Cultural Amnesia Read Online Free PDF Page A

qualified they were. (The prejudice affected priorities even
    within the faculty: nuclear physics, for example,featured so many Jewish personnel mainly because it was considered a secondary field.) In Austria the quota system was built
    into every area of society as a set of laws, limits and exclusions. As an inevitable result, in Austria even more than in Germany there was a tendency for scholarship and humanism to be pursued
    more outside the university than inside it. A case could be made—among the Austrian privileged class you can still hear it being made—that the Jews thus benefited from having doors
    closed against them. It would be a bad case. The humiliations were real and the resentments lasting. But there was one undoubted benefit to us all. Whole generations of Jewish literati were
    denied the opportunity of wasting their energies on compiling abstruse doctoral theses. They were driven instead to journalism, plain speech, direct observation and the necessity to entertain.
    The necessity to entertain could sometimes be the enemy of learning, but not as often as the deadly freedom to write as if nobody would ever read the results except a faculty supervisor who owed
    his post to the same exemption.
    In 1938, the flight from the Anschluß —and if only all of them had fled
    in time—was not the first case of a Jewish intellectual community scattering to the world. It had happened before, in the German cities in 1933, and it happened before that, in Poland under
    Russian persecution, and in Russia both before and after the Revolution. In each case, the suppression of liberalism worked like a shell-burst, with the Jews as the fragments of the shell’s
    casing, the fragments that travelled furthest. These local disasters added up to a benefit for the world, so we need to change the metaphor, and think of an exploding seed-pod. In the reception
    of first-rate minds driven into exile, Britain and America were the most prominent beneficiaries, but we should not forget smaller countries like my own, Australia. The intellectual and artistic
    life of Australia was transformed by the arrival of those Jews who managed to make the distance. In New Zealand, the exiled professor Karl Popper was able to develop the principles contained in The Open Society and Its Enemies because he was at last living in an open society, and remembered the enemies. In those democracies that were sensible
    enough to let at least some of the Jews in, the growth of a humanist culture was immeasurably accelerated. It hardly needs adding that the enforced new diaspora was an immense factor in turning
    Israel from an idea to a burgeoning fact. The idea had earlier been developed inVienna, by Theodor Herzl. Just as Lenin’s idea for a Communist nation left from Vienna for
    its long journey to Russia, Herzl’s idea for a Jewish nation left from Vienna for its long journey to Palestine. Had history worked out otherwise, Herzl’s idea might have retained the
    same status as Freud’s ideas about the subconscious—a mere theory, though a seductive one. The same could even be said of Adolf Hitler, whose early years in Vienna confirmed him in
    his own idea: the idea of a world without Jews.
    The Jews in the first half of the twentieth century were not the only persecuted minority on Earth, and
    indeed the time would come, after the foundation of the state of Israel in 1948, when they would begin to be regarded—sometimes correctly—as persecutors in their turn. As liberal Jews
    have had increasing cause to observe, one of the penalties for becoming another state was to become a state like any other. But the fate of the Jews, and its accompanying achievements, will be a
    recurring theme in this book for a good reason. There could be no clearer proof that the mind is hard to kill. Nor could there be a more frightening demonstration of the virulent power of the
    forces which can combine to kill it. There is some room for hope, then, but none for