BOOK REVIEW

The Philo-Semitic Face
of Christian Anti-Semitism

 

David Bristle

The Wrath ofJonab by Rosemary Rad-
ford Ruether and Herman Ruether.
Harper ?St Row, 1989, 277 pp.

ome books are part of the solution.

The WratbprOiiab is part of the
problem. Under the pretense of try-
ing to effect a reconciliation between
Israelis and Palestinians, the authors
have only thrown more oil on the
already burning tires of the Middle
East. This is an anti-Zionist diatribe
cloaked in the sweet light of Christian
universalism; as such, it stands as a
singular warning of how a Christian
critique of Israel can slide unwittingly
into the swamp of anti-Semitism. The
question prompted by this dubious
book is how it could come from the
pen of Rosemary Ruether who, ?fteen
years ago, exposed the Christian roots
of anti-Semitism in her pathbrealting
Fair/J and Fram'czkz?e.

There is, to be sure, much in the
Ruethers? polemic against the state
of Israel with which progressive Jews
might agree. Many, both in Israel and
the Diaspora, have paid no small per-
sonal price for attacking Israel?s occupa-
tion of the territories and the abundant
human rights violations that have ac-
companied the occupation since 1967.
Many have called for Israel to sit down
at the negotiating table with the PLO
in order to arrive at a two-state solution.
Many would agree with the Ruethers
that Israel bears a share of the respon-
sibility for creating the Palestinian
refugee problem in 1948 and for pur-
suing policies that have discouraged the
emergence of Arab moderates. Many
might even agree with the Ruethers?
far-reaching calls for a restructuring

 

David Bible is (be director of the Center
for Jewish Studies at the Graduate
Theological Union in Berkeley 
wort recent book is Power and Power-
lessness in Jewish History (Sebockea
Books, 1987).

of the State of Israel to make its Arab
citizens truly equal.

But the Ruethers' criticisms of Israel
are embedded in a subtext that is so
lacking in balance and so unremittingly
hostile to the very notion of Jewish
national self-determination that their
book loses all credibility. Despite ges-
tures toward a two-state solution, the
Ruethers clearly do not believe that
the Jews have the right to a state.
They fail the minimum litmus test for
any progressive solution to the Israeli-
Palestinian conflict by viewing the con?
flict as right against wrong rather than
as a clash of two equally legitimate
rights. By systematically denying the
legitimacy of the Jewish position they
become the flip side of Israeli rejeCLion?
ists such as Yitzhak Shamir who believe
that the Palestinians have no rights.
Against such rejectionism from both
camps, it needs to be asserted, again
and again, that the only viable solution
must rest on mutual recognition.

The Ruethers are so wedded to the
Palestinian side of the story that they
are unable to evince the barest sym-
pathy for the historical experience of
the Jewish people. In their cursory
survey ofJewish history, they naturally
mention the Russian pogroms and the
Holocaust, but they fail to exhibit even
the slightest understanding of why, after
this recent history of oppression, Jews
might feel the pressing need to achieve
political sovereignty. Instead of empa-
thizing with the instinctive response
of Jews to the Nazi nightmare, the
Ruethers regard the Holocaust as a
?shock? that ?made it possible for
Zionists to capture control of Jewish
organizations in the Diaspora and ce-
ment the of?cial loyalty of world Jewry
to theJewish state.? How can the author
of Fart/J and Ft?alrr'czde fail to grasp why
most Jews have responded to modern
anti-Semitism by demanding the right
to defend themselves in their own state?

Do the Jews deserve Ms. Ruether?s
sympathy only when they are down,
not when they are trying to defend
themselves?

The Ruethers make a series of ten-
dentious and unsupported claims that
often border on the conspiratorial or
outright fanciful. They write, for ex-
ample, that ?it has been suggested that
the Abu Nidal group has actually be-
come a front for the Mossad [Israeli
Intelligence] The authors muster no
evidence to support this grave allega-
tion that one of the world?s most ruth-
less murderers is an Israeli agent; the
footnore that precedes the sentence
refers to two works, neither of which
corroborates the claim. Similarly, the
Ruethers describe the assassination at-
tempts on the Palestinian mayors in the
West Bank as ?incidents that have been
officially blamed on settler extremists
(but are generally believed to have
been coordinated by the Israeli military
and secret police?) [emphasis added]
Generally believed by whom? On what
grounds? The authors give no reliable
source. Instead, they simply reproduce
the kind of feverish rumor that has
led many Palestinians to believe that
the Mossad placed the bomb on the
Pan Am plane that recently blew up
over England.

