[In the previous post I distributed the introduction to this draft. In a preface, I wrote:
In August 2014 I was on vacation in France when Israel launched Operation Protective Edge in Gaza. I started writing and ended up with an unfinished book manuscript: an Introduction, four chapters, and part of a fifth chapter. I have been both encouraged and discouraged by reviewers and have never figured out what to do with it. I decided to put it on Substack, piece by piece, and see if anyone had some (constructive) suggestions. Chapter one is the first chapter of the book’s main text.
Chapter One. The Lying Messiah
Elie Wiesel was crying, everyone in the audience was crying. I couldn’t hear a word he was saying, because I was sitting directly behind him as he delivered the commencement address at my graduation from Akiba Hebrew Academy in Philadelphia on June 5, 1967. But I understood him without hearing his words.
In his memoirs, Wiesel recalled the emotional state he shared with his audience:
In 1967 the Six-Day War stamped a whole generation of Jews with its halo of glory. I remember every phase and aspect of the war as if it were yesterday, as if I had fought in it myself. I remember the three somber, tension-laden weeks that preceded it. I remember the outrageous words, the overt, brutal threats of our enemies, and the silence of our friends and allies. And I remember Israel’s solitude.[1]
“The news was depressing, Jerusalem’s silence ominous. We didn’t know that the new minister of defense, Moshe Dayan, had ordered a strict blackout on news from the front. The only available information came from Arab capitals. Radio Cairo, Damascus, and Amman were jubilant: The Israeli front had collapsed, Beersheba was about to fall, the army was disintegrating, Tel Aviv would soon be in flames . . . .
The entire Jewish population now offered its unconditional support to Israel. The Diaspora communities, as if lifted by a tidal wave of solidarity, rose to the occasion. Even intellectuals who had suffered their Jewishness as an embarrassing contradiction now openly proclaimed it. . . . Isaac Stern canceled his concerts and flew to Tel Aviv, declaring: “Our enemies say they will exterminate two and a half million Jews. Well, let them add one more to the list.” I knew I had to leave for Israel. [2]
Listening to Wiesel that night, we did not yet know the final outcome of the war, but reports had started to emerge of an Israeli victory that astounded us, if not better-informed observers. The CIA had told President Lyndon Johnson that it would take Israel not much more than a week to defeat the Arab armies,[3] an estimate it shared with “totally alone” Israel under an intelligence cooperation agreement. “Totally alone” Israel’s French-built Mirage III fighters destroyed the Arab states’ air forces in a matter of hours. France had likewise supplied Israel with the fuel and technology for its growing nuclear program, which started producing warheads shortly after the 1967 war.
I was sitting in the front row at graduation so I could get collect my prize, for Hebrew studies. One reason I won the prize was that during my senior year (1966-67) I had worked on translations into English of Hebrew works by two other Zionist cultural icons: Shmuel Yosef Agnon and Jacob Katz, born respectively in 1888 and 1904, in Galicia and Hungary, both then part of the Austro-Hungarian Hapsburg Empire. Agnon was born in the town of Buczacz, whose destruction by the Nazis he memorialized in his story, “The Sign,” recalling the day (Shavuot 1943) when he learned the news in his house in Jerusalem:
I used to say how much better it was to live in the Land of Israel than outside the land, for the Land of Israel has given us the strength to stand up for our lives, while outside the land we went to meet the enemy like sheep to the slaughter. Multitudes of Israel, none of whom the enemy was worthy even to touch, were killed and strangled and drowned and buried alive; among them my brothers and friends and family, who went through all kinds of great sufferings in their lives and in their deaths, by the wickedness of our blasphemers and our desecrators, a filthy people, blasphemers of God, whose wickedness had not been matched since man was placed upon the earth.[4]
Katz was born in the tiny Hungarian village of Magyargencs, which had only six Jewish households. After Palestinian gunmen killed his brother in 1938 during the Arab revolt against the British mandate, he managed to bring his two parents to Jerusalem, where they soon died.[5]
My prize consisted of $100 of Hebrew books. One of the books I chose was the complete works of Hayyim Nahman Bialik, the founder of modern Hebrew poetry. His poems, “’Al ha-Shechita,” (“On the Slaughter”) and “’Be-Ir ha-Harega (“In the City of Killing”) commemorated the 1903 pogrom in Kishinev, then capital of the Russian province (guberniya) of Bessarabia, and today, Chisinau, capital of Moldova. I had studied those poems in my class on Modern Hebrew literature.
Here is how the New York Times of April 28, 1903, described the event:
The anti-Jewish riots in Kishinev, Bessarabia, are worse than the [Russian] censor will permit to publish. There was a well laid-out plan for the general massacre of Jews on the day following the Russian Easter. The mob was led by priests, and the general cry, "Kill the Jews," was taken up all over the city. The Jews were taken wholly unaware and were slaughtered like sheep. The dead number 120 and the injured about 500. The scenes of horror attending this massacre are beyond description. Babes were literally torn to pieces by the frenzied and bloodthirsty mob. The local police made no attempt to check the reign of terror. At sunset the streets were piled with corpses and wounded. Those who could make their escape fled in terror, and the city is now practically deserted of Jews.
