The Fierce Anti-Sephardism and Zionist Militant Supremacy of Ben-Zion Netanyahu
David Shasha
The Fierce Anti-Sephardism and Zionist Militant Supremacy of Ben-Zion Netanyahu
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.
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
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