Wannabee Jews. Not.
Young Jews outside a bagel shop in Golders Green on Saturday night, after sabbath has ended. Are such traditions what sustains Jewish identity?
What does it mean to be Jewish today? Two books offer very different perspectives
Review: How I Stopped Being a Jew by Shlomo Sand and Unchosen: The Memoirs of a Philo-Semite by Julie Burchill review
By Will Self, Guardian
November 06, 2014
In 2006, as the Israel Defence Forces (IDF) were undertaking their second major incursion into Lebanon, I resigned as a Jew. I did it publicly in an article for the London Evening Standard. My resignation wasn’t a protest against Israeli aggression – why would they care about such a gesture? – but aimed, I believed, against prominent leftwing English Jews, who, despite the complete contradiction between their espoused values and the undemocratic, apartheid and territorially expansionist policies of the so-called Jewish homeland, continued vociferously to support Israel. A couple of years earlier, on Question Time, I had also challenged Melanie Phillips over her campaign to force British Muslims to take a loyalty oath, saying: if British Muslims, why not British Jews? But on that occasion, when she had accused me of being an antisemite, I was still able to play my trump card: I’m Jewish.
The reaction to my resignation was pretty muted. I did receive an email the following morning from a pressure group called Jews for Justice in Palestine [sic], urging me to reconsider on the basis that it was perfectly possible for me to retain my Jewish identity while objecting to the activities of the Zionist state. In fact, I’d been surprised by my own apostasy (if it can be called that), and it’s only now, having read Shlomo Sand’s elegant and passionately felt essay, that I’ve come to understand why it is I resiled from … what? This heritage? Or is Jewry a people, a religion, or possibly – if pejoratively – a tribe?
Sand, a history professor at Tel Aviv University, is the author of The Invention of the Jewish People (2009), a discursive yet polemical work that systematically undermines the claim that Jewishness is necessary – let alone sufficient – to justify the claims of the Israeli state to the territory formerly known as Palestine. Now comes this short, highly personal text, which repurposes some of these arguments to serve existential ends; Sand asks the question: what, in this day and age, exactly is a secular Jew? Born in an Austrian displaced persons camp in 1946 to a Jewish mother and a non-Jewish father, he grew up in Israel and continues to identify himself as an Israeli, yet he unearths inconsistencies in the Zionist ideological bricolage that explain – at least in part – why a state founded on democratic and socialist ideals has descended into bigotry, intolerance and a lopsided form of what, I think, can only be termed racism.
Sand observes that Theodor Herzl and his financial backers were assimilated German Jews, repelled by the Ostjuden who came west, fleeing the Russian pogroms of the late 19th century; the creation of modern Hebrew (which bears scant resemblance to the biblical language) was aimed specifically at replacing Yiddish, which was perceived by the nascent Zionists as the peasant tongue of the shtetl and Pale. In time, the othering these Ashkenazim had imposed on the Ostjuden was reimposed by the emerging Israeli Sabra elite – many of whom had Eastern European origins – on post‑1948 refugees from the Maghreb; Jews who, while more “traditional” in their lifestyle – and more observant – had such demerits as speaking and writing fluent Arabic.
According to Sand the contradictions of Israel are implicit in its inception: a secular state, established by colonisation and the expropriation of land, its claims to ancient title over Israel/Palestine have no more validity than would an Anglo-Saxon’s “right to return” to Germany (should we opt to exercise it), unless, that is, secular Jews choose to ground them – as the devout do – in a contractual arrangement with a supernatural being. Sand dubs the current Israeli position on Jewishness “identitarian”, or alternatively “ethno-Zionism”, and notes that Zionists have reached out to the Jewish diaspora and sought to make “Israel” a state of mind that anyone, no matter how far flung, can experience – so long, of course, as she has a Jewish mother. These “new Jews”, as Sand terms them, can be in Los Angeles or London; they can be religiously unobservant, and possess no recognisably “Israeli” cultural attributes (because, after all, most of what we term “Jewish culture” is in fact the cuisine, the humour and folk tales of the discredited Yiddish-speakers), yet they possess the “right” to settle in Israel – a right to citizenship, in effect, that is held by the Israeli constitution to be logically and morally prior to that of Palestine’s indigenous people.
Jews in the rag trade in London’s East End, early 20th century. Not the intellectuals of philosemitic ardour.
Sand dryly observes that were this situation to obtain in our neck of the woods, “Britain would solemnly proclaim that it no longer belonged to any of its British subjects – the Scots, the Welsh, the citizens descended from the immigrants from the former colonies – but was henceforth the state only of the English, those born of an English mother”. For each element of supposed secular Jewish identity, Sand has a concise dismissal: any talk of Jews as a “race” (not, of course, that most Jews think of themselves as a race) is unfounded: according to Steven Pinker, the “genetic overlap” between the Ashkenazim and adjacent populations was/is between a third and a half depending on which genes you examine. Nor, according to Sand, do most secular Jews look simply to shared language or traditions for their identity; instead, he argues that the most secure foundation of Jewish secular identity since 1945 has been the persecutory criteria that crystallised in the Holocaust – following Elie Wiesel, he says we “Jews” have defined ourselves purely as the sort of people who might be murdered by Nazis, although conveniently downplaying the way that might make Roma, Communists, Poles and homosexuals equally “Jewish”. (Yes, I know it can be argued that the specifically genocidal character of the Nazis’ liquidation of European Jewry makes it distinct – but I doubt that argument would cut much ice with their non-Jewish victims.) Really, if you subscribe to Sand’s viewpoint unequivocally, the conclusion has to be that it’s support of embattled Israel alone that allows the new Jews to cleave to their old, faithful brethren.