My great-grandfather, Adolph Cooperman (at that time Jews would still name their sons “Adolph”) was born in Odessa, in Russian-ruled Ukraine, in 1873. In 1891, at the age of 18, he left for the U.S. to escape the Tsar’s punitive conscription of Jews. Another great-grandfather, Berl Rubin (renamed Barnet after immigration), left Bessarabia for the U.S. in 1897, a few years before the pogrom, taking with him a One-year-old boy, Joseph, who would become my grandfather.[6]
In the history textbook I translated, Israel among the Nations, Katz wrote that in the “City of Killing,” Bialik expressed the “terrified feelings of the Jews of Russia and even poured out his wrath on his own people, who were led like lambs to the slaughter and did not have the courage to defend themselves”:[7]
...The heirs
Of Hasmoneans lay, with trembling knees,
Concealed and cowering—the sons of the Maccabees!
The seed of saints, the scions of the lions!
Who, crammed by scores in all the sanctuaries of their shame,
So sanctified My name!
It was the flight of mice they fled,
The scurrying of roaches was their flight;
They died like dogs, and they were dead!
This poem served – and still serves -- as a call to Jewish self-defense. Bialik’s immediate reaction in “On the Slaughter,” written after an investigative trip to Kishinev for the Jewish Historical Commission in Odessa, however, was despair:
Cursed be he who says 'Revenge!'
Vengeance for the blood of a small child
Satan has not yet created.
This passage gained notoriety when Israel’s Prime Minister Binyamin Netanyahu tweeted it (though only the last two lines) on June 29, 2014, after the discovery north of Hebron of the bodies of three abducted and murdered yeshiva students, Eyal Yifrach, 19, Gilad Shaer, 16, and Naftali Frankel, 16, the incident that sparked the assault on Gaza. He cited the same quotation on October 7, 2023, after the massacre of over a thousand people in southern Israel by Hamas and others.
My translation of Katz’s textbook resulted from the publication in Commentary of my earlier translation of Agnon. In fall, 1966 I had translated a story by Agnon, “The Fable of the Goat,” first published in 1925. I showed the translation to one of my Hebrew teachers, the late Penina Howarth. She advised me to send it to Commentary, which was not yet the fountainhead of “neo-conservatism,” a term not invented until 1973. Mrs. Howarth’s husband, a professor of English at the University of Pennsylvania, had learned that Agnon was about to win the Nobel Prize for literature. Commentary published my translation with two other works by Agnon in its December 1966 edition.
This story tells of an old man whose health and life depends on the milk of a goat whose milk tasted of paradise. Seeking the origin of the miraculous milk, the owner’s son followed the goat through a cave:
When they emerged from the cave, the youth saw lofty mountains, and hills full of the choicest fruit, and a fountain of living waters that flowed down from the mountains; and the wind wafted all manner of perfumes. The goat climbed up a tree by clutching at the ribbed leaves. Carob fruits full of honey dropped from the tree, and she ate of the carobs and drank of the garden's fountain.
The youth stood and called to the wayfarers: "I adjure you, good people, tell me where I am, and what is the name of this place?"
They answered him, "You are in the Land of Israel, and you are close by Safed."
Through these images, Agnon tells us that this is the cave where Rabbi Simeon bar Yohai hid with his son for thirteen years after the suppression of the Bar Kochba revolt against Rome in 135 C.E. Rabbi Simeon was a disciple of Rabbi Akiba, the spiritual leader of the uprising, after whom my school was named. Akiba proclaimed that Bar Kochba was the messiah.[8] After Bar Kochba and the rest of the leadership were killed in Betar, Akiba defied the Roman decrees against teaching Jewish religious texts, and the Emperor Hadrian ordered him flayed alive. An account of his execution forms part of the martyrology, “Eleh Ezkerah,” recited in the services on Yom Kippur Tisha Be’Av, the anniversary of the destruction of the Temple.
Shortly after crushing Bar Kochba’s revolt, Rome merged the provinces of Judea and Galilee into the new province of “Palestina.” According to Katz’s textbook, “The Romans wanted to wipe out the name of Israel from its land, so our land was given the name ‘Palestina’ after the ancient Philistines.”[9] Katz thus used the narrative of the Bar Kochba revolt to strengthen the Jewish claim to Israel and undermine the legitimacy of a Palestinian identity. Before the revolt, however, when the Romans had administered the territory between the Mediterranean Sea and the River Jordan through two provinces named Judea and Galilee, there were no political entities named either Israel or Palestine, though both words existed, “Palestine” as a geographic term and “Israel” as a group affiliation.
Rabbi Simeon was one of five sages who fled Roman death sentences to hide in Galilee. The reason for his death sentence was a conversation about whether development brought by the Romans was worth the price of subjugation, a constant question for colonized people:
R. Judah, R. Jose, and R. Simeon were sitting, and Judah, a son of proselytes, was sitting near them. R. Judah commenced [the discussion] by observing, 'How fine are the works of this people! They have made streets, they have built bridges, they have erected baths.' R. Jose was silent. R. Simeon b. Yohai answered and said, 'All that they made they made for themselves; they built market-places, to set harlots in them; baths, to rejuvenate themselves; bridges, to levy tolls for them.' Now, Judah the son of proselytes went and related their talk,which reached the government. They decreed: Judah, who exalted [us], shall be exalted. Jose, who was silent, shall be exiled to Sepphoris[a town in the Northern Galilee]; Simeon, who censured, let him be executed. [10]
He and his son went and hid themselves in . . . a cave. A miracle occurred and a carob-tree and a water well were created for them. . . . Thus they dwelt twelve years in the cave. Then Elijah came and stood at the entrance to the cave and exclaimed, Who will inform the son of Yohai that the emperor is dead and his decree annulled? . . . . A Heavenly Echo then came forth and said, 'Go forth from your cave!' They came out. . . . on the eve of the Sabbath before sunset, and they saw an old man holding two bundles of myrtle and running at twilight. What are these for?' they asked him. 'They are in honor of the Sabbath,' he replied.[11]
During those thirteen years, the Prophet Elijah is said to have revealed to Rabbi Simeon secrets of the inner history of God, which, according to tradition, became the basis for Jewish mysticism as expressed in the Book of the Zohar(Radiance). The Zohar was published in its current form by Rabbi Moses de Leon (1250-1305) of Spain, which was then the main center of Kabbalah.
