The End Of The Jewish People? by Georges Friedmann
Robbins, Richard
THE END OF THE JEWISH PEOPLE?, by Georges Friedmann. New York: Doubleday & Co. 305 pp. $5.95. GEORGES FRIEDMANN is a Frenchman, humanist, intellectual, distinguished sociologist, Jew. I choose...
...Then, in an instant, with the explosion of Nazism beyond Germany and the fall of France, all seemed different...
...As a case study of a small evolving society which is much more than simply a place of refuge for Jews driven out of other countries, The End of the Jewish People...
...Who can afford the luxury of a theoretical 93 BOOKS debate about Israel, given what has happened, what can still happen to Jews...
...I can think of no better book to place in the hands of a reader, Jewish or gentile, who is interested in social innovation, continuity and discontinuity over three generations of time, cultural diversity and synthesis, socialism-in-practice, the relationship of religion to state, the public-private tension in a mixed economy...
...but the excesses of Stalinism turned him away from the Soviet Union...
...A POSSIBLE ANSWER suggested itself in the founding of the state of Israel...
...they believe, and they live "in the community...
...A "marginal" Jew wholly at home in France and with no direct experience of anti-Semitism, Friedmann simply went about his work in industrial sociology...
...Is that enough for us...
...If one has left the faith of the fathers or never knew it, if one is assimilated here and does not wish to go to Israel to live there, if one does not wish, for the sake of parents or convention, to practice the forms of religion without accepting the commitment to faith—if all that, is there then a point in holding to "Jewish humanism...
...For easy proof consider the recent Arab-Israeli war, and the stunning defeat inflicted on Nasser's forces by an army of bus drivers, professors, clerks, some more Jewish than Israeli, some more Israeli than Jewish, but all known to us because they were saying, "No, not this time...
...But apart from a vague hope that the rich, historic, creative "anxiety" of the Jewish diaspora can coexist nicely with the secure, solid, if somewhat flat "happiness" of the new Israel, Friedmann fails to come to terms with a central issue: Judaism within Jewishness...
...Why not humanism, point...
...the unique, confusing but somehow workable Histadrut joint labor-management economy...
...It is about Israel's "centrality" for every Jew...
...the paradox of a society where Orthodox Judaism occupies a special, favored place but is strongly resented by a large segment of the population which defines Israel basically in secular terms...
...It is anti-Semitism in extremis, it is Auschwitz and Vichy, that have brought him back, via his deep and compelling experiences in Israel, to Jewish humanism, to diaspora "anxiety," and Israeli "happiness...
...For millions of Jews whose Judaism is one with their Jewishness this is not a relevant question...
...is first-rate...
...For a time attracted to Communism, he thought "the Jewish question" might be resolved by revolution...
...For the Nazis it mattered not in the slightest that a Friedmann's "Jewishness" was no more, really, than a certain open and generous outlook toward life itself...
...In 1963 and 1964 Friedmann made two extended visits to Israel...
...the Sabras, the native-born— some of them not so much Jews in the accepted sense as citizens of Israel speaking Hebrew— confident men and women who, as one informant wistfully puts it, have put aside not only the defects of their European parents but also their virtues...
...Friedmann concludes, and I would concur, that despite such aspects of Israel which disturb those who had hoped "normalization" might bring a less boisterous, more reflective integration of nationalism and diaspora Jewishness—Israel, as it stands, is a buoyant, hopeful example of what can be done by a people, in the face of enormous obstacles, to build and sustain a democratic society...
...he would suffer exactly the same fate as a Goldmann who went daily to the synagogue —deportation and death in the East...
...But after the gas chambers of Auschwitz, what could restore his faith in man...
...Stripped of his job, subjected to the humiliating new Vichy laws, Friedmann went into the Resistance and restored his faith in France...
...For the sake of a review let me be false to Friedmann's emphasis on the relatedness of his role, as detached sociologist and involved, Jewish, humanist, and first take up his sociology of Israel...
...And, specifically, how could a French Jew who felt a new identification with fellow-victims of the holocaust experience a revitalization of his Jewish identity...
...I choose the order of these modifying nouns deliberately, for Friedmann, like so many assimilated Jewish intellectuals and social scientists at work in Western Europe in the period between the world wars, had no occasion to be centrally preoccupied with such questions as the loss of faith in Judaism, the "danger" of complete assimilation, or the future of Jewish tradition and ritual...
...FRIEDMANN'S ACOUNT OF ISRAEL iS SO rewarding that it seems unfair to cavil at his other theme, the broader question of Jewish identity in the world...
...But Georges Friedmann, as a Jew, is not one of these...
...It is about the state of Israel as observed by a sociologist of sensibility whose Jewishness, for all that Friedmann remains nonZionist and non-pratiquant, can never be the same again...
...Arriving in Israel almost too highly charged, expecting Israel alone to provide very nearly a complete counterweight to the unredeemable loss of European Jewry, Friedmann soon settles down to a sympathetic, judicious, but also tough-minded view...
...His book is not about "the end of the Jewish people" at all—with or without question mark...
...Or our children...
...Not again...
...Kaleidoscopic sketches quickly give way to closely argued chapters on the changing kibbutz pattern of community organization...
Vol. 15 • January 1968 • No. 1
