Taffy Brodesser-Akner, "The One About Bibi Netanyahu’s Father and the Perils of Diaspora"
David Shasha
Book Review: The One About Bibi Netanyahu’s Father and the Perils of Diaspora
By: Taffy Brodesser-Akner
Joshua Cohen, The Netanyahus: An Account of a Minor and Ultimately Even Negligible Episode in the History of a Very Famous Family
Joshua Cohen’s new novel, “The Netanyahus: An Account of a Minor and Ultimately Even Negligible Episode in the History of a Very Famous Family,” is a generational campus novel, an unyielding academic lecture, a rigorous meditation on Jewish identity, an exhaustive meditation on Jewish-American identity, a polemic on Zionism, a history lesson. It is an infuriating, frustrating, pretentious piece of work — and also absorbing, delightful, hilarious, breathtaking and the best and most relevant novel I’ve read in what feels like forever.
“The Netanyahus” (as I’ll call it) is the highly fictionalized, highly ostensible account of the very true time in the late 1950s when Benzion Netanyahu, father of the longtime but very recently deposed prime minister Binyamin, arrived in the United States seeking an academic position.
The narrator of the story is Ruben Blum, a taxation historian — “I am a Jewish historian, but I am not a historian of the Jews,” he points out on the second page — himself reiterating this story long after his retirement from the fictional Corbindale College just as it has become a place where a bewildering “culture of grievance” has taken over, one that he finds “anathema.” Blum was a Brooklyn Jew, a cheder-educated yid who had abandoned traditional Jewish life for academia — “I wasn’t what I was doomed to be” — becoming the first Jew ever (not just hired faculty, but first Jew on campus in any role, from student to janitor) at Corbindale, which I am told via a press release for the book is a stand-in for Cornell, where Netanyahu did spend some time teaching.
Of course, when Blum left Brooklyn behind, he learned the same lesson any Jew who attempts true assimilation in the diaspora learns: that in trying to Just Be An American you are rendered even more Jewish. In your attempts to not be seen as a Jew, you set off the Uncanny Valley tripwires of the gentiles, and now all they see is your Jewishness, which is its own kind of doom. That doom comes in a lot of forms: via the sound of breaking glass of a Jewish storefront, via men dressed up as Blockbuster Video employees, lit by torches, chanting that you won’t replace them. Or it comes in a series of microaggressions: hence Blum being asked to dress up as Santa Claus at the faculty Christmas parties because “it’ll free up the people who actually celebrate the holiday to enjoy themselves”; hence Blum getting his head patted by a garage attendant who wants to know when he’s getting his horns serviced; hence the local golf and racquet club constantly claiming to have lost the Blums’ membership application. It is not a coincidence that at the exact moment when the American-born Jew believes himself to have achieved the heights of Good American status — as a frontier-crossing historian, say — that is when he becomes the most conspicuously Jewish version of himself yet.
But the story: Blum recounts being summoned to his boss’s office in the late 1950s and told that the history department is considering a new professor and would Blum please sit on the hiring committee? This confuses Blum, as the candidate’s specialty is Iberian medieval history, and Blum is an Americanist. It turns out that this candidate, Netanyahu, is Jewish, and the department chair would like Blum’s take on Netanyahu’s “fitness and aptitude” for the job and campus life, as a fellow Jew.
Blum goes home to review Netanyahu’s scholarship and finds not the normal research of a historian, but something stranger: What Netanyahu purports about the Spanish Inquisition is just a variation on the same kind of story young Blum heard at the knee of the rabbis who educated him — namely that the Spanish Inquisition happened not because Catholics wanted to convert Jews to Catholicism and expel all those who refused, but because the Jews are doomed to suffer. In fact, Netanyahu asserts, the Iberians tried to undo the Jewish conversions, not because the Jews didn’t make good Catholics, but because “when they began to convert — willingly, for the first time in their history — they were punished and admonished that they could never be other than what they originally were.” Reading these theories, Blum realizes that Netanyahu sees no difference between 1490 and 1940, and that his central insight is that hatred of the Jews is the Jewish birthright. This is not exactly an academic line of thinking; “dogma” is the word Blum uses. Netanyahu, he realizes, is a believer.
