READINGS

[Essay)

A JEW'S GRIEFFrom "Why a Jew Can Only Grieve," by GeorgeSteiner, published in the May 14 issue of the LondonTimes. Steiner is Professor of English and Compara-tive Literature at the University of Geneva, and Ex-traordinary Fellow of Churchill CoUege, Cambridge.May 14 marked the fortieth anniversary of the found-ing of the State of Israel.

Israel did not invite the world to its fortiethbirthday party. It knows precisely what thatworld was doing when Jewish men, women, andchildren were being hounded to death.

Ought it to have guests from France, whosemilice was rounding up Jewish children for de-portation lest any escape the net of the SS?Ought Israel to have sent invitations to Britain,whose government, even after the truths ofBelsen and of Auschwitz had overwhelmed his-tory, was seeking to destroy the desperate survi-vors on their way to a last possible haven inPalestine?

Perhaps America should be guest of honor.Had not its State Department, immediately be-fore the doors of hell closed in 1939, offeredseventy-five ex gratia visas when some 5,000trapped children could have been rescued? Orthe Soviet Union, whose despots were, at thevery moment of the birth of the State of Israel,preparing yet another of the internal pogromsand campaigns of blood-libel that, with sicken-ing regularity, punctuate the bear dance ofRussian history?

Israel has not invited to its anniversary the sixor seven hundred journalists, television camera-men, and pundits who now throng that most

18 HARPER'S MAGAZINEiOCTOBER

beautiful and haunted of lands. There was nolack of cameramen to record the systematic hu-miliation of}ews in the jeering streets of Viennain the spring of 1938, to film the Warsaw Ghet-to in flames, to chronicle the mounds of bodiesbeing shoveled into the lime ditches from theBaltic to Salonika, Nor any shortage of colum-nists to explain, in the very newspaper in whichthis article appears, the need for accommoda-tion with Herr Hitler. Often the tone of theLondon Times seemed to imply that Jews doseem to bring upon themselves so much of thedistaste and desolation which beset them.

No, the list of Israel's birthday wishes is suc-cinct. It seeks a moratorium on advice from na-tions and cultures that, only of late, activelyparticipated in the extermination of the Jews orabstained from intervention (we are accom-plices to that which leaves us indifferent). Israelwants those whose policies, be they in Ulster,Central America, [ran, Afghanistan, or ontheir own streets, are charged with cruelty andwith cant to refrain from moralistic censureand counsel. To Israel there is plain obscenity inthe very thought that Herr Waldheim's empori-um and talkshop should sit in judgment on itsown torments, on what it takes to be matters oflife and death immediate to itself.

As to the presents it would gratefully receiveon its fortieth, these, too, can readily be listed.It needs the most sophisticated weaponry withwhich to offset the immense demographicweight of those sworn to destroy it. It needsmoney to develop the agriculture, the industrialtechnology, the institutions of health and edu-cation that have made it the touchstone andenvy of the Third World.

Above all: Israel demands-though waitinghas made it harsh and almost indifferent-some

measure of informed insight from world opin-ion. Of insight into the singular imperative ofits coming into being, into the inherent desper-ateness of its geopolitical situation, of insightinto the sheer miracle of all that it has achievedfor a people very nearly made ash.

What Israel most expressly does not requireon this somber birthday are the ruminationsof a Jew out of the diaspora, of a Jew whose li-cense to observe and to criticize is radicallyirresponsible. It is irresponsible because he him-self has, till now, chosen not to come to Isra-el-though he visits often, though he knowsno spell more inward to his being than that ofJerusalem at sunrise, of the bleached and bur-nished light across Jericho. He sits in safety,knowing next to nothing of the physical men-ace, of the psychological pressures under whichJews live and create on that tiny strip of groundwhich contains the unbounded promise ofsurvival.

There is an even sharper irresponsibility: sofar, neither of my children has chosen to makehis or her life in Israel. So I have given hope nohostages, nor invested in my son and daughterthe obligations of the messianic.

