Practicing History_ Selected Essays - Barbara W. Tuchman [121]
Assimilation was a solution born of the Enlightenment—a dream of adaptation within a dominant Gentile society while supposedly maintaining something not quite definable called Judaism. Whether this was to be equivalent to or more than the Jewish religion depended on the individual interpreter, but in any case it tended to shrivel in partnership with assimilation. In degree and nature the whole concept of assimilation was a disturbing problem of belief tortured by doubt, and so troubling that it was not discussed in front of the children. It is likely, I suspect, to remain forever unsolved, never wholly achieved or wholly abandoned.
Meanwhile the record suffers from a certain distortion—in that the dominant voice, as in every historical record, belongs to the victors, who in this case are the Zionists. Events proved them right with regard to the revival of Israel, and the assimilationists wrong. Consequently the former appear in the record as the disciples of truth and the latter as obstructionists, blind and selfish bitter-enders, objects of scorn and sometimes of malice. The malice and falsity of Felix Frankfurter’s recollections of Morgenthau, published after the subject was safely dead, are a mean-spirited example.
Yet while the Zionists supplied the impulse, the ideal, and the driving force, not to mention the settlers, the fact remains that the German-Jewish leaders in America, whether from motives of guilt or reinsurance or a sense of responsibility, or a mixture of these, gave the support without which there would have been no living settlement to incorporate statehood. The work of Louis Marshall, for one, was essential. As chief spokesman of the “establishment,” he cooperated with Chaim Weizmann to create the Jewish Agency, through which non-Zionists could support the settlement in Palestine. Nathan Straus was another. His support of public-health and other projects in Palestine, estimated to have absorbed two-thirds of his fortune, is commemorated in the town named Netanya on Israel’s seacoast. Ultimately it was Morgenthau’s son, Henry Jr., who, on leaving Roosevelt’s Cabinet, assumed the chairmanship of the United Jewish Appeal in 1947–50 and raised the funds critical for the survival of Israel in the endangered first years of statehood. He was galvanized, I have no doubt, by the failure of his ceaseless effort, as Secretary of the Treasury under Roosevelt, to make the President take some effective action to save Jews from Hitler’s final solution.
Needless to say, the German program of annihilation was the experience that turned assimilationists into supporters of statehood, anti-Zionists into reluctant pro-Zionists. Nor was it Hitler alone who accomplished the change but the reaction of the Western democracies—the lack of protest, the elaborate do-nothing international conferences, the pious evasions, the passive connivance in which Hitler read his cue, the avoidance of rescue, the American refusal to loosen immigration quotas when death camps were the alternative, the refusal even of temporary shelter, the turning back of refugee ships filled with those rescued by Jewish efforts. More than nine hundred on board the St. Louis were turned back to Europe within sight of the lights of Miami, more than seven hundred on board the leaking Struma were turned back from Palestine to sink with all on board in the Black Sea. Was their fate so very different from that of Auschwitz?
The accumulation of these things slowly brought to light what had long lurked in the shadows of ancient memory: a bitter recognition that the Gentile world—with all due respect to notable and memorable exceptions—would fundamentally have felt relieved by the final solution. That the Jewish “establishment” came to believe this about the Gentiles cannot be documented because it was the great unmentionable, too painful to acknowledge, but basically this is what shattered the faith of assimilationists and