536
PARTISAN REVIEW
ings ... had no parallel at all in the Jews' ill-treatment of the Palestinian
Arabs." But they deprived of "their homes and property" and reduced
to the status of "displaced persons" some 684,000 Arabs. In a note this
figure is qualified and the Jews are blamed only for 284,000; but these
"expulsions," we are told, "were on the heads of all Israel." Did they
occur during a war or in the midst of peace? Toynbee does not say,
but throughout he gives the consistent, if fantastic, impression that the
Jews attacked innocent Arabs to vent the aggressive feelings accumulated
during their own persecution by the Nazis. That any Arab had ever
fired a shot on a Jew in Palestine before 1948, or that the Arab states
had declared war on Israel the moment the British had left their
former mandate, and that the Jews were fighting a war in self-defense
against armies pledged to exterminate them to the last man, woman,
and child-all that is not only not mentioned but brazenly denied by
implication.
Judged by high standards, what the Israelis did may well deserve
censure, as does, perhaps, our systematic bombing of civilians toward
the end of World War II, not to speak of Hiroshima or, worse, Nagasaki.
But those who are fighting for their life and liberty can at least plead
extenuating circumstances. What can the historian plead who willfully
falsifies the history of events with which no man required
him
to deal?
So much for the historian. Surely, A.
J.
P. Taylor is too kind when
he says: "Professor Toynbee's method is not that of scholarship, but of
the lucky dip, with emphasis on the luck." But in a recent note on
"What I Am Trying to Do," in the same issue of
International Affairs
in which Sir Ernest Barker offers his strictures, Toynbee tells us: "One
of my aims in
A Study ,of History
has been to try out the scientific
approach to human affairs and to test how far it will carry us."
What he proposes to show, as is well known by now, is that some
twenty-odd civilizations exemplify certain patterns in their development.
Taylor has suggested that Toynbee's scheme was, in fact, a generaliza–
tion from classical antiquity:
"If
other civilizations failed to fit into
this pattern, they were dismissed as abortive, ossified, or achieving a
wrong-headed
tour de force."
This criticism is valid as far as it goes,
but it does not bring out the full enormity of Toynbee's method.
In the first place, Toynbee's anthropomorphic conception of civil–
izations is superstitious: the question how many civilizations there are
is like asking how many sciences there are, and the question when a
particular civilization originated is on a level with the query when art
began. Worse still, the conceit that civilizations are not only individual
