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PARTISAN REVIEW
respected-Jews without sovereignty, subject, even on their own
ground, to revilement and oppression. Revilement and oppression,
hatred and massacre, libel and canard, are hardly novel elsewhere in
Jewish experience. The central shame of the twentieth century was that
the right of Jews to exist was put in question and murderously
answered. The shame did not stop there; it is a shameless shame; it con–
tinues into the new century; it swells grotesquely, putting in question the
right of Jews to exercise sovereignty in their own land, and in their own
ancient capital. The ubiquitous phrase "Israel's right to exist" is heard
even in the mouths of apparent friends, and it is a corrupting and
degrading phrase.
David Vital, writing in the London
Times Literary Supplement
last
March, describes a pervasive Jewish psychological condition as one dis–
posed toward a "well-founded pessimism. ..after centuries of confine–
ment to the bottom of the human heap." "In their soberer moments,"
he asserts, "the Jews remain hugely conscious of their limited numbers,
of their perpetual lack of natural and reliable allies, and of the dangers
consequent on being continuously, not to say habitually, the object of a
degree of hostility and abuse that extends well beyond what might be
thought of as par in other bitter confrontations ." In alluding to "bitter
confrontations," he is speaking of course of the last year of violence and
terror directed against Jewish citizens of Israel. He ends by noting the
capacity of Jews under pressure for "free and autonomous pursuit of
what they deem to be their essential interests."
But one hundred and fifty years ago the American writer and the Ital–
ian architect did not see Jews in pursuit of what they deemed to be their
essential interests. The architect saw a Jew in flight, a servile and
defenseless Jew pleading for protection; the writer saw wriggling flies in
a skull. More than a century would pass before the restoration of
Jewish independence, through struggle and war, and in the aftermath of
a vast European slaughter-and then at last Isaiah's call came to
fruition : "Awake, awake; put on thy strength, 0 Zion; put on thy beau–
tiful garments, 0 Jerusalem, the holy city....Shake thyself from the
dust; arise!" With the rebirth of sovereignty came bitter confrontation:
a clash between despotism and Covenant, between the rule of the skull
and the Noahide Laws.
As to the Noahide Laws, which express the principle that Jews will
not prescribe faith for other peoples, and will not exclude other peoples
from the respected family of humankind: I find on my shelves a volume
titled
Jerusalem, Sacred City of Mankind: A History of Forty Centuries,
first published in
1968,
splendidly illustrated by photographs, the work
