I went to shul on the afternoon of Yom Kippur and was there for the "martyrology" section of the Conservative prayerbook. In which the rabbis who were slaughtered in the Crusades are eulogized, the pogroms in eastern Europe are invoked, also the women who killed themselves rather than submit to Nazis in Poland, and Mainz from World War II, and ultimately, we cite Hebron and Jerusalem. Hebron is a reference to Arab riots in 1929 that killed dozens of Jews in the West Bank. Jerusalem I take to be a reference to suicide bombers. The rabbi said something about Israel, and of course the Israeli flag was up there, which has reminded Doug Rushkoff and others of the claims for dual loyalty made by Zionists.
When the congregation said Hebron, I murmured "Gaza" and felt good about it.
Today my friend James North asked me if I had observed Yom Kippur and I told him about the martyrology. He said, "It sounds like they left out all the Jews that were murdered when the Muslims ruled Spain."
I said, "I didn't know about them."
"That's my point," he said. They weren't murdered. Maimonides had flourished in Spain, it wasn't till the Christians took over in the 1400s that Spinoza's forbears and countless other Jews were forced to convert or leave, he said.
Update: Commenter Wondering Jew and others nail my mistake on Maimonides. Thank you
Wow. I haven’t been to shul on YK in years (my hypocrisy allergy tends to flare up), but my old Ortho haunts only recited the “Eleh Ezkerah” piyut itself – which describes the ten martyrs tortured and killed by the Romans – with no additions or updates. I guess there’s something to be said for fossilised liturgy. Good for you for remembering Gaza. I would like to think that I would have done the same – but then there’s that allergy of mine. I wrote a couple of comments on Mondoweiss instead.
The Muslims, too, were persecuted by the Spanish Christians.
Moriscos AND Marranos
Amin Maalouf gives a vivid discription of the persecution and expulsion of Muslims and Jews from Christian Spain, in his wonderful novel Leo the African. For anyone unfamiliar with Maalouf, he is a brilliant storyteller, who has also written a couple of important works of non-fiction (The Crusades through Arab Eyes, On Identity).
“Maimonides had flourished in Spain”. Untrue!
I quote from Wikipedia’s bio of Maimonides [aka Rambam].
“The Almohades from Africa conquered Cordoba in 1148″ [Rambam was born in 1135-wj] “and threatened the Jewish community with the choice of conversion to Islam, death or exile. Maimonides’s family, along with most other Jews, chose exile. For the next ten years they moved about in southern Spain, avoiding the conquering Almohades, but eventually settled in Fez in Morocco… Following this sojourn in Morocco, he and his family briefly lived in the Holy Land, before settling in Fostat, Egypt around 1168.”
The Almohades might have been the exception rather than the rule (among Muslims) for the “convert, leave or die” alternatives that they offered the Jews. But they were Muslims and to state that Maimonides flourished in Spain is to demonstrate an ignorance of history and to state it as fact.
A correction is warranted.
Correct. Maimonides’ family came to a lot of grief under the Almohades. The famous Spanish Jewish exgete and poet Abraham Ibn Ezra wrote two poignant laments for the fourteen Jewish communities destroyed by the Almohades in Andalus and North Africa. It must be said however, that that dark period was an exception to the general tolerance enjoyed by Christians, Jews and “heretical” Muslims in Muslim Spain.
You seem to be pointing out, Wondering Jew, that there were two groups of Muslims. So you’re going to blame all Muslims — you know, including the ones who allowed Maimonides to become a scholar of great renown and helped preserve his writings, instead of doing what Christians pretty much universally at the time did to Jews — keep them as slaves, or worse?
Are you forgetting that the reason Maimonides was even able to flee to the Holy Land was because Muslims had displaced the Roman Empire and permitted Jews to return?
You know, if you demonized Jews the way you demonized Muslims, WJ, well… frankly, you’d be a Nazi sympathizer.
Are you related to Kaos from “Get Smart”?
Wondering Jew is right. Although it is revealing that Maimonides and his family fled the Almohades not to Christian Western Europe, but to Morocco, the Holy Land, and Egypt — predominately Muslim areas. The point is that Western Orientalists who contend that Islam is by its nature viciously hostile to Jews and Christians contradict centuries of history.
Dead right. This knee-jerk division of the Middle Ages into the Abrahamic Three is so far off the mark as to be laughable. Here’s another flush on the history we know so little about because most of us only speak one language and cant read in the original; hence, our arrogance subsumes our lack of a better education, which so few us us got in US high schools.
link to newdawnmagazine.com
The martyrs is about those that committed to ONE God, as expressed through Torah and the association of the followers of Torah.
Political revisionism does not detract from that assertion, not really says anything about anything.
Not really says anything about anything? Kind of like you, I guess.
Also. GASP! You mean Jews venerate martyrs too?! I was taught that was a crazy Muslim custom to be despised — oh, wait, I forgot, I was raised Catholic. We honor martyrs too.
Funny, that.
Witty actually thinks he is a MOT that is different in some key way from the rest of humanity–it’s always nice to feel chosen, makes one feel less isolated and in a commune. Every organization on the face of the earth depends on this feeling of superiority. It’s really Psyche 101, and cuts across all secular and religious cults, new or ancient.
