Last Spring, I asked my father over dinner why it was such an outrageous proposition, leaving aside whether or not true, that Judaism is solely a matter of confession, as opposed to an ethnonational identity. He answered with some trepidation “because it contradicts 2,000 years of history.” When I went on to concede that for most of Jewish history there existed isolated ethnic-tribal groupings who adopted Judaism – in other words, numerous Jewish peoples – but that the idea that they constituted a single pan-Jewish volk was absurd, my father rigidly retorted “they just are.”
I was struck, first, by the sharp contrast to a Reform Rabbi friend who had months earlier given a thoughtful if less than satisfactory answer to the question. But the reality exposed right before my eyes was stunning. I remember growing up how odd I found it that my father, a serious Jew and a physicist, was deeply ambivalent about any notion of reconciling science and religion, and more recently was practically on the fence about even believing in God. But the quasi-racialist imperative of “Jewish peoplehood” – this was what, in the phrase of Maimonides, he believed with a perfect faith.
Norman Podhoretz, in his recently published angst asking why Jews are liberals, finally concludes what may be his most totally self-regarding work yet by describing the “Torah of liberalism” to which most American Jews subscribe. This Torah of liberalism does exist, and I am not a fan (notwithstanding my own lefty shul which the Commentary set would surely argue is its ultimate expression). The bottom line is that Podhoretz and his followers are the last people who can credibly criticize the Torah of liberalism, for it merely follows in the precedent set by their Torah of Jewish nationalism.
I frankly never got the Torah of Jewish nationalism until I was an adult. My formal Jewish education (Conservative) very clumsily hobbled together Hebrew instruction so that one could recite but not understand a traditional prayer service with the teaching of Zionist history to 5th graders at an 8th grade level, with the apparent intention of instilling an identification with these things deliberately lacking in substance. Never was it spelled out for us explicitly that this meant we were some kind of nation within a nation and not merely what we were instead of being Christian – presumably even the teachers were not quite credulous enough to say so. Finally, by the time I grew up my father would say to me point blank that “Judaism is a national religion” and that he had no problem with me being a “secular Jew”, from both of which statements I recoiled. For a time I completely despaired that there was no alternative.
For God so loved the Jews that he sent unto them his only begotten nation-state so that the Jewish people would not perish but have everlasting life – this is the Torah of Jewish nationalism in a single verse, the thing that, whatever their attitudes about the existence of God or the Jewish religion generally, Jews are expected by their self-appointed leaders to believe with a perfect faith. And now, at long last, we have a definitive and learned polemic against this idea which has caused so much terror in our world today with The Invention of the Jewish People by Shlomo Sand, finally released in its English translation.
To begin with, it is yet another testimony to that beautiful part of Israeli society which gives us Haaretz that a dense academic work could be on Israel’s best-seller list for 19 weeks. The book begins by thoroughly spelling out the theories of nationalism and its rise that I learned in graduate school. Readers may get lost in this, but their patience will be rewarded. Among the most useful parts of this preface is a long overdue explication of the etymology of the Hebrew am and how it was distorted into the German volk and ultimately the English people.
This provides the foundation for a discussion of Heinrich Graetz, whose five-volume History of the Jews in the 19th century remains a standard work. Though this remains a serious work of history and does not have an obvious ideological slant, it is nonetheless thoroughly grounded in the foundations of modern nationalism inspired by Hegel. The translation of this into political Jewish nationalism, however, would be provided by Moses Hess.
It is shocking to consider the vast chasm between the long shadow and brief historical treatment of Moses Hess. The disillusioned “Young Hegelian” comrade of Marx and Engels foresaw the resurrection of the eternal Jewish nation as part of a larger nationalist framework which anticipated both fascism and Wilsonian democracy. Arguably therefore the first neocon, a century before Norman Podhoretz wrote My Negro Problem – And Ours, Moses Hess blazed this dark path by declaring in his manifesto Rome and Jerusalem “that behind the problems of nationality and freedom there is a still deeper problem which cannot be solved by mere phrases, namely, the race question, which is as old as history itself and which must be solved before attempting the solution of the political and social problems.”
Also beginning with Graetz and later elaborated by authors such as Simon Dubnow and Salo Baron was the dramatic revival of historical interest in the Old Testament, which ultimately led to the bizarre Bible study groups of Ben-Gurion and other avowed atheist founders of the State of Israel, and finally the teaching of the Old Testament as a secular “national history” in Israeli schools. And on this foundation was built what Sand calls “the invention of the exile”, that is, the ahistorical notion that the Romans ever expelled the Jews en masse from Palestine which nonetheless forms a crucial component of the Torah of Jewish nationalism.
Here we arrive at the crux of the matter – whether Judaism has historically been a religion or a tribalism – by asserting the incontrovertible historic fact that even Sand’s detractors dare not directly refute but rather obfuscate as best they can: that Judaism was spread far and wide throughout the Hellenistic world by missionaries, and that Palestine had a Judean majority until the rise of Islam. Sand elaborates that Judaism as we know it first emerged out of the universalist and monotheist ferment of Persia and was opposed to the exclusionist sect founded by Ezra and Nehemiah, with numerous biblical texts such as the Books of Isaiah and Ruth originally written as polemics against this sect.
Moreover, as the Jews moved into the Hellenistic world, they were, contrary to the modern telling, more of that world than opposed to it. Traditionalist Jews today will scold any suggestion of Hanukkah as part of some universal “holiday season” because it is precisely the celebration of triumph over assmilationism. But the irony, as Sand points out, is that Hanukkah originated as a Hellenist observance and was only recast as celebrating the military triumph of the (in fact deeply Hellenized) Hasmoneans at the dawn of Rabbinic Judaism, some five centuries after the fact.
The height of Jewish expansion was in fact in the third century, long after the alleged exile and at the time of the completion of the Mishnah, when at least one chronicler wrote “The noun Iuodaios is not the name of an ethnos, but of a choice in manner of life.” Judaism remained an active proselytizing religion well after the triumph of Christianity, but focused itself on what remained the periphery of the Christian world, and here at last is the meat of Sand’s deconstruction of the Torah of Jewish nationalism.
During the early Middle Ages, three separate Jewish kingdoms took hold at the fringes of Christendom, all three born of proselytizing, and to which virtually all Jewish communities of the last thousand years can be traced back. The first two were the Himyar of Yemen and the Kahina of Berber North Africa. Both fell to Muslim conquest by the end of the seventh century, but the Jews were then well represented in the Muslim armies which conquered Palestine and Iberia respectively. Of the Himyar came the Yemenite Jews as well as the Ethiopian Jews whom they converted in the rival Christian kingdom of Axum across Red Sea. And from the Berber Kahina came the Sephardic Jews who flourished in Spain and were ultimately dispersed across Western Europe, the Americas, and the Ottoman Empire.
Sand notes that in the brief instances when Graetz and his successors were forced to acknowledge these two kingdoms at all, extreme sophistry was employed toward asserting that they were unequivocally born of the seed of Abraham, of “the Jewish nation.” The third kingdom, Khazaria, which extended at its height across the Russian steppe from Crimea to the Aral Sea, would leave far too great a legacy in history for the inventors of the Jewish people to ignore, and would haunt them right unto the present.
What is beyond any historical dispute is that the rulers of the Khazar Empire converted to Judaism in the year 740, and that a century later its sphere of influence, consisting of various tributary states, extended as far west as the gates of Vienna and as far east as the present-day northwestern border of China. The fall of Khazaria began with the internal sacking by the Kievan Rus in the 10th century and its last remnants were swept away by the Golden Horde.
What Zionist historiography has hotly disputed is that this is the primary origin of Eastern European Jewry. A key claim is that only the rulers and nobility converted to Judaism, not the masses, but over the course of two to three centuries a large enough segment of the population would have surely adopted the religion of the ruling class to leave a lasting legacy. The passions have also been exacerbated in recent years by the seizing of anti-Semites upon the history of the Khazars, particularly both black and white supremacist sects which claim to be the true Israelites. But contrary to this, the Khazars in fact had the strongest link to the ancient Judeans among the three kingdoms, having been influenced by the original great mass of Persian Jews dating to the pre-Hellenic era, which also left remnants in Greece, Iran, and India. It is, in fact, the Sephardic and Yemenite Jews who have the most overwhelmingly proselyte ancestry.
Sophisticated arguments have been constructed by the keepers of the Torah of Jewish nationalism to refute the idea that European Jews are overwhelmingly descended from the Jews of Khazaria, but they manage to ignore simple logic: They would honestly have us believe that a kingdom ruled by Jews was not the principal source of the exceptionally large Jewish population of their territory for the thousand years following their fall.
Zionist historiography has insisted that most Eastern European Jews are descended from Jews who migrated from Germany, but as Sand points out, contrary to what they would have us believe, only a tiny number of Jews endured the medieval German ghetto, so in fact German Jewry was largely descended from the westward migration of Khazars with their long-time vassals, the Magyars, into Central Europe in the 10th and 11th centuries. This migration was key, because it was the crucible of European Jewish civilization.
Whereas the Khazars likely spoke a Turkic dialect, upon arriving with the Magyars who founded the Hungarian nation they adopted the local medieval Gothic dialect, which, when combined with the Turkic influence on the language of their religious practice in words like daven and yarmulke gave birth to the Yiddish language, dialects of which would be the language of no less than 80% of the world’s Jews by the year 1900.
Lost to the Torah of Jewish nationalism then is the history of a great cosmopolitan and religiously pluralist empire the size of India or Brazil, which lasted four times longer than the Hasmonean Kingdom of less than a century (about as long as, on its present course, the State of Israel) – which thrived no less in the darkest of the dark ages and, as the nexus of trade between East and West for several centuries, came remarkably close to giving birth to capitalism almost a thousand years before the English and the Dutch.
Furthermore, Sand misses in his telling a critical implication of the history of Khazaria, a reason equally important to the genetic continuity of “the Jewish people” that it threatens the Torah of Jewish nationalism. The critical premise of the Torah of Jewish nationalism that anti-Semitism is a constant and mystical force in history and human nature, ultimately owes as much to the Holocaust as it does to the Russian experience, in which anti-Semitism was indispensably fueled by Russian Orthodox theology.
But this history easily strips the mysticism from the reality, which is of a long legacy of ancient and gruesome tribal warfare between the Khazars and the medieval Slavic tribes. Most notably the Kievan Rus, which ultimately became the Russian Empire, but also likely countless other Eastern European nations, forged their earliest identities in wars of liberation against the Khazar Empire. The great historically philo-Semitic exception of Hungary is supportive of this, as the Khazars were an indispensable part of the Magyar migration.
And through the Yiddish Renaissance and the Bund, the legacy of the Khazars can be extended to the valiant struggle of the last European people to resist the rise of nationalism as both Zionism and European totalitarianism threatened it on two fronts, right up to the darkest of dark moments in the Warsaw Ghetto.
So by the 19th century, the rise of romantic nationalism led rather naturally to its most utterly fantastic proposition – that Europe’s great Yiddish civilization could somehow be merged with the various other small scattered communities across the globe who adhered to Judaism into a restored Jewish nation in Palestine, thus resurrecting with the “eternal nations” of France, Germany, and Italy the parent nation of western civilization itself. But by the time Herzl could get it all off the ground Western Europe was already beginning to move on, and by the time the State itself was founded, two world wars had disillusioned Europe with nationalism forever.
In his groundbreaking essay calling for a binational state, Tony Judt nailed it: “The problem is not, as it is sometimes suggested, that Israel is a European enclave in the Arab world, but rather that it arrived too late. It has imported a characteristically late 19th century separatist project into a world that has moved on, a world of individual rights, open frontiers, and international law. The very idea of a ‘Jewish state’, a state in which Jews and the Jewish religion have exclusive privileges from which non-Jewish citizens are forever excluded, is rooted in another time and place. Israel, in short, is an anachronism.”