Safed gained even more religious importance for Jews in the sixteenth century. After the expulsion and forced conversions of the Jews of Spain in 1492, many Sephardic scholars emigrated to the Ottoman Empire, where the rulers welcomed them. When the Ottomans conquered Palestine from the Mamelukes in 1517, many of the Sephardic refugees moved there, and, as Katz wrote, “Within a single generation a great community came into being, the like of which had not existed in the Land for hundreds of years, . . . and especially the Jewish community of Safed grew.”[12] Safed was both economically prosperous and close to the cave of Simeon bar Yohai. Messianic expectations mounted there: “There were some who were thinking how to hasten the redemption, when God would have mercy on his people and redeem them from their long exile.”[13] According to Katz, they took the first steps toward re-establishing the Sanhedrin that had been the highest authority among the Jews under the Ptolemaic and Roman Empires.
Joseph Karo, a scholar and Kabbalist born in and exiled from Toledo, Spain, had fled to Salonika. Karo claimed that a “bat kol” or heavenly voice instructed him to leave Salonika for Safed. He moved there together with the Kabbalist Shlomo Halevy Alkabetz , who wrote the best-known Sabbath hymn, “Lecha Dodi.” Karo published his authoritative codification of Jewish religious law, the Shulhan Aruch, in Safed in 1565.
In 1569 Rabbi Isaac Luria, a Kabbalist whose students whispered that he had conversed with the Prophet Elijah, moved to Safed from Cairo. His students believed, Katz wrote, that “he had it in his power to bring redemption in his own days, and they blamed themselves for the delay.”[14]
While Luria left no writings and died in 1572 at the age of 33, his students transmitted his doctrine of the Kabbalah, according to which God, the Infinite (Eyn Sof) contracted himself to create space for this world, which came into being when his light broke the vessels in which it was stored. According to some of his followers, the messiah would come only when Jews repaired those vessels (carrying out “tikkun ‘olam,” repair of the universe) by fulfilling the commandments. (On February 10, 2015, while I was writing this, I walked through the diamond district of Manhattan on my way to see a Jewish gem trader from Kabul to inform him that I might have found the missing Torah scroll from the Kabul synagogue. On West 44th street, a grey bearded man asked me if I was Jewish and said, “Do a mitzvah, bring messiah.”) According to some religious Zionists, chief among the commandments whose fulfillment would bring messiah was that of settling the Land of Israel. Thus Safed became ensconced in Jewish lore and memory as a sacred city of mysticism and messianic hope.
Upon his arrival in the Land of Israel, the son in the “Fable of the Goat” planned to return home with good news for his parents:
He said, "Until the day breathe and the shadows flee away, I shall sit on the hill under this tree. Then I shall go home and bring my father and mother to the Land of Israel." As he was sitting and feasting his eyes on the holiness of the Land of Israel, he heard a voice proclaiming:
"Come, let us go out to greet the Sabbath Queen."
And he saw men like angels, wrapped in white shawls, with boughs of myrtle in their hands, and all the houses were lit with a great many candles. He perceived that the eve of Sabbath would arrive with the darkening, and that he would not be able to return.
The men greeting the Sabbath Queen were most likely singing Alkabetz’s Sabbath hymn, “Lecha Dodi.” They were carrying myrtles, like the man seen by Simeon bar Yohai and his son after they emerged from the cave, By walking through the countryside around Safed on Sabbath Eve they were carrying out a custom initiated by Isaac Luria, who, according to Katz, welcomed the Sabbath by walking through the hills around Safed with his students.
