Where did 'national liberation' go wrong?

Review of:
Michael Walzer, The Paradox of Liberation: Secular Revolutions and Religious Counterrevolutions. Yale Univ. Press, 2015. 178 pp. (including notes and index).

Movements for "national liberation," which seek to free a people or "nation" from colonial rule or from other kinds of statelessness or national 'oppression', have a sometimes complicated relationship to the traditional culture and religion of the "nation" on whose behalf they act.  That relationship is the focus of Walzer's The Paradox of Liberation, which considers three national-liberation movements -- the Algerian FLN, the Indian National Congress, and Labor Zionism -- all of which achieved their goal of founding independent, (more-or-less) secular states only to be met with fundamentalist religious reactions roughly 25 years after independence.   

Walzer's main argument is that these three movements, in their drive to create "new men" and "new women" and new polities, were too dismissive of the religion and culture of the peoples they were seeking to liberate.  Of the leaders of these movements, only Gandhi consistently spoke to 'the people' in a traditional religious idiom (p.20).  Although the FLN and early Zionists made some religious noises (the FLN said it respected "Islamic principles"), their "long-term political agenda" was not "significantly influenced by their people's religion" (p.22).  According to Walzer, "[i]t is the absolutism of secular negation that best accounts for the strength and militancy of the religious revival" (p.109).   

On this account, the results of this "secular negation" were: an Islamist movement in Algeria that led to civil war in the 1990s; the growing strength of Hindu nationalism (Hindutva) in India (where the BJP, the political party of this movement, currently is in power); and ultra-Orthodox Judaism in Israel (and its offshoot, the settler movement).  Walzer thinks an attitude of "critical engagement" with traditional religion on the part of the national-liberationists could have led to the creation of some kind of middle ground (though he doesn't use that phrase).  

Walzer's examination of the histories of these movements, however, suggests that this would not have been easy.  With respect to the case about which he is most deeply concerned, he acknowledges that the gulf between political Zionism and "the mentality of exile" (p.39) of traditional Judaism "was very wide, and it wasn't easy to find continuities" (p.46).  Indeed, as Walzer points out, a key part of Zionism's self-definition was and is its rejection of the traditional commitment to waiting for the Messiah and all that idea implied in the way of passivity and (perceived) weakness.  "[T]he anti-Semitic stereotype of the pale, stooped, fearful Jew is also a Zionist stereotype" (p.47), and Zionists replaced this stereotype with the image of the strong, self-sufficient pioneer.  Ironically perhaps, a rather similar image was later appropriated by the Orthodox Jewish settlers of the occupied territories, who see themselves as warriors for a cause.  The difference is that the Labor Zionists envisioned a state in which all citizens, Jewish and non-Jewish, would enjoy the same rights and to which, as a result, they would feel the same ties (see the quotation from Ben-Gurion on p.99).

Within the secular 'negation' of tradition, it is, Walzer writes, "[t]he demand for gender equality [that] poses the greatest challenge to traditional religion and is probably the most important cause of revivalist zealotry in all three...cases" (p.115).  Citing the work of (among others) the Indian scholar Uma Narayan, he argues that the solution is to connect the quest for gender equality to "national narratives and religious traditions" (p.119), as some feminists are already trying to do.  The implication is that those who are unwilling to do this cannot succeed and will only generate an increasingly intense backlash.  
 
Hindu nationalism, ultra-Orthodox Judaism, and the political versions of fundamentalist Islam (whether, say, in Algeria, Egypt, Saudi Arabia or, in perhaps the most extreme form, with ISIS) can be seen as part of a global religious revival, but The Paradox of Liberation, largely because of its case-study approach, pays little attention to such global dimensions.  The strongest criticism of this book will likely come from some on the left who will see Walzer as too accommodating of tradition and won't be mollified by, for instance, his quotations from Gramsci (see p.124) or his discussion of some Marxist and postcolonialist critiques of his argument.  Even if one disagrees with or is skeptical of Walzer's position, the book provokes thought and has the advantage of being very short, and the notes contain useful references for those interested in the histories of, and debates surrounding, the three 'revolutions' and 'counterrevolutions'.  In addition, there is a postscript on the American Revolution and why it differs from the three main cases.

