The Causes of Hostility Towards Jews: A Historical Overview - Radio Islam
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THE CAUSES OF HOSTILITY TOWARDS JEWS: A HISTORICAL OVERVIEW
"Reason
and documentation ... attest to the fact that anti-Jewish
hostility has not been (and
is not) constant and ubiquitous. If it
had been, the conclusion is obvious: Jews could not have
survived
individually or collectively, religiously or ethnically."
--
Alan Edelstein
"Medieval
Jewry, much as it suffered from disabilities and
contempt, still was a privileged
minority in every country in
which
it was tolerated at all."
-- Salo
Baron, p. 259, 1972
"If
Judaism is fundamentally altruistic in an evolutionarily
meaningful sense, it would
be expected that Jews [through
history]
would characteristically engage in self-sacrificing
behavior on
behalf of gentiles -- a thesis for which there is
absolutely no
evidence."
-- Kevin
MacDonald, p. 64
"Indeed,
the more religiously conservative a Jew is today, the less likely he or she
is to identify with universalistic ideologies or with the non-Jewish 'poor
and downtrodden.'"
-- Stanley
Rothman
and S. Robert Lichter,
1982,
p.
112
"My
God," she gasped with grief. "Who died?"
"Don't worry for nothing,"
Max assured her. "It's nobody.They're burying a man called
Blenholt today. He's not a Jew."
--
Daniel
Fuchs, fiction, "Homage to Blenholt [in
BERSHTEL, p.113]
In order to understand the present and prospects
for the future, something must be understood about the past. Jews claim their
origins to a seminal patriarch, Abraham, in the land of Ur (today part of
Iraq) 4,000 years ago. Abraham was not a farmer or village member of a settled
community. He was likely one of the "wandering" tribes of his time,
a citizenship less, "outsider" social class known as the "Apiru,"
or "Habiru" (Hebrews) who were scattered across a wide area of the
Middle East, from Syria to Egypt. [ANDERSON, p. 33] According to traditional
Jewish religious belief, God is reputed to have singled out 75-year old Abraham
among all people on earth and struck an arrangement with him, providing his
progeny the consummate family inheritance: "If Abraham will follow the commandments
of God, then He, in His turn, will make the descendants of Abraham His Chosen
People and place them under His protection ... God at this time stipulates
only one commandment, and makes only one promise." [DIMONT, p. 29] The
initial agreement, by modern standards, seems extraordinarily peculiar. God's
commandment was that all males by the eighth day of birth must have the foreskin
of their penises cut off, a painfully literal branding of Jewish distinction
around the male procreative organ:
"God ... said to Abraham
... You shall circumcise the flesh of
the foreskin and that shall be
the Covenant between Me
and you." GENESIS:
17:9-13
With this physical marking, notes Barnet
Litvinoff, “no male child born of Jewish parentage is ever allowed to forget
he is a Jew ... it reminds him of the doctrine of the chosen people.” [LITVINOFF,
p. 5] "As a sign of this sacred bond, of being special seed, Chosen,"
note Herbert Russcol and Margarlit Banai, "The Lord of the Universe commands
Abraham" to circumcize "every man child among you." And as
the Torah states it: "I will establish my covenant between Me and thee
and thy seed after thee in their generations for an everlasting covenant."
[RUSSCOL/BANAI, 1970, p. 173]
Is this alleged commandment by God to
the Abrahamic "seed" in Jewish tradition not racial?
"Circumcision," says Lawrence
Hoffman, "has thus remained the sine
qua non of Jewish identity throughout time. Jews came to believe that
it warded off danger, and even saved Jews from damnation, that the sign of
circumcision was tantamount to carrying God's ineffable name carved in the
flesh, that it was a means of attaining mystical unity with the creator, and
that it brought about visionary experience." [HOFFMAN, p. 11] It also
symbolized, on the male genitals, special attention to the genetic continuance
of the progeny of Abraham, that -- if they obeyed the laws and demands of
God -- they would someday be as "numerous as the stars."
“By the very sexual act itself,” says Philip
Sigal, in explaining traditional thinking, “the circumcized mystically transmits
the covenant to the foetus.” [SIGAL, p. 20] Until the 20th century, it was normal that during the
mezizah phase of the circumcision ritual,
the mohel (the expert who performed
the circumcision) took the infant's "circumcized member into his mouth
and with two or three draughts sucks the blood out of the wounded part. He
then takes a mouthful of wine from a goblet and spurts it, in two or three
intervals, on the wound." [ROMBERG, p. 45] Today, notes Rabbi Immanuel
Jacobovits, "the original method of sucking by mouth tends to be increasingly
confined to the most orthodox circles only." [JACOBOVITS, p. 196]
In exchange for circumcision and following
God's orders, the Jews were promised the land of Canaan (the land mass of
today's Israel, more or less), a place that was already inhabited. [DIMONT,
p. 29] This land for circumcision
exchange is the root of Jewish tradition, from which centuries of rules, regulations,
dictates, interpretations and other additions have followed. God's spiritual
link to Jews is understood to have originated, of all things, around a piece
of real estate commonly understood to be part of the "Covenant,” which,
says Alfred Jospe, “is the agreement between God and Israel by which Israel
accepts the Torah [Old Testament] .... The concept of covenant signifies the
consciousness of what the truth is.” [JOSPE, p. 15] “The covenant,” adds Will
Herberg, “is an objective supernatural fact; it is God’s act of creating and
maintaining Israel for his purposes in history.” [EISENSTEIN, p. 274]
"The covenant made for all time means that all future generations are
included in the covenant," notes Monford Harris,
"Being born into this covenental people
make one a member of the covenant.
Berith is election. This is very difficult
for moderns to understand, let alone
accept. It is our modern orientation that sees
every human being as an
'accidental collocation of atoms,' the birth
of every person as purely
adventitious. From the classical Jewish perspective,
being born to a Jewish
mother is a divine act of election." [HARRIS,
M., 1965, p. 90-91]
"For Israel," notes Edward Greenstein,
"God's immanence found expression in the perception of God as a superperson."
[GREENSTEIN, E., 1984, p. 89] The idea that God was some kind of tradesman,
and that he was a distinctly dialectical Other to humanity, as a Lord, King,
Patriarch, Commander, and even Warlord of a worldly provenance has -- with
the religious commentaries and meta-commentaries that evolved from His commands
in Judaism -- provided fuel for modern
scholarly debate about Jewish (and linked strands of Christian) creations
in the world of secular affairs, most particularly in their materialist, rationalist,
and patriarchal flavors. The result, in today's Orthodox Judaism, says Evelyn
Kaye, is a "community [that] has developed an insular, single-minded
approach which is completely intolerant of any views that differ from its
own." [KAYE, p. 23]
Whatever else they believed, Jews have
traditionally understood themselves to be -- by hereditary line -- special,
intrinsically better than other people: they were divinely esteemed. The Old
Testament stated it plainly:
"For you are people consecrated to
the Lord your God: of all the
peoples on earth the Lord your God chose
you to be His
treasured people." [DEUTERONOMY 7:6]
The notion that Jews -- originally defined
racially as the Israelite progeny of Abraham (and a special lineage through
his son Isaac, then Jacob, and so on) -- are the "Chosen People"
of God is the bedrock of Jewish self-conception and it resonates deeply in
some form to Jewish self-identity to this day. What exactly such a mantle
of greatness confers has, for most, changed drastically over (particularly
recent) centuries, and is still a delicate source for self-reflection and
debate, ranging from traditional racist theories against non-Jews (still entertained
by many Orthodox Jews, and most of Zionism) to more modern, liberalizing,
and even secular notions that Jews are destined to lead humankind to some
kind of redemptive glory.
The extraordinary self-perpetuating ethnocentric
premises of traditional Judaism have been remarked upon by many modern scholars.
Likewise, they have often addressed the drastically different ethical and
spiritual views of Judaism and Oriental religious faiths (such as Hinduism
and Buddism). Such a gap is poignantly illustrated in this story by the great
popular folklorist, Joseph Campbell:
"A young Hindu gentleman
came to see me, and a very pious
man he proved to be: a worshipper
of Vishnu, employed as a
clerk or secretary of one of
the Indian delegations at the UN.
He had been reading the works
of Heinrich Zimmer on Indian
art, philosophy and religion,
works that I had edited many years
before, and which he wanted
to discuss. But there was
something else he wanted to
talk about too.
"You know, "
he said after we had begun to feel at home
with each other, "when
I visit a foreign country I like to acquaint
myself with its religion; so
I have bought myself a Bible and for
some months now have been reading
it from the beginning; but
you know" ... and here he paused, to regard me uncertainly,
then
said, "I can't find any
religion in it!"
... Now I had of course
been brought up on the Bible and I
had also studied Hinduism, so
I thought I might be of some
help. " Well," I said,
"I can see how that might be, if you had
not been given to know that
a reading of the imagined history of
the Jewish race is here regarded
as a religious exercise. There
would then, I can see, be very
little for you of religion in the
greater part of the Bible."
I thought that later
I should perhaps have referred him to
the Psalms; but when I then
turned to a fresh reading of these
with Hinduism in mind, I was
glad that I had not done so; for
almost invariably the leading
theme is either the virtue of the
singer, protected by his God,
who will "smite his enemies on
the cheek" and "break
the teeth of the wicked;" or, on the other
hand, of complaint that God
has not yet given due aid to his
righteous servant: all of which
is just about diametrically opposed
to what an instructed Hindu
would have been taught to regard as
religious sentiment.
In the Orient the ultimate
divine mystery is sought beyond
all human categories of thought
and feeling, beyond names and
forms, and absolutely beyond
any such concept as of a merciful
or wrathful personality, chooser
of one people over another,
comforter of folk who pray,
and destroyer of those who do not.
Such anthropomorphic attributions
of human sentiment is -- from
the point of view of Indian
thought -- a style of religion for
children." [CAMPBELL,
Myths,
pp. 93-94]
"If you will obey my voice," God
tells Jews in their seminal religious text, the Torah, "and keep my Covenant,
you shall become my own possession among all people, for all the earth is
mine." [EXODUS 19:5] This anthropomorphized model of the Israelite God
is someone profoundly concerned with ownership, allegiance, and control --
key values in the self-promotive tenets of classical Judaism and their practical
application in history. After all, the seminal Jewish religious text -- the
Torah (in Christian tradition the first five books of the Old Testament) --
was created as a kind of Jewish family album, an ancient listing of Israelite
genealogies and pedigrees that codifies sacred recipes for group solidarity,
self-aggrandizement (land conquest, et al), and self-preservation for those
with direct ancestral linkage to Abraham.
"The biblical faith [of the Old Testament],"
writes scholar Bernhard Anderson, "to the bewilderment of many philosophers,
is fundamentally historical in character. It is concerned with events and
historical relationships, not abstract values and ideas existing in a timeless
realm." [ANDERSON, p. 12] "The
halakah [Jewish religious law] does not
aspire to a heavenly transcendence," notes influential modern rabbi Joseph
Soloveitchik, "nor does it aspire to soar upon the wings of some abstract,
mysterious spirituality. It fixes its gaze on the concrete, empirical reality
and does not let its attention be diverted from it." [SOLOVEITCHIK, p.
92]
"There is no Valhalla [afterlife Paradise] in Judaism,"
notes Chaim Bermant,
"and no Garden of the Houris, and while
there was paradise and hell, both were to
be experienced mainly on earth ... Neither heaven
with all its joys, nor hell with all
its torments (which, as described in the Talmud,
are akin to those of Tantalus)
have a central place in the Jewish faith, Judaism
is of this world and in so far
as it believes in the Kingdom of Heaven at all
it is as somethng which will become
manifest on earth." [BERMANT, C., 1977,
p. 16]
Beyond Israelite genealogies, the Torah
(the Old Testament) includes an ancient
compilation of rules and regulations, elaborated upon in metacommentaries
by later Judaic religious texts, especially the Talmud, which codifies correct
behavior for all the minutia of daily living.
In Jewish tradition, “the whole keynote of being,” says sociologist
Talcott Parsons, “starting with the creation, was action, the accomplishment
of things.” [PARSONS, p. 103]
(And one of the "keys to Jewish success,"
says Jewish business author Steven Silbiger, is to "be psychologically
drivent o prove something.") [SILBIGER, S., 2000, p. 9]
“Judaism is not a revealed religion,” wrote
the great German-Jewish philosopher Moses Mendelssohn, “but revealed legislation.
Its first precept is not ‘thou shalt believe’ or not believe, but thou shalt
do or abstain from doing.” [GOLDSTEIN, D., p. 43, in Jerusalem] "A constant motif of post-Enlightenment
ethics," says rabbi Jonathan Sacks, "is the rejection of religious
authority as an external command to which one submits. For this reason [philosopher]
Hegel is sharply critical of the Jewish structure of law. 'Of spirit,' he
writes of Judaism, 'nothing remained save pride in slavish obedience.' Much
of Nietzsche’s work is a deepening set of variations on this theme. Judaism,
he says, introduced 'a God who demands.' The autonomous self, central to modern ethics, is radically
incompatible with the structures of Jewish spirituality, built as they are
on the concept of mitzvah, command."
[SACKS, J., p. 100-101]
The all-encompassing and dictatorial manner
of Jewish Orthodoxy in the Talmudic (and other) interpretations of the Old
Testament is reflected in this observation by Gerson Cohen:
"The Torah encompasses and seeks
to regulate every moment of
life ... Nothing human is beyond the
scope of judgment and its
program of prescription. It is for
this reason that Torah is often
called a way of life, for its purpose
is to teach the Jew how to act,
think, and even feel." [COHEN,
in KLEINE, p. 92]
The obsessive nature of even modern Jewish
Orthodoxy within a tight web of restrictive daily dictates, and the surrender
to what Israeli scholar Israel Shahak calls its innate "totalitarianism,"
[SHAHAK, p. 15] is reflected in this comment by Egon Mayer:
"What are the first words that one
should utter upon awakening? There
is a rule. How many steps may one take from
one's bed before washing
at least the tips of one's fingers. There
is a rule." [MAYER, Suburb]
Michael Govrin notes that
"A Jew is born into an already articulated biography.
In the traditional
context of Halacha -- the Jewish Law (which
until two hundred years
ago was the only way a Jews could define him
or herself) -- a Jew's
life is codified to a unique extent. From rising
in the morning to the moment
of falling asleep at night, from birth to death
and burial, the myriad
of gestures, thoughts, and intentions is pre-articulated,
forming a specific
mold into which the life is poured. The private
life in a given historical
moment is a personal variation on that generic
mold; always seemingly
only a re-enactment -- not an 'invention' --
of a preexisting role in an ongoing
plot that started with the first Jews, and is
still unfolding." [GOVRIN, M.,
2001]
Charles Liebman and Steven Cohen note that
the "halakaha [Jewish religious
law] commands that before eating bread a Jew must recite a blessing, and before
this blessing the hands must be washed and a blessing recited over the hand
washing. Even the manner in which the hands are washed is prescribed: the
kind of utensil used, the order in which the hands are washed, the number
of times each hand is washed." [LIEBMAN/COHEN, p. 125]
"It is a commonplace," adds Eunice
Lipton, "that an abiding and secularized aspect of Jewish tradition is
its valuing of sensual satisfaction. Jewish law acknowledges appetite; one
is even is told how often one should make love ... One might say that Jewish
validation of the senses results from the emphasis on human life in the present
as opposed to any interest in any afterlife." [LIPTON, p. 289] Evelyn Kaye, who grew up in an Orthodox community,
notes that "Orthodox Judaism plans to regulate every minute, every action
and every thought of life ... [KAYE, p. 126] ... The code of Jewish law dictates
a range of regulations for sexual intercourse, including when and where it
may be experienced, as well as what to think about during the act." [KAYE,
p. 125] "It is forbidden,"
says the Code of Jewish Law, "to discharge semen in vain. This
is a graver sin than any other mentioned in the Torah ... It is equivalent
to killing a person ... A man should be extremely careful to avoid an erection.
Therefore, he should not sleep on his back with his face upward, or on his
belly with his face downward, but sleep on his side, in order to avoid it."
[GANZFRIED, p.17] "There are even rules," says Kaye, "about
what you may think about while you sit on the toilet." [KAYE, p. 17]
Israel Shahak underscores Orthodox Judaism's
complex honing of regulations to the point of hairsplitting for even purely
theoretical concerns that appear to be extraordinarily esoteric in a modern
context:
"During the existence of the Temple,
the High Priest was only allowed
to marry a virgin. Although during virtually
the whole of the talmudic
period there was no longer a Temple or
High Priest, the Talmud devoted
one of its more involved (and bizarre)
discussions to the precise
definition of the term 'virgin' fit to
marry a High priest. What about a
woman whose hymen had been broken by accident?
Does it make any
difference whether the accident occurred
before or after the age of three?
By the impact of metal or wood? Was she
climbing a tree? And if so,
was she climbing up or down?" [SHAHAK,
p. 41]
One of the most profoundly important dimensions
of traditional Judaism (one that has had enormous repercussions for Jewish
relations throughout history with their non-Jewish neighbors) is its injunction
to fellow members that Jews must -- conceptually, and through most of history,
physically -- live “apart,” “separate,” distinct from other human beings.
Jewish self-conception, from its early days, was antithetical and antagonistic
to other peoples. "Separation of Israel from the nations [non-Jews],"
says Moshe Greenberg, "in order to be consecrated by God took the extreme
form of condemning to death any who worshipped or tempted others to worship
alien gods." [GREENBERG, p. 28]
In later years, throughout the Jewish diaspora,
this developed into the Jewish self-conception as a "nation apart"
-- physically as well as conceptually distanced from all other peoples. "In
their determined efforts to prevent assimilation and loss of identity as a
small minority in the midst of a hostile majority," notes the Oxford
Dictionary of the Jewish Religion, "the rabbis deliberately set up
barriers for the explicit purpose of preventing social interaction with gentiles
[non-Jews], and decrees were enacted to erect barriers against this danger.
The partaking of meals with gentiles was forbidden ... food cooked by gentiles
was banned." [WERBLOWSKY, p. 269]
"The underside to this sense of
chosenness [per the Chosen People idea]," says Rabbi Isar Schorsch, "is
an inclination to dichotomize the world between 'them' and 'us. Categories
of people are set apart by the fact that God has assigned them far fewer mitzvot
[commandemnts] to keep. Three of those 100 blessings [Orthodox Jews must
recite each day] praise God for 'not having made me a gentile,' 'for not having
made me a woman,' and 'for not having made me a slave.'" [SCHORSCH, I.,
4-30-99] Even in a 1988 survey, "more than a third of Reform rabbis --
traditionally the most 'integrated' and 'outreaching' of the major Jewish
denominations -- endosed the proposition that 'ideally, one ought not to have
any contact with non-Jews.'" [NOVICK, P., 1999, p. 181]
Such a "nation apart" admonition
is part of classical Jewish religious (and related to secular Zionist) belief
to the present day. Jewish author Alfred Jospe notes that
“when a male Jew is called to the Torah,
he recites the traditional
blessing, asher bahar banu
mi’kol ha’amim, praising God ‘who
has chosen us from among all other
nations.’ When Jews recite their
daily morning prayer they say the benediction,
she’lo assani goy,
thanking God ‘that he has not made
[us] gentiles.’ When they
pronounce the benediction over the
Sabbath [Saturday] wine, they
declare that God has chosen and sanctified
Jews from all other
peoples in the same way which he has
distinguished between Sabbath
and weekday. When Jews make
Havdalah on Saturday night, they
recite the traditional
ha-mavdil, glorifying God for setting Jews
apart
from all other peoples just as He set
apart the sacred from the profane
and light from darkness.” [JOSPE, p.
10-11]
"Unlike many religions," notes Steven
Silbiger,
"Judaism is more than simply a belief system
that anyone can adopt. To
become Jewish means enlisting in a tribe.
The relationship or covenant
is between God and the Jewish people,
rather than between God and
individual Jews. Judaism is a religion
with a strong ancestral component."
[SILBIGER, S., 2000, p. 11]
In the ancient Greek and Roman worlds
people were polytheists, and relatively tolerant of each other’s theology.
Judaism, however, was expressed throughout their diaspora as an elitist, confrontational
faith, engendering ill will everywhere. "It was not sensible," says
Jasper Griffin, "nor was it good manners [in the ancient world] to allege
that other peoples' gods did not exist. Only a madman makes fun of other peoples'
religious practices, says the historian Herodutus in the fifth century BCE
... The response of the Jews [to other religions] was felt to be shocking
and uncouth, as well as dangerous for everybody." Jewish rejection of
the religions and communities in which they lived "placed an inseparable
barrier between them and full acceptance into the classical world; as later
on, even more acutely, it did with Christians." [GRIFFIN, p. 58]
*****************
The seminal source of Jewish history
and sacred law is recorded in the Torah
(the
Old Testament of the Bible in Christian tradition, consisting of Genesis,
Exodus, Leviticus, Numbers, and Deuteronomy). Biblical scholars tend to believe
that the Old Testament (which sometimes cites conflicting facts in various
places) was essentially four different written narratives eventually combined
together, each section originally written between 800 to 1600 years after
the events described allegedly occurred. Within these texts we read that Abraham
and the early Israelites settled tentatively in the land of the Canaanites,
but that famine eventually drove them towards Egypt. The ancient Hebrews were
reportedly enslaved in Egypt, (a period of momentous impact even in current
Jewish collective memory), but were ultimately led back to Canaan -- the Promised Land -- by Moses in a 40-year
trek across the desert in the thirteenth century BCE. Moses became instrumental
in mediating God's demands to the Hebrew people and instituting laws of behavior
and belief for them, known today as the Mosaic code.
Eventually the Israelites forcibly reestablished
themselves in the land of Canaan and over the following centuries divided
into sub-clans, fighting and warring among themselves, and against others.
The most drastic intra-Jewish schism was the establishment of two conflicting
monarchies -- Israel, in the northern areas, and Judah, in the south. When
ancient Israel joined a coalition of non-Jewish states in threatening the
southern Jewish kingdom, Judah joined the powerful Assyrian kingdom which
destroyed Israel in about 723 BCE. Judah was destroyed, in turn, in 586 BCE,
by Babylonian invasion, concluding the
first Jewish expulsion from their proclaimed homeland. Jews were allowed to return in 538 BCE under
the sovereignty of the Persian monarch, Cyrus; the Romans wmastersere of the
Palestine area by about 100 BCE. The Jews were ultimately expelled en masse
again, this time by the Romans, when Israelites repeatedly revolted against
Roman rule. By the third century CE most Jews were scattered all across the
Roman Empire, from India to Spain. In Jewish lore, this is the solidification
of the Jewish "galut"
(a term meaning exile, with derogatory connotations) in non-Jewish lands,
i.e., the Diaspora (dispersion).
It is necessary to again underscore, against
the grain of modern popular (and largely secular) Jewish opinion, that the
Old Testament is a compilation of stories, genealogies, and Godly dictates
that were intended by its Jewish authors to be purely intra-Jewish in scope.
The ten commandments of Moses -- "Love your neighbor, "Thou shalt
not kill," and all the rest of it -- did not represent in origin for
Jews a universalistic creed. "Love
your neighbor” meant love your fellow Israelite. "Thou shalt not kill"
meant don't kill those of your own people.
"[Jewish] tradition," says Charles Liebman, "argued
that the essence of Torah is the obligation to love one's neighbor as oneself,
with the term 'neighbor' implying only 'Jew.'" [LIEBMAN, Rel Tre,
p. 313] John Hartung notes that careful inspection of the Torah/Old Testament
"Love Thy Neighbor" commandment make this clear, for example, in
Leviticus 19:18:
"Thou shalt not avenge, nor bear any
grudge against the children
of thy people but thou shalt love thy neighbor
as thyself." [Jewish
Publication
Society translation: other translations include the
same qualifier; HARTUNG, 1995]
As Louis Jacobs observes:
"Among both Jews and Christians the injunction
is read simply as 'love
thy neighbour as thyself'
... [but] in the original context the [Love Thy
Neighbor] verse means: even when someone has
behaved badly
towards you, try to overcome
your desires for revenge but rather
behave lovingly towards him because, after all,
he, too, is a human
being and a member of the covenant people as
you are and
therefore entitled to be treated as you yourself
wish to be treated ...
The golden rule to love the neighbour applies
only to the neighbour
who is a Jew." [JACOBS, L., 1995, p. 323,
324]
As Menachem Gerlitz explains the "neighbor"
passage:
'And you shall love your neighbor like your
own self' -- this is an important
rule of the Torah. Every Jew must love his fellow
Jew with all his heart. The
Baal Shem Tov [founder of the ultra-Othodox
Hassidim] used to explain
this as follows: Our Torah teaches us to 'love
Hashem your G-d with all
your heart.' How can we prove to ourselves that
we are really fulfilling
this commandment? Only through the commandment
of loving our fellow
Jew like our own selves. Only by truly loving
each and every Jew, every
son of the Chosen People which Hashem selected
from all other nations
to love, just like a person loves the son of
a dear friend." [GERLITZ, M.,
1983, p. 195]
Judeocentrism, not human universalism, is
the core of traditional Jewish understanding of the Old Testament. The influential
medieval Jewish theologian, Maimonides, advised that “It is incumbent on everyone
to love each individual Israelite as himself as it is said, ‘Thou shalt love
thy neighbor as thyself.’” [MANKIN, p. 37] Although there were some Jewish apologetics
with this notion as early as Philo, it was Christian and Enlightenment influences
that universalized the Ten Commandments, and liberalizing Jews, mainly since
the eighteenth century, began to follow suit, bending and broadening the tenets
of Judaism (carefully selecting from contradictory religious references) to
encompass a humanistic concern for non-Jews in step with modern universalist-oriented
values.
