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I. Defining the Problem-Space: The Dialectics of Identity - Religion, Ghetto, Ethnos, Nation
The sole actual common link among members of Jewry is the Jewish religion. Jewry originating in different regions of the world share certain common characteristics. These characteristics are common to both the national communities in which they originated or inhabited, as well as among Jewry only of that specific region. For example, the common features of Jewry in North Africa are different from those of Jewry from North America, and within the Jewry of North America there are features that Canadian Jewry has far more in common with other Canadians than with U.S. citizens. Similarly, Libyan Jewry has its features in common with other people in Libya, Moroccan Jewry with other people in Morocco etc.
However, the notion of Jewry as synonymous with a stable set of characteristics we could call a "national identity" is demonstrably false. There are all manner of elements of common identity in various sections of Jewry today as in the past, but there is no definable set of characteristics that could be said to be synonymous as a national identity with all Jewry. It has even been demonstrated down to the DNA level that there are no genetic markers serving to definitively distinguish Jews ethnically or biologically from fellow native-born citizens of their home countries.
Various sections of Jewry have had their common cultural artifacts and linguistic idioms. However, nowhere to this day have any of these partially common cultural or linguistic traits come to define all Jewry uniquely or distinctively as a whole. Nor do these traits in any other way root Jewry to any one place in particular. Thus, many believe for example that klezmer music is something specifically Jewish. But in fact anyone who has heard folk music from Bulgaria on the eastern side of the Balkans to Albania on their western flank has in fact heard klezmer music. The point is not that this makes it illegitimate for klezmer music to be considered a cultural artifact of at least some part of Jewry. Since the artifact is not exclusive to the Jews and therefore cannot be called definitive, the point rather becomes: any notion that such an artifact serves as a defining cultural feature of Jewry anywhere by virtue of being in any sense exclusive is erroneous.
Similarly, there are language traditions common to broad swaths of Jewry: Ladino among the Sephardic Jewry of the Mediterranean, Yiddish among central, west and east European Jewry and their descendants and extended kin among North American Jewry. But can Ladino or Yiddish be considered "Jewish" languages? In the sense that Spanish (a major component of Ladino and principal source of its grammatical structure) is a language, or German (one of the languages on which Yiddish is based, which also happens to supply much of its grammar) is a language - clearly not. Indeed, Ladino and Yiddish were historically common idioms for wide sections of Jewry. However, east European Yiddish long ago incorporated large portions of vocabulary from Russian, Ukrainian, Lithuanian and Polish. Meanwhile, written Yiddish abjured both the Romanised alphabets of German or Polish as well as the Cyrillic alphabet of Russian, Ukraininan and Lithuanian - in favour of Hebrew script! Since the emergence of the State of Israel, there have been numerous attempts to substitute Hebrew as an international language of Jewry outside and beyond that country, i.e., for Jews-at-large, anywhere in the world. The results, however, have been at best indifferent. Indeed, the other side of this failure has been the more or less absolute displacement of Yiddish and Ladino by Hebrew inside the State of Israel.
These distinctions and definitions are not abstruse matters, or points of talmudic disputation. These matters of theory have profound practical consequences. After the State of Israel was created, the in-gathering of the Jews from all over the world to one corner of the earth was effected by an organ - the World Zionist Council (WZC) and its branches - possessing state power as one of the fundamental organs of the new government. In this capacity, the WZC oversaw the grossest manipulation whereby all the partial characteristics just mentioned above were "smorgasbord-ed into some set of features of classical Jewish personality serving allegedly to define a "nation".
Subsequently, the so-called "cultural" Zionists elaborated Zionism-with-a-human-face: an entire fraudulent theory of "Jewish cultural", i.e., Zionist, "personality". Especially when the IDF have been committing fresh atrocities against the Palestinians, these elements insist the loudest how much they personally regret all this unnecessary killing and brutality while never forgetting to remind everyone in the next breath how much they are for Zionism as "cultural renewal of the Jews as a people".
Before the French Revolution, ancestral Jewry of western, central and northern Europe shared a common historical experience of ghettoisation literally for centuries. But this, too, did not and could not develop into a defining national identity even for this segment of Jewry, let alone among Jewry in general. The peculiar circumstances of the ghettoisation of Jewry operated to breed not only resistance to, but a thoroughgoing suspicion, distrust and (at a fundamental level) a rejection of the entire principle of national identity. The next section explores how that happened. Here, it is necessary first to address another profound legacy of what might best be described as the "ghettoisation differential".
The "ghettoisation differential" is the difference between the actual ghettoes, i.e., confined and no-go areas of cities and towns, that evolved on the one hand in western and central Europe from the end of the Crusades until the French Revolution, and what developed meanwhile on the other hand in the so-called Pale of Settlement. These were the border regions of the western Tsarist empire, between Poland, Ukraine and Russia-proper. In this zone, millions of Jews settled initially voluntarily starting at the end of the 1300s under the self-interested tutelage of Polish landlords.
Following Tsar Alexander I's emancipation of the serfs in the 1860s, the Jews' confinement became increasingly involuntary as the serfs were liberated and chafed increasingly against the relative social superiority, and its material consequences, of the Jewish trader or townsman over the muzhik. However, the Jews remained the vast majority of the town population in the villages of the Pale. Jewry did not live as a walled-in minority at the sufferance of hostile outsiders. Following the assassination of Tsar Alexander II (1881), the tsarist regime consciously strove to generate an equivalent state of terror and uncertainty - by organising the Black Hundreds to implement and instigate pogroms in which existing non-antagonistic contradictions among Christian and Jewish residents were intensified into antagonistic splits.
The differences of condition between the forms of Jewish settlement in western Europe and the Pale were manipulated by the official Zionist movement.(1_1) It played one off against the other from the 1890s to the end of the Second World War. Little had been said and even less has been written about situation and its potential and actual consequences. However, awareness of it is crucial to understanding why, and especially how, the Zionist hierarchy and especially the vaunted tactical "flexibility" - which many came to regard as the rankest opportunism - of Herzl, Weizmann et al operated in practice. This was what converted Zionism into such a windfall for Great-Power diplomacy in general and for British diplomacy in particular at critical moments, decades before the establishment of the State of Israel. The Zionists ersatz or substitute-"nationalism" served, or was molded, to render permanent a symbiosis between Zionism and imperialism. With all due apologies to Ira Levin, it was a kind of "Rosemary's baby" spawned during the intercourse that took place behind a pseudo-"national" identification with Palestine - from the Balfour Declaration onward - of some identity as a "Home for the Jewish people".
The Zionists wanted to transplant a modern European state complete with a working class, middle class and ruling class into an environment in which such a social order, as well as those who were to populate it, were utterly alien. They were thus compelled to take a different approach to encouraging the impoverished shtetl Jews of the Pale to line up as a voluntary labour force from the approaches taken to encouraging the Europeanised middle-class Jews of western and central Europe to bring at least their money-capital (if not themselves) to Palestine. This included encouraging the wealthiest, most plutocratic Jews - the merchant-prince Rothschilds, for example - to remain "on board" with the Zionist project regardless of the likely contradictions between rival imperial and colonial interests in the different corners of Europe in which such families held court (the Rothschilds were simultaneously a banking power in Paris, London and Frankfurt).
In western and central Europe, between the decay of the Crusades in the mid-1200s and the ravaging of the principal European trading ports and of the countryside near them by the Black Death or bubonic plague at the start of the 1300s, the Jewish ghetto emerged as a norm. The ghetto was where the broad mass of Jews - minus the rich and prosperous - lived in a town.
The original ghetto of the early Christians in Rome had been a device to keep the minority from entering the precincts of the majority. The Jewish ghettoes of mediaeval European towns, by contrast, were organized and maintained so as to discourage the external or neighbouring majority from having any truck or trade with the minority where it actually lived. Psychologically, this operated to buttress a garrison mentality among the Jewish minority residents. At the same time, it enabled utter ignorance to fester among the majority, so they could be instigated, usually successfully, to inflict bloody punishments on the ghetto residents as retribution for some outrage.
The Christian Crusades to Palestine are generally presented as an ideologically-driven development. Everyone knows the Crusades mobilised armies of fervent Christian believers against "Mohammedanism" as well as against Judaism. Politically and militarily, however, the Crusades were undertaken against a then-rising Arab-Moorish ascendancy. The Moorish empire energised, colonised and rendered rich and prosperous various classes across a vast geographic expanse - from the Pacific coast of Asia, across central Asia and the Indian subcontinent east of the Arabian Peninsula, all the way across North Africa into the Iberian peninsula far to the west of the Arabian Peninsula - starting from 632 CE. The spread of (western) Christianity beyond western and central Europe, by contrast, was checked in Asia Minor. Its expansion beyond Poland, into "the Russias", was attainable only at the expense of the Orthodox Church.
The political-economic motives impelling the Crusades were thus profound. They were as strong as, if not stronger than, religious zeal. The rise of trade with the east opened a path for the rise of a Jewish merchant class in general. However, it was the opportunities opened by the Crusades in particular that created conditions for the emergence of some of these merchants as merchant-princes and financial powers in their own right. Here also emerged a fateful branching-off.
The European feudal system, centred on an ultimate authority and sovereignty of Rome, offered absolutely no incentive to develop or apply productive agricultural technologies. The feudal order was already beginning to fail even in its most elementary mission of ensuring that the entire population on the land was fed. Larger and larger numbers were drifting into the mediaeval towns in search of alternative means of livelihood. With the unexpected availability of such a profusion of cheap labour-power, these new centers flourished very suddenly and prominently. The subsequent prosperity of the new centers itself then became a pole of attraction, eating away further at the foundations of the feudal order. At the same time, these towns, as goods-producing centres, became entirely reliant on merchant trade. The east - the Middle East - was the source of markets and return-trade goods.
The practical basis on which the mass of the Jewish population in western Christendom came to be ghettoised was also intimately connected with the course of organising the Crusades and their "blowback" - the recoil impact - in west European Christian society.
The general tendency of how enterprise was organized within the feudal order had significant consequences as well. The norm was to parcel out franchises and monopolies over the land. Consonant with this approach, the new trading relations were also extended in the form of dedicated franchises and monopolies. As these went beyond the bounds of feudal Christian Europe, they bumped up against Arab competitors. These competitors saw no reason - where this conflicted with their own interests - to submit to or otherwise respect monopolies and franchises asserted by the European merchants in various trade goods. Indeed, the ensuing conflicts gave rise to the European stereotype of Arab traders as pirates, bent on wreaking another era of mayhem on the peace-loving populace of devout Europe - much like the last non-Christian wave spearheaded by the Vikings. Indeed, throughout mediaeval writings we find, alongside scholarly pursuits owing almost everything to lines of inquiry pioneered by Moorish intellectuals, examples of demonisation of entire Arab peoples as torchbearers for an alien and threatening ideology and outlook that make the fascistic ravings of today's "clash-of-civilisations" propagandists appear rather tepid by comparison.
