"Ruppin, who several years later founded the Brit Shalom movement advocating a binational Arab-Jewish state, repeated his proposal for the removal of the Arab fellahin to Syria in a letter dated 12 May 1914 to Victor Jacobson, a member of the Zionist Executive and the Zionist Organization's representative in Istanbul (1908-15)."
I found this in Nur Masalha's book cataloguing the history of transfer. Notably, Nur does not mention any letter by Bergmann despite the fact that, if it exists, it almost certainly would appear in that book. This is the only possible source I can find for Shahak's claim and even then it's the wrong person, dated to 1914-15 implying there's multiple letters when it's just one letter from 1914, and the wrong country (Iraq vs Syria). The best case is he garbled basically all his facts here.
Thanks. I need to review his stupid book at some point. Masalha published two years before Shahak, so it sounds like he just copied it over like the tool he was.
The first time I ever heard of Israel Shahak was in a Ron Unz article reviewing this same book back in 2018, around the time Unz started to lose touch with reality. He claimed to have hired a graduate student to investigate Shahak's claims and ended up not finding any errors lol. Now who that graduate student was (talmud scholar? an Unz.com comments section contributor?) and what exactly he wrote about the book was never revealed.
I’m late in getting to this but it’s fantastic!! The reason it seems Said and others as smart as him fell for Shahak is because he practices pure random association American Studies methods. Though the generational difference making Shahak not so fashionable these days is a big one - in the late 20th century the bogey religious fundamentalism was much more in vogue than of settler colonialism or whiteness, and the whiplashed day school kids who are the preponderance of JVP et al can far more easily grab on to the latter.
The discussion of the darker tones of the romanticism of Bergmann and Buber happens to be extremely timely for me, having just gotten to 1929 and its repercussions in my book, and having to explain why the binationalists claimed Moses Hess for their side and not as a political Zionist.
Interesting article. I agree it might be good for some Orthodox Jews to read Shahak, even just for דע מה שתשיב to what all the antisemites are reading. But he does greatly exaggerate things, and he focuses too much on texts, rather than on how things are actually understood by Orthodox Jews. For example, I think, even in the Yeshivish world, attitudes to goyim, are often much more influenced by the universalism of Meiri, R. Hirsch, etc., than by some extreme statement by a European Achron, written in a time period of constant pogroms. Also, as you point out, his claims about Chabad are ridicilous. The Rebbe was literally, one of the most universalist gedolim ever. He was trying to help all the non-Jews merit heaven, by sending his chassidim to tell them about the seven mitzvos of Noach.
Was just wondering, did the Rebbe really say that one solider was worth killing infinite civilians? That seems very suprising.
Looking forward to the next part of the series. Do you know when it will come out?
Interesting. To be fair, he seems to be talking about extreme collateral damage, not deliberately targeting innocents. Also, what's interesting is that he seems to be arguing this would help save Arab civilians also, which is a far cry from the far-right who don't care a hoot about Arab life. In a similar vein, he is quoted as having said we should have said expelled the Palestinians in the WB and Gaza in 67, because it would have caused less Palestinians to be killed, then were killed in the wars we fought against them.
As with Rav Kook, if you advocate mental racial supremacism plus being nice about it, people tend to forget about the being nice part.
It's easy to slip from 'let's do this insane militaristic thing because it will lead to less death in the long term' to 'whoopsies, turns out it won't lead to less death, let's do it anyway'.
That was kind of the story with Adolf Hitler. Blitzkrieg was supposed to mean short wars with minimal cost. By the end, Gotterdammerung had come into vogue with the idea that a Germany which remained after defeat wasn't worth saving.
Do you speak Yiddish? The Rebbe says here that putting soldiers at risk is wrong when you have the ability to flatten a whole area, and you should just give a short warning so that everyone in the area can leave. You can disagree with the tactics, but not particularly bloodthirsty
I understand enough to follow with help from Google Translate when it gets hard, but I didn't read it and don't need to for this point. The false messiah Schneerson is widely cited in support of terror bombing of civilians in Gaza *even massively in excess of what we already did*, and the murder of infinity Arabs to save even one soldier. If you think this is a wrong interpretation, you need to explain that to *them* not to *me*.
