Jewish Ideas Weekly
www.jewishideasdaily.com
Friday, October 5
In Defense of the Nation-State
By Diana Muir Appelbaum
Daniel Gordis wants you to know that if you
want tolerance, diversity and freedom, you
should work for Zionism. In his new book,
The Promise of Israel: Why Its Seemingly
Greatest Weakness Is Actually Its Greatest
Strength (John Wiley & Sons), Gordis weaves
the work of political theorists and historians
into a compelling case for the nation-state in
general and Israel in particular. His first ar-
gument, in favor of the nation-state, is every
bit as important as the second.
As Gordis points out, talk does not pro-
duce human rights; governments do. And
the governments that have produced hu-
man rights such as personal liberty and the
rule of law have most often been ethnically
based nation-states like Israel, South Korea,
and the Czech and Slovak Republics. Even
in places like communist Poland, where the
government was perfectly dreadful, the eth-
nic nation-state has generated these benefits.
In the Middle East, hardly fertile ground for
law and freedom, Zionism has brought civil
liberties and democracy to millions of people
who never enjoyed them before, chiefly Jew-
ish refugees from Middle Eastern and Euro-
pean tyranny but also Israeli Arabs.
Gordis quotes intellectual historian Mark
Lilla, who notes that while Western Euro-
peans have forgotten “all the long-standing
problems that the nation-state, as a modern
form of political life, managed to solve,” Zi-
onism “remembers what it was to be stateless,
and the indignities of tribalism and imperi-
alism. It remembers the wisdom of borders
and the need for collective autonomy to es-
tablish self-respect and to demand respect
from others.” Until Western Europeans re-
learn those lessons, “the mutual incompre-
hension regarding Israel between Europeans
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and Jews committed to Zionism will remain
deep.”
Gordis is on to something here. True, Eu-
ropean and American opposition to Israel
partly reflects anti-Semitism; but it also re-
flects the fact that Israel is the archetypal na-
tion-state, and nation-states have fallen from
favor in intellectual circles.
The idea that humanity is arranged into
peoples and nations, each with its homeland,
language, and unique ideas about how soci-
ety should be organized, is fundamental to
the Hebrew Bible. It is a profoundly tolerant
idea, acknowledging that there
may be more than one way
to build a good and just soci-
ety. This Jewish idea stands in
radical opposition to universal-
ism. The great universalizing
traditions of the West—Greek,
Roman, Christian, Islamic,
Marxist—have all attempted
to annihilate Jewishness be-
cause they could not tolerate
such diversity. It is no accident
that universalism, religious and
secular, has spawned many of
history’s great crimes.
Until recently, republics have arisen only
in small city-states and, usually, only briefly.
Apart from these cases, in all of human his-
tory only a few ways have been found to or-
ganize political life. There is the intense and
appalling tribalism of Afghanistan. There
are empires in which conquering Herrenvolk
oppress conquered peoples. There are dicta-
torships and monarchies in which individu-
als may have comforts or privileges but not
rights. There has been the universalizing
ideology of Marxism, which has produced
brutality and death on an unimaginable scale.
Then there is the nation-state.
The nation-state gives no assurances of
the universal peace and justice promised by
Marxism, Islam, or the human rights move-
October 5-19, 2012
ment. It claims merely that it will attempt to
establish justice, insure domestic tranquility,
provide for the common defense, promote
the general welfare, and secure the blessings
of liberty for its citizens. The nation-state
does not claim it will bring peace or justice
to the whole world, only that it will work to
bring these benefits to a particular people liv-
ing on a particular piece of land.
Even for one people in one land, this is a
tall order; yet Israel, Gordis argues, has largely
succeeded in filling it. Israel has maintained
a stable democratic government, a free press,
and a high standard of civil
liberties for its Jewish, Mus-
lim, and Christian citizens,
even those who work openly
for its destruction. It has
made world-class contribu-
tions in every field of human
achievement. It has taken in
large numbers of refugees, not
just Jewish but non-Jewish.
It has created a first-world
economy and defended itself
against attacks aimed at its an-
nihilation.
As Lilla puts it, in a passage not cited by
Gordis, “One of the long-standing puzzles
of politics is how to wed political attachment
(which is particular) to political decency
(which knows no borders). The nation-state
has been the best modern means discovered
so far of squaring the circle.” Nation-states
can produce bad governments, of course.
But they quite often produce good govern-
ments, even liberal democracies; and that ca-
pacity makes them unique in a world mostly
governed by dictatorships. The nation-state,
one can conclude, is the worst possible form
of political organization, except for all the
others.
Gordis would not put it so minimally. He
envisions a world in which each people lives
in its own nation-state, governing itself as it
chooses, perhaps competing freely through
persuasion but claiming no right to impose
its ideas on another people. For him, the
utilitarian laundry list of decent government,
civil rights, a flourishing economy, and the
other miracles that tiny Israel has produced
in the face of implacable hatred are but a pre-
lude to the things that Jews living as a free
people in their own land can and will pro-
duce. In Jean-Jacques Rousseau’s terms, such
a flowering is possible only under conditions
of self-determination. “I shall never believe
that I have heard the arguments of the Jews,”
he once wrote, “until they have a free state.
Only then will we know what they have to
say.”
Liberal American Jews, Gordis argues—
he is surely right—are embarrassed by the
fact that the Jewish state is a standard-bearer
for nationhood, a political idea hopelessly
Wednesday, October 10
Strategic Investment in
Israel’s New War
By Ronen Shoval
Foreign governments, acting thoughtfully
and strategically, fund dozens of non-gov-
ernmental organizations (NGOs) that form
a flourishing anti-Israel movement within
Israel itself. This movement neither repre-
sents the will of the Israeli people nor seeks
to operate as a legitimate political opposi-
tion. Instead, it is an orchestrated attempt
from outside Israel to alter—dramatically—
the basic character of the Jewish state. The
effort is a new tactic in the old war against
the Jewish people’s right to self-determina-
tion.
Non-Israelis often assume that Israelis
can and should be responsible for dealing
with Zionism—and, therefore, with anti-
Zionism as well. This assumption ignores
a fundamental shift in the balance of power
among anti-Zionist forces. From 1948 to
2001, the struggle was primarily physical;
it could take place only in Israel among Is-
raelis. From 1948 to 1973, the struggle was
between nation-states at war. From 1973
to 2001, the tactic became terrorism. Now,
however, the main arena—the “Durban
strategy,” which emerged at a 2001 UN con-
ference in Durban, South Africa—is a battle
over the legitimacy of the very existence of
Israel.
Because the struggle is no longer physi-
Jewish Ideas Weekly
out of fashion. But the fashionable advocates
of universal human rights have a far more
embarrassing problem: Advocating human
rights in general doesn’t actually do much to
move particular governments toward decent
behavior. Issuing reports that tally human
rights violations by oppressive governments
often seems to do little more than teach dic-
tatorships to lie more effectively.
Yet practical politicians in Israel have de-
livered real democracy and human rights, the
Czech and Slovak Republics have amicably
separated into two admirably liberal nation
states, South Korea emerged from decades of
brutal imperial occupation to walk a difficult
path towards a prosperous liberal democra-
cy, and the state built by the Nationalist Chi-
nese on Taiwan is more admirable in every
way than the one built by Marxist idealists on
the mainland. None of these young nation-
cal, international financial support has be-
come critical. When Alistair Burt, the UK
Foreign Office Minister for the Middle East,
was asked about the $800,000 he has given
