Now, I speak Hebrew, not Jewish (Yiddish).  I grew up and came of age in Tel-Aviv – “The First Hebrew” (not Jewish) city.  I graduated from The Hebrew (not Jewish) University, and so on and on.  Hebrew was the Semitic language the Jewish people spoke in antiquity.  Yiddish was the language the Jewish people spoke in the ghettos and the Shtetls.  For them Hebrew was the language of the Bible and of prayer, not of daily life.  In the Zionist ideology, the term Hebrew is associated with the “healthy” part of Jewish history, when the Hebrews occupied the land.  The term Jewish denotes association to what the Zionist movement considered the “sick” part of Jewish history.  The first Jewish immigrants to Palestine spoke mainly Yiddish, the second wave of the Zionist pioneers spoke Hebrew.  The exchange of letters between my relatives who belonged to the second and third waves and my parents and other Zionist relatives in Poland was in Hebrew.  For them the settlement of Eretz-Israel/Palestine signified a renaissance – a rebirth of the healthy past.

The view of the Zionist Fathers was that the significant rise of anti-Semitism in the 19th century was due to the emergence of national sentiments in the newly formed European countries after the collapse of the big empires and the old social and political orders.  This left the Jews in a somewhat peculiar situation.  “Among the living nations of the earth the Jews occupy the position of a nation long since dead. With the loss of their fatherland, the Jewish people lost their independence, and fell into decay…..The world saw in this people the uncanny form of one of the dead walking among the living. A ghostlike apparition, an eerie form no longer alive, and yet moving about the living.”[1] What is more, unlike all other nations whose social pyramid consisted of a wide base of farmers and manual workers, the Jewish pyramid was upside down - a base composed of religious scholars and a narrow top of manual workers.  The Jewish religion, as practiced in the Diaspora, was according to Zionist teaching responsible for the weak and puny human products of the ghettos and the East European shtetls.  The logical prognosis was to have a state and to settle it with agricultural settlements that would produce a new generation of strong and proud Jews.  The term Hebrew signified what was to be a new brand of Jews, a healthy product cultivated by a way of life rather than by a debilitating religion.  It also implied a link to the ancient Jews and their culture, severing the direct link to the religious culture of the Jews as it had developed and exercised during the last 2000 years of life in exile.

The question was – what was the culture of those ancient Jews that the Zionist movement understood itself as its sequel?  David Ben- Gurion, the father of Israel’s independence and its first prime minister found it in the first chapter of the Bible which signifies that man (referring to all human beings) was created in the image of God and deserve therefore to be treated as such.  He added to it the commandment to “love your fellow-creature as yourself,” that, contrary to the teaching of the Orthodox sector in Judaism, signifies a universal, humanitarian approach.[2]  Usually, Zionist ideologists correlated their teaching with the form of life at the first half of the first century BC, the time of the prophets who called for an ethical approach but also made it clear that the practiced culture was, to a large extent, paganism.  Paganism signified a healthy connection to the natural motifs linking the people to the fundamental and basic elements of nature.  This, in turn, allowed the Zionists writers to cloak ancient mythological and cultural figures, like King Arthur, Fredric Barbarous and Russian folk characters in the guise of Jewish literary characters.  The Israeli scholar, Boas Evron considers this trend a form of assimilation and a departure from Jewish history.  According to his interpretation the recognition of this fact led to hesitation and waning of the revolutionary elements out of Zionism.[3]  Towards the mid forties, while a major part of the Jewish population in East Europe was exterminated in the Nazi camps, it became clear to Ben Gurion that if Eretz-Israel would ever become independent the human reservoir that could join the current 600,000 Jewish population could come mainly from Europe and he directed his policy accordingly.

The same years also signified the rise of a new movement that soon adopted the title Canaanite, given to them as derogatory by the poet Abraham Shlonski.  In their first pamphlet in 1944 they claimed that Hebrews cannot be Jewish and vice versa.  The current Hebrews according to them, stem from a large area, including Jordan, Syria and Lebanon that in antiquity spoke Hebrew and may revive it in the future.  While the Zionist movement strived to turn Jews into Hebrews, this new movement completely severed the links between Jews and Hebrews.  There was some logic in their approach for by disengaging themselves from Judaism as it developed in two thousand years of exile,  the future Israelis would miss cultural roots to define their identity and many would be “born again” into Orthodoxy.  The Canaanites could link their roots, not only historically but also culturally, to the rich literary Semitic heritage of antiquity e.g. Ugarit and Assyrian.  Their ideology appealed, directly or indirectly, to a good many of the generation of the forties many of whom even changed their inherited “exilic” surnames to Hebrew ones.[4]

The declaration of Israel in 1948 realized the Zionist aspiration for an independent state where Jews could settle.  However, the massive streaming of millions of new immigrants, both survivors from the Holocaust and refugees from Arab countries put an end to the intent to change the nature of Jews from “Jewish” to Hebraic.  The belief that human nature can be changed by adjustments in the nature of the environment stem from post revolutionary Russia, and it failed in Russia as well as in Eretz Israel, in spite of heroic and interesting efforts.  The assignments before the new state, which in a very short span of time absorbed millions of people from many different cultures, most of whom were completely destitute, were enormous and very different.  The establishment of the state signified thus the end of the leading ideology and probably the end of the Zionist era.

