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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Read more

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

Part 1. Introduction and Spoiler

Part 2. The culmination of the Kabbalah revolution.

Part 3. Sabbateanism is Zoharism

Part 4. The Spread of Zoharism in Eastern Europe

Part 5. Sabbateanism after the apostacy

Part 6. The Hayyun Controversy

Moo. You should have stuck with moo.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

בֹּנֶה צִיּוֹן בְּדָמִים וִירוּשָׁלַ͏ִם בְּעַוְלָה׃

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

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

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

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

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

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

Antinomianism

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Simple Faith

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

1

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

3

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

4

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Inexplicable Rise in Reported Women Killed

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

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

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

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

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

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

Change in LMoH Reporting System

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

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

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

Ministry Context and History of Lying

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

   

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

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

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

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

Read more

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

First entrance

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

The Party of Ali

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

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

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

To sum up core Twelver doctrine:

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

2. The Imam is invisible.

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

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

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

I have a secret

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

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

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

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

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

Mordor

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

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

The war

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

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

1

For something really gay, though, check this out:

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

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

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

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

It says right here on page 13

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

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

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

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

The power of vision

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

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

Strange and stranger deeds

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Or take these guys:

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

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

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

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

Who is parasiting off who?

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Right now, though, Dr Ansbacher is super pissed. His case is simple: Bibi promised ‘absolute victory’ and the ‘destruction of Hamas’ and instead he signed up to, well, no-one really knows, but not that. Hamas are not even in theory committed to disarming. The question of whether to accept the Trump plan pits those on the Right who are committed to their ideals of territorial maximalism and security through overwhelming force and who meet the minimum threshold of intelligence to know when they are being sold a pup against those on the Right who will agree to anything, sell anything and defend anything that Bibi says because they are human garbage. Unfortunately for the former, there are a lot more of the latter than there are of them because that’s what happens when you build a political base composed of human garbage. Duh! So, as I say, Dr. Ansbacher is not happy. Here he is practically crying:

Lol. Anyway, today I want to look a bit closer at another interview he did recently. What I found interesting about it is he explicitly calls out a genre of Right-Wing slop in which soldiers blow up a building while sending encouraging messages, or quoting a pasuk, or dancing to subhuman techno music or whatever. He doesn’t object to this on a moral or aesthetic level (he says it’s ‘very nice’), but he points out that this performative sadism serves to pump up an audience of cretins while Bibi signs up to everything he said he would never sign up to. The ostensible goal is to make Gaza unliveable, so the Gazans have to leave, but Gaza is already unliveable; the problem is that there is nowhere for Gazans to go, and real important countries that don’t run their foreign policy for the entertainment of their stupid population are determined that they stay where they are. Blowing up another apartment block while whooping doesn’t make any difference. This, I think, is kind of the first stirrings of an awakening in the rightoid mind, which goes like this: my side are retarded → why do I want my side to win then? → I am retarded. However, I’m skipping ahead; here it is:

And here are my comments:

1. The core question animating Ansbacher is ‘why can’t Israel achieve a decisive victory?’ He appeals to various hidden variables (muh deep state), but his main answer is that Israel lacks ‘vision’, because, as yet, it won’t embrace its biblical destiny. He believes that, against their will, the Jewish people are being dragged by circumstances to embrace said destiny. On the other hand, it’s not so clear what this destiny means. We can start with what it doesn’t mean. It doesn’t mean compliance with the covenant of Sinai as received and transmitted by the sages, and expressed in the system of halacha. It’s better if you keep halacha, but not necessary. He is emphatic in ruling out any suggestion that conditions of the covenant are obligatory.

2. It seems to be the case that the biblical vision does require a belief in God, though not a God who demands fulfilment of the Torah. What, if anything, God does demand is unclear. Ansbacher mentions the ‘experience’ of his visit to the ‘holy Ohel’ in New York, and 770, so any kind of fussiness about monotheism and not worshipping human beings or chairs is irrelevant. The only thing belief in God does clearly entail is support for territorial expansion by means of military aggression, and faith in God is apparently co-extensive with faith in that. I don’t want to say that what these people mean by God is some kind of externalised representation of racial narcissism, but I already just said that, so it’s too late.

3. Ansbacher believes that the key to Israel’s international diplomatic and PR predicament is to share this biblical vision with the world. The British once believed in Zionism because they were ‘men of the Bible’ and by abandoning cringe hasbara and embracing our destiny, we can once again get the righteous gentiles to get behind Israeli nationalism. (He cites the late leader of Lubavitch in support of this view). It’s impossible, I think, to overstate just how detached from reality this is. Christian Zionism was the product of a specific and temporary phase in the secularisation of the West. It has always been greeted with, at best, bemusement by Catholics, the Orthodox and ‘classical Protestants’. Liberal Protestants today, obviously, can’t get on board with it either. Christian Zionism, rather, was one of the many spasms of a tradition in collapse, a mutant combination of traditional and radical ideas cobbled together to appeal to culturally adrift people desperate for some kind of religion to hang on to. It survives today as not just cringe, but radioactive cringe, its expiration date measured in funerals. In any case, the core of western support for Israel was never Christian Zionism anyway, but generic liberalism before it radicalised on race, which Zionists exploited with stuff like this:

   Or this:

   The traditional, albeit not ubiquitous, view of WASP liberalism was that Jews were a talented, if sometimes annoying people, with a noble history, who had been mistreated by sundry continental brutes, and many concluded from this that they merited a fair crack at starting their own project provided it wouldn’t ‘prejudice the civil and religious rights of existing non-Jewish communities’. Reviving WASP philo-Zionism probably isn’t a viable idea nowadays, but even if it was, you wouldn’t do it by loudly declaring the Tanach gives you the right to commit open-ended ethnic cleansing.23

4. Rightoid Zionists really just seem to be very misinformed at a basic level about what level of military casualties are normal to incur as an expansionist militarist state. Ansbacher laments how Israel could have sacrificed so many soldiers in Lebanon without annexing any territory. OK, but total fatalities from ground operations were 51. It’s quite likely that political pressures from abroad forced Israel to accept a worse deal than what purely military factors might have dictated, but 51 soldiers is just not a lot to die in a war. If you think it is, then you can be a pacifist or some type of lib, or whatever it is I am, but you can’t be a militarist; it just doesn’t go. As in other areas, (e.g. education policy) Israeli rightism has adopted a kind of Jews-only hyper-liberalism, the specific expression of which in this context is the demand that Israel should blow up a gorillion apartment blocks to save one soldier combined with a genuine incomprehension of how this sounds to literally anyone else.

