The gazillion Trumps

HuffPost ran an intriguing article the other day entitled "Trump’s Neo-Nazi And Jewish Backers Are Both Convinced He’s Secretly On Their Side." Specifically:

Rabbi Bernhard Rosenberg, the founder of the Facebook group Rabbis for Trump, argues that Trump’s daughter’s conversion to Orthodox Judaism is proof enough that he harbors no ill-will toward Jews. “You’ve got two Trumps — The Trump that’s trying to get the vote, and the Trump in real life,” said Rosenberg, who renamed his group “Rabbi for Trump” after failing to attract support from other Jewish clergy members.

[Neo-Nazi Andrew] Anglin agrees that there are two Trumps, and he isn’t worried that Trump has Jewish supporters and family members. Trump, he said, is too savvy to openly announce his views on Jews, and only allowed his daughter to convert to Judaism to trick Jews into supporting him. “He couldn’t simply say it straight,” Anglin wrote. “That just wouldn’t fly in America.”

The notion that "there are two Trumps" is one I have seen expressed by a number of supporters. Here, for example, is former rival Ben Carson explaining his endorsement of Trump:

"There are two different Donald Trumps," Carson said at the billionaire's Mar-a-Lago resort in Palm Beach, Florida. "There's the one you see on the stage and there's the one who is very cerebral, sits there and considers things very carefully. You can have a very good conversation with him. That's the Donald Trump that you're going to start seeing more and more of."

In a similar vein, Rush Limbaugh describes Trump's heresies as proof of his brilliance:

Will we finally now admit how brilliant Trump is? Can we all finally admit that he’s been setting these people up for years? He’s been out there praising the Clintons. He’s been fooling them. He’s been making the Clintons think he loves them, he supports them, he’s in their camp, he’s got them tamed, they’re not even thinking about Trump, even looking about Trump, and Trump is just icing them.

I could go on with further examples, but you get the idea. In my last post on Trump, written in December, I wrote that I didn't think he was going to win the nomination, but I also imagined that if he did I'd be half-expecting him to suddenly announce it was all one big joke. What I failed to grasp was the extent to which his supporters have embraced his aura of profound unseriousness, to the point that it's become their main rationalization for dismissing any areas of disagreement they have with him. If you like his border wall idea but don't like his past support for the Clintons, you say he wasn't serious about the latter but is serious about the former. If you have doubts about the border wall but like other things about him, you call it a "virtual wall," as Rep. Chris Collins did a couple of weeks ago.

Politicians have always found ways to attract disparate groups, like FDR being able to garner support from both blacks and segregationists. But I don't know that it's ever been accomplished by having the different groups assuming he's telling boldfaced lies for the things they're against and the unvarnished truth for the things they're for. I'm not sure if that makes his supporters incredibly cynical or incredibly naive--or some bizarre combination of the two.

Ivory tower crusaders

According to Ron Paul, "Libertarians are incapable of being racist, because racism is a collectivist idea, you see people in groups."

That remark reminds me of Pat Buchanan's response to charges of anti-Semitism: "I am as aware as any other Christian that our Savior was Jewish, His mother was Jewish, the Apostles were Jewish, the first martyrs were Jewish.... So no true Christian, in my judgment, can be an anti-Semite."

Not only do these statements both demonstrate the No True Scotsman fallacy, they raise some intriguing points about how the concept of prejudice is commonly misunderstood.

Let's start with the claim that a true Christian cannot be an anti-Semite. Somehow I doubt that assertion would much impress the Jewish victims of the Crusades, the Inquisition, and the numerous expulsions and pogroms and massacres committed in the name of Christ throughout the centuries. Presumably, Buchanan would respond that none of those attackers were "true" Christians. (I'm being charitable here, because I know there's a distinct possibility that he would defend the Crusades, as some on the right have.) It's a seductive argument because you can't possibly disprove it. Anytime a Christian assaults a Jew, you can either deny that person is a "true Christian" or deny that what that person did was anti-Semitic. It's one of those airtight defenses lawyers love.

It also shows a poor understanding of the historical roots of anti-Semitism. The simple fact is that most of the themes of modern-day anti-Semitism first emerged in a medieval Christian context. This happened not in spite of the fact that Christianity began as a rival Jewish sect, but in many ways because of it. Medieval Christians saw the continued existence of Judaism as an insult to their own faith which was supposed to have supplanted it. In theory this was a religious rather than racial prejudice, with the goal of converting Jews rather than killing them. And when it took on a racial character, as in 15th-century Spain, pointing out the Jewishness of the early Christians would probably not have swayed the persecutors.

Buchanan seems to be implicitly defining anti-Semitism as "the doctrine of hating all Jews who ever walked the face of the earth"--which is not how medieval Christians, even the Spanish, ever framed the issue--and then suggesting that this doctrine is logically incompatible with the theological claims of Christianity. And so it is--but only very mildly. The fact that his religion is founded upon worship of a long-deceased Jewish man does not automatically imply acceptance of the vast majority of Jews. History makes this all too clear. Centuries of persecution and bigotry can't be swept aside by one tiny, possible logical inconsistency.

That brings us to Ron Paul and his argument that libertarians can't be racist because racism is a form of collectivism, the opposite of libertarianism. If that's the case, then it's a funny coincidence how closely many of his policy views match those of the people he calls collectivist. As Stormfront founder Don Black said after endorsing his 2008 presidential bid, "We know that he's not a white nationalist...but on the issues, there's only one choice." What issues? Black mentions the Iraq War and immigration, but maybe there's just a few other things Paul has said that might appeal to white nationalists--say, his long-standing opposition to the Civil Rights Act of 1964. He insists he takes this position not because he harbors any animosity toward blacks (or "the blacks," as he phrases it in the earlier clip) but merely because he values freedom.

When you invade and violate the Constitution, you attack the personal liberties of the citizens of California and Maine, as well as the liberties of the people of South Carolina and Virginia. You cannot create new rights for one group by taking them away from another.

I am deeply concerned over the efforts of opposing groups to smear our effort with the false trappings of race hatred. We are interested solely in protecting the rights of states to manage their own internal affairs, which is a fundamental guarantee of the Constitution.

Actually, those aren't the words of Ron Paul. They're the words of Strom Thurmond during his 1948 segregationist campaign. (The first paragraph is from The Washington Post, Oct. 12, 1948, the second from The Baltimore Sun, Jul. 20, 1948--both obtained from my library's archive.) But if you read what Paul has actually said on the subject, you'll find that the above quote wouldn't sound at all out of place.

Of course Thurmond also once said, "there's not enough troops in the army to force the Southern people to break down segregation and admit the nigger race into our theaters, into our swimming pools, into our homes, and into our churches." Admittedly it's hard to imagine a remark like that escaping Paul's lips (though not so hard to imagine it appearing in a newsletter under his name). And Paul does talk favorably, as Thurmond would not have, about creating a "color-blind society."

But Paul's argument about collectivism is doubly flawed, first because it conflates a philosophy of government with a philosophy of human differences (a person can, with perfect consistency, believe that blacks and whites should be treated equally under the law while also believing whites will naturally come out on top), second because it's exactly the sort of rationalization that white supremacists have used for centuries to justify keeping racist institutions alive. They also talked about states' rights; they also depicted civil-rights legislation as an assault on freedom; they also claimed their preferred policies would benefit blacks; and they also repudiated certain manifestations of bigotry. (Thurmond, for example, opposed the poll tax and distanced himself from the racist, anti-Semitic preacher Gerald L. K. Smith.) Even if Paul's motives are entirely honorable, rooted only in his fealty to federalist principles and not to prejudice, it doesn't change the fact that racism has a long history of coming cloaked in such principles.

Paul and Buchanan both think they can refute charges of bigotry simply by identifying themselves with a favored belief system and defining that belief system in logical opposition to the charges. Their use of this defense reveals a cartoonish understanding of bigotry, and the philosophical basis on which they reject that bigotry is hopelessly feeble. They are men living in ivory towers, too attached to the elegant simplicity of their logic to appreciate its real-world implications.

Why ethnic labels matter

One time as I was waiting in the hall for a class, I began a conversation with a woman sitting nearby, and when she asked me what I was taking, I said, "Hebrew." She then inquired, without a hint of irony, "Why do you need to take Hebrew if you are a Hebrew?"

I was struck dumb. It wasn't just her ignorance of the fact that most American Jews are less than fluent in the Hebrew language, it was her referring to me as a "Hebrew." I hadn't encountered that nomenclature before, and if I'd ever expected to, it would have been from a small-town dweller in Alabama or some such place, not from a fellow student at U. of Maryland!

Was I offended? Not really. While I'm suspicious about the sorts of ideas that might accompany her terminological illiteracy, this use of the word "Hebrew" was once considered perfectly respectable--like, oh, back in the nineteenth century. As British historian Paul Johnson notes:

From about the second century BC, when it was so used by Ben Sira, 'Hebrew' was applied to the language of the Bible, and to all subsequent works written in this language. As such it gradually lost its pejorative overtone, so that both to Jews themselves and to sympathetic gentiles, it sometimes seemed preferable to 'Jew' as a racial term. In the nineteenth century, for example, it was much used by the Reform movement in the United States, so that we get such institutions as the Hebrew Union College and the Union of American Hebrew Congregations.

