Tblong

Una girfriend experence per febo

2010-05-10T01:03:00.000-07:00

E' ora che si discolpi Golia

2006-01-20T02:09:00.000-08:00

venerdì 20 gennaio 2006, Il Foglio
http://www.informazionecorretta.it/main.php?mediaId=&sez=60&id=15148

Da qualche tempo provo l’impulso a rigurgitare ricordi. Mi si perdoni il verbo volgare, ma è proprio quello che descrive perfettamente la situazione. Ad esempio, mi è successo recentemente, a proposito di un dibattito sulla rivista “Primato”. Ho visto giustificare con supponenza una marmaglia di opportunisti che, dopo essersi sporcata con le peggiori compromissioni nella politica razziale fascista, era stata lavata alla candeggina dall’amnistia togliattiana, quindi assurta a gotha dell’intellettualità e di nuovo oggi esaltata come crema della cultura italiana. E mi è tornata in mente la memoria di tante persone di ben altra levatura intellettuale massacrate da quei personaggi e dal cinismo con cui è stata traghettata la classe dirigente di questo paese. I ricordi possono stare fermi sul fondo in nome del sano desiderio di vivere nel presente e per il futuro. Ma se qualcuno ti ripropone una menzogna che, per giunta, offende di nuovo gli offesi, allora i ricordi rigurgitano. Così mi è tornato in mente il caso di un illustre professore intellettuale antifascista e comunista che non trovò di meglio che assolvere l’ex Capo dell’Ufficio Razza del Minculpop col dire che era tanto bravo a trovar soldi.
Quello era un piccolo campione di ricordi assopiti. Ne usciranno fuori altri? Dopo aver letto l’intervento di Clara Sereni su L’Unità – “La colpa di essere Ebrea” – temo proprio che non soltanto ciò possa accadere, ma che ciò debba accadere, per una sorta di dovere civile ed etico.
Ho molta simpatia per Clara Sereni, anche se non la conosco di persona. Ci accomunano non soltanto la generazione e il tipo di esperienze, ma ricordi comuni. Mio padre era grande amico di Enrico Sereni, suo zio, e della sua famiglia che frequentava assiduamente da giovane, e tante tante volte ho sentito racconti da lui al riguardo. Ricordo, ad esempio, quando mi raccontava di Emilio Sereni che, da molto giovane e prima di diventare fervente comunista, era non soltanto sionista ma credente, girava per casa con la kippà e il libro di preghiere in mano. Evoco questo ricordo perché porta al tema che è al centro dell’intervento di Clara Sereni: la difficoltà di conciliare un’identità ebraica con una militanza comunista. È un problema che hanno vissuto tutti i dirigenti comunisti che non hanno accettato di sopprimere totalmente ogni legame con la loro identità ebraica, come fu il caso di Umberto Terracini. Nella mia modesta esperienza l’ho vissuto anch’io per lunghi anni ed è chiaro che Clara Sereni lo vive ancora e con tormento.
Nel suo intervento Clara Sereni denuncia due episodi che l’hanno ferita – e quanto duramente è facile capire da come ne parla! – l’uno pubblico e l’altro privato: essere stata presentata a una tavola rotonda della CGIL come “ebrea e scrittrice” e l’aver dovuto ascoltare, durante un pranzo di compleanno di amici di sinistra, espressioni di vero e proprio pregiudizio antiebraico.
Capisco il suo turbamento e le esprimo la mia solidarietà. Ma mi chiedo: delle due l’una, o il livello di pregiudizio antiebraico ha raggiunto nella sinistra livelli esplosivi, oppure Clara Sereni è in stato di catalessi da qualche decennio. Precisamente dal 1967, da quasi quarant’anni.
Non dico che già prima non vi fossero aspetti a dir poco equivoci nell’atteggiamento del movimento comunista nei confronti della questione ebraica. Al contrario, tutto nasce di lì. Valga per tutti il silenzio attorno alle politiche razziali fasciste, attorno alla “congiura dei medici ebrei” inventata da Stalin o la complicità nel caso Slansky. Anzi, il recente dibattito sull’amnistia togliattiana mi induce a ritenere che vi sia un terreno ancora tutto da scavare. Ma è innegabile che, fino al 1967 – alla Guerra dei Sei Giorni e alla rottura totale dell’URSS nei confronti di Israele – aveva prevalso un linguaggio, a suo modo, “politically correct”. Quando, nel 1967, inviammo in molti a L’Unità una lettera di protesta per la scelta israeliana, la risposta privata del direttore Maurizio Ferrara fu dura e negativa, e tuttavia, anche oggi, non mi è dato leggervi una sbavatura fuori dal terreno prettamente politico.
Da quel momento le cose iniziarono a prendere una piega sempre più brutta. Lasciamo perdere l’analisi storico-politica e consentiamoci un piccolo rigurgito, il ricordo di un episodio analogo a quello narrato da Clara Sereni. Era la fine degli anni settanta, ed ero in vacanza nel paesino di Ginostra (isola di Stromboli), che ero fra i primissimi ad aver scoperto, portandovi gruppi di amici di sinistra, che poi si ampliarono esponenzialmente fino a trasformarlo in un affollato luogo di vacanza militante. Scenario: una cena di una ventina di ragazzi sessantottini sul terrazzo di una tipica casetta cubica bianca, nel buio illuminato da qualche lampada a petrolio. A un certo punto, tra una chiacchiera e l’altra, un “compagno” toscano prorompe in un’invettiva violentissima contro gli ebrei: capitalisti, sanguisughe, imperialisti, assassini del proletariato, e chi più ne ha più ne metta. Reagisco indignato, definendo il suo linguaggio come fascista e razzista, certo di trovare ampia solidarietà, e… sorpresa… mi trovo nell’isolamento più assoluto. Nessuno mi difende, nemmeno i più cari amici. Anzi, la mia reazione viene condannata come spropositata. Alla fine, scornato e umiliato, abbandono polemicamente la compagnia e vado via da solo, sul sentiero buio con la torcia, seguito soltanto dalla mia fidanzata, verso la nostra casetta, dove più tardi vengo raggiunto dagli amici. Costoro non trovano di meglio che sottopormi a un processo tra la psicanalisi e la politica, mettendo sotto accusa il mio attaccamento “morboso” alle radici ebraiche che non mi permette di assumere il necessario “distacco”, e di ammettere con “oggettiva serenità” le colpe che gli ebrei indiscutibilmente hanno sullo scenario del mondo. Cerco disperatamente la solidarietà di un giovane “compagno” tedesco che risponde freddamente: «Noi tedeschi abbiamo fatto cose troppo brutte agli ebrei perché io possa dire liberamente quel che penso». Coro trionfale: «Hai visto!».
Potrei raccontare tanti altri episodi del genere, pranzi e cene come quelle di Clara Sereni, a suon di «Come mai voi ebrei siete quasi tutti commercianti?». Sarà per un’altra volta. Per ora mi limito a dire che l’episodio di cui sopra mi servì a capire una volta per tutte una cosa: che potevo scegliere di restare nella sinistra comunista o uscirne ma, qualsiasi cosa avessi fatto, ai razzisti e agli antisemiti occorreva rispondere soltanto con un calcio – ovviamente verbale – nei denti e, se non basta, nel sedere. È l’unica pedagogia che può svegliare la coscienza di coloro che sono in buona fede. Ed è l’unico modo di salvare la propria dignità e integrità, la verità e la giustizia. Quel che certamente avevo appreso è che non è possibile lasciarsi colpevolizzare, subire la richiesta inaudita di dover fare un atto di discolpa. L’ha capito questo Clara Sereni? Non pare, visto che dice: «come tante altre volte, ho dovuto, come ebrea, fare il mio “Radames, discolpati”». “Tante” altre volte? L’ha fatto tante altre volte, e l’ha rifatto ancora questa volta senza trovare innaturale assoggettarsi a un simile infame ricatto?
Per parte mia, il decennio abbondante di militanza comunista che seguì all’episodio ginostriano – e che fu tutt’altro che facile – terminò proprio quando venne l’epoca delle richieste pubbliche di discolpa. Se ne ricorda, Clara Sereni? Fu l’epoca della guerra del Libano, nel 1982, quando a sinistra si chiedeva e richiedeva a gran voce agli ebrei di tutto il mondo di dissociarsi da Israele e di ottenere un salvacondotto di rispettabilità attraverso una condanna del governo Begin. Rosellina Balbi denunciò con forza questa intollerabile pretesa in un memorabile articolo su La Repubblica: “Davide discolpati”. Altro che Radames… Fu un periodo cupo. Le umilianti giaculatorie di un certo numero di ebrei di sinistra non servivano a placare le arroganti richieste di dissociazione. E a forza di fomentare l’odio venne l’evento nefando: nel corso di un corteo dei tre sindacati confederali venne deposta una bara davanti al Tempio maggiore di Roma. E, infine, in questo clima di sordida ostilità, il terrorismo palestinese prese il coraggio di compiere l’assalto armato al Tempio che vide l’uccisione del piccolo Stefano Taché.
A ventiquattro anni di distanza ancora Clara Sereni non ha assimilato quella lezione e accetta di sottoporsi alla pratica umiliante della “discolpa”? Occorre forse rispiegare perché non dovrebbe? Non discuto il suo legittimo diritto di continuare ad essere comunista e di difendere l’attualità di Marx (il che mi fa venire in mente quanto diceva nel 1989 il mio amico scrittore Alberto Lecco: «Il comunismo è finito? Vedrete… Comincia adesso…). Non discuto la legittimità dei suoi giudizi su Israele e sulla questione palestinese. Siamo su posizioni diversissime, ma questo è irrilevante. Appunto: che c’entra? Perché mai, per conquistarmi il diritto a non essere afflitto da tirate antisemite, debbo fare una fede di professione comunista, antisionista, filopalestinese e dimostrare di essere un “ebreo buono”? Insomma, perché, per non essere colpito dal razzismo, debbo legittimare il razzismo? Non si rende conto Clara Sereni che questo è esattamente l’atteggiamento umiliato e umiliante che assunsero gli ebrei “camerati” del gruppo torinese de La Nostra Bandiera negli anni trenta, che, con le loro sviscerate professioni di fede fascista (peraltro perfettamente sincere!) speravano di esorcizzare il montante antisemitismo del regime e persino le leggi razziali? Perché Clara Sereni si sottopone a questi avvilenti ricatti tipici di ogni forma di totalitarismo? Non si rende conto che, se c’è ancora gente che non si vergogna di chiedere queste discolpe, e non si avvilisce a vederle fare, aveva ben ragione Alberto Lecco: il comunismo, quello stalinista cattivo, è vivo ed è fra di noi.
A ventiquattro anni dalla campagna “Davide, discolpati”, Clara Sereni, invece di continuare a sottoporsi al ricatto, a “giustificarsi di essere ebrea”, a lasciarsi brutalizzare neanche più nelle vesti di David ma in quelle di Radames, dovrebbe intimare ai Golia razzisti: discolpatevi voi della vostra infamia, e vergognatevi, se ne siete capaci.
Tutto il suo intervento è intriso di patetiche illusioni. Si può davvero credere di ammorbidire i cattivi ripetendo la solita giaculatoria anti-sharoniana (“la politica del governo Berlusconi ha spiaccicato ebrei e Italia sulla politica di Sharon”). Che senso ha, mentre mezzo mondo ha fatto ammenda dei luoghi comuni su Sharon, continuare con la tiritera su Sharon boia? E perché mai la mossa di apertura verso Israele del ministro degli esteri Fini sarebbe stata efficace ma “scorrettissima”? Dove sta la scorrettezza? Nel non essere rimasto fedele a un’ortodossia fascista? Perché bisogna dire delle cose senza senso per non lasciar dubbi sulla propria ortodossia di sinistra?
Infine, forse l’illusione più patetica è tentare di convincere la sinistra a voler bene agli ebrei, per non regalarli alla destra e perdere le elezioni. Gli ebrei sono quattro gatti, ammette Clara Sereni, ma le elezioni si vinceranno per pochi voti, e quelli ebraici potrebbero essere decisivi. Ora, posto che su 30.000 ebrei non sono pochi quelli che voteranno per il centro-destra, quale sarebbe lo spostamento possibile:1000 o 1500 voti? E la sinistra, se non ci sta a voler bene agli ebrei per intima convinzione, dovrebbe mostrarsi benevola per l’opportunità di non perdere quel migliaio di voti? Me le immagino le sghignazzate dei commensali antisemiti di Clara Sereni… Peraltro, dopo aver fatto ricorso a un simile argomento, l’unica risorsa disponibile sarebbe mettersi in ginocchio e supplicare piangendo.
Capisco perfettamente l’ansia di Clara Sereni di perdere il rapporto con la sinistra, il suo attaccamento alla sua identità progressista. Ma la domanda è: qual è il modo più costruttivo e dignitoso per mantenere un rapporto autentico e realmente proficuo con quel mondo?
Per rispondere vorrei tornare a quel lontano 1982. Dopo la deposizione della bara davanti al Tempio maggiore di Roma, lo scandalo che ne seguì fu aggravato dalla reticenza delle dirigenze sindacali e, in particolare, dall’atteggiamento a dir poco ambiguo dell’allora segretario della CGIL Luciano Lama. Per me e per tanti altri fu la goccia che fece traboccare il vaso. Scrissi una lettera di sette pagine contro Lama che, in tutto o in parte, fu pubblicata da parecchi giornali e, con altri, promossi un appello che fu pubblicato su Repubblica col titolo “Lama e gli ebrei”. Ciò mi costò l’ostracismo di tanti ex-compagni. L’avviso venne da alto loco e fu perentorio: se non si ritira la lettera e l’appello la rottura è totale. Ancor oggi c’è gente che attraversa la strada se mi vede arrivare sullo stesso marciapiede. E appena qualche anno fa, quando raccontai queste vicende nel libro “La questione ebraica oggi”, venne fuori qualche maggiordomo della memoria di Lama a sostenere che quel che dicevo era falso, che Lama si era al contrario adoperato a condannare l’atto della deposizione della bara, che non aveva mai detto nulla di lontanamente equivoco. Insomma, ero io il fazioso, il rissoso e il calunniatore e il povero Lama era il crociato in difesa degli ebrei. Da non potersi credere. Riandai a leggermi l’appello pubblicato su La Repubblica pensando di essere ormai in preda all’Alzheimer. Diceva una cosa durissima: che il commento di Lama era «reticente e tale da offrire copertura [sic!] a quanti si sono resi responsabili di quegli atti», che erano definiti senza mezzi termini «neonazisti» e non accidentali bensì «pensati e organizzati». E sapete quali firme c’erano in calce a quell’appello? Fra le altre, quelle di noti proto-berlusconiani come Massimo Cacciari, Aniello Coppola, Giacomo Marramao, Claudio Pavone, Mario Pirani, Beniamino Placido, Luigi Spaventa. Eppure, nel 2002, ero diventato io l’unico cattivo e fazioso. Una tecnica arcinota e collaudata, quella della demonizzazione e dell’isolamento del reprobo, codificata dall’immortale maestro Josif Vissarionovic Dugasvili.
Ciò detto, ho forse perso qualcosa agendo in questo modo? Non credo proprio. Che perdita è mai quella della finta amicizia di gente di quella fatta? Era meglio non perdere il saluto dell’allora segretario della sezione universitaria del PCI (che ancora fa finta di non conoscermi) oppure sentirsi riconoscere pubblicamente da Piero Fassino che la mia “furia iconoclasta” è servita a stimolare riflessioni utili e costruttive? Era meglio tenersi buoni gli intellettuali che parlano di razza ebraica, o stabilire un dialogo fertile e costruttivo con persone come Giuseppe Caldarola e Umberto Ranieri? Esiste e cresce una sinistra aperta, attenta e senza pregiudizi sulla questione israeliana e sulla questione ebraica. Con questa bisogna parlare e non amareggiarsi i pranzi con la gentaglia: esistono pur sempre le porte per andarsene e ottimi ristoranti. Cara Clara Sereni, chi cova i pregiudizi di cui lei racconta non è certamente una persona “per bene” e, se è “di sinistra”, non cambia nulla: a destra e a sinistra i razzisti sono la stessa pasta di mascalzoni.
So bene quanto certi percorsi siano difficili e tortuosi. Sono l’ultimo a pretendere di giudicare, tanto meno di condannare. Ma ogni percorso nel deserto deve prima o poi finire nella terra promessa. Che è quella in cui si vive con una coscienza libera e, tra il partito-che-rappresenta-il-destino-storico e la verità, si sceglie la verità.

Giorgio Israel

Podhoretz: the panic over Iraq

2006-01-19T00:25:00.000-08:00

January 2006

COMMENTARY
January 2006

The Panic Over Iraq

Norman Podhoretz

Like, I am sure, many other believers in what this country has been trying to do in the Middle East and particularly in Iraq, I have found my thoughts returning in the past year to something that Tom Paine, writing at an especially dark moment of the American Revolution, said about such times. They are, he memorably wrote, “the times that try men’s souls,” the times in which “the summer soldier and the sunshine patriot” become so disheartened that they “shrink from the service of [their] country.”

But Paine did not limit his anguished derision to former supporters of the American War of Independence whose courage was failing because things had not been going as well on the battlefield as they had expected or hoped. In a less famous passage, he also let loose on another group:

’Tis surprising to see how rapidly a panic will sometimes run through a country. . . . Yet panics, in some cases, have their uses . . . . [T]heir peculiar advantage is, that they are the touchstones of sincerity and hypocrisy, and bring things and men to light, which might otherwise have lain for ever undiscovered.

Thus, he explained, “Many a disguised Tory has lately shown his head,” emboldened by the circumstances of the moment to reveal an opposition to the break with Britain that it had previously seemed prudent to conceal.

The similarities to our situation today are uncanny. We, too, are in the midst of a rapidly spreading panic. We, too, have our sunshine patriots and summer soldiers, in the form of people who initially supported the invasion of Iraq—and the Bush Doctrine from which it followed—but who are now abandoning what they have decided is a sinking ship. And we, too, are seeing formerly disguised opponents of the war coming more and more out into the open, and in ever greater numbers.

Yet in spite of these similarities, there is also a very curious difference between the American panic of 1776-7 and the American panic of 2005-6. To put it in the simplest and starkest terms: in that early stage of the Revolutionary War, there was sound reason to fear that the British would succeed in routing Washington’s forces. In Iraq today, however, and in the Middle East as a whole, a successful outcome is staring us in the face. Clearly, then, the panic over Iraq—which expresses itself in increasingly frenzied calls for the withdrawal of our forces—cannot have been caused by the prospect of defeat. On the contrary, my twofold guess is that the real fear behind it is not that we are losing but that we are winning, and that what has catalyzed this fear into a genuine panic is the realization that the chances of pulling off the proverbial feat of snatching an American defeat from the jaws of victory are rapidly running out.

Of course, to anyone who relies entirely or largely on the mainstream media for information, it will come as a great surprise to hear that we are winning in Iraq. Winning? Militarily? How can we be winning militarily when, day after day, the only thing of any importance going on in that country is suicide bombings and car bombings? When neither our own troops nor the Iraqi forces we have been training are able to stop the “insurgents” from scoring higher and higher body counts? When every serious military move we make against the strongholds of these dedicated and ruthless adversaries is met with “fierce resistance”? When, for every one of them we manage to kill, two more seem to pop up?

Winning? Politically? How can we be winning politically when the very purpose for which we allegedly invaded Iraq has been unmasked as a chimera? When every step we force the Iraqis to take toward democratization is accompanied by angry sectarian strife between Shiites and Sunnis and between each of them and the Kurds? When our clumsy efforts to bring the Sunnis into the political process have hardly made a dent in their support for the insurgency? When the end result is less likely to be the stable democratic regime we supposedly went there to establish than a civil war followed by the breakup of Iraq into three separate countries?

There has been one great exception to this relentless drumbeat of bad news: it occurred in January 2005, in the coverage of the first election in liberated Iraq. To the astonishment of practically everyone in the world, more than 8 million Iraqis came out to vote on election day even though the Islamofascist terrorists had threatened to slaughter them if they did. This very astonishment was a measure of how false an impression had been created of the state of affairs in Iraq. No one fed by the mainstream media could have had the slightest inkling that these 8 million people were actually there, so invisible had they been to reporters who spent all their time interviewing the discontented Iraqi Man in the Street and to cameras seemingly incapable of focusing on anything but carnage and rubble.

But the mainstream media soon recovered from the shock. By October, on the morning after a second ballot in which the new Iraqi constitution was ratified by fully 79 percent of the electorate, the Washington Post ran its announcement of these inspiring results on page 13. As for the paper’s front page, the columnist Jeff Jacoby would note that it

was dominated by a photograph, stretched across four columns, of three daughters at the funeral of their father, . . . who had died from injuries suffered during a September 26 bombing in Baghdad. Two accompanying stories, both above the fold, were headlined “Military Has Lost 2,000 in Iraq” and “Bigger, Stronger, Homemade Bombs Now to Blame for Half of U.S. Deaths.” A nearby graphic—“The Toll”—divided the 2,000 deaths by type of military service.

In sum, in the words of the Australian blogger Arthur Chrenkoff:

Death, violence, terrorism, precarious political situation, problems with reconstruction, and public frustration (both in Iraq and America) dominate, if not overwhelm, the mainstream media coverage and commentary on Iraq.

About a year ago, concerned that he might have been exaggerating when he made this assertion on the basis of his “gut feeling,” Chrenkoff decided to check it out more scientifically. So he did “a little tally” of the stories published or broadcast all over the world on a single average day (which happened to be January 21, 2005). Here are some of the numbers that, with the help of the Google News Index, he was able to report from that one day:

2,642 stories about Condoleezza Rice’s confirmation hearings, in the context of grilling she has received over the administration’s Iraq policy.
1,992 stories about suicide bombings and other terrorist attacks.
887 stories about prisoner abuse by British soldiers.
216 stories about hostages currently being held in Iraq.
761 stories reporting on activities and public statements of insurgents.
357 stories about the antiwar movement and the dropping public support for involvement in Iraq.
182 stories about American servicemen killed and wounded in operations.
217 stories about concerns for fairness and validity of Iraqi election (low security, low turnout, etc.).
107 stories about civilian deaths in Iraq.
123 stories noting Vice President Cheney’s admission that he had underestimated the task of reconstruction.
118 stories about complicated and strained relations between the U.S. and Europe.
121 stories discussing the possibility of an American pullout.
27 stories about sabotage of Iraqi oil infrastructure.
As against all this, the good news made a pathetic showing:
16 stories about security successes in the fight against insurgents.
7 stories about positive developments relating to elections.
73 stories about the return to Iraq of stolen antiquities.¹

Obviously, then, the reporters and their editors in the mainstream media have been working overtime to show how badly things have been going for us in Iraq. Meanwhile, the op-ed pundits, the academic theorists, and the armchair generals have chimed in with analyses blaming it all on the incompetence of the President and his appointees. By now, the proposition that the aftermath of the invasion has been marked by one disastrous blunder after another is accepted without question or qualification by just about everyone: open opponents of the Bush Doctrine eager to prove that they were right to denounce the invasion; Democrats whose main objective is to discredit the Bush administration; and erstwhile supporters who have lost heart and are looking for a way to justify their desertion.

But the charge of incompetence has also been hurled by strong supporters of the Bush Doctrine in general and of the invasion of Iraq in particular, whose purpose is to prod the people running the operation into doing a better job. The most authoritative such supporter, Eliot A. Cohen of Johns Hopkins, has expressed a

desire—barely controlled—to slap the highly educated fool who, having no soldier friends or family, once explained to me that mistakes happen in all wars, and that the casualties are not really all that high, and that I really shouldn’t get exercised about them.

Now, this person may well have deserved a slap for being presumptuous toward a distinguished military historian, or for insensitivity in downplaying casualties when speaking to the father of an infantry officer on his way to Iraq. But at the risk of exposing myself as another highly educated fool, I must confess that I too think we need to be reminded that mistakes happen in all wars, and that the casualties in this one are very low by any historical standard.

Before measuring Iraq in these two respects, I want to look more closely at some of the actions taken by the Bush administration that are universally accepted as mistakes, and to begin by pointing out that the main one is based on an outright falsification of the facts. This is the accusation that no thought was given to what would happen once we got to Baghdad and no plans were therefore made for dealing with the aftermath of the combat phase. Yet the plain truth is that much thought was given to, and many plans were made for dealing with, horrors that everyone expected to happen and then, mercifully, did not. Among these were: house-to-house fighting to take Baghdad; the flight of a million or more refugees; the setting of the oil fields afire; and the outbreak of a major civil war.

As for the insurgency, even if its dimensions had accurately been foreseen, it would still have been impossible to eliminate it in short order. To cite Eliot Cohen himself:

If the insurgencies in Northern Ireland, Israel/Palestine, Sri Lanka, and Kashmir continue, what reason do we have to expect this one to end so soon?

A related group of alleged “mistakes” turn out on closer inspection to be judgment calls, concerning which it is possible for reasonable men to differ. The most widely circulated of these—especially among supporters of the war on the Right—is that there were too few American “boots on the ground” to mount an effective campaign against the insurgency. Perhaps. And yet the key factor in fighting a terrorist insurgency is not the number of troops deployed against it but rather the amount and quality of the intelligence that can be obtained from infiltrating its ranks and from questioning prisoners (a task made all the more difficult for us by the campaign here at home to define torture down to the point where it would become illegal to subject even a captured terrorist to generally accepted methods of interrogation).

Finally, there are “mistakes” that were actually choices between two evils—choices that had to be made when it was by no means obvious which was the lesser of the two. The best example here is the policy of “de-Baathification.” This led to a disbanding of the Iraqi army, whose embittered Sunni members were then putatively left with nothing to do but volunteer their services to the insurgency. Yet allowing Saddam Hussein’s thugs to continue controlling the army would have embittered the Shiites and the Kurds instead, both of whom had suffered greatly at the hands of the Sunni minority. Is it self-evident that this would have been better for us or for Iraq?

However, even if I were to concede for the sake of argument that every one of these accusations was justified, I would still contend that they amounted to chump change when stacked up against the mistakes that were made in World War II—a war conducted by acknowledged giants like Roosevelt and Churchill.² And I would still say, as I have said before, that the number of American casualties in Iraq is minimal as compared with the losses suffered in past wars.³ Similarly, the mistakes—again assuming they were mistakes rather than debatable judgment calls—committed in the first year after the fall of Saddam were relatively inconsequential when measured against those made in the aftermath of the Allied victories over Germany and Japan.

Several Iraqi bloggers, and many letters written by American soldiers in the field that have found their way onto the Internet, paint a very different picture. Like Arthur Chrenkoff, these close-range observers do not overlook the persistence of major problems, and they do not deny that we still have a long way to go before Iraq becomes secure, stable, and democratic. But they document with great detail the amazing progress that has been made, even under the gun of Islamofascist terrorism, in building—from scratch—the political morale of a country ravaged by “post-totalitarian stress disorder,” in setting up the institutional foundations of a federal republic, in getting the economy moving, and in reconstructing the physical infrastructure.

The columnist Max Boot, who has himself been free with charges of incompetence, and who takes the position that we should have put more troops into Iraq, can (like Eliot Cohen) see clearly through his own reservations to provide a good summary of the situation as it now stands:

For starters, one can point to two successful elections . . . , on January 30 and October 15 [2005], in which the majority of Iraqis braved insurgent threats to vote. The constitutional referendum in October was particularly significant because it marked the first wholesale engagement of Sunnis in the political process. . . . This is big news. The most disaffected group in Iraq is starting to realize that it must achieve its objectives through ballots, not bullets.⁴

Moving on to the economy, Boot (relying on a Brookings Institution report) tells us that “for all the insurgents’ attempts to sabotage the Iraqi economy,” per-capita income has doubled since 2003 and is now 30-percent higher than it was before the war; that the Iraqi economy is projected to grow at a whopping 16.8 percent in 2006; and that there are five times more cars on the streets than in Saddam Hussein’s day, five times more telephone subscribers, and 32 times more Internet users.

Finally, Boot points out that whereas not a single independent media outlet existed in Iraq before 2003, there are now 44 commercial TV stations, 72 radio stations, and more than 100 newspapers.

To all of this we can add the 3,404 public schools, 304 water and sewage projects, 257 fire and police stations, and 149 public-health facilities that had been built as of September 2005, with another 921 such projects currently under construction.

As for the military front, a November 2005 report by the Committee on the Present Danger (CPD) cites an example of what is being accomplished by American troops:

In the recent Operation Steel Curtain on the Syrian border, our troops detained more than 1,000 suspected insurgents. One hundred weapons caches were found and cleared. Since January, 116 of Zarqawi’s lieutenants have been killed or captured.

The CPD report also notes the steady strengthening of the Iraqi armed forces, and the increasing degree of responsibility they are assuming in the fight against the insurgency:

[Since July] Iraq’s armed forces . . . have added 22 new battalions, and 5,500 police-service personnel have been trained and equipped (as have some 2,000 special-police commanders). Coalition senior officers report that 80 Iraqi battalions now are able to fight alongside our troops and 36 are “generally able to conduct independent operations.” More than 20 of the coalition’s forward-operating bases have been turned over to the Iraqi army.

The CPD supports the campaign in Iraq. Anthony H. Cordesman of the Center for Strategic and International Studies is (to put it mildly) unfriendly to the Bush Doctrine and all its works. But Cordesman concurs with the CPD assessment. Citing slightly different statistics, he notes

continued increase in the number of Iraqi units able to take the lead in combat operations against the insurgency . . . [p]rogress of Iraqi units in assuming responsibility for the battle space . . . [and] continued increase in the number of units and individuals trained, equipped, and formed into operational status.

What this means in concrete terms is laid out by Newsweek’s Fareed Zakaria, also no great admirer of how the Bush administration has conducted the Iraq campaign:

For two years, when reporters would ask how it was possible that the mightiest military in history could not secure a five-kilometer stretch of road, the military responded with long, jargon-filled lectures. . . . Then one day this summer the military was ordered to secure the road. . . . Presto. Using Iraqi forces, the road was secured. Similar strategies have made cities like Najaf, Mosul, Tal Afar, and even Falluja much safer today than they were a year ago.

Why is there so little public awareness of these things? One young reporter, who proudly proclaims his membership in the mainstream media, has been only too happy to provide an explanation:

As long as American soldiers are getting killed nearly every day, we’re not going to be giving much coverage to the opening of multimillion dollar sewage projects. American lives are worth more than Iraqi shit.

Observe, in this clever and brutal formulation, the professed concern with American casualties. From it, one might imagine that the statement is worlds away from the hostility to American military power—and to America in general—that pervaded the radical Left in the 1960’s and that in a milder liberal mutation came to be known as the “post-Vietnam syndrome.” And it is certainly true that the antiwar movement spawned by Vietnam rarely had a tear to shed for the American lives that were being lost there. But the newfound tenderness toward our troops in Iraq does not in the least reflect a change in attitude toward the use of force by the United States. To the contrary, the relentless harping on American casualties by the mainstream media is part of an increasingly desperate effort to portray Iraq as another Vietnam: a foolish and futile (if not immoral and illegal) resort to military power in pursuit of a worthless (if not unworthy) goal.

Mark Twain once famously said that reports of his death were greatly exaggerated. So it was, in the immediate aftermath of 9/11, with the post-Vietnam syndrome. During those early weeks, a number of commentators were quick to proclaim the birth of an entirely new era in American history. What December 7, 1941 had done to the isolationism of old, they announced, September 11, 2001 had done to the Vietnam syndrome. Politically speaking, it was dead, and the fallout from the Vietnam war—namely, the hostility to America and especially to American military power—would follow it into the grave.

As is evident from the coverage of Iraq in the mainstream media, such pronouncements were more than a little premature: the Vietnam syndrome is still alive and well. But equally apparent is that the reporters and editors to whom it is a veritable religion understand very clearly that success in Iraq could deal the Vietnam syndrome a mortal blow. Little wonder, then, that they have so resolutely tried to ignore any and all signs of progress—or, when that becomes impossible, to dismiss them as so much “shit.”

This, however, is at least a kind of tribute to our progress, if a perverse one. The same cannot be said of the opponents of the Bush Doctrine in the universities and think tanks, who are unwilling even to acknowledge that more and better things are happening in Iraq and the broader Middle East than are dreamed of in their philosophy.

Take, for example, Zbigniew Brzezinski, who left the academy to serve as Jimmy Carter’s National Security Adviser and is now a professor again. In a recently published piece entitled “American Debacle,” Brzezinski began by accusing George W. Bush of “suicidal statecraft,” went on to pronounce the intervention in Iraq (along with everything else this President has done) a total disaster, and ended by urging that we withdraw from that country “perhaps even as early as next year”—i.e., 2006. Unlike the late Senator Aiken of Vermont, who once proposed that we declare victory in Vietnam and then get out, Brzezinski wants to declare defeat in Iraq and then get out. This, he mysteriously assures us, will help restore “the legitimacy of America’s global role.”

Now I have to admit that I find it a little rich that George W. Bush should be accused of “suicidal statecraft” by, of all people, the man who in the late 1970’s helped shape a foreign policy that emboldened the Iranians to seize and hold American hostages while his boss in the Oval Office stood impotently by for more than six months before finally authorizing a rescue operation so inept that it only compounded our national humiliation. And where was Brzezinski—famed at the time for his anti-Communism—when the President he served congratulated us on having overcome our “inordinate fear of Communism”? Where was Brzezinski—known far and wide for his hard-line determination to resist Soviet expansionism—when Cyrus Vance, the then Secretary of State, declared that the Soviet Union and the United States had “similar dreams and aspirations,” and when Carter himself complacently informed us that containment was no longer necessary? And how was it that, despite daily meetings with Brzezinski, Carter remained so blind to the nature of the Soviet regime that the invasion of Afghanistan, as he himself would admit, taught him more in a week about the nature of that regime than he had managed to learn in an entire lifetime? Had the cat gotten Brzezinski’s tongue in the three years leading up to that invasion—the same tongue he now wags with such confidence at George W. Bush?⁵

But even if Brzezinski’s record over the past 30 years did not disqualify him from dispensing advice on how to conduct American foreign policy, this diatribe against Bush would by itself be enough. For here he looks over the Middle East, and what does he see? He sees the United States being “stamped as the imperialistic successor to Britain and as a partner of Israel in the military repression of the Arabs.” This may not be fair, he covers himself by adding; but not a single word does he say to indicate that the British created the very despotisms the United States is now trying to replace with democratic regimes, or that George W. Bush is the first American President to have come out openly for a Palestinian state.

Again Brzezinski looks over the Middle East, and what does he see? He sees the treatment of prisoners in Abu Ghraib, and by extension Guantanamo, causing the loss of America’s “moral standing” as a “country that has stood tall” against “political repression, torture, and other violations of human rights.” And that is all he sees—quite as though we never liberated Afghanistan from the theocratic tyranny of the Taliban, or Iraq from the fascist despotism of Saddam Hussein. But how, after all, when it comes to standing tall against “political repression, torture, and other violations of human rights,” can such achievements compare with a sanctimonious lecture by Jimmy Carter followed by the embrace of one third-world dictator after another?

Then for a third time Brzezinski looks over the Middle East, and what does he see? He sees more and more sympathy for terrorism, and more and more hatred of America, being generated throughout the region by our actions in Iraq; and in this context, too, that is all he sees. About the momentous encouragement that our actions have given to the forces of reform that never dared act or even speak up before, he is completely silent—though it is a phenomenon that even so inveterate a hater of America as the Lebanese dissident Walid Jumblatt has found himself compelled to recognize. Thus, only a few months after declaring that “the killing of U.S. soldiers in Iraq is legitimate and obligatory,” Jumblatt suddenly woke up to what those U.S. soldiers had actually been doing for the world in which he lived:

It’s strange for me to say it, but this process of change has started because of the American invasion of Iraq. I was cynical about Iraq. But when I saw the Iraqi people voting [in January 2005], 8 million of them, it was the start of a new Arab world.

The columnist Michael Barone has listed some of the developments that bear out Jumblatt’s judgment:

[The] progress toward democracy in Iraq is leading Middle Easterners to concentrate on the question of how to build decent governments and decent societies. We can see the results—the Cedar Revolution in Lebanon, the first seriously contested elections in Egypt, Libya’s giving up WMD’s, the Jordanian protests against Abu Musab Zarqawi’s recent suicide attacks, and even a bit of reform in Saudi Arabia.

Even in Syria, reports the Washington Post’s David Ignatius,

people talk politics . . . with a passion I haven’t heard since the 1980’s in Eastern Europe. They’re writing manifestos, dreaming of new political parties, trying to rehabilitate old ones from the 1950’s.

And not only in Syria. As the democratic activist Saad Eddin Ibrahim who, like Jumblatt, originally opposed the invasion of Iraq, told Ignatius’s colleague Jim Hoagland:

Those [in the Middle East] who believe in democracy and civil society are finally actors . . . [because the invasion of Iraq] has unfrozen the Middle East, just as Napoleon’s 1798 expedition did. Elections in Iraq force the theocrats and autocrats to put democracy on the agenda, even if only to fight against us. Look, neither Napoleon nor President Bush could impregnate the region with political change. But they were able to be midwives.

Nor are such changes confined to the political sphere alone. According to a report in the Economist, a revulsion against terrorism has begun to spread among Muslim clerics, including some who, like the secular Jumblatt, were only recently applauding its use against Americans:

Moderate Muslim clerics have grown increasingly concerned at the abuse of religion to justify killing. In Saudi Arabia, numerous preachers once famed for their fighting words now advise tolerance and restraint. Even so rigid a defender of suicide attacks against Israel . . . as Yusuf Qaradawi, the star preacher of the popular al-Jazeera satellite channel, denounces bombings elsewhere and calls on the perpetrators to repent.

Zbigniew Brzezinski may be wrongheaded, but he is neither blind nor stupid. Why, then, his willful silence in the face of all these signs of progress? I can only interpret it as the product of a rising panic. No less than the denizens of the mainstream media, he is desperately struggling to salvage a worldview that, like theirs, should have been but was not killed off by 9/11 and that, like theirs, may well suffer a truly mortal blow if the Bush Doctrine passes through the great test of fire it is undergoing in Iraq.

Brzezinski’s worldview is a syncretistic mix of foreign-policy realism (with its emphasis on stability and the sanctity of national borders) and liberal internationalism (with its unshakable faith in compromise, consensus, and international institutions). In this he differs somewhat from another former National Security Adviser, Brent Scowcroft, a Republican who occupied the office under George W. Bush’s father and whose own commitment to the realist perspective is pure and unadulterated.

In spite of this difference, the two men are at one in regarding the war in Iraq as a disastrous distraction from the really important business to which we should be attending in the Middle East—namely, the conflict between Israel and the Palestinians. In an article published some months before the invasion and entitled “Don’t Attack Saddam,” Scowcroft wrote:

Possibly the most dire consequence [of attacking Saddam] would be the effect in the region. The shared view in the region is that Iraq is principally an obsession of the U.S. The obsession of the region, however, is the Israeli-Palestinian conflict. If we were seen to be turning our backs on that bitter conflict, there would be an explosion of outrage against us.

Evidently he still holds to this view. So does Brzezinski, who attacks “the Bush team” for having transformed “a manageable, though serious, challenge of largely regional origin into an international debacle,” and who urges us to get out of Iraq, the sooner the better, so that we can shift our focus back to where it really belongs—“the Israeli-Palestinian peace process.”

Well, whether the conflict between Israel and the Palestinians is truly “the obsession of the region” or, rather, a screen for other things, it certainly is the obsession of Brzezinski and Scowcroft, as it is of almost everyone else who looks at the Middle East from the so-called realist perspective and to whom stability is the great desideratum. Even from that perspective, however, the non-stop preoccupation with Israel would seem to be warranted only if the conflict with the Palestinians were the main cause of instability throughout the region.

This is indeed what Brzezinski, Scowcroft, and most other members of the realist school believe.⁶ Yet the realities to which they are so deferential in the abstract make utter nonsense of this idea. Since the birth of Israel in 1948, there have been something like two dozen wars in the Middle East (variously involving Egypt, Yemen, Lebanon, Syria, Iran, and Iraq) that have had nothing whatever to do with the Jewish state, or with the Palestinians. In one of these alone—the Iran-Iraq war of 1980-88—more lives were lost than in all the wars involving Israel put together.

The obsessive animus against Israel goes hand in hand with the overall strategy for dealing with the Middle East that prevailed before 9/11, and to which Brzezinski and Scowcroft are still married, heart and soul and mind. The best and most succinct description of that strategy was given by President Bush himself in explaining why 9/11 had driven him to reject it in favor of a radically different approach:

For decades free nations tolerated oppression in the Middle East for the sake of stability. In practice, this approach brought little stability and much oppression, so I have changed this policy.

And again:

In the past, . . . longstanding ties often led us to overlook the faults of local elites. Yet this bargain did not bring stability or make us safe. It merely bought time, while problems festered and ideologies of violence took hold.

We learn from Jeffrey Goldberg of the New Yorker that, when Condoleezza Rice quoted these words to Scowcroft (her former mentor), he responded that the policy Bush was rejecting had actually brought us “50 years of peace.”⁷

In addition to remaining convinced that the old way of doing things was right, Scowcroft is utterly disdainful of the new approach being followed by George W. Bush, which (as I like to describe it) is to make the Middle East safe for America by making it safe for democracy. “I believe,” he told Jeffrey Goldberg, “that you cannot with one sweep of the hand or the mind cast off thousands of years of history.” But the despotisms in the Middle East are not thousands of years old, and they were not created by Allah or the Prophet Muhammad. All of them were established after World War I—that is, less than a century ago—by the British and the French.

This being the case, there is nothing “utopian” about the idea that such regimes—planted with shallow roots by two Western powers—could be uprooted with the help of a third Western power, and that a better political system could be put in their place. And, in fact, this is exactly what has been happening before our very eyes in Iraq. In the span of three short years, Iraq, liberated by the United States from the totalitarian tyranny of Saddam Hussein, has taken one giant step after another toward democratization. Yet Scowcroft can still assure us that “you’re not going to democratize Iraq,” and certainly not “in any reasonable time frame.”

As with Brzezinski, so again it seems that nothing else but panic can explain so astonishing a degree of denial.

Like the mainstream media and the theorists in the academy and the think tanks, the Democratic party—fearing that it might be frozen out of power for a very long time to come—is also in a panic over the signs that George W. Bush’s new approach to the greater Middle East is on the verge of passing the test of Iraq. Hence the veritable hysteria with which the Democrats have recently tried to delegitimize the war: first by claiming (three years after the fact!) that it had begun with a lie, and then by declaring that it was ending in a defeat. Leaning heavily on the turn in public opinion largely brought about by reports in the mainstream media and the lucubrations of the theorists, the Democrats now joined in by clamoring openly for a withdrawal of American forces from Iraq.⁸

A goodly number of these Democrats (Howard Dean and Congresswoman Cynthia McKinney, to name only two) are the “Tories” of today, in the sense of having from the very beginning stood openly and unambiguously against the revolution in foreign policy represented by the Bush Doctrine and now being put to the test in Iraq. But a much larger number of Democrats fit more smoothly into Tom Paine’s category of “disguised” Tories. These are the Congressmen and Senators who in their heart of hearts were against the resolution authorizing the President to use force against Saddam Hussein, but who—given the state of public opinion at the time—feared being punished at the polls unless they voted for it. Now, however, with public opinion moving in the other direction, they have been emboldened to “show their heads.”

Finally, we have a certain number of Democrats who correspond to “the summer soldiers and the sunshine patriots” of the American Revolution.⁹ One of them is Congressman John Murtha, who backed the invasion of Iraq because (to give him the benefit of the doubt) he really thought it was the right thing to do, but who has now bought entirely into the view that all is lost and that the only sensible course is to turn tail:

The war in Iraq is . . . a flawed policy wrapped in illusion . . . our military is suffering. The future of our country is at risk. We cannot continue on the present course. It is evident that continued military action is not in the best interests of the United States of America, the Iraqi people, or the Persian-Gulf region. . . . Our troops have become the primary target of the insurgency. They are united against U.S. forces and we have become a catalyst for violence. U.S. troops are the common enemy of the Sunnis, Saddamists, and foreign jihadists. . . . Our military has done everything that has been asked of them, the U.S. cannot accomplish anything further in Iraq militarily. It is time to bring them home.

