Full text of "Shlomo Sand : How I Stopped Being A Jew"

Full text of "Shlomo Sand : How I Stopped Being A Jew"

Full text of "Shlomo Sand : How I Stopped Being A Jew"

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HOW I I 

STOPPED 

I BEING I 

A JEW 

SHLOMO SAND 

How I Stopped Being a Jew 

Shlomo Sand 

Translated by 

David Fernbach 

V 

VERSO 

London • New York 

First published in English by Verso 2014 

Translation © David Fernbach 2014 

First published as Comment j’ai cesse d’etre juif 

© Flammarion 2013 

All rights reserved 

The moral rights of the author have been asserted 

Verso 

UK: 6 Meard Street, London W1F OEG 

US: 20 Jay Street, Suite 1010, Brooklyn, NY 11201 

www.versobooks.com 

Verso is the imprint of New Left Books 

ISBN-13: 978-1-78168-614-0 (HB) 

eISBN-13: 978-1-78168-615-7 (US) 

eISBN-13: 978-1-78168-698-0 (UK) 

British Library Cataloguing in Publication Data 

A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library 

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data 

Sand, Shlomo, author. 

[Matai ve-ekh hadalti li-heyot Yehudi. English] 

How I stopped being a Jew / Shlomo Sand ; 

translated by David Fernbach. 

pages cm 

ISBN 978-1-78168-614-0 (hardback) - ISBN 978-1-78168-615-7 () - ISBN 978-1-78168-698-0 () 

1. Jews-Identity. 2. National characteristics, Israeli. 

3. Sand, Shlomo. 4. Judaism and state-Israel. I. 

Title. 

DS143.S228154 2014 

305.892'4-dc23 

2014013306 

v3.1 

In memory of Eric J. Hobsbawm 

In terms of suffering, I believe that the extreme human situations today are no longer Jewish ones. 

- Romain Gary, ‘Le judai'sme n’est pas une question de sang’, 1970 

Contents 

Cover 

Title Page 

Copyright 

Dedication 

Epigraph 

1. The Heart of the Matter 

2. Identity Is Not a Hat 

3. A Secular Jewish Culture? 

4. Pain and Duration 

5. Immigration and Judeophobia 

6. From One Oriental to Another 

7. Empty Cart, Full Cart 

8. Remembering All the Victims 

9. A Rest After Killing a Turk 

10. Who Is a Jew in Israel? 

11. Who Is a Jew in the Diaspora? 

12. Exiting an Exclusive Club 

CHAPTER 1 

The Heart of the Matter 

The main line of argument developed in this essay is bound to appear illegitimate to 

more than one reader, not to say repugnant. It will be rejected out of hand by many 

people who are determined to define themselves as Jews despite being non-religious. 

Others will see me simply as an infamous traitor racked by self-hatred. Consistent 

Judeophobes have characterized the very question of self-definition as impossible or 

even absurd, seeing Jews as belonging always to a different race. Both these groups 

maintain that a Jew is a Jew, and that there is no way a person can escape an identity 

given at birth. Jewishness is perceived in both cases as an immutable and monolithic 

essence that cannot be modified. 

In the early twenty-first century, from reading newspapers, magazines and books, I 

do not think it exaggerated to maintain that Jews are too often presented as bearers of 

particular hereditary character traits or brain cells that distinguish them from other 

human beings, in the same way as Africans are distinguished from Europeans by their 

skin colour. And just as it is impossible for Africans to shed their skins, so too are Jews 

unable to renounce their essence. 

The state of which I am a citizen, when it conducts a census of its inhabitants, defines 

my nationality as ‘Jew’, and calls itself the state of the ‘Jewish people’. In other words, 

its founders and legislators considered this state as being the collective property of the 

‘Jews of the world’, whether believers or not, rather than as an institutional expression 

of the democratic sovereignty of the body of citizens who live in it. 

The State of Israel defines me as a Jew, not because I express myself in a Jewish 

language, hum Jewish songs, eat Jewish food, write Jewish books or carry out any 

Jewish activity. I am classified as a Jew because this state, after having researched my 

origins, has decided that I was born of a Jewish mother, herself Jewish because my 

grandmother was likewise, thanks to (or because of) my great-grandmother, and so on 

through the chain of generations until the dawn of time. 

If chance should have had it that only my father was considered a Jew, while in the 

eyes of Israeli law my mother was ‘non-Jewish’, I would have been registered as an 

Austrian; I happen to have been born in a displaced persons camp in the town of Linz, 

just after the Second World War. I could indeed, in this case too, have claimed Israeli 

citizenship, but the fact that I spoke, swore, taught, and wrote in Hebrew, and studied 

throughout my youth in Israeli schools, would have been of no avail, and throughout my 

life I would have been considered legally as being Austrian by nationality. 

Fortunately or unfortunately as the case may be, depending on how one sees this 

question, my mother was identified as Jewish on her arrival in Israel at the end of 1948, 

and the description ‘Jew’ was added to my identity card. Moreover, and no matter how 

paradoxical it might appear, according to Israeli law just as according to Judaic law 

(Halakhah), I cannot stop being a Jew. This is not within my power of free choice. My 

nationality could be changed in the records of the Jewish state only in the exceptional 

case of my conversion to another religion. 

The problem is, I don’t believe in a supreme being. Apart from a brief fit of mysticism 

at age twelve, I have always believed that man created God rather than the other way 

around - an invention that has always seemed to me one of the most questionable, 

fascinating and deadly wrought by human society. As a result, I find myself tied hand 

and foot, caught in the trap of my crazy identity. I don’t envisage converting to 

Christianity, not merely because of the past cruelty of the Inquisition and the bloody 

Crusades, but quite simply because I don’t believe in Jesus Christ, Son of God. Nor do I 

envisage converting to Islam, and not just on account of the traditional Sharia that 

allows a man, if he feels it necessary, to marry four women, whereas this privilege is 

refused to women. I have instead a more prosaic reason: I don’t believe Muhammad was 

a prophet. Nor will I become a follower of Hinduism, as I disapprove of any tradition 

that sacralizes castes, even in an indirect and attenuated fashion. I’m even incapable of 

becoming a Buddhist, as I feel it impossible to transcend death and do not believe in the 

reincarnation of souls. 

I am secular and an atheist, even if my limited brain finds it hard to grasp the infinity 

of the universe, given the tight and terrible limits of life here on Earth. The principles 

that guide my thoughts - my beliefs, if I dare use this word - have always been 

anthropocentric. In other words, the central place is held by human beings and not by 

any kind of higher power that supposedly directs them. The great religions, even the 

most charitable and least fanatic, are theocentric, which means that the will and designs 

of God stand above the lives of men, their needs, their aspirations, their dreams and 

their frailties. 

Modern history is full of oddities and irony. Just as the ethnoreligious nationalism 

that emerged in the early nineteenth century forced Heinrich Heine to convert to 

Christianity in order to be recognized as German, and Polish nationalism in the 1930s 

refused to see my father as completely Polish if he would not become a Catholic, so the 

Zionists of the early twenty-first century, both inside and outside Israel, absolutely reject 

the principle of a civil Israeli nationality and recognize only a Jewish one. And this 

Jewish nationality can be acquired only by the almost impossible path of a religious act: 

all individuals who wish to see Israel as their national state must either be born of a 

Jewish mother, or else satisfy a long and wearisome itinerary of conversion to Judaism 

in conformity with the rules of Judaic law, even if they are resolutely atheist. 

In the State of Israel, any definition of Jewishness is deeply deceptive, imbued with 

bad faith and arrogance. At the time these lines were written, a number of immigrant 

workers - fathers and mothers of children born and raised in Israel - applied in despair 

to the Chief Rabbinate to convert to Judaism, but found their request rejected out of 

hand. They wanted to join the ‘Jewish nation’ to avoid being sent back to the hell from 

which they’d fled, not to satisfy a belief in the Jews as a ‘chosen people’. 

At Tel Aviv University, I teach students of Palestinian origin. They speak a faultless 

Hebrew and are legally considered full Israeli citizens, yet the records of the Ministry of 

the Interior identify them definitively as ‘Arabs’, not just ‘Israelis’. This mark of identity 

is in no way voluntary; it is imposed on them, and is almost impossible to change. You 

can imagine the fury that would be triggered in France, the United States, Italy, 

Germany or any other liberal democracy, if the authorities required that individuals who 

identified themselves as Jews have this attribute marked on their identity papers or that 

they be categorized as such in the official census of the population. 

Following the Judeocide of the Second World War, the UN partition resolution of 1947 

referred to the creation of a ‘Jewish state’, along with an adjacent ‘Arab state’ that 

never saw the light of day. It should thus be understandable why resorting to such labels 

at this point in the twenty-first century appears to be a questionable and dangerous 

anachronism. Twenty-five per cent of Israeli citizens, including the 20 per cent who are 

Arab, are not defined as Jews within the framework of the law. The designation ‘Jew’, 

therefore, as opposed to the designation ‘Israeli’, not only does not include non-Jews, 

but explicitly excludes them from the civic body in whose interest the state ostensibly 

exists. Such a restriction is not only antidemocratic; it also endangers the very existence 

of Israel. 

The antirepublican identity policy of the State of Israel, however, is not the only 

motivation that compelled me to write this short essay. It does indeed occupy a key 

place here, and certainly contributed to the sharp assertions I have sometimes resorted 

to, but other factors, too, influenced the elaboration of the essay’s content and objective. 

I wanted herein to place a large question mark against accepted ideas and assumptions 

that are deeply rooted, not only in the Israeli public sphere but also in the networks of 

globalized communication. For quite some time, I have felt a certain unease with the 

ways of defining Jewishness that became established within the heart of Western culture 

during the second half of the twentieth century and on into the twenty-first. I have the 

increasing impression that, in certain respects, Hitler was the victor of the Second World 

War. Certainly he was defeated militarily and politically, but within a few years his 

perverted ideology infiltrated itself and resurfaced. Today that ideology emits strong 

and threatening signals. 

Let us not deceive ourselves. Today we are no longer threatened by the horrific 

Judeophobia that culminated in genocide. The morbid hatred towards Jews and their 

secularized descendants has not had a sudden rejuvenation in Western culture. Public 

and political anti-Semitism has actually retreated significantly in the liberal-democratic 

world. 1 Despite the shrieks of the Israeli state and its Zionist outriders in the ‘diaspora’, 

who claim that hatred of Jews, with which they equate any criticism of Israeli policy, is 

constantly growing, we need to emphasize right away a fact that has broadly 

conditioned and inspired the writing of this essay. 

No politician in our day can publicly make anti-Jewish statements, except perhaps in 

a few places in Central Europe and within the new sphere of Islamic nationalism. No 

serious press organ disseminates anti-Semitic twaddle, and no respectable publishing 

house will publish a writer, no matter how brilliant, who defends hatred of Jews. No 

radio station or television channel, public or private, will allow a commentator hostile 

to Jews to express himself or appear on-screen. And if any statements that are 

defamatory towards Jews should insinuate themselves into the mass media, they are 

quickly and effectively suppressed. 

The long and tormented century of Judeophobia that the Western world experienced 

between approximately 1850 and 1950 has effectively ended - and just as well. It is true 

that a few marginal pockets of this viewpoint remain, relics handed down from the past, 

hatred conveyed in whispers in dubious salons or displayed in cemeteries (naturally 

their predestined place). This hatred is sometimes mouthed by crazed outsiders, but the 

broad public does not extend it the least legitimacy. To try to equate today’s marginal 

anti-Semitism with the powerful, mainstream Judeophobia of the past amounts to 

greatly downplaying the impact of Jew-hatred in Western, Christian and modern 

civilization as expressed until the mid-twentieth century. 

Yet the conception that makes Jews a ‘race’ with mysterious qualities, transmitted by 

obscure routes, still blossoms. While in former times it was a matter of simple 

physiological characteristics, blood, or facial shape, today it is DNA or, for the more 

subtle, a paler substitute: the strong belief in a direct lineage down the chain of 

generations. In a distant past we were dealing with a mixture of fear, contempt, hatred 

of the other, and ignorance. Today, on the part of the ‘post-Shoah goyim ’, we face a 

symbiosis of fears, guilty consciences and ignorance, while among the ‘new Jews’ we 

often find victimization, narcissism, pretentiousness, and likewise a crass ignorance. 

I therefore felt compelled to write the present text, as a desperate attempt to free 

myself from this determinist straitjacket, both blind and blinding, full of dangers for my 

own future and that of those dear to me. There is a close link between the identification 

of Jews as an ethnos or eternal race-people, and the politics of Israel towards those of its 

citizens who are viewed as non-Jews, as well as towards immigrant workers from 

distant lands and, clearly, towards its neighbours, deprived of rights and subject for 

nearly fifty years to a regime of occupation. It is hard to deny a glaring reality: the 

development of an essentialist, non-religious identity encourages the perpetuation of 

ethnocentric, racist or quasi-racist positions, both in Israel and abroad. 

In light of the tragedies of the first half of the twentieth century, the emotional 

connection felt by Jewish descendants towards Israel is both understandable and 

undeniable, and it would be foolish to criticize it. However, in no way does that 

undeniable connection also necessitate a close connection between the conception of 

Jewishness as an eternal and ahistorical essence, and the growing support that a large 

number of those who identify themselves as Jews give to the politics of segregation that 

is inherent in the self-definition of the State of Israel, and to the regime of extended 

occupation and colonization that has been enforced in the territories conquered in 1967. 

I am not writing for an audience of anti-Semites. I view them as either totally 

ignorant or stricken with an incurable disease. As for the more learned racists, I know 

no way to convince them. Instead I am writing for all those who question the origins 

and metamorphoses of Jewish identity, the modern forms of its existence, and the 

political repercussions induced by its various definitions. To this end, I shall extract 

certain crumbs from my patchy memory and reveal some components of the chain of 

personal identities I have acquired in the course of my life. 

1. The concept of ‘anti-Semitism’ does occur at many points in this text, for want of a more suitable phrase. But to my 

mind it has dubious connotations, having been invented by Judeophobes, while the term ‘Semite’ is manifestly racist and 

lacks any historical foundation. 

CHAPTER 2 

Identity Is Not a Hat 

A well-known joke will help illustrate my theoretical starting-point. In a school in the 

Paris suburbs, young Mohammed is seen as a little genius. Not only is he unbeatable in 

arithmetic, he excels in French. One fine day, the teacher comes up and asks him, 

‘Would you like me to call you Pierre?’ The young pupil’s face lights up, and he responds 

to this invitation with an outburst of enthusiasm. When Mohammed/Pierre arrives home 

later in the day, his mother says, ‘Mohammed, can you go to the supermarket and get 

two bottles of milk?’ The child replies that he’s now called Pierre, and refuses to comply. 

In the evening his father comes back from work and asks his son to bring him some 

water from the fridge. The boy refuses and again demands to be called Pierre. The 

father gets up and slaps him, accidentally scratching the boy’s face with his ring. The 

next morning when he arrives in the classroom, the teacher asks: ‘Pierre, what’s that on 

your face?’ and the child replies, ‘The Arabs beat me up!’ 

Clearly, this is a story told by French people and not by Arabs. Aside from what it 

reveals, both positive and negative, about the ‘open’ character of French nationality, the 

joke couldn’t be repeated in Israel to illustrate the state’s identity policy, given its 

segregationist dimension. That may also stimulate us to reflect a moment on the notion 

of identity - the self-image that it conveys, the risks of social fracture that it carries, its 

imaginary dimension, its evident dependence on others, and one’s capacity or inability 

to change it. 

At the risk of sounding trivial, I have to recall that very early in their existence human 

beings acquire an identity of their own, which demands recognition from their milieu. 

The ‘ego’ invents and sets itself an identity through permanent dialogue with the Other’s 

regard. Even though identity as such responds to a constant and transhistorical 

psychological need common to all human beings, its forms and variations depend, on 

the one hand, on natural givens (sex, skin colour, height, and so forth), and on the 

other, on external - that is, social - circumstances. 

Identity always proceeds from practices enacted by human individuals, and their 

modes of dependence on others. We bear it and cannot live without it. But even if one’s 

identity does not always agree with other people’s regard, it constitutes the point of 

entry for communication with them. Through it, individuals are rendered significant 

both to themselves and to their milieu. Their identity forms part of the definition of their 

status in the social body within which they evolve, interacting in turn with the identity 

of this body. Every individual identity, in its major traits, feeds into a collective identity, 

just as this latter results largely from an assemblage of particular identities and, in all 

probability, also of transcendent elements, both in the reciprocal relations of this 

collective with other groups and in its self-definition. 

Beware, an identity is not a hat or an overcoat! It is possible to have several 

simultaneous identities; however, as distinct from hats and coats, it is hard to change 

them rapidly, hence the comically absurd story of little Mohammed/Pierre. A man may 

be an employer or an employee and, at the same time, atheist, married, tall, young, etc. 

These identities coexist and comprise different levels of power and hierarchy that 

interpenetrate and complement one another. The identity palettes of modern man, from 

youth to old age, constitute a fascinating subject, particularly in the way they manifest 

themselves in changing situations and contribute to creating - or maybe, challenging - a 

social order. The extreme sensitivity to attack displayed by identities of all kinds 

likewise constitutes an important subject that deserves discussion. Nevertheless, it is 

beyond my power to discuss these socio-psychological orientations in the present essay. 

What I want to do here is focus on the problematic that is my main concern. If certain 

identities complement one another and are superimposed, others, by contrast, are 

mutually exclusive. It is not possible in practice to be both male and female, tall and 

short, married and single, and so on. In the same way, it is hard to be at the same time 

both Muslim and Christian, Catholic and Protestant, Buddhist and Jew, even if a few 

exceptional cases of syncretic and intermediate versions always turn up here and there 

when the initial faith begins to shatter. 

Accordingly, it was impossible during the past hundred and fifty years to be at the 

same time French and German, Polish and Russian, Italian and Spanish, Chinese and 

Vietnamese, Moroccan and Algerian. Religious identity, today as in the past, and 

national identity, in the modern age, precisely resemble those hats and coats of which 

no more than one can be worn. Both religion (that is to say, monotheism rather than the 

polytheism that preceded it) and patriotism (excepting pre-national transition phases, 

situations of emigration, or post-national sensibilities) have demanded absolute 

exclusivity on the part of both individuals and collectives. This is a particular source of 

their power. 

For centuries, the religious identities of the pre-modern world offered meanings and 

explanations for natural and social phenomena that would otherwise have remained 

incomprehensible. So as to overcome their finite character, they also conferred on life 

an aura of eternity, in the form of heaven and reincarnation. For this useful and lasting 

service, the various churches claimed not only financial rewards but also absolute 

devotion to the exclusive truth they offered. 