"The jews invented modernity" critique is I think directionally accurate, for better and for worse, to the point of almost being too obvious to comment on. At least, jews made disproportionate contributions to physics, chemistry, and medical advances that saved hundreds of millions of lives at the same time they furnished disproportionate ammunition for both deranged left-wing intellectual movements and inflexible capitalist dogmas that are currently cannibalising our civilisation. Uniquely or even primarily responsible, no, but... well, you know what they say about per capita.
Directionally accurate? Maybe if you limit your scope just to the later part of the 20th Century. Virtually all these Jewish contributions to the sciences (and indeed the arts) come well after Renaissance and the birth of the modern world, when secularisation was partially forced on European Jewry from the outside. Which isn't to downplay Jewish achievements in this sphere, but they begin quite late and thus don't have much of a claim to have "created the modern world."
Directly consqeuent on this, any attentive reader of Shahak will notice his stressing of precisely this fact *considerably lessens* Jewish "group agency" beloved of people like Kevin Mcdonald in history, and thus the harder 'puppet-masters' rendition of classic anti-semitism can't actually be built on Shahak's book being reviewed here.
I'll get to it in the relevant chapter, but Shahak completely ignores when the Jews were invited back to England. Jews didn't have so much of an active role in the early stages of modernity, but part of modernity in its more benign versions is having a soft spot for Jews.
(1) I'm pretty sure figures like Max Sänger and Fritz Haber were active and influential well before the latter part of the 20th century, as were Marx and Freud
(2) I already qualified with "not primarily responsible", so I'm not sure what you're telling me I didn't already state
(3) Plenty of right-wing traditionalists/reactionaries will argue that western civilisation peaked somewhere between 1850 and 1918, which would imply that maximal jewish influence neatly coincides with our civilisational decline (this heavily depends on how you define 'decline' and correlation doesn't prove causation, of course, but it's not a priori wrong either)
(4) If the argument is that "jews didn't shape modernity until recently because they basically weren't allowed to" then that's neither an argument for or against jewish character or inclusion in western societies, the question is what jews did relative to what they had the power to do
Obviously I'm not arguing for the moustache-twirling elders-of-zion-supervillain-cabal version of anti-semitism here, but there doesn't need to be a coordinated conspiracy for an assortment of jewish intellectuals to provide specious arguments (which they may well sincerely believe) for their own short-term political or financial self-interest at the expense of the longer-term health of host nations. The fact that the venn diagram overlap of "zealous white nationalist" and "holocaust denier" is far from slim doesn't help of course, but I'm not currently replying to an article from a holocaust denier.
It's quite off not "directionally accurate". The Renaissance and Enlightenment, which we value as creating the critical values of modernism (especially the Enlightenment) had very limited Jewish influence. There's far greater Jewish influence that starts in the 19th century with figures like Marx and Freud, continuing into the 20th century. Marx doesn't represent my favorite stream of modernism personally.
Well, every explanation for social phenomena is "anthropomorphic" at some level, the question is whether any single group is the cause. HBD isn't precisely reductive in that sense.
Nothing about the telephone on Shabbos story? I guess it's not in the book.
I read the articles that make up the book on matzpen when I was in high school and was bewildered. Who knew the Classical Era of Judaism was 800-1800 CE? Some interesting sociological points (no Jewish peasants) but they were just full of misrepresentations, misreadings, and nonsense.
I said the leading RW figure, and that's Ben Gvir. If tomorrow the leader of the right becomes Moshe Feiglin, it is 100% certain that Chabad would become fans of him instead
He's not the leading figure by most definitions today and he certainly wasn't 4 years ago, when he was already a cult celebrity in Chabad. Most Chabadniks support him because they support genocidal violence based on racial supremacism, and are also attracted to his general image of idiocy, ignorance and ugliness. Get over it.
"leading RW figure" is the guy with a major platform who can say that he is the toughest on security issues. Ben Gvir is definitely that today, and he definitely was not that 4 years ago. And the idea that Chabad loved him 4 years is an extraordinary claim that requires some kind of evidence. I never heard his name until after 10/7, and he had zero involvement with Chabad organizations or events until after, according to the limited Hebrew-language research I was able to do
Here's a video from 3 years and 10 months ago, but you'll now tell me that he built up this fanatical support in the preceding 2 months. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9NDJq_bTgnU
If you continue to just answer with blatant lies, I'm going to block you.
