For a long time, American Jews believed they had escaped the tragedies of Jewish history. The rise of a supremacist right and the increasing frequency of anti-Semitic acts undermine these certainties, as the historian Pierre Birnbaum explains in his book The Tears of History. From Kishinev to Pittsburgh (Gallimard, 208 pages, 18.50 euros).
Is the American dream of the Jews shaken?
The shock of the bombing of a synagogue in Pittsburgh on October 27, 2018, was immense. Killer Robert Gregory Bowers, yelling “Heil Hitler”, killed eleven worshipers and injured many more. The emotion spread across the country, and beyond. Since then, synagogues and Jewish institutions have barricaded themselves, raised protective walls, hired guard services, never before seen in the peaceful history of small Jewish communities, lost in the suburbs, deep in the United States. The memory of the pogroms undergone by the grandparents or the great-grandparents transmitted ceaselessly resurfaces intact. In this imaginary, the Cossacks of the Kishinev pogrom, in Russia [1903], crossed the Atlantic. The fear sets in to such an extent that, for the first time in half a century, nearly 5,000 American Jews left for Israel in 2021.
The Dark Predictions of Philip Roth [1933-2018], who imagined in his work The Plot Against America [2004] the establishment of fascism in the United States, seem to become reality. Just before he died, he denounced the quasi-fascism of Donald Trump, whose verbal violence leads straight to the Pittsburgh massacre, and the rise of the anti-Semitic radical rights, which are directly inspired by Nazism.
Did American Judaism believe that it had been preserved from the tragedies of Jewish history?
Salo Baron, the first Jewish professor appointed to Columbia University in 1930, argued that Jewish history is not necessarily synonymous with tears, massacres, pogroms. After the Shoah, however, he comes to recognize that for two thousand years it has indeed been a valley of tears. He then became the champion of American exceptionalism, a decentralized society where the shtetl [village juif d’Europe de l’Est] can revive in a democratic and pluralistic environment.
The Founding Fathers experienced themselves as the new Hebrews who escaped the grip of the English “pharaoh” by crossing the Atlantic to reach the Holy Land and establish, thanks to the Constitution of 1787, complete freedom of conscience and religion, a separation of the State and religions conducive to the development of the latter.
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