Digital Iconoclasm

I've kept image-posting to a minimum in honour of the biblical prohibition against graven images, and because servers are unreliable.

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The Lost Cause of Alawite Zionism

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Very interesting article about Syria fron the New York Review of Books . Point of note, the sectarian ancestors of Syria's rulers (including Assad's father) defending Zionism! In 1936, six Alawi notables sent a memorandum to Leon Blum, head of France’s Popular Front government, expressing their loyalty to France and their concern at negotiations leading to independence in a parliamentary system dominated by the Sunni majority. The memorandum includes the following points: • We can sense today how the Muslim citizens of Damascus force the Jews who live among them to sign a document pledging that they will not send provisions to their ill-fated brethren in Palestine. The condition of the Jews in Palestine is the strongest and most explicit evidence of the militancy of the Islamic issue vis-à-vis those who do not belong to Islam. These good Jews contributed to the Arabs with civilization and peace, scattered gold, and established prosperity in Palestine without harming anyone or t...
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Orthodox Heresy

Daniel Landes' review of Arthur Green's Radical Judaism: Rethinking God and Tradition reminds me of my own tension with Orthodoxy: Green admits, "(partly in sadness!) that it no longer suffices for me to limit my sense of spiritual fellowship to those who fall within the ethnic boundaries that history has given us." He is, indeed, prepared to say: "I have more in common with seekers and strugglers of other faiths than I do with either the narrowly and triumphally religious as the secular and materialistic elements within my own community." Thus Green calls for a broader "Israel," imagining "an extended faith-community of Israel, a large outer courtyard of our spiritual Temple." Although Green himself is a person who is clearly attached to the Jewish people, the logic of his position is disturbing. It leads him to privilege people possessing the proper spiritual consciousness, "my Israel," over the actual people of Israel. So G...
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Joseph Marco Baruch: Proto-Zionist and Mad Poet

The following excerpts from the journal article 1890s Zionism reconsidered: Joseph Marco Baruch attest to the sublimity of this Hebraic D'Annunzio, who sadly killed himself in 1899: Baruch was a Turkish-born Frenchman, whose Zionist conception was independent from, yet nourished by, Central and East European Zionist trends. Geographically, his activism was not limited in scope and was well received in a variety of European and Mediterranean contexts. Conceptually, his social vision juxtaposed political action and an affirmative Jewish identity that called for a distinctly Jewish/Hebraic society positioned among a panoply of other nations. This contrasted with a Herzlian "liberal utopia" largely devoid of Jewish content. . . . Of passionate character, Baruch was given to singing songs about "Carmel" (presumably the mountain) and composing poetry in French. But he was also prone to more belligerent behavior, frequently engaging in both verbal and physical confron...
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