Well, whether he digs his claws in for a few more months, or decides to take the early retirement package in the next week or so, it looks like the long, strange trip is just about over for Hosni Mubarak. We wish him well in his future endeavors, and while he may missed the perks of presidential power, now that he’ll be out of the public eye, he can save a fortune on Just For Men. Whatever the future holds for him, however, there’s a general sense that this is bad news for the Jews. To put it all in perspective, we have a rundown on the Top Ten Bad Transitions of Power in Jewish History.
1. Roughly 1550 bc–Joseph-lovin’, Jacob welcomin’, Hebrew-toleratin’ Pharaoh dies, is replaced by new pharaoh who knew not Joseph. Like with any formerly hot star who can longer get the studio moguls to return his calls, next stop for the Hebrews, reality show—in this case, “Real Slaves of Goshen.”
2. 175 bc–Seleucus IV is replaced by his brother, Antiochus IV , who, after getting punk’d by the Romans outside of Alexandria, decided to strengthen his control over Judea by banning circumcision, Sabbath observance and kosher slaughter, and desecrating the Temple. He wanted to be known as “Antiochus Epiphanes” (the God Revealed,”), but was called “Antiochus Epimanes (“The Mad”). Still, if it weren’t for him, Adam Sandler never would have written “The Chanuka Song,” so not a complete disaster for the Jews.
3. 305 AD–Diocletian might not have been great, but he kept the Christians in check. Not so much his successor, Constantine, who not only stopped persecuting Christians ( a decision with which we are totally cool), but then went on to make Christianity the official religion of the empire. We know that the Jews were never big fans of polytheism, but in retrospect, it really doesn’t look so bad.
4. 1066—In the medieval Jewish world, Shmuel Ha-Naggid was most definitely the Man. Poet, Talmudic authority, vizier, and general, Shmuel was a Jew who led Muslim armies in battle and then wrote the kind of depressing poetry about it that chicks totally dig. When he died, his son Joseph took over as the king of Granada’s vizier, but much as they might have respected the father, the majority of the population didn’t like the son any more than people like Joan Rivers’ daughter, resulting in the murder of Joseph and the massacre of many of Granada’s Jews.
5. 1795—Granted, things may not have worked out great in the end, but for a long time, the Jews in Poland had it pretty good; lots of herring, fairly infrequent beatings, and plenty of material for Borscht Belt one-liners. Then came the Three Partitions of Poland, and the next thing you know, most of Poland’s Jews are now Russia’s Jews, which, Fiddler on the Roof notwithstanding, left much to be desired.
6. 1815—So Napoleon conquers the Germans, and emancipates the hell out of its Jews—it’s baguettes and law school for everyone! Then Napoleon has his Waterloo, and Vienna has its Congress, and Jews are only getting the rights granted them by the German states themselves, (which are none), university students are beating them up in the streets, and Karl Marx’s father’s gets baptized (see next entry to see how that turned out).
7. 1917—Although communists and the people who love them like to imagine that the Bolshevik Revolution overthrew the tsar, that had already been taken care of by the March revolution. What the Bolsheviks did was overthrow the Provisional Government, which had already emancipated the Jews, abolished the Pale of Settlement, and was about to conduct the first democrat elections in Russian history. Instead, the Jews got the civil war (complete with pogroms), decades of policies that served to shatter Jewish institutional and communal life, and, adding insult to injury, the blame for all the depredations of the Soviet regime. Bolshoe spasibo, tovarischi.
8. 1918—The Dual Monarchy of Austro-Hungary was a relic—polyglot in an age of nationalism, autocratic in an age that at least extolled the virtues of popular opinion, and a state so backwards in an age that revered industrial efficiency that they had a special word—“schlamperei”—for the uniquely Austrian type of lackadaisicalness. It was, in other words, the perfect place for what was, at the time, the third largest Jewish community in the world, and in a state in which virtually every other ethnicity had a nationalist movement calling for the breakup of the empire, the Jews were the most loyal subjects of Franz Josef and his successor, Karl X. And say what you will of the numerous vices of the 19th century, when one compares them to that of the various nationalist, authoritarian, and anti-Semitic regimes that filled the vacuum of the empire’s collapse, it’s easy to wax nostalgic.
9. 1933—Thankfully Hitler and his NSDAP lost votes in the second elections of 1932, so he’ll be reasonable and easily controlled if we make him chancellor, right?
10. 1979—Sure, the shah is a ruthless autocrat, but he has close ties to Israel, and he keeps a tight grip on the country, so what could possibly go wrong?
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