According to Katz, Luria considered Sabbath eve the most propitious time to reveal mysteries. Once while walking on Sabbath Eve he told his students to accompany him to Jerusalem. When the students asked for time to notify their families, Katz wrote, “Luria answered with sorrow, ‘This was the propitious moment for the redemption, but you were of little faith and delayed the hour.”[15]
This story about Luria recapitulates a theme from the Talmud about the cave of Simeon bar Yohai:
R. Joshua b. Levi met Elijah standing by the entrance of R. Simeon b. Yohai's cave. He asked him: “When will the Messiah come?” — “Go and ask him himself,” was his reply. “Where is he sitting?” — “At the gate of [Rome][the city].” And by what sign may I recognize him?” — “He is sitting among those with illnesses: all of them untie their bandages all at once, and rebandage them together, whereas he unties and rebandages each separately, thinking, when I am needed [when it is time for my appearance as the Messiah] I must not be delayed [through having to bandage a number of sores].” So he went to him and greeted him, saying, “peace upon thee, Master and Teacher.” “Peace upon thee, O son of Levi,” he replied. “When will you come, Master?” he asked. “Today,” was his answer. On his return to Elijah, the latter enquired, “What did he say to you?” —”He lied,” he rejoined. “He said that he would come today, but he has not.” He [Elijah] answered him, “This is what he said to you (Psalm 85): Today, if you will hear His voice.”[16]
Agnon’s story’s conclusion evokes those tales of frustrated redemption. The son left a note behind the goat’s ear, advising his father to follow her to the Land of Israel. But when the goat returned, she did not flick her ears, and the father did not see the note. In grief and fury over the loss of his son, he summoned the butcher. As the butcher’s knife severed the goat’s throat, the note fell out. Agnon concluded:
He mourned over the goat many days and refused to be comforted, saying, "Woe to me, for I could have gone up to the Land of Israel in one bound, and now I must suffer out my days in this exile!"
Since that time the mouth of the cave has been hidden from the eye, and there is no longer a short way. And that youth, if he has not died, shall bear fruit in his old age, full of sap and richness, calm and peaceful in the Land of the Living.
For all the longing after redemption and the return of the people of Israel to their land, some of the rabbis of the Talmud expressed ambivalence about it. ‘Ullah, Rabbah, and Johanan all said of the messiah, “Let him come, but let me not see him.”[17] When asked why, R. Johanan answered: “[This refers to God's] heavenly family [i.e., the angels] and his earthly family [i.e., Israel,] when God says, These [the Gentiles] are my handiwork, and so are these [the Jews]; how shall I destroy the former on account of the latter?”[18]
The issue of Commentary with my translation of Agnon included an evaluation of the author by Edmund Wilson, identified as “the dean of American literary critics.” An Agnon character, wrote Wilson, “exists in a world which is entirely invisible to the Christians or Arabs [sic] among whom he lives.”[19] Wilson was referring to that hidden world of holiness and messianic expectation evoked by the very name of Safed, which suffuses The Fable of the Goat.
But likewise, it turns out, the Arabs of Safed lived in a world “entirely invisible” to many Jews. A few centuries after the deaths of Karo and Luria, Safed was the birthplace of Palestinian Authority Prime Minister Mahmoud Abbas, whose family fled to nearby Syria during the 1948 Israeli War of Independence, known to Palestinians as the “Nakba,” or catastrophe. Abbas was working as head of the civil service in Qatar at the time of my high school graduation. Katz described the battle for Safed briefly:
As the day of turnover [of authority of the British Mandate] approached, the British Army gradually withdrew, and the Jewish and Arab forces stood face to face. Our forces won their first victory in Tiberias. The entire city passed into Jewish authority. In Safed the Jewish quarter heroically resisted attacks from the Arab quarters, and when the Palmah [special forces] brigades arrived, the Arabs fled and abandoned their dwellings. [20]
The 1948 events in Safed became a public controversy in 2011, when Abbas wrote in a New York Times Op-Ed:
Sixty-three years ago, a 13-year-old Palestinian boy was forced to leave his home in the Galilean city of Safed and flee with his family to Syria. He took up shelter in a canvas tent provided to all the arriving refugees. Though he and his family wished for decades to return to their home and homeland, they were denied that most basic of human rights. That child’s story, like that of so many other Palestinians, is mine.[21]
The article stirred up a whirlwind of conflicting narratives, though no one denied the most important point, that Israel prevented Abbas and his family from returning to their home. [22] Efraim Karsh of King’s College London, echoed Katz’s narrative. After failing to expel the Jewish population, the Arabs decided to flee a counter-offensive: “There was no act of Jewish expulsion,” wrote Karsh, “As there were none in other cities that were rapidly emptying of their Arab residents at the time.[23]
Historian Mustafa Abbasi of Israel’s Tel Hai Academic College found a more complex story in the archives. Arab-Jewish tension had run high in Safed since 1929, when Arab rioters killed fifteen Jews from the traditional (non-Zionist) religious community, which included both Sephardim and Hasidim from Ukraine who had settled there since the eighteenth century to be close to the tombs of the sages. As the British withdrew over 1947 and 1948, clashes ensued, as in every other ethnically divided country I have studied where state power collapses. Equally bloody things were happening simultaneously on the Indian subcontinent as it underwent partition, in Eastern and Central Europe and the Balkans where killings and expulsions (including of concentration camp survivors trying to return home) reshaped the map, and in the USSR, where Stalin deported whole nationalities he deemed disloyal. Similar events took place after the 1991 dissolution of the USSR, in Azerbaijan, Tajikistan, Chechnya, Moldova, and, eventually, Ukraine.
On December 13, 1947, Arabs killed a Hagana fighter on patrol, and the Hagana killed three Arabs in reprisal. A few days later, when a Jew was killed near the Arab village of Khisas, the Hagana blew up houses in the village and killed ten of its inhabitants. In February 1948 the Palmah launched a raid on the village of Sa’sa, destroying 35-40 houses, killing 11 residents, and injuring 60-80. In March 1948 the Palmah raided the village of Huseiniya both for strategic reasons and to avenge the deaths of two Palmahniks who died defusing a bomb allegedly planted by villagers. “In my heart,” the Palmah commander said, “I resolved to annihilate the village.” He destroyed all but one house in the village and killed “scores” of its residents.
