In November 1970, a book was published that fiercely accused Palestinians and other Arabs of swallowing wholesale European antisemitic myths and conspiracy theories about the Talmud as the root of Jewish evil and the ultimate guide for the Protocols of the Elders of Zion. The book claimed that Arabs did not even bother to take a look at a page of the Talmud but simply engaged in “parrot-like repetition of traditional views.” This book was not published by Israeli propagandists or Jewish apologists, nor by an Arab on the Israeli intelligence payroll.Footnote 1 Rather, this fierce Arabic-language indictment of Palestinians’ and other Arabs’ embrace of antisemitic libel of the Talmud was actually published by the Palestine Liberation Organization's think tank, the PLO Research Center in Beirut.
In this article, I contextualize and analyze this fascinating book, al-Talmud wa-l-Sahyuniyya (The Talmud and Zionism), written by the scholar Assʿad RazzoukFootnote 2 under the editorial guidance of the PLO Research Center's longtime director general Anis Sayegh.Footnote 3 Three sets of questions drive this article. First is the issue of motivation. What led the PLO's think tank to engage a researcher with the task of learning and writing about the Talmud? Even if the PLO think tank's intellectuals suspected that the dominant Arab view of the Talmud was erroneous and drawn from polemical, antisemitic sources, why did the PLO Research Center regard it as its responsibility—or in its interest—to correct the myths? Second is the question of sources. How did the PLO researcher who undertook this myth busting find his information in Lebanon? What books was he reading? And what does the presence of these sources on the PLO Research Center library's bookshelf tell us about the world of PLO intellectuals in late 1960s Beirut? Finally, what can be learned from the conclusions the researcher drew about the relationship between the Talmud and Zionism and, more broadly, between Judaism and Jewish nationalism? What insights about this relationship were detected by the PLO's researcher given the unique vantage point from which he and his fellow intellectual-activists were reading the sources?
This article is part of a broader project studying the PLO Research Center in Beirut, aiming to understand what it meant, in this particular context in Palestinian history, to “know the enemy,” as the center's mission was often articulated.Footnote 4 In one article, which appeared in the International Journal of Middle East Studies, I analyzed the PLO Research Center's Arabic version of Arthur Hertzberg's classic compilation The Zionist Idea. Noting the Christian background of the PLO Research Center's leadership and several key researchers, I argued that the way in which they understood the relationship between Zionism and Judaism was informed, in part, by traditional Christian perceptions of Judaism and by Christian communal interests among Palestinians and others in Lebanon.Footnote 5 In another article, published in The Jewish Quarterly Review, I noted the similar definition of Judaism formulated, on the one hand, by nineteenth-century Jewish religious reformers in Europe and the United States and, on the other hand, by the PLO, most famously in its founding charter, in the 1960s. I argued that the parallel was not mere coincidence, but was rather informed by long-standing Palestinian Arab interest in the Jewish Reform movement's opposition to Jewish nationalism and by the relationship between key PLO intellectuals and a leader of American Jewish anti-Zionism, Rabbi Elmer Berger.Footnote 6 In the present article, I build on this earlier work, but also complicate it by showing that while there may have been Christian supersessionist inclinations among some in the PLO Research Center, the researchers’ perspectives on Judaism were far more complex—and could evince far greater respect and even sympathy—than one might suspect considering the tense context of conflict.
Motivations and the Protocols
Why would the PLO, within the first half decade of the liberation organization's existence, dedicate precious intellectual and financial resources to learning about and reading the Talmud and then publishing the findings? To answer this question, we must start with the views about the Talmud that were circulating in Arabic at the time. The PLO researchers were actually not the first to express frustration about the fact that Arabs were not reading the Talmud. In 1967, right around when the PLO Research Center tapped Razzouk to engage in this project, a different book was published in Beirut that also bemoaned the problem of Arab ignorance of the Talmud. The book was written by ʿAjjaj Nuwayhid, a man born in Lebanon but who was educated and lived in Jerusalem until 1948. Nuwayhid laments, “Until today, all that is possible to know about the Talmud, among the Arabs, after the passage of about fourteen centuries since its completion in Iraq, consists of hearsay and a few written fragments. And I do not imagine that any Arab—whether Muslim or Christian—in the entire Arab world has read one volume of the Talmud except if that person is a specialist student in a college or university.”Footnote 7
Nuwayhid offers three explanations for what he views as broad Arab ignorance about the Talmud. “Perhaps the first reason is the language,” namely that Arabs cannot read Hebrew and Aramaic, the original languages of the talmudic texts. “The second,” he suggests, “is the Jews’ perpetual attempt to keep it [the Talmud] far from the minds of non-Jews, and the third is the belief among a large number of Arab thinkers that the Talmud is old [and] obsolete,” an irrelevant relic from the past. If Arabs mention any Jewish religious texts, Nuwayhid adds, “they mention the Torah, and even the Torah interests few Arabs and [few] study it to know what images of Jewish morality are in it.” Nuwayhid declares that finally “the time has come in 1966,” when Nuwayhid was writing these lines, “for the Arab to know that the Talmud is the abode of ‘the elders of Zion,’ to which they return and from which they proceed, and from the spirit of which ‘the protocols’ derived and formulated decisions.”Footnote 8
This assertion of a clear and direct—if generally overlooked by Arabs—spiritual link between the Talmud and the Protocols of the Elders of Zion appears in Nuwayhid's 1967 two-volume Arabic edition of the Protocols of the Elders of Zion. This edition, Brutukulat Hukamaʾ Sahyun, published in Beirut, quickly reached the PLO Research Center in the same city. Indeed, the passage cited above from Nuwayhid is quoted by the PLO researcher Razzouk in al-Talmud wa-l-Sahyuniyya. Razzouk—a Christian Arab intellectual originally from the Marjʿayoun region of Lebanon, who earned a PhD in philosophy in Tübingen, Germany, in 1963—agreed with Nuwayhid about the problem of Arabs’ talmudic illiteracy.Footnote 9 However, unlike Nuwayhid, who complained about Arab ignorance of the Talmud but seems not to have read much of it himself, Razzouk thought that the appropriate response to the charge of illiteracy was to become literate in the Talmud. As it happened, there was a new English edition of the Babylonian Talmud that had recently been published by the Soncino Press, the last volumes of which were completed in 1961.Footnote 10 Razzouk had the Soncino edition before him as he undertook his research.
