Chapter Fourteen Behind the Scenes With Dr. Goldmann

Nahum Goldmann could not have chosen a better title for his book - The Jewish Paradox.1

What is a paradox? The definition in the Concise Oxford Dictionary is itself somewhat paradoxical, explaining that a paradox is either “a seemingly absurd though perhaps really well-founded statement" or “a self-contradictory, essentially absurd statement”-take your choice. The prefix “para,” from the Greek, is defined as having any of these meanings; “beside," “beyond," "wrong,” “irregular."

However, we can learn far more about the paradox from the way it has been used from time to time by those who handle it with skill, like the late George Bernard Shaw-and like Dr. Nahum Goldmann.

As the experts have demonstrated, the paradox is simply the truth stood upon its head. A writer can attract attention to what he wants to say by making a statement which is instantly noticed and challenged because it is obviously absurd-but behind that absurd statement there can lurk an important truth which takes the reader or listener by surprise. The mind is first boggled, then suddenly illuminated.

The paradox can be used for very different purposes, as Dr. Goldmann has demonstrated in his book producing the effect of a sort of double paradox, simultaneously mind-boggling and instructive, words used with consummate skill to instruct some readers while at the same time thrusting others more deeply into ignorance and confusion

But, who is Dr. Nahum Goldmann? In a few words he was the world's top Jew, having combined for some years the presidency of the World Jewish Congress and the World Zionist Organization, the man who spoke for world Jewry with all the world’s leaders since long before World War II.

Goldmann is himself a sort of walking paradox. Having campaigned all his adult life for a return of the Jews to Palestine in fulfilment of Bible prophecy, he candidly admits that he is himself not “an orthodox Jew"-“I stopped being religious in the traditional sense at the age of 17, meaning that I stopped observing the laws, eating kosher, going to the synagogue . .

There are evidently many other Jews who have been estranged from orthodox religion, for Goldmann remarks that “relations between the state and religion constitute one of the great unsolved problems in Israel where a formal separation of the two could produce a splitting of the population into *believers and unbelievers’." Having informed us that not all Jews are religious believers, he goes on to say that they are united in believing that for religious reasons the Jews were fully justified in taking Palestine from the Arabs,

What Goldmann has to say about the “Jewish identity" reminds us of the mazes of the Cretan labyrinth from which heroic Theseus was able to extricate himself thanks only to a clew of tliread given to him by Ariadne, daughter of the King of Crete. Prepare to enter the labyrinth on the subject of “Jewish identity." Says Goldmann:

I remember giving a lecture when I was a student during which I offered more than twenty definitions: Judaism is a religion, a people, a nation, a cultural community, etc. None of them was absolutely accurate ... For some the keystone is religion. For others it is the glory of a people which has given the world monotheism, the prophets, Spinoza, Marx, Freud, Einstein and so many other geniuses. For others again it is their respect for Jewish sufferings past and present that cements their adhesion.

Goldmann rejects a definition offered by one of Jewry’s staunchest defenders, Jean-Paul Sartre: "A Jew is anybody whom other people designate as such,"-a definition that served to conceal the fact that he was himself a Jew.2

It is somewhat paradoxical that the short list of Jewish “geniuses" should have included Spinoza, who in 1632 was cursed and anathematized by the Amsterdam rabbinate:

... with all the coursings which are written in the Torah; cursed by day and cursed by night, cursed when he goeth out and cursed when he cometh in .. . There shall be no man to speak to him, no man write to him, no man show him any kindness . . .3

On the other hand, the claim that Jews gave the world "monotheism" is no paradox at all, but a simple falsehood-for we may read in the ancient Egyptian Book of the Dead, dated approximately 2600 BC:

Thou art the one, the God from the very beginnings of time, the heir of immortality, self-produced and self-bom; thou didst create the earth and make man" (translated by the British archaeologist and Egyptologist E.A. Wallis Budge).

