The experience of the Diaspora is the perceived historical background for Gordon’s essays; everything he writes about the future in Palestine, he writes in the perspective of the past in the Diaspora. In the following I shall present Gordon’s view on how the Diaspora experience affected the Jewish people, to show how he creates a negative identity for the Jews of the past. As the following quote show, Gordon’s view of the Jewish existence in the Diaspora and what it had done to the Jews as a people was exceedingly negative:
“Since we are torn up by the roots from Palestine, and in the Diaspora have become enslaved and persecuted, we have been alienated from nature, from living a natural form of life, and from all productive labor. Our economic and spiritual life are anomalous. Our national spirit has drawn sustenance for this life in exile only from remnants of the past or from the tables of others”
(The Work of Revival in the Diaspora: 77)
Gordon repeatedly refers to a range of negative connotations throughout his essays: the image of the Jews as estranged from nature and labor, and as a result without a living culture, passive and parasitic (dependent on others). In the following I shall analyze what Gordon meant by these specific claims by relating it to his ideology about the connection between nation, nature and labor.
The Diasporic Life and the Connection Between People, Nature and Labor
Gordon was the first Jewish thinkers to wrestle with the problem of the Jews and their alienation from nature. While Zionists wrote about the trauma of being uprooted from the soil of Eretz Yisrael, Gordon wrote of this uprootedness from the perspective of his philosophy of man and society (Cohen and Noveck 1963: 59). Gordon saw the Jew...
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... will of others and in harmony with the spirit prevailing in the worlds of others (The Core of the Matter: 54). Gordon argues that the Jewish people’s natural growth and self-realization has been hampered by alien and extraneous influences (Some Observations: 377). As the Jews has been pushed away from the primary creative processes, and forced to live under constant pressure and influence of foreign cultures, they have eventually lost the distinctive, external signs of identity, social structure, language and lifestyle, and become dependent on others materially and spiritually, leading them to have an inanimate existence, lacking in national creativity (Our Tasks Ahead: 381). This life has made the Jews passive and submissive; they no longer act upon or influence others, but are merely acted upon and influenced by others (The Work of Revival in the Diaspora: 78).
Sartre's book is a solid description of both anti-Semite and the victim of prejudice Jew. What makes the book as interesting as it is that it written by a non-Jew as well as from a non-Jewish point of view. The problem of the Jew's relationship to the Gentile is examined in a concrete and living way, rather than in terms of sociological generalizations. It is thoroughly discussed from a fair viewpoint. The author takes himself out, and although often times coming off as blunt and overly honest, is fair in his points.
Oxtoby, Willard Gurdon. "Jewish Traditions." World religions: western traditions. 1996. Reprint. Toronto: Oxford University Press, 2011. 127-157. Print.
Throughout history, Jews have been persecuted in just about every place they have settled. Here I have provided just a small ...
The Jewish Community. Publication Society, 1996. http://www. Wiesel, Elie. A.
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...f society. The second point of view held that Jews were inherently bad and can never be salvaged despite any and all efforts made by Christians to assimilate them. These Christians felt that there was absolutely no possibility of Jews having and holding productive positions in society. All the aforementioned occurrences lead to the transformation of traditional Jewish communities, and paved the way for Jewish existence, as it is known today. It is apparent, even through the examination of recent history that there are reoccurring themes in Jewish history. The most profound and obvious theme is the question of whether Jews can be productive members of their country and at the same time remain loyal to their religion. This question was an issue that once again emerged in Nazi Germany, undoubtedly, and unfortunately, it is not the last time that question will be asked.
As I have shown, throughout his essays, Gordon establishes a narrative of the past in the Diaspora which is distinctly negative, drawing on images of the Jewish people as passive and parasitic, alienated from nature and labor and accordingly without a living culture. Through his ideology, Gordon establishes an idea of the perfect relationship between people, nature and labor; a relationship that must be withheld in order for a people to be a living, creative culture. Gordon asserts that the Jewish people have been kept apart from the natural sphere in their own land in which they developed as a people, and have been severed from direct contact with nature in the countries where they are living in Diaspora, thus creating a strictly negative identity for the Diasporic Jews. The Diaspora experience is presented by Gordon as an identity defining experience that is presupposed as part of the Jewish self-understanding. The ideology of Gordon indicates that the Diaspora was a degrading and negative experience for all Jews:
Most interpretations of history are to some extend based on an arbitrary selection of events influenced by ideology. Accordingly, they can easily assume a mythical character, which can function to legitimize social and political practices or mobilize action or identification with a cause through anchoring of the present in the past and actualization of the past in the present. Through this mythologization, nations, social groups or set of individuals produce its collective memory and establish their distinctive identity (Wistrich and Ohana 1995: ix). In order to understand how the Zionist movement creates their specific view on the Diaspora, and how Gordon uses this view to establish a distinct identity for the Jewish people, we must understand the mechanics of collective memory.
In Dovid Katz’s “World on Fire”, we see the growth and development of the Yiddish culture over the past millennium from a Yiddish perspective. For example, we see that the growth of the Hasidic culture came from a series of calamities that heavily demoralized the Jews of Eastern Europe. Disasters like the Chmielnitski Cossack massacres and the predictions of the false prophet Sabberhai Zevi
Being an international student is exciting. It offers a lot of exposure and scope for improvement. Canada has a lot of institutions that accept foreign students, but before that, the practical difficulties an international student might face in the country should be noted.
"Dehumanization of the Jews." . Jewish Federation of Greater Pittsburgh , n.d. Web. 16 Dec 2013. .
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