Today is Purim.
* Tabletmag: “The three faces of Esther.”
Here is an interview of Israeli thinker Yoram Hazony on his book on Esther.
* He says that many people find the Old Testament too dark and violent. They avoid it because they don’t want to do the work that the Hebrew Bible requires. This Bible is realistic. It fits the world as we have it, not an idealized world. Hard work is required to redeem your people, to achieve this-worldly salvation.
* God is not mentioned in Esther. This does not excuse one from seeking goodness in the world. You’re not off the hook because you’ve wandered far from God and religion.
* In this Christian interview of Yoram Hazony, every question but one is about God. God can become a narcotic excusing you from taking action to change your life. A Hasidic rabbi once taught his followers that everything has a holy purpose in this world. His followers asked him about atheism. The rebbe replied that when you see a poor person, you should help as though there were no God to help him. You should take the responsibility of acting to do good.
* Casey: I like chapter 1 of Esther the best. I love how Xerxes handles his disobedient wife.
Okay… note last verse. All about Mordecai being honored for doing good by his people. Nothing about HaShem here.
Note that Xerxes isn’t a cuck, but in a sense, marrying a Jew is effectively a cucking–he basically hands over his kingdom.
Mordecai seems like a total snake to me. He just sits around on his ass rudely not honoring the state hierarchy… it’s a classic case of sycophantism.
End of chapter 8 is all about people becoming so afraid of Jews because of these decrees that they start converting. Sad!
Jewish supremacy in Esther 3:2 — all have to kneel except the Jews?
* Dennis Prager & Robert P. George: A Jewish Christian Dialogue; Religion, Culture, and Politics
Dennis said: “In Philadelphia about five years ago, there was a very large audience. I began by saying, ‘I just want to thank WNTP, my local affiliate here in Philadelphia, AM 980.’ And about a thousand people yelled out, ‘990!’ And I said, ‘I’m Jewish. I can get it for you for 980.'”
* Professor Albert S. Lindemann writes in his book Anti-Semitism Before the Holocaust:
“Haman offers a more engaging model from a modern standpoint, in part because the Book of Esther leaves God or divine purposes out of the picture. In that book we encounter tribalism, inherited hatred requiring no immediate or palpable cause, as the reason Haman plotted to murder Jews. Still, there is also the fact that Mordecai insulted Haman in a flagrant and apparently unprovoked way — starting things, as it were — and making Haman’s anger understandable. Mordecai’s motives for the insult remain obscure but ostensibly also reflected tribalistic attitudes. Further complicating matters, the Jewish people in the Book of Esther lead a shadowy existence, lacking any notable moral dimensions, any clearly asserted association with the one true god and his superior morality. Haman denounces the difference, and it is not immediately obvious from the bare text why Mordecai and his tribe should be ranked morally above Haman and his or any others in the kingdom. A reader who is innocent of the symbolic significance of the links of Mordecai to Saul and Haman to Amalek might well see the tale as an all too familiar one of two tribes seething with inherited hatred and ready to murder one another on the slightest pretext. Such a reader might even conclude that the Jews, by ostensibly refusing to respect the laws of the state (we are not told which laws are at issue or how they were being disobeyed), were the kind of disloyal or subversive element that any ruler must view with suspicion.”
* As a Jew, I like to see Jews as a tiny but holy people embodying God in the world and oft-persecuted for doing just that.
I converted to Judaism in 1993 after several years of study. One of the books that most influenced me was Why The Jews: The Reason For Antisemitism by Dennis Prager and Joseph Telushkin.
From the bestselling authors of The Nine Questions People Ask About Judaism, a compelling discussion of the dangerous rise in antisemitism during the twenty-first century.
The very word Jew continues to arouse passions as does no other religious, national, or political name. Why have Jews been the object of the most enduring and universal hatred in history? Why did Hitler consider murdering Jews more important than winning World War II? Why has the United Nations devoted more time to tiny Israel than to any other nation on earth?
In this seminal study, Dennis Prager and Joseph Telushkin attempt to uncover and understand the roots of antisemitism—from the ancient world to the Holocaust to the current crisis in the Middle East. Why the Jews? offers new insights and unparalleled perspectives on some of the most recent, pressing developments in the contemporary world, including:
-The replicating of Nazi antisemitism in the Arab world
-The pervasive anti-Zionism/antisemitism on university campuses
-The rise of antisemitism in Europe
-Why the United States and Israel are linked in the minds of antisemitesHatred of the Jew has been humanity’s greatest hatred. While hatred of other groups has always existed, no hatred has been as universal, as deep, or as permanent as antisemitism.
The Jews have been objects of hatred in pagan, religious, and secular societies. Fascists have accused them of being Communists, and Communists have branded them capitalists. Jews who live in non-Jewish societies have been accused of having dual loyalties, while Jews who live in the Jewish state have been condemned as “racists.” Poor Jews are bullied, and rich Jews are resented. Jews have been branded as both rootless cosmopolitans and ethnic chauvinists. Jews who assimilate have been called a “fifth column,” while those who stay together spark hatred for remaining separate. Hundreds of millions of people have believed (and in the Arab world many still do) that Jews drink the blood of non-Jews, that they cause plagues and poison wells, that they secretly plot to conquer the world, and that they murdered God.
