Das deutsche Gerichtsurteil gegen Beschneidung hat mich schockiert und ich finde es falsch, obwohl ich finde, dass Beschneidung tatsächlich eine Art der Körperverletzung ist.¹ Das Urteil ist ein Fall von religiöser Unterdrückung, was jedoch vielen Menschen in Mitteleuropa offensichtlich nicht klar ist – sogar die Österreicher und Schweizer haben sich dieser Entscheidung angeschlossen.

Um es vorweg zu nehmen: Obwohl ich dieses Thema schwierig finde, bin ich grundsätzlich der Meinung, dass alle kulturellen Praktiken, die die Verletzung von Babys beinhalten, fragwürdig bis absolut widerlich sind. Schon in meiner Kindheit, als skeptischer Junge in einer jüdischen Umgebung, habe ich insbesondere die Beschneidung etwas widerlich gefunden. Ich wünsche mir, dass Beschneidung und alles ähnliche von der Welt verschwinden würde. Ich bin auch dankbar dafür, dass das Thema aufgrund des Urteils jetzt diskutiert wird, auch in Israel.²

Allerdings zeigt für mich das Urteil und dessen Unterstützung ein grundsätzliches Fehlverständnis der Bedeutung von Beschneidung im Judentum.³

Beschneidung, so krass sie als Praxis sein mag, gilt im Judentum schon seit Jahrtausenden als wichtiges, für Jungen sogar als das wichtigste Zugehörigkeitskriterium. Natürlich bedeutet diese Tatsache allein nicht, dass die Praxis gut oder schlecht ist. Eine Beschneidung ist tatsächlich eine ziemlich bescheuerte Art und Weise, sich von anderen Gruppen zu unterscheiden. Ich finde aber, dass man es bei Religionen wirklich nicht anders erwarten kann. Was erst einmal wichtig ist, ist die Bedeutung dieser Praxis, für die von dem Urteil betroffenen Menschen.

Egal wie wir es bewerten, man muss einfach wissen, dass die Entscheidung, einen neugeborenen Jungen nicht zu beschneiden gleichzeitig bedeutet ihn aus der Gemeinschaft, aus der man selbst kommt, zu entfernen. Ein Junge aus einer jüdischen Familie, der nicht beschnitten ist, wird vermutlich nicht nach jüdischem Recht eine jüdische Frau heiraten dürfen, sollte er sich das wünschen.⁴

Das ist alles ziemlich scheiße, weil für uns, die wir einen jüdischen Hintergrund haben, dann die Wahl, es dem Kind ganz selbst zu überlassen, nicht vorhanden ist: wir legen für ihn fest, ob er ein potenzieller Jude ist oder nicht.

Ich wünsche mir, das wäre alles nicht so, aber es ist so. Fakt ist, dass, wenn es mir auch nur ein bisschen wichtig wäre, mein Leben nach jüdischer Tradition zu führen, nach diesem Urteil Deutschland als Wohnort einfach nicht mehr in Frage käme. Selbst ich, so absolut sekulär wie ich bin, mache mir jetzt angesichts des wiederbelebten Gestanks der Intoleranz erneut Gedanken zum Thema. Und das, noch bevor wir über Geschichte geredet haben.

Denn im Judentum selbst ist das ein schwieriges, historisch beladenes Thema. Schon seit über zweitausend Jahren kommt immer mal wieder ein Herrscher, der den Juden die Beschneidung verbieten will. Weil die sturen Juden immer wieder auf ihre Religion beharren, wurden sie früher auch immer wieder ermordert. Damit will ich nicht andeuten, dass Deutschland auf diesem Hintergrund wieder Juden schlachten will – das glaube ich nicht – der Punkt ist, dass dieses Gerichtsurteil im, der Geschichte sehr bewussten, jüdischen Bewusstsein, alte Wunden aufreißt.