But there is more. The Ruethers
hold that Ben-Gurion devised a plan
between 1944 and 1947 to terrorize

the Arab towns and villages [in
order] to encourage most of the
middlc-class leadership to leave.
Once the British departed and the
Jewish forces were fully in com-
mand, then there could be a more
forcible mass expulsion of Pales-
tinian villagers, either razing their
villages or transferring their prop-
erty to Jewish immigrants.

This alleged plan was put into effect in
early December 1947, and it culminated

99

. a- ..- .


with the Deir Yassin massacre. Later,
the Ruethers describe the conquest of
Ramle and Lod as a ?blitzkrieg? (one
wonders why they don?t come right
out and call the Israelis Nazis).

 

Go straight to the source

 





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100 TIKKUN VOL. 4, NO. 3

here is no mention here of the

widespread attacks by Palestin-
ian guerrillas against Jews in the weeks
after the United Nations partition
resolution?attacks that resulted in
hundreds of Jewish civilian deaths. The
Arab side bears no reSponsibility what-
soever in their account for the civil
war that engulfed Palestine between
December 1947 and May 15, 1948. More-
over, the Ruethers' discovery of a prior
Jewish ?plan? to expel the Arabs has
never been supported by a shred of
evidence (and the do not offer
even a footnote). The Israeli historian
Benny Morris, whose recent revisionist
history of the creation of the Palestinian
refugee problem contains material that
is highly critical of the Haganah for in-
flaming the Palestinian-instigated civil
war (see Tz'kkuzz, Nov./ Dec. 1988),
asserts that no such evidence exists.
Even the left-wing Israeli historian,
the late Simha Flapan, whom the
Ruethers quote approvingly elsewhere,
also found no evidence for such a plan.
That the Ruethers continue to advance
such a claim shows that they are on
one side of the propaganda war rather
than in the business of mediation.

But by far the most outrageous dis-
tortion with respect to modern Israel
is their argument that, were it not for
the Zionist transfer agreement with
Nazi Germany, the Holocaust might
not have happened. The Ruethers claim
that, by trading with the Nazis as a
way of utilizing the blocked accounts
of German Jewish immigrants to Pales-
tine, the Zionists effectively destroyed
the boycott of Nazi Germany. Had
the bchott succeeded, they argue,
?the German economy might have
cracked and Hitler's regime toppled."
As a result of Zionist per?dy, ?Hitler
remained very much in power, rearmed
Germany and embarked on the con-
quest of Europe. . .. The economy of
Jewish Palestine thrived, building the
infrastructures of the future Jewish
state, while European Jewry was being
murdered.?

Needless to say, this preposterous
claim not only inflates the economic
power of the Yishuv (whose popula-
tion was between 400,000 and 500,000
during the 19305) but also ignores the
intense moral dilemma posed by the
Nazi regime. The transfer agreement,
about which one may legitimately ar-
gue, made it possible for Jews to leave
Germany at a time when the freezing

of bank accounts effectively prevented
many from emigrating. TheseJews sur-
vived the Holocaust. No one who reads
the Hebrew press from the Yishuv in
the 19305 can doubt that the transfer
agreement had as much to do with
saving Jews as it had to do with building
the Yishuv. Don?t the early Zionists
deserve some credit for saving these
lives, or were the Zionist leaders moti-
vated solely by political self-interest?

For the Ruethers, Zionism is a con-
spiracy designed to dupe the Jewish
people, who otherwise would remain
peacefully in the Diaspora. That Zion-
ism might have the same deep roots in
the Jewish people?s historical experi-
ence as Palesrinian nationalism has in
the experience of the Palestinians seems
beyond the Ruethers? comprehension.
That the enmity between the Jews and
the Arabs is the tragic result of a
conflict between two equally legitimate
nationalisms also has no place in their
conspiratorial view.