This truth comforted believers, integrating them into a readily visible identity group, 

and thus gave their lives not only understanding and meaning, but also order and 

security. On top of his identity as peasant or blacksmith, merchant or pedlar, lord or 

serf, the individual knew he was also Christian, Jew, Muslim, Hindu, or Buddhist. No 

one was without a religious identity of some kind, just as until the recent past it was 

inconceivable that there should be men without a god. The expansion of the human 

grasp of nature, its products and its caprices, thanks to the decoding of its mysterious 

places and its secrets hidden in the ‘essence of things’, made a particular contribution to 

the shattering of an all-powerful god and especially to the delegitimization, in the eyes 

of the people, of his accredited agents on earth. The wide retreat - though not the 

disappearance - of traditional and institutionalized religions took place simultaneously 

with the growth of a new collective identity that came to assume a share of moral rule 

over social life. With the rise of the market economy and its apogee in industrialization 

and the age of imperialism, along with the powerful process of modernization of the 

means of human communication, from printing through radio and television, and as 

well with major changes in the structure of class relations, national identity came to 

serve as the main lightning-rod for the mental storms of the modern age. 

This new collective identity became necessary for various reasons, among which we 

should particularly mention mobility, both horizontal (bound up with urbanization) and 

vertical (with social stratification), and also of course the division of labour, with its 

growing fragmentation, which required a homogeneous public culture to remain 

operational. The nation-state presided over the process of nationalization of the masses, 

which could not have happened without it. To this end, it drew on effective networks of 

public and private communication, but especially, from the late nineteenth century, on 

the two strong arms of compulsory education: its national-pedagogical products on the 

one hand, and military service with its militarist objectives on the other. 

The new nationality drew widely on the earlier religious identity. It was often able to 

pillage its symbols and some of its rituals, which it used as foundations for the building 

of a new collective identity. At other times it completely secularized these, inventing 

new concepts, symbols and flags while still keeping them grafted onto a mythological 

and sometimes pagan past. Weaker than its predecessor in certain respects, particularly 

in the realm of the metaphysics of the soul, it asserted itself all the more boldly on other 

levels, particularly that of broad popular mobilization and the sentiment of being equal 

owners of a homeland, which it generously distributed to its supporters. The major 

difference between religious and national identity lies in the concept of sovereignty. For 

the ‘authentic’ religious believer, the sovereign is always outside his own personal 

identity, whereas for the votary of nationality, the sentiment of sovereignty is an 

integral part of identity. In place of the old Lord and Master of the universe, it was the 

nation, erected into master of its actions and responsible for its acts, that thereby 

became the main object of worship. 

In the course of the last two centuries, national identity has solicited a total 

commitment of astonishing power. It has demanded that millions of men be ready to die 

for the defence or expansion of their homeland, while on an even greater number it has 

imposed a language and way of life, and imbued them with a strong sense of collective 

and popular solidarity unprecedented in history. 

The new identity has nationalized history and adapted it to the patriotic needs of the 

present. The world of the national imaginary has always taken, for us, the form of a 

long recital. Legends, great deeds, and the particular myths of tribes, religious 

communities, and kingdoms were transformed into a long, continuous narrative of 

imaginary peoples who had supposedly existed since the dawn of time. Misty and 

fragmentary images served as fictional foundations for a mythological temporal 

continuum, flowing since the birth of the nation. 

We can certainly maintain that without the idea of the nation, history as a discipline 

(the teaching of which has, for many years, been how I earned my living) would not 

have been taught with such constancy and continuity, from primary school through to 

the end of secondary education. In all democracies, whether liberal or totalitarian, every 

pupil must recite the history of his or her ‘people’. Clio, the muse of history, has become 

a goddess worshipped by modern peoples in order to fashion their collective identity 

and seal their faith in the political representation of the nation. 

In the late nineteenth century, in reaction to widespread growing racialization on the 

part of anti-Semites, a small fraction of Jewish descendants underwent a phase of auto¬ 

nationalization, even self-racialization. This phenomenon gave new life to ancient 

myths and legends, and fashioned a series of secular identities of a new type. The near¬ 

disappearance of men’s wearing of the kippah, tallith, and beard, and women’s shaving 

of the head and wearing a wig, gave way in the mid-twentieth century to being ‘ethnic 

Jews’. One segment of these new Jews became enthusiastic Zionists. Others adopted the 

essentialist standpoint of their detractors despite not coming to believe in a Jewish 

nationality. 

If until a recent past, and despite all persecutions, being a Jew continued to mean 

worshipping a particular God, stubbornly following a host of religious commands and 

undertaking a series of prayers, history was now to bring surprising illusions in the field 

of modern identity politics. From now on, in the eyes of both anti-Semites and philo- 

Semites alike, a Jew would always be a Jew, but not on account of the cultural practices 

and norms that he or she followed. This individual would be perceived and considered a 

Jew not because of what he did, what he created, what he thought or what he said, but 

on account of an eternal and mysterious essence inherent in his personality. Indeed, 

Zionist scientists in Israel and elsewhere even introduce genetics. I shall try and trace 

some of the causes that led to this situation. 

CHAPTER 3 

A Secular Jewish Culture? 

The start of my questioning, which like every start was not really one at all, goes back 

to 2001, in the spacious kitchen of an apartment in the 11th arrondissement of Paris. 

Michele, the wife of one of my closest friends, surprised me on one of my visits by 

saying, ‘Tell me, Shlomo, why is it that my husband, who never sets foot in the 

synagogue, does not celebrate Jewish festivals or light candles on the Sabbath, and 

doesn’t even believe in God, is defined as a Jew, whereas no one would define me as a 

Christian or Catholic, given that I stopped going to church decades ago and am 

completely secular!’ 

To tell the truth, I was surprised by the direct and unexpected character of her 

question. I reflected on it and, as I usually do, tried to appear as though I had an answer 

to everything. Quite confidently, despite not being completely sure of my line of 

argument, I replied, ‘Contrary to Christian identity, Jewish identity isn’t just a matter of 

belief in God and a particular form of worship. History has left its mark on Jews in the 

form of outward signs that go beyond those of a traditional religious culture. Hostility 

towards them in modern times has given Jews a specific identity as victims of 

segregation, which has to be taken into account and respected.’ The discussion naturally 

ended up with Hitler and Nazism, and, strong in my knowledge of history, I heaped up a 

pile of arguments designed to justify my friend’s definition as a secular Jew, and - who 

knows? - perhaps also to square myself with my own identity. 

Following this conversation, however, I felt a kind of diffuse unease; my own 

arguments had not satisfied me. Something was lacking, which I did not manage to 

define right away. A certain thought, which made me wary, kept insinuating itself, only 

to be repeatedly rejected. I worried over this for weeks without finding a way out of my 

obsessive questioning. As is well known, it is far easier to hold on to simple prejudices 

and ideas that are constantly reproduced in everyday conversation than to challenge the 

underlying concepts and constructions of our system of thought. As Martin Heidegger 

said in his time, most often in the course of our life we think less with words and 

concepts than they think themselves through us. 

But what contradicted the idea that there are secular and atheist Jews? Hadn’t there 

been, for millennia, a Jewish people: exiled, dispersed and wandering for two thousand 

years (like everyone, I still credited the Christian-Zionist myth of an ‘exile of the Jewish 

people’)? Hadn’t the history of persecution thereby developed among Jews a particular 

sensibility, a fundamental common behaviour, a specific solidarity? Just look! Here was 

the secular Jewish culture in which, according to all appearances, I had grown up: didn’t 

Karl Marx, Sigmund Freud and Albert Einstein create Jewish culture and science? Were 

they not, along with many others, objects of pride for the modern secular Jew? At least, 

that is what I so often heard on the school bench from both teachers and classmates. 

The more time went on, the more my mind was troubled by this problem. There 

certainly was a secular Jewish culture, the proof being that people define themselves as 

Jews despite not believing in God and not keeping up the slightest residue of tradition. 

Jean-Paul Sartre’s old and telling assertion that it is the anti-Semite who creates the 

secular Jew was still completely pertinent in my eyes. Wasn’t identity fixed by the 

regard of the Other at least as much as by the consciousness that the subject had of 

himself? I continued to believe that so long as the Jew existed for the ‘non-Jew’ Other, it 

remained impossible to obliterate or abstract from ‘Jewish alterity’. 

And yet, when I began honestly to sort out what exactly constituted a secular Jewish 

culture, the difficulty of formulating such a definition suddenly came home to me, and I 

found myself plunged in an abyss of perplexity. Assuredly there is an ancestral religious 

culture, with its folkloric and exotic appurtenances. The Bible, far from being solely the 

property of Judaism, constitutes one of the cultural and historical foundations of all 

Western monotheistic religions (Judaism, Christianity and Islam), but the Mishnah and 

Talmud, Saadia Gaon, Maimonides and the other rabbinical exegetes - these were 

Jewish creations and creators par excellence. There has also been a major line of Jewish 

thought in the modern age. In the wake of Moses Mendelssohn, Hermann Cohen, Franz 

Rosenzweig, Martin Buber, Abraham Joshua Heschel and through to Emmanuel Levinas, 

various thinkers have sought to gloss and advance a Jewish philosophical reflection, a 

field in which they have succeeded, here and there, in obtaining significant results - 

though it must be mentioned that, for all its originality, this thought is always nourished 

by non-Jewish philosophical syntheses. 1 

What, then, is the specific culture shared by those who define themselves as secular 

and atheist Jews? Do they have a common language, with both elitist and popular 

expressions? Isn’t the culture of a people characterized above all by their spoken 

language, and in particular by their recourse to specific codes through which 

communication is effected? What way of life distinguishes and characterizes secular 

Jews? Where are Jewish plays or films produced nowadays? Why is there no secular 

Jewish poetry, literature or philosophy? Are there ways of being, gestures and tastes 

that are specific and common to all the Jews of the world, or at least to a majority of 

them? In other words, is there a creative Jewish culture that serves as spiritual 

nourishment or everyday expression for those people in the world who are identified as 

Jews? Can one genuinely point to Jewish elements in the work of Karl Marx, Sigmund 

Freud or Albert Einstein? Has the critique of capitalism, the theory of the unconscious, 

or the theory of relativity contributed in some way to preserving and shaping a secular 

Jewish culture? 

Knowing that each of these questions calls for a negative answer, I understood that 

my secular Jewish identity was based simply on my origin, that is, exclusively on the 

past or, more exactly, on my reconstructed memory of it. The present and future 

scarcely came into play in the collective Jewish identity I had sought to justify as a 

living identity, supported by a specific culture. Nowhere to be found is there a way of 

life common to all so-called secular Jews. They do not experience today pains or joys 

shared by other secular Jews the world over. They do not communicate or dream in a 

language specific to themselves: instead they express themselves, earn their living, cry 

and believe, each in their own respective national language and culture. 

Tristan Tzara, ne Samuel Rosenstock, whose Dadaist rebellion lit up my own youth, 

did not write Jewish poetry. Harold Pinter, of Eastern European Jewish origin, a 

playwright and scriptwriter whose work has always enchanted me, produced 

masterpieces in English that have nothing Jewish about them. Stanley Kubrick, my 

favourite film director, made films that are both very American and very universal, but 

without an ounce of Jewishness. Henri Bergson, the philosopher with whose concept of 

time I had to grapple while writing my doctoral thesis, did not present to the world a 

Jewish philosophy. Marc Bloch, one of the greatest of twentieth-century historians, from 

whom I sought in vain to steal lines of argument and narrative techniques, had no 

interest at all in Jewish history but was completely immersed in the history of Europe. 

Was Arthur Koestler, a bold provocateur who helped me greatly in the shedding of my 

Communist illusions, a Jewish writer? And could it be that Serge Gainsbourg, whom I’ve 

admired for so long, composed and interpreted Jewish songs and not French songs 

without anyone noticing? 

All the above-mentioned individuals, and far more, came from a Jewish family 

background of one sort or another. It is true that, indirectly, this background may help 

explain the presence of a relatively large number of individuals of Jewish origin in the 

fields of Western science and culture. The situation of protracted marginality of a 

persecuted religious minority, restricted against its will to spheres of abstract activity, 

formed a springboard for rapid accession to and success in the modern world, marked as 

this world has been by the growing production of signs and symbols. 

Indeed, in some cultural creators, there are fragments from a Jewish past already in 

the throes of dissolution, fragments that may be called ‘post-Jewish’. Although he tried 

to learn Hebrew at a certain point in his life, Franz Kafka produced a body of work that 

is manifestly not Jewish, and in which, quite deliberately, he did not put a single Jewish 

character. We may infer, all the same, that the life led by his family in Central Europe 

probably helped give rise to the strong expression of signs of alienation and anxiety in 

his stories. This is true likewise of Walter Benjamin: his curiosity about the milieu of 

Jewish origin from which he came led him to interest himself for a while in Hebrew and 

in the mysticism of the Kabbalah, from which, however, he soon took his distance in 

order to immerse himself completely in the critique of German culture - more correctly, 

in fact, European culture, as witnessed in his highly original writings on France. In his 

work, too, one finds expressed a tragic dimension whose roots tap into his Jewish family 

background as well as other sources. 

It is also true that a share of Eastern European sensibility, both Jewish and 

specifically Yiddish, resonates strongly in the works of Stefan Zweig, Joseph Roth, Irene 

Nemirovsky, Saul Bellow, Philip Roth, Henry Roth and Chaim Potok, among many 

others. But Philip Roth, for example, who is sometimes accused of anti-Semitism, insisted 

more than once that he wrote as an American, not as a Jew, and it is clear that the 

characters of Yiddish origin who feature in his novels are the last Mohicans of a 

disappearing generation. 

None of these authors created any secular culture common to all Jewish descendants, 

nor even to a majority of their number. Even a novice anthropologist knows that a 

culture and a sensibility do not have their source merely in the legacy of ancestors, nor 

only in the signs and traces left by memory, but are constructed above all on shared 

experience, on modes of communication, and on the interactions and contradictions of 

lived reality. Knowing that there is no specific mode of everyday life that could bind 

together secular individuals of Jewish origin across the world, it is impossible to assert 

the existence either of a living, non-religious Jewish culture or of a possible common 

future, apart from vestiges handed down from a declining religious tradition. 

Again, it is incontestable that many secular people of Jewish origin, despite being 

totally atheist, continue to celebrate certain festivals and ceremonies that issue from the 

long history of Jewish cultural practices. Some teach their children to light a Hanukkah 

candle for the winter Feast of Lights, others to participate in the Pesach (Passover), 

Seder in the spring or even to attend synagogue in autumn on Yom Kippur, the Day of 

Atonement. But then, should we designate as Christians the secular French or German 

atheists who celebrate the birth of Jesus, put up a pine tree in their living-room, and 

place presents for their children beneath it? And as for the American agnostics of Jewish 

origin who hang an eight-branched candlestick on their Christmas tree, should we call 

them Judeo-Christians? Theodor Herzl, for example, the founder of political Zionism in 

the late nineteenth century, did not have his son circumcised and used to celebrate 

Hanukkah with a Christmas tree; on the basis of those practices, should we call him a 

Christian or a Jew? Perhaps he was ‘a bit’ Christian, and was led to change his identity 

and become a ‘new Jew’ under the influence of a hostile environment. 

Whereas synagogues, churches and mosques are viewed by nonbelievers as museums 

of a kind, it would appear that festivals, commemorations and ceremonies, on the other 

hand, are cultural signs charged with a significance whose value does not disappear and 

which it is not easy to abandon. They break the uniformity of the cycle of days; they 

return us for a moment to families that may tend to drift or even break apart; they 

bring back nostalgic memories of the dear departed. But no culture can be reduced to 

nostalgia and ritual commemorations of a religious origin; although these may well 

constitute a significant point of departure in the complex system of self-definition, they 

also risk contributing to the erection of dividing walls between people. If young people 

are prevented, in the name of a religious tradition, from meeting and loving, and if 

faith and the respect for beliefs, or the fears of relatives, incite people to reject and 

devalorize those who are deemed different from themselves, they are then condemned to 

remain imprisoned throughout life to these points of departure that have ossified over 

time, and that soon distort and even threaten. National societies in which religious- 

communitarian criteria play a dominant role in the dividing lines of identity cannot be 

described as liberal or democratic. 

As a result, I became increasingly vexed by the disturbing question of whether my 

secular Jewish identity had in fact been based on anything more than a dead past. 

Certainly, from the point of view of a living present called on to create and orient the 

future, it was hollow. What is this past, and what is its history? The geological strata 

that surround and overlie these questions play a significant role in understanding the 

identitarian development of those who define themselves as Jews. I shall now try to cast 

some unsteady and fragmentary beams of light on these retrospective Jewish and 

Zionist constructions. 

1. 1 do not include Spinoza in this list. The contemptible practice, in Israel and elsewhere, of presenting him as a Jewish 

thinker rather than simply a philosopher from a Jewish background reveals the essentialist and tribalist conceptions of 

those who call themselves ‘secular Jews’. Not only was Spinoza ostracized and his works banned in his lifetime by the 

Jewish community, but he himself, in his maturity, no longer saw himself as a Jew and always spoke of Jews in the third 

person. And despite having been given at birth the Hebrew first name Baruch, he never used it, always writing his name as 

Benedict or Benedictus. 

CHAPTER 4 

Pain and Duration 

In 1975 I arrived in France to pursue my study of history. That same year, my father, 

who had lived continuously in Israel since 1948, left the country for the first time to visit 

his brother in Montreal. He stopped off en route to meet me in Paris. I was proud to be 

able to act as his guide in the ‘city of light’, and I recall that we were lucky enough to 

enjoy warm and sunny weather, with golden sunsets illuminating the monuments and 

roofs of the city. 

While we were strolling, my father said that he could recognize a Jew in the street. 

‘You always complain of living with too many Jews in Israel,’ I said to him, ‘surely 

you’ve not come to Paris to look for more! And besides, how could you prove that the 

person you identify really is a Jew?’ 

Soon afterwards, at a bus stop, there was a tall man standing next to us in line; he 

had grey hair and blue eyes, and looked to me like just another old man. My father 

whispered in my ear that he actually was a Jew, and to prove it, said that we should 

speak Yiddish, on the assumption that the unknown man would then join our 

conservation. As two Israelis, or two ‘typical’ Mediterraneans, it wasn’t hard for us to 

make a noise. The Jewish ‘target’ took no notice and didn’t even turn towards us. 

During the bus ride, my father asked me about every square, every crossroads, every 

monument we passed. When we reached a certain point, I think it was Place Vendome, 

he asked me the name of the column standing in the middle. Despite my fairly good 

knowledge of Paris, I found myself unable to answer. Suddenly the man my father had 

identified as a Jew, who was sitting in front of us, turned round and began to explain in 

Yiddish the origin of the column. It turned out that he came from Romania and had 

arrived in France before the Second World War. He was an engineer and lived in 

Montmartre. 