5. In all the talk of vision and destiny, we never learn - territorial expansion aside - what the destiny is. Ansbacher mentions being a light unto the nations, but a light to do what? Binary Options? Mrs NonZionism took a trip to Tel Aviv recently. Here are some snaps from along the way:
   

   

   

   But we’ve been over this a thousand times. The point is what are goyim supposed to say, ‘I used to have some kind of vague idea that morality was being nice to the people and looking after the planet, but then I saw Israelis dancing to techno music while carpet bombing civilian areas, and some feral person throwing molotovs at an Arab house and a Rabbi told me this was morality, and now I know better’? Presumably not that, but, then, seriously, what? Some goyim are still into this only-democracy-with-gay-bars-in-the-Middle-East thing, but,who is the actual market for being enlightened by Israeli irredentism?

6. Finally, while he certainly knows a lot about wars, and how they have been mis-fought, Ansbacher gets very vague when it comes to how they are actually supposed to be fought. He thinks Israel should have done more in Iran, but more what? Israel should have done more in Lebanon, but more what? Fair enough, he thinks we should have conquered south of the Litani, but we already did that once, then what? In Gaza, I know at least the barebones: drive out the Gazans, but to where? Again, you already did expel Palestinians; that’s why you are where you are. The point here, obviously, is that the goal of war is to impose a political solution, but there is no political solution, because the problem is that rightoids want to build a country on top of other people, but refuse to rule them. Like children. The rightoid conceit is that the Palestinian problem is, as a matter of logistics, an easy problem to solve, and that the obstacle is only some kind of false consciousness. They are such inept hillbillies that the favourite candidate for villain is ‘postmodernism’, but it can also be ‘westernising liberalism’ or progressivism, or the mental traits of exile, or whatever. If we can just have enough ‘moral clarity’ to overcome this ideological blinder, then we could just not have a Palestinian problem at all. That’s certainly not because we would just murder them all. That’s an antisemitic BLOOD LIBEL. It’s because … oh, look, a balloon.

Anyway, that’s all that comes to mind. We’ll check back in periodically to see if any of these guys make any progress.

2

It’s a little tangential to our main point, but check out this from the Times of London, September 7th, 1903:

3

However, when I started this blog, I did have kind of a theme I was going for. The idea was the Clear Pill on modern Jewish history. I honestly don’t know what is going down with Boldmug nowadays, but he was once a genius. I promise. Life-changing stuff. Not life changing in the sense that your life changes, but that you see it in a new way. Much worse, but also kind of better. But then sometime after October 7th I realised it was all fake. I hadn’t been seeing life differently at all, I’d just been pretending. Believing Democracy is fake: that’s easy. I’d even managed to convince myself that I thought Zionism was fake, but this was transparent self-deception. ‘The evil Zionists won’t let us kick out all the Arabs and build our Torah State!’ Very cool משכיל בינה, you idiot. But then I really did it and I just didn’t believe in anything anymore. As the master said:

What you realize as a nonidealist is that it’s okay not to participate in these rites. You don’t even need to deny them. You don’t need to raise your hand and say “I hate the environment,” or “I think I might be a racist.” You can practice what Czeslaw Milosz called ketman, not only rejecting the whole ridiculous circus, but deriving real visceral pleasure from the exercise of pretending to conform with it.

And instead, you can love only the things that you yourself love, pity only the people that you yourself pity, and feel guilty only for any crimes that you yourself have committed.

In fact, you should cherish the fact that you live in a society which indulges itself in absurd political parodies of these emotions. Because when you actually feel the real things, and distinguish them from their sentimental counterfeits, you get to feel special. And everyone likes to feel special—not just young people.

Did I feel special? I’m not sure. I recall feeling very cold, almost dead, but that’s because this house doesn’t have radiators. I feel cold right now. Nevertheless, I thought I would share this cold with the world, and it was going pretty dandy. Literal gentiles were sending me messages suggesting podcasts. Scott Alexander shared my stuff and then banned me, and shared me again. Blog was cooking.

It all started falling apart when I wrote the article about disgusting pig Ben Gvir visiting 770 and endorsing on video their chair-worship cult. I knew it was stupid, but I had to do it anyway. The whole article took maybe 40 minutes of manic typing. I was just so disgusting. I’m exactly as disgusted now as I was when I wrote it. It’s very obvious that all of the ‘religious’ members of the government would leave immediately if they weren’t total phoneys, and I am repulsed by anyone who would vote for these parties. And that’s how, when you thought you were out, you pull yourself back in. The truth is I’m just an extreme guy with a lot of extreme opinions. As they say, the only person you can change is yourself, but you can’t do that either. So sucks to be you. Unless you’re a well-adjusted person with good social skills, which must be nice.

Anyhow, while the blog concept fell through, the blog goal is going OK. Could be better, but OK. But I caught myself wasting time again recently debating extremist takes on Jewish history for free, and I committed to making a post about it. This is far too big for one post, though. Likely far too big for ten. What I’m going to do is keep typing until the tab at the top saying ‘too long for email’ pops up and then call it a day for a week. Some of the things I’m going to write I’ve read a lot about, some of them a bit, some of them I’m just going to wing it. If you have corrections, throw them in the comments section. If you don’t, maybe read a book once in a while. Let’s go!

The central fact of modern Jewish history is the Holocaust. Everything else is insignificant except in so much as it finds significance in relation to it. I have tried, with distinctly limited success, to explain to our fellow Jews that this is not the same as the Holocaust being central to modern history simpliciter. That is clearly not the case. It was a marginal event in the course of WW2, which most people involved didn’t know was happening, or think especially important if they did. The whole rancid history of the mid-century collapse of human civilization would have played out almost exactly the same if the SS had managed to keep it in their pants. Certainly, there have been innumerable subsequent knock-on effects. The Holocaust was an act of concentrated dysgenics of the sort the liberal welfare state can only gesture at; without it, we would perhaps have not got stuck so long in the impasse of string theory. Maybe there would be moon bases. But by these standards we can also argue ourselves, if we only try hard enough, into thinking that a butterfly’s fart was the most consequential event in history too.

The importance of the Holocaust to global affairs came afterwards, when, amidst the grim wreckage of the original dopey plan to divvy up the world in a progressive alliance with the Soviet Union, the United States needed a justification for why it had conquered the world. In other words, the significance of the Holocaust to world affairs is not as fact, but as myth. Exceptionally stupid people take that sentence to mean that the Holocaust didn’t happen. Exceptionally stupid people say a lot of things; best to try and ignore them.

