Jews, Zionism and the European Right of Blood Part I
David Kessel
February 18, 2006
Jews, Zionism and the European Right of Blood.
The Middle Eastern conflict has been viewed from many angles in the media, and there have been numerous viewpoints as to who had caused it, why it has happened and who is at fault. It is kind of hard not to be partial or not to take sides in the debates surrounding it as the temptation to do so is very high. "Oh, those Arabs, they are such fanatics!" "Oh, those Israelis, they are baby killers!" "Oh, they are both wrong". "They are brothers, why can't they just try and get along somehow?"
I keep seeing all these commentators with respectable faces, experts, in their sixties, who are supposed to know about such things better than we do, but they never seem to give you the complete picture. There are just too many factors involved many of which even they do not know of- religion, tradition, the nationality question, and, most of all, lots of emotions pouring out every which way. The Arab-Israeli conflict seems simple to some and complicated to others, but even the most knowledgeable pundits of international politics cannot give you the whole truth. Some things simply seem to be missing from all of their explanations.
If you ask most people in the West about the Arab-Israeli conflict, they will probably tell you a very simple story- there was the Holocaust and then the establishment of the State of Israel as a kind of shelter for Holocaust victims. The Nazis persecuted the Jews; killed six million of them, and then the survivors went back to their ancient homeland and established an independent state there. Arabs would not accept these Jews and have been fighting them ever since. On the Arab side they usually talk about European imperialism, Western colonialism and how the Jews come to Palestine to take Arab land. They will also tell you about how they are killing Muslims who never did anything bad to the Jews. The Jews became Nazis themselves, and are racists, and are killers of Arab children. They took the place of other Western colonial powers in the Middle East in further oppressing the Arabs. They see Jewish immigrants as Europeans of Jewish belief that should be living in Europe and not in the Middle East. They see Jewishness as a religious thing only- same as Christianity or Islam.
Outside of mentioning the Nazis, or occasionally, Germans, almost no one ever mentions East or Central Europeans and how they treated the Jews as one of the main factors to cause the Jews to leave the countries of their birth, and go to a faraway desert land to build a new country there. Moreover, almost no one ever talks about a very important European nationality law called "Jus Sanguinis" which loosely translated from Latin means "The Right of the Blood" and which was one of the main causes of mass Jewish exodus from Europe in the 20th century. In this short paper I attempt to show how Russia and Poland and other Central and East European countries applied the Jus Sanguinis law to the Jews and put them in a situation where the only possible way out, short of emigration to the New World, was the creation of Zionism and subsequent exodus of hundreds of thousands of East European Jews to Palestine.
Central/East Europeans and Arabs see "Jewishness" in two different ways.
The Arabs do not see Jews as an ethnic nationality or a race of people who have the right to be in the Middle East. They see them as Europeans who should be residing in Europe. They also see them as merely a religious group, the same as Catholics or Baptists. However, many Europeans who had large Jewish populations in their countries saw and still see the Jews as non-Europeans who have no business being in Europe. These two conflicting views caught the Jews who moved to Palestine between the rock and the hard place. On the one hand, the Europeans (particularly Central /East Europeans) constantly told them that they were an alien nation and urged them to get out of their countries and go back to the Middle East, and on the other hand you have the Arabs who say that the Jews are just a religious group and most are Europeans that should go back to Europe. They say that Palestine belongs to Arabs and Muslims and that Jews have no right to be there. So, a Jew goes to Europe and they tell him to go to his country, and then he goes to "his country" and they tell him to go back to Europe. You just can't win!
One of the main reasons why so many Jews went back to the Middle East and established the state of Israel was because they could not obtain the ethnic nationality of Central and Eastern European countries in which they lived. Hence, they were persecuted there and were told to go back to "where they came from". And, according to East/Central Europeans, they came from what is known as Palestine/ Israel/Judea, etc. So, they went back there. It is about as simple as all that. The Jews were practically put in the midst of the Arabs by the Poles, the Russians, the Ukrainians, the Lithuanians and other such nationalities. So, why are the Brits and the Americans the only ones that feature in the long accusative harangues of Arab leaders as the powers guilty of causing Zionism to appear on the world stage? Before I continue, I would like to clarify some important logical premises that are often utilized in many an anti-Zionist rhetoric. The main one is: "Jews are not a nation but a religion only, hence they have no right to be in the Middle East".
Are Jews a Nation(ality) or a Religion?
