We construct the history of our wisdom only by burying our foolishness in the endnotes. To imagine a Chelm ”” the town inhabited, according to Ashkenazi Jewish folklore, entirely by fools ”” requires a presumption of general wisdom elsewhere, as the proper imagining of Heaven requires an earthly realm of sorrow.
As a Jewish child I was regularly instructed, both subtly and openly, that Jews, the people of Maimonides, Albert Einstein, Jonas Salk and Meyer Lansky, were on the whole smarter, cleverer, more brilliant, more astute than other people. And, duly, I would look around the Passover table, say, at the members of my family, and remark on the presence of a number of highly intelligent, quick-witted, shrewd, well-educated people filled to bursting with information, explanations and opinions on a diverse range of topics. In my tractable and vainglorious eagerness to confirm the People of Einstein theory, my gaze would skip right over ”” God love them ”” any counterexamples present at that year’s Seder.
This is why, to a Jew, it always comes as a shock to encounter stupid Jews. Philip Roth derived a major theme of “Goodbye, Columbus” from the uncanny experience. The shock comes not because we have never encountered any stupid Jews before ”” Jews are stupid in roughly the same proportion as all the world’s people ”” but simply because from an early age we have been trained, implicitly and explicitly, to ignore them. A stupid Jew is like a hole in the pocket of your pants, there every time you put them on, always forgotten until the instant your quarters run clattering across the floor.
It was this endlessly repeated yet never remembered shock of encountering our own stupidity as a people ”” stupidity now enacted by the elite military arm of a nation whose history we have long written, in our accustomed way, by pushing to the endnotes all counterexamples to the myth of seichel ”” that one heard filtering through so much of the initial response among Jews to the raid on the Mavi Marmara.
Read it all.
