Colonialism

 As we face the end of the year with the IDF still conducting its campaign in Gaza, with so many hostages still not released, and with the support of the world waning by the minute, we could all use a bit of shoring up. I am speaking of myself as well, by the way: despite my abiding confidence in the innate tolerance of Americans, I continue to feel shaken by the ferocity of the anti-Zionism, anti-Israelism, and anti-Semitism that seems to have arisen almost from nowhere in the wake of Israel’s response to the Simchat Torah massacre.

This week, I would like to address a specific aspect of that ferocity, the accusation—by now almost a commonplace among the haters—that Israel is nothing but a last-gasp outpost of colonialism. And, as a result, that the Jews of Israel have the same right to Palestine that the Belgians had to the Congo, the Dutch to Indonesia, the French to Algeria, the British to India, and the Germans to Namibia: none at all. (It is interesting how few of those who regularly tar Israel with that brush feel the same way about Australia or Canada, not to mention our own nation, which actually were founded by overt colonialists who saw nothing at all wrong with moving onto other people’s turf and declaring their independence in that place. About that paradox, I will write on another occasion.)

Colonialism, sometimes called imperialism, surely was one of the most pernicious avenues of political theorizing ever devised to justify the conquest of other people’s countries and the addition of those conquered lands to the conquerors’ self-proclaimed empire. And this is so much the case that, at least for most of us, even the rationale behind the concept seems impossible to grasp. It is true that decades of mini-trade-wars between Dutch, British, and Portuguese set the stage for the eventual absorption of India into the British Empire, but the larger picture is the one that survives of a rapacious Empire ignoring the fact that it had no conceivable right to a country thousands of miles away from Britain with which it had no history of enmity, let alone of overt hostility or warfare, and unilaterally making that place part of its Empire, and then using the full force of its own Armed Forces to stifle dissent and to prevent any serious movement on the part of the people whose country it actually was towards self-rule. This was the story of the British in India, but it was also the story of many other nations struggling to annex the maximum number of overseas territories without regard for the wishes of the people who actually lived there.

I have to assume that most colonialists were motivated by pure greed. But there were others who were motivated not by rank acquisitiveness or covetousness, but by the supremely arrogant assumption that they were actually doing the native people’s whose nations they occupied a huge favor by exposing them to Western ways and beliefs. The prize for the most grotesque expression of that idea, even after all these years, has to go to Rudyard Kipling (1865–1936), whose famous poem, “The White Man’s Burden,” depicted colonialism not as venal or brutal, but as virtuous. “Take up the White Man’s burden,” he wrote to his fellow Brits. “Send forth the best ye breed. / Go bind your sons to exile / to serve your captives’ need: / To wait in heavy harness / On fluttered folk and wild / Your new-caught sullen peoples, / Half devil and half child.” It’s really hard to know what to say to that! (The poem goes on at length along similar lines. To read the full poem, click here.)

But what could any of this have to do with Israel?

The history of Israel is recorded in the historical books of the Bible and confirmed by archelogy: there have been Jewish people, or the ancestors of what we reference as the Jewish people, in the Land of Israel since the beginning of the 2^nd millennium BCE and there has never been a day since then that there was not a Jewish presence in the land. That’s about 3000 years of continued residence in the land and that is at the core of the Jewish claim to consider Israel as the national homeland of the Jewish people. The nations they replaced have long since vanished: there are no surviving Girgashites or Kenites to negotiate with. But where did the Arabs come from?

As the seventh century dawned, the world’s two great super-powers, Byzantium and Persia, were at war. Things were calm in the Holy Land for a while, but then, in 613, the local Jews joined with the Persians in their ongoing campaign against the Byzantines. In 614, the Persians, now fighting alongside about 20,000 Jewish supporters, captured Jerusalem. It was a bloody war. According to some ancient historians, the siege of Jerusalem resulted in the deaths of about 17,000 civilians. Another 4500 or so, taken first as prisoners of war, were eventually murdered by the Persians at the Mamilla Pool, then a man-made lake just outside Jerusalem and today the site of a very popular upscale shopping mall. Another 35,000 or so were exiled to Persia.

But the tide eventually turned. By 617, the Persians determined that their best interests lay in making peace with the Byzantines even if it meant betraying their Jewish allies. And that is just what they did. In 628, the shah of Iran, King Kavad II, made peace with his Byzantine counterpart, a man named Heraclius. The Jews surrendered and asked for the emperor’s protection, which was granted. That lasted about twelve minutes, however: before the ink on the treaty was dry, a massacre of the Jews ensued throughout the land and Jewish residency in Jerusalem was formally forbidden.