Dazu muss man sagen, dass unter vielen Juden, Versuche, Juden von ihrer Religion abzubringen oder insbesondere sie dazu zu bringen, ihre Kinder nicht entsprechend der Religion zu erziehen, mit Genozidversuchen gleichgesetzt werden. Ich finde diese Gleichsetzung stark übertrieben, kann sie aber nicht ändern, und ich kann sie gewissermaßen auch verstehen. Denn dieses Urteil ist nicht das erste mal, wo Juden gesagt wird, die dürfen gerne wo leben, so lange sie ihre religiöse Identität abgeben.

Der Wunsch, Beschneidung nicht mehr in der Welt, oder zumindest im eigenen Land, zu haben, ist ein berechtigter. Dieses Urteil wird aber meiner Meinung nach bei den meisten Juden zwei Arten Reaktionen auslösen: entweder woanders zu leben, oder hier zu bleiben und aus Trotz weiterhin Beschneidung zu betreiben. Die jüdische Kultur hätte nicht so lange überlebt, hätte sie nicht den Reflex entwickelt, das Überleben als solches allen Vorschriften der Herrscher als überlegen zu betrachten. Selbst einige Juden, die sich zuvor vorstellen konnten, die Beschneidung sein zu lassen, werden nun darauf bestehen. Wer das nicht versteht, kennt offensichtlich weder Juden noch das Judentum.

Die inhaltliche Bedeutung einer Aussage ist oft eine andere, als die Bedeutung der Aussage selbst, in ihrem Zusammenhang. Das Urteil, Beschneidung mit Körperverletzung gleichzusetzen, ist inhaltlich richtig, durfte aber trotzdem nicht gemacht werden, denn es bedeutet schlicht und einfach, dass Juden und Moslems nicht mehr in Deutschland willkommen sind – solange sie drauf bestehen, weiterhin Juden bzw. Moslems zu sein.

Dieser Post wurde von Sabine Günther korrigiert, wofür ich mich herzlich bedanke.

Kommentare, in Englisch oder in Deutsch, sind unten herzlich willkommen, insbesondere anderer Meinung. Kommentare, die ich subjektiv als rassistisch empfinde, werden nicht veröffentlicht – ich bitte die Verfasser dieser Kommentare, ihren Rassismus woanders zu äußern und mir (per Mail) einen Link zu geben.

[Englische Übersetzung beginnt / English translation begins]

Ignorance and bris

The German court ruling against ritual circumcision – outlawing it as a form of unnecessary bodily harm – shocked me. I think it’s the wrong decision, although I actually do think ritual circumcision is a form of unnecessary bodily harm.⁵ The ruling is a case of religious oppression, but this is apparently not clear to many people in Central Europe.

Before I even start, I should make something clear: although this is a very difficult issue for me, I do basically believe that any cultural practice which includes harming babies is at best questionable, usually repugnant. In my childhood, as a skeptical boy in a Jewish environment, I was already disturbed by circumcision. I wish circumcision and everything like it would cease to exist in this world, and I’m thankful for the court ruling insofar as it’s instigated discussion about this, even in Israel.⁶

Nonetheless, the ruling reveals a fundamental lack of understand of the meaning of circumcision in Judaism.⁷

Jewish circumcision – crass a practice as it may be – has, for millennia, been an important criterion for belonging; for boys, perhaps the most important. This alone says nothing to how good or bad it is, of course. It’s actually a pretty insane way to differentiate yourself from other groups, but I don’t think one can really expect much better from religion. The important thing is only the meaning of the practice for those affected by the ban.

No matter how you choose to judge it, it’s crucial to understand that the decision not to circumcise a newborn boy means, at the same time, to decide to remove him from the community you come from. An uncircumcised boy from a Jewish family, I think, will later not be able to marry a Jewish woman by Jewish religious law, even if he wishes to do so.⁸

It’s a pretty shitty situation. Those of us from a Jewish background don’t actually have the choice to let our boys decide on their own. We face the decision of either deciding that our boy can potentially be every bit as Jewish as he wants, or that he can’t.

