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Thoughts on the Torah by Oxford Theoretical Physicist Prof. Douglas Abraham

Thu, 26 Jan 2017 11:07:00 AM

The Torah reading of the portion of Lech Lecha in Genesis begins with Abraham leaving Ur Kasdim and venturing into the desert. During this time, he made a profound discovery by observing the heavens; this is described by Adolf Jellinek (1821-1893) in his collection: Beit Ha-Midrash (1853-1878, 6 volumes):

When Abraham was young, he sought to serve the Highest. When the sun sank, and the stars came forth, he said: “These are the gods!” But the dawn came and the stars could be seen no longer, and then he said, “I will not worship these, since they are no gods.” Thereupon the sun came forth, and he spoke, “This is my god, him I will extoll”. But then the sun set, and he said, “He is no god” and, beholding the moon, he called her his god to whom he would pay divine homage. Then the moon was obscured, and he cried out: “This, too, is no god! There is One who sets them all in motion.”

For those who have experienced it, observing the night sky in the desert far from artificial illumination is extraordinary: one sees the sky apparently rotating overhead as the night evolves about the axis of the pole star, over one’s shoulder the milky way is doing the same thing and overhead the stars hang down like cotton wool.

The text on the Creation, Genesis 1.3, states: G-d said “Let there be light”; and there was light. Then, almost at the end of the Creation, on the sixth day, G-d created man and made mankind trustee of creation. The author of Psalm 8, verse 7 declares: You have made him master over Your handiwork, laying the world at his feet. On the one hand, trusteeship suggests trying to understand what one is entrusted with. On the other, Koheleth (Ecclesiastes), 1:9, states that: there is nothing new under the sun. This is indeed correct; creation is complete and on Shabbat we are celebrating the fact. But what Koheleth does not discuss is whether we have seen, let alone appreciated or understood, the half or indeed any fixed proportion of the created world. So, study it! Thus we are prompted to ask the question: what is light? The creation did not reveal this. Rather, it is a clear statement about the attributes of G-d in the Maimonides sense.

Let me say at this point that arguments and questions of this sort could be made about many fields, such as social matters, aesthetics, medicine. I chose physical science simply because I have spent some years studying applied maths and theoretical science in general. Returning to light, in the second half of the 19^th century, extraordinary discoveries were made about this question by Faraday and Maxwell, a timely fusion of experimental and theoretical ideas which enabled Maxwell to propose equations which governed the variation in space and time of electric and magnetic fields. These equations allow wave-like solutions: light is an electromagnetic wave and from this we understand reflection, refraction interference, colour. Radio communication requires waves of longer wavelength. It provides the possibility of long distance communication to enlighten people, rescue from disaster and so on. This is the inclination to good, yetzer tov. On the other hand, one can use radar to flatten cities by aerial bombardment or hard X-rays to trigger thermonuclear weapons, a prime example of inclination to evil (yetzer hara). So, studying nature has a distinct Janus property.

The combination of Newtonian mechanics (from the 17^th century) and the electromagnetic theory reduces the entire universe to a clockwork-like problem. Once you know the initial condition, you have not only the world evolution for all time, but also its entire past; freedom of will is inconsistent with this. So where is the solution of this conundrum?

The end of the 19^th century was one of great technical success. But there were nagging problems, one being the wavelength distribution of the electromagnetic waves emitted by hot bodies, the cavity radiation. This was sorted out in an empirical way by Planck, who had been advised earlier to stick to the violin, rather than to participate in the wrapping up the odd loose end in the understanding of the physical world! Then in 1905 came Einstein, who turned the description of the physical world on its head. But before embarking on that, let me quote the preface of a recent textbook on Electromagnetic theory, by Andrew Zangwill:

The search for reason ends at the shore of the known; on the immense expanse beyond it only the ineffable can glide.

From Abraham Joshua Herschel: Man is not alone (1951).

The quotation above from Torah is in the ineffable. The discussion about light is from the first part. As J. von Neumann, a Hungarian Jewish mathematical physicist active from 1930 to 1955, put it, to answer a question such as “what is light?”, we must construct a model. This cannot deal with issues such as what was there “before creation” and after the world, as we know it, ends. So this entire intellectual process has intrinsic limitations.

We now return to the millennial demise of nineteenth century physics. Now, back to Einstein; he threw a spanner in the notion of electromagnetic waves in the “aether”, an undefined medium of propagation. One of the things he proposed is that instead of light being wavelike, it is actually particle-like, some of the time, whence the quip “Don’t look, wave; look, particle”. This solved Planck’s problem and pointed the way to the intellectual revolution of quantum mechanics, from1924/5 onwards to the present day. If you make a measurement at an atomic scale, there are in general many possible outcomes and all you “know” is the probability of any particular outcome. In this sense, there are very many possible evolutions and the “clockwork” model fails. Thus, at this level, there is no intellectual conflict between freedom of will and basic physics. Detailed examination of what G-d created reveals an utterly incredible world!

Rabbi Eli very kindly drew my attention to two works in the Chabbad library by Chaim Halevy Donin, in which, amongst other things, the author reveals his enthusiasm for Ecclesiastes. This book repeatedly points out the futility and falseness of life and makes a number of highly provocative remarks (his views on women in particular) to wind the reader up in preparation for the final remark:

The sum of the matter, when all is said and done: Revere G-d and observe his commandments! For this applies to all mankind.

This, of course invites the corollary: if one were to apply Reverence to ultimately pointless (in the sense of Koheleth) activities, then they might well acquire a point. In passing, they make a Crime of Galileo impossible within the Jewish framework (ideally!).

But recall von Neumann’s warning: we are building models, playing a game, saying nothing of an ineffable character in the sense of Herschel. I would like to end with an anecdote (a true one!):

An out-of–work (or rather, a between jobs) medical malpractice lawyer has decided to challenge himself by offering a course on cutting-edge astrophysics to Rabbinical students at Yeshiva University in New York. The students do the assignments with apparent ease and ask probing questions. At the end of the final class, he asks:

Did I convince you?

Reply:

Not exactly, but we loved your arguments.

A little healthy scepticism is a Good Thing!

(as Sellars and Yeatman of “1066 and All That” might have put it).

Pauline Malkiel 'Hebrew Printing in Venice in the 16th Century & the Valmadonna Trust Library'

Thu, 15 Dec 2016 1:49:00 PM

A few words about how the Library began. Mr. Lunzer’s wife came from Italy, with family connections to a village in Piedmont by the name of Valmadonna. His interest in the Jews of Italy – which he visited many times – was aroused by passing through little places like Ferrara, Ancona, Fano, Sabbionetta, Pesaro, Rimini and Cremona, and reading about the wanderings of the Soncino family of printers. His wife’s father had started a small collection of Italian books, and Mr. Lunzer, a diamond merchant, took over the custodianship of these books, which had been hidden away in a cellar during the War. Gradually collecting Italian books became a priority, together with books printed in Amsterdam, which were readily available during the 1950s. He became an avid reader of bibliographies, with which he spent many a sleepless night, and encouraged by his wife and by his great friend and mentor Chimen Abramsky, he attended auctions of the Missionary Society, Sotheby’s, and the Sassoon sales, and made important purchases during the seventies and eighties as well as acquiring the Libraries of the Ferrara and Gibraltar communities during the seventies. When I came on the scene in 1982 many of these books and their duplicates were stored in Hatton Garden and the most valuable – the manuscripts and Incunables – in the vault at IDC. Gradually, as the collection developed, all the books were moved to Fairport, Mr. Lunzer’s house overlooking Hampstead Heath Extension. The Venice collection, comprising the largest part of the Italian collection with the exception of Livorno printing, numbers 1,280 records, of which 114 items were printed by Daniel Bomberg.

The beginnings of Hebrew printing and the ascent of Venice.

The first Hebrew books to be printed after the invention of the printing press in Mainz by Johannes Gutenberg were known as Incunables (“from the cradle”), starting in Rome around 1469, and in Spain and Portugal until the Expulsions in 1492 and 1497 respectively. In the early 16^th century Hebrew presses were set up in Italy, the Ottoman Empire, and Central and Eastern Europe. In Italy Gershom b. Moses Soncino, whose family had printed Incunables in Italy in the 15^th century under the patronage of the Sforzas, became the first to print there in the 16^th century. In 1502 Gershom was given permission by the Duke of Fano to set up a press in Fano, where he printed a series of small Latin books in 1502 and a few Hebrew books in 1503. Between 1502 and 1526, when he left Italy for Salonika and Constantinople, he had printed approx. 66-68 Hebrew books in around 10 different towns as well as about 95 Latin, Italian and Greek books of high quality, many of them with beautiful borders and woodcuts.

Venice became the foremost city in the printing world in the 16^th century. Aldus Manutius was the first printer to use Hebrew letters, but it was with the arrival of Daniel Bomberg, a non-Jew from Antwerp, that Venice first achieved prominence. He printed first a Latin Psalterium in 1515, and soon after received the right to print Hebrew books from the Venetian Senate and established his printing house. He printed on quality paper and in beautiful type, and over the next 40 years (till 1548/49) his press produced over 200-250 titles, all of the highest quality and taste, encompassing liturgy, Talmud, Halakhah, philosophy and grammatical works. These include the first Rabbinic Bible (1516-17), the Jerusalem Talmud (1523-24), the Siddur of the Aleppo rite (Aram Sova), printed by Bomberg in 2 parts in 1527, numbering 817 + 7 folios and of which no complete copy exists. JLwas determined to lay hands on every fragment he could and the very substantial Val copy contributed to a facsimile edition published in Jerusalem by Yad Harav Nissim in 2008. Bomberg printed the first Karaite book – the Siddur of 1528-29, and beautiful quarto and folio editions of the Bible, but he is best known for his first edition of the complete Babylonian Talmud in 1519/20- 1523 (the Talmud that King Henry VIII ordered from Italy to facilitate his divorce from Catherine of Aragon). This printing was a major accomplishment considering that almost all of his publications were produced from manuscripts and that the art of Hebrew printing was still in its infancy, and his typographical excellence has never been surpassed. Bomberg’s Talmud, with its continuous pagination from beginning to end, established the standard followed by all subsequent editions to this day. Together with Cornelius Adelkind, the manager of his shop, Daniel Bomberg employed a large staff of scholars, and assistants to deal with sales and exports of his books. There were editors and proofreaders such as Isaiah Parnas (who ended up as an apostate), while the French engraver Guillaume le Be provided six different Hebrew fonts for the press.

Bomberg was succeeded in the mid-16^th century by five other gentile printers of Hebrew books, primarily Giustinian and Bragadin. In the smaller press of the dei Farri brothers, assisted by Cornelius Adelkind, around 15 Hebrew books were printed in 1544. The Jewish printer Meir b. Jacob Parenzo, who had worked at Bomberg’s press, printed five books independently at the print shop of Carlo Quirino, from 1546 to 1548, with his printer’s mark of a seven-branched Menorah. These included Meshal ha-Kadmoni, a book of animal fables for moral edification containing eighty fine woodcut illustrations. Marco Antonio Giustiniani, also assisted by Cornelius Adelkind, published several important Talmud tractates between 1546 and 1551, containing the cross-references and indices of Joshua Boaz, which became part of the standard Talmud of today. Other works produced by Giustinian in 1545 were Zevah Pesah and Nachmanides’ commentary on the Torah, many of his title pages bearing his distinctive printer’s device representing the Temple.

Giustinian came into conflict with Alvise Bragadin over the printing of Maimonides’ Mishneh Torah, both publishing rival editions in 1550, the former printing unauthorized glosses. This led to a papal review and to Pope Julius III’s decree of August 22, 1553, ordering the confiscation and destruction of the Babylonian and Jerusalem Talmuds. There had been previous book burnings of medieval manuscripts and Incunables in Spain and Portugal under the Inquisition at the end of the 15^th century. Earlier still, at the latter end of the Crusades, the Talmud was condemned by the Pope and confiscated in Paris in 1240. Twenty-four wagon-loads of Hebrew books were burned at Paris in 1242. Following Pope Julius III’s decree in August 1553 a vast number of Giustinian’s tractates were destroyed in the infamous book burnings that took place in October in St. Mark’s Square. An eye-witness states that over one thousand complete copies of the Talmud were burned at Venice alone, besides hundreds of other books, and this was followed by public burnings of Hebrew books all over Italy and the Papal States. After the book burnings in St. Mark’s Square the Pope resorted to censorship of Talmudic literature or liturgical passages deemed to be blasphemous, often carried out by Jewish apostates such as Vittorio Eliano. A modified Index of prohibited books came out in Venice in 1564, including books by the non-Jewish authors Paul Fagius (an apostate) and Sebastian Muenster.

Hebrew printing ceased in Venice for over ten years after Giustinian closed his press in 1552, after which printing resumed in 1563 under Alvise Bragadin, assisted by Meir Parenzo. Other printers at this time were Giorgio di Cavalli, with his printer’s mark of an elephant bearing a turret, who, assisted by an able Jewish staff, printed over twenty Hebrew books from 1565 to 1567, beginning with the Arba’ah Turim and ending with Ashkenaz and Polish rite Mahzorim. Giovanni Gryphio, his printer’s mark the family emblem of a griffin, printed less than ten Hebrew books between 1560 and 1567, starting with an Aleppo rite Mahzor, after which he ceased printing due to the competition between printers. Bragadin, with his printer’s mark of three crowns, symbolizing royalty, priesthood and Torah, produced the first edition of Joseph Caro’s Shulhan Arukh in 1565, and a new edition of the Mishneh Torah, with Joseph Caro’s commentary, in 1574-5. Both Parenzo and Bragadin died in the mid-1570s, but their families remained associated in printing well into the 18^th century. Alvise Bragadin’s printing house was active for almost 150 years. During the entire 18^th century his sons printed in association with the Foa family of printers, and his printing house amalgamated with Vendramin in the second half of the century. Another family of printers, the Zanetti’s, was active in Venice from 1564 onwards, the most prolific being Daniel Zanetti who published more than 60 titles between 1596 and 1608.

The press of Giovanni di Gara, who had worked for Daniel Bomberg and is regarded as his heir, printed over 270 books, primarily in Hebrew and covering all Jewish literature except the Talmud, between 1565 and 1611. An order was issued by the Venice Senate in 1571 forbidding Jews to be employed as typesetters, which led to a drop in standards. Di Gara’s Jewish assistants were Asher Parenzo, brother of Meir, Samuel Archivolti, whose small crown (“the crown of a good name surpassing them all”) occasionally appeared on the title page; Israel Zifroni and his son Daniel, Leone Modena, and Isaac Gershon of Safed. From 1579 to 1600 Bragadin and di Gara worked together. In 1609 di Gara, together with Israel Zifroni, published a beautiful, lavishly illustrated Haggadah in 3 editions, the Hebrew text in the centre of the page and the translations in the outer columns - in Judeo-Italian for Italian Jewry, Yiddish for Ashkenazi Jews, and Ladino, for Sephardim. The illustrations in this Haggadah were completely new and became a basis for future editions. This was the first printing of Ladino in Venice. Yiddish or Judeo-German had been printed there as early as 1548, and the liturgies printed in Venice represent the rites of the Spanish and Portuguese Jews, Ashkenazi, Italian, Romaniot, Karaite, and the Jews of Aleppo and Corfu.

After di Gara, printing in Venice revived in the early 17^th century under Giovanni Cajon (c.1614-1623), followed by Calleoni from 1621-1657, both of whom printed in association with the Bragadin brothers. Although the quality of printing declined in Venice from the mid-17^th century, it was a major centre for over 400 years. Other centres such as Amsterdam, Livorno and Izmir rose to prominence and Hebrew printing in Venice came to an end in the early 19^th century.

Overview of the Valmadonna Trust Library

I can only describe this Library as a treasure trove. My first impression, as I walked into the study on Shavuot 1982, was of row upon row of beautiful bindings, elegantly and very tidily arranged, and the strong smell of leather. I noticed many spines saying “Ed. Pr.” (1^st edition) and “Unicum”, and also many double or stepped slipcases showing “Var.1” and “Var.2” – variant printings of the same book. To my left was a wall of Italian 16^th century Hebrew books, the spines showing exotic place names like Riva di Trento (where the Library holds all but one book printed there between 1557 and 1562), Cremona, Sabbionetta, Alcala, and some of the most beautiful books with Soncino borders printed in Fano and Pesaro. (There is also a collection of about 44 very early Latin imprints printed by the Soncino’s, starting with Fano 1502, Pesaro 1507 and Ancona 1514.) The wall on the right as you enter the study contains only Venice printing, with whole areas devoted to Bomberg printing (starting with the 1517 Bible, with all the Bibles arranged chronologically), and di Gara and Zanetti printing, arranged by size. I was struck by the huge collection of Venice liturgies – Siddurim and Mahzorim, with the whole gamut of different rites: Sefarad, Ashkenaz, Roman rite, Karaite rite, Aleppo and Corfu rites, Yanina (Greece), and so on.

On another wall in the study, in which most of the 16^th century Hebrew printing was housed, were all of our early Salonika and Constantinople books, starting in Constantinople in 1505, where the exiles from Spain and Portugal had arrived at the end of the 15^th century and the early 16^th century, bringing their craft with them. A fragment of 2 folios of the Arba’ah Turim, 1493, and the Haftarot and Megillot on vellum of the 1505 Humash were locked up in the vault, but on the shelves were 3 books of Abarbanel printed in 1505 (Nahalot Avot – his comm. on Pirkei Avot; Zevah Pesah, his comm. on the Haggadah, and Rosh Amanah). Nearby were the 2 Constantinople Polyglot Bibles – the 1546 edition, in Hebrew, Chaldaic, Persian and Arabic, and the 1547 edition, with Greek and Spanish, also exceedingly rare. Other Constantinople printing includes 12 volumes of the Talmud printed around 1583-1595. Among the special Salonika books are the 1526 Mahzor of the Barcelona rite, according to the custom of Catalonia, and the first edition of the Yalkut Shimoni, printed in Salonika, oddly Pt.2 in 1521 and Pt.1 in 1526-7.

On the wall opposite the door are the early Polish books: Cracow, starting in 1569, of which we hold 141 books printed before 1640 (still considered 16^th century printing), including the Shulhan Arukh by Joseph Caro, printed in Cracow in 1578-80, and the Talmud (1602-5). Our Lublin collection begins in the 1570s and we have 48 items printed before 1640 including 12 Talmud Tractates printed between 1617 and 1628. Printing in Poland went into decline after the Chmielnicki massacres of 1648.

Our Prague collection begins with one of only 2 copies extant (the other is an imperfect copy at the B.L.) of the 1526 Haggadah printed on vellum, formerly the property of the Hebrew Congregation of Charleston, South Carolina (some of the provenances are amazing!), the oldest illustrated, dated edition, with over 60 woodcuts. We have about 110 Prague books printed before 1640. Dotted around this wall are books whose spines show some unusual places of printing, where only a few Hebrew books were printed in the 16^th century, mostly in areas of Switzerland and southern Germany – places such as Thiengen (1560), Hagenau, Tuebingen, Pfortzheim, Isny, Nuernberg (we hold a Bible of 1599, a Tehillim of 1602 and Sefer Nitzahon, 1644); Konstanz (a 1544 Bible), Heddernheim (a Kabbalistic super-commentary on the Pentateuch, 1546), a very rare Mahzor printed in Maguntia (Mainz) in 1584 (Orden de Rosasanah y Kipur), and one Hebrew book printed in Worms in 1529, the Yosippon, with Shalosh Esreh Ikkarim of the Rambam. To my regret we never managed to acquire anything from Thannhausen, where one Mahzor was printed, or Ichenhausen, where a Bible with Yiddish and another Yiddish book were printed, around the year 1540. However we have 10 very rare Hebrew books printed in Augsburg between 1534 and 1544: Perush Rashi, Selihot, the Mahzor Ashkenaz rite, Arba’ah Turim and a Humash. Other very rare books in this room are 3 very early books printed in Safed, including the 1^st edition of Sar Shalom, by Samuel Aripol, printed in Safed in 1578-9; Kesef Nivhar, sermons on the Pentateuch by Josiah Pinto, printed in Damascus in 1605-6, where only one Hebrew book was printed; and Sefer Avudraham, Fez, 1521, the first book printed on the African continent. This was purchased at the very memorable Schocken sale. The 4^th wall in this securely-locked Holy of Holies looks out on a beautiful garden, another of Mr. Lunzer’s passions.

