On Illuminating Darkness

Abstract

On Illuminating Darkness Ira Katznelson soon after the world trade center towers came down, the leaders of the Jewish Theological Seminary sought to offer comfort and consolation. In their statement, they recalled that before the destruction of the Temple in Jerusalem by the Romans in AD 70, the high priest would pray on behalf of those at risk from catastrophes of nature and war. Emerging from the Holy of Holies on Yom Kippur, the priest asked that "their homes not become their graves" (cited in Schorsch and Kekst 2001). At that moment, these priests could not possibly have anticipated the scale and scope of homes becoming graves in whirls of intolerant passion, especially from the aftermath of the Reformation and down to our time. We know, and we cannot escape such knowledge. A profound irony is at work. The discovery of social, cultural, and religious pluralism by ancient empires and modern global conquests helped generate a sense of common humanity, the idea that, despite many differences, others are more like us than not, that we thus owe each other a threshold level of neighborliness. And yet, divisions between "us" and "them"—divisions of faith, geography, and hierarchy—became ever more profound, often cruel and dangerous, precisely as ideas about human fellowship advanced. Propinquity and distance, regard and loathing, have coincided. Put differently, the continuum from a warm embrace of human difference to killing fields based solely on human difference has become ever more elongated, not only since the Reformation but also under the aegis of Enlightenment reason. Our most cherished values and institutions are rooted in the Enlightenment, yet so are dark possibilities. And when there is a fusion between spiritual passion and not quite rational but rationalistic argument, remarkably dangerous [End Page 387] hybrids can develop, with the result that some swaths of humankind are designated as more than strangers but superfluous, as Hannah Arendt put things. These might be Africans in an Atlantic crossing or Jews in Jedwabne. Indeed, the Jewish experience—with its own range, from deep incorporation upon legal and civic emancipation, to the loss of one in three members by willful murder—is emblematic of the range conferred by modernity. The Courage in Public Scholarship award honors Jan Gross, a scholar whose stunning work directly addresses this uncomfortable and dangerous reality. He has done so, not just in Neighbors (Sąsiedzi) but also before and after that extraordinary book burst so painfully and powerfully into the public realm in 2000 and, translated into English, in 2001 (Princeton University Press). His earlier work considered Poland under both German and Soviet occupation. There are few articles, as an example, to match the incisive power concerning its subject of Professor Gross's 1979 essay, "Terror and Obedience: A Society under Occupation." Since 2001, Jan has written analytical accounts of anti-Semitism in Poland after Auschwitz, and he has analyzed the overlapping themes of war, Shoah, and the crisis of the communist order. This is a remarkable corpus that has earned the appellation "courageous," the designation central to the Courage in Public Scholarship Award. Jan Gross's body of work confronts us with some of our hardest questions, not only how some neighbors, people just like us, can slaughter residents they know by face and by name, and how other neighbors can rather swiftly lose their full human status to become superfluous, and how robust pluralism can be erased in just one day as a result of what might be described as a voluntary effort by civil society. What we are taught by Jan moves well beyond the reconstruction and description of a horrific event, an event that transformed more than 1,500 persons, a majority of the approximately 2,500 individuals who lived in Jedwabne, into burnt corpses in July 1941. To be sure, these were not a random two-thirds of the town's population, [End Page 388] losers in a lottery of death; every victim was a Jew. But just as Jan's study of depravity insists that we probe insecurity and worse on the peril-filled Christian-Jewish and Polish-Jewish frontiers, his work forces us to ask more portable analytical questions. How is what...