Global Zionism and Universal Religion
Global Zionism and Universal Religion
Excerpts from this book
Elliott Abrams wrote in 1997, before becoming deputy national security adviser in the Bush II administration: “Outside the land of Israel, there can be no doubt that Jews, faithful to the covenant between God and Abraham, are to stand apart from the nation in which they live. It is the very nature of being Jewish to be apart—except in Israel—from the rest of the population.”—
Benjamin Ginsberg writes that already in the 1950s, “an accommodation was reached between the Jewish state in Israel and the Jewish state in America”; but it was after 1967 that the compromise became a consensus, as anti-Zionist Jews were marginalized and silenced.— Thus was born a new Israel, whose capital was no longer only Tel Aviv but also New York; a transatlantic Israel, a nation without borders, delocalized. It was not really a novelty, but rather a new balance between two realities, one old and the other beginning in 1947.
Let us not forget that until the foundation of the Jewish state, “Israel” was a common designation of the international Jewish community, as when the British Daily Express of March 24, 1933, printed on its front page: “The whole of Israel throughout the world is united in declaring an economic and financial war on Germany.”—
Joel Stein, who defines himself as a “proud Jew,” and replied in a 2008 Los Angeles Times article to Abe Foxman, who believes that talking about Jews’ power over Hollywood is “dangerous”: “I don’t care if Americans think we’re running the news media, Hollywood, Wall Street or the government. I just care that we get to keep running them.”
Brownfeld, who is editor of the American Council for Judaism’s periodical Issues and contributor to the Washington Report on Middle East Affairs, reports that after Schneerson’s death, “[T]housands of his Israeli followers played an important role in the election victory of Binyamin Netanyahu. Among the religious settlers in the occupied territories, the Chabad Hassids constitute one of the most extreme groups.
Brownfeld writes that it is essential to understand these beliefs in order to understand the current situation in the West Bank, where many of the most militant West Bank settlers are motivated by religious ideologies in which every non-Jew is seen as “the earthly embodiment” of Satan, and according to the Halacha, the term ‘human beings’ refers solely to Jews.”
Brownfeld explains that leaders of the settler movement in the occupied West Bank follow the teachings of Rabbi Kook, “the revered father of the messianic tendency of Jewish fundamentalism,” which based on the Lurianic Kabbalah.
Brownfeld quotes Kook: “The difference between a Jewish soul and souls of non-Jews—all of them in all different levels—is greater and deeper than the difference between a human soul and the souls of cattle.”
In Jewish Fundamentalism in Israel, Shahak and Mezvinsky state, “One of the basic tenets of the Lurianic Cabbala is the absolute superiority of the Jewish soul and body over the non-Jewish soul and body. According to the Lurianic Cabbala, the world was created solely for the sake of Jews; the existence of non-Jews was subsidiary.”
Gilad Atzmon therefore correctly characterizes Jewish Power as “the capacity to silence criticism of Jewish Power.”—
“By my own self I swear it; what comes from my mouth is saving justice, it is an irrevocable word: All shall bend the knee to me, by me every tongue shall swear.”
After June 1967, as Norman Podhoretz recalls, Israel became “the religion of the American Jews,”— it goes without saying that this religion should remain discreet, if possible even secret, since it was incompatible with American patriotism, at least as conceived by those who, in a similar way, consecrate an almost religious worship to America.
We are reminded of the double language of the book of Ezra, where Yahweh is “the God of heaven” for the Persian kings, but “the God of Israel” in the rest of the book. The book of Ezra is a key to understanding Judaism, since the Yahwist ideology with its tribal-universal ambiguity crystallized during this period. Put simply, it seems that Yahweh is the tribal god of the Jews that the rest of humanity takes for the universal God. This is why, although the Tanakh of the Jews and the Old Testament of the Christians are practically identical, they are two totally different books according to how they are read.
The duplicity of modern Judaism has been discussed by Gilad Atzmon, who grew up in Israel in a family of Zionist militants (his grandfather was an Irgun official), but later became a severe critic of this legacy. To him, the Haskalah insight, “Be a Jew at home and a goy on the street” (fonnulated by the poet Judah Leib Gordon but often attributed to Moses Mendelssohn) is fundamentally dishonest: “The Haskalah Jew is destined to live in a dual, deceptive mode, if not practically a state of schizophrenia. [...] The Haskalah Jew is deceiving his or her God when at home, and misleading the goy once in the street. In fact, it is this duality of tribalism and universalism that is at the very heart of the collective secular Jewish identity. This duality has never been properly resolved.”
