Interesting take on territorialism, but your analysis of the Charedi position is missing an important point. Eastern European countries owe their current democracy and security in large part due to ethnic cleansing that resulted in relative homogeneity. Recall that, in addition to the destruction of European Jewry, millions of Germans were expelled from Eastern Europe after World War II.
You are correct that “The Jewish community in Hungary is the most safe and secure in Europe.” However, if Charedim would en masse immigrate to Hungary today, would it remain so safe and secure? Eastern Europe can accommodate tiny Jewish minorities, but the interwar period showed that it had no place for large, economically and politically dynamic Jewish populations of the kind we see in Israel and America.
You are definitely correct that one of the conditions for civil peace in Eastern Europe today is that Ukraine got rid of its Poles and Poland got rid of its Ukrainians etc. Hypothetically, this could have been done without kicking out the Jews (since they had nowhere analogous to go), but that's probably not what would have gone down.
I don't accept that the the interwar period is *necessarily* demonstrative of what Eastern Europe would have looked like today sans WW2. Nationalism was very fashionable so Eastern Europe was very nationalist, but why does it follow that it would be very nationalist today? Obviously counter-factuals are very hard yada yada.
I did some quick back of the paper calculations based on the proportion of Hungary's Jewish population and based on that Eastern Europe could easily accommodate 1 million Jews no problem. You could double Hungary's Jewish population and I doubt anyone would mind, so that's 2 million. 4 million is probably stretching it. But then it's not like everyone would have had to stay forever anyway. America opened its borders in 1964.
So, in sum, if we imagine no Nazis then it would have been pretty rough, but not greatly rougher than going to EY.
Counter-factuals are hard, though interesting and occasionally enlightening. Even without Nazism, the future of Jews in Eastern Europe was looking grim. From https://jewishreviewofbooks.com/holocaust/14390/at-the-edge-of-what/: "Polish Jews saw themselves as overwhelmingly poor, fundamentally unsafe, and deeply uncertain about their future.... The Polish political arena was split largely between parties prepared to bear the presence of Jews as long as they remained in their proper place (as second-class citizens who owed the Polish nation gratitude for its historic tolerance and whose needs and interests must always be subordinate to those of ethnic Poles) and parties who saw no legitimate place for Jews in Poland at all."
Traditionalist and quietist, we might say "cucked," Jews, might have been content being second-class citizens in Eastern European nation-states. But the upwardly mobile Jewish masses were eager to emigrate. Without Israel, the bulk of them would have headed for Western Europe and the New World, if those doors were open to them. But how large of a Jewish minority would even the "enlightened" West tolerate? I think you're right that it's a question of numbers, and the Zionists recognized the fundamental problem that there were too many Jews (who were politically and economically restless) for universal, continued minority status to be tenable.
No-one's denying the situation was grim, and no-one then was denying the situation was grim. The question was would it stay grim (or get worse), or was the best thing to just keep your head down and ride it out. My point was that in the actual timeline we have, in fact things got much better, and Eastern Europe is now a pretty great place for Jews to live. Your point (which is correct and I accept) is that the Holocaust and post-WW2 ethnic cleansing wasn't incidental to that, but a causal part of Eastern Europe getting better.
Again, I think that's correct, but it's not the whole story. Hatred of Jews based on blood-libels, killing Jesus etc. would have decline anyway because of the general decline of fervent Christian faith. Nationalism-based hatred of Jews would have declined because of the general decline of nationalism. A lot of people in the 1920s and 30s believed in genuinely deranged forms of nationalism, every bit as ridiculous as transmania today. The Iron Guard, for example, got 15% of the vote in Romania 1937 running on a platform that makes Dylan Roof look like Mitt Romney. If you take these away (and I don't see any reason to assume they would just have persisted indefinitely) then a lot of the impetus behind giving Jews grief would have gone away.
