How and When I Stopped Being Jewish
Author: Shlomo Sand
Publisher: Kinneret, Zmora-Bitan
Publication date: 2013
180 pages.
Introduction
How and When I Stopped Being Jewish is the third book by historian Shlomo Sand, professor of history at Tel Aviv University, in which he confronts the Zionist movement’s systematic and continued distortion of the history of Jews and that of Palestine. In 2008, Sand published The Invention of the Jewish People, followed by The Invention of the Land of Israel in 2012. Both books received much interest, stirring much controversy and debate in Israel, Europe, the United States, and elsewhere. Originally written in Hebrew, Sand’s books were translated into many languages, with The Invention of the Jewish People translated into more than 20 languages.
In a scholarly and methodical manner, Shlomo Sand critiques Zionist historiography and its take on the history of Jews, Judaism, and Palestine; deconstructing and demystifying the Zionist historical narrative that often bases itself on religious myths and fables. Sand’s work also exposes the incessant distortion fabricated by Zionist leaders and theorists, with the purpose of legitimating and justifying the creation of a Jewish state in Palestine.
The Dissemination of a Religion and not a Racial Diaspora
Sand stresses that Judaism is a religion and not a nationality or a race, moreover a missionary religion that strives to expand and spread its message. Sand asserts that Judaism spread widely in the ancient world through the conversion of different races, tribes, and peoples; and not through the migration of a race, as Zionism claims. He also attributes the decline in the spread of Judaism to Christianity’s triumph in the 4th century and its adoption by the Roman Empire, who thereafter imposed restrictions on the spread of Judaism in its territories. The expansion of Judaism was further curbed with the appearance and rise of Islam, starting in the 7th century.
Judaism spread before the emergence of Christianity and Islam and their rise throughout the ancient world, the Middle East and the Mediterranean Basin. Judaism had by then spread to Palestine and Greater Syria, and among many Arab tribes in different parts of the Arabian Peninsula and among different ethnicities in North Africa. Among states that had adopted the Jewish religion were the Principality of Hidyab in northern Iraq, which became Jewish in the 1st century, and the Himyarite Kingdom in Yemen, which also adopted Judaism in the 5th and 6th centuries.
It is the spread of the Jewish religion in the Khazar Kingdom, however, that had a monumental impact on Jewish history and on the dissemination of the Jewish religion and increase in its followers. The Khazar Kingdom, founded on the coast of the Caspian Sea (called the Khazar Sea by the Arabs) followed paganism until in the mid-8th century, when the King of the Khazar converted to Judaism, a conversion that quickly spread among the Tatar, Turkish, and Turkmen tribes. Sand explains that the weakening and disintegration of the Khazar kingdom between the 10th and 12th centuries led to the migration of the Jewish Khazars to Russia, Ukraine, Lithuania, Poland, Belorussia, Galicia, and Hungary, and also toward Central Europe. As a result of these migrations, in the 19th century Eastern European Jews of Khazari origins came to represent over 80 percent of the total Jews in the world. After the industrial revolution, more than three million of Eastern European Jews migrated to Central and Western Europe and to America.
Many historians have written about the historical events that took place in Khazar including Harkabi Albert (1835-1919), Abraham Pollack (1910-1970), Arthur Koestler (1905-1983), and Simon Dubnow (1860-1941). What distinguishes Shlomo Sand, however, is the fact that he is virtually the only Israeli historian to research the conversion of the Khazar state to Judaism in the last half-century. Since the 1950s, “memory-makers” in Israel have avoided the subject of their Khazari past, Sand maintains, since to Israel’s leaders and thinkers, Khazar represents a detriment to the legitimacy of the Zionist project. Recognition of events in Khazar would imply that Jewish Zionist settlers in Palestine are in fact the descendants of Khazar’s tribes rather than the inheritors of “the People of Israel”, or the descendants of Abraham.
Sand argues that the increasing number of Jewish Khazars in the cities of Central and Western Europe led to the appearance of two important movements that played a central role in modern Jewish history: anti-Semitism and Zionism. Prior to the rise of Zionism, at a time where hostility toward Jews was rising, the anti-Semitic and fundamentalist Protestant current had promoted the notion that Jews represent a nation and race, and that Palestine was their national homeland. This, in an effort to expel the Jews and to repatriate them away from Europe. Sand states that the founding fathers of Zionism ended up assimilating the central views of anti-Semitism, particularly those claiming that the Jews constitute a nationality and a race. Zionists thereafter worked hard in turning the Jewish religion into ethnic nationalism, and to re-write the history of the Jews based on this premise. It is this process that according to Sand contributed to the “invention” of the Jewish people. Religious terms were endowed with a new “nationalist” content that was not originally part of these traditions. Simultaneously, Zionism fabricated the notion of the “Land of Israel” as a geographic location with political dimensions. Contrary to historical facts, the Zionists persevered in claiming that Jews underwent expulsion and exile from the “Land of Israel”.
