The Forward ran a nice piece by Rebecca Dube, talking to Eddie Antar, of the store Crazy Eddie’s, about the crime ring lately unearther in the Syrian Jewish community. Sayeth Antar:
“You have to understand something — the way this community survived when they got expelled from Spain in 1492 was to maintain insularity,” Antar explained. “The same insularity also protects a subculture of crime that goes on…. People use religion as a shield; they use it as a wall of false integrity to enable crime to exist.”
This is a mythology, and a kind of vanity too. Can you imagine being motivated today by events of 500 years ago, to which you may not be entirely sure of your own connection? I am not discounting those events, only saying that they function at a mythological level. Far more important to talk about the Syrian Jewish experience in Syria. These mythologies are too easily accepted in the Jewish community. Note the use of Judea and Samaria, biblical names, to justify the colonization of Palestine.
Far more persuasive than Crazy Eddie’s mythology is Michael Walzer’s interpretation of Jewish history:
"We sustained a national existence for 2000 years without territory, sovereignty, and without coercive power… That is an extraordinary political achievement… one that has not been studied enough, or appreciated enough."
Then he said, "It may be that the talents honed by exile don’t fit the circumstances of statehood." Jews were trained in the circumstances of "kehal," or their own legal/religious community. "We governed only ourselves, as best we could… Sometimes [we were] semi-autonomous… responsible only for ourselves. In the state of Israel, we have accepted responsibility for other people. That is something we have never had in all the years of exile, and we have not done terribly well."
Walzer is talking about a living religious myth that actually serves to define a community, of sorts. Assimilation and Israel are transforming that community.
