The State of the Jews

A wonderful discovery, Dr. Emmanuel Navon of Tel Aviv University and his blog For the Sake of Zion.

He expresses beautifully the consensus feeling among most Israelis. Shlomo Sand may be sexy in a certain foreign milieu, but he is so radically disconnected from the Israeli discourse and Israeli identity that no one even bothers to challenge him here. The Jewishness of the Israeli state is so obvious, and ethnic Jewish identification so universal that Sand is little more than a circus curiosity in this country. Only abroad, among those profoundly ignorant and exceedingly loud about Israel, can he find his groupies.

Navon’s latest captures the hypocrisy of the likes of Tony Judt and Sand, and should be read by, well, Judt and Sand. Unfortunately, their academic credentials don’t seem to drive them to self-critical reflection.

One wonders what happens when Navon and Sand pass each other in the hallways of Tel Aviv University.

Anyway, here’s Navon:

The understandable frustration with the intractability of the Israeli-Palestinian conflict has led some people to suggest that, for the conflict to abate, one of the two protagonists must give up. But what if both sides prove relentless forever? A Freudian answer to that question has recently been devised by (you guessed it) Jews: explain to the Jews (but not to the Palestinians, Heaven forbid), that they don’t actually exist, and they will stop fighting for their “imagined self.”

It is logically undisputable that there would be no Israeli-Palestinian conflict if there were no Israelis or no Palestinians (or both); that there would be no anti-Semitism if Jews didn’t exist (though even that is debatable); and that there would be no car accidents if cars hadn’t been invented….

This is the underlying argument that Shlomo Sand is promoting in his book The Invention of the Jewish People. A historian of modern French and European history at Tel-Aviv University, Sand is no expert in the Ancient Middle East and in Jewish history. His book has been dismissed and ridiculed by scholars of Jewish history as a cheap and embarrassing piece of falsifications and propaganda. Even Tony Judt (also an expert on modern European history, and also an anti-Zionist Jew), had to admit that Sand’s contribution to the knowledge of Jewish history “is at best redundant” (”Israel must unpick its ethnic myth,” Financial Times, 7 December 2009). Judt does not dispute that Sand’s book is academically sloppy, but he argues that this sloppiness is irrelevant (if not forgivable): What counts, according to Judt, is the point that Sand is trying to make.

For Judt, “the perverse insistence upon identifying a universal Jewishness with one small piece of territory … is the single most important factor accounting for the failure to solve the Israeli-Palestinian imbroglio.” In other words, one of the central tenets of Judaism is “perverse” and is “the single most important” reason for the Israeli-Palestinian conflict. So Jews must abandon one of their strongest beliefs –a belief that gave them hope and helped them survive throughout two millennia of exile. On the other hand, the fact that Islam holds that a land that was once ruled by Muslims must be “liberated” from “infidels” is not a problem. Nor is the fact that the Palestinians insist on invading Israel with millions of descendants (or alleged descendants) of the 1948 refugees, or that they deny the very existence of the Jerusalem Temple. The problem is not Muslim theology or Palestinian myths. The problem is Jewish faith.

Just wondering if you noticed: The New York Times politely calls Prof. Shlomo Sand a liar – not for his theories on the origins of today’s Jews, but for pretending his ideas were either new or proven.

In his wonderful “History of Zionism,” Walter Laqueur chides the post-Zionist historians by saying that what is true in their work is not new, and what is new is not true. Shlomo Sand, former campus radical turned publicity-hound professor and wanna-be destroyer of Jewish nationhood, seems to have written his book precisely to fit that description.

Patricia Cohen of The New York Times explains:

Mixing respected scholarship with dubious theories, the author, Shlomo Sand, a professor at Tel Aviv University, frames the narrative as a startling exposure of suppressed historical facts.

…

Professor Sand, a scholar of modern France, not Jewish history, candidly states his aim is to undercut the Jews’ claims to the land of Israel by demonstrating that they do not constitute “a people,” with a shared racial or biological past. The book has been extravagantly denounced and praised, often on the basis of whether or not the reader agrees with his politics.