I was flabbergasted and speechless. When we got off the bus, I immediately asked my 

father how he’d been able to identity this man. ‘It’s because of the eyes,’ he replied. I 

found this hard to understand. ‘But he had blue eyes!’ I said. ‘It’s not the shape or the 

colour, it’s the look.’ ‘What look?’ ‘A fleeting and sad look, the mark of fear and deep 

apprehension,’ explained my father. ‘That’s how the German soldiers sometimes 

identified Jews in Poland. But don’t worry, you don’t get that anymore with young 

Israelis!’ 

And so I then examined my father’s look very closely, as never before, and it seemed 

that for the first time I perceived the impact that a situation of prolonged marginality 

could have on someone’s mentality. It’s almost unnecessary to add that, given my native 

Israeli impatience, I had not previously paid this the slightest attention. 

A history of suffering, a history of persecution, a history of a minority group’s 

resistance in the midst of a hostile and dominant religious civilization: the story told by 

the eyes is far too long to be conveyed in the context of this short essay. And yet, before 

readers conclude that they are reading yet another tale of Jewish victimization, 

intended to arouse in the goyim a feeling of guilt and so accumulate additional moral 

capital of commiseration, I must add a few small, unkind comments. 

I have always avoided wallowing in the invocation of past sufferings, and never 

dreamed of repairing the misfortunes of yesterday. My own place is among those who 

try to discern and root out, or at least reduce, the excessive injustices of the here-and- 

now. The persecuted and victimized of yesterday seem to me less a matter of priority 

than the persecuted of today or the victimized of tomorrow. I also know how history 

serves only too often as an arena in which the roles of hunter and hunted, strong and 

weak, are shuffled around. 

As a scholar and teacher of history, I am aware that Jews have not always and 

everywhere suffered persecution and, where they have, it has not been with the same 

violence or frequency. The existences of the Jews of Babylon in the Persian and Hellenic 

ages, the Jews of the great convert kingdoms, the Jews of Muslim Andalusia and other 

communities throughout history have been varied, and it is impossible to speak of a 

common destiny. Moreover, in places where Jews ruled, such as the Hasmonean 

kingdom of the second century bce or the Himyarite kingdom during the fifth century ce 

in the Arabian Peninsula, their behaviour towards others was precisely similar to what 

they themselves experienced elsewhere and subsequently. It is incontestable, however, 

that in medieval Europe, and especially in the east of the continent on the threshold of 

the modern age, millions of Jews endured alienation and lived as foreigners, in a deep 

and lasting insecurity which can be neither forgotten nor relativized. 

In order to understand all this, we need to go back through the tunnel of time to 

distant eras, shrouded in indistinctness and fog, which often makes them hard to situate. 

Originally, we find a monotheistic belief that it is still difficult to define as Jewish and 

would be more correct to call Yahwistic. This began to take shape in the fifth century 

bce, sometime after the political and clerical elite of Jerusalem were exiled by Babylon. 

The majority of the admirable stories of the Bible were composed under the effects of 

this unprecedented disruption as well as the encounter with Persian Zoroastrianism. In 

the second century bce, the young religion was already sufficiently sure of itself to rise 

up and establish in Judea the first theocratic and monotheistic kingdom, which would 

forcibly convert all its own subjects and those of neighbouring lands. 

The revolutionary new faith erupted and spread by way of Hellenistic cultural 

networks and then via Roman communication routes around the Mediterranean. After 

the defeat of its three great revolts against paganism, during the late first and early 

second centuries CE, it split into two major currents, with an ever-growing gulf between 

them: rabbinical Judaism and Pauline Christianity. The former, less powerful, gave the 

world the Mishnah and Talmud. The latter, stronger and more effective, brought forth 

the New Testament. Christianity was easily the victor, and imposed on its defeated 

competitor a long and painful historical state of siege. 

Contrary to accepted ideas, Jewish self-enclosure was not the result of Judaic dogma, 

even if this dogma had, from its origins, conveyed the principle of exclusion, as testified 

by several books of the Old Testament. Certainly, the early Yahwistic monotheism 

appeared fearful and unsure of itself, but as it grew it gained strength, and exponents of 

its Judaic variant embarked on an offensive and effective proselytism, giving rise, it 

would seem, to the majority of the world’s Jewish communities. Only the threat posed 

by Christianity, and later by Islam, reactivated its sectarian foundations, so that its 

autarkic self-enclosure resulted above all from its attempts to survive in the face of a 

permanent existential threat. With the triumph of Christianity, in the fourth century, 

law and power forced Jews to retrench behind the gates of their faith. This was the end 

of the great wave of Judaization which had travelled the entire Mediterranean, and 

Jewish missionary activity from then on would be confined to the margins of medieval 

Christian civilization. It suffered a second blow with the rise of Islam, its other younger 

sister, and subsequently found itself once again subject to the goodwill and good humour 

of other powers. 

At this juncture, it may be useful to mention a historical fact that arouses a certain 

awkwardness among all those who take pride today in belonging to ‘Judeo-Christian’ 

civilization. The fate of Jewish communities in the shadow of Islam was very different 

from the often dark fate they experienced in Europe. True, Islam saw Judaism as an 

inferior religion, and cases of persecution did occur. But on the whole, the Muslims 

granted Judaism the respect due to an ancient divine faith that, like Christianity, needed 

to be sheltered and protected by the dominant religion. 

Jews were called in the Koran ‘People of the Book’ (sura 9:5), whereas in the much 

earlier New Testament, it was said of them: ‘They will fall at the sword’s point; they will 

be carried captive into all countries’ (Luke 21:24). Following the accounts of the 

Gospels, the Jews were generally regarded in the Christian world as descendants of the 

murderers of Jesus, expelled from Jerusalem by force. During most of its phases, and for 

a substantial portion of its temporal and spiritual descendants, Christianity refused to 

see Judaism as a legitimate competing religion. There was only one true Israel (veins 

Israel ) - not two, and certainly not three! Christianity rejected in principle the 

possibility that a different monotheism, Jewish or Muslim, might exist alongside it. By 

the end of the Middle Ages, not a single Muslim community remained in Europe, 

whereas Christian communities continued their existence in the lands of Islam. 

For Christianity, it was both incomprehensible and unacceptable that Jews could 

voluntarily remain faithful to another religion and refuse to recognize that grace had 

already come to earth in the form of the Messiah. Thus, in the Christian imagination, 

Jews remained the scions of Judas Iscariot, who had been banished from Jerusalem 

because of their sins, and they continued to appear as a threat to the faithful in Christ, 

themselves pure and innocent. In contrast to what pagans sometimes experienced, the 

Church made no plans for the extermination of the Jews; instead it chose to preserve the 

wretched Jew as proof of the rightness of the path taken by the true faith. But 

prejudices, periodic offensives, mass expulsions, accusations of ritual crime, and 

spontaneous pogroms did form an integral part of ‘Judeo-Christian’ civilization from its 

origins to the threshold of the modern age. 

This religious hatred of the Other, of long duration, formed the conceptual basis for 

the emergence of modern Judeophobia in the nineteenth century. Without this extended 

background, the new nationalist and racist hatred would in all likelihood not have risen 

into such a torrent or enjoyed such wide distribution. Besides, if in principle, until that 

time and despite all obstacles, Jews had been able to ‘improve’ themselves and ‘make 

amends’ by converting to Christianity at the cost of great effort and goodwill, now the 

path of salvation offered by the repudiation of their traditional faith would be blocked. 

Jews would be unable to become true Anglo-Saxons, proud Gallo-Catholics, genuine 

Teutonic Aryans or authentic indigenous Slavs. 

When Jewish believers began to emancipate themselves en masse from the very real 

ghettos imposed on them for so long by Christian powers, but also from the ideological 

and mental ghetto built by Jewish cultural institutions, and began to take an active part 

in the creation of national cultures in Europe, there was born in parallel with this an 

aggressive racism that rejected them. While their quite common situation of living in 

urban communities had predisposed Jews and their descendants (whether of Judaic faith 

or completely secular) to appear in cultural and linguistic terms just like the earlier 

French, Germans, Dutch or British, modern nationalism constantly presented them as a 

foreign body secretly developing in the arteries of - and ever ready to sink their hooks 

into - the new nations. 

In the great process of national construction, the French certainly needed the German 

enemy, the Germans the Slav enemy, the Poles the Orthodox enemy, and so on. The 

Jews, however, in their role of longue duree enemy, remained irreplaceable and highly 

effective as a foil to the ethnocentric crystallization of nations erected on a Christian 

foundation. 

To constitute itself, the fictional invention of a common national origin needed every 

inch and every cultural spark of unity, whether linguistic or religious. Jewishness, as the 

antithesis of Christianness, effectively fulfilled this function, although there were 

certainly local differences: Judeophobia had freer rein in Paris than in London, in Berlin 

than in Paris, in Vienna than in Berlin, and in Budapest, Warsaw, Kiev or Minsk than in 

the West. Almost everywhere, the emerging nationalism took from the existing Christian 

tradition the deicidal Jew and grafted it onto the figure of the foreign Other, the better 

to mark the boundaries of the new nation. To be sure, the spokesmen of these nations 

were not all Judeophobes, but all political anti-Semites presented themselves as zealous 

prophets of nation-building. 

The long century of Judeophobia, as previously noted, ran from 1850 to 1950. 

‘Judaism in Music’, Richard Wagner’s famous article first published in 1850, could be 

taken as its symbolic official date of birth, while the suppression by Pope John XXIII in 

1959 of the description of the Jews as heretical and traitorous ( perfidis ) marked its end. 

The recrudescence of modern hatred, culminating with meteoric speed in the advent of 

the Nazi monster, took place against the background of an increase in the flow of 

Jewish emigration from Eastern Europe in the late nineteenth century. Just as hostility 

towards Arab and Muslim immigrants in our own day contributes to characterizing, 

specifying and sharpening Europe’s ‘white’ and ‘Judeo-Christian’ identity, constructed 

not without effort and difficulty, so too have the waves of immigration of Yiddish 

populations had the effect in their time of crystallizing ethno-national awareness. These 

immigrants came from places where Jews lived in a situation of far greater distress than 

anywhere in the West, or indeed in the Islamic world. 

CHAPTER 5 

Immigration and Judeophobia 

A few years after completing my doctoral thesis on the sulphurous philosopher Georges 

Sorel, my research interest turned to one of his friends, who deserves to be seen as 

among the most curious intellectual figures of the turn of the century. With rare 

bravura, and in opposition to his entire milieu, Bernard Lazare was in fact the first 

person to rouse himself to prove the innocence of Alfred Dreyfus. His battle, and his 

nonconformist spirit, led him to become proudly outspoken as a Jew. A self-definition of 

this kind was in no way acceptable or popular at that time among ‘Israelite’ milieus in 

Western and Central Europe. 1 

Despite not making Palestine the land of his dreams, Bernard Lazare may be 

considered the first French Zionist, as he formulated the Jewish right to national self- 

determination. He resigned from the Zionist movement after Theodor Herzl and his 

supporters, in order to advance their plans, refused to denounce the repression of the 

Armenians by the Ottoman sultan, deeming it a greater priority to establish a bank to 

finance colonization in the Holy Land. Yet until his dying day Lazare continued his 

struggle in support of Jewish victims of oppression in Romania, devoting to this the 

greater part of his scant forces and resources until his death in 1903. 

It is less well known, however, that at the dawn of his career, in the early 1890s, this 

symbolist poet and anarchist publicist was partly anti-Semitic, in the sense that his 

practice was to attack not all Jews but only ‘Oriental’ ones. In cutting articles, he 

argued that the elegant and refined Portuguese and Spanish (‘Sephardic’) Israelites, in 

whom he recognized himself, should not be equated with the Jewish epigoni from the 

tribes of the Huns, dirty and ugly, who were steadily arriving in considerable numbers 

from the Tsarist empire. In accordance with the fashion of the time, Lazare was 

persuaded that the latter constituted a distinct race, with a totally different origin from 

that of the Jews of Central Europe. He was equally of the view that their immigration 

into France and neighbouring countries should be prevented at all costs. 

This point of view on the part of a French intellectual, radical though it was, was in 

no way exceptional. It was, in fact, more or less the view of the so-called Gallo- 

Catholics, Anglo-Saxons, Aryan Germans and many others concerning the threats posed 

by immigration to the ‘autochthonous’ cultures of the West. The cultivated Israelite 

communities of Paris, London and Berlin thought no differently. 

At the end of the nineteenth century, about 80 per cent of the world’s Jews and their 

secular descendants, that is, more than seven million individuals, lived in the Russian 

empire, Austro-Hungarian Galicia, and Romania (in addition, a more than negligible 

proportion of German Jews hailed from Eastern Europe). This surprising demographic 

phenomenon is not explained by a supposed abundance of food that the Jews had 

cunningly managed to appropriate at the expense of their neighbours. Nor is the 

explanation to be sought in the indefatigable sexuality of Jewish males, as anti-Semites 

of the day likewise imagined, nor by the fact that Jews washed their hands before eating 

- though Zionist historians have sometimes proposed that curious argument. There was 

no demographic explosion among the Jews of Western Europe, who also washed their 

hands before eating, but lived in a situation of relative prosperity, at least when 

compared with those of the East. The same was true even in North Africa and the Middle 

East, where Jews generally endured less threatening pressures from their Muslim 

neighbours. 

Until the late 1960s, the majority of historians of Judaism, whether Zionist or not, 

championed the hypothesis that only the existence of the medieval Jewish Khazar 

kingdom - on the steppes of southern Russia, eastern Ukraine and the Caucasus - could 

have generated such surprising demographic growth, perhaps the most significant in 

modern Jewish history. The weakening and subsequent breakup of this kingdom, 

between the tenth and twelfth centuries, led to the migration of Jews to the West, to 

those lands that would become western Ukraine, Lithuania, Poland, Belarus, Galicia, 

Hungary and Romania. (In the mid-eighteenth century, shortly before the start of the 

large upsurge in the European population, there were more than 750,000 Jews in the 

kingdom of Poland and Lithuania alone, as against only 150,000 in Western Europe.) 

As distinct from other Jewish communities across the world, the Jewish population of 

Eastern Europe had preserved ways of life and culture that were completely different 

from those of their non-Jewish neighbours. In France, Italy, western Germany, the 

Iberian Peninsula, North Africa and the northern reaches of the Fertile Crescent, the 

Jews, whether converted indigenous people or immigrants, shared both language and 

the everyday habits of life with their neighbours; settlements were almost always shared 

by both, whereas Eastern Europe underwent a very different sociocultural development. 

The Jews of Eastern Europe were grouped for centuries into separate townships or 

other localities, in which they formed a majority or at least a large minority. The Jewish 

shtetl, half rural and half urban, formed the principal cradle of the vast Yiddish 

population. With the beginnings of urbanization, they preserved their cultural specificity 

not only in practising the same religion as Jews in other parts of the world, but also in 

their ‘secular’ everyday life. They ate kosher food but also developed culinary habits 

different from those of their non-Jewish neighbours. They wore the kippah but also fur 

hats, and dressed in a fashion distinct from that adopted by the surrounding mass of 

peasants. They hardly spoke the language of their neighbours; instead, in their working 

life and in their function as intermediaries, they preferred to resort to the Germanic 

dialects widely used in economic transactions. The arrival of learned German-speaking 

rabbis also influenced the formation of specific Yiddish idioms, with a more Slavic 

inflection in the eastern regions and a more Germanic one in the western. 

We should also emphasize that, as distinct from the small Jewish communities of 

Western Europe or the Islamic world, which had adopted flexible and relatively symbolic 

religious customs, the Yiddish speakers of Eastern Europe maintained rigid practices of 

worship that strikingly marked their difference from their non-Jewish neighbours and 

environment. In many respects, this form of religious fundamentalism exhibited an 

affinity with the strictest currents of Orthodox Christianity (and a certain closeness may 

be noted between Hassidic mysticism and the popular Christian mysticism of these 

regions). With the onset of modernization and secularization, this world of intransigent 

commands led a certain number of secularized heirs of these Jewish families to adopt an 

attitude of marked hostility towards a religious tradition so closed in on itself. Many 

Jewish sons and daughters thus became atheist socialists (Socialist Revolutionaries, 

Mensheviks, Bolsheviks, Bundists, anarchists, and so on). The response of the religious 

authorities was similarly hostile, rejecting all connection with these apostates. 

Like its Austro-Hungarian counterpart, the Russian empire was far too large and 

backward to provide a state springboard for the birth of a united nationality that would 

bring people together on a civil basis, following the model already undertaken in the 

major countries of Western Europe. In the hands of the tsarist power, Pan-Slavic 

nationalism served, above all, as an instrument of manipulation and oppression. This is 

why local and fragmented national components appeared, both within Pan-Slavism and 

against it, owing to the plurality of languages and religions. Poles, Ukrainians, 

Lithuanians, Latvians and so on all came into being in this way. In almost all regions 

inhabited by mixed populations that spoke different dialects, intolerable and dangerous 

conflicts appeared. But it was the presence of the Yiddish population in these areas that 

had the effect of escalating the modern intolerance so characteristic of all ethnocentric 

nationalist currents. The wave of pogroms that began in the 1880s, at the same time as 

the restrictions imposed by the tsar and in particular the insufferable living conditions 

in the Pale of Settlement, started to propel Jewish communities outward, in a flow of 

emigration that spilled into Vienna, Berlin, London, New York and Buenos Aires. 

Estimates of the size of this migration vary. But at least three million people were 

uprooted and cast on the roads between the 1880s and the Second World War. This 

great mass moved rapidly westward, arousing, as we have seen, strong reactions of 

hostility and fear, not only among the non-Jewish public but equally on the part of 

European Jewish institutions. These displaced immigrants, with their strange dress, 

peculiar customs and particular language, gathered in the capitals of Central and 

Western Europe, while many ended up reaching the Americas, both North and South. 

The rise of Judeophobia, and its relation with this wave of migration, has thus far 

scarcely been addressed by serious research on a Europe-wide scale. Nonetheless, 

investigations meant to explain the long and painful experience that led to the Nazi 

genocide must involve not only attempts to decipher the ethnocentric, Judeophobic 

currents that were widespread in Europe, not only analysis of the specific character of 

German nationalism, not simply an understanding of the crystallization and specific 

character of the Nazi state apparatus or a deeper decoding of the paths by which the 

systemic violence of the First World War made possible the industrialized crime of the 

Second. These investigations must also include a rigorous analysis of the thresholds of 

sensitivity and hostility that were breached during this great upheaval of populations. 

