Expulsion, imprisonment or worse lurked - a constant threat.Ī century before Herzl, in 1789, the French Revolution and the Declaration of the Rights of Man had seemed to signal a new era.
To think otherwise was indeed useless, an exercise in delusion. The fate of Alfred Dreyfus, a loyal French officer falsely convicted of treason, was always possible. No Jewish patriot, rich or poor, was secure. It is difficult to read the 800 pages of “Belonging” and not reach the same conclusion. Theodor Herzl finally answers that question with his Zionist vision of a “home that is destined to be a safe haven for the Jewish people.” The homeland, for Herzl, whose pamphlet “The Jewish State” was published in 1896, was needed because it had proved “useless” for Jews to be “loyal patriots.” Only in their own state would they not be potential pariahs. The book begins around the time of the Spanish Inquisition and ends with the Dreyfus case, a 400-year round trip back to the same Jewish question. They are the Christ killers, fit principally for the ghetto, unfit for citizenship. Degradation amounts to the Jews’ “perpetual punishment for the sin of the Crucifixion,” Schama writes. This is the standard lexicon of Jew hatred during the period Schama covers in “Belonging.” Loathing flares - from Mantua to Prague, from London to Lisbon, from the Vatican to Berlin - with scant variation. “They have clung to us like leeches,” wrote the French polemicist Georges-Marie Mathieu-Dairnvaell in the 1840s, and were no more than “vampires, scavengers of nature.” Jews never belong enough anywhere to avoid vilification as parasites, vultures, usurers and traitors. Simon Schama’s “Belonging: 1492-1900,” the second volume of his panoramic study of Jewish life, “The Story of the Jews,” is in fact an account of serial exile.
THE STORY OF THE JEWS Volume 2 Belonging: 1492-1900 By Simon Schama Illustrated.
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