The State of the Jews

Zvi Mazel, former ambassador to Egypt, writes in The Jerusalem Post:

All was in place for an impressive ceremony that would have shown the world that Jews and Muslims could rejoice in harmony over a site dedicated to a man held in veneration by both. Maimonides had been the personal physician to Saladin, and for centuries Jews, Muslims and Copts had come to his yeshiva in search of healing. As work was nearing completion, it was agreed with the Egyptian authorities that the small Jewish community of Cairo would organize a dedication ceremony on March 7.

And then the Egyptians had a change of heart. The head of the Antiquities Department stated that it was an Egyptian site. Let Jews hold a religious ceremony discreetly and among themselves; the official inauguration by the Egyptian authorities would take place a week later. That the decision was both ludicrous and impractical did not occur to them until it was too late.

People living there were ordered to close their shops, their doors and their windows and not set foot outside. Security personnel checked invitations and barred journalists from entering. A reporter from a popular daily who tried to interview me was driven away none too gently. A similar fate met a New York Times correspondent. The event was to be kept strictly private – or so hoped the Egyptian authorities. They presumably had not heard of cellphones and other sophisticated recording and transmitting equipment.

(After the jump, Egypt doesn’t miss an opportunity to miss an opportunity. Also video of the dedication of the beautiful synagogue and yeshiva.)

My speech last week in Riga on the uniqueness of the Holocaust. It is edited slightly, and shortened:

In the ten short minutes I have been given, I’d like to try to offer what I believe is the Jewish public’s perspective on the issue at the heart of this conference. I am not an academic, but a journalist. Less an investigator of facts than an observer of public assumptions and beliefs.

It is from that perspective that I want to bring something to the attention of the scholars, activists and politicians gathered here – what I believe may amount to the central lesson that the world’s Jews have drawn from the Holocaust. You cannot understand Jewish politics and political structures of our day without, I believe, understanding this central lesson.

The Holocaust marks the crowning genocide of the bloodiest century in human history, in part because it was the most philosophically purposeful and intellectually sophisticated mass murder ever seen. But for Jews it is about more than the murder alone, about more even than six million Jewish lives and those of millions more enemies of the Nazi regime.

It is about the history-shattering power of hatred. The dead are already dead. But this capacity for hatred lives on.

In case you missed it, Tom Gross caught it on Wednesday:

Not only did Iran’s supreme leader, Ayatollah Ali Khamenei, today say that negotiating with the United States would be a “naive and perverted” thing to do (Khamenei revealed President Obama has approached him several times through oral and written messages which he has not replied to).

Not only did Israeli commandos today intercept a ship carrying hundreds of tons of Iranian weapons intended for Hezbollah in Lebanon – the biggest ever seizure of arms on their way from Iran to its client terrorist militia, Hezbollah, which Iran plans to use as one element in its attempt to wipe the Jewish state off the map (BBC story and video here).

Mohammad Ali Ramin

Not only did Iran brutalize pro-democracy demonstrators once again on the streets of major Iranian cities today (there are several videos if you scroll down here from France 24, and a report here by BBC Persian).

But in addition Iran has appointed as its new deputy culture minister, in charge of media and communications, Mohammad-Ali Ramin, who previously served as President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad’s top advisor on Holocaust matters and is known as “the brain” behind the president’s strategy of Holocaust denial.

Incidentally, an interesting piece on the possible philosophical roots of Ahmadinejad’s Holocaust denial ran in the Forward last month. You should read it.

Phil Weiss is angry that Israeli law has no mechanism for intermarriage, since there is no civil marriage and the religious hierarchies that handle personal status law do not recognize intermarriage. He learned of this dark reality, though not its source or reasons, from Shlomo Sand.

I pointed out that Israel’s marriage laws, like its divorces, burials, etc., are not constructed against Muslims or Catholics, but in the old Ottoman confessionalist models, which are agreed upon by everybody.

Now he returns to accuse me of misrepresenting the essential evil of this system:

Well I’m reading Shlomo Sand’s great book now and Gur is I believe misrepresenting the reality. Sand makes it clear that a bar on intermarriage was no leftover accident of history. “In 1953 the political promise to bar civil marriage in Israel was given a legal basis. The law defining the legal status of the rabbinical courts determined that they would have exclusive jurisdiction over marriage and divorce of Jews in Israel. By this means, the dominant socialist Zionism harnessed the principles of the traditional rabbinate as an alibi for its fearful imaginary [sic] that was terrified of assimilation and ‘mixed marriage.’”