to anti-Zionist Israeli organizations, he not-
ed, “Since we began supporting these pro-
grams there have been a number of changes
to Israeli civil and military judicial practice
and decisions, and increased public debate
on these issues.” Furthermore, he said un-
apologetically, “we believe that continuing
British support will assist in
strengthening democratic
processes” in Israel.
Britain is not alone. Be-
tween 2006 and 2010, Euro-
pean governments transferred
some $20 million to the 15
most radical anti-Zionist or-
ganizations operating in Is-
rael. In America, the New
Israel Fund, with a 2010 bud-
get of $34 million ($1 million
is dedicated to lobbying), has
funded 92 percent of the Is-
raeli groups that accused the
Israel Defense Forces of perpetrating the
war crimes alleged in the Goldstone Report.
Other NIF-supported NGOs have joined
the worldwide witch hunt that condemns
Israeli officials like Ehud Olmert and Tzipi
Livni as war criminals. NGOs supported by
the European Union participate in the anti-
Israel Boycott, Divestment, Sanctions (BDS)
campaigns.
Overall, foundations and organizations
states is perfect, but their governments look
awfully good compared not only to what
went before in these places but to what goes
on today in nearby countries. A book could
be filled with examples of places where na-
tionalism has brought comparatively good
government—sometimes even peace, pros-
perity, and human rights protected by courts
of law—in parts of the world long oppressed
by the great empires and universalizing ide-
ologies.
Activists understandably want to find a
simple political formula that will bring per-
fect government to everyone in the world,
but Gordis is right: Building a world of
nation-states one by one, a job requiring
the kind of hard, painful political labor that
created Israel, is a far more practical way to
produce a world that is tolerant, diverse, and
free.
trying to alter the fundamental nature of
Israel receive approximately $100 million
a year from sources outside Israel. These
organizations influence public discourse
in academia, culture, the legal system, the
economy, and the media.
A New Profile, an Israeli NGO that re-
ceived $137,870 from Germany’s Bread for
the World foundation in 2009-2010, en-
courages draft-dodging. Breaking the Si-
lence, which got $135,570 from the British
government in 2010, sullies
the image of the IDF and its
soldiers. The Association for
Civil Rights in Israel—which
has received $71,200 from the
Belgian government, $69,300
from the British government,
and $489,190 from NIF—ar-
gues that a Jewish nation-state
is, by definition, a racist state.
In academia, Hebrew Uni-
versity’s Gilo Center for Citi-
zenship, Democracy and Civic
Education, which in 2007 re-
ceived $200,000 from the Gilo
Family Foundation and additional funding
from the EU and the Norway Fund—along
with similar organizations, like the Minerva
Center for Human Rights, the Leonard Da-
vis Institute for International Relations, the
Swiss Center for Conflict Research, and the
Truman Institute for the Advancement of
Peace—host one-sided conferences, grant
scholarships to like-minded students, and
seek to guarantee that the next generation
October 5-19, 2012  2
of scholars will hold the desired views. It is
no accident that eight out of nine political
science professors at Ben-Gurion University
openly support anti-Zionist positions.
Elite lawyers who share an anti-Zionist
ideology are groomed by NIF through its
Israel-U.S. Civil Liberties Law Program, de-
scribed by Ha’aretz as a “crucial” initiative
that has “changed the face of public law in
Israel.” The program places lawyers in doz-
ens of anti-Zionist NGOs—and the State At-
torney’s office, which, at last count, held 55
of the program’s alumni. Thus, in some civil
liberties cases, complainants and defendants
are interchangeable: Both advocate the NIF
agenda.
NGOs participating in BDS actions—
like the Women’s Coalition for Peace, with
$150,560 from Germany’s Rosa Luxemburg
Foundation and $261,000 from NIF—have
begun to have some success. The Israeli
company Ahava had to close a store in
London. Deutsche Bahn and Pizzaroti
have pulled out of an ongoing Jerusalem-
Tel Aviv rail project. Veolia has withdrawn
Thursday, October 11
More Expensive by the Dozen
By Dara Horn
Child-bearing and child-rearing, the most
universal of human functions, have been en-
listed in the service of virtually every social
theory invented by man or woman. A hun-
dred years ago the industrial efficiency expert
Frank Gilbreth, Jr., applied his stopwatch and
motion studies to his own family to try to es-
tablish that children could indeed be “cheaper
by the dozen.” More recently the economist
Bryan Caplan has made the modern version
of the rationally self-interested case for produc-
ing more children rather than fewer. In an
exclusive feature from the current issue of the
Jewish Review of Books, novelist Dara Horn
elegantly begs to differ. —The Editors
From Amy Chua’s Battle Hymn of the Tiger
Mother (Penguin) to Pamela Druckerman’s
Bringing up Bébé (Penguin) to Mayim Bialik’s
Beyond the Sling (Touchstone), a spit-up-like
effluvium of books has been released on to-
day’s parents, informing them that the best
way to ensure their children’s success in life
is to drag them to music lessons, drag them
to adult cocktail parties, or drag them around
in an elaborate baby wrap. Despite their con-
Jewish Ideas Weekly
from the Jerusalem Light Rail project, and
the Norwegian national oil fund no longer
invests in Elbit and Africa-Israel. B’Tselem,
an internationally known, often-quoted
NGO that has received $156,360 from the
EU, $101,300 from the Dutch Government,
$71,725 from the Norwegian Embassy, and
$180,000 from the Ford Foundation, has re-
peatedly misrepresented international law,
skewed statistics, and perpetuated lies about
the IDF.
The problem is that no opposing voice is
heard, that there is no one to answer peo-
ple like NIF’s Associate Executive Director
in Israel, who sees an Arab majority in the
country as a good idea that would make Is-
rael more democratic. Most Zionist organi-
zations are not equipped to face this strate-
gic challenge, one that threatens the identity
of the only Jewish nation-state.
Those who want to preserve the Jew-
ish state must change the way they use the
financial assets at their disposal. Zionist
philanthropists should not focus only on
projects that ameliorate societal conditions
tradictory advice, these books have all got-
ten one thing right: no matter how you do
it, some aspect of parenting is bound to be a
drag.
For many of us, the biggest drag may be the
parenting advice itself. The oddest and most
unnoticed feature of these parenting books is
that they are all written by relatively inexpe-
rienced parents. All of the current parenting
bestsellers are authored by people who have
small-to-medium-sized families—and al-
most none are authored by people who have
actually raised children to adulthood. This is
not a problem if readers merely want advice
on how to make a 12-year-old practice the
flute or how to make a 2-year-old stop eat-
ing deer feces, but it falls a bit short for those
searching for proven ways to make children
into caring and competent adults.
The sort of person I wouldn’t mind hear-
ing parenting advice from would be more
like Glückel of Hameln, the 17th-century
Yiddish writer and mother of fourteen whose
memoirs recount her experiences as an in-
ternational businesswoman and helicopter
mom. While revisiting her work recently, I
found myself wishing she had expressed her
thoughts in handy bullet points:
• Have your first kid at 14 and your last at 42.
• Farm out children over the age of 12 to
and do not play any role in the current fight
for Israel. They must start spending strate-
gically to neutralize the influence of anti-
Zionists in the culture war. They should
use their money to fight uncompromisingly
against the anti-Zionist organizations that
lead the campaign to delegitimize Israel at
home and abroad. Moreover, they should
use their funds to rebuild a pro-Israel van-
guard within Israel, supported and educated
in Zionist principles and values so that they
can successfully stand against those who
seek to damage Israel.
A country’s strength is measured not by
the number of its tanks and planes or the
money in its bank accounts but by the will-
ingness of its people to tie their fate to that
of the nation. The tragedy of pre-Zionist
Jews, Herzl said, was that “we lack faith in
