How I Stopped Being a Jew

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Shlomo Sand

• Publisher: Verso
• Year: 2014
• Print ISBN:
  9781781686140
• eBook ISBN:
  9781781686980
• Topic: History
• Subtopic: Historical Biographies
• Index: History

Shlomo Sand was born in 1946, in a displaced person's camp in Austria, to Jewish parents; the family later migrated to Palestine. As a young man, Sand came to question his Jewish identity, even that of a "secular Jew." With this meditative and thoughtful mixture of essay and personal recollection, he articulates the problems at the center of modern Jewish identity.

How I Stopped Being a Jew discusses the negative effects of the Israeli exploitation of the "chosen people" myth and its "holocaust industry." Sand criticizes the fact that, in the current context, what "Jewish" means is, above all, not being Arab and reflects on the possibility of a secular, non-exclusive Israeli identity, beyond the legends of Zionism.

CHAPTER 1

The Heart of the Matter

The main line of argument developed in this essay is bound to appear illegitimate to more than one reader, not to say repugnant. It will be rejected out of hand by many people who are determined to define themselves as Jews despite being non-religious. Others will see me simply as an infamous traitor racked by self-hatred. Consistent Judeophobes have characterized the very question of self-definition as impossible or even absurd, seeing Jews as belonging always to a different race. Both these groups maintain that a Jew is a Jew, and that there is no way a person can escape an identity given at birth. Jewishness is perceived in both cases as an immutable and monolithic essence that cannot be modified.

In the early twenty-first century, from reading newspapers, magazines and books, I do not think it exaggerated to maintain that Jews are too often presented as bearers of particular hereditary character traits or brain cells that distinguish them from other human beings, in the same way as Africans are distinguished from Europeans by their skin colour. And just as it is impossible for Africans to shed their skins, so too are Jews unable to renounce their essence.

The state of which I am a citizen, when it conducts a census of its inhabitants, defines my nationality as ‘Jew’, and calls itself the state of the ‘Jewish people’. In other words, its founders and legislators considered this state as being the collective property of the ‘Jews of the world’, whether believers or not, rather than as an institutional expression of the democratic sovereignty of the body of citizens who live in it.

The State of Israel defines me as a Jew, not because I express myself in a Jewish language, hum Jewish songs, eat Jewish food, write Jewish books or carry out any Jewish activity. I am classified as a Jew because this state, after having researched my origins, has decided that I was born of a Jewish mother, herself Jewish because my grandmother was likewise, thanks to (or because of) my great-grandmother, and so on through the chain of generations until the dawn of time.

If chance should have had it that only my father was considered a Jew, while in the eyes of Israeli law my mother was ‘non-Jewish’, I would have been registered as an Austrian; I happen to have been born in a displaced persons camp in the town of Linz, just after the Second World War. I could indeed, in this case too, have claimed Israeli citizenship, but the fact that I spoke, swore, taught, and wrote in Hebrew, and studied throughout my youth in Israeli schools, would have been of no avail, and throughout my life I would have been considered legally as being Austrian by nationality.

Fortunately or unfortunately as the case may be, depending on how one sees this question, my mother was identified as Jewish on her arrival in Israel at the end of 1948, and the description ‘Jew’ was added to my identity card. Moreover, and no matter how paradoxical it might appear, according to Israeli law just as according to Judaic law (Halakhah), I cannot stop being a Jew. This is not within my power of free choice. My nationality could be changed in the records of the Jewish state only in the exceptional case of my conversion to another religion.