Mosaic law or not, the only time-- till
the modern state of Israel -- that
Jews have had the opportunity to practice Moses' commandments and the rest
of their beliefs (towards themselves or anybody) from a position of complete
empowerment was, even by their own ancient religious standards, a disaster.
The pinnacle of ancient Jewish history was a series of monarchial regimes
that represented a turbulent time of failures in living up to Covenantal laws,
incessant quarreling, fratricide, genocide, wars of conquest with non-Jewish
neighbors, repeated intra-Jewish civil wars, and other struggles for power
and control, rife with continuous bloodletting, as violent as any in human
history. Most of this is codified as part of the Jewish religious faith/history
in the Torah.
The well-known historian, Will Durrant, describes
the Israelites' seizure (after
the Mosaic moral code was accepted) of the Holy Land from the Canaanites
who lived there, like this:
"The conquest of Canaan was
but one more instance of a
hungry nomad horde falling upon
a settled community. The
conquerors killed as many as they
could find, and married the
rest. Slaughter was unconfined,
and (to follow the text) was
divinely ordained and enjoyed.
Gideon, in capturing two cities,
slew 120,000 men; only in the annals
of the Assyrians do we
meet again with such hearty killing.
[DURRANT, p. 302]
Even in the Book of Exodus, when Moses
(deliverer of the admonition "Thou Shalt Not Kill" and all the rest
of it) discovered his own people weakening,
"out of control” with idolatrous dancing, naked, before a "Golden
Calf," he directed the Levites, the priest caste, to slay three thousand
of them. [EXODUS 33:27-28]
Considerable portions of the Bible revolve
around violent struggles amongst Israelites for power. Both King David and
Solomon -- among the most beloved of the Israelite ancients in the myths of
modern Jewry -- had half-brothers with rival claims to the Israelite monarchy
murdered. Solomon, for example, arranged for Adonijah to be slain as well
as another threat to the throne, Joab, who was even murdered in the Holy Tabernacle.
(Both David and Solomon even had forced labor gangs of their own Israelite
people). Likewise, Ambimelich, the son of Gideon, (who like most powerful
Israelite rulers had a harem of wives and concubines) murdered 70 of his brothers
to guarantee the throne for himself. Jeru too, in a fit of ruthlessness, killed
the King of Israel, Joram, and then murdered Ahaziah, of the Israelite kingdom
of Judah, as well as his two brothers. Then he had all 70 sons of King Ahab
decapitated, clearing the way for his own leadership.
In King David's family, notes Joel Rosenberg,
"David's adultery with Bathsheba and
murder of Uriah is balanced
by the sexual violation of David's daughter
Tamar by David's son
Amnon, the murder of Amnon by his half-brother
Absalom, the
appropriation of David's concubines and
kingdom by Absalom,
and the slaying of Absalom by David's own
servant Joab."
[ROSENBERG, J., 1984, p. 47]
There is too the story of Gibeah (Judges
19:21). An Israelite, enraged by the rape-murder of his concubine by Jews
of another tribe, hacked the corpse into pieces and sent a section to each
of the twelve Israelite tribes to make an embittered point about solidarity.
A confederation of tribes joined together to exact revenge on the perpetrators
of the crime. The ensuing Israelite battle against each other took over 60,000
lives (Judges 20:21). The victorious confederation then marched on Jabesh-gilead,
a group who had declined to join the coalition against the destroyed Benjaminites.
12,000 soldiers were sent to "smite the inhabitants of Jabed-gilead with
the edge of the sword, with the women and children." (Judges 21) Only
female virgins were spared.
Going further along in Jewish religious
history, there is the murder of Simon by his son-in-law, Hyrcanus, in another
bid for the monarchy, and his son, Aristobulus I, who killed his mother and
brother, and imprisoned the rest of his family. After him came his brother,
Alexander Jannaeus, to the throne, a "despotic, violent ruler" who
reigned during the civil war between warring pro-Greek Israelites (Sadducees)
and anti-Greek Israelites (Pharisees). Jannaeus' bloody revenge upon the Pharisees
was "as bloody as any in history." [DIMONT, p.89, 90] There was
Antipater, "one of history's most unsavory characters," whose family
had been "forcibly converted to Judaism" [GOLDBERG, M., 1976, p.
32] and his son, Herod, who murdered a few sons, one of his wives, and range
of others including 45 Israelite religious leaders. [DIMONT, p. 95-96] The
Torah tells us that the Israelite prophet Elijah slew 450 prophets of the
rival deity Baal (I Kings 18) and military commander Jeru killed "all
the prophets of Baal, all his worshippers and priests." (I Kings 10:18-27)
[LANG, B., 1989, p. 120]
Under the ruler Mannasseh there was the
reintroduction of pagan cults, child sacrifices and "systematic murders"
in the southern Israelite kingdom of Judah; this kingdom itself had a rivalry
with the northern Israelite kingdom, Israel, and -- as noted -- it eventually
aligned with Assyrian invaders against its Israelite brethren, ultimately
to ancient Israel's complete destruction.
The chaos, internecine warring and corruption,
the straying from the “Covenant,” the worship of idols and the fraying of
the moral codes of Israelite solidarity resulted in a central Jewish belief
that took form in later centuries, that Jews had been scattered in a Diaspora
(dispersion) throughout the earth in galut (exile) from the land God gave them, Israel. But 2,000 years
of exile experience, notes Alfred Jospe, “could not shatter the image Jews
had of themselves. Destruction and exile were a national disaster but not
completely unforeseen. They were part of the divine plan ... The Jew was persecuted
not because God had abandoned or rejected him; [The Jew] suffered because
he was not equal to his moral task. In the words of the prayer book, ‘because
of our sins, we were exiled from our land’ ... Suffering was defined as punishment
and punishment in turn was a call to duty. Exile was God’s call to return
to the faithfulness inherent in Israel’s role as the ‘chosen people.’ The
acceptance of punishment opened the gate to redemption and return to the land.”
[JOSPE, p. 17] Such a view of human suffering by Judaism, argues Richard Rubenstein,
was "a colossal, megalomaniacal and grandiose misreading of a pathetic
and defeated community's historical predicament. To this day Jews can be found
who delude themselves with the notion that somehow Jewish suffering and powerlessness
have redemptive significance for mankind." [KREFETZ, p. 182]
The key to the Israelite future of divine
favoritism, and its special covenantal “mission,” was eventually linked to
a Messiah who would triumphantly come to lead His people into a glorious future.
Originally the Messiah was understood to be merely a nationalist savior, a
great and literal king of the Israelite people; later He was reconfigured
as an expression of the one God of the Universe who would lord -- physically
and spiritually -- over the earth, not in an after-life, but in the here-and-now.
[JOSPE, p. 22-23] "Judaism,"
notes Stephen Whitfield, "in all its forms and manifestations, has always
maintained a concept of redemption as an event which takes place on the stage
of history and within the community. It is an occurrence which takes place
in the visible world, unlike Christianity, which conceives of redemption as
an event in the spiritual and unseen realm, an event which is reflected in
the soul." [WHITFIELD, American, p. 33]
****************
Over the centuries the Messiah was not quick in coming, and not all answers to
questions about changing times were clearly indicated in the seminal Torah,
so a written tradition of commentary, argument, and interpretation by respected
Jewish religious leaders evolved and became codified in a second religious
text called the Talmud. Many argue that it is not the Torah but actually the
Talmud -- this later legalese and folklore
about the seminal Torah -- that is the crucial source for day-to-day Orthodox
Jewish decision making about religious and secular issues. "The Talmud,"
observes Jacob Neusner, "is the single most influential document in the
history of Judaism." [BORAZ, p. 5] "Historically speaking,"
says Adin Steinsaltz, "the Talmud is the central pillar of Jewish culture."
[STEINSALTZ, 1976, p. 266] "The Talmud," adds Robert Goldenberg,
"provided the means of determining how God wants all Jews to live, in
all places, at all times. Even if the details of the law had to be altered
to suit newly arisen conditions, the proper way to perform such adaptation
could itself be learned from the Talmud and its commentaries." [GOLDENBERG,
R., 1984, p. 166]
This many volumed tome, consisting of Judaism's
"legal literature," is really two distinct books merged together,
the Mishna (the "oral law," originally written in Hebrew -- a language
considerably different than modern Hebrew) and the Gemara (largely commentaries
about the Mishna), written mostly in Aramaic three hundred years apart.
The Talmud is so difficult to read and so unwieldly that only lifelong
experts even think to tackle the original texts. Hence, the Talmud that explains
and interprets the Torah has needed plenty of other vast textual explanations
to deal with itself; such influential metacommentaries
through history include those of Maimonides (including his
Mishneh Torah), Joseph Caro (particularly
his Shukan Arukh, which has never
appeared unabridged in English), [GOLDENBERG, R, 1984, p. 174] and others.
Many of such works, too, are so large that they are further distilled into
more reasonably digestible abridgements. Rashi's 39 volumes of explanation,
for example, are much larger than the talmudic texts it addresses. (Rashi's
comments are usually printed as part of the text in Talmudic editions printed
since the early Middle Ages). [GOLDENBERG, R., p. 139] It was not until 1920
that the Talmud was translated into another language (German) for the first
time. In 1935 it first appeared in English.
Edwin Boraz notes that "the study
of the Talmud may be so formidable, challenging, and complex ... [that] one
may ask, for what purpose? ... [BORAZ, p. 1] ... [Aside from the 'mishnaic'
Hebrew and Aramaic of the original texts] the classic commentaries to the
Talmud are written in 'medieval rabbinic Hebrew,' which is a blend of both
Hebrew and Arabic. The language barrier alone is arduous." [BORAZ, p.
13] The Talmud also lacks "an inner order
... [it] shift[s] from one subject to another in ways that are not readily
apparent. Often, the pronominal references are unclear ... In short, a talmudic
passage seems scattered and diffused, rather than a well-reasoned dialectic
inquiry." [BORAZ, p. 13-14]
To complicate matters even further, there
are even two versions of the Talmud, of Babylonian and Palestinian origin.
The latter (called the Yerushalmi), however, is rarely used, even in religious
circles. Jacob Neusner notes that "it fills hundreds of pages with barely
intelligible writing. [It is] famous for its incomprehensibility ... The Yerushalmi
has suffered an odious but deserved reputation for the difficulty in making
sense of its discourse." [NEUSNER, 1993, p. x]
A fundamental current of Talmudic discourse,
however, is noted by Herman Wouk: "Talmudic political judgment often
shows the bitterness of a people trodden by wave after wave of oppressors."
[WOUK, p. 201] And what of its legal and moral direction which shifted in
emphases so much over the centuries as was politically expedient?
This from Wouk again, a devout Jew: "Since the Talmud reports
the sayings of hundreds of savants over many centuries, it abounds in contradictory
maxims, in conflicting metaphysical guesses, in baffling switches from cynicism
to poetry, from misanthropy to charity, from dislike of women to praise for
them .... In a word, one can say almost anything about this recording of the
talk of wise men through seven centuries, and then find a passage to support
it." [WOUK, p. 201]
"For any maxim of the haggada," says Leon Poliakov, "one
can be found that states precisely the contrary." The haggada
are "non-legal teachings, speculations, stories, legends, and prayers"
in the Talmud. (The
halakah is its "legal" contents.)
"The ancient rabbinic sage used two kinds of speech," says Rabbi
Samuel Karff, "halacha and
agada [i.e.,
haggada]. Halacha is the
language of Jewish law. It asks and answers the question: 'What must a Jew
do to fulfill the covenant?' Agada was
the language of the Jewish faith. It tells the story of God's relation to
man through his relation to the people of Israel ...
Agada remains not only the language of worship, but the language of
preaching." [KARFF, S., 1979, p. 8, 11-12]
"The Jewish tradition is so rich in
the diversity of its sacred texts," adds Alan Dershowitz, "that
one can find an antidote to virtually any unacceptable statement." [DERSHOWITZ,
p. 132] The "antidotes" to every troubling statement in the Talmud
suggest a chameleon-like capacity, a religious faith that has the ability
to change colors in different milieu, and readily adapt to pressures around
it. This capacity is based upon "pilpul" (pepper), a "dialectical
technique of reconciling apparently contradictory concepts in the Talmud's
texts, often by straining original meanings through the needle's eye ... [It
later] degenerated into little more than sophistry." [SACHAR, p. 65] "Talmudic dialectics," notes the
Jewish Encyclopedia, "became developed and endowed the Jews who
stood beneath the spell of the Talmud with peculiar characteristics, especially
imbuing them with a love of hair-splitting which afterwards deteriorated into
sophistic subtlety." [GOLDSTEIN, D, p. 133, v. 5, p. 726] The Talmud,
notes Robert Goldenberg, has a reputation for "overcomplicated, 'hairsplitting'
dialectic." [GOLDENBERG, R., 1984, p. 139] "One of the thirteen rules for interpreting the Torah,"
says influential modern rabbi Joseph Soloveitchik, "is the contradiction
between two verses and their harmonization by a third verse." [SOLOVEITCHIK,
p. 143] In interpreting the seminal
Torah, notes Mark Zborowski and Elizabeth Hertog, "each word in the Torah
has, according to esoteric tradition, four kinds of meanings: the direct,
the interpretive, the allusive, the secret." [ZBOROWSKI/HERTOG, p. 119]
Canadian Jewish theatre mogul Garth Drabinsky
once noted this tradition's influence upon his own personality:
"Jewish scholars have their own version
of the Socratic method: they disssect,
analyse, interpret, and argue over everything.
Today, partly as a result of this
training, I refuse to take anything at face
value, which makes me hard to please.
No wonder I've been called one of Canada's toughest
bosses. What people
don't realize is that I have a problem pleasing
myself. It wasn't until I went to
Jerusalem for the first time -- and that wasn't
until I was thirty-seven -- that I
really understood my own background. Jerusalem
was a buzz-saw of argument.
You can't survive in Israel unless you're willing
to argue -- about everything.
I felt absolutely at home." [DRABINSKY,
G., 1995, p. 26]
Leon Poliakov uses the following story
to explain the nature of Talmudic reasoning:
"A
goy [non-Jew] insisted that a Talmudist explain to him what the
Talmud was. The sage finally consented
and asked the goy the
following question:
-
'Two men climb down a chimney. When they come to the bottom,
one has his face covered with soot,
the other is spotless. Which of
the two will wash himself?
-
'The one who is dirty,' answered the
goy.
-
'No, for the one who's dirty sees the others' clean face and believes
he is clean too. The one who's
clean sees a dirty face and believes
his is dirty too.'
-
'I understand!' the goy exclaimed.
'I'm beginning to understand
what the Talmud is.'
-
'No, you have understood nothing at all, the rabbi interrupted, for
how could two men have come down
the same chimney, one dirty
and the other clean?' [POLIAKOV,
p. 253]
Although Talmudic reasoning considers a variety
of argument, Israeli lawyer Uri Huppert explains the fundamental underlining
of its "intolerant" discourse:
"It is beyond any doubt that the
halachic-Talmudic reasoning is
reached by considering a variety of opinions,
hence the sophisticated
rabbinical
'responsa' -- questions and answers -- are regarded as the
very essence of
halachic Judaism. But by the same token, this Judaism
cruelly rejects, prohibits, and excommunicates
any step or expression
that collides with the legalistic-dogmatic
concept of Orthodox Judaism,
which is xenophobic and intolerant by definition,
as expressed by the
[modern] Orthodox rabbinical establishment."
[HUPPERT, U., 1988,
p. 197]
The Talmud is full of anecdotes, advice,
folk wisdom, and material that, by modern standards, affects the non-Jew with
feelings of incredulity (but sometimes insult and indignation as we will see
later). It is not hard to imagine why so many Jews flocked from the rabbinically
controlled ghettos in the European Enlightenment era. Many modern, secularized
Jews have looked with dismay upon the wisdom of their ancient sages. We learn
in the Talmud, for example, that:
"One who eats an ant is flogged five
times forty stripes save one."
[HARRIS, p. 71]
"Demons ... have wings like angels
... [and] they know the future."
[HARRIS, p. 76]
"A dog in a strange place does not
bark for seven years." [HARRIS, p.
84]
"For night-blindedness, let a man take a hair-rope and bind
one end of it
to his own leg and the other to a dog's,
then let the children clatter a
potsherd after him, and call out, "Old
man! dog! fool! cock! ... "
[HARRIS, p. 191]
"The bald-headed, and dwarfed, and
the blear-eyed are ineligible for the
priesthood." [HARRIS, p. 88]
"Only kings ... eat roast meat with
mustard." [HARRIS, p. 88]
"The Rabbis have taught that a man
should not drink water on
Wednesdays and Saturdays after night fall
... An evil spirit ... on
these evenings prowls around..."
[HARRIS, p. 92]
"These things cause hemorrhoids:
-- eating cane leaves, the foliage and
tendrils of a vine, the palate of cattle,
the backbones of fish, half-cooked
salt fish, wine, lees, etc." [HARRIS,
p. 106]
"These things are detrimental to
study [including] walking between two
camels...; to pass under a bridge beneath
which no water has flowed
forty days; to drink water that runs through
a cemetery..." [HARRIS, p.
116]
"It is not right for a man to sleep
in the daytime any longer than a horse
sleeps. And how long is the sleep of a
horse? Sixty respirations."
[HARRIS, p. 157]
"The daughters of Israel burn incense
for [purposes of] sorcery."
[HARRIS, p. 188]
Jewish apologists like Alan Dershowitz
exclaim immediate indignation at anyone who dares to excerpt such material,
despite the fact that they very much represent -- in page after page -- the
"folk" flavor of the ancient Talmud. Cloaking himself as protective
defender of both Judaism and
Christianity, and going back one generation from the interpretive Talmud
to the Torah itself, he argues that
"A classic technique of both anti-Semitism
and anti-Christianity has
been to cull from Old and New Testament
biblical prescriptions that
when taken out of context seem bizarrely
out of place in contemporary
life." [DERSHOWITZ,
p. 332]
What, one wonders, do Dershowitz-like commentators
have in mind for the correct "context" for understanding
Talmudic
admonitions, from which anti-Semites have always found a treasure trove of
disturbing material? They are just as bizarre when left in their original
context, probably more so since hundreds, if not thousands, of the same sorts
of archaic perspectives reinform each other, and those who are doing the "culling"
are usually the religiously pious. Such "bizarre cullings" as above
are not Talmudic aberrations but are part of a common tone of an interwoven
multi-rabbinical catalogue, from the very particular perspective of "being
Jewish" hundreds of years ago. Such
expressions of "folk wisdom" are not just that, they are explication
of a distinct religion, and
are argued about over and over, debated to this very day in Orthodox circles
not towards discard, but towards (in their essential meanings, however they
are conjured) use.
When confronted with the details of Talmudic guidance
and logic, some liberal-minded Jews can't actually stomach what they find.
Jane Rachel Litman notes that, when faced with the teachings of the ancient
rabbis, some Jews respond with abject denial: i.e., arguing, on modern
terms, that the old rabbinical sages couldn't have possibly meant what they
wrote:
"The background sound in the small library is
muted but intense. Pairs of scholars
lean over their talmudic texts whispering energetically,
trying to puzzle out the
meaning of the particular sugya, passage. The
teacher directs them back toward
the group and asks for questions. One student raises
a hand: 'I don't understand
verse 5:4 of the tractate Niddah. What does
the phrase 'it is like a finger in
eye' mean? The teacher responds, 'This refers
to the hymen of a girl younger
than three years old. The Sages believed that
in the case of toddler rape, the
hymen would fully grow back by the time the
girl reached adulthood and married.
Therfore, though violated, she would still technically
be counted as a virgin
and could marry a priest. It's an analogy: poling
your finger in the eye is
uncomortable, but causes no lasting harm.
There is a collective gasp
of breath among students. Their dismay is palpable.
They do not like this particular talmudic text
or the men behind it. But its
authors, the talmudic rabbis, hardly wrote it
with this particular group of
students in mind -- mostly thirty- and forty-year
old women in suburban
Philadelphia taking a four-week class titled
'Women in Jewish Law' at their
Reform synagogue.
The questioner perists.
'I don't understand. Are you saying this refers to the
rape of a three year-old girl?'
"Or younger,' the teacher responds
dryly.
'I don't see how it says anything
about rape and hymens. You must be
mistaken. I don't believe the rabbis are talking
about rape at all. I think this
statement has nothing to do with the rest of
the passage.'
The teacher (I'll admit now that
it was me, a second-year rabbinic student)
responds, 'Well, that's the common understanding.
What do you think it means?'
The woman is clearly agitated, 'I don't know,
but I do know that it couldn't
be about child rape.' This is week three of the class.
The woman does not
return for week four. Denial." [LITMAN, R., SEPT
2000]
Litman, the rabbinic student, then confesses that
"I find [Elizabeth Kubler] Ross's model helpful when addressing sacred
Jewish texts that are violent or xenophobic, that speak of child abuse, human
slavery, or homophobia with gross insensitivity. Like so many of my colleagues
and students, I often drift confusedly through denial, anger, grief, rationalization
(a form of bargaining); sometimes reaching acceptance, sometimes not."
[LITMAN, R., SEPT 2000]
Another Jewish religion teacher, Deena Copeland
Klepper, notes that "there are many passages in the Bible that make us
squirm." She cites Pslam 137 from the Torah, where Israelites are enjoined
to dash innocent Babylonian babies against the rocks. "I have read Pslam
137 with adults in Jewish history classes many times," Klepper says,
"it is the best way I know to communicate the anguish of the Israelites
in exile from their homeland. And yet reading the text also elicits a horrified
reaction in my students. Against the familiarity of the first part of the
psalm, that final vengeful outburst against innocent children shocks; it violates
my students' modern sensibilities." [KLEPPER, D., APRIL 2001]
Despite such moral problems with
ancient texts, says Edward Boaz, "To be sure, the Talmud was written
in a historical context vastly different from the world we live in. Its solutions
may not be entirely appropriate to ours. But to its credit, the Talmud is
not an abstract religious work. It grows out of the needs of people in all
walks of life. The authors have created for us a valuable paradigm that may
be utilized for meeting the challenges that confront our children." [BORAZ,
p. 3]
For all such Talmudic injunctions, the
enduring capacity for the Talmud (and other Jewish religious metacommentaries)
to be entirely malleable as an authoritative work to fit the occasion at hand
is noted by Jacob Katz; of seven Talmudic commentators expressing an opinion
about a seminal religious dictate concerning apostasy, "three succeeded
in twisting the meaning of the sentence into the opposite of its obvious intention."
[KATZ, Ex, p. 81]
To hold the Jewish community tightly together
against other peoples, rabbinical arguments can even be
consciously used to subvert the original
meanings of the seminal Torah itself. Rabbi Jonathan Sacks notes that
"One of the most famous passages in
the entire rabbinical literature
[is] the argument between Rabbi Eliezer
ben Hyrcanus and [other
rabbinical] sages [of his era] on the ritual
cleanliness of a broken
and reconstituted oven. Rabbi Eliezer declared
it clean; the sages
ruled against him. He 'brought all the proofs
in the world' for his
view but none was accepted. After invoking
several miracles, he
finally appealed to Heaven itself, 'whereupon
a Heavenly voice was
heard saying: Why do you dispute with Rabbi
Eliezer, seeing that
in all matters the
halakhah agrees with him?' This proof too was
rejected, on the grounds that 'It [the Torah]
is not in heaven.'"
[SACKS, J., p. 164]
Here, even though Rabbi Eliezer was, according
to Jewish law, clearly correct in his opinion about the broken oven, "the
assertion of [communal rabbinical] authority [over God] is necessary 'so that
disputes should not multiply in Israel.'"] [SACKS, J., p. 165]
Lothar Kahn notes prominent secular Jewish author
Arthur Koestler's views about such Talmudic reasoning:
"The survival of a brand of scholasticism
in today's Talmudic schools was
an intellectual shock [to Koestler]. The
acrobatics in logic in which it indulged
appeared to aim at the same intellectual
and moral evasions as the practices
relating to Sabbath and Pesach. Interpretations
of Mosaic Law, specifically
devised to evade the original law, struck
him as a form of mental corruption."
[KAHN, L., 1961, p. 151]
The Talmud has always functioned as a
flexible apparatus to shift and adapt the Jewish faith over the centuries
to current needs and political expediencies. There is enough conflicting argument
in the Talmud to prove or disprove virtually anything, resolve from the shelf
any theological -- or practical -- emergency, depending on which way contemporary
winds blow. In the Talmud, for example, (Sanhedrin 59a) one old sage, Johanan,
opins that "A Gentile who takes up the Torah [Old Testament] is deserving
of death." This, to say the least, can be rather disconcerting to find,
especially for all the millions of non-Jews who have dared to read the Old
Testament, but the admonition to kill is there in seminal Jewish religious
literature. Of course, on the same page another rabbi, Meir, takes an opposite
stance and claims it is meritorious for anyone to absorb the Bible.
(UNIV JEW EN, v. 3, p. 4] Both opinions are there, both are legitimate,
both religiously sanctioning what a devout Jew essentially chooses to believe,
based upon his or her evaluation -- generally within current convention of
a maze of interpretations and emphases -- of conflicting rabbinical arguments.
