Читать книгу Jews & the Japanese - Ben-Ami Shillony - Страница 11

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Security Lost and

Security Assured

ALTHOUGH Jerusalem and Kyoto carried the ideal of peace within their names, in reality both cities have witnessed many wars. The greatest destruction of Kyoto occurred in the fifteenth century when two rival factions of the ruling warrior class fought each other in the streets of the capital for ten years over the question of who would succeed the shogun. During this bloody dispute, known as the Onin War, most of the city was burned to the ground. But the internal wars of Japan ended at the beginning of the seventeenth century, and since then Kyoto has indeed remained a city of peace. It even escaped the bombardments of World War II, which leveled most other Japanese cities, due to American consideration for its antiquities.

Jerusalem knew more destruction because its conquerors, being usually foreigners to the land, cared little for the city and were hostile to the cultural and religious traditions it had exemplified. On the other hand, in the wars that took place in Japan, except for the attempted Mongol invasions of the thirteenth century that never reached Kyoto, all parties to a conflict belonged to the same people, spoke the same language, believed in the same gods, cherished the same values, and respected the same masterworks of art. The defenders of a castle under siege would sometimes ask for a ceasefire during which its valued treasures could be handed to the enemy in order to save them from destruction. Moreover, all sides in the internal wars of Japan respected the same imperial line, and, unlike in other countries, no contending warrior ever attempted to destroy the imperial family or install his own clan in its place. For national or cultural continuity it mattered little who won or who lost in the many internal wars of Japan, whether they were the Taira or the Minamoto, the Northern Court or the Southern Court, Tokugawa Ieyasu or Takeda Shingen. The aim of all those contenders was to control the country, not to destroy it. Even a cruel warlord like Oda Nobunaga, who did destroy many temples and monasteries, showed great respect for the traditional arts.

An outstanding example of the self-restraint that the Japanese warriors exercised toward sacred institutions, buildings, and treasures is the survival of the Shosoin in Nara, a wooden storehouse built in the eighth century C.E. to accommodate the treasures of the Todaiji temple and the imperial palace. Despite the many wars that have raged in Japan during the twelve hundred years since the treasures were deposited there, the Shosoin has never been broken into or robbed. It still stands where it was erected, and its valuable treasures (recently removed to a modern museum) remain intact.

A glimpse of what might have happened in Japan had the feuding sides been foreign to each other is provided by the behavior of the Japanese during their invasion of Korea at the end of the sixteenth century. As occupiers of a foreign land for which they had little respect, the Japanese burned and pillaged the cities they conquered, destroying many art treasures. During their six years in Korea (1592-98), the Japanese caused more destruction than they had unleashed on their own country for many centuries.

The lot of Jerusalem over the centuries was often similar to that of Korea under the Japanese. While suppressing the Jewish Revolt in 70 C.E., the Romans slaughtered or enslaved most of the Jewish inhabitants of Jerusalem, razing the city in order to obliterate every trace of Jewish presence there. On its ruins the Romans built a new city in which Jews were not allowed to reside; the place that had been the religious capital of the Jews for a thousand years was forbidden to them. After the fall of Jerusalem, about a thousand Jewish zealots, including women and children, escaped to the fortress of Masada, built on the top of an isolated mountain in the Judean desert, where they held out for three more years against a formidable Roman siege. In 73 C.E., when resistance was no longer possible, they all committed suicide, preferring death to a life of slavery. The mass suicide at Masada, not approved by the religious leaders of that time, has many parallels in Japanese history, when warriors preferred to kill themselves rather than surrender. In 1333 in Kamakura, about three hundred members of the ruling Hojo family, including their retainers, committed mass suicide when their liege family was deposed from power. But because both winners and losers belonged to the same people, these dramatic suicides were less traumatic and less fateful for the Japanese than the suicides of the Masada defenders, which signaled the end of Jewish independence for almost nineteen hundred years.

Unsuccessful at revolt, and driven from their holy city, the Jews gradually became a minority in their own land. As synagogues began to replace the Temple, the Jews practiced their religion wherever they went. By the middle of the first millennium, most Jews already lived outside Palestine, and by the end of that millennium very few still lived there. At first they settled in neighboring Middle Eastern countries, from which they spread to other areas of the Mediterranean world, and later to other parts of Europe and Asia.

