Kesher Talk

Why Jews No Longer Support a United Europe: According to David Meyer, chief rabbi at the Brighton and Hove New Synagogue and formerly a rabbi in Brussels, writes in the September 25 Wall Street Journal Europe that he feels Jews have an interest in a Europe of many nations, not a unified euro-blob:

More and more, we European Jews are beginning to think we may have been foolish. This reconsideration is not due to the fact that our love has been unrequited -- though no one can deny the European Union's bias toward Palestinians -- but because we've suddenly remembered that a Europe of separate nations has prevented our destruction.

.... Slowly, I began to understand that the notion of a unified Europe does indeed run contrary to the fundamental teaching of Jewish history.

During the last 2,000 years, the Jews have survived in Europe not because of its unity but because of its lack of it. When expelled from one country, say England in the 13th century or Spain in the 15th, to take only two examples, we could take refuge in another and start all over again. During the Crusades, when mobs ransacked Jewish ghettos, the situation was similar. Always we had another, European, place to go to. During the Inquisition, for example, Holland and some of the Italians states took us in.

This is not, as anti-Semites would put it, "divide and rule." It is more that division has allowed us to exist. Incidentally, those countries that took us in flourished for it. Spinoza and David Ricardo were Iberia's loss and the gains of the Netherlands and Britain.

With Hitler, however, we saw what it was like to have unity and be trapped in a place where one vision and one policy rules over such a large geographical area.

To be sure, today's Europe and its integration process cannot be compared to the tragedy of the past. So I understand if some may think this hyperbole. But the French-led "Old Europe," which believes that it should counterbalance to the U.S., is infecting the continent with anti-American and anti-Jewish prejudices. Under the unified foreign policy that many in Europe want, and have written into the new constitution, a decision made in Brussels would apply throughout the realm. "Feeling out of place," could apply to the whole continent.

I am not entirely pessimistic. In today's Europe, at least I can still choose -- as I have done by settling in Britain -- to live in the "New Europe." This New Europe is looking for a convergence of interest and values with the U.S., adding to Western power rather then undermining it. In Britain, I feel, for the time being, a certain sense of belonging, of being part of it. So like our ancestors, I have managed to "escape" within Europe to a place where I can still be a Jew. But if we ever have a united Europe, where would I go?

posted by William @ 10/09/2003 06:56:38 AM