The pogroms and uprooting were the first blow dealt to the Yiddish people who had 

began to take shape and unity in the wake of the modernization process of the late 

nineteenth century. The second blow came from the Bolshevik Revolution, which sought 

to stifle the varied expressions of this particular culture through administrative 

measures. The third and moral blow was delivered by the Nazis, who perpetrated the 

physical extermination of the majority of the Jews who remained in Europe. Zionism 

dealt a fourth blow, in working to wipe out Yiddish linguistic and cultural practices. This 

is not, of course, to place all these events on the same level, either in terms of their 

motivations or their results, and still less so in terms of their morality. 

1. In the nineteenth century, several Jewish institutions and milieus in Western and Central Europe came to prefer the 

term ‘Israelite’, on account of the negative connotation that ‘Jew’ had in the long Christian tradition. 

CHAPTER 6 

From One Oriental to Another 

In 1971 I was accepted as a student at Tel Aviv University. Since my level of English 

was inadequate, I was forced to take a remediation course. At the first lecture, when I 

was still tormented by the fear of failure, the English professor asked the students to 

note on a sheet of paper all the languages besides Hebrew that they spoke. At the start 

of the second lecture, the teacher asked, ‘Who is Shlomo Sand?’ I raised a finger, not 

without trepidation, fearing I was about to undergo a repeat of the nightmare I had 

experienced at secondary school before being expelled. But this was a different story: 

‘Sand is the only one to have mentioned Yiddish,’ he said. ‘Who else in the class speaks 

Yiddish?’ Nine hands went up. It was evident that, in the early 1970s, there were still 

many who dared not admit that they spoke the wretched ‘language of exile’. To tell the 

truth, I was a little ashamed myself, and hesitated a while before noting Yiddish as a 

second language of mine. 

In fact, it wasn’t even second. Yiddish had actually been my mother tongue; it was in 

Yiddish that I spoke with my parents, beginning with the first words that came out of 

my mouth. With the death of my parents and their intimates, I no longer had anyone 

with whom I could speak Yiddish, and so the language of my childhood slipped into the 

folds of my subconscious or began to fade altogether. It was in Paris, meeting former 

Bundists or Communists - of whom I met still more during my first visit to New York, in 

1998 - that I became more broadly acquainted with the survivors of the Yiddish 

population that was in the process of disappearing. It was the last period of my life 

when I could practise the language of the old immigrants from Eastern Europe, whereas 

in Israel the majority of them refrained from speaking Yiddish in public places (other 

than in Hasidic schools, which I never attended). 

It was also after that first stay in the United States that I understood why Americans 

equate and confuse Yiddish identity with a general imaginary Jewish identity. They 

cannot distinguish between, on the one hand, a popular culture that prospered within a 

large population in a large though limited territory, and a religious culture spread 

across every continent in varying forms. What is called ‘Jewish humour’, for example, is 

actually Yiddish-Slavic humour (to use Romain Gary’s expression) and continues to fuel 

New York jokes and the films of Woody Allen. This particularly inspired both Nikolai 

Gogol and Sholem Aleichem, but neither the Rothschilds nor the marvellous Judeo-Iraqi 

writers ever shared it, using other canons of comedy for the purpose of inducing 

laughter. Contemporary Israeli humour is also totally different - a cultural expression 

flowing directly from geography, in other words, from modes of everyday life rather 

than a higher written tradition, and including a wide vocabulary of insults and oaths. 

The rich Yiddish culture is now extinct. It is true that some students take classes in the 

language of the Eastern European Jews, but they do not communicate or create in this 

language. Linguistic study and the connection with Yiddish culture may warm the hearts 

of nostalgists, but they cannot possibly create characters and situations like those 

encountered in the literary monuments bequeathed by such writers as Sholem Aleichem 

or Isaac Bashevis Singer. (It is no accident, by the way, that these two giants of Yiddish 

literature both ended their lives in North America, not in the Middle East.) Another 

disappearance was the fine dream of the Bund, the great Jewish social democratic party 

of the Russian empire, subsequently of Poland, which, contrary to Zionism, was based 

on a living popular culture and so had no need to dress itself up in religious guise in 

order to constitute a semi-national class identity. 

The number of persons who spoke the various dialects of Yiddish on the eve of the 

Second World War is estimated to be more than ten million; in the early twenty-first 

century there are no more than a few hundred thousand, chiefly among the Haredim, 

the strictly Orthodox ‘God-fearers’. A popular culture has completely disappeared, wiped 

out without any hope of resuscitation, as it is truly impossible to bring back to life a 

culture or a language. The presumption that Zionism can resuscitate ancient Hebrew 

and the culture of the ‘people of the Bible’ is based on no more than a mythical quest for 

national references - a belief on which generations of Israelis and Zionists across the 

world have been brought up, leading them to believe in its truth. 

If the first theorists of the Zionist idea included many of German cultural background, 

the founders of the colonizing enterprise had instead been immersed in the Yiddish 

culture of Eastern Europe; their mother tongue was that ‘minor jargon’ caricatured by 

German Israelites, that is to say, by the Ashkenazim. The Yiddish colonists, in fact, were 

very quick to discard their despised mother tongue. The first thing they needed was a 

language that could unite Jews the world over, and neither Theodor Herzl nor Edmond 

de Rothschild could communicate in Yiddish. The early Zionists subsequently aspired to 

create a new Jew, who would break with the popular culture of their parents and 

ancestors as well as with the wretched townships of the Pale of Settlement. 

Starting from earlier attempts, made in the Russian empire, that sought to adapt 

biblical texts and prayers into a modern language, Zionist linguists set out to create a 

new language of communication whose principal lexicon was indeed drawn from the 

books of the Bible but whose writing was Aramaic and Assyrian (that is, taken from the 

Mishnah, rather than being Hebraic), with a syntax predominantly Yiddish and Slavic, 

and thus in no way biblical. This language today is incorrectly called ‘Hebrew’ (I myself 

am forced to call it that, for want of anything better), but it would be far more 

appropriate to follow the lead of progressive linguists and define it as ‘Israeli’. 

This new language developed well before the founding of the State of Israel, rapidly 

becoming the language of official communication used by the Zionist community that 

settled in Palestine. It became the spoken and written language of the children of these 

pioneers, who would subsequently form the cultural, military and political elite of the 

early Israeli state. These ‘Sabras’ expressed a firm and vigorous rejection of Yiddish 

culture, an attitude which they were strongly encouraged to adopt by the leaders of the 

immigrant community. David Ben-Gurion had banned the use of the language of the 

Eastern European Jews in the congresses of his socialist party, and at least one situation 

has gone down in legend, when a former fighter with the Vilnius partisans, speaking in 

1944 at a Histadrut meeting about the extermination of Jews in her country, had her 

speech interrupted by Ben-Gurion himself, who came to the tribune to condemn this use 

of a ‘shrill foreign tongue’. 

The Hebrew University of Jerusalem, which officially opened its doors in 1925, did 

not have a chair in Yiddish, and students who wished to study the destroyed culture had 

to wait until 1951 to do so. In 1949, just after the creation of the State of Israel, with the 

massive arrival of Yiddish-speaking survivors of the genocide, a law was passed that 

prohibited Israeli citizens from staging public performances in the language of these 

immigrants (only invited foreign artists had the right to express themselves in the 

language of ‘exile’, but for periods not exceeding six weeks). Not until the early 1970s, 

when the complete victory of the new autochthonic culture was assured, could the 

position towards the despised language be softened. 

This disdain and discredit of Yiddish did not signal a preference for, or a more flexible 

attitude towards, the culture and language of other immigrant communities. In the 

utopian vision of Theodor Herzl, the inhabitants of the ‘state of the Jews’ would speak 

his language, German; however, the Zionist colonists who had previously expressed 

themselves in Yiddish did not view kindly the refugees from Germany who arrived in the 

wake of the advent of Nazism and the closing of the US frontiers. Indeed, those refugees 

were commonly perceived as ‘assimilated Jews’, trying at any price to import German 

culture to the land of the Bible - an accusation that was not totally false. The 

contemptuous view that the Ashkenazim (the old term for the refined Jews of Germany) 

had of the Ostjuden, as they pejoratively called the Jews of Eastern Europe, underwent a 

complete reversal within the Zionist enterprise: it was the descendants of these 

‘Orientals’ who would become the dominant political elite, while also proclaiming a 

generalized and demonstrative disdain for the Yekes (German Jews). 

Former Yiddish speakers were now quite happy to adopt the prestigious descriptor 

‘Ashkenazi’, just as in antiquity the Jewish authors of the Bible appropriated ‘Israel’, the 

prestigious name of the kingdom in the north of Canaan, to denote the ‘chosen people’. 

In this way, they wove a myth according to which their historical origin went back to 

civilized Germany, rather than to an East viewed as backward; in the young State of 

Israel, the role of inferior Oriental devolved on another population, mostly new and 

immigrant, who came from the West - that is, from the Maghreb. 

Following the First Arab-Israeli War in 1948 and the creation of Zionist sovereignty, 

masses of destitute immigrants arrived from the Arab and Muslim countries that they 

were forced to leave. The war in Palestine was the immediate trigger of this exodus. 

Anti-colonial nationalism in the Arab world appeared incapable of distinguishing 

between religious community and secular state, thereby generating suspicion and fear, 

and thus contributing to this uprooting and abandonment. It was largely a tragic and 

painful emigration: populations from impoverished social strata in the Maghreb 

countries arrived in Israel, while the majority of their middle and upper-class 

compatriots found refuge in Europe and North America. 1 Iraqi emigres as a group, on 

the other hand, while of a more heterogeneous social composition, equally experienced 

discrimination and much humiliation, despite the presence within their ranks of a 

middle class and many scholars. 

The first Zionist colonists, in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, had 

shown a certain romantic empathy with Middle Eastern folklore, but an iron wall was 

quickly built, behind which the Zionist community dug in so as to avoid any amalgam 

with Arab civilization. Relations with the indigenous culture were ultimately shaped in 

accordance with the tendencies of the Western Orientalism in vogue during the colonial 

era. In his time, Theodor Herzl already saw the future Jewish state vis-a-vis Asia as ‘the 

advance post of civilization against barbarism’, an ideological view that would be more 

or less shared by all the leaders of the Zionist enterprise. This lies at the root of the 

relationship, composed equally of blindness and severity, with the indigenous villagers 

who had lived on these lands for many centuries. As is well known, a large proportion 

of the Palestinian Arabs were uprooted and expelled during the 1948 war. Those who 

remained after the establishment of the Israeli state were kept under a regime of 

military administration for seventeen years and viewed as a lower stratum, outside the 

new society. 

The Arab-Jewish immigrants, for the most part, spoke Arabic and had an Arabic (or, 

in some cases, Berber or Persian) everyday culture, and the Israeli authorities and 

institutions viewed them with varying degrees of deep contempt and manifest suspicion. 

David Ben-Gurion let slip on one occasion that he did not want a Moroccan culture in 

Israel, and that unfortunately ‘the Moroccan Jews have taken much from the Moroccan 

Arabs’. The majority of these ‘Oriental’ immigrants were settled on the margins of the 

country and received only a minor share of the territorial booty conquered in 1949. 

Many Eastern European Jews, former Yiddish speakers, scarcely considered them Jews, 

if at all. 

Ironically, these Arabic Jews had in fact remained more Jewish than had other groups 

of immigrants who arrived in the new state. The majority of those of Yiddish origin 

were more secular; accordingly, to consolidate their specific identity, they more or less 

consciously resorted to a mixture of traditional Jewishness and secular Yiddish ways of 

life that had formerly distinguished them from their non-Jewish surroundings. For the 

Arab-Jewish immigrants, by contrast, their religious practices were the sole markers of 

their Jewishness. In other words, everything that was secular and everyday in their way 

of life was Arabic, and consequently was the object of negative perception, if not 

outright rejection, on the part of the new Israeli culture that was in the process of 

construction. 2 Thus, for the Arabic Jews to avoid being seen as Arab within the ‘Jewish 

state’, it became necessary for them to preserve and exteriorize traditions of worship 

and religious ceremonies to the maximum degree. 

This repression - the dissimulation and self-negation of all Arabness - greatly 

facilitated the lasting repression of its outward signs and its reproduction. Even though 

the Zionist enterprise was fundamentally secular, the cultural schizophrenia of the 

Jewish Arabs did not significantly help slow the process of their secularization. It also 

had the effect of orienting many of them to anti-Arab positions, hence leading them to 

support the Zionist right, which was traditionally firmer in its hostility towards the 

indigenous population. 

Cultural distinction, as a key phenomenon in the identity policy of social groups, is a 

well-known expression of modern sociology that has been well analysed by, for 

example, Pierre Bourdieu. It was not specific to Israel that Jewish Arabs and their 

descendants distanced themselves from the residues of their culture of origin. A similar 

phenomenon, mutatis mutandis, occurred among Maghrebis of Jewish origin who 

emigrated to France or Canada. The pressing desire not to be identified as Arab led 

many of their number to embrace strongly anti-Oriental political tendencies, resulting in 

repercussions down to the second and third generations. 

Rapid Israelization certainly obscured a good part of the imported cultural 

differences, but on the other hand it also shored up various hierarchies established in the 

course of the creation of the state. 

1. The Jews of Algeria were French citizens, so that very few of them emigrated to Israel after the winning of Algerian 

independence in 1962. 

2. A further irony of history is that Maimonides, like other Jewish authors of the Middle Ages, wrote mainly in Arabic. 

CHAPTER 7 

Empty Cart, Full Cart 

In 1952 the Israeli prime minister, David Ben-Gurion, met with Rabbi Avraham 

Yeshayahu Karelitz, known as Hazon Ish (‘man of vision’). This historic encounter 

remained engraved in Israeli annals as a friendly ‘dialogue of the deaf. The leader of 

the ‘Jewish state’ asked the head of the ‘God-fearing’ Orthodox how religious and secular 

could live together in harmony under the new political regime. The wise rabbi, who was 

no Zionist and in no way viewed Israel as a Jewish state, cited the example of the camel 

in the Tractate Sanhedrin of the Babylonian Talmud, replying that, logically, in a 

narrow passage, the empty cart must give way to the full cart: secular Zionism was a 

hollow culture, whereas Judaism was heavily loaded. Annoyed, Ben-Gurion asked 

whether the commands to colonize the country, work its land and protect its frontiers 

did not amount in the eyes of the rabbi to a mission of Jewish culture, adding that, 

moreover, the secular were a majority of the Israeli population and controlled the state. 

The rabbi replied that for those ready to give their life for the divine commands, the 

opinion of the majority and the acts of the sovereign were without interest. 

With the passage of time, there is no doubt that Hazon Ish was right. In comparison 

with the full cart of the Jewish religion, that of secular Judeity was empty and has 

remained so. The deeper one digs into this question, the more one is forced to recognize 

that there is no Jewish cultural baggage that is not religious. This is one of the main 

reasons for the deep contradictions of Zionism and its unswerving obsequiousness 

towards history, as against the world of genuine tradition. 

Yet this subtle rabbi was as yet unable to perceive, in 1952, that the Zionist enterprise 

was in the process of creating a full cart of specifically Israeli culture, the existence of 

which Zionism itself had difficulty recognizing. Arbitrarily and against all logic, this 

creation persists in calling itself ‘secular Jewish culture’, despite the fact that it is not 

shared by the persons in other countries whom it considers Jews, whereas there is no 

doubt that many believers the world over share the Jewish culture of Hazon Ish. 

The foundations on which the State of Israel was created were essentially laid by 

socialists from the various Eastern European nations. These individuals were secularists 

who rebelled against Judaism, yet they were forced nonetheless to adopt from the start 

key markers of the religious tradition, including the Jewish communitarian ethic 

intrinsic to it. These markers were accepted by all currents of Zionism, on the left as 

well as the right. The complex causes for this ideological and conceptual phenomenon 

were anchored in the characteristics and objectives of Zionism, beginning in the late 

nineteenth century and continuing through today. 

To justify colonization in Palestine, Zionism appealed above all to the Bible, which it 

presented as a legal property title to the land. It then proceeded to depict the past of 

various Jewish communities not as a dense and varied fresco of the motley groups that 

converted to Judaism in Asia, Europe and Africa, but rather as a linear history of a race- 

people, supposedly exiled by force from their native land and aspiring for two thousand 

years to return to it. Secular Zionism deeply internalized both the religious myth of 

Abrahamic descent and the Christian legend of the accursed and wandering people 

condemned to exile for their sins. On the basis of these two matrixes, it succeeded in 

fashioning the image of an ethnic group whose palpably fictional character (one need 

only observe the diversity of appearance of Israelis) in no way subtracted from its 

effectiveness. 

At the same time, and without embarrassment at the contradiction, the Zionist 

enterprise sought to create a culture that broke completely with the ‘exilic’ past. From 

the 1940s onward, a specific form of Israeli elitism prospered in the yishuv (the Zionist 

settlement), growing stronger and becoming hegemonic in the 1950s and 1960s. What 

mattered now was to be Israeli or, more precisely, Hebrew, while the old Jewish 

tradition became the object of a thinly veiled contempt not devoid of hypocrisy. 

To offer one example among others, the propensity to replace ‘exilic’ names by 

Hebrew ones flourished among the cultural elites and young people of good families. 

‘Hebrewization’ did not apply only to surnames; new parents feverishly leafed through 

the Bible to find rare and vigorous first names that would contrast with supposedly 

outmoded Jewish names such as Moshe, Yaakov, David or Shlomo. The seemingly 

strange names of the Talmudic rabbis of antiquity were similarly rejected: they smelled 

too much of the Talmudic school, the yeshivah and the wretched shtetl. 

Canaanite names that had never had any connection with Jewish tradition, or even 

names that had never been spoken by Jewish lips, exercised a particular attraction. All 

the Israeli leaders, like their pioneer parents before them, abandoned the surnames that 

Jews had adopted at the time of the first modern population censuses, with David Green 

passing to posterity as David Ben-Gurion and Szymon Perski becoming Shimon Peres. 

Similarly, Yitzhak Rabin had been born Rubitzov, Ehud Barak had been Brog, Ariel 

Scheinermann became Sharon, the father of Benjamin Netanyahu was born 

Mileikowsky, and Shaul Mofaz had been the young Shahram Mofazzakar. The old names 

evoked the weak Jews who had been led to concentration camps and massacred like 

cattle, or those who slavishly aped Islamic civilization. The point was to create a ‘new 

man’ in Israel, a muscular Hebrew full of vigour, physical as well as spiritual. 

To a great extent, this Hebrew identity, forged even before the creation of the state, 

served equally as a mark of cultural differentiation from the mass of immigrants who 

formed the working classes in Israel. ‘Hebrewity’ was mainly a practice characteristic of 

the cultural, political and military elites. It set the tone in the public arena at a time 

when the citizens of Israel were not yet so Israeli: the majority of them, of Yiddish or 

Maghrebi extraction, spoke modern Hebrew only with difficulty, and the new culture 

was outside their reach. Some of them had been secularized in Europe, but residues of 

Jewish, Yiddish and Arabic tradition still constituted an everyday cultural and folkloric 

support in the hard conditions of immigrant life. 