I don’t subscribe unequivocally. As I said, I had resigned my own Jewishness with considerable perplexity; Sand has clarified my thinking in some ways; but while his arguments concerning this identity and its impact on the wider issues raised by the Israeli-Palestine conflict are lucid and logical, they have an apodeictic* feel about them that, for all his scrupulous even-handedness, seems to play directly into the binary, and intractably oppositional character of the dispute. Discussing Sand’s views with a variety of self-identifying secular non-Israeli Jews over the last few weeks, I found them stubbornly clinging to their Jewish identity. And why wouldn’t they? They do indeed share powerful and meaningful traditions – festivals, commemorative meals, holidays, ways of speaking and doing – and if I found it easy to resign my own Jewishness this was probably because there was very little of this in my natal home, unless you count my mother’s periodic outbursts about the Jews being “smarter than everyone else”, and occasional trips to Bloom’s in Golders Green to scoff hot salt beef sandwiches. Besides, whatever the strength of Sand’s underlying logic, what people think they are is undoubtedly their own affair – to seek to deprive people of an identity they cleave to smacks of a peculiar form of abuse. Moreover, surely what’s needed when it comes Israel-Palestine is nuance, and a willingness to see the world in greyscale rather than black-and-white. And to acknowledge the wrongs – indeed, atrocities – committed on all sides, so detaching those corrupted by the exercise of violence from the arena of policy-making.
Sephardi Jews in Sarajevo, 1900. After the expulsions from Spain (1492) and Portugal (1497), Sephardim settled in most countries round the Mediterranean sea. They were encouraged to emigrate to Israel, as evidence of Israel being the Jewish state, but most found themselves despised as ignorant and dirty.
The last person to look to for such subtlety is Julie Burchill, who’s made – by her own admission – a fortune from writing the sort of ad hominem abuse that all too often is passed off as “comment” in our media. In truth, I’ve always thought of Burchill as a sort of newsprint Alastair Campbell; just as in his heyday Campbell intimidated the Westminster lobby journalists by flecking their faces with spittle and expletives, so she seems to win newspaper contracts by playing the part of sacredly authentic monster for credulous readers. I’m afraid I can’t really dignify her latest offering with the ascription “book”, nor the contents therein as “writing” – rather they are sophomoric, hammy effusions, wrongheaded, rancorous, and pathetically self-aggrandising.
I wasn’t actually aware that Burchill was a philo-Semite of long standing, but if alcoholics are prone to reciting “drunkalogues”, then we might reasonably describe Unchosen as a similarly tedious “Jewalogue”. (And since Burchill descants at such length on her own prodigious drinking and cocaine-sniffing, we might reasonably see it as a drunkalogue too.) There isn’t a shred of reason in this text, which – one hopes because all the publishers it was offered to turned it down – has been produced by an imprint funded by subscribers including such beacons of enlightenment as Richard Littlejohn. I really don’t see it as my responsibility as a reviewer to catalogue Burchill’s repugnant gallimaufry of insults and half-baked nonsense; suffice to say, she believes everything the state of Israel does is just peachy, and she uncritically accepts ethno‑Zionism, endorsing the idea that some schmuck – such as myself – who grew up in the Hampstead Garden Suburb, has a “right” to my place in the Holy Land in advance of the 1.8 million Palestinians currently penned up in the giant internment camp known as “the Gaza Strip”.
When it comes to identifying exactly who the “Jews” are that she loves so unreservedly, Burchill tellingly rejects one set of stereotypic Ashkenazi characteristics – humour, chicken soup, kvetching, Woody Allen, fiddling on rooftops – in favour of those advanced by the ethno-Zionists: intelligence, IDF machismo, “true” democracy, good looks etc. Like the police and social services employees in Rotherham who claimed they were inhibited from prosecuting Muslim child-abusers because they feared accusations of racism, Burchill is incapable of understanding that her very exaltation of specific – and implicitly genetic – Jewish characteristics plays right into the hands of anti-Semites and crypto‑Nazis. The imperative in respect of Israeli-Palestine, as in any other dispute where “identity” is fuelling the conflagration, is to step back and regard the players on all sides first and foremost as people, irrespective of what group they belong to.
But Burchill’s most egregious fault is her insistence that her enemies are all pals together. Time and again in this threadbare text she equates any criticism of the Israeli state with support for Hamas, Hezbollah and other organisations that commit terrorist acts in the name of Palestine – this is wrong, deeply unhelpful, and an attitude that, in my view, could lead ultimately to the destruction of Israel.
About 12 years ago I profiled Burchill for the Independent on Sunday. I wrote then that she presented the bizarre spectacle of an intelligent woman who had spent her entire adult life making herself more stupid; this process has now reached its inevitable conclusion, and she has become to all intents and purposes moronic. If I were still a Jew I might have cause to reject her overtures, but thankfully, having resigned from the club, I’m no longer in any danger of being bothered by this particular barroom bore.
To order How I Stopped Being Jew for £7.99 (RRP £9.99) and Unchosen: The Memoirs of a Philo-Semite for £9.49 (RRP12.99) go to bookshop.theguardian.com or call 0330 333 6846.
* If you can’t be arsed to look it up, it means necessarily true, beyond contradiction. The preferred spelling is apodictic.