JERUSALEM — After tracing Jewish history in Europe from the expulsion from England in 1290 to the Russian pogroms to the Holocaust, Daniel Gordis writes in Commentary that the Iranian nuclear threat is more subtle and profound than most people realize:
What must be understood is that the threat to Israel is not that Iran will one day use the bomb. No, Iran merely needs to possess the bomb to undermine the central purpose of Israel’s existence—and in so doing, to reverse the dramatic change in the existential condition of the Jews that 62 years of Jewish sovereignty has wrought. The mere possession of a nuclear weapon by Iran would instantly restore Jews to the status quo ante before Jewish sovereignty, to a condition in which their futures would depend primarily on the choices their enemies — and not Jews themselves— make.
Gordis, senior vice president of the Shalem Center in Jerusalem and the author of “Saving Israel: How the Jewish People Can Win a War that May Never End,” sees a historical parallel between now and the mid-twentieth century:
But after Iran has a nuclear capability that rests in the hands of evil men who believe that the Jewish state is a disease in its midst and that Judaism itself is a foul doctrine—in what way will the existential Jewish condition be all that different from what it was in Central Europe in the early 1930s?
Gordis is not exaggerating the subconscious effect that an Iranian nuclear weapon would have on the Israeli psyche. To understand the mentality, one first needs to go back hundreds of years.
If one would ask an American or European to describe the stereotype of a Jewish person, it would likely be a caricature of Woody Allen (pictured): a small, weak, glasses-wearing person who is smart but lacks confidence and strength. The culture and personality of an Ashkenazi Jew — one whose ancestors settled in Europe after the Roman Empire’s destruction of ancient Judea — was the result of centuries of exile, ghetto life, and persecution. (There was far less anti-Semitism towards the Mizrahi and Sephardi Jews who had settled in Arab countries over the same centuries.)
Now, the leaders of the Zionist movement since its founding in the nineteenth century, like Theodore Herzl, had been Ashkenazi Jews who had wanted to create a Jewish state and a “New Jew” who would not be weak, not confident, and pitiful. So, they intentionally aimed to discard the vestiges of Ashkenazi culture. A Yiddish report was replaced with Hebrew; immigrants performed hard labor to drain swamps, build cities, and fight malaria; and, most significantly, they would once again become something akin to the biblical warriors who would defend themselves, if necessary, with violence. This foundational aspect of Israeli society has always been a point of pride here.
The “New Jew” of Israel is vastly different than the Jews of America and Europe, and countless tourists and visitors have commented on this fact to me. As I have written in earlier posts, the brash attitudes and personalities of Israelis — depending on the circumstances — can be both extremely admirable and very annoying. The change in mentality was also caused by the immigration of Jews from surrounding Middle Eastern countries — those who had never developed the Ashkenazi personality — in the 1950s.
Overall, I think the cultural shift has been a net benefit, especially for a country that needs to survive in a tough part of the world. This is why I am extremely opposed to Ashkenazi Jews, especially in Israel, who still insist on speaking Yiddish, discriminate against non-Ashkenazi Jews, and adopt ultra-Orthodox (haredi) attitudes. Of course, the diversity of Jewish life in Israel does not come without conflict — nothing here does.
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