A quick search on Google News, which has a mammoth historical archive of newspaper articles, turns up numerous instances of this usage between 1875 and 1915. For example, one 1913 article from The New York Times reports, "More than 500 Hebrews crowded Clinton Hall last night and took part in an enthusiastic meeting...in honor of Nahum Sokelew, the Zionist, and editor of the best-known Jewish newspaper in Russia." To this day there are statutes on the book that refer to things like "Orthodox Hebrew religious requirements." But in the common language this sort of phraseology sounds ignorant, if not anti-Semitic, to most people. That it once was standard usage has been all but forgotten.

If you keep up with current events, you may already have suspected where this post was leading. Two apparently coincidental news items recently have sparked a debate in the media and blogosphere about the use of outdated racial/ethnic terminology. In one, the census forms for 2010 included "Negro" as an option for racial identification, because some older blacks still prefer the term. In another, a 2008 quote by Sen. Harry Reid was uncovered in which he had stated that the country was ready for a black president, especially one who was "light-skinned" and spoke "with no Negro dialect, unless he wanted to have one."

If Reid had said "black" instead of "Negro," would his statement still be objectionable? Depends who you ask. (I personally think no.) But most commentators agree that there's something exceedingly strange about hearing the word "Negro" used in earnest, and not in a historical context, by the Majority Leader of the U.S. Senate.

Unlike "Hebrew," which few if any individuals alive today remember as an accepted term for a Jewish person, "Negro" fell out of fashion only about 40 years ago. Martin Luther King used the word several times in his "I Have a Dream" speech, and Bobby Kennedy used it when he suggested--with considerable foresight, as it turns out--that the U.S. would elect a black president in the next 40 years. People of Reid's generation (b. 1939) had to expunge the word from their vocabulary when they were well into adulthood. Can younger people like me (b. 1977) understand what that's like? Why, yes we can. That's exactly what happened with the word "Oriental" when I was growing up.

Anyone should be able to understand why terms like these persist in the margins of society for decades after having been purged from mainstream discourse. Apart from the fact that old speech habits die hard, the changes usually seem a little arbitrary on the surface. Why is "Hebrew" more demeaning than "Jew"? Why is the Spanish word for "black" worse than the English word? Partly it may be their closeness to a slur ("Hebe," "nigger," etc.), but the real reason is probably that it is just a way of marking a shift in public attitude. Therefore, any person who continues using a linguistic casualty of this type gives the impression of not having fully absorbed the social developments that left it behind.

I molt therefore I am

"They administered beatings to dogs with perfect indifference, and made fun of those who pitied the creatures as if they felt pain. They said the animals were clocks; that the cries they emitted when struck were only the noise of a little spring that had been touched, but that the whole body was without feeling. They nailed poor animals up on boards by their four paws to vivisect them and see the circulation of the blood which was a great subject of conversation."

-- Nicolas Fontaine, 1650

I once visited an oceanarium hoping I'd get the chance to hold a live lobster in my hands. It turned out the place wouldn't let us--something about contaminating them, I think. I did get to hold a horseshoe crab, a starfish, and a sea cucumber, all alive. The lobsters, however, we could only observe in their enclosures, snapping their claws, waving their antennae.

Our guide was eager to debunk the popular notion that lobsters scream when they are cooked alive. That is impossible, he told us, first because lobsters have no vocal cords, and second because they have no brains.

That didn't sound right to me. First of all, of course lobsters don't have vocal cords, but then neither do birds, and birds certainly emit a shrill noise when in extreme distress. I suppose he meant lobsters don't vocalize, period. Fair enough. Then what is the high-pitched sound heard when a lobster is placed in a boiling pot? He didn't say, but later I found out that many sources explain it as steam escaping from the animal's carapace.

A much bigger stretch was his second claim. I knew that not all animals have brains. We even got to see a confrontation between two such creatures. Someone placed a starfish into a tank with a mussel, an animal that looked sort of like a three-dimensional Pac-Man. As soon as the starfish hit the water, the previously sedentary mussel rocketed toward the other end of the tank, its shell bobbing open and closed with each stroke. We were told it was trying to escape because the starfish is a natural predator. It wasn't "afraid" of the starfish. As a type of clam, a mussel has no brain and therefore can have no emotion. But it did nonetheless possess survival reflexes.

The problem was that everything I knew about lobsters, insects, and other arthropods suggested they did have some sort of brain. I had done several reports in college on honeybees, who have the most complex system of communication in the animal world, involving a "dance" that conveys the location of nectar to other members of the hive. They know the dance instinctively, but it seems unlikely that any brainless creature could process that level of information.

It wasn't until a while later that I found the decisive refutation for what our guide had said. I was in my university's library when I wandered into the biology section and decided, on a whim, to check a book on crustacean anatomy. The book unhesitatingly described these animals as possessing a brain. In fact, the brain of arthropods is fairly advanced for invertebrates, surpassed only by that of cephalopod mollusks--squids and octopuses, the only invertebrates that appear to possess intelligence.

As noted zoologist Donald Griffin stated, "Experimenters have demonstrated that the central nervous systems of crustaceans, insects, and cephalopods organize and modulate information in ways that are quite comparable in complexity and precision to those of vertebrate brains" (qtd. in George Page's Inside the Animal Mind, p. 167).

Okay, so they have brains. Or at least something we can call a brain. But that leaves open a more crucial question: Do they have any consciousness? When injured, do they experience pain? Remarkably, many scientists insist the answer is no. A 2005 study funded by the Norwegian government received wide publicity, which claimed it merely bolstered an existing scientific consensus that these animals feel no pain:

[A]nimals with simple nervous systems, like lobsters, snails and worms, do not have the ability to process emotional information and therefore do not experience suffering, say most researchers.... "When you drop a lobster in boiling water, or put a fishhook through a worm, those stimuli cause those muscles to contract," Stevens said. "We describe that as pain because of the motor response, which is nothing more than neurons that have been stimulated."

Or, in the words of the Terminator, "The data could be called pain."

I guess that settles it, huh? Not quite. A more recent investigation paints a rather different picture:

[Robert] Elwood, along with Stuart Barr and Lynsey Patterson, outline seven reasons, with supportive findings, they believe crustaceans suffer.

For one thing, they argue, crustaceans possess "a suitable central nervous system and receptors." They learn to avoid a negative stimulus after a potentially painful experience. They also engage in protective reactions, such as limping and rubbing, after being hurt.

Other scientists remain unconvinced. As one puts it, "You could argue the shrimp is simply trying to clean the antenna rather than showing a pain response."

Well, of course you could argue. An alien scientist studying humans could argue that humans do not experience pain. They cry, scream, and sweat when they're injured simply because those are adaptive behaviors for getting help or scaring away predators (or whatever). If you're intent on denying an organism's inner experience, you can explain away any behavior you see. Much of what drives this skepticism, however, is scientists' unwillingness to expand their idea of what an invertebrate nervous system can do.

Proving that lobsters suffer when boiled would probably have legal consequences. They would be subject to laws prohibiting cruelty to animals (they already are in some places), and chefs might be required to kill them or stun them before boiling them. (There is even now an electrocution device for that purpose called CrustaStun.) Since there's a big worldwide seafood industry and many people consider lobsters incredibly tasty, it's no wonder discussions of this nature tend to provoke angry, knee-jerk reactions.

What do religious Jews, who don't eat lobster, think about this issue? Most don't get involved at all. We already have our own problems dealing with groups that seek to ban kosher slaughter. But the teachings of our religion do shed light on this topic. While allowing the killing of animals for food and other human-related purposes, Judaism places great value on their proper treatment. There are a range of laws about taking good care of one's livestock or pets, including feeding them on time and not overburdening them. Many rabbis prohibit hunting for sport, and none encourage it. The ritual slaughter of mammals and birds attempts to make their death quick and painless.

These rules have given Judaism a better record on animal welfare than Christianity, but they have important limitations. They allow a Jew to harm an animal for a legitimate human purpose (for example, ridding a rat infestation), and some Jews have interpreted this stipulation broadly enough to justify some pretty brutal practices. The ugliest example in recent memory concerned the Agriprocessors meatpacking plant (later shut down after the fallout from another controversy, involving mistreatment of employees). Undercover videos released by PETA showed cows apparently walking around for several minutes after their necks had been cut. Defenders insisted the animals were like chickens with their head cut off, acting on reflex but feeling no pain.

Kosher supervisors finally agreed to change the plant's practices, and later it received a positive review from an inspection by leading animal-welfare expert Dr. Temple Grandin. But one of their controversial practices that remained in effect was turning animals upside-down before killing them, which is authorized by Israeli rabbis but not practiced by any other kosher slaughterhouses in America.

Judaism teaches that non-Jews should observe the Noachide commandments, which include an injunction not to eat an animal while it is still alive, usually interpreted as a general statement against cruelty to animals. But the obligation is narrower than it is for Jews, and might not apply to a marine invertebrate anyway.

The important point in all this, however, is that Judaism always intended the principle of compassion for animals to go beyond the letter of the law. As Rabbi Natan Slifkin explains in his book Man and Beast:

Rabbi Yehudah HaNasi was once approached by a calf fleeing in terror from the butcher. But Rabbi Yehudah HaNasi did not take pity on it. He said, "Go; for this is what you were made for!" As a result of this he suffered pain for many years. His atonement came when his maid discovered a rat's nest in the house and was about to sweep it away; Rabbi Yehudah HaNasi told her to leave it alone.

Now it is undeniably true that the calf's purpose in life was indeed to be eaten. That was what it was bred for. This is neither wrong nor cruel; on the contrary, it assures the success of the species (cows will never become extinct) and the elevation of this animal. Yet nevertheless it was this event that brought punishment to Rabbi Yehudah HaNasi. For treatment of animals is not meant to be determined on a purely legal level. The purpose of the mitzvah of kindness to animals is to inculcate one in the trait of compassion. That cows are destined to be eaten is irrelevant. When faced with a dewy-eyed, bleating, tender calf, one's mercies should be aroused. Likewise, although there is every reason to dispose of rats, it is admirable if one feels sympathy for the poor little things and cannot bring oneself to do so.