Nuwayhid was no doubt correct that Arabs were, in the main, broadly ignorant of the actual contents of the Talmud (even if the same generalization appropriately could have been made about any other contemporary group, including for that matter Jews).Footnote 11 He was wrong, however, in his assertion that Arabs ignored the existence of the Talmud and its significance for Jews. In fact, in the modern period in the Arab world, as Razzouk demonstrates in the first part of al-Talmud wa-l-Sahyuniyya, the Talmud was a major focus of interest, speculation, and denunciation. This preoccupation was especially evident in the midst and in the wake of the Damascus affair, the blood-libel incident that took place in Egyptian-occupied Syria in 1840.Footnote 12 It was then, in the mid-nineteenth century, that the charge began to circulate in the Arab world, through Arabic translations not of the Talmud itself but rather of European-language antisemitic texts, alleging that the Talmud commanded Jews to murder Christian boys and extract their blood, which would then be used as an essential ingredient in Passover matzah. Indeed, the Arabic term that came to be used for Jewish ritual murder, especially since the late nineteenth century, was al-dhabāʾiḥ al-talmūdiyya—talmudic sacrifices.Footnote 13 The Talmud, as an idea, was far from ignored by modern Arabs; on the contrary, the Talmud was the subject of immense fascination and, importantly, fear.Footnote 14
The Protocols of the Elders of Zion were of interest to the PLO not only because the “Elders of Zion” naturally reminded Palestinian nationalists of the name of the competing nationalist movement, Zionism, that created the State of Israel, but also because the idea of a global Jewish conspiracy to wrest control of the world from non-Jews struck a particular chord with Palestinians—then, after the 1948 and 1967 wars, and, no less, later, as evidenced in the 1988 Hamas charter.Footnote 15 In fact, Razzouk was not the only intellectual affiliated with the PLO who was concerned about the extent to which the Protocols had been employed as an explanatory device for understanding the Arab-Israeli conflict in the wake of the 1967 war. In 1968, the Syrian philosopher Sadik al-Azm (who went to high school with Razzouk and also eventually worked for the PLO Research Center in Beirut) penned an extended essay that came to be a landmark—and controversial—work in modern Arab intellectual history, Self-Criticism after the Defeat.Footnote 16 In the piece, al-Azm assesses the underlying societal causes for the Arab defeat in the Six-Day War. Criticizing those Arabs who failed to take responsibility for their societies’ deficiencies and failures, al-Azm remarks on those Arab “writers who seek refuge in the Protocols of the Elders of Zion to prove that the Jews practice total control, through infernal international conspiracies, over the course of modern history (and perhaps ancient history, too). According to this superstitious logic, the Elders of Zion gather together at least once every century where they carry out discussions and studies in order to compose their frightening secret plan to enslave the world.”Footnote 17 Al-Azm contends that “the diffusion of this kind of thinking among the Arabs to explain their defeat by Zionism and its colonialist allies indicates that the Arab mind (or better, the Arab imagination) still leans strongly towards the adopting of the simplest and most naïve explanations for the course of historical events.”Footnote 18 Al-Azm was a rigid secularist and so, perhaps unsurprisingly, he attributes the appeal of the Protocols among the Arabs to “the influence of mythological or traditionally religious thinking that explains events, in the end, by recourse to divine will and the desires of supernatural beings, and that sees in the course of history a premeditated plan for the path of events and an intentional design for everything that happens.”Footnote 19 Though in this discussion he cited a book by Shawqi ʿAbd al-Nasir titled Brutukulat Hukamaʾ Sahyun wa-Taʿalim al-Talmud (The Protocols of the Elders of Zion and the teachings of the Talmud), al-Azm was apparently not interested in engaging with the substance of the Talmud. He was satisfied demonstrating the absurdity of the Protocols by other means. For Razzouk, however, working on behalf of the PLO Research Center, the frequently alleged link between the Protocols and the Talmud required substantive investigation. The PLO think tank thus sought to investigate the purported source of the Protocols, namely the Talmud, in greater depth.
Sources and the PLO Research Center's Jewish Studies Library
How did Razzouk undertake this investigation? What sources, aside from the Soncino translation of the Babylonian Talmud, did he turn to?Footnote 20 Razzouk's bibliography begins with four pages listing and annotating Arabic booksFootnote 21 that he sees as following the tradition of—and even simply republishing passages from—two different anti-Jewish Arabic works from the 1890s. The first was al-Kanz al-Marsud fi Qawaʿid al-Talmud (The guarded treasure in the laws of the Talmud),Footnote 22 originally published in 1899 in Egypt and reissued in 1968 and again in 1970 in Beirut. This was an Arabic translation of August Rohling's antitalmudic, antisemitic polemic Der Talmudjude (The Talmud-Jew) of 1871. The second book on which the others were based was Surakh al-Bariʾ fi Buq al-Hurriyya wa-l-Dhabaʾih al-Talmudiyya (The cry of the innocent with the trumpet of freedom, and talmudic sacrifices), written by Habib Faris and published in Egypt in 1891. The next section of the bibliography lists other Arabic texts, including modern editions of medieval Islamic anti-Jewish polemics, such as Ibn Hazm's al-Radd ʿala ibn al-Naghrila al-Yahudi (Refutation of Ibn Naghrila the Jew) and Al-Samawʾal al-Maghribi's Ifham al-Yahud (Silencing the Jews),Footnote 23 and modern anti-Jewish works such as Amil al-Khuri Harb's 1947 Muʾamarat al-Yahud ʿala al-Masihiyya (The Jewish conspiracy against Christianity)Footnote 24 and Muhammad Khalifa al-Tunisi's 1951 al-Khatar al-Yahudi: Brutukulat Hukamaʾ Sahyun (The Jewish peril: The Protocols of the Elders of Zion).Footnote 25 Such works are the main subjects of the first part of Razzouk's book (part 1 is called “The Arabs and the Interest in Studying the Talmud”), in which he analyzes with eviscerating criticism the prevailing contemporary Arab discourse on the Talmud, judging the more recent works as even more problematic than the medieval polemical literature and tracing the modern books directly to European Christian antisemitic texts.
