Do American Values Stem from Judaism?

Henry Srebrnik, Calgary Jewish Free Press

The American presidential election is now in full gear, with Barack Obama and Mitt Romney debating, among other things, what the United States should look like in coming years.

The citizens of very few countries examine their ideological “essence” in the way Americans do.

Michael Lind, author of The Next American Nation: The New Nationalism and the Fourth American Revolution, has noted that many American theorists posit a view of the United States as not a nation-state but an idea-state, based on the philosophy of liberal democracy in the abstract. There are no American people as such, but rather an American idea.

Yale University professor David Gelernter goes further, stating that the American world-view emerged not just from the Bible, but especially from the Hebrew Bible, via those English Protestant Calvinists known as the Puritans, who looked to the “Old Testament” for their values.

Puritanism would turn into “Americanism.” In a sense, Gelernter asserted in “A Religious Idea Called ‘America’,” a lecture he gave at the American Enterprise Institute in 2006, “the molten bronze of Puritanism became the solid metal of the American Religion.”

As such, the “American creed” is derived from biblical Zionism, “which is based on two ideas: a chosen people and a promised land,” he maintained. “Both elements were understood by the biblical prophets to imply privileges and duties. The chosen people is closer to God than any other and is held to higher standards. The promised land flows with milk and honey and must be made by its inhabitants into a beacon of sanctity for the whole world.”

The community as a whole conceived itself as having a covenant with God, or a vow agreed to by both sides. The Puritans who came to America on the Mayflower in 1620, known as the Pilgrims, signed such as compact before landing at Plymouth. Many consider it the seed of American democracy. American Puritans often described their settlements as covenant communities. “We are the children of Abraham; and therefore we are under Abraham’s covenant,” declared one early settler.

The Puritans had fled a “house of bondage” in Europe, as it seemed to them, and made a dangerous journey to a pagan land where they struggled to establish themselves. They were forming a “new Zion” in the Americas. “American Puritans thought of themselves as ancient Israel reborn, and said so often,” stated Gelernter. And liberty, equality, and democracy all had Biblical roots, so far as the Puritans understood them. “Biblical passages dealing with man and the state and the organization of a state -- such as they are -- are mainly located in the Hebrew Bible,” he said.

It was these “founding ideas,” as enunciated in the Declaration of Independence and the U.S. Constitution -- human equality, natural rights, civil liberty, democracy, and constitutional government – that made people into Americans. “American-ness,” in this view, is less membership in a national community than a belief in a secular political faith -- the religion of democracy.

Is the United States an "Idea-State"?

Henry Srebrnik, [Summerside, PEI] Journal-Pioneer

The American presidential election is now in full gear, with the Republican national convention having opened in Tampa on Aug. 28, and the Democrats meeting in Charlotte, North Carolina Sept. 3.

Both parties will debate, among other things, what the United States should look like in coming years.

The citizens of very few nations examine their “essence” in the way Americans do.

Michael Lind, author of The Next American Nation: The New Nationalism and the Fourth American Revolution, has noted that many American theorists posit a view of the United States as not a nation-state but an idea-state, based on the philosophy of liberal democracy in the abstract. There are no American people as such, but rather an American idea.

The American struggle for independence would create a different kind of nation. Declared the radical pamphleteer Tom Paine in his call to arms, Common Sense, in 1776: “We have it in our power to build the world over again.”

It was the founding ideas of the American Revolution -- human equality, natural rights, civil liberty, democracy, and constitutional government – that would make people Americans. “American-ness,” in this view, is less membership in a national community than a belief in a secular political faith -- the religion of democracy.

For such thinkers, the country is a post-national idea-state (as opposed to a multicultural federation of ethnic groups, the view on the left.) It is defined only partially by language and culture, and not at all by race or religion.

As the journalist Cokie Roberts has stated, “We have nothing binding us together as a nation -- no common ethnicity, history, religion, or even language -- except the Constitution and the institutions it created.”

This has led to the idea of “American exceptionalism” -- the belief that the U.S. is not only different from other countries but superior in morality and institutions. It also gave rise to the expansionist notion of “Manifest Destiny.”

The historian Paul Johnson has defined the U.S. as “a unity, driven by agreed assumptions, accepting a common morality and moral aims, and able therefore to marshal and deploy its forces with stunning effect.”

For American exceptionalists, politics since the 1776 Declaration of Independence has been the gradual, sometimes painful, working out of the ideas of the Founders. There has been only one constitution since 1789, the dominant parties have been in place since the 1850s, and even the state boundaries have remained fixed.

