Letters to TLS Published and Not Published

This one was published:

Michael Moore (LETTERS,  October 2) impugns Israel that it practices a policy of exclusion in denying Arabs who reside in Jerusalem the right to vote in "general elections". He then further casts an aspersion in suggesting that situation is the same form of discrimination Jews faced elsewhere.

As "permanent residents", the category they fall in, while they cannot vote in national elections, they surely can in local elections. In the overwhelming cases, it is the free choice of Arabs of the pre-1967 municipal borders not to vote or even apply for full citizenship so as not to be viewed as "traitors" to the cause of "Palestine". In addition, there are many tens of thousands of Jews who, for reasons of their own, also have chosen not to become citizens, accepting a permanent residency status.

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This one was not:

Sara Fredman (September 18) errs in writing "Judaism does not have ritualized confession". Every week day, except for the Shabbat and Holidays, a ritually observant Jew will recite a form of confession the text of which is fixed, called Tachanun in Hebrew. The chest is lightly beaten and at one point, one sits down, lowers one's head on his arm and recites several relevant verses from Psalms. True, unlike Catholics, there is no priest to confide in nor forgiveness formula. As on Yom Kippur, the enumeration of sins is in the plural.

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And while we are at it, this one was from 2017 but did not make it in:

In his review of Daniel Heller's "Jabotinsky's Children", Colin Shindler writes of the relationship between the Betar youth movement and its leader, the Revisionist Party's Vladimir Zeev Jabotinsky, that "when he realized that Betar’s accelerating radicalization was out of control he began to respond to the “fashishtlekh” (little fascists). Given the static situation in Palestine and the darkening of Europe’s skies in the 1930s, Jabotinsky’s attempt to row back from maximalism failed, and was ignored by his followers" ("Learn to shoot", TLS, Nov, 7). 

On the eve of World War II, the number of members of Betar world-wide on six continents and more than 20 countries approached 80,000-90,000. Basing myself on 50 years of study and reviewing dozens of books based on documented research as well as personal reminisces and the literature and periodicals of the times, those who identified themselves as fascists perhaps numbered ten, including one intellectual who publicly back-tracked. Never was a fascist ideal or construct promoted in Betar.  Radicalization is not fascism. At the most, as Toby Lichtig wrote in the April 29, 2016 issue of TLS, there may have been "arguably 'fascist'...elements".

Maximalism, I would stress, was less a social, political and economic program and more a simple frame-of-mind which sought to gain and achieve the fullest possible Zionist goals as recognized by the League of Nations and formulated and conceived by generations of Jews. To mix or confound the two, by ideological rivals or scholars, must be avoided.

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Back to the Theme of Jewish Self-Hatred

I have dealt with Irene Nemirovsky previously and now in the Times Literary Supplement, Frederic Raphael has a review essay.

The issue, for me, is insanely attracting in that elements of her outlook and behavior seem to keep repeating themselves. In Israel, the theme of self-hatred is not simply a polemical shout of political antagonism but a very real and threatening development among our elite, as self-crowned as they are.

I have selected passages from the essay that deal with the question of the author's Jewishness, self-hatred and reaction to antisemitism:-

...Did Némirovsky satirize Jews simply in order to ingratiate herself with an alien audience? Anti-Semitism was a stylish conceit in the Parisian circles to which she so diligently sought entry, but the émigrés’ world of conspicuous insecurity was also the one she knew best...

Like Proust, only more so, she at once acknowledged and derided the Jewishness she could never shuck (although females are never quite “Jews”, even to themselves, to the degree to which the anti-Semite takes males to be). Literary “self-hatred” can combine self-advertisement with a play for exemption. Karl Marx’s early polemic against the “huckster race” is an example; Harold Pinter’s bully boy Goldstein, in The Birthday Party, just might be another. Self-criticism is, however, fundamental to Judaism: it metastasized into both Communist and psychoanalytic confessional modes.

Némirovsky said later that she would never have written David Golder (and other stories) in so scathing a tone, if she had known that Hitler was imminent. In fact, the dormant bacilli of the Dreyfus affair, and its vocabulary, were always, like shingles, ripe for resuscitation in the Right as it itched for revenge. Meanwhile, the young Robert Brasillach, although already an acolyte of Charles Maurras’s right-wing Action française, stepped out of the ranks of Tuscany to cheer Irène’s early work: “this young woman of both Russian and Jewish origin . . . [grasps] the secrets of our race better than French writers”.