Why, then, bother with this book,
when it appears, on the face of it, to
differ little from a whole library of
pro-Palestinian propaganda? The story,
however, is much more complex, for
the Ruethers also propose an interpre-
tation ofJewish history and ofJudaism
that removes the question of Israel?s
existence from the dusty battle?elds
of the Middle East to the ethereal
realms of Christian theology.

The Ruethers believe that it is their
role to ?liberate the Jewish community
[so that it can] regain its prophetic
voice toward its own system of power.?
As Christians, the aspect of Judaism
with which the Ruethers identify is the
so-Called voice of prophetic universal-
ism. In their view, rabbinic Judaism is
the genuine continuation of biblical
prophetic Judaism because it is univer-
salist and ethical, unlike the ethno-
centric nationalism of the Zealots. They
also claim that rabbinic law developed
primarily in Diaspora settings rather
than in Palestine. ?True? Judaism is the
Judaism of the Diaspora, the Judaism
that renounces national cxclusivism and
presents itself as ?a light unto the
nations.? Jews are not a nation, but a
religion; the Zionists are the ones who
try to impose alien nationalism on the
Jewish people.

Much of this argument looks like
nineteenth-century Reform Judaism.
But it is scarcely history. The Rabbis
were, in fact, part of the Palestinian

 

 

Jewish governing hierarchy and were
strong nationalists who supported the
?rst part of the Great Revolt against
the Romans, as well as the later Bar
Kokhba rebellion. Jews in the Green-
Roman Diaspora considered them-
selves, and were considered by Hellen-
iStic and Roman law, to be an ei?hnor
rather than a re/igfo. The passage that
the Ruethers quote (frorn Tractate
Pesachim of the Babylonian Talmud)
in order to support the view that the
Rabbis wanted Judaism to be a ?light
unto the nations" is, in fact, a call
for proselytism throughout the Roman
Empire, hardly a product of pluralist
Universalism.l

hroughout the Middle Ages, the

Jews were not universalists, nor
was Judaism purely a religion, either
in the Jews? self?conception or in the
View of the nations among which
they lived {in medieval law, they were
viewed as foreigners, not simply as
non-Christians). In modern times, the
de?nition ofJews as a religious group
was an innovative construct that be-
came untenable in Eastern Europe
where, in fact,Jews constituted a nation
long before the rise of Zionism.

But all of this history will hardly
make a dent in the Ruethers? analysis.
Their view of Jews and Judaism really
has more to do with their own peculiar
view of Christianity than with actual
Jews and Judaism. They identify fully
with the position of certain Arab Chris-
tian theologians, giving them totally
uncritical celebration. In a curious ar-
gument, they hold that only anti?Zionist
Christians clan respect Judaism as an
equal religion because their Christianity
is based on universalisr tolerance~
?true Christianity? for the Ruethers.
Such universalism has no place for eth-
nocentric nationalism. (Does this in-
clude Palestinian nationalism as well?).
According to the Ruethers, the "only"
Chrisrians who, as a group, support the
State of Israel are the evangelicals, but
they do so out of a desire to convert
the Jews.

It now becomes increasingly clear
how the author of Faith and Fi-atrz?cfde
could have written this book. The pur-
pose of Faith and Fratrr'cz'de was to
divest Christianity of its own form of
chauvinism, namely, anti-Semitism, so
that it might become its true universalist
self. The purpose of The Wrath offonah
is to do the same thing for Judaism,

the parent religion of Christianity.
Christian universalism comes from the
?true? Judaism, but the Jews have
strayed from their calling by espous-
ing tribal nationalism. The correct
role for Jews is to ?ght for these
universal, pluralistic values in the coun-
tries of the Diaspora, the true Jewish
homelands.

Faith and Fran-rattle was a bold and
welcome attack on Christian imperial-
ism? as well as a call for Christians
to reexamine their very core beliefs
in light of their culpability for anti-
the publication of The
Wimh ofjonah, however, it becomes
necessary to ask whether Rosemary
Ruether has in fact overcome the very
anti-Semitism she so eloquently pillor-
ied. She and her husband will no doubt
indignantly protest that anti?Zionism
is not the same as anti?Semitism, and
on that score they are, in principle,
correct. To object to the existence of a
Jewish state on political grounds need
not involve anti?Semitic the ac-
quisition of Jewish sovereignty has cre-
ated real political questions that should
not be confused with the fantasies of
the anti-Semites.

