The Merkley Report
Paul Charles MERKLEY
Paul Merkley is a retired Professor of History from Carleton University in Ottawa. His teaching specialties were in the History of the United States in the Twentieth Century and in the Religious Factor in American History. He has published scholarly books and articles on Christian theology of History and on aspects of the role of Christian faith in American politics.Paul’s interest in Israel goes back to 1981 when he spent six months with his family in residence as a visiting Professor at the Hebrew University, Jerusalem, where he taught courses in History of Religion in the United States. He has made several subsequent research visits to Israel.
Who is a Jew?
-- by Paul Charles Merkley. ………………………………………………………………………………… Both Jews and Christians might well ask: “Who needs a Christian Zionist perspective on the definition of Jew?” I ask you, however, to bear with me. I begin by sorting out terminology. And the first step here is to reckon with the two words “Jews” and “Israel.” Students of Old Testament History know that “Israel” was the name that God gave to Jacob, a descendent, two generations down, from Abraham, perhaps somewhere around sixteen hundred years BC. This man’s legacy was carried forward by twelve sons who are collectively called “Israel”, saluting their father and recalling also a pledge that God made to him in the course of giving him this name: “one who has striven with God” (Genesis 32:28.) After many adventures (to put it mildly!) the Israelis succeeded in establishing an intact and self-governing Kingdom (about 1000 BC); but this Kingdom unhappily broke up within another century, most of the tribes adhering to the Northern Kingdom which pre-empted the name of Israel, while only one intact tribe, Judah, adhered to the Southern Kingdom, centered on David’s city of Jerusalem. The northern Kingdom was destroyed by external enemies in the late eight Century BC, and its inhabitants were carried off far into the interior of the Kingdom of the conqueror, Assyria. For the most part of the following nine hundred years the community of Judah, the Jews, survived as a subordinate part of someone else’s mightier Empire; and then it was eventually swept from the map altogether (in the year 70 AD.) That remnant of the descendants of Israel who lost their separate political existence in the destruction of the Second Temple but who were encountered in many cities throughout the civilized world thereafter were referred to as “the Jews,” and were without doubt exclusively descended from the one tribe, Judah. It was, however, a central article of the faith which the Jews reared upon daily reading of their Scriptures that their entire community, Israel, would eventually be restored through God’s intervention in the process of History. In this restored manifestation they would again become a community which was representative of all twelve of the original tribes – some of whom had been “lost” altogether to history, others of which had left traces of their adventures over the centuries in the histories of all of the lands which were known to history. * * * Down to virtually the last hour before the announcement of the new State (May 14, 1948), a contest went on within the company of the Zionist founders about an appropriate name. President Truman had to keep a blank space in the draft of the message with which he intended to greet the new state until he could receive discreet notice of how this insiders’ debate had come out. “Israel” won out over “Judea” (and lesser also-rans) because the founders eventually persuaded themselves that they must go out into the world as a people committed to providing a home to all those everywhere in the world who laid a plausible claim to being descended from the people who had established the Kingdom of Israel in David’s time. This commitment would mean keeping the door open to whatever remnants could be found and proved to be of the so-called “Lost Tribes.” This work has been essentially accomplished in our lifetime. Throughout nearly two millennia the word “Israel” and the name “Israelites” were employed by Christians as the antique names of a people who once defined themselves as the Chosen of God but were now scattered throughout the globe. The Jews had persisted as a community because they lived in the recollection of once having been Israel, a people with a land and a history. What kept the Jews in existence was theBiblical promise that they would be a people with a land again. On November 29, 1947, the United Nations, the newly-constituted Parliament of the World, undertook to assist the Jews in re-establishing their statehood. A few months later, the community of Jews who had been built over nearly a century previous within the boundaries of the Biblical land of Israel took up the offer made by the United Nations, and declared themselves to be the State of Israel. Henceforth, whatever a Jew had been in the days of recollection and anticipation, he was that no longer. Both “insiders” (Jews) and “outsiders” (non-Jews) were obliged to review their understanding of these names – “Israel” and “the Jews” -- and to review their expectations of the people who bore them. In the moment of its appearance in the world under the title “State of Israel,” there was a dimension of meaning added to the immemorial name of “Israel”. This happened without abstraction from the meaning