as a struggle for the salvation of the soul, judges Zionism by the standards of the Kingdom of God. He feels confident he knows what those standards are, even though it is unlikely that they should be revealed to most of mankind before the Day of Judgment. The idea of applying the standards of “The Kingdom” to the evaluation of human behavior is not really new for a Jew. The Pharisees themselves taught that God judges much more strictly the failures of the righteous than those of the unrighteous, for exactly the same reason that Toynbee himself mentions: He judges a man according to the light which He has vouchsafed to him; “He’s exacting with the righteous up to a hairbreadth.”18Talmud Babli, Yebamoth, 121/B. However, the Pharisees—not so confident as Toynbee that they were sufficiently familiar with the standards of “The Kingdom”—left this kind of superior, Day-of-Judgment judging to God. Bearing in mind their own deficiency, when it came to judging people they taught: “… trust not in thyself until the day of thy death; judge not thy neighbour until thou art come into his place.”19Ethics of the Fathers, II/5. Toynbee, of course, enjoys the great advantage over the Pharisees that “the historian’s inspiration” prepared him for the experience of “the Beatific Vision,” in which God is seen face to face, “and no longer through a glass darkly.”20X/129. This might well account for the difference.
3.
It is abundantly clear that the association in Toynbee’s mind between Zionism and Nazism is not to be separated from his theology of salvation. We shall therefore consider what Zionism and Nazism represent within the scheme of Toynbean salvation.
It was not easy to explain away the continued existence of a people that was supposed to have perished; it was still more difficult to explain the survival of a fossil against which the most fiendish powers of destruction have been arrayed for many centuries. It is exasperating to see the fossil creep back into history. Worst of all, not only do these Jews assert that they are alive, but they maintain that they return to their ancient homeland. The return to Zion is affirmed as the continuity of Jewish history and as a chapter in the realization of Jewish Messianism. The Jewish state was established at the end of a period of unparalleled Jewish suffering. If it is the successful response to the challenge of the breakdown and disintegration of Diaspora Jewry, then it is an act of salvation. The Zionist redemption, however, is of the type which Toynbee considers not only insufficient but impossible. Zionism is of “this World” and salvation requires the passing of “this World”; Zionism is effective through the instrumentality of man, but salvation is of God alone. If Zionism is successful, if it is indeed what Jews believe it to be, then Toynbee’s “laws” of history and his concept of salvation are invalid. If Israel’s return to Zion is redemption, one would have to say of the ten volumes of A Study of History: Commit them then to the flames; for they can contain nothing but sophistry and illusion.21See the concluding sentence in Concerning Human Understanding, by David Hume.
This, however, is only one part of the Toynbean dilemma; the Jewish suffering, which was the main impetus in the last phase of Zionist achievement, leads us to the other part: Nazism. What does Nazism stand for in history, understood as man’s struggle for salvation? The historian Toynbee does not allow himself the luxury of putting all the blame for the abominable crimes of the concentration camps and crematoria at the door of the Germans alone. Germany is part of the West; it is bone of its bone and flesh of its flesh. Since Germany is surely guilty, so must the non-German Westerner also be.
A Western nation, which for good or evil, had played so central a part in Western history, since the first emergence of a nascent Western Civilization out of a post-Hellenic interregnum, could hardly have committed these flagrant crimes if the same criminality had not been festering foully below the surface of life in the Western World’s non-German provinces. The twentieth-century German psyche was like one of those convex mirrors in which a gazer learns to read the character printed on his own countenance through seeing the salient features exaggerated in a revealing caricature. If a twentieth-century Germany was a monster, then, by the same token, a twentieth-century Western Civilization was a Frankenstein guilty of having been the author of this German monster’s being.22IX/433.
The guilt of the Germans is the guilt of the West; the fall of Germany, the fall of Western civilization. Toynbee’s disillusionment with man sinks to its nadir; the overwhelming Nazi guilt of the West is “a salutary terrifying reminder” of the truth that civilization is “at the mercy of perennial eruptions of Original Sin.”23VIII/273. The Toynbean theology of despair gains a new and shocking affirmation.
In this manner, Nazism receives an ambivalent significance for the Toynbean philosophy of history: as the overwhelming guilt, reflecting the foully festering criminality of the West, it confirms the Toynbean position on the corruptness of human nature and the essential otherworldliness of salvation; as the horrifying martyrdom of the Jewish people, which became the main impetus for the redemption of a shattered Jewry in a successfully re-established Jewish state, it confounds everything Toynbee asserts. We have reached a turning point in Toybean reasoning: these two meanings of suffering imposed by man on man are mutually exclusive. If the suffering endured has indeed led to a Jewish-Zionist salvation, then the whole course of history has to be reinterpreted without the Toynbean “laws”; on the other hand, if the suffering inflicted is the crime that reveals the truth that man cannot save himself, that man by virtue of Original Sin is by nature a “Nazi,” then we are all “Nazis.” It is the logical result of the Toynbean philosophy that, since it is impossible to explain history in terms of this-worldly salvation, one must explain it in terms of an otherworldly salvation by Grace. Human suffering inflicted and human suffering endured cannot but prove one and the same thing, namely, that man is bound to fail unless God save him again as He has done once before. Zionism, being an attempt at this-worldly redemption, has to be interpreted, like everything else of “this World,” as a manifestation of “Nazism.” If, as a result of the primordial corruption of human nature, the entire West is “Nazistic,” the Jews cannot be an exception. And since suffering is the “key to salvation,” the Jewish suffering of the Nazi era, having stirred an ungodly Zionism to even greater activity, has obviously been “misused” for the furtherance of a mundane aim; it therefore only intensifies the Zionist guilt. Mr. Toynbee apparently believes that a few brazen misstatements about Zionist aggression against defenseless Arabs and the mobilization of the standards of the Kingdom of God against Zionism may make his thesis sound plausible.
