Essence of Judaism

Burning Lights by Bella Chagall. With 36 drawings by Marc Chagall. Schocken Books. $3.00.

For most Jews of the West, it is not Palestine but the Pale of eastern Europe that stands at the center of the idea of being Jewish. That is where they came from—they or their parents—emerging into the modern world from a background of experience that has no real parallel anywhere. They left the ghetto for very good reasons indeed, and there is probably no one who would want to go back even if it were possible. But the world outside the ghetto turned out to be uncomfortable, too—uncomfortable for everybody, perhaps, but for Jews especially and in a special way, mostly because the world was reluctant to receive them, but also because the Jews themselves had lived too long on the fringes of western society to accept its pretensions completely and allow themselves to be submerged; the ghetto was still a good point of reference. And by 1933, when the ominous possibilities of the “Jewish problem” began to crystallize, it was natural that some Jews should begin to think of the virtues of the ghetto. For the ghetto did have virtues, and whatever might be said against it, it was almost enough for a Jew in the years after 1933 to say that the life of the ghetto was at least not the life of modern capitalism.