It seems never to have occurred to Murtha that talk of this kind could only confuse and demoralize the troops for whose welfare, and for whose sufferings, he expresses such concern. By all accounts, those troops are very proud of what they are accomplishing in Iraq. How then could they not be confounded when a respected Congressman—a former Marine, no less—declares that they have been fighting for nothing, nothing whatsoever, and when for saying so he gets a standing ovation from his fellow Democrats? How could they not be demoralized to be told that there is no point in going on because their very presence in Iraq is making things worse for everyone concerned?¹⁰

And how, by the same token, could talk of this kind fail to give new heart to the Islamofascist terrorists—just when they are on the run? How could they not be delighted to see the elected representatives of the American people carrying on a heated debate in which the only questions at issue are how quickly to bug out of Iraq, and whether to fix a timetable and a deadline? How could they not feel vindicated when, after being surprised by the fierce reaction of the Americans to 9/11, they now behold fresh evidence for believing that Osama bin Laden was right after all when he called us a paper tiger?

On the other hand, if (as the President intended all along, as he reiterated in his great speech of November 30 at Annapolis, and as is prescribed in the recently declassified “National Strategy for Victory in Iraq”) American forces are drawn down only at the rate and to the extent that they can be replaced with similar numbers of Iraqi soldiers and policemen fully capable of taking over, the joy now being felt by the Islamofascists will commensurately be replaced by dread. For no one knows better than they that, once up to snuff and on their own, the new Iraqi forces will be less inhibited than the Americans by moral considerations and accordingly much more ruthless in the way they fight.

Tom Paine grew so disgusted with “the mean principles that are held by the Tories,” with the hypocrisy of the disguised Tories, and with the shrinking from hardship of the summer soldiers and the sunshine patriots of 1776-7 that he finally gave up trying to persuade them:

I have been tender in raising the cry against these men, and used numberless arguments to show them their danger, but it will not do to sacrifice a world to either their folly or their baseness.

And so, “quitting this class of men . . . who see not the full extent of the evil that threatens them,” Paine turned “to those who have nobly stood, and are yet determined to stand the matter out,” and rested his hopes on them.

These hopes, we know and thank God for it, were not disappointed. And neither will be the hopes of those today who likewise see “the full extent of the evil that threatens” us; who understand the necessity of the war that our country has been waging against it; who recognize the moral, political, and intellectual boldness of how George W. Bush has chosen to fight this war; and who take pride in the nobility of what the United States, at whose birth Tom Paine assisted, is now, more than 200 years later, battling to achieve in Iraq and, in the fullness of time, in the entire region of which Iraq is so crucial a part.

—December 6, 2005

NORMAN PODHORETZ is the editor-at-large of COMMENTARY and the author of ten books. The present article is a sequel to his “Who Is Lying About Iraq?,” which appears in the December issue and which can be found, along with other essays by him on the Bush Doctrine and Iraq, at www.commentarymagazine.com.

1 Chrenkoff adds: “[M]any stories are ‘duplicates’ of wire reports from AP, Reuters, and others, but that’s precisely the point: if a negative story from the AP is picked up by hundreds of newspapers around the world, then the story’s penetration of the global news market is much greater than another story published in just one local newspaper. This, by the way, cuts both ways: if a wire service writes a positive story, that [too] gets syndicated worldwide (in fact most of the 73 positive stories above about the return of stolen treasures are such duplicates)—except that it’s quite rare for a news wire service to have a good-news story.”

2 Tim Cavanaugh, in a posting on the website of Reason magazine that I have quoted in the past, has offered a partial list of such blunders and the lives that were lost because of them: “American Marines were slaughtered at Tarawa because the pre-invasion bombardment of the island was woefully deficient. Hundreds of American paratroopers were killed by American anti-aircraft fire during landings in Italy—for that matter the entire campaign up the Italian boot was an obvious waste of time, resources, and lives that prevented the western Allies from getting seriously into the war until the middle of 1944. . . . In late 1944, Allied commanders failed to anticipate that the Germans would attack through Belgium despite their having done so in 1914 and 1940.” In brief, Cavanaugh concludes, “On any given week, World War II offered more [foul-ups] and catastrophes than anything that has been seen in postwar Iraq.”

3 In World War II, 405,399; in Korea, 36,574; in Vietnam, 58,209.

4 As I write, it looks very much as though the same trend will continue into the election scheduled for December 15, when a new parliament empowered to form a four-year government will be chosen.

5 As Thomas Joscelyn reminds us, Brzezinski also wagged it at Ronald Reagan: “If present trends continue,” he wrote in 1981, “American foreign policy is likely to be in a state of general crisis by the spring of 1982 . . . causing the global position of the United States to be placed in jeopardy.”

6 But not Henry Kissinger, the leading realist of them all. Even though he is skeptical about the possibility of democratizing the Middle East, Kissinger favored the invasion of Iraq and thinks that victory there is essential. Nor does he believe that the war between the Palestinians and Israel is the most important problem in the world, or even in the Middle East.

7 What, asked James Taranto of the Wall Street Journal, “do you call someone” who can describe the many wars that have been fought in the Middle East in the past five decades as “50 years of peace”? Taranto’s sardonic answer: “A ‘realist.’”

8 An honorable exception is Senator Joseph Lieberman, who writes: “What a colossal mistake it would be for America’s bipartisan political leadership to choose this moment in history to lose its will and, in the famous phrase, to seize defeat from the jaws of the coming victory.” I should also mention that there are Republicans who, as Lieberman rightly says, “are more worried about whether the war will bring them down in next November’s elections than they are concerned about how we continue the progress in Iraq in the months and years ahead.”

9 So do liberal intellectuals like David Rieff and Michael Ignatieff, whose support was based on humanitarian grounds. By now, however, they have decided that they were mistaken to think that Bush was either serious enough or sufficiently competent to fulfill the idealistic goals he had enunciated.

10 The Democrats indignantly deny that they are hurting the morale of our troops, but they have not succeeded in persuading the public. Thus, in a poll taken by RT Strategies, a whopping 70 percent say that Democratic criticism of the war “hurts troop morale—with 44 percent saying morale is hurt ‘a lot.’” Even among self-identified Democrats, 55 percent say that criticism hurts morale as against 21 percent who say that it helps. Furthermore, only three out of ten of the people surveyed accept the Democrats’ claim that their criticisms are intended to help the war effort, while a majority believe that the motive is to “gain a partisan political advantage.”

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Shadow of Anti-Semitism over Ukraine's Disputed Election

2006-01-06T10:38:00.000-08:00

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Shadow of Anti-Semitism over Ukraine's Disputed Election
The British Helsinki Human Rights Group ^ | 24 November 2004

Posted on 11/25/2004 8:56:53 AM PST by DTA

Shadow of Anti-Semitism over Ukraine's Disputed Election

Western television viewers and newspaper readers are being fed on a diet of propaganda about the current crisis in Ukraine. The orange flags and uniforms of the opposition fill our screens and decorate the front pages. “People power” and Western-orientated democrats are on the march against evil ex-communist oligarchs. Good is battling against evil for the soul of Ukraine.

Sadly it is not so simple. Western media and governments may have edited out the manifestations of extreme nationalism and anti-Semitism which disfigure the Ukrainian opposition’s rabble-rousing but history will record that in the run up to the disputed presidential elections, key opposition leaders, including Viktor Yushchenko, Julia Timoshenko and Alexander Moroz, defended anti-Semitic publications and accepted the backing of neo-Nazi groups as well as US and EU and so-called “civic society” NGOs. Nor were the anti-Semtic apologetics of the Ukrainian opposition unknown to key OSCE observers and EU parliamentarians who nonetheless ignored the dark shadow across Yushchenko’s campaign preferring instead to abuse his rival.

A key media outlet which has backed Viktor Yushchenko’s long march on the Ukrainian presidency published an extraordinary anti-Semitic rant in 2003 which claimed that 400,000 Jews fought alongside Hitler’s invading army in 1941!

Inserted as an advertising feature, “Jews in Ukraine Today: Reality Without Myths," appeared in Silski visti (Village News). The newspaper was one of the largest in Ukraine with a circulation of around 500,000. It was a prominent backer of Viktor Yushchenko and his Our Ukraine party.

In late 2003, Alexander Shlayen, the head of the Ukrainian Anti-Fascist Committee and a prominent member of the post-Holocaust Jewish community in Ukraine, initiated a prosecution of the newspaper, Silski visti for promoting inter-ethnic discord in the country which was the site of the infamous Babi Yar massacre along with countless other Nazi atrocities against Jews.

On 28th January, 2004, the court ordered the closing of the newspaper but it defied the ruling with the vocal backing of the opposition Our Ukraine party and its allies. In August, 2004, Alexander Shlaven died suddenly and unexpectedly.

In an interview with JTA (Jewish Telegraphic Agency) , the paper's editor, Vasily Gruzin, defended the newspaper's decision to publish the piece:

"Although we published the Yaremenko article as a paid advertisement and not as a position we ourselves endorsed, I happen to believe the figure of 400,000 Jews taking part in the German invasion of the Ukraine is not far from the truth," he said.
"I personally have nothing against common Jews, but rather against a small group of Jewish oligarchs who control Ukraine both economically and politically. I believe the point of Zionism today is Jewish control of the world, and we see this process at work in Ukraine today."

Shortly after this anti-Semitic diatribe by Yaremenko, Victor Yuschenko – who our media always apostrophises as “the pro-Western presidential candidate” and who enjoys the open support of the Bush administration -- and another prominent opposition leader, energy oligarch Yulia Timoshenko and Alexander Moroz of the Socialist Party issued a statement headed "Hands Off Silski Visti”! [http://www.ncsj.org/AuxPages/092104JTA_Ukraine.shtml]

Mr Moroz has been a prominent figure on the opposition in tribune in Kiev and as recently as 21st September, 2004, he insisted,

“"I have defended Silski Visti and will continue to do so," Moroz said. "I personally think the argument of the author of the article, Vasily Yaremenko, citing 400,000 Jews in the S.S. is incorrect, but I am not in a position to know all the facts." [http://www.ncsj.org/AuxPages/092104JTA_Ukraine.shtml ]

What kind of ally of the West needs to learn more about the Nazis to refute Yaremenko’s claims about a Jewish-Nazi alliance? Yet this is the sort of politician who gets unconditional backing in Washington and Brussels.

One of the so-called “independent” election observers whose denunciation of the Yanukovich camp for fraud has been a central part of the propaganda battle is the British Conservative MEP, Charles Tannock, who has appeared in recent days on opposition platforms egging on the protestors. Before the elections Mr Tannock wrote several articles openly backing Viktor Yushchenko’s candidacy, but Mr Tannock’s best known intervention in Ukrainian politics before the disputed presidential election was his criticism of the courts for banning the anti-Semitic newspaper, Silski visti.

Like Viktor Yushchenko and Julia Timoshenko, MEP Tannock condemned the ban saying in an interview in the Our Ukraine party newspaper on 12th March, 2004: “the closure of the newspaper went a step far too far” according to Mr Tannock’s own web-page. He goes on to admit that as a backer of Our Ukraine “I don’t think it does your party any good to be associated with extreme [emphasis added] anti-Semitic articles”! [http://www.charlestannock.com/pressarticle.asp?ID=360 ]

Sadly the Silski visti affair was not unique.

In western Ukraine in particular (as in Britain and North America) there is an aging cohort of elderly veterans of the Waffen SS’s Galician division. They are anxious to revise their country’s history and re-habilitate their wartime service on behalf of the Third Reich. In Ukraine these old Nazis parade protesting their patriotism and demanding equal rights with Red Army veterans. A younger more aggressive and openly racist and neo-Nazi cohort of historical revisionists has also appeared. They have their “intellectual” spokesmen whose anti-Semitic and white supremacist writings have produced scandal in Kiev not only in Silski visti.

In western Ukrainian towns like Ivano-Frankivsk, the uniformed bully-boys of the UNSO movement, so-called Ukrainian Self-Defence forces, act as enforcers for Our Ukraine in effect. Mr Yushchenko scored well over 90% in western regions like Ivano-Frankivsk – results at least as improbable as any for Mr Yanukevich in the east of the country. How much does Mr Yushchenko’s near unanimous support in western towns depend on the storm troopers of the Ukrainian new right?

It is shocking that any link could exist between such neo-Nazi muscle men and their propagandists and politicians usually presented in the Anglo-American media as the harbingers of Western democracy and universal humanitarian values in Ukraine. Even more bizarre than the defence of the right of an anti-Semite to disseminate his wares by “pro-Western” Ukrainian politicians like Yushchenko, Julia Timoshenko and Aleksandr Moroz is the fact that Mr. Yushchenko’s candidacy for president of Ukraine is openly backed by the famous American billionaire philanthropist, George Soros, himself a survivor of the Holocaust.

Although ten years ago in 1994, Mr. Soros put his influence and money behind Leonid Kuchma, the democracy-promoting philanthropist has since turned against the outgoing Ukrainian President and his preferred successor as candidate for president, Viktor Yanukevich. As far back as 1st March, 2001, the American billionaire had written an editorial page piece in the Financial Times making his support for Yushchenko clear when he demanded , “If Mr Kuchma cares about Ukraine’s survival as an independent democratic state, he must take responsibility for his actions and hand over duties to the prime minister, [i.e. Yushchenko] the constitutionally designated successor, pending the results of the investigation. The West must take a clear position, denouncing Mr Kuchma’s behavior and his actions. There is no way for the international community to continue to do business with Mr Kuchma until an impartial investigation [into the Gongadze murder case] has been completed and those responsible are held to account.”

Mr. Soros’s concern for human rights and due process does him credit, but his tone does not suggest the assumption of innocence! Moreover at precisely the same time in early, 2001, his own local Ukrainian foundation was supporting media which were the antithesis of democratic decency. In Germany, Neue Solidarität’s Roman Bessonov reported from the western Ukrainian city of Lvov on 4th April, 2001, that a Soros-funded “Renaissance” foundation was backing the nationalist monthly, “Derzhanist” ((“Independent Statehood”) commenting “Whoever reads it would conclude that Kiev is the Fourth Rome and that Babi Yar wasn’t where umpteen thousands of Jews were murdered by the Nazi SS but rather where the Chekists murdered Ukrainian patriots.” [See http://www.bueso.de/nrw/Aktuelles/ukraine.htm ]

In Ukraine, in the presidential elections, Soros’s people back Yushchenko but he is also supported by Andrei Shkil’s ultra-nationalist UNSO. Vyacheslav Likhachev of the European-Asian Jewish Congress noted the unsettling links between Mr Soros’s preferred candidate for Ukrainian president, Yuschchenko, and the neo-Nazis there after the 2002 parliamentary elections

“the former leader of the UNA-UNSD Andry Shkil was elected to the parliament in a single-ticket election in the Lviv region, with the support of Our Ukraine, led by Viktor Yuschenko (Victor Yuschenko is a former prime minister and one of the quite probable presidential candidates). At the time elections were held, the leader of the nationalists had been in jail for a year, accused of organizing mass anti-government riots. Having been elected, Andry Shkil was granted immunity to criminal prosecution. Thus, the moderate national-democrats form unions with the radicals.”

[See Vyacheslav Likhachev, “Anti-Semtism in Ukraine” @ http://www.eajc.org/program_art_e.php?id=10 ]

Some idea of Mr Shkil’s pro-Western reform-minded ideas is available on his web-page: ““Inside, an article appeared, entitled “Nationalism in the World: Past, Present, Future,” written by Andriy Shkil’, editor-in-chief of Natsionalist, chairman of the Dontsov Supporters’ Club, and head of the Lviv branch of UNA. Mostly devoted to the New Right, it also mentioned their precursors, including Gobineau, and “his worthy student Walter Darre, who developed the idea of artificial selection [eugenics] to improve the human race.” Mein Kampf and its author (whose name is not given) are praised for “re-examining these ideas on the highest level.” Several of Darre’s ideas are applied to the Ukrainian situation: Christianity’s mistaken view of the equality of human beings, the necessity for the revival of paganism as an essential spiritual feature of the nation and as a precondition for the creation of a new national elite, with eugenics as a means of cleansing and renewing the people.Thus, the UNA values the experience of the European Right, and other radical regardless of their political orientation.”

[See http://www.una-unso.org/av/mainview.asp?TT_id=17&TX_id=402]

Belatedly in the run-up to October’s presidential elections, Mr Yuschchenko tried to distance himself from radical nationalists like Shkil _ at least in the English-language version of his web-page. [ See “Yushchenko advises «fascist thugs» to support Yanukovych” 15:25, 2 July 2004 @ http://www.yuschenko.com.ua/eng/present/News/838/] But they were not prepared to denounce him: “It was reported that last Saturday in Kyiv there was a «parade» of the «UNA-UNSO» party that has nothing in common with the «UNA-UNSO» organization headed by Andriy Shkil, YTB member. During this meeting Kovalenko’s «UNA-UNSO» declared the support of Yushchenko with the fascist signs, «SSS» symbols and gestures in Hitlerite manner.”! [See http://www.una-unso.org/av/mainview.asp?TT_id=17&TX_id=402 ]

With friends like these Mr Yushchenko may feel he has all the People Power he needs to seize the presidency, but should OSCE observers, European parliamentarians, Colin Powell and George W. Bush be undiluted in endorsing a candidate with backing from neo-Nazis and Holocaust deniers? What kind of West is being created if the Euro-Atlantic elite openly endorses a president of Ukraine whose domestic supporters at senior levels as well as at street level don’t know who invaded the country in 1941 and defend publications which say Jews were the culprits?
TOPICS: Editorial; Foreign Affairs
KEYWORDS: ANTISEMITISM; HOLOCAUST; SOROS; UKRAINE; WAFFENSS; YUSHCHENKO
background info MSM chose to ignore
1 posted on 11/25/2004 8:56:53 AM PST by DTA
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To: SJackson; dennisw; Alouette

major anti-semitism ping

2 posted on 11/25/2004 8:57:34 AM PST by DTA (proud pajamista)
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To: cornelis; Destro; MarMema; FairOpinion; cicero's_son; Steel Wolf; joan; Jane_N; Doctor13; ...

SOROS ping

3 posted on 11/25/2004 9:02:39 AM PST by DTA (proud pajamista)
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To: DTA

I was hoping someone would eventually bring to light the anti-semitism of the Luschenko party. I fear for the Jews in Ukraine after he barges his way into power.

4 posted on 11/25/2004 9:05:07 AM PST by MarMema
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To: DTA; 1bigdictator; 1st-P-In-The-Pod; 2sheep; 7.62 x 51mm; A Jovial Cad; ...
Ukraine's Jews split in vote

Kiev

Ukrainian Jews mirrored the rest of the country in this week's presidential elections – both in how they voted and in their strong reactions to the controversial results.

Many Jews, pleased with the status quo, supported Prime Minister Viktor Yanukovich, who was backed by the government in Sunday's runoff vote.

"I voted for stability in Ukrainian society," said Pyotr Rashkovsky, head of the Association of Jewish Communities of Small Towns of Ukraine, which unites Jewish groups in a dozen former shtetls in the central part of the country. "I know that most Jews in my region also supported Yanukovich."

But others echoed the sentiments of the estimated 100,000 to 200,000 Ukrainian voters who took to the streets of Kiev on Monday after Yanukovich was declared the winner over the liberal opposition candidate, Viktor Yuschenko.

"After the total falsification of the results of the presidential elections, the people demand to announce Yuschenko the next president," said Eduard Gurvitz, a Jewish member of Parliament and former mayor of Odessa who supported Yuschenko.

The choice of the new president may prove crucial for Western and Russian strategic interests in Eastern Europe.

According to the Central Elections Commission, Yanukovich won about 49.4 percent of the vote and Yuschenko received 46.7 percent. In the first round of voting on October 31, Yuschenko led Yanukovich by less than 1 percentage point, according to the official results.

Many Jews are believed to have voted for Yuschenko and generally followed the nationwide pattern, with the younger, urban and better-educated voters favoring the opposition.

But with no valid data in existence, some observers believe probably as many, if not the majority, of Jews still backed Yanukovich – partly because they feared the rising Ukrainian nationalist sentiment.

Many Jews were afraid of speaking openly about their choice even after casting their vote, as were many Ukrainians. Up to 40 percent of respondents refused to talk to those conducting exit polls, local media reported.

"People are afraid of the authorities," one Jewish voter in Kiev said. "And many Jews may have found themselves even in a more difficult situation knowing that many wealthy Jews sponsoring Jewish community programs support the authorities and particularly Yanukovich."

Indeed, some of the leading domestic sponsors of Jewish life in the region backed Yanukovich, reflecting the fact that many Jewish big business owners have played a prominent role in Ukraine's economy during the current regime.

For many of Ukraine's Jews, estimated at between 250,000 and 500,000, the election was a difficult choice between the liberal Yuschenko, who in the past has allied himself with politicians openly expressing anti-Semitic views, and Yanukovich, who has displayed authoritarian traits but has promised stability, which appeals to Jews in a region where instability has historically led to anti-Semitism.

Some Jews said they believed Yanukovich would be better at fighting anti-Semitism and xenophobia – partly because of his past statements on Jews and Israel, and partly because of Yuschenko's mixed record on Jewish issues.

"I'm sure that Yanukovich is able to prevent" radical nationalism from developing in Ukraine, said Aleksandr Naiman, a leader of the Ukrainian Anti-Defamation League, a group not related to ADL.

At the end of September, Yanukovich visited Israel. He met with President Moshe Katsav and members of the Ukrainian community to discuss the issues of dual citizenship and payment of pensions to Jewish pensioners from Ukraine now living in Israel.

Only 3,106 out of nearly 40,000 eligible Ukrainian voters in Israel cast their ballots.
5 posted on 11/25/2004 9:07:46 AM PST by Alouette (9 children, 12 grandchildren, 0 abortions.)
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To: DTA

just who is george soros?

6 posted on 11/25/2004 9:08:02 AM PST by ken21 (against the democrat plantation.)
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To: ken21

The forerunner to the antichrist. Do an FR search for Soros to learn a lot. He is a billionaire from Hungary who likes to manipulate markets to make money, and then he spends his money supporting abortion and euthanasia all over the world.

7 posted on 11/25/2004 9:10:39 AM PST by MarMema
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To: DTA
How many Jews now live in the Ukraine and what is the situation for them now? How antisemitic is their world?

And is Yushchenko antisemitic, or does he just accept money from strange bedfellows?
8 posted on 11/25/2004 9:11:32 AM PST by Yaelle
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To: ken21
Set aside a day or two for reading
9 posted on 11/25/2004 9:12:13 AM PST by MarMema
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To: DTA

"Western television viewers and newspaper readers are being fed on a diet of propaganda about the current crisis in Ukraine. The orange flags and uniforms of the opposition fill our screens and decorate the front pages. “People power” and Western-orientated democrats are on the march against evil ex-communist oligarchs. Good is battling against evil for the soul of Ukraine.

Sadly it is not so simple. "

Thanks for the ping.

That is exactly the point, that things aren't so simple, in fact are very complex, and the media is not giving us all the information.

They want Yushchenko elected, just as much as they wanted Kerry elected. That should make people stop and think.

The media is also letting people believe that virtually all Ukrainians are supporting the opposition, and Yanukovich is forced on them. I only saw a couple of articles which mentioned that there actually have been years of strife between the Eastern and Western half of Ukraine, where Yanukovich is supported mostly in the East, and Yushchenko by the Western half.

"Borys says simply that it is "not clear what Yushchenko might bring to the country" and adds that the economy has been doing well under the current prime minister's stewardship.

"It is insulting for me that they consider me to be a silly animal. I wholeheartedly support Viktor Fiodorovych Yanukovych. To begin with, I know him. He is very decent, good, powerful -- a man with strong will power. I feel insulted when they say that nobody voted for him. I am from Kyiv. I voted for him, my family did, my children did, grandchildren did, and my mother did. Why they are insulting me?" Svitlana says.

"Me, as a human being, as a woman feel that Yushchenko is not a leader. And Yanukovych is the leader of our country," Svitlana says. "

http://www.freerepublic.com/focus/f-news/1288359/posts

10 posted on 11/25/2004 9:14:20 AM PST by FairOpinion (Happy Thanksgiving!)
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To: MarMema

thanks.

ask, + you shall receive!

11 posted on 11/25/2004 9:14:47 AM PST by ken21 (against the democrat plantation.)
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To: Yaelle; cicero's_son
Anti-Semitism in Ukrainian media is up, and its acceptance is worrying Jews
12 posted on 11/25/2004 9:16:08 AM PST by MarMema
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To: FairOpinion
That should make people stop and think.

Same tactics too. Remember the calls for riots if Bush won?
13 posted on 11/25/2004 9:18:07 AM PST by MarMema
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To: malakhi

ping

14 posted on 11/25/2004 9:18:47 AM PST by MarMema
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To: DTA

Helsinki Human Rights Group ?

I'm sure they claim that Bush is a fascist.

15 posted on 11/25/2004 9:20:06 AM PST by Grzegorz 246
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To: GOP_1900AD; TapTheSource

Let's hear from you.

16 posted on 11/25/2004 9:20:31 AM PST by MarMema
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To: Grzegorz 246
I'm sure they claim that Bush is a fascist.

Guess again
17 posted on 11/25/2004 9:23:47 AM PST by MarMema
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To: FairOpinion

In war things are topsy turvy and one can best only trust a spy to be a spy. One clue that should give pause is the consent for the popular dispute by Lech Walesa and Vaclav Havel as well as the dissent of the U.S. and Canadian governments against the corruption in the elections. Soros is a bogeymen who may buy votes, but I really don't think that this is what these campers are about.

18 posted on 11/25/2004 9:24:23 AM PST by cornelis
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To: DTA

Screw Yushchenko and screw Soros.

19 posted on 11/25/2004 9:26:44 AM PST by Rome2000 (Democrats are perverted socialist crooks)
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To: Rome2000; nw_arizona_granny

Best post of the day.

20 posted on 11/25/2004 9:27:46 AM PST by MarMema
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To: MarMema
Thanks for the ping. I've been reading some of these threads, but I've refrained from comment because there is so much propaganda it's hard to tell what's really going on. The impression I have formed is that neither side is particularly savory. Ultimately, I'd like the outcome to truly reflect the wishes of the Ukrainian majority. Right now, it is impossible for me to determine what that really is.
21 posted on 11/25/2004 9:37:21 AM PST by malakhi
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To: malakhi

Walesa coming to meditate stand-off Nov 24, 19:49

WARSAW (AP) - Lech Walesa, the founder of Poland's Solidarity movement, will travel to Ukraine to act as a mediator in the standoff over the disputed presidential elections there, his son said Nov. 24.

Walesa, a Nobel Peace Prize laureate, had said Nov. 23 that he received a letter from Ukrainian opposition leader Viktor Yushchenko seeking his help in negotiating a resolution to the crisis.

Jaroslaw Walesa told The Associated Press that Walesa would leave for Kyiv early Nov. 25 for a one-day visit.

Lech Walesa told Polish news agency PAP that he wanted to meet outgoing President Leonid Kuchma and election rivals Yushchenko and Kremlin-backed Prime Minister Viktor Yanukovych.

"I would like to meet each of them" and tell them "I don't want to interfere with your affairs, but as a neighbor I would like to help as much as I can," Walesa told PAP.

He said he wanted to avoid a situation similar to Poland's 1981 martial law crackdown against the Solidarity labor movement, which he called a "crime on the Polish nation" that "divided the nation, killed determination and drove many people from the country."

Walesa launched the Solidarity movement in 1980, rallying workers as part of eastern Europe's first free labor union. He presided over round-table talks in 1989 that led to the peaceful end of communism in Poland, and was elected president the following year.

kyivpost.com
22 posted on 11/25/2004 9:41:17 AM PST by cornelis
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To: Calpernia; Velveeta

Ping

23 posted on 11/25/2004 9:44:55 AM PST by nw_arizona_granny (Today, please pray for God's miracle, we are not going to make it without him.)
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To: MarMema

Very interesting, especially the picture of Soviet "Pioneers".

24 posted on 11/25/2004 10:01:06 AM PST by Grzegorz 246
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To: GarySpFc

ping

25 posted on 11/25/2004 10:18:49 AM PST by MarMema
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To: DTA

Jews in Ukraines have suffered horribly a lot under Communism. They were among the 7 million killed in the famine in the 1930s. Nikita Khruschev had almost every synangogue shut down and some were allowed to operated under constant surveillance. Now, they are victims again.

26 posted on 11/25/2004 10:20:27 AM PST by Ptarmigan (Proud rabbit hater and killer)
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To: Grzegorz 246
PLEASE NOTE that the so called British Helsinki Group is NOT affiliated with the IHF

The BHHRG is merely a group of old Europe leftists who are trading on the legitimacy of the actual Helsinki Federation groups.

The fact that they also go under the name "OSCE Watch", is something of a dead giveaway as to where their actual agenda lies.

Contrary to the condemnations issued by the team of professional politicians and diplomats deployed by the OSCE mainly from NATO and EU states, the BHHRG observers did not see evidence of government-organized fraud nor of suppression of opposition media.
...
In spite of concerns, BHHRG finds no reason to believe that the final result of the 2004 presidential election in Ukraine was not generally representative of genuine popular will.

Bunch o' f'n morons.
27 posted on 11/25/2004 10:55:46 AM PST by Hoplite
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To: ken21

Is Soros a Neo-Nazi?

28 posted on 11/25/2004 10:56:37 AM PST by MonitorMaid (Promise Keeper)
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To: MonitorMaid
>>>>>>Is Soros a Neo-Nazi?<<<<<

No. Soros is Old Nazi. In 1944 he was a member of the Hungarian Nazi "Arrow Crosses". It was at the time when hundreds of thousands of Hungarian Jews were being exterminated. Soros confirmed this himself in a book written by his father Tivador.
29 posted on 11/25/2004 11:06:50 AM PST by DTA (proud pajamista)
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To: MonitorMaid

being jewish, i hope soros is not a nazi.

i've wondered if he isn't one world goverment man.

if so, he's got problems. many in the world hate him.

the indonesians don't like him.

30 posted on 11/25/2004 11:07:19 AM PST by ken21 (against the democrat plantation.)
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To: Hoplite
>>>>>>Bunch o' f'n morons.<<<<<

Seems you got quite upset they exposed anti-semitism of your Nazi pals. Get over it. Nazism was defeated in 1945.
31 posted on 11/25/2004 11:13:43 AM PST by DTA (proud pajamista)
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To: ken21
"being jewish, i hope soros is not a nazi."

Soros is a Moscow puppet. He is busy destabilizing Western democracies in the interests of long-range Sino-Soviet strategy.
32 posted on 11/25/2004 11:30:04 AM PST by TapTheSource
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To: ken21; DTA

Thanks for the reply. I've heard the Soros name tossed around a bit during the election but was unsure of his agenda or group affiliation. I had figured him for either a commie or neo-nazi. I'm surprised to find out he is Jewish. He sounds like a troublemaker, whatever he is. sheesh.

33 posted on 11/25/2004 11:31:44 AM PST by MonitorMaid (Promise Keeper)
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To: MonitorMaid

Soros is a bugbear.

34 posted on 11/25/2004 11:32:08 AM PST by cornelis
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To: DTA
Check yourself, DTA.

Soros is a Hungarian Jew.

By the by, I hear that OTPOR is helping the Ukrainian opposition - so are they Nazis now too?

Lol.
35 posted on 11/25/2004 11:32:40 AM PST by Hoplite
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To: DTA; Alouette
This is one of those situations that it's almost impossible to comment on or know what is really happening. I don't doubt that there are extremely sinister and unsavory individuals and movements on both sides.

Since I define Nazism by its opposition to HaShem's people and Communism by its opposition to belief in HaShem, I am not one of those people who thinks one is "preferable" to the other. Anti-Semitism isn't an ethnic prejudice but a theological heresy that rejects the True G-d and His Chosen People.

May Mashiach HaMelekh be revealed to our troubled world soon, speedily, and in our day!
36 posted on 11/25/2004 11:34:41 AM PST by Zionist Conspirator (G-D'S TORAH defines conservatism.)
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To: Hoplite
Soros is a Hungarian Jew.

His name is Yiddish for "trouble" (tsuros)
37 posted on 11/25/2004 11:37:11 AM PST by Alouette (9 children, 12 grandchildren, 0 abortions.)
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To: Zionist Conspirator
This is one of those situations that it's almost impossible to comment on or know what is really happening.

No, what's happened is election fraud.
38 posted on 11/25/2004 11:41:14 AM PST by cornelis
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To: Alouette
Hence the kvetching?
39 posted on 11/25/2004 11:47:27 AM PST by Hoplite
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To: Zionist Conspirator

The only choice - if such a thing were possible - is a "Sophie's Choice" type scenario - Nazis will kill you outright for being Jewish - even if not a religous Jew - they are after eradicating the "blood". The Communists just may leave you alive if your are not religous and are not cought up in a purge of some sort.

40 posted on 11/25/2004 12:35:12 PM PST by Destro (Know your enemy! Help fight Islamic terrorism by visiting johnathangaltfilms.com and jihadwatch.org)
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To: Destro

All too true.

41 posted on 11/25/2004 12:36:16 PM PST by Zionist Conspirator (G-D'S TORAH defines conservatism.)
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To: Zionist Conspirator
This "Sophie's Choice" applies to other groups as well. The Nazis of course would go after you if you were of any of what they considered sub-human "races" - some selected for outright extermination and others for perpetual slavery. The Communists at least paid lips service to the equality of all - while they starved and overworked millions to death.
42 posted on 11/25/2004 12:39:58 PM PST by Destro (Know your enemy! Help fight Islamic terrorism by visiting johnathangaltfilms.com and jihadwatch.org)
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To: Alouette

Just picked up a copy of the book BABI YAR, by Anatoly Kuznetsov at our library for 25 cents. They always seem to be getting rid of the best history books, and the timing is interesting.

43 posted on 11/25/2004 1:55:26 PM PST by Esther Ruth
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To: Esther Ruth; Alouette
>>>> They always seem to be getting rid of the best history books, and the timing is interesting.<<<<

Michael Moore deliberatelly chose the title Fahrenheit 911 to draw attention away from Truffaut's massterpiece interpretation of Ray Bradburry's Fahrenheit 451

Liberals DO destroy books. Many exist in print only, without any electronic reference. In 10 years from now, the knowledge of paper version will be equivalent to oral copy.

We have to start making lists of recommended books and making electronic references to them.

Thank you for mentioning this one.
44 posted on 11/25/2004 6:24:05 PM PST by DTA (proud pajamista)
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To: Alouette

BTT!!!

45 posted on 11/26/2004 1:46:03 AM PST by Robert Drobot (God, family, country. All else is meaningless.)
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To: DTA
We have to start making lists of recommended books and making electronic references to them.

I'm currently working on a project scanning and digitizing microfilm of 19th-century publications.

The Occident and American Jewish Advocate
46 posted on 11/26/2004 1:46:06 AM PST by Alouette (9 children, 12 grandchildren, 0 abortions.)
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To: MarMema

Anti Semitism has reared its ugly head across a broad swath of Eurasia. When we hung the Nazi leaders at Nuremberg, the message was mostly felt in the US and in Western Europe. The further east (and south) one goes, the less the message is part of people's psyche. That is why there is a resurgence of both the fradulent Protocols of the Elders of Zion in the Middle East and Mein Kampf through out the non Western World. Of note, some of the worst anti Semitism I have observed is in pan Sinic groups. But Islamists and Arab Pan Nationalists are in stiff competition with them in this regard. Finally, another very dangerous group is the National Bolsheviks, a resurgence of an older concept developed by people who had been Communists around 1900 but later gravitated toward the Nazi way of thinking. Whereas, the early 1900s version of it was mostly found in France, Germany and the Benelux countries, the current version appears to be focused in the former Soviet Union and Germany. The National Bolsheviks, notably, have ties with Spartacus in Canada and nearly every neo Nazi and major anarchist group in the US and UK. And some folks thought I was kidding when I wrote, a few months ago, that I am a Nazi hunter. :=)

47 posted on 11/30/2004 12:22:08 PM PST by GOP_1900AD (Stomping on "PC," destroying the Left, and smoking out faux "conservatives" - Take Back The GOP!)
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To: Hoplite

That bears repeating:

PLEASE NOTE that the so called British Helsinki Group is NOT affiliated with the IHF
The BHHRG is merely a group of old Europe leftists who are trading on the legitimacy of the actual Helsinki Federation groups.

The fact that they also go under the name "OSCE Watch", is something of a dead giveaway as to where their actual agenda lies.

48 posted on 11/30/2004 12:27:34 PM PST by Agog
[ Post Reply | Private Reply | To 27 | View Replies ]

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THE BIBLE "CODES": A TEXTUAL PERSPECTIVE

2005-12-27T10:09:00.000-08:00

THE BIBLE "CODES": A TEXTUAL PERSPECTIVE

Jeffrey H. Tigay
University of Pennsylvania
October 13, 1999

In the 11th or 12th century, a Jewish woman in Byzantium named Maliha wrote to her brothers in Egypt that she wanted to come visit them, but that when she looked into a Torah scroll she found a bad omen forecasting failure if she were to make the journey.¹ Something in the passage that caught her eye seemed to presage evil. Maliha was practicing bibliomancy, fortune telling by opening the pages of a sacred book at random and spotting a message there -- a practice widely known in the classical, Jewish, Christian, and Muslim worlds.²

In recent years, bibliomancy has been resurrected in a more contemporary form, based on finding hidden patterns and messages in the Hebrew text of the Torah, patterns and messages so sophisticated that most of them can be recognized only by a computer. The method involves finding words formed of letters that are equidistant from each other -- for example, 7, or 53, or 4772, or any other number of spaces apart. These sequences of letters are known as equidistant letter sequences, ELSs for short, and proponents of the method use them to argue that the Torah contains various significant patterns of letters and often alludes cryptographically to historical events that took place long after the Bible, down to modern times.

There are three types of such arguments.

(1) The simplest is to find words of related significance in close proximity to each other. For example, in Exodus 11:9-12:13 (see Fig. 1), the Hebrew title of Maimonides' Code -- Mishneh Torah -- is found by starting with the M in Moshe in 11:9 and counting every fiftieth letter until the word "Mishneh" (M$NH) is spelled out, and then starting with the second T in 12:11 and counting every 50th letter three times until "Torah" (TVRH) is spelled out. Between the first letter of Mishneh and the first letter of Torah there is a gap of 613 letters, equal to the traditional number of the Torah's commandments, which the Mishneh Torah explicates. What is more, one of the verses in this gap, 12:6, mentions the 14th day of the month (of Nisan), Maimonides' birthdate. To top it off, although the following point is not based on an ELS, the last four words of 11:9 begin with the letters R, M, B, and M, which form Maimonides' acronym Rambam (for RABBENU MOSHE BEN MAIMON), and the clause containing the acronym means "that My marvels may be multiplied in the land of Egypt," and 11:3, a few verses earlier, says "Moses was much esteemed in the land of Egypt among Pharoah's courtiers and among the people." These two verses can be taken not only as allusions to the Biblical Moses but to the achievements and public stature of Moses Maimonides, who was court physician in Egypt.³

Fig. 1. "Maimonides" in Exodus

(2) Much more computer-dependent is the discovery of hidden messages and predic-tions in the Torah, spread over such large segments of the text that they cannot be spotted merely by eyeballing the text. For example, the American reporter Michael Drosnin, in his book The Bible Code,⁴observes that if you look for the name Yitzhak Rabin, you will find it by starting with the first Y in Deuteronomy 2:33 and then reading every 4772nd letter, ending with the first N in Deuteronomy 24:16 (see Fig. 2). If you then lay out all 304,805 letters of the Torah⁵in an array consisting of 64 rows of 4772 letters, so that the name Yitzhak Rabin appears in a vertical row, it will be found to intersect with a Biblical phrase from Deuterono-my 4:42, ROCEAX 'ASHER YIRCAX, "a murderer who murders." Drosnin, who renders the phrase as "assassin that will assassinate," takes this as a prediction that Rabin would be assassinated.

Fig. 2. "The assassination of Yitzhak Rabin" in Deuteronomy

(3) Finally, the most sophisticated and computer-dependent of all are such phenomena as the "famous sages" experiment, whose proponents -- Prof. Eliyahu Rips of the Hebrew University Mathematics Department, along with Doron Witztum and Yoav Rosenberg -- argue that one can find ELS-coded references to the names of several dozen medieval rabbinical sages and, nearby, in statistically improbable proximity, their dates (Hebrew month and day) of birth and/or death.⁶ For example, the first name and the acronym ("Maharshal") of Rabbi Shelomo Luria and the date of his death (12 Kislev), all composed of ELSs of various length, can be found near each other in an array comprising the text of Genesis 20:9-22:2 (Fig. 3).⁷

Fig. 3. "Rabbi Shelomo Luria" (the Maharshal) in Genesis

To be fair, we should distinguish between what the different proponents of the codes claim. The lecturers at the "Discovery" seminars sponsored by the Aish HaTorah yeshiva; Rips and Witztum in their publications; and Moshe Katz in his book Computorah⁸hold that the Torah encodes references to persons and events from long after Biblical times, such as Maimonides and the other famous medieval sages, the Holocaust, the 1991 Gulf War, and numerous other events. Some of these proponents use the codes to prove the divine origin of the Torah and thereby win Jews over to Orthodoxy. Others, however, especially Drosnin, have gone much further, arguing that the Torah codes can be used to predict future events. He claims to have warned Rabin of his assassination before it happened, to have predicted Benjamin Netanyahu's election, to have warned of a future atomic attack on Israel by Libya from Jordan, and of numerous other disasters. Rips and Witztum have disowned this soothsaying use of their work.

In what follows I argue that the entire enterprise of the "Bible codes" is specious. It is undercut by what we know about the history of the Biblical text, by flaws in the "famous sages" experiment, and by the arbitrariness of the methods by which the decoders identify which letters belong to the alleged patterns and messages and then proceed to interpret them.

THE TEXT OF THE TORAH

Whatever the purpose for which they use the alleged codes, their proponents depend on the assumption that the text of the Bible on which they base them is universally accepted among Jews and is completely identical to the original text.⁹ It is essential for them to insist on these points because the code consists primarily of finding words formed of letters that are equidistant from each other -- ELSs. What turns these words into messages, or at least mean-ingful patterns, is the fact that when the text of the Torah is laid out in a grid whose dimensions are determined by the size of the ELS that forms these words, they appear unexpectedly close to, and sometimes even intersect in crossword fashion with, other words -- either real words (with no letters skipped) from the Biblical text or other words formed of equidistant letters. This makes it obvious why proponents of the codes must assume that their text is accurate down to the very last letter, for if the spacing between letters in a "message" or in some meaningful pattern formed by equidistant letters is changed by even one letter, the equi-distance, and hence the message or pattern, is destroyed.

The edition of the Hebrew Bible used by the decoders is the popular Koren edition, published in Jerusalem in 1962. It is distinguished by its beautiful Hebrew font. But the history of the Biblical text shows that without special pleading it is practically inconceivable that this text, or any other known text of the Torah, is identical to the original text, letter for letter. While there was an ideal of an unchanging text, identical in all copies, this ideal was not achieved in practice as far back as manuscripts and other evidence enable us to see. ¹⁰

It is not that we lack good texts. All forms of the Tanakh used today are forms of what is known as the Masoretic Text, abbreviated "MT," named after the medieval scholars (the Masoretes) who labored for several centuries to produce the most accurate text they could. The MT in use today is based on Masoretic manuscripts of the ninth and tenth centuries C.E., themselves based on older manuscripts. It has been largely unchanged since late Second Temple times (ca. the third century B.C.E., as reflected in the earliest of the Dead Sea scrolls from Qumran).¹¹ But although the text has been largely unchanged, there is a large number of variant readings, most of which do not materially change the meaning of the text, but drastical-ly affect the number of letters it contains. In fact, in the oldest complete manuscript of the entire Bible, Leningrad Codex B19A which was finished in 1009 C.E., the Torah has some 45 letters more than the 304,805 of the Koren edition.¹² Furthermore, the text of the 3rd century B.C.E. was itself several centuries younger than the original, which was composed over the preceding several centuries -- mostly between the thirteenth and seventh centuries B.C.E., though some books of the Bible were composed a few centuries later. In the centuries between the composition of the Biblical books and the early Masoretic text of the third century, many changes had befallen the text.