In the next room, the sitting-room or lounge, I can only mention briefly a beautiful collection of Mantova books, a collection from Basel comprising about 150 items, most from the 16^th century, including 10 volumes of the 1578-80 Talmud printed by Froben, the 4-volume Constantinople 1509 edition of the Alfassi, and the magnificent 6-volume Chatsworth copy of the Complutensian Polyglot Bible, printed in Alcala-en-Henares, in Castille, in 1514-17. Also in this room is the Amsterdam collection, one of the major collections in Val, with 1664 titles. It includes a wonderful collection of Amsterdam Spanish liturgies and of Menasseh ben Israel prints, starting with an “Orden” of 1617. One of my favourite sections, which had to be put behind glass, is a display of tiny liturgies, mostly in original bindings and chronologically arranged, consisting, as in the Venice and Livorno collections, of all the different rites of the Jewish population of Amsterdam through the centuries, starting with the Spanish and Portuguese rites, and encompassing the Polish and Ashkenaz rites, the Selihot of the Frankfurt Rite, and liturgies of the Bohemian, Polish, Moravian and Austrian rites. We have Seder ha-Ashmorot, 1763, according to the rite of Carpentras and another edition of the Avignon rite. There is also a Siddur, 1757, of the Ceylon (Shingili) and Cochin rite.

In the back garden is a converted out-building used to house the fast-growing library in the eighties. This became the home of the vast Livorno collection – to date 1413 items, starting at 1649 and again serving many communities with their different rites, from the Mediterranean and North Africa to the Ottoman Empire. Rites I have come across under Livorno liturgies are Spanish and Portuguese, Ashkenazi, the Italian, Roman and Livorno rites, Ferrara, Modena, the Ancona rite of the Turin community, Tunis, Algiers, Tripoli and Djerba, Fez, Aden, Ceylon and Baghdad. Also in the garden out-building is the Jerusalem collection – 1238 items, starting at 1841, with the first Jerusalem Siddur printed in 1842 by Israel Bak, who was forced to move to Jerusalem after the earthquake in Safed in 1837. The latter Constantinople, Salonika and Izmir collections were later moved to the top floor of the house, while Baghdad, India and Aden remained in the garden house. The Indian books, a source of great pride and affection, were augmented by the acquisition of the Sassoon collection in the late nineties, and with this purchase came another unique and mostly unrecorded collection of Indian and Shanghai journals. The Baghdad collection numbers 364 items (114 of them in Judeo-Arabic), Bombay numbers 407 items, Calcutta 191 items, Poona 34 and Cochin 26. From Bombay and Poona we have 285 items in Marathi or with Marathi translation, the language of the Bene Israel, and include 2 very important Haggadahs with Hebrew and Marathi on facing pages printed in Bombay in 1846 (lithographed) and Poona in 1874, with many illustrations depicting the Bene Israel in distinctive Indian dress and postures; and a lithograph from Calcutta, c.1880, in Urdu with Hebrew letters, a play with similar illustrations in Indian dress.

I should also mention the manuscript collection, consisting mainly of Italian and Indian items, for which there is a printed catalogue, and the broadside collection of about 600 broadsides or single leaves, and a long-awaited and very special publication devoted specifically to them came out in summer 2015. These broadsides have survived through the ages and include communal notices, official Edicts in Hebrew and Italian, e.g. dress regulations for the Jews of Mantova, odes, wedding riddles and poems, some beautifully decorated or headed with angels blowing trumpets, prayers for the sick, for rain, and so on. This collection includes 82 Wall Calendars, starting around 1547 with 3 from Constantinople and including a whole run of 47 Mantova wall calendars, almost consecutive from the year 1559; a similar run of 26 Venice wall calendars, starting in 1597, and one very early wall calendar from Sabbionetta dated 1560. The JNUL has only one 16^th century wall calendar. Our collection was purchased mainly en bloc from a book dealer with Italian connections, who I believe discovered them in an attic, already starting to rot.

There are around 363 Ladino books in the collection, including 77 printed in Constantinople, 67 in Salonika, 30 in Izmir, 30 in Venice, 67 in Livorno and 63 in Jerusalem. Our earliest Ladino items are Hanhagat ha-Hayyim (by Almosnino, Salonika 1564), and Hovot ha-Levavot (Salonika 1569, by Bahya b. Asher). The Library has many items known to be unique copies. Amongst these are 4 16^th century Venice items: a small liturgy, Me’ah Berakhot, Spanish rite, printed by Bomberg in Venice in 1548, for which Mr. Lunzer got carried away at an auction in Geneva in 1989 and exceeded his own intended bid by at least double; another small liturgy, Seder Berakhah, Ashkenaz rite, printed by di Gara in Venice in 1592; an unknown Venice 1596 miniature Sephardic Siddur printed by Bernardo Giustinian in association with Daniel Zanetti, and a Humash dated 1595, printed by di Gara.

The Valmadonna Library also contains an exceptional collection of de-luxe printing – books printed on blue and coloured paper, even on silk, and books printed on vellum. There are 47 items printed on vellum, including 4 incunables, 3 of them Bibles from Ixar (Hijar) and Lisbon. Between 125 and 140 Hebrew Incunables are known to have been printed before 1500, and of these, Valmadonna has 71, starting with 6 items printed in Rome c.1469-73.

The concept of enhancing beautiful books to elevate their content, holiness and importance has been part of Jewish culture since time immemorial. It is based on the principle that “Torah is enhanced in a beautiful vessel” (Talmud, Tractate Ta’anit). In the 13^th century work Sefer Hasidim: “You would buy a beautiful casket to store silver and gold, how much more fitting that you should acquire a beautiful case to store your books”. Profiat Duran (d. c.1414) wrote: “Study should always be from handsome and exquisite books, using fine script and parchment, and enhanced by splendid appearance and covers … and the places of study … in beautiful and pleasant buildings … because anyone seeing noble structures, engravings and illustrations will be uplifted and it will inform and strengthen his soul …”. Akiva Eger (1761-1837) instructed his son in the same vein: “I beg you, my dear son, to pay particular attention that it [referring to the publication of his works] should be printed on beautiful paper, with black ink and nice letters … When on studies from a beautiful and exquisite book, the spirit is uplifted, knowledge is broadened, and meaning is brought to light”. [One wonders what they would have thought about digital or e-books].

There are many examples of censorship in the Library – burnt out passages or text heavily inked out but which, curiously, can now be seen as the ink has worn thin. We also hold copies of Papal Bulls and Indexes of prohibited books. Book-burnings, confiscation and censorship of Jewish books continued through the centuries in different parts of Europe. The Valmadonna Library is thus a witness to the survival, despite all the odds, of the earliest Hebrew printed works, restored with the greatest love and care, in the finest copies available.

As Mr. Lunzer has said, “‘The People of the Book’ takes on a new meaning. These rare books are our links to the past which we treasure so highly”. In July 1992, when he was in Perth, Western Australia, he wrote: “Hounded, libelled, tortured, untold discrimination has been the order of the day. That the Hebrew book, be it in printed or manuscript form has survived at all is truly remarkable. If the Valmadonna Trust Library survived, intact, it will have been worthwhile”.

Professor John Lennox 'Science & G-d'

Thu, 15 Dec 2016 1:30:00 PM

When talking about science and religion seriously there is no conflict but more than this the difficulty is not the coexistence of science and religion but science coexisting with atheism. The fact that there is no necessary conflict between science and belief in G-d ought to be obvious, as Peter Higgs may have been an atheist but William Phillips believes in G-d and they both won the Nobel Prize in physics. In fact, over 60% percent were believers in G-d. There is no essential conflict between science and belief in G-d but rather the conflict lies between science and atheism. The case is however being made by Richard Dawkins and Stephen Hawking. Hawking writes in his most recent book The Grand Design with Leonard Mlodinow, “he has no need or space for G-d.” He uses the laws of gravity to argue that the world can and will create itself from nothing. This is ironic as Newton who discovered the laws of gravity used it as a ground for theism. What has caused this shift from Newton to Hawkins?

Science, historically, points to the existence of G-d, as opposed to the opposite. Firstly, modern science arose in the theistic Judeo-Christian culture of Europe. CS Lewis writes “men became scientific because they expected law in nature because they believed in a lawgiver.” The early scientists saw science in Genesis of the Bible. The naming of the animals for example can be considered the science of taxonomy. To counter this and say that everyone believed in G-d back then is not true, as the Chinese did not believe in G-d. It is possibly for this reason that although technology, printing, irrigation and much more developed in China, abstract science did not, as the East had no concept of a rational creator that created the university based on rationally intelligible laws.

Nature of G-d

There is an intellectual fog that concerns the nature of scientific explanation. There are those who believe that the G-d of the Bible is like the Greek G-d of lightening. That would be the concept of G-d of the Gaps, which may be closed by science, thus there’s no need for G-d. With ‘G-d of the Gaps one is forced to choose between G-d and science because G-d is a postulate that is anti-science. All the ancient gods were believed to have descended from the heaven. Jaeger argued that this is vastly different to G-d of the Bible who created the heavens and the earth. G-d then created everything, that which we do understand and that which we do not understand. For Newton, the more he understands the laws of nature the more he admired the creator of the universe. Similar to the more the way one admires a painting by Rembrandt the more one admires Rembrandt.

Limits of scientific explanation

Why did they not make the same mistake as today? Because they believe in scientism and that this is the only way to view reality. They believe that science is the only way to truth and rationale. Peter Medawar does science a disservice with the claim that it can answer all questions. Einstein understood the limitation of science when he said, “you can speak about the ethical foundation of science but not the scientific foundation of ethics.”

What do we mean by explanation pertaining to science? The law of gravity does not tell us what gravity is. Wittgenstein saw this most clearly that the great delusion of modernism is that the laws of nature are descriptive but not explanation in the exhaustive sense. We can realize then that there are different levels of explanation. A kettle may be boiling because of the heating plates send currents and heats up the water but we can also say that the water is boiling to pour a cup of tea. One is scientific and one is intention. The problem today is that some people think there is only one type of explanation. This refutes Hawking’s premise that sees the law of gravity as proof that G-d does not exist as gravity can create the world from nothing. I argue in my book ‘A Matter of Gravity: God, the Universe and Stephen Hawking’ that this is a flat argument as laws of gravity cannot create anything. This is a misunderstanding of the nature of explanation.

Nature of faith

Another intellectual fog is generated by the newly revised definition of faith. The Webster says, “faith is believing where there is no of evidence.” This is not the Biblical idea of faith that comes from the word fidelity and trust. Faith in the Bible is based on evidence. On the contrary, the strength of faith is measured by the evidence that lies behind it. Einstein saw this – he said he couldn’t imagine a scientist who does not have that profound faith in the rational intelligibility of the universe. You cannot do science unless you believe it can be done. Cambridge physicist Sir John Polkinhorne writes that physics is powerless to justify its belief in the rational intelligibility of the universe because you have to believe in the rational intelligibility of the universe.

Why should one do science? If one believes that one’s brain is the end product of mindless unguided processes one would not trust it. Darwin expressed this difficulty when he wrote: “with me the horrid doubt always arises whether the convictions of man's mind, which has been developed from the mind of the lower animals, are of any value or at all trustworthy.” Atheist physics Professor Alvin Platinga wrote: “If Dawkins is right, and we are the product of mindless unguided natural processes, then he has given us strong reason to doubt the reliability of human cognitive faculties and therefore inevitably to doubt the validity of any belief that they produce—including Dawkins’ own science and his atheism. His biology and his belief in naturalism would therefore appear to be at war with each other in a conflict that has nothing at all to do with God.”

Atheist philosopher Thomas Nagel says essentially the same in Mind and Cosmos: “if the mental is not itself merely physical, it cannot be explained by natural science. Evolutionary naturalism implies that we shouldn’t take any of our convictions seriously, including the scientific world picture on which evolutionary naturalism itself depends.”

At the heart of argument then is that there is a self-destruct course here. As you look at the big discoveries in science, as the code structure of DNA with 3.5 billion letters, what do you do with it? Is it purely chance and necessity? This is contradictory as DNA is letters, which by definition has meaning. This opposition to random processes is in Genesis where it describes the act of creation with the words “And G-d says”. This is the input of an intelligible creator of the universe; opposite to the notion that blind forces can create the universe. The choice today is therefore between G-d and ‘nothing’, as apparently ‘nothing’ can create the universe, according to Hawking.

Dr. Yoram Hazony "Sir Isaiah Berlin'

Thu, 15 Dec 2016 1:28:00 PM

I am very grateful to Rabbi and Rebetzin Brackman for all the work that has made it possible for me to be here. It is humbling to come here to oxford and stand in a place where Isaiah Berlin once stood and be tasked with sharing my own thought about Isaiah Berlin and his legacy and adopting it to us, which is our goal this evening to think about the place of the Jew in contemporary philosophy and theology.

Let me begin this challenge by saying that if our question and the subject is the place of the Jew in contemporary philosophy and theology, then there is no better place to began than here at Oxford with Isaiah Berlin. In many ways we can think of his career that began in Oxford in the 1930s and didn’t end until the 1990s, a span of 60 years, a career in which when he first entered there was almost no question whether there should be Jews as Jews contributing to philosophy and theology here in the heart of western Christian civilization. By the time he had concluded a transformation had been worked such that today it’s not an exaggeration to say that such is the openness to hearing what Jews have to say within academia that both of the major camps of philosophy in the western tradition today, the materialists and the Christians, are eager, excited and enthusiastic to hear what the Jews have to say, so a few words about that mysterious transition over those 60 years.

To think about Isaiah Berlin I think we should also name another Jew who was at Oxford for many of those years, AJ Ayer, Prof. Berlin’s almost life long friend and rival. In a certain sense we can say these two Jews are almost the two bookends that describes the ups and downs of philosophy and the place of Jews in it during the 20^th century. Prof Ayer was the most famous ‘bad boy’ of the tradition that became known as logical positivism. He was in many ways the ultimate product of the tradition of what we call the enlightenment. By the time we reach Prof. Ayer’s famous language, truth and logic we reach a point in which the greatest, most powerfully articulated fruits of western philosophy at least in the English speaking world were being articulated in the service of a view which we can say had reduced truth, the longing, search and desire for truth, to the methods of the physical sciences on the one hand and mathematics on the other hand, as Prof. Ayer was famous for saying anything that is not verifiable is nonsense. In so saying he lead two generation of the greatest minds in the west to something that would be fair to call it total contempt for things that were not the product of physical science or things that imitate them and mathematics.

Isaiah Berlin is almost universally regarded as a leading, or thee leading, liberal thinker of the 20^th century and the instinctive association that I think most of his admirers would have is to associate him with this tradition of enlightenment and western liberalism and yet it’s fascinating when one begins to dig into Isaiah Berlin’s works to see the way in which this extraordinary subtle and gifted man devoted such a great proportion of his output not to the elaboration of the enlightenment and the tradition that gave birth to Freddie Ayer but to pay close, painstaking attention to the tradition of its detractors, what he in a phrase Prof. Berlin made famous called the counter enlightenment. The counter enlightenment, according to Prof Berlin, are thinkers such as Vico, Haman, Herder, Yakobi, even Demester, and Berlin brought his extremely formidable, philosophical and historical acumen to bringing these thinkers to life. Why? What’s the interest in these thinkers? I can only speculate but I will speculate. First of all, Isaiah Berlin, as we have mentioned, is a Jew. Jews have a tradition of being contrarian. This is an old tradition. Abraham, you’d recall, becomes famous for being willing to challenge G-d. G-d said that the world is just one way, but Abraham had something to say about it, he believes the world would be just a different way, so he tells G-d so.

Now its interesting that it recent years I’ve come to know rather well a number of Christians philosophers and one of my dear friends, the Catholic philosopher, one of the great minds of our generation, Eleanor Stump came to one of my conferences in Jerusalem and she stood behind the podium in front of an audience consisting of almost entirely of Jews and she told us that Abraham in challenging G-d had sinned, the sin of pride. I had to admit that I never thought of it, though its plausible and makes sense, and the reason I never thought of it is because I had grown up as a Jew and one thing that unites all Jews, as far as I know, regardless of background and movement, is they’re proud of Abraham for telling G-d what He is supposed to thin about justice. We call that Chutzpah.

There is something deep about the restless Jewish need and mission to puncture the accepted idols of the generation and I believe some of that is what we see in Professor Berlin. He is famous for having once said when visiting a Shinto shrine, that he can worship any G-d but the Christian G-d. Now, this is a lifelong student and professor and don at Oxford and his salary is paid by the established English tradition and yet he is able to worship any G-d but that one, the one that pays him a salary and I think this is a worthy lesson. So Jews are contrarians and Prof. Berlin was also bit of a contrarian, more than a bit, and we can honour and respect that.

These thinkers of the counter enlightenment we are talking about, it’s not just any kind of opposition. What’s the counter enlightenment? The counter enlightenment, all these thinkers ranging from – you can give them all sorts of labels, as they’re quite different people, some of them are reactionary, some of them are conservatives, some of them are socialist, some of them are romantics, and some are all of them, but what they all are, are people when they beheld the enlightenment vision which consisted of the unshakable belief that there is one truth, there is one truth in politics, there is one truth in ethics, metaphysics, and that truth is accessible to a rational mind, and there’s also only one such thing as reason, there are no variations in reason, reason is but one thing and if you are that one thing, that rational being, as they sometimes said, then you can simply know the answers to all the questions and those answers are always universal and eternal answers, they go on forever they speak to absolutely everyone, and if you do not accept those answers that is because you are living in darkness. Now, all of these counter enlightenment figures that Prof. Berlin brought into the eye of the enlightenment discourse - everyone of course knew of these figures before and that they had existed, but there had never been someone like Isaiah Berlin to stood before the enlightenment community and said that you know your history is missing many of the most important aspects of it. He had never said that he was not sympathetic to the enlightenment but he did present them in book after book and essay after essay with a critique so devastating and presented so sympathetically, though at the end he was always careful to make sure everyone understood how the excess of this tradition led to fascism, and yet at the same time we all know how a professor who wants to disagree with one who is studying, how they can present their views how they are slanted and stilted, especially when dealing with conservatives and reactionaries but not so Prof. Berlin, who presented these thinkers with a passion and a sympathy because of the fact that he believed that the things these people were saying were true. What were they saying? They were saying this universal reason that is the same everywhere that can’t be argued about eliminates everything that is particular about the human being, it eliminates each of our histories and languages, it eliminates the nations in which we live, in order to try and reach the truth, each one according to its own direction, each one according to the local brilliance and insight of a particular people or language or community. All those things become eliminated; they became worthless, as Freddie Ayer said they become nonsense. Everything that is particular, historical, poetic and impassioned, everything that is related to what is termed as the mere contingency of human experience, all of that becomes worthless and nonsense. And these thinkers said hold on; those things that you’ve described as nonsense are reality. They not just trivial, emotional, sentimental subjectivity, they are reality in which human beings live and if you eliminate all of that then the human beings who are subjected to this universal, eternal rational system, they cease to become human beings, they’re drained of whatever it was that made them unique, that gave them some special connection to reality and, some special connection to G-d. You rob them of all of that and you force them into a cookie cutter mold, where anything that made them G-d’s image disappears and they simply become mathematical ciphers; that was the challenge of the counter enlightenment.

