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Title: Jewish History, Jewish Religion: The Weight of Three Thousand Years (Pluto Middle Eastern Studies) by Israel Shahak, Gore Vidal ISBN: 0-7453-0819-8 Publisher: Pluto Press Pub. Date: 01 December, 1994 Format: Paperback Volumes: 1 List Price(USD): $18.95 |
Average Customer Rating: 4.19 (43 reviews)
Rating: 2
Summary: Valuable empirical material, seriously flawed historiography
Comment: The author (the late professor Israel Shahak) provides a comprehensive summary of racist elements in talmudic sources, which (in his opinion) reveals that anti-Gentile racism is built into and deeply codified in Orthodox ("Classical") Judaism. The book also deals with Israeli politics and Jewish History, since (as Shahak claims) this inherently racist world view has influenced Jewish attitudes to Gentiles from the Middle Ages to the present.
Shahak's approach to Orthodox Judaism is analogous to that of "Endecktes Judenthum" (Judaism Unmasked) by Johann Andreas Eisenmenger (1654-1704), an established Christian scholar who produced a similar compilation of offensive material from talmudic sources (see Jacob Katz's "From Prejudice to Destruction"). However, Eisenmenger and Shahak acted in different historical and political contexts: while the former was criticizing the religion of a weak and oppressed minority from a position of power, the latter was a political activist confronting the same religion, but now turned into the state religion of a modern nation state (Israel). As Shahak argues, convincingly, the symbiotic alliance between Zionist ideology and religious orthodoxy implies that clericalism and institutionalized discrimination against non-Jews are inherent (not circumstantial) features of the Israeli state. In this context and notwithstanding skepticism regarding Shahak's exegesis of Orthodox Judaism, the book has brought to a wide readership empirical material of undeniable value in contemporary political debate, since talmudic sources provide ideological sanction to many groups that play an important role in internal Jewish and Israeli politics and in the Israel-Palestine conflict.
Unfortunately, the historiographical work that accompanies the book's critique of Jewish religion and Zionism is seriously flawed. Shahak is more concerned in condemning Jewish racism than in achieving a critical but well balanced explanation of Jewish-Gentile relations. While he correctly criticizes apologetic historiographies that stress anti-Semitism and ignore Jewish racism, the alternative he has produced is a long moralistic and polemical pamphlet that reduces the History of the Jews to the History of Jewish racism (something equivalent to judging the servings of a restaurant by sampling only its rubbish bin). Thus, for example, all that readers unfamiliar with Jewish History will learn about an important Jewish political-cultural movement like the Bund, is that its leaders where prejudiced against Gentile peasants (a claim which Shahak fails to substantiate).
While Jewish racism (as any other racism) is clearly immoral, Shahak's purely moralistic approach to this issue ignores the different conditions in which Jews related to Gentiles throughout history. Shahak is not justified in judging anti-Gentile racism of Jews who lived as ethno-religious minorities in historical circumstances of political weakness, persecution and discrimination, with the same standards as the anti-Semitism of the Gentile majority (like equating the racism of Blacks with that of White supremacists). Certainly, these considerations do not apply to West Bank settlers, who rule over an oppressed Gentile (Palestinian) population by means of the full political and military apparatus of the Israeli state. However, Shahak makes no distinctions: he castigates every manifestation of Jewish racism (regardless of which Jews are involved) with angry, often sarcastic, vitriol. As a contrast, his condemnation of anti-Semitism and Nazism is correct and sanitized, even polite. Perhaps this explains why this book is so popular among anti-Jewish hate groups and web sites.
