So, I turned to a Rabbi-intellectual Guy Alaluf who is good at taking inchoate sentiments of right-leaning Israelis and turning them into something coherent, without unduly worrying if it ends up sounding horrific:

To sum up:

1. The nations of the world are collaborators in an exterminationist agenda against Jews lasting thousands of years.

2. This campaign works by constantly upping demands for concessions from Jews until there is nothing left to concede, so you just have to kill them. Therefore, any time any gentile anywhere criticises Jews for any reason, this is a step in a campaign which ends in genocide.

3. The proof is that Christian churches complain about incidents of Jews spitting on Christians in Jerusalem. This is so clearly a trivial problem that no-one could be honestly aggravated about it and concern can only be motivated by antisemitism. [?!]

4. Therefore, it is forbidden to even think about the charges made in the film, and the only appropriate response is to pray for the death of its creators.

We are honestly so cooked. It’s important to get into your head that there is an extremely plausible path for this country in which it flames out in ever more outlandish acts of military aggression while rightoid pundits shriek still louder about ‘suicidal empathy’ and ‘Jewish syndrome’ of caring about your enemies more than yourself, decrying the exilic mindset that simply won’t see that you can just solve all your issues by killing some large number of people, and explaining why the numbers of people killed to date just aren’t sufficient. It’s not definitely going to happen because various forces are arrayed to stop it, but if they take their eye off the ball, then it could happen. Like AI existential risk, even if you think there’s a 10% chance of this going down (and I think that’s too low), then it’s worth thinking hard about how to prevent it based on weighted expected outcomes.

Back to the point though. I don’t understand Israeli outrage at the NAZA film and I don’t think there is anything to understand. There is obviously some kind of vague idea these people have that if only all Israelis stand their ground and insist on the absolute righteousness of our military efforts (whether it’s by denying we killed civilians or saying it’s good to kill civilians, doesn’t matter) then the goyim will have to admit it. Unfortunately, though, a few scabs don’t play ball and this is what permits the nations to condemn us. We saw this on display when various intellectuals declared that, after years of cabinet ministers shouting insane genocidal nonsense as loudly as possible to the entire world, it was really Yair Golan who had blackened our name. This is so obviously stupid that even Guy Alaluf can’t launder it, but that’s the best I can do. So, instead, I thought it might be good here to set out a framework for those who for whatever reason, want to think about the topic. Israeli war crimes, I think, should be divided into three categories.

1. Hunting Amalek

Some Israelis believe that it is good to kill civilians in Gaza because they are innately evil and eternally hostile. Some of these Israelis are in the army.

In this video, a young man eulogising his brother who died in combat declares that he went into Gaza to kill as many people as he saw, specifying women and children, this sentiment apparently endorsed by his family and other mourners. People say stuff when they are emotional, but I’ve heard similar sentiments expressed enough times by people who weren’t emotional. It stands to reason that those who want to murder women and children do, in fact, when given the opportunity, murder women and children.

This is the easiest category of war crimes for Jews to think about because we are not officially corporately responsible. In theory, even Otzma Yehudit is against just shooting Gazans without tactical justification, even though everyone knows that they aren’t really. Indeed, the entire right-wing of Israeli politics will fight tooth and nail against anyone who does so being prosecuted, while centrists will mumble and change the subject for fear of looking weak. Still, we’re not ordering it.

In reality, though, if you don’t set up law courts to punish things, you are responsible. Long before the war, Israeli soldiers had almost complete immunity for killing Palestinians. To face time, you have to literally do it on camera, and walk over and shoot someone on the floor, and even then you get 18 months and it will be commuted to 9.1 As long as you don’t do anything on camera, you can even just murder a Jew and you’ll be fine. If it is on camera, then the family of the victim will have to spend years lobbying to get anyone to prosecute you.

In order to not be classified as completely lawless, the IDF runs a military prosecutor unit, whose job is to file lots of paperwork to show that claims of crimes have been investigated, and once every so often to actually prosecute a particularly black and white case and give a small sentence. This is very important. The Palestinians have on their side one of the best activist networks in the world, able to draw on a vast well of generic leftist organisational experience and Gulf oil money. One of the things they want to do is use established mechanisms of international law enforcement to make it so that Israeli politicians, high level generals, and even ordinary soldiers who posted something unfortunate to social media can’t go abroad without getting pinched. The response of western governments who want to avoid that kind of thing is that prosecuting Israelis is outside their jurisdiction because Israel has its own robust system of investigating and prosecuting abuses committed by its military. Of course, they know that it doesn’t, but it does have the ability to provide formal evidence of such robustness and that’s probably good enough unless some rogue judge kicks off and then you can call him an antisemite.

Unfortunately for us, the Right Wing is one big machine for the systematic elevation of human shit, and so they were not willing to tolerate this arrangement. They want their cookies now. At one of the military prisons where literally everyone knows that Palestinian prisoners are being beaten up every day, one turned up in hospital with his rectum torn, apparently consistent with having had a metal object stuck up it. The military prosecutor ordered some soldiers to be arrested prior to investigation (note: did not pre-emptively declare guilty and throw in a dungeon, nor even hold without charge for years as is routinely done to Palestinians), and there was a riot including MKs. Some of them said the soldiers were innocent, some said they did a good thing, some said both, the ones with laughable pretensions to intellectual accomplishment spewed out some word salad about class warfare. It doesn’t really matter; the point is it’s not OK to arrest a soldier on suspicion of a crime just because you have probable cause to suspect him of a crime. At this point, a power struggle ensued in which what is left of the secular Ashkenazi elite showed their usual ineptitude and cuckdom in the face of internal adversaries. The military prosecutor leaked some footage to the press like a dumb cow and got caught, she was arrested, and the case was dropped. We’re no longer going to pretend; that’s goyish and we don’t play that no mo'.

Of course, what that means is that now we have lost both plausible deniability and implausible deniability about enforcing the law against our own war criminals, so a simple application of accepted international norms is that other countries have to do it for us. We can lean on our other weapons - German dweebs wracked by Holocaust guilt, obese boomer lunatics, open perversion of the American electoral process - and maybe that will buy us some more time. At some point though, Corporal Major Yossi can’t go for a relaxing holiday on the beaches of Croatia anymore; he’s going to have to settle for Eilat.

Oops, we got distracted again. More important than after-the-fact investigation, or its absence, is how much this stuff happens in the first place. October 7th drastically increased the number of Israelis who think this, the number of Israelis who already thought it and are now willing to say so, the number of Israelis who aren’t quite there but are willing to look the other way etc. The Gaza war also increased the practical ability of people to act on such sentiments. Maybe 5% of Israelis think this way, but it’s higher among those still young enough to be serving, and higher still among those in combat units. Perhaps it’s 10%, but they won’t be evenly distributed. The army is large enough that there must be some platoons where they are the majority. Boys will be boys.

On the other hand, most power in the IDF is still wielded by people ranging from center-Left to soft Right and, at the very least, they consider that kind of thing to be a breach of discipline and do what they can to stop it. Perhaps more important is that the IDF has consistently cleared areas of civilians and then chucked in a lot of bombs before sending in troops. It’s perhaps telling that many of the clearest cases of intentionally targeting civilians are those of Palestinians who entered already cleared and designated killzones. The most sustained run of alarming shootings happened at the GHF aid sites, which was one of the few times that IDF soldiers were in sustained contact with large numbers of civilians. I’m inclined to think, therefore, that this is a relatively marginal problem in practice, responsible for 1 or 2% of Palestinian civilian casualties. But it’s definitely happened and it makes sense out of apparently senseless cases like that of Hind Rajab.

2. Laying waste

A lot of Gaza is rubble. At least 55% of buildings have been completely destroyed and more than 80% are damaged. It looks pretty bad.

As a result, the majority of Gaza’s population is living in tent camps or shacks, and these are pretty bad too. Sometimes it rains and that’s really bad.

By any standards, this is cruel. The policy of destroying most of urban Gaza emerged from the bottom up. The IDF was caught in a cycle of giving evacuation notices, going into urban areas and killing any paramilitary members present, then coming back a few months later and having to do it all over again. This was because the IDF didn’t have a plan, or at any rate a good plan, or maybe had multiple incompatible plans, and was trying to achieve ‘total victory’ by just killing everyone in Hamas. Zionists are prone these days to declaring that their critics ‘don’t understand the reality of war’ and that’s certainly true, but if they did understand it more they might be even more critical. There are not many cases of wars fought without either an attempt to hold territory or to create a political entity that will do it on your behalf, or even with a demand that the opposing side could accede to, but instead solely based on killing enemy troops faster than they can be replaced. Those that came closest to such a modus operandi (like Vietnam or the Soviets in Afghanistan) are case studies in failure. Feiglin loves to make that stupid face where he tells you that the point of war is kill your enemy unlike whatever it says in that cursed IDF ethics book written by godless snobs alienated from their true Jewish identity, but actually it isn’t. That’s a means to an end. If it’s all your doing, you aren’t doing anything good. Our friend Sam Kriss was very exercised about this:

Israel is not fighting to remove Hamas from power in Gaza.

Nothing about this war makes sense until you realise that what’s at stake here is something other than victory. The length it’s been going, for one thing. During the Suez War, it took Israel five days to capture the Gaza Strip from a well-armed and dug-in Egyptian army. In 1967, Israel had seized the entirety of Gaza by the end of the Six-Day War’s second day. The IDF of 2024 is not the IDF of half a century ago, and unlike the Egyptians, Hamas has nowhere to retreat. But I’m not sure that can explain why this conquest of Gaza has already taken seventy times longer than the last one. Or the other unusual events that keep happening. Not long ago, Israeli jets bombed the al-Shifa hospital complex in Gaza City. You might remember that last November, the IDF besieged the hospital: they cut off fuel and bombed solar panels while snipers shot doctors through the windows. Dozens died. In the end, the IDF captured the complex, which they claimed was a Hamas command centre; their evidence consisted of a few Kalashnikovs planted in an MRI room, a box of dates, and a calendar on a wall. So why are they bombing it again now? IDF strategy in Gaza appears to consist of a series of rapid advances, moving in to destroy houses, smash up shops, vandalise schools—and then equally rapid retreats, followed by aerial bombardment of whoever’s moved into the ruins. Outside a few strategic areas like the Salah al-Din Road, which runs the length of the strip, they’re not interested in holding territory in Gaza. They do not want to have to take over governmental duties for its population of two million (and shrinking) Palestinians. They don’t want to collect Gaza’s taxes, operate its sewage system, or pick up its litter. They just want to destroy.

I think this is unfair. The goal - and I will return to this - was not just to destroy, it was to destroy Hamas. A goal, even an incoherent impossible goal, is still a goal. It’s something, but it’s admittedly not much. There’s a left-wing critique of this (instead of pointlessly killing people, don’t kill people), but there’s also a right-wing critique (instead of pointlessly killing people, pointfully kill people). Kriss’s charge that the IDF wasn’t serious because it wasn’t holding territory was heard plenty in Israel, just not the way he wanted it.

That wasn’t the only critique though, or even the most widely-held one. A good number of Israelis didn’t want to hold land, and knew that pointfully killing would actually end up landing them with a big headache they preferred not to deal with. What almost all Israelis agreed with, however, is that too many Israeli soldiers were dying. These numbers were indeed high. Not high by the standards of the mid-20th century wars to which Israelis invariably refer to when asked to justify their conduct. By these standards, they were so laughably low as to not even merit consideration. But Israel is not a mid-20th century state, it’s a cucked 21st century liberal pantomime just like everywhere else where kids who throw rocks at their headteacher go to the school counsellor to play a card game which helps them express their feelings. Israelis have more stomach than western European countries for military casualties, but not that much and certainly nothing like Russia or Ukraine has. Israelis wanted it to end.2

The solution the IDF hit upon was simple. Instead of going in and clearing an area and then leaving so both civilians and soldiers could return, just blow everything up before you go. The soldiers can’t come back now, and nor can the civilians, who will have to make their tent a permanent abode. Then when you’re sent to a new area, you do the same thing, and again, and again. Eventually you’ve destroyed most of it.

It’s important to be clear that this tactic definitely worked. Lives were saved. In every single case it was used, it could be justified on tactical grounds (or at least we can grant that this is so). That is why it was done. Each time, the guy on the ground put in a request to demolish everything, and each time it was approved. No-one needed to order anyone to raze the place like Carthage.

Nevertheless, it became clear at a certain stage that the policy was more than that. Each individual case had a tactical justification, but tactics are supposed to serve strategy, and the killing now was no more pointful, it just came at lower cost. Eventually, when you have fields of gray as far as the eye can see, you either come up with a strategy or stop, unless that is the strategy. Bit by bit it became clear that the idea was to create so many Palestinians with no homes to go back to that they would just have to leave.

The dual nature of the campaign allowed for the Israeli Right’s favourite pastime: being a mendacious crymurderer. In the most obvious example, a certain Rabbi called Avraham Zarbiv who claims credit for inventing the ‘blow everything up’ tactic made a name for himself by sending out videos giving inspirational divrei Torah3 about having the courage and emunah to do ethnic cleansing before blowing up a building and saying woohoo. A certain lib-leaning Rosh Yeshiva named Yuval Cherlow made a mild objection by quoting certain medieval Rabbis on the need to avoid allowing warfare to warp ethical sensibilities. Predictably, the rage machine erupted, accusing him of pOSTMODERNISM and aghast that he could decry a tactic that saved soldiers’ lives.

Regardless, though, whenever plausible deniability about this ran out, it’s certainly ran out by now. The Defence Minister has boasted of his accomplishment in destroying the houses more than a million of Gazans so they have no choice but to leave. This is government policy, with only the most superficial layer of deniability for international diplomacy. and if you can’t be held corporately responsible for government policy, what can you be held corporately responsible for?

For my part, I’m in favour of the ethnic cleansing of Gaza in principle. Gaza is a big mess, a place created to herd Arabs Israel didn’t want in 1948, with no plausible pathway to becoming something functional after having been developed into a booby-trapped lunatic asylum. Everyone would be better off if the Gazans went somewhere else, and, while I’m aware that Palestinians have a perfectly good claim to be considered natives of the land, I am generally unmoved by ethnonationalist claims to connections between soil and bloodlines. My chief objection to voluntary emigration as a strategy for solving the problem is that if you don’t do it in the required volume, it just makes the problem worse by removing the most reasonable and pragmatic Gazans and leaving behind all the hopeless nutters who then breed themselves back to the original level. So I get that if you are going to make it work then ‘voluntary’ is going to have to be ‘voluntary’ with a big fat asterisk attached.

On the other hand, putting people in tents and then leaving it up to them to find out where to go while they rot year after year in sub-medieval conditions is barbaric. If you want them to leave, then put at least as much effort in finding them a new home as into immiserating them. It would be a lot cheaper to pay someone to take them than to keep blowing stuff up and becoming an international pariah, but the fact is that too many Israelis hate Palestinians more than they love their own children. They don’t mind spending the money, but they sure as hell won’t put up with it being spent on them. So, because the two bordering countries to which Gazan would walk if they could are blocked off, we end up doing a bunch of the bad stuff associated with ethnic cleansing while not even doing very much ethnic cleansing, which sucks.

3. Death from the sky

The third category of war crime we have committed is in lowering the threshold for a legitimate military target for an aerial strike and raising the permitted level of collateral damage way, way beyond what is normal in contemporary warfare. This has happened all through the war, but it happened most, ironically or perhaps not, precisely when global support for the Israeli war effort was at its highest ebb during the opening month. The thought process went like this:

1. Following October 7th, Israel must achieve total victory over Hamas.

2. Because Israel must achieve total victory over Hamas, therefore it is possible to achieve total victory over Hamas.

3. Israel cannot incur the kinds of casualties likely to result from sustained urban combat in territory prepared in advance.

4. Therefore it must be possible to achieve total victory over Hamas without incurring such casualties.

This logic appeared impregnable to almost every Israeli and non-Israel Zionist. So Israel did what democracies tend to do when faced with a difficult military situation and fired bombs all over the place. True, these bombs were very not indiscriminate; they were extremely discriminate. If there was a local Hamas police chief in a building with 20, 30, 40 … well we don’t know because they won’t say, but we have allegations and a lot of circumstantial evidence.

This is something that Israelis aren’t just corporately responsible for. They are, almost without exception, individually responsible. I certainly was. Oh another tower block went down? FAFO I guess. There’s a neat interview with Naftali Bennet on Sky News:

That’s how pretty much everyone felt. But it turns out that it’s not true that just because you must do something therefore you can do it without paying the costs you won’t pay. So what you did was, if not for nothing, not for all that much, and killing people for not all that much is murder, and murder is wrong.

Darryl Cooper, back before he let himself get totally cooked by rightoid internet culture, actually had a pretty good take on this. If you found out your neighbour had walked into someone’s house and slit the occupant’s throat, you’d be very perturbed. If you found out, he was in the airforce and dropped a bomb on someone’s house, you might want to argue out the morality over a barbeque, or maybe you’d just avoid the topic. It is different. But it isn’t limitlessly different. The civilian to combatant ratio of Israelis on October 7th was 1.9:1, somewhat better than what the IDF achieved in Gaza and, of course, the overall quantity is a lot more. The IDF outperformed Hamas sometime around the 11th or 12th of October and kept going. Eventually it’s too much. When? Mr Borelli in the first week or so called it at 40,000. He was pretty prescient.

Does this mean that Israel is one of those irredeemable countries like the Third Reich that has to be disassembled and replaced with a gay version of itself? I don’t believe so. ‘I was angry’ is a legitimate excuse. It doesn’t justify murder for you, but at the state level it does, otherwise every state is illegitimate, at least in potentiality. International law wasn’t given to Malachei haShares. When you have calmed down, you just cook up what you need between some combination of heat-of-the-moment and rogue-actors and that-bit-didn’t-really-happen until enough time has passed that you can ask why people are being so woke and have their head stuck in the past. You move on. But you do have to move on. What you shouldn’t do is declare your crimes the highest expression of morality and thus commit yourself to committing ever more in the quest to turn your conscience into an accomplice. Don’t do that. Move on, while there’s still time. If there’s still time.

No posts over Succos, so have a great Yom Tov everyone.

First of all, it’s mekorism with a k. Cut that out, OQ? I’m loath to pull rank like this, but sometimes you have to.

Secondly, yes, sure, the human capital issue is key. People are policy, cadres decide everything etc. Ironically, given the present direction of attacks, traditionally, a chronic problem weighing down mekorism has been its general association with Kahanism. Machon Shilo literally started off as one of the various Kahanist factions formed after Meir Kahane was murdered, but even the other groups with less of a direct connection were still intertwined. The general assumption was that both mekorism and Kahanism involve going back to some earlier and more pure form of Judaism, so they went together. Not all Kahanists were mekorists, but almost all mekorists were Kahanists. The problem is a lot of Kahanists were obese weirdos with chaotic personal lives, and a lot of the ones who weren’t were prickly and couldn’t get on with each other.

I would like to say that my own ramblings have been instrumental in breaking this connection, but, in truth, I was pushing at an open door. Kahanism in its original sense doesn’t really exist anymore. It has folded into being the violent wing of Religious Zionism. Or, if you prefer, Religious Zionism has folded into being the hinterland for Kahanism. Not only are pre-Kookian Mizrochniks now more or less extinct, but orthodox Kookists are an endangered species too. The Breslov-Chabad-Kook-Irgun synthesis is what Religious Zionism is, and Kahanists are distinguished only in the degree to which they are eager to impose this by unauthorised violence, and barely even in that. To be a Kahanist is to be an active promoter of Zoharism in one of its most extreme forms. This has a lot of implications, but one of them is that you can’t be a Kahanist and a mekorist anymore. They are incompatible things. Not everyone can figure that out on their own, but it’s pretty obvious once it is pointed out.

A little anecdote before we move on. Limor Son Har Melech and some other Otzma MKs wanted to pass a law enshrining Menachem Mendel Schneerson as some kind of official figure in Judaism, the practical implications of which were (even more) public moneys diverted to the movement and also some kind of obligation for schools to teach about him. It likely would have passed because the Left don’t care about this kind of stuff, and there are informal arrangements in Knesset committees according to which each side signs off on the other promoting their respective versions of degeneracy. But, in fact, the law went away. Bentzi Gopstein, who is old school and still takes it for granted that Rambam is the boss, kicked off about it, and Ben Gvir, who is worried about his old mates starting up a separate party that will bleed him votes, made the law go away. So we won that battle, but everyone knows the war is being lost. Gopstein will soon be an old man, and the young guys aren’t interested in monotheism, not interested at all.

Back to mekorism. I know it’s hard for people my age, and even a decade younger, traumatised by too many sparsely-attended meetings where multiple participants had mustard all over their ill-fitting T-Shirt, to accept, but things are going pretty well. One center of mekorism is the Modi’in Yeshiva, Migdal haTorah, where the consensus of the smart kids is that some version of our schtick is obviously true and the rebbeim are kind of resigned to it. These guys all come from upper-middle-class families and, after one or two years in learning, are going to go and pursue an upper-middle-class career. If there’s a danger, it’s that when they settle down they will be too well integrated into upscale ModOx or Yeshivish-lite communities to really make much of a difference. Similarly, the Habura guys in the UK are, if anything, too normie and well-adjusted, and they are on course to basically be whatever remains of Anglo-Jewry that isn’t Charedi.

But neither is really where mekorism is at these days. Check this out:

It probably won’t surprise many readers if I say I don’t really get this. The aesthetics and general vibe … it’s a nope from me. I think I also disagree with the theory expressed, but I’m not sure because I couldn’t make it more than 5 minutes. However, I’m just one guy and 36,000 views is an awful lot for a frummy video, more than most big-name YouTube rabbis can reliably pull in.

