Shahak and Mezvinsky’s book is not intended to provide original research on the question of Jewish fundamentalism in Israel. The authors instead want to provide an “analysis” of the phenomenon based on the research of others. In doing so, they do not limit themselves to studying Jewish fundamentalism in Israel in the modern period but also provide a background history of different Jewish “fundamentalisms” in different periods of the Jewish past worldwide.
Jewish fundamentalists in Israel are divided into two groups, the Haredim “the religiously more extreme group” and the “religious-national Jews,” who constitute the “religiously more moderate” group. While the first group is itself divided into two groups, Yahadut Ha’Torah (for Ashkenazi Jews) and Shas (for the Mizrahim), the “moderate” religious-nationals are organized in the National Religious Party (NRP) (p. 7). The colonial-settler group Gush Emunim belongs to this second group. The two groups together constituted in 1996 almost a quarter of the Israeli Jewish electorate, winning 23 seats in the Knesset. Whereas the Haredim are non- or anti-Zionist, the religious-nationals are ultra-Zionist. The Haredim emerged in European Jewish history in response to “enlightenment” and have thus kept their circa-1850 dress (black hats and coats). The NRP Jews, who dress “in the more usual Israeli fashion” (p. 7), “made their compromises with modernity” (p. 8). These two groups, however, are not necessarily a united bloc as they fight with each other and among themselves.
The authors are keen to point out that although the Haredim are non-Zionist, believing that Israel is another diaspora for Jews (p. 17), this does not make them pro-Palestinian. For example, Rabbi Ovadia Yosef advocates the expulsion of all non-Jews (especially Christians, whom Judaism considers idolaters) from Eretz Yisrael but only when Jews are more powerful than non-Jews, which will only happen after the coming of the Messiah (pp. 20-21). Also, although the Haredi Rabbis Eliezer Shach and Yosef have declared that it is permissible to give parts of Eretz Yisrael to non-Jews, this is only allowed in times, like the present, when not giving up the land would cause loss of Jewish life.
The book contains a plethora of important and rarely recorded information about Jewish fundamentalist groups in Israel and their relations to secular Israeli Jews and to the Israeli government. For example, in an attempt to ingratiate himself to the Haredim, Shimon Peres went so far as to spend months attending Talmudic lessons given to him at home by Rabbi Yosef (pp. 50-51). Israeli education authorities in the early fifties, to take another example, removed the international plus sign from elementary school books of arithmetic replacing it with a “T” due to Haredi pressure that the sign is that of the Christian cross (p. 154). Other interesting tidbits abound.
The authors explain how fundamentalist Judaism basing itself on Jewish scripture considers Jews unique racially and genetically with special Jewish blood and Jewish DNA which in turn makes Jewish life special and more valuable than non-Jewish life (p. 43, p. 156). This attitude seems to seep into the belief system of secular Jews also, the authors say. It is allegedly because of this racism that Israeli protesters against Israeli military involvement in Lebanon, except for Shahak himself, do not mention the Lebanese casualties.
Yet, can this omission be adequately explained by calls of Jewish racism alone? It is unclear how this Israeli attitude would differ from its US counterpart, whereby Americans refer to the 50,000 or so US soldiers who “died” in Vietnam without ever mentioning the three million Indochinese that these US soldiers killed. Could a chauvinist and racist nationalism -- in its Zionist guise in Israel and its anti-Communist camouflage in the US-- be also the culprit and not only a Judaism or a Jewish fundamentalism which privileges Jewish life?
From the outset, the authors deploy a comparative grid between Judaism and fundamentalist Judaism, on the one hand, and Christianity and secular Europe and its Israeli secular imitators, on the other. It is within this grid that the authors tell their story of a horrific Jewish fundamentalism. The reader is subjected to minute details about the Halacha and about Jewish fundamentalist life and philosophy which are a threat, we are told, not only to secular Israeli Jews and to all Palestinians and Arabs (which they indeed are) but also to all gentiles worldwide!
The book proceeds like most recent Western tracts on Islamism which exoticize Muslims and Islam before proceeding to make the most outrageous conclusions about them. The main difference, of course, is that unlike the anti-Islam pundits who are writing in support of a hegemonic Western propaganda against Muslims, Shahak and Mezvinsky are challenging the hegemonic and distortive Zionist rewriting of Jewish history. What they share with the anti-Islam writers is their a priori positive valuation of the Christian liberal secular West.
Whereas the Zionist distortive account of Jewish history reduces that history to a chain of anti-Semitic pogroms culminating in the Holocaust, Shahak and Mezvinsky produce a nightmarish account of a Jewish history filled with rabbinical and rabbinically-inspired persecution of errant Jews who refuse to abide by the rabbis’ “totalitarian” dicta. This was so bad that, according to the authors, “until 1881 in Russia, the number of riots by Jews against other Jews probably exceeded the number of pogroms by non-Jews against Jews” (p. 133). No statistics or documentation are provided to support such conclusions.
