Israel Shahak

From Philosopedia

Israel Shahak (28 April 1933 - 2 July 2001)

Shahak, who was born in Warsaw, Poland, was the youngest child of a cultured religious pro-Zionist Jewish family. He became a professor of chemistry at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem. Between 1970-1990, he was president of the Israeli League for Human and Civil Rights and was an outspoken critic of the Israeli government. Shahak's writings on Judaism have been a source of widespread controversy.

During the German occupation of Poland, his family was forced into the Warsaw Ghetto. His brother escaped and joined the Royal Air Force. His mother paid a poor Catholic family to hide him, but when her money ran out he was returned. In 1943 was sent with his family to the concentration camp Poniatowa, near Lublin. His father died there, but Israel and his mother succeeded in escaping and returning to Warsaw. Found, they were both sent to Bergen-Belsen concentration camp. Shahak was liberated in 1945, after which he emigrated to the British Mandate of Palestine where, attempting to join a kibbutz, was turned down according to a Guardian obituary, as being "too weedy."

His unhappy life led to his eventual attending Hebrew University, where he received his doctorate in chemistry and became an assistant to Ernst David Bergmann.

In 1961, Shahak left Israel for the United States to study as a postdoctoral student at Stanford University. He returned two years later to become a teacher and researcher in chemistry at Hebrew University, where he remained until his retirement in 1990. He published many scientific papers, mostly on organic fluorine compounds.

After the 1967 Six-Day War, Shahak became critical of Israel's treatment of Palestinians, a supporter of a Palestinian state, and wrote many articles and several books outlining his views of Israeli society and Judaism.

His obituary in The Guardian included the following:

Shahak underwent two major conversions in his life. Aged 13, he scientifically examined the evidence for the existence of God and found it wanting. Then, shortly after the l967 six-day war, he concluded from observation that Israel was not yet a democracy; it was treating the newly occupied Palestinians with shocking brutality.

For the next three decades, he spent all his spare time on attempts to change this. He contributed to various small leftwing papers, but when this proved to have little impact, he decided to alert journalists, academics and human rights campaigners abroad. From his small, bare West Jerusalem flat poured forth reports with titles such as "Torture in Israel," and "Collective Punishment in the West Bank." Based exclusively on mainstream Israeli sources, all were painstakingly translated into English.

World coverage gradually improved, but Shahak never let off, he never became blasé. Watching him read out a small news item about an Israeli farmer who had set his dogs on a group of Palestinian children was to see a man in almost physical distress.

Shahak came to believe that these human rights incidents stemmed from Israel's religious interpretation of Jewish history, which led it to ignore centuries of Arab life in the country, and to disregard non-Jewish rights. Confiscation, every schoolchild was told, was "the redemption of the land" from those who did not belong there. To Shahak, this was straightforward racism, damaging both sides. It was a minority view, but after the 1982 war, when the Israeli liberal sector grew, Shahak was able to put it forward in the reputable daily Ha'aretz. After retiring in 1991, he could also turn his ideas into books.

Jewish History, Jewish Religion (Pluto Press, 1994), studied the attitudes to non-Jews held by Israel's religious establishment. Shahak also emphasised the fate decreed for Jewish heretics: death. Shortly after the book appeared, Premier Yitzhak Rabin was assassinated by an Orthodox student.

Jewish Fundamentalism in Israel (Pluto Press, 1999). written with Norton Mezvisky, looked at the growing power of rightwing orthodox groups. "A fundamentalist Jewish regime, if it came to power in Israel," Shahak warned, "would treat Israeli Jews who did not accept its tenets worse than it would treat Palestinians."

To reverse this process, Shahak gave up most things, including marriage and a family. A great music lover, he allowed himself one concert or opera visit per year. He was fond of philosophy and had started writing a book on Spinoza earlier this year, but passed most evenings scanning local newspapers. Despite his criticisms, he remained fiercely proud of the country's free press.

Having been urged to write his autobiography, Shahak only found time to write a superb piece on his childhood under Nazism for the New York Review of Books. In it he recalled listening to some Polish workmen talking during his days on the gentile side of Warsaw. Discussing the situation, one young man had defended the Germans by pointing out that they were ridding Poland of the Jews, only to be rebuked by an older labourer: "So, are they not also human beings?" It is a phrase Israel Shahak never forgot.

Werner Cohn, Professor Emeritus of Sociology at the University of British Columbia, described specific claims in Jewish History, Jewish Religion as fabrications and accused Shahak of making "grotesque charges"L

• Dr. Shahak is full of startling revelations, if that is the word, about Jewish history and the Jewish religion. None of those I was able to check had any foundation...Some are just funny. He says (pp. 23-4) that "Jewish children are actually taught" to utter a ritual curse when passing a non-Jewish cemetery. He also tells us (p. 34) that "both before and after a meal, a pious Jew ritually washes his hands....On one of these two occasions he is worshiping God... but on the other he is worshiping Satan..."

In his last years of life lived in the quarter Rehavia of Jerusalem. He died in Jerusalem at age 68 due to complications from diabetes and was buried in the Givat Shaul cemetery. In an obituary published in The Nation, Christopher Hitchens wrote that Shahak's home was "a library of information about the human rights of the oppressed", and that

The families of prisoners, the staff of closed and censored publications, the victims of eviction and confiscation – none were ever turned away. I have met influential "civil society" Palestinians alive today who were protected as students when Israel was a professor of chemistry at the Hebrew University; from him they learned never to generalize about Jews. And they respected him not just for his consistent stand against discrimination but also because – he never condescended to them. He detested nationalism and religion and made no secret of his contempt for the grasping Arafat entourage. But, as he once put it to me, "I will now only meet with Palestinian spokesmen when we are out of the country. I have some severe criticisms to present to them. But I cannot do this while they are living under occupation and I can 'visit' them as a privileged citizen."