Blum cannot turn away from Netanyahu’s work. Like the rest of us running from our upbringings and therefore obsessed by them, he can’t stop reflecting upon his own past. The sleepless hours he spends reading through Netanyahu’s writing were “the first time in my life I’d ever looked back and compared who I’d been with who I’d become. I was a tenure track historian and an active participant in secular American life sneaking around in the attic-mind of an obscure Israeli academic like I was one of the antique Jews he wrote about, a convert forcibly returned to the faith I’d left and too consumed by internal turmoil to notice the hour until — jolted by the chatter of amatory birds‚ I’d turn and tug aside the curtain and outside the window was morning.”
Through this all is the story of Blum’s home life, which contains his wife, Edith, who misses New York, and their daughter, Judy, who, like all daughters, is slightly more liberal than they are. She’s writing her college essays now — the theme is fairness — and pining for a nose job, which she will get at all costs. On a Thanksgiving visit, Edith’s mother puts Blum’s impossible position succinctly: “If you decide to go and hire this Jew, they’ll say Jewish favoritism. If you decide not to go and hire this Jew, they’ll say you’re trying to avoid the appearance of Jewish favoritism.”
Blum, of course, is asked to host Netanyahu through the rigmarole of a hiring weekend: a job interview, a guest lecture, drinks at the local. Netanyahu brings along his three sons and his wife, Tzila, and Edith shows the Netanyahus her American hospitality. To say it gets chaotic from there is an understatement, but more, the chaos is just the ingenious layer on top of what this book also is, which is a brilliant examination of the Jew’s role in American society, always a tense place. The success of the Jews in America doesn’t dispel danger; no, the success creates the danger.
This is what the book is about, about the grappling of American Jewry (and its secret girlfriend, Israel). “The Netanyahus” presents, in addition to a dynamic and compelling story, a thorough history of the quarrels of Zionism at its founding and an account of the unimaginable thing that happened when finally the Jews had a national homeland and a place to go, when, according to the Netanyahu in this book, Jews stopped being a mythological people who wandered the earth, who were chased around the earth, and began being a people who could their record their own history. They — we — were finally real.
This seems heavy, yes. And it is! But I promise that the book is both readable and, in spots, I absolutely screamed with laughter. I hesitate to say it’s accessible, only because of the amount of unnecessarily blue-chip words that appear throughout. And here I’ll take a paragraph on just this. It was unclear to me if these words appeared as a way to convey the character of Ruben Blum — maybe as a pompous professorial type? If so, it was lost on me, since the net result was the same: I lost some of the rhythm in a Sheol of internet vocabulary searches, though, to be clear, I do not cavil at these words, lest my own lesser vocabulary stick out like a carbuncle. (Also: Glabrous! Cathexes! Strappado! It goes on!)
“The Netanyahus,” as an appendix to the book reads, was inspired by a story that the literary critic and academic Harold Bloom told Cohen toward the end of Bloom’s life. Blum, however, appears to be a wholly fictional character, even though the real-life Benzion Netanyahu did spend some time at Cornell as a professor. It’s unclear what else about the book is true.
But I also don’t care. Because this was a great book for me to read during the weeks after it was assigned to me, as tensions between Israel and Gaza raged and there was nothing to say about the matter but to text a few people I’m in touch with when these things go on and share my distress and also my inability to share that distress wider. This was a good book to read while tensions escalated further, and friends reached out to me who were just “wondering” what my point of view was on it, in argument stance, and people I didn’t know tweeted at me to see where my support for an oppressed people was, and my peers — who know full well the constraints of my job’s policy on tweeting about politics — liked those tweets, as though being Jewish meant I had to answer for Israel or its government, which I did not elect.
This was a good book to read as I searched in my mind for other times that we cheer on terrorism except for when it’s happening to the Jews. This was a good book to read as the meme of asserting that the “questioning” of Israel’s policies is not anti-Semitism morphed into something that was, by some parties, actually yes quite gleeful and strenuous anti-Semitism, until finally my sisters in Crown Heights began to beseech their male children to cover their yarmulkes with baseball caps and the world around me was heartbreakingly silent as Jews were cornered and threatened here in America for something going on very far away. This was a good book to read as my Jewish friends texted me that this would stop if we could just get Bibi out of power, and I wondered what they texted each other in 1935 as the streets in Europe overheated with pogrom energy and there was no Bibi and no Israel to blame.