Then a war of attrition began in Safed, where the Jews feared a repetition of the 1929 massacre on a larger scale. The Arab citizens of Safad, including Mahmoud Abbas’s family, who soon heard of the April 9 massacre of over 100 villagers in Deir Yassin, near Jerusalem, started to flee in terror. Arab forces started mortar attacks on the Jewish quarter. One Arab commander telegraphed: “We will slaughter them.” On April 21 the Palmah commander recommended measures for “the harassment of Arab Safed in order to speed up its evacuation” according to Plan D, the Hagana’s plan for taking control of Arab-populated regions. In the Galilee, Plan D was implemented through Operation Yiftah (He shall open). One Palmah commander inspired his soldiers with the narrative of Jewish tragedy and redemption, confounding the Palestinians he was expelling from Safed with the Jews who die resisting the Nazis: “The battle is hard but the end is victory. The flag of Israel which fell in the ghetto war will fly again on the citadel of Safad.”
On May 1 Palmah Davidkas (the homemade mortars mentioned by Karsh) bombarded the village of Ein Zeitun, some of whose residents had been “exceptionally cruel” in the 1929 riots. The Palmah destroyed the villages of Ein Zeitun and Birya and then, according to the report of a Palmah officer, shot and killed seventy Arab prisoners.
The roads were now open for more Jewish units to arrive, for the first time firing Davidka mortars into the city. According to historian Benny Morris, “According to Arab sources, cited by an HIS [Hagana Intelligence Service] document, the first homemade Davidka bomb, which killed ‘13 Arabs, most of them children,’ triggered the panic – intended by the Palmah commanders when unleashing the mortars against the Arab neighbourhoods. A rumour then spread that the Jews were using ‘atom’ bombs. . . .”
I learned about the Davidkas at Akiba. These homemade mortars, which we were taught to appreciate as products of Jewish ingenuity, were utterly inaccurate but made a huge noise. The terrified Arabs thought the Jews had the atomic bomb! At the time it seemed funny. In inaccuracy, indiscriminate targeting, conventional military ineffectiveness, and ability to cause panic, the Davidkas resembled the rockets used by Hamas during the Gaza war in the summer of 2014.
On May 9 the Palmah pushed out the Arab forces, and most of the remaining Arab population fled on May 10 through a corridor the Palmah left open for that purpose. Arab civilians who stayed behind were expelled, the Muslims to Lebanon and the Christians to Haifa. Eight wounded fighters who were captured were beaten and killed, according to a report filed by a Palmah interrogation officer. Small planes belonging to the Hagana dropped bombs on the surrounding wadis to ensure that any refugees hiding in the vicinity would leave. The website of the city of Safed boasts: “As a result of Operation Yiftach, Safed became a completely Jewish town,”[24] just as it had been in Agnon’s imagination.
A few weeks after accepting my translation for publication, Commentary assistant editor Neal Kozodoy invited me to lunch in New York at a now-closed French restaurant on Third Avenue, Le Moal. (This was my first lunch in a French restaurant, a life-changing experience in a different way.) Over my blanquette de veau (I had recently ended a two-year experiment with complete observance of the Jewish dietary laws, even outside our kosher home), Kozodoy told me that he had agreed to translate Katz’s Yisrael ve-ha-‘Amim (Israel and the Nations), then the principal textbook on Jewish history in Israel’s modern Orthodox schools. Since joining the staff of Commentary, however, Kozodoy no longer had time to work on the translation, which he proposed to subcontract to me. We agreed on a fee of $750 ($5340 in 2014 prices), to which he later added $250 for payment to a typist. This was my first job. I was about to turn 17.
Over the next few months, as I worked away on this project at the dining room table, Jacob Katz, 63, a year younger than I was when I started drafting this essay, was debating how history should be taught in Israel’s schools.[25]Katz’s scholarly work on Jewish social history remains influential – he is credited with the insight that “Orthodox Judaism” is a modern social construction reacting to Reform Judaism, rather than the continuation of tradition – and he insisted that academic history must use sources critically.
As a committed Zionist, however, Katz also advocated a distinct “educational history,” to transmit a narrative that would build a unified national consciousness. On January 22, 1967, at a meeting in the Israeli Ministry of Education, Katz strongly opposed a proposal to reform the national history curriculum to encourage students to question sources, appreciate multiple perspectives, and develop critical skills.[26]
The book I translated was Katz’s masterpiece of educational history, which has been revised and updated repeatedly. He had written the first edition during 1945-1950 as a textbook for the Israeli Jewish modern Orthodox school system. Rereading both early and later versions now in Hebrew, since no known copy survives of my never-published translation, I see that it reproduces the narrative form of religio-nationalist textbooks in many countries I have studied, starting with sacred beginnings and unification, moving on through travails that lead to reunification and redemption. The work opens:
You know from the Torah and Prophets how the People of Israel became a nation: how the sons of Jacob went down to Egypt, and how their descendants were later redeemed from there. Also known to you are the great events that happened to our forefathers in the desert, the greatest of which was that the Lord God of our Fathers revealed to them the Torah as they stood before Mount Sinai.
After wandering in the desert for forty years, the children of Israel conquered the Land of Canaan and settled the land as various tribes. Slowly the tribes united, as they fought difficult wars against the inhabitants of the Land and their neighbors, and the tribes helped one another as brothers belonging to one people and believing in one faith.