Despite the extremely malleable capacities
intrinsic to the Talmud, one of its historical standards to our own day --
in the Orthodox context (which is what all Jews were till the Enlightenment)
-- is religiously sanctioned racism, rooted in the Chosen People ethos and
the notion that Jews were superior to all others and destined to remain "apart"
from them. "The Talmudic mind," says Norman Cantor, "is hostile
to ethnic equality and to universalism. It is very anxious to enforce an ideal
of communal purity. All possible contacts with Gentiles are to be avoided."
[CANTOR, p. 206] “It is the Talmudic mentality and customs,” wrote David Goldstein,
a Jewish apostate, in 1940, “that are largely responsible for the enmity of
non-Jews towards Jews. This enmity also exists among Jews themselves, for
revolt is the keynote of modern Jews, revolt against Rabbinism, Orthodox Judaism,
which is Talmudism.” [GOLDSTEIN, p. 130] "Learning the classic Jewish
texts in the yeshivot (religious
schools) of both western and eastern Europe," notes Edwin Boraz, "involved
generations of traditions. The Talmud became part of the genetic code of our
people." [BORAZ, p. 3]
And what is included in this "genetic code?"
"Sadly," says Rabbi Isar Schorsch,
"a low estimate of non-Jews pervades much
of Talmudic liteature. The Mishna
admonishes Jews not to leave their animals unattended
at the inn of a gentile,
because gentiles are suspected of engaging in
beastiality. Gentiles are described
also as liable to rape and murder, so that a
lonely Jew should avoid their
company ... [T]reatment of the 'other' remains
a problem for Judaism. In
a divided world, we are entilted to take whatever
measures will advance
our narrow interests. And it is such a world,
in which holiness and hatred
are intertwined, that [jailed American fraudster]
Rabbi Frankel inhabits."
[SCHORSCH, I., 4-30-99]
Flagrant religious directives, in classical
Judaism, for racist positions (and worse) against all non-Jews, however, are
difficult for the non-Jew to research for many reasons. Relatively few Jews,
for instance, are inclined to address such a subject in detail (for fear of
fueling "anti-Semitism") in English publications. (Non-Jews who
address the Talmud critically are routinely dismissed as anti-Semitic). It
is usually addressed more safely, "privately," in Hebrew. An example
of this may be gleaned from an English summary in Religious and Theological
Abstracts of a 1994 article in Hebrew by Elliot Horowitz. His subject
is Purim -- the annual Jewish festival that celebrates the destruction of
the Jews' arch-enemy, Haman -- usually by hanging him in effigy. Horowitz's
article
“deals with the character of Purim over
the centuries as a day
combining ritual reversal, joys and
hostility -- especially towards
Christians and its symbols, as well
as with 19th and 20th century
historiographical attempts to come
to grips with the troubling
evidence concerning the activities
of the Jews as part of the holiday’s
carnivalesque character. The problematic
character of much
historiography concerning Purim can
be seen in the case of H. Graetz
who wrote that it had been the custom
to burn Haman upon a gallows
which had the form of a cross. It was
difficult for Jewish historians to
speak their minds honestly about what
Purim had been like in the past,
for fear it would reflect upon European
Jewry in the present. [The
article] stresses the tenacity of anti-Christian
Purim practices,
especially among European Jewry, in
medieval and modern times.”
[REL&THEO, 1995, 38, p. 851]
Meanwhile, for popular, public Gentile
consumption in English, Hayyim Schuass's book about Jewish festivals is typical
in its reframing of historical fact into merely the fantasies of Christian
anti-Semitic fanatics, i.e., the reconstruction
of Jewish culpability into Jewish innocense, an attitude systematically manifest
throughout Jewish polemic. Schauss writes that:
"As far back as the fifth century
the charge was made against Jews that
they burned a cross and a figure of Jesus
on Purim. This slander often
led to attacks upon Jews by their Christian
neighbors. In time, under
pressure of the Christians, the custom
[of burning an effigy of Haman]
disappeared in Christian lands."
[SCHAUSS, p. 268]
The Israeli social critic, Israel Shahak,
addresses another example of this systematic deceit and dissimulation about
Jewish history by noting the 1968 English-language volume, The Joys of
Yiddish, by Leon Rosten. Shahak notes that the book
"is a kind of glossary of Yiddish [the
Jewish traditional language of
central and eastern Europe] [with]....
an etymology stating ... the
language from which the word came into
Yiddish and its meaning in
that language ... The entry
shaygets - whose main meaning is 'a Gentile
boy or young man' -- is an exception: there
the etymology cryptically
states, 'Hebrew origin,' without giving
the form or meaning of the original
Hebrew word. However, under the entry
shiksa -- the feminine form of
shaygets
-- the author does give the original Hebrew word,
shegetz (or, in
his transliteration,
shegues) and defines its Hebrew meaning
as 'blemish.'
This is a bold-faced lie as every speaker
of Hebrew knows. The
Megiddo Modern Hebrew-English Dictionary,
published in Israel,
correctly defines
shegetz as follows: 'unclean animal': loathsome
creature, abomination ... wretch, unruly
youngster; Gentile youngster."
[SHAHAK, p. 26]
Edwin Freeland notes that:
"The etymological history of the
word shiksa itself is instructive
... The
Hebrew word
shakaytz means to abominate, to utterly detest. In the
Bible there are constant admonitions not
to eat or take the shikutz
(masculine noun form), literally,
the abominated thing, into
one's
house." [FREEDLAND, E., 1982, p.
508]
For
popular consumption in English, however, the word
shiksa is usually carefully censored.
In A Dictionary of Yiddish Slang and Idioms, for example, "shikseh"
is simply defined as "Non-Jewish girl (also used to imply an impious
or wild Jewish girl)." [KOGOS, p. 70]
But most Jews know better. Yossi Klein Halevi,
who grew up in an American Orthodox community, notes that the word "shiksa"
means "a gentile woman, that nasty Yiddish word implying 'slut.'"
[HALEVI, MEMOIRS, p. 224] When Israeli Ze'ev Chafets married a non-Jewish
woman in 1997, he had to face more firmly the institutionalized Jewish racism
(and moral double standards) against his new wife:
"Jews who would rather cut off their
tongue than say 'nigger ' or 'spic'
and consider 'kike' and 'Hymie' fighting
words talk about 'goyim' and
'shiksas' with blithe indifference. They
assume that we can't be guilty of
prejudice because we are all victims ...
But terms like 'shiksa' ... no
longer sound like charming Yiddishisms
to me; they seem like slurs."
[BROWNFELD, p. 85]
A minority of non-Orthodox Jews who haven't
studied their own traditional literature, or Yiddish and Hebrew, in detail,
may not even be aware of the range of such objectionable (by modern moral
standards) material in seminal Jewish religious texts. Nor do informed Jews invite an examination
of the full context of Jewish-Gentile relations through history. In the last few decades whenever such material
is brought to public attention, however rarely, its exposure is attacked by
Jewish organizations as "anti-Semitic canards," distorted and misrepresented
excerpts from their original contexts. Throughout history it has usually taken
apostate Jews to reveal them to the non-Jewish community.
"Among the first generation or two
of Dominican friars [in the Middle Ages]," says Norman Cantor, "...
were a remarkable number of Jewish converts. The reason that the friars ...
could engage in a lengthy debate with the rabbis in their public disputations
in France and Spain was that these debating friars were almost invariably
former rabbis or rabbinical students, or sons of rabbis." [CANTOR, p.
179] "Most often," notes
Leon Poliakov, "by making the conversion of the Jews and the denunciation
of Jews their chief vocation [Jewish apostates] constituted a true scourge
for the Jewish communities.... [POLIAKOV, p. 167] ... The role of the renegade
Jew ... has always been of prime importance during the persecutions of the
Jews." [POLIAKOV, p. 69]
In the year 1236, for example, Nicholas
Donin, a Jewish convert to Christianity, "approached Pope Gregory IX
with a list of charges against rabbinic Judaism." [COHEN, J., 1982, p.
60] According to Donin, notes Jeremy Cohen, "the rabbis [of the Talmud]
allegedly instructed the Jews to kill Christians and ruled that the Jew may
blamelessly cheat and deceive Christians in any way possible ... The Talmud,
claimed Donin, licensed murder, theft, and religious intolerance, and it included
strictures against trusting Gentiles, honoring them, or even returning a lost
piece of property to them. The worst outrage for Donin was the prayers in
the Jews' daily liturgy uttered against Christians and apostates." [COHEN,
J., 1982, p. 68, 71] A compilation was also made, "probably in large
part by converts from Judaism," [COHEN, J., 1982, p. 65] which resulted
in "a collection of objectionable excerpts from the Talmud and Jewish
liturgy according to topic, over one hundred folios listing the passages in
the order of their appearance in the Talmud." [COHEN, J., 1982, p. 65]
The result of a Papal investigation of the Talmud resulted in its public burning.
Another such disputation in Barcelona, Spain,
occurred in 1262 between Rabbi Moses ben Nahman and Friar Pablo Christiani.
Christiani was born Jewish and "he had studied Jewish literature under
the direction of Rabbi Eliezer ben Emmanuel of Tarascon and Jacob ben Elijah
Lattes of Venice." [COHEN, J., 1982, p. 108] Elsewhere, "Juan Perez
de Montalvian, a Marrano [secret Jew]," notes M. H. Goldberg, "was
a priest and notary of the Inquisition. The Society of Jesus founded by Saint
Ignatius had numerous monks of Jewish descent. When Saint Ignatius chose a
successor to lead the order, he appointed Diego Lainez, who had been born
a Jew." [GOLDBERG, M. H., 1976, p. 109-110]
In the 15th century, notes Bernard Lazare,
"Peter Schwartz and Hans Boyd, both
converted Jews, instigated the
inhabitants to sack the [Jewish] Ghetto;
in Spain, Paul de Santa-Maria
[formerly Solomon Levi] instigated Henry
III of Castille to take
measures against the Jews ... [Santa-Maria]
is generally found the
instigator in all the persecutions which
befell the Jews of his time, and
he hunted the synagogue with a ferocious
hatred ... The Talmud
was the great antagonist of the converts,
and one that had to withstand
most of their wrath. They constantly denounced
it before the inquisitors,
the king, the emperor, and the Pope ...
The theologians followed the
example of the converts, most frequently
they had about the Talmud no
other notions beyond those given them by the converts." [LAZARE,
p.
88]
"In the sixteenth century," adds
M. Hirsch Goldberg, "a butcher named Pfefferkorn tried to have the German
emperor destroy all rabbinic writings and Hebrew books except the Bible."
[GOLDBERG, M., 1976, p. 214] Pfefferkorn too was a Jewish convert to Christianity,
as was, in the eighteenth century, Jacob Frank (1726-1791). "Frank and
his closest followers adopted Catholicism," notes Jewish apologist Milton
Aron,
"and, in vengeful activities against
their opponents within Jewry, heaped
various false accusations against the Jews
and their teachings, leading
to the burning of the Talmud." [ARON,
M., 1969, p. 30]
Then there is the case of "Michael
the Neophyte, an eighteenth century Jewish convert to Christianity, who not
only swore that Judaism commanded the ritual killing of Gentile children,
but provided gory details of his own participation in those murders."
[PIPES, D., 1997, p. 32]
In Germany, notes Nachum Gidal, "one
of the most influential opponents of political equality for the Jews was the
baptised Jew Freidrich Julius Stahl (1802-1861) who was the founder of Prussian
conservatism, leader of the Conservative Party, House of Lords, and member
of the Upper House of Prussian Parliament." [GIDAL, p. 17] In Russia, in 1869, "the infamous Book
of the Kahal, ... written by the Jewish apostate Jacob Brafman, made its
appearance and seemed to document the already well-known accusation that the
Jews constituted a 'state within a state' whose main aim was to subjugate
and exploit the non-Jewish population." [ARONSON, p. 42] (Louis Rapoport
even argues that Jewish oppression of Jews was even pre-eminent in the Russian
communist revolution: "The Jewish Bolsheviks were the most fanatical
advocates of suppressing Jewish parties.") [RAPOPORT, L., 1990, p. 29]
Even recently, in Croatia,
"in July 1997, Mladen Schwartz, an individual
of Jewish origin and an ultra-nationalist
agitator, promoted his book 'Protocols, Jews
and Adolf Hitler' in Zagreb's main
square. In the book Schwartz poses such questions
as 'Why should the Croatian
state be in the service of Judeo-lobbyists?'"
[INSTITUTE OF JEWISH POLICY
RESEARCH, 2001]
Over the centuries, inflammatory Talmudic
passages were "exposed" to the Christian public more and more by
non-Jewish authors; in 1700, for example, the German, Johann Eisenmenger,
wrote Judaism Uncovered and August Rohling, a professor of Semitic
languages in Prague, penned Talmud Jew in 1871.
These two works were among the most sensational charges against Jewish
tradition and belief; modern Jewish scholarship (and even more so, Jewish
popular opinion) generally portrays such texts as fabrication or misinterpretation
-- in either case, “anti-Semitic.” "The Talmud," says George Mosse,
"was said to be full of exhortations to cheat, lustfulness, usury, and
hatred of Christians ... The Talmud had come to symbolize the secret of the
'perverted' religion of the Jews." Rohling decided that it was a "program
for domination of the world by the chosen people." [MOSSE, p. 139]
In Eisenmenger's case, his "anti-Jewish
sallies," writes Jacob Katz, "were on the whole not his own inventions.
He collected anti-Jewish ornaments from the Christian tradition, systematized
them, and attempted to prove their truth by reading them into the Talmudic
literature with which he was well acquainted." [KATZ, Jew Dig,
p. 6] Nazis and others have, of course, recognized such materials' value in
enflaming anti-Jewish hostility and appropriated them for presentation for
their own purposes.
Eisenmenger’s anti-Jewish work, the argumentative
basis for many books critical of Jews that were written later, is particularly
noteworthy and bears greater scrutiny. As a dedicated Christian, Eisenmenger's
writings were framed as a polemic that impugned Jewish belief and tradition.
His opus, Judaism Uncovered (Endecktes Judenthum), was a two-volume set of over 2100 pages, quoting
from 200 mostly Jewish sources and was the result of twenty years of research.
The author was a respected scholar and well read in Hebrew, Aramaic, and Arabic.
"In short," says Jacob Katz (a well-known Jewish scholar who Israeli
critic Israel Shahak singles out as being particularly apologetic when it
comes to Jewish religious texts), [SHAHAK, p. 114] "Eisenmenger was acquainted
with all the literature a Jewish scholar of standing would have known ...
[He] surpassed his [non-Jewish] predecessors in his mastery of the sources
and his ability to interpret them tendentiously. Contrary to accusations that
have been made against him, he does not falsify his sources." [KATZ,
From, p. 14]
Katz refers here to the likes of Bernard
Lewis, another Jewish scholar, whose reaction to Eisenmenger's work is much
more typical:
"Eisenmenger was a professor of Oriental
languages ... By careful
selection, occasional invention, and sweeping
misinterpretation, due
sometimes to ignorance and sometimes to
malice, he presents the
Talmud as a corpus of anti-Christian and
indeed anti-human doctrine...
Eisenmenger's book, though disproved again
and again by both
Christian and Jewish scholars, became a
classic of anti-Semitic
literature, and has remained a source book
for anti-Semitic accusations
to
the present day." [LEWIS, B., 1986, p. 105]
Influential Jews of the Royal Court in
Eisenmenger's locale and era (Samson Wertheimer and Samuel Oppenheimer, among
them) managed to have the book banned by the Hapsburg Emperor; Eisenmenger
appealed, and "litigation continued for decades." The author never
lived to see the censorship of his book about Jews lifted. [KATZ, p. 14] "The
powerful supplier of the Austrian armies, Samuel Oppenheimer," notes
Leon Poliakov, "actually succeeded, for a consideration, in having the
work banned. Its 2,000 copies were confiscated as soon as they were printed,
and the author died, apparently of grief." [POLIAKOV, p. 243]
Conceding that Eisenmenger's voluminously
footnoted citations from Jewish law and religious literature do indeed exist
as he says, Jacob Katz argues (as do many Jewish apologists) that just because
these citations are undeniably part of Judaism's religious tradition doesn't
mean the rules and laws were actually practiced (or, at least, practiced any
longer). Katz asserts that such odious directives from Jewish sages must be
understood in terms of the climate of their creation. "Eisenmenger,"
says Katz, "consciously ignored whatever later [Jewish] generations read
into earlier sources ... [he was] seeking only the original meaning intended
by the writers." [KATZ, p. 17]
Katz proclaims what he calls the "historical
approach" (i.e., trying to understand "the original meanings intended
by the writers") to be fallacious. The correct way to view Jewish seminal
thinking, he argues, is by the "exegetical-homiletical method" (i.e.,
what Jews were supposed to believe and what they practiced were eventually
two different things -- they adjusted to changes around them). This, for Katz,
negates the "original meanings."
One of Eisenmenger's principal attacks was
upon codified Jewish opinion for treatment of non-Jews and their religions.
Eisenmenger cited textual evidence that Jewish religious tradition forbids
robbery, deceit, and even murder only
within their own community, non-Jews were categorically exempt from moral
protection. If Jews were raised with such beliefs, argued Eisenmenger, it
is not hard to believe that they would be inclined to defame Christianity
at every chance, as well as rob, swindle, and even murder those not of their
own community.
"The nature of the Jewish tradition,"
writes Katz of such Eisenmenger charges, "its earliest strata reflecting
the conditions of the ancient world, enabled Eisenmenger to prove such theses.
The legal and ethical systems of the ancient world were dualistic ... In the
period of the Mishnah and Talmud, the question of whether the property of
non-Jews was protected by law was still under dispute. Certain individuals
who were considered subversive -- idol worshippers and the like -- remained
outside the absolute protection of the [Jewish] law even in matters of life
and death." [KATZ, From, p. 18]
Katz goes on to argue that those rabbinical
opinions that asserted, for instance, "that one should actively work
towards ["sectarians' and "infidels'"] deaths became merely
"theoretical material." [KATZ, p. 18] Or as another apologetic Jewish scholar, Louis Jacobs, puts the Eisenmenger
issue:
"There is
no doubt that the Talmudic Rabbis, living among pagans,
had a poor opinion of the
Gentile world around them even while
admiring some of its features.
At times some of the Rabbis gave
vent to the harshest feelings,
as in the notorious statement 'Kill
the best of the goyyim.'
Johann Andreas Eisenmenger (1654-1704)
in his Endecktes Judenthum
(Judaism Unmasked) collected such
adverse passages in order
to prove to his satisfaction that the Jews
hate all Gentiles. It became
an important aspect of Jewish
apologetic to demonstrate
that Eisenmenger had either
misunderstood many of the
passages he quotes or had taken
them out of context."
[JACOBS, L., 1995, p. 184-185]
Ultimately, Eisenmenger aligned evidence
from Jewish religious law to exhibit an alleged foundation which suggests
that, when the Messiah comes, non-Jews would be destroyed. But not only that.
Based on the citational evidence he could piece together, Eisenmenger thought
"it stood to reason that [Jews] would carry out the commandment of destruction
even in the present on those whom it was within their reach to injure and
harm." [KATZ, p. 19] In fact,
this theme of vengeful Jewish destruction of non-Jews was addressed in a volume
by professor Abraham Grossman in Hebrew, in 1994, specifically investigating
Ashkenazi (European Jewish) religious society. A summary of his conclusions
in Religious and Theological Abstracts states that
“[The] Ashkenazi believed in the conversion
of the Gentiles as part of
the redemptive era, following the stage
of vengeance ... The idea that
a link exists between vengeance to be carried out against the
enemies
of Israel and the redemption, and that
vengeance is a forerunner to
redemption, can be found in the Bible,
the Talmud, and in
apocalyptic literature, and should not
be viewed as uniquely
Ashkenazi.” [REL&THEO, 38:1, 859]
As renowned sociologist Max Weber once noted:
"In the mind of the pious Jew the
moralism of the law was inevitably
combined with the aforementioned hope for
revenge, which suffused
practically all the exile and post-exilic
sacred scriptures. Moreover,
through two and a half millennium this
hope appeared in virtually every
divine service of the Jewish people, characterized
by a firm grip upon
two indestructible claims -- religiously
sanctified segregation from the
other peoples of the world, and divine
promises relating to this world
... When one compares Judaism with other
salvation religions, one
finds that in Judaism the doctrine of religious
resentment has an
idiosyncratic quality and plays a unique
role not found among
the disprivileged classes of any other
religion." [NEWMAN, A.,
1998, p. 163])
Yet, concludes professor Katz, "To
anyone who is knowledgeable of Jewish literature, Eisenmenger's interpretations
[of central Jewish religious texts] read like a parody of both the legal and
homiletic literature ... It is otherwise, of course, for the reader who is
unfamiliar with the literature: he may fall for Eisenmenger's conclusions,
not knowing that they are no more than the very assumptions that preceded
the writer's examination of the material [i.e., anti-Jewish Christian prejudice]."
[KATZ, J, From, p. 20]
Unfortunately, this "parody" reading
of seminal Jewish religious literature, and its “theoretical theses,” as we
will soon see, has many Jewish adherents even today, as it always has, and
-- with renewed interest in it in the Jewish world today -- is causing moral
consternation for the more universalistic, enlightened members of the Jewish
politic.
"Eisenmenger neither forged his sources
nor pulled his accusations out of thin air," says Katz, "There was
a nucleus of truth in all of his claims: the Jews lived in a world of legendary
or mythical concepts, of ethical duality -- following different standards
of morality in their internal and external relationships -- and they dreamed
with imaginative speculation of their future in the time of the Messiah."
[KATZ, p. 21] That admitted, Katz turns to debunk Eisenmenger's volumes of
evidence by claiming that the German scholar found only what he wished to
find. In other words, the most relevant facts of Eisenmenger's argument, to
Katz, are not to be found in the evidence of Jewish religious law and literature,
but, rather, in Eisenmenger's underlying paradigm of anti-Semitism.
Is Katz's view true? Is all this anti-Gentile
animosity irrefutably found in Jewish religious literature “obsolete,” and
did Eisenmenger just piece various facts together to form a false whole?
Or, rather, is it just that pious believers in talmudic Judaism have
really never had the political empowerment -- until the creation of modern
Israel -- to surface the most disturbing elements of the faith?
Let's turn to Moshe Greenberg for the beginning
of an answer to all this, a scholar described by the periodical Conservative
Judaism as "one of the leading scholars of Hebrew scripture in the
world," formerly the Chair of the Department of Bible Studies at Hebrew
University in Israel. As a young man, Greenberg's first introduction to the
racist foundation of Jewish religious literature was in Sefer Hatanya,
the central works of Habad hasidim [one of today's ultra-Orthodox groups,
also spelled "Chabad"]. Greenberg noted in 1996 that
"What emerged for me, from the study
of the first chapters of the book
and their antecedents was the discovery
that the main stream of Jewish
thought is permeated by the genetic spiritual
superiority of Jews over
Gentiles, disconcertingly reminiscent
of racist notions of our time.
Living in Israel for the past twenty
years in a Jewish majority that is no
more sensitive to the feelings of minorities
within it than Gentile
majorities are.... [with] Jews in their
midst, I have come to realize the
vitality of Jewish racist notions, and
I am more than ever convinced that
the hold Judaism will have on this and
future generations will be gravely
impaired unless these notions are neutralized
by an internal reordering of
traditional values." [GREENBERG,
p. 33]
Such traditional values may be found in
the memoirs of Yossi Klein Halevi (an American Jew who eventually moved to
Israel) and what he was taught as a youth at Brooklyn's Talmudic Academy:
"Jews and
goyim [non-Jews] were locked in eternal struggle. For now the
goyim
prevailed. But when the Messiah came,
we would triumph. Twenty
goyim
would cling to each thread of our prayer shawls, pleading to serve
us as protection against divine judgment."
[HALEVI, p. 68]
One Talmudic Academy teacher taught that
"Jews were the center of the world ... Anything extraneous to Jews was
of no real interest to us, or, by implication, God himself." [HALEVI,
p. 68]
Today's Orthodox Lubavitcher movement (famous
for its yearly Chabad telethon to raise money for its projects) also reflects
the principles of Jewish racial uniqueness, for example, in its Sefer Hama'Amarim,
by Rabbi Yosef Yitzchok Schneersohn:
"The Jewish people were granted the
unique ability to draw down all
Divine effluences through their performance
of Torah and mitzvos
[the fulfillment of religious commandments]
... [Jews] become vessels for
G-dliness ... The reason why only Jews possess
this unique quality
is because of their power of
mesirus nefsh, total self-sacrifice...
[SCHNNERSOHN, Y., 1986, p. 2] ... The Talmud
comments that
Jews possess three innate character traits:
they are bashful, merciful
and benevolent. These traits are not only
meritorious in and of
themselves, but also reveal the greatness
of the Jewish people. Every
Jew inherently possesses these beautiful
traits. [SCHNEERSOHN, Y.,
1986, p. 11] ... G-d's conduct with the
Jewish people transcends the
bounds of nature. When a Jew submits all
his natural matters to G-d's
service, the Almighty then helps him in
a supranatural manner."
