Here’s my article on why I don’t like Jabotinsky.

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As we have discussed in previous articles, the purpose of Zionism as a movement was not to provide a safe place for the Jewish people to live in. There were, it is true, Zionists who believed that it was, and some of them were even important at various stages, but, at the movement level, this was hashed out at the sixth and seventh Zionist Congresses where the orthodox Herzleans were marginalized. From then on, those whose primary concern was getting Jews out of harm’s way were confined to the fringes of the movement or left altogether. Zionism, after Herzl’s death, was not about safety, or at the very least not just about safety in the short to medium term, but about something else, namely bringing to an end the condition of the Jews as a stateless, wandering people in exile by bringing them home.

As to what the Jews should become once they had a state in their own land, there was a great diversity of opinion. One relatively minor strain, which has become increasingly common in recent years in the wake of inexorable demographic change brought about by differential birthrates, is the idea of a Jewish homeland in Israel as the vehicle for a religious revival, a place not to replace rabbinic Judaism, but to reinvigorate it, both by purging the corruptions and depredations of exile, and also by creating a truly pan-Jewish center of culture that contains all of its different branches, and thus can fully develop them into a greater whole.1 I recently came across this view expressed quite persuasively by Maia Zelkha in Yad Mizrah magazine.

Already, the identity of diaspora is fading away, whether we like it or not. Languages of exile are vanishing, and perhaps with the exception of Yiddish, will be gone within a single generation. My father’s first language, Iraqi Judeo-Arabic, was never transmitted to my generation. The same goes for my husband and his parents, who never knew or spoke Moroccan Arabic or Judeo-Malayalam. We each know a few words— his brother knows a song— but the languages are gone. The same is true for food, music, and rituals. They were already cultural fragments when we inherited them, and each generation becomes more fragmented.

…

And yet, for all their beauty, the traditions rooted in our diaspora can entrap us in an illusion. When we Jews shape our national self-perception through categories and differences, we fracture our collective soul and chain ourselves to the mental slavery of separation, superiority, judgement, racism, and ego. We’re not the first to experience it within the history of our peoplehood; even while enslaved in Egypt, not all Jews chose to leave when presented with liberation. They were too attached to the familiarity of Egyptian culture, routine, and society, even while under oppression. That said: a very real attachment to our diasporic identities still exists, perhaps because we cannot yet imagine what it means to be Jewish outside of them. That is for the next generations to imagine, because sooner or later, that will be their reality as Jewish cultural and ethnic distinctions fade into memory. A huge turning point in Jewish civilization is happening as we speak.

…

The great Rav Kook writes in Orot HaKodesh: “Just as this occurs in an individual, so it occurs with the nation as a whole: when the spirit of Israel gathers inward beautifully within its depths, it feels a supreme wholeness within itself.” That “gathering inward” doesn’t necessarily need to look miraculous; I think more realistically it looks like two Jews from vastly different regional and ethnic backgrounds falling in love and making babies. Rav Uziel, the first Sephardic Chief Rabbi of Israel, understood this clearly. He argues in Mishpetei Uziel that ethnic separation within the Jewish people was unnatural, even dangerous: “Just as we are commanded to be one unified body (agudah achat), we are also sternly warned: Do not make yourselves into separate factions — Lo ta’asu atzmechem agudot agudot.”

If that is true, then perhaps marriage and families that span across Jewish ethnic lines isn’t just a sociological transformation, but part of the slow, natural healing process of our remaining fractures of exile.

In a strange way, we move backwards as we move forward in our history, returning to a moment before our identities were split into Iraqi, Ashkenazi, Cochini, Moroccan, or Yemenite. The last time Jews lived together in one place, with a shared sense of peoplehood unmediated by exile, was before those divisions ever existed. The age of exile gave us extraordinary cultural diversity. But now begins a new transformation, one that we don’t have a name for now but that our children and grandchildren certainly will: the early formation of a post-diasporic— a truly post-diasporic— Jewish identity.

The view is attractive, and it’s not exactly wrong. Jewish civilization is turning a corner and there’s not much anyone can do to stop the process in which one dominant Jewish center composed out of all the others comes to increasingly dominate over the diaspora from which it grew. The problem is it sucks. The purpose of this article is to flesh out that claim, which I will do by comparing like with like, something that Israel simps never do. Some things I’ve already written about, some will be new. Let’s gooooooo!

Charedim

This part I don’t really need to explain. There’s an entire genre of Israeli discourse which is just ‘how can we get Charedim in Israel to be less messed up like the Charedim in America are?’. There are two aspects of this. The main one is the barmy idea that men not working so they can study all day should be the norm for an entire community of hundreds of thousands of people as it is among the yeshivish in Israel. The second one is just that a lot of Charedi neighbourhoods around here have litter everywhere, are dilapidated, and the inhabitants act as if they just don’t care at all about not resembling a bad bit of a third-world country. I was once on a bus from Jerusalem to Beitar Illit, and two chalmers with black hoisinzocken and big white cappelach got on and sat across the aisle from each other loudly schmoozing. That’s just normal in Israel, but what was not normal is that after five minutes the one on the right hocked up a big ball of phlegmy spit and then lobbed it into the middle. Then he did it again five minutes later, then again, then again; seven times in total. There in the aisle sat a puddle of the stuff, which everyone else had to step over because, y’know, the floor of a bus isn’t made of mud you disgusting retarded ape.

Anyhoos, like I say, we don’t have to justify the claim here, though Ash has a good compilation of Israeli Charedim acting like gutter trash in a way that is literally inconceivable anywhere in the diaspora if you’re interested. What I will point out, in passing, is that, as is generally typical, the normie Israeli perspective on this whole issue is diametrically wrong because it’s based on the idea that Charedim need to be made to integrate more into Israeli society. Precisely the problem is that Israeli Charedim are already much more integrated than Charedim are anywhere else in the world, as made most spectacularly evident during the Covid years when diaspora Charedim realized a few months in that it was ridiculous and made a big kiddush Hashem, showing everyone you could just ignore it and it was totally fine, while Israeli Charedim beclowned themselves with stuff like this:

There are three ways in which greater integration makes Charedim worse. The first is that when Charedim assimilate, they never pick up anything good from the surrounding culture, only bad things, and in Israel there are an awful lot of bad things to pick up. Charedim are exposed very little, if at all, to respectable middle-class Israelis, and so absorb the worst traits of the worst parts of the country. Secondly, the lower degree of cultural and practical day-to-day separation from the rest of society leads Israeli Charedim to double down on their ideology as a source of group identity, but their ideology is just a bit mad. In America, it’s OK because people don’t really believe it that much. It’s probably a good thing for your average Jewish businessman making bank to hear one or twice a week that it’s pointless trying to earn money and only learning Torah matters, but it’s definitely not good for some broke guy in Bnei Brak who spends 12 hours a day failing to learn gemara because he’s not smart to hear that over and over until he decides to up it to 14. Thirdly, their integration allows them to pursue a political strategy inconceivable in the diaspora, the harms of which do not need to be elaborated here.

Before we’ll close this section, it’s well to mention that, though the State of Israel gave the heirs of the Lithuanian yeshiva movement the ability to fulfil their dreams and create a cradle-to-grave education system of pure talmudic learning with no secular studies to impinge upon it (the system American Charedim profess to want if only the government would allow it), it completely fails even on its own terms. The Rosh Yeshiva of Chevron is American; the Rosh Yeshiva of Slabodka is American; the Rosh Yeshiva of Mir inherited the position but his father was American; the Rosh Yeshiva of Ateres Shlomo is American. All of them received an education that would be considered chazer treif in Israel, but it is they who are consistently front and center of the campaign against the draft because, despite none of them even being especially proficient in spoken Hebrew (their third language), they are nevertheless better equipped to stand up and say consecutive sentences than anyone else in the Israeli yeshiva world. Prominent Israeli Roshei Yeshiva are, excepting the ones who inherited their position, older than the system they preside over and so literally too decrepit to do much more than whisper. Hence their representatives are Yankees and sound like this:

Or like this

(The whole channel is … illuminating)

Lubavitch

Usually, when I rag on Chabad, someone will chime in that my perspective is distorted because I live in Israel. Well, yes, I live in Israel, but the point is valid enough. In America, the split is, if we’re charitable 40-60 meshichist non-mechichist (though, in fact, the latter group also believe MMS is or will be the moshiach).2 In Israel, it’s 80-20 at the very least. In most diaspora countries, it’s possible with a bit of artful lying to maintain plausible deniability for the ‘I love Chabad, but I reject their tiny minority of extremists’ line, but in Israel you have to be an exceptionally clueless Anglo dipstick to still say this. A neat indication of just how off the rails Israeli Chabad is, was a brawl that happened on Rosh haShanah in America’s center of idolatry and general weirdness, 770 Crown Heights. In the states, this is the stronghold of the extreme of the extreme, but in Israel they are considered moderates, allied with the old-school meshichist yeshiva of Tzfat. This more extreme faction, centred around the yeshiva in Rishon leTziyon are waging a (racially inflected) campaign to take over 770 from the ante-nicene meshichists, as part of which they affixed a picture of MMS on the aron before prayers. The old-school guys are still embarrassed about stuff like that and took it down, so the Israelis started throwing tables at them.

What is even worse is that the off-the-chain levels of extremism of Chabad in Israel are not compensated for by their being relatively marginalised. In fact, they are even more mainstream and accepted than in the diaspora. I remember in Jerusalem at the local park, each week on shabbos two shluchim would hand out sweets to neighbourhood children in return for saying various pesukim. Everyone let their children join in, seculars and religious and in between. They ended each time with יחי, which is bad enough, but one week a sub changed the nusach to (note well) יחי אדוננו אלהינו בוראנו מלך המשיח לעולם ועד, but obviously I’m the weirdo for objecting to this. Here’s another example that’s relevant mostly because I saw it this morning. There’s a relatively new YouTube channel by a guy called Tamir Dortal who people point to as evidence against the claim that right-wingers are illiterate subhumans. It’s very thoughtful and stuff. He talks to Ben Shapiro about how the right can fight against the Left-Wing media through alternative platforms, and they bond over judicial philosophy and not liking postmodernism (the other week he had a similar convo with Dave Rubin). Anyway, here’s what he put out for Gimmel Tamuz.

Abolish. This. Country. I want to smash up my computer now and walk away, but this article has barely got started.

Breslov

There’s not a whole bunch to add about Breslov that I didn’t write already. The difference between the cases of Breslov and Chabad is that, while Chabad outside Israel is still massive but less bad, Breslov outside Israel is barely a thing at all. If you don’t look for it, you won’t find it. Over here, it’s really impossible to overstate just how big Breslov is. Unless you live in a very elitist Charedi community, or a very elitist secular community, you really can’t escape one of the hundreds of branches of a movement that was universally condemned as an insane heresy even by all the other chassidim because it’s that bad. And it’s even worse now than it was then. How bad is Breslov?

Item: The most influential Breslov leader for two decades was Eliezer Berland, a man who declared himself God to his followers, taught that he was more righteous than Moshe Rabbeinu and present in the room at all times with those who believed, and who shagged dozens, maybe hundreds of other people’s wives, then, after getting out of clink, got his operation back off the ground by selling mentos and tic tacs as kabbalistic remedies for chronic disease.

Item: In Lod, a guy called Netanel Deri set up a Breslov branch and had a thriving community until he was arrested for multiple counts of sexual abuse against minors.

Item: Some French immigrant dude called Daniel Ambash set himself up as cult leader in Jerusalem and married a bunch of women. When he got pinched, allegations included locking children in cages, forcing them to eat faeces and mandatory intercourse with animals.

Item: A younger son of a prestigious Satmar-affiliated Rav in the States got depressed and found Breslev cheered him up. He set up a community in America, but realised Israel was way more fertile ground and eventually his followers turned up in a nice secular yishuv and started wrecking it. Unlike other Breslov leaders, he was basically on the level and not some crazed pervert, but the whole thing is nevertheless a big disaster. To stop all the feral children in his utopian community shagging and raping each other, he started having them get married off at 14, but then they just started wife swapping instead. There’s a whole documentary about sundry goings on.

Item: Yosef Shovali is the Breslov leader in Meron and also a medium-level YouTube influencer retard. Earlier, this year he got arrested too. It’s the usual menu, but apparently he’s more into men.

Item:

Then, of course, there’s the hilltop youth guys, who for many years now have all been Breslov with various degrees of Chabad admixture. They particularly like to do arson on Shabbos, because, don’t ask me, probably some wanker from Arutz 7 can explain how it’s pIKUACH nEFESH.

Zoharism

I’ve written a lot about Zoharism3 and I shall be writing more. When I do, I usually get an American telling me to chill out. “If you don’t like kabbalah, just don’t practice it; no-one’s forcing you”. I don’t think that’s really true even in America, but it is sort of true at a day-to-day level. Here it’s not. You can escape it, but it takes ongoing daily effort. Apart from the religious issues involved, this means - even leaving aside the Breslov guys - there’s always some Goel Ratzon hypnotizing women and forcing them to work for him. Even completely-secular [ALLEGED]4 rapist Likud-Knesset-member genocidal- freaks are somehow also members of New Age kabbalah cults.

bUT tHAT’S nOT rEAL kaBBALAH. OK, well does being a Rosh Yeshiva whose seforim have haskamos by two chief Rabbis of Israel plus R. Dov Lior and R. Yakov Ariel make you a real kabbalist? Because I have bad news for you.

Why, though, is Zoharism so much bigger in Israel than elsewhere? It’s actually really simple. Starting with the founder of the Hurva synagogue, the Sabbatean Yehuda heChassid, in 1697, there had already been two centuries of mystical aliyah by Zoharists before Pinsker and the gang got in on the act. Many of these were legit schizo maniacs and they were responsible for setting ‘minhag Eretz Yisroel’. As we have discussed from time to time, the Zionists were totally wrapped up in their own Russian world of dreams, resentments and internal torments, and put precious little thought into how to approach the existing inhabitants of Palestine until it was too late. This applied to the Jewish population no less than the Arab one. Tzfat was ethnically cleansed of its Arabs in 1948 (Mahmoud Abbas is famously sore about it), but, in retrospect, the whole cursed city should have been burned to the ground and mined so no-one could ever go there again. And not just there. There’s no good reason for Meron to exist. If you want to find out what the Zionist plan was though, to deal with all the madness before it grew like a cancer into something out of control, you’re flat out of luck. They just figured everyone would become a moshavnik by magic in a decade or two.

Gerrer Chassidim

The largest Chassidic sect in Poland was Gur, and they were known for being relatively intellectual and generally nice to other Jews within the broad orthodox umbrella, co-ordinating with German neo-orthodox professionals who knew how to balance the books to build the Agudas Yisrael. Today, outside of Israel, they are almost-normal Chassidim. They wear an inferior-looking version of a shtreimel called a spodik, they daven stupidly fast, and they tuck their regular trousers into regular socks, so they look a bit ridiculous. They also have a general reputation for being a bit too interested in tznius, and like to join miscellaneous school boards they have nothing particular to do with so they can measure wigs and skirts with a ruler. However, with that said, they’re OK. Don’t marry your daughter off to a Gerrer, but don’t freak out about having one for a neighbour.

Ger in Israel, however, are an evil and violent cult. The extent of this became clear a few years ago when R. Shaul Alter set up a breakaway Ger splinter trying to go back to the OG version, doing big numbers in fundraising in America, and establishing a few schools and yeshivos. Some parents decided to affiliate with the breakaway, but were still working out logistical issues, and one day their daughters didn’t come home after school. It eventually emerged that they were living in a ‘home for orphans’ run by the Gerer Rebbes’ wife. There’s an almost infinite list of weird messed up stuff going on in Ger and a hell of a lot that hasn’t come out yet because of the police state. Gerer Chassidim literally teach their children that, if you are in trouble, you should close your eyes and visualise the criminal head of their movement and you will be saved.5

This would be bad enough if Ger was just a successful religious movement, but, in fact, its leader has a personal fortune of roughly 250 million dollars and controls the Agudas Yisrael and so, in effect, has four MKs under his command, in particular Minister for Construction Goldknopf, perhaps the single most obnoxious advocate of the synthesis of dopey expansionist nationalism and fanatical hostility to the military draft. It almost goes without saying, at this point, that they are the most Israeli of all the Chassidic groups, having switched to speaking Hebrew in the 1950s.

Modern Orthodoxy

There are a lot more sections of this article I wanted to write when I started. A whole section on synagogue architecture, something about Carlebach, and, obviously, Kookism. But it’s getting late and I feel sick. I haven’t even mentioned Yitzchak Ginsburgh, Menachem Mendel Vizhnitz, the Yanuka, Abergel, or Yitzhak Shapira, but it’s too bad. I’ll close by saying two things. The first is that religious groups in Israel are good precisely in proportion to how much they don’t embrace a new Eretz-Yisrael form of Judaism. The best, obviously, are the Baladim, who do exactly what it says in the Tichlal neither a jot to the right or to the left and cannot be moved from this position by any argument or other form of inducement. The various runners up are different Ashkenazi and Sephardi groups who stick stubbornly to Moroccan or Lithuanian or Iraqi identity (even a substantially imagined one), with its poems, tunes, foods etc. For various obvious reasons, I don’t find the ideological position of any of these groups persuasive at all. My siddur is Nusah Eretz Yisrael. But facts are facts, and the fact is that if you want to have anything good in this country at scale, then you need to get on board with fighting obstinately and dogmatically for an exilic identity, the more obstinately exilic the better.

The other point I want to make is about Modern Orthodoxy, which is probably where you’d focus if you wanted to argue in favour of Israel. It’s no secret that Modern Orthodoxy in America and elsewhere is perpetually unstable, with a new crop of young idealists popping up every three years asking whether now can we have gay marriage? In that sense, things are better here, but there’s a catch. All of Modern Orthodoxy abroad is strongly Zionist, usually in a pretty over the top way. They aren’t actually Religious Zionists, though they think they are, because they have no clue what Religious Zionism is (spending a year in the Gush doesn’t count, in fact it’s actively misleading). What this means, though, is that, in every generation, the most committed and dedicated members of the community, those who would have been a good gabbai, leave for Israel. This would be, from a national perspective, fine if the talents and energies they would have put into community building abroad were spent doing the same here. Generally, though, that’s not so and they just kind of go to waste. Some deal with this by becoming terrorists in the West Bank, some by sitting in silent despair as their children go OTD one after another, reading books about loving your son no matter what, some by finding a nice bubble of ex-Charedim in Bet Shemesh and kidding themselves into believing that’s Religious Zionism. I begrudge no man his cope if it works, but the negative-sum parasitism of aliyah is something the Modern Orthodox should think about if they are serious about this whole ‘religion fit for literate people’ thing being viable.

5

Get a load of the worksheets in Ger schools paid for by the general taxpayer:

1. Esoteric Bibi-ism is true. There is no military solution to the predicament of Zionism just as there is no diplomatic solution to the predicament of Zionism. There are military solutions to specific problems just as there are diplomatic solutions to specific problems, and that’s it. Yes, in some sense, it is intolerable to have countries and/or paramilitaries in rocket-range that believe you shouldn’t exist, but tolerate it you will nevertheless have to do.

2. Israel is over-reliant on its airforce because it is extremely casualty averse; for that reason it can’t function as a military superpower even though in other respects its armed forces are pretty awesome. In fact, it can’t even act as a local enforcer.

   

   

   This leaves you with only two options (a) somehow stop being so casualty averse or (b) give up pretensions to being a military superpower. I’m not saying you have to choose (a), but I am saying you have to choose (a) or (b). There isn’t a third option where you just get to kill infinity civilians and it’s completely fine, and if someone tells you can, it is very long past time to stop paying any attention to them.

3. Speaking of which, this is an interesting video for a whole bunch of reasons, but the main one is the obvious:

   People like the guy on the left are not rare. They’re not a majority of Israelis, they are probably not even a majority of right-wing voters, but they are the core right-wing electorate. To call this magical thinking is technically accurate, but it underplays the profound sickness of the intellect exhibited here. These are people deep in a murderous and fantastical daydream irresponsibly allowed to fester for decades by the Israeli state and, with complete and total justice, an object of revulsion and disgust to all mankind. All who see them wag their heads. It’s important to be clear about this: disenfranchising these people is a life-and-death matter for the Israeli state. The mechanism for doing so used to be esoteric Bibi-ism and that’s fully spent, so now you need something new, and stat. This is not a joke or hyperbole at all. None of the guys on the centre/left have an answer to this because they are a joke.

4. Back when I did my first ever podcast, I was broadly sceptical of the claim that Hamas had done October 7th in order to thwart the expansion of the Abraham Accords, but it seems that it’s pretty much true. So Hamas won, and they won big since they’re on course to crash our relations not just in the region, but with humanity at large (see what I wrote here which is perhaps partially vindicated and partially not).

   

5. Bibi is almost certainly going to lose the election now. I think Otzma will get a boost too. However, I think the center will regret winning these elections. A lot of bills have been racked up by this government and will shortly come due. When they do, we will talk ourselves into believing we were this close to regional hegemony if only we’d kept pushing. The great thing about military Zionism is that, no matter how much it fails, you can always explain it away on the grounds that we weren’t militaristic enough. You can always kill more civilians, you can always attack more countries, you can always send Breslov terrorists to seize one more hilltop. It’s forever possible to retard-max just that little bit extra. Every failure to convert the success of the IAF and Mossad into strategic advantage is met with ever more frantic antiquarian appeals to the Oslo Accords or to insufficient barbarity in 1948, in a way that makes American libs’ obsession with redlining and Emmett Till look reasonable. The only circumstances under which they’ll admit that ‘yes, we tried it our way, and it didn’t work’ are circumstances under which we’d all be dead. I call this the anthropic principle of Israeli rightoidism, a concept you might consider adding to your arsenal alongside blood libel parallax and the law of merited ethnic cleansing.

6. There are two whitepills. The first is that the medium-term impact of the war will be to increase investment in infrastructure for the production of and transport of oil and gas around the world, as well as to accelerate diversification with renewables. Iran played the Hormuz Strait option well, but actually it wasn’t all that bad. It was bad, but not anything remotely like as bad as it would have been even 10 years ago. If they play it again, it will be even less of a big deal, and eventually it won’t be a big deal at all. Iran is still a crap country, without even the ability to consistently provide water to urban centers, with 77% inflation, an economy in advancing collapse and multiple secessionist movements, whose average IQ sucks, and whose smart fraction substantially lives in California and cheers when the country is bombed. Things look grim right now, but this is the peak of Iran’s power unless someone comes in to buttress it. If Israel plays its cards OK, it will still win the generational war. The second, connected, whitepill is that, as well as eroding the ability of Iran to hold the world hostage, the inexorable decline of the Middle East as a proportion of the world’s energy supply will mean that, one day, most people around the world can just stop thinking about this stupid region and its stupid people with their stupid fights about stupid nonsense.

Those are my takes and they’re not grade A, so maybe consider this the first NonZionism open thread.

In the last instalment, we looked at the infamous Emden-Eybeschutz controversy which crashed the aura of rabbinic authority for European Jewry. To sum up, it’s obvious that Eybeschutz was a Sabbatean, and also that he believed a whole bunch of super weird things. The most material comes from his youth and it’s possible that he calmed down in later years, perhaps even probable given the sheer degree of graphic sex talk there is in אבוא היום אל העין, something that, in the way of things, usually loses its appeal with age. However, the claim that he was innocent is completely unsustainable.

Eybeschutz’s chief persecutor was R. Yakov Emden (though, in fact, R. Emden ended up getting a lot more persecuted than Eybeschutz did), an interesting figure for many reasons, and, in his breadth of learning and intellectual adventurousness, the rabbi of the period most similar to Eybeschutz himself, except not a crazy heretic. Both academics and normie orthodox defenders of Eybeschutz are wont to say uncomplimentary things about R. Emden in order to attribute his crusade to some kind of personality flaw or disorder. It’s true that R. Emden in his later years became rather a bitter man, and excessively credulous concerning allegations made about the secret practices of Eybeschutz and other Sabbatean rabbis,1 but it’s also true that he was the subject not only of violence and lawfare, but a full two and a half decades of relentless gaslighting. To state the truth and be rewarded with endless wading through nonsense arguments and evasion will, at best, make you in due course depressed and resentful.

If you want to read more about Emden’s life of travails, then look here, but the important point for our history is that, in his mounting frustration and bewilderment concerning the mixture of indifference and hostility his quest to rid the Jewish people of heresy had met, he saw the terrible truth. Sabbateanism could not be excised because it wasn’t a freak accident or a foreign import. It was, instead, the fruit of the great theological revolution that dated back to the proliferation of the Zoharic corpus in the late 15th century. Since Sabbateanism is Zoharism, and Zoharism was Judaism, its adherents, assuming they possessed a modicum of conscientiousness and wit, could endlessly swerve from motte to bailey and back again without ever being caught. There was no way of decisively defeating them without confronting the source of all their doctrine.

