Israel Shahak, Israel Shahak

I have met influential "civil society" Palestinians alive today who were protected as students when Israel was a professor of chemistry at the Hebrew University; from him they learned never to generalize about Jews. And they respected him not just for his consistent stand against discrimination but also because--he never condescended to them. He detested nationalism and religion and made no secret of his contempt for the grasping Arafat entourage. But, as he once put it to me, "I will now only meet with Palestinian spokesmen when we are out of the country. I have some severe criticisms to present to them. But I cannot do this while they are living under occupation and I can 'visit' them as a privileged citizen." Christopher Hitchens, "Israel Shahak, 1933-2001" , The Nation , July 23, 2001.

Christopher Hitchens, Forward to Israel Shahak, Open Secrets:Israeli Nuclear and Foreign Policies , Pluto Press, London, Sterling, Virginia, 1997 p.xi But, he argued, the history of Judaism itself had not yet been the full beneficiary of modern critical perspectives. For Shahak, open public discussion of what he called 'Jewish ideology' is required if people are to take the same attitude towards Jewish chauvinism as is commonly taken towards anti-Semitism and all other forms of xenophobia, chauvinism and racism. He believed the political influence of Jewish chauvinism and religious fanaticism was much greater than that of anti-Semitism, and affirmed his belief that anti-Semitism and Jewish chauvinism could only be fought simultaneously.

He also argued that on several occasions Zionists held links with anti-Semites, as was the case of Herzl and Count von Plehve, the antisemitic minister of Tsar Nicholas II; Jabotinsky and the Ukrainian leader Petlyura,whose forces, Shahak says, massacred some 100,000 Jews in 1918-21; Ben-Gurion and the French extreme right, which included notorious antisemites, during the Algerian war; and other such as the Zionist rabbi Joachim Prinz, who welcomed Hitlers rise to power, since they shared his belief in the primacy of race and his hostility to the assimilation of Jews among Aryans. Shahak notes that Prinz, whose book Wir Juden (We Jews, 1934) celebrating Hitler's German Revolution and its defeat of liberalism, subsequently emigrated to the USA, where he rose to be vice-chairman of the World Jewish Congress and a leading light in the World Zionist Organization.' Israel Shahak, Jewish History, Jewish Religion , p.71 . He concluded by arguing the struggle against Jewish chauvinism and exclusivism, which must include a critique of classical Judaism, was of equal or greater importance as the struggle against antisemitism,and all other forms of racism.

None of those I was able to check had any foundation...Some are just funny. He says (pp. 23-4) that "Jewish children are actually taught" to utter a ritual curse when passing a non-Jewish cemetery. '(T)almudic passages directed against Christianity or against non-Jews had to go or to be modified . . a few of the most offensive passages were bodily removed from all editions printed in Europe after the mid-16th century. In all other passages, the expressions Gentile, non-Jew, stranger ( goy, eino yehudi, nokhri ). . were replaced by terms such as idolator, heathen or even Canaanite or Samaritan, terms which could be explained away but which a Jewish reader could recognize as euphemisms for the old expressions...Following the establishment of the State of Israel, . . all the offensive passages and expressions were restored without hesitation in all new editions. . . So now one can read quite freely - and Jewish children are actually taught - passages such as that which commands every Jew, whenever passing near a cemetery, to utter a blessing if the cemetery is Jewish, but to curse the mothers of the dead if it is non-Jewish.' Israel Shahak, Jewish History, Jewish Religion , ibid. pp.23-4 He also tells us (p. 34) that "both before and after a meal, a pious Jew ritually washes his hands....On one of these two occasions he is worshiping God... but on the other he is worshiping Satan..." 'Other prayers or religious acts, as interpreted by the cabbalists, are designed to deceive various angels (imagined as minor deities with a measure of independence) or to propitiate Satan.

Israel Shahak made the comparison between Israel and Nazism respectable all the while describing Judaism according to the medieval canons of the blood libel. Ottolenghi, Emanuele.

Source: Wikipedia > Israel Shahak