New Article: Yale Jewish Lives’ Maimonides, Alberto Manguel, Jose Faur, and White Jewish Supremacy
David Shasha
Yale Jewish Lives’ Maimonides, Alberto Manguel, Jose Faur, and White Jewish Supremacy
Negroes have no control over their education and have little voice in their other affairs pertaining thereto. In a few cases Negroes have been chosen as members of public boards of education, and some have been appointed as members of private boards, but these Negroes are always such a small minority that they do not figure in the final working out of the educational program.
Carter G. Woodson, The Mis-education of the Negro (1933)
Woodson understood efforts to control scholarship produced by black academics, as in the case of this encyclopedia, to be directly related to white control of black education at the level of institutions and curriculum.
Jarvis R. Givens, Introduction to Carter G. Woodson, The Mis-education of the Negro (Penguin Books, 2023)
My world, it moves so fast today
The past, it seems so far away
And life, squeezes so tight that I can't breathe
And every time I've tried to be
What someone else thought of me
So caught up, I was unable to achieve
But deep in my heart
The answer, it wasn't me
And I made up my mind
To define, my own destiny
Lauryn Hill, “The Miseducation of Lauryn Hill” (1998)
The last time I took the trip to the Upper West Side’s Book Culture store, I was confronted by the connection between Dara Horn’s execrable Neo-Con Straussian best-seller People Love Dead Jews and the Ashkenazi-run Tikvah ASF, which allowed me to square the Commentary magazine Neo-Con Jew circle:
https://docs.google.com/document/d/1dqTxHAp38o_OwER7gEEvNDF0Ey3JYtnb/edit
And so it was that on a gloriously warm and sunny Mother’s Day, I made the trip to 112th Street again, and had yet another very troubling Tikvah Fund White Jewish Supremacy experience.
There it was in the rear corner of the store on the Judaica new books section:
https://yalebooks.yale.edu/book/9780300217896/maimonides/
To be honest, I learned of the Yale Jewish Lives series publication of a new volume on Maimonides by Alberto Manguel a few months ago.
Indeed, I stupidly believed that it would be a book that I could heartily recommend – even though I wisely did not request a review copy; a practice that I have adhered to with “Sephardic” books for some years now, as I do not want to be under an obligation to write a review of a work that insults the Sephardic heritage.
The Yale Jewish Lives series is one of the most egregiously White Jewish Supremacist in the publishing world, having issued dozens of volumes with barely a Sephardi included:
https://www.jewishlives.org/completecollection/the-complete-jewish-lives-collection-6r77t
An exception is Primo Levi, who no one really identifies as a Sephardi anyway:
https://yalebooks.yale.edu/book/9780300137231/primo-levi/
Here is my article contrasting Levi’s Sephardic Humanism with Elie Wiesel’s Hasidic Fatalism:
https://docs.google.com/document/d/1Rl7pHt_g48Bb5SStgVlo3WrVrPvElpF3dP4R_IYTqVg/edit
And, more recently, Amsterdam sage Rabbi Menasseh Ben Israel:
https://yalebooks.yale.edu/book/9780300224108/menasseh-ben-israel/
Of Cromwell fame:
https://www.amazon.com/Menasseh-Israels-Mission-Oliver-Cromwell/dp/1108053807
The racist editors gave that one to Steven Nadler, a rabid Spinozist and Anti-Maimonidean:
https://smnadler.wixsite.com/mysite/books
https://aeon.co/essays/at-a-time-of-zealotry-spinoza-matters-more-than-ever
He is deeply committed to the pantheist lens-grinder!
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_box6LY7adQ
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4P1iu4QkuNs
The Yale Jewish Lives series is truly not friendly to Sephardim, whether as authors or subjects.
But the reason that I was cautiously optimistic was that Manguel wrote an excellent book in the complex Borgesian fashion, A History of Reading, back in 1996:
https://www.amazon.com/History-Reading-Alberto-Manguel/dp/0140166548
It is a book that is very much in the rich, polyglot vein of the work of my teacher Jose Faur, as it delves into a Post-Modern narratology that is rooted in a cosmopolitanism very much in keeping with the classical Sephardic heritage.
That Manguel and Faur’s Golden Doves with Silver Dots have some important things in common, blinded me to the absence of Faur’s name in A History of Reading.