Katz continued with a Biblically based history of the kings of Israel, but he skipped the part where God warned the Israelite tribal elders that nothing good would come from establishing a state. The elders had complained to Samuel that his sons, whom he had appointed as judges, were corrupt, and asked him to appoint a king to rule them “like all other nations.” (1 Samuel 8:5.) Samuel consulted God, who went into a sort of passive-aggressive Jewish mother routine, telling Samuel, if I may paraphrase Him, “Don’t take it personally. It's not you they’re rejecting, it’s Me. They never listen to Me anyway. But if it’s what they really want, let them have it. Just don't let them say I didn’t warn them.”[27] Samuel delivered the warning (I Samuel 8:11-18) about how an absolute monarch would build a predatory state,[28] but the elders persisted, and Samuel appointed Saul, son of Kish, the first King of Israel.
This narrative branches into several versions I have since read. In the Quran (Sura al-Baqqara, 245-251) a prophet (Samuel, though unnamed) hesitates to appoint a king out of fear that the Israelites will disobey his orders to fight. He eventually settles on Saul (Talut bin Qais), whose virtues the Quran praises. Afghan genealogies claim that the Pashtuns are descended from a grandson of Saul named Afghana, raised by King David (the prophet Daud), who built the First Temple for King Solomon (the prophet Sulaiman), and is buried in Takht-i Sulaiman (Throne of Solomon) in Zhob district of today’s Balochistan province of Pakistan. Afghana’s descendant, Qais (Kish, the name of Saul’s father) Ibn Abdul Rashid accepted Islam directly from the Prophet Muhammad in Madina, where he was sent by his tribe, descendants of Israelites living in Ghor province in the west of today’s Afghanistan. There are remnants of Jewish settlements in Ghor, including an ancient cemetery with Judeo-Persian inscriptions, but, regardless of historical accuracy, this narrative aimed to prove that Pashtuns, who descended from ancient prophets and received the message of Islam directly from the Prophet Muhammad, were in no way junior partners of the Arabs in the Islamic community. Thus do stories – true or false, partial or confabulated -- ground political claims.
In the Biblical account, Saul lost Samuel’s favor when he violated God’s commandment to slaughter all of the Amalekites and their livestock, perhaps a precursor of the doubts expressed in the Quran about the willingness of the Israelites to fight. The Amalekites, who had raided the sick and weak stragglers behind the Israelite camp in the wilderness after the Exodus from Egypt, were considered to embody irremediable evil. Saul killed nearly all the men, women, children, and cattle, sparing only the Amalekite king, Agag, and the best cattle, but a furious Samuel killed Agag himself and never saw Saul again.
Judaism long taught that the Amalekites no longer exist, and that the commandment to annihilate them now symbolizes the obligation to destroy the “inner Amalekite” in every human heart, similar to the Muslim concept of the “inner jihad.”[29] Soon after the 1967 war, however, some in the settler movement Gush Emunim (Bloc of the Faithful) argued that the Palestinians were Amalek. In 1980 Yisrael Hess, the campus rabbi of Bar Ilan University, the main modern orthodox institution of higher education in Israel, published an article in the campus newspaper entitled “The Commandment of Genocide in the Torah.” Hess concluded: “The day is not far when we shall be called to this holy war, to this commandment of the annihilation of Amalek.” Hess was dismissed from his job as a result.
In 2009, when the Chief Rabbi of Safed, Shmuel Elyahu, traveled to the front lines during Operation Cast Lead in Gaza, he taught at the Bnei Akiba Yeshiva in Ashdod that the war against Hamas is “a war of the people of Israel against Amalek."[30] He was not dismissed from his position, though other statements he made (such as warning Jewish landlords not to rent to Arab tenants) led the Ministry of Justice to try to block his candidacy for Chief Sephardic Rabbi and investigate him for incitement; the investigation was dropped in 2013.
At the Auschwitz-Birkenau concentration camp on Holocaust Remembrance Day, January 28, 2010, Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, speaking from a dais overlooking the ruins of the gas chambers and crematoria at the Birkenau extermination camp, warned: "A new Amalek is appearing and once again threatening to exterminate the Jews.”[31] Everyone understood he was talking about Iran. He repeated the same warning in different words to a standing ovation from a joint session of the U.S. Congress on March 3, 2015 (two days before I drafted this). He repeated the reference in a speech on October 28, 2023, about Israel’s response to the killings of Ocober 7.
I visited the camp on September 14, 2014. At that time the crisis over the disputed presidential election in Afghanistan was reaching a crescendo. Starting in January, through track-two meetings between Americans and Iranians, I had opened a back channel of indirect communication about Afghanistan with Iran. I had attended the Bonn Talks that formed the post-Taliban government as an advisor to the UN special envoy, Lakhdar Brahimi, and I had seen how U.S.-Iran cooperation made that agreement possible. The leader of the Iran team was then deputy foreign minister, now foreign minister, Javad Zarif. In early 2014 I foresaw that the Afghan presidential election’s outcome would be disputed and that misunderstandings between the U.S. and Iran could exacerbate the dispute.
U.S. and Iranian officials were authorized to meet by their respective governments only to discuss Iran’s nuclear program, but since I had left government in October 2013, they could now meet me. I received the approval of the State Department and started the channel. I knew the small team of Iranian Afghanistan experts well, and we met several times, in Stockholm, Istanbul, Vienna, and Oslo.