There are other limitations in one's actions toward animals. Although a human need justifies causing pain to animals, it only justifies it insofar as it is required. Where different options are available, one should choose the less painful option. (pp. 194-5)

The prime consideration in Judaism is not what the animal is experiencing but what type of person you become in the way you treat it. People who are unaffected by seeing an animal suffer are likely to lack empathy in general. So even if the lobster's nervous system is too simple for the creature to experience pain, just the appearance that it does ought to give us pause. Whether the practice of boiling lobsters alive continues or not, there's something seriously wrong when people have desensitized themselves to the point they consider the process as casual as chopping fruit.

The sushi myth

Often when I mention sushi to someone who has never eaten it, I get a response like, "Well, raw fish ain't my cup of tea." It seems that every American who hasn't directly encountered sushi believes it is just another word for raw fish. They hold this belief firmly, like it's a simple fact.

I don't know where this misconception got started, but it's widespread. I myself held it at one time. Snopes even has an entry debunking it. But it takes on an added irony when it comes from people (and Jews in particular) who don't realize they have been eating a type of uncooked fish for years, called lox.

"What?!" they exclaim. "How can lox be raw? Everybody knows it's smoked salmon. Even the dictionary says so."

Okay, now wait a second: do you know what smoking means in this context? It refers to cold smoking, a preservation process that does not expose the fish to heat. Furthermore, not all lox is smoked; it is mainly preserved through curing--soaking in brine (hence the salty flavor).

Like sushi, it is an acquired taste. It's a little weird, actually: eaten by itself, it's borderline unpalatable. Add cream cheese, and it becomes delicious. The raw fish that is found in some sushi has a similar quality.

In the last ten years or so, kosher markets have begun selling sushi. To remain kosher, it must forgo traditional ingredients such as crab. The first sushi I ever ate, I made myself. I was guided through its creation while sitting in a Sukkah, in a program hosted by my college's Hillel during the holiday.

If sushi isn't raw fish, what is it? Usually it consists of rice wrapped in seaweed, with a middle that can contain just about anything--fish generally, but there is also vegetable sushi and fruit sushi. I even once tried chicken sushi, though I didn't think the combination worked.

Snopes defines it as "vinegared rice that can (but need not) be paired with raw seafood." That's also the definition offered by Wikipedia, which then links to the Snopes page. But does it really need to have rice? I once ordered something from a sushi menu, and was given simply a slab of raw tuna on a plate. I say "tuna" because that's what the menu called it, but it didn't look or taste anything like the sort of food you find in a Chicken of the Sea can. It was dark red, with a jello-like consistency, and was about as appetizing as baking soda toothpaste.

But if it doesn't need to have rice, and doesn't need to have fish, what makes sushi sushi? I tried asking this once to a sushi chef, but he didn't know enough English to explain it to me, or even to understand my question.

I made some a few weeks ago using a kit, the first time I've done it without supervision. The kit provided the seaweed and rice, and I added lox, carrots, cucumbers, and celery. The people I served it to liked it, but it was far from perfect. I put in too much rice, making it hard for me to keep the pieces together. I've asked for tips on Internet forums, and watched what the chefs at local restaurants do. The latest technique I learned is to wet the knife before cutting the rolls.

Let's face it. Sushi is just more fun to make--or to watch being made--than it is to eat. The chefs always remind me of artists, their products more visually dazzling than gustatorily appealing. But you should try it some time, just to say you've had it.

The line between cranks and scholars

What is it with some linguists and claiming a mysterious relationship between English and Hebrew? First there's Isaac Mozeson, the literature professor (I hesitate to use the term "linguist") who maintains that all English words can be traced to Hebrew. Then there's Ernest Klein, a rabbi/linguist who saw Semitic origins where other scholars didn't. I never expected John McWhorter of all people to enter the fray. But he does, in a recent book that features an eccentric theory about early Semitic influence on the language that would become English.

Superficial relationships
Even in my early childhood, I noticed resemblances between certain Hebrew words and their English counterparts: camel is gamal, wine is yayin, and earth is eretz. There's a perfectly reasonable explanation for all this. Animal names often come from languages spoken in the region where the animal is found. Hence, moose comes from a Native American tongue, and camel comes from a Middle Eastern Semitic tongue that may or may not have been Hebrew, but was certainly related. Similarly, the ancients would have referred to wine using the term from the culture that first disseminated the drink, just as we today adopted the Japanese word sushi instead of inventing our own term using pure-English roots (e.g. "seafood roll"). As for eretz and "earth," that's probably just a coincidence.

That last statement, in my experience, often provokes the response, "I don't believe in coincidence." But it has nothing to do with coincidence in a cosmic sense. The Hawaiian word kahuna meaning "priest" sounds remarkably similar to the Hebrew word for priest, but unless you can devise a story about an ancient encounter between Semitic tribes and Polynesians, it is likely that the two languages just happened to hit upon the same combination of sound and meaning in this one instant. These things happen from time to time.

Isaac Mozeson
In his 1988 book The Word, Mozeson maintains not only that the English language (as well as all other languages) comes directly from Hebrew, "the language of Eden," but that this fact can be discerned by examining the roots of English words. According to Mozeson, "Hebrew vocabulary has as much affinity with English as it has with Arabic. More English words can be clearly linked to Biblical Hebrew than to Latin, Greek, or French."

As for the Indo-European theory of modern linguistics, Mozeson argues that it is nothing more than a racist plot by white Gentiles to segregate their languages from other cultures and undermine the eternal truth of the Torah. As Mozeson puts it, "The third son of Noah, Ham, is behind the generic term for African languages, and white gentiles in the linguistic community have no trouble with the evidence of a related Hamito-Semitic language family. Let the Blacks and Jews share the ghetto, whisper the professors, as long as Indo-European remains lily white." It never seems to occur to him what the "Indo" part of the theory signifies.

The book is filled with his unorthodox etymologies. "Sparrow," he claims, comes from the Hebrew tzipor ("bird"). The English word "lad" derives from the Hebrew yeled ("boy"). "Direction" comes from derekh ("path, way"). He even traces "samurai" to the Hebrew shomer ("guardian")--via Japanese, of course.

This is all quite clever. But I can't help thinking of the father in the movie My Big Fat Greek Wedding who insists that if you give him any English word, he can explain how it is derived from Greek. He shows how it's done with some easy examples, like arachnophobia. Then one of the kids says "kimono!" The father is stopped short for a moment, then he explains that it comes from the Greek word for winter, himona, and in winter you stay warm by wearing a robe--kimono!

If Mozeson considered other theories, he'd find his own wanting. For example, mainstream linguists trace the word direction to the Latin directus, which is the past participle of the verb dirigere, "to set straight." That word comes from a combination of dis- ("apart") and regere ("to guide"). Not exactly a plausible candidate for connecting with the Hebrew derekh. But Mozeson disregards the mass of historical and literary evidence, as well as the theories of systematic sound change between languages, used by mainstream linguists to establish cognates. Ironically, Mozeson's picture of language evolution makes the process seem far more random and haphazard than in mainstream linguistics.

Of course, his method could be used to "prove" that any language came from any other language. John McWhorter demonstrated this in his 2003 book Power of Babel. Not specifically in reference to Mozeson or any other crank linguist, McWhorter "proves" that Japanese comes from English, based on the following words:

sagaru: hang down (i.e. "sag")
namae: name
mono: thing, single entity
nai: not
mo: more
miru: see (hence, "mirror")
taberu: eat (hence, "table," where one eats)
atsui (ott-SOO-ee): hot
hito: man (i.e. "he")
yo: emphatic particle (i.e. "Yo!")
kuu: feed your face (i.e. "chew")
inki: dark-spirited or glum (hence, "inky")

I actually think Japanese shows a close relationship to Hebrew. In Hebrew, karati means "I read." And what people are more in need of learning self-defense than the guys with their noses in books?

Ernest Klein
Klein was a linguist and Orthodox rabbi best known for two works: an etymological dictionary of English, and one of Hebrew. He had a tendency to suggest Semitic origins for English words more often than other scholars did. Unlike Mozeson, however, he worked entirely within the framework of mainstream linguistics, and in fact his dictionaries are widely respected works of scholarship. The Online Etymology Dictionary, which has had considerable influence across the Internet, relies a great deal on Klein's research. One time I was reading a word-origin blog that traced the word traffic to the Arabic tafriq meaning "distribution." I immediately suspected--and quickly confirmed--that the blogger had gotten his information from the Online Etymology Dictionary and ultimately from Klein.

John McWhorter
In his earlier books on linguistics, McWhorter mainly attempted to explain the views of professional linguists before the general public. He does some of that in his latest book Our Magnificent Bastard Tongue, talking about the flaws in conventional conceptions of "correct" and "incorrect" grammar, as well as debunking the Sapir-Whorf hypothesis (that a language's grammatical properties affect its speakers' thought processes). But he also proposes some theories he admits few linguists accept.

For the purposes of this blog entry, I will mention just one of the theories: He thinks that the Phoenicians, who spoke a language very similar to Hebrew, made their way to the area that is now Germany and Denmark and had such a profound effect on the languages spoken there that the entire Germanic subfamily (which includes modern German, Dutch, English, and the Scandinavian languages) was the result of Semitic-speaking adults struggling to learn an Indo-European tongue.