Ben Gurion, who laid the foundations for the new state’s institutions, granted to the Orthodoxy the exclusive legal right to define who is a Jew and the right to control their own separate educational institutions.  It is clear that he did not anticipate the effects of these grants or the monstrous dimensions to which those institutions would grow.  Twenty years later, in 1968, (when he was out of power), he declared that the mere existence of the Orthodox sects in Israel and the immense political power they held were “disaster and pervasion.”[5]  For that he blamed, not himself, but the Israeli electoral system that grants massive power to small minorities and the Israeli population that still needs synagogues even though most of them visit a synagogue only once a year.  

Unlike most Jews in the world, including Israel, Israeli Orthodoxy has been living according to the Talmudic code that was shaped for life in the Diaspora under foreign rule.  They stuck to the Talmudic teaching that has no instructions for life in a Jewish state, at least not until the coming of the Messiah.  Accordingly, they have declined to include in their definition of Judaism the majority of the people in Israel and the world at large, e.g. secular, Conservative, Reform or others.  Rabbinic courts often refused to recognize conversions to Judaism even when they were done by Orthodox rabbis in other counties.  The problem they face is that if they recognize the secular and others as Jews they will have to also recognize their right to reinterpret Scriptures.  As there has been no real common denominator between them and all other Jews, both in Israel and abroad, they have returned to the time in the 18th century when presumably all Jews observed the same religious laws that the Orthodoxy, in spite of being a new 19th century movement, claimed to preserve.[6]

To a large extent the Israeli Orthodoxy follows the maxim that “everything new is forbidden by the Torah,” therefore no new ideas stemmed out of their yeshivas, in spite of hundred of thousands students who spend their life studying the Talmud (all expenses paid by the state) doing nothing else (including military service).  Their religious focus is directed therefore mainly to the performance of rituals.  However, most religious people strive for other links to God beside rituals, and that need gave rise to a new phenomenon – the elevation of rabbis not only to spirituals leaders but also to “holy figures,” in the style of the Hassidic rabbis who presumably have direct link to God and mediate between Him and their followers.  From their assumed elevated position they claim, or so their followers believe, that they are able to see everything and are justified in controlling every aspect in the life of their followers.  In a sense, every such “holy rabbi” who mediates between his followers and God is playing the role of a miniature Jesus and the whole trend has messianic elements.  This is clearly evident in the parasite kingdom settled in the West Bank by people who believe that the occupation of the area in which the two ancient Jewish kingdoms existed, is a testimony that the messianic times are already here.  It is a parasite kingdom, as, like the yeshivas, it is financed by the state and cannot exist without the protection of the Israeli army.  A parasite, because the army that for 40 years concentrated on defending the settlers and fighting mainly stone throwing children, pregnant women and old people with a cane, is no longer fit for professional assignments, and financing the settlements doesn’t leave much money for essential functions in Israel proper.  Most settlers are Orthodox and the character of their settlements resembles mostly the East European shtetls whose effects Zionism strived to efface.  However, claiming that the end of Zionism was only to settle the land, they arrogated to themselves also the term Zionists.  Because Israel granted the Orthodox sects the authority to decide who is a Jew, and the growing power and influence of the religious political parties, it was natural for them to claim that they are “the authentic representatives of Judaism.” 

The current period, especially in Israel, resembles the situation in the turn of the first century, when many sects, including messianic ones, claimed to represent “real Judaism.”  It took the destruction of the Second Temple and the suppression of the Jewish revolts to facilitate the rise of the descendants of the Pharisees sector to become the dominant segment  in Judaism and, in what is now Israel, overcome all the other sects, then, and now.

The irony is that by demanding to be recognized as a Jewish state, Israel declares that it is the inheritor, not of the ancient Hebrew kingdoms but of the exilic shtetls whose characteristics the Zionist movement tried to eliminate.  What is more, even though Israel claims that its existence is an answer to the Nazi Holocaust, allowing the Orthodox Jews and their rabbinical courts to determine who is a Jew using the measure of “pure Jewish blood,” the state adopted the German emphasis on the centrality of blood lines and, so it seems, the doubtful justification to treat the Palestinian Arabs the way Germany treated the Jews.  Ben Gurion expected Israel to follow the universal messages of the Bible and the prophets.  What he (and we) got is a revisit of the culture of the ghettos and soldiers who behave like clones of the German army at the Nazi era.  The Germans strived to build an Arian state; the Israelis want to be recognized as a Jewish state.  Both vying for the exclusive right of “pure blood” to rule and to oppress.  In both cases the spilled blood is crying from over the face of the earth, in Israel, not many listen.