The universality of antisemitism is attested to by innumerable facts, the most dramatic being that Jews have been expelled from so many of the European and Arab societies in which they have resided. Jews were expelled from England in 1290, France in 1306 and 1394, Hungary between 1349 and 1360, Austria in 1421, numerous localities in Germany between the fourteenth and sixteenth centuries, Lithuania in 1445 and 1495, Spain in 1492, Portugal in 1497, and Bohemia and Moravia in 1744-45. Between the fifteenth century and 1772, Jews were not allowed into Russia; when finally admitted there, they were restricted to one area, the Pale of Settlement. Between 1948 and 1967, nearly all the Jews of Algeria, Egypt, Iraq, Syria, and Yemen fled these countries, fearing for their lives.
The depth of antisemitism is evidenced by the frequency with which hostility against Jews has gone far beyond discrimination and erupted into sustained violence. In most societies in which Jews have lived, they have at some time been subjected to beatings, torture, and murder solely because they were Jews. In the Russian Empire during the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, mass beatings and murders of Jews were so common that a word, pogrom, was coined to describe such incidents. And these pogroms were viewed by their antisemitic perpetrators as being of such significance that they were equated with the saving of Russia.
On a number of occasions even beating and murdering Jewish communities was not deemed sufficient. Antisemitic passions have run so deep that only the actual annihilation of the Jewish people could solve what came to be called by antisemites the “Jewish Problem.” The basic source of ancient Jewish history, the Bible, depicts two attempts to destroy the Jewish people, that by Pharaoh and the Egyptians (Exodus 1:15-22) and that of Haman and the Persians (book of Esther). While it is true that the historicity of these biblical accounts has not been proven or disproven by nonbiblical sources, few would dispute the supposition that in ancient times attempts were made to destroy the Jews. Indeed, the first recorded reference to Jews in non-Jewish sources, the Mernephta stele, written by an Egyptian king about 1220 B.C.E., states, “Israel is no more.”
Jewish writings from the earliest times until the present are replete with references to attempts by non-Jews to destroy the Jewish people. Psalm 83:5 describes the enemies of the Jews as proponents of genocide: “Come, and let us cut them off from being a nation, that the Name of Israel may no more be remembered.” Just how precarious Jews have viewed their survival is reflected in a statement from the ancient, and annually recited, Passover Haggadah; “In every generation they rise against us in order to annihilate us.”
On three occasions during the last 350 years, annihilation campaigns have been waged against the Jews: the Chmelnitzky massacres in eastern Europe in 1648-49, the Nazi German destruction of Jews throughout Europe between 1939 and 1945, and the attempt to eradicate the Jewish state by its enemies.
For various reasons, the Chmelnitzky massacres are today not well known among Jews and are virtually unknown among non-Jews; perhaps the Holocaust tends to overshadow all previous Jewish suffering. Yet without denying the unique aspects of the Nazi Holocaust, there are a number of significant similarities between it and the Chmelnitzky massacres. In both instances, all Jews, including infants, were targeted for murder; the general populaces nearly always joined in the attacks; and the torture and degradation of Jews were an integral part of the murderers’ procedures. These characteristics are evidenced by the following contemporaneous description of a typical Chmelnitzky massacre:
Some of [the Jews] had their skins flayed off them and their flesh was flung to the dogs. The hands and feet of others were cut off and they were flung onto the roadway where carts ran over them and they were trodden underfoot by horse….And many were buried alive. Children were slaughtered in their mothers’ bosoms and many children were torn apart like fish. They ripped up the bellies of pregnant women, took out the unborn children, and flung them in their faces. They tore open the bellies of some of them and placed a living cat within the belly and left them alive thus, first cutting off their hands so that they should not be able to take the living cat out of the belly…and there was never an unnatural death in the world that they did not inflict upon them.
The permanence (as well as depth) of antisemitism is attested to by the obsessive attention given to the “Jewish Problem” by antisemites throughout history. At one time or another nearly every major country that has had a large Jewish population has regarded this group, which never constituted more than a small percentage of its population, as an enemy. To the Roman Empire in the first century, the European Christian world for over fifteen centuries, the Nazi Reich, the Soviet Union, and to the Arabs and much of the Muslim world, the Jews have been or are regarded as an insufferable threat.
Jews have been perceived as so dangerous that even after their expulsion or destruction, hatred and fear of them remain. The depiction of Jews as ritual murderers of young Christian children in Chaucer’s “Prioress’s Tale” in The Canterbury Tales one hundred years after all Jews had been expelled from England attests to the durability of antisemitism. So does the characterization of Jews as usurers who wish to collect their interest in flesh in Shakespeare’s The Merchant of Venice, three hundred years after the Jews’ expulsion. A more recent example was Poland in 1968, when for months the greatest issue for Polish radio, television, and newspapers was the “Unmasking of Zionists in Poland.” Of the thirty-three million citizens of Poland in 1968, the Jews numbered about twenty thousand or less than one-fifteenth of 1 percent.
How are the universality, depth, and permanence of antisemitism to be explained? Why such hatred and fear of a people who never constituted more than a small minority among those who most hated and feared them? Why, nearly always and nearly everywhere, the Jews?