This formal constitutional and political continuity of course has disguised the many political upheavals -- often violent -- in American life, including the Civil War, Reconstruction, and the Civil Rights Revolution.

But the powerful set of ideas enshrined in the Declaration of Independence and the U.S. Constitution has served as ideological glue and unifying principle for the people of the United States.

California Doesn’t Loom Large in the 2012 Election

Henry Srebrnik, [Charlottetown, PEI] Guardian

Prince Edward Island has had a glorious summer this year. Yet, when friends invited me to spend two weeks in Los Angeles earlier this month, I couldn’t pass it up.

Needless to say, the climate in southern California was also excellent. But what of the political climate?

California is, politically, a deep shade of “blue,” so neither President Obama nor Mitt Romney will spend much time campaigning here, even though, as the largest state in the country, with a population bigger than all of Canada’s, it delivers 55 electoral votes to whoever wins it in November. It’s not a swing state.

Obama will carry California easily on Nov. 6. He beat John McCain by more than 24 per cent here in 2008.

One of the state’s two U.S. Senate seats is being contested. Veteran Democratic incumbent Dianne Feinstein, first elected to the Senate in 1992, is being challenged by Elizabeth Emken.

The Republican candidate opposes abortion and same-sex marriage. She also wants the Affordable Care Act (“Obamacare”) repealed, even though she helped shape parts of the act that apply to autism.

Emken thinks that her career in business, along with her background in autism advocacy – her son is autistic -- makes her a strong candidate for legislator.

“My dual career creates what you want for someone in government. You don’t typically see someone like me that has both backgrounds,” she said. Though she says she would seek to cut down government spending, she does not want that to fall on the backs of those that need help.

“California needs to become economically competitive again, but with an eye for the truly vulnerable,” she has said.

But hers is an uphill battle against a well-financed, well-known and well-liked incumbent, and she has little chance of pulling an upset. Feinstein has built statewide name identification and a multimillion dollar campaign war chest in her two decades in the U.S. Senate.

In 2006, Feinstein won 59.43 per cent of the vote against Republican Richard Mountjoy’s 35.02 per cent. Two years ago, California’s other Democratic senator, Barbara Boxer, beat challenger Carly Fiorina by ten per cent.

Of California’s 53 members of the House of Representatives, 34 are currently Democrats and 29 Republicans. Most Democratic districts are along the coast and in the big cities; Republicans are stronger in the interior. In the Los Angeles region, 13 of the 18 representatives are Democrats.

Something new will be shaping the outcome in the House races. In 2010, Californians approved a measure, Proposition 14, which requires that all candidates in a Congressional district run in a single primary election open to all registered voters.

Voters can choose any candidate without regard to the political party affiliations of either the candidate or the voter. The top two candidates, regardless of party, face each other in the November general election.

As a result of this “blanket primary,” which took place in June, a number of California’s 53 congressional districts will have same-party candidates battling each other in the Nov. 6 general election.

The economy remains the main issue in the Golden State. Unemployment stands at 10.7 per cent in California, with underemployment estimated at 21 per cent. California has eight of the top 10 worst unemployment and foreclosure areas in the country.

Three cities, unable to pay their bills, have recently declared bankruptcy; Stockton is the largest American city to ever acquire that unenviable distinction. More than a dozen other cities are facing the financial strains of rising pension costs and declining revenue, forcing them to slash staff and basic services such as police and fire protection and library hours to keep up with the payments.
                                               
Yet, despite such economic problems, only 13 congressional districts in California may be competitive this year, according to a Cook Political Report analysis, because most districts have been gerrymandered to create safe seats. So, once again, California will send a largely Democratic delegation to Congress.


           

Is Islam Inherently Anti-Jewish?

Henry Srebrnik, [Toronto] Jewish Tribune

Certainly, in comparison with classical Christianity, the answer is no. There is less of a theological basis for opposition to Judaism. Islam does not see itself as being the successor to the covenant between G-d and the children of Israel, as the Church did. Nor, of course, were “the Jews” ever considered responsible for deicide.

Still, long before the birth of the modern Zionist movement, there was already a centuries-old tradition in Islam of treating Jews in a subservient, even derogatory manner – although this was true of the way a triumphalist Islam deal with other faiths as well.

During the Muslim prophet Muhammad’s life, thousands of Jews lived in the Arabian peninsula, especially in and around Medina, the city to which in 622 Muhammad was forced to migrate from Mecca.

Muhammad’s early teachings appeared to borrow from Jewish tradition. However, once it became clear the Jews would not accept him, Muhammad began to minimize or eliminate the Jewish influence on his beliefs.

