Pale.
The physical seclusion and segregation of the Jews in ghettos and shtetls, whether resulting from coercion, necessity, or their own desires, was a central feature of Jewish life for a long time. However, the closed, cramped, and often impoverished environment of the shtetl did not breed intellectual stagnation. On the contrary, Jewish learning there flourished with a minimum of outside interference. Physical segregation enhanced cohesion and developed communal institutions. Traditional scholarship thrived, great talmudic schools (yeshivot) prospered, and a rich religious literature was produced. Constant argumentation over scriptural interpretation produced rival schools of thought. The Hasidim, who emphasized enthusiasm and mystical communion with God, clashed with the Opponents (Mitnagdim), who emphasized scholarship and a strict adherence to tradition. Proponents of Enlightenment (Haskala) advocated the introduction of secular Western studies and clashed with an Orthodox establishment afraid of outside influences. The increase in population, the spread of education, and the growing gap between the closed Jewish society and the materially advancing outside world turned the crowded shtetl into a social and intellectual powder keg where ideas, ambitions, and frustrations simmered. Then when the ghetto walls finally fell, these pent-up energies burst forth with a power that changed not only Jewish life, but also much of the outside world.
Something quite similar happened in Japan. Geographic isolation, a separate language, unique customs and institutions, and a long, uninterrupted independence caused the Japanese to perceive themselves as different and distinct from their neighbors. In the seventeenth century this mental detachment from the rest of the world was augmented by the official closing of the country (sakoku). Except for two small and well-controlled Chinese and Dutch trading posts at Nagasaki, and occasional delegations from Korea and the Ryukyu Islands, no contacts were maintained with the rest of the world for more than two centuries.
Thus, a little more than a century after Catholic Spain and Portugal had expelled their Jews, Japan expelled the Spaniards and the Portuguese living there and outlawed Christianity. The cruel persecution of the "hidden Jews" in Spain and Portugal—the so-called Marranos, who had become converts to Christianity under threat of death but continued to practice Judaism in secret—had its counterpart in the cruel persecution of the "hidden Christians" in Japan.
Seclusion denied Japan the fruits of international trade and arrested its technological and military development but saved the country from falling prey to the colonial ambitions of the European powers. Continued intercourse with the West might have kept Japan abreast of European inventions but might also have brought Japan to share the fate of the Philippines and India, which became Western colonies. Moreover, as it did with the Jews, seclusion had a positive internal effect. It consolidated the Japanese and united them into a nation as never before. It also imbued them, like the Jews in the shtetl, with great dynamism. Peace and stability stimulated internal commerce, promoted the growth of cities, and caused production to flourish. Scholarship, literature, and the arts thrived behind the closed doors of Japan, penetrating even the lowest classes of society. In the seventeenth, eighteenth, and early nineteenth centuries, different interpretations of the Confucian classics emerged, producing different attitudes toward the past and the present. Neo-Confucian ideas of the Zhu Xi school clashed with those of the Wang Yang-ming school, admirers of Chinese culture argued with supporters of the national studies (kokugaku), and conservatives debated with the advocates of Dutch learning (rangaku). As in the case of the Jews, the bottled-up energies of an increasingly sophisticated, educated, and ambitious population shut off from the outside world would soon explode with enormous force.
Holland was one of the leading nations of Europe in the seventeenth and early eighteenth centuries; and it is no surprise that both Jews and Japanese came in touch with the European thought of that time through some Dutch connection. The first scholar to introduce modern philosophical thought into Judaism was Benedict (Baruch) Spinoza (1632-77), whose father had fled from persecution in Portugal and settled in Holland. Spinoza's rational approach appeared heretical to the Jewish rabbis of Amsterdam, and he was excommunicated. However, his writing had an enormous impact on European thought, ultimately securing his place as one of the greatest Western philosophers.
During the time of Spinoza, the only Westerners with whom the Japanese maintained some contact were the Dutch merchants in Nagasaki. In the middle of the eighteenth century the shogun Tokugawa Yoshimune ordered two scholars to learn the Dutch language from the Dutch in Nagasaki, and this initial study developed into a lively interest in Western disciplines, especially medicine and mathematics.
Even the nationalist romantics (kokugakusha), who called upon their country to return to its "true self," admired Holland. Hirata Atsutane (1776-1843), who claimed that Japan was superior to all other nations in the world, wrote in 1811: "The Dutch have the excellent national characteristic of investigating matters with great patience until they can get to the very bottom. . . . Unlike China, Holland is a splendid country where they do not rely on superficial conjectures." At the same time that scholars of Dutch learning were introducing concepts of European enlightenment into Japan, the Enlightenment movement of the Jews (Haskala), calling for the adoption of secular, Western learning, was emerging with the Maskilim of central Europe. While Dutch was for more than a century the language through which the Japanese learned about Europe, German became the language through which the Jews acquainted themselves with European culture in the eighteenth century.
The foremost proponent of the Jewish Enlightenment, Moses Mendelssohn (1729-86), first received a traditional Jewish education and then acquired a liberal Western education, mastering the German, Latin, Greek, English, and French languages and the philosophical writings of his time. Although he became a leading figure of German Enlightenment, Mendelssohn never distanced himself from Orthodox Judaism and was never excommunicated. Therefore he wielded more influence over his contemporary Jewish world than did Spinoza. Mendelssohn advocated that Jews should acquire Western civilization in addition to their Jewish culture, as these two could enrich each other. Like Hirata Atsutane, he also wished to return to the roots and revive ancient Jewish culture. He therefore wrote in modern German as well as in biblical Hebrew, two innovations for the Yiddish-speaking Jews of his time. The revival of the old Hebrew language, which paved the way for the Jewish national revival in the following century, was thus started not by conservatives but by advocates of modern Western culture.
In the nineteenth century, the walls surrounding the closed societies of the Japanese and the Jews collapsed before the onslaught of the industrializing West. In the seventeenth century no one questioned the right of Japan to close her doors to the world and no foreign country was strong enough to challenge that policy. But in the nineteenth century Japan's isolation came to be regarded as an affront to the international order, and the Western powers possessed the means to put an end to it. The refusal of one country, situated on the sea route from North America to East Asia, to trade with the rest of the world could not be tolerated by the expanding West. The industrial revolution provided the maritime nations of the West with firepower adequate to defeat anyone who dared to oppose them. The American gunboats of Commodore Perry thus opened the gates of Japan in the middle of the nineteenth century, but had the Americans not done so, the British or the Russians would likely have shortly thereafter. The walls that the Japanese had erected around their islands could not withstand the Western impact.
There was no need for gunboats to tear down the walls of the Jewish ghetto and shtetl, but the rationale for their dismantling was similar. In the increasingly integrated world of the nineteenth century there was no place for a detached society living and behaving according to its own rules. The concept of the modern nation-state that emerged with the French Revolution held that all citizens were equal, but each citizen was part of the integral community. During a debate on the Jews at the National Assembly of France in 1789, Delegate Count Clermont-Tonnerre declared, "The Jews should be denied everything as a nation, but granted everything as individuals.... If they do not want this, they must inform us and we shall then be compelled to expel them." The integration of Jews into Western society was attained through their surrender of communal autonomy and achievement of equal rights as individuals; the integration of Japan into the Western family of nations was achieved through
