TOYNBEE AND SUPER-HISTORY
535
work that he prints, in footnotes and appendices, critical comments by
scholars who have read parts of his manuscript-and again and again
these comments invalidate the text but are left standing without any
reply hy the author. In the present instance, James Parkes, a Gentile
student of anti-Semitism, throws more light on the origin of Zionism in
three lines on page 294, not to speak of his two-page "Annex," than does
Toynbee in his daydreams and sermons in the text.
I am not advocating a pedestrian approach. A historian should put
himself into the place of the men whose decisions he discusses and ask
himself what went on in their minds-but naturally after having first
used all the available data as the necessary context and clues. Toynbee,
however, ignores the most relevant data; and for the sake of his system
or sermon he spurns them even after Parkes has called attention to a
few of them.
There is no reason why Toynbee should know a great deal about
Zionism or Judaism; but as long as he does not, why does he insist on
writing about both at such great length? The indices of volumes VI
and X (which take care, between them, of all but the first three
volumes) contain over four columns of references to the Jews, and a
column apiece about "Judaism"-but not a single reference to Hillel
or Akiba, not to speak of lesser men or such contemporary representa–
tives as, for example, Buber.
Actually, the name of Hillel is mentioned once in Toynbee's in–
dictment of Zionism: "The image and superscription of this new human
coinage was not Hillel's but Caesar's." But a few sentences later, on
the same page (311), he pontificates: "This mystical feeling for an his–
torical Eretz Israel, which inspired the Zionist pioneers with the spiritual
power to move mountains, was entirely derived from a diasporan ortho–
dox theology that convicted the Zionists of an importunity which verged
upon impiety in their attempt to take out of God's hands the fulfillment
of God's promise to restore Israel to Palestine on God's own initiative."
Clearly, Toynhee does not know one of Hillel's most celebrated dicta:
"If
I am not for myself, who will be? And if I am for myself only,
what am I? And
if
not now, when?" Nor does Toynbee see the weak–
ness of his own conception of religion which would indeed turn it into
a mere opiate by so unhesitatingly divorcing God's initiative from man's.
What is most unjustifiable is surely Toynbee's report to posterity
about what happened in Palestine after the British left. In the text he
gives the impression that the Jews did to the Arabs precisely what the
Nazis had done to the Jews. In a footnote he belatedly admits that
"the cold-blooded systematic 'genocide' of several million human be-