You've posted this clip before, I asked you then with no response and I'll ask you know, in what universe is bochurim dancing with a public figure at a public, open event evidence of fanatical support?
I agree that Chabad is a kind of concentrated microcosm of modern Judaism, for good and for bad. One of the many ways this is so that people like you won't invest 1% of the effort you expend policing people like me who point out what's wrong on actually trying to fix what's wrong. Ben Gvirism is mainstream Chabad. If you don't like that, you need to persuade Chabadniks to change their mind, not gaslight me.
You: Stop trying to police your critics, just fix the things that make you evil and bad
Me: I don't agree that we're evil and bad, you should educate yourself a little before making these claims about your fellow Jewsto a large audience
You: No thank you, I'm comfortable agreeing in principle if not in detail with this person who I'm planning on demonstrating over ten thousand words is a psycho moron of the highest order about you, and I will keep feeding grist to the Rothschild/Chabad/Epstein/Palestinian Organ Stealing mill.
Most right wing Jews are generically pro whoever the leading RW figure is at any given time, Chabad is no exception. Your painting this reality as him being "Mainstream Chabad" is dishonest to an extreme.
There's an interesting diaspora difference here. The liberal Jewish diaspora today seems to be overwhelmingly concentrated in the USA and Britain. In Australia, Russia (and, I think France) Jews tend to much more rightwing and indeed, Chabad is relatively much more dominant in those countries.
The Jews waited 2000 years before the British, in their own good time, got Israel back for them. Likewise NonZionism will have to practice patience until I repost all of James Lawrence's fine but often overlong essays.
Very glad you are doing this series, looking forward to the next essay.
"Ruppin, who several years later founded the Brit Shalom movement advocating a binational Arab-Jewish state, repeated his proposal for the removal of the Arab fellahin to Syria in a letter dated 12 May 1914 to Victor Jacobson, a member of the Zionist Executive and the Zionist Organization's representative in Istanbul (1908-15)."
I found this in Nur Masalha's book cataloguing the history of transfer. Notably, Nur does not mention any letter by Bergmann despite the fact that, if it exists, it almost certainly would appear in that book. This is the only possible source I can find for Shahak's claim and even then it's the wrong person, dated to 1914-15 implying there's multiple letters when it's just one letter from 1914, and the wrong country (Iraq vs Syria). The best case is he garbled basically all his facts here.
Thanks. I need to review his stupid book at some point. Masalha published two years before Shahak, so it sounds like he just copied it over like the tool he was.
He didn't even copy it correctly he garbled the details inc. attributing it to the wrong person.
Oh Geez. He confused Ruppin and Bergmann. What an ass.
The first time I ever heard of Israel Shahak was in a Ron Unz article reviewing this same book back in 2018, around the time Unz started to lose touch with reality. He claimed to have hired a graduate student to investigate Shahak's claims and ended up not finding any errors lol. Now who that graduate student was (talmud scholar? an Unz.com comments section contributor?) and what exactly he wrote about the book was never revealed.
I too remember that article.
I’m late in getting to this but it’s fantastic!! The reason it seems Said and others as smart as him fell for Shahak is because he practices pure random association American Studies methods. Though the generational difference making Shahak not so fashionable these days is a big one - in the late 20th century the bogey religious fundamentalism was much more in vogue than of settler colonialism or whiteness, and the whiplashed day school kids who are the preponderance of JVP et al can far more easily grab on to the latter.
The discussion of the darker tones of the romanticism of Bergmann and Buber happens to be extremely timely for me, having just gotten to 1929 and its repercussions in my book, and having to explain why the binationalists claimed Moses Hess for their side and not as a political Zionist.
Interesting article. I agree it might be good for some Orthodox Jews to read Shahak, even just for דע מה שתשיב to what all the antisemites are reading. But he does greatly exaggerate things, and he focuses too much on texts, rather than on how things are actually understood by Orthodox Jews. For example, I think, even in the Yeshivish world, attitudes to goyim, are often much more influenced by the universalism of Meiri, R. Hirsch, etc., than by some extreme statement by a European Achron, written in a time period of constant pogroms. Also, as you point out, his claims about Chabad are ridicilous. The Rebbe was literally, one of the most universalist gedolim ever. He was trying to help all the non-Jews merit heaven, by sending his chassidim to tell them about the seven mitzvos of Noach.