Who are these people? Their husbands are middle-class mizrahim from traditional/moderate frum backgrounds who wanted a bit more and would have gone the generic Shasnik route, but didn’t have to because someone bothered to put in a bit of basic legwork promoting Rambamism. They are software engineers, kablanim, air-conditioning installers, that sort of thing. Some of them do pretty well. A few of them are doing really well. I don’t want to get anyone too excited, but proper money is starting to slosh around. Projects people have been thinking about for years are suddenly possible. If you are an Anglo, it’s easy to be completely unaware of what’s happening, because it’s very Israeli. But this is real, and it’s just getting started. The web of lies is thick, it chokes, but for that very reason it is all too visible, it cannot be ignored, no-one can disguise it anymore. And when you stop believing you are bound to these lies, you just blow a little, and it all goes away.

Relatedly, I have decided to stop engaging at all with people who make apologetics, of any description, for Chabad and Breslov. Look at this.

In the same way that everyone instinctively knows that putting a wire on some poles doesn’t make it a private domain, and everyone knows putting a wavy wig on a woman’s head doesn’t make her more modest, everyone who has said Krias Shema even once and meant it knows how wrong this is. You don’t need anything explained to you to grasp why going to Uman to have an invisible man fix your head is the antithesis of every word of the Torah. It’s obvious. The problem is an entire edifice of fake learning designed to intimidate honest Jews into feeling they are inadequate to make such basic judgements until they have spent decades in learning, and when they have done that, their brains are too fried by all the garbage and nonsense to make any kinds of judgements at all.

The job of the mekorist who has the capacity (and the time, time is important too) to read and write is actually very simple. It’s giving these Jews the permission structure to do the right thing. There are various different strands to this. Talmudic and halachic study is obviously the most important, but intellectual history is necessary too, especially for dealing with חבלה, and perhaps philosophy has a role to play too. But while the methods may (and, I believe, contrary to much Rambamist sentiment, do) require subtlety and skill, the end goal isn’t complicated at all. The one God created the heavens and the earth; He gave us a law that is righteous and good; He loves justice, kindness and mercy; He hates idolatry; He will not permit it. And so we must not do it, or allow it to be done.

This is why I disagree with our friend at Datepalm Discourses.

I don’t agree with Maskil. If a person rejects the notion that the talmud is authoritative because of the nature of the institution it came from and that community practices can spontaneously become authoritative, then it becomes difficult to identify why the Yeshivish community isn’t right.

I don’t think it hard, even a little bit, to identify why the Yeshivish community isn’t right (and they, of course, are very far from being the worst offenders). It is trivially easy to point out what’s wrong. Every one who has learned a bit can see it all over the place, which is why so many buffoonish theories of a non-existent ‘halachic process’ have been cobbled together out of myriad gentile (oh no!) philosophies to justify it. What is hard is designing something better. Mekorists have generally got everything precisely backwards: they portray the perfect end state and then try to figure out how to get there. Their end state is based on selective, often incoherent readings of primary texts, but that isn’t even the most pressing problem. The opposite is necessary: just stop deliberately doing the wrong thing. After a while, it becomes a habit. When we get to the end state, we’ll know what it is.

Again, there is no need to explain what is wrong with doing toasts with an invisible man-god. It is necessary, because we are in a hole, to make space to allow Jews to express the justified horror and rage at such things, and we must make that space. There are some, of course, whether because of the way they are born or what has happened to them, who genuinely do not understand, that actually like it. For them it’s the point. They will have to be dealt with in due course, but we have nothing to say to them. Our attention must be focussed on those who, out of misplaced shame, are suppressing their disgust, to give them the words to pour it out.

This brings me to the particular plight of the disagreeable smarty-pants. There are two errors that such a man is prone to. One is to imagine himself as the best human type; the other to think himself uniquely defective. Both are mistakes. Different people are different and it’s OK. The challenges of such a person are not my concern here. Suffice it to say, focus at a young age on finding a remunerative career you can tolerate, go to the gym, and learn to play some kind of game that you can do socially that doesn’t require a lot of talking. I didn’t do those things, but those are the correct things to do. More pertinent right now is what you can do as a mekorist. Probably the least effective thing you can do is write manifestos. The most effective thing you can do is patiently gather and organise knowledge that other men with skills you do not possess can use.

I would be remiss here not to point out that the wider situation is very bad. The Jewish people as a collective are systematically recreating every error and perversion decried by the prophets in minute detail and in such a way that it seems almost deliberate. The Torah is widely believed to be a doctrine of criminality, of race narcissism, of the most grotesque and imbecilic forms of paganism, of nonsense for its own sake, nonsense without end. The most probable future is that it just keeps getting worse until we get the just deserts spelled out in the Torah. Again. But you need to know it isn’t hopeless. In the places you least suspect, hope springs. Doubtless the fact that we least suspected it there means our mental models have something wrong with them. You can help, but probably not in precisely the way that you want to. Likely no-one will remember you for it. Trust me, though, if we somehow pull this off, it will be worth it.

For reference, here is Shahak’s paraphrase.

Even the real dopes, I hope, will have noticed a few differences. First of all, though it might seem a bit trivial, the proposal was to transfer Arab peasants from Palestine, not to Iraq, but to Syria. This is not a distinction without a difference, because the most popular opinion of educated Arabs in Palestine was that they were part of a Greater Syria (Bilad al Sham), so the proposal was not to transfer these peasants to a different country, but a different place in the same country. More importantly, the idea was not at all the ‘expulsion of all Arabs’, but ‘a limited population transfer’ of those who were dispossessed when Zionists bought land from absentee landowners and removed their new tenants, as was their legal right (subject to adjudication at court which, of course, Arab peasants did not have the wherewithal to organise). Thirdly, Shahak remembered the wrong man. It wasn’t Bergmann, but one of his Brit Shalom cofounders Arthur Ruppin, a man who certainly never seemed to anyone incapable of hurting a fly.

The man who built the Yishuv

Arthur Ruppin is not one of the better-known Zionists. Most Israelis would not recognise his picture.

The reasons for this are not mysterious. Ruppin was a race crank. There were a lot of race cranks knocking around in the early 20th century, but because the Nazis lost the plot in the middle, everyone afterwards did their best to try and forget about it, unless it was to smear their enemies. Mainstream Zionism, both in its socialist and liberal forms, therefore preferred to pretend he never existed. Right-wing Zionists, for their part, reject him because he wasn’t a race crank enough. The theory for which he is best known, namely that the ancient Hebrews were a non-Semitic race might not be correct,1 but he did recognise the obvious fact that the category ‘Jewish’ includes different ancestry clusters, with different average characteristics and capabilities. This, of course, is absolute kryptonite to the Israeli Right built by Begin, whose central conceit is that the honours accrued by Einstein and von Neumann demonstrate that an illiterate Breslov junkie in Afula with tattoos is the master race. Thus, no-one is interested in making Ruppin part of their Zionist history. They prefer to claim continuity with terrorists and fruitcakes.

Nevertheless, Ruppin was extremely influential in the establishment of the state of Israel, and, with the probable exception of the big man himself David Ben Gurion, you can tell the history of the Zionist movement through his life story better than anyone else.

Herzl, as is well known, did not invent the Zionist movement, but reinvented it. His big idea was that efforts to buy land and establish settlements in a run-down malaria-ridden, bandit-infested shithole under the radar of the Ottoman authorities were both demeaning and pointless. What was needed, instead, was to get a charter from the Ottomans, or from someone else who would take over the territory, giving Jews legal right to settle and then move in as an organized national unit. Herzl was obviously right that Zionist efforts up to that point had not borne much fruit, and the movement, hitherto centered in the Russian empire, lined up, with varying degrees of enthusiasm and resentment, behind the new Western European leadership. Before too long, however, it became clear that Herzl’s ‘Political Zionism’ had failed too. Half a decade of start-up shuttle diplomacy had resulted only in the offer of some land in Uganda. At this point, the movement fractured, with many orthodox Herzlians leaving to become ‘Territorialists’, and the Russian old guard taking the opportunity to seize back control and turn Herzl’s new institutions into vehicles for their sundry plans for spiritual and intellectual renewal in the Holy Land.

What eventually came out of this was ‘Synthetic Zionism’, the idea that you could focus both on practical settlement and diplomacy because each one made it easier to make progress with the other. The political representatives of Synthetic Zionism were the General Zionists, led by Chaim Weizmann and Nahum Sokolow, who dominated the elected parliament of the World Zionist Organisation until the early-1930s and were tied to the largest Zionist education system in Palestine, but were a small minority in the Yishuv’s local representative body and eventually also the WZO, totally outmanoeuvred by the better-organised and more ruthless Labour movement. However, the key figure in implementing Synthetic Zionism on the ground was Arthur Ruppin, who directed the Palestine Office of the WZO from 1908, organizing the settlement and colonization policy during the second half of the Second Aliyah, while acting as the movement’s principal land agent.

Ruppin was a German bourgeois with no moral commitments to socialism, and untainted by adherence to Marxist economics or historical theory. Nevertheless, in practice, he worked to set up agricultural collectives run on egalitarian principles in Palestine because he understood that this was what was necessary to get the state off the ground. He steered idealistic pioneers from the Poalei Tziyon and HaPoel haTzair movements into collective agriculture projects because this was what could reliably bring young Jews to the Land of Israel and keep them there. Indeed, while the Labour Zionist movement in theory owes its origin to Dov Ber Borochov, in reality its working model contradicted his consistently expressed views, excepting a few speeches made towards the end of his life. Of course, the kibbutz and moshav system as it eventually emerged was the result of trial and error on the part of many people, but the quiet father of Labour Zionism was not a theorist like Syrkin or Gordon, but the bureaucrat Ruppin.

Ruppin was also unusually precocious in understanding that the Arab Question was by far the most serious one Zionism had to face. The typical approach of the Zionist movement to the issue of fellahin displaced following Jewish land purchases was strictly legalistic. We bought it fair and square, and they have to go. This can (and from a leftist perspective certainly should) be questioned on ethical grounds, especially since many formal land titles had been acquired in the mid-19th century through political intrigue and corruption, but in practice it’s easy to ignore ethics if you are pumped up enough. However, Ruppin saw that the more important issue was urgently practical: displaced Arab peasants weren’t going to just dissolve or wander off, they would form a restless and bitter proletariat open to propaganda from the Arab nationalist bourgeoisie. All around the world, modernisation of agriculture led to peasants relying on informal and customary tenant arrangements getting screwed over, and Palestine, being a dump, was long overdue for this process. However, while always and everywhere this process presented challenges to political stability, its racialisation in Mandate Palestine was obviously disastrous. It is not necessary to ascribe to Ruppin an unusual degree of benevolence to see that his Syrian relocation scheme was an attempt to solve a real social issue in a way that didn’t involve people murdering each other.

Ruppin’s hard-headed and open-eyed approach to the Arab problem eventually led to him co-founding Brit Shalom. There have always been two strains in dovish Zionism, one, represented by Bergmann, being primarily ethical, and the other, represented by Ruppin, being essentially pragmatic. Ruppin arrived at binationalism while much of the Zionist movement was still stuck in its ‘fingers in ears’ stage of thinking about the Arab problem, because he became convinced that, whatever one may wish to be the case, Arab national feeling in Palestine was an objective social fact that had to be dealt with no less than the presence of Arab individuals. What is perhaps most interesting is that he didn’t arrive at this position because of Arab political violence. To the contrary, he drifted away from Brit Shalom after the riots and massacres of 1929, convinced there was no Arab party with enough control worth talking to. Rather the more boring work of Arab nationalist propaganda, strikes and petitioning over the 1920s had won him round to the inevitability of compromise. Palestinians don’t want to hear it, but the resort to violence has always been their movement’s Achilles heel. Of course, acceding to binationalism, while being beneficial to the Arab population from any reasonable utilitarian perspective, would not have satisfied certain ethnonationalist aspirations. People can believe what they want, but no-one is obligated to indulge them in it. In cases like this, I would say they are obligated not to indulge them in it.

Arthur Ruppin today

Ruppin was the most quintessential of Zionists, both a General and Labour Zionist at the same time, without ever being formally either. He did more to build the new Zionist society than any other non-politician, and a great deal more than most politicians. He saw more clearly than most that the real obstacle to Zionism was not Jewish apathy or international interference, but the opposition of the local population, and his journey from indifference to compromise to gritty determination to do what it took prefigured Ben Gurion’s by about a decade. As a middle-class German, he was a part of a minority in the Yishuv’s population, and didn’t fit in well with its leadership class. However, the German-speaking bourgeoisie, about 10% of the Yishuv population thanks to the Nazis, did more to build the State of Israel than is generally appreciated, disproportionately creating the capitalist economy and university system that would, in due course, eat the kibbutz movement and provide the economic might necessary to survive in the region. But who today wants Arthur Ruppin the racist peacenik and snob? Is the true Zionism NonZionism after all?

As a result, this has been even more of a diplomatic disaster for Israel than the normal resting state of diplomatic disasters. None other than the cringest of cringe boomerzionists, Mr Huckabee himself turned up and was like ‘errr what?’ Coalition pressures or no coalition pressures, Bibi had to buckle this time, and he ordered some outposts to be dismantled, and some of the perpetrators actually got arrested. Where were they arrested?

This is not a very big surprise because 95%+ settler terrorism is committed by Breslovers. It’s interesting, though, because Daas Yochid is starting his revolution, and it turns out the missing ingredient for Haskalah ver. 2 that isn’t just a big disaster is Breslov, you see:

People like to mock Rebbe Nachman, but most people who become Breslov are noticeably happier and more fulfilled, no matter how crazy they started off.

Sigh. So I guess we have to do this again.

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I suppose they are happier and more fulfilled.

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They sound extremely happy and fulfilled.

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So happy, so fulfilled.

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The boys certainly seem happy and fulfilled.

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So. Much. Fulfillment.

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TBF, he does look happy.

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The world is a narrow bridge, and the ikar is not to be bumraped by a Breslov tzaddik.

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I guess he was happy and fulfilled.

Defenders of Breslov like Daas Yochid will claim all movements are like this, because they are incontinent liars. In fact, you cannot find any Jewish group with the same number of high-profile scandals per capita, or even remotely close. I doubt you can find a gentile one, though it’s a big world. Like Daas Yochid, they will make the lunatic claim that they are better off being Breslov because they were even crazier to start with, but, in the real world, random Hiloni Israelis are not constantly getting exposed for running child sex abuse cults. All this is so silly. Likely in the absence of Breslov, a lot of these guys would be leading fairly meaningless lives with a lot of video games and weed, but that’s better. We’re just getting started though.

Heresy and sin

As Daas Yochid explains, Breslov is about more than artificially inducing a state of subhuman intelligence in yourself through spiritual exercises, it’s also about hiskashrus with the perfect tzaddik. Basically, you’ll never be good enough on your own and God is too far away for you to grasp, but luckily there is a wholly righteous man who is kind of God wink-wink, no of course I didn’t mean that literally, but, like, you can meditate over him and think about him all the time, and that will get you close to God, which he is … part of, wink-wink.

What Breslovers (really all Zoharists) love to do is say completely insane heresy and then, when you simply quote back what they said, demand that you engage in ridiculous apologetic to explain why they are actually monotheists while they just go around propagating their completely insane heresy to people who literally wouldn’t understand the apologetic interpretation even if it was put to them, which it never is. If you don’t engage in this demeaning game, it’s because you lack Ahavas Yisrael. They think this is very clever. It’s not, but lucky for them, you don’t need to be very clever.

Where does this theology come from? As I have explained, it was developed by followers of Shabtai Tzvi (with some contribution from the man himself) to explain what it meant for him to be the Messiah when all he really did was go around being weird and making gnomic statements. The rabbinate did not succeed in stamping out this theology, largely because many of its members were adherents or sympathisers, and it grew in different directions for a century and a half. Over time, the theology of divine mediation developed for Shabtai Tzvi was applied to a wider range of purportedly righteous leaders, sometimes without any particular messianic connotation. Eventually, the radical wing of the movement coalesced around Jacob Frank who flamed out and led his followers into formal adoption of Christianity. The moderate wing dumped the least sustainable part of its belief system, namely faith that Shabtai Tzvi specifically was the Messiah, and rebranded itself under the name Chassidim (a term hitherto applied among Ashkenazim to ascetics who had little if any connection to the new movement).

The Modern Jewish History series has stalled a bit, because the next installment is supposed to be about Maskilim, and I don’t know anything about them and needed to read some books and these books are boooooring. This is a shame because the episode after that one is going to be a banger about the cleaving of the Chassidic movement from the third generation onwards.

Many people have studied primary Chassidic texts and looked at Chassidim today and wondered what on earth they have in common. Here’s a somewhat annoying short video about that:

The answer is twofold, a good bit and a bad bit. The bad bit is that the normal thing happened with an idealistic movement once it gets followers. Being a tzaddik with followers is great, but being a rich tzaddik with a pimped-out chair and a fur coat is even better. Cynicism set in, and with it corruption and the general conversion of the movement into a business. The good bit (well, sort of) is that large sections of traditional orthodox Jewry threw in the towel and decided that it was better to get subsumed into Chassidus than hitch up with the yeshiva movement and be miserable all day. As they did, they brought in a lot of their vibe with them, and the Chassam Sofer became the real ideological cornerstone of the movement as it spread into Hungary. The synthesis was helped along by the Haskalah giving traditionalists and Chassidim a common enemy. Eventually, this tendency became Satmar-normative Chassidus of today, in which any appeals to primary Chassidic texts can be nicely batted away with a neat ‘the way of Besht is lost’ and everyone eats their kugel and it’s awesome.

The other tendency was the opposite, to try and go back to the original meaning of Chassidus. Again, this had a good side and a bad one. The revivalists were trying to overthrow corrupt and often tyrannical Rebbes whose courts were centers of intrigue and avarice, scarcely more edifying than those of a secular monarch (and with worse interior decor). The bad side is they also wanted to go back to authentic Chassidic theology, which is heresy. Breslov was the most extreme and deranged representative of this tendency, with its deification of their tzaddik unmatched until Lubavitch schized out following the Holocaust. It was also paradigmatically radical in some other ways. Nahman of Breslov didn’t just return to the earliest times of the movement, he wanted to go back further, and deal with some business the Besht had left unfinished.

That’s Yehuda Liebes, who is a heretic if ever there was one, but has a useful penchant for spilling the beans. Unsurprisingly, Nahman was condemned by more orthodox Chassidic Rabbis as a heretic, in response to which he drew on his roots and called them Erev Rav.

The idea of cleaving to a perfectly righteous man who alone is capable of saving you obviously parallels the central claims of the Christian religion. Some Jewish monotheists use this as a rhetorical weapon, but I think it’s wrong. First of all, there doesn’t seem to be all that great a deal of Christian influence on Sabbatean theology. The Zohar contains some recycled Christian exegesis, Cardoso smuggled in a bit of his youthful Catholicism, but mostly it’s an internal development, parallel to, but not deriving from Christianity. There seems to be something structural in the Jewish religion, or the Jewish people, where out of despair at living up to monotheism we kick against it and alight on the most primitive form of idolatry: the deification of human beings. Secondly, even if it is effective as a short-term tactic, it ends up compounding the real problem, which is the assumption that anything ‘Jewish’ that we came up with on our own can’t be a fundamental violation of the Torah, that we are immune from precisely the sin that we are very patently addicted to.

However, there certainly are parallels to Christianity here. Daas Yochid thinks it’s fine to cleave to the perfect tzaddik who is entangled in some kind of hard to define way with God as long as it makes you a better person at the end of it. OK, here’s David Wood:

If utilitarian considerations trump theology, then Christianity beats Breslov four million times over with spare change. And you don’t have to go to America for it, here’s the Israeli version:

These guys are kind of cringe (though they are working on it with their PR team), but they aren’t chimping out and running sex cults. If you want to help miserable people fix their lives and be productive, that’s your answer, and you can tap into practically limitless American funds to support this evangelisation.

But that’s not Jewish! Right, it’s not Jewish, but what is Jewish? Is it fulfilling the laws regardless of what you believe? Well, the nevi’im say the precise opposite, that fulfilling the laws while adulterating faith in the true God is not only worthless, but an offense in itself. OK, so maybe they got carried away with rhetoric from time to time, but they keep coming back to this point. They must have meant something. Have you thought about what is?

There is an interesting midrash:

דרש רבי פפיס וימירו את כבודם בתבנית שור. שומע אני, בשור שלמעלן תלמד לומר אכל עשב. אמר לו רבי עקיבה: דייך פפיס! אמר לו: מה את מקים וימירו את כבודם בתבנית שור אכל עשב בשור שלמטה. שומע אני, בשור שלימות השנה! תלמד לומר אכל עשב. אין לך מנול ומשקץ יותר מן השור בשעה שהוא אוכל עשב.

There is nothing more revolting than a cow chewing the grass then swallowing it, then spitting it up, then chewing it again, then swallowing it again, over and over. Yet, for this, of all things, did the Children of Israel spurn their Glory. The Satmar Rebbe explains: Jews can’t do Avodah Zarah properly. When the goyim do it, they build these beautiful temples, they play this incredible music, it has all this aura. But when you do it? You’re sitting in a filthy room, books full of nonsense and inane wordplay scattered about the desks, a stinking fatso next to you intermittently bursting into tears and giggling. Something deep within you refuses to give you the excuse. When you do Avodah Zarah, you do it lishmah.

