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Shlomo Sand: ‘I wish to resign and cease considering myself a Jew’
His
past was Jewish, but today he sees Israel as one of the most racist
societies in the western world. Historian Shlomo Sand explains why he
doesn’t want to be Jewish anymore
During
the first half of the 20th century, my father abandoned Talmudic
school, permanently stopped going to synagogue, and regularly expressed
his aversion to rabbis. At this point in my own life, in the early 21st
century, I feel in turn a moral obligation to break definitively with
tribal Judeocentrism. I am today fully conscious of having never been a
genuinely secular Jew, understanding that such an imaginary
characteristic lacks any specific basis or cultural perspective, and
that its existence is based on a hollow and ethnocentric view of the
world. Earlier I mistakenly believed that the Yiddish culture of the
family I grew up in was the embodiment of Jewish culture. A little
later, inspired by Bernard Lazare, Mordechai Anielewicz, Marcel Rayman
and Marek Edelman – who all fought antisemitism, nazism and Stalinism
without adopting an ethnocentric view – I identified as part of an
oppressed and rejected minority. In the company, so to speak, of the
socialist leader Léon Blum, the poet Julian Tuwim and many others, I
stubbornly remained a Jew who had accepted this identity on account of
persecutions and murderers, crimes and their victims.
Now,
having painfully become aware that I have undergone an adherence to
Israel, been assimilated by law into a fictitious ethnos of persecutors
and their supporters, and have appeared in the world as one of the
exclusive club of the elect and their acolytes, I wish to resign and
cease considering myself a Jew.http://www.theguardian.com/world/2014/oct/10/shlomo-sand-i-wish-to-cease-considering-myself-a-jew
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