Many answers have been offered by scholars. These include, most commonly, economic factors, the need for scapegoats, ethnic hatred, xenophobia, resentment of Jewish affluence and professional success, and religious bigotry. But ultimately these answers do not explain antisemitism; they only explain what factors have exacerbated it and caused it to erupt in a given circumstance. None accounts for the universality, depth, and persistence of antisemitism. In fact, we have encountered virtually no study of this phenomenon that even attempts to offer a universal explanation of Jew-hatred. Nearly every study of antisemitism consists almost solely of historical narrative, thus seeming to indicate that no universal reason for antisemitism exists.
We reject this approach. To ignore or deny that there is an ultimate cause for antisemitism contradicts both common sense and history. Antisemitism has existed too long, and in too many disparate cultures, to ignore the problem of ultimate cause and/or to claim that new or indigenous factors are responsible every time it erupts. Factors specific to a given society help account for the manner or time in which antisemitism erupts. But they do not explain its genesis — why antisemitism at all? To cite but one example: the depressed economy in Germany in the 1920s and 1930s helps to explain why and when the Nazis came to power, but it does not explain why Nazis hated Jews, let alone why they wanted to murder every Jew. Economic depressions do not explain gas chambers.
The very consistency of the passions Jews have aroused demands a consistent explanation. Ancient Egyptians, Greeks, and Romans, medieval and many modern Christians and Muslims, and Nazis and Communists have perhaps only one thing in common: they have all, at some point, counted the Jews as their enemy, often their greatest enemy. Why?
Among Jews, this question has been posed only in the modern era. Until the modern age, Jews never asked, “Why the Jews?” They knew why. Throughout their history, Jews have regarded Jew-hatred as an inevitable consequence of their Jewishness. Contrary to modern understandings of antisemitism, the age-old Jewish understanding of antisemitism does posit a universal explanation for Jew-hatred: Judaism, meaning the Jews’ God, laws, peoplehood, and claim to being chosen. The historical record, as we shall show, confirms the traditional Jewish view that the Jews were hated because of Jewish factors. Modern attempts to dejudaize Jew-hatred, to attribute it to economic, social, and political factors, and universalize it into merely another instance of bigotry, are as opposed to the facts of Jewish history as they are to the historical Jewish understanding of antisemitism.
Antisemites have not hated Jews because Jews are affluent — poor Jews have always been as hated; or strong — weak Jews have simply invited antisemitic bullies; or because Jews may have unpleasant personalities — genocide is not personality-generated; or because ruling classes focus worker discontent onto Jews — precapitalist and noncapitalist societies such as the former Soviet Union, other Communist states, and various Third World countries, have been considerably more antisemitic than capitalist societies. Antisemites have hated Jews because Jews are Jewish. Christian antisemites ceased hating rich Jews when they became Christians. Muslim antisemites embrace Jews who convert to Islam. The same has held true for virtually all other antisemites except the Nazis, whom we shall discuss later.
What about Judaism has provoked anti-Jewish hostility? There are four answers.
1. For thousands of years Judaism has consisted of four components: God, Torah, Israel, and Chosenness; that is, the God introduced by the Jews, Jewish laws, Jewish peoplehood, and the belief that the Jews are God’s chosen people. Jews’ allegiance to any of these components has been a major source of antisemitism because it not only rendered the Jew an outsider, but more important, it has often been regarded by non-Jews as challenging the validity of their god(s), law(s), national allegiance, and/or national worth.
By affirming what they considered to be the one and only God of all humankind, thereby implying illegitimacy to everyone else’s gods, the Jews entered history — and have often been since — at war with other people’s most cherished beliefs. The antisemites also hated the Jews because the Jews lived by their own all-encompassing set of laws. And because the Jews also asserted their own national identity, Jews intensified antisemitic passions among those who viewed this identity as threatening their own nationalism.
2. As if the above were not enough, Judaism has also held from the earliest times that the Jews were chosen by God to achieve this mission of bringing the world to God and His moral law (i.e., ethical monotheism). This doctrine of the Jews’ divine election has been a major cause of antisemitism.
3. From its earliest days, the raison d’être of Judaism has been to change the world for the better (in the words of an ancient Jewish prayer recited daily, “to repair the world under the rule of God”). This attempt to change the world, to challenge the gods, religious or secular, of the societies around them, and to make moral demands upon others (even when not done expressly in the name of Judaism) has constantly been a source of tension.
4. As a result of the Jews’ commitment to Judaism, they have led higher-quality lives than their non-Jewish neighbors in almost every society where they have lived. For example, Jews have nearly always been better educated; Jewish family life has usually been more stable; Jews aided one another more than their non-Jewish neighbors aided each other; and Jewish men have been less likely to become drunk, beat their wives, or abandon their children. As a result of these factors, the quality of life of the average Jew, no matter how poor, was higher than that of a comparable non-Jew in the same society (see Chapter 4).
This higher quality of life among Jews, which, as we shall show, directly results from Judaism, has, as one would expect, provoked profound envy and hostility among many non-Jews.
Since Judaism is the root cause of antisemitism, Jews, unlike victims of racial or ethnic prejudice, could in almost every instance of antisemitism, except Nazism, escape persecution. For thousands of years and until today, Jews who abandoned their Jewish identity and assumed the majority’s religious and national identity were no longer persecuted.
For these reasons, Jews have always regarded antisemitism as a response, however immoral, to Judaism. Thus, most Jews until the modern era, and most religious Jews to this day, would describe Jews murdered by antisemites not as victims of ethnic prejudice but as having died al kiddush hashem, that is, as martyrs sanctifying the name of God before the world.