The Crusades emerged in part as a response from feudalists who felt their status coming under challenge at home from the rise of mercantile wealth. The maintenance of long-distance trade and trade routes beyond the established confines of Europe presupposed the extension and management of credit. Credit, however, involved loaning money at interest. Imposition or collection of interest was the Christian sin of "usury". The way around such a sinful estate this was to authorize a virtual Jewish monopoly over management of the merchant functions of trade.
This, in turn, generated new processes of accumulation of wealth. This wealth was not accumulated, however, in the form of vast landed estates like the Christian feudal nobility, or great public works and buildings like the feudal Christian monarchs, but rather in the form of a money-hoard. It is under the Jewish merchants and money-lenders of feudal Christian Europe that money emerges not merely as a means of exchange and incidentally a store of value, but as the single most portable store of value.
As a parallel development, this mercantile accumulation increasingly outstripped the apparent status of the feudal aristocracy as landowners and employers of large retinues of retainers, etc. Sections of the feudal aristocracy thereby became increasingly interested to restore their positions relative to the "merchant princes", heightening the competition for wealth by plundering the Arab world directly.
Just as piracy against infidels was rationalised in the Moorish provinces, the Papacy and various Christian monarchs similarly excused looting of the Holy Land by Crusaders. The scale on which Crusades eventually had to be organized entailed going cap in hand to the Jewish merchant aristocracy to borrow money to raise and maintain further expeditions to the Holy Land.
Two things, however, did not and could not emerge among the ghettoised Jews of western Europe in these conditions. Their failure to emerge would have fateful consequences:
1. a Jewish peasantry, and
2. a nascent middle class interested in any form of national self-expression.
Instead, from this point, until the French Revolution demolished all secular authority or power of the rabbis, it was a struggle within Jewry that would compete for prominence with that already taking place between the external Christian society and the Jewish believers. As part and parcel of this struggle, it was the broad mass of Jewish believers living in the ghetto who were routinely and repeatedly sacrificed by the rabbis and by the wealthiest Jews in order to bolster their own existing positions within mediaeval European Christian society. (Much of this soil, and all of the methods, were inherited and taken over intact by the Zionist leadership. They remained notoriously indifferent to uniting all who could be united against such anti-social behaviours as anti-Semitism. Instead, from the time of the founding international congress in Basel to date, even the mildest recycled anti-Jewish bigotry became coupled with a penchant to employ such outrages purely as a sectarian recruitment opportunity, regardless of what might befall the immediate victims.)
In his signal work Jewish History, Jewish Religion, Prof. Israel Shahak, the unintimidated survivor of the Belsen death camp and founder of the Israeli human rights movement, rich evidence for this generalisation may be found, and he elaborates there on some implications.
The first implication is that, within the ghettoised conditions of pre-modern Europe, it was precisely the lack of true national identity which very much served the interests of the Jewish elites. Jewish law of the "classical", i.e., mediaeval, period frequently "commanded Jews to revile Gentiles and refrain from praising them or their customs," Shahak points out, but "allowed one and only one exception: a Gentile king, or a locally powerful magnate (in Hebrew 'paritz', in Yiddish 'pooretz'). A king [would be] praised and prayed for, and he [would be] obeyed not only in most civil matters but also in some religious ones." Even "Jewish doctors, who were in general forbidden to save the lives of ordinary Gentiles on the Sabbath, were commanded to do their utmost in healing magnates and rulers."
Jewish communities of this period were "chartered" by a king, prince or nobleman with a limited "right of autonomy" - in fact, the rabbis were invested with powers to dictate to the other Jews, according to the precepts of Jewish law. As part of the charter, the rabbis were exempted from royal taxation - a dispensation that in the rabbis case went back to the Roman Empire but that was not acquired by Christian clergy until the Middle Ages. As part of these same charter privileges, starting in the late Roman Empire, the rabbis could and did impose taxes on and collect taxes from the Jews, a portion of which was returned to the monarch - something Christian clergy would not be empowered to do until the time of Constantine (after 800 CE).
The law was not merely hypocritical in restricting the actual application of high-sounding moral, religious and ethical principles to Jews only - a notorious feature of present-day law in the State of Israel and the mechanism by which discrimination against Palestinians has been legalised. By thus institutionalising unequal or special treatment, it isolated the Jews from any common ground with non-Jews, while at the same time enforcing the allegiance of the ordinary Jew according to the power and authority of the rabbi. The lower-order clergy of the mediaeval Catholic Churches had relations with their peasant flocks that were far more democratic and almost egalitarian by comparison. (1_2)
During the High Middle Ages, Jewry in western Christian Europe was thrown entirely on its own resources and compelled to survive only in, and as, a diaspora - with little or no prospect of regaining any homeland territory, let alone returning to the Holy Land en masse. The late Middle Ages was the critical period of west European historical development marked by widescale peasant revolt and the earliest inchoate forms of national self-expression. It was well before that time, during the latter stages of the Roman Empire, that the legal position of Jewry was formulated in a manner that would establish significant precedents that would operate to further de-"nationalise" Jewry later on.
From about 200 CE until the early 5th century, Roman law recognized a hereditary Jewish Patriarch (residing at Tiberias in Palestine) both as a high dignitary in the official hierarchy of the Empire, and as supreme chief of all the Jews in the Empire.(1_3) As a Roman official, the Patriarch was 'vir illustris' ("an illustrious man"). This was a position within the high official class that included the consuls, the top military commanders of the Empire and the chief ministers around the throne (the Sacred Consistory). It was out-ranked only by the imperial family. In fact, the Illustrious Patriarch (as he was invariably styled in imperial decrees) out-ranked the provincial governor of Palestine. Emperor Theodosius I, the Great, a pious and orthodox Christian, executed his governor of Palestine for insulting the Patriarch. The Patriarch was empowered to tax the Jews directly, and discipline them by imposing fines, flogging and other punishments. He used this power in order to suppress Jewish heresies and (as we know from the Talmud) to persecute Jewish preachers who accused him of taxing the Jewish poor for his personal benefit.
Jewish sources state that the tax-exempt rabbis used excommunication and other means within their power to enhance the religious hegemony of the Patriarch.(1_4) The essential feature making these things possible was, of course, precisely the backing of the might of an external (in this case, Roman) Empire.
Hardly surprising, then, that by the time the mediaeval Jewish ghetto emerged, the rabbinical class, in alliance with the Jewish rich, was seen oppressing the Jewish poor in its own interest as well as in the interest of the state - that is, of the Crown and the nobility. The incipient revolts of the poor, who had to bear the main brunt of taxation, were suppressed by the combined force and naked coercion of Jewish "self-rule" and religious sanction. The religious sanction of "Chosen People"-hood played an immediately and always political role of reminding those who might dissent that they enjoyed no support whatsoever in the society outside and therefore open rebellion would be suicidal. Those who sought to life the oppressive yoke of the rabbis over daily life in the ghetto, like Shabbatai Zevi, were immediately condemned as "false Messiahs" and are presented as such to date in the concoctions of so-called histories of the Jewish people which are fed to Jewish young people in Israel and outside to this day.
In Christian and Muslim countries throughout the European Middle Ages, the rabbis assiduously identified the future and fate of Judaism or Jewry with their clique (including the rich), and thereafter threw principle to the winds. Unlike what occurred in the Muslim regions, when the manipulations of the Jewish merchants or government counsellors aroused resistance and outrage in other sections of the surrounding Christian society, the ghetto remained a convenient target against which to exact some measure of retribution.
At this the very point at which the Jewish masses needed assistance to ditch such irresponsible and criminal leadership, the rabbis played an especially treacherous role, advising the survivors of the pogrom instead that they owed everything to their being Chosen People holding a Covenant with G-d, and should therefore do everything to re-entrench the 'status quo ante'. The rabbis also acted to fuel or initiate among the survivors the notion that "national", or similarly collective, sentiments among the non-Jews - ideas flowing naturally and directly from the fact that Christian townspeople, as a grouping now stripped of connections previously enjoyed with a landed estate when they had been peasants, under which they used to have certain obligations but also certain rights, however limited - represented the single greatest threat to the "Chosen People"-hood of the Jews.
Thus did it come about, as Shahak writes, that "the position of the Jews was particularly favorable under strong regimes which retained a feudal character, in which national consciousness, even at a rudimentary level, had not yet begun to develop." In these kinds of unofficial prison regimes, characterised by rigidified monarchies that had always been or had become dissociated from most classes in society, the prominently-positioned sections of Jewry flourished best of all, fulfilling "one of the functions of a middle class - but in a permanently dependent form." The same general principle, holding true in both Christian and Muslim countries, can be found in England, France, Italy, Moorish Spain, Egypt, Ottoman Turkey, Catholic Spain and (pre-1795) Poland.
The main difference lay in the peculiarity that medieval Catholic canon law neither commanded nor forbade mass expulsions of unbelievers or heretics, whereas expulsion of the Jews, being contrary to Islamic law, was virtually unknown.
The first period of Jewish residence in England was brief. It coincided with the development of the English national feudal monarchy. They were brought over to England by William the Conqueror, as part of the French-speaking Norman ruling class, with the primary duty of granting loans to those lords, spiritual and temporal, who were otherwise unable to pay their feudal dues. These dues were particularly heavy in England and more rigorously exacted in that period than in any other European monarchy.. The Jews greatest royal patron was Henry II (1154-1189). The Magna Carta (1215) - the source of the principle of the Right of Return that the Zionists continue to deny Palestinians - marked the beginning of their decline, which continued during the conflict of the barons with Henry III (1216-1272). The temporary resolution of this conflict came under Edward I, with the formation of Parliament and of "ordinary" and fixed taxation. This was accompanied by the expulsion of the Jews.
Similarly, in France the Jews flourished during the formation of the strong feudal principalities in the 11th and 12th centuries, including the Royal Domain. Their best protector among the Capetian kings was Louis VII (1137-80), known for his deep and sincere Christian piety. At that time, the Jews of France counted themselves as knights (in Hebrew, parashim). The leading Jewish authority in France, Rabbenu Tam, warned them never to accept an invitation by a feudal lord to settle on his domain, unless they were accorded privileges similar to those of other knights. The decline in their position began with Philip II Augustus. He originated the political and military alliance of the Crown with the rising urban communes. Their position plummeted under Philip IV the Handsome, after he convoked the first Estates-General for the whole of France, seeking to muster support against the Pope. The final expulsion of Jews from the whole of France was closely bound up with the firm establishment of the Crown's rights of taxation and the national character of the monarchy.
