Moment Debate | Can Jews Ever Flourish Under Authoritarians?

Interviews by Amy E. Schwartz

INTERVIEW WITH DIANA PINTO

Can Jews ever flourish under authoritarians? | Yes

Can Jews ever flourish under authoritarians?

Yes—if you’re talking about organized Jewish communities, not individual modern Jews. Jews flourished in nondemocratic contexts for millennia. Jews can do well under authoritarianism that doesn’t actually kill them: Even in Czarist Russia, they managed to survive and create a wonderful culture.

The notion of Jews living at ease in democracies is a relatively recent one, and it’s constantly under attack from more conservative and Orthodox groups that believe we must stay inside our own closed forts to survive. This caution is a very deeply embedded trait, and it’s come back to life massively with the current fear of rising antisemitism.

What forms has Jewish life taken historically under authoritarians or dictators?

Picture the “tortoise” formation of the Roman army, in which troops moved forward with their shields on top and on the sides. That model has punctuated Jewish life, especially in times of crisis: closed, highly organized communities that have one interlocutor to deal with ransom demands or other horrible conditions imposed by the non-Jewish world around them. When things are going better, individual Jews and more progressive groups are willing to leave this tortoise formation and swim with the rest of society. But there is always a hard core of officials ready to pounce and say, wait a minute, you’re deluding yourselves, and you’re also diluting yourselves, trying to swim in these waters that can only be treacherous in the long run.

The historian Yosef Hayim Yerushalmi, in an essay called “Servants of Kings, Not Servants of Servants,” argued that Jews throughout European history greatly valued having the ear of the king and didn’t bother with lesser bureaucrats. I definitely see aspects of this tendency today. In France, the umbrella group for Jewish institutions holds an annual dinner that’s attended by the president of the republic, and they all sit there feeling very honored. They would panic at the idea that other groups, such as Africans or Muslims, might start having such banquets. Having that privileged relationship with the top obviously did not endear Jews to the society below. A lot of antisemitism, even today, is linked to the functions Jews were given by these authoritarian princes or kings, such as tax collecting or selling alcohol.

Jews can do well under authoritarianism that doesn’t actually kill them.

Yerushalmi writes that when the Nazis came to power in Germany, there were no Jewish reflexes for handling it, because past rulers might have hated Jews but still considered them useful. With the Nazis, there was no ear into which Jewish leaders could whisper.

Are there advantages for Jewish communities under the enforced order of illiberal societies?

There were functioning synagogues in Moscow and Leningrad under Communism. After 1989, free-floating individual, democratic, pluralist Jews in formerly Communist countries often clashed with those who kind of liked having one Communist-approved community: Maybe it was bumpy, or not ideal, but it was clear.

I’m an Italian Jew by birth. Before 1938, even under fascism, Jews had rights; there were fascist Jews. But in the 1929 Lateran Treaty between Mussolini and the Catholic Church, all Jews were automatically assigned to membership in the only official Jewish community. You had no choice. And after the war, in a supposedly democratic republic, this rule was maintained. I used to have fierce arguments with an uncle who thought it was a wonderful thing for the Jews that postwar Italy had kept this fascist relic.

What happens to Jewish communities when societies undergo rapid political change?

There were Jews ardently in favor of every liberalizing movement, whether the revolutions of 1848 across Central Europe or the great Soviet experiment, in which Bolshevik Jews were deeply involved (although the purges got rid of that generation). Elite Jews’ hearts pulsated with notions of brotherhood and humanity. More traditional and less secularly educated Jews, including many esteemed Talmudic scholars, were frightened by that instability and became very conservative. I still see this today: In France, before the recent elections, intellectuals like Alain Finkielkraut who feared antisemitism on the extreme left said they would vote if necessary for the National Front.

Do modern liberal societies support particular kinds of Judaism?

When Napoleon passed through Vilna on his way to Russia in 1812, the followers of the great sage the Gaon of Vilna, who had died in 1797, said Napoleon might be good for the Jews, but he was a curse for Judaism. The idea is that organized Judaism suffers when there are universal rights and the atmospheric pressure, if you will, is identical inside and outside the tent. The great French revolutionary sentiment was “We must refuse everything to the Jews as a nation and accord everything to Jews as individuals.”

