by Karl Pfeifer

In spite of all the lopsided and false explanations of  historian Tony Judt,  Israeli society is pluralistic and most of the Diaspora Jews  - who - as he claims -  sympathize  with Israel - could overlook his advice  in ”An ethnic Society. How should one define Israel?”   published December 12^th  on the Sueddeutschen Zeitung .

Judt is not shy away from demagogy. He pretends to speak for “us Jews” and feels  he is entitled to ask  New York Jews   the “most decisive question” :  who are we”?   As if they had nothing else to do.  And as an answer  he expects they would express a “presumably very strong racial and ethno deterministic interpretation”,  contradicting  Jewish history.

In Israel one can meet white, black, brown and yellow Jews.  But  for a tiny minority, nobody would define the Jews as a race neither in Israel nor in the Diaspora. The Jewish tradition is not racist. One glance at the Bible would confirm it. To prove it we have the long list of different names,  covering all  peoples of the world at the time,  in the first book of Moses, chapter 10:  and they are all  offspring  of Noah’s three sons,  just one  big family.  we could quote plenty of excerpts  from the Bible and the Talmud which are definitely against discrimination.

Very few Jewish thinkers  interpreted the doctrine of ‘the chosen people’ in a racial way . Some Chasidim think that the Jewish soul is different from other souls, but these ideas are not part of the main stream.

Jewishness can neither be defined as a race nor as a homogenous ethnic group.  The definition used  in Israel: “A Jew is a person born from a Jewish mother or one who converted to Judaism” cannot be  seen as  a racial expression, in spite of  Judt’s assertions.

There might be jewish genetic characteristics transmitted over many generations, but it’s the  problem of geneticists and not of  historians.   When Judt talks of  “the superiority of Jewish thought “and thinks that  from the start “one has to ask this ethnically differentiating question”,  he makes little reference to  reality and much to  his hallucinations.

When he fights against an hypothetical racial platform of Judaism, he obliges  the thesis of the victim-turned perpetrator.

In 1945 Theodor W. Adorno  (in his important work “ Mélange”) already  demolished  Judt’s current argumentation:

 “The question of tolerance, meaning that all men and  all races are equal,  is a boomerang.  Both  by the simple refutation of the senses, or by the straight jacket of  anthropological proofs,  Jews are not a race -  but it would not make any difference in a pogrom, because the totalitarians know best whom to kill”.

He continues: “A totally emancipated society would be no state, but a community created by conciling differences. Therefore politics, because that is what  we are really speaking about,  should not defend the abstract equality of people,  not even as an idea.

By stating that a black person is exactly as a white one, we discriminate that person  again in a hidden way.  He is humiliated in a friendly way by criteria  which do not help him fight the pressure of  different conditions. Should he ask more than this, it would  be questionable.  Those who are in favour of one-sided  tolerance  usually have a bias against  groups that do not adapt:  with proper  enthusiasm for the blacks,  indignation about  Jewish lack of manners  can  become acceptable”. 

When Judt  the historian states against all rational criteria that “the basic assumption of Zionism was  that the Jews were a homogenous people”, he ignores the basic reality of the epidemic spread of anti-Semitism in Europe.  He says that in order to contrast “the ethno- nationalistic movements in central and east Europe “, the Jews defined their own ethnic exclusivity. Which is not true. The German, Austrian and Hungarian Jews wanted to be recognized as Germans, Austrians and Hungarians of “mosaic faith” with equal rights.

The rising anti- Semitic movements were against this,  and specifically rejected the assimilated Jews, hating most of all baptized ones.

Talking of the tangible anti Semitism of  the 19^th century, we cannot forget that Theodore Herzl experienced  the fate of Captain Dreyfus in France, historically the  land of Jewish emancipation: his transformation from a totally assimilated Jew belonging to officer ranks  into a  scapegoat.  He saw  how an anti Semitic mob used  the trial as the occasion for a raging madness.

Karl Kraus, who reproached the Jews  as responsible for  anti Semitism already 110 years ago, as Judt does today,  saw  only one solution: Jews should disappear,  assimilation is not enough.  One can say that ”assimilation without psychological integration  proved insufficient”.

Zionists were realistic people and did not see Jews as a  community self-invented out of the blue.  They recognized  their powerless vulnerability (though not foreseeing anything like the Shoah) and created a state that is far from being perfect, but  is the only Jewish state in this world.  Such being the case,  Semitism after Auschwitz evolved  again.  Israel as a state became the scapegoat and Judt contributes to it.    

What can one say about a ‘scientist’ who  reproaches  Israelis for being Jewish and  implicitly supports arab and muslim  hegemony on the region?