Sand’s great triumph, along with restoring the history of Judaism as a worthy competitor of Christianity and Islam as monotheism triumphed in the wake of the fall of Rome, is to place Zionism’s invention of the Jewish people in its 19th century context to show just how anachronistic it is. Sand thus concludes his work by detailing the genetic research which has been undertaken in just the last several years, since the cracking of the human genome, to prove once and for all that the Jewish people are one, out of the Land of Israel from time immemorial. Sand convincingly argues that this research is of a piece with the discredited racial anthropology at the heart of much of early Zionist (and anti-Semitic) argument and that its methods will ultimately prove to have been equally dubious.
In short, Shlomo Sand may well be remembered – and very possibly within our lifetime – for knocking down the idol of “the Jewish people” as did Spinoza to classical rabbinic orthodoxy. Again, the great Tony Judt: “In cool, scholarly prose, he has, quite simply, normalized Jewish history. In place of the implausible myth of a unique nation with a special destiny – expelled, isolated, wandering and finally restored to its rightful home – he has reconstructed the history of the Jews and convincingly reintegrated that history into the general story of humankind. The self-serving and mostly imaginary Jewish past that has done so much to provoke conflict in the present is revealed, like the past of so many other nations, to be largely an invention.”
Related posts:
{ 2 trackbacks }
{ 189 comments }
Its an insightful and interesting article.
But, I think you miss one of the important ironies of Jewish identity. Rather than either/or (nationalist vs confessional, or other dualities), Jewish identity is both.
An orthodox friend described to me a lecture by a prominent rabbi talking about Torah in the 1920’s. In the lecture, the rabbi stated that Torah contains all of the prominent ideological emphases of the time. A socialist asked the rabbi for his ratification of his thesis that Torah was an advocacy for socialism and that rabbi gave it. An anarchist similarly. A “Main Street” capitalist similarly. And, a “Wall Street” capitalist as well.
Each argued to the rabbi that Torah ratified ONLY their perspective, that the others were innaccurate and rejected.
The rabbi responded “No, Torah is the story of the life of our people and our individual and communal relationship to the unnamable”. It need not be either/or.
Richard, nobody can say nothing like you can. Between unction and pretension, with plenty or room for bullshit.
“An orthodox friend described to me a lecture by a prominent rabbi talking about Torah in the 1920’s”
And you listened? Wow, you are a glutton for punishment. Oh BTW, what’s a “prominent” Rabbi? Is that like being a Bishop or a Cardinal?
You obviously believe that Torah is “either”, rather than “or” or both.
No one can handle a non sequitur like you, Richard, no one. You have the kind of Olympian detachment which almost makes me think you don’t know your pants are split, and your ass is showing.
And of course, what you are saying is that if I don’t credit your completly ridiculous story, made, without a doubt, from Kosher whole cloth, I’m not a good Torah-loving Jew. As you may know, there is an old Yiddish proverb which answers that, and it goes like this: “Blow it out your ass, clown” I’m sorry, but I don’t know a useful English translation.
witty do you plan on reading this book?
Talk about letting the air out of the MOT balloon that’s always up there in the thin air, just over the clouds non-Jews (and maybe at least the 50% of Jewish Americans who intermarry) usually see due to their contemporary view that the individual is the litmus test of what it means to be human, fully human… And that accordingly, it’s the state’s job merely to assure this–and no more, as developed at least from the Magna Carta to the USA Declaration Of Independence and its impact on the whole world.
what is MOT? M____ of Torah? Inquiring minds wat to understand your comment. Thanks.
A superb review, Jack. But what of the biological evidence; I assumed Tay-Sachs disease and other genetic evidence showed at least some biological connection, (not that it should matter)? How does Sand refute this?
Tay-Sachs disease is common to ashkenazi Jews – primarily of east european ancestry. Sand would no doubt argue this reinforces his thesis, as the gene carrying the disease may be traced to Khazar origins. I believe Tay Sachs is not at all common among Mizrahi jews (who immigrated to israel from arabic countries).
From whence do you get the idea that the acquiring of a genetic disease is a distinctive marker of a people?
That’s like saying you can tell if a person is black by whether they get sickle-cell anemia.
Mooser – diseases do run in ethnic groups, which is not the same as saying they are a distinctive marker. There’s something called statistics, according to which, ashkenazi Jews, especially those from eastern europe have a higher probability of being born with tay sachs than say, some other groups. This, of course does not imply that jews – specifically ashkenazi – are in any way a coherent group or that having the genetic disorder marks one as a jew with ashkenazi origins. Hopefully, you will not take issue with the way I stated the case above, ie, with the modifier “common to”. Seems to me you are way too sensitive to simple – and harmless – generalizations.
Unfortunately, I have a lot to do this morning, and will have to miss out on this discussion. One look at the article below the fold convinced me of that. Please, don’t let my absence inhibit the discussion in any way, have at it. Best to all, and see ya later.
One thing which incontestably unites Jews from every corner of the world is their worship of the sacred blue and white emblem. In fact, they told me in Hebrew School, the mysterious initials upon it are so sacred their true meanings must never be mentioned! So I never did learn what BMW stood for.
Judaism is a religion not a race.
Before the Jews were Jews, they were pagan.
Paganism is a religion not a race.
There are five races in the human DNA:
1- African
2- Mongolian
3- Chinese
4- Native Red Indian
5- Caucasian (which includes both Semitic and Aryan tribes)
Presently, little pure strain of any of the above remains. Most of humanity now is a mish-mash of varying degrees of mixed ethnicity.
Religion for the most part is the result of geography – ie if I was born in Saudi Arabia, I would probably be a Muslim today – if I were born in Tibet, I would probably be a Buddhist – if I were born in Texas, hell, I’d probably be an atheist by now :-)
Please enlighten us, Taxi! What distinguishes these five “races”? And how is this shown in their DNA? Are you proposing seperate evolutions of man in different places? Or early enough seperation of primary humans to produce different, well, what exactly, since you haven’t defined what constitutes a race. I know, it should be self evident from the groupings you gave us?
Or could you be both stupid and bigoted? Sounds like a two-fer to me.
Oh, and BTW, Taxi, where are the Jews in your schema? Which of the groups are they in?
Don’t be a fathead, Mooser. Taxi’s fifth group includes “Semitic tribes”.
I can’t help it. I have the genes for fatheadedness, on my mother’s side.
Humankind ORIGINATES from these five basic DNA types. Don’t bother arguing this with me, it’s not my ‘personal theory’ – go take it up with the god/goddess/nogodexists who created the grand design we call existence. In other words, don’t hiss-fit at the messenger.
I think we can all easily distinguish these five human races from their apparent physiognomy – ie, we can tell visually tell who’s ancestors come from Africa, and who’s hail from China.
“Oh, and BTW, Taxi, where are the Jews in your schema? Which of the groups are they in? ”
Like I said before, Judaism is a religion not a race. The original Semites come under the category of Caucasian – as do Aryans.
Stomp your feet as you may, Judaism will ALWAYS be a religion not a race.
Why gosh, there, taxi, old pal, if your “racial” divisions are that commonly accepted, would you mind referring me to, say, a Wiki article substantiating it.
Or are you saying that it is self evident, because well, all those people look that way?
And I am most certainly not the one claiming the Jews are anything more than an accident, just like anybody else.
“I think we can all easily distinguish these five human races from their apparent physiognomy “
And the measurements of their skull cavities? (I do not advocate doing this to live persons of any race or religion, except wingnuts.)
I mean, since no one can give us a level of genetic distinctiveness (and in which area? On which chromosomes? Leading to which characteristics?) which should distinguish one “people” or even “race”, for that matter, from another, the whole discussion is moot, don’t ya think? And may I assume no one here is proposing dividing mankind into different species?
Oh, I spoke too soon! Here’s “Taxi” with a brilliant racial schema of humanity, and I see the Jews aren’t even included.
I can see this is going to be a very special discussion, I’ll probably kick myself for missing it.
Another article by Shlomo Sand:
Israel deliberately forgets its history
Zionist nationalist myth of enforced exile. An Israeli historian suggests the diaspora was the consequence, not of the expulsion of the Hebrews from Palestine, but of proselytising across north Africa, southern Europe and the Middle East
http://mondediplo.com/2008/09/07israel
(2) See David Ben Gurion and Yitzhak Ben Zvi, Eretz Israel in the past and present, 1918 (in Yiddish), and Jerusalem, 1980 (in Hebrew); Yitzhak Ben Zvi, Our population in the country, Executive Committee of the Union for Youth and the Jewish National Fund, Warsaw, 1929 (in Hebrew).
“It has imported a characteristically late 19th century separatist project into a world that has moved on, a world of individual rights, open frontiers, and international law.”
I would bet money that the early Zionists never anticipated being left alone in that world; No matter what shape Israel took on eventually, they thought that the European colonial “mandate” in the Middle East would be around forever, and Zionism’s big problem would be dealing with those colonial controllers of the area in the last resort. But those darn English and French left the Midddle East and Israel has been trying to drag in another Shabbes Goy ever since, in desperation (or was it, America First?) even turning to the Soviet Union for a while. But, there’s always the US, unless we get our priorities straight.
I don’t understand that question, Mooser, but your comment points up one of the many absurdities of the Zionist project. The idea was that Jews couldn’t exist in Europe due entirely to irrational Christian religious prejudice. So off they went to Arab Palestine, and guess what the Jews promptly began facing existential threats there too, due entirely to irrational Muslim religious prejudice. So now those Jews’ fate is again in the hands of Christians, most especially rational, unprejudiced folks like Hagee and Dobson. Ironic, isn’t it?
Mooser- the early Zionists probably includes Herzl and at that time it was Turkey that controlled the Middle East, not England and France.
Not really relevant, per se, to where Zionism was when Israel waged the Nakba and declared independence, considering. Or, you know, the King David Hotel bombing and myriad other acts of Zionist terrorism. But thanks for playing!
” So off they went to Arab Palestine, and guess what the Jews promptly began facing existential threats there too, due entirely to irrational Muslim religious prejudice”
Except that Palestine was not “Arab” at the time. The English had gotten it along with some other stuff from the Ottoman Turks with the fall of the Ottoman Empire (their motto- “The Empire where you can put your feet up and relax”) and it was to the English the Zionists applied, and were granted, permission to settle. And it was with the English the Zionists had to fight to exceed their allotment. The Arabs didn’t have bupkis in the way of power. And the Zionists could simply shell them or scare them away( http://lawrenceofcyberia.blogs.com/news/2009/01/a-land-without-a-people.html)
And I maintain that the Zionists conceived of Israel within the context of a powerful and long-lasting British Empire to control the “Arabs” and relieve Israel. But that didn’t work out.
Now, I can see you are making your usual odiotic and anti-semitic point: that there is some intrinsic and fatal flaw in the make-up of “Jews” that makes everybody hate them, for good reasons. So why beat around the bush? First of all tell us who “the Jews” are, and then tell us what the fault is which causes otherwise peaceful and moderate Christians to hate them so. We might as well have it out in the open, so we can learn from it. Maybe I could even learn to be as good as a “moderate Christian” some day.
that there is some intrinsic and fatal flaw in the make-up of “Jews” that makes everybody hate them, for good reasons. How about some common fatal flaw in the genetic makeup of jews that causes them to invent a common ancestry, some myth about them all coming from the same ancient people? Nice theory, I like it. But you had work to do…
“How about some common fatal flaw in the genetic makeup of jews that causes them to invent a common ancestry, some myth about them all coming from the same ancient people?”
That might be some kind of distinction, if you could find me some people or even individual who hasn’t done that!
Mooser, Mooser, take a breath.
Except that Palestine was not “Arab” at the time. Yeah, it was, and Christian, AND Jewish. All three religions existed within Palestine. That’s a given. But the main population was Muslim. Whether Arabic or not, I dont know. And neither do you, but all the population censuses and the maps and the UN docs and the internal docs we can read on the web say that Arabs (meaning Muslims) occupied the majority of the country.
But then you take this badly engineered skate-board leap into this:
Hunh? Mooser, I luvs ya babee, but you’re better than this.
