A Confirmed Verticalist

As I’ve read op-ed after op-ed by people, including Jewish people, who seem to understand the events of October 7 totally differently than I myself do, it finally struck me to wonder why precisely that is. Some are just misinformed, which category includes people who are naively getting their information online from openly biased sources all too eager to exploit their readers’ ignorance. And others are being guided forward, I think, by the siren opportunity to express their basic anti-Semitism in a way that makes it feel marginally more acceptable by hiding it behind the diaphanous veil of anti-Israelism. But still others, I think, are guided in their analyses not by prejudice or ignorance, but by a worldview that preferences the horizontal over the vertical.

There are basically two ways to understand any specific event: horizontally and vertically.

When confronted with an event, and challenged to explain and evaluate that event, horizontalists look from side to side to determine how they can fit the event under consideration into the wide world of similar events. So they saw the IDF massed at the border of Gaza and, when the moment was finally right, they saw them crossing that border in pursuit of some of their nation’s most fiendish enemies. That much, we all saw. But then horizontalist, instead of asking themselves how this can have happened, ask themselves instead what this is like. And then, having framed the issue that way, a key to interpreting the event presents itself easily. After all, it’s not like there’s any lack of nations throughout history that have sent their armies across the border into neighboring lands. Some instances of cross-border invasion are known to all: Russia crossing the border to invade Ukraine in 2014 and then again last year, for example. Or Iraq invading Kuwait in 1990. Or the Soviet Union invading Czechoslovakia in 1968. Others instances of one country invading another were once common knowledge but have by now been forgotten by most: the American invasion of Panama in 1989, for example, or of Grenada in 1983. And still other instances of cross-border invasion have become mere curiosities known these days more or less solely to historians of such things. The Brazilian invasion of Bolivia in 1903 in the context of the now-forgotten-by-all so-called “Acre War” would be a good example. And so would the British invasion of Sri Lanka, then called Ceylon, in 1795, just one year after the one in which France invaded Holland as part of the so-called French Revolutionary Wars.

There are lots of other examples, too. Most feature one nation ignoring the sovereignty of some contiguous or not contiguous other nation and then sending troops across the border into that other nation to wrest control from the locals and make the occupied territory part of the invading nation’s plan for its own future. I have omitted to mention the invasion of eleven different countries by Germany following the invasion of Poland in 1939, but those terrible stories are interpretable along similar lines. And, indeed, when a powerful nation invades a less powerful one, the point is almost always to impose the will of the stronger upon the weaker…and almost never to restore power to the people of the invaded nation. (That happens, of course: the invasion by Allied Forces of Nazi-occupied Europe would be the obvious example.) But, somehow, when horizontalists think of one nation invading another, it’s never to examples like that that their minds wander, but always, or almost always, to instances of powerful nations seeking to dominate less powerful ones.

And it is for that reason that opposing Israel’s invasion of Gaza feels so right to so many. Here is the powerful nation of Israel with its mighty armed forces, its powerful arsenal of advanced weaponry, and its formidable military prowess invading a strip of land less than one-third the size of greater Los Angeles that is ruled over by a governing body that has no air force, no navy, no regular army, and no nuclear weapons. How is that different from China invading Tibet in 1910?

And that is the path of horizontalism: you take an event and then, taking a good look around, you compare it to similar events to the east and the west, to the north and the south. You set the situation under consideration into the context of similar situations in other places and draw whatever parallels seem fair. And then, having contextualized the event in a way that feels reasonable, you feel more than entitled to your opinion.

I am, however, not a horizontalist, but a verticalist. I look back, not around. When I see film clips or hear descriptions by eye-witnesses of Jewish people being murdered in their beds, of grown women and teenaged girls being raped, of Jewish children being dragged from their homes and taken hostage by marauding foes intent not on making some sort of dramatic statement about their own vision of the future but, far more simply, on killing as many Jews as possible in as many vicious and brutal ways as time will allow—my mind doesn’t wander to Ceylon or Bolivia, but directly to Kovno, to Lviv, to Vienna, and to my grandparents’ town in Poland, the remaining Jews of which place were all murdered on the same day in 1942 after having been dragged from their homes and marched to their common grave.

Because I have spent my life reading books relating to Jewish history, my verticalism goes a long way down and that is the context in which I evaluate the events of October 7: looking specifically Jewish history to find the correct context in which to evaluate the events under consideration.

In 1963, Salo Wittmayer Baron, probably the greatest Jewish historian of the twentieth century, published an essay called “Newer Emphases in Jewish History” in the journal called Jewish Social Studies in which he came out forcefully against what he contemptuously labelled “the lachrymose conception of Jewish history,” by which expression he meant the way of retelling the history of the Jewish people as an endless series of lurches from one catastrophe to the next, from disaster to expulsion to persecution to ghettoization to genocide. The core concept of this theory, which Baron attributed ultimately to the work of Heinrich Graetz (who is widely recognized as the greatest Jewish historian of the nineteenth century), is the Jew as the eternal object and never the subject, as the eternally acted-upon party and never as the actor, as the eternal victim of persecution who spends the days of a lifetime hoping that no one does anything bad to them. (For an interesting evaluation of Baron’s theory by Professor Adam Teller of Brown University, click here.)

I have read all eighteen volumes of Baron’s masterwork, A Social and Religious History of the Jews. I highly recommend the experience. It will, however, take a while to get through (and you’ll have to assemble a full set book by book from various on-line sites), but the gain will more than justify the time spent reading: this is one of the single greatest works of Jewish scholarship ever written, a work of true genius. Of course, I get the point that Jews have surely been actors and not only the acted-upon parties in the course of Jewish history. But even if that is correct, which it is, the lachrymose thing is still very resonant with me: the history of the Jews outside of Israel really can be characterized as a never-ending series of nightmarish disasters,  of pogroms and auto-da-fés, of deportation and expulsion. Yes, there was more to it than that. But there was also that. And that is the baggage I bring with me as I approach October 7.

And that is why I see it my way and so many others, theirs. For me, it is not possible to think about the wanton murder of Jewish children, including babies, without my mind going directly to Treblinka or to Sobibor or to Belzec. I cannot imagine Jewish families annihilated en masse without my mind going directly to Babyn Yar. I cannot read about parents being shot in their own children’s presence without the full horror of what I know of the Shoah as the backdrop to the scene currently at centerstage.

But that isn’t all that comes to mind. Also in my thoughts constantly these days is the fact that there was no IDF in 1943, let alone in 1648 and 1649 when Cossacks murdered hundreds of thousands of Jews across Ukraine or in 1171 when the locals rounded up the Jews of Blois in France and killed every single one of them. There was no Jewish state for stateless Jews to flee to when they were expelled from Spain in 1492 or from Portugal in 1496, let alone from England in 1290 or from Hungary in 1360. And there was no Israel on the map to speak out in the forum of nations on behalf of the Jews of the Rhineland merciless massacred by Crusaders in the eleventh century or on behalf of the Jews of France during the Second and Third Crusades during the course of the twelfth.

We were, basically, on our own in the lands of our dispersion: on our own to cower in the cellar and hope not to be noticed, on our own to pray for safety, on our own to hope for the best. And it is why I am a confirmed verticalist when it comes to events like the October 7^th pogrom: maybe I’ve just had enough of facing the future on our own and embracing the “hope for the best” thing as a thoughtful plan forward.