I wish it weren’t so, but so it is. Fact is that if it were even just a little important to me to live by Jewish tradition, Germany (and Austria, and Switzerland) would no longer be places I could see myself living in. In fact, even as thoroughly secular as I am, the reanimated stench of intolerance makes me have second thoughts already. And all of this before we even touched on the history.

You see, in Judaism in particular this is a difficult, historically loaded topic. For over 2,000 years already, Jews have been confronted, again and again, with some ruler who wishes to stop their circumcisions. Because the stubborn Jews repeatedly insisted on sticking to their religion, they used to be repeatedly murdered. I don’t mean to insinuate, that Germany will return to the wholesale slaughter of Jews on this backdrop – I don’t believe that’s the case whatsoever. The point is simply that this court ruling reopens old wounds, wounds which all Jews remember well.

I also have to add that for many Jews, such attempt – attempts to get Jews to abandon their religion, and especially to get them to stop raising their children as Jews – are seen as a form of genocide. I find the comparison highly exaggerated, but I can’t change the way people feel, and I can even understand it a little; after all, this ruling is not the first time that Jews have been told they can live somewhere so long as they relinquish their religious identity.

The wish to see circumcision gone from the world, or at least one’s own land, is a fair wish to have. However, I believe this ruling will trigger one of only two reactions amongst Jews: either we’ll live somewhere else, or we’ll stay here and circumcise our sons out of spite. The Jewish culture would not have lasted this long if it did not have the reflex of seeing the survival of the culture as overriding any ruler’s decrees. I imagine that even some Jews who might previously have considered avoiding circumcision for their sons might now insist on it. If you can’t understand this, you clearly know neither Jews nor Judaism.

What you say is often something different from what it means that you said it. The ruling is correct in stating that ritual circumcision is unnecessary bodily harm. But a German court should never have said such a thing – the fact of the statement, in its context, means very simply that Jews and Muslims are no longer welcome in Germany – so long as they insist on continuing to be Jews or Muslims.

Thanks, Colin, for the suggestion that led to this post’s English title!

Comments in English and in German are most welcome, especially those disagreeing with me. However, any comment I subjectively consider racist will not be published. I ask those whose comments I do not publish to publish their comments elsewhere and email me a link.

Footnotes

1. Man kann sich aber natürlich auch fragen, ob man also nicht auch das Rauchen in der Schwangerschaft strafbar machen will, und sogar das Essen von industriell aufgezogenem Fleisch.
2. Ein Beitrag auf Englisch zum Beispiel hier von Larry Derfner.
3. Wie es im Islam ist, kann ich nicht genau sagen – es folgt hoffentlich bald ein Beitrag von einem muslimischen Freund dazu.
4. Ich kenne mich mit diesen Einzelheiten nicht aus, da ich mich nie mit der Religion identifiziert habe, aber soweit ich weiß, müsste der Junge sich dann konvertieren und auch beschneiden lassen, und würde danach noch immer für viele Juden nicht als wirklich-echt-ganz-100%-jüdisch gelten.
5. But while we’re at it, why aren’t we banning smoking during pregnancy, or even the consumption of industrially-grown meat?
6. For example, see what Larry Derfner wrote.
7. I can’t really speak for Islam, but I will hopefully soon have the pleasure of hosting a guest post by a Muslim friend on this topic.
8. I should point out that I’m not very knowledgeable about the details, mainly because I’ve never identified with the religion. But if I’m not mistaken, the boy would have to go through the process of conversion, including adult circumcision, in order to marry that way – and then many Jews would still consider him not really-truly-totally-100% Jewish.

I recently finished reading an amazing book about Israel and Jewish history, written over 20 years before I was born. The Source, by James A. Michener, is a thick tome spinning an intricate web of fictional stories spread out through the realistic history of a fictional tel¹ called Makor (Hebrew for ‘source’) near Acre, in what is now Israel. In retrospect, I probably should have kept a reading diary, because there are so many things in this book I would like to comment on.