During this time, the elites energetically pursued the production and distribution of 

the new culture that had gained hegemony, as we saw above, in the political and 

intellectual balance of forces. In this work they held two levers in their hands, at a time 

when television did not yet exist: the educational system and the military apparatus 

(and, to a lesser extent, the press). In every school, teachers instructed their pupils to 

speak as Israelis and read Hebrew, and taught them the Bible as a heroic and secular 

story. Even before the foundation of the state, the formula ‘from the Bible to the 

Palmach’ 1 was widespread. In other words, what really mattered in history was the 

imagined Hebraic sovereignty in antiquity, and the real Israeli sovereignty today. 

Ancient heroism and contemporary boldness were the identity marks of the virile Sabra. 

Sickly Judaism, which had remained passive in the midst of historical events, was of 

secondary importance, perceived as a shaky, narrow gangway whose purpose had been 

to provide a transition to national renaissance. 

Compulsory military service performed an equally important educational function. In 

parallel with compulsory education, it was an intensive melting pot, creator of an 

original identity and culture. The strongest contact between the elites and the mass of 

immigrants took place via this hierarchical apparatus. Those who, before enrolling in 

the army, had spoken the repugnant foreign languages of Yiddish or Arabic with their 

parents, found themselves recognized, after two or three years in the Tzahal, not only as 

good soldiers but also as far better Israelis. They then began to teach their parents the 

language of the state and, in so doing, to instil them with shame for their old culture, 

with its lack of military vigour or national majesty. That Israel found itself in the 

permanent position of being a besieged fortress, and won victories in the wars of 1948, 

1956, and 1967, added a lustre to Israeli identity and sanctified the cult of force along 

with the power of the old elites. 

Israeli culture solidified with remarkable speed, a fact that must be emphasized. 

Whereas in other states the national culture was shaped in the course of a relatively 

long process, in Israel, owing to its nature as a completely immigrant society, an 

entirely new language and culture were established and transmitted in the space of two 

generations. It is true that not the whole of the population received this transmission 

equally; subcultures continued to exist, and still do so today, but the success of the 

Zionist enterprise in the cultural field, as with its achievements in agriculture and 

military prowess, would seem unprecedented. 

In high culture, too - in the visual arts, literature, poetry, theatre and cinema - artists 

have produced original and valuable work. Despite the rejection and derision 

proclaimed towards earlier cultural traditions, contemporary Israeli culture has secretly 

internalized certain components of that legacy. New musical tonalities, distinct from 

Yiddish chants or Arab melodies, have displaced the Russian airs that stirred the hearts 

of the young Sabras. In all public gatherings, group singing has largely replaced the old 

prayers. The Israelis, long before the age of globalization, adopted clothing quite 

different from that of the Jews of Eastern Europe or North Africa, choosing instead to 

adapt their costumes to the local climate, resulting in a remarkable similarity to the 

colonial style widespread throughout the British Empire (one exception is the kova 

tembel, the characteristic hat of the peasant Sabra). In the everyday culture of the 1970s, 

Israeli/Hebrew, despite variants of pronunciation, had become the common language; 

cooking habits, many of which had been borrowed from the Palestinians, had been 

standardized; and it seemed that the national cultural enterprise had reached a 

conclusion. 

Zionism succeeded in fashioning a new people with new characteristics and its own 

new language, differentiated both from ancestral Jewish practices and from the anti¬ 

national conceptions that accompanied them. This people now possessed a country, 

though not knowing the precise location of its frontiers, and they also possessed a 

uniform public culture, though not always appreciating the extent to which this culture 

was not Jewish. 

The victories that Israeli culture and the Hebrew language had achieved were 

accompanied, from the mid-1970s onward, by considerable flexibility and relaxation. 

The various cultural components of the Jewish or Arab past had ceased to represent a 

threat to the mechanisms of national power and came to be viewed as inoffensive and 

acceptable folkloric expressions, even to be cautiously encouraged. Nostalgia for 

Yiddishkeit became popular and legitimate; Arabic melodies were increasingly recycled 

into Israeli music in the guise of ‘Oriental’ or ‘Mediterranean’ songs. 

Even the genocide of the subjugated and weak European Jews (who had for a time 

been pleasantly referred to in Israel as ‘soaps’ or ‘cattle for slaughter’), which had been 

placed on a low shelf in the hierarchy of national memory, was repositioned after the 

great victory of 1967 and installed in a new place of honour. The reasons for this shift 

in the edifice of memory, however, were more complex. 

1. An acronym for plugot machatz, or ‘shock troops’, a paramilitary organization predating the foundation of the State of 

Israel and the Tzahal, the Israeli Defense Forces. 

CHAPTER 8 

Remembering All the Victims 

In April 1944, the poet Julian Tuwim published a manifesto entitled ‘We, Jews of 

Poland’, which reads, in part: 

If I had to justify my nationality, or more precisely my national sentiment, I would 

say that I am Polish, and this for reasons that are very simple, almost primitive, 

most of them rational but some irrational, if without any ‘mystical’ ingredient. 

Being Polish is not an honour, a glory or a right. 

It’s like breathing. I have never yet met a man who took pride in breathing. I am 

Polish because I was born and grew up in Poland, because I went to school and 

university there, because in Poland I have been happy and unhappy. Because I 

want to return from exile to Poland, even if I am promised the pleasures of 

paradise somewhere else.... 

In reply to this, I hear a voice say: ‘All right, if you are Polish, then why this “We, 

Jews ...”?’ And I am honoured to reply, ‘Because of blood.’ ‘In other words, a racial 

doctrine?’ No, not at all. Not a racial doctrine, but precisely the opposite. There are 

two kinds of blood, that which flows in the veins, and that which flows out from the 

veins. 

Here Tuwim expresses what it meant to be a Jew on account of the blood spilled. Prior 

to the Second World War, although the poet did not deny his Jewish origin, he preferred 

to see himself as Polish, and felt disgust at both Zionist racists and Catholic 

Judeophobes, all of whom sought to deny his national identity and send him to 

Palestine. And though he chose to return to his native country at the end of the war, the 

industrialized black death that had submerged Europe led him to (re)define himself in 

1944 as a Jew. He had good reason: the millions murdered because of their origin were 

likewise unable to leave their land or change their origin. Because of Hitler, they 

remained Jews forever. 

I remember having read Tuwim’s manifesto early in my life, when it contributed to 

strengthening my own Jewish awareness. But I also chose, at the same time, to adopt 

Ilya Ehrenburg’s assertion, well after the end of the Second World War, that he would 

remain a Jew so long as the last anti-Semite remained on the planet. And yet, as the 

years have passed, and in view of the radicalization of Israeli politics, especially the 

shifts that have taken place in its politics of memory, my assurance in this definition of 

my identity has steadily eroded. 

One incident, among many others, will illustrate the emergence of these rifts. During 

my years as a doctoral student in Paris, at the Ecole des Hautes Etudes en Sciences 

Sociales, the decision was taken to organize a university conference, the first in France, 

on Nazism and extermination. Representatives of the Jewish community who took part 

in preparations for the conference were alarmed by the invitation extended to a Roma 

participant and firmly opposed her coming. After great efforts, and thanks to the 

intervention of the historian Pierre Vidal-Naquet, the contribution of this ‘non-Jewish’ 

researcher was authorized. This incident imbued me with a lasting feeling of 

discouragement. My initial reaction, however, had been that of surprise, as in the early 

1980s I was still unfamiliar with the intransigent claim of Jewish exclusiveness in 

relation to the Nazi crime. 

After several events of this kind had occurred, I often found myself - at dinners in 

town, lectures at the university, one-off discussions - asking the question, How many 

people did the Nazis murder, either in concentration and extermination camps or in the 

other massacres they perpetrated? The response, without exception, was six million. 

When I made clear that my question was the total number of people and not just the 

number of Jews, my respondents expressed surprise. Rarely did anyone know the 

answer. 

Any viewer of Alain Resnais’ film Night and Fog (1955), however, could give the 

answer: eleven million deaths. But this number of ‘non-conventional’ victims of the 

Second World War has been wiped from the hard disk of Western collective memory. In 

fact, out of a total closer to ten million than eleven, Raul Hilberg, in the 1985 edition of 

his authoritative Destruction of the European Jews, determined that there were five 

million Jews rather than the six million he had accounted for in the first edition of his 

work in 1961. But it is not this difference in numbers that is important; what matters 

here is to know why the total number of the murdered has completely disappeared and 

it is only the Jewish number that is handed down. 

One of the weaknesses of Alain Resnais’ otherwise very successful film lies in the fact 

that ‘the Jews’ are mentioned on only two occasions. The central story focuses on the 

Nazi extermination apparatus, with the victims presented being mainly political 

prisoners, resistants, and Soviet prisoners of war. Sadly, it is impossible for viewers to 

learn anything from this film about the nature of Nazi demonization of the Jews and 

their obsession with the imaginary Jew. The fact that half of the ‘atypical’ victims were 

marked by the executioners as ‘Jews’ assumes great importance for understanding the 

enterprise of hatred and extermination during the Second World War. Even if many of 

these ‘priority’ victims in no way saw themselves as Jewish, but simply French, Dutch, 

Polish or German, they were led to massacre after having been marked by their 

assassins as belonging to the Jewish race-people. The embellished dialogues on this 

subject in Resnais’ film are thus a key weakness. 

Compensating for this director’s weak point with regard to the Jews, however, was his 

boldness in depicting the characteristic cap of a French gendarme in an internment 

camp. Presenting this uncomfortable reality in the 1950s, when there still existed many 

French people who had collaborated with the Nazi occupation, required a certain 

intellectual courage. Unfortunately, the scene did not get past the censor. 

In 1985, just thirty years after Night and Fog, a long and exhausting film appeared 

from another French director, Claude Lanzmann. Within the film culture of the late 

twentieth century, Shoah rapidly acquired iconic status as a memorial of the Nazi 

genocide. Should it be held against the director that, at the time, he concealed the 

information that a major part of his film’s financing came from companies he had set up 

in Switzerland to receive secret funds granted him by the Israeli government? And 

should we not pay too much attention to the fact that at times in this terrible tragedy 

the main enemies of the Jews seem to be ignorant and wretched Polish peasants rather 

than cultivated German Nazis? The implication that the two groups stood on the same 

footing and were linked in a common action amounts to an intolerable distortion of 

history. 

It is far harder, however, to excuse the surprising fact that, in a French film lasting 

nine hours, no mention was made of a single train reaching Auschwitz from France. In 

addition, there was scarcely a reference to the relative indifference of the majority of 

the inhabitants of the ‘city of light’, including the intellectuals who killed time at the 

Cafe de Flore or Les Deux Magots while Jewish children were being taken to the 

Velodrome d’Hiver in July 1942. At the end of the day, the historical responsibility of 

the Vichy regime is totally absent from the French cult film, a fact that clearly facilitated 

its construction as a recognized and appreciated site of memory, in France and 

throughout the Western world. Many people were happy with the idea that the death 

industry was organized ‘over there’ in the distant East, anti-Semitic and grey, among 

frustrated and uneducated Catholic peasants, and had nothing to do with an enlightened 

and refined Europe. 

Moreover, as an Israeli spectator of the work of a director who defines himself as a 

Jew, I found it hard to accept the fact that throughout a film on memory, which pays 

tremendous attention to detail, the presence of victims other than Jews in this gigantic 

death machine goes simply unmentioned. Thus, despite the great part of the film having 

been made in Poland, the spectator is not informed that, in fact, five million Poles were 

murdered: two and a half million of Jewish origin, and two and a half million Catholics. 

Nor is the fact that the Auschwitz camp was originally constructed for non-Jewish Polish 

prisoners mentioned in Shoah. It is scarcely surprising, then, that an American president, 

Barack Obama, could quite ingenuously speak of a ‘Polish extermination camp’. 

Of course, the great majority of Jewish Poles were wiped from the map of Poland, 

incinerated or buried, whereas the majority of Polish Catholics survived the war, and of 

course this makes an important difference in the horrific balance sheet between the dead 

and the living. But if proportions are taken into account, the proportion of Roma 

murdered in relation to the size of their communities turns out to be very close to that of 

the Jews, and yet they, too, receive no mention in Lanzmann’s account in Shoah. 

Unfortunately, this French director is not the only agent of memory to effect an ethnic 

selection when it comes to constructing the memory of the victims; he was both 

preceded and followed by others. For example, the permanent and deafening silence of 

Elie Wiesel, an immigrant who did not remain in Israel, and won the Nobel Peace Prize 

for having perpetuated the exclusiveness of Jewish death while never expressing the 

least recognition of the death of others. 

From the final quarter of the twentieth century onward, the memory of almost all 

victims not designated by the Nazis as Semites has disappeared. The industrialized crime 

has become an exclusively Jewish tragedy. Western memory of the Nazi concentration 

camps and exterminations has been more or less emptied of other victims: Roma, 

resistants and other opponents, Communists and socialists, Jehovah’s Witnesses, Polish 

intellectuals, Soviet commissars and officers, and so on. With the relative exception of 

homosexuals, all those exterminated by the Nazis, in parallel with the systematic 

assassination of Jews and their descendants, have also been wiped from the hegemonic 

network of memory. Why has this happened, and how has the construction of this new 

memorization influenced the characteristics of present-day Jewish identity? 

In the late 1940s and throughout the next two decades, the shameful memory of the 

extermination of the Jews remained on the margins of Western culture and thought. In 

Israel, despite the Eichmann trial, the genocide did not even figure on school curricula 

until 1970. The subject remained highly unpopular with Jewish institutions across the 

world, which tackled it only cautiously. Among the several reasons for this, I shall 

mention just two. 

The first reason bears on the caprices of the mind’s history: in the immediate 

aftermath of the war, the survivors of the camps did not necessarily enjoy a positive 

image with the broad public. According to a cruel prejudice of the time, if someone had 

managed to emerge alive from that hell, this was seen as having very likely been at the 

expense of others who had been murdered. It was well known how the Nazis, before 

reducing human beings to dust, bent their efforts to deprive them of any sense of human 

solidarity, thereby reinforcing their Darwinian philosophy and easing their consciences. 

In this enterprise of dehumanization, they incited prisoners against one another, 

encouraged thefts and laughed at physical attacks. The guards and their auxiliary kapos 

delighted in the absence of solidarity and the general brutishness. Furthermore, on many 

occasions in the 1950s, survivors of the camps accused one another of unworthy 

behaviour in this ignoble world. During this period it was almost impossible to interview 

the survivors and get them to provide oral or visual testimony of their sufferings; many 

were ashamed of having survived. 

A second reason for this long silence bears on international politics. During the Cold 

War, the West mobilized strongly to reintegrate West Germany into the ‘democratic’ 

family of nations. Accordingly, given that the country’s elite, aside from socialists and 

Communists, belonged to the generation that had adulated Hitler, it was deemed 

preferable to prettify this past and supply a carefully doctored version. Many American 

films of this time presented a laundered and normalized picture of the Wehrmacht; 

many books were devoted to the German resistance against the Nazis and the 

clandestine sympathy it enjoyed. Those who ‘irresponsibly’ dared to infringe the rules of 

this cynical and selective game of memory were found primarily among the writers and 

artists of the political left. 

From the late 1960s onward, awareness of the absolute horror slowly began to evolve. 

The Cold War acquired a new tone, and the Federal Republic of Germany, after paying 

large sums of money to Israel and compensating survivors, was now well integrated 

into Western political culture and the military apparatus of NATO. Israel also became, 

in the same period, a full and faithful partner of the Atlantic alliance and of the United 

States in the Middle East. 

The 1967 war also played a role in this turning-point. The so-called lightning victory 

of the Tzahal wiped out the ‘shame’ that had afflicted Israeli elites since the foundation 

of the state. If the ‘cattle’ that went to slaughter had previously served as an anti-model 

for the formation of the nascent Sabra, the strategy of representation of past destruction 

would now undergo a metamorphosis. 

Israel had become a power - a small one, to be sure, but strong nonetheless, and one 

that dominated another people on whom it imposed an extended and brutal military 

occupation. The Jewish victim, yesterday hidden on account of his or her weakness, now 

culminated in the Jewish martyr. Acts of heroism and resistance were somewhat played 

down in the stories now told, leaving the most prominent place in the historical 

massacre to the murdered Jews, who could in no way be placed on the same level as the 

victims of other crimes in history. 

The marginal position that the Judeocide had occupied until then in the memory of 

Judeo-Christian civilization was clearly intolerable, and it was important on the moral 

level for it to be recognized as a key element in Europe’s involvement in the Second 

World War. To be sure, this mattered far more for Zionist and pseudo-Jewish politics. It 

was not enough that the memory of the victims should be engraved in the consciousness 

of the West. What was demanded was the specificity, exclusiveness, and total national 

ownership of suffering. This is the point at which we see the beginnings of what has 

been named the Holocaust industry, with the objective of maximizing the painful past in 

order to accumulate capital, not just economic, but also in terms of prestige. 

All other victims were therefore dismissed, and the genocide became an exclusively 

Jewish matter. Any comparison with the extermination of another people was now 

forbidden. That is why, when Armenian descendants in the United States demanded a 

day of recognition to commemorate the massacre committed by the Turks, the pro- 

Zionist lobby joined with the latter in an attempt to block the demand. All past and 

present crimes were necessarily minuscule in the face of the gigantic massacre of Jews 

during the Second World War. Besides, from now on, those who were victims ‘because 

they were born Jews’ ceased to resemble other victims; the individuals we see in Steven 

Spielberg’s Schindler’s List or Claude Lanzmann’s Shoah are victims of a special kind. 

Hitler’s desire to exclude Jews from the ranks of ordinary humanity has found a 

perverse form of expression in the memorial policy adopted by Israel and its supporters 

across the Western world; Zionist rhetoric, in fact, has increasingly insisted on the 

eternal specificity of the victim rather than that of the executioner, of the Jew and not 

of the Nazi. In other words, there are hosts of murderers like Hitler, while there have 

never been and never will be victims like the Jews. Gamal Abdel Nasser was the first to 

be called the ‘new Hitler’, before being replaced by the Palestinian Yasser Arafat and 

the Iraqi Saddam Hussein; most recently, the role fell to the Iranian Mahmoud 

Ahmadinejad. In this view of the world, and this construction of memory, the singularity 

of the European continent’s history, from the Enlightenment on, does not lead to the 

Nazi organizers of the death industry but solely to the dead and persecuted of Jewish 

origin. 1 

The camp that comprises descendants of the survivors of extermination has steadily 

grown since the 1970s: nowadays, everyone wants to be a survivor. Many Americans of 

Jewish origin who did not live in Europe during the Second World War and did not show 

any effective solidarity with the victims at the time of massacre have declared 

themselves to be direct heirs of the survivors of the work of death. Children of Jews from 

Iraq and North Africa have come to view themselves as an integral part of the growing 

community of victims of Nazism. In Israel the formula of a ‘second generation’ of the 

Shoah began to appear in the 1970s, now followed by a ‘third generation’; thus, like any 

other capital, the symbolic capital of past suffering can be bequeathed. 

