Europa Europa

The 65th anniversary of the end of World War II in Europe will be marked this week with speeches, parades, and, one imagines, more than a little concern. The free-fall of the Greek economy has exposed enormous fault lines in the economic institutions of the European Union and the moral community on which it rests. Similarly concentrating the European mind are the recent electoral success of the far-right Jobbik party in Hungary, Russia's swift victory over Georgia and NATO in August 2008, and the challenge presented by the swelling numbers of Muslims and by militant Islam to the new Europe's commitment to tolerance and civic equality.

Jews and Israel figure here in complicated ways.  Holocaust memory has been institutionalized in Europe, not only in monuments and educational projects but in the very vision of the European Community, whose avowed aim of transcending the nation-state owed much to the idea that the Holocaust was the direct result of a fevered and idolatrous nationalism. Culturally, the wraith-like image of the Jew as victim of Europe's most perilous furies has transfixed artists and intellectuals for decades.  And yet, in a terrible irony, this same poignant reverie has helped render today's Jewish nation-state of Israel into a scandalous affront, an insult to enlightened humanity. Should not the Jews, demands Tony Judt, victims of nationalism's worst pathologies, have been the first to understand that sovereignty must be laid aside?

The affront is compounded by Israel's close ties with the crass, capitalist Uncle Sam—which, in another terrible irony, has provided Europe's security umbrella for decades.  All this, together with Europe's abiding guilt over colonialism, helps account for the disproportionate vilification so often hurled at Israel and ranging so far beyond any bounds of reasonable criticism and debate. What it may highlight is an idolatrous fever of a different but potentially no less perilous kind: the worship of a false utopian vision, last incarnate in Soviet Marxism, that would wish away normal self-interest, normal attachments to land and ethnicity, and the normal impulses to national power.

Endless negotiations between the universal and the particular, the ideal and the real, the need for sovereignty and the imperative to contain it by morality and law have been the stuff of Jewish thought for millennia. If there is any one lesson to be drawn from that intellectual tradition, it is that although no magic formulas can square these circles, there are modes of argument and basic moral principles that aid immeasurably in adjudicating disagreement and braking the worst excesses of the human will. In thinking of the conflict whose end is being commemorated this week, and of the portentous if still relatively bloodless crises that rack Europe today, such modest-sounding prescriptions loom as a precious legacy.

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