For it was during the years that elapsed between Compte de Clermont-Tonnere and Adolph Ochs that the Enlightenment spread from France across Europe and to America, and a virtual tidal wave of Jews, exhausted from centuries of exile and Church-inspired terrorism, accepted the patently dishonorable and self-abnegating terms for equal status in the new order.

As conceived by Napoleon, the Jew was welcome to participate on an equal basis, provided that he first repudiate his "mythic" homeland in Zion and his belief that his children would someday return there. In what had been, up to that point, a Church-dominated society, everyone was well aware that the spiritual integrity of the Jew rested upon his belief in the historicity of Zion, the eternal covenant of his people with God, and his obligation to live separately from the other nations. Any Jew that could be coerced into repudiating Zion was as good as fully assimilated. Perhaps that's why Napoleon's demand (akin to asking a Muslim to disavow Allah, or a Frenchman France) not only survived the dictator's demise - but became the standard for modern European Jewish policy.

Unsurprisingly, the emancipation-enthralled, well-heeled German Jews, woozy from Stockholm syndrome, embraced the deal with gusto, "reformed" their religion to accomodate it (setting a new standard for the word "sophistry" in the process), and prospered fabulously in the newly "enlightened" Europe right up until they were collectively murdered (along with their religious brethren) in the 1940's. (Those interested in the history of Reform Judaism should read Michael Meyers' show stopper "The Origins of the Modern Jew") Most German Jews viewed emancipation as a godsend and devoted themselves to Europe's "high culture" with the same ardor that their parents once reserved for the Talmud. Those who emigated from Germany to America, like the Ochs family, brought with them their new European weltanschaung. Adolph Ochs would eventually bring it to the pages of the most powerful newspaper in America.

Adolph Ochs purchased The New York Times in 1896, twelve years after marrying the daughter of "Rabbi" Isaac Wise, the leading American exponent of "Reform Judaism" and founder of the movement's new seminary in New York. By the 1920's, Ochs is quoted (see above) as refusing to support Jewish settlement activity in Palestine and viewing Jewish nationhood as having no reasonable basis because "they [Jews] share only a religion." In the 30's, with the European genocide of the Jews underway, his son-in-law Arthur Hays Sulzberger, who had by then succeeded Ochs at the helm, tried to derail David Ben Gurion's efforts to establish a Jewish state. According to Hazony, The Times even tried to broker a separate deal - behind Ben Gurion's back - with Hitler's one-time ally, the Grand Mufti of Jerusalem - for a combined Arab-Jewish state. Today, The New York Times and its European collaborators continue to decry Jewish resettlement of the ancient Jewish territories of the Middle East as an "occupation." The result is that millions of American readers who know precisely who the Children of Israel are and where they hail from end up with a severe case of cognitive dissonance. Rooted in revelation, religious Zionism roils the children of European high culture. For those who trust in God it represents ultimate good. Maybe it's time for the Sulzbergers to get deprogrammed, and the Europeans to get lost.

Those interested in the history of the campaign waged by Felix Warburg, Judah Magnes, Arthur Hays Sulzberger and The New York Times against the creation of the state of Israel in favor of a bi-national Arab-Jewish state will want to read Yoram Hazony's "The Jewish State" (Basic Books, 2001.) For more on religious Zionism, check out the writings of Avraham Yitzchak Kook, Palestine's first Chief Rabbi, and Yitzchak Ya'akov Reines, who founded the religious Zionist movement. In DFME, however, the Bible gets the last word -