We learn from Mishlei that the temptation of idolatry is like that of a woman. To become a Christian is to forsake your wife for a stone cold 10, with a PhD, and a dowry, and, for some reason, she is incredibly into you. You shouldn’t do it. It’s wrong. God is real, Jesus was just a man and now he’s dead. But if you do it, we know why. To choose Breslev is to forsake your wife for a diseased, whore with lesions on her face. You didn’t want better; you just wanted different. Desperately wanted it.

It’s Rosh haShanah tomorrow night. According to the Talmud, we are supposed to read the curses of Devarim beforehand. The prevalent custom is to do it two weeks beforehand, for reasons we shan’t get into here, but the basic point remains: you are going to be judged, be afraid. This is no joke.

As it happens, Breslovers like this passage. It’s where they hallucinated the belief that it’s a great mitzvah to be happy at all times. This is what we do: always read what it doesn’t say, always focus on what it doesn’t mean. The simple reading, that actually God is really serious about this monotheism thing, that He isn’t playing around, that He is not going to tolerate this, that He doesn’t care about whether you feel connected, He wants you to do what you’re told, that’s boring. Does that make you feel good? No, and that’s the real test.

This is not a joke. It’s not funny. If the Torah is true, for any conceivable meaning of true, we can’t do this anymore. We have to stop literally right now. God’s mercies are so incredible that it sometimes overwhelms one to think about it. After every chance we’ve been given, after each time we have thrown it back in His face, He still gives us more. But his mercies don’t get you off the hook indefinitely. He told us so in that book we claim to believe in, and He showed us too. Not so long ago. Isn’t that enough? Can’t we just do the right thing? When it’s this easy?

James I was the victim of a gay pederast in his teenage years and a very damaged person. In general, I think men who have a strong hatred of smoking are messed up one way or another (girls are different, they’re not supposed to like it). If you are one of those guys who starts manically coughing and gesticulating when someone lights up on the other side of the room, then you have my sympathy, but I have nothing other to say to you. However, the argument that even though smoking is totally awesome you still shouldn’t do it because it’s bad for you is a serious one, so we’ll start with that.

First of all, smoking* is genuinely extremely bad for you. It remains the gold standard for isolating cause and effect from correlational studies because the effect size is just that large. Reducing the prevalence of smoking* in society is one of the more effective public health interventions of the post-WW2 era. If you presently smoke*, then quitting is probably the single best thing you can do for your long-term health. All that is true and I don’t dispute it. I’m not some kind of crank or immature troll. You may be wondering why I put an asterisk next to ‘smoking’ though. We’ll get to it shortly.

The worst thing about smoking* is that it causes lung cancer. Here is a graph of lung cancer mortality in the United States over time.

As you can see, the decline in lung cancer rates clearly tracks with the declining acceptability and use of tobacco in wider society. Conversely, the rise of lung cancer correlates very clearly with the rise of … well actually it doesn’t at all.

Tobacco has been widely used among Europeans since the 17th century. Among indigenous Americans, it goes back a lot further than that. The general consensus among both primitive and civilized peoples was that smoking was good for your health. That’s actually kind of odd because in some ways smoking is kind of obviously not so great. If you have a cough and you smoke, then you will in short order have a really bad cough. It also makes your skin kind of dirty. That’s not a big deal, you can just wash it, but it makes it interesting that here was a centuries-long consensus that overall it was good for you. Of course, people can be wrong, but, when they are, you need a mechanism to explain why.

The steep and fairly terrifying rise in lung cancer in the 20th century has no correlation at all with use of tobacco. However, it has an extremely strong correlation with smoking cigarettes.

What is it that makes cigarettes more dangerous than smoking generally? The answer is largely that, with cigarettes, you can, and people generally do, inhale the smoke into the lungs. If you try doing that with a cigar or a pipe, you will probably literally fail and make a fool of yourself, but if you do somehow succeed, you won’t be trying it again in a hurry. This is why the invention of filters and ‘light’ cigarettes, once widely considered to be a healthier alternative for removing much of the tar, actually makes smoking worse for you. Here’s an old Vice magazine article with the goods:

Fifty years ago, tobacco companies started putting tiny holes in the paper filters in their cigarettes. Based on some dubious science, the companies claimed that these new “high-ventilation” cigs were healthier and smoother, pitching them as “low tar” and “light.” That kind of labeling was eventually outlawed, but the tiny holes remain—they’re now found in virtually every cigarette smoked today. Now, a new research review shows that not only do those tiny holes not make cigarettes any healthier, but they’ve likely contributed to a rise in a certain kind of lung cancer.

The cancer is called adenocarcinoma, and it occurs deep in the lungs. Today it’s the most common type of lung cancer, but that wasn’t always the case. Over the last 50 years, other types of lung cancer have decreased as smoking rates have fallen but, strangely, cases of lung adenocarcinoma have increased.

Researchers at the The Ohio State University Comprehensive Cancer Center and five other universities wanted to find out why. They pored through the existing literature—chemistry and toxicology studies, human clinical trials and epidemiological studies, and even internal tobacco company documents—and uncovered what they believe is the culprit behind the rates of lung adenocarcinoma.

Research shows that filter ventilation holes make the tobacco burn more slowly and at a lower temperature, which actually leads to relatively higher amounts of toxic substances in the smoke. Next comes a one-two punch: The filter blocks some of the addictive nicotine and the holes dilute the smoke with air, so some smokers compensate by taking longer, deeper drags to get more nicotine. The result? More chemicals getting forced deeper into the lungs where adenocarcinomas more frequently occur. Far from being a safer way to smoke, the filters (and their holes) actually make cigarettes more dangerous.

The Ohio State University Comprehensive Cancer Center – Arthur G. James Cancer Hospital and Richard J. Solove Research Institute

“Our data suggests a clear relationship between the addition of ventilation holes to cigarettes and increasing rates of lung adenocarcinoma seen over the past 20 years,” Peter Shields, a lung medical oncologist and deputy director of OSUCCC – James, said in a statement.

Why do people inhale in the first place? It’s because there’s a lot more permeable skin in the lungs than in the mouth, so more nicotine gets absorbed. But this is nevertheless an extremely disgusting practice. It’s like cutting a hole through your belly and jamming dinner directly into your stomach to get a faster hit. It is this practice which I above referred to as smoking*, but a better term is smooking, and it is that we shall use henceforth. Because doing this is both unsatisfying and highly addictive, the typical smooker does it 12 times a day, constantly assaulting their body for ever-diminishing returns.

So far, I haven’t actually said anything controversial in health orthodoxy, but here’s where it gets interesting. The obvious conclusion from this is that you should just not inhale. Smoke, don’t smook, but that is very much not the health orthodoxy. Let’s ask the internet:

Mayo Clinic

WebMD

American Lung Association

The general gist of it is this: yes, not inhaling is much better for you, but because cigars are so much stronger than cigarettes, it’s still bad for you. OK, fair enough, but you know what is not dozens of times stronger than a cigarette? A cigarette. Checkmate libs.

However, there is now a different type of snag: if you take an average cigarette and don’t inhale, it’s not fun. It just kind of tastes like you took some paper and floor sweepings, burnt them and sucked the smoke into your mouth, because that’s more or less what you just did. In other words, most commercially available cigarettes aren’t even made for smoking, all you can do is smook them. But all is not lost. American Spirit, Camel Yellows and, at a pinch, a Marlboro Red are eligible for smoking. Just rip off the filter, take the smoke in your mouth, let it sit for 5-10 seconds, and then push it out again, in smoke circles if you aren’t a spaz. It’s better to smoke a pipe if you have time for that, but these will do.

Is smoking in this manner still bad for health? Yeah to an extent, but it’s well within the range of activities about which a free adult should be able to choose whether or not to take the hit, because there are many benefits. First of all, it’s nice. Life is for living, not morbidly trying to stretch it out an extra week or two so you can have a few more minutes to lecture people about how they, too, should foreswear pleasures like some kind of giant longevity ponzi scheme (we’ll get back to that). Secondly, it boosts your brainpower giving you up to roughly the equivalent of a 6-point advantage in an IQ test. Thirdly, and most importantly, it decreases stress and, unless you do something really dangerous (like smooking), the best thing you can do for your health, and that of those around you, is to be less stressed.

A neat analogy is co-sleeping with a baby. Most reputable authorities strongly recommend against doing this because of a slightly elevated risk of suffocating your child. It’s true, there is an elevated risk. But what these studies don’t take into account is the elevated risk of crashing your car into a tree because you haven’t slept properly in four weeks, or getting divorced, or jumping off a bridge, or losing your job, or any of the other crazy things that happen to people when they are out of their mind from putting the baby to sleep fourteen times a night. You can cut the risk of co-sleeping down to pretty close to zero through various precautions (don’t drink, don’t do drugs, keep blankets far away from the baby’s face etc.), but there’s always a risk, and that risk is worth it. If you’re a billionaire who can afford a fleet of nannies and there are no tradeoffs, then it’s not worth it, but you’re not that.

Smoking is much the same way. Say you come home from work, and the baby has spent the last half hour dismantling the living room. You are exhausted and would rather put fifteen bullets in your head than tidy up two-dozen ripped-up napkins again. What do you do? Well, you could shout at your wife until she cleans it up, and she probably will, but slowly you hate each other that little bit more, and said baby has to grow up in a warzone. Or you could go outside and have a smoke. And then you come in and it’s not so bad. And if you want to tell me that’s assur, and I’m not frum then sorry I don’t care because I’m too busy having a smoke and it’s chill.

With that said, I think it’s good to have some rules to stop it becoming a bad habit. Here are mine:

1. No more than 2 cigarettes on any given day.

2. If I have a cold, complete ban until it goes away.

3. Once every 3 months, don’t smoke for a week to check I’m not addicted.

But you do you. What I want to finish with is something a bit more controversial. If a Jew wants something to illustrate the humane and decent nature of halacha he will generally reach for pikuah nefesh, the idea that saving a human life overrides even the most severe prohibitions in the Torah. And that’s true, it is beautiful, but over the past decade I have lived through two incidents of warped insanity justified by this very principle.

The first was Covid, when, long after the futility and absurdity of the whole affair was evident to any moderately thoughtful person, the most degrading and demeaning intrusions on human dignity were justified by appeal to the limitless obligation to schlep out the life of anyone who might be infected by someone who might be infected by someone who might be infected by me. I still remember vividly the wild eyes of the assorted people possessed as if by demons who felt they had the right to scream at a complete stranger because he wasn’t wearing his muzzle. And the whole time, Chassidim, precisely because they aren’t so into halacha, just ignored everything and it was completely fine. A few more people died than elsewhere, but still much less than at any other time in human history and it was worth it because life is for living.

The second, which I hope is starting to wind down, is the constant din of ever more outlandish calls for war crimes in Gaza and anywhere else the IDF is operating to save even one Jewish soldier, greeting each new piece of evidence that the IDF (and especially the IAF) is already doing everything short of deliberate murder (most of the time…) with even more crazed demands for more. למה יש מבנה עומד ברצועה? The only real response to this is ‘WTF is wrong with you?’, but the logic of pikuah nefesh (once you have established that it’s a ‘Jewish’ life and not a ‘human’ one to which it applies) is remorseless. It admits no claims of common sense; it doesn’t see the raised eyebrow. Any moral principle, no matter how beautiful, can become something ugly if it does not acknowledge a limit. It’s not just us. The evangelicals who demanded that Terri Schiavo be kept, not alive, but in a grotesque parody of life, who bounded through police barricades to squirt a water bottle into her gaping mouth, all meant well. They had an absolute principle to uphold.

The truth is that the battle for pikuah nefesh has already been won. There are exceptions - children with leukaemia, car crash victims - and they justify throwing a great deal of resources at them, but the average baby born can expect to get past 80. That’s plenty. I have lived long enough that a non-trivial number of people I grew up around are now dead; I have seen different ways of going out. I want to die of a heart attack. If there was some sort of way of ensuring that would happen rather than spending years sitting in my own shit until the nurse does her afternoon inspection, unclear on who I am or who these people are sitting around my bed, I would take it, even if it means shaving 10, maybe 20 years off my life. I am not Richard Hanania. I don’t have any kind of solution, let alone a simple one, to the novel moral problems thrown up by the unexpected triumph of medicine over the human condition, nor to the havoc it is wreaking on social institutions. I know suicide is assur. I can, though, at least, not pretend this change hasn’t already happened. To continue to priggishly demand that we do whatever it takes to live even longer is perverse. We won. Take the W, and kick back with a ciggy.

Appendix:

I can argue anything basically, but here’s the actual science. First from the National Cancer Institute:

Smoking 1-2 cigars a day, or even smoking a larger number with no inhalation is basically not bad for you at all. It’s surprising that cigarette smoking without inhalation is actually really bad for you, but I’m not sure the data is really useful because 1-19 cigarettes is not a meaningful category. 19 cigarettes a day is a lot!

Here is the Surgeon General

Nine cigarettes a day is still quite a lot, but this is still surprising given how harmless cigar smoking is. I can think of two explanations. The first is that people are self-reporting themselves as not inhaling when actually they are by accident. The second is that commercial cigarettes are just really bad for you because of all the other stuff they put in like the crunchy conspiracy theorists say. I must admit that the safe, science-supported thing to do is to only smoke cigars, but I don’t like cigars and they make me feel dizzy. צ’’ע.

Here’s the man himself dancing to it in the shuk.

Expect to hear it a lot more over the next month.

What’s the problem now? Oh, look, Maskil Binah is going to get on his hobby horse and nerd out. Here’s the problem you idiot.

אַשְׁרֵ֣י אָ֭דָם מְפַחֵ֣ד תָּמִ֑יד וּמַקְשֶׁ֥ה לִ֝בּ֗וֹ יִפּ֥וֹל בְּרָעָֽה׃

Stupid Anglos who don’t know anything will tell you that Religious Zionists are better than Charedim because they learn Tanach. Wrong, wrong, wrong. Sure, they learn the book of Joshua. They love that. And then they work their way inattentively through until the end of Melachim and that’s it, they’re done. Some of the special ones do read all of it, sure, just like some Conservative Jews keep Shabbos, but in general they don’t even know what they don’t know. They think the Tanach is a book about killing people, like a Reddit atheist, but with and that’s a good thing attached. That’s why their propaganda mimics not just what is specifically condemned by the prophets in semantic terms, but even specific linguistic nuances to a degree that is so uncanny that it just has to be providential, that God is telling us something. I’ve quoted this passage before, and now I’m going to quote it again. Go on, desubscribe:

שִׁמְעוּ־נָ֣א זֹ֗את רָאשֵׁי֙ בֵּ֣ית יַעֲקֹ֔ב וּקְצִינֵ֖י בֵּ֣ית יִשְׂרָאֵ֑ל הַֽמְתַעֲבִ֣ים מִשְׁפָּ֔ט וְאֵ֥ת כׇּל־הַיְשָׁרָ֖ה יְעַקֵּֽשׁוּ׃ בֹּנֶ֥ה צִיּ֖וֹן בְּדָמִ֑ים וִירוּשָׁלַ֖͏ִם בְּעַוְלָֽה׃ רָאשֶׁ֣יהָ ׀ בְּשֹׁ֣חַד יִשְׁפֹּ֗טוּ וְכֹהֲנֶ֙יהָ֙ בִּמְחִ֣יר יוֹר֔וּ וּנְבִיאֶ֖יהָ בְּכֶ֣סֶף יִקְסֹ֑מוּ וְעַל־יְהֹוָה֙ יִשָּׁעֵ֣נוּ לֵאמֹ֔ר הֲל֤וֹא יְהֹוָה֙ בְּקִרְבֵּ֔נוּ לֹֽא־תָב֥וֹא עָלֵ֖ינוּ רָעָֽה׃ לָכֵן֙ בִּגְלַלְכֶ֔ם צִיּ֖וֹן שָׂדֶ֣ה תֵֽחָרֵ֑שׁ וִירוּשָׁלַ֙͏ִם֙ עִיִּ֣ין תִּֽהְיֶ֔ה וְהַ֥ר הַבַּ֖יִת לְבָמ֥וֹת יָֽעַר׃

Apart from the obvious echoes in multiple Israeli hits, it’s just ridiculous how on the nose it is. You want detestation of justice? Got it. Making crooked the straight? Got it. Building Zion in blood? Too easy. Its heads judging for bribes? Come on, this was yesterday. Its priests teaching for a price? Bro, do they do anything but that? Its prophets conjuring for silver. Yo, we got that.

But we are rabbinic Jews, so maybe we aren’t supposed to be looking at what the pesukim say. That’s what they keep telling me. What do Hazal do with it?1 Funnily enough, אשרי אדם מפחד תמיד appears in Gittin 55b at the beginning of the passage recounting material from the destruction of the second temple. I’ll quote liberally:

אמר רבי יוחנן, מאי דכתיב. אשרי אדם מפחד תמיד ומקשה לבו יפול ברעה. אקמצא ובר קמצא חרוב ירושלים, אתרנגולא ותרנגולתא חרוב טור מלכא, אשקא דריספק חרוב ביתר.

הוו בהו הנהו בריוני אמרו להו רבנן: ניפוק ונעביד שלמא בהדייהו. לא שבקינהו. אמרו להו ניפוק ונעביד קרבא בהדייהו, אמרו להו רבנן: לא מסתייעא מילתא. קמו קלנהו להנהו אמברי דחיטי ושערי והוה כפנא.

אבא סקרא ריש בריוני דירושלים, בר אחתיה דרבן יוחנן בן זכאי הוה. שלח ליה: תא בצינעא לגבאי. אתא. אמר ליה עד אימת עבדיתו הכי וקטליתו ליה לעלמא בכפנא. אמר ליה מאי איעביד, דאי אמינא להו מידי קטלו לי! אמר ליה חזי לי תקנתא לדידי דאיפוק, אפשר דהוי הצלה פורתא. אמר ליה: נקוט נפשך בקצירי, וליתו כולי עלמא ולישיילו בך, ואייתי מידי סריא ואגני גבך, ולימרו דנח נפשך. וליעיילו בך תלמידך ולא ליעול בך איניש אחרינא, דלא לרגשון בך דקליל את, דאינהו ידעי דחייא קליל ממיתא. עביד הכי. נכנס בו רבי אליעזר מצד אחד, ורבי יהושע מצד אחר. כי מטו לפיתחא, בעו למדקריה. אמר להו יאמרו רבן דקרו בעו למדחפיה. אמר להו יאמרו רבן דחפו פתחו ליה בבא נפק. כי מטא להתם אמר שלמא עלך מלכא שלמא עלך מלכא … אמר ליה מיזל אזילנא ואינש אחרינא משדרנא אלא בעי מינאי מידי דאתן לך. אמר ליה תן לי יבנה וחכמיה, ושושילתא דרבן גמליאל, ואסוותא דמסיין ליה לרבי צדוק. קרי עליה רב יוסף ואיתימא רבי עקיבא משיב חכמים אחור ודעתם יסכל איבעי למימר ליה לשבקינהו הדא זימנא.

אתרנגולא ואתרנגולתא חריב טור מלכא דהוו נהיגי כי הוו מפקי חתנא וכלתא מפקי קמייהו תרנגולא ותרנגולתא כלומר פרו ורבו כתרנגולים. יומא חד הוה קא חליף גונדא דרומאי שקלינהו מינייהו. נפלו עלייהו מחונהו. אתו אמרו ליה לקיסר מרדו בך יהודאי אתא עלייהו. הוה בהו ההוא בר דרומא, דהוה קפיץ מילא וקטיל בהו. שקליה קיסר לתאגיה ואותביה אארעא. אמר ריבוניה דעלמא כוליה אי ניחא לך לא תמסריה לההוא גברא לדידיה ולמלכותיה בידיה דחד גברא … אמר רבי אסי תלת מאה אלפי שליפי סייפא עיילו לטור מלכא וקטלו בה תלתא יומי ותלתא לילוותא ובהך גיסא הלולי וחנגי ולא הוו ידעי הני בהני.

אשקא דריספק חריב ביתר דהוו נהיגי כי הוה מתיליד ינוקא שתלי ארזא ינוקתא שתלי תורניתא וכי הוו מינסבי, קייצי להו ועבדי גננא. יומא חד הוה קא חלפא ברתיה דקיסר, אתבר שקא דריספק. קצו ארזא ועיילו לה. אתו נפול עלייהו מחונהו. אתו אמרו ליה לקיסר: מרדו בך יהודאי. אתא עלייהו.

To sum up, retarded arsim kept getting everyone killed by being retarded arsim. The Rabbis tried to stop them, but they didn’t listen, so the Rabbis sold them down the river and they all got killed. Not saying it was a good thing, but clouds and silver linings and all that. The literal precise ideology of Otzma Yehudit is condemned as being ומקשה לבו יפול ברעה. If you are in a position of public responsibility, you’re supposed to be afraid, not least because God has more than enough cause to let you be slaughtered.

[Parenthetically, I like to think that I know every ridiculous thing about religious Zionism, but I only found out this week that Dr. Michael Ben Ari has a book where he does a well akshully on the traditional rabbinic account of the Great Revolt. Part of it is clownish source-bending to argue that actually it wasn’t all the Rabbis who opposed the zealots, and that maybe the Talmud doesn’t mean to condemn the strategy of burning all your food and causing starvation. The other part is arguing that the rebellion was actually a dramatic success because it prevented assimilation into the Roman Empire and preserved the Jewish character. This raises alarming implications about what kind of outcomes these guys consider acceptable that may explain why they think their proposed strategy of chimping out against the world will not lead, by construction, to disaster.]

