Between Jew and Arab: The Lost Voice of Simon Rawidowicz

Part 2: The Arab Question

Section numbers in parentheses refer to the translated English version (presented in this volume) of “Between Jew and Arab.” 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 one line short 89| Myers: Between Jew and Arab page 89 PART II | THE ARAB QUESTION The narrow line of justice runs between the Scylla of blind revenge and the Charybdis of impotent cowardice. —Hannah Arendt, 14 August 19421 Between Jew and Arab” was planned as an appendix to Rawidowicz’s massive Bavel vi-Yerushalayim. From the time that he arrived at Brandeis in 1951, he began to consolidate his thoughts on the Jewish past and future that had been germinating since the late 1920s into a single book.2 The English subtitle of Bavel vi-Yerushalayim, “Toward a Philosophy of Israel ’s Wholeness,” gives a fair indication of the sweep of Rawidowicz’s vision , as well as of his characteristic nomenclature for the Jewish people. In reflecting on this book, we must recall the distinct, though related, domains of Rawidowicz’s life at Brandeis. He was busy establishing a graduate program in Jewish studies that would assume a position of prominence in the American academy. He was also an active and well-respected figure beyond his home department of Near Eastern and Judaic studies, participating in various intellectual and institutional initiatives that helped give shape to the young Brandeis campus. Moreover, he was at work publishing scholarly studies, mainly in Hebrew, on medieval and modern Jewish thinkers (for example, Saadya Gaon, Judah Ha-Levi, Maimonides , and Nachman Krochmal). At the same time, Rawidowicz was writing the nine-hundred-page text of Bavel vi-Yerushalayim. Unlike his more narrow scholarly studies, this text was not intended for a small circle of academic researchers. Rather, its target audience was a wider, if somewhat mythic, learned laity that not only could read Hebrew fluently, but was open to viewpoints well out of the Jewish mainstream. “ 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 one line short 90 between jew and arab| Myers: Between Jew and Arab page 90 As we have noted, Rawidowicz never held hard and fast to a boundary line between scholarly and ideological writing. In fact, in introducing Bavel vi-Yerushalayim, he consciously challenged the distinction between historical scholarship and contemporary reflection, between work dedicated solely to the past and work born of the present. He noted, in a gloss on Leopold von Ranke’s famous call to understand the past “wie es eigentlich gewesen” (usually translated as “as it actually happened”), that the scholar is a product of and informed by his own time. Thus, one should not prefer “static research, frozen and already molded” over research focused on dynamic change.3 A scholarly endeavor worth its weight must mix historical and present-day concerns. We gain here a glimpse of Rawidowicz’s penchant for traversing borders in the name of overcoming seeming opposites. Perhaps the most obvious example of this impulse was his unflagging interest in the well-being of both Babylon and Jerusalem, not of one to the exclusion of the other. This interest was more than a matter of geographic focus. It was a methodological , even epistemological, stance. As Rawidowicz elaborated in the introduction: “A Babylon-Jerusalem approach in Jewish scholarship is not simply a matter of place and time, of connecting one place to another or one time period to another time period, but rather a matter of meaning, content, and form. It requires a vantage point that embraces the wholeness of Israel, both inside and out.”4 Rawidowicz’s tendency to break down established boundaries was evident beyond his distinctive focus on Babylon and Jerusalem or his desire to efface the boundary between the vocations of the scholar and the public intellectual. It was present as well in his constant pairing of moral and political considerations. Mindful of the danger of being branded a dreamy utopian, Rawidowicz endeavored to balance what he saw as the unique ethical charge of “Israel” with a utilitarian impulse to justify that which was in the best interests of the Jewish people. This mix of considerations was especially evident in “Between Jew and...