Zionists despise both religious and secular Jewish traditions

Part 8 of 8 on Zionism as an anti-Jewish, racist ideology

Until Western scientific racism became dominant in the 19th century, Jewish was a religion - what else could it have been? It was race science and race-science based, organized anti-Semitic organizations that racialized Jewish people. Though a debate continues about whether or not the Jewish identity ultimately must rest on a religious foundation, non-religious Jews are accepted and claimed widely as Jews in their own communities. Zionists are hostile to both religious and secular Jews.

Zionists are openly hostile to those religious Jews who understand and identify with Judaism through religion. Yakov Rabkin in A Threat From Within: A History of Jewish Opposition to Zionism (pg. 46-48) quotes historian Noah Efron: “Nowhere are Haredi Jews as feared and hated as in Israel. Israel is a bastion of a classic sort of anti-Semitism, aimed not against all Jews, but against the ultra-Orthodox, the overly Jewy Jews.” Quoting Efron at length, Rabkin argues that “Zionism’s promoters have simply refined the hateful image of the traditional Jew as painted by Voltaire and Fichte” 

“One need not search hard to find denigrating images of the Altjtude traditional Jew] in Zionist rhetoric and pamphletry. Herzl had al­ready noted in 1894 that Jews had “taken on a number of antisocial characteristics” in the ghettos of Europe, and that Jewish character was “damaged.” [The poet David] Frishman [1859-1922, of Russian origin] opined that “[traditional] Jewish life is a dog’s life that evokes disgust.” [Another Russian poet,] Joseph Haim Brenner, [1881-1921] likened Jews to “filthy dogs, inhuman, wounded dogs.” [Yehuda Leib] Gordon [1831-1892, an active opponent of Judaism, also of Russian origin] wrote that European Jews were parasites. [Micha Joseph] Berdyczewski [1865-1921, a poet and a philosopher bom in the Russian Empire] christened traditional Jews “spiritual slaves, men whose natural forces had dried up and whose relation to the world was no longer normal,” and elsewhere, “a non-people, a non-nation — non-men, indeed. (Efron 1991,88-89)”

Rabkin (pg. 49) quotes the well-known critic of Zionism, Yeshayahu Leibowitz, who argued that Zionists were “seeking a national identity that exists only in and for itself, for they no longer have any concrete, empirically observable ties with Judaism.”

Leibowitz feared that national identity would “be transformed into statism and will to power; into a national identity in the Mussolinian sense.”

Rabkin believes that Leibowitz’s analysis reveals “seeking a national identity that exists only in and for itself, for they no longer have any concrete, empirically observable ties with Judaism… the national consciousness of the Jews had only Judaism as a shared basis, and the state’s founders openly opposed it.”

But Leibowitz, opposing this, tried to remind his readers that “The state exists to serve men; men do not exist for their state.” 

Rabkin quotes the Chief Rabbi of Britain, Jonathan Sacks, who criticized the disunity of the Jewish community: “we have fissured and fractured into different edot [congregations]: Orthodox and reform, religious and secular, and the many subdivisions that continue to atomize Jewish life into non-communicating sects and subcultures.”

Among all this, Rabkin reflects, it is Israel alone that provides the sense of belonging: 

“For three decades, Zionist organizations have been inculcating belief in the centrality of Israel in most non-Haredi Jewish schools of the Diaspora. This vicarious “Israelism” replaces the traditional Jewish identity all the more easily because the new identity makes far fewer demands. Since Jewish identity is based on obedience to the Torah and to the commandments that it articulates, it affects both the most intimate of precincts (such as food and sex) and public behavior (such as the non-use of automobiles on the Sab­bath or dressing modestly). Contrariwise, Israelism imposes no particular obligation, while at the same time transmitting a feeling of belonging. “I identify with Israel because it is the last refuge of the secular Jew,” a friend confided to me one day. While interested in Judaism he denies it any nor­ mative significance. “Without Israel I would be obliged either to observe the Torah commandments or to stop being a Jew.” When I passed on his remark to Rabbi Moshe Dov (Baer) Beck, perhaps the most prolific of the anti-Zionist thinkers, he replied, to my astonishment: “What’s wrong with being a non-Jew?” In other words, why would those who do not observe the Torah insist on remaining Jewish? A secular Jewish identity is obviously nonsensical for Rabbi Beck.”