So where did Ben Gvir get this slogan from? It’s almost too bad to be true, but eventually you realise that nothing’s too bad to be true. It’s from a synth pop song by Eyal Golan. Here’s Eyal Golan:

In Judaism, you’re not supposed to have tattoos. But Eyal Golan is not one of those guys who restricts his sinning to the ritual elements of the law, nosireebob.2

I’m trying to not be inflammatory on the subject of Israeli demographic trends. It’s an important subject and requires sensitive treatment so as not to scare the libs. But geez it’s not easy.

He’s also a genocidal baboon, because of course.

But maybe it’s not that bad. Surely, they know it’s just a pop song by a sex criminal, they don’t actually think it’s like a religious principle or anything? WRONG.

Sure sounds like he’s quoting a pasuk. Who is this guy? Well, he runs a yeshiva which is a sort of Frankenstein’s monster of Sharabian kabbalah and Breslev, and they have a lot of options where you can buy tikkunim for whatever’s wrong in your life for a small fee, or, even better, a big one.

Notice that, in this charming medley, he also found space for אל תירא ישראל אל תירא כי גור אריה אתה. That’s not a pasuk either. It’s a song by Avihu Medina from the 1970s that sacrilegiously applies biblical-style language that you would expect to refer to God to the Israeli nation and its military might. This is the OG version:

Kind of lame, but still in the general ballpark of civilized humanity. However, Avihu Medina was oppressed by the euronormativity of Labour Zionist Israel. Here is an updated version for the new Israel that glorifies ugliness without constraint.

Good job we don’t have LEFTISTS pushing us around anymore making us be depraved and goyish. Anyway, what was I saying? Here’s another mashup, this time of what Religious Zionists’ WhatsApp statuses looked like two years ago.

Do they know it’s not a real pasuk? Do they even know what the question means? I did a little poll of religious Zionist youth. About 70% thought it was from tehillim. How did this crummy song become so popular in the Israeli Right in the first place anyway? What’s the worst possible reason you can think of? Yep, it was when Aryeh Deri was convicted of taking bribes as a government minister, because, you see, he’s called Aryeh, gettit? And he took bribes which the Torah says is … uhh …. look a LEFTIST and he’s Ashkenazi, gettim.

That’s enough. What are we supposed to even do with this mess, this absurd, hideous dumpster-fire of a religion cannibalising Judaism without even putting in an ounce of the effort Reform once did in asserting plausible deniability? Here’s a nice gemara:

אמר רבי אלעזר עם הארץ מותר לנוחרו ביום הכיפורים שחל להיות בשבת. אמרו לו תלמידיו רבי אמור לשוחטו. אמר להן זה טעון ברכה וזה אינו טעון ברכה. אמר רבי אלעזר עם הארץ אסור להתלוות עמו בדרך שנאמר כי היא חייך ואורך ימיך על חייו לא חס על חיי חבירו לא כל שכן. אמר רבי שמואל בר נחמני אמר רבי יוחנן עם הארץ מותר לקורעו כדג. אמר רבי שמואל בר יצחק ומגבו.

No, you shouldn’t take it literally, but you should take it seriously.3

There are, however, different varieties of antisemitism, inasmuch as there are different ways of explaining how or why Jews are the main problem in the world. Back in the gaye old times of the alt-right, the most popular, at least formally, was that of Prof. Kevin MacDonald. However, after getting mogged by Nathan Cofnas asking basic questions about evidence and causal inference, MacDonald’s prestige went into decline. Anyway, his theory is rather convoluted and requires making admissions (for example about high Jewish IQ) that most antisemites would prefer not to make. As his star was waning, there was a brief flirtation with Michael E. Jones, but this was far from perfect. First of all, if you aren’t a particular kind of TradCath, it doesn’t get off the ground (Jews promoted the Reformation, and the American Revolution and modernity, how, err, terrible). Secondly, it’s pretty insane.1 Thirdly, you no longer get to say ‘run a physiognomy check’ anymore as a dunk on Twitter.

So, in due course, antisemites converged on a different version of antisemitism, that basically combines the old school Talmudjude tradition with various elements of modern antizionism. A good representative of the synthesis is Will Sexton, but it’s all over the place nowadays and it goes like this:

1. Judaism has no theological content in the normal sense. There’s a vague inyan to affirm belief in one God, but after that you can believe pretty much whatever including the most unhinged, blasphemous guff and outright schizoid rambling, and it’s totally fine and no-one is allowed to object to it. Just believe whatever motivates you to be a committed Jew and it’s gravy.

2. The actual doctrinal content of Judaism is that Jews are innately superior to gentiles, and that the Land of Israel belongs at all times to Jews and anyone else who lives there can either get lost or get killed. God is subservient to Jews, or maybe Jews are really God in some sense.

3. Judaism has no concept of ethics at all outside the bounds of its own community. Gentiles are looked at as either rivals or objects to be exploited to whatever degree is possible. When Jews are weak, it’s permissible to be nice to them, but only for the sake of Jewish wellbeing.

4. Any Jew who rejects any part of the above is not representing Judaism, but is, whether he knows it or not, reflecting western values that are alien to the Jewish tradition itself.

That’s a pretty damning assessment and, if true, would justify a fairly high degree of animosity towards Jews, and, arguably, the legal proscription of their religion. We have a bit of a problem, though, because there is a growing, confident, and increasingly ascendant movement within Judaism that argues the following:

1. Judaism has no authoritative theological teaching in the normal sense. There’s a vague inyan to affirm belief in one God, but after that you can believe pretty much whatever including the most unhinged, blasphemous guff and outright schizoid rambling, and it’s totally fine, and no-one is allowed to object to it. Just believe whatever motivates you to be a committed Jew and it’s gravy.

2. The actual doctrinal content of Judaism is that Jews are innately superior to gentiles, and that the Land of Israel belongs at all times to Jews and anyone else who lives there can either get lost or get killed. God is subservient to Jews, or maybe Jews are really God in some sense.

3. Judaism has no concept of ethics at all outside the bounds of its own community. Gentiles are looked at as either rivals or objects to be exploited to whatever degree is possible. When Jews are weak, it’s permissible to be nice to them, but only for the sake of Jewish wellbeing.

4. Any Jew who rejects any part of the above is not representing Judaism, but is, whether he knows it or not, reflecting western values that are alien to the Jewish tradition itself.

Colloquially, this movement is known as ‘Kahanism’, which is not misleading, but is a bit inaccurate. Kahana was more a prophet of the movement than its theoretician, and, whether for form’s sake or otherwise, included some conventionally religious elements within his call to arms. The avatar of the movement, of course, is disgusting pig, Itamar Ben Gvir. Already, it is far safer within orthodox Judaism to be an ally of this tendency than an opponent. The safe bet is it will continue to grow.

The prevalent form of antisemitism, therefore, has as a fairly valuable advantage the fact that it is partly true, and becoming progressively truer with the passage of time. This does not per se justify antisemitism, because Judaism, considered as such, is not the world’s biggest problem and wouldn’t justify the kind of obsessive and prurient attention antisemites give it, but, even so, this is a relatively strong factual base to work with. Many ideologies have to make do with much worse.

Where does this variety of antisemitism come from? Based on the above, one might say it is simply, as its proponents allege, a response to Jewish behaviour, but nothing is actually a simple response to anyone’s behaviour in that respect, let alone the behaviour of people in another, albeit rather disruptive, country half the world away. Someone has to shove it in your face and tell you how to understand it. Of course, as is ever the case, it’s possible to trace back the new antisemitic synthesis to many sources, but I believe the most important of those was an eccentric Israeli Chemistry Professor, Israel Shahak. And with that we get to the subject of our article.

Shahak’s main work Jewish History, Jewish Religion, is a book I would encourage Jews to read, because I think it’s valuable to read hostile caricatures of your own group. It’s not a book I’d encourage gentiles to read, because I don’t think it’s a good thing to read hostile caricatures of other groups. Unfortunately, reality generally works the opposite way round. Even so, I was rather surprised to find the following in Edward Said’s foreword:

If Said had said ‘this is a well-written and cogently argued polemic against Judaism which inspires in its moral urgency’, I would have disagreed because, as we shall see, I think the book is badly written, badly argued and possessed of profound moral imbecility, but I would have known what Said meant. To say the book is a ‘succinct history of … Judaism’ that towers over so many others isn’t even in the right genre of approbation. It would be like declaring Dan Burwami the foremost scholar of Islam.2 If this is what a Palestinian moderate who opposed (at least some forms of) terrorism and was willing to consider (at least some forms of) territorial compromise thought was a helpful way of going about understanding the enemy, then that’s a good data point in support of it all just being completely hopeless.

This book sucks

Israel Shahak has been described as ‘the last Israeli liberal’; a more precise and illuminating definition would be libtard. Another obvious thing about him is that he had Asperger’s. You’re not supposed to diagnose stuff like this over the internet, but sometimes you’re allowed.

The upshot is that Israel Shahak was the Jewish equivalent of a Portlandia character who spends all his time shrieking at normy well-socialised libs who celebrate Thanksgiving when it’s a festival celebrating genocide and the dispossession of Native Americans. The idea that a Jew, having discovered the ghastly truth, could do anything other than dedicate his life to exposing the foul nature of Rabbinic Judaism was incomprehensible to him, and so his worst ire was focussed on the ‘fake liberals’ who let him down. In the book, Begin gets a mere five mentions, Likud only two and the Irgun, none at all. There is a bit more treatment of Gush Emunim, but mostly Shahak concentrates on pouring excrement on the true villains: Martin Buber, Moses Hess, Leo Rosten. He is particularly outraged that any gentile could be philosemitic: just look at them!

I’ll content myself with citing two passages. They are, naturally, particularly egregious examples of Shahak’s method, otherwise I wouldn’t have chosen them; but there are more than a hundred cases in the book where the same techniques of argument by non-sequitur and perverse innuendo are employed.

In the first example, Shahak describes the reception of a particular passage in Maimonides’ Guide for the Perplexed, in which he briefly recapitulates the Aristotelian theory of race differences. Basically, if you grow up somewhere that’s too cold (like Turks or Franks) or too hot (like Nubians), you come out all messed up, but if you grow up in the Mediterranean, you come out just right. This theory seemed to track relative social development in the Hellenistic era pretty well, but didn’t work so much when the Roman empire expanded northwards. It came back into fashion in the early Middle Ages when Aristotle was massive, plus Islam and the Italian states were killing it and northern Europe reverted to savagery. Strictly speaking it’s not clear that this theory actually counts as racism, since it’s really a particularly extreme form of environmentalism, but, regardless, it’s not comfortable for enlightened audiences, even 100 years ago, to read that Africans are intermediate between monkeys and people. So in Friedlander’s translation of 1925, he translated the Arabic word hyper-literally as Cushite, which would leave the less attentive reader in the dark about who was being referred to. Shahak has a massive libout out over this egregious deviation from scholarly accuracy and concludes by saying this:

If I were to answer the ‘question’ of why a Conservative or Reform Rabbi (or, more rarely, even an Orthodox one) might support the Civil Rights movement even though Maimonides thought black people were subhuman, a few possibilities come to mind. First, in the majority of cases, they just didn’t know. Despite Shahak’s incomprehensible claim that Guide for the Perplexed is a ‘most important and necessary work of Judaism’,3 very few Jews, including learned Jews, have ever read it. Nor do they need to because most of the book is either (a) resolving contradictions between medieval Aristotelianism and the Bible, which is all a moot point today, (b) explaining historical reasons for the mitzvot based on the Nabatean Agriculture, a fake book of zero value in understanding Bronze Age near-East religion or (c) stuff that honestly doesn’t seem to make a great deal of sense and the scholars say has an esoteric meaning, and they’ll get back to us any day now on what that is. Even among those Jews who did read it, many likely did so in the English translation (not a dishonourable thing since the work was composed in Arabic, not Hebrew) and so didn’t realise Maimonides was a big racist. Secondly, among those civil rights Rabbis who had read the work and realised what was up, the great majority probably didn’t care at all. Guide for the Perplexed has at least half a dozen imprecations against ‘those who are foolish as women’ and believe in the atomic hypothesis. Nevertheless, none of the moderns who see in Maimonides’ philosophical struggles something of value to the modern Jew have a difficult time accepting the standard model of particle physics.4 As I just hinted, Maimonides’ views on women were quite stridently, err, Islamic, and these were expressed rather more frequently than his views on Black people, and yet, somehow, JTS went co-ed regardless. Finally, among the vanishingly small number of Jews who found it necessary to reconcile Maimonides’ theory of race with their own beliefs, maybe they just came up with something. Taken literally, Maimonides’ climactic theory would imply that white and black Texans were equally monkeyish and the solution would be to move them all to Boston, so maybe, if we hunt around enough, we’ll find a scholar at Hebrew Union College who scribbled that in his notebook.

Shahak, though, ignores all of that and jumps to the most unreasonable and idiotic ‘explanation’ possible, namely that the liberal rabbinate engaged in ‘hidden enjoyment’ of Maimonides’ racism while using blacks for their own nefarious aims. This is the ‘paranoid reconciling hermeneutic’ so beloved of rightoids, but with Shahak’s own neurodivergent twist. If Shahak spends a frantic evening combing through Maimonides and then gets a juicy racism quote and obsesses over it for the next four years, then that’s just what any other reader would do. The whole concept of ‘hmm, don’t like that, turn the page’ just doesn’t register with him.

I want to add here that I was recommended by a number of readers to look at Shahak, so I do have to ask: what book were you reading? Like, this sucks. It really sucks. Is this convincing to you? Isn’t it obvious that it’s very silly? I kind of feel like doing a Fuentes rant about goyim, but I’ll restrain myself. Next example:

Some background for you readers who don’t know how to ask ChatGPT questions and rely on me to do it for you. Bergman was co-founder of Brit Shalom, the best-known organisation advocating a Jewish-Arab binational state. He responded to the 1929 massacres of Jews at the hands of Palestinian Arabs by insisting that it meant Jews needed to work harder to reach rapprochement, and condemned the principle of ‘Hebrew Labour’ in Zionist enterprises that he (and the Peel Commission) believed lay behind Arab resentment. After 1948, he accepted defeat, but continued to campaign for reconciliation with local and regional Arabs. If anyone is a peacenik gaylord, it’s him, and Hazony wrote a book about how his gang were subversive traitors.

But that’s not good enough for Shahak. Akshully, Bergman was an advocate of ‘expulsion, racism and genocide’. The evidence is that in 1914-15 he advocated expulsion of Palestinians to Iraq. At the time Bergman was an officer in the Austro-Hungarian army, and he didn’t come to Palestine until 1920, so, if it was true, it would only prove he changed his mind, but I (OK, AI) have been unable to find any evidence it is true. I’m a little bit loathe to accuse Shahak of outright lying, because in all other cases of him saying something totally ridiculous there’s some factual crumb which he could use as a motte to retreat to. However, whatever it is (and Shahak basically never cites anything, even though the book has 15 pages of mostly useless endnotes), it’s definitely not enough to substantiate the clear libel being made here.

That’s Bergman, but remarkably what he says about Kaufman is even more ridiculous. Here’s what he’s referring to:

To take a recent and remarkably close analogy, there’s a well-known and affable, if somewhat slippery, Christian apologist called William Lane Craig. As part of his job, he had to explain what was up with the Book of Joshua, and his explanation is basically a combination of (a) if God says it, it’s OK (b) it was a mercy to Canaanite children to be killed before they reached the age of moral responsibility and faced eternal damnation. Famously, Dawkins used this as an excuse to chicken out of a debate he was likely to lose. Now, there’s a bunch of things you could say about Lane Craig’s argument. At the very furthest reaches of plausibility, you might argue it makes him dangerous because if he ever got schizophrenia and thought God was telling him to kill the children of MS-13 members he wouldn’t have a moral objection. However, obviously, it would just literally be stupid to call him ‘an advocate of genocide on the model of the Book of Joshua’ today. So it is with Kaufmann. Unlike Bergmann, he wasn’t a big peacenik, but he was moderate enough, leaning towards territorialism as a way of avoiding conflict with Arabs, and comfortable with partition. Maybe his justification, such as it is, of the Israelite conquest is condemnable, but it’s not advocating genocide.

So, with that out of the way, I want to turn to another passage:

I’ll start by pointing out everything wrong with this passage, in which Shahak exhibits the same kind of basic failures of intellectual competence we have seen.

1. It is stupid and dickish to imply that Elazar Shazar secretly agreed with the metaphysical racism of Chabad because he maintained contacts with and interest in the religious community of his youth including its leader. Clearly Shazar wasn’t an ‘ardent adherent’ of Chabad in the normal sense of the term because he was secular. Shazar was a moderate dove and gave no indication of being a racial supremacist. Even if we take a maximal interpretation of his interest in Chabad philosophy, he could simply have taken the view of Hillel Zeitlin, that what Chassidic thought says about the dignity and importance of the individual Jew can simply be expanded to the dignity and importance of all mankind, a popular current in 20th century Jewish thought, and with plenty of exponents today.

2. It’s pointlessly inflammatory to call Schneerson the Fuhrer of Chabad.

3. The fact that Schneerson would not visit Israel was not one of the main reasons he was widely criticized in the orthodox world.

4. Shulamit Aloni was not an impartial witness, but a far-left anti-religious activist (which is, of course, her right).5 In a controversy in the 1990s over (still unsubstantiated) claims that doctors at Sha’arei Tzedek hospital were given pamphlets telling them not to treat gentiles on the sabbath, she mentioned in testimony that she had it on good authority that something similar was distributed among soldiers during the Lebanon war. She mentioned nothing about Chabad, or this propaganda being ‘stepped up’.

5. Schneerson was, if anything, pro-black, and while he did not acquit himself very well in the run up to the Crown Heights riots, the local black community acquitted itself much worse. Among liberal-leaning Chabadniks, there is a widespread belief that Schneerson invented food stamps.

And yet, check this out:

That’s Ben Gvir being treated like a rock star at one of their heretic conventions. Here’s him arriving at the belly of the beast:

This is a well-documented phenomenon. Many have pointed out that Schneerson substantially modified the original misanthropy of Chabad philosophy in favour of a paternalistic and friendly racial supremacism, much like Rav Kook, but ordinary Chabadniks in Israel don’t want to hear that. What they do want to hear is Schneerson’s genius argument that to save one Jewish soldier, it is obligatory to kill infinity gentile civilians. Not one, not one hundred, not one million: as many as it takes. The story of how Chabad and Breslev got locked into an ever-escalating battle to see who could come up with the weirdest justifications for murder while grinning inanely is for another day, but it’s very much something that has already happened (even if it’s likely far from over). If anything, in retrospect, Shahak looks like he’s underplaying it. The people who let it happen, and still more those who assisted it, messed up big time, and, at some point, comeuppance is due.

Shahak provides a hostile caricature of Judaism, a product of a vindictive and spiteful mind, on the brink of a kind of madness, if not over it. But there’s another term for a caricature: failure mode. And Judaism is failing; it’s failing very badly, much worse than anyone could have predicted only a few years ago, except, of course, Shahak.

I thought it might be appropriate now to go through Shahak’s book, chapter by chapter and divide out the nonsense from the critiques that have bite. I always regret committing to these kind of series, but I guess it’s one more thing to regret.

5

This meme is widely shared, apparently by people who think it’s a confession, not an accusation.

Stanislas Richard

1) Why do you think Western leftists, and, really, leftists everywhere, are so obsessed with Palestine? I live in Chile, and here it is the only topic on which an unorthodox opinion, basically, disagreeing with the idea that a unified, democratic, secular state “from the river to the sea” (sic!) is feasible or even a good idea, will get you expelled from polite society.

This is an easy question. Within the Left there are three heuristics used to work out which is the good and which is the bad side in a conflict: (a) powerful (bad) vs. weak (good); (b) white (bad) vs. dark (good); (c) allied to America (bad) vs. opposed to the imperial hegemon America (good). This seems a bit stupid, and it is, because leftism is stupid, but if you rephrase it a bit I don’t even think most leftists would disagree with this characterisation. Different parts of the Left emphasise the three heuristics to different degrees, so when they conflict they will disagree. For example, is Russia the baddy because it’s big, or is Ukraine the baddy because it’s allied to America? When that is the case, different leftist activists cancel each other out, instead of reinforcing each other, and the movement as a whole loses interest. Israel is the one issue where all three heuristics give the same answer. At some level, hasbarists understand this, which is why they are always spamming people with pictures of Yemenite Jews and Falashas, and, while you or I might find this too cringe to contemplate, I think it actually does work a bit.

This also helps us understand why the Left was once mostly pro-Israel. Back then, Israel was perceived as good because it opposed English imperialism, and was standing up to the whole Muslim world. The second heuristic was less explicitly racialised, so Jews got points as a minority, even if they were whiter.

2) In your opinion, what does it mean to be an HBD liberal (I was made to understand that this is roughly your stance on things)?

I am not an HBD liberal, because I am not a liberal, but an HBD liberal is just a liberal who believes in HBD. Every liberal should be an HBD liberal, because HBD is true. It’s like being a ‘the world is round liberal’ or ‘salt is a compound of sodium and chlorine liberal’. As to what it actually entails, the biggest difference is that you no longer take disparate impact as evidence of discrimination. If there is a high IQ field in which Asians dominate and there are hardly any Blacks, then this is not evidence of injustice, it’s evidence of justice.

Deszcz
Would like to hear your thoughts about Dara Horn without having to wait for the book chapter.

Geez. Think of it like this. Most westerners are sympathetic to Palestinians when they see pictures of them crying outside wrecked buildings in Gaza, but they weren’t sympathetic to them when they were rampaging around kibbutzim kidnapping grannies. I guess ‘people love dead Palestinians’.

