Even the widespread treatment of Jews as somehow less than human provoked a universalist response. As children of the same God, Jews argued, when this was permitted or just quietly reflected when it wasn't, that they shared a common humanity with their oppressors and that this should take precedence over everything else. The anti-Semitic charge, then, that Jews have always and everywhere been cosmopolitan and insufficiently patriotic had at least this much truth to it.
Russell: But this surely has everything to do with the impossibility in many cases of assimilating into the indigenous non-Jewish population rather than any active desire to be 'cosmopolitan'? Who after all wanted to be a rootless 'luftmensch'? As somebody once said, failing inter-war eastern capitalism had the habit of squeezing even the most assimilated Jews out of its pores.
Ollman: Not many Jews today, of course, take this position. In a 1990 interview, Britain's most famous intellectual and Zionist, Isaiah Berlin, recounted a conversation he had with the French philosopher, Alexander Kojeve, who is reported as saying, "You're a Jew. The Jewish people probably have the most interesting history of any people that ever lived. And now you want to be Albania?" Berlin's reply was, "Yes, we do. For our purposes, for Jews, Albania is a step forward."
Russell: Sadly true. But largely as a consequence of the failure of the only possible 20th Century alternative to Zionism - i.e. Communism. When once Jews in the East were split between those who saw their emancipation in the great revolutionary upheavals after the First World War and those who opted for a Jewish state (and even these were split between 'socialist' and other Zionists), the degeneration of the experiment into 'national roads' to socialism involving a pandering to local nationalisms and sometimes anti-semitism, left most surviving Eastern Jews with very few options after the Holocaust. Turned around in sight of the Statue of Liberty, hounded in every western country and appalled by a Soviet regime that could stoop to the crass anti-Semitism of the 'Doctors' Plot', where else could they go but to a little Jewish 'Albania' in Palestine with all the political and moral compromises that implied?