Avoiding labels based on ignorance or hypocrisy, we thus see that the word ‘Jewry’ and its cognates describe two different and even con­trasting social groups, and because of current Israeli politics the continuum between the two is disappearing fast. On the one hand there is the traditional totalitarian meaning discussed above; on the other hand there are Jews by descent who have accepted and internalised the complex of ideas which Karl Popper has called ‘the open society’.

Wow, that’s actually a really interesting point (emphasis added by me). I haven’t finished reading part 1 yet, but that’s a fascinating article and I’m sure the other parts are interesting. Thanks for posting it. Maybe we should add this to the list at some point.

From what I read so far, the article substantiates anti-Jewish discrimination as a historical European problem, but points out the historical developments in Jewish European society which are intertwined with it, such as the fact that Rabbis had massive power over community members unless those members converted and totally severed themselves from all other Jews, and that the European liberalization that put an end to that benefited Jewish people by doing so even though many of the agents of that liberalization were themselves deeply and actively antisemitic.

However, a great many present-day Jews are nostalgic for that world, their lost paradise, the comfortable closed society from which they were not so much liberated as expelled. A large part of the zionist movement always wanted to restore it – and this part has gained the upper hand. Many of the motives behind Israeli politics, which so bewilder the poor confused western ‘friends of Israel’, are perfectly explicable once they are seen simply as reaction, reaction in the political sense which this word has had for the last two hundred years: a forced and in many respects innovative, and therefore illusory, return to the closed society of the Jewish past.

The author goes on in this passage to propose that many zionists are trying to restore a fictionalized version of the old Jewish communities, with religious control and repression. I think this is somewhat substantiated by the massive rise in ultra right-wing religious zionist groups in the past few decades.

Shahak has some strong points paticularly viz a viz settler messianism and the growth of National Religious factions in Israel. He has the tendency to make broad generalization statements based on either smaller examples or the rumsfeldian “absence of evidence.” (For example his statement for a lack of pre-modern Jewish Humor).