Linguists have long believed that Proto-Germanic underwent strong non-IE influence. For one thing, one-third of Proto-Germanic vocabulary cannot be traced to IE roots. McWhorter discusses several lines of evidence, including Proto-Germanic's substitution of fricatives for stop consonants (compare English's father with Latin's pater), its tendency to put verbs into the past tense by simply changing the vowel (e.g. drink/drank), and its extreme simplification of the IE case system.

McWhorter speculates on a possible connection between certain Germanic and Semitic roots, such as the English word fright compared with the Semitic root p-r-kh meaning "to fear." Particularly interesting is his attempt to connect the names of two Germanic deities, Phol and Balder, with the Phoenician god Baal. Also, an archeologist allegedly found the remains of a Phoenician cooking pot in the shallows of the North Sea.

McWhorter is quick to admit that none of this comes close to proving his case; he simply argues that his hypothesis is an intriguing possibility worthy of further investigation.

Final thought: the line between cranks and scholars
Etymology is far from an exact science. Look in any dictionary, and you will find scores of words with unknown origins. In those situations, even the professionals end up resorting to guesswork, some of it as crude and far-fetched as anything Isaac Mozeson could have dreamed up. The difference, I suppose, is that legitimate researchers try to gather up as many facts as they can, and acknowledge when the limits have been reached. Usually.

Urban bubbe meises

Linked to at DovBear's Blog

Blogger Wolfish Musings recently wished for a Jewish version of Snopes, the premier site for investigating urban legends. He made this wish after receiving an email listing ten "proofs" of the Moshiach's imminent arrival. As it stands, such a site already exists, and it is called Jewish Legends. Unfortunately, it lacks the scope or professionalism of Snopes.

Snopes was hardly the first urban legend-debunking site, but it took a new approach to the subject. For one thing, unlike previous sites of its kind, Snopes didn't deal exclusively with tall tales. Some of the claims that Snopes investigates end up being true. According to Snopes, what sets urban legends apart is not their truth value but their mode of transmission. They're the types of stories you "know" happened because you heard it from a friend of a friend (or read in an email forwarded to you by a friend). Occasionally such stories may in fact be accurate or nearly accurate. The problem is verifying them, and that's where Snopes comes in. It categorizes the truth value of stories with a red light for false, a yellow for uncertain, and a green for true.

Jewish Legends adopts the same color-coding, but with Stars of David instead of traffic lights. Unlike Snopes, it includes roughly the same number of "green" stories as "red" stories. Because so much of it is true, the site begins to sound more like a weird news page than an urban legends page.

Some of the green stories are reasonable choices, such as the report that Coca Cola tastes better during Passover season than during the rest of the year, because it uses sugar instead of corn syrup. Religious Jews are aware of this fact, but because it's so word-of-mouth, it's the type of claim for which verification is useful, if for no other reason than to convince skeptics.

But why do we need the site to tell us, for example, that the first pro-baseball player was Jewish? That may be a noteworthy fact in itself, but it's not a story that has been passed around by word of mouth. I had never heard the story before I came to the site, so it's probably not something that was in need of investigation.

Likewise, the site puts Christopher Columbus's Jewishness in the yellow category. That belief is not an urban legend by any definition. It is a legitimate hypothesis still being debated by scholars.

I also wonder why the site bothers itself with answering the Protocols or the business about a kosher tax. Once you start getting into the debunking of anti-Semitic conspiracy theories, your task is practically endless. And it gives the site a graver tone than a discussion about urban legends ought to have. Is the site going to start taking on Holocaust deniers? That would be a perfect way to kill the fun.

The site's best entries include whether the name of the Satmar sect comes from "Saint Mary," whether the Israeli archaeologist Vendyl Jones was the inspiration for Indiana Jones, whether Mordechai was Esther's uncle, and whether "hip hip hooray" has anti-Semitic origins. (Click the links to find out the answer to each of those questions.) Those are all beliefs that have swirled around the Jewish community for quite some time, and are worthy of investigation. I just wish the site would also tackle more current stuff, like the chain emails targeted at Jews. And the weird news entries, interesting as they may be, should at least be placed in a separate section and be less focused upon.

The site seems to have an Orthodox standpoint, but it never tells you that it does. It considers the existence of the Golem to be an open question. It asserts that the actor Ben Stiller, contrary to popular belief, is not Jewish (his father is, and his mother had a Reform conversion before he was born). I suspect that Ben Stiller would disagree.

Religion and influence

There is a school of thought suggesting that atheistic Jews like Marx and Freud were creating essentially surrogate forms of Judaism. I was intrigued to learn that James Joyce's novel Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man suggests a similar thing about lapsed Catholics. The protagonist Stephen Daedalus rejects the Catholicism of his upbringing, yet as he is explaining his philosophy of art to a friend, the friend coyly observes, "It is a curious thing...how your mind is supersaturated with the religion in which you say you disbelieve."

When I had to do a paper on the novel in college, I seized on this idea. I posed the question of why Stephen abandoned his Catholicism, and my answer was that he found in art what he had been seeking in religion, namely a way to transcend the temptations of the flesh. Stephen's philosophy is that when examining art, a person should separate his impression of a piece from any physical or emotional reaction it may provoke. Superior art, according to Stephen, is created through a detachment between the artist and his work, whereby the artist's personality "refines itself out of existence, impersonalizes itself."

I traced the development of Stephen's philosophy throughout the novel. As a child and teenager, Stephen reacts to artistic pieces---books, poems, and the like--by letting himself be overcome by them. Conflict arises one day when he wanders into a bad part of town where he has his first sexual encounters. He knows he faces eternal torment for his actions, but at first he feels "a cold lucid indifference." Then his school has him attend a three-day retreat by a priest who gives a harrowing description of what Hell is like. Here is a brief excerpt from the priest's vivid speech:

In earthly prisons the poor captive has at least some liberty of movement, were it only within the four walls of his cell or in the gloomy yard of his prison. Not so in hell. There, by reason of the great number of the damned, the prisoners are heaped together in their awful prison, the walls of which are said to be four thousand miles thick: and the damned are so utterly bound and helpless that, as a blessed saint, Saint Anselm, writes in his book on Similitudes, they are not even able to remove from the eye a worm that gnaws it....

The horror of this strait and dark prison is increased by its awful stench.... Imagine some foul and putrid corpse that has lain rotting and decomposing in the grave, a jellylike mass of liquid corruption. Imagine such a corpse a prey to flames, devoured by the fire of burning brimstone and giving off dense choking fumes of nauseous loathsome decomposition. And then imagine this sickening stench, multiplied a millionfold and a millionfold again from the millions upon millions of fetid carcasses massed together in the reeking darkness, a huge and rotting human fungus. Imagine all this, and you will have some idea of the horror of the stench of hell.

For all its raw emotional power, the speech has an important limitation. The priest describes the speech as being about "death, judgment, hell and heaven," but it is almost entirely about Hell, with scarcely a word about what Heaven will be like. Stephen becomes a fervent worshipper, but soon doubts begin to surface, and he wonders if his new devoutness is driven more by fear than by sincere belief. He has trouble finding a more positive basis for his faith.

What he gains most from that period of atonement is considerable practice at inhibiting his physical reactions. He walks with eyes to the ground; avoids eye contact with women; subjects himself to loud noises and unpleasant smells; and refuses to make himself comfortable in bed. By quelling his receptiveness to sensory experience, however, he undermines the very quality that allowed the priest's speech to influence him in the first place. He ultimately leaves his Catholicism behind when he satisfies his need for a chaste vantage point from which to observe life, without the "chill and order" of the priesthood that first attracted him. And he achieves that purpose through his newfound appreciation of art.

When I looked back on my essay later, I noticed a curious irony. Stephen's philosophy of art was almost the polar opposite of mine. Whenever I'm examining a work of fiction, or film, or music, the first question I ask myself is, "What effect did it have on me?" That question leads me to the most sincere and, hence, authentic, answers. Depersonalizing the process only leads to an artificial response, in my view.

In fact, that's exactly how I approached Joyce's novel. I wasn't sure what my paper was going to be about. But the point in the novel that had the most immediate impact on me was the priest's description of Hell. I knew I had to pivot my reaction to that scene into a larger thesis, and that's exactly what I did.

I wonder if my approach to art has something to do with my Jewish background, just as Stephen's has to do with his Catholic background. Judaism emphasizes the idea of a person being transformed through his actions. That's why Jewish thought is relatively weak on theology. Even Torah study is viewed in this light: you're encouraged more or less to lose yourself in it and then see how it affects you.

Then again, I could be totally off about this theory. I'm generalizing based on two limited examples, my own personal philosophy and that of a fictional character (albeit one based on Joyce himself). But I do believe that it is hard for people to escape their initial influences in life.

God's third party

The most poorly understood philosophy about God is pantheism. To pantheists, God isn't the creator of the universe, God is the universe. To other people, this sounds more like a semantic trick than a coherent philosophy, as if pantheists are simply calling the universe by a different name, without making any unique statements about reality.

Curiously, many self-described pantheists almost seem to agree with that characterization of their beliefs. Pantheism.net, for example, approves of Richard Dawkins's description of pantheism as "sexed-up atheism." According to the website, "our beliefs are entirely naturalistic, and compatible with atheism, humanism and naturalism. Also with those forms of paganism that see magic and the gods as symbols rather than realities."