Jewish philosophy, thought and ideology," Dr. Goldmann goes on, "are made up of manifold contradictions. One of them is that we are at one and the same time the most separatist and most universalist people in the world," In support of this statement he quoted the Talmud as saying that "anger, a convert, is as hard to bear as a sore."

However, Goldmann has some words of comfort for those who might begin to fear that they have been discriminated against by what he calls "the Jewish God": "That is the great characteristic of our people; we are apart and isolated from the rest, and at the same time destined to fulfil a mission which concerns the whole world, to be the servants of humanity."

The paradox here is concentrated in one word, "servants," which stood upon its head gives us the word rulers, for was there ever a ruler, no matter how vicious and arbitrary, who did not regard himself as the servant and benefactor of his people?

There is much more in the same vein. In one and the same paragraph in the introduction we read that '‘the Jews are the most separatist people in the world” whose “belief in the notion of the chosen people is the basis of their entire religion,’' and we read also that no other religion has "proclaimed so passionately the equality of all races and all classes before God." In other words: “All animals are equal, but some are more equal than others”—since there must surely be some superior kind of equality among those who qualify as "the chosen,"

There is, of course, no mention in Goldmann's book of the fact that most of those who now call themselves Jews have no lineal connection with the Jews of the Bible, being the descendants of a Turko-Mongol people, the Khazars of South Russia, who were converted to Judaism during the seventh century of our era.

If, instead of trying to follow Dr. Goldmann all the way through the labyrinthine caves of the Jews’ "revolutionary notion" of a people that is at once "separatist and universal," we drive a perfectly straight, well-lit tunnel right through this great mountain of paradoxes, what do we find?

We find that the Jews are a chauvinist, nationalist and racially- oriented people who have learned how to preserve their unity and cohesion in spite of geographical dispersion. This lesson, first learned during the Babylonian Captivity, has been vastly amplified down the centuries and is the central teaching of the Talmud. Once we understand this, we have a key which instantly unlocks every imaginable manifestation of “the Jewish paradox."

A relationship of competitive nationalism-for that is what it is-gives rise inevitably, as Professor Sir Arthur Keith has explained, to the practice of twin ethical codes, an “in" code and an "out" code, one for “us” and the other for "them.”

On this subject, too, Dr. Goldmann is surprisingly frank, but always, of course, in the same paradoxical way. Thus, the man who proudly claims that he carried the passports of eight different countries, quotes himself as saying in an interview with Dean Acheson, then U.S. Secretary of State: "Listen, Mr. Acheson, I am talking to you now not as a Jew but as an American, I am an American citizen."

Further on in the book Goldmann writes of his influence with leading Western politicians:

Seduction can become a passion. When one seduces a woman, the sensation may be more acute, but seducing a statesman comes close to it. When I convinced Dean Acheson to accept the partition of Palestine in spite of his anti-Zionist convictions, I felt an almost sensual pleasure . ., a success of the sort makes you feel that you are cleverer than your opposite number.

There, of course, he was implementing the out code, treating the U.S. Secretary as an enemy to be outwitted and defeated.

And, of course, Dr. Goldmann was not being "cleverer” than his opposite number; all he had to do was to bring to bear on Dean Acheson the irresistible pressure of America’s Zionist lobby.

Numerous other examples of the practice of what Leon Abramowicz describes in a laudatory preface to Goldmann's book as a combination of “prudence, dissimulation and astuteness" are provided, Thus, we learn how President Truman, “a simple, upright man" whose “honesty was proverbial," arrived at a decision of global historical importance “against the advice of all his advisers, except one who teas a Jew”- said Truman: "My friends are Jews, the Jews want partition; alright, they can have it.”

It would be hard to find another book which tells us more about the way modem power politics are conducted-provided, of course, that we have first acquired the art of translating paradoxes into plain, straightforward English.

