Between Jew and Arab: The Lost Voice of Simon Rawidowicz

Part 1: The Jewish Question

PART I | THE JEWISH QUESTION In 1957, Simon Rawidowicz (fig. 1) could look back on his sixty years with a newfound sense of fulfillment and purpose. After a peripatetic career as a Jewish scholar writing in Hebrew in the Diaspora, Rawidowicz joined the fledgling faculty of Brandeis University in 1951. Very quickly, he established himself as a central presence on the Waltham campus, earning wide praise and admiration among administrators, colleagues, and students alike. Brandeis was precisely the kind of vibrant Jewish university of which he had dreamt and which he had advocated for years. The year 1957 was also when Rawidowicz neared completion of the summa summarum of his life’s work, Bavel vi-Yerushalayim (Babylon and Jerusalem ).1 After decades of research, thinking, and ideological refinement —followed by five years of writing (1951–55)—Rawidowicz was on the brink of publishing a nine-hundred-page Hebrew text that gave full Myers: Between Jew and Arab page 21 21| 1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 10 11 12 13 14 15 16 17 18 19 20 21 22 23 24 25 26 27 28 29 30 31 32 33 34 35 36 37 Fig. 1. Simon Rawidowicz (1897–1957). Myers: Between Jew and Arab page 22 1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 10 11 12 13 14 15 16 17 18 19 20 21 22 23 24 25 26 27 28 29 30 31 32 33 34 35 36 37 Fig. 2. Thank-you note from Esther Rawidowicz (wife) and Benjamin Ravid (son) to condolence callers. expression to his distinctive vision of Jewish nationalism.2 This vision rested on the claim that there had been throughout Jewish history, and should continue to be in the future, two main centers of Jewish national life and culture: one in the Land of Israel (symbolically designated Jerusalem) and the other in the Diaspora (Babylon). As fate would have it, Rawidowicz did not live to see the publication of the two volumes of Bavel vi-Yerushalayim. He died on 20 July 1957, index cards with him in hospital and page proofs at home in Waltham (fig. 2).3 The two volumes were published a bit later in 1958 (although with a 1957 imprint) by the Hebrew publishing house, Ararat, that Rawidowicz and a number of collaborators had established in England fifteen years earlier. If there is a certain poignancy in the fact that Rawidowicz did not live to see the book’s publication, there is also an element of mystery. At some point in the preparation of Bavel vi-Yerushalayim, a decision was made to withhold from publication a chapter that Rawidowicz had been working on throughout the early and mid-1950s. The rest of the book engaged Rawidowicz’s usual concerns: the origins and development of the Jewish nation over millennia, the relations between the main centers of Jewish culture in the Diaspora and the Land of Israel, and, as of 1948, the impact of the creation of the State of Israel on the Jewish world. As we have seen in the introduction, the suppressed chapter departed from these concerns to address the fate of the Arab population of Palestine during the 1948 war and thereafter. Rawidowicz argued in this chapter that the great triumph of the Jews—the assumption of statehood in their ancestral homeland —spelled disaster for the Arabs. In the first place, he sought to demonstrate that the Arabs who remained within the borders of the new state—156,000 in 1949—were subject to unacceptable discrimination by the Knesset, the legislative body of the Jewish state. Even more dramatically , Rawidowicz argued that it was the responsibility of the State of Israel to attend to the plight of hundreds of thousands of Arabs displaced during the hostilities that ensued in Palestine from late 1947 through the armistice agreements of 1949.4 Accustomed to the charge of being an anti-Zionist,5 Rawidowicz proceeded with the drafting of his chapter, placing at its center the argument that the Arab Question had become the most compelling Jewish Question of the day. We shall address this most unlikely of equations in part II; now, however, we turn to the literary mystery of why the chapter “Between Jew Myers: Between Jew and Arab page 23 the jewish question 23| 1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 10 11 12 13 14 15 16...