The State of Israel may not live among us’ encapsulates the numerous attempts to isolate Israel from normative, global society. We see it in the incessant delegitimisation Israel faces at the United Nations or in the campaigns to boycott it, divest from it or impose sanctions on it. All mark Israel as beyond the pale, unwelcome among the other, apparently morally superior nations of the world.

Joseph Solomon Delmedigo was a physician and teacher – Baruch Spinoza was a student of his works. [39] Baruch Spinoza [ edit ] Baruch Spinoza And two years after his famous declaration, Balfour said Zionism would “mitigate the age-long miseries created for western civilisation by the presence in its midst of a Body [the Jews] which it too long regarded as alien and even hostile, but which it was equally unable to expel or to absorb”. According to Genesis 6, in the early generations of humanity, some divine beings (“ elohim” understood by many ancients to be angels) were so attracted to human women that they came down to earth and procreated with them. The offspring produced of these unions were known as Nephilim. These semi-divine “heroes” or “giants” stalked the earth for generations, to God’s dismay. But what became of them is as murky as their origins. Witch of Endor

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Other Jewish Israeli progressives, including the former deputy mayor of Jerusalem Meron Benvenisti, the Haaretz columnist Gideon Levy and the activists of the Federation Movement, have followed a similar path. Thousands of young Jews resisted by escaping from the ghettos into the forests. There they joined Soviet partisan units or formed separate partisan units to harass the German occupiers. Among them was a new official definition of antisemitism. That definition, produced by the International Holocaust Remembrance Alliance in 2016, includes among its “contemporary examples” of antisemitism “denying the Jewish people their right to self-determination”. In other words, anti-Zionism is Jew hatred. In so doing, Macron joined Germany, Britain, the United States and roughly 30 other governments. And like them, he made a tragic mistake. The myth of the golem originates in the idea that human beings might be able to form living creatures from clay, just as God made Adam. The most famous golem is the one made by Rabbi Judah Loew, the Maharal of Prague, who inscribed a clay man with the word emet meaning truth, and then spoke the divine name and brought him to life. The golem protected the Jewish community from persecution, but was also difficult to control and ultimately dangerous, so the rabbi deactivated him by erasing the first letter of the word emet, leaving the word met“dead.” The golem tales of early modern Jewry find parallels in other early modern tales of the creation of life, including Frankenstein and “The Sorcerer’s Apprentice.” The golem remains a favorite monster in popular culture to this day. Leviathan

The spread of Islam throughout the Middle East and North Africa rendered Muslim all that was once Jewish. Greek philosophy, science, medicine and mathematics was absorbed by Jewish scholars living in the Arab world due to Arabic translations of those texts; remnants of the Library of Alexandria. Early Jewish converts to Islam brought with them stories from their heritage, known as Isra'iliyyat, which told of the Banu Isra'il, the pious men of ancient Israel. One of the most famous early mystics of Sufism, Hasan of Basra, introduced numerous Isra'iliyyat legends into Islamic scholarship, stories that went on to become representative of Islamic mystical ideas of piety of Sufism.

More people now think Israel is evil

It is an understandable impulse: let the people threatened by antisemitism define antisemitism. The problem is that, in many countries, Jewish leaders serve both as defenders of local Jewish interests and defenders of the Israeli government. And the Israeli government wants to define anti-Zionism as bigotry because doing so helps Israel kill the two-state solution with impunity. In Claude Lanzmann’s epic documentary, Shoah, the late Holocaust historian Raul Hilberg succinctly captures the historical evolution of anti-Jewish hatred in a pithy three-part phrase: “You may not live among us as Jews; you may not live among us; you may not live.” I don’t consider Israel an apartheid state. But its ethnic nationalism excludes many of the people under its control. Stephens notes that Israel contains almost 9 million citizens. What he doesn’t mention is that Israel also contains close to 5 million non-citizens: Palestinians who live under Israeli control in the West Bank and Gaza (yes, Israel still controls Gaza) without basic rights in the state that dominates their lives. Reshit Ḥokmah, treating of moral duties, of the sciences, and of the necessity of studying philosophy.

Among the modern critics of Kabbalah was Yihhyah Qafahh, who wrote a book entitled Milhamoth ha-Shem, ( Wars of the Name) against what he perceived as the false teachings of the Zohar and the false Kabbalah of Isaac Luria. He is credited with spearheading the Dor Daim. Yeshayahu Leibowitz publicly shared the views expressed in Rabbi Yihhyah Qafahh's book Milhhamoth ha-Shem and elaborated upon these views in his many writings.