Yes, this book was a good place to turn to swallow my opinions, which are fungible and not really worth knowing, while smart people I know shared the history of the Arab-Israeli conflict as cherry-picked by an Instagram influencer or by a tweet thread that had similarly squishy origins. It was good to actually know the history of the Jews and the founding of Israel, and learn about the infighting of it even more intimately from this book, as the noise around me got louder and I began to sympathize with Benzion’s point of view not of everything, but of the fact that it must be that Jews were doomed to this particular torture: to remain polite and quiet as this goes on. I began to have Benzion Netanyahu’s old dogmatic thought that this kind of hatred had to be preordained by someone. A thing they didn’t prepare me for in my own cheder — or maybe they did and I just didn’t hear it — was that the unique sadness and terror of anti-Semitism for the Jews lies not just in its violence, but in the people around you pretending that the violence doesn’t even exist.
It was good to be able to hold all the dimensions of all the ways a Jew can be in this country and in the diaspora in my hands — literally in my hands in the form of a book called “The Netanyahus,” where Jews could have that conversation among ourselves, since who is going to read a book called “The Netanyahus”? It felt like a deeply personal experience I was having, a shelter, so much so that I asked my editor on this review and my older sister and a writer friend to read it along with me. It was with these people that I talked about this book, about the complications of Zionism, the necessary criticisms of Israel, the horrible loneliness of being an American Jew in ways we can’t always talk about when someone else is listening.
I finished writing this as the rhetoric against Israel that had parlayed itself into violent attacks on Jews in the streets of America quieted down, and the online conversation on anti-Semitism chastened itself and receded into its safest places, a place we all agree upon, where a gentile author was bullied into removing an innocuous Anne Frank reference and we Jews all broke our necks nodding in defense of an author being able to make an innocuous Anne Frank reference — and there we American Jews were again, going out of our way to promise we won’t be any trouble if you just leave us alone. Yes, make jokes about that poor dead girl, just please don’t kill us!
Things cooled, as they do, and I was faced with a new book to review, but I didn’t. Instead, I reread this one, in the name of shaking off the noise of the previous weeks and spending a little more time among friends, too consumed by internal turmoil to notice the hour until — jolted by the chatter of amatory birds — I’d turn and tug aside the curtain and outside the window it was morning.
From The New York Times, June 18, 2021
The Fierce Anti-Sephardism and Zionist Militant Supremacy of Ben-Zion Netanyahu
July 2014 Update
I originally prepared the following article to mark the passing of Ben-Zion Netanyahu back in 2012.
In the article I do my best to provide a clear understanding of the fanatical anti-Sephardic posture of a man whose role in Israel’s politics has been a very important one because of his son, the current Israeli Prime Minister.
As the current obscene bloodletting in Gaza continues, I believe that it is vital for us to understand the venal ideas of Ben-Zion Netanyahu and their place in the ongoing violence.
My main concern is, as always, to expose the delusions of the “Idiot Sephardim” whose unquestioning loyalty to Benjamin Netanyahu betrays a complete lack of understanding of his own worldview when it comes to Sephardim and the Sephardic tradition of Religious Humanism. Benjamin Netanyahu learned his nihilistic Ashkenazi Jewish fatalism from his father who in turn imbibed it from the racist Vladimir Jabotinsky. The elder Netanyahu, as is well-known, was Jabotinsky’s secretary:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Benzion_Netanyahu#Zionist_activism
It is this Zionist nihilism which is intrinsic to the brutal policies of the current Israeli government.
For these men it was the blood of the Jewish race that was important above all else. The intellectual, cultural, and moral values of the great Jewish sages were not as critical to this racialist vision as violence and blood. This political philosophy had echoes of racist European movements like Sturm und Drang and Blood and Soil which had, ironically, targeted the Jews for persecution:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Blood_and_Soil
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sturm_und_drang
Ben-Zion Netanyahu, along with more mainstream Zionists like Ben-Zion Dinur and Yitzhak Baer, believed that the Sephardic acculturation to the Greco-Arabic model of Religious Humanism was an adulterated, impure version of Judaism that could not stand next to the doctrinal “purity” of the great Ashkenazi rabbis and their tradition of martyrs:
http://izgad.blogspot.com/2010/05/jewish-philosophy-and-politics.html
Only death could prove fidelity to Judaism. The study of philosophy and science and the writing of literature served to “weaken” the “true” Jewish spirit. Sephardic acculturation during the many centuries of Islamic civilization was seen negatively.
