Guest Blog: Hands off the Law of return, Part II: Jewish Denial

In a previous submission, Hands off the Law of Return , respondents covered the spectrum of issues related, it seemed to me, to the title, but few spoke of the issues raised in the article itself. For instance, why was the Law and its Grandparent Clause among the first Basic Laws enacted by the new State of Israel, why was this law considered a priority? Why, if it was to be the gatekeeper regarding persons to be granted instant refuge and citizenship did it not defer to Halacha, Jewish traditional law, defining a Jew as born of a Jewish mother? Why instead was the Law written to include the child of a single Jewish grandparent, regardless of the grandchild's present religion, as gateway to Jewish identity for purposes of refuge? All of these questions relate back to the foundations of Zionism, to the very need and quest for a state of the Jews.
 
I
 
Religious Jews had, as far back as the fall of Jerusalem and the Roman dispersion, returned to Zion in small numbers to fulfill the Halachic injunction to physically live on the land. With the Enlightenment, Europe broke the bonds of Christian theocracy and emancipated the Jews. For the first time in the Diaspora, Jews were accepted as equals and citizens in the lands of their residence. But with "European enlightenment" came a new theory of Jewish difference. No longer seen through the lens of religion, Jews were now designated biologically different, a race separate from their neighbors. And the secular version of anti-Judaism, racial antisemitism was born. Faced with this new and even more virulent discrimination and persecution, Jews came to realize that ,even as they were now granted civil citizenship in their countries of residence they were still, and would always remain the 'Other', foreign in the eyes of their hosts and neighbors.
 
Germany is the obvious case in point. Nowhere, including our much-vaunted refuge in the United States , comes close to the degree of assimilation we experienced in that country. Our loyalty and persistent, even while residing overseas, pride of identity with the "fatherland" is convincing testimony. Germany was our Goldene Medina long before Jews fled in large numbers to the New World.
 
And found in their dream of acceptance the continuing sting of discrimination, of rejection. When Herzl discovered his Jewish identity amidst the mobs of Paris during the antisemitic frenzy surrounding Captain Dreyfus; when he called for the creation of a Jewish state, he represented all Jews, then and now, living in the self-delusion of security in the Christian Diaspora. Zionism is not the response of a people yearning to surrender the comfort of developed society for the challenge of turning a desert into a garden. He correctly recognized that anti-Jewry, religious or secular, is not an aberration but a fact of our life among Christians. Herzl realized that whatever the expressed identification of persons and groups raised within the Christian tradition, whether they later self-identify as Buddhist, Nazi-pagan or devil-worshiper, still were they suckled at the breast of Christian culture and legend. And at the very heart of that tradition is the gospel description of Jewish guilt for the murder of their messiah and god. That the anti-Jewish tradition was later affirmed by such giants of Christian thoughts as Augustine and Luther verifies to the believer the credibility of the charge. 
 
 II                                                                                    
 
How to overcome the animus inspired by writings accepted as the word of God? In the mid-1960s the Catholic Church, responding to the charge of complicity in the Holocaust, discovered its limits of reform and penance. Recognizing that the Holocaust was inspired by and based on theological and legal Christian precedent, the Church sought to reform doctrine, to insulate Christianity from blame for any future Holocaust. But how can one modify the gospels, the revealed word of God, without bringing to question the validity of those writings as God's word? Was the price of penance worth the cost? In the end the Church drafted Nostre Aetate, a sort of compromise: the anti-Jewish texts would stand, but the clergy was instructed to teach them allegorically, not as fact. Recent surveys reveal that antisemitism has not diminished but increased since Nostre Aetate.
 