Some in today’s Jewish community recognize
a growing problem with what Jacob Katz disregarded as the “original meanings”
of Jewish religious tenets, particularly when reinvigorated by Jewish Orthodoxy
and fused to modern Zionism, wherein “theoretical” status is revived as practical
actions in the real world. In a 1994 issue of Tradition magazine, published
by the Rabbinical Council of America, four questions were posed to a panel
of scholars, including this one:
“Has Religious Zionism been guilty of cultivating
a negative stance
towards Gentiles? How can Israel’s chosenness
(behirat Yisrael) be
so formulated as to avoid its being misinterpreted
as either another
form of secular nationalism, or an endorsement
of negative attitudes
towards Gentiles? [FELDMAN, p. 5]
The simple fact that such questions need
to be asked, in-house, in a Jewish rabbinical magazine, is revealing. Of the
various responses, Gerald Blidstein, Professor of Jewish Law at Ben Gurion
University in Israel, had the most disturbing one:
“Unfortunately -- from my point of view
and, it would seem, from
the perspective from which this symposium
is mounted -- the number
of followers of Meir Kahane [the profoundly
racist and, some say, even
fascist, American-Israeli leader] within
the Orthodox movement is not
tiny, nor has his militant doctrine found
a positive response among
small sections of our community. On the
contrary: central aspects
of his worldview, or at least his basic
attitudes, are shared by large
segments of observant Jewry in both Israel
and America ... Kahane
is merely an unmasked version of what
Zionism always was -- racist,
brutal, rapacious ... The modern Orthodox
community ... exploits...
democratic, humanistic modes of behavior
... for its own benefit.
Exploiting values cynically, benefiting
from them but not committing
oneself to them or internalizing them,
ought to be unacceptable.”
[BLIDSTEIN, p. 11, 14]
("A confidential [1970] survey by the American
Jewish Congress, the most liberal of the leading Jewish organizations, revealed
that more than a third of its members said they approved the tactics of the
JDL" [the Jewish Defense League -- the party Meir Kahane founded.]) [NOVICK,
P., 1999, p. 174]
The 1995 assassination of Israeli prime
minister Yitzak Rabin by a zealous Orthodox student, Yigal Amir (whose yeshiva
had military training as part of its curriculum), was an event of tragically
profound importance to Jews; it brought into ominous focus a very real and
very lethal expression of traditional talmudism, underscoring a widening gap
between areligious Jews and growing numbers who have revived religious fundamentalism
based upon ancient talmudic intolerance, and who now celebrate -- thanks to
the creation of the modern state of Israel -- the
power to express the angry dreams of their ancestors. Amir
publicly professed his act of murder to be a
religious deed (Rabin's willingness to surrender occupied land
in peace talks with Arabs was understood to be traitorous to Jewish messianism).
Even in America, four months before Rabin was assassinated, a Brooklyn rabbi,
Abraham Hecht, publicly called for the death of any Israeli public official
who ceded land to Arabs in peace agreements with them. [JEWISH WEEK, 3-27-98, p. 20]
A year before Rabin's murder, the prime
minister spoke to a Jewish audience about (American-born) Israeli doctor Baruch
Goldstein, the man who had recently burst into a Hebron mosque with an automatic
weapon and slaughtered nearly 30 Muslims at prayer until he himself was beaten
to death:
"The level of support for a murderous
lunatic and the identification
with [Goldstein] among some sectors of the
public have been greater
than I'd estimated at first. I see in this
the danger of an Israeli racism,
or to be more procise, a Jewish racism."
[DERFNER, L, 4-1-94,. 2]
As the Jewish Bulletin noted in 1994,
"since the Hebron murders, Israeli teachers have devoted lessons to explaining
why Goldstein's deed was an abomination. But at one highly rated Jerusalem
school, the Hebrew Gymnasium, about half the students of an 11th grade class
gathered off campus after one of the anti-Goldstein lessons, and chanted 'Death
to the Arabs,' and 'Goldstein tzaddik,' or righteous man ... Probably the most disturbing finding
came from one of the largest high school in Beersheva. A teacher there polled
the class and found that 60 percent of the students supported the massacre."
[DERFNER, L., 4-1-94, p. 2]
Based upon literal interpretations of some
parts of the Talmud, even Jewish religious opponents understood how religious
texts could be interpreted to sanction
Rabin's murder. As a troubled Israeli rabbi, David Hartmann, observed:
"The rabbis under radically different
conditions prevailing during the
third century AD ... encouraged ... hate
and destruction. [Rabin's
assassin] was no aberration. He was wholly within the normative
tradition that has survived frozen through
the ages to our own time ...
There are sufficient other resources in
the tradition -- humane and
pacifist ones -- to counteract the dogmatism.
The tragedy is that a
group of fanatical and political rabbis
has become dominant over all
other voices in Israel." [ELON, p.
42]
Gershom Scholem, a professor at Hebrew
University and an author on Jewish mysticism, was outraged when a dozen kabbalists
(Jewish mystics) camped outside Prime Minister Rabin's house a few weeks before
his murder publicly calling upon "angels of destruction," and prayed
for Rabin to die. This occurred, notes Scholem, "in the heart of Jerusalem,
in fairly normal times. No one in the religious world cried out to protest.
Nobody said it's all nonsense. In other words, they believe (these invocations
to black magic) actually work." [ELON, p. 46]
In 1988 another Israeli rabbi, David Ben-Haim,
this one a member of the "radical right" messianic religious movement
in Israel, dipped into Talmudic texts and other seminal Judaic literature
to evidence profoundly disturbing material. "In a thirty page study that
examined all Halakhic authorities
on the subject," says professor Ehud Sprinzak of the Hebrew University
of Jerusalem, "Ben-Haim proves that according to the vast majority, the
Torah, when speaking about Adam (a human being), never includes Gentiles in
this category. He points out that ten recognized
Halakhic authorities repeatedly proposed
that Gentiles are more beast than human and that they should be treated accordingly;
only two authorities recognize non-Jews as full human beings created in the
image of God." [SPRINZAK, p. 273]
"What comes of all this," wrote
Rabbi Ben-Haim, "is that according to the prophets, and also according
to our sages, the Gentiles are seen as beasts ... It is possible that one
may see these injunctions as racism; another may call it hatred of Gentiles,
whoever he is; but as far as the Jew who adheres to the statement of the Torah
of Israel is concerned, this is reality and a way of life which were set for
the people of Israel by G-d." [SPRINZAK, p. 274]
"Hardly anyone speaks of Jewish fundamentalism,"
worries Israel Shahak, "which is growing in Israel and the United States
even more." [SHAHAK, Ideology, p. 80]
Evelyn Kaye, a woman raised in an Orthodox
Jewish community in New York, wrote in 1987 an indicting volume about her
life within it and the religiously enforced racism of the ancient sages that
still holds firm in Jewish communities to our present day. The foundation
of "being Jewish" against the rest of humanity is manifest in the
fundamentally hostile attitudes towards non-Jews. Kaye writes that
"The mark of a truly devout
Hasidic or Orthodox Jew, as well as
many other Jews, is an unquestioned
hatred of non-Jews. This is the
foundation of ultra-Orthodox and
Hasidic philosophy. It is as
tenacious, unreasoned, and impossible
as anti-Semitism, racism, and
sexism. And as intractable...
There is a complete litany of
all the terrible things about non-Jews
which apply to every single one and
which are believed implicitly by
the Orthodox.
These include:
-- all Goyim drink alcohol
and are always drunk;
-- all Goyim are on drugs;
-- all goyim hate Jews even
when they seem friendly;
-- all Goyim are anti-semites,
no matter what they say and do;
-- all goyim have a terrible
family life and mistreat their wives
and children'
-- all Goyim eat pork all the
time;
-- Goyim are never as clever,
as kind, as wise or as honest as
Jews;
-- you can never ever trust
Goyim.
There's much more. But the essence
of anti-Goyimism is passed to
Jewish children with their mother's
milk, and then nurtured, fed and
watered carefully into a full-blown
phobia throughout their lives.
In order to avoid being contaminated
by these terrible creatures,
the Ultra-Orthodox go out of their
way to avoid them ... Children ...
manage to grow up without seeing
one of these dangerous people
close up. Their attitudes are then
perfectly formed. They know
whom to hate." [KAYE, p. 113]
In the 1980s, Samuel Heilman watched an
ultra-Orthodox teacher lecture his young students, and noted that
"Already at this age, these children
knew that goyim represented the
absolute other of Yidn [Jews] -- the counterworld.
The relation
between the two was clear: 'No ideas or
institutions that held in the
one were valid in the other.'" [HEILMAN,
S., 1992, p. 192]
Yossi Klein Halevi (whose grandfather was
a millionaire in Europe) also grew up in a New York Hasidic neighborhood,
in Borough Park. In 1995 he wrote that:
"Aside from watching them on TV,
goyim were alien to me as they were
to the Hasidic children. Naturally, I had
no non-Jewish friends. An Italian
family lived on our block. If I saw one
of the Italians at a distance, I'd
cross the street to avoid the awkwardness
of saying hello ... I did master
[my father's] crucial lesson: to see myself
as a stranger in a hostile world,
a member of a people only formally to humanity
-- in effect, a separate
species." [HALEVI, p. 15]
"Sadly," noted Orthodox rabbi
Mayer Schiller in 1996, "it is ... the granting of humanity to the Gentile
either as an individual or as a people ... that is so often lacking in Orthodox
circles. Suffering from a kind of moral blindness, we find it difficult to
see the non-Jew as anything more than a bit player in our own drama."
[MACDONALD, p. 5]
The origin for such beliefs are largely
to be found in traditional Jewish religious literature, then secularly reinforced
by a litany of Jewish complaints about alleged Gentile persecution throughout
history. The ambivalent nature of some of today's translated Jewish religious
texts themselves (per their traditional
intent) often reflects the fact that various offending words and passages
attracted censorship throughout past centuries by offended Christian authorities
(who were initially appraised of the remarks by Jewish apostates) and Jewish
publishers (who feared dangerous consequences from Christian hostility). As
Adin Steinsaltz notes, "When the Christian church adopted a more severe
attitude toward enemies within its own ranks, it also began to examine Jewish
literature and, to a large extent, the Talmud. Much of the responsibility
for this attitude rests with various Jewish converts to Christianity ... Several
European rulers and Church dignitaries were convinced that the Talmud contained
anti-Christian material and, on the basis of informers' charges, they ordered
that all anti-Christian statements and libel against Christ be erased from
the books." [STEINSALTZ, 1976, p. 81-82]
Jewish publishers eventually became self-censors;
offending passages were excised or spaces were left blank on pages for Jewish
readers to fill in by oral tradition and memory. The word "Gentile,"
or the pejorative "goy," (both meaning any non-Jew), for example,
was often replaced with the word "other," "Egyptian,"
"Kushite," "stranger," or other dissimulatives for non-Jewish
consumption. In one case, for example, a Jewish scribe's definition of "goyim"
as "followers of Jesus Christ" became "those who do not believe
in the law of Moses." [POPPER, p. 28]
As Rabbi Adin Steinsaltz notes, "most present day editions [of
the Talmud] still contain a considerable number of changes and omissions introduced
by censorship. Indeed, almost every passage dealing with non-Jews must be
suspected of having undergone some change." [STEINSALTZ, p. 50] "Much
Talmudic discussion of early Christianity," notes Robert Goldenberg,
"was censored out in the course of the Middle Ages and must now be recovered
from scattered manuscripts." [GOLDENBERG, R., 1984, p. 170] Jewish religious
leaders, scholars and general readers usually knew and understood the subterfuge
through history, however, many knowing well the original meanings.
The Encyclopedia Judaica notes that
"In rabbinical literature the distinction
between gentile (goy,
akkum)
and Christian (Nazeri) has frequently been obscured by textual
alterations necessitated by the vigilance
of censors. Thus 'Egyptian,'
'Amalekite,' 'Zadokite (Sadducee),'
and 'Kuti' (Samaritan) often
stands in place of the original
Nazeri, as well as
goy, akkum, etc.
Probably when Resh Lakish stated that
a gentile (akkum, etc. in
existing texts) who observed the Sabbath
[Saturday rites] is punishable
by death (Sanhedrin, 58b), he had in mind Christians ... Numerous
anti-
Christian polemic passages only make
real sense after Nazeri has been
restored in place of the spurious Kuti
or Zedokite." [ENCY JUD, v. 7,
p. 411]
"Whole paragraphs have been deleted,"
says Morris Goldstein, "words have been expunged or substituted, spellings
have been changed, thoughts mutilated, and manuscripts seized and burned."
[GOLDSTEIN, p. 3]
M. Herbert Danzger writes that "Jewish
modernists" (seeking to reframe and redirect morally objectionable passages
against non-Jews in Jewish religious literature), argue "that these laws
referred not to Gentiles generally but to 'star worshippers,' a precise legal
category meaning those who deny the existence of deity, who practice no law
and no justice, whose ways are cruel and murderous." [DANZGER, p. 295]
Even if the 'star worshippers' interpretation had credence, who exactly in
history ever believed in 'no deity, no law, no justice,' and wallowed in cruelty
and murder? Certainly any society anywhere conceives of itself as framed within
concepts of some kind of deity, law, and justice, and attributes their lack
to its enemies, as does the rabbinical literature. According to the Encyclopedia
Judaica, after the fall of the second Temple in 70 CE, the
"world was regarded as divided, by
rabbinical opinion ... into the Jewish
people and the 'nations of the world,'
and insofar as individuals were
concerned, into the 'Jew' and the 'idolater,'
with the Hebrew equivalent
of 'idolater' usually abbreviated to 'akkum,'
literally a 'worshipper of
the stars and planets." [EN JUD,
p. 410]
Michael Asheri, a Jewish American immigrant
to Israel, notes modern Jewish apologetics and dissimulation about the subject
of idolaters:
"Once we get out of the area of friendship
and business [with non-Jews],
... it is obvious that to the Jewish way
of thinking, many of today's
Gentiles are still worshippers of idols.
The use of devotionals
in Christian churches is ingeniously explained
away by orthodox Jewish
thinkers, but Jews are still stringently
prohibited from entering churches
in which such images are displayed. (Shulchan Aruch,
Yoreh Deah
142:14) Certainly the practices of present
day Hindus and Buddhists
must be considered idol worship or the term
has no meaning at all.
In addition, the prohibition of
yayin nesech, wine made by Gentiles,
is based entirely on avoidance of
avoda zara [worship of strange Gods].
If some of the Gentiles are not idol worshippers,
why does this
prohibition continue to be obligatory for
all observant Jews?" [ASHERI,
M., 1983, p. 332-333]
Asheri next addresses the reason for Jewish
secrecy about this delicate subject: the fear of anti-Jewish hostility as
a response to the Jewish anti-Gentile tradition. There is, says Asheri,
"an important reason for not making
apparent our attitude in this
respect and that is
darchet shalom, keeping the peace, between
the Jews and the peoples of the world,
among whom they live."
[ASHERI, M., 1983, p. 333]
There are other things about Jewish identity
that are best not discussed too publicly. One of the principles of traditional
Jewish law, notes the Israeli social critic Israel Shahak, is that a Gentile's
life must not be saved. He cites a line in the Talmud (Tractate Avodah Zarah,
26b): "Gentiles are neither to be lifted (out of a well) nor hauled down
(into it)," i.e., if a non-Jew falls into a well a Jew is religiously
forbidden from saving his/or her life. The highly respected Jewish theologian
Maimonides takes this example to comment that "it is forbidden to save
[non-Jews] if they are at the point of death; if, for example, one of them
is seen falling into the sea, he should not be rescued." [SHAHAK, p.
80] (In this context of Jewish religious tradition, Shahak sardonically notes
the extremely uncompromising position many outraged Jews can find themselves
in when they so vociferously complain that so many countries "stood by
and did nothing" to help Jews during the Jewish Holocaust.)
As far as Maimonides is concerned, we will
refer to him heavily here. His opinions are highly relevant in our own day.
Maimonides is neither obscure to modern Orthodox Judaism, nor obsolete. He
is an integral part of modern Orthodox discourse; according to the New
Encyclopedia Brittanica (1993), Maimonides is recognized "as a pillar
of Orthodox faith -- his creed became part of the Orthodox liturgy [and he
is known] as the greatest of Jewish philosophers." [NEW ENCY BRIT, 7,
p. 708]
Israeli professor Michael Harsegor explains
another angle to Jewish self-absorption, in the tale of the "Good Samaritan"
from the Christian New Testament tradition (Luke 10:33-34.) Two Jews, a Cohen
and a Levite, pass a non-Jewish man who had been physically attacked and left
behind for dead by robbers. Per traditional Jewish religious conviction, the
passing Jews do not stop to aid the injured man. Eventually a Samaritan passes
and stops to help the fellow in distress. As Harsegor notes, in explaining
this parable of pan-human Christian teachings,
"It is wrong to cling to the Torah,
like the Cohen and Levite, and do
nothing more. You have to be humane, like
the Samaritan, who
is not a religious Jew." [COUSSIN,
1999]
Conversely, rabbi Yitzhak Ginsburgh, an
immigrant from the United States to Israel, has commented that
"If you saw two people drowning, a
Jew and a non-Jew, the Torah
says you save the Jewish life first. If
every simple cell in a Jewish
body entails divinity, is a part of God,
then every strand of DNA
is part of God. Therefore, something is
special about Jewish
DNA ... If a Jew needs a liver, can you
take the liver of an innocent
non-Jew passing by to save him? The Torah
would probably
permit that. Jewish life has infinite value."
[BROWNFELD, A.,
MARCH 2000, p. 105-106]
It is critically important today, of course,
for Jewish apologists to find more humane perspectives on the subject of non-Jews
in traditional literature. "Moses
Rivkes, a seventeenth century [Jewish] Lithuanian authority, "notes Jacob
Katz, "drew the conclusion that, regarding the obligation to save life,
no discrimination should be made between Jews and Christians; the same degree
was attached to saving either." Rivkes, of course, represents only one
man's view and reflects the views he sought to counter. His opinion, note
Charles Liebman and Steven Cohen, "only demonstrates the depth of historic
Jewish hostility toward the non-Jew and the legitimization that this hostility
received within the religious tradition." [LIEBMAN/COHEN, p. 38]
Other disturbing views from Jewish religious
literature and tradition include:
"When we withhold mercy from others
[it] is equal to that for doing
(merciful deeds) to members of our own
people." [SHAHAK, p. 96]
"If the ox of a Jew gores the ox of
Gentile, the Jew is not required to pay
damages, but if the ox of a Gentile ...
gores the ox of a Jew, the Gentile
is required to pay full damages."
[MISHNAH, BABA KAMA 4:3]
If after taking a purification bath, a Jewish
woman sees a dog, pig, donkey, horse, leper, or a non-Jew ("heathen")
before she "meets a friend," she has to take the bath over again.
[GANZFRIED, p. 42] "One should
not be alone with a heathen belonging to one of the seven peoples [the Biblical
tribes of Canaan from which non-Jews are traditionally understood to have
descended], because they are apt to commit homicide." [GANZFIELD, p.
52] Likewise, "cattle should
not be kept in the barns of heathen-owned inns, out of suspicion that they
may practice sodomy with them." [LIPMAN, E., 1974, p. 235]
"The Talmud is in disagreement over
whether Jews may rob Gentiles," says Jewish scholar Gordon Lafar, "but
even the liberal authority Rabbi Menachem HaMeiri agrees that a Jew who finds
something that was inadvertently lost by a Gentile is not obliged to return
it." [LAFAR, p. 189-190]
In this regard, for example, in 1980 Brooklyn
rabbi Dovid Katz wrote a book about the 613 mitzvot (i.e., commandments;
singular: mitvah) that a good Othodox Jew is expected to fulfill. (Katz
notes them as "divine decrees"). [KATZ, D., 1980, untitled preface
page] Among those is Mitzvah 69: "It is a positive commandment
to return a lost object to a Jew, as the posuk says (Vayikra
22), 'You should return to your brother.'" Of interesting note here are
some of the detailed explanations of this: Katz highlights the Jewish religious
"law" as stated by an old -- and obviously still influential --
Talmudic expert, Rambam [i.e., Maimonides]:
"3. One is allowed to keep
a lost object of a gentile and he who returns it commits
a sin because he is supporting the wicked
people of the world. But if he returns
it to sanctify G-d's name, by their saying
that the Jews are honest people,
it is allowed an praiseworthy to return
it. Where there will be a profaning of
G-d's name one is forbidden to keep the
lost object and must return it ...
4. In a city that has
Jews and gentiles living together and half are Jews and
half are gentiles, if one found a lost
object he should take the lost object
and announce it. If a Jew comes and gives
a sign, that the object is his,
he is obligated to return it to him.
5. If the majority of
the city are gentiles, and one finds it in a place where most
people there are Jews, he must make an announcement.
But if it is in a
place that is mostly gentile, the lost article
belongs to the finder and even
if a Jews gives a sign we do not give it to
him. We say he gave up since
there are mostly gentiles and they would take
it for themselves. Still
the right way is to return it even then to the
Jew who gave the sign."
[KATZ, D., 1980, p. 211-212]
In traditional law, Jewish physicians may
break the Sabbath (i.e., the rest day) and work in order to help seriously
sick Jewish patients. But there are conflicting opinions in religious texts
about helping non-Jews, and the allowance to aid ill Gentiles on the Sabbath
is not as clear. Apologetic rabbi Immanuel Jacobovitz notes that
"the special sanction to disregard
religious laws in the face of
danger to life originally operated only
in regard to Jewish lives,
an attitude still upheld, in theory at
least, by the Shulkan 'Arukh ...
Evidently the problem [of what to do about
helping non-Jews]
was not very acute until the 17th century,
when many responsa
[opinions] began to be devoted to it. In
principle the more rigorous
view of the Talmud and the codes was generally
maintained, but in
practice it was admitted that Jewish doctors
and midwives -- even
the most religious among them -- often
violated the Sabbath in their
attendance of non-Jews, however legally
indefensible their action might
be." [JACOBOVITS, p. 63]
An Israeli commentator, Uri Hupperet, is
more blunt about the traditional reasons why Orthodox Jewish doctors might
help Gentiles on the Sabbath:
"Saving a Gentile's life is also subject
to pragmatic reasoning. A
Gentile who is in immediate danger of losing
his or her life can
be saved even on the Sabbath; not based
on the philosophy of
'loving thy neighbor,' but motivated by
netivey shalom (preserving
peace with neighboring Gentiles), or by
darkey eivah (avoiding
atrocities of Gentiles against Jews). It
is not the human dimension
that motivates the command to save a life
in this respect, but a
dimension beneficial to the ethnocentric
community that will
remove ammunition from antagonists of Orthodox
Judaism."
[HUPPERT, U., 1988, p. 95]
Peter Novick notes the "psychological and
rhetorical" tensions, as he calls them, which traditional Jewish law
provided for Jewish American soldiers in World War II:
"Jewish American GIs were expected -- always
in principle and sometimes in
practice -- to crawl out under enemy fire to
bring in wounded Irish Americans
or Italian Americans, as the later were expected
to do for them. Members of the
older [Jewish] immigrant generation surely tested
much higher for feelings of
of international Jewish peoplehood. At the same
time, and not unconnected with
this, they were closer to a tradition that made
it in principle impermissible to
violate the laws of Sabbath observance to save
the life of a gentile, let alone
risk one's own life." [NOVICK, P., 1999,
p. 34]
In the Middle Ages it became customary to
spit (usually three times) at a Christian cross (one European king had the
word “God” in Hebrew etched on the cross to alleviate the insult). Pious Jews
are also traditionally enjoined to curse when passing a non-Jewish cemetery
or building inhabited by Gentiles. [SHAHAK, p. 93] To this day, in some traditionally religious communities good Jew
ritually curses if he passes a crowd of non-Jews, but utters a blessing when
a group is Jewish. [SHAHAK, p. 93] “According
to the Talmud,” confirms Reuven Kitelman, “a blessing is to be offered upon
seeing a multitude of Jews.” [KITELMAN, p. 147]
In 1996 Yossi Klein Halevi wrote that during
his youth in an Orthodox Jewish neighborhood in Brooklyn, "some Borough
Park children said it was a mitzvah, a religious commandment, to spit when
you passed a church. An alternative opinion held that it was forbidden to
even walk within spitting distance of a church." [HALEVI, p. 17] "An
Orthodox Jew learns from his earliest youth, as part of his sacred studies,”
says Israel Shahak, “that Gentiles are compared to dogs, that it is a sin
to praise them." [SHAHAK, p. 96] Institutionally, says Shahak, "The
Book of Education, written in the 14th century, is currently a popular
book for Israeli schoolchildren, its publication subsidized by the government.
Its texts includes material such as 'The Jewish people are the best of the
human species ... and worthy to have slaves to serve them. We are commanded
to possess them for our service.'" [SHAHAK, p. 95]
In our own time the occasional exhuming
of such anti-Gentile passages from seminal Orthodox Jewish literature for
public discourse has garnered storms of Jewish wrath and protest; apologists
vehemently argue that such texts are obsolete, misunderstood, ambiguous, or
representative of a minority rabbinical opinion among others who took opposing
views.
