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.

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.

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,........

© The Times of Israel (Blogs)