On G. Gordon Liddy’s show, there is a guest, “Rabbi Gerald Meister,” and the topic of discussion is Mahmoud Ahmedinejad supposedly being Jewish. I am baffled by this. Here’s a transcript of the exchange:
Liddy: What do you make of the fact that - and it’s proven by documents held aloft by Ahmedinejad in his own hands in 2008 - showing that he’s actually Jewish?
Meister: Why am I not shocked? I mean we live in the age of the perverse. And it makes absolute sense that if we are going to do theater of the absurd, then this is just another act.
Liddy: Well, we know that Adolf Hitler was at least partially Jewish —
Meister: Yes, he had Jewish blood in him -
Liddy: But this man is apparently 100% Jewish.
What the hell is this about? First of all I thought it was completely unproven whether or not Adolf Hitler was Jewish. Nobody can know for sure because apparently his father was illegitimate - but this is not the same as proof that he’s partially Jewish. By that same token he could be partially Greek, partially Irish, partially anything. And I’ve never heard a Jew claim that Hitler was even partially Jewish.
And I also am unaware that Ahmedinejad had any Jewish ancestry. Is there anything to this, or are Liddy and his guest just completely mistaken here?
What difference does it make if Hitler’s father was Jewish? Doesn’t Judaism (at least the sects of Judaism present in Germany and Austria at the time) only consider matrilinear descent for that inclusion?
I really don’t have the inclination to go into the whole megillah about it, but in short, being Jewish is more complicated than you seem to think. One can be a practicing Muslim, Christian or atheist and still be Jewish ethnically, which is the only kind that was important to the Nazis and to opponents of Jews in general.
Strictly speaking Judaism is both a race and a religion, as far as my understanding goes (disclaimer: this doesn’t go beyond GCSE level RS and wikipedia). It’s possible for someone to be ethnically Jewish or practise Judaism without being the other. Islam, like Christianity, is quite heavy on proselytism so an ethnic Jew could convert and still be Jewish.
One who is Jewish by birth, but who converts to Islam (or who is raised from infancy in the practice of Islam) is still Jewish, in the eyes of Jews. He is a Jew who does not keep the Law.
In the eyes of (many) antisemites, he is also Jewish, because for those antisemites Judaism is a matter of genetics, not religious belief or practice. The Nazis, for example, would certainly have treated such a person as Jewish.
But, while Islamists are certainly capable of antisemitism, I think they would happily accept a person of Jewish descent who was rasied as a Muslim and sincerely embraced (their version of) Islam. For them, Judaism (like Islam) is not a matter of genetics but of faith and identity. I don’t think Admnedinejad’s Jewish background is particularly politically embarrassing to hiim. (If it were, he would hardly be flourishing the documentary evidence in front of the television cameras.)
SeeThe Guardian note. It does appear (and knowing the Telegraph, not surprising) someone got a bit into over-reading for the sake of a catchy headline.
Yeah, it’s all about religion, not ‘race’ - I suppose that makes the label anti-semite not particularly accurate for this kind of prejudice against Jews, since many Muslims are also Semites.
There’s something mind-bogglingly perverse about accepting the Nazi’s definition of Jewish and applying it to our times.
The better answer is to reject that definition entirely. Judaism then becomes a religion. If you are not an adherent of that religion you aren’t Jewish. People should not be held accountable for their ancestors’ beliefs in the first place.
If Ahmedinejad was raised from birth as a Muslim and is an adherent of Islam today, then he is not Jewish. Period. It should not matter an iota that some Jews’ religious beliefs put a claim on the children of a Jewish woman. No one of any religion or lack of at any time in any country should be culturally bound by the beliefs of a religion they are not a part of. It doesn’t matter that it’s likely that no one in his family was ever Jewish. Why should that affect him?
Judaism as a culture has even less coherence. Can Irani Jews be said to have anything culturally in common with the German/Eastern European ethnicity that is defined as “Jewish culture” in America? There are long-lived pockets of Jews in Ethiopia and China, too. How culturally Jewish are they? Israel has cultural wars among the multitudes of Jews from different areas of the world who have emigrated to Israel.
Neither definition works for individuals, who are what they choose to be. Ahmedinejad is not Jewish by any conceivable proper definition.
Interesting article, though it makes it seem a lot less certain that Ahmadinejad is Jewish. The one jjimm posted made it sound like a certain thing, but from this one it just sounds like he’s descended from some ethnic or religious minority which may or may not be Jewish.
I’d go with “almost certainly not and never has been Jewish.” The word of an expert on Iranian Jews for me trumps a lot of speculation based on one data point.
I have read that Muslims are more peeved at people who have forsaken Islam than at people who have never been Muslim.
Is there a similar pattern in Judaism, that is, a formerly Jewish Muslim is worse than a Muslim who was never Jewish? This is probably a foolish question, but I mean no offense.
Right, the only rules Jews expect non-Jews to follow are the seven Noahide commandments, which, having been given to Noah, apply to all of Noah’s descendants just as the Mosaic law applies to all of Moses’ descendants. From memory, they’re:
No idolatry
No blasphemy
No stealing
No murder
No eating the limb of the living
No incest
Be civilized
(not necessarily in that order).