I did not think in such conspiratorial terms back then.
Sadly, I do now.
And to explain it, I will have to do a massive connect-the-dots which will bring us back to The Tikvah Fund.
Please bear with me while I again do the disagreeable grunt work.
The first thing I noticed as I went through the book was the inclusion of laudable figures like Maria Rosa Menocal, Ammiel Alcalay, Peter Cole, and S.D. Goitein, all in relation to Andalusian Judaism and Islam.
That is all to the good.
In addition, Manguel references the work of figures I have praised in earlier articles.
Herbert Davidson:
https://docs.google.com/document/d/1WSKjgm6nqK_GXIdsCKuEcPLnHtKM1U41zHjcZSRd_uM/edit
https://www.amazon.com/Moses-Maimonides-Man-His-Works/dp/0199747571
And Joel Kraemer:
https://www.huffpost.com/entry/moses-maimonides-arab-jew_b_491543
https://www.amazon.com/Maimonides-World-Civilizations-Greatest-Minds/dp/0385512007
But that’s all there is on the positive side of the ledger.
Once Manguel does his analysis of Maimonides and his writings, it is all White Jewish Supremacy.
In fact, it is all about the Anti-Maimonideans.
Rabbi Joseph B. Soloveitchik:
https://docs.google.com/document/d/19iVeUgl2UVZwYW2dg3hkknljJqfPwcwiApvO3ejCi9s/edit
Aryeh Kaplan:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Aryeh_Kaplan#Religious_works
Rabbi Adin Steinsaltz:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Adin_Steinsaltz
And the ubiquitous Isadore Twersky:
https://docs.google.com/document/d/1Ye7X9yLWRJbJWR7SIknhuO8dqWBtp_EC/edit
Who has his own Yale Judaica connection:
https://yalebooks.yale.edu/book/9780300028461/the-code-of-maimonides-mishneh-torah/
It is here that we should note, yet again, the way in which Twersky has displaced Faur on the study of Maimonides, in spite of the former’s Hasidic bona fides:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Isadore_Twersky#Biography
Even as the late Faur continues to remain the primary academic authority on Maimonides and Sephardic Humanism, as may be seen in his voluminous literary output which I have distilled into the following resource sheet:
https://docs.google.com/document/d/1p8bgBmpENXW8UTmkkgZyOvVGZmz-UU84uyStJtO5ADA/edit
The White Jewish Supremacy orientation that Manguel adopts is consistent with the way in which Modern Jewish Thought has been processed in a Jewish institutional world that has sought to erase Sephardim from the discourse and from sitting at the Adult Jewish Table.
I have addressed the problem and its residual racism in my discussion of Leonard Levin’s workbook:
https://docs.google.com/document/d/1mjPboUYJIFK3e5HeU0xUzvMcdlpcLxoQdRwqFI3guuw/edit
Here is that workbook:
https://drive.google.com/file/d/1VAxVUNgZw9vez8dM7epyx70tl4T2tfwf/view?ths=true
In this sense, Faur has been erased twice: once as a Modern Jewish thinker, and then as an authority on Maimonides.
The initiate Manguel confirms this erasure by his exclusive use of Ashkenazi Jewish scholars to parse Maimonides’ work in a way that goes against the grain of Sephardic Humanism.
It is thus natural to find his consistent use of Leo Strauss, the father of Neo-Con Judaism and The Tikvah Fund:
https://groups.google.com/g/davidshasha/c/7--egAduduU/m/JNaQjSufBQAJ
Strauss’ seminal essay “Persecution and the Art of Writing” not only promotes a Platonic Anti-Democratic elitism, but essentially accuses Maimonides and other Religious Humanists for being liars and prevaricators, as they hide their “true” views from the idiot masses:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Persecution_and_the_Art_of_Writing#Overview
From Strauss it is a short leap to other Tikvah Fund Neo-Cons.