It depends on what school of thought you adhere to. One can say that there are, generally, two methods of describing what constitutes a nation and/or a nationality. One is the German/Russian/Japanese method, which teaches that a nation is a group of people that is of common ethnic origin, a certain predominant physical appearance, descends from a common ancestor, and has its own language and traditions, but may or may not necessarily have its own independent political entity. So, according to this concept, Gypsies are a nation, Tibetans is a nation, Kurds are a nation and so are Basques and Catalans. Belonging to such a nation means having its nationality. Hence, Jews would be a nationality within this conceptual framework, and a Jew's nationality would thus be just "Jewish". The concept of "citizenship" would be different from that of nationality. Citizenship would mean "having paper documents from a particular independent state and thus, having the right of abode, the right to vote and the right to do business there and travel under that state's passport." So, citizenship would thus be political, but 'nationality' would be an ethno-racial/cultural concept.
Such "nationalities" would not be easy to acquire as they are transmitted genetically. For example, one can join a Gypsy caravan or be accepted into Judaism, but one will never be a true Gypsy or a true Jew. Only by intermarrying and having children with a spouse from that particular group would one's lineage become Gypsy or Jewish, but only after several generations of such 'racial' mixing.
One mainly belongs to such nations through something called "Jus Sanguinis" (Yoos-San-Gwee-Nis): in Latin, "the right of the blood". Let's take Japan as an example. One cannot "become" Japanese. One does not become Japanese by being born there, either. You need to have a Japanese face and lineage, a Japanese name, and you must speak Japanese. If two Germans go to Japan and their child is born there, the child is not Japanese. If two Japanese persons go to Germany and their child is born there, the child is not really German. One can obtain "paper citizenship" there, but one will never be truly German or Japanese to the people in daily situations in that country. And, in the past, even citizenship in those countries was very hard to obtain, let alone if one tried to obtain "nationality" there.
The countries in Eastern/Central Europe have traditionally adhered to this "nationality by bloodline" concept and they strictly separated citizenship and nationality. That is why when you go to Poland or Lithuania or Latvia, you will see that most of the people there belong to one ethnic stock, look (kind of) similar to each other, and have the same language and the same kind of names. A Jew born in such countries would never be Polish or Lithuanian. He would just be a "Jew." Hence, millions of Jews living in those countries were always treated as foreigners, denied many fundamental human rights, and physically persecuted. They were told to "Get out!" "Go home" and thus, to counteract such persecutions, they created a movement called "Zionism" so that they could be "in their own country", at last.
The British/French and American (including Latin American) concept of a nation is that of "a group of people having an independent political state that is recognized as such by the world community". How does one belong to such a nation? Usually, by being born on the territory of that independent state or having at least one parent born there. This is called "Jus Solis", translated from Latin as "the Right of the Soil". Hence, a person born in the US, or Britain, or France, or Argentina is automatically American, British, French or Argentinean. And such citizenship would be identical to "nationality". The governments of those countries recognize you as one of them and the people also consider you to be part of their nation. Therefore, a Jew from America is an American first and foremost. A Jew from Britain is British and a Jew from Australia is an Australian. And while there may be some prejudice against them in those countries, the position of the government and the general population there is: these people were born here; therefore, they have the right to be here. Thus, there has not been as much Jewish emigration out of these countries into Israel as there has been emigration out of Eastern Europe. Those who did emigrate, usually did so based on strong religious convictions and not because of 'national' aspirations, or because they were never considered to be part of the nations of their birth.
Poland, Germany, Romania, Ukraine and Russia, places where millions of Jews ended up living after centuries of migrations, were not like the US, Latin America or France. They utilized the Jus Sanguinis method of determining people's nationality. A Jew born in Russia was not Russian. Russia traditionally sees belonging to the Russian nation as a "blood" thing, not as a citizenship thing. Jews came from somewhere else. Russians did not. So, a Jew may have citizenship there, but he would not be considered a Russian by the hundred plus million ethnic Russians and by the government of Russia. You see, who is Russian in Russia and who is not, was always decided by the Russians.
