The Nation State and the Promised Land: An American Yiddish Writer in Israel, 1949, by Solomon Simon. English translation, 2024, by David R. Forman. All rights reserved.
Page numbers from Medines Yisroel un Erets Yisroel, 1950, Farlag Matones (NY), are included for those who wish to follow along with the original Yiddish, below.
To begin with the Introduction, click here.
There is a special neighborhood in Tel-Aviv, where party functionaries and government officials live. There are several houses there where journalists, teachers and writers live next to one another. Rent is inexpensive there. The houses were built recently, and have all the modern comforts.
In the Tel-Aviv café where I ate, I often used to meet an editor of a Yiddish magazine. He invited me to visit him several times. Finally, I could not refuse him, and I went to see him one afternoon.
He lived in three fine rooms, with a large veranda on the courtyard. The rooms were small, by our standards, and very modestly furnished. But it was a comfortable apartment, decorated in excellent taste.
I met two more journalists there, invited for lunch. Right after lunch, five more writers came: The first was a world-known American Yiddish writer, knowledgeable in Hebrew, a scholar, a Talmudic authority and an encyclopedist; the second was a professor of history at Hebrew University; the third, a famous bible researcher; and finally, there were two well-known storytellers.
A passionate discussion developed, about the State of Israel, the diaspora, Hebrew, Yiddish, Arab questions, Messianism and all the burning Jewish questions. Almost all of
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them had read the book “Jews Among the Nations,”[1] and my little tract was the reason and the stimulus for the discussion. Later it went beyond the bounds of the book. I believe that the core of that discussion best expresses the arguments of the State of Israel’s opponents and of the honest responses of the State of Israel’s proponents.
I intentionally do not mention names because, first, it was a private discussion and I do not have the right to speak for them. If they want to express themselves publicly, each of them has an available journal where he can write what he wants. Second, I cannot guarantee other people’s exact words. I am transmitting the discussion as I received it, and as it affected me. It can easily be that I am interpolating my own thoughts into their speech. What is certain is that this pointed conversation is a part of my impressions of the State of Israel, and gives a summary of my moods and conclusions.
The American Yiddish Writer began and two of the others then helped him out.
“I have read Yidn Tsvishn Felker. I do not agree with your conclusion. You write, “A Jewish State in Israel is no more than the liberation of a small portion of Jewry from foreign captivity. This is a small salvation[2] and a great comfort for the Jewish people at this time.” No, you are incorrect. The State of Israel is no small salvation and no comfort. It is a risky venture that can lead to the greatest catastrophe. Let us take the problems of the present State of Israel one at a time.
“The Arab question. Everyone thinks that the question of the Arabs has been solved. No more Arabs, and it’s done. They ran away or were driven out, and the State of Israel is ‘Arab-free’[3]. All done with the Arab question. I’m telling you that the Arab question has only become more acute. Hundreds of thousands of Arab refugees remain at our borders. In any Jewish community you come to, you can climb up the water tower and see Arab villages. The enemy is in arm’s reach. Do you expect that those Arabs who ran away will forget their homeland?
“People cry that the Arabs ran away. One does not just…
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run away from one’s own home. Maybe “ki nafal pakhad hayehudim aleyhem” played a large part here?[4] Deir Yasin was no isolated case. Second, if they did run away, does that justify the fine things we have done to their property? All of you who were here know how the Jews conducted themselves. Here, in plain black and white, is a witness. Moshe Smiliansky writes in Ha’Aretz of the 5th of Elul, 5709 [Aug 30, 1949]:
“An epidemic of ‘grabbing’ has taken hold of all the citizens. Individuals, kibbutzim, men, women and children – all of them have gone off looting. Doors, windows, doorposts, bricks, shingles, floorboards, and parts of cars… Ruined houses, wrecked cars, so say those who were responsible for watching over the abandoned property. Others say that the guardians’ hands were not clean either.
“From a national point of view, it is foolish and we are playing with fire. The Arabs can afford to lose not just one war, but several. They have somewhere to run to. We cannot afford to lose even one battle. Where will we run?
“And the Arabs do not forget! They will not even sit with us at the same table. There was rejoicing in the newspapers: Egypt has invited the Jews to the international conference on health, which will take place in Alexandria. By the next day, the foreign minister denied it. The statement casts a shadow over all our military victories. We cannot live in perpetual enmity among enemies who are forty times our number.