ourselves.” Thus, he predicted, “The same
day that we will believe in ourselves, our
distress will end.” The test of our generation
will be whether we can renew this belief in
the rightness of our path.
foreign in-laws in order to build multina-
tional business connections.
• If your kid has a rash, cover it with a sleeve
so the community doesn’t run you out of
town when they assume the kid has plague.
Alas, few modern parenting writers are so
wise, as I was reminded while reading Bryan
Caplan’s Selfish Reasons to Have More Kids:
Why Being a Great Parent is Less Work and
More Fun than You Think (Basic Books). Ca-
plan should know: he has three children, you
see, all under the age of 8.
Caplan’s book isn’t quite as chutzpahdik
as its title suggests. The author is an econo-
mist, and Selfish Reasons to Have More Kids
is not a personal tale but a modest economic
proposal. According to Caplan, many mod-
ern parents “overcharge” themselves when it
comes to their investments in their children,
devoting endless energy and anxiety to rais-
ing them. But the cost of rearing children
is “artificially inflated”—not because of the
cash outlay for mommy-and-me classes, but
because, as Caplan argues, research shows
that almost nothing that parents do has any
lasting effect on the adults their children be-
come. This provocative idea is the premise
of this intriguing but ultimately frustrating
book.
The bulk of the book recounts research
October 5-19, 2012  3
results on identical twins and adopted sib-
lings, which consistently demonstrate the
miniscule effects of nurture compared with
those of nature for just about anything par-
ents might wish for their children—health,
intelligence, future income, and even more
nebulous categories like happiness, charac-
ter, and values. “Good kids do tend to come
from good families,” Caplan concedes. “Yet
contrary to what everyone thinks, the over-
arching reason is heredity.” Sifting through
dozens of studies, Caplan summons numbers
showing that identical twins raised apart are
more similar as adults than adopted siblings
raised together. Interviews with 8,000 adult
twins in Virginia found “zero effect” of nur-
ture on self-esteem, for instance; a survey of
15,000 Danish adoptees found that criminal
behavior correlated only with the rap sheets
of the respondents’ biological
parents; personality tests on
500 identical Swedish twins
raised together and 600 raised
apart found that adult agree-
ableness and conscientiousness
corresponded overwhelmingly
to genes.
Indeed, one of Caplan’s most
compelling bullet points of
advice is one that Glückel of
Hameln would have agreed
with: If you really want to in-
vest in your children’s future,
“choose a spouse who resembles the kids you
want to have.” Caplan clarifies that these stud-
ies are restricted to middle-class families in
industrialized countries, and that real abuse
or neglect will indeed harm children. But
assuming you don’t live in a ditch and aren’t
selling your kids on eBay, he insists that your
long-term effect on your children is minimal.
Rather than finding this deflating, Caplan
finds it stimulating, in the economic sense—
because it means that children do not require
the immense resources many parents invest.
“What does enlightened self-interest tell you
to do when you find out that something is
cheaper than you previously believed?” he
asks, then answers: “Buy more.”
Yet it was hard to read this book as I did,
while nursing my fourth child, without expe-
riencing some buyer’s remorse. Considering
that Caplan is an economist, it’s especially
strange that he overlooks certain enormous
and non-negotiable financial costs of “buy-
ing more.” Even if one pretends that the
middle-class families who are Caplan’s audi-
ence don’t give a hoot about paying for col-
lege, there remains the fact that since we don’t
Jewish Ideas Weekly
live in Sweden, free childcare (read: school)
only begins at age 5 and only lasts until three
o’clock. This means that someone, in most
cases a paid someone, has to watch the chil-
dren while parents are working—or that one
parent must quit or reduce work for at least
five years.
I was an adjunct college professor with only
one baby when I realized that I was earning
less per hour than my babysitter. The math
in my very typical case was not conducive to
selfishness. Caplan counters that the high-
impact years of raising young children are
brief and that parents should take the long
view: “If you were good at being self-interest-
ed, you’d ask yourself, ‘How many kids will I
want when I’m 60?’” But he neglects to note
that each additional child makes those chal-
lenging years longer—potentially a lot longer.
Shortly after completing my
fifth of at least ten years of es-
corting children to preschool,
I asked my mother why people
always say that childrearing
“goes by so fast.” Does it re-
ally, I asked her? My mother,
a parent of four and grandpar-
ent of nine, looked at me and
said gravely, “It’s interminable.”
Glückel of Hameln, who de-
livered her first child the same
week her mother delivered her
last, would have agreed.
The more disturbing aspect of Caplan’s
book is that if one follows its argument to its
natural conclusion, it’s actually claiming that
education itself is pointless. The obvious ef-
fects of childrearing that parents observe
in their own children—such as those “tiger
moms” who successfully force their children
to practice piano—are dismissed by Caplan
as short-term results that “fade out” over
time. “Think about how many parents try to
inspire a love of books,” Caplan notes. “At the
time, they succeed: lots of kids won’t sleep
without a bedtime story. Ten or twenty years
later, however, only a small minority read
for pleasure. That’s fade-out for you.” Prov-
erbs advises us, “Educate a child in the way
he will go, and even when he grows old, he
will not depart from it.” Such ancient wisdom
is handily unseated by 1,100 Swedish twins
who decided to mail in their questionnaires.
In light of this research, the Mishnah’s revised
version might read, “Educate a child, or park
him on the couch playing Angry Birds: either
way he will turn out like you.”
The problem with this argument is not
so much that it is false—which, given that
research is imperfect and genetics is not
simple, it may well be—as that it focuses on
the things that matter least. Most parents are
acutely aware that there’s not much they can
do to alter their children’s personalities. Even
the Haggadah, a wildly successful model of
what educators now call “differentiated in-
struction,” never suggests that parents can
turn wicked sons into wise sons, or even
that they should try. And most parents don’t
choose to have more children based on “mar-
ginal returns.” Parenting means joining a
hundred-thousand-year-old chain of sharing
what it means to be human and ensuring that
that meaning will survive us. The question of
what it means to be human can’t be answered
by surveying people’s income or intelligence
or asking their peers how agreeable or con-
scientious they are, because the answers lie in
why they find it important to be agreeable or
conscientious, or what they hope to do with
their income and intelligence. It is only edu-
cation, beginning with the possibilities that
parents model for their children, that gives
children the language and context to eventu-
ally answer this question for themselves.
In the early decades of the Zionist move-
ment, many kibbutzim separated children
from their parents, raising them in special
“children’s houses” and only allowing them to
see their parents for a few hours a day. The
purpose of this was not merely to strengthen
the community’s collective responsibility, but
also to sever the intergenerational ties that
would have made the creation of a new He-
brew language and culture—and the slough-
ing of the old Diaspora perspective—among
this new Zionist elite close to impossible. The
kibbutz model, utopian experiment that it
was, ultimately succumbed to the social and
economic realities of an evolving modern
state. But it is also coincidentally true that
once a new Hebrew-speaking culture was in
place for over a generation, the drastic mea-
sure of separating children from parents was
no longer necessary; parents could go back to
raising their own children and imbuing them
with their now-native sense of meaning and
purpose, expressed in the language and cul-
ture through which they themselves grew up.
Unfortunately for parents like me, there re-
ally aren’t any “selfish reasons to have more