INTERVIEW WITH MICHAEL WALZER

Can Jews ever flourish under authoritarians? | No

Can Jews ever flourish under authoritarians?

No. Today’s authoritarian regimes are generally dangerous for Jews. Some, strangely, are antisemitic at home but pro-Israel abroad. But for Jews domestically, liberal democracy, with its commitment to pluralism and tolerance, is safer than almost any modern authoritarian regime.

Most current authoritarianism is populist in character, and we are not generally part of the “people” encompassed by the term. Authoritarians generally come with a commitment to a monolithic culture—often, as with Vladimir Putin, in alliance with a church—with a non-pluralist notion of national identity and a strong bias against immigrants. That makes the world too small for Jews.

And if this monolithic nation somehow gets into trouble, a depression or almost any kind of crisis, the government will look for scapegoats, and we are the eternal, automatic scapegoats.

What forms has Jewish life taken historically under authoritarians or dictators?

Before emancipation, Jews did best when there was a powerful ruler and a “court Jew,” often a physician or financier, whispering in his ear. The king became a protector against the populist mob. In the Middle Ages, wandering preachers, medieval versions of evangelical or Pentecostal Christians, often preached against the Jews and fomented pogroms, and it would be the ruler who’d intervene on behalf of “his” Jews. We got protected, and the king got our taxes.

Most authoritarianism is populist, and we are not part of the ‘people.’

Big imperial regimes such as the Ottoman Empire practiced indirect rule: Each minority had its own courts and family law. Jews often prospered in that situation, perhaps in ghettos, but with some precarious autonomy. There, too, the danger was from mass movements that caught the popular imagination, as when Crusaders would stop along the way to Jerusalem to kill Jews and Muslims.

Are there advantages to Jewish communities under the enforced order of illiberal systems?

The politics of shtadlanut, or dependence on a court Jew who “made arrangements,” was a politics of deference and passivity. Shtadlanut often made for periods of prosperity and creativity (think of Spain in what we call the Golden Age). But the Zionists hated it. Zionism thought of that whole relationship as something shameful that had to be overcome. It saw the Purim story as paradigmatic of that situation—Y.L. Peretz, at various times a socialist and a Zionist, once called Mordechai the first pimp and the first informer. Zionists wanted a Jewish community that did not rely on people like Mordechai. Yeshayahu Leibowitz famously said Zionism had nothing to do with redemption or religion, it was just an expression of our desire not to be ruled by the goyim anymore.

What happens to Jewish communities when societies undergo rapid political change?

It depends on the change. The American Revolution was an extraordinary transformation that turned out to be very good for the Jews, as exemplified by George Washington’s famous letter to the Touro Synagogue. Periods of depression or plague have historically been dangerous for Jews, who get blamed. There was a rise of antisemitism in America in the 1930s during the Depression. But in a liberal democracy where pluralism is already established, Jews tend to do better even during those critical times. Where there are multiple minorities, we tend at our best to be allied with them, as in the Black-Jewish alliance that was. When I went South in the early 1960s, I think a plurality of northern liberals and leftists who went South were Jews, and we thought defending Black people was also a form of collective self-defense.

Do modern liberal societies support particular kinds of Judaism?

That’s a big debate. First, modern liberal societies have made Judaism a denominational religion. In the medieval kahal, there were heresies, such as the beliefs of the Karaites, but basically just one version of Judaism. Emancipation led to denominations, particularly in America. I’m still on the email list for Harvard Hillel, though it’s many years since I taught there, and this past Pesach there were 12 seders listed—Reconstructionist, feminist, radical, secular, every kind of seder.

That’s unimaginable in pre-emancipation countries, or in authoritarian ones.

One of the old Zionist arguments was, if you don’t come to Israel, you’ll end up disappearing in liberal society. We do lose people, but we also gain people. I know many intermarried couples who are raising Jewish children. I was raised in the Reform movement in western Pennsylvania, and I know fourth- and fifth-generation Reform Jews. That was supposed to be impossible—both the Zionists and the Orthodox said Reform Judaism wasn’t “thick” enough to survive. But it got thicker, and here we are.