Response to an Anti-Zionist

by Andreas Wittenstein

A recent letter in the Point Reyes Light, while purportedly not anti-Jewish, offered misinformed racist excuses denying Jews' claim to Zion.

The anti-Zionist chiefly argues that "the vast majority" of Israeli and other Jews are Ashkenazic "white, blue-eyed European racists" who are racially non-Jewish. Chet Seligman's response (June 6 Letters) refutes this, proving most Israeli and diaspora Jews are genetically patrilineally Semitic (though Jews reckon matrilineally). The anti-Zionist's argument is also incorrect on other levels. Actually, the majority of Jews in Israel are Sephardic "olive, Mediterranean" non-racists who are religiously Jewish.

60% of Israeli Jews are Sephardic, which the anti-Zionist equates with genuinely Semitic "black Arab Jews". To Jews, Sephardic ("Spanish" in Hebrew) and Ashkenazic ("German") are not racial terms, but denote geographically distinct groups of Jews whose cultures, including religious rituals and languages, diverged over 2000 years of exile. They speak different dialects of Hebrew (a Semitic sister-language to Arabic dialects), plus different vernaculars from pre-ghetto times: Judezmo/Ladino (medieval Spanish) for Sephardic Jews, Yiddish (medieval German) for Ashkenazic Jews. Sephardic is Israel's official dialect.

If you judge people by skin and eye colors, blue eyes are equally common among Sephardic and Ashkenazic Jews, and most Israeli Jews are "olive-skinned" like their Mediterranean neighbors, including Arabs. Other Israeli Jews have "white", "black", or "yellow" skin.

Though host to woeful inequities of class and religion, Israel is uniquely nonracist. Where other states guarantee citizenship to their nation's descendants (to some purity fraction), Israel's supreme court explicitly rules Israel's law of return nonhereditary. Even pure-blooded Jewish descendants who follow another religion have no Israeli citizenship rights. But Israel welcomes all religious Jews equally regardless of ancestry.

A Jewish race is a lie imposed by non-Jews seeking easy ways to oppress and exterminate Jews. To Jews, Jew denotes not shared ancestry, but a shared God, Torah (teaching), and culture. The Bible explicitly includes as Jews all and only those who endeavor to follow God's commandments. Prominent Biblical Jews from earliest times, including Abraham, Sarah, Rebecca, Rachel, Leah, Bilhah, Zilpah, Zipporah, and Ruth, were converts. Children of Jewish mothers, being raised Jewish, are presumed Jews, but considered non-Jews if they follow another religion.

Jews are mostly Semitic because Jews never proselytize, even actively discouraging potential converts because Judaism is so burdensome. Nevertheless, medieval Europe passed laws prohibiting conversion to Judaism, and for nearly a millennium confined Jews to ghettos and forced Semites (papal Canon 68) to wear distinctive clothing to prevent religious contamination. In contrast, Jews were repeatedly converted to Christianity under force of rape, torture, execution, and expulsion.

Northern European Jews assimilated physically anyway, because of the widespread policy of pogroms, in which their hosts plundered ghettos, massacred Jewish men, and raped Jewish women. Thus in a grotesque sense, the children of pogroms were, as the anti-Zionist wrote, "converts for political reasons".

Zionists want one tiny state with a non-persecuted Jewish majority. Christians and Muslims have many states. Denying Jews this right is anti-Jewish. Zion, the only such home Jews have known, is theirs again, with a majority for now, but they're still persecuted, even from distant Marin.

Let's focus on bringing peace to the Middle East instead of promoting racist hatred.

—from our July 2002 Newsletter, reprinted from the 13 June 2002 issue of the Point Reyes Light newspaper

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