The “return” to Zion – to a Middle East that the Zionists despised – was to be constructed along the lines of this Ashkenazi fatalism and would be drawn up on a crucible of blood that continues to this day and looks to continue forever. Israel today has no idea whether it wants a two-state solution or a one-state solution. It is intent on living in the PILPUL limbo of its own nihilism. One day it supports HAMAS, the next day it targets HAMAS for destruction.
http://online.wsj.com/news/articles/SB123275572295011847
The Jewish State will thus forever be an outsider nation; something that is looking more and more likely as Israel’s aggressive actions are truly making it a pariah state.
The Arab enemy must always be treated with cruelty and venality. It is Jabotinsky’s “Iron Wall” philosophy that permeates the current violence. Women and children are being killed in order to fulfill the Zionist mission of blood and sacrifice:
The “Idiot Sephardim” have lost their cultural heritage and know very little, if anything, about their history. They have become allies of the very Ashkenazim who have contempt for that heritage. It is a sad reality to see Sephardim echoing the nihilism and barbarity of the Ashkenazi Zionists in the false belief that Israel represents their cultural heritage. All we see today is Jewish aggression and an endless lust for violence and carnage.
Israel today represents a frontal assault on the Sephardic tradition. The values of Israel are opposed to the values of Jewish Humanism. As the “Idiot Sephardim” puff up their chests to show the vile arrogance that this wanton bloodshed has engendered, those who actually have some familiarity with the classical Sephardic heritage are painfully struck by the cruelty of the self-delusion process and the irony of the Ashkenazification of the Sephardim.
The PILPUL mentality and its deeply antinomian values represent the triumph of Ashkenazi contempt for Sephardim. It is the Sephardim who have given a helping hand to the very Ashkenazi primitives who have sought, as Ben-Zion Netanyahu did, to destroy everything that Sephardim have always believed in.
These “Idiot Sephardim” now have complete control over our communities and have sought to silence and persecute those who still have the temerity to actually speak out against the Ashkenazim and try to restore a modicum of self-respect and decency to Judaism at the current moment.
DS
Ben-Zion Netanyahu was not just another scholar of Sephardic history. Because he was the father of the current Israeli Prime Minister his views on Jewish history and identity took on an outsize importance. His many years of counsel to his son – one of Israel’s most important politicians – made his own idiosyncratic views of Sephardic Jews and the Spanish Inquisition and their place in the historical Jewish identity a central factor in Israeli political culture.
Ben-Zion Netanyahu believed that traditional Sephardic Jews were less Jewish than their Ashkenazi compatriots. Along with his academic peers Yitzhak (Fritz) Baer and Ben-Zion Dinur, two men who also had an important role to play in the emergence of Jewish identity in Israel through their writing of national curriculum standards, Netanyahu saw the Sephardim as being effete intellectuals who cared more for sophistication and the good life than for Judaism.
In his discussion of the root causes for Jewish conversion to Christianity in Spain, Netanyahu – similar to the arguments of Baer and Dinur – blames the role of philosophical rationalism and in particular what is called “Averroism”:
“Besides the conversionist campaign, however, there was another ‘spiritual’ factor that contributed to the Christianization of the converts. In 1861 [Ernest] Renan observed that owing to the influence that the philosophy of Averroes wielded on Jewish thinking, ‘the Jewish people became one of the principal representatives of rationalism in the second half of the medieval era.’ If by the term ‘Jewish people’ Renan meant small sections of the Jewish communities in Southern France, Italy, and Spain, his observation was a true statement of fact. But for a long time, nobody related this fact to the general state of religion in Spanish Jewry, or to the rapid retreat from Judaism of the forced converts of 1391 and 1412. Such a relationship, however, existed, though it was indirect and not always apparent.
There is no doubt that, in the last analysis, Averroism was a denial of religion. Its lessons, however veiled, implied negation of such concepts as the immortality of the soul, the afterlife, and a world governed by reward and punishment. Thus, it conflicted with the fundamental beliefs not only of Islam (Averroes’ own religion), but of Christianity and Judaism as well. Jewish students of Averroes tried for a long time to coordinate his views with the tenets of religion, but finally the development of Jewish philosophy brought to the fore bolder spirits, who spelled out the implications of Averroes’ teachings in clear and definite terms. It did not take long before their conclusions spread from the intellectual elite, which upheld them, to the social elite of the Jews of Spain; and no special insights are needed to envisage how ties were formed between these two groups…” (The Origins of the Inquisition in Fifteenth Century Spain, Random House, 1995)
From this passage it is clear that Netanyahu was attacking the tradition of Maimonidean Religious Humanism which sought to bring Judaism and Jewish values into the world of Arabo-Islamic science and philosophical speculation. The attack is one that bitterly marks Religious Humanism as anti-Jewish and anti-religion.