But the Ruethers have gone far be-
yond a mere political critique of Zion-
ism. Their wild and unsubstantiated
conSpiracy theories, which in?ate Zion-
ist power beyond recognition, smell
suspiciously like the older of a
world Jewish conspiracy. More impor-
tant, their attack on the Jews? right to
self-determination, while couched in
universalist rhetoric, smacks of the old
double standard; for they apply none
of the same criticism to the Palesrinians,
whose nationalism they celebrate.

ere, in the ?nal analysis, is Chris?
tian anti-Semitism with a philo-
Semitic face. Having disposed in her
previous book of the belief that the
Jewish exile is a punishment for reject-
ing Jesus, Rosemary Ruether can now
embrace the Jewish existence in the
Diaspora as a positive vocation. She,
after all, is willing to ?ght for Jewish
rights in the Diaspora. But the Jews?
that stiff?necked people?are (once
again) ungrateful and prefer to defend
themselves with their own arms in
their own state. Having betrayed their
calling to remain dispersed among the
nations, Jews surely deserve the wrath
of the righteous Christians.

As has been true for two millennia,

the Jews are not allowed to be them-
selves. They are neither purely a religion
nor purely a nation, neither strictly
universalists nor solely exclusive na-
tionalists. For Judaism is all of these
things and more, and the struggles
and tensions between these Strands
are the essence of Jewish history. The
Ruethers? definition oftrueJudaism as
the precursor to Christian universalism
is exactly the same as the old Christian
de?nition of Judaism as a preparan'o
evangelimdvalid only as a precursor
to Christianity. Theirs is the liberal ver-
sion of the old Christian imperialism,
that spiritual colonialism that presumes
to tell the Jews who they really are.

 

Do the Jews deserve
Ms. Rnez?herit sympathy
only when they are down,
not when they are
trying to defend
themselves?

 

The Ruethers have entitled their
book The Wrath ofjonah. According to
their interpretation, the Book of Jonah
is a prophetic Critique ofJewish ethno-
centrism, represented by Jonah ?s anger
upon hearing that God renounced His
vow to destroy the city of Nineveh when
its inhabitants repented. Jonah could
not accept a universal God who loved
the Ninevites as much as He loved the
Israelites. This may or may not be a
plausible interpretation of the Book
of Jonah, but in taking it as the leit-
motif and title of their own book, the
Ruethers have repeated Christianity?s
oldest offense against Judaism: they
have stolen a Jewish book and told us
how to read it. They have turned the
Hebrew Bible into a stick with which
to beat the Jews.

There is, without question, a place
for a prophetic critique of the State of
Israel, just as there is a place for such
a critique of all nation-states. But a
Chrisrian author attuned to the history
of Christian anti-Semitism should be
the first to exercise caution before as-
sailing the Zionist barricades with Bible
in hand. In a recent article in Chris-
tian Century, the Protestant theologian
Robert McAfee Brown laid out a set of
reasoned principles for how a Christian
should criticize Israel if he or she ex-
pects to receive aJewish hearing. Brown

REVIEWS 101

 

ngv?r ;:a1 -. A .11 -

does not shrink from invoking the pro-
phetic tradition in opposition to the
idolatry of the nation-State. But he
makes it clear that such criticism must
never be applied to Israel alone. And
he understands that criticism will reg-
ister only if it is presented as part of
an af?rmation of the Jewish right to
self-determination. The Ruethers have

BOOK REVIEW

.. 

failed on these counts, and they have
consequently forfeited the audience
they claim to seek.

