How I Stopped Being a Jew

I wish my father could have read this book. To me, he represented the best of being a Jew, being, and teaching me to be, for justice and human rights for all, not just those like me. He moved to Israel in his fifties, but left ten years later, horrified by its politics. For the rest of his life, he said he was no longer a Jew. Thus, it was very painful for me to read this book. Of course I live in this white-Christian country always with a bit of fear, afraid the Trumps of America will triumph. But I wish for a better America and also for a better Israel. Both countries are countries of immigrants living in tension with those who are more indigenous.

Having read Sand's seminal works "The Invention of the Jewish People" (2010) and "The Invention of the Land of Israel" (2012) I started reading this small book with great expectations and read it in one day. The first fat question mark I set where Sand denies that one can point to "Jewish elements in the work of Karl Marx, Sigmund Freud or Albert Einstein" (p.20). See my refutation in the appendix!Next question mark: Sand reduces the seven-hundred-years-long blood libel delusion to the machinations of "a number of provocateurs" (p.67). He should know that this "inflammatory connection between infant blood and matzo" reflects the whole Pauline doctrine which connects the virgin-born Godson in the manger with the eucharistic consumption of a matzo wafer meaning the flesh of Jesus crucified by Jews. This is the taproot of millennial European anti-Semitism that led to Zionism, and in historical veracity Sand should not minimize it for appeasement.More question marks: The shortness of his essay results in misleading abridgements that contradict the well-researched historical data Sand affirms in his earlier big volumes. Depicting Jewish history as "a dense and varied fresco of the motley groups that converted to Judaism in Asia, Europe and Africa" (p.48) surely exaggerates the fact of strong pre-Constantine Jewish proselytism he rightly expounded in his Invention of the Jewish People. Contrarily, he starkly exaggerates exclusivism claiming that "if someone is not a Jew, she cannot become one, try as she might" (p.91). Whereas in his work of 2012 he compellingly explains why the genocidal book of Joshua was taken into the Bible canon, here he simply states that "God also undertook to exterminate all the inhabitants of Canaan"(p.72); Whereas in 2012 he disclaimed any actual genocides of resident tribes ("Hittites, Girgashites, Amorites ...) by archaeological evidence and contradicting bible passages, quipping: "Strange though it seems, God first ordered the complete extermination of the local population and then issued instructions not to marry those who had been annihilated", now he just cites Exodus 23:23: "My angel will go before you and bring you to the Amorites, Hittites, Perizzites ... and I will make an end of them."And then, oops, the funny inconsistency of an Israeli PM: As a Jew in Israel, says Sand, you do not "have to respect the commandments ...You may, like Ariel Sharon, eat locusts while keeping a kosher household" (p.85). Oy vey Shlomo! Indeed you may, since even an Israeli Jew should know that locusts are the only kosher insects that Torah (Leviticus 11:22) allows!On page 95, Sand asks: "But if those who call themselves anti-Zionist Jews without having lived in Israel ... make accusations against Israel ... how can one criticize overt pro-Zionists for granting themselves the privilege of actively intervening in decisions regarding the future and fate of Israel?" So how long must I have lived in this alleged "Jewish state" Sand regards as "one of the most racist societies in the Western world" to finally get entitled to criticize its Zionist politics?"Know, Sire, that Judaism is one of the incurable diseases" said Spanish physician Solomon Ibn Verga, baptized by force in Portugal 1497; and Shlomo Sand isn't curable either. Only the very last pages reveal that the book's title is misleading. Though being "pessimist" in view of the "accursed and interminable occupation" and fearing that it's "already too late", Sand still has a "deep attachment to the place" and when he is far from Israel he looks forward "to the moment I can return to it". It's just for leaving the "exclusive club of the elect" and "tribal Judeocentrism" that Sand wishes "to resign and cease considering myself a Jew". But these (understandable) Jewish feelings have been described (more elaborately) by Anne Karpf and other British Jews in 2008; and by Brian Klug in 2012, even with the same words: one friend of Klug "wondered out loud if she could 'resign' from being Jewish" after Gaza operation Cast Lead (ending in January 2009 with 1100 dead).Resume: This book is an expression of an Israeli Jew's deep concerns and dark premonitions about Zionist Israel. It is a necessary book. Just today (Oct 21, 2014) Israel's President Reuven Rivlin (Likud) lamented that Israeli society is sick of racism, and he begged academics to help healing this violence engendering illness. Exactly this seems to be Sand's therapeutic intention. However, he impedes greater medical efficiency by lack of elaboration and redaction, of diligence in pondering words and phrases.The best passages are those Sand takes from his life experience: His father, a holocaust survivor, betting with him that he can recognize Jews on Paris' sidewalks in 1975 just by their "fleeting and sad look, the mark of fear and deep apprehension" (p.26; Sand senior won), or his five year-old daughter challenging him with questions after a Passover seder, with the final shock question "Did God also kill the little babies, if they were the first boy in the family?" (p.66) And this wise-child-question about cruel adult narrations still believed to be God's own word is worth the book's whole price.Appendix: "Jewish elements in the work of Karl Marx, Sigmund Freud or Albert Einstein".As to Freud, the Jewish atheist in 1926 wrote to Jewish friends in Vienna: "... only to my Jewish nature I owed the two characteristics which had become indispensable to me on the difficult journey of my life. Because I was a Jew, I found myself free of all prejudices which restrict others in the use of their intellect; as a Jew, I was prepared to enter opposition, renouncing consent with the compact majority" (Heer, Friedrich: Gottes erste Liebe, 1981, p.316).In 1939, Freud ascribed the specific Jewish intellectuality to religious tradition: "The primacy which during about two millennia was granted to spiritual efforts in the life of the Jewish people naturally has had its effect; it helped to curb the crudeness and inclination to violence which usually ensues where the development of muscle power is a people's ideal." Here in his last work about "Moses and Monotheism", Freud interprets the specific Jewish spirituality as the result of the second temple's destruction - and of that second commandment which is "more significant than one recognizes at first. It is the prohibition to make an image of God ... For it implied a triumph of intellectuality by prompting man to acknowledge `spiritual' powers in the first place; powers which cannot be perceived by the senses but nevertheless exert indubitable and even overly strong effects ... Hence also the discovery of soul was given, as the spiritual principle in the individual person." (Der Mann Moses und die monotheistische Religion. Frankfurt on Main 1990, p.114-116).As to Einstein, the "almost fanatical love of justice" he confessed connects him not only with Marx (a Christian of Jewish descent) but also to Sand who mentions his own outrage at the "excessive injustices of the here-and-now" (p.26-27) and who asks: "Was it mere chance that the domains of revolution, protest and reform attracted so many individuals whose origins go back to Jewish past?" (p.73). Similar to Nahum Goldmann who called non-conformism the Jewish core trait, Sand stresses that Jews "became nonconformists par excellence in modern times" (p.74). And nevertheless he claims "that there is no Jewish cultural baggage that is not religious" (p.47) - a highly questionable assertion at least as long as Sand does not define what "religious" means.

