"Is There A Distinction In Your Mind Between Being A Jew & Being A Zionist?": A Famous British Rabbi's Reply

"Judaism Rejects Zionism" proclaims this poster held by a bunch of zealots from Neturei Karta, an organisation whose whacky and Jewishly unrepresentative stance has nevertheless given untold aid and comfort to Israel's enemies.

Cast as "useful idiots" in the anti-Israel cause, Neturei Karta's insistence that Judaism and Zionism are incompatible has been echoed by certain secular Jews to whom the inside of Jewish communal buildings, much less the inside of a synagogue, is unknown or virtually so.

And, with incredible chutzpah, the "Judaism Rejects Zionism" mantra has been taken up by anti-Israel activists who are neither Jews nor scholars of Judaism.

A British Methodist minister and blogger (whom I have had occasion to refer to here and here) yesterday put up a blogpost with the chutzpahdik title "How To Separate Jewishness From Zionism".

In a response to a comment made there by me he has written:

'"Zionism is integral to Judaism” is precisely the point that is being challenged here. I think. And the fact that Zionism co-existed with other perspectives within Judaism in the past rather proves the point. Doesn’t it?'

And in the wake of the following observation by an Orthodox Jerusalemite he's changed the title of the blogpost to "Is Zionism Integral To Judaism":

"'How to Separate Jewishness from Zionism” - how about “How to Separate Christianity from Christ”? Any more offensive than Richard’s title? Or any more ridiculous?'

Now, it so happens that, sifting through years of accumulated papers in preparation for what is emerging as the house move from hell, I've come across a pamphlet called Zionism Today in which a celebrated British rabbi of Orthodox principles explained how central Zionism and Israel are to the majority of Jews.

The pamphlet was published the year following the United Nations' adoption of the (now rescinded) ignominious resolution equating Zionism with racism, but is no less relevant for that.

Here, then, is part of the edited transcript of a BBC2 interview (9 February 1976) by journalist Richard Kershaw with the rabbi in question, no less a personage than Dr Immanuel (later Sir; later Lord) Jakobovits (1921-99; pictured), Chief Rabbi of the United Hebrew Congregations of Britain and the Commonwealth from 1966-91.

Q: Dr Jakobovits, is there a distinction in your mind between being a Jew and being a Zionist, because in non-Jews' minds this distinction sometimes arises and of course it is that distinction which is pejoratively used by Israel's enemies?

 A: To me certainly there is no distinction.  My Zionism is part of my religious commitment.  There isn't a prayer that I utter three times a day, and in the grace after every meal, at every wedding, at every visit to mourners, in which I wouldn't make reference to this longing for the restoration of our people to Zion.  And indeed you would have to censor and expunge large parts of the Prophets and of the book of Psalms and so on, if Zionism were to be expurgated from the rest of Judaism.

Q:  And yet the Israel which I visit quite often is in many ways a secular state.

 A:  It is in the first stage of its development.  After all, when Joshua entered the Land forty years after the exodus from Egypt, it took another 440 years until the first Temple was built.  So one must allow in historical developments of dimensions which are reckoned, in our terms, in millenia rather than in centuries, for a certain time to elapse for the total purpose to be fulfilled.

Q:  Well, then, the founding fathers hoped that the creation of Zion, of Israel, would end the so-called Jewish problem in the world, and in some ways it seems as if it has now become the Jewish problem.  How do you react to the United Nations vote which called Zionism racism?

A: Well, I react of course with a sense of extreme and most profound distress.  I worry not so much over the survival of our people, because after all we've had four thousand years' practice in prevailing over impossible odds and will manage to do so again.  I have not the slightest doubt that we will continue and won't throw up the sponge now, after four thousand years of martyrdom and loneliness in the world.  We were as lonely in the age of the prophets in antiquity or during the great Greek and Roman Empires, as a tiny minority dispersed among others who sought, often by force and brutality, to bring about our conversion.  So the experience of being alone and having to face very heavy and often universal opposition is not exactly new to us.

Q: And yet there is this charge made that Zionism, that Zion, that Israel has an imperialistic and racialistic odour.  Can I put it this way?  One source of that charge of racism – and I'm not subscribing to it, and I'm choosing my words very carefully – is the fact that Judaism does claim its people are a special people, the Chosen People.  Isn't there a danger that this can be seen by outsiders in the world rather as Milton talked of God's Englishmen as special people?  But there have been many perversions of this in history.  The Aryan claim to speciality, from which the Jews suffered.  Is there not a danger that the way that Jews insist they are so separate and special does lead to the charge of racial separation and racism?

A:  I do not only subscribe, as I said earlier, to the firm belief that a special historic assignment has been given to our people – part of which I believe we vindicated in our history –  but I believe that every nation, every people, has a special assignment and is chosen for a special role; otherwise they would be redundant.  I think even every individual should feel that he is indispensable and has a unique and incomparable role to play in the fulfilment of the human destiny.

Q: Do you think then, Chief Rabbi, that one can be anti-Israel without being anti-Semitic?  Or do you think that that is a fallacy?

A:  In theory that is possible.  In practice it isn't.  The fact that the Arab nations, for instance, which of course have been the prime sponsors of this resolution, themselves do not distinguish between Jews and Zionists.  For example, in the Arab Boycott any Jew who serves on a major firm in industry causes that firm to be blacklisted....

Q:  But they also feel that because biblical authority is quoted by Jews for their position in Israel, they also say that biblical authority talks about expansion and they fear Israeli expansionism based on the same principle.

