European Judaism

"All the calculated ends have already passed, and it now depends entirely on repentance and good deeds" (Sanhédrin). This rabbinic word of caution about anticipating the exact date of the arrival the Messiah would apply to all such hopes and calculations associated eschatological movements throughout history, as well as expectations bound the new millennium. Whether waiting for a new heaven to descend peacefully on earth or some final apocalyptic disaster, presumably covered by CNN, energies unleashed by the concept of the new millennium could be turned 'repentance and good deeds' the world might indeed be transformed messianic place. But the odds seem to be against such a radical transformation.

As far back as can be traced, my father and his paternal ancestors were all born in Recklinghausen, and some of the ancestral graves can still be seen in cemetery on the Nordscharweg. Since the cemetery was only consecrated 1905, and my great-grandfather Isack died in 1893, his gravestone must have been one of the twenty or so stones which, along with the bones which still remained, were moved from the cemetery on the Börster Weg in the early 1930s, due to growing anti-Semitism. As it turned out, it was most fortuitous that Isack was reinterred, as the Nazis destroyed the first graveyard completely, eventually turning it into a children's playground. Having outlived her husband by forty years, my great-grandmother Henriette was buried close to him in 1933. These stones are of enormous importance to me as they mark the only prewar family graves I have in Germany

In his book The Transparency of Evil, Jean Baudrillard claimed that the opportunity to understand something of the Holocaust had been missed – the time had been ripe in the immediate aftermath of the conflagration but no one took up the challenge. Now that the Holocaust, like every other event in our postmodern universe, has become a simulacrum of itself – known only through the various representations of it that circulate in the culture – it is too late ever to get to grips with what it really involved. Today 'there is no longer enough history to back up any historical proof of what happened . . . History should have been understood while history still existed . . . These things were not understood while we still had the means to understand them. Now they never will be.

For many years, I, like most people who have perhaps heard of the Wannsee Conference but not studied it in any depth, believed that it was here that the Final Solution was agreed upon and its mechanics discussed and decided. It was only when I agreed to tackle this topic for this essay that I came to realise that the Wannsee Conference was not what I had thought. As I struggled to make sense of the differing positions of Dawidowicz (that the Final Solution had been centrally planned) to that of Broszat (that the Final Solution gradually evolved) I became aware that there was no agreement amongst scholars of how the Final Solution came about.

Racial theories of culture were considered by many mid-nineteenth century intellectuals to be a powerful, stylish discipline that could be depended on the conclusion that Europe's Jews were an insidious, inassimilable cultural economic force. While recent research supports the authorship of Liszt's companion, Princess Caroline Sayn-Wittengstein, Liszt allowed his name to the author of The Gypsy in Music, which follows in the path established influential racial theorist, Count Arthur de Gobineau, author of the seminal sur l'Inégalité des Races Humaines (1853–55). In the three chapters Liszt/Sayn- Wittgenstein's book devoted to the 'Jew in Music', the Jew is identified as a link in the production/consumption cycle of art, incapable of imagination and individuality.

An analysis of Yiddish language periodicals destined for a haredi reading public is fraught with difficulty. First and foremost, the very existence of such reading material is paradoxical. On the one hand haredim strongly discourage wasting time reading anything not directly related to Torah, yet on the other hand Yiddish newspapers have a much stronger readership among haredim than among secular Jews. Even the Forverts, the most widely sold secular paper in Yiddish, has a distribution of 5,000 copies per week, which is far below that of most haredi papers. As one hasid explains, it's a waste of time to read secular papers, but it's a mitsve to read the haredi news publications.

Old age is not popular in western society. The former veneration connection between age and wisdom has virtually ceased to exist, and reactions toward elderly people are frequently of pity, exasperation or even tempt, but the life expectancy of people today is ten years more than the end of World War Two and twenty to thirty more than at the beginning this century, so that there are a lot more of us around, and it has become necessary for psychotherapists to take notice of a hitherto much neglected the population.

In Thomas Mittscherlich 's moving film 'Reise ins Leben' (Journey into Life) three death camp survivors are asked about their lives post-1945, for, as the director notes, most of us spend our lives journeying towards death – but for those interviewed, it is as if the reverse has happened, and their journey has been from death into life. How is it possible, the film asks, to live after such experiences, to find meaning and purpose? And what does it say about us, those who were not there, who have rarely asked until the making of the film in 1996, about what happened after?

In September 1997 Vaclav Havel and Elie Wiesel called together the great thinkers and leaders of the world to look at the year 2000 and to share their thoughts for the future of the world. Nine Nobel Prize winners, at least ten former presidents or current leaders of countries, and spiritual thinkers representing the religions of the world assembled in Prague, met for five days in a splendid castle, and tried to make some informed statements about the future of the world after the millennium. In October 1998, most of the speakers met again in Prague.

Ladies and Gentlemen,

Distinguished Participants,

Allow me to welcome you all very cordially to the Czech Republic, to Prague and Prague Castle. Thank you for accepting the invitation to the Forum 2000 conference – which is being held here and has been made possible especially thanks to the foundations sponsoring and organising it.