However, for Jews, the Holocaust just obviously is the most important thing that happened since the calamity of 66-136 CE. When Theodore Adorno said there can be no art after the Holocaust he was indulging in group narcissism, but if he had said there can be no Jewish art after the Holocaust, it would have been perfectly reasonable (and also, to be quite blunt, explain quite a lot of things in a more charitable light than seems possible otherwise). Looking backwards as a Jew is to stare into a void of cattle trucks, and exhaust pipes, and piles of stinking flesh, behind which lies only a pointless blur. To put it less portentously, if modern Jewish history ends in such total, numbing failure, it must be, both essentially and in its details too, a story of failure. All its heroes are failures; if they hadn’t failed, then it wouldn’t have ended as it did. Either their influence was limited, or their influence was wrong, or, like King Josiah, it was all too late anyway; there are no other options.

The only way out of this is to see the Holocaust as something orthogonal, something that comes from outside, like a speeding train that takes out a family minding their own business, at a stroke wiping out all their dreams, hopes, fears and regrets, but not in such a way that it changes the meaning of the story till that point. If so, you can look at Jewish history as a narrative with its own internal plot and subplots that was cut short at random when viewed from the perspective of its own internal logic. Such a perspective is not ridiculous at all; quite a good case can be made for it. But it is an atheist case, and I am not an atheist. Therefore, if you don’t read everything that follows with a sense of growing doom, bulging until it is ready to crush everything, then I have failed to get my point across.

Everyone knows that history repeats itself, first time as tragedy, the second time as farce. Banger line, no doubt, but, actually, it’s just a description of one historical event, and arguably not a great one either. Modern Jewish history ends as tragedy and starts as farce. Just as the tragedy was total, inescapable, all-encompassing, so was the farce. If you forced me to pick, it’s hard to say whether the farce was more farcical or the tragedy more tragic. We are talking, of course, about the messiahship of Shabtai Tzvi declared by his prophet, Nathan of Gaza, in 1665.

Shabtai Tzvi had precisely none of the qualities that one is entitled to demand of a messiah, but, more than that, he had none of the qualities you would demand of the junior manager of a Burger King. He was a drifter, sponging off his brothers to pursue scholarship without having much to show for it, and prone to extended spells of melancholy. Even before his conversion to Islam, he was known for weird acts of antinomianism, including saying a special blessing on consuming forbidden foods, or celebrating the whole annual calendar of festivals in a week for no discernible reason. He would tell his followers that he could fly, but they weren’t worthy to see it.1 He was married three times, but each time he refused to consummate. Strictly speaking, he was married four times, because he also had some kind of cringefest marriage ceremony with a Sefer Torah. His plan for redeeming the world was to rock up at the Sultan’s palace, say psalms and wait for cosmic forces to start kicking off.2 In other words, he was a massive weirdo. It would be bad enough if he was accepted as messiah by the bulk of the Jewish people in spite of being a weirdo, but it seems more correct to say, as we shall see, that being a weirdo was actually his specific qualification for the job.

After Shabtai Tzvi committed apostasy, most Jews moved on to something else. That’s not a mystery. The mysteries, at first sight, are why (a) a majority, perhaps a very large majority, of Jews got caught up in the initial ecstatic enthusiasm over this total bozo and (b) a significant minority, probably around 5%, and a greater proportion of the religiously motivated, continued to believe in him even afterwards, and for a good century and a half until it really petered out. If you get crucified and you manage to go out declaring אלי אלי למה עזבתני like a boss then, honestly, that’s pretty based and you kind of deserve to have some kind of posthumous cope movement keeping your messiah flame alive. Shabtai Tzvi, by contrast, ended his campaign of global redemption in the absolute gayest way imaginable. Converting to Islam is forgivable given that the alternative was probably getting flayed alive, but he couldn’t even be a pussy like a man. Instead, he sent out messages to his followers saying that he was still messiah, and his conversion was all part of his special mission. Nathan took this as his cue to develop an extended version of Lurianism in which the sparks most deeply trapped in the peels3 can only be released by calculated acts of deviancy on the part of the great soul of the messiah, an idea which in due course would become the generator of radical Sabbatian thought and practice. However, Shabtai Tzvi actually never justified his apostacy this way, instead, he had a simpler idea, actually two of them:

The answer to our two conundrums, which represents the central generative crux of all that follows, is that, as well as being a clownishly shambolic fiasco, the good news of Shabtai Tzvi’s mystic kingship was also the culmination of a great movement that had developed over the past 200 years, and had rapidly spiralled out of control over the last thirty of them. You already know what I’m talking about, of course, but you’re going to have to wait because the pop-up just popped up.

2

There’s a slightly different version, according to Yehuda Liebes:

1.

It’s easy to forget now, but the whole purpose of the Dissident Right, or whatever you wish to call it, when it got cracking amidst the wreckage of the project for the New American Century, was to try and make a Right Wing that was smart. Plainly, it has achieved the opposite, and polarisation by education (which is not the same as, but certainly correlates with, intelligence) has accelerated way beyond anything extrapolatable from prior trends. Nazi antisemitism was rather insane and led to some pretty self-defeating actions on the part of the Third Reich, but it did have a distinct use, namely to sublimate the dispute between progressive and conservative Germany by allowing Jews to stand in as a scapegoat for the sins of the former. Conversely, the American Far Right is now animated by a hysterical and literally murderous hatred of extremely normal white people - at least at first sight - like Alex Pretti. Even among the most committed antisemites, few exhibit obvious signs of understanding the constructive purpose of antisemitism, even in principle, as a tool for creating white unity. Instead, the road ahead seems to entail escalating demonisation of people with glasses who ride bicycles and enjoy ethnic food until it ends up in some kind of tackier version of the Khmer Rouge.

2.

One of the things that was supposed to have been settled a long time ago is that the Civil Rights movement was a victory of the more powerful over the less powerful. In the context of the bus that she was on, Rosa Parks was the less powerful actor, but that bus is not the correct frame of reference. Rosa Parks was picked by an activist organisation, which was funded by foundations that were, properly understood, part of the most powerful government in the history of the world and their opponents were a bunch of doomed hicks. The ability to create and distribute images that determine popular opinion is power; not the only form, for sure, but a very potent one, and it doesn’t just appear, but has to be cultivated through organisation of talent.

The Trump administration chose to make Minneapolis the site of confrontation for two extremely good reasons. The first is that the local and state governments were refusing to comply with federal laws to facilitate the deportation of illegal immigrants incarcerated for committing a crime. The second is that the state government had been exposed for facilitating organized mass fraud by the Somali community. These are two issues over which the Right can command the support of perhaps 80% of the American population. There is literally no more advantageous battleground they could have picked, which means that if they turned it into a defeat then it’s because they suck.