After listing these Arabic texts (highlighted mainly to repudiate them), Razzouk then lists a page of “Jewish sources in Arabic”Footnote 26 followed by eight pages of foreign-language texts and encyclopedias. This bibliography reveals that the PLO Research Center's library included much of what any basic mainly English-language Jewish studies library circa 1970 would have had on the shelves. Some selections will suffice to demonstrate the point. These sources begin with Morris Adler's The World of the Talmud (1963) and end with Lucien Wolf's The Myth of the Jewish Menace in World Affairs, or, The Truth about the Forged Protocols of the Elders of Zion (1921). In between are Leo Baeck's The Essence of Judaism (trans. from the German, 1936); Salo Baron's A Social and Religious History of the Jews, vols. 1–2 (1966); Eliezer Berkovits's Toward Historic Judaism (1943); Joseph Bloch's Israel and the Nations (trans. from German, 1927); Norman Cohn's Warrant for Genocide: The Myth of the Jewish World-Conspiracy and the Protocols of the Elders of Zion (1967); Lucy Dawidowicz's The Golden Tradition (1967); Isidore Epstein's Judaism: A Historical Interpretation (1959); Eliezer Goldman's Religious Issues in Israel's Political Life (1964); Heinrich Graetz's History of the Jews (1893/1956); Solomon Grayzel's A History of the Jews (1947/1964); Jacob Katz's Tradition and Crisis (1958/1961); Bernard Lazarre's Antisemitism: Its History and Causes (1894/1967); Jacob Marcus's The Jew in the Medieval World (1960); Michael Meyer's The Origins of the Modern Jews (1967); Howard Sacher's The Course of Modern Jewish History (1963); Alexander Altmann's selections from Saʿadiah's Book of Doctrines and Beliefs (1946); Solomon Schechter's Studies in Judaism (1945); and Max Weber's Ancient Judaism (1952/1967), among many others. In contrast to the Arabic sources listed in the bibliography's opening section, Razzouk treats these foreign-language texts mostly as reliable, legitimate scholarship. This Jewish studies library—with the Soncino edition of the Talmud at its core—provides the basis on which Razzouk constructs his withering critique of Arabic writing on the Talmud.
After revealing such previous Arabic writing to be uninformed translations and adaptions of libelous, fictitious drivel, Razzouk then aims to provide his readers with an introduction to the actual Talmud. This section of the book consists of four chapters: on defining the Talmud, on the composition of the talmudic text, on the areas of focus of the six orders (or main sections) of the Talmud, and on the place of the Talmud in Judaism. In defining the Talmud, Razzouk turns to Solomon Schechter's Studies in Judaism, the Jewish Encyclopedia, Israel Wolfenssohn's Arabic work on Maimonides, and Isidore Epstein's Judaism: A Historical Interpretation.Footnote 27 On the composition of the Talmud, Razzouk follows Schechter in presenting the chain of transmission and development from Soferim to Zugot to Tannaim to Amoraim and finally to Saboraim.Footnote 28
In this discussion, which includes an exposition on talmudic hermeneutics, Razzouk regularly turns to, and cites, the Soncino Talmud to understand and explain to his readers the broader context of the talmudic passages to which his secondary sources refer. In his chapter on the orders of the Talmud, Razzouk follows but also expands on the introductions of the orders offered by the Soncino edition. In addition, he provides a synopsis not only of each order but of each tractate of the Talmud.Footnote 29 In these chapters, as well as the following one on the place of the Talmud in the life of the Jews,Footnote 30 Razzouk is strikingly dispassionate. He relies on informed, sympathetic, and even somewhat apologetic Jewish secondary scholarship, and avoids tendentious descriptions.
Rejecting Antisemitism to Defend the Palestinians
If the PLO's researcher ultimately concluded, after studying the Talmud, that the ancient text did not in any sense embody or prove Jewish moral iniquity or conspiracy, why did the PLO Research Center bother writing it up and publishing it? In part this seems to be an indication of the intellectual honesty of the researcher, Razzouk, and the director-general of the center, Anis Sayegh. For a think tank under the auspices of a militant liberation movement, such commitment to truth is surely remarkable.
There are, however, two other answers to this question that ought to be considered, both of which are connected to the ultimate interests of the PLO and its Research Center. Others in the Arab world, as we have seen, believed that the Talmud demonstrates Jewish moral depravity and the Jews’ global conspiracy, both key features, as these critics saw it, of Zionism. That the readings of the Talmud on which these earlier and contemporary Arab writers relied were produced by European antisemites was evidently irrelevant or, in any case, not disqualifying. But the PLO Research Center's leadership and staff—many of whom had spent significant time studying in Europe or the United States—were of a different mind. In his introduction to al-Talmud wa-l-Sahyuniyya, Razzouk writes:
The European tradition of antisemitism and hostility toward the Jews and oppressing them for religious or other reasons is a legacy with a weighty burden on the contemporary Western world. There are still European countries and peoples that sink to the ground under it [i.e., this burden] and suffer because of it in a variety of ways, despite all the attempts to get rid of it and overcome it or to transcend it by means of a “guilt complex.” Why should we burden ourselves with such matters that harm our cause and disfigure its reputation and undermine its liberational and nationalist character? Disdain for facts will not serve our purposes at all.Footnote 31
Razzouk asserts that, far from helping Arabs in their battle against Zionism, accepting antisemitism actually harms them.Footnote 32
Having only a few years earlier earned his PhD in post-Holocaust Germany, Razzouk was well aware of the costs of antisemitism, and not just for its victims.Footnote 33 No doubt, in the view of the PLO Research Center, the Palestinian cause was just; as Sayegh puts it in his foreword to al-Talmud wa-l-Sahyuniyya, the Palestinian conflict with Israel “is fundamentally and essentially a battle of right versus wrong.”Footnote 34 There was no reason, therefore, to associate the Palestinians’ fundamentally just movement with a fundamentally unjust ideology such as antisemitism, that is, to taint the Palestinians’ cause with this ugly product of Europe. Doing so was, in Sayegh's view, both unnecessary and ultimately self-defeating.