These changes are primarily of two types: spelling differences and other types of textu-al variants.

1. Spelling differences. The differences in spelling involve the way the text indicates vowels. As is well known, the Bible contains two different systems for indicating vowels. The fullest and most precise of the two consists of vowel "points" (nequdot), various configurations of dots and lines which stand for the different Hebrew vowels. This system, introduced in the Middle Ages, is used today in printed Bibles where it is superimposed on the older system, the one used in synagogue scrolls. The older system uses the consonants ' (aleph), H, V, and Y to indicate certain similar groups of vowels (e.g. V represents u and o; Y represents i and long e); when functioning as vowels these letters are called vowel letters or matres lectionis (Hebrew 'immot qeri'ah), literally "mothers of reading." These letters are not used with perfect consistency. "David," for example, can be written DVD or DVYD and $omer can be written $MR or $VMR. Spelling with the vowel letter is called "full" spelling," and spelling without it is called "defective" (the latter term does not imply anything erroneous). The use of the vowel letters is attested in the oldest known Biblical manuscripts, the Dead Sea scrolls from the third and following centuries B.C.E., though not always in exactly the same places where they are used in the Masoretic Text of today. Moreover, archaeological evidence indicates that this system of spelling developed gradually; the evidence available indicates that it was not developed until after the time of Moses.¹³ The adoption of this system naturally affected the text of the Bible and the number of letters it contains.

2. Other variant readings. In addition to changes caused by the evolution of the spelling system, manual copying of texts naturally created variants, some by error and some intentional. This happens with virtually all texts. We are not even certain, lehavdil, of the exact wording of the Gettysburg Address which was composed hardly more than a century ago (1863), let alone of the original text of Shakespeare's plays. Even printed Bibles contain typographical errors. Some English printings have acquired humorous nicknames because of the typos: one edition of the King James Version is called "The Printers Bible" because it reads "printers [instead of: "princes"] have persecuted me without a cause" (Ps. 119:161); another, printed in 1631, is called the Wicked Bible because in it the seventh commandment omits one word and reads "Thou shalt commit adultery" (the printers were fined heavily for their mistake!).

In the case of the Hebrew text of the Bible, we can see textual variants clearly enough when we compare texts that appear twice in the Bible. For example, one of the Psalms appears both in 2 Samuel 22 and Psalm 18 with numerous differences: one word is replaced with another, words are present in one version but not in the other, and there are spelling differences (for example, many words that are spelled defectively in 2 Sam. 22 have the fuller spelling, with matres lectionis, in Ps. 18).¹⁴

Ancient manuscripts of the Bible also contain numerous readings that differ from those in the Masoretic Text. These include manuscripts from the Dead Sea region (mostly from prior to 70 C.E.), the Septuagint (the Greek translation of the Torah made from a Hebrew original in the third century B.C.E.), and the Torah of the Samaritans. The vast majority of differences are insignificant variations in spelling and grammar which do not affect the sense of the text but do affect the number of letters in each verse. Most of these readings are scribal errors or revisions made for the sake of greater clarity, particularly in spelling (as mentioned in note 13, the matres lectionis were introduced gradually and without perfect consistency). Some call attention to the fact that certain phrases may have fallen out of the MT, such as the missing "And God saw that this was good" in Gen. 1:7-8 (present in the Septuagint), "the offspring of your cattle" in Deuteronomy 28:18 (contrast verse 4; present in the Samaritan Pentateuch and some medieval Hebrew manuscripts of the Torah), and Cain's words to Abel in Genesis 4:8 (the Samaritan Pentateuch, the Septuagint, and some of the Aramaic targums supply "come let us go out into the field," though they may have guessed these words from the context).

A particularly interesting variant involves Deuteronomy 6:20, in which the child asks: "What are the decrees, laws, and rules which the Lord our God has enjoined upon you ('TKM)?" As is well known, this verse is the basis for the question of the wise son in the baraita cited in the Haggadah shel Pesah. It has caused no end of headaches for commentators because the child's statement that God commanded "you," instead of "us" ('VTNV) makes his question seem as bad as that of the wicked son who asks (following Exodus 12:26) "What is this rite to you (LKM)?" after which the baraita states that the pronoun is the offensive part of his question. In the Septuagint to Deuteronmy 6:20, the son actually says "us," and that is the reading found in the Talmudic sources of the baraita, namely the Mekhilta and the Jerusalem Talmud, as well as manuscripts of the Haggadah.14a In other words, this was the reading found in the Torah texts quoted by the rabbis who first taught this baraita, and with this reading the question of the wise son causes no problems.

The preceding example is one of scores of passages in Talmudic litertature that quote Biblical verses with wording or spelling that differs from the MT.¹⁵ It is conceivable that some of these variants are due either to the rabbis citing verses from memory or to scribal errors in the copying of the rabbinic texts. But sometimes these variants agree with other ancient witnesses to the text, such as the Septuagint or the Dead Sea scrolls, proving that they are based on actual texts of the Bible.¹⁶ And, most significantly, sometimes the Talmud bases laws on the spelling of particular words (e.g., the number of compartments required in the head tefillin),¹⁷ yet the spelling differs from that found in the MT. In such cases, the Talmudic rabbis were obviously confident of the accuracy of the reading they relied on, and none of their colleagues challenged it. This is an important fact: the Koren Bible and all other texts in use today contain readings that differ from spellings which the Talmud was confident were correct.¹⁸ As far as the number of letters and words in the Torah is concerned, it is also worth noting the following: a very puzzling passage in the Babylonian Talmud states that according to the "first scholars," called soferim ("Scribes"), the middle letter in the Torah is a particular letter in Leviticus 11:42 and the middle pair of words appears in Leviticus 10:16. However, in Koren and all the other texts used today, the middle letter appears 4830 letters earlier, in Leviticus 8:28, and the middle words appear 933 words earlier, in Lev. 8:15.¹⁹ There have been numerous far-fetched attempts to explain this descrepancy between the Talmud and the MT. Unless the tradition of the "first scholars" is based on erroneous calculations, it seems to imply that they were referring to a text of the Torah that was either of a different length than today's text or had the pertinent passages in Leviticus in a different order than they are today.²⁰

It is, of course, true that the predominant view in the Jewish tradition is that the Torah has remained completely unchanged, letter for letter, since it was given by Moses.²¹ But this is not the only position that has been considered possible, and several contemporary Orthodox scholars who are critical of the codes acknowledge certain changes in the text of the Torah.²² Earlier, no less a figure than Rabbi David Tsvi Hoffmann, in writing of his conviction of the integrity of the MT, acknowledged that the variants implied in Talmudic sources may indicate that the MT did not completely escape scribal error, although he insisted, against modern emenders of the text, that there is no way for scholars to confidently restore the original reading.^22a

Several traditional sources acknowledge that there have been changes.

a. Talmudic-midrashic and medieval sources list between 7 and 18 Biblical passages containing "corrections of the scribes" (tikkunei soferim). The sources preserve two traditions as to what these corrections involve: some sources describe the corrections as euphemisms in which the Biblical text used a seemingly incongruous phrase to avoid using an expression that might seem disrespectful toward God; other sources hold that the text originally did contain a seemingly disrespectful phrase and that the scribes changed it to avoid disrespect.²³

b. Dots appear above certain letters in the Torah. Avot deRabbi Nathan indicates that the dots were placed there by Ezra the scribe who explained that if Elijah should challenge his having written those letters, Ezra would point out that he had dotted them, and if Elijah should say that he was right to have written those words, he would then erase the dots.²⁴ In other words, Ezra was uncertain whether the letters in question belonged there or not. His practice corresponds to that of Alexandrian grammarians who used dots to indicate doubtful passages.²⁵

c. There is a talmudic report that three scrolls containing variant readings were found in the Temple court.²⁶ The differences were resolved in a mechanical way by adopting the read-ing found in 2 of the 3 scrolls. The need to resort to this method implies that there was no sure knowledge of which readings were correct; hence there is no certainty that following the majority necessarily resulted in restoring the original reading.

d. The MT includes the kere and ketiv system, in which marginal notes indicate that certain words are to be read differently than they are spelled in the text, or that certain words in the text should not be read at all, or that certain words not in the text should be read there. Various explanations have been suggested for this system. The medieval grammarian and commentator Radak (Rabbi David Kimhi, 1160?-1235?) explained that this system was created because Bible texts were lost during the Babylonian exile and the best scholars died. The later scholars who re-established the text found different readings in the surviving manuscripts and accepted the reading found in the majority of manuscripts, but when they couldn't make up their minds about a reading they indicated both possibilities with these marginal notes. Kimhi's explanation of the kere and ketiv system, which like the preceding item (c) also implies that we are not sure which are the original readings, is not the only possibility, but for present pur-poses it is noteworthy that he considered it likely and that his religious faith did not prevent him from holding this view.²⁷

Medieval Jewish authorities were well aware of these textual phenomena.

a. The variant readings in Talmudic quotations of the Bible were well known to Jewish authorities throughout the Middle Ages. As the Tosafists (disciples of Rashi) put it: haShas shelanu xoleq al hasefarim shelanu, "Our Talmud disagrees with our Bibles" (at B. Shabbat 55b, s.v. M^cBYRM). From the 13th through the 19th centuries, major rabbinic authorities insisted that Torah scrolls be corrected to adopt the Talmudic readings, at least in passages where a law was based on a particular reading, but they insisted to no avail. To this day, all Jewish Bibles, including the Koren Bible on which the codes are based, contain the readings that are inconsistent with those quoted in the Talmud.²⁸

b. Discrepancies between good copies of the Masoretic Text were recognized and discussed throughout the Middle Ages and beyond. The Talmudic passage in Kiddushin 30a identifying the middle letter, words, and verses in the Torah concludes with statement that it is impossible to determine whether the middle letter belongs to the first half of the Torah or the second half because "we are not expert on full and defective spelling" (that is, the use of vowel letters). That passage was cited often in the Middle Ages to explain discrepancies between manuscripts and as the reason why a Torah scroll should not be declared unfit for use solely on the basis of discrepancies in full and defective spelling.²⁹ Masoretic treatises such as Minhat Shai (1626) -- which is still commonly printed in rabbinic Bibles (Mikra'ot Gedolot) -- regularly discussed spelling differences between model texts.³⁰ It was only with the rise of printing that greater textual uniformity was achieved, but even today, there is no universally agreed-upon version of the Masoretic Text.³¹ Yemenite Torah scrolls differ from the Koren edition in the spelling of nine words. Their readings are adopted in the edition edited by Rabbi Mordechai Breuer and published by the (Orthodox) Mossad Harav Kook (see Fig. 5a). These readings -- which reduce the total number of letters in the Torah by four -- agree with the Aleppo Codex,³² which Maimonides, in the Twelfth Century, said was considered the most reliable text in his time.³³ This is a point for the decoders to ponder: they are relying on a text that not only disagrees with the Talmud, but also disagrees with the text used by Maimonides, arguably the greatest authority on Jewish law in history.

In sum, apart from the archaeological evidence about the history of Hebrew spelling, and manuscript evidence about the history of the Biblical text, explicit statements in Talmudic and later Jewish sources make it crystal clear that present copies of the Tanakh are not identi-cal to the original text. Even the editors of the Koren edition have stated as much. When this edition was first published in 1962, at a public program celebrating its publication one of the editors who prepared the text stated: "We do not claim that we have established our edition on the basis of the tablets that Moses brought down from Mount Sinai."³⁴ He was absolutely correct.

Of course, one might claim that whatever may be the prehistory of the MT and the computerized version of the Koren text, in the latter the codes do work! Perhaps the Koren editors were miraculously guided to produce the text that does contain the revealed code. It is beyond me why God would have allowed the Talmudic rabbis to base laws on a text that He knew He would eventually change. In any case, whether the "codes" really work is also highly dubious, as we shall see.

THE FAMOUS SAGES EXPERIMENT

Advocates of the codes make much of the "famous sages" experiment in which Witztum, Rips, and Rosenberg (henceforth: WRR) claim to have found ELS-coded references in Genesis to famous medieval sages with their dates of birth and/or death nearby, closer than would be expected by chance alone. They studied two lists of sages, consisting of 34 and 32 individuals, respectively, and published the results, based on the second list, in the journal Statistical Science in 1994. In an accompanying note the editor of the journal stated:

Our referees were baffled: their prior beliefs made them think the book of Genesis could not possibly contain meaningful references to modern-day individuals, yet when the authors carried out additional analyses and checks the effect persisted. The paper is thus offered to...readers as a challenging puzzle. (p. 306)

This experiment is controversial among mathematicians and other scientists.³⁵ A refutation has been written by Profs. Brendan McKay, a mathematician in the Department of Computer Science at the Australian National University in Canberra; Dror Bar-Natan, of the Department of Mathematics at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem; Maya Bar-Hillel, of the Department of Psychology and the Center for the Study of Rationality at the Hebrew University; and Gil Kalai, also a mathematician at the Hebrew University (henceforth: MBBK).³⁶Since I am not a mathematician, I cannot comment independently on the mathematical aspects of the debate, but in all other respects it is clear to me that MBBK's argument is persuasive.

In WRR's experiment, everything hinges on the claim that the sages appear "in close proximity" to their dates. It is noteworthy that "close proximity" does not necessarily mean what laymen are likely to think it means. As Rips states elsewhere:

We have chosen for our analysis a specific pattern, namely, proximity (in a certain technical sense [emphasis mine -- JHT]) of related words appearing as ELSs. Thus, everything is reduced to a statistical analysis of the significance of such proximity patterns.³⁷

Since "proximity" is meant only in a technical sense, readers should not expect to find the names and dates of the sages in actual passages on real pages of the Torah. The letters of their names and dates are drawn from different chapters of the Torah, often many pages apart. Any proximity between them is found only on grids created by computer from ELSs. Perhaps this is why WRR do not show in their article any of the textual arrays in which the sages and their dates appear near each other (an example would be Fig. 3, above).³⁸ Instead, they illustrate the phenomenon of ELSs with a few simple arrays containing words of related meaning (such as the Hebrew words for hammer and anvil and some names that are related to each other) and for the sages experiment they publish the lists of the sages and dates whose ELSs they consider to be unexpectedly close to each other.³⁹ The closeness itself is displayed by mathematical tables and formulas rather than pictorially. It is virtually impossible for non-mathematicians to examine their evidence. In response to my question about this, McKay explained: "The pictorial evidence in the form of letter arrays is irrelevant to the mathematical question. What matters is only the numerical 'distance' computed according to WRR's complicated definition."

Interestingly, however, McKay continued as follows:

WRR don't actually claim that all the rabbis appear close to their dates. All they claim is that they are a little closer than expected on average. This slight statistical trend needs a careful test to detect. Some rabbis are far from their dates...and in fact most of them are closer to the dates of some other rabbi than to their own dates.⁴⁰ Here is a summary I made for WRR's second list, using the smallest distance from any name of a rabbi to any of his dates.

McKay's summary is as follows:

Rabbi Comment

1 Close to many dates but closest to the right date.
2 Closer to at least 8 wrong dates.
3 Closer to at least 3 wrong dates.
4 No date used (claimed to be uncertain)
5 No ELS for the date exists. Not close to anything.
6 Closer to at least 5 wrong dates.
7 Closer to at least 15 wrong dates.
8 No dates used (uncertain). Close to 8 wrong dates.
9 Far from right date, close to 7 wrong dates.
10 Far from right date, close to 9 wrong dates.
11 Far from right date, close to 10 wrong dates.
12 Close to many dates but closest to the right date.
13 Far from right date, close to 15 wrong dates.
14 Far from right date, close to 9 wrong dates.
15 Closer to at least 2 wrong dates.
16 Far from right date, close to 11 wrong dates.
17 No ELS for the name exists.
18 No ELS for either name exists.
19 Closer to at least 19 wrong dates.
20 Closer to at least 7 wrong dates.
21 Closer to at least 9 wrong dates.
(It seems the date is wrong; should be 1st Iyyar.
The right date does even worse.)
22 Good match, equally close to two wrong dates.
23 Close to many dates but closest to the right date.
24 Closer to at least 5 wrong dates.
25 Far from all dates.
26 Closer to at least 7 wrong dates.
27 Closer to at least 12 wrong dates.
28 Closer to at least 9 wrong dates.
29 No ELS for the name exists.
30 Good match, equally close to 1 wrong date.
31 Good match, equally close to 1 wrong date.
32 Far from right date, close to 3 wrong dates.

It is instructive to note that the rabbi contributing most strongly to the Statistical Science result is #27.⁴¹

From a layman's point of view, then, even using WRR's "technical" definition of proximity, the correlation of sages and their dates is actually poor, even though on average it is not quite as poor as one might have expected from chance; that is why mathematicians and other scientists find it interesting. But from a theological point of view, why should one be impressed by correlations that are surprising only "on average," and not in every case?

The same point may be illustrated another way. According to MBBK,⁴² in order to test whether there was an extraordinary closeness between the sages' names and dates, WRR compared the distances in the list of 32 sages and their dates of death to 999,999 alternative control lists in which each sage was paired not with his own date of death but rather with a date chosen randomly from the list (random pairings would more often than not pair a rabbi with the date of some other rabbi). The assumption was that "if there is anything special in the Book of Genesis and the sages' names really appear exceptionally close to their dates of death, then the distances between correct name-date pairs should be, on average, closer than between random name-date pairs." Accordingly, 999,999 permutations of the list were chosen. In each, every sage was paired with the date of a sage chosen randomly from the list, and the distance between the names and those dates was computed. When the original, correct list of distances was compared to the 999,999 random lists, "the correct list achieved one of the first places" (fourth place, according to WRR) in this race among one million contestants. This means that three of the lists in which the sages were mostly paired with the wrong dates did better! In those three lists, the sages and the dates were closer than they are in the correct list. From a mathematical point of view it is interesting that the correct list did as well as it did (better than 999,996 other lists), since there was no a priori reason to expect it to do so. But from a theo-logical point of view, a test in which mostly incorrect lists perform better than the correct one seems meaningless. If God arranged the text so as to pair the sages with their dates, why would He have paired most rabbis more closely with incorrect dates than with correct ones?

Returning to the subject of textual criticism, MBBK re-ran WRR's experiment on the list of 32 sages based on the text of Genesis in the Koren edition and then on six other editions of the MT whose differences from Koren were listed by Prof. Menahem Cohen of Bar Ilan University (Cohen's list is posted on Brendan McKay's website; see note 30). Their results are as follows:⁴³

Differences Rank

Koren 0 6
Yemenite 3 19
Sassoon 11 2308
Venice Mikra'ot Gedolot 15 16608
Leningrad 22 12528
Jerusalem 35 19075
Hilleli 43 6411

"Differences" is the number of places where the other texts spell a word differently than Koren. The numbers under "Rank" mean that if one compares the correct dates to 10,000,000 random permutations of the dates, the correct dates perform 6th best, 19th best, 2308th best, etc. (for greater accuracy, MBBK give the ranks out of 10 million permutations, instead of the 1 million used by WRR). Note that the other texts do much worse than Koren, but that even in Koren the correct dates do not perform best. In other words, there is no known text of the Torah in which the list with the correct dates does best!

Given the fact that all of these editions of the MT are so much later than the original text of Genesis, it is also important to consider the much earlier Hebrew copies of Genesis from Qumran. Fragments from 14 different manuscripts of Genesis have been found at Qumran, from the last two centuries B.C.E. and the first century C.E. They differ from the MT in different degrees. Extrapolating from variants in these fragments, each of the manu-scripts when complete would have differed from the MT by hundreds of letters.⁴⁴ This number of differences is enough to completely obliterate the codes. As MBBK explain:

Clearly an ELS is destroyed if any letter is inserted or deleted within its overall span. The ELSs giving the strongest contribution to WRR's result together span most of the text. Experiments show that deletion of 10 letters in random places is enough to de-grade the result by an average factor of 4000, and 50 letters are enough to eliminate it completely.⁴⁵ Of course, the effect has a very large variance, as it depends on which of a comparatively small number of important ELSs are "hit" by a deletion. WRR's first list [the 34 sages - J.H.T.] is even more sensitive to the effects of corruption, as its important ELSs have greater skips. Ten letters deleted in random places are on average enough to eliminate its significance altogether.

Considering that even the Qumran scrolls are centuries later than the traditional date of the Torah, MBBK conclude:

if the text of Genesis were to be consistently spelled in the style of the inscriptions closest to the time it was traditionally written, the differences would number in the thousands (even without any change of meaning). This conclusion has catastrophic consequences for any theory that "codes" in the original text have survived until today.

MBBK argue that WRR's results, to the extent that they seem interesting at all, are due to flaws in their research methods. There are numerous possible forms of each rabbi's name and acronym that could have been used,⁴⁶ and numerous possible ways to write their dates.⁴⁷ MBBK argue that WRR chose only a limited number from among these possibilities, without any valid scientific reason for their choices, and that this strongly affected the outcome; had the test been run with other, equally valid choices, the results would have been worse. This strongly suggests, they argue, that WRR's choices may have been made not in an unbiased way, but precisely in order to enhance their results.

Much more material is available in MBBK's full article, cited in note 36. Part of that material includes patterns and "codes" found in other texts, such as the Christian Scriptures,⁴⁸the Qur'an, and Poe's "The Raven." McKay showed that one can also find "encoded" references in Melville's Moby Dick to various political assassinations, such as those of Leon Trotsky, John F. Kennedy, and Martin Luther King, Jr. He and Bar-Natan also ran a version of the "famous sages" experiment on the first part of the Hebrew translation of Tolstoy's War and Peace, equal in length to Genesis. They followed the procedures used by WRR on Genesis, and achieved the same degree of success. That such results can be found in so many texts, including texts for which no one claims divine authorship, is not unexpected. It has long been known that striking pat-terns can be found in all kinds of large masses of data.⁴⁹

INTERPRETIVE METHODS

Apart from the mathematical aspects of the decoders' work, many other aspects of their method are also questionable. The basic method, as mentioned above, consists primarily of finding words formed of ELSs. "Interpreters" such as Drosnin then read the ELS-based words in conjunction with words, or parts of words, that are nearby or that intersect with them crossword fashion. What usually happens is that the computer will be "instructed" to look for a word. When the word is located, it is found to consist of letters spaced at equidistant intervals. As mentioned, the name Yitzhak Rabin is formed by letters appearing 4772 letters apart. Then the computer is instructed to lay out all the 304,805 letters of the Torah (Koren edition) in an array consisting of 64 rows of 4772 letters, so that Rabin's name appears in a vertical row. Then the computer displays the nearest segment of the array, a square consisting of ca. 15-20 rows of letters both horizontally and vertically. This segment resembles the grid of a "Word Hunt" puzzle (see Fig. 6), and the task of the researcher is then to find other phrases nearby that combine with it to form a message. Since the horizontal lines consist of Biblical verses, they can be searched by the naked eye. That's how the phrase "murderer who will murder" was found. But the codes aren't limited to what can be noticed with the naked eye. For example, if one asks ask the computer to find the name of Rabin's assassin nearby, it will do so a mere two lines above -- but with two hitches. As one can see from Fig. 7, the letters of the assassin's name (Amir) are a mere 9 spaces apart, not 4772, and -- they spell his name backwards! What is more, if one changes the width of the array, the phrase "murderer who will murder" will still be found in its place, but Rabin's name will now appear in a diagonal line with the letters separated from each other by two horizontal columns and one vertical (see Fig. 8). And if one does this, one will also find nearby the name of Netanyahu and the phrase "all his people to war," an ominous prediction of what Netanyahu might do. This willingness to change the distance between letters for different parts of the same message, to read words horizontally, vertically, diagonally, upside down and backwards, all within the same message -- procedures that are found on every page of the Bible code books -- gives the impression of arbitrariness and manipulation of the data. Nowhere do the decoders show these choices to be based on any objective, systematic method.

Fig. 6. A "Word Hunt" grid

Fig. 7. "Rabin's assassin" in Deuteronomy

Fig. 8. "Benjamin Netanyahu" in Deuteronmomy

Another key element of the procedures is to ignore the spaces between the words. By running all the letters of the Torah together, they can then be redivided into different words to produce new messages. For example, in Fig. 9, the words "fire, great noise [literally, thunder]" ('E$, RA^cAM, spelled '$ R^cM), allegedly describing a bus bombing in Jerusalem, are produced by redividing the letters of the words "which is near" ('A$ER ^cIM, spelled '$R ^cM) in Genesis 35:4. In an array that spans Exodus 19:12-Deuteronomy 4:48, some letters are lifted from parts of the words in God's declaration "You will be My people. I am the Lord your God" (Leviticus 26:12-13) and are taken to mean "July to Amman" -- Hebrew YULI LE-cAMAN, formed from the last two letters of the Hebrew word for "will be" (YU) plus the word for "My" (LI) and the word for "as a people" (LE-^cAM) plus the first two letters of the word for "I" ('AN) (see Fig. 10); this "phrase" is taken to predict a trip to Amman planned by Netanyahu for July, l996 (it was ultimately delayed until August).⁵⁰Just how much mischief can be done by this method was shown to me when I was in Hebrew high school by a teacher who pointed out that the words "In the beginning God created" (Genesis 1:1) could be redivided into "At first the god of the sea created himself" (see Fig. 11). Truly, by such methods one can produce messages not only undreamed of by the Torah, but contrary to its most fundamen-tal, monotheistic, teaching.

Fig. 9. "Bus bombing" in Genesis

Fig. 10. "July to Amman" in Leviticus

Fig. 11. "The God of the Sea" in Genesis 1:1

Likewise problematic are other methods used in interpreting these alleged messages. First, the messages consist of disconnected words and phrases with no syntactic connection, which leaves them equivocal. For example, the intersecting phrases "Yitzhak Rabin" and "murderer who will murder" could mean "a murderer will kill Rabin" or "Rabin is a murderer." In fact, since the Hebrew grammatical particle 'ET that usually precedes the direct of object of a verb is not present before Rabin's name, Rabin is more likely the subject of the verb than its object, and the message more likely means that he is a killer than that he will be killed. Another message consists of the phrases "Hitler," "evil man," "Nazi and enemy," and "slaughter." In a somewhat lighter vein we have this message: "Watergate," and "Who⁵¹ is he? President but he was kicked out." And here is a third message: "Einstein," "science," "he overturned present reality," "they⁵² prophesied a brainy person," "a new and excellent under-standing." These disconnected phrases make the author of the codes sound like an incoherent babbler.

Then there are messages that do not come true. In time-honored fashion, they are ra-tionalized or reinterpreted. Near the supposed prediction of Rabin's assassination Drosnin found the words "all his people to war," which he took to predict an atomic holocaust after Rabin's death (pp. 54-58). Eventually, he settled for the 1996 bus bombings as the fulfillment of the prediction "all his people to war" (p. 69). Drosnin found another message with the phrases "atomic holocaust," "Libya," and the date 1995-96, which he took as a warning of a nuclear attack on Israel by Libya in that year; the closest thing he can report to confirmation is the fact that in 1996 the Libyan leader Muammar Kaddafi called on all Arab countries to acquire nuclear weapons. But Drosnin is also protected against this problem because he even-tually "realized" that not all predictions are definite, and that the Hebrew letters that spell out the Hebrew equivalent of 1995-96 (HT$NV) also spell out a word meaning "Will you change (it)?" (HATE$ANNU, pp. 59, 83).

Finally, those parts of the messages produced by reading the letters of the horizontal lines in their actual sequence are not produced by equidistant letter sequences, but by arbitrari-ly selecting certain letters as part of the message and ignoring the rest. This is a very important point: the choice of which letters and words to include in a message is not based on an objec-tive, scientific method, such as considering only words composed of equidistant letters -- it is, rather, subjective and arbitrary. For example, citing again the passage intersecting with Rabin: that passage is from Deuteronomy 4:42, but Drosnin ignores the words immediately following "a murderer who will murder." What comes next is the phrase "unwittingly" (biveli da'at). This is because the verse deals with the cities of refuge where accidental killers can find asylum. In this case, then, the message would refer to an accidental killing of (or by) Rabin and it would therefore be wrong. Another message (p. 71) supposedly contains a "complete" description of the terrorist bombing of a bus in Jerusalem on February 25, 1996. It includes the phrase "fire, great noise," but overlooks the fact that the letters which make up those two words are actually part of a larger phrase from Genesis 35:4 which says: "under the terebinth that was near Shechem." If the phrase does tell of a bus bombing, why not take it to indicate that it would be in Nablus, the site of ancient Shechem?⁵³

Of course proponents of the codes could argue that since Rabin was assassinated and the bus was bombed in Jerusalem, that is what the codes must have meant. But if the very meaning of the messages is apparent only after the fact, of what use are they? What did their author hope to achieve by encoding them? They become no better than the Delphic oracles who told Croesus that if he attacked the Persians he would destroy a mighty empire. When he was defeated and complained to the oracles, he was told that if he had been wise he would have inquired whether the Persian empire or his own was meant; he therefore had only himself to blame for the result (Herodotus 1:53, 91).

* * * * *

As mentioned earlier, there are differences between the work of Rips and Witztum, on the one hand, and Drosnin on the other hand. On a personal level, Drosnin regularly insists that he is not religious and does not believe in God, which puts him in the bizarre position of wanting the Israeli government to act on the disastrous messages that he finds encoded in the Bible while he personally disregards the messages that are stated there plainly! (Perhaps this is connected with Drosnin's suggestion that the true source of the Bible is an advanced alien, extraterrestrial intelligence [pp. 96-98].) Rips and Witztum are religious Jews who at least live in harmony with their theories. Furthermore, they vigorously deny that the Bible codes can be used to predict the future. But all of these gentlemen base their computations on an unreliable textual base which evidence suggests was not the original text of the Torah, and all of them strain the credibility at least of the layman by changing the size of the ELSs for different parts of each message or pattern, and by reading words horizontally, vertically, diagonally, upside down and backwards, giving the impression of arbitrariness and manipulation of the data. Their case, therefore, is not convincing.⁵⁴

NOTES

In transliterating Hebrew, I use the closest English equivalents. Special cases are:

' = aleph ^c = ayin
V = vav C = tsadi
X = het Q = qof
T = tav or tet $ = shin

This paper is based on a lecture delivered as part of a panel on "The Bible Code: Criti-cal Perspectives" convened by Prof. Saul Kripke at the Princeton University Math Department on April 28, 1998. In preparing and revising this paper I benefited from helpful suggestions and information kindly provided by Profs. Moshe Greenberg, Uriel Simon, Emanuel Tov, Shlomo Sternberg, Sid Z. Leiman, B. Barry Levy, Yeshayahu Maori, Alan Groves, Messrs. Scobie Smith and Alec Gindis, my student Shawn Zelig Aster, and my fellow panelists Profs. Brendan McKay and Maya Bar-Hillel.

1. Jacob Mann, The Jews in Egypt and Palestine under the Fatimid Caliphs (reprint New York: Ktav, 1970), 1:241; 2:307.

2. See J. Tigay, "An Early Technique of Aggadic Exegesis," in H. Tadmor and M. Weinfeld, eds., History, Historiography, and Interpretation (Jerusalem: The Hebrew University of Jerusalem. The Institute of Advanced Studies. Magnes Press, 1983), pp. 175-176. See also B.M. Metzger, "Sortes Biblicae," in The Oxford Companion to the Bible, ed. B.M. Metzger and M.D. Coogan (New York: Oxford University Press, 1993), pp. 713-714.

3. Aish HaTorah's Discovery Seminar (no editor, date, or place of publication listed; the cover includes the name of the organization "Arachim" and states that the booklet is "Sponsored by the Dan Family of Canada"), p. 11; M. Katz, Computorah. Dr. Moshe Katz on Hidden Codes in the Torah (Jerusalem: CompuTorah [P.O.B. 23702], 1996), pp. 74-77. According to Katz, p. 74, and J. Satinover, Cracking the Bible Code [New York: William Morrow, 1997], pp. 2-3, 85, this ELS was discovered by Rabbi Michael Dov Ber Weissman-del, while the discovery of Maimonides' acronym is traced, perhaps apocryphally, to the Vilna Gaon.

4. New York: Simon and Schuster, 1997.

5. This is the number of letters in the Koren edition of the Torah (Torah, Nevi'im, uKetuvim [Jerusalem: Koren, 1962 and frequently thereafter]). It agrees with Jacob ben Hayyim ibn Adoniah's colophon in the Pardes edition of Mikra'ot Gedolot at the end of Deu-teronomy.

6. Doron Witztum, Eliyahu Rips, and Yoav Rosenberg, "Equidistant Letter Sequences in the Book of Genesis," Statistical Science 9/3 (1994):429-38.

7. The year of the Maharshal's death (5334 [1573]) also appears in this array, but years were not included in WRR's test.

8. Katz, Computorah, pp. 150-155, 204-208.

9. Katz, Computorah, pp. 12-22; Drosnin, pp. 38, 194-95. Witztum resolved the ques-tion of the accuracy of the text by simply consulting Rabbi Shlomo Fisher, who answered that "we could fully rely on our text" (Witztum, "The Seal of God is Truth," Jewish Action 58/3 [Spring, 1998]:26; on p. 32 n. 2 he claims to have given a full treatment of this issue on his website [http://www.torahcodes.co.il]; however, as of 17 August, 1998 and January 26, 1999, I could find no such discussion in any obvious place on his website, and two e-mailed requests for clarification, sent to the address given on the website, went unanswered). Drosnin states that "all [Hebrew Bibles] that now exist are the same letter for letter" and that "the Bible code computer program uses the universally accepted original Hebrew text." He states that the text "existed at least 1000 years ago, and almost certainly 2000 years ago, in exactly the same form it exists today" (pp. 194-95). In fact, he assumes that it is identical to the text of the time of Moses, since throughout the book he keeps referring to the code's predictions as being from 3000 years ago (e.g. pp. 39, 87, 90). The same assumption of textual accuracy is necessary for a similar reason according to Nahmanides' introduction to the Torah, who refers to a tradition that "the whole Torah is comprised of Names of [God], and that the letters of the words separate themselves into Divine Names when divided in a different manner" (Eng. trans. by C.B. Chavel, Ramban (Nachmanides). Commentary on the Torah [New York: Shilo, 1971] 1:13-15).

10. See Menahem Cohen, "The Idea of the Sanctity of the Letters of the Text and Textual Criticism," in U. Simon, ed., HaMiqra' vaAnahnu (The Bible and Us) (Tel Aviv: Dvir, 1987), 42-69. An English translation under a slightly different title appears on Brendan McKay's website:
http://cs.anu.edu.au/~bdm/dilugim/CohenArt.

11. For the history of the Masoretic Text see E. Tov, Textual Criticism of the Hebrew Bible (Minneapolis: Fortress Press, 1992), 22-79.

12. There are 304,850 letters in the Michigan-Claremont-Westminster (MCW) comput-erized text of Biblica Hebraica Stuttgartensia (BHS), which is the critical edition of the Lenin-grad codex currently in use by most scholars (statistics courtesy of Alan Groves, the final editor of the MCW text). C.D. Ginsburg's edition of the Torah contains 304,807 letters ac-cording to the colophon at its end (C.D. Ginsburg, The Pentateuch [London: British and Foreign Bible Society, 1926; repr. Jerusalem: Makor, 1970]).

13. All known Hebrew Bible texts, ancient and modern, use a system of spelling that is different from the one that was used in the days of Moses. The archaeological evidence shows that Hebrew spelling has gone through three stages.

(1) At first, Hebrew and the other West Semitic alphabets (such as Ugaritic, Phoenician and Aramaic) represented only consonants, and readers were normally left to infer the vowels from the context. This was a problematic system because it left many words equivocal. It would be as if we wrote the English letters r-v-r and left the reader to decide whether they stood for river, rover, raver, revere, or Rivera. On rare occasions, certain long vowels were indicated. To indicate them, a few of the consonants were used as matres lectionis to represent the vowels that sounded like those consonants; the consonant Y, in particular, was also used for the vowel sound /i/.

(2) In the second stage this sporadic use of consonants was expanded and four different consonants were used more frequently to indicate vowels. VAV, originally pronounced like a w, was also employed as a vowel to indicate certain /u/'s and /o/'s (e.g. LNV = LANU; XWRC = XOREC); ALEPH (pronounced consonantly as a glottal stop) represented certain other /o/'s and /u/'s (e.g. R'$ = RO$; H' = HU); YOD repre-sented /i/ and certain /e/'s (e.g. 'DNY = ADONI; BYT = BET); and HEH (pro-nounced consonantally as h) represented /a/ and certain other /o/'s and /e/'s (e.g. HYH = HAYAH;^cBDH = ^cABDO; ZH = ZEH). This stage began around the tenth century B.C.E. in Aramaic, and later spread to Hebrew. It was a gradual development, used at first for long vowels at the end of words, and later, but less frequently, within words as well. This system was a major help for readers, but it was imperfect for three reasons: first, there weren't enough suitable consonants, so each of them had to represent more than one vowel; second, they were not consistently used -- sometimes a vowel would be indicated, sometimes not ("full" and "defective" spelling, as explained above); and third, those letters continued to represent consonants as well as vowels, creating a certain amount of ambiguity.

(3) Finally, much later, some time between the sixth and eighth centuries C.E., the system of diacritical "points" -- dots and dashes above and below the letters -- was invented to represent the vowels. This created a certain amount of redundancy since the vowel letters of the second stage continued to be used alongside the diacriticals, but it led to greater clarity.

Let me exemplify. In the Gezer Calendar, the oldest known Hebrew inscription from Biblical times, the word meaning harvest, QACIR, is spelled Q-C-R (see the boxed word in Fig. 4). The internal vowel /i/ is not shown. In Masoretic Torah scrolls, it is spelled Q-C-Y-R, with the vowel /i/ represented by Y (see the boxed word in Fig. 5 left). In Bibles with diacritical vowel points, the same letters are used, but the diacrit-ical signs are added above and below the letters (see the boxed word in Fig. 5 right; all three types of spelling are represented in English characters in Fig. 4, lower right).

Fig. 4. The Gezer Calendar and the word QACIR ("harvest")

Fig. 5. Selection from a Torah scroll and a printed Bible
with diacritical vowels and cantillation signs

Now the Gezer Calendar comes from the 10th century B.C.E., approximately three centuries after Moses. Its non-representation of the internal vowel is characteristic of the West Semitic writing that we know from that early period. It is clear that the Bible texts we use today, which usually include matres lectionis to represent long vowels at the end of words and often within the words, reflect a post-Mosaic system of spelling (again, see Fig. 5). The spelling in manuscripts of Moses's time would have looked very different from that in the Masoretic Text of today, which contains thousands of vowel letters that would not have been used in Moses's time.

For the history of the spelling system see F.M. Cross, Jr., and D.N. Freedman, Early Hebrew Orthography. A Study of the Epigraphic Evidence. American Oriental Series 36 (New Haven: American Oriental Society, 1952); Z. Zevit, Matres Lectionis in Ancient Hebrew Epigraphs. American Schools of Oriental Research Monograph Series 2 (Cambridge, Mass.: American Schools of Oriental Research, 1980); Tov, Textual Criticism, pp. 39-49; M. Greenberg, Introduction to Hebrew (Englewood Cliffs, N.J.: Prentice-Hall, 1965), 17-23.

14. The two versions are laid out side by side, with differences highlighted, in Abba Bendavid, Makbilot BaMikra' (Parallels in the Bible) (Jerusalem: Carta, 1972), p. 61-62. Kimhi held that such differences as Dodanim in Gen. 10:4 vs. Rodanim in 1 Chron. 1:7, and Deuel in Num. 1:14 vs. Reuel in 2:14 are due to confusion of similar letters, but he held that the confusion took place in pre-Biblical texts and that the Bible intentionally preserved both forms to show that they referred to the same peoples or persons; there was no confusion in the transmission of the Bible itself (see his comments to Gen. 10:4 and 1 Chron. 1:7, and Uriel Simon, "Ibn Ezra and Kimhi -- Two Approaches to the Question of the Accuracy of the Masoretic Text," Bar Ilan 6 (1968):208-209).

14a. See Mekhilta Pish . a, 18 (ed. Horovitz-Rabin, p. 73; ed, Lauterbach 1:166-167); Yerushalmi Pesahim 10.4, 37d; M.M. Kasher, Haggadah Shelemah 3d ed. (Jerusalem: Torah Shelema Institute, 1967), p. 22; N.N. Glatzer, The Passover Haggadah (New York: Schock-en, 1969), pp. 24-29.

15. Noted in Jacob ben Chaim's introduction to Mikra'ot Gedolot (1525; see C.D. Ginsburg, Jacob ben Chajim ibn Adonijah's Introduction to the Rabbinic Bible...1867; repr. New York: KTAV, 1968; see, for example, p. 42); Minhat Shai (1626); Rabbi Akiva Eiger, Gilyon haShas, Shabbat 55b; S. Rosenfeld, Sefer Mishpahat Soferim (Vilna: Romm, 1883); M.M. Kasher, Torah Shelemah 23 (Jerusalem: American Biblical Encyclopedia Society/Makhon Torah Shelemah, 1969), pp. 113-14 (for Genesis and Exodus); etc. The basic modern study is V. Aptowitzer, Das Schriftwort in der Rabbinischen Literatur (1906-15; repr. New York: KTAV, 1970, with prolegomenon by S. Loewinger), which focuses on Joshua and Judges. See also Y. Maori, "Rabbinic Midrash as Evidence for Textual Variants in the Hebrew Bible: History and Practice," in S. Carmy, ed., Modern Scholarship in the Study of Torah. Contributions and Limitations. The Orthodox Forum Series. A Project of the Rabbi Isaac Elhanan Theological Seminary. An Affiliate of Yeshiva University (Northvale NJ: Jason Aronson, 1996), pp. 101-29. On variant readings in Rashi's commentary, see Shnayer (Sid) Z. Leiman, "Yavneh Studies in Naso," in Yavneh Studies in Parashat HaShavua. Bemidbar (New York: Yavneh. The Religious Jewish Students Association, 1972), pp. 3-7.

16. For example, in Bavli Berakhot 61a R. Nahman bar Yitzhak quotes a passage that is not present in the MT: VYLK 'LQNH 'XRY '$TV, "and Elkanah walked after his wife." This passage, if it existed, would have belonged in 1 Samuel 1 or 2. It is also absent in the Septuagint and in the partially preserved fragments of Samuel from Qumran. However, both of these versions of the text include other extra phrases not found in the MT (in 1 Samuel 1:22 a Qumran fragment reads: "And I shall give him as a Nazirite forever all the days of his life," and in v. 18, after "the woman went her way," the Septuagint adds: "and entered the chamber and ate with her husband and drank"). This suggests that R. Nahman bar Yitzhak was quoting from a text of Samuel known to him. (For the Qumran text see F.M. Cross, "A New Qumran Biblical Fragment Related to the Original Hebrew Underlying the Septuagint," Bulletin of the American Schools of Oriental Research 132 [1953]:15-26.

17. The precept of tefillin is based on Exodus 13:9 and 16 and Deuteronomy 6:8 and 11:18. The word totafot, "frontlets, headbands," referring to the tefillin worn on the head, appears in three of these verses. According to Rabbi Ishmael in the Talmud (Sanhedrin 4b and parallels), the suffix -OT is spelled defectively (that is, without the vowel letter VAV) in the first two occurrences and fully (with the VAV) the third time. This allows the first two to be read "as if" they were singulars, implying one compartment each, and requires the third to be read as a plural, hence requiring two compartments, and thus indicating that the head tefillin must have a total of four compartments. However, in all known copies of the Bible, both ancient (with one exception, in Exodus 13:16) and Masoretic, the suffix is spelled defectively all three times, and this is how Maimonides rules that they must be written (Mishneh Torah, Hilkhot Tefillin 2:7, presumably following the Aleppo Codex). For the ancient manuscripts see J. Tigay, "On the Meaning of totafot," Journal of Biblical Literature 101 (1982):321. For other such examples see Leiman, cited in the next note.