It’s interesting that this challenge is in the writing of Prof. Berlin is presented out of the mouths of Germans and Frenchman, and British and Irishman. And yet, if we as Jews, listen to their critique of the enlightenment, surely we can’t miss the Jewish aspect of what it is being said for after all what was the enlightenment objection to Judaism. If we take a Decarte or Spinoza, Leibnitz or Kant, what was their objection to Judaism? What was it such a terrible thing and abused and discredited in the enlightenment university in the eighteen hundreds? Well it was just these things, the Jess stand for history, Jews think they can learn theology fro history, Lessing says, I can\t get over this ditch, I cant get to learn about he eternal reality and the Divine through the corrupt instrument of historical writing which is contingent and flawed and misleading. Kant and Spinoza dismissed and had nothing but contempt for historic writings. Its precisely the contingent they derided, the particular they contested, they called the material. The Jews of mired in the contingent of the material; they can’t rise to the heights of the universal philosophy.

These are all well known things and they don’t appear in Prof Berlin’s writings. You don’t need to know a great deal to know these things. Someone with an ear inclined to look for it can hear in Prof Berlin’s introduction, his sympathy, his extraordinary warm embrace of these very difficult thinkers who are rebels against the very enlightenment heritage in which in his day was unchallengeable to be thee heritage of the west and the only thing that was worthy in the west and he looks at these thinkers, I believe, from the perspective of the Jew – Herder said explicitly about the Jew – and was even a Zionist and said that Jews were only regain what they have to say upon their returning to their land. Some were indeed terrible anti-Semites, but in Berlin treatment of them we hear the response of a Jew who looks at the criticism of the enlightenment against Judaism and he says implicitly, delicately to his enlightenment hosts and friends, I’m not going to go in the direction Freddie Ayer went, who for all his brilliance became a slave to this enlightenment machine, I myself see the good in it but I withhold my unequivocal support because a Jew can’t really find his place in this machine. Judaism cannot really find his place in this machine. The extent that the enlightenment becomes accepted at face value, Judaism becomes, as Ayer says, nonsense. And that’s the heritage that we as thinking people have inherited from the enlightenment and that is the heritage of our universities. The dominant of the culture was once a Christian culture and after it ceased to be a Christian culture it became an enlightenment culture and the shift from Christian to enlightenment is a complicated one but there is much more that these two enemies have in common that usually meets the eye and their criticism of the particular of the historical and the Old Testament Biblical and the Jew, of anything that is not universal and eternal, is the same criticism and the Jew who resists it must resist in its Christian forma and its enlightenment form.

In 1962, Prof. Berlin wrote an essay The purpose of philosophy, I think in response to his colleague at Oxford Prof. Ayer, although it doesn’t say so. In it he says that with some contrariness that philosophy is everything other than which is mastered by the physical sciences. In so doing it is everything that Ayer calls nonsense. What is philosophy? The ways in which the permanent or the semi permanent categories in terms in which experiences conceived and classified. Then he starts to talk about the different forms and the models and perspectives to things we have in the world. He brings examples, what is philosophy, whether man is made to fulfill a purpose by G-d or nature and if so what is that purpose, whether men are free to choose between alternatives or the contrary we are controlled by the rigorous laws of nature that governs inanimate nature. Whether ethical and aesthetic truths are universally objective or subjective, whether men are just bundles of flesh and blood and bone and nerves and tissue or early habitations of mortal souls, whether u=human history had a discernable pattern or was a repetitive causal sequence of unintelligible accidents. Then notice the following sentence that I have not seen in any philosophy textbook by anyone in the 20^th century. He says these ancient questions tormented the ancestors, referring to the enlightenment philosophers, as they had their ancestors in Greece and Rome and Palestine.

Now what is Palestine doing in that sentence? We were just talking about ancestors of philosophy so we understand Greece and Rome but Palestine! Was there a Palestinian philosophy we were not aware of? Prof. Berlin is talking about the Jews. He believes that the Jews had something to say about philosophy. Now you can’t find this in history text boos. They begin with pre-Socratic and go straight onto Berlin and there’s no stops for ancient Israel and yet here it is it says Palestine. IN Princeton, they give you the 30 authors in philosophy to pass your exam – you find any reference to the Talmud. The way philosophy is taught today is the same way it was taught a hundred years ago in Europe, as if the Jews had nothing to do with it.

What is Jewish philosophy today in the universities? They are for the study of Philo, who of course became a philosopher, we are told, thanks to the influence of Plato, or for the study of Saadia Gaon, who we are told became a philosopher thanks to the Islamic philosophers, or for the study of Hermann Cohen, who became a philosopher thanks to the influence of Kant. What is philosophy about Jewish philosophy is that it is anything but Jewish. It is well meaning, brilliant Jews speaking a language that is not a Jewish language and trying to interpret things that come from Judaism in a language that is not their own. But surely you can all understand that if the university had not been constructed first as a Christian institution and then as enlightenment, post Christian, institution but had rather been constructed by Jews, we would not study history that way. We might think of it this way that there was a Jewish philosophy and what we find in the Bible. At least from what Prof. calls philosophy, the Bible fits very well. Today, people find all sorts of good reasons not to include Bible but if we take this essay, the Bible is philosophy and so might be the Talmud or at least parts of the Talmud. So if the Jewish would have constructed the story it would begin with Moses in Deuteronomy standing as the Jews are about the land of Israel and he tells them that why are we studying Torah and observing the laws? For it is Your wisdom and Your understanding in the eyes of the peoples who hear all these laws and they will say only a wise and understanding is this great people. That is Moses doesn’t think that the Bible is darkness, only for the Jews, he thinks it is enlightenment, the Jewish have something to say to the nations, not because He says it’s wisdom, as those people didn’t believe in the Jewish G-d, they will come from the outside and they’ll be able to see that this is wisdom and understanding. That, Isaiah Berlin would say is philosophy, that’s the Jewish philosophy.

Or maybe a little bit later, Isaiah says, all the nations will stream towards it and many peoples will come, lets go up to the mountain of the lord, the house of Jacob and He will teach us of His ways and we’ll go according to His customs, for from Zion will come forth instructure. The authors of the Jewish scripture believed that they were speaking and saying something for the world. They believed they had something to share with others. If we as Jews had constructed the story then the story would begin with these texts hundreds of years before and we may even ask if there was a influence, we don’t know. We would pay heed to theoaphress an Cleo.. when they say that Aristotle met Jews and he thought they could represent a nation of philosopher. We would rethink our story and what humanity is looking for.

Holocaust Survivor Ivor Perl

Thu, 15 Dec 2016 1:25:00 PM

Seventy years ago to this day there was a young boy - I was standing next to an electric fence at the end of January crying in my heart praying to G-d let me get out of this hell because it is my Bar Mitzvah. I was born in southern Hungary, a family of eleven, from a Chassidic family, and only my brother and I survived. We had a fairly happy childhood and normal life, despite anti-Semitism was a norm in Eastern Europe in the 1930s. My day started at 5 in the morning, learned Hebrew studies, had lunch and then resumed studying. That was my life until March 1944. In 4 months, until July, Hungary found the infrastructure for 400,000 Jews to be sent to their death. It was when Admiral Horthy tried to make peace with the allies, the Germans invaded Hungary, the Fascists took over, and within days laws came in and pushed the Jews into ghettos and then into Auschwitz with cattle trucks taking nearly five days with just two buckets for their needs. We spoke Yiddish and that saved my life. When we arrived all we saw were people with blue stripes and they were shouting in Yiddish ‘all children must say they are sixteen years old and not to save any food’.

We saw the selection and I saw my mother and sisters on the women’s side. I ran to their side and my mother told me

go back to your brother. It was the last time I saw the rest of my family. At selection, Dr. Mengele asked in German ‘how old are you?’ and because of what I was told in Yiddish earlier, I answered ‘sixteen’ and was sent to the showers with those selected to work. We ran into the showers, after being told to leave our clothes neatly on the side and that we will get them back on the other side. We had all our hair shaved, men and women, standing naked, and we were given wooden slippers and the blue uniform. We arrived at the barracks and at the centre stage a capo, selected from the prisoners, was standing there and said you have arrived at Auschwitz, you will be given a number, no names any longer, and I suddenly started crying for my mother. I knew then that this was not an adventure after all, as being a child that is what I had initially thought. After about ten minutes in the line waiting to be tattooed they ran out of ink. The next day, again, there was an air raid siren and we were dispersed. When we were walking we saw a Hebrew prayer book in a ditch. We were then taken to Dachau camp number 4 for a few months and my brother Yitzchok came over and said that our father was also there. We had roll calls morning and night and after the roll call we were taken out to work. On one particular day, we were put into different lines and my father never came back.

One day the planes were coming over and we were told to march in order to liquidate the camps with just one loaf of bread to be shared. My brother and I began fighting over the loaf of bread and we suddenly saw the butt of a rifle and we thought we were to be shot. The soldier said, why are you fighting, you will be liberated soon. That was the only feeling of comfort we ever received. We arrived at a second Dachau camp but there was no room at the camp. We were supposed to have been shot in the field but the commander didn’t want to be a war criminal as the war was coming to an end. We were left in the open air with the American planes over head and we ran. We saw machine guns opening but we escaped. We were then liberated by the Americans and had our first proper meal.

professor alister mcgrath on einstein and faith

Professor of Science and Religion at Oxford University Alister McGrath delivered a lecture on science and religion in honour of 100 years since Albert Einstein discovered his general theory of relativity. The title of the lecture was "Albert Einstein on Science and Faith: The Eternal Mystery of the World is Its Intelligibility", in which McGrath presented Einstein’s view on faith, based on an interview he gave in 1930, in which he said there is something overwhelming of the universe that we cannot fully understand. He insisted that ‘I do not want to be referred to as an atheist because I think that is unhelpful. I don’t know if I can define myself as a pantheist. The problem involved is too vast for our limited minds. The human mind as much as it is trained cannot grasp the universe. It’s like a child in a vast library. We see the universe marvelously arranged but we can only understand this dimly.’ According to McGrath, Einstein was astonished we can understand anything about the universe and the eternal mystery of the universe is in fact its comprehensibility.

Chief Rabbi of Russia Berel Lazar with Introduction by Nathaniel Rothschild & Prof. Robert Service

Thu, 15 Dec 2016 1:18:00 PM

Professor Robert Service - Introduction

It is a great pleasure to have been invited to help to introduce Chief Rabbi of Russia Rabbi Berel Lazar. It is impossible to understand the history of Russia, the USSR and Russia again, without understanding the relation between Russians and Jews, Russians and Ukrainians and Ukrainians and Jews. It was complex and tormented. For most of the 20^th century it was extremely tormented.

Often we think of the years of the 1930’s as being the nadir of Jewish religious life, Christian religious life, Muslim religious life and all religious life. But in fact, one of the greatest persecutors of religious faith in the USSR was the successor to Stalin, namely Nikita Khrushchev.

In other words, the decades of religious persecution, the decades in attempt to eradicate religious belief, religious organisation, religious practice, were very long indeed and then vastly outlived Joseph Stalin.

We are talking about a theme that is now possible to talk of as historical. There is now something like religious tolerance in Russia but it is contested religious tolerance in Russia. It is not completely simple matter to be a religious believer in the Russian federation today. All sorts of political, cultural, social as well as religious questions are involved. It gives me really much pleasure in introducing the speaker tonight. He is Chief Rabbi of Russia, recognised by President Vladimir Putin. It is a great honour to have the pleasure to help introduce Rabbi Lazar, our speaker, tonight.

The Honourable Mr. Nathaniel Rothschild - Introduction

My only qualification for speaking tonight is that I am very good friends with Rabbi Lazar. I thank Elliot Shear for sponsoring this event and I thank my friend and business partner David Slager for sponsoring this centre and making it a reality.

I have been going to Russia since 1992, when I was still a student in Oxford. When I began visiting Russia regularly around 2001, I didn’t have much idea about the resurgence of Jewish life. However, I met Rabbi Lazar in Switzerland at the World Economic Forum in Davos and I was struck by watching this figure and we eventually connected and started talking, and from there began a friendship and I started visiting his centre in Russia, many times a year.

For me it was an incredible experience to watch it grow and his efforts in this. It has over 140,000 members, serves over 1,000 meals a day and helps 15,000 elderly people. It is a place where Jews and non-Jews visit. It has a synagogue and swimming pool and there is work a foot to build a Jewish museum. At the same time Rabbi Lazar is a great unifying force in Russia. I have met some important people at his centre, including a leading Muslim businessman n Russia, who is now a close friend.

I have only wonderful things to say and I am very honoured to introduce him here tonight.

Chief Rabbi Berel Lazar

My call to fame is actually being Mr. Rothschild’s friend and it is a pleasure to honour Mr. Rothschild and David Slager for what they have done here in Oxford for the Oxford University Chabad Society, with the opening of the Slager Chabad Centre, under the leadership of Rabbi Brackman. It should be a lesson for many of us not to forget ones Alma-Ata. Not to forget what one received and remember to give back. Another reason I am here is in honour of Elliot Shear who has sponsored tonight’s lecture in memory of his grandfather, Joseph Graham.

We will be celebrating in a few weeks the holiday of Purim, when we read the scroll of Esther. The story begins with a big feast, divorcing his wife, remarrying and goes on and on until finally arrives at the point, when the Jews were saved from the wicked Haman during the Persian of the Jewish people in 5^th century BCE. Most of the narrative, however, has nothing to do with actual point of the story. Many people have asked why it’s necessary all the details, aside from the fact that Jews are good story tellers.

A young Russian boy

I will tell you a small story, which took place in St Petersburg about 50 years ago. A young non-Jewish boy grew up in a very poor family. Those times, most people lived in communal apartments, which had different rooms for families and shared kitchen and living area.

This boy had poor parents who were barely home. He was fortunate that a neighbouring family from another room in the apartment started inviting him over. The father was a professor who helped him with his homework, they babysat for him. He was a young boy. The family, who was Jewish, also invited him for the Friday night Shabbat meals. He remembers how they used to take out an old book and read from this book after the meal.

At that time, the boy said, look how impressive these people are. They never fight with each other. There is respect between the husband and wife; a beautiful family to emulate.

Many, many years later, the same boy grew up and became the vice-Mayor of St Petersburg. There was an issue of opening a Jewish school in St Petersburg, about 19 years ago. The vice Mayor heard that the city government was not giving permission for the school to open.

He went over to the deputy minister of education and asked him how comes you don’t want to give permission to open the Jewish school. He said, because I am Jewish and everyone will say that it is because I am Jewish I opened the Jewish school. I thought it would be better to leave the status quo. There is no Jewish school and we will leave it how it is; it will be better for all.

The boy, now vice-Mayor of St Petersburg, took the papers and signed the papers himself. Although he wasn’t allowed to sign because it wasn’t his department he nevertheless signed the papers. This was how the first Jewish school opened up in St Petersburg. This boy was Vladimir Vladimirovich Putin.

Today, he has a few more days of being president of Russia, as on Sunday there are elections and it just shows how G‑d pre-plans our life with us realizing.

Fifty years, a young boy, was helped by a Jewish family and there is no question that the revival and success of Jewish life today in Russia is due to the president of Russia Mr. Putin.

There was recently an article published in the NY Times by a Professor at Maryland University entitled “the anomaly of the President of Russia and the Jewish community”. One thing that we have seen in the last eight years of Mr. Putin’s presidency is his great support fighting for the Jewish community against anti-semitism. No other president in the world has come out so forcefully in such a radical way against anti-semitism.

I heard from Elliot Shear an hour ago that there is a meal planned at Buckingham Palace by the Duke of Edinburgh in honour of an official visit to the UK by President of Israel Shimon Peres. When Mr. Sharon came to Russia he had many long meetings with Mr. Putin. Every time he came out of such meetings, he said, as Mr. Olmert and Mr. Netanyahu have, that we have a close friend of Israel in the Kremlin.

Once when Mr. Sharon was meeting Mr. Putin, the meeting was taking much longer than expected. Every so often someone would walk into the meeting with a small piece of paper. Mr. Putin would say a few words in Russian and the person would leave. A few minutes later someone else walked in with another piece of paper. The president tells him something and the person walks out. On the third time, Mr. Sharon turns to President Putin and says, when, in Israel, someone comes in during an important meeting with a piece if paper, it’s a sign that something terrible has happened in the country. Did anything happen, should we cut the meeting short.

The president said, actually my staff realised that the meeting is taking much longer than expected, so they offered we should have lunch. I told them that you will surely eat Kosher and I gave them the instructions how to arrange a Kosher meal.

Mr. Putin then said to Mr. Sharon that, looking at you, I am sure you wouldn’t refuse a meal. So I am happy to let you know that we have a Kosher meal coming in, in a few minutes.

That wasn’t the first time that we had a Kosher meal arranged in the Kremlin. When President Katzav came to Russia the reception was completely Kosher. We koshered the whole kitchen in the Kremlin. At that time there was an article in the NY Times, “why did the rabbi blow torch the kitchen in the Kremlin”.

What is the situation today with the Jewish community in Russia?

What is the situation today with the Jewish community in Russia? A famous Jew who comes daily in to our centre asks for a coffee and the communist Pravda newspaper. This continued for some time, asking the same question and always receiving the same response that he can have a coffee but the Pravda newspaper has not been published for some 20 years already with fall of the Soviet Union. Finally, the worker asks him why he asks daily for a coffee and the Pravda when he knows that the Pravda has not been published for 20 years. He responded, you don’t know what pleasure I get when I hear you saying that the Pravda newspaper is not being published anymore.

If you look at history, things have changed drastically; none would have believed that one can be openly Jewish and so proud of ones Jewishness. On Chanukah we try to put up large Menorot (Chanukah candelabras) in many cities in Russia. Of course, there is one also in the Red Square.

Many of the Governors today in Russia are still from the communist era and they give a hard time to the Jewish community who would like to put up these Menorot. It happened to be that one year President Putin came to our centre for Chanukah and he lit the Shamash (the centre candle), which was broadcasted on national television.

The next morning our rabbis around Russia got calls asking what time is the lighting of the Menorah in their city, as they would like to participate. The rabbis responded that they have no permission to put up such a Menorah. The Governor immediately said that there is permission granted and the Menorah should go up; please let me just know what time you would like the lighting to take place.

Challenges

As much we see the changes, we know Russia has gone through 70-80 years of hard times, popular anti-semitism and government anti-semitism. We don’t take anything for granted. Everything that happens is for us a new miracle. I would say that Russia is still going through a process. Everyone thought that when Russia opened and the Soviet Union fell, everything would just change in a few years, as a full democracy, and people will dance in the streets and would all have suddenly food on their tables.

The situation is not as simple as that. They said at that time that Russia went through shock-therapy. It was more shock than therapy. The shock was felt and people resented it and that is one of the many reasons for what we see today.

