Altrove – Seventy Years
By Daniel Leisawitz
Last Thursday and Friday, the State of Israel celebrated its 70th anniversary. On the one hand seventy years is a long time and major milestone for a small country that started out so precariously. On the other hand, three score and ten– the number of years prescribed for a full human life in the Bible – is but a passing shadow within the context of the thousands of years of Jewish history. It made me curious to take a look at where other countries were on their seventieth birthdays. I’ve just taken as examples the two countries I know best: the United States and Italy.
In 1846 the United States of America marked its seventieth anniversary. It is also the year in which we began the first war that the US would fight mainly on foreign soil: the Mexican-American War. At war’s end, the US would take control of one third of Mexico – land which is now California, Utah, Nevada, Arizona and New Mexico, as well as Texas, which Mexico claimed for itself, but which had seceded in 1836.
In 1846 a young lawyer from Illinois was elected for the first time to the US Congress. Abraham Lincoln quickly made himself unpopular in the House of Representatives by speaking out against the Mexican-American War, accusing President James K. Polk of deviously provoking an unjustified war, the real aim of which was to gain more territory for Southern slave states.
In 1846, also in Illinois, the Mormons decided that they did not have a future in the state, where they had fled after being expelled from Missouri. After years of violent persecution from their neighbors, the religious sect, led by Brigham Young, decided to flee their newly established town of Nauvoo, Illinois and leave the United States on their Westward Exodus to Salt Lake City, which was part of Mexico at the time.
In 1846 Frederick Douglass went on a speaking tour of Ireland and England. Part of the reason for his traveling to Europe was to evade fugitive slave catchers, who, alerted by his newfound notoriety, could attempt to capture him and return him to his former owner in Maryland. So, in 1846 some of Douglass’ British supporters gathered the funds to buy his freedom.
Also in 1846, the first game of baseball was played according to modern rules in Hoboken, NJ.
The Kingdom of Italy, on the other hand, celebrated its 70th anniversary in 1931, or, as it was officially known at the time, year IX of the Fascist Era. It, too, was engaged in warfare on foreign land. It was in 1931, after twenty years of fighting, that Italy consolidated its control of what would become its colony of Libya.
It was also in 1931 that Mussolini demanded that all university professors swear an oath of loyalty to the Fascist Regime. Of the roughly 1,200 Italian university professors, 13 refused. They were promptly sacked.
On October 12, 1931, from his laboratory in Rome, Italian physicist Guglielmo Marconi successfully activated the floodlights of the Christ the Redeemer statue more than 5700 miles away, in Rio de Janeiro, Brazil, by means of radio signal.
It is striking to compare where the US and Italy were 70 years into their existence and where they now are. They are in some ways profoundly different countries, while in other ways quite similar. Who can say where Israel will be in another 70 years? It is up to us – Israelis and diaspora Jews, Christians, Muslims, Druze, Palestinians and citizens of the surrounding Arab nations – to work toward peace, so that seventy years from now, Israel will be a land of contentment and peace.
*Daniel Leisawitz is the Director of the Italian Studies Program at Muhlenberg College (Allentown, Pennsylvania, USA). The artwork is by Abraham Cresques a 14th-century Jewish Spanish cartographer.