18. Sid Z. Leiman, "Masorah and Halakhah: A Study in Conflict," in Tehilla le-Moshe. Biblical and Judaic Studies in Honor of Moshe Greenberg, ed. M. Cogan, B.L. Eichler, and J.H. Tigay (Winona Lake, Indiana: Eisenbraun's, 1997), pp. 291-306.

19. S. Rosenfeld, Sefer Mishpahat Sofrim (Vilna: Romm, 1883), 34-36, 100, who identifies the middle letter as the ALEPH in the word HU', in Lev. 8:28 (the same is true for the Koren edition), and the middle pair of words as 'EL YESOD in Lev. 8:15. According to the Talmud, the middle letter is the VAV in the word GAXON in Lev. 11:42, and the middle words are DAROSH DARASH in Lev. 10:16. The inconsistency between the Talmudic passage and the MT of today is also noted by Barukh HaLevi Epstein, Torah Temimah, at Lev. 11:42 and M.M. Kasher, Torah Shelemah 28 (Jerusalem: American Biblical Encyclopedia Society/Makhon Torah Shelemah, 1978), pp. 286-289. In the Yemenite text the middle letter is the L of LYHVH in Lev. 8:28; according to Alan Groves, in BHS, which has an even number of letters, the middle two letters are HX in HXZH, also in Lev. 8:28. Witztum claims to have dealt with the passage in Kiddushin 30a on his website but, as noted above in note 9, I could find no such discussion there.

20. For the latter possibility one may compare the Septuagint of Exodus 35-40, which is based on a Hebrew original that had many passages in a different order than in the MT. But if this is the case in the text to which the "first scholars" were referring, it was, without the rabbis realizing it, from a textual tradition other than the one that was current in rabbinic cir-cles.

21. See Maimonides, Introduction to Perek Helek (Sanhedrin 10:1), Eighth Principle; R. Joseph Albo, Sefer haIkkarim 3:22; Abarbanel, Introduction to Commentary on Jeremiah (Tel Aviv: Torah veDaat [n.d.]), pp. 298-99.

22. E.g., Shlomo Sternberg, "Snake Oil for Sale," Bible Review 13/4 (August, 1997): 24-25; "Comments on The Bible Code, in Notices of the AMS 44/8 (September, 1997):938-39. For other Orthodox scholars acknowledging changes in the text, see also Cohen (above, note 10; below, note 30), Leiman (above, note 18) and Levy (below, n. 28). In view of the spell-ing variations in Torah manuscripts, the late Rabbi Yaakov Weinberg, Rosh Yeshiva of Yeshivat Ner Yisrael, wrote:

Rambam knew very well that these variations existed...The words of Ani Ma'amin and the words of the Rambam [in his commentary on Mishnah Sanhedrin 10:1] "the entire Torah in our possession today" [is the one that Moses received from God] must not be taken literally, implying that all the letters of the present Torah are the exact letters given to Moshe Rabbeinu. Rather, it should be understood in a general sense that the Torah we learn and live by is for all intents and purposes the same Torah that was given to Moshe Rabbeinu.

Y. Weinberg, Fundamentals and Faith. Insights into the Rambam's Thirteen Principles, ed. M. Blumenfeld (Spring Valley, N.Y.: Feldheim: 1991), pp. 90-91 quoted by M.B. Shapiro, "Maimonides' Thirteen Principles: The Last Word in Jewish Theology?" The Torah U-Madda Journal 4 (1993):203 (for our purposes R. Weinberg's view is important whether or not Maimonides intended his words to be taken literally). (Ironically, R. Weinberg's book is listed in "Aish HaTorah's Recommended Reading List" http://www.aish.edu/learning/booklist.htm).

22a. See D.Z. Hoffmann, Sefer Vayikra (Jerusalem: Mosad Harav Kook, 1956), pp. 7-8; for an English translation see Hoffmann's "General Introduction to Biblical Exegesis," translated from the original German by Jenny Marmorstein, "David Hoffmann: Defender of the Faith," Tradition Winter 1966, pp. 99-100.

23. See Saul Lieberman, Hellenism in Jewish Palestine (New York: Jewish Theological Seminary, 1962), pp. 28-37; Tov, Textual Criticism, pp. 64-67; Ginsburg, Introduction, pp. 347-363. Examples are in Gen. 18:22 (see also Rashi) and 1 Sam. 3:13, "committed sacrilege at will/for themselves" (LHM), where Radak records a tikkun soferim to avoid saying "com-mitted sacrilege against God" ('L, or 'LHYM), as the Septuagint actually reads (Tanakh [Jewish Publication Society] ad loc., note a-a). Lieberman shows that the views that these readings are original euphemisms (kinnah(u) hakatuv) and scribal corrections (tikkun soferim) are distinct and divergent traditions and should not be harmonized so that one becomes just another way of referring to the other. The view that they are original euphemisms appears in tannaitic sources; the view that the scribes actually changed the original text is first expressed by Rabbi Joshua b. Levi (first half of third century): "It is a correction of the scribes; (the word ^cYNW, 'his eye, in Zechariah 2:12) was (originally) written with a yod (i.e., ^cYNY, 'My eye')" (Shemot Rabbah 13:1). Note also the Masoretic list cited by Ginsburg, Introduc-tion, p. 351 n. 2, which explicitly states that in each case something else "was written" in place of the current reading in the MT.

The Talmud also lists 5 words containing "omissions of the scribes" (ittur soferim) in which the scribes omitted the one-letter conjunction vav (Ginsburg, Introduction, pp. 308-309; Tov, p. 67; see Tosafot, the Geonim, the Arukh and other views cited by Steinsaltz at B. Nedarim 37b).

24. Avot deRabbi Nathan, Version A chap. 34; Version B chap. 37 (pp. 101 and 98 in ed. Schechter; for translations see J. Goldin, The Fathers According to Rabbi Nathan [New Haven: Yale University Press, 1955], pp. 138-39; A. Saldarini, The fathers According to Rabbi Nathan...Version B [Leiden: Brill, 1975], p. 224); see also Bemidbar Rabbah 3:13.

25. Lieberman, Hellenism in Jewish Palestine, pp. 43-46.

26. See Lieberman, Hellenism, pp. 21-27; S. Talmon, "The Three Scrolls of the Law that Were Found in the Temple Court," Textus 2 (1962):14-27.

27. For Kimhi's view on textual criticism see U. Simon, "Ibn Ezra and Kimhi -- Two Approaches to the Question of the Accuracy of the Masoretic Text," Bar Ilan 6 (1968):191-237.

28. Leiman, "Masorah and Halakhah." The struggle is traced in great detail in a forth-coming book by B. Barry Levy, Fixing God's Torah. The Accuracy of the Hebrew Bible Text in Jewish Law, kindly shown to me by the author in advance of publication.

29. Shulhan Arukh, 'Orah Hayyim 143:4, Isserles; cf. Kasher, Torah Shelemah 28:229-30, note 258.

30. For a list of discrepancies cited by Minhat Shai in Genesis and Exodus, see Kasher, Torah Shelemah 23:109-111 (a fuller list of variant readings for Genesis, prepared by Menahem Cohen, is found on Brendan McKay's website at:
http://cs.anu.edu.au/~bdm/dilugim/cohen_heb1.html (see also C.D. Ginsburg, The Massorah, 3:23-36, 106 etc.). Mordechai Breuer presents a list of over 200 orthographic differences between six important versions of the MT (five ancient masoretic manuscripts and the text in Mikra'ot Gedolot); see his The Aleppo Codex and the Accepted Text of the Bible (Jerusalem: Mosad Harav Kook, 1976), pp. 68-94 (in Hebrew).

31. A list of discrepancies in spelling and conjunctions in the first 19 printed editions of the Torah is found in Torah Shelemah 23:111-112.

32. The readings are at Gen. 4:13; 7:11; 9:29; Exod. 25:31; 28:26; Num. 1:17; 10:10; 22:5; and Deut. 23:2. See M. Breuer, Hamishah Humshei Torah (Jerusalem: Horev, 5756/1996), Appendix "haNusah," p. 9; M.L. Katzenellenbogen, ed., Torat Hayyim (Jerusalem: Mossad Harav Kook, 1993), Vol. 5, Devarim, p. 447. The Yemenites regard these dif-ferences seriously enough that they consider non-Yemenite Torah scrolls to be disqualified for public reading. See Y. Kapah, devarim 'axadim, paragraph aleph, in Sefer Keter HaTorah. Ha"Taj" HaGadol, ed. Y. Hasid (Jerusalem, 5730/1970), p. 2. There were three additional variants in the Aleppo Codex not found in the Yemenite text: Exod. 1:19 ('LYHN); Lev. 19:16: R^cYK; Lev. 25:10 (or possibly 11 or 12) (HY'). See Menahem Cohen, Mikra'ot Gedolot HaKeter. Joshua-Judges (Ramat Gan: Bar Ilan University 1992), pp. 55*, 96* nn. 160-161, citing Joseph Offer, "M.D. Cassuto's Notes on the Aleppo Codex," Sefunot N.S. 4 (19) (1989), pp. 309, 335.

33. Maimonides, Mishneh Torah. Hilkhot Sefer Torah 8:4.

34. M. Medan, "Al haNusah beMahadurat Koren," Beth Mikra 3 (15), Jan. 1963:142. It is worth keeping in mind that the decoders do not work directly with the Koren edition, but with a computerized version of its text, which could contain errors. There is at least as much room for human error in typing the text into the computer as there has always been in copying texts manually (and in setting them in type). Anybody familiar with how frequently errors can still be found in Torah scrolls, even though they are written by experienced scribes following exacting procedures, understands this. Rabbi David Greenfield of the Vaad Mishmeret Stam in New York (an organization of scribes that checks Torah scrolls for errors) informs me that errors are found in more than half the scrolls checked, and in more than 90% of those written since World War II (the Vaad now uses computer scanners to check for errors, and when it first received an electronic text of the Torah to use as the standard, 10-15 errors were found in it!). A sobering case in point is an article published in 1981 by Gerard E. Weil, an expert on the Masorah who edited the Masorah of BHS. Weil's article, based on a computerized version of the text that he prepared, gives the total number of letters in the Leningrad Codex's text of the Torah, and the total number of occurrences of each letter of the Hebrew alphabet ("Les decomptes de versets, mots et lettres du Pentateuque selon le manuscrit N 19a de Leningrad," in P. Casetti et al. eds., Melanges Dominique Barthelemy [Gottingen: Vandenhoeck & Ru-precht, 1981], pp. 651-703). But the Michigan-Claremont-Westminster (MCW) text of BHS, prepared independently of Weil's, gives different totals for the whole Torah (304,850 versus Weil's 304,848) and for 14 of the letters of the alphabet. Alan Groves, the final editor of the MCW, text tells me that in every case where a consonantal difference was found between it and Weil's text, Weil's was found to be wrong. Before concluding that the computerized ver-sion of the Koren text reproduces even Koren itself accurately, one would desire some evi-dence of how carefully, and how many times, it was checked against the original Koren text.

35. A critical statement, signed by over 40 mathematicians, is published on the internet at the following website: http://www.math.caltech.edu/code/petition.html.

36. B. McKay, D. Bar-Natan, M. Bar-Hillel, and G. Kalai, "Solving the Bible Code Puzzle," in Statistical Science, 14/2 (1999):150-173. The article is available on McKay's and Bar-Natan's websites at, respectively http://cs.anu.edu.au/~bdm/dilugim/StatSci/StatSci.pdf and http://www.ma.huji.ac.il/~drorbn/codes/StatSci.pdf. An earlier, less technical paper was published by M. Bar-Hillel, D. Bar-Natan and B. D. McKay, "The Torah Codes: Puzzle and Solution," in Chance (A Magazine of the American Statistical Association) 11 (1998): 13-19. For those with the proper software, the paper is available on Brendan McKay's website (http://cs.anu.edu.au/~bdm/dilugim/Chance.pdf).

37. "Dr. Rips Responds to Professor Sternberg," http://www.discoveryseminar.org/rresponse2.htm).

38. A number of arrays are shown pictorially in Doron Witztum, ha-Memad ha-nosaf: 'al ha-Ketivah ha-Du-memadit ba-Torah (Jerusalem: Ka-tamar Yifrah, 5749 [1988-89], pp. 101-131.

39. WRR, pp. 432, 433.

40. E-mail letter of 5 May, 1998. On the same date, Bar-Hillel, responded in a similar vein:

[T]he result WRR published is not really that rabbis are close to their dates, but rather that a large list of rabbis paired with their own dates are closer, on average [my empha-sis - J.H.T.], than lots and lots of lists where rabbis were paired with someone else's dates. So it is a comparative assertion, not an absolute one. To be sure, their rationale requires actual proximity, and they devised a complex measure of alleged proximity, but the "miracle" is not in the absolute proximities, but rather in relative proximities. In other words, even though the rabbis yield very few "pretty pictures" with their own dates, there may be even fewer with other dates. Paradoxically, even that is not the case...but as per the race they ran between lists, the correct list did almost best. Poorly, by the measure of 'pretty pictures,' but almost best."

41. McKay, e-mail letter of 7 May, 1998.

42. Bar-Hillel, Bar-Natan and McKay, "The Torah Codes: Puzzle and Solution," in Chance 11 (1998):15.

43. E-mail letter of 26 May, 1998.

44. 4QGenesis^b is a possible exception. It has one difference in the 1200 surviving letters. If variants were evenly distributed through the entire manuscript, this would imply a difference of about 65 letters in all of Genesis. This would make the scroll quite anomalous among the Qumran fragments, and it may be that the surviving fragments are accidentally closer to the MT than the rest of the manuscript was. But even assuming a mere 65 letters of difference from the MT, that is enough to completely obliterate the codes, as we shall see below.

45. According to cryptographer Harold Gans, 78 deleted letters are necessary to oblit-erate the statistical significance of the codes (Satinover, Cracking the Bible Code, p. 224). For present purposes, this makes no difference.

46. For example, Rabbi Hayyim Benveniste's name can be written: BNBN$TY, HRB HXBY"B, HRB XBY"B, RB XBY"B, or RBY XYYM. Other have even more possible appel-lations, including the names of their major books, sometimes preceded by B^cL, sometimes not.

47. For example, ALEF TISHREI, B'ALEF TISHREI, ALEF B'TISHREI, B'ALEF B'TISHREI, ALEF L'TISHREI, B'ALEF L'TISHREI, ALEF SHEL TISHREI, B'ALEF SHEL TISHREI.

48. Christians have also begun to claim that Christological messages can be found encoded in the Tanakh as well. For example, Grant R. Jeffrey, The Mysterious Bible Codes (Nashville: Word Publishing, 1998), chaps. 6-8, finds ELS-based references to Jesus, Mary, and some of Jesus's disciples in Isaiah 53, Psalm 22, and elsewhere (ref. courtesy of Chanan and Yisrael Tigay).

49. See A.M. Hasofer, "Codes in the Torah: A Rejoinder," in B'Or Ha'Torah 8 (1993/5743), pp. 121-131 (published by "Shamir," the Association of Religious Professionals from the Soviet Union and Eastern Europe in Israel, POB 5749, Jerusalem, Israel).

50. Drosnin, The Bible Code, pp. 157-8. For this and other examples, see R. Hendel, "The Bible Code: Cracked and Crumbling," Bible Review 13/4 (August, 1997), p. 23.

51. Who is "he"? The text never mentions Nixon's name! Actually, the spelling (MHV) would more likely mean: What is he/it?

52. Who? Drosnin never explains.

53. On pp. 58 and 80, Drosnin's rendering "after the death of prime minister" ignores the intervening word 'B, "father," which would make the message mean "after the death of the father of the prime minister" (later in the book, on p. 161, he includes 'B, reading the passage as: "Another will die, Av [i.e., the Hebrew month of Av], prime minister." On p. 54 he ignores what follows "all his people to war": "to Jahaz, and the Lord our God delivered him to us and we defeated him..." (Deut. 2:32-33).

54. Sources of the illustrations are as follows:

Fig. 1. Katz, Computorah, p. 77.

Fig. 2. Drosnin, p. 15.

Fig. 3. Aish HaTorah's Discovery Seminar, p. 5.

Fig. 4. Drawing from J. Naveh, Early History of the Alphabet (Jerusalem: Magnes, and Leiden: Brill, 1982), p. 63; transliteration from R. Hestrin, et al., Ketovot Mesapperot (Inscriptions Reveal). Israel Museum Catalogue no. 100. 2d edition (Jerusalem: Israel Museum, 1973), p. 18.

Fig. 5. Tikkun laKore'im. Revised ed. (New York: KTAV, 1969), p. 87.

Fig. 5a. The upper half of the figure, showing a standard printed text with the Yemenite variant indicated in the margin at Genesis 6:29, is from Sefer Keter ha-Torah. Ha"Taj" Ha-Gadol, ed. Y. Hasid (Jerusalem, 5730/1970), Vol. 1, p. 62; the lower part is from M.L. Katzenellenbogen, ed., Torat Hayyim (Jerusalem: Mossad Harav Kook, 1993), Vol. 5, Devarim, p. 447. [Fig. 5a is not yet loaded on the web version of this paper.]

Fig. 6. Favorite Crossword Puzzles 32/1 (West Springfield, MA: Quinn Publishing Co., February, 1983). pp. 95, 189.

Fig. 7. Drosnin, p. 29.

Fig. 8. Drosnin, p. 76.

Fig. 9. Drosnin, p. 71.

Fig. 10. Drosnin, p. 158.

People's court in Budapest 1944-1945

2005-12-26T15:51:00.000-08:00

Crime and Punishment:
People's Courts, Revolutionary Legality, and the Hungarian Holocaust

László Karsai:
University of Szeged
Since 1994, I have been heading a small team of historians commissioned by the Yad Vashem Archives in Jerusalem to microfilm Hungarian documents produced after 1938 concerning the Holocaust. So far, we have surveyed the papers of more than 20,000 trials in the Capital Archives of Budapest, and those of approximately 3,000 others in archives all over Hungary. Thus, what I will present here is not based on my own archival research alone. I also wish to make clear that I am not going to discuss the great political trials in this paper -- I have done that in a lengthy essay, which is also available in English.1
I first wish to analyze the Act on People's Courts from a legal point of view, followed by a presentation of the history of the post-World War II retributions in Hungary in an international perspective. I shall conclude by illustrating the way in which these special courts operated, through a number of characteristic trials.
The decrees previously issued by the Council of Ministers concerning the punishment of war criminals became law in Hungary through Act VII, 1945.2 Contrary to the principle that the norms defining the fundamental conditions of life should be laid down in laws, those accused of war crimes and genocide [népellenes bánök] were indicted and arraigned by government decrees up to September 1945, rather than according to acts of parliament. In accordance with the government decrees on People's Courts, the sentences in such cases could be imprisonment and even capital punishment.
The Hungarian creators of the decrees had deliberately ignored the principles of nullum crimen sine lege and nulla poena sine lege. In doing so, they were adhering to general international practice, the legal-philosophical grounds of which were laid by Gustav Radbruch in his article "Gesetztliches Unrecht und übergesetztliches Recht," published in 1946. With regard to the conflict between legal security and injustice, the two pillars of the rule of law, Radbruch came to the conclusion that unjust and inexpedient law is usually preferred, unless its conflict with justice is intolerably great. Radbruch also admits that legal injustice exists, but there may be a point at which justice is avoided, either by the legislative or by the executive.3 At that stage,
1 László Karsai, "The People’s Courts and Revolutionary Justice in Hungary," in István Deák, Jan Gross, and Tony Judt, eds. The Politics of Retribution in Europe: World War II and Its Aftermath, 1939-1948 (Princeton: Princeton University Press, in press). 2 Miniszterelnöki rendelet [Premier's decree — henceforth M.E.r.) Nr. 81/1945. On people's judiciary (January 25, 1945.); and the decrees modifying the basic decree: M.E.r. Nr. 1.440/1945. (April 27, 1945.); M.E.r. Nr. 5.900/1945 (August 1, 1945.); M.E.r. Nr. 6.750/1945. (August 16, 1945.)
Quoted in Imre A. Wiener, ed. Bünterend•ség, büntethet•ség. Büntet•jogi tanulmányok [The necessity and/or possibility of punishment. Essays on penal law] (Budapest: Közgazdasági és Jogi K.- MTA Állam és Jogtudományi K., 1997), 18. See, for example, the "laws" of Nazi Germany, or the decrees
positive law cannot actually be regarded as law, since the fundamental purpose of law should be the creation of order and justice.
The members of the People's Court were nominated by each of the parties of the Hungarian National Independence Front [Magyar Nemzeti Függetlenségi Front], originally an alliance of openly antifascist and mostly left-wing parties. The People's Courts made their decisions on the majority principle, thus appeals were possible only if the majority of the people's judges found the defendant worthy of mercy. If the appeal was turned down, the prisoner was executed within two hours.4 If the accused was sentenced to imprisonment of less than five years, neither the condemned person nor his/her council had the right of appeal – only the prosecutor. As a court of appeal, the National Council of People's Courts [Népbíróságok Országos Tanácsa, NOT], featured a similarly partisan composition, with professional lawyers and judges as members. A court of justice should, however, be required to be impartial. The People's Courts were special in this respect, because they were party courts; indeed, the decree in question stipulated that in case the five parties were unable to designate a people's judge, the missing member or candidate member should be nominated "from among politically reliable persons." The composition of the People's Courts did not change even after the parliamentary elections in 1945, when the Smallholders' Party [Kisgazdapárt] gained an absolute majority, and the left-wing parties continued to dominate them.
Ákos Major, the first people's judge and first chairman of the Budapest People's Court, proudly says in his memoirs that the parents of the newborn creation of legal history were the Budapest committee of the Hungarian Communist Party and the Budapest National Committee, while he himself [Major] acted as midwife, and did not regard the "baby" either as a monster or as non-viable.5
The People's Court Decree applied the principle of collective accountability on many points, as in the case of someone having voluntarily joined the Arrow-Cross or other right-wing parties, or someone having been a member of the Volksbund, the organization of ethnic Germans in Hungary. The individual actions of minor Arrow-Cross members or Volksbundists were never investigated. Section eight of the People's Court Decree violates the principle that the norms of criminal law must be precisely defined. The passage in question ordered the punishment of
concerning Jews issued by the Sztójay and Szálasi governments after the German occupation of Hungary.
4
According to my research to date, the following Arrow-Cross mass murderers were hanged in 1945 within a couple of hours after the sentences had been passed: Dénes Bokor (Budapest F•város Levéltára [Capital Archives of Budapest — henceforth: BFL] — Népbírósági iratok [Papers of people's courts — henceforth: Nb] 313/1945) on June 14; Károly Toronyi (BFL–Nb. 477/1945). on July 7; András Kun (BFL–Nb. 2.583/1945) on September 19; Lipót Tóth (BFL–Nb. 1.287/1945) on October 4; Mrs. Vilmos Saltzer (BFL–Nb. 2.288/1945) on October 11; József Fodor (BFL–Nb. 1.129/1945) on October 15; József Mónos (BFL–Nb. 2.788/1945) on November 13. We know of similar cases in other countries. On February 6, 1946, the people's court in Riga sentenced to death SS General Franz Jaeckeln, who had directed the final solution of the Jewish question in the Baltic states in the autumn of 1941. The sentence was carried out on the same day. Randolph L. Braham, A népirtás politikája [The Politics of Genocide] (Budapest, 1997), 218. n. 45.
5
Ákos Major, Népbíráskodás, forradalmi törvényesség [People's justice, revolutionary legality] (Budapest: Minerva K., 1988), 127. [henceforth: Major, Népbíráskodás].
everyone who had been involved in any activity that would impede postwar peace and cooperation of peoples during the world war.
The Red Army crossed the present borders of Hungary in August 1944, but it took them eight months to finally remove the Nazi and Arrow-Cross troops who persevered in Hungary till the end. In the liberated eastern half of Hungary, and from February, 1945 in Budapest as well, persecutions started immediately against the Arrow-Cross, the Volksdeutsche, and all who were rightly or wrongly accused of having been the adherents and/or lackeys of the previous regime. The Ministry of Interior and the political police were taken under the control of the Communist Party with the help of the Soviet authorities. Under the previous anti-Semitic regime, Jews could not be employed as police officers, gendarmes or even clerks. They were now allowed to join, and indeed did join, various repressive organizations. This situation helped to fuel old anti-Semitic apprehensions, and the dread of Jewish revenge could be felt all over the country.
As early as March 1945, the well-known populist writer József Darvas accused the Jews of wishing "to be idle under the false disguise of their martyrdom" and of cherishing a certain "military forced laborer attitude." The Jews, Darvas said, had grown accustomed to the existence of guards and military forced laborers. "Now, that the tables have turned, they want to be the guards," Darvas wrote in the daily paper of the Communist Party.6 Since 1943, extensive groups of populist intellectuals had harbored serious fears of Jewish revenge after the war. In 1943, László Németh, the leader of the populist writers, talked about Shylock sharpening his knife.7 According to Gyula Gombos, one of his colleagues, both the bourgeois democratic and socialist left-wing camps contained "forces alien from Magyars," and the only thing to be expected after the war was the revenge of the Jews.8 The populist writers saw and understood very well that Hungarian Jews had been deeply hurt and literally bled by the Jewish Acts and the institution of military forced labor. In the fall of 1944, Zionist leader Ottó Komoly learned that after the deportation to Auschwitz of over 430,000 Hungarian Jews, there was a meeting in the Ministry of Interior, with the agenda of deciding what the authorities should do if the "understandable and justified distress" of the Jewish masses were to explode.9
The thirst for revenge of the Jews in Hungary never erupted in lynchings in 1945 and 1946. As Ákos Major later noted in an interview, when on February 4, 1945, two persons responsible for the deaths of 124 military forced laborers were publicly hanged after a short trial, the chief message of the procedure was that there must be no lynchings since the democratic state itself
6 József Darvas, "•szinte szót a zsidókérdésben" [Let's be frank about the Jewish question] Szabad Nép, March 25, 1945, 5. 7 For Németh's text, see: Szárszó 1943. El•zményei, jegyz•könyve és utóélete. Dokumentumok [Szárszó 1943. Its preliminaries, minutes and afterlife] Gyõrffy Sándor, Pintér István, Sebestyén László, and Sipos Attila, eds., (Budapest: Kossuth K., 1983), 214-26, especially 221. Quoted in: Gyula Juhász Gyula, Uralkodó eszmék Magyarországon, 1939-1944 [Dominant ideas in Hungary, 1939-1944] (Budapest: Kossuth K., 1983), 293-94. 9 Ottó Komoly was informed by Miklós Mester, undersecretary of state in the Ministry of Religion and Education on September 9, 1944. Parts of his diary were published in Maria Schmidt, Kollaboráció vagy kooperáció. A Budapesti Zsidó Tanács [Collaboration or Cooperation: the Jewish Council of Budapest] (Budapest: Minerva K., 1990), 193.
would being the culprits to account.10 However, it was a foreboding omen that although the People's Court Decree was only published in Magyar Közlöny on February 5, 1945 only, military judge Ákos Major, who had no qualification as a judge and a barrister, (i.e. he had no right to pass sentences even in civil cases), was already hanging people. Moreover, he was doing so in response to instructions from the Food Commissar, and later the communist mayor of Budapest, Zoltán Vas. In his memoirs, Major calls the body he presided over "the people's law-court" [néptörvényszék], forgetting to mention that Hungarian law had never known nor recognized such a court.11
It was sometimes reported in the daily papers that former military forced labor guards were recognized and brutalized in the street or attacked in the law courts.12 The most famous almost•victims of popular Jewish wrath were Andor Jaross, Interior Minister in the cabinet of Sztójay (the Hungarian Quisling), and his two undersecretaries of state, László Endre and László Baky, whose guards had a hard time protecting them after their third day at the people's court, December 19, 1945.13
The "sentences" of partisan courts of law and the spontaneous and/or organized eruptions of popular wrath took 8,000 to 9,000 victims in France and at least 8,000 to 10,000 victims in Italy during 1944 and 1945.14 Tito's partisans killed tens of thousands of people in Yugoslavia, and the victims of the "savage purging" in Bulgaria numbered between 30,000 and 40,000.
10
Major said this in a documentary film entitled A magyar nép nevében [In the name of the Hungarian people] (1984). In his memoirs he says that at this trial he "allowed the whirl of passions, the bereavement, despair, and hate to mix freely in front of the people's court — that is why we were the people's court." Major, Népbíráskodás, 123.
11 Major, Népbíráskodás, 121-31. My attention was called to this by László Varga. I am also indebted to him for allowing me to use his manuscript essay on the subject, Politikai jogszolgáltatás az 1945 utáni Magyarországon [Political jurisdiction in Hungary after 1945], MS, 1998.
12 On June 7, 1945, Detective Zoltán Preisz reported taking József Török to the VIIth District Police Headquarters after saving him from the crowd. Török had not only been beaten up, but his watch and bicycle were "missing" as well. (BFL-Nb., Török József, 2399/1945). Former guard Éliás Mendelovits from Sub-Carpathia was recognized by former deportees at Dózsa György street was attacked and knifed. (Világ, 18 October, 1945, p. 8.) After the people'court had sentenced former guard László Géza Szungyi to 8 years of imprisonment, the outraged public wanted to lynch him, and the prison officers were compelled to restrain the crowd with warning shots. (Szabad Nép, October 21, 1945). When former guard Géza Huver was sentenced to life, his wife and son, who had served as witnesses, were beaten by the audience with sticks and umbrellas. (Világ, November 17, 1945). Former forced laborer staff captain Gusztáv Schmidt, originally a witness for the defense, was rushed by 20 young former forced laborers, severely battered, then denounced at the people's court trial, and ended up arrested by the people's prosecutor. (Világ, November 21, 1945).
13
László Karsai and Judit Molnár Judit, eds. Az Endre-Baky-Jaross per [The Trial of Endre, Baky, and Jaross], (Budapest: Cserépfalvi K., 1994), 129.
14 Marcello Flores, Political Justice in Italy in the Post-War Era (MS,1995, 5). Flores puts the number of victims around ten thousand, adding that most of them were killed in the Emilia province. According to the estimation of Henri Rousso, some 8-9,000 people were executed during the "épuration sommaire," in France, 20-30 percent of them before June 6, 1944. H. R.ousso, Syndrome de Vichy, 1944–1987 (Paris: Seuil, 1996.) For the retributions in France, see also Peter Nowick, The Resistance versus Vichy: The Purge of Collaborators in Liberated France (New York, 1968).
There are two myths in the public mind in connection with the People's Court trials in Hungary. According to the extreme right, which has again become vociferous since the political changes in 1989, the Communist-Jewish murderers paid off old scores in a genuine bloodbath in Hungary.15 At the same time, there are rumors among Jews that save a few major wartime criminals and some Arrow-Cross mass-murderers, all the criminals escaped justice.16 Neither claim is supported by comparative statistics.
After World War II, approximately 27,000 people were convicted for war crimes and genocide in Hungary. The People's Courts passed 322 death sentences before March 1, 1948, and 146 people were executed. Regarding the number of those executed under final sentences, Hungary lies in the middle of the European list of countries.
Not one of the 1,246 people arrested in Greece were convicted -- they escaped trial for collaboration with the occupying Nazis as “anti-communist warriors .”17
In France, 350,000 people were investigated, 45,000 were convicted, and 1,500 were executed.
In Italy, 36 death sentences were passed before the end of 1947, and two persons were executed.
In Holland, 120,000 to 150,000 people were arrested, and tens of thousands were fired from their jobs. The courts sentenced 50,000 people, 152 of them to death. 40 of these were executed (five were Germans).18
In Belgium, investigations were initiated against 405,000 persons (seven percent of the adult population) on charges of unpatriotic behavior. 60,000 were accused of economic collaboration
15
"The holocaust put many people, very many Jews into lucrative leading jobs… at the ÁVH [the Communist
Bureau of State Security] even the torturers were Jews," wrote Gyula Bujdosó P. in Megbékélést!
[Reconciliation!] (Szent Korona, April 10, 1991.) István Benedek talks about no less than "two deaths of the
nation" caused by Jews after 1919 and 1945. I. Benedek, "Válasz egy Izraelbe költözött barátn•mnek" [Reply to
a lady friend who has moved to Israel] (Hunnia, February 25, 1992, 5.) András Sándor is also of the opinion that the Jews started to lose, and then only gradually, the Ministry of the Interior, the secret police and the special police only after 1956. A. Sandor, "Kirekesztés vagy önkirekesztés" [Exclusion or self-exclusion] (Új Magyarország, July 31, 1991, 10.) Criticising the retroactive jurisdiction at Nuremburg, István Csurka asked, "And aren't we having the end of a long war on our hands now [in 1989-90 L.K.]? And was the regime that has just lost and been destroyed less inhumane, less destructive than the one condemned at Nuremberg?" István Csurka "Az Alkotmánybíróság döntéséhez" [On the decision of the Constitutional Court] (Magyar Fórum, March 12, 1992, 15.)
16
"Although the top war criminals were convicted, many of the smaller ones were allowed to go free," claimed
Miklós Hernádi recently, in "Unlearning the Holocaust. Recollections and Reactions," in Randolph L. Braham
and Attila Pók, eds.: The Holocaust in Hungary. Fitfty Years Later (New York: Columbia University Press,
1997), 666. 17 Mark Mazower, "Three Forms of Political Justice: Greece, 1944–45" in Deák, Gross, and Judt.
18
Luc Huyse, "Belgian and Dutch War Trials after World War II Compared," Mellon Seminar on Transitional Justice, Columbia University, New York, November 3, 1998, 15.
for working in Germany after they had been forcibly recruited. The cases of the blue-collar "collaborators" were closed without indictments.19
In Austria, 30 of the 43 people sentenced to death were executed. As the Italian Communist Party wished to generously pardon minor fascists, so the Austrian Communist Party left minor Nazis alone, carefully distinguishing between simple NSDAP members and active Nazis.20
In Germany, approximately 5,000 Nazis were convicted and 800 of them sentenced to death by the occupying authorities of the USA, Great Britain and France; 500 of the culprits were actually executed. We do not have reliable data concerning the number of German and Austrian war criminals tried by the Soviet Union, but the number of Nazis convicted after the war was about 50,000. There is no way to know how many non-German and non-Austrian war criminals were convicted by Soviet authorities.21
The People's Courts in Bulgaria passed 2,138 death sentences between September 1944 and March 1945, effectively decapitating the pre-war political elite.22
I have no data about the purges in Czechoslovakia and Romania. According to one source, those executed in Romania for war crimes and genocide numbered four, including Marshal Antonescu. We have information about Romanian People's Court trials in which dozens of Hungarian gendarmes were sentenced to death in absentia. They, like hundreds of thousands of Hungarian right-wing adherents and Arrow-Cross members, escaped trial by fleeing to the West in time.23
In Hungary, some 40,000 people were interned by 1949. People were often taken from the internment camps to the People's Courts, some more than once. Approximately 180,000-200,000 Hungarian Germans were deported,24 and 103,000 people were placed on the so-called "B" list. The latter were state employees, who thus lost their jobs. A similar number of those employed in the private sector lost their jobs. Since the overwhelming majority of those tried were men, we can say that in Hungary, a country of 10 million, an average of one out of five or six men was penalized in some way.25
19
Luc Huyse, "The Criminal Justice System as a Political Actor in Regime Transitions: The Case of Belgium
(1944–1950),” in Deák, Gross, Judt. 20 Oliver Rathkolb, "Austrian and Allied Perceptions of Political Trials 1944/1945," in Deák, Gross, Judt. 21 Henry Friedlander, "The Judiciary and Nazi Crimes in Postwar Germany" (Simon Wiesenthal Center Annual,
Vol. XXIX. (1984.), 27-44.), published in Michael M. Marrus, ed., The Nazi Holocaust: Historical Articles on
the Destruction of European Jews., Vol. IX. The End of the Holocaust, 665-81. Reference to 668. 22 Le livre noir du communisme. Crimes, terreur et répression (Paris: Robert Laffont, 1997), 430-31. 23 Verbal communication courtesy ofDr. Radu Ioanid, United States Holocaust Memorial Museum, Washington, D.C.
24
For the deportation of the Germans in detail, see Ágnes Tóth, Telepítések Magyarországon 1945-1948 között
[Settlements in Hungary, 1945-1948], Kecskemét, 1993 (candidate's dissertation). 25 Tibor Zinner, "Háborús b•nösök perei. Internálások, kitelepítések és igazoló eljárások 1945-1949" [Trials of war
criminals. Internments, deportations and denazification procedures] Történelmi Szemle, 1985. No.1, 133-40.
See also: Tibor Lukács, A magyar népbírósági jog és a népbíróságok (1945-1950) [The Hungarian People's
Court Law and the People's Courts] Budapest, 1979.
Moreover, Judge Major's claim that nearly all those brought to justice had committed crimes against the Jews cannot be shown to be true in the case of the People's Court of Budapest. We have been able to select for microfilming only thirty of the more than 1,300 cases tried before the People's Court in Györ`during 1945; in Pécs, the number of the cases was 875, but we could use
only 45. During the year 1945, 5,109 trials were held before the divisions of the Budapest People's Court. In 1,800 cases, either the registration numbers of the cases is all that is known, or we only have the name(s) of the accused with the sentence(s), without explanation. Of the remaining approximately four thousand cases, we have selected 1,786 as being connected to the Holocaust. If we assume that one-third of the "lost" cases were also connected with the Holocaust, then we can conclude that Jewish cases came primarily before the Budapest People's Court. We have so far surveyed 5,126 of the Budapest trials in 1946 and have found 1,401 were connected with the Holocaust. For 1947, the respective numbers are: 3,958 trials, of which we have selected 268, and in 1948 we selected 205 trials out of 4,971. As of March 31, 1999, we have surveyed 2,690 trials and selected 48 for microfilming as Holocaust-related. The reasons for the sharp decline in the "Jewish" trials need more research. In most of the trials, the charge was merely membership in the Arrow-Cross or other right-wing parties.
The various People's Courts passed sentences in rather dissimilar ways. In some courts, heavy prison sentences were meted out to minor officials who had merely executed the anti-Jewish decrees of the Sztójay government. However, Lajos Argalás, counselor of the Ministry of Interior, who had played a major role in formulating the anti-Jewish decrees in 1944, was only sentenced to three years’ imprisonment only.26 László Radocsai, Minister of Justice between November 9, 1939 and March 22, 1944, was not even taken to court. Gendarme Lieutenant-Colonel László Ferenczy, who had played a major role in organizing the deportation of the Jews in the country, was sentenced to death, while gendarme colonels whose role had been no less crucial than that of Ferenczy were nearly without exception sentenced to imprisonment.27 Gábor Faragho, Inspector General of the Gendarmerie, who had assigned Ferenczy to Adolf Eichmann's staff, was a witness in a number of great political trials after the war, and was then allowed to live in peace on his country estate in light custody.
Already by the summer of 1945, a daily paper reported that 200 people had demonstrated in the streets of Pécs, shouting slogans like "Hang the Jews! Down with the People's Courts, stooges of Jews!"28 The anti-Semitic, anti-people's-court atmosphere has often been attributed to the
Dr. Lajos Argalás, BFL-Nb. 1.391/1945. His sentence was reduced to two years by the National Council of
People's Courts on May 29, 1946 (NOT 575/1946). 27 Having served his 15 years of imprisonment, Gendarme Colonel János Árbocz was released in 1960. The people's court
(BFL-Nb. 1.267/1946) had sentenced him to forced labor for life, but his punishment was reduced to 15 years
by the National Council of People's Courts (5125/1946). Gendarme Colonel József Czigány, commander of the
central detective department of the Gendarmerie between February 1, 1943 to October 16, 1944, and one of the
addressees of Ferenczy's well-known daily reports in 1944, continued to live in peace at Hódmez•vásárhely
until 1947. That year he was arrested and indicted, and was then sentenced to ten years in 1950. Gendarme
Colonel Gyula Balázs-Piri was one of the chief organizers of the deportations in the country in 1944; Ferenczy
reported to him and to László Endre that the preparations had been made for the deportations to commence on
May 15. We know that he made a deposition at the police station at Balatonalmádi in 1960 when the Hungarian
authorities were collecting material for the Jerusalem trial of Eichmann. 28 Szabad Nép, July 27, 1945, 3.
participation of Jews in People's Court procedures. On the other hand, we should remember that until October 1945 only minor Arrow-Cross mass-murderers were sentenced to death for having murdered Jews.29
Professional judges who had not been compromised in the pre-war regime were unwilling to take part in the work of the People's Courts. As Sándor Molnár, head of the People's Prosecutor's Office, said bitterly in February, 1946, "We went to democratically minded lawyers of integrity, asking them to undertake the job of prosecutors, but we were turned down. Thus we were obliged to take nearly without any selection people who would then regard their offices as profitable opportunities for private gain. They used their power and influence for petty ends. The hindmost of this set are just now being taken by the devil."30 What Molnár meant was that two well-known people's prosecutors had just been arrested on charges of blackmail, accepting bribes, and other crimes. As it turned out, one of them, originally called Freund, had been a roisterer, a member of the smart set, then a military forced laborer. After the liberation "he joined one of the left-wing parties, where all they knew of him was that he was a trained lawyer and could not have been a fascist since he had been a military forced laborer."31
We do not have exact numbers about the Jews who took part in the post-war retributions. According to a contemporary report of the secretariat of the Social Democratic Party, about 80 percent of the people's judges of this party were Jews, and 90 percent of them were independent merchants or tradesmen who attended the trials out of revenge or for entertainment.32 Only in one of the 500 trials surveyed by my colleague Ferenc Gáspár concerning military forced laborers could it be shown that the role of a Jew in the judicial apparatus was "fiercely militant."33 Neither are the occupations of the witnesses in these trials telling, designations like "policeman," "political detective," or "army officer" being few and far between. However, it is not only the absolute numbers that can be of interest. In the political police headed by Gábor Péter (the sadistic organizer of the subsequent sham political trials, Beria's best Hungarian disciple, a communist and, incidentally, a Jew), majors or colonels of Jewish descent could wield significant power. The historico-statistical analysis of all the cases could yield more precise data on the number of Jewish policemen or soldiers who were witnesses in the Holocaust-related trials.
In most cases, the political detectives were convinced of the truth of the charges in the letters sent by the hundreds to various authorities. It was not only their being prejudiced, something
29 Ákos Major claims that "on account of the forced agenda of the praxis of the people's courts, during the previous six months [i.e.
before the fall of 1945] the small murderers came up before the courts and to the gallows. Thus the 9 million Hungarians could
have the impression that the functioning of the People's Courts was offering satisfaction, indeed, retribution for the hundreds of
thousands of Jewish victims." Major, Népbíráskodás, 186. Major here is referring to the fact that the chief war
criminals were brought to Hungary in October 1945 only. 30 Sándor Mátrai, "A férgese most hullik el" [The devil is taking the hindmost now] Kis Újság, February 10, 1946,
4. The daily Világ published the arrest of István Matiszfalvy on January 22, 1946. He was, among others, the people's prosecutor in the trial of Endre–Baky–Jaross. 31 Béla Zsolt, "Tolvajt kiált a gyilkos; Kicsoda Fontány" [The murderer crying thief: who is F.] Haladás, February 14, 1946. 32 Loránt Tilkovszky, "Vád, védelem, valóság. Basch Ferenc a népbíróság elõtt" [Prosecution, defense, reality (B.F. before the people's court)] Századok, 1996. Vol. 130. No. 6, 1405.
Ferenc Gáspár, "A kiskunhalasi tragédia. (1944. okt. 11)" [The tragedy at Kiskunhalas (October 11, 1944)] Századok, ibid. 1473–1505.
much too obvious at certain times, that posed a problem, but also the fact that in many cases the detectives and people's prosecutors were unable to support the charges with data and documents. Let us examine a few examples.
Regardless of the facts of chronology, Lajos Bordás was accused of persuading László Endre to banish Jewish merchants from markets. He was sentenced to three years' imprisonment by the People's Court, although it was proved that Endre, the sub-prefect of Pest County, had issued the decree in question before receiving the petition of the accused.34 So far I have found only three files where the police officers in charge of the investigation had doubts about the truth of the incriminating reports and depositions.35 As detective Endre Rádai said, the charge that the accused had stolen the possessions of the plaintiff was not very convincing in the depositions, since "two military occupations and a fire can doubtlessly cause things to disappear."36
In accordance with the practice of political trials since the Jacobian Terror, the defendants in many cases were found guilty and punished not for what they had done but because of the positions they had held.
The People's Court found that Ferenc Gertai, not wishing to emigrate to the West under the orders from the local Arrow-Cross town-leader, had reported at the National Court of Account [Nemzeti Számonkér• Szék], where he was given the job of carrying food parcels to the front on a
military truck. At Christmas, 1944, under orders from his superiors, he and his comrades disarmed the guard of the Arrow-Cross Centre, taking the leaders to the Arrow-Cross Headquarters at 14 Városház Street, and the members to the building of the Ludovika Academy. A series of witnesses testified that Gertai had provided Jews with Swedish safe conducts, made out certificates to hide deserters, and saved the Jewish inhabitants of a yellow-star house when the Germans wanted to deport them. The People's Court sentenced him to four and a half years, finding him not guilty on one of the charges of the people's prosecution, and stating that that carrying off Arrow-Cross guards at Christmas 1944 could no longer be regarded as a criminal act. The fact that he had been a Social Democrat for a long time before joining the Arrow-Cross was an aggravating circumstance. With regard to Gertai having saved Jews and deserters and persecuted the Arrow-Cross, the National Council of People's Courts sentenced him to two years and six months.37
Zoltán Bagossy, Chef de Cabinet of Arrow-Cross Foreign Minister Gábor Kemény, had risked his life on a number of occasions in trying to save inhabitants of the international ghetto in Budapest. Although this was attested to by a series of documents and depositions (among others by Papal Nuncio Angelo Rotta, by the representative of the International Red Cross in Budapest Friedrich Born, and by Swiss diplomat Carl Lutz), Bagossy was sentenced to forced labor for life.38
34 Lajos Bordás, BFL-Nb. 2.294/1945. A series of witnesses testified that Bordás had actually been saving Jews.
István Pivarcsi, BFL-Nb. 2.532/1945; Ferencné Novotta, BFL-Nb. 2.588/1945., Sándor Obetkó, BFL- Nb.
2.274/1945. 36 Ferencné Novotta, BFL-Nb. 2.588/1945. Report of March 15, 1945 by Endre Rádai. 37 Ferenc Gertai, BFL-Nb. 839/1945. 38 Zoltán Bagossy, BFL-Nb. 147/1946.
Police Inspector Zoltán Tarpataky was the organizer of the Budapest international ghetto. One can say with little exaggeration that neither Raoul Wallenberg, nor Lutz nor any other diplomat could have done anything without him in Budapest. He was sentenced to eight years’ imprisonment, despite a great number of witnesses who testified that he had tried, against the Arrow-Cross, to help Jews wherever he could. After the National Council of People's Courts acquitted and released him on October 14, 1946, the political police arrested him. He was interned, then relocated. After 1954 he found employment as an unskilled laborer.39
In West Germany, by the early 1950s many former Nazi officials, judges, policemen, soldiers, teachers, and so on that had not been convicted were allowed to return to public service. In Hungary, left-wing, class-struggle based purging began as early as 1945, and the People's Courts were only one of its numerous instruments.
We know that after 1948, even the Jew-saving military, police or gendarme officers who had not been convicted between 1945 and 1948, lost their jobs and/or pensions; they would later be honored with the Righteous Gentiles memorial medal.
It was an established practice to use physical torture to make the arrested person confess to whatever was contained in the incriminating reports. When the American authorities extradited the chief war criminals to Hungary in the autumn of 1945, it was also strictly stipulated that the arrested should not be, and were not, subjected to physical or psychological coercion. Gábor Péter and his colleagues probably regarded such coercion as unnecessary, since they were convinced that the people’s judges would easily condemn these war criminals.40 In the case of minor criminals, however, they used sheer physical violence in trying to make up for the lack of evidence. Sándor Linzer, one of the victims of Detective Dr. Bauer, deposited in writing that he upheld the confession he had made at the police station in its entirety, "...because they beat me when they took my deposition, and if I withdrew it now, they would beat me again."41
Mrs. Károly Göllner (who was 58 in 1945) said before the People's Court that she had been seriously beaten and kicked by the police. Although the People's Court sentenced her to twelve years' forced labor, the National Council of People's Courts reduced the sentence to one and a half years, saying that the defendant had been an Arrow-Cross member for only a year and had made but a few speeches.42
Károly Sümegi was beaten until he signed a statement saying that that he had been an SS soldier and had killed 233 persons, 32 in Zólyom, 78 in Gyöngyös, and 76 at Kispest. Even the people's prosecutor noticed that something was wrong with the calculation (47 "dead" were
Zoltán Tarpataky, Belügyminisztérium Történeti Hivatal [Historical Office of the Ministry of Interior —
henceforth: BMTH]- Vizsgálati iratok [Investigation papers — henceforth: V.] 102.343. 40 Tilkovszky: Vád, védelem..., 1996, 1398. 41 Sándor Linzer, BFL–Nb. 2430/1945. 42 Károlyné Göllner, BFL–Nb. 1974/1945. Gusztáv Schwalm was told that if he did not confess, his wife, who was
then not pregnant, would be brought in and not released until she was pregnant. BFL-Nb. 2408/1945.
missing), thus the charges were reduced to Volksbund membership and having voluntarily joined the SS.43
Using the summary reports on the basis of the confessions extracted at the political police, the people's prosecution prepared the indictments, which in most cases were not more than a few lines. The indictments were often written in primitive, confused language, full of spelling mistakes. A five-line indictment accused András Újlaki of taking "part in the murder of innumerable people" in Budapest, in the winter of 1944. The people's prosecution returned the case for re•investigation, saying, "the opinion of the witnesses, in the lack of objective evidence, cannot serve as the basis for indictment."44 As in many other cases, the witnesses of the prosecution had only heard what the defendant had allegedly done.
Since the most important Arrow-Cross person, Ferenc Szálasi, was not extradited to Hungary by the Western powers until October 1945, his wife and even his very old mother-in-law were arrested instead. Gizella Lutz was arrested and interned on July 3, 1945. She had been imprisoned for eight years already when on October 27, 1953 an order was issued for her arrest. The Budapest Court sentenced her to 12 years imprisonment on December 3, 1953. Szálasi had expressly prohibited his fiancée from becoming involved in political activities, and the widow of the "Leader of the Nation" was innocently imprisoned until 1956, when the revolutionaries set her free.45
Mrs. József Trenkula was indicted on charges that she had been involved in the distribution of clothes taken from Jews, and she had seen people shot dead in the streets, and "thus, by her activity, which was not of a leading character, she aided the Arrow-Cross movement in gaining and remaining in power." The people's court sentenced her to three years.46
Detective Chief Inspector József Ökrös, when testifying as a witness in the case of József Honfi, happened to say he had indeed heard that Honfi had been an Arrow-Cross member, but he did not deem it important, "because now everybody is said to have been an Arrow-Cross." Political Detective Mrs. Zoltán Alpár demanded in her report that Ökrös be removed from the police, with success. József Ökrös was subsequently indicted as second defendant in the trial of Honfi.47
It was general practice that the People's Courts did not hear the witnesses of the defense. During the past few years, we have found more than fifty persons deserving to be presented with Yad Vashem's award to Righteous Gentiles for saving Jews, often in the face of mortal danger. Since these people were taken to court, it was of vital importance for them to prove with
43 Mihály Sümegi, BFL-Nb. 1975/1945. The accused was 17 years old in 1944. 44 Antal Domonkos, BFL-Nb. 2273/1945.
BMTH-V.82.522. Gizella Lutz was acquitted of charges of spreading Arrow-cross propaganda first by the
people's court on November 22, 1945, then, on June 19, 1946, by the National Council of People's Courts as
well. According to the people's prosecutor, the fact that her apartment had been full of Arrow-Cross symbols
meant the service of propaganda against the people and democracy. BFL-Nb. 2.464/1945. 46 Józsefné Trenkula, BFL-Nb. 2.450/1945. The National Council of People's Courts changed the sentence to one
year, and she was also released because she had been imprisoned precisely for a year. 47 József Honfi, BFL-Nb. 2313/1945. Ökrös was acquitted.
witnesses and documents that they had saved rather than mistreated Jews. Even though my colleagues and I have been applying very strict criteria when analyzing contemporary depositions and vindicatory letters, we have found dozens of shockingly tragic cases. These were without exception people who were denounced by their neighbors or enemies, mostly on completely fictitious charges. The other reason why the more than fifty Righteous Gentiles is a considerable number (and it is continuously growing as a result of our research) is that Yad Vashem has so far honored less than 400 Hungarians (including 12 foreign diplomats stationed in Hungary, like Raoul Wallenberg) with that award.
The people's prosecution returned a relatively high number of cases to the political police as insufficient for indictment. In addition, the People's Courts, often found the defendants not guilty in the first instance -- or handed out a few months' imprisonment, usually equal to the time the prisoner had already spent in custody. The professional judges of the National Council of People's Courts acquitted or significantly reduced the sentences of many of those condemned by the People's Courts. There was no "reactionary conspiracy," however; the charges were, as I have tried to show above, simply unsubstantiated in many cases.
Pál Dajkovics managed to prove before the National Council of People's Courts that he was not identical to the mass-murderer Arrow-Cross he was thought to be. The People's Court sentenced him to death, and the National Council of People's Courts acquitted him.48 Gyula Kiss and Mrs. János Fülöp, also sentenced to death in the first instance, were able to clear themselves from the most serious charges only before the National Council of People's Courts.49
János Korcz, who was sentenced to ten years by the People's Court, was later acquitted by the National Council of People's Courts when medical specialists found that he was criminally insane.50
János Hesz, sentenced to lifelong forced labor by the People's Court, had his sentence reduced to five years' imprisonment by the National Council of People's Courts. The explanation for this change was that while the defendant had boasted of killing partisans in Greece during World War II, the People's Court had not proven that he had indeed done so.51 In August 1945, Gábor Péter demanded that the people's judges enforce the criteria of "revolutionary lawfulness," "against the legalistic entangledness" of the People's Courts. Minister of Justice István Ries (who would also perish in communist prisons within a few years) used suspensions and removals of people's judges and members of the National Council of People's Courts in trying to stimulate the judges to pass tougher sentences.52
48 Pál Dajkovics, BFL-Nb. 68/45.
49 Gyula Kiss, BFL-Nb. 934/1945. When it had turned out that the accused had been involved in significant Jew