Was just wondering, did the Rebbe really say that one solider was worth killing infinite civilians? That seems very suprising.
Looking forward to the next part of the series. Do you know when it will come out?
https://www.hageula.com/news/israel/24638.htm
I've heard this cited in various forms hundreds of times.
Interesting. To be fair, he seems to be talking about extreme collateral damage, not deliberately targeting innocents. Also, what's interesting is that he seems to be arguing this would help save Arab civilians also, which is a far cry from the far-right who don't care a hoot about Arab life. In a similar vein, he is quoted as having said we should have said expelled the Palestinians in the WB and Gaza in 67, because it would have caused less Palestinians to be killed, then were killed in the wars we fought against them.
As with Rav Kook, if you advocate mental racial supremacism plus being nice about it, people tend to forget about the being nice part.
It's easy to slip from 'let's do this insane militaristic thing because it will lead to less death in the long term' to 'whoopsies, turns out it won't lead to less death, let's do it anyway'.
That was kind of the story with Adolf Hitler. Blitzkrieg was supposed to mean short wars with minimal cost. By the end, Gotterdammerung had come into vogue with the idea that a Germany which remained after defeat wasn't worth saving.
Benny Morris had the same take a few years back, IIRC, and I basically agree. The Nakba should have been more thorough.
I disagree https://nonzionism.com/p/better-in-that-out
Do you speak Yiddish? The Rebbe says here that putting soldiers at risk is wrong when you have the ability to flatten a whole area, and you should just give a short warning so that everyone in the area can leave. You can disagree with the tactics, but not particularly bloodthirsty
I understand enough to follow with help from Google Translate when it gets hard, but I didn't read it and don't need to for this point. The false messiah Schneerson is widely cited in support of terror bombing of civilians in Gaza *even massively in excess of what we already did*, and the murder of infinity Arabs to save even one soldier. If you think this is a wrong interpretation, you need to explain that to *them* not to *me*.
"The jews invented modernity" critique is I think directionally accurate, for better and for worse, to the point of almost being too obvious to comment on. At least, jews made disproportionate contributions to physics, chemistry, and medical advances that saved hundreds of millions of lives at the same time they furnished disproportionate ammunition for both deranged left-wing intellectual movements and inflexible capitalist dogmas that are currently cannibalising our civilisation. Uniquely or even primarily responsible, no, but... well, you know what they say about per capita.
Directionally accurate? Maybe if you limit your scope just to the later part of the 20th Century. Virtually all these Jewish contributions to the sciences (and indeed the arts) come well after Renaissance and the birth of the modern world, when secularisation was partially forced on European Jewry from the outside. Which isn't to downplay Jewish achievements in this sphere, but they begin quite late and thus don't have much of a claim to have "created the modern world."
Directly consqeuent on this, any attentive reader of Shahak will notice his stressing of precisely this fact *considerably lessens* Jewish "group agency" beloved of people like Kevin Mcdonald in history, and thus the harder 'puppet-masters' rendition of classic anti-semitism can't actually be built on Shahak's book being reviewed here.
I'll get to it in the relevant chapter, but Shahak completely ignores when the Jews were invited back to England. Jews didn't have so much of an active role in the early stages of modernity, but part of modernity in its more benign versions is having a soft spot for Jews.
You're not broadly wrong per se, but:
(1) I'm pretty sure figures like Max Sänger and Fritz Haber were active and influential well before the latter part of the 20th century, as were Marx and Freud
(2) I already qualified with "not primarily responsible", so I'm not sure what you're telling me I didn't already state
(3) Plenty of right-wing traditionalists/reactionaries will argue that western civilisation peaked somewhere between 1850 and 1918, which would imply that maximal jewish influence neatly coincides with our civilisational decline (this heavily depends on how you define 'decline' and correlation doesn't prove causation, of course, but it's not a priori wrong either)
(4) If the argument is that "jews didn't shape modernity until recently because they basically weren't allowed to" then that's neither an argument for or against jewish character or inclusion in western societies, the question is what jews did relative to what they had the power to do
Obviously I'm not arguing for the moustache-twirling elders-of-zion-supervillain-cabal version of anti-semitism here, but there doesn't need to be a coordinated conspiracy for an assortment of jewish intellectuals to provide specious arguments (which they may well sincerely believe) for their own short-term political or financial self-interest at the expense of the longer-term health of host nations. The fact that the venn diagram overlap of "zealous white nationalist" and "holocaust denier" is far from slim doesn't help of course, but I'm not currently replying to an article from a holocaust denier.
It's quite off not "directionally accurate". The Renaissance and Enlightenment, which we value as creating the critical values of modernism (especially the Enlightenment) had very limited Jewish influence. There's far greater Jewish influence that starts in the 19th century with figures like Marx and Freud, continuing into the 20th century. Marx doesn't represent my favorite stream of modernism personally.
I think I've replied here
https://nonzionism.com/p/israel-shahak-clown-mentalist-liar/comment/327192677
I don't see how you can endorse HBD and deride "seeking anthropomorphic explanations for complex social phenomena" simultaneously.
Anthropomorphic means ascribing social phenomena to conscious (usually malign) intent.
Well, every explanation for social phenomena is "anthropomorphic" at some level, the question is whether any single group is the cause. HBD isn't precisely reductive in that sense.
Nothing about the telephone on Shabbos story? I guess it's not in the book.
I read the articles that make up the book on matzpen when I was in high school and was bewildered. Who knew the Classical Era of Judaism was 800-1800 CE? Some interesting sociological points (no Jewish peasants) but they were just full of misrepresentations, misreadings, and nonsense.
I said the leading RW figure, and that's Ben Gvir. If tomorrow the leader of the right becomes Moshe Feiglin, it is 100% certain that Chabad would become fans of him instead
He's not the leading figure by most definitions today and he certainly wasn't 4 years ago, when he was already a cult celebrity in Chabad. Most Chabadniks support him because they support genocidal violence based on racial supremacism, and are also attracted to his general image of idiocy, ignorance and ugliness. Get over it.
"leading RW figure" is the guy with a major platform who can say that he is the toughest on security issues. Ben Gvir is definitely that today, and he definitely was not that 4 years ago. And the idea that Chabad loved him 4 years is an extraordinary claim that requires some kind of evidence. I never heard his name until after 10/7, and he had zero involvement with Chabad organizations or events until after, according to the limited Hebrew-language research I was able to do
Here's a video from 3 years and 10 months ago, but you'll now tell me that he built up this fanatical support in the preceding 2 months. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9NDJq_bTgnU
If you continue to just answer with blatant lies, I'm going to block you.
You've posted this clip before, I asked you then with no response and I'll ask you know, in what universe is bochurim dancing with a public figure at a public, open event evidence of fanatical support?
Weird how often so many of the people made crazy by Judaism are made even crazier by Chabad specifically. Present company included
I agree that Chabad is a kind of concentrated microcosm of modern Judaism, for good and for bad. One of the many ways this is so that people like you won't invest 1% of the effort you expend policing people like me who point out what's wrong on actually trying to fix what's wrong. Ben Gvirism is mainstream Chabad. If you don't like that, you need to persuade Chabadniks to change their mind, not gaslight me.
Me: Hey, you're wrong about us
You: Stop trying to police your critics, just fix the things that make you evil and bad
Me: I don't agree that we're evil and bad, you should educate yourself a little before making these claims about your fellow Jewsto a large audience
You: No thank you, I'm comfortable agreeing in principle if not in detail with this person who I'm planning on demonstrating over ten thousand words is a psycho moron of the highest order about you, and I will keep feeding grist to the Rothschild/Chabad/Epstein/Palestinian Organ Stealing mill.
Most of Chabad is pro Ben Gvir. Get over it.
Most right wing Jews are generically pro whoever the leading RW figure is at any given time, Chabad is no exception. Your painting this reality as him being "Mainstream Chabad" is dishonest to an extreme.
There's an interesting diaspora difference here. The liberal Jewish diaspora today seems to be overwhelmingly concentrated in the USA and Britain. In Australia, Russia (and, I think France) Jews tend to much more rightwing and indeed, Chabad is relatively much more dominant in those countries.
The Jews waited 2000 years before the British, in their own good time, got Israel back for them. Likewise NonZionism will have to practice patience until I repost all of James Lawrence's fine but often overlong essays.