I grew up surrounded by what some well-meaning anti-Semites might call a cosmopolitan elite. My younger years were spent at a Jewish school, surrounded by other kids of the diaspora, and when I left them, I joined instead the ranks of a bilingual school where all the kids had 5 origins, spoke at least 3 languages and joked about how difficult it was to answer the (often-asked) question: “where do you come from?”
It came as a bit of a shock to me, then, when I discovered that some people actually stayed grounded in a country for generations. The revelation came before I left to study at LSE, when I decided to study humanities in a French, Catholic cours préparatoire. My unusual style and propensity for Franglais already set me apart from the rest of the students, but most striking was their frenchness: I had never seen such a homogenous group of people that so unanimously claimed to belong to a land and to have always belonged there. I sat amongst classmates who could trace their lineage back for 500 years; one of my close friends’ houses had been in her family for close to 8 generations, and in her living room was displayed the sabre with which her ancestor had fought in Napoleon’s army.
Needless to say, not many of them were willing to discuss where their families had been during the war (except one extremely honest professor who, no doubt seeing my presence in his classroom as his opportunity to repent, very candidly declared to me at the beginning of the year that his great-uncle had been a Nazi collaborator. As you can probably imagine, that was just the right thing to tell me to make me feel welcome and it of course fostered a climate of goodwill and camaraderie in his classes I’ll never forget.)
That link to their territory my classmates had underlined my own lack of it. I was French, sure, but my family tree stopped one or two generations after the Shoah, for lack of records. My family did not have an age-old townhouse, and our heirlooms dated back to my great-grandmother at most, since everything else had been destroyed when we had left Poland, after the Second World War. My other identity, my Judaism, was the only one which seemed to relate to a place: every year at the Passover Seder we would finish the evening singing, softly then as loud as we could, about spending the next Chag in Jerusalem. Our people, Am Israel, was born out of God’s promise to Abraham that he would have a land for his sons. It is ironic, therefore, that we spent most of our recorded history either looking for that land, or being expelled from it.
I may not know about my family’s exact history, but here is what I do know about my people. Our exile started around the 8th century BC, when Assyrians started expelling Jews from Israel. It continued with the Babylonian exile in the 5th century BC, and pretty much never stopped from that point on. Some highlights include the systematic expulsion of Jews from pretty much every sovereign country they tried to settle into, the separation of the Jewish people into Sephardi Jews (the original Spanish and Portuguese communities who, following their expulsion, moved mainly towards the Maghreb and Ottoman Empire) and Ashkenazi Jews, whose amazing instinct of self-preservation led them to Eastern Europe where they spent a few centuries getting pogromed until one Austro-Hungarian leader of Nazi Germany finally took it too far.
Throughout all of those persecutions, Jews held on to their identity and their rites by commemorating the promise that is the very founding of our faith: that one day, at last, we might have a land of our own where we can be free to live our identity under our own rules. Every Rosh Hashanah, Jews repeat the story of Avraham’s test, ringing the shofar as a reminder of the promise God made to him, symbolised by the saving of Isaac. In a sense, then, Jews were the eternal refugees: always displaced, always brought back to that original land from the very core of our faith.
It is interesting to observe, therefore, how much the creation of Israel has shaken our identity as Jews. From the Zionists who chose to take the Torah’s word literally and create the state of Israel as a haven for Jewish life to ultra-religious communities who refuse to recognise Israel as the land of the Jews since it doesn’t come with the Messiah’s stamp of approval, one thing the state did not do was shake our immutable sense of disagreement.
In a post-Auschwitz world, it’s not difficult to understand why Jews would want a land of their own, God-approved or not. But it’s conversely very difficult to appraise the impact it has had on our Jewish identity. We live in an age where less and less Jewish kids follow the rules of Judaism the way our forefathers did. In Europe, this has led many to fear that we are losing a great chunk of our people. The age old story goes: rabbi Joshua made a prayer for his community every year in a specific place in the forest and to a specific tune. His sons carried out the tradition, remembering the tune and the place but not the exact words to the prayer. Their sons in turn remembered the place, but when it came to the rabbi’s great-grandsons, they could only remember that Rabbi Joshua once had this custom, and the ritual was lost forever. But when I see all of the non-religious, anti-religious kids even who make Aliyah and tell me that Israel has allowed them to find another way to be Jewish, I regain some hope that we may still live on.
The beauty of the Israeli Jewry is its diversity: from ultra-orthodox Jews to those who will eat pork on Yom Kippur without batting an eyelid, the knowledge that the state of Israel allows them to live out Judaism in their own way, without the constraints that the diaspora faces in trying to salvage its culture, enables many to find their own way of relating to our history.
I’m not saying Israel is perfect: it is struggling in many ways and the Palestinian identity must be allowed to coexist alongside ours; our Jewish laws must not stifle the great multiculturalism of our country and each Israeli must be able to feel defended by the state. But as far as Jewish identity is concerned, maybe owning the land may be the first step towards a celebration of our Jewish identity and the hope of creating a country that our forefathers might indeed be proud of, connecting us to our heritage despite our differences.