We’ll never know, obviously. But Jews at the time were drawn to ideologies like Zionism and Communism (not to mention simple emigration) precisely because the status quo, including Charedi quietism, was untenable and radical change seemed necessary. Eastern European nationalists agreed. For example, in the late 1930s, the Polish government worked with Revisionist Zionists on a plan for the mass immigration of its "superfluous" Jews to Palestine. Some Polish leaders actually proposed moving Jews to Madagascar instead. In this, they were certainly more humane than the Nazis, but most Central and Eastern European nationalists shared an understanding that there was a "Jewish problem" that needed to be solved.
Again, I think “riding it out” was no longer an option for a large, increasingly enlightened (in the Haskalah sense) minority population with essentially too much human capital for the majority population to accept. The problem in Eastern Europe was too structural--the presence of a demographically, economically, and intellectually robust nation within other nations--for antisemitic nationalism to die out naturally. Perhaps it would have done so after a mass emigration of Jews (possibly driven by quotas, boycotts, and smaller-scale violence), but the question then turns to their destination.
"Again, I think “riding it out” was no longer an option for a large, increasingly enlightened (in the Haskalah sense) minority population with essentially too much human capital for the majority population to accept."
I think that's true enough, but you're essentially saying the Charedi solution couldn't work because too many Jews weren't Charedi. But the whole point of the Charedi argument is that they *should* have been Charedi.
There's an interesting broader context to this discussion, which is the decline of traditional rabbinic authority in Eastern Europe. Most of the Charedi were opposed to Zionism, Bundism, and emigration to America (the "treyfe medina"), but that didn't prevent large numbers of Jews from embracing these alternatives. The Charedi response to the modern Jewish condition, such as it was, was broadly seen as inadequate.
As a counter-factual, I could imagine a scenario in which, without the Holocaust, most Jews emigrate from Eastern Europe except the Charedim. If there is an Israel in this timeline, it would probably be stronger without a large, non-Zionist Charedi minority. Life wouldn't be easy for the Charedi as an unwanted remnant in Eastern Europe, but at least their dress would be more appropriate for the climate.
Large populations of minorities, Jews probably in particular, usually do cause trouble (the only really non-antisemitic countries like Italy or WE had negligible Jews), so I agree it definitely can't be assumed that levels of antisemitism or xenophobia in EE would be the same as they are today. The region's ethnic conflict was also usually pinned on Jewish economic activities deemed exploitative, to a good extent a similar dynamic to the overseas Chinese in SE Asia, which nationalism only exacerbated.
I thought that the overwhelming number of Jews were just normal people who emigrated West, mostly to the US (with UK, Australia, and Canada in the mix). They junked the old religion and embarked on the road to assimilation. I have no label for these people. Normies might do.
This was my take as well - every Jew I've ever known had an origin like this, a reaction of "welp, the religion didn't work, we got holocausted" and then journeyed west to safer climes.
Interesting take, but I find it fundamentally unconvincing. By the time the gates of Palestine had slammed shut in 1939, many of those who understood that the European soil was starting to burn under their feet, had found a way to go there. I know that from personal testimonies in the family. The majority, by the time they understood, were trapped. So I doubt that the availability of a territory in an actual godforsaken location would have changed much. The Charedim are fundamentally conservative and passive. They would have maintained their illusion that "this too will pass" until it was too late no matter what.
On the other hand, it is doubtful that a movement to settle in Uganda (or in Alaska, with Michael Chabon in the role of Herzl https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/16703.The_Yiddish_Policemen_s_Union) could have mustered the Jewish nationalistic energies that were unleashed by the return to Zion. And finally, in such an alternative reality, it is doubtful that the local populations - be they Bantu, Inuit or gauchos - would have accepted thriving Jewish Yishuv in their midst anymore than the Palestinian Arabs accepted it.
So, yeah, the Holocaust did in fact vindicate Zionism.