On the other hand we do see how not just the government but also people on the street have a new attitude towards the Jewish community.

One example, this morning the speaker of the parliament came to visit the synagogue and this evening the head of the election committee came to visit the synagogue to speak to the Jewish community about the upcoming elections. Having in one day two such important people visiting a Jewish community centre shows how much things have actually changed. In the past the same people in the government were attacking the Jews, blaming all problems on the Jews. If there was no water in the sink, it was because the Jews took it. We finally see that there is not just understanding but respect, as well.

How did Judaism survive through all the years of communism?

How did Judaism survive through all these years? If you look at the history of different countries, the moment the Jewish community had to hide their Jewish identity, they vanished. The modern Jewish community in Spain has nothing to do with the former community, the Marranos, who vanished with almost no remnants today.

How than did Russian Jewry survive through seventy five years of communism? It was forbidden to observe Shabbat. If one didn’t come to work on Shabbat, one was considered a parasite. One was not allowed to send one’s children to a Jewish school. One was not allowed to study Torah or do anything that was Jewish. Nevertheless the Jewish community survived.

There is no question that one of the reasons for the survival of the Jewish community is thanks to the Jewish mother. They kept Jewish life alive in the home. They did this through Jewish food. There was kneidlach, gefilte fish, kreplech and also Matza. Matza was the most identified Jewish item with the Jewish community throughout communism. People would bake Matza at home, role it and make the holes with forks. This is the Matza they ate for 70 years.

Today, when people come to the synagogue, they come primarily when they hear we are giving out Matza, either for free for those who need or for a nominal price. Through the Matza we reach out to lots of Jews and slowly educate them who they are and show them the way home.

I was once sitting in a taxi in Russia, not long after we moved to Russia, and the driver asked me, are you Jewish? I responded, yes. He said that he also is Jewish. Can you answer me one question, he said, why must we, the Jews, eat the Matza?

I told him the Biblical story that the Jews were in Egypt and there wasn’t time to bake bread before the exodus. To remember this story we eat the Matza. He asks, but why the Matza? I explained the story over again. He said, but why do de we have to put blood of Christian children in the Matza?

This was in 1985. As a Jew, he still believed that Jews baked Matza with Christian blood. This shows how myth and anti-semitic propaganda managed to convince even Jews how bad they were.

Today, when we have this huge change, when Jews can finally be proud of who they are and find about their Judaism it is truly a great miracle.

Jewish education

There is one more important point to remember. Eighty one years ago, the previous Lubavitcher Rebbe, Rabbi Joseph Isaac Schneersohn (1880-1950) arranged a gathering in Moscow, where he gave a talk that has been published numerous times. He knew that at the gathering there were KGB agents in the room, in particular the Jewish section of the communist party, the Yesvesetzia, who, as Jews themselves, were the Jewish community’s worst enemy in Russia.

Although they were present at the gathering, the Rebbe said that there is one thing that we must ensure, that the children should get a Jewish education. They should continue going to Jewish schools and receive a full Jewish education. At that time, this was going against the government, it was counter-revolutionary and he was actually arrested a few months later for his work in teaching and preserving Judaism. He was sentenced to death and by a great miracle it was commuted and he was able to leave the Soviet Union.

There is no question that what we see today is thanks to the children of those parents who sent their children to Jewish schools, against the orders of the government, that there is any Jewish life today in Russia. In every city, when we came twenty years ago, we saw there was one Jew who was willing to risk his life to keep the Jewish community alive, whether it was opening a Mikvah, as the opening of the Mikvah in Oxford, or the publishing of Jewish books.

The publishing of Jewish books was done by taking a picture of an original book, develop the picture in a dark room in their apartment, and people would study from the picture. In effect they were learning from pictures taken from books, which was against the law.

They would also perform circumcision, despite the fact that it was outlawed. They would do this by having a particular person who would meet interested people, put them in a car and would have to blindfold them, before bringing them to a place, without them knowing where they were. This was done in case he would be called in for questioning by the police, and he wouldn’t be able to reveal where the circumcision took place.

In each city they would have one person who survived communism, who, as a young child, learnt in a Jewish school and was able to later keep the Jewish community alive. I met some of these people, when I first came to Russia, and they became my heroes in my life, to meet someone who was ready to risk their life to make sure that a child should have Jewish education and families should have some sort of Kosher food, despite the scarcity of food at that time in the USSR. It was thanks to these people that Judaism survived in Russia throughout the Soviet era and was able to be revived today.

What is the difference if one's child receives a Jewish education or if the child goes to a public school? They could get a Jewish education at home. It is impossible to underestimate the affect is has on a child to have a group of Jewish children around him or her, finding out about their Jewish heritage and growing up as a knowledgeable Jew.

Today, finally, when being Jewish is something to be proud of and not, as most people thought during the communist era, something bad and unfortunate that happened in their life, we need to be thankful to the government for allowing this new era to develop.

In the beginning of the Perestroika, when Gorbachev came to power he turned to his minister and asked, how many Jews do you think live in Russia. His minister said around five-six million. Gorbachev asked him, if we open the doors and allow them to go to Israel, how many do you think would leave? He said, around ten million.

Today, the opposite is happening. It is sad that people are leaving Israel. There are over a hundred thousand people who have returned to Russia. Russians who, when they left said that they will never step foot back in that country, cursed place, ever again, today they are coming back, getting involved in the Jewish community and helping rebuild it, whether it’s in Vladivostok, Moscow or anywhere in the country where one can see a thriving Jewish community. It is amazing that in small villages, people find out that it is possible to celebrate Judaism proudly.

To illustrate this, on Sunday there are elections in Russia. When one searches on Google in Russia the name Medvedev, the most popular result for his name is the question, is Medvedev Jewish? There is much discussion whether his mother is Jewish or not. Why are people suddenly discussing his Jewishness? We don’t believe he is actually Jewish, aside from the fact that his mother’s name could have been a Jewish surname. One, indeed, never knows who in Russia might be Jewish. It is however unlikely that the President of Russia would have selected a successor who is Jewish.

The reason why everyone is discussing this is because of the attitude of Mr. Medvedov towards the Jewish community. Three days before he was hand picked as Mr. Putin’s successor, he visited the Jewish community centre, the Jewish day school, where the young boys and girls asked him questions, and the synagogue. In the synagogue he asked what the Torah is, what is the Kabbala.

His visit was followed by a meeting he held with the leaders of the Jewish community for close to two hours. He then promised much help to the Jewish community, whatever is needed. In the eyes of many, Russia cannot swallow this change. Many anti-semitic and nationalistic groups, when trying to attack the government, they do this by saying the president is Jewish.

This says a lot about the new relationship that exists between the government and the Jewish community. This respect has also caused a big change in the Jewish community itself. Today, Jews are able to find out who they are, celebrate the holidays, and we can say that we are no longer citizens number two, but regular citizens of Russia.

An old lady recently told me that she has walked her whole in the street with her head bent down, and today, finally, she said, “I can walk straight, looking eye to eye with people”, not being ashamed who she is, as a Jew.

This is in short the story of the Jewish community in Russia. When we talk about the future, we keep on praying that everything will continue to be good. However, we could never be certain. This current change in Russia might just be a window of opportunity. We don’t know if things will change to the worse. We pray that things will remain good and become even better. Indeed, more and more people realise that by giving freedom of religion and freedom to people, this is the best way for a country to develop and they can be sure that the Jewish community will give their investment for the future of Russia.

Professor David Deutsch 'The fabric of reality’

Thu, 15 Dec 2016 1:16:00 PM

‘The fabric of reality’ is a world view and my contention is that it should be the basic world view that is implied by our best ideas at present. Not that it’s not going to be improved upon, but it’s my opinion that our best ideas currently aren’t taken seriously enough, and The Fabric of Reality, the title of my first book, is my name for what you get when you do take them seriously.

It starts with the fact that we are human beings and therefore we are fallible: we make mistakes.

The first thing I ever published contained quite a big mistake. It was a review of a book called Advice to a Young Scientist by the biologist Peter Medawar, which I wrote for the Wolfson College magazine when I was a graduate student. They asked me to write it because I was a young scientist, so that I could give a sort of ‘reply’ to the book – and I think that may have gone to my head. Also, Medawar was a supporter of the philosophy of Karl Popper, and so was I. So, my review was generally favourable. But it ended with a snide remark. Medawar had said in the book, ‘I cannot give any … better advice than this: the intensity of your conviction that a hypothesis is true has no bearing on whether it is true or not.’ Well, of course! The history of science is littered with false ideas on which scientists would at one time have staked their lives. But saying that that’s the most important thing you could tell a young scientist seemed to me absurdly out of proportion. So I wrote that, and I accused him of being condescending to the eponymous ‘young scientist’. But as I’ll explain, I have realised that he was right.

While I was still at school, I had been deeply impressed by a popular book on cosmology by the physicist Dennis Sciama. Later I had the very good fortune to become a graduate student of his here at Oxford. His book was called The Unity of the Universe. In the course of giving a nice overview of the state of cosmology at the time, it made a powerful case that the laws of nature are neither arbitrary nor separable from each other but are part of – almost, a single idea.

I think the main reason I was impressed, is that by saying this, Sciama was contradicting something I’d always been told, and didn’t like – namely that, as human knowledge grows, explosively, it grows increasingly out of reach of any one human mind. And therefore there can never again be such thing as understanding the world, to the limits of human knowledge. One can only understand tiny facets of what is known. This is therefore deemed to be the age of specialisation – and that will always get worse from now on. But Sciama said: we can understand the world, not by memorising a heap of facts but by explaining it, through theory. That’s one reason I liked science: a single, comprehensible theory can cover an infinity of facts. As knowledge increases we find that the world is not a heap of facts but, on the contrary: great discoveries are often unifications, revealing simplicity where previously we had seen only complexity and arbitrariness.

By the time I came to Oxford, Sciama had actually abandoned most of the specific cosmological theories in that book. Many of them, for instance, had been about the Steady State theory, which had been superseded; there’d been a period of fundamental discovery in cosmology, as there is at the moment by the way. Wherever the theories in his book had been refuted by experiment, he was already enthusiastically investigating their successors. But his idea of the unity of the universe had not been refuted, but spectacularly vindicated by those discoveries and others. Soon one couldn’t do cosmology (the science of the biggest things we know of) without studying quantum physics (the science of the smallest). Apparently unrelated fields were being connected. And often, each field helped to understand others more simply than before.

That doesn’t necessarily mean more easily – because deep, simple theories are usually also counter-intuitive: meaning that they conflict with what Medawar warned against: the ‘intensity of our conviction’. They’re counter-intuitive just because the deeper a theory is, the further it is from everyday experience, so the more opportunity there is for our misconceptions about the world to seem self-evident truths.

My own work, developing the quantum theory of computation, was another unification. On the one hand quantum theory – one of the deepest theories in physics, which provides the mathematical framework and language within which the rest of physics is formulated. And on the other, the theory of computation – which had previously been self-evidently a branch of mathematics, not science at all. Once, I was giving a lecture, explaining that in my opinion this unification implies that there is nothing a priori, logically, special about the class of operations that we call computations – including mathematical proofs – and therefore, I said, the persuasive power of mathematical proofs comes only from our knowledge of physics. An eminent mathematician in the audience stood up and said that was the most foolish statement he had ever heard: knowledge of mathematics is by definition entirely independent of scientific knowledge. (Now that’s a mistake: mathematical truth is indeed independent of all empirical facts, but mathematical knowledge is derived by brains which are physical objects, and their operation obeys the laws of physics which are for these purposes ultimately expressed in the quantum theory of computation.) He wasn’t pleased at that unification. It conflicted with the intensity of his conviction on which he thought, mistakenly, his knowledge of mathematics rested.

Today, physicists routinely write, on the same sheet of paper, equations of quantum physics and computational algorithms. Two strands of knowledge that used to be studied in separate buildings are now seen as inseparable and referring to the same underlying reality.

I also kept noticing that those two strands were linked with two other fundamental strands of knowledge: one was the theory of evolution. And the other was Popper’s theory of the growth of knowledge itself (there’s something nicely self-referential there). So there are four strands of our most fundamental knowledge of the natural world. Taken together, they constitute the single world view which became the subject of my book The Fabric of Reality.

The four strands also have something more mundane in common: in the way they are received and the way they are used. For instance: one strand, quantum theory, which is the one that I am basically ‘coming from’, implies that the universe we see around us – this room, each other, stars, galaxies – is not the only universe that exists: there are countless others, and in microscopic ways, they affect each other, though they are largely independent. Yet if you ask 100 theoretical physicists whether quantum theory implies that, at least 90 will say no, some of them quite angrily. They’re not denying the equations. They’re denying that they imply this about reality – or indeed that they imply anything about reality. And much the same holds for the other three strands. All four of our best theories in those areas of human knowledge are counter-intuitive – but very successful pragmatically, so they can’t be straightforwardly dismissed. So people are tempted to use them only pragmatically, for prediction and analysis, and to refuse to think about the reality that brings those predictions about. Which leads to a loss of confidence in the existence of objective knowledge (knowledge that corresponds to reality). This sort of denial about reality, knowledge and truth, blighted philosophy and much of science during the 20th century, and they have by no means recovered.

If we want objective knowledge about the physical world, how can we heed Medawar’s warning, that the intensity of our convictions is no guarantee of truth? What should we do about the fact that the truth is often counter-intuitive, and can be expected to become more so, the more progress we make? Well, first of all, if you take seriously that we can be mistaken, that we are fallible, then that already implies that an objective reality exists: the very concept of error implies that there’s a truth. Then, it comes down to: how can we correct our errors? As the physicist Richard Feynman said, science is what we have learned about how to avoid fooling ourselves. Therefore, if we are to understand the physical world more than superficially despite our limitless fallibility, it must be through scientific theories and through reason and criticism, and not through our feelings, our convictions, nor even through common sense, because common sense is routinely superseded by deep scientific theories. But the good news is, as I say in the book, our best theories, the four strands, are not only truer than common sense, they actually make more sense than common sense, if they are understood in combination. Then, they portray a unified Fabric of Reality that is always still mysterious (because there is always still an infinity left to discover) – mysterious in the sense of illimitable – but also limitlessly comprehensible.

That’s my message.

Professor Brian Leftow 'Arguments proving the existence of G‑d'

Thu, 15 Dec 2016 1:14:00 PM

Atheism is all the rage. It sells lots of books, and they are angry books. It is also close to being the majority creed of the UK. A recent survey has it that 28% of Brits believe in a personal God. Another 26% believe in "something," but do not know what (no mean feat). (Maybe it's a toaster.) By contrast, 26% believe in UFOs. 42% think religion is harmful, and I think it's a safe bet almost all of those are atheists. The new sort of atheist is aggressive. They would like to convert you. One move they all tend to make is to challenge you to prove God's existence, and claim that you're irrational or stupid to believe in God if you can't provide an argument that does so to their satisfaction. The criticisms they offer for standard arguments are mostly pretty poor. Alvin Plantinga reviewed Dawkins' book, and said that he'd call the philosophy in it sophomoric except that this would be too hard on sophomores. But the more basic idea the polemicists take for granted- that you need something like an argument for God's existence that would convince anyone to be rational believing it- is what I want to challenge.

To begin with, the atheist making this challenge suggests that if you can't convince anyone- i.e., in the circumstances, him- you shouldn’t be convinced yourself. The thought is that to be a rational religious believer, you would have to put yourself in the atheist's position, supposing only what he supposes, and argue yourself into theism, using only considerations that would convince anyone. But why? Why should the standpoint of the atheist or agnostic be the touchstone from which rationality is assessed? And the thought that only considerations that would convince any neutral observer are rational bases for religious belief is surely wrong. For religious experience is a sound basis for belief. It is rational to be convinced by your own experience. If it seems to you that God appears to you, or speaks to you, that is an excellent reason to think that God exists, as long as you know you weren't drunk etc. at the time. Prima facie, having God appear to you is as good a reason to believe in God as having a crested woodpecker appear to you is to believe in them. But the one who hasn't had this experience may legitimately be more skeptical. He may wonder whether it could have been as you say, whether your environment and background beliefs led you to misinterpret something, etc. You may legitimately not take these doubts seriously: you know what it was like. He doesn't, and so legitimately may. Which makes the point that not all rational bases for belief are person-neutral. People can rationally believe based on evidence others may rationally reject.

But you don't need experience to be rational in believing. Nor do you need philosophical arguments. I believe in God ultimately due to my acceptance of testimony on the subject. I'm going to suggest that testimony is enough.

I grew up believing that there was some sort of God b/c this was what the grownups told me. If this was irrational, then I ought also not to have believed that 2+2=4, that "dog" means dog, or that the Magna Carta was signed in England, b/c I believed these too only b/c that was what the grownups told me. I was not under a rational obligation to doubt their testimony. Nor was I under a rational obligation to investigate history and the set-theoretic foundations of mathematics for myself when I got older, to replace my testimonial basis for belief with some other sort. I was not required to look up my history teacher's university marks, or travel to England, to believe rationally. I still believe that the Magna Carta was signed in England for no better reason than that I was told it, others still tell me it, and I haven't come across anything that made me doubt it, or ought to have done so. And surely I am rational to believe it, and perhaps even know it. You might think that as a philosopher, I've learned some nifty arguments for God's existence, and these are now the supports of my belief. Well, yes, I've found arguments I find convincing. But the same arguments fail to convince people who come to them as atheists, and this rather suggests that other bases for belief are playing a large role in how I evaluate the arguments, and that I haven't really ultimately gotten away from testimony.

We learn most of what we know about the world by testimony. What you know about history, science, mathematics came to you not b/c you did research or proofs. You simply accepted your teachers' words, as your teachers did for most of what they learned from their teachers, and their teachers for most of what they learned, and so on. If testimony were not a rational basis for belief, we could not rationally believe any of this. If accepting it were not on its own a sufficient basis for knowledge, you could not claim to know one bit of history, science, mathematics, or even current political events. (Newsreaders are giving testimony.) Either testimony is on its own sufficient to justify belief and render it rational, or no jury ever decides a case on the basis of rational, justified belief. And either testimony is on its own sufficient for knowledge or no-one but a few archaeologists knows anything about ancient history.

I suspect that the only rational attitude is to give all testimony a prima facie pass. What this means is: suppose someone tells you something. There are things that should lead you immediately to doubt a story. Maybe he says that David Cameron is PM, but you've heard otherwise. (Notice, though, that it's what you've heard- testimony.) Maybe the story is simply crazy. (But could you judge it so w/o relying on beliefs you'd acquired by accepting testimony?) There are also things that should lead you to doubt a story's teller. Maybe he looks drunk. Maybe he has shifty, dishonest eyes. Maybe his friends call him Liar Joe. But if nothing like that is true, then the only rational attitude is to believe him, perhaps not with maximal confidence, but with confidence enough.

The reason is simple. If you did not do this, you'd be committed to one of two things: either finding some other principled basis to doubt the given story or teller, even though it "passes" the initial tests mentioned, or trying to sift all testimony as you received it- to try to accredit the witness, or test it for yourself, etc. But could you know enough to do this w/o accepting other testimony? Could you know what stories are crazy w/o relying on testimony? You can judge who's drunk easily, and maybe you've seen firsthand that drunks can get things wrong or perhaps reasoned this out on the basis of experience- but maybe even that is only something you've heard. The friends' calling him Liar Joe is testimony. You don't know whether Cameron is PM without accepting the testimony of newsreaders and reporters: you aren't going to get to see him to ask, and surely you don't have to do so to be rational in believing this. You couldn't speak a language without having accepted testimony about words. In most cases, you're not even in a position of knowing enough to do the relevant checks and tests w/o first accepting testimony. So: you can't sift testimony w/o relying on other testimony. And it's not clear that you can have a principled basis for deciding which testimony to take initially on sheer trust (given the initial "pass" of the speaker, as someone who does not seem untrustworthy). IF that turns out true, the only rational choice is to take all testimony initially on trust if the teller seems trustworthy.