Or was there? R. Emden was an accomplished student of kabbalistic literature, and, over his decades of study, he had noticed one troubling thing in the Zohar after another until a picture emerged in his head, one which eventually he felt he had to share with the world. Now, I can already hear members of Charedi Substack feverishly tapping on the smartphone they have a ‘heter for business purposes’ to use to catch me in a lie. Don’t you know that Rav Emden was a kabbalist and believed in the Zohar? It was only the wicked maskilim and academics who took his words out of context to make him look like a sceptic. Well, yes, indeed. Emden’s intention was not to condemn the Zohar, but to vindicate it from false interpretation, to show, as in the opening line to Mitpachat Sefarim, that ‘the whole essence of the Zohar is holy, and like the essence of the heavens in its purity’. His goal was to detach the Zohar from Sabbateanism, and, more broadly, from the whole complex of popular and elite Zoharism into which Sabbateanism was inextricably tangled up. His way of doing this was to distinguish between the book ‘the Zohar’, which had been first printed at Mantua and Cremona two centuries prior, from the true Zohar, which contains the esoteric truths of the Jewish religion. In other words, in order to vindicate the true Zohar, a thing to be discovered, R. Emden became the first textual critic of ‘the Zohar’, the thing that actually existed.

Based on his encyclopaedic knowledge of the text, and, for his time, strong grasp of historical philology, R. Emden presented the following taxonomy of the zoharic corpus, a taxonomy that, in certain respects, holds up surprisingly well today.

1. The oldest layer of the Zohar contains ‘short statements’ containing the ‘principles of wisdom in a cursory and concealed form’. These principles were received at Sinai and passed down until the time of the amoraim who were the first to write them down. These parts of the Zohar are those introduced by the terms מתניתין, תוספתא or ‘secrets of the Torah’ (3-5% of the total).

2. The second layer, which also counts as being part of the Zohar proper, dates from the period of an otherwise-unknown Babylonian amora called Shimon bar Yohai until the time of the Geonim. This layer is attributed to the tana Rabi Shimon bar Yochai either on the grounds that the doctrines taught date back to him and were passed down by his students, or because the later amoraim were reincarnations of Rabi Shimon and his contemporaries. This section includes the running midrashic commentary on the Torah (guf haZohar in academic terminology), the Idrot, Sifra d’Tzniuta, and the saba and yanuka dialogues (50%)

3. The third layer was written by a Spanish medieval kabbalist, either Moshe de Leon or one of his colleagues, synthesising and explaining material from the ancient layers. This layer includes Tikkunei Zohar and Ra’aya Mehemna (25%).

4. The fourth layer is Midrash Ne’elam, an incompetent medieval forgery, written partly in Hebrew and partly in defective Aramaic. (15%)

5. The fifth layer consists of additions by medieval scribes inserted throughout the first four categories, which are identifiable because they make obvious mistakes, or because they say blasphemous or heretical things. R. Emden identifies 281 such mistakes he has found, though that is an understatement because many of the items include multiple passages that make the same or similar mistakes. He also states that these are only those he has been able to identify in the course of his personal study and a systematic search might identify more (5%?).

R. Emden closes his discussion by calling for the production of an authoritative edition of the Zohar, one that omits fake material and identifies the different strata among the first four categories. That was 265 years ago, and R. Emden’s research programme was clear enough, so there’s been plenty of time to get it done in the meantime. But it doesn’t exist, and it never will exist, for the following reasons:

1. Passages that R. Emden identifies as obvious fakes were relied upon by the authoritative kabbalists. A simple example is no. 45 on his list of fraudulent insertions, where he identifies six [!] places in the Zohar that state that the hilazon from which the techelet dye is produced lives in the Sea of Galilee, a freshwater lake, contradicting the Talmud, which states it is found in the Mediterranean Sea. This is, indeed, a gross mistake, only partially excused by the fact that the authors of these passages lived in Spain and knew nothing at all of Levantine geography. However, Isaac Luria, who had no such excuse, clearly interprets these passages literally and believed them to be true. Thus, even a beginner’s attempt to implement R. Emden’s agenda would explode the whole kabbalistic enterprise by showing that the most elite kabbalists had zero ability to distinguish between fake and real parts of their holy book.

2. Both kabbalists and halachists who quoted the Zohar over the previous two centuries freely attributed it to Rabi Shimon, regardless of what strata they were citing, including the roughly 40% of the Zohar that R. Emden identified as medieval. Often, they underscored the tannaitic attribution in order to give halachic weight to the passage cited. Thus, again, R. Emden’s vindication of the Zohar would, if carried out in anything but the most impressionistic manner, collapse the whole edifice of authority built upon the Zohar and mandate going back and starting from scratch without Cordovero, Luria and the rest of it.

3. R. Emden performed two different types of textual criticism on the Zohar. In order to identify the different strata, he used a form of comparative linguistics. However, to identify the fake passages found within these four layers, he looked at content. If a section of the Zohar mixes up two amoraim, or paraphrases tosefos, or says straight heresy, then it’s fake. However, what happens if you combine these two forms of textual criticism? The answer is that there are no linguistic grounds for separating the real material from the fake. R. Emden’s assumption is that everything in the Zohar is authentic (within the definition of authentic appropriate to each layer) unless it can’t possibly be, but that’s just preposterous. It’s not reasonable at all to assume that every medieval scribe who stuck in some material made some error that exposes him, every time he did it. The only fair way to proceed is to analyse all the clear examples of fakery, look for linguistic commonalities and then see what other parts of the Zohar were written by the same authors. But the answer to that is that all of it was.

To put it simply, it’s certainly true that R. Emden set out to vindicate the ‘true Zohar’, but the true Zohar doesn’t actually exist. If you admit the possibility that some parts of the Zohar are fake and that the tools of reason can be used to identify them, you will in due course come to the conclusion that all of it’s fake because that’s what’s actually true in real life. However, I’m still substantially underselling the instability of Emden’s Zohar vindication, for two reasons:

1. One of the most difficult problems R. Emden had to deal with was the fact that the main body of the Zohar (his second stratum) undeniably postdates the tana Rabi Shimon bar Yohai by many generations for simple and irrefutable reasons. His first answer to the question, which appears at the beginning of Mitpachat Sefarim, is that the compilers of the Zohar were students of his students, and their teachings trace back to him. This is the argument relied on today by Zohar apologists who aren’t just ignoramus buffoons. However, R. Emden knew too much to believe this argument was sufficient because, within the layer of the Zohar that must be much later than Rabi Shimon bar Yohai, Rabi Shimon bar Yohai keeps popping up, speaking, doing things, often in conversation with people who lived long after he died. R. Emden’s true solution to this problem, which he introduces in the fifth chapter, is that there were two Rabi Shimon bar Yohais, the one that appears in the Mishnah and Talmud and a later Babylonian amora that no-one before had ever before heard of or imagined, that appears in the Zohar.
   
   This is a neat solution to the problem, but unfortunately, it’s completely ridiculous. R. Emden tries to soften the blow by speculating that perhaps the second Rabi Shimon was the reincarnation of the first one, but that’s even more ridiculous. This whole line of argument is so patently absurd that, whenever you find anyone discussing Mitpachat Sefarim, whether in the cause of attacking the authority of the Zohar or buttressing it, they almost invariably leave this part of R. Emden’s theory out. However, the truth is that it’s a central pillar of his whole model, and therefore vindication, of the Zohar. If you ignore, as everyone wishes to do, the theory of the phantom Rabi Shimon II, there is only one conclusion left: the reason that Rabi Shimon keeps popping up in the Zohar talking to people who lived after his death, or to people who don’t even exist, or referring to things he could never have known or seen in ways that make the whole thing look like a clumsy forgery by shoddy scholars is because it is. The method by which R. Emden identifies individual passages of the Zohar as fake, if we remove the ridiculous cope, in reality identifies the whole thing as fake (with the hypothetical exception of the small first stratum).
   

2. R. Emden’s goal was to pull the rug from the false, popular kabbalah (and its Sabbatean extension), which was based upon the book ‘the Zohar’, in order to preserve the true esoteric, elite kabbalah. The problem was this esoteric kabbalah never existed or, to put matters more accurately, it existed, but Zoharism came to kill it. The kabbalists of Gerona (Ramban being the most famous example) believed and practiced a rigorous, elitist and esoteric faith of theurgic prayer and ritual. The kabbalists of Castille disagreed with them on a large number of crucial points, but, perhaps most importantly, they disagreed with them on their elitism. The fact that the Zoharic corpus was not widely distributed for the first 150 years after most of it was composed was not for any want of trying on the part of its authors. At every stage in its proliferation, the masters of Zoharic kabbala did their utmost to promote knowledge of the secrets of the Torah, which, since the ‘discovery’ of the Zohar, were no longer secrets. It is true that Luria claimed to have discovered a new, esoteric layer of doctrine within the Zohar and both he and his students wanted that bit kept secret, but that collapsed pretty soon too. In short, R. Emden wanted to recover an authentic Zoharism that never existed, that is precisely what Zoharism is not.

Influence

R. Emden had opened a can of worms. There were only two responses left. The first was to follow his logic into, at a minimum, a drastic downgrading of the authority of the Zohar and its recategorization as an optional work of medieval Jewish philosophy. The second was to retreat into pure obscurantism, to look at the huge burden of evidence R. Emden had presented (and the more that was to come) and to shrug it off. What may be surprising to modern readers is that the brightest stars of the rabbinic establishment leaned towards the former.

The Chasam Sofer

R. Moshe Sofer established what would soon become one of Europe’s most prestigious yeshivot in Bratislava (known to German and Yiddish speakers as Pressburg), and became the generally acknowledged preeminent Rabbi of Hungarian Jewry. He was among the first to see that secularizing trends beginning in his era were qualitatively different from generic laxity and indifference which any religion struggles with over the course of its history and pioneered the slogan ‘anything new is forbidden by the Torah’ (wittily repurposing a talmudic phrase about a different topic). Because the Jews of Hungary and, even more so, Romania,2 were much more likely to survive WW2 than anyone else in Eastern Europe except Bulgaria, his influence over Orthodox Jewry today is very great, with Belz, Vizhnitz and Satmar, as well as satellite groups, seeing him as their chief ideological inspiration.

It is relatively well known among interested people that despite (or, perhaps, because of) his uncompromising conservatism, the Chasam Sofer accepted R. Emden’s analysis of the Zohar, and understood that it implied more than R. Emden was willing to admit. He is quoted as saying that if it were possible to distil out of the Zohar only those parts that were really authored by Rabi Shimon that it would only come to a ‘few pages’.3

The Noda biYehuda

R. Yehekzkel Landau rose through the ranks to become Rabbi of Prague and authored probably the most important collections of teshuvot and talmudic chiddushim of the era. We saw him in the last installment as the chief architect of the policy to deal with the Eybeschutz problem by covering it up. This is obviously quite shocking, but the fault lies with Judaism in general, and not the Noda biYehuda, who accurately appraised a disastrous situation. Like the Chasam Sofer, the Noda biYehuda was a fierce opponent of secularising trends and the incipient haskalah movement, and, like the Chasam Sofer, he had read and agreed with R. Emden’s Zohar criticism.

The Noda biYehuda’s views were given their clearest expression in an essay he wrote that was later suppressed in printed versions of his drashot (you can read it here). Though he states that he can only say a fraction of his true beliefs for fear of what the kabbalists will do in response, he does say that the Zohar had no reliable history of transmission, a sine qua non for authority in Judaism, and that no-one can know whether any part of it is real (he also says the papers of Luria’s doctrines taken from Chaim Vital after his death cannot be trusted.4 However, the full extent of his views can be found stated by his student and successor R. Elazar Fleckeles who wrote that the Zohar is full of ‘forgeries and distortions’, that ‘one page of the Talmud Bavli … is holier than the entire Zohar’, that it was unknown to the editors of the Talmud and all the Geonim and Rishonim until ‘a certain group [church?] received it from a rabble’, and that ‘anyone with half a brain’ knows that it was written long after Rabi Shimon bar Yochai. He added that ‘from the day the Zohar was introduced many have stumbled’ and heaped praise on ‘our lord Kaiser Joseph II’ who had banned kabbalistic studies in his realms.5

A committed apologist will point out, and fairly enough, that none of these rabbis completely rejected the Zohar outright. However, what is really crucial to appreciate here is not where their opinions line up on an absolute spectrum, but the rapid direction of travel. The Chasam Sofer was the student of the eccentric kabbalist R. Nosson Adler; the Noda biYehuda was educated in the Brody Kloiz, the elite center of European kabbalistic study. They came from an intellectual world in which the Zohar was completely authoritative, entirely the work of Rabi Shimon and the epitome of holiness and wisdom. They arrived at the position that either nothing of the Zohar, or close to nothing, could be traced back to any tana, that it was full of clumsy and sometimes heretical forgeries, that it was a superfluous to Jewish religious life, that it was primarily a stumbling block, and that study of it should be prohibited by law.

It took one generation for the consequences of R. Emden’s application of critical reason to the Zohar to percolate through the European rabbinate. We cannot, of course, know exactly how far this process would have proceeded in due course. I like to think that it would have ended up where it should have, namely a serious and frank reckoning with what had happened over the previous three centuries, undoing what needed to be undone. More likely, though, I suppose, is that the Zohar would have drifted progressively into obscurity, its wild escapist fantasy realm of obscenity and narcissistic delirium reduced to traces and memory, just like the high-Aristotelianism of the medieval Spanish elite, the heichalot mysticism or whatever zany trends were current among Jews of the second temple period.

Regardless of internal developments in its religious ethos, the Jewish people were in short order going to have to face a number of challenges: modern science and technology, nationalisms, the opportunity for settlement in Ottoman Palestine, the rise of capital and then the proletariat as political force, the triumph of confidence in mechanistic rationality and its collapse. Thanks to R. Emden, the Jews had the chance to face it like adults, led by their natural leaders, the scholars of the oral law, firmly rooted in tradition, but with two eyes open. However, in the backwoods of the Ukraine, (and, in a different way, the narrow streets of Vilna) a different wind was blowing. The only viable option to preserve faith in Zoharism now was to abandon reasoned thought altogether, but there were some who were willing, eager even, to take the deal. In Mitpachat Sefarim, R. Emden noted that ‘there has arisen a new sect of hasidim in Volhynia, Podolia … whose entire activity is the Zohar and books of kabbalah … and they make strange movements in prayer and clap their hands…’6 It was already too late.

The man behind this stuff does not need to binge-read articles about bell curves and factor analysis to understand what it means to have an IQ of 80, like I imagine other people do instead of just being a normal human being. He just gets it. He knows exactly what to say to make people who struggle with the 'how would you feel if you hadn’t had breakfast?’ question go and vote so that, election after election, proportional representation go brrr. Some snooty people don’t like this. They find open, unabashed electoral appeals to the dull-witted viscerally revolting in their gut and then they come up with reasons like ‘it makes a nonsense of the concept of the Knesset as a deliberative chamber’ or ‘this will lead to escalating levels of corruption and vote farming until all institutions of state are gutted from the inside’. Look, you’re not wrong, but I say don’t hate the player, hate the game.

At this point some literal moron will be typing out a comment along the lines of ‘well if race realism is so true, how come Aryeh Deri is a genius?’. First, no-one cares what you think and, secondly, this is super-basic.

Anyway, the second reason I like Aryeh Deri is that he’s a filthy liar. He’s constantly saying mad, baboon nonsense, but he doesn’t believe a word of it, and we have proof. What Aryeh Deri really wants to do is steal and, because he loves stealing, he wants a dynamic 1st world economy to steal from, which means he does his best to put a spanner in the works of the policies his voters demand, then tells them to vote for him because God/Maran (does it make a difference?) says to. In short, he has the decency to be a hypocrite, which, in the current circumstances, is not something to sniff at.

However, with all that said, Aryeh Deri is a criminal, an unrepentant criminal perpetually on the lookout for new crimes, the very definition of אוהב כסף לא ישבע כסף. Even in Israel, you have to keep a lid on this kind of stuff, if only for form’s sake, which is why in due course every mayor in this dumb country will be in prison. Aryeh Deri got caught multiple times, and in 2022, in order to avoid prison he agreed to resign from the Knesset and not seek office. Then the election came and gave a ‘fully Right Wing’ government its first ever majority without some pesky Kahlon figure ruining everything, and Aryeh Deri asked for his old job of Interior Minister back. Bibi agreed, but the SECULAR GODLESS AND UNDEMOCRATIC SUPREME COURT said that ‘umm, you can’t promise to leave politics to avoid prison after being convicted a second time and then literally the next ****ing year become a government minister” (I’m paraphrasing). In giving this ruling, the court leaned on the controversial ‘reasonableness doctrine’, according to which they can order the government not to do really messed up stuff based on ‘because I said so’.

Then things kicked off. For decades, various figures on the Right had been demanding and/or promising judicial reform. The first fully Right-Wing government had a number of priorities, such as securing Israel’s borders (grade A), combatting crime (grade A+), and giving Israel dignity on the global stage by teaming up with based right-wingers (grade A+++ with cherries on top). Somewhere in the mix, though, was supposed to be judicial reform. Aryeh Deri would have been the main figure trying to delay and water down proposals for reform, but instead he got on board, and the government went full blast until October 7th.

A criminal lawyer

Israel’s constitution (in the Aristotelian sense of the word) is quite irregular for a modern state. First, like only six other countries, it has no document codifying the division of powers between different branches of state (a ‘constitution’ in gaylord). Second, like five other countries, it is a parliamentary system (with an almost purely ceremonial presidential office) in which executive power is wielded by whoever can command a majority in a unicameral legislature. Third, it has one of the most pure form of proportional representation in the world.1

Left alone, this would be a recipe for pure chaos, giving each government that could cobble together 61 seats limitless power to do whatever it wanted, and then the next one would have limitless power to reverse it. In the first two and half decades of the state, this was a substantially theoretical issue because the country was ruled by the same party, with political debate being primarily a matter of internal debates between more and less hawkish descendants of Borochov. However, the government screwed up with the Yom Kippur war, and Menachem Begin cheated by breaking the gentleman’s agreement not to openly campaign for Mizrahi votes, raising the spectre of electoral anarchy-tyranny. Begin confirmed suspicions that the untrammelled democracy thing was not a great idea by causing skyrocketing inflation and launching a disastrous invasion of Lebanon and into the breach stepped Aharon Barak who basically declared that, in the absence of a written constitution, whatever he said was the constitution.

The status of the judiciary in Israel is genuinely quite unusual. The Supreme Court picks new members itself (though there has been more Knesset input since 2008). It can strike down any law it wants based on incompatibility with certain ‘basic laws’. These basic laws were passed many decades ago when the secular ashkenazim owned the country. When the government tries to pass new basic laws, the Supreme Court tells them they can’t, while reserving the right to interpret existing basic laws creatively. When that doesn’t work, it leans on the ‘reasonableness doctrine’. Large areas of law usually considered in other countries to be political questions outside of the purview of judges, are considered justiciable. In short, Aharon Barak said, ‘yes it’s very nice that you are the majority, but I don’t want to live in a third world country, so get bent’.

To sum up, you can certainly take the weird things about the Israeli Supreme Court and, by completely ignoring the context, find enough material for Anglo cringelords who can quote Antonin Scalia and blabber on about ‘judicial activism’, but the key impetus for judicial form in the real world was to remove restrictions on the ability of ethnic machine politicians to commit crimes with impunity. However, it wasn’t just that. The Right is united in its opposition to judicial over-reach, but each faction has its own reasons, which we will now review.

Bibi Netanyahu

Bibi, like Aryeh Deri, has not traditionally been in favour of judicial reform, but switched sides for personal reasons. Some background here is required, and I will pull out my old hat as the internet’s most fanatic Bibi supporter. Netanyahu’s personal politics are defined by two belief systems, which, to put it mildly, exist in a certain tension. First, he inherited from his nutcase father a grim belief system, in which history is a perpetual zero-sum struggle between national groups, and the Jews exist in perpetual enmity with everyone else. The purpose of Israel is not, as Zionists (including the right-wing ones) traditionally had it, to transcend, defeat or, at least escape from antisemitism, but simply to continue the struggle from a place of strength, to have a gap of a few hundred years in the ‘history of Holocausts’. Secondly, he’s a generic cringelord neoliberal who believes in free trade and economic development through peaceful cooperation and the division of labour. Because Zionism was a dumb idea that was implemented spectacularly well, Netanyahu’s odd combination of beliefs proved to be the perfect combination for a state that needed a way to muddle through the mess it had gotten itself into without flaming out in the search for a solution.

Bibi’s ideology allowed him to take lemons and make passable lemonade. On the one hand, the state had a whole bunch of secular ashkenazim. If it was just left up to them, it would be the highest human-capital nation in the world by a country mile, but they would just endlessly shoot themselves in the face by lurching from socialism to la-la-land peacenikism to whatever weird thing they’d alight on next. On the other hand, there were the MENA Jews who were immune to all this nonsense, but if left to themselves would just be slightly-above-average Middle Eastern country, which would not be wealthy or strong enough to win out in the numbers game against the Arab world. Bibi’s solution was basically this: the MENA Jews would vote for him, and he would implement standard Chicago-school monetarism to put the Ashkenazism to work making bank, allowing Israel to develop into an economic, technological, and military superpower. If the MENA Jews started demanding he did something they wanted in exchange for their votes, he would just say some variation of ‘look, a balloon!’ and, in the meantime, he’d just kind of bob and weave through the fraught geopolitical environment until something came along to increase his freedom of action, or, failing that, forever.

It’s important to understand that, given the context, this plan worked incredibly well. I think Israel sucks, but GDP doesn’t care what I think:

Sure, there were various issues with how sustainable this was in the long-term, but the main issue is that the secular Ashkenazim were going progressively more round the bend about Bibi crushing them in one election after another and so, they, too, decided to cheat. Technically speaking, Bibi is clearly guilty of various misdemeanours, but his voters don’t care. Most of them admire criminality. Every country has things that are technically illegal, but are de facto decriminalized because too large a proportion of the country are OK with it to make police action feasible. That’s how it is with Bibi’s various petty gifts and favours secured for his crazy wife and dickhead son. It’s obvious that picking Bibi’s indiscretions from the millions of similar offences was actually a politicization of the legal system. Likud without Bibi is just a collection of the worst and most depraved people in the world that probably couldn’t even run an election campaign without someone stealing all the money, so the Left figured if they knocked out Bibi they could win an election after trying everything else and failing. The problem is that, technically speaking, they were in the right: a crime is a crime, and ‘everyone else does it too’ isn’t a defence.

Bibi’s real attitude to the Supreme Court has traditionally been one of silent gratitude. The chief objection that principled right-wingers have about the Supreme Court, namely that it improperly removes political questions from electoral politics and makes them the domain of judges was exactly what he needed. Since his governing philosophy was ‘don’t do anything dumb’, which amounts to ‘don’t do anything’ since all the options are dumb, any state institution that tied his hands and gave him plausible deniability was a gift. Even better, when it was election time he could turn to his voters and say ‘look at these snooty European atheists who look down on you and consider you unfit to participate in government, vote for the European atheist who condescends to you. Aren’t Moroccan cookies yummy?’.

It was a true win-win, but, after exhausting all other options, Bibi realised that his only serious option for resolving his legal woes was getting the Knesset to pass a law saying ‘the Prime Minister has criminal immunity’, but the Supreme Court said it would just strike down any such law, and so Bibi decided that he was now pro judicial reform.

The Charedim

The Charedim want judicial reform for a simple reason. Since the 1952 agreement between Ben Gurion and the Chazon Ish, Charedi men have been exempt from the mandatory draft on the condition that they are studying Torah, or pretend to be studying Torah, or come from a family in which the expectation is pretending to be studying Torah. As the Charedi community has ballooned, an exemption originally given for 400 students now applies to something in the region of 70,000 young men, a number that continues to expand exponentially.

Since the late-1990s, the Supreme Court has become increasingly restless about this situation. The draft-exemption has never been codified in law, and the Court has, following repeated orders to rectify this system, gradually adopted the position that the exemption is therefore illegal. However, at the same time, the Court has also strongly indicated that any law that does formalise the current arrangement by giving a blanket exemption based on unverifiable membership of yeshivot from a particular religious community will be struck down as a violation of ‘basic laws’ guaranteeing equal treatment before the law. In other words, despite it having consistently passed the test of electoral politics, the Supreme Court wants to abolish the draft exemption by judicial means.

This would perhaps sound like a case of judicial over-reach except for one important fact: opinion polling consistently shows sky-high approval for ending the blanket Charedi draft exemption, with support never dipping below 65% and sometimes getting as high as 85%. In other words, no matter how many times the Right says that הרוב קובע, in this case of judicial over-reach, the Supreme Court is acting to promote the view of the majority against an electoral system which, for better or worse, systematically promotes committed and organised minorities.