kids,” short of the possibility of having your
own reality show if you have eighteen or
more. (If you were hoping they’d support you
in your dotage, the Swedish twins apparently
disagree.) Nor is it compelling enough to
know that kids are “fun,” as Caplan’s subtitle
announces, or that grandchildren are even
October 5-19, 2012  4
more so. All parents, consciously or not, face
the task of giving the children they raise a
language—expressed not only in words, but
in images, rhythms, gestures, patterns of rea-
soning, and just about every other way that
humans have communicated with each oth-
er—as their children’s most elemental con-
nection to the human past.
The reason to have more kids is because
you care enough about whatever languages
Friday, October 12
The “Married to another Man”
Story
By Shai Afsai
In the introduction to his popular and in-
fluential history of the Arab-Israeli conflict,
The Iron Wall: Israel and the Arab World
(W.W. Norton), Oxford professor Avi Sh-
laim tells this story:
The publication of [Theodor Herzl’s] The
Jewish State evoked various reactions in
the Jewish community, some strongly fa-
vorable, some hostile, and some skeptical.
After the Basel Congress [the First Zionist
Congress, in 1897] the rabbis of Vienna
sent two representatives to Palestine. This
fact finding mission resulted in a cable
from Palestine in which the two rabbis
wrote, “The bride is beautiful, but she is
married to another man.”
Though the story lacks a primary source
and no basis has emerged for describing it as
a historical event that occurred during the
early years of the Zionist movement, ver-
sions of the story have continued to appear
in many books and articles. Ghada Karmi,
for instance, used it as the basis for the title
of her 2007 book, Married to Another Man:
Israel’s Dilemma in Palestine (W.W. Norton),
in which she argues for the dissolution of
the Jewish state. Former Swedish diplomat
Ingmar Karlsson recently followed suit with
his 2012 anti-Zionist work, Bruden är vack-
er men har redan en man: Sionismen—en
ideologi vid vägs ände? (The bride is beautiful
but there is already a husband: Zionism—an
ideology at the end of the road?)
Often, as with Shlaim and Karmi, no
source is cited for the story. Other times, the
source presented is an erroneous one. For
example, the opening paragraph of Musta-
Jewish Ideas Weekly
you speak, and the chains of stories and ideas
and commitments that have carried those
languages through time, to want more people
to speak those languages in the future, no
matter what they may choose to say. Giving
children a language rich enough to express
the past’s mistakes and the future’s possibili-
ties isn’t a task for chromosomes. It’s a task for
parents and teachers. Perhaps the Swedish
twins are right, and the history of humanity
pha Marrouchi’s 2011 article, “Cry No More
for Me, Palestine—Mahmoud Darwish,”
cites Henry M. Christman’s The State Papers
of Levi Eshkol as a source for the story; but
no such story appears in Christman’s book.
In some versions of the story, it is the First
Zionist Congress, rather than the Vienna
rabbinate, that dispatches the two represen-
tatives. In others, it is Herzl himself who
sends the representatives and receives their
reply. Regardless of the differing details, the
point of the “married to another man” story
is generally the same: Even in the early years
of the Zionist movement, Jews
recognized that it would be
wrong for them to try to claim
the Land of Israel/Palestine
because it was already inhab-
ited by Arabs. Yet, despite
this recognition, the Zionists
proceeded with their plans for
Jewish statehood there. From
the outset, in other words, Zi-
onism was inherently immor-
al; the establishment of the
state of Israel was at its very
core an act of willful injustice.
The anti-Zionist potential inherent in the
“married to another man” story has made it
irresistible to certain writers and accounts
for much of its literary popularity, despite its
lack of historical authenticity. In this way the
story resembles another commonly repeated
anecdote, involving Herzl and his right-hand
man, Max Nordau, meant to demonstrate
the Zionist leadership’s early awareness of
the immorality of its program. It is said that
when Nordau first learned there was already
a sizeable population in Palestine, he ran to
Herzl, crying, “I did not know that; but then
we are committing an injustice.”
Although the “married to another man”
and Herzl-Nordau stories are unsupported,
arguments about the justice of Zionism pre-
occupied Jewish and Arab leaders in the late
that distinguishes us from gorillas has been
pointless. But at two in the morning, when
I’m singing my baby to sleep with Hebrew
songs my parents taught me and whose mel-
odies comfort me still, I tend to doubt it.
Toward the book’s end, Caplan asserts, “I
had kids because I love kids.” But by his own
reasoning, that’s short-term thinking. One
should have kids because one loves adults.
19th and early 20th centuries as they do to-
day. But in contrast to much of today’s of-
ficial anti-Zionist propaganda, Arab leaders
of a hundred years ago or so were quite will-
ing to acknowledge that the Jewish nation
had formerly dwelled and thrived in Pales-
tine. Compare that bygone approach with,
for example, former Palestinian Authority
Mufti Ikrima Sabri’s May 11, 2012 assertion
on Al-Arabiya TV that there are no places
holy to the Jews in Jerusalem and no arche-
ological remains pertaining to Jewish holy
places have ever been found there.
Those older opponents of
Zionism merely argued that
since Arabs currently inhabit-
ed the land, Jewish history was
immaterial. For instance, in
an 1899 letter to Zadok Khan,
Chief Rabbi of France, Kha-
lidi Yusuf Dia al-Khalidi wrote,
“Who can challenge the rights
of the Jews on Palestine? Good
Lord, historically it is really
your country.” Nonetheless, al-
Khalidi urged the Jews to look
elsewhere for a homeland:
The world is vast enough, there are still
uninhabited countries where one could
settle millions of poor Jews who may per-
haps become happy there and one day
constitute a nation. That would perhaps
be the best, the most rational solution to
the Jewish question. But in the name of
God, let Palestine be left in peace.
Even the notorious Mufti Haj Amin al-
Husseini, later a Nazi collaborator, tacitly
acknowledged Jewish history in the Land of
Israel. In November, 1936, urging the Brit-
ish Government to treat Palestine as a pure-
ly Arab country, he argued not that Jews had
never been there but merely that they left it
2,000 years ago and, therefore, should now
October 5-19, 2012  5
go to other, uninhabited parts of the world.
Zionist leaders, for their part, argued that
Jewish history in the Land of Israel/Pales-
tine was undeniably relevant and that Jews
had a right to return to their ancestral land
and the cradle of their religion even if Ar-
abs were currently a majority there. Ze’ev
Jabotinsky, in his 1923 essay, “The Ethics of
the Iron Wall,” wrote, “There are no more
uninhabited islands in the world.” Jabotin-
sky noted the anti-Zionist argument that “if
Monday, October 15
Hans Bethe and the Problem of
“Jewish Genius”
By Alex Joffe
Few topics make Jews more uncomfort-
able than the question of “Jewish genius.”
While Jews happily point to the extraordi-
nary scientific accomplishments of their
co-religionists, discussion of the genetic or
cultural basis of these achievements causes
squirming and denials. What can the story
of a half-Jewish genius, the Nobel Prize-
winning physicist Hans Bethe, contribute to
this debate?
Nuclear Forces: The Making of the Physi-
cist Hans Bethe (Harvard University Press),
a new biography by Silvan Schweber, makes
Bethe’s genius more accessible. Born in
1906 in Strasbourg to a German scientist fa-
ther and a Jewish mother who had convert-
ed, Bethe was a mathematical prodigy who
co-authored his first scientific paper at 17.
He belonged to the heroic era of subatomic
physics, with scientific interests ranging
from large to small, from astrophysics to
particle and quantum physics.
Educated in Germany, he was teaching at
the University of Tübingen when the Nazis
came to power and he lost his job. He came
to America in 1935 and joined the faculty
of Cornell University, where he stayed until
his death in 2005. In 1967 he was awarded
the Nobel Prize for his fundamental work in
understanding energy production in stars.
Bethe’s contribution to the Manhattan
Project was critical. Albert Einstein and Leo
Szilard had warned Franklin Roosevelt that