In Italy of this era, many city-states had a republican form of government. The same pattern was discernible: Jews flourished especially in the Papal States, in the twin feudal kingdoms of Sicily and Naples (until their expulsion, on Spanish orders, ca 1500) and in the feudal enclaves of Piedmont. But in the great commercial and independent cities such as Florence their number was small and their social role unimportant.
In the Muslim world, the Christian atmosphere of discrimination was not present and expulsion was unthinkable. Nevertheless, under regimes which were particularly dissociated from the great majority, and whose power rested on nothing but naked force and a mercenary army, the Jews flourished. This was seen in the west in Muslim Spain, in the east in the Fatimid empire, especially after the conquest of Egypt in 969 CE, when it became based on the rule of an Ismaili-Shi'ite religious minority. The same was observed in the Seljuk states - based on feudal-type armies, mercenaries and, increasingly, on slave troops (mamelukes) - and in their successor states; and in the Ottoman Empire at its height during the 16th century.
The Ottoman regime was based initially on the almost complete exclusion of the Turks themselves (not to mention other Muslims by birth) from positions of political power and from the most important part of the army, the Janissary corps, both of which were manned by the sultans Christian-born slaves, abducted in childhood and educated in special schools. Until the end of the 16th century, no free-born Turk could become a Janissary or hold any important government office. In such a regime, the role of the Jews in their sphere was quite analogous to that of the Janissaries in theirs.
The decline of the highest-placed Jews position may not have appeared very sharp, because of the continuing arbitrariness and non-national character of the Ottoman regime. Nevertheless, with the admission of the Turks themselves (as well as some other Muslim peoples, such as the Albanians) to the ruling class of the Ottoman empire, the writing was on the wall. The dynamic at work here had important consequences that, in themselves, are relatively well-known, but which are only infrequently, if ever, linked either back to their actual cause or forward to their further consequences. For example, it is commonly argued, and even Chaim Weizmann, the next most prominent Zionist diplomat after Theodor Herzl until the emergence of Ben-Gurion and Shertok/Sharrett just before WW2, acknowledged before the 1919 Anglo-American Commission that the Jews were treated with "considerable tolerance" by the Muslim world at all times and places and urged the Jews "never to forget that." Yet it is also the case that this relatively better treatment from the surrounding society was purchased at a tremendous cost to internal Jewish community life, which the rabbis were able to subjugate to a far more ruthless degree of tyranny than the norm seen in the mediaeval European ghetto. Shahak relates how Saladins appointment of Maimonides as the Chief (Nagid) of the Jews immediately unleashed severe religious persecution of Jewish "sinners" by the rabbis. For instance, Jewish "priests" (supposed descendants of the ancient priests who had served in the Temple) were (and still are) forbidden to be married not only to prostitutes, but also to divorcees. This latter prohibition, which has always caused difficulties, was infringed during the anarchy under the last Fatimid rulers (circa 1130-80) when,, contrary to the Jewish religious law, these priests married Jewish divorcees in Islamic courts, which were nominally empowered to marry non-Muslims. Thus did the greater tolerance towards "the Jews" instituted by Saladin enable Maimonides to issue orders to the rabbinical courts in Egypt to seize all Jews who had gone through such forbidden marriages, and have them flogged until they "agreed" to divorce their wives.(1_5)
There is a thesis among various students and writers of Jewish history that the rise of a Jewish middle class served eventually to attenuate such feudal "excesses", rejecting in principle any connection between such practices and the absolutism and unaccountability of the rabbis power. However, the historical record demonstrates that, on the contrary, where the Jewish middle classes had become a significant social force in pre-modern Europe, the plight of the Jewish masses as a whole soared to the greatest heights only to be dashed to the depths of near- as well as outright, Holocaust as soon as the non-Jews subjugated by these middle-class Jews acquired a chance to settle accounts. Thus did the activity of this class that, in non-Jewish society, was so long identified with leading national movements, become (where it was sufficiently numerous) a dynamic factor in severely alienating both the Jews from any desire to join with the national aspirations of the surrounding non-Jewish communities and the non-Jewish communities from seeking any support among the Jewish masses.
In parts of Christian Europe where ghettoes as such were never formed, viz., pre-1795 Poland, as well as in Christian Spain of the High Middle Ages - areas in which the Jewish middle classes were relatively numerous even compared to the Jewish poor - the Jewish community's "autonomy" under rabbinical tyranny, backed by an external state-power financed by Jewish merchant-princes from the feudal / baronial elite, operated so as to arrest any and every tendency among both middle-class and poor Jews either to resist the rabbis openly or to seek or build alliances or understandings of any kind with the surrounding majority. Precisely in these regions, the Jewish elites achieved their greatest prominence in the pre-modern era. Why? Precisely as their position vis-à-vis the non-Jewish peasantry became increasingly antagonistic, these middle classes sided more and more with the upper elite rather than the ordinary Jewish masses.
Politically, before the 19th century, the position of Jews in the Christian Spanish kingdoms was the highest ever attained by Jews in any country (except some of the taifas and under the Fatimids). Many Jews served officially as Treasurers-General to the kings of Castile, regional and general tax collectors, diplomats (representing their king in foreign courts, both Muslim and Christian, even outside Spain), courtiers and advisers to rulers and great noblemen. And in no other country except Poland was the internal rule of terror of the rabbis over Jewry so extensively legalised and wielded so widely and publicly, including the power to inflict capital punishment. In Castile, from the 11th century the persecution of Karaites (a heretical Jewish sect) by flogging them to death if unrepentant was common. Jewish women who cohabited with Gentiles had their noses cut off by rabbis who explained that "in this way she will lose her beauty and her non-Jewish lover will come to hate her". Jews who had the effrontery to attack a rabbinical judge had their hands cut off. Adulterers were imprisoned, after being made to run the gauntlet through the Jewish quarter. In religious disputes, those thought to be heretics had their tongues cut out.
Thus the allegedly moderating effect of the relatively large Jewish middle classes in Spain and Poland turned out to be one of the cruelest and bitterest pieces of mendacious mythology. That is the only way to account for the fact that the brutalities visited eventually on the Jewish masses by the Holy Roman Inquisition in Spain during the 14th century and by the Nazis in the last century assisted actively by a large number of Poles [before they grasped - too late! - that they were Hitler's immediate next target regardless] remain the two biggest periods of extended violent persecution of Jewish masses justified at the time as a "settling of accounts" with the Jewish overseers from that same vauntedly "moderate" Jewish middle class.(1_6)
End Notes - Section I
1. The Zionist side of these maneuvers conducted itself in a manner that assisted the aims of the tsarist autocracy to survive the mounting assaults against its authority from all sections of Russian society. To grasp the significance and the profound criminality of this approach, it is appropriate to mention certain aspects of what happened with Jewish communal life under Tsarism during the 19th century.
In December 1825, a younger generation of reform-minded courtiers and military officialdom at the court of the Tsar, in league with Russian intellectual circles especially poets and writers - influenced by the democratic ideals of the French Revolution - launched a revolt against the inner circle of the Tsar's advisors. Branding the revolutionists "Decembrists", the regime reacted by ruthlessly crushing all symptoms of liberal influence. The Orthodox clergy noted the presence of a number of Jews among those deemed "rebels"; the regime proceeded to "cure" the disease by treating the Jewish communes of the Pale, geographically wedged between Europe and the Empire of the Russias, as permanently dangerous vectors of liberal ideological infection from the West. A minimum twenty-five year term of conscription in the Tsar's army became the law for Jewish men from the Pale. Individual communities were compelled to supply specified quotas of new young conscripts each year.
At the same time, by various official and unofficial methods, the lands available within the Pale for the Jews to settle were increasingly restricted. The Orthodox hierarchy were the main appropriators of these lands before the liberation of the serfs. Newly-freed landless peasants were enticed to acquire more and more pieces of these territories starting in the 1860s. The Pale was undergoing a simultaneous population explosion and land-control transfer in which the Jews alone were not permitted to leave or take up residence anywhere else in the Russian Empire. The subsequent crowding of more and more impoverished Jews into the new industrial towns in the Pale created a large industrial Jewish working class living in conditions increasingly approximating those of the mediaeval town ghettoes experienced centuries earlier by European Jews.
Various elements of the regime found common cause in doing nothing to arrest any of this deepening social chaos in communal life on the western edges of the empire, and everything to exploit it for their various ends. These were sometimes at cross-purposes. Thus landlord and Church interests favoured pogroms as a screen behind which to maneuver to alienate communal lands and privatise them. The social disorder unleashed within pogroms, on the other hand, caused the tsarist nobility anxiety over when and whether such violence might be turned against them, even as the bloodletting on such occasions was welcomed as a means of restoring enthusiasm and solidarity among their troops. The situation of the Jew in the Pale was an irresistible weapon in the hands of an autocracy deeply interested in deepening existing social divisions so that the numerous and heterogeneous anti-tsarist forces would never be able to unite effectively and overthrow it.
The only way forward out of Russia's Asiatic backwardness under tsarism was the class-based alliance of forces advocated by the Russian Social-Democratic Labour Party. This approach responded to those advocating chauvinist forms of "nationalism" by affirming national rights for oppressed nations and peoples and doing away with distinctions, gradations and hierarchies based on ethnic origin. This was the secret of its widespread popularity among Russian Jewish workers, as well as the main reason the Zionists propped up tsarism against the theories and tactics of both the democratic and socialist revolution in pre-1917 Russia.
The Zionist movement stood against and worked to subvert every progressive feature, aspect or element of the Russian people's movement to overthrow tsarism starting in 1905 -- before the Bolsheviks became the leading force in Russian Social Democracy. It continued on this course again during the March 1917 revolution which precipitated the abdication of Nicholas II, and yet again during and following the October 1917 revolution which brought the Bolsheviks to power. Finally, the Zionist movement deliberately slandered as "anti-Semitic" the entire period of Lenin's rule and that of his successor J.V. Stalin. Indeed, the organs of official Zionism shut down this foul and outrageous slander only during the Second World War when the Red Army stood alone from 1941 to 1944, resisting and then breaking the back of the Nazi fascist regime and its so-called "final solution to the 'Jewish question'".