“Danger number two: The Jews’ underestimation of the Arabs. You hear how the victor talks about the vanquished: They are barbarians, physically weak, militarily inept, under the yoke of feudal lords, economically backward, culturally in the sixteenth century, and who knows what else. Suppose it is true today (which in fact it is not at all true); what can happen twenty or thirty years from now? Japan beat Russia forty years ago. But Russia has three times as large a population, and that was the decisive factor [in WWII]. Twenty years from now, that could happen here with the Arabs, too.
“And now about spiritual matters. The matter of Yiddish. I am not a Yiddishist. But can we afford to knowingly give up such a…
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national cultural possession? Do people think a language can be created overnight? It will take hundreds of years before Hebrew will have the flexibility, tenderness, richness and spoken eloquence of Yiddish. As of now, Hebrew is a synthetic, rationally-built language. The national loss from giving up an eloquent language cannot yet be apprised. Only many generations from now will the greatness of the loss be acknowledged.
“And taking on the Sephardic pronunciation? Jews have prayed, studied, said blessings, and sang songs with the Ashkenazy pronunciation for thousands of years. Every word has its intonation and expressiveness. How much grief and loneliness lie in the word yosem.[5] Suddenly, we have made a new word yatom – a hollowed-out word. And the names! Avrom is a Jewish name, after Avrom Avinu (Father Abraham); Sore, a name after Muter Sore (Mother Sarah). But Avram and Sara are two non-Jewish names. Only those who wanted to shake off and tear themselves away from the entire Jewish past could accept the Oriental pronunciation.
“The State of Israel is still small, whether in quality or in quantity. It has few people in comparison to the diaspora, and is spiritually poor. Nevertheless the State of Israel aims to achieve hegemony over Jewish life. It looks with contempt on all the communities of the People of Israel in the diaspora. Not only is the spiritual life of the great Jewish community in America denied, but they are continually threatened with their downfall. Every step of the way, you have heard: A Hitler will come to you in America, too. Escape. Don’t bother establishing any institutions, don’t be fools busying yourselves with children’s education, because your lives are not secure. Any day now a new Hitler will emerge and kill you off.
“What kind of schadenfreude does this give you? How are you so sure that if another Hitler comes and the Jews of America are exterminated, that the Jewish community in the State of Israel will be spared? After all, it is only a coincidence that in the current catastrophe the Russians did not stop Hitler in Bialystok and the English did stop the Germans in El Alamein. The Jewish community in Israel did not save itself through its own strength.
“And this threatening American Jews with another Hitler is directly connected to the immigration question. Go to the immigrant camps and to the villages, where the immigrants have settled and talk to them. You will hear…
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that they were promised gold mountains. A large portion, possibly the majority, were simply hoodwinked with promises. Nor were they picky about who was taken from other countries, with the exception of Germany, in order to create political pressure. Parents were taken from Romania, leaving children behind, and a lot of children were taken, leaving parents behind.
“The moral and economic pressure to bring out the Jews from the German [DP] camps, can be justified to a certain extent. That can’t be helped. But Jews were just taken out of Bulgaria. The Bulgarian Jews had not suffered from anti-Semitism. People came and terrified them about the coming economic changes. So, they ran away, because they thought a better country was waiting for them. Fundamentally, this is a terrible precedent. It means that Jews are not rooted where they are. A homeland is waiting for them somewhere. They can escape at the first difficulty. How can you build lasting institutions with such a feeling? How can someone with such a sense of temporary belonging root themselves in a country? In the first exile, the Babylonian exile, Jeremiah [29:5] told the exiles:
Build houses and live in them. Plant gardens and eat their fruit. Take wives and have sons and daughters with them. Take wives for your sons, and give your daughters to husbands, and let them have sons and daughters, and multiply and do not become fewer.
“But what do you do? You cry: A Hitler will come upon you! Do not build houses, because they will be taken from you! May your children not marry there, and may they have no children, because they, too, will be killed in the end! Save yourselves while there is still time! Come here to us in time, while you still have your possessions, and they will let you out, so that you will not come to us when we will have to build refugee camps. Can a people thrive among the nations with such a sense of immanent catastrophe? Let us not, heaven forbid, infect the whole world with this malice. It would convince even the best among the gentiles that the anti-Semites are right: We are strangers everywhere.
