Jewish History, Jewish Religion: The Weight of Three Thousand Years

Israel Shahak, an Israeli Jew, born in Poland, incarcerated in Belsen and a resident in Israel for over 40 years, has produced an intriguing and controversial study of the extent to which the secular state of Israel has been shaped by religious orthodoxies of a potentially dangerous nature. While Muslim fundamentalism is vilified in the West, Jewish fundamentalism goes largely unremarked. Shahak claims that classical Judaism is used to justify policies that are as bad as some of the worst excesses of anti-Semitism.