2. So far as the central power of the Jewish Patriarchate was concerned, the arrangement was terminated by Theodosius II in a series of laws, culminating in 429 CE; but many of the local arrangements remained in force.
3. This condition was obviously rife with lack of accountability of any kind, full of endless opportunities for arbitrary treatment of underlings, etc. To take some of the edge off this brutal reality within the Jewish communities, the rabbis cultivated an air mixing aloofness with a kind of forced humility, benevolence and apparent charitableness to those who worked with them on a daily basis or at relatively close quarters. This in turn led to some pointed satire from the Jewish masses, captured in the acid jokes told at the expense of rabbinical reputations (and leading inevitably also to rabbinical injunctions that jokes and humour were instruments of Satan).
For example, there's the story of the chauffeur and the rabbi of a small Jewish village; the rabbi was considered learned and wise and his opinion was so widely and frequently sought that the chauffeur was kept busy full-time taking him hither and thither. One day the chauffeur marveled out loud to the rabbi: "You're so respected and so sought after; I am just a simple driver and only because of this work do I even get a chance to see a little bit of the world beyond our home village. If I could bask only for the briefest time in even a smidgen of the limelight and aura that surrounds you when you are speaking in the other villages, I could die a happy man." The rabbi looks up from his Talmud, regards the chauffeur for some moments, nods his head and says: "Then it is done. You have watched me more carefully than any one else possibly could have over these last several months as we have gone from town to town. Next time, you dress as the rabbi, I will dress as chauffeur, and you can act in my stead and fulfill your wish." The chauffeur, dumfounded but extremely grateful that the rabbi has responded seriously to his initiative, prepares with extra energy for the upcoming next trip. Later that evening, on the outskirts of the village they are about to visit, rabbi and chauffeur change clothes and positions, as the rabbi-turned-chauffeur carefully guides them both to the local synagogue. Everything goes just fine, nobody has noticed anything amiss, when one of the most elderly and learned lay elders comes forward to the chauffeur-turned-rabbi to quote one of the most difficult and obscure passages from the Talmud, seeking an opinion as to what it could mean. In the slightest possible indication of quasi-contempt and intellectual superiority, the "rabbi" gestures at the gentleman and remarks: "This is so simple, so obvious, even my driver can tell you the answer."
4.For those who speak or write these days about how Israel commands America, it is worth noting In the millennia that have passed since, it should also be mentioned that no one has yet the tail wag the dog.
5. A prohibited marriage is not generally void, and requires a divorce. Divorce is nominally a voluntary act on the part of the husband, but under certain circumstances a rabbinical court can coerce him to "will" it (kofin oto 'ad she yyomar rotzeh ani).
6. Israel Shahak remains to date the most, and in many respects the sole, serious historian of this process. The following paraphrases from his Jewish History, Jewish Religion at length:
Under Pedro I / the Cruel, both feudal misgovernment and Jewish political influence in Castile reached their peak. The Jewish communities of Toledo, Burgos and many other cities served practically as his garrisons in the long civil war between him and his half-brother, Henry of Trastamara, who after his victory became Henry II (1369-79). Pedro then rewarded the Jews of Castile with the right to establish a country-wide inquisition against Jewish religious deviants - more than 100 years before the establishment of the more famous Catholic Holy Inquisition, in which the Jews would be widely persecuted to widespread popular acclaim.
As in other western European countries, the gradual emergence of national consciousness around the monarchy, which began under the house of Trastamara and after ups and downs reached a culmination under the Catholic Kings Ferdinand and Isabella, was accompanied first by a decline in the position of the Jews, then by popular movements and pressures against them and finally by their expulsion (on 1 August 1492 - the day before Columbus sailed for America). As happened elsewhere, the Jewish elites were defended by the nobility and upper clergy. It was the more plebeian sections of the church, particularly the mendicant orders, involved in the life of the lower classes, which were hostile to them. The great enemies of the Jews, Torquemada and Cardinal Ximenes, were also great reformers of the Spanish church, making it much less corrupt and much more dependent on the monarchy instead of being the preserve of the feudal aristocracy.
The old pre-1795 Poland - a feudal republic with an elective king illustrates how, before the advent of the modern state, the position of the Jews was socially most important, and their internal autonomy greatest, under a regime which had retrogressed to a point of utter degeneracy.
The Black Death and other mass epidemics common to poorly-drained regions areas under swamps decimnated Polands population during the 11th and 12th centuries, leaving it lagging England and France and without a strong feudal-type monarchy until the 14th century, especially under Casimir the Great (1333-70). Even then it still lacked any parliamentary institution, and immediately upon his death, changes of dynasty and other factors led to a very rapid development of the power of the noble magnates, then also of the petty nobility. By 1572 the process of reduction of the king to a figurehead and exclusion of all other non-noble estates from political power was virtually complete.
Over the next 200 years, the lack of government turned into an acknowledged anarchy. A court decision in a case affecting a nobleman was only a legal license to wage a private war to enforce the verdict (for there was no other way to enforce it). Feuds between great noble houses in the 18th century involved private armies numbering tens of thousands, far larger than the derisory forces of the official "Army of the Republic".
The Polish peasants, who had been free in the early Middle Ages, also degenerated to the point of utter serfdom, hardly distinguishable from outright slavery and certainly the worst in Europe. The desire of noblemen in neighboring countries to enjoy the power of the Polish pan over his peasants (including the power of life and death without any right of appeal) was instrumental in the territorial expansion of Poland. The situation in the "eastern" lands of Poland (Byelorussia and the Ukraine) - colonized and settled by newly en-serfed peasants - was worst of all.
(Until the 18th century the position of serfs in Poland was generally supposed to be even worse than in Russia. In that century, certain features of Russian serfdom, such as public sales of serfs, got worse than in Poland but the central Tsarist government always retained certain powers over the enslaved peasants, for example the right to recruit them to the national army.)
A small number of Jews (albeit in important positions) had apparently been living in Poland since the creation of the Polish state. A significant Jewish immigration into that country began in the 13th century and increased under Casimir the Great, with the decline in the Jewish position in western and then in central Europe. Not very much is known about Polish Jewry in that period. But with the decline of the monarchy in the 16th century - particularly under Sigismund I the Old (1506-45) and his son Sigismund II Augustus (1548-72) - Polish Jewry burst into social and political prominence accompanied, as usual, with a much greater degree of autonomy. It was at this time that Poland's Jews were granted their greatest privileges, culminating in the establishment of the famous Committee of Four Lands, a very effective autonomous Jewish organ of rule and jurisdiction over all the Jews in Poland's four divisions. One of its many important functions was to collect all the taxes from Jews all over the country, deducting part of the yield for its own use and for the use of local Jewish communities, and passing the rest on to the state treasury.
What was the social role of Polish Jewry from the beginning of the 16th century until 1795? With the decline of royal power, the kings' usual role in relation to the Jews was rapidly taken over by the nobility - with lasting and tragic results both for the Jews themselves and for the common people of the Polish republic. All over Poland the nobles used Jews as their agents to undermine the commercial power of the Royal Towns, which were weak in any case. Alone among the countries of western Christendom, in Poland a nobleman's property inside a Royal Town was exempt from the town's laws and guild regulations. In most cases the nobles settled their Jewish clients in such properties, thus giving rise to a lasting conflict. The Jews were usually 'victorious', in the sense that the towns could neither subjugate nor drive them off; but in the frequent popular riots Jewish lives (and, even more, Jewish property) were lost. The nobles still got the profits. Similar or worse consequences followed from the frequent use of Jews as commercial agents of noblemen: they won exemption from most Polish tolls and tariffs, to the loss of the native bourgeoisie.
But the most lasting and tragic results occurred in the eastern provinces of Poland - roughly, the area east of the present border, including almost the whole of the present Ukraine and reaching up to the Great-Russian language frontier. (Until 1667 the Polish border was far east of the Dnieper, so that Poltava, for example, was inside Poland.) In those wide territories there were hardly any Royal Towns. The towns were established by nobles and belonged to them - and they were settled almost exclusively by Jews. Until 1939, the population of many Polish towns east of the river Bug was at least 90 per cent Jewish. This demographic phenomenon was even more pronounced in that area of Tsarist Russia annexed from Poland - the Jewish Pale. Outside the towns, very many Jews throughout Poland, but especially in the east, were employed as the direct supervisors and oppressors of the en-serfed peasantry - as bailiffs of whole manors (invested with the landlords full coercive powers) or as lessees of particular feudal monopolies such as the corn mill, the liquor still and public house (with the right of armed search of peasant houses for illicit stills) or the bakery, and as collectors of customary feudal dues of all kinds. In eastern Poland, under the rule of the nobles (and of the feudalized church, formed exclusively from the nobility) the Jews were both the immediate exploiters of the peasantry and virtually the only town-dwellers.
This situation stagnated until the advent of the modern state, by which time Poland had been dismembered. And that was how Poland ended up as the only big country in western Christendom from which the Jews were never expelled. A new middle class could not arise out of the utterly enslaved peasantry. The old bourgeoisie was geographically limited and commercially weak, and therefore powerless.
Internal conditions within the Jewish community moved along a similar course. In the period 1500-1795, one of the most superstition-ridden in the history of Judaism, Polish Jewry was the most superstitious and fanatic of all Jewish communities. The considerable power of the Jewish autonomy was used increasingly to stifle all original or innovative thought, to promote the most shameless exploitation of the Jewish poor by the Jewish rich in alliance with the rabbis, and to justify the Jews' role in the oppression of the peasants in the service of the nobles. Such was pre-1795 Poland, the closest thing to a Jewish national home before the proposal of the Zionist project, where the social role of the Jews was more important than in any other classical diaspora.
II. Ghettoisation - Internal as well as External
The stigmatising of the Jews for centuries as the hated non-Christian / anti-Christian "other" in regions to the west of the Polish-Russian Pale of Settlement is a sorry and well-known history. This history accounts for the origin, and to some extent the persistence, of certain mediaeval forms of anti-Semitic prejudice. However, if there is to be a clear and balanced understanding of the apparently a-national character of the Jews as one of the peoples of the ancient world and of the possible consequences of their failing to become rooted to a particular territory as they dispersed into Europe with the destruction of the Temple in Jerusalem and the decay and collapse of the Roman Empire, it is necessary to detour at this point. It is time to revisit certain formative moments in the evolution of the social psyche of Jewish believers.