In other words, there’s a general bias in western morality towards victims and against victimisers. You can make the argument that this has gone too far, and we should rebalance moral norms to give more weight to qualities like competence, fitness or strength, and maybe I agree to some extent, but that isn’t what Dara Horn wants, she wants moral sentiments to be rebalanced specifically for the benefit of Jews. Jews should be loved when they are victims, and they should also be loved when they are running a 60-year military occupation. It’s not good enough for gentiles to apply their general standards of ethics consistently to Jews, they have to arbitrarily alter them in line with whatever is good for Jews. And what’s worse is that they already do do that, but it’s not enough! If liberal standards were applied consistently, Israel would already be a pariah state (unless it drastically changed its policies), but European countries fudge the issue because of Holocaust guilt and a certain degree of philosemitism. But that’s not enough to satisfy Dara Horn. Westerners aren’t allowed to merely bend their moral principles to favour Israel, they have to openly trample on them.

Zeb Naybar
Was Zionism actually a secret conspiracy by antisemitic goyim to shred the fabled verbal IQ of Ashkenazis by creating a movement that would facilitate their intermarriage with the arsim?

Hmm.

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It’s a good book, well-written, fast-paced and thought-provoking. Mirsky does a good job of balancing his admiration for Rav Kook as a man (justified) and thinker (dubious), with his evident discomfort about how mad it all is, without making his editorial voice unduly intrusive. I recommend you read this book. Maybe even worth buying it if that’s what you’re into. Here ends the book review section of the article. Now for my thoughts.

1. It’s easy to mock Religious Zionism, and fun too. I think it’s also a great mitzvah, but I’m biased in the same way that the hilltop guys are biased when they say it’s a great mitzvah to burn houses. Regardless, it’s all too easy. There’s Motti Elon, who even by the standards of homosexual sex offenders is an off-putting person and somehow became their inspirational guru for a decade. There’s Kahana, there’s Scheinberg, there’s Tal, there’re the other ones who it was never proven so it’s improper to name names, there’s all the crazy stuff they said during Covid, there’s the way they get dumped on all the time by Charedim and just take it, there’s that thing where they try to do Chassidus and take away literally every good aspect of it (there’s a lot of that), there’s the extreme level of confusion about what shirts are designed to do. There’s a lot. But Rav Kook is different. At the time, everyone - except for the real scum of Meah Shearim - understood he was different, and, no matter what he said, Charedi Rabbinical leaders always emphasised that, as a man and a scholar, he was off limits. I think that’s right. I hadn’t realised that, as well as Shaul Lieberman ז’’ל, he was also the teacher of Binyamin Levin, who did as much for Jewish scholarship as any 20th century gadol. It’s a shame that Rav Kook’s plan for a genuinely rigorous yeshiva curriculum never got anywhere institutionally, but, even so, he more than earned his own gadol card. Taking him on needs to be done not only with kid gloves, but something more like awe. Obviously, I’m not the man to do it, but someone absolutely has to, because Kookism has to go, properly go. The absolute maximum status he should have is something like Avraham Abulafia. I recall once that I was in a Satmarer house, and he had a Rashba or something and had scratched out the מוסד הרב קוק logo on the spine with a screwdriver. At the time, I thought it very extreme, but I think it’s closer to the right balance than where we are today.

   

2. It’s generally appreciated that Rav Kook had a messianic turn of thought, but what Mirsky brings out well is that his confidence (not hope) in imminent universal redemption wasn’t just some aspect of his philosophy that you can analyse along with the others, it was the whole thing. The reason why his philosophy seems to contain so many intractable contradictions is that it literally does, and deliberately so, because Rav Kook saw the messianic process as consisting of the resolution of those contradictions. In the absence of a messianic process actually existing, it is impossible to reconcile all of the different sides of Kookism, so it is strictly impossible to be an authentic Kookist. Those minority strains today that emphasise his humanism, his demand for the highest ethical standards, his boundless benevolence are no less authentic than the majority strains which emphasise the absolute obligation to impose Jewish sovereignty on holy soil, the ontological superiority of Jews to all mankind, and the necessity of teleological suspension of the ethical to achieve redemption. On the other hand, they are no more authentic either, and appealing to the ‘correct’ reading of Kook has no value beyond its ability to influence public perception, something that in practice seems to be extremely limited. The truth is quite otherwise: Kookism is a failed messianic movement. The attempt to keep it going after the messianic promises were not fulfilled inevitably involves, at the very least, pervasive intellectual corruption. In practice, it would seem to entail much worse than that. There is precisely one response to the work of Rav Kook that allows you to preserve your intellectual decency, and that is to say that he was wrong. Only after that are you permitted to start inquiring about whether there were some things about which he was right. This is an indispensable act of mental hygiene and very urgent.

3. Rav Kook’s big idea was that the great opposed movements of his era, to wit liberalism, nationalism, and religious traditionalism, all had aspects of a higher truth that would be unified in the messianic era. From liberalism he valued the freedom of the individual and the opposition to tyranny, from nationalism he valued the call to a higher good and the diversity resulting from each nation pursuing its calling according to its talents, and from religion he valued the reverence for the divine and the insistence on objective moral truth. He thought that, because the messianic process was inevitable, the weaving of these three strands into a higher combined truth was also inevitable. However, since the messianic process did not come, there is nothing inevitable about this process. It is just as likely that from liberalism you get shallowness and trash culture, from nationalism you get cruelty and the lust for conquest, and from religious tradition you get ignorance and narrowness of thought. That is, approximately, what is actually happening in Israel, certainly more so than Kook’s proposed synthesis. Kook himself, though a man of frenetic action, was not a successful institution builder. In that way, he was a type quite familiar to those who have spent any time in the utopian wing of Israeli religious-politics. Like all prophets of inevitable historical processes, he faced the difficult question of what role concerted human action actually has in these processes, and, from a practical perspective, he flubbed it. What he gave was a vision for others to take up later as Judea and Samaria miraculously (as it appeared) fell into our lap, Labour Zionism unravelled, and Mizrahi voters granted the Right electoral dominance. But these were all historical phenomena that Kook didn’t think about, let alone predict. Kookism, from its very beginning as an actual social movement, was a kind of cargo cult of an already failed vision, a fact that was substantially obscured by the fact that the man running the cargo cult was his own son.

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It takes a greatness of soul to build fabulations the way Jason Arday did. You need a Promethean spirit to decide to create yourself again out of nothing, and real courage to bet your entire being on lies that can so easily be disproven. But you are small and cowardly and you will spend all your life scurrying around in the undergrowth of the world, never poking out your head to look at the sky, and the thing that happened to Professor Jason Arday will never, ever happen to you.

Wrong. Jason Arday was a nasty, vindictive bully who on at least two occasions used the police to silence journalists and academics trying to expose his misdeeds. While incessantly portraying himself as the victim of a racist society, Arday knew perfectly well that all the institutional power in the United Kingdom was on his side, and that he could get away with it forever (if it wasn’t for that pesky Substack). More broadly, Arday’s whole career was an act of violence against the natives of the United Kingdom who are expected to pay for the privilege of being abused and libelled. If you are going to treat blacks as religious objects and throw money at them, at least pay them to do something other than hurl abuse at those footing the bill. There is no evidence he felt any guilt about his life of crime, because he didn’t.

Nasty, vindictive, lying, thieving bullies can still possess greatness of soul though, maybe, but we know that Jason Arday didn’t because when he was exposed, he did the smallest, shittiest thing he could possibly have done under the circumstances and murdered himself. He knew that this would rescue his reputation in large sections of a sick, mad society, and, what’s more, he knew that it would pull the rug out from those trying to leverage his exposure to claw back some measure of sanity in the university system, or - one can only dream - pare down the system of racially-based exploitation that disfigures the western world (the one that actually exists), and he did it anyway. These are evil ends and, whatever else he was thinking too, he intended them on the general principle that the known consequences of action are intended.

Had he possessed greatness of soul, there are plenty of things he could have done. He could have said, ‘you got me, and I don’t regret a thing because what’s yours, cracker, is mine’. He could have made a tell-all biography about how he conned dopey libwomen with self-evidently ridiculous lies and then reinvented himself as a based anti-woke black man. GB News would have given him his own show for sure unless he went too far and started ranting about Jews. Or he could have done some other zany thing that I, a man of no especially big soul, couldn’t even conceive of. Failing that, he could have turned off his phone and gone on holiday. 1.4 million should buy you a few years’ sabbatical, but if that’s made up too, he could always just go work at Sainsbury’s.

Enough of that then, but we’re just getting started. There are the centre-right jerks who say the real villain of the piece is Cambridge University for promoting him beyond his competence which is the ‘bigotry of low expectations’ (maybe you should … let’s not finish that thought). Of course they are villains, but their victims are literally everyone else in the world except Jason Arday who had to live in a planet that is dumber, and more unjust for their decision to appoint him. Arday was not victimised by being given money and acclaim to write total nonsense that he couldn’t be bothered to even write himself. That’s stupid, what are you even talking about? Hey Cambridge University, I’m a bad person, a racist and a bigot, can you victimise me by giving me £80,000 a year to doss around writing nonsense and being a jerk to my students? It’s the only punishment worthy of my crimes. Can you not see how dumb this is? No, of course you can’t, and then you wonder why everything is the way it is.

And then I read this by Hussein Aboubakr Mansour, and because when I lie down right now my throat somehow simultaneously feels like sandpaper and has gloop all over it that chokes me, here I am in the middle of night writing, yet again, the most incredibly obvious stuff.

This is the moment that generated Hanania, Cofnas, and others — resentful, ambitious, young, and coming back with a vengeance to defeat wokeism once and for all through the superior tools of scientism, empiricism, etc., defeating the master with the master’s tools. He, too, did not care about Arday at all. He was fighting wokeness because he wanted Cambridge. That is what he cared about and wanted.

I’m sorry, what? WHAT? Why should Cofnas have cared about Jason Arday, a liar, a thief, a bully, a parasite, and also just a completely ridiculous person, a man Cofnas had never met and had no reason to think about at all except for all of the above? Even if you want to claim that the media coverage went overboard (which you shouldn’t think at all), Cofnas didn’t do any of that. All he did was write an article with completely true information that had been provided to him by others who were too scared (justifiably so) to bring it to public attention themselves. In the most literal sense possible, Cofnas did absolutely nothing wrong.

As it happens, Cofnas has been a consistent critic of madness and stupidity on the Right, sadly very much not limited to race mysticism, but including it. He is also an Ashkenazi Jew married to a Korean, which, based on my religion, I can’t condone, but should absolve him of any imputation of racial bigotry or even ethnocentrism. However, even if that wasn’t true, he still did nothing wrong. There is no moral complexity here at all. Arday lived a life of villainy, and capped it off with one last act of irredeemable villainy. Cofnas wrote a correct blogpost. That’s it. If you think there is moral complexity, something has gone very wrong for you. It is true, and no-one can deny it, that Arday’s wife and kids have been victimised, no doubt his friends and other family too, but there is precisely one man who victimised them, and he is dead.

Why am I so angry about this? Some might claim the question is misprised, as if me being angry about something requires a local explanation. I’ll leave you to judge, but in the great mess of lies and illusions that Sam Kriss says we all live in, my subjectively-felt reason for being angry is because people say things like this.

I understand the sentiment, but it’s just not true. I know this because, almost literally every day, I benefit from research at a university.

• I am very interested in Hebrew pronunciation, and by far the best book on the subject is by Geoffrey Khan, Regius Professor of Hebrew at Cambridge. You can literally read it for free online! His student, AD Hornkahl, has also published amazing work you can read for free too.

• The best and most illuminating work on Talmud and halacha today is created by Robert Brody, professor at the Hebrew University. His edition of Rav Natronai’s teshuvot, on its own, is more of a contribution to Torah scholarship than anything that has come out of a yeshiva in 50 years. I have also read things that have massively increased my understanding by Vered Noam (University of Tel Aviv), Shulamit Elitzur (Hebrew University), Menachem Kehana (Hebrew University), Yair Furstenberg (Bar Ilan University), Moshe Halbertal (Hebrew University), Martin Goodman (Oxford University), Adiel Schremer (Bar Ilan University), Yair Lorberbaum (Bar Ilan University), Ishai Rosen-Zvi (Tel Aviv University), and David Stern (Harvard University) among others.

I’ve also learned some very interesting and important things from people outside universities, but, in complete honesty, nowhere near as much. I’ve also found that academics are almost always very gracious in answering unsolicited questions by randomers emailing them. Conversely, I have been involved in efforts to promote scholarship outside of universities and they almost always end in fiasco. Of course, there’s no shortage of nonsense in Jewish Studies about queer subjectivities in the Tosefta, but if you want to know what classic Jewish texts mean, or even just read editions of them that aren’t basically useless, academia is your friend, and almost your only friend. I’ll desist now from going on a rant about yeshivos, but I’ll add that this is even more true now than it was in the recent past. Dovid Weiss haLivni and Shaul Lieberman זצ’’ל spent their time at JTS, but now the institution produces almost exclusively nonsense, and much the same is true of Pardes, Hadar or the Hartmann Institute.

I appreciate that Jewish Studies is in a better state than a lot of other subjects for various contingent reasons (and this, perhaps, provides the best justification for the State of Israel), however, I think that most nerds who are into something and have made a real effort to become knowledgeable about it will end up with more or less the same verdict. If the research isn’t being conducted in universities, it isn’t being conducted anywhere else either. In certain areas of science, there are always Google and Facebook, but the politicisation there isn’t all that much better.

There is a widespread belief on the Right that universities are a lost cause, and one should search elsewhere for civilizational salvation. Life in Israel has convinced me that the more or less the opposite is true. At least in certain circumstances (whether or not they are replicable anywhere else), the Right can win by doing an end run against the educated classes, and what they will do with it is implement the relentless promotion of ignorance, boorishness, ugliness of every conceivable kind, unhinged ethnonarcissism, and the cannibalisation of religion into a repulsive horror. If something doesn’t come along to replace Bibi as the mechanism for reining all this nonsense in, it will flame out in a mad rush of violence our descendants will have marked upon their head.

Universities, however, can be saved, or saved enough. Who, exactly, is saner on the Israel-Palestine than Benny Morris? What else except a university would have given him the space and funding to be sane? Everywhere, even in the most disastrous ivory tower bastions of gay, race communism, there are honest nerds doing honest work that makes the world a little bit more comprehensible to other nerds. I shan’t say that is the only thing that matters, for that would be nerd supremacism, but it is a thing that matters, and to some extent is doable. Every real scholar who is left alone in his study to write is a victory, and every Jason Arday fired is a victory too. He got exactly what he deserved. Scratch that, he didn’t get 1% of what he deserved, because he wasn’t just a liar, a thief, and a bully, he was an existential criminal, waging war on the mind, and thus the dignity of humankind. If you can’t do the time, don’t do the crime.1 That he was far from alone in this is no excuse. Justice isn’t any less justice because the guilty, as a general rule, prosper. Some have pointed out that Nathan Cofnas’s plan for fixing society won’t work. I agree, it won’t work. The only thing that will work is complete disenfranchisement of the entire population to turn this whole ghastly machine we call politics off, and no-one knows how to start doing that because Moldbug quit in the middle and started writing slop. So what? Nathan Cofnas did, for the world, and whether he knows it or not, a hesed shel emet.

It’s not really a book actually. It’s a collection of articles. I found it in my Mum’s house and it took a couple of hours. If you have a couple of hours and find it in your Mum’s house, I’d recommend it, but you probably won’t learn a lot. The main thing I learned is that I learned nothing at all because nothing is different. I’m wondering, in fact, whether I may just be a leftist after all. I started saying I was a leftist a year or so ago when an Israeli was talking to me about his political opinions and I needed a quick way to make him walk away in disgust. Then I adopted it as an artful pose: ‘oh so the left are the real racists eh?’😎. But, actually, maybe I am just a leftist after all, because I don’t just agree with Amos Oz about most things he wrote, I could have written them (if Amos Oz was untalented and addicted to internet humour and childish insults). I’ve tried to explain what is so uniquely revolting about the Israeli Right’s mixture of limitless victimhood bitching and desire for infinite violence, which they do not merely combine, but turn into a reinforcing cycle. But why do I bother when he said it already?

Or what about how the special kind of unmerited pride rightoids exhibit when they promise security and Jewish power, and then just provide fantasy slop that blows up into self-destruction on contact with reality?

Or how the Right is wholly parasitic on the achievements of the secular Ashkenazim upon whom they throw endless maledictions and hate:

Or the NonZionism take on Palestinian nationalism:

Or that pervasive feeling of doom, the feeling that the one thing Jews did that we can be kind of proud of is becoming, by means of the urges it itself unleashed, a monster, that nagging mental murmur which I have tried to articulate in various ways:

So maybe I should just post Amos Oz quotations from now on? It would be more dignified. But the goycattle won’t pay for that, so, instead, I will write a bit about how I'm not like Amos Oz, or on why, if we agree on all these things, he was a Zionist and I am a NonZionist.1

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Everyone is interested in Chassidim. If you want stock footage of Jews for a documentary, you want Chassidim; if you’re a secular philosopher wannabe looking for something to solve your overwhelming feeling of ennui, you want Chassidus; if you’re trying to spice up Religious Zionism with something to keep the kids engaged once they go off to the army, you want Hassidut. Conversely, their opponents, the Misnagdim are boring. No-one cares about them or wants to think about them at all. Three decades ago, Allen Nadler set out to fill the strange hole in historical study with The Faith of the Mithnagdim, portraying for a wider audience the religious beliefs of this group from primary sources. Because they saw the Misnagdim through the eyes of the Chassidim whose radicalism and demotic instincts they admired, historians generally have been willing to accept Chassidic caricatures of their opponents as miserable misanthropists offering nothing to masses of ordinary Jews except contempt and demands for money. Nadler was determined to let the Misnagdim speak for themselves and it turns out that … yeah, actually, that was pretty much correct.

Adler starts the book by debunking the one apparently interesting thing that earlier historians had focussed on, namely the question of whether tzimtzum is literal or not, and, therefore, whether some kind of pan(en????)theism is true. Nadler argues that it is impossible to arrive at a consistent Misnagdik, as opposed to Chassidic, position on the matter: both sides thought it was not literal, but also that something ‘real’ had happened as well. The difference between the two groups was not ontological, but epistemological: Chassidim called upon Jews to look, by hook or by crook, beyond the visible world to the divine reality pulsing through it whereas the Misnagdim said, no, don’t do that, and even if you try you can’t. Nadler then goes on to summarise the key points of Misnagdik ideology as they were propagated in semi-popular tracts:

1. Zoharism, in particular its Lurianic version, is objectively true, and should only be studied by a tiny minority of scholars already fully expert in Talmud. Even for them, transcendent experience of mystical union is probably not possible on earth.

2. Because of the low spiritual state of Jews in general, the best they can hope for in prayer is concentrating on what they are saying. Any kind of connection to God, let alone mystical union, in prayer is impossible. It’s better to spend time studying than praying beyond the statutory amount.

3. All material pleasure is bad and distracts from your true purpose. Active asceticism is also pointless, though. Therefore, for example, you shouldn’t fast, except on days when it is required by halacha, but rather eat small portions of plain food quickly so that you can focus on studying.

4. The world we live in is one big test in which material pleasures tempt us away from mitzvot and, especially, study, and if we resist them well enough, we get bliss after death.

5. Chassidim and Maskilim are bad for the same reason, namely that they are optimistic about the potential of Jews to do anything except be miserable all the time and study.

6. Torah study is the thing that matters most, not because it leads to practical observance of its contents, or because it trains the intellect or character. It just simply is the only really worthwhile human endeavour.

This is an ideology almost uniquely tailored to fail in the marketplace of ideas, and its proponents were aware of this fact. The cultural-economic Jewish establishment and its semi-aligned rabbinical class wanted to preserve traditional Ashkenazi Judaism against the threats of the upstart Chassidic movement and the Jewish enlightenment imported from Germany, but, before the battle began, the true Misnagdim knew that they had already lost.

This was R. Eliyahu the Gaon of Vilna (henceforth Gra), at a time when he was the treasured celebrity of Vilna, employed to study full-time at the public expense, and with the ability to issue bans on whichever strain of Judaism he wished. But he knew: it was all hopeless. The modern state was hollowing out the institution of the kehilla from above, the Chassidim were replacing it from below, the winds of secularism were taking Jews looking for something more away from their community and faith. None of this had really happened yet, but the Gra saw it all, and his advice to his students was simple and consistent: withdraw, eschew rabbinical employment, focus on the pure service of God through study.

The Gra himself was, in a sense, cheating. His asceticism was entirely sincere, but he had no wish to die, and, because of his unique genius, he was supported by communal funds without having to ask for it. As brilliant as some of his students certainly were, you can’t build a social movement out of scholars showing up in Jewish communities and wowing everyone with their smarts so they give them free money unasked. Quite likely, the Gra had no plans for any such movement. We know so little beyond his myriad annotations of Jewish texts and legends of his piety and intellectual abilities that it is impossible to know much at all. However, his student R. Chaim of Volozhin did have a plan, and that plan was the modern yeshiva.

The idea of a yeshiva was nothing new, but R. Chaim innovated in multiple overlapping respects. First, the Volozhin Yeshiva was a permanent, freestanding institution, not tied to the local kehilla, and not dependent on the local rabbinical authority. Secondly, the purpose of the yeshiva was not to train future members of the rabbinate, but to promote full-time scholarship, as much as possible within its own walls. As such, the yeshiva solicited donations from wealthy donors around Europe, focussed on study of Talmudic tractates with little contemporary practical relevance, and cultivated a mentality of elite status among its students and graduates.