Hard-nosed skeptics find pantheism infuriating. They don't know how to deal with a system that renders proof irrelevant. Not that all traditional theists claim their beliefs are provable. But the statement "God exists" at least qualifies as a truth claim. The statement "God is the universe," on the other hand, merely redefines God as something which even atheists admit exists. Yet a fellow blogger makes a strong case that pantheism and atheism do in fact differ in their beliefs about reality:

The major difference lies in the appreciation for existence. What is existence really? Is it some random backdrop in which we find ourselves or is it an integral part of who and what we are?

Pantheists are generally philosophical Monists [who believe that] everything is 'one thing' and all comes from the same source. All things within the universe are interconnected....

The ultimate difference lies in what each side considers the basic substance of the universe to be like. The atheist conceives of nothing but subatomic particles whizzing about or random quantum fluctuations while the pantheist imagines a fundamental well-structured ground of being.

In practice, there is a fine line between pantheism and the views of traditional believers. Western forms of mysticism have challenged the simple assertion that "God exists." To the mystics, God is beyond existence in the usual sense. Many of them have come to think of God as the totality of everything, including, but not limited to, the universe. This view is called panentheism. It's pantheism with an extra syllable, which apparently makes all the difference as to whether it's acceptable to mainstream Judaism and Christianity.

The raison d'être of pantheism concerns two interrelated questions about the universe. Why does anything exist? And why is the universe that does exist capable of producing conscious beings--in effect, becoming aware of itself? Theistic philosopher Roger Scruton ponders this second question in a recent essay:

Dawkins writes as though the theory of the selfish gene puts paid once and for all to the idea of a creator God -- we no longer need that hypothesis to explain how we came to be. In a sense that is true. But what about the gene itself: how did that come to be? What about the primordial soup? All these questions are answered, of course, by going one step further down the chain of causation. But at each step we encounter a world with a singular quality: namely that it is a world which, left to itself, will produce conscious beings, able to look for the reason and the meaning of things, and not just for the cause. The astonishing thing about our universe, that it contains consciousness, judgement, the knowledge of right and wrong, and all the other things that make the human condition so singular, is not rendered less astonishing by the hypothesis that this state of affairs emerged over time from other conditions. If true, that merely shows us how astonishing those other conditions were. The gene and the soup cannot be less astonishing than their product.

Since atheists have no answer to the question of why anything exists, all they can do is neutralize it by asking "Who created God?" But the idea of an uncreated Creator as the conscious source of everything raises fewer questions than the idea of an uncreated universe which happens to have the properties needed to become conscious of itself.

It's no wonder so many atheists fall back on the hypothesis of multiple universes, even though an infinity of time and space in which anything can happen is little different in effect from an infinite Creator. Others pretend the question isn't objectively meaningful. "The world exists because it exists," they say, and they go on to suggest that our ability to come up with such questions must have evolved in our primitive ancestors.

That's a major point of divergence from pantheism, which attempts, however imperfectly, to bridge the gap between theism and atheism. Its tenets superficially resemble those of atheism, but it has a greater appreciation for the mystery of existence. The consequence of viewing existence as one interconnected whole, of which conscious beings that can reflect on the matter are an integral part, and not just a byproduct, is subtle but real.

Suffixism

Ferris Bueller says, "A person should not believe in an -ism, he should believe in himself." But nobody can totally escape -isms, not even Bueller (who is basically preaching individualism). Still, many people find something ugly about the suffix, which is why they keep adding it to words to make existing ideologies sound more ideological.

Take Islamism. It's supposed to suggest the politicized, theocratic version of Islam that has taken hold in places like Iran. Journalists have been using the term for a while now, though I'm unaware of anyone who self-identifies as an Islamist. More recently, some bloggers have begun using the term Christianist to denote the politicized Christianity of some of the more extreme evangelicals in this country. Daily Kos defines Christianism as having the following goals:

1. The establishment of a state religion. This state religion, of course, is not to promote Christianity, but rather to consolidate power in order to achieve their second goal.

2. Legislation of their repressive moral agenda. The Christianists plan to destroy the system of checks and balances in the Constitution, and they plan to do this in the name of Christianity.

A definition like that isn't likely to go very far. It shows too much contempt for what it's supposed to be defining. (What person would ever admit to promoting a "repressive moral agenda"?) You can't expect the term to catch on without at least a pretense of neutrality. Other commentators, like Andrew Sullivan, have made more eloquent attempts to define the concept. Sullivan identifies Christianism with the Christian Right and argues that the proper response is not the Christian Left but a separation between religion and politics altogether.

So far there's no comparable term to describe a politicized Judaism. Partly this is an accident of semantics, since Judaism, unlike Christianity and Islam, already ends in -ism. "Judaismism" would never work, and neither would "Jewism" or "Jewishism." One blogger proposes "Judaicism," but even he seems to realize that it probably sounds too academic to catch on. He doesn't think it's necessary, anyway, because he thinks the term Zionism already fills that slot.

The problem is that Zionism is not in any way the Jewish equivalent of Islamism or Christianism. It began as a secular movement, primarily the work of activists who didn't believe in the Torah. Even the religious variety of Zionism, far more prominent today than it was in the past, is not inherently theocratic, and some of the most theocratic Jews today don't consider themselves Zionists and are hostile to the State of Israel, at least in its current form.

Zionism, in any case, isn't a politicized form of Judaism but a political movement aimed at advancing the Jewish people. That's why you don't even have to be Jewish to be a Zionist, any more than you have to be a woman to be a feminist. Islamism and Christianism are, in contrast, intrinsically forms of the religions that precede their -isms.

In the end, our language won't allow us to create a single word to describe Judaism's more theocratic sector. Maybe that's a good thing. It prevents people from lumping together different groups, one of the more unfortunate consequences of terms like Islamism and Christianism. The real problem with -isms is not that people believe in them, but that they make separate factions seem more unified than they actually are.

The pursuit of weird happiness

It seems like in every discussion about gay rights, opponents raise the specter of sex with youngsters, siblings, sheep, goats, dogs, corpses, and just about every other forbidden--and sometimes not-so-forbidden--union. As Justice Scalia wrote in his dissenting opinion to Lawrence v. Texas, "State laws against bigamy, same-sex marriage, adult incest, prostitution, masturbation, adultery, fornication, bestiality, and obscenity are likewise...called into question by today's decision." Imagine that: if we're soft on homosexuality, next thing you know they'll be allowing masturbation.

Commentators usually call this type of reasoning a slippery slope, but it is more of a reductio ad absurdum. The difference is subtle but important. With a slippery slope, you're opposing a policy on the grounds that it will lead to worse policies--regardless of logical connection. With reductio ad absurdum, you're attempting to expose the flaw in an argument by showing that its logic leads in unacceptable directions. The classic example is the cliché response to peer pressure: "If your friends jumped off a cliff, would you follow them?"

People often use reductio ad absurdum to hide the weaknesses of their own arguments. It's pretty easy, with the help of a little self-delusion, to shut your mind to nuanced distinctions. Then all you have to do is tell your opponent, "If you hold X, you might as well hold Y." While he's busy explaining why he doesn't hold Y, he doesn't notice that you've shifted the discussion away from X.

Over at DovBear's blog, I recently had a debate with a fellow who calls himself Lawyer-Wearing-Yarmulka. He reiterated an argument he made two years ago in which he suggested that the philosophy of consent underlying gay rights could be used to justify sex between men and cows. His point was that we never demand consent from cows for anything else we do to them. If we can turn them into burgers without their consent, why shouldn't we be allowed to have sex with them?

LWY fails to understand that consent has a particular significance with regard to sex acts, which doesn't apply to other types of acts. By their nature, unwanted sexual experiences are highly traumatic. The notion that there's something inconsistent about opposing cruelty to animals while condoning slaughter of animals is an argument I would expect from a PETA member, not a Bible-believing Jew.

I'm astounded by LWY's suggestion that the law against raping a cow is entirely for the human's benefit, not the cow's. (It brings to mind Lord Macaulay's statement, "The Puritan hated bearbaiting, not because it gave pain to the bear, but because it gave pleasure to the spectators.") This certainly is not the common view in our legal system, where bestiality is typically classed under "animal abuse." While that may differ in some ways from the traditional perspective, that just goes to show that our society has over time shown an increasing concern for the treatment of animals, even if it is still far from perfect.

Notice how far this discussion has drifted from its original topic. In that whole time, LWY didn't offer even one justification for his position on gay rights. All he did was make an egregiously poor analogy, but because it concerned treatment of animals, an area of public policy that is controversial and by no means perfectly consistent, he was able to keep the discussion pointed away from himself.

I've repeatedly encountered this sort of evasive attitude from critics of gay rights. Instead of explaining their own point of view, they spend an inordinate amount of time trying to catch defenders in an inconsistency regarding other sexual deviances. What's especially surprising is that they tend to jump on the least relevant examples, where there is clearly a victim.

Ironically, LWY dismissed the importance of incest, a much better example to create the sort of reductio ad absurdum he was trying to establish. Let's say an adult brother and sister become lovers. Let's say they're not going to have kids: they use birth control, or one of them is infertile, or the woman is past menopause. Their affair would still be illegal in most places. Yet it is a purely victimless act between consenting adults, and so, by the standard argument in support of gay rights, it should be allowed.

What would happen if we did allow it? We might then have to make provisions to ensure that incestuous lovers never have children. Further, we would have to deal with the competing argument that they have a right to have kids, even ones who will likely have genetic defects. And I haven't even mentioned the marriage issue. This is all a big can of worms to open up in the name of consistency (according to Wikipedia, this form of incest is extremely rare), but it is something our society might have to face, if we are to remain committed to the principle that people have the right to pursue their own happiness as long as it doesn't hurt others.