Guys? Arab is an ethnicity, not a nationality. There are Arab Muslims, Arab Christians and Arab Jews — and Palestine most definitely was Arab at the time.
Oh, I see what you are getting at, America fust-cless! I’m asking whether Israel’s brief fling at an alliance with Soviet Russia was out of desperation, or just the attraction of like, hive-minded, congenital leftist to one another. I mean, with Jews being irrresistibly attracted to totalitarian regimes, and having invented every one of them themselves, why, it’s like two peas in a pod, innit?
Naturally the left-wing project of Zionism was drawn to their Bolshevik brothers in the struggle against international capitalism and moderate Christianity.
I thought you were going to piss off today, as you mentioned above, and weren’t going to be available for commenting. :-) :-)
Palestine, of course, had three religions living there, there’s no question about that, but the area was a colonial “protectorate” of England’s. If it wasn’t, from whence comes the Balfour letter? Permission for further Jewish settlement had to come from England. Permission for expanded areas of Jewish settlement had to come from England. Why do you think the Zionists blew up the King David Hotel? Because the Arabs were giving them trouble? The “Arabs” were obviously not the problem, they could be easily scared off or killed. The English were a problem.
My point is that Zionism was in many ways, a sub-project of British Imperialism in its late stages. As the man said, already an anachronism when it was made.
But I’m pretty sure the Zionists thought that ultimately, they could count on Western Colonial interests not relinquishing the area, (it was after all, the Christian Holy Land and had been fought over since the Crusades) and could count on their help in enforcing colonial policies, like ‘move over and make room for Israel’
But they didn’t and Israel got left by its lonesome.
Hardly, I would think, a contentious point.
MRW, what do those punctuation marks mean? The “colon, dash, closing parenthesis thing? Everybody is using those as a sort of emoticon, but I don’t know what they mean. Is there a site which has them? Where did they come from?
I saw that first comment of Mooser’s and figured it to be a first attempt at gatekeeping on the topic. Mooser is afraid of where the discussion might go, and that was his first volley. Since returning to see the comments this afternoon, I was supremely UNsurprised to see that he is the most frequent commenter here, despite his professed busy schedule. We are straying from Mooser’s approved historical line , which is that Zionism is a merely a sub-project of British Imperialism, despite the fact that Zionism predates Britain’s post WWI control of Palestine, and that the early Zionists were petitioning the Ottoman Empire in the same way before WWI that they petitioned the British in the post war period.
Any attempt to insist that any two or more Jews could have gotten together and come up with the idea on their own is sacrilege to Mooser, because he knows that if you get two Jews together you will come up with 3 opposing ideas. Totally unlike, say, Americans, who are all “racist chickenhawks”, and can be easily and acceptably generalized about.
——
I’m just beginning on Sand’s book. I was sold on the author’s writing style after reading the introduction, where he recites the identity stories of his father and father-in-law and some of his friends and students, none of which comfortably fit the Zionist myth of Jewish (or non-Jewish) identity, and all of which cry out for a need for an Israeli identity separated from an ethno-religious one.
I also was sold on his quote from the book jacket, “I could not have gone on living in Israel without writing this book. I don’t think books can change the world – but when the world begins to change, it searches for different books.”
I also chanced upon the last few paragraphs of the book.I’ll only quote the last 3, although the paragraphs that precede it are just as profound, I think.
Mooser, :-) means smile, or laugh.
Yes: Mooser, Mooser, take a breath.
And Mooser, you don’t expect us to believe this. Do you? what do those punctuation marks mean? The “colon, dash, closing parenthesis thing?
;) ;-) :-)
Don’t shoot from the hip, honey Pie.
I am a bit puzzled in your activities above. I am with you concerning race studies, but does it at the same time bother you that Taxi doesn’t offer a special category for the Jews?
5- Caucasian (which includes both Semitic and Aryan tribes)
Maybe “I” didn’t read your responses carefully. But I did appreciate Jack’s review. So far I was very hesitant about Slomo Sand, in pretty much the same way I didn’t read one of Norman Finkelstein’s books, since it’s all over the place in circles I don’t really like.
Hmm? Is he still considering moving on to the “history of the Jews” studywise?
This sounds interesting:
It’s ages that I read Graetz, and Judaism isn’t exactly my expertise, but it is still somewhere on a shelf, so maybe I’ll put Sand on my reading list or in my Google books collection. Bad they don’t offer categories, or do they?
“We are straying from Mooser’s approved historical line , which is that Zionism is a merely a sub-project of British Imperialism,”
That is most certainly not what I have said. Zionism must be looked at from more angles than just it’s relationship to Judaism, is my point.
But that I inspire such petulant and personal animus in you will always be a comfort to me. That comes from reading your comments, so they are effective.
Listen to Shlomo Sand in two of his rare English interviews:
Radio
http://pulsemedia.org/2009/05/17/the-invention-of-the-jewish-people/
Video
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=cq6EPYLfcM0
Jews living in Tel Aviv, New York or Moscow do not share the same secular practices and language and thus cannot be called one people, says Professor Shlomo Sand.
Yay, Jack Ross. Now, Phil, as I wrote you before: get an interview with Sands on this site.
My point of course, although buried under mountains of whatever it is I bury stuff under, is that Sands is doing no more than bringing common sense and real history into the matter. But what I find so amazing is that the stories Jews tell about their own lives, their personal and family histories as they worked out their lives through oppression and emigration and assimilation will tell you that the story of a monolithic Jewry in any sense is ridiculous. This is what I meant when I said that the story of Jewish survival is a story of diversity, not the story of a monolithic people.
What is amazing is who, as Jack notes, people can make these two contradicting history congruent in their minds.
And if it wasn’t for the Zionists, we would probably be celebrating Jewish diversity, instead of Zionism hijacking religious instruction to instill conformism and destructive and racist myths.
I did some looking around the other day, on the web, and I’m beginning to wonder who many Jewish social or philanthropic organisations are “a-Zionist”. It’s a little too soon for me to tell, but I wonder how an Jewish organisation which advocates for social justice can completely ignore the problem of Zionism. I don’t know, and won’t know until someone smarter than me takes up the question, if they are PEP, or something else I’m not aware of yet, but I am calling “a-Zionist” for now.
I’m sure they can ignore it very easily, merely by abandoning the virtue of consistency.
I’m not sure yet. But look, ignoring it would actually be a step up from trying to rationalise or repeating lies about it. But as I said, I don’t know yet.
What I find so amazing is that the stories my Italian immigrant ancestors and my Polish immigrant friends and my Iranian immigrant friends and my German family members and the great masses of Irish Americans tell about their own lives, their personal and family histories as they worked out their lives through oppression and emigration and assimilation, are so human, so poignant, so rich.
The most antisemitic thing anyone can say seems to be: It’s not always all about YOU.
What on earth is your problem? But anyway, thanks for agreeing, that yes, no matter what particular wrinkles there are in the Jews history, they are pretty much like everyone else, and we can expect about the same degree of mixing.
Well, except all those other people, well, you know, they’re well, just not as cool as Jews. Everybody knows that!
Now, please, don’t fail to take this in the most banally literal sense possible. I wouldn’t want you to miss out on whatever it is that gets your juices flowing.
And as far as me having the greatest number of posts, well, what’s stopping you? Please, go ahead, outpost me, if posting on the same forum as me isn’t too distressing or below someone of your attainments.
Excellent review and commentary by Jack Ross. Now I really can’t wait to read the book myself – none of the other reviews I saw mentioned for example, the magyar connection to the khazars. To me, with my backround, this’d actually explain a lot. But I’ll have to first plow through the whole exposition before adding my comments.
Excellent review and commentary by Jack Ross
I agree.
“with Jews being irrresistibly attracted to totalitarian regimes”
Mooser, sometimes you are too funny.
I believe it was America Fust-Cless that tried to demonstrate the common Hebraic origins of Zionism, Socialism, Bolshevism and, wait for it, Neoconservatism. Not sure if we, or rather “the Jewish mind” were responsible for Nazism, too, but somehow, I bet we were.
Not to mention (and I sure wish he didn’t) “Jew media which promotes inter-racial relationships” . Hard to believe but that’s a quote.
I don’t know where Phil attracts this audience of tea-baggers. It must just be coincidence or something.
Yeah, I have to admit I find the whole “Jews are responsible for Bolshevism” very off putting. And not accurate. And socialism too. I don’t want to trivialize the important role that Jews play in socialism — and I consider myself a socialist, for the record — but socialism doesn’t belong to Judaism, or vice versa. And trying to tie Judaism to communism is way, way, way too McCarthy for my tastes.
I second your sentiments exactly, Chaos.
“I don’t know where Phil attracts this audience of tea-baggers. It must just be coincidence or something.”
If you don’t carefully monitor the comments section of a blog you often end up with crazies of one sort or another, or alternatively the sort of combative sociopaths who will say or do anything to “win” a debate. Given that this blog is devoted to the I/P conflict and only a handful of the most grotesque people have been banned, it’s actually surprising there isn’t a higher fraction of Arab-haters fighting it out with Jew-haters. “The Angry Arab” used to have a comment section which he didn’t police. I tried reading it a few times and it was totally worthless. I think there might have been some sane people, but the haters were overwhelming. The problem was solved when he eliminated the comment section.
Mooser: “I don’t know where Phil attracts this audience of tea-baggers. It must just be coincidence or something. ”
Donald: “… only a handful of the most grotesque people have been banned ….”
Though not being a tea-bagger myself and hopefully not being overly grotesque, I can’t agree with the sentiments behind either of these two statements. The implication is that there are a lot of grotesque people here still, which I have not been able to confirm by direct observation. And even tea-baggers sometimes have ideas worth considering – if only for purposes of debate.
I appreciate the diversity of reasonably intelligent views I find here. Makes for interesting discussion.
Good stuff, Jack Ross. Thank you.
(I would be interested in learning more about the changing attitudes towards proselytizing, as this seems to have a bearing on the concept of Jewish peoplehood.)
Actually I read several histories, but since I am no scholar of Judaism and miss the foundations, and thus read most of it without an awareness of scholarly traditions and controversies inside the Jewish community my knowledge is necessarily a dangerous half-knowledge. …
But as far as I remember most dealt with the topic: Yes Jews did proselytize, but to a much lesser extend than the Christians. As they tended to proselytize more among the elites, which is not such a stupid thing if you are a minority, at least from the time on that the Romans adopted Christianity.
Now, what reliably data could this be based on when e.g. Heinrich Graetz wrote his history? Obviously the proselytes among the elites are recorded, while the not so prominent and famous would be lost in history. I don’t remember if Graetz put it that way, I read him as a teenager. Or if he did, how I should interpret it given it was written in the 19th century, or what sources and/or data he relied on.
But as far as I rememberNicholas de Lange suggested it in his Illustrated history of the Jewish people. But obviously again, I don’t remember whom he cites in this context, and what earlier scholars he relies on.
Now we only have to wait a couple of years and Jack will help us non-experts with a new history and present us with an enlightened updated wisdom concerning this question and other issues.
I’m not following Mooser’s prolific posts. He doesn’t (I assume) believe Jews are a “people” in the racial sense. And he doesn’t believe in something that could be called Jewish identity (since he says there are as many Jewish ideologies as there are Jews). And I’m guessing he’s not a follower of the religion of Judaism. So what is it that he’s claiming membership in when he keeps informing us that he is “Jewish”?
“So what is it that he’s claiming membership in when he keeps informing us that he is “Jewish”?
D, a very good question! And as soon as I find out, I will let you know.
But of course, that shouldn’t prevent you from telling me what I’m a member of.
So why don’t you tell me what I am a member of when I say I’m Jewish.
And if I don’t do those things, what possible business could it be of yours? Have I asked you to report to me on your religious inclinations? But of course you think I must satisfy this demand or my credibility is in doubt?
I can only reply to you with the same Yiddish proverb I used for Witty.
