Israël Shahak (1933–2001)

It's a book that's bound to be used as ammo for propaganda purposes more than to shed light on the often-murky past of Rabbinic Judaism, but I find Shahak's ideas interesting and compelling in their own right. Unfortunately, there's a lack of rigor which means the book can never be more than a smart guy spouting off some interesting ideas.

I understand what he's trying to do in Chapter 3, and it may have seemed more useful when this was written in 1994, but now it seems almost completely extraneous. Would exposing Talmudism in all its weirdness alienate evangelicals from Zionism? I doubt it, not today. Although the quasi-gnostic emanations of kaballah are likely an embarrassment for Orthodox Zionists who want to emphasize commonalities between their beliefs and Christianity, the tinge of sneering at the "gross superstition" of the Babylonian Talmud inclines the evangelical to side with the talmudist. Where he sees hypocrisy in the "dispensations" scholars devise to get around clear commandments, I see only theologians who take their holy text far more seriously than the woke-peddlers running American seminaries. The anti-Christian elements of the Talmud will always be handwaved away by evangelicals as the natural result of antisemitic environs, which is why Shahak attacks the received historiography in chapters 4 and 5.

Unfortunately, Chapters 4 and 5 are, like the rest of the book, uncited on their most contentious claims. Shahak almost seems to be using historical criticism on cultural memories - a very useful technique for developing a novel historiography, but one which absolutely must be augmented by exhaustive primary-source documentation if it's going to ever be taken seriously. It is very provocative to state that Jews were all middle-class enforcers of social order in medieval Europe, universally in better condition than the peasants. But how does he know that?

The single best point he makes, which needs the least research backing it up (and has the most citations actually backing it up), is that peasant mobs were always violent in premodern Europe. We don't pathologize German peasants for what they did to their lords in 1525. We don't accuse Irish peasants who got rowdy with English lords and merchants from time to time of being anti-English bigots. Why then should we assume that any uniquely deep-seated animus was the driving force behind pogroms and expulsions? If it could be demonstrated with more rigor that it was indeed always the aristocracy and church leadership opposed to pogroms, and always peasants and mendicant orders in favor of them, then this would be an important insight.

There is a need for an accessible and critical history of the Rabbinic Jews up through Mendelssohn. I suspect that it would agree with Israel Shahak's conclusions. Perhaps I ask too much, since some of his claims are necessarily extremely hard or impossible to verify (intentional talmud mistranslations in English, secret teachings and customs occasionally dispensed to commoners). But, in lieu of verification of major claims, this book does not come close to filling that need.… (mehr)