In my shul, we pray for Muslims, for Palestinians, for Arabs weekly. We pray that they get to live decent lives, lives in peace and security, same as we pray for ourselves.
Conservatives make a mistake when they describe terror victims as martyrs, as neo-fascists err when they describe terror perpetrators as martyrs.
Phil errs in describing Gazan civilians as martyrs in the same sense that the prayer for the martyrs is conveyed in shul.
I get how at 19 he could be confused. I don’t get how at 54 he could be. He has the capacity to be thoughtful and effective, and wastes that capacity with cutely clever propagandistic approaches rather than respectful, thoughtful and true.
Oh, you’ll pray for them. You won’t lift a finger and you won’t stop sending money to the people who are murdering them and stealing their land and starving them to death, but oooh, you’ll pray for them.
Anyone else wonder what that prayer sounds like? “Oh God, I pray that the Palestinians stop making the Israelis do what they have to in the name of security. I pray that they stop fighting for their sovereignty against the fourth most well armed military in the entire world who has violated more UN resolutions than any other nation combined. I pray for all those unfortunate Gazan children who blundered into the path of IDF bullets and mortars and white phosphorous. Oh God, I pray that you give me strength so that they don’t make me hate them.”
I’ve not sent a dime to any expansionist, and I have invested my personal funds in education on the plight of Palestinians, including distribution of materials by Chomsky (whom I disagreed with).
Don’t shoot first, before making sure that your target is not a civilian. Otherwise you will be guilty of war-crimes. Only of words, but libelous lies nevertheless.
I’d say that shooting at a civilian target would merely make me IDF but then you seem to think that reports of that actually happening are only “opinions.”
I thought Yom Kippur was a day of atonement. Was there no mention at all of the Palesitianians run out or killed as land was being legally and illegally confiscated in the 30′s and 40′s and continues today?
Kathleen – As with all good human ideas, there is theory and there is practice. In theory, Yom Kippur is the day of atonement, on which we repent and pray to God to forgive the sins we have committed against him, and ask our fellow man (specifically and individually) to forgive the sins we have committed against him. Despite a lot of hype about the Kol Nidre prayer, there are no structural tricks or shortcuts. Repentance must be sincere, and must include recognition of one’s actions, regret, and determination not to repeat our wrongdoings.
In practice, honesty and sincerity are rare commodities. There is a special Yom Kippur prayer distributed by Rabbis for Human Rights concerning wrongs against Palestinians, recited by some individuals and congregations during the prayer of public confession. The vast majority of individuals and congregations fail to take an honest look at all of their sins of commission and omission.
So is Yom Kippur only about looking at the crimes commited against Jews? If that is it that is pathetic
Yom Kippur is about personal reflection, repeated, transforming a state of guilt to a state of normalcy and participation.
It is NOT about groveling, but about healing.
And, it is future oriented. So, reforms are useful and called for, insisted on.
Kathleen – The point of the Martyrology is to arouse devotion and contrition, not to wallow in Jewish victimhood. I think the Conservative Movement has entirely missed the point by adding to the original (and indeed moving) mediaeval liturgical poem. I find Phil’s addition of Gaza, on the other hand, entirely in the spirit of the ancient liturgy.
“Hebron is a reference to Arab riots in 1929 that killed dozens of Jews in the West Bank.”
I like it when this event is mentioned once in a blue moon. Makes most of the posters here struggle to explain why the Palestinians would murder Jews regardless of any Jewish state or occupation.
The nice thing about Tom Segev’s book is that one gets the context for this and the earlier riots–this was at a time when it was clear the Zionists were trying to take over. This was after the Balfour Declaration, in which the Zionists persuaded the British colonial overlords to promise them a state where Arabs already lived in vastly larger numbers. It doesn’t make one excuse the particular individuals who killed Jewish children–and btw, it was particular Palestinians, not “the Palestinians”. One also learns that an early Zionist was complaining about the contempt and violence his fellow Zionists would use on Arabs as early as 1891.
Another thing I “like” to learn is that the Zionists are the ones who introduced terrorist bombings against Arab civilians as a tactic into this conflict. This probably makes some Zionists struggle to explain why Palestinian terrorism is worse.
I interpret the right-wing political motivations (coercion) of terrorists to be similar.
The Etzel and the black hand were similar.
The Zionists themselves, including even slighted Ben-Gurion, offered to participate in a bi-national state before the 1936 Arab riots made that obviously impossible.
Read already Donald.
Segev and Pappe are not enough.
Gasp! You blamed the Arabs for the very foundation of Israel? Gee, what a shocker, Witty. I suppose we can scratch that off the list of “Things Witty hasn’t blamed the Palestinians for”
I haven’t read Pappe. I’vepicked up my rather jaundiced view of Zionism from reading people like Shlaim, Morris, Meron Benvenisti and Shlomo Ben-Ami, among others, but haven’t read Pappe yet. And Ben Gurion talked out of every corner of his mouth, according to Avi Shlaim. Shlomo Ben-Ami gives me the same impression–he says Ben Gurion sometimes talked of Arab rights, but fundamentally had contempt for them and his positions were contradictory. He was a pragmatic politician–in some respects the Palestinians could learn a thing or two from him, if they want to achieve their state through Machiavellian means. I often suspect that one reason the Israelis are so suspicious of long-term Palestinian ambitions is that they know their own Zionist heroes were the same way–talk about living in peace and compromise, while planning to take what one could get at the moment and hoping to get more later.