Only with the rise of Fascism, and then of Nazism, was Brasillach engorged by the prospect of power and happily perverted by the genocidal malice which, some say, has to be excused in Céline’s lethal frivolity. In the same spirit, after the defeat of 1940, Henri Béraud – a “friend” of Némirovsky who had won the Prix Goncourt in 1922 – chose to associate Jews with the English and with Freemasons and conclude, “In all conscience, yes, one should be anti-Semitic”. Anti-Semitism is often less a recondite sentiment than a social contagion; opportunism in its Sunday best. Under the Occupation, it could be worn, with profit, all week. Brasillach then advocated giving “serious thought to the deportation of little Jewish children”...

...Suite française occupies a place in Némirovsky’s oeuvre not unlike that of the last section of À la Recherche du temps perdu, in which Proust’s narrator perceives that the gratin to which he has deferred so sedulously, and so long, is a decadent crust. Redemption is recovered personality. Némirovsky’s last work mentions the word Jew only twice. All the vices which had seemed specific to Jews she now realized to be pandemic: her fastidious Parisian aesthete, Langelet, in his flight, cares more for his porcelain collection than for France itself. He scorns the Jewish fugitives hoping to reach Portugal or South America, but all his refinement cannot save him from being run over in the common panic. In the margin of her manuscript, describing his end, Némirovsky scribbled “the end of the liberal bourgeoisie”. Similarly, Hugo Grayer, in the short story “Le Spectateur”, presumes himself too fine for the doomed Europe which he abandons, only to find that he has taken flight on a literally sinking ship...

...As for Némirovsky’s “self-hatred”, a single intelligence might have guessed that the mercilessness directed at “her own people” concealed a much wider scorn. Her underlying topic was the interplay of emotion and callousness, the alternations of vanity and despair, in all the players of the world’s game. Imaginative impersonation is the mark of the natural novelist; fiction is where the truth can be found; documentary is too often where it is confected. Némirovsky could play male or female, be villain or dupe, candid or duplicitous. She moved the black and the white pieces with equal versatility. The insolence of her impostures was a function of an isolation from which neither success nor marriage dispensed her...

What do you say?

Sand Throwing Cont'd

In the prestigious Times Literary Supplement, Shlomo ("No Jewish Nation/Natio") Sand attempted to rip a critic to shreds.

Well, here's the come-back:

The Jewish ‘natio’

Sir, – Shlomo Sand’s response (Letters, March 12) to my review of the parody of historical scholarship he presents in his book illustrates perfectly the accuracy of my critique (February 26). In his letter, as in the book, he substitutes belligerence for argument, and misrepresents the research by others which he quarries. His letter is replete with irrelevance, innuendo and inaccuracy, but I shall confine myself here to a refutation of the personal attack he has chosen to make on my honesty as a reviewer. It would have been self-indulgent in a review of a book which includes so many untruths about other historians to have used the space to demolish his claims about me, since he refers explicitly to my work only in two footnotes (six lines in one footnote, and two lines in the other). But since he has now been foolish enough to challenge my integrity on the grounds that I did not discuss these references in my review of his book, I am more than happy to oblige here.

Sand asserts in his book and repeats in his letter the claim that my book Mission and Conversion (1994) betrays an “ethnocentric” approach to Jewish history, and that this approach arises from my having written part of it in Jerusalem, “the eternally united capital city of the Jewish ‘natio’”. Such geographical determinism would be weird in any case, but it is exceptionally bizarre in this instance. Sand has no evidence about my views on the present and future status of Jerusalem, but how he comes to claim that any of my work was carried out in Jerusalem is not difficult to guess, since on the first page of the preface I express thanks for hospitality, during the final stages of checking the typescript in 1993, to the Institute for Advanced Studies, which is based in Jerusalem. But if Sand had looked two paragraphs up on the same page, to the first lines of the preface, he would have seen that the book contains the “Wilde Lectures in Natural and Comparative Religion” as delivered in Oxford between January and March 1992, long before I was at the Institute. Does he want to say that, in the process of checking the final typescript, aberrant ideology must have crept into my interpretation of ancient history like an infection? Or that anyone prepared in 1992 to accept an invitation to take up a visiting fellowship in 1993 at Israel’s National Institute for Advanced Studies must already have been infected from afar?