It sometimes amazes me that someone can launch a years-long cultural attack against an entire society without knowing some really basic facts about it, such as the degree to which its “ethnic democracy” is a common phenomenon, or the mechanisms for marriage, or the fact that its marriage laws that effectively forbid intermarriage are supported by the minority religions more than by the Jews.

Of course, the problem is not with the singular fact of the year of the passage of the law, but with the thick layer of deconstruction slathered over it by Sand. The law formalized the already-existing Ottoman system, preventing the state from having to take away from the Muslim minority its generations-old sharia courts. The Muslims, Druse and Christians were not predisposed to give these up for a new Israeli jurisprudence. This wasn’t accomplished by Israeli racism – by and large the Druse are admired by Israeli Jews, but still demanded their own courts – but by a cultural commitment of Israel’s religious groups to maintain their traditional collectivist identities.

I neglected to note – and this is important for Weiss to consider – that I am no supporter of the rabbinate. I have done everything in my power, including Jerusalem Post editorials, interviews, etc., to advocate against Israel’s established rabbinate. My own father is a Reform rabbi. My wife’s father is an Orthodox rabbi. When we married in Israel in March 2008, it was in a wedding unrecognized by the state of Israel because neither of our fathers (who together officiated) were recognized rabbinate officials. We refused to invite a state rabbi to our wedding. Our legal standing is through a quickie civil marriage conducted in a Baltimore courthouse a few weeks earlier.

I don’t like this system. I think the “state church” of Israel has utterly politicized Israeli spirituality and collectivized Israeli religious identity. Without getting into the real suffering the haredi-controlled rabbinate is causing to agunot and would-be converts, the greatest tragedy is that the politicization of religiosity has had the effect of making Israel a spiritual wasteland. I yearn for the day – and I teach in a high school program and premilitary academy to bring it closer – when Israelis look to American Jews to discover how to construct authentic personal spiritual journeys.

But for all that, it’s simply not the reality to claim that the system was born primarily as a means of preserving Jews from religious intermarriage. That misunderstands the motivations of the early years of the state, and ignored some of the most basic identity structures of Middle Eastern religions – where religion is more akin to tribes than to the individualistic confessional faiths of the United States.

Consider: How much is the Sunni-Shi’ite split in Iraq to do with theological difference, and how much tribal? Are the Christians of Syria merely a confessional difference, or a collective tribal one? Or the Druse in Israel, who have an intermarriage rate estimated at 1% despite commonly dating Jews during our shared military service, and who live in their own villages apart from the Arabs or the Jews – are they primarily an American-style religion or a Middle Eastern tribe?

Weiss doesn’t prove anything by quoting the date of the passage of the law and then Sand’s ideological interpretation. He must show not that the Jews of Israel identify collectively like all other Middle Easterners, but that their personal status laws go beyond that and are motivated by a special prejudice against minorities. Since he can’t prove it, he interprets it.

I grew up with these attitudes in American Jewish life. They’ve faded a lot since I was a kid. But in Israel they were memorialized in law. Later Sand writes that even the liberal secular Supreme Court Justice Aharon Barak said, “A Jewish state is one in which Hebrew Law plays an important part, and in which the laws of marriage and divorce of Jews are based on the Torah.”

Here is Weiss’ main mistake: believing that at their core Jews are the same in the US and Israel, and therefore the values of one can easily judge the other. American Jews have transformed into a Protestant-style individualistic faith. Israelis, perhaps 60% of whom hail from the Muslim world, have transformed the notion of Jewishness into a Middle Eastern religion-affiliated national collective that draws more from Muslim world identities than from Zionist ideology.

This is a vast gap in the basic structures of identity, and the two communities (which are together 80% of all Jews) will have to start learning about each other in order to begin to understand each other better. In the meanwhile, it’s not legitimate to offer cheap and easy indictments of the other community. Israelis are fond of saying that American Jews are either disappearing or living on “borrowed time.” Both are false, and come from an Israeli misunderstanding of what it means to live one’s Jewishness as Americans. Some Americans (still a small minority) believe Israeli Jewish nationhood is somehow a warping of the essentially religious nature of Jewishness. True, it’s a deep change, but no deeper than the American spiritualization of Jewish identity. After all, the shtetl Jew was not merely an autonomous citizen with a spiritual affiliation. He was part of a feudal corporate system that identified Jews as a distinct group with distinct living areas and separate legal obligations.