“Now, the question of immigration. As long as there was a little immigration to Israel and the motive for it was idealistic,…
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the difficulties of adjusting to the country did not play a role. Now when there has been mass immigration, and no longer of idealistic human material, the real problems of adaptation will soon begin. No nation has succeeded in settling such a large number of people in their country. No nation has been able to awaken a pioneering spirit among such a great number of people. And here there is a need to settle the Negev and other barren places. There is no industry in the country, and there is not enough raw material to develop any kind of great industry. The markets of the neighboring countries have been closed off. What will be done with the immigrants after the dust has settled? A nation cannot live off charity forever.
“For the diaspora there is also a great danger in the current conception of Israel, that Jewish people must be unitary, from the same mold, like all other peoples who occupy their land, a people of the state[6]. For a span of two thousand years or more, we have not been a nation in the accepted sense of the word. We have been connected to an abstraction, not to earth. The commonality between different parts of the people has often been minimal. The communal link between individuals has often been barely perceptible. What kind of spiritual commonality is there between the French Jewish philosopher [Henri] Bergson and the old Lubavitcher Rebbe? What sort of communal ties are there between, for example, a Yemini “sage” and a secular Jewish union activist in New York? Nevertheless, the world considered them to be Jews and they also considered themselves Jews. A kind of thin spiritual thread kept them all connected. In hindsight, it was very difficult for Jews to stop being Jews. Often someone remained a Jew due to a negative, because he never officially declared himself not to be a Jew.
“But this thin spiritual thread is not strong enough to hold the Jews together now, if we become a people of the state. Within the country itself there is no dissolving the conglomeration of tribes: Yemini and Moroccan, who speak Arabic; Bulgarian Jews who speak Ladino; Eastern European Jews, who speak Yiddish; and Kurdistani Jews, who speak a Caucasian dialect– separate tribes with their customs and concepts and distinct languages. One must meld together all these disparate Jews into one…
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unified mass, that will have more or less one face, a people like all other peoples, with its own language and unified customs, connected to the one national flag and language. As long as this conception of unity is naturalized here, the diaspora Jews will automatically not be Jews. The basis of membership in the Jewish people has been the feeling that some abstraction binds every individual one of us to the Community of Israel. If this feeling dies out, then the Jewish people will be diminished and wither almost automatically.
“Kibbutzim are the backbone of the Yishuv. These democratic cooperatives, with their system of true political, economic, and social equality have the capacity to influence the world. But the chief flaw of the kibbutzim is that they are based on asceticism and on a general denial of individualistic life. Asceticism and denial of individualism was very well suited to the idealists who came here to build a country and to redeem the Jewish people from exile. But they are not well suited to the new immigrants, who are seeking happiness and fulfilling personal lives after years of forced collectivism. Would you say that they must become kibbutzniks, whether they want to or not? No. You can build a kibbutz with ninety percent idealists and ten percent who have no other choice; but not with ninety percent who have no other choice and ten percent idealists. A quarter of a million Jews were brought here without calculation, without a prior plan for how to get them settled in, and without considering the fact that they are unsuited for pioneer agricultural work. Rather, you depend on God’s mercy and the support of American Jews. Yihye b’seder – it will work out – is your favorite saying. No it will not be b’seder. The honeymoon will end, time will be up, and the bill will have to be paid.
“And one more basic issue. The state must be secular. No state can conduct itself too fairly. There must be a certain degree of evil towards one’s neighbors. The most basic rules of fairness, righteousness, and justice must often be disregarded, when they go against the interests of the state, whether or not they turn out to be true interests. Holiness, and the justness of daily life will have to become a private matter in the State of Israel, as everywhere else in the world. It seems probable that among the Jews as elsewhere in the world, that when a soldier comes into a synagogue,..
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he’ll leave his rifle at the door and go in to pray. Rabbis will talk about God’s righteousness on the battlefield. Like with the goyim, certain hours will be set aside for holiness and God’s justice, but daily life will go on with its evil. Shabbes and holidays will be secularized. After praying, it will be psychologically possible to go hunting. The greatness of Judaism has been that it has always been opposed to compromise. Can you imagine Rabbi Israel Salanter or the Khofets Khayim in the role of a government minister? Now in a nation-state, all the holiness of Jewish life will become secondary to secular life. We will become like all other small nations in the Middle East, or in the Balkans. Is the redemption we have waited for over thousands of years? Is it worth it? Lo mini velo miktsesa.”[7]
I will not translate the last four words, because in Yiddish they ring very harshly. But still harsher words than what I have given here were spoken. I want it to be clear that they were not spoken in the order that I presented them, nor were they spoken by a single person, without a pause. I have set them out this way only in order that the opposing points of view should come across clearly. The answers to these tough questions will also come across more clearly if they are set out in order and without interruption.