Externally reinforced by the various forms of pogrom unleashed against them, the Jews as a mass would become ghettoised rather than nationalised, as their "protectors" among the rabbis and wealthy Jewish notables deflected any modicum of responsibility for provoking such reactionary violence by claiming the outcome to have been endemic either to the allegedly inherent superiority of the Jews as "the Chosen People" or the allegedly inherent barbarity of "the Gentiles" ("Whatever happens, the Jews will be blamed" - this was even invoked by Israeli Prime Minister Menachem Begin as the world condemned his Defence minister Ariel Sharon for enabling the Lebanese Phalangists slaughter of Palestinian civilians in the refugee camps of Sabra and Shatila in 1982). The key point to grasp is that anti-Semitism did not originate in these conflicts of mediaeval daily life. However, assigning it all the blame was a standard self-serving tactic developed by the rabbis and Jewish community elite during the Middle Ages.
Judaism's origin as a religion remain more indeterminate than ever, thanks to archaelogical findings that continue to suggest serious unreliability and anachronisms in the Biblical record. Whatever the actual details, which seem to have been lost, the evidence is that this religion was converted over about 1400 years (ca 2000 BCE to 600 BCE) from a set of rituals followed by a relatively small group into a system of kingship and rule over others who likely did not share Judaic religious beliefs.
Politically, there evolved a so-called northern kingdom, Israel, conquered by the Assyrians in 722 BCE, and a later, apparently unconnected southern kingdom of Judah subdued by the Babylonians in 587-586 BCE. Carbon-dating of such relics as have been found to exist contradicts the chronological scale and order of the Biblical rendering, placing most of it in question if not outrightly refuting it altogether, since the personages and chronicles related there could not possibly have existed at the periods or in the sequence recorded. The standing and reputation of such northern kingdom luminaries as Solomon and David are either not as recorded, or outright inventions. All that can be positively affirmed is 1) the domination of a rabbinate and development of the aforementioned chronicles only after the destruction of the First Temple, probably while in exile in Babylon, and 2) an end thereafter to the line of Hebrew monarchs.(2_1)
The First Temple was destroyed in 587 BCE. Jewish believers were largely exiled from Palestine to Babylon, i.e., present-day Iraq. Although a rabbinical council acting in the name of continuing the interpretation and upholding of Mosaic law substituted itself as a ruling body, the original Jewish tribal institutions of independent kingship were in fact suppressed. The rabbis could interpret and enforce religious law and thereby retain an active role in the daily life of the Jewish tribes only under a dispensation from an external sponsor holding the actual reins of power. Unbeknownst to or unnoticed by anyone at the time, on the one hand, with the loss of their own institutions of kingship, the Jewish tribes from this point lost anything tending to anchor them to any specific portion of territory in the Holy Land. At the same time, retaining powers under such a prerogative, this body in practice substituted its autonomy as a clique of imperial trusties for the religious scenario of a special Covenant between Yahweh and the so-called Chosen People in order to maintain the differentiation of the Jewish believers from their neighbours.
Anti-semitism actually originates in this early period, the era of tribes and of cannibalism, as the ideology of those who worship gods other than the Jewish godhead or who challenge the supremacy of Yahweh over all other gods. Stigmatising the Jewish worshipper and follower of Mosaic law as the member of a cult practicing rituals that threaten the life and liberty of those who hold other beliefs or no particular belief, it advocates extirpation of this cult and all its practitioners in various extremely brutal ways, such as the Egyptian Pharaohs injunctions to do away with all the first-born among the Jews in Egypt, and other similar forms of oppression unleashed against the Jews as documented in the Book of Exodus.(2_2)
As a result of the rabbinical ascendancy as a substitute for kingship and fixed territorial attachments among the communities of Jewish believers, the precise feature that would remain unique to ancient Judaism turned out to be not the actual content of the beliefs - a peculiar form of monotheism in which worship of various gods was acknowledged to exist but worship of only one of them was considered legitimate. No, the feature that truly differentiated ancient Judaism from other belief systems of the time was its marriage of a particular set of religious beliefs and rituals shared by various individuals and tribes with a system of rule exercised from outside any one tribe designed to enforce adherence to these beliefs and rituals on all.
Shahak in his Jewish History, Jewish Religion illuminates this dark corner of the actual history of the formation of a Jewish and especially anti-national social psychology by pointing out that it was in these conditions of a dominating clique whose social influence depended on royal support in the Persian court that ideas that were to become typical of later Judaism - including in particular ethnic segregation and monotheistic exclusion increasingly displaced the norms that had existed under the ancient Jewish kingdoms. These former pre-exile norms were socially quite similar to the neighboring non-Jewish kingdoms of Palestine and Syria - especially in the variety of religious cults practiced by the great majority of the people.(2_3)
After 537 BCE, Jews began returning to Palestine from Iraq/Babylon. Two centers of Jewish population now emerged both under Persian rule, autonomous, both based primarily on agriculture. The new feature: a "Jewish religion" according to the prescriptions elaborated previously in priestly and scribal circles, would now be imposed by the force and authority of the Persian empire. The Old Testament Book of Ezra contains an account of the activities of Ezra the priest, "a ready scribe in the law of Moses", who was empowered by King Artaxerxes I of Persia to "set magistrates and judges" over the Jews of Palestine, so that "whosoever will not do the law of thy God, and the law of the king, let judgment be executed speedily upon him, whether it be unto death, or to banishment, or to confiscation of goods, or to imprisonment".(2_4) And in the Book of Nehemiah - cupbearer to King Artaxerxes who was appointed Persian governor of Judea, with even greater powers - how rabid this rabbinate had become to exercise plenipotentiary powers over their own as toadies of a foreign power in the name of "autonomy" becomes even clearer.(2_5)
The Jewish religious aristocracy itself became "infected" with Hellenistic ideas (from 300 to 166 BCE and again under Herod the Great and his successors, from 50 BCE to 70 CE). This reflected the inter-imperialist rivalries of the Greeks and the Persians, each in severe decay during the last 200 years of the pre-Christian era as Rome was on the rise and about to displace both. There were also splits emerging in reaction to new developments (for example, the division between the two great parties, the Pharisees and the Sadducees, which emerged in about 140 BCE). Heterodoxy was therefore bound to be seen as the anteroom to opening some maneuvering-space for a rising imperial pretender, at the expense of the established imperial arrangements. Not surprisingly, then, the moment any one party to these "religious" disputes triumphed, it used the coercive machinery of Jewish autonomy (or, for a short period, independence) to impose, or re-impose, its own sectarian views on all Jewry in both centers.
Outside these centers, meanwhile, especially after the collapse of the Persian empire and until about 200 CE, Jewry lived free from religious coercion. Among the papyri preserved in Elephantine (in Upper Egypt) there is a letter dating from 419 BCE containing the text of an edict by King Darius II of Persia which instructs the Jews of Egypt as to the details of the observance of Passover.(2_6) But the Hellenistic kingdoms, the Roman Republic and early Roman Empire did not bother with such things. The freedom that Hellenistic Jews enjoyed outside Palestine allowed the creation of a Jewish literature written in Greek, which was subsequently rejected in toto by Judaism and whose remains were preserved by Christianity.(2_7) The very rise of Christianity was possible because of this relative freedom of the Jewish communities outside the two centers. The experience of the Apostle Paul is significant: in Corinth, when the local Jewish community accused Paul of heresy, the Roman governor Galho dismissed the case at once, refusing to be a "judge of such matters"(2_8); but in Judea the governor Festus felt obliged to take legal cognizance of a purely religious internal Jewish dispute.(2_9) This tolerance came to an end in about 200 CE, when the Jewish religion, as meanwhile elaborated and evolved in Palestine, was imposed by the Roman authorities upon all the Jews of the Empire.
The other monotheistic religions deriving subsequently from Judaism would share with it the notion of vesting absolute authority in a single godhead. But Judaism, while acknowledging the role of prophets, uniquely disdained to place any single, individual human being in a position either of temporal authority over the fate of the community of believers, or in any other otherwise unassailable position of authority. This may have originated as a matter of making a virtue of necessity. Had they dared to restore kingship or otherwise reassert or re-establish a kingdom of their own, certainly the Jewish tribes would have been compelled to fight again for their existence. Securing a position instead for Judaism as a kind of autonomous department of the status-quo, on the other hand, enabled the rabbis to continue their authority unbroken. From the outside, by the simple device of the rabbis and-or community spokesmen supported by them seeking only special rights for the community to retain its own internal exclusive religious authority undisturbed, the integrity of the community of Jewish believers would have appeared to have remained intact.
Of calculations so practical and explicit there is nothing to be found in the historical record. However, it would be difficult to account in any other way for the remarkably stable relations that developed and persisted over several generations between the Jewish religious court, the Sanhedrin in Jerusalem, and a succession of Roman viceroys during that imperial occupiers rule in Palestine. Although not observed at the time, this was the compromise that would actually serve to seal the fate of the ancient Jewish tribes as far as any fixed or certain attachment to the land of their forebears was concerned. Of far greater moment for the rabbinical system of authority were the destructions of the second temple in Jerusalem, begun in 70 and finished in 132 CE. Coupled with the challenge posed by Christianity not merely to the absolute authority of Roman rule but especially to the local mediation and implementation of general submission to Roman rule which the Sanhedrin had ensured, destroying the temple as an assertion of imperial supremacy severely disrupted the monolithic unity which the rabbinical system had evolved over the first century of Roman occupation.
Rather than the threatened and eventually actual spread of Christianity, it was this that opened the possibility of increasingly open challenges to the authority of the rabbis. Here lay the actual crisis of Judaism after the destruction of the temple. The dispersion of Jewish believers to other parts of the Mediterranean as a result of Roman pressure was of minor moment to the leading clique of rabbis; in fact it served their interests to the extent that it dispersed potential sources of dissent against the absolute authority of their interpretation of Jewish religious law. In general, an outstanding feature of the rabbis was their utter indifference to the physical, family or social safety or security of the believers. The temple had provided a kind of substitute for a Jewish-supported but secular system of rule (which, in order to keep from happening, the Romans had backed the authority of the rabbis). At the same time, with the temple providing an ersatz symbol of a non-existent system of civil administration, the ongoing disconnection of the Jewish tribes from any definite or fixed piece of territory - a disconnection that had become a norm since the elimination of the kingdoms - continued not to be addressed. Hence, the animating concern of the rabbis was ultimately not ideological differences over the interpretation of the law, significant as that may have been for many of them as individuals. They were quite concerned to prevent these other issues of the Jewish community, of the lack of a territory of its own and the lack of its own civil administration independent of the rabbinical court being raised at a time when there was no other central symbol of any kind to substitute, let alone one under their authority as the temple had been.