ETA: There's some good material in the book's postscript that I may address in another post. 

Stalin's homeland for the Jews

Those interested in somewhat out-of-the-way corners of 20th-century history will want to read this from the blog Strange Maps.

HC on Longfellow's 'The Jewish Cemetery at Newport'

Thought we were all done with poetry? Not just yet!

Today, guest commentator HC offers reflections on Henry Wadsworth Longfellow's poem 'The Jewish Cemetery at Newport,' published in the 1858 collection 'Birds of Passage.' The poem was inspired by Longfellow's visit in 1852 to the oldest Jewish cemetery in the U.S., in Newport, Rhode Island.

The text of the poem is reproduced immediately below, followed by HC's commentary. (For explanatory notes on particular references in the poem, go to http://rpo.library.utoronto.ca/poem/1328.html [sorry, but it didn't work as a hyperlink].)



The Jewish Cemetery at Newport

How strange it seems! These Hebrews in their graves,
Close by the street of this fair seaport town,
Silent beside the never-silent waves,
At rest in all this moving up and down!

The trees are white with dust, that o'er their sleep
Wave their broad curtains in the south-wind's breath,
While underneath such leafy tents they keep
The long, mysterious Exodus of Death.

And these sepulchral stones, so old and brown,
That pave with level flags their burial-place,
Seem like the tablets of the Law, thrown down
And broken by Moses at the mountain's base.

The very names recorded here are strange,
Of foreign accent, and of different climes;
Alvares and Rivera interchange
With Abraham and Jacob of old times.

"Blessed be God! for he created Death!"
The mourners said, "and Death is rest and peace";
Then added, in the certainty of faith,
"And giveth Life that never more shall cease."

Closed are the portals of their Synagogue,
No Psalms of David now the silence break,
No Rabbi reads the ancient Decalogue
In the grand dialect the Prophets spake.

Gone are the living, but the dead remain,
And not neglected; for a hand unseen,
Scattering its bounty, like a summer rain,
Still keeps their graves and their remembrance green.

How came they here? What burst of Christian hate,
What persecution, merciless and blind,
Drove o'er the sea--that desert desolate--
These Ishmaels and Hagars of mankind?

They lived in narrow streets and lanes obscure,
Ghetto and Judenstrass, in mirk and mire;
Taught in the school of patience to endure
The life of anguish and the death of fire.

All their lives long, with the unleavened bread
And bitter herbs of exile and its fears,
The wasting famine of the heart they fed,
And slaked its thirst with marah of their tears.

Anathema maranatha! was the cry
That rang from town to town, from street to street;
At every gate the accursed Mordecai
Was mocked and jeered, and spurned by Christian feet.

Pride and humiliation hand in hand
Walked with them through the world where'er they went;
Trampled and beaten were they as the sand,
And yet unshaken as the continent.

For in the background figures vague and vast
Of patriarchs and of prophets rose sublime,
And all the great traditions of the Past
They saw reflected in the coming time.

And thus forever with reverted look
The mystic volume of the world they read,
Spelling it backward, like a Hebrew book,
Till life became a Legend of the Dead.

But ah! what once has been shall be no more!
The groaning earth in travail and in pain
Brings forth its races, but does not restore,
And the dead nations never rise again.

---

What is so good about this embarrassing poem? Why would Helen Vendler circulate it (as she did last year, without comment) to everyone with a Harvard University email address as part of an apparently abortive campaign (I never got another poem from her) to disseminate Great Poetry?

Longfellow seems intent on treating the Jews the way James Fenimore Cooper treated the Mohicans, romanticizing their disappearance so eagerly and prematurely that his motives might be questioned. At least Cooper celebrates the noble qualities and skills of the Mohicans; Longfellow has almost nothing good to say about the Jews other than that they had unshaken faith in eternal life, which, as the Maine Historical Society website points out in its commentary on the poem (Longfellow was born in Maine), is probably more reflective of Longfellow’s comfy Protestantism than of Jewish theology. It is this faith that allows the Jews to endure persecution and preserve their pride (“Pride and humiliation walked hand in hand”), and the wellspring of this faith is the greatness of the Jews’ past, which “they saw reflected in the coming time.” Again, more Protestant than Jewish: true, the Jews look forward to the coming of the Messiah, but Longfellow gives this a second-coming gloss that is distinctly Christian. (The prophet Elijah does return in Judaism, at every Passover, and Longfellow may have this in mind when he refers to the Seder, with its unleavened bread and bitter herbs, but the Messiah himself, whom Elijah heralds, just comes once.)