Those Jews who are familiar with such passages
(particularly -- but not only -- the Orthodox) realize that such texts are
guaranteed fuel for anti-Jewish hostility; hence, apologetic Jewish scholars
inevitably step forward at the first inkling of these texts gaining any kind
of non-Jewish audience, seeking -- at all costs -- damage control. The fact
is that such material was, and is, often very much, part of Jewish Orthodoxy
and is seminal to traditional Jewish thought about "others." Such
material is not what the apologetic Jewish community wants known and circulated
about them beyond Jewish circles. Nor does it fit modern secular Jewry’s universalistic
myths about themselves, that liberal universalism originated in the Jewish
religion. "Jews would be pretty
embarrassed if some of our own triumphalist literature were better known,"
Leah Orlowick, a Conservative rabbi told a Jewish interviewer inquiring about
Christianity, "I can show you texts where Jews declare themselves inherently
on a higher spiritual level than all non-Jews. And if you're willing to wade
through all the apologetics, the hemming and hawing, I can bring you to Jews
who still believe in natural superiority, so let's not be hypocrites."
[HALBERSTAM, p. 221] One of the best ways of dissimulation by Jewish apologists
is to turn the tables of complaint by indignantly arguing that the public
examination of such racist Jewish doctrines is, in fact, unreasonable expressions
of the investigators' anti-Semitism.
Morris Adler's post-Holocaust (1958) comments,
sponsored by the B'nai B'rith Hillel Foundation, are typical:
"A distinguished group of Christian
scholars have studied the
Talmud and refuted the vile allegations
about it. They have treated
it as an important phase of historic Judaism
and interpreted its
true character. The most patent absurdities
are no longer repeated
except perhaps by some ranting bigot whose
very extremism
discredits him in the eyes of reasonable
people." [ADLER, M., 1958,
1963, 1974, p. 12]
One of the ways Jewish dissimulation works
is also like this:
"The Talmud is full of remarks against
idolatry and idolaters; but the
prevailing opinion of the rabbis is that
by idolaters are meant only those
in Palestine." [UNIVERSAL JEWISH ENCYCLOPEDIA,
v. 3, p. 4]
"Idolaters" is traditionally known
by Orthodox Jews to be one of the words that can signify, generically, non-Jews
anywhere. "The term idolatry," says E. E. Urbach, "was coined
by our sages and included everything connected with a god other than the God
of Israel ... in practice the laws dealing with idolatry cover all relations
between Jews and non-Jews." [HALBERSTAM, p. 157]
"The assumption that all Gentiles
are by definition idolaters," says David Novak, "led to a number
of important halakhic norms. And
although the concept of Noahide, that is, the non-idolatrous Gentile changed
this assumption, many of the norms based upon it remained, albeit in modified
form in most cases." [NOVAK, Image, p. 115]
"As far as Christians being idolaters,"
says Ronald Modras, "the state
of Jewish law on the matter was confused. Medieval Jews generally regarded
Christianity as an idolatrous religion. But laws prohibiting interaction with
idolaters were not applied to Christians with any uniformity ... [Jews] often
regarded themselves as a civilized people living among barbarians." [MODRAS,
p. 193]
Jacob Minkin notes that “Maimonides classed
the Christian in the category of idol worshippers.” [MINKIN, p. 318]And “an Israelite who worships an idol,” says Maimonides, “is regarded
as an idolator in all respects ... the penalty for which is death by stoning.”
[MINKIN, p. 318] Maimonides also had this to say about "idolators":
"It is forbidden to show them mercy, as it was said, 'nor show no mercy
unto them (Deut. 7:2) ... You [also] learn that it is forbidden to heal idolators
even for a fee. But if one is afraid of them or apprehends that refusal might
cause ill will, medical treatment may be given for a fee but not gratuitiously."
[HARKABI, p. 157] "Maimonides exempts the Muslims from the category of
idolators," says former Israeli army official Yehoshafat Harkabi, "but
the Christians, by contrast, were explicitly included ... [HARKABI, p. 157]
... The classification of Christians as idolators has apparently become widespread
and accepted in religious literature [today]. This is not merely a theoretical
matter, since practical conclusions flow from it." [HARKABI, p. 159]
With the increasing rise of a "back
to the roots" Jewish nationalist Orthodoxy in Israel (and in considerable
degree in the United States), and irretrievably tainted by the influence of
modern western pan-human moralities, some Jews are stirring with serious moral
qualms about bygone eras' interpretation of seminal Jewish religious literature
returning to credibility. An Israeli rabbi, Tzvi Marx, for example, has lamented
the dangers of traditionalist understanding of some talmudic, and even Torah,
texts. These includes the likening of Arabs to dogs and the notion that Jews
are human beings but "idolaters" are not. [from the Talmud, BT Yebamot
61a, also BT Baba Metzia 114b, MARX, p. 44] Elsewhere, Rabbi Marx bemoans
talmudic rabbi Shimon bar Yohai's "infamous teaching" and "dehumanizing
depiction" of non-Jews, stemming from the Torah line that states: "And
you [only you Jews] my sheep, the sheep of my pasture, are men." [EZEK.
34:21]
"The difference between a Jewish soul
and souls of non-Jews," said influential rabbi Yitzhak Hacohen Kook (spiritual
leader of today's Gush Emunim messianic movement) in the early 20th century,
"-- all of them in all different levels -- is greater and deeper than
the difference between a human soul and the souls of cattle." [BROWNFELD,
A., MARCH 2000, p. 105-106]
How popularly widespread are such brutal
dehumanizations of non-Jews in traditional -- even secular -- Jewish culture?
In a 1961 study of Jewish-Americans (not focusing solely on the Orthodox),
Judith Kramer and Seymour Leventman noted that
"Even in the Yiddish language [the
common language of immigrant Jews
from central and eastern Europe, where
more Jews lived, til Hitler, than
any other place in the world] ... popular
usage distinguished between
Jews and non-Jews by employing different
verbs to describe the
behavior. Reserved for gentiles are
words otherwise used in reference
to animals: e.g., Jews eat (essen), but
goyim eat like pigs (fressen);
Jews die (starben), but goyim die like dogs (pagern); Jews take a drink
(trinken),
but goyim drink like sots (soifen)." [KRAMER, p. 107]
(For the people and their language that
is ever innocent, Jewish author Leo Wiener reflected a common Jewish perception
in 1899: "There is probably no other language in existence on which so
much opprobrium has been heaped as on Yiddish. Such a bias can be explained
only as a manifestation of a general prejudice against everything Jewish."
[ HERZ, J., 1954, p. 82] In 1999, as part of widespread Jewish public relations
efforts to veil the essences of traditional Jewish identity, unsuspecting
non-Jews in Poland were invited to sit in on a brief "course" for
them at the 9th Jewish Culture Festival in Krakow. It was entitled, however
incongruously, Jezyk jidisz dla kazdego ("Yiddish for Everyone").
A Polish monthly tourist magazine noted that the festival "plays a not
insignificant role in breaking down bad stereotypes in Polish-Jewish relations."
[MIESAC w KRAKOWIE, p. 3] )
"Every Jew is familiar
with the works of Hillel," says Chaim Bermant,
"and the precept of 'love they neighbor
as thyself' is at the heart of Judaism, yet
every student brought up on the Babylonian
Talmud -- and it must be remembered
that for many centuries, especially in Poland,
the Jews studied little else -- is
inculcated with a disdain for the gentile which
has entered into Jewish lore and into
the very expressions of the Yiddish language."
[BERMAN, C., 1977, p. 35]
This human/non-human kind of Yiddish linguistic
distinction between Jews and non-Jews has been transposed to Hebrew and Jewish
culture in modern day Israel. "The immediate referent of the Israelis
is a Jew," says Charles Liebman and Steven Cohen, "Indeed the very
term Jew is used colloquially as a synonym for person." [LIEBMAN/COHEN,
p. 166] This kind of degradation of the Gentile world is also reflected in
the Hebrew words for Jewish immigrants who come to live in Israel from around
the world, and, conversely, those who
leave the Jewish state. Those who
come to Israel are olim,
which means to ascend. Those who leave
Israel for non-Jewish lands are yordim,
"from the root meaning to 'descend,' but also to 'decline' and to 'deteriorate.'"
[AVRUCH, K., 1981, p. 56]
In a discussion concerning Jewish perspectives
on slavery (about which there is "no negative attitude" in Biblical
or rabbinical literature) Judah Rosenthal, Professor of Biblical Exegesis
at the College of Jewish Studies in Chicago, also notes Rabbi Yohai's weighty
opinion on the biblical sheep reference and that, indeed, the old rabbi believed
the "concept of man refers only to Israel." A more tolerant opinion,
in Rosenthal's view, was that of another Talmudic contributor, Rabbi Akiba,
who wrote that "Beloved is the man that he was created in the image of
God." However, adds Rosenthal, Rabbi Akiba also believed that a citation
from Leviticus 25:46 ("You should keep them [non-Jews] in slavery forever")
was an "obligation." [ROSENTHAL,
p. 70-71] This echoes Maimonide's belief that keeping a Gentile slave "forever"
was a "normative commandment." [ROSENTHAL, p. 71]
Maimonides also said this:
“A Gentile slave has to be enslaved forever
... one of the main reasons
being that since the Jewish nation is
the elite of the human race ...
they deserve to have slaves serve them.”
[ROSENTHAL, p. 71]
and:
“A man may give his bondswoman [female
slave] to his [male] slave
or to his neighbor's slave ... since they
are regarded as cattle.”
[ROSENTHAL, p. 71]
("The Torah hardly abolishes slavery,"
notes Edward Greenstein, "The Bible assumed slavery as a given and gave
it a role. A slave was an indentured servant who could repay his debts through
labor.") [GREENSTEIN, E., 1984, p. 96]
Along the same lines, Isaac Abravenel
(1437-1508), a prominent Jewish scholar of the Middle Ages, "considered
Israel to be superior to other nations and therefore, he [Israel] is entitled
to be their masters." [ROSENTHAL, p. 73]
There are also Jews who believe such things, quite literally, today.
In a 1980 speech by Israeli rabbi Moshe Halevi Segal, he proclaimed that
"All nations should surrender to
us, to the King of Israel, to the Messiah
of G-d of Jacob, and should be taught
exclusively by us. They must
desert their false beliefs and cultures,
and the social system dangerous
to us, to leave this treacherous democracy
... Democracy ... confuses
the truth and justice." [SPRINZAK,
p. 273]
The Orthodox "Chabad" movement
is a very popular, and activist, movement in America and Israel today, seeking
to pull wayward secular Jews back to the religious fold. For decades this
organization was headed by Rabbi Menachem Schneerson, who died in the 1990s.
"The difference between a Jewish and a non-Jewish person," said
Schneerson,
"stems from the common expression:
'Let us differentiate.' Thus, we do
not have a case of profound change in
which a person is merely on a
superior level. Rather, we have a case
of 'let us differentiate' between
totally different species. This is what
needs to be said about the body:
the body of a Jewish person is of a totally
different quality from the
body of [members] of all nations of the
world ... A non-Jew's entire
reality is only vanity. It is written,
'And the strangers shall guard and
feed your flocks' (Isaiah 61:5). The entire
creation [of a non-Jew] exists
only for the sake of the Jews." [BROWNFELD,
A., MARCH 2000,
p. 105-106]
Some talmudic -- and other -- citations
also dictate that only non-Jewish corpses are "unclean." This, says
Rabbi Tsvi Marx, has an "attitudinal impact [that] is far reaching ...
and ethically devastating when taken literally." The idea, for instance,
that only Jews can have ritually "unclean" corpses can be, and is,
interpreted by many Orthodox Jews to mean that non-Jews are not technically
of the same essential material as Jews, and, thus less -- or not at all --
human. "In the Talmudic tradition Jews are often depicted as reflecting
"the image of God," says Moshe Greenberg, "but not the non-Jews.
R [abbi] Yohanon, for instance, says Jews 'were purged of their pollution;
the Gentiles ... were not. R [abbi] Shmuel Edel is among those who collaborated
this view." [GREENBERG, p. 31-32]
Rabbi Marx adds that in the English Soncino
Talmud translation concerning tractate Yebamot (p. 405, footnote 2), readers
are informed that Rabbi Simeon b. Yohait says that "only an Israelite
... can be said to have been like Adam, created in the image of God. Idol
worshippers [i.e., non-Jews] hav[e] marred
the Divine image and forfeit all claim to this appellation." [MARX, p.
44] Marx brings up the influential Maimonides again too, in another context.
According to Maimonides' interpretation of earlier rabbinical arguments, Marx
worries that in Jewish religious law the “murder of a gentile seems not to
be a punishable offense." [MARX, p. 45]
Again, Maimonides is no rabbinical slouch,
and is not obscure. His opinion on all matters is respected by Orthodox Jews
to this day. "Ignoring the weighty legal opinion of Maimonides,"
says Eugene Korn, "is always a risky strategy." [KORN, p. 271] Of
the Jewish sages, Maimonides was also "the most consistent advocate of .... suzerainty over Gentiles." [NOVAK,
The Image, p. 114] In fact, Maimonides also wrote the following, referring
to the biblical figure Noah, who was not Jewish:
"Moses [commanded] on the authority
of God to compel all human
beings to accept the commandments that
were commanded to Noah,
and he who does not accept [them] is killed."
[KORN, p. 266]
"The context of [this]," says
Eugene Korn, "is [Maimonide's] description of an ideal polity under Jewish
sovereignty." [KORN, p. 266] Such a world view in traditional Jewish
thinking is usually swept under the rug in modern popular discourse. A case
in point is the complete lack of historical
context in which popular Jewish commentary condemns those non-Jews
who readily accepted (and still accept) the infamous Protocols of the Elders
of Zion, the best known anti-Jewish text in modern history. (Originating
in Eastern Europe, the Protocols claimed to be an actual document from
a secret Jewish cabal). "The Protocols of the Elders of Zion,"
notes Richard Levy,
"one of the most important forgeries
of modern times, presents a
Jewish plot to take over the world and to
reduce non-Jews to slavery ...
The Protocols found a huge audience,
especially following the
turbulent times following World War I ...
Why has the Protocols
of Elders of Zion, a shameless fraud,
seized the imagination and
informed the political judgment of [anti-Semitic]
men and women
throughout the twentieth century?"
[SEGEL, p. 3]
Like virtually all Jews who pose such a
question, they do not actively seek an answer from within their own community
-- i.e., they are really not interested in an honest answer. Why would anyone
fall for the idea of a Jewish plot to dominate the world aimed at holding
all others in subjugation? Maimonides, above, in classical religious thinking,
points to the beginning of an answer. Orthodox conviction that God will favor
Jews at the "end of days" to, in some form, rule the world is yet
another marker. The Torah/Old Testament states expected Jewish domination
clearly in a number of places -- for example:
"The Gentile shall come to thy light,
and kings to the brightness
of thy rising ... the forces of the Gentiles
shall come unto thee ...
Therefore thy gates shall be open continually;
they shall not be
shut day nor night; that men may bring unto
thee the forces of the
Gentiles, and that their kings may be brought.
For the nation and kingdom
that will not serve thee shall perish; yea,
those nations shall be utterly
wasted." [ISAIAH 60, 1-12]
"Ask of me, and I shall give thee the
heathen for thine inheritance,
and the uttermost parts of the earth for
thy possession. Thou shalt
break them with a rod of iron; thou shalt
dash them in pieces like a
potter's vessel." [PSALMS 2: 8-9]
"Thus saith the Lord, 'The labor of
Egypt, and merchandise of
Ethiopia and of the Sabeans, men of stature,
shall come over unto
thee, and they shall be thine: they shall
come after thee, in chains they
shall come over, and they shall fall down
unto thee, they shall make
supplication unto thee, saying, 'Surely
God is in thee; and there is none
else, there is no [other] God.'" [ISAIAH
46: 14]
[See John Hartung's article about the roots
of the Israelites' war-based ethnocentrism and how it has been popularly transformed
in much of Christian tradition (and some reforming strands of Judaism) into
a benevolent "light of nations" scenario; HARTUNG, 1995]
As Old Testament scholar John Allegro has
noted:
"The history of the Jews as revealed
in the Torah was thus in a sense
coextensive with the story of mankind, and
in Adam's supremacy of
the beasts of the field [GEN. 1:26] could
be seen figured from the
Creation the eventual dominion of the Jew
of the whole world ...
[ALLEGRO, J., 1971, p. 61] ... Yahweh [the
Israelite God] is not
just a tribal deity, but the God of the
Universe. His Chosen People
are not just another
ethnos: they are the Sons of God, destined to rule
the world." [ALLEGRO, p. 162]
"One of the basic tenets of the Lurianic
Cabbala [a strain of Jewish mysticism]," note Israel Shahak and Norton
Mezvinsky, "is the absolute superiority of the Jewish soul and body over
the non-Jewish soul and body. According to the Lurianic Cabbala, the world
was created solely for the sake of the Jews; the existence of non-Jews was
subsidiary." [BROWNFELD, A., MARCH 2000, p. 105-106] A(n ultra-Orthodox)
Chabad-sponsored Internet website, geared for non-Jews, frames this world
view discretely:
"What is the key to salvation? Those who
return to the Law (the Seven
Commandments for the Children of Noah, according
to the eternal covenant
made with Noah in Genesis 9) and who assist
the Jewish people (Isaiah 60.
61, 66) will be saved and will participate in
the miracles and revelations,
including worshipping in the Third Temple, under
the kingship of the Messiah.
As described in many places, including Jeremiah
16:19-21 and Zechariah 8:20-23,
all the old gentile religions of the world will
disappear, and their followers
will turn to Jews for spiritual leadership."
[NOAH'S COVENANT WEBSITE,
2001]
As prominent anti-Jewish critic Henry Ford
once said about his own publishing of an edition of the
Protocols of the Elders of Zion:
"You will find we at no time guaranteed
their authenticity. We have
merely stated what they contain and have
paralleled this with what
actually took place and are leaving it to
the mind of the public to
judge." [WARREN, D., 1996, p. 150-151]
In 1920, the London Times reviewed the
Protocols, not with condemnation, but with the uneasy sense that much
of what the Protocols proclaimed, forgery or not, was coming to pass on the
world scene:
"What are these 'Protocols?' ... Are they
a forgery? If so, whence comes the
uncanny note of prophecy, prophecy in parts
fulfilled, in parts far gone in
the way of fulfilment? Have we been struggling
these tragic years to blow up
and extirpate the secret organisation of German
world dominion ony to find beneath
it another, more dangerous because more secret?
Have we been straining every
fibre of our national body, escaped of a 'Pax
Germanica' only to fall into a
'Pax Judaica?' The 'Elders of Zion' as represented
in their 'Protocols' are by
no means kinder taskmasters than William II
and his henchmen would have
been." [BERMANT, C., 1977, p. 33]
We may seek further clues to Gentile receptivity
to the fictitious Protocols due
to Jewish identity itself and the inevitable expressions, in day-to-day life
with the goyim through history,
of Jewish supremacy and domination.
"Throughout their history," says
Israeli Jay Gonen, "the Jews ... entertained feelings of superiority
over Gentiles ... It therefore became a prevalent notion among Jews that they
are supposed to use their heads while the Gentiles do the dirty work."
[GONEN, p. 137] "A Jewish servant or labourer is almost unknown in Egypt,"
noted one "Mr. Samuel" in his late 19th century Jewish Life in
the East, "our people here as elsewhere being infected with that
dislike for manual labor and that preference for earning our living with our
heads which is at once the strength of our upper and the destruction of our
lower classes." [SMITH, G., 1881/1959, p. 18]
Israeli-born David Grossman notes the expression
of this elitist Jewish attitude in modern Israel. Much of his 1988 volume,
The Yellow Wind, explores Jewish exploitation of its Arab underclass
for menial labor. The following is an interchange Grossman had with a small
Arab child in a West Bank refugee camp. It is, as Grossman consistently notes,
far from an isolated example of how young Palestinian experiences and world
views about Jews are being shaped by their overseers.
"[Grossman]: Do you know who the Jews
are?
[Boy:] The army.
Are there other Jews?
No.
What does your father do?
Sick.
And your mother?
She works in Jerusalem for the Jews. Cleans
their houses."
[GROSSMAN, D., 1988, p. 24]
In the same book, Grossman expands upon
this theme of socialized Jewish racism and exploitation of a menial underclass,
illustrated by an incident with one of his neighbors in Jerusalem:
"An Arab woman cleans the stairwell
at the [Jewish] housing project
in which I live. Her name is Amuna, and
she lives in Ramallah [an
Arab town]. I talk to her from time to time.
A three-year-old
[Jewish] boy, the son of one of our neighbors,
used to seeing her
bent over a pail of water, heard us talking
and was surprised -- I
saw it on his face. He asked her name and
I told him. Afterwards,
he asked what we had talked about in Arabic,
and I explained. He
thought a minute and said: 'Amuna is a little
bit a person and a little
bit a dog, right?' I asked him why he said
that. He explained: 'She
is a little bit dog, because she always
walks on all fours. And she
is also a little bit of a person, because
she knows how to talk."
End of story." [GROSSMAN, D., 1988,
p. 214-215]
In 1911 the prominent Zionist A. D. Gordon
(an early pioneer to Palestine/Israel) surveyed his Jewish people and culture
-- Orthodox or not -- with concern, writing:
"We [Jews] have developed an attitude
of looking down on manual labor.
We must not deceive ourselves in this regard,
nor shut our eyes to our
grave deficiencies, not merely as individuals
but as a people. The well-
known Talmudic saying, that when the Jews
do God's will their labor is
done for them by others is characteristic
of our attitudes. This saying is
significant. It demonstrates how far this
attitude has become an
instinctive feeling within us, a second
nature." [GORDON, p. 679]
The "Labor Zionism" political
movement sought to readjust urban Jews to farm labor in the early years of
Zionism in Palestine/Israel. But Rosemary Reuther even notes the same old
Jewish propensity to function as overseers has come to the fore in modern
Israel:
"The sabra [native-born Jewish Israeli],
redeemed from Diaspora
weakness, with a gun in one hand and a
plow in the other, has
become a military-political-industrial
ruling elite. Many Jews no
longer work the land with their own hands
or do any kind of
manual labor. For many, such labor is
now seen as 'Arab work.'"
[ELLIS, M., 1990, p. 150]
Israeli Nimrod Tevlin recalled his youth
in Russia:
"After [the first year of college],
we [members of a Zionist organization]
decided to quit and spend full time preparing
to emigrate to
Palestine. Hardly any of us, however, had
backgrounds as workers --
heavy physical work like farming was considered
work for the
goyim."
[GORKIN, M., 1971, p. 56]
The 1989 Russian census clearly evidences this
traditional Jewish proclivity to avoid manual labor. And why have so few Jews
ever worked in Russian factories? Jewish scholar Michael Paul Sacks, in a
common Jewish apologetic theme to be elaborated upon in depth in this book
later, has the stock answer: anti-Semitism among the working class. "There
was little to attract Jews to work in the factory," says Sacks, "Surveys
have shown greater levels of anti-Semitism among blue-collar workers and those
with lower levels of education ... There can be no doubt that in comparison
with professional or semi-professional employment, Jews in blue-collar jobs
were an especially small minority." [SACKS, M., 1998. [p. 265]
Chone Shmeruk notes the practical implications
of such feeling in pre-war World War II Warsaw: "As far as my district
goes [where I lived in Warsaw] ... it was exclusively Jewish. The only non-Jews
there were the janitors, who usually had small apartments near the entrance."
[SHMERUK, p. 326] [See also later discussions of American Jewry's propensity
towards employing maids, especially African-Americans, for menial labor [in
the POPULAR CULTURE chapter], as well as the traditional non-Jewish Saturday
servant known as the shabbes goy].
What are we to make of the disturbing implications
of these words, in 2001, from Michael Finkel, in a New York Times article?
:
"Moshe lives in Israel, which happens to
be one of the more active nations in the
international organ-trafficking market. The
market, which is completely illegal, is
so complex and well organized that a single
transaction often crosses three
continents ... Israel also does not contriute
much to the supply side of the
equation. Organ donation is extremely low; an
estimated 3 percent of Israelis
have signed donor cards ... Paying for an organ
has become so routine in Israel
that there have been instances in which a patient
has elected not to accept the
offer of a kidney donation from a well-matched
relative. 'Why risk harm to
a family member?' one patient told me."
[FINKEL, M., 5-27-01]
Early Zionist Arthur Ruppin notes an incident
in which he found a Gentile cutting wood for a Jew in Eastern Europe. Ruppin
suggested that there were Jews would might be able to use the work, but the
employer noted that "a Jew does not undertake such work, even when he's
starving; it is not suitable for a Jew." [MACDONALD, p. 23]
During the California Gold Rush in the mid-19th
century, many Jews hurried to the mining areas, but not to labor for gold.
Their demeanor was noted by Hinton Rowan Helper, "whose tract, The
Impending Crisis of the South, would soon crystallize opinions concerning
slavery ... [Helper] ws as vociferous in his claims of Jewish laziness in
the gold rush as he was in condemnation of the southern slaveholder. With
regards to the Jews he wrote: 'Mining, the cultivation of the soil, in a word,
any occupation that requires exposure to weather, is too fatiguing and intolerable
for them. The law requiring man to get bread by the sweat of his brow is an
injunction with which they refuse to comply.'" [LEVINSON, R., 1978, p.