Jews have been many different things in different periods, and both Americans and Israelis are new kinds of Jews. Neither is “wrong.”

As for Aharon Barak, again, this is a twist of the truth. Some of the influence of Halacha in Israeli law includes, for example, viewing the prostitute as the victim, and the pimp and client as its perpetrators. That Israel draws from millenia of Jewish legal thought is not bad, as long as it is subject to oversight over the question of equality and the Basic Laws.

There are more responses to my claims in the comments on Weiss’ site, but I can’t respond to them because I’m awaiting approval as a commentor. These include the claim that what I wrote about “German ethnic origin” in article 116 of the German constitution isn’t there at all. This is a strange complaint. Google it. It’s there. (Search “right of return” on Wikipedia to find it easily.) It refers to East European German-speakers in the post-war period who had nowhere else to go – but had never been citizens of Germany.

Another comment responds to my statements about Israeli marriage law by bringing up the debate over Palestinian family reunification across the Green Line. This is an important question – the Supreme Court decided it on one vote – and I’m happy to get into it if that’s necessary. It continues to be debated to this day. But it has nothing to do with marriage law. Can we stick to one topic at a time?

I’ve never been able to get too worked up over the latest fashion of left-wing Jewish anti-Zionism. Always had a much deeper respect for the agonized theological contemplation that produced haredi anti-Zionism, which at least grows from the Jewish bookshelf rather than from a simpleton’s misreading of it.

At the end of the day, the many movements and ideals, sometimes contradictory, that together made up the Zionist movement in the last century constituted a profound shift in Jewish identity and communal organization. Obviously such a vast project would inspire opposition. In 1948, just after the murder of six million in Europe, only 600,000 Jews lived in Israel. Even factoring for the refugees stuck in British transit camps, Zionism had failed to convince the masses.

Yet so little remains of Yiddish civilization, or Iraqi Jewish civilization, after the massacres and expulsions of the 20th century that to be anti-Zionist is to nitpick about an ideological leaf in a vast forest of brutal historical experience.

Zionism’s “triumph” was caused by a horrific human tragedy, and stands as a devastating moral rebuke to 20th-century Europe and Islam. The Jews deserve their state whether or not they are being massacred. But it sure makes it tougher to argue against Israel’s legitimacy when this country harbors the last major civilization of Jews left alive in the Eastern Hemisphere.

(The exception to this Zionist experience, of course, is the English-speaking world. But that’s a whole ‘nother story beyond the purposes of this post.)

So it is with that caveat that I want, bechol zot, to note a well-written intellectual curiosity on the radical anti-Zionist Jewish Left – published Saturday on the Mondoweiss website. (Scroll down to “And one last obvious point” for the essence. Continue below for the fun argumentation.)

The framework of this critique of Zionism is, predictably, a glowing review of Shlomo Sand’s The Invention of the Jewish People by Jack Ross.

It begins:

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.

What follows this pointed question are reflections on the allegedly anti-historical lunacy of seeing the Jews as anything but a religious faith. Sand is brought in as a man who, in Tony Judt’s words:

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.

He did this by “discovering” that Jewish history is the history of the Khazars, who became Ashkenazic Jewry, and not that of a primordial Jewish people expelled from Judea into a two-millennia exile.

In other words, the “Exile” is an ideology, an invention, and the modern Jewish nation, nothing more than an “invented nation.”

Here ends the recap, and begins the exposition of The Problem. (Notice the dramatic capitalization.)

The Problem is that this entire discourse is essentially political, not academic, and thus disjointed. The pretext of academic rigor is intended to corroborate already-existing political views.

Taken on an academic level, this is appalling. It is one thing to do the wonderful work of tracing Ashkenazic Jewry to the Khazars – an unproven but fascinating hypothesis. It’s also nothing new. But it’s quite another thing to develop a theory of unproven historical events structured around contemporary political need. Yes, the Khazars may be antecedents to Ashkenazi Jewry. But does that theorizing prove, for example, that they are the only antecedents?

The need to disprove the Zionists leads Sand – or at least the public debate he has attempted to launch – to ignore the fact that the Exile is Ashkenazi Jewry’s own origin story. It was not invented by the Zionists. And there are good reasons (like this one and this one) to give them the benefit of the doubt.