They see Jews as a nation that came from the Middle East. Jews may live in Russia and have paper citizenship there, so much is true. However, they are not related to the Russian indigenous population by 'blood'- Russians called Jews “Yevreyi" -"Ethnic Hebrews". Such "Hebrews" are basically seen as foreigners, and, according to many Russians, they have no real right to be in Russia. They should "go back to where they came from" even if they came from there two thousand years ago. "Russia is for Russians". "Israel, Palestine, or somewhere else in the Middle East is for Hebrews". "They should get out of the Holy Russia and go back to their country." Such was the attitude of many Russian people and the Russian government in those times and it can still be found in Russia today. Laws were passed against Jews by the Czars stripping them of more and more rights and increasingly making them feel as unwelcome as possible in that country. Then, pogroms, or attacks on Jewish property and lives were effectuated by the Czars in various parts of the Russian Empire. Fantastic accusations such as that the Jews were killing Christian babies to make matzos were fabricated and circulated as rumors to whip up crowds into going out and killing Jews.
Most Arabs, on the other hand, follow the American model. Syrians, Egyptians and Jordanians in particular, see "nationality" as "belonging to an independent state by citizenship" and see citizenship and nationality as essentially one and the same. They practice the Right of the Soil- or, again, Jus Solis. They see the Jews living and having citizenship in Syria, Lebanon or Egypt as just Syrians, Lebanese or Egyptians, and as Arabs, too, since, traditionally, an "Arab" is a person who speaks Arabic as his mother tongue. Many Jews there did, consequently they were often seen as just Arabs, too, albeit of Jewish faith.
The Arabs saw Jews coming from such 'Jus Sanguinis' countries as Russia as simply Russians/Europeans because they did not understand anything about how the Jus Sanguinis- the "right of the blood", or more exactly, the absence of it, drove the Jews out of those places.
So, to stress my point again, you have a situation where on one hand you have the Arabs who see nationality as a citizenship concept and see Jews who ran away from Europe as just Germans and Russians and Poles of Jewish faith, and, on the other hand, you have East Europeans such as Russians and Poles who see nationality as a 'blood thing' and who have forced the Jews to leave their countries of birth because they told them that they had no blood right to be there. And who also made sure that they could not live a normal life there by persecuting them legally and by creating organized massacres against them.
Hence, the big conflict of the two nationality systems and the ensuing misunderstanding -the East and Central Europeans ( Germans for one) said that the home of the Jews is the Middle East and practically forced them to go there, and many Arabs who see Jews as Europeans have been telling them to "go back to Europe". It was and is an awkward situation for Jews to be in, not to mention that it has been causing tremendous bloodsheds for over a century now.
The Middle Eastern conflict has been viewed from many angles in the media, and there have been numerous viewpoints as to who had caused it, why it has happened and who is at fault. It is kind of hard not to be partial or not to take sides in the debates surrounding it as the temptation to do so is very high. "Oh, those Arabs, they are such fanatics!" "Oh, those Israelis, they are baby killers!" "Oh, they are both wrong". "They are brothers, why can't they just try and get along somehow?"
I keep seeing all these commentators with respectable faces, experts, in their sixties, who are supposed to know about such things better than we do, but they never seem to give you the complete picture. There are just too many factors involved many of which even they do not know of- religion, tradition, the nationality question, and, most of all, lots of emotions pouring out every which way. The Arab-Israeli conflict seems simple to some and complicated to others, but even the most knowledgeable pundits of international politics cannot give you the whole truth. Some things simply seem to be missing from all of their explanations.
If you ask most people in the West about the Arab-Israeli conflict, they will probably tell you a very simple story- there was the Holocaust and then the establishment of the State of Israel as a kind of shelter for Holocaust victims. The Nazis persecuted the Jews; killed six million of them, and then the survivors went back to their ancient homeland and established an independent state there. Arabs would not accept these Jews and have been fighting them ever since. On the Arab side they usually talk about European imperialism, Western colonialism and how the Jews come to Palestine to take Arab land. They will also tell you about how they are killing Muslims who never did anything bad to the Jews. The Jews became Nazis themselves, and are racists, and are killers of Arab children. They took the place of other Western colonial powers in the Middle East in further oppressing the Arabs. They see Jewish immigrants as Europeans of Jewish belief that should be living in Europe and not in the Middle East. They see Jewishness as a religious thing only- same as Christianity or Islam.
Outside of mentioning the Nazis, or occasionally, Germans, almost no one ever mentions East or Central Europeans and how they treated the Jews as one of the main factors to cause the Jews to leave the countries of their birth, and go to a faraway desert land to build a new country there. Moreover, almost no one ever talks about a very important European nationality law called "Jus Sanguinis" which loosely translated from Latin means "The Right of the Blood" and which was one of the main causes of mass Jewish exodus from Europe in the 20th century. In this short paper I attempt to show how Russia and Poland and other Central and East European countries applied the Jus Sanguinis law to the Jews and put them in a situation where the only possible way out, short of emigration to the New World, was the creation of Zionism and subsequent exodus of hundreds of thousands of East European Jews to Palestine.
