I read a review in the Wall Street Journal the other day. It was about the new play by Tom Stoppard called ‘Leopoldstadt.’ That is the name of the traditional Jewish area of Vienna.
It tells the story from 1899 to 1955 of a high-society Jewish family. Progressively, the “Merz’s” Jewish identity dissolves in the embrace of Austrian tolerance and assimilation.
In the first iteration of the family, the child of the patriarch of the family and his non-Jewish wife, puts a Star of David on top of their Christmas tree. This provokes a family member to say, “Poor boy, baptized and circumcised in the same week, what can you expect?”
Then comes the Anschluss, then the Holocaust. A pitifully few survivors gather in the last era of the play. The reunion takes place in the historic family home that once promised them such a bright future. Stoppard even introduces an autobiographical character who escaped the Nazis with his parents and reached England.
The playwright himself only discovered that he was a Jew who came from such a family, when he was forty-seven.
His work raises the complicated question, why educated and intelligent Jews such as these did not see what was coming and escape the flames.
Another work I use to teach a degree course in Modern Jewish History offers one answer.
“The Reunion” by Fred Ullman is a semi-autobiographical account of a not untypical German Jewish family. In it, the writer recalls an incident from his childhood.
“I still remember a violent discussion between my father and a Zionist who had come to collect money for Israel. My father abhorred Zionism. The whole idea seemed to him stark mad. To claim Palestine after two thousand years made no more sense to him than the Italians claiming Germany because it was once occupied by the Romans… And anyway, what had he, a Stuttgarter, to do with Jerusalem?
When the Zionist mentioned Hitler and asked my father if this would not shake his confidence, my father said, “Not in the least. I know my Germany. This is a temporary illness, something like measles, which will pass as soon as the economic situation improves.”
I had never seen my father, who was usually quiet and peaceable, so furious. For him, this man was a traitor to Germany, the country for which my father, twice wounded in the First World War, was quite ready to fight again.”
The answer is that many, like the fictional Merz’s and the real Ullmans were besotted with their country. They embraced Austrian or German morals, history and Weltanschauung. They would not leave because they were totally faithful to the country they loved. For these Jews there was only Germany or Austria.
It is a phenomenon that became apparent from the birth of Jewish peoplehood in Egypt. Only one fifth of the Jewish people left. Rashi, the most famous Torah commentator of all, quotes the Midrash that the other four fifths died in the plague of Darkness. Another Midrashic opinion says that they didn’t die physically, rather spiritually as Jews. They choseto stay behind in Egypt. As long as they could still claim to be Egyptians, even as slaves, that was enough for them. They loved their country.
The phenomenon is a repeating one throughout Jewish history.
Jew’s love affair with Greece was extremely intense. Huge numbers of Jews embraced that society with as much passion as the majority had in Egypt. This time they actively joined their Greek “brothers” in the suppression of Judaism and the oppression of those who clung to the old love.
Revolutionary France also opened its arms to Jews. In 1791 a marriage proposal of sorts was offered and French Jews were emancipated by the Constituent Assembly and became French citizens. One year later, the Jews of Metz sang a Hebrew version of the “Marseillaise” to French soldiers in their synagogue. Yet throughout the era, there was a recurring doubt about the patriotism of “The Jews” and the need for them to channel their young into “productive occupations” (echoes here of the New York Times libel and the Board of Regents decisions).
Like Revolutionary France, the “happy ever after” promise revolutionary Russia offered Jews was irresistible to millions. Leon Trotsky, whose real name was Leibel Bronstein and many others played key roles in bringing this “utopia” into being.
Like Greece, some who embraced this new marriage did their best to uproot any recollection of the old. The Jewish section of the Communist Party, the Yevsektzia’s stated mission was “The destruction of traditional Jewish life, the Zionist movement and Hebrew Culture.”
They fulfilled their mission with gusto, sending Rabbis and teachers of Judaism to freeze or die in Siberia. (Stalin expressed his gratitude to the Yevsektzia by including them in his great purge and executing them.)
Today, perhaps the last great love affair takes place here in America. The current political scene is no less revolutionary as those of the past. The Woke Left has a long list of demands that will fundamentally change America. There’s Critical Race Theory (where White people are expected to admit that they are all racists) and recognition of “scores” of genders. There’s cash-free bail and refusal to prosecute criminals and much worse. Once again, many Jews; today’s Merzs, Ullmans, and Bronsteins are married to these ideas and in love with this proposed America.
I wonder if anyone, a communal leader, a Rabbi or simply a Jew who studied Jewish history, had told the semi-fictional family in Tom Stoppard’s new play what their attachment and belief in Vienna and Austria was likely to turn into, if they would have been viewed by anyone listening as anything other than insane or demented?
I wonder if anyone issuing exactly the same warning to an American “Merz” family today, which is to say the majority of American Jews, would be seen as being in any way less mad or delusional.
That is indeed a pity. History has an uncomfortable habit of repeating itself.
