The Ashkenazi Revolution

92Moreover: Not only did we not save European Jewry from destruction, buteven that portion of it that was saved, owed its salvation to the oldfashionedmethod of fleeing from one diaspora to another. This facttestifies to the weak rescue-effort by Jewish revolutionaries, and it provesthat this effort, which started with great momentum, got stuck in thesymbolic mud and lost its power.Chapter 6The New Hebrew Literature1Modern political activism began within Ashkenazi Jewry in the 1880’s, butthe New Hebrew Literature was born at least a hundred years prior to this.This literature had a strong political-publicist quality to it, and even itspoems were political messages expressed in verse. It dealt with issues ofJews and Judaism in light of the changes taking place in the world, battledthe old religious-rabbinical world and suggested solutions for the future.The literature of the Jewish enlightenment was the first link in modernsecular political behavior to arise within the Ashkenazi People. It was adecisive factor in the birth of the Lovers of Zion movement and the secularbranch of this movement depended upon it and suckled from itcontinuously.The New Hebrew Literature was never a nationalist or populist literature.The linguistic tool that it used created a natural partition between it and themasses, and turned it into the voice of the intellectual class. At thefoundation of this literature is found duality and even hypocrisy. It spokein the name of the people and about the people but, in practice, it fought itsown war, for it sought to remain separate from the people. Its Hebrewlanguage was the product of this desire for separation and a wonderful andeffective tool for this separation. These traits of the New HebrewLiterature deprived it, from the beginning, of the ability to conduct a properand basic analysis of the questions that stood before the Ashkenazi People