…

Since Professor Sand’s mission is to discredit Jews’ historical claims to the territory, he is keen to show that their ancestry lines do not lead back to ancient Palestine. He resurrects a theory first raised by 19th-century historians, that the Jews of Central and Eastern Europe, to whom 90 percent of American Jews trace their roots, are descended from the Khazars, a Turkic people who apparently converted to Judaism and created an empire in the Caucasus in the eighth century. This idea has long intrigued writers and historians. In 1976, Arthur Koestler wrote “The Thirteenth Tribe” in the hopes it would combat anti-Semitism; if contemporary Jews were descended from the Khazars, he argued, they could not be held responsible for Jesus’ Crucifixion.

By now, experts who specialize in the subject have repeatedly rejected the theory, concluding that the shards of evidence are inconclusive or misleading, said Michael Terry, the chief librarian of the Jewish division of the New York Public Library. Dr. Ostrer said the genetics also did not support the Khazar theory.

See also the argument I had with Philip Weiss over Sand’s quixotic effort to destroy the basic narrative of Israeli identity: “Anti-Israel, with a dash of intellectual pretense.”

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?

Ron Kampeas weighs in on my anti-Sand ranting with an interesting contribution about Middle Eastern marriage:

…the Associated Press just ran a story on how Israelis and Lebanese share a tradition of taking their vows to Cypus in order to circumvent confessionalist strictures.

Not only that, but in this neighborhood, the AP reports, Israel and Lebanon actually are progressive for recognizing the Cyprus marriages.

As Ron notes, this kind of cross-border reportage makes AP invaluable:

No one does across the border, collaborative stories better (see the pile of co-bylines at the end.) I remember the thrill of AP, about 1993, introducing IM technology into its content management system; and then, of instantly conversing with staffers in Beirut that until then had been little more than bylines to me.

Self-described anti-Zionist Philip Weiss learned something from my posting on his love of Shlomo Sand.

I called Sand “intellectually lazy” for claiming that Israel can not be both an “ethnocracy” and a democracy. After all, most of the world’s democracies are, in fact, nation-states with specific ethnic identifications, and many (such as Greece, Ireland and England) even have official state religions. Israel is the average, and non-ethnic universalist democracies like the US and France are the exception, I pointed out.

Weiss retorts:

You learn something new every day! But do those places not let you marry people of other ethnic backgrounds? I was shocked at the Sand lecture to learn– I’m always the last to know– that Jews and Palestinians can’t marry each other in Israel.

Once again, Sand is playing his listeners for fools.

The basic fact is true, but the social, historical and moral reality behind it is missing. There is no law against intermarriage.

Here’s what Sand failed to explain: Israel inherited Ottoman personal status law which places personal status – marriage, divorce, burial, etc. – in the hands of religious establishments. This means Jews can only marry in a rabbinic court, Muslims must marry in a sharia court, Catholics only within the auspices of the Catholic Church, Druse in their system, etc.

To my knowledge, Israel is the only Western democracy that grants its Muslim citizens their own government-funded sharia courts.

All these religious hierarchies are under the secular – and venerated – High Court of Justice, which makes certain that their rulings are in keeping with Knesset legislation.

It’s not that intermarriage was outlawed, but that all the communities want their own system for their own people. Is this weird? Yes. Is this profoundly Middle Eastern? Absolutely. But is it discrimination?

It also hurts the Jews. Conservative and Reform rabbis cannot officiate at an Israeli wedding, even between Jews, because they are not government-paid members of the state rabbinate.

Worse yet, all Protestants, not to mention 300,000 Russian-speaking non-Jews, can’t marry even among themselves because the legislation never got around to recognizing them as official religious groups with their own court system.