saving activities, the National Council of People's Courts instructed the people's court to start a new procedure
— at the end of which he was sentenced to four years penal servitude. Mrs. János Fülöp (BFL-NB. 1.032/1945.) was sentenced to four years by the National Council of People's Courts.
50 JÆnos Korcz, BFL-Nb. 10/1945. 51 JÆnos Hesz, BFL-Nb. 2.481/1945. 52 Szabad Nép, January 9, 1946, 1.

Epilogue
The decrees that served as the foundation for the activities of the Hungarian People's Courts were based upon criminalized political acts, such as the joining of legal political parties and organizations before the war. However, we cannot say that all these trials, without exception, were faked, showcase trials. Most of the defendants condemned to death before the autumn of 1945 were indeed Arrow-Cross mass-murderers. It must be admitted, on the other hand, that a great number of minor Arrow-Cross members and minor Volksbundists fell victim to prejudiced investigations and showcase trials. A great many political detectives, people's prosecutors, and people's judges behaved like the Jacobins of old, who had regarded the country as divided in three parts: policemen, denouncers, and suspects. It would of course be unrealistic and unhistorical to expect to find unprejudiced judicial procedures in 1945 in a country destroyed by war, with one million of its people dead. Nowhere in Europe was this the case. It is too early to draw the final historical balance of the functioning of the People's Courts in Hungary -- further careful research remains to be done.
The history of Hungarian People's Courts has yet to be written, without suppressions, taboos, and distortions. I can regard this easy as only a small step in the direction of that monumental undertaking.

La tesi negazionista di Abu Mazen

2005-12-26T07:42:00.000-08:00

Likely PA Prime Minister a Holocaust-Denier
By Rafael Medoff
Jewishsf.com | February 26, 2003

While European Union officials praised Yasser Arafat's decision to appoint his first-ever prime minister, historians of the Holocaust winced at the news that a leading candidate for the job is the author of a book denying that the Nazis murdered 6 million Jews.

The candidate is Mahmoud Abbas (also known as Abu Mazen), Arafat's second in command, and his book, published in Arabic in 1983, translates as "The Other Side: The Secret Relations Between Nazism and the Leadership of the Zionist Movement." It was originally his doctoral dissertation, completed at Moscow Oriental College.

The book repeatedly attempts to cast doubt on the fact that the Nazis slaughtered 6 million Jews, according to a translation provided by the Simon Wiesenthal Center in Los Angeles.

"Following the war," he writes, "word was spread that six million Jews were amongst the victims and that a war of extermination was aimed primarily at the Jews...The truth is that no one can either confirm or deny this figure. In other words, it is possible that the number of Jewish victims reached six million, but at the same time it is possible that the figure is much smaller -- below one million."

Abbas denies that the gas chambers were used to murder Jews, quoting a "scientific study" to that effect by French Holocaust-denier Robert Faurisson.

Abbas' book then asserts: "The historian and author Raoul Hilberg thinks that the figure does not exceed 890,000."

That is, of course, utterly false. Hilberg, a distinguished historian and author of the classic study "The Destruction of the European Jews," has never said or written any such thing.

Abbas believes the 6 million figure is the product of a Zionist conspiracy: "It seems that the interest of the Zionist movement...is to inflate this figure so that their gains will be greater," he writes. "This led them to emphasize this figure in order to gain the solidarity of international public opinion with Zionism. Many scholars have debated the figure of six million and reached stunning conclusions -- fixing the number of Jewish victims at only a few hundred thousand."

Another falsehood. In fact, no serious scholar proposes such a figure.

After reducing the magnitude of the Nazi slaughter so that it no longer seems to have been a full-scale Holocaust, Abbas seeks to absolve the Nazis by blaming the Zionist leadership for whatever killings did take place. According to Abbas, "A partnership was established between Hitler's Nazis and the leadership of the Zionist movement...[the Zionists gave] permission to every racist in the world, led by Hitler and the Nazis, to treat Jews as they wish, so long as it guarantees immigration to Palestine."

In addition to encouraging the persecution of Jews so they would immigrate to the Holy Land, the Zionist leaders actually wanted Jews to be murdered, because -- in Abbas' words -- "having more victims meant greater rights and stronger privilege to join the negotiation table for dividing the spoils of war once it was over. However, since Zionism was not a fighting partner -- suffering victims in a battle -- it had no escape but to offer up human beings, under any name, to raise the number of victims, which they could then boast of at the moment of accounting."

Perhaps sentiments of this sort were common within Abbas' circle of graduate students in the Soviet Union in the 1970s. But in the free world, such propaganda has never been accepted as serious scholarship.

In most Western countries, Holocaust-deniers have been treated as pariahs. In Canada and many European countries, Holocaust-denial is a criminal offense. In New Zealand, Canterbury University recently issued an apology for having accepting a master's thesis denying the Holocaust, while the French minister of education revoked a doctoral degree that was awarded to a Holocaust-denier by the University of Nantes. A Polish university professor who denied the Holocaust was suspended from his position. The Japanese publisher Bungei Shunju shut down one of its magazines for printing an article denying the Holocaust.

International pressure compelled Croatian President Franjo Tudjman to publicly retract statements in his book doubting that the Holocaust had taken place. Austrian Freedom Party leader Jorg Haider was ostracized by the international community for his remarks praising members of the SS, as was French politician Jean Marie Le Pen, for questioning the existence of the gas chambers and belittling the significance of the Holocaust. A recent poll found 64 percent of Americans believe world leaders should likewise refuse to meet with Abbas.

Yet some in the media have treated Abbas with kid gloves, to say the least. The official BCC News Profile of Abbas reports: "A highly intellectual man, Abbas studied law in Egypt before doing a Ph.D. in Moscow. He is the author of several books." The New York Times recently characterized Abbas as "a lawyer and historian...He holds a doctorate in history from the Moscow Oriental College; his topic was Zionism." Neither the BBC nor the Times offered any further explanation as to the contents of Abbas' writings.

Bestowing the title "historian" upon Mahmoud Abbas awards his writings a stature they do not deserve, and deals a grievous insult to every genuine historian.

If Abbas is elevated to the post of prime minister of the Palestinian Authority, not only the media but the entire international community will be confronted with the question of whether Abbas deserves to be treated any differently from Tudjman, Haider and Le Pen.

The writer is visiting scholar in the Jewish studies program at the State University of New York-Purchase College. His latest book is "A Race Against Death: Peter Bergson, America and the Holocaust," co-written with David S. Wyman.

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On Bible Criticism and Its Counterarguments

2005-12-26T04:19:00.000-08:00

On Bible Criticism and Its Counterarguments

A SHORT HISTORY[1]

By Rabbi Nathan Lopes Cardozo

One of traditional Judaism's most important claims is its total commitment to the divinity of the text of the Torah, the Pentateuch. It is believed that the other books of Tanach may contain a human element since "no two prophets prophesied in the same style."[2] But the Torah came to Moshe from God in a manner that is metaphorically called "speaking," after which Moshe wrote it down "like a scribe writing from dictation."[3] In the nineteenth century, this belief came under severe attack by a theory called Higher Criticism or Quellenscheidung. This theory denied the divinity of the Torah as a verbal account of God's words to Moshe. Instead, the text was seen to be made up of a conglomeration of various sources compiled over many hundreds of years. As such, it could not have been written by Moshe.[4]

The proponent of this theory was Julius Wellhausen (1844-1918), a German Semitic scholar and professor of theology and oriental studies. Wellhausen, however, was not the first to doubt the "authenticity" of the Torah. In the seventeenth century, the famous Dutch philosopher Benedictus de Spinoza (1632-1677), who was a descendant of the Marranos, stated in his Tractatus Theologico-Politicus (and in some letters) that he doubted the Mosaic and the divine authorship of the Torah.[5]

Spinoza's major point was that the Bible, like many other literary works, should be seen as the product of human spiritual development, mostly of a primitive nature. While accepting the possibility that some parts of the Torah could have originated with Moshe, he contended that it was only many centuries after Moshe died that the Torah, as we know it today, appeared. Ezra the Scribe (fourth century b.c.e.) should be considered the major author and editor of the Torah as well as of the Books of Joshua, Judges, Samuel, and Kings. Because Ezra died prematurely, these works were never revised and are therefore full of contradictions and repetitions.

Because Spinoza never reached any systematic or clear conclusion, Jean Astruc (1684-1766), a French physician, is considered the real founder of classical Bible Criticism. Being a conservative, Astruc concluded in his work (published anonymously in Brussels and Paris, 1753), Conjectures sur les memoires originaux, dont il parait que Moses s'est servi pour composer le livre de la Genese, that Moshe, the redactor of Genesis and the first two chapters of Exodus, made use of two parallel sources and ten fragments written before his time. These primary sources refer to God as Y-H-V-H and Elohim, respectively.

Although Astruc's conclusion aroused intense opposition, scholars like J. G. Einhorn (1752-1827) attached much importance to his work. It was Julius Wellhausen, however, who gave full impetus to this theory, and his name is identified with the Graf-Wellhausen Hypothesis or Documentary Theory.[6]

Wellhausen wanted to prove that the Torah. and the Book of Joshua were, in large measure, "doctored" by priestly canonizers under Ezra in the lime of the Second Temple. Their purpose was to perpetuate a single falsehood: Moshe's authorship of the Torah and the central worship, first in the Tabernacle and later in the Temple. According to Wellhausen, there never was a Tabernacle and no revelation at Sinai ever took place. Moshe, if he ever existed, considered the Deity a local thunder god or mountain god. The Torah had, therefore, to be seen as a complete forgery and not as a verbal account of God's words to Moshe and the People Israel.

In 1875, Wellhausen published his Prolegomena to the History of Ancient Israel, an unusual work with almost five thousand textual references covering the whole of the Old Testament. In this work, Wellhausen purports to present the true biblical story. Relying heavily on his forerunners, he maintained that four major documents could be identified in the Torah. Each had an individual character, both in content and in general outlook. Though they had been skillfully interwoven, their special characteristics made it possible to trace each source throughout the books of the Torah. The earliest was the -J- Document (J being the first letter of the Divine Name, which was used throughout this source and so became essential). It was followed soon after by the Elohist Document -E-, in which God is designated as Elohim. These documents were thought to have been composed in the early monarchical period, probably in the ninth or eighth century b.c.e.

The Book of Deuteronomy -D-, which gave a narrative framework to the "Book of the Law," promulgated by King Yoshia in the seventh century b.c.e., was primarily a code of law based on prophetic principles.

The Priestly Code (P), a universal history and extensive legal code, was chiefly concerned with matters of cult and was dominated by the priestly interest in prescribing the correct ritual for each ceremonial occasion. K. H. Graf had already assigned it to the post-exilic age and connected it with the Law of Ezra in the fifth century b.c.e.

Wellhausen's method is clear and straightforward. Every passage that fits his theory is authentic; all others are forgeries. Whenever possible, he points out poor grammar, corrupt vocabulary, and alleged internal inconsistencies. In cases where he felt some "need" to change the plain meaning of a Hebrew word to fit into this theory, he offered what he called "conjectural emendation." The fact that thousands of verses contradicted his theory never disturbed Wellhausen. He contended that there was a master forger or interpolator at work who anticipated Wellhausen's theory and consequently inserted passages and changed verses so as to refute it. Wellhausen assumed that the forger had worked, as it were, with scissors and paste, taking all kinds of liberties: carving up (the original texts; moving half a sentence here, a few sentences down, and three and a half sentences there, and a few sentences up, while altogether suppressing and omitting large portions of each source that could not be fitted into this patchwork. He claimed to be more clever than the interpolator could have ever imagined and therefore to have divulged the real truth. This obviously was a wonderful theory, for arguments against Wellhausen's theory thereby became his strongest defenders!

With the publication of this masterpiece, Wellhausen introduced a new era in the world of Bible studies, and most of his contemporaries, as well as their students, accepted his conclusions as gospel. His influence on younger scholars was profound and far-reaching. For a full generation, he dominated Old Testament scholarship, not only in his own country but also in England[7] and America.[8]

The most important histories of Israel and of Hebrew literature, as well as a host of commentaries and introductions, were based more or less directly on the Wellhausen system. The commentaries edited by Wilhelm Nowack and Karl Marti,[9] as well as those of the International Critical Commentary on the Holy Scriptures, were indebted to Wellhausen's theories.[10]

His students continued to use his method and discovered within their teacher's J, E, P, and D documents at least thirty additional documents. Each document (especially J and E) contained a number of older elements; each had undergone a certain amount of "editorial" revision in an effort to coordinate and harmonize the various elements within the style of the original. The additional materials were so extensive that they could not have been the products of only a handful of authors, but rather belonged to a complete religious school.[11]

The materials were cut even finer. Slowly, more and more forgeries were "discovered," until finally half a dozen documents were found for each single verse, and others even went as far as tracing them through some of the other books of Tanach as well. The whole theory degenerated into a reductio ad absurdum. Already in his own day, objective and honest scholars raised objections against Wellhausen's incredible guesswork and fantasies. The chancellor of England, the earl of Halsbury, referred to it in 1915 as "great rubbish."[12] The famous historian Lecky sharply criticized it on the basis that it totally lacked evidence.[13]

In 1908 Wellhausen came under heavy attack by B. D. Eerdmans,[14] while in 1925, Professor Rudolf Kittel, originally an admirer of Wellhausen's theories, stated that "the assumption of forgery may be one of those hypotheses which, once set up, is so often repeated that finally everyone believes it. Who nowadays would take upon himself the odium of being 'behind the times'?"[15]

Among the generations of critics who came to maturity after World War I, new insights provided by later approaches to Tanach made the Higher Criticism of the preceding generation seem less than adequate. Slowly it appeared to the scholars that new criteria had to be established and that historical criticism had its limitations. Hugo Gressmann declared that "in our field we need not more but less literary-critical research. The Higher Criticism has generally exhausted the problems which it could and had to solve."[16]

Scholars began ascribing the books of the Torah and the rest of Nach to earlier periods and stated that the legal principles of the Torah were already well established in the time of the prophet Samuel.[17] This tendency to regard much of the narrative and law in the Torah as more ancient brought into question what had once been accepted as the assured result of criticism.

The dating of Deuteronomy has always been the central point from which the critics had worked forward and backward to determine the age of the other law codes and documents. The description of Deuteronomy as the immediate inspiration for the reform and centralization of the "cultus" had been the starting point for Wellhausen's reconstruction of the religious history of Israel. With the dating of Deuteronomy, the whole critical edifice stood or fell.

Adam C. Welsh's earlier dating was, therefore, a major blow to the whole critical school and consequently not easily accepted by his contemporaries.[18] His view was, however, strengthened a decade later by certain conclusions of Otto Eissfeldt regarding the nature and history of the Pentateuchal law.[19]

While the origin of much of the law was being moved back in time, the alternative that the final dates of the law codes should be moved down, was also considered. While Gustav Holscher dated Deuteronomy later than had the Wellhausen school, most scholars were of the opinion that earlier dates were more plausible.[20] It became increasingly clear that Wellhausen's theory of the history of Judaism was inadequate.

This does not suggest that the scholars agreed, for different dates were suggested and new theories contradicting each other were published. What became clear was that Bible Criticism was developing into a chaos of conflicting conjectures producing contradictory results and generating the impression that this type of research was ineffective.[21]

Moreover, in Jewish circles, sharp protest was raised. Although these theories did not impress the greatest Jewish scholars, they highly influenced many assimilated Jewish communities (especially in Germany). The Reform movement, perhaps searching for a means to support its objections against observance, embraced this theory and contributed some of its strongest proponents. Rabbi Samson Raphael Hirsch (1808-1888), in his Torah Commentary,[22] Dr. David Hoffmann (1843-1921),[23] an Orthodox Jewish scholar of great erudition, and Professor Jacob Barth (1851-1914),[24] another outstanding philologist of his time, destroyed much of Wellhausen's theory. Also, Rabbi Yitzchak Isaac Halevi (1847-1914), in his historical works, showed the position of Wellhausen and his admirers to be untenable.[25] In non-Orthodox Jewish circles, Wellhausen also came under sharp attack. One of the most profound analyses in this field was written by Benno Jacob (1862-1945) in his book on Genesis, Das Erste Buch der Torah, which concludes (p. 1048) with the words, "The theory that the Book of Genesis is composed of various sources that can be singled out and separated has been rejected."

Later non-Orthodox scholars, in particular Umberto Cassuto (1883-1951)[26] and Yechezkel Kaufman (1889- 1963)[27] further demolished the theory, showing that Wellhausen's observations contradicted his conclusions. Kaufman's main contribution lies in his thesis that monotheism was not, as Wellhausen and others had stated, a gradual departure from paganism, but an entirely new development. Israel's monotheism began with Moshe and was a complete revolution in religious thought.

Why were these earlier-mentioned theories ever accepted? In Wellhausen's day the theory of evolution was dominant. Darwin had won the day, and any discipline, including literature, that accepted the theory of evolution was welcomed with open arms. Furthermore, the philosopher Hegel (1770-1831) had left a deep impression in German and European culture by contending that all of history is a development from lower to progressively higher stages. It was therefore assumed that the Jewish religion developed from idolatry, and having passed through many intermediate stages, the earlier one of which was the Torah, reached the ultimate pure monotheism of latter days.

Special mention should be made of the famous archaeologist William F. Alright[28] He convincingly demonstrated that archaeological research did not support, and in fact often contradicted, this view of history. In many of his works, Albright destroyed the very foundations upon which Wellhausen's edifice had been erected.

In retrospect, it is rather surprising that Wellhausen's theories were accepted for so long. How is it possible that so many scholars promulgated similar theories and totally ignored or attacked those who differed?[29] Albright and others have pointed out that besides Hegelian theories, other motivations kept the Wellhausen tradition alive. Christian scholars were eager to attribute greater significance to the New Testament than the Old. In order to make this plausible, it had to be proven that large portions of the Torah were falsified and were not to be taken seriously.

When anti-Semitic tendencies became stronger in the immediate pre-Hitler days, many scholars felt the need to use the Wellhausen and other theories to give a final blow to the Jewish People, religion, and Bible. When Friedrich Delitzch (1850-1922) delivered a lecture called "Babel und Bibel," in which Tanach was considered devoid of any religious or moral value, Kaiser Wilhelm congratulated him for helping "to dissipate the nimbus of the Chosen People."[30]

The Germans, convinced of their status as Herenvolk suffered from Teutomania and believed that anything must either be German or valueless, according to William F. Albright. Solomon Schechter, who headed the Jewish Theological Seminary in its earlier and more Orthodox days, exclaimed that Higher Criticism was no more than higher anti-Semitism. Albright asked the question, how was it possible that the "scientific community" accepted many of these theories without critical assessment, knowing that many of the scholars had shown that their personal anti-Semitism completely overshadowed their intellectual honesty.[31]

While Wellhausen and other schools of Higher Criticism slowly lost their credibility, a new school developed, introducing the anthropological approach. It saw religion as a general feature of the cultural history of mankind and made it possible to view Torah (and the rest of the Tanach) in the broad light of the universal experience of humanity. The anthropological approach to the study of religion was first applied to the whole of Tanach by William Robertson Smith.[32]

The general trend of Smith's interpretation was determined by the view, common to anthropologists, that religion was an integral part of life, not to be treated as an entity separate from a people's social and political culture. Smith suggested that to understand the basic foundations on which the primitive Semitic religions were based, one had to make a thorough study of the ritual (sacrificial) institutions. Since these tended to remain unchanged from the earliest times to the historical period, they reflected the fundamental beliefs that stood at the beginning of religious development. He subsequently found "a consistent unity of scheme," which ran through the whole historical development, from a crude and imperfect understanding of religious truth to a clear and full perception of its spiritual significance.

Working along the lines of Robertson Smith, Sir James G. Frazer published his famous work The Golden Bough (1890), which grew from two volumes in the first edition to twelve, twenty years later. This work studies the traditional rites and superstitious practices of primitive peoples and presents a great number of suppositions regarding the evolution of primitive religions. However, the vast accumulation of illustrative data is frequently more impressive than the conclusions drawn from them.

The faults of Frazer's methodology were those of nineteenth-century anthropologists in general, for they failed to understand that monotheistic religion could not be explained as developing out of primitive cults. While other theories were suggested by Wilhelm Wundt[33] and Johannes Pedersen,[34] these approaches failed to explain the transition from a primitive mentality to the highly developed conceptions of a later age, especially in the framework of the Tanach with its distinctive features and its religion.

In the meantime, another school had emerged: the Religio-Historical School of Interpretation. This field of research is known in German as Religionsgeschichte. The term "Comparative Religion," which is sometimes applied to it, connotes the early anthropological approach to religion and fails to indicate the importance of its historical aspect. Generally speaking, it is the application of the historical method to the study of religion, under the influence of positivist principles of investigation combined with the use of the comparative method. Auguste Comte made the point that one had to take the concrete and actual into consideration in philosophy; thus, this positive approach became influential in religious studies as well.[35]

No longer were broad generalizations about religion to be permitted. Rather, careful study of the historical manifestation of religion was researched. With the recovery of religious literature of the Far East, the publication of large numbers of inscriptions from the Graeco-Roman world, and the critical reexamination of the surviving documents of classical literature, the new approach acquired rich material with which to work.

The major point that this school propounded was that these discoveries showed that the ancient Orient represented a high cultural maturity—something denied by Wellhausen and others—and that Torah (and Nach) had been the outcome of this maturity. Some scholars rejected the evolutionary view of Israel's religious history and described the religion of Tanach as having already reached the full development of its most important features in the age of Moshe. Paul Volz argued that the high ethical principles of the Decalogue, which were usually attributed to prophetic inspiration, were known to the Israelites in Moshe's time.[36] On the basis of the evidence, Volz declared that the Mosaic authorship of the Decalogue could easily be established and that it was as advanced as the later teachings of the Prophets. The most significant attempt to restore the traditional view of the Mosaic religion was made by Bruno Baentsch, who claimed that traces of monotheism can be found in other religions of the ancient Orient.[37] Moreover, the discovery of the Hammurabi Code in 1902—a code of ethics of a remarkably high standard—completely changed the picture of the ancient Far East. Some suggested that this code was the forerunner of the Torah law, a view that was later rejected.[38] The difficulty of this approach is that Hammurabi's monotheistic ideas do not seem to agree with the monotheistic idea of the one Invisible God described in the Old Testament. Also, the laws of the Torah often contradicted the Hammurabi Code.

As was the case with other schools, speculation became more and more rife. It became clear that the Torah and the other books of Tanach could best be understood on their own merits, without extrabiblical evidence. Israel's religious history had characteristic features of its own that could not be understood without primary attention being given to evidence derived from the Bible itself.

In his classic work Critique of Religion and Philosophy (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1978) p. 377, Walter Kaufmann discusses Wellhausen's as well as other forms of Higher Criticism and shows one of the major failures of these schools in the following observation:

Imagine a Higher Critic analyzing Goethe's Faust, which was written by a single human being in the course of sixty years. The scenes in which the heroine of Part One is called Gretchen would be relegated to one author; the conflicting conceptions of the role of Mephistopheles would be taken to call for further divisions, and the Prologue in Heaven would be ascribed to a later editor, while the prelude on the stage would be referred to yet a different author. Our critic would have no doubt whatsoever that Part Two belongs to a different age and must be assigned to a great many writers with widely different ideas. The end of Act IV, for example, points to an anti-Catholic author who lampoons the church, while the end of Act V was written by a man, we should be told, who, though probably no orthodox Catholic, was deeply sympathetic to Catholicism. Where do we find more inconsistencies in style and thought and plan: in Goethe's Faust or in the Five Books of Moses?[39]

In short, inconsistencies of style and text cannot be taken as proof that a work was written by more than one author.

This is not the only observation Kaufmann makes concerning the nature of Tanach. After asking how Tanach should be read, he answers (p. 383):

Any suggestion of the close affinity of religion and poetry is generally met with the retort that a religious scripture is not mere poetry, which is true enough. But at the very least one might accord a religious scripture the same courtesy which one extends to poetry and recall Goethe's dictum: "What issues from a poetic mind wants to lie received by a poetic mind. Any cold analyzing destroys the poetry and does not generate any reality. All that remains are potsheds which are good for nothing and only incommode us."

His observation is true in its critical attitude not only toward Higher Criticism but toward most of the other schools of Old Testament research as well. The different schools approached the Old Testament as a collection of historical facts from which to draw only such conclusions as the facts warranted.

It was the theological approach to Old Testament, studies that, after long being neglected, made this point. The real value of Torah and the other books of Tanach is essentially religious in content and outlook and, as such, the critical schools missed the point the Torah was making. Consequently, they used the wrong tools of investigation. Only an approach to the world of Torah and Nach that did justice to what it said about God, man, and the meaning of life could offer a means of arriving at the permanent significance of the Torah.

This point, for ages emphasized by traditional Jewish scholars, had been made by Otto Eissfeldt[40] and later by Walter Eihrodt,[41] albeit these studies were also heavily influenced by New Testament sentiments. Still these studies are of major importance, for it took courage to present this view at a time when the Torah and the rest of Tanach was rejected as a "Jewish book" of no significance to Germans and Christians. It is only in the last twenty to thirty years, especially in America and England, that full emphasis was given to this approach. One of the most important books accepting the true significance of Torah and Nach was written by H. H. Rowley and is entitled, The Relevance of the Bible.[42] Norman H. Snaith's important work The Distinctive Ideas of the Old Testament (London, 1944) also drew attention to the uniqueness of the Hebrew tradition.

In 1946, the secular German literary critic and theorist Erich Auerbach published an essay called "Odysseus Scar." In this important study he explored the nature of the biblical narrative. In comparing it with the Homeric way of narrative, Auerbach shows how much the biblical narrative is different from the Greek epic. Unlike Homer, the former is "fraught with background," unspoken words, and silence. It can only be understood on its own terms. It is in need of constant interpretation, claims absolute truth, and draws its reader into the world of religious experience. But above all, it is not art but command that strikes the student as the most important characteristic of the biblical story.

Auerbach maintained that the text of the Torah clearly shows that it wants to be "heard" as an encounter in which God speaks to man. It was not the later Rabbis or theologians who invented such a claim, but the very intent of the text itself.[43] Auerbach's essay gave impetus to much novel research in the field of Bible studies. Most important are the works of Robert Alter,[44] Roland Barflies[45] and Harold Fisch.[46] All of them show a remarkable sensitivity for the authentic meaning of the text, reflecting a more "Jewish" approach when discussing some of the most difficult biblical narratives. Meir Weiss,[47] Meir Sternberg,[48] and Shimon bar Efrat,[49] using literary analysis, have dealt with the intricate subtleties of the biblical texts, uncovering more traditional interpretations. While these developments fall short in the eyes of traditional Judaism, they indicate a more objective, honest approach toward the Torah. The authors, dissociating themselves from the old schools of Bible Criticism, tried hard to hear the genuine "voice" of the Torah, and therefore moved closer to the traditional Jewish approach than any of their predecessors.

What has become increasingly clear is that the problems raised by Spinoza, Wellhausen, and others were well known to the traditional Jewish commentaries throughout the ages. What is different is the method by which these problems were solved. The Bible critics took it for granted that the biblical texts were texts like any other and therefore to be explored by the normal criteria of literary research. Axiomatically, without sincerely considering other possibilities, they rejected the idea of a "personal" God, the possibility of verbal revelation, and the authority of tradition in interpreting these texts.[50]

Mordechai Breuer, an Orthodox Jewish scholar, goes even as far as to state that he is prepared to accept much of the critic's findings. Using an unusual hybrid of neo-Kantian thought and Jewish mysticism, he concludes (not without major problems) that the traditional and the critical views are both "true." He distinguishes between the Torah as a "document" (phenomenon) and as words "written in black and white fire" (noumenon).[51] Thereupon, he asks why the word of God came down to man in such a way that it seems to support some of the critic's findings. He answers that this was necessary to show all the different religious perspectives of the Torah. For example, when discussing the different Pentateuchal names for God (one of the most important foundations of the Wellhausen theory for the existence of "documents"), he explains that this is connected with the different attributes of God as understood by the Jewish tradition. Sometimes God appears to us as a merciful God (the Tetragrammaton), at another time as Judge (Elohim). These, however, are the ways in which God appears to us (phenomenon). But behind all this is the mystical meaning of the Torah, which unites all these names (noumenon).[52]

The famous Rabbi Avraham Yitzchak Kook (1805- 1935) added that there could essentially be no conflict between the scientific approach and the religious one. This was due to the fact that the Torah was primarily concerned with the knowledge of God and the sanctification of life, not with astronomy or geology. Scientific statements in the Torah and later prophets have to be understood as parables and analogies and not as primitive scientific statements.[53]

The greatest problem with Bible Criticism must, however, be seen in its failure to understand the crucial role the Oral Torah plays in the proper understanding of the Pentateuchal text. As stated before, the text can be understood only when read in its own spirit. Looking a little deeper, this means that it can be understood only when one "hears" its words in "the doing," in other words, when one "lives" it and is part of its Weltanschauung. One can read the text of the "Pentateuch" and remain unaffected; in contrast, one can listen to the "Torah" as a religious act and be involved.[54]

More and more Bible scholars in the latter years admit that this is possible only when one studies the Pentateuchal text from within a certain tradition on which the text heavily relies. This is indeed one of the most important claims made by the Jewish tradition. Many Jewish commentators have convincingly argued that it is wholly impossible to understand the text without such a tradition. The point that they were making is that not only is it possible to read the text through the eyes of an Oral Tradition but that the intended meaning is the very one suggested by the Oral Tradition. While some modern commentaries may not go as far as arguing for a talmudic Oral Tradition, they do agree that the Pentateuchal text alludes to a comprehensive Oral Tradition that preceded it.[55]

In his famous commentary on the Torah, Rabbi Samson Raphael Hirsch argues that the Written Torah is the masterful "synopsis" of the Oral Tradition as laid down in the Talmud; first God instructed Moshe concerning the Oral Torah, and only afterward did He give him a dictation of the written text. In much the same way that lecture notes can help us to reproduce the original lecture only after we have heard it in full, so the Written Torah can only be understood after one has studied the Oral Torah in all its aspects: "It is not the Oral Law (Torah) which has to seek the guarantee of its authenticity in the Written Law (Torah); on the contrary, it is the Written Law (Law) which has to look for its warrant in the Oral Tradition."[56]

Yeshayahu Leibowitz, one of the most controversial Orthodox scholars of today, argues on similar lines: The sanctity and the uniqueness of the Written Torah cannot be inferred from any quality of the text itself.[57] Getting very close to the kabbalistic tradition, he states that as literature, the Written Torah is inferior to Shakespeare; as philosophy, it cannot compete with Plato or Kant, and as "moral education," Sophocles' Antigone is superior![58] Where the critics went wrong was to try to read and understand the "notes" without having heard the lecture. This would obviously perforce lead to the most absurd propositions. To read the Torah as an autonomous text is therefore an unforgivable mistake: "This kind of bibliolatry is Lutheran," says Leibowitz.

Important in a different way are the observations of Rabbi J. B. Soloveitchik, who deals with several "contradictions" in the Pentateuchal text. These, he shows, are not the result of having been written by a different hand but are rather evidence for different and paradoxical dimensions in the human condition with which the religious personality has to struggle.[59]

What can be said with certainty is that honest Bible scholars no longer maintain that the Torah is the result of different fragments edited and reedited. The Torah is now taken to be Mosaic in origin and content, and it has been acknowledged that much of this tradition was already well established in pro-Mosaic times. Although this position has moved considerably in the direction of the Jewish traditional view, it has definitely not thrown in the towel to the tradition concerning the verbal infallibility of the Torah.

A sister school of "Higher Criticism," known as "Lower Criticism," has come to the fore within the last centuries. This school has taken upon itself to question the reliability of the text based on outside sources such as the Septuagint. The proponents of this school have developed recensions based on variant readings that they regard as more reliable than the traditional text. As later scholars have pointed out, these recensions have been accomplished by offering baseless emendations and conjectures that are without rational foundation.

Nijberg has shown that these methods of critical analysis were in vogue in the latter part of the nineteenth century and were often employed in classical philology.[60] He mentions a scholar who used this approach to analyze Paradise Lost and came to the conclusion that this work was full of later interpolations. He also speaks of a scholar who made seven hundred revisions in Horace and finally published a volume that contained, in effect, a revised version of the poems which, while hardly being improved upon, turned out to be rather amusing.

Regarding "Lower Criticism," Nijberg observes:

The most insane arbitrariness in this field is slowly beginning to recede. . . . The first step to such reflection, however, must be the recognition of the errors in method that have so far been made in the treatment of the text. ... In the end we should remember a good old philological rule: When one does not understand something, one should first mistrust oneself and not the text."[61]

As has been clearly demonstrated, the Jewish Sages and later scribes were extraordinarily careful to guarantee that no changes were made in the text of the Torah and Nach.[62] Their precision was such that today, despite the fact that the Jews were dispersed to almost every corner of the globe and their communities often had little contact with each other, there are no essential differences in the text of the Torah scrolls. The Torah text that Jews brought from Cochin, India, is identical to the text used by the community in Cracow, Poland.

Still, there are differences in some ancient versions. This is not surprising: from the earliest times many individuals wrote scrolls for private study. These private scrolls often contained emendations that reflected the Oral Torah connected with a specific phrase or verse. This was done so as to remind oneself of the correct interpretation of the text. These scrolls were not intended for public use and were, in fact, ritually unfit for use because of these changes. Jewish tradition informs us that one of the great earlier Sages, Rabbi Meir, used to mark his allegorical explanations in his own private scroll as a means of remembering them.[63] There is no evidence of these private scrolls ever becoming mixed up with the traditional written Torah, for Jewish law is extremely precise and exacting in its demands of the scrolls used for the Torah reading in the synagogues. Scribes who prepared Torah scrolls were and are required to use a copy of the traditional Torah text as a source and are prohibited from writing a scroll from memory.

It is possible that non-Jewish editions of the Bible, such as the Septuagint or Vulgate, may have used private scrolls as a source, and this would account for the deviations found there.