This is the first crux. In respect to the State ofIsrael and to the measures it judges primordial toits endurance, comment from without is veryprobably an iru:1ecency. This is, for both partiesto a possible dialogue, the gravest of handicaps.But it must be faced. There are issues to whichone ought to address oneself only if one is pre-pared to become fully involved.

For a Jew from outside to say that Israeli for-eign policy, since the Sadat visit, is a drearycatalogue of missed imaginings and lost nerve;that the violence in the Gaza Strip and WestBank is insanely counterproductive; that cow-ardice, triviality, and the style of minor mafiosinow mark and paralyze Israeli political institu-tions-is, in my conviction, to say the obvioustruth.

For a Jew from outside to point out that, evenif peace was miraculously secured at the borders,Israel will, pretty soon, have an Arab majorityinside its territories-this, also, is to sayanobvious truth. But why should any Israeli listen!Or why should he not riposte with that salty de-rision characteristic of the Israeli manner: "Andwhat are you prepared to do about it, what areyour children?"

There are those Jews who would reject thechallenge, who would regard the destiny of theState of Israel as irrelevant to their own. I takethis to be nonsense. There is, tragically, proud-ly, not a Jew anywhere whom Israel does not, beit only in a spiritual sense, hold hostage. Thereis not one who does not know, deep inside him-self, that it is in Israel that he or his children

have their only guarantee of refuge should thenight come again (in South Africa, in Argen-tina, in the Marseilles of Le Pen).

It is precisely because the question of Israelreaches profoundly into Jewish existence it-self that one must hammer out one's convic-

tions without-l stress this-having

Mearned the full right to do so.

y definition of a Jew had always beenthat of a man incapable of burying any otherhuman being alive, whatever the provocation,whatever the cost. I had taken this specific inca-pacity-yes, it has behind it 2,000 years of po-litical impotence and a catastrophic conclusionto those years-to be at the enigmatic roots ofthe long mystery of Jewish survival. That mys-tery is ethical, or it is nothing. Other men tor-ture and burn and bury alive. Not Jews. Not thetribe of the Prophets, of the Suffering Servant,of Spinoza. If this be racial arrogance, I pleadguilty.

Secondly, my definition of a Jew had alwaysbeen that of a man incapable of censoring, ofpulping books. The homeland of the Jew is thetext. If there is a citizenship for him to strivetoward, it is that of truth, wherever it may lead,whatever danger it entails. The Jew moves, notlike night, but like day, from land to land,because he is the courier of thought, of specu-lative inquiry, because God has made and pre-served him in order that he may pose questionsand tell stories. In no other cultural tradition isthere a formal blessing spoken on scholars andscholarship.

Israel has made these definitions no longerconcretely tenable. There is torture in Israel.There has been a case of live burial by soldiers,made the more hideous by the lightness of thesentence incurred.

Censorship of the crassest kind is rife inIsrael. Certain books, deemed subversive, arebarred (a fatuously self-defeating measure) fromArab schools and campuses. "We have becomenormal men and women," proclaims Israel; "wefight for our lives as all other human beings andcommunities do. We have sadists and swindlersas you do, and you. We are no longer dreamerswaiting to be butchered." I understand. Howcould one be so frivolous as not to! And yet.

The price seems to me, finally, too high. HasJudaism known the dark wonder of preservationonly to become a nation-state, living by thegun! Trees have roots; men and women legs.The possibilities that this opens seem to mepeculiarly pertinent to the Jewish condition,which is to learn new tongues, to cross frontiers,to contribute, wherever he is given breathingspace-to the life of the mind, to that of moralargument. All of us are now imperiled guests on

READINGS 19

this scarred, exploited planet.Nationalism, the tribalism of rabid ideolo-

gies, will do us to collective death if we do notlearn to live as one another's guests. The learn-ing process is arduous; within it, the harried butimmensely creative intellect and spirit of theJew has its privileged function.