Mooser, you are falling off the deep end here. You are the one here who continually announces your Jewishness, and you usually make crass stereotypical jokes about yourself while doing it, and at the same time you insist that there is no such thing as Jewishness. So, you’ve given us a conundrum and D is asking for your solution.
people wear cloths to fit in…walk around naked and see where it will get you…
same with nationality, religion and etc… if we lived in a society free of this, we could be free of it… perhaps that is the dilemma mooser intuitively recognizes… now off to the next costume ball, lol…
The easiest answer would have been that Jewishness is a cultural aspect of your upbringing for which you hold an affection. This is, I think, the answer that Phil and most of the posters here who identify as Jewish would give. But this answer makes Jewishness a contingent or accidental aspect of identity, like being an Irish-American or an Oregonian or coming from a community of cattle-ranchers. They see themselves as human beings who happen to have been exposed to particular ideas, some of which they may find inspirational, some of which they may find troubling.
But in your case, I got the impression that Jewishness is more central to your sense of identity than that. That’s the reason I asked. I didn’t mean to offend you.
” And I’m guessing he’s not a follower of the religion of Judaism.”
C’mon over and I’ll dick-smack you. Then you can see for yourself, huh.
Bit of a tangent, but that’s not a reliable indicator anymore. Not to… ahem… put too fine a point on it, but I might be mistaken for Jewish rather than Catholic in that regard.
Also, there is a trend to foregoing the procedure among some Jews.
As an observer I’ve always noted that what it means to be a jew depends upon the situation. Whatever will give one the upper hand in a discussion seems to be the preferred angle. Jewishness is a religion in some circumstances. It is a nationality in others. It is a race of people according to yet another line of thought. It is a political movement, etc. etc. And sometimes it is an amalgam of two or more. The fact is one is a Jew if they self-identify as such. If they seek approval from some officialdom (a Reform groom from a Conservative’s bride’s family) or some group (a synagogue, the ADL, whatever) then they hold themselves subject to passing certain litmus tests of their purity. Was your mother jewish? Have you been to Israel? Are you a zionist? Ad nauseam … as a lifelong atheist never indoctrinated into any kind of wacky superstitious cult I marvel at how much time and with such depth of feeling so much of humanity spends agonizing over all this hooey.
radii – you are homing in on it. Jews like to confuse the goyiim by the eternal ‘who’s a jew” conundrum – often posited more to confuse as to enlighten. In reality it’s just another tool to inferioratize the poor christians – who can’t make heads or tails of such holier-than-thou bouts of spiritual self-indulgence. Most western jews (which DOES NOT include the so-called jews of israel) are pretty much jews when convenient , with religiosity/denomination/ethnicity/nationality added in as needed to spruce up whatever conversation is going on. The common thread though is one – and Mooser will jump out of his skin at the mere mention of said commonality – it’s exceptionalism. No matter what any jew – real, wanna-be, pretend, accidental or whatever – tells you – they feel exceptional, changing only the meaning and/or substance of said exceptionality for added pomp and according to circumstance. In the bones it is felt – even at the cost of diminishing one’s own bond with the rest of humanity. Naturally, one feels at their most exclusive when vehemently denying it. And for that the Jews were often admired and hated throughout history. Yet, even as many a western member of the club – accidental or not – chooses to wrestle with the conflict of ‘chosen vs human” – there comes israel to have us all take a real good look at just how bad it can really look when taking the former way too literally.
I wouldn’t even frame it as Jews versus everyone else — from what I’ve seen, there are extremist Jews who attempt to confuse, browbeat and, failing that, exclude other Jews with their attempts to define “Jewish” exclusivity. Take how the Ethiopian Jews are treated — they were useful to Israel for the PR moment, but now that that’s over no more may come to Israel and those who are there are treated with open racism.
Those diverse demonic Jews always trying to get a foot up on you by tricking you with the people versus religious conundrum. Guess what? You know that chicken or egg conundrum? They came up with that too. No wonder Hitler wanted them dead.
As we’ve come to expect, WJ, you bring to the table all of the insight and constructive discussion as one might expect from a colonial era Puritanical preacher armed with scarlet letters and a cartload of witch-burning supplies.
WJ, if you have to put false words into others’ mouths to make your point, then maybe you should consider that you are projecting and not adding to the conversation. You’re descending into Chris Berel territory here. I would say that, although I have disagreed with most of them, up until now your arguments have been of a better caliber than this.
tree- please tell me how one should react to the danaa radii amen chorus published above. please enlighten me.
Danaa (is that our earlier Dana, by the way?),
a very private story make me hesitate concerning your “exceptionalist core”.
The personal story it triggers is the encounter with a female gatekeeper, a psychologist, a guardian in front of the gates for group therapy at my university then. All I remember is that she had long loud red fingernails. And the first thing she did when I had sat down was to push the button tape recorder. The second that followed almost immediately after was: You feel you are very special, exceptional. Why don’t you admit it. In the end of the encounter, about half an hour later, she told me: I would never accept you into the group, you would upset it.
I actually do think it makes sense to look for details in the encounters between Jewish/secular power/Christian European history, but my suspicion is that you will be confronted with a complex nexus between outside and inside definition, something Mooser struggles with and yes Wondering Jew is rightly wondering too.
What you should do is witness pretty much what they’re describing in action right over here: http://mondoweiss.net/2009/10/shlomo-sands-the-invention-of-the-jewish-people-reviewed-by-jack-ross.html#comment-114369
“Whatever will give one the upper hand in a discussion seems to be the preferred angle.”
Ah, my son, you have penetrated to the very center of Kabbalah and the Talmudic mysteries. It’s like you’re some kind of religious WD-40!
You have lit the lit, rung the bell, scored a knock-out, and are entitled to cigar or coco-nut, winners choice!
And we do that as well as Christians do!
Chaos- your dedication to the hatred of the Jews is worthy of a nobel peace prize. your rhetoric should be inscribed in the book of life and your name in lights on broadway.
WJ – your attitude lately has been disappointing. Your responses lately have been reduced to the lowest level of namecalling: “Jew-hater! Jew-hater! Jew-hater!”
Well, we all know that one can claim to be Jewish while simultaneously claiming to
be an atheist or persistent agnostic. This does not seem to be true of Christianity
or Islam. Right or wrong?
Many Catholics will say, I am a lapsed Catholic and as the Islamic world steps into modernity you will hear more Muslims say, I am a cultural Muslim.
But certainly Hitler did not give a theological exam at the gates of Auschwitz. And although it doesn’t befit the Jewish people to identify themselves based upon Hitler’s criteria, the two events of recent Jewish history are the holocaust and the state of Israel and the state of Israel (quite obviously) is a source of much controversy, whereas the holocaust as a victim experience is easier to relate to.
I’ve never heard a Jew claim to be a “lapsed Jew.” They say they are a Jew. Catholics either say they are Catholic or they say they are not. I won’t address your speculation
about future Muslims describing themselves as cultural Muslims. I rather think
they will describe their then present seld identity as Muslim or not (similarly, regardless of
informing you they were born into a particular religion or not).
Obviously somebody thinks it benefits somebody to identify themselves based on Hitler’s criteria–check out Israel’s law of return.
I met a Lebanese who identified himself as a Shiite and a supporter of Hezbollah. I once asked him if he believed in God and he said he was an atheist.
There’s always a few exceptins to any rule, which proves the rule.
WJ-
You forgot the third, major event of recent Jewish history, WJ — the takeover of America.
Joachim laid out some pretty compelling data:
http://eaazi.blogspot.com/2009/10/what-i-said-in-washington.html
Bradley Westerfield, Cheney’s favorite Yale professor, wrote in the textbook Cheney most likely used in the early 1950s, that Jews in the US exercised significant power because they could dominate a few electoral districts that had the capacity to swing a national election, and, more significantly, because no group in the US was funded or organized sufficiently to counterbalance Jewish power.
If Westerfield was right in the 1950s, and I believe he was, in how many more ways have Zionists, or persons and organizations in power in the US whose agenda focuses on support for Israel regardless of the negative impact on US interests, taken at least gatekeeper control of American media, finance, intelligence, communications, legislation, entertainment, foreign policy, and “homeland security,” (Joe Lieberman’s brainchild, Michael Chertoff’s domain)?
It appears to have been the practice of Jewish people to function as a state-within-a-state in the states to which they migrated (an earlier Mondoweiss discussion of Jews in Poland http://mondoweiss.net/2009/08/in-the-beloved-old-country-a-jew-has-visions-of-her-homeland.html and http://mondoweiss.net/2009/08/a-polish-american-calls-for-healing-between-poles-and-jews.htmlenlightened me on this process, which supports Israel Shahak’s thesis. My Polish friend Phil Wilayto: read and learn!) Jews mark as their “emancipation” the actions in revolutionary France to grant rights to “Jews as individuals but NOT to Jews as a people.” France experienced the threat of a polity that sought to conduct its own affairs by its own rules, while receiving institutional sustenance from the larger state to which it did not necessarily pay either full allegiance or taxes. Bar Kochba’s grievance with Rome involved a similar dispute; Jews lost that battle and Zionism was born.
As Joachim pointed out, above, “Jews as a people” have acquired hegemonic power in the US.
ah, so that’s how it works.
I wrote a lengthy response to WJ’s comment that “the two events of recent Jewish history = holocaust and Israel.” I said the third major event was the acquisition of major levers of power and influence in the US. I cited data and an extensive quote from oachimjay artillomay (!! — sheesh, this is what it’s come to??)
my comment was sent to moderator purgatory.
too much truthiness?
I would say that peoples innermost religious feelings, or the lack of them, is pretty hard to estimate with any degree of accuracy. And taking into account that most people have even more misconceptions about their own religions than they do about others, I really don’t see why I should spend any time worrying about it.
No one’s beliefs have ever “picked my pocket or broken my leg”. Onle people’s actions do that.
i apologize to chaos for my response. but if you read danaa and radii as being something other than sneering and jew hating, please enlighten me.
Well, in response WJ, I say… screw you. Stop using other Jews as your personal human shields. And cutting down on the rampant support of white phosphorous as population control would be nice.
chaos- sorry for the apology you hating piece of feces.
Meh. I knew your apology was worthless anyway. I’ve been through this song and dance before.
Wow, WJ, you quickly devolved into a typical ZioCokehead.
I think Saleema or someone here told us a story about how she encountered an Israeli woman at an airport and over the course of their verbal exchange the Israeli became upset and blurted out angrily that she wish she had killed more Palestinian children as a soldier.
Kind of like how you went from calm, reasonable, to typical Alan Dershowitz-intellectualism.
He does seem to be prone to scatological references.
Here, WJ, I’ll step in to try and enlighten. Just in case you missed it – there was a bit of irony (maybe even a touch of sarcasm?) in my comment regarding what you refer to as the “conundrum”. This, my wondering friend, sometimes passes as sense of humor. Now, it is quite a jewish in-thing (not exclusively so! I don’t want to bend mooser out of shape any more than he has bent already) to mix funny with tragic, usually breathlessly, often in the same sentence. Go see a woody allen movie if you don’t believe me. Admittedly I am guilty of disclosing tribal secrets (such as the reality of exceptionalism as a very individual thing. No two feel exceptional in the same way). OTOH, it is also a very good jewish custom to hide things in plain sight. Kind of the opposite of scientology which zealosly guards its own gobbly-gook. Given the amount of verbiage usually heaped on the subject (if you can still find it in mine, that is) one gets judged by how obscure one can get while straining for the utmost transparency. So, by this criterion, I must be one fine jew, right? So there goes your hitler definition – no wonder he missed so many in his rush…
But let’s look at your quotation for a moment:
WJ: “But certainly Hitler did not give a theological exam at the gates of Auschwitz. And although it doesn’t befit the Jewish people to identify themselves based upon Hitler’s criteria, the two events of recent Jewish history are the holocaust and the state of Israel and the state of Israel (quite obviously) is a source of much controversy, whereas the holocaust as a victim experience is easier to relate to.”.