1) I definitely think the Holocaust discredited the Charedi position, but for the same reason it discredited the Zionist position, which was that there was no particularly imminent danger and, therefore, organised Jewry should divert Jews *away* from arranging transport away from Eastern Europe and into building up settlements in Palestine. From 1906-1912, 13,000 Jews emigrated to Argentina each year. If even half of the money sunk into buying up land in Eretz Yisrael at incredibly inflated prices had been spent there, easily a million could have been settled there. And that's just one example.
2) It's true that Territorialism suffered from the problem of not being able to rouse the Jewish masses to action, or in other words it was too rational. But this all seems to me an argument for being *more* rational.
3) The key flaw in Territorialism for me is that it was still too Zionist, in that it was focussed on picking one territory. What we should have done is been adaptive and flexible, taking advantage of opportunities as they arose and then moving on. You might say this meant giving up on dreams of independence but (a) so what? and (b) look at Kiryas Yoel.
It doesn't scale. The 100,000 Jews that settled in Argentina - with considerable help of the Rothschild and Hirsch families - encountered strong local opposition. There is no way that Argentina would have let ten times more in (20% of its population). And while a single Kiryas Yoel might be tolerated, an archipelago of Kiryas Yoels would not be for long. That's the basic flaw of territorialism: there are no virgin territories. You will always encounter friction. So the rational position is: let it be at least where it makes historical sense to defend against it.
It seems to scale OK. There are 6 million Jews in America and it's fine. The easiest way to avoid friction is to try out lots of different places and see where there is least friction.
That's not territorialism. That is what Jews have always done, look for more welcoming shores when the situation became intolerable - as individuals. My point is that this is nor feasible in large numbers and in an organized way, because of the reasons I mentioned. The only example of a massive, organized exodus of Jewish communities to a new location is the emigration of the Jews from the Arab countries, once Arab nationalism made it impossible for them to stay, to Israel.
Even if it’s not “territorialism” I think it still proves the point that Zionism didn’t offer the proper solution to safety. Last time I checked there weren’t intifadas and thousands of Jews getting killed in pogroms in America, Argentina, or even France.
Interesting take on territorialism, but your analysis of the Charedi position is missing an important point. Eastern European countries owe their current democracy and security in large part due to ethnic cleansing that resulted in relative homogeneity. Recall that, in addition to the destruction of European Jewry, millions of Germans were expelled from Eastern Europe after World War II.
You are correct that “The Jewish community in Hungary is the most safe and secure in Europe.” However, if Charedim would en masse immigrate to Hungary today, would it remain so safe and secure? Eastern Europe can accommodate tiny Jewish minorities, but the interwar period showed that it had no place for large, economically and politically dynamic Jewish populations of the kind we see in Israel and America.
You are definitely correct that one of the conditions for civil peace in Eastern Europe today is that Ukraine got rid of its Poles and Poland got rid of its Ukrainians etc. Hypothetically, this could have been done without kicking out the Jews (since they had nowhere analogous to go), but that's probably not what would have gone down.
I don't accept that the the interwar period is *necessarily* demonstrative of what Eastern Europe would have looked like today sans WW2. Nationalism was very fashionable so Eastern Europe was very nationalist, but why does it follow that it would be very nationalist today? Obviously counter-factuals are very hard yada yada.
I did some quick back of the paper calculations based on the proportion of Hungary's Jewish population and based on that Eastern Europe could easily accommodate 1 million Jews no problem. You could double Hungary's Jewish population and I doubt anyone would mind, so that's 2 million. 4 million is probably stretching it. But then it's not like everyone would have had to stay forever anyway. America opened its borders in 1964.
So, in sum, if we imagine no Nazis then it would have been pretty rough, but not greatly rougher than going to EY.
Counter-factuals are hard, though interesting and occasionally enlightening. Even without Nazism, the future of Jews in Eastern Europe was looking grim. From https://jewishreviewofbooks.com/holocaust/14390/at-the-edge-of-what/: "Polish Jews saw themselves as overwhelmingly poor, fundamentally unsafe, and deeply uncertain about their future.... The Polish political arena was split largely between parties prepared to bear the presence of Jews as long as they remained in their proper place (as second-class citizens who owed the Polish nation gratitude for its historic tolerance and whose needs and interests must always be subordinate to those of ethnic Poles) and parties who saw no legitimate place for Jews in Poland at all."