the Nazis could develop an atomic bomb; at
Los Alamos, the greatest minds in physics,
including Jews like J. Robert Oppenheimer,
Edward Teller, Richard Feynman, Rudolph
Peierls, Isidor Rabi, Victor Weisskopf, Stani-
slaw Ulam, and John von Neumann worked
Jewish Ideas Weekly
homeless Jewry demands Palestine for itself
it is ‘immoral’ because it does not suit the
native population. Such morality,” he an-
swered, “may be accepted among cannibals,
but not in a civilized world.” Jabotinksy
stressed that Arabs possessed immense
stretches of land, while Jews, in desperate
need of a country, possessed none: “It is an
act of simple justice to alienate part of their
land from those nations who are numbered
among the great landowners of the world,
feverishly to get there first. Bethe, as head
of the Los Alamos Theoretical Division,
was responsible for calculating the amount
of nuclear material necessary to create the
bomb. “Jewish physics,” reviled and driven
out of Germany, had triumphed over its
“Aryan” counterpart.
After the war, Bethe remained a govern-
ment consultant. But, along with many Los
Alamos veterans, he opposed the develop-
ment of the hydrogen bomb and became
devoted to the cause of world peace and
nuclear disarmament. In contrast with most
physicists or “geniuses,” he remained incred-
ibly productive well into his
eighties.
As Schweber makes clear,
Bethe did not think of himself
as Jewish but gravitated to-
wards Jews as friends and as-
sociates and married a woman
of Jewish descent. Schweber
attributes this affinity to the at-
traction, for Bethe, of a “fam-
ily climate of warmth, open-
ness and liberality”—as well
as sense of German-ness. For
decades, Germany’s Jews had
cultivated a liberal and intellectual German-
ness, even as Germany defined the nation
increasingly in racial terms. Jews and part-
Jews like Bethe scaled Germany’s intellectual
heights before their own society repudiated
them, then exterminated the vast majority
who could not escape.
Does any of this inform the debate about
Jewish genius? Statistically, the evidence is
undeniable. In a famous Commentary ar-
ticle, Charles Murray noted Ashkenazi Jews’
disproportionate intellectual accomplish-
ments over the past two centuries. Murray’s
explanation was ultimately genetic: occu-
pational restrictions and a culture valuing
education channeled Jews into skilled urban
professions and created a population se-
in order to provide a place of refuge for a
homeless, wandering people.”
The debates about the justice of re-estab-
lishing a Jewish state in the Middle East are
likely to continue for as long as the Arab-
Israeli conflict persists. There is nothing to
be gained, however, from relying on fictions.
The disagreements remain complex enough
without adding unsubstantiated stories into
the mix.
lected for verbal and quantitative skills. But
recent genetic analyses by Harry Ostrer and
others have been equivocal regarding the
genetics of Jewish intelligence, much less
genius. There is more obvious evidence for
genetic diseases like Tay-Sachs, breast can-
cer, and depression.
Bethe had good genes. He also came
complete with a neurotic (ex-)Jewish moth-
er, who complained constantly and thought
his wife wasn’t good enough for him. Af-
ter escaping from Europe she lived with the
couple in Ithaca, making everyone’s life a
living hell until she was packed off to stay
with a German couple in Long
Island. Discussions of Jewish
genius do not usually refer to
such familial dynamics. Per-
haps they should.
But there is also the matter
of culture. Bethe and other
Manhattan Project Jews and
half-Jews were geniuses in the
true sense of the word, intel-
lects far above the norm. But
whatever their genes, they also
emerged from broadly similar
environments: families that
were emancipated in the 19th century in
Germany and the Austro-Hungarian Em-
pire and became partly or wholly assimilated.
Two centuries earlier, their genius would
have gone unnoticed in the larger world. But
it flourished in the first half of the 20th cen-
tury, in a new international scientific culture
of physics that developed in the rarefied envi-
ronment of a handful of research institutions
and university departments.
On this point Schweber cites Thorstein
Veblen, who in 1919 had already noted the
“intellectual pre-eminence of Jews in mod-
ern Europe” (the title of his article on the
subject). Veblen developed a theory of Jew-
ish marginality, suggesting that exclusion
had produced a “skeptical animus” and a
October 5-19, 2012  6
“release from the dead hand of conventional
finality.”
The skeptical animus might also be de-
fined simply as energy. The Emancipa-
tion liberated Jews from both external and
internal restrictions. Immense—perhaps
unique—physical and intellectual energies
poured from the ghettos into businesses,
professions, and the arts and sciences. Jews,
in effect, immigrated, first to the European
continent in which they had lived as a de-
spised minority, next toward varying de-
grees of integration, then to the New World.
Historian of science Daniel Kevles, in his
study of American physicists, also cites Ve-
blen, emphasizing how Jews’ intellectual-
ism (rather than genius) and their desire to
Tuesday, October 16
Ettinger’s Redemption
By Allan Arkush
Jacob Barnai, a professor of Jewish history at
the University of Haifa, recently published, in
Hebrew, Shmuel Ettinger: Historian, Teacher
and Public Figure. It is a specialized work. I
am not sure I would have read it if the award-
winning Israeli film Footnote, which centers
on the relationship between a father and son
who are both members of the Talmud depart-
ment of the Hebrew University, hadn’t whet-
ted my appetite for gossip about the faculty of
that august institution. True, I read the au-
tobiography of Hebrew University’s Gershom
Scholem, the great scholar of Jewish mysti-
cism, as soon as it came out; I did the same
with the autobiography of Hebrew University
historian Jacob Katz. But Ettinger’s writings
never excited me in the way theirs did, and
nothing I knew about the man himself made
me want to hear his whole story.
Now that I have read Jacob Barnai’s version
of that story, I know a lot about Ettinger’s
career, friendships, and rivalries. My store-
house of knowledge about Hebrew Univer-
sity tenure and promotion battles has been—
slightly—enriched. Still, it does not seem to
me that anything in Barnai’s book concerning
Ettinger’s Hebrew University career could be
turned into a movie with the drama of Foot-
note. On the other hand, Ettinger’s life before
he became a professor, and perhaps some of
what he did later on, outside the academy,
would make for one good cinematic tale.
Born in the Soviet Union, Ettinger spent
Jewish Ideas Weekly
“make it” spurred their outsized role in sci-
ence. Genius flourished, even as it became
less specifically Jewish.
This process also accelerated the self-
dissolution of German Jewry as Jews, long
before the rise of fascism. Following the
Federal Law of Personal Status and Marriage
Certification of 1875, which mandated civil
marriages and removed obstacles to inter-
marriage, the number of Jewish marriages
lagged, while both Jewish men and women
intermarried at increasing rates. Combined
with baptisms, intermarriage rates were so
high as to produce fears that Jews would be-
come extinct in Germany. That matter was
soon taken out of their hands.
Bethe’s story suggests that genius, Jewish
most of his youth as a committed Commu-
nist. In the Leningrad high school where he
acquired a solid grounding in the humani-
ties, he was renowned as a “Wunderkind.”
Whether that was the place where he im-
bibed his faith in Marxism-Leninism is not
certain. According to Barnai, Ettinger “never
described explicitly and openly the circum-
stances that led him to Communism.” What
led to Ettinger’s departure from the Soviet
Hebrew University.
Union, however, is clear enough: His parents
were very religious Jews, and they had always
wanted out. Ettinger’s father was imprisoned
by the Soviet regime for seven months for
the crime of holding foreign currency. After
he got out, he succeeded, against enormous
odds, in obtaining Palestinian immigration
certificates. In 1935 the family made aliyah.
Ettinger’s parents joined other pious Jews in
Jerusalem. Ettinger joined his parents.
He attended two yeshivot, in Jaffa and
Jerusalem, before enrolling as a student of
history and philosophy at the Hebrew Uni-
versity in 1936. He did not cut his newly
grown peyot. They served as a good dis-