Kill a Turk and Have Some Rest
In his book How and When I Stopped Being Jewish, the author investigates Israel’s Judaism and Jewish Zionists across the world, particularly those who identify themselves as “secular Jews”. Sand here explores the rise of racist values in Israel and the parallel decline of humanist ones in the Jewish state and among many “secular Jews” worldwide, whose main role has been reduced to justifying Israel’s crimes against the Palestinians.
As part of his critique on the decline in the values of Jewish Zionists, Sand recounts an old Jewish joke which goes as follows: a Russian Jewish mother gives her son, who was recruited in the Russian Army during the Crimean War in the 19th century, his food and the following advice “kill a Turk, and do not forget to sit down right afterward to have some food”. Her son answers: “understood, mother”. Then the mother pulls a scarf around her son’s neck and adds: “and when you shoot the Turk, do not expose yourself to the cold wind”, to which the son replies: “understood, mother”. The mother cautions her son further: “it is important to rest a little each time after you attack and kill Turks”. “Of course, of course”, answers the young man. Then, after some hesitation, the son asks his mother: “and what if the Turk kills me?” The mother was shocked by the question of her son, opens her eyes wide, and asks in puzzlement: “and why would he kill you? What have you done to him so that he kills you?” At the heart of this joke, is Sand’s harsh criticism of morals that guide Jewish Zionists today.
Underlining this behavior, claims Sand, is the fact that Jews across the world have in the last centuries studied the Talmud more than they have the Torah and that the persistent Talmudic influence over religious and secular Jews represents an ethical problem in need of urgent addressing. The Talmud, Sand argues, is rife with racism and comes with innumerable stories and examples that are rampant with contempt, hostility, and dehumanization toward non-Jews. It is thus of no coincidence, he continues, that Rabbi Abraham Isaac Ha-Cohen Kook, the most prominent Rabbi of Jewish settlers in Palestine, stated that the difference between the Jewish soul, in its essence and desires, and the soul of all non-Jews with their different varieties, is wider and deeper than the difference between man’s soul and the animal’s soul.
For those secular Jews around the world who persist in reiterating and embracing racist values in this day and age Sand holds sheer disdain. He notes how the Passover story, recounted by Jews every Passover, includes calls for the harming of those who are not Jewish, as well as a clear call for the extermination of those who do not believe in the god of the Jews, “Jehovah”. Such prayers, he notes, are still read by so-called secular Jews in New York and London and Paris, the same people who claim to be superior to others in their commitment to higher humanist and ethical ideals. Sand can’t help but notice the remarkable difference between Jewish elites during the spread of anti-Semitism in the last two centuries, and those elites witnessing a retreat of anti-Semitism in the last few decades. During the rise of anti-Semitism, Jewish intellectuals around the world adopted universal humanist values and ideas, defending the persecuted and the disinherited. With the waning of anti-Semitism, however, Sand notes how many Jewish intellectuals turned conservative and justified the aggressive and racist Israeli policies against Palestinians and Arabs. Sand also points out how the retreat of anti-Semitism in Europe and America actually represents a challenge for Israel and Zionism, since it increases the assimilation of Jews in their European and American societies, increasing—as a result—the rate of intermarriage with non-Jews, which has reached 50 percent among the young generation.
In the absence of a secular Jewish culture and due to the waning of anti-Semitism, Sand maintains that the two main factors that are preserving the Jewish secular identity in Europe and America are the relationship with Israel and the commemoration of the Holocaust.
Who is the Jew in Israel?
Israel identifies itself as a Jewish state, and as the state of “all Jews spread across the entire world” but as shown in Sand’s analysis, Israel cannot define who a Jew is beyond the Jewish religious parameters. All Israeli and Zionist attempts to define who a Jew is through racial belonging - with the use of fingerprints or DNA information - have resulted in failure. The Jewish world population does not even share a common tongue, or a share secular culture, argues Sand, the religious aspect being the only remaining method to define who the Jew is. It thus comes of no surprise that Israel stresses the Jewish character of the state, and relentlessly works to reinforce Jewish religious content in educational and cultural institutions and throughout the institutions of the state at the expense of humanist values. Israel’s secular intellectual elite, and many from the secular middle classes nonetheless still complain against religious impositions in Israel. This dual character remains a constant source of concern for those who wish to remain Jewish without Judaism, and who are yet to understand its impossibility.
