A collection of poems by Iossif Ventouras, the only surviving Jewish man born in Crete, has recently been published in English as Tanais. It gets its name from one of the poems in the volume, which in turn is named for an ancient Greek colony in what is now Russia—and a ship whose fate was bound up with that of Cretan Jewry. Mark Glanville explains in his review:

In early June [1941], the Nazis filled the holds of the ship with about 900 prisoners bound for Auschwitz, among them Cretan partisans, Italian prisoners of war, and the entire Jewish community of Crete, which comprised 299 souls, 88 of them children. On June 9, the Tanais was torpedoed by the British submarine Vivid, killing all but a handful of passengers. This was the end of the Cretan Jewish community, which had thrived on the island for more than 2,000 years. (Jews are said to have served as guards at the palace of Knossos, where King Minos had Daedalus build the labyrinth with his son the Minotaur at its center.)

This event looms large in Ventouras’s work, and Glanville deems “Tanais” and another poem in the volume, “Kyklonia” (“cyclone”), “two of the most important and devastating poems written in the wake of the Holocaust.” He compares their resonances, and opening verses:

Ventouras is a true heir to two ancient traditions, Jerusalem and Athens. In “Kyklonia,” he writes:

Question: what is your name?

Answer: My Jewish name, or . . . ? My Greek name is . . .’

The poem opens with an epigraph from Jeremiah (1:13): “I see a bubbling pot/ and its spout is facing north,” which the poet adopts as a description of the German invasion of Greece and Crete. Ventouras’s other great Holocaust poem, “Tanais,” opens with . . . the words of the sorceress Circe from Book Ten of the Odyssey. And Odysseus will go down to Hades to encounter the spirits of those he has fought alongside at Troy.

Contributing to the Jewish state’s current controversy over efforts to reform its judicial system, observes Peter Berkowitz, is its lack of a written constitution. Berkowitz encourages Israelis to seek a way out of the present crisis by looking to the founding document they do have: the Declaration of Independence.

The document does not explicitly mention “democracy.” But it commits Israel to democratic institutions not only by insisting on the equality of rights for all citizens and the establishment of representative government but also by stressing that Arab inhabitants would enjoy “full and equal citizenship.”

The Israeli Declaration of Independence no more provides a constitution for Israel than does the U.S. Declaration of Independence furnish a constitution for America. Both documents, however, announced a universal standard. In 1859, as civil war loomed, Abraham Lincoln wrote in a letter, “All honor to Jefferson—to the man who, in the concrete pressure of a struggle for national independence by a single people, had the coolness, forecast, and capacity to introduce into a merely revolutionary document, an abstract truth, applicable to all men and all times, and so to embalm it there, that to-day, and in all coming days, it shall be a rebuke and a stumbling-block to the very harbingers of re-appearing tyranny and oppression.”

Something similar could be said about Ben Gurion’s . . . affirmation that Israel would be based on, ensure, and guarantee basic rights and fundamental freedoms because they are inseparable from our humanity.

Perhaps reconsideration of the precious inheritance enshrined in Israel’s Declaration of Independence could assist both sides in assuaging the rage roiling the country. Bold and conciliatory, the nation’s founding document promises not merely a Jewish state, or a free state, or a democratic state, but that Israel will combine and reconcile its diverse elements to form a Jewish and free and democratic state.