Throughout the book Shahak makes questionable judgments on various Jewish individuals and groups. Anti-Jewish massacres in medieval times are justified as liberating acts by oppressed peasants that should be "applauded" by "progressive historians". I wonder if any "progressive historian" would agree to this demagogic glorification of mob revenge (even if done by former victims: imagine Jewish mobs slaughtering German civilians after WWII). Shahak claims (page 17), without providing evidence, that left wing parties have been infiltrated by "disguised Jewish racists" on behalf of a sinister "Jewish interest" (a vaguely defined ethnic loyalty). Shahak justifies this contention by arguing that Jewish leftists have never denounced the kibbutz for systematically excluding non-Jews. While Shahak's criticism of Jewish leftists tending to play down racism in Israel is justified, his allegations about a secret Jewish conspiracy on this issue are pure demagoguery. Another example concerns American rabbis campaigning for civil rights who failed to denounce Maimonides' anti-Black passages (pages 25-26). Shahak is right in criticizing them, but this issue alone cannot justify his unwarranted accusation that they were "secret racists" whose support for Martin Luther King was dishonest. As a contrast, XIX century European anti-Semites are sympathetically described (page 66) as "bewildered men who believed in conspiracy theories, hated modern society and cast the Jew as the scapegoat", as if their anti-Semitism was a harmless detail that did not merit condemnation. Thus, Shahak expects absolute moral integrity only from Jews, excusing nuances and contradictions in the behavior of non-Jews.
According to Shahak, most Jews nowadays (except for some individual "Jews by descent" who have internalized the values of Popper's "Open Society") are willing prisoners of a sort of totalitarian Orwellian anti-utopia, a modern incarnation of the old "closed" Jewish society, demanding uncritical support for the State of Israel, just as in the "closed" medieval communities rabbis demanded absolute obedience to religious law. Although this is an interesting historical analogy, it is a flawed substitute for a proper understanding of the complex interplay between modern Jewish identity and contemporary politics.
In spite of containing valuable material, its deficient historiographical methodology and the contemptuous dismissal of all studies of Jewish History and religion carried on by Jews (other than the author), detracts from this book being a scholarly work.
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Rating: 5
Summary: Such views are usually censored...
Comment: I highly recommend reading the book "Jewish history, Jewish Religion". Its author, Israel Shahak, a professor at the Hebrew University in Jerusalem, engages in deep introspection about Jewish religion and practices.
He seems deeply toubled by the rigidity, and intolerance of Jewish religion. Shahak quotes from the Talmud and points out a pervasive Jewish racism and haughtiness toward non-Jews.
He believes that anti-semitism may have its roots in this historic Jewish mindset. Shahak also points out a wide-spread practice of deception and double-speak.
In writing this book, he hopes that other Jews will engage in similar introspection to estabish a more harmonious relationship with Goyims.
Recommended books: 'The Holocaust Industry' (by Finkelstein) 'An Eye for an Eye' (John Sack)
Rating: 5
Summary: Uncommon Introspection Into Some Historic Tenets of Judaism
Comment: The author became aware of the stronghold that mythical ideological Judaism exerts on the minds of both secular and un-Orthodox Jews alike, when he heard Ben-Gurion (an avowed atheist, showing only utter contempt to religion) stating before the Knesset in 1956, on the third day of the Suez War, that the real reason for initiating the Suez-War was "the restoration of the Kingdom of David and Salomon" to its Biblical borders (at this point in speech, almost every Knesset member rose to sing the Israeli national anthem).
This was what constituted the author's "political conversion".
His "religious conversion" took place a decade later, and is also worth mentioning.
Israel Shahak witnessed an ultra-religious Jew refusing to let his phone be used on a Sabbath to call for an ambulance for a non-Jew that had collapsed in his Jerusalem-neighbourhood. Taken by surprise with such an attitude, Israel Shahak asked for a meeting with the Rabbinical Court of Jerusalem (composed of rabbis nominated by the State of Israel), where he enquired whether such behaviour was consistent with their interpretation of Jewish religion. They answered that this Jew had acted correctly, indeed piously, and backed their statement with an authoritative 20th century compendium of Talmudic laws. By that time, it became apparent to the author that neither Zionism nor Israeli policies could be understood, unless the deeper influence and worldview curtailed by those laws was taken into account.
Israel Shahak's argument is that some of the Talmudic teachings and Cabbalistic lore are just poisoning the minds of the Jewish people, and thereby resulting in potentially disastrous effects and consequences, for both Jews and non-Jews alike, whether in the Middle-East or elsewhere.