But perhaps the most devastating blow to these critical theories was delivered by Rabbi Chaim Heller (1878-1960). Not only had he mastered the Oral Torah to the extent that he was one of the greatest talmudic scholars of his time, but he also knew every extant ancient Bible translation in its original target language, whether Aramaic, Greek, Latin, or Syriac. In his Untersuchungen ueber die Peschitta (1911), he took issue with those who concluded that apparent divergences from the Torah in their possession were due to variae lectiones in the ancient texts. Not so, he asserted. Every translation is a commentary, and the variations result from the translator preferring one explanation in the Oral Torah to another. Thus, the differences were exegetical rather than textual. He further showed that all the apparent differences stemmed from the thirty-two exegetical rules of biblical interpretation enumerated by Rabbi Elazar ben Rabbi Shimon.[64] In the above-mentioned study he gives examples showing how the translator employed each rule in his version.

Dr. David Hoffmann points out that even to accept the contention that the text in certain places of the Torah has been altered would still leave no choice but to accept the traditional version as the one closest to the original, for "every conjecture, no matter how many exegetical and historical and critical arguments it may be supported, does not offer us even the probability that the Prophet or the writer of Scripture wrote in this form and not in the text before us.”[65]

On many occasions, seemingly "unintelligible" words of Tanach have suddenly become understandable in light of research and comparison with other oriental languages. It is due to this late research that the traditional text has grown in stature and respectability in the eyes of critical scientists and is increasingly preferred in many cases over other versions that were once considered accurate.

In summation, while Bible Criticism has found its way back to a more traditional approach, as far as the Pentateuchal text, its date, and its origin are concerned, one should never forget that the question of the verbal infallibility of the Torah as the expression of an explicit divine revelation lies outside the scope of any literal or scientific investigation.

The modern crisis of religion, of which Bible Criticism is a symptom, is due to the misapplication of scientific research to aspects of reality, like faith and revelation, to which they do not belong. Laws deduced from the world of nature cannot explain supernatural phenomena, in the same way that no scientist would ever accept the position that the rules governing why organic materials react to certain stimuli could apply to inorganic substances. Both are intrinsically different in nature and can only be understood as two completely different systems.

The Torah is a covenantal document and is to be studied as such. It does not inform us of "facts," "history," or "anthropology." It reveals a continuous encounter between God and man, which was set in motion with the revelation at Sinai. It cannot be read but only studied, proclaimed, heard, and experienced. The encounter with its text is a religious act and therefore prefaced with a blessing. For this reason it is untouched and unimpaired by the results of Bible Criticism.

What is important to realize is that the struggle over the origin of the text of the Torah was, and is, not just an academic one. It is foremost a battle between "divine authority" and "human autonomy." Modernity, starting with Spinoza, was looking for ways through which it could liberate itself from the biblical worldview and its far-reaching divine demands. Since it was this biblical text that made man submissive to divine authority, it was necessary to start an assault on the biblical text itself and strip it of its divine nature. The interplay between sociology and theology is a complex one, but what is clear is that what man will find and conclude is greatly dependent on the question of why he is looking. The Torah can be made to yield whatever meaning its interpreters like to assign to it.

This fact is also of great importance in understanding what has happened within the Jewish community over the last two hundred years. In an attempt to become part of the secular world, many Jews looked to Bible Criticism as a most forceful (and welcome) source of legitimization for the break with tradition. In reference to what Heinrich Heine once called "the portable fatherland of the Jew," the Torah was historicized, secularized, and fragmentized. It is hardly possible to ignore the fact that since the day when this fragmentation theory made inroads into the Jewish community, the Jewish People has lost much of its élan vital. It resulted in “nontraditional" forms of Judaism and eventually caused Jews to turn their backs on tradition altogether. The secularization of the Torah had led to secularization of the people.

[1] This essay was written many years ago. Since then, I have updated it several times. To my pleasant surprise, I have found some similarities between this essay and some of the observations made by Chief Rabbi Dr. Jonathan Sacks from Great Britain. I have incorporated some of his insights from his book Crisis and Covenant (New York: Manchester University Press, 1992).

[2] T. B. Sanhedrin 89a.

[3] Maimonides, Commentary to Mishnah: Introduction to Sanhedrin, chap. 10, principle 8.

[4] See Rabbi Chaim Hirschensohn's interesting discussion, Malki Ba-Kodesh, pt. 2. (St. Louis, MO: Moinester Printing Co., 1921), pp. 215-250, concerning the question of whether it is only the divinity of the Torah that is vital to Judaism or Moshe's "authorship" as well.

[5] Benedictus de Spinoza, A Theologic-Political Treatise (New York: Dover, 1951), p. 165. Spinoza's conclusion was "that the word of God is faulty, mutilated, tampered with, and inconsistent, that we possess it only in fragments and that the original of the covenant which God made with the Jews has been lost." This observation is, for two reasons, most remarkable: First of all, Spinoza leaves the door open for a possible revelational experience. God may have spoken to the Jews, but the original text of that conversation was lost. This seems to conflict with Spinoza's understanding of a God who lacks all "personality" and henceforth is incapable of ever conversing with man. Second, it lays the foundation for what later became the attitude of Reform Judaism's understanding of the Pentateuchal text, which sees the text as some kind of human record of the Jews' encounter with God, and as such, "inspired." This idea contradicts Spinoza's general attitude, which sees the text as "primitive literature."

There are even earlier observations of this kind. One famous "Bible critic" was Chivi Al Balkhi (ninth century) of Persia. See "Geniza Specimens—The Oldest Collection of Bible Difficulties by a Jew," Solomon Schcchter, Jewish Quarterly Review (old series) 13 (190): 345-374.

In Numbers, (chap. 16) we read of Korach, the first critic of Moses' authority, who claimed that "the Torah was not from heaven" (Jerusalem Talmud, Sanhedrin 10, halachah 1). Another earlier critic was Menashe the son of Hizkiah (698-543 b.c.e) "who examined biblical narratives to prove them worthless." Thus, he jeered: had Moses not anything else to write besides, "and Lothan's sister was Timnah"? (Genesis 36:12) (T. B. Sanhedrin 99).

[6] Karl Heinrich Graf (1815-1869), a German Protestant Bible scholar on whose work Wellhausen founded his theory. Wellhausen's forerunners were Karl David Ilgen (1763-1834), a German Protestant philologist (Urkunden des Ersten Buchs Moses, 1798); Wilhelm Martin Leberecht de Wette (1780-1849), (Beitraege zur Einleitung in das Alte Testament, 1806-1807); and Wilhelm Vatke (1806-1882) (Die Geschichte des Heiligen Schriften des Alten Testaments), who was highly influenced by Hegel. Vatke laid the foundation for Wellhausen's critique, and the latter admitted that he was indebted to Vatke "for the most and the best" of his own work. Ironically, Vatke, in his later days, retracted his conclusions, undermining many theories that Wellhausen later published!

[7] See H. Wheeler Robinson, "The Contribution of Great Britain to Old Testament Study," Expository Times 41 (1929-1930): 46-50.

[8] See J. M. Powis Smith, "The Contribution of the United Stales to Old Testament Scholarship," Expository Times 41 (1929-1930): 169-171.

[9] See Handkommentar zum Alten Testament, 15 vols., ed. Wilhelm Nowack (Gotlingen, 1892-1903); Kurzer Handkommentar zum Alten Testament, 20 vols., ed. Karl Marti (Freiburg, 1897- 1904).

[10] The following works summarize the literary criticism of the Wellhausen schools: John Edgar McFaydon, "The Present Position of Old Testament Criticism," in Arthur S. Peake, The People and The Book; "Modern Criticism," in H. Wheeler Robinson, ed., Record and Revelation (Oxford, 1938), pp. 74-109. For these and other important works in the field, see Herbert F. Hahn, The Old Testament in Modern Research (Philadelphia: Fortress Press, 1966).

[11] One of the most important works following this line is Heinrich Holzinger's Einleitung in den Hexateuch (Freiburg, 1893). (According to some scholars, the J and E documents could also be traced through the Book of Joshua, so they spoke of the Hexateuch—six books). See Rudolf Smend's "JE in den geschichtlichen Buchern des Alten Testament," Zeitschrift fuer die Alttestamentliche Wissenschaft 49 (1921). Also see Rudolf Smend, Die Erzaehlung des Hexateuch auf ihre Quellen des Genesis von neuem untersucht (Giessen, 1916).

[12] See J. H. Hertz, The Pentateuch and the Haftarahs, 2nd ed., (London: Soncino Press, 1962), p. 199.

[13] Ibid.

[14] Alttestamentliche Studien (Giessen, 1908, 1910, 1912).

[15] See Hertz, The Pentateuch and the Haftarahs, p. 939. Kittel remarked on another occasion:

Speaking for all branches of science we may say that a hypothesis which has stood for half a century has done its duty. Measured by this standard, Wellhausen's theory is as good as the best. However, there is increasing evidence that it has had its day and that those scholars, who from the first expressed serious doubts about it, were right. (Ibid., p. 941)

[16] "Die Aufgabe der Alttestamentlichen Forschung," Zeitschrift Juer die Alttestamentliche Wissenschqft 42 (1924): 8. See Hahn, Old Testament in Modern Research, p. 28.

[17] See, for example, Adam C. Welch, The Code of Deuteronomy: A New Theory of Its Origin (London, 1924); see also Theodor Oestreicher, Das Deuteronomische Grundgesetz (Guthersloh, 1923) and Edward Robertson, The Old Testament Problem (Manchester, 1950).

[18] A. Welch, The Code of Deuteronomy.

[19] Einleitung in das Alte Testament (Tubingen, 1943).

[20] On Holscher, see his Komposition und Ursprung des Deuteronomi ums Zeitschrift fuer die Alttestamentliche Wissenschaft 40 (1922).

[21] See C. R. North, "Pentateuchal Criticism," in H. H. Rowley, ed., The Old Testament and Modern Study (Oxford, 1951).

[22] S. R. Hirsch, The Pentateuch, Translated and Explained, tr. I. Levy (New York: Judaica Press, 1971).

[23] Die wichtigsten Instanzen gegen die Graf-Wellhausensche Hypothese (vol. 1, 1903; vol. 2, 1916); Das Buch Leviticus, uebersetzt und erklaert (1905-1906); Das Buch Deuteronomium, uebersetzt und erklaert (1913-1922).

Most important was Hoffmann's refutations of the theory that the Priestly Code was a separate document composed after the Book of Deuteronomy and even after Ezekiel. Hoffmann showed that Leviticus was an earlier work than Deuteronomy and that Ezekiel was a derivative of it, rather than the other way around. Interesting is Hoffmann's belief referring to a statement in the Talmud (T. B. Gittin 60a) that Moshe composed the Torah in a series of scrolls that were written down after every revelation and later redacted into a single document.

[24] In many unpublished papers. See A. Barth, Dorenu Mul She'elat Ha-Netzach (Jerusalem, 1952). In this book some important examples of Hoffmann's and Barth's arguments are presented.

[25] Dorot Harishonim, 7 vols. (1897-1939, repr. 1967).

[26] The Documentary Hypothesis and the Composition of the Pentateuch, trans. Israel Abrahams (English ed. [Jerusalem: Magnes Press, Hebrew University, 1961-1972]) or "The Theory of Documents." Cassuto concludes (pp. 100-101):

I have not shown that it was possible to solve the problems in a different way from that of the documentary theory. I have shown that one must necessarily solve them otherwise and that it is impossible to solve them according to this system. I did not prove that the pillars are weak or that none of them is decisive. I have proved that they are not pillars at all, that they arc non-existent and imaginary. Hence, I have arrived at the conclusion that the complete negation of the theory of documents is justified.

Other books by Cassuto in this field are La questione della genesi (1934), his commentaries on the books of Genesis and Exodus, and many other important papers.

[27] Toledot Ha-Emunah Ha-Yisraelit (1937); abridged version in English, The Religion of Israel, translated and condensed by M. Greenberg (Jerusalem: Magnes Press, Hebrew University, 1960).

[28] William F. Albright, From Stone Age to Christianity (Baltimore: Anchor, 1957), pp. 84, 118-119.

[29] W. L. Baxter (1841-1937), a Scottish Bible scholar, wrote, "Witnesses are reliable when they testify in favor of the critics, but their veracity is promptly impeached if their testimony is on the other side" (Sanctuary and Sacrifice [1892]); quoted in J. H. Hertz, The Pentateuch and the Haftarahs (London: Soncino Press, 1962), p. 556.

[30] On Delitzch, see Babel und Bibel (Leipzig, 1902). See also Hugo Winckler, Geschichte Israels, vol. 2 (Berlin, 1900).

[31] See History, Archeology and Christian Humanism (Baltimore: Anchor, 1942).

[32] See W. R. Smith, Lectures on the Religion of the Semites (Edinburgh, 1889).

[33] Voelkerpsychologie, 2 vols. (Leipzig, 1909).

[34] Israel: Its Life and Culture (London, 1926; repr., 1940).

[35] See E. Hardy, Zur Geschichte der vergleichenden Religion forschung, Archiv fur Religionswissenschaft 4 (1901).

[36] Moses, Ein Beitrag zur Untersuchung ueber die Urspruenge der Israelitischen Religion (Tubingen, 1907).

[37] Altorientalischer und Israelitischer Monotheismus (Tubingen, 1906), p. 1. For an interesting comparison, see Maimonides, Mishneh Torah: Hilchot Avodah Zarah, introduction.

[38] For an overview of this debate, see Henry Biberfeld, Universal Jewish History (Jerusalem: Feldheim, 1948), appendix, pp. 129-156.

[39] Herman Wouk remarks in his book This is My God (Glasgow: Williams Collins Sons and Co., 1973) p. 291:

"Literary analysis has been used for generations by obsessive men to prove that everybody but Shakespeare wrote Shakespeare. I believe literary analysis could be used to prove that I wrote both David Copperfield and Farewell to Arms. I wish it were sound!"

[40] Israelitisch-Juedische Religionsgeschichte und alttestamentliche Theologie, Zeitschrift fuer die Alttestantentliche Wissenschaft 44 (1962): 1-12.

[41] Theologie des Alten Testaments, 3 vols. (Leipzig, 1933-1939). See "Guide to Understanding the Bible," Journal of Biblical Literature 65 (1946): 205-207.

[42] The Relevance of the Bible (London, 1942). See also his Rediscovery of the Old Testament (London, 1946); Frank Glen Lankard, The Bible Speaks to Our Generation (New York, 1941); and Wyatt A. Smart, Still the Bible Speaks (New York, 1948).

[43] Erich Auerbach, Mimesis (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1971).

[44] The Art of Biblical Literature (London: George Allen and Unwin, 1981).

[45] Image, Music, Text (London: Fontana, 1977).

[46] A Remembered Future (Bloominglon, IN: Indiana University Press, 1984).

[47] The Craft of Biblical Narrative (Hebrew) (Jerusalem: Molad, 1962).

[48] The Poetics of Biblical Narrative (Bloomington, IN: Indiana University Press, 1985).

[49] Narrative Art in the Bible (Sheffield, U.K.: Almond Press, 1989).

[50] Most enlightening is Spinoza's observation that some texts of the Torah, such as the ones in Genesis 12:6; 22:14, and Deuteronomy 1:2, must have been written many years after Moshe's death, since they reveal information that refers to latter days. Spinoza relies here on the famous Jewish commentator Ibn Ezra (1088-1167), who wrote that these verses were "mysteries" about "which the wise should be silent" (on Deuteronomy 1:2). The traditional understanding of Ibn Ezra, as also confirmed by the modern Jewish scholar Samuel David Luzzatto (ShaDaL) (1800-1865), is that these passages must be understood as prophetic and anticipating the future. Here, the differences between the traditional approach and the ones of criticism become apparent. The critics were obviously not prepared to accept the "prophetic" dimension as suggested by tradition and consequently concluded that these passages could not have been written by Moshe. In other words, it was not the problems themselves that caused these differences of opinion but the very approach to the text that created these controversies.

[51] See chapter 7 [of Rabbi Cardozo’s Between Silence And Speech].

[52] "Emunah U-Madda Be-Parashanut Ha-Mikra," Deot, Cheker Ha-Mikra Be-Machshavah Ha-Yehudit Ha-Datit He-Chadashah, 11 (1959):18-25, 12 (I960): 13-27. See also Zvi Kurzweil, The Modem Impulse of Traditional Judaism (New York, 1985), pp. 79-91. See also the critical comments by Jacob Katz, Uriel Simon, Joseph Heinemann, Meir Weiss, Dr. Halperin, and Jacov Zeidman in Deot 13 (1961): 14-23.

[53] See Ish Shalom, Avraham Isaac Kook: Between Rationalism and Mysticism (Hebrew) Tel Aviv: Am Oved, 1990), pp. 98-115. Also see Zvi Yaron, The Philosophy of Rabbi Kook (Jerusalem: Elmer Library, 1991), pp. 188-189.

[54] See also Franz Rosenzweig, On Jewish Learning, ed. Nahum Glatzer (New York: Schocken, 1955).

[55] See H. S. Nijberg, Studien zum Hoseabuch: Zugleich ein Beitrag zur Kehrung des Problems der Alttestestamentlichen Textkritik. (Uppsala: Uppsala Universitets, Arskrift, 1935). For an overview, see E. Nielsen, Oral Tradition: A Modern Problem in the Old Testament Introduction, Studies in Biblical Theology 11 (Chicago, 1954); C. Stuhlmueller, "The Influence of Oral Tradition upon Exegeses and the Senses of Scripture," Catholic Biblical Quarterly 20 (1958): 299-326, B. Gerhardsson, Memory and Manuscript; Oral Tradition and Written Transmission in Rabbinic Judaism and Early Christianity, Acta seminarii neo-testamentici upsaliensis 22 (Uppsala, 1961); by the same author, Muendliche und Schriftliche Tradition der Prophetenbuecher,Theologische Literaturzeitung 17 (1961), pp. 216-220; and Michael Fishbane, Biblical Interpretation in Ancient Israel (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1985). Herbert Schneidau's Sacred Discontent (Berkeley, CA: University of California Press, 1977) argues that textual tensions and apparent inconsistencies function as ways through which the reader becomes involved in the text. See also the important observations by J. F. Molitor, Philosophie der Geschichte oder ueber die Tradition, vol. 3 (Frankfurt, 1857), in which the author stresses the fact that in ancient times, the relationship of the written word and the spoken word was very different and much more involved than in modern times.

[56] See the introduction on Hirsch's commentary on the Torah by Dayan Dr. I. Grunfeld in Samson Raphael Hirsch, The Pentateuch, Translation and Commentary, Genesis (New York: Judaica Press, 1971), pp. viii-xxx.

[57] Judaism, Human Values, and the Jewish State (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1992), pp. 11-12.

[58] Rabbi Simeon said:

Alas for the man who regards the Torah as a book of mere tales and everyday matters! If that were so, even we could compose a Torah dealing with everyday affairs and of even greater excellence. Nay, even the princes of the world possess books of greater worth which we could use as a model for composing some such Torah. The Torah, however, contains it all, its words are supernal truth. (Zohar IIl:152a) (italics added)

[59] "The Lonely Man of Faith," Tradition 7:2 (Summer 1965).

[60] IT. S. Nijberg, quoted in Walter Kaufmann, Critique of Religion and Philosopliy (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1958), p. 384.

[61] Ibid., p. 385.

[62] See the author's The Infinite Chain (Jerusalem: Targum-Feldheim Press, 1989), pp. 35-42.

[63] See Nachmanides on Ecclesiastes (Kitvei Ha-Ramban).

[64] For a short overview of these thirty-two exegetical rules, see Hermann L. Strack, Introduction to the Talmud and Midrash (New York: Atheneum, 1978), pp. 95-98.

[65] Quoted by M. Kapustin in "Biblical Criticism, a Traditionalist View," in Challenge, Torah Views on Science and Its Problems, ed. C. Domb and A. Carmel (Jerusalem: Feldheim, 1976), pp. 426-427. See also Chaim Hirschensohn, Malki Ba-Kodesh, vol. 2 (St. Louis, MO: Moinsier Printing Co., 1921), pp. 215-250, who points to a talmudic passage (tractate Sofrim 6:3) that states that there were three Torah scrolls in the Temple court that contained slight textual misreadings and that the correct reading was determined on the principle of following the majority.

© Nathan Lopes Cardozo 1995, www.cardozoschool.org

The letters in our Torah

2005-12-26T03:39:00.000-08:00

http://www.aishdas.org/toratemet/en_pamphlet9.html
Pamphlet 9 - The Letters of the Torah

The Number of Letters

There is a famous saying, from the Zohar Chadash on Song of Songs (74d), that there are 600,000 letters in the Torah. The Megaleh Amukot (186) explained that these letters correspond to the 600,000 Jewish souls that exist (evidently, a person can have part of a soul because there are more than 600,000 Jews). He also suggested that the word Yisrael is an acronym for "Yesh Shishim Ribo Otiyot LaTorah" - "There are 600,000 letters in the Torah". The difficulty with this is that the Gemara in Kiddushin 30a says that there are 5,888 verses in the Torah. Even if each verse had 100 letters, and a quick check will reveal that the average is well below that, the Torah would still have less than 600,000 letters (see Chavot Yair 235).

Furthermore, our Torahs have 304,805 letters. This can be verified by counting and is recorded by the famous 10th century Masorete Aharon Ben Asher in his Dikdukei Taamim. For the Torah mentioned by the Zohar Chadash to have 600,000 letters it must be almost twice as long as our Torah. However, we have ancient Bibles such as the Septuagint (third century BCE) and the Samaritan Torah (from before Ezra) that are almost identical to our texts (we discuss the differences elsewhere). It is inconceivable that there was ever a Torah that was twice as long as the Torah we currently have. Rather than this saying being a statement about ancient Torah scrolls and therefore an indictment of ours, it is a puzzling statement that does not seem to describe any known or possible variant of the Torah.

The puzzle is solved, however, when we remember that this saying is recorded in kabbalistic books. Characteristic of this genre, the statement is referring to mystical issues and not the simple letters of the Torah. Some claim that it refers to the strokes a scribe requires to write the letters while others suggest that it refers to both the written and unwritten portions of a scroll. See R' Reuven Margoliyot's Hamikra Vehamesora ch. 12. Whatever the saying means, we can be certain that it does not mean that there are literally 600,000 letters in the Torah.

Letters and Words in the Torah

Words Letters
Genesis 20,512 78,064
Exodus 16,723 63,529
Leviticus 11,950 44,790
Numbers 16,368 63,530
Deuteronomy 14,294 54,892

Total
79,847
304,805

While we are on the subject of letters, let us mention that Rav Saadia Gaon wrote a poem about the letters of the Torah whose total of 792,077 does not match ours of 304,805. However, as R' Chaim Yair Bachrach pointed out in his Chavot Yair (235), Rav Saadia Gaon's list is impossible. The list has the alephs, gimmels, and zayins with almost the same frequency in the Torah while everything we know about the Hebrew language tells us that this is not naturally possible. Aleph is an extremely common letter while gimmel and zayin are not. The Tanach Yehoash has a list of how many times each letter appears in the Torah. Aleph appears 27,057 times while gimmel appears 2,109 times and zayin 2,198 times. Aleph is more than ten times more frequent than either gimmel or zayin. Similarly, we counted in Genesis ch. 1 and found aleph 158 times, gimmel 5 times, and zayin 11 times. From where Rav Saadia Gaon got his list we do not know. But he definitely did not get it from counting letters in his Torah. How he could have used that list and exactly what this sage meant remains a mystery.

Letters in the Torah

Letters Letters
א 27,057 ל 21,570
ב 16,344 מ 25,078
ג 2,109 נ 14,107
ד 7,032 ס 1,833
ה 28,052 ע 11,244
ו 30,509 פ 4,805
ז 2,198 צ 4,052
ח 7,187 ק 4,694
ט 1,802 ר 18,109
י 31,522 ש 15,592
כ 11,960 ת 17,949

Total
304,805

Is this number of 304,805 letters in the Torah exact? Did G-d give Moshe a Torah with precisely that number of letters? We do not know for sure but we know that it was very close to that number. The reason we cannot be certain is twofold. First, the Gemara in Kiddushin 30a says that we are not experts in chaser and yeter. There are certain vowel sounds in Hebrew that can be spelled with (yeter) or without (chaser) an assisting letter. It is important to note that the presence or absence of this letter make no difference in terms of meaning and pronunciation. The words and verses mean exactly the same whether they are spelled chaser or yeter, which may be how these uncertainties crept in. Because of this, there are certain discrepancies between even good versions of the Torah in this respect. Beginning in the 8th century, the Masoretes tried to standardize the spelling of chaser and yeter words by recording them in their masoretic notes. Surprisingly, even some excellent manuscripts do not follow this Masora precisely (see R' Mordechai Breuer's introduction to The Aleppo Codex and the Accepted Text of the Bible, par. 20). However, this standardization of chaser and yeter came after the talmudic statement that we are not experts in them so the standardization is not final (see Rama, Orach Chaim 143:3). Therefore, there remain differences between texts in terms of chaser and yeter. Again, it is important to emphasize that these minor differences do not change the meaning or pronunciation of the words (see ).

The second reason that there might be slight discrepancies between Torahs is that there are some words whose spelling is a matter of dispute. In the Torah itself, there are two major questions. Genesis 9:29 has a word that may be spelled ויהי or ויהיו. Ashkenazi Torahs have the former and Yemenite Torahs have the latter. The difference is between singular and plural and is insignificant enough to be lost in translation from Hebrew to English. Small as it is, it is still a difference. Similarly, there is a question in Deuteronomy 23:2 whether a word should be spelled דכא or דכה. Here, there is no difference in meaning at all. Some would suggest based on midrashim that there are a handful of other single-letter differences in the Torah but others argue that this is merely a misunderstanding of midrashic techniques (we discuss this at length in our essay on The Text of the Torah).

In the end, out of over 300,000 letters in the Torah, there are at most a dozen or two instances where a letter is under question. This means that the Torah text we have is over 99.99% correct. That is important to remember when discussing this issue.

The Accepted Text of the Torah

Some may wonder whether the less than one hundredth of a percent that is under question presents an halachic problem. How can we make a blessing over the reading of the Torah in synagogue if we are not entirely certain that the Torah has been written correctly? The simple answer is that the Rambam wrote in a responsum (Pe'er Hador, 9) that, for the purposes of synagogue use, even an invalid Torah scroll may be used. While many disagree with this ruling, we rely on it in times of great need (see Rama, Orach Chaim 143:4 and Mishnah Berurah, 29).

However, we do not need to rely on this ruling of the Rambam because of two important halachic concepts. The first is that of majority. In Sofrim 6:4 we are told that this is a valid method of determining an authoritative text of the Torah (we discuss this passage at length elsewhere). By taking well-known, reliable texts we can resolve the few differences based on majority. This is certainly sufficient halachically (Chullin 11a-b) but is also an excellent tool for arriving at the original version of the Torah. All scribes err occasionally but excellent scribes do so only rarely. By taking the majority of readings, we can be fairly certain that the resulting version is based on error-free transmission. The second tool we have is that of tradition - masora. We can rely on good ancient texts because they were accepted as authoritative in their time. Similarly, we can rely on the Masoretic notes because they were written based on intensive study of manuscripts that were ancient even in the days of the Masoretes.

These two principles have been used before. In 1525, Daniel Bomberg's publishing house printed a rabbinic Bible - Mikraot Gedolot - that was arranged by Yaakov ben Chaim. In addition to arranging this edition, Yaakov ben Chaim gathered together the masoretic notes from many different manuscripts into one text that he called Masora Rabbata. Many like to exaggerate his role in the transmission of the Torah because, later in his life, he became an apostate by converting to Christianity, thus embarrassing traditionalists who rely on his work. However, his accomplishments were not original but technical. He helped publish things that had already been written and attempted to publish them as accurately as possible. Yet, his rabbinic bible is still riddled with errors that had to be corrected later. This was done by R' Menachem di Lonzano in his Or Torah and R' Shlomo Yedidiah Nortzi in his Minchat Shai. These two scholars used the tools of majority and tradition to clarify the accepted text of the Bible and their work remains the guide for scribes as codified by R' Shlomo Ganzfried (the author of Kitzur Shulchan Aruch) in his Kesset Sofer. The claim that Yaakov ben Chaim determined the basis of the accepted text is entirely wrong. He contributed to the confusion by printing a mistaken text and to the solution by printing masoretic notes. The true determinators of the accepted text were the authors of Or Torah and Minchat Shai (see Breuer, par. 23).

Recently, R' Mordechai Breuer applied this same methodology to the best and most ancient texts of the Bible available. He used the following versions: The Aleppo Codex, the Leningrad Codex, the British Museum Manuscript, the Cairo Codex, and the two Sasoon Manuscripts of the Bible. Based on the principles of majority and tradition, he arrived at a text of the entire Bible that is consistent with the Masora and is, surprisingly, almost identical to the Aleppo Codex. See his The Aleppo Codex and the Accepted Text of the Bible. His edition of the Bible is already becoming standard in many libraries and synagogues.

Going back to our original question, when we use the halachic principle of majority then there is no problem of making a blessing. Halachically, this Torah is considered acceptable. Similarly, there is no problem in fulfilling the mitzva of writing a Torah scroll. While the Chatam Sofer (Responsa, Orach Chaim, 52) suggested that we do not recite a blessing on the mitzva of writing a Torah scroll because of the doubts regarding chaser and yeter, this has been refuted by later halachists. See his student the Maharam Schick's work on the 613 Mitzvot (613:2-3), Responsa Ginat Vradim (Orach Chaim 2:6), Yabia Omer (vol. 8, Yoreh Deah, 36:3), and Ateret Paz (1:2, Yoreh Deah, he'arot 12:2). With the accepted text based on the majority of manuscripts and Masoretic notes, we can assert that we have confidence that even the less than 0.01% of letters that were in question have been resolved correctly.

However, we cannot be absolutely certain. Therefore, a Torah based on an ancient tradition that was in the minority cannot be summarily rejected. For example, a Torah that has Genesis 9:29 written as ויהיו, based on the minority Yemenite tradition, cannot be considered unacceptable. While it should not be written that way, a Yemenite scribe who followed his tradition and wrote it that way did so based on an ancient masora. We must therefore accept it as a possible version. See the sources quoted by R' Ovadia Yosef in his Yechave Daat 6:56. He cites rulings by R' Avraham ben Harambam, Meiri, Radbaz, and others as precedent. However, as the Meiri wrote in his commentary to Kiddushin 30a, only variations that have traditionally been in question may be considered acceptable ex post facto. For the over 99.99% of the spellings in the Torah in which we are expert, including the thousands of chaser and yeter that have never been questioned, variations are not acceptable.

Verses in the Torah

We have already cited above the Gemara in Kiddushin that there are 5,888 verses in the Torah. Some versions of the Gemara have 8,888. This version is clearly incorrect because it implies a Torah that is over 50% larger than the Torah we have. We can again turn to the ancient Samaritan Torah and Septuagint that do not imply a book that is 150% the size of our Torah. However, this version of 8,888 caused great anguish to many commentators, including the Minchat Shai, who were puzzled that our Torah is thousands of verses shorter than that mentioned in the Gemara. We can say with confidence that this was simply due to a copyist's error.

The Gemara also says that Psalms has an additional eight verses and Chronicles has eight less. With this, we find two puzzles in this Gemara. The first is that our Torahs have 5,845 verses rather than the 5,888 stated in the Gemara. The second is that Psalms and Chronicles do not have anywhere near that number of verses. Psalms has 2,527 verses and Chronicles has 1,764 verses. That is far from being within eight verses of 5,888.

R' Menachem Kasher (Torah Shelemah, vol. 28 addenda ch. 12) quotes an explanation of this Gemara from R' Yehuda Epstein, a student of R' Chaim of Volozhin. R' Epstein pointed out that there are 43 verses from the Torah that are quoted in Psalms and Chronicles - 8 in Psalms and 35 in Chronicles. If these Torah verses that are cited in Psalms and Chronicles are added to the 5,845 verses in the Torah we arrive at the number of 5,888 that the Gemara mentions. While the exact wording of the Gemara is still difficult, the meaning seems to have been elucidated. It is not that Psalms and Chronicles have a few more or less verses than the Torah. Rather, if we add certain Torah verses from these books to the count in the Torah then we arrive at the number cited by the Gemara.

The Middle of the Torah

That same Gemara in Kiddushin states the following: The vav of gachon (Leviticus 11:42) is the middle of the letters of the Torah, darosh darash (Leviticus 10:16) is the middle of the words of the Torah, and the ayin of miyaar (Psalms 80:14) is the middle letter of Psalms. Simply counting the letters and words of these two books shows that everything on the list is incorrect. Does this shed doubt on the authenticity of our books? Not only are they incorrect, but for the vav of gachon to be the middle of the Torah, the Torah would need another 9,667 letters. That is a large number of letters to be missing.

R. Menachem Kasher (ibid.) quoted R. Yitzchak Yosef Zilber (in Shmaatin issue 43) who offered the following explanation. Almost all of the letters of the Torah are written in the standard Hebrew script in the standard size. However, there are some letters that are written in an unusual fashion and some that are written large or small. If one were to count all of the small and large letters in a standard Torah, one would find that there are exactly 16 of these letters. Of these, the ninth, the middle one, is vav of gachon. In other words, the Gemara was not referring to vav of gachon as the middle of all the letters of the Torah. Rather, it was referring to it as the middle of all the unusually large and small letters in the Torah. However, there is another tradition of large and small letters, that of R' Yosef Tov Elem. But, even according to that tradition there are 32 such letters and the sixteenth is vav of gachon. While this explanation seems far-fetched, it is confirmed by noting that there are exactly seven unusually large and small letters in Psalms and the fourth - the middle letter - is ayin of miyaar.

Similarly, there are 77 instances of double words in the Torah (like Avraham Avraham and Lech Lecha). Of those 77 cases, the 39th instance - the middle one - is darosh darash. It is not the middle of all the words in the Torah but it is the middle of all the unusual double-words.

Large and Small Letters in the Torah

1. Genesis 1:1 5. Exodus 34:7 9. Leviticus 11:42 13. Deuteronomy 6:4
2. Genesis 2:4 6. Exodus 34:14 10. Leviticus 13:33 14. Deuteronomy 29:27
3. Genesis 23:2 7. Leviticus 1:1 11. Numbers 14:7 15. Deuteronomy 32:6
4. Genesis 27:46 8. Leviticus 6:2 12. Deuteronomy 6:4 16. Deuteronomy 32:18

The Script of the Torah

The Gemara in Sanhedrin 21b-22a tells us what at first seems very surprising. However, after a careful reading and placing the events in an historical context they do not seem surprising at all.

Mar Zutra and some say Mar Ukva said: Originally the Torah was given to Israel in Ktav Ivri (paleo-Hebrew characters) and in the holy lanugage. It was given again to them in Ezra's time in Ktav Ashurit (Assyrian characters) and in Aramaic. Israel selected for themselves Ktav Ashurit and the Hebrew language... It was taught: Rebbe said: Torah was originally given to Israel in Ktav Ashurit. When they sinned it was changed to Roetz (Ktav Ivri). When they repented, Ktav Ashurit was reintroduced... R' Shimon ben Elazar said in the name of R' Eliezer ben Parta, who said in the name of R' Elazar Hamodai: This writing was never changed...

We see three opinions regarding the script of the Torah. According to Mar Zutra, the Torah was given to Israel in Ktav Ivri and in Hebrew but Ezra changed it to Ktav Ashurit and Aramaic. The people, however, only accepted Ktav Ashurit and Hebrew. According to Rebbe, the Torah was given in Ktav Ashurit but was changed to Ktav Ivri due to the people's sins. According to R' Elazar Hamodai, the script of the Torah never changed.

This passage raises a number of questions. How could Ezra change the script of the Torah? How could he change the Torah's language from Hebrew to Aramaic? Furthermore, if he found the authority to do so, how could the people determine an outcome against his decision? According to Rebbe, why would the script of the Torah change based on whether Israel sinned or repented?

R' Reuven Margoliyot (Margoliyot Hayam, Sanhedrin ad loc,; Hamikra Vehamesora, ch. 9) answers all of these questions with the following historical reflection. It is known that some ancient cultures had one script for sacred purposes and one for everyday use. For example, the Indians only used Sanskrit for religious purposes and not for the mundane. The talmudic sages mentioned in the above passage were debating the extent of this practice of having a script for only holy purposes in Israel. However, according to everyone this was the practice, similar to the talmudic dictum, "Something that is used for the sacred may not be used for the profane" (Avodah Zara 52a).

According to Mar Zutra, the first tablets of the ten commandments were written in Ktav Ashurit (see Responsa Radbaz 3:442) but once Israel sinned with the Golden Calf they were deemed unworthy. They could not be trusted to use Ktav Ashurit for purely sacred matters. Therefore, the second tablets and the Torah scrolls written for general use were in Ktav Ivri. This can, perhaps, be seen from the fact that in Megillah 2b Rav Chisda says that the mem and samech in the tablets were miraculously hanging in the air. This can only happen in Ktav Ashurit and not in Ktav Ivri. However, in the Gemara in Sanhedrin quoted above, Rav Chisda seems to agree with Mar Zutra that the Torah was originally given to Israel in Ktav Ivri. Therefore, it seem that Rav Chisda would have to say that the tablets were in Ktav Ashurit and the Torah in Ktav Ivri. Or, as the Radbaz suggested, everything was originally in Ktav Ashurit but after the sin of the Golden Calf the second tablets and the Torah were in Ktav Ivri. But not all of the Torahs were in Ktav Ivri.

That the original tablets were given in Ktav Ashurit but not the second tablets can be seen hinted in a number of sources. For example, the Gemara in Pesachim 87b says "the tablets broke and the letters floated in the air". Exactly what it means that the letters floated in the air is unclear. However, on that same page the Gemara says, "Three things returned to their origin... the script of the tablets". That sounds like Ktav Ashurit being replaced with Ktav Ivri. Similarly, the Mechilta on Exodus 17:8 says that after the tablets were broken "the heavenly writing returned to its place". We perhaps also see evidence of the disappearance of Ktav Ashurit much later in history. The Tanchuma on Vayeshev 2 says, "What did they do [in response to the Samaritans]? Ezra, Zerubavel, and Yehoshua gathered the community to the sanctuary... and excommunicated the Samaritans with the sacred name of G-d, with the script that was written on the tablets, with the decree of the heavenly court,..." The use of the "script that was written on the tablets" is important for two reasons. First, it seems that this script was unique. Furthermore, we know from the Gemara in Sanhedrin and from other historical sources that the Samaritans used Ktav Ivri. The contrast between the Samaritans and the "script that was written on the tablets" implies that this script was not Ktav Ivri. We thus see that there is ample material supporting the Radbaz's claim that the first tablets were in Ktav Ashurit.

Recall that Mar Zutra said that the Torah was given to Israel in Ktav Ivri. The Ritva deduced from this that the special Torah of Moshe that was kept in the ark and later in the Temple was in Ktav Ashurit. Only Torahs for the people were in Ktav Ivri. The ability to read Ktav Ashurit was maintained by priests and scribes, which is why King Yoshiyahu needed a priest to read to him from Moshe's Torah when it was found in the Temple (2 Kings 22:8-11; Abarbanel). The king had never before seen Ktav Ashurit and his reaction to seeing it fo the first time, and in the Torah scroll that Moshe himself had written, demonstrates the deep religious emotion it evoked. We perhaps find hints of this in Isaiah 8:1 where the prophet is commanded, "Take a large tablet and write on it in common characters". This is must have been referring to Ktav Ivri that was used by the common people (see Rashi). Ktav Ivri had gained such prominence that the existence of ending letters (ךףץןם) was forgotten by the masses and had to be restored (Megillah 2b-3a).

However, Ktav Ashurit was still studied by the priests and scribes, of which Ezra was both. When he saw that Ktav Ashurit was so forgotten that, when it was written on the wall of King Belshatzar of Babylonia, only Daniel could read it (Daniel 5) he realized that it must be reintroduced to the people. Yet, he still had the dilemma that people would then be writing Hebrew in the holy Ktav Ashurit for improper purposes. His solution was to translate the Torah into Aramaic and introduce the Aramaic Torah in Ktav Ashurit into common usage. That way people would become familiar with Ktav Ashurit without using it in their daily Hebrew writing. This is what is meant in Nehemiah 8:8, "So they read from the book, from the law of God, with interpretation." It was interpreted by translation into Aramaic (Megillah 3a). (This translation was later recreated by Onkelos). However, the people had lived their whole lives with a Hebrew Torah and were not ready to change the language of their holiest of books. Therefore, they decided to retain a Hebrew Torah in Ktav Ashurit but conduct their daily business in Aramaic. This would produce the results that Ezra desired because Ktav Ashurit in Hebrew would not be a part of the daily routine.

Rebbe agreed with this historical reconstruction but attributed the original transition from Ktav Ashurit to Ktav Ivri to the idolatrous era of the First Temple rather than the episode of the Golden Calf. According to Rebbe, it is even more plausible that the scholars always retained knowledge of Ktav Ashurit. It was only the masses who were busy with their daily lives and/or idolatrous ways who forgot Ktav Ashurit when the Torahs were changed to Ktav Ivri.

R' Elazar Hamodai does not necessarily disagree that people forgot Ktav Ashurit. He only argued that the Torahs were never changed from one script into another. However, he agreed that people had forgotten Ktav Ashurit, the script used only for sacred purposes, and that Ezra had to re-educate the masses in the holy script (see Teshuvot HaRambam, ed. Blau no. 268).

As a final note, the Gemara in Sanhedrin 22a offers two opinions why the script is called Ktav Ashurit. One is that the Jews brought it back to Israel with them from Babylonia/Assyria (Ashur). The other is that it is a beautiful script (me'usheret). Since the literal translation of Ktav Ashurit is "Assyrian script", we must ask why the Gemara even asks such a basic question. It is called Ktav Ashurit because the Assyrians used it. Furthermore, the view that it is called Ktav Ashurit because the script is beautiful strains credibility. We already know that it is called Ktav Ashurit because it is an Assyrian script, as the words simply mean.

We have seen that many questions can be raised about the validity of our Torahs. However, Judaism, like any other serious thought system, is complex. While by necessity we were taught simplicites in our childhood, we need to sieze all available opportunities to broaden our perspectives and deepen our faiths. Rather than using questions as reasons to reject traditional Judaism, we must use them as opportunities for intellectual and religious growth.

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Judaism: A New Hebrew Bible: the Aleppo Codex - Keter Yerushalayim/Jerusalem Crown: The Bible of the Hebrew - Book ReviewThe Ben Chayyim Masoretic tex

2005-12-24T13:29:00.000-08:00

The Keter Yerushalayim was introduced to the public at the Jerusalem Book Fair two years ago. The Jerusalem Report ran a short and very positive review the next month. Beyond that, little has been said about this impressive new Tanakh in the English language press. Although the Keter can be found in nearly every bookstore in Israel, it is still hard to locate in the United States. This is unfortunate as this Tanakh is an outstanding achievement.

The Keter Yerushalayim is a Hebrew Tanakh without an English translation. What then would be the appeal to the English-speaking reader? The answer is two-fold.

Firstly, the Keter is an attractive book. The typography and page layout is open and inviting. It is an advance over the Koren Tanakh which appeared in the 1960s, and superceded the many different Tanakhim that used the same nineteenth-century version of the Biblia Hebraica typography--the Hertz Chumash, for instance. While the Koren's modern typography was a major improvement and the layout was pleasant, it has a certain blandness to it that Keter Yerushalayim has overcome. For the Keter an entirely new typeface was developed by Zvi Narkiss based on the calligraphic script used in the Aleppo Codex.

<http://www.findarticles.com/p/articles/mi_m0411/is_4_51/ai_106730959>

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Ben Chayyim text and Leningrad Code

2005-12-23T22:50:00.000-08:00

[warning: fondamentalismo protestante]

The Ben Chayyim Masoretic text was the uncontested text of the Old Testament for over four hundred years. The Ben Chayyim text was used in the first two editions of "Biblia Hebraica" by Rudolph Kittel, usually referred to as BHK, published in 1906 and 1912. However, in 1937, Kittel changed his Hebrew text from the Ben Chayyim to the Ben Asher text.