13]
Another contemporary of the Gold Rush, J. D. Bothwick observed
that
"In traveling through the mines from one
end to the other, I never saw a Jew lift
a pick or shovel to do a single stroke of work,
or, in fact, occupy himself in any
other way than in selling slops. while men of
other classes and of every nation
showed such versatility in betaking themselves
to whatever business or occupation
appeared at the time to be most advisable without
reference to their antecedents,
and, in a country where no man, to whatever
class of society he belonged, was
in the least degree ashamed to roll up his sleeves
and dig in the mines for gold,
or to engage in any other kind of manual labour,
it was a remarkable fact that the
Jews were the only people whom this was not
observable." [LEVINSON, R.,
1978, p. 13]
In his autobiography, well-known Yiddish
author Sholem Aleichem watched a ferryman in Eastern Europe absorbed in the
difficult physical task of pulling a boat across a river. "Only a Goy
could do work like that, not a Jew," he wrote, "The Bible says of
Esau [non-Jews], 'And thou shalt serve they brother.' It is good that I am
a descendant of Jacob [Jacob: Jews] and not of Esau." [LINDEMANN, Esau's,
p. 5] Albert Lindemann also notes the case of "the eminent Jewish-American
intellectual Sidney Hook [who] remembered how, as a boy, he had asked his
religion teacher about the injustice of what Jacob did to Esau. The teacher
responded, 'What kind of question is that? Esau was an animal.'" [LINDEMANN,
p. 5]
This Jacob-Esau division is another deep
source of enduring Jewish racism and elitism per their supposed genius in
outwitting others. The story of Jacob and Esau is from the biblical Genesis.
They were the two sons (twins) of Isaac (son of the seminal Jewish patriarch
Abraham) and Rebecca. Jacob, however, is understood in Jewish lore as an early
patriarch of the Jewish ancestral lineage, Esau is not. Esau is an ancestor
of Gentiles. And as the Torah (Genesis 25.21-23) states it, God told the pregnant
Rebecca that "two nations are in thy womb, two nationalities will emerge
from inside of thee. And one people will be stronger than the other -- the
elder will serve the younger." The "younger" of course was
Jacob, ancestor of the Jews. "If you fail Jacob," notes traditional
Yiddish folklore, "you aid Esau." [KUMOVE, S., 1985, p. 81]
Albert Lindemann notes the later development
of this brother tale:
"In the biblical account, Jacob conspires
with his mother, Rebecca,
to trick Esau out of receiving the blessing
of their aged and blind
father, Isaac. Esau, the first-born, had
already foolishly given over
his birthright to Jacob in exchange for
a bowl of lentils. But Esau
remained Isaac's favorite ... Esau was outraged
when he discovered
that he and his father had been duped, that
Jacob had posed as his
older brother [to his blind father] and
had gained Isaac's blessing ...
Anti-Semites of various shapes have drawn
upon the Jacob-Esau tale
as proof of the incorrigible cunning and
moral corruption of the Jews
throughout history ... Even in the 1990s,
the notion of a somehow
unbridgeable gap between Esau and Jacob,
Gentile and Jew, remains
central to traditional Jewish perspectives
('Esau always hates Jacob,'
'The Messiah will not come until the tears
of Esau have been
exhausted.')" [LINDEMANN,
Esau's,
p. 4-5]
"[Jacob's] deception," says
Shlomo Riskin, "was orchestrated by his mother, perhaps even ordained
by God, but his feeling of guilt never leaves him." [RISKIN, S., 1994,
p. 5B] Esau, notes Nathan Ausubel,
"surnamed 'the wicked' in Jewish folklore, is portrayed as a fierce warrior
and hunter, preoccupied with fighting and the chase. Jacob, on the other hand,
is depicted as a gentle scholar, always found in the House of Study in pursuit
of divine instruction." [AUSUBEL, p. 28] Jacob,
however, in the original story, was the treacherous brother. One Jewish observer,
Hugh Blumenfeld, has noted with consternation that the brother who was morally
righteous, Esau, is so much condemned in Jewish lore. "It floors me,"
Blumenfeld told a Jewish newspaper, "because he is the one who forgives
his brother, who tries to do right by the end of the story." [KATZ-STONE,
1999, p. 47]
Rabbi Yisroel Yaaikov Klapholz notes the
traditional Talmudic views of the Esau (Gentiles) - Jacob (Jews) dialectic:
"Rebekah became pregnant with twins
... Esau said to Jacob: 'If
you do not let me come out first, I will
kill my mother as I leave her
stomach.' Jacob said: 'That evildoer is
a murderer even before his
birth' ... One [son] will adorn himself
with Torah, the other will boast
of his sins. Both will be hated by other
nations and both will rule
the world. But in the end, the descendants
of your righteous son
shall reign supreme. After Esau's rule,
no other nation shall reign
but Israel. G-d [God] also revealed to Rebekah
that He loves Jacob
and despises Esau ... Rebekah called one
son Jacob, the other Esau.
Esau was born ruddy all over, like a hairy
mantle, his redness
indicating that he was of a murderous nature
... Esau ... refused to
be circumcized for the rest of his life.
Jacob, on the other hand, was
born circumcized." [KLAPHOLZ, p. 14-16]
One of Rabbi Klapholz's chapters in a book
he authored is called "Jacob's Innocence and Esau's Cunning." "People
saw the deeds of the two youths," says Klapholz, "and said: 'Esau
is a thorn-bush and Jacob a fragrant flower.' The cunning Esau was always
plotting to do evil." [KLAPHOLZ, p. 17]
Samuel Heilman, an anthropologist and an
Orthodox Jew, notes, from the usual Jewish martyrological view, the Jacob-Esau
subject in the Hasidic community:
"'Jacob and Esau are two opposites,'
as Rabbi Shlomo Halberstam
(1848-1906) of Bobov, Poland, put it in
commonly heard terms
that saw Jews and Gentiles symbolized by
the two Biblical brothers,
'and it is unthinkable that there should
be any connection between
them in any way.' If much of the two thousand
years of the diaspora
had led to Jewish persecution and degradation,
these Jews responded
by categorizing everyone who was not a Jew
as some inferior being."
[HEILMAN, S., 1992, p. 19]
Throughout Jewish tradition, the origin
of hatred of Jewish arch-enemies is the most primitive sort: animosities are
rooted in clan-based feuds. The despised are actually blood-related with common,
not so terribly distant, ancestors. As noted, the Israelite patriarch Abraham
had two sons: Isaac and Ishmael. Isaac is considered by modern day Jews to
represent the Jewish lineage; Ishmael, even according to Islamic tradition,
fathered the Arab line. In the Jewish family tree, Isaac's sons were Jacob
and Esau: Esau is a kind of symbolic patriarch of all Gentiles. Only the children
of Jacob are considered to continue the Jewish line. Esau fathered Eliphaz,
who in turn fathered Amalek, the most-hated enemy in Jewish tradition. [More,
at length, about Amalek later. For purposes here, suffice it to note -- as
startling as it may sound -- that the Old Testament commands Jews to "blot
out the memory" of him by exterminating all his descendants. To read
about Amalek now,
click here] Amalek is, hence, actually
not that terribly remote from the Jewish bloodline: he was the great-great
grandson of Abraham.
Joshua Cohen notes traditional Jewish perspective
of the Amalek story:
"The Talmudic sages tell us that the
Jewish fathers -- Abraham, Isaac
and Jacob -- rejected [Amalek's mother's]
offer to convert and that her
rejection resulted in Amalek's hatred of
Israel ... In a way then, this
[Talmudic] midrash tells the origin of
the prejudice that western tradition
would later call anti-Semitism ... The
Amalekites ... were the first enemies
of the Jews after their emergence from
Egypt as a full-fledged nation ...
Not only do Jews and Amalekites share a
common ancestry; Jewish
humanity and Amalekite bigotry were encoded
in the same seed."
[COHEN, J., p. 296-297]
The Israelites/Jews continued on their separatist
course thus conceptually armed, victims of senseless bigotry, as they saw
it, through history.
Before we move on, however, we must yet
mention again the influential sage Maimonides, whose pronouncements still
find widespread credibility in Jewish culture (particularly amidst the Orthodox
in our own day). According to Maimonides, notes Eugene Korn:
"Only with the commission of grievous
sins do a small minority of Jews
lose their share in the world to come. The
reverse proposition appears
to be true for Gentiles: Immortality for
non-Jews would be the exception,
open to a small minority. Thus we arrive
at arbitrary inequality, the
essence of injustice." [KORN, p. 270]
Some modern, and influential, rabbis like
Rav Velvel Soloveitchik interpret such Maimonides opinions to their most ominous
degree. "Not only is the rational and autonomous moral [non-Jewish] person
denied wisdom and a share in the world to come," says Eugene Korn, "
... it robs all non-believers and their cultures of any intellectual, religious,
or even human value." [KORN, p. 281] "By modern standards,"
observes Lenni Brenner, "Judaism is jarring in its ethnic and religious
chauvinism, and extreme and contradictory in its social ethics, real and ideal."
[BRENNER, p. 41]
Israel Shahak, both an Israeli citizen
and Holocaust survivor, underscores that racism, stemming from the Jewish
Chosen People concept, is intrinsic to the Orthodox Jewish faith. "The
rabbis," he writes, "and, even worse, the apologetic 'scholars of
Judaism’ know this very well and for this reason they do not try to argue
against such views inside the Jewish community; and of course they never mention
them outside it. Inside, they vilify any Jew who raises such matters within
earshot of Gentiles, and they issue deceitful denials in which the art of
equivocation reaches its summit. For example, they state, using general terms,
the importance which Judaism attaches to mercy; but what they forget to point
out is that according to the Halakhah
[Jewish religious law] 'mercy' means mercy towards Jews." [SHAHAK, p.
96]
Note, for example, the apologetics of professor
Robert Pois, who, like many, turns the usual dissimulatives about a "selective
interpretation" of the Talmud into the implication that only Nazis and
their kindred would, in overview, entertain negative opinion about this important
Jewish religious work:
"The selective mining of Talmudic sources
... has been a traditional
approach of anti-Semites for some time.
Yes, there are nasty anti-heathen
(read anti-Christian) comments in the Talmud.
But ... the 63 sections of
this compendium of Jewish oral law and folklore
... was not informed by
a systematic theology. Rather, it was, literally,
commentary. In a word,
it was a panoply of opinions of one or the
other religious and social
issues ... Obviously, if one wants to depict
the Talmud as being
consistently anti-Goy, great selectivity
is necessary. Such was revealed
in that tradition which informed the writings
of Houston Stewart
Chamberlain and Alfred Rosenberg."
[ROIS, R., 1998]
Chamberlain and Rosenberg, of course, were
prominent Nazi ideologues. Pois here
infers that to investigate assertions of Jewish racism in its sacred works
can only be the interest of a Nazi.
The origin of the chauvinist Jewish worldview,
which will surface many times in this volume, is, again, the traditional Jewish
notion of themselves as the "Chosen People" of God. This idea, wrote
J. O. Hertzler, is “literally and vividly maintained ... in a very decided
Judeocentric view of history and the world.” [HERTZLER, p. 70] It is often
referred to as "chosenness," or "election," as if there
had been a divine vote cast somewhere to confirm their self-perceived specialness.
“The Jews may stand astride time and eternity,” wrote Arthur A. Cohen, "... This is unavoidably an aristocratic
mission.” [EISENSTEIN, I. p. 275] "Alas," says Ze'ev Levy, "the
concept of chosenness entails ethnocentrism, for the better (in the past)
or the worse (today). Chosenness does not go with otherness, that is, with
unconditional respect of others." [LEVY, p. 104] This is an understatement. "The concept
of an eternal selection," says Moshe Greenberg, "eventually merges
with a doctrine of spiritual-racial superiority, rooted, it seems, in the
biblical term 'holy seed' ... [According
to the Old Testament/Torah, Ezra 9:2] holiness inheres in the seed and is
hereditary." [GREENBERG, p. 31]
"The word 'chosen' [per 'Chosen People'],"
notes Arnold Eisen, "is used sparingly in the Bible, to convey the passion
of choosing. Its antonym is not 'considered impartially' or 'ignored,' but
'despised.'" [EISEN, p. RHETORIC, p. 66] "The Jewish religion,"
wrote Arthur Koestler, "unlike any other, is racially discriminating,
nationally segregative, and socially tension-creating." [LINDEMANN, p.
20]
The continuing debate about this within
the Jewish community by liberal and secular thinkers is generally framed euphemistically
in the contrasting terms of "particularism and universalism."
While most Jews tend to be apologetic for this term, particularism
actually refers to the purely self-concern,
self-aggrandizement, racism, and ethnocentrism of traditional Jewish
thinking (to the systemic detriment of non-Jews) throughout the centuries.
This was consistently manifest by a Jewish segregated lifestyle, tight knit
community, different Jewish moral standards for behavior towards Jews and
non-Jews, racial and hereditary obsessions, and condescending views of all
non-Jews around them. Universalism, on the other hand, refers to a shift in
Jewish moral thinking (like everyone else) beginning with the Enlightenment,
exemplified in a liberalizing Germany with the universalizing ideas of philosophers
like Immanuel Kant. Universalism embodies the notion that Jewish particularism
(or any other) is morally incorrect and obsolete and that spiritual and secular
laws should be the same for everyone, all-inclusive. (As Israel Shahak notes,
the Jews of Europe did not fight for freedom and liberation from their own
stagnant ghetto ideology of particularism; emancipation was a
gift of universalistic benevolence from the surrounding non-Jewish community
which opened the doors for Jews to leave their distinctive ideological ghetto.) [SHAHAK, p. 17]
Monford Harris calls tradition Jewish conception
of its collective self in our modern, post-Emancipation universalistic age
"the scandal of particularity." "The current definitions of
Jewishness derive from emancipation-era expeiences," he noted in 1965,
"Until that time Jews knew very well what
Jewishness was. Emancipation-era
Jewishness was involved with understanding itself
through universally valid
categories, and in the process authentic Jewish
understanding of Jewishness
is rejected. The Jewish understanding of Jewishness
had become too particular
and parochial for modern premises." [HARRIS,
M., 1965, p. 85]
Eventually recognizing that complete acceptance
of a universalistic ethic towards their fellow human beings could only mean
serious endangerment of the "particularist" Jewish identity, liberalizing
elements of world Jewry over past decades have moved to proclaim two antithetical
ideas as essential parts of Jewish identity: both an allegiance to "Chosen
People" Judeo-centrism and pan-human universalism. This is managed
by the enduring Judeo-centric notion that distinctly Jewish hands must cling
to the steering wheel of humanity itself as some form of a Jewish leadership
"mission": in the pseudo-religious sphere, this is generally expressed
as some version of "We Jews are fated to lead all of humanity to its
destiny." In this new Chosen People construct, Jews can thereby still
take satisfaction in their presumed exceptionality, but it is now (supposedly)
morally adjusted to do some good for others in their wake.
"In the very emphasis upon the particular,"
says Rabbi Hayim Halevy Donin, "this singular family [Jews] reflected
the noblest form of universalism." [DONIN, p. 8] "We Jews are a narrow, nationalist, self-centered
people, " observes Samuel Dresner, "There is no point in denying
it ... [Yet] in all of Judaism ... particularism and universalism go hand
in hand ... Particularism and universalism, both are essentials of Judaism."
[DRESNER, p. 50-51] "Jewish pride, Jewish chauvinism, Jewish particularism,"
says Roger Kamenetz, "-- the idea that we are a special chosen people
-- seems to contradict the very universalistic prophetic messages Judaism
also teaches." [KAMENETZ, R., 1994, p. 150]
Knowing the foundation of Judeo-centric
religious history, such Jewish proclamation is peculiar:
“We [Jews] are under no obligation to forcefully
convert non-Jews,”
says Reuven Bulka, “On the contrary, we
must carefully avoid any
coercive conversion practices. However,
it is another matter when the
issue is enlightening the world with Judaic
values.” [BULKA, p. 18]
“Why did God choose Israel?” asks Alfred
Jospe, “Because all other nations refused to accept Torah. Originally, God
had offered it to all nations of the world. But the children of Esau [non-Jews]
rejected it because they could not reconcile themselves to the commandment
‘Thou shalt not kill.’ The Moabites declined the offer because they felt they
could not accept the commandment ‘Thou shalt not commit adultery.’ The Ishamaelites
[traditional ancestors of today's Arabs] refused it because they could not
square their habits with the commandment, ‘Thou shalt not steal.’” [JOSPE,
p. 14]
This is of course yet another manifestation
of classical Jewish ethnocentrism, often arrogance, and even today sometimes
racism, false-fronted by an illusionary claim of Jewish service to humanity,
a service conceived to be more special than any other. Jewish scholar Norman
Cantor states the true essence of traditional Jewish identity succinctly:
"The covenant idea is the polar opposite
of democracy, multiculturalism,
and ethnic equality." [CANTOR, p.
21]
"Jewish values," adds Charles
Liebman,
"... are folk-oriented rather than
universalist, ethnocentric rather than
cosmopolitan, and at least one major strand
in Jewish tradition expresses
indifference, fear, and even hostility to
the non-Jew." [LIEBMAN, C., p.
10]
"In Borough Park's language,"
says Yossi Klein Halevi, referring to the Orthodox community where he was
raised, "'universalist' was a
synonym for traitor ... Other people might take their humanity for granted;
but Jews, at least in Borough Park, felt certain only of their Jewishness."
[HALEVI, p. 75] "Maintaining
the bonds one Jew must feel with another Jew," notes Susan Schneider,
"is part of Judaism, along with the idea that being Jewish may require
maintaining the purity and/or unity of the Jewish people." [SCHNEIDER,
p. 323]
In an American context, Arnold Eisen notes
the modern Jewish liberals' resultant quandary in reframing the Jewish worldview
for Gentile consumption:
"The notion of the Jewish [special]
mission to [other peoples] was
problematic, because it presumed that one
people had the truth, and
all others could but wait patiently to
receive it. Such hierarchical ideas
did not seem to fit in a society which
espoused egalitarianism; if all
men were created equal, why did other people
need the Jews in order
to attain true knowledge of God? The search
for ways of reconciling
pluralism and election became a pressing
task of Jewish apologetic."
[EISEN, p. 21]
One of the ways convoluted apologetic seeks
to distance itself from racism and inevitable Gentile hostility is to rhapsodize
about special Jewish destiny, as does Reuven Bulka, who in this case also
obfuscates it:
"The notion of chosenness is ...
misleading and fraught with danger,
as if to imply some inherent genetic
or biological virtue that
is merely an accident of fate. Being
chosen is the end result of
chosingness, much the same way that
the bride's choice to agree
to the request of a groom to marry her
is predicated on the
presumption that she has already been
chosen, an assumption
inherent in the groom's question-request
entreaty." [BULKA, p. 17]
But as Jewish author Monford Harris notes about
such notions of Jewry as a "choosing" people:
"The idea of the Jews as 'chosen people'
has been eclipsed. Yet it is so central
to classical Jewish thought it could not be
wholly surrendered. It was, consequently,
reinterpreted ... [One] way of reinterpreting
the idea of the chosen people
is to say that the Jews are the 'choosing people.'
Since the day of the Nazi idea
of the master race it has been said that the
idea of the 'chosen' people is
ethically untenable, and that it is better to
understand the Jews as the choosing
people; i.e., the Jews were the only people
in antiquity to recognize the true God.
Precisely that which it tries to avoid is what
this notion falls prey to. To say the
Jews are the choosing people is to assert a
position of such arrogance as to
violate the canons of good manners, let alone
ethical coniderations. To assert
that only our ancestors were wise enough,
good enough, to make the right
choice and that all other nations lacked either
the wisdom or the sincerity to
do so is on a par with Nazi racism." [HARRIS,
M., 1965, p. 89]
In the apologetic realm, it is interesting
to note the noble moral currency afforded modern Judaism in popular American
culture by the presentation of the pan-human,
universalistic excerpt from Jewish religious sources that supposedly
says: "Whoever saves a single life, saves the world entire." (This
is the stated theme, for example, during a candle-lighting scene to begin
the fabulously popular Stephen Spielberg movie about Jews under Nazi occupation,
Schindler's List). Even taking this "life-saving" statement
at face value, however, it is subject to interpretive manipulation. Some Jewish
observers have noted that "this Talmudic saying, taken literally, is
the ideological basis for an amoral survivalism," i.e., saving "a"
life is merely self-survival.
[CHEYETTE, p. 233]
Yet this supposedly noble refrain is clouded
even further. In the talmudic Mishna,
Sanhedrin 4:5, the original really says this: "Whoever destroys a single
Jewish life, Scripture accounts it to him as though he had destroyed a whole
world." It is quite particularist in its scope, i.e., it only cares about
Jews, self-survival or not. Nonetheless, this literal fact does not hinder
many Jewish non-Orthodox apologists from universalizing this chauvinist quote
anyway. "Most Jews whose study of the Mishna," says Jacob Petuchowski,
"is confined to the standard edition continue to invest this statement
with a particularist limitation, while the few scholars who deal with textual
criticism are aware of the greater universalistic breath of the original statement."
[PETUCHOWKI, p. 8] When dropping the adverb "Jewish" from the seminal
source, insists the likes of Petuchowski, one arrives at the "correct
reading."
"The Talmudic epigraph of Stephen Spielberg's
Schindler's List," adds Jewish scholar Peter Novick, "'Whoever saves
one life saves the world entire,' surely reflected the universalist values
of liberal Judaism as it had evolved in recent centuries. The observant knew
that the traditional version, the one taught in all Orthodox yeshivot [religious
schools], speaks of 'whoever saves the life of Israel.'" [NOVICK, P.,
1999, p. 182-183] Apologetic rabbi Isar Schorsch does a little verbal gymastics
to rearrange the timeline sequence of
this "regretful"
Jewish racism:
"[Jewish] xenophobia contaminates one of
the finest expressions of
universalism in the Mishna. Prior to testifying
in a capital case, witnesses
are warned of the consequences of their words.
'Anyone who saves a single
person is credited with having saved the entire human
race.' (Mishna Sanhedrin
4:4) Regretfully, in some manuscripts and printed
texts the word 'person'
is replaced by the word 'Jew.'" [SCORSCH,
I., 4-30-99]
This kind of modern revisionism has set
the stage for a bitter -- and intensifying -- struggle in international Jewry
for the heart, and meaning, of Judaism between Orthodox followers of traditional
belief and liberalizing revisionists, who largely suppress the historical
facts of their own religious history. In recent years a number of Orthodox
groups have even declared that their ideological rivals -- those Jews who
at least pay lip service to universalistic ideals -- are not even Jewish. "In debates within the Jewish community,"
says Gordon Lafar, "both universalists and chauvinists claim to be speaking
in the name of traditional Jewish values." [LAFAR, p. 180]
"In my youth," noted Meir Tamari
in 1987, "Judaism was synonymous with socialism. There were religious
Orthodox trade unions and religious Orthodox socialist parties. In Reform
Judaism, this was a major issue. And we literally distorted Jewish sources
-- and I was guilty of that, misguiding many young people in explaining to
them that the Torah and socialism were synonymous." [JEWISH WEEK, 5-15-87,
p. 28] "After fifty some years
of conscious exploration," wrote professor Paul Laute, a 1960s-era Civil
Rights activist, "it has finally occurred to me that my identification
of Jewishness with progressive social action is as much a historical construction
as the messianic intolerance of [the racist Jewish messianic movement] Gush
Emunim." [LAUTER, p. 45]
Amnon Rubenstein, an Israeli scholar, in
noting the folly of claiming Judaism as a "universal" religion,
cites the following crucial Torah (Old Testament) passages about God's favoritism
towards the Jews:
"If ye will hearken unto My voice
indeed, and keep My covenant, then
ye shall be Mine own treasure from among
all peoples."
"Ye shall be holy unto Me, for I the
Lord am holy and have severed
you from other people that ye shall me
mine."
"These well known passages," he observes, "explain
why it is impossible from the traditional viewpoint, to separate the idea
of chosenness, of a 'treasure nation,' from the concept of the covenant and
the observance of Jewish religious law and how false it is to relate these
religious paradigms to secular values. It is futile to transplant the biblical
injunctions into a secular context and support this by referring to the prophets'
'universal' visions of social justice and peace among nations." [RUBENSTEIN,
A., p. 34-35]
Rubenstein attributes the values of "human
equality" to "Christian monotheism" and the French revolution.
[RUBENSTEIN, A., p. 36]
Another Israeli, Bernard Avishai, notes
that left-wing Israelis "cringe when they hear the same people ["Jewish
American intellectuals"] talk about 'Jewish ethical vocation' or, worse,
lecture Israelis about how Judaism mandates a peculiarly open-spirited morality,
a sense of history." [AVISHAI, B., p. 350] As Stuart Svonkin notes:
"The work of Jewish historians clearly
demonstrates that there are few discernible
connections
between the premodern Jewish tradition and modern ideals of social
justice. The liberal universal precepts that
[the likes of former Anti-Defamation
League head Benjamin] Epstein
enumerated
bear little relation to historical Judaism;
their provenance is much more recent ... These
renovated, if mythic, 'Jewish precepts'
-- clearly dehistoricized and largely secularized
-- closely corresponded with the basic
tenets
of postwar American liberalism. The ADL's intergroup relations program was
thus predicated on the assertion -- historically
inaccurate but rhetorically powerful
-- that the same 'concepts of dmocracy' informed
both Judaism and the 'American creed'
of liberty
and equality." [SVONKIN, S., 1997, p. 20]
In Israel, a society for Jews and controlled
by Jews, there is no need for universalizing apologetics over the essence
of traditional Judaism. Charles Liebman and Steven Cohen note that
"Many leftist secularists see Judaism
as so inimical to liberal values that
they have severed their own ties with
it. Whereas their predecessors
held that one could be a humanist socialist
and be Jewishly committed
at the same time, intellectuals in this
new circle are in effect walking away
from the battle over the political meaning
of Judaism. They view Judaism
as so thoroughly conservative, nationalistic
and particularistic that it
cannot be reformed. In this view the only
hope for the Israeli liberal is
the disestablishment of Judaism."
