Alternatives to Paralysis in a New Age of Pogroms

Georgetown University Law Professor David E. Bernstein notes in the “Washington Post” that in France last week, “A group of anti-Israel demonstrators tried to storm a synagogue, but Jews had their own undercover agents at the protests so they could raise the alarm if any of the protestors started to engage in violence. They did so, and the rioters were beaten back by a combination of ‘right-wing’ Jewish youth groups and communal security.”

Counter to Hannah Arendt’s mythology about self-emasculated Jews, Jewish self-defense in the Diaspora has medieval roots as well as such modern manifestations as the Hashomer Hatzair or Labor Zionist youth movement, growing out of the era of the Kishinev pogroms, that resisted the Nazis, in the tradition of Jabotinsky’s Revisionist Zionism, and in modern “shomrim” societies.

Bernstein implicitly suggests that—if organized Jewish life is going to survive in Europe—there are two alternative but not necessarily contradictory ways to go. One is Jewish self-defense, which has been seen recently not only in France but the Ukraine. The other is that the police become “proactive, using intelligence gathering, decoys wearing kippot and other Jewish garb to draw attackers and arrest them, stings, and so on. Unfortunately, though, policing in Europe is by custom almost entirely reactive, the belief is that specifically doing anything proactively stopping anti-Semitic violence would be ‘provocative’, and the Jewish leadership, as a well-placed European friend told me, is too ineffectual to demand anything different.”

Increased Jewish interest in the U.S. in martial arts training and—dare I say it—the Second Amendment reflects the first approach. Jewish collaboration with proactive police efforts against anti-Jewish violence—which some civil libertarians and leftists don’t like because it may intimidate American Muslims—reflects the second. Sad to say, in Czarist Russia—where the police were in league with the pogromists—many Jewish revolutionaries, initially at least, opposed Jewish self-defense because they viewed anti-Jewish pogroms as a “righteous reflex” that needed to be redirected against the authorities.

Of course, there is need for caution about getting what you wish for in terms of vigilanteism. The heinous murder of a Muslim teenager by three Jewish soccer hooligans in Jerusalem was not an outgrowth of the tradition of Diaspora self-defense. It occurred in a Jewish-majority nation where the state has an obligation to assert its monopoly over the legitimate means of violence and to protect non-Jewish minorities against violence by misguided or demented Jews who take law into their own hands.