For my part, I think the draft exemption is mostly a good thing, and certainly should not be abolished. The masses want to, but the masses are asses. No-one very much cares what I think, but it also seems obvious to me that in forcing the issue, the Left has allowed Charedim to slot their extremely unpopular stance of not contributing and being massive parasites into a broadly popular policy of ‘judicial reform’, which is dumb. If they were smart instead of dumb, they would instead suggest a law allowing an exemption to anyone willing to sign the following statement: ‘as a believer in Orthodox Judaism, I follow the opinion of all the great Rabbis that any involvement in Zionism is a grave moral and halachic offense, and therefore I cannot serve in the Zionist army’. The Charedim would feel mighty embarrassed, but they’d have no choice but to go for it, and the Right Wing alliance would collapse, making it basically impossible for them to form a government ever again.

Religious Zionists

Religious Zionists object to the Supreme Court mainly because it places obstacles in the way of settlement expansion. These guys have spent a lot (a lot) of time thinking about how to get more houses with Jews in them built in the West Bank and beyond, and they have the following objections to the Supreme Court’s treatment of the issue:

1. Well-funded foreign NGOs constantly trawl through records to show that some patch of a new settlement development is actually the private property of Abdul Mustafa, illiterate camel farmer, and bring armies of lawyers with the intention, not even of securing compensation for the supposedly aggrieved party, but simply obstructing construction. This is gaming the legal system for political purposes and the Supreme Court knows it and lets them get away with it.

2. Records of land ownership in the West Bank are a giant mess, but the Supreme Court takes ownership titles at face value.

3. Under the Palestinian Authority, it is illegal to sell land to a Jew on pain of death, and even in Israeli controlled areas and East Jerusalem, there is a constant threat of vigilante violence. This means that sales have to be conducted in secret, and it is easy for Arabs to subsequently deny they happened, but the Supreme Court makes no allowance for this.

All this is true enough, as far as I can tell, but anti-settler NGOs raise the following points, which are also true.

1. Despite the overwhelming opinion of lawyers around the world, and counsel the Israeli government itself has received, that all settlements violate international law (including conventions Israel has signed up to) under the prohibition of settling the civilian population in territories under occupation, the Supreme Court ignores this in toto and treats West Bank property disputes as just like any other area of property law.

2. Many settlements are built on land that the state originally confiscated on security grounds, and then reallocated for settlements. This is obviously cheating, but the Supreme Court looks at each act in isolation and waves it through.

3. The State of Israel recognises the right of Israelis who have claims to property in the West Bank and East Jerusalem that was expropriated in the War of Independence, but rejects outright Palestinian claims on a vastly greater amount of property they lost in Israel during the same war. The Supreme Court enforces the law on this basis even though it’s basically impossible to justify on rational grounds.

Overall, it’s pretty clear that the Supreme Court is trying to do its best to arbitrate difficult disputes in difficult circumstances, while in fact, being relatively restrained in not overriding political decisions. Regavim has a whole bunch of cases they are outraged about, and B’Tselem has a whole bunch of cases, and they are both justified depending on what set of normative assumptions you bring to the table. What the Supreme Court is really doing is just its job, namely trying to apply the concept of law to a particular sphere of human interactions. No ideological party is ever happy with the application of law as such, because the nature of the thing is to dissolve great narratives into a large number of individual disputes, some of which go one way, some of them the other. Maybe it’s silly to apply the law to a kind of cold warzone, it certainly feels pretty silly a lot of the time, but that’s kind of the point: to keep it a cold warzone. Maybe you think that you have more to gain than to lose from turning the war hot, but maybe you’re wrong.

Other stuff

To sum up, the different factions of the Right converged on opposition to the Supreme Court for reasons of their own, turning sectoral and unpopular issues into one meta-issue that commanded the support of a broad majority (and also bamboozled centrist dipsticks open to abstract argumentation). There are some other issues with the Supreme Court, but they are mostly total nonsense. One area of contention is its general stance in favour of restraining the IDF. Right-wingers are bombarded daily with social media telling them about how brave soldiers are endangered by a leftist judiciary tying their hands in service of postmodernizm.2 Again, the world is a complicated place, but at almost any level of simplification, this narrative is just a lie. IDF soldiers routinely get away with everything up to and including literal murder, even of Jews, and the longest sentence a soldier serving in the West Bank has served is three years. Probably that’s just how it has to be when you are running a military occupation with a citizen army, but there’s nothing to really complain about.

The other main area of concern is stuff like the Tiberias municipality trying to ban the sale of pork and the Supreme Court telling them to knock it off. You can see this as an intrusion on democratic politics if you want, but the reality is that Israel gives more communal autonomy than any western country, with the possible exception of the United States, and gives more financial support to sectarian institutions than any country without exception. Attrition rates in the Religious Zionist community are catastrophic not because the Supreme Court is imposing too much individual liberty on municipal institutions, but because they make a point of exposing their children to secularism as long as it is nationalist. As for justifying the Court’s rulings on these issues, one could just read verbatim any one of thousands of legal briefs the Agudas Yisroel in the United States has submitted to the Supreme Court in support of religious freedom and pluralism. Either it’s right or it’s wrong, but it can’t magically become right just because now you’re the majority.

There is, however, one issue where the Supreme Court has both over-reached and done harm, and, in a sense, it illustrates in a perfect way the real political dynamics of Israel.

Out of Africa

Until the early 2000s, Israel almost completely avoided third-world immigration. There are a number of reasons for this. Israel was a relatively poor country, with a weird language that was very far down the list of desirable destinations for aspirational citizens or poor countries. Until the Second Intifada, there was a practically unlimited supply of cheap Palestinian labour, and immigration from surrounding trashcan nations in a state of war with Israel was out of the question. However, the accelerating exclusion of Palestinians from the Israeli labour market coincided with the Eritrea-Ethiopia war and the last stages of the Sudanese Civil War. Israel started going through the same general thing experienced in western countries around the world with immigrant neighbourhoods becoming pits of crime and squalor, but it was even worse in Israel, because its immigrants came from basically the worst countries on earth, and it’s a small, crowded place with limited room to move into the suburbs.

Bibi put a stop to all this quite early on in the process, with the details worked out by Eli Yishai. As a technical matter, it was relatively easy because Israel’s borders are among the most heavily militarised on earth, but it required political manoeuvring to outwit pro-immigration lobbies on both the Left and Right. The barriers have been shut to further migration since 2012, but ever since then the Supreme Court has thrown one spanner after another into efforts to clear out those who had already come. As a result, large parts of south Tel Aviv have been uninhabitable for anyone else for over a decade. Supporters and opponents of the Eritrean government have mass brawls with batons, and there’s a whole gang ecosystem composed of second-generation Eritreans.

Here’s the thing though. Tel Aviv is the leftists’ city. In a certain way, it’s their only city (though they also have some nice suburban towns). It’s also expensive, in a crazy way. The natural thing for aspiring young leftists looking to make something out of themselves is to gentrify some relatively crummy part of Tel Aviv until they have the money to move into a better place. Unfortunately, they can’t because it’s all just Africans. In the rest of the country, you maybe see a Sudanese woman with a crucifix tattoo on her head cleaning toilets or something, but it’s really not a big deal. In other words, the members of the Supreme Court are waging class warfare against themselves.

What it’s all about

Yair Golan is a great guy. After an impressive military career, at the age of sixty-one he turned up on October 7th and rescued people from the music-festival massacre. I often look down on people without justification and it’s a bad character trait, but it wouldn’t even occur to me to look down on Golan because he’s just an objectively better person than the vast majority of mankind. He’s the only man in Israeli politics about which one could plausibly tell an ‘I cannot tell a lie’ story. If justice means anything, it’s that such a man should be honoured by society in general. In the real world, however, he can’t walk around without repulsive subhuman trash harassing him. There’s no need for a Camp of the Saints novel about what Israel might look like if feral third-world detritus made it intolerable for civilized people to live there. It’s a thing that is happening literally right now in thousands of little incidents up and down the country daily. And what does Yair Golan, literally himself a victim, have to say about this? Nothing, just endless muh Democracy and gay rights. Hopeless.

The Emden-Eybeschutz controversy tore European jewry apart and is generally considered to be the moment that the aura of Rabbinic authority cracked, leading to the haskala and, in due course, mass secularisation, Bundism, Zionism, Reform and the rest. To briefly sum up what happened, Yonasan Eybeschutz was generally regarded as the pre-eminent genius of Ashkenazi Jewry, not only a master of Talmud, halacha (then demonstrated through the discipline of pilpul) and kabbala, but also with a unique talent for drush, the repurposing of materials from across the Jewish corpus for the purpose of homiletics and exhortation. Originally a rosh yeshiva and then dayan in Prague, in 1750 he was appointed, as befitting his stature, Chief Rabbi of Hamburg-Altona-Wandsbeck, the most lucrative position in Europe. Students from around the continent flocked to his yeshiva, the continent’s most prestigious and intellectually vibrant institute of Jewish learning.

One of the few Rabbis in Europe who was considered Eybeschutz’s peer was Rav Yakov Emden, who lived in Altona and, it is widely believed, was sore about having been passed over in favour of Eybeschutz. Rav Emden was the son of Rav Tzvi Ashkenazi, the semi-successful heresy hunter we saw in the last installment. Upon inspecting some amulets that Eybeschutz had distributed for women during pregnancy, Rav Emden claimed to have discovered Sabbatean allusions and demanded that Eybeschutz be fired and placed under some kind of rabbinical ban. The rabbinate of Europe was split on the question of Eybeschutz’s guilt, but it is fair to say that the majority were more upset with Emden for his extremism and insistence on airing the Jewish world’s dirty laundry before the gentiles. Eybeschutz was protected by the King of Denmark, but the Hamburg Senate was more sympathetic to Emden’s claims. In the end, Emden never succeeded in his campaign against Eybeschutz who died in his post in 1764, and the main result was to leave a bad taste in everyone’s mouth and the credibility of the rabbinical establishment in the gutter.

Among Orthodox Jews, the consensus is that Emden was wrong and there is a moderately strong taboo against suggesting otherwise. Among academics, the consensus is that he was right as to the facts, but a nasty person because what’s wrong with a little heresy here and there? We will deal with the last part in due course, but let us first deal with the factual part of things.

The truth of the matter is that there is no legitimate debate about this question whatsoever. All the evidence is on one side, and the arguments for the other side don’t make sense and actually point to the opposite. Let us review. First, for the prosecution:

1. In 1724, an itinerant book-seller from the Sabbatean center of Żółkiew in Podolia, was arrested in Frankfurt upon suspicion of distributing heretical books to an underground Sabbatean network. Among the books discovered on his person were works attributed to ‘Jonathan of Prague’, most notably ואבוא היום אל העין, a genuinely bizarre kabbalistic cosmology full of graphic sexual imagery and startling theological assertions (we’ll get to it). There is no plausible candidate for ‘Jonathan of Prague’ other than Eybeschutz, and this was explicitly understood by the Sabbatean community of Mannheim who revered the book, the leader of which declared Eybeschutz divinely inspired. To this date, the only person apart from Eybeschutz that anyone has claimed to be the author of the tract was Jacob Frank, who was one year old at the time.

2. In recent years, the amulets identified by Emden have been inspected and it has been shown that Eibeschutz’s description of their contents that he provided to the authorities was misleading, and they confirm to Emden’s description.

3. Rav Emden was arguably the greatest sage of his generation, and, apart from ridiculous and impious slanders, no-one has been able to explain why he would put himself in physical and economic jeopardy over his Eybeschutz jihad had he not been on to something. Much less well known, however, is that Eybeschutz’s guilt was also affirmed by the only other candidates for gadol hador, namely R. Yehezkel Landau and R. Yehoshua Falk. Their differences with Emden were about how to deal with it. The Noda biYehuda favoured keeping the matter a secret because Eybeschutz was too powerful, well-entrenched and a genuine giant of Torah scholarship to be dislodged and trying to do so would only backfire on the prestige of the Torah in general. The Pnei Yehoshua took a middle position, and was willing to allow Eybeschutz to keep his position on condition of repentance, while Emden insisted that he was permanently unfit to hold any rabbinic position. It is true that many rabbis did affirm Eybeschutz’s innocence, but they all fall into the category of being (a) Sabbateans themselves (b) Eybeschutz’s students (c) nobodies or (d) all of the above. The only really great rabbi who thought Eybeschutz was innocent was Eybeschutz himself and affirming his innocence is tantamount to saying that the gedolei hador were clueless bigots.

4. Eybeschutz’s own son, Binyomin Wolf was not only a Sabbatean, but Jacob Frank’s main rival for leader of the Sabbatean movement in Europe. It is true that upstanding people can have sons going OTD, but it’s also true that the main predictor of religious identity is the one you grew up in. This is slightly more true than usual of Sabbateanism after the rabbinate started to crack down on it, which was well known to be passed down principally through families, in some cases for a surprisingly long time.

5. In the 1760s, there was a scandal when many of the students at Eybeschutz’s yeshiva were exposed as or confessed to being Sabbateans, and the yeshiva had to be closed.

6. Eybeschutz’s grandson converted to Christianity after, according to his testimony, reading a bunch of Sabbatean texts that had been passed down as family heirlooms.

7. Among Sabbateans, Eybeschutz was regarded as a fellow believer and their most esteemed intellectual. Of course, it’s possible that this was delusional on their part, like Religious Zionists today claiming the Vilna Gaon, but it’s simpler to say that they were correct.

8. On at least one documented occasion, Eybeschutz provided hospitality for Sabbatean pilgrims on their way to visit the court of Jacob Frank (specifically to pay homage to his daughter, believed to be some kind of goddess).1

Now for the defence.

1. It is argued that a great Torah scholar like Eybeschutz couldn’t have been a Sabbatean, but this is just ignorant nonsense. Accomplished talmudists who were Sabbateans include Nathan of Gaza, Raphael Mordechai Malachi, Herschel Tzoref, Yehuda heHasid, Eliyahu haCohen, Avraham Yachini, Moshe David of Podhajce, Avraham Rovigo and Elisha Shor. It’s true that Eybeschutz would still count as the greatest Sabbatean scholar, but, logically, someone would have to take that role. The assumption that Eybeschutz has passed some threshold of talmudic proficiency at which Sabbatean affiliation would be untenable is never justified or explained.

2. A related argument is that Eybeschutz couldn’t have been an antinomian because he devoted so much time to pilpul and obsessing about fine halachic distinctions. This argument is based on two complete misunderstandings. The first is that the extreme antinomianism of the Frankists was normative among all Sabbateans. In reality, many Sabbateans were known for their extreme piety and attention to halachic details. The Sabbatean movement contained a diversity of opinion on two questions: (a) whether antinomianism was something only the messiah engaged in or whether his followers needed to get in on the act too, (b) how far along the messianic process which necessitated/allowed antinomian behaviour had got. Clearly, Eybeschutz was a moderate Sabbatean, not a Frankist, though ‘moderate’ doesn’t mean quite what you might think it means, as we’ll see. The second, and even more important, point is that the antinomianism of the Sabbateans wasn’t like the ‘those laws are outdated and I don’t like them’ antinomianism of Reform today. Rather, it was based on a belief that the whole system of halacha is a set of tools for manipulating divine cosmic forces and that, as the nature of the cosmos changed with the advent of messianic redemption, then so must the appropriate tools.2 As such, a detailed knowledge of the law was a prerequisite for successful antinomianism. Some scholars have suggested using the term ‘hypernomianism’ to clear up this confusion.

3. A key part of his defence, and the one relied on most during his own lifetime, is that Eybeschutz signed multiple bans and condemnations of Sabbateans. First of all, this isn’t any kind of argument at all. We know that Sabbateans often signed such bans. However, when we look more closely, we see that actually it’s evidence in the opposite direction. Astoundingly, out of those who co-signed Eybeschutz’s original declaration against Sabbateans, all but one whose affiliation can be demonstrated were also Sabbateans. Further, his ban has all sorts of weird language that at first sight looks just rambling and irrelevant, but actually turns out to be coded Sabbatean allusions.3

So, to repeat myself, there isn’t really an argument here at all. It’s just facts vs. cope. We’re not going to stop there, though, because the crazy truth is that Eybeschutz’s Sabbateanism wasn’t even the weirdest thing about him, not even close. His aforementioned tract ואבוא היום אל העין does contain affirmations that Shabtai Tzvi was the messiah who redeemed the world, though these are relatively subtle and possible to miss if you read quickly. More to the point, however, it contains the following startling claims:

1. From the perspective of the Ein Sof, the creation of the world is a form of defecation.

2. Out of the Ein Sof proceeded a trinity composed of Atika Kadisha, the god of Israel, and the Shechinah.

3. Atika Kadisha is Esau, and thus the Christian god.

4. The god of Israel engaged in intercourse with Atika Kadisha as the feminine partner while unconscious, and their union created the Shechina, with which it mates as a male partner.

5. Atika Kadisha interacts with the world, via the Shechina, though pure kindness, but because this kindness is expressed without sexual union it destroys everything in its path. To save creation, the god of Israel then castrates him, and he becomes inert.

6. The god of Israel should now engage in ongoing sexual union with the Shechina, but, alas, he is asleep and also impotent, so therefore instead he … check the footnote if you really want to know.4

7. His son, the messiah, was created through his urine, because you can still urinate in your sleep.

8. The job of the messiah is to receive the ejaculate of Atika Kadisha so as to stop it destroying everything, which task he achieves by apostatizing. He then is to have vigorous intercourse with the Shechina, but without taking her virginity, which he does by the ahem, well … have you heard of the Silver Ring Thing?

I could go on but I think that’s really enough.5 It is not surprising, then, that the Noda BiYehuda had this to say about the work:

This book is that of a complete heretic, who does not merely cut down the saplings, but who uproots and destroys the very fundamentals of Jewish faith… I did not find such heresy even among all the religions of the Gentiles that ever existed…The tract is by one who plotted evil against Hashem and plotted wickedness and it denied the providence of the Ein Sof… He denied the entire faith of Judaism.

Now, that seems fair enough, but, remember, the Noda biYehuda’s position during the Emden controversy was, functionally speaking, pro-Eybeschutz!

In short, the Noda biYehuda believed that things were so bad that the most famous and revered scholar of the generation above him was worse than any gentile pagan, and thought there was nothing he could do but try and keep a lid on it. Looked at from a merely sociological point of view this was an absolute, unmitigated disaster. The enemy, the very worst kind of enemy, had risen to the top of Judaism’s hierarchy. However, from an internal religious point of view, it was even worse. The Torah is first and last a weapon against the perennial human urge to idolatry, but Judaism had contracted an autoimmune disease and the Torah itself had become the occasion for the most insane form of idolatry6 to ever be conceived in the history of mankind (allowing for a bit of poetic license and the Noda BiYehuda’s lack of detailed knowledge of Central American history). Becoming a great Torah scholar was, now, not only fully compatible with being a fruitcake with a brain full of sewage, the one was in some sense the condition for the other.7 Judaism, in short, was broken. Only one avenue remained to fix it.

3

4

I disagree. The 1940s were a rough time for humanity. A lot of regrettable things happened and we should get over them and move on. Most people have, and it’s not that bad. In these parts, the Palestinians gave as good as they got, it’s just that they weren’t very good. You win some, you lose some and, in truth, what did they really lose? Someone who agrees with me is Salah Khalil Faisal Na’ameh. He was born in Dir al-Assad, but he decided that he could do better than gang feuds and ISIS, so he moved to Be’er Sheva where he works for the District Attorney’s office. A few weeks ago, one Friday evening, he was sitting on the balcony with friends listening to music. I imagine he was listening too loud, and Arab music is typically pretty annoying, prone to excessive repetition and rather crude melodies. On the other hand, this is Israel, so glass houses and all that. Anyway, someone took offense, as is their right, and perhaps their duty, and the police showed up. However, they showed up without a warrant so he told them to leave. Lawyers can be annoying that way. The police showed up again later the same evening. They didn’t have a warrant this time either, but they did have balaclavas on and they forced their way in, before dragging Salah to their car. This is what Salah looked like after:

Here’s my take: this whole new Jew thing, it’s not working out. Yes, I know you have a lot of nice words about how returning the Jew to his ancestral soil would unleash his native powers anew and allow him to round off the over-developed virtues of exile with those of a settled and free people. Words are nice, and useful too. I’m writing words right now, but facts are more useful. The results of the experiment are in, and I’m afraid to say they suck. It turns out that you kind of have to put some actual thought into building a new Hebrew culture. You can’t just take people from all over the world, put them into a war zone, funnel them through a massive hazing ritual posing as an education system, and allow criminals and lunatics to fill their head with insane, degenerate nonsense and unhinged racial narcissism moulded into a gruesome pastiche of a religion and just hope for the best. Well, you can, because that’s what they did, but you end up here. The best we can say is that, for now, there’s still enough of the old Jew - and some obsolete beta versions of the new Jew - around to keep it all from spinning out of control.

That’s what I think, but not everyone agrees. Once or twice, it has been suggested that my sentiments arise not from reasonable interpretation of the facts, but rather from a more fundamental fact, namely that I am gay, a big faggy gay liberal. If I wasn’t gay, I would know that this is all just what humans do: they fight over land, and if they win, they fight over some more land, until they are a big empire. That’s what we’re here to do, and we’re going to do it. From the river to the sea. And we’re not talking about that river anymore.

OK, so let’s roll with it. Who can we learn from who knew how to build a large empire that lasted for more than a generation or two? Certainly no-one from our own history. So let’s take Julius Caesar, who conquered Gaul in 8 glorious years from 58 to 50 BC. Did the bald lecher commit some atrocities in the process? Wooh-boy did he commit some atrocities. After the siege of Avaricum, he had almost the whole population - 40,000 according to his estimate - put to death. When the old and sick fled Alesia, he starved them to death. Against the Eburones, he embarked on a campaign of extermination, burning everything in sight, and hunting down fleeing survivors. So, based, right?

And, sure enough, a few hundred years later there were no Gauls anymore. No druids, no names ending in x, no whatever else Gaulic culture consisted of. Everyone was Roman now. Job done. Except there’s a catch. Everyone living in Gaul circa 200 CE was a Roman, but they weren’t descended from Romans. They were descended from Gauls. It’s probable that Caesar was exaggerating about how many based points he had accrued through all the killing; people were prone to that. But even if he wasn’t, it wouldn’t have made all that much difference. Back in those days, population was limited by the carrying capacity of the soil. If you killed a bunch of people, as happened not infrequently, you just had to wait a bit and those who remained would breed a bunch more.

The point we’ve been working our way round to [wait, this is 1,000 words already before I even got to the topic? Oh, yeah that will make a neat topical intro, idiot] is that if you want to be all based and historical about it, just massacring everyone and bringing in your own people isn’t how you build an empire. It’s a strong move, one can’t really gainsay that, but it’s also kind of a bitch move. It’s what really primitive peoples do if they figure out how to build a new kind of chariot, or whatever the Indo-European secret sauce turns out to have been, and suddenly become militarily unstoppable without knowing what to do with it. It’s also what old empires gone squalid and senile do because they just can’t help themselves. But proper empires in their period of expansion and greatness don’t do that. Instead, they conquer and say ‘you’re not x anymore, you’re us’, and it happens. That’s why Mustafa from Nablus is called Mustafa, not Theophilus or some poof name like that.

So, learning from the proud conquerors of history, the solution to the Palestinian problem isn’t to expel them so they can sit at the border attacking you, until you conquer and expel them again in a pattern of infinite regress like a muppet. And it isn’t to murder them all like a monster. It’s to convert them. Though, as I said, the Jewish people have never been an empire, we did have a short period as a middle-rank regional power under the Hasmoneans, and that’s how it was achieved. The way this happened varied from conquered place to conquered place. The Idumeans, at any rate some of them, were forcibly converted on pain of expulsion. The Galileans were converted mostly by a process of acculturation promoted by settlers from Judea. The Itureans, well, if the Ancient Historians figure it out, they’ll let us know. In any case, the point is that expansion through acculturation worked pretty well until dynastic feuds brought the Romans in.

So, the genuinely based thing to do is to convert the Palestinians. However, you instantly sense that there is something absurd about this, and you are correct. One obstacle to such a programme is that converting to Judaism doesn’t protect you from being murdered by a retarded Likudnik soldier, but that’s not the real problem. It’s just very implausible that millions of people are going to abandon Islam for Judaism. Sunni Islam is a religion of 1.8 billion people. Its median level of human capital is, to put it mildly, not very good, but no matter how left-shifted your bell curve, quantity ends up having a quality all of its own. Thus Sunni Islam has thousands of universities and madrassas churning out clerics and influencers to comfort and fire up the people. If there was ever a serious campaign to convert the Palestinians, Judaism would just get overwhelmed with proofs for tahrif and reprints of Ibn Hazm. With all due respect to Aish haTorah, the Kuzari argument is not going to cut it. Converting the Israeli Druze to a pozzed version of Druzism in which Druze and Jews are best buddies going back to Jethro was feasible, but anything more ambitious than that is not going to fly unless we go to Africa and conquer some illiterate animists.