that “Israel” has always had. When we encounter the name “Israel” in Scripture or in any other context which precedes the year 1948 AD, we cannot help but notice that something has been added to the meaning which it would have had in any age previous to our own. It is like encountering my unusual family name (“Merkley”) in perhaps a medieval document: although the uses and abuses of that name in the twenty-first century would not have been known to the person whose hand put that name in that document in reference to some long-ago ancestor of mine, the name has added meaning to me that he could not have known. It is a kind of disloyalty to what I know about the future to pretend that I can handle that name without the knowledge that it would some day be my name – a name being claimed by many tens of thousands of persons living in 21st century North America. The creation of the State of Israel was meant to put an end forever to the problem that followed from the question, “Who is a Jew?” Something of the greatest value had been added to Judaism: Jews now acquired the right to believe that to be a Jew would be to be like other people. Those Jews who made aliya became Israelis. They did not cease to be Jews. But those Jews who remained in the Diaspora did not become Israelis. Had something, then, been subtracted from their Judaism? Did they continue to be Jews? Most insisted loudly that they did! Indeed, they said, “we have become better Jews;” and most behaved as if the best proof of their continuing Jewishness lay in their devotion to the continuance of Israel, through financial contributions, through visits to Eretz Israel, through active defense of Israel in the political arena at home in the U.S. or in Britain, France, Canada, and so on . Most American Jews believed that they had become more “Jewish” than before. Did it then follow that American Jews had become less “American”? Not at all, they said: they had, if anything, become more like other Americans than they were before, in that they now had a homeland behind them, as did most other Americans. Was it not true that Italians who emigrated to America and became Americans still continued to be “Italians”? If so, then American Jews had become better Americans, in that other Americans now recognized that Jews were now more like themselves, having a homeland behind them. But there were other Jews who behaved as though being a Jew, having lost its old meaning, had lost meaning altogether. Many wrote poignant memoirs, and many more became rich and famous writing even more poignant, best-selling novels in which the hero agonized over this matter. Still others simply neglected thereafter to tell the census-taker that they were Jews. * * * It is not widely appreciated among non-Jews today that, prior to the creation of the State in 1948, there had always been a powerful vein of anti-Zionism among Jews. In fact, throughout the first forty years following the First World Zionist Congress of 1897, most Jews were anti-Zionist. Among Jews, the argument against Zionism had taken a great variety of forms, but the most fundamental distinction to be noted is that between arguments which followed from religious conviction and arguments which followed from secular conviction. Within the first category, two fundamental sub-categories are to be distinguished: the Orthodox-religious, and the Liberal-religious. Broadly speaking: throughout the first forty years of so of the existence of the modern Zionist movement, most Orthodox Jews stood aside, believing that it would be sinful to anticipate the work which Messiah will do when He comes. Among Liberal-religious Jews, who had cast off faith in a coming Messiah along with other fundamentals of the traditional faith, hostility to Zionism was typically just as strong as among the Orthodox, but for distinctly different reasons. For the Liberals, Zionism put in jeopardy the distinctiveness of Judaism as a religion which, they alleged, lies in its ability to be a witness before the whole civilized world to the humane values acquired by the Jewish people over the centuries of their preparation for modern life -- values which had been preached in their classical form by the Prophets, starting with belief in One God, Creator of all Mankind, Sustainer of all life, Who requires justice in all human dealings. Zionism would remove this benign leaven from European and American society, and would transport the Jews into a narrower world, circumscribed by ancient pre-modern, pre-scientific, anti-humanistic traditionalism. Among secular Jews, the case against Zionism was based on a quasi-philosophical, quasi-sociological, argument: Zionism alienated Jews from the societies and the cultures to which Diaspora had brought them, spoiling their opportunities to fully realize their talents and ambitions in the secular culture, dragging them back into narrower confines of ethnic or tribal culture, in which religion -- otherwise destined to wither away under the global influence of “secularization” -- would regain its former grip on the unliberated, becoming the enforcer of patriotism. But within all three of these constituencies a transformation of attitudes took place in the years of the Holocaust. The Orthodox and the Liberal-religious both learned that the whole Jewish people, believers as well as unbelievers, stood under judgment for its refusal to see that it was helpless