So to you, not only you find sneer where there’s at most queer (as in rationale), but the journey from idiosyncracy to auschwitz takes but a single keyboard stroke. I believe this is called a hyperbole, of which you appear guilty as charged.
In my [self-] assigned role as arbiter of all things tangential, I hereby sentence you to write a 1000 word essay on one of the following topics:
1. “Talmudic lessons on Jewish exceptionalism – the thin line between humility and hubris”
2. Can america jews still be defined as jewish, having failed to experience either of the two defining moments you mentioned: the holocaust and/or Israel. Please reflect on the theme of Jewish-by-osmosis – does one have to go to a shul to get it?
Note added in proof: come to think of it, forget the 1000 word limit…that’d be way too cruel
Danaa assigned topic (sentenced for taking his sarcastic humorous comments as literal).
Can American Jews still be defined as Jewish having failed to experience the two defining moments of recent Jewish history: the holocaust and/or Israel?
Certainly if I take Jewish pride in my forebears: Groucho, Chico and Harpo, or some others closer to contemporaries: Dylan and Woody Allen, I must attribute Jewish identity to those American Jews despite the fact they viewed the essential events of recent Jewish history separated by an ocean.
Still there is a difference between one (hypothetical) brother who spent the years 1939 to 1945 scrounging for food in a Polish forest, two steps ahead of the executioner and the other brother who spent the years eating popcorn and watching Bette David and James Cagney not to mention Edward G. Robinson and Paul Muni (unser yidden) on the screen. It’s like that movie where Burt Lancaster took the rap and spent some hard time in prison while Kirk Douglas (noch a yid) took the dame and the money and when Burt gets out there really is no way for Kirk to make it up to him (even if he wanted to, which if I remember correctly, he didn’t).
Let’s take Bob Dylan. First he changed his name from a Jewish name (although Zimmerman does not sound specifically Jewish to me) to an Irish name. He boasts in the Scorcese edited documentary that as a kid listening to country music he felt he had been born to the wrong parents- like why was he born to two Jewish parents when his thing was country music and Woody Guthrie (although Woody married a Jewish gal). He also boasted that at a certain point he never looked back and he was born in the wrong place always trying to find his way home, though there was no direction home. This explains his early period. but then he found heroin and had to find Jesus to cure him of his addiction- with the adage, you have to serve somebody, it may be the devil (heroin) or it may be the lord (jewish son of a carpenter with a suicidal rebellious streak that got him nailed, consequently blamed on the jews resulting in thousands of years of repercussions rather than atonement), but you’re going to have to serve somebody. when his creative burst calmed down he also found his jewish side (although highway 61 and the “lord you must be putting me on” is more “jewish” than abraham’s “certainly lord, whatever you want” response) and the photograph in the insert of infidels is that of the joker playing with the soil a valley away from haram el sharif or the temple mount and including the song, Neighborhood Bully, a zionist anthem if there ever was one.
Although A.b. Yehoshua argues that the only true Jews are the Jews who pay taxes to a Jewish tax collector and throw out garbage collected by a Jewish (or Arab) garbage collector and turn off the tap quickly so they won’t waste water from the Sea of Galilee and face the responsibility of Jewish power in the flesh and not on t.v. or in the pages (or on the web site) of the New York Times. Others argue that the power of the state has taken the Jewishness out of the Jews and handed it to the Palestinians, the new powerless and therefore the new Jews and so the only true Jews are those who side with the Palestinians whether Women in Black and Shulamit Aloni in Tel Aviv or Finkelstein and Chomsky in New York.
To be continued…
Phucking funny.
_________________________
short note toe-hold.
“to mix funny with tragic, usually breathlessly, often in the same sentence.”
Just to let you know, we hold the patent on that, and guard our intellectual property jealously. We even hear of a Gentile employing irony, bam, we slap em with a suit and haul them into court!
All non-Jews must, by regulation, keep comedy and tragedy well separated. On the other hand, they can eat Beef Stroganoff, so I guess it all works out.
(although Zimmerman does not sound specifically Jewish to me)
Wondering Jew. I expect this to be continued. You haven’t reached the 1000 words yet.
Zimmermann or Zimmerman is a common German name. One of the professions category: Baker, Miller …
Zimmer = from Middle High German timber, wood; Mann=man. It’s simply a carpenter. Here an image of the typical travelling German Zimmerman a very old tradition.
The entire concept of taking pride in someone from one’s own ethnic group is questionable, or shall I say childish, but since we start life in our childhood (or even earlier), it is human. Sunday nights when I was a child were a treat because Ed Sullivan was on, and though I enjoyed Ed and the little mouse, I especially enjoyed the comedians and when they were Jewish comedians there was an extra dose of nachas or ethnic pride.
Woody Allen of course was one of the more Jewish comedians and particularly enjoyable. Of course Woody besmirched his name when he stole his step daughter away from Rosemary’s baby (i mean) Mia Farrow’s family. But remember Woody’s devotion to Jewish causes was “damaged” before Soon Nyi came on the scene. At the beginning of the first intifadeh, when Rabin, before his incarnation as a peace maker, promised to literally break the limbs of the stone throwers, Woody had an op ed in the Times bemoaning how the blue and white JNF boxes had seemed innocent enough and this breaking of bones seemed to be a bit cruel. Now Woody is devoted to the idea of mixing of the races or undoing the Jewish race through intermarriage and he sees tribalism as a curse that needs to be undone. Yet when he indulges in racial pride or something approaching it, when Annie Hall’s grandmother envisions him as a chasid while he’s sitting at Annie Hall’s table, or when the screen splits and the Jewish half (Alvy Singer’s family) talks of Yom Kippur and Annie Hall’s half talks of the bright sunshine of Minnesota (or whatever) there is a pride that I take in Woody’s Jewishness. (Let alone when he refers to his rabbi as “reform, very reform, a nazi in fact.)
Certainly Annie Hall is more famous than Woody’s “Stardust Memories” but when the Woody character in Stardust Memories meets a classmate from the good old days in Brooklyn and the classmate bemoans their divergent paths one to fame and the other to obscurity the Woody character gives chance its due- “I happen to live in a culture where a good sense of humor is valued. If I had been born in Europe I would have ended up a lamp shade.” So a recognition of the Holocaust plays a role in Woody’s humor even though Woody was born on the wrong (right) side of the Atlantic.
Certainly even Jews who take umbrage at Noam Chomsky’s anti Zionism feel that Chomsky crossed a line when he wrote an endorsement of the right of free speech of Faurisson. And even Jews who hate Neturei Karta for their anti Zionism feel that they crossed the line when they attended Ahmadinejad’s Holocaust denial shindig in Tehran, even though they asserted the Holocaust’s undeniability from Ahmadinejad’s podium, sharing the podium with lowlife Jew haters was seen as a new low for Neturei Karta.
We take pride in Leonard Cohen when he writes “And who by fire” but moreso when he plays his concerts in Tel Aviv.
The Jewish penchant to take pride where others don’t take pride was portrayed on one episode of the Sopranos, where the Italian shrink (played by Lorainne Brocco who played a Jewess in Goodfellas) is ashamed of Italian mafiosi whereas some Jewish person she meets beams with pride when discussing someone of the likes of Meyer Lansky or Bugsy Siegel. And although I have never heard a Jew in any degree of seriousness taking pride in Jack Ruby’s act, who can deny that there might have been a little Jewish chip on his shoulder that helped drive him to the act and afterwards proclaim, “I’ve got balls, don’t I?”
To be continued
WJ – we are getting ready to grade your paper here (delay due to midterms!). Anything to add/modify, BTW, before end of the quarter grades are due?
Hint: slight tangent there on woody allen (cf to be proud of another jew is not the same as being a jew)
“And there are, certainly, people among the Yahud and Nasara, those who believes in Allah and in that which has been revealed to you, and in that which has been revealed to them, humbling themselves before Allah. They don’t sell the Verses of Allah for a little price, for them is a reward with their Lord. Surely, Allah is Swift in account,” – Holy Qur’an 3:199
No matter what Shlomo Sand, Gilad Atzmon, and others say – Torah and its followers Israelites were not invented – though Torah haslong been corrupted by rabbis and Israelites over-run by non-Semite people….
Who were the “people of the book”?
http://rehmat1.wordpress.com/2009/05/25/who-were-the-people-of-the-book/
One of the best (if not THE best) English commentaries on the Holy Qur’an is this:
http://www.islamibayanaat.com/EMQ.htm
It comes in PDF form. Pretty good for an 8 volume commentary, don’t you think? I mention this because it has some interesting things to say about Jews, especially in its commentary on the second chapter Surah. Enjoy.
Are you familiar with Paul Wexler, Linguist, Tel Aviv University?
Wexler uses the relexification hypothesis to support his claim that ”the contemporary Ashkenazic Jews are not, in any significant sense, the direct descendants of the Palestinian Jews of the Roman period”. Specifically, he proposes that Yiddish underwent relexification twice: once in western Slavic (Upper Sorbian), and secondly in the eastern Slavic (Ukraine and Belarus’) language area. This second relexification occurred relatively recently (he dates it to the 15th/16th centuries), which suggests that an eastern Slavic speaking Jewish population was already in place at an earlier date. This population was, in Wexler’s view, descended from the Khazars and other groups of converts.
http://linguistlist.org/issues/14/14-2533.html
So if Phil accepts Sands’ argument, as I imagine he does, he will have to face this simple question.
Phil, why do you consistently call yourself a Jew? Some vague cultural associations with 1950s liberalism? That won’t do it.
It never ceases to amaze me that the most vicious enemy Jews often have to face… are Zionists.
fanatics are like that…. they turn on their own regularly…
And what will, complete subjugation to whatever your little ziocaine fantasy is?
And how does it pick your pocket or break your leg if he calls himself a Jew.
I guess you figure there are too many Jews, and we need to get rid of some, some of the sub-standard ones? Oh, don’t feel bad, a lot of ziocaine addicts make that same gaff. It’s always the Zionist-supporters who want to get rid of or expel Jews from Judaism.
Now it seems to me, if, as you Zionists say, declaring one’s Judaism can be a death sentence, and given the miserably small numbers of Jews left, it seems we would be glad to welcome any man who would avow himself as such.
But I know how it is when you’re all puffed up on ziocaine, and you can see all and judge all, and no moral restraint can ever be applied. Drugs do nasty things to people, don’t you think?
That’s the central question: And how does it pick your pocket or break your leg if he calls himself a Jew.
I am watching this phenomenon with quite a bit interest. Please Phil, join us, leave your tribe and family behind. The struggle for Phil’s soul.
How does that demand differ from earlier attempts to deal with the issue? If only Jews converted everything would be fine. If I miss something, I would be pleased if someone pointed it out to me.
The problem is, as Wondering Jew wrote, it didn’t help to convert. At one point the converted like <a href=http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Edith_Stein were rounded up even in their cloisters. So it’s not about believe, is it? (Interesting thinker, by the way.)
I consider myself as an agnostic Catholic, Catholicism being the faith I was raised in, the religious classes I had to take in school, agnostic describes the estrangement from the Catholic rituals, even in its most liberal attempts as here in the Jesuit community. The holy communion felt from the very start like symbolic cannibalism to me. … But wait, this may be connected to a dream, that puzzled me in my late teens.
That’s the central question: And how does it pick your pocket or break your leg if he calls himself a Jew.
I am watching this phenomenon with quite a bit of interest. Please Phil, join us, leave your tribe and family behind. The struggle for Phil’s soul.
How does this demand differ from earlier attempts to deal with the issue? If only Jews converted everything would be fine. If I miss something, I would be pleased if someone pointed it out to me.
The problem is, as Wondering Jew wrote, it didn’t help to leave the community, turn agnostic or convert. At one point the converted like <a href=http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Edith_Stein were rounded up even in their cloisters. So it’s not about believe, is it? (Interesting thinker, by the way.)