In determining that Jewish nationhood is “invented” – which is a fancy way of saying the blindingly obvious truth that if all Jews everywhere stopped feeling like a nation they would stop being one – Sand’s allies are not pursuing intellectual truth, but trying to deny Jewish nationhood the authenticity it needs to stand up to the “natives” in Palestine.

Take, for example, this paragraph extolling the Khazars:

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.

Did you catch the jibe about Israel’s coming destruction? Is that really the lesson to be learned from the Khazar example, which in any case is here exalted far beyond any real historical knowledge? Is the professed Jewish identity of Israelis so utterly false it is destined to collapse faster than the House of Hashmonai?

The Palestinians sure think so, and it drives a lot of the impulses that have turned their national movement into such a tragedy.

But the anti-Zionists’ own question actually works against them. If identities are “invented” – as, of course, they are – can “Jewishness” be something other than what the Jews believe it to be? So if a majority of Israelis say they are Jews, and that their Jewishness is a nationality, are they wrong?

And is Palestinian identity also invented, or does the deconstruction of national identification apply only to Jews? After all, walk through Jenin and you’ll notice different skin colors. In Hebron half the population is still called “Yemenite.” The word Palestinian did not denote an Arab, but a Jew, when it was used in the New York Times circa 1948.

Sand, of course, wants to be considered not a member of the “Jewish” nation, but of the “Israeli” one. This is completely kosher, I suppose, and entirely his choice, but he does owe us the intellectual honesty of noting that this is an ideological project, an essentially political campaign which has yet to convince most Israelis. And after winning over all the Jews, Sand will have an even harder time convincing the Israeli Arabs that they share a “nation” with them.

And one last obvious point that still needs to be made, because it is on this score that this particular breed of anti-Zionist fails most profoundly (the haredim are much more serious, believe me): acknowledging the complexities of identity formation.

It isn’t at all clear what makes up Jewishness even in Judaism’s inner definitions. Some of the earliest halacha already envisioned a tribal collective that can be joined through religious conversion. Anybody got a name for that in English?

And things have changed a lot since Persia and Babylon. In Israel, with a majority of Jews hailing from the Muslim world (or, since they are all mixed now, a majority of their grandparents), Jewish identity has become structurally more tribal and, well, Arab. (Consider: the difference between Sunni and Shi’ite in Iraq is tribal first, theological a distant second. Now think about the gap between Israeli Jews and their neighbors.) In America, meanwhile, things became very American: individualistic, spiritual, obsessed with personal autonomy…Protestant.

And so we face a Jewish world today with radically different, but still collectively agreed-upon, structures of identification – two worlds with different historical experiences and fundamentally different ways of identifying. It hardly needs pointing out that these two kinds of Jews, Israelis and Americans, make up over 80% of all Jews currently living.

So to get back to Ross’ initial question to his father, a question his father was unfortunately unable to answer satisfactorily: what are the Jews? The answer, I’m afraid, is “Who knows? The Jews sure don’t.” Or better yet: “It’s complicated. The Jews are many things all at once, not always in agreement with themselves.”

And here comes the really damning question that the budding anti-Zionist must answer: Why does that complexity, the difficulty to pin down a single “truth” about something as deep and shifting as human identification, give someone the right to “discover” that the core identity of one of the major living Jewish civilizations is “untrue?”

Iran analyst Meir Javedanfar pokes so many holes in the Daily Telegraph story about Ahmadinejad’s Jewish origins that, well, it sinks.

Upon closer inspection, a completely different interpretation of “Sabourjian” emerges. According to Robert Tait, a Guardian correspondent who travelled to Ahmadinejad’s native village in 2005, the name “derives from thread painter – sabor in Farsi – a once common and humble occupation in the carpet industry in Semnan province, where Aradan is situated”. This is confirmed by Kasra Naji, who also wrote a biography of Ahmadinejad and met his family in his native village. Carpet weaving or colouring carpet threads are not professions associated with Jews in Iran.

According to both Naji and Tait, Ahmadinejad’s father Ahmad was in fact a religious Shia, who taught the Quran before and after Ahmadinejad’s birth and their move to Tehran. So religious was Ahmad Sabourjian that he bought a house near a Hosseinieh, a religious club that he frequented during the holy month of Moharram to mourn the martyrdom of Imam Hossein.

Moreover, Mahmoud Ahmadinejad’s mother is a Seyyede. This is a title given to women whose family are believed to be direct bloodline descendants of Prophet Muhammad.

I stand by my question from yesterday about the possibility of a Jewish past for the Holocaust-denying theocrat: Who cares?