The increase in racism and focus on Judaism in Israel in recent decades is clear, and is made evident in a number of ways. First, the large number of Palestinians living under Israeli occupation, be they Palestinian Arabs living within the Green Line, or Palestinian Arabs residing in apartheid regions in the occupied Palestinian territories. Second, the victory of the Zionist Right supported by Oriental Jews, whom Sand terms “the descendants of Arab Jews”, and its contribution to increasing racist tendencies in Israel. The third factor is Russian Jews. During the 1990s Russian Jews were “imported” into Israel, and their having no Jewish culture or traditions prompted Israel to affirm and stress their Jewish identity. This was no easy task, especially since many of them were not of the Jewish faith to begin with; leaving them with little choice but to express their Jewish identity through crude racism toward Arabs under the supervision of their racist elites and the racist general atmosphere that is dominant in Israel against Arabs.
In an atmosphere of military occupation accompanied by an obsession with state Judaism, in addition to the repression of Palestinians, their dehumanization, and the rise of hatred toward Palestinian Arabs, Israeli political elites began – in the last two decades – to legislate racist laws that affirm the Jewish character of the state and discriminate against Palestinian Arabs. Behind this assertion of Jewishness is the deprivation of Palestinian Arabs living within the Green Line from citizenship rights. To Sand the existing situation in Israel is akin to the idea of the United States deciding against a state for all its American citizens, but one restricted to Anglo-Saxon Protestants around the world, discriminating against anybody who does not belong to that group. The racist reality in Israel is similar to what would happen in France, Sand asserts, if France decided that France was only for Catholic Gauls or if Great Britain declared itself exclusive to English Anglicans, discriminating against the Scotts, the Welsh, the Irish, and the sons and daughters of emigrants.
Despite Israeli obsession with Jewishness, Sand believes that in reality most Israelis do not live in accordance to the precepts of the Jewish religion, or according to Jewish traditions, with the exception of a group of religious Jews who do not exceed one-sixth of the total Jewish population in Israel. Sand thus poses the crucial question: what does it mean, then, to be Jewish in Israel? To which he answers that primarily to be a Jew is to be favored over non-Jews, and to enjoy privileges and advantages that are not enjoyed by non-Jews. To be Jewish is not to be Arab. Judaism in this sense is the negation of the Palestinian Arab and the negation of his or her individual and collective rights. To be Jewish in Israel means that you can settle, by force, in a land that is not yours; in land that is the property of the Palestinian Arab. It means that you can travel on Jewish-only roads in the occupied West Bank and not to stop at the military checkpoints that dot the landscape of the occupied West Bank. Being Jewish in Israel means that you do not get arrested, tortured, or shot and killed without having committed a crime, and that your house does not get demolished.
Sand argues that the Jewish citizen in Israel in the early 21st century can be compared to the white man in the southern United States in the decades preceding the 1960s; the French settler in Algeria before Algeria’s 1962 independence; the white settler in South Africa during the pre-1994 apartheid system; and that of Germans of Aryan origin in 1930s Germany. He then questions how honest, non-religious individuals, who are democratic and liberal, and who maintains a modicum of human values, can continue to view themselves as Jewish. Doesn’t identifying oneself as a Jew carry an implicit decision to belong to a privileged group that enjoys benefits in Israel, which engenders unbearable violence around it?
Sand asserts he is living in one of the most racist societies in the Western world and that even if racism exists, in one form or another, in all societies, racism in Israel is prevalent everywhere and is actively sponsored by the state. In Israel, racism is taught in all educational institutions, and is engrained in the spirit of the laws that the Knesset continues to legislate. Racism has reached a degree of hegemony and power to the point where racists no longer realize that they are racist, and do not feel the need to apologize. Israel in the past years, concludes Sand, has become a model that is revered by racists and extreme right-wing movements throughout the word; ironically the same movements that were once considered anti-Semitic.
*This review was published in the fourth issue of Siyasat Arabiya (September 2013), a peer-reviewed journal specializing in political science, international affairs, and public policy, published bimonthly by the Arab Center for Research and Policy Studies.
It was translated by the ACRPS Translation and English Editing Department. The original Arabic version can be found here.
