The Wiener Holocaust Library. Founded by Dr Alfred Wiener in 1933, it is described in its Home website section as '...one of the world's leading and most extensive archives on the Holocaust and Nazi era'. Today its research, teaching and advocacy work extend beyond the Holocaust to other acts of genocide, a piquant irony in view of the anger launched at Israel over its response to the Hamas terrorist attack of 7th October.
You can find the Library nestled in a corner of Russell Square on the edge of the University of London Senate House complex. I still have a reading card for it. I used the Library for research when I was writing a history Master's Dissertation on a case that explored the intersection of law and history in relation to the Holocaust. Irving v Penguin Books and Lipstadt, if you have any interest. When I went there for research the security was no more than using an entryphone and being checked out on camera before being allowed through the inner door. I have not been by for a while. I suspect that the security will be greater today.
Wiener appeared again when I recently read the cosily entitled, but magnificent in breadth and depth, Hitler, Stalin, Mum and Dad, by Wiener's grandson, the journalist and peer Daniel Finkelstein. I commend this book to you, as much as I commend any work that helps us to understand the geo-political forces that directly or indirectly have contributed to the development of Israel and that moves us beyond the intellectual compass of the keyboard warriors and placard-wavers who thrill to the belief that rhetoric rules. All words quoted below will be from this book unless I state otherwise.
If anyone reads pieces like this article, they will be reaching out to decide where the writer stands, so for the avoidance of doubt if you have not read anything I have written previously, I defend the right of Israel to exist as a state in some form. It is probably safety first for me to say this, as I will now recount a small portion of Finkelstein's book, where he explains Wiener's early scepticism over the practical viability of Israel as a safe and secure home for the Jewish people.
It is impossible to explain Wiener's thinking without seeing from where he came. We were in 1920s Germany, a country in a nervous state after the outcome of World War 1, left and right of the political spectrum fighting for supremacy, and hyperinflation on the way to eviscerate any hope that ordinary Germans might have of a return to stable economic life. And for the Jewish community, there was the lingering backdrop of antisemitism, this unshakeable prejudice that Jews worldwide wielded conspiratorial power over institutions in any country where there was a Jewish presence.
Wiener, as General Secretary of the Central Union of Jewish Citizens of the Jewish Faith, fought against these prejudices, not just in the narrow sense of defending his community, but to '...spread the ideas of tolerance, liberalism, and equality of man'. Yet ranged against those supporting his beliefs were the incipient forces of Adolf Hitler, buoyed by Hitler gaining a platform for his views after the Beer Hall Putsch, his failed coup d'etat of 1923.
Germany as a safe home for an integrated Jewish community? The jury was out. Wiener's battle of ideas was toward Jews in Germany being accepted as fully German as well as fully Jewish. But counter to him were the sceptics who believed that '...the idea that the marriage of Germanness and Jewishness was a stable one seemed a hopeless delusion'.
So where could home be, if not Germany? For some at least of those sceptics, the answer was a Jewish state in Palestine. Those of this belief had become known as Zionists, the Zionist movement having originated decades before (though anti-Zionism, as Jake Wallis Simons has pointed out in his recently published Israelophobia, has for the radical left now become a cipher for antisemitism ie Jew hatred, a convenient way of repackaging the latter under the veneer of concern over Israel's treatment of Palestinians).
Wiener understood the desire of Jews to have a home in Palestine. He knew what he was talking about, always helpful when expressing opinions - he had spent time in Palestine as a student and as a solider. Finkelstein emphasises 'home' not state, an uncomfortable thought for Zionists. The precise word comes from the Balfour Declaration, a statement in a 1917 letter by British Foreign Secretary Arthur Balfour to Lord Rothschild. Here it is:
'His Majesty's Government views with favour the establishment in Palestine of a national home for the Jewish people, and will use their best endeavours to facilitate the achievement of this object, it being clearly understood that nothing shall be done which may prejudice the civil and religious rights of existing non-Jewish communities in Palestine, or the rights and political status enjoyed by Jews in any other country'.
The Declaration marks an early point in the twisting path towards the 1948 declaration of independence by Israel; my italics underline the challenge that modern-day Israel was going to face.
Wiener, a man for evidence, embarked on 35-day tour of Palestine in 1926. He met with the Zionist leaders in the region, and talked to as many of the settlers as he could manage. His reflections came in a book published in 1927, A Critical Journey Through Palestine. Finkelstein summarises Wiener's critique as follows:
- Zionism was utopian, and overlooked obvious practical problems.
- Palestinian land was not large enough to absorb all of European Jewry.
- A doubt over whether Jewish settlements could be economically successful, though Wiener commended the 'splendid will' of the young people. Linked was a challenge in reconciling the socialist idealism of many Zionists with their dependence on funds from Jews living abroad.
- A fear of Zionist chauvinism. Wiener was an Arabic scholar and had a deep affection for the Arab world. His words: '...such a people should not be ignored or treated with suspicion, rather, one should make every effort to live with them in friendship'.
- From the last point, Finkelstein's summary of Wiener's apprehension: '...that there would be violent rejection of the Jews, and their home in Palestine would never be secure'.
So this is not the dystopian prophesy that some readers of my article might have thought was coming, that a Jewish home in Palestine was unconditionally doomed to failure. The reflection is more nuanced; it is of concern, not outright dismissal. And of course Wiener's own utopian, as it turned out, vision of the home for German Jews being Germany, was blown apart by the rise of Nazism, with Wiener suffering the emotionally mortal blow of his German citizenship being revoked in 1939 out of his being allegedly one of those whose activities (words from Nazi legislation) '...have damaged German interests through behaviour that violates the duty of loyalty to the Reich and the people'.
Nevertheless, the future challenges for Zionists were spelt out by Wiener, although with hindsight only one has remained uncomfortably in the throat for the Israeli population.
To deal with the first one quickly, I have not read around enough to be clear if Wiener did seriously think that logistically Germany, let alone Europe, could be emptied of Jews and that they could be deposited wholesale in Palestine - it seems unlikely.
On the more significant economic success point, Wiener as a scholar but not a clairvoyant might not have realised that the 'splendid will' he encountered from younger Jews would harden into a bloody-minded determination to survive and economically prosper, determination reinforced by the knowledge of an existential threat from the Middle Eastern factions that saw Israel as an aberration that needed to be obliterated. If you get this then you will appreciate better today's Israeli psyche.
It is the last concern that presaged what was to come, an Israeli state that was born through conflict, and whose growth has had embedded in it the never absent dichotomy of proud achievement alongside neurotic fear of genocidal dispossession. To this add a further dichotomy, Israel's military superiority in the region alongside its dependence upon the United States, in everything from hardware to global diplomacy, continuing to support its client state, with the last resort being Israel playing the brinkmanship card - fail to support us and your bulwark of Western democracy will be shattered.
Sadly Finkelstein is pessimistic:
'The greater Jewish tragedy is that as Jews [in Wiener's time] argued over which solution could long guarantee peace, security and acceptance, history would reveal that none of them could. That none of them can [my italics].
If that is fatalism, perhaps we would want to reject it and maintain hope. Perhaps we are in a liminal period before an alliance of moderate Arab states joins with Israel and the US in putting Iran and its own client elements back in the box. And as one writer pointed out recently, the modern state of Israel is little more than 75 years old and we are looking at a long, long game.
Always better for the soul to keep some sense of optimism.
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The author is a writer, speaker, historian, and former Managing Partner of a City law firm.