[LIEBMAN/COHEN, p. 118]
In 1996 American-born Israeli Ze'ev Chafets
noted how troubled he was at what he discovered to be powerful expressions
of traditional Judaism in the Jewish state:
"Rabbi Meir Kahane began preaching
that Arabs are dogs and the
penalty for a Muslim man marrying a Jewish
woman should be
death," Rabbi Yitzhak Peretz "said
a schoolbus full of kids was
hit by a train because God was angry that
the movie theatre in their
town was open on Friday nights,"
the Lubavitcher Rebbe [rabbi]
"allowed his followers to declare
him the Messiah," Rabbi Yitzhak
Kadouri, "the world's greatest kabbalist
... put a hex on a Jerusalem
office building that blocked his view,"
Rabbi Dov Lior "declared it
kosher to kill gentile women and children
in wartime," Rabbi Nahum
Rabinovich "advocated scattering
land mines to prevent Israeli soldiers
from carrying out orders in the West Bank,"
"20,000 yeshivah boys
gathered to stone and threaten Israeli
archeologists," Rabbi Moshe
Maya "arose in the Knesset and said
that the halakhic penalty for
homosexuality is death," Rabbi Ovadiah
Yosef, "universally considered
one of the great Torah sages of the age,
was quoted as ruling that
the faithful should refuse transfusions
from gentiles and nonobservant
Jews because they have dangerously
treif
blood
which might cause all
manner of un-Jewish behavior," Rabbi
Mordechai Eliyahu believes
that "Jewish blood is inherently
pure and therefore incapable of defiling
Jewish recipients." [CHAFETS, Z.,
1996, p. 18]
"Real Torah Judaism," concludes
Chafets, with sarcasm for the Orthodox, "is a scientifically based doctrine
of racial purity. Jews have one, superior, kind of blood, the rest of humanity
has another ... [My rabbi in Michigan] was probably ashamed to tell the truth."
[CHAFETS, Z., 1996, p. 18]
The origin of this divide between "particularist"
and "universalist" Jews is to be found in the 19th century, in
the wake of the Enlightenment and the emergence of European Jews from their
isolationist ghettos. "Rationalism, modernism, and emancipation,"
notes R. J. Zwi Wroblowsky, "made the notion of a chosen people increasingly
problematical." [WERBLOWSKY, p. 158] Religious reformers in Germany
sought to "redefine Judaism to fit Protestant categories." This
new Reform Judaism, says Charles Silberman, "expurgated ... aspects
of Judaism ... to make worship in the synagogue resemble Protestant services
as much as possible." [SILBERMAN, p. 38] "In general, [Reform
Judaism] gave Jewish religion a distinctly gentile tinge." [PATAI,
R., 1971, p. 304] "Orthodox Jews naturally expressed their horror at
the progressive Christianization of the synagogue," says Walter Laqueur,
"for this, not to mince words, is what it amounted to." [LAQUEUR,
p. 17] In 1884, Orthodox Jews even sued a Reform temple in Charleston, South
Carolina, for introducing an organ into the synagogue, "a desecration
of the Jewish ritual." [GOLDEN, H., 1973, p. 6] Theology shifted in
"Reform Judaism" too. In 1869, for example, a Philadelphia conference
of Reform-minded rabbis formally de-emphasized the more literal aspects
of the old chosen people concept, refocusing on "the unity of all rational
creatures." [LIPSET/RAAB, p. 59]
Even a strand of Orthodox Judaism in America
-- commonly termed "Modern Judaism" -- in earlier years did play
down some of its segregationist and anti-universalistic tenets. But, as
Jack Wertheimer noted in 1993,
"Few Orthodox spokesmen any longer articulate
the undergirding assumptions
of Modern Orthodoxy, namely, that a synthesis
of traditional Judaism and modern
Western culture is not only feasible but desirable.
The thought of the leading
ideologue of modern Orthodoxy in the
nineteenth century, Rabbi Samson
Hirsch, is now reinterpreted by his disciples
as having urged Torah im
Derekh Eretz, a synthesis of traditional
Judaism and Western culture, as
merely a temporary solution to
the pressing needs of the day; now, it is
argued, such a goal is no longer desirable
...[WERTHEIMER, J., 1993, p. 127]
Virtually all contemporary gedolim
(recognized rabbinical authorities
within the Orthodox world) identify
with right-wing Orthodoxy, and their
views are rarely challenged." [WERTHEIMER,
J., 1993, p. 128]
Jewish thinkers, particularly in the Reform
world, says Richard L. Rubenstein, sought "to assert the priority of
those elements of the Torah which seemed to remain relevant and defensible
in their own times. [T]hey tended to distinguish between the spirit of the
Torah and its frequently embarrassing letter by emphasizing the abiding relevance
of the moral elements of the Torah." [RUBENSTEIN, p. 236]
"The idea," says Michael Meyer, "that pure religious
faith is essentially moral rapidly became the theoretical basis and practical
operative principle of the Reform movement." [RUBENSTEIN, p. 337]
With the Reform movement came Jewish efforts
to distance enlightened, modern Jewry from their rabbinically archaic and
cloistered pasts. Also came the appropriation of the universalistic themes
of Christian-based culture to make them "Jewish." "Attempts have been made to link the Jewish
propensity to identify with political activism and social justice to Judaism,"
note David Desser and Lester Friedman, "with specific exhortations in
the Old Testament. Such attempts try to isolate precepts and commandments
favoring social egalitarianism and universalism. This thesis ... has at best
a tenuous explanatory capacity. In fact, Christianity would more likely have
greater ties to secular liberalism ... Jewish cries for social justice did
not arise until the 19th century, and there were precious few major political
thinkers until this period." [DESSER, p.] "Some commentators,"
worry particularist Jewish scholars Seymour Lipset and Earl Raab, "want
to believe that an intrinsic aspect of Jewish life consists of such universally
benevolent 'Jewish social values' as equality, social justice, and world peace'
... By taking on a public orientation similar to Christian denominations,
Judaism runs the danger of appearing more Americanized and less particularistic."
[LIPSET/RAAB, p. 54]
One of the most influential propagators
of the notion of a universalistic Judaism (the basis for the popular western
strain of Judaism called Reform) was Abraham Geiger. Geiger, an early nineteenth
century theologian, claimed that "Judaism has proved itself a force outliving
its peculiar nationality, and therefore may lay claim to special consideration."
This "special consideration" is ultimately understood to be Jewish
exceptionality in pan-human affairs, especially in -- but not limited to --
matters of morality and spirituality. But as modern scholar Joseph Blau observes
about Geiger's above proclamation, "let us reflect for a moment on the
paradoxical quality of this assertion. Geiger was saying that because Judaism
had eliminated its own claim to a special character, it was entitled to a
special character. Because particularism had been excised from Jewish religion,
Judaism had a right to special status. He seems to be on the verge of replacing
particularist Jewish nationalism by particularist Jewish religion." [BLAU,
p. 49] In other words, Geiger, Reformed Judaism, and many of today's Jews
(especially in America where Reform is so popular) have been shamed by the
democratic, egalitarian, and universalistic impact of the Enlightenment and
pan-human ideals of Christianity to exchange Jewish chauvinism for ... Jewish
chauvinism! Modern Jewry simply lifts Christian universalistic
tenets and incongruously tacks them onto Jewish particularism, the particularism
that early Christians (rebelling Jews) left in the first place. "It is
curious to sit in a Reform or so-called Conservative American [Jewish] congregation,"
says Norman Cantor, "and listen to the rabbi sermonize about the equality
between Jew and Christian, black and white. This is actually the universalizing
message not of the talmudic rabbi, but of Rabbi Saul
[St. Paul of New Testament fame] who was beaten up and driven from
the diaspora synagogues when he preached this leveling message." [CANTOR,
p. 106]
George L. Mosse notes the way particularist
Judaism was contorted to be somehow universalized in turn-of-the-century Germany:
"In 1910, Rabbi Cossman Werner of Munich
castigated Jews
who had been baptized into Christianity
for committing a crime
not merely against Judaism but above all
against humanity itself.
Such Jews opposed equal rights and hindered
others in fighting
for justice, for 'to be a Jew means to be
human,' a statement
which was greeted with thunderous applause.
The argument
against baptism was based not on Judaism
as a revealed religion
but on the religion of humanity." [MOSSE,
G., 1985, p. 19]
This curious universalistic message, heralded
today in some form by so many modern Jews, is rendered transparently hollow
and fundamentally incongruous in a Jewish context. As Eric Kahler phrases it, in Orwellian double-think:
"The substance of [Judaism's] particularism is universality." [KAHLER,
E., 1967, p. 11] "True universalism, according to [one Jewish] school
of thought," wrote Lothar Kahn, "can't occur without each human
family contributing its individuality to the whole race of men. The Jew can
best become a Frenchman or German -- a citizen of the world -- by perfecting
the Jewishness in him." [KAHN, L., 1961, p. 30] Or take Will Herberg's
typical Jewish view of it all:
"Jewish particularism, because it transcends
every national and cultural
boundary, becomes, strangely enough a vehicle
and witness to
universalism.
[HERBERG, p. 276]
In other words, at root here, Herberg simply
asserts that because Jews extend their allegiance to each other wherever they
are in the world, this is "universalism." E.L. Goldstein notes the
Jewish reluctance to relinquish the racial foundation of Jewish identity,
even in the invention of a "universalistic" Reform Judaism in the
19th century:
"It was not uncommon for a rabbi to
make bold pronouncements about
his desire for a universalistic society
and then, in moments of frustration
or doubt, revert to a racial understanding
of the Jews ... While willing
to stretch the definition of Judaism to
its limits, it was clear that most
Reformers were not willing to break the
historical continuity of the
Jewish 'race.' Even Solomon Schindler ...
one of the most radical of
Reform rabbis, felt compelled to acknowledge
the racial aspect of
Jewish identity. Despite the high universal
task of Judaism, wrote
Schindler, 'it remains a fact that we spring
from a different branch of
humanity, that different blood flows in
our veins, that our temperament,
our tastes, our humor is different from
yours; that, in a word, we differ
in our views and in our modes of thinking
in many cases as much as
we differ in our features.'" [MACDONALD,
1998, p. 157]
"The tension between the universal
and particular in Jewish life," observes Charles Liebman and Steven Cohen
about much Jewish commentary today, "is a favorite theme of Jewish commentators,
both scholarly and popular ... They in effect lead their audiences in cheering
the uniqueness of American Jewry, portraying it as the one American religious
or ethnic group that combines a passionate concern for itself with an almost
equally passionate concern for others." [LIEBMAN/COHEN, p. 28]
Louis Jacobs, in an apologetic, notes
the endemic Jewish universalist/particularist identity incompatability:
"The question of universalism in
Judaism is, and is bound to be, an extremely
complicated one. The God Jews worship
is the Creator of the whole world
and of all peoples yet Jews believe
that they are the Chosen People, however
the latter concept is understood.
The balance between universalism and
particularism has always been difficult
for Jews to achieve ... It is all
really a matter of where the emphasis
is to be placed and there have been
varying emphases in this matter
throughout the history of Judaism. Some
Jews have spoken as if God's chief,
if not total, interest, so to speak, is
with 'His' people. Others, especially
in modern times, have gone to the
opposite extreme, preferring to
stress universalism to the extent of
watering down the doctrine of particularism
to render it a vague notion
of loyalty to a tradition in which
the universalism had first emerged.
Few Jews will fail to admit that
there are tensions between the two
doctrines." [JACOBS, L., 1995,
p. 576-577]
Popular Jewish author Cynthia Ozick can,
on one hand, claim that "Jewish universalism emphasizes that the God
of Israel is also the God of mankind-in-general" and yet conclude the
same article with an appeal to fellow Jews to be more self-absorbed as Jews:
"If we blow into the narrow end of the shofar [a ram horn, used as an
instrument to herald traditional religious practice] we will be heard far.
But if we choose to be Mankind rather than Jewish and blow into the wider
part, we will not be heard at all; for us America will have been in vain."
[OZICK, C., p. 34]
This implicit contradiction in a "universalist"-"particularist"
Judaism is not lost to some young Jews who see through such illusory thinking.
In a book about Jewish identity, one Jewish interviewee notes that "Judaism
is very insular, it doesn't happily bring people in, so if you're supposed
to be setting an example yet you keep everyone out, that's contradictory."
[KLEIN, E. p. 191]
And this thinly disguised attitude of enduring
Jewish superiority always leaves the ideological door ajar for Jews to easily
turn back to Jewish Orthodoxy and its seminal "particularism" of
religious antiquity, or simply convert it in secular terms to modern Zionism.
By the end of the twentieth century, with the modern state of Israel, we are
seeing this happening. Most of those
who call themselves Jews have a significant degree of loyalty to Israel. And
Jewish Orthodoxy is in fact growing in America and often entwining with its
secular Chosen People offshoot, Zionism. The idea of being divinely endowed
is a powerful attraction. One study notes that about a quarter of all Orthodox
Jews in America today were new (i.e., "returned") to Orthodoxy.
The current growth in Orthodox adherents is the first since the eighteenth
century Enlightenment. "The Haredim [ultra-orthodox]," says Robert
Wistrich, "are the fastest growing segment in contemporary Jewry."
[WISTRICH, TERMS, p. 5] "Institutionally
and demographically," noted Jonathan Sacks in 1993, "the strongest
and most rapidly growing group in the contemporary Jewish world is Orthodox
Jewry." [SACKS, J., p. 138]
How profoundly this paradoxical "particularism"
(i.e., chauvinism) is ingrained in
the Jewish consciousness is evidenced even in leftist political organizations
that are supposed to be founded upon notions of universality, egalitarianism,
and pan-human solidarity. In the years leading up to the Russian communist
revolution in the early twentieth century, the undying obsession by most Russian
Jews for themselves -- distinct from many Russian leftists
around them -- often manifest itself in ethnocentric political expressions.
Many Jews of Russia and Poland congregated towards their own socialist movement
called the Bund. Much to the aggravation of communist party leader V. I.
Lenin and his universalistic Bolshevik movement, the Bund's version
of leftism insisted upon -- even within the context of the existing nation
state of Russia -- special Jewish national
rights beyond those civil. [AGUS, p. 164]
"It was not enough for the Bund,"
says Heinz-Dietrich Lowe, "to shift ... from Russian to Yiddish in its
agitational programme, it had to develop a fully fledged national programme
which demanded cultural autonomy for the Jews of the Russian empire."
[LOWE, p. 171] When non-Jews began rioting in Russia against Jewish exclusionism
and commercial exploitation in the late 1800s, "the Bund ... used these
pogroms as an opportunity to intensify its economic activities and further
its political aims." [LOWE, p. 171] "[The Bund's] leaders,"
says Joseph Marcus, "consistently conducted a class-conscious policy,
ostensibly in the interests of the whole working class, but actually confined
to its Jewish members." [MARCUS, p. 211]
While the Bund had a large following in Eastern
Europe, notes Shmuel Ettinger,
"at the same time, the Zionist Federation,
which was also being formed
by Russian Jews, stimulated the [Jewish]
nationalist trends ... Among
Jewish political subgroups the Socialist
Zionist Party demanded that
a Jewish society, socialist in principle,
be established in a special
territory to be set aside for the Jews;
the Jewish Socialist Party, the
'Seymists,' demanded a superior leadership
institution, 'Sejm,' for
every one of the nations which belonged
to the Federation of Russia;
the 'Peoples' Party' (Folkspartey), led by historian Simon Dubnov,
demanded a large measure of autonomy for
the Jews within the
framework of the Russian state ... Many
Jews also played a part
in organizing the general Russian political
parties." [ETTINGER, 1984,
p. 9]
Across time and culture, even in the context
of the supposed multiculturalist and egalitarian American New Left movement
of the 1960's, Jews collectively tended to perceive themselves with special
distinction. As Arthur Liebman noted:
"[Gentile intellectuals] really are
not totally accepted into even the
secularist humanist liberal company of
their quondam Jewish friends.
Jews continue to insist in indirect and
often inexplicable ways on their
own uniqueness. Jewish universalism in
relations between Jews and
non-Jews has an empty ring ... Still, we
have the anomaly of Jewish
secularists and atheists writing their
own prayer books. We find
Jewish political reformers ... ostensibly
pressing for universalist
political goals -- while organizing their
own political clubs which are
so Jewish in style and manner that non-Jews
often feel unwelcome."
[LIEBMAN, in MACDONALD, p. 158]
Jews have a long history of leftist political
advocacy, agitation against any status quo of Christian empowerment, and profoundly
disproportionate percentages of leadership roles in groups that ostensibly
espouse pan-human, universalist themes. With massive Jewish escape from the working class in America, Nathan
Glazer and Patrick Moynihan noted in 1963 that "the unions are increasingly
less Jewish [but] Jewish labor leaders continue to dominate, even though they
deal for the most part with non-Jewish workers." [GLAZER/MOYNIHAN, p.
144-145] "In America and Europe," says Barry Rubin, "the left
was so heavily Jewish as to be virtually a communal activity in itself, especially
in the 1930's ... Marxist intellectuals in those years were heavily Jewish
in composition and profoundly Jewish in their thinking ... [Its pre-eminent
leaders] were all born into highly assimilated, wealthy families..."
[RUBIN, B., p. 147] Reflecting on
the collapse of the leftist movement in America, Harold Cruse, an African-American
intellectual and former communist, complained that
"The Jews could not [Americanize Marxism]
with the nationalist-
aggressiveness emerging out of East Side
ghettoes to demonstrate
through Marxism their intellectual superiority
over the Anglo-Saxon
goyim.
The Jews failed to make Marxism applicable to anything in
America but their own national-group ambition
or individual self-
election." [LIEBMAN, A., p. 529]
In 1982 a Jewish author noted a similar
quote by a Gentile communist activist from Wisconsin:
"It became increasingly apparent to
most participants [at a communist
youth conference] that virtually all the
speakers were Jewish New
Yorkers. Speakers with thick New York accents
would identify
themselves as 'the delegate from the Lower
East Side' or 'the comrade
from Brownsville.' Finally the national
leadership called a recess to
discuss what was becoming an embarassment.
How could a
supposedly national student organization
be so totally dominated by
New York Jews? ... The convention was held
in Wisconsin." [in
MACDONALD, 1998, p. 72]
"The problem arose," says Arthur Liebman,
"to the means to accomplish the objective
of Americanizing what was an essentially
Jewish and European socialist movement
... [LIEBMAN, A., 1986, p. 340] ...
The disproportionate presence of Jews
and the foreign born generally in
the socialist movement coupled with the relative
absence of non-Jews and
native Americans troubled many of its
leaders, Jews and non-Jews alike.
The Communist party, for example, in the
1920s was made up almost
entirely of Jews and foreign born, most of
whom were in foreign language
federations. The Jews alone in the 1930s
and 1940s accounted for approximately
40 to 50 percent of the membership of
the Communist party." [LIEBMAN, A.,|
1986, p. 339]
Nathaniel Weyl notes that:
"Although Communist leaders were normally
taciturn about the extent
to which Party membership was Jewish, Jack
Stachel complained in
The Communist for April 1929 that
in Los Angeles 'practically 90 per
cent of the membership is Jewish.' In 1945,
John Williamson, another
national leader of the American Communist
Party, observed that, while
a seventh of Party membership was concentrated
in Brooklyn, it
was not the working-class districts, but
in Brownsville, Williamsburg,
Coney Island and Bensonhurst, which he characterized
'as primarily
Jewish American communities.' In 1951, the
same complaint about
Brooklyn was reiterated. A 1938 breakdown
of Communist educational
directors on a district level reported that
17 out of 34 were Jewish and
only nine 'American' ... Based on scrutiny
of surnames, Glazer concluded
that all of the 'Rank and File' (Communist)
teachers placed on trial by
the Teachers Union in 1932 were Jewish."
[WEYL, N., 1968, p. 118-119]
"The popular association of Jews with Communism,"
notes Peter Novick, "dated from the Bolshevik Revolution. Most of the
'alien agitators' deported from the United States during the Red Scare after
World War I had been Jews." [NOVICK, P., 1999, p. 92] Major American
twentieth century court trials included those of Charles Schenck, general
secretary of the Socialist Party, who was arrested for sedition in 1919: "The
case marked the first time the Supreme Court ruled on the extent to which
the U.S. government may limit speech." [KNAPPMAN, E., 1995, p. 61, 60]
Likewise, in 1927 the Supreme Court "upheld the conviction of Socialist
Benjamin Gitlow under a New York state law for advocating criminal anarchy."
[KNAPPMAN, E., 1995, p. 63]
Peter Pulzer once noted that, in the German
socialist ranks of the early 20th century, "Their [Jews'] disproportionately
bourgeois origins and their tendency to derive their views from first principles
rather than empirical experience, led them into a dominating position [in]
the party's debates." [WEISBERGER, A., 1997, p. 93] Arthur Liebman
notes the background to the Morris Hillquit's election to the American Socialist
party chairmanship in 1932:
"Hilquit, in turn,
brought the unmentionable to the center stage in an emotional
speech, declaring, 'I apologize for having
been born abroad, for being a Jew, and
living in New York City.'
Hilquit's
oblique reference to anti-Semitism assured him of victory. As Thomas
[Hilquit's opponent for the chairmanship]
later commented, 'Once the anti-
Semitic issue was raised, even though
unjustly, I was inclined to think it
best that Hillquit won.' The Socialist
party did not want to risk being labeled
anti-Semitic." [LIEBMAN, A., 1986,
p. 341]
Some estimates
suggest that 60% of the leadership for the 60s-era radical SDS (Students for
a Democratic Society) were Jews (well-known radicals included Kathy Boudin,
Bettina Aptheker, among many others). [PRAGER, p. 61]
From 1960 to 1970, five of the nine changing presidents of the
organization were Jewish males (Al Haber, Todd Gitlin, and the last three
for the decade: Mike Spiegel, Mike Klonsky, and Mark Rudd). [SALE, K., 1973,
p. 663] "Perhaps fully 50 percent of the revolutionary
Students for a Democratic Society," says Milton Plesur, "and as many as 50
to 75 percent of those in campus radical activities in the late 1960s were
Jewish." [PLESUR, M., 1982, p. 137] As Stanley Rothman and S. Robert Lichter
note:
"The early SDS was heavily Jewish in both its leadership and its
activist cadres.
Key SDS leaders included Richard Flacks, who played an important role
in its formation and growth, as well as Al Haber, Robb Ross, Steve Max,
Mike Spiegel, Mike Klonsky, Todd Gitlin, Mark Rudd, and others. Indeed,
for the first few years, SDS was largely funded by the League for
Industrial Democracy, a heavily Jewish socialist (but anti-communist)
organization.
SDS's early successes were at elite universities containing
substantial
numbers of Jewish students and sympathetic Jewish faculty, including
the University of Wisconsin at Madison, Brandeis, Oberlin, and the
University of California. At Berkeley SDS leaders were not unaware
of their roots. As Robb Ross put it, describing the situation at the
Unversity of Wisconsin in the early 1960s, '... my impression is
that the left at Madison is not just a new left, but a revival of the
old ...
with all the problems that entails. I am struck by the lack of
Wisconsin-born people [in the Madison-area left] and the massive
preponderance of New York Jews. The situation at the University
of Minnesota is similar' ... [Researcher] Berns and his associates
found that 83 percent of a small radical activist sample studied at
the University of California in the early 1970s were of Jewish
background." [ROTHMAN/LICHTER, 1982, p. 61]
Susan Stern was among those to turn to the
violent Weatherman underground organization. Ted Gold, another Weatherman
member, died when a bomb he was making exploded in his hands. [ROTHMAN/LICHTER,
1982, p. 61] In an iconic 1970 incident, three of the four students shot
and killed by National Guardsmen at a famous Kent State University demonstration
were Jewish. [BYARD, K., 5-5-00]
A
study by Joseph Adelson at the University of Michigan, one of the American
hotbeds of 1960s-era activism, suggested that 90% of those defined as politically
"radical students" at that school were Jews. [PRAGER, p. 61, 66]
And, "when, for instance, the Queens College SDS held a sit-in at an
induction center several years ago," wrote Gabriel Ende, "they
chose to sing Christmas carols to dramatize their activity, although the
chairman and almost all of the members were Jewish." [ENDE, G., 1971,
p. 61]
Ronald Radosh notes that
"In elite institutions like the University
of Chicago, a large 63 percent of student
radicals were Jewish; Tom Hayden may have
been the most famous name in
the University of Michigan SDS, but '90 percent
of the student left [in that school]
came from jewish backgrounds;' and nationally,
60 percent of SDS members
were Jewish. As my once-friend Paul Breines
wrote about my own alma
mater the University of Wisconsin, 'the
real yeast in the whole scene had been
the New York Jewish students in Wisconsin'
... As late as 1946, one-third
of America's Jews held a favorable view of
the Soviet Union." [RADOSH, R.,
6-5-01]
Decades earlier, note Rothman and Lichter:
"The American Student Union, the most prominent
radical student group
during the 1930s, was heavily concentrated
in New York colleges and
universities with large Jewish enrollments.