The problem is, I don’t believe in a supreme being. Apart from a brief fit of mysticism at age twelve, I have always believed that man created God rather than the other way around – an invention that has always seemed to me one of the most questionable, fascinating and deadly wrought by human society. As a result, I find myself tied hand and foot, caught in the trap of my crazy identity. I don’t envisage converting to Christianity, not merely because of the past cruelty of the Inquisition and the bloody Crusades, but quite simply because I don’t believe in Jesus Christ, Son of God. Nor do I envisage converting to Islam, and not just on account of the traditional Sharia that allows a man, if he feels it necessary, to marry four women, whereas this privilege is refused to women. I have instead a more prosaic reason: I don’t believe Muhammad was a prophet. Nor will I become a follower of Hinduism, as I disapprove of any tradition that sacralizes castes, even in an indirect and attenuated fashion. I’m even incapable of becoming a Buddhist, as I feel it impossible to transcend death and do not believe in the reincarnation of souls.

I am secular and an atheist, even if my limited brain finds it hard to grasp the infinity of the universe, given the tight and terrible limits of life here on Earth. The principles that guide my thoughts – my beliefs, if I dare use this word – have always been anthropocentric. In other words, the central place is held by human beings and not by any kind of higher power that supposedly directs them. The great religions, even the most charitable and least fanatic, are theocentric, which means that the will and designs of God stand above the lives of men, their needs, their aspirations, their dreams and their frailties.

Modern history is full of oddities and irony. Just as the ethnoreligious nationalism that emerged in the early nineteenth century forced Heinrich Heine to convert to Christianity in order to be recognized as German, and Polish nationalism in the 1930s refused to see my father as completely Polish if he would not become a Catholic, so the Zionists of the early twenty-first century, both inside and outside Israel, absolutely reject the principle of a civil Israeli nationality and recognize only a Jewish one. And this Jewish nationality can be acquired only by the almost impossible path of a religious act: all individuals who wish to see Israel as their national state must either be born of a Jewish mother, or else satisfy a long and wearisome itinerary of conversion to Judaism in conformity with the rules of Judaic law, even if they are resolutely atheist.

In the State of Israel, any definition of Jewishness is deeply deceptive, imbued with bad faith and arrogance. At the time these lines were written, a number of immigrant workers – fathers and mothers of children born and raised in Israel – applied in despair to the Chief Rabbinate to convert to Judaism, but found their request rejected out of hand. They wanted to join the ‘Jewish nation’ to avoid being sent back to the hell from which they’d fled, not to satisfy a belief in the Jews as a ‘chosen people’.

At Tel Aviv University, I teach students of Palestinian origin. They speak a faultless Hebrew and are legally considered full Israeli citizens, yet the records of the Ministry of the Interior identify them definitively as ‘Arabs’, not just ‘Israelis’. This mark of identity is in no way voluntary; it is imposed on them, and is almost impossible to change. You can imagine the fury that would be triggered in France, the United States, Italy, Germany or any other liberal democracy, if the authorities required that individuals who identified themselves as Jews have this attribute marked on their identity papers or that they be categorized as such in the official census of the population.

Following the Judeocide of the Second World War, the UN partition resolution of 1947 referred to the creation of a ‘Jewish state’, along with an adjacent ‘Arab state’ that never saw the light of day. It should thus be understandable why resorting to such labels at this point in the twenty-first century appears to be a questionable and dangerous anachronism. Twenty-five per cent of Israeli citizens, including the 20 per cent who are Arab, are not defined as Jews within the framework of the law. The designation ‘Jew’, therefore, as opposed to the designation ‘Israeli’, not only does not include non-Jews, but explicitly excludes them from the civic body in whose interest the state ostensibly exists. Such a restriction is not only antidemocratic; it also endangers the very existence of Israel.

The antirepublican identity policy of the State of Israel, however, is not the only motivation that compelled me to write this short essay. It does indeed occupy a key place here, and certainly contributed to the sharp assertions I have sometimes resorted to, but other factors, too, influenced the elaboration of the essay’s content and objective. I wanted herein to place a large question mark against accepted ideas and assumptions that are deeply rooted, not only in the Israeli public sphere but also in the networks of globalized communication. For quite some time, I have felt a certain unease with the ways of defining Jewishness that became established within the heart of Western culture during the second half of the twentieth century and on into the twenty-first. I have the increasing impression that, in certain respects, Hitler was the victor of the Second World War. Certainly he was defeated militarily and politically, but within a few years his perverted ideology infiltrated itself and resurfaced. Today that ideology emits strong and threatening signals.