Some gay rights activists, of course, would object to this example on the grounds that incest is "sick" and "disgusting." That's what critics of gay rights want the defenders to concede, that there are certain acts that just fall outside the bounds of civilized behavior, even if they seem to harm no one. But it's unlikely that this example will persuade anyone to abandon a belief in gay rights. This reductio ad absurdum at best reveals an inconsistency in the views of some advocates, but it doesn't come close to dismantling the philosophy behind gay rights.

Manimal

One time when I was a kid, a younger boy I was hanging out with insisted that "Insects aren't animals!" after I referred to them as such. Where did he get that idea? Well, according to some dictionaries, animal sometimes means "mammal." On rare occasion, this definition even shows up in professional writing. (For example, my 1993 edition of Compton's contains the following sentence: "The birds of Australia are even more diverse than the animals.") But this is an obscure definition that sounds pretty strange to me. Why would a child adopt it? I think it has something to do with Jewish education.

When teachers at Jewish schools discuss the laws of kashrus, they almost always say that a kosher animal must have split hooves and chew its cud. But this is only true of mammals; there's a whole different set of laws for birds, fish, and insects. If they mean mammal, why don't they say mammal? Partly it reflects the classic Bible translations, which were written before the word entered English. Hebrew itself didn't have any such word, and "animal" is a pretty accurate translation of chaya, which is derived from chai, meaning "life."

While mammal isn't a totally erudite word, the category has a fuzzy existence in many people's minds. When I once suggested feeding chicken to my parrot, I was asked, "Wouldn't that be cannibalism?" I replied, "Is it cannibalism when humans eat beef?" We tend to think of birds as basically one thing, but mammals as many different things, even though Aves and Mammalia are at the same taxonomic level: class. The presence of mammary glands is just not as memorable a trait as feathers. Substituting animal avoids this problem, because the word is taken to denote any creature that isn't a person, a bird, a fish, a vermin, or a plant. It's the default category that's left over after you've taken away the "special" categories.

This isn't just a semantic quibble; it can affect life decisions. At age eight, my brother decided he was a vegetarian, and he considers himself one to this day, even though he never gave up fish. He reasons that fish isn't meat, and according to Jewish law, he's right. The law against mixing milk and meat is derived from the Bible's injunction not to boil a baby goat in its mother's milk. The law originally applied only to mammals, since only mammals produce milk. But an old rabbinic decree extended the prohibition to birds. As a result, the Hebrew word for meat--basar--usually denotes the flesh of mammals and birds, but not fish. This dichotomy carries over into the English that Jewish kids learn, and my brother based his brand of vegetarianism on it.

Color is in the eye of the beholder

Last year, The New York Times ran an article on the debate over Columbus's ethnic origins. It featured a chart (which doesn't appear in the Internet version of the article) listing pros and cons to each hypothesis. When it reached the hypothesis that Columbus was Jewish, it mentioned the following as a con: "Most Jews in Southern Europe at the time were Sephardic Jews of North African descent, but preliminary analysis of Columbus's DNA suggests he was Caucasian."

This ill-informed remark stopped me short. I don't know what's more ridiculous, the assumption that Sephardic Jews in medieval Spain were of "North African descent," or the implication that this made them non-Caucasian.

I'm not trying to pick on the article, which was just trying to be balanced. And I have no stake in the question of Columbus's origins. I mention this quote only because it raises some interesting points about how the public perceives Jewish ethnicity.

First, there's the confusion over the meaning of Sephardic, a term that comes from the Hebrew word for Spain, Sefarad. In the strictest sense it refers to medieval Spanish Jews and their descendants. Following their expulsion from Spain in 1492, they went everywhere--as far west as Holland, as far east as India, even to the New World. But the bulk of them settled in the Middle East, and consequently, Sephardic has become a general term for Middle Eastern Jews.

Actually, the common convention is to apply the term to all non-Ashkenazic Jews, whatever their origin. That includes Dutch Jews, Italian Jews, Greek Jews, Turkish and Moroccan and Yemenite Jews. I grew up knowing only this binary way of classifying Jews, which still permeates the media. But careful writers use the term Mizrahi or "Oriental" to describe Middle Eastern Jews who don't have a family history in Spain.

How does race factor into the discussion? Mizrahi Jews even more than Sephardim tend to look relatively dark compared to the common Western image of the Jew. The convention of calling them Sephardi, coupled with the association of dark skin with Africa, is probably what led the article to think that medieval Spanish Jews were of "North African descent."

The fact is that many Jews physically resemble their non-Jewish countrymen. Russian Jews often look like ethnic Russians, and Iranian Jews often look like ethnic Iranians. This fact may seem surprising when you consider the religious and political barriers to mixing with the native population. Not only does Judaism discourage conversion and prohibit intermarriage, the countries themselves often enacted laws against those things, and in many places Jews lived separately from Gentiles for centuries.

But conversion and intermarriage did occur, occasionally on a large scale. Some scholars have maintained that modern-day Jews are more closely related to their non-Jewish neighbors than to Jews in other parts of the world. This hypothesis, which has been used to support as well as refute anti-Semitic beliefs, looks increasingly doubtful in light of genetic research over the past few decades. The research suggests a close kinship among Ashkenazim, Sephardim, and Mizrahim, despite their diversity in appearance. Only a few groups that don't fit any standard classification--the black Jews of Ethiopia, the Bene Israel of India, the Chinese Jews of Kaifeng--do seem racially distinct from the rest of world Jewry, and their origins remain a source of debate.

If Jews of different colors are fundamentally related, can they be called Caucasian? Well, it depends how you define the term. Its meaning has shifted over time, as has "white." Originally it encompassed not only Europeans but also the darker skinned inhabitants of Mediterranean lands. But in early twentieth century America, Jews, Arabs, and many European ethnicities were classed as non-white or non-Caucasian. Nowadays, Ashkenazic Jews are usually considered white or Caucasian, as are most indigenous Europeans, but the perception remains that Arabs and other Middle Eastern groups are people of color. This dichotomy has contributed to the curious notion that Ashkenazim belong to a different race than Sephardim.

But that just goes to show that the boundaries of whiteness are more political than biological. I saw a telling example in Nelson Mandela's criticism of U.S. intervention in Iraq: "Israel has weapons of mass destruction.... Why should there be one standard for [Iraq], especially because it is black, and another one for another country, Israel, that is white?"

The idea that Israel is a "white" country while Iraq is a "black" country is laughable. If you define Iraqi Arabs as black, then how can you call Israel, whose Jewish population is about half Sephardi/Mizrahi, a white country? Anyone who's lived in Israel can tell you that it is sometimes impossible to tell the Jewish and Arab residents apart. That's because Jews and Arabs are ethnically closely related. But for political reasons, one group is seen as white and the other as non-white.

And when it comes to political classification, it seems Jews can never win. They came to be regarded as part of the white majority around the same time that being a minority started being fashionable. (The term minority itself is far more likely to be applied to blacks and Asians than to Jews, even though in a worldwide sense Jews fit the definition far better, and even within the United States are far fewer in number than blacks.) It is in situations like this that Jews remind me of the kid who isn't accepted by either the in-crowd or the nerds.

In defense of celebrating black identity

Cross-posted at DovBear's blog

In 1994, National Review editor David Klinghoffer wrote a refreshingly candid piece about Orthodox Jewish racism. Klinghoffer is a baal teshuva¹ who was shocked by the casual racism he encountered in the frum² world. I mention his article now because it hits upon some of the themes that Obama covered in his race speech. While not condoning bigotry in any form, Klinghoffer argued that some of the bigotry coming from Jews should be understood in the context of their experiences, a consideration he did not extend to American Jews who denigrate blacks.

I began to wonder what Klinghoffer, as a conservative, is saying about Obama now. It turns out that he has defended Obama, sort of, but from a perspective I find highly problematic. In a recent article, he argues, "The Bible makes it clear...that God has chosen some races to teach important lessons to the rest of the world.... [W]hatever unique contribution Africans have to give to the world, it is not racist to suggest that a black church, even a black theology, could be a vehicle for making that contribution."

I think Klinghoffer isn't exercising anywhere near as much caution as he should in using the term "race." The Torah talks about different peoples. The ancient concept of a people is not equivalent to the modern concept of a race. What we call race arose largely as a means of establishing differences where there needn't be.

Klinghoffer was addressing the charge that a "black church" should be considered racist in the same sense that most of us would consider a "white church" to be. But his answer was inadequate. The main purpose of black pride is to raise up a group that has been pushed down.

Whatever the white power movement may insist, whites do not fall into that category. Individual white groups might; there's nothing wrong with ethnically Irish or Italian or Polish people having their own organizations to express pride in their heritage. But an organization for white people is a different matter. Whiteness is an elusive concept that tends to be defined as whatever is left over after you've excluded "other" groups. In practice, it usually ends up excluding many Caucasians.

Some people try to apply the same argument to blacks. Why should we recognize black or African identity at all? Why not talk instead about ethnic Nigerians and Kenyans and Ugandans? In a perfect world, this argument might hold water. But blacks were brought to this country by force and stripped of their previous ethnic identity. No matter where they came from in Africa, they ended up as one group, today known as African American.