In the religious view, being a Jew means no more or less than being a follower of the religion and fulfilling obligations of faith and conduct to that religion. If you don’t want to follow the religious rules, the Rabbi asks, “What’s wrong with being a non-Jew?” But to Nazis steeped in scientific racism, adherence to the religion or not is irrelevant - to Nazis, Jews are a racial group. Zionists also adopt a racial view of who is Jewish, and not a religious one.

The Zionist founders of Israel believed in colonial conquest and the nation’s will to power. Rabkin (pg. 56): 

“According to the Israeli intellectual Boaz Evron, “Zionism is indeed the negation of Judaism” (Leibowitz, 133)… “Ben-Gurion saw Judaism as the historical misfortune of the Jewish people and an obstacle to its transformation into a normal nation” (Leibowitz, 144).”

Criticizing Hindu right-wing nationalism in the 2008 book 1857: War of Civilisations, Indian author Amaresh Mishra pointed out that all fascists are atheists, since they ultimately believe in earthly power and will. Religion is another tool to be used in the quest for power, whether to Zionists or the Indian ideologists of Hindutva like Golwalkar and Savarkar. 

Holders of these ideologies are not capable of sincere religious belief. 

In New York-based Rabbi Yaakov Shapiro’s 1382-page book The Empty Wagon: Zionism’s Journey from Identity Crisis to Identity Theft (2018), the author argues that early Zionists needed to “neutralize the Torah”, for “if the Torah would continue to be perceived as the defining principle of Jewish identity, Zionism would never get off the ground… The Zionists realized they would be unable to successfully deny the centrality of religion in the Jewish consciousness. Instead, they decided to enslave it and channel it for their own cynical agenda.” He quotes Ben Gurion: “I will never agree to the separation of religion from the State, because I want the state to hold religion in the palm of its hand.” In the Zionist integration of religion and state, it is religion that is subordinated. To religious authorities like Shapiro, this is blasphemy. 

“I will never agree to the separation of religion from the State, because I want the state to hold religion in the palm of its hand.” - Ben Gurion

Can the army teach you how to be Jewish?

Shapiro describes the specific role of the Israeli military in undermining Jewish religion and subordinating it to political goals of Zionism. Reviewing the IDF officers’ training course, Shapiro finds lectures on:

1. What is Judaism?

2. The uniqueness of the Jewish people

3. The people and the land in a Jewish perspective

4. War and the army in a Jewish perspective

5. Is Judaism a religion, a way of life, or a constitution?

6. The identity of the Jewish people

“Suffice it to say,” Shapiro continues, “the IDF version of Judaism and Jewishness is not the same as the Torah’s… while the information disseminated is certainly destructive from the Torah perspective, the problem here is not just the content, but also the fact that these topics are being taught by a national army at all. The reality is that the IDF is the army of Israel, not the army of the Jewish people. But consistent with Zionism, the Israeli army is not portrayed as just the army of Israel, but of all the Jews.”  

Zionist abuses of religious Jews from Yemen

Zionist abuses of religious Jews from Yemen are recorded by Yakov Rabkin in A Threat from Within (pg. 43). “The Yemeni Jews, well known for their devotion to the Torah and for their Judaic erudition, were subjected upon their arrival in Israel in the late 1940s to secular re-education campaigns, often in isolated camps. This measure was aimed primarily at the young, who, while not actually kid­napped, were nonetheless forced to endure ideological pressures designed to estrange them from tradition. Many sources concur: physical violence was employed, particularly when the young secular camp commanders forbade access to young religious Jews who wished to assist the internees.”

Rabkin quotes one Israeli parliamentarian saying in the Knesset:

“I cannot employ any other terms to describe the situation in these camps than those of spiritual constraint and inquisition against the Jewish religion. I see nothing in what is being done in these camps but the cultural and religious murder of the tribes of Israel.”

Rabkin continues: “Their Zionist educators apparently forced the young Yemeni Jews to harvest oranges on the Sabbath, to walk about bareheaded and to cut off the side-curls the Yemeni Jews had worn for centuries.” He quotes one Yemeni Jew describing this: “here, they treat us with contempt, and force our people to profane the Sabbath. They mock us; laugh at our traditional beliefs, our prayers and the religious observances of our Holy Torah.” In addition to religious abuse, these Yemeni Jews were also tested for “negro blood”, according to a June 16, 2017 report by the Times of Israel. The report was based on investigations for the “Knesset Special Committee on the Disappearance of Children from Yemen, the East and the Balkans”. 

