Jewish.History.Jewish Religion-The.Weight.of.Three.Thousand.Years-Israel-Shahak, Judaism
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Israel Shahak
Jewish History,
Jewish Religion
The Weight of Three Thousand Years
Foreword by Gore Vidal
AAARGH
Internet
2005
Jewish History, Jewish Religion
First published 1994 by Pluto Press345 Archway Road, London N6 5AA,
United Kingdomand 5500 Central Avenue, Boulder, Colorado 80301, USA
ISBN 0-7453-0818-X
ISBN 0 7453 0818 X
French edition by La Vieille Taupe and German edition, online
on the AAARGH website.
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Contents:
Foreword by Gore Vidal
A Closed Utopia?
Prejudice and Prevarication
Orthodoxy and Interpretation
The Weight of History
The Laws against Non-Jews
Political Consequences
Notes and References
Index
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Jewish History, Jewish Religion
Foreword
Sometime in the late 1950s, that world-class gossip and occasional historian,
John F. Kennedy, told me how, in 1948, Harry S. Truman had been pretty much
abandoned by everyone when he came to run for president. Then an American
Zionist brought him two million dollars in cash, in a suitcase, aboard his whistle-stop
campaign train. 'That's why our recognition of Israel was rushed through so fast.' As
neither Jack nor I was an antisemite (unlike his father and my grandfather) we took
this to be just another funny story about Truman and the serene corruption of
American politics.
Unfortunately, the hurried recognition of Israel as a state has resulted in forty-
five years of murderous confusion, and the destruction of what Zionist fellow
travellers thought would be a pluralistic state - home to its native population of
Muslims, Christians and Jews, as well as a future home to peaceful European and
American Jewish immigrants, even the ones who affected to believe that the great
realtor in the sky had given them, in perpetuity, the lands of Judea and Sameria.
Since many of the immigrants were good socialists in Europe, we assumed that they
would not allow the new state to become a theocracy, and that the native Palestinians
could live with them as equals. This was not meant to be. I shall not rehearse the wars
and alarms of that unhappy region. But I will say that the hasty invention of Israel
has poisoned the political and intellectual life of the USA, Israel's unlikely patron.
Unlikely, because no other minority in American history has ever hijacked so
much money from the American taxpayers in order to invest in a 'homeland'. It is as
if the American taxpayer had been obliged to support the Pope in his reconquest of
the Papal States simply because one third of our people are Roman Catholic. Had this
been attempted, there would have been a great uproar and Congress would have said
no. But a religious minority of less than two per cent has bought or intimidated
seventy senators (the necessary two thirds to overcome an unlikely presidential veto)
while enjoying support of the media.
In a sense, I rather admire the way that the Israel lobby has gone about its
business of seeing that billions of dollars, year after year, go to make Israel a 'bulwark
against communism'. Actually, neither the USSR nor communism was ever much of a
presence in the region. What America did manage to do was to
[viii] turn the once friendly Arab world against us. Meanwhile, the misinformation
about what is going on in the Middle East has got even greater and the principal
victim of these gaudy lies - the American taxpayer to one side - is American Jewry, as
it is constantly bullied by such professional terrorists as Begin and Shamir. Worse,
with a few honorable exceptions, Jewish-American intellectuals abandoned
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Jewish History, Jewish Religion
liberalism for a series of demented alliances with the Christian (antisemtic) right and
with the Pentagon-industrial complex. In 1985 one of them blithely wrote that when
Jews arrived on the American scene they 'found liberal opinion and liberal politicians
more congenial in their attitudes, more sensitive to Jewish concerns' but now it is in
the Jewish interest to ally with the Protestant fundamentalists because, after all, "is
there any point in Jews hanging on dogmatically, hypocritically, to their opinions of
yesteryear?' At this point the American left split and those of us who criticised our
onetime Jewish allies for misguided opportunism, were promptly rewarded with the
ritual epithet 'antisemite' or 'self-hating Jew'.
Fortunately, the voice of reason is alive and well, and in Israel, of all places.
From Jerusalem, Israel Shahak never ceases to analyse not only the dismal politics of
Israel today but the Talmud itself, and the effect of the entire rabbinical tradition on a
small state that the right-wing rabbinate means to turn into a theocracy for Jews
only. I have been reading Shahak for years. He has a satirist's eye for the confusions
to be found in any religion that tries to rationalise the irrational. He has a scholar's
sharp eye for textual contradictions. He is a joy to read on the great Gentile-hating Dr
Maimonides.
Needless to say, Israel's authorities deplore Shahak. But there is not much to be
done with a retired professor of chemistry who was born in Warsaw in 1933 and
spent his childhood in the concentration camp at Belsen. In 1945, he came to Israel;
served in the Israeli military; did not become a Marxist in the years when it was
fashionable. He was - and still is - a humanist who detests imperialism whether in the
names of the God of Abraham or of George Bush. Equally, he opposes with great wit
and learning the totalitarian strain in Judaism. Like a highly learned Thomas Paine,
Shahank illustrates the prospect before us, as well as the long history behind us, and
thus he continues to reason, year after year. Those who heed him will certainly be
wiser and - dare I say? - better. He is the latest, if not the last, of the great prophets.
Gore Vidal
[1]
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Jewish History, Jewish Religion
Chapter 1
A Closed Utopia?
I write here what I think is true, for the stories of the Greeks are
numerous and in my opinion ridiculous ;
Hecateus of Miletis, as quoted by Herodotus.
Amicus Plato sed magis amica veritas . — Plato is a friend but truth is
a greater friend.
Traditional paraphrase of a passage of Aristotele’s
Ethics
In a free state every man can think what he wants and say what he
thinks
Spinoza
THIS BOOK,
although written in English and addressed to people living
outside the State of Israel, is, in a way, a continuation of my political activities as an
Israeli Jew. Those activities began in 1965-6 with a protest which caused a
considerable scandal at the time: I had personally witnessed an ultra-religious Jew
refuse to allow his phone to be used on the Sabbath in order to call an ambulance for
a non-Jew who happened to have collapsed in his Jerusalem neighbourhood. Instead
of simply publishing the incident in the press, I asked for a meeting which is
composed of rabbis nominated by the State of Israel. I asked them whether such
behavior was consistent with their interpretation of the Jewish religion. They
answered that the Jew in question had behaved correctly, indeed piously, and backed
their statement by referring me to a passage in an authoritative compendium of
Talmudic laws, written in this century. I reported the incident to the main Hebrew
daily,
Ha'aretz
, whose publication of the story caused a media scandal.
The results of the scandal were, for me, rather negative. Neither the Israeli, nor
the diaspora, rabbinical authorities ever reversed their ruling that a Jew should not
violate the Sabbath in order to save the life of a Gentile. They added much
sanctimonious twaddle to the effect that if the consequence of such an act puts Jews
in danger, the violation of the Sabbath is permitted, for their sake. It became
apparent to me, as drawing on Talmudic laws governing the relations between Jews
and non-Jews, that neither Zionism, including its seemingly secular part,
[2] nor Israeli politics since the inception of the State of Israel, nor particularly the
policies of the Jewish supporters of Israel in the diaspora, could be understood unless
the deeper influence of those laws, and the worldview which they both create and
express is taken into account. The actual policies Israel pursued after the Six Day
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