This isn’t because anyone cares whether two Protestants marry each other, but because Israel’s constitution is incomplete and its legal system is a hodge-podge of Anglo-Saxon precedent, Continental regulations, Ottoman sharia-inspired tradition and Israeli innovation since 1948.

It’s a mess, it badly needs reform, but it’s not founded on discrimination.

The good news – and the reason this legal structure still exists – is that it is ignored by both Israeli citizens and courts. Since official marriage is so difficult in this country, judicial precedent over the decades has come to recognize full marital rights for unofficial “common law” marriages. Just living together grants rights as comprehensive as alimony, adoption and inheritance.

In having the most medieval marriage law in the West, Israel’s judiciary has created the most post-modern. Gays who cohabitate owe each other alimony when they break apart. Indeed, Israeli judges in recent years have begun to scale back this process out of fear that they were judicially “marrying” people who only wanted to live together.

It’s thought that one-third of Israeli marriages, including intermarriages, are “common law” – in Hebrew, yeduim betzibur.

To cut to the chase, Israel is complex, strange, Mideastern and imperfect. And Shlomo Sand? He’s the worst kind of liar, the kind that specializes in half-truths.

Beware the labels, the simplistic jargon laid over a complex reality. That’s my takeaway from online comments I read over the weekend that reached truly weird conclusions about, well, me, by falling in love with lingo and abandoning all semblance of self-critical reflection.

In a long joyful reflection on a Shlomo Sand lecture at NYU, American Jewish anti-Zionist blogger Philip Weiss describes the “high” of discovering a deep narrative for his long-held political beliefs.

Of all the events I’ve covered surrounding Jewish identity and Israel in the last year, none has given me so much pleasure as the lecture last night by Shlomo Sand at NYU on the Invention of the Jewish People.

Weiss’ joy surrounds Sand’s new history of the Jews – a history that rips away the old “Zionist” narratives and replaces them with a new story: the Jews are Khazars and Yemenites and Bergers. There’s no such thing as “Jewish peoplehood.” Israel is founded on a lie.

I’m all for intellectual stimulation, and I love new theories based on new historical evidence. Unfortunately, in Sand, I got neither. As Weiss points out:

Sand offered very little by way of evidence. You will find that in his “boring” book, he said. This was an aria not a chalktalk.

Will you? Or will you find more historical surmising based on partial records and incomplete theories? Elsewhere, Weiss reports Sand saying that:

…at the supposed time of the Exodus, the Egyptians also controlled Canaan. The kingdom of David and Solomon was not a kingdom at all, but a small settlement around Jerusalem.

I have a professor cousin who believes that King Solomon didn’t even exist. Sand isn’t radical in his historical reconstructions. In fact, his “discoveries” are really just run-of-the-mill and johnny-come-lately academic theories.

His error is not in the theories themselves, but in pretending to hold newly-obtained truths that spectacularly affirm his preexisting politics. It is this sleight-of-hand effort that transforms this project – like Weiss’ own pretense to scholarship – from honest critique to mere political hypocrisy.

How else to explain the confusion reflected in Weiss’ account. He quotes Sand:

“I don’t deny Jewish identity. I’m not fighting against someone’s identity. There is identity of homosexuals. They are not a people. We are composed of a lot of identities.”

But then quotes Sand again:

“I am anti-racist. And an anti-anti-semite,” he said. “But look at me, do you think I hate the Jewish?” More devil eyes flashing. “I don’t hate myself… I hate the Jewish people? But that doesn’t exist. How can I hate something that doesn’t exist?”

So the Jewish identity he is emphatically not fighting against – does not exist. Did you get that?

You can argue Jewish nationhood is antithetical to, oh, Jewish religiosity (as do some haredim) or universal liberal values (as do some on the radical left). But faced with millions of people that believe that they personally constitute a Jewish nation, does it make any kind of sense to say it doesn’t exist?

Identities are decided by the people who hold them, not by the politicized professors who oppose them.

