January 8, 2012

Looming Destruction: Will Jews Ever Learn?

By Victor Sharpe
On the eve of the Second World War, Chaim Weizmann, who was to become Israel's first president, wrote the following about the persecutions taking place in Nazi Germany: It would require the eloquence of a Jeremiah to picture the horrors, the human anguish, of this new Destruction and of a new book of Lamentations to depict the present plight of Israel among the nations. Several decades earlier, Max Nordau, one of the most noted European philosophers of the 19th century, and supporter of Theodore Herzl, once told the great Zionist leader and Jewish patriot, Vladimir Jabotinsky, that "the Jew learns not by way of reason, but from catastrophes. He won't buy an umbrella merely because he sees clouds in the sky.  He waits until he is drenched and catches pneumonia." This prescient observation foreshadowed the many anti-Jewish pogroms that followed in the bloodiest of all centuries: the twentieth.  It also led, inexorably, to the swallowing up of the Jews of Europe by the...(Read Full Article)