Once one understands why Judaism has precipitated antisemitism, the unique universality, depth, and permanence of Jew-hatred also become understandable. It takes infinitely more than economic tensions or racial prejudice to create the animosity that often has involved the torturing of children and the murdering of entire communities. Only a people representing a threat to the core values, allegiances, and beliefs of others could arouse such universal, deep, and lasting hatred.
That is why totalitarian regimes, secular and religious, inevitably are antisemitic. Totalitarian regimes by definition aim to control the totality of their citizens’ lives and can therefore tolerate no uncontrolled religious or national expressions, both of which are part of Judaism. Once the Jewish roots of antisemitism are recognized, the only solutions to the “Jewish Problem,” as far as antisemites are concerned, are obvious. The Jews must either convert, be expelled, or murdered. In the 1880s, the Russian czar’s procurator of the Holy Synod and architect of Russian government policy at the time, Constantine Pobedonostev, is said to have offered precisely this advice: One-third of the Jews living in the Russian Empire should be converted to Christianity, one-third should be expelled, and one-third should be put to death.
In fact, for the last two thousand years, this has repeatedly been the chronological order of antisemitic acts. First, attempts would be made to convert the Jews. When the Jews refused, they were often expelled. And when even expulsion failed to solve the “Jewish Problem,” there remained one “Final Solution,” which is precisely the name the Nazis gave to their plan to annihilate the Jews.
It is also clear that antisemitism is not ethnic or racial prejudice, though it obviously shares certain features with them. Haters of Jews persecuted them for the same reasons Romans persecuted Christians, Nazis tortured members of the Resistance, and Communist regimes imprison dissidents. In each instance, the group is persecuted because its different beliefs represent a threat to the persecuting group. This hatred must be understood as being very different from a racial or ethnic prejudice. Blacks in America, for example, have been discriminated against because of the physical fact of their blackness, not because of specific black ideas or beliefs. Hatred of blacks is racial prejudice. Blacks cannot stop being black. But in dictatorships, dissidents can stop being dissenters, and a Jew has always been able to, and in general still can, stop being a Jew.
Even the major exception to this rule, Nazi antisemitism, confirms the Jewish basis of antisemitism. The Nazis simply maintained that Jews could never really become non-Jews. They believed that no matter how much Jews may consciously attempt to appear and behave like non-Jews, they nevertheless retain the values of Judaism. Nazi anti-Jewish “racism” emanated from a hatred of Judaism and what Jews represent. Nazi racism is ex post facto; first came the antisemitism, then came the racist doctrine to explain it.
Antisemitism is, therefore, as Jews have always regarded it: a response to Jews. The charges often made by antisemites — that Jews poison wells, drink human blood, plot to take over the world’s governments, or control world finance — are hallucinatory. But the roots of antisemitism are not. The real reasons antisemites hate Jews and the accusations they make against them are rarely the same. This is hardly uncommon. When people harbor hatreds, individually or communally, they rarely articulate rationally the reasons for their hatred.
We should not be so naive as to regard all antisemitic accusations as the reasons for the antisemitism. For example, the modern belief that economic factors cause antisemitism, besides confusing exacerbating factors with causes, grants the accusations of antisemites far too much credence. It is analogous to the efforts of some fine historians to determine the historical accuracy of the Christian claim that the Jews killed Jesus, because Christian antisemites called Jews “Christ killers,” as if proving one way or another would have ended Christian antisemitism. It is also analogous to the tireless efforts of other fine historians to decipher the exact number and circumstances of Arabs displaced during the founding of Israel, as if those who single out Israel from all other countries to support efforts to destroy it do so because six hundred thousand Arab refugees were created in 1948.
The questions for those wishing to understand the roots of antisemitism are not whether some Jews helped execute a fellow Jew two thousand years ago, or how great a role Jews played in the German economy, or how many Arabs fled Israel in 1948. The questions are why, to begin with, people hate Jews, and then invent reasons to do so.
This was an intoxicating vision — Jews are persecuted for being God’s representatives on earth.
Then I gradually saw rational reasons why Jews were hated. The Jew was everywhere a stranger and nobody likes strangers, to quote Mark Twain. Jews were disproportionate in every form of insanity I saw infecting the West (communism, socialism, feminism, pornography, gangster rap, Hollywood, decay in moral standards, etc) in addition to having a disproportionate role in good things in America (scholarship, excellence, entrepreneurship).
Also, I encountered many Jews running scams. I encountered Jews who had no shame about committing various forms of cheating and theft. I came to understand why some of the world views the word “Jew” as synonymous with dishonesty in business (though it seems to me that Jews are not more dishonest than other people of Middle Eastern origin, and they are considerably more law-abiding and honest than Chinese and Africans).
So I kept reading and looking at the world and eventually I was able to understand why nationalists often view themselves as an oppressed minority, oppressed, at times, by powerful Jews.
I guess every nationalism contains a victimology, every victimology contains a nationalism and every nationalism contains the capacity for genocide. Different groups have different interests and they are usually competing for scarce resources.
A Jewish friend says:
I read Why the Jews and I thought it was such a poorly written piece of selective facts to argue a specific point of view I couldn’t believe anyone took it seriously, except Jews who want to reinforce their persecution complex.