Traditionalist and quietist, we might say "cucked," Jews, might have been content being second-class citizens in Eastern European nation-states. But the upwardly mobile Jewish masses were eager to emigrate. Without Israel, the bulk of them would have headed for Western Europe and the New World, if those doors were open to them. But how large of a Jewish minority would even the "enlightened" West tolerate? I think you're right that it's a question of numbers, and the Zionists recognized the fundamental problem that there were too many Jews (who were politically and economically restless) for universal, continued minority status to be tenable.
No-one's denying the situation was grim, and no-one then was denying the situation was grim. The question was would it stay grim (or get worse), or was the best thing to just keep your head down and ride it out. My point was that in the actual timeline we have, in fact things got much better, and Eastern Europe is now a pretty great place for Jews to live. Your point (which is correct and I accept) is that the Holocaust and post-WW2 ethnic cleansing wasn't incidental to that, but a causal part of Eastern Europe getting better.
Again, I think that's correct, but it's not the whole story. Hatred of Jews based on blood-libels, killing Jesus etc. would have decline anyway because of the general decline of fervent Christian faith. Nationalism-based hatred of Jews would have declined because of the general decline of nationalism. A lot of people in the 1920s and 30s believed in genuinely deranged forms of nationalism, every bit as ridiculous as transmania today. The Iron Guard, for example, got 15% of the vote in Romania 1937 running on a platform that makes Dylan Roof look like Mitt Romney. If you take these away (and I don't see any reason to assume they would just have persisted indefinitely) then a lot of the impetus behind giving Jews grief would have gone away.
We’ll never know, obviously. But Jews at the time were drawn to ideologies like Zionism and Communism (not to mention simple emigration) precisely because the status quo, including Charedi quietism, was untenable and radical change seemed necessary. Eastern European nationalists agreed. For example, in the late 1930s, the Polish government worked with Revisionist Zionists on a plan for the mass immigration of its "superfluous" Jews to Palestine. Some Polish leaders actually proposed moving Jews to Madagascar instead. In this, they were certainly more humane than the Nazis, but most Central and Eastern European nationalists shared an understanding that there was a "Jewish problem" that needed to be solved.
Again, I think “riding it out” was no longer an option for a large, increasingly enlightened (in the Haskalah sense) minority population with essentially too much human capital for the majority population to accept. The problem in Eastern Europe was too structural--the presence of a demographically, economically, and intellectually robust nation within other nations--for antisemitic nationalism to die out naturally. Perhaps it would have done so after a mass emigration of Jews (possibly driven by quotas, boycotts, and smaller-scale violence), but the question then turns to their destination.
"Again, I think “riding it out” was no longer an option for a large, increasingly enlightened (in the Haskalah sense) minority population with essentially too much human capital for the majority population to accept."
I think that's true enough, but you're essentially saying the Charedi solution couldn't work because too many Jews weren't Charedi. But the whole point of the Charedi argument is that they *should* have been Charedi.
There's an interesting broader context to this discussion, which is the decline of traditional rabbinic authority in Eastern Europe. Most of the Charedi were opposed to Zionism, Bundism, and emigration to America (the "treyfe medina"), but that didn't prevent large numbers of Jews from embracing these alternatives. The Charedi response to the modern Jewish condition, such as it was, was broadly seen as inadequate.
As a counter-factual, I could imagine a scenario in which, without the Holocaust, most Jews emigrate from Eastern Europe except the Charedim. If there is an Israel in this timeline, it would probably be stronger without a large, non-Zionist Charedi minority. Life wouldn't be easy for the Charedi as an unwanted remnant in Eastern Europe, but at least their dress would be more appropriate for the climate.
