A MINOR SCANDAL
609
On the other hand, what becomes of those Jews who remain be–
hind, in the Diaspora? They can only disappear, says Koestler. The
Eastern European settlements are already dead, with their distinctive
language and traditions. Their religion has long since transmitted its
purely spiritual values to the Christian Occident; for the rest, it has
survived merely as a mythology for the Return. But the Return is now a
fact. The perspective ("Next year in Jerusalem ... ") once operated as
a principle of cohesion.
The reality now imposes a choice.
Let those
who would be Jews make their way to the Jewish homeland. Let the
others be warned that, with each generation, their Jewishness becomes
more gratuitous and empty, bears less relation to the reality of Israel.
And that their continued distinct existence in the West has become
"an untenable anachronism."
Untenable-and dangerous. For centuries, says Koestler, quoting
Dr. Weizmann, the Jews have "carried antisemitism in their knap–
sacks," simply because they were Jews. Those to whom the tradition
meant nothing were morally deterred from apostasy and total assimila–
tion, for such a course seemed to imply the cowardly abandonment of
a people in distress. Now, in good conscience, they can be Englishmen,
Dutchmen, Americans, provided they cease to be Jews. Let them dis–
appear into the mass of their fellow-citizens. Let them cut every last
link
with a past which means nothing to them, except a sterile obses–
sion and a promise of murder.
Waiting in Cairo for my passport, I found myself thinking of the
old man who gave me my name. He was anti-religious, on the style of
the village-atheist, and he had no desire to see Jerusalem; yet he would
have laughed at the suggestion that he, or his son, could choose to be
anything else than a Jew. What makes a pigeon a pigeon, he would
enquire, ironically? We observe this bird and we agree to call it a pigeon.
For my father, Koestler was a pigeon who, preferring to be an oriole,
could not help detesting the other pigeons because they looked so in–
sistently like
him.
I, too, thought Koestler was wrong, but for far more scandalous
reasons. Being the child, not only of my father but also of my time, I
was aware that these birds, under new conditions, might indeed cease
to look like pigeons.... But there was no time to work out this con–
fusion. An immense black car came screeching to a halt near the con–
trol building, scattering a pack of sub-human wretches who were pre–
tending to labor in the roadway. Out oozed a swarthy fat colonel, all
booted, bestrapped and bemedalled. His bodyguard also emerged from