What Prager and Teluskhin absolutely failed to deal with how such a despised minority acquired so much power and wealth.
I remember reading some Rabbi’s sermon in which he explained that all countries which exhibited hostility toward Jews suffered as a result. I don’t know about that. After the Spanish expelled the Jews in 1492, Spain became the wealthiest and most powerful empire in the world for the next three hundred years and retained significant power and clout until the Spanish American War at the end of the 19th Century.
I think for someone who knows little of Jewish history and less of Jewish Gentile relations and history, the book if the facts are taken as true, paints Jews in a heroic light, holding onto their one true religion, wanting nothing more than to be left in peace to recite their prayers and study Torah and Talmud, except for those irrational haters surrounding them.
One of the other great myths about Jewish immigration around the turn of the century is that Jews came to America to avoid persecution. In fact whether the societies they came from were anti semitic in one degree or another, the Jews came for economic reasons. No Jewish institute of learning, and there were many especially in Lithuania, relocated to the United States.
Polish Jews who we often see in the shtetl photographs of Roman Vishniak were actually up to the start of WWII mostly urban with Jews forming huge neighborhoods (not ghettos) in Polish cities, especially Lodz and Warsaw, many of them despite living in an officially anti semitic regime with strict quotas for Jews at universities quite wealthy.
It is so easy to conflate the efficient and lethal official anti Semitism of Nazi Germany, with the folk anti Semitism in Roman Catholic and most Eastern Orthodox countries, and the official anti Semitism practiced in pre-communist Russia and in interwar Poland, and the Baltic States. Jews could and did thrive in these countries despite the folk and institutional anti Semitism.
* Every nationalism contains a victimology and every victimology a nationalism.
From the RCA Artscroll Siddur (Jewish prayer book): The Torah commands that six events be remembered always. Consequently, some authorities maintain that the verses containing these commandments should be recited daily. #3 REMEMBRANCE OF AMALEK’S ATTACK (Deuteronomy 25:17-19): “Remember what Amalek did to you on the way, as you departed from Egypt, How he encountered you on the way and cut down the weaklings trailing behind you, while you were faint and exhausted, and he did not fear God. It shall be that when HaShem, your God, lets you rest from your surrounding enemies, in the land that HaShem, your God, gives you as a heritage to bequeath; you are to erase the memory of Amalek from beneath the heaven. Do not forget.”
When Jewish groups campaign for laws against hate speech, is banning this sort of thing what they have in mind?
How is wishing the complete erasure of a group of people not a call for genocide? Why stir up hatred against a people for something their ancestors did?
I put “Amalek Palestinians” into Google and got 42,000 results. “Amalek” is a flexible term that Jews can use on their enemies.
I have no problem with this. I have no objection to Judaism. I have no objection to Jewish texts that say negative things about Jews and non-Jews. I have no objection to Judaism commanding us to wish every day to wipe out Amalek. My objection is when Jewish groups campaign to ban racial and religious vilification but never consider applying these rules to their own group. This is why I started Jews for Consistency, a group dedicated to monitoring Jewish groups to make sure they never seek for non-Jews anything different from what they seek for themselves.
Tonight at the Passover seder I’m going to get a good chuckle over the deaths of thousands of Egyptian first born (even as I dip ten drops of wine in sympathy for their loss) because that’s what all strongly identifying in-groups do — celebrate the destruction of their enemies.
As an Orthodox friend comments about Haman from the book of Esther:
Let’s be honest for a sec.
He’s called “Haman Ha’Agagi”, right? That’s because he was a descendant of Agag, the king of the Amalekites who Shaul let live after conducting a genocide in which he attempted to kill all Amalekite men, women, and children. Still with me? Good.
Here’s the thing. Every single day in our prayers, Jews reaffirm our biblical obligation to “Wipe out Amalek from under the heavens”.
Every. Single. Day.
It’s clear that Haman was merely acting in self defense against an aggressor who’d already almost succeeded in killing off his entire ancestral people and stated publicly, every single day without fail for centuries, their intent to do it again and succeed. Right?
My friend Chaim Amalek says: “I always feel a bit nervous around especially joyous yom tovim like pesach and purim, as that is when Yidden are most apt to talk about killing me.
“I can think of no more self-defeating way for the memory and name of Amalek to be erased than by memorializing it in the Torah itself.
“The only way to erase Amalek from daily discourse is by excising it from the Torah itself. Of course, once you start doing that, who can say where the excisions stop? Maybe by putting the name ‘Amalek’ in the Torah and then repeatedly telling us to wipe out the memory of Amalek, Hashem was slyly commanding us to get rid of Torah altogether. That’s what my Rav thinks.”
The Nazis and Adolf Hitler have been referred to as Amalekites.[19]
A prominent 19th and early 20th century rabbi, Rabbi Yosef Chaim Sonnenfeld, claimed upon Kaiser Wilhelm’s visit to Palestine in 1898, three decades before Hitler’s rise to power, he had a tradition from his teachers that the Germans are descended from the ancient Amalekites.[20]
Samuel’s words to Agag: “As your sword bereaved women, so will your mother be bereaved among women.” (Samuel 1:15:33) were quoted by Israeli President Itzhak Ben-Zvi in his handwriting in response to a telegram sent by Nazi war criminal Adolf Eichmann‘s wife pleading for clemency after he was taken to Israel and sentenced to death.[21][22]
According to the Hebrew Bible, Amalek lived in Canaan:”Amalek dwells in the land of the Negev” (Numbers 13:29). The Israelites were instructed to kill all those who dwelled in Canaan: “thou shalt save alive nothing that breathes” (Deuteronomy 19:16) otherwise “it shall come to pass, that I shall do to you, as I thought to do to them” (Numbers 33:56). The Hebrew Bible ascribes Haman, who tried to commit a genocide of the Jewish people, to Agag, whom the Israelites, led by Saul, failed to kill. According to these verses Hitler may be seen as a result of this failure.