The strategy of the Left in Minneapolis was to create images and video of ICE agents attacking or killing sympathetic-looking victims. It’s not a very difficult tactic to understand, and it is not very difficult to understand what the appropriate response is, namely to not take actions that generate these images, but instead generate images that create the opposite effect (for example, victims of crimes committed by illegal immigrants in Minneapolis, contrasted to effective and peaceable administration of immigration policy in Texas). The online Right has managed to convince themselves of a different and completely insane thesis, namely that this was a test of their ability not to give into moral blackmail. All they had to do was respond to each image with a Chad face and eventually the Left would just give in or something. In other words, they didn’t even understand what it is they are competing for. People say theory is overrated compared to practice, but it beats memes.

3.

There is an account of Moldbuggism according to which it fundamentally states that the Right can never win in political competition. Stated like that, it is clearly wrong because you can easily find countries where the Right has won. In Turkey, Islamists won because demographics worked in their favour against the westernisers, and because Islam solved the Schelling point problem of what the anti-liberal thesis was supposed to be. An additional factor is that the Islamists were able to disrupt the westernisers’ ability to co-ordinate with liberal forces in the West itself by using the rhetoric of anti-imperialism. Turkish state media, similar to Qatar, gains international support, or at least acquiescence, by promoting left-liberalism for every country except Turkey.

Another example is our dear Israel. Of course, again, demographics here are key, as well as the decision of the Israeli Right to co-opt Judaism as its ideology after various daft experiments in the early decades of the State. The Left here has also been progressively more obstructed in its ability to coordinate with global liberalism by the disruptive actions of the pro- Palestinian movement. Another obviously important factor has been the consistent policy of Palestinian rejectionist groups in committing terrorist attacks, the objective function of which has only ever been to undermine the peace camp or anyone associating with, or associated with, it.

However, none of that is the most important thing. We could go through the whole world and look at all the examples, but already we should be able to see the common factor between Turkey and Israel: they are peripheral. People are worried about an exodus of Israeli human capital setting off an economic doomloop, and this is a legitimate concern, but the truth is that real elite human capital already left Israel. In large part, it just never came in the first place. The anti-Bibi movement is quite lame. Take Lior Schlein:

I think ‘mildly amusing’ is about as approbative as it gets. Real elite Israelis, if they haven’t left already, just don’t care that much. They can easily get just as good jobs abroad, and the frictional costs of immigration from language and cultural adaptation are not a big deal to them. The people who stay and fight are the people for whom staying and fighting is their easier option.

In America the precise opposite dynamic is at work. There are better (way better) places for the elite to retire to and holiday in, but there is nowhere better for them to prosper and jostle for status. Not only that, the elites and aspiring elites of elsewhere who decide they can do better come, if they can, to America and, at least nine times out of ten, it is the culture of urban liberalism that they will be joining. The strategy of overwhelming liberalism through mobilisation of the yeast is more promising the further away you are from the imperial core. You can argue about whether it’s really an improvement, but it’s a real thing that can happen. The closer you get to the core, the more improbable it becomes, until, eventually, it is merely absurd.

4.

One of the more important remaining open questions in the human sciences is to what extent the liberalism of mentally balanced, affluent people who have their life together is innate and to what extent it is culturally conditioned. There must be something innate to it, or modern states wouldn’t keep defaulting to left-liberalism as their operating system regardless of starting point. Noah Carl has dealt with this, and I have little to add, but I have an illustrative example.

Curt Jaimungal interviews various physicists and physicist-adjacent philosophers. I’m not sure I really learn anything much listening, but it’s nice to pass the time while doing boring things. It almost goes without saying that the people he interviews are 90% white and 90% male, but it occurred to me how comically absurd it would be if one of his interviewees refused to talk to him because he was an Indian. It is scarcely less ridiculous to imagine them spinning some tale about how they were from a different nation, and though they didn’t think either one was inferior, they preferred to be part of a community of kinfolk ineffably unified by strands of interlinking culture and blood stretching back and forwards over thousands of years nurtured in a particular soil and whatever. Of course, listening to a physics podcast doesn’t make me elite human capital, it makes me a sadact, but we should be able to agree that actual physicists are elite human capital. In the life of the mind, borders are just kind of dumb. This is not a new discovery. The absence of borders is very dumb, too, hence the most realistic patch to stop everything totally falling apart is Open Borders except for [racial epithet] if only someone can market it.

5.

Since Trump burst on to the scene, the most obvious and yet strangely difficult task has been to explain what Trump really is. One answer is, of course:

But we’re all big boys here. The most likely solution is still that Trump is the adaptation of the American political system to evolving demographic realities. Democracy - let us just agree to use the word - requires a Right-Wing party or coalition to periodically wield the instruments of government in order to (i) collect and safely siphon off opposition to the general progress of left-liberalism, (ii) to obscure power relations and allow for the Left to self-conceptualise as engaging in resistance in order to allow for permanent revolution and (iii) to clean up when the system overshoots and does a bunch of really dumb stuff. In the post-war era, the voter base of the Republican party was (a) conservative Protestants and (b) married white people who wanted to pay less in taxes. The decline of both groups as a share of the population to below the level at which the GOP could be electorally competitive at a national level required a new model to appeal, most specifically, to Hispanics and proles. It turns out that a kind of confused and bombastic soft white nationalism is the most effective tool for doing that.

However, I’m increasingly thinking that’s not what Trump really is. The other option is that Trump is the outward manifestation of a fundamental process in which the internet has rendered the Right-Wing opposition party too dysfunctional to do its jobs properly.2 The system can no longer be provided with janitorial services because the people tasked with doing so are locked into an online feedback loop that is incompatible with even medium-term political manoeuvring. What should be happening right now is that the abundance liberals and Bari Weiss types cross the aisle and use the GOP apparatus to solve national problems caused by intra-Democrat dysfunctions, repeating a centuries-old cycle. But not only will the GOP not have them, they have no desire to join its freak show. As has happened before, a stable self-ordering social system has been broken by new communications technology. Democracy, against its own will, is thus forced to adopt a one-party liberal state as its crystallised form because no-one not insane enough is there to oppose it, and so the self-stabilising equilibrium of liberalism will have to become something brittle. What is brittle will break. If so, despite everything, the Dissident Right will have won after all.

There is a silent conspiracy about Iran. Not a conspiracy of silence, for its participants know neither the word nor the thing. A conspiracy of chatter. Inane, contentless chatter, bulging endlessly at you, allowing you no rest. A conspiracy of memes, and dunks, and outrage, and tweets, and outrage, and Instagram selfies, and outrage, just so much outrage. Are you not yet outraged? Look how outrageous they are!

On the one side of this conspiracy are the purest specimens of human dirt: the tankies, the MAGA communists, the people who don’t get that Tucker Carlson is performance art, the vermin who read DropSite news for insight, the thing that Sam Kriss was before he became Numb. They are here to tell you that the protesters are armed thugs, that they have been put up to it by Mossad, that Israel wants to drag America into a regime change war. The Iranian regime is the head of the alliance against Zionist crimes, and now the Zionists want to snub it out.