Unlike many other peoples who have been conquered, enslaved, or exiled over the ages, Jews survived as a community, a people with a common religion, a common language, and common aspirations. Lacking a territory and a government of their own, they always tried to obtain the status of a tolerated minority in other countries, in exchange for commercial and professional services. In medieval Christian Europe, the Jews were the only non-Christian community whose existence was tolerated. But this tolerance was often short-lived. Persecutions drove the Jews from one country to another until they became one of the most nomadic peoples on earth. In a curious way, God's command to Abraham "Go forth from your native land and from your father's house" was fulfilled three thousand years later in the form of the Wandering Jew. Long after the nomadic peoples of Europe and the Middle East had settled and formed sedentary political units, the Jews remained homeless, prospering where permitted to live and work, and fleeing where persecuted.

The history of the Japanese was precisely the opposite, as nothing ever occurred to make their hold on their islands tenuous or questionable. There has been little emigration from Japan to other countries over the centuries. The Japanese merchants who settled in Southeast Asia in the sixteenth century, and the Japanese farmers who emigrated to Hawaii and the American continent in the twentieth century never reached the numbers of the overseas Chinese or Indians, let alone those of the great waves of European emigration to the New World. Thus, while the Jews became a Diaspora without a home country, Japan remained a home country without a diaspora. Not only did the Japanese stay on their islands, but until late in the nineteenth century they rarely ventured abroad to conquer other territories. Although Japan was an island-state ruled by a warrior elite, until the second half of the nineteenth century it had never been a maritime power. When Commodore Matthew C. Perry sailed into the Bay of Edo (now Tokyo) in 1853 to forcibly open Japan, the country had no navy to protect its shores. Nevertheless, until 1945 no foreign power, not even the Europeans and Americans who followed Perry, ever controlled Japan; and those who attempted to do so in the past, such as the Mongols in the thirteenth century, were driven back by the land-based warriors.

The Jews and the Japanese were also different with respect to the occupations of their people. In the twelfth and thirteenth centuries, Japan, like medieval Europe, developed into a society of peasants and warriors. In consequence, the nation's dominant values were those of the farmer—diligence, perseverance, and teamwork— and those of the soldier—loyalty, courage, and self-sacrifice. The merchants of traditional Japan occupied the lowest social stratum, and their preoccupation with profit was looked down on by the warrior class, the samurai. Because they wielded power and owned land, warriors, whether in Europe or in Japan, could afford to despise money. For the Jews, however, money was the means of survival. It could be accumulated, stored, hidden, transported, exchanged, invested, and loaned out. It was the best insurance against adversity and could buy security, at least for a considerable period of time. The long-dispersed Jews—not allowed to own land, to serve in armies, or to join governments—concentrated on trade as their main occupation, since it enabled them to survive and prosper without having to be settled in one particular location. Versed in languages, familiar with different cultures, and with relatives or associates scattered throughout many towns and countries, the Jews were well suited to engage in international trade. Indeed, their trading expertise made them assets to rulers of countries wishing to advance their own economies, such as the kings of Poland in the sixteenth century, who, to this end, invited Jews to come and settle there.

From the time of the loss of their native land, the security of the Jews had never been assured. Their survival and prosperity depended on the whim of local rulers. Subjected to discrimination, persecution, expulsion, and massacre, the Jews developed a keen sensitivity to danger. The least secure people on earth, they became masters of the art of survival. The Japanese, on the other hand, enjoyed security in their islands. Although they experienced internal war and turmoil, and very often were victims of such natural disasters as earthquakes, typhoons, fires, and floods, these were sporadic and isolated affairs; the basic security of the nation was never seriously jeopardized. Safe from foreign interference and domination, lacking sharp ethnic and religious divisions, enjoying a moderate climate with plenty of sunshine and water, and possessed of fertile valleys and rich fishing areas, the Japanese could feel that their basic needs were well provided for. The unbroken perpetuity of the imperial dynasty helped to strengthen the feeling that whatever happened, the fundamental structure of their existence remained stable.