 A:  I am not aware, throughout our four thousand years of history, of any imperial conquests that Judaism made with a view to dominating other people.  I think if you compare the vast conquests made by the Arabs, often by force of arms, in the Middle Ages, which now stretch from the Atlantic Ocean to the Indian Ocean and beyond, or if you compare the activities of the colonial powers – partly through conversionist or missionary activities –  to conquer for Christianity vast parts of the globe, with the Jewish record, you haven't got a fraction of these conquests at any time in the four thousand years ----------

Q:  Perhaps I should be more specific though.  Do you think Israel should rest within its present borders, or do you think it should expand?

 A:   I certainly believe that the historic land of Israel, as defined in the Bible, is divinely promised to us and will eventually become ours by right.

That, I believe, is as authoritative and cogent a riposte to the canard that "Judaism Rejects Zionism" as any of the many others that could be invoked to counter the claims of those enemies and critics of Israel who insist that it is otherwise, or assume that it can be made so.

See also here

Put Not Your Trust in Princes – Nor They in Their Advisers: Buckingham Palace, the Jews, and Westminster Abbey

Ninety-years of age this coming June, and still remarkably hale and hearty, the Queen’s husband, Prince Philip, Duke of Edinburgh, is well-known for speaking his mind, and for dropping a few unpolitically correct clangers as a result. (See, for instance, http://www.independent.co.uk/news/people/profiles/prince-philip-royal-flash-889303.html from which the accompanying Getty image comes)

Since I posted yesterday about the Foreign Office’s outrageous and suspiciously Arabist failure ever to arrange a royal state visit to Israel in all the years (from 1952) that Elizabeth II has been on the throne, I thought I’d stay with the royal theme for this post.

For it’s not generally known that one of the prince’s clangers involved the Jewish community – although it was probably not the prince himself but some bumbling Buckingham Palace or Whitehall adviser who was ultimately responsible for the blooper.

The missive from Buckingham Palace that landed on the desk of Sir Immanuel (later Lord) Jakobovits, Chief Rabbi of the United Hebrew Congregations of Great Britain and the Commonwealth in 1983 was bemusing, to say the least. Signed by Prince Philip, it suggested that Anglo-Jewry, as a community, might contribute to the Westminster Abbey Restoration Fund.

Its offence was not that Anglo-Jewry was being asked to contribute to the restoration of a venerable, landmark Christian house of worship, albeit one that figured none too happily in the annals of England’s Jewish community (on Richard the Lionheart’s Coronation Day in 1189, when gift-bearing Jewish leaders arrived at the Abbey to pay their respects to the king, they were roughly refused admittance, their possessions were plundered by the milling crowd, and several were killed; Benedict of York, whose wife and children perished as martyrs the following year, succumbed to his wounds on his way back north from London).

Its offence was not even in the fact that Anglo-Jewry was almost certainly the only minority faith community to receive such a request – not even the Muslim community, despite having received “the magnificent Regent’s Park site for their London mosque as a gift from the British taxpayer,” noted Jewish Chronicle columnist Chaim Bermant (14 October 1983).

What was so eyebrow-raising about the letter's request was the ignorance it betrayed. Evidently oblivious of the magnanimity that has always characterised modern Anglo-Jewry in contributing to worthy causes and humanitarian endeavours of all kinds regardless of creed, it assumed that Anglo-Jewry’s charitable efforts invariably begin – and end – at home: “I quite understand that individual Jewish charities normally restrict their donations to their own community.”

To this, the Chief Rabbi (pictured) made a tart reply: “In principle, neither Jewish individuals nor Jewish charitable organisations normally restrict their donations to their own community, realising the debt we owe to the country, its citizens, and the law.”

Perhaps even worse than the assumption that they did was the fact that the letter cited a precedent for Anglo-Jewry’s donation to the Abbey. Whichever of His Royal Highness’s advisers came up with that blast from the past – the year 1245 to be exact! – can have had little knowledge of historical realities.

 For King Henry III, whose long reign (1216-72) was not a happy one for medieval Anglo-Jewry – from 1218 Jews were forced to wear a distinguishing badge (the earliest instance of compulsory badge-wearing in Europe), missionary efforts began to intensify amid a climate of intolerance (whereas in the previous century several Christians had adopted Judaism without reprisal, in 1222 an Oxford deacon who did so and wed a Jewish wife was burned at the stake), building new synagogues was prohibited, and so on – the precedent that the letter cited was not a donation made on a voluntary basis, for the Jews were the king’s chattels, and he could do with them as he pleased.

What Prince Philip (or more probably an adviser) apparently failed to realise was that Jews were forced to contribute both corporately and individually to the rebuilding of Westminster Abbey that began in 1244-45, with very wealthy people having to donate large sums. (And it didn't save the community from rapine and persecution, either under Henry or his son Edward I, who following draconian legislation against them expelled them from the country in 1290, warning that any who remained would be put to death.)

Thus the twice-widowed financier Licoricia (who was fated, much later, to be a murder victim along with her Christian servant, Alice, and who is seen here wearing the mandatory Jewish badge, which took the form of the Tablets of the Law) was fleeced of over £2500 and Moses of Hereford of £3000.

Elias le Eveske, who was archpresbyter (Anglo-Jewry’s officially-recognised communal leader) at the time, was compelled to donate a silver-gilt chalice, and and other Jewish individuals had to defray the cost of the Abbey’s internal embellishments.

To add insult to injury, the Torah Scrolls used by the justices of the Jews for administering oaths were compulsorily sold off in order to pay for new liturgical vestments for the Abbey’s clergy and other ritual items! In the previous year, when Henry began his plans for refurbishing the Abbey, Aaron of York, the country’s richest financier, who was constantly fleeced by the king through levies and fines, was compelled to donate a large sum towards the shrine of King Edward the Confessor in the Abbey “for the salvation of the king and queen and their children.”

Oy!

But at least, when the royal wedding takes place at Westminster Abbey next month, Jewish viewers watching the event on television can point to the building with pride and say "We helped to pay for that!"