However, there is no need to despair because history provides an equally based and red-pilled option for practitioners of an inferior religion (talking in strictly sociological and material terms) who use their martial prowess to overwhelm older powers gone flabby. Over in Europe, the Visigoths did it, the Franks did it, the Ostrogoths did it. It’s a tried and true strategy, and also one very indigenous to our region: the Seljuks did it, the Ottomans did it, the Mughals did it too. You can just do things. Specifically, you can just convert to Islam. Job done.

By rights I should just end the article there with an epic mic-drop. Unfortunately, some of my readers, specifically the bums who don’t pay, aren’t smart, so I’m going to spell out for you how this is the obvious choice to advance the interests of Israeli militarism, and anyone who opposes it is ipso facto a big dummy pinko:

1. Precisely the most radical elements of the Palestinian national movement can now be leveraged to exterminate what’s left. As our brothers in ISIS have pointed out many a time, Arab nationalism is absolute heresy full of Christians and atheists and literally even Jews and now this motley crew of kuffar are trying to incite good Muslims against their fellow faithful members of the umma. Off with their heads!

2. As hasbara activists tell us all the time, nobody cares when Muslims kill other Muslims, and, guess what, now it’s gonna be Muslims killing Muslims - a whole lot of Muslims - until we get our land and security. No doubt, some of them will object, specifically all the ones we are going to kill, but the umma at large will be split between the ones on their side and the ones on our side, leading to the same kind of general malaise and irrelevancy that they exhibited during the Syrian Civil War.

3. The Israeli military is pretty good in many ways, but it is fatally hobbled by its extreme aversion to military casualties, something that is quite normal for gay liberal democracies, but is literally unheard of for expansionist military states. This gives the IDF a strangely comic, somewhat grotesque character, half Genghis Khan and half Dutch homosexual, with the result that we used about 100,000 tons of explosives in an area slightly larger than Dresden, and still didn’t really win. Fortunately, Islam is famously pro-martyrdom, so instead of wasting tens of thousands of dollars calling in an air strike every time Yossi thinks there’s a fighter in an apartment block, we are going to start sending thousands of troops into tunnels to achieve heroic deaths. With this faggy pikuach nefesh nonsense out of the way, the technological and manpower superiority of the IDF over the rest of the region can finally be used to full effect.

4. As we noted above, there are more than a billion Muslims in this poor planet of ours, and most of them are contiguous, creating an immense natural block which a strong military power can lead. (Un)fortunately, the Muslim countries, that presently exist suffer from chronic human capital issues and political dysfunction, leaving this empire in waiting rudderless and constantly beset by completely inane conflicts. As a Jewish state, Israel is in literally the stupidest place it could possibly be, but the Most Muslim Kingdom of Israel with an extra 6 million ex-Palestinians (just for a start) will be perfectly positioned for regional dominance. Turkey is going to get BTFOd.

5. Currently, a lot of powerful countries like China keep their relations with Israel to a minimum, because even if Israel was everything the hasbarists say it is, it would still make more sense to take the side of the Muslim world against it. Hence Israel is crippled by having only one possible superpower patron whose political system it can manipulate, so far, by appealing to diaspora Jews and miscellaneous weird Christians. However, the new Muslim Kingdom of Israel has no natural enemies and so can freely manoeuvre between different alliances to get the best deal.

6. Speaking of which, the best pitch we have for America right now was formulated by Yoram Hazony, namely that we act as the regional policeman/pitbull so America can retrench and focus on its own problems and/or preparing for World War 3 with China. The problem with this analysis is that it has no connection with reality whatsoever because the region’s countries won’t accept us as umpires in their disputes. We had to sit out both Gulf Wars, and even taking on the insane heretic state of Iran is pushing it. However, as an orthodox Sunni state with mild leanings towards fundamentalism, we can actually do this for real.

7. Now the country is Muslim, it can no longer get limitlessly cucked by Charedim exploiting the confused Israeli relationship with its Jewish heritage, and so the ultra-Orthodox (assuming they don’t get on the Muslim train with the rest of the country) will have to start flipping houses and trading diamonds like their diaspora cousins or get lost.

Even the slow kids at the back can now see that this is a no-brainer if you want to be the dominant regional, and one day maybe even global, power. Given that it’s so, why not do it? Really, why not?

I can only think of one valid objection, namely that it would be bad for Judaism. Now, to be perfectly frank, with how things are going with religion in Israel, I’m not 100% sure even that’s true, but let’s say it is and, as common sense would have it, the loss of millions of Jews and all the religious infrastructure they presently possess to another religion would be bad for our one. Fine, what that means is that the interests of the Jewish religion and the interests of the Israeli state are two different things. Maybe they overlap, maybe they don’t. It can’t be assumed until you check. If you do check, then often you’ll find that an idea that might be good for the state of Israel given its geopolitical predicament might be a terrible idea for Judaism or vice versa. To close off, we’ll look at two such ideas, one from the Left and one from the Right and see why, though they have undeniable benefits to the Israeli state, they are clearly not in the interests of the Jewish religion.

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Nehemya Hayyun was born sometime around 1650 in Ottoman Bosnia, which had been settled by exiles from the Spanish expulsion and become a relatively small, but moderately distinguished center of Sephardic culture, a status it retained until the 1940s when the Groyper state of Croatia largely liquidated the population in conjunction with their Nazi backers. He studied in Hebron, one of the major Sabbatean centers, and was appointed as Rabbi in what is now Skopje (another Jewish community created by Sephardi refugees to the Ottoman empire). He seems to have found small-town Rabbi-ing tedious, and became a travelling holy-man hustler, eventually turning up in Izmir, once the capital of Shabtai Tzvi’s clown-kingdom, and getting some of kind of rabbinical post while publishing his fruity theological treatises, to which we shall shortly return. The rabbinate of Izmir, however, cognizant of their embarrassment a half century prior, were not especially tolerant of this kind of stuff. Hayyun left for Jerusalem, where Yehuda heHassid (not that one, the other one) had established a Sabbatean community in the first conscious aliyah movement. However, the leaders of the Jerusalem rabbinate, also an anti-Sabbatean stronghold even from the beginning, were forewarned by their Izmir colleagues and excommunicated him before his arrival.

Hayyun, then, did something a little bit unusual and decided to leave Sephardim behind and try his luck in the barbarous lands of the North. He started in Prague, where the community rabbi Naphtali Cohen, learned in both talmud and kabbala, took a shine to him and gave his book approbation (without, according to his subsequent testimony, having read it). He travelled around Jewish communities of central Europe, and succeeded in finding a publisher in Berlin. In addition to publishing, he also made money through ‘practical kabbala’ i.e. magic, selling amulets, miraculous remedies and the like. Hayyun did quite well for himself, but he enjoyed an expensive lifestyle, so he decided to go to Amsterdam to make some real bucks.

The Jewish community of Amsterdam was, like Hayyun’s home, founded by Sephardim, but of a rather different type. The Jews of the city had not come in 1492, when the choice had been expulsion or conversion, but around a hundred years later, from families that had become Christians only to find themselves subject to persecution from the Inquisition for maintaining their Judaism in secret, sometimes accurately and sometimes not. Amsterdam was the global center of finance and, after a fashion, of religious and civic liberty and, as such, the Jewish community there had both a lot of money, and a lot of weirdos. Hayyun was a weirdo who liked money, so he thought it a perfect fit. He arrived in 1713.

Following the Chmielnicki massacres, Amsterdam had also acquired an Ashkenazi community originally composed of refugees, which, unusually for the times, established independent institutions according to their own customs instead of folding into the Sephardi community. The Rabbi of the Amsterdam Ashkenazim was Hacham Tzvi Ashkenazi, an interesting and well-connected figure who has been the subject of recent, and well-merited, scholarly attention. Hacham Tzvi had studied in the Ottoman Balkans, hence his Sephardi title of Hacham, and thought he recognised Hayyun as a Sabbatean troublemaker, but then retracted the allegation. Then it all kicked off.

Hayyun sought the approval of the Rabbi of the Sephardi community, a certain Shlomo Ayllon, himself a probable Sabbatean, to publish his books. Ayllon formed a committee to make a decision, some members of which showed copies of the books to Rabbi Moshe Hagiz, son of the great Jerusalem kabbalist and OG anti-Sabbatean Yaakov Hagiz we saw earlier, and a major legend in his own right.1 Hagiz had arrived in Amsterdam a year or so prior and become good friends with Hacham Tzvi. He showed Tzvi the books, and it was obvious to both of them that they were Sabbatean and heretical. Tzvi went to war over it, but this completely backfired. The committee unanimously approved Hayyun’s books as containing nothing contrary to the Jewish religion and proceeded to launch a campaign against Tzvi and Hagiz, both of whom were repeatedly attacked by arsim in the street, as well as pressurising the notables of the Ashkenazi community to terminate Tzvi’s contract. Eventually, the pair had to leave town, but they did manage to convince a number of Rabbis around Europe that Hayyun was treif, and in due course, the Amsterdam rabbinate decided it was better for their reputation if Hayyun left, which he did, returning to his life of itinerant grifting, though with more obstacles than he had previously faced.

The story of Hayyun is important for a number of reasons. First of all, it marks the shifting of the center of the Sabbatean movement from the Sephardim to the Ashkenazim. Despite Natan of Gaza himself being a white LARPer, the core of the Sabbatean movement had always been Sephardi, which was natural, if not inevitable, because Sabbateanism is Zoharism, and Zoharism is the ideology of degenerate Spanish Jewry which it developed to reconcile its grandiose self-image to the objective circumstances of its decline, and then justify it bullying the Jews of the Mediterranean and Levant into submission after its dispersion. Ashkenazim, like more or less all Jewry, got caught up in the general excitement of 1665-66, but they were peripheral to the movement as an active force, and relatively unaware of the specifics of the lunacy involved. When Shabtai Tzvi donned the turban, the cholent eaters mostly lost interest.

However, there were reasons for Sabbateanism to eventually make the jump to Central and Eastern Europe. Ashkenazim lack the majestic past of the Sephardim, but in other respects they are similar only more so: smarter, more neurotic, accomplished, but also a bit ‘off’. Shabtai Tzvi could only have been a Sephardi, but one rather suspects that Jacob Frank could only have been Ashkenazi. Always punching above their weight, Ashkenazim had been emerging as the clear center of gravity for Rabbinic scholarship before the Chmielnicki massacres, and so, after a generation or so to recover demographically, it was not surprising that they were once again becoming dominant. Sabbateanism was where all the intellectual energy in Judaism was concentrated, so they would by nature come to dominate it. Further, and as is generally the case, the Sephardi world, because it was where Sabbateanism was spawned, also had many more antibodies to it. The monstrous ease with which Hayyun got European Rabbis to sign off on his writings until he encountered Hacham Tzvi is a textbook case of how ideas that exist in some kind of equilibrium where they are birthed can spread like wildfire elsewhere.

This brings us to the second, and I think most important, lesson of the controversy. Hayyun was really obviously a Sabbatean and this is not one of those things that is only obvious in retrospect. His writings themselves are demonstrative enough: he believed in a triune god, the three parts of which were the hidden god, the king-messiah, and the shechina, with all sorts of details of the second part’s tribulations and sufferings that were clearly based on the life of Shabtai Tzvi. However, at a more basic level, his main book Oz Lelohim is a commentary on the short tract Raza DeMeheimnuta, cherished among Sabbateans as the only work authored by the messiah himself, in which he spilled the beans about the knowledge of the true God which it was his task to reveal (albeit not enough that it didn’t require further commentary). In fact, this was almost certainly not so. In reality, the movement’s no.2 theologian and total fruitcake, Cardoso, had authored it himself and passed it off as the work of the big guy to win an intra-Sabbatean debate. The pious fraud, however, was so successful that it even fooled Gershom Scholem.

So, given that, what was the controversy surrounding the book even about? Well, really, it wasn’t about anything at all. Hayyun’s accusers had the fairly simple argument that his book contained completely outlandish heresy and was literally an attempt to explicate Shabtai Tzvi’s own teachings, and his defenders had just random nonsense. ‘Why are you hounding fellow Jews?’; ‘yes that might sound a bit heretical, but have you spent 7 million years learning kabbalah? If not you can’t really comment’; ‘what’s the harm if some people find it inspiring?; ‘he’s not really saying a man is God, he’s saying, like, some really deep stuff’; ‘what’s your problem anyway, are you some kind of rationalist?’. You may know this drill. The key point is that the burden of proof for establishing Sabbatean guilt was set not only unreasonably high, but absurdly, preposterously high. This is essential background when we look at a more famous debate about a ‘suspected’ Sabbatean in the next installment.

Read more

This series started off, like all other things on this blog, in a burst of energy prompted by someone being wrong on the internet. It continued because I rashly committed to finishing it. Nevertheless, I think it is by far the most important thing I have written. It do be that way sometimes.

Part 1. Introduction and Spoiler

Part 2. The culmination of the Kabbalah revolution.

Part 3. Sabbateanism is Zoharism

Part 4. The Spread of Zoharism in Eastern Europe

Part 5. Sabbateanism after the apostacy

Part 6. The Hayyun controversy

Part 7. The Eybeschutz controversy

Part 8. Rav Emden and the Zohar

Moo. You should have stuck with moo.

Iran has a much larger population than Israel. If Iran was in a land war with Israel, with armies facing off against each other, that factor would likely be determinative. If Israel was somehow to emerge from the battlefield nevertheless victorious, there would be something to explain. As Operation Barbarossa might indicate, the answer would not necessarily be special divine favour, but it would be at least one of the candidates. There would be something to discuss. Here, though, there is nothing to discuss because there is no land war. In a war fought by air, population is relevant only as a proxy for the state’s ability to raise resources, but you don’t need to use a proxy because you can just look at it directly.

There are two ways of measuring GDP, nominal and purchasing power adjusted (PPP). When it comes to a war of this sort, in which the tools of battle have to be bought on the global market, nominal GDP is the relevant figure. Iran’s is $450 billion and Israel’s is $550 billion. So, right off the bat, Israel has the larger economy and is thus at an advantage.

However, this drastically understates Israel’s advantage, because the contest is substantially a contest of brains. Who can design the best tech? Who can figure out the enemy’s strategy? Who can infiltrate the other’s security apparatus? To really contribute to this, you probably need to have an IQ of 130 or above. Iran has an average IQ of 84, so using a standard bell curve model, we would expect there to be about 99,000 130+ Iranians for the state to work with. If we do the same sum for Israel, using an average IQ of 95, we get about 98,000, but clearly this is wrong. Israel contains multiple different populations with their own curve. If we estimate that 30% of the population is Ashkenazi and they have an average of 112, then we get 345,000 people above 130, more than 3.5 times Iran, and with a smaller overall population, leaving more of them surplus to work in the military.

However, this still drastically understates Israel’s advantage because Iran has been a victim of a five-decade brain drain since the “Islamic” revolution. A conservative estimate is that about half of the smartest fraction have left, so Israel’s real IQ advantage is probably closer to 6.

However, this still drastically understates Israel’s advantage because despite what a hasbara cretin may have told you about symbolic votes in the UN or whatever, while Israel has received more than 150 billion dollars from the US over the years, Iran is subject to sanctions from the United States, the European Union, the United Kingdom, the United Nations Security Council, Canada, Australia, Japan, and the G7 (through the FATF). Thus, Iran relied until this war on equipment they inherited from the Shah, which in its age was pretty nifty, but now is only a few steps less obsolete than muskets, and got blown up.

However, this still drastically understates Israel’s advantage because, when Israel went to war, it did so not only with all of the above advantages, but alongside the most powerful military in the history of the world.

So, given all that, how did the war go? OK. There were some definite tactical successes for Israel, but then it kind of petered out as we reached the limits of what you can do from the sky. Strategically, it’s still kind of up in the air, but Iran came out of it a lot stronger than one would have thought in the first few days, so maybe they are the objects of divine favour. That’s ridiculous, of course, because they are grave worshippers who put the Koran on their head like clowns. Probably, it just comes down to a combination of defender’s advantage, the ruthlessness of the IRGC, and the ineptitude of Israel’s and Trump’s diplomacy. Reflect on the former point a little, though, because we are coming back to it.

Israel has had many military successes over the years. The 1948 war went pretty well. 1967 went really well. The most recent war against Hizballah went pretty well too, even if we cucked out before the end because Bibi cut a deal concerning his outstanding warrants. As I’ve written before, in as much as it’s possible to find a common factor in Israel’s successes, it’s when the Left-Wing secular establishment/deep state gets to run things themselves without interference.

Israel’s military golden age was achieved at precisely the time that the hilonim ran things with no-one else getting a say. If the baboons got too uppity, the Left just literally murdered them. Ever since Begin cheated in the elections by directly appealing to people incompetent to vote, it’s gotten gradually worse. For a religious Jew, obviously, there is a certain mystery involved in all this. You can have your answers, but you’d be better off having mine. However, regardless of your personal brand of cope, it doesn’t change the facts. With the Left you win, with the Right you lose, and not in a beautiful loser way either, you just commit a bunch of atrocities for nothing.

To attribute your successes and triumphs to God rather than your strength and the might of your hand is an act of piety. The Torah demands it of you. However, to ascribe other people’s success and triumphs to your special favour in the eyes of God isn’t modesty at all. It’s thinly disguised pride. Sure I didn’t fly the plane, or pay for the plane, or provide the intelligence for the plane, or, in fact, do anything at all, but it is not the wicked leftists who did all these things that should take the credit. No, they should be driven from the country to make it stronger. Instead it is I who am responsible, for I, err, davened.

This can be seen most clearly when Charedim do it. Here, for example, is the Rosh Yeshiva of Ateres Shlomo, a man who has made it his life’s mission to demonstrate in squirm-inducing detail that, probably, the Rambam was actually right about the consequences of taking money for learning Torah, declaring that it was really the Charedim who freed the hostages.

None of the Charedim who read this blog will even try to defend this because it’s so laughable and revolting. He’s high off his own supply, and no-one else is getting high off it. However, while it’s self-evidently absurd to claim that Charedim are making incalculable contributions to the war, it’s also, after only a very little reflection, self-evident that it’s no less absurd to claim that anyone religious had anything much to do with the successes against Iran. The decent thing for a man of the Right to do would be to pop into his car, go wherever it is the posh hilonim live, find a random one and say ‘thankyou’ and, maybe even apologise for trying so hard to turn the mediocre country they built into a third-world criminal slum. It’s certainly true that Religious Zionists made outsized contributions to the Gaza war and they can attribute their successes there, such as they are, to God all they want, but the bits that went well … sorry, you didn’t build that, you just got in the way.1

That’s the ranting portion of the article over. Jk/ there is no other part of the article. However, I’ve also been thinking about something else recently. I’ve argued before that the concept of antisemitism as understood by most Jews directly contradicts the Jewish idea of providence. If the gentiles hate you, you are supposed to see it as a sign of divine displeasure, but, instead, you see it as the result of some mystery virus that infects them for no reason at all, and definitely, never ever, because of any flaws on your own part. That’s antisemitic! This is so obvious, that you have to wonder why I had to point it out, but there’s something more obvious.

Every Jew reads at least twice a day that if the children of Israel will do what they are told, then there will be rain, and if they don’t there won’t. Apart from the fact that it was promised to the Patriarchs (which only pushes the question back), it is the only time the Torah explains why the children of Israel were given this land and not some other. It is here, as opposed to a place where water comes via river or canal, that you will be acutely conscious of your reliance on the divine will. Well, that’s funny because two things happened recently. First of all, following October 7th, there was a massive religious revival in Israel, which you can read about here, here, here, here, here, here and a whole bunch of other places. Then there was a drought.

The rainy season 2024-25 was very bad, the worst in over 100 years in the western Galilee. The first half of the 2025-26 rainy season was also shaping up to be pretty bad, but then the second half was good and, overall, it came out pretty average, not enough to repair the environmental damage of the previous year, but enough to avert total catastrophe:

So, the year-and-a-half–drought was kind of a warning shot, but a warning shot for what? Didn’t we do all the things God wants us to do; shouldn’t we be getting some kind of reward?

I can think of two explanations. The first is to look at the nature of the religious revival, which occurred overwhelmingly through either (a) Chabad, (b) Breslev or (c) miscellaneous Sephardi miracle-worker social influencers or, to sum up in a word, Zoharism. Zoharism has different varieties, but the features common to all branches are that (a) regular monotheism is crusty and stale (b) Jewish ritual is really an elaborate system of theurgy (c) God has gendered aspects and when you do your rituals they, erm, well, maybe children read this blog so we can’t be too graphic. While not strictly essential to Zoharism, most contemporary variants also have (d) righteous holy men, identifiable principally by looking weird, who act as conduits of divine blessing because they are, well not exactly God, but, you know, not not God either. Most of these holy men are venal in an astoundingly crude kind of way, and rather a lot of them are literally criminals. Indeed, we might add that (e) outright, open contempt for the idea that bribery and fraud are actually wrong is another prevalent feature of Israeli Zoharism. Finally, we also have to mention the mysterious element of (f) Kookism, which is the belief that the collective soul of the Jewish people is even more not not God than the tzaddikim, which means that whatever the Jewish people do is ipso facto correct.

In short, Zoharism is precisely, in every single detail, the religion propagandized against throughout the prophets from beginning to end. So maybe that’s just it. Maybe they meant what they said? ‘I hate, I despise your festivals’. Of course, the Zoharists have their explanations. Everything means the opposite of what it says. When it says don’t worship Asherah it means this; when it says God created the heavens and the earth, it means this; when it says the ‘Hashem is one’ it means this. But maybe not. What if it does actually mean what it says?’. ‘When you stretch out your palms, I will hide my eyes from you, when you increase prayer, I will not listen. Your hands are full of blood’.2

But I’m kind of sounding like some sort of ISIS maniac now, so let’s flip the script and suggest option number 2. A lot of people say we did a genocide in Gaza. I think this is silly hyperbole. It was grim, there were war crimes, but no genocide. Perhaps we would have done one if people weren’t watching (Turkish style, not German), but people were watching, so it’s moot. However, what is for sure is that a lot of people over here kept shouting about how we should do a genocide, and genocide is good, and you’re Erev Rav if you don’t want to do a genocide, and this is the age of the internet, so the goyim are waking up.3

You know my opinions. I am a contemptible bugman and, as such, I think we as a species did a good thing in inventing the civilian-combatant distinction and that taming war is a real, and fragile, achievement we should hang on to, not least because we know what happens when we don’t. Say I’m wrong, though, and there’s nothing intrinsically wrong with killing tens of thousands of children. It’s still the case that everyone thinks it’s wrong and is sickened when you loudly declare your desire to do it. The Talmud tells us that a scholar who walks around with a stain on his shirt deserves death because he brings the Torah into disrepute. Has the Torah ever been brought more into disrepute than it is today by one baboon ‘Rabbi’ after another loudly shouting ‘Hey Al Jazeera come and clip me saying insane, clownish, murderous nonsense and show it to a billion people’ over and over again for two years?4

Or maybe I’m wrong. Maybe the real reason God was angry is because we didn’t kill enough people, or maybe because we didn’t do enough theurgy, or we didn’t give enough money to convicted felons to perform penances on our behalf. Let’s look at some representative examples of Israeli religious figures grappling with the question of why their apparently great successes in promoting religious observance and faith met with what is apparently the Torah’s paradigmatic sign of divine displeasure.

Oh, you can’t because they don’t exist. It never occurred to any of these people to grapple with the question, because it never occurred to any of them to do anything other than look at current events so as to congratulate themselves on the achievements of others, to cite virtues and accomplishments they neither have nor even aspire to have to prove that they are specially loved by the Creator of the Universe. And that’s my real point. To be honest, ISIS or not, I actually believe in my explanations, but you don’t have to. The take home message is simply this: it’s all just bollocks. You don’t have to take it seriously at all. They don’t bother to formulate their ideas in such a way that they could persuade anyone interested in thinking them through, so you don’t have to treat them as if they do. The only proper response is mockery, contempt, disgust.

