Der Krieg ist der Vater der Dinge. -HERAKLIT

23 July 1995:

"... a paper I wrote recently for a conference about Jerusalem held in London and which I was unable zu attend ..."
(Israel Shahak to Horst Lummert)

Jerusalem and the Jews

by: Israel Shahak

Discussion of anything related to the subject of the Jews presents some difficulties. The first difficulty is that the term "Jewish" as used during the last 150 years has two rather different meanings. It has not always been so. Let us take year 1780 as a point of comparison. Then the universally accepted meaning of the term "Jew" coincided with self-identification of Jews themselves. Although Jewish identity was then primarily religious, both the Jews and the peoples they had contact with regarded them as a nation, even if distinct by virtue of their religion. For the Jews that view was crystallized in the oft-repeated saying of the tenth century Sage, Rabbi Sa'adiah Ha'gaon: "our nation owes its very nationhood to its religious law". That law not only governed all aspects of life, both public and private but also commanded a strict separation between them and the non-Jews. The experience up to 1780 could confirm the saying of the tenth century Sage. It was then literally true that a Jew could not even drink a glass of water in a home of a non-Jew.

From then on, however, this situation was altered by two parallel processes. One of them was the process which Jewish historiography calls "Emancipation of the Jews". From its bare beginning in Holland and England of the seventeenth century, it came to fruition in revolutionary France and in countries following in its footsteps, including the modern monarchies of the nineteenth century. In the process, the Jews gained a significant level of individual rights - in some cases full legal status - as a result of which the legal authority of the Jewish community over its members was annulled. For example, if a Jew was in 1780 noticed by his fellow Jews drinking a glass of water in a hame of a non-Jew, he could as a rule be legally punished by his own Jewish community. In 1880 this was in most places no longer possible. The second process is a corollary of the first. When already "emancipated", some Jews could to a greater or lesser extent renounce their Jewish heritage and accept modern views. This of course marked profound changes not only in their behavior but also their attitudes. The extreme case of this have been the Jews who remained Jews only in the sense of not converting to another religion, but who otherwise might have lost all interest in any Jewish subjects.

Even if we ignore the last category - as I am going to do - the term "Jewish" now applies to two populations which have little in common with each other. In particular, their views on anything "Jewish", including Jerusalem, are as a rule different and often diametrically opposed. There exist no more qualities "common to all Jews" and there is no common "Jewish" view on anything, least of all on the issue of Jerusalem.

Since I am most familiar with Israeli conditions and since the attitudes of the Israeli Jews to Jerusalem are in any case going to have particular political importance, I am going to confine my presentation to different attitudes toward the issue of Jerusalem held by different segments of Israeli Jewish society, and to indication of the roots of those attitudes in the Jewish past. The predominant view of modern Israeli sociologists and pollsters is that Israeli Jewish society is divided into two segments nearly equal in size. It is the attitude toward the Jewish religion, its observance and its influence on political issues which is the most important single factor defining one's affiliation with one or another of those segments. In terms of political distinctions, one is comprised of Likud, other right-wing parties and all religious parties on one hand and the other of Labor and all left-wing parties. One bloc stands for continuation, full or partial, of the Jewish religious tradition and the other for modifying its tenets considerably by features of modernity.

Let me quote in this context some data from an article by one of the most reputed Israeli sociologists, Baruch Kimmerling (Z'manim, no. 50-51, autumn 1994) significantly entitled "Religion, nationalism and democracy in Israel". Quoting plenty of researches, Kimmerling shows conclusively that Israeli Jewish society is much more split on religious issues than it is supposed abroad, where the belief in qualities "common to all Jews" and in attendant generalizations is much less challenged. For example, Kimmerling quotes the data of a survey made by the prestigious Gutman Institute of the Hebrew University of Jerusalem, to the effect that while 19% of Israeli Jews say that they pray daily, 19% declare that they would not enter a synagogue under any circumstances. From this and from similar findings he draws the conclusion that each of the above-mentioned blocs contains a hard core of believers in opposite tenets.