On September 6, Dr. Abdullah’s supporters threatened to seize power and stopped only after calls to both candidates by President Obama, who told them that any illegal transfer of power would terminate U.S. and international assistance to Afghanistan. This veiled threat worked, but only Iran had the influence on the ground to reinforce it and restrain Dr. Abdullah’s most militant supporters. I called my Iranian contact and asked where I could meet him, as he often traveled to conferences. “Warsaw, September 16,” he said.
I traveled to Warsaw early, arriving on September 12, because I wanted to be sure I had time to visit the death camp. This was my first visit to Poland. The visit was strangely appropriate in another way. I had known the Iranian for about twenty years, but we had no contact during the Ahmadinejad presidency, when he was ousted from his positions. When we renewed our acquaintance in Stockholm in January 2014, he told me that he had a very difficult time under Ahmadinejad. He had been fired because he had opposed the Holocaust denial conference. “What does this have to do with the national interest of Iran?” he asked. Only the election of President Rouhani in September 2013 and Rouhani’s appointment of Zarif as foreign minister brought him back, and he and Zarif were still on a sort of probation. He got permission to meet me, but warned me that very few people in the Iranian government were informed.
On Monday September 15 I was sitting in the late morning sun in Warsaw’s Market Square when he called me from Tehran. His wife had fallen ill, he said, and he could not travel. (I never verified this from an independent source). That night I called him from my hotel, and we had a brief conversation about the situation in Afghanistan, during which I passed the main messages I had. I then told him about my visit to Auschwitz-Birkenau and recalled our conversation about the Holocaust denial conference. Next time, I said, we should visit Auschwitz-Birkenau together. That would be wonderful, he said.
The prophet who commanded the annihilation of Amalek, Samuel, if he was a historical figure, died about three thousand years ago, but a shrine near Jerusalem said to be his tomb lives on in controversy. The Byzantines identified the grave as Samuel’s in the sixth century, and after the Arab conquest the village was named Nabi Samuil (Prophet Samuel). The town became a Crusader citadel before the capture of Jerusalem. After the reconquest of Jerusalem by Salahuddin, Muslim rulers erected a mosque over the tomb, and Jews built a synagogue attached to the mosque under the protection of the Ottoman sultans.
Unlike Safed, the village of Nabi Samuil resisted the Palmah’s assault in 1948. It came under Israeli control only in 1967, a few days after I was trying to understand what Elie Wiesel was saying. Israel razed the village in 1971. Today a newer, much smaller village sits in the “Seam Zone,” a no-man’s land between Israel’s “security barrier” on the West Bank and the annexed portions of East Jerusalem. Its dwindling inhabitants confront restrictions on movement in all directions and are ineligible for building permits. Israel has built a new synagogue over Samuel’s tomb. It turned the area into the “Nebi Samuel National Park” in 1995, preserving important historical and natural sites, while imposing even further restrictions on the few remaining Palestinian inhabitants. The Park’s explanatory materials do not mention the destruction of the Palestinian village and minimize the importance of the site to Muslims.[32]
Katz’s nation-building narrative expunged such strains and conflicts from history. Kozodoy wanted to enable American Jewish students to learn Katz’s religio-nationalist narrative, a variant of the narrative of exile and redemption that I had not so much learned as lived, the narrative that enabled me to understand Elie Wiesel’s speech without hearing a single word he said. But in my life, unlike the curriculum that Katz envisioned, there were multiple narratives.
[1] Wiesel, Elie (2010-09-01). All Rivers Run to the Sea: Memoirs (Kindle Locations 6833-6835). Knopf Doubleday Publishing Group. Kindle Edition.
[2] Wiesel, Elie (2010-09-01). All Rivers Run to the Sea: Memoirs (Kindle Locations 6872-6886). Knopf Doubleday Publishing Group. Kindle Edition.
[3] https://www.cia.gov/library/center-for-the-study-of-intelligence/csi-publications/csi-studies/studies/vol49no1/html_files/arab_israeli_war_1.html
[4] Agnon, “the Sign,” translated by Arthur Green, in A Book that Was Lost and Other Stories, ed. Alan Mintz and Anne Golomb Hoffman, pp. 378-379. I have slightly modified the translation.
[5] Katz, With My Own Eyes.
[6] Fifty years later someone added an extra “t” to Barnet’s name on my birth certificate. Until 1967, when I applied for a passport for a trip I took to Israel after my graduation from Akiba and the Six-Day War, everyone thought my name was “Barnet.”
[7] Katz, YA 3:2, p. 128.
[8] YA 1:… Katz here follows the account of Maimonides in Mishneh Torah commentary on Sanhedrin chapter 11.
[9] Katz, YA II: 24.
[10] Tractate Shabbat, 33b. The conversation strangely resembles the discussion about the Romans among the Zealot commandos planning a raid on Pontius Pilate’s residence in Monty Python’s The Life of Brian:
REG: They’ve bled us white, the bastards. They’ve taken everything we had, and not just from us, from our fathers, and from our fathers’ fathers… . And what have they ever given us in return?! . . .
XERXES: The aqueduct. . . .
COMMANDO #3: And the sanitation.
LORETTA: Oh, yeah, the sanitation, Reg. Remember what the city used to be like?