You may continue to be justified in believing the testimony even if you find things that make you doubt the story or the teller somewhat, or ought to do so. If the basis for doubt is considerable, perhaps you need to do something to allay it. But that's the most you need do. If you do it, your testimonial justification for belief remains undefeated and your belief is justified and rational.

And- finally- there is no non-question-begging basis for denying the same prima facie acceptance to religious testimony. If it is rational to accept a story about physics, given that you have no particular reason to doubt the teller, why not one about God? If all you need to do to remain rational is find a reasonable response to bases for doubts about physics, so too here. And whoever claims that we have an obligation to become skeptical about religious testimony, to investigate whether the sources are credible etc., needs to explain why the same doesn't hold for scientific testimony (e.g. looking up your teacher's undergraduate marks). There is only one well-known argument about this, Hume's against believing testimony about miracles. But not all religious testimony concerns the miraculous. Some is just testimony to religious experience, or prophesied/fulfilled historical events. And in any case, Hume's argument is a bust.

It might seem that testimony to experience of God, or to miracles, should not get prima facie acceptance b/c it runs up against some of the barriers I mentioned earlier. It is rational to doubt testimony if the teller seems crazy- and perhaps Dawkins thinks that anyone who claims to have heard God's voice shows himself to be crazy. It is rational to doubt testimony if the story is literally incredible, or close to it- and perhaps Dawkins thinks that any miracle story is ipso facto incredible, and ditto any story about seeing a vision or hearing God's voice. But why?

It's probably craziness to seem to hear God's voice if it is very improbable that God exists- so perhaps Dawkins thinks that he has a good argument for this. (The absence of independent proof that God exists isn't an argument. We have no independent proof that North American woodpeckers exist, save that some people have seen them and reported it. If it's rational to believe them, other things being equal, it's just b/c there's no particular argument that they don't exist.) The only one out there is the argument from evil. And while that argument can impress, the truth of the matter is that there are pretty good answers to it out there. Of course, you know by testimony that some philosophers think there are, and some think there aren't. It's a peculiar fact about philosophy, that an argument that seems crushing to some seems irrelevant to others. One thing you could do is examine the argument and the answers for yourself. But that's of limited value if you're not a philosopher: you should know that someone who spends more time on it might well see considerations you don't, and defer to some degree to expert opinion- which is divided. So what's the rational answer in the face of that, given that you're not a philosopher? I suggest that the absence of a consensus against God's existence on the basis of this argument, among people who've considered the question seriously, leaves you with little reason to think that people who think they've heard God's voice are crazy. That's not to say no reason, but if there are a fair number of people who seem otherwise sane who claim this, the craziness block on accepting testimony doesn’t seem to apply.

The theist's position may well be this. He believes in God growing up, bc the grownups say so. As he grows, he learns that their testimony traces ultimately back to a book in most cases. There are in that book testimonies to religious experience he finds convincing- say, someone's account of a vision of a burning bush. On testimonial basis, he continues to believe. Someone who as a child or young adult simply believes what they hear is behaving perfectly rationally. And they may remain rational even after they come into contact w/testimony to other religions, and critical discussion of testimony to miracles, and critical Scriptural scholarship where that exists: all they need is a sufficiently reasonable response to the problems raised, or a good reason to think that an expert has such a response. If someone is skeptical of your story about the Big Bang, to be rational in resisting his skepticism, you don't have to be a physicist. You need only have good reason to think a physicist could do it for you, and refer your inquirer to the expert. So too here: if you have reason to think someone can do the job for you, you can farm out the work. I f the theist can rebut the atheist's case against his testimonially based belief, or believe rationally that others can do it for him, the theist is fully rational. Nothing more is required.

Prof. Sir Michael Howard 'Reflections on the Holocaust'

Thu, 15 Dec 2016 1:13:00 PM

First, where I am coming from. I am, as I realised rather late in life, a Jew of the blood. My mother’s Jewish parents came over from Germany and settled in England in the 1880s. They were not ‘observant’; and like most of their contemporaries in that diaspora, they did their best to assimilate to their host society. They gave my mother an upper-class English education; she did the same for me and my siblings; and as a result I have never felt anything but totally British. I only became conscious of my Jewish connections when a sad procession of my mother’s relations sought refuge in England in the 1930s. It did not strike home to me how closely involved I was with their tragic circumstances until I visited Auschwitz some twenty years ago.

There I saw two things that literally made my blood run cold. The first was a photograph of a railway station in Vienna in 1942, where smartly-dressed Jewish ladies were queuing to catch a train for a destination, unknown to them, all too well known to us. They were dressed exactly as my own mother was at the time: the same chic little hats, the same calf-length dresses, the same elegant hair-dos.: she would have passed unnoticed among them. The second was a pile of the contents of the handbags taken from the same victims before they were herded into the gas-chamber: powder-compacts, lip-sticks, face-creams, embroidered handkerchiefs : all the female accessories I had seen whenever my mother snapped open her handbag to powder her nose. It was only then that I realised what would have happened to her if the Germans had successfully invaded us in 1940.

As it was, all my close relations escaped one way or another, except for one cousin, an elderly lady who killed herself on the eve of being transported to the womens’ concentration camp at Ravensbruck. That is as close as my own family came to the Holocaust.. But I now know that, but for good fortune and the heroic performance of the Royal Air Force, I would not be here to give this lecture.

Do I find this experience – or rather, my good fortune in escaping it – an advantage as a historian ? In one way, yes: it enables me to empathise with the strong feelings that the memory of the Holocaust stirs in all those remotely connected with it; and that of course includes the whole Jewish people, But my training as a historian warns me against allowing those passions to affect my historical judgement; and that training has made me take a stand on two issues that are not always popular among audiences such as this.

First, I do not accept that those unbalanced individuals who deny the existence of the Holocaust should be criminalised, and so given the status of ‘martyrs for free speech’. Apart from anything else, to declare the holding of any opinion, however offensive or absurd it may seem to the rest of us, to be ‘illegal’ is to enter on a very dangerous path indeed. These people should be argued with, discredited and if necessary mocked. David Irving appears to be an intensely disagreeable man, and has been exposed as a thoroughly unreliable historian, and I think that those who invited him to address the Union were according him an honour that he did not deserve. But I also think that those who so vociferously objected to his presence were not only giving him a publicity that he did not deserve either, but probably also providing him with intense personal gratification. John Milton was right when he said that the best way of dealing with error is the re-iteration of the truth; which is one very good reason why the memory of the Holocaust should be kept fresh by lectures such as this.

Second, I can not accept that the argument that the Holocaust should not be ‘historicised’; that is, that historians should not try to understand, explain, and put it into context as we do any other historical event, because to do so may seem in some way to justify it. As a historian I cannot see that there can be any such ‘no-go areas’ in the past: I would be out of business if I did. There may be times or occasions when it is socially or politically inexpedient to raise certain issues, but as historians we have one overriding duty : to discover the truth of what happened and explain it to the best of our ability. That is what I shall try to do this evening.

It is easy to be shocked by the Holocaust: it is far more difficult to explain it. Here were the people of Germany, one of the most advanced and civilised societies that the world has ever seen, leaders in every branch of the arts, of philosophy, of scholarship, of science and technology , using all the means that their ingenuity had put at their disposal quite systematically to murder millions of their own most loyal and productive citizens. To call it ‘evil’ is almost to trivialise it: it was on a scale so monstrous that it almost transcended evil. Also, to use such emotive terms seems to absolve us from our responsibility to understand. To understand is not to forgive; but without understanding we cannot appreciate the dimensions of the problem with which we are dealing, or know what to do to ensure that it does not happen again..

The first problem that I myself face is, why was it the Germans who did this ? Here again I must explain where I am coming from. My mother transmitted to me not only Jewish blood, but the German culture imbibed and loved by her own parents. I feel at home with the German language (though I can barely speak it), with German poetry and German music, as I do with no other. So for me, even after I have explained it, it remains something of a mystery. After all, the Jews were no more unpopular in 19th century Germany than they were anywhere else in Europe. If one had been told , say in 1900, that the Holocaust would occur forty years later and asked to guess where it would happen, Germany would certainly not have been the first choice. That would probably have been Russia, where the pogroms, admittedly on a small if brutal scale, gave some indication of the intensity of racial prejudice in at least some regions of the Tsarist Empire. But Russia, it was generally admitted, was still semi-barbaric.. When she had caught up with the West, as she seemed rapidly to be doing, incidents like these would surely sink back into her troubled history. But next on the list would probably have been France, where at the turn of the century violent and endemic anti-Semitism was finding expression, not only in such works as Edouard Drumont’s La France juive and the circulation of the infamous Protocols of the Elders of Zion, but in the official victimisation of Captain Alfred Dreyfus with the consent of the entire French establishment and half the electorate.

There was nothing like this going on in Germany. There was anti-Semitism certainly: Jews found it hard to get on in certain professions, especially the Army; but so they did in England. But on the whole, ever since their emancipation at the beginning of the nineteenth century, the Jews had been assimilated into German society as well, if not indeed better, than anywhere else in Continental Europe. They prided themselves on being loyal subjects of the Hohenzollern monarchy. My mother had cousins who fought as gallantly in the German Army in the First World War as her brother did in the British. A little later, others would have served their country just as willingly in the Wehrmacht in the Second World War, if they had been given the chance. So why was it the Germans who inflicted on themselves this hideous wound; one from which, arguably, they have never recovered?

To try to explain why, I am afraid that I must venture in a very amateur way into the fields of political science and human psychology

In the course of the eighteenth century there developed in Europe two contrasting schools of thought. One was that generally known as ‘the Enlightenment’; the ideas that inspired the American and French Revolutions and are now the orthodoxy of the Western world. This teaches that all individual human beings are born with inalienable rights and responsibilities for their own well-being. In consequence any association or community to which they belong comes into being only through their freely-given consent and remain legitimate only in so far as it recognises those rights.

On the other hand there was the school that Isaiah Berlin has termed ‘the Counter-Enlightenment. This held that, so far from individuals being born ‘free’ and responsible for their own destinies, they are in fact born into pre-existent communities which mould their characteristics and their cultures; and the interests of these communities have overriding precedence over those of the individual. Indeed the values and ‘rights’ of individuals derive entirely from their membership of this pe-existing community. This view was more popular in the land of Herder and Hegel than it was in France, Britain, or the United States, but there is a great deal to be said for it. As most of us know from personal experience, we all have a deeply-felt need to be members of a community of some kind, and we feel uncomfortable and isolated if we are not. Adolescents once they leave the protection of their nuclear family find security in groups of their peers; sometimes, alas, in gangs. Their loyalties, with luck, will broaden out into more mature and productive communities, and of these the ultimate and all-embracing has been, in Europe, the nation-state. I think that for most of us it still is. In non-European cultures it has usually been the extended family of the tribe, or the religious community and its local variants. As for the Jews, it was of course for centuries the close-knit communities of the ghettoes, from one of which my own great-great grandfather emerged two hundred years ago, to become a loyal citizen of the principality of Hesse, as his children, a little later, were to become loyal subjects of the German Reich.

But the very existence of these communities, however necessary they may be to our well-being, creates, alas, the outsiders; the Others, those who don’t belong. We learned to recognise those Others at school. They spoke with the wrong accent, or they wore the wrong clothes, or they had funny-sounding names, or they lived on the wrong side of the tracks: in short they were not , as Lady Thatcher put it, ‘one of us’ – unless of course they were stars at games, in which case all was forgiven. They might not present a ‘threat’, but they did not fit. And that was the trouble with the Jews in Europe, from the Middle Ages till the nineteenth century and after: with their closely-knit families, their own language, their elaborate religious observances, and often their distinctive appearance, they did not fit. They were always ‘the other’: useful enough when one wanted to borrow money and an even more useful scapegoat when anything went wrong. Shakespeare’s Shylock would have been instantly recognisable to any Elizabethan audience.

So long as they were confined to their ghettoes and knew their place, the Jews were tolerable. They might not fit, but they had their uses and presented no serious threat to their neighbours. But once they were emancipated and granted full civil rights, they were able to join in every field of social activity. They had always been disliked by the aristocracy and the peasants who encountered them mainly as money-lenders. Now, in an increasingly capitalist economy, they were also resented by the middle and professional classes as successful competitors, as well as being mistrusted, if envied, for their international affiliations. (And I am afraid that the fact that my Jewish cousins who fought in the Great War had cousins on the other side cannot have counted in their favour among their own comrades-in-arms). So nineteenth-century Europe witnessed the grim paradox, that the more successfully the Jews were assimilated into their host societies, the more unpopular they became.

This did not have serious consequences in stable and prosperous societies such as Britain. Anti-Semitism was certainly rife in Edwardian England where the Jews were not seen as ‘one of us’ unless they were stinking rich; and even then they were not welcome in the really smart upper-class clubs. Humorists like Hilaire Belloc was able to write about them in terms that no editor would dare to print today. But when societies were not stable or prosperous it was a very different matter; and when the wheels came off the coach as disastrously as they did in post-war Germany the situation became really nasty.

So to understand why the Holocaust occurred in Germany, we have to remember what Germany was like after 1918. There had been the long ordeal of the war itself, with its mass slaughter of soldiers at the front and the near-starvation of civilians at home. Then there had been the humiliation of sudden, total, and to many people inexplicable military defeat. Then there was social revolution and civil war. And finally there came economic and financial collapse; not once, but twice, in 1923 and six years later in 1929. The stable, self-confident civil society that before 1914 had been the envy of the world was shattered: and its members looked for someone to blame.

Wartime privation had already blamed on the Jews, who were very widely seen – as indeed they were in England – as being war profiteers. Now they became the scapegoats for all Germany’s ills: not just disliked, but hated: hated as aliens, not true Germans and all the more to be mistrusted when they pretended to be true Germans. Visceral prejudice was given bogus scientific validity by the quasi-science of eugenics. Adolf Hitler had brought with him from Vienna an anti-Semitism far more bitter than any being brewed in Germany itself, and his party skilfully exploited the political advantage of an enemy equally unpopular among all social classes. Anti-Semitism lay at the very root of Nazi propaganda and, I am afraid, very largely of Nazi success. By 1939 the German people had been taught to see in the Jews an internal enemy as dangerous as those who threatened them from beyond their frontiers, and almost certainly in league with them. When war came, it was depicted as a pre-emptive strike against Jewish Bolshevism in the East and Jewish Capitalism in the West; a global conspiracy that had to be destroyed if Germany was to survive.

So the elimination of the Jewish population was seen by the Nazi regime as an essential part of waging, and winning, the Second World War. First they had to be rendered impotent through confiscation of wealth, property and status. Then they had to be forcibly expelled. Finally, when there was nowhere left to expel them to, there could only be one solution; that made possible by the technological expertise that German scientists had done so much to develop.

I think that it is the sheer efficiency of the Final Solution that we find so shocking: the meticulous paper-work by the dedicated bureaucrats; the railway timetables; the expert organisation of the death-camps; the scientific ingenuity with which the largest number of victims were slaughtered in the shortest possible time; and – perhaps most horrible of all – the careful economy with which their possessions were preserved and recycled for the war effort. If there was one thing at Auschwitz that I can never forget, it is the piles of human hair, carefully harvested from the heads of living victims for future use. It is this cold-blooded use of industrial and technological skill in mass murder that that makes the Final Solution unique: so far.

For don’t let us forget that this kind of tribal slaughter has happened before; it is happening now; and is all too likely to happen again. Whether or not we call it ‘genocide’ is to my mind legal pedantry: it makes no difference to the victims what it is called. It can happen when any group is persuaded that its existence is threatened by another – an ‘Other’, that is strong enough to pose a threat but weak enough to be eliminated without offering serious resistance. I cannot think of any region of the world, or period of human history, when this has not happened. Classical antiquity is full of such slaughters. I shall prudently leave it to you to decide what evidence is provided by the Old Testament (to use Christian parlance) about the means used by the Jews to eliminate opposition to their conquest of the Promised Land. Protestants and Catholics slaughtered each other in Europe – not least in Ireland. In the early twentieth century Moslems and Slavs slaughtered each other in the Balkans and Turks slaughtered Armenians in Asia-Minor. In my own lifetime Hindus and Moslems slaughtered each other by the million in India; while today in Africa we might almost say that tribal slaughter is endemic.

A hundred years ago, we might have dismissed such slaughter as a phenomenon of a past that we have long outgrown, or a barbaric practice in the darker parts of the world that we had a duty to eliminate. We can’t do that any longer. For one thing, we have done it ourselves: civilisation, or modernisation, or whatever we like to call it, clearly provides no inoculation against the habit. For another, the state of the world today makes the temptation to such actions more rather than less likely.

For we are witnessing how throughout the world the comparatively orderly structures created by agrarian societies are dissolving, as did those in Europe two centuries ago, under the impact of global capitalism. Their former European masters bequeathed their own model of nation-states, but these do not necessarily fit, either geographically, economically or culturally. When these societies try to remould themselves, they need to define or redefine their frontiers, and establish viable hierarchies of administration. Their space will include ethnic or religious minorities. It may indeed be composed entirely of such minorities; groups that should be co-opted as partners but are all too easily regarded as threats. In a world of constantly changing uncertainties, people will naturally cling, or revert, to their traditional communities, tribal or religious: but the very existence of these communities implies a threatening ‘Other’ both within and outside their own borders. Finally, such rivalries and mistrust may well be sharpened, in the not far distant future, by competition for scarce natural resources. The option of ‘pre-emptive slaughter’ remains very much on the cards.

So we would be very unwise to see the Holocaust as a terrible exception, a unique event to be taken out of history and placed beyond the reach both of deranged sceptics and prying historians. Much better to see it as an awful warning: this is what people can do to one another under certain conditions: have done before, are doing now, may do again. Of course Jews in particular should remember it and make sure that everyone else does; but not simply because they were the victims, and because what was done to them makes them in some way privileged and exceptional. It was done by ordinary human beings to other ordinary human beings. Neither murderers nor their victims were in any essentials different from ourselves.

So when we pray in remembrance of those who died, let us pray also that neither we, nor our children, ever find ourselves in the position, not so much of the victims as of their murderers and those who supported them, or those who simply let it happen: thinking the kind of thoughts, saying the kind of things, tolerating the kind of behaviour, that ultimately makes such horrors possible. From such temptation, not a single one of us is exempt.

Rabbi Adin Steinsaltz Q & A with Oxford students

Thu, 15 Dec 2016 1:10:00 PM

Student: What are the current challenges facing science, and what are the common points, where Torah and science converge?

Rabbi Steinsaltz: The challenges facing science is in biology, which is currently the cutting edge of science. One simple thing that can happen over the next decade is the development of a brain-computer link, which may revolutionise our existence, far more than what has been done before. Imagine having unlimited memory with accessibility to everything. This would present a profound change and it is frightening to think that we are not that far from it.

The novelty that the Torah represents is the ability for a person to say ‘no’ and challenge certain areas of scientific development, which goes contrary to human ethics. We derive this characteristic from the patriarch Abraham who challenged the trends in his time and had the courage to say ‘no’.