Writes Goldmann:

All through my life I have observed the same thing; the diplomats were against the resurrection of Israel, and the great statesmen were for it. Without Balfour, Lloyd George and Wilson we would never have obtained the Balfour Declaration of 1917 and what ensued from it. All the ministerial machines were hostile to the project and all the functionaries said . , . "It’s unheard of."

Translated out of the lingo of paradox, what that means is that it is easier to "seduce” a few top “statesmen" who depend heavily on Jewish favor in terms of votes, financial backing and press support, than to seduce scores and possibly hundreds of people lower down in the echelons of power who have nothing to gain by surrendering their integrity and self-respect, and are, in any case, not so easily reached by those who would like to seduce them.

Similar methods, Goldmann informs us with unconcealed pride, were used to persuade Lyndon Johnson to grant him a two-million dollar Agency for International Development (AID) low interest loan for the purpose of financing the Encyclopedia Judaic:

One of Lyndon B. Johnson's friends was a Polish Jew called Jim Novy who . .. was treasurer of the committee which financed his presidential campaign and had a pass authorizing him to enter the White House day or night, and even to request a bed there, just like a hotel.

Again, Goldmann tells us how, as a youth in Lithuania, he was able to avoid conscription into the army:

Luckily there was a law exempting "only sons" from military servtee, and in Jewish communities it was the Rabbi who kept the birth register. So when my father had three sons, they were each entered under a different name.

(Good for “us,” not so good for "them").

On the subject of the Soviet Union Goldmann makes some interesting admissions:

After the Revolution in 1917 there was a very intense Jewish cultural life in Russia, both in Yiddish and Hebrew. It should not be forgotten that Israel’s present national theater, Habima, was created in Russia.

He quotes Ben-Gurion as saying that it was thanks more to the USSR than America that the state of Israel came into existence. As for Israel being the West's great '‘bastion” of residence to Soviet expansion in the Middle East, he explains:

... if today, they (the Russians) have an interest in the existence of the Jewish state, it is paradoxically because it was Israel which brought them a political victory they had awaited for centuries, by enabling them to gain a foothold in the Mediterranean, (Emphasis added).

Dr. Gotdmann’s book is a perfect treasure-house of paradoxes. We are told that ‘'Israel is one of the most conservative countries in the world," while “Jews are revolutionaries for other people but not for themselves." This paradox when translated means that "other people” are used for Jewish revolutionary purposes.

The Jews, Goldmann tells us, have always taken the initiative against discrimination, “in the United States together with the Blacks, in Catholic countries together with the Protestants, and in Protestant countries together with the Catholics-in other words, wherever discrimination exists." A minority, he insists, has a right to preserve its separate identity and to have, “for example, its own schools/ The paradox here is that minorities may preserve their own identity and have separate schools, but not majorities.

Another interesting item: How many Catholics know that such was the influence exerted by Dr. Nahum Goldmann on the Vatican that there now exists:

... a composite commission of Catholics and Jews which meets three times a year to delete or modify controversial passages in the various Catholic books-from the elementary catechism to the textbooks used in Catholic universities and seminaries, by way of liturgy and, most of all, the service for Good Friday,

What have they done with the New Testament, we wonder—surely the most—"controversial" book of all? Dr. Golldmann does not tell us.

The crowning paradox is Israel itself as it now exits: Dr. Goldmann does not believe in it; it should have been something quite different, something even the Arabs could have accepted. He tells us that Ben-Gurion was himself most pessimistic about the new state's ability to survive:

Why should the Arabs make peace? If I were an Arab leader I would never make terms with Israel. That is natural; we have

taken their country, Sure, God promised it to us, what does that matter to them? Our God is not theirs.

Notes

1. The Jewish Paradox. Weidenfeld and Nicolson, 1978,

2. The Jewish Paradox (above cited), See also, Chapter 3 of the present work (“The Identity Problem").

3. The Controversy of Zion, Douglas Reed (p, 101) quoting from the ban pronounced against Spino2a by the Amsterdam rabbinate in 1632.