In
all of our many conversations that took place over the better part of
the past decade, I never asked Prof. Benzion Netanyahu what led him to
become an historian. Certainly it was a function of his concern for his
nation and his recognition that our very existence hung in the balance.
Certainly, too, it was a function of his insatiable intellectual
curiosity.
I don't know whether his decision
was the function of a specific event or simply a natural progression of
his life's path. But through the lessons that he taught me both
directly, and through the books he wrote, I can understand why once he
embarked on his journey into Jewish history, the path he eventually took
became inevitable.
A good place to begin a study of his long life and its impact on
his actions is with his first major work, his biography of Don Issac
Abravanel, the leader of the Jews of Spain at the time of Spain's final
expulsion of the community in 1492. Abravanel was an extraordinary
scholar of philosophy and Jewish teachings as well as a financial
genius. The former brought him renown among his people. The latter
attracted the monarchs of Portugal and Spain and the leaders of Italian
city states.
One of the shocking aspects of the
tragic end of the Jewish community is Spain is that Abravanel, and his
fellow communal leaders failed to anticipate the expulsion order. For
all of his proximity to King Ferdinand and Queen Isabella, Abravanel had
no idea that they were planning to expel the Jews and so was unable to
either cancel the expulsion decree or to make preparations for the
community to move to another land.
In his biography, Netanyahu described the exiled Jews of Spain as they sought and were denied refuge in port after port.
In
his words (translated from the Hebrew edition): "On 24 August 1492 nine
caravel ships arrived in the Port of Napoli bearing expelled Jews from
Spain. The journey from Spain was one of continuous suffering. The ship
owners were unsympathetic, cruel and greedy. The ships were overloaded
and lacked sufficient food. The sanitary conditions invited disease, and
the plague quickly spread among the passengers. All these conditions
left the expelled in a state of abject penury after weeks of suffering.
The historian Genovani, who saw some of these exiles when their ship
passed through his town's port, wrote, 'It was possible to mistake them
for ghosts; they were so hollow; their looks were so frigid, their eyes
so sunken in their sockets. They looked just like the dead, aside from
the fact that with great difficulty, they were still able to move.'"
Netanyahu
proceeded to do the only thing he could, when faced with this
description. He made the comparison between the plight of the expelled
Jews from Spain, and the Jews of Europe during and after the Holocaust.
And from this direct line of suffering, one can begin to understand not
only the continuity of the form of Jewish suffering - but the continuity
the persecution of the Jews over the course of the long exile that
began in 70 CE with the destruction of the Second Temple.
NETANYAHU'S
RESEARCH into the life of Abravanel led him to his most important
historical discovery. While working in one of the libraries in Spain, he
came across the writings of Jewish leaders in Spain from the years
leading up to the Inquisition and expulsion in 1492. He discovered that
in the early and mid-15th century, the Jewish community hated and feared
the former Jews who were forcibly converted en masse to Christianity
during the first state offensive against the Jews in 1391.
Until
Netanyahu came across these writings, he shared the popular view that
the so-called Conversos were heroes who led a double life. On the
outside, they were Christian, but they remained Jews in secret.
What
he discovered was that this heroic posture lasted at most one
generation. The children of the Conversos were enthusiastic Catholics.
Many rose to power in the Catholic Church.
Whereas
the Jews who remained in Spain after 1391 were by and large a pitiful,
impoverished remnant of what had once been a magnificent community, the
Conversos quickly became the leaders of Spain, and in so doing, angered
their fellow Catholic Spaniards who envied their success.
Netanyahu's
findings led to his revolutionary conclusion that the Spanish
Inquisition did not target the Jews as a religion, but the Jews as a
race. Most of those who died by Torquemada's sword were loyal Catholics
whose only crime was their possession of Jewish blood. The real Jews
were not killed. They were expelled. His conclusion from his finding was
that there was nothing unique or new about the Nazis' racial and
genocidal hatred of the Jews.
Netanyahu's
intellectual journey shaped and sharpened his perception of the Jewish
condition. It fortified his conviction that Zionism is the only means of
securing the lives of Jews as individuals and the existence of the
Jewish nation.
Netanyahu's Zionism was not a
hyphenated one. It was not Labor Zionism, like the Zionism of David
Ben-Gurion and his socialist followers. It was not religious Zionism,
like that of the Lovers of Zion movement which formed the core of the
initial modern Jewish settlement drive in the Land of Israel.
He learned from the early Zionist leader Yehuda Pinsker's seminal pamphlet, Auto-Emancipation,
that Zionism rejects utopianism. Netanyahu's own lesson from the
Spanish Inquisition is that for Jews, assimilation is as much of a
utopian path as socialism. As Pinsker, and later Theodor Herzl made
clear, the only way for Jews to be redeemed is by doing it themselves.
