Eggs in One Basket

Avnery doesn´t mention one thing of the possibilities of Jews in the 19th and 20th century European world: Jews could in fact get to the higher echelons of society and state - if they stopped being Jews. Families could rise very high in few generations after conversion to Christianity. Theirs was the usual dilemma of minorities, to be fully accepted by the society they lived in, they had to blend in and choose a new identity. In todays Eastern Europe, it´s claimed that significant part of the 600 000 Hungarians of Slovakia are in fact Gypsies, maybe up to 100 000 of them. A despised and opressed minority finds shelter by adopting a new identity.

But what comes to the American Jews, it´s good to remember that usually minorities tend to prosper in large empires that have heterogenous populations. But when things start to go wrong in these empires, the minorities tend to get find themselves attacked. This has happened troughout history and practically in all empires of this kind.

The T´ang dynasty of China, that ruled from 618 to 907, was until 755 very open to foreigners and their cultures and religions. The capital, todays Xi´an, was the most cosmpolitan city of it´s day in the entire world. But in 755 nine governors of non -Han-chinese background rebelled, claiming corruption in the court as the reason of their rebellion. Led by An Lus-han, a man of Turkish origin, they started a civil war that ran for 11 years. Both sides used foreign mercenaries. When loyalist troops re-captured the capital, they had to let their nomadic auxiliaries to rob it because of the agreement they had made with them (and because they still needed their support). The kingdom of Tibet attacked and captured the corridor that connected China proper to the Chinese possessions in Central Asia, where a Chinese army had been defeated by the Muslims near Samarkand in 751. This Tibetan war run until 779, and China didn´t re-capture the corridor until 848, when the Tibetan kingdom had been destroyed by a civil war between buddhists and animalists. But now T´ang dynasty was too weak to start any new expansion in the areas that it had controlled prior to the rebellion.

China was devastated, the glory of the dynasty was a thing of the past, and so too was China´s openness to foreigners. When new rebellions emerged, the rebels usually targeted the foreigners living in China. Large massacres were common. And the government itself took a dim view of foreign influence in China. Buddhism, import from India, was targeted during the 840s. Thousands of monasteries were destroyed, tens of thousands of monks and nuns were forced to leave religious life. Christianity, that had been given imperial aproval in 635, and Islam, were both destroyed in China as a side-effect.

After a government ban of non-governmental sailing and shipping to foreign countries was lifted in 1567, large numbers of Chinese emigrated to the Philippines, Indonesia, Malaysia and etc. There they both prospered economically and were oppressed politically and often massacred. In the 18th century Philippines, a massacre of a significant portion of the Chinese population of the Spanish held part of the islands occurred about once in a generation. 10 000 killed was not an uncommon number.

The Chinese still have this position of a scapegoat in several countries in the area, like Indonesia. During the genocide of 1965-66, at least 20 000 Chinese and maybe as many as 500 000 were murdered in Indonesia and large numbers were forced to leave the country. During the riots that forced an end to the dictatorship in 1998, and which made Indonesia the partial democracy that it´s today, the rioters targeted especially Chinese.

So, as long as US fares well, the US Jews have little to fear. But when things go ugly - and in the end they go ugly for every empire - it may be best to be able to blend in, to adopt another identity, claim other roots.