Thus would the Jewish tribes of the ancient Holy Land emerge and disperse into various corners of Europe during the last two centuries of the Roman Empire. On the one hand, they were no longer attached to, or defined by an attachment to, any particular territory anywhere on Earth. On the other hand, they shared not merely a common religious identity but especially a collective submission to an internal rabbinical legal authority. On the one hand, such a social fragment could never become was a nation attached to some definite place on the face of the Earth. On the other hand, how to preside over a ghetto as a ruling class stooge became quite normal.
This was the set of circumstances and conditions leading to the formation of that self-ghettoising mentality that came to characterise the Jews of western, southern and central-eastern Europe - whether they happened to live inside a ghetto or not - for the entirety of the Middle Ages, right up to the French Revolution. Unable to root themselves securely anywhere, they also remained paralysed and unable to integrate in meaningful or fundamental ways with the plight of their fellow citizens either in the towns or the countryside. The persecutions visited repeatedly on these communities by Christian monarchs and fanatics are well-known; but in themselves these persecutions cannot account for the inability of Jewish believers in these areas to overcome their status as "outsiders" over centuries.
Among the crucial consequences of this line of development was the emergence of a Jewish demographic singularly notable not merely for its concentration in towns and cities - after all, under Christian rules of segregation and exclusion of Jews from most occupations under the feudal system, such a concentration in the zones least controlled by the feudal system would hardly be considered surprising - but the absence of any development of a Jewish peasantry anywhere.(2_10) This, coupled with the extreme development of Jewish elites particularly specialised in fleecing peasants (especially on behalf of feudal Christian rulers and nobles throughout Europe during the Middle Ages), further marginalised the Jew throughout European society, throwing him into a position of even greater dependence on the ghetto institutionalization of Jewish life and at the utter mercy of the wealthy Jews.
In the dessicated condition of classical Judaism of the Middle Ages in Europe, Karl Marx, Israel Shahak and others each located over the centuries to come, the identification of the Jew with huckstering, profit-seeking and an attachment to the accumulation of money to the exclusion of all else, including not only overtones of exploitation of others without conscience, but also every imaginable unsavoury implication (money as a means of "saving" the individual at the expense of the collective, etc.) The entire career of the American Jewish writer and director Woody Allen is intimately bound up with popularising - and repeatedly repackaging in 1001 different forms this stereotype of the utterly unheroic individual who will do whatever it takes to survive. Those who opposed this disposition with words, either for being disastrous in the long-term or unattractive and unhealthy in the short-term were dismissed as Luftmenschen ("people with their heads in the clouds"), while those who dared to act and organise others to oppose such an outlook were attacked and destroyed as "false Messiahs".
The same phenomena were found among the social classes of Jews living in the Pale. This is an interesting fact, as it cannot possibly be considered an "ethnic" or "national" trait. These Jews were probably *not* in the main descended from those who had dispersed into Europe from the Holy Land. Indeed: the bulk of Russian Jewry descend from the Khazar tribes of the Caucasus who were converted to Judaism by their king in the 7th or 8th century CE. The Khazari originated as a Turkic people in the southern Caucusus. Their kingdom was conquered during the expansion of the Kievan Rus; at the time it was dismantled early in the 14th century CE, the monarch was Christian,not Jewish. "Khazaria" extended at its height from the Crimea in the west to the Caspian in the east. Large portions of the populace were assimilated among the Russians after it disappeared. Many remained Jewish in subsequent generations. An unknown quantity, but probably not many, intermarried with Jewish emigres from Bohemia & Moravia -- Ashkenazic Jews indeed descended eventually from middle Eastern Jewish tribes -- who settled in the Pale in subsequent centuries. Their arrival was not a chance affair. As a consequence of population losses due to the Black Death, the Polish nobility at the end of the 1300s extended an invitation to Jews from other parts of Europe to settle, vesting them with lands of their own.
As the Russian tsars consolidated their control and influence over the Polish landlords, enforcing with Prussia three partitions of Polish territory in the last half of the 1700s, they rewarded their supporters from the Orthodox hierarchy with a decision to expel all Jews from Russia proper. The partitioned Polish lands were used to resettle them. As a result, throughout the late Middle Ages until well past the French Revolution, while one region after another in Europe was expelling Jews as national movements gained force and achieved a position from which they could eliminate the money-power that had propped up the local decadent aristocracy, Poland was the one place in all Europe that never expelled its Jews. At the same time, its Jewry was initially supplied entirely "from elsewhere" - and not just some particular "elsewhere", but multiple "elsewhere"-s.
These territories became something approximating a national home for the Jewish people for the first time since the disappearance of the ancient world. At the same time, however, one of the most ruthless and unpopular landlord classes in all Europe, the Polish nobility, now relied heavily on the Jewish community hierarchy to prop up their rule. As a result, this part of Europe at the same time became the heartland of the most fanatical Judaic religious obscurantism. As notions of social equality, democratic participation, trade unions - spawned in the French Revolution and as part of the Industrial Revolution - eventually filtered to this corner of Europe, the resulting social movement was fuelled to go into motion at a very high level, combating the most ruthless forms of reaction assembled anywhere on the continent.
Powerful socialist and democratic movements now increasingly sapped the strength of an order largely unreconstructed since the late Middle Ages, while for their part the interests of the status quo stopped at nothing to smash these challenges, including official and unofficial sponsorship of pogroms, secret police infiltration of existing organizations and movements, secret-police operation of police-controlled "socialist" sects and trade unions, arming and deployment of anarchist bombers, encouragement of any split or source of division in the general social movement (for example arranging secret financial assistance for Poale Zion, the Bund and other groups that preached either exclusivism in the organizing of Jewish workers or promoted the Zionist program of emigration to Palestine).
In addition, from the 1890s until 1914, there were large-scale efforts to organise the emigration to the North American continent of more than 2.2 million mostly Jewish people from this region. Meanwhile, in western Europe, the Jewish communities were enjoying the benefits of a certain modicum of social equality and since the French Revolution, the domestic or private authority of the rabbis in one country after another had been demolished and completely displaced by the supreme assertion of the rule of secular law in all social spheres.(2_11)
Regardless of the ideological or idealistic ambition of a Jewish homeland proclaimed by the official Zionist movement launched by Herzl at the Basel Congress in 1896, the practical content entailed reproducing European society, with an upper class, middle class and working class starting with a settlement movement directed to territory securely ensconced in the European imperial ambit. Thus, even if the working class would come from the impoverished Jews of the east, there would have to be some appeal to the middle class and prosperous Jews concentrated in the west.
Meanwhile, however, the 20-year period preceding the First World War was characterized by a huge social movement in every part of Europe and America, including large masses seeking to strike out against the existing social order in eastern Europe and large movements for major social reform in western Europe. One way or another, these movements either challenged the status quo or pushed to restrict or redirect its normal direction and operation. Herzl's Zionist program, on the other hand, presupposed retention of the status quo, the system of colonial settlement and expansion under the protection or patronage of one of the Great Powers. It followed that the Zionists were bound to, or would have to, offer the Great Powers something in exchange for their support of Zionist colonization that they could otherwise not expect to attain except at greater cost or risk.
These contradictory demands intersected on the notion of providing a Jewish national home as a response or partial solution both to the revolutionary social movement threatening the future existence of the Austro-Hungarian and Tsarist empires, and to the needs of British finance to ensure the transition of the Suez Canal from a lifeline for British goods and markets in the subcontinent into a guaranteed link for supplying British industry and the navy with secure supplies of petroleum. The essence of this transition was that the traditional export of goods had become a field in which rates of profit had plateau-ed and were beginning to stagnate, while the growing new arena, the field of export of capital, had become a sphere with the potential to generate practically an infinite increase in rates of profit.
Great Britain was the only Great Power in this period able actually to project power outside the European continent. Thus, there was no other road on which the Zionist movement could proceed to the next stage. The imperialist transformation of economic life into one of monopolies striving for domination, based on the merger of industrial with financial capital, also gave rise to imperialist politics and political methods. These are the politics of subverting mass movements, detaching them from the general social movement and hitching them to the interests of one empire of Great Power against its rivals, using police spies and provocations of every kind, including the planting of false information, etc. The political maneuvering of official Zionism within the various social and progressive movements of the first decades of the 20th century, especially its signal role in assisting the Tsarist, Austro-Hungarian and Ottoman Empires to smash the just struggles of their internally imprisoned nations for the right of self-determination, richly illustrates some of these aspects.
In 1903, Theodor Herzl, as head of international Zionism, visited and negotiated with von Plehve, the Tsarist Russian police minister. In the name of extracting some "concessions" protecting Russian Zionist representatives from the general Tsarist repression of Jews, what these two interests actually reached agreement on was the necessity to isolate and pick off any elements among Jewry who were working for the overthrow of Tsarist autocracy. The police ministry considered all those Jews who objected to the military draft fell into precisely that category. This conclusion required no actual proof. It was simply a logical deduction from the fact that Jewish young men could be drafted to serve up to 25 years in the Tsarist armed forces, with no right of appeal.
Before the Zionist movement could garner an outflow of pioneering émigrés to Palestine from these arrangements, however, Russia lost badly in the Russo-Japanese War and the Revolution of 1905 broke out against Tsarist rule. Once the middle classes abandoned the demand for a democratic republic and the abdication of the Romanov royal dynasty in favour of a constitutional monarchy, the Romanov bases of power lay intact. The Tsarist system was thereafter able to crush the rebellion and reconsolidate its rule. Coming at a time in which modern nationalism in western Europe and America had produced the nation-state based on one or another system of representative government, the utter rejection of even the slightest move in the direction of reform by Tsar Nicholas II accelerated the tendency to extreme political reaction not only within Russia but in the neighbouring empires of Austria-Hungary and the Ottomans. (2_12).
In the aftermath of the 1905 Revolution, the Bolshevik leader of Russian Social-Democracy, V.I. Lenin argued in his pamphlet "Two Tactics of Social Democracy in the Democratic Revolution" that this débâcle had proven that only the working class could lead the overthrow of Tsarism: the middle classes had compromised to the point of betraying the entire struggle against autocracy. The Zionists responded by stepping up their support, secretly, for efforts already begun under the Bund to organize non-Zionist Jewish workers separately from the rest of the Russian workers, while also sponsoring the organizing separately from the Bund, i.e., outside the Russian Social-Democratic movement, as well from the official Zionist movement, of Jewish workers favouring the Zionist program of emigration to Palestine.(2_13)
The Zionists did not neglect to play the card of colonial chauvinism and delusions of superiority, which they shared themselves with the leading Great Powers of the time. Today, about a century later, it is forgotten and very much glossed over, but at the time the concept of "Jewish national home" discussed among Christian Zionists and British ruling circles for more than a decade before the drafting of the notorious Balfour Declaration was a negation of the right of the Palestinians to any nationality, and actually anything but a declaration of Jewish nationality. Rather, it was carefully designed to exploit the existing racist and chauvinist notions that Arab people, like fellow Asian peoples, peoples of the Indian subcontinent, peoples of Africa etc. were "unfitted" to be considered a nationality on an equal footing with Britain, France, Germany or Italy, etc.