We may now also be able to understand the fury of the Toynbean righteousness. The intellectual requirements of the system are a thousandfold underscored by the emotional needs of the man. Gazing into the “convex mirror” of Nazism and beholding the loathsome caricature of the Western world, he decries—as so often before in the course of history—the gap between the real and the idealized self of the West: the idealized self, as formulated in noble principles of Christianity, and the real self as manifested for Toynbee in the many gruesome failures of Christendom. The higher the ideal, the more disgusting its “caricature.” But Toynbee has the religious fervor and the moral courage to identify himself with the real as well as the idealized self of the West; thus his loathing of the “caricature” of the West is really a form of “self-contempt.” One may observe the sense of hopelessness, which is usually associated with the conflict between a highly idealized and a deeply disappointing self, in the many moving manifestations of Toynbean disillusionment with all civilization and progress. But “self-contempt” is not easily endured, and Toynbee’s furiously righteous indignation with Zionism is true to the typical form of escape from it.
When “self-contempt” reaches hardly bearable dimensions one solves the conflict by what psychologists call “externalization,” which is a specific form of projection that turns self-loathing into loathing of others. This is how a well-known modern psychologist, Karen Horney, describes the nature of the escape: When self-loathing becomes unbearable, the patient “must fortify himself against it by reinforcing an already existing armor of righteousness…. He is compelled, therefore, to externalize his self-contempt, to blame, berate, humiliate others.”24Our Inner Conflicts, by Karen Horney, M.D., London, Routledge and Kegan Paul, p. 204. Blaming, berating, and humiliating Judaism and Jewry are distinctive features of the Study; Toynbee’s anger against “Zionist” Jews is the badly needed compensation at a moment when, as a result of the Western world’s horrifying “Nazistic” failure, the West’s self-loathing in him is most intense. The West is bad enough, but it is rather comforting to know that the Jews are even worse. The identification of Zionism with Nazism is accounted for by the well-established pattern of externalization. The rage against oneself is thrust outward and turned against others. It appears “as a specific irritation directed at the very faults in others that the person hates in himself.”25Ibid., p. 120.
As the cases described in Karen Horney’s Our Inner Conflicts show, it is not at all necessary that the faults for which we berate others should be real; often we impute them to others or exaggerate them in others. “A patient complained of her husband’s indecision. Since the indecision concerned a trivial matter, her vehemence was distinctly out of proportion. Knowing her own indecision, I suggested that she had revealed how mercilessly she condemned this in herself.” This is a fairly good illustration of the case of Toynbee versus Zionism. No one denies that the partition of Palestine, as is always true of the partition of any country, was accompanied by a great deal of human suffering and tragic guilt on both sides; but the unbridled vehemence of Toynbee’s condemnation of Zionism is out of all proportion to the guilt on the Zionist side. Accusing Zionism of “Nazism” reveals the measure of Toynbee’s condemnation of “Nazism” in his own West. The condemnation is so merciless that, in order to render it psychologically bearable for himself, he must project the crime of his West onto others.
The reasons for making Jewry the butt for the externalization of Toynbee’s Western “self-loathing” are ample. The “others” in the midst of the Western world—according to the entire structure of the Study—are the Jews. The Jews are also constant reminders, and perennial witnesses, to the failure of the West. The Jews have been the challenge for the ethos of gentleness, for the idealized Western self, through the entire history of the West; the unbroken record of Jewish suffering has been the most consistent manifestation of the tragic gap between the real and the idealized self of the Western world—in itself one of the irritating causes of Toynbee’s Western “self-loathing.” What to do with the silent accusation of Jewish martyrdom? As we saw, Toynbee’s rage over the shame of Christian anti-Semitism was at first externalized by making Judaism itself responsible for it; there is no one else in the West to blame for Western failures except oneself or the Jews. The far greater rage over the far more degrading shame of Western “Nazism” is externalized by turning Jewish martyrdom into an accusation against the Jews. Those Zionist Jews, who are “Nazis” just as we of the West are, are really much worse than we ourselves; for, having suffered so badly, they should be much better than we. And with this turn in Toynbee’s thinking the pattern of externalization becomes complete to its last detail. “In reality he [the patient] tries to enforce upon the partner the impossible task of realizing his … idealized image.”26Ibid., 205. Here it is, the perfect projection of Western guilt by means of applying the standards of the “Kingdom of God” to Zionism: if we are “Nazis,” at least the Jews, having suffered so much, should have been “Christians!” It is soothing to know that, in spite of all our wickedness, the Jews—the victims of our wickedness—are so much worse than we are. At the same time, the sting of nineteen centuries of Jewish quietism as compared with an equal period of Western aggression has also been eliminated. Jewry was practicing the ethos of gentleness because it had no opportunity to persecute; for witness what the “Nazi-Zionist Sicarii” did to the Arabs, when the first opportunity arose for Jewry to persecute.
To summarize: The Toynbean theology of despair and salvation impels. Toynbee to explain the Zionist success in terms of the “Nazistic” failure of the West as an affirmation of his disillusionment; the Toynbean Western “self-contempt” compels him to a furious and merciless condemnation of “Zionist” Jewry as the only effective means for “externalizing” the Toynbean rage over Western disgrace. To paraphrase Dr. Karen Horney: to strike out against “Zionist” Jewry is for Toynbee a matter of self-preservation.27Ibid., 204.