If we don’t have the ability to resist certain areas of scientific development, when it goes contrary to our value system, and instead we find all kinds of ways of compromising to the dictates of science, we will lose the sense of truth, integrity and sincerity that we have been imbued with by the Torah and our forefather Abraham. The novelty of the Torah is its ability to say ‘no’ to the many things that are happening today and may happen in the future.

Student: What about empirical scientific proof, when it goes against the Torah? How can that be disproved?

Rabbi Steinsaltz: A theory that simply cannot be negated does not necessarily make it a true statement. If you cannot prove a particular theory and it goes contrary to the Torah, the Torah has the ability to say ‘no’. It is understandable that at university it is very hard not to become a part of its mindset and environment. I wrote a book about the special Jewish ability of being a chameleon. This is the worst danger. We tend very easily to blend in, not only by appearance, but also intellectually, with the dominant society. It is important to sometimes resist even when it’s unpopular.

Student: Shall we try to concentrate more on healing diseases from medical point of view, or to improve the body and mind?

Rabbi Steinsaltz: The problem about healing diseases is that, although people have written a lot about it, it is not clear whether we are on the winning side. The mutations among bacteria and viruses are so fast, is it possible to catch up with them? The real question should be whether we can create a comprehensive immunity for ourselves? Can we change strategically, not only tactically, the relationship between us and the biological world? Most of what research is currently developing is tactical, rather than essential and strategic. I concede that I just don’t know what we have the ability to do, but if we can do something, it should be aimed at something far reaching.

Student: What is your opinion of stem cell research?

Rabbi Steinsaltz: Regarding biology and science in general, I support progress. Although it is presumed religious people are stuck in the mud and think yesterday was always better than today and the day before was even better, I am not like that and I believe in progress. I think stem cell research is positive. I had a conversation with a senior official in the American health system pointing out that one has to be very careful about trying not to do something which has uncertainty where it will end up. An example is the development of the atom bomb. Humanity created something that has given man enough killing power to destroy the world a hundred times. The only thing that has stopped this from happening is fear.

We should be very concerned regarding stem cell research. We are opening vistas into things that we don’t really know where they will end up. On the other hand humanity can benefit in all kinds of ways with its potential to improve the human condition.

One potential of stem cell research is the possibility to create more angelic human beings. The concern, however, is that it can likewise create worse “devils”. There is need for much caution. This is one of the areas that one has to consult the Torah so that we won’t end up creating more devils in the world. To be true, there seems to be enough devils in the world without us having to create new ones.

Student: What is your opinion about the Torah’s six days of creation, contrary to science which claims the world to have evolved into its current state over billions of years?

Rabbi Steinsaltz: Time has meaning only when there are human beings to observe it. When there are no human beings, time is only an extrapolation. When we speak about pre-human times, we are really speaking about something which is an extrapolation. This problem has been discussed many times from a philosophical point of view, whether time has any real meaning before the existence of human beings. I can call it by any name I want, because it only depends on the person’s scale of reference.

Student: Is it not, according to the Torah, six days as we count days?

Rabbi Steinsaltz: The day that we count as days needs some method of counting. Although one believes that the six days of Creation were the same as our days, it is however impossible to prove, and has no meaning. The definition of a day is measured by movement of something. When nothing moved comparable to our notion of movement, the concept of a day is just a metaphysical statement. What is time without any way of measuring it?

I am not trying to defend any particular view, but rather attempting to put forward points for consideration.

Alice in Wonderland

There is one beautiful thing in Oxford, which is a garden that still exists in Christ Church College, where Alice used to play. It is possibly one of the nicest, most intelligent things they have there.

Liddell, the father of Alice, wrote something which is still considered the best Greek dictionary that exists, Liddell-Scott Dictionary. The Oxford students who are here seem to be from the sciences but if one consults somebody in humanities, they will confirm this. In fact, some of the stories of Alice are really on the same kind of level of intelligence. Just as I don’t understand Greek, how am I meant to understand those stories?

Student: There is currently an important issue called climate change and global warming, which allegedly leads to the increase of natural disasters. How is this compatible with the coming of Messiah?

Rabbi Steinsaltz: If it would be known when and how the coming of Messiah will happen, I would not be wasting my time sitting here. Sitting here really seems inconsequential, had I the real answer for predicted natural disasters.

Regarding global warming, I prefer not to be obscurantist, but nevertheless one of the things that need to be checked is how much it has to do with natural cycles. This point is important because there are so many articles written on this subject and some are written by people who have biases influencing their views.

As someone who has no shares in the gasoline industry, I may question whether human beings have any effect on the environment. There is the theory that the major contributor is the natural emissions from animals. It is wonderful to be someone like Al Gore, a great man who thinks he will change the world; however, there is the possibility of greater forces at play than Al Gore.

This is just a note of caution about getting too involved in global warming. It ends up becoming a point of belief, when really it might not be so important.

According to Jewish teaching, the coming of Messiah is connected to some kind of crisis. Global warming is indeed a growing crisis, which might be a sign of the coming of Messiah. We can presently see in the world a crisis, which comes as a result of various effects that seem to converge. One cannot predict at what point they will converge, but I would say it appears that it might happen in the near future.

In the past, we would speak about the coming of Messiah in a rational way, when the contributing elements were fragmented. My opinion is that the coming of Messiah will be when there is some kind of ‘crack’ in the fabric of existence. It seems that we are approaching what can be called a ‘crack’ in one way or another. Global warming is one aspect of this concept, but there are also other things that are converging. We have for example the problem of draught, lack of sufficient water in places. We have all kinds of ways of getting oil or other energies, but there is less and less water for the world population. I can see many of these kinds of problems coming to a head, not in the unforeseeable future. Someone has to rectify these problems. This is the role of Messiah.

Student: Do you think Jews should be more persuasive in encouraging gentiles to observe the seven noahide laws?

Rabbi Steinsaltz: It is important that Jews do something about the observance of the seven noahide laws amongst the non-Jewish population, since, in addition to the fact that it might be a protection for Jews, it is necessary to live in an environment that is not antagonistic.

Those who know me are aware that when I come to America they think I am hired by foreign powers to besmirch them. I am offensive about American culture in almost every way. Nevertheless, America is the most religious country in the West. It is therefore easier for Jews to exist.

I’ve written many newspaper articles about the ‘paganisation’ of Europe. This ‘paganisation’ is not necessarily healthy for the Jews, because it’s very distant from our own beliefs and it is difficult to exist without reference points. In that sense, one can say, in addition to there being a general duty for Jews to positively influence humanity, through the noahide laws, it is also necessary for self-protection, as the Jews need some kind of familiar environment. This leads to the gentiles being able to understand Jewish existence or indeed, in the negative, due to their Christian beliefs, dispute Jewish teaching. However when one enters a pagan society, as most of the English, who, unlike America, don’t believe in Jesus, although they believe the Jews killed him, there is total lack of understanding and absence of any reference points between gentile and Jew.

Rabbi Eli Brackman: An Oxford professor was asked whether anyone in the academic world believes that Moses wrote the Torah. He responded that if a student would write it in an essay in Oxford, it would automatically be rejected. What are your thoughts on Biblical criticism?

Rabbi Steinsaltz: Science, in the past and especially today, has nothing to do with truth. It is built on consensus. It is like fashion. Who triggers change in fashion? A few years ago there was Gauthier. He decided to make a new fashion that was modelled on Jewish Hassidic dress. He made a whole line of clothing for girls. It consisted of fur hats (shtreimleh), long coats and so on. For some reason, it wasn’t accepted. I also remember fashions that were so terribly ugly, it is beyond belief how any sane girl could dress like that.

It is the same fashion that exists at universities. They are ‘blind powers’ that move from one place to another. What is accepted, nobody dares question. I once saw on the door of a professor a long list of some of the most important inventions in the world, while alongside it detailing the period that theory was condemned by outstanding scientists of the time. The purpose was to encourage the students to think on their own.

There is something called cryptography, which is a computer-based analysis of a text, which is quite reliable. One puts in a certain text and one is able to find out very subtle changes of syntax, which a human reader won’t detect. An old acquaintance of mine, who was Jewish, though non-observant, was a professor about twenty years ago in Computer Sciences at the Technion in Haifa. He researched texts with this method, putting the machine to use by inserting the Iliad, the Odyssey and all kinds of Shakespeare works, in order to find out the various different authors of these works.

He then did the same thing to the book of Genesis, the most important source for the theory of multi-authorship of the Bible. To anybody’s reading of the Book of Genesis it has clearly three or four sources. One can see very clearly the differences between the ‘j’ source, the ‘i’ source, the ‘p’ source and the ‘r’ source. One needs to be blind not to see it. The professor put the Book of Genesis into the machine and the result was that the book is written by a single author.

If scientists and heads of universities would be honest people, they would feel hit over the head by this result, especially since the research was done by machine, rather than a human being. A person has biases and subjective opinions, but a machine has no vested interested either way.

In fact, the machine wasn’t very orthodox. They put the book of Zachariah into it and the result was it was written by two authors. Neither the fellow, nor the machine, was orthodox. However, the result for the book of Genesis should have been a ‘disaster’ for the unquestionable theory of Biblical criticism.

However, the effect this research had on Biblical scholarship was inconsequential and was met with total silence. There was a small article that appeared in one or two international magazines, however, the Biblical studies departments round the world did not react. If they would have denied the validity of the research, saying that the machinery wasn’t accurate enough, that would have at least made a noise.

Bible Codes

There was once a wealthy American fellow who wrote a book on the Bible Codes and would phone me with his questions at the early hours of the morning having found out that I stay up very late. He had all kinds of inter-planetary conspiracy theories regarding external malevolent powers that influence the world. He wanted to know whether there were any sources for his theories in the Bible or Kabbala.

When he was working on the Bible Codes, I was glad to be able to direct him to a leading mathematician, who looked over his writings and he thought mathematically speaking it was good work. Indeed, the American author of the bible Codes became very wealthy from this.

When it was at an early stage of his involvement in the subject of Bible Codes, I asked him, if you find the Bible Codes are indeed true, will it cause you to observe the Torah? He responded, of course, although as of now, it still didn’t have any effect. There doesn’t seem to be any connection for these people who work on the Bible to the observances written inside it.

When speaking once on the Bible Codes in Singapore, I suggested to the audience that instead of going into all kind of complicated Biblical analysis such as whether the death of so and so is mentioned in a Biblical text or not, there are some very simple codes which are written, for example, don’t eat non-kosher foods, keep the Shabbat and so on, which are simple and easily understood.

Rabbi Reuven Leigh (Cambridge University): What is your opinion about students taking drugs and is there a difference between drugs and alcohol?

Rabbi Steinsaltz: There is no real difference between taking alcohol and drugs, whether it marijuana, hashish, grass or whatever. I once heard from the Lubavitcher Rebbe, in a private audience, his view on the subject. Although people are unaware and don’t usually connect it with him, the Lubavitcher Rebbe had a great sense of humour. He may not have used it when giving his widely broadcasted talks and discourses, sometimes to five thousand people. However, in private he would use it.

He was speaking about the effect on a person taking drugs. He was, incidentally, very careful about saying anything negative about anybody. He said that the notion of the Torah in general is that the person should be the master over one self, and anything that the person is enslaved to, is wrong.

Therefore, there is no difference between smoking, drinking alcohol, smelling all kinds of, say, cocaine, heroin and so on, or injecting them. It’s basically all the same. The question is rather can the person still be the master over themselves when involved in these things? If one can, then it can be used and it should be taken, though very carefully.

There is a book on the effect of drugs by Aldous Huxley, The Doors of Perception & Heaven and Hell (1954). He makes a mistake when he writes that the recreational drug mescaline opens gates to something objective. He thought that mescaline opens the way to see higher worlds. Drugs might open gates of perceptions, but the gates are inner gates. They open gates to see part of ones own psychic. One shouldn’t think that a person is able to see the beautiful images that the prophet Ezekiel saw. When taking drugs one does not see something real, outside oneself, but rather is an inside experience. It might be interesting, but it doesn’t take the person beyond the subject of the mind.

In conclusion the problem using any kinds of drugs or almost anything that has a little bit psychoactive material is the same. Indeed, almost everything is psychoactive, including bread. If one fasts and then takes a piece of bread, it is possible to see how many changes are made in ones psychic.

The problem, however, with most drugs is that people come relatively fast to a point of no return. To be true, there is never a point of no return, but one reaches quickly to a point at which it is very hard, almost impossible, to return. The person loses ones ability to have control over oneself. This is the negative side of drugs.

This is not the case with smoking tobacco. Indeed, there were the early Hassidim who would smoke tobacco extensively. There is a paper written by Steinshneider called Tobacco worship among the Hassidim. The founder of the Hassidic movement Rabbi Israel Baal Shem Tov and many of his followers would smoke tobacco extensively, before the dangers were known.

Professor Irwin Cotler

Thu, 15 Dec 2016 1:09:00 PM

Sixty years on from the Holocaust, the most systematic and sophisticated genocide in human history, we are forced to encounter the ultimate question: has humanity advanced and learnt its lessons from the past? Can genocide reoccur in front of the eyes of the world?

This was the subject of a lecture given by renowned expert on human rights, former Minister of Justice and Attorney General of Canada, the Honourable Professor Irwin Cotler MP for the Oxford University Chabad Society.

Professor Irwin Cotler, who is at the forefront of a campaign to prosecute Iran's President Ahmedinejad for incitement to genocide, travelled from Canada to give the Chabad Society's annual Pearl Grunzweig memorial lecture. To give added flavour to the event, a special introduction was given by Cotler’s high school friend from Montreal, Professor Jerry Cohen, who is currently Chichele Professor of Social and Political Theory at Oxford University, fellow of All Souls College and who Professor Cotler described as "the wittiest and most brilliant philosopher in the world today".

Professor Cotler addressed the society on the influences and inspirations guiding his work. He said that it was guided by the principles that his father held dear, “justice, charity, and righteousness”. All these words are core Jewish values and found in the single Hebrew word, Tzedaka.

At the inauguration ceremony of his appointment to Justice Minister of Canada, he proclaimed, “I will be guided in my work by one overarching principle: justice, justice, and the pursuit of equality”. However, he qualified the pursuit of justice with the feeling of empathy. The philosophy “if you do not know what hurts me, you cannot love me" is a useful formula and should be a guide underlying ones mentality, he said. In today's age of constant fear of terrorism whether real or imagined, he said, knowing one's neighbours and their cultural roots on a personal level rather than through superficial generalizations is the only way of making informed decisions.

He therefore drew the following important observation, quoting the great Jewish sage, Hilel “If I am not for myself, who will be for me.” This means, if Jews, for example, don’t affirm their history and heritage, ethos and ethics, values and heritage, they will be less able to convey themselves and be less able to help others understand them. Only then can they fulfil the second part of Hillel’s statement “If I am only for myself than who am I?” and will then be fit for campaigning for others.

Cotler believes that the principles of Judaism are based not only on respect but pursuance of justice. He declared that if Jews don’t get involved in human rights struggles of our time they are complicit by their complacency and silence. Furthermore, in his view, they would not be conducting their lives according to Jewish values.

The pursuit for justice is even more important when viewed in the context of the commemoration of the 60^th anniversary of Nuremberg and on the eve of the 62^nd anniversary of the UN, which Cotler said was founded specifically because of the holocaust of European Jewry.

In light of these anniversaries, he said, it must be asked, what has the world learned and what has been done to prevent similar genocides from happening again? Quoting Søren Kierkegaard, he said, "Life has to be lived forwards, but can only be understood backwards". Based on this philosophy, Cotler set out universal lessons of the Holocaust.

His biggest concern was related to the dangers of state sanctioned cultures and incitement to hate and genocide. The Holocaust indeed did not begin in gas chambers, but in Nazi teaching of racist hate.

He saw the irony of today’s times that countries who have signed the international declaration of human rights, stood aside during the unspeakable genocide in Rwanda. The same, he lamented, is regarding Darfur. Despite well mobilized grassroots efforts the political will of governments to act is still not there. He suggested not only popular protest but an inter-governmental Darfur summit to bring together all parties able to take political action to save Darfur.

It is most common to view the violators of human rights as violent groups and despotic governments. However, Professor pointed out the neglected phenomenon of what he called the treason and complacency of intellectual elites. As a man of action, he said that it is necessary to also hold accountable, doctors, lawyers, engineers and teachers.

The greatness of a society can be measured by its treatment and care of the most vulnerable and powerless. The real test of human rights as taught to him by his daughter Gila can be summed up: Is it good for the children?

When asked "What his prediction of future is" he replied: "The future will look like what we say and do today!"

Ambassador Yehuda Avner

Thu, 15 Dec 2016 1:05:00 PM

Before I delve into that I would like to tell you how refreshing it is to be just one of two speakers at tonight's grand occasion. I say this because just a few weeks ago I was invited to address a Jewish dinner in London, and I was the fourteenth speaker. When the evening began there were perhaps three hundred people in the hall, but as speaker after speaker droned on and on the hall gradually began to empty, so that by the time the eighth speaker went to the microphone there must have been about seventy people left. By the twelfth speaker we were down to twenty. And when I rose to speak — which was well after midnight — there were precisely two people left. But I made my speech. And when I finished I stepped down and asked the first fellow why on earth had he stayed, and he answered, I'm your chief security officer. And when I asked the second fellow, he said, I'm the last speaker.

This past year marked the sixtieth anniversary of the founding of the State of Israel, and Rabbi Menachem Mendel Schneersohn, OBM, the Lubavitcher Rebbe, is an extraordinary chapter in the telling of this tale. It is an epic about the Jewish people's most extraordinary visionary in living memory — an immortal whose leadership sparked a torch of Jewish renewal across all continents — a man whose presence was so inspiringly strong it is sustained to this day in the devoted work of yourselves — the thousands of his disciples who dedicate your lives to the building of fortresses of Judaism, often in the most remote corners of our earth. Wherever Jews are - there we find you — the shluchim (emissaries) of the Lubavitcher Rebbe.

And though I am not a card carrying member of Lubavitch, I had the privilege to have been a sort of unofficial liaison between Rabbi Schneersohn and the various prime ministers whom I served. And it is assuredly an interesting commentary on our political leadership that they sought, in one degree or another, to maintain some form of contact with this extraordinary luminary who lived under the chestnut and maple trees of Brooklyn rather than under the poplars and pines of Jerusalem to which, mysteriously, he never journeyed.

I never asked him why. I never asked him why because being a mere diplomatic practitioner I was intellectually humble enough to realize that he dwelt on an entirely different plane — a profoundly mystical plane — one to which I could never aspire. The Lubavitcher Rebbe was a theologian, not a political Zionist. But if Zionism is an unconditional, passionate devotion to Israel and to its security and welfare, then Rabbi Menachem Mendel Schneersohn was a fanatical Zionist.

Few men did more than him to enrich the spirit of Israel in virtually every walk of life, be it in the spiritual succor of our Israel Defense Forces, in the spread of Yiddishkeit, or the establishment of educational facilities.

The first Israeli leader I ever escorted to meet the Rebbe was Yitzhak Rabin when he was our ambassador in Washington in the late sixties - early seventies. One spring day in 1972, I persuaded him to call on the Rebbe in the name of our then President Zalman Shazar, to convey Israel's greetings on the occasion of the Rebbe's seventieth birthday. Off we went to 770 Eastern Parkway, Crown Heights, where we were kept waiting for so long that Rabin became fidgety. This straight-as-a-die agnostic was distinctively uncomfortable among the multitude of bearded men bustling to and fro around him, all identically clad in black suits and fedoras, and all seemingly indifferent to the pealing paint and the cracked linoleum of the Tudor-style edifice that houses the headquarters of the world Lubavitch movement. Sitting there with a red silk yarmulke perched precariously on his head, Yitzhak Rabin looked like an alien in a foreign land.