As this assertion was contained in a book written in Arabic, the intended readers were, in the main, Arabs. The goal was to convince fellow Arabs of the fallaciousness of antisemitic theories (whether the blood libel or the Protocols of the Elders of Zion, both of which were allegedly linked to the Talmud) so that they would finally stop employing them in their otherwise just battle against Zionism and Israel. For this reason, moreover, it was critical that the publisher of this book be the PLO Research Center, rather than some other Arab institution. The PLO's intellectuals, based in the Research Center, were arguing that for the sake of (and not despite the need for) the liberation of Palestine, antisemitism must be repudiated.
On the Relationship between the Talmud and Zionism
There was another separate, if related, motivation for investigating the Talmud and publishing this book. The two sections of the book thus far considered—the first on Arab misconceptions about the Talmud and the second an introduction to the text of the Talmud—build up to the third and final section of the book, which concerns the relationship between the Talmud and Zionism. If the Talmud is not the spiritual guide or blueprint for the Protocols of the Elders of Zion, if it is not some nefarious source of Jewish immorality and vice, if it is rather, as Razzouk demonstrates, a multivocal collection of all kinds of Jewish discourse from antiquity and late antiquity—what connection does it have to Zionism? Is the Talmud relevant for a proper understanding of Zionism? Underlying this question was a more basic one that very much occupied the PLO Research Center in these years, especially after the 1967 war: What is the relationship between Zionism and Judaism?Footnote 35
There was an American Jewish organization that was deeply engaged in this very question: the American Council for Judaism (ACJ), a Reform Jewish anti-Zionist group founded in 1942.Footnote 36 The PLO Research Center, as I have noted, was in close touch with activists at the ACJ.Footnote 37 The PLO's researchers read and regularly cited the ACJ's journal Issues. Indeed, the opening epigraph of the first chapter of Razzouk's section on Zionism and the Talmud is a quote, translated into Arabic, from an article by Rabbi Richard Singer in a 1959 volume of Issues. Singer wrote, “Talmudic Judaism has an interesting attitude toward Palestine. The Talmud has little use for the mystique of land and soil and people so attractive to so many of our coreligionists. The religious emphasis of the Talmud was placed on the Torah—on the unique moral and ethical insights of Judaism. The religious leadership and emphasis of the Talmud was Torah-centered, Judaism-centered, rather than land-centered. This has been an embarrassment for contemporary Jewish nationalists.”Footnote 38 According to Singer, the Talmud is focused on the Torah, morality, and ethics, not on physicality or geography. While the PLO Research Center often took its cue from the ACJ on the question of the relationship between Judaism and Zionism, having now reviewed the Talmud, Razzouk could not accept Singer's generalization about the Talmud's overall lack of interest in the Land of Israel.
In contrast to the ACJ's Singer, who contended that Jewish nationalists have been “embarrassed” by the Talmud's alleged indifference to the Holy Land, Razzouk offers a more nuanced assessment of Zionist engagement with the Talmud. Razzouk had read the classics of Zionist thought, particularly those exemplars found in Arthur Hertzberg's 1959 compendium, The Zionist Idea: A Historical Analysis and Reader.Footnote 39 In fact, he was involved in the Arabic translation project of Hertzberg's The Zionist Idea, which the PLO published as al-Fikra al-Sahyuniyya in 1970, the same year as the publication of al-Talmud wa-l-Sahyuniyya.Footnote 40 From his reading of these Zionist classics, Razzouk concludes that Singer might be right that the Talmud was insignificant in the thought of some later secular Zionists who, as Razzouk puts it, “grew up in a nontalmudic environment.” However, Razzouk asserts, based on his reading of the Zionist classics, the claim of the Talmud's irrelevance to Zionism “does not at all apply to those early Zionists who paved the way for the Herzlian call. We have in their writings the best evidence for this, as we study it on the basis of the influence of the Talmud, and discover in them [i.e., their writings] many of its [the Talmud's] statements and teaching. There is no doubt that the talmudic influence appears absolutely clearly among this first flock of Zionists who wrote in the middle of the last century and since the beginning of the second half of it.”Footnote 41 For the earliest Zionists, if not for all the later ones, the Talmud was absolutely crucial in the formation of their nationalist thought.