Let us not deceive ourselves. Today we are no longer threatened by the horrific Judeophobia that culminated in genocide. The morbid hatred towards Jews and their secularized descendants has not had a sudden rejuvenation in Western culture. Public and political anti-Semitism has actually retreated significantly in the liberal-democratic world.¹ Despite the shrieks of the Israeli state and its Zionist outriders in the ‘diaspora’, who claim that hatred of Jews, with which they equate any criticism of Israeli policy, is constantly growing, we need to emphasize right away a fact that has broadly conditioned and inspired the writing of this essay.

No politician in our day can publicly make anti-Jewish statements, except perhaps in a few places in Central Europe and within the new sphere of Islamic nationalism. No serious press organ disseminates anti-Semitic twaddle, and no respectable publishing house will publish a writer, no matter how brilliant, who defends hatred of Jews. No radio station or television channel, public or private, will allow a commentator hostile to Jews to express himself or appear on-screen. And if any statements that are defamatory towards Jews should insinuate themselves into the mass media, they are quickly and effectively suppressed.

The long and tormented century of Judeophobia that the Western world experienced between approximately 1850 and 1950 has effectively ended – and just as well. It is true that a few marginal pockets of this viewpoint remain, relics handed down from the past, hatred conveyed in whispers in dubious salons or displayed in cemeteries (naturally their predestined place). This hatred is sometimes mouthed by crazed outsiders, but the broad public does not extend it the least legitimacy. To try to equate today’s marginal anti-Semitism with the powerful, mainstream Judeophobia of the past amounts to greatly downplaying the impact of Jew-hatred in Western, Christian and modern civilization as expressed until the mid-twentieth century.

Yet the conception that makes Jews a ‘race’ with mysterious qualities, transmitted by obscure routes, still blossoms. While in former times it was a matter of simple physiological characteristics, blood, or facial shape, today it is DNA or, for the more subtle, a paler substitute: the strong belief in a direct lineage down the chain of generations. In a distant past we were dealing with a mixture of fear, contempt, hatred of the other, and ignorance. Today, on the part of the ‘post-Shoah goyim’, we face a symbiosis of fears, guilty consciences and ignorance, while among the ‘new Jews’ we often find victimization, narcissism, pretentiousness, and likewise a crass ignorance.

I therefore felt compelled to write the present text, as a desperate attempt to free myself from this determinist straitjacket, both blind and blinding, full of dangers for my own future and that of those dear to me. There is a close link between the identification of Jews as an ethnos or eternal race-people, and the politics of Israel towards those of its citizens who are viewed as non-Jews, as well as towards immigrant workers from distant lands and, clearly, towards its neighbours, deprived of rights and subject for nearly fifty years to a regime of occupation. It is hard to deny a glaring reality: the development of an essentialist, non-religious identity encourages the perpetuation of ethnocentric, racist or quasi-racist positions, both in Israel and abroad.

In light of the tragedies of the first half of the twentieth century, the emotional connection felt by Jewish descendants towards Israel is both understandable and undeniable, and it would be foolish to criticize it. However, in no way does that undeniable connection also necessitate a close connection between the conception of Jewishness as an eternal and ahistorical essence, and the growing support that a large number of those who identify themselves as Jews give to the politics of segregation that is inherent in the self-definition of the State of Israel, and to the regime of extended occupation and colonization that has been enforced in the territories conquered in 1967.

I am not writing for an audience of anti-Semites. I view them as either totally ignorant or stricken with an incurable disease. As for the more learned racists, I know no way to convince them. Instead I am writing for all those who question the origins and metamorphoses of Jewish identity, the modern forms of its existence, and the political repercussions induced by its various definitions. To this end, I shall extract certain crumbs from my patchy memory and reveal some components of the chain of personal identities I have acquired in the course of my life.