in the face of the gentile world's deep, irrational, demon-driven hatred, and had thus not responded with sufficient vigour to the first religious duty of all: to save its life. The secularists felt confirmed in their belief that piety was no solution to the problems of the Jewish people; but now they recognized as well that divisions of all kinds must be set aside. If the Jews could not found a homeland of their own they would perish altogether. The religious and the irreligious must make concessions to each other's stubbornness for the sake of creating a State wherein all Jews could live without having to explain and justify themselves to anyone who did not belong to the nation of Israel. When the facts of the Holocaust began to emerge, and as the Christian nations made clear their unwillingness to accommodate the Jewish survivors by welcoming them to their own lands, there were few Jews who still persisted in arguing that the creation of a State would be a mistake. Henceforth, for the vast majority of Jews, there could be no more talk of “anti-Zionism.” * * * In the secular sense, the gathering of the Jews to Israel added a dimension to the Jew’s identity, which, for over two thousand years he believed that he lacked -- namely, the virtue of belonging to a nation-state. Some years later, the American Jewish historian, Barbara Tuchman, reflected on this transformation of the Jews’ self-understanding: The change is reflected in the position of the Jews of the diaspora, not so much in the attitude of non-Jews towards them as in their attitude toward themselves, which is the important thing. Sovereignty in Israel has imparted dignity, confidence, self-respect and a straighter stature to Jews wherever they live. But, she noted further, this transformation in the situation of the Jews could also be perceived as having subtracted something from Judaism. One consequence of nationhood has been to make the Jews like other nations. To sustain and defend their cause, they have had to use the world's methods.… The dream of a fruitful, peaceful nation that drew the early Zionists has not been allowed realization. Subjected to attack, Israel has had to make itself stronger and more effective in the use of force than its surrounding enemies.... To become like other nations has become the tragedy of statehood, the price of avoiding the greater tragedy of disappearance. As a matter of logic, the creation of the State of Israel should have ended the Zionist/anti-Zionist debate. Now, after the creation of the State, it remained open to a Jew to accuse Israel of injustice in its policies, even to the extent of disowning it. It was not logical, however, to call such a viewpoint “anti-Zionism,” since the creation of the State had rendered meaningless the arguments against its creation. Much later on, however, when logic became less important in political rhetoric, one began to hear of “anti-Zionist Jews.” If pressed, persons claiming this title would explain that there was a case against Israel that turned on its failure to act justly towards local Arabs, or towards Arab neighbors; it was said that the founders of the State had claimed that they had intended to live within the modest borders defined in the original U.N. Resolutions, and that by refusing thereafter to do so, they had made of “Zionism” a kind of “imperialism.” This attitude should more honorably be described as “anti-Israelism.” But let us split the difference and speak of “Neo-anti-Zionism.” The leaders of world Zionism had sought for a half-century prior to 1948 to persuade the majority of Jews around the world that the creation of a Jewish State, which would stand in the company of all the other states of the world, would not put in jeopardy their acceptance as citizens of the nations in which they found themselves, and to which they might voluntarily choose to continue to belong. When a Jewish homeland came into the world, the Jews of Britain and France and of the United States immediately (and the Jews of Egypt, Syria, Iraq, and Jordan and so on in due course) would find themselves accepted as a race like all others, having patriotic loyalties to the nations in which they found themselves, and a concurrent loyalty to a homeland where the traditions would be kept and maintained in a wholehearted way. This matter was supposed to have been settled on November 29, 1947, but the Arab nations which were Israel’s neighbours refused to permit it to be tested. Since then, the continuing refusal of the world to accept the irreversibility of the decision in favor of the creation of the State of Israel, demonstrated to Jews everywhere that Israel is not regarded as a nation like all others, another member of the community of nations. This continuing situation has caused many Jews to fear that that their future as citizens of other nations is in jeopardy. The most unpleasant blowback from the Jews’ efforts to become a people like other peoples, with a State of their own, was felt by Jews who lived in Muslim-Arab countries. During the course of the War of Independence of 1948-1949, most Arab nations declared that to be a Jew was now incompatible with being a citizen of a Muslim state, and accordingly drove out their Jewish citizens, notwithstanding that the ancestors of those Jewish citizens might have lived in these places centuries before they became either Muslim or Arab. Where the process was