For our purpose it is even more important that Kimmerling (as well as other prestigious researchers) finds that the more religious an Israeli Jew is, the less he respects democracy. The difference is the greatest in the attitudes of Jewish youth toward Arabs holding Israeli citizenship. For example, while 47% of young Jewish respondents say that the rights of Israeli Arabs should be "drastically curtailed", the corresponding percentages among the religious and the secular youth are 89% and 13%, with those who define themselves as "traditionalists", i.e. observing the religious commandments only in part, falling between those two extremes. There are, of course, additional factors such as poverty. The most antidemocratic Jews are those who are both religious and poor, but of the two variables religion has greater explanatory power.

Let me proceed to attitudes toward Jerusalem. I am going to begin with the attitudes of religiaus Jews in Israel which are traceable to what I would call "classical Judaism", i.e. that Judaism which was adhered to by the entire Jewish society from roughly the first till the mid-nineteenth century AD, and which has still retained its influence upon about a half of Israeli Jewish society. I am not going here to refer to the Bible or Judaism in Biblical times, since "classical Judaism" was really molded later, by the Talmud. Biblical influence, revived by the Jews who rebelled against Judaism has its role only in the case of those Jews who accepted modern outlook, especially among precisely that hard core which refuses to enter a synagogue under any circumstances. I am not going to refer either to what goes under the name of "Judeo-Christian tradition", which in my view is a concoction on a par with Stalin's "Marxism-Leninism". Nor am I going to deal with other popular terms such as the "Abrahamic tradition" which in my view are sheer nonsense.

It is quite apparent to anyone conversant at first hand with the literature produced by "classical Judaism" throughout the ages that Jerusalem appears in it primarily as the town where the Temple stood. It is the Temple and the animal sacrifices performed in it which evoke deepest Jewish attachment, accompanied by sorrow and feeling of loss lasting since its destruction by the Romans in 70 AD. In contrast to the many thick volumes of "classical Judaism" scholarship, discussing in the greatest detail the Temple and everything connected with it, but especially the animal sacrifices, its literature connected with the town of Jerusalem is minuscule. It is the Temple and its sacrifices which are constantly referred to in Jewish prayers. Zionist use of Jewish prayers is about as remote from their content as Stalin's use of quotations from Marx. It is possible only because Christians and Muslims tend to know next to nothing about Judaism, either classical or modern.

For example, the oft-quoted exclamation "Next year in Jerusalem" is indeed a part of the Passover Eve celebration, which many secular Jews also continue to observe in the ancient manner. But in what context does this exclamation appear in that ceremony? It is preceded by a solemn prayer asking God to soon restore the animal sacrifices in the Temple. In that happy time, the prayer says, the Jews will rejoice in "the sight of blood of sheep to be thrown at the side of the [Temple's] altar, to give Thee pleasure, O Lord". The exclamation follows only then, and is in turn followed by a poem which looks forward to the actual sacrifice of a sheep already during the next year's Passover Eve celebration. It is quite clear that the original meaning, still held by many Jews, of "Next year in Jerusalem" exclamation, is that "next year the blood of a sheep will be thrown at a side of an altar in a rebuild Temple". At the same time, no important Zionist politician, from Weizman and Ben-Gurion through Begin to Rabin and Peres, has looked forward "to seeing the blood of a sheep thrown at a side of an altar" in a Jewish Temple. They all couldn't care less about it. What they wanted was to manipulate the real feelings of religious Jews for their own purposes and to impress the non-Jews with quotations taken out of their historic Jewish context. But their policies with regard to Jerusalem have not been based on considerations rooted in the Jewish past or Jewish religion.

The pilgrimage of pious Jews to Jerusalem, let alone their settlement in it, which has continued since the destruction of the Temple was also motivated by the deep attachment to the site of the destroyed Temple and the wish for its restoration. When a pious Jew sees for the first time the Temple Mount (Haram Al-Sharif), he makes a small tear in his shirt or cloak as a sign of mourning, derived from the custom of Biblical times of tearing one's clothes. The same ritual he performs during the funeral of his nearest relatives. His destination was always the place either nearest to the site of the Temple or allowing the best look at it. Actually, the role of the Wailing Wall as such a site is relatively recent in historical terms. For many centuries the place pious Jews considered holiest in Jerusalem area was the Mount of Olives, because it afforded the best view of the Temple's site. The holiness of the Wailing Wall dates from the fifteenth century, when the personal security outside the walls of Jerusalem was precarious, and visits to Mount of Olives were dangerous even during daytime. The holiness of the Wailing Wall was popularized and emphasized in all Jewish diasporas in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries by the Jewish mysticism (the Cabbala) which then dominated Jewish religion and culture. (Incidentally, it was during that period that almost all other quite numerous Jewish "holy sites" in Palestine were invented). The Cabbalist doctrine, previously unheard of in Judaism, that prayer in a holy place will be heard and answered by God sooner than prayer elsewhere, mightily helped the notion of Wailing Wall's holiness. This tenet was soon extended to prayers in writing inserted between the Wall's stones.