And now we get to the relevant part. Just ten years later, in 648, the Byzantine Empire was invaded again, this time by the Islamic State that had grown up after Mohammed’s death in 632. The Byzantines retreated, the Muslims took over, and Israel was then ruled by Muslim Arab colonialists until the Crusaders arrived a cool four and a half centuries later in 1099. Nor is “colonialist” a vague term here. In fact, it is the precisely accurate one: a powerful nation wrests land from a neighboring nation that it bests on the battlefield, then annexes that land to itself with reference neither to the history of the place nor to the wishes of its citizens.

At first, life under Arab occupation wasn’t that bad. Historians estimate that there were between 300,000 and 400,000 Jewish residents in Israel in those days. Umar, the second caliph of the Rashidun caliphate, even eventually permitted Jews to return to Jerusalem. The famous Pact of Umar promised Jewish families security and safety, but also classified Jews as dhimmis, i.e., as non-Muslims whose presence in Islamic lands was begrudgingly to be tolerated as long as they accepted their second-class status and agreed to pay a special tax, called the jizya, that was levied against non-Muslims. Things were not great, but tolerable. But tolerable didn’t last, particularly after the Arabs built the Dome of the Rock on the Temple Mount in 691 and the Al-Aksa Mosque in 705. By 720, Jews were banned from the mount, the holiest site in all of Judaism and things just continued to deteriorate from there. (To read more about the Pact of Umar, click here.)

And so did the Arabs come to Byzantine Palestine, a land that had been the Jewish homeland even then for one and a half millennia. But although Muslim rule eventually gave way to a long series of foreign overlords who seized the land and ruled over it for as long as they were able, the Muslims who came along with the armies of occupation remained in place. And so were set in place the ancestors of today’s Palestinian Arabs.

Working all that data yields the semi-astounding result that, in the almost two thousand years from the time the Babylonians laid siege to Jerusalem in biblical times until the Crusaders were finally defeated once and for all by the Mamluks (yet a different version of Arab invader), the Jews were able to restore Jewish sovereignty to the Land of Israel and rule over themselves for precisely one single century, the one stretched out between the Maccabean victory over King Antiochus in 164 B.C.E. and Romans’ successful invasion of the land a century and a year later in 63 B.C.E.  That’s a lot of years of occupation by a wide range of occupiers.

To refer to today’s Palestinians as imperialist colonizers because their ancestors came to the land as part of an army of occupation thirteen centuries ago—that seems exaggerated: thirteen hundred years is a long time! But to refer to the Jews of Israel, whose ancestors have been present in that place not for centuries but for millennia—that seems even wackier and far less reasonable. I suppose some of Israel’s enemies must be sincere in their sense of Israel as a force of occupation, as a last-gasp vestige of European colonialism. But leaving aside the detail that most Israelis are not of European origin, the notion itself is simply incorrect. The Land of Israel has been the homeland of the Jewish people from time immemorial. To argue to the contrary is to ignore history. And ignoring history is never good policy, not for our own nation and not for anybody. Arabs have lived in Israel for more than a millennium. But to use that fact to deny the reasonableness of there being a Jewish state in the Land of Israel is simply an abuse of history. 

Anti-Judaism Then and Now

 

On Sesame Street, they used to sing a song that challenged young viewers to decide “which of these things belong together.” The idea was that the youngsters would be presented with a group of things all but one of which belonged to the same group. But the trick, of course, was that the specific nature of the group wasn’t revealed—so the young viewer had to notice that there were three vegetables on the screen and one piece of fruit, or three garden tools and a frying pan. You get the idea. All of the things belonged together but one didn’t. It wasn’t that complicated. But the tune is still stuck in my head and I don’t think I’ve heard the song in at least thirty years.

In the grown-up world, there are also all sorts of groups made up of things that are presented as “belonging together.” Some are obvious and indisputable. But others are far more iffy.

Languages, for example, are in the first category. Danish, Japanese, Laotian, and Yiddish all belong in the same group; each is an artificial code devised by a specific national or ethnic group to label the things of the world. You really can compare the Japanese word for apple with the Danish word because both really are the same thing: a sound unrelated in any organic way to the thing it denotes that a specific group of people have decided to use nonetheless to denote that thing. Languages are all codes, all artificial, and all each other’s equals. The world’s languages, therefore, really are each other’s equivalents

Other groups, not so much. Religion comes right to mind in that regard: we regularly refer to the world’s religions as each other’s equivalents, but is that really so? In what sense, truly, is Judaism the Jewish version of Hinduism or Buddhism? Is Chanukah the Jewish Christmas? Is the New Testament the Christian version of the Koran in the same sense that the Danish word for cherry is the Danish version of the French word for that same thing? You see what I mean: the notion that the religions of the world are each other’s equivalents hardly makes any sense at all.