The Ben Asher text was based on a text call the Leningrad Manuscript (B19a; also called simply L), which was dated around 1008 A. D. Using the peculiar logic of that day, which believed that older must always be better, Kittel published his 1937 edition based on this "older" text. His 1937 edition had about 20,000 changes (most of them minor, but changes nevertheless) from the Ben Chayyim text. Both texts are still referred to as "Masoretic," so care must be taken as to which text is being referred to. It had apparently not dawned on Kittel that the Ben Asher version was based on very few minor manuscripts similar to B19a, while the Ben Chayyim text followed the vast majority of the manuscripts available. Why would Kittel throw out the evidence provided by the vast majority of manuscripts to follow only a small minority of texts? May I suggest, very carefully, that profit may have been the motive? Kittle had not published a major work for many, many years, he was growing older, funds for his retirement were low, and he was living in the rapidly fading glow of past glory. One final work would not only propel him back into the limelight of scholarly recognition, but would provide the funds for his impending retirement. He found a large and receptive market in the rapidly growing modernist camp that had grown to hate the traditional texts of both the Old and New Testaments.

In 1966 there was a further revision of Kittel's "Biblia Hebraica" called "Biblia Hebraica Stuttgartensia," which was also based on the "older" Ben Asher text. This new edition of Kittel is generally referred to as BHS. The revision was the work of unbelieving German rationalists, and represents theologically liberal modernism in its worst form. The 1937 BHK and the newer BHS are not only based on a few minor Hebrew manuscripts which contain many erroneous footnotes, but "corrections" were often made to these already inadequate and corrupt texts by referring to such things as the "Septuagint" or "LXX", which is nothing more than the Hebrew Scriptures translated into the Greek language. The "Septuagint" is a poor translation at best of the Hebrew due mainly to the fact that it does not follow the verbal and formal rules of translation, but is largely a paraphrase, changing the wording wherever the translators desired, seeking to "clarify" the meaning of the original.

<http://members.tripod.com/bible_study/kjvissue/criticism3.html>

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Commentary/Ottolenghi - Europe's

2005-12-21T00:55:00.000-08:00

Europe’s “Good Jews”

Emanuele Ottolenghi

It is common knowledge that anti-Semitism in Western Europe has been on the rise for the last five years. Its frequency and intensity have coincided for the most part with the curve of violence in the Middle East, and with the incendiary and openly slanted way that this violence has been covered in the European media. But expressions of anti-Semitism have also taken on a life, and a momentum, of their own. Of course, Jews in Europe have not been deprived of property, expelled, or deported; but they have been subjected to physical violence, insults, libelous attacks in the press and in intellectual circles, accusations of disloyalty, and much else besides.

All of this has been thoroughly documented. Known, too, are the factors that have contributed to the astonishing recrudescence of a hatred thought to have been long uprooted from pluralist, tolerant Europe. Those factors include the open hostility of some European governments to the state of Israel and their active sympathy with the Arab and Palestinian “cause,” even to the point of justifying Arab terrorism against civilian Israeli Jews; the felt need on the part of European elites to accommodate the often murderous anti-Semitism within the immigrant Muslim community; and the alignment of European leftist and “progressive” opinion behind the idea of Israel as the new Nazi Germany, according to which those European Jews who support Israel are relegated to the category of racists until proved otherwise.

To be sure, it is regularly and vigorously denied that contemporary hostility to Israel and its Jewish supporters is itself in the least bit anti-Semitic; rather, it is held to be solely an expression of disagreement with particular policies of the Israeli government. To draw a parallel between this and past variants of European anti-Semitism, especially of the Nazi type, is thus dismissed as a species of moral blackmail.

There is something to this argument, although not much, and then only when it is couched in such extreme terms. The Nazi card is a powerful rhetorical weapon, no matter who plays it—as the anti-Israel side, quick to condemn Israel itself as a replica of Nazi Germany, knows better than anyone. But to help put matters into historical perspective, I want to focus here on a particular feature of the new European anti-Semitism that has been less commented on. This is the crucial role played by some European Jews themselves, mostly intellectuals or academics, who have responded to the latest assault on the Jewish people by excusing it, justifying it, and in effect joining it.

In October 2002, a number of leading European authors discussed Israel’s conduct in the pages of the London Independent. For one of these writers, it was plain that Israel had “adopted tactics which are reminiscent of the Nazis.” For another, it was no less plain that the Israelis “were educated by the Nazis.” And so it went. Such assertions, staples of Arab and Palestinian propaganda, have by now assumed canonical status in liberal European opinion.

But what, aside from rhetorical bombast, is meant by the term “Nazi” in such statements? Ultimately, the evil that Israel is said to embody is the evil of an extreme, aggressive, and racially exclusive nationalism—that is, the very same disease that Europe, in the aftermath of Hitler and the Holocaust, has sought so strenuously and with such success “to limit, transcend, and overcome” (in the flattering words of the historian Anatol Lieven). Now this great sickness is alleged to have returned in the lurid form of present-day Israel, throwing the whole world into turmoil and disturbing the hard-won tranquility of post-nationalist Europe by inflaming the passions of its rising Muslim population.

Hence the obsessive intensity with which European elites have focused on a territorial conflict that, in the scale of the world’s problems, would seem rather less worthy of their concern, let alone of their one-sided rage, than many another. For, in the end, this is their conflict as well, involving as it does their own twisted and morally compromised history with the Jews. Involving—and perhaps mitigating. As I am hardly the first to have observed, Europeans have seized upon the Palestinian intifada, or rather upon Israel’s determined response to it, as an opportunity at last to turn the moral tables, a chance, however specious, to hold not themselves but the Jews to account.

The Italian columnist Barbara Spinelli, writing in La Stampa, spelled out the charge a few years ago. Today’s ultra-nationalist Israel, she wrote, constitutes nothing less than a “scandal.” And it is a scandal, above all, for Jews themselves—since, as every European knows, Jews are the quintessential victims of modern nationalism (nationalism being, for Spinelli as for many other Europeans, virtually coterminous with Nazism). It follows, then, that Jews everywhere have a special duty to speak out against Israel, to apologize to its victims, and to do so in public.

“If one thing is missing in Judaism,” Spinelli wrote in late 2001, “this is precisely it: a mea culpa vis-à-vis the peoples and individuals who had to pay the price of blood and exile to allow Israel to exist.” She called upon world Jewry to undertake such an act of contrition forthwith:

If the initiative does not come from Jerusalem then it should start in the Diaspora, where so many Jews live a double and contradictory loyalty: to Israel, and to the state they belong to and vote in. A solemn mea culpa, proclaimed from the scattered communities in the West. . . .

This call to Europe’s “good Jews,” as they might be called, has in fact been answered. For the most part, those answering it have been not the long-term, all-out, rabid haters of Israel of the Harold Pinter or (in American terms) Noam Chomsky stripe, who need no excuse and waste no pieties in reviling the Jewish state. Pinter, for example, who has termed Israel “the central factor in world unrest,” and has accused it of using nuclear weapons against the Palestinians, hardly stoops to identifying himself as a Jew concerned for the welfare of his fellow Jews. Most “good Jews” are of a somewhat different complexion. Not only do they tend to speak more circumspectly but, with whatever degree of disingenuousness, they cloak their hostility to Jewish nationalism (i.e., Israel) in the mantle of solicitude for, precisely, the good name of Jews and Judaism.

Thus, writing in Britain’s weekly Spectator earlier this year, one Anthony Lippman issued just such a mea culpa as Barbara Spinelli may have dreamed of. Himself the son of a Holocaust survivor, albeit a convert to Christianity and an active member of the Church of England, Lippman was moved temporarily to reclaim his patrimony. Writing under the title, “How I Became a Jew,” he averred that the “little band” of Holocaust survivors in Europe

has a terrible responsibility—to live well in the name of those who did not live and to discourage the building of walls and bulldozing of villages. Even more than this, they—and all Jews—need to be the voice of conscience that will prevent Israel from adopting the mantle of oppressor, and to reject the label “anti-Semite” for those who speak out against Israel’s policies in the occupied territories.

Similarly responding to the claims of an awakened Jewish conscience has been the British academic Jacqueline Rose. In her book, The Question of Zion (2005), Rose undertakes to save Judaism itself from the curse of its movement of national liberation. “What is it,” she asks, “about the coming into being of this nation [Israel] and the [Zionist] movement out of which it was born, that allowed it—and still allows it—to shed the burdens of its own history, and so flagrantly to blind itself?” Zionism, she concludes, has to be seen not as the fulfillment of an age-old Jewish dream but as the out-and-out betrayal of Jewish history and the Jewish heritage, an adoption of all that is, historically and morally, un-Jewish.

Can the disease that is Zionism be cured? Yes, Rose and others assure us, but only by a thorough-going renunciation. In the pre-Israel past, she writes, “dissident voices” in the Jewish world warned against the terrible consequences that would flow from the effort to win a state for the Jews; although silenced and repressed then, they are needed more then ever today, during the Jews’ “dark night of the soul.”

No one can say that such voices have not been forthcoming. In the August 8, 2002 Guardian, 45 Jewish signatories, in a widely hailed act of public abjuration, repudiated their right of return to the Jewish state on account of its racist policies. Since the statement’s original publication, it has been signed by over 80 more individuals from around the world. One of the organizers subsequently explained that what motivated him to act was the “pitiless violence” of his “blood relatives,” i.e., the Israeli people—the “violence,” as he put it, of the “traumatized former victim, clinging to past wounds from generation unto generation.”

The publicity attending this and similar initiatives by European Jews, abetted in some cases by their Israeli counterparts, has been very great. There was tremendous excitement in Europe over the declaration by 99 Israeli academics that their government was planning an imminent “full-fledged ethnic cleansing” of the Palestinian people (a charge that was not withdrawn when the alleged genocidal atrocity failed to occur), and again over the refusal of a few hundred Israeli army reservists to serve in the administered territories. There was even greater excitement when several European Jewish academics turned up among the instigators of a movement to boycott Israeli academic institutions, and yet again when a number of Jewish politicians called for the boycott of Israeli commercial products.

Among the latter group was the British parliamentarian Oona King, who in June 2003, comparing Israel’s treatment of Palestinians in Gaza with the Nazi treatment of Jews in the Warsaw ghetto, spoke of her personal “shame” as a “Jewish person” (her father is Jewish). A year later, Gerald Kaufman, another member of the British Parliament, called for a boycott of Israeli goods on similar grounds, as, in South Africa, did Ronnie Kasrils, a government minister: “As a person who was born Jewish, I am morally obliged to speak out against what is being done by the Zionist state of Israel to the Palestinian people.”

Many others have likewise seen it as their specifically Jewish duty to denounce Israel. Their ranks include all three proponents of a motion, “Zionism is the real enemy of the Jews today,” aired at a public debate in London early this year. One of them was the historian Avi Shlaim. Like others before him, he too felt the need to advertise his Jewish virtuousness by writing about it for publication. In a subsequent op-ed in the International Herald Tribune, he justified the implacable anti-Zionism on which he has based his academic career by appealing to a faith he does not appear ever to have practiced: “One of the greatest accolades in Judaism,” he instructed his readers, “is to be a rodef shalom, a seeker of peace.”

The assertions of Jews like these are often buttressed by a particular narrative of the history of Zionism. The narrative itself has been thoroughly debunked,* but here I want to concentrate less on its veracity or rather lack of it than on the terms in which its main thesis is often expressed. These are revealing.

According to this reconstruction of the past, the achievements of Zionism involved, for the Jews, a fatal loss of moral and historical innocence. In order for the state of Israel to be born in 1948, unspeakable crimes were committed against the Palestinian people. Zionist leaders then entered into a conspiracy of silence to conceal these awful events from the Jewish public. Not until the 1980’s did a small, intrepid band of scholars—Israel’s so-called New Historians—emerge to uncover the evidence and expose the hidden truth.

Zionism’s precipitous descent, from the noble liberal vision of Theodor Herzl to the obloquy of mass expulsions and worse, was characterized in 1988 by Benny Morris, a leading New Historian, in striking language:

How one perceives [Israel’s war of independence in] 1948 bears heavily on how one perceives the whole Zionist/Israeli experience. If Israel, the haven of a much-persecuted people, was born pure and innocent, then it is worthy of the grace, material assistance, and political support showered upon it by the West over the past 40 years—and worthy of more of the same in years to come. If, on the other hand, Israel was born tarnished, besmirched by original sin, then it was no more deserving of that grace and assistance than were its neighbors.

“Grace,” “purity,” “original sin”—Christological vocabulary of this kind recurs frequently in the rhetoric of certain scholarly and journalistic discussions of Israel’s birth. Avi Shlaim, for instance, has mocked those who persist in conceiving of Israel’s War of Independence as a struggle against Arab aggression. They hold, he writes with savage sarcasm, to the idea of “an immaculate conception.” Worse, they do so perfidiously, for both material and moral gain, thus aspiring to the roles of Judas and Jesus simultaneously:

[They] put so much store by Israel’s claim to moral rectitude that they cannot face up to the evidence of cynical Israeli double-dealings or brutal dispersal and dispossession of the Palestinians. It is an axiom of their narrative that Israel is the innocent victim. Not content with the thirty pieces of silver, these people insist on retaining for Israel the crown of thorns. [emphasis added]

But, if the brutality with which Israel is charged was indeed inherent to the project that led to its creation—as the notion of original sin suggests—how can it possibly be made good? That European Jews should wash their hands of the Jewish state goes without saying. But what is required of Israel itself? For this there is an answer as well. Both logically and, as it were, theologically, the only remedy lies in the political equivalent of conversion.

For Israel, in this analysis, entrance into a new life of grace is contingent on shedding its identity as the Jewish national state. Instead, it must agree to a unitary, binational arrangement with the Palestinians. Only thus might the state of the Jews yet wash away the stain of its original sin.

The signatories of the 2002 letter in the Guardian were explicit on this point. No mere condemnation of Israel’s allegedly brutal behavior would satisfy the demands of their Jewish conscience. What was necessary was the dissolution of Israel itself, its place to be taken by a new entity that would no longer be ruled by Jews but in which Jews and Palestinian Arabs would at last live together peacefully as equals.

Of course, this is absurd—a fancy-dress re-wording of longstanding Arab propaganda about the illegitimacy of Israel’s national existence. It is also hypocritical: Europeans who expend such vast quantities of energy lecturing Israel on its supposed hypernationalist instincts give no thought whatsoever to ridding the Arabs of their own, rather more vivid, forms of nationalist sentiment. But for those European Jews who embrace the modish conviction that nationalism is not just a sin but the root of all modern evil, the fantasy of Israel’s de-nationalization serves another purpose. It ensures their own conformity with the latest European thinking on the best way for human beings to organize themselves in society—namely, as good Europeans.

Such, at any rate, was the burden of a notorious 2003 essay by Tony Judt, a British historian now living in the U.S. For Judt, writing in the New York Review of Books, contemporary European anti-Semitism, insofar as it exists, has been the wholly foreseeable result of bad Jewish (that is, Israeli) behavior. And just as the Jews of Israel have only themselves to blame for the fact that the enlightened world condemns them, so they can relieve their suffering, and incidentally that of their fellow Jews around the world who have been implicated in their black deeds, through compensatory acts of self-effacement and re-dedication.

Here, in Judt’s words, is the root sin of which Israel is guilty:

In a world where nations and peoples increasingly intermingle and intermarry at will; where cultural and national impediments to communication have all but collapsed; where more and more of us have multiple elective identities and would feel falsely constrained if we had to answer to just one of them; in such a world Israel is truly an anachronism. And not just an anachronism but a dysfunctional one.

And here, again in Judt’s words, is the path to remission from sin:

To convert Israel from a Jewish state to a binational one would not be easy, though not quite as impossible as it sounds: the process has already begun de facto. But it would cause far less disruption to most Jews and Arabs than its religious and nationalist foes will claim.

The use of the word “convert” is again no accident.

In seeking to explain the seemingly obsessive need for Jewish self-negation that is on display in examples like these and others, psychologists of the future will have their work cut out for them. And if we were dealing with only a few anti-Zionist Jews impelled to act out their personal identity problems in public, we could safely leave them to those future psychologists. Unfortunately, even though such individuals are not many in number, and even though their arguments are invariably mendacious and easily refuted, they, and the many grouplets that have sprung up to represent them, enjoy great acclaim in today’s Europe, and together they have done incalculable damage by lending a Jewish imprimatur to the anti-Israel cause.*

One evening last spring, the UK branch of Peace Now hosted a debate on the Israel-Palestinian conflict at London’s School of Oriental and African Studies. Taking the Israeli side, ironically enough, was Benny Morris, the pioneer New Historian. (In recent years Morris has found himself at odds with some of his colleagues since he still supports Israel’s right to exist; he has also begun to entertain second and third thoughts on the issue of Zionism’s “original sin.”) Opposing him was Ahmed Khalidi, a Western-educated scion of Palestinian aristocracy and a “moderate” who is willing to negotiate Israel’s demise diplomatically rather than advocating its destruction through violence.

During the question-and-answer period, a frail student stood up to make an impassioned plea. “I want to express my gratitude to you, Dr. Khalidi,” said this young woman, “for your willingness to share Palestine with the Jews as a common patrimony.” (“Common patrimony” was the anodyne catchphrase Khalidi had coined to promote his one-state solution, i.e., the dissolution of Israel.) Such conspicuous, large-hearted charity, the student went on, heedless of her choice of ancient religious antinomies, stood in sharp contrast to the miserly approach of Benny Morris, who had insisted on Israel’s right to continue its national existence. “As a Jew,” she concluded her address to Khalidi, “I feel ashamed that your land was taken away from you in my name and that of my ancestors. It is my duty as a Jew to stand up for justice.” If indeed she stood up in shame, she sat down to thunderous applause.

In statements like this, one cannot but notice the recurrence not only of those enduring theological tropes but of a certain very dangerous dance in which European Jews have long participated. Today, as yesterday, Jewish “particularism,” then religious, now national, remains a thorn in Europe’s side. Today, as yesterday, removing the thorn involves a renunciation of particularism followed by an espousal of the regnant form of universal salvation—then Christianity, now the tenets of humanistic liberalism.

This is not 1930’s-style anti-Semitism; in that narrow sense, anti-Israel Europeans are correct in protesting that they are not anti-Semites. Nevertheless, it is an age-old form of anti-Semitism, and one that has always called forth a typical pattern of response on the part of the Jews under scrutiny. For most, the choices are to lie low in hopes that the trouble will pass, to pick up and seek life elsewhere, or to resist and oppose to the extent they can. We have seen all three responses in European Jewish society over the last years, each bearing its cost. Some, however, take a different route, finding favor and reward by exerting every effort to assimilate themselves to whatever is required of them, including to the point of publicly dissociating themselves from their people’s history and fate. As ever with such maneuvers, exculpatory rationalizations must be found, and are readily at hand.

Unlike the case in pre-Enlightenment Europe, present-day anti-Semitism does not expect Jews to abandon their religion. Today’s Europe is a self-consciously multicultural society. Although it cherishes secularism above all, it respects, if somewhat warily, religious pluralism. What the enlightened sector of today’s Europe would like Jews to do, in exchange for fully approved membership in the circle of approved opinion, is to renounce a core component of their identity: that is, their sense of Jewish peoplehood as expressed through their attachment and commitment to the democratic state of Israel and to the Zionist enterprise.

What remains constant is that, as in both pre- and post-Enlightenment Europe, today’s European elite has its good Jews and its bad Jews. There are the Jews whom it embraces, encourages, and celebrates; and then there are the Jews whom it chastises and condemns. For the former, there will always be a place of honor in the European sun. On the latter, today’s officially pluralist and tolerant Europe has turned its back. Is it any wonder, then, that some “good Jews” have chosen to live in the light, stopping only to burnish their qualifications by noisily joining the chorus that has consigned their fellow Jews to the dark?

Emanuele Ottolenghi, who was born in Bologna, Italy, is a research fellow at St. Antony’s College, Oxford University, where he specializes in Israeli politics and the history of the Arab-Israeli conflict. This is his first appearance in Commentary.

* For example, see, in Commentary, Shabtai Teveth, “Charging Israel with Original Sin” (September 1989) and Efraim Karsh, “Were the Palestinians Expelled?” (July 2000) and “Revisiting Israel’s ‘Original Sin’” (April 2003).

* The groups, with names like Jews for Justice for Palestinians (UK), Jewish Union for Peace (France), Network of Jews against Occupation (Italy), Jewish Voice for a Just Peace in the Middle East (Germany), New Outlook (Denmark), Another Jewish Voice (Netherlands), and so forth, even have their own umbrella organization, European Jews for a Just Peace.

<http://www.commentarymagazine.com/article.asp?aid=12005044_1>

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Il multiculturalismo è multirazzismo (però buonista)

2005-12-17T09:25:00.000-08:00

Da il foglio 16 dicembre 2005 - pag 2

E’una storia vera, realmente accaduta, come
altre analoghe. Un bimbo africano
adottato fin da piccolo da una famiglia italiana
viene ripetutamente molestato a scuola. I
suoi compagni di classe lo chiamano “scimmia”.
Il bambino è scosso, disperato, i genitori
protestano, s’incontrano con gli insegnanti
e con i genitori degli altri bambini. Questi ultimi
escludono vivacemente che vi siano sentimenti
razzisti in circolazione. “E’ così difficile
capirsi tra ‘diversi’… – protestano – non
sarebbe il caso di organizzare degli incontri
per scambiare la conoscenza dei rispettivi usi
e costumi? La cosa più carina sarebbe organizzare
delle cenette in cui ognuno fa gustare
all’altro le proprie specialità etniche…”. In
realtà, il nostro bimbo parla romanesco e
adora la pizza e gli spaghetti. Perché mai dovrebbe
rompersi la testa a cucinare il kunde,
il kaklo o il riso al cocco, e provarne il sapore
per lui inusuale, mentre i suoi compagni lo
introducono alle meraviglie dei bucatini all’amatriciana,
che lui conosce meglio di loro?
Inutile dire che al bimbo africano e ai suoi
genitori la proposta non piace per niente.
Sono storie vere. Storie di razzismo. Di razzismo
buonista, non meno efferato di quello
ordinario, perché ti avvolge subdolamente
con le sue spire carezzevoli e se lo prendi a
calci – come merita – rischi anche di passare
per cattivo. Sono storie che esprimono meglio
di qualsiasi analisi quanto l’ideologia multiculturalista
abbia tracciato un nuovo “rispettabile”
percorso per il razzismo, e minaccia
di farlo diventare senso comune.
Esaminiamo il percorso concettuale che
sta dietro all’atteggiamento di quei genitori.
Si parte dall’assioma della diversità: siamo
diversi, ognuno ha delle radici identificanti,
che è inutile nascondere o confondere, anzi è
meglio che ognuno ne riassuma la consapevolezza
fino in fondo, casomai le avesse improvvidamente
smarrite. In parole povere: se
sei negro (pardon, nero) e non hai cucinato e
mangiato la banana fritta, sbrigati a farlo e a
riacquisire la tua identità occultata: etnico è
bello. Questo percorso consiste nell’indurire
la coscienza etnica, laddove essa non è già
sufficientemente dura, attraverso un processo
di “culturalizzazione”. E allora, dopo che
ci siamo ben assisi ciascuno nella propria
identità etnico-culturale, che abbiamo occupato
il posto che ci è stato assegnato nel mondo
della multiculturalità, con tanto di biglietto
numerato, resta da passare al processo interattivo,
al dialogo, all’“interculturalità”.
Nella fattispecie, fare un assaggio incrociato
di bucatini all’amatriciana e di riso al cocco.
Per tale via creeremo la società della mutua
tolleranza. Per l’intanto – notiamo noi – ci siamo
divisi più di quanto lo fossimo stati.
Non è necessario molto sforzo per ricostruire
questo percorso concettuale: basta
consultare gli scritti “teorici” degli operatori
del multiculturalismo, non di rado formulati
come concreti programmi d’intervento politici
e gestionali. Si parte dall’assunzione apodittica
che le nostre società, le nostre città sono
un “mosaico” di etnie, e pertanto si assume
come dato di fatto una condizione di
“multietnicità”; quindi si individua come primo
passo per rompere le “barriere”, la trasformazione
della multietnicità in “multiculturalità”,
ovvero nientemeno che l’indurimento
delle identità; il terzo passo consiste
nel lanciare “ponti” di dialogo mediante
l’“interculturalità”.
Se queste dottrine pretendono di diventare
senso comune e addirittura orientamento
di attività pratiche, diventa un dovere osteggiarle,
perché si tratta di dottrine razziste. Difatti,
i capisaldi concettuali che abbiamo appena
visto sono la prova inequivocabile che
il vecchio razzismo tradizionale e le dottrine
multiculturaliste sono le facce della stessa
medaglia. Abbiamo visto che il dato di partenza
è che la realtà sociale è costituita da un
“mosaico di etnie”. Notiamo di passaggio che
questa visione è oltretutto ignorante, perché
presenta come un fatto nuovo la coesistenza
di identità diverse, come se la Roma imperiale
non fosse pullulante di ancor più identità
di quanto non lo sia l’attuale, e la globalizzazione
fosse un fatto del tutto nuovo, e non
un processo che caratterizza tutta la storia
dell’umanità (il vino e lo strudel sono esempi
di globalizzazione alimentare ben prima della
Coca-Cola). Certo, le forme attuali della globalizzazione
– soprattutto economica – hanno
caratteristiche nuove e pervasive, ma si tratta
comunque di un discorso che merita ben
altra cautela della asserzione di una rottura
totale tra passato e presente. Comunque, l’idea
del “mosaico di etnie” è il cuore di una
visione razzista. Un razzista tradizionale
avrebbe detto che l’umanità è un “mosaico di
razze”, magari composto dei tre tipi fondamentali
di Gobineau. Che poi per qualcuno
l’incrocio razziale sia il male – la fonte della
degenerazione – e per altri sia invece il bene,
cosa cambia? Ci si divide sui gusti ma si è
d’accordo sulle premesse e cioè sul carattere
razzialmente segmentato dell’umanità.
Il “cerchio infernale”
Ma – si dirà – qui non si parla di razze, bensì
di etnie. Il guaio è che questo non migliora
affatto le cose. Il concetto di etnia è più complesso
e ambiguo di quello di razza, perché
non si basa come il primo sul determinismo
biologico, bensì ricorre a un insieme di fattori
eterogenei: biologici, linguistici, sociali, fino
agli aspetti ideologici e di autorappresentazione.
Trattasi di fattori che possono essere
in parte assenti – un’etnia può caratterizzarsi
per una forte identità religiosa o culturale
senza unità linguistica o senza tratti somatici
caratteristici – e che comunque si collocano
a livelli molto diversi e incommensurabili fra
di loro. Mantenere separati questi fattori è essenziale
perché, come ha osservato Lévi-
Strauss, il “peccato originale dell’antropologia”
consiste nella confusione tra fattori biologici
e produzioni sociologiche e psicologiche
delle culture, la quale è all’origine del
“cerchio infernale” che ha condotto alle ideologie
razziste. Ed per questo che non pochi
antropologi sono diffidenti nei confronti del
concetto di etnia e considerano l’opportunità
di sbarazzarsene. Chi conosca la storia delle
dottrine razziali sa che esso è parente stretto
di quel concetto di “stirpe” con cui il cosiddetto
“razzismo spiritualista” italiano del periodo
fascista tentò di proporre una versione
non biologistica e più “accettabile” del razzismo.
Come che sia, una prescrizione essenziale
è non considerare le etnie come formazioni
omogenee e confrontabili – come se tutte
possedessero lo stesso tipo di componenti
e caratteristiche, materiali, sociali o ideologiche
– pena il ricadere nel “circuito infernale”
di cui sopra. I tasselli di un mosaico hanno
tutti lo stesso spessore e quasi tutte le stesse
caratteristiche, mentre nulla del genere
può dirsi per le etnie. Pertanto, la nozione di
“mosaico” (etnico o razziale che sia) fa rientrare
direttamente nel “circuito infernale”.
Un modo per immiserire l’umanità
Il multiculturalista predica il confronto tra
etnie su basi culturali. Pertanto ha necessità
di un insieme di dati omogenei e di compiere
un’operazione. La necessità deriva dal fatto
che, per essere confrontabili, le etnie debbono
esibire ciascuna tutte le possibili caratteristiche,
nessuna esclusa: somatiche, culturali,
culinarie, di abbigliamento, di religione,
di lingua eccetera. Perciò, il bambino “africano”
della nostra storia, per confrontarsi
con i suoi compagni “italiani”, deve esibire
tutte le “sue” caratteristiche: se non sa cosa
sia il riso al cocco, è bene che lo impari al più
presto, e che impari anche la “sua” lingua, e
via dicendo. E, per rendere possibile il confronto,
le caratteristiche etniche debbono essere
acquisite ed esibite in forma consapevole
e strutturata: in una parola, debbono essere
trasferite nella dimensione “culturale”.
Ma la codificazione “culturale” delle differenze
è esattamente il modo per cristallizzarle:
il bambino “africano”, per potersi far
accettare dai suoi coetanei “italiani” è costretto
– sottilineiamo, costretto – a strutturare
la sua identità attorno allo zighinì o alla
banana fritta, e a imparare e a proporre i
“suoi” canti tradizionali. Mentre gli altri risponderanno
a suon di pizza e di funiculì funiculà.
Scappa da ridere. Ma è un dramma.
Perché di qui nasce la società comunitarista,
la società delle divisioni, del razzismo e della
violenza. Difatti, come scriveva Amarthya
Sen il 2 dicembre sul Corriere della Sera, “la
violenza è alimentata dal senso di priorità
che viene dato a una pretesa identità. Quando
arruolavano gli hutu per ammazzare i tutsi,
alle reclute potenziali veniva detto che
erano hutu e non anche kigaliani, rwandesi,
africani ed esseri umani”. Già, esseri umani…
Il guaio è che i multiculturalisti sono riusciti
a far diventare senso comune l’idea che
l’umanesimo sia vuota retorica, mentre le loro
visioni sarebbero ispirate a un realismo
che rispetta le identità conciliandole tra di
loro. E hanno occultato il fatto che, al contrario,
la loro dottrina è quanto mai miserabile,
non nel senso offensivo del termine, ma in
quello testuale: perché immiserisce la straordinaria
e infinita ricchezza con cui si manifesta
l’umanità, riducendola a un conglomerato
finito di monadi cristallizzate nella loro separatezza.
Non vedono e non vogliono far vedere
quale straordinario e variegato succedersi
di identità sempre diverse per natura e
caratteristiche ci offra la storia umana, nel dispiegarsi
di una fantasia senza limiti: un
“continuum” – non un mosaico, non un “discreto”
– di formazioni, ciascuna caratterizzata
da aspetti diversi, un emergere incessante
di nuove identità. E’ proprio questa visione
aperta che include anche la possibilità
della riscoperta e del recupero (per libera
scelta, però!) di parte o tutto delle proprie radici.
Il multiculturalista non coglie che il
bambino di origine africana, di colore, ma
che parla in un dialetto napoletano o siciliano
e ha abitudini alimentari della terra d’adozione,
e tante altre caratteristiche di infinita
varietà, è una nuova identità dinamica, è
uno straordinario e originale frutto di quella
continua creazione di nuovo che si manifesta
nei processi sociali umani. No, secondo lui,
per essere “accettato” egli deve essere inchiodato
alle caratteristiche ricavabili dalla
sua storia anagrafica, deve essere incasellato
nella sua “etnia”. Di qui le orride prescrizioni
“interculturali”, che imboccano la via opposta
a quella più naturale e giusta: spiegare
ai bambini che lo chiamano scimmia, che siamo
tutti esseri umani, spiegare le cause che
producono certe differenziazioni somatiche,
e altre differenze di altro genere, mostrarne
l’inessenzialità rispetto a ciò che ci accomuna.
E’ davvero impossibile spiegare a un bambino
che le razze non esistono, smantellare i
pregiudizi pseudo-scientifici che ci si sono attaccati
addosso come concrezioni? Non è così
difficile. Quantomeno, se si crede ancora
alla possibilità dell’“insegnamento”, non ridotto
alla trasmissione di formulette miserande
da bazar della subcultura.
Parlavamo di concrezioni difficili da scalfire.
Ci si provi a dire “apertis verbis” in pubblico
che le razze non esistono. Ci si troverà
di fronte a reazioni tra lo scandalizzato e lo
stupefatto, anche da parte di persone moderate,
aperte, “progressiste”. Ti dicono: “Ma
come! Non è un dato di fatto che io sono bianco
e quelli sono neri come la pece, e quegli
altri gialli col naso schiacciato?” Devi spiegargli,
contrastando mille pregiudizi, che la
gamma dei colori che puoi trovare nel mondo
è praticamente infinita, un continuo, che
la gamma delle forme dei nasi è infinita, e così
via; devi spiegargli che è impossibile fondare
le differenze su basi genetiche. Quasi tre
secoli di pregiudizi razziali, sostenuti da
un’autorità “scientifica” che non era altro
che un cumulo di assunti ideologici, ci hanno
lasciato in eredità una crosta spessa di pregiudizi
straordinariamente difficile da scalfire:
nel perverso intreccio tra antropologia fisica
e genetica delle popolazioni si è fondato
un complesso dottrinario che si è ammantato
di vesti “scientifiche” mentre non era altro
che un conglomerato di preconcetti. Tanto
più è necessario impugnare lo scalpello, invece
di ricominciare a imboccare sentieri
perversi già funestamente percorso con il
concetto di razza.
Dovrebbe essere superfluo dire che il concetto
di “identità” non ha in sé nulla di negativo.
Al contrario. Non vi è mai stato nulla di
creativo nella storia dell’umanità che non sia
stato connesso all’affermarsi di identità, e
spesso di identità forti. Con il che non s’intende
certo identità “pure”: dovrebbe essere
superfluo dirlo, ma purtroppo non è così. L’identità
culturale dell’uomo rinascimentale
non era altro che un conglomerato di apporti
e recuperi culturali fra i più lontani e disparati,
ma sintetizzati da una visione forte e
proiettata verso un fine ben definito. Una società
vitale – anzi, una società degna di questo
nome – deve avere come perno un’identità
dominante capace di orientarne lo sviluppo
e stabilire i principi della convivenza civile.
Questa identità dominante non deve essere
sentita come qualcosa di chiuso, di esclusivo,
o addirittura proteso a sanzionare la contrapposizione
dell’“uno” contro l’“altro”; deve
essere un’identità aperta, inclusiva, che
propone il proprio modello in modo tollerante
e rispettoso, tendente a dissolvere i fattori
di contrapposizione e ostilità. La forza di un’identità
aperta e vitale sta proprio nel non
aver bisogno di caratterizzarsi in senso negativo,
ovvero sulla sola base della sua diversità
dagli “altri”. Il multiculturalismo ha invece
come pilastro la contrapposizione fra il “noi”
e il “voi”, e quindi, sotto lo schermo di un sorriso
tollerante e buono, cristallizza una divisione
irriducibile. Al contrario, un’identità vitale
si fonda soprattutto su principi e ideali
solidi da proporre e propugnare e attorno ai
quali federare una società. Per questo il multiculturalismo
alligna soprattutto nelle università
dell’occidente e dilaga in Europa: perché
è il simbolo di un’identità che non crede
più in se stessa e nella propria capacità di
proporre prospettive e ideali e ripiega verso
la visione di una società segmentata e divisa
in aree comunitarie che dovrebbero rispettarsi
a vicenda quanto più non interferiscono
e finiscono, com’è naturale, con l’odiarsi. Tanto
più che oggi, fra queste identità, ne emerge
una – l’integralismo islamico – che si pretende
forte e capace di riempire tutti gli spazi
lasciati liberi. Tariq Ramadan l’ha detto
chiaramente: solo l’islam è capace di riempire
il vuoto spirituale e ideale dell’Europa.
Che risponde a questa sfida con la miseria
multiculturalista, ovvero accettando di fatto
questi propositi e tutte le loro conseguenze.
L’occidente è solo questo?
Ma è proprio vero che l’identità europea
non ha più nulla da dire, se non acconciarsi,
con il multiculturalismo, alla deriva verso
quello che ci ha prospettato la recente esperienza
francese, verso quel che aveva previsto
Lévi-Strauss nel 1971, “tensioni tali che gli
odii razziali offriranno una misera immagine
del regime di intolleranza esacerbata che rischia
di instaurarsi, senza che le differenze
etniche debbano neppure servirgli di pretesto”?
Lo si può ammettere soltanto accodandosi
alla corrente egemone di quella cultura
accademica europea e statunitense che ha
fatto delle teorie di Edward Said il proprio
vangelo. Dobbiamo ammettere, con Said, che
l’identità europea e occidentale sia stata una
semplice costruzione basata sulla contrapposizione,
all’“altro”, all’orientale; e quindi che
sia stata soltanto orientalismo? Dobbiamo
quindi ammettere che, poiché l’orientalismo
sarebbe stato il motore dell’imperialismo e
del razzismo europeo, l’identità occidentale
è nient’altro che imperialismo e razzismo, e
che, dietro le parvenze di un falso umanesimo,
tutte quelle costruzioni che riteniamo come
grandi realizzazioni dell’identità europea,
siano soltanto orrore? Colonialismo, razzismo,
imperialismo: questo sarebbe l’occidente,
e nient’altro? Buona parte della cultura
occidentale si è accodata dietro queste teorie
per coltivare quel che François Furet ha
chiamato l’“odio di sé”. E’ una letteratura vastissima.
In fondo, “Impero” di Negri e “Guerra”
di Asor Rosa non sono altro che un commento
a Said. E ad essa non vale opporre una
sorta di controcanto a Said, come fanno semplicisticamente
Buruma e Margalit nel loro
“Occidentalismo”, senza mai spiegare cosa di
quella tradizione possa ritenersi valido.
Sono teorie che vanno respinte in primo
luogo perché costrutti ideologici senza serio
fondamento storico. E, in secondo luogo, perché
l’identità europea ha avuto qualcosa di
positivo e vitale da proporre indipendentemente
dal suo definirsi contro l’“altro”.
Non nascondiamocelo. La ricerca delle
“radici” ha sempre qualcosa di equivoco. Il
Soldati italiani
Ma cosa si saranno detti i piloti
che bombardavano Belgrado:
“Poverini, li abbiamo centrati”?
Chiesa catodica
A Bologna va in onda la storia
del Concilio Vaticano II rivista da
Melloni con gli occhi della Rai
rifiuto della caricatura tragico-comica della
storia dell’occidente che ci forniscono i multiculturalisti
non può consistere in una rivendicazione
di bandiera delle glorie del
passato. Non ci stancheremo di ripeterlo: sarebbe
un errore tragico impigliarsi in un’impossibile
tentativo di assoluzione degli autentici
e indiscutibili orrori della storia europea.
Ma sarebbe altrettanto folle dimenticare
che, se le religioni monoteiste hanno
avuto il torto enorme di essersi arrogate il diritto
di imporre con la forza il loro messaggio,
nondimeno è nella tradizione ebraica e cristiana
che si è affermata l’idea della dignità
dell’uomo, del rispetto della persona, una visione
umanistica improntata all’idea di progresso.
Né sarebbe saggio dimenticare che
non è stato un torto, bensì un merito, dell’Illuminismo
aver propugnato sul terreno “laico”,
più precisamente “non religioso”, quelle
idee e quelle visioni, di averle tradotte in
principi della convivenza associata, persino
sotto forma costituzionale. E’ stato suo torto
piuttosto quello di pretendere di costituire
una dottrina dell’uomo su basi scientifiche,
cristallizzando in tipi (o razze) ben definiti i
gruppi umani da “emancipare”; di aver preteso
di definire le modalità scientifiche per
redimere i popoli in stato provvisorio di inferiorità.
Quando l’Abbé Grégoire scriveva, nel
1789, il suo saggio sulla “rigenerazione fisica,
morale e politica degli ebrei” mescolava un
sentimento indiscutibilmente nobile – e che,
non a caso, convinse gran parte degli ebrei
d’Europa ad assimilarsi alla cultura dominante
– con una pericolosa caratterizzazione
fisica e morale del “tipo” ebraico. Noi non risponderemo,
con il multiculturalista, che l’ebreo
andava lasciato nel ghetto (sia pure un
ghetto dorato). Diremo al contrario che una
visione umanistica è incompatibile con qualsiasi
cristallizzazione delle differenze e che
quindi bisogna ricominciare da dove si è sbagliato,
con un’opera di resezione e ripensamento
di quei principi che la civiltà europea
ha offerto come base di ogni possibile convivenza
civile, ancor oggi validi.
Non può essere compito di un articolo neppure
abbozzare questa opera di resezione.
Ma appare evidente come vada gettato lo
sguardo in quell’infernale intreccio di reazioni
e controreazioni che si è prodotto, a partire
dall’inizio dell’Ottocento, tra scientismo
e romanticismo e che ha finito col porre al
centro un’unica sciagurata posta in gioco: la
rigenerazione totale dell’uomo, la palingenesi
della società e dell’umanità, in contrapposizione
a una visione realista e tollerante delle
vicende umane. Un ideale palingenetico
oscillante tra la pretesa di una ricostruzione
scientifica dell’uomo e della società e quella
del ritorno alle radici di un’umanità perduta
e incorrotta, mito inesistente il secondo quanto
è irrealizzabile il primo, entrambi fonte
delle tragedie del Novecento.
L’umanesimo non è di moda
Un ritorno a una visione umanistica è
quindi l’unica via di rigenerazione di un’identità
europea altrimenti destinata a essere
stritolata tra la guerra di civiltà che le è stata
dichiarata e il suo odio di sé: una visione
umanistica che ha saputo coniugare un progetto
di conoscenza e di progresso con il principio
della dignità dell’uomo ispirato ai principi
ebraici e cristiani. L’umanesimo non è di
moda. Alain Finkielkraut, nel suo ottimo
“Nous autres modernes” ricorda alcuni passi
del “De dignitate hominis” di Pico della
Mirandola, e individua nell’idea dell’assenza
di limiti per l’uomo il principio che ci ha condotto
a “triturare, suturare e persino sostituire
la natura” e che ci ha posto di fronte a
un’alternativa tra natura e libertà che ci fa
scoprire oggi la necessità dei limiti, alla constatazione
che “i fondamenti biologici dell’esistenza
non debbono essere totalmente a disposizione
dell’uomo, se vuole preservare le
sue speranze di essere libero”. L’idea dell’onnipotenza
è un prodotto della metafisica
cartesiana posta a fondamento della scienza.
Essa è conseguenza della concezione secondo
cui la natura è soltanto una macchina, i
cui principi di funzionamento sono assoluti e
immutabili: essi sono stati stabiliti da Dio una
volta per tutte, dopo di che egli si è ritirato
dal mondo e l’ha abbandonato al suo funzionamento
autonomo. Soltanto l’esilio di Dio
dal mondo poteva concedere all’uomo l’onnipotenza
assoluta, la facoltà di conoscere senza
confini e di manipolare la natura senza limiti.
Questa visione non appartiene all’umanesimo.
Al contrario, il cartesianesimo ha voluto
combattere radicalmente le concezioni
umanistico-rinascimentali, imputando loro la
colpa di una visione monistica del mondo.
Quando Pico della Mirandola afferma che
l’uomo è libero e non ha limiti, mette in luce
soltanto un dato di fatto. Ed è un fatto a noi
reso lampante dagli sviluppi più recenti della
tecnoscienza (cui allude Finkielkraut), che
mirano a toccare il fondo stesso della natura
umana e non conoscono limiti alle loro ambizioni
prometeiche. Osservare il dato di fatto
di questa libertà non significa giustificarne
tutti i possibili esercizi. Pico – esponente
di una visione che mira a riconciliare il razionalismo
greco con lo spiritualismo e la teologia
cristiani ed ebraici – afferma che questa
libertà è stata concessa all’uomo da Dio,
ma che essa non implica di per sé un esito benefico:
“Potrai degenerare in forme inferiori
come quelle delle bestie, o, rigenerato, avvicinarti
alle forme superiori, che sono divine”.
E così ricorda che questa è l’alternativa che
l’uomo ha di fronte e su cui si misura la sua
capacità di scegliere la via per migliorarsi,
oppure la via per ridursi a uno stato bestiale,
credendo che la libertà si realizzi abbattendo
ogni limite, e in tal modo perdendola.
Giorgio Israel

Kasherut of Fruits and Vegetables

2005-12-05T01:56:00.000-08:00

KASHRUT OF FRUITS & VEGETABLES
INFO | WASHING | TITHING | ORLAH | SCHMITTA

<http://www.kashrut.com/consumer/vegetables/#ORLAH>

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Not Your Father's Talmud: July 2005

2005-12-05T01:31:00.000-08:00

ARE GENETICALLY ENGINEERED FOODS IN ACCORD WITH JEWISH LAW?