You might ask why Obama, who is not descended from slaves, should be considered a part of this group. It's a good question. I will answer it with an anecdote from several years ago. Tiger Woods insisted he was not black but "Cablinasian," an acronym he coined to highlight the many races in his ancestry. Gregory Kane, a black conservative who writes for The Baltimore Sun, retorted that Woods should be given "the cab test": "Stand him on a street corner in any large American city and have him hail a cab. If he gets one, he's Cablinasian. If he doesn't, he's definitely black" (Apr. 27, 1997, pg. 1B).

For the vast majority of people, even those of mixed ancestry, racial identity is not a matter of choice. It is something thrust upon them. Let's get real: when most Americans look at Obama, they see a black man. The notion that he chose to call himself black to advance his career is preposterous.

Whatever you may think of hip hop music or contemporary inner-city culture, African Americans as a group have made significant positive contributions to America. They are as much a legitimate cultural group as Jews, Italians, Irish, and all the rest that make up this great country. Group identity of any kind has a danger of turning into chauvinism, and often does. But that's the price we pay for having a heterogeneous society. The solution is that people should learn to respect differences, not that they should stop having differences.

Glossary
¹returner to the faith
²religious

Sacred and mundane

Faye Kellerman's bestselling series of murder mysteries concerns an L.A. police detective named Peter Decker. He stands 6'4" with a muscular build, a shock of red hair and a ginger mustache. He has a tough, no-nonsense personality, and his conversations are laden with profanity.

He is also a practicing Orthodox Jew.

I was first exposed to these books in the early '90s. Several years later I took it upon myself to read the entire series in order, and I have kept up with it ever since. They aren't the type of books I normally read. I like prose that crackles. Kellerman's prose just sits there, except for her dialogue. She has a fine ear for dialogue.

If there is any reason I'm attracted to the series, it's because of its depiction of Orthodox Jews. Kellerman (wife of novelist Jonathan) is not the only writer of modern secular fiction to tackle that subject, but she may be the most accurate, being Orthodox herself. She patterns her style after Walter Mosley, Tony Hillerman, and other writers who incorporate ethnic details into their crime fiction.

I know little about the mystery genre. Most of my experience comes from reading the old private eye stories which center on logical deduction. Modern police procedurals like Kellerman's are handled differently. The solution to the mystery is usually somewhat arbitrary, arrived at through trial and error rather than through sudden revelation. I do not find her plots especially memorable. What interests me is how she blends the material with Jewish themes.

Most movies and novels featuring Orthodox Jews are way off. Even a film like The Frisco Kid--which many Orthodox Jews love--is full of inaccuracies. Other books and films are often downright offensive. Kellerman takes pains to get the details right. Her Orthodox characters feel like people I've known, something I've never said about any other work of fiction I've read, apart from overtly religious works like Chaim Potok's The Chosen.

But her depiction of the Orthodox community is not a whitewash. She touches upon the problems, the scandals, the extremism. The biggest irony of her books, which feature graphic violence and lurid sexual encounters, is that the types of people she writes about may be the least likely to read them.

Her first book, The Ritual Bath (1986), takes place at a yeshiva. A woman is raped on her way out of a mikvah (the "ritual bath" of the title). Peter Decker comes to investigate the crime and begins to fall in love with Rina Lazarus, a young widow whose late husband was a Talmudic scholar there. The trouble is, she doesn't know Decker is Jewish.

Actually, he didn't know either until he turned eighteen. His biological mother was an Orthodox Jew who gave birth to him in her mid-teens. He was sent to an adoption agency and ended up being raised by Southern Baptists. He served in Vietnam, has a Jewish but nonobservant ex-wife, and is in his late thirties when the series begins. His romance with Rina draws him to the Jewish faith.

And no wonder. Rina is drop-dead gorgeous, sharply intelligent, religious but worldly, and a fine housewife. She's something of a Mary Sue, possibly an idealized version of Kellerman herself. She fades into the background later in the series.

The second book, Sacred and Profane, deals with Decker's theological struggles as he explores Judaism. The title is a quote from the havdalah ritual at the end of Shabbos. A more proper translation would be "sacred and mundane," since profane has connotations not found in the original Hebrew word. Kellerman, however, takes the traditional English translation of the phrase rather literally. The book is about snuff films (which appear in fiction a lot but have never been confirmed to exist in the real world), and it poses the question of how a cop who deals with this kind of stuff daily can possibly be religious.

In a moment of anger, Decker tells Rina that the rabbi who heads the yeshiva (a wonderful character) is living in an ivory tower and maintains his faith only because he hasn't seen the horrors that Decker has seen. Rina promptly informs Decker that the rabbi lost his entire family at Auschwitz. Later, Decker talks to the rabbi himself:

"...there are times when I feel God is omnipresent. I feel Him everywhere I go, in everything I do. And there are times I think there's nothing in the skies but an ozone layer. I'm not an agnostic. I'm not waiting for God to come down and prove His existence to me, because sometimes I just know He's out there. I can't explain why I feel so strongly one minute and like a total atheist the next. In short, sometimes I have doubts."

The old man looked at him impassively and extended his hand across the desktop.

"Join the club, Peter." (pp. 253-4)

I've heard members of many faiths report similar feelings. Recently I was reading The Conservative Soul, a book by journalist Andrew Sullivan, an openly gay Catholic. His take on religion reminded me of Decker's:

There have been periods when I have felt the truth of my faith as powerfully as I have felt a warm current in a cool bay, or the stifling heat of a Washington August. And there have been periods when it has seemed utterly empty, drained, arid, and without passion. (p. 50)

One of my favorite books in the series is the fourth, Day of Atonement. Decker and Rina are newly married, and Decker runs into members of his biological family. Meanwhile, they face one of the fiercest villains in the series, a teenage monster from a yeshiva background. Another favorite, later in the series, is Jupiter's Bones, in which Decker is sent to investigate the death of a man who headed a small science-based cult. This gives Kellerman a chance to explore the elusive boundary between cults and mainstream religions.

Generally, I have preferred the earlier books to the later ones. From the start, I would often skim past the sections that didn't have Jewish content. The trouble is, that content figures considerably less in the later books.

Decker is now middle-aged. (I think Kellerman has done a little sleight of hand to keep Decker relatively young while keeping the series in line with current events, but I'm not sure--I haven't done the math.) Recent books have focused on his daughter from his first marriage. She's not especially religious, and she is simply not that interesting a character. But in the book Street Dreams, she gets into a relationship with an Israeli-born Ethiopian Jew. This plot twist gives Kellerman a convenient way to address the frequent charge that the Jewish ban on intermarriage is racist.

In one scene, Decker's daughter serves him breakfast at her apartment. Since he keeps kosher and she doesn't, we would expect her to make certain accommodations, but the book doesn't mention any. This oversight wouldn't bother me in an ordinary book, and certainly non-Jewish readers won't care. But it's a lapse from what Kellerman achieved earlier in the series. I get the feeling she finds the religious elements of the story increasingly distracting.

On a dramatic level, the series lags in certain places. Occasionally, characters act in ways we can't possibly believe. Sometimes Decker, while scrupulously moral in general, displays questionable ethics. In the eighth book, Justice, he gets promoted to lieutenant after he blackmails his boss, an incompetent bigot, into resigning. Moments like this, while troubling, contribute to Decker's complex characterization--probably the second most important reason I like the series.

Bigotry chopping

Earlier, I discussed how the term anti-Semitism is abused. I've noticed that many writers avoid the term when referring to religiously motivated events such as the Crusades, where Jews could escape persecution through conversion, at least in theory. The bigotry underlying these events is called anti-Judaism, as opposed to the racial doctrine of anti-Semitism developed in the nineteenth century (when the latter term was actually coined). Many academic scholars make this distinction, which I find problematic.

One example is Jeremy Cohen in his recent book Christ Killers: The Jews and the Passion from the Bible to the Big Screen. Cohen links the historical treatment of Jews at the hands of Christians to evolving interpretations of the Christ-killer myth. For much of the first millennium, the Church followed the view of St. Augustine, who held the Jews responsible for Jesus' death but attributed their sin to ignorance rather than complicit guilt. Under this view, Jews were to be tolerated in the hope they would eventually "see the light." By the time of the Crusades, however, harsher interpretations of Scripture had taken hold in the Christian world.

Cohen discusses the influence of the Christ-killer myth on modern anti-Semitism, including the set of beliefs underlying the Holocaust. But he declines to apply the term anti-Semitism to most of the medieval anti-Jewish bigotry. According to Cohen, "one should guard against simply assuming an uninterrupted continuity between medieval anti-Judaism and modern anti-Semitism in every conceivable mode of religious expression" (pp. 208-9).

I have two basic objections to the term anti-Judaism. First, it's too neutral-sounding. It lacks the negative connotations which anti-Semitism acquired after the Holocaust. Second, the distinction between religious and racial persecution gets pretty muddy when you look at history. Many of the medieval stereotypes of Jews--hook noses, red hair, horns and body odor--had distinctly racial overtones. (How would conversion get rid of any of those things?) By the time of the Inquisition, converting to Christianity was no longer an escape; indeed, the converts were the ones in the most danger.

Pat Buchanan's response to charges of anti-Semitism illustrates the confusion that can result from identifying anti-Semitism purely with a racial ideology. According to The Nizkor Project, Buchanan told a Christian newspaper in 1992, "I am as aware as any other Christian that our Savior was Jewish, His mother was Jewish, the Apostles were Jewish, the first martyrs were Jewish.... So no true Christian, in my judgment, can be an anti-Semite."

That's a good start. But the medieval Church was also perfectly aware that Jesus and all of the early Christians were Jews. That knowledge did not stop them from persecuting the people who continued practicing the faith that Christianity was supposed to have supplanted. If you define an anti-Semite as "one who thinks all Jews who ever lived are bad," then these persecutors were not anti-Semites. But that distinction is of little consequence to the victims.

