Ya. RABKIN. JEW AGAINST JEW. JEWISH RESISTANCE TO ZIONISM. Translated from French. by the author with the participation of A. Kushnir. Moscow: Text, 2009. 521 p.
(Chase Collection)
Author of the book, Prof. Professor of the History of Science and Jewish History at the University of Montreal, a former Leningrad resident who emigrated to Canada in the early 1970s, devoted his work to defending anti-Zionist Jewish Orthodox ideology. Ultra-Orthodox rabbis consider the State of Israel to be the antithesis of Judaism, because it was created by human hands, and not by the moshiach (Messiah), whose arrival Jews expect. The State of Israel and Zionism, in their opinion and in the opinion of the author, are the true enemies of Judaism, destroying everything truly Jewish.
Ya. Rabkin claims to be a scientific monograph, but the terms and assessments he uses are so approximate and vague that they betray the author's commitment to a completely different discourse - propaganda or Messianic. Evidence of the academic nature of his work should obviously be the fact that its author is very generous, almost in every paragraph, quotes and references to authoritative sources, which, however, very often have more than an indirect relationship to the topic. They include general observations by prominent Israeli historians who have no connection with anti-Zionist ideology at all, and critics of Zionism such as the philosopher Hannah Arendt and left-wing historians better known as "post-Zionist". Thus, the ultra-Orthodox point of view on Zionism is artificially "inflated", becoming more representative and reasoned.
The author is prone to strong conclusions and pathetic statements based on controversial theories: "A recent book by Tel Aviv University historian Shlomo Sand, titled 'How and When the Jewish People Were Invented', proves that Jews are from different countries... they have nothing in common with each other. Except for religion... [The Jewish people], in his opinion, were "invented" to please the Zionist ideology... Since thus [sic! the secular, national motivation for preserving the Jewish state is fading away, and the religious motivation is becoming more and more important" (p. 22). On the basis of "well-known" statements, which are far from always true, Rabkin argues that the completely assimilated Viennese journalist Theodor Herzl began to claim the role of representative of Jews around the world, despite the fact that from time immemorial people who had knowledge of the Torah and strictly observed the commandments were nominated for leadership of Jewish communities. I note that Herzl "claimed to be the representative of all the Jews of the world", being the leader of the influential World Zionist Organization. As for the religious leadership of Jewish communities, the criteria for his election were not knowledge of the Torah, but above all wealth and close ties with the ruling, secular environment.
Many of Rabkin's statements indicate ignorance of textbook facts. For example, Rabkin obviously knows about the biography of T. Herzl firsthand, if he writes that he was going to "legalize dueling in the state he foresaw-the highest manifestation of honor and nobility" (p.230). In fact, Herzl suggested that Jews defend their violated honor in duels long before he conceived the idea of creating a Jewish state, as evidenced by his play "The New Ghetto", as well as entries in his diary. In his program essay "The Jewish State" there is not a word about duels.
Rabkin reports that on one day hundreds of thousands of opponents of the Zionist State of Israel took to the streets of Mea Shearim, a Jerusalem neighborhood where several thousand ultra - Orthodox Jews currently live (p.306). Here, as in many other cases, the author relies on the ignorance of the Russian-speaking reader: the streets of Mea Shearim are so narrow that it is not easy for two passers-by walking towards each other to miss each other. And it is physically impossible for hundreds, let alone thousands, of people to be in this place at the same time. In general, a fairly characteristic feature of the book under review is the desire to give "Jewish resistance to Zionism", which is for Israel
and Jewish communities in some countries are already clearly marginal, on a completely different scale than those that exist in reality.
On almost every page of the book, you can find rather biased interpretations of certain events or quotes. Thus, the author condemns the calls for resistance made by the victims of the pogroms of the late 19th and early 20th centuries as a wrong choice (in comparison with flight and repentance) and a "sharp departure from Tradition". Rabkin interprets the poetic invective of the poet H.-N. Bialik to Jewish men in the poem "The Legend of the Pogrom", who are not able to protect their women during the pogrom, as "an expression of the thirst for power and rebellion against Judaism." Sometimes strong epithets and loud accusations such as "Jabotinsky's fascist ideology", "Israeli officers and soldiers are war criminals", "the apartheid regime in Israel" are found in the text in the first person without reference to the source.
One of the final stories about the role of the State of Israel in Jewish history includes the following quote from Boaz Evron (the author calls him an Israeli intellectual, without specifying that he is a well-known post-Zionist theorist, and not at all an orthodox anti-Zionist): "The State of Israel, of course, will disappear in a hundred, three hundred or five hundred years... The existence of this state has no meaning for the existence of Jews... The Jews of the world can live perfectly well without it" (p. 484).
In Rabkin's work, the reader will find neither an analysis of Jewish criticism of Zionism, nor its genetic or structural analysis. We are faced with a jumble of arguments from all sources - from the radical left to the Satmar Hasidic Rebbe. The author includes quotations from the works of such well-known contemporary Israeli historians as Yisrael Bartal, Shaul Stampfer, and others. However, these scientists actually hold different political beliefs. There are believers among them, but none of them called for the need to resettle Israel's Jews from the Middle East to Europe or Alaska, as suggested by Iranian leader Ahmadinejad, whom the author mentions with considerable respect.
The authors cited by Rabkin are often researchers of the opposite direction in their views. This is the case with Prof. Robert Wistrich, director of the Vidal Sassoon Center for the Study of Anti-Semitism at the University of Jerusalem. Rabkin, who advocates the" peaceful " elimination of the State of Israel and the return of Jews to the status of Zimmi-Gentiles under the protection of the Islamic state, as Palestinian propagandists also like to write about, remains unknown to Wistrich's 1984 lecture: "The goal of Arab anti - Zionism is ultimately to reduce Israel (or Jews as a community) to their age-old humiliated state." to the position of people who are "protected" by Islamic tolerance and live in a Muslim environment not by right, but out of mercy. This type of anti-Zionism seeks to de-emancipate Jews as an independent nation, just as secular European anti-Semitism seeks to de-emancipate them as free and equal individuals in civil society."
Rabkin's work in its own way fits into the" style " of Laitman's Kabbalah, which is miraculously intended just for those who do not know any Judaism other than Laitman's.
The limited scope of the review does not allow us to demonstrate all the logical inconsistencies and substitution of theses in the 500-page book.
In my opinion, it would be more honest to write an openly anti-Zionist polemic book or objectively present a critique of Zionism from ultra-Orthodox circles in Judaism than to pseudo-research anti-Zionist ideology.
If the respected publishing house that published this essay really wants to introduce the Russian reader to the orthodox Jewish view of Zionism, then it would be more useful to translate from English and publish Aviezer Ravitsky's famous book "Messionism, Zionism and Jewish Religious Radicalism", published in Chicago in 1996, in which the anti-Zionist position of the Jewish Orthodox is fully presented it is adequate and more intelligently than in a peer-reviewed paper, which is very far from academic correctness.
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