Curiously, this profound attachment to the site of the Temple coexisted with the strict ruling prohibiting the Jews to visit it. In order to explain this paradox, I have to say something about the period before 70 AD, when the Temple still stood. At that time Judaism included the very detailed rules of purity and impurity. Only a Jew in a state of ritual purity could enter the Inner Court of the Temple where the animals were sacrificed and their carcasses burnt on the Great Altar. The Temple itself was a small building surrounded by large Courts. That building was accessible only to Jewish priests in a state of purity. Entry of an impure Jew to the inner Temple Courts or officiation at the Temple by an impure priest was considered a heinous sin and a sacrilege. There were many ways in which a Jew could become impure, but the chief and the most "contagious" - to use a modern expression - among them was a contact, however indirect, with a Jewish corpse or even with a tiniest part of a Jewish bone from no matter how long a past. (Incidentally, Talmud rules that only the dead body of a Jew causes impurity. Dead bodies of non-Jews or of animals do not have this effect.) For example, if a Jew merely found himself in a Jewish cemetery, all Jews whom he subsequently as much as touched with the tip of his little finger became impure, and the impurity extended to their clothes.

Impure Jews could become repurified, however, through a complicated ritual of seven days' duration. For our purposes it suffices to mention what happened on its third and seventh day. The still impure Jew had to be sprinkled by a pure priest with water containing a tiny portion of ashes of a Red Heifer (see Book of Numbers, chapter 19). Red Heifers were from time to time sacrificed on the Mount of Olives by a pure priest. They had to be fully red; two hairs which were not red sufficed to disqualify them. Since a ritual state of purity was required not only for the entry to the Temple Courts but also for numerous other acts of Jewish worship, many Jews of those times preferred to keep themselves pure at all times to please God. In order to let them to repurify themselves, portions of Red Heifer's ashes were periodically distributed across Jewish-inhabited Palestine. We possess firm evidence that some remains of Red Heifer's ashes were kept in the Galilee until as late as the sixth century and that some priests kept themselves pure until then in the expectation of rebuilding the Temple.

Since that time, however, all the Jews find themselves in the state of ritual impurity. Hence religious commandments forbid them not only to enter the site of the Inner Temple Courts but also to rebuild the Temple, which also requires purity. Let me add here that all non-Jews, who according to Judaism are not only impure but can never be purified, are according to a Chief Rabbinate's proclamation (at least in its Hebrew version) also prohibited from entering the Temple Mount. The Jews who have visited the Temple Mount are precisely those who, as mentioned at the beginning of my presentation, rebelled against "classical Judaism". The rabbis and the Jewish religious parties would like to close the Temple Mount to everybody, including the Muslim worshippers in Al-Aqsa mosque, since in their view their entry desecrates the sanctity of the site no less so than the entry of infidel Jews. Those visits continue and are encouraged only because all Israeli governments have so far been secular. Interestingly, the Jewish Underground wanted to blow up the Temple Mount mosques after receiving a rabbinical opinion that a short and one-time entry of impure Jews to the holy site for such purpose was preferable to its long-term desecration.

It follows that the tiny groups of Jews who desire to rebuild the Temple, or the Great Altar alone, or who enter the Temple Mount in order to pray there, can only be described as Jewish heretics. They are freaks and ignoramuses, are fiercely repudiated by all truly religious and many secular Jews. Their much exaggerated importance derives from the media which likes to record their antics and from the ignorance of the Muslim clergy and scholars about Judaism.