Zionism began as an effort to resolve this contradiction, so that a Jew could be a Jew both at home and in the street. But the result is that “there is no trace of universalism in either the Zionist’s ‘street’ or in his ‘home’.” However, since Israel has a vital need for support from the international community, the Zionist Jew still has to don the mask of universalism and humanism, not so much in the streets of Tel Aviv, but in those of New York, London, and Paris.
For historical reasons, Zionism is today a global and not just a national project. Jews of the Diaspora participate in it at least as actively as Israelis do. “Within the Jewish framework, the Israelis colonize Palestine and the Jewish Diaspora is there to mobilise lobbies by recruiting international support.”— Zionism is no longer a nationalism but a globalism, a project for a new world order.
But has it ever been anything else? Theodor Herzl and Max Nordau no doubt thought of Zionism on the model of the nationalisms of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries.
“Early Zionist thinkers were apparently galvanized by a deep revulsion for the diaspora Jews,” writes Gilad Atzmon. “They preached for a radical metamorphosis of the Jew. They promised that Zionism would civilize the diaspora Jew by means of a manufactured homecoming. [...] They vowed to change, striving to become a ‘people like all other people.’”
Atzmon cites Aaron David Gordon, founder of Labor Zionism: “We are a parasitic people. We have no roots in the soil, there is no ground beneath our feet. And we are parasites not only in an economic sense, but in spirit, in thought, in poetry, in literature, and in our virtues, our ideals, our higher human aspirations.”—
However, in retrospect, Zionist nationalism may have masked a very different project. No other nationalist movement has ever viewed the concept of a people in such exclusively genetic terms—not even Nazism. “Zionism is a form of racism and racial discrimination,” as Resolution 3379 of the United Nations General Assembly so aptly put it on November 10, 1975.
Blood takes precedence over land. That is why Israel has never ceased to mean, for the Jews themselves, a world community rather than a national community. And that is why the ultimate goal of Zionism cannot be just Israel, as Gilad Atzmon stresses: “In fact, there is no geographical centre to the Zionist endeavor.
It is hard to determine where Zionist decisions are made.” The strength of modern Zionism rests on an organic rather than hierarchical link between Jews. “While the organism functions as a whole, the particular organ fulfills an elementary function without being aware of its specific role within the entire system.”— It is the ideology, internalized by each individual, that is the center. And this ideology, in the last analysis, is that of biblical Yahwism. Naturally there must be a cognitive elite to perpetually pump the ideology throughout the organism.
This ideology is epitomized by the book of Esther, which Atzmon illustrates by quoting an article by Rafael Medoff titled “A Purim Lesson: Lobbying Against Genocide, Then and Now.”
Prom the story of Esther and her cousin Mordecai, Medoff draws as a lesson the importance of infiltrating power (which he euphemistically calls “lobbying”): “The holiday of Purim celebrates the successful effort by prominent Jews in the capitol of ancient Persia to prevent genocide against the Jewish people.” So, Atzmon comments, “To internalise the message of the Book oj Esther is to aim for the most influential centres of hegemony, to collaborate with power and bond with rulers.”
And the Esther-Mordecai tandem is the perfect illustration of the organic complementarity of the different levels of Jews. “Medoff s reading of the Book of Esther provides a glaring insight into the internal codes of Jewish collective survival dynamics, in which the assimilated (Esther) and the observant (Mordechai) join forces with Jewish interests on their minds.” Esther not only incarnates the assimilated Jew, but the most assimilated of all, the crypto-Jew, since the king and the people are unaware that she is Jewish. In the organic onion-layer structure of the Jewish community, even “anti-Zionists of Jewish descent [...] are there to portray an image of ideological plurality and ethical concern.”—
The Mission Theory
Modern Zionism is a global project because it is the child of Yahwism—a rebellious child in its youth, but loyal in maturity. Jewishness itself is a global project, for what does election mean if not a universal mission? This universal mission, too, has a double face. There are many Jews who associate this mission with a priesthood for the salvation of mankind.
Jabotinsky quotes in The War and the Jew (1942), in a mocking tone, a Parisian friend who adhered to the theory “that it was the sacred mission of the Jews to live scattered among the Gentiles and help them rise to higher ethical levels.”— The Italian rabbi Elijah Benamozegh, author of Israel and Humanity (1914), is one of the most famous representatives of this “mission theory”: “The constitution of a universal religion is the ultimate goal of Judaism,” he writes. This entails a sense of Israel’s superiority: “In Heaven, one God of all men, and on earth a single family of peoples, among whom Israel is the eldest, responsible for the priestly teaching function and the administration of the true religion of humanity.”
