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PARTISAN REVIEW
from the land of their birth, but retain the means and right to return
from time to time; it is natural for them to have more than one resi–
dence, and to switch from time to time, either within the country or
beyond its borders.
The duality and dialectic of the citizen and the traveller are generally
familiar to Jews: those who leave like to arrive home as well; some of them
can attribute metaphysical significance to national borders; others do not
want to give themselves over to their impulse to settle, not anywhere in the
world, not even in Israel. They come and go, and it is not possible to
deprive them of this freedom.
If they succeed relatively well on the world market and in the most
diverse local competitive fields, I would explain this by referring
to
the sur–
plus energy liberated on departing and entering, and of course to the
advanced age of the Jewish people, its accumulated life-strategical experi–
ence, passed on, made into tradition in one way or another.
In the case of Jewry , it is not possible to disregard the link between
contingency and substance, metaphysics couched in flesh, the inseparabil–
ity of the physical and the spirituallintellectual, accidental, and imperfect
individuals carrying within themselves something symbolic, something
characteristic of the whole of world Jewry.
Here is a people thrown into history, able to remain the subject of its
own existence through nearly all its scattered life, and when the Jewish
upper crust no longer wished to bear the self-designation and other, large–
ly painful, consequences of being chosen, practically speaking, for exclusion
and persecution, it then had to suffer probably the greatest blow in its his–
tory, the holocaust, which I do not bring into causal connection with the
conduct of the Jews, but which possibly could have been avoided with
more farsighted strategy by them, if, for example,Jewish radicals of the Left
had not attacked democratic constitutionalism, and hadn't thus provided
example, argument, reference, and validation for the counterrevolution and
dictatorshi p of the extreme Right.
This is a people that does not like being defined, and eludes every def–
inition. Perhaps it feels they are a prison. Nor is it enthusiastic about those
who are of it, the Jews, wanting to define it. It is a people that likes to keep
open the possibility of decamping, because it knows the ground can sud–
denly start to burn under its feet, because it knows that insanity comes out
in patches on the face of the globe, largely unpredictably, because some–
times even the occasional crackpot is capable of driving mad the multitude
of sensible people, and not even the greatest of wisemen can gaze into the
