The Consequences of Diaspora

Abstract

Living without a political state for almost two thousand years has had profound effects on the history, religion, culture and psychology of the Jewish people. Discussion of those effects has gained new meaning since 1948 and removed the issue from the purely academic plane. An Israeli professor has recently argued that with the emergence of the state of Israel, it is now possible to isolate those elements which truly make up the Jew, and at the same time identify those encrustations and accretions which are part of the diaspora baggage. “Zionism and the State of Israel,” says Ernst Simon of the Hebrew University, “having secured the social and national conditions for independent Jewish existence, have also made it possible to study the principles and commandments of the Jewish religion for their own sake — independently that is to say, theologically — it being no longer necessary or possible to base them on national needs alone. In the State of Israel the birth of a human being, as a son to his people, does not by itself make him a Jew. And so the history of the Jewish religion has arrived at a new point of departure.”¹

Other people are led by their best and strongest. But the best and strongest are absorbed by the superior careers and pleasures of the environment—and the few who remain to lead, lead for the most part, to destroy. Israel Zangwill