The book begins with a frame story, which it returns to briefly again and again between short stories, each spanning a few years; the first takes place some 11 thousand years ago, then they progress through the history of Makor and the scions of one family, skipping millennia, centuries, or decades at a time, to create a coherent chain of stories ending in a young, pre-1967 Israel. The main topics are the evolution of religion and civilization, the persecution of Hebrews, and the development of modern rabbinical Judaism and later, Zionism.

I don’t know where exactly Michener got his information, but it’s evident throughout the book that he really did his research. This is history done better than real history ever could be; the narrator knows things that can’t be known, carefully drawing connections between stories that at first seem connected only because they take place in or near Makor. The early stories – where I assume Michener had to rely on intuition, creative license, and the anthropological literature of his era – are fascinating, although even without knowing much about anthropology I got the impression that his theory must be outdated; for one, the relationship he describes between male and female in the stone age is basically the same as that which was the norm throughout history before feminism. In contrast, I’ve heard many different educated assertions that the agricultural revolution radically changed this relationship in some way or another.

The storytelling itself is magnificent, and in 1,000 pages, Michener managed to better get across to me the history of the Jewish people than my rather Jewish education could in 8 years. (Of course, I also approached this book with a more positive, open attitude than I ever approached my pre-Sudbury schooling with.) All in all, I feel much enriched for having read this novel, and there are certain ideas and attitudes I grew up exposed to that I don’t think I ever properly understood before. Take the concept of “in every generation, they rise up to destroy us” (a line sung on Passover); with the Israeli fixation on the Holocaust, the strange and cruel sequence of oppression and persecution that followed Hebrews since antiquity seems to more or less have escaped me. Now, far be it from me to follow this to the conclusion that Jews are now justified in destroying or harming others, nor do I think every person should try to imagine the suffering of his ancestors’ people (i.e. “every generation should see itself as having escaped Egypt/Auschwitz”, etc.), but I’m glad I can better appreciate the very long and complex history behind these attitudes.

Now, reading about disgusting, brutal, and surprisingly varied forms of oppression throughout history was difficult, but I was surprised at the view of the 1948 war (a.k.a Nakba, or Israel’s War of Independence) presented in the book. It was so one-sidedly pro-Zionist that it made me wonder whether Michener was just trying to make sure his novel sold well, or if he was actually ill-informed. He didn’t spare any brutality elsewhere in the book. But after struggling a little with the 1948 chapter and the 1964 ending, I simply made my peace with the fact that this was a novel, i.e. a story, and a story means a narrative. The Zionist narrative is only partly true, just like the Palestinian narrative is only partly true, and I’m wiser for having had the Zionist narrative sold to me so convincingly, so beautifully.

But like other books about Israel², this one ended on a very hopeful note, in particular regarding co-existence between Jews and Arabs and Israel’s intention of being a model of human right. Obviously, 1967 and its consequences were unimaginable at the time of writing (1964), no less than Israel’s victory in 1948 was even as it was going on. But reading about a hopeful future imagined before I was born and falling so very far off the mark is always painful. And all we can do is update the hopeful imagination and work to make it come true this time.

Footnotes

1. A tel is a hill composed of layers over layers of civilization; these things are everywhere in Israel.
2. At least non-fiction Arab and Jew, by David Shipler (1986), which I highly recommend, and not only because both of my parents are quoted in it from when they were dating!

The Enlightenment achieved many things, some good, some bad. About a year ago, in a conversation, I realized that one of the good things was eliminating the role of religion in public discourse and policy in Europe. One of the bad things, perhaps, is stigmatizing spirituality in the personal sphere, an unfortunate side-effect of its elimination from the public sphere.

