After forty days and forty nights on the ark, crammed among a large family and animals of all species, the waters began to recede, and Noah saw an extraordinary seven-colored bow of light in the sky. Noah and his descendants were the survivors of a catastrophic flood produced by God to destroy the crown jewel of his own creation, because of their corruption and lack of humanity. “When the rainbow is in the clouds, I will see it and remember my covenant with you and all living creatures of the earth,” God promised, recorded in chapter 9 of the book of Genesis.
By Maxine Lowy
The God of the Jews enters the world at the end of the Flood, notes rabbi and theologian Jonathan Sacks, by making a covenant – “brit” in the Hebrew text – of peace with all peoples of the earth. God promises never again to destroy living beings, while the people, in return, promise to keep a code of ethics. From then on, any cataclysm that occurs on planet Earth will not be by the hand of God.
By the terms of the covenant, the Jewish religion is unique; the God of Israel is also the source of the divine spark that resides in each human being. Sacks calls it the “universalizing of a particularity,” which recognizes the specific particularity of Jewish teachings while acknowledging and respecting the differences of other peoples.[i] Partly for this reason, promoting proselytization is alien to Judaism.
This reading contrasts with the interpretation of Daniel Jadue, mayor of the municipality of Recoleta of Palestinian descent, member of the Communist Party Central Committee of Chile. On December 28, at the launch of the book “Sionismo, una ideología que extermina” (“Zionism, an Ideology that Exterminates”) by Pablo Jofre, he stated: “I always argue, fraternally, with my Jewish leftist friends, that for me there is a contradiction between being left-wing and a Jew. To be Jewish is part of a supremacist concept. If you are part of a chosen people, you don’t believe in the equality of all human beings above all. Here we are before an extremely nazi ideology.”[ii]
Following Sacks, the mayor’s interpretation is wrong and harmful. On the contrary, the universalizing particularities – Jewish, Muslim, Christian, Hindi, Mapuche, and all others – allows us to see God in the face of the other without obliging the other to renounce their particularity.
This perspective, along with the practice of questioning and analyzing traditional texts, and the absence of dogma, a humanist ethic and vision emerges. This forms the core of Jewish, and Jewish left-wing thought in particular.
Judaism is both an ancient religious tradition that has never been static, but rather, has been updated over centuries by various subsequent Jewish currents. But Jewish identity is not limited either to the religious dimension nor to an affiliation to a Jewish community institution. It also arises from culture, history, mysticism, ethical values, family ties and an intangible sense of affinity that eludes definition. At the same time, Jews have in the back of our minds that at some point the dominant culture will single us out as “the other.” The sense of marginalization also can be a component of Jewish identity. Jews of progressive and leftist leaning politics activate that memory of discrimination to condemn, denounce, and reject all forms of racism, discrimination, gender-based violence, and other forms of injustice in the world, and certainly in Israel.
Igor Rosenmann, architect, playwright and Communist Party member, had his Jewish identity beaten into him. On an afternoon in the mid 1960s, at the prestigious Colegio Alianza Francesa school in Santiago, Chile, a fight broke out between brats.[iii] As they kicked a boy lying on the floor, they shouted at him, “Shitty Jew!” The altercation became a milestone in the life of Igor, the 8-year-old boy who suffered the beating.
Earlier in that century, his grandfather Isaac had more than once endured similar humiliations in Poland, biting his lip to contain the rage he dared not show his assailants. Many such incidents, directed not only at him but at all his Jewish neighbors, prompted his departure from the village for a distant continent. Arriving in 1906, in a country on the other side of the world called Chile, he added a second “n” to his surname, to make it appear more German than Jewish. However, the new surname did little to shield either his son or grandson from the stigma of being Jewish in a largely Catholic country.
But this was not Poland. The grandson got to his feet and “Yes, I’m a Jew! So what?” His reaction could have been one of denial to protect himself from further attacks. Unlike his grandfather who fled to Chile, in the belief that it was a tolerant and peaceful country, Igor’s beating prompted him to soak up Jewish history and culture, also details of centuries of persecution, and the Holocaust in particular, until he embraced a Jewish identity. At the same time, he wanted to understand the roots of social injustice, which led him, on the one hand, to participate in the Jewish socialist youth movement Hashomer Hatzair, and, on the other, in the Young Communist League (Juventudes Comunistas) as a member of the Ramona Parra Muralist Brigade. Thus, two facets of his identity came together.