ICYMI

One reason Israel doesn’t give these Palestinians citizenship is because, as a Jewish state designed to protect and represent Jews, it wants to retain a Jewish majority, and giving 5 million Palestinians the vote would imperil that. Medieval re-discovery of ancient Greek philosophy among the Geonim of 10th century Babylonian academies brought rationalist philosophy into Biblical- Talmudic Judaism. The philosophy was generally in competition with Kabbalah. Both schools would become part of classic rabbinic literature, though the decline of scholastic rationalism coincided with historical events which drew Jews to the Kabbalistic approach. For Ashkenazi Jews, emancipation and encounter with secular thought from the 18th century onwards altered how philosophy was viewed. Ashkenazi and Sephardi communities had later more ambivalent interaction with secular culture than in Western Europe. In the varied responses to modernity, Jewish philosophical ideas were developed across the range of emerging religious movements. These developments could be seen as either continuations of or breaks from the canon of rabbinic philosophy of the Middle Ages, as well as the other historical dialectic aspects of Jewish thought, and resulted in diverse contemporary Jewish attitudes to philosophical methods. Hillel wrote a commentary on the 25 propositions appearing at the beginning of the second part of the Guide of the Perplexed, and three philosophical treatises, which were appended to Tagmulei ha-Nefesh: the first on knowledge and free will; the second on the question of why mortality resulted from the sin of Adam; the third on whether or not the belief in the fallen angels is a true belief.

As early as 1934 Karl Popper wrote of the search for truth as "one of the strongest motives for scientific discovery." Still, he describes in Objective Knowledge (1972) early concerns about the much-criticized notion of truth as correspondence. Then came the semantic theory of truth formulated by the logician Alfred Tarski and published in 1933. Popper writes of learning in 1935 of the consequences of Tarski's theory, to his intense joy. The theory met critical objections to truth as correspondence and thereby rehabilitated it. The theory also seemed, in Popper's eyes, to support metaphysical realism and the regulative idea of a search for truth. Popper coined the term critical rationalism to describe his philosophy. Contemporary Jewish philosophers who follow Popper's philosophy include Joseph Agassi, Adi Ophir and Yehuda Elkana. Contemporary Kabbalists, Tosafists and Rationalists continue to engage in lively, sometimes caustic, debate in support of their positions and influence in the Jewish world. At the center of many of these debates are "Guide for the Perplexed", "13 Principles of Faith", "Mishnah Torah", and his commentary on Anusim. Moshe Chaim Luzzatto wrote in Derech Hashem that "Man is the creature created for the purpose of being drawn close to God. He is placed between perfection and deficiency, with the power to earn perfection. Man must earn this perfection, however, through his own free will... Man's inclinations are therefore balanced between good (Yetzer HaTov) and evil (Yetzer HaRa), and he is not compelled toward either of them. He has the power of choice and is able to choose either side knowingly and willingly". [15] The power within man to overcome sin [ edit ] Jewish tradition is opposed to magic, divination, and sorcery. Exodus 22:18 reads: “You shall not allow a witch to live.” And Deuteronomy 18:10-11 is more elaborate: “Let no one be found among you who consigns his son or daughter to the fire [i.e. who offers their child as a sacrifice, as some neighboring religions did], or who is an augur, a soothsayer, a diviner, a sorcerer, one who casts spells, or one who consults ghosts or familiar spirits, or one who inquires of the dead.” Magic of this sort was and still is a major no-no. The point of these Biblical prohibitions is that there are correct ways to relate to God (namely, prayer and sacrifice), and then there are incorrect ways — magical ways — to try to manipulate divine power or call upon the supposed power of other gods. Fleischer, Ezra. "A Fragment from Hivi Al-Balkhi's Criticism of the Bible." Tarbiẕ 51, no. 1 (1981): 49-57.David ibn Merwan al-Mukkamas was author of the earliest known Jewish philosophical work of the Middle Ages, a commentary on the Sefer Yetzirah; he is regarded as the father of Jewish medieval philosophy. Al-Mukkamas was first to introduce the methods of Kalam into Judaism and the first Jew to mention Aristotle in his writings. He was a proselyte of Rabbinic Judaism (not Karaite Judaism, as some argue); al-Mukkamas was a student of physician, and renowned Christian philosopher, Hana. His close interaction with Hana, and his familial affiliation with Islam gave al-Mukkamas a unique view of religious belief and theology. You may not live among us as Jews” referred to forced conversions. Jews were coerced to give up their Judaism and convert to Christianity from as early as the 4th century. In some precincts, there’s a growing and reprehensible tendency to use the fact that many Jews are Zionists (or simply assumed to be Zionists) to bar them from progressive spaces. People who care about the moral health of the American left will be fighting this prejudice for years to come. I think the answer lies in its refocusing. Because much of the antisemitism we see around us today can be captured in a reformulation of Hilberg’s aphorism.