The old religious identity of the ‘chosen people’ has gradually given way to the 

modern, and very effective, secular cult not only of the ‘chosen victim’ but also of the 

‘exclusive victim’. This identitarian axis of ‘secular Jewishness’, in its ethnocentric moral 

dimension, constitutes a major component enabling many to mark their self- 

identification as Jews, a point to which I shall return below. It has also contributed to 

my own growing malaise in continuing to define myself as a secular Jew, though other 

factors have of course also played a part. 

1. 1 refer to the European continent, as the two other supreme horrors of the modern age, subsequent to the 

Enlightenment - colonialism and Stalinism - essentially took place outside Europe. It strikes me, in fact, that the 

exceptional people, in the times of persecution and crime, were the ‘just’, who risked their lives to save others. As always 

in history, they were not numerous. 

CHAPTER 9 

A Rest After Killing a Turk 

A well-known Yiddish comic tale, full of self-derision, lambasts the intragroup character 

of Jewish morality. A Jewish mother accompanies her son to his enlistment in the tsarist 

army at the time of the Crimean War. At the moment of leaving him in the recruitment 

office, she slips a few sandwiches into his knapsack and whispers into his ear, ‘Kill a 

Turk, and then don’t forget to sit down and eat.’ ‘Yes, Mum,’ replies the son. ‘And make 

sure’, the mother adds, ‘that you rest properly after each attack when you kill a Turk.’ 

‘Sure,’ says the new recruit, and then asks, after a few seconds’ hesitation, ‘And what if 

the Turk kills me?’ The mother gapes at her son and says, ‘And why should he kill you? 

You’ve not done anything to him!’ 

During Passover in 1999, when I spent some time in San Francisco with distant 

relatives who were descendants of Yiddish people and who had invited me for a Pesach 

Seder, something strange happened to me. The majority of the guests were speakers of 

English, and it fell to me to recite from the Haggadah, the story of the exodus from 

Egypt - something which I had always abstained from doing - and then to translate the 

text aloud for the benefit of the Americans. This is a customary way of arousing 

children’s interest for the traditional Passover Seder: the Haggadah is designed to 

educate them and transmit to them a sum of Jewish ‘memories’. I took my role of 

instructor seriously, showing proof of creativity and emphasizing the message of liberty 

in the historic stories. There was a joyful ambience at that Seder, amid the recitation of 

the severe plagues visited upon Egypt and, as well, the consumption of fine wines. 

On the way home, in the dark of the car, my daughter, then five years old, kept 

asking questions about the ten plagues that God had sent the wicked Egyptians. With 

the first plague, did the blood flow from taps or just in the rivers? Did they really drink 

it? What exactly did the frogs do to the people? Were the flies small or big? And so on. 

Even though she was half asleep, the child continued through to the tenth plague, the 

most disturbing in the tale of the Exodus from Egypt. What exactly did ‘the first-born’ 

mean? Did it include just boys, or were girls killed as well? When I assured her that only 

boys were singled out, it had a calming effect on her, and her subsequent silence 

persuaded me that she’d gone to sleep. But suddenly there came a final ‘shock’ question 

from the back seat: ‘Did God also kill the little babies, if they were the first boy in the 

family?’ 

I remember having delayed my reply, quite embarrassed. I wasn’t going to spell out to 

my daughter that this passage referred only to the inhabitants of Egypt, not to ‘our’ 

children: I had never been a blind and blinkered ethnocentrist. Nor did I try to invoke 

the pretext of ‘justified’ vengeance, as I found it hard to believe that even Satan himself 

would have invented a revenge expressed in the deliberate killing of young children. 

Nor could I tell her that this was an objective description of a divine action that passes 

our understanding. What did she know, after all, about objectivity and neutrality? And 

just a couple of hours earlier, she had listened to the powerful chant in which we 

thanked God for the plague on the first-born, and had herself murmured, after me, ‘That 

suffices for us.’ 

I racked my brains to find other ways of not quite replying in case the questioning 

resumed the next morning, but I was blocked by a paralysing apprehension. What 

would happen if she wanted us to read the Haggadah again, and we reached the 

supplication for vengeance, addressed to God: ‘Pour down Your wrath on the peoples 

that do not know thee ... and destroy them from under Your heaven’? 

The compilation known as the Haggadah has long occupied a key place in Jewish 

cultural life. The first known version dates from the ninth century. We are unsure 

exactly when the explicit demand to exterminate all the peoples who did not believe in 

the God of the Jews and had dared to attack Israel was inserted. We do know for 

certain, however, that in the Middle Ages, Judeophobic priests were familiar with this 

text and made use of it periodically to inflame people’s minds against these heretical 

murderers of Jesus, condemning them to revenge by spreading atrocious accusations of 

ritual crimes. It is also well known that an inflammatory connection between infant 

blood and matzo (the unleavened bread of Passover) was used as a popular weapon by a 

number of provocateurs. 

I suppose that my two grandmothers and my grandfather still celebrated the Pesach 

Seder while they were imprisoned in the Lodz ghetto, before being asphyxiated in lorries 

designed to achieve that effect but which did not function very well and were thus soon 

replaced by the more effective gas chambers. I do not know whether, in their Passover 

prayers, my grandparents arrived at that terrifying sentence calling for wrath and 

destruction, but I am sure that the world today would be full of indulgence for them, as I 

am indeed myself. It is understandable that the weak and persecuted should cry 

vengeance without having to justify every one of their acts and every word they speak. 

But what attitude should we adopt towards the ‘secular Jewish’ intellectuals in Paris, 

London or New York who in our own day read the Haggadah with enthusiasm and self- 

satisfaction, while not eliminating from it the outrages against the goyim ? And a still 

more thorny question: How should we view the fact that this unfortunate sentence is 

pronounced by the Israeli pilots who rule the skies of the Middle East, or by armed 

columns that patrol alongside defenceless Arab villages in the occupied West Bank? 

Many people, deprived of the consoling belief in God, newly identify as secular Jews 

and today invoke the excellence of Jewish ethics. For some time now, many intellectuals 

have sought to credit Judaism with a superior ethic of love for the Other and immanent 

solidarity with the suffering and oppressed. Yet for centuries Jews were stigmatized for 

their moral degradation as unscrupulous usurers or swindling merchants (the portrayals 

in Shakespeare or Dickens are not exceptional). Of course, it was not the Talmud that 

led Jews to concentrate on ‘shameful’ activities such as moneylending, dealing in gold, 

or hawking; these fields were most commonly forced on them by the Christian world, 

which denied them the right to own property or work the land. Once transformed into 

wretched swindlers, insult was added to injury, attributing to Jews essentialist traits 

induced, not by their activities, but by an inborn greed fuelled by their beliefs. The 

descendants of Judas Iscariot, having rejected the grace of Jesus, could subsist only as 

parasites living on dirty money. Was this not what the Talmud laid down? Was this not 

always their historic destiny? 

Charles Fourier and Pierre-Joseph Proudhon were not alone in the sacrifice to 

historical stupidity that consists of characterizing Judaism as worship of a money God: 

the young Karl Marx himself slipped in that direction for a while. The fact that Jews and 

their descendants distinguished themselves as bankers and businessmen was indeed not 

due to chance, but the causes of this phenomenon are socio-historical, not ideological. 

The latter explanation was attempted by Werner Sombart, but he went astray in several 

of his hypotheses. 

In the second half of the twentieth century, in the wake of the shockwave of genocide, 

anti-Jewish views gradually underwent a radical change. Various intellectual circles 

focused on the undeniable fact that many sons and daughters of the Jewish bourgeoisie 

did not follow the ancestral path of capital accumulation but, on the contrary, took a 

stand on the side of the oppressed and exploited. From Karl Marx himself, who devoted 

his life to the industrial proletariat of the nineteenth century, to Leon Trotsky and Rosa 

Luxemburg in the early years of the twentieth century, Leon Blum in the 1930s, through 

to Howard Zinn and the hundreds of young people involved in the struggle for the equal 

rights of blacks in the United States or in support of the Vietnamese, there were many 

scions of Jewish families who rebelled and consistently fought for the advent of justice 

and social rights. 

The image of the Jews thus underwent a positive turn, culminating in the philo- 

Semitic, ‘Judeo-Christian’ Europe of today. Now it has become a habit to seek an 

immanent causality for the massive presence of Jewish descendants who have taken the 

side of culture and progress. Many people have hastened to perceive this as the imprint 

of a deep-rooted Jewish morality. The motivations for the widespread revolt against 

injustice have been explained in terms of the Jewish education received from parents, 

seemingly based on a long-standing humanist tradition. According to this approach, the 

‘people’ that gave the world the Ten Commandments continued their particular 

trajectory among other nations to initiate them in the sublime principles of the biblical 

prophets. It has now been deemed useful to cite, for example, Martin Buber’s religious 

philosophy of dialogue or, more recently, the theory of the Other in the philosophical 

work of Emmanuel Levinas. 

However, just as the ill repute of Jews in the past was based on fundamentally untrue 

assertions, so too is the image of Jewish moral superiority put forward today no more 

than a myth, cobbled together and lacking historical foundation - a fact that neither the 

thinking of Buber nor Levinas can refute. Jewish tradition has essentially been based on 

an intragroup ethos. Other religious communities as well exhibit the lack of a 

universalistic ethics, but in the Jewish case this is more visible, strongly reinforced by 

the Jews’ isolation and self-withdrawal as a result of the persecutions they underwent. 

For a span of several centuries, Judaism continued to fashion a strongly particularist 

ethnoreligious morality. 

It is customary, to demonstrate the universalistic foundation of Judaism, to cite 

Leviticus 19:33-34: ‘When an alien settles with you in your land, you shall not oppress 

him. He shall be treated as a native born among you, and you shall love him as a man 

like yourself, because you were aliens in Egypt. I am the Lord’. The term ‘alien’ here 

(Ger, in Hebrew) should be seen as meaning ‘new inhabitant’, but it is likely that it 

refers exclusively to immigrants who adopted the belief in Yahweh as per the biblical 

commandments. The Bible expressly forbids coexistence between idolaters and the 

followers of Yahweh on the divinely promised land, which is why ‘Ger’ is never applied 

to Canaanites or to uncircumcised Philistines. 

The famous aphorism ‘You shall love your neighbour as yourself’ (Leviticus 19:18), 

repeated by Jesus in the New Testament (Matthew 19:19, Mark 12:31, Romans 13:9), is 

indeed a biblical teaching. But few are prepared to recognize that the complete verse in 

Yahweh’s sacred text begins thus: ‘You shall not seek revenge, or bear any grudge 

against the sons of your own people, but you shall love your neighbour as yourself.’ 

That is why Maimonides, the greatest Jewish exegete of all time, in his Mishneh Torah, 

interpreted the phrase as follows: ‘Every man should love all those of Israel like 

himself ...’ For Yahwism, as for subsequent Judaism, there was no doubt that this 

principle concerned only those who shared the same faith, not the whole of humanity. 

Viewers of Steven Spielberg’s moving film Schindler’s List, with its accolade of Oscars, 

will have heard at the end the noble and generous declaration about the German who 

rescued Jews: ‘He who saves a single life has preserved a whole world.’ How many 

know that in the Babylonian Talmud, which has always been the determining text for 

Jewish law, it is written: ‘He who saves a single life in Israel ... has saved a whole 

world’ (Tractate Sanhedrin 5, Mishnah 4). Spielberg’s cosmetic rhetoric proceeded from 

praiseworthy intentions and pleased many, but the Hollywood-style humanism of the 

film has little to do with Jewish tradition. 

As we know, throughout the centuries Jews studied the Talmud far more than the 

Bible. True, the Pentateuch was well known in the Talmudic schools, thanks to the 

Parashat Hashavoua (the weekly extract from the Torah read in public every Shabbat), 

but there was no debate or argument about the messages of the great prophets. It was 

the Christian tradition, more than the Jewish, that became imbued with the 

universalistic aspects of the biblical prophecy. The position of inequality towards the 

non-Jewish Other, however, was not always as unambiguous as in the Talmud: ‘You 

shall be called men, but the idolaters are not called men’ (Tractate Yebamoth 61a). And 

it was not the work of chance, for example, that Avraham Yitzhak HaCohen Kook, the 

main architect of the process of nationalization of the Jewish religion in the twentieth 

century, and first Ashkenazi chief rabbi of the colonist community in Palestine before 

the founding of the State of Israel, was able to write, in his book Orot (Enlightenment): 

The difference between a soul of Israel, with its authenticity, its inner desires, its 

aspirations, its quality and its vision, and the soul of all non-Jews, is greater and 

deeper at all levels than the difference between the soul of a man and that of an 

animal; among the latter there is only a quantitative difference, whereas between 

these and the former there is a qualitative difference in kind. 

It is important to know that the writings of Rabbi Kook are still used today as a spiritual 

guide for the community of religious-national settlers who have established themselves 

in the occupied territories. 

This leads us to a comparison. The moral principles of the Ten Commandments 

presented in the Bible have, in the West, become the common legacy of believers in a 

single God. They appeared for the first time in the mythological context of a place on 

Mount Sinai, and were consecrated by all three Western religions: Judaism, Christianity 

and Islam, considered the foundation of monotheism as a universalistic faith. But should 

they be seen as the universal ethical basis of Judaism? 

In the same striking mythological place where he appeared to the Hebrew prophet 

Moses, God also undertook to exterminate all the inhabitants of Canaan in order to 

make room in the Promised Land for the sons of Israel. So, just three short chapters in 

the Bible after the Ten Commandments, including the declaration ‘Thou shall not kill’, a 

mass murder was promised: ‘My angel will go before you and bring you to the Amorites, 

the Hittites, the Perizzites, the Canaanites, the Hivites, and the Jebusites, and I will 

make an end of them’ (Exodus 23:23). In the course of history, the Jews became familiar 

with this promise and its cruel expression in the continuation of the story; as consistent 

believers, they were constrained to accept and sanctify a divine law whose logic could 

not be challenged. 

This genocidal Yahwistic tradition was transmitted, along with the Ten 

Commandments, to the two other monotheistic faiths, permitting or even encouraging 

them to eliminate idolaters who stubbornly refused to recognize the superiority of a 

single omnipotent God. It was not until the eighteenth century, and the Enlightenment, 

that a criticism of these terrible prescriptions was formulated, and a distance taken. 

That was the doing of Jean Meslier, Thomas Chubb, Voltaire and other philosophers, 

who made clear the anti-universalistic religious morality characteristic of the Bible, on 

which were nourished, indirectly, all those Jews, Christians and Muslims who revered 

the sacred text as a living God. 

It took great effort for Jewish descendants, in the course of secularization, to break 

from this egocentric ethical tradition and join in a broader, universalistic morality. 

Though some were aware that the dream would never be fully realized, they had to 

believe in and adhere to the modern principles of liberty, equality and fraternity that 

were deemed to have become the common aspiration of humanity. Without the 

upheavals induced by the age of Enlightenment, without the universal conception of the 

rights of man and of the citizen, and then of social rights, we would never have seen the 

emergence of intellectuals and leaders such as Karl Marx, Leon Trotsky, Rosa 

Luxemburg, Kurt Eisner, Carlo Rosselli, Leon Blum, Otto Bauer, Pierre Mendes-France, 

Abraham Sarfati, Daniel Cohn-Bendit, Noam Chomsky, Daniel Bensaid, Naomi Klein, 

and a good many others, close or distant heirs of a Jewish background. 

The distancing of these individuals, and so many more, from the Jewish religious 

tradition was inversely proportional to their convergence with a humanist view of the 

world and a burning desire to change the conditions of people’s lives, whoever those 

people might be, and not just members of their own religion, their own community or 

their own nation. This problematic requires further clarification and exploration: Was it 

mere chance that the domains of revolution, protest, reform and utopia attracted so 

many individuals whose origins go back to a Jewish past? 

The oppression exercised by the dominant religious civilizations towards a religious 

minority prepared the ground so that, with the advent of the Enlightenment, a section 

of the oppressed joined, in the course of their secularization, with all those who suffered, 

proclaiming solidarity with them. Modern Judeophobia, moreover - which persists in 

seeing such individuals as Jews despite their clearly expressed desire - strengthened the 

frequent aspiration to a universal morality: to liberate ourselves, the whole world must 

be liberated; to obtain our own liberty, all persons must be free, on principle. 

A residue of the messianic tradition of hope, the foundation of the ancestral Jewish 

faith, may have continued to echo among some of these individuals, though it is hard to 

find confirmation of this. Jewish sensibility was imbued with a burning desire for 

religious salvation, which, in the wake of alienation, persecution, and secularization, 

became translated into a keen desire for deliverance through revolution and for the 

attainment of a more just world, synonymous with the end of history, the end of 

suffering, the end of oppression. 

For several generations subsequent to the beginnings of emancipation, while the 

winds of Judeophobia continued to blow, many descendants of Jews filled the battalions 

of those who challenged the established order. They became nonconformists par 

excellence in modern times. But this of course was not true of all Jews, a majority of 

whom, along with their secularized descendants, preferred to support the established 

powers. Nevertheless, there were a large number of rebel intellectuals whose parents 

issued from the Jewish cultural world - a development not at all to the liking of 

conservatives or the Judeophobic right. 

With the disappearance of political anti-Semitism and the devalorizing of utopia in 

the Western spiritual universe, that phenomenon underwent rapid changes. As 

revolutionary universalism lost prestige in the wake of revelations of the atrocious 

crimes committed by Communist regimes, this was sadly accompanied by a dissolution 

of the principles of general human solidarity, even if other factors were also involved. 

The ranks of intellectuals inspired by a universalistic consciousness - sons or daughters 

of immigrant Jews, ready to stand always on the side of the persecuted - have 

singularly declined; a large fraction even proclaim themselves increasingly 

conservative. Some seek a return to Jewish religious tradition, whereas others, a greater 

number, have become enthusiastic defenders of all Israeli policies and actions in the 

Middle East. 

Anyone who seeks to establish a connection between Jewish morality and social 

justice, between Jewish tradition and human rights, must ask why the Jewish religious 

sphere has barely given rise to preachings against repeated Israeli attacks on human 

rights. In our own day, still, hardly any protests are forthcoming from Jewish 

institutions against the grave injustices committed under the Israeli occupation. A few 

young rabbis here and there show signs of compassion towards the distress of others, but 

they are the exception, while the solidly organized Jewish communities have never 

mobilized in support of persecuted non-Jews. Talmudic students, full of energy, have 

never turned to protests against the oppression experienced by others: such initiatives 

would go completely against the traditional religious mentality. 

