To be a Jew

What is it to be a Jew? In many different forms, this is the question that Isaac Deutscher asks himself in these brilliant and searching posthumous essays. His publishers are to be congratulated for setting them before us; for Deutscher’s answers involve a deep analysis of the nature of the nation state and the future not only of Israel and the Jewish communities of the world but of all races and nations.

To be a Jew is to belong to a particular race and to have segments of racial patriotism; to be a Jew may mean (though not for Deutscher, who is a socialist) to adhere to a particular religion or set of customs derived from that religion; to be a Jew may means to be a citizen of Israel; to be a Jew may mean to be a man obliged from day to day to meet and somehow come to terms with the strange and terrible ogre of anti-Semitism. Deutscher explains most cogently how anti-Semitism drove many Jewish people ‘to adopt a Zionist political position . . .’.

Deutscher fully understands and sympathises with the situation of the Palestinian Arabs, expelled from their native land to make room for a wave of desperate, well-armed and highly civilised colonists. Elsewhere in these essays he propounds the kind of middle-of-the-road solution which would most readily enable Israel to come to terms with her Arab neighbours. His natural identification with the situation of the Jewish settlers – most evident in his vivid description of the structure of the kibbutzim – at no point smothers his total objectivity and sense of justice. His book is certainly one in a million.

Though Deutscher deliberately rejects Judaism and regards the Zionist movement as retrograde because of its racial exclusiveness, one cannot help being aware of how much strength has come to him from his Jewishness. The boy who became a Khassidic rabbi at the age of thirteen and who later clipped away his side-locks so that he would not have to go to a Judaic theological training centre – the spirit of fervour and humanist enquiry which animated that boy never died in Deutscher. The hugely malicious stupidities of anti-Semitism did not make him misanthropic or paranoid they sharpened his sense of justice and his passionate goodwill towards all men. Perhaps the finest essay in the book is the one devoted to the part played by Jewish people page 43 in the Russian Revolution, the anti-Semitism apparent towards the end of Stalin’s regime, and the complex relation between the state of Israel and both Russia and the U.S.A. Deutscher has the great gift of seeing the other man’s point of view as clearly as his own. These seminal essays should be read by anyone who wants a better understanding both of the Middle East conflict and the structure of modern Western society.

1969 (578)