Demonstrating just how misguided Singer was to deny the importance of the Talmud in Zionism, Razzouk proceeds to introduce and analyze the writings of key early Zionists. Following the Zionist pantheon Hertzberg had constructed in The Zionist Idea, Razzouk starts with the Sarajevo-born Sephardic rabbi Yehuda Alkalai (1798–1878). “This Zionist advocate was influenced to a great extent,” begins Razzouk in his assessment of Alkalai, “by the teaching of Jewish Kaballah, just as the talmudic influence is clearly reflected in his writings.” Razzouk explains that “at the beginning of his article on ‘The Third Redemption,’” which was excerpted in Hertzberg's compendium, “we find Alkalai citing the talmudic interpretation of a saying in the Torah: ‘Return, O Lord, unto the many thousands of the families of Israel’ (Numbers 10:36).” The Hebrew words used for “many thousands,” rivevot ʾalfe, can literally be rendered “tens of thousands, thousands.” Because the plural form is used for both of these terms, “tens of thousands” and “thousands,” Razzouk notes that the “Tannaim commented on this verse in the book of ‘Yebamoth’ 64a p. 427, saying that it means the following: ‘the Divine Presence can be felt only if there are at least two thousands and two tens of thousands [i.e., 22,000] of Israelites together.’”Footnote 42
Though Razzouk generally followed Hertzberg's translation of Alkalai here, Hertzberg did not use the word “Tannaim” (the term used for the rabbis of the mishnaic period) but rather more simply “rabbis.” Razzouk, however, knew that the rabbis referred to in this talmudic passage were Tannaim because, seeing the citation for Yevamot 64a in Hertzberg's endnotes, he turned to the relevant passage in the Soncino edition of tractate Yevamot (where it indeed appears on page 427).Footnote 43 Having studied the terminology of the Talmud, with an interest in the different stages of rabbinic development, Razzouk recognized that the phrase “our rabbis taught” (tanu rabbanan) referred to a tradition attributed to the Tannaim. In other words, Razzouk engaged not merely in translation. He read widely on the Talmud and incorporated what he learned into his analysis of the primary sources.
With the Soncino edition of Yevamot in hand, Razzouk was able to investigate the literary context of the talmudic proof text Alkalai mustered for his argument that there needed to be large numbers of Jews living in the Holy Land before the redemption could occur and, by implication, that Jews could not wait until the messianic redemption before immigrating to Palestine. Razzouk reports on what he discovered in his talmudic reading: “If we look back to the conversations of the rabbis in the previous pages of this commentary, we find that they revolve around the question of reproduction.Footnote 44 Rabbi Eliezer declares (Yebamoth 63b, p. 426) that one who refrains from participating in increasing the Jewish race [al-ʿirq] is like someone who spills blood.” Razzouk notes that to support this claim, Rabbi Eliezer cites Genesis 9:6–7, successive verses that forbid murder and command reproduction, which, according to this interpretation, suggest that the failure to procreate is tantamount to murder. When the talmudic discussion reaches “the teaching of the Tannaim” that Alkalai addresses in his essay, Razzouk notes, the rabbis “link the necessary number of Israelites to the establishment of the divine presence among them.” Razzouk explains, “If one man were missing from this magical number,” 22,000, “and the duties of procreation were not fulfilled, the divine presence would depart Israel!”Footnote 45 None of this explanation appears in Hertzberg; this was all Razzouk's attempt to understand Alkalai and explain the proto-Zionist thinker to his readers by turning to the text of the Talmud in its modern English translation.
Similarly, even when Alkalai, in Hertzberg's edition, offers an interpretation of a biblical passage without mentioning a talmudic precedent for the interpretation, Razzouk looks to the Talmud to show the tradition in which Alkalai was operating. For instance, Alkalai highlights that the biblical patriarch Jacob purchased land in Shechem “to teach his descendants that the soil of the Holy Land must be purchased from its non-Jewish owners.” Razzouk notes that the concern for purchasing and owning territory in the Land of Israel “appears frequently in the Talmud in different and various ways. In the tractate ‘Avodah Zarah’ or idolatry (20b–21a, pages 108–109), we read, for example … one law of the Mishnah that says: ‘One should not lease houses to them in the Land of Israel; and it is needless to mention fields.’ But outside [the Land of Israel], this is permitted. By ‘them’ is meant all people who are not Jewish.” Here Razzouk identifies a talmudic passage that forbids the leasing of houses and land to non-Jews. “As long as ‘outside’ was a far distance from Palestine,” writes Razzouk, “the Talmud expresses unrivaled tolerance.” According to the Talmud, writes Razzouk, “in Syria it is permitted to lease houses, but not fields, to non-Jews.” Razzouk notes that “the talmudic justification for forbidding the sale of Jewish homes in Syria to non-Israelites” is the fear that this “would lead to selling houses also in ‘the Land of Israel.’”Footnote 46 Raised in Marjʿayoun and writing in Beirut, the Lebanese Razzouk must have been struck by the talmudic discussion of whether Jews are permitted to sell or lease land and homes to non-Jews in Syria, but, if he was, he did not mention it here. His discussion remains dispassionately expository. Razzouk's contention is straightforward: to understand the value Alkalai places on Jewish land ownership in Palestine, one must look at the talmudic traditions in which Alkalai was immersed.
Razzouk has a similar view of the other religious proto-Zionist in Hertzberg's pantheon, the Posen-born Ashkenazic rabbi Zvi Hirsch Kalischer (1795–1874). For Kalischer's writings, Razzouk looked not only to Hertzberg's compendium but also to Moses Hess's Rome and Jerusalem, which cites and engages with Kalischer's ideas. “There is no doubt,” asserts Razzouk, that Kalischer “was thoroughly familiar with the Talmud” alongside his interest in mysticism. In fact, explains Razzouk, “in the Jewish sources about him we read that his lengthy study of the Talmud is what persuaded him that the redemption requires the preparation of the masses, and this is not simply the Jews’ observance of their religious duties and commandments in their Diaspora. Rather, its fulfilment requires the Jews” to undertake “settlement activities and practical colonization in Palestine.”Footnote 47 Razzouk discusses Kalischer's plans for purchasing land in Palestine, resettling Jews there, establishing self-defense organizations, and training Jewish youth in agriculture along with sciences and traditional religious subjects. While the initial progress would necessarily be slow, the efforts would continue, wrote Kalischer, until “the country gradually comes into our possession, and we own the Holy Land in accordance with what the prophets prophesied.” Razzouk cites Kalischer's assertion, quoted in Rome and Jerusalem, that his belief that Jews needed to “take the initiative and inaugurate the beginning” of the redemption by resettling Palestine was grounded in “numerous citations from Talmud and Midrash.” In other words, “the talmudic roots” underlying Kalischer's ideas “are abundant here by the testimony of Rabbi Kalischer himself,” concludes Razzouk.Footnote 48 The contention by Singer that there is no significant connection between the Talmud and Zionism is, in Razzouk's view, evidently belied by figures such as Alkalai and Kalischer.
