The Jewish 100: A Ranking of the Most Influential Jews of All Time (37 page)

King James of Aragon respected Nahmanides, often consulting him on matters of state. Most probably on the urgings of Dominican priests, James forced Nahmanides into the debate.

In a room filled with bishops and royalty, the participants were asked simple questions not simply answered. Was Jesus the Messiah, was he divine, was the Messiah yet to come, was the Messiah a man, not a god, and who practiced the one true faith and was guided by the only correct law, Jews or Christians?

But the debate was not rigged this time. King James had given Nahmanides permission to speak freely, without fear of retribution.

Christiani argued that sections of the Talmud confirmed that the Messiah had come. Jesus, Pablo urged, was both god and man, dying on the Cross to atone for all the sins of humanity. By Jesus’ intercession on earth, Judaism had lost its reason to be, and was therefore not valid. Jews must be guided by the one true faith, belief in the Christ.

Nahmanides carefully refuted Christiani’s Talmudic references. The Ramban noted that Christianity was basically illogical. Jesus could not have been the Messiah, for he did not bring peace to the world, did not confirm the fundamental prophecy uttered by the prophet Isaiah (“Nation shall not lift up sword against nation, neither shall they learn war any more”). Imperial Rome had gone into decay after accepting Christianity. Jesus’ death was followed by over a thousand years of great savagery and blood, often committed in his name. Christians, praying to the Prince of Peace, had “shed more blood than all other peoples.”

The debate dragged on for four days.

Nahmanides noted that Jews and Christians were divided by the question of Jesus’ divinity. Jewish tradition had no place for belief in a Messiah as god. No man could be a god. Only God was God. Why would the Almighty create out of a human mother a baby who would grow up only to be betrayed by his brethren and executed horribly, then resurrect him and bring him back home again? Nahmanides told the King that he would never have believed such a story if he had heard it for the first time as an adult. Only through indoctrination since birth would someone believe such a tale.

As to which law was still binding, Nahmanides urged that the Torah remained valid as the world had not changed. Mankind needed God’s guidance.

Unable to tolerate Nahmanides’ free speaking, the priests halted the debate in its fourth day. The King, a rather remarkable man for his time, rewarded Nahmanides with a cash prize for his efforts, angering the priests to fever pitch. Nahmanides published an account of the debate. Despite the protection granted the rabbi by the King, the Dominicans enlisted the aid of the Pope and sought to try Nahmanides for blasphemy. With the probable help of King James, Nahmanides fled to safe haven in Jerusalem. The Barcelona debate hardened the Church’s position against the Jews, leading directly to the horrors of the Spanish Inquisition.

Although there were other great debates between Jews and Christians over the centuries, including those between Moses Mendelssohn and Johann Lavater or Martin Buber and Karl Ludwig Schmidt, the Disputation of 1263 displayed how far apart people remain when intolerance restrains their ability to communicate with understanding. Of course, whether one believes in the divinity of Jesus or not is a matter of faith, and matters of faith must always be respected and cherished by everyone. However, people have repeatedly shown their inability to respect each other’s beliefs (religious or not) as if such respect would be to deny their own existence. The Disputation at Barcelona was but another tragic example of man’s failure to listen when blinded by hate. Many historians have dated the fall of Spanish culture and political dominance to the expulsion of the Jews from Spain in 1492.

P
olitical figures are often chastised for their lack of conviction. All they seem interested in is power and glory. Menachem Wolfovitch Begin, however, was totally and consistently convinced of his beliefs. A follower of Vladimir Jabotinsky, the founder of the Zionist Revisionist organization and a believer in armed struggle as the only way to create the Jewish homeland, Begin first led Betar, the European Jabotinsky youth movement, and in 1940s Palestine, Irgun Zvai Leumi, the clandestine terrorist group battling British colonial rule. His militaristic activities led directly to the resistance by Jews of oppression first in Europe and later in the Middle East.

The Irgun functioned alongside Yitzak Shamir’s rival group, the Stern Gang, as a brutally aggressive counterpoint to the more conventional, but no less dynamic and crucial, Haganah or regular forces, led by David Ben-Gurion. Without Begin’s covert actions, the State of Israel might not have been established in 1948.

Out of the remnants of the Irgun, Begin built a political party into a major force in Israeli government. As prime minister, he exchanged land for peace with the Egyptians, sharing the Nobel Peace Prize with the dynamic and courageous President Anwar el-Sadat. Begin fostered the construction of settlements on lands captured in the 1967 and 1973 Arab conflicts, considering them part of the biblical Israel. He was unable however to calm the savage tensions with the country’s other Arab neighbors, leading to a costly war in Lebanon which reached to the bloody streets of Beirut.

Menachem Begin grew up in a household which treasured the idea of the Jewish Zion. Born in Brest, a part of Poland still part of tsarist Russia before the First World War, Begin was exposed by his father, Dov Zeev Begin, a merchant, to the Jewish “heretics” or nationalists. The young boy exhibited a remarkable talent for public speaking, giving his first oration at the age of ten in Hebrew and Yiddish. He joined Betar at fifteen and soon learned how to handle weapons. Within ten years he not only held a law degree from Warsaw University, but was also the head of the seventy-thousand-strong Betar movement.

