In this week’s eSkeptic, Tim Callahan reviews R. D. Gold’s book entitled Bondage of the Mind: How Old Testament Fundamentalism Shackles the Mind and Enslaves the Spirit (Aldus Books, 2008, ISBN13 978-0979640605).
Fundamental Truths
by Tim Callahan
Most of us involved with issues of critical thinking are accustomed to dealing with what we think of as fundamentalism, which implies specifically Christian fundamentalism. Bondage of the Mind deals, specifically, with Jewish fundamentalism. Just as evangelicalism, and particularly evangelical fundamentalism, is a potent force in Christianity, so too is modern Orthodox Judaism a potent force among Jews today.
Orthodox Judaism, like fundamentalist Christianity, claims to be the only valid form of Judaism. In the process of evangelizing Jews, particularly Jewish youth, it refers to Jews who switch their allegiance from Reform Judaism to Orthodox Judaism as returnees. For those unacquainted with the three ideological branches of Judaism — Orthodox, Reform and Conservative — the origins of the split lie in the Jewish Enlightenment of the 19th century. Until the Jewish Enlightenment, most European thinkers viewed the Jews of Europe as hopelessly backward both intellectually and culturally. The encapsulation of the Jews, their segregation from the surrounding Christian society (resulting from centuries of intermittent persecution) had resulted in their intellectual isolation. While European society at large had been effectively secularized in the 1700s, in part as a reaction to the horrors of the religious wars (particularly the Thirty Years War), Jews had largely remained what they were in the Middle Ages.
The spread of democratic ideologies in the 19th century led to a repudiation of anti-Semitism among at least some of the intellectuals of that day, as well as a reduction in legal isolation of the Jews. There was a resulting reaction to these reforms among Jewish intellectuals: the Jewish Enlightenment. Jews began to question the excessive importance laid upon such practices as the dietary laws and the peculiarities of dress affected by the encapsulated Jews. The end result was the repudiation of these peculiarities among those who became reformed Jews. Reformed Jews also engaged and integrated into the greater society around them. The origin of Jewish intellectualism and the impact of Jewish philosophers, mathematicians, scientists, artists, classical musicians and others — an impact out of all proportion to their numbers — dates from this 19th century enlightenment.
Some Jews among those in the reform movement felt that the degree of assimilation had gone too far and made a point of returning to such practices as maintaining the dietary laws and the study of Hebrew, though they did not return to the traditional peculiarities of dress. They became the Conservative Jews. Those Jews who did not engage the greater society, who in fact resisted all such efforts, hardened their resolve to retain all the outward signs of separation, became the Orthodox Jews. We might compare this movement to the Catholic counter-reformation, which was a reaction to Protestantism. Another apt comparison from the Christian experience would be the reaction of those who became fundamentalists to the wholehearted liberal acceptance of modern scientific views, particularly to the theory of evolution, among American Protestants.
For many decades fundamentalist Christians did not engage the general Protestant community and maintained in separation what they saw as the purity of their belief system. However, in the wake of the social upheavals of the 1960s, fundamentalists began to actively proselytize the general population, particularly the young. By the 1980s they had, of course, become a potent force not only in their various denominations — such the Southern Baptists, where fundamentalists ousted liberals from the leadership — but in politics as well. Bondage of the Mind deals with the active proselytizing of Orthodox rabbis, who specifically target the youth of Reformed Jewry. In his examination of the thoughts, goals and tactics of resurgent Jewish fundamentalism, Gold focuses on three tracts commonly used by Orthodox proselytizers: On Judaism by Rabbi Emanuel Feldman, Choose Life by Rabbi Ezriel Tauber, and Living Up … to the Truth by Rabbi David Gottlieb. In the latter two titles one can see the implicit assumption of moral superiority by the Orthodox rabbis: If you accept my hyper-religious view and abandon your secularism, you will be choosing life and truth. If you disagree, you’re obviously deliberately choosing lies and death...