Igor was not the only Jew in the “Jota” (“J” from Juventudes). He thinks there were many but he was the only one in his circle to openly admit to being Jewish. “It could be that they didn’t have Jewish surnames. Others preferred to keep a low profile because we Jews were seen as reactionaries from the upper class. There were also Jews from low-income families but these too preferred to lay low because they said to themselves, “If I say I’m Jewish, they’ll say I’m right wing.”
In August 1976, the curtains came down after the last act of his play Día at the Universidad Técnica del Estado (today University of Santiago). It had been an award-winning play that he wrote for a theater festival three years earlier at Dario Salas High School. This time the audience barely began to applaud when the theater was raided by soldiers. The 200 people from the audience, as well as the actors were arrested, loaded into paddy wagons, and taken to Estación Central police station. Later all were released except for Igor and six other people. Between blows and more blows, a tall blond man interrogated Igor, shouting, “You’re a Jew! You motherf***g Jew!”
Weeks later, he passed from the solitary confinement of Cuatro Alamos to the general population of Tres Alamos, the adjacent prison, and fellow political prisoners he was greeted by eighty tight embraces from fellow political prisoners who sang to him and fed him. The sensation of incredible relief of that moment when he stepped from horror back to life has not diminished in his memory. Months later, he was transferred to Puchuncaví, along the coast north of Valparaiso, where the guard towers, coils of barbed wire, and cabin cells, reawakened his Jewish inner self. “I felt like I was in a concentration camp. I seemed to be living the history I had read about the Holocaust. I was prisoner because I was a communist, yet I had a kind of hallucination that I was there because I was a Jew. All my life I have had this dual feeling of being a Jew-communist.” His prison mates would joke, “How can you be a communist if you are a Jew? It was constant: being a Jew in prison was an issue.”
It is a common dilemma for leftists who identify as Jews in Chile. Both among their left-wing comrades and in the conservative Jewish establishment, they are an uncomfortable presence. It is important to note that at least 20 people of Jewish origin were part of Salvador Allende’s government; never before had there been such prominent participation in a government in Chile. However, during the civil-military dictatorship that brutally overturned the Allende government, many Jewish community leaders, who supported the regime, asked themselves whether detainees of Jewish origin were Jewish enough to be concerned about them. Twenty-two people of Jewish origin have been documented so far as having been extrajudicially executed or forcibly disappeared. In all likelihood, mainstream Chilean Jews who do not abide Jadue share with him the belief that a progressive outlook and being Jewish are incompatible.
In the context of the horrific scenes broadcast from Gaza and Israel, it would not have been surprising to hear Jadue speak of “Zionists,” also a misconstrued word. But what he said was that being a Jew is “incompatible” with being progressive. This affirmation attempts to unite ideology and religion, distorting the biblical concept of a chosen people as an ideology. This tendentious statement, expressed by an important public figure and transmitted infinitely by social networks, is a dangerous precedent that attacks, not only Jews, but “the other.” Jadue’s words are not precisely addressed to “my left-wing Jewish friends,” they dig at the core of a dangerous discourse within Chilean society. As Theodore Adorno warned in 1950, one type of discrimination is associated with others, and anti-Semitism leads to xenophobia.
Entrenched in societies, and in Chilean society, in particular, labels and prejudices dehumanize and are the catalyst for xenophobia and racism. These seeds are deeply buried and usually concealed, but statements like Mayor Jadue’s can contribute to their germination, leading to acts of violence and hatred. In recent years, in Chile, this trend has been seen in a criminalization of Venezuelan and Haitian immigrants; 80 years ago, in the 1930s and 1940s, it was Jewish immigrants and refugees whom Chile sought to keep out by erecting barriers to prevent their entry.
In Chile, a country with a population of just 20,000 Jews -as compared to 400,000 Chileans of Palestinian descent- it is common to hear jokes about Jews, see the burning of Judas effigies during Holy Week in Valparaiso, and hear children singing about the breads in the oven burned by the Jewish dog. Every so often, Jewish conspiratorial theories such as Plan Andina, invented by Argentine Nazis