Forward - 12.27.2002

Forward

The Changing Face of Antisemitism in Modern-Day Russia

 

Invidious, Age-old Distinctions Resurface in Solzhenitsyn Book

 

By David Klinghoffer

American Jewish culture appears to have passed through the phase during which our community leaders frequently indulged in the habit of singling out prominent Christians to be condemned as "antisemites."

So lest I appear to be reverting to our reflexive communal defensiveness, I hesitate to point an accusatory finger at Alexander Solzhenitsyn — even though the Russian novelist has over the years seemed to invite the charge that he feels some hostility toward Jews. In novels such as "Lenin in Zurich" and "The Red Wheel," he prominently casts Jewish socialists in the role of demonic villains, seeking to overturn Russian society in the years before and after the 1917 Revolution.

Actually, I don't intend to label Solzhenitsyn an antisemite. Who really knows what is in a man's heart? But there is some reason to hesitate at the recent exoneration of him that appeared in The New Republic, from the pen of Harvard Russian historian Richard Pipes. In commenting on Solzhenitsyn's new book, not yet translated into English, Pipes finds grounds for concluding that the writer "absolves himself of the taint of antisemitism."

The book in question, "Dvesti let vmeste" — "Two Hundred Years Together" — tells the story of Jews in Russia from 1775, the year that Russia enveloped part of freshly partitioned Poland, thus gaining a Jewish population of 1 million, to 1995. While certain passages in this generally laudable contribution to historical literature may sound downright philosemitic, one also notes that Solzhenitsyn is careful to distinguish between good Jews and bad Jews — the former being the religious and the Zionists, the latter being the secularists and the socialists.

For the religious Solzhenitsyn voices admiration: "The preservation of the Jewish people for more than two thousand years in Diaspora arouses amazement and respect." As for the revolutionaries, Pipes writes, Solzhenitsyn "cites name after name, and he conveys the impression that Jews supplied the leadership as well as the rank and file of this movement, adding naively that his stress on Jewish radicals 'does not mean, of course, that there were not many and important revolutionaries among the Russians.'"

The first response of someone like me — an Orthodox Jew who if I'd been alive in that place in the year 1917 would have vigorously opposed the radicals — might be to applaud Solzhenitsyn's schematic of Russian-Jewish history. After all, he would have put me in the camp of the good Jews.

And yet a second, more considered response would draw back from self-congratulation. This tendency to split us into good and bad Jews is very ancient, and typically comes to no good.

You see it in the earliest texts of the world's other two monotheistic faiths. From the start, the traditions that became Christianity and Islam were obsessed with the Jews and our failure to accept the new teachings of Jesus and Mohammed, respectively. In all four Gospels, Jesus is constantly fussing with the rabbinic sages, known in the Bible as Pharisees, who question his interpretation of Jewish law. Mohammed, for his part, on page after page of the Koran denounces "the People of the Book" in the harshest terms for rejecting his message. Yet in both cases there are exceptions, Jews who "get it" and merit a pat on the head.

"God has cursed [the Jews] in their unbelief," writes Mohammed. "They have no faith, except a few of them" (4:46). Elsewhere: "You will ever find them deceitful, except for a few of them" (5:13).

In John's account of Jesus' ministry, to take the example of the most Judeo-phobic of the Gospels, the division of the Jews into bad and good is a recurring theme. John writes, "Some of the Pharisees said, 'This man [Jesus] is not from God, for he does not keep the Sabbath.' But others said, 'How can a man who is a sinner do such signs?'" (9:16). Or: "There was again a division among the Jews because of these words. Many of them said, 'He has a demon, and he is mad; why listen to him?' Others said, 'These are not the sayings of one who has a demon. Can a demon open the eyes of the blind?'" (10:19-21).

Solzhenitsyn's book, it should be pointed out, differs from these older texts in an important way. After all, in the Gospels and the Koran, it's the Jews who adhere to the teachings of their ancestors who are cast into the fire of the bad Jews, while in Solzhenitsyn it's precisely the observant Jews who are registered in the roles of good Jews. Yet the spirit is too close, I think, for comfort.

This is not to say that Solzhenitsyn isn't right — factually speaking. In a given society, there may well be a party of Jews who stand for values that damage and undermine, and another party that stand for different values that enlighten and refine.

But the factual truth may not be the spiritual truth. It's important to remember how God sees things. In His eyes, as both the Bible and the rabbis make clear, the Jewish people are a single — and most singular — spiritual organism. The crimes of some Jews redound to the discredit of all the other Jews, while the converse is also true: the merit of the saints, the tzadikim, saves the rest of us from the troubles and tribulations we deserve.

If this is God's perspective, it should also be ours. The impulse to pat Solzhenitsyn on the back for patting some of us on the head should be resisted. As Jews, we are in this life, and in history, together, for better or for worse, the very best among us and the very worst. A writer who wants to divide us in half, some for praise, others for scorn, may not be an antisemite — but he's not our friend either.

David Klinghoffer's new book, "The Discovery of God: Abraham and the Birth of Monotheism," will be published by Doubleday in March.