The Zionist Imperative

Wed, 01 Feb 1995 00:00:00 -0500

Some eighty years ago, the German-Jewish philosopher Hermann Cohen declared, “The Jewish people do not need a state of their own. Nor may they have one, for a state is particularistic, and conflicts with the Jewish messianic mission, which is universal.”

Cohen was both a good philosopher and a good Jew; yet today no good Jew and few good philosophers would agree with this statement. What is missing here is the timing . The place in which Cohen made his statement is troubling: Wilhelminian Germany. And positively ominous is the time of it: just before or during the Great War. For had Cohen been a lot younger, and a lieutenant in the Kaiser’s army, he might have had serving under him a corporal by the name of Adolf Hitler. Everything depends upon the timing.

Let us move on some twenty-five years. In Jewish history this is not much, and in world history it hardly counts at all.

The time is now 1939, after the Munich pact and Kristallnacht, during which throughout Germany and Austria synagogues were set on fire, Jewish stores smashed and looted, and Jews themselves carted off to concentration camps.

The place is a boat, the St. Louis , in the middle of the Atlantic loaded with German and Austrian Jews fleeing for their lives. The refugees were carrying Cuban visas, but on the boat’s arrival in Cuba, these had not been honored, for the consul in Germany had issued invalid or phony ones. What had next taken place was a frantic search, so characteristic of the time, for some country, any country, that would give these refugees a haven. Telegrams had been sent, phone calls made, all across the huge continent of America. Wasn’t there any country that would take those nine hundred men, women, and children?

There had not been. Instead the unbelievable was now happening: the captain had to turn his boat back, moving ever so slowly in the hope that rescue might yet come from somewhere. Later it would be said that the captain would have done what for a seaman is unthinkable, wreck his ship, rather than take his human cargo back to Germany, where what awaited them was a concentration camp or death. In the end, the refugees were all taken in, the lucky ones by Great Britain, the others by European countries where they would later be caught and murdered by the German invaders.

A movie of some years ago, Voyage of the Damned , captured this episode truthfully, which is to say that it was all black and white, good and evil. The Jewish victims, if not that good, were in any case innocent. The other side was pure evil. The critics panned the movie. It seems that good and evil does not make for suitably sophisticated drama. That, however, happened to be the way it was.

My wife and I saw the movie in a Toronto suburb where few Jews live, and that night the audience was mostly kids. The critics may have been bored, but the kids were fascinated. In my experience most kids have an innate sense of decency. At the movie’s end, there silently flashed on the screen the names of each of the Jews on the St. Louis and what happened to them. When the names of ones who were saved appeared there was applause. When one of the Nazis, hit by a falling beam during an air raid, was listed as killed, again there was applause. Finally, we were told about the fate of the captain: after the war he was investigated by de-Nazifiers, but was let off when some of the Jews from the St. Louis testified in his behalf. At this point, it was I who led the applause.

The movie showed a good deal, but it did not show everything. A Jewish leader named Nahum Goldmann had gone to see Cordell Hull, the U.S. Secretary of State, to plead with him on behalf of the nine hundred. Hull replied that his duty was to guard U.S. immigration laws. Goldmann then wondered aloud what would happen if, with their ship anchored just outside the Statue of Liberty, these people were to jump overboard. Surely, Goldmann speculated, they could not be left to drown. Surely they would be picked up. They could then be interned on Ellis Island, but at least they would be safe. To which Hull replied that Goldmann was the most cynical man he had ever met.

Canada had no immigration laws, only mostly secret practices mostly administered by one Frederick Blair. In his diary Blair relates how three leading Jews came to plead with him on behalf of the passengers on the St. Louis . Blair writes that he advised the three to gather in a synagogue and meditate on the question of why Jews were so universally disliked.

In light of the foregoing, there are two things to be said in response to Hermann Cohen: one, the Jews do need, if not a state, then at least a haven; and two, whatever the Jewish messianic mission might be, no one seems to want it.

Let us move on, just three to five years-Jewish history, along with world history, moved fast in those years. The following is the record of the testimony given by a Polish guard at the Nuremberg trial.

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The Zionist Imperative