I have long had an interest in Jewish history, religious history in general, and the politics of the Middle East. The opportunity to take a study trip like this has been a dream long-held, once almost acted upon a few years ago, and finally, circumstances aligning to allow it at this time. (While I am not doing handstands over present circumstances, I choose to view it as the mystery of life moving forward, opening doors, closing others, and allowing wonderful things to happen that make for the magical tapestry of life (though, hmmmm, come to think about it, I haven't EVER been very keen on tapestries at any time in my life, so what is up with THAT analogy.......but, on to the point.)
I spent the better part of a few months reading book after book in preparation for this month. In these blogs I have tended to cute-sify things a little more with pictures of hamburgers and other more touristy odds-and-ends, believeing most of you would be understandably more interested in small snippets of daily life. After all, long essays on religion and history and politics often are better left for the enjoyment of the indivdual with the interest. But, at least for a moment, I'll do some writing of a more in-depth nature. (You can choose to read or skip as you like, knowing that more humorous blog entries will no doubt follow.)
I readily admit to having a personal, long-standing affinity for the Jewish people and their struggles. It seemed to me to be the more rational argument when looking at all sides of the admittedly complex issue. This trip has done nothing but reinforce whatever Zionist tendencies that I suppose I have always had. While I don't love what is going on in Gaza, I am more sympathetic to the cause driving Israel in this and other matters than that of Hamas and/or the rest of the Arab world. (It does not have to be black and white, certainly. A woman presenting on our guest panel last night was a Jewish, pro-Israeli, anti-war activist who is ashamed and furious as to what her government is doing. It shows that the complexity and diveristy of people and positons and beliefs here is so mind-boggling I could hardly begin to explain it to you -- but needless to say, if you think there are two sides to this affair, you are drastically misunderstanding the situation. It is truly, a tapestry (I really am not in love with this word, you know.) The analagous equivalent I can offer would be one of those wrestling extravaganzas, where thirty or more brawlers are put into the ring to fend for themselves in a Battle-of-the-Millenium, supposedly with loose alliances to differentiate the struggle. As the match wears on, it becomes a free-for-all with everyone fighting for themselves, at times marshaling forces to oust an opponent, at times, adversaries teaming up to unexpectedly attack an unsuspecting, former "ally", and at many times, confusion reigning as to who is with who in the midst of the general chaos and mayhem. Picture that? Then you have some idea......)
The best background I can encourage you to read is taken from one of the books I read for the trip, a historical novel of the forming of the State of Israel in 1947-48, entitled "O Jersualem". A great work of historical fiction (if you liked "Winds of War", or James Michener novels, you'd love this). The paragraphs below from the novel give a quick, digestible overview of Jewish history. For some reason, the Jews seem to have been singled out more than any other race, any other people, as the "designated people to pick-on", like an eternal fourth-grader singled out for harassment of all kinds by the school bully -- with fourth-grade recurring year after year after, century after century, millenium after millenium. A horrible nightmare, that gave rise to a solution in a return to an ancient land -- Israel. Truly an amazing tapestry of people, faiths, beliefs, geography, and history.
(from "O Jerusalem", by Larry Collins and Dominque LaPierre)
Their ancestors, the first wandering Hebrew tribes fleeing Mesopotamia, had barely set foot on that land before history condemned them to ten centuries of warfare, migration and slavery. Finally, fleeing Egypt under Moses, they began their forty-year trek back to the hills of Judea to found their first sovereign state.
Its apogee, under David and Solomon, lasted barely a century. Living at the crossroads of the caravan routes of Europe, Asia and Africa, installed on a land that was already a beckoning temptation to every nearby civilization, the Hebrews endured a millennium of unremitting assaults. Assyria, Babylon, Egypt, Greece, Rome, each in t turn sent its cohorts to conquer their land. Twice, in 586 B.B. and in A.D. 70, their conquerors inflicted upon them the supreme ordeal of exile and destroyed the Temple they had built in Jerusalem’s Mount Moriah to Yahweh, their one and universal deity. From those dispersions and the suffering accompanying them was born their tenacious attachment to their ancient land.
Reinforcing its appeal, giving it a continual contemporary urgency, was the curse of persecution which had followed the Jews into every haven in which they had taken shelter during their dispersal. The roots of Jewish suffering grew out of the rise of another religion dedicated, paradoxically, to the love of man for man. Burning in the ardor of their new faith to convert the pagan masses, the early fathers of the Christian Church strove to emphasize the differences between their religion and its theological predecessor by forcing upon the Jews a kind of spiritual apartheid. The Emperor Theodosius II gave those aspirations legal force in his code, condemning Judaism and, for the first time, legally branding the Jews a people apart..
