traNSLatioN aND coNqueSt • 229Both matters were obviously of great consequence to Malul as they
represent two of the central rationalizations for hatred of the Jews.
after the second destruction of Jerusalem, by titus, the Jews were
scattered throughout the world. they all came to belong to the
authority [sulṭa] to which the land that they settled submitted.
the lesson that the Israelites learned from the destruction and
time, which is the best teacher, is that their destruction and the
fall of the crown of their kingdom happened in order to spread
their word. they also saw from the differences of the peoples,
nations, and tribes in the Dark ages that there was no better path
to follow than to amass money in order to preserve their existence
among those peoples.here Malul insists not only that Jews have consistently submitted to
the authority of their host governments, but also that their loss of their
own sovereignty and their subsequent dispersion served a positive
function: “to spread their word.” In his inversion of the traditional
Jewish perspective on the exile as an unmitigated evil, a punishment
for the Jews’ sins, it is not clear to what extent Malul had in mind
the nineteenth- century reform movement’s concept of the “Jewish
mission” in the Diaspora, a concept that informed reform’s later re-
jection of Jewish nationalism and Zionism. the similarity of Moyal’s
view to classical reform’s transvaluation of the Diaspora view strikes
the reader as markedly non- or even anti- Zionist.^170 But this book was
published the very year Malul returned to palestine and became an
employee of the Zionist organization. it is thus difficult to determine
precisely where Malul stood on the matter. Did he believe that there
was a value in the dissemination of Jewish ideas that resulted from
Jewish dispersion, but that now that this had occurred, a Jewish return
to palestine was appropriate? Or did Malul, like many except the most
radical Zionists of the time, see no contradiction between the perpetua-
tion of Diasporic Jewish communities, on the one hand, and the growth
of a Jewish community in palestine, on the other? the explanation of
the apparent discrepancy notwithstanding, there is no ambiguity or
ambivalence with regard to the latter part of the paragraph. In the
Diaspora, Malul contends, the Jews recognized that the only means
of combating the existential threat posed by dispersion was to attain
wealth and, with it, power.
(^170) Cf. the nineteenth- century neo- Orthodox position of Samson raphael hirsch on
the mission of Israel in exile: “Israel accomplished its task better in exile than in the full
possession of good fortune. Indeed, improvement and correction were the chief purposes
of the Galuth— exile.” See hirsch, The Nineteen Letters of Ben Uziel, 82.