But what about prejudices of various sorts? Are racism and homophobia each other’s equivalents, distinguished only by the target of the bigot’s irrational dislike? Are sexism and ageism the same thing, only different with respect to the specific being discriminated against? And where does anti-Semitism, with its weird medial capital letter and its off-base etymology (because it denotes discrimination against Jews, not other Semites), where does anti-Semitism fit in? Is it the same as other forms of discrimination, differing only with respect to the target?

I suppose my readers know why this has been on my mind lately.

Last week I wrote about that grotesque congressional hearing in which the presidents of three of America’s most prestigious institutions of higher learning, including two of the so-called Ivies, could not bring themselves to label the most extreme form of anti-Semitism there is, the version that calls not for discrimination against Jews but for their actual murder—they could not bring themselves unequivocally and unambiguously to say that that calls for genocide directed against Jews have no place on their campuses. The president of the University of Pennsylvania paid with her position for her unwillingness to condemn genocide clearly and forcefully. But hundreds and hundreds of faculty members at Harvard, perhaps the nation’s most prestigious college, spoke out forcefully in support of their president despite her unwillingness to say clearly that calling for the murder of Jews is not the kind of speech that any normal person would imagine to be protected by the First Amendment.

At a time when anti-Semitism is surging, it strikes me that treating different versions of prejudice as each other’s equivalent is probably more harmful an approach than a realistic one. That is what led to the moral fog that apparently enveloped the leaders of three of our nation’s finest academies and made them unable simply and plainly to condemn calls for genocide directed against Jewish people.

I think we should probably begin to deal with this matter in our own backyard. And to that end, I would like to recommend three books and a fourth to my readers: the three are “about” anti-Semitism (and each is remarkable in its own way) and the fourth is a novel that I’ve mentioned many times in these letters, the one that led me to understand personally what anti-Semitism actually is and how it can thrive even in the ranks of the highly civilized, educated, and cultured.

The first book is by the late Rosemary Ruether, known as a feminist and as a Catholic theologian, but also the author of Faith and Fratricide: The Theological Roots of Anti-Semitism, published by Seabury Press in 1974 and still in print. This was not the first serious study of anti-Semitism I read—that would have been Léon Poliakoff’s four-volume work, The History of Anti-Semitism, which also had a formative effect on my adolescent self. But Ruether’s book was different: less about anti-Semitism itself and more about the way that anti-Jewish prejudice was such a basic part of the theological worldview of so many of the most formative Christian authors that the task of eliminating it from Western culture would require a repudiation of some of the basic tenets set forth by some of the most famous early Christian authors. I was stunned by her book when I read it: stunned, but also truly challenged. In think, even, that my decision to specialize in the history of the early Church as one of my sub-specialties when I completed by doctorate in ancient Judaism was a function of reading that book and needing—and wanting—to know these texts (and, through them, their authors) personally and up close. Jewish readers—or any readers—concerned about anti-Semitism could do a lot worse than to start with Ruether’s book.

And from there I’d go on to David Nirenberg’s book, Anti-Judaism: The Western Tradition, published by W.W. Norton in 2013. This too is something anyone even marginally concerned about anti-Semitism in the world should read. The book is not that long, but it is rich and exceptionally thought-provoking; its author describes his thesis clearly in one sentence, however: “Anti-Judaism should not be understood as some archaic or irrational closet in the vast edifices of Western thought,” but rather as one of the “basic tools with which that edifice was constructed.” Using detailed, thoughtful, and deliberate prose, Nirenberg lays out his argument that Western civilization rests on a foundation of anti-Judaism so deeply embedded in the Western psyche as to make it possible for people who have doctorates from Harvard to feel uncertain about condemning genocide—the ultimate anti-Semitic gesture—unequivocally and forcefully. This would be a good book too for every Jewish citizen—and for all who consider themselves allies of the Jewish people—to read and take to heart. Anti-Judaism is deeply engrained in Western culture. To eradicate it—even temporarily, let alone permanently—will require a serious realignment of Western values and beliefs. Can it be done? Other features of Western culture have fallen away over the centuries, so I suppose it can be. But how to accomplish such a feat—the best ideas will come from people who have read books like Nirenberg’s and taken them to heart.