Jewish babies in Israel were taken from their parents who were lied to about it in the “Yemenite Babies Affair”

The kidnapping of thousands of Yemeni Jewish babies for forced re-education is now known as “The Yemenite Babies Affair”. Rabkin: “ The government apparently assured the parents that their children had died. It was not until many years later, when some of the parents received military call-up notices for their children, that they began to smell a rat.” 

But the religion can’t be discarded; so it must be subordinated

For all of Zionists’ hatred of the Jewish religion, they are unable to discard it and adopt a purely “racial” definition of Jews, since no “race science” can produce a coherent “race” of any kind, let alone a “Jewish race”. Those Zionists who adhere most strongly to a “racial” definition of Jews are also the most inclined to discriminate against Jews of Arab, Asian, or African ancestry. In a video interview, Rabbi Yaakov Shapiro pointed out this contradiction in Israel’s Law of Return: while an atheist of Jewish origin could become an Israeli based on the Law of Return, a person of Jewish origin who converted to, e.g., Christianity, could not. Zionism is about subjugating religious Jews and using the religion as a cover, not sincere adherence to faith. 

Zionism’s secular enemy: the Jewish left

Jewish culture goes beyond religion only, and there are non-religious participants in Jewish life. Zionism is inimical to these as well. 

Describing her background in a 2021 video on her “journey away from Zionism”, Jewish-American activist Maya Edery said she had been “accidentally a Zionist” because she “didn’t know there was another way to be Jewish,” but her upbringing and understanding of “Judaism as a form of practicing social justice” made it impossible to reconcile her understanding of Judaism with the oppression of the Palestinians. 

The late David Graeber described left-wing Jewish traditions in a video coming to the defence of Jeremy Corbyn against false accusations of anti-Semitism. Graeber argued that it was preposterous to argue that the left was anti-Semitic partly because “to some degree what we now think of as the left is a product of Jewish thought and the Jewish tradition.” 

The right-wing in Europe is obsessed with the historical connections between Jewish culture and left-wing emancipatory politics. Right-wing ideologies, including Nazism and Fascism, arose as both anti-Left and anti-Jewish ideologies and remain so to this day. The list of Jewish left-wing historical figures hated by the right-wing (and revered by the left to this day - Marx, Luxembourg, Trotsky, Goldman, Chomsky…) is very long indeed.

Herzl, Jabotinsky, Weizmann, and other Zionist leaders offered a solution to the “Jewish problem” to anti-socialist, anti-Jewish racists. They accepted the right-wing premises that Jews are a degenerate, impure “race,” and that one of their flaws is apparently socialist agitation. Zionists interpret the participation of Jews in socialist struggles as a “racial flaw” to be remedied by their removal from Europe. 

In 1948, the Jewish Labor Bund - a socialist labor organization that developed in parallel and in opposition to Zionism with a left-wing philosophy, argued in a pamphlet that while Jews could of course live in Palestine, that “the fight against anti-Semitism, for full equality, and for the full national and cultural development of the Jewish people must be waged - as it has been until now - side by side with the democratic and Socialist elements of the non-Jewish population in those countries.”

An emergency bulletin of the Bund, when the Jewish left tried to stop Israel from inflicting the then-beginning Nakba on Palestinians

In a section of the same pamphlet titled “We Will Not be Bullied”, the pamphleteers described how “The entire Jewish press, dailies, weeklies, and scores of other publications, united in taking the Bund to task as a traitor to the Jewish cause. All shades of Jewish public opinion united in mobilizing the Jewish communities against us - simply because we dare criticize the wisdom of the establishment of a Jewish state in Palestine… Be this as it may, we wish to assure our political antagonists that we shall not allow them to terrorize us into silence.” 

Zionists treat the Jewish left, whether in Palestine or in the Diaspora, as an enemy. 

Zionists try to redefine Jewish identity

If neither religious worship nor secular left tradition are allowed by Zionists, what is left of Jewish identity after Zionism is done with it?

Rabkin (A Threat From Within, pg. 38) quotes Rabbi Blau, who believed that “Zionism had inflicted worse harm upon the Jews than upon the Arabs. The Arabs may have lost their land and their homes, but the Jews, by accepting Zionism, had lost their historical identity (Blau, A., 2-3).”