1. The concept of ‘anti-Semitism’ does occur at many points in this text, for want of a more suitable phrase. But to my mind it has dubious connotations, having been invented by Judeophobes, while the term ‘Semite’ is manifestly racist and lacks any historical foundation.

CHAPTER 2

Identity Is Not a Hat

A well-known joke will help illustrate my theoretical starting-point. In a school in the Paris suburbs, young Mohammed is seen as a little genius. Not only is he unbeatable in arithmetic, he excels in French. One fine day, the teacher comes up and asks him, ‘Would you like me to call you Pierre?’ The young pupil’s face lights up, and he responds to this invitation with an outburst of enthusiasm. When Mohammed/Pierre arrives home later in the day, his mother says, ‘Mohammed, can you go to the supermarket and get two bottles of milk?’ The child replies that he’s now called Pierre, and refuses to comply. In the evening his father comes back from work and asks his son to bring him some water from the fridge. The boy refuses and again demands to be called Pierre. The father gets up and slaps him, accidentally scratching the boy’s face with his ring. The next morning when he arrives in the classroom, the teacher asks: ‘Pierre, what’s that on your face?’ and the child replies, ‘The Arabs beat me up!’

Clearly, this is a story told by French people and not by Arabs. Aside from what it reveals, both positive and negative, about the ‘open’ character of French nationality, the joke couldn’t be repeated in Israel to illustrate the state’s identity policy, given its segregationist dimension. That may also stimulate us to reflect a moment on the notion of identity – the self-image that it conveys, the risks of social fracture that it carries, its imaginary dimension, its evident dependence on others, and one’s capacity or inability to change it.

At the risk of sounding trivial, I have to recall that very early in their existence human beings acquire an identity of their own, which demands recognition from their milieu. The ‘ego’ invents and sets itself an identity through permanent dialogue with the Other’s regard. Even though identity as such responds to a constant and transhistorical psychological need common to all human beings, its forms and variations depend, on the one hand, on natural givens (sex, skin colour, height, and so forth), and on the other, on external – that is, social – circumstances.

Identity always proceeds from practices enacted by human individuals, and their modes of dependence on others. We bear it and cannot live without it. But even if one’s identity does not always agree with other people’s regard, it constitutes the point of entry for communication with them. Through it, individuals are rendered significant both to themselves and to their milieu. Their identity forms part of the definition of their status in the social body within which they evolve, interacting in turn with the identity of this body. Every individual identity, in its major traits, feeds into a collective identity, just as this latter results largely from an assemblage of particular identities and, in all probability, also of transcendent elements, both in the reciprocal relations of this collective with other groups and in its self-definition.

Beware, an identity is not a hat or an overcoat! It is possible to have several simultaneous identities; however, as distinct from hats and coats, it is hard to change them rapidly, hence the comically absurd story of little Mohammed/Pierre. A man may be an employer or an employee and, at the same time, atheist, married, tall, young, etc. These identities coexist and comprise different levels of power and hierarchy that interpenetrate and complement one another. The identity palettes of modern man, from youth to old age, constitute a fascinating subject, particularly in the way they manifest themselves in changing situations and contribute to creating – or maybe, challenging – a social order. The extreme sensitivity to attack displayed by identities of all kinds likewise constitutes an important subject tha...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title Page
• Copyright
• Dedication
• Epigraph
• Contents
• 1. The Heart of the Matter
• 2. Identity Is Not a Hat
• 3. A Secular Jewish Culture?
• 4. Pain and Duration
• 5. Immigration and Judeophobia
• 6. From One Oriental to Another
• 7. Empty Cart, Full Cart
• 8. Remembering All the Victims
• 9. A Rest After Killing a Turk
• 10. Who Is a Jew in Israel?
• 11. Who Is a Jew in the Diaspora?
• 12. Exiting an Exclusive Club