In the Jewish struggle around Zionism there were at least three strands in opposition so fierce that it was evident that the very meaning of “the people Israel” was at stake. The first of these was a vast religious cohort, at once immensely learned or purported to have such learning and having, as well, the authority of the sages. Or the ages. While ongoing study and “trust in the Lord” constituted their program, they practiced a politics that was fundamentally anti-political. God was both their instrument and their end. A second vision emerged in Europe, from European socialism, to be exact, and it was typified by the Jewish Labor Bund, organized primarily in Poland but also elsewhere in eastern Europe in the belief that peoplehood would flourish through the Yiddish language and independent communitarian arrangements made with the mostly anti-semitic regimes of the region. The bright future of socialism underpinned the whole enterprise. Of course, it wasn’t really an enterprise. It was a dream—alas, closer to a delusion. My own Jewish upbringing was touched by this apparition. Here is the last line of a Godless and prayer-less Sabbath hymn: “Yiddish vort host upgeheet undser tsar un undser freyd.” Or in a rough English translation: “Yiddish word, you have protected our sorrows and our joys.” Protected, indeed. Perhaps “ward” or “guardian” is more fitting. Still, it was not what it made itself out to be.

The third was a variety of Jewish assimilationist programmatics entailing a denigration of the very idea of universal beliefs connecting through the sinews of a scattered nation one Jew to another. Starting with the demeaning Napoleonic formula “Frenchmen of the Mosaic persuasion,” these programmatics flourished during the nineteenth century especially in England, Germany, and France where, in 1896, the career of the citoyen juif was collapsed in the delirium of the unpatriotic Jew, international banker, socialist conspirator, traitor, and spy. True, it limped along longest in the Kaiser’s empire and in the mixed autarchies stemming from the Austro-Hungarian empire. And it collapsed there more bloodily than in France. Still, after Captain Dreyfus and despite his ultimate court-adjudged rectitude, it was mostly pretense. L’affaire Dreyfus—there was a kindred legal scandal, l’affaire Zola—was a turning point in the history of liberal Europe.

In any case, the European citizen Jew did not survive the twentieth century. He had been literally wiped out in the gas ovens of the Nazi empire. And what was left of this Jew in the Communist utopias was, well, virtually nothing. Except that it was Zionism that rescued the remnant, the Zionism that had been so ridiculed and dismissed by both the ultra-pious and the secular heretics, apikorsim, according to the lingo of those who guarded the gates of the faith. Of course, that Zionism had altered the working paradigm of Jewish history. It was the Jewish state that rescued a million Jews from the Soviet Union and its miserable satellites, and it was also that state, even in its very infancy, that rescued 800,000 Jews from their dhimmi status out of the Maghreb all the way to Arab Baghdad (actually Jewish Baghdad) and to Isfahan and Shiraz in Persia. Some of these Jews descended from the Exile following the destruction of the First Temple in 535 BCE. Old communities, indeed.

Verdi’s Nabucco is based on this saga, and its “Va Pensiero” or “Song of the Slaves” has been called the most popular operatic chorus in existence. Before Hatikva, “The Hope,” written in 1886, was declared the official Zionist hymn, Verdi’s melody was sung at proto-Zionist meetings all over the continent: “Remember the fate of Jerusalem.” Almost uniformly at contemporary performances of the opera, and at present there are more and more frequent performances in America and Europe, once “Va Pensiero” is sung it is sung again, in tribute to both the passion of the music and the passion of the narrative. Arturo Toscanini conducted the piece with thousands of singers at Verdi’s funeral in 1901. If you have even just five minutes to spare for a rewarding melody and a rewarding message, listen to any one of the following: Nana Mouskouri, Placido Domingo, Luciano Pavorotti, Andrea Bocelli, Kiri Te Kanawa.

The vision of the slaves in Babylon was fulfilled existentially in 1948 and then definitively in 1967. The first Jewish polity in two millennia has now been around for 64 years. And in Jewry the old formations, ones that many Zionists assumed to be near extinction, have been revived or, to be precise, have revived themselves. Not socialism, heaven forfend. There is a probably apocryphal tale told about David Ben Gurion, the first prime minister of Israel, taking his grandson to the ultra-orthodox Mea Shearim neighborhood of Jerusalem early in the history of the state. There were perhaps a few hundred pious Jews living in that sector of the city at the time, maybe a little more. Ben Gurion was certain that their kind of piety had very little future and that Jews like these would disappear. The prime minister wanted his young kin to see the phenomenon before it vanished. But it has not, and it won’t.