In fact, campaigns against Jews would become part of the very genesis of Islam. One of the first examples was the murder of Ka’b ibn al-Ashraf, a Jewish poet who lived near Medina. He wrote verses satirizing Muhammad and incited Meccans against the new faith, and as a consequence was assassinated in 624 by followers of Muhammad.

In 627, the Muslim armies defeated a tribe of Jews, the Banu Qurayza, following the Battle of the Trench between the followers of Islam in Medina and their opponents. The bulk of the tribe’s men, apart from a few who converted to Islam, were killed, while the women and children were enslaved.

Two years later, the Battle of Khaybar was fought between Muhammad’s followers and the Jews living in the oasis of Khaybar, 150 kilometres from Medina.

Khaybar’s Jews made their living growing date palm trees, as well as through commerce and craftsmanship, accumulating considerable wealth.

The Muslims won, and the victory in Khaybar greatly raised the status of Muhammad among his followers and local Bedouin tribes, who, seeing his power, swore allegiance to the new prophet and converted to Islam.

The captured booty and weapons strengthened his army, and he captured Mecca in 630, two years before his death.

The story includes an example of “Jewish treachery.” As the Jewish leaders of Khaybar went to Muhammad to negotiate the terms of surrender, Zeynab bint al-Harith, a Jewish woman whose husband had been killed in the battle, enquired about Muhammad’s favourite food. Hearing that it was shoulder of lamb, she offered him a poisoned meal. A companion died, but Muhammad did not; Zeynab was executed.

The Jewish community in Khaybar was eventually expelled by Caliph Umar in 642.

In succeeding centuries, Jews were periodically the victims of mob violence against their communities in the Arab world.

The conquest of Morocco and Al-Andalus (Muslim Spain) by the Muslim Berber Almoravids in 1040 and by the Almohades 81 years later, caused destruction and suffering to their Jewish communities. In 1066, a massacre of the Jewish population of Granada saw thousands killed. In Fez, 6,000 Jews were massacred in 1035 and mobs slaughtered thousands more in 1465. There were pogroms in Tetuan in 1790 and 1792.

In the 16th century, the Jews of Tunis were subjected to anti-Jewish policies and forced to live in ghettos. In 1869 anti-Jewish riots broke out, and the rabbis and leaders of the community of Tunis appealed desperately to French officials, informing them that “in the face of Muslim ferocity, 18 Jews have fallen to the knives of the fanatical murderers.” (Tunisia became a French protectorate in 1881.)

Elsewhere in North Africa, Ali Burzi Pasha murdered hundreds of Jews in Libya in 1785. Jews were also massacred in Algiers in 1805, 1815 and 1830.

Things did not improve in the 20th century. As H.E.W. Young, the British Vice-Consul in Mosul, present-day Iraq, wrote in 1909, “The attitude of the Muslims toward the Christians and the Jews is that of a master towards slaves, whom he treats with a certain lordly tolerance so long as they keep their place. Any sign of pretension to equality is promptly repressed.”

More than 1,000 Jews were killed in anti-Jewish rioting during the 1940s in Arab countries.

On June 1-2, 1941, during Shavuot, riots against Jews in Baghdad, Iraq, resulted in about 180 Jews killed and 1,000 injured, in what became known as the farhud (Arabic for “violent dispossession”). Looting of Jewish property took place and 900 Jewish homes were destroyed.

This followed the April 1941 coup that temporarily overthrew the pro-Western regime and installed Rashid Ali al-Gaylani as prime minister, with Nazi support and financing. He was finally ousted by British forces by the end of May.

On Nov. 2, 1945, anti-Jewish riots broke out in Egypt. Organized by the ‘Young Egypt’ group, Jewish-owned department stores in Cairo were looted, and a synagogue, Jewish hospital, and old-age home were set on fire. In Alexandria, six Jews were killed and 200 wounded.

Three days later, in a two-day pogrom, more than 140 Jews, including 36 children, were killed and many more injured in Tripoli, Libya.

On Dec. 2, 1947, Arab rioters, assisted by the local police force, engaged in a bloody pogrom in Aden, in today’s Yemen, that killed 82 Jews. Four synagogues were burnt to the ground and 220 Jewish houses were burned and looted or damaged.

All of this, of course, preceded the creation of Israel. No wonder hundreds of thousands of Jews fled these countries in the decades that followed.

Is an Indian-Israeli-Russian Entente Being Formed?