In a 2020 +972 mag article, journalist Etan Nechin explored the consequences of Israel’s Nation State Law, through which, Nechin argued, “Israel’s religious right is deciding who is a Jew.” Nechin cites the 1947 “status quo” letter from Ben Gurion to Orthodox Jewish leaders, which produced a lasting arrangement whereby “secular society would operate with limitations in areas such as transportation on the Sabbath, laws around marriage and death, and others. In return, religious communities would turn a blind eye to certain deviations from the rabbinate, Israel’s highest Jewish religious authority, such as the immigration of hundreds of thousands of Jews from the former Soviet Union who have not been recognized as Jewish by the rabbinate.”

The resulting definition of Jewish, Nechin argues, is a purely negative one: 

“Passed by the most right-wing, nationalist-religious government in the country’s history, the law exposes the hypocrisy of the religious right in Israel: the only definition it can propose of being Jewish is “not an Arab.” Judaism is not defined as a vibrant religion with manifestations all around the world, but a state identity that guarantees superiority over people of different faiths under its rule, as well as over Jews living outside Israel. In other words, in Israel, Judaism is a synonym for power.”

In the 2013 book The Tragedy of a Generation: The Rise and Fall of Jewish Nationalism in Eastern Europe, Yeshiva University scholar Joshua Karlip traces movements for two roads not taken by Jewish Nationalists, roads that were ultimately folded into Zionism: Yiddishism and for Diaspora Nationalism. Karlip analyzes these roads through a study of three leading Russian-Jewish nationalist intellectuals - Elias Tcherikower, Yisroel Efroikin, and Zelig Kalmanovitch.

All of these leaders ultimately opted for Zionism because they feared assimilation above all, and felt especially strongly that the Soviet Union and socialism were guaranteed to end with assimilation. Their own anti-communism led them to a rejection of the Jewish left; their secularism meant they couldn’t accept a religious basis for their identity.

As one of these three intellectuals, Tcherikower, moved towards Zionism, he argued that Soviet Jewry was in the process of ‘“death by the kiss” of assimilation.’ Despite official support in the Soviet Union for Yiddish culture, Tcherikower came to see it as a dead end: “Why specifically Yiddish? If there is no national, historical or, dare we say, religious feeling of connection with the collective then why be a Jew in a country where you can freely partake of the general rich culture? Why send the children to a Yiddish school when the general ones prepare them much better for practical life?”

Another one of the trio, Kalmanovitch, concluded that Yiddish was “bankrupt. What kind of a movement can it be whose program is to read a Yiddish book and to go to the Yiddish theater once in a while?” Wherever they lived, Jewish people would “need to buy bread and repair their shoes and work; they need to do it in the language of the country in which they live… the only solution is for Jews to have their own country, where they can live a normal life.”

Describing the views of these three intellectuals on Nazism in the 1930s (before the Nazi genocide): “Tcherikower, Efroikin, and Kalmanovitch all viewed Nazism as a potential catalyst for the reconstitution of Jewish communal consciousness.” Karlip quotes one of these at length, stating that “Tcherikower even recognized a positive side to the rise of Nazism:” 

“And who knows, perhaps the Jewries in the Fascist and half-Fascist lands would have been devoured internally if not for Jewish historical providence, which imparted to the contemporary Hamans the idea to build the anti-Semitic movement on principles not of religion but rather of race. And from this standpoint, it is perhaps true that “the Holy One Blessed Be He made a blessing for Israel” that this illogical [racial] theory has rendered apostasy purposeless. What would become of these Jews, if they would be able to save their lives and property through conversion?”

In this Jewish nationalist perspective, defining Jews racially instead of religiously had the benefit of providing a bulwark against assimilation. 

The experience of the Anglo-American settler colonies (US, Canada, Australia, New Zealand) shows that a settler colonial state is no foundation on which to build a culture: such a state creates an identity based on theft and cultural appropriation.

Tcherikower mocked Yiddish culture, but whatever is not European in Israeli settler culture - from language to place names and food - is based on appropriation from Indigenous Palestinian culture. Having trampled on Jewish religious and secular traditions, Zionists have arrived at an empty, negative definition of Jewish identity as Nechin noted, someone who is “not an Arab”, while defining everyone who opposes them as an “anti-Semite”. 

In this way, centuries of lively Jewish culture and tradition are effaced and replaced with this ideological dead end.

[This concludes the series. There will be an epilogue on the Hannibal Doctrine and how it, too, is anti-Jewish in effect.]