Copy of Scapegoat - Andrea Dworkin - pdf

French Revolution, ostracized as a Jacobin. “Deeply a man of place, ”
writes a biographer, “he hated wanderers and wandering, the nomadic obsession.
In his mind and in his words he strained always to reproduce the
movement of the rooks whose great circles gave form to mystery and established
boundaries to the place he called home. ”18Standing against the
English hatred of the French revolutionaries, he stood against his people,
but he made for himself a place in England nevertheless; he created a territory
in which he was the sovereign, very much at the cost of his wife
Jane Carlyle. Gordimer did not want power; Carlyle did, small, mean,
and petty as it was. Each experienced a subjective exile while living in the
country of birth. Belonging is not simple.
Carlyles beloved French Revolution emancipated Jews for the first
time in European history. Jews were recognized as French citizens. Laws
discriminating against Jews were struck down. (Male Jews, of course; the
French Revolution betrayed women, all women. See Mary Wollstonecraft,
A Vindication of the Rights o f Women. ) It was the emancipation
itself, according to Sara Bershtel and Allen Graubard in Saving Remnants:
Feeling Jewish in America, that gave rise to the “‘Jewish question, ’ which
asked whether the Jews could truly be integrated into the larger nation. ”
This question, they say, became “the central issue in European Jewish
life. ”19 A pariah group, the Jews were seen as nomadic and separatist.
It is too easy to say that Jews accepted this characterization because
they were a people who did not belong to the nations in which they lived.
Beit-Hallahmi describes a version of the Jewish reality prior to the establishment
of the state of Israel: “For most of history the Jewish condition
has been one of Diaspora or dispersion. The Hebrew term used to describe
this means exile, and the term has been used for 2, 000 years, as if
Jews had just recently moved from their homeland. In their synagogues,
Jews mourned over their exile and the desolation of the ancient homeland
every day, every week, and every holiday. ”20 But the reality is more schizophrenic.
Jews developed affection for the countries in which they lived;
also loyalty. Devotion to the promised land was a religious devotion contingent
on the coming of the Messiah; it was not a mandate for conquest.
Cursed by the Catholic Church, then Calvinists and Lutherans, for having
killed Christ, Jews were always vulnerable to instant, organized, and
sanctioned assault. But in everyday life, one lived in Italy or Austria or
Hungary or Russia (or, for example, earlier incarnations of the Austro-
Hungarian Empire, Prussia, the Balkans). In daily life it is hard not to love
where one lives, where one’s life is. Even now, dislocation is a whisper