The messianic vision was, precisely, thatwhich strove to overcome the homicidal tribal-ism that inhabits man. Having to be peregrineon this earth, the Jew developed that inwardrestlessness, those antennae for danger to whichhe owes his survival. For the Jew, the nation-

state is not a fulfillment but a deathtrap.

Ihad long believed that Israel would, out ofinspired necessity, under the prophetic goad ofvision, evolve a formula of religious and of eth-nic configuration as new to the hopes of man aswas the Greek polis. That Jerusalem would be-come a city for all faiths and legacies (perhapsJewish New York is that city). From the 1950son I pleaded for Jewish universities to give hon-orary degrees to the great Arab poets and schol-ars who would one day come to collect them.There are those in Israel who, at severe personaland public cost, sustain that vision.

The outside world is giving no real help. TheArab nations have, with cruel mendacity, re-fused to resettle, to re-educate the Palestinianrefugees. Now these wretched men and womenhave become the fiercest of Zionists. Is it toolate? It may be so, but such lucidity is suicidal.

Many of the most talented and clairvoyant ofyounger Israelis are already leaving the place ofmiracles wrought by their parents. Already thesilicon valleys of California are like anotherpromised land. It is not toward Israel that thevast majority of Russian Jews direct their pun-ished dreams. Here too, an unknown futuretense is at work.

It is so easy to be the idiot-questioner, lodgedin (temporary) safety. Only one thing seems tome absolutely certain. Jews cannot be at home ina land where children have to be beaten and im-prisoned as a matter of routine; where enemies,albeit deadly, must be buried alive; where booksmust be shredded.

Jews who inure themselves to these modes ofsurvival will simply give to those who have, solong, sought to demean and destroy them, theirvictory. The world at large may, indeed, haveno right whatever to apply a double standard ofethical, political exaction to the Jew. The Jewmust apply it to himself.

Was it for ordinariness, for the commonplaceof human stupidity and savagery that he waschosen? Or that to his every birthday one mustadd 5,000 years?

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[Letter to the Editor]

GREAT BOOKSAND BAYONETSFrom a letter to the editor by Cyrus Veeser in the June23 New YorkTimes. Veeser is a graduate student inAmerican History at Columbia University.

Stanford University's revision of its WesternCulture course has sparked fear in some circlesthat the slogan "Western Culture's got to go"will become a general campus rallying cry. For-mer Secretary of Education William J. Bennettaccuses radicals, feminists, and minorities ofpoliticizing the disinterested study of Westernculture. An overlooked question is where thecourse known as Western Civilization camefrom in the first place.

Today's Western Civ classes are the offspringof a government-sponsored propaganda courseinstituted during World War I. As shown by thehistorians Carol Gruber (Mars and Minerva:World War I and the Uses of the Higher Learning inAmerica) and William Summerscales (Affirma-tion and Dissent: Columbia's Response to the Crisisof World War I), nearly all male college studentsin the country were in uniform by the autumn of1918, and their pre-induction training includeda "War Issues" course.

The course spoon-fed Western history, poli-tics, and philosophy to undergraduates in an ef-fort to produce what an editorial of the time inThe History Teacher's Magazine called "thinkingbayonets." War Issues, said its director, instilled"an understanding of what the war is about andof the supreme importance to civilization of thecause for which we are fighting."

At the war's end, the Columbia Collegefaculty and deans took War Issues as a modelfor an innovative course called ContemporaryCivilization. The idea won faculty support bypromising to provide students with a commonbackground of ideas and by spanning disciplinesthat were already compartmentalized, But thecourse also had an ideological mission: as WarIssues had sought to discredit Kaiserism, Con-temporary Civilization would inoculate youngpeople against Bolshevism and other subversivedoctrines. One Columbia dean said the coursewould quiet "the destructive element in oursociety" and produce students "who shall besafe for democracy." Colleges and universitiesaround the country followed Columbia's leadand created their own Western Civ offerings.

At first, the class taught at Columbia broughtthe "best thought" of the past to bear on currentissues. Its syllabus promised to "present the fea-tures of civilization, past and present, which are