or otherwise, is always a rarity. Perhaps with
Jews there was, at best, some minor selection
for quantitative reasoning and quick think-
ing. Certainly no Jewish genius for politics
is evident, or—given Jewish reproductive
rates—much instinct for collective survival.
Yet, if culture is the primary variable and
energy a particular trait, perhaps Jews do
form a unique case, at least under certain
cultural conditions. The American Jewish
experience suggests that marginality in-
duced a striving in which genius was more
easily recognized, though at the price of as-
similation. If so, the diminution of Jewish
marginality and Jewish genius may be inevi-
tably twinned.
guise for what he was from his early days at
the university: a covert agent of the Pales-
tine Communist Party, bent on subverting
the student branch of Ben-Gurion’s Mapai
party from within. In this activity Ettinger
and his friends appear to have drawn inspi-
ration from a recently published—and still
famous—essay by the Hebrew University’s
own star professor Gershom Scholem, titled
“Redemption through Sin,” which described
the way in which secret followers of the an-
tinomian rabbi Shabtai Tzvi burrowed into
the ranks of genuinely observant Jews in the
17th and 18th centuries.
Even if Ettinger had read Scholem’s de-
scription of the Sabbateans’ covert tech-
niques with utmost care, however, it is un-
likely that he would have been able to keep
his operations undetected. Both the Haga-
nah and British intelligence had their eyes
on the group for some time before the British
finally arrested him, on the night of Novem-
ber 1, 1940, for distributing anti-war, anti-
imperialist (and, for that matter, anti-Zionist)
literature. Ettinger got off with a very light
sentence. Soon afterward, he left the univer-
sity. He also changed his political tune: After
Germany invaded the Soviet Union, Ettinger,
along with the rest of his party, became an ar-
dent supporter of the British war effort.
In the 1940s, with the Palestinian Commu-
nist movement now above-ground, Ettinger
became one of its principal figures, generally
representing the party wing that sought to
reconcile Communism with Jewish nation-
alism. It was with the aim of winning sup-
port for this position from local Communists
that he and a friend traveled to Poland and
October 5-19, 2012  7
other East European countries in the sum-
mer of 1946. But what he saw and learned
about Communist society and Russian anti-
Semitism during his eight-month trip deeply
disillusioned him. He never got as far as Rus-
sia itself because, as he reported to a friend
many years later, a high-ranking Communist
in Poland told him “in absolute secrecy not
to travel to Moscow, where they would surely
execute him.” When Ettinger returned to Pal-
estine, he gradually extricated himself from
Communist affairs.
And here, in 1949, “Ettinger: the Melo-
drama” might end, with the now 30-year-
old Communist-turned-Zionist returning to
the Hebrew University, in its makeshift new
Wednesday, October 17
One-Step Ethics
By Gil Student
For 13 years in the New York Times Magazine,
Randy Cohen’s weekly column, “The Ethi-
cist,” posed and answered ethical questions
from readers. It was widely discussed and
debated, often angrily. Cohen recently pub-
lished a collection of his columns, Be Good:
How to Navigate the Ethics of Everything
(Chronicle). I turned to the book for a sum-
mation of his ethical sensibility—and found
evidence of both his decency and the limits of
his secular approach, which in turn highlight
a danger society currently faces.
Cohen’s politics are not mine, but in his
book I found him fair and thoughtful. A
sensible man, he thinks long and hard about
the questions he faces, using the ethical tools
available to him. Cohen generally demands
that his questioners practice honesty, obe-
dience to law, and sensitivity to others. He
requires that they refrain from damaging
other people’s property and otherwise caus-
ing financial harm. You might think that
these are ethical no-brainers. Still, Cohen
deserves praise for his consistent adherence
to common-sense morality.
But when ethical situations become com-
plex, Cohen grows unpredictable. Indeed, he
punctuates his book with updates of some of
his columns, including correspondence and
other fallout that highlight debate over his
conclusions. In one column, for example, he
advises a company’s computer technician not
to report the child pornography he found on
the president’s computer. Cohen then defi-
Jewish Ideas Weekly
quarters, to complete his studies not in his-
tory in general but Jewish history. The mark
he eventually made there, not only—or even
primarily—as a scholar but as the mentor of
countless key figures in Israeli historiography,
was extremely important; but it is not the
kind of thing that could be easily brought to
a movie screen.
There was, however, a later, more dramatic
chapter involving Ettinger’s extracurricular
activities, particularly his enormous efforts
from the late 1960s onward on behalf of So-
viet Jewry. Many of those who worked with
him in this campaign, including the writer
Haim Be’er, have characterized his zealous
devotion to this cause as his “great tikkun,”
antly reproduces the letters of remonstration
he received from the offices of the Manhat-
tan District Attorney and U.S. Attorney Gen-
eral. In another column, Cohen allows the
producer of a play to alter its words to make
it suitable for her small town audience. He
then reprints an angry letter from a play-
wright: “How is it ethical to encourage people
to alter and/or deface artists’ work BECAUSE
IT’S NOT IMPORTANT TO YOU?” There
were several more rounds to the exchange.
Neither party changed his mind.
These are more than simple
mistakes or differences in judg-
ment. They demonstrate a fun-
damental gap in Cohen’s ethi-
cal reasoning. Please make no
mistake: Randy Cohen’s ethical
decisions are rarely objection-
able. His problem is that while
he has an excellent moral com-
pass, he lacks a map. In the in-
troduction to his book, Cohen
describes his approach:
I didn’t apply any method,
and I suspect neither does
anybody else, at least not initially. When
deciding on correct conduct, it is first the
verdict, then the trial. I had what some
readers deprecated as “just a gut reac-
tion,” an immediate feeling about right and
wrong. But I didn’t stop there. I subjected
the intestinal tremor to various forms of
moral scrutiny: how does it stand up to the
Golden Rule, or to a greatest-good argu-
ment, or to the categorical imperative?
Cohen subscribes, in sum, to dart board
or “penitence,” for his Communist period.
True, a filmmaker might have problems in
trying to dramatize Ettinger’s endless letter-
writing on behalf of newly arrived Soviet olim
who sought his assistance in finding jobs or
getting their books published. Nor would it
be easy to make an exciting scene out of his
falling asleep in a colleague’s armchair after
an all-nighter spent working on the Russian
Encyclopedia Judaica. But during this period
of his life he worked closely with Israeli intel-
ligence; in the Ettinger archives, some of the
material that concerns Soviet Jewry is still
stamped “Classified.” It might be best to wait
until that label is removed before putting to-
gether the film version of the historian’s life.
morality: hang your gut reaction on the wall,
toss objections at it, and see what sticks. And
why not? Who is to say which is right? This
one says this; that one says that. I can support
whatever I say with a respectable rationale.
In the end, this post-modern haze of faux
values lets self-affirmation pass as considered
judgment. Cohen’s columns do not just en-
tertain; they denigrate the idea of a principled
morality. Yet Cohen deserves only part of the
blame. A comedy writer turned journalist,
he did the best he could with his unconven-
tional background and lack of
education in the field of eth-
ics. The greater lapse lies with
his editors, who handed over
the keys of moral judgment in
the “paper of record” to a man
without a license. Maybe Seth
McFarlane will be their next
literary critic.
For contrast, let us look at
Rabbi Aaron Levine’s recent
book, Economic Morality and
Jewish Law (Oxford Univer-
sity Press), written shortly
before his death. Levine,
whom I knew and admired, followed a for-
mal ethical process. His studies are generally
divided into four parts: the moral question or
questions, the relevant Jewish laws, any ap-
plicable economic principles, and a detailed