For Netanyahu this “Averroism” led the Sephardic Jews to convert to Christianity. Because of such philosophical values they lost their allegiance to Judaism and sincerely chose to embrace Christianity. The vicious hatred of the Spanish Catholics towards the Conversos was racial in motivation and not at all religious. Netanyahu forcefully rejected the commonly-held idea that the Conversos maintained Judaism in secret. The Jewish converts for him had completely abandoned their ancestral tradition.
My esteemed teacher Jose Faur has forcefully responded to Netanyahu’s noxious attacks on Maimonides (already a central part of his thinking well before the 1995 publication of his opus on the Inquisition) in his seminal study In the Shadow of History: Jews and Conversos at the Dawn of Modernity (State University of New York Press, 1992) where he emphasizes the opposite idea: it was the rejection of the venerable tradition of Sephardic Religious Humanism that led to the inculcation of new and alien patterns of thinking that promoted anti-rational and barbarous primitive values in Spanish Judaism just prior to the Inquisition. It was the institution of these new ideas, ironically drawn from Christian religious fanaticism and its persecuting culture, that were responsible for transforming Sephardic Jewry:
“A long chain of events, originating in the new ideology taking hold in Gerona and Catalonia, resulted in the rise of the Converso phenomenon and the eventual expulsion of the Jews. Some of the mystical ideas newly introduced into Spanish soil appeared to have a special spiritual kinship with Christianity. At the same time, religious fervor and strong animosity against critical thought, raised as the banner of religiosity, served to confirm the basic thought patterns and feelings peculiar to the Christian clergy in Spain. Indeed, the whole legacy of the golden age, based on a careful balance of Jewish and secular studies, was repudiated by the new ideology. Regardless of their intent, the people perceived the new religious leadership as transmitting the idea that their entire legal and spiritual system of old Sepharad, regarded as sacred and inviolable throughout the ages, was a sham.” (In the Shadow of History, p. 24)
Not surprisingly, by critically comparing the two opposing views we can see echoes of the bitter dispute waged over Zionism in the context of contemporary Jewish identity. The establishment in Zionist thought of the “New Jew” was also part and parcel of a process of “semantic assimilation” to Gentile values that sought to eviscerate the Jewish tradition. Transcending the essential values of Torah Judaism most accurately formulated in Maimonides’ teaching, Zionism was firmly intent on creating a very different understanding of what it means to be Jewish.
In both cases – in Spain and in Zionism – the net effect was to strongly reject the past and its traditions in order to promulgate values quite different from the ethics and pieties of the venerable Jewish heritage.
Ben-Zion Netanyahu and his Zionist cohorts sought to stigmatize rational and scientific thought as not being Jewish while valorizing mystical and anti-rational values as being authentically Jewish. This revaluation has had a decisive – and deleterious – impact on contemporary Judaism.
I have discussed this vexing matter in my Huffington Post article “Dangerous Mystic Motifs in Judaism” where I argue that Maimonidean Religious Humanism was consistently attacked by Ashkenazi Jews who sought to promote obscurantism and a militantly authoritarian Judaism. In the article I present a quote from the scholar Menachem Kellner that speaks to the point:
“The world favored by Maimonides’ opponents, on the other hand, is an ‘enchanted’ world. Many of Maimonides’ opponents, in his day and ours, do indeed accept the efficacy of charms and amulets, and fear the harm of demons and the evil eye. But it is not in that sense that I maintain that they live in an enchanted world. Theirs is not a world which can be explained in terms of the unvarying workings of divinely ordered laws of nature; it is not a world which can be rationally understood. It is a world in which the notion of miracle loses all meaning, since everything that happens is a miracle. In such a world instructions from God, and contact with the divine in general, must be mediated by a religious elite who alone can see the true reality masked by nature. This is the opposite of an empowering religion, since it takes their fate out of the hands of Jews, and, in effect, puts it into the hands of the rabbis.”
http://www.huffingtonpost.com/david-shasha/dangerous-mystic-motifs-i_b_637535.html
This integration of Jewish irrationalism into the very heart of contemporary Zionist thought is due in large part to the views of scholars like Netanyahu who successfully made their ideas part of the Israeli educational system and the larger civic culture of the nation.