If Judt’s Ethno Myth had  a universalistic basis, it might be understandable. But then he could not play the role of “the good Jew” defending  Arabs against “foreign” Jews, and thus offer reasons for their aggressions.  With no proof whatsoever,  he states that ”in being ever more aggressive, Israel pretends  to speak and to act not only in the name of the Jewish state but in the name of all Jews”.

And here comes out  the  simple explanation: “this leads the unwilling world Jewry to be accomplices of the Israeli policy. No wonder that anti Semitism is on the rise”.   Judt also worries that  “the young men of north African, near Eastern and south Asian origin  watch on television how the Israelis shell the Palestinians in the Gaza strip”.   Judt shows a prejudice against  young Muslims – at least  those he usually deals with -   and sees them as mentally underdeveloped and lacking any morals, when he attributes them the impossibility of making a difference between a Jew living in the suburbs of Paris and one who does not accept  to be shelled by rackets coming from Gaza.

As if  he were not aware  that traditional  anti-Semites  throw all the guilt for their own prejudice on the Jews, Judt offers the new anti Semites, who are no less murderous than their foregoers, an excuse for their misdeeds:  ”powerless and full of rage,  they identify with the land  and faith of their parents”.  It is  now clear why hundreds of cars are burnt and shops are plundered – especially in France.  

Judt adds: “This rage cannot be tamed neither in Paris nor in Amsterdam”. Which is obviously absurd, but not altogether surprising.

The old saying: “The Jew is guilty of everything” is unpopular to-day.  “Israel is guilty of everything” can be freely used instead by the anti Zionist in their criticism of the Jewish state.

Judt  not only forgives the unforgivable  and bestows on  murderous anti Semitism a distinctive sign of purity, but also pretends to be a specialist in near eastern affairs: “To insist that “Jewishness “ is limited to life on  a small geographic territory is perverse and harms both Israel and the Jews. This is the main reason why  the problem between Israel and Palestine cannot be solved”.

Judt has a hallucinated vision of how to solve the conflict:  when the American Jews will stop linking their destiny (and maybe their guilt feelings) to Israel and spend their donations for better purposes, then something could  happen in the near east, as it did in Ireland when the civil war ended”.  As if Israel lived on  donations,  and as if Israel’s neighbors were eager to live in peace and harmony with Israel!

Israel certainly exists not  thanks to some theory,  nor on the basis of its Jewish character, but  because, as a fact,  upon its very foundation as a state  Israel defended  itself from the aggression of its neighbors.  One can imagine  what would happen to the Israeli Jews if they could not defend themselves.  One has just  to look at  how other  ethnic and religious minorities are treated in the middle east, with no hate campaigns  fuelled for  tens of years,  to know what would await  undefended Jews.

But this is Judt’s sweet dream. He would like that Israel’s powerful allies leave Israel in the mire: ”maybe  Washington will one day  realize how senseless it is to bind  American foreign policy and  international prestige to the madness of a small near eastern ethnic state.”

The knowledgeable historian, looking down from the Olympus of his New York academy, does not realize that powerful nations base   their alliances on their own national interests,  rather than on  the “spleen” of some anti Zionist academic.

Judt also writes some utter nonsense: “Imagine a group of Tyrolese doctors and lawyers  crossing to England and there  announcing  they came to take the land of their Saxon forbearers.”  Saxons were not banished from England, on the contrary they conquered it and subdued the original population.  And whatever one might say about Tyrolese doctors and lawyers, they do not pray a few times a day that God take them back to the south of England.  Jews were the majority of the population of Jerusalem already in the middle of the 19^th century.  And from whatever angle the New York University might look at it , ties between Jews and the Holy Land were somewhat different than those of the Tyrolese with the south of England.  

Shamelessly he repeats the lies of Arab propaganda about the alien Jews that have nothing to look for in the Holy Land and asks,  posing as naïf :” Why in such a place  as Canaan? Why not Canada?”

Judt  accuses Israel  of  fabricating  the denial of the Holocaust by the Iranian president.  Other  anti Zionists also regularly try to conceal this fact by attributing it to translation errors: “ When Israel’s best defense is Auschwitz, then one only has to say that the Holocaust never took place”.   Judt also insists  that Ahmadinedjad’s anti-Semitic variations  on the theme:” could be from an Israeli perspective most “corroborating” and should not be looked upon as totally negative…    

What once the baptism did, does now the anti Zionism for some Jewish academics.   They are allowed to give verdicts  on other Jews, for  the joy of  anti Semites who do not want to appear as such.  They pretend just to criticize Israel, not the Jews,  as  if they needed encouragement to do it.  Thus anti Zionism becomes the entrance ticket into some academic circles.

Tony Judt successfully  uses with his usal valiance  the whole range of  stale stereotyped  anti Zionistic and pre-minted  expressions:   from ‘the Jewish lobby’  to the alleged’ Israeli racism’,  as if he were charge of  propaganda for  an Islamic movement.

He earned  his entrance ticket all right.