Though he forcefully and compellingly challenges the claim that the Talmud is wholly unrelated to Zionism, Razzouk does not contend the opposite—that Zionism emerged entirely from the Talmud or that all Zionists were motivated by talmudic mandate. Rather, Razzouk perceives a spectrum of talmudic influence on various Zionists. Razzouk portrays the Bonn-born socialist Moses Hess (1812–75), for instance, as a liminal figure. On the one hand, contends Razzouk, the title of Hess's Jewish nationalist tract, Rome and Jerusalem, itself highlights “the parallel that Hess sees between the movement for liberation and unity in Italy and its goal of Rome and the Jewish nationalist movement that looks toward Jerusalem.” Hess, according to Razzouk, manifestly “borrows his nationalist ideas from the Europeans preaching these [ideas] at that time.”Footnote 49 On the other hand, notwithstanding the influence contemporary European nationalisms had on his philosophy, Hess's work is “filled with references and allusions that go back to talmudic sources.” Among the clearest examples of Hess's turn to the Talmud, Razzouk contends, is the appearance in Hess's work of “the doctrine of the messiah in its talmudic form.” Razzouk points to Hess's reference to “one of the great Amoraim [rabbis of the talmudic period] (Rabbi Yoḥanan) in tractate Sanhedrin” who said, “it is only with the coming of the messiah and the establishing of the messianic kingdom that the purpose of creation will be accomplished.”Footnote 50 In Hess's “Sabbath of History,” a notion he develops in Rome and Jerusalem, Razzouk hears “talmudic echoes that repeat in these ideas, perhaps coming indirectly.” In his assessment of Hess's work, Razzouk carefully notes the talmudic ideas and references (e.g., the talmudic attribution of the redemption of biblical Israel from Egyptian bondage to “the chastity of Jewish women and their devotion to Jewish nationalism” or Hess's assertion of “the Jewish rule of mutual responsibility” linked to the talmudic maxim that “All Israelites are responsible for one another”). Razzouk concludes his discussion of Hess as follows: “It might be that these chains of tradition [al-asānīd] do not rest on the Talmud alone, but Hess's citing them” so extensively “has significance concerning the talmudic elements in the man's Zionism and concerning his concept of Jewish nationalism.”Footnote 51 In other words, while the “chains of tradition” in Hess's proto-Zionism may be traced as much to European nationalism as to talmudic precepts, the fact that Hess devoted considerable attention to the Talmud in his work suggests the enduring power of its ideas in the formation of his nationalism.
If, for Razzouk, Hess's work represents an amalgam of talmudic concepts and references, on the one hand, and modern European nationalist ideas, on the other, the Russian-born Peretz Smolenskin (1842–85) represents a Zionist step further away from the Talmud. Smolenskin, who Razzouk notes “studied in a talmudic academy (yeshiva),” had a traditional religious education, though he soon began studying Enlightenment texts and leaving behind his interest in the Talmud. Once he came to embrace Jewish nationalism, Razzouk explains, his discussion of the Talmud essentially ceased. “It is difficult to detect the talmudic influence” in Smolenskin's Zionism, writes Razzouk, “because he moved from one extreme to the opposite without returning to the Talmud.”Footnote 52 Having abandoned the talmudic academy, Smolenskin did not use clear talmudic language in his nationalist appeal and thus, Razzouk contends, one cannot clearly discern the role of the Talmud in his ideology.
Perhaps the most incisive talmudic reading that Razzouk provides is in his discussion of the Lithuanian-born Eliezer Ben-Yehuda (1858–1922). Still using The Zionist Idea as his guide to Zionist ideology, Razzouk analyzes Ben-Yehuda's 1880 letter to the publisher of the Hebrew journal Ha-shaḥar, which Hertzberg had translated. In that letter, Ben-Yehuda quotes the talmudic adage that “Whoever lives outside the Land of Israel is like a man without a God.” As in the previous cases, when he came across a reference to the Talmud in Hertzberg's reader, Razzouk turned to the Soncino translation to understand and then to explain the literary context.Footnote 53 While it is true, Razzouk writes, that this statement appears in the Talmud, in tractate Ketubbot, there also appears in the very same talmudic pericope “a completely contradictory idea.” A different talmudic rabbi says, “Whoever goes up from Babylonia to the Land of Israel transgresses a positive commandment.” Showing other related rabbinic disagreements in tractate Ketubbot, Razzouk concludes, “It appears through all this that the talmudic position is not settled on one opinion, except for the agreement on the distinction between the holy lands and the unclean or impure lands.” In other words, Razzouk demonstrates, the Talmud contains multiple and conflicting views on the question of whether it is obligatory for Jews to immigrate to and settle in Palestine. “The bottom line,” writes Razzouk, “is that Eliezer Ben-Yehuda of course cites the expressions of the Talmud that meet his Zionist goal and support his argument.”Footnote 54 In the case of Ben-Yehuda, then, Razzouk recognizes talmudic knowledge not as a prime motivator determining Zionist goals but rather as a tool to be employed to serve a priori Zionist ends.