And the final book I would like to recommend is James Carroll’s, Constantine’s Sword: The Church and the Jews, published by Mariner Books in 2001. The author, a former Roman Catholic priest, makes a compelling argument that the roots of anti-Semitism are to be found in the basic Christian belief that the redemption of the world will follow the conversion of the world’s Jews to Christianity. I was surprised when I read the book by a lot of things, but not least how convincingly the author presses his argument that the belief that the redemption of the world is being impeded by the phenomenon of stubborn Jews refusing to abandon Judaism is the soil in which all Western anti-Semitism is rooted. It’s an easier book to read than either Ruether’s or Nirenberg’s—written more for a lay audience and clearly intended by its author to be a bestseller, which it indeed became—but no less an interesting and enlightening one.

So that is my counsel for American Jews feeling uncertain how to respond to this surge of anti-Semitic incidents on our nation’s streets and particularly on the campuses of even our most prestigious universities. Read these books. Learn the history that is, even today, legitimizing anti-Jewish sentiments even among people who themselves are not sufficiently educated to understand what is motivating their feelings about Jews and about Judaism. None of these reads will be especially pleasant. But all will be stirring and inspiring. And from understanding will come, perhaps, a path forward. Any physician will tell you that even the greatest doctor has to know what’s wrong with a patient before attempting to initiate the healing process. Perhaps that is what is needed now: not rallies or White House dinners (or not just those things), but a slow, painstaking analysis of where this all is coming from and an equally well-thought-out plan for combatting anti-Jewish prejudice rooted in the nature of the beast we would all like to see fenced in, tamed, and then ultimately slain.

And the novel? My go-to piece of Jewish literature, André Schwarz-Bart’s The Last of the Just, was published in Stephen Becker’s English translation by Athenaeum in 1960, just one year after the publication of the French original. A novel that spans a full millennium, the book traces the history of a single Jewish family, the Levys, and tells the specific story of the individual member of the family in each generation who serves as one of the thirty-six just people for whose sake the world exists. (The book begins in eleventh century England and ends at Auschwitz, where the last of the just perishes.) I read the book when I was a boy and have returned to it a dozen times over the years. No book that I can think of explains anti-Semitism from the inside—from within the bosom of a Jewish family that is defined by the prejudice directed against it—more intensely, more movingly, or more devastatingly. This is definitely not a book for children. I was probably too young to encounter such a book when I did, but it is also true that, more than anything else, it was that book that set me on the path that I followed into adulthood. (And that is probably just as true spiritually and emotionally, as it is professionally.) I was too young, perhaps, to process the story correctly. But when I was done reading even that first time as a sixteen-year-old, I knew what path I wished to follow. The Last of the Just is not a book I would exactly characterize as enjoyable reading. But it is riveting, challenging, and galvanizing. To face the future with courage and resolve, the American Jewish community needs to look far back into the past so as to understand the challenges it now faces. And then, armed with that knowledge, to find a path forward into a brighter and better world.

 

 

Chanukah 5784

To me—and, I suspect, to most (or at least to most decent people unburdened by prejudice)—it feels as though we truly have stepped through the looking glass into a topsy-turvy world this Chanukah, an upside-down world in which nothing is quite as it should be.

Just this week, for example, we were treated (and that is definitely not the right word) to the spectacle of a member of the House of Representatives, Pramila Jayapal (D-Washington), finding it impossible—even when being broadcast to the nation on CNN—unequivocally to condemn the brutal rape of Jewish women, the sordid and truly horrifying details of which are only now becoming common knowledge. Yes, Representative Jayapal generously allowed, rape is “horrific.” But in the context of the October 7 Pogrom, what we really need to bring to our appraisal of unspeakably grotesque violence directly specifically against women is, and I quote, “balance.” So that was one indication, at least to me, that we have departed from a world of normalcy (i.e., one in which a member of the U.S. government can feel confident that she won’t lose any votes by speaking out unequivocally against rape) and entered an Orwellian fairyland in which rape elicits, not blanket condemnation, but a call for a even-handedness, for balance, for let’s-consider-the-feelings-of-the-rapist-too-ism. If Representative Jayapal’s mother had one of the women repeatedly violated and/or killed (and many were apparently both) on October 7, would she feel the same way? Or if her daughter had been? Readers can feel free to answer that question for themselves.