Palestinians as Amalekites[edit]
Nur Masalha has written that:
“Frequently Jewish fundamentalists refer to the Palestinians as the ‘Amalekites’ … of today… According to the Old Testament, the Amalek … were regarded as the Israelites’ inveterate foe, whose ‘annihilation’ became a sacred duty and against whom war should be waged until their ‘memory be blotted out’ forever (Ex 17:16; Deut 25:17-19)…. Some of the [modern] political messianics insist on giving the biblical commandment to ‘blot out the memory of the Amalek’ an actual contemporary relevance in the conflict between the Israelis and Palestinians.[23]
The Palestinians have been associated with Amalek since 1974 when Rabbi Moshe Ben-Tzion Ishbezari of Ramat Gan made the association in a book.[24] The equation began to circulate in Gush Emunim circles, and its full implications were spelled out by Rabbi Yisrael Hess in 1980.[25] A former campus rabbi of Bar-Ilan University, Hess published in the university’s student paper in February 1980 an article on “The Genocide Commandment in the Torah”,[26] in which he concluded that:
‘The day is not far when we shall be called to this holy war, to this commandment of the annihilation of Amalek.’
Hess’s reference to Amalekites was later taken in Israel to be an allusion to the Palestinian Arabs, especially since he spoke of a jihad.
‘Against this holy war God declares a counter jihad . .in order to emphasise that this is the background for the annihilation and that it is over this that the war is being waged and that it is not a conflict between two peoples. . God is not content that we annihilate Amalek -‘blot out the memory of Amalek’ – he also enlists personally in this war . .because, as has been said, he has a personal interest in this matter, this is the principal aim.’[27]
In 1982 Danny Rubinstein, in his book On the Lord’s Side argued that this notion permeates the Gush Emunim movement’s bulletins, citing one such article on ‘The Right to Hate’ which affiremed:-
‘In every generation there is an Amalek. The Amalekism of our generation finds expression in the deep Arab hatred towards our national revival in our forefathers’ land.’
In 1985 Uriel Tal, in his Foundations of a Political Messianic Trend in Israel,[28] argued that Hess’s position is to be contextualised within a totalitarian messianic force, whose process he summed up as follows.
- Palestinians in the Occupied Territories were to be reduced to the halakhic status of resident alien.
- The promotion of Arab ‘transfer’
- The implementation of the commandment of Amalek, involving the ‘annihilation’ of Palestinian Arabs.[29]
Ron Geaves[30] also writes that ‘in settler circles, the Palestinians are likely to be identified with the Amalekites’, and citing the same pamphlet from the campus rabbi attached to Bar-Ilan University, adds that the message is passed on through ‘the religious schools where boys are taught that the Arab is Amalek.’ After Baruch Goldstein‘s massacre of Palestinians at the Mosque in Hebron, Rabbi Arthur Waskow argued that Goldstein had decided to ‘blot out the memory of Amalek’ by machine-gunning the Palestinian worshippers, and commented:
So then, in our generation, for some Jews the Palestinians become Amalek. Some Palestinians are terrorists? Some Palestinians call publicly for the State of Israel to be shattered? The archetypes of fear slide into place: all Palestinians are Amalek. And the fantasies of the powerless become the actions of the powerful. For in our generation, Jews have power.’[31]
After the death of Yassir Arafat, a declaration was issued by 200 rabbis of Pikuach Nefesh asserting that the anniversary of the death of ‘this Amalek of our generation’ should be celebrated as ‘a day of rejoicing’.[32]
Zionists as Amalekites[edit]
The anti-Zionist Haredi rabbi Zalman Teitelbaum denounced the proposed draft of Haredi men by the Israel Defense Forces by saying “the Zionists came from the seed of Amalek. There has never been such a sect that caused so much damage to the Jewish people.”[33] A senior rabbi in Israel’s Shas party, Shalom Cohen, publicly labeled Religious Zionists as Amalek, but later clarified that his remarks were aimed only at The Jewish Home party, not all Religious Zionists.[34] Another rabbi associated with Shas, Shimon Badani, referred to Finance Minister Yair Lapid and The Jewish Home party as Amalek.[35]
The Neturei Karta are a Haredi group known for their radical opposition to the state of Israel and extreme wariness with regard to non-Haredi Jews. Historically, Neturei Karta equated Zionism with Amalek and Nazism.[36] For some Neturei Karta rabbis the very word ‘amalek’ is read in gematriya to mean ‘politics’, which in their view is something pious Jews should never engage in, since politics for them constitutes galut, or exile.[37]
See also[edit]
- Herem (war or property)
- Judaism and violence
- New Chronology (Rohl)
FROM THE JERUSALEM POST MAY 18, 2014:
A rabbi at the prestigious haredi Mir Yeshiva in Jerusalem told students recently that the government is comparable to the Jewish people’s ancient enemy the Amalekites and that government officials should in theory be killed.