If, in Razzouk's view, Ben-Yehuda's appeal to talmudic texts and precepts was more instrumental than fundamental, this was all the more true for Leo Pinsker (1821–91).Footnote 55 The Russian-born author of the 1882 pamphlet Auto-Emancipation cites the talmudic aphorism of Hillel: “If I am not for myself, who will be for me? And if not now, when?”Footnote 56 Notwithstanding the pride of place Pinsker gives in his pamphlet to a talmudic quotation, Razzouk asserts that “the author of Auto-Emancipation reflects in his writings and ideas the influence of Western ideas and culture more than he reflects anything clearly linked to the Talmud.”Footnote 57 It is not only that Pinsker expresses ideas that are “far from talmudic doctrines,” including his laments about the “absence of Jewish nationalist sentiment” or his claim of “the nations’ fear of the Jews (Judeophobia)” or his view of “the inseparability of Judaism and antisemitism.”Footnote 58 In Razzouk's view, Pinsker presents “the doctrine of the chosen people in a mocking and sarcastic way,” considering that in Auto-Emancipation Pinsker writes that one “must be blind indeed” to “assert that the Jews are not the chosen people, the people chosen for universal hatred.”Footnote 59 Even beyond his extratalmudic ideas and his disrespectful approach to particular talmudic concepts, Pinsker actually blames certain talmudic beliefs for the deplorable condition of contemporary Jews. Razzouk writes that, for Pinsker, the Jews exhibit insufficient “nationalist pride and self-respect” and Pinsker “attributes this deficiency on the part of the Jews”—that is, the inadequate interest they pay “to their national freedom and to their independence and unity”—“to their doctrine of waiting for the ‘messiah.’”Footnote 60 The Jewish belief in the messianic redemption, for which Jews must patiently and passively wait, has prevented them from properly exercising their nationalist pride and from taking their fate into their own hands. Having demonstrated what he regards as the non- and even antitalmudic positions at the heart of Pinsker's proto-Zionist philosophy, Razzouk concludes that “one might say that Talmudism [al-Talmūdiyya] has no influence in Pinsker's pamphlet on Auto-Emancipation.” The true source of and motivation for Pinsker's ideas were, rather, “nationalist ideas that were then prevalent” in his day.Footnote 61
Whether because of the deep and explicit influence of talmudic teachings, or because of time spent studying in talmudic academies, or because of the instrumentalization of talmudic precepts, or even because of the active negation of those precepts, the Talmud was part of the early proto-Zionist story. That changed, according to Razzouk's assessment of the Zionist pantheon, with the Austro-Hungarian-born Theodor Herzl (1860–1904). Razzouk opens his section on Herzl with the following appraisal of the relationship between Herzl and the Talmud: “When we come to Theodor Herzl himself it becomes entirely impossible to observe the talmudic influences because the founder of political Zionism was raised far from the traditional Jewish environment. It is futile to search in the man's writings and diaries for clear reference to the Talmud.”Footnote 62 The “foundation” on which Herzlian Zionism rests, writes Razzouk, is not the Talmud but rather Herzl's “analysis of the Jewish condition,” with the “prevailing conditions for eastern European Jews” seen “as the model and example of this condition.” Razzouk was well aware that, “surrounding Herzl at the start of his Zionist period was a circle of a number of talmudists and Hasidim” and yet, contends Razzouk, there does not appear in Herzl's thought “any influence from their ideas.”Footnote 63
Razzouk, to be clear, does not deny the possibility of religious influences in Herzl's upbringing and even, perhaps, in his Zionism. Having read Alex Bein's biography of Herzl, Razzouk notes the interest Herzl's grandfather had in the writings of the religious proto-Zionist Alkalai. Pointing to Herzl's annual holidays with his grandfather until the latter's death when Herzl was twenty years old, Razzouk cites Bein's suggestion that perhaps it was during his grandfather's visits “that the seed was sown which after long and invisible subterranean growth broke out in seed and flower in the sight of all men.”Footnote 64 Razzouk raises this suggestion without expressing any particular skepticism about it. Similarly, following Bein's biography, Razzouk recounts Herzl's Reform synagogue attendance during his childhood and even his retrospective claims, later in life, of messianic pretensions.Footnote 65
What mattered most for Razzouk in this study, though, were not religious but explicitly talmudic influences on Zionism. On this question, Razzouk concludes concerning Herzl that there is “no reference to the Talmud in his biography.”Footnote 66 While it is possible, concedes Razzouk, that “the founder of Zionism might have been exposed to talmudic influences indirectly or through his reading and contacts with people close to him,” Herzl's focus was, rather, “on scientific discovery literature along with his deep fascination with modern technology.” The Talmud was not a text of concern for him. In contrast to pre-Herzlian proto-Zionism, beginning with Herzl, Razzouk discerns much less, if any, interest in talmudic references and proof texts. This does not mean Judaism disappeared entirely from Herzlian and post-Herzlian Zionist discourse, but rather that that Judaism was no longer centered on the Talmud.
In summarizing his conclusions about the relationship between Zionism and the Talmud, Razzouk writes, “That religious longing for Zion found explicit expression in religious Zionism is not sufficient reason to grant the Talmud responsibility for the development of Zionism. For the books of the Old Testament in the Torah are filled with expressions of religious longing. Jewish religious poetry, in Andalusia in particular, was preserved in piyyutim [liturgical poetry] and prayers that speak about the longing and yearning for redemption.”Footnote 67 Jewish religious longing for Zion can be found throughout the Jews’ sacred texts, whether in the pretalmudic Hebrew Bible or in post-talmudic medieval poetry; it is not exclusively, or even especially, talmudic. “Therefore,” explains Razzouk, “it is difficult to discover and specify the direct influence of the Talmud.” Indeed, Razzouk suggests, it is possible that “the mystical and kabbalistic tendencies among some circles in eastern Europe are closer to Zionism in certain ways than is the Talmud,” even as “most of its teachings and beliefs derive from aggadic sources in the Talmud.” In all, “the religious influence in Zionism is difficult to deny, and the Talmud constitutes a primary element in the religious education for the Jews.”Footnote 68