Large populations of minorities, Jews probably in particular, usually do cause trouble (the only really non-antisemitic countries like Italy or WE had negligible Jews), so I agree it definitely can't be assumed that levels of antisemitism or xenophobia in EE would be the same as they are today. The region's ethnic conflict was also usually pinned on Jewish economic activities deemed exploitative, to a good extent a similar dynamic to the overseas Chinese in SE Asia, which nationalism only exacerbated.
I thought that the overwhelming number of Jews were just normal people who emigrated West, mostly to the US (with UK, Australia, and Canada in the mix). They junked the old religion and embarked on the road to assimilation. I have no label for these people. Normies might do.
This was my take as well - every Jew I've ever known had an origin like this, a reaction of "welp, the religion didn't work, we got holocausted" and then journeyed west to safer climes.
Interesting take, but I find it fundamentally unconvincing. By the time the gates of Palestine had slammed shut in 1939, many of those who understood that the European soil was starting to burn under their feet, had found a way to go there. I know that from personal testimonies in the family. The majority, by the time they understood, were trapped. So I doubt that the availability of a territory in an actual godforsaken location would have changed much. The Charedim are fundamentally conservative and passive. They would have maintained their illusion that "this too will pass" until it was too late no matter what.
On the other hand, it is doubtful that a movement to settle in Uganda (or in Alaska, with Michael Chabon in the role of Herzl https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/16703.The_Yiddish_Policemen_s_Union) could have mustered the Jewish nationalistic energies that were unleashed by the return to Zion. And finally, in such an alternative reality, it is doubtful that the local populations - be they Bantu, Inuit or gauchos - would have accepted thriving Jewish Yishuv in their midst anymore than the Palestinian Arabs accepted it.
So, yeah, the Holocaust did in fact vindicate Zionism.
So there are few different points here:
1) I definitely think the Holocaust discredited the Charedi position, but for the same reason it discredited the Zionist position, which was that there was no particularly imminent danger and, therefore, organised Jewry should divert Jews *away* from arranging transport away from Eastern Europe and into building up settlements in Palestine. From 1906-1912, 13,000 Jews emigrated to Argentina each year. If even half of the money sunk into buying up land in Eretz Yisrael at incredibly inflated prices had been spent there, easily a million could have been settled there. And that's just one example.
2) It's true that Territorialism suffered from the problem of not being able to rouse the Jewish masses to action, or in other words it was too rational. But this all seems to me an argument for being *more* rational.
3) The key flaw in Territorialism for me is that it was still too Zionist, in that it was focussed on picking one territory. What we should have done is been adaptive and flexible, taking advantage of opportunities as they arose and then moving on. You might say this meant giving up on dreams of independence but (a) so what? and (b) look at Kiryas Yoel.
It doesn't scale. The 100,000 Jews that settled in Argentina - with considerable help of the Rothschild and Hirsch families - encountered strong local opposition. There is no way that Argentina would have let ten times more in (20% of its population). And while a single Kiryas Yoel might be tolerated, an archipelago of Kiryas Yoels would not be for long. That's the basic flaw of territorialism: there are no virgin territories. You will always encounter friction. So the rational position is: let it be at least where it makes historical sense to defend against it.
It seems to scale OK. There are 6 million Jews in America and it's fine. The easiest way to avoid friction is to try out lots of different places and see where there is least friction.
That's not territorialism. That is what Jews have always done, look for more welcoming shores when the situation became intolerable - as individuals. My point is that this is nor feasible in large numbers and in an organized way, because of the reasons I mentioned. The only example of a massive, organized exodus of Jewish communities to a new location is the emigration of the Jews from the Arab countries, once Arab nationalism made it impossible for them to stay, to Israel.
You can just do it collectively and at scale. Clearly it was feasible in large numbers, because people did it in large numbers.
Even if it’s not “territorialism” I think it still proves the point that Zionism didn’t offer the proper solution to safety. Last time I checked there weren’t intifadas and thousands of Jews getting killed in pogroms in America, Argentina, or even France.