REG: Yeah. All right. I’ll grant you the aqueduct and the sanitation are two things that the Romans have done.
MATTHIAS: And the roads. . . .
COMMANDO: Irrigation.
XERXES: Medicine.
COMMANDO #2: Education.
COMMANDO #1: And the wine.
COMMANDO: Public baths.
LORETTA: And it’s safe to walk in the streets at night now, Reg.
FRANCIS: Yeah, they certainly know how to keep order. Let’s face it. They’re the only ones who could in a place like this.
REG: All right, but apart from the sanitation, the medicine, education, wine, public order, irrigation, roads, a fresh water system, and public health, what have the Romans ever done for us?
XERXES: Brought peace.
REG: Oh. Peace? Shut up!
[12] YA 3:1, p. 88.
[13] Ibid., 89.
[14] Ibid., 94.
[15] YA 3:1, 94.
[16] Shachter, Jacob; Freedman, H. (2012-05-16). Soncino Babylonian Talmud Sanhedrin (Kindle Locations 25752-25768). Talmudic Books. Kindle Edition.
[17] Shachter, Jacob; Freedman, H. (2012-05-16). Soncino Babylonian Talmud Sanhedrin (Kindle Location 25875). Talmudic Books. Kindle Edition.
[18] Shachter, Jacob; Freedman, H. (2012-05-16). Soncino Babylonian Talmud Sanhedrin (Kindle Locations 25890-25893). Talmudic Books. Kindle Edition.
[19] Edmund Wilson, “The Invisible World of S. Y. Agnon,” Commentary (December 1966), p. 31.
[20] JK, YA 4: 109.
[21] http://www.nytimes.com/2011/05/17/opinion/17abbas.html?_r=0.
[22] http://www.safed.co.il/safed-1948.html. In October 2012 Mahmoud Abbas tried to manage the fallout from the controversy by telling an Israeli journalist that he did not claim the right to live in Safed but wanted to be able to visit it. Abbas also told Palestine television in 2013 that the Arabs fled Safed in 1948 out of fear of reprisals for the killings of fifteen Jews there during the Uprising. Abbas’s political balancing act led him to be accused by Palestinians of abandoning the right of return, while defenders of Israel cited his words to support their claim that the Palestinians left Safed voluntarily out of fear and guilt.
[23] http://www.meforum.org/2909/abbas-fable
[24] http://www.safed.co.il/safed-1948.html
[25]http://www.jstor.org/discover/10.2307/4467656?uid=3739696&uid=381664431&uid=2&uid=3&uid=3739256&uid=60&sid=21104656573197
[26] Ibid.
[27] The original says (I Samuel: 7-9): “And the Lord replied to Samuel, ‘Heed the demand of the people in everything they say to you. For it is not you that they have rejected; it is Me they have rejected as their king. Like everything else they have done since I brought them out of Egypt to this day – forsaking Me and worshiping other gods – so they are doing to you. Heed their demand; but warn them solemnly, and tell them about the practices of any king who will rule over them.”
[28] 11 These will be the ways of the king who will reign over you: he will take your sons and appoint them to his chariots and to be his horsem*n and to run before his chariots. 12And he will appoint for himself commanders of thousands and commanders of fifties, and some to plow his ground and to reap his harvest, and to make his implements of war and the equipment of his chariots. 13He will take your daughters to be perfumers and cooks and bakers. 14He will take the best of your fields and vineyards and olive orchards and give them to his servants. 15He will take the tenth of your grain and of your vineyards and give it to his officers and to his servants. 16He will take your male servants and female servants and the best of your young men and your donkeys, and put them to his work. 17He will take the tenth of your flocks, and you shall be his slaves. 18And in that day you will cry out because of your king, whom you have chosen for yourselves, but the Lord will not answer you in that day.
[29] As the Chabad website puts it (http://www.chabad.org/library/article_cdo/aid/267677/jewish/Wipe-Out-Amalek-Today.htm): “No longer a foreign nation, today's Amalek is an internal enemy. We each have an Amalekite lurking within our very self. The inner Amalek is unholy cynicism. That little voice inside each of us that derides, belittles and attacks truth and goodness; our irrational tendency to mock people who act morally, to be cynical when we see altruism, to doubt our own or other's sincerity - these are the modern day Amalekites. They wage a lethal war with our soul. If we let it, cynicism can kill our every attempt to improve ourselves and smother any move towards refining our character and expressing our soul. There is only one effective response to Amalek's attacks: Annihilation. Don't argue back, it won't work. The power of cynicism is that it is irrational. The most inspiring, uplifting and profound moment of spiritual awakening can be dismissed in an instant by Amalek's sarcastic taunts. The most logical and sound arguments can be deflected with his quick one-liners – ‘Get real!’, ‘Who ya kidding?’ or ‘Hey, you think you're so holy-moly?’ There is no answer to such cheap pot-shots. You can't fight cynicism with reason. Just wipe it out. No dialogue. No compromise. Erase it from the face of your soul.”
[30] http://www.haaretz.com/news/gaza-campaign-is-war-against-amalek-says-chief-rabbi-of-safed-1.268296
[31] http://www.jpost.com/International/A-new-Amalek-is-appearing-Netanyahu-warns-at-Auschwitz.
[32] http://alt-arch.org/en/nabi-samuel-national-park/