application of these concepts to the question
at hand. For example, he discusses a rabbi
who speaks poorly at a charity event and the
various people who praise his unremarkable
address. Levine explains the prohibitions
against lying and flattering, the situations in
which these principles must apply, and the
October 5-19, 2012  8
times when exceptions may be made. He
then analyzes the circumstances of each flat-
terer, using these rules to render ethical judg-
ment. Like Cohen, Levine carefully explores
the potential avenues of recourse, examining
the details of the case and the complex in-
terpersonal effects of particular actions. But
Levine does so in light of the values he has
previously established.
Levine repeats this process with various
moral issues—some extremely complex, like
the question of the living wage. Should we
differentiate between single- and multiple-
wage households? Will raising salaries help
or hurt the neediest people? In each case,
Levine first establishes his moral foundation,
then judges the case. In contrast, Cohen has
Thursday, October 18
Cousins: Jews and Arabs
Seek Each Other Out
By Moshe Sokolow
Absence makes the heart grow fonder. So, it
seems, is the rule governing Jews and Arabs:
the farther apart they are from one another,
the greater their mutual interest, while the
greater their proximity, the more antago-
nistic they seem. The fascination that these
kindred peoples have for one another and
the fractious nature of their association is
not just a contemporary phenomenon born
of the modern Middle East “situation”; it has
been ongoing since Muhammad published
his first revelation and attempted to convert
others to his cause.
Islam regarded all of its pre-history as
an age of “ignorance” (jahiliyyah) and pro-
fessed no interest in any of its details—save
for Persia and Israel. Why they were except-
ed from the rule of disdain is unclear. The
reason may have been merely utilitarian:
Jews were the most immediate neighbors of
the early Muslims, while Persia was Islam’s
first great conquest; they were therefore the
likeliest source of prospective converts. Yet
it might also have been theological: Judaism
and Zoroastrianism—along with Christian-
ity—were scripture-based religions whose
adherents, named the “People of the Book”
by the Qur’an, were granted relative reli-
gious tolerance.
In fact, the curiosity of early Muslims
over the numerous biblical personalities and
events mentioned in the Qur’an led to the
Jewish Ideas Weekly
no clear foundation; he makes snap moral de-
cisions, which he then tosses around, some-
times changing his mind, until he reaches a
level of comfort. Both approaches work well
enough in simple cases. But when multiple
values intertwine, only a sophisticated pro-
cess can unravel the knot. Levine, with his
clarity of thought and process, can make his
way through an ethical maze. Cohen’s hands
get hopelessly entangled when his moral con-
cerns outnumber his thumbs.
A secularist, Rabbi Jonathan Sacks argues
in his recent book, The Great Partnership
(Schocken), can be a deeply moral person;
but a secular society inevitably falls into im-
morality. In Sacks’ view, the relationship be-
tween religion and morality, while indirect, is
creation of a genre known as “Isra’iliyat” (Is-
raelite), in which Jewish converts combined
traditional legends of the Talmud and Mi-
drash with indigenous Arabic folklore. Lat-
er Jewish anthologies composed in Arabia,
such as the Yemenite “Midrash HaGadol,”
returned the favor by incorporating Muslim
traditions (hadith) into their own.
Islam was not as charitable in its estima-
tion of the Jewish Bible, which
it viewed as essentially flawed if
not outright counterfeit. Con-
vinced, as Muslims were, of
the truth of their own prophet
and his revelation, they sought
evidence of it in the Jewish re-
ligious tradition as well. When
they failed to find it, they
concluded that it had been
deliberately obscured. This
ambivalence towards Judaism
was reciprocated. Maimonides
(1135-1204) ruled that while
it was permissible for Jews to teach Torah to
Christians, even though their concept of a
“New Testament” effectively invalidated the
Jewish tradition, it was prohibited to teach it
to Muslims, despite their essential theologi-
cal kinship. Maimonides justified his ruling
on the basis that Muslims would not be con-
vinced of the truth of Judaism, since they
would not be swayed by arguments drawn
from what they deemed an unreliable source,
whereas Christians accepted the evidence of
Jewish scripture, so theoretically could be
persuaded of its truth.
Perhaps the most significant and success-
ful medium of bicultural exchange among
powerful and deep-rooted. Secular moralities
are external: there are many secular morali-
ties from which a consumer can choose. The
convenience of selfishness will win out over
altruism and, in the process, destroy the so-
cial cohesion that depends on truly moral
standards.
The job of the ethicist is to prevent this
moral erosion by identifying the rules that
are relevant to a given situation and apply-
ing them, with sensitivity and without bias.
If you skip the first step, you allow self-cen-
teredness, masquerading as morality, to in-
vade and corrupt the public sphere. Our loss
of Rabbi Levine highlights our need for real
ethicists to help us rediscover the virtue that
society requires for its sustenance.
Jews and Muslims was the Arabic language,
which (in a form known as Judeo-Arabic,
utilizing the Hebrew alphabet to represent
Arabic characters) became the vehicle for
Jewish religious and secular expression to
an extent and a degree unparalleled until the
late 20th century’s use of English.
Judaism and Islam operated on paral-
lel tracks not only in linguistic form, but
in content, too. Thus, in
11th century Spain, Solo-
mon ibn Gabirol wrote an
original work of philosophy
that was so consistent with
the prevailing neo-Platonic
philosophical norms—and
so indistinguishable as a sin-
gularly Jewish composition—
that when the Arabic original
lapsed and the work was re-
covered in a Latin translation
(entitled Fons Vitæ), it was
presumed Muslim or Chris-
tian. It was not until the mid-19th century
that Salomon Munk identified its true au-
thor. (The book is now known primarily in
a Hebrew translation as Mekor Hayim.)
Jews were among the first Westerners to
take a scientific interest in Islam in the mod-
ern age. Abraham Geiger, later the founder
of Reform Judaism, wrote a prize-winning
university essay entitled “What did Mu-
hammad take from Judaism?” In the fol-
lowing generation, Ignacz Goldziher—who
served a term as secretary to the Orthodox
Jewish community of Budapest—became
the world’s leading Orientalist. At the end
of the 19th Century, Solomon Schechter,
October 5-19, 2012  9
Cambridge scholar and later founder of the
United Synagogue of Conservative Judaism,
retrieved the Cairo Genizah, surely the most
important trove ever of Judeo-Arabic litera-
ture. Today, Israeli university departments
of Arabic language and literature are world-
renowned for their multi-faceted coverage
of both Arabic history and culture and the
contemporary Middle East, while also sup-
plying the Israeli military and government
with many of its intelligence specialists.
Arab inquisitiveness over Jews and Judaism
was constrained by illiteracy and the reluc-
tance to be exposed to alien cultures, limita-
tions that—somewhat incongruously—seem
more widespread and significant today than
in the Middle Ages. Many medieval Muslims
acquainted themselves with Jewish sources,
some for purposes of comparative scholar-
ship and others for purposes of polemics.
In 2001, the American Jewish Committee
published a two-volume set entitled Children
of Abraham, consisting of “An Introduction
to Islam for Jews” by Khalid Durán, and “An
Introduction to Judaism for Muslims” by Re-
uven Firestone. It would have been more re-
vealing had each author sought to introduce
the other’s religion rather than his own. One
also gets the impression that the term “Abra-
hamic Religions,” which has gained currency
largely since 9/11, was chosen, apologetically,
to incorporate Islam within the orbit of what
had theretofore been exclusively the “Judeo-
Christian” tradition.
Fundamentalism distorts religion, and
militant fundamentalism makes the proposi-
tion of ecclesiastical recognition—let alone
rapprochement—seem ever more distant
and unattainable. We should be grateful to
all those who sought and seek to overcome
initial prejudices and contribute to mutual
understanding.