And then we had the spectacle of U.N. Women (also known as the Entity for Gender Equality and the Empowerment of Women), the website of which defines its role as an organization devoted to upholding women’s human rights and to working to ensure that “every woman and girl lives up to her full potential,” having nothing at all to say about October 7 for eight long weeks, at the end of which it issued a strange statement announcing that it was “alarmed” by the accounts of rape and violence directed specifically against women on October 7. I don’t know, maybe it’s just me—but verified stories of men—beasts, really—brutally violating and then beheading women feels as though it should elicit something marginally stronger than “alarm”  from an organization whose entire raison d’être has to do with the defense of women. I have to say, though, that the U.N. Women did accomplish something with their silence (and then with their timid, equivocal statement) and, at that, something I would have thought impossible: they have made me think even less of the United Nations than I did even just a few months ago. And, believe me, that is no small accomplishment.

And then, as if all that weren’t enough, we had the spectacle of the presidents of some of America’s most prestigious universities appearing before the House Committee on Education and the Workforce earlier this week trying to explain how their schools can have descended so far into an abyss of prejudice and immorality that, as their school’s leaders, they felt unable unequivocally to condemn calls for the wholesale murder of Jews. When asked if  calling for the genocide of the Jewish people does or doesn’t constitute bullying or harassment according to the University of Pennsylvania’s code of conduct, for example, the president of the University, Professor M. Elizabeth Magill, herself had to be bullied into admitting that, yes, calling for the slaughter of Jews could be interpreted as “harassment.” Admittedly, the presidents did describe all they were doing to make their Jewish students feel safe and to banish anti-Semitic activity from their campuses. They sounded sincere too, as I’m sure they were. It’s just that they appeared not to feel that calling for the eradication of Israel and the annihilation of its millions of Jewish citizens rose to the level of anti-Semitism. It’s really hard to know what to say. I wonder if they Jews of Warsaw or Vilna would have used the word “harassment” to describe their treatment at the hands of the Nazis. Readers can feel free to answer that question for themselves as well.

And that brings me to Chanukah, our annual festival of resisting tyranny and asserting the simple right of Jewish people to live as they wish and where they wish, to pursue their religious goals without being pestered by outsiders who find their rituals annoying or offensive, and to feel uninhibited about supporting their fellow Jews in the lands of our dispersion and in Israel.

The story of the Maccabees is far more complex than most people realize and far more interesting. In the end, though, what Chanukah is about is the natural right of Jewish people to chart their own course forward through history. Yes, it is true, that the “real” reason King Antiochus sent his army to Israel in the 160s BCE was to support one side in what was about to degenerate into a true civil war. And it is also true that the anti-Jewish edicts that we all have heard about in the context of the Maccabean revolt were instituted specifically to support the Hellenizers who wished to abandon rituals out of step with Greek culture and to embrace the institutions which, even today, are considered the hallmarks of Greek culture at its finest. All that is true.

But it is also true that the Maccabean Revolt was about the right of the Jews of Israel to work out their disputes, to reach reconciliation on their own, and to live in peace. The world was no less a dangerous place in ancient times than it is today. There were always enemies at the gate, always powerful nations eager to tamp down the Jews’ natural yearning for autonomy to serve their own nationalistic ends. Hamas’s wish for Israel to vanish (and its Jewish citizens to vanish along with it) is not something new at all, but merely the latest recrudescence of a recurring theme in Jewish history. We go through different eras, we Jews. Sometimes the world is accepting, but other times brutally hostile. Sometimes, our foes wish us to vanish by adopting other faiths, but other times simply to vanish utterly from the world. And sometimes we are awarded the right to exist only if we agree not to annoy the neighbors by asserting our right to self-defense or to self-determination. It’s always something!

But the point of celebrating Chanukah each year is to remember that, no matter how bleak the horizon, defeat is never our only option. Yes, this whole Jewish thing seems at times (at times!) to rest on a foundation of anxiety and ill ease regarding the future. But that’s just who we are. It’s what the world has made us into. And yet we persevere, moving ahead into the future possessed of the conviction that we can survive, that we will survive.

We have all stepped through the looking glass just lately into a topsy-turvy world in which governmental agencies, university presidents, and at least some members of Congress feel unable unequivocally to condemn rape and murderous brutality directed against innocents as though doing so would somehow be unfair to the rapists and brutal murderers. How to fix that, I have no idea. But I plan to light my candles each night of the holiday and to focus on the second of the blessings we recite before doing so, the one in which we acknowledge that God wrought miracles for our ancestors at this time of the year in ancient times and, in so doing, to affirm my faith in the possibility of miracles even in our own day. The Maccabees should have lost. They were a tiny fighting force of untrained guerillas going up against a mighty army made up of endless platoons of well-trained soldiers. But God was good…and the Maccabees defeated their foes. So may the foes of the Jewish people be eradicated in our day! Amen, ken yehi ratzon!