The new yeshiva movement grew quickly. It suffered terribly during the Holocaust, though less than Eastern European Jewry generally. The Mir, famously, relocated to Shanghai. After the war, it grew again, buoyed by the unexpected fillip of an Israeli state willing to fund it for all sorts of tactical reasons, as well capitalist modernity and the welfare state in general. It is arguably the most successful religious institution of the modern age. Anyone who wishes to think about how to do traditionalism for real, at scale needs to look at it.

In many respects, the yeshiva system has travelled very far away from its original impetus in the Gra’s heroic life of secluded study. He was entirely self-taught, whereas the yeshiva system holds lifelong institutionalisation as an ideal and stigmatises independent learning. He believed textual emendation to repair corrupted texts was both essential to proper study and a religiously valuable act in its own right, whereas the yeshiva world is famous today for holding the concept in suspicion, if not contempt. He rejected pilpul, for centuries the dominant scholarly mode, in favour of precise understanding of what we might call authorial intention and maximum breadth of knowledge, whereas the regnant model of yeshivish b’iyun study and chakiros today is essentially pilpul revived and stripped of epistemic safeguards through elevation to a madcap pseudoscience. However, any attempt to replicate genius at scale must involve distortions of this kind, if not necessarily scale.

In essence, the yeshiva system solves the dilemma of an elitist religious ethos in a democratic age. If only Torah scholars are really human beings in a meaningful sense, then just make everyone a Torah scholar, boom. In yeshivish communities, there are yeshivos where you can send your son with Downs syndrome. Everyone knows, I hope, that this is a feint, something to make him feel better, but there are innumerable institutions which are no less fake and a lot less cute. It is what is. Humans are what they are. Even with Ashkenazi Jews you can’t make a society of scholars and make it not fake. In the meantime, much else from the misnagdic ethos has fallen by the wayside. Litvaks are ascetic in the same way that LWMO keep shomer negiah. All sorts of Chassidic tools have been employed willy nilly to stop the inmates from going insane. The essence of idea, though, namely endless talmudic study for its own sake as the only real religious good, has been preserved. As I have written, after Shabtai Tzvi, Judaism gave itself constipation by refusing either to reject Zoharism or endorse its consequences. In the yeshivos, Zoharism, while never knocked off its pedestal, or even threatened per se, in practice receded ever more into the distance. This, too, was very much a departure from the Gra, who spent most of his time on kabbalah both in study and commentary. This bought, not a solution to the interminable problem, but space to pretend it didn’t really exist.

Matters, though, were a bit more complicated than that. R. Chaim was the Gra’s most influential student; the jury is out as to whether he was the most faithful. Some stranger things were happening elsewhere. Read about it here and here. How important is all this? In truth I don’t know. Chime in if you wish.

What can be said with a high degree of confidence is that the Gra believed the solution to the chronic tension in the Jewish religion since the advent of Zoharism was full integration. Zoharism was the essential content of Judaism, full stop, and, as such, could not contradict any part of it. If there appears to be such a contradiction it is because one of the contradictory items has been misunderstood (or is textually corrupt). On most occasions, the Gra resolved the contradiction by reinterpreting (or fixing) a Zoharic text, not a halachic one. Because Zoharism entered Jewish history about 150 years after most of its contents were written and in a haphazard and chaotic manner, the Gra was very often correct regarding the technical question at hand. He considered himself able to do this task of reinterpretation because he was a superior kabbalist not only, naturally, to the Chassidim around him, but to all other kabbalists alive, perhaps in some ways even to Isaac Luria himself. When the Gra could not solve the problem this way, he reinterpreted the Talmudic sources instead, with violence if necessary.

Anyone who has argued against Zoharism will have met with the retort ‘even the Gra believed in kabbalah’. It’s a bit of a strange claim, like saying ‘even Trotsky believed in Marxism-Leninism’. The genesis of this is that some Maskilim identified the Gra as their intellectual forebear on not very good grounds to get some clout, and because they hated Chassidim too, he got lumped in as some kind of rationalist. Thus, if even the arch-rationalist endorses the Zohar, then why purity spiral against it? This is so wrong it’s not even wrong. In reality, the Gra fixed Zoharism in the heart of Judaism perhaps more than ever before, while the movement built out of his example made it possible to ignore it in practice. Whether that’s a step up or a step down depends on who you’re comparing it to.

It’s actually two years and two months, but I am disorganised and it’s been busy recently what with stuff and other things.

In celebration of this momentous occasion, I present the second NonZionism reader survey. Click here to fill it in.

In addition, I’ve decided to do quarterly AMAs for paychads. The first one will be right now. If you are a paychad, leave a question in the comments below, and I’ll answer it in a future post unless it’s prurient or generally weird. The answer may be ‘I don’t know’.

Many have asked - I hear you asking even now - ‘what can I, a mere mortal, do to help NonZionism grow still further?’ Actually, it’s easy. Most growth comes from shares by big-name accounts. If you are friends with such a person, ask them to share me. They can say ‘look at this self-hating, bigoted retard, I hate him’. Literally doesn’t matter as long as there’s a link. If you don’t personally know such a person, then respond to pronouncements from big name accounts with relevant articles I have written.

On that score, I have been doing some preliminary market research and basically everyone tells me the same thing, namely that they would like to share a given article with more people, but they can’t because it contains a racial epithet or incomprehensible internet gibberish or sounds like it was written by an off-his-meds schizophrenic. If you have had a similar experience, please comment with which article you would like to share but can’t and I will consider presenting a parev version for normies.

Finally, paychad subscriptions are stacking up, but they can always stack up more. There is also a ‘Founding Member’ tier. There’s really not much I can offer you for this, except that it will encourage me to write more. However, as an extra inducement, if you take it up, you can request one article per year on a topic of your choice (if the choice is strange and idiotic, I guess I’ll still do it, but the article might say ‘I don’t know anything about this topic’).

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Item: some religious youths were hanging a sign over bridge calling for the release of Yigal Amir who is serving a life sentence for assassinating Yitzchak Rabin.

They say he didn’t do it, that he was tricked by Shabak into doing it, that he did a tremendous mitzvah in doing it. For all these reasons, and perhaps more too, he should be released immediately. However, some old dude objected, and they beat him up.

He subsequently developed a brain bleed and was hospitalized.

Item: Defence Minister and inarticulate buffoon who fidgets queerly when he talks, or doesn’t talk, Israel Katz, was on Channel 14 and was asked why he had not dealt with insubordination by Avi Bluth, military governor, so to speak, of the West Bank. Here is the background. Bluth has presided over a policy of decriminalising settler violence and incorporating the network of pioneer farms into the IDF’s security architecture. One can argue about the rights and wrongs of such a policy following October 7th, but either way he has given the settler movement everything it could reasonably demand and some more. However, a week or two ago he ordered Yinon Dardik to leave the West Bank. Dardik is suspected of some serious crimes including affixing a cable tie to the penis of a bedouin Arab and parading him in front of his extended family. Dardik refused to leave the West Bank and was placed in administrative detention upon which he commenced a hunger strike. This was unacceptable to Otzma MKs so Katz told Bluth to let him go home, but Bluth renewed the order. Katz, who is facing primaries in Likud and needs support from the core Likud electorate, was asked why he put up with that, so he said he’d fired Bluth like the massive boss he is.

IDF head, Zamir (appointed by Netanyahu) pointed out that the Defence Minister can’t fire generals on TV because the studio audience is giving him gyp. Katz dealt with the media fallout by blaming it on Leftist lies and denying he said what he said even though he said it on TV and everyone can see.

Item: On motzaei Shabbos, a group of religious teens surrounded a bus with no passengers at a red light, hit the side of the bus, and, when the Arab driver opened the window, they beat him unconscious and knocked out four of his teeth.

Item: A group of Breslev teens, who object to the deification of the wrong man and perhaps the relative coherence and intelligence of Christian theology, spat on the door of a monastery in the Armenian quarter in Jerusalem. When an elderly lady filmed them through the window, they threw rocks at her and called her the daughter of a whore.

Item: The Minister for prisons and police, Ben Gvir, who has presided over the largest spike in murder in the history of the country, did some nonsense with alligators that’s too ridiculous even to detail.

This could be any week more or less. The mayor of a major city was not arrested this week for fraud and embezzlement; no Palestinian grandmas were beaten unconscious with a baseball bat; I didn’t see anything about HaTzel (oh bugger, I did). So it’s not even a bad week. Just a week.

You have probably seen this video.

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(i) The Zionists wanted to conquer all of Palestine and empty it of its Arab inhabitants.

(ii) The Zionists accepted partition in 1937 and 1947 as a pretext to achieve the above. The Arabs rejected partition because they knew this was the Zionist plan.

(iii) The Arabs did not want war. They opposed partition, but their plan to oppose it was [honestly, I have no idea what he even wants you to believe here, but he doesn’t say anything].

(iv) The Zionists provoked the Arabs into a war, then used the war to ethnically cleanse the Arabs.

In the next part of the video, he shows how part (iv) happened. Shehada briefly discusses four massacres/expulsions at Tantura, Safsaf, Haifa and Deir Yassin and then, as if in some kind of sadomasochistic attempt to make clear that he considers his intended audience to be cognitively challenged children, declares, ‘Do you need more evidence on who was the oppressor and who was the victim? Because there is. All of this was the result of direct orders from David ben Gurion’.

This is a claim that literally no-one defends. Even Shehada wouldn’t defend it if he had to actually go back and trace his steps explicitly rather than relying on thought association and his audience being dopey. There’s been a good deal of debate about how much Ben Gurion knew about the various atrocities, how much he approved of them, and how much they were the result of local commanders executing what they had been given to understand was central policy. Those who ascribe to Ben Gurion a relatively high level of guilt seem to have the better of the argument, but the reason why there was a debate at all is precisely because there are no ‘direct orders’. And that’s concerning atrocities committed by the Haganah. It’s not even conceptually possible that he ‘directly ordered’ the Deir Yassin massacre committed by the Irgun and Lehi; that would be like claiming Yasser Arafat ‘directly ordered’ the Entebbe hijacking. What proof does Shehada bring for his astonishing and obviously untrue assertion?

This is the piece of evidence usually presented as the smoking gun, which is a good tipoff that that there’s no actual smoking gun. I’m inclined to think that the extract from the memoir is real (there’s some debate about it) and that Rabin correctly interpreted Ben Gurion’s gesture. However, this concerned what was to be done about the cities of Lod and Ramla, cities that were at that point under siege by the Haganah and about to be conquered.1 There is no evidence, even of the hand-gesture sort, for a general policy of expulsion.2

There’s a whole bunch to say about this. First of all, the full quotation is:

There is a need now for strong and brutal reaction. We need to be accurate about the timing, place and those we hit. If we accuse a family, we need to harm them without mercy, women and children included. Otherwise, this is not an effective reaction. During the operation there is no need to distinguish between guilty and not guilty

Which is pretty bad, but a bit different. Secondly, it’s a matter of dispute whether Ben Gurion is recording his own opinion here, or summarising Yigal Allon’s arguments during a meeting held by the Zionist leadership following the Al Khisas massacre in which different figures argued for and against the policy that had led to it. Thirdly, again, this was not about a general policy of expulsion, still less a general policy formed in advance, but about how to respond (it’s right there in the quotation) to certain Arab attacks that the Haganah had no other way to prevent.

However, I feel a bit Joseph Cohen now. ‘You say the IDF has bombed fourteen gazillion innocent children this week with cluster missiles, but actually it was only seven’. The truth is that if you want to make a case against Zionism, the War of Independence is kind of a layup; you can just say this:

(i) As a result of the war, the Zionists ended up with significantly more territory than they were awarded in the partition plan, which was already somewhat generous based on prior demographic realities.

(ii) Getting a Jewish supermajority in this expanded territory required a major population transfer, well in excess of the numbers envisioned in the Peel plan.

(iii) In many cases, this population transfer was achieved by terrifying the population into fleeing, sometimes by committing atrocities that would have been regarded as outrageous crimes long before Geneva Conventions.

(iv) Even in cases where the population fled to avoid fighting, they should have been allowed to return home when fighting ceased, rather than penalised for doing the right thing. To the contrary, the government continued pushing Arabs into the West Bank and Gaza even after the war.

(v) Both during and afterwards, the Zionist leadership shamelessly lied about all of this, and, because of sympathetic media, their lies were widely believed in the western world for many decades, and in some holdouts even today.

So why not just stick with that and dispense with the need to lie and say ridiculous things? You’d think it was out of a desire to portray Zionism as a uniquely evil and irredeemable political movement (though Muhammad Shehada supports a 2-state solution supposedly). I think that’s wrong though, the more important motivation (and one we Jews, at least, must be able to empathise with) is to dinduise the Palestinians, to absolve them of all guilt, to ‘make clear who is the oppressor’, but, much more importantly, who is the victim.

The problem with this is that, by anyone’s standards, the Palestinians have done some incredibly gnarly s**t. They did it, substantially on camera, three years ago, and they’ve been doing it in various forms for decades. Rashid Khalidi’s way out of this is to label the Balfour Declaration a declaration of war, after which everything is self-defence. However, that only works because Khalidi is willing to admit that mistakes were made during this defensive war, something he is happy to do because he has family beef from way back with the Husseini clan. Shehada doesn’t want to do that, so his only way out is to pin everything on 1948. However, just as history didn’t start on October 7th, it didn’t start then either. Though he is deliberately vague about many things, Shehada isn’t vague about his overriding moral principle: the side that starts the massacring is the one in the wrong, and whatever the other side does is resistance. OK then.

April 1920. Following incendiary speeches during the Nebi Musa festival, crowds of Arabs attacked Jews in the Old City of Jerusalem, killing 5 and wounding over 200.

May 1921. Following false rumours that Jewish immigrants were attacking Arabs, riots started in Jaffa and spread around the country. 47 Jews were killed in all, with British troops stopping the riots before more died.

August 1929. A wave of riots around the country was sparked by claims made by Al Husseini that Jews were trying to take the temple mount. The worst massacre happened in Hebron, where 67 Jews were murdered, often in appallingly brutal ways, without consideration of their Zionist affiliation (which most didn’t have). In the country at large, a total of 133 Jews were killed.

April 1931. The Black Hand organisation, formed by Sheikh Izz al-Din al-Qassam, ambushed and murdered three members of kibbutz Yagur.

April 1936. Members of the Black Hand stopped cars on the road between Nablus and Tulkarm and shot 3 Jews, killing two of them.

April 1936. Arabs rioted in Jaffa, killing 15 Jews and causing around 12,000 to flee.

April-October 1936. Attacks on Jews around the country killed 80 Jews.

August 1937. Arabs burst into a family home in Tzfat and murdered four family members, three of them children.

November 1937. Five JNF workers are ambushed and murdered by Arabs.

March 1938. Arab gunmen shot at Jewish passengers travelling between Haifa and Tzfat, killing 6.

June 1938. Arab gunmen attacked the settlement of Kiryat Haroshet, killing 3.

August 1938. Arabs kidnapped three members of a Jewish family living near the town of Atlit and murdered them.

October 1938. Arab militants attacked the Kiryat Shmuel neighbourhood of Tiberius, attacking civilians indiscriminately and killing 19, nearly half of them children.

For good measure, in 1947, when Shehada says the Arabs ‘didn’t want war’, but were being goaded into it by Zionists, we can cite:

November 1946. Arabs attacked Neot Mordechai, killing 2.

August 1947. Arab gunmen attacked a cafe in Tel Aviv, killing 5.

November 1947. Fajja bus attacks.

December 1947. Jerusalem riots.

And when war broke out for real, the Arabs committed their own massacres, many fewer in total than the Zionists, but more per town captured. It wasn’t, shall we say, for want of trying. We can note here that the Haganah (literally ‘the defence’) was created following the Nebi Musa riots and the Irgun was founded after the 1929 massacres. Transfer, as an idea outside of a diary entry here or some crank letter there, entered Zionist discourse following the waves of atrocities in the mid 1930s.

Of course, if Shehada was to acknowledge it at all, he could point out that the nearly 40 years of violence before the War of Independence against the Jewish community of Palestine had been committed by ‘Arabs’ and not ‘the Arabs’ (though in some cases, even that’s a bit of a stretch), but then you would have to acknowledge when the violence he describes was committed by ‘Zionists’ and not ‘the Zionists’. We’ll deal with that in the next installment.

That’s from February, since when things have got worse.

And all indications are that it will keep getting worse still. The simple explanation for this is that people around the world see news about Israel and then develop more negative views about Israel. Examples of this news include things like:

• >10 Palestinians being shot while waiting for aid every day for over a month.

• Settler militias, often visibly coordinating with IDF soldiers, or themselves wearing IDF uniform, on video raiding Palestinian towns and villages with the explicit intention of driving the residents out.

• Members of the Israeli government publicly calling for war crimes.

• Pictures of Gaza showing that most of it is rubble.

etc. If you saw news about [Country Name] and this is what you saw, then you’d probably have negative views about [Country Name]. However, if you know Jews, you will know that simply stating the above will generally inspire rage and sorrow, and, not infrequently, accusations of antisemitism. There are two lines of ‘argument’ that accompany this. The first is that criticism of Israel is motivated by antisemitism and antisemitism, by construction, is uncaused. Any sufficiently strong negative sentiment towards Jews is, also by construction, antisemitism, and so, as such, only ever reveals something about gentile societies, it never reveals anything about Jewish behaviour. Of course, they still have to explain why this recrudescence of antisemitism happened at the same time as the Gaza war, so you get something like the following:

I think for a lot of people, there has to be some kind of reason for all this antisemitism. “Oh, it must be Israel, it must be some sort of geopolitical conflict or dispute about territory.” But it sounds like what you’re saying is that there’s always been this kind of ambient antisemitism and that Israel just gave people an excuse, a justification, to finally let out this hate that had always existed—latent hate. I find that persuasive.

It’s hard to know what to do with this. On the one hand, it’s good we still have some smart, well-socialised guys batting for us; on the other hand, I think is mostly enabling people who actually need a glass of cold water to the face. What does it mean for antisemitism to be ambient? Where in the brain of the masses did it lurk waiting for ‘permission’ to move from latency to actuality? How in heaven’s name is that persuasive?

I’ve done my best to explain what is wrong with this line of ‘thinking’, so I won’t belabour the point here. Instead, I’ll deal with the slightly less mystical version of the argument, which goes like this:

1. Much criticism of Israel is clearly insincere and motivated by pre-existing animus towards Israel or Jews, not the specific action or policy that is supposedly being criticised.

2. Since the criticism of any given policy/event is not motivated by this policy/event, it follows that the policy/event has no causal relationship to the criticism.

3. Therefore, there’s nothing Israel can or should do to lessen this criticism.

Now, this is, obviously, just really stupid. The relevant variable we’re concerned about isn’t what your critics say, it’s how many people they persuade. However, it is important to grant the premise. Regardless of what Israel does, it has and will have many inveterately hostile critics from multiple groups: (a) The Arab and Muslim world that see Israel as an illegitimate state birthed in crime and permanently stained by it, (b) leftists who see Israel as ipso facto in the wrong because of being the wealthier, whiter, and more US-aligned party in a conflict and (c) antisemites. The last group has long been a tiny minority despite the fervent insistence of hasbarists otherwise, and is still a small minority even today, but it makes no odds for the substance of the argument. However, again, obviously, it matters much less what motivates your critics than how much of a receptive audience they find. In a sense, I could stop the article right there, but, instead, I’m going to offer some intuition pumps1 easy thought experiments to make things clearer.

First of all, let’s posit a cartoonishly simple model in which public opinion concerning any given person is a simple combination of (a) true information about him and (b) false information about him, with the split between them being 50-50. So, if we turn to our old friend Barry, let’s say that, on a scale from 1-10 , where 10 is fully evil and 1 is not evil at all, his actual behaviour is a 2, but he has malicious enemies who spread lies about him day and night, depicting him as a 10. With the exception of those who know him personally and his enemies themselves, everyone just splits the difference, concluding that he is a 6. However, if his actual behaviour is a 6, then they conclude he is an 8. What this means is that even if you are genuinely the victim of completely malicious criticism that bears no relationship to your actual conduct, then your behaviour still partially determines how you are perceived. The only way to avoid such a conclusion is to make the obviously absurd assumption that your own actual behaviour does not contribute at all to how you are perceived, which is the sort of thing you literally are supposed to go to a shrink to talk you out of.

You might, however, still come away from that analogy with a somewhat fatalistic attitude. After all, relatively large changes in your behaviour produce relatively small changes in how you are perceived. If the best you can do is act with perfect virtue and still be perceived as merely average, then maybe it’s not worth the bother. That’s clearly not true, though, because look at the graph above. Islamists, lefties and Nazis have been saying Israel is very, very evil for a long, long time, and, nevertheless, until 2018, American opinion of Israel was still trending slightly up. The extra assumption we need to make our model approximate reality to any degree is as follows: to be effective, malicious propaganda needs to be within range of what it is depicting.

Returning to Barry, let’s say he is an ordinary guy: has a wife, kids, likes a drink on the weekends, and klotzes in front of the telly too much. You spread rumours about him that he cheats on his taxes, that he sometimes has one too many sometimes and smacks his wife, that he likes Coldplay, people might believe you. However, if you spread a rumour that he is a prolific axe murderer, then people don’t believe you. They don’t think ‘if there’s smoke there’s fire’ and update their view of Barry negatively, they just ignore this obviously fake information. To put it another way, your actual conduct provides a sort of anchor to how you are perceived. Hostile parties can push this in a more negative direction, but there’s a limit on what they can do because, if they try to push the effect size too far, then they achieve nothing at all.