שִׁמְעוּ־נָא זֹאת רָאשֵׁי בֵּית יַעֲקֹב וּקְצִינֵי בֵּית יִשְׂרָאֵל הַמְתַעֲבִים מִשְׁפָּט וְאֵת כׇּל־הַיְשָׁרָה יְעַקֵּשׁוּ׃

בֹּנֶה צִיּוֹן בְּדָמִים וִירוּשָׁלַ͏ִם בְּעַוְלָה׃

רָאשֶׁיהָ  בְּשֹׁחַד יִשְׁפֹּטוּ וְכֹהֲנֶיהָ בִּמְחִיר יוֹרוּ וּנְבִיאֶיהָ בְּכֶסֶף יִקְסֹמוּ וְעַל־יְהֹוָה יִשָּׁעֵנוּ לֵאמֹר הֲלוֹא יְהֹוָה בְּקִרְבֵּנוּ לֹא־תָבוֹא עָלֵינוּ רָעָה׃

לָכֵן בִּגְלַלְכֶם צִיּוֹן שָׂדֶה תֵחָרֵשׁ וִירוּשָׁלַ͏ִם עִיִּין תִּהְיֶה וְהַר הַבַּיִת לְבָמוֹת יָעַר׃

That’s it. Now have a coffee or something. I probably should.

There were two main responses among the Jewish intellectual classes who had accepted Zoharism as the theological core of Judaism (those who did not, though doubtless meriting great rewards in the World to Come, were too marginal to mention). The first response, which we shall title ‘orthodox’ was to pretend as hard as they could that it never happened. Yes, obviously, there was a man called Shabtai Tzvi who had proclaimed himself the messiah, but his followers had been a minority, mostly drawn from the ignorant rabble, and even those had been hoodwinked by a calculated conspiracy on the part of Tzvi and his inner circle of evildoers. Huge numbers of records demonstrating the breadth and intensity of the messianic fervour were eradicated. If you could get away with denying that you had been involved, that was best; if you were - say - literally Shabtai Tzvi’s Chief Rabbi in Izmir, as was the author of Kenesset haGedolah, a central text until today in the Sephardi halachic tradition, and widely cited more broadly as the source of the ‘correct’ function of kabbalah in halachic casuistry, then you apologised, excused yourself on the grounds that you meant well, and moved on.

The orthodox answer to the problem of how Zoharism had promised a messiah and came up with a pup was a shrug. Maybe the real messiah would come soon, or maybe by picking the wrong guy the Jews had delayed the promised time by another hundred or so years. In order to deal with the problem of how Zoharism had caused such as catastrophe, earlier traditions of esotericism were called upon, and a wave of decrees was made limiting kabbalistic study to those over 40 who were first thoroughly versed in Talmud. Zoharism was still the theological core of Judaism, but its contents were to be restricted somewhat lest they be again misunderstood. This wasn’t very intellectually satisfying, but the rough edges were smoothed over by vitriol aimed at Shabtai Tzvi and his remaining followers who were depicted as consciously malign agents who had knowingly perverted the pure kabbalistic doctrine. If you asked too persistently where the line was between interpretation and perversion, then that looked suspiciously like you might sympathise with them. So don’t do that. Eat your kugel.

Anti-Sabbateanism was, therefore, not so much a set of ideas as a mixture of evasion and irritable mental gestures. Like post-war American conservatism, it sought to re-arrange a cluster of concepts that clearly and ineluctably led precisely to the results that it was organised to oppose. In as much as it worked, it was because ideas aren’t everything. Jews wanted their religion to not be destroyed, so they said whatever they needed to say. It was not for a full century that anyone attempted to attack Sabbatean doctrines in a fundamental and principled way. We will get to that in due course, but in the meantime the Sabbateans, without doubt the majority of intellectually productive Jewry, had a more interesting task.

Antinomianism

Because he was the first to take it seriously, Gershom Scholem’s model of Sabbateanism is the starting point of discussion. According to him, Sabbateanism evolved under two pressures. The first was the refusal of some significant section of Jewry to admit that their inner experience of redemption had been in vain, and the second was the shock of an apostate messiah. Under such conditions, Tzvi’s remaining believers were forced into extrapolating from his scandalous act a doctrine that their messiah had come to redeem them from the law itself, drawing them towards a doctrine of ‘redemption through sin’ a term invented by Scholem himself, not used even by the most extremist antinomian Sabbatean sects. The focus on antinomianism as the characteristic feature of Sabbateanism was central to Scholem’s understanding of it as the wellspring of Jewish Reform movements and, ultimately, Zionism, and has also been accepted by the Orthodox who find in it an excuse to absolve a number of 18th century rabbinical figures of Sabbatean guilt. Scholem’s narrative, however, is sufficiently misleading that, while containing much truth, at a certain level of simplification, it is necessary to declare it false.

The first reason for this, which remarkably enough has barely been commented on, is that Shabtai Tzvi’s conversion to Islam was not in fact antinomian. Five-hundred years prior, the Almohads, a renegade Berber dynasty whose rebellion against the corruptions and compromises of the Abbasids had led them to jettison much of normative Sunnism in pursuit of purifying it, abolished dhimmi protections for people of the book and demanded Jews and Christians convert on pain of death. Whether the Jews of the Maghreb and Andalus who had fallen under their rule could save their lives by saying the shahada, or were rather required to accept execution was extensively discussed by the decisors of the time. The accepted view was that of Maimonides, namely that Islam is not Avodah Zarah, and that, as such, it was permitted (indeed, obligatory) to perform conversion for the purpose of saving a Jewish life. Thus, Shabtai Tzvi, in fact, did the correct thing according to Jewish law, all the more so since, had he refused, many other Jews would certainly have been killed by the Ottomans in punishment for his farcical quasi-rebellion.

What was scandalous about Tzvi’s conversion was that he told his followers that, despite being humiliated, he was still the messiah and his conversion was part of some messsianic plan. He absolutely did not tell his followers the plan was to redeem the Jewish people through sin; in fact, he didn’t tell them anything much, partly because his modus operandi was being a massive weirdo and dropping hints instead of ever just saying something clearly, and partly because he himself wasn’t clear what the plan was. The idea that he had to descend into the realm of darkness to liberate sparks still trapped there was Nathan’s idea, and is anyway not the same thing as saying that the sin of conversion itself effected this liberation. However, the other major theologian of Sabbateanism, Abraham Cardoso, interpreted it as Tzvi taking on the punishment of exile on behalf of the Jewish people as a whole, in a way roughly analogous to how Christians view the sacrifice of Jesus.

While the conversion, however, was not, at any rate not necessarily, an antinomian act, Shabtai Tzvi, both before Nathan declared him Messiah, and during the period from then until his conversion, had committed multiple serious and public violations of Jewish law, and had explicitly marked them as having mystical antinomian significance by repurposing the traditional blessing ‘who frees the bound’ to mean ‘who permits the forbidden’. The masses of believers were unaware of the full extent of this, but it was well known to his kabbalist core believers.1 Nathan had devoted his very first publications to explain the necessity of the messiah’s strange deeds in the scheme of cosmic salvation, and substantial detail was included in his letter to the Chelebi’s court which secured the movement financial backing and international support. Scholem arbitrarily chooses to find in this only the ‘seeds’ of an antinomian theology only realised after the apostacy, but it seems simpler to say that the theology of the movement was antinomian from the start. The developments in doctrine after the catastrophe of the conversion were not necessitated by a new need to explain a sinning messiah, but to explain away his failure. The presence of antinomianism from the start is not at all surprising because, as we have established at length, Shabtai Tzvi was the heralded messiah of Zoharism, and Zoharism is antinomian.

The essence of the Torah according to the Rabbinic understanding is that it is law. The nature of law is that (a) it requires compliance as its mode of engagement and (b) its details are determined by judicial means. Regarding the specifics of (b) there has always been disagreement about exactly what this entails, with different figures giving more or less weight to lawgiving institutions, textual interpretation, analogy, custom and other features familiar from other legal systems. However, generically, the use of judicial tools to determine what halacha allows and obligates was a fundamental assumption of everyone. Kabbala, however, involves a reimagination of halacha as a system of theurgy. It may be that what halacha obligates has been commanded, but that is not why it obligates. It is necessary to do this and not do that because in so doing one either fixes or damages the universe, and this would be so to exactly the same extent if it was uncommanded.

This change in the essential nature of halacha inevitably put tremendous and escalating strain on its subjection to judicial arbitration. Let us say that there is a dispute about the detail of a particular ritual act and the kabbalist has divined that one of the suggested alternatives is more effective in channelling positive cosmic forces. To subject his judgment to considerations like which alternative better comported to the probable meaning of an elliptical statement in the Talmud, or what a majority of jurists had hitherto decided, or what the prevailing custom was would be a sort of madness. This is especially so given that, as the Beit Yosef writes in his introduction, by the mid 16th century, the proliferation of hermeneutical techniques in the midst of institutional anarchy had rendered appeal to primary sources ineffective as a mode of judicial resolution, leading to the use of arbitrary and unsatisfactory ad hoc tools of decision making such as the one he outlines there. The fact that, for a century and a half, kabbalists mostly did so subject their judgment to halachic decisors is testimony to the tremendous taboo Judaism had erected on interfering with the legal process by quasi-prophetic means. However, this taboo had broken down long before Shabtai Tzvi was revealed. It is easy to cite examples, but perhaps the best one is Simhat Torah.

According to the Babylonian custom of completing the cycle of Torah readings each year, the final section is read on the second customary day of Shemini Atzeret observed in exile. In the Geonic period, this day came to be known as Simhat Torah, and certain liturgical innovations were made, most notably the seven hakafot. In one responsum of Rav Hai Gaon found quoted by Ri Migash, he reports two anomalous customs observed on this day which violate Jewish law, one lighting incense and the other dancing, justifying them based on custom and the lesser status of Yom Tov Sheni (itself an anomalous ruling). Both practices died out, but in Tzfat, the kabbalists took a fancy to this historical oddity, and decided to revive the first of these practices, with a key difference: since there is no second customary day of Yom Tov in the Land of Israel, they observed it on the biblical mandated day of Shemini Atzeret itself, in effect abolishing the original festival.2 The kabbalists demanded not merely dancing, but ecstatic dancing, the more ecstatic the better to effect cosmic repairs by means of open, overt and wilful violation of an unambiguous prohibition. Judgement was visited on Tzfat five years before Shabtai Tzvi’s revelation, but the new festival of joyous desecration spread first throughout the Sephardi lands, then to Poland, and then gradually everywhere, the last holdouts mostly giving up in the 19th century. Halachic ‘justifications’ found in major codes make the Disabled Lesbian Reconstructionist Rabbinical Seminary of San Francisco look like a peerless exemplar of intellectual honesty and strict fidelity to codified law.

Rant over. I hear, however, a reader call out ‘that’s not real antinomianism, like having sex orgies rolling in whipped cream on Yom Kippur like the Sabbateans did!' Dancing is nice and sweet’. Well, first of all, lots of things are nice and sweet. Wearing a linsey-woolsey suit is sweet; eating gammon and chips while reading the morning newspaper is sweet; watching the football after lunch on a Shabbos afternoon is sweet, but you’re not allowed to do all that, OK. All of those things are a lot more sweet than crashing around in a room full of plastic wrappers and screwed up disposable cups, incontinently slurring songs that sucked to begin with (sorry, we said rant over). You can pick which bits of antinomianism you like for yourself, but you don’t get to pick which bits of antinomianism other people like, and what a lot of people like is sex. However, more to the point, the vast majority of Sabbateans were not antinomians in that sense either. Even many followers of the biggest extremist, Jacob Frank, who we’ll get to, didn’t join in his shenanigans, but rather lived staid lives in compliance with normative Jewish law whilst being inspired from afar by his ‘strange deeds’. The mainstream of Sabbateanism didn’t go that far even. For them, the ‘strange deeds’ were part of Shabtai Tvi’s own personal tussle with metaphysical forces and not to be emulated by anyone. There might be a bit more antinomianism to go round, in due course, but that would have to wait for the completion of redemption. In the grey area where they now lived, only controlled doses of antinomianism were allowed.

This brings us to another point, which is that the idea that, since Jewish law is actually really a vehicle for repairing a broken cosmic reality, once that cosmic reality had been fixed there’s no point in doing it anymore. To return to our example above, the dancing on Simhat Torah was licit partly because the kabbalists of Tzfat were unanimously agreed that the messianic age was right around the corner, and hence you could afford to be a bit more creative with the boringer parts of Jewish law. This idea is implicit in all of kabbalistic literature, and it’s explicit in some of it, so the difference between the ‘orthodox’ kabbalists and the Sabbateans was not about antinomianism at all, but about whether the messiah had come. But that’s the whole dispute in the first place!

Antinomianism, then, is to a substantial degree a distraction in understanding what made Sabbateanism Sabbatean. Certainly, regular outbreaks of antinomian energy were a feature of the movement, but it wasn’t what it was really about. What was it about?

Simple Faith

It’s easy to overcomplicate things, so let’s repeat again: fundamentally, the difference between Sabbateans and non-Sabbateans was about whether the messiah had come. The non-Sabbateans had a problem, namely how Zoharism could promise the messiah and a messiah came, but he was a dud. They responded by trying to take an evolving tradition and freeze it right before the point at which it evolved into Sabbateanism, elevating Lurianic kabbalah into the final statement of Zoharism beyond which no progress was possible.3 The Sabbateans had a different problem: if the messiah had come, how come nothing had happened?

The Sabbatean answer at a basic level was the same as the Christians before them: the redemption had two stages, the full redemption with the end of evil and suffering was still to come, but an intermediate kind of redemption had already happened. The contents of this redemption were also the same, generically, as in the Christian version: the believers in Shabtai Tzvi felt a sense of liberation, from doubt, from the indignities of life, and to some extent from burdens of the Jewish religion, at any rate from it feeling so burdensome. This feeling, they declared, was not just a delusion it was an actual divine gift, given through His anointed, and all you had to do to be granted it was believe.

From the beginning of the Sabbatean movement, Nathan of Gaza had emphasised the need for a pure faith unevidenced by miraculous signs and argued that those who did not have this faith were ipso facto, of the Erev Rav. After the apostacy, he doubled down on the doctrine: the true Jew must believe not only without evidence, but against all evidence, ironically drawing on a famous statement of Maimonides that one should not expect the messiah to be accompanied by miracles.4 The renunciation of worldly wisdom, of common sense, was now the highest religious value. The term כופר (denier), which had always been used in Rabbinic discourse as part of a phrase (כופר בעיקר, כופר בתורה), now become a standalone designation for the unbelievers, opposed to מאמינים (believers) who, alone, had an unblemished soul.

However, faith must be faith in something. The Sabbatean elevation of faith as the supreme religious good had two doctrinal components. The first was belief in the messiah, the perfectly righteous person whose soul was uniquely attached to God, through whom the ordinary believer could attain spiritual heights he could not reach on his own. Different Sabbateans understood this differently, with the most extreme versions saying that Shabtai Tzvi was literally God (though, as with all kabbalists, they would then proceed to write a million words explaining how that was not literally true, but also was literally true, and was and wasn’t and [SCREAMS]). The moderates, however, saw him as elevated to some quasi-divine intermediary status by virtue of the unique tribulations he had endured in his fight with the forces of evil. In order to cultivate connection to the tzaddik, completely unprecedented practices, such as having a portrait of Shabtai Tzvi in the house, were innovated.

The classic text of this new doctrine was Tzaddik Yesod Olam, authored by Yehuda Leib Prossnitz, but often attributed to Isaac Luria, and not infrequently printed in editions of Chaim Vital’s Sha’ar Yihudim. This book presents the new doctrine צדיק גוזר והקב''ה מקיים (the tzaddik decrees and God establishes) based apparently on a garbled version of a talmudic passage. Originally, this cultivation of faith in the tzaddik was restricted to Shabtai Tzvi, but gradually it came to be extended more widely. Some of these tzaddikim were identified as reincarnations of Tzvi himself, or as supplementary messiahs (the doctrine of two messiahs being employed for the purpose). Eventually, though, the Sabbateans came round to the idea that there were no fixed number of quasi-divine intermediaries for them to adore, so long as they gave off the right vibes.

The second aspect of the Sabbatean faith was the search for a new doctrine of God Himself. As we have mentioned now a few times, the orthodox response to the Sabbatean farce was to try and freeze Zoharism in precisely the position it had evolved into just before the farce happened. Many moderns have pointed out, not without justice, that this turns kabbalah into a kind of parody of itself, a set of dogmas in place of what was once a dynamic intellectual system. The problem is that if you let Zoharism evolve any further, it evolves into Sabbateanism! For the Sabbateans, themselves, of course, this was a feature not a bug, and they set themselves the task of finally completing the job that had begun with the revelation of the Zohar and proclaim to the Jewish people of who their God had been all along:

That was Cardoso’s view, and he was the second most important Sabbatean theologian, but it would be a mistake to see his or anyone else’s version of Sabbatean theology as definitive. Like the early Christians, the Sabbateans had multiple figures frantically arguing about doctrine.5 A common alternative belief, attacked fiercely by Cardoso but quite possibly held by Shabtai himself, was that the true God of Israel was simply the Sefirah of Tiferet. What united the Sabbateans was, first, the search itself, and secondly the hatred for the ‘rationalists’ who had concealed the true God in their philosophy. What they sought to do was combine the intellectually sophisticated version of kabbalah articulated by Isaac Luria with the raw, blasphemous power of the Zohar itself, to complete the task of turning a mechanical God into a personal one via the kabbalistic concepts they had inherited. Unlike the Christians, they never arrived at a ‘catholic’ version of the fulfilled kabbalah because the movement died out before consensus could be reached. (Or did it? Stay tuned!)

Finally, the Sabbateans saw it as their duty to complete the job of spreading knowledge of the Zohar. The Jewish masses had by and large accepted the kabbalists as their doctrinal authorities, but they still knew relatively little of the contents of their doctrines. It was partly for this reason, the Sabbateans believed, that they had abandoned their messiah over a trifling matter like apostacy. While the orthodox did their utmost to halt and reverse the proliferation of Zoharic texts that had happened in the century prior, the Sabbateans continued to promote their publication and distribution. For the next hundred years or so, it was chiefly them who funded such work. New texts such as Hemdat Yamim (source of the Tu Bi’Shvat Seder and much else) freely mixed pre-Sabbatean and Sabbatean Zoharic material in a way that, even today, no-one can fully disentangle.

1

Regarding how much the masses did know, see this important detail:

3

The crispest statement of this I have seen is from one of the Substack OTDs.

4

David Berger שליט''א has a good article on this:

Contradictions in the Number of People Killed on the Days of April 7-9

Lebanese Ministry of Public Health (LMoPH, or LMoH, for short) numbers are generally accepted without question. However, a few of their recently announced figures cited by Lebanon’s National News Agency (NNA) are mutually irreconcilable.

This report states that as of the afternoon of April 10, 1,953 people had been killed during the war in total, and 65 people were killed that day. This report states that, as of that same afternoon, the death toll of the April 8 attack had risen to 357, and this one states that as of April 7, the death toll was 1,530. Taken together, these official sources mean that, during the remainder of April 7 and the days of April 8 and April 9, only 1 person was killed, outside of Israel’s “Eternal Darkness” strikes (1,953 minus 1,530 minus 357 minus 65 = 1). Needless to say, this is basically impossible, given the ongoing airstrikes throughout the country and military clashes in the south.1

Not only do these figures strain credulity, they contradict other figures provided. The NNA posted here that per the LMoH, as of the afternoon of April 9, 1,888 people had been killed in total during the war, and 303 had been killed in the “Eternal Darkness” strikes on April 8. As I already noted, their April 7 update stated that the death toll of the entire war was 1,530. Taken together, that means that the death toll on the end of April 7, after that update, and on April 8, outside of the “Eternal Darkness” strikes, and on April 9, until the update was 1,888 minus 1,530 minus 303 = 55. This shows that 55 people were killed during those days, not 1, as follows from their April 10^th announcement.2 3

From the above, at the minimum, we see that the LMoH figures aren’t reliable, since they’re internally contradictory. More specifically, it appears that they’re trying to inflate the death toll of Israel’s “Eternal Darkness” strikes. They do this, first, by conflating all deaths from the war on April 8 with those specifically from the 10 minutes of strikes constituting the “Eternal Darkness” attack, and secondly, apparently, they do this by lumping in deaths from other days.

As I noted, if the April 9 announcement is to be believed, then 55 people were killed on late April 7, in other strikes on April 8, and on the beginning of April 9, whereas the April 10 announcement lumps 54 of them into the “Eternal Darkness” attack. If the April 10 announcement is to be believed, then 358 people were killed from the afternoon of April 7 through April 9. All but one of whom were killed during 10 minutes of April. Much more likely, assuming that stated totals are accurate, they lumped all casualties over those days into the toll of the Eternal Darkness attack.

Contradictions continue with their April 11th announcement. It states that 2,020 people were killed in total, including 97 killed that day. However, as I noted, their April 10 announcement stated that 1,953 people had been killed, so the total on April 11 would have needed to be at least 2,050 (1,953 + 97). If the April 11 cumulative and daily daily death tolls are accurate, perhaps they inflated the previous ones, as part of exaggerating the death toll of the April 8th attack.

Anomalously Low Number Reported Wounded on Days of April 7-9

Their figures imply that from the April 7 afternoon announcement through April 9, only 57 people were wounded outside of the “Eternal Darkness” attack,4 which is considerably lower than their recent average of about 152 per day.5

The simplest explanation for the reported sharp decline would be that most of the injuries during those days were falsely lumped into the figure for the “Eternal Darkness” attack.

Inexplicable Rise in Reported Women Killed

The next issue is an anomalous increase in reported women killed. On April 7, the LMoH reported that 102 women, 130 children, and 1,298 men had been killed. On April 11, they reported that 248 women, 165 children, and 1,607 men were killed. Thus, over the 4 day period, 490 were reported killed of whom 146 (248 minus 102) were reported to be women, 35 were reported to be children (165 minus 130), and 309 were reported to be men (1,607 minus 1,298). That comes out to 7% children, 30% women, and 63% men. It’s odd that the share of women is so high and that the share of men is so low.

Now, the obvious explanation is that the “Eternal Darkness” attack on April 8 was particularly indiscriminate. But if that were the case, we’d expect the children’s share killed to be higher. In fact, as the April 7 numbers show, the percent killed who were children before the April 8 attack was 8.5%. Thus, the reported share killed who were children actually dropped. Why would that be the result of particularly indiscriminate attacks?

The percentages look even stranger if we look at additional deaths announced in the following days. Their April 9 announcement stated that 303 people had been killed in the April 8 attack, including 71 women, 30 children, and 9 elderly people. If we assume that of the elderly people, 5 were female and 4 were male, we’d get 30 children, 76 women (71 + 5) and 197 men. Adding those to the April 7 numbers, we get 178 women, 160 children, and 1,495 men.

What were the demographic shares of those killed between then and April 11? Well, you had another 5 children (165 minus 160), another 70 women (248 minus 178) and another 112 males (1,607 minus 1,495) for a total of an additional 187 people. Of these 187, the percentage who are children is just 2.7%, the percentage who are women is a whopping 37%, and the percentage who are male is 60%.

To repeat, the period of April 8-11 had an oddly high share of casualties being women. Naturally, this might be explained by the indiscriminate attack on April 8, but when we remove the bulk of the deaths from the April 8 attack, we get an even higher female share of casualties!

The simplest explanation is that they falsely inflated the number of women killed.6 7

Change in LMoH Reporting System

Notably, the Lebanese Ministry of Health had been publishing daily casualty figures on their site, but they stopped posting on April 7, restarting on April 12 (posting their full casualty breakdown for April 11, but not for the earlier missed days). During their pause, the figures came from Lebanon’s National News Agency, citing the Health Emergency Operations Center of the Ministry of Public Health.

The contradictions I pointed out all stem from this period when the LMoH stopped posting on their site.

Perhaps these false figures only began to be introduced then, with the absence of daily tolls on the LMoH possibly meant to obscure this.

Ministry Context and History of Lying

The LMoH was already making extremely dubious claims about casualties during the last war. In defense of their reports at the time, the NYT, noted (among other things) that the head the ministry was nominated by Sunnis, not Hezbollah.

It’s worth noting, then, that the current minister, Rakan Nassereddine, was indeed nominated by Hezbollah. In the words of Hezbollah’s Al-Manar outlet, “Hezbollah is represented by two ministers: Minister of Public Health Rakan Nassereddine and Minister of Labor Mohammad Haidar.”

