What happened when the Jews found out their strength

I recently came across an essay by Mark Twain called “Concerning the Jews,” published in 1899. It is admiring, provocative, occasionally stereotypical, and at moments so eerily prescient that Twain seems to be reporting from the future.

This was one of those moments:

“Dr. Herzl has a clear insight into the value” of concentration, Twain wrote. “He wishes to gather the Jews of the world together in Palestine, with a government of their own.”

Twain did not object, but he offered a warning:

“It will not be well to let that race find out its strength. If the horses knew theirs, we should not ride any more.”

Forty-nine years later, the horses found out.

The State of Israel was born.

Twain could not have imagined Hebrew revived, deserts turned into farmland, refugees transformed into citizens, or a tiny Jewish state becoming a center of global technology. But somehow, he sensed the potential.

For centuries, Jewish talent had been scattered across the world, usually at the pleasure—and always at the mercy—of somebody else. Jews could help build a country but could never be certain it would continue to permit them to live there. Their abilities could be employed, taxed, restricted, confiscated, or expelled.

Twain’s horse metaphor captured that condition with uncomfortable precision: Jewish strength was harnessed for someone else’s purposes because someone else held the reins.

Zionism was the moment the horse looked over its shoulder.

Herzl understood that the Jewish problem was not a shortage of talent but of power: political, military, and sovereign. A dispersed people could produce extraordinary individuals. Concentrated in its ancestral homeland, that people might restore a civilization.

Nations have spent centuries accusing Jews of possessing too much power while ensuring they possessed almost none. They resented Jewish success, restricted Jewish participation, confiscated Jewish property, and periodically expelled the Jewish population—only to watch those Jews enrich another city, kingdom, or continent.

History contains few acts of national self-sabotage as reliable as expelling the Jews.

Keeping the Prejudice, Exporting the Talent

By the end of the fifteenth century, Spain’s Jews had produced one of the great civilizations of the Diaspora. Then Ferdinand and Isabella decided Spain would be better off without them. The Alhambra Decree of 1492 gave practicing Jews a brutal choice: convert or leave.

Spain kept much of their property. Other countries received their people.

The expelled Sephardim brought languages, skills, and commercial networks to North Africa, Europe, and the Ottoman Empire. The civilization Spain rejected became an asset to the societies that received it.

The pattern reached........

© The Times of Israel (Blogs)