On the other hand, there are our brothers, and the weirdo goyim who can’t get enough of them. They have a very different message. They want you to know that Israel is behind the Iranian protestors, that they want to drag lead America into a regime change war. The Iranian regime is the head of the alliance against Zionism, and the Zionists want to snub it out.

The Iran regime change movement has a dirty secret (I think it still just barely qualifies as that): it’s not very interested in regime change. Sure, the foot-soldiers, they’re legit for the most part. But the guys who know what’s up? Come off it.

The reductio ad absurdum of the Iranian opposition is the Crown Prince, Reza Pahlavi. What is his plan to remedy Iran having decimated its water sources through decades of crime and incompetence? What is his plan to deal with the millions (and they are millions) of Iranians who sincerely believe in the imminent Shi’ite millennium and will gleefully kill and die for it? What is his plan to get round the fact that most of the economy is in the hands of the IRGC crime syndicate? How does he plan to entice the Iranians with talent and drive who have buggered off over the past 40 years to take a 2/3rds cut in their income and return home? How can he create a unifying national ethos to replace Shi’ite Islam in a country that is only slightly more than 50% Persian? What are his policies to address the reality that Iran has a TFR of 1.7 and is facing a 1st world population pyramid with a 3rd world economic base?

You dummy! There is no plan. Why would the Crown Prince want to go back and rule a messed-up disaster zone like Iran? Because he wants to be a King? He’s already a King. What would he gain from having subjects with their interminable, unsolvable bullshit? He’s not a psycho. What he wants to do is stand in front of a gawdy, purple (why always purple?) stage with weird strobe lights and tell wealthy Jewish Americans that the mullahs are criminals (which is true), that they cannot be appeased (which is true), that they have wrecked Iran (which is true), and that America messed up big time by not giving his Dad support when crunch time hit (which is true). He can do that right now. If the regime falls, he might have to pack it in.

Here’s some real talk: Iran is done. Its only hope now is for colonial powers to turn up, dismember, and exploit the place, but they won’t do that. The oil isn’t worth the squeeze. In the era of liquid money, there’s a lot easier ways to leverage political power to make bank than go to places full of resentful natives and build infrastructure and stop them killing each other over whether Abdullah or Abu Gaganga was really best mates with Muhammad (no-one cares! get over it!). And all you get in return is endless gyp. So there’s no hope after all, just decline and chaos, and gunshots aimed at the eyes.

This is a non-deviationist Moldbuggist blog. That means I oppose both the Right-Wing heretical version of Unqualified Reservations called ‘Yarvinism’ and the Left-Wing heretical version advocated by blog-buddy, Deep Left Analysis. However, we all get one deviation, and my protest against the master is his contention that government is fundamentally easy.1 I’m pretty sure government is hard. The fact that it looks easy on paper is just one of the factors contributing to it actually being very hard. What’s easy, when you have modern tools at your disposal, is ruining a country, ruining it so bad there’s nothing to fix. A lot of governments have been at it, and the 21st century will be substantially the story of the chickens coming back to find there’s nowhere to roost, one by one.

OK, with that out the way

But we’re not here to talk about the Reza Pahlavi or Iran. One thing I share with the hasbarists is that I don’t actually care about Iran. I see photos of body bags strewn across the floor, people milling around between them, and I feel a little sick, but they are just images. I turn off the images and I feel better. I would like to say that the difference between me and them is that I am honest, but that’s not true either. This is all artifice. It’s not like I jut look at my keyboard and the unfiltered contents of my brain appear on the screen. The difference is that I get my views by shorting the market for lies, and they get it by inflating it. Just as with the real economy, we are both equally sinners.

Last week, Israeli soldiers stole around 250 sheep from Syrian farmers and drove them in trucks to various farmers in the West Bank. The soldiers are in Syria because the Israeli Golan Heights needs a buffer zone. The Golan Heights belong to Israel because the Galilee needed a buffer zone. Both these needs were perfectly real, and, in the fullness of time, the need to annex a bit more of Syria to protect this buffer zone will be real too. Some of the soldiers involved in this operation got fired, but they’ll probably just join a different unit, and everyone knows no-one will be punished. Eventually, the Syrians in the area will get sufficiently annoyed at this treatment that they’ll kick off, and the need to crush them will also be real. We cannot yet say that they must go, but it shall be.

Most of mankind’s history was punctuated by waves of mass removals of human populations. Archaeologists are used to finding that all the pots in one layer are Corded Ware and then they suddenly turn into Verdic Red Ware. They used to argue whether it was because the Verdic pot people turned up and killed all the Corded pot people, or because the Corded pot people decided that the Verdic pots were much better. Then the geneticists turned up and settled it: it was genocide. History went like that up until the Indo Europeans who, possessed of lactose tolerance or whatever other advantage it really was, came and did what those before them had done: kill, kill, and kill. Then something changed. Maybe it was the moral reforms of the Axial Age, maybe it was ambient gut bacteria, maybe it was aliens, but people stopped doing genocide. Really. Conquests still happened, of course, and they could be bloody, but the genetic evidence is clear: the ancestors of a random person in 1800 from 2,000 years before most likely lived where he lived. Empires and principalities ebbed and flowed over the map, but the people who lived under them mostly just kept chugging along, changing, when they needed to, their hats, or their language, or their gods. The English speak a beautiful bastard mixture of German and French, but deep down in their cells, they are mostly Celts. The Spanish absorbed Visigoth and Arab DNA, but they are mostly EEFs. The Palestinians? Sorry Ahmed, you’re Yahud.

Of course, there were exceptions. The Mongols did make an earnest attempt to kill everyone they could, but, even there, 750 years after the sack of Baghdad, the locals don’t have slitty eyes if you bother to check. The discovery of the New World also pushed the envelope. Suddenly, millions of people were dying before European eyes, stricken by disease that could only be divine judgement. Killing the survivors, many of whom reverted to the stone age but with horses, didn’t really seem like a big deal. Then, in the 19th Century, people noticed that new technology for killing people was a game changer. You could mechanise things sufficiently that, if you just didn’t pay attention, you could have the military do Bronze Age genocides over there and still have developed civilization over here. By the time the 20th Century rolled around, there was enough proof of concept to roll this out at scale. Once again, the world saw peoples and soil separated by force of the sword, but this time packed off into trains, sometimes to die, sometimes just to somewhere else.

