Comment
April 4, 2008
Tibetans & Jews
Ira Rifkin
Special to the Jewish Times
In 1990, the Dalai Lama hosted a delegation of American Jews in Dharamsala, his home in exile in northern India. Tibetans had lost sovereignty over their homeland and were scattering around the globe. How, he asked, had Jews preserved their cultural and religious identities during their own 2,000-year exile and what might Tibetans learn about preserving theirs?
Eighteen years later, the parallel between Tibet’s unfolding and increasingly bleak prospects and the Jewish historical experience seems even more relevant.
Just as after the failed first-century Jewish uprising against Rome, Tibetans are becoming a minority in their homeland as Beijing alters Tibet’s population by flooding the territory with Han Chinese, China’s dominant ethnic group.
Already, two out of three residents of Lhasa, Tibet’s capital, are Han Chinese. In 2006, Beijing hastened the process considerably by opening a high-speed rail link between Lhasa and Beijing. Chinese-run brothels, karaoke bars and a sprawling amusement park now surround the Portola Palace, the Dalai Lama’s former residence and Tibet’s equivalent of Jerusalem’s ancient Temple.
It’s easy to imagine that the only reason China has not razed the Portola Palace as Rome razed the Second Temple is the horrific press response that action would unleash in today’s global media environment. It’s easier for Beijing to leave the palace intact, if only for tourism, particularly this year when large numbers of foreign visitors are expected to visit China’s hinterlands as part of their Beijing Olympics experience.
But saving the palace does nothing to offset the greatest threats to Tibet’s future as a political entity run by and for Tibetans: the passing of time and humanity’s cruelly short memory.
It took Jews almost two millennia to re-establish an independent state in their homeland. During that time, later-arriving Arabs settled the land and claimed it as their own. Despite Judaism’s numerous ritual remainders of Zion’s centrality, Jewish historical ties to the land were forgotten by most of the world, which came to view modern Jews as entirely distinct from the ancient Israelites who once populated the land. As a result, returning Jews were regarded as colonialist interlopers and Arabs were seen as indigenous innocents suffering at the hands of Jewish pretenders.
Tibetans now face a similar inversion of history.
How long will it be before Tibetans are viewed as a relic minority in their homeland similar to the condition of American Indians in the United States, Formosans in Taiwan, or Serbs in Kosovo? How long must Beijing hold on to Tibet before the world comes to think of Tibet as Chinese territory and favors the claims of the descendants of Chinese settlers over Tibetans seeking to re-establish their historical national rights? Another 30 years? A century or two? Two thousand years?
Jewish cultural identity survived the destruction of the Second Temple by shifting from a temple-based religion to its rabbinic form. Instead of a central temple, local synagogues and the family home became the new centers of Jewish life. Moreover, it took Jewish secularists willing to take up the gun for Zionism to gain a state in the modern era.
Tibetan religion and culture are in the initial stages of a similarly radical transformation. What shape that will take and whether it will successfully preserve a distinct Tibetan identity is, of course, unanswerable. What is clear is that Jews and Tibetans have more in common than is superficially apparent — as the Dalai Lama recognized back in 1990.