Judah Magnes was a good man. Ben Gurion was a politician.
As for the 1936 Arab uprising making a binational state impossible, that says something about you, doesn’t it? An Arab revolt is crushed, and so from that moment on, in your mind, Ben Gurion is right to think in terms of ethnic cleansing. Because ethnic cleansing was the only way they could realistically have a Jewish democracy.
You’re really not a good representative for your position. I’ve been at other blogs with liberal Zionists who didn’t come across the way you do–that weird mixture of seeming humility and arrogance and double standards. I have to remind myself that Shlomo Ben Ami (who I respect even if I don’t necessarily agree with him on everything) was in the Israeli government at one point and you’re just another goofy person hanging around a blog. As am I.
In the tradition of Zionist “doves”, Ben-Ami has always talked a good talk, and I used to have a lot of respect for him. As minister of internal security during the Second Intifada however, he was responsible for – and justified – the killing of 13 Palestinian Israeli demonstrators. Since then, I haven’t been able to take anything he says seriously. I’d rather be a goofy person hanging around a blog than a killer who pretends to be a delicate soul.
Palestinians in Israel have declared a general strike today, to mark the anniversary of the police violence that left 13 Palestinian Israeli citizens dead, in October 2000.
“Time to read of his life.”
You sound like a preacher. Segev, who you imply is a propagandist, is actually sympathetic to both sides in his book, but the reader of his books gets the sense of the distinction between the idealized history of Zionism and the actual history. The historians I’ve mentioned come to the conclusion that Ben Gurion’s life is full of contradictory statements and beliefs because those are the facts.
And actually, quite a few people respect Jabotinsky for his blunt honesty–he was brutal, but you knew what he was up to and you knew where he stood, unlike the more diplomatic liars. It doesn’t mean Jabotinsky was a good person, but his views of the Arabs weren’t that different from Ben Gurion’s–he just didn’t pretend otherwise.
As for your beliefs, I was initially impressed by some of what you said, until I noticed your moral inconsistencies, which always bend in one direction and the way you try to restrict criticism of your team to the actions of the extreme right.
Shmuel–I didn’t know that about Ben Ami. Shows what a little time in a government position will do to a person–I also think that, like Morris, the closer you come to the present the more ideological his views become, though he’s not nearly as bad as Morris in that respect, as far as I can tell.
Ben Gurion’s overtures to Arab leaders were not isolated incidents. They were part of his program, until he realized that there was no possible raproachment.
You read revisions of his views over a life during struggle and changing circumstances. Time to read of his actual life.
Judah Magnes and Martin Buber similarly changed over their life, especially during and following the holocaust. They did advocate for cultural Zionism, for settlement and for the revival of Hebraic culture. And, they held that reconciliation was possible for longer than Ben Gurion, and certainly longer than Jabotinsky. (Ironically, the Arab leaders stated that they trusted Jabotinsky as sincere (simple and unconditional), whereas they didn’t trust Weizman for example, as a more conditional nuanced diplomat).
The bi-nationalist idea was rejected by the Arab communities on more than a few occassions when it was seriously proposed and by the Zionist leadership. (Not as rhetoric).
It is easy to revise history.
I’m a goofy well-read blog poster, with conviction to pursue mutual decency through non-militant means.
I’m a liberal, similar to Judah Magnes in sympathies and hopes. Most Jews and Israelis have given up hope that any reconciliation between Arab and Israeli Jewish community is possible. I retain that hope.
Those that go to some coercive form of dissent, invest in the hopelessness, NOT in the hopefulness of mutual decency that they like to paint themselves.
“Ben Gurion’s overtures to Arab leaders were not isolated incidents. They were part of his program, until he realized that there was no possible raproachment.”
What do you mean by “no possible raproachment?” Are you really all that surprised that the natives of the Middle East weren’t too keen on a militant European Zionist entity with ambitions to stretch north into Lebanon and Syria, East through Jordan right through to Iraq and southwest into Egypt displacing them and founding a colonial state?
Go ahead and deny that “Eretz Israel” was never a component of Zionism. I dare you.
The prayers are just a part of it…inside a unnamed rabbi’s home a wall carving done as a gift he says from his wedding. It is about 3×5 1/2 approx with the ancient text stating something pretty bad in arabic in a denouncing aspect. So yes they are always in some prayer like everyone…but for what is it they are praying for…and to whom would be a god in any negativity light that you would pray for yourself forsaking all others out side the cult or circle?
I sincerely wish that Phil would have posted on what he DID value of the Yom Kippur prayer process, rather than what he resented.
Did you miss the part where Phil was actually reacting to how Yom Kippur had been suborned for political statement already? Nice of you to put the blinders on after the fact.