Published: 18 April 2018
Last updated: 4 March 2024
“Berlin – more than you ever thought!” says an advertising banner on my computer screen. “Europe’s coolest city can bring you profits. A safe real-estate investment!” And an email announcement from Lufthansa tempts Israeli customers to “A Spring vacation in Berlin.”
The Israeli-German Spring is no longer new or shocking. I explored its beginnings in my book Israelis in Berlin in 2001. Even at that early stage, the pioneers of this novel diaspora of Berlin-based Hebrews, articulate and artistic, listed Israel’s political woes and never-ending wars as incentives to their emigration, whether they deemed it permanent or temporary.
But members of that young crowd were not émigrés in any classical sense. They were already global-minded and internet-savvy, a moment before the blogosphere and social networks came into existence. They were heralding the world phenomenon of wired nomads, belonging to more than one place and culture, traveling at ease among languages, able to return to their homeland at any given moment, or to shun the idea of homeland altogether – those were Israel’s first millennial transnationals.
But, perhaps against the grain of their own Israel critique, these Hebraic Berliners, like other Israelis in Los Angeles, Melbourne and London, were also cultural emissaries of a certain part of Israeli society. While representing themselves as individualists, world-wise protesters against Israel’s high cost of living (this was their most visible banner), rising nationalism and democratic deficits, they also carried with them some of Israel’s best tenets: textual and artistic creativity, sophisticated inter-connectedness, and the ever-expanding Hebrew language and literature.
Today’s liberal Israelis, mostly but not exclusively secular Jews, mostly but not exclusively left-wing and peace-seeking, our real and metaphorical Tel Aviviens taking a minority stance against the real and metaphorical Jerusalem, are divided between those who think that the battle for peace and democracy is lost, and those (like me) who believe that humanist Zionism can still prevail.
But this inner debate is not parallel to the presumed dichotomy of homeland and diaspora, or – a better phrasing for our age – homeland and global citizenship. Jews have been nomads since Abraham, again since the Egyptian-Israelites, again since the Babylonian captivity, and again since the destruction of the second Temple in 70AD.
The new Hebrew-speaking nomads in today’s western countries, alongside their backpacking younger siblings in Asia and South America, are instinctively carrying that ancient cultural DNA in their luggage. Of course, today’s world is full of other itinerants, from refugees to business people and idealistic emissaries.
The Jews are by no means unique, but they are perhaps the best historical emblems of this modern nomadism, and also the most noted jugglers of carry-on intellectual luggage. After all, language and textuality are humankind’s weightless assets.
Thus, the bookish and artistic Israelis drawn to Berlin today – to Berlin, of all places, because the history-minded Berlin is Europe’s friendliest, safest, most hospitable city to Jews as well as Israelis – are the latter-day followers of the teenage Moses Mendelssohn, carrying his intellectual goods into that far more hostile Brandenburgian town in the mid-eighteenth century.
Make no mistake: for many Israelis, Berlin is still the ultimate icon of evil. But for many others, it is the friendliest of cities, offering the best kind of globalisation, full of non-natives of every colour and creed. I know Jews and Muslims who got together in Berlin bars and truly talked to each other for the first time in their lives.
The Zionist movement, in all its founding versions, wished to end Jewish nomadism once and for all. It hoped for what the physicists call a centripetal motion of every Jew into the ancestral homeland. This Zionism, I think, no longer exists; not even among its most nationalist twisters today.
But the novel acknowledgement of the merits of a Jewish world often stops when Israelis are concerned. Is it not a betrayal of the ideal, or at least a no-confidence vote in present-day Israel, to see thousands of its talented youngsters opt out?
Not for me. I am still a zionist, with a small “z”, of the kind putting humanity and democracy before Judaism but seeing their alignment possible and doable. Moreover, I believe that global humanity and democracy carry a few Hebraic chromosomes. Thus, I do not fear or shun the new Israeli diasporas, the new travel-lines of modern Hebrews.
It is impossible to map Hebrew literature of the past two decades without the seminal Berlin-based novels by Yoram Kaniuk and Haim Beer. Or, more poignantly, without the world Hebrew literature of Maya Arad and Reuven Namdar, followed by numerous others.
Theirs is a new and ephemeral concept of global citizenship. They reside, offline and online, in two places or more at the same time. Only a few have truly divorced Israel. Many might prefer to say that they and Israel are temporarily separated due to mutual disagreements, or simply due to the ancient nomadic call inspired by the necessities of science, business, art or love.
“Why are the Israelis in Europe mostly anti-Zionists?” a journalist recently asked me. But most of them are not. With fierce criticism comes great attachment. They loathe and love. This is why a great Hebrew novel may yet be written in Munich, Miami or Madrid.
Is national memory and creativity best served by the patriot, the nationalist and the warrior? Why not the wanderer, the nomad? If Israel did not have diasporas, it would be a self-consuming black hole rather than a modern country. The new generation of wired Hebrew nomads is part of this story.
Even when they turn their backs on their homeland with distaste and disappointment, their backpack is still – symbolically, at least – full of texts and able to produce new texts. While fervently hoping for a realignment of present-day Israeli politics with the better aspects of the Jewish legacy, I also trust the Hebrew backpack’s textual staying power.
