of compromise as possible. I have always held that the spiritual longing for the land of divine promise was a central axis of identity for Jewish communities and an elementary condition for understanding them. However, these strong yearnings for the Heavenly Jerusalem in the souls of oppressed and humiliated religious minorities were primarily metaphysical longings for redemption, not for stones or landscape. In any event, a group’s religious connection to a sacred center does not endow it with modern property rights to some, or all, of the places in question.
Despite the many differences, this principle is as true for other cases in history as it is for the case of the Jews. The Crusaders had no historical right to conquer the Holy Land, despite their strong religious ties to it, the extended period of time they spent there, and the large quantity of blood they spilled in its name. Neither did the Templars—who spoke a southern German dialect, identified themselves as the chosen people, and, in the mid-nineteenth century, believed they would inherit the Promised Land—earn such a privilege. Even the masses of Christian pilgrims, who also made their way to Palestine during the nineteenth century, and clung to it with such fervor, typically never dreamed of becoming the lords of the land. Likewise, it is safe to assume that the tens of thousands of Jews who have made pilgrimages to the grave of Rabbi Nachman of Bratslav in the Ukrainian city of Uman in recent years do not claim to be the city’s masters. Incidentally, Rabbi Nachman, a founder of Hasidic Judaism who made a pilgrimage to Zion in 1799 during Napoleon Bonaparte’s short occupation of the region, considered it not his national property but rather a focal point of the spreading energy of the Creator. It therefore made sense for him to return modestly to his country of birth, where he eventually died and was buried with great ceremony.
But when Simon Schama, like other pro-Zionist historians, refers to “the remembered connection between the ancestral land and Jewish experience,” he is denying Jewish consciousness the thoughtful consideration it deserves. In actuality, he is referring to Zionist memory and to his own extremely personal experiences as an Anglo-Saxon Zionist. To illustrate this point, we need look no further than the introduction to his intriguing book Landscape and Memory, in which he recounts his experience collecting funds for the planting of trees in Israel as a child attending a Jewish school in London:
The trees were our proxy immigrants, the forests our implantation. And while we assumed that a pinewood was more beautiful than a hill denuded by grazing flocks of goats and sheep, we were never exactly sure what all the trees were for. What we did know was that a rooted forest was the opposite landscape to a place of drifting sand, of exposed rock and red dirt blown by the winds. The Diaspora was sand. So what should Israel be, if not a forest, fixed and tall?18
For the moment, let us ignore Schama’s symptomatic disregard for the ruins of the many Arab villages (with their orange orchards, sabr cactus patches, and surrounding olive groves) upon which the trees of the Jewish National Fund were planted and cast their shadow, hiding them from sight. Schama knows better than most that forests planted deep in the ground have always been an essential motif of the politics of romantic nationalist identity in Eastern Europe. Typical of Zionist writing is his tendency to forget that forestation and tree planting, throughout rich Jewish tradition, were never regarded as a solution to the “drifting sand” of exile.
To reiterate, the Promised Land was undoubtedly an object of Jewish longing and Jewish collective memory, but the traditional Jewish connection to the area never assumed the form of a mass aspiration for collective ownership of a national homeland. The “Land of Israel” of Zionist and Israeli authors bears no resemblance to the Holy Land of my true forefathers (as opposed to the mythological forefathers), whose origins and lives were embedded within the Yiddish culture of Eastern Europe. As with the Jews of Egypt, North Africa, and the Fertile Crescent, their hearts were filled with a deep awe and a sense of mourning for what was, to them, the most important and sacred place of all. So exalted worldwide was this place that, during the many centuries following their conversion, they had made no effort to resettle there. According to most of the rabbinically educated figures whose writings have survived the passage of time, “the Lord gave, and the Lord hath taken away” (Job 1:21), and when God would send the Messiah, the cosmic order of things would change. Only upon the arrival of the redeemer would the living and the dead gather together in eternal Jerusalem. For most, the hastening of collective salvation was considered a transgression to be severely punished; for others, the Holy Land was largely an allegorical, intangible notion—not a concrete territorial site but an internal spiritual state. This reality was perhaps best reflected in the reaction of the Jewish rabbinate—traditional, ultraorthodox, Reform, and liberal alike—to the birth of the Zionist movement.19
History as we define it deals not only with a world of ideas but also with human action as it plays out in time and space. The human masses of the distant past did not leave behind written artifacts, and we know very little about how their beliefs, imagination, and emotions guided their individual and collective actions. The way they dealt with crises, however, provides us with a bit more insight into their priorities and their decisions.
When Jewish groups were expelled from their places of residence during acts of religious persecution, they did not seek refuge in their sacred land but made every effort to relocate to other, more hospitable locations (as in the case of the Spanish expulsion). And when the more malicious and violent protonationalist pogroms began to take place within the Russian empire, and the increasingly secular persecuted population began to make its way, full of hope, to new shores, only a tiny, marginal group, imbued with modern nationalist ideology, imagined an “old/new” homeland and set their course for Palestine.20
This was also true both before and after the appalling Nazi genocide. In fact, it was the United States’ refusal, between the anti-immigration legislation of 1924 and the year 1948, to accept the victims of European Judeophobic persecution that enabled decision makers to channel somewhat more significant numbers of Jews toward the Middle East. Absent this stern anti-immigration policy, it is doubtful whether the State of Israel could have been established.
Karl Marx once said, paraphrasing Hegel, that history repeats itself: the first time as tragedy, the second as farce. In the early 1980s, US President Ronald Reagan decided to allow refugees of the Soviet regime to immigrate to the United States, an offer greeted with overwhelming demand. In response, the Israeli government exerted pressure to have the gates of immigration to the United States blocked by all possible means. Because the immigrants continued to insist on the United States, and not the Middle East, as their preferred destination, Israel collaborated with Romanian ruler Nicolae Ceauşescu to limit their ability to choose. In return for payoffs to Ceauşescu’s Securitate and the corrupt Communist regime in Hungary, more than one million Soviet immigrants were routed to their “national state,” a destination they had not chosen and in which they did not want to live.21
I do not know whether or not Schama’s parents or grandparents had been given the choice to return to the Middle Eastern “land of their forefathers.” In any event, like the large majority of immigrants, they, too, chose to migrate westward and continue to endure the torments of “diaspora.” I am also certain that Simon Schama himself could have immigrated to his “ancient homeland” anytime he chose to do so, but preferred to use migrating trees as a proxy and to leave immigration to the Land of Israel to Jews who were unable to gain entry into Britain or the United States. This brings to mind an old Yiddish joke that defines a Zionist as a Jew asking another Jew for money to donate to a third Jew in order to make aliyah to the Land of Israel. It is joke more applicable at present than ever before, and a point to which I will return throughout this book.
In sum, the Jews were not forcibly exiled from the land of Judea in the first century CE, and they did not “return” to twentieth-century Palestine, and subsequently to Israel, of their own free will. The role of