It is little wonder then that the net result of this intellectual integration has been a culture that is predicated on militancy, as the following obituary states: “Throughout, his views were relentlessly hawkish: he argued that Jews inevitably faced discrimination that was racial and not religious, and that efforts to compromise with Arabs were futile.”
Living in an enchanted world where anti-rational beliefs are
the norm, Netanyahu understood the Arab-Israeli conflict through the lenses of
the magical and occult. There can never
be a rational solution to the conflict because rationalism is anti-Jewish. The mystical is easily translated into the
violent. It is an enchanted place where
no rational political solution can ever take place. The sword, not the word, is of decisive
importance in Netanyahu’s fatalistic epistemology.
Dispensing with the rational, Ben-Zion Netanyahu firmly believed in a deeply
radical Right Wing vision of Zionism that was predicated on the values of
violence and militancy. His intimate association
with the fanatical Revisionist leader Vladimir Jabotinsky spoke to his
understanding of politics as an outgrowth of a chillingly occult process.
His benighted and inaccurate scholarship saw the Spanish Inquisition as an existential contest between incompatible essentialized racial identities. This contest was seen through the prism of a primordial tribal agon that could only ever be resolved through death and destruction of the enemy.
That this ideology was – contrary to the vain protestations of his son Benjamin – given importance in elite circles of Israeli political thinking is sad testimony for a Zionism whose roots are part and parcel of a way of seeing and interpreting Jewish history that firmly negates the rich Jewish culture of Sephardic Jewry.
The elevation and eventual triumph of Ashkenazi Judaism in Israeli society is marked by a tradition of anti-rationalism that finds its expression in militant zealotry that often spills over into a blind fanaticism and a siege mentality. It is a culture of suicidal Judaism that remains paranoid and sees itself as being under endless persecution. It is a Judaism that can never have common ground with the Gentile world.
Those are the values that Ben-Zion Netanyahu believed in. These values were transmitted in his writings and discussions to his son, and through his son to the Israeli public and world Jewry as a whole. His outsize influence on Israeli politics has made his death an international matter. He was an important personage whose ideas, however offensive they might have been, have taken on a great significance in our understanding not only of medieval history, but of the current struggle between Israeli Jews and Palestinian Arabs.
It is a legacy of tortured thinking and a profound struggle with the most basic ethical values of a Judaism that he sought to aggressively transform into a corrosively militant ideology which continues to be articulated by the current Israeli Prime Minister and his legion of supporters.
David Shasha
From SHU 537, July 11, 2012
Ben-Zion Netanyahu, Hawkish Scholar, Dies at 102
By: Douglas Martin
Benzion Netanyahu, the father of the two-time Israeli prime minister Benjamin, who fought for the creation of the Jewish state by lobbying in the United States and went on to write an influential history of the Spanish inquisition, died on Monday. He was 102.
His death was announced by the prime minister’s office. Mr. Netanyahu was at various times a journalist, encyclopedia editor, professor, historian and lobbyist — not to mention a behind-the-scenes adviser to his son, the most powerful person in Israel. Throughout, his views were relentlessly hawkish: he argued that Jews inevitably faced discrimination that was racial and not religious, and that efforts to compromise with Arabs were futile.
In the 1940s, as the executive director of the New Zionist Organization in the United States, he met with influential policymakers like General Dwight D. Eisenhower and Secretary of State Dean Acheson. He also wrote hard-hitting full-page advertisements that appeared in The Times and other newspapers.
The goal of his group, which was part of the movement known as revisionist Zionism, was to prevent dividing Palestine between Jews and Arabs to create the new Israel. The group wanted a single, bigger state that would have included present-day Jordan.
Ultimately, Israel was created as a result of the partition the revisionists opposed. Nonetheless, Rafael Medoff, director of the David S. Wyman Institute for Holocaust Studies, said in a letter to The Jerusalem Post in 2005 that Mr. Netanyahu was instrumental in building American support for the smaller Israel that did emerge.
Mr. Medoff said Mr. Netanyahu persuaded the leadership of the Republican Party to put a call for a Jewish state in its 1944 platform. It was the first time a major party had done this, and the Democrats followed suit.