Leaving identity behind, we then have another example of what I am beginning to call the anti-Israel “errors-by-labeling.” Here, Sand creates a definition of democracy which, well, removes much of the free world from the democratic camp.

When Sand said that Israel was not a democracy, and a Zionist called out, “It is a flawed democracy,” Sand bellowed. No: a democracy is founded on the idea that the people are the sovereign, that the people own the state. That is the first principle of a republic going back to Rousseau. Liberalism and civil rights are not the core. Yes, Israel is a liberal society. It tolerates Shlomo Sand’s heresy, for instance, and puts him on TV. But it is a liberal ethnocracy.

His theories on Ashkenazim carrying Khazar blood – interesting. His theories on Jewish roots of the Palestinians – fascinating. But this? This is just stupid.

Why? Because most democracies are ethnic democracies. Most of the free states of this planet define a specific ethnos or nation whose interests they serve. Examples: Ireland, Finland, Germany, Romania, Georgia, Italy, Spain. All are constitutionally devoted to a single ethnicity, which is defined in their constitutions as a group that is not equal to the sum of their citizens.

Israel’s “ethnocracy” is the standard among democracies, not the exception. In fact, only two states share Sand’s view that the state belongs to the sum of its residents or citizens: the US and France.

A good example is in a survey of the “rights of return” of various democracies – a right granted to non-citizen “affinity Diasporas.” Such a “right of return” is not the province only of Zionists (or of the future Palestine). In fact, it is shared by these fine states:

There is Germany (link is PDF), whose constitution, in article 116, recognizes something called “German ethnic origin” as a grantor of automatic citizenship.

India allows “Indians by descent” easier access to full citizenship than other residents.

And Finland, which despite defining itself as a “state of all its citizens” still grants special naturalization rights to ethnic Finns who have lived for centuries in areas under Russian or Czarist sovereignty.

Lithuania’s constitution is explicit (article 32.4) that “Every Lithuanian person may settle in Lithuania” – a right granted not to absentee citizens (which would be obvious), but to non-citizen ethnic Lithuanians.

How about democratic Armenia? Article 14 of its Constitution states: “Individuals of Armenian origin shall acquire citizenship of the Republic of Armenia through a simplified procedure.”

Or Bulgaria, whose constitution (Article 25.2) states: “A person of Bulgarian origin shall acquire Bulgarian citizenship through a facilitated procedure.”

Or Greece, whose constitution (article 108) decrees that:

The State must take care for emigrant Greeks and for the maintenance of their ties with the Fatherland. The State shall also attend to the education, the social and professional advancement of Greeks working outside the State.

It was Greece that granted automatic citizenship to Ukrainians after the fall of the Iron Curtain merely because they belonged to the Greek Orthodox Church.

Even Israel’s national religion – something I have written against often – is not unusual among the democracies. Both Greece and Ireland place a single national religion above others and give it constitutional status that has made it synonymous with national identity. Thus Greece’s constitution assures us that:

The prevailing religion in Greece is that of the Eastern Orthodox Church of Christ. The Orthodox Church of Greece, acknowledging our Lord Jesus Christ as its head, is inseparably united in doctrine with the Great Church of Christ in Constantinople and with every other Church of Christ of the same doctrine, observing unwaveringly, as they do, the holy apostolic and synodal canons and sacred traditions.

Similarly, the Preamble to Ireland’s constitution:

In the Name of the Most Holy Trinity, from Whom is all authority and to Whom, as our final end, all actions both of men and States must be referred,
We, the people of Éire,
Humbly acknowledging all our obligations to our Divine Lord, Jesus Christ, Who sustained our fathers through centuries of trial,
…
Do hereby adopt, enact, and give to ourselves this Constitution.

And on and on. If Israel’s “ethnocracy” is not democratic, we need a whole new set of words. Because then neither is India, Japan, all of Eastern Europe, Ireland, Germany or Mexico.

What do we learn from this latest example of intellectual laziness? Beware unfounded labels, and call out those who use them.