Israel Shahak (1933 – 2001) was a Polish Jew who survived both the Holocaust and the Warsaw ghetto, and lived his adult life in Israel. His surname, Hebrew in the middle of Poland, can be explained by a relevant fact: his parents were Zionists, and they changed their Yiddish last name Himmelstaub to the Hebrew Shahak. This is common among Zionists: the Netayahu family was Mileikowsky; Ben-Gurion was born Grün; Golda Meir was Golda Mabovitch.
And Israel Shahak, in turn, was anti-Zionist in a much more radical way than the current Left. In his book Jewish History, Jewish Religion: The Weight of Three Thousand Years, Shahak argues that Judaism, as it exists today and since the adoption of the Talmud, is a problem in itself, as it is totalitarian and supremacist.
The book is originally a series of newspaper articles from the 1990s prompted by the following event: in Israel, in the 1960s, a gentile collapsed during the Sabbath and an Orthodox Jew did not authorize the use of the telephone to call an ambulance. The Jews did not call because it is not lawful to violate the Sabbath to save the life of a gentile – to save the life of a Jew, it is lawful. Shahak witnessed the event and caused a series of controversies in Haaretz.
This event is very important in order to understand the way Israel thinks about its politics. Shahak convinces us that both so-called secular Zionism and religious Zionism are guided by the Talmud. Shahak’s booklet includes a brief history of Judaism. It is worth highlighting that since the Babylonian Talmud, the words of the Old Testament (or Torah) have lost its relevance because what matters is the interpretation established by the rabbis in the Talmud. This interpretation causes the ethics of the Old Testament to change completely. The “neighbor”, for example, should be interpreted as “the Jew”; it is considered that the gentile is never a Jew’s neighbor. Thus, all the universalist ethical imperatives of the Old Testament are first converted into a norm of intra-Jewish conduct; and, as a logical consequence, there is a vague field of ethics (the ethics of relations between gentiles and Jews), to be filled by the interpretation of the rabbis.
The commandment “thou shall not covet thy neighbor’s wife”, for example, comes to mean that a Jew must not covet the wife of another Jew. Nothing is said about a Jew coveting the wife of a gentile. Thus, the rabbis were able to prohibit the sexual relationship (any sexual relationship) between a Jew and a gentile in other ways: by comparing it to bestiality and punishing it as a deviation. This means not only that a Jew should not covet a gentile’s wife, but also that a Jew cannot marry a gentile, just as a man cannot marry a goat. But while it is hard to find a legal body willing to punish a goat, the same is not true of women: “If a Jew has coitus with a Gentile woman, whether she be a child of three or an adult, whether married or unmarried, and even if he is a minor aged only nine years and one day – because he had wilful coitus with her, she must be killed, as is the case with a beast, because through her a Jew got into trouble.” This is Maimonides.
Such interpretation of the word “neighbor” also applies to “man,” which is also considered synonymous with Jew. The Gentile, in fact, is something analogous to an animal. Every time a Zionist propagates a phrase that sounds humanist, it is good to remember this peculiar glossary of rabbinical origin. Picking up a Talmud to read is pointless unless one knows Hebrew, because, according to Shahak, translations of the Talmud contain distortions designed to avoid upsetting the Gentiles. These distortions are especially important in hiding what the rabbis think of Jesus Christ and Christians, who are considered inferior to Muslims.
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