Shtetl mentality

Matthew Yglesias asks, "what's [Israel] got to do with me?" Matt points out that his family's background is in Eastern Europe, not in the Middle East. He agrees with me that "Israel and religion, not neurosis and cured meat, will be what hold the Jewish people together," but disagrees that this is something to be happy about. A fair point, but one which misses various other, more compelling ones:

Matt may feel himself to have Eastern European heritage, and the existence of such things as Yiddish; my grandfather's old, very old, passport; hearty, bland Jewish cooking; and the fact that I am very, very pale confirm that many Jews do, in fact, have such heritage. However, it's likely that Matt's Ashkenazi ancestors, aside from the more recent ones, both considered themselves, and were considered by their non-Jewish neighbors, a foreign, "Oriental" people quite distinct from Slavs and so forth.

When you ask an American Jew what his family "is," you will get the following sort of answer: "I'm part German, part Russian, and part Polish." As per Matt. But ask a German, a Russian, or a Pole (now, perhaps, but certainly in past decades) what claim this individual has on such an identity, and unless the individual happens to be a Freud or an Einstein, the answer would be, think again. The point is, even though many Jews' most recent heritage is geographically in Eastern Europe, we as Ashkenazi Jews are fooling ourselves if we believe our forebearers had anything other than an extreme outsider--foreign, even--status while in that part of the world. This is not to say there was no mixing, that cultures never blended, but if your ancestors were (as were mine) in the Pale of Settlement, chances are they were in something that more resembles parts of Israel (or, um, Brooklyn) than anything you'd find in non-Jewish Eastern Europe. While I support the right of Jews today, as well as others, to live equally and peacefully in whichever country they'd prefer, it makes no sense to project back into history and claim that this was the way it was way back when.

Which brings me to the obvious: There's a reason that Matt and I and (insert your favorite American Jew here) are not currently in Eastern Europe. It didn't work out so well there. Pogroms and the Holocaust, for a start. It is unfair and upsetting and "letting the Nazis win" and so on to allow the anti-Semitic view that certain residents of Eastern Europe "count" as Eastern European while others do not. And it wouldn't be enough to say that anti-Semites didn't consider one's ancestors to be Russian or Polish or whatever, if that had been how they thought of themselves, but it cut both ways. Matt claims to feel ties to non-Jewish (i.e. current, post-Holocaust) Eastern Europe, yet these ties are a bit harder for me to understand than just a general sense that, yes, my ancestors did live in a climate such as whatever with trees such as whatever. Because, when it comes down to it, that's what it means that my ancestors (none of whom were, far as I know, "court Jews" or even close) were "Eastern European."

The question comes down to this: which matters more, geographic or national heritage? While the modern state of Israel is, well, modern, it is, due to some pretty basic and well-known historical reasons, where the European Jewish community--at least the part of it most interested in Jewish continuity--now resides. Yes, Israel is in many ways a "made-up" thing--it's creating a falafel-eating, Hebrew-speaking group out of people whose immediate heritage involved neither chickpeas nor reading from right to left. But there are some good reasons for a contemporary Jew's sentimental pangs to be nostalgia for this recent extension of their own people's history, rather than to a geographic area where their most recent ancestors happened to live.

So while it is in a sense understandable to identify with Ashkenazi culture and heritage, identifying as "Eastern European" requires more uplifting revisionism than I care to try out. It makes American Jews feel better about ourselves to believe that we are Russian-American or Polish-American, because it gives us a pre-American nationality, gives us a proper sense of having come from somewhere. While the modern state of Israel is not many Americans' pre-American nationality, the Jewish nation, albeit the pre-state Jewish nation, is.

I've got more where this came from, but this post is way too long as it is.