When we were finally ushered into the inner sanctum the Rebbe’s face beamed a warm welcome. It was an angelic face, half curtained, so to speak, by a square gray beard, and topped by the trademark Lubavitch black fedora.

However, Rabin seemed unmoved. He displayed no interest when the Rebbe spoke to him of things celestial. But once the Rebbe began questioning him about certain of his strategic decisions during the Six Day War — Rabin, you will recall had been chief-of-staff — and then went on to talk I depth of Washington affairs, Rabin was amazed at his knowledge and insights.

What lured Rabin the most, so he told me afterwards, were the eyes. Ask anyone who ever met the Lubavitcher Rebbe and they will talk about the eyes. They were wide apart, arched over by fine eyebrows, their hue a deep blue, intense and compelling, and exuding wisdom, awareness, kindness, and good fellowship. Yet, as I was later to witness, when the Rebbe’s soul grew somber those eyes could dim into an ominous gray, like a leaden sky.

I got to know those eyes rather well over the years, and gradually came to understand that they saw things that the average person like me could never see. They were the eyes of one who could discern poetry in the mundane, mystery in the obvious, and large issues hidden in small things.

Said Yitzhak Rabin to me as we left, “I've just met an extraordinary leader of our people. That man knows more about what’s going on in Israel than most of the members of our Knesset."

A short while later, on a Purim eve, I escorted our president, Zalman Shazar, to meet the Rebbe. President Shazar had been born into the Hassidic Lubavitch enchantment and on his rare visits to New York he would abjure diplomatic protocol, choosing to call at 770 as the Rebbe's disciple rather than solicit the Rebbe to call on him at the Waldorf Astoria as a head of state. This greatly aroused the ire of our then prime minister, Golda Meir.

"What does Golda understand of these things?" Shazar grumbled as we drove to Brooklyn in a burnished limousine, escorted by NYPD outriders, sirens shrieking. "She wouldn't even know what a Lubavitcher Hassid looks like even if she saw one.”

Actually, that was not quite true. I heard her say so myself during the Yom Kippur War of 1973. On the third day of that most horrific war she toured the battle zone on the Golan Heights which the Syrian's had almost overrun. There, she addressed a group of soldiers waiting for their tanks to be replenished, and she asked them if anyone would like to ask her a question. One young fellow, unshaven, unkempt, his uniform caked with black dust from head to toe, and soiled from cordite, gunpowder, and oil, said in a voice husky with exhaustion, "Golda, my father was killed in the 1948 war and we won. My uncle was killed in the 1956 war and we won. My brother lost an arm in the 1967 war and we won. Last week I lost my best friend here in the battle for the Golan and we're winning. But is all our sacrifice worthwhile, Golda? What's the use of our sacrifice if we can't win the peace?"

Those were his very words. I have them down on tape.

Golda returned the young soldier a long and compassionate look, and she said, "I weep for your loss, just as I grieve for all our dead. And I must tell you in all honesty, were our sacrifices for ourselves alone, then perhaps you might be right; I'm not at all sure they are worthwhile. But if they are for the whole of the Jewish people, then I believe that any sacrifice is worthwhile."

And then she went on to tell those battle-weary troops the following tale:

She said, and I quote, "In 1948 I arrived in Moscow as Israel's first ambassador to the Soviet Union. The State of Israel was brand new. Stalinism was at its height. Jews as Jews had no rights whatsoever. On the contrary – practicing Jews were persecuted.

"The first Shabbat after I presented my credentials," she went on, "my embassy staff joined me for services at the Moscow Great Synagogue. It was practically empty. But the news of our arrival in Moscow spread quickly. How did it spread? Lubavitch Hassidim spread the word though their covert network. Throughout the darkest Stalinist days these Hassidim kept the spark alive. So when we went a second time the street in front of the shule (synagogue) was jam packed, as was the inside. Close to fifty thousand people were waiting for us. Without speeches, without parades, they were showing their love for Israel and the Jewish people, and I was their symbol. People surged around me, stretching out their hands, and crying, 'Gutt Shabbos Goldele/ 'Sholem aleychem Goldele/ 'Goldele,lebn zolstu/. And all I could say over and over again was, 'A dank eych vos ir zayt gebliben yidn. ('I thank you for having remained Jews.'). And that was when I knew for sure that our sacrifices are worthwhile."

In 1977 Menachem Begin was elected prime minister and he had a long-standing, close relationship with the Rebbe. Thus, on a balmy July day of that year he visited him at 770, to pay his respects and receive his blessing before continuing his journey to Washington, there to meet for the first time President Jimmy Carter. (In parenthesis I have to say that the Jimmy Carter of 1977 was not yet known as the perniciously prejudiced Jimmy Carter of 2008).

The Rebbe and the prime minister closeted themselves alone for a good hour, at the end of which it was decided I would return to New York after the White House talks to brief the Rebbe on how they had fared.

The Rebbe then escorted the premier to his front door where, amid a blaze of photo-flashes a hard-hitting reporter shouted out, “Mr. Begin, you are prime minister of Israel, so why do you come to see the rabbi? Surely, the rabbi should come to see you?”

"Why indeed?" said Begin with easy rapport. And then, in deep reverence, “I have come here because I am on my way to the White House to meet President Carter for the first time. So it is most natural for me to want to seek the blessings of this great sage of the Jewish people."

"How great is he?" asked another impudently.

"Rabbi Schneerson is one of the paramount Jewish personalities of our time," answered Begin. "His status is unique among our people. So yes, certainly, his blessing and counsel will strengthen me as I embark on a mission of acute importance for our Jewish future.” And off we drove to the airport for Washington and to the White House.

When I called on the Rebbe, as arranged, we sat alone in his wood-panelled chamber whose furnishings were so timeworn they were monastic. We spoke in Hebrew - the Rebbe’s classic, mine modern. And as he dissected my Washington report, his air of authority seemed to deepen. It came of something beyond knowledge. It was in his state of being, something he possessed in his soul which I cannot possibly begin to explain.

My presentation and his interrogation took close to four hours, and it was now after two in the morning, and I was utterly exhausted. But not the Rebbe. He was full of vim and vigor.

He must have noticed my fatigue for he suddenly leaned forward, fixed me with his eyes, and said with a surprisingly sweet smile, “How come, Reb Yehuda, you visit us so often yet you are not a Lubavitcher. Why?”

It was true. This, probably, was my fifth or sixth encounter. I remember my taking a deep breath and daring to say, “Maybe it is because I have met so many people who ascribe to the Rebbe powers which the Rebbe does not ascribe to himself.”

His brows knitted, and his eyes grayed into something between solemnity and sadness. Softly, he said in Hebrew, “Yesh k’nireh anoshim hazekukim l’kobayim — there are evidently people who needs crutches.” By the way he said it, it was clear that he meant that out there in the world there are so many Jews who are looking for a meaning to their lives, are in need of spiritual support, who seek some sagacious advice, and possibly a helping hand — and he, the Rebbe, was there for them all.

And then, with an encouraging smile, he went on, “Let me tell you what I try to do. Imagine you’re looking at a candle. What you are really seeing is a mere lump of wax with a thread down its middle. So when do the thread and the wax becomes a candle? Or, in other words, when do they fulfill the purpose for which they were created? When you put a flame to the thread, then the wax and the wick become a candle. And that, basically, is what I try to do – to encourage every Jew to fulfill the purpose for which he or she was created.

His voice then morphed into a rhythmic Talmudic chant as he went on to say: “The wax is the body, and the wick is the soul. Bring the flame of Torah to the soul, then the body will fulfill the purpose for which it was created. That is my mission - to ignite the soul of every Jew with the fire of Torah.”

And then we went back to talking about the strategic pros and cons of offering the Americans our Haifa port facilities as a base for their Sixth Fleet.

When I rose to bid farewell the Rebbe escorted me to the door, and there I asked him, “Has the Rebbe lit my candle?” “No,” he said. “I have given you the match. Only you can light your own candle.”

There are times when I think back with deep nostalgia to those days when a prime minister of Israel would ask me to call on the Rebbe to mull over this or that issue of the day. I venture to say our present government could do with an injection of his wise counsel right now.

Let me end with a story. In March 1992 the Embassy of Israel in Buenos Aires was blown up by Arab terrorists. Many were killed, and among the missing was a young mother called Yael Michaeli. Amid the carnage and the havoc and the confusion of the wreckage, our own Mosad people could not find her. So her sister and brother-in-law in New York desperately phoned Rabbi Moshe Kotlarski to see if he could find Lubavitchers in Buenos Aires to find Yael Michaeli?

By this time it was well after midnight and Rabbi Kotlarski urgently contacted a number of Lubavitchers in Buenos Aires, among them a Rabbi Tzvi Grunblatt. Rabbi Grunblatt did find Yael Michaeli in a hospital. She was alive but severely burnt. He immediately called back Rabbi Kotlarski to pass on the news to her family. Rabbi Grunblatt did not leave Yael Michaeli's bedside for a moment. He sat with her throughout the night saying Tehillim (Psalms).

Friends – I understand Rabbi Tzvi Grunblatt is with us tonight. Please stand up Rabbi Grunblatt.

Rabbi Grublatt, I am the father of Yael Michaeli. My daughter is fine, thank G‑d. She is living with her beautiful family in Israel.

I want to publicly thank you for the self sacrifice and kindness which you displayed on that night, long ago. What you did was the very quintessence of what Chabad emissaries do all the time. This is surely the Rebbe’s legacy.

It is a legacy of boundless self sacrifice and kindness infused with the teachings of the Torah and love for humanity. It is this synergy which has made Chabad – Lubavitch the greatest movement for the spread of Jewish life anywhere and at anytime. Day by day you are handing out matches to ignite Jewish souls the world over. This is what makes the Shluchim (emissaries) absolutely unique in the Jewish world.

And as for the rest of us, ours is the task, especially in these turbulent economic times, to guarantee that they will never lack the means to carry out and expand their sacred mission. We cannot afford to allow Chabad Lubavitch to suffer because of turbulent stock markets. It is far too precious an investment for that. Indeed the more they thrive the more we prosper.

Thank you.

Rabbi Adin Steinsaltz 'The Paganization of Western Culture'

Thu, 15 Dec 2016 1:03:00 PM

Many years ago, Sir Isaiah Berlin and I started a correspondence that had to do with his ancestry. In Jewish terms, he came from a very distinguished ancestry. He was a direct descendant of the founder of the Chabad movement. In the course of the years, I had the honor and the joy of meeting Sir Isaiah several times, both in England and in Jerusalem. Isaiah Berlin was one of the last intellectuals in England. An intellectual is not necessarily a university professor: he can also be a shoemaker. An intellectual is a person of boundless curiosity, who has the desire and the ability to discuss everything, and the spark that can make something new out of anything. There are very few people of this kind nowadays; neither England nor the world seems to grow enough of this breed anymore.

Western culture can be said to have begun with ancient Greece. Its real beginning, though, seems to be approximately the second century CE. It was then that Greek ideas and systems of thought blended with Jewish concepts to create the Greco-Christian culture that prevailed for almost two millennia.[1] While there have been both major historical and cultural shifts and continuities over time, Western culture can be perceived as one culture that had a fair number of important unifying elements. Even though it is difficult to define a single clear point of change, contemporary Western culture can be seen as a different culture, which has to be defined and described.[2]

One of contemporary Western culture’s most salient features is its enormous and unprecedented technological ability. Technology is no longer an additional feature of the culture, but an essential part of it. In fact, advanced technology is now one of the most important factors in the culture, in addition to defining it.

Technology serves many purposes: it may hasten certain processes and delay others, but mostly it makes life more comfortable, and also makes so many things more accessible. Advanced technology was the result of advances in science and more efficient social structures. It began as a tool for Western civilization, but became in itself a factor in shaping and changing the culture. From a tool of society, it became one of its masters. Technology has become a very powerful cultural agent. To cite one example: the contraceptive pill, while based on major scientific discoveries, is a minor technological event. From the perspective of pure science, there is no great novelty about it; but the change it created is enormous. It created a behavioral change; it has changed the lives of boys and girls in every part of the Western world – and it affects the future of Western society.

Communication is another example. In the new world in which we live, reaching from one part of the world to another is so much faster and easier than ever. As a result, languages are changing all over the world; radio and television cause local dialects to die, and even some national entities are becoming blurred. Internet, with its many tools and accessories, is a recent development in communication. Its power in the political, scientific and moral spheres cannot be overestimated. In this case, the content of the Internet is secondary to the enormous power it has due to the very existence of the ability to create super-communication. Technology, itself, does not dictate any specific behavior but it changes the parameters of our behavior.

And Western culture is now expanding geographically. Until only a few decades ago, Eastern Europe was a different cultural unit. Today, Russia and the Ukraine, although not as advanced technologically as other countries, are a part of the West – in terms of what people wear, what they read and write, the music they listen to and produce. Israel, too, is now identified with Western culture; Israeli culture, although connected to Jewish culture, is not identical with it. Israelis, too, behave, dress and think like Westerners; they even speak like them, albeit using a slightly different language; but then again, Western culture never had one language.

The expansion of Western culture has both historical meaning and cultural significance. Eurovision is not a tremendously high level cultural event; but it is one of Western culture’s manifestations and every year, more countries participate in it. It also becomes shallower, but that is a part of the development of the culture.

But most importantly, the influence and power of Christianity – which had been extremely strong in Europe and the regions connected with it – are disappearing. To be more precise, they have already disappeared. Indeed, it has been noted that the Western world is now living in the void that Christianity has left behind.[3] I think this is a very good definition of contemporary Western culture. Does this mean that there are no Christians anymore, or that there is no Pope in Rome? There are. There is also an archbishop in Canterbury; but what power or influence does he have over England? Christianity as an essence – as a power, as a meaningful factor – is disappearing. In fact, the number of church-goers is dwindling, and the Church is selling property in order to survive.

Good or bad, this is a fact, a part of contemporary life. Christianity has left behind lots of memories, ways of expression, and numerous superstitions. Superstition tends to remain long after faith has disappeared. Someone once said that people still hate the Jews for having killed a god they do not believe in. We are now living in a world that is empty of Christianity, or Judeo-Christianity. And this void is now being filled with something else, and that something else is paganism.

Yes, contemporary Western culture is a pagan culture. It is ruled by the gods of olden time, only with new names and different images. The first is the god of power – formerly known as Baal (literally: "owner") – who sometimes appears in a slightly different form as Mammon, the god of money. Another such god is Ashtoreth (Astarte or Ishtar), the goddess of sex and fertility. In our time, though, it is no longer the goddess of fertility but only of pure sex.

Yet another god, perhaps promoted from a mere muse to a full-fledged deity, is Calliope, who is now the ruler of the craving for fame. People may want money in order to obtain material goods; they may want sex for amusement, sometimes even for procreation. But Fame is now a thing in itself; it is a certain addiction. What does the relatively new term "Celebrity" mean? It means that one is a well-known nothing. And the more one is well-known, the less people care who and what one is; it does not matter. Indeed, so many young girls and boys want to be film stars – not because they wish to be beautiful or powerful, but because they want to be known all over the world.

One may ask: where are all the temples of these gods? Well, the temples of Jupiter-Mammon are in almost every other building in the City of London and in Geneva; only they are called banks, and their priests and high priests are called managers and executives; the temples (as well as the images) of Astarte are everywhere; and Calliope has little shrines in almost every household, in the form of television sets.

Does this mean that in the past, people did not crave for power, did not want money and abstained from sex? I do not think so. All these things existed from the beginning of humanity, perhaps even earlier; but in the past, they were hidden desires; for some they were temptations, while others branded them demons. Nowadays, however, these cravings are naked and are flaunted openly and unabashedly.

So the Western world is now ruled by this trinity – which is quite different from the Christian one. This is neither a sermon nor an admonition, but a statement of fact. There are, however, some changes that come as a result of the times; the old-new gods now have more modern garments, and they drive better cars. Today's Jupiter often wears a business suit, Astarte has undergone plastic surgery, and Calliope very often appears on television.

This neo-paganism is also not completely official, yet: there are still various kinds of camouflages, such as universities or political institutions; but what makes them run? Surely not love. And one can see that they, too, are crumbling as real centers of power. Universities, although they are still teeming with people and activities, no longer have the same attraction, since Knowledge is no longer a general passion; while politics is almost a bare drive for power, not a striving for any ideas. Along with them crumble all of the 19^th Century ideologies. Ideologies nowadays are worth less than the paper they are printed on. Take nationalism or Marxism: in the beginning of the 20^th Century, both were very strong semi-religious ideologies. But today, how many people would be willing to die for the glory of their nation or for the proletariat? The University of Oxford once had a number of spies, some of them believers, or half-believers, in one of those ideology-religions. Today there are no longer any spies at Oxford – not because people are purer or better, but because there is no reason for it, no sense in it. Similarly, Orwell’s book "1984," which for so many people was a real nightmare, is no longer even published, because the Communist regime that it depicted is dead, and today the world is ruled by these other powers.

Is this reality better or worse than what we had in the 20^th Century? I do not know, nor am I trying to make any judgments. I am only pointing out that the culture in which we live, contemporary Western culture, is a pagan culture that is not very different from the culture that prevailed in the world some 2500 years ago. Even technology does not really make things different. The difference is only external.

Does contemporary Western culture have no literature, no poetry, no dreams? It does have some. Does it not have a fair number of good people? It does. Many features of human nature, as well as many of its good traits, have remained. But there are major changes in the basic tenets of the culture. We seem to continue on the same path, because culture has an enormous amount of inertia and takes a long time to change. Consider how long it takes for a language to die, or for a new language to appear. So we are not in the very end of a period, but we are very well into a neo-pagan era.

What does Jewish culture have to say about all this? When it comes to technology, Judaism is all for progress. Most other religions tend to view progress with suspicion, even hatred, as well as a real desire to destroy. Whereas Judaism, even in earliest times, saw innovation as important and chronicled it; in the opening chapters of Genesis, the inventors of musical instruments and weapons are mentioned. While we were aware that some inventions might be dangerous, progress was always considered to be positive. This attitude, which has helped us remain a young people, is based on Judaism's profound faith in man. We believe that the duty of humanity is to be partners of God – which means, among other things, being creative. Creativity, then, is a basic component of our belief, of our desire to improve the world.

In regard to the pagan gods, however, Judaism is very clear: we are totally against them. In that sense, we are standing in the very same place as our Father Abraham stood. In Abraham’s time, the pagan world had a very high culture; not only did it have its own poets and philosophers – some of them quite great – it even had international banking, enabling the transfer of funds in clay envelopes containing clay letters for distances of two thousand kilometers and more. Abraham was considered – rightly or wrongly – as the lonely madman of Ur (then – the lonely madman of Haran, and finally – the lonely madman of Canaan), because he was against the prevailing religious culture. Judaism has a clear stand in this issue, even if it is not so very popular. Indeed, we see that after all is said and done, we are still lonely, as lonely as Abraham. The verse "Abraham was one" (Ezekiel 33:24) says just that: he was one, against a whole world. Indeed, the Midrash (Genesis Rabbah 42:8) explains the epitaph Avraham ha-Ivri as "Abraham who came from the other side"[4]; "the whole world stands on one bank [of the river], and he is on the other bank."