The rise of extreme nationalism, racism and xenophobia that swept through France, Germany, the United Kingdom and even some Scandinavian countries during the past decade – a tendency that appears only very recently to have begun very slightly to reverse itself – is yet again evidence of the ease with which the collective mind can be swept up by demagoguery that appeals to that 'zone of faith' in the consciousness of most human beings. The 'nation' is only another article of faith – like religion and ideology, and an appeal to the irrational baggage that sustains it in the mind is no different from the irrational supports of religious or totalitarian orders.

That an end entails a beginning is the beautiful aspect of the circularity human existence. It is, of course, important that the soft perfection of harmonious roundness is not debased into a vicious cycle. There is little value beginnings if we simply commit the same mistakes that caused so much suffering in the past.

During the past one hundred years, in Europe alone, more than one hundred million persons lost their lives by violence: under strafing aeroplanes, murdered by machine guns at the edge of trenches they had dug, by deliberate acts of man-made famine, beaten and starved in death camps. For many years the term 'human dignity' was only a noise made by lips. Yet no century in history became so drunk on utopias, and so disoriented morally by pretty pictures of the future. Murders were committed in the name of ideas about a 'better' organisation of society – ideas that we learned to call 'ideology'. It was enough to cast speech about 'a better future for humanity' into suspicion.

The destruction of European Jewry as an intellectual presence and living tradition in the heart of Europe, the virtual absence of Jewish life in eastern Europe in the last half of this century, and the rebuilding of Jewish communities in many countries in east and west, but in particular, in Germany, requires an investigation of the path of European intellectual history and its beginnings in the light of the Jewish legacy of Europe.

Someone standing on the threshold of a new millennium has a better view than earlier generations of the long-term trends that characterise our century. In this connection, Germany currently offers a good illustration of the fact that many European countries are at present going through a third wave of pluralisation. After the first wave, which ruptured medieval church unity in the sixteenth century and which might be termed a denominational, internal Christian pluralism, a second wave began to build up during the eighteenth century; this involved the shattering of 'Christian' unity – which, despite it all, still existed- and the splitting of society into one part wedded to Christian values and another of secular-humanistic outlook.

I start this essay with the observation that human beings are living beings and are therefore, part and parcel of the ecosphere. Unlike other organisms, at least so far as we know, we have a greater capacity for choice and a wider range of choices we can make.

Jericho Gilboa Michael Watches Diplomatic Exchanges Genesis II Prayer of the Trees David and Jonathan Out of Eden In Budapest Translations from the 'Mysterium'

At the Edge of the Millennium: Taking Stock – An Essay Review

Marcus Braybrooke, The Explorer's Guide to Christianity, London, Hodder and Stoughton, 1998, pb., 287 pp., £8.99, ISBN 0 340 71005 5

Jonathan Magonet, The Explorer's Guide to Judaism, London, Hodder and Stoughton, 1 998, pb., 329 pp., £8.99, ISBN 0340 70984 7

Studies in Polish Jewry: Polin; Volume Nine 'Jews, Poles, Socialists: The Failure of an Ideal' London and Portland Oregon, published for Institute of Polish Jewish Studies (an associate centre of the Oxford Centre for Hebrew and Jewish Studies) by The Littman Library of Jewish Civilization, 1996, £39.50, 346 pp. ISBN 1 874774 21 8

Studies in Polish Jewry: Polin; Volume Ten: 'Jews in Early Modern Poland', ed. Gershon David Hundert, London and Portland Oregon, for the Institute of Polish Jewish Studies by The Littman Library of Jewish Civilization, 1997, £19.95, 457 pp. ISBN 1 87474 31 5

Studies in Polish Jewry: Polin; Volume Eleven: Focusing on Aspects and Experiences of Religion', London and Portland Oregon, published for the Institute of Polish-Jewish Studies, The American Association for Polish Jewish Studies by Hie Littman Library of Jewish Civilization, 1998, 443 pp. ISBN 1 874774 34 X (pb.)

John D. Rayner, Jewish Religious Law: A Progressive Perspective, Berghahn Books, New York and Oxford, 1998, 224 pp. ISBN 1 57181 975 4, pb. ISBN 1 57181 976 2

John D. Rayner, A Jewish Understanding of the World, Berghahn Books, Providence and Oxford, 1998, 224 pp., ISBN 1 57181 973 8, pb. ISBN 1 57181 974 6

John D. Rayner, An Understanding of Judaism, Berghahn Books, Providence and Oxford, 1997, 272 pp. ISBN 1 57181 971 1, pb. ISBN 1 57181 972 X

The Goldapple Guide to Jewish Berlin, Andrew Roth/Michael Frajman, Goldapple Publishing, 1998, 181 pp., ISBN3-9806356-0-0

Alfred Wiener and the Making of the Holocaust Library, Ben Barkow, Vallen- tine Mitchell, 1997, 21 1 pp., Cloth £35.00/Paper £17.50, ISBN 0 85303 329 3

God Made Blind, Isaac Rosenberg: His Life and Poetry, Deborah Maccoby, Symposium Press, EJPS. ISBN 1-900814020-X

A Moon at the Door, Wanda Barford, Flambard Press in association with the European Jewish Publication Society, £5.95, ISBN 1 873226 33 0.