Central/East Europeans and Arabs see "Jewishness" in two different ways.
The Arabs do not see Jews as an ethnic nationality or a race of people who have the right to be in the Middle East. They see them as Europeans who should be residing in Europe. They also see them as merely a religious group, the same as Catholics or Baptists. However, many Europeans who had large Jewish populations in their countries saw and still see the Jews as non-Europeans who have no business being in Europe. These two conflicting views caught the Jews who moved to Palestine between the rock and the hard place. On the one hand, the Europeans (particularly Central /East Europeans) constantly told them that they were an alien nation and urged them to get out of their countries and go back to the Middle East, and on the other hand you have the Arabs who say that the Jews are just a religious group and most are Europeans that should go back to Europe. They say that Palestine belongs to Arabs and Muslims and that Jews have no right to be there. So, a Jew goes to Europe and they tell him to go to his country, and then he goes to "his country" and they tell him to go back to Europe. You just can't win!
One of the main reasons why so many Jews went back to the Middle East and established the state of Israel was because they could not obtain the ethnic nationality of Central and Eastern European countries in which they lived. Hence, they were persecuted there and were told to go back to "where they came from". And, according to East/Central Europeans, they came from what is known as Palestine/ Israel/Judea, etc. So, they went back there. It is about as simple as all that. The Jews were practically put in the midst of the Arabs by the Poles, the Russians, the Ukrainians, the Lithuanians and other such nationalities. So, why are the Brits and the Americans the only ones that feature in the long accusative harangues of Arab leaders as the powers guilty of causing Zionism to appear on the world stage? Before I continue, I would like to clarify some important logical premises that are often utilized in many an anti-Zionist rhetoric. The main one is: "Jews are not a nation but a religion only, hence they have no right to be in the Middle East".
Are Jews a Nation(ality) or a Religion?
It depends on what school of thought you adhere to. One can say that there are, generally, two methods of describing what constitutes a nation and/or a nationality. One is the German/Russian/Japanese method, which teaches that a nation is a group of people that is of common ethnic origin, a certain predominant physical appearance, descends from a common ancestor, and has its own language and traditions, but may or may not necessarily have its own independent political entity. So, according to this concept, Gypsies are a nation, Tibetans is a nation, Kurds are a nation and so are Basques and Catalans. Belonging to such a nation means having its nationality. Hence, Jews would be a nationality within this conceptual framework, and a Jew's nationality would thus be just "Jewish". The concept of "citizenship" would be different from that of nationality. Citizenship would mean "having paper documents from a particular independent state and thus, having the right of abode, the right to vote and the right to do business there and travel under that state's passport." So, citizenship would thus be political, but 'nationality' would be an ethno-racial/cultural concept.
Such "nationalities" would not be easy to acquire as they are transmitted genetically. For example, one can join a Gypsy caravan or be accepted into Judaism, but one will never be a true Gypsy or a true Jew. Only by intermarrying and having children with a spouse from that particular group would one's lineage become Gypsy or Jewish, but only after several generations of such 'racial' mixing.
One mainly belongs to such nations through something called "Jus Sanguinis" (Yoos-San-Gwee-Nis): in Latin, "the right of the blood". Let's take Japan as an example. One cannot "become" Japanese. One does not become Japanese by being born there, either. You need to have a Japanese face and lineage, a Japanese name, and you must speak Japanese. If two Germans go to Japan and their child is born there, the child is not Japanese. If two Japanese persons go to Germany and their child is born there, the child is not really German. One can obtain "paper citizenship" there, but one will never be truly German or Japanese to the people in daily situations in that country. And, in the past, even citizenship in those countries was very hard to obtain, let alone if one tried to obtain "nationality" there.
The countries in Eastern/Central Europe have traditionally adhered to this "nationality by bloodline" concept and they strictly separated citizenship and nationality. That is why when you go to Poland or Lithuania or Latvia, you will see that most of the people there belong to one ethnic stock, look (kind of) similar to each other, and have the same language and the same kind of names. A Jew born in such countries would never be Polish or Lithuanian. He would just be a "Jew." Hence, millions of Jews living in those countries were always treated as foreigners, denied many fundamental human rights, and physically persecuted. They were told to "Get out!" "Go home" and thus, to counteract such persecutions, they created a movement called "Zionism" so that they could be "in their own country", at last.
The British/French and American (including Latin American) concept of a nation is that of "a group of people having an independent political state that is recognized as such by the world community". How does one belong to such a nation? Usually, by being born on the territory of that independent state or having at least one parent born there. This is called "Jus Solis", translated from Latin as "the Right of the Soil". Hence, a person born in the US, or Britain, or France, or Argentina is automatically American, British, French or Argentinean. And such citizenship would be identical to "nationality". The governments of those countries recognize you as one of them and the people also consider you to be part of their nation. Therefore, a Jew from America is an American first and foremost. A Jew from Britain is British and a Jew from Australia is an Australian. And while there may be some prejudice against them in those countries, the position of the government and the general population there is: these people were born here; therefore, they have the right to be here. Thus, there has not been as much Jewish emigration out of these countries into Israel as there has been emigration out of Eastern Europe. Those who did emigrate, usually did so based on strong religious convictions and not because of 'national' aspirations, or because they were never considered to be part of the nations of their birth.
Poland, Germany, Romania, Ukraine and Russia, places where millions of Jews ended up living after centuries of migrations, were not like the US, Latin America or France. They utilized the Jus Sanguinis method of determining people's nationality. A Jew born in Russia was not Russian. Russia traditionally sees belonging to the Russian nation as a "blood" thing, not as a citizenship thing. Jews came from somewhere else. Russians did not. So, a Jew may have citizenship there, but he would not be considered a Russian by the hundred plus million ethnic Russians and by the government of Russia. You see, who is Russian in Russia and who is not, was always decided by the Russians.
They see Jews as a nation that came from the Middle East. Jews may live in Russia and have paper citizenship there, so much is true. However, they are not related to the Russian indigenous population by 'blood'- Russians called Jews “Yevreyi" -"Ethnic Hebrews". Such "Hebrews" are basically seen as foreigners, and, according to many Russians, they have no real right to be in Russia. They should "go back to where they came from" even if they came from there two thousand years ago. "Russia is for Russians". "Israel, Palestine, or somewhere else in the Middle East is for Hebrews". "They should get out of the Holy Russia and go back to their country." Such was the attitude of many Russian people and the Russian government in those times and it can still be found in Russia today. Laws were passed against Jews by the Czars stripping them of more and more rights and increasingly making them feel as unwelcome as possible in that country. Then, pogroms, or attacks on Jewish property and lives were effectuated by the Czars in various parts of the Russian Empire. Fantastic accusations such as that the Jews were killing Christian babies to make matzos were fabricated and circulated as rumors to whip up crowds into going out and killing Jews.
Most Arabs, on the other hand, follow the American model. Syrians, Egyptians and Jordanians in particular, see "nationality" as "belonging to an independent state by citizenship" and see citizenship and nationality as essentially one and the same. They practice the Right of the Soil- or, again, Jus Solis. They see the Jews living and having citizenship in Syria, Lebanon or Egypt as just Syrians, Lebanese or Egyptians, and as Arabs, too, since, traditionally, an "Arab" is a person who speaks Arabic as his mother tongue. Many Jews there did, consequently they were often seen as just Arabs, too, albeit of Jewish faith.
The Arabs saw Jews coming from such 'Jus Sanguinis' countries as Russia as simply Russians/Europeans because they did not understand anything about how the Jus Sanguinis- the "right of the blood", or more exactly, the absence of it, drove the Jews out of those places.
So, to stress my point again, you have a situation where on one hand you have the Arabs who see nationality as a citizenship concept and see Jews who ran away from Europe as just Germans and Russians and Poles of Jewish faith, and, on the other hand, you have East Europeans such as Russians and Poles who see nationality as a 'blood thing' and who have forced the Jews to leave their countries of birth because they told them that they had no blood right to be there. And who also made sure that they could not live a normal life there by persecuting them legally and by creating organized massacres against them.
Hence, the big conflict of the two nationality systems and the ensuing misunderstanding -the East and Central Europeans ( Germans for one) said that the home of the Jews is the Middle East and practically forced them to go there, and many Arabs who see Jews as Europeans have been telling them to "go back to Europe". It was and is an awkward situation for Jews to be in, not to mention that it has been causing tremendous bloodsheds for over a century now.
Print
Email