Hard hitting but a book that needs to be read by everyone who is a friend of Israel but apprehensive or unwilling to be associated with an oppressive political/religious/military system that in demanding special treatment refuses to acknowledge the rights of others. It is past time, for the sake of Israel and for the Palestinians to pretend that the holocaust -terrible as it was and the memory of which we must keep alive- is a ticket to destroy the hopes and dreams and lives of others. With our friends we must be honest and friends are both within and without the ghetto.

Perhaps a more felicitous title for this book might have been The Myth of the Secular Jew, or better yet, The Impossibility of Secular Zionism. While in a universe unaffected by the self-anointed hasbara literary death squad this worthwhile and thoughtful little book would warrant a four star rating. I gave it five stars to counterbalance those who would rate it without a reading (literally) and think Leon Uris a first rate historian and the sectarian militia commonly known as the IDF is the world's most moral army.

I really like this book, he covers many of my own questions and concerns but seeing from an Israeli perspective, not the gola like my case. I really appreciate with critical thinking, his honest dilemmas and the data he shares of the inequities inside Israel for non Jews. A very challenging and interest book , very fast to read.

Not sure how I came to hear about Shlomo Sand, but it must have been something from the social media that these days has become the sole source of the War on Gaza truth. Shlomo’s book was a timely pick and I loved the human and personal element that the authors left for the reader to uncover and try to understand the author’s unique experience . Shlomo’s honest and courageous reflection of the issue deserves respect.

Great book. After reading this work I have started to wonder if I should think of stopping being a Jew.

Outstanding

Shlomo Sand is one of the few Israelis to objectively question what it is that makes a Jew, a Zionist, an Israeli. This book joins his other tomes on this never ending story.

Sometimes the grammar is a bit tricky because it has been translated. However, it is a very interesting read. I especially appreciated reading about how there has been a concerted campaign to describe the holocaust as an exclusively Jewish phenomenon.