ABSTRACT
The creation of the State of Israel has had its impact on Jewish-Gentile relations. It was a revolutionary event. Throughout the centuries, the Jewish people have never given up their claim to the ancient homeland, and there has never been a time when Jews have not lived in what was then called Palestine; but the restoration of sovereignty has eluded them time and time again. Their prayers for the coming of the redeemer were a mockery to the Gentiles. The claim of the Jews to be the “favorites of God” did not seem to meet with divine acceptance. The contrast between the affluence and even influence of individual Jews, on the one hand, and the powerlessness of the Jewish people “as a corpo,” on the other, was so glaring as to provoke derision. Even the most influential Jew had to seek the protection of alien sovereigns. The Jewish community could not protect him; to the contrary, Jews who were esteemed and in the seat of power, time and again, have to use their elevated position to inter-cede for the community. The Jewish people appeared as a ghost people in the image of Ahasver, the wandering Jew, present everywhere but at home nowhere: a mere shadow of their former glory, dead in the eyes of the world, yet refusing to die. Henry Wadsworth Longfellow has expressed this feeling in romantic fashion in his poem about the Jewish cemetery in Newport: And thus forever with reverted look The mystic volume of the world they read, Spelling it backward like a Hebrew book, Till life became the legend of the dead. But, ah! What once has been shall be no more! The growing earth, in travail and pain Brings forth its races, but does not restore, And the dead nations, never rise again.
