Shlomo Sand - How I Stopped Being a Jew

First published in English by Verso 2014
Translation David Fernbach 2014
First published as Comment jai cess dtre juif
Flammarion 2013
All rights reserved

The moral rights of the author have been asserted

Verso
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Verso is the imprint of New Left Books

ISBN-13: 978-1-78168-614-0 (HB)
eISBN-13: 978-1-78168-615-7 (US)
eISBN-13: 978-1-78168-698-0 (UK)

British Library Cataloguing in Publication Data
A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

Sand, Shlomo, author.
[Matai ve-ekh hadalti li-heyot Yehudi. English]
How I stopped being a Jew / Shlomo Sand ;
translated by David Fernbach.
pages cm
ISBN 978-1-78168-614-0 (hardback) ISBN 978-1-78168-615-7 () ISBN 978-1-78168-698-0 ()
1. JewsIdentity. 2. National characteristics, Israeli.
3. Sand, Shlomo. 4. Judaism and stateIsrael. I.
Title.
DS143.S228154 2014
305.8924dc23

2014013306

v3.1

In memory of Eric J. Hobsbawm

In terms of suffering, I believe that the extreme human situations today are no longer Jewish ones.

Romain Gary, Le judasme nest pas une question de sang, 1970

The main line of argument developed in this essay is bound to appear illegitimate to more than one reader, not to say repugnant. It will be rejected out of hand by many people who are determined to define themselves as Jews despite being non-religious. Others will see me simply as an infamous traitor racked by self-hatred. Consistent Judeophobes have characterized the very question of self-definition as impossible or even absurd, seeing Jews as belonging always to a different race. Both these groups maintain that a Jew is a Jew, and that there is no way a person can escape an identity given at birth. Jewishness is perceived in both cases as an immutable and monolithic essence that cannot be modified.

In the early twenty-first century, from reading newspapers, magazines and books, I do not think it exaggerated to maintain that Jews are too often presented as bearers of particular hereditary character traits or brain cells that distinguish them from other human beings, in the same way as Africans are distinguished from Europeans by their skin colour. And just as it is impossible for Africans to shed their skins, so too are Jews unable to renounce their essence.

The state of which I am a citizen, when it conducts a census of its inhabitants, defines my nationality as Jew, and calls itself the state of the Jewish people. In other words, its founders and legislators considered this state as being the collective property of the Jews of the world, whether believers or not, rather than as an institutional expression of the democratic sovereignty of the body of citizens who live in it.

The State of Israel defines me as a Jew, not because I express myself in a Jewish language, hum Jewish songs, eat Jewish food, write Jewish books or carry out any Jewish activity. I am classified as a Jew because this state, after having researched my origins, has decided that I was born of a Jewish mother, herself Jewish because my grandmother was likewise, thanks to (or because of) my great-grandmother, and so on through the chain of generations until the dawn of time.

If chance should have had it that only my father was considered a Jew, while in the eyes of Israeli law my mother was non-Jewish, I would have been registered as an Austrian; I happen to have been born in a displaced persons camp in the town of Linz, just after the Second World War. I could indeed, in this case too, have claimed Israeli citizenship, but the fact that I spoke, swore, taught, and wrote in Hebrew, and studied throughout my youth in Israeli schools, would have been of no avail, and throughout my life I would have been considered legally as being Austrian by nationality.

Fortunately or unfortunately as the case may be, depending on how one sees this question, my mother was identified as Jewish on her arrival in Israel at the end of 1948, and the description Jew was added to my identity card. Moreover, and no matter how paradoxical it might appear, according to Israeli law just as according to Judaic law (Halakhah), I cannot stop being a Jew. This is not within my power of free choice. My nationality could be changed in the records of the Jewish state only in the exceptional case of my conversion to another religion.

The problem is, I dont believe in a supreme being. Apart from a brief fit of mysticism at age twelve, I have always believed that man created God rather than the other way around an invention that has always seemed to me one of the most questionable, fascinating and deadly wrought by human society. As a result, I find myself tied hand and foot, caught in the trap of my crazy identity. I dont envisage converting to Christianity, not merely because of the past cruelty of the Inquisition and the bloody Crusades, but quite simply because I dont believe in Jesus Christ, Son of God. Nor do I envisage converting to Islam, and not just on account of the traditional Sharia that allows a man, if he feels it necessary, to marry four women, whereas this privilege is refused to women. I have instead a more prosaic reason: I dont believe Muhammad was a prophet. Nor will I become a follower of Hinduism, as I disapprove of any tradition that sacralizes castes, even in an indirect and attenuated fashion. Im even incapable of becoming a Buddhist, as I feel it impossible to transcend death and do not believe in the reincarnation of souls.

I am secular and an atheist, even if my limited brain finds it hard to grasp the infinity of the universe, given the tight and terrible limits of life here on Earth. The principles that guide my thoughts my beliefs, if I dare use this word have always been anthropocentric. In other words, the central place is held by human beings and not by any kind of higher power that supposedly directs them. The great religions, even the most charitable and least fanatic, are theocentric, which means that the will and designs of God stand above the lives of men, their needs, their aspirations, their dreams and their frailties.

Modern history is full of oddities and irony. Just as the ethnoreligious nationalism that emerged in the early nineteenth century forced Heinrich Heine to convert to Christianity in order to be recognized as German, and Polish nationalism in the 1930s refused to see my father as completely Polish if he would not become a Catholic, so the Zionists of the early twenty-first century, both inside and outside Israel, absolutely reject the principle of a civil Israeli nationality and recognize only a Jewish one. And this Jewish nationality can be acquired only by the almost impossible path of a religious act: all individuals who wish to see Israel as their national state must either be born of a Jewish mother, or else satisfy a long and wearisome itinerary of conversion to Judaism in conformity with the rules of Judaic law, even if they are resolutely atheist.

In the State of Israel, any definition of Jewishness is deeply deceptive, imbued with bad faith and arrogance. At the time these lines were written, a number of immigrant workers fathers and mothers of children born and raised in Israel applied in despair to the Chief Rabbinate to convert to Judaism, but found their request rejected out of hand. They wanted to join the Jewish nation to avoid being sent back to the hell from which theyd fled, not to satisfy a belief in the Jews as a chosen people.