Israel Shahak also aptly rejects the myth of a Jewish "race" (a relatively modern concept, that has only recently climaxed with modern anti-Semitic writers such as Drumont, Adolph Hitler, Alfred Rosenberg, et al.), but argues consistently that it is some of these poisonous and deleterious tenets of Orthodox Judaism that are and have been the principal spring for anti-Semitism, in first fuelling hatred and contempt towards non-Jews, and thereby, in the end, resulting in one of the main historical fuels for Gentile anti-Semitism.
He argues that Gentile anti-Semitism and Jewish ethno-centrism (call it Jewish chauvinism, xenophobia, patriotism, racism, or whatever you like) can only be fought in par, and are actually pretty much joined at the hip (cf. the fact that some Zionists were somehow either enthused or comforted in their Zionist beliefs by the rise of Nazi Germany, and that many Nazis were seeing Zionistic concepts with some kind of sympathy).
The author also gives some more rational explanations and historical insights as to the roots of modern-day anti-Semitism (the ingrained hatred of peasants and peasantry, Jews often being considered as privileged by European nobility, the grant of special status that was often advantageous compared to the common population, Jews often having acted as middle-men to the well-to-do and tax-collectors, etc. etc.), and somehow demystifies modern-day anti-Semitism by considering that anti-Semitic outbursts and attacks (such as pogroms, etc.) can be seen as the (traditional) revolt of the poorer strata of society (peasantry and serfdom) upon the limitless oppression of the favoured layers (and its all-to-often Jewish middle-men) of Middle-Age-like societies.
Israel Shahak also sees the tenets of Judaism and Zionism as fostering some kind of modern-day Sparta-ideology (the mind should not even consider acting as an individual, let alone know how to do it). Scholar Moses Hadas claimed that "classical Judaism", as established by the Talmudic sages, is based upon Platonic influences, and especially on the image of Sparta as it appears in Plato, and that crucial tenets of the Platonic political system were adopted by Judaism as early as the Maccabean period in 142-63 BC ("that every phase of human conduct be subjected to religious sanctions which are in fact to be manipulated by the ruler").
The author also acknowledges the historical fact that classical Judaism was only able to survive in its present form through ruthless "Imperialistic enforcement" (cf. Esdras and Nehemias, the Persian rulers, the Roman edicts, the grant of autharcy by many European States and the warrancy to the rabbis to enforce legal punishments upon non-observant Jews, religious heretics, etc.)
Israel Shahak clearly sees modern-day Zionist Israel as a utopian return to a "closed society", a Middle-East Ghetto that might well once more end up being subject to the same internal religious oppressions and aberrations, as well as suffering the same kind of ostracization by the rest of the world.
He might well have seen the strong resurgence of the Shinui Party as some kind of a legacy to his work and fight for openness and lucidity.
In the end, this book reminded me of the words of some people who proclaimed (nearly two thousand years ago) "I came to tell you the truth, but you will not receive it"... Strangely enough, "Jewish History, Jewish Religion" was written by an agnostic turned humanist, a survivor of Bergen-Belsen, a scientist who became University Professor, a Jewish resident of the State of Israel since its very inception, and has something like the ring of the Voice of a Prophet to his people...
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Title: Jewish Fundamentalism in Israel by Israel Shahak, Norton Mezvinsky ISBN: 0745312764 Publisher: Pluto Press Pub. Date: 01 October, 1999 List Price(USD): $18.95 |
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Title: Judaism's Strange Gods by Michael A. Hoffman II ISBN: 0970378408 Publisher: Independent History Pub. Date: 30 August, 2000 List Price(USD): $12.95 |
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Title: The Politics of Anti-Semitism by Alexander Cockburn, Jeffrey St. Clair ISBN: 1902593774 Publisher: AK Press Pub. Date: 01 October, 2003 List Price(USD): $12.95 |
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Title: Open Secrets: Israel Nuclear and Foreign Policies by Israel Shahak, Edward W. Said ISBN: 0745311512 Publisher: Pluto Press Pub. Date: 01 December, 1997 List Price(USD): $22.50 |
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Title: The Israeli Holocaust Against the Palestinians by Michael Hoffman II, Moshe Lieberman ISBN: 0970378424 Publisher: Independent History Pub. Date: 29 August, 2002 List Price(USD): $12.95 |
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