But the impurity of religious Jews is not only caused by the lack of Red Heifer's ashes. Plenty of fully red cows were found in all kinds of places around the world and brought to Israel where they were lovingly tended in expectation of being used as soon as possible. But a "Catch 22" situation exists here. As mentioned above, the priest who sacrifices the Red Heifer must himself be pure. Otherwise the sacrifice is not valid and can have no purifying effect. Since all the Jews, including all their priests are impure for at least 1,400 years and their daily life contributes to their impurity, no pure priest can be found to sacrifice the Red Heifer. It is believed that one of the tasks of the Messiah would be to find, or perhaps to bring from heaven, some of the old Red Heifer ashes and so initiate the process of purification. But in the absence of the Messiah nothing can be done. Some Gush Emunim stalwarts may possibly "find" an old pot with rubbish and proclaim it to contain the Red Heifer ashes. But it can be taken for granted that almost all rabbis would denounce such a "discovery" with horror and attribute to it no validity.

Nevertheless, the feelings the religious Jews have about the Temple and its site can often, but not always, have political manifestations. Religious Jews in Israel can be divided into two categories: those who support, or at least sympathize with the National Religious Party, often called "messianists", and those who are called "Haredim" [God-fearing] whose observance of the commandments of "classical Judaism" is much stricter. The split runs quite deep: each category has a separate school system and separate systems of kashrut rules. There is one important theological difference between them. The "messianists" believe that the coming of the Messiah is imminent and "the quality of time has changed", with the world being in a new era of "The beginning of the Redemption". The task of the Jews in this era is to prepare the best conditions for the Messiah. The confiscation of Arab land in Jerusalem and the thousand and one ways of oppressing the Palestinians have in the opinion of the "messianists" a theological purpose. Ideally, according to the Jewish religious law [halacha] non-Jews are not allowed to reside in Jerusalem, although they may visit it. In addition, no places of worship of any non-Jewish religion should be tolerated in Jerusalem. (Readers of Josephus Flavius will recall that the Jews believed in those tenets in the last centuries of the Temple's existence.) In other words, the "messianists" believe that the less non-Jews would be present in Jerusalem the more God will be pleased and the faster "the beginning of the Redemption" will turn into the full-fledged "Redemption".

The Haredim, however, deny such theological assumptions, and accordingly the "messianist" policies. According to them, the time has not changed. The sole aim of Israeli policy should be the welfare of the Jews, especially of the Haredi ones. Land confiscations in Jerusalem are in their view permissible only when they serve that aim. If they elicit too much protest, they should be desisted from. In other words, the "messianists" are isolated even among the religious Jews. They could never accomplish anything, whether on the issue of Jerusalem or on anything else, without their secular Israel Jewish allies. This is why I need now to discuss that segment of Israeli-Jewish society in terms of its attitude toward Jerusalem.

Let me begin with the question of what is known and unknown about Jerusalem by Israeli Jews with secular education, who spend their adult lives in a thoroughly secular social milieus? Jewish education in Israel (let alone in diasporas) is chauvinistic. Its chauvinism expresses itself in the first place in ignoring, or minimizing to the extent possible the role of any non-Jews that ever inhabited Palestine or played any role in its history. The more popular media reinforce this notion of the public education as much as they can. It is, for example, taught in Jewish schools and believed by a great majority of Israeli Jews against all historical and archeological evidence that Palestine flourished only when it was ruled or inhabited by Jews, and that no one but the Jews have contributed anything of value to it. This pernicious myth is applied to Jerusalem. Its long history before its conquest by king David (around 1.000 BC, the exact date is quite uncertain) is either ignored or barely mentioned. The history of the roughly 1,000 years afterwards, from the time of this conquest till the destruction of Jerusalem and the Temple in 70 AD, when Jerusalem was an Israelite and then a Jewish city, is taught in great detail. Thereafter, the history of the city is taught in Israeli Jewish schools or discussed in public very selectively: taking into account only what in that history relates to the Jews. The existence of non-Jews and especially of their rulers in Jerusalem during that long time cannot be ignored completely, but it is discussed solely from the point of view of their attitude to the Jews rather as a subject in its own right. Strange as it may seem, it is popularly assumed that whenever there were no Jews living in Jerusalem no one else lived there. This is by no means an exaggeration. Right after the conquest of East Jerusalem in 1967, a popular song writer, Na'omi Shemer composed Jerusalem the Golden, a song which achieved enormous popularity. Its crucial lines describe East Jerusalem before its conquest: "All the marketplaces are empty, no one walks through Jericho toward the Dead Sea".