In March, Rabbi Nissan Kaplan was discussing the special Bible reading relating to the Amalekites and noted that Rabbi Aharon Leib Shteinman, the leader of the non-hassidic haredi (ultra-Orthodox) world, had said that the current government should be considered to be Amalekites.
“On Shabbat I spoke to my kids, and I said that Rabbi Shteinman spoke and said ‘practically speaking we have today Haman, Amalek, all of this government, and the way is to take knives and to kill them, like with the [ancient] Greeks,’” Kaplan said.
“So why aren’t we doing it? Because, he said, ‘I don’t know who the general is to run the war. If I would know who is the general we’d go out with knives.’ This is what Rabbi Shteinman said. There’s a war on religion.”
“I was talking with my kids, they were saying, Daddy, maybe you should be the general. My kid, six-years-old, tells me, ‘we don’t have swords in the house, maybe a hammer is also good?’ I was very happy, I gave him a kiss,” Kaplan said.
Speaking to The Jerusalem Post, Kaplan said he did not mean what he said and that his comparison of the government to Amalek and his comments that government officials should be killed was a mistake.
He added that he has given three lessons to his students in which he said his words were wrong and that he had not meant what he said.
“I am completely against such words, they’re disgusting. I regret what I said and I am deeply sorry for using such examples. I am also sorry for hurting people’s feelings and I hope they can forgive me.”
He also said he had never actually had the conversation with his child he mentioned in his lesson and that he had not met with Rabbi Shteinman for over six months.
Asked how he could say such things if he did not believe them, Kaplan said that “it is hard for me to answer, I really don’t know,” and suggested that he had been carried away joking with his students.
Rabbi Nathan Slifkin wrote in May 2014:
There is rhetoric about Amalek and suchlike coming from much bigger players than someone regarded as a young entertainer of harmless Americans. While Rav Steinman’s spokesman denied that he said what Rav Kaplan attributed to him, there are other reports of Rav Steinman describing Lapid as Amalek and saying that the government should suffer in hell and have their names erased. It is true that Rav Steinman has explicitly qualified such statements by noting that the way to battle Amalek is by learning more Torah, but it is still a wrong and dangerous way to talk. And remember that Rav Steinman is a moderate compared to the likes of the Eidah Charedis, Satmar and Rav Shmuel Auerbach! (They have described Rav Steinman himself as Amalek due to his being too moderate, and one deranged follower attacked and nearly killed Rav Steinman)! Then there’s Rabbi Shalom Cohen, the new rabbinic leader of Shas, saying that Jews who wear knitted kipot are Amalek – which he later clarified as “only” referring to the leaders of Bayit Yehudi and their supporters. Unlike with Rav Kaplan, these statements have not been retracted.
The headline of Rabbi Slifkin’s blog post is: “It’s Time To Erase Amalek – From Daily Discourse”
How can Amalek be erased from daily Jewish discourse when Judaism commands Jews to repeat every day that Amalek must be erased?
* Every major Jewish organization, including the Orthodox Union and Agudas Yisrael, supports immigration amnesty. Jewish groups were united in condemning Arizona’s SB1070 bill attempt to reduce illegal immigration. In other words, every major Jewish organization in the United States supports the destruction of the country I love by flooding it with migrants.
Rabbi Steven Burg is the new director general of Aish HaTorah. He worked at the OU (Orthodox Union) for 22 years. Then he worked for the Simon Wiesenthal Center. “Most recently, Rabbi Burg served as the Eastern Director of the Simon Wiesenthal Center, a global Jewish human rights organization that confronts anti-Semitism, hate and terrorism, promotes human rights and dignity, stands with Israel, and defends the safety of Jews worldwide.” (Link)
There’s nothing in Torah saying that Jews need to push for civil rights for goyim. There’s nothing in Torah saying that Jews need to push for more non-white immigration. Yet this is the universal stance of all major Jewish organizations in America. They all seek the opposite for non-Jews (diversity) of what they seek for Jews (cohesiveness).
Should I stand silent while these rabbis try to destroy my country?
Let us not confuse ordinary Jews (who have all sorts of views) with activist Jewish organizations. The author of a book on Jewish organizations in France makes the point: “Let us be explicit in that it is question here only of the LICRA and in no case of the French Jewish community, whose members represent all sensibilities, notably political. It would then be perfectly wrong, and false, to confuse the LICRA and the Jewish community.”
Why should any group be forced to absorb outsiders who are often hostile to them? I believe in Zionism for Jews and Mexican Zionism for Mexicans and Nigerian Zionism for Nigerians. Every people deserve a land where they can live without being disturbed by outsiders. Torah has no conception of non-Jewish citizenship for a Jewish state of Israel. Why should other countries be different?
Perhaps the Pharoah in Egypt 3300 years ago saw that the Israelites were going to destroy the cohesiveness of his country? Perhaps by enslaving them, he was only acting in Egypt’s best interests? Perhaps Haman saw the same problem and similarly acted rationally in his people’s best interests? Haman was perhaps descended from Amalek and Jews pray to obliterate Amalek every single day. Is that not hate speech?