Dagobert, King of the Franks, drove them from Gaul: Spain’s Visigoths seized their children as converts; the Byzantine Emperor Heraclius forbade Jewish worship. With the Crusaders, spiritual apartheid became systematic slaughter. Shrieking their cry: “Deus vult! (God wills it!)”, the Crusaders fell on every hapless Jewish community on their route to Jerusalem..
Most countries barred from owning land. The religiously organized medieval craft and commerce guilds were closed to them. The Church forbade Jews to employ Christians and Christians to live among Jews. Most loathsome of all was the decision of the Fourth Lateran Council in 1215 to stamp the Jews as a race apart by forcing them to wear a distinguishing badge. In England, it was a replica of the tablets on which Moses received the Ten Commandments. In France and Germany it was a yellow “O”, fore-runner of the yellow stars with which the Third Reich would one day mark the victims of its gas chambers.
Edward I of England and later Philip the Fair of France expelled the Jews from their nations, seizing their property before evicting them. Even the Black Death was blamed on the Jews, accused of poisoning Christian wells with a powder made of spiders, frogs’ legs, Christian entrails and consecrated hosts. Over two hundred Jewish communities were exterminated in the slaughters stirred by that wild fantasy.
During those dark centuries, the only example of normal Jewish existence in the West was in the Spain of the Caliphate, where, under Arab rule, the Jewish people flourished as they never would again in the Diaspora. The Christian Reconquesta ended that. In 1492, Ferdinand and Isabella expelled the Jews from Spain.
In Germany, Jews were forbidden to ride in carriages and were make to pay a special toll at they entered a city. The republic of Venice enriched the vocabulary of the world with the word “ghetto” from the quarter, Ghetto Nuovo – New Foundry – to which the republic restricted its Jews. In Poland, the Cossack Revolt, with a ferocity and devotion to torture unparalleled in Jewish experience, wiped out over 100,000 Jews in less than a decade. When the czars pushed their frontier westward across Poland, and era of darkness set if for almost half the world’s Jewish population. Fenced into history’s greatest ghetto, the Pale of Settlement, Jews were conscripted at the age of twelve for twenty-five years of military service and forced to pay special taxes on kosher meat and Sabbath candles. Jewish woman were not allowed to live in the big city university centers without the yellow ticket of a prostitute. In 1880, after the assassination of Alexander II, the mobs, aided by the Czar’s soldiers, burned and butchered their way through one Jewish community after another, leaving a new word in their wake: pogrom.
Bloody milestones on the road to Hitler’s gas chambers, those slaughters succeeding one another through the centuries were the constant of Jewish history, the ghastly heritage of an oppressed race to whom the crematorium of the Third Reich might seem only the final, most appalling manifestation of their destiny.
Yet by a strange paradox, the event which produced the decisive Jewish reaction that that bloodstained history was not a pogrom, not a slaughter, not a Cossack troops’ brutality. It was a military ceremony, a ritual whose killing was spiritual, the public humiliation of Captain Alfred Dreyfus in Paris in January, 1895.
In the midst of the crowd massed on the esplanade of the Champ de Mars to watch the ceremony was a Viennese newspaperman named Theodore Herzl. Like Dreyfus, Herzl was a Jew. Like Dreyfus, he had led his life in comfortable, seemingly unassailable assimilation into European society, little concerned with his race or religion. Suddenly on that windy esplanade, Herzl heard the mob around him begin to cry, “Kill the traitor! Kill the Jew!” A shock wave rolled through his being. He had understood. It was not just for the blood of Alfred Dreyfus that the crowds was clamoring; it was for his blood, for Jewish blood.
Herzl walked away from that spectacle a shattered man; but from his anguish came a vision that modified the destiny of his people and the history of the twentieth century.
It was Zionism. With the energy of his despair, Herzl produced its blueprint, a one-hundred page pamphlet entitle “Der Judenstaat” – “The Jewish State”.
“The Jews who will it,” it began, “shall have a state of their own.”
Its apogee, under David and Solomon, lasted barely a century. Living at the crossroads of the caravan routes of Europe, Asia and Africa, installed on a land that was already a beckoning temptation to every nearby civilization, the Hebrews endured a millennium of unremitting assaults. Assyria, Babylon, Egypt, Greece, Rome, each in t turn sent its cohorts to conquer their land. Twice, in 586 B.B. and in A.D. 70, their conquerors inflicted upon them the supreme ordeal of exile and destroyed the Temple they had built in Jerusalem’s Mount Moriah to Yahweh, their one and universal deity. From those dispersions and the suffering accompanying them was born their tenacious attachment to their ancient land.
