Joseph Roth: The Wandering Jews

There are no longer borders that protect against miscegenation. Therefore every Jew erects borders around himself. It would be a shame to give them up. Because however great the need, the future will bring the most magnificent deliverance. The apparent cowardice of the Jew who doesn’t respond to the stone thrown at him by the child and who seems deaf to the shouted insult is, in fact, the pride of someone who knows that he will one day prevail. He knows that nothing can happen to him except by God’s will, and that nothing will shield him from harm as sublimely as God’s will. Has he not happily allowed himself to be burned? What can a pebble do to hurt him; how can the saliva of a rabid dog harm him? The contempt that the Eastern Jew feels for the unbeliever is a thousand times greater than any that is directed at him. What is the rich nobleman, the police officer, the general, the governor, compared to a single word of God, one of those words that a Jew always has in his heart? Even as he greets the nobleman, he laughs at him. What does the nobleman know of the inner meaning of life? Even if he had wisdom, his wisdom would be froth on the surface of things. He may know the laws of the land, build railways, invent all manner of curious things, write books, and go hunting with kings. But what are all these compared to a tiny character in the Holy Scripture, compared to the most ignorant question from the youngest Talmud student?

The Jew who thinks like this will not be greatly interested in any law that promises him personal and national liberty. Nothing truly good can come to him from people. In fact it is almost a sin to try to secure something from them. This Jew is not a “nationalist” in the Western sense. He is God’s Jew. He does not fight for any Palestine. He detests the Zionist, who uses ridiculous European methods to try to set up a Judaism that doesn’t deserve the name, because it won’t abide the coming of the Messiah and God’s change of heart, which are sure to come. In that crazy stubbornness, there is as much courage and spirit of sacrifice as there is in the bravery of the young halutzim who are building Palestine — even though the one may attain an end and the other its own destruction. There can be no compromise between that Orthodoxy and the kind of Zionism that will build roads even on the Sabbath. An Orthodox hasid from the East will prefer a Christian to a Zionist. For the latter would change Judaism root and branch. His Jewish nation would be along the lines of a European state. The outcome might be a sovereign nation, but it wouldn’t have any Jews in it. These Jews have failed to notice that progress is destroying the Jewish religion, that fewer and fewer believers are holding out, and that the numbers of the faithful are dwindling. They fail to make any connection between developments in the wider world and developments in Judaism. They have a lofty and a mistaken way of thinking.

Many Orthodox Jews have allowed themselves to be persuaded. They no longer see in the shaved beard the mark of the defector. Their children and grandchildren go to work in Palestine. Their children become Jewish nationalist politicians. They have accepted how things are and have reconciled themselves to it, but they still have not ceased to believe in the miracle of the Messiah. They have made compromises.

Still bitter and unreconciled, however, are a great many hasids, who occupy a very remarkable position within Judaism. To the Western European they are as exotic and remote as, say, the inhabitants of the Himalayan region, who are now so much in fashion.* In fact they are even more mysterious, because, being more prudent than those other helpless objects of European inquisitiveness, they have already come to know the superficial civilization of Europe, and they are resolutely unimpressed by such things as film projectors, or binoculars or airplanes. But even if their naïveté and their hospitality had been as great as those of other people who have suffered at the hands of our desire for knowledge, even then it would be hard to persuade a European man of learning to embark on a voyage of discovery among the hasids. The Jew, because he lives everywhere in our midst, has ostensibly already been “researched.” Meanwhile, the things that happen at the court of a wonder-rabbi are at least as interesting as with your Indian fakir.

There are many wonder-rabbis living in the East, and each one is reckoned by his supporters to be the greatest. The calling of wonder-rabbi has been handed down from father to son for generations. Each one holds court, and each one has his lifeguard of hasids, who come and go in his house, fast and pray, and take their meals with him. He has the power of blessing, and his blessing is efficacious. He can curse too, and his curse will blight an entire family. Woe betide the skeptic who talks dismissively about him. Fortunate the believer who comes to him bearing gifts. The rabbi doesn’t take them for himself. He lives more modestly than the meanest beggar. He eats only so much as will barely keep him alive. He lives only that he may serve God. He takes small morsels of food and small sups of drink. When he sits at a table among his people, he takes a single mouthful from the richly heaped plate in front of him, and then he sends the rest around the table. Every guest is sent away replete with the rabbi’s food. He himself knows no physical needs. The enjoyment of his wife is a sacred duty to him and is a pleasure only because it is a duty. He must sire children so that the people of Israel should be as numerous as the sand on the shore or the stars in the sky. All other women are banished from his immediate circle. Food, too, is not food, so much as thanks to the Creator for the miracle of food and obedience to the injunction to nourish himself from the fruits of the earth and the flesh of beasts — which God has created for mankind. Day and night the rabbi reads in his holy books. Many of them he has read so many times that he knows them by heart. But every word, every letter even, contains millions of pages, and every page tells of the greatness of God, never sufficiently to be learned.

Day after day people come to him with a dear friend who has fallen ill or a mother who is dying, who are threatened with imprisonment or are wanted by the authorities, whose son has been called up so that he may drill on behalf of strangers and die on behalf of strangers in their senseless war. Or by those whose wives are barren and who want a son. Or by people who are faced with a great decision and are uncertain what to do. The rabbi helps and intercedes not only between man and God, but between man and his fellow man, which is still harder. People come to him from far afield. In the course of a single year, he hears the most extraordinary stories, and no case is so complicated that he hasn’t already heard one that was still more so. The rabbi has wisdom and experience in equal measure; he has as much practical common sense as he has confidence in himself and his mission. He is able to offer advice or prayer. He has learned to interpret the sentences of Scripture and the instructions of God in a way that does not bring them into conflict with the laws of earthly life, and he leaves no little chinks anywhere through which a liar might manage to slip. Since the first day of Creation, many things have changed but not the will of God, which expresses itself in the basic laws of the world. There is no need of any compromises to prove that. Everything is just a question of understanding. Whoever has seen as much as the rabbi is already beyond the reach of doubt. He has left the stage of wisdom behind him. The circle is unbroken. Man is once more a believer. The arrogant science of the surgeon kills the patient, and the empty knowledge of the physicist leads his students into error. One no longer believes the knower. One believes the believer.