Judaism After Huwara
“The image of the awful cruelty that tyrannical rulers inflicted upon them,” wrote Orthodox rabbi Aharon Shemu’el Tamares of his fellow Jews in 1912, “is fixed too firmly before their gaze for them to desire to be tyrants themselves and not to keep in their hearts a deep hatred for all other tyrants.” Born into the Russian empire in the late 19th century, Tamares was a firm pacifist and an ardent anti-Zionist, who believed – or, at least, wanted to believe – that their millenia-long experience of persecution had inoculated the Jews against the temptation to themselves become oppressors… Read the rest at Vashti!