Thus the majority of Israeli Jews assumed that the Eastern part of the city was depopulated before it was conquered by the Jewish state. Except for a few daring radicals no one protested against that assumption in 1967 and only a minority (admittedly quite vocal) protests against it now. This assumption is a secularized version of the notion found in the Hebrew religious poetry written throughout the ages, which invariably described the city of Jerusalem as "ruined" or "humiliated" when it was in fact well-inhabited and much honored, but by the non-Jews. When I studied "historical geography of Palestine" in my Tel Aviv high school, around 1950, the only fact I was taught about history of Jerusalem from 70 AD till its conquest by Khalif Umar in 638 was that the Jews were then not let into the city except for one day each year when they could lament the destruction of the Temple near its location. When I once innocently asked what was otherwise going on in Jerusalem during that long period I was rudely answered by the teacher that some questions shouldn't be asked. This tendency of most Israeli Jews to deny or minimize non-Jewish presence is manifested in case of any part of the Land of Israel under Israeli their rule, for example the Golan Heights.

That attitude, as currently applied throughout the Territories, has been described by Meron Benvenisti (Haaretz, April 27). He regards it as a manifestation of "conceptual ethnic cleansing i.e. of erasing the others from one's consciousness. It cannot be attributed to chance that the so-called peace process with the Palestinians is in Jewish society accompanied by an unusually high incidence of ethnocentrism approaching racism, of tribal forms of morality and of the failure to distinguish between the moral right to exist and the moral obligation to behave decently". Benvenisti concludes, rightly in my view, that "the Oslo process, the resultant ideology of segregation and the resultant security considerations are intended to vest [Israeli] ethnic cleansing with an aura of respectability. Sure, my use of that term may be viewed as a manifestation of extremism compared to its usual use as an elegant term for expulsions and mass murders. But in my view ethnic cleansing may also be more limited in time. A closure of the Territories or a curfew intended to cleanse the public space from the presence of others are perfect examples of such conceptual ethnic cleansing limited in time". The goings-on in Jerusalem are perhaps better known that the goings-on in the West Bank, but the policies are the same.

In this presentation I cannot discuss all aspects of what I regard as the Israeli apartheid policy, whether in Jerusalem or in any other part of Palestine, Israel included. But apartheid policies are in my opinion in the last analysis based on the notion that, ideally, only Jews should live on the Jewish land and in a Jewish state. As stated by all the founding fathers of Zionism, and as not denied by a single Zionist leader till this very day - only in a fully Jewish society, i.e. in a society comprised of the Jews alone, can the Jews become "normal", devoid of all sorts of "bad qualities" described by the stock phrase of "diaspora-like mentality". It is not only Palestinian workers who are now routinely described in the Israeli media as "cancer in our body", but also Thai and Romanian workers imported to take their place. The ideal of ethnic cleansing applies to all non-Jews.

Incidentally, let me say emphatically that this pernicious attitude toward non-Jews is not propagated by Israeli archeologists, as some Arab intellectuals seem to believe, because it is so discrepant with their archeological findings. No archeologist can deny that before nineteenth century the time at which Palestine (and incidentally, also Jerusalem) was most prosperous was the late Roman and early Byzantine period (roughly from early fourth to mid-sixth century), when the great majority of its inhabitants were Christians and many of whom spoke Greek. The Israeli archeology certainly has its flaws but, if anything, it exerts a moderating influence on Israeli Jewish chauvinists.

The described attitude of secular Israeli Jewish chauvinists absolutely cannot be reconciled with "classical Judaism", in whose name, ironically, Israel as a "Jewish state" claims exclusive "historical rights" over the "united Jerusalem". It is because the most sacred aspects of the Jewish past, including the Temple and the city of Jerusalem during its existence when it was a Jewish city, are totally repugnant to secular-chauvinists and their restoration would be unwelcome to them. It may be a new phenomenon, connected with reawakened interest in Jewish history, and with the growing popularity of its revisionist currents which, far from what it is sometimes thought, are by no means confined to investigation of events of the present century.