And on other campuses,
such as the University of Illinois, substantial
portions of its limited
membership were students of Jewish background
from New York
City." [ROTHMAN/LICHTER, 1982, p. 101]
In communist organizations that supposedly
idealized a classless society for all people, it inevitably grated with enduring
Jewish self-perception: Jews often tended to configure as a special caste
of controllers of -- not a religious, but now -- a
secular messianism. As Jeff Schatz notes
about pre-World War II Poland: "Despite the fact that [communist] party
authorities consciously strove to promote classically proletarian and ethnically
Polish members to the cadres of leaders and functionaries, Jewish communists
formed 54 percent of the field leadership of the KPP [Polish Communist Party]
in 1935. Moreover, Jews constituted a total of 75 percent of the party's
technica,
the apparatus for production and distribution of propaganda material. Finally,
communists of Jewish origin occupied most of the seats of the Central Committee
of the of the KPPP [Communists Workers Party of Poland] and the KPP."
[SCHATZ, p. 97] Jews were at this time 10% of the Polish population.
In Russia, notes Shmuel Ettinger,
"when the Russian Social Democratic
Party split into two factions --
Bolsheviks and Mensheviks -- both factions
had many Jews in
their leaderships (such as Boris Axelrod,
Yuly Martov, Lev Trotsky,
Grigory Zinoviev, and Lev Kamenov) and among
their most active
party members. Many Jews also played a part
in the foundations and
leadership of the party ... For example,
Mikhail Gots was one of the
party's main thereoticians and Grigory Gershuni
was the leader of
its fighting organization, which carried
out terrorist acts against the
Tsarist regime." [ETTINGER, p. 9]
Earlier in Russia, notes Leon Schapiro,
"a particularly important part was played by [Jewish revolutionary Aaron]
Zundelovich, who in 1872 had formed a revolutionary circle mainly among students
at the state-sponsored rabbinical school, at Vilna." [SCHAPIRO, L., 1961,
p. 153]
Also, notes Albert Lindemann, "it seems
beyond serious debate that in the first twenty years of the Bolshevik Party
the top ten to twenty leaders included close to a majority of Jews. Of the
seven 'major figures' listed in The Makers of the Russian Revolution,
four are of Jewish origin." [LINDEMANN, p. 429-430] Among the most important Jewish communists
were the aforementioned Trotsky (originally Lev Davidovich Bronstein) and
Grigori Yevseyevich Zinoviev ("Lenin's closest associate in the war years").
Lev Borisovich Kamenev (Rosenfeld) headed the party newspaper, Pravda.
Adolf Yoffe was head of the Revolutionary Military Committee of the Petrograd
Bolshevik Party in 1917-18. Moisei Solomonovich, head of the secret police
in Petrograd, was known by some as the epitome of "Jewish terror against
the Russian people." [LINDEMANN, p. 431]
In Hungary, notes Jewish scholar Howard Sachar,
"for 135 days [in 1919], Hungary was ruled by a Communist dictatorship.
Its party boss, Bela Kun, was a Jew. So were 31 of the 49 commissars in Kun's
regime." [SACHAR, H., 1985, p. 339]
During that
time, note Jewish scholars Stanley Rothman and S. Robert Lichter, Jews also
represented
"most managers of the forty-eight People's
Commissars in his
revolutionary government. Most managers of
the new state farms were
Jewish, as were the bureau chiefs of the Central
Administration and the
leading olice officers. Overall, of 202 high
officials in the Kun government,
161 were Jewish. Jews remained active in the
Communist party during
the Horthy regime of 1920-44, dominating its
leadership. Again,
most were from established, midle-class (or,
at worst, lower-middle-
class) backgrounds. Hardly any were proletarians
or peasants. Most
of the Hungarian Jewish community was massacred
during World
War II ... Nonetheless, the leading cadres
of the Communist party in
the postwar period were Jews, who completely
dominated the regime until
1952-53 ... The wags of Budapest explained
the presence of a lone
gentile in the party leadership on the grounds
that a 'goy' was
needed to turn on the lights on Saturday."
[ROTHMAN/LICHTER, 1982,
p. 89]
"In Lithuania," add Rothman
and Lichter,
"about 54 percent of the [Communist]
party cadres were Jewish. Salonika
Jewry played a major role in the foundation
of Greek Communist party and
remained prominent until the early 1940s.
Similar patterns prevailed in Rumania and
Czechoslovakia.
Jews played quite prominent roles in the top and second echelon
leadership
of the communist regimes in all of these countries in the immediate
postwar period. Theywere often associated
with Stalinist policies and were
strongly represented in the secret police.
In Poland, for example, three of the
five members of the original Politburo were
Jewish. A fourth, Wladyslaw Gomulka,
was married to a woman of Jewish background.
In both Rumania and Czechoslovakia,
at least two of the four key figures in the
Communist party were of Jewish background."
[ROTHMAN/LICHTER, 1982, p. 90]
In Canada, in the 1940s, the Jewish head
of the Communist Party in Montreal, Harry Binder, estimated that 70% of the
Communist Party membership in his city were Jewish. In Toronto, from a Jewish
population of 50,000, about 30% of the formal members of the local Communist
community were believed to be Jews, not including those who had looser ties
to the organization. [PARIS, E., 1980, p. 145]
David Biale notes Jewish pre-eminence among
the communists of South Africa:
"The fact that they were outsiders
to the main elements of white South
African society -- British and Afrikaner
-- undoubtedly made them more
likely to rebel against the existing order.
It was the explosive combination
of Communist ideology as a kind of substitute
for religion and the Jews'
marginal status that probably turned these
Jews into such a prevalent
presence on the South African left."
[BIALE, D., MARCH/APRIL 2000,
p. 63-64]
"Jews of Polish background played an important
role in the founding of the Cuban communist party," note Rothman and
Lichter, "and there are scattered indications of their significance in
left-wing parties and groups in other Latin American countries. Jews were
also prominent in the formation of Communist parties in various North African
countries." [ROTHMAN/LICHTER, 1982, p. 90-91]
Even in 1930's pre-Nazi Germany, the Communist
Party's top two leaders -- Rosa Luxemberg and Paul Levi -- were Jewish. (Hannah
Arendt notes that Luxemberg was a member of a "Polish-Jewish 'peer group,'"
which was a "carefully hidden attachment to the Polish party which sprang
from it.") [ARENDT, 1968, p. 40] Earlier, in the wake of World War I,
another Jewish radical, Kurt Eisner, proclaimed a socialist republic in Bavaria.
Upon his assassination, Eisner's government was replaced by another socialist
one -- that of president Ernst Toller (also Jewish). Erich Muehsam and Gustav
Landauer were other Jews in high positions in the government. [PAYNE, p. 124-125]
Next came a Communist coup to oust the socialist regime. As John Cornwell
describes it, "After a week or two of outlandish misrule, on April 12
[1919] a reign of terror ensued under the red revolutionary trio of Max Levien,
Eugen Levine, and Tonja Axelrod [also all Jewish] to hasten the dictatorship
of the proletariat. The new regime kidnapped 'middle-class' hostages, throwing
them into Stadeheim Prison. They shut down schools, imposed censorship, and
requisitioned peoples' homes and possessions." [CORNWELL, p. 74] In Austria,
in 1920, repeating the theme, "the socialist government was led by Friedrich
Adler, Otto Bauer, Karl Seitz, Julius Deutsch and Hugo Breitner." [GROLLMAN,
E., 1965, p. 117]
"The Austrian Social Democrat party was founded
by Victor Adler, a deracinated Jew from a well-known Prague Jewish family,
and the party paper was edited by Friedrich Austerlitz, a Moravian Jew. Other
prominent Jews in the party leadership included Wilhelm Ellenbogen, Otto Bauer,
Robert Dannenberg, and Max Adler." [ROTHMAN/LICHTER, 1982, p. 88]
'The list of leading socialists [in Germany]
of Jewish origin is long and illustrious," adds Adam Weisberger, "--
Eduard Bernstein, Rosa Luxemberg, Gustav Landauer, Kurt Eisner, Paul Singer,
Hugo Haase -- to mention some of the most prominent among them." [WEISBERG,
A., 1997, p. 2]
As George Mosse notes:
"Jews were highly visible in many of
the postwar [World War I]
revolutions, not only in Bolshevik Russia
but also in Budapest,
Munich, and Berlin. During the postwar
crisis, belief in Jewish
conspiracies and subversive activity was
not just a curious notion
held by professed haters of Jews; in 1918,
even Winston Churchill
associated Jews with the Bolshevik conspiracy."
[MOSSE, G., 1985,
For those who even know about such a past,
Jewish historiography these days tends to assert that communist and socialist
Jews, in Russia and everywhere else, did not have any interest in a Jewish
identity. This position asserts that such Jewish communist involvement was
an investment in a secular universalism that leaves behind the traditional
Jewish collectivist identity. In explaining away why so many Jews were secret
police terrorists under the communist regime in Eastern Europe [see above
links], Jewish author Michael Checinski writes that
"They were, for better or worse, considered
less susceptible to the
lures of 'Polish nationalism,' to which even
impeccable Polish Communists
were not thought immune. It should be remembered
that these Jews
were of a particular type: there were few
veteran Communists among
them, as their victims would be former KPP
members and other
left-wingers, and Moscow was taking no chances
with sentimental
ties of comradeship cramping their style
as guardians of political
'purity.' Many of them had not only sadistic
inclinations but also
various grudges against their future victims,
both Polish and Jewish.
Indeed, it is significant that there were
no traces of 'Jewish
solidarity' among the staff of the Tenth
Department. On the
contrary, they represented a distorted conception
of 'internationalism,'
which could be described as 'Jewish anti-Semitism.'"
[CHECINSKI,
M., 1982, p. 71-72]
This is a common Jewish apologetic tact today,
to explain away the Jewish identities
of so many communist terrorists by proclaiming that they had no connective
identity with others in their work circles. Even here, Jewish consensus proclaims,
even as Jews murdered others, Jews remain
victims
of anti-Semitism. [Much more about this in future chapters]
But as Kevin MacDonald suggests, "surface
declarations of a lack of Jewish identity may be highly misleading ... There
is good evidence for widespread self-deception about Jewish identity among
Jewish radicals ... [Bolshevism] was a government that aggressively attempted
to destroy all vestiges of Christianity as a socially unifying force within
the Soviet Union while at the same time it established a secular Jewish subculture."
[MACDONALD, 1998, p. 60]
Arthur Liebman notes this phenomenon in "the
flood of Yiddish-speaking Jews" to America in the early years of the
twentieth century:
"These new Jews were too large a constituency
to be kept separate from the
Socialist party for the length of time
ncessary to accept the arguments of the
sophisticated Marxist cosmopolitan Jews.
If these masses of Jews who valued
their Jewish identity and language would
come to socialism through a speical
Jewish organization, then the Socialists
decided they would have it. The Jewish
Socialist Federation was officially recognized
by the Socialist party in 1912."
[LIEBMAN, A., 1986, p. 339]
As Jewish author John Sack notes about the
many officials of Jewish origin in Poland after World War II who headed the
repressive communist secret police system:
"I'd interviewed twenty-three Jews
who'd been in the Office [of State
Security], and one, just one, had considered
himself a communist in
1945. He and the others had gone to Jewish
schools, studied the
Torah, had been bar-mitzvahed, sometimes
wore payes ... By whose
definition weren't they Jews? Not by the
Talmud's, certainly not by
the government of Israel's or the government
of Nazi Germany's."
[PIOTROWSKI, p. 63]
Melanie Kaye-Kantrowitz puts her Jewish
identity in a socialist context this way:
"Out of nowhere pops a question,
'If you don't care about being
Jewish, how come all your friends are Jews?'
Vivian ... thinks about being Jewish
on the toilet and in her
sleep, as well as every other moment of
the day or night.
'I live in New York,' I snap, and we
both burst out laughing.
Mentally I flip through my friends for a
non-Jew. Nothing.
She shakes her head. 'You're such a Jew.
How come you
don't know this about yourself?'
... My parents never thought about it
either, it was who they
were. In Vilna they were Jews and socialists,
and when they came
here they were still Jews and socialists.
They lived among other
Jews. Everyone spoke Jewish. What was there
to think? It was
like air, they breathed it. There was Jewish
everything. My parents
would argue who you could trust less, communists
or Democrats,
anarchists they never worried about. All
Jewish. Orthodox,
secular. Owners, bosses, workers. Doctors,
teachers, salesclerks,
writers, dancers, peddlers, you name it.
All Jewish. Movies. Gossip
columns. Like I said, you breathed it."
[KAYE-KANTROWITZ,
1990, p. 188]
Jewish author Anne Roiphe, today an ardent
supporter of Israel, addresses the same theme:
"I can say I was a Marxist before
I was old enough to know history,
and afterward a liberal, a Leftist, a woman
of the people with the people,
but finally I must own to the hypocrisy.
I see certain unwelcome
contradictions." [ROLPHE, 1981, p.
113]
Rolphe's first hypocrisy was that she was
born to wealth: "I am the product of the [economic] wits of my grandfather."
[ROLPHE, 1981, p. 113] And despite an identity as a Marxist, Leftist, liberal,
or whatever else she thought she was, Rolphe inevitably was drawn back to
"this odd mystical connection to the Jewish peoplehood, " [ROLPHE,
1981, p. 182] writing an entire volume about it (subtitled A Jewish Journey
in Christian America). "I thought," she wrote, "that ...
I had asserted my ego as separate from the forced march of Jewish history
... I had thought I had cut out the roots of the tree
that was causing too much shade in my garden ... [but] the tree without roots
had surprised me with its staying power." [ROIPHE, 1981, p. 180]
Jewish communist Sam Carr was released
from a Canadian prison in 1951 for spying for Russia. "Ironically,"
notes Erna Paris, "given the fact that he 'wasn't much of a Jew,' he
did become the leader of the Unified Jewish People's Order after 1960."
[PARIS, E., p. 176] In Argentina, Jewish publisher Jacobo Timerman was imprisoned
by the ruling military junta in 1977. It was pointed out to him by his right-wing
interrogators that he was a member of a "registered affiliate organization
of the Communist Party" in his youth. Timerman denied that he joined
it because of any interest in communism, but, rather, for how it could serve
his other ideological interests: "I belonged to it as an anti-Fascist,
a Jew, and a Zionist." [TIMERMAN, J., 1981, p. 116]
"A number of Jewish socialists, particularly
in the later stages of the [German] Wilhelhmine period," notes Adam Weisberger,
"exhibited the phenomenon of returning to Judaism ... although admittedly
often in secular or accentuated form. Joseph Bloch, for example, originally
an ardent assimilationist and German nationalist, became perhaps the chief
proponent of Zionism in the German socialist movement." [WEISBERGER,
A., 1997, p. 98]
In 1961, Jewish author Daniel Aaron criticized
the shallow attachment many in radical movements really had to their left-wing
postures: "Some writers joined or broke from the [Communist] Movement
because of their wives, or for careerist reasons, or because they read their
own inner disturbances into the realities of social dislocation. To put it
another way, the subject matter of politics ... was often the vehicle for
non-political emotions and compulsions." [WALD, p. 14]
Sigmund Freud (although not a Marxist, his
areligious work is often joined to Marxist theory) insisted that his psychological
speculations applied to all people and tried to dismiss any evidence of his
own special Jewish particularism. But he was always conflicted about it. As
he once wrote about his connection to Jewish identity, "When I felt an
inclination to [Jewish] national enthusiasm I strove to suppress it as being
harmful and wrong, alarmed by the warning examples of the people among whom
we Jews live. But plenty of other things remained to make the attraction of
Jewry and Jews irresistible -- many obscure emotional forces, which were the
more powerful the less they could be expressed in words, as well as a clear
consciousness of inner identity, the safe privacy of a common mental connection."
[ROIPHE, 1981, p. 180] (The clique that runs, and enforces, the psychoanalytic
world, as we shall see later, remains overwhelmingly Jewish).
Jewish messianic elitism in leftist "universalist"
circles endures to this day. In 1992, Michael Lerner, prominent editor of
the left-wing Jewish journal Tikkun, suggested remedies for curing
anti-Semitism in leftist organizations. The cure? "Put[ting] self-affirming
Jews in positions of leadership in your organizations" [LERNER, Socialism,
p. 115] and indoctrination sessions to sensitize non-Jews to Jewish needs
(Lerner's term is: "internal education programs.")
Erna Paris notes the history of Jewish communism
in Canada:
"Although the Jewish left claimed to
be dedicated to perfect equality,
it also gave full-blown expression to the
strong velvet-gloved, ancient,
patriarchal traditions of Judaism. If the
ancestral prophets like Amos
were the Fathers of Israel, so the men of
UJPO [United Jewish
People's Order: a 'Jewish' branch of communism]
and the school of
the Jewish labour movement were the 'Fathers'
of the women and
children in the movement. Without question,
they were the new
Hebrew prophets of a better world."
[PARIS, E., p. 152]
As Adam Weisberger notes this Jewish identity
root in the profound historical influence of Jews in revolutionary communist
and socialist movements that aimed to destroy the existing social order:
"A messianic idea, derived from traditional
Judaism, persisted through
the process of secularization and entered
into the groundwork of
socialism ... Jewish socialists, even when
they were estranged from
Judaism and possessed little or no formal
Jewish education, remained
an essential part of the mission of those
Jews who believed they had
broken with tradition." [WEISBERGER,
A., 1997, p. 112]
"After being nurtured by a culture that
saw itself superior by virtue of its special relationship with God,"
note Jewish authors Stanley Rothman and S. Robert Lichter,
"many Jews must have experienced their
contact with modern Europe
[with the birth of the Enlightenment] as traumatic.
It was difficult to
think Jewish life superior to the achievements
of European civilization
once the protective mantle of the shtetl
was no longer present. What
better way to reestablish claims to superiority
than by adopting the
most 'advanced' social position of the larger
society and viewing
this adoption as a reflection of Jewish heritage?
Thus many radical
Jewish intellectuals were able to continue to
assert Jewish
superiority, even as they denied their Jewishness."
[ROTHMAN/
LICHTER, 1982, p. 121]
Arnold Eisen, in a discussion of Leslie
Fiedler (who started out as a socialist) and other well-known Jewish American
"intellectuals," notes the transformative essence of Jewish identity
from traditional Judaism to modern political movements: "Here the entire
language of chosenness -- suffering, witness, mission, reciprocity, exclusivity,
covenant, and even repudiation of Christianity and idol worship! -- has been
appropriated and hollowed out in order to endow the Jewish intellectual with
the role of prophet to his own community and the world." [EISEN, p. 136]
Salo Baron goes back further in time, but underscores the same Jewish
identity foundation, which can, however incongruously, simultaneously straddle
both "universalistic" communist movements and "particularist"
Zionism:
"Under one guise or another, even the
antireligious movements in
19th century Judaism were unable to cast
off their messianic yearnings
for an ultimate redemption of their people,
or of mankind at large. The
growing secularization of modern Jewry
made the transition from
religious messianism to political Zionism
appear as but another link
in that long chain of evolution."
[BARON, 1964, p. 172]
David Horowitz recalls what it was like growing
up in a New York City household with his communist parents, an environment
still founded upon the Jewish religious myths of redemption:
"In the radical romance of our political
lives, the world was said
to have begun in innocence, but to have
fallen afterwards under
an evil spell, afflicting the lives of all
with great suffering and
injustice. According to our myth, a happy
ending beckoned,
however. Through the efforts of progressives
like us, the spell
would one day be lifted, and mankind would
be freed from its
trials." [HOROWITZ, D., 1999, p. 284]
Even the founder of Hadassah (the women's
Zionist organization), Henrietta Szold, once wrote that "the world has
not progressed beyond the need of Jewish instruction, but the Jew can be witness
and a missionary only if he is permitted to interpret the lessons of Judaism
as his peculiar nature and his peculiar discipline enable him to interpret
them." [GAL, A., 1986, p. 371] How Zionism, the modern secular expression
of traditional Jewish ethnocentrism, is supposed to "instruct the world
that has not progressed beyond the need of Jewish instruction" is never
explained. [Note Zionism's implicit racism and oppressive policies against
non-Jews in the later chapter about Israel].
With the erosion of the New Left in America
in the late 1960s and early 1970s, and Israel's 1967 victory in its war with
surrounding Arab states, distinctly Judeo-centric political configurations
arose out of the Jewish universalistic left-wing community that, as Mordecai
Chertoff notes, "affirm[ed] Zionism
... and Judaism ... as socialists and radicals." [CHERTOFF, p.
192] Such organizations included the Jewish Student Movement, the Jewish Action
Committee, Kadimah, the Jewish Student Union, the Maccabees, American Students
for Israel, the World Union of Jewish Students, Na'aseh, Jews for Urban Justice,
the New Jewish Committee, the Jewish Liberation Project, the Youth Commitee
for Peace and Democracy in the Middle East, and the Committee for Social Justice
in the Middle East. Such organizations produced between 20 and 40 periodicals
with a combined circulation of over 300,000. [GLAZER, NEW p. 192-193]
"The extreme radical groups of the
New Left came out officially in favor of the Arabs," notes James Yaffe,
"but it generally conceded that there was much opposition from Jews in
those groups. 'Jewish kids in the Movement,' one of them told me, 'have a
double standard on Israel. A non-Jewish leftist is much more likely to condemn
Israel than a Jewish leftist." [YAFFE, J., 1968, p. 193]
"There are still those [Jews] who
are impressed," wrote Nathan Glazer in 1971, "by what seems to be
the New Left concern for all of mankind, but more and more ... are discovering
... that there is a limit to the number of trumpets one can respond. [Jews]
are responding, in greater numbers to their own." [GLAZER, p. 196] "How
many times," complained anti-Vietnam War activist Gabriel Ende in the
same year, "have committed Jews joined with others in Vietnam and student
power rallies, only to have their erstwhile companions stab them in the back
with boorish anti-Israel remarks on the morrow?" [ENDE, G., 1971, p.
59]
Traditional Jewish tendency to cluster
and control is likewise evidenced in the opposite political field -- American
conservatism. Pat Buchanan -- the outspoken conservative newspaper columnist
and former candidate for the President of the United States (widely despised in Jewish circles as an "anti-Semite")
-- has attacked the 'neo-conservative' movement of Irving Kristol and others
(many Jewish), who Buchanon likens to "fleas who conclude they are steering
the dog, their relationship to the [conservative] movement has always been
parasitical." [SHAPIRO, Pat, p. 226]
In more recent history, reflecting another
popular angle of Jewish chauvinism under the guise of universalism (in a theme
to be discussed at length later), Eli Weisel, the well-known semi-official
spokesman for Jewish suffering in the Holocaust, wrote a formal report to
the President of the United States about what the proposed $168 million United
States Holocaust Memorial Museum in Washington DC would be. While up to six
million Jews were killed in the Nazi extermination programs (and over three
times that number of non-Jews may have been killed, [MILLER, p. 253] depending
upon how one defines "Holocaust," Weisel, true to Jewish particularist/univeralist
form, noted that the museum would focus mainly on Jewish victims:
"The Holocaust was the systematic
bureaucratic extermination of six
million Jews by the Nazis and their collaborators
as a central act of state
during the Second World War; as night
descended, millions of other
peoples were swept into this net of death
... The event is essentially
Jewish, yet its interpretation is universal. The universality of the
Holocaust lies in its [Jewish] uniqueness." [MILLER, p. 255]
A poignant -- and current -- example of this worldview is the aforementioned
Michael Lerner, a man who has been provided precious moments in the national
spotlight by an influential admirer, Hillary Clinton. Incredibly, Lerner frames
American universalistic ideals themselves
as oppressors of American Jewry. "Jews have been forced," complains
Lerner," to choose between a loyalty to their own people and a loyalty
to universal ideals." [LERNER, p. 5] What moral person of any faith or
ethnicity is not "forced to choose" -- by his or her own conscience
-- between what Lerner cannot openly state: selfish, exclusionist self-interest
club interests versus sacrifice for the
common
good? That Lerner imagines only Jews have faced such a dilemma in the American
-- or any -- context is but evidence of the blind depth of Judeo-centrism.
Lerner is enraptured, overwhelmed, by his own sense of Jewishness. True to
form, "it is [a] hidden vulnerability," insists Lerner, "that
constitutes the uniqueness of Jewish oppression." [LERNER, p. 65]
Leftist, rightist, Orthodox, atheist, or
anything else, the origins of Jewish incessant, undying obsession with their
"uniqueness," "exceptionality," "difference,"
"messianism," et al is to be found in the Judaic religious record.
As Adam Garfinkle sees it:
"The mission of Israel, as the Prophets
defined it, is to spread
monotheism and the moral code that flows
from it around the world,
but not to make everyone part of a great
Israelite tribe. .... The Jews
do not merge with the nations or convert
them. They are, said Balaam,
in Numbers 23:9, a people destined to
live alone. Although Jewish ideas
are universalistic, [?] traditional Jews
see themselves in exclusionist
terms, a self-perception that has caused
endless confusion and
resentment among non-Jews. Jewish apologists
like to emphasize the
special burdens of this role and point
to the costs it has extracted on the
Jewish people in history -- no doubt all
true. But that does not change
the basic fact, as even a casual reading
of central Jewish texts show,
that Jews have believed themselves special,
closer to the Divine than
other people." [GARFINKLE, p. 10]