left incomplete in 1949, it was resumed after June, 1967. That process of removal of the Jews from Dar al-Islam has been virtually completed today. Every day, in countless mosques throughout the world, masses of Moslem men renew their vows not to rest until Israel is no more. In many Moslem countries, the air over all the great cities rings with the voices of preachers calling the faithful to proceed with the liquidation of Israel. Vilification of Israel is not, however, exclusive to Muslim nations. Every day -- or so it seems to Israelis -- some body within the United Nations denounces Israel as a uniquely criminal violator of human rights, responsible for “brutality,” “oppression,” “occupation,” and other crimes extending even to “genocide.” A survey funded by the European Commission has exposed the conviction of a majority of Europeans and an ever-growing minority of Britishers that Israel is the major reason why peace has not come to the world. Meanwhile, Israeli politicians and pro-Israeli speakers face real death-threats and mob violence when they seek to answer for Israel before University audiences in the United States and Canada. All the efforts of the Jewish people to shed their uniqueness have come to nought. The world simply does not accept that the Jews are a people like other people. Now it appears that having their own state has become the largest part of the indictment against them. * * * Among some thoughtful Christians, there was, in 1948, a powerful sense that the re-creation of the Jewish State had also to some extent re-defined the meaning of “the Church” -- of what it means “to be a Christian.” The crux of the dilemma for Christians was that preachers and theologians had never found a way of explaining how, in the light of the Church’s understanding of itself as the heir to the promises which God made to Abraham, the Jews and the synagogue continued to exist. It made no sense to the earliest Christian leaders that Israel should continue to exist outside the Church. But it did; and it continued to do for another nineteen hundred years. And so long as these people continued to call themselves “Israel” a great question hung over Christian theology: How can the Church's understanding of herself as the People of God, the True Israel, be reconciled with the Jewish community's understanding of itself as the People of God, the True Israel? It seems to many Israelis and Jews throughout the world today that the resistance which the nations of the world seem to be still putting up to the existence in peace of Israel must owe something to this legacy of Christian resentment about the continuance of Israel after its alleged rejection of its Messiah in the person of Jesus of Nazareth. Is it not obvious, they say, that, beneath all the rhetoric of secular complaint against Israel -- its alleged territorial aggressions, its allegedly cruel behavior towards its “Palestinian” population, and the whole catalogue of its alleged sins against its neighbors and against the world community -- there is a far deeper cause of complaint that draws from the same theological source as did the medieval libels against the Jews of Europe? Israelis and Jews of the Diaspora simply do not know what to make of Christian attitudes toward Israel. On the one hand, there is the phenomenon of “Christian Zionism,” which, some say, provides the most reliable, the most constant voice in defense of Israel - which indeed, in recent years, has been a more constant political resource for Israel than the “Jewish vote.” On the other hand, there is the attitude of those organizations which present themselves as the official voices of the Church today -- notably, the World Council of Churches, and the conferences and conventions of the various denominational bodies, where a consistent anti-Zionism has been the keynote for decades. The denigration of Israel to which a nearly-commanding portion of our intellectuals is now addicted and which has taken hold as well upon a substantial sector of the leadership of our mainline churches is just one fruit of the modern campaign of denigration of the authority of Scripture. The mentality that denies that our Scripture know that Israel is the perpetual child of God – that the name and title “Israel” belongs to “Israel” – is the same mentality that has sown contempt for all the cardinal elements of our Creed: the doctrine of the Trinity, the Virgin Birth, the Resurrection of Christ and His return in glory to judge the living and the dead. The creation of the State of Israel in 1948 and the story of its adventures so far is taken by Christian Zionists as proof that the God of Israel never abandoned His People, as the mainstream Christian theology taught during the Catholic millennium. If Israel ceases to be, it will be because the post-Christian world will have made peace with a worldview in which Scripture is once and for all dismissed as an embarrassment. In this world, there will be no place for Christianity. Jews, wherever they live, will not be able to sustain their right to life unless they are ready to display unmixed loyalty to the Jewish State – the State of the Restored People of God. For precisely the same reason, Christians will lose their identity as Christians if they permit themselves to be brow-beaten out of the conviction that Israel is Israel. Paul C. Merkley. |
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