As Shahak and Mezvinsky are writing against the grain, one would have expected them to produce impeccable documentation to challenge the distortive Zionist accounts. The authors do not only condemn Jewish fundamentalism but Judaism itself. Just like attackers of Islam often do, the authors have searched the Jewish religious archive for the most misogynistic quotes in order to present them to the reader as emblematic of Judaism. We are told how the “Halacha forbids Jewish males to listen to women singing...[as the] voice of a woman is adultery” (p. 9). Some NRP members, who are colonial settlers in the West Bank, have gotten around this by having men sing popular songs sung by women and then having their voices changed electronically “to the female pitch” -- a type of casuistry that has no currency with the Haredim (p. 9). Without anything resembling a thorough discussion of Judaism’s attitude toward women, the authors conclude that the Haredi approach to women “mirrors to a great extent traditional Judaism’s broadly based position on women..[which] holds women in contempt” (p. 37). An endless barrage of quotes to shock the “secular” sensibility is provided, including one taken from the Shulhan Aruch: “A male should not walk between two females or two dogs or two pigs...” (pp. 37-38), and one from the Talmud “A Woman is a sack full of excrement” (p. 38).
The authors’ commitment to Zionism’s assimilationist project of transforming Jews culturally into European gentiles while still calling them Jews is everywhere in evidence. While the authors have a long history of opposition to colonial Zionism, they are in agreement with an assimilationist Zionism which borrowed from the Haskala its assimilationist impulse. For example, the Haredim are so exoticized that they “and most other Israeli Jewish fundamentalists,” we are told, " live figuratively in a time period that corresponds closely to European Christian societies many generations ago. These fundamentalists have not made the quantum leap, as have secular Israelis, into modern times. The tension between fundamentalist and secular Israelis, therefore stems mostly from the fact that these two groups live in different time periods” (p. 31). Such evolutionist representations are characteristic of many Western (and some Muslim) authors who write on Islam and the Third World more generally.
Not only is Judaism as bad as medieval Christianity, it is actually worse. “Unlike St. Augustine,” for example, Shahak and Mezvinsky inform us, “Orthodox Judaism totally prohibited independent thinking” (p. 123). How Judaism differs in this regard from the three monotheistic religions is not made clear, especially so as the authors’ statements are always in a comparative mode. As for Jewish fundamentalism, it is just like German Nazism, the authors insist, as “the hatred for Western culture with its rational and democratic elements is common to both movements” (p. 65).
This kind of prejudicial representation is not only directed at Judaism and its contemporary fundamentalist adherents but even at Jews who have a non-fundamentalist but nonetheless a non-secular relationship to Judaism. Unlike the secular Ashkenazim who are presented by the authors as “enlightened” on the issue of Judaism and rabbinical authority, we are treated to the patronizing account that “almost all Oriental politicians, including the Black Panthers of the early 1970s and the members of the tiny Oriental peace movements, commonly bow to and kiss the hands of rabbis in public” (p. 48). Aside from the similarity of this traditional gesture to how non-fundamentalist Arab Muslims and Christians treat their clerics, this Orientalist panic in Shahak and Mezvinsky is compounded by their description of the Oriental peace movements as “tiny” (which they are), as if to suggest that the Ashkenazi “peace” organizations constitute mass popular movements (which they do not)!
The failure of the secular Oriental Jewish groups in Israel to end discrimination is not attributed to endemic Ashkenazi racism, government and police harassment, and media ridicule but rather to these groups’ alleged failure to grasp that the “not fully modernized” Oriental Jews still “define themselves primarily in religious terms” (p. 54). In fact, most of the Mizrahim defined themselves historically in Israel as Moroccan, Yemeni, or Iraqi and not as “Jews.” It took over four decades for them to see themselves as Mizrahim. What Shahak and Mezvinsky see as “religious” in the Mizrahim is the latter’s refusal to regard Judaism with the same contempt that many secular Ashkenazim regard it. Moreover, it is unclear how being “religious” makes one “not fully modernized.” Even Western social scientists have done away with such criteria as it could not account for the religiosity of most Americans, the most religious population of all industrialized countries. Their patronizing attitude toward the Mizrahim notwithstanding, the authors note the prevalent racism of the Ashkenazi Haredim against their Mizrahi coreligionists (see for example, p. 50).