Reinforcing its appeal, giving it a continual contemporary urgency, was the curse of persecution which had followed the Jews into every haven in which they had taken shelter during their dispersal. The roots of Jewish suffering grew out of the rise of another religion dedicated, paradoxically, to the love of man for man. Burning in the ardor of their new faith to convert the pagan masses, the early fathers of the Christian Church strove to emphasize the differences between their religion and its theological predecessor by forcing upon the Jews a kind of spiritual apartheid. The Emperor Theodosius II gave those aspirations legal force in his code, condemning Judaism and, for the first time, legally branding the Jews a people apart..
Dagobert, King of the Franks, drove them from Gaul: Spain’s Visigoths seized their children as converts; the Byzantine Emperor Heraclius forbade Jewish worship. With the Crusaders, spiritual apartheid became systematic slaughter. Shrieking their cry: “Deus vult! (God wills it!)”, the Crusaders fell on every hapless Jewish community on their route to Jerusalem..
Most countries barred from owning land. The religiously organized medieval craft and commerce guilds were closed to them. The Church forbade Jews to employ Christians and Christians to live among Jews. Most loathsome of all was the decision of the Fourth Lateran Council in 1215 to stamp the Jews as a race apart by forcing them to wear a distinguishing badge. In England, it was a replica of the tablets on which Moses received the Ten Commandments. In France and Germany it was a yellow “O”, fore-runner of the yellow stars with which the Third Reich would one day mark the victims of its gas chambers.
Edward I of England and later Philip the Fair of France expelled the Jews from their nations, seizing their property before evicting them. Even the Black Death was blamed on the Jews, accused of poisoning Christian wells with a powder made of spiders, frogs’ legs, Christian entrails and consecrated hosts. Over two hundred Jewish communities were exterminated in the slaughters stirred by that wild fantasy.
During those dark centuries, the only example of normal Jewish existence in the West was in the Spain of the Caliphate, where, under Arab rule, the Jewish people flourished as they never would again in the Diaspora. The Christian Reconquesta ended that. In 1492, Ferdinand and Isabella expelled the Jews from Spain.
In Germany, Jews were forbidden to ride in carriages and were make to pay a special toll at they entered a city. The republic of Venice enriched the vocabulary of the world with the word “ghetto” from the quarter, Ghetto Nuovo – New Foundry – to which the republic restricted its Jews. In Poland, the Cossack Revolt, with a ferocity and devotion to torture unparalleled in Jewish experience, wiped out over 100,000 Jews in less than a decade. When the czars pushed their frontier westward across Poland, and era of darkness set if for almost half the world’s Jewish population. Fenced into history’s greatest ghetto, the Pale of Settlement, Jews were conscripted at the age of twelve for twenty-five years of military service and forced to pay special taxes on kosher meat and Sabbath candles. Jewish woman were not allowed to live in the big city university centers without the yellow ticket of a prostitute. In 1880, after the assassination of Alexander II, the mobs, aided by the Czar’s soldiers, burned and butchered their way through one Jewish community after another, leaving a new word in their wake: pogrom.
Bloody milestones on the road to Hitler’s gas chambers, those slaughters succeeding one another through the centuries were the constant of Jewish history, the ghastly heritage of an oppressed race to whom the crematorium of the Third Reich might seem only the final, most appalling manifestation of their destiny.
Yet by a strange paradox, the event which produced the decisive Jewish reaction that that bloodstained history was not a pogrom, not a slaughter, not a Cossack troops’ brutality. It was a military ceremony, a ritual whose killing was spiritual, the public humiliation of Captain Alfred Dreyfus in Paris in January, 1895.
In the midst of the crowd massed on the esplanade of the Champ de Mars to watch the ceremony was a Viennese newspaperman named Theodore Herzl. Like Dreyfus, Herzl was a Jew. Like Dreyfus, he had led his life in comfortable, seemingly unassailable assimilation into European society, little concerned with his race or religion. Suddenly on that windy esplanade, Herzl heard the mob around him begin to cry, “Kill the traitor! Kill the Jew!” A shock wave rolled through his being. He had understood. It was not just for the blood of Alfred Dreyfus that the crowds was clamoring; it was for his blood, for Jewish blood.
Herzl walked away from that spectacle a shattered man; but from his anguish came a vision that modified the destiny of his people and the history of the twentieth century.
It was Zionism. With the energy of his despair, Herzl produced its blueprint, a one-hundred page pamphlet entitle “Der Judenstaat” – “The Jewish State”.
“The Jews who will it,” it began, “shall have a state of their own.”
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