The professor of history spoke first and then the others helped him out.
“With all your complaints here you are making one fundamental error. By what you are saying it would appear that Jewish life has not changed in the last hundred years, and you are ignoring the catastrophe that just happened. Your words make it seem as though Jews have lived quietly and in peace among the gentiles, and that some crazy Zionists came along and decided on their own to go and conquer a country. That is not how it was. The current complete rupture in Jewish history came about because of the rupture in Jewish spiritual life and because of the Goyim’s persecution.
“Let us take the Arab question first of all. You talk just as though you have only just discovered that the Jews have come to the Land of Israel to occupy the land and become the majority. We never denied it. This was the program of the bilutsim, of the settlers of the first wave of Jewish…
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immigration, and of Ahad Ha’Am as well. But we never expected that it would be resolved the way it has happened now.
“The first pioneers in the country knew what they wanted. They wanted to take the land through colonization. Sh. Ben-Zion, when he depicted the first vanguard, told how they worked like dogs and went hungry yet kept their distant goal in mind. Ragged, tattered, half-starving Jews sang in the evenings. What did they sing? “Al gdot haYarden…”[8]
“Listen closely to the words: On the banks of the Jordan and in Sharon, there are the Arab companies. This land is going to belong to us, and you will be among the builders. Do you hear? Even in the song “Idol Worshippers” Tchernichovsky does not say: And you will be among the conquerers. No, only among the builders. To take the land through work.
“And the Jews in fact wanted to get along with the Arabs. You would say: The Arabs did not want their new neighbors, just as Australia does not want new immigrants, like Canada wants their country for themselves? So, I ask you, are Australia and Canada right to leave millions of acres of land empty, when Europe is suffocating? The unjust behavior of these two countries should not be accepted as the ethical rule.
“Jews bought up empty tracts of land for good money (which no other nation has done), working and building villages and towns on marshland. Right from the beginning, they set up a government bzeyr anpin (in miniature) in their settlements. They did not come to live together with their neighbors, but wanted to have a completely Jewish life, and they did. Well, they thought that they could get along with the Arabs. Of course, they had an alternative plan. If not, they had to have youth who would be able to defend themselves. It came to war, and the Arabs ran away. Agreed, that we partly drove them away. Still, you should also add that we wanted to come to an agreement with them the easy way, right up to the last minute. But they are goyim. They knew…
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what they wanted to do with us when they won. They assumed that we would do the same. They did not believe our assurances and they ran away. After the fact, we were happy. Now we have a country where there is practically no minority question.
“Take the Arabs back? Where will we put them? Maybe you’re going to tell us to send our refugees back where they came from? History often plays little tricks like that and complicates matters so that no one can untangle them. Under the current circumstances, it is just to settle the Arab refugees in the Arab countries, and not in the State of Israel.
“Your argument that it is dangerous. That our actions set a precedent for the future. So, no one can predict what will happen in a generation or two. And anyway, I ask you, do the goyim need a precedent to attack Jews?
“Now, the question of Yiddish. It is true that our renunciation of Yiddish is a national loss. Adopting the Sephardic dialect is a caprice. But this was not a conspiracy of a few individuals. Jews do not have any respect for Yiddish. It’s a shame, but nevertheless that’s the way it is. The part of the Jewish people that came here have connected the Jewish renaissance, long may it live, with Hebrew. The people apparently agreed with us. You can see that Jews all over the great diaspora have failed to demonstrate the same determination to maintain Yiddish as we have shown here in reviving Hebrew, which is a much more difficult matter. It is also a fact that Hebrew is a greater unifying factor among all the various Jewish “tribes” in the world.
“In general, why do you come complaining to us? Keep Yiddish alive in your own children’s mouths. If the whole American Jewish community spoke Yiddish, we would be forced to reckon with you. But your children speak English. It doesn’t matter whether our children speak Hebrew or Yiddish. Either way, they will still not be able to talk to your alienated younger generation.