During the previous war, the LMoH would regularly claim that the vast majority, if not all, of the casualties were civilians,8 which was undermined by their own reported demographics of victims,9 and even more so by external evidence, such as the flood the funeral announcements on Hezbollah channels for their martyrs.10

They also seemed to systematically undercount huge numbers of militants killed. This became most evident at the end of the war,11 as Israel’s reported number of terrorists killed12 roughly equaled the total number of people the LMoH reported were killed in the country,13 and Hezbollah’s finally announced death toll of their fighters actually significantly exceeded it.14

1. A funny quirk of the modern era is that elected politicians, at any rate American ones, have significantly more leeway to Just Do Things in the sphere of foreign policy than in other areas.2 Partly, this is obviously a function of some historical quirks in the distribution of decision-making within the American constitutional system, but there’s also something a bit deeper - dare I say it? ‘structural’ (you gaylord) - for another day. For now, though, I’ll observe that a consequence of this is that a lot of political engagement and ideological polarisation now revolves around foreign policy. Polls consistently shows that electorates rate domestic issues as more important, but concrete differences of opinion are small or non-existent. Neither side is explicitly in favour of more crime or worse healthcare or economic decline, though, with justification, different parties are seen as better or worse on these issues, and more or less willing to discount them against other priorities.3 Foreign policy, by contrast, comes with a worldview and an identity attached, and lots of shouting. The problem is that this is a big problem. As a rule, most people shouldn’t really have opinions about anything, but they should have opinions about foreign policy least of all. Forming a perspective about even one country requires a lot of reading about disparate topics, and warfare, the ultimate foreign policy instrument, requires lots of specialist technical knowledge, which is mostly extremely boring, and much of which is literally secret. Inevitably, foreign policy ideologies are clownish attempts to process complex reality into memes for which the metaphor of the square peg and the round hole lacks five or six dimensions. The most successful version today elevates noninterventionism into a religious principle where phrases like ‘regime-change war’, ‘boots on the ground’, or ‘forever wars’ function as taboo impurities that are seriously supposed to (and, worse, actually do) regulate the actions of the global hegemon. Terrifyingly, though, this may actually be the least insane ‘school’ of foreign-policy thought that can be laundered at scale through contemporary mass media. If you have some pet issue like Taiwan, do what you can to keep it the preserve of wonks and publicity-averse lobbies. Of course, these decision-making structures are structurally insane too, but less, and more predictably.

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2. The State of Israel for the foreseeable future is probably going to be at war frequently. Our take is that it’s not our fault; we tried as hard as we could and the Arabs or the Muslims wouldn’t play ball and this is how it’s got to be. Let’s accept that for the sake of argument. If you are going to be at war all the time, you need to, quite literally, normalise war, treat it as politics by other means. On a practical level, Israel is quite good at that. Our civil defence makes it so you can go to work, shop and maintain regular rhythm more or less, but, at the same time, culturally it all goes to pot. Every war is the war, the last war, the most significant war in history, and then it ends, and the next one is instead. Here’s an extremely indigenous Jew showing me his deeply-rooted and indigenous Jewish culture by telling me the Messiah is coming by Pesach because, look, it says right here in this Polish collection of babble completely untethered from reality.

   Unfortunately, the goyim know about all this Amalek stuff. Mostly, they are concerned that it entails some kind of intention to complete massive war crimes, and this concern is not without merit, but I think more important is the flight from reality it entails, the belief that by wildly pattern-matching current events to biblical ones refracted through folk mysticism you are understanding them more deeply rather than, more prosaically, not understanding them. On a simple practical level, how many times can these people keep doing this while still summoning up enthusiasm? I don’t know, but it’s certainly quite a lot. It isn’t just the literal retards either, here’s great friend of the blog and extremely enlightened Charedi, Ash.

   

   I’ll try: Israeli intelligence (a) has very high human capital to work with (b) is extremely well-funded (c) is competing against a dysfunctional basket-case regime with millions of silent defectors and (d) rightly or wrongly, doesn’t respect taboos such as assassinating leaders adhered to by other states. If you are inclined to see miracles, you can see them here, like you can see them in a lot of places. Mrs NonZionism made a cake on Pesach from some recipe she found on the internet and it was amazing. Why that cake and not some other gross cake? No-one knows. It’s far from the worst hashgacha pratis story I’ve heard. I’m rambling because I’m hungry, but the point is knock it off with this crap, OK. Find something else to be religiously inspired by, like the kingfisher, or Cheerios or whatever. Just not Israeli war every six months.

3. Back to the moral-boundary point, I think Israel’s extensive use of assassination as a military tactic in very clear violation of international law to whatever extent it can be said to exist, is, in the abstract, a good thing. The long-term incentives are pretty bad, since an international order in which assassination was the norm would be composed of states led by the foolhardy and the insane, but, looked at in isolation, it’s so obviously more moral to target the people who make the decisions rather than their conscripts. Moral, however, is not the same as effective. At a basic level, the present predicament is a function of Iran having escalation dominance over the U.S. because (a) they are willing to commit economic terrorism against third parties and really the whole human race and (b) they are willing to push the immiseration of their population right to the edge. These two factors, however, are not givens, they depend on the specific composition of the regime. Up till now, when pushed to the wall, Iran did the less criminal thing and cucked. This time it did the more criminal thing and Trump cucked. Chime in if I’m wrong, but it seems that the net result of the assassination policy was to increase the criminality quotient of key decision makers.

4. The war was a gamble, like any war, but a bit more so than usual. The big black pill here is that technically everything went very well. Since there aren’t really any operational failures of note to blame things on, it looks like the odds were just bad going in, which means it was a bad decision, which is a problem because everyone knows who the main advocate of the decision was.

5. From the Israeli perspective, this was a good bet. We got the most powerful military in the history of mankind fighting on our behalf. The risks were distributed globally, and while no-one likes a global recession, we are relatively immune, since we are only a marginal net energy importer, and very little of our supply comes through the Strait of Hormuz. Our economy is not heavily dependent on industries that are highly vulnerable to oil-price shocks. Iran is an existential threat, certainly to some degree, but also an ongoing non-existential threat, in multiple ways ranging from irritating to deadly. Under such conditions, it makes sense to roll the dice, and, in truth, we haven’t even come out of it so bad, while Iran has certainly been set back a great deal militarily. The hitch is that this is the behaviour of an insane terrorist state that exploits weaknesses in the American political system as a force multiplier, and offloads the costs on random third parties. The problem with being an insane terrorist state, though, is that people think you are an insane terrorist state. Even if they accept the argument that you have no choice to do that to survive, they’ll just kind of wish you wouldn’t, that you would go away. The people who want to drive this country off a cliff rely on being able to portray all critics as third worldists, centrist bugmen, cuckservatives, leftards, anti-semites, woke Right etc. Luckily for them, there are plenty of these people and they do their very best to crowd out other criticism of Israel. However, we are getting closer and closer to the point where no-one is buying what we are selling except weird third-world Pentecostals and football hooligans with brain damage. I recommend sharing this article from Pimlico Journal with Zionists to get them to understand how thoughtful gentiles are looking that them. This one by Scott Greer is also good. You don’t have to agree with anything (I don’t), but you should be able to understand everything without reaching for your cliches. (Try!)

Read more

Some things are cool simpliciter, and some things are cool in the ‘it’s cool that someone did that’ sense, but they are not themselves cool. It’s impressive that someone put so much effort into making the world’s largest tower of pennies, but it would have been better had he put his efforts into something else. Hebrew is like that. People can argue about whether it clears the technical threshold of a resurrected language, but it’s definitely the closest anyone has ever come. It’s objectively cool that a bunch of OTDs from Volozhin decided to make up a new language just to stick it to their Rosh Yeshiva and now millions of people actually speak that language (we’ll get back to this). Nowadays, OTDs just write memoirs about being OTD and their feelings. This is a yawning chasm of human accomplishment. However, the fact is that Israeli Hebrew just kind of sucks. It’s probably not the ugliest language anyone in the world speaks - there are a lot of languages - but it’s ugly and also mildly comical. All the predictions of cultural revival promised by the prophets of the new Hebrew fizzled out after early promise. Bialik is good, Shai Agnon is good, Amos Oz is OK. After that? No-one cares. Certainly Israelis don’t care. They have Hidabrut. To the extent that something that could be called culture happens in Israel, it is mostly conducted in English. The most widely-studied author today from the Hebrew Renaissance is Rabbi Kook and literally no-one has the foggiest clue what he was trying to say (don’t lie). As their last resort, people say that it’s so wonderful that Israeli children can open up the Tanach and understand it, but this is not actually true. Take a child and check. Yes, there is something kind of grimly impressive about the Israeli determination to win the prize for the fewest consonants by endlessly whittling down the alphabet (screw you! ה), as well as somehow having both the largest number of clumsy loanwords and most restricted vocabulary of any language all at the same time, but, again, it’s impressive because they do it, not inherently.

But what should the language of the new state have been? Nothing, check the name of the blog, but, if we take Zionism as a given, I think it’s obvious that Israel should have been a bilingual Yiddish-Arabic state. The reasons for this are as follows:

First of all, Yiddish was spoken, at the time, as a first language by the overwhelming majority of Jews in the world, and, more specifically, by the Jews of the Russian empire for whose predicament Zionism was a proposed remedy. The second most common first-language was Arabic, and between them they accounted for at least 90% of the global Jewish population. In a Yiddish-Arabic speaking Yishuv, therefore, the massive amounts of resources spent teaching new immigrants a new language could have been spent on just about anything else. Yiddish is an easy language to learn because of its grammatical anarchy, and easy adoption of lexis from other languages. The majority dialect of Yiddish today, American-Chassidic, is about 30% English as measured by vocabulary,1 and probably something quite similar would have happened with the adoption of Arabic vocabulary, aiding adoption by the minority population of Jews from MENA countries. The removal of the large barrier to successful assimilation posed by learning Hebrew would likely have lowered the rate of yerida in the pre-state Yishuv from the staggering 30-50% estimated by historians, substantially easing the main problem of Zionism, namely its failure to outnumber the Arabs as per the original plan

There is a somewhat deeper level to this too. Everyone knows that the best Jews are Chassidim. They are just much more comfortable in their own skin, possessed of an authentic and deeply-rooted Jewish identity that everyone else lacks and tries to compensate for in increasingly pathological ways, and just generally more chilled and based and awesome. People assume that this is because of Chassidic ‘thought’ in some way, hence the cancer of neo-Chassidism and proliferation of literature explaining stuff like deveikus, but this is just obviously and provably wrong. Leaving aside Chabad and Breslev, which you can claim are kind of sui generis, Gerrer Chassidim are the absolute worst Jews: dirty, rude, perverted, and sick in the head. The actual difference is that the good Chasidim speak Yiddish and the bad Chassidim speak something else (usually Hebrew). Indeed, the minority of Yiddish-speaking Gerrers left are, to this day, almost completely normal except for trying to tuck regular trousers into their socks. Language is not just a tool for communication; it’s an instrument of group identity through which innumerable things only partially or not at all understood at the conscious level are passed from generation to generation, and across the group. The sad truth that we have to admit is that an Ashkenazi Jew who doesn’t speak Yiddish is an abortion, a spiritually hobbled and deformed creature, fatally detached from the culture of his ancestors and trying to fake it (I don’t speak Yiddish by the way).

The same thing is also true of MENA Jews who don’t speak Arabic. The Mizrahim are always moaning about how they were treated in the early days of the state. A lot of this is pretty ridiculous. Yes, they were in shabby camps, but Israel was dirt poor and coming out of years of gruelling war. There wasn’t some obvious better option. In fact, a lot of Mizrahi Jews got to live in a house in Ramle or Lod from which an Arab had been recently expelled at gunpoint. Some of the other complaints are even more ridiculous, like the idea that there was a thriving trade in stolen Yemenite babies being smuggled to America to go to families willing to pay any price and commit any crime to procure the inestimable treasure of a Yemenite child as a conversation starter at dinner parties or something. However, at the end of the day, the fact is the Zionists did indeed mess them up good and proper and I think the main way they did it (apart from the obvious of getting them kicked out of their home country) was the mass trauma of putting them in schools in an alien language that half of the teachers were also in the process of learning. Transitioning from one language to another can work, but it needs a lot of cultural scaffolding and should preferably happen over a few generations. Not enough research has been done on the mass hazing ritual that was the early state education system - and that which has been done is usually ruined by race leftism - but it’s easy to intuit how it resulted in the mutant freak that is Israeli ‘Sephardi’ culture. Were it not for Rav Ovadya’s heroic efforts in promoting a kind of franchise pastiche of elite Iraqi Jewish culture borrowing heavily from the European Yeshiva movement, it would likely have been a whole lot worse. There’s a whole genre of hasbara posting that is showcasing the rich cultural heritage of MENA Jewry to prove we are indigenous to the region, but it’s all rendered silly and moot by the fact that there is more of this indigenous Judeo-Arabic culture in New York than there is here. Superstition, credulousness and adulation of criminals are not, in and of themselves, a culture.

The second reason is geopolitical. The language of this region is Arabic. For the purpose of espionage and diplomacy, Israel has managed to get by OK, though one suspects there was a stark drop in quality from the era of Eli Cohen after the first wave of immigrants died out. However, for more mundane day to day matters, the lack of broad-based Arabic competency - an entirely self-inflicted disability - has been consistently debilitating. For me, the penny dropped when watching the following video, in which Shimon Peres took a visit to support the pro-cooperation Mayor of Bethlehem against a PLO-supporting challenger:

Isn’t that just so awful? Communicating in broken English as a shared second language, of sorts, is just obviously not an effective way of ruling a group of people, and, whether by choice or necessity, Israel has spent a great part of its history ruling over Arabic speakers. Some of these were hostile from the off, some of them weren’t.

Wherever they started, though, they always ended up very hostile indeed. Israelis have an excuse for this. Better, they have a handful. It’s anti-semitism, it’s the Koran, it’s Soviet propaganda etc. It’s never entirely false, but the only common denominator in all your spectacularly unsuccessful military occupations is you. Probably the single most important factor in avoiding stressful encounters that leave everyone resentful thousands of times a day is frictionless communication. Language incompetency also means you can’t rule effectively by proxy either. One of Ariel Sharon’s more reasonable ideas was to tool up the Maronites through the instrument of the South Lebanese Army, but half of the money was allocated to literally non-existent units and then used to start up catering businesses in Buenos Aires because no-one could keep track on it.

Thus concludes the inoffensive part of the article. I think that’s more than enough justification for preferring Yiddish-Arabic bilingualism, but I also have some offensive reasons too.

Take, for example, this headline from a while ago:

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In 1648, Bohdan Khmelnytsky commenced a Cossack revolt against his former master, the Polish-Lithuanian Commonwealth, which ended in the establishment of an independent Cossack state of sorts that immediately became a Russian vassal, eventually leading to the Cossacks becoming a Tsarist paramilitary in the 19th century. The rebellion was a disaster for the local Ukrainian peasantry, who were massacred by the bucketloads first by the Cossacks’ enemies, the Polish, and then by the Cossacks’ allies the Crimean Tatars. Today Khmelnytsky is especially popular among Duginists, and plays a key role in Putin’s stupid article where he gaslit himself into invading Ukraine, but Ukrainian nationalists also quite like him because he stopped Ukraine becoming Polish, which is good for some reason.

Anyway, Eastern European history is only moderately more interesting that Pakistan’s so the only reason I care at all about this is the effect it had on Jews, among whom it is known not as the ‘Khmelnytsky Uprising’, but the ‘Chmielnicki massacres’. The Jews had served as the tax collectors and enforcers of the Polish nobility, which combined with some Orthodox Christian anti-Judaism, and an injection of oriental savagery, led to brutal mass killings. These have lain heavy on the Jewish imagination ever since, with the Jewish years ת''ח and ת''ט, corresponding to 1648, still known for their gezeiros that go in the list along with the destruction of the two temples, the expulsion from Spain, and, now, the Holocaust.1 Given how shortly this happened before the Sabbatean excitement (the killings continued until 1657), it has, naturally, been considered important background on the general principle that desperate people reach out for hope in messianic movements no matter how silly or even squalid.

Gershom Scholem pointed out that this only gets us so far since the excitement spread to areas like North Africa and Yemen that were untouched by, and largely unaware of, what had recently happened in the Ukraine. On the other hand, it’s certainly true that in Ottoman Palestine, where it all kicked off, the kabbalists were acutely conscious of what had happened because Eastern Europe had been a major area of their missionizing in the first half the 17th century, with many pietists responding by making aliyah to join them, some of them, such as the Shlah or Naftali Bacharach, becoming major figures in the development and proliferation of kabbalah. In addition, though it has been substantially forgotten today, the year of slaughter had actually been announced by the kabbalists beforehand as the year of salvation.

We have seen already that the Zoharist movement was a messianic movement from the beginning. The explanation for why the grand secrets of divine multiplicity and cosmic semen that had lain dormant in a box, or a cave, or whatever, were now revealed to the world was that it was both sign and cause of imminent messianic revelation. Since Zoharists had been beating this drum from around the 1470s, eventually the need to pick a date was overwhelming. The Zohar itself, with its typical wisdom, actually said that the Messiah was coming in the early 1300s, more than a century and a half before Zoharism even kicked off, but the last date found there that hadn’t happened already was the resurrection of the dead in 1648. With a little bit of interpretative magic, this was taken to refer to the Messiah, and the inevitability of redemption in this year had been explicitly predicted by Cordovero, Bacharach and others, providing that Israel failed to bring it forward through sufficient Zohar study.

The great strength of Zoharism is its ability to take knocks in its stride and turn them to its advantage. Over and over again, the Zoharists promise salvation and then, precisely when they predict, everything goes awfully, and the sum total of genuine introspection this summons up in them is nothing. No, it’s always because you weren’t Zoharist enough. Somewhere out there, there’s a cantankerous RATIONALIST daring to practice the religion of his ancestors and that’s why redemption didn’t happen after all the times it was predicted. The most overt signs from heaven you could hope for that Zoharism is not actually true, and actually God meant all that stuff about only worshipping Him to be taken literally, just get solved with a neat ‘the generation wasn’t worthy’, and it’s back to regular programming. Were this not precisely the attitude of the false prophets and their followers during the biblical period, it would be inexplicable. הלא השם בקרבנו לא־תבוא עלינו רעה, sorry השם יתברך תמיד אובה אותי ותמיד יהיה לי רק טוב.

But I am ranting. The point is that it’s not just that kabbalists predicted a specific date would be the advent of the messiah and it was the greatest disaster for hundreds, perhaps a thousand years, it’s that it happened precisely in the place where the kabbalists had had their most recent success.

First entrance

Zoharism had originally been a Spanish thing, and followed the Spanish diaspora wherever it went, which meant primarily the Mediterranean and then further East through the Ottoman lands. As well as the Land of Israel, Italy had emerged as a second center, developing its own homegrown versions, and the Netherlands also got its fair share. The Yiddish speaking Jews, however, were initially untouched, continuing either with earlier forms of Jewish mysticism or no mysticism at all. This started to change in the mid-17th century. The attitude of the rabbinical establishment at this stage can be summed up through three important figures, whose response was substantially overlapping, but distinct enough to describe separately for analytical purposes.

The first is that of the Maharshal, who emphasised the centrality of traditional Talmudic scholarship, and categorised kabbalah as a form of speculative or ethical literature that was firmly secondary. He wrote the classic defence of traditionalist halacha on the key litmus-test issue of tefillin on Hol haMoed, writing that even if Rabi Shimon had written the Zohar, it would not change the halacha, since Rabi Shimon’s purported expertise in theosophy granted him no special advantage in halachic debate, which was determined through the material recorded in the Talmud. The Maharshal did not attack kabbalah, and even read a little of it, but he refused to grant it the supremacy or centrality which, in the Sephardic world, it was assumed to have by virtue of its alleged prominence and elevated subject matter. (Naturally, because kabbalists don’t understand ordinary moral boundaries, in later generations a myth was generated of the Maharshal as a secret kabbalist who maintained the older insistence on esotericism, which was taken as a vindication of kabbala rather than the esotericism.)

The second approach was that of the Rema, who studied kabbalah in far more detail, and attempted a synthesis of the Zoharic literature with Jewish philosophy and astronomy. The resulting work Torat haOlah, is rarely studied today, having been the subject of rather sharp criticism by the Vilna Gaon. I haven’t read it, and I’m not going to, but, unless I am mistaken, the general thrust is to ignore the outrageous and blasphemous elements of the Zohar that excite academics today, to understand it more generally as a system of metaphor, and to translate its vocabulary into the terminology of Jewish philosophy. Kabbalah becomes a kind of cherry on the cake of Judaism, giving an extra layer of ‘meaning’ to the base of legalism, but not in such a way that it can change what lies beneath.

The third is that of the Maharsha, who, like the Rema, complained bitterly of the proliferation of kabbalistic material among the masses who had not first mastered the traditional Jewish curriculum. His answer was to, for the first time, properly deal with an old issue: the Talmud contains a lot of stories in it; quite a lot of them seem implausible, some of them are facile, a certain number are a bit offputting, and a dozen or so are properly iffy, at any rate if taken literally. The attitude of the Geonim and early Rishonim was very simply ‘don’t look at that stuff’. Some people still manage that. I once learned Daf Yomi with an old Yekke, and every time we got to that kind of thing he had the exact same routine: look down, look up, look down again, say ‘wow’, wait five seconds and we moved on. I think that this is literally the correct answer. The aggadic material, especially the bulk of it which is post-amoraic, and even some of the halachic sections of the Talmud, are subject to sensationalism- or counter-intuitivity bias, and this is provably so from a few places where it mentions offhand the alternative opinion that the verse just means what it says because that’s how Hebrew works. However, while this approach is correct and of impeccable lineage, it’s subject to stress when bad actors are around, and we see already from the Rambam’s famous comment in the introduction to the Perek Helek it was wearing thin. The Zoharic authors frantically combed over the Talmud for anything weird that they could spin out in their diseased imaginations, just like certain 20th century heterodox movements and their ignoramus readers.

Anyway, I’m ranting again, but the Maharsha set out to deal with this by producing the first comprehensive treatment of the aggadic material in the Talmud, explaining each story in ethical or homiletical terms, thus pulling out the rug (albeit after the fact) from the Zoharists, who saw in this material the basis of their reformation of Judaism. Aggada could have a deeper meaning without that meaning being kabbalistic. How well a job he did is for other people to decide, but I’ll note that in Satmar, which, paradoxically, but undeniably, became the only real organised opposition to antinomianism and feelgood paganism in recent decades, serious study of Talmud is considered to necessitate frequently consulting the Maharsha.

All in all, the response of the Eastern European rabbinate to kabbalah, was the same one we know today: it’s holy, but don’t think about it too much, and it doesn’t mean what it says, and that bit definitely doesn’t mean what it says, and don’t worry because we have a mesorah, and zog tehilim. The idea is that Judaism is big enough and battle-hardened enough to safely absorb Zoharism as a vehicle for encouraging meticulousness in halachic observance and a general pro religiosity attitude, without letting the nasty stuff do any damage. As I’ve said before, there’s only one problem with this approach, which is that it has never once worked at all. It didn’t work then, it’s not working now, and it’s never going to work. The next generation of Eastern European Jewry shows just how badly it didn’t work.

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Iran, today, however, is not iconophobic at all. It is icono-obsessed: great, big images loom down upon every public space in a way that would make Nebuchadnezzar himself grimace; and its icons are not beautiful. They are not even ambitious enough to be hideous. They are just shit.

So what’s up? How did the Islamic republic become the world’s foremost exponent of political idolatry? Well, it’s a long story and it starts with me binging on Wikipedia. The proverbial immigrant doing the dirty jobs so you don’t have to.

The Party of Ali

The fourth caliph of the Muslims was Ali Ibn Ali Talib, Mohammed’s cousin and, Arabic marital norms being what they are, also his son in law. After his death, there was a dispute about who should succeed. A minority insisted it should be Ali’s son, Hasan, on the principle of hereditary succession. The majority party favoured some other relative of Muhammad called Mu’awiya ibn Abi Sufyan, and after a bit of war Hasan more or less accepted their verdict for all practical purposes and chilled out in Medinah. However, Mu’awiya decided to install his son as successor, turning his Umayyad clan into a dynasty, in essence adopting the hereditary principle upon the negation of which his legitimacy rested. With Hasan now dead, his younger brother Husayn, made a bid for power, ending in his death at the Battle of Karbala in 680. Politically speaking, that was the end of the party of Ali for the time being, but a certain proportion of the Alids refused to accept that the verdict of history and the verdict of Allah were the same. While the Umayyads, and then the Abbasids had earned the right to temporal rule, religious authority lay solely with the descendants of Ali, the Imams, alone able and worthy to authoritatively interpret the Koran to whom in due course earthly rule would return.

Of course, in practice, hereditary descent is always a tricky matter. There was a split over who was the correct Imam at number 5, with the splitters eventually becoming terrorists in Yemen, and another one at number 6, which, in due course, begat the Fatimid Caliphate in North Africa. The groups that ‘split off’ at these points were arguably more important in their own era, but we are concerned here with the ‘Twelvers’ about whom people now use the term ‘Shi’ite’ without qualification. ‘Twelver’ is, however, something of a misnomer, because they only got to eleven. Hasan Al-Askari was born under house arrest in the city of Samarra where he lived until his death at age 28 in the year 874, quite probably having been assassinated by the Abbasid regime. Because of his young age, he had not fathered or appointed an heir. As many as 20 different sects emerged as a response to this crisis, but the one we know of now as the ‘Twelvers’ had the most ingenious solution.