2005-12-05T01:25:00.000-08:00

In recent years, the biotechnology industry has launched a massive enterprise to genetically reconfigure a large portion of the world�s food supply. Hundreds of genetically altered crops and animals are being developed in laboratories, and already several varieties of such foods are on grocery shelves (unlabeled). In most cases, biotechnicians transpose a gene from one species into organisms of another to endow them with a trait they do not ordinarily possess (e.g. human growth gene into salmon to increase their size; flounder gene into beets to make them cold resistant; bacterial gene into corn and potatoes to make them pesticidal). Because this technology is growing so rapidly, because it could in many respects be irreversible, and because an increasing number of Jews (including many rabbis) are concerned that its products are unkosher, it is important there be a comprehensive examination of genetically engineered food in relation to Halakha so that, if necessary, prompt action can be taken to secure labeling and protect Jews from being unknowingly subjected to a broad influx of these altered foods.

From the perspective of Jewish law, there are two basic questions regarding genetically reconfigured foods, the second more general than the first.

Question #1: Do foods that are ordinarily kosher become unkosher when implanted with genes from unkosher animals?

Question #2: In the context of food production, does the artificial transfer of genetic material between species that are naturally prevented from crossbreeding constitute a violation of Halakha (even if both species are kosher)?

<http://www.biointegrity.org/Halakha.html>

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The grafted etrog

2005-12-04T00:28:00.000-08:00

Grafting, a widespread agricultural procedure, involves attaching a branch of a certain tree to a tree of a different species. It is particularly common to graft branches taken from cultivated trees onto wild trees, which are considered agriculturally stronger and more immune to botanical disease. Over the course of many generations, people would commonly graft branches of etrog trees onto lemon trees. We refer to an etrog grown in this manner as "etrog ha-murkav," or a "grafted etrog."

The Gemara never addresses the suitability of such an etrog for the mitzva of the four species on Sukkot. Nor do we find any Rishonim who address the issue. The discussions concerning this issue begin to appear only in the last several centuries. The Acharonim dealt with this question at length and gave different reasons to disqualify an etrog ha-murkav from use on Sukkot. We may classify all the different reasons under two general categories:

A) We disqualify the etrog because the identity of its species.

B) The etrog is invalid because of the prohibition that had been violated through the grafting procedure.

<http://216.239.59.104/search?q=cache:_ZYQJr-oSCUJ:www.vbm-torah.org/sukkot/suk64rya.htm+graft+species+torah+halakha&hl=en>

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The Tale of the etrog - Archives: Jerusalem Post

2005-12-03T15:53:00.000-08:00

Tracing the saga of the Succot fruit all the way back to its Far East roots. Ari Greenspan is a dentist in Jerusalem and Ari Zivotofsky teaches neuroscience at Bar Ilan University. Together they have been "halachic adventurers" for over 20 years.
[Table]
It should be simple. The holiday of Succot approaches and you
buy the four species mandated by the Torah. The lulav (palm
branch) with its accompanying willow and myrtle stems are easily
chosen. But choosing the etrog is an entirely different matter.
For the most mehudar (exquisite) etrog, you need to spend time
studying the hundreds of yellow lemon-like fruits at your local
etrog dealer. Who would have thought that behind this fine,
fragrant, and beautiful fruit is a history of political intrigue,
worldwide business domination, and acerbic religious disputes that
left a sour taste in the mouths of many?
The phrase used by the Torah to describe the etrog is pri etz
hadar or "the fruit of a beautiful tree" (Lev. 23:40). Modern
Hebrew for all fruit of the citrus family (lemon, orange, etc.) is
"hadar."
The oral tradition from Sinai is very clear: the fruit we take
today and have used for thousands of years is the etrog, or
citron, known scientifically as Citrus Medica, (because of its
medicinal uses, or Citrus Media, attributed to its Persian
origin).
The etrog is also called "Adam's apple," or "paradise apple,"
and is one of the suggested candidates for the fruit of the Tree
of Knowledge in the Garden of Eden.
That was all fine and dandy for Jews living in the Holy Land
and Persia, where the etrog was well-established. Prof. Ari
Schaffer of the Volcani Institute for Agricultural Research in
Beit Dagan cites Maimonides's thesis presented in his Guide for
the Perplexed that the Torah's mandate of these particular four
species is that "they were plentiful in those days in Eretz
Yisrael, so that everyone could easily get them."
Schaffer also notes that the etrog specifically fulfills the
symbolic role of the plant growing largely on the coastal plains
of Israel and demanding much water, as part of the ritual of the
four species which represent water-loving plants in the various
ecological habitats of Israel (palm - desert; willow - river beds;
myrtle - mountains; etrog - plains).
The etrog was unique in the ancient period as a tree that
required intense irrigation (hadar was even interpreted in the

Talmud as "hydro," the water tree), unlike native Israeli fruit trees such as the fig, date, grape, and pomegranate.
[Table]
This ritual coincides with the other water rituals of Succot,
including the water libations, because both thanks and prayers are
specifically offered for rain during this period.
In fact, the history of the citrus fruit has its roots in the
Far East. Botanical historians followed the etrog from its origins
in the Far East westward. Jewish tradition holds that the etrog
was transmitted from father to son from the time of the giving of
the Torah.
One thing is sure: by the time of Alexander the Great in 332
BCE, it was well-rooted as the first citrus fruit in the western
world. The fruit is described in detail by the great Greek
naturalist Theophrastus, a contemporary of Alexander, and extolled
for its medicinal value as well as its fragrance.
The Jews, however, constantly used it on the joyous holiday of
Succot. An unusual event occurred during the Simchat Bet
Hasho'eva, the joyous celebration of water libation during the
intermediate days of the holiday.
During the first century BCE, Alexander Yanai, the sixth and
last of the Maccabean ruler high priests, had angered the Pharisee
population by his Hellenized, military behavior. The outrage at
this soldier priest climaxed when he brazenly expressed Sadducee
beliefs by pouring the water libation on his feet (Succah 4:9),
and he was pelted with etrogim by the multitudes gathered on the
Temple Mount in Jerusalem.
With the dispersion of the Jews to the four corners of the
earth, the heretofore unknown fruit went with them. For why would
a fruit with almost no pulp, little known benefit, that needs
copious quantities of water and care, and that is particularly
fragile find itself being grown in orchards on the perimeter of
the Mediterranean Sea?
It was clearly to enable the fulfillment of the precept
commanded in the Torah. It appears in the Peloponnesus (southern
Greece) and Mauritania in the first and second centuries. From
Israel westward we find it transplanted to Egypt, Libya, Tunisia
and Morocco. Going north, it was dispersed to Lebanon, Syria,
Greece and Italy.
Jewish art and coins
We find numerous examples of the etrog on mosaic floors and
frescoed walls of synagogues from the Roman and Byzantine period.
Sometimes it appears with the lulav and other times alone.
It's such an important Jewish icon that it is also found on
numerous coins of the Great Revolt in the year 66 CE, and is a
common theme on the coins of the Bar Kochba rebellion of 132-135
CE. In fact, its appearance in non- Jewish art is considered to be
a sign of Judaizing influences. Even the well-known belt or
"gartle" around the middle of the fruit which is especially chosen
by many hassidim can be seen to be prevalent 2,000 years ago,
based on depictions on coins of the first and second centuries,
as well as various synagogue mosaics.
The "gartle" can already be observed on the fruitlet only days
after the flower opens, and is caused by the ring of anthers in
the flower physically constricting the fruitlet, much like a
rotund hassid tying a gartle around his belly.
One of the most interesting testimonies from a Bar Kochba
period coin is the representation of the Four Species showing a
single etrog, a single lulav, a single willow branch and a single
myrtle branch, rather than the two willows and three myrtles we
are accustomed to. This is in accordance with the opinion of Rabbi
Akiva, Bar Kochba's supporter, that "just as the etrog and lulav
are single, so too are the willow and myrtle."
The use by Bar Kochba of the etrogim on his rebellion coins is
all the more poignant when we discover that one of the very few
letters found intact in the caves of the Judean desert by Yigal
Yadin was written by Bar Kochba himself, and deals with his army
and its supply difficulties.
"Shimon to Yehudah Bar Menashe: Kiryat Arabaya. I have sent two
donkeys. You shall send two men with them to Yehonatan bar Be'ayan
and to Masabla. They shall pack and bring back to you palm
branches and etrogim. You should send others from your place to
bring back myrtles and willows. See that they are tithed. Send
them all to my camp. Our army is large. Peace."
High finance and the etrog
It would seem that as long as Jews stayed in the moderate
climate on the shores of the Mediterranean, there was no
difficulty obtaining etrogim for the holiday. As people moved
north into France, Germany, Poland and Russia, however, the
temperature-sensitive tree could not exist and tremendous problems
ensued. In fact, the halachic literature is replete with cases of
only one etrog being available to fulfill an entire community's
need.
The commercial aspect regarding the Jews' willingness to buy
these fruits at any price was not lost on the non- Jews. In 1329,
victorious Guelph Florence prohibited the republic of Pisa from
engaging in the etrog trade, keeping the lucrative business for
itself. Empress Maria Theresa (mid-18th century) demanded a huge
annual tax of 40,000 florins from the Jews of Bohemia for the
right to import their etrogim.
The local Jewish community was often in charge of etrogim
sales, and a small tax was levied in order to help with communal
expenses. The fledgling Ashkenazi community of Jerusalem in the
first half of the 19th century was prohibited from engaging in the
etrog trade.
One of the early etrog dealers in Palestine to break the
Sephardic monopoly was Rabbi Yaakov Sapir, for whom the Jerusalem
Hills moshav Even Sapir is named. He describes how "when I came
from the holy city of Tzfat, may it be rebuilt, to Jerusalem, the
holy city, may it be rebuilt, in the year 1835, the entire
business was in the hands of the Sephardic community. A great
rabbi, who was in charge of the fund, would send two people in the
month of Av every year, who were born in Israel, to bring the
necessary number of erogim. In those days, 500 etrogim was more
than enough."
Grafted etrogim
The etrog tree is very delicate, requiring constant care. It
starts to bear fruit after about five years, but because it is
vulnerable to a number of diseases, particularly those of the root
system, they rarely live more than 10 or 15 years.
The solution is to graft an etrog onto a base of another citrus
tree, most often a lemon tree, thus using the hearty base of the
lemon to nourish the etrog.
A grafted-citron tree, known as a murkav, has a life expectancy
of 30 to 35 years, is more durable, and requires less care. After
just a few years, the place where the two trees were joined
becomes difficult to detect, and it is then virtually impossible
to determine if a tree is pure or grafted. At times the graft

union is below ground level, adding difficulty to the diagnosis.

No mention is made in the Talmud, early commentators,
[Table]
Maimonides, or even the Shulchan Aruch about the halachic status
of a grafted etrog, despite the fact that the technique of
grafting was known from before the talmudic period.
Not only were they familiar with the general principal of
grafting, but Maimonides even discusses grafting etrogim, albeit
not in the context of Succot but rather related to the pagan
rituals that often accompanied the grafting procedure.
This silence by the rabbis on the suitability of murkav fruit
may be because they did not commonly graft etrogim, possibly
because there were not yet any other citrus plants in Israel on
which to graft them, since the second citrus fruit to be
introduced into the Middle East, the lemon, makes its appearance
only in the Middle Ages. Or the omission may be because such an
etrog would actually not have been problematic in their eyes.
The first discussion of a concern over an etrog murkav is by
scholars of the Holy Land and Italy in the 16th century, who
probably personally witnessed what was by then a widespread
procedure. Rabbi Meir Katzenellenbogen, known as the Maharam
mi'Padua (1482-1565, Padua, Italy) and Rabbi Moshe Alshich (1508-
ca. 1593 Safed), a student of Rabbi Joseph Karo, the author of the
Shulchan Aruch, or Code of Jewish Law, were among the first to
discuss and prohibit the grafted etrog.

Although these are the earliest recorded prohibitors, from
[Table]
these sources it is clear that the phenomenon already had
established roots, positions on its use were known, and most
likely the use of such etrogim was widespread.
Over the centuries, while it was generally held that a murkav
was unacceptable, the search for a reason offered fertile ground
for a plethora of suggestions as to its invalidation.
Some of these reasons are:
1. Due to the fact that the fruit must be whole and not missing
a piece (chaser), the grafted etrog is considered as being
partially from each fruit and therefore not complete.
2. Possibly the identity of a fruit is determined by the trunk
of the tree on which it appears, meaning that a grafted etrog is
not even considered to be an etrog but rather a lemon.

3. Because the fruit consists partially of a lemon, using it
[Table]
for the mitzvah entails adding an additional species, which
violates the prohibition of bal tosif (adding onto mitzvot).
4. Interspecies grafting of any kind is a biblical prohibition,
and using the progeny of an illicit act for a mitzvah is
"repugnant to God."
Most authorities are willing to apply this rationale even if
the grafting was done by non-Jews. However, it is actually not
clear whether the etrog and lemon are in fact considered distinct
species according to halakha.
Over the past few hundred years, following the prohibition of
grafted etrogim, various physical, botanical characteristics have
been proposed to distinguish between the grafted and pure etrog:
the murkav is smooth like the lemon, while the etrog is rough and
bumpy; the grafted etrog has a protruding stem, while the pure one
has a recessed stem; the real etrog has a very thick skin and
almost no pulp, while the grafted one has a thin skin like the
lemon and a liquidy pulp; finally, the pure citron has seeds that
lie longitudinally (i.e. parallel to the long axis), while in the
murkav the seeds lie latitudinally (horizontally).
The important 19th-century authority, the Chatam Sofer, greatly
minimized the utility of these late, non- Talmudic signs.
In lieu of anatomical markers to identify an ungrafted etrog,
he demanded the existence of an unbroken mesorah, tradition, as is
required in order to identify kosher birds. He did, however, grant
weight to two other signs that have their roots in the Talmud. The
etrog is described as the only tree in which the fruit and the
tree have the same taste. In addition, the etrog is considered
unique in that the fruit will stay on the tree past its "season"
and continue to grow and thrive year-round.

Prof. Eliezer Goldschmidt of The Hebrew University of
[Table]
Jerusalem's faculty of agricultural, food, and environmental
quality sciences, and a world expert on etrogim, has studied the
history of the etrog as well as the morphological and genetic
effects of grafting. He concludes that genetically, grafting has
no effect on the etrog fruit, and that the fruit growing on a
branch of the etrog scion (the stem portion of the tree) will
remain the same etrog irrespective of the tree used as the stock
(the root portion of the grafted tree).
Interestingly, some of the most recent scientific research in
the field of plant molecular biology suggests that in certain
cases there can actually be a transfer of genetic material across
graft unions in plants. But nevertheless, from a scientific view,
a grafted etrog has the same makeup as a non-grafted one.
The etrog wars
As the Jewish population of northern Europe proliferated, the
need to import etrogim from far away, namely the Italian and Greek
coasts and neighboring islands, grew, and the possibility of graft
increased. In fact, the non-Jewish merchants understood the
fortunes that could be made, and actually turned the grafted
etrogim into an exquisitely beautiful fruit.
The unparalleled experts were the islanders of Corfu.
No one knows exactly when etrog orchards first started in
Corfu, but the Corfu etrog appears to have first been sold in
Sephardic lands in the mid-18th century. By the last decades of
the 18th century, these beautiful etrogim were introduced to the
Ashkenazim.
Corfu etrogim were characterized by their stunning appearance,
relatively steep price, and by the retained stigma (pitam), taken
by many as a sign that they had been grafted. This led to
questions regarding their fitness.
Not everyone, however, agreed that a murkav is unkosher. The
Hungarian rabbi Meir ben Isaac (b. 1708), in his work Panim
Me'irot, concludes that since a murkav has all the properties of a
pri etz hadar it should be kosher. The Rashban (Rabbi Shlomo Tzvi
Schick) permitted buying etrogim of questionable lineage from the
local etrog merchant, a widow, because supporting her is a greater
hiddur than the fear of grafted etrogim.
Throughout the first half of the 19th century, Corfu etrogim
were widely distributed and, for many, were the preferred variety.
A large number of Sephardic rabbis were wary of the potential for
fraud but accepted etrogim from Corfu as long as they had local
rabbinic validation.
In Poland and Lithuania, there was also widespread use of the
Corfu etrog, although the rabbinic reaction was mixed, but rarely
equivocal. People either preferred the Corfu beauty and were
willing to pay the premium price or held it to be part lemon and
invalidated it totally.
In 1846, all heck broke loose, and what would be probably the
most ferocious and acrimonious halachic debate of 19th-century
Europe burst forth. This fascinating piece of Jewish history was
the subject of a recent in-depth study by Prof. Yosef Salmon of

Ben Gurion University.

Behind the initial salvo was Alexander Ziskind Mintz, a learned
[Table]
resident of Brody who earned his livelihood from selling etrogim.
He had actually achieved a monopoly the previous year on citrons
from Parga on the Ionian coast of Greece, near Corfu.
He published a booklet titled Pri Etz Hadar that prohibited the
etrogim of Corfu and the surrounding areas such as the Albanian
coast. It seems that a former partner of his had broken off and
set up shop in these new areas. In order to stop him, Mintz
solicited and received the support of many of the great rabbis of
the time, all of whom were included in this slender volume. Their
claim was that the exceptional beauty of the Corfu fruit was
actually what damned it. A real etrog could never be as perfect as
a grafted one. In parallel, a minor brouhaha erupted over the
etrogim from Corsica that were also suspected of being grafted.

The chief rabbi of Corfu, Rabbi Yehudah Bibias, countered that
[Table]
he had personally checked the local etrogim and they were not
grafted. Furthermore, he argued that grafting in the warm climate
of Corfu is actually detrimental to the fruit.
Numerous rabbis lined up behind the Corfu etrogim, as did many
consumers who continued to prefer the attractive Corfu product.
From that time onwards, all etrogim were sold with rabbinic
supervision reading "kosher with no concern of being grafted." Yet
the argument persisted, engendering many letters and responses.
Fortunes hung in the balance. Various rabbinical prohibitions
over the years were either observed or ignored, but everybody
agreed on one thing - the beauty of the Corfu fruits was
unsurpassed.
The farmers of Corfu fought back, found supporters among the
Hassidim, and a number of times even dumped thousands of citrons
into the ocean to create a shortage to raise the price. The
temptation for a beautiful etrog was so great that despite the
rabbinic ban, Jews continued to purchase those etrogim.
In 1876, the debate was reignited with the publication of a
broadside signed by 117 Polish rabbis banning the Corfu etrog, and
so once again the rabbi of Corfu defended "his" product.
Two additional factors conspired to doom the Corfu etrog. In
1891 the Greek population of Corfu, never known for their love of
Jews, became involved in a blood libel. The Avnei Nezer wrote of
"the etrogim of Corfu that are in the hands of the uncircumcised
Greeks, known through their writings to be Amalekites, may their
names be erased."
From as far away as Newark, New Jersey, a call was issued to
ban Corfu etrogim. A broadside was issue there in 1892 which
described the importers of Corfu etrogim to the United States as

"traders in the blood of Israel" who, "since there is hardly a man in Europe who will touch them, bought these etrogim dripping with the blood of the children of Zion."
[Table]
The second factor was the Israeli etrog crop. There had always
been a small, local etrog industry in the Land of Israel. The
tradition on the kashrut of the etrogim from Tiberias, Safed,
Shechem and Jaffa was very old. Some of the orchards had been

planted by Rabbi Yosef Karo in Safed, some 300 years earlier.

In fact, Rabbi Chaim Wax, in his Nefesh Haya, published in the mid-19th century, tells us that the entire concern over grafted trees began from the year 1851.
[Table]
He writes: "Originally all of the land was under the control of
the Sultan, and nobody had the right to plant trees, and if he did
the extracts were the Sultan's. Who would plant a tree if one knew
the fruits would not be theirs? However, there was a garden

belonging to the king, and in it no falsity was practised. In 1851 though, permission was granted to plant trees if a tax was paid to the king, and since then there has been an increase in the fakers and grafters."
[Table]
The orchards in the Land of Israel were all in Arab hands, and
etrogim were relatively inexpensive. In the mid 19th century local
Sephardim entered the etrog trade, and soon thereafter the
Ashkenazim accused them of peddling grafted etrogim . The
Ashkenazim too started selling etrogim. After several decades of
bitter fighting, Israeli etrogim garnered the strong support of
chief rabbi Avraham Kook. Kook suggested raising kosher etrogim in
Israel, and making the Land the leading supplier of etrogim.

"The future, my brother, is with the kosher etrog, with the
[Table]
power of kashrut, and only with the kosher etrog will we win the
battle of those who are against us, the Corfu mamzer [etrogim]."
There was even a famous trip across Israel on donkey by the
leading rabbis of Jerusalem at the end of the 19th century in
search of non-grafted etrogim. The journey was described in all
the newspapers.
There is the quaint description of their sojourn among the Arab
orchardists, and how they dug around the base of the trees looking
for the graft scar. Originally the Israeli etrogim were of
significantly poorer quality, but Kook, in an effort to boost
sales, published a text extolling the virtues of using
specifically etrogim from the Land of Israel on Succot.
So too the famed Lithuanian authority Rabbi Yechiel Epstein
included in his Halakhic work, Aruch Hashulchan, a plug for
Israeli etrogim, not only because he said they are unquestionably
kosher, but because of the importance of buying from the Land of
Israel.
Rabbi Hezekiah Modena (19th century, Israel) writes: "If
Israel's etrogim are not the loveliest on earth, they will be the
loveliest in Heaven."
Over time, the Israeli etrog became "lovelier on earth," and
has won the etrog wars. Today Israel is the world's leading
supplier of etrogim for Succot, and most Jewish communities
worldwide pride themselves in using the holy fruit from the Holy
Land.
There are a few exceptions to this unifying theme of world
Jewish ritual usage. One interesting exception is the Chabad sect,
which adamantly uses etrogim of the Diamente variety from
Calabria, near the southern portion of the boot of Italy.
Schaffer relates that Chabad followers are known to pass on the
legend that when Moses received the commandment during the

wanderings through the desert to take the etrog, he naturally looked around the desolation around him, bewildered, and asked the Almighty, "From where am I supposed to take them?"
[Table]
And the Almighty took Moses upon a cloud and flew him around
the world until he landed in Calabria, where he picked the first
etrogim used by Jews for the ritual of Succot. And to this day
they preserve the custom of using Calabrian etrogim.
The modern etrog
Nothing, of course, will stop the bickering about whose etrog
is the genuine article, and today in Israel several "breeds" are
grown.
Some have posited that the "Yemenite etrog" is the closest to
the "original" fruit used by the Jews in days of old.
It is large, without pulp, and edible, indicating to its
supporters that the lemon has not been grafted with it. It is
still grown in the orchards of Yemen in the same primitive ways as
of old. Today, it is also cultivated by Jews of Yemenite ancestry
in Israel.
Others vote for the etrogim of the Atlas Mountains in Morocco,
grown by Berber tribesmen in primitive and ancient conditions.
Prof. Eliezer Goldschmidt pointed out in an article in T'chumin
that there is simply no way to tell if an etrog today is a
descendent of a grafted tree or one that naturally cross
pollinated years ago.
Nonetheless, he and his colleagues in a recent study compared
the DNA of 12 etrogim from a variety of sources and found great
similarities, indicating that "all the currently acknowledged
types of citrons appear to be 'true,' authentic citrons."
Despite the DNA evidence that these are all one species,
business is booming for all, as there are still buyers who prefer

only one of the various types.

4 photos; Caption: Yael Greenspan holds a fingered etrog in one hand and a large Yemenite etrog in the other. An Arab etrog salesman in the souk of Sanaa in Yemen. The authors, Ari Greenspan and Ari Zivotofsky pose with etrogim. A medieval Rothschild manuscript featuring a picture of a man holding the four species.

Credit: Ari Greenspan

Reproduced with permission of the copyright owner. Further reproduction or distribution is prohibited without permission.
People: Greenspan, Ari, Zivotofsky, Ari
Companies: Bar Kochba
Section: Features
Text Word Count 4167
Document URL:

<http://pqasb.pqarchiver.com/jpost/index.html?ts=1133653120>

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Jewish Perspectives on Genetic Engineering

2005-11-30T23:59:00.000-08:00

" against mixing different species even if it does not violate the letter of the law? There is disagreement among the sages as to whether the rationale behind the laws against interbreeding are within the realm of human comprehension or not. The classical commentator Rashi writes that as hukim, these laws are "decrees of the King"19 and are beyond any human comprehension. If we cannot understand the reasons for these prohibitions, then perhaps the ethical scope of these laws can be limited to the specific cases given in the Torah, just as the legal scope was limited in the discussion above. Nachmanides, on the other hand, believes that humans are capable of understanding, at least partially, the reasons for these laws. Nachmanides writes that one who mixes two different species is "changing and denying the Divine Creation of the world,"20 a sin that may well go beyond the scope of the halakhic prohibition given in the Torah.

Supporters of Nachmanides' position include the thirteenth century author of Sefer HaHinukh who writes on the prohibition of mixing species: "and all that G-d did is intended for the perfection of that which is needed in His world...and the species should not be mixed, lest it detract from the perfection and there will not be (G-d's) blessing."21 The eighteenth century German Rabbi Samson Raphael Hirsch writes in his commentary on the Bible:

[T]he Torah must consider this law (against mixing different species) which G-d implanted in the organic world of nature to be of the very highest importance for our human and Jewish calling, for it has interwoven consideration of it (the prohibition of mixing different species) in the whole of our life. Not only does it forbid us actual interference with this law by the prohibition of interbreeding animals and

<http://www.jcpa.org/art/jep2.htm>

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Occupazione legale, illegale, annessione

2005-11-29T12:56:00.000-08:00

>> Ho un dubbio però, web.
>> Credo che il discorso non valga se l'occupazione avviene in seguito ad
>> una aggressione. Confermi?
>>
>> Tb

In effetti i giuristi internazionali distinguono tra la conquista che
deriva da un'aggressione e una disputa territoriale che deriva da una
guerra di difesa. Stephen Schwebel, presidente della corte di
Giustizia Internazionale dell'Aja scriveva nel 1970 riguardo ad
Israele: "Quando il detentore precedente occupava i territori in modo
illegale, lo stato che li ha ripresi esercitando il diritto di
autodifesa ha le carte in regola per mantenere questi territori nei
confronti del precedente."

Su questa interpretazione ruota il problema. Ci si dimentica spesso che
nel 1948 nonostante una presa di posizione del Consiglio di Sicurezza
la Striscia di Gaza venne occupata dall'Egitto. Nel 1950 altrettanto
illegalmente la Giordania dichiarò l'annessione della Cisgiordania e di
Gerusalemme Est (annessione riconosciuta solo da Gran Bretagna e
Pakistan).

Ora secondo il diritto internazionale queste annessioni giordane ed
egiziane derivarono da una aggressione. Successivamente Israele nel
1967 a seguito di una guerra di aggressione conquistò quei territori
detenuti illegalmente da Giordania ed Egitto. In questosenso la Corte
di Giustizia Internazionale dell'Aja non ha mai condannato la presenza
israeliana nella Striscia di Gaza e a Gerusalemme Est.

Il fatto che questi territori all'epoca della conquista israeliana
fossero detenuti illegalmente da Egitto e Giordania ha un'altra
conseguenza: giuridicamente non si possono definire "territori
occupati" così come indicato dalla Quarta convenzione di Ginevra del
1949, Sezione III, articoli 47 e seguenti.
Ne consegue che i trasferimenti di popolazione e quant'altro non
ricadrebbero nella sfera di tutela della Convenzione stessa.

Dal 9 all'11 giugno 1998 dietro pressione della Confederazione Elvetica
(Custode delle Convenzioni) si è tenuta una riunione a porte chiuse a
Villa Sarasin vicino Ginevra per arrivare ad un accordo tra palestinesi
ed israeliani sull'estensione della Quarta Convenzione ai territori che
giuridicamente non vi ricadono. Non so bene come sia finita la storia
ma credo ci sia stato un arenamento. L'idea di base svizzera sarebbe
quella di riconoscere alla popolazione la protezione sancita dalla
Sezione III senza che ciò automaticamente costituisca un insostenibile
riconoscimento alla Cisgiordania e a Gerusalemme Est dello status di
territori occupati.

Per rispondere in modo diretto alla tua domanda: l'occupazione
giordano-egiziana di queiterritori era illegale. L'occupazione
israeliana è giuridicamente sotto il profilo del diritto internazionale
legale. Si potrebbe volendo prefigurare il diritto alla annessione.

(Diritto alla annessione che però non può prescindere in ogni caso dal
voto popolare. In altri termini chi annette deve istituire un libero
referendum. Un esempio di questa pratica è la battaglia giuridica di
alcune organizzazioni hawaiane che contestano l'annessione USA per un
esisiale vizio di forma nel referendum. In base a questo vizio
sembrerebbe invalida l'annessione stessa)

just my cent

NB. Testo italiano della Quarta convenzione a
http://it.wikisource.org/wiki/Quarta_convenzione_di_Ginevra

Comunicato stampa dei colloqui di Villa Sarasin a
http://www.admin.ch/cp/d/1998Jun12.174251.9541@idz.bfi.admin.ch.html

Israele dal Mediterraneo al Giordano

2005-11-29T10:15:00.000-08:00

"Due popoli due stati" è bello, scalda il cuore, quando lo dici sei
dalla parte giusta. Ma e' anche, davvero, la soluzione migliore? Parliamone.

Su altri ng e su altri giornali si discutono senza problemi anche
soluzioni OT, cioè antisioniste, come uno stato unico, non più ebraico,
binazionale. O addirittura uno stato arabo, punto e basta.

Ecco una proposta alternativa a "due popoli due stati", che partendo da
alcune novità nell'analisi demografica, prevede uno stato unico,
ebraico, con diritti democratici per tutti.

Politicamente scorretto, ma credo non OT.

--------------------------------------------------------------

http://www.israpundit.com/archives/2005/11/israel_from_the_1.php#more

Il presidente Moshe Katzav in una recente intervista ha sottolineato che
le prossime elezioni saranno un referendum sui confini di Israele

[...]

In effetti tutti i partiti sono pronti a ritirarsi in vari gradi e con
differenti condizioni. Il Labor e Kadima accettano la soluzione "due
stati" della Roadmap, mentre il Likud dichiara di farlo, fiducioso che
le condizioni saranno impossibili da raggiungere.

Il desiderio del ritiro è guidato da una largamente diffuso mito
demografico secondo cui gli arabi superano gli ebrei a ovest del
Giordano. Quasi tutti sono ignari di uno studio demografico
<http://www.pademographics.com/> completato quest'anno secondo cui ci
sono solo 1.4 milioni di arabi in Giudea e Samaria dei quali si stima
che tra 100 e 300 mila si siano già infiltrati in Israele. Se Israele
annettesse questi territori, gli ebrei costituirebbero il 67% della
popolazione. Una percentuale che è costante dal 1967.

Inoltre, nell'abbracciare la soluzione "due stati" nessuno sembra
prendere in considerazione la incombente catastrofe demografica
successiva <http://www.israpundit.com/archives/2005/11/no_so_simple.php>:

"Una volta che uno stato provvisorio palestinese sia dichiarato sulla
West Bank, 500.000 arabi saranno immediatamente e facilmente assorbiti.
Come la popolazione araba in quello stato palestinese crescerà, gli
arabi israeliani vedranno il trend di lungo termine e la finale
supremazia demografica palestinese nell'area dal Giordano al mare e
cominceranno ad esercitare crescente pressione sul governo israeliano.
Ci saranno richieste di diritti particolari, il rifiuto dello stato
ebraico e laspettativa di essere identificati con fratelli e cugini
dall'altra parte della barriera monterà; l'identificazione col
nazionalismo palestinese, bandiera e inno, crescerà. L'attuale
infiltrazione di immigrati illegali crescerà."

"La richiesta che Israele rinunci ai territori conquistati con
"avventurismo militare e aggressione" si sentirà in tutto il mondo e
all'ONU. La linea verde sarà identificata non più come un confine
nazionale, ma solo come una linea armistiziale. Nessun trattato formale
ha mai riconosciuto e nessuno stato arabo ha mai accettato il diritto di
Israele ad esistere come stato ebraico. Nessuna entita palestinese ha
mai rinunciato alle rivendicazioni della sua parte del piano di
spartizione del 1947, se non a tuta la "Palestina". La comunità
internazionale, specialmente alla luce delle proteste di lungo corso
sull'espulsione dei civili dalle loro case nel 1948, deciderà di non
riconoscere più l'acquisizione di terre attraverso conquista militare.
La pressione su Israele perché ceda parti della Galilea e del Negev allo
stato palestinese, crescerà."

Riconoscendo tutto questo, il Dr. Micheal Wise, co-autore dello studio
demografico di cui sopra, ha proposto la soluzione di un solo stato
ebraico <http://www.onestateplan.com/>, da non confindere con lo statoo
secolare binazionale.

Secondo questo piano, Israele annetterebbe formalmente i territori a
ovest del Giordano con l'esclusione di Gaza e li renderebbe parte
integrale e irreversibile di Israele. Agli arabi residenti sarebbero
offerte opzioni di cittadinanza e/o residenza permanente, che andrebbero
in fase in un periodo di quindici anni, per permettere l'aggiustamento
della mentalità di una popolazione piuttosto ostile e facilitare una
transizione fluida. L'ANP sarebbe dissolta e tutti i membri delle
organizzazioni terroriste espulsi.

Wise arriva al punto di raccomandare un sussidio per tutti quelli che
scegliessero di emigrare.

Per stabilizzare ulteriormente le cose, Wise raccomanda una nuova
costituzione che formi un Senato, come negli USA, che comprenda 60
rappresentanti di 15 distretti, 4 dei quali a maggioranza araba e 11
prevalentemente ebraici. Proprio come negli USA, dove ogni stato ha una
popolazione variabile, non c'è alcun bisogno che i distretti siano
uguali in popolazione. Le materie di interesse nazionale richiederebbero
l'approvazione di entrambe le camere. La Knesset sarebbe ridotta a 60 seggi.

Per mettere in atto il piano, Israele dovrebbe:

-adottare una nuova costituzione
-annettere formalmente i territori
-smantellare l'ANP
-mettere fuori legge tutte le organizzazioni terroriste
-mettere fuori legge la propaganda al martirio
-smantellare e disarmare tutte le frze di sicurezza
-mettere fuori legge armi e munizioni private
-sostituire i libri di testo arabi
-fornire welfare agli arabi residenti (il che costerebbe meno dei 12
miliardi di dollari necessari a evacuare 80.000 israeliani)

I benefici di questo piano lo rendono di gran lunga preferibile
all'irrealizzabile soluzione dei "due stati".

<b> Messo semplicemente: concluderebbe l'ooccupazione, concluderebbe la
propaganda, concluderebbe la disputa sui confini e il bisogno di un
accordo su Gerusalemme, concluderebbe il conflitto che gli arabi
israeliani vivono in rapporto ai loro parenti in Giudea e Smaria,
risolverebbe il problema della realizzabilità e permetterebbe ad Israele
di partire per la costruzione di uno stato ebraico democratico, dal
Mediterraneo al Giordano </b>

IL BLOG DI TB
http://www.tonibaruch.blogspot.com/

Zeek | The Second Coming of Yeshayahu Leibowitz

2005-11-28T02:16:00.000-08:00

Leibowitz thought that peace was a very remote scenario. He believed that the concept of “land for peace” was flawed and untenable. Full and immediate withdrawal was an absolute necessity. Ideally, though wildly improbably, withdrawal might create the conditions necessary for a future peace. At the very least, though, it would allow Israel to retain the integrity of its democracy and spare Israeli society the ruinous ramifications of occupation.

According to Leibowitz, Israel’s security will come neither from the vision of wide borders—and is, in fact, weakened by the population that lives within these borders—nor will it come from half-baked “peace” schemes. He was, in effect, a leftist on territorial issues (with no patience for religious arguments) and a rightist on peace prospects. This bubbling brew of ideas is, in short, what characterizes the new Israeli center; it describes the fragile coalition that made the disengagement possible. And it’s likely that only someone as politically credible and shrewd as Sharon could have pulled it off. He was, after all, shrewd enough to appoint a Leibowitzian as his deputy.

<http://www.zeek.net/politics_05112.shtml>

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Jewish Fundamentalism in Israel

2005-11-27T02:25:00.000-08:00

<>Jewish fundamentalists in Israel are divided into two groups, the Haredim "the religiously more extreme group" and the "religious-national Jews," who constitute the "religiously more moderate" group. While the first group is itself divided into two groups, Yahadut Ha'Torah (for Ashkenazi Jews) and Shas (for the Mizrahim), the "moderate" religious-nationals are organized in the National Religious Party (NRP) (p. 7). The colonial-settler group Gush Emunim belongs to this second group. The two groups together constituted in 1996 almost a quarter of the Israeli Jewish electorate, winning 23 seats in the Knesset. Whereas the Haredim are non- or anti-Zionist, the religious-nationals are ultra-Zionist. The Haredim emerged in European Jewish history in response to "enlightenment" and have thus kept their circa-1850 dress (black hats and coats). The NRP Jews, who dress "in the more usual Israeli fashion" (p. 7), "made their compromises with modernity" (p. 8). These two groups, however, are not necessarily a united bloc as they fight with each other and among themselves.

<http://web.mit.edu/cis/www/mitejmes/issues/200105/br_massad.htm>

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Barenghi:è cambiata la sinistra o è cambiato sharon?

2005-11-25T23:22:00.000-08:00

Riporto da IPI un interessante articolo di r barenghi

Anticipo un giudizio più articolato: secondo me sharon è cambiato poco,
e non è cambiata molto nemmeno la sinistra.

Solo che sharon aveva visto giusto e ha vinto, la sinistra aveva
sbagliato molti giudizi e ha dovuto tornare sui suoi passi. Cosa che, va
detto a suo onore, ha saputo fare.

Ah, ed è morto arafat (ogni tanto si dimentica questo dettaglio)

------------------------

LA STAMPA
"Dall'odio all'amore per il falco Sharon"
Riccardo Barenghi
Dall’odio alla simpatia, in qualche caso addirittura all’amore. Il
rapporto tra la sinistra italiana e Sharon viene da lontano, da quando
l’attuale premier israeliano era un durissimo generale dell’esercito,
che aveva combattuto tutte le guerre e veniva accusato di diverse
stragi di civili, come quella nel villaggio di Qibya del 1953. Fino,
naturalmente al 1982 di Sabra e Chatila, quando un campo profughi di
palestinesi in Libano venne letteralmente raso al suolo dalle milizie
falangiste «coperte» dall’esercito di Tel Aviv, il cui ministro della
Difesa era appunto Sharon. E fino alla famosa o famigerata passeggiata
sulla spianata delle moschee, considerata la scintilla della seconda
Intifada, della reazione israeliana, del terrorismo palestinese, i
kamikaze sugli autobus, la repressione, l’assedio al quartier generale
di Arafat, la costruzione del Muro. Insomma, fino all’ultima,
sanguinosa e non ancora finita guerra tra israeliani e palestinesi.
Qui Sharon è un falco, un reazionario, un fascista, un guerrafondaio,
spesso anche un macellaio. Anche i settori della sinistra italiana più
moderati e più attenti al rapporto con lo stato di Israele (e con la
comunità ebraica in generale) non lo digeriscono, lo considerano un
ostacolo alla pace, sperano ancora nei laburisti di Peres, sostengono
sempre più tiepidamente Arafat considerando anche lui un ostacolo. Gli
altri, quelli più radicali, più filo-palestinesi (tra i quali non ci
sono solo Bertinotti, Diliberto, Pecoraro ma anche per esempio
D’Alema), di Sharon non vogliono neanche sentir parlare: sono convinti
che con lui non sia possibile discutere.
Nessuno si aspettava che nel giro di un paio d’anni, Sharon sarebbe
diventato un’altra persona. Non più macellaio ma leader politico,
interlocutore, uomo coraggioso, capace di scontrarsi con la sua ala
più oltranzista, di costringere i coloni – anche con la forza – ad
abbandonare Gaza. Capace, addirittura, di uscire dal suo partito
storico, il Likud, per fondarne un altro, più di centro, meno
estremista, subito ribattezzato il partito per la pace. Paradossi
della storia e della politica, un guerrafondaio che fonda un partito
per la pace, un nemico che diventa un compagno di strada. E’ cambiato
Sharon, è cambiata la sinistra, sono cambiati tutti e due? La risposta
giusta è la terza, anche se il cambiamento in percentuale più corposo
è ovviamente quello di Sharon. Capaci però, i leader della sinistra
italiana (non tutti ma molti), di coglierne il senso nel tempo giusto.
Anche prima del ritiro estivo da Gaza.
Siamo nel marzo scorso a Venezia, Bertinotti conclude il congresso di
Rifondazione comunista rivolgendosi a un ragazzo che poco prima aveva
urlato il suo odio per Sharon. Così: «Tu gridi contro Sharon, ti prego
di credere che lo saprei fare anch’io. Sabra e Chatila sono nella
nostra memoria, potrei parlarvi di persone oggi notissime che,
indignate contro Sabra e Chatila, uscirono dal Partito Comunista
perché non sufficientemente capace di condannare Sharon. Se volete
sapere il nome, si chiama Giuliano Ferrara. Questo per dire che io non
mi sono dimenticato di chi è Sharon. Ma ti chiedo: tu dove stai? I
leader palestinesi oggi negoziano con Sharon, trattano con Sharon
(...). Tu sei qui, non rischi nulla, perché devi mettere soltanto il
tuo urlo radicale contro Sharon dimenticandoti della fatica, della
sofferenza e del disagio di chi, avendo vissuto tutta la vita contro
quel muro e contro di lui, deve oggi trattare, perché la trattativa è
l’unica strada possibile per costruire il popolo palestinese?».
Una prova di realismo politico non indifferente, se fatta dal leader
della sinistra radicale nel congresso del suo partito, addirittura in
anticipo sul ritiro da Gaza che avrebbe scatenato l’entusiasmo di
molti altri (resistono i Comunisti di Diliberto e movimenti sparsi
nella sinistra). Tanto entusiasmo che un dirigente dei Ds come
Giuseppe Caldarola propose addirittura di assegnare il Nobel per la
pace all’ex «macellaio». Da allora e fino a ieri, gli apprezzamenti
per il nuovo Sharon si sono moltiplicati, e se lui vincerà le nuove
elezioni, darà vita a un governo di centro-sinistra e continuerà sulla
strada recentemente imboccata, si moltiplicheranno ancora. Tanto più
se e quando l’Unione sarà al governo, e con Sharon dovrà avere un
rapporto politico-istituzionale, da Stato a Stato. Chissà se allora
avrà avuto ragione il filopalestinese D’Alema quando ha azzardato un
pronostico: «Sharon può realmente proseguire il processo di pace
iniziato da Rabin».
--

TBLOG
http://www.tonibaruch.blogspot.com/

A gaza continua l'anarchia

2005-11-21T02:36:00.000-08:00

<a href="http://www.israelnationalnews.com/news.php3?id=93270">Da Arutz
Sheva:</a> Un diciassettenne ucciso durante gli scontri per il possesso
delle terre
di Gush Katif. Assalto a una stazione di polizia. Bande armate in libera
circolazione. Spari in aria durante il funerale, in violazione
dell'accordo che imponeva di non portare più armi in pubblico</p>

Raiquaz

2005-11-19T13:03:00.000-08:00

Raiquaz è il mio blog preferito

Tblog: Il Caso e chiuso?

2005-11-18T08:35:00.000-08:00

Tblog: Il Caso %uFFFDchiuso?