Progressive Jews are engaged today
in a fateful struggle over the future of
Israel and, indeed, the future of the
Jewish people. We desperately need
all the allies we can get. But the last
thing we need is modern versions of the

Thinking With the People

 

medieval sermons that Jews were forced
to listen to in Christian churches, or
?well-meaning? attempts to "liberate
the Jewish community." we wish to be
neither oppressors nor victims, neither
heroes nor puppets in someone else?s
theology. We wish, in short, to be a
normal people. El

 

Casey Blake 

The Company ofCritics: Social Criticirm
trad Political Commifmerzt in 5/76 Twen-
tietl: by Michael Walzer. Basic
Books, 1988, 288 pp.

a famous battle cry against the

America that had executed Sacco
and Vanzetti, John Dos Passos wrote
?All right we are two nations? (The Big
Money). Such a declaration of inde-
pendence is a familiar refrain in the
history of modern American radicalism.
In subsequent decades, Dos Passos's
sentiments were echoed by celebrants
of American pluralism and their critics
within the New Left. The historian
Richard Hofstadter, describing ?the
heartland of America" as ?filled with
people who are often fundamentalist
in religion, nativist in prejudice, isola?
tionist in foreign policy, and conserva~
tive in economics," betrayed the not-
so-secret contempt for mainstream
values that informed much of Kennedy
liberalism in the early sixties (Anti-
latellecriralism in Arizerz'cmz Life). So
did those bitter radicals of the late
sixties (including many ex-liberals) who
raged against and sepa-
rated the country nearly into ?pigs?
and ?freaks.? A cold, cruel disdain for
anything smacking of convention and
common sense has too often served as
a badge of honor for both liberal and

 

Casey Blalze tear/7e: history at Indiana
University. Heir currently writing a book
on the cultural crisz of Randolle
Boame, Mm W?'rl? Brooks, ll?f'aldo Frank,
and Lewis 

102 TIKKUN VOL. 4, NO. 3

leftist critics of American society. To
be capable of critical insight, to rise
above the platitudes of one's fellows,
has meant being distanced from the
dominant culture. In this view, social
criticism requires a truly dispassionate
elite?a vanguard party, perhaps; or a
professiOnal corps of experts, an avant-
garde, or a school of critical theorists
possessed of superior insights and a
vocabulary unavailable to ordinary citi-
zens. Or it requires the heroism of a
lone rebel, armed only with the wea-
pons of criticism, who risks everything
in a desperate private shoot-out with
the authorities.

Michael \Y/alzer's new book, The
Company of Critics, is aimed directly
at challenging these assumptions. For
Walzer, both elitist condemnation and
romantic rebellion obscure the way
effective social criticism actually works
in the twentieth century. Social critics
succeed, he argues, only when they
speak with their fellow citizens in a
commonly understood moral language.
The best criticism articulates the shared
aspirations and grievances of peOple
even as it painfully notes their short-
comings. ?We criticize our society just
as we criticize our friends," Walzer
writes, ?on the assumption that the
terms of the critique, the moral refer-
ences, are common."

Thus, reading in a Walzerian vein,
one would say that the crucial passage
in Dos Passos?s novel is not the oft-
repeared line about America?s ?two
nations." but a preceding section that
laments: "America our nation has been

beaten by strangers who have turned
our language inside out who have taken
the clean words our fathers spoke and
made them slimy and foul." Our nation,
our language, our fathers?without this
assumption of some shared moral de-
cency and democratic heritage uniting
Americans, Dos Passos's grim acknowl-
edgment that ?we are two nations?
would hold no force. Dos Passos moves
us because he speaks as Socrates or
the Old Testament prophets did, as a
voice of civic conscience that appeals
to values that continue to shape many
of our private practices and that may
yet serve to renew our public life.
Walzer examines the careers ofeleven
Western critics, from Julian Benda and
Randolph Bourne to Michel Foucault
and Breyten Breytenbach, in order to
defend a prophetic role for critical
intellectuals on the left. His book is
not a work in intellectual history or in
the sociology of knowledge. It is rather
a personal manifesto. a contribution
to the long debate about the social
position and function of the critic that
assesses how ?general intellectuals?
have situated themselves in relation to
the moral and political discourses of
their contemporaries. From the start,
Walzer makes clear his belief that com-
mitment to some kind oflocal political
or moral community is necessary for
the practice of social criticism. ?The
most attractive picture of the true in~
tellectual," \Valzer writes, is not ?as
the inhabitant of a separate world, the
knower of esoteric truths, but as a
fellow member of this world who de-