...This book is thoroughly researched, well written and easily readable. Bondage of the Mind is R. D. Gold’s first book. It is an auspicious beginning.
Stumble It!
By Tom Segev
Israel's Declaration of Independence states that the Jewish people arose in the Land of Israel and was exiled from its homeland. Every Israeli schoolchild is taught that this happened during the period of Roman rule, in 70 CE. The nation remained loyal to its land, to which it began to return after two millennia of exile. Wrong, says the historian Shlomo Zand, in one of the most fascinating and challenging books published here in a long time. There never was a Jewish people, only a Jewish religion, and the exile also never happened - hence there was no return. Zand rejects most of the stories of national-identity formation in the Bible, including the exodus from Egypt and, most satisfactorily, the horrors of the conquest under Joshua. It's all fiction and myth that served as an excuse for the establishment of the State of Israel, he asserts.
According to Zand, the Romans did not generally exile whole nations, and most of the Jews were permitted to remain in the country. The number of those exiled was at most tens of thousands. When the country was conquered by the Arabs, many of the Jews converted to Islam and were assimilated among the conquerors. It follows that the progenitors of the Palestinian Arabs were Jews. Zand did not invent this thesis; 30 years before the Declaration of Independence, it was espoused by David Ben-Gurion, Yitzhak Ben-Zvi and others.
If the majority of the Jews were not exiled, how is it that so many of them reached almost every country on earth? Zand says they emigrated of their own volition or, if they were among those exiled to Babylon, remained there because they chose to. Contrary to conventional belief, the Jewish religion tried to induce members of other faiths to become Jews, which explains how there came to be millions of Jews in the world. As the Book of Esther, for example, notes, "And many of the people of the land became Jews; for the fear of the Jews fell upon them."
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Zand quotes from many existing studies, some of which were written in Israel but shunted out of the central discourse. He also describes at length the Jewish kingdom of Himyar in the southern Arabian Peninsula and the Jewish Berbers in North Africa. The community of Jews in Spain sprang from Arabs who became Jews and arrived with the forces that captured Spain from the Christians, and from European-born individuals who had also become Jews.
The first Jews of Ashkenaz (Germany) did not come from the Land of Israel and did not reach Eastern Europe from Germany, but became Jews in the Khazar Kingdom in the Caucasus. Zand explains the origins of Yiddish culture: it was not a Jewish import from Germany, but the result of the connection between the offspring of the Kuzari and Germans who traveled to the East, some of them as merchants.
http://www.haaretz.com/hasen/spages/959229.html
This is a book review? No, it's not, it's an ad for the book and I object to having links to order the book on this site.
Anyway, I removed the one link that said "order now", but left the other link to the book publisher in.
Meanwhile, I'm happy to post any other book reviews here, especially original reviews of books having to do with Canadian sovereignty issues, if people submit them.
All the really good bits of the review are left out of the post:
"Other examples of reprehensible behavior on the part of the Orthodox revealed by Gold involve Orthodox authorities shielding rabbis known to have sexually abused teenagers and children from exposure and prosecution (pp. 160–162). Considering that Roman Catholic authorities did likewise with respect to pedophile priests, one can see that the problem is endemic in religious authority structures forced to confront immoral and unethical behavior on the part of their functionaries. Of course, this is not a problem of religious power structures alone. What it points up, however, is that all power structures need checks and balances and must be accountable for their actions by the authority of the people. The problem with religious power structures is often — and this seems particularly true, considering what God has to say, of Orthodox Judaism — that they refuse to submit, often with a certain self-righteousness, to outside oversight. This also points up the utter bankruptcy of Orthodox Judaism’s claims to moral superiority."
Yuppers! an dat's da point!
That and much of what we take as truth is hokum.
When investigation and critism is road blocked it is past time to protest, not acquiesce
In short it is just Russian Communist propaganda as valid as CO2 AGW theory.
Well! Here we have it! Rational thought. Sheesh!
Fundamentalism in religion, any religion = insanity.