At the same time, it is imperative that we avoid confusion and not equate Judaism 

with Zionism. Judaism firmly opposed Jewish nationalism until the twentieth century, 

and even until the arrival of Hitler. Jewish organizations and institutions, with the 

massive support of their members, rejected the idea of colonization of the Holy Land 

and, a fortiori, the creation of a state that would be ‘the Jewish state’. It must be made 

clear that this consistent opposition did not result from a humanist identification with 

the local inhabitants who were steadily being uprooted from their land. In their firm 

opposition to Zionism, the great rabbis were not guided by universal moral imperatives. 

Rather, they quite simply understood that Zionism represented, in the end, a collective 

assimilation into modernity, and that worship of the national soil, expressed in a new 

secular faith, would supplant devotion to the divine. 

The creation of the State of Israel, its military triumphs and its territorial expansion, 

eventually carried along the great majority of the religious camp, which underwent an 

accelerated radical nationalization. Large blocs of religious nationalists and nationalist 

Orthodox are today among the most ethnocentric elements of Israeli society. They were 

not led down this path by the Bible or the Talmud, and yet the main messages of the 

holy book and its commentators did not guard them against a slippage into brutal 

racism, a frenetic desire for territory, and a crying failure to take into consideration the 

native inhabitants of Palestine. 

In other words, perhaps the egocentric dimensions that characterize traditional Jewish 

morality do not bear direct responsibility for the anti-liberal and anti-democratic 

collapse that we are witnessing today in Israel; however, they have incontestably made 

it possible and continue to authorize it. When a tradition of intragroup ethics is 

combined with a religious power, a national power, or a party, it invariably generates 

terrible injustices against those who are excluded, who are viewed as not part of the 

community. 

CHAPTER 10 

Who Is a Jew in Israel? 

In 2011, at Ben Gurion Airport outside Tel Aviv, I was preparing to catch a flight for 

London. The security inspection took a long time, and passengers were showing signs of 

impatience. Like everyone else, I was tired. Suddenly my gaze was drawn to a woman 

sitting on a bench near the check-in desk; her head, though not her face, was covered by 

the traditional scarf (misnamed a ‘veil’ by Western media). She was being guarded by 

two Israeli security agents, who had taken her from the queue a few moments before. It 

was not hard to figure out that she was a ‘non-Jewish’ Israeli. Around me, the Jewish 

Israelis seemed not to see her, as if she were completely transparent. 

It was a routine embarkation scene. Israeli Palestinians are always separated from the 

rest of the passengers before being subjected to a special questioning and search. The 

justification given, and considered self-explanatory, is fear of a terrorist attack. The fact 

that Israeli Arabs have not been involved in such attacks, and that terrorism has 

declined in the past few years, has not led to the relaxation of surveillance. In the 

national state of Jewish immigrants, indigenous Palestinians remain suspect, and are to 

be permanently watched. 

I felt ill at ease, and made a gesture of impotence towards her. She examined me for a 

moment in a questioning silence. Her look did not exactly correspond to the description 

given by my father of the look in the eyes of a Jew, but it, too, expressed sadness, the 

experience of offence, and profound fear. Suddenly she smiled at me, and her expression 

became one of resignation. A few minutes later, I reached the check-in desk and passed 

through without the slightest difficulty. I was almost ashamed, and did not dare to turn 

my head in her direction. In writing these lines, I am turning my head towards her now. 

That fleeting encounter brought home to me that in Israel, being a Jew means, 

fundamentally and before all else, not being an Arab. 

Since the founding of the State of Israel, secular Zionism has had to confront a 

fundamental question to which not even its supporters abroad have so far found an 

answer: Who is a Jew? 

Talmudic Judaism did not pose this kind of question. In the Talmud, in complete 

contrast to the Bible, the Jew has always been someone who either is born of a Jewish 

mother or has converted according to the law, and upholds the essential precepts. At a 

time when atheism did not exist, a time when, if someone abandoned Judaism (as many 

did), he cleaved to another faith, it was clear that by changing religion that person 

ceased to be a Jew in the eyes of the community. With the advent of secularism, a Jew 

who stopped performing religious duties but did not opt for a different belief might 

arouse sadness within their family but nonetheless continued in a certain sense to be 

considered a Jew, because the hope remained that, so long as the person did not become 

Christian or Muslim, he might one day return to the bosom of the faith. 

In the first years of existence of the State of Israel, although waves of immigration 

brought their share of ‘mixed couples’, Zionism tried not to pay attention to this 

problem, but it soon became clear that the definition of a Jew based on a voluntary 

principle could not be preserved. Given that the ‘law of return’ automatically gave, to 

all those defined as Jews, a right to emigrate to the new state and obtain citizenship 

there, such an opening of the gates risked challenging and muddying the ethno-religious 

legitimacy of the colonization on whose principles secular Zionism was based. Besides, 

Zionism had confirmed a definition of Jews as a ‘people’ of unique origin and, as in 

Judaism before it, the ‘assimilation’ between Jews and neighbouring peoples was a 

development to be feared. 

This is why, in the secular state being created, civil marriage was prohibited, and only 

religious unions were authorized and performed. Someone who is defined as a Jew may 

marry only a Jew, a Muslim may marry only a Muslim, and this strictly segregationist 

law likewise holds for the Christian and the Druze. A secular Jewish couple can adopt a 

non-Jewish (that is, Muslim or Christian) child only by converting him or her to Judaism 

in accordance with rabbinical law; the notion of a child of Jewish origin being adopted 

by a Muslim couple is not even envisaged. Contrary to widespread assumptions, the 

perpetuation of this pseudo-religious legislation is not due to the electoral weight of the 

religious community; it results from uncertainties bearing on secular Jewish identity, 

and the desire to preserve a Jewish ethnocentrism. Israel has never been a rabbinical 

theocracy; from birth, it has remained a Zionist ethnocracy. 

This ethnocracy, however, must continually respond to a cardinal problem. Israel 

defines itself as a ‘Jewish state’, or as the ‘state of the Jewish people’ throughout the 

world, but it is not even able to define who is a Jew. The attempts made in the 1950s to 

identify Jews on the basis of fingerprints, like more recent experiments aimed at 

distinguishing a Jewish DNA, have all failed. Zionist scientists in Israel and abroad may 

well have proclaimed the existence of a ‘genetic purity’ that Jews have preserved down 

through the generations, but they have not managed to characterize a Jew on the basis 

of the DNA genotype. Nor are cultural or linguistic criteria of any use in defining Jews, 

given that their descendants have never shared a common language or culture. As a 

result, only religious criteria remain at the disposal of secular legislators: someone who 

is born of a Jewish mother, or has converted according to religious law and regulation, 

is recognized by the State of Israel as a Jew, an exclusive and eternal co-proprietor of 

the state and the territory that it administers. Which also explains the growing need, in 

the official identity policy of the State of Israel, to preserve religious customs. 

Besides, since the late 1970s, and increasingly so with the passage of time, emphasis 

has been laid on the idea that the State of Israel is Jewish, not Israeli. The first 

adjective, as we have seen, refers to the Jews of the whole world, whereas the second 

‘only’ includes all citizens living in Israel: Muslims, Christians, Druze and Jews without 

distinction. Despite the fact that in everyday life, cultural Israelization has reached a 

high level of maturity (Israeli Palestinians have undergone acculturation and speak 

perfect Hebrew). But instead of recognizing this identity, enshrining it, and seeing it as 

the melting pot of an inclusive republican and democratic consciousness, the opposite 

has occurred, with the state becoming ever more Judeocentric. 

On the one hand, we have the everyday Israeli cultural reality; on the other, a Jewish 

super-identity generated by Israeli identity policy through a strange schizophrenia in 

conflict with itself. On the one hand, the Israeli state has increasingly proclaimed that it 

is Jewish, and as a result is obliged to subsidize ever more cultural enterprises and 

traditional religious and national establishments at the expense of the teaching of 

general humanities and scientific knowledge. On the other hand, the old intellectual 

elites and a segment of the secular middle class have continued to chafe at the 

restrictions imposed by religious constraints. The latter have tried to act ‘without’ while 

continuing to feel ‘with’: they would like to remain Jews without Judaism, but fail to see 

the impossibility of this. 

Many factors may explain the emphasized Judaization of state identity. This tendency 

probably results principally from the inclusion of a large Palestinian population under 

the direct power of Israel. The Palestinians of the apartheid zones in the occupied 

territories, along with the Arab citizens of Israel, represent a demographic mass that is 

perceived as critical and threatening to the pseudo-Jewish character of the state. 

The increased need for the identity of the state to be a Jewish identity may also have 

its origin in the victory of the Zionist right, which benefited mainly, though not 

uniquely, from the support of Jews of Arab origin. That category of Jews, as we saw, 

had preserved their Jewish identity in a far stronger form than had members of other 

immigrant groups, and from 1977 on, that strength was expressed politically, in an 

electoral victory that has had a lasting effect on the path subsequently followed by 

Israel. 

Starting in the late 1980s, the instrumentalized arrival of the ‘Russians’, with their 

very different characteristics, likewise contributed to the exacerbation of this general 

tendency. In the case of those new immigrants, it was actually the absence of any 

Jewish tradition or any familiarity with Israeli culture that led the Zionist institutions to 

emphasize a Jewishness stamped not in their specific cultural inheritance but in an 

essence - in other words, their DNA. This identitarian campaign was complicated by the 

fact that a more than negligible part of this population was not Jewish in any sense, so 

that many Russian immigrants only discovered their ‘Jewishness’ by way of a strong 

anti-Arab racism. 

An additional explanation can be offered: the decline of classic nationalism in the 

Western world and the rise of communitarianism or a transnational tribalism (a subject 

that I shall return to below) manifested their first symptoms in Israel. What value could 

a minor Israeli cultural identity have in an age of globalization? Wasn’t it preferable, in 

those historical conditions, to develop a supranational ‘ethnic’ identity that would, on 

the one hand, give the descendants of Jews across the world the feeling that Israel 

belonged to them, and would, on the other hand, maintain among Israeli Jews the 

consciousness of forming part of a great Jewish people, whose members were perceived 

as exercising true power in all Western capitals? Why not belong to a ‘world people’ 

that had produced so many Nobel laureates, so many scientists, so many film-makers? A 

local Israeli or Hebrew identity has lost much of its past prestige, and gradually given 

way to an insistent and hypertrophied Jewish self-identity. In this way, as we saw, 

certain aspects of the Jewish tradition have found a new lease on life in many of the 

new Jews. 

A comparative example will help elucidate the identitarian laws of citizenship and 

education that have been conspicuously strengthened and refined in Israel since the 

1980s. If the United States of America decided tomorrow that it was not the state of all 

American citizens, but rather the state of those persons around the whole world who 

identity as Anglo-Saxon Protestants, it would bear a striking resemblance to the Jewish 

State of Israel. African Americans, Latin Americans or Jewish Americans would still have 

the right to take part in elections to the House of Representatives and the Senate, but 

the representatives of those chambers would have to understand and make known quite 

clearly that the American state must remain eternally Anglo-Saxon. 

To grasp this issue better, let us expand on this parallel. Imagine that in France it was 

suddenly decided to change the constitution and establish that the country was to be 

defined as a Gallo-Catholic state, and that 80 per cent of its territory could be sold only 

to Gallo-Catholics, despite the fact that its Protestant, Muslim or Jewish citizens would 

continue to enjoy the right to vote and be elected. The tribalist, anti-democratic current 

would soon extend across Europe. In Germany difficulties would arise, bearing on the 

stigmata of the past, in connection with the official rehabilitation of the earlier 

ethnocentric principles, yet the Bundestag would successfully overcome the obstacles 

and decree that foreign immigrants who had already obtained citizenship and taken 

part in political life could not marry Germans of Aryan Christian origin, with a view to 

preserving the German ethnos for another thousand years. Great Britain would solemnly 

proclaim that it no longer belonged to any of its British subjects - the Scots, the Welsh, 

the citizens descended from immigrants from the former colonies - but was henceforth 

the state only of the English, those born to an English mother. Spain would cause 

problems by tearing off the veil of national hypocrisy and declaring that it was no 

longer the property of all Spaniards but an explicitly Castilian-democratic state which 

generously granted its Catalan, Andalusian and Basque minorities a limited autonomy. 

Were historical changes like these to become reality, Israel would finally accomplish 

its destiny of being a ‘light among the nations’. It would feel far more at ease in the 

world, and clearly less isolated, in its exclusive identitarian policy. But there is a shadow 

in this picture: measures of this kind are unacceptable in the context of a ‘normal’ 

democratic state based on republican principles. Liberal democracy has never been 

solely an instrument for the regulation of relations between classes; it has also been an 

object of identification for all its citizens, who are supposed to believe that they have a 

property title to it and in this way directly express their sovereignty. The symbolically 

inclusive dimension has played a major role in the advent of the democratic nation¬ 

state, even if a certain gap has always persisted between symbol and reality. 

A policy like that of Israel’s towards its minority groups who do not belong to the 

dominant ethnos is rarely found today outside the post-Communist countries of Eastern 

Europe, where there exists a nationalist right wing that is significant if not hegemonic. 

According to the spirit of its laws, the State of Israel belongs more to non-Israelis than 

it does to its citizens who live there. It claims to be the national inheritance more of the 

world’s ‘new Jews’ (for instance, Paul Wolfowitz, former president of the World Bank; 

Michael Levy, the well-known British philanthropist and peer in the House of Lords; 

Dominique Strauss-Kahn, former managing director of the International Monetary Fund; 

Vladimir Gusinsky, the Russian media oligarch who lives in Spain) than of the 20 per 

cent of its citizens identified as Arabs, whose parents, grandparents and great- 

grandparents were born within its territory. Various nabobs of Jewish origin from 

around the world thus feel the right to intervene in Israeli life; through massive 

investment in the media and the political apparatus, they increasingly seek to influence 

its leaders and its orientation. 

Intellectuals who know well that the state of the Jews is their own also figure among 

the ranks of the ‘new Jews’. Bernard-Henri Levy, Alan Dershowitz, Alexandre Adler, 

Howard Jacobson, David Horowitz, Henryk M. Broder and numerous other champions 

of Zionism, active in various fields of the mass media, are quite clear about their 

political preferences. Contrary to what Moscow meant for Communists abroad in former 

times, or Beijing for the Maoists of the 1960s, Jerusalem really is their property. They 

have no need to know the history or geography of the place, nor are they obligated to 

learn its languages (Hebrew or Arabic), to work there or pay taxes, or - thank heaven! - 

to serve in its army. It is enough to make a short visit to Israel, readily obtain an 

identity card, and acquire a secondary residence there before returning immediately to 

their national culture and their mother tongue, while remaining in perpetuity a co¬ 

proprietor of the Jewish state - and all this simply for having been lucky enough to be 

born of a Jewish mother. 

The Arab inhabitants of Israel, on the other hand, if they marry a Palestinian of the 

opposite sex in the occupied territories, do not have the right to bring their spouses to 

live in Israel, for fear that they will become citizens and thereby increase the number of 

non-Jews in the Promised Land. 

That last assertion, in fact, requires a certain amplification. If an immigrant identified 

as Jewish arrives from Russia or the United States along with his non-Jewish wife, the 

latter will have the right to citizenship. However, even if the spouse and her children are 

never considered Jews, the fact that they are not Arab will prevail over the fact of not 

being Jewish. ‘White’ immigrants from Europe or America, even if not Jewish, have 

always enjoyed somewhat tolerant treatment. To diminish the demographic weight of 

the Arabs, it is judged better to weaken the Jewish state through non-Jewish dilution, so 

long as the newcomers are white Europeans. 

At the same time, it is necessary to be aware that the state of the Jews is not 

thoroughly Jewish. To be a Jew in the State of Israel does not mean that you have to 

respect the commandments or believe in the God of the Jews. You are allowed, like 

David Ben-Gurion, to dabble in Buddhist beliefs. You may, like Ariel Sharon, eat locusts 

while keeping a kosher household. You may keep your head uncovered, as do the 

majority of Israeli political and military leaders. In most Israeli towns, public transport 

does not operate on the Shabbat, but you should feel free to use your own car as much 

as you like. You may gesticulate and hurl insults at a football stadium on the sacred day 

of rest, and no religious politician will dare protest. Even on Yom Kippur, the holiest 

day in the Jewish calendar, children freely play on their bicycles in every courtyard in 

the city. As long as they do not come from Arabs, anti-Jewish abominations remain 

legitimate in the state of the Jews. 

What is the meaning, then, of being ‘Jewish’ in the State of Israel? There is no doubt 

about it: being Jewish in Israel means, first and foremost, being a privileged citizen who 

enjoys prerogatives refused to those who are not Jews, and particularly those who are 

Arabs. If you are a Jew, you are able to identity with the state that proclaims itself the 

expression of the Jewish essence. If you are a Jew, you can buy land that a non-Jewish 

citizen is not allowed to acquire. If you are a Jew, even if you speak only a stumbling 

Hebrew and envisage staying in Israel only temporarily, you can be governor of the 

Bank of Israel, which employs only four Israeli Arabs in subordinate positions out of a 

staff of seven hundred. If you are a Jew, you can be minister of foreign affairs and live 

permanently in a settlement located outside the legal borders of the state, alongside 

Palestinian neighbours deprived of all civic rights as well as of sovereignty over 

themselves. If you are a Jew, you can not only establish colonies on land that does not 

belong to you, but can also travel through Judea and Samaria on roads that the local 

inhabitants, living in their own country, do not have the right to use. If you are a Jew, 

you will not be stopped at roadblocks, you will not be tortured, you will not have your 

house searched in the middle of the night, you will not be targeted nor will you see your 

house demolished by mistake. These actions, which have continued for close to fifty 

years, are designed and reserved solely for Arabs. 

In the State of Israel in the early twenty-first century, does it not appear that being a 

Jew corresponds to being a white in the southern United States in the 1950s or a French 

person in Algeria before 1962? Does not the status of Jews in Israel resemble that of the 

Afrikaners in South Africa before 1994? And is it possible that it might soon resemble 

the status of the Aryan in Germany in the 1930s? (Resemblance has its limits, however: I 

utterly reject the least comparison with Germany in the 1940s.) 

How, in these conditions, can individuals who are not religious believers but are 

simply humanists, democrats and liberals, and endowed with a minimum of honesty, 

continue to define themselves as Jews? In these conditions, can the descendants of the 

persecuted let themselves be embraced in the tribe of new secular Jews who see Israel as 

their exclusive property? Is not the very fact of defining oneself as a Jew within the 

State of Israel an act of affiliation to a privileged caste which creates intolerable 

injustices around itself? 