What this means, concretely, is that the unhinged, over-the-top and libellous nature of anti-Israel polemic has traditionally worked in Israel’s favour. It’s not that no-one was exposed to this stuff (if you went through an American college campus, you could hardly have avoided it entirely), it’s that they encountered it and discounted it. At some level, the hasbara community actually understands this mechanism, which is why so much of their output has been dedicated to identifying and exposing the most obviously hateful and bigoted forms of anti-Zionism.

We can now push this a bit further. If you are the victim of sufficient unmerited hostility, witnesses to this hostility will sympathise with you more. When Bob Dylan became an evangelical Christian and got interested in Israel, he grasped well that this was an effective PR weapon:

To take a well-worn example, the unpleasant obsession of the UN General Assembly with Israel has been an effective weapon in winning over normie libs in the West who respond negatively to unfairness and bullying, while in the Security Council, where things actually matter, Israel enjoyed routine protection via American veto. Best of all, if you are sufficiently perceived as the victim of malicious criticism, people will start to discount even perfectly fair and accurate criticism, a tactic that hasbarists draw upon whenever they invoke antisemitism against statements that are clearly not antisemitic.

A bonus additional layer is that criticism from people who are themselves very unpopular causes neutral observers to update their opinion of you more favourably. If some rando accuses you of being an axe murderer, people will probably just ignore it, but if that person is a racist paedophile, then people will think you might be better than you look if such an awful person hates you enough to spread malicious libel. Luckily for Israel, its critics have been extremely unpopular. Nazis are, literally, the most unpopular people in the world; leftist activists are unpopular with about 70% of Americans; and Muslims made themselves very unpopular too.

The problem with all this is that this malicious, unhinged and thus ineffective criticism that actually makes you more popular can suddenly snap back in your face if you mess up sufficiently enough. No-one took seriously all that stuff about you being an axe murderer until you got messed up at the pub and beat up a guy who took your ashtray. If only you would have stopped kicking him in the head when he was on the ground and five people were trying to restrain you … but you didn’t and now people cross the road when you pass and youths graffiti axes on your garage. In the strict sense, it’s still very unfair. You don’t even own an axe, and there’s not a strong connection between axe murdering and drunken pub beatings, but you messed up, and anyone telling you didn’t mess up - to concentrate instead all the blame on your detractors - may pose as your friend, but is really your enemy.2

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Anyway, that’s what I wanted to write about this week, but after our podcast the other week, recommended I check out a Palestinian writer from Gaza called . So I checked him out.

FFS.

No, seriously, FFS. Why do I have to do this? I asked a while ago who the Palestinian NonZionism was. There were a few suggestions, but whoever it is pull your finger out, OK. I don’t want to do this. I was born with some kind of biological malfunction, call it hyper-Judaism, where I want to culture-of-critique my own culture, to point out that we’ve lost the plot, we’re walking off a cliff etc. I don’t want to do it for Palestinians because (a) I don’t know enough and (b) I don’t care enough. No doubt you guys are interesting to yourselves, and that’s as it should be, but you’re not interesting to me; you’re just proximate. But what can I do? I watched a video. It sucked and now I’m going to spend the afternoon writing about it. You, subscriber, are going to read it. It’s a sorry tale, but we’ve all made questionable life choices. Here’s the video.

It starts off with Bibi Netanyahu saying some ridiculous nonsense. The point here is that it’s wrong for Zionists to say ridiculous nonsense so as to demonise their enemies and legitimate war crimes. Agreed. However, the principle that ‘it’s wrong for Zionists to say ridiculous nonsense’ is a special case of the general principle that ‘it’s wrong for people to say ridiculous nonsense’. If you are Palestinian, then I want you now to pause and read the previous sentence again. I don’t want to patronise, but you (plural) brought this on yourselves. Either it’s wrong to construct a fantasy world of lies to let yourself off the hook for all the gnarly stuff you’ve done, or it’s not, but it can’t be wrong for us and not wrong for you. Think about it. If you do, you’ll find the logic impeccable.

Preambles done, we can now move on to the argument, which is that Zionists have always been as bad as they are today, it’s just that now it’s better documented. The argument is made by stitching together quotations. So, we’re going to go through one by one:

Everyone agrees that the Zionists accepted partition and the Arabs didn’t. The implication, though, is that the Arabs were justified in rejecting partition because the Zionists were only using it as part of a plan to take ‘all of the land’ and make it ‘empty of Palestinians’. The problems are threefold. The first is that Haim Shapira, a non-Kookian religious Zionist (today known as Erev Rav) immediately asked Ben-Gurion ‘by force as well?’ and Ben-Gurion answered, ‘Through mutual understanding and Jewish-Arab agreement’. Secondly, here is the partition the Zionist movement under Ben-Gurion decided to accept.

In response to a wave of terrorism and multiple atrocities, the British tacitly concluded that the Balfour Declaration had been a mistake (duh!) and offered the Zionists a joke country in a tiny minority of the originally promised territory, mostly in the worst bits, and not even fully contiguous. A large proportion of the Zionist movement wanted to reject the offer; after all, it was clearly not what they had been promised. Ben-Gurion, by contrast, thought that any state was better than no state. If the Zionist movement wanted proof of concept, so as to persuade regional and global opinion that Zionist immigration was to the general benefit, then it had to take whatever it was given and make it work. And what’s wrong with that?

However, the third problem is the weightiest. Let’s say Muhammad wasn’t lying and Ben-Gurion really had said ‘we’ll get a tiny country and then with our pimped-out army, we’ll take over the whole region, bwahahahahahaha’, what would that mean? In his articles and our conversation, Seth’s central proposition is that when Arabs do this, Israelis shouldn’t freak out. First of all, any leader who wants to make a deal will have to deal with rejectionists, and thus have to sell his compromise as a prelude to future expansion. Secondly, even if he’s not just leading them on, it doesn’t necessarily matter, because his choices post deal will be shaped by the incentive structure after the deal not (at least not solely) his long-term aspirations going in. So the rational thing for the Arabs to do in response to the Zionist movement accepting the Peel plan was to accept it as well, and give the Zionist rump country reason to be content with arrangements as they stood, instead of chimping out.

There’s another point here. If accepting a state far smaller than you want and believe you deserve as a basis to achieve more in the future is such an amazing strategy why not do it? The Palestinians have rejected a state three times since Oslo. I accept the argument that what they were offered was less than (a) what they would be accorded by a simple application of international law (b) less than most Palestinians are willing to accept (c) less than they deserve from an impartial perspective. OK, but so what? Learn from the winners.

This is basically the same thing. Ben-Gurion continued:

We shall organize an advanced defense force... At that point I am confident that we would not fail in settling in the remaining parts of the country, through agreement and understanding with our Arab neighbors, or through some other means.

‘Or through some other means’ sounds a bit ominous, I guess. Lots of stuff Arab leaders have said sounds ominous, and heaven only knows what they were saying in private correspondence since they won’t open their archives. Again, Seth Ackerman is right: chill out.

Again, same thing. So he wanted to. At the time, there were 8 million Jews in Eastern Europe, a large proportion of which, perhaps the majority, wanted to leave. Weizmann thought that in due course they’d come to Palestine, which is fine - right? - no human is illegal, but, in the meantime, he was content for Jews to work on their patch in the north for 25-30 years. Major no-brainer how Arabs should have responded to this. Now we move on to something a bit meatier.

We’ve skipped ahead 10 years, and some things happened in the meantime that maybe are relevant. As is the case with many of the quotations here, it’s not a quotation, but a summary by Ilan Pappe in the form of a quotation, where in the endnote he says ‘this is what I feel he would have said’. I know Palestinoids think Ilan Pappe’s zany techniques are super cool, but they’re not. They stink; they make a mockery of the discipline of history; you degrade yourself and the human race at large by referencing him. I get that gentiles find Jews bewitching with our verbal tilt, but you can do better. Yes, even you. Further, Cunningham was speaking to Ben-Gurion, in order to try and make him rein the Haganah in, something that would have been pointless had he thought that Ben-Gurion was committed to provoking conflagration that would allow him to commit ethnic cleansing.

However, this is still a valuable piece of evidence if we make clear that by ‘Palestinians’ we are supposed to understand ‘the majority of the Palestinian leadership’ whom in Cunningham’s estimate wanted to avoid a civil war that they would get wrecked in. If by ‘Palestinians’ you mean ‘Palestinians’ though, then it would just be very obviously wrong since by March 1948 ‘Palestinians’ had conducted hundreds of sniper attacks, convoy ambushes, assaults of settlements, and sieges. Just a few weeks before, about 50 Jewish civilians were murdered in the Ben Yehuda street bombings. Of course, Cunnigham was entitled to his opinion about the overall strategy of the Arab leadership, but the implication of Shehada that Zionists were busy trying to goad Arabs in general into a war they didn’t want is false.

Ben-Gurion’s belief, which may or may not have been true, is that the Arab population at large was demoralised, and that therefore, it was possible to avoid war. OK So what?

So, I guess this is supposed to be the ‘so what?’ This is what really bugs me. Ben-Gurion was a smart guy; he said smart things. Every time he said something smart, we are supposed to treat this as an aha! moment, rather than a chance to learn, to understand. The very quality of seriousness and realism is treated as some kind of irredeemable flaw. Ben-Gurion was talking about the UN Partition plan, which was substantially more favourable to the Jews than the Peel plan:

But getting more territory came at a cost: it meant the Jewish majority was weaker. Ben-Gurion was right: 60-40 wasn’t good enough for a stable Jewish state, you need 80-20. So what was the solution? Well, the source doesn’t say, but there are three options (1) add more Jews via immigration (2) offload some of the territory with Muslims in it and (3) offload some of the Muslims. (1) was undoubtedly Ben-Gurion’s policy; (2) wasn’t, though maybe he could have been talked into it. What about (3)? Well, if some Arabs could take a 10-minute drive from Afula to Jenin, that would be swell, but how to do it? Muhammad’s contention is that Ben-Gurion sought to engineer a war to make it possible. What’s the evidence?

You’ll notice a lot of ellipses here. Ben-Gurion’s handwriting sucked,1 and there has been some debate about what he wrote in this letter, but the correct reconstruction appears to be:

We do not want to and we do not have to expel Arabs and take their place. All of our ambitions are built on the assumption that has proven true throughout all of our activities in the land [of Israel] — that there is enough room for us and for the Arabs in the land [of Israel]. And if we will have to use force, not for the sake of evicting the Arabs of the Negev or Transjordan, but rather in order to secure the right that belongs to us to settle there, force will be available to us.

So, completely different. As they say, if you had strong proof, you wouldn’t be using this.

There’s more to add though. Shehada here is taking us back again ten years to the aftermath of the Peel Commission, which did indeed recommend transfer as a way to create two stable states, one (small) Jewish one and one (larger) Arab one. While this particular source doesn’t prove anything, it is true that, in general, the Zionist movement, and Ben Gurion himself, was open to the idea. However, this has absolutely nothing whatsoever to do with Shehada’s claim of provoking a Civil War. To the contrary, the whole point of the Peel plan was to put an end to the conflict after the Arab revolt, by getting Jews and Arabs out of each other’s faces, and the purpose of transfer wasn’t to allow Jews to seize all the land, but to confine them to a quarter of it. And now it gets really stupid as we skip forward again 10 years.

He did say this, but he said it in opposition to the Al Khisas raid. This attack (‘war crime’ would not be an unfair designation) was launched by local Palmach commanders in response to the murder of a Jewish man nearby. It was widely criticized within the Zionist leadership both on moral grounds, and because it would drive the Arab population at large to arms, which means that this was not their goal, but rather something they wanted to avoid.

OK, but Moshe Dayan did want to provoke a broader war? Well, maybe. While the first quotation was a quotation, this is one of Ilan Pappe’s patented ‘I get to be Thucydides and make stuff up’ quotations. Assuming it’s an accurate summary of Dayan’s position, it means he was in favour of escalation in the Galilee, which doubtless he was since rolling the dice was his thing. Does it prove that the purpose of the escalation was to create conditions for ethnic cleansing, as Shehada claims, rather than trying to deal with the problem of Arab terror attacks through deterrence? No.2

Now Shehada skips ahead to after the war is over and Shmuel Lahis is on trial for the Hula massacre. The trial is important as a rare example of evidence provided under oath about what Haganah units got up to over the previous 3 years. Maklef pointed out what is not under dispute, namely that atrocities were committed over the course of the war, and this caused civilians to flee. What does it have to do with Shehada’s ‘argument’ that Zionists had a crafty plan to pretend to be in favour of partition in order to provoke a war so as to ethnically cleanse all of Palestine? Beats me.

We’re only a third of the way through, so I guess this will be another series. Gosh, how silly this all is.

1

2

The origins of the Chassidic movement are clouded in mystery. This is not an unusual thing historically, but it is unusual for something that happened in Europe (more or less) in the 18th century. We know, indeed, a great deal more about the origins of Frankism, despite it being an underground movement whose members were committed to secrecy both for practical reasons and as a matter of principle of sorts. There are eras where an industrious historian can eventually read every source there is to find, but even for a backwater like Podolia, by this point there is ample documentation for most topics you might be interested in researching (unless it’s something gay like women’s textiles). However, for Podolia’s most important contribution to global culture, we got bupkiss.

That we know little of the family background of the Ba’al Shem Tov (henceforth the Besht) is not in itself so irregular. People weren’t good on ‘Early Life checks’ back in those days, though, as a rule, important Rabbis came from rabbinical families that were careful to record and publicise their lineage. That we know nothing, or at any rate nothing that isn’t obviously fanciful, about the Besht’s intellectual influence is absolutely weird. According to Chasidic tradition, he received his teachings from a certain ‘Adam Baal Shem’, head of an underground pietist society and, in addition, by means of direct revelation from Ahiya the Shilonite.1 That these claims are fantastic barely needs to be said, but what does need to be said is that the origins of Chassidus are not just shrouded in mystery as a matter of fact; they have been deliberately shrouded.

The creation of a fictional origin story for the movement took place in multiple stages. It began in earnest with the publication of Shivchei haBesht, a collection of tales modelled on the (in)famous Shivchei Ari, which had, a few hundred years prior, been substantially responsible for elevating Lurianic Zoharism to authoritative status before most people had even had a chance to check what was in it. A second important episode was the ‘discovery’ of the Kherson documents purportedly containing original letters to and from the Besht as well as other early Chassidic luminaries. One common theme of these histories is that they emphasise something unknown from contemporary sources, namely the Besht’s energetic opposition to Sabbateanism and the ability of he and his followers to successfully identify and reject texts with Sabbatean origins.

Let us start, though, with what we do know. First, the followers of the Besht were not the first in early-modern Europe to identify themselves with the appellation of hassidim. There were preceded by the following groups.

• The leader of the Sabbatean aliyah which established a community in Jerusalem was Yehuda the Hasid and his followers were called Hasidim.

• The Sabbatean community of Mannheim, to whom were delivered Yonasan Eybeschutz’s tracts prayed together at the Chassidim Schule the leader of which was called Yishaya the Hasid.

• The closest pupils of Avraham Rovigo, a wealthy Italian Rabbi whose household beit medrash became perhaps the main center for the dissemination of Sabbatean literature into Europe, were known as hassidim.

• Yonasan Eybeschutz’s inner group of disciples in his yeshiva, which had to be closed after the discovery that they were learning Sabbatean texts, were called hassidim.

To pile on examples, though, is to miss the point. The term Sabbateans used to identify each other was ma’aminim (believers) vs. kofrim (deniers), and the term they used to identify fellow Sabbateans who were really into it was hassidim. This was even the term used for the followers of Jacob Frank before they got big enough to merit a more sectorial designation. This seems counter-intuitive to people today because to be a hassid is to go above and beyond the letter of the law, whereas Sabbateanism is known as a theology of ‘redemption through sin’. As we have explained, however, Sabbatean antinomianism is better understood as ‘hypernomianism’, the idea that adherence to the letter of the law was, in the throes of the messianic era, just not enough anymore. The Sabbatean calls to acts of extreme piety and penitence and the targeted violation of the law for theurgic purposes were not in tension with each other, but two aspects of the same thing: a rejection of the Rabbinic ethos of submission and moderation as inadequate for the new era. Those who took upon themselves the burden of a new higher and more demanding law for the incoming universal sabbath were naturally known as the ‘pious ones’ regardless of where precisely they lay on the Sabbatean spectrum of holy sin as a practical matter.

The second thing we know is that when the followers of the Besht started to become known around Europe, the ‘new hassidim’ as they were called by their opponents, were identified as a recrudescence of the Sabbateanism the Rabbinical establishment had spent the last 50 years trying to snuff out, with mixed, but slowly increasing success. This assessment was based both on the fact that the heartlands of the new Hassidic movement (Podolia and Volhynia) were the most stubborn Sabbatean strongholds, and also the strong resemblance they saw between the two. As we shall see, academics over the past two decades have converged upon the view that this was a mistake borne of small-minded bigotry and petty elitism on the part of talmudic scholars, aghast at the possibility that anyone might be having a bit of fun. More strangely, this is the view of orthodox Jews today, though they refuse to articulate it as such.

However, the hypothesis that the Rabbis knew what they were talking about neatly solves a problem in Jewish intellectual history. We know that the hassidim caused a revolution in European Judaism, but where did they get their radical ideas from? The answer that revisionist historians have converged on is essentially the same one Chassidim believe themselves: the Besht was vibing out in the woods, and it all came to him bang! and these new doctrines just happened to be perfectly designed for a proliferation among Ashkenazi Jewry worn out from being so dry and boring. However, if we look at the novel doctrines of the Beshtian movement, we see that almost none of them are, in fact, novel at all. By dint of apparent coincidence, they are all doctrines that we have seen developed by the Sabbatean theologians as they dealt with the apparent collapse of the messianic movement that Zoharism had heralded:

• The state of complete cleaving to God can only be achieved by the true tzaddik whose soul is specially bound up with divinity from creation. However, other Jews can achieve a form of this devekut by cleaving to the tzaddik himself since, despite his divine soul, he is nevertheless a man to whom other men can cleave.

• The true tzaddik must go through periods of acute spiritual turmoil in which he wrestles with the forces of evil, undergoing ירידה לצורך עליה (a doctrine found absolutely everywhere in hassidic literature).2

• God is not the remote and austere lawgiver of the Geonic-Maimonidean tradition, but something else in a way that has been hitherto hidden from the masses

• The kabbalah is not a doctrine reserved for a select few to be studied in secret, but can and must be spread to the masses as part of redemption.

• The dourness of Judaism since exile (emphasised perhaps to an excessive degree in Ashkenazi tradition) must now be replaced with overt joy and enthusiasm.3

There is, of course, one very major difference, and that is the role of the person of Shabtai Tzvi himself. There were various Chassidic figures who saw it as part of their role to rehabilitate the divine sparks in the Sabbatean movement, and we will look more closely at that in a future installment, but there were certainly none who saw him as a messiah in any meaningful respect. This transformation was ably described by Scholem:

All we really need to add here is that the demotion of Shabtai Tzvi from his place within the general complex of Sabbatean theology was not something the Besht initiated, but rather something he completed. We have already seen that in the most ‘profound’ text of the Sabbatean movement, ואבוא היום אל העין, Shabtai’s role is severely diminished, and this was true also of Frankism. While the paradoxes of his personality and the obvious failure of his movement to bring about national redemption were doubtless a great spur to the development of Sabbatean theology and spirituality, Shabtai Tzvi was also a deadweight on the movement, an element of absurdity whose incongruity only became more acute the more time passed and nothing happened. Jacob Frank’s desperate push for redemption right now was one way of dealing with this, but the Besht hit upon something much better: Sabbateanism without Shabtai Tzvi, the decentralisation of tzaddik-worship so it could function as a vibrant and growing social movement.

Objections

As mentioned, Gershom Scholem figured this all out when he delved into long-suppressed knowledge of Sabbateanism and found that the innovations of the Hassidic movement weren’t actually innovations at all. There are two main criticisms of his approach. The first is that it’s grossly offensive because Sabbateans were bad and Hassidim are good, or, to put it more precisely, Sabbateans were violating Judaism whereas Hassidim uphold it. We’ve already dealt with this, but to repeat: the Frankists were not representative of Sabbateanism generally, but its most extreme offshoot. The Sabbatean mainstream was consistently opposed to violation of the law as a practical matter for most adherents. R. Emden and others made a serious strategic error in overplaying (and often most likely fabricating) the antinomian behaviour in the fringes of the movement, which became a legitimating device for the movement at large: since they aren’t being fed pig by a hooker on Yom Kippur, they’re not really Sabbateans; it’s not so bad.

In as much as Sabbateanism at large really was antinomian, so is the Hassidic movement. It is not necessary to get into what goes on even today in parts of Breslev, though nor should it simply be ignored (as it shamefully is today by our religious leaders). It is well known, practically a cliche, that the Hassidim, for example, placed devotion and emotional intensity in prayer above things like being particular about stipulated times for prayer or the prohibition on dancing on the Sabbath. That this is not seen as antinomian today demonstrates nothing more profound than that the Hassidim have been very successful. Despite this behaviour plainly contradicting the law, it’s not seen as actually wrong. Well, guess what, when Sabbateans contravened the law, they didn’t think it was wrong either!

There is, however, an additional argument currently in vogue in academia, which is more … complicated I guess. Here are various quotations from Hassidism: A New History.

