In her recent acceptance speech as recipient of British PEN’s Pinter Peace Prize, writer Arundhati Roy made special note of President Biden’s words on his visit to Israel shortly after 7 October 2023.

I don’t believe you have to be a Jew to be a Zionist, Biden declared, and I am a Zionist.

It was a statement of America’s undying loyalty to Israel which, like many such statements, papered over what is in fact a far more complicated set of issues. For while anyone can be a Zionist, converting to Judaism is no easy matter. Unlike others, Judaism isn’t a proselytising religion, and of the many things that Judaism is, it certainly isn’t Zionism.

It’s curious how spiritual movements founded with calls for love and peace have transmogrified at one stage or another into militant proselytisers. Thus was Christianity under the Crusades, Islam under the Mongols, Buddhism today in Myanmar. Yet in most respects Judaism would seem to be the reverse of that trajectory.

Judaism began as a tribal religion. Abraham’s tribe, the Hebrews, worshipped Yahweh, an especially jealous, vengeful deity. Nor was there was much peace-loving in what became the kingdom of Judah. The first five books of the Old Testament, what we Jews call the Torah, and parts of the extended Tanach, fairly bristle with Judah’s conflict with its neighbours. If Judah hadn’t beaten the Hittites, for example, Jews might well have ended up praying to the Hittite goddess Kattaha. But if that’s a fancy the archaeological record demolishes,........

© Pearls and Irritations