According to the Twelvers, Hasan had had a son called Mohammed and designated him as the next Imam. The fact that no-one had ever seen this son was explained by the hypothesis that he could not be seen. The term used for this is ‘occulted’, but that isn’t taken to mean he went to heaven or space. Rather he was on earth, but no-one could communicate with him except his representatives. Shi’ites were used to this on a logistical level because the last two Imams had been confined to house arrest and communicated through trusted emissaries. The retreat of ‘Muhammad’ to somewhere where only four people could talk to him was the ‘minor occultation’, followed by the ‘major occultation’ in the year 941 when he could no longer communicate even through representatives (because the original ventriloquists died without being able to initiate new members in on the joke.) This 12th Imam is somewhere on earth ruling over the ummah in a spiritual fashion, and will reveal himself at the end of days.

To sum up core Twelver doctrine:

1. The indispensable constituent part of the Muslim community is the Imam, a perfect and sinless man and living descendant of Muhammad via the line of Ali, who alone can interpret the Koran, and has received the secret doctrines that give it meaning.

2. The Imam is invisible.

Without the actual guiding hand of an Imam in a more prosaic sense, the Twelvers were forced to develop a canon of Koranic interpretation and law, based on hadith collections, precedent, and logic, just like the Sunnis. By any reasonable standard, this was tantamount to a confession that the Sunnis had been right all along, but, as we shall see, reasonable standards do not unduly trouble the Shi’ites.

One might wonder why the ruling Sunni caliphs did not simply suppress this movement out of existence. During the early stages, they were restrained by the great respect all descendants of Mohammad, and especially those of Ali, had within the broader Muslim community, and, in fact, did repress them as much as they thought they could get away with. After the double-disappearance of the last Imam, the Twelvers saved themselves through a doctrine of strict political quietism. Since the authentic leader of the ummah was unfortunately deaf, dumb and invisible, there was no question of installing him as caliph in a practical sense, so a good Twelver would obey the public law, keep the peace, and practice his religion, where it differed from the established one, in private. Given the large number of very-much-not quietist political movements, some of them Shi’ite and some of them other weird stuff, which would occasionally even succeed in setting up rival caliphates, the Abbasids looked at Twelvers as benign by comparison. Twelver Shi’ites themselves practiced careful deception (taqiyya) about their own religious beliefs, designed to avoid getting fatwahed like the Alawites or Druze. Normative Sunni jurisprudence is actually surprisingly tolerant in certain respects and let them get away with it. Finally, the Abbasid empire gradually became substantially dysfunctional and contained multiple de facto independent polities under the theoretical rule of the caliph, one of which - the Buyid state in Iran - actively promoted Shi’ism.

This was the situation until the 16th century. The Safavids, originally a Sufi order, who had adopted a more radical version of Shi’ism as part of their conversion into a militia, and after many centuries of fighting from the mountains, took over Iran. The first Safavid Shah, Ismail I, was not properly a Twelver, he considered himself to be an Imam, and also an incarnation of God himself. However, he invited Shia scholars from the established schools in Lebanon and Iraq to staff his religious revolution because his own version of Shi’ism didn’t really have any. Unsurprisingly, after 800 years posing as harmless and pleading, mostly successfully, for their toleration, the newly empowered Shi’ite clergy set about ruthlessly persecuting the Sunni population of Iran, which is why there practically aren’t any today outside of the wastelands and mountains of the periphery. When there were no Sunnis left to persecute, they moved onto other groups, principally Jews, Christians being more problematic because of the close relationship Iran had developed with Russia by that point.

I have a secret

I briefly alluded above to the Shi’ite belief that, in addition to believing that a living Imam is necessary to authoritatively teach Islamic law and resolve disputes, he possessed esoteric doctrines not taught, or perhaps alluded to, in the Koran itself. Students of Jewish mysticism will be familiar with many of these, such as the idea of four levels of scriptural interpretation or the 72-letter name of God which allows those who know it to perform miracles. However, the core of this doctrine is the core of all esoteric doctrine, namely that conventional monotheism is too boring, too simplistic, too stale, and there’s a much more complicated and profound version of monotheism that sounds a lot, to the untrained ear, like not-monotheism, but is definitely monotheism, trust me bro.

Closely tied to this more sophisticated theosophy were doctrines about the Imams themselves. I have already mentioned that Shi’ite doctrine holds them to be free of all sin and error, but that is the moderate version. More extreme versions of Shi’ism, known as ghulat (exaggerators) believed that the Imams were basically God. These more extreme versions were suppressed with some vigour by the Abbasids and the Twelvers we know and love are the more Sunni-like quasi orthodox ones, at least that’s what they say. Another typical aspect of mysticism is that it leads to greater tolerance of popular religious practices, which can be favourably interpreted in the light of their secret doctrine. Mainstream Islam frowns very strongly on praying at graves, but Shi’ites figured out that since God is kind of everywhere, maybe he is especially present at the graves of the righteous. They are thus widely known as ‘grave worshippers’ because they, in fact, worship graves. For an example of Shi’ite religiosity that adapts esoteric doctrines to the level the ordinary man can get on board with, google search ‘Shi’ite Koran on head’ (go on, do it).

However, the taboo on use of images in Islam is so deeply rooted that this was too far even for Shi’ites, until the 19th century. The ruling Qajar dynasty took advantage of developments in print technology to try and get a personality cult thing going, adapting Russian artistic styles.

It didn’t go especially well, but it did generate a copycat industry producing images with greater popular appeal, namely of Shia saints, and in particular the Imams. These images were based on Christian devotional models, which was unfortunate since the 19th century was the time when Christian art had hit rock bottom and pulled out the heavy drilling equipment. Hence the new Shi’ite iconography ended up looking like this:

Some irreverents have pointed out that this is all just a teensy bit gay, and Isfahan was once a famous tourist destination for homosexual pederasts.1 Be that as it may, this new devotional culture was originally treated with some suspicion by the Shi’ite clerisy, but they mostly got over it in due course. You know the drill: ‘they’re not really praying to the images, they are being inspired by the images to pray, and not to the person depicted, but to God whose religion they represent, and why are you such a killjoy and always denouncing your fellow Muslims, and blah, blah, blah”. However, it was not until later that clerics became active promoters of iconism for political purposes.

Mordor

The Seminary of Qom was founded in 1924, before which Iranian clerics of distinction had generally been trained in Najaf. The teachers and students of Qom grappled above all with the problem of the cumulative detachment of Iran’s rulers from the enforcement of Shi’ite orthodoxy, which went into overdrive with the ascension of the Pahlavis in 1925. Strictly speaking, the Twelvers had never departed from their doctrine of political quietism prior to the return of the 12th Imam. The rulers of Iran had asked them to help, and who were they to say no? However, the growing liberalism of the regime forced upon them the question: having tasted power, were they now just going to give it up merely because their religion told them to? The answer was no, and because needs must, they groped their way towards the new doctrine of Wilayat al-Faqih, which states that while the 12th Imam is busy being invisible, temporal rule is ‘entrusted’ to the Shi’ite clergy.

This was not, however, the only way in which the seminary of Qom distinguished itself from Najaf. Ruholla Khomeini was an advocate of Irfan, the revamped form of Shi’ite mysticism, with heavy borrowings from Sufism, replete with all sorts of complicated and subtle meditations on the multiplicity of divine unity, and the quasi divinity of the ‘perfect man’. While taking a very letter-of-the-law approach when it came to issues of modesty or dietary laws, he was an ultra-liberal on the use of images, worship of graves, and anything involving popular superstition or apparent violation of monotheism. Whatever remaining taboo on iconism existed was abolished amidst the revelation that not only deceased saints, but also living clerics, generals, terrorists, and gang bosses could also be the subject of devotion in soft focus and neon colours.2

The war

Iran is ruled by a criminal regime. Opponents of the war like imbecile clown Aaron Bastani tend to minimize this in proportion to the intensity of their opposition. This is the wrong way round though. If the Iranian regime were less criminal, it would be more susceptible to changing its policy in response to military action, it would not have wrecked the country sufficiently thoroughly to preclude it being overthrown, it would not consider causing global economic collapse a legitimate tactic of war. But it is a criminal regime, and so it does. If you have a rabid dog outside, it may be doubtful what the correct course of action is in response, but it is certainly not to gather the neighbours in the yard then throw rocks at it.

Islam has a violence problem; no reasonable person would deny that. It does, though, have an excuse. It is the only religion that has ever enforced strict monotheism at an international scale and stuck to it. Iranian Shi’ism, however, thinks it gets to eat its cake and have it. Its contempt for the unbelievers is unlimited; Shi’ite clerics are loathe to allow them even to walk outside in the rain lest they defile the pure. But among the believers themselves, no deviation is too gross or imbecilic to merit restriction. Submission means in some very theoretical sense submission to God, but everyone knows it means submission to his favourites, to whom all is permissible, especially what they really want, namely to kill, and no matter how many they kill, they are the victims of aggression and the ever-growing list of ‘aggressors’ who object to them only proves how victimized they are. Iran is a criminal regime, not because it is ruled by clerics, but because it is ruled by clerics of a criminal religion, at any rate a criminal version of one. Food for thought.

1

For something really gay, though, check this out:

For the purpose of confirming this, we will make a brief tarry into prosopography before getting to the main point. Anyone who wishes to claim that Sabbateanism is a perversion or unnatural outgrowth of the messianic expectations of Zoharism has to deal with the problem that it was greeted with such enthusiasm by the kabbalists of the age.

The most important, obviously, was Natan of Gaza himself, the most talented pupil of the pre-eminent kabbalist of the age, Rabbi Yaakov Hagiz, head of the kabbalistic yeshiva in Jerusalem, which had gradually become the centre of Zoharic study as Tzfat declined amidst recurrent conflict between the Druze and Ottoman authorities and the decline of the textile trade. Natan was a young man, but also generally acknowledged to be next in line as one of the greats, if not the great, of kabbalah, and to many it was inconceivable that his prophetic vision of Shabtai Tzvi’s messiahship was false.

However, it wasn’t just him. Perhaps most important was Shmuel Vital, son of Chaim, Isaac Luria’s foremost pupil and most jealous custodian of his legacy who guarded his teachings from publication until his death in 1620. Our most reliable witness of Luria’s teachings (in the view of most scholars) comes from selections of these writings published by Shmuel, in particular the Eight Gates. Shmuel was preeminent among the Egyptian kabbalists and, as a result, the naggid of Egyptian Jewry, Raphael Yosef Chelebi, became supporter and bankroller of the new movement. Tzvi’s messiahship was also accepted by the kabbalists of Hebron and the remaining kabbalists of Tzfat. In Italy, the second home of kabbalah, there was no known opposition before Tzvi’s apostasy. Even Moshe Zacutto, later a key opponent of Sabbateanism, only made his decision after Tzvi converted to Islam despite ample documentation of Tzvi’s antinomian behaviour (including ordering the assault and murder of his opponents on the sabbath as its ultimate fulfilment).

There is, however, one important exception. Rabbi Hagiz himself, Natan’s teacher, was a ‘denier’ from the beginning. This has been attributed to his generally conservative bent, but the key factor is that he had previously been responsible for repeatedly ordering Tzvi to be flogged for his lunatic behaviour during his period living in Jerusalem, and had eventually ordered him to leave. Natan’s early propaganda included a lot of invective against those who had persecuted the messiah during his cosmic spiritual struggles, so it is perhaps more accurate to say that Sabbateanism rejected Hagiz than the other way round (though, presumably he could have been accepted had he been willing to sufficiently grovel before the freak). He is, therefore, the exception that proves the rule and, as Scholem pointed out, though there is no doubt that he was one of the very few to keep their heads at the height of enthusiasm, there is precious little evidence of him taking an active role in opposing it either.

It says right here on page 13

That’s the prosopography part out of the way, but that is only part of establishing that Sabbateanism was the culmination of Zoharism. We have already discussed the most basic point, which is that, throughout the previous 150 years, the apostles of kabbalah had explicitly taught both that the revelation of their doctrines was hastening the messianic era and that it was the fact of imminent revelation that made it licit for them to reveal what had hitherto been concealed. There are, though, additional ways in which Zoharism paved the way not only for a messianic explosion across world Jewry, but also determined its character.

In the manic enthusiasm following his initial vision and revelation to Tzvi that he was indeed the messiah (an idea Tzvi had previously toyed with but had given up on), Natan authored then ‘discovered’ an apocalyptic prophecy that he would then write an explanation on, showing how it explained the messianic significance of Tzvi’s erratic behaviour and general weirdness. You might well ask however, what was the point in producing a messianic prophecy out of nowhere after your alleged messiah had already arrived. Wouldn’t people immediately realise that this didn’t prove anything, especially in light of the farcical accounts given of its origin?

But, of course, the answer is that scepticism of this sort had already been ruled out in advance because the Jewish people had accepted the Zohar. Chabad have been in the news recently, so let’s look at their explanation of where the Zohar comes from:

Sad to say, this is actually a relatively enlightened take since it engages in a certain respect with the obvious proofs that Rabi Shimon ben Yohai did not compose the Zohar. However, this is the best they can apparently do after more than 500 years in which they have had to formulate something resembling a coherent explanation and we’re still stuck at ‘maybe a goy found it in a box’. The point here is that, in accepting the Zohar, Jewry had already essentially subjected itself to a form of cult conditioning in which incredibly obvious frauds could be promoted. For a good hundred years, anyone asking basic epistemological questions had been subject to vitriol, denunciation and sometimes violence by the very holy advocates of kabbalah, and, as such, the Jews were left without the basic conceptual tools to resist Sabbatean propaganda.

The power of vision

Even more primary to Sabbateanism, though, was Natan’s own 24-hour vision, the contents of which he struggled to expound to himself and others for the rest of his life. Unlike his apocalypse, there is no doubt that the vision was real. People have visions all the time, and they can be induced through extreme physical deprivation, structured meditation or hallucinogenics. The traditional approach of Judaism, however, is that visions are irrelevant both to doctrine and practice. The test of whether a prophet is true or false is whether his prophecy conforms to what the Torah has already decreed, which anyone can do anyway, just in a less impressive way. For that reason, Judaism did without prophecy altogether from the crystallisation of the biblical canon. The response to Natan’s vision, therefore, should have been ‘so what?’

The reason it wasn’t is that the Zoharist movement had explicitly justified its revolution of theology through its adepts’ visions. Each new teacher had been gifted these visions through which they learned new depths of the secrets contained within kabbalah. Such visions on the part of ethereal holy men who possessed secret knowledge were now the chief source of religious authority. There were, therefore, no principled grounds left upon which to question Natan’s vision and the imprimatur it gave to its contents. Soon enough, Sabbateans were having visions all over the place and, instead of this being grounds for rejecting this movement, as it would have been at any time in the thousand years before 1492, it was considered ever mounting proof of its truth. In these two ways, Judaism’s immune system had been hijacked and all of the Rabbinic safeguards against an explosion of madness and antinomianism had been not only rendered ineffective but turned into their opposite by the theology that had infected halacha from the inside and transformed it into a vehicle for everything it is designed to resist.

Strange and stranger deeds

Natan’s apocalypse is not long, but it’s not interesting either. Scholem, as was his wont, considered it to be a powerful piece of imagery. However:

Why do we need to know about the Messiah’s giant penis? To understand, we need to grapple with the most important way in which Zoharism determined the character of the Sabbatean explosion. No matter how frantically this has been covered up by conservatives in a commendable effort to keep the house of cards from falling down, the fact is that long before Shabtai Tzvi came along, Zoharism was really weird and really dumb. The reason why the messianic movement it produced was idiotic is that it itself was idiotic. Idiocy is its chief distinguishing characteristic.

Now, this is going to need some qualification. Kabbalah seeks to answer certain questions that are inevitable in any kind of intellectually sophisticated version of monotheism:

1. If God is completely transcendent, how can He interact with the physical universe and what does it really mean for Him to do so?

2. If God is infinite, how can anything exist apart from Him?

3. If God knows everything already, what is the point of praying for Him to change His mind?

Stuff like that, and the truth is that, if you zoom out, the answers aren’t dumb either. Some of them are legitimately smart; tzimtzum probably is a genuinely groundbreaking contribution to theology. Because these questions are quite obvious, though, roughly these same kind of answers have been arrived at all over the world: God is pure love, or pure consciousness; all is truly one, the divisions between objects are only from the vantage point of our perception; God emanates out in unfolding layers of decreasing spirituality, or alternatively withdraws Himself, to allow the material to exist, after a fashion. The Vedanta Hindus arrived at more or less these conclusions three thousand years ago; Bernardo Kastrup is advocating them today. It’s very plausible as metaphysics. The problem is that what most naturally follows is the conclusion that the matters of the world are vain and you should just kind of vibe in a monastery. Applied to Judaism, it would probably lead to the view that the mitzvot are social tools for the harmony of society, or preparatory training for the higher life of meditation. However, that is what the more radical Maimonideans had already concluded, and what kabbalah was precisely formulated to deny. The whole point of Zoharism was to make ritual life more meaningful, not less.

Thus, kabbalah was never just theosophy, but also, and more fundamentally, theurgy, the analysis of how human action changes and influences the divine realm. While theosophy might be smart, theurgy is inherently and irredeemably dumb. Moreover, the smarter the theosophy, perforce the dumber the theurgy, because the more refined and delicate the analysis of the divine, the more intuitively ridiculous it is to believe you can influence it by saying words or moving your hands. The only thing that can make Jewish law religiously meaningful, namely the existence of a God with will who demands obedience, is precisely what is denied by kabbalah at the more abstract level, and so the further the mystics depart from this simplistic model, the more insane things they have to posit to make their intellectual project work.

Or, at least, that’s how it seems to me. Maybe you think otherwise about the etiology, but what can’t be denied is that the more intellectually sophisticated Zoharism became, the more madcap material it incorporated, and the more any safeguards against just really obviously loopy, messed-up stuff fizzled. Take this:

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About the war, I don’t have much to say. It is a good thing when murderous criminals get their comeuppance. It is a bad thing when the innocent are killed. Perhaps the most admirable thing about this country is its multi-layered system of civil defence, and I am once again reminded of how grateful I should be to be protected by it.

The most jarring feature of the Book of Esther is the recurrent disconnect between cause and effect, between motivation, at least as it can be rendered in thought, and action. Ahashverosh deposes his Queen merely because she won’t appear for him;1 Bigtan and Teresh try to murder him because they are ‘angry’; he appoints Haman to the chief office in the land without explanation; all we know about Haman’s administrative capabilities is that he decides to annihilate an entire race over a trivial snub. Everything is going very badly for the Jews and then it starts to go well, because the King couldn’t sleep. Many have told us how this story demonstrates the presence of God in the small things, how the agglomeration of apparently random small details comes together in a larger plan, but if you read it, it actually doesn’t at all. There is no connection whatsoever between Mordechai riding the King’s horse and the salvation of the Jews. What happens is that Haman asks Ahashverosh to kill the Jews, and he says yes, and then Esther asks him to not kill the Jews and he says yes to that instead. Why? Well, they asked. Everything else is just other stuff that happens; it is connected to the main ‘plot’ by what the ancients called fate, and we degenerates call vibes.

Perhaps the standout example of this phenomenon is at the beginning of chapter 3:

וְכׇל־עַבְדֵי הַמֶּלֶךְ אֲשֶׁר־בְּשַׁעַר הַמֶּלֶךְ כֹּרְעִים וּמִשְׁתַּחֲוִים לְהָמָן כִּי־כֵן צִוָּה־לוֹ הַמֶּלֶךְ וּמׇרְדֳּכַי לֹא יִכְרַע וְלֹא יִשְׁתַּחֲוֶה׃

Why doesn’t Mordechai bow? The question in this case is so obvious the book asks it for you. The response of the King’s servants ‘why do you transgress the King’s command’ can be read as rhetorical, a speech-act of condemnation, but syntactically, it’s just a question: why? And Mordechai doesn’t answer, so we don’t know.

For many readers, all this is an invitation to insert a back story. Perhaps Mordechai and Haman were leaders of rival court factions; that’s why Mordechai’s always hanging round the gate: he’s intriguing. Perhaps Mordechai was resisting the dangerous growth of centralising tyranny on behalf of the empire’s diverse subject peoples. Perhaps it was some kind of family blood feud. As a literary matter, I think all these readings are backwards. If a book is written a certain way, that’s how you are supposed to read it. It sure looks, sometimes, like the motivations of other people are inscrutable, whatever explanation of them offered afterwards being just a facade for primal, often disordered, psychic forces. Neuroscientists say that’s how it actually is, though, admittedly, they sometimes make stuff up. If it seems that we are subject to the arbitrary whims of others we can’t understand, let alone control, maybe that’s just how it actually is.

One thing everyone agrees on is that the Book of Esther is full of allusions to earlier canonical books. One genre of biblical writing (certainly not the only one) is a kind of hyper-realism, so stripped of extraneous detail, of the fluff we use to excuse ourselves, that it’s more real than real and crosses over to the other side. My favourite example:

Sarai, Abram’s wife, had borne him no children. She had an Egyptian maidservant whose name was Hagar. And Sarai said to Abram, “Look, the LORD has kept me from bearing. Come unto my maidservant; perhaps I shall have a child through her.” And Abram heeded Sarai’s request. So Sarai, Abram’s wife, took her maidservant, Hagar the Egyptian—after Abram had dwelt in the land of Canaan ten years—and she gave her to her husband Abram as a wife. And he came unto Hagar and she conceived; and when she saw that she had conceived, her mistress was light in her eyes. And Sarai said to Abram, “The wrong done me is your fault!

🤷. The Book of Esther is what it looks like if you spin out that style for a whole story. It’s horrifying, really, but also quite comforting; cathartic if you want to be all Greek about it.

However, a literary reading is not the only way to read a book, and, in the grand scheme of things, it’s probably not the most important. Jewish tradition has a clear answer for why Mordechai didn’t bow. Haman had an idol round his neck, or perhaps was claiming divinity for himself. To bow on Mordechai’s part, whatever internal motivations he could have attached to it, would have been to affirm this idolatry, so like Shadrach, Meshach and Abed-Nego, he didn’t, even at the cost of risking everything, because denying idolatry is what being a Jew is all about. Without that, the rest of it, your very life, isn’t worth a damn.

All of that is preparatory to a video that has been zipping around WhatsApp and Telegram:

In this video, Mordechai’s act of defiance is recast for our era as an injunction for the Israeli of today: he must not bow to the Left.

If you are very plebeian and jejune, you might be asking something like ‘what the hell is this?’ The Right been in government for 34 of the last 49 years, and the figure is only that low because we are counting Naftali Bennett (founder of the party ‘Rightward’ with Betzalel Smotrich), Ehud Olmert (son of an Irgun terrorist) and, err, prolific war criminal Ariel Sharon as leftists now. Who do the Right need to bow to, exactly? However, it’s not as stupid as it sounds because formal political power is only one form of power in society. Since we want the taps not to have muddy water come out when you turn them on, for there to be some public officials who don’t just embezzle all the money they are allocated, for pager operations to actually explode when they are supposed to, the wicked secular Ashkenazim still take most of the top jobs, and they throw their weight around as much as they can. For example, Aryeh Deri was imprisoned twice for taking bribes and tax fraud while in office, and had his sentence commuted after agreeing to resign from politics. Then, at the next opportunity, he was given the jobs of Deputy Prime Minister, Interior Minister and Health Minister, and the Supreme Court - being totally possessed by foreign, gentilic, postmodern, progressive ideas - was like ‘uh, what?’. Practically the dictionary definition of tyranny.

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If, like me, you are a big liberal gaylord who thinks this country has to find a way to get along with its Arab neighbours unless it wants to enter a spiral of ever more delirious militarism until it eventually spectacularly flames out in a spasm of atrocities which will burden your descendants for the next 100 generations, if they even exist, you will probably have heard the above arguments and similar many times. Today, I’m going to explain why that is basically wrong, but before I do, I need to get something out of the way. Islam is a stupid religion. If I was an important Israeli politician, I wouldn’t say that, and I shouldn’t say that because it’s irresponsible, but I’m just a blogger and (a) I can say whatever I want and (b) I can personally most effectively move things in a better direction by just saying what’s true rather than what’s politic. So, again, Islam is dumb. If you are Muslim and this offends you, then fix your religion so it’s less dumb and then you won’t be offended.

I know Islamophobia. I was reading Lawrence Auster when you were still reading Thomas Sowell or whatever like the stupid noobie you are. Not only do I know Islamophobia, I am Islamophobic. Back in the day when David Wood made funny videos instead of seventy-five hour streams about who knows what, I used to watch every one.