So basically, ‘nu-uh’, ‘you can’t prove it’ and ‘look a balloon’. In as much as there is any argument I can find, it’s that distinctively Hassidic ideas all have antecedents in pre-Sabbatean kabbalistic texts, but this is just basic incomprehension. Sabbateanism is Zoharism; Zoharism is Sabbateanism. Sabbateanism wasn’t a perversion of Zoharism or an alien intrusion, it was an attempt to continue and develop Zoharic religion following the crisis that Zoharism had, by its own internal dynamics, brought itself to. What was inauthentic, in fact, was anti-Sabbatean kabbalah, which sought to simultaneously uphold the sanctity of 200 years of Zoharic tradition while repudiating its culmination. If Sabbateanism eventually solved its problems by transforming into Chassidus, then it is entirely to be expected that it could find the germs of its doctrines in earlier texts.

What, then, is the proper way to think of the issue? Readers will, I hope, be familiar with Moldbug’s Puritan hypothesis, that is to say the assertion that Leftism is Reformed Protestantism. Many readers of Moldbug, especially those who see in his writings a devious attempt to protect Jews from blame, have attacked him on historical grounds, but while Moldbug certainly oversimplifies and cuts corners, the core historical argument is not controversial. It is a commonplace of historical discourse that modern progressive movements evolved out of radical Protestantism. Moldbug’s argument was not historical, but analytic: to say that Protestantism became something else when it became leftism is to implicitly accept the truth claims of one or the other. If we zoom out, though, the distinction between ‘religion’ and ‘ideology’ is conventional and, if used unreflectively, misleading. Protestantism certainly evolved under selective pressures, but to understand it properly we should see it not as a new thing, but the same thing with new features.

It’s an argument you can take or leave, but, in as much as it works, it works even better here. First of all, Protestantism is still a thing, and distinct from Leftism, sometimes even opposed to it. This represents a good, if not conclusive, argument for looking at the matter in terms of speciation. However, there is no Sabbateanism per se today, except for a few LARPers maybe. Either Sabbateanism has ceased to exist, or it exists today as Chassidus. Secondly, the history of Leftism is an extremely complicated process, with dozens of different vectors, and it is a matter of some argument whether Protestantism is even the most important input. In the case of Chassidus, however, it doesn’t seem terribly complicated at all. The Besht, as even Aryeh Kaplan admitted, took his ideas from Hershel Tzoref and completed the process of stripping Sabbateanism of its obsolete content, allowing it to take off. The other inputs, in as much as they exist at all, are all pre-Sabbatean.

If you’ve been paying attention over the course of the series, you figured out a few episodes back that I was going to say this. However, some people aren’t close readers, so probably someone is angry right now. In part 13 or 14, I’ll cheer you up somewhat, but in the meantime, I’m going to close with something nice.

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Coleman is easily the best defender of Israel today. It’s a good thing he’s around because even a guilty man deserves good representation, and we sure as chips are chips can’t do it ourselves right now.1 Palestinians are blessed with plenty of people who can get on western media and sanewash their political aspirations and activities, so it’s fair for us to get a few too. I think Hughes must know that some of the things he says aren’t really true (I messaged him and explained some of them, so he must know), but he does a good job of showing how someone in our position would do kind of what we do if you zoom out and don’t look at the details. I believe that Hughes arrived at his robust pro-Israel stance because of negative polarisation against leftwing campus radicalism, his original signature issue. Zionists complain about the grotesqueries and stupidities of pro-Palestinian activism, but without them we’d have no supporters left at all, certainly not any of his calibre.

However, overall I’d say Hughes gets massively wrecked by Beinart, who isn’t an accomplished thinker, and certainly isn’t an accomplished debater. There are two basic reasons for this. First, Israel has spent the last three years frenetically cucking out anyone who steps up to defend it. ‘It is a ridiculous libel, explicable only in terms of two thousand years of entrenched prejudice, to suggest that Israel would use the withholding of food to a civilian population as a weapon of war, wait … ahem … you sure they did that? … so anyway, as I was saying, the concept of a siege is hardly a new one in the annals of warfare’. Imagine you are a lawyer tasked with representing a defendant on rape charge and that (though strictly it doesn’t matter) you are sincerely convinced of his innocence. You’re doing a good job, but then in the middle of trial your client pulls down his trousers and starts furiously masturbating. OK, that’s pretty bad, but it doesn’t prove anything; maybe, in fact, it’s his propensity to do that kind of thing that generates the false accusations. Interesting angle. You can move on from this if you’re deft enough. Then the next day he climbs on the table and shouts ‘I LOVE RAPE; RAPE IS GOOD; IT’S WHAT I LOVE TO DO’. That’s roughly what it’s like being endlessly demoralised as an Israel advocate, and Beinart has enough practice rattling off this kind of stuff to induce demoralisation.

The second reason, though, is our topic for today. Even when Hughes holds frame and keeps the topic on the genuine dilemma Israel faces in response to a century of Arab intransigence and terrorism, Beinart still comes out kind of top because there are places Hughes won’t go, and Beinart knows Hughes won’t go there, and Hughes knows Beinart knows Hughes won’t go there. So, it’s all a bit stupid, but Beinart looks better. The clearest example of this is how Beinart repeatedly steers the conversation towards the case of South Africa, showing how the arguments Israelis make against extending equal political rights to all those living under its military control were made by the Afrikaners defending apartheid. Hughes tries to draw distinctions between the two cases, but it’s not very convincing. If anything, once you add them all up, the Afrikaners who, in their heimat of Cape Colony at least, predate the Bantu population, come off looking better. But this is all completely missing the main point, which is that South Africa sucks!

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To recap where we’ve got to so far, the revelation and proliferation of the Zohar beginning in the late 15th century in Spain constituted a profound and revolutionary transformation in the nature and inner meaning of Judaism that culminated in the charade of Shabtai Tzvi’s messiahship. After this fell apart in a shambolic fashion, Judaism was stuck, unable to move forward and unable to move backwards and, most pressingly, unable to purge from its ranks the faithful Sabbatean believers who were the authentic heroes of the Zoharic tradition, and the majority of the intellectually vibrant part of the Jewish people. After the better part of a century in which the rabbinical establishment groped around erratically for a solution, the rise of a particularly daring Sabbatean theologian, Yonasan Eybeschutz, to the peak of rabbinical honour forced Rav Emden into desperate measures: a last-ditch attempt to cut the cord binding together Zoharism and its Sabbatean expression that ended up becoming a demolition of Zoharism itself. This offered European Jewry the opportunity to enter the modern world with their brains intact and next week we’ll see what they made of it. However, today, we are going to take a little detour to see what the Jews of the Islamic world were up to.

As with Zoharism in general, the centre of gravity of Sabbateanism had originally been the Sephardi diaspora all around the Mediterranean and, for the first three generations, it continued to be particularly prevalent among the speakers of Ladino. However, as the 1700s wore on, the situation became reversed: Ashkenazi Jewry lay practically prostrate and helpless before Sabbateanism as it got ever more cuckoo while it withered among the Jews of the Islamic world. There were three reasons for this surprising reversal.

First, the most dedicated followers of Shabtai Tzvi had followed his example and ‘donned the turban’ forming a group known as the Dönmeh. Originally, this group were Muslim in only the most formal sense, retaining their own version of the Jewish religion and, substantially, their associations and social bonds with the broader Jewish community. However, over time, and under pressure from Ottoman authorities, the community gradually became more Islamicized and separated from even the Sabbatean believers among the Jews. They did not become good Muslims by any means; in fact, orgiastic wife-swapping ceremonies appear to have continued until the late 19th century. However, they did become more Muslim in sociological terms, having more ongoing contact with various underground Sufi groups than Jewish ones. In due course, even the sages among them lost their facility with Hebrew, and the Sabbatean community was left bereft of what would have been its most vigorous intellectual and spiritual leaders.

Secondly, the Sabbatean movement had been especially popular among conversos who had returned to the faith after fleeing from the Spanish Inquisition’s persecution of marranos, including most famously the second most prestigious theologian of the movement, the fruitcake Avraham Cardoso. Much has been written about the special attraction that Sabbateanism had for these people, and it doesn’t take a genius to see how they might take to the idea that forcible conversion to another religion was not an ancestral stain but actually super based and awesome in the celestial realms. Some scholars have suggested it has something to do with their forming an idealised image of Judaism while living as Christians and then getting their brain fried by encountering the mess of Zoharism without the two-century period of acculturation Jewry at large had gone through, or, alternatively, their importing an essentially Christian set of assumptions about what a messiah is supposed to look like. Whatever the case however, ex-converso identity and its accompanying complex of neuroses and insecurities is something that can only be passed down for a generation or two. After that, you either feel Jewish enough to settle down or you don’t and leave. Thus, to the extent that MENA Sabbateanism had its social base in the ex-converso community, it had an inherent demographic sell by date.

However, the third reason is probably the most important: precisely the greater prominence of the Sabbatean movement in the Ottoman heartlands motivated orthodox forces to organise and defeat it. In Europe, Sabbateans were able to travel wherever they wanted and get away with saying the most out there stuff imaginable without molestation from local rabbinical authorities on the grounds of ‘if it sounds mental, it must be super holy’. As we have discussed before, even before Sabbateanism, in its marketing around Europe, Lurianic kabbalah acquired all sorts of mad gobbledygook and paranoid demonology supported with vague references to כתבי אר’’י. The European Rabbis had little to no ability to work out what was the authentic Lurianic kabbalah and what were Sabbatean developments. In the Islamic world, however, the rabbinate (many of whom had been Sabbateans) knew perfectly well what a reference to ‘the unthinking light’ or a descent in the klippot in a pamphlet meant. They also understood the critical importance of an authorised version of Zoharism that could be presented as an alternative to Sabbatean deviation (or, more precisely, to rewrite history to portray Sabbateanism as a deviation). It is this new version of Zoharism that we will discuss here.

The Beit El Yeshiva and Shalom Sharabi

In 1737, R. Gedaliah Hayun, who was probably, but not provably, a relation of the itinerant Sabbatean prophet Nehemiah Hayun, opened a new yeshiva for kabbalists in Jerusalem. His choice of the holy city was, in a certain sense, self-justifying, but it was also likely motivated by the fact that since the aliyah of Yehuda the Hasid in 1700, the Jewish community there had been dominated by Sabbateans, a source of great, and justified, scandal and embarrassment. A few years later, a Yemenite scholar named Shalom (who took his surname, Sharabi, from his family’s place of origin, though he himself was born in Sanaa) arrived following many years spent travelling around the Levant and promptly dominated the institution through his intellect and breadth of learning, receiving Hayun’s daughter as a bride in reward. Over the rest of his life, R. Sharabi, known as the Rashash, would work on developing a version of Zoharism that became synonymous with the term kabbalah throughout Eastern and North African Jewry and to a substantial extent even beyond. A century and half later, even a kabbalistic scholar as eminent as the Leshem, who inherited traditions of interpretation from the Vilna Gaon, had to meekly apologise in the introduction to his greatest work for having the temerity to disagree with Sharabi on certain points. Sharabian dominance endured until the establishment of the state of Israel led to the destruction of Jewish life across the Middle East, and the subsequent race to the bottom in Israeli religious life.

Before we proceed, it should be said that there is no good reason to believe that Sharabi and his disciples were anything other than sincere in their quest for true kabbalistic knowledge. Nevertheless, it is plainly the case that Sharabian kabbalah was a systematic reformation of the Zoharic tradition that precisely neutralises all of its elements that flow into Sabbateanism.

The first task of Sharabi was to define an authoritative and official interpretation of sephirotic theology, which he did very precisely. The only authoritative text was the Zohar; the only correct interpretation of the Zohar was that of Isaac Luria; the only correct interpretation of Lurianism was that provided by Chaim Vital; the only correct interpretation of Vital was that of Sharabi himself. All other material within the Zoharic tradition was categorised as introductory and superfluous (Cordovero) or wrong (Sarug). In this way, the Zohar was placed in the same general position that the Pentateuch occupies in rabbinic Judaism: its status is unique and unchallengeable, but it is wrapped in a protective layer of official interpretation beyond which appeal to the text itself is strictly inadmissible. By contrast, Sabbateans looked at Lurianism as correct, but only the penultimate step in the revelation of Israel’s true god. Famously, Shabtai Tzvi himself declared that Luria had ‘made a beautiful chariot, but did not reveal its rider’ and would primarily study the Zohar and an earlier proto-Zoharic work Sefer haKanah. His followers set themselves the task of scouring the primary texts to reveal as-yet-still-hidden secrets. Sharabi declared that this was all vain. Luria had completed kabbalah and, once his doctrine was properly understood, there was nothing left to discover.

As well as searching for the final boss of Zoharic madness, the Sabbateans also faithfully continued the Zoharic mission of the previous two and a half centuries to spread knowledge of the Torah’s secrets as widely as possible among the Jewish people so as to bring redemption. Sharabi did the opposite, and revived pre-Zoharic traditions, particularly associated with the schools of Provence and Catalonia, according to which kabbalistic knowledge was supposed to be the exclusive preserve of a scholarly elite. In so doing, Sharabi had to solve two problems: theoretical and practical. The first was simply that all of the masters of Zoharism had promoted dissemination of its contents and ascribed to this process messianic significance. Sharabi dealt with this through a sleight of hand. Luria was conflicted and, at least towards his death, seems to have decided that the innovations he added to Zoharism were not fit for general dissemination, an attitude that was faithfully upheld by Vital who kept his manuscripts under lock and key until death. Sharabi revived the (long-abandoned) obligation to maintain a protective wall around Lurianism, while at the same time condemning all non-Lurianic explication of the Zohar as either wrong or only valuable as preparatory to Lurianism. Thus Zoharism in its entirety was moved, for the first time, into the sphere of the esoteric.

Sharabi’s practical problem was that the Zohar had been printed alongside many hundreds of commentaries and practical guides. Many times already in the wake of Sabbateanism, rabbinical authorities had warned against popular consumption of these materials, imposing obligations to wait until the age of 40 and complete talmudic studies first, but what was really stopping someone who didn’t want to obey these decrees? Sharabi’s solution was, simply, to make kabbalistic study so boring and so difficult that no-one would be interested in learning it. Zoharism became esoteric in the same way that advanced theoretical physics today is esoteric. Of course, people can form opinions about quarks and mobwomgon fields by reading popular books and watching YouTube videos, but these opinions are understood by members of the academy and their loyalists in the general public to be simply wrong by default. Similarly, anyone could learn alternative understandings of kabbalah to the Sharabian version that were more engaging, but what they were learning was declared by the kabbalistic elite to the lay audience to be just nonsense. Instead of the impossible task of popularisation, Sharabian kabbalah offered the masses the opportunity to participate through financial support of the kabbalists themselves, pious observance of Jewish law, and the practice of running their fingers over the text of a Zohar, a work they could never understand and shouldn’t try to.

How did Sharabi achieve this? First, he took the already extremely cumbersome Lurianic system and made it an order of magnitude more cumbersome. Take it away Jonathan Garb:

Secondly, Sharabi and his heirs moved the location of essential metaphysical reality from the entities described in the Zohar and Lurianic writings that are kind of cool in a pagan way to the most intensely boring stratum of explanation, namely the system of divine names. Pinchas Giller explains:

This brings us probably the most important innovation of the Sharabian school. According to Sharabi, kabbalah was a completed discipline (and whatever innovations his students made, they were careful to justify with references to his own works, and never any prior source). There was nothing left to learn, and very few people to teach, so what was a kabbalist supposed to do? The answer was that he was supposed to pray, and pray, and pray. For the Sharabian adept, daily prayer takes a minimum of six hours, during which time the recitation of each word must be accompanied by mental concentration on dozens of other words and their relation within a system to hundreds of other words.1 This sounds incredibly boring, and it is incredibly boring, but the Sharabians believe that this is their solemn duty without which the Jewish people will be beset by plagues and famine. Giller has spent a lot of time observing goings on at the Beit El yeshiva:

If you are thinking, ‘this doesn’t sound very mystical’, you would be correct.

This, of course, is in clear opposition to the Safedian tradition whose members were constantly tripping their nuts off, experiencing vivid hallucinations induced by extreme sleep deprivation and fasting, as well as breathing exercises that approximate asphyxiation and probably drugs. Matt Goldish recently wrote a book on Shabtai Tzvi which adds very little to Scholem and is quite boring, but he does do a good job of establishing that the Sabbatean tradition was in complete continuity with Zoharism in basing doctrinal development on ecstatic visions, demonstrating that Nathan of Gaza’s famous Shavuot schiz-out was closely modelled on precedents by famous approved members of the tradition. In abandoning this tradition, it was Sharabian Zoharism, and not Sabbateanism, that deviated.

To sum up, R. Sharabi and his disciples achieved the apparently impossible and tamed Zoharism. When people use the tHAT’S nOT rEAL kABBALAH ‘argument’ in response to the latest monthly outrage committed by a Zoharist leader today it is because they are working on the assumption that something similar to Sharabianism is the normative version. And perhaps, indeed, they are right, or at least they were right. Sharabianism was clearly a deviation from the tradition, but since there is no actual truth behind Zoharism, it can be defined as what it is by what it does. Two hundred years of dominance is a long time.

I will say one more thing in praise of the Sharabians. One of the objections to Zoharism; not the only one, but a weighty one for sure, is that it violates monotheism. Anyone who has ever got into such a debate will know how fruitless it is, but what should perhaps be more readily accepted is that some versions of Zoharism are more amenable to explanation as being compatible with monotheism than others. In some senses, Sharabian kabbalah is worse than other systems because it is based on a strong realism regarding the entities that are parts of the Zoharic corpus, ruling out the most popular form of apologetic argument, namely that divine multiplicity is only from the human perspective. However, in its monumental complexity it offers a different kind of way out. Paradoxically, by multiplying the parts of the godhead into the thousands, it makes it impossible to focus on any one part to the exclusion of others. Zoharists have always stuck to the mantra of ‘it is all one’, but have violated it to various degrees in practice. The Sharabists patched things up by making the system so elaborate and cumbersome that it’s impossible to get a working pagan myth out of it. Luria’s genius was to take the mythic power of the Zohar and turn it into a mechanistic system, without losing (and in fact boosting) its mythic power. Sharabian orthodoxy drains the system of myth, leaving behind just one big snooze.

Gershom Scholem has often been criticised for undervaluing, if not ignoring outright, Sharabian kabbalah, importing normative considerations into supposedly objective historical research so as to dub the mainstream form of kabbalah a fossilized form of a once-vibrant and alive tradition, barely worthy of interest. However, as usual, Scholem was completely correct. It’s just that, compared to the alternatives, that’s a good thing.

Coda

So, after all that, have we arrived at the conclusion that Zoharism is actually basically fine after all? Sure, it started off pretty ropey, and everything went to hell in the mid-17th century, but after that, things got ironed out eventually and it became just a bit of harmless, well not fun, but harmless something. Haha. If we’re going to say something nice for a change, we’re certainly not going to sign off that way. My objections to Sharabian kabbalah are threefold.

First of all, that’s not Judaism. It’s a cliche to say that, in contrast to other faiths, Judaism aims not to facilitate the flight from impurity for a religious elite, but to sanctify the community at large, but it’s a cliche because it’s true. Sharabian kabbalists are like monks, except they don’t do anything cool or worthwhile like make beer or copy manuscripts of Aristotle. Sharabianism thus amounts to the degeneration of Judaism into a faith like that of the Druze (no offense Druze), which is OK for a goy, but obviously kind of a let-down if you believe in a unique one-of-a-kind covenant between God and a chosen nation.

Secondly, it’s an incredible waste of time. Whatever elegance Sharabian kabbalah might have as an intellectual system (and I’m not seeing it), none of the entities that its practitioners think about actually exist in any way whatsoever and so forming an immense and intricate mental map of how they are interconnected is totally fruitless expenditure of mental energy. Sephardi Jewry historically was like the Ashkenazim, but turned down a few notches. Then, in the eighteenth century, they just kind of dropped out of history, occasionally popping up to run a chain of factories in Iraq or something. In large part, that’s because their greatest brains were being sent to endlessly ponder figments of their imagination to no purpose. If the alternative is Sabbateanism, then I guess it’s better, but it’s still an ignominious finale for an accomplished ethnic group.

Thirdly, and most importantly, Sharabianism smothered the Zohar and Lurianic writings in multiple layers of protective theory, but underneath it all, they were still there, just as radical and blasphemous as before, and invested with supreme sanctity and authority. Sharabianism rescued Zoharism from Sabbateanism but because Sabbateanism is Zoharism it could only do so by making Zoharism something other than itself. Zoharism was attractive initially because it offered what medieval Judaism lacked: a place for emotion, and emotional turmoil, in religious life; a god that was accessible to the ordinary man whose powers of imagination exceeded his intellect; a way of imbuing ordinary Jewish ritual with cosmic significance. However, the Sharabian reformation of Zoharism produced something that was just as elitist, austere and irrelevant to the life of the multitude as any kind of Maimonideanism, but without its intellectual respectability.

The Sharabians argued that not only could the Zohar not be understood according to its plain meaning, but nor could large parts of the Lurianic writings. Their proof for this, however, was nothing more than that they said so. The conditions in which Zoharism was kept in suspended animation were fragile and contingent and, in particular, the Ben Ish Hai in Iraq used his prestige to re-embark on a project of popularisation without ever formally critiquing the Sharabian synthesis. How long it would have taken matters to crack up and go mental again is an interesting question, and one that is hard to answer in the absence of much research into religious trends in the early 20th century among oriental Jewry. However, it’s a moot point because these communities were emptied out one after another and their inhabitants dumped into Israel. The kabbalists of Beit El and its various offshoot yeshivot have done their best, in cooperation with R. Ovadya Yosef, to maintain a plausible synthetic traditionalism that could keep Zoharism in check, but they will fail. In fact, they already have and we’re just here to watch.