Herman Wouk had been completely secularized by the time he entered Columbia University at age 15. He’d been raised by an Orthodox family in the Bronx, but was so secularized that his first novel contained no Jews. In his most famous novel, The Caine Mutiny, the sole Jew is the lawyer who defends the mutinous crew and delivers an impassioned defense of the paranoid captain after winning the case.
Wouk was a comedy writer who had been editor of Columbia’s Jester and author of two Varsity Shows before becoming a joke writer, mostly for Fred Allen. But following the attack on Pearl Harbor, he joined the Navy and served in the Pacific Theater aboard two minesweepers, participating in six invasions and winning numerous battle stars.
Once the war was over, Wouk traveled to Europe and began researching what happened because he was disturbed by the systemic racism inside the US State Department that had allowed the extermination of Jews, Gypsies and homosexuals from Europe in cold-blooded massacres. The impact on German troops carrying out the atrocities was so emotionally harmful that they stopped shooting and began building gas chambers. The ovens came later, after the buried bodies began leaking into the ground water.
Racism against Jews had been stoked for millennia by Christians and especially by the Vatican. The discovery of ancient Greek and Roman literature and philosophy suddenly spread across Europe like a wildfire, and there was a tremendous shift in zeitgeist that shook the Vatican to its core, which is why the Jesuits emerged as a military force designed to roll back the Renaissance. The Inquisition concentrated on Spain and Portugal where Conversos had attained immense power and authority. They attended Catholic mass on Sundays but held Hebrew ceremonies in secret on Saturdays.
When the leading Conversos heard a Jesuit inquisitor was coming to investigate them, they tragically decided to hire a hit man, and the Jesuits sought revenge for that crime, so all the Conversos were banished, many fleeing to the New World, although the Netherlands was a popular destination as the Dutch merchant class had fomented a successful and largely non-violent revolution that had democratized the new republic.
When the Jews were originally banished from their homeland it was only men who were forced to leave. The women were useful as slaves, midwives, prostitutes and wives. So single men spread out across Europe, looking for wives.
If you know anything about genetics, you know that when you marry two vastly different DNAs, you get hybrid vigor. Racism is an affront to spirituality because the great spirit welcomes the melting pot, which always produces great talents, while inbreeding produces only problems.
In Germany a new language emerged, a mishmash of Hebrew and German called Yiddish. The German Christians pushed the Jews into the Ukraine, Poland and other Eastern European countries, but the Russians began pushing from the other direction.
Even though hybrid vigor and universal education had sparked immense cultural contributions from the relatively tiny Jewish population, the pogroms never ended, nor did the dream that one day the Jews would reunite in their ancestral homeland, a place now occupied by the descendants of the Mycenae Greeks who attacked Egypt and were bribed and resettled in Gaza, first becoming known as the Philistines.
The decade Wouk spent studying the Holocaust shook him to his core, and led him back to the Talmud. His first work of non fiction was “This is My God: the Jewish Way of Life,” written seven years before the Six Day War, when the existence of the fragile state of Israel was in great peril. This existential threat cemented the religious rightwing into permanent power.
In the 1990s a peace messiah emerged, Yitzhak Rabin, and he orchestrated a two-state solution that might have begun the process of healing and mutual respect necessary for ending the never-ending terror show. Like all peace messiahs, Rabin was assassinated to erase his influence, and there was no more talk of two-state solutions.
Were Wouk alive today, I believe he would be horrified at what Israel has become and especially horrified by the destruction of Gaza in what seems to have been an orchestrated black flag event designed to keep the rightwing in power.
Populations have always been directed and influenced by propaganda and the science of propaganda has grown immensely since Goebbels. The kraken has been unleashed and now we are raining bombs on Iran. This insures that for generations, suicide bombers will be plotting revenge against America.
Embracing orthodox religion may provide emotional comfort, but it is the wrong direction and will not lead out of this morass. Wouk leaned on the Talmud for his morality and empathy, but it blinded him to the deficiencies of theocracies.
When Wouk published Winds of War and War of Remembrance, it was the first time the Nazi horror show was revealed. In the early 80s, the two books became one of the greatest television events ever, although the 50-hour series was never streamed and has largely disappeared.
So I put the entire 50-hours up for free on Youtube. Two families are explored, one deep inside the WASP oligarchy and one deep inside an educated and secularized Jewish family, and Wouk covers both with amazing insight. It is some of the best dialogue since Shakespeare, Chekov and George Eliot.
The end of war and the beginning of peace starts in remembrance.