And then we stopped. We needn’t have stopped. There are plenty of peoples that we’d be better off without, conflicts that could be solved by telling one side to pack up their stuff and scram. I’m trying to be good, so I won’t name names, but you can read between the lines. Why did we stop? Some people say it was the Jews; others say it was the goyim. Really, though, it’s because, after indulging in it for a few ghastly decades, we just couldn’t anymore. The Nazis tried, they really did try, to shed this awful thing, squeamishness about human blood, the false morality of the bourgeoisie, but they were faking it too. If even they needed to dose up on meth and then still cheat by herding their victims into carbon-monoxide filled trucks where you can’t see their face, then what hope do we have? So, we patched up international law, with a whole bunch of additional safeguards, and we tried to move on. It didn’t make a great deal of sense, but it kind of worked.

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The general principle is that we’re not supposed to teach the oral law to gentiles, but the general principle has exceptions, and it’s clear enough that there’s not much to be gained now by maintaining a detached silence. has what I think is a very good general introduction to the issue, and, at that level of detail, I don’t think there’s too much to add. Nevertheless, as a talmudjude myself, I think there’s something missing. It’s not something that, necessarily, would make an outside party more positively disposed, though I think it might. It is something, I think, that without having first chapped, you can’t really understand what’s going on in general. Again, given the circumstances, I don’t think there’s anything really to lose by being candid, but I also don’t need the aggro either from JIDF types or Nazis so we’re paywalling.

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The Hebrew language has four guttural letters. They are:

• א Aleph, pronounced either as a silent letter or, more usually, a guttural stop.

• ע 'Ayin, a voiced pharyngeal fricative

• ה Heh, a voiceless glottal fricative, like the English letter h.

• ח, Heth, a voiceless pharyngeal fricative - henceforth /ħ/ - like an h but raspier

Except that’s not true, at least it’s not true if the word ‘Hebrew’ refers to the language of the State of Israel. If so, it has one guttural letter. To be honest, that’s cheating because most languages do. Say the words apple a few times. Unless you are Spanish or something you said it with a glottal stop. As to the rest, Israeli is all balls no strikes. Ayin is pronounced as glottal stop no different from aleph by essentially everyone, and large swathes of society will habitually use one letter in place of the other in writing. While many older Israelis do know how to say heh, it has whittled down with each generation to nothing. One of the first things you learn as an English teacher is that you should definitely not say that the letter h is pronounced like a ה, because this will just lead to confusion about whether h is actually a vowel. Then, of course, we have the infamous heth, or rather the KHet.

The story of the letter ח is as follows:

• The letter was pronounced universally by all Jews as /ħ/. However, under the influence of Greek, this tended to degrade to /h/. Rabbinic Judaism protested this development and barred those incapable of correct pronunciation from leading prayer services and similar.

• Ashkenazi Jews started pronouncing ח as an /x/ like the German ch sometimes in the Middle Ages. This was obviously facilitated by the prominence of /x/ in German, but I think maybe it was also motivated by a desire to avoid the prohibition on pronouncing ח as /h/ leading to over-correction, a phenomenon common generally among Jews who adopted the Masoretic pronunciation tradition.

• The letter כ, which is an aspirated /k/, is spirantized when it appears after a vowel. Among Ashkenazim, this was realised as a /x/, which means that the letters weak-כ and ח became the same phoneme, despite the totally different morphological rules in normative Hebrew (Masoretic) morphology that apply to them. Among non-Ashkenazim, weak כ was realised as a /χ̟/, which is slightly further back on the tongue. Apparently, this is the historically accurate realisation, even though /x/ is closer in the mouth to k.

• The revivers of Hebrew all agreed that ח should be pronounced as a ħ, but were unable to impress this on the children of the Yishuv who inherited Yiddish phonology from their parents. Thus, children grew up learning that ח and כ are the same, just like back in Belarus, but with a bit of a twist. Their teachers managed to shift the prevalent pronunciation of this Siamese-twin letter from /x/ to /χ̟/, thus giving it a little bit of Eastern flavour.

• Though MENA Jews arrived saying /ħ/, both in their native Arabic and liturgical Hebrew, they lost it in one or two generations though Israeli schooling.

The result is that Israeli has a lot of /χ̟/ in it. Other languages have /χ̟/, too, but no language has two letters that say it. Further, Israelis tend to exaggerate the /χ̟/ in an unusual way, especially in public speaking. This might be a legacy of the artificial labours early speakers had to perform to adopt it, or perhaps just simply the way that it doesn’t really shtim very well with Israeli phonology overall, leading to hyper-articulation. Another factor is that the Masoretic vocalisation system, adopted in the manner of a cargo-cult by the maskilim and then the Zionists, contains multiple orthoepic devices designed to ensure proper articulation of guttural letters, which, when you substitute in an /χ̟/, results in excessive emphasis. Regardless, the result is that Israeli is quite an ugly language by any normal standards, with the characteristic and famous phenomenon of ‘spit talk’.1 One way this is annoying is that, if you are standing too close to an Israeli and he is agitated or exuberant, you will probably get spit in your face, which is gross. But even if you don’t, it just sounds bad and gives you a headache. The other result is that Arabs take the piss out of us because we say Khamas and it makes us sound like retards.

Now, there are two Zionist defences from this charge. The first is gay and involves such observations as ‘languages change bro’, ‘there’s no such thing as a correct language bro’ and the like. This is the thing about Zionists, especially the ones to the Right. They love to talk about how Israel is reviving an ancient civilization, that they are transcending the emptiness of modernity, and it’s all great when you stick to the generalities. But if you ever push them on anything specific about their project, suddenly we’re back to absolute gutter liberalism: ‘language is just what people speak, bro, there’s no right and wrong’. Kill yourself.

The more sophisticated apologetic for the kh goes like this:

The Hebrew Ḥet is often mockingly used as proof of Israeli Hebrew’s allegedly “European” nature. Indeed, in Israeli Hebrew it is most often pronounced as an uvular fricative /ḫ/ hence Arabic words such as ḥabībī become khabībī. This isn’t universally the case, especially among speakers of Hebrew that came from the Arab world. The pronunciation of Ḥet as /ḫ/ isn’t etymologically wrong either, as it was originally pronounced both as a pharyngeal fricative /ḥ/ and /ḫ/ in Classical Hebrew. During the period of Aramaic influence over Hebrew this was levelled to /ḥ/, and later on to /ḫ/. This last change ironically restored etymological consistency for many words, such as חמש ḫaméš “five” from Proto-Semitic *ḫamšum or ירח yaʁéᵃḫ “moon” from PS *warḫum, the toponym “Jericho” is derived from that same word yet in Arabic it is called ˀArīḥā which is etymologically incorrect due to the Aramaic levelling of /ḫ/ to /ḥ/ mentioned earlier (the word تاريخ tārīḫ “date; history” in Arabic is derived from that same root for “moon” and therefore preserves the /ḫ/).