That’s funny. So, I’m not saying that we shouldn’t say mean things about Islam, even though, to repeat, if you have a position of public responsibility, then that’s exactly what I think you shouldn’t do. I’m saying that saying mean things about Islam is of limited value in understanding the Israeli-Arab conflict.

Demonstrating this isn’t very hard. At the 1972 Olympics, Palestinian terrorists kidnapped and murdered eleven Israeli athletes. This was, obviously, very shocking because it’s completely beyond the bounds of what any remotely normal person would consider an acceptable way of pursuing political goals, even very just ones. Actually, it was even worse than people knew at the time, with the athletes being not only murdered, but also tortured and castrated. The operation was carried out by a group called ‘Black September’, which was a radical branch of Fatah originally formed to take revenge on Jordanians after the expulsion of the PLO. The head of Black September was this guy:

If you think that he doesn’t look like a big Muslim fundamentalist, you would be right. Wikipedia notes that ‘He was known for flaunting his wealth, being surrounded by women and driving sports cars, and having popular appeal among Palestinian young men’. When trying to track him down, Mossad accidentally killed some random Moroccan waiter, who looked like this:

Apart from the Munich massacre, maybe the craziest act of Palestinian terrorism was the hijacking of Air France Flight 139, which culminated in the peak of Israeli basedness at Entebbe. This episode had all the signs that are typically used to prove that anti-Zionism is really antisemitism, since non-Israeli passengers were released by the hijackers, but Jewish ones, including a Holocaust survivor, had to stay with the Israelis. However, the hijacking was carried out by a splinter group of the PFLP founded by Wadie Haddad, a Marxist fruitcake from a Christian family (the original PFLP had similar heritage).

Or take these guys:

This isn’t a scene from Goodfellas, it’s the people arrested in Egypt for murdering the Jordanian Prime Minister. I mentioned this before because one of them bent down and started lapping up the poor dead guy’s blood in front of everyone like some total mentalist. We could pile on the examples here all day, but the point is that you don’t need any Islam to explain why Palestinian nationalism is batty, addicted to revolting and self-destructive violence, soaked in vindictive self-pity, glorifies its most sociopathic and depraved elements, and sucks. It can be that all on its own.

Before we move on, we can make here an observation about the famous allegation that Israel ‘created Hamas’. What this basically means is that, during the 1970s and 1980s, Israel tolerated the growth of the Muslim Brotherhood, especially in the Gaza Strip, and also threw a bit of spare change at its charity and educational projects. The context is that, at the time, the Muslim Brotherhood was committed to a policy of tactical non-violence, and rejected the leadership of the Palestinian nationalist movement on the grounds of it being too secular. Given that said Palestinian nationalist leadership was hijacking planes and mangling weightlifters and drinking human blood while the Muslim Brotherhood was handing out prayer beads and imploring Gazans to go to the mosque five times a day, this was not the dastardly Machiavellian move it is typically assumed to be. Mostly, it was just shortsighted, but gaining a few years of quiet at the expense of greater trouble down the line is just what Israeli security policy is. There’s no need to seek a special explanation in this case.

Back to our point, though, what is the actual relationship of Islamism to Palestinian political violence? Well, it’s complicated. One thing it does is act as a force multiplier. As every bankrobber knows, the trickiest part isn’t getting to the money, it’s getting it into the getaway car. If you are planning a terrorist operation, and you don’t have to plan how to get the terrorists safely back home, then you can do a lot more terrorism. Suicide bombings, therefore, are just no brainers from an operational view, but thats’s a big problem persuading people to do them. After all, even if you, collectively, are spectacularly successful, the Jews all go back to Krakow and the glorious Arab nation rules from river to sea, you, personally, are just a bunch of splatter on a bus seat. You need to be really into it for that to be a worthwhile deal. If, though, you can persuade some retards that they will get 72 (72!) raisins as their eternal reward, though, then you can really cook.

That’s just an example, but you get the point. Islam stiffens the Palestinian cause; it adds transcendence, after a fashion, intransigence, fanaticism, courage in the face of death, persistence in the face of hardship, that kind of stuff, plus, best of all, it gives a lot of excuses for teleological suspension of the ethical, which come in handy when there’s a granny to stab, a child’s throat to be slit. Islam isn’t necessarily better per se at winding up numnutses to do crazy nonsense than Arab nationalism, but it’s more timeless, less vulnerable to the ebbs and flows of ideological fashion. Islamicizing the conflict also gets you support from countries like Indonesia and Pakistan, that don’t objectively have anything to do with the dispute, but do share your religion. However, the true relationship of Islam to the conflict is quite different, almost opposite. Islam feeds the conflict, no doubt about that, but more importantly, the conflict feeds Islam.

Who is parasiting off who?

Let’s take some things everyone knows. Hamas is more Islamist than Fatah. Hamas is more committed to armed struggle and opposed to territorial compromise than Fatah. Hamas is more popular than Fatah, way more. What is the relationship between these facts? As always, it’s complicated, but the dominant dynamic is that Palestinians like Hamas because it is more committed to armed struggle, and they take the Islamism as part of the package.

This may seem confusing, but it shouldn’t be. The right wing in Israel is defined by territorial maximalism. The more territory you want to take, and the more people you are willing/eager to kill to do it, the more right wing you are. At the same time, the right wing is characterized by political Judaism. The more you want Israel to be a Jewish state, substantively, the more right wing you are. What is the relationship between these factors? Well, again, it’s complicated. The Kook dynasty started with the premise that Jewish settlement throughout the land of Israel was necessary to repair some kind of cosmic tear. Originally, they combined this with effete humanitarian idealism, but then when the Arabs made it clear that they weren’t up for it, the Kookists decided they needed some military muscle to grease the wheels of metaphysical redemption and it all kind of spiralled. On the other hand, the Israeli far right that split off from the Revisionist movement, started with the principle of territorial maximalism and militarism and cycled through a whole bunch of different ideologies, many of them overtly hostile to the Jewish religion, until eventually they settled on religious zionism as their vehicle after 1967. In many cases, such as Daniella Weiss, it’s genuinely hard to know what’s driving what.

Broadly speaking, though, we can say that people who are mainly in it for the religion and consider militarism the cost of doing business vote Noam, those who see Judaism as a vehicle for militarism and aren’t overly concerned about plausible deniability vote Otzma, and those who are somewhere in between vote for whatever Smotrich’s party is called. If we look at the polls, Noam consistently poll at half a seat, and have to join a different list to get anywhere, Smotrich might not pass the threshold if he ran alone, and Otzma are on course for 9 or 10. Militarism is popular, and Judaism is OK, too, as long as it serves militarism. That’s how it mostly works in Palestine as well. There are sincere Islamists around, but their way of becoming a party capable of winning elections is to promote Islamism as the best way to fight Zionism, and then test the boundaries of how much burka Palestinians are willing to put up with in practice. Of course, what they actually have achieved is relentless, calamitous defeat, but, luckily for Allah, Palestinians are as dumb as a bin full of bricks.

You only hate me because your religious book tells you to!

Globally, we are not polling well at all, but even if we literally just kill everyone in Gaza, we probably won’t do as badly as we already do in the Arab world:

Rough. These are, of course, all Muslim countries, so maybe it is Islam to blame? If you really squint, there’s probably a bit of a relationship. Lebanon is slightly less than 70% Muslim these days and it’s a shade more open to peaceful relations than the average Arab country. Perhaps greater traditionalism in Qatar explains the 1% difference with Kuwait. However, clearly something else is the overriding factor.

That factor is that Arabs believe Israel is a uniquely evil country founded on and maintained by crime, and how into Islam they are is barely relevant. A good example of this appears in a recent article by , who, by the way, is a major legend who just emails random warlords and militia heads from across the Middle East and asks them for interviews, kind of analogous to getting a first-hand account of the political ideology of Gelimer king of the Vandals. Anyway, here’s him talking about Saudi Arabia:

Dislike of Israel among Saudis is not somehow the preserve of Islamists. It also exists among Saudis whom one might deem to be relatively liberal in social terms. Consider the case of Aseel Omran. A Saudi model, singer and actress residing in the UAE, Aseel stood out for her Western-style appearance even before the social liberalisation brought about by Muhammad bin Salman (whom she supports). As a brand ambassador for cosmetics company L’Oréal Paris, Aseel has spoken openly about how she faced wider criticism for her career path on the basis that it did not conform with societal expectations about the role of women.

Clearly then, she is no Islamist. But one of the few political issues she does speak up about is the Palestinian cause, and she has made clear that she does not think Israel should exist in any form, as can be seen from her Instagram posts. For example, even prior to the Gaza war, she shared the following post (see below): ‘Teach your children that Palestine is occupied, that the al-Aqsa Mosque is held captive, that the Zionist entity is an enemy, that resistance is honourable, and that there is no state called Israel.’

The point then is that relative Saudi social liberalism does not necessarily correspond to a willingness to be more open to and understanding of Israel. Normalising relations with Israel- especially in the absence of a Palestinian state- is unpopular in both Saudi Arabia and the wider Arab world, and has become even more unpopular since 7 October 2023. In this regard, the Saudi leadership has to have at least some regard for public opinion: while social liberalisation may be welcomed among many younger Saudis, normalisation would be a very tough sell indeed.

At this point, my hasbaratard readers will intone that actually it’s not Islam that’s the problem, it’s some kind of Arab domination complex. They just can’t bear the fact that their identity is based on being the best ever warriors and they got wrecked over and over by a bunch of jewboys with crappy Czech weapons. Sure, that’s part of it, but it’s actually worse than that. Arabs have completely ridiculous views about the history of the Arab-Israeli conflict. They think that Palestine was this great place, and then the Zionists got together with the imperialists who were desperate to control its sweet, sweet dates and made the Balfour Declaration which says Arabs have to be slaves, and then the Jews attacked the Arabs while they were just picking olives, and then just kept attacking them more and more, until eventually they kicked them all out, and then they just kept attacking them for kicks.

When confronted with this great wall of madness, many find it greatly depressing, but for me it’s basically my only sliver of hope. The fact that the vast majority of people on both sides of the conflict have completely ridiculous views of its history means that there’s something you can actually fix. To the extent their opinions are based on mistaken beliefs, correcting the beliefs improves the opinion. The problem for Zionists, however, is simple: it’s more important for them to hold on to their own ridiculous views than it is to correct ridiculous Arab views. And they are right. Unless you are a major psycho, if you have a reasonably accurate view of what happened in this place over the past 140 years, you’re going to end up, at most, a very tepid kind of Zionist. You’ll sympathise with Zionists up to a point, but you’ll think it was a pretty dumb idea because of basic facts they should have been able to figure out. Worst of all, you’ll eventually realise that, far from being implemented badly (which would imply there’s a fix switch), the fact that it actually achieved anything at all is because it was implemented much better than one has a right to expect. The true red pill is that you’re already living in the best of all possible Zionist worlds, or close enough that it makes little odds.

I recall, shortly after October 7th, posted something very interesting. Since then, he deleted all his old tweets, so I’ll have to describe it roughly. Basically, he was working for some Jewish-American think tank, and his job was to influence the American public and elite opinion in a pro-Israel direction by collating material showing Arabs saying demented, murderous things about Israel in their media. Nice work if you can get it, but Hussein was dissatisfied with just documenting this sick stuff for the horrified fascination of a western audience, he wanted to use his knowledge of Arab culture to create social media campaigns to encourage Arabs to have less sick views about Israel. So he went to his bosses, and they told him there’s no budget for that.

Since then, Mansour has decided that the only intellectual faction that isn’t completely bad is the Tikvah Foundation crowd - or at least that’s what he says - and I don’t blame him. The truth is there is no faction that isn’t completely bad, at any rate none that gives out grants, but we can’t all just make money on substack rants (… yet). However, it does mean that he has developed a penchant for making rather convoluted arguments identifying the problem with the American Liberal Zionist Jewish establishment as being a function of their liberalism, not their Zionism, so I suspect he’ll disagree with my explanation of his testimony, but I’m right.

If we make a scale from 1-10 where 1 is ‘fact-based and sober’ and 10 is ‘so stupid and preposterous that it actually degrades humanity as a whole simply by existing’, the average Jewish narrative of the history of the conflict is perhaps a 7, and the average Arab one is a 12. I mostly rag on the Jewish version because that’s what I’m exposed to day after day, and I come here to let off steam, but we should state that if we are judging retardation, it’s not correct to strictly bothsides it. Arabsbara is worse. The problem is, though, that, while hasbara can beat Arabsbara on points, it can’t actually defeat it. The Arab can always point to something preposterous and plainly false that the Jew said and so retreat back to his own narrative. It would be easy, really easy, to debunk 95% of anti-Zionism, but the problem is that the only weapon you have to do so is truth and then, uh-oh, poof that’s your Zionism gone too. Having the basic ability to collate and analyse information isn’t a universal acid, but it’s a universal acid for anything proximate to this cursed debate. And that is why Zionists will always be stuck parading the grotesques of their enemy’s discourse rather than refuting them. You can only keep your glorious lies if they can too.

It might be objected to here that this is a race realist blog, and therefore I can’t seriously be claiming that the 80 IQ biomass of Egypt could actually be won round by facts and logic if only we used them. Certainly not, but the biomass cannot be won round ever. I am talking about the elites, and not even the very elite elites. That L’Oreal woman counts. It is possible, of course, that social media means the cat is out of the bag, the complex of words (we do not consent to calling it thought) that comes out of the mouths of the mass mind has been liberated to wreak havoc wherever it wills indefinitely. However, for the sake of argument, let’s assume that’s not so; we still live in history and the task of changing a society’s views is the same as changing the views of the intellectuals. The rest will adopt whatever they adopt in due course, only dumber. Can you convince the Arabs with glasses and V-neck sweaters that they are grossly in error? If not, it doesn’t say much for you. It might be because you are trying the wrong thing. Einat Wilf says there will be no peace until the Arabs become Zionists. Plainly, this is a very unreasonable thing to expect, but that they become nonzionists, what could be more reasonable? Righteous Victims has never been translated into Arabic; the most basic work has not been done because that’s how the Zionists prefer it. The Arabs get their delusions; we get ours. The contradictions between the two delusions are arbitrated by means of checkpoints and perimeter fences and a security guard outside the post office. It was manageable. Maybe it still is. But is it still worth it? Really?

Jewish history since then is the attempt to put things back together again. As we said, it all ended in complete failure. What’s the point in even learning about it then? Maybe nothing. As I said before, I’m writing this because I would be writing it anyway; just under someone else’s blog like a sucker.

Before we can move on though, we have to understand what the Shabtai Tzvi episode actually was. It’s easy to say something like ‘mass insanity’, but that doesn’t explain anything. Why did everyone go insane all at the same time? The classic answer to this in modern scholarship, voiced by Gershom Scholem, is that it was the result of the spread of Lurianic kabbalah, which had primed the Jewish people for a messianic eruption focussed on spiritual rather than material or political freedom. Scholem’s thesis has since been widely criticised, but his critics are wrong and talking nonsense. The problem with Scholem’s thesis that Sabbateanism is a consequence of Lurianism is that it understates matters. It needs to be rephrased, and I will rephrase it, but first the important background material.

It is generally said that the Zohar was ‘revealed’ around the end of the 13th century. If so, that would put more than three and a half centuries between the beginning of Zoharism and the Sabbatean debacle. No-one who knows anything about Sabbateanism would presume to deny that it was a movement totally based on kabbala, which emphasised the authority of the Zohar above all texts. However, three and a half centuries gives enough space to look at Sabbateanism as a perversion, rather than a development, of Zoharism. After all, if Jews were studying the Zohar for hundreds of years without anything going too awry then the Zohar can’t be solely responsible for everything suddenly falling apart. It must, at the least, be Zohar + something else that is to blame. This whole framing is wrong though.

It is true that the deceiver, Moshe de Leon, started to claim in the 1280s that he was in possession of a work from the tana Rabi Shimon, sometimes under the name Zohar and sometimes other names, from which he would quote in his own writings. It is also true that the bulk of the book that would eventually be printed in Mantua 1558 was written by de Leon and his circle of Castilian kabbalists at roughly that time. However, there was no revelation of the Zohar at this point. What there were, rather, were rumours. When Isaac of Acre turned up after de Leon’s death and requested to see the book, it was not to compare it with his own copy, but rather to find out what was in it. Of course, the answer he received was that there was no such book and that should have been the end of it, but this did not stop kabbalists from trying to piece it together by collecting and collating whatever manuscripts of kabbalistic midrash they could find. The crucial thing to understand, however, is that this was a project carried out in the shadows, at most hinted at, not only to the general Jewish public, but even its rabbinic intellectual elite. Even this marginal activity largely fizzled out, and we find almost no references to this Zohar book in the years 1350-1450.

The revelation of the Zohar on a mass scale begins in Spain in the decades before the expulsion. The sources do not portray a clear picture, but this is not just a result of their paucity. The process seems to have been chaotic, lacking a rationale that its participants could have explained even had they wanted to. Strange things, unknown among the Jewish people for at least a thousand years, start to happen:

I have heard that it is written in the Zohar that no-one should not read [from the Torah] at all except one. And it is fitting to be concerned for its words if they are true, that which I have not seen written, but rather I heard it.

This is Rabbi Isaac Abuhav, the last great rabbinical authority of Castille who died in Portugal, one year after the expulsion, subordinating his judgement to hearsay and rejected the opinion of the legal decisors before him.1 A legal tradition that for a millennium had emphasised the subordination of divine inspiration to jurisprudence, and which had been based on the twin pillars of talmudic exegesis and received tradition was suddenly and without justification cast to the wind whenever the fancies and fantasies of the new book dictated:

The universal custom was to wear them [tefillin on Hol haMoed] until the times of the latter Rabbis who found in the book of the Zohar on the Song of Songs that one who wears tefillin on Hol haMoed is like one who cuts down the saplings, and they refrained from wearing them from then on.

In our days, great streams of ink have been spilt to obfuscate what happened, but the protagonists themselves felt no such qualms. After quoting Rabbi Abuhav above, Rabbi Yosef Karo adds ‘and I, the writer, have merited to find it’ before quoting a section of the Zohar. The attitude might be summed up in the famous verse ‘we will do and we will hear’. The process of finding out what the Zohar taught happened after its acceptance as a source of overwhelming authority; working their way through its contents to discover new laws was part of the point. No-one, even the greatest scholars, even pretended to be in possession of a received body of knowledge (kabbalah), rather they were engaged in finding new truths from this book, aided by ecstatic visions and heavenly messengers. In other circumstances, the fact that the revelation of the Zohar among Spanish Jewry had been swiftly followed by the total destruction of what had been for five-hundred years the pre-eminent Jewish community might have given some pause for thought, but what actually happened is that Spanish Jews spread around the Ottoman empire and used their knowledge of Zohar as part of their campaign to take authority and inveigle the Jews of North Africa and the Levant to abandon their traditions and become ‘Sephardim’.

Given the intense and self-conscious traditionalism of Judaism in normal times, the obvious question is how, during this period, the Jewish world accepted a revolution in its theology and ritual practice. A similar question is why, since, according to them, the Zohar had lain dormant and read only in secrecy since the Mishnaic period, it was now proper to spread its contents far and wide. The answer is clear and repeated by all those who were involved in this process: the Zohar was revealed because the messianic age was near, and the revelation of the Zohar was both a sign of this and a cause. Gershom Scholem in Major Trends distinguished between the essentially theosophical and theurgical kabbalah of the Zohar itself, and the Safed kabbalists who interpreted it as a doctrine of redemption. Even if we accept this, outside of the narrow realm of purely intellectual history, it substantially misses the point because Zoharism as an active force within Jewish history was a messianic movement. Here, for example, is Moshe Cordovero, often cited as the paradigm of the more rational quasi-philosophical form of kabbalistic speculation:

It means to say that this work will be hidden from the days of Rabi Shimon until the last generation of the King Messiah, when it will be revealed and possessed by all so they can study it. Therefore it was not revealed until our generation, and its revelation is one of the signs of the redemption.

Isaac Luria famously arrived in Safed just after Cordovero had completed his life’s work providing the first complete commentary on the Zohar and systemisation of its contents. Luria reinterpreted the whole Zoharic corpus again as a system of ‘rectifications’ leading to the ultimate rectification that would happen at the end of history. Scholem found in this new more thoroughly messianic kabbalah the explanation for the unprecedented Sabbatean messianic moment, and this is not false exactly, but it is also the case that Luria postponed the advent of a Zoharic messiah. Until his arrival, the Safed kabbalists, undisputed leaders of Zoharism around the world, thought themselves on the verge of fully plumbing the Zohar’s secrets. Luria taught them that they had, in fact, only been scraping the surface, necessarily pushing off the date of Zoharism’s culmination in messianic redemption.

Luria himself, after revealing his new layer of mystical secrets to his disciples, seems to have had some kind of pang of conscience or at least insight into what he was letting rip and instructed them to keep their silence. His chief disciple, Chaim Vital, kept to this stricture till his death in 1620, but another disciple (or pseudo-disciple, the debate remains open) had already extensively publicised a version of the doctrine in Italy by then. After Vital’s death, however, his students broke the ban completely and there was a flurry to publish anything and everything attributable to ‘the Lion’. A great portion of what was distributed has dubious relation to any doctrine ever articulated by Luria, and some of it was just random folklore and demonology. Whatever the case, however, in the three decades before Natan of Gaza’s vision, the last remaining obstacles, from the perspective of Zoharism, to the final redemption were loosed. The true hidden doctrine reserved for the last generation was spread around the world.

Had Luria not arrived on the scene when he did, it is likely that the messiah of Zoharism would have emerged in the 1570s or soon after (or, alternatively, Luria himself could have been that messiah had he lived longer). If so, the messianic explosion would have been much smaller because the spread of Zoharism was much more limited. In 1570, the influence of Zoharism among the Ashkenazim was still marginal (don’t tell the Faurists!) and they would have likely greeted a group of holy men they knew little about declaring the messiah with bemusement rather than rapture. It’s also the case that the Zoharist messiah would probably have been less of a weirdo because, whatever else Lurianism may be, it represented the elimination of any kind of baseline consensus understanding in Jewry that some things were off limits on the grounds of being freaky-deaky. But that is for next time. For now, I will close with an analogy.

In the 19th century, Marxism made a number of predictions. The proletariat of the liberal countries would be ever more pauperised, if not in the absolute sense, then certainly in its ownership of property. Its alienation from the means of production would liberate it from all local and national bonds of loyalty to be replaced with an international class consciousness. Economic slumps of increasing severity would lead to this proletariat seizing the means of production in the most developed countries from which the revolution would spread. The rationalisation of the means of production in the hands of the dictatorship of the proletariat would, by eliminating the contradictions of capitalism, lead to an immediate and dramatic increase in production. Want would end, the state would wither away, and humanity would be freed to playfully develop its capabilities.

Absolutely none of that happened. By the 1880s, at the least, the working classes in Britain began to enjoy sustained improvement in their standard of living, and, from then on, the welfare state relieved remaining pockets of deprivation enough to forestall political instability. The revolution happened not as a result of the natural progress of capitalism, but the exogenous shock of a world war. The working class of each nation, far from being internationalised, were so successfully indoctrinated into nationalism that they volunteered in staggering numbers to be shot for nothing much at all. The revolution happened in the most backwards country of Europe, if it even counts as such, and from there spread not at all, except by force of arms. Economic growth in the Soviet states was sometimes more and sometimes less, but always lagged behind the capitalist powers. Man was not freed either from want or subjugation; rather, barbarity not seen since the days of the Mongols was loosed upon the earth.

Marxists had two choices. One was to go along with what happened, that is to become Stalinists, and then whatever it was that Soviet orthodoxy said to be after Stalin died. This involved, naturally, drastic reinterpretations of what had before been Marxist doctrine. However, the alternative path of rejecting Stalinism also involved drastic reinterpretations. Whatever form of cope the anti-Stalinists chose, they had to depart from what Marx himself had said, because everything Marx had predicted had not come true. The goal of this intellectual endeavour was, while changing various specific elements of Marxist doctrine, to preserve its essential core, but this was not as easy as it sounds because, as insane wife murderer Louis Althusser pointed out, there’s an ‘epistemological break’ in Marx’s writings somewhere, i.e. he said a lot of different things that contradict each other. Oops.

The only correct thing for a Marxist to do after 1917 was to accept that Marxism had been empirically disproved and stop being a Marxist. Anything else required, at the very least, engaging in crimes against honesty and reason; often it involved crimes much greater than that. What was the correct thing for a Zoharist to do after the farcical collapse of their messianic movement? The correct thing to do was to admit they had been participants in a great lie. Anything less involved some kind of intellectual perversion. Both Sabbatean and non-Sabbatean kabbalah were reinterpretations in the light of what had gone wrong with the original vision. Both were equally legitimate, which is to say not legitimate at all. Neither can claim to be more authentic; authenticity from that point on was not an option.