I consider myself as an agnostic Catholic, Catholicism being the faith I was raised in, the religious classes I had to take in school, agnostic describes the estrangement from the Catholic rituals, even in its most liberal attempts as here in the Jesuit community. The holy communion felt from the very start like symbolic cannibalism to me. … But wait, this may be connected to a dream, that puzzled me in my late teens.
Edith Stein
Why is that amazing? It’s the most mundane truth about all humans everywhere. It’s what Freud called the narcism of minor differences–the reason 1/3 of Germans were killed in the seventeenth century over which type of communion to take. It’s why otherwise happy Serbs become genocidal at the thought of Croatians–from whom they are indistinguishable. It’s the reason the nastiest fighting on the Left was always between (for example) Marxist Socialist Humanists, and Marxist Humanist Socialists.
Am I the only one who’s seen The Life of Brian?
It certainly describes the discussion here tonight!
You’re… trying, to justify your vicious attack on other Jews, then?
Chaos, there is a world of possibilities in No.3 (You Suck) and No. 4 (The Whole World Sucks). That’s where the real action is in Hasbara these days.
This just in:
http://www.ynetnews.com/articles/0,7340,L-3787847,00.html
See???
Oh, but that’s politics!
What does this have to do with Shlomo Sands again? You know the whole “Ignore the man behind the curtain!” didn’t fool Dorothy. In my case you’re going to have to find an object that’s shinier by far, to distract me from the fact that you are attacking other Jews verbally.
Who attacked Jews? Me? I love Jews? I just said Phil isn’t a Jew. That’s not an attack. It sure as hell isn’t “vicious”!
apparently the fanatics get to decide who is or isn’t….. this is one of the rules out of the fanatics handbook….
Huh? No no no—please pay attention. Phil subscribes to Sand’s definition of Jews as an entirely religious group that fabricated an ethnicity. So who’s a Jew?
Hello?
I take it you’ve completely missed the part where this is a review by a gentleman named… Jack Ross.
The more I see, the more inclined I am to observe that Zionism truly is mutually incompatible with intellectualism. Have fun designating your “master race,” OhioJoes!
I’m telling, you discount my “drug addiction model” (this is your brain on ziocaine) of Zionism-support.
You will find almost exactly the same psychological and character changes (and I would bet some of the same physiological patterns, too) in ziocaine users as you see in long time cocaine or stimulant abusers. And when you add in group confirmation, well, it’s powerful stuff. So powerful the addict has no idea what he appears like and the implications of what he says to people (Jewish or not) that aren’t devotees of their drug.
Phil earlier was seen drooling at the thought of this book being published. Just wait, he said, it’ll teach the Jews!
But Shlomo doesn’t think Phil is a Jew.
This is not a non-issue. I think there’s not much intellectualism associated with any nationalism–it comes from a non-intellectual place in human development.
You don’t understand what the book is about but seem to think that Sand has an opinion on whether Phil is a Jew or not and seem to think that posting your ignorance is a good thing.
Sand’s point is that the Israeli idea of a Jewish “nationality”, invented by the Zionists, comprised supposedly of one people who trace their genetic line back to ancient Israel and were exiled from that land is contrary to both history and biology. It has nothing to do with whether Phil considers himself a Jew or not. It has everything to do with whether Phil thinks he has a genetic or historical connection that allows him as a Jew to displace those who are not Jews from the lands of Israel/Palestine. But Phil doesn’t think that. I suspect that you do.
The concept of the Jews as a “nationality” might have been an invention of the Zionists, for “nationality” is a 19th century concept. But the concept of the Jews as a “people” or in Hebrew “am” is part of the religion. People make a mistake when they go to the Bible or to the Talmud to search for the definition of “am”. The book to which they should refer is the prayer book, for it was the book that the religious Jew recited day in and day out, whether learned or ignorant. Three times a day Jews prayed for the ingathering of the exiles, for the coming of the Messiah and for the rebuilding of Jerusalem. Zionism did not invent this. Zionism tried to adapt the religious concept and to turn it into a secular concept. After every meal Jews thanked God for the land (of Israel) and prayed for the rebuilding of Jerusalem. Zionism did not invent this. Zionism tried to adapt this.
WJ, I agree with you. The Nazis did their best to follow suit with their notion of the aryan race and its place in history.
“Three times a day Jews prayed for the ingathering of the exiles, for the coming of the Messiah and for the rebuilding of Jerusalem.”
I thought the coming of the Messiah was supposed to be concurrent with the rebuilding of Jerusalem. What happened to him?
Citizen, this gets tiresome. Could we please leave out the comparison between Israel/Zionism and the Nazis. The Nazis weren’t the first authoritarian ideologues and they won’t be the last. True they shared a specific time frame and their respective solutions to the “Jewish problem” are somehow connected, in so far that they both considered “a solution” necessary, and yes they both were infected by the nationalist spirit, but that’s about it.
Did you understand what Wondering Jew told you, what makes you so angry about this simple truth? Do you think you are completely independent from the Zeitgeist around you. Why should the Zionists be different?
LeaNder, you ask, “That’s the central question: And how does it pick your pocket or break your leg if he calls himself a Jew.”
You think that’s not a grave political question, with very real impact on the world?
My, you are really naive.
Leader, you are as as gullible as any Nazi from the old days.
Well, Citizen, could you please explain?
Leader, you are as as gullible as any Nazi from the old days.
Hitler, Goebbels, Himmler, … were gullible? Tricked by whom? What exactly makes me like them. Or are you not suggesting the manipulators but the manipulated?
Look I am making a difference between people and politics. And I am perfectly satisfied with the fact that he shares his thought processes with us. Why should I want him to change in any way? And how exactly does he need to change according to you? Are you expecting him to leave his Jewishness behind like a pair of worn trousers, or would you allow him to redefine so it fits again under the new conditions?
“I think there’s not much intellectualism associated with any nationalism–it comes from a non-intellectual place in human development.” (OhioJoes)
Historically wrong! European popular nationalism arose in the early modern period through identification with a language and the culture (which may or may not entail a religion) built on that language. In addition, the earliest examples of nationalism were territory-specific, as in 17th-century England, France, Holland, Sweden. 18th-century example: “Hail Britannia!”. Along with the competing influence of pan-European culture, early European nationalism had a great deal to do with intellectualism.
And, to WJ: Later, 19th-century manifestations of European nationalism (also highly intellectual in impetus) were distinguished by intense romanticization of common lingual and cultural influences that had existed for centuries, combined with a desire for “in-bringing” of the cultural compatriots into a single, united territorial state associated with real or imagined ancestral territorial claims. In this, the Germans and Italians wanted to emulate the English and French from centuries past. Ideas of “race” became a major aspect of the paradigm.
Modern political Zionism, it seems to me, fits rather nicely, if only superficially, into this paradigm for the historical evolution of European nationalism. The superficiality comes from the fact that modern Jews had no, or few, rights to the lands they coveted and conquered.
Oops. I meant, of course, “Rule, Britannia!”
Look, if I used my status as an African American to critique the bigotry, hypocrisy, and criminality in the Black community–and then, one day, it was revealed that I was not Black . . . that might be an issue.
So, if Jews are not an ethnicity . . .shit. I think Mooser was right–this one ain’t worth it.
Do you have any idea whether Phil considers himself Jewish in the religious sense? Of course not.
Of course, Mooser then proceded to make half of thefirst 45 comments on the topic. Are you going to do the same, giving us numerous posts about your uninformed opinion about a book you haven’t read?
This whole discussion can get kind of confusing. What is Sand’s basic insight that we’re discussing? That Jews are not a race? That they’re not an ethnic group? Not really either, I think. The biological concept of race is essentially meaningless–at least that is what I learned in college. So we know they’re not that. And ethnicities are properly understood as imagined communities. If Jews believe they are an ethnicity, which most seem to, that means that they are an ethnicity, regardless of historical facts.
Sand’s insight is a little more complex. It stems from the assertion that, well after its birth as a religion, significant numbers of people converted to Judaism. The assertion contradicts the idea that Jews are both a religious community and a pseudo-racial community (with near-universal genetic origins in a specific tribe of the old testament era). Rather, Jewish religion has, for significant periods in the past, existed independently of ethnicity in much the same way that Jewish ethnicity today exists independently of religion.
When you think about it, it would be truly unbelievable if that WEREN’T true–if all Jews (or at least some 90%) all over the world really could trace most of their ancestry to a small tribe that existed thousands and thousands of years ago. Simply by looking at different Jews–Ethiopian, Mizrahi, Sephardic, Ashkenazi–you can tell there is way more genetic diversity than that idea would suggest. In fact, each of those groups, to me, look much like the non-Jews of the regions they’re identified with. Unless the diversity is purely a product of divergent evolution (not really possible within the time period of recorded history) then you had to have had significant conversion and incorporation of people with no Jewish background.
Jews will remain a real ethnicity as long as they and others regard them as one. But Sand’s argument does debunk some of the myths of the Jewish nationalist narrative–replacing them with a view of Jewish history as a more complicated and changing interplay of religious and ethnic ideas.
That’s my interpretation anyway. As someone who hasn’t read the book, isn’t Jewish, and hasn’t done serious research on Jewishness. So let me know if I have misunderstood anything.
I’ve gotten about half way through the book now and I would say that your interpretation is generally correct. Sand also points out that there was no massive Jewish exile by the Romans, and that the Jewish historiography adopted and expanded on by the Zionists and Israel was really an invention of some 19th Century Jewish historians and intellectuals who were caught up in the contemporary craze of nationalism. In essence, he is saying that the Zionist history of the Jews being one people ( a nation) forced into exile 2000 years ago and longing to return is merely a historical myth created to justify both the creation of Israel and the expulsion of non-Jews from the territory that the Zionists wished to possess. Tony Judt has a blurb on the book jacket and it seems to me to be an accurate summation of the book so far.
Just a thought after viewing the youtube interview by RT news of Shlomo Sand. Sand says how can two Jews one from Moscow and one from Brooklyn be of the same nation when they speak different languages, listen to different music and enjoy different foods. But my concept of nation goes something like this: immediate family, extended family, tribe, nation. And it is possible for one son to stay in Russia and another son to move to Brooklyn in which case their children will speak different languages, listen to different music and enjoy different foods, so maybe they are from different nations but they are actually first cousins. And if they are in fact “mishpocha” this is even closer than being from one nation. So it seems that this concept of cultural differences is not in itself sufficient to explain that these people belong to different nations.
On the subject of biological proof of the different origins of various Jewish groups I think that the Cohen Y chromosome studies done about ten years ago would be relevant. A cursory glance at the wikipedia (I know, too basic for you highbrows) was over my head, but I wonder what research has been done on the biology of various Jewish groups.
The research has and is being done. Those people who consider themselves Jews have a rich and complex tapestry of genetic markers. The Y chromosome stuff is interesting in its own right but there are 23 other human chromosomes and the genetic finger prints are now coming in. In summary, those who can trace their ancestry to Eastern Europe have a very complex signature. Ninety percent of their haplotypes they share with other Europeans. In that 10% of markers that differ, some of these they share with modern day Palestinians in support of the hypothesis that many Jews did migrate out of Palestine and became part of the European gene pool. (These studies also show that 8th century Arabs that conquered Palestine, did not displace the native genotypes, but rather converted them to Islam.) Also, there are also specific haplotypes that are more concentrated among the Ashkenazis that are shared with people now living in central Asia, in support of the Khazari theory of Eastern European Jewish origins. The Sephardim on the other hand carry genetic markers that show that some of their ancestors likely came from Northern Africa. Then there are the Jews from Yemen, Persia, Damascus and other modern Arab states — they carry genetic markers common to those areas. Finally, the Ethiopean and Peruvian Jews that moved recently to Israel carry markers that relate them to their ancestral lands. Basically, what this all shows is a diversity of origins that make those who consider themselves Jewish no more genetically unique then those of us who identify ourselves as Americans.