For those who find linguistics tough, the TLDR here is ‘I am cleverer than you’, and he is cleverer than me, but I am more disagreeable. I rate this claim ‘mostly false’ for reasons I will explain in the footnote right here →2, but, even if it was true, what does it change? The fact is that if you say khamas, you sound like a retard, and if you say KHamas while spitting like an Israeli on TV you sound like a double retard. The reason you sound like a retard is that Hebrew was deformed in an alien language environment, and then Zionists failed to fix it, and the language that was born was deformed.

Because Zionism is disgusting and anti-Zionism is disgusting, the online debate is between whether Israeli is really Hebrew, or whether it is actually re-lexicalised Yiddish or some nonsense. Imagine an orange. It is bitter; it is mouldy; it has lichen on it; there are flies. The owner feels embarrassed about this orange; perhaps he should throw it away instead of keeping it in the fruit bowl. But then some absolute imbecile clown comes along and says, ‘this isn’t an orange at all, it’s an apple’. Now you can debate whether it’s an orange for the next gorillian years, and you can win! So it is with Israeli. As long as there are enough dinguses willing to go to bat for the claim that it’s not Hebrew at all, but white supremacist settler colonialism reified as words, you don’t have to think about whether it’s any good.

If you take a step back, there’s an obvious word for a language like Israeli that has lost over a third of its phonology, that has been relexicalized in a haphazard fashion with tens of thousands of words from other languages, and which is developing new grammatical structures unknown to the language before: a creole. I’m not the first to point this out, but most linguists reject it for technical reasons. A creole has to evolve out of a pidgin, and Israeli didn’t. However, that is based on the assumption that linguistics is both value-neutral as a science (fair enough) and cannot inform value judgments (completely baseless inference). A creole has to be judged on purely formal criteria, and since a creole doesn’t differ generically from any other language, it can only be assigned as such based on its historical genesis. Since Israeli’s historical genesis is sui generis, it can’t be assigned as anything. Simples! But we neither have to be liberals, nor accept arbitrary and unprincipled invocations of liberalism by Zionists either. Sure, you can explain, each one on its own, why it’s totally part of normal language development for Israeli not to have a ט and not to have a ק and not to have a ח and not to have a ה and not to have an ע and not to have a ג or a ת or a ד in the weak state, and to assimilate ָ to ַ and ֵ to ֶ , and to lose gemination entirely, and whatever else I forgot. But if you put it all together, that’s a creole bro.

Why am I agitated? Well, it’s my thing, but also, I’m annoyed because word on the street is that I’m actually a Zionist, so I thought I needed to clear some things up.

Zionism is dumb and it sucks and I hate it and it’s dumb

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This is an argument for Zionism. Or is it? What type of argument is it?

One way it could be an argument is in service of based, zero-Fs-given Zionism that prides itself on the negation of exile.

Before the State of Israel, these Jews lived in foreign lands, under the rule and subject to the whim of other nations, while speaking goyish languages. Now they are back in their homeland, speaking their ancestral tongue, and are free, self-governing people living lives of dignity in Afula.

However, that’s probably not the argument intended. Instead, the meme likely serves the agenda of cringe, hasbara Zionism and it goes like this:

Israel is accused of genocide, ethnic cleansing and every other sin, but we see who are the real perpetrators of ethnic cleansing. Communities of hundreds of thousands who had lived there for thousands of years were expelled or forced to flee by Arab and Islamic intolerance. The Jews of the Middle East are left with one tiny patch of land, whereas the Arabs have TWENTY TWO COUNTRIES. By nature and logic, having fewer countries gives you the moral high ground, and thus you should support Israel.

The human heart contains multitudes and the human brain contains principally miscellaneous litter and half-remembered clichés. Thus it is not only possible, but actually the case that the average Zionist believes both of these arguments. Zionism is vindicated both by virtue of its success in liberating the Jews of MENA from the inherent indignity of exile, but also vindicated by the fact that these Jews were tragically wrenched from their homes by the same forces that attack Israel today. To be both free and victim is, ultimately, the Jewish dream; free to mawkishly cry out in pain as you level another apartment block.

OK, that allusion is a bit over the line maybe, but let’s circle back. We’ve seen that there are two ways that this meme can serve as an argument for Zionism, but there is also an obvious way it can serve as an argument against, and it goes like this:

For thousands of years, Jews lived across the Middle East. Sometimes it was better sometimes it was worse. Jews drifted towards the places where it was better. Thus Morocco had 265,000 Jews whereas Libya had 38,000. However, Zionism made all this untenable. Arab nationalism, while in its formative years, found in opposition to Zionism its essential test of legitimacy. Inevitably, this was turned against domestic Jewish populations, and, all the more so, when, following the total failure of their original plan to overwhelm the Palestinian Arab population by immigration, the Zionists elected to rescue their project by means of mass expulsion. Jewish life from Morocco to Iraq became untenable, and, in scarcely more than a decade, thousands of years of culture, faith and dignity went up in smoke, living on now only in the ghastly pastiche of the Shasnik, at best, and the common ars, at worst.

As I said, the facts themselves do not create the story. We each must choose which narrative structure makes the most sense. However, we need not do so arbitrarily. Here are two possible narratives of what might have happened to Middle Eastern Jewry in the absence of Zionism.

1. In the absence of Zionism, the early participation of Jewish intellectuals such as Anwar Shaul or Mir Basri in Arab national revival would have continued, and Jews would have played a roughly similar role to Christians in the formation of Arab national consciousness.

2. In the absence of the Balfour Declaration, Arab Nationalism would have evolved to be less hostile to British imperialism and thus Anglo-American culture generally.

3. For both of the above reasons, Arab Nationalists would not have seen the Nazis as allies or a source of inspiration, and so would have not absorbed all the bad ideas they did from Nazism, including, but certainly not limited to, antisemitism.

4. In the absence of the state of Israel, Arab Nationalists would have taken a more pro-American stance during the Cold War.

5. For reasons (3) and (4), Arab Nationalism would have converged on a market-based path to economic growth.

6. In the absence of repeated humiliations by Zionism, as well as with a slightly larger demographic base and better human capital, and enjoying the sympathy of global Jewry, Arab Nationalism would have resisted the paranoid and lunatic trends that have bedevilled it.

7. Arab Nationalists would have achieved their dream of uniting most of the Levant as Greater Syria, which would have broadly peaceful relations with both Egypt and Iraq. They would create stable economic growth that would allow them to successfully suppress the Muslim Brotherhood. Radical Islamism never becomes a thing outside of Saudi Arabia and some Gulf States, which eventually drop it too out of embarrassment.