Universal religion therefore implies “the recognition that humanity must accept the truth of the doctrine of Israel.” This universal religion will not be Judaism proper, but an inferior form, founded on the laws God gave to Noah and not on the more demanding ones given to Moses. The universal religion of the Gentiles will be Noachism. “
The special cult of Israel is safeguarding the means of realization of the true universal religion, Noachism.”— This conception deviates significantly from the Bible, whose only universalist message is that the nations (goyim) must pay tribute to Yahweh in his Jerusalem Temple. It is therefore legitimate to ask whether the fraud of Noachism and all the other versions of the “mission theory” are not simply skillful rationalizations of Jewish supremacism.
The same question may be asked about the attempt of Joseph Salvador, in his book Paris, Rome and Jerusalem (1860), to outline a universal religion based on a fusion of Judaism and Christianity. He believed that the natural center for this syncretistic religion would be Jerusalem, and therefore advocated the establishment of a new state, a bridge between the Orient and the Occident, encompassing the borders of ancient Israel.—
Yet it would be wrong to suspect conscious hypocrisy in most of the countless Jewish thinkers who have echoed the Jewish people’s global “humanitarian mission.”
But the Haskalah strategy requires paying obsequious respect to Christianity. It consists not only in imitating Christianity in order to enjoy the same rights and dignity as a universal religion, but also in asserting paternity in order to absorb it. “What gave birth to the Christian gospel,” Rabbi Benamozegh claims, “is this faith in the universal religion that the Jews believed was born by their ancient doctrine and whose reign they were to establish one day.”
But Christianity, like Islam, is an imperfect expression of this ideal, the true form of which should be Noachism, the universal law “which Judaism has preciously preserved and which was the starting point and impetus of Christian preaching in the world.”—
Benamozegh therefore exhorts Christianity to acknowledge its errors and return to its sources. The source is Jesus the Jew, while responsibility for Christian anti-Semitism is blamed on St. Paul, the first self-hating Jew, who wrote that the Jews “do not please God, they are enemies of all men” (1 Thessalonians 2:15-16).—
Heinrich Graetz writes in his History of the Jews : “Jesus made no attack upon Judaism itself, he had no idea of becoming the reformer of Jewish doctrine or the propounder of a new law; he sought merely to redeem the sinner, to call him to a good and holy life, to teach him that he is a child of God, and to prepare him for the approaching Messianic time.” And so, he “fell a victim to a misunderstanding. How great was the woe caused by that one execution! How many deaths and sufferings of every description has it not caused among the children of Israel!”—
This process can be described as a superficial “Christianization of Judaism”: Judaism not only mimics the universalist message of Christianity, but also claims Jesus as one of its honorable representatives. Better yet, the crucifixion of Christ becomes the symbol of the martyrdom of the Jews.
While mimicking Christianity, Judaism also seeks to transfonn it. And so the counterpart of the Christianization of Judaism is the Judaization of Christianity. According to the historian of Judaism Daniel Lindenberg, “the Jewish Reformation does not only want to ‘assimilate’ unilaterally into the modem Christian world. In a way, it aims to ‘reform’ it, too. [...] It is really about awakening the Hebrew ‘root’ of a Christianity reconciled with Human Rights.”—
In fact, it is really about eradicating all traces of anti-Judaism from Christianity—from the Gospel if it were possible—in order to turn Christianity into a Judeophilic religion, that is, a branch of Judaism.
The dialectical opposition between Zionism and communism is another case in point. Both originated, again, in the same milieu, and the very nature of their opposition is perhaps best represented by the friendship between Karl Marx and Moses Hess.
Theodor Herzl, we remember, used the threat of communism in his Zionist diplomatic overtures to Russian and the German leaders: “Support my movement, and I will rid your cities of their revolutionaries.”
Churchill, also on the Zionist side, dramatized the opposition between the “good Jews” (Zionists) and the “bad Jews” (communists) in his 1920 article “Zionism versus Bolshevism.”
Similar dialectical machinery can be found in all levels of Jewish movements. Consider, for example, the opposition between pro-Nazi Zionists and anti-Nazi Zionists in the 1930s. The Hegelian synthesis between the two is best embodied by Joachim Prinz, who in 1934 expressed sympathy for the Nazi racial laws, and in 1958 was elected president of the American Jewish Congress, the very organization which in 1933 had called for total economic war on Germany.