The Blogs: My Heart Is in the East

Before we can talk about anything, about Zionism, about Palestine, about 1948, about the argument I actually want to have across this series, we have to sit for a moment with something strange. Something so familiar to Jews that we barely notice it, and so unfamiliar to everyone else that they don’t quite believe it when they hear it.

So: the Arch of Titus.

Walk into the Roman Forum, and it’s still standing, as it has been since 81 CE. Carved into the stone, Jewish captives carry the menorah into exile on their shoulders, their own Temple’s sacred candelabrum, looted from Jerusalem, borne by the defeated through the streets of Rome in the emperor’s triumph. The Romans forced the survivors to parade their own holy things before the crowd, before selling them into slavery. Then they preserved the scene in marble, so everyone who walked past would remember who had won.

For nearly two thousand years, we refused to walk under it. When Israel was declared in 1948, Jews in Rome walked under it the wrong way, from the Colosseum toward the Forum, reversing the direction of the triumph, because the thing the arch commemorated had been undone. The descendants of the captives on the arch had come home. The procession ran backwards, finally. Think about that for a second. Nineteen hundred years of grudge against a stone arch. Nineteen hundred years of knowing which direction it faces and what it meant. That is not normal.

And yet it’s barely a footnote in what we’re about to discuss. It’s just one small example of a much larger strangeness: a people maintained, across two thousand years and every continent on earth, a specific, daily, named attachment to a specific, named place and did not let go of it, ever, under any pressure, through any catastrophe.

Before we can talk about what to do with that fact, we have to be honest that it exists.

The rule, and the exception.

Here’s the rule: no one remembers anything for more than a century. Great-grandparents become names on a family tree, then photographs nobody can identify, then nothing. Lost homelands soften into sentiment within two generations and dissolve entirely within three. This isn’t a failure of memory; it’s the shape of memory. The past recedes, and the living get on with living.

The Greeks of Asia Minor, expelled in 1923, became Greeks of Greece within a generation; their grandchildren do not dream of Smyrna. The Germans driven from Silesia after 1945 integrated into West Germany, and no German in Düsseldorf says at Christmas, “next year in Breslau.” The Huguenots in England, the Armenians across the diaspora, the Irish in America each preserved identity, but the specific daily orientation toward a named geography fades within a generation or two. That’s what happens. It happens fast.

What we did for two thousand years is not what happens. It isn’t even close.

What we did instead.

We wove the longing into every corner of daily life, deliberately, until it became our bones. And it wasn’t the rabbis who kept it; it was everyone. The poorer we got, the more persecuted we became, the harder we held on.

We face Israel when we pray. Three times a day, in the central prayer, we turn our bodies toward Jerusalem and ask to return. From London, Casablanca, Aleppo or Vilna, our bodies orient toward a specific longitude and latitude. Children learn the direction before they learn what it means.

We break a glass at every wedding. The bride and groom stand under the chuppah on the happiest day of their lives, and the groom reminds everyone present, by shattering a glass, that the Temple is still destroyed and we are still not home. The destruction being mourned is from 70 CE.

We leave a part of every home unfinished. A square of bare, unpainted wall opposite the door as a remembrance of the destruction. Every house a Jew builds, in every country we have ever lived, carries a deliberate wound cut into its plaster. No house is ever complete, because the house that would complete it is the one we lost.

We say next year in Jerusalem at the end of every Passover seder, and at the end of Yom Kippur, after a whole day of fasting. We say it because our parents said it and their parents said it, and the chain has not broken in two thousand years. The pain is still real.

We fast on the ninth of Av. We do not eat, we do not bathe, we do not sit in chairs. We sit on the floor, like mourners, and we read Lamentations by candlelight. Eicha yashva badad ha’ir rabati am. How does the city sit solitary, she that was full of people. In medieval Spain we read it. In Ottoman Salonika we read it. In Shanghai in the 1940s, where refugees had fled the Nazis, they read it. On the same day. About the same city. For the same loss.

And we mourn.

Two thousand years after a building was destroyed, we still mourn it. Who does this? Who remembers a building for two thousand years? Who weeps for a loss their great-great-great-great-great-great-great-great-great-grandparents could not have remembered living through?

No one does this. Except us.

The world wrote it down too.

A skeptic could say: fine, you kept it alive yourselves. Self-reporting. But the record isn’t only ours.

The Arch of Titus is Roman. The coins Rome minted after the destruction, stamped IVDAEA CAPTA, Judea captured, showing a weeping woman under a palm tree, circulated across the empire for years. Roman propaganda acknowledging, in the most public currency available, that a specific Jewish homeland had been conquered.