In
his study of Pinkser from 1944, Netanyahu wrote, "Pinsker thought that
normal relations between national groupings are not based on mutual
affection but on mutual respect."
According to
Pinsker, what distinguished exile Jews from all other nations was the
Jews' failure to understand this basic truth. For the Zionist movement
to succeed in liberating the Jews, its leaders needed to demand and
command the respect - not the sympathy - of other nations.
AS
NETANYAHU showed in his 1937 article on Herzl's Zionist doctrine,
Herzl, the man who built the diplomatic and legal edifice upon which the
State of Israel was created, believed that Zionism rested on two
essential foundations: international recognition of the Jews' right to
sovereignty over the Land of Israel; and Jewish military capacity to
defend those sovereign rights.
Until his death
in 1904, Herzl worked feverishly to build international recognition of
the Jewish people's right to the Land of Israel in its maximalist
borders - from the Nile Delta to the Euphrates River. As Herzl
understood, it is much harder to secure international recognition of
sovereign rights than it is to give them up, and once they are
renounced, they are all but impossible to regain.
What
Herzl found was that it was much easier to secure international
recognition of the rights of the Jewish people than it is to convince
the Jews to muster the courage to demand, seize and defend those rights.
Netanyahu
wrote his study of Herzl at the same time as the Zionist leadership in
pre-state Israel was debating Britain's Peel Commission's partition
plan. Although it provided for the establishment of a tiny, indefensible
Jewish statelet, the plan involved Jewish renunciation of their
sovereign rights to the overwhelming majority of the land they had
lawfully received sovereign title to under the 1917 Balfour Declaration
and the 1922 League of Nations Mandate for Palestine. That sovereign
title included all of present day Israel as well as Judea and Samaria,
and arguably present-day Jordan as well.
Netanyahu
argued that the tragedy of Zionism is that the leaders who took over
after Herzl's death - first and foremost Ahad Ha'am and Chaim Weizmann -
lacked the courage to demand the rights of their nation, preferring to
be loved than respected.
Lamenting this failure
of will and what it was liable to mean for the future of the Jews as
the drums of the next war grew ever stronger, Netanyahu wrote that the
one thing that Herzl worked towards but failed to achieve was to change
"the character of the nation."
"This change,"
he wrote, "which Herzl believed was critical, was not manifested in the
spirit of its leaders, or more precisely, in the spirit of those, who
conducted negotiations in the name of the Jewish people, and afterwards
managed its affairs. When it was necessary to demonstrate the courage of
a sovereign, which Herzl spoke of, when it was necessary to dare and
demand from the world the Jewish State and sovereignty over that state,
the nation's representatives issued no such demand."
In
the end, despite Netanyahu's reiteration of Herzl's warning, the
Zionist leadership accepted the Peel Commission's partition plan, just
as 10 years later they accepted the UN Partition Plan.
Fortunately
for their ill-served nation, their willingness to renounce the Jews'
sovereign rights under the League of Nations Mandate was never binding,
because the Arabs rejected the plans and so rendered them null and void.
The Jewish nation's sovereign rights to the Land of Israel remain in
force today.
In 2005, Netanyahu republished his
profiles of Pinsker and Herzl, as well as profiles on Max Nordau,
Israel Zangwill and Ze'ev Jabotinsky, which were written between 1937
and 1981, as one collection. He called this book of essays The Founding Fathers of Zionism.
In
his introduction to the collection, Netanyahu wrote, "The articles
included in this book were written decades ago. They are published here
as first written because I saw no reason to correct them...."
And he was right.
Zangwill once wrote, "The past is for inspiration, not imitation, for continuation, not repetition."
The
challenges the world Netanyahu departed last week present to the Jews
bear striking similarities to those that faced the Jews throughout our
history, and certainly since the dawn of modern Zionism. Unlike the
options Abravanel had to weigh, since the dawn of modern Zionism, our
leaders have had the option of demanding and commanding the respect of
the nations of the world and so securing the lives of the Jews and
nationhood of the Jewish people in our land.
Today
the heirs of the failed utopian movements of the last century have
joined forces with the jihadist heirs of the Mufti of Jerusalem to deny
the Jewish people our sovereign rights to our land. If they succeed they
will finally and irrevocably destroy Herzl's greatest achievement.
The
most ardent hope that comes through clearly in Netanyahu's life work is
that the Jews find a leader of Herzl's stature, capable of demanding
and commanding the world's recognition and respect for our rights, and
the ability to finish Herzl's work by convincing the Jewish people that
it is our right and our duty to assert and secure our destiny in our
land.
Originally published in The Jerusalem Post.
Caroline Glick
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