Fleeing the approaching Germans in 1939, Begin left Warsaw for Vilna, the great mythical capital of Yiddish and Talmudic learning, then occupied by the Soviets. The Russians arrested him, accused him of being a Zionist and British spy, and sentenced him to Siberia. His wife of a year, Aliza, traveled to Palestine, hoping to pave the way for Menachem after his liberation. He survived a brutal incarceration to be freed in 1941 in a general release by the Russians of over a million Polish prisoners. Begin then joined the Free Polish Army, found his sister, made his way to Iran and then Palestine. Both of his parents had been killed by the Nazis. Begin often imagined his father going to his death praising the name of the Lord and singing his beloved
Hatikvah,
the Slovak folk song that would become the national anthem of Israel. Dov’s son never forgot his father’s teachings that the Jewish people would not travel, go, or come but would
return
to their homeland. To return after thousands of years of dispersion in foreign lands was a right given to the Jews in eternity.

For a short time in Palestine, Begin served in the British army as an interpreter. By 1943, however, he assumed the leadership of the Irgun and went into hiding to fight the British. By 1946 Begin had a price on his head of first eight then fifty thousand dollars. “Grim, bespectacled Menachem Begin” was a target of an intensive manhunt resulting from such terrorist tactics as executing captured British officers in retaliation for the deaths of Irgun operatives in British jails. The most famous incident, however, was the blowing up of a wing of the King David Hotel in Jerusalem. The explosion killed ninety people, including many British officers and some Arab and Jewish workers. A more infamous incident was the attack by Irgun forces on the Arab village of Deir Yassin. Two hundred men, women and children died in the assault. Two months later, Ben-Gurion, furious at the Irgun activities and fearful of civil war, directed the Haganah to fire on Irgun forces on board a cargo ship laden with arms and ammunition.

Menahem Begin while a university student in Poland.

From the creation of the State of Israel in 1948 until he became prime minister twenty-nine years later, Begin led the loyal opposition to the Labor governments of David Ben-Gurion, Levi Eshkol, Golda Meir, and Yitzhak Rabin. Attracting many Sephardic or Oriental Jews to his side, he built a potent political party grounded not in socialist and liberal ideals, but in orthodox religious beliefs and biblical ideology. To Prime Minister Begin, the West Bank captured in the 1967 war with the Arabs was the Judea and Samaria of the Old Testament. It was the government’s obligation to the faithful to establish settlements on this land, a controversial decision opposed by many in the Labor party and condemned at the United Nations. Begin told the world that Israel did not need anyone’s blessings for its acts—it was legitimate because it existed.

However, the deserts of the Sinai Peninsula were not part of the greater Israel of the Bible. When President Sadat indicated his willingness to trade peace for land, Begin was waiting, eager to negotiate. With the able assistance of President Jimmy Carter, after sixteen months of difficult talks, the Camp David accords were signed on March 26, 1979. Peace with Egypt was at last achieved.

Yet the rest of the Arab world would not let the Israelis live in peace. Every terrorist attack was responded to severely. When he felt Israel’s vital security interests were threatened, Begin’s response was immediate. In 1981 the prime minister ordered the bombing of the Iraqi reactor outside of Baghdad, halting Saddam Hussein’s atomic weapon research. (For this strike, Begin was widely criticized. But think of how Desert Storm in 1991 or the later American invasion of Iraq might have ended if Saddam had had the bomb!)

Begin annexed the Golan Heights, also captured in the 1967 War. He changed the unit of currency from the Israeli pound to the shekel, the coin used by the ancient Israelites. Under his direction the Israeli Parliament or Knesset declared Jerusalem, undivided, the capital of the nation, for all eternity.

After Sadat’s assassination, relations with Egypt cooled, particularly after the invasion of Lebanon in 1982 by the Israeli army. Relying largely on the advice of his defense minister, Ariel Sharon, Begin directed the routing out of terrorist bases just over the border. The Lebanon War dragged on for months, bringing the Israelis to the outskirts of Beirut and into an occupation no one really wanted. When hundreds of people were massacred in the Palestinian refugee camps at Sabra and Shatila by Lebanese Christian militia, the Israeli military was roundly damned as responsible for not securely guarding the victims.

Begins medical problems, his wife’s death in 1982, and his despair over the futility of the Lebanese conflict led to his resignation in 1983. Until his death in 1992 he lived a reclusive life, rarely venturing out of his home, usually only to visit his wife’s grave or attend a family function. At his death he was praised as the guerilla fighter who made peace with Egypt and defended his homeland, never wavering from his beliefs.

It is, of course, too soon to totally judge Begin’s effect on the history of the world and the Middle East. However, Menachem Begin made it clear that never again would his people be dictated to by the world; they would determine their own destiny, no matter what anyone thought. This fighter for Zion and creator of a powerful political movement was an elegant speaker who dressed formally and took everything personally. He could not, would not, separate his beliefs from his feelings. Begin made extreme statements for extreme purposes. The world had to know quite clearly what he meant and why he meant what he said. His message is unmistakable and forever—Israel, the nation of survivors, is here to stay.