Micah Goodman:
https://tikvahfund.org/faculty/micah-goodman/
Moshe Halbertal:
https://tikvahfund.org/faculty/moshe-halbertal/
And, best of all, David Novak, founder of The Tikvah Fund 2008 Summer Seminar at Princeton University:
https://philosophy.utoronto.ca/wp-content/uploads/CV-David-Novak-utoronto-philosophy.pdf
https://www.giffordlectures.org/lecturers/david-novak
https://judaic.princeton.edu/sites/g/files/toruqf1786/files/about-us/NewsletterFall2008.pdf
Novak is a longtime Right Wing religious radical, who has been publishing with the Catholic Fascists at First Things for a very long time:
https://www.firstthings.com/author/david-novak
And so it is that Manguel has done the proper Neo-Con Jew thing by erasing Faur and promoting the White Jewish Supremacy from Washington Heights illiberalism to Tikvah Fund Straussianism.
I began this article with a couple of citations from the excellent new edition of the seminal African-American historian Carter G. Woodson’s classic 1933 book The Mis-education of the Negro:
https://www.amazon.com/Mis-education-Negro-Carter-G-Woodson/dp/0143137468
Throughout his groundbreaking career in education, Woodson fought White Supremacy in a way that focused laser-like on institutional inclusion and exclusion. He demanded that African-Americans be represented to tell their history and to expound on their culture in a way that comports with their organic experiences as a community.
And so too must Sephardim be permitted to speak on Maimonides and other crucial figures and books in our own tradition.
I have addressed this organic Sephardic perspective in many introductory articles which present a counterweight to the regnant White Jewish Supremacy and its endemic racism and benighted reactionary Judaism:
https://www.huffpost.com/entry/a-jewish-voice-left-silen_b_487586
https://drive.google.com/file/d/1KNT3cG91CHYNf6ibRwp_gSQbcaDV1Irj/view?ths=true
Indeed, I have discussed the complexities of the Hispano-Jewish tradition as it applies to Converso culture and literature, in the tradition of Faur and Borges:
https://docs.google.com/document/d/16Q5bnDAid8WSNWlf6xftWZnsyQbKrnRXwycu2qL_vYw/edit
https://docs.google.com/document/d/1xROeoNl0b5U4iXhYdDw503ppy2GkT-GF786w4PNDp30/edit
We have recently seen how North African Jewish children in France have been robbed of their Sephardic heritage by this same toxic White Jewish Supremacy, turning them into unthinking, unfeeling automatons who follow the dictates of the Ashkenazi religious radicals:
https://docs.google.com/document/d/1GkHwZ_UjfaUWloj3qffjtrucMTpZ9vC2s6MagZjoZKs/edit
There is a direct correlation between this Ashkenazi racism and Jewish dysfunction, which I addressed in my article “A Broken Frame”:
https://drive.google.com/file/d/1TjFku-0Z8bD2BD4QuDxv6OWK5Lubd8Uj/view?ths=true
As Lauryn Hill so very wisely put it in her musical homage to Woodson’s book:
I made up my mind
To define, my own destiny
Until Sephardim can speak for themselves, the rich heritage of Maimonides and Jewish Humanism will be absent from the Jewish discourse and its institutional world.
Racism remains primary in that Shtetl world, as it continues to undermine the classical values of Torah Judaism.
It is thus little wonder that we see how Manguel, who asserts that he is Jewish, marks his preface to the book with the fact that it was completed on the day of Yom Kippur.
Writing a book on Maimonides by violating the holiest day on the Jewish calendar!
With Leo Strauss as a guide.
How very appropriate!
Which leads me to close on what is personally the most distressing and depressing part of the sordid story.
In his closing acknowledgements, Manguel expresses profuse thanks to our former-friend Arthur Kiron, the scholar who has heroically brought to light the work of the forgotten Sephardic Sage Sabato Morais:
https://docs.google.com/document/d/1oJ6PrGWTGHnTnfPkBhPao3oSucPPg-k4sEKZDgCGOZc/edit
Here is my loving tribute to his excellent Morais dissertation:
https://docs.google.com/document/d/15jNchwcdp7UvLG6qplBsDf7pu1UUnAhLFHZMQY_G624/edit
Seeing Kiron’s name mentioned so prominently at the very end of the racist book not only reminded me of how many people I have befriended and lost along this very difficult Sephardic journey, but how corrupt the Jewish institutional world remains.
Manguel’s book stands against the Maimonidean tradition that Morais represented, as the idea of Sephardic continuity remains in serious peril as Ashkenazi Jewish reactionaries remain in full control over a discourse that is causing so many young Jews to simply abandon our religious heritage.
David Shasha