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After this extensive three-part PLO-sponsored study of the Talmud and Zionism, this is the conclusion: a fairly sophisticated, nuanced—not especially provocative or controversial—view of the complex relationship between the Talmud and Zionism that not only denies but itself defies conspiracy theories. And that was exactly the PLO's point here: the case for their liberation movement stood on its merits. There was no need to fear an honest assessment of and a sincere engagement with a sacred Jewish text and its relationship to modern Jewish nationalism. The Palestinian cause required no manipulation or fabrication of the facts about the enemy. Jews, Judaism, Zionism, and Israel could be confronted with intellectual openness and even some degree of empathy, both because of the Palestinian cause's righteousness, in the minds of the PLO researchers, and because, as we saw Razzouk explain above, the cause is only harmed by its advocates’ turning a blind eye to or, worse yet, employing anti-Jewish prejudice. As Razzouk put it in his critique of Palestinian and Arab uses of antisemitism: “Until when will we remain our own worst enemy, continuing to prejudice the justice of our cause?”Footnote 69
This argument calls for a reconsideration of the relationship between the PLO and antisemitism, a subject of continued interest and polemic, within academe and beyond. At least in official statements, the PLO generally maintained a practice (with precedents or roots going back to the late Ottoman period)Footnote 70 of distinguishing between its enmity toward Zionism and Israel, on the one hand, and its amity toward Jews and Judaism, on the other. Recall PLO Chairman Yasser Arafat's assertion in his landmark speech before the United Nations General Assembly in 1974 that “since its inception, our revolution has not been motivated by racial or religious factors. Its target has never been the Jew, as a person, but racist Zionism and aggression. In this sense, ours is a revolution for the Jew, as a human being. We are struggling so that Jews, Christians, and Muslims may live in equality, enjoying the same rights and assuming the same duties, free from racial or religious discrimination.”Footnote 71 In light of this expressed goal, Arafat was careful to “distinguish between Judaism and Zionism,” explaining that “while we maintain our opposition to the colonialist Zionist movement, we respect the Jewish faith.”Footnote 72
Notwithstanding these sorts of assertions, the PLO regularly was and continues to be accused of antisemitism, a charge revived most recently in response to Palestinian president and PLO chairman Mahmoud Abbas's April 2018 speech before the Palestine National Council in Ramallah.Footnote 73 In A Genealogy of Evil: Anti-Semitism from Nazism to Islamic Jihad, antisemitism and Holocaust scholar David Patterson portrays the PLO, represented by the organization's charter, as fundamentally and essentially antisemitic.Footnote 74 “In keeping with the anti-Semitism that characterizes Islamic Jihadism,” argues Patterson, “the PLO Charter buys into the ‘world Jewish conspiracy’ libel.” The PLO, Patterson contends, “with Arafat at its helm, is the champion and defender of humanity in the eternal struggle against the eternal Jew.”Footnote 75 Accepting the view that the PLO's “mindset” was one of “absolute antisemitism,” historian Joel Fishman similarly maintains that “even before the founding of the PLO in 1964, this mindset was current and has not changed to the present.” Perceiving Palestinian perspectives on Israel as “intransigent hatred,” Fishman argues that “the position of the Palestinians and their supporters has remained frozen in time and has not evolved. They have become entrapped by religion and ideology.”Footnote 76 For Fishman, the PLO's religious and ideological fanaticism have made the organization not only obstinately opposed to Israel but also rigidly (and timelessly) antisemitic.
Those who see deep-seated antisemitism in the PLO tend not to focus on the words but rather on the violent actions of the organization; little dispositive value is thus assigned to statements by Arafat or any other PLO leader that the PLO was not antisemitic. Indeed, the PLO's denial of its own antisemitism is, for many critics, just another piece of the PLO's duplicity, a rhetorical tool in its battle against the Jews.Footnote 77 Insofar as this debate concerns underlying, even unselfconscious, motivations, my analysis of the PLO Research Center's writings about the Talmud does not fundamentally alter or intervene in this argument. Moreover, the PLO was an umbrella organization consisting of various constituencies with radically different ideological orientations.Footnote 78 Given this diversity, there is no reason to think that there existed a single “true motivation” for “the PLO” or PLO actors, let alone that that motivation might be ascertainable. There does not appear to me to be a great deal to be gained—intellectually, that is—through this debate.
However, what is significant here is the window that Razzouk's text opens to us onto the explicit, intra-PLO—and, importantly, Arabic—consideration of and reflection on the impact of antisemitism on the PLO and Palestinian nationalism. Here was not simply an assertion of friendliness toward Jews and Judaism but an argument that the alternative, namely hostility toward Jews and Judaism, was harmful for the Palestinian cause. It strikes me that partisans of either side of the PLO-antisemitism debate could seize this fact and employ it to support their respective positions. Either: here is clearly revealed the degree to which antisemitism (or, in this case, its denial) was used, functionally, to serve the interests of the Palestinians without meaningful concern for the moral implications of embracing this form of hatred. Or: here is revealed the degree to which PLO intellectuals were eager to root out antisemitism from the movement's midst, using any argument available (even that of Palestinian self-interest) to convince fellow supporters of the Palestinian cause to desist from partaking in the morally loathsome ideology. In other words, my analysis will not yield a resolution to the question of whether the PLO was, in its true motivations, driven by antisemitism, but it does offer critical insight into the internal conversation among the intellectuals gathered in the PLO Research Center and consideration of what was at stake in this question in the years following the 1967 war. Whether to embrace antisemitic tropes and assumptions, or to reject them, was a topic of substantive debate about how best to achieve the goals of the Palestinian national movement. The PLO Research Center, through this publication, was making a strong argument—by turning to the Talmud, the very document at the core of contemporary Arab antisemitic approaches to Jews, Judaism, and Zionism—for eliminating antisemitism and basing the movement's liberational goals and strategies on sounder historical and ideological ground.
For the PLO Research Center, that ground was to be discovered, as we have seen, through study, including through the serious study of Judaism and Jewish texts—ancient and modern. These were texts the PLO researchers found on the voluminous bookshelves of the Research Center library.Footnote 79 That the PLO Research Center rested its argument against the embrace of antisemitism on an in-depth study of Jewish sources (rather than merely on a political calculus of Palestinian self-interest) is, I would argue, a critical legacy of the Research Center.Footnote 80 Thus, when Israel seized the Center's library in 1982 and when, though having been returned to the PLO in Algeria in 1983, the library effectively disappeared,Footnote 81 the loss of this Jewish studies library at the heart of the Palestinian national movement represented a significant loss not only for the Palestinians, but also for those about whom they sought to learn.Footnote 82