Hadrian, after crushing the Bar Kokhba revolt in 135 CE, renamed the province Syria Palaestina, from Philistia, the ancient Philistine enemies of Israel, specifically to erase the Jewish connection. A Roman emperor imposed it as an act of memory erasure because the connection was strong enough to require erasing. You don’t rename things that have no meaning. He renamed Jerusalem too, Aelia Capitolina, and barred Jews from entering on pain of death. You don’t ban people from cities they have no claim to.

The archaeology is overwhelming and grows every year. The ritual baths at Masada, the ossuaries of Jerusalem inscribed in Hebrew, the Galilean synagogues, the Dead Sea Scrolls. A people’s fingerprints are layered in the ground there in thousands of places, going back three thousand years, and they keep emerging every time someone digs.

Christian Europe, for all its hostility to Jews, never doubted whose land it had been. From the Church Fathers to medieval pilgrimage accounts to Protestant Bibles, Europe understood it as the Jewish land. When Mark Twain, George Eliot, and Herman Melville wrote about Palestine in the nineteenth century, they wrote about it as Jewish territory. That was the default understanding of Christian civilisation for nineteen hundred years.

Islamic tradition recognises it too. The Quran says God gave the land to the Children of Israel. Later theology holds that possession was forfeited, but the original connection is not disputed. It’s scripture.

The foundation that Jews have an ancient, continuous, specific, internationally acknowledged connection to this land is not something invented by twentieth-century propagandists. It’s cut in Roman stone, stamped on Roman coins, written into Christian tradition, present in Muslim scripture, buried in the archaeological record, and kept alive by us, without interruption, for longer than most civilisations have existed.

Why we didn’t just go back.

A reader might reasonably ask: if the longing was so strong, why didn’t we just go? Why did it take until the twentieth century?

Because we couldn’t. For most of those two thousand years, return wasn’t a choice we were free to make.

The Byzantines restricted Jewish access to Jerusalem. Early Islamic rule permitted some return, but we lived under dhimmi status, subordinate, taxed, restricted, alive on the sufferance of whoever ruled that month. The Crusaders massacred the Jewish community of Jerusalem in 1099, gathered them into the synagogue and burned it with everyone inside.

And where we actually lived, conditions were often worse. Expelled from England in 1290. From France, repeatedly. From Spain in 1492, Portugal in 1497. Massacred in the Rhineland in 1096 on the way to the Holy Land. Blamed for the Black Death and burned alive for it. Slaughtered by Chmielnicki in 1648, perhaps a hundred thousand of us in a single wave. Ghettoized. Forced to wear yellow badges, a Church invention from 1215 that the Nazis later borrowed. Tortured. Burned at autos-da-fé. Tolerated, sometimes, until we weren’t.

We were poor. We were desolate. We lived in places where we could be killed any afternoon and our property taken by sundown. Organising a journey of a thousand miles, across hostile territory, to a land whose rulers restricted Jewish settlement, while starving and persecuted in our own place, most of us simply could not.

And still we went. A steady trickle across centuries, pious elderly coming to die on holy ground, young idealists coming to rebuild, always at enormous risk. Nachmanides’ students rebuilt the Jerusalem community in 1267. Safed became a centre of Jewish mysticism within a generation of the 1492 Spanish expulsion. The students of the Vilna Gaon arrived in 1808. By 1870, Jerusalem once again had a Jewish majority, before political Zionism existed as a movement.

For every hundred of us who said next year in Jerusalem and could not go, one or two went. And the ones who could not go kept saying it.

When it finally became possible, we came. That isn’t the behaviour of a people with a manufactured attachment. That’s the behaviour of a people who had been waiting.

Why this matters.

I promised this was background, and it is. But it’s background we need before we can go anywhere else.

When modern political Zionism emerged in the late nineteenth century, it wasn’t a new invention conjuring a homeland from nothing. It was the mobilisation of something already fully formed, something two thousand years old, sustained daily in every corner of the diaspora, written into our bodies, our calendars, and our walls. Herzl didn’t invent Jewish attachment to Zion. He proposed a vehicle for something we had been carrying daily, since Hadrian.

This matters because it changes what the Zionist project is. It is not European colonialism dressed in biblical language, because European colonialism was not preceded by two millennia of liturgical longing for the specific place being colonized. The French in Algeria did not say at Christmas “next year in Algiers.” The British in India did not organize their calendar around Bengal’s agricultural seasons. The Dutch in Indonesia did not break a glass at weddings for the loss of Jakarta. Roman emperors did not rename Paris to erase British memory of it. These are not small differences. They are the whole thing.

There are real arguments to have about what came next. About 1948, about what happened to the people already living in the land, about the choices made since. I’m going to have those arguments in the pieces that follow, and I’m not going to flinch from them.

But not yet. First, we have to be honest about the strangeness we started from: that somehow, impossibly, against every historical pattern, a people kept a home in their hearts for two thousand years, wove it into every prayer and every wedding and every wall, and when the moment finally came, they went home.

That’s where this series starts. From there, we can talk about everything else.