Judaism had many disagreements with the former Christian culture of Europe, but we agreed with some of its basic notions: faith in God; the belief that our human needs are not supreme; the understanding that man is not only a master, he is also a servant. These were points of consensus between Jewish culture and Christianity, Islam, even Hinduism and Buddhism. Thus, even though we were spat upon, and even killed for our disagreements, we agreed deeply – and were much more in step – with the Western world of two and three centuries ago. We are completely out of step with contemporary Western culture, because wherever we are – from Kamchatka to New Zealand – we are still walking in Abraham's path. And we are very much alone. Will the world change? It may, and if it does, we will gladly walk together with it; if not, we will remain alone.

That is not a terribly optimistic view. However, Leibnitz[5] proposed the basic idea that our world is the best of all possible worlds. His contemporary, Voltaire,[6] maintained that ours is the worst of all possible worlds. I would say that the Jewish view is that our world is the worst of all possible worlds, in which there is still hope.

Questions and answers

Q: You described what happened in Europe with regard to religious faith; but what about the secularization of Jewish society?

RAS: Israel, as I said, is now a part of the Western world. But while Europe is now living in the void that Christianity has left, Israel is living in the void that Judaism has left. On a rather practical and emotional level, there may be a difference between two kinds of void; but basically, it is the same thing. In fact, some of the Arab or Muslim countries are also similarly westernized. They never were Christians, but they were Muslims, and some of them have practically become non-Muslim entities, a part of the Western world. Even Japan and China can nowadays be said to be part of the Western world. I did not mention militant Islam; this may be a new phenomenon, a new historic event; but what I said about Western culture is as true about Israel as it is about England, France or Denmark.

Q: So how do people who have no religious faith and do not lead a religious life, connect with Jewish culture and tradition?

RAS: Jewish culture is not just about waving a blue-and-white flag, and it is not even about knowing some Hebrew. Even this double achievement does not make it very easy to be connected with Jewish culture. To be connected with Jewish culture is to accept that it is different. As Elijah the Prophet said on Mt. Carmel (I Kings 18:21): we cannot "halt between two opinions"; we must make a decision once and for all – which god do we go for? You want the Baal? Fine, enjoy; but if you do want that, you cannot play with this.

In fact, one sees many people with a similar dilemma. For some the answer may be: in principle I know where I want to be; but practically, I find it very difficult. Thus, some people may be officially observant, but for them, being observant is an unimportant, external shell that they shed the instant the opportunity comes. For some people, that opportunity never comes; others may move to another place – and find out that their observance was no more than disposable habits. For others, it goes the other way around, but they too may find that changing one’s culture is not like pushing a button: any change in life is a very complex process which may take a very long time.

It is a matter of choice, then, which for some people is a choice of a culture, and for others also a choice of nation. One very moving example is the story of the journalist Daniel Pearl, who was executed in Pakistan. This man was surely not counted among the rabbis, nor was he a shining example of Jewish life; yet before his execution he made a most startling last statement. He said: "My father is Jewish, my mother is Jewish, I am Jewish." He certainly made a clear decision where he belonged.

Q: How do you see the future, in terms of where both Western culture and Jewish culture are heading? Is a renewed blending of Jewish ideas possible – or is the future more bleak?

RAS: I have hope, or I would not be standing here. There are all kinds of possible blends: certain blends yield mules, or mongrels that are not fit to live, while others display the phenomenon known as "the hybrid power" – hybrids that are far better than their ancestors, be they human beings, animals or plants. Will there be another meeting of those two cultures? Perhaps. However, I always prefer to be a historian than a prophet; it's safer.

[1] The interaction between these two cultures is an interesting subject in itself. Let us take only one example: the notion of democracy. Ancient Greek democracy was a wholly different notion from that of Western democracy. In Athens, only a small percentage of the population was allowed to vote (not including women, slaves and foreign residents); yet in Western democracy everyone has the right to vote – based on the Jewish notion that all human beings are created in God's image.

[2] The history and understanding of this cultural change should be subject for another work. There were several evolutionary and revolutionary steps, some of which are still happening at present.

[3] In a similar way, Israel is also living in a differently shaped void – that of Judaism that is disappearing.

[4] Ivri, literally: "Hebrew," comes from the root 'evr which also means "side."

[5] 1646-1716, German philosopher and mathematician.

[6] 1694-1778, French Enlightenment writer, philosopher and essayist.

Stephen Ross 'T.S. Eliot and Anti-Semitism'

Thu, 15 Dec 2016 1:02:00 PM

Passages from Poems, 1920:

from “Gerontion”:

My house is a decayed house

And the Jew squats in the window-sill, the owner,

Spawned in some estaminet of Antwerp,

Blistered in Brussels, patched and peeled in London.

The goat coughs at night in the field overhead;

Rocks, moss, stonecrop, iron, merds.

The woman keeps the kitchen, makes tea,

Sneezes at evening, poking the peevish gutter.

I am an old man,

A dull head among windy spaces.

from “Burbank with a Baedeker; Bleistein with a Cigar”:

But this or such was Bleistein’s way:

A saggy bending of the knees

And elbows, with the palms turned out,

Chicago Semite Viennese.

A lustreless protrusive eye

Stares from the protozoic slime

At a perspective of Canaletto.

The smoky candle end of time

Declines. On the Rialto once.

The rats are underneath the piles.

The Jew is underneath the lot.

Money in furs. . .

from “Dirge” (later excised from The Waste Land)

Full fathom five your Bleistein lies

Under the flatfish and the squids.

Graves’ Disease in a dead jew’s eyes!

When the crabs have eat the lids.

Lower than the wharf rats dive

Though he suffer a sea-change

Still expensive rich and strange.

Some prose passages:

In a letter to Eleanor Hinkley, March 1915, Eliot (age 26) writes of the “clever Jew undergraduate mind at Harvard,” one that is characterized by “wide but disorderly reading, intense but confused thinking, and utter absence of background and balance and proportion.”

Perhaps the most infamous prose passage comes from his Virginia Lecture of 1933, later published as After Strange Gods (1934):

“The population should be homogeneous; where two or more cultures exist in the same place they are likely either to be fiercely self-conscious or both to become adulterate. What is still more important is unity of religious background; and reasons of race and religion combine to make any large number of free-thinking Jews undesirable. There must be a proper balance between urban and rural, industrial and agricultural development. And a spirit of excessive tolerance is to be deprecated.”

The Jewish Response:

Emanuel Litvinoff and “To T.S. Eliot” (ca.1950):

I am not one accepted in your parish.
Bleistein is my relative and I share
the protozoic slime of Shylock, a page
in Sturmer, and, underneath the cities,
a billet somewhat lower than the rats

[...]

So shall I say it is not eminence chills
but the snigger from behind the covers of history,
the sly words and the cold heart
and footprints made with blood upon a continent?
Let your words
tread lightly on this earth of Europe
lest my people’s bones protest.

George Steiner in an April 1971 letter to Listener: “The obstinate puzzle is that Eliot’s uglier touches tend to occur at the heart of very good poetry (which is not the case of Pound).”

Anthony Julius, T.S. Eliot, Anti-Semitism, and Literary Form (1995): 1) Eliot wrote anti-Semitic poetry and prose, which makes him an anti-Semite; 2) Eliot’s anti-Semitic poetry is original and imaginative, and therefore cannot be dismissed as an inconsequential blemish in his oeuvre.

Gabriel Josipovici in a 1996 Jewish Chronicle review: “[Jews like Anthony Julius] do themselves (us) a disservice when they undertake this sort of task. . .I would urge [Julius] and other Jews obsessed with unearthing anti-Semitism to turn the spotlight on themselves occasionally and ask whether their activities are motivated solely by the impeccable scientific desire to bring out the truth.”

Dr. Brian Klug 'The concept of Anti-Semitism'

Thu, 15 Dec 2016 1:01:00 PM

I wish my talk today could be light-hearted, but the subject we are discussing is no laughing matter.

Which reminds me of a Jewish joke. That’s not quite as paradoxical as it sounds, when you remember that irony, and especially self-mockery, is a staple of Jewish humour. Why, I’m not sure. But I know it’s true, not just because I grew up in a Jewish household but because Freud says so; and he took humour very seriously. In his 1905 treatise Jokes and Their Relation to the Unconscious he said this about the Jews: “I do not know whether there are many other instances of a people making fun to such a degree of its own character.”

Be that as it may, the joke of which I am reminded is about Moishe the pedlar. Moishe was pushing his cart down an alley in Vitebsk, minding his own business, when he was stopped by an antisemite. “Hey, Jew!” yelled the antisemite, jabbing Moishe’s tattered gabardine with his finger. “Who gave you the right to control the world?” Moishe looked puzzled. “You mean me, personally?” he asked. “Don’t be a wise guy,” retorted the antisemite, jabbing him again. “I mean you, the Jews.” Moishe was amazed. “You know something I don’t know?” “You know perfectly well what I mean,” said the antisemite gruffly. “I’m talking about your cousins, the Rothschilds.” Suddenly Moishe’s face lit up with pleasure. “The Rothschilds!” he exclaimed. “I had no idea they were mishpachah!”

We know, because the joke labels him this way, that the person confronting Moishe is an antisemite. But in the real world, people don’t always go around wearing labels telling you who or what they are. Besides, there is no point in having a label if we don’t know what it means. So, what do we mean by ‘antisemitism’? This evening I invite you to join me on an imaginary London bus ride in which we shall explore the concept together. The bus is the no. 73, whose route passes through Hackney, the London borough that includes the district of Stamford Hill, home of Europe’s largest population of Haredi Jews To assist us in our enquiry, I have brought along a cast of imaginary characters: Lucy, the non-Jewish conductor; Rabbi Cohen, a passenger, and the ubiquitous Mrs. Goldstein, also a passenger, the unofficial representative of the mainstream Jewish community. We shall consider five scenarios in which Lucy, as it were, jabs Rabbi Cohen’s gabardine.

Let us begin with a good, simple working definition of antisemitism: hostility towards Jews as Jews. This definition has the virtue of ruling out the case where Lucy angrily throws Rabbi Cohen off the bus for smoking. Even if smoking is something Rabbi Cohen does religiously, even if he is wearing a kipah identifying him as Jewish: even so, his situation is no different from that of Jane Smith or Ahmed Khan or Bhupinda Singh or any of the other passengers that Lucy evicts that morning from her bus for smoking. His crime is that he is a smoker, not that he is a Jew. This is the first scenario.

It is a little more complicated if Lucy’s hostility to Rabbi Cohen is based on the fact that he is singing zemiros on the upper deck at the top of his voice. But is it because he is singing zemiros or is it because he is singing, full stop? Suppose he would have been singing ‘All you need is love’: would Lucy have taken the same action? In other words, which is he guilty of being: loutish or Jewish? (And if you see no distinction, then you’re an antisemite!) Let us give Lucy the benefit of the doubt: let us say that she is a liberal, tolerant, broad-minded woman, but rules are rules and she throws him off the bus because he is creating a nuisance. The fact that he is Jewish is neither here nor there – for Lucy. But for Rabbi Cohen it matters. I mean specifically that it is the reason why he is singing zemiros. Rabbi Cohen is not merely a person who happens to be Jewish and happens to be singing. He is singing as a Jew. But she evicts him as a lout. This is the second scenario. Mrs Goldstein, who is watching this scene from the back of the bus, smells antisemitism. She is wrong.

But now let us not give Lucy the benefit of the doubt. Let us assume the worst and suppose she is bigoted. But about what or whom exactly? What does she know from ‘Jewish’? Rabbi Cohen is singing in Hebrew. Does she know it is Hebrew? It could be any foreign lingo. She looks at Rabbi Cohen, with his foreign appearance and foreign ways, and she sees a figure that she recognizes clearly from the pages of The Sun or Daily Express: an asylum seeker. And under the guise of enforcing the rules against creating a nuisance, she deports him from her bus. Even if she is aware of the fact that he is Jewish, it is not his Jewishness per se that bothers her, but what she sees as his alienness. We might call this ‘xenophobia’, hatred of strangers or of anyone ‘different’; but it is not antisemitism. This is the third scenario.

However (fourth scenario), perhaps Lucy’s prejudice is more specific. She is not an ignorant woman. One look at Rabbi Cohen’s black garb and long flowing beard and Lucy knows precisely what he is: one of them mullahs. ‘Clear off, Abdul’ she shouts in his ear as she shoves him on to the pavement. As Rabbi Cohen picks himself up off Stoke Newington High Street, he reflects philosophically that he is the victim of Islamophobia. But Mrs Goldstein is convinced that all London bus conductors hate Jews.

But suppose now that Mrs Goldstein is right, not about London bus conductors in general but about Lucy. Suppose, in other words, that Lucy knows Rabbi Cohen is Jewish and that this is why she ejects him from her bus. This is the fifth scenario: she knows he is Jewish and she feels contempt or hatred for him because he is Jewish. What does this mean? Knowing he is Jewish, what exactly does Lucy think she knows? She is antisemitic: she despises him because he is a Jew. But what is a Jew?

In his essay ‘The Freedom of Self-Definition’, Imre Kertész, the Hungarian-Jewish writer who survived a Nazi concentration camp, reflects on Jewish identity in the light of his wartime experience. “In 1944,” he writes, “they put a yellow star on me, which in a symbolic sense is still there; to this day I have not been able to remove it.” What he is unable to remove is the meaning of the word ‘Jew’ that the Nazis invested in the badge. Kertész recalls Montesquieu’s dictum “First I am a human being, and then a Frenchman” and comments: “The racist … wants me to be first a Jew and then not to be a human being any more.” In a brilliant dialectical riff, he works through the implications for the victim: “[A]fter a while,” he says, “it’s not ourselves we’re thinking about but somebody else.” That is to say, the self that we think about is not our own: I am not my own person. “In a racist environment,” he concludes, “a Jew cannot be human, but he cannot be a Jew either. For ‘Jew’ is an unambiguous designation only in the eyes of anti-Semites.”

This is how I understand Kertész: he is saying that the yellow star was not just a form of identification, picking him out as a Jew, but a whole identity, projected onto him as a Jew. Pinning the star to his breast, they were pinning down the word ‘Jew’ or ‘Jewish’, determining what it means. This meaning or identity – this ‘unambiguous designation’ – belonged to the Nazis, not to the Jews, not to him.

Kertész observes that “no one whose Jewish identity is based primarily, perhaps exclusively, on Auschwitz, can really be called a Jew”. What he means is that they cannot call themselves a Jew – they cannot define themselves as Jewish – because the word is not theirs to use: it is someone else’s brand stamped on them and they are stuck with it: ‘Jew’. This appears to be how Kertész sees his own condition. Recall his words: “to this day I have not been able to remove it.” But (to get back to the 73 bus), Rabbi Cohen, singing zemiros at the top of his voice on the upper deck, is Jewish on his own terms: he ‘can really be called a Jew’. So, Lucy knows Rabbi Cohen is Jewish. Rabbi Cohen knows Rabbi Cohen is Jewish. But do they know the same thing? They do not. For he is not the ‘Jew’ – the figment – that Lucy perceives and despises.

Let us recap. We began with a working definition of antisemitism: hostility towards Jews as Jews. In the light of the 73 bus, we need to amend this as follows: hostility towards Jews as ‘Jews.’ Adding the scare quotes around ‘Jews’ might seem like a detail, but they transform the meaning of our definition. Spelling it out, it comes to this: antisemitism is hostility towards Jews as Jews, where Jews are perceived as something other than what they are. Or more succinctly: hostility towards Jews as not Jews. For the ‘Jew’ to whom the antisemite feels hostile is not a real Jew at all. Thinking that Jews are really ‘Jews’ is precisely the core of antisemitism.

Antisemitism is best defined not by an attitude to Jews but by a definition of ‘Jew’. Defining the word in terms of the attitude – hostility – rather than the object – Jew – puts the cart before the horse. Indeed, hostility is not the only ‘cart’ that the horse can ‘pull’ behind it. Envy and admiration are also possible. The German journalist Wilhelm Marr, who founded the Antisemiten-Liga (League of Antisemites) in 1879, described Jews as “flexible, tenacious, intelligent”. These are not in themselves terms of contempt. However, their antisemitic bent is evident when they are read in context: “We have among us a flexible, tenacious, intelligent, foreign tribe that knows how to bring abstract reality into play in many different ways. Not individual Jews, but the Jewish spirit and Jewish consciousness have overpowered the world.” This ‘Jewish spirit’ and ‘Jewish consciousness’ is what Marr meant by Semitism. It is the main element in the word he popularised: antisemitism (antisemitismus). It is the horse that pulls the cart.

What manner of beast is this horse? To begin with, whatever its origins might be, the antisemitic concept of a ‘Semite’ or ‘Jew’ is essentially a priori: it is a construction, not a description. No doubt there are Jewish individuals – even groups – who fit the stereotype. (There are non-Jews who fit it too.) But the stereotype is normative: it does not describe what Jews are like but prescribes what they must be like.

And what might that be? Here is a thumbnail sketch of the antisemitic figure of the ‘Jew’:

The Jew belongs to a sinister people set apart from all others, not merely by its customs but by a collective character: arrogant yet obsequious; legalistic yet corrupt; flamboyant yet secretive. Always looking to turn a profit, Jews are as ruthless as they are tricky. Loyal only to their own, wherever they go they form a state within a state, preying upon the societies in whose midst they dwell. Their hidden hand controls the banks, the markets and the media. And when revolutions occur or nations go to war, it is the Jews – cohesive, powerful, clever and stubborn – who invariably pull the strings and reap the rewards.

Not all these themes need to be present; not all receive equal emphasis in a given case; and there are variations on each. But such, more or less, is the semitism of antisemitism. This is how Moishe looks in the eyes of the antisemite in the joke; it is who Lucy sees when she ejects Rabbi Cohen from the 73 bus; and it is what Kertész became when, stripped of everything except the badge they pinned on him, he was made a ‘Jew’ in Auschwitz.

In short, antisemitism is the process of turning Jews into ‘Jews’.

This analysis applies whether Jews are seen as a people, an ethnic group, a religious community, a racial type or whatever. Wilhelm Marr conceived of Jews in biological terms: he saw them as a race. But his idea of the ‘semite’ is detachable from his racial ideology. And he did not invent it. He inherited it; for, in one form or another, it has been around a long time – long before anyone dreamed up the newfangled theory of race – as I expect we shall hear from other speakers this evening. The figure of ‘the Jew’ has been transmitted from generation to generation in popular culture. Nor is it likely to disappear overnight.

However, it occasionally happens (if you will pardon the understatement) that we Jews see antisemitism when it isn’t there. (I hope it isn’t antisemitic of me to say this.) Which brings me to my closing anecdote. Mendel went with Mary, his Catholic friend, to a comedy club one evening, where the non-Jewish entertainer told one racist joke after another. It was unrelenting. Blacks, Hispanics, Asians, Kurds, Arabs, Muslims, Catholics, Scottish Presbyterians from Fife: just about every ethnic and religious group on the planet were the butt of his humour; except Jews. “You got off lightly,” said Mary, when the show was over. “What do you mean?” asked Mendel indignantly. “I was deeply offended. Once again we see how the world is against us.” “Against you?” asked Mary incredulously. “But there wasn’t a single antisemitic joke.” “Exactly!” exclaimed Mendel meaningfully. “Always we are excluded.”

Thank you, Rabbi Brackman, for including me.