In his 1995 book, “The Origins of the Inquisition in Fifteenth Century Spain,” Mr. Netanyahu offered a radical new way of viewing the Inquisition. Rather than seeing it as the persecution of Jews for secretly practicing their religion after pretending to convert to Roman Catholicism — which had been the predominant view — Mr. Netanyahu offered evidence that most Jews willingly became enthusiastic Catholics. Jews were thus burned at the stake, he concluded, for being perceived as an evil race rather than for anything they did or believed.
Mr. Netanyahu said this persecution was fueled by jealousy over Jews’ success in the economy and at the royal court. In his 1,384-page book, he traced what he called “Jew hatred” to ancient Egypt, long before Christianity.
The book garnered praise for its insights and criticism for ignoring standard sources and interpretations. Not a few reviewers noted that it seemed to look at long-ago cases of anti-Semitism through the rear-view mirror of the Holocaust.
Indeed, in 1998, Mr. Netanyahu said in an interview with The New Yorker that “Jewish history is a history of holocausts.” He suggested then that Hitler’s genocide was different only in scale.
Mr. Netanyahu believed Jews remain endangered in today’s Middle East. In an interview with the Israeli newspaper Maariv in 2009, he said, “The vast majority of Israeli Arabs would choose to exterminate us if they had the option to do so.”
He further said that Arabs are “an enemy by essence,” that they cannot compromise and that they respond only to force.
Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu repeatedly denied that his father was a one-dimensional ideologue. He further emphasized that he himself was a different person from his father.
Benjamin has dismissed conjectures about Benzion’s influence on his decision-making as “psychobabble.” (He has, however, acknowledged that his father called to correct grammatical mistakes in his speeches.)
The author of the 1998 New Yorker article, David Remnick, reported that Israelis seemed in the dark about the extent of paternal influence on their leader. Benzion Netanyahu, he said, was “nearly a legend, a kind of secret.” But, Mr. Remnick added, using the younger Netanyahu’s nickname, “To understand Bibi, you have to understand the father.”
Benzion Mileikowsky was born on March 25, 1910, in Warsaw, then part of the Russian empire. His father, Nathan, was a rabbi who toured Europe and America making speeches supporting Zionism. After Nathan brought the family to Palestine in 1920, he changed the family name to Netanyahu, which means God-given.
The young Mr. Netanyahu studied medieval history at Hebrew University in Jerusalem. He became involved with the right-wing revisionist Zionists who had split from their mainstream counterparts, whom they believed were too conciliatory to the British who then governed Palestine and the Arabs who lived there.
The revisionists were led by Vladimir Jabotinsky, whose belief in the necessity of an “iron wall” between Israel and its Arab neighbors has influenced Israeli politics since the 1930s. Jabotinsky is the most popular street name in Israel, and the ruling Likud party traces its roots to his movement.
In 1940, Mr. Netanyahu went to the United States to be secretary to Mr. Jabotinsky, who was building American support for his militant brand of Zionism. Mr. Jabotinsky died in a car accident that same year, and Mr. Netanyahu became executive director of Mr. Jabotinsky’s New Zionists, a post he held until 1948.
When not lobbying, Mr. Netanyahu found time to earn his Ph.D. from Dropsie College in Philadelphia. He wrote his dissertation on Isaac Abrabanel, a Jewish statesman who unsuccessfully opposed the banishment of Jews from Spain.
After Israel declared its independence in 1948, Mr. Netanyahu returned to Jerusalem, where he tried without success to get into politics. He became editor of the “Encyclopedia Hebraica,” in Hebrew. During the 1950s and 1960s, Mr. Netanyahu and his family lived alternately in Israel and in the United States, where he taught at Dropsie, the University of Denver and Cornell University.
In the 1960s, Mr. Netanyahu edited two more major reference books, these in English. They were the “Encyclopedia Judaica” and “The World History of the Jewish People.”
Mr. Netanyahu’s eldest son, Jonathan, commanded the spectacular rescue of more than 100 Jewish and Israeli hostages on board an Air France jet at Entebbe Airport in Uganda in 1976. He was the only Israeli soldier killed.
In addition to Benjamin, who was Israel’s prime minister from 1996 to 1999 and from 2009 to the present, Mr. Netanyahu is survived another son, Iddo, a radiologist and writer. His wife, the former Cela Segal; died in 2000.
An early example of Mr. Netanyahu’s uncompromising spirit occurred when he was a university student and won a poetry contest with a prize of $20. When he went to claim the prize, he was given just $10.
When he protested, he was told that he wasn’t getting the full amount because his poem was short. He never wrote another.
From The New York Times, April 30, 2012