Religion: The Diaspora Age

Historian Arnold Toynbee, in A Study of History, referred to the Jewish religion as a “fossil,” and further nettled Jews by blaming the Old Testament’s exclusivism for what he views as the evil intolerance of Christianity. In the current number of the journal Issues, published by the anti-Zionist American Council for Judaism, Historian Toynbee changes his tune—or at least transposes it to a different key. Judaism, he now says, is performing a pioneering role in the development of a religion for the Atomic Age.

The existence of the state of Israel, says Toynbee, has profoundly changed the nature of Judaism. Before 1945, Judaism was a half political, half religious entity; part of the religion was the hope and prayer to return to the Holy Land. But Israel, by making it possible for all Jews in the Western world to migrate there-expenses paid, if necessary—has placed those who do not migrate in the position of opting for 100% political allegiance to the countries in which they live.

New Community? Those Jews who remain outside Israel will continue to be concerned for the welfare of their fellow Jews there, as they will be for Jews all over the world. But politically, argues I Toynbee, they will be Americans, Frenchmen, Englishmen, etc., even more firmly than they were before. Does this mean that the Diaspora—the dispersed group I of Jewish communities outside Israel—is ! doomed to extinction? On the contrary, I says Toynbee. “It has a magnificent future on a religious basis if it bases itself on religion alone.”

Israelis, and perhaps most other Jews, are convinced that the wave of the future for Judaism lies in the state of Israel rather than the Jews outside it. But, says Toynbee, “as an historian, peering into the future in the light of the past, [ spy the wave of the future in the Jewish Diaspora.”

Israelis are confident that the future is theirs, because they have brought Jews back to the “normal” pattern of society —the territorial state. But the nation-state is out of date, thinks Toynbee. “In the new age, on which we are now entering, the standard type of community, in my expectation, is going to be not the territorial national state, but the world-encompassing religious community. It is, in fact, going to be the type of community that has been represented already, for some 2,400 years past,*by the Jewish Diaspora.”

No More Romance? This fits in with another pet Toynbee thesis. Agricultural civilization, which tied man down to a parcel of land and produced the territorial type of community, is being replaced, Toynbee theorizes, by a “mechanical-industrial dispensation,” which “resembles the food-gathering and hunting one in a significant particular. In contrast to the cultivator of the soil, the aboriginal Australian food gatherer and the ultramodern immigrant Australian or American industrial worker are like each other in both being rootless … If we want a label for the now dawning third age of human history, we can call it equally well either ‘the age of Diasporas’ or ‘the age of civilization’ . . .

“Those once romantic goddesses, the local states—Britain, Nicaragua, the United States, Israel, and the other ten dozen of them—will still be on the map, because they will still have local jobs of work to do, such as minding and mending the drains and administering other local pubic utilities. But the romance will have gone out of them . . . Ubiquitous but non-monopolistic religious associations will, I believe, be the standard type of ommunity in our Atomic Age. “If this forecast proves correct, the

Jewish Diaspora will have been the pioneer and pilot community of the new kind. That is a glorious role . . . Let it take heart, and seize its destiny with both hands, now that its long travail is at last on the verge of bearing fruit.”

* Toynbee harks back to the first Diaspora in 586 B.C., when Emperor Nebuchadnezzar wiped out the Kingdom of Judah and initiated the spiritually fruitful period of the “Babylonian Captivity.”