Obviously, that’s a very, very best case scenario. So here’s Option no. 2.

1. Just as with Italian Fascism, Arab Nationalism eventually turns against the Jews who did so much to aid it in its earlier stages.

2. British obstinacy or incompetence alienates the Arabs anyway.

3. The pull of Nazism is irresistible.

4. After the defeat of Nazism and absorbing its worst ideas, Arab Nationalists are still fiercely hostile to Britain and so flip to the Russian side in the Cold War.

5. Arab Nationalism makes a giant tit of everything.

6. Because of its manifest incompetence, and the general tendency of all nationalist movements to rightoidism, Arab Nationalism descends on a path of paranoia and the search for a scapegoat.

7. Islamic radicalism rises in response to the gross incompetence of Arab Nationalism. Desperate to stave off rising popular support for the Brotherhood, Arab regimes give in to their least destabilising demand and initiate an escalating cycle of persecution of Jews. Jews have nowhere to go, and it all eventually culminates in a Middle Eastern Holocaust.

Which narrative we see as more likely is not a simple function of facts. It is even less a simple function of facts than how we choose to interpret the history that actually happened. However, what cannot be ignored is the multiple ways that Zionism has in reality made the Middle East worse:

1. Defeat in the 1948 War (which many Arab regimes only entered with reluctance as a result of public outrage over reports of expulsions and massacres), led directly to regime change in Egypt in 1952 and Syria in 1949, and contributed to the eventual revolution in Iraq in 1958. In all these cases, relatively civilized and sane regimes were replaced with relatively barbaric and disgusting ones. Syria, in particular, was sent into a spiral of coups that progressively elevated the most depraved elements of the body politic.

2. Palestinian refugees from the 1948 war destabilised Lebanon and caused the Lebanese Civil War, collapsing the region’s best country.

3. Zionism created Palestinian Nationalism and national identity out of essentially nothing (as our hasbarists are ever eager to remind us), giving the world the PLO and Hamas.

4. Defeat in 1948 boosted the Muslim Brotherhood in Egypt and around the Middle East.

One big problem with Israel-Palestine discourse is that the real and legitimate criticism of Zionism as a cause of bad things in a region are rarely made because the critics of Zionism are themselves supporters of, or at least simps for, those very bad things. It falls to me therefore to point out the obvious:

• Arab Nationalism probably would have picked up some bad things from European fascism in the absence of Zionism, but it probably would have done so less.

• Arab Nationalism probably would have been attracted to Soviet patronage, and thus implemented disastrous economic policies, in the absence of Zionism, but it probably would have done so less.

• Arab Nationalism probably would have succumbed to paranoid and mad tendencies, but it probably would have done so less.

• Islamic revivalism would probably have risen in response to the general rubbishness of the Middle East, but it probably would have done so less.

etc. Overall, the likely story of Middle Eastern Jewry in the absence of Zionism is like neither of the extremes above. It’s probably more or less similar to Arab Christians in our timeline. Over time, the population would have gradually declined, as Jews took advantage of assistance from wealthier western Jews that isn’t open to Druze, Yazidis and Alawites. In some places, the Jewish population would have emptied out quickly as they collapsed into civil war, but overall it would be a drip-drip thing, and it’s likely that Morocco would have seen its Jewish population increase from immigration from other MENA countries. Jews who left would not have been subjected to the Zionist hazing ritual of learning a new language in a concentration camp, so they would have come out talkative avaricious fops in pointy shoes like French Jewry, rather than genocidal orcs with stripes on the side of their head like in Israel [these are GENERALISATIONS, calm down]. In some cases, there probably would have been short- to medium-term issues getting Jews out of sticky situations without the permanent Israeli backstop. Certain populations of Jews would be stuck in really deplorable circumstance as common today among Christians in parts of Egypt and Iraq. In some ways it would have been better, and some ways worse.

One Zionist argument is that because a really bad event is a possible result of an alternative Zionism-free timeline, then Zionism is vindicated on the precautionary principle. However, it’s cheating to compare the full variance of an alternative timeline with one variable change to what actually happened. We also need to take into account the full range of possibilities in the timeline with Zionism. Perhaps the biggest redpill about Zionism is that what happened was quite far towards the better end of possible outcomes. A lot of stuff in this country’s history could quite easily have gone wrong:

1. After Yitzhak Rabin shot down the Altalena, Menahem Begin might have decided not to cuck and went to war. Either the infant state collapses in chaos, or the pressures of the resulting civil war turn Israel into a full Left-authoritarian regime and Soviet puppet.

2. The Czech Republic refuses to sell arms to the Yishuv, and so does everyone else. Despite its massive advantages in terms of human capital and organisation, the Yishuv is outgunned, and can only keep control of a rump state in the Galilee.

3. The IDF high command took a lot of calculated risks in 1967, and they rolled 6s every time. If they had rolled 3s, they still would have won, though less stunningly. But if they had rolled 1s they could have lost the war, and the state collapses.

4. If 200 people die on the USS Liberty, not 34, and Lyndon Johnson is just a bit more touchy, he makes a big issue about it, Israel loses all international support, and the economy completely collapses.

5. US refuses to resupply Israel in 1973 and Israel loses the war with massive territorial concessions. A ceasefire is imposed, but Israel is now not viable and goes into a tailspin.

6. Hizb’Allah goes all in on October 7th and the IDF collapses across the board. Iran thinks, ‘why not’ and chucks all its ballistic missiles in. Iran is destroyed as a result, but so is Israel.

In any of these cases, you get all the negative consequences of Zionism on the Jews of the region, but without Israel being able to act as a refuge for them (or it does, and they all die). One way out of this is to say that Israel’s history is protected by Providence, so all these bad things couldn’t happen. The obvious objection is that the State of Israel was founded (a) against the express will of 80%+ of Rabbis entrusted to express God’s will and (b) by atheists who explicitly saw it as an act of renunciation of the Jewish religion. So you need to explain why it’s God’s will to disobey God’s will and that requires some theology that I’ll describe today as ‘funky’ because I’m pushing 40 and people tell me I can’t keep calling things gay and retarded. More obviously, though, if you think Zionism a religious obligation then this conversation was concluded before it begun.

So that leaves us with comparing the likely alternative scenario with what actually happened. One specific thing (a refuge for MENA Jewry that would never close its doors) was better, and pretty much everything else was worse. If you find value in Jews living in Eretz Yisrael (qualified yes), or lower rates of assimilation (qualified yes), or national self-determination (no), or you think Israeli cultural and religious achievements are impressive (bro), then certainly it was all worth it, and, if not, then not. Zionism stands or falls based on whether what it creates is something of which Jews can be justly proud; the question cannot be circumvented.