The documentary Hollywoodism concludes with a statement by Douglas Rushkoff, author of Nothing Sacred: The Truth About Judaism: “The thing that makes Judaism dangerous to everybody, to every race, to every nation, to every idea, is that we smash things that aren’t true. We don’t believe in the boundaries of nation states, we don’t believe in these ideas of individual gods that protect individual people, these are all artificial constructions and Judaism really teaches us how to see that. In a sense, our detractors have us right in that we are a corrosive force, we’re breaking down the false gods of all nations and all people because they’re not real and that’s very upsetting to people.”
Jewish groups are slamming Arizona’s stringent new immigration-enforcement law and saying they hope outrage over the measure will reignite efforts to address comprehensive immigration reform on the national level.
“I believe that it has absolutely ignited a movement across this country for comprehensive immigration reform,” said Rep. Jan Schakowsky (D-Ill.), the daughter of Jewish immigrants, who is co-sponsoring a bill that would allow illegal immigrants to normalize their status. “You see people pouring out of their homes and into the streets and halls of government rejecting this notion of allowing our country to become a police state.”
Arizona Gov. Jan Brewer signed the Support Our Law Enforcement and Safe Neighborhoods Act into law last week, though the measure won’t go into effect for 90 days. It requires that police check the immigration status of anyone suspected of being an illegal immigrant, a tactic civil liberties groups say effectively mandates racial profiling.
Proponents of the law say the tough measures are necessary — given the federal government’s failure to act — to rescue the state from a flood of illegal immigrants from Mexico who they say sap taxpayer-funded programs and, in some cases, commit violent crimes. They also note that the Republican governor has issued an executive order establishing a training program on how to avoid racial profiling when implementing the new rules.
On April 26, following a weekend of protests, vandals smeared refried beans in the shape of swastikas on the windows of the Arizona State Capitol buildings, the Associated Press reported. More protests were being planned, including a vigil organized by the Jewish Council on Urban Affairs.
The new law has been criticized by an array of Jewish groups, including the Hebrew Immigrant Aid Society, Anti-Defamation League, American Jewish Committee, Simon Wiesenthal Center, National Council of Jewish Women and the Jewish Council for Public Affairs, a public policy umbrella group composed of the synagogue movements, several national groups and local Jewish communities across North America.
Gideon Aronoff, president and CEO of the Hebrew Immigrant Aid Society, said he is working with other Jewish organizations to draft a broad statement condemning the federal government’s failure to enact comprehensive reform.
“Are most of the Latinos who suffer from this law Jewish? The answer is no, but we look at this through the oral commandment of ‘welcome the stranger,’ ” Aronoff said. “We are all Americans, we are all our brothers’ keepers.”
Phoenix Mayor Phil Gordon, a Jewish Democrat, referred to the immigration bill as one that “nationally embarrasses Arizona” in an op-ed piece April 24 in the Washington Post.
Eight Reform rabbis in Arizona wrote a letter to Brewer urging the governor to veto the measure, calling it “an affront to American values of justice and our historic status as a nation of immigrants.”
Rabbi David Saperstein, director of the Religious Action Center of Reform Judaism, said in a statement that “allowing an individual’s accent or skin color to precipitate an investigation into his or her legal status is anathema to American values of justice and our historic status as a nation of immigrants. [It] is also likely to endanger our communities by discouraging immigrants from cooperating with law enforcement on issues of national security.”
Along similar lines, Rabbi Marvin Hier of the Wiesenthal Center issued a statement saying that “this law makes no sense — it guarantees and stigmatizes people of color as second-class citizens and exposes them to intimidation and the use of racial profiling as a weapon of bias.”
ATLANTIC CITY (Nov. 26)
An appeal to the 84th Congress to revise the McCarran-Walter Immigration Act was made last night by the Union of Orthodox Jewish Congregations of America at its national convention. The resolution also urged President Eisenhower to “affirm his leadership” in obtaining revocation of the act’s “discriminatory provisions.”
Representing traditional synagogues in the United States and Canada, the Orthodox Union said that the Act was “predicated upon the false assumption and vicious doctrine of the superiority of groups born in certain European countries and does violence to our American heritage and traditions. ” It charged that American moral leadership in world affairs “is open to challenge as long as a prejudiced origins-quota system constitutes the basis of our present immigration policy.
“In this tercentenary of Jewish settlement in America, ” the resolution asserted, “it is fitting that we do not lose sight of the fact that the greatness of our country is the product of the immigration of peoples of every race, color and creed.”
Mr. Green in the course of his remarks also touched on the immigration question indicating that his organization is seeking a way to eliminate the hardships resulting from the present immigration law through the separation of families. “We do not want families to be separated. We will do all that is possible that women and children may be reunited with their husbands and fathers and that Jewish families may be united in this country.
“Economic necessity has driven the American Federation of Labor to adopt a policy for restricted immigration,” Mr. Green continued. “We want to raise the standard of living of the American worker and this is possible only through a normal absorption of the newly arrived.
In the United States, more than 1,200 rabbis and cantors are taking time during the Jewish holiday season to urge Congress to pass a comprehensive immigration reform bill. Two-thirds (67 percent) of Jewish Americans favor a path to citizenship for immigrants currently living in the United States illegally.
* Why do they deny the Holocaust?
* Attachment theory. JSMITH: “Luke, tell your guest to watch some of Ross Rosenberg’s videos on this, he is at the tip of research on fixing one’s attachment issues.”