Taking History into Their Own Hands

My late friend, the political writer Ben Wattenberg, used to say that if you condensed the history of the past two centuries into a single day’s newspaper, the page-one headline above the fold would be “AMERICA.” If so, somewhere on that same page you would also find “Israel.” In Israel: A Concise History of a Nation Reborn, the prolific author Daniel Gordis has now produced an account that might appear beneath that headline. As he summarizes the case succinctly in his opening passage, Israel’s is “one of the most extraordinary human stories of all time.”

Gordis means this in a double sense. First, in the 68 years since the birth of their state, Israelis have accomplished remarkable feats—military, economic, intellectual, cultural, and humanitarian—which compare favorably with the achievements of any of the other hundred-plus states founded since World War II. Second, the return of the Jews to their ancestral home, and thereby their renewal as a nation, is an event without parallel among history’s countless instances of ethnic dispossession and dispersion.

Gordis’s chronicle of the Jewish state succeeds handsomely on its own terms, but the book’s special strength lies in the way the author embeds Israel’s story in the pre-state history of Zionism and, through necessarily brief references, within the broader sweep of modern Jewish history. His story thus begins in earnest with the French Revolution, which both liberated the Jews from ghettoization, allowing them to take part in French and, more broadly, European life and contrarily kindled flames of xenophobic nationalism across the continent. The Jews, long persecuted as Christ-killers and deniers of the true religion, now appeared as an alien presence within the body politic—a bacillus, as Hitler would put it in Mein Kampf.