“You cry that we are threatening you with a Hitler. You ask: What kind of schadenfreude does this give you? How are you so sure that if another Hitler comes…
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and the Jews of America are exterminated, that the Jewish community in the State of Israel will be spared? You are challenging the central principles of Zionism. Both [Leon] Pinsker and Herzl came to the idea of Zionism because of antisemitism. The Bilu’im came here because of the pogroms in what was then Russia. Nearly every inhabitant of the State of Israel, with a very small number of exceptions, came here to escape from persecution and violence. You claim that the situation with you in America is different. You have true democracy. We do not believe you. We do not think that the goyim consider you to be true citizens. You are fooling yourselves. It does not matter that you think you have equal status to the goyim there. We believe with perfect faith, that your fate will be the same as the fate of all the Jewish communities of the world – downfall. The very fact that you are a significant minority will strengthen hostility to you. And supposing we are wrong and you are right? Of course that’s good. But we are afraid. We are allowed to be.
“In general, we would like you to understand that the State of Israel is in fact redemption, but a redemption brought by secularists. It’s a revolution in Jewish history – the emergence of a whole new Judaism and a new Jewish people. Why are you yelling like that? First, you are secularists yourselves, and second, why should Judaism remain static? The world is different than it was before. Jews are different than before, and the redemption is also different.
“Yes, we want to limit ourselves now, we want to shrink the community of Israel and connect it to a piece of ground. This is a time when we cannot remain a people if we are scattered all over the world. Just as Jews once sensed that land was unnecessary for the people to preserve its spiritual character, we now believe that the people senses that it must have a land again in order to survive.
“Let’s say it is a decline. A spiritual decline. But sometimes one has to sin a little in order to stay alive, so that later he can climb higher. But the fundamental principle of all is, do not expect us to maintain your form of Jewishness. If you want to challenge us, challenge us with deeds. Your philosophizing will have very little effect on us. We are too busy with day-to-day concerns to philosophize now.”
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I repeat that all these criticisms and responses I’ve recounted were not said in such a systematic manner. These thoughts were also expressed with a lot more sagacity and scholarship than I have rendered. The main thing that struck me was the earnestness, open-heartedness and honesty of both sides. No one called anyone else an assimilationist. No one, heaven forbid, accused anyone else of insincerity. Jews sat and discussed matters of the utmost import, and every heart was filled with love of the People of Israel, with doubts and with faith. I wrote down the discussion right after that evening. I believe that a lot of what was spoken then reflected the true direction of the thinking of the Jewish community in the State of Israel, and the mood of a great many in the diaspora.
[1]Yidn Tvishn Felker. Published in Yiddish in 1949 by the Jewish Ethical Society.
[2] In the conclusion to “Jews Among the Nations,” Simon used the Aramaic phrase הצלה פורתא “Small salvation.” Earlier in that book he had discussed Rashi’s commentary on Tractate Gittin 56b:6. There, the sacrifice of the nation state was described as necessary to ensure the survival of a small remnant of scholars. In his conclusion, Simon turns this backwards, saying that the re-establishment of the state has served to ensure the survival of a few.
[3] The speaker uses the phrase ‘Arab-rein’, in an accusatory echo of Hitler’s final solution.
[4] Ki nafal… “And the fear of the Jews fell upon them.” From the Book of Esther.
[5] Yosem (accent on the first syllable) and Yatom (accent on the second syllable) = ‘orphan’.
[6] There is no obvious equivalent for Simon’s use here of melukhe-folk. Melukhe in hyphenated compounds usually means ‘state’ (melukhe-kase = state treasury, melukhe rosh = head of state), or else, whether literally or indirectly, ‘government’ (melukhe-shul is public school, melukhe-dinst is civil service). The word ‘folk’ shares features of a ‘people’ and a ‘nation’ in the sense of national identity. He is contrasting the traditional identity of Jews as a diverse and international people bound by religion, history, and culture, with a people that has a current state nationality in common as the core of their identity.
[7] Translator’s note: I am unsure how to best transliterate this. It means, roughly, “In no way and not to the slightest degree.”
[8] The original gives the four lines first in Hebrew, followed by the Yiddish.
The Nation State and the Promised Land 