Calling this persecution anti-Judaism seems inadequate. In today's society, opposition to a religion is not regarded as inherently bigoted. Religions themselves tend to be "anti" other religions to some extent. Where do we draw the line between bigotry and mere disagreement?

Anyone is entitled to critique a religion. But religions are made up of people, not just ideas, and there comes a point when abstract criticisms begin to spill over into stereotypes. Cohen provides an example in a quote from Protestant theologian Karl Barth, normally an outspoken opponent of anti-Semitism:

Who is this Judas, the man who will maintain his freedom in face of Jesus for the sake of something better, the man for whom Jesus is for sale...? Obviously he does not bear this name for nothing. Within the apostolic group...he obviously represents the Jews..., he merely does that which Israel has always done in relation to Yahweh. He merely does that which has always made Yahweh's rejection of His chosen people inevitable.... Israel always tried to buy off Yahweh with thirty pieces of silver. (p. 259)

Nowadays, many Christians have become great friends of the Jewish people. The challenge facing Jews today is how to combat theologically rooted anti-Jewish ideas without attacking Christianity itself. While I don't agree with Buchanan's cavalier dismissal of Christian anti-Semitism--the past needs to be acknowledged before we can move on--the Christian establishment has taken great strides in healing the wounds between the two religions.

The final chapter of Cohen's book examines several movies about the Passion, including Mel Gibson's controversial film. (Gibson has long identified with Traditionalist Catholics who reject Vatican II, though his own views on the matter aren't clear.) These movies use a variety of strategies to avoid the impression that they're attacking all Jews. Sometimes they downplay the Jewishness of Jesus' opponents, or else overplay the Jewishness of Jesus and his disciples. Gibson and his defenders emphasize the theme that "we are all sinners." But a core of hostility toward traditional Judaism lurks in the Gospels, no matter how you spin it.

Film critic Michael Medved is perhaps the most prominent Jew to defend Gibson's film. Around the time of the film's release, he took Rabbi Shmuley Boteach to task for calling the movie anti-Semitic. Medved's reasoning for defending the film--which by his own admission deeply contradicts his beliefs--is interesting:

By what right do Rabbi Boteach and his many outspoken allies in the Jewish community demand that Mel Gibson and his innumerable supporters among Protestant and Catholic clergy should reject their own religious tradition to accept a Jewish version of the death of their savior?.... For reasons that defy rational explanation, Rabbi Boteach insists upon picking an ugly public fight with believing Christians who view their own sacred books in the same way the Rabbi views the Torah - as the inerrant word of God.

In fact, many devout Catholics and Protestants found much fault with Gibson's interpretation of the Passion story. For example, when the United States Conference of Catholic Bishops (USCCB) organized a committee to review the screenplay prior to the film's release, the committee concluded:

Certainly films can present Jesus' suffering and death in a powerful way. But they must remain faithful to the church's current understanding. "The Passion of the Christ" does not. Gibson, in fact, rejects those teachings as well as modern biblical scholarship and thus stands outside of official Catholicism today.

After the film was released, the USCCB backed down considerably, but they still felt the movie's depiction of the Jewish leadership was overly harsh. The point is that there are many ways for devout Christians to approach the Passion story, and criticizing the way they portray Jews in a particular account is not the same as asking them to give up their traditions. I agree with Medved that we need to be sensitive to the fact that even ideas which offend us may stem from deeply held religious beliefs, no less sincere than our own. But considering how much damage has resulted from the Christ-killer myth throughout history, these concerns should not just be dismissed under the mantle of ecumenicism.

The Nazis based their anti-Semitism on centuries of hatred by Christian oppressors, even if the Nazi leaders were privately anti-Christian, and even if they brought the anti-Jewish ideas to an extreme the medieval Christians never envisioned. Wherever it comes from and whatever term is used to describe it, anti-Jewishness is basically a single phenomenon. That fact should be recognized before we start making fine distinctions, or else we risk not seeing what's in front of us.

Jewish rainbow

When I walk into a room and say to people I meet "I'm Jewish" often I will get the response "But you're Black." I often want to say "no kidding," but the usual response I give is "Yes, my family has been practicing Judaism for at least three generations, now." The point that I aim to make is that it would make it easier to just "BE" as a Jewish person of color if "black" and "Jewish" identity were not so commonly assumed to be mutually exclusive. Historically, Jews have been multiple skin colors and it's unfortunate that the passive internalization of color consciousness that happens so easily in American society, helped us to forget the freedom from identifying around color that is a part of our Jewish history. (p. 27)

The above quote comes from Yavilah McCoy, as recorded in a fascinating book I just read, Melanie Kaye Kantrowitz's The Colors of Jews: Racial Politics and Radical Diasporism. Designed to raise awareness about Jews of color, the book presents numerous anecdotes about the experiences of nonwhite Jews, followed by stimulating discussions on the implications of this research. The book is marred for me by its anti-Zionist standpoint, which culminates in a final chapter that has very little to do with the rest of the book. The back cover sports endorsements by Tony Kushner, Chandra Talpade Mohanty, and Adrienne Rich, all left-wing thinkers squarely in Kantrowitz's ideological camp. I get the sense that Kantrowitz underestimates her audience, thinking that her discussions about racial diversity in the Jewish community either will appeal only to those with her positions or will inevitably move readers toward those positions. Instead, her dogmatic advocacy of ideas that most Jews find offensive will likely turn away many readers who would otherwise find much value in the information she presents.

What types of nonwhite Jews are there? The question is not as easy to answer as one might expect, because it depends on how one defines "white" and "Jewish," both highly contested categories. Most Americans today assume that the prototypical Jew (which usually means Ashkenazic Jew) is white, but that was not always the common perception in this country. The very act of designating Jews as white or nonwhite can be a political statement, because it is taken to suggest something about their status and position in society. (I have known Jews who mark themselves as "other" in forms asking for their race.)

With these precautions in mind, Kantrowitz considers several types of people: (1) African American and Asian American converts to Judaism (2) nonwhite children adopted by Jewish families (3) children of mixed marriages (4) Ethiopian Jews and other black African communities that have practiced Judaism for centuries or more (5) the most ambiguous category, Sephardic and Mizrahi Jews, some of them quite dark-skinned, others scarcely distinguishable from their Ashkenazic brethren.

One reason this information has value is that Jews, despite a long history of crucial involvement in the civil rights movement, also have a history of racism that persists today in some religious communities. The historical tension between Ashkenazim and Sephardim can take on racial overtones. More pertinently, many Jews have trouble accepting the very concept of a black Jew--it seems an impossibility, a contradiction in terms.

One anecdote really struck home for me, reflecting the type of compartmentalized behavior I've witnessed. McCoy, the woman I quoted before, attended a Hasidic school as a child. On one occasion when she complained to classmates who were denigrating non-Jewish blacks, they assured her they weren't talking about her. The inconsistent thinking required to sustain this kind of attitude demonstrates why Jews of color may help stem the tides of bigotry coming from both Jews and non-Jews.

Kantrowitz wishes to uproot the perception that "black" and "Jewish" are mutually exclusive categories, and to reveal the Jewish people as a racially diverse group. She feels that recognizing this reality will ease the tension between Jews and blacks. Her point is that if the two categories can overlap, people will be less inclined to view the two groups as enemies of each other.

She weakens her argument, however, by trying to downplay the well-documented fact that a disproportionate level of anti-Semitism exists among African Americans. She fails to discuss any of the official studies, such as Harris Polls taken over the last several decades. As Charles Silberman noted in his book A Certain People, black anti-Semitism is not a mirror image of Jewish racism. The latter is far more marginalized in the Jewish community than the former is in the African American community. The problem is not that most blacks agree with Louis Farrakhan's anti-Semitic pronouncements, but that leaders like him exhibit far greater influence than any comparably racist figure in the Jewish community.

She also wishes to blur the line between "Jew" and "Arab" by emphasizing the strong Arab element of Jews who are the product of Arabic land, culture, and language as surely as American Jews are Americans. She eagerly embraces the term "Arab Jew" to highlight this dual identity.

She correctly observes that Islamic countries in the Middle Ages generally treated Jews far better than Christian countries from the same era did. The height of this relatively peaceful coexistence occurred in the Golden Age of Spain from the eighth to twelfth centuries. But the picture is more complicated than she would like to believe. This period, when Jews enjoyed more rights and privileges than any time until the modern age, ended not because of the fifteenth-century Christian rulers who instigated the Inquisition, but because of violent Muslim invaders from two centuries earlier.

In addressing this fact, Kantrowitz performs a remarkable sleight of hand. She quotes Victor Perera saying, "[u]ntil the arrival of bloody-minded Almohade Berbers in 1146, bent on implanting Islam in all of Europe, Spain's Jews generally lived at peace with Muslim rulers and their Christian subjects; and they thrived culturally and commercially as never before or since" (p. 81). She immediately comments, "This peace persisted until the Christian conquest of Iberia and the Inquisition," which is not only false, but directly contradicts what she just quoted!

The final chapter of the book is little more than an essay on forging a Jewish identity apart from Zionism. Too bad. There is considerable merit to her thesis that recognizing racial diversity among Jews will help improve relations with other people. She doesn't seem to accept, or even consider, that Jews can support Israel and still be fully committed to peaceful relations with non-Jews. I hope that intelligent readers will be able to overlook the book's flaws, because beneath the rhetoric lies some valuable material about forgotten portions of world Jewry.