It is very difficult to read the primary literature for those without some basic training is genetics — all of these summaries I just mentioned are based on statistical analysis of gene frequencies, linkage groups, haplotypes, and other technical terms. They are based on analyzing hundreds of thousands of polymorphisms and indentifying a few thousand that support one hypothesis or another. The simplest explanation is that most of us (excluding Icelanders and the Finns, we happen to be unusually homozygous in human terms for what that is worth) have very complex genetic histories. Small clusters of genes in that big mix can sometimes reveal migrations of people from one part of the globe into another.
Anyway, Sand’s work is quite consistant with what modern genetic research has so far revealed.
Thanks, Syvanen, for this explanation.
Sorry, WJ, I don’t see that anything you say here is inconsistent with the totality of what Shlomo Sand says in the clip interview. Your step concept of nation–he covers it in details suggesting the contrary of what you say. People, go to the video clip and jusge for yourself.
Jews are a people. We all call ourselves Jews, and from VARIOUS reasonings.
Phil calls himself a Jew. I call myself a Jew. Mooser calls himself a Jew.Naomi Klein calls herself a Jew. My chabad rabbi neighbor calls himself a Jew. My wife’s cousin in Toronto calls herself a Jew. My Hungarian speaking mother-in-law calls herself a Jew. Falashas call themselves Jews.
All different racial appearances (appearances are insignificant). All different languages. All different cultures. All different ideologies.
Many things, many characteristics, many descriptions.
Any attempt to pigeon-hole is by definition innaccurate.
Your litany of who calls themselves a Jew proves only that it’s a religious appellation and nothing more. You could say absolutely the same of an exclusive group who likes to identify themselves as Catholics, which at one point in history, Catholics did: the Catholics were the ruling party of the world for a couple of centuries.
Your litany no more proves that a religious group is a ‘people’ than fly to the moon.
Further, it’s like WASPs calling themselves a ‘people’. Anyone can identify their group as a people, but it doesn’t make it so.
Naomi Klein is not religious. Jeffrey Blankfort is not religious, but he names himself as a Jew (more for the PR to gain some credibility for his attacks than for religious or continuing ethnic identity.)
Jews are a people, because we call ourselves a people.
Are French a people? Are Americans (somehow excluding Canadians, Mexicans and South Americans) a people?
How?
Various SELF-definitions, but accepted.
Time to accept.
I agree with Witty, however I think Jewish identity is much more problematic than let’s say ‘Palestinian’ identity. The latter is purely nationalistic.
The former is a mishmash. It’s ethno-religious. And now it’s claiming to be nationalistic. So Jews like Witty want it all. Hence the inanely idiotic ploy to conflate antisemitism with anti-Zionism.
In this context, antisemitism itself must be redefined. If all these various components of Jewish identity are being conflated as ‘one’ cohesive mechanism – then antisemitism becomes less and less complex. Antisemitism becomes what other forms of racism are – pure logical fallacies. Stupid ones at that. Like if someone were to say ‘Jews drink the blood of Christians.’
Versus, Rabbis in New Jersey were running an organ trafficking ring.
Jewish identity has become all about ‘exceptionalism’ IMO. And especially self-loving.
That Rabbi who came out against BDS with the typical chicken-shit Zionist apologetics – is a Jewish exceptionalist.
And Witty’s pathetic mud-slinging at Blankfort reveals his fascistic conception of Jewish identity.
Blankfort is not really a Jew because he’s deeply critical of Zionism and frequently talks about Jewish identity critically.
Like I’ve been saying since day 1 – Witty is a polite fascist. You see it in his utter contempt for human rights and dignity of ‘the other’ and for his apologetics for *everything* Israel does to the Palestinians.
Zionism is a good in the world.
The history and present of Jewish identity and life is enhanced by the existence and security of Israel.
And, rather than a pervasive “Jewish question”, with the hosts’ audacity to willingly persecute in multiple contexts, and over centuries and centuries, is a great good for the world as a whole.
But, there are side effects, some harms, some confusions, that require reform.
I am a “live and let live Zionist”, a Zionist that regards “enough” as enough.
I and millions others won’t retreat from that. But, that view of need of enough is NOT mutually exclusive, NOT exceptionalist, NOT expansionist, NOT colonialist.
It is a revision of history to describe the peace-seeking Zionist as those attributes.
And, as such, the work at hand is to create the objective conditions, and the consciousness among the American and Israeli Jewish community to voluntarily accept enough.
It won’t happen as a result of indisciplined punitive approaches. It will be deterred by those approaches.
If you believe that Israel will not exist at some near future time, and that that setting will be more just than an “enough” Israel, then go to war, if your hypocritical conscience can stand the responsibility of it.
Zionism is not a ‘good’ in the world.
Zionism is an imperialistic and colonialist ideology. A racist ideology.
Jews exist all over the world. The formation of the Zionist State was not necessary for the ‘the Jews’ (an entity up for interpretation) to have their self-determination. There were plenty of Zionists who wanted equal rights w/ the Palestinian Arabs and a bi-national State.
But it was the popular conception of Zionism that led to Israel. You couldn’t have a Jewish State w/ so many Arabs. So the Zionist terrorists kicked 600-800K Palestinians off of their land and homes.
Zionism – like any other idea – as someone else here has said, once it enters the world and becomes subject to the laws of physics is not simply an intent or idea anymore.
It’s a reality.
And Zionism and Imperialism in the ME, has caused destruction of countless lives.
Joel Kovel’s book, Overcoming Zionism, is an excellent read. Israel become, as he states, a ‘Macbeth’ amongst the nations.
But keep deluding yourself Witty. You are totally transparent to anyone who knows you on this blog. Liar.
It is a valid alternate history question how would the Arabs of Palestine reacted had the major thrust of the Zionist movement been in the vein of Martin Buber and Judah Magnes rather than Jabotinsky and Ben Gurion. We will never know. We do know that the enmity of the Palestinian Arabs was such that the exile forced on them by refusing them reentry after the war of Independence made plenty of sense from a survival is best point of view.
“… I think Jewish identity is much more problematic …. [It] is a mishmash. It’s ethno-religious. And now it’s claiming to be nationalistic. So Jews like Witty want it all. Hence the inanely idiotic ploy to conflate antisemitism with anti-Zionism.
“In this context, antisemitism itself must be redefined. If all these various components of Jewish identity are being conflated as ‘one’ cohesive mechanism – then antisemitism becomes less and less complex.
“Jewish identity has become all about ‘exceptionalism’ IMO. And especially self-loving.”
Cliff, if I am interpreting you correctly, maybe you have hit upon something here.
There seems to be an increasing tendency in some Jewish quarters to try and give anti-semitism the broadest meaning conceivable (e.g., not liking kosher pickles, not watching Seinfeld, etc.)
I think you have given the correct prescription: Anti-semitism is opposition to Jewish exceptionalism.
More specifically, it is opposition to the more egregious outward effects of Jewish exceptionalism, such as the tendency to garner unto itself seriously excessive political power, or control over the channels of public information.
(Caveat exemplar: Many Jews themselves are in the forefront of opposition to these egregious effects of Jewish tribal exceptionalism.)
We do know that the enmity of the Palestinian Arabs was such that the exile forced on them by refusing them reentry after the war of Independence made plenty of sense from a survival is best point of view.
It also made a lot of sense from a greed point of view, from a looting and pillaging point of view, from a theft point of view. From an ethnic cleansing point of view. But “security” always makes for a good excuse and whitewash of baser motives.
It is a fact that the Yishuv lost 1% of its population or 6,000 out of 600,000 people in the War of Independence. It is also a fact that Lebanon, the nearest country to Israel with a thoroughly mixed population of Christian and Muslims is a godawful mess. So, yes baser motives might have played a role, but the primary motives, I believe were security and even moreso a desire to have a functioning country. When people say that Israel could not have come into existence without kicking out the Arabs (or keeping them out, as the case may be), they are usually trying to cite the inherent racism of Zionism, but they are inadvertently revealing how impossible a mixed population would have been- a permanent ongoing civil war.
No one yet has drawn a picture of how that polity would have looked had those refugees been allowed back and this failure demonstrates that the nakba was a necessity. (Maybe not, but certainly those who today advocate a single state and those who today wish to undo the nakba with a right of return have done little work in imagining and painting the picture. That’s why it seems like a hopeless utopia. Tikkun Magazine had a recent piece of how to combine the right of return and the two state solution which involves citizenship in one state and residence in the other state. But beyond this very little imagining has taken place. Just a lot of rhetoric (including lots of hatred) but very little imagining.)
If, as you say and Benny Morris insists, the Nakba was a necessity, all this does is to prove that the Zionist project was invalid from its inception, since a Zionist state could not be created without necessarily expelling the Arab population.
I hear your point, but let’s try some alternate history again: if America had not limited immigration in 1924 and Hitler had not come to power in 1933, the Jewish population of Palestine would not have been sufficient to advocate for statehood. In 1929 the Jewish population was 170,000. By the late 30’s it was close to 400,000. It was this increase in population that made statehood a viable option from the Jewish point of view. Was the enmity of the Palestinians as exemplified by the Mufti inevitable? There were other voices although they are not so well known. When Weizmann signed an agreement with Feisal in 1918 and Feisal agreed to Jewish immigration (an agreement which depended upon the lack of a Western power taking control, thus when the mandate was given to Britain, his agreement lost its validity) how would that have played out. There are many different scenarios that might have resulted if history had been tweaked in some major and minor ways.
WJ, should we characterize the old American Indian wars as a “civil war?” How about
the Spanish conquests in S America?
WJ – it is hard to conceive of the Palestinians acquiescing to a project which would necessarily entail their being second-class citizens in a state defined by their exclusion.
But essentially, Zionism is an evil of imperialism. The Palestinians were and always have been denied self-determination by a series of imperialist states. Go back to 1918 and have the British keep their promise to the Arabs and clear out of the territory instead of setting up puppet kingdoms, and you would have a different situation. One in which the outcome would be unpredictable, but I believe there would not be room for Zionism.
Maybe we can approach this a different way? What is a clear sign that one is a non-Jew? Can anyone list some? Mister Witty?
BTW, in what area of higher human learning are there no “pigeon-holes?”
So, witty, can the palestinians start calling themselves jewish too? why not? the markers are all there – historical and genetic – just read the above. They can of course go on and practice islam, christianity, samaritanism, what not. Just as many jews are practicing buddhists while remaining jews. Others are hasidic or neturei karta. Still others are reconstructionists or messianic jews. Thus palestinians can claim jewish ancestry probably at least as much as you (if not more) but remain their own sect(s) – some more muslim than others, some secular and some out there – just as jews have done from time immemorial.
Then maybe they’d qualify for the right of return (a heck of a lot more than the 1/2 million russians who neither converted nor practice any faith other than pursuit of the good life, such as it is). Bingo, problem solved and the greater israel can be a majority jewish state with lots of different sects and customs . Ain’t life beautiful?
There were quite a few Palestinians still practicing vestiges of Judaism, much like the Marranos in Spain, while officially Muslim.
I personally respond to the question of Palestinians as Jews, is that many are likely Jews, and even the possibility of that is sufficient basis to treat them decently, if not agreeing to the militants’ punitive political conclusions.
Among Habad chasids there is the cultivation of affection for one’s fellow Jews. Yes, a tribal description of actually caring deeply for one’s neighbors. (I regard it as an extremely progressive attitude, to put one’s neighbors’ needs on equal or greater footing than one’s own personal.)
The Habad don’t limit their commitment (probably affection though) to only Jews, but definitely priority.
I suggest to them (when discussing Israel) two things, one is that especially with compelling evidence that many Palestinians are/were practising Jews (similar to the Spanish conversos that retained Jewish practice in secret even though forced to convert), that it is impossible to know if one’s Palestinian neighbor is not of our tribe. That and the possibility that neighbor may also be part of the messianic collective.
Best that we love our neighbor.
That is reform.
“Best that we love our neighbor.
And stop burning their children to death with white phosphorous, perhaps.
OK Witty – that was a good enough answer (for now). So you don’t seem to object to having one democratic state for all, I take it. Assuming of course that there is no violence from either direction. Which, BTW, I’d agree with were Israelis willing to give it a go. Which, unfortunately they don’t.
