It is shocking to consider how Jews have beatified Truman.
By ELI KAVONHARRY S. TRUMAN.(photo credit: REUTERS)
It was November 1953. Harry Truman had months earlier left the presidency and was invited to the Jewish Theological Seminary on the Upper West Side of Manhattan. In what seems to be an apocryphal account, Eddie Jacobson – Truman’s long-time Jewish friend and a former business partner – introduced the former president to the American-Jewish dignitaries present as “the man who helped create the State of Israel.”Truman emphatically corrected his friend. “What do you mean ‘helped to create? I am Cyrus. I am Cyrus.”’Cyrus was the king of Persia 2,500 years ago who defeated the Babylonians and permitted the exiled elite from the Kingdom of Judah to return to Jerusalem and rebuild the Temple. He is celebrated in Jewish tradition.Harry Truman, in what he called “one of the proudest days of my life,” represented the United States in recognizing the State of Israel on Friday, May 14, 1948. He did so only 11 minutes after David Ben-Gurion, head of the Jewish Provisional Government, issued Israel’s Proclamation of Independence in Tel Aviv.Several years later, Ben-Gurion met with Truman and later reported, “I told him that his courageous decision to recognize our new state so quickly, and his steadfast support since then had given him an immortal place in Jewish history. As I said that, tears suddenly came to his eyes and his eyes were still wet when he bade me goodbye.”Indeed, in his own way, Harry Truman was a modern Cyrus, and Jews have recognized that ever since. He was a hero at a time when Israel was desperate for heroes.Nevertheless, if Harry Truman was a modern Cyrus, during the events leading up to Israel’s statehood, he was a reluctant Cyrus.I am a student of history, I am not a hagiographer. We should thank Truman but not idealize him. Truman, although he was courageous in recognizing Israel despite intense pressure not to do so by supporters of the Arabs in the State Department and the military establishment, deeply resented the lobbying efforts of American Jews who supported the creation of the Jewish state.As President, Truman complained to Eleanor Roosevelt, “The action of our US Zionists will eventually prejudice everyone against what they are trying to get done.”In July 1947, the president complained that Henry Morgenthau Jr., the former treasury secretary and then head of the United Jewish Appeal, was pressuring him to compel the British to allow the refugee ship Exodus 1947 into the Land of Israel. Truman was certainly a supporter of the Jewish people but he did not want to be pressured by American Jews to act on behalf of the Yishuv (the pre-state Jewish population). The original Cyrus of old seemed to have no problem with Jewish requests to return to Jerusalem.In July 2003, the Truman Presidential Museum and Library in Independence, Missouri, released shocking entries from Truman’s diary in 1947. Truman writes that the Jews “have no sense of proportion nor do they have any judgement [sic] on world affairs.”HE CONTINUES in a later entry, “The Jews, I find are very, very selfish. They care not how many Estonians, Latvians, Finns, Poles, Yugoslavs or Greeks get murdered or mistreated as D[isplaced] P[ersons] as long as the Jews get special treatment. Yet when they have power, physical, financial, political, neither Hitler nor Stalin has anything on them for cruelty or mistreatment to the underdog. Put an underdog on top and it makes no difference whether his name is Russian, Jewish, Negro, Management, Labor, Mormon, Baptist, he goes haywire.”That was written on July 21, 1947. Truman, despite his support for the State of Israel, castigates the Jews – and certainly American Jews – for their exercise of power. This is vintage Charles Lindbergh.It is true that Truman does not blame only the Jews for pressuring him, but it tarnishes his reputation as a friend of the Jewish people. It seems that Truman possessed some of the same condemnations of “powerful Jews” that was the libel of many an anti-Semite in America and abroad.Truman did not live in a void but was from the same Midwest as Henry Ford. This is not equating Ford’s rabid antisemitism with Truman’s attitude toward Jews lobbying for a Jewish state. But Truman, though a great hero, was not a saint. We should honor him but not ignore his faults.President Truman had a personal stake in recognizing the State of Israel. He took it upon himself to support any effort to relieve the distress of Jews in displaced persons camps. He saw a Jewish state as the answer to this humanitarian crisis. He was neither a supporter of British imperialism, nor did his “Truman Doctrine” allow for the spread of Soviet Communist influence in the Middle East.It is to his credit that he overcame pressures of supporters of the Arabs and was the first head of state to recognize the State of Israel at its birth. But he also was a flawed human being who did not hesitate to condemn the Jews for being as malignant as Hitler or Stalin. It is shocking, considering how Jews have beatified Truman. Yet we have discovered a darker side of Truman’s relationship to Jews, especially in America.One more note, not directly related to Truman. One can be an ardent supporter of the State of Israel and still realize the seminal importance of the history of the Jewish people in exile. Obviously, Deborah, David, and Jeremiah – among many others – represent the genius of our ancestors in the land of our origin and our later yearnings.But to dismiss Saadya, Rashi, Samuel Hanagid, Maimonides, Gracia Nasi and Moses Mendelssohn; that wrongheaded viewpoint rejects the great Jewish historian Salo Baron’s plea that we not look back on the Diaspora as “lachrymose.”Jewish history in the Diaspora is not simply a history of suffering, exiles and pogroms. We should appreciate and respect the enormous religious and cultural creativity of Jews from Yemen to Poland, as well as Jewish economic achievement in all places they settled.Yes, sovereignty in Israel is superior to autonomy in exile. But under self-government in the pagan, Christian and Islamic world, Jews achieved greatness. To reject that is to reject who we are.The writer is rabbi of Congregation Anshei Sholom in West Palm Beach, Florida.
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