The British colonial system uniquely had developed an entire theory and practice of anti-nationalism which made it the ideal partner for the Zionist movement and made the Zionist project such a windfall for the interests of British finance at that particular moment.
Nationality is a fundamental condition found around the globe. In many places, although by no means all, either one nation is, or a majority nation and other minority nationalities are, contiguous with a single state. Historically there have been various experiments with multi-national states, in which there are large numbers of different nationalities. There is the model of the Soviet state, based on 15 national republics and 22 autonomous regions for national minorities, with fully guaranteed rights of all members of all national minorities in the single biggest (Russian) republic. On the question of national rights, this actually solved the problem justly on the basis of equality for the first time in world history, and it refuted the pessimism engendered for centuries by the abysmal failures of the multinational experiments it set out not to repeat, namely that of the Austro-Hungarian Empire and the Ottoman Empire. Dismantled at the end of the First World War, the Hapsburg empire had permitted local administration in the various national areas of its jurisdiction but shared no sovereignty. Imploded and exploded over a century from without and within, the Ottoman Empire treated all national minorities in its territories as equally suspect and potentially treasonous and operated frequently to pit one against others.
The alternative approach fostered under the British Empire was to place nationalities on a spectrum of "civilisation"; the British, French, Germans and Italians were at the top, the Americans and other English-speaking peoples were practically their equals, others were hopelessly inferior. Not to worry, under some appropriate period of British tutelage to be determined unilaterally by the British, such "lesser breeds without the law" as Kipling poetically described them could become gradually fitted for "self-government". Palestine as a League of Nations Mandate was to be gradually fitted for self-government under such British tutelage.(2_14) The Zionists found it useful to retain this same view of the Palestinians. Benjamin; Netanyahu frequently spewed racist drivel about the "orientalism" of the Palestinians and Arabs having to be tamed to make them suitable to share in the fruits of western civilisation. (2_15)
This is how it happened that the British colonialist concepts became incorporated into the Zionist concept of nationality following the creation of the State of Israel, for exactly the same purposes as the British, of denying the Palestinian right of self-determination. The British needed to keep the Arab peoples of the region divided and off-balance so their control of the Suez Canal and of the regions oil resources could not be seriously challenged. The Zionists need to be able to continue stealing Palestinian land "legally."
But there's more: British notions associating the conferring of nationality with the contingency of being sufficiently ready for "self-rule" had a useful side-effect. It separated the notion of national rights from the tricky matter of actual ownership and historic occupation of territory. This is specifically the most important element in the Zionist definition of nationality: to finesse and try to make disappear the asymmetrical reality that most of the land that Israel was subjecting to its jurisdiction had never been properly or legally ceded by its original owners or occupiers. It was stolen under the cover of war and subsequent manipulations, declared "Jewish" and alienated forever from legal methods of recovery by any original owner who didn't happen to be Jewish. This brings us to consider at last the questions: What is a nation? and: What are the chief defects in the Zionist conception of nationality?
In a famous work of socialist political literature, "Marxism and the National Question", by J.V. Stalin,(2_16) there is a a famous definition of what a nation is, from which an extensive quotation is merited at this point:
"What is a nation?
"A nation is primarily a community, a definite community of people. This community is not racial, nor is it tribal. A nation is not a racial or tribal, but a historically constituted community of people. A nation is not a casual or ephemeral conglomeration, but a stable community of people. A common language is one of the characteristic features of a nation. A common territory is one of the characteristic features of a nation. But this is not all. Common territory does not by itself create a nation. This requires, in addition, an internal economic bond to weld the various parts of the nation into a single whole. Thus, a common economic life, economic cohesion, is one of the characteristic features of a nation. But even this is not all.
"Apart from the foregoing, one must take into consideration the specific spiritual complexion of the people constituting a nation. Nations differ not only in their conditions of life, but also in spiritual complexion, which manifests itself in peculiarities of national culture. Of course, by itself, psychological make-up or, as it is otherwise called, 'national character,' is something intangible for the observer, but in so far as it manifests itself in a distinctive culture common to the nation it is something tangible and cannot be ignored. Needless to say, 'national character' is not a thing that is fixed once and for all, but is modified by changes in the conditions of life; but since it exists at every given moment, it leaves its impress on the physiognomy of the nation. Thus, a common psychological make-up, which manifests itself in a common culture, is one of the characteristic features of a nation.
"We have now exhausted the characteristic features of a nation. A nation is a historically constituted, stable community of people, formed on the basis of a common language, territory, economic life, and psychological make-up manifested in a common culture. (Emphasis added - Ed. Note)
"It goes without saying that a nation, like every historical phenomenon, is subject to the law of change, has its history, its beginning and end. It must be emphasised that none of the above characteristics taken separately is sufficient to define a nation. More than that, it is sufficient for a single one of these characteristics to be lacking and the nation ceases to be a nation.
"It is possible to conceive of people possessing a common 'national character' who, nevertheless, cannot be said to constitute a single nation if they are economically disunited, inhabit different territories, speak different languages, and so forth. Such, for instance, are the Russian, Galician, American, Georgian and Caucasian Highland Jews, who, in our opinion, do not constitute a single nation. It is possible to conceive of people with a common territory and economic life who nevertheless would not constitute a single nation because they have no common language and no common 'national character.' Such, for instance, are the Germans and Letts in the Baltic region. Finally, the Norwegians and the Danes speak one language, but they do not constitute a single nation owing to the absence of the other characteristics. It is only when all these characteristics are present together that we have a nation.
"It might appear that 'national character' is not one of the characteristics but the sole essential characteristic of a nation, and that all the other characteristics are, properly speaking, only conditions for the development of a nation, rather than its characteristics.
"[Otto] Bauer speaks of the Jews as a nation, although they 'have no common language'; but what 'common destiny' and national cohesion is there, for instance, between the Georgian, Daghestanian, Russian and American Jews, who are completely separated from one another, inhabit different territories and speak different languages? The above-mentioned Jews undoubtedly lead their economic and political life in common with the Georgians, Daghestanians, Russians and Americans respectively, and they live in the same cultural atmosphere as these; this is bound to leave a definite impression their national character; if there is anything common to them left, it is their religion, their common origin and certain relics of the national character. All this is beyond question. But how can it be seriously maintained that petrified religious rites and fading psychological relics affect the 'destiny' of these Jews more powerfully than the living social, economic and cultural environment that surrounds them? And it is only on this assumption that it is possible to speak of the Jews as a single nation at all.
"What, then, distinguishes Bauer's nation from the mystical and self-sufficient 'national spirit' of the spiritualists? Bauer sets up an impassable barrier between the 'distinctive feature' of nations (national character) and the 'conditions' of their life, divorcing the one from the other. But what is national character if not a reflection of the conditions of life, a coagulation of impressions derived from environment? How can one limit the matter to national character alone, isolating and divorcing it from the soil that gave rise to it? Further, what indeed distinguished the English nation from the American nation at the end of the eighteenth and the beginning of the nineteenth centuries, when America was still known as New England? Not national character, of course; for the Americans had originated from England and had brought with them to America not only the English language, but also the English national character, which, of course, they could not lose so soon; although, under the influence of the new conditions, they would naturally be developing their own specific character. Yet, despite their more or less common character, they at that time already constituted a nation distinct from England! Obviously, New England as a nation differed then from England as a nation not by its specific national character, or not so much by its national character, as by its environment and conditions of life, which were distinct from those of England.
"It is therefore clear that there is in fact no single distinguishing characteristic of a nation. There is only a sum total of characteristics, of which, when nations are compared, sometimes one characteristic (national character), sometimes another (language), or sometimes a third (territory, economic conditions), stands out in sharper relief. A nation constitutes the combination of all these characteristics taken together. Bauer's point of view, which identifies a nation with its national character, divorces the nation from its soil and converts it into an invisible, self-contained force. The result is not a living and active nation, but something mystical, intangible and supernatural."
The key points are: the concise definition of a nation; the clarification that a nation is an historical product, whereas a tribe is an ethnographic category; the significance of a common territory; the importance of evaluating what a nation is based on a totality of characteristics as opposed to isolating some single distinguishing characteristic; and the necessity to look at and be guided by what is living and not merely by some formal or abstract categories. Even if one looks at present-day Israel - to which Jews have been brought from different parts of the globe - in "national" terms, it is a new nation that is in fact no longer Jewish but Israeli. Furthermore, it incorporates a sizable Arab non-Jewish population, plus peoples whose religiosity as Jews is non-existent or in whose daily lives religion plays little or no role whatsoever.
The issue of the nation is bound up, obviously, with basic notions of democracy. This points to a major set of issues, or "can of worms", for present-day Israel. As is well-known, Israel is a "democracy for Jews only". Concepts such as "democracy" are interpreted such that the universality of the principles of the French Revolution is converted into something that upholds and extends Zionist domination of the Palestinians. This takes place under the guise of only applying legal principle positively where it is in the interest of some Jewish citizen or corporation and otherwise applying legal principle so as to actively discriminate against the Palestinians. For example a permit to build housing is required throughout Israel; few are actually issued - and practically none in Jerusalem, east or west. Palestinians build without a permit and the authorities demolish the house; Jewish Israelis do the same thing and no action is taken.
