Literary / Arts
“I Was a Catholic Zionist” – An Eloquent Exploration
Allan C. Brownfeld
Volume 33 Issue 10, 11 & 12 | Posted: March 30, 2020
Part two of this book review. The review was originally published on The American Council for Judaism website:
Another Time, Another Place
Part two of this book review. The review was originally published on The American Council for Judaism website:
Another Time, Another Place
The Catholic Zionism he embraced, Schmidt writes, “…was rooted in another time and another place. I was a Catholic traumatized by the Christian complicity in the Nazi genocide. Because of an historical accident of place and birth, I had no sense of anti-Judaism. …My broad Vatican ll social justice Catholicism freed me to see clearly that the Palestinian people were the new Jews…who were living under a brutal occupation. My faith and my love of prophetic Judaism impelled me to enter into a double solidarity with my first love, Jews and Judaism, and. secondly, …another solidarity with the humiliated outsiders in Israel.”
From its very beginning, Schmidt shows, Zionism was a minority view among Jews: “Response to this radical break, with traditional Judaism was swift and universal. It may be summed up this way: There is no Jewish nation. Jews are a religious community. Its fundamental territory is not the land of Israel but the Torah. Jews living in the yishuv (Jewish colony) in Palestine were not yearning for a country. In fact, in the history of Judaism, there had never been a mass movement of return. Fidelity to the covenant and the mitzvahs (good deeds) which flowed from them constituted Judaism.”
In 1918, Moritz Gudemann, the Chief Rabbi of Vienna, said this of Zionism: “The Zionists would ultimately create a Judaism of cannons and bayonets that would invert the roles of David and Goliath and would end in a perversion of Judaism, which never glorified war and never idolized warriors.”
Cultural Zionism
Among the many figures critical of political Zionism at its very beginning was Ahad Ha’am, who embraced cultural Zionism and rejected Theodor Herzl’s political goals. He wrote an important article in 1881: “We who live abroad are accustomed to believe that almost all of Eretz Yisrael is now uninhabited desert and whoever wishes can buy land there as he pleases. But this is not true. It is very difficult to find in the land cultivated fields that are not used for planting.
…We believe that the Arabs are all wild desert people who, like donkeys, neither see nor understand what is happening among them. But this is a grave mistake. …They see and understand what we are doing and what we wish to do on the land…And what do our brothers do? This sudden change has planted despotic tendencies in their hearts, as always happens to former slaves. They deal with the Arabs with hostility and cruelty, trespass unjustly, beat them shamefully for no sufficient reason, and even boast about their actions. If this be the Messiah, I don’t wish to see him coming.”
In 1905, Yitzhak Epstein, a Russian Jew, gave a speech to a cultural association which laid out “the hidden question”— which to this day Zionism has failed to deal with: “Among the difficult questions linked to the idea of the rebirth of our people on its land, there is one question that outweighs all the others: the question of our attitude toward the Arabs.
“Faithful Zionists have not dealt with this question. Our brothers in Eretz Israel did not realize the seriousness of the question and we forget one small detail: that there is in our beloved land an entire people that has been attached to it for hundreds of years and has never considered leaving it.”
Judah Magnes, the first president of the Hebrew University in Jerusalem, declared: “If we cannot find ways of peace and understanding, if the only way of establishing the Jewish National Home is upon the bayonets of some Empire, our whole enterprise is not worthwhile, and it is better that the Eternal People that has outlived many a mighty empire should possess its soul in patience…but not in the Joshua way…
“Do we want to conquer Palestine now as Joshua did in his day—with fire and sword? Or do we want to take cognizance of Jewish religious development since Joshua, our Prophets, Psalmists and Rabbis, and repeat the words ‘Not by might, and not by violence, but by my spirit saith the Lord.’”
Universalist Worldview
The German Jewish philosopher Martin Buber, who made his way to Palestine during the rise of Nazism, immersed himself in the prophets and adopted a universalist worldview. He warned Zionists not to embrace imperialist Europe’s arrogance and callous behavior to “those in need of civilizing, ” the indigenous population of Palestine.
Buber, along with Judah Magnes and others, founded Brit Shalom (Covenant of Peace) in 1925 when Palestine was home to 750,000 Arabs and only 75,000 Jews. In its first publication, it set forth its goals: “To create in Palestine a binational state in which the two peoples will enjoy totally equal rights as befits the two elements shaping the country’s destiny, irrespective of which of the two is numerically superior at any given time.”
In 1923, Buber had published his magnum opus, “I and Thou.” Clearly, this theologian-philosopher insisted on treating others as “thou” and not as “it.”
Much is said about “Jews of Conscience” who have rejected nationalism and the idolatry of substituting Israel for God as an object of worship. Hebrew University's highly regarded Orthodox Jewish thinker Yeshayahu Leibowitz wrote:
“If there exist Jews willing to join the national-occupationist trend and go so far as to make ‘a greater Israel’…the essential element of their faith, a religious commandment, well then, these people have become the heirs of worshippers of the golden calf who also proclaimed, ‘Behold your God, O Israel.’ The golden calf need not be made of gold. It may also be called ‘nation’, ‘land’, ‘State.’”
Rabbi Henry Siegman, former head of the American Jewish Congress and the Synagogue Council of America, referred to this debilitating idolatrous trend in American Jewry: “For many American Jews—and I suspect for most American Jews—Israel has become the content of their Jewish religious identification. It has very little other content. I rarely have been at a Shabbat service where a rabbi gives a sermon where Israel isn't a subject of the sermon. And typically, they are.
“The sermons are not in the spirit of an Isaiah, you know, who says, ‘My god, is this what God wants of you? Your hands are bloody, they’re filled with blood. But he doesn’t want your fast. He doesn’t want—he despises the sacrifices and your prayers. What he wants is to feed, to feed the hungry, to pursue justice…So what I mean…is that there is much more to Judaism …than support for the likes of Netanyahu.”
God Replaced by Israel
Rabbi David Goldberg of the Liberal Synagogue of London notes that, “With the erosion of belief, God has been replaced by Israel as the credo of the Jewish people to the benefit of neither. Excessive reference to the Holocaust and dark allegations about resurgent anti-Semitism are two of the diversionary tactics used in the diaspora by the Israel lobby to deflect growing criticism of Israel.”
On a visit to Israel, Schmidt interviewed Rabbi David Foxman, who was chairman of Rabbinic Human Rights Watch. Discussing the mistreatment of Palestinians, Rabbi Foxman said that,
“The good news is that many Israeli Jews, following the tradition of the prophets, are protecting the dignity of these victims. Those of us in Israel who object to the double standards applied to the Palestinians do so because they offend the standards that we, not others, have set for ourselves…we must always judge ourselves by a single standard, one based on the prophetic vision of social justice and equality.”
Using Jewish victimhood as a justification for victimizing Palestinians is assessed by American Jewish theologian Marc Ellis: “By constantly referring to suffering in the Holocaust—as if only Jews have suffered in history—and pretending to innocence in Jewish empowerment in Israel—Jews, most especially Jewish leadership, appropriate a narrative justification to use power over against the Palestinian people without accountability.”
Allan C. Brownfeld