I assume you also realize that this whole posture of “Israel as a jewish state” has a completely different interpretation of what “jewish” is than the chabad rabbis you quote. In fact, Israel is committed to NOT having good neighbourly relations with “the others”, as their words and actions indicate.
So when will you wake up and admit that the Israel you sometimes envision and often defend is the one that would run you out – or at least shun you – and probably also persecute your chabad friends were they to set foot over there and actually voice their opinions openly?
The Israel that is – as opposed to the Israel as an idea that you keep holding up here – has become a militaristic, authocratic and conformist society. In fact, you probably wouldn’t recognize any of your lofty jewish ideals in it. Trust me, america s a whole – is far more jewish in spirit than israel is.
Witty knows it–do you see him getting ready to leave the USA, no matter how much
some of his friends say Auschwitz is right around the corner here?
I have Israeli friends that confirm your statement Danaa, that Israel is not motivated by its ethically based aspects.
In Phil’s inquiry into Jewish identity, I think he has identified (standing on the shoulder of giants) that there are at least two large strains that are both coherent and diverge.
That is the identity based on ethical practice, interacting with the emphasis on association. I know that he is influenced by both, a feeling of affinity with Jews (by association, a familiarity) and a feeling of either solidarity or internalized guilts with the ethical.
The reality is that although they appear to be divergent, they are one, as the universe is one, as God is one. They have simultaneiously diverging characteristics, all in the same being.
Shlomo Sand: Jewish myth of ‘a people’ challenged
http://z.pe/ovC
Phil calls himself a Jew. I call myself a Jew. Mooser calls himself a Jew.Naomi Klein calls herself a Jew. My chabad rabbi neighbor calls himself a Jew. My wife’s cousin in Toronto calls herself a Jew. My Hungarian speaking mother-in-law calls herself a Jew. Falashas call themselves Jews.
Yes, but have of these people had any personal experience of anti-semitism? Not a measly ‘unfriendliness’, but actual fair-dinkum anti-semitism. Please, only first-person experiences.
To draw an arguably tepid analogy (although not for those who experienced it directly), do contemporary Irish Americans use the early Irish experience in the USA
as a rational for putting Ireland First over general USA First? What Irishman in the USA today has experienced what the earlier generations did? I know the analogy is not on all fours, as they say, but it might be worth a comment or two, especially since, how many later USA presidents (e.g.,Kennedy, Nixon, Clinton, Obama) have Irish heritage, including Obama? It also goes to dual loyalty since being Irish has always been associated with being Papal run…
“Deep down, I believe that a little anti-Semitism is a good thing for the Jews – reminds them who they are.”
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jay_Lefkowitz
Is the common thread of Jewish identity people who consider themselves victims of anti-Semitism, or see some advantage in it?
Well, where would Jewish solidarity be without anti-semitism? The 50% American Jewish intermarriage is sufficient for many Jewish groups to equate it with “the
silent holocaust.” Interesting turn of words apropos events, that loving a Jew and visa versa equates with shoving Jews into the ovens of Auschwitz-Berkenau.
It is very difficult to read the primary literature for those without some basic training is genetics — all of these summaries I just mentioned are based on statistical analysis of gene frequencies, linkage groups, haplotypes, and other technical terms. They are based on analyzing hundreds of thousands of polymorphisms and indentifying a few thousand that support one hypothesis or another.
Not to mention that these studies posit theories that extrapolate data with frequencies over tens of thousands of years. We are nor talking about common haplotypes over generations, but eons. Transposing the data top represent “common Markers” overs generations is voodoo science and these studies severely embarrassed serious scientist in Israel and elsewhere. Even the Venda tribes of South Africa had these “common Markers”
All Jewry is divided into three parts:
(1) Zionists
(2) Anti-Zionists
(3) The Uncommitted
That is all ye know on earth, and all ye need to know.
Tom Robbins (paraphrase) : The world can be divided into two groups: those who divide the world into two groups and those that don’t.
That was funny.
“With a new technique based on the male or Y chromosome, biologists have traced the diaspora of Jewish populations from the dispersals that began in 586 B.C. to the modern communities of Europe and the Middle East.”
http://www.nytimes.com/2000/05/09/science/y-chromosome-bears-witness-to-story-of-the-jewish-diaspora.html
Too bad for Sand that science disproves him.
Sand’s position from http://z.pe/oMh
And the end of that May 2000 Nicholas Wade NYT article you quote says:
Which is precisely Sand’s point.
Like archeology, genetics is being used as a political weapon in the war over the Land of Canann. In particular, Israeli ideologues want to minimize the evidence that the 19th-century population of Palestine was essentially comprised of the descendants of the population of Judea, in short, the Roman-era Jews who never left the land and thus had no need, before Israeli expulsion, to return.
The Israelis have only finished the job that the Romans left incomplete when they exiled the population of Jerusalem but not the Judean countryside.
But this is not consistent with the Israeli national myths.
didn’t read the link; could you provide the Cliff notes version to answer this question:
WHICH Jewish population is the source of the Y chromosome, the minority/elite that Nebuchadnezzar took to -Baghdad- Babylon, where most of them stayed even after Cyrus funded their return to Palestine, or the majority who remained in Palestine after Nebuchadnezzar’s population transfer?
Professor Ruderman teaches that a great deal of animosity existed between the two groups of Hebrews, an inter-religious tension that persisted strongly for perhaps a thousand years, as Babylon Jews insisted they were the arbiters of Jewish religious law as against the Palestinian dispensation; and that continued to a lesser degree well into the 20th century, during all of which time Jews still had a large and influential population in Baghdad and ‘ruled’ from that Vaticanistic stronghold until the first third of the 2oth century.
So, which Jews are the owners of the Y chromosome — Baghdad Jews or Palestinian Jews?
What Sand does is remove a mythic monotone of origin and places Jewishness in a rich diversity. Indeed, this is what has to be done, not only to remove us from some ancient lore (and anyone who seriously studies antiquities knows the “borrowing” of myths from other ancient civilization, whether it be Jewish – Christian – Muslim, etc.), but in order to move into the 21st century.
All religion has this idea of the special, making whatever individuals supposedly unique that embrace whatever tenets, supposedly bequeathing this special insight, or a lens through which to create some world view. Religion rightly viewed and demystified from its ancient and backward exclusivity can enrich the world community, and become truly world class asset rather than a liability.
What Zionism did (as all fundamentalism do) is truncate any universal and healthy contribution a tradition can bring, and essentially it turned the light out. It brought to the fore a destructive use of religion, one that easily manipulates people to the will of the few – a sort of virulent priestly, tribal and or national quest to enrich the few. It promoted this exclusivity based on ancient myths and this “god” created in the image of man who is only beneficial to this specific “group,” it narrows the world view making the religion exclusive and confrontational – it buries its adherents in a spurious and ancient sepulcher and fires mythical and ancient animosity. It is almost like a form of mind control, which forces the masses to do what its leaders chose. Which brings us to Voltaire’s dictum (loosely) – “those who can cause you to believe absurdities can get you to commit atrocities.”
What Sand’s does is clear the pathway to a more inclusive Israel, not a throw back to ancient forms of narrow minded myths which fuel the apartheid and slow genocide we currently see espoused by Israelis regarding “the other” in the region (based on equally spurious myths of dominance and genocide from an ancient “holy book” taken literally). It is hoped that when this factual truth is ingested by the Israelis it will loose them from constricted and contrived motivations and animus, break the chain of confluence of interest with Western Hegemony which enriches their elite, and transforms Israel into what it should be as a modern contributor in a world that embraces all humanity.
“What Sand’s does is clear the pathway to a more inclusive Israel,”
If his book does that I will make a shrine to it, and kiss it three times a day! That would be a wonderful result! Much to be desired, it might make the Israelis amenable to making the compromises which would make it possible for them to be accepted.
However, I’m sure you haven’t failed to notice how quickly Zionists can go from justifications in ancient legnds to rationalisations from current self-created exigencies. That would screw it all up.
Jeez, I hope they can work it out, from the Israelis I have met, I’m not sure I want them coming to America if their project goes mammaries-skyward. And the settlers I was glad to get rid of, keeps the number of Jews in American jails lower than it would otherwise be.
“It is hoped that when this factual truth is ingested by the Israelis it will loose them from constricted and contrived motivations and animus, break the chain of confluence of interest with Western Hegemony which enriches their elite, and transforms Israel into what it should be as a modern contributor in a world that embraces all humanity.”
V, what do you believe defines the 21st century? What ideas should the best modern men hold? Do you believe that outside of Western Hegemony there is a world that embraces all humanity? Is it possible that those who embrace humanity and those who don’t would wind up at odds over ideological issues rather than racial, ethnic or religious issues? Are ideological conflicts more humane or noble than conflicts based on religious, ethnic or racial matters?
I find V’s comment astute. I have nothing to add except this, one of many definitions
of religion found online:
“Religion is any specific system of belief about deity, often involving rituals, a code of ethics, a philosophy of life, and a worldview.”
(A worldview is a set of basic, foundational beliefs concerning deity, humanity and the rest of the universe.) Thus we would consider Christianity, Islam, Judaism, Native American Spirituality, Wicca, and other Neopagan traditions to be religions. We also include Agnosticism, Atheism, Humanism, Ethical Culture etc. as religions, because they also contain a “belief about deity.” Their belief is that they do not know whether a deity exists, or they have no knowledge of God, or they sincerely believe that God does not exist.
Some say the difference between religion and cult is purely in the number of converts.
You have enough converts and you can be accepted as a ‘religion’. Otherwise you’re just a cult.
Nice try Julian, but dont confuse the mouth-breathers on this site with cutting edge science. It gets their tin hats in a bundle.
Oh come now, do we have to listen to these strange retorts of scientific quackery OJ? The next thing you know you will be trying to connect ethnic cleansing and land theft to archeology. Also, what does that remark “mouth-breathers” mean? Are we to assume that you breathe through you’re ass (as well as cogitate)? lol
Take this link for instance, although I do not believe the ancient events that Dawkins seems to embrace (minus the miraculous) really occurred. It is the simple fact of not only indoctrinating children that this happened (which I do not believe), but the idea which it communicates – it is OK to do anything in the name of some god. What it does is give a short version of what we are seeing acted out today, and I simply ask how far can it go? -
GOD LIKES A GOOD GENOCIDE
Thanks for the link, V.
From the mouth of indoctrinated children; the sample reasons given certainly made good illustrations and the substituted scenario control group’s response sure
reveals, e.g., what Goering assured his fellow defendants at Nuremberg, i.e., that
the military winner writes the history and is the judge. What better example than
Joshua at Jericho? Oddly, Goering has gone down in history as amoral; the shrink
concluded his key psychological fault he lacked any sense of moral ethics–My god is better than yours? Seems illogical but Goering did have a sense of morality and loyalty to his own god, his people–he made sure his daughter was baptized–Hitler was the god father.
“the military winner writes the history and is the judge. What better example than Joshua at Jericho?”
Cause if there’s one place you can go for precise military history, it’s the Old Testament. I don’t mind you reaching to cast aspersions on Jews, but that was pretty ridiculous. Damn that lying Joshua anyway! I bet he really lost, huh?
You are too much, Citizen. Or as we say in Yiddish “moo tuch”!
Oy Gottenyu I’ve had enough with you people. It’s like pulling teats. Well since everyone has been so mean to me, I am not going to give you a link to my You-tube of “I Enjoy Being A Jew” (Sung to the tune of “I Enjoy Being a Girl” from, “Flower Drum Song”) which I perform in drag as “FreakinFrumah Sarah”
Now you’ll never see it! Hah! Just shows you, anti-Semites never win!
And I won’t give you the link to my “Easy Chair” You-tube neither, either!
Like the Yiddish proverb says: “If I can’t sell it, I will remain seated upon it. I ain’t about to give it away!”
Comments on this entry are closed.