Henry Srebrnik, [Toronto] Jewish Tribune

Is it too far-fetched to imagine an Israeli-Indian-Russian alliance some day?

If one were to take seriously political scientist Samuel Huntington’s famous “clash of civilizations” theory of international relations -- that people’s cultural and religious identities will be the primary source of conflict in the 21st century -- then clearly, given how Israel is surrounded by a mostly hostile Islamic world, its “natural” allies would be those countries whose interests also collide with the Muslim world.

Of these, the major ones are India and Russia.

Orthodox Christian Russia lies north of the Islamic civilization in the Caucasus and central Asia. It has already retreated from the five Muslim states of Kazakhstan, Kyrgyzstan, Tajikistan, Turkmenistan, and Uzbekistan following the collapse of the Soviet Union.

Russia has fought two bloody wars to maintain control of Chechnya. Terrorism remains a constant there and in neighbouring Dagestan and Ingushetia.

The Indian subcontinent has been the scene of Hindu-Muslim clashes for more than a millennium, and even its partition into the two states of India and Pakistan in 1947 has not ended the enmity.

They have gone to war three times and came close to engaging in major hostilities many times more. The Muslim-majority but Indian-ruled state of Kashmir remains a major bone of contention. Tens of thousands of people have been killed there in the years of strife.

(China, too, faces an independence movement, by the Muslim Uighur people in Xinjiang, but it is too far removed from the Middle East to matter.)

Since the 1960s, Israel’s main ally has been the United States. During much of that period, a Communist Russia and a left-leaning India supported the Arab world against Israel. But the end of the Cold War terminated most of those ideologically-based alliances.

The United States remains Israel’s most important friend, founded on a common Judeo-Christian affinity, true. (It also helps that there is an influential Jewish diaspora in America.)

But it has often been said that states have no permanent friends or allies, they only have permanent interests. Geopolitically the U.S. is far away from the Middle East and has fewer fundamental disputes with the Muslim world. One might say that its support for Israel is “voluntary” and not based on national interest or realpolitik -- in fact the U.S. would be much better off, from that point of view, in abandoning the Jewish state.

After all, it causes America complications it would otherwise not have when dealing with the vast arc of Islamic states that stretches from Morocco in the west to Indonesia in the east. The Islamic world encompasses more than 50 countries and makes up over 23 per cent of the world’s population.

Israel can’t depend forever on an America that wouldn’t suffer politically, and indeed might gain, by abandoning it -- whereas India and Russia, even if they didn’t really care about Israel, are in the same political boat with it.

Again, applying Huntington’s formulation, Jewish civilization is distinct and so Israel has no “natural” allies -- the way Scandinavians or Latin Americans may feel some affinity towards each other. And in fact the Zionist movement sought support from various countries in the past -- Germany before the First World War, Great Britain in the 1920s and 1930s, France after the Second World War, and the United States since the late 1960s. So this may shift yet again.

Given all of this, it is interesting to observe that Russian President Vladimir Putin visited Israel in late June. (President Barack Obama has yet to visit Israel.)

Russians have long suffered from terrorism and extremism at the hands of Islamists in the northern Caucasus. Zvi Magen, a former Israeli ambassador to Russia, recently told the BBC that President Putin fears the events of the Arab Spring “might inspire similar developments in Russia’s soft belly -- the Caucasus.”

This may be spreading. Recently, assassins attacked two prominent Muslim opponents of religious extremism, in Kazan, a city on the Volga River that is the capital of Tatarstan, far from the Caucasus. It has been a center of Islamic culture since the 10th century.

In 2010, during a meeting of Russian Defence Minister Anatoly Serdyukov and his Israeli counterpart Ehud Barak in Moscow, an agreement was signed to boost military ties between the two nations, to help them fight common threats, such as terrorism and the proliferation of weapons of mass destruction.

Putin attended the inauguration in Netanya of a new monument commemorating Red Army soldiers who fought against Nazi Germany in the Second World War. For the Russian soldiers who liberated the Nazi concentration camps, Israeli President Shimon Peres told Putin, “the Jewish people owe a historical ‘thank you’ to the Russians.”

India, too, has strengthened ties with Israel. It formally established relations in January 1992 and ties between the two nations have flourished since, primarily due to common strategic interests and security threats. Indian foreign minister S. M. Krishna visited Israel last January and called for increasing counter-terror and economic cooperation between the two countries.

A study conducted a few years ago by an international market research company, found 58 per cent of Indian respondents showed sympathy to the Jewish state.

It’s possible we might be witnessing the beginnings of an informal triple entente.