Finally, what is the meaning of being a secular Jew outside of Israel? Does the 

position taken by Julian Tuwim in 1944 - of that of my parents, who became refugees 

in Europe at the end of that year - still have any moral validity in 2013? 

CHAPTER 11 

Who Is a Jew in the Diaspora? 

It is 2011. I am attending a discussion in a good London bookshop on the occasion of 

the publication of one of my books. The organizer of the evening’s proceedings, a 

philosopher from Oxford, a charming and subtle man, introduces me with evident 

sympathy. He makes clear that he is, like me, a critic of Israel’s militarist policy, that he 

is enraged by its racism, the complacency with which it presents itself as Jewish, the 

apartheid policy it has applied in the occupied territories, and so forth. Yet he expresses, 

albeit with delicacy, a reservation towards my point of view on the non-existence of a 

Jewish people. He feels himself part of this people, and the great majority of those 

attending, fairly liberal and left, indicate their agreement. In the course of the friendly 

exchange that follows, I ask him what constitutes the popular culture of secular Jews, 

and what Jewish education he can transmit to his children. He finds it hard to reply. 

An elderly lady stands up and, somewhat indignant, declares that if my argument 

deprives her of her Jewish identity, she has nothing left. I am surprised; I seek to 

reassure her. It is clearly not my role to suppress people’s identifications, I explain, and 

besides, I am certain she has many other identities as well as her Jewish one. I ask her 

at the same time if her liberty is also mine: do I, too, have the right to define myself as 

seems good to me, rather than tying myself to a painful memory that strikes me as 

increasingly exploited in bad faith? 

Among the attendees were some individuals whom I had every reason to believe were 

not ‘Jewish’ despite being of Middle Eastern appearance, but none of them asked to 

intervene in the discussion. I experienced a sense of unease: was the whole debate, 

which sounded ‘politically correct’ and manifestly non-Zionist, to be confined to an 

exclusive exchange reserved for ‘new Jews’? Were goyim not supposed to take part? This 

question raised in me a still more complex set of problems which I had never considered 

until then. 

Modern identity politics is packed with barbed wire, walls and roadblocks that define 

and limit collectives great and small. Some of these barriers can be crossed legally; 

others can be got round or even abolished in order to join this or that chosen group. 

Many social, political, national and religious circles are, in principle, open for all 

potential adherents. You can, for example, become an American, British, French or 

Israeli citizen, just as you can cease to be one. You can become an activist in a socialist 

movement, leader of a liberal current, or member of a conservative party; you can also 

resign from any one of these. All churches welcome proselytes. Anyone can become a 

fervent Muslim or Jew. 

But how can you become a secular Jew if you are not born of parents considered to be 

Jews? This was the question that struck me, and that I could not manage to resolve. Is 

there any way of joining secular Jewry through a voluntary act, in the form of a free 

choice, or is this instead an exclusive, closed club whose members are selected as a 

function of their origin? In other words, are we not increasingly dealing with a 

prestigious club that, by accident though not by chance, sees itself as comprising the 

descendants of an ancient tribe? 

Certainly, in the past, no one sought to join this closed club. No gentile envied the 

fate of those marked out as Jews - not in the Pale of Settlement of the Russian empire, 

nor in occupied Paris, nor, to be sure, in Auschwitz. Quite fortunately, however, this is 

no longer the case in our time, in a Western world repentant for its past persecution of 

Jews and desirous to expiate its sins. In the universities of New York, the studios of 

Hollywood, the political antechambers of Washington, in many firms on Wall Street, in 

the press rooms of Berlin or Paris, or in the cultural salons of London, it is rather the 

fashion to be a ‘Jew’. 

This requires no excessive effort. It is not necessary to study religion or know the 

history of the Jews, nor to believe in any particular god. No necessity either to learn a 

new language, and still less to restrain sensual and material pleasures in order to 

scrupulously observe the commandments. As surely as a circle is not a square, you are a 

Jew because you’re born a Jew. And if someone is not a Jew, she cannot become one, 

try as she might. 

In the Western world in the early twenty-first century, we are witnessing the relative 

decline of classic nationalism, which, two centuries after its birth, is now in poor shape. 

The crises of economic globalism, hand in hand with a cultural globalization 

disseminated by systems of communication that cross all borders, have begun to gnaw 

away at formerly solid national attachments. If a past era required identification with 

the flag and absolute fidelity to it, along with loyalty to a dominant national culture, 

there is now more space for partial community identities, secondary subcultures and 

even transnational identities, so long as they do not threaten the supreme principle of 

the sovereign nation-state. 

Today it is far easier to express one’s desire to be identified as a Jew, but the problem 

of ‘new Jews’ lies in the lack of specific cultural expressions or outward signs of the 

secular Jewish identity. This is why, in the United States but also elsewhere, total 

atheists sometimes travel to the synagogue by car on the Shabbat to have their sons 

circumcised (a cultural act that supposedly reduces the risk of AIDS, if we believe, oh 

father Abraham), and organize sumptuous Bar-Mitzvah celebrations at which the food 

may well not be kosher, similarly expecting to be married in due course by a rabbi, 

preferably a Reform rabbi, if there is one available in the local community. This, then, is 

how a Jew expresses his membership of this ancient and specific ethnos without the 

expenditure of any particular effort. As a result, these pseudo-religious practices, since 

we are not talking about people who are serious believers, have no real consequences. 

The desire for an intimate context of identity, from which it would be possible to gain 

a certain comfort, is eminently respectable. At a time when the nation-state is 

increasingly unable to give meaning to large collectives, when the reserve of national 

enemies is exhausted and the great political and social utopias are at death’s door, the 

renewal of community, half religious and half tribal, is capable of enhancing everyday 

life. And we could view with benevolent reserve the fact that, in order to maintain their 

Jewish identity, parents choose to have their sons circumcised, despite the fact that 

removal of this ‘impurity’ is irrational and, above all, an infringement on the 

fundamental right of any person to bodily integrity. 

However, if in the name of maintaining an imagined Jewish identity, secular parents 

prevent their children from loving a partner designated as non-Jewish, afraid that they 

will ‘marry out’, this must be stigmatized as ordinary racism. ‘Ethnic Jews’ have good 

reason for concern. More than 50 per cent of Jewish American descendants marry non- 

Jews, and likewise in Europe. Community institutions, with the aid of the Jewish 

Agency, shamelessly do the maximum to restrain this tendency - well aware that, in the 

absence of Judeophobia, what will slowly but surely destroy the ‘Jewish people’ is the 

deep need for love and a shared life freed from the ties of tradition. Golda Meir, when 

prime minister of Israel, is said to have declared that the man or woman who marries a 

non-Jew ‘adds to the six million’. She likewise proclaimed that the two dangers 

threatening the Jewish people were extermination and assimilation. 

The ritual of commemorating the Shoah constitutes another link in the arrangements 

designed to preserve at all costs a separate and exclusive Jewish identity. Who could 

object to evoking the memory of the European horror? On the contrary, for the Western 

world to forget it would add insult to injury. But when Zionists and their supporters 

transform the memory of this destruction into a secular religion, with its cult 

pilgrimages to the reconstituted sites of extermination, and its aim of instilling paranoia 

in the consciousness of the ‘Jewish’ generation of tomorrow, we have to ask whether an 

identity constructed by the constant recall of past trauma does not generally lead to 

danger and trouble, both for those who are its bearers and for those who live alongside 

them. Despite Israel being the only nuclear power in the Middle East, it regularly 

reinforces terror in its supporters across the world by pointing on the future horizon to 

the spectre of a repeated Holocaust. Such a stance bears the ingredients of future 

catastrophe. 

We must recognize that the key axis of a secular Jewish identity lies nowadays in 

perpetuating the individual’s relationship to the State of Israel and in securing the 

individual’s total support for it. If, until the 1967 war, Israel occupied a relatively 

secondary place in the sensibility of Jewish descendants in the West, from that point 

onward, this little state - which had just given a display of its great strength, even 

appearing as quite a power - became a source of pride for a goodly number of Jewish 

descendants. As is well known, any power attracts a mass of followers and comes to 

constitute, to a lesser or greater degree, a locus of adulation and worship. The image of 

soldiers of the Israel Defense Forces, svelte and spirited, perched on powerful armoured 

cars or leaning proudly against jet fighters, serves as an identity card for many new 

Jews throughout the world. The prestige that this gives has been used to the maximum 

by the Israeli state. 

The Jewish Agency has now put an end to its final, fruitless attempts to bring 

‘persecuted Jews’ to Israel. Since the fall of the Soviet Union, there is no longer a 

country in the world where the descendants of the chosen people are prevented from 

emigrating to the state of the Jews. Zionism has shifted the objective that originally 

constituted its raison d’etre and acquired a second youth through a reinvigorating 

initiative. Now more than ever, those who aspire to identify themselves with the seed of 

Abraham are asked to gather funds in support of a land of the Jews that is in full 

territorial expansion and, above all, to activate all their networks of influence on their 

country’s foreign policy and public opinion. The results of the latter objective have been 

remarkable. At a time when communitarianism enjoys growing legitimacy - particularly 

in an age of reverence for ‘Judeo-Christian’ civilization, underpinning the ‘clash of 

civilizations’ - it is more possible than ever to harbour pride at being a Jew and finding 

oneself on the side of the powerful who dominate history. 

To be sure, a minority of individuals who define themselves as secular Jews organize 

protests, either individually or in a group, against the Israeli policies of segregation and 

occupation. They rightly see these policies as genuinely threatening the renewal of a 

Judeophobia that blindly and stupidly encompasses all Jewish descendants of a certain 

race-people and, more seriously still, confuses them with Zionists. 1 But the desire of 

secular Jews to continue identifying with a Jewish ‘community’, however 

understandable on the part of the generation that immediately followed the genocide, 

appears to be a temporary posture with little weight and no political future. 

A particular sensibility, understandable and praiseworthy, may well be expressed 

among these Jewish descendants. But if those who call themselves anti-Zionist Jews 

without having lived in Israel and without knowing its language or having experienced 

its culture claim a particular right, different from that of non-Jews, to make accusations 

against Israel, how can one criticize overt pro-Zionists for granting themselves the 

privilege of actively intervening in decisions regarding the future and fate of Israel? 

1. The emergence of a new Judeophobia, directly linked to the Israeli-Palestinian conflict, is regularly expressed and 

displayed among radical Muslims. 

CHAPTER 12 

Exiting an Exclusive Club 

During the first half of the twentieth century, my father abandoned Talmudic school, 

permanently stopped going to synagogue, and regularly expressed his aversion to 

rabbis. At this point in my own life, in the early twenty-first century, I feel in turn a 

moral obligation to break definitively with tribal Judeocentrism. I am today fully 

conscious of having never been a genuinely secular Jew, understanding that such an 

imaginary characteristic lacks any specific basis or cultural perspective and that its 

existence is based on a hollow and ethnocentric view of the world. Earlier I mistakenly 

believed that the Yiddish culture of the family I grew up in was the embodiment of 

Jewish culture. A little later, inspired by Bernard Lazare, Mordechai Anielewicz, Marcel 

Rayman and Marek Edelman, I long identified as part of an oppressed and rejected 

minority. In the company, so to speak, of Leon Blum, Julian Tuwim and many others, I 

stubbornly remained a Jew who had accepted this identity on account of persecutions 

and murderers, crimes and their victims. 

Now, having painfully become aware that I have undergone an adherence to Israel, 

have been assimilated by law into a fictitious ethnos of persecutors and their supporters, 

and have appeared in the world as one of the exclusive club of the elect and their 

acolytes, I wish to resign and cease considering myself a Jew. 

Although the State of Israel is not disposed to transform my official nationality from 

‘Jew’ to ‘Israeli’, I dare to hope that kindly philo-Semites, committed Zionists and 

exalted anti-Zionists, all of them so often nourished on essentialist conceptions, will 

respect my desire and cease to catalogue me as a Jew. As a matter of fact, what they 

think matters little to me, and still less what the remaining anti-Semitic idiots think. In 

the light of the historic tragedies of the twentieth century, I am determined no longer to 

be a small minority in an exclusive club that others have neither the possibility nor the 

qualifications to join. 

By my refusal to be a Jew, I represent a species in the course of disappearing. I know 

that by insisting that only my historical past was Jewish, while my everyday present 

(for better or worse) is Israeli, and finally that my future and that of my children (at 

least the one I wish for) must be guided by universal, open and generous principles, I 

run counter to the dominant fashion, which is oriented towards ethnocentrism. 

As a historian of the modern age, I put forward the hypothesis that the cultural 

distance between my great-grandson and me will be as great as, if not greater than, that 

separating me from my own great-grandfather. All the better! I have the misfortune of 

living now among too many people who believe that their descendants will resemble 

them in all respects, because for them peoples are eternal - a fortiori a race-people such 

as the Jews. 

I am aware of living in one of the most racist societies in the Western world. Racism is 

most certainly present to some degree everywhere, but in Israel it exists deep within the 

spirit of the laws. It is taught in schools and colleges, spread in the media, and above all 

and most dreadful, in Israel the racists do not know what they are doing and, because of 

this, feel in no way obliged to apologize. This absence of a need for self-justification has 

made Israel a particularly prized reference point for many movements of the far right 

throughout the world, movements whose past history of anti-Semitism is only too well 

known. 

To live in such a society has become increasingly intolerable to me, but I must also 

admit that it is no less difficult to make my home elsewhere. I am myself a part of the 

cultural, linguistic and even conceptual production of the Zionist enterprise, and I 

cannot undo this. By my everyday life and my basic culture I am an Israeli. I am not 

especially proud of this, just as I have no reason to take pride in being a man with 

brown eyes and of average height. I am often even ashamed of Israel, particularly when 

I witness evidence of its cruel military colonization, with its weak and defenceless 

victims who are not part of the ‘chosen people’. 

Earlier in my life I had a fleeting utopian dream that a Palestinian Israeli should feel 

as much at home in Tel Aviv as a Jewish American does in New York. I struggled and 

sought for the civil life of a Muslim Israeli in Jerusalem to be similar to that of the 

Jewish French person whose home is in Paris. I wanted Israeli children of Christian 

African immigrants to be treated as the British children of immigrants from the Indian 

subcontinent are in London. I hoped with all my heart that all Israeli children would be 

educated together in the same schools. Today I know that my dream is outrageously 

demanding, that my demands are exaggerated and impertinent, that the very fact of 

formulating them is viewed by Zionists and their supporters as an attack on the Jewish 

character of the State of Israel, and thus as anti-Semitism. 

However, strange though this may seem, and in contrast to the locked-in character of 

secular Jewish identity, treating Israeli identity as politico-cultural rather than ‘ethnic’ 

does appear to offer the potential for achieving an open and inclusive identity. 

According to the law, in fact, it is possible to be an Israeli citizen without being a 

secular ‘ethnic’ Jew, to participate in its ‘supra-culture’ while preserving one’s 

‘infraculture’, to speak the hegemonic language and cultivate in parallel another 

language, to maintain varied ways of life and fuse different ones together. To fully 

concretize and consolidate this republican political potential, it would be necessary, of 

course, to have long abandoned tribal hermeticism, to learn to respect the Other and 

welcome him or her as an equal, and to change the constitutional laws of Israel to make 

them compatible with democratic principles. 

Most important, if it has been momentarily forgotten: Before we put forward ideas on 

changing Israel’s identity policy, we must first free ourselves from the accursed and 

interminable occupation that is leading us on the road to hell. In fact, our relation to 

those who are second-class citizens of Israel is inextricably bound up with our relation to 

those who live in immense distress at the bottom of the chain of the Zionist rescue 

operation. That oppressed population, which has lived under the occupation for close to 

fifty years, deprived of political and civil rights, on land that the ‘state of the Jews’ 

considers its own, remains abandoned and ignored by international politics. I recognize 

today that my dream of an end to the occupation and the creation of a confederation 

between two republics, Israeli and Palestinian, was a chimera that underestimated the 

balance of forces between the two parties. 

Increasingly it appears to be already too late; all seems already lost, and any serious 

approach to a political solution is deadlocked. Israel has grown accustomed to this, and 

is unable to rid itself of its colonial domination over another people. The world outside, 

unfortunately, does not do what is needed either. Its remorse and bad conscience 

prevent it from convincing Israel to withdraw to the frontiers it obtained in 1948. Nor is 

Israel ready to annex the occupied territories officially, as in this case it would have to 

grant equal citizenship to the occupied population and, by that fact alone, transform 

itself into a binational state. It’s rather like the mythological serpent that swallowed too 

big a victim, but prefers to choke rather than to abandon it. 

Does this mean I, too, must abandon hope? I inhabit a deep contradiction. I feel like 

an exile in the face of the growing Jewish ethnicization that surrounds me, while at the 

same time the language in which I speak, write and dream is overwhelmingly Hebrew. 

When I find myself abroad, I feel nostalgia for this language, the vehicle of my emotions 

and thoughts. When I am far from Israel, I see my street corner in Tel Aviv and look 

forward to the moment I can return to it. I do not go to synagogues to dissipate this 

nostalgia, because they pray there in a language that is not mine, and the people I meet 

there have absolutely no interest in understanding what being Israeli means for me. In 

London it is the universities and their students of both sexes, not the Talmudic schools 

(where there are no female students), that remind me of the campus where I work. In 

New York it is the Manhattan cafes, not the Brooklyn enclaves, that invite and attract 

me, like those of Tel Aviv. And when I visit the teeming Paris bookstores, what comes to 

my mind is the Hebrew book week organized each year in Israel, not the sacred 

literature of my ancestors. 

My deep attachment to the place serves only to fuel the pessimism I feel towards it. 

And so I often plunge into a melancholy that is despondent about the present and 

fearful for the future. I am tired, and feel that the last leaves of reason are falling from 

our tree of political action, leaving us barren in the face of the caprices of the 

sleepwalking sorcerers of the tribe. But I am not a metaphysical philosopher, simply a 

historian who tries to compare, so I cannot allow myself to be completely fatalistic. I 

dare to believe that if humanity succeeded in emerging from the twentieth century 

without a nuclear war, everything is possible, even in the Middle East. We should 

remember the words of Theodor Herzl, the dreamer responsible for the fact that I am an 

Israeli: ‘If you will it, it is no legend.’ 

As a scion of the persecuted who emerged from the European hell of the 1940s 

without having abandoned the hope of a better life, I did not receive permission from 

the frightened archangel of history to abdicate and despair. Which is why, in order to 

hasten a different tomorrow, and whatever my detractors say, I shall continue to write 

books like the one you have just read. 

how i i 

STOPPED 

I BEING 

A JEW 

SHLOMO SAND