You see, there’s absolutely nothing wrong with people having faith in something supernatural, so long as they know their belief is their own business. In Israel, the Jewish religious establishment tied in with the state has never internalized the Enlightenment. The establishment, and the mainstream Judaism to which the secular majority belongs (together with some of the orthodox minorities) rejects the Enlightenment outright, denouncing it as “Hellenizing” and foreign.¹

This is no accident, of course, as religion provides some of the classic arguments for the Zionist project and the resulting existence of the state. And indeed, when one views Israel through a naive Judeochristian lens, it’s really pretty amazing that a Jewish state with its capital in Jerusalem exists today. This fact, particularly in isolation, has tremendous emotional power, and the state clearly cannot afford to shut up about that kind of thing.

The problem is that religion-oriented political discourse has been losing currency in the developed world for a couple of centuries now. In most of Europe it’s a thing of wacky backwards foreigners and the crazy past. That the United States re-elected George W. Bush seven years ago is evidence that in America this is still a divisive issue.

Israel is swimming backwards in this current. Where the founding generation’s Judaism was a secular nationalism with some religious symbols, religion has been creeping into politics for decades. In recent months it’s been getting positively scary. As such, it’s probably too much to hope that Israel will realize sometime soon that in today’s world, you sound like a crazy person when you claim the Bible as an authority in your favor in a dispute over land.²

And as long as hasbara goes back and forth from sounding like an attempt to change the subject to sounding like the politics of a time predating the invention of the airplane, Israel will not convince the world of anything.

I remember there used to be a load of public outcry amongst the Israeli secular and reform regarding religious coercion (kfiya datit). What ever happened to that? Is that simply a battle we’ve already lost?

Footnotes

1. Ironically, certain well-known European fascists called the Enlightenment a Jewish plot. All nationalist projects need an outside force to associate universalism and humanism with, so that they may be rejected. One cannot see all human beings as equal and at the same time consider one’s own nation especially important.
2. Consciously or not, this is using an excuse that has little direct bearing on most people’s current reality but is used to justify gross injustice towards large groups of people. As such, it is morally reprehensible and should be rejected outright.

0

Noam Sheizaf at +972 Magazine brought to my attention a Jerusalem Post editoral which made a few red lights in my head go off (bolding mine):

ISRAEL IS the only country in the world where Jews are the majority. Only here can they enjoy the advantages of living in a state whose language, holidays and national symbols are their own.

Let’s leave aside the truly objectionable stuff in this editorial and focus on the linguistic part. I love Hebrew, in fact, it’s my favorite of Israel’s national symbols. I would like to point out how ludicrous it is for the Post to claim Jewish “ownership” over this, or any, language.

I

Before anything else, reflect for a moment on the fact that the majority of Jews worldwide do not speak Modern Israeli Hebrew and would probably call another language (usually American English) their own.

II

The nation is a relatively new construct, dating back just to the end of the 18th century. Naming official national languages was part of the rise of nationalism in Europe. It was part of the creation of a national identity — not artificial, but put together of existing pieces.

To the linguistically uninitiated, it might seem natural that every nation-state has a language “of their own”. German for the Germans, Swedish for the Swedes, Chinese for the Chinese. But languages are actually really bad at sticking to international borders. The Swiss speak Swiss German, which is no more similar to Germany’s Standard German than is Dutch. Standard Swedish is so similar to Norwegian and Danish that the three might be considered dialects of one language, and can be understood mutually with a bit of effort. “Chinese” is not even one language; usually “Chinese” means Standard Mandarin, the official language used by the People’s Republic, but the term includes the many many languages spoken in mainland China, even though many of them only have a writing system in common, remaining unintelligible to one another.

In the case of Modern Israeli Hebrew it should be especially clear that there is not a 1:1 relationship between (Jewish) nation and (Hebrew) language. Modern Hebrew has taken on European structure in almost all areas of grammar (with some very notable exceptions), since those who revitalized it were speakers of European languages. The bulk of Israeli slang is comprised of Arabic loanwords such as ahla and sababa. And the language is spoken by non-Jews as well; the Arabic of Israeli Arabs is so full of Hebrew that efforts are underway to refresh the community’s Arabic vocabulary.