For example, the Israeli leading paper Haaretz published in its last Eve of Passover Supplement (April 14) an article describing, for the first time ever how the Temple really looked when it functioned and animal sacrifices were offered in it. Its title was "The Holy Butcher Shop". (I have a slight suspicion that if a Jewish-related article under that title would appear in the British press, there would be a major scandal. In Israel there was none.) The article, using the best Jewish sources, described how the Temple Courts used to actually look like during their supposed glory, and how the daily total of hundreds (or occasionally even thousands) of sheep and bulls burned there in whole or in part as sacrifices affected life in Jerusalem. The smell for modern nostrils must have been unbearable. As to the other details, the article pointed out that the sacrificed animal had to be skinned and then divided into six portions: the four feet and the upper and lower parts of the body. All that holy work was carried by pure priests in the Inner Temple Court in the full sight of the people. After all this skinning and carving there was a lottery to determine which priest would get the coveted privilege of, say, putting a bloody leg of a bull on his shoulder and running to throw it on the fire blazing on the Great Altar. Other priests were baking pancakes from the sacred flour and oil on open ovens scattered around the Inner Court in order to throw them on the Great Altar to be burned, or in some cases to be eaten by priests.

Incidentally, there exists voluminous literature written throughout the ages by rabbinical sages, discussing e.g. how exactly the sacrificed sheep should be skinned. The authorities are not always in agreement on such important points. Some of the Gush Emunim stalwarts spend their entire time in studying this literature in special yeshivot. The most notorious of them, Ateret Cohanim ["the priests' diadem"] is combining the job of training priests in offering animal sacrifices with acquiring - not necessarily in the most legal ways - Palestinian property in the Old City of Jerusalem in order to settle pious Jews there. Most of money collected for both sacred aims comes from pious Jews in English speaking countries, including Britain, where the authorities consider it as tax deductible. Perhaps if some in Britain knew more about the purposes of Ateret Cohanim the British government would withdraw its privileges. But ignorance about Jewish affairs, past and present, precludes any serious discussion of the aims of such institutions. This ignorance can exceed any limit. For example, in the voluminous literature about the times of Jesus I have not yet run across any description of how the Temple looked when he was preaching there. The formation of such nonsensical concepts like "Judeo-Christian tradition" can be attributed to such ignorance.

My presentation of the operations of the Temple might have been scanty, but it will suffice to understand why their resumption can only be resented by any secular Jew, no matter how chauvinist. It will be all the more the case if all these gory details are shown on TV across the world. Although pious Jews would surely cherish that prospect, for the secular ones it can only be most repugnant.

Time for some political conclusions. In the first place, there will never be justice and equity in Jerusalem, and the city will never be open to all human beings without difference, unless we know in detail by whom and why these goals are opposed. As one of founders of modern science, Francis Bacon, said: "Knowledge is power". Whoever deprives himself of accurate and detailed knowledge, deprives himself of power to rectify the wrongs that were inflicted on him or others. No amount of discussing the U.N. resolutions can substitute for power resting on knowledge.

Second, those who make even the most minimal demands for justice for non-Jews in Jerusalem must realize that they will have to cope with Israeli power and the powerful backing which Israel receives from the U.S. Therefore, our first priority should be to initially raise such demands as would acquire as broad a support as possible, and would be intentionally contrary to the Israeli claims of Jewish exclusive rights over Jerusalem. Let me propose one such demand. Even the Israeli government cannot deny that Jerusalem contains sites holy to Christians and Muslims. But it denies the right of pious Christians and Muslims to live in Jerusalem because of their religious attachments to those sites. Incidentally, the Ottoman Empire did recognize that right in the case of Christians. Let the demand be raised that Christians and Muslims who for religious reasons want to live in Jerusalem, will have that right.

Third, the Israeli attempt to cleanse Jerusalem ethnically can under present political conditions be resisted only in two ways: by invoking the concept of universal human rights and especially individual human rights and by demanding its application to all Jerusalemites, and disseminating all the truth about Jerusalem as widely as possible. This includes the truth about Jerusalem's past. Falsifications of the city's past help the oppressions going in it at the present. However, this cannot be done by replacing the crass myths propagated by Israel by even crasser myths propagated by some of its opponents.

All xenophobic and reactionary movements falsify the past in order to corrupt the present. Zionism is not an exception to this rule. Our task is not only to expose those falsifications, but also to point out the way to a more just future by revealing the complexities of the past.

Quelle: Israel Shahak

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