The real kicker is near the end, with Longfellow’s equation of the “backward” (right to left) reading of Hebrew with this “reverted look” to the past. The idea that one’s method of reading conditions one’s world view is nice, but Longfellow goes on to equate this backward look (apparently forgetting its corollary look to the future) with death (“Till life became a Legend of the Dead”) and so in effect blames the Jews for their own demise: they were obsessed with death, ergo they died off. (This recalls the prior invocation of Moses’s disgust with his own people via the analogy of flat gravestones to thrown-down tablets.) The saving grace – the phrase is appropriate given that Longfellow has turned the Jews into Christians (and by the way, I see on Google that Vendler gave a lecture on Victorian Jews for Jesus, so maybe I’m on her wavelength here) – the saving grace, I was saying, is that this die-off seems part of a natural cycle and so perhaps not entirely self-inflicted: “The groaning earth in travail and in pain / Brings forth its races, but does not restore, / And the dead nations never rise again.”

Here you might object that this reading of the poem as a piece of disguised anti-Semitism is unfair, and maybe it is. After all, the poem is a denunciation of Christian anti-Semitism: they mock and jeer, spurn and hate, beat and trample, exile and burn the Jews. It is clear-eyed about that, and therefore cynical about history, which obviously does not punish those who deserve it. Interesting that the word God only appears once, within an imagined quotation: “Blessed by God! For he created Death!” Not a great endorsement. Is this a Godless poem? I hope so.

In any case, I have not answered my question: what is so good about it? I’m not sure it’s a great poem but there are certainly a number of great lines.

“How strange it seems!” A natural way to start a lyric, initiating a flow of thought that continues nicely through the poem.

“At rest in all this moving up and down.” The image is concrete, rendering the conceit of the poem (Jew vs. world) utterly physical, and the language is stunningly simple, every word a monosyllable except one. It blows the previous line, with its hackneyed repetition-via-epithet (silent, never-silent), out of the water.

“The long, mysterious Exodus of Death.” Nice phrase, esp. with the verb keep.

“Alvares and Rivera interchange / with Abraham and Jacob of old times.” This is the declaration of a device of simple coupling that runs throughout the poem, starting with “up and down” and continuing: old and brown, rest and peace, merciless and blind, Ishmaels and Hagars, Ghetto and Judenstrass, mirk and mire, mocked and jeered, pride and humiliation, and that’s not even half of them. A poem of couplets. Even more than that, I like the glossolalia of Alvares-Rivera, which is picked up later by “Anathema maranatha!” In these near-palindromes the Jews get their revenge, infecting Longfellow’s own language with their Hebraic reversion.

“In the grand dialect the Prophets spake.” It’s the last word I like, with its spitting sound and its gone-native quality: an obsolete word (the only one in the poem) to invoke an obsolete language. Here Longfellow declares that he loves Hebrew. If it has infected his language, he has welcomed it. (Actually I like this whole quatrain. Nice rhyme of synagogue and Decalogue.)

“Spelling it backward, like a Hebrew book.” Again, the simplicity is stunning. What a great, irreligious way to refer to the Bible (for what other book could he possibly be talking about?).

“And the dead nations never rise again.” Here Longfellow maintains his strict syllable count (ten per line) but finally upends his iambs to come down hard on DEAD. Which is the whole point: the Jews are dead.

I have a feeling the poem inspired at least two others about unredemptive death: Robert Lowell’s “A Quaker Graveyard in Nantucket” and possibly Yeats’s “An Irish Airman Foresees his Death” (compare uses of the verb drove in the two poems). Not a bad afterlife.

-- HC