III
 
Of course the gospel references to the Jews are one problem. Not only with regards to the mistreatment of the Jews which it inculcates among its followers, but also as a barrier to the realization of its own ideal as a "religion of love and compassion." If the gospels served to inspire antisemitism, it was the enactment of Church laws regarding the Jews that provided the tools that turned inspiration into action. It was, for example, the medieval Church that first ordered that a distinguishing symbol be worn by Jews on clothing to distinguish them from Christian, the forerunner of Hitler's yellow star. And Warsaw was not the first ghetto concentrating Jews in an impoverished and walled enclave separate from Christian society. This too was an innovation of the Church. Even the notion of Jewish Blood, a primitive form of "racism" was not a modern invention but of the Renaissance, the Church's 15 th Century Inquisition which was to last into the 20th Century. Even the effort to remove Jews from Christian lands and, yes, from life itself was introduced by Torquemada and the 15th Century Inquisition.
 
No, Germany and 20th Century Europe did not arrive at the Final Solution to their Jewish Problem by innovation, but by historical precedent. The Holocaust was merely the logical next step in Christian animus, a next step made far more effective and efficient with the invention of the computer to identify and locate the victims; of Ford's assembly line efficiency in dispatching the victims and eliminating their remains. Nor was the Holocaust limited to the murder machinery located in Europe, but was aided and abetted by Christendom beyond the borders of the death factory which was Europe. How do we measure the guilt of countries that refused refuge when the opportunity was available, when Hitler offered escape to all able to find a country willing to accept them? What was Roosevelt and America thinking as the St. Louis sailed up and down the coast of the United States with its cargo of over 900 refugees fleeing death in Europe; when Roosevelt refused to act to allow the ship to land and his inaction resulted in the return of the refugees to Europe, and death? What was Roosevelt thinking when he refused to slow the machinery of death in the closing weeks and hours of the war by bombing Auschwitz, or even the rail lines feeding the crematoria? What are we to make of Roosevelt's expressed "concern" at the pain bombing Auschwitz would cause the camp's inmates while he and the American public were well aware of the fate the inmates faced? Reports by the camp's few survivors described inmate despair, their feeling of abandonment at watching American bombers fly over the camps on their way towards other targets. What was Roosevelt, the American president most identified as "friend" of the Jews, thinking? What does America's policy of closed borders and conscience during Shoah mean for the Jews, then and now?
 
Is the guilt of complicity some form of perverse mitzvah because it is passive? Is the passive act of refusing refuge resulting in murder a lesser guilt than of the Ukrainians photographed clubbing their Jewish neighbors to death under the disgusted eyes of more civilized German einsatscomandos? Where was the American Goldene Medina then? Where in the future?
 
IV
 
No, the Law of Return is not an out-of-date document, a quaint reminder of the halcyon days of pre-statehood Zionism. The Grandparent Clause is as necessary tomorrow as it was yesterday. If it is interpreted as allowing entry to inappropriate immigrants in times of non-emergency then the fault is not with the Law but with those who administer it. If the children of such immigrants react to their forcible removal from their homes by taking their anger out on the country to which they were unwillingly moved, then the problem again is not with the Law but with its administrators. The Law is in place to protect the Diaspora in time of emergency, not as an instrument of population politics. The Law and the Clause are the purest definition of Zionism and the responsibilities of the state of the Jews it birthed. Dilute the Law and Israel is reduced to just another country except in its temporary Jewish majority. And Israel in the Diaspora is again set adrift to face its uncertain future as in the days before Zionism.
 
V
 
An afterthought: One of the major shortcomings of Responses to on-line articles it seems to me is the immediacy of the medium. We glance at or read something, assume its meaning or intent, dash off an unmediated response and move on to the next issue of controversy or interest. And I also am guilty of this. The result is much emotional activity, but little learning and integration of the alternate position. In reading some of the responses to my previous article, Hands off the Law of Return I was struck by the lack of attention to the meaning both of the Law and of my plea on its behalf. It was as though the article went unread beyond the inspiration provided by the title! Like it or not, whatever our identification as Jews, Orthodox or Conservative or Reform or "none of the above" in the end, as we faced mass murder in the 1940s so will we face our fate in the future: We are doomed to be identified as Jews not by personal election, but by murderer selection. One single Jewish grandparent is the operative definition of what was a nearly successful precedent.
 
And that is the reason the Law of Return was among the first Basic Laws enacted by the Zionist state of the Jews. And why it must be protected and preserved for as long as our Diaspora exists.