The authors play the role of Western anthropologist while simultaneously sharing their own Jewish experiences and providing anecdotal information about Jewish fundamentalists and Jewish life in general. Secular Israeli jokes about the Haredim are provided to entertain us in the process (pp. 28-29). We are also told that in Haredi Yeshivot, “the classes are noisy because the students shout about what they are studying” (p. 25). Shahak illustates how bad Judaism really is in his opinion by relating a story of how heretical Jews receive a burial that mocks and celebrates their death rather than receiving a proper Jewish funeral. In Shahak’s own personal story, he tells us how his family (who later perished in the Holocaust) wore white and rejoiced at such a funeral in 1939 (pp. 123-124 and p. 165n). Moreover, the much celebrated Jewish intellectual production of the last 150 years is not part of the tradition of post-Talmudic Judaism but rather by rebellion against “this type of totalitarian system; they negated some of its major tenets” (p. 123). While this is true, it is hardly different from the intellectual production of Christian Europe.
Shahak has long predicted a civil war in Israel that never materialized. Now, he, along with Mezvinsky, has more startling predictions to make: “it is not unreasonable to assume that Gush Emunim, if it possessed the power and control, would use nuclear weapons in warfare to attempt to achieve its purpose” (p. 72). This is fully consonant with US propaganda about Islamists and Muslim “rogue” states’ alleged readiness to use nuclear weapons, which they do not have, against the West -- especially so as the authors go to pains to tell us that the gentiles do not only include the Arabs but also the Christian West (p. 65). Absent from this narrative is the fact that Golda Meir, a secular Zionist, was the one who almost used nuclear weapons against Egypt and Syria in 1973. It was Kissinger who convinced her not to. Shahak, who has written on Israel’s nuclear capability, is no stranger to these facts. The point is not that Gush Emunim would not use nuclear weapons (which Israel has in abundance), but that it would not use them solely based on its interpretation of Judaism but based on its Zionist convictions which color its view of Judaism in the first place. Moreover, “Judaism,” we are led to believe, is inherently “totalitarian,” as “it should not be forgotten that democracy and the rule of law were brought into Judaism from the outside” (p. 139). It is unclear if this is suggesting that democracy and the rule of law came to Christianity from the inside!
The authors concede that the only books outside Israel which mention any of these Jewish atrocities are “the invalid, out-of-context, virulent and poisonous anti-Semitic literature” (p. 158). Their book, however, unintentionally lends credence to such representations. For the authors, as for the anti-Semites, it is Judaism, not Zionism and a Zionised Judaism, that is the culprit. Baruch Goldstein, who massacred Palestinians in al-Haram al-Ibrahimi on Purim, is not seen in the context of a racist and colonialist Zionism and its myriad massacres against Palestinians, but rather as part of a tradition of Jewish murders of non-Jews. Citing a newspaper article by one Rami Rosen, we are informed of the “well-documented cases of massacres of Christians and mock repetitions of the crucifixion of Jesus on Purim, most of which occurred either in the late ancient period or in the Middle Ages” (p. 116). It is surprising that the authors who are committed anti-Zionists fail to make this connection. Just like the Western trend of considering any crime committed by a Muslim throughout the history or geography of the Muslim world as a “Muslim” crime, Shahak and Mezvinsky want to apply this Orientalist criterion to Jews. One wonders why such authors have not taken most white Protestant historians to task for their continued refusal to consider crimes such as US slavery, British colonialism, and the Holocaust, among others, as “Protestant” crimes resulting from the pervasive supremacist attitudes of white Protestants (not to mention that, with the exception of the Holocaust, the other crimes were committed by Protestant liberals not fascists). One is forced to make these comparisons as the authors fail to include them in their comparisons!
After their unending atrocity exhibition, Shahak and Mezvinsky address their secular (read European) Jewish audience by asserting that modern secular Jews should not have “an intellectual compromise with Jewish Orthodoxy [which is a] totalitarian system,” and must abandon their “apologetic approach to the Jewish past” (p. 132).
While this book rightly questions Zionist and Zionist-inspired Jewish historiography in the last one-hundred years and its censorship of the unflattering parts of Jewish life and Judaism, and informatively chronicles facts and events dealing with the racism and murderous practices of Jewish fundamentalism and the collusion of the Israeli government with it, it fails to set the record straight. Like Shahak’s last book Jewish History, Jewish Religion, but unlike his other courageous writings against colonial Zionism, this book is blind to the fact that the Judaism that Jewish fundamentalists espouse is one that is thoroughly colored and inflected by Zionism. While the authors are opposed to colonial Zionism throughout, their book betrays a commitment to assimilationist Zionism’s project of transforming Jews into European gentiles as they condemn all those who resist this assimilationist project, whether Mizrahim or fundamentalists. Palestinians and their Jewish and gentile friends should not let these authors’ opposition to Zionism’s colonial project sway them otherwise.
http://web.mit.edu/cis/www/mitejmes/issues/200105/br_massad.htm