GEORGE KONRAD
555
distant future. The unpredictability, unforeseeability but conceivability of
the blow made Jews familiar with networks. Knowledge is the property
with which changing location is relatively least difficult, the one whose
operation elsewhere is within the realm of possibility. There is no really
secure place; the crack-brained are many around Israel too; some kind are
necessary throughout the globe. We can be annihilated most readily
in
war;
thus our stake is in peace everywhere in the world.
More than many others, European Jews are familiar with the prospect
that a person can suddenly be killed by organized, armed hatred. The idea
of democratic equality of rights, opposing the system of feudal prerogatives
and discriminations, was originally a European idea, and brought with it
the emancipation of the Jews: if people have equal rights, then so do Jews.
In the twentieth century, however, the notion of feudal prerogatives
returned, this time in a collectivized version, in the fascist romanticism of
the
herrenfolk
(ruler nation), which democratized the concept of nobility by
extending it to the entire people, the whole majority nationality, suppos–
edly entitled to trample other nations and peoples underfoot. The myths
of the
herrenfolk
and the pernicious pariah nation presume and complement
each other; one does not exist and cannot exist without the other.
Universalism-one dimension of which is European integration–
frees Jews from their constraints; in other words, it is good for Jews. Before
emancipation, these constraints were forms of feudal and religious dis–
crimination; in the twentieth century, however, they were modernized, and
now it was the nationalist-etatist spirit which restricted or totally exclud–
ed the Jews, using a few innovations in anti-Jewish phraseology. Livelihood
and lifestyle tied Jews to Europe. In their hopes if not elsewhere, they did
not believe Europe to be the land of bondage, and they were not there only
out of obligation, but by choice as well. Europe, however, acquiesced to
despotism, and twice in the twentieth century, America represented the
spirit of European humanism; it was done partly by those former–
Europeans who had emigrated to America, and were beyond ethnic
nationalism, those who saw swearing by the democratic constitution as the
most significant symbol of belonging to the nation. I would not call
American nationalism ethnic, but rather constitutional. America used force
to insist on the idea of the state of law, and led the Europeans back to the
discipline of the state of law. Protection of the lives of Europeans calls for
international supervision of the individual nation-states, recognizing that
protection of life, the injunction that the continent's inhabi tants do not kill
one another, is of a higher order than the idea of unlimi ted national
sovereignty.