Shahak cites numerous further examples, but the underlying fundamental point to grasp is why such a thing can happen. It is simply this: Israel has no constitution vesting sovereignty in its populace. Openly stating the truth, viz., that everything is to apply only to qualified persons of Jewish religion who have agreed to take up Israeli citizenship - rather than to all native-born persons regardless of religious persuasion or ethnic origin as well as to naturalised residents who have met some citizenship qualification - would automatically place the country formally outside the colloquy of modern civilised states. So, for decades, Israel has fudged this matter, declaring it has a set of so-called Basic or Fundamental Laws instead of a constitution. Without a constitution vesting sovereignty in its people regardless of their ethnic origin, all law can be manipulated to discriminate blatantly for one commune and ruthlessly against all other communes. This illustrates better than anything else that could be said why a common religion cannot be allowed to stand as a basis for defining national identity, and why no serious definitions of nationality ever base themselves upon such a notion. Israeli courts interpret secular law according to principles distilled from religious law, precisely so that blatant discrimination can become law dressed up as an appeal to apparently timeless, abstract principles.(2_17)
There is a general notion that Zionist nationality is based necessarily on a defensive concept of fending off and overcoming anti-Semitism, rather than putting forward some particular positive nationality. In fact the Zionist movement manipulated sympathy for, and guilt over, the plight of the Jews after the Nazi exterminations on a continuing basis and in the most shameless manner, (2_18) but in the present context, it is necessary to expand on certain additional aspects.
Today many are either justifying, or conciliating with, the genocidal schemes of the Sharon administration in Tel Aviv on the grounds that Palestinian resistance, however justifiable in theory, has by its resort to such methods as suicide bombings lost any moral high ground and, worst of all, fuelled a resurgence of anti-Semitism against Jews and Israel around the world. There might be the thinnest sliver of justification for this view if these acts of resistance were nothing but episodic responses to so-called "excesses" by the IDF. But the fact is that the Israeli government and the IDF have developed and have been implementing systematic plans to eliminate the Palestinians right of self-determination, while resistance has been undertaken precisely to throw a spanner into those works. So, those who point, like the "Canadian Jews At Risk From Anti-Semitism", to so-called "rising anti-Semitism" are conciliating the Sharon governments plans for "transfer" of the Palestinians into Jordan under cover of the build-up to, and launching of, war on Iraq. Those who continue to deny the obvious reality that Zionism is a racist doctrine are also conciliating with further ethnic cleansing of the Palestinians. There is more than one occasion in history where Zionism and anti-Semitism operated hand in glove: proponents of the former egged on acts or speeches of the latter in order to whip up sympathy and even drive Jews to leave their home countries for Israel.
The Zionist movement and the State of Israel have systematically denied the reality of Palestinian nationality. They have placed themselves and the peoples of Israel in an impossible and dangerous bind by continuing to define the country as a state of the Jewish people anywhere in the world, rather than a state of its own citizenry. The model they have developed and continue defend is obsolescent and malignant; to continue to follow it in the 21st century as any kind of model for nation-building can lead only to disaster. The Zionist model of nationality and nationhood was unfolded in conscious opposition to the right of self-determination, and history has now demonstrated their folly. On this matter, we cannot afford either the slightest smugness or indifference, because our own ability to defend sovereignty and independence is being compromised by governments conciliating - based on various illusions about the equality of English-speaking nations and the shared heritage of so-called free institutions etc. - with the demands of foreign imperialist powers, including demands to participate in unjust, pre-emptive wars of aggression. Facing an increasingly open and blatant menace to our sovereignty and independence from the most dangerous superpower in world history along our border, there are one or two things we can learn for the future of our own nation-building effort from the steadfastness of the Palestinians in insisting on their right to self-determination.
End Notes - Section II
1. See Daniel Lazare, "False testament: How archaeology refutes the Bible's claim to history", Harpers (Mar 02), p. 39
2. The Soviet Union was and historically remains the only government that correctly defined anti-Semitism as originating in the era of cannibalism and tribes, and it was also the only country - Israel included - which ever proscribed the death penalty (from 1936) for those found by a court to advocate any of its precepts (the so-called "blood libel" etc.)
3. See Book of Jeremiah 44:5-9. Shahak points out that "the Pentateuch [the first five books of the Bible - Ed. Note] as we know it, were actually composed after" the destruction of the First Temple, in conditions where the rabbis now had an interest to select and promote only those features and aspects of the old kingdoms that served their new status as imperial trusties enjoying an externally-propped-up plenipotentiary power over, without any actual base of support or authority within, the Jewish masses.
4. 2 Ezra, 7:25-26. According to Shahak: "the last two chapters of this book are mainly concerned with Ezra's efforts to segregate the 'pure' Jews ('the holy seed') away from 'the people of the land' (who were themselves at least partly of Jewish descent) and break up mixed marriages."
5. This tends to shatter illusions that have scattered rather widely about to the effect that somehow the modern-day rulers of the Zionist state of Israel are not in exactly the same relation to the United States of America.
6. W.F. Albright, Recent Discoveries in Bible lands (New York: Funk & Wagnalls, 1955), p.103.
7. It is significant that, together with this literary corpus, all the historical books written by Jews after about 400 BCE were also rejected. Until the 19th century, Jews were quite ignorant of the story of Masada and of figures such as Judas Maccabaeus, now regarded by many (particularly by Christians) as belonging to the 'very essence' of Judaism.
8. Acts, 18:15.
9. Ibid., 25.
10. It is an oft-remarked feature of the life and work of Leon Trotsky, the most famous Jewish personality from among the Russian revolutionary leaders of 1917, that he made no effort to understand the Russian peasant, or to organize the peasantry on an equal social footing with any of the Russian working people, and that he formulated his thesis of so-called "permanent revolution" on the assumption that Russia could never achieve socialism or sustain a revolution because the peasantry would drown it and strangle it at birth. All those who followed Trotsky in excoriating Soviet policy of the 1930s routinely place the charge of "anti-Semitism" at Stalin's door. This reaches hyperbolic extremes when these individuals own utter detachment from any of the life or concerns of the basic masses is condemned for exactly what it is, namely "rootless cosmopolitanism".
11. For these fragments, the Zionist notion of capturing or recapturing a Jewish national identity by emigrating to Palestine was something of no moment whatsoever in their own lives. Many suspected the Zionist mission aimed not so much at the creation or reinvigoration of a Jewish nation as it did at the re-ghettoisation of the Jew. See Dossier on Palestine (shunpiking magazine Vol.7, No. 43 - October 2002).
12. A crucial piece of this political reaction involved the placing of anti-Semitism on a conscious organised basis under the organs of the Tsarist state machinery itself, in order for the Russian authorities to retain the anti-Semitic card for playing at appropriate moments. Thus did the secret police became embroiled during and following the 1905 Revolution in organizing and deploying the notorious "Black Hundreds". These gangs unleashed the pogroms that would drive the second major wave of Russian Jewish emigration to North America between 1906 and 1912 - a circumstance most distasteful to the official Zionist movement. The Zionists therefore responded with a five-fold tactic:
(a). to unite with Tsardom to block any further advance in Russia of the revolutionary forces;
(b). to discredit the notion that Jews in central or eastern Europe should aspire to or expect reforms, by pointing to the mixed and largely negative record of the path taken by social reformers in western Europe;
(c). to capitalise on the pessimism thus created to propagandise the necessity for emigration of Jews to Palestine;
(d). to capitalise on the deepening of political reaction within the Tsarist, Austro-Hungarian and Ottoman Empires following the 1905 Revolution, especially with its attendant anti-Semitic incidents and outrages, to further fuel this pessimism so as to accelerate this emigration; and
(e). to steadily build the message that the only escape from anti-Semitism lay in emigration to Palestine, a campaign which did not shrink from attempting to outflank the already-popular escape route of emigrating to America. This tactic was seen in the Dreyfus Case-type international publicity generated around anti-Semitic outrages such as the 1913 lynching of Jewish pencil-factory manager Leo Frank in Atlanta, Georgia, USA following his acquittal for "lack of evidence" in the murder of a 13-year-old female factory employee, and the classic frame-up of Mendel Beilis in the Ukraine in 1912 around the notorious "blood libel" notions of the anti-Semites.
Although failing in their main aim of attracting large numbers of Jewish workers to emigrate to Palestine or even endorse the Zionist cause, such tactics blocked sections of the Jewish workers from finding solutions appropriate to their conditions for an entire period. Meanwhile, after the 1905 Revolution and reaction, the Zionists were leaving nothing to chance and also took up directly infiltrating the workers movement in pre-revolutionary Russia to further their ends.
13. That is how the Zionists ended up supporting both the Bund inside the Russian Social Democratic movement and Poalei Zion outside it.
To carry off this subversion, the Zionists cultivated extensive relations with the Russian secret police service, the Okhrana, and retained and further developed these relations even after von Plehve was assassinated. Some deep students of this history have suggested that the translations into Hungarian, Serbian and Arabic of the "Protocols of the Elders of Zion", a crude anti-Semitic forgery concocted within the Okhrana, and their subsequent circulation in the central European cities of the Austro-Hungarian Empire, as well as the major Arab centers and Balkan cities of the Ottoman Empire, were undertaken by Zionist-connected groups. In addition to their maintenance of contacts with the Okhrana, there is circumstantial evidence for this conclusion arising from two further conditions well-known at the time:
(a). the Okhrana had only French and German translators, yet the Protocols appeared in these languages (i.e., Hungarian, Serbian and Arabic) very shortly after their initial publication in Russian, Ukrainian, German and Polish; and
(b). the Zionists already had some interest in provoking an anti-Semitic atmosphere conducive to selling the notion of emigration to Palestine as a "way out", and the Protocols were the ideal vehicle.
14. In some British possessions such as Canada, where in fact the majority population was neither ethnically English nor English-speaking, a charter-grouping of superior nationalities was cooked up whereby the "French" - the Quebecois, who were the clear runaway numerical majority through most of the 19th century - were graciously placed on an equal footing with the "British", with nothing being said about the Irish or the Gaels, who between them outnumbered English-speakers for quite a few decades; and the native peoples were dismissed as "savages".
15. In the Dossier on Palestine, q.v., an anecdote is related of a member of the Knesset telling a visiting British delegation that the Palestinians were savages; former Israeli Prime Minister Golda Meir famously told The Times of London that the Palestinians "didnt exist", while Menachem Begin only slightly more candidly admitted that if one allowed the concept of "Occupied Territories" to remain, this would lend legitimacy to the Palestinians demand for the right of self-determination - so therefore only the term "Judea and Samaria" should be used instead!
16. J.V. Stalin, Marxism and the National Question. London: Red Star, 1973 - exact reprint of the Soviet English translation of the original 1912 edition.
17. See especially Ardi Imseis' article on "Zionism, racism and the Palestinian people: 50 years of human rights violations in Israel and the Occupied Territories", in the Dossier on Palestine, q.v., which provides further detailed of this phenomenon in housing law, employment law, property law, laws regarding citizens rights against arbitrary arrest / detention, etc.
18. See Dossier on Palestine, q.v., and Norman G. Finkelstein, The Holocaust Industry: Reflections on the Exploitation of Jewish Suffering. London, Verso 2000
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