A former resident of a Jewish ghetto in Europe once quipped, “What? They locked us in? Not at all! We locked them out.”
He may have been joking, but Rav Samson Raphael Hirsch writes that G-d actually did us a favor by enclosing us in European ghettos. They were “the most active means in G-d’s hands to keep us afar from the lack of culture of the Middle Ages.”
He makes this remark in commenting on the story of Yaakov’s sons settling in Goshen. In this Egyptian “ghetto,” Bnei Yisrael were able to develop and guard their unique way of life – which is what G-d desired. That’s why He made Yosef viceroy of Egypt – so that his family would receive special treatment from Pharaoh and be permitted to live in Goshen.
To benefit Bnei Yisrael, G-d also inspired the Egyptians to ask Yosef to buy their land – which resulted in virtually every Egyptian uprooting himself and moving elsewhere in Egypt (see Bereishis 47:19-21). After doing so, “no Egyptian could reproach the Hebrew by saying, ‘You have no business to be here; you were not born in these parts.’”
Similarly, at a later period, G-d ensured that European countries were populated with people who weren’t originally native to the area. That way, when anti-Semites said, “‘Go back to Palestine…,’ history [could] riposte with the inexorable question, ‘Did then the cradle of your ancestors stand here?’”
Of course, thankfully now we can return to “Palestine,” but for many centuries, doing so was close to impossible, and G-d, in His mercy, orchestrated events so that the Jewish presence in Europe – and Egypt – not be seen as intolerable by fair-minded gentiles.
But if G-d was looking out for us, why did He force Yaakov and his sons to move to Egypt in the first place? Couldn’t He sustain Yaakov and his sons in the Land of Canaan?
Rav Hirsch replies that the “family of Yaakov could hardly have developed as a nation” in Canaan. They would have spread out and assimilated. “To become a nation without intermingling, they had to come in the midst of a nation – Egypt – that in principle was opposed to the whole nature of the Jews.” Only there would they maintain their identity.
And so they did.
Elliot Resnick, PhD, is the host of “The Elliot Resnick Show” and the editor of an upcoming work on etymological explanations in Rav Samson Raphael Hirsch’s commentary on Chumash.