III

Nonetheless, Modern Hebrew is the result of a conscious effort of will, and one might insist that it is an exceptionally national language. After all, the Zionist made a real, and apparently successful, effort to revive the language of Jewish scripture.

But in fact, even those parts of Modern Hebrew considered “pure Hebrew” — the parts attested in the Bible and other ancient texts — are unlikely to be in any way pure or belong entirely to any ethnic group. Quite simply, no language ever does. The ancient Israelites did not live in isolation, and were surrounded by different peoples with different cultures and different languages. Inevitably, the language they spoke was affected by it, and likely eagerly assimilated elements of the gentiles’ languages, just as all languages have always done everywhere. (but see NOTE below)

IV

The suggestion that the Arabs have no place within our state, that they are a foreign entity that does not belong, is ludicrous and incredibly offensive. It is even ludicrous if you think there’s a god-given right for Jews to be in what was once Cana’an. Modern Israel (and its language) have always had non-Jewish residents (and speakers), most of them Arabs. At no point was the pre-state Yishuv isolated from Arabic culture. Israel has co-existed with Arabs, sometimes more peacefully than at other times, from the very start. Perhaps oddly, I find myself startled to see Israelis railing against Arabic culture as though it were a scary foreign influence. To me, hummus is the national dish, and even those who mistakenly think it’s falafel can’t deny there’s a bit of Arab in us.

Incidentally, sababa shel hummus, roughly “nice hummus”, is a phrase with an [arguably] European structure (cf. English “quite a day” and “hell of a guy” ), made up of two Arabic-loaned content words connected by one Hebrew function word [shel, “of”]. And what phrase could possibly be more Israeli?

I feel there is a general point here about Jewish culture – before, during, and after Diaspora. Before Diaspora, the Israelites were a part of the fabric of the Ancient Near East, going about the typical Ancient Near East national pass-times of worshiping, building, farming and conquering, maintaining a distinct culture and very distinct religion but not without influence from the languages, cultures and religions of their neighbors (who were all influenced in return, and by one another as well). In Diaspora, the Jews of every area developed their own cultural and linguistic remix. The most well-known resulting languages are Yiddish and Ladino, but they are not nearly the only ones. I recently learned that a small Jewish community in northwestern India developed a dialect of Marathi: Judæo-Marathi, still spoken in India and Israel.

And indeed, after Diaspora, the state of Israel has been a cultural patchwork quilt, taking patterns and colors from the many places its residents came from, while remaining firmly grounded in the political and cultural reality of the Middle East, which we are now undoubtedly part of.

V

One could argue, and perhaps one should, that in all of these cases the borrowing group made the borrowings its own, both by choosing them and by integrating them in a unique way (i.e. fitting loanwords to native phonology and morphology, which Modern Hebrew excels at). But there is nothing particularly Jewish about living in cultural isolation, nor is it a particularly sensible proposition that Modern Hebrew belongs exclusively to Israeli Jews. The Israeli Arabs and Palestinians have been there since before Hebrew was revitalized, Hebrew has been in contact with them ever since, and whether the Jerusalem Post likes it or not, the Arabic language and Palestinian culture are part of the fabric of the Israeli quilt.

Note

Unfortunately I am unfamiliar with Ancient Hebrew and neighboring languages of the same period, such as Philistine, Phoenician, Moabite, Hittite, and Ancient Egyptian, and can’t give examples for loanwords off the top of my head like I can with English and Modern Hebrew. I also don’t know any good source to check (though I’d be eager to get one). But I’ve certainly seen mention on Wikipedia and on Israeli linguistics blogs of loanwords from neighboring languages into Ancient Hebrew, and this is not surprising in the slightest. It would be surprising if it were the other way around.

Related reading tip

Jerry Haber of the Magnes Zionist is writing a fascinating series of articles about “Israel’s ‘Arab Problem'”. Part one, part two. I read them cross-posted on +972 Magazine, which is becoming a more and more central source for my reading…