“A brilliant, well-argued, and much-needed work.”

—Rabbi Lord Jonathan Sacks

Inheriting Abraham
The Legacy of the Patriarch in Judaism,
Christianity, and Islam
Jon D. Levenson

“One of the world’s leading Bible scholars, Jon

D. Levenson, has given us an incisive and deeply
challenging account of the three Abrahams of Jewish,
Christian, and Islamic theology. It may be, he
suggests, that we are divided by a common ancestry
and that we need to understand our differences no
less than our commonalities.”
—Rabbi Lord Jonathan Sacks, Chief Rabbi
of the United Hebrew Congregations of the
Commonwealth

“Well-written and beautifully argued, this book

makes an outstanding contribution to our
understanding of the figure of Abraham.”
—Gary A. Anderson, author of Sin: A History

“A masterful reading of Jewish, Christian, and

Islamic thinking.”
—Sidney H. Griffith, author of The Church in
the Shadow of the Mosque

“Levenson’s fine book . . . deals elegantly with the

complex relationship of texts and communities.”
—Guy G. Stroumsa, author of A New Science:
The Discovery of Religion in the Age of Reason

“Groundbreaking. . . . Levenson’s thought is crisp

Library of Jewish Ideas
Cloth $29.95 978-0-691-15569-2
Cosponsored by the Tikvah Fund
and nicely provocative, his writing is lucid, witty, and
accessible to the nonspecialist. Inheriting Abraham is
an eye-opening and compelling read.”
—R.W.L. Moberly, Durham University

See our E-Books at

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Jewish Ideas Weekly October 5-19, 2012  10