Sand has also failed to notice that there is nothing whatever “ethnocentric” about the rest of the book, which is (unsurprisingly, given its title) a study of religious conversion. His assertion in his book that I attempt “to deny entirely the missionary aspect of Judaism” is a particularly breathtaking falsehood, since Chapter Seven of my book is devoted to tracing in some detail the evidence for the emergence of strong missionary ideas in rabbinic texts in late antiquity.

MARTIN GOODMAN
Oriental Institute, Pusey Lane, Oxford.

Literary disputes are so intellectually stimulating.

Chabad in The TLS

Chabad-Lubavitch

Sir, – In his review of Dana Kaplan’s Contemporary American Judaism (In Brief, October 2), Simon J. Rabinovitch misleadingly implies that the Chabad-Lubavitch movement is well beyond the pale of mainstream Judaism when he labels it as a “messianic, proselytizing . . . sect”.

If by “messianic” Rabinovitch is referring to the hope that Chabad’s deceased leader, Rabbi Menachem Schneerson, will return as the Messiah, this has never been part of Lubavitch’s public outreach programme as it has always been a matter of great controversy within the organization. Rabinovitch also should have exercised greater caution in employing the term “proselytizing” in a secular forum like the TLS, as readers might actually think that Chabad seeks the conversion of non-Jews. Reintroducing Jews to traditional forms of religious practice can hardly be qualified this way.

KENNETH LOISELLE
Department of History, Trinity University, One Trinity Place, San Antonio, Texas 78212

"I Don't Like Said; and Israel, Too"

That's Edward Said to whom we are referring. The "Orientalism" 'scholar'.

Anyway, there's been a discussion over at the Times' Literary Supplement these past 3-4 weeks over the worthiness of Said's scholarship. And what interested me was this snippet:-

...Said’s attack on Bernard Lewis would have been more effective if it had been more accurate and more thoroughly researched. I disagree with a great deal of what Lewis has written in recent years. I also regard Israel’s treatment of the Palestinians as barbarous and unfair and have always thought that our war in Iraq is illegal, immoral and stupid. Yet none of these things impels me to endorse Said’s account of past Western literary and scholarly encounters with the Middle East, for it was in general, as well as in almost every detail, false.

ROBERT IRWIN
39 Harleyford Road, London SE11.

And I was always taught that if you are doubtful, continue pressing your doubt, researching it. Who knows? You might discover that if Said's scholarship isn't genuine scholarship, maybe his politics aren't genuine politics.

Off Goes Another Letter-to-the-Editor

The Editor
TLS
London

Sir,

Daniel Pick’s review of Mike Davis’ history of the car bomb, BUDA’S WAGON, (“The first car bomb”, July 1) includes the assertion that a “seminal date..is January 12 1947, when Zionist extremists, the Stern Gang, drove a truck of explosives into a British police station in Haifa to lethal effect”. Unfortunately, Davis has erred, twice.

In the first instance, the first Sternist car bomb attack was over a month previously, at Sarafand Army camp on December 5, 1946. Two hundred kilos destroyed offices in the camp and there were casualties and injuries. Moreover, it cannot be ignored that car bombs were placed by British soldiers in Palestine, among them Eddie Brown, a police captain and Peter Madison, an army corporal, who crossed over to the Arab side in early 1948. One blew up the Palestine Post editorial offices on Feb. 1 causing one fatality and 20 injured. Another left in Ben-Yehuda Street on Feb. 22 killed 52 with 123 injured. On March 11, a car bomb exploded in the Jewish Agency courtyard leaving 13 dead and 84 wounded. Although the driver of the last one was an Arab, he was aided by British explosives experts.

In the second instance, as the Palestine Post reported on July 25, 1938, a car bomb was detonated the previous day on Sir Herbert Samuel Quay in Tel Aviv. Twenty-one passers-by were injured. Eyewitnesses claimed, albeit ambiguously, that Arabs had driven the car whereas a car dealer said it had been sold to a TransJordanian. At that time of the Arab Revolt, hundreds of Jews had been murdered in Arab terror attacks and dozens of British troops also were victims. It is illogical that Jews would have placed the car bomb. Can one hope that this information was also included in the book?