Isolation
In recent weeks we have experienced the consequences of isolation and paid its price. Like Jerusalem after its fall, we have sometimes felt that we were “dwelling alone.” Our relatives, our friends, our students have become images on a screen. Personhood has been diminished; we have set ourselves apart, lest our lives be in danger.
Our present situation may call to mind other forms of isolation in our own time and in the Jewish history of ages past. Even in the absence of a pandemic there are those among us who are isolated during a course of years or even a lifetime. There is the child who is less socially adept than his or her age-mates, who is excluded from their activities, forced to rely on the self, who is often bullied, when paid attention to at all. There are the severely ill or disabled children, hidden away because they are unable to connect with others. Perhaps they require home schooling, perhaps their malady makes them unable to communicate or to communicate only in so labored a fashion that their parents alone make the effort to understand them.
At the other end of the age spectrum a new isolation awaits all too many: the isolation of the elderly. Beyond the active life of middle age, retired from employment, often neglected by children and grandchildren, older people are likely to feel that they have been isolated, put aside, that they will spend the remainder of their lives without human contact, shut up in an apartment or a nursing home. What once were outgoing emotions turn inward for lack of emotional contact outside the self.
Fortunately, we have learned that there are means to overcome such isolation. For physically challenged children we have developed techniques to maximize their communication possibilities. A remarkable organization called “Team Impact” connects severely ill—and hence isolated—children with college athletic teams allowing them to feel that they belong to a world they greatly admire. As they pull on the jersey of this or that team, as the players gather around them, the children’s isolation is broken, the illness or disability temporarily forgotten.
Similarly, and fortunately, we have activity centers for the elderly. Two generations ago the anthropologist Barbara Myerhoff, in her acclaimed book Number Our Days, empathetically described such a center catering to immigrant Jews in Venice, California. There the isolation of an or persons within an outsider group was broken. Cantankerous individuals were enabled to shatter the isolating strangeness of a country in which they did not grow up even as they interacted with others who shared their fears, commitments, and hopes. By turning outward to the group they were able to avoid the dreadful loneliness that comes when old acquaintances gradually fall victim to the inevitable malakh hamavet. More recently, the HUC-JIR historian of American Jewry, Jacob Rader Marcus, was able to breach the isolation of extreme old age thanks to the willingness of a few students to walk and talk with him each day. For Marcus, even in his nineties, the communication with youth restored his soul even as the gingerly taken steps restored his body.
““If we now look backward to Jewish history, we discover that there is yet another sort of isolation that differs from the forms it takes among the disabled, the chronically ill, or the elderly… It is the isolation not of individuals, but of an entire people.” ”
If we now look backward to Jewish history, we discover that there is yet another sort of isolation that differs from the forms it takes among the disabled, the chronically ill, or the elderly. It differs, as well, from the isolation necessitated by the spread of a disease. What sets it apart is that it is an isolation imposed from outside action intended not for the welfare of those upon whom it is levied, but rather for their harm. Moreover, it is the isolation not of individuals, but of an entire people.
When the Nazis came to power in 1933, they ruled over a nation whose Jews felt “at home.” To be sure, Germany had a history of antisemitism that went back to medieval times, when, at the time of the Black Plague in 1348, Jews were accused of poisoning the wells—much as contemporary antisemites have recently spoken of a “Jew virus,” malevolently imposed on fellow Americans. And Martin Luther, late in his life, wrote of the need to burn down synagogues and Jewish homes, for were not Jews, after all, as one verse in the New Testament makes explicit, “children of the devil”? In the late Middle Ages, in Frankfurt, Jews were isolated in cramped quarters in the overcrowded Judengasse. Christian society was regarded as a sacred body that a cancerous Judaism could all too easily attack if Jews were not expelled, or at least isolated.
But beginning in the nineteenth century, a halting yet ultimately successful process of political emancipation moved forward in Germany, state by German state. With the establishment of the Second Reich in 1871, Jews, at least on paper, possessed the same political rights as non-Jews. By the time of the Weimar Republic, German Jews were, for the most part, happily ensconced in the middle class. Popular Jewish actors performed on the stage, Jewish musicians were lionized, Jewish professionals admired and patronized. To be sure, there were antisemitic incidents, but no indicator was more crucial for understanding the positive change that had taken place following the World War than the high rate of interfaith marriages. Jews not only participated in political life and German culture, their social contacts with non-Jews had in many instances led to the very closest of such contacts, marriage. At least on the surface, Weimar Jewry was not isolated.
But then, the wheel turned. 1933 marked the beginning of a process of isolation that became ever more severe. Jewish physicians could no longer treat non-Jewish patients; Jewish lawyers lost their Gentile clients. Jewish actors were removed from the stage while Jewish musicians could no longer be heard in the musical hall. Worst of all, social contacts between Jews and non-Jews virtually disappeared. Patronizing Jewish stores was regarded as a political offense; even speaking to a Jew became a form of national or racial betrayal.
A sense of isolation, purposefully induced, overcame German Jewry. Jewish neighbors, once regarded as fellow human beings, were now just Jews, a foreign, if not also a dangerous race. It was not unusual for Christians, who once had Jewish friends, now to turn away from them on the street, acting as if they had never seen them before, and making every effort to avoid contact.
In the course of time, this state-determined isolation became ever more institutionalized. In the years following the November pogrom of 1938 (the so-called Kristallnacht), Jews were tangibly stigmatized as Jews lest anyone accidentally break through the Jewish isolation. In October 1941 they were forced to wear the yellow star; they could no longer live in the same building with non-Jews, but only with coreligionists in nigh quarantined Judenhäuser. A star was placed on the outside of such houses to warn away any straying non-Jew. There was a strictly enforced curfew so that Jews would be seen on the streets only during limited hours.
Even as we have sought in our time, as best we are able, to cope with the ongoing isolation of the disabled and elderly and with the bothersome isolation created by the coronavirus, so did German Jewry in the troubled Nazi years seek to overcome its own isolation. It did so by deepening ties among fellow Jews. As Jewish children were forced out of public schools, the Jewish school system expanded. Since advanced education now excluded Jews, Jewish university professors taught, and Jewish adults studied, in courses on Judaism and Jewish history established by the Jewish community. No longer allowed to exercise their professions for a general public, Jewish actors and musicians performed for fellow Jews in the Jüdisches Kulturbund, a cultural society that put on symphonies and plays. Isolation from the outside prompted energization on the inside. But that separation might have meant the acceptance of a new spiritual isolation--an undermining of the Jewish identity, which had absorbed significant elements of general culture ever since the eighteenth-century Enlightenment.
No one was more aware of this danger than the Jewish philosopher Fritz Bamberger, from 1934 to 1939 director of the Liberal teacher-training academy in Berlin. In an article that he wrote at the time, Bamberger, who would later become associated with HUC-JIR, made it clear that the response to isolation from the outside must not result in the creation of a new spiritual ghetto. It was necessary to resist such isolation with tools that could be exercised from within. The goal of Jewish education, as he conceived it, was therefore to encompass both Jewish culture and humanistic general culture, the latter being the very legacy that Nazism had come to despise.
““Isolation and defamation could lose their sting if Jews worked together, each in some way assisting the other.” ”
And there was yet one other way to combat the restricting isolation and the sense of despair that were increasingly leading to suicide. It was to transcend the exclusion by casting one’s eyes away from the suffering it induced toward purposes that could be established from within--to tasks that retained the power of agency. One could choose to remain subject, not object. No one expressed this more fervently than Rabbi Leo Baeck, the leader of German Jewry during those troubled years. A new bond of communication, he believed, could be created by each Jew helping the other to alleviate pain and perhaps even achieve a measure of comfort. Isolation and defamation could lose their sting if Jews worked together, each in some way assisting the other. Baeck survived the Holocaust in the concentration-like ghetto of Theresienstadt, where, for many, his empathetic counseling drove away an isolation born of personal anxiety and fear.
The isolation suffered over millennia by diaspora Jews should invoke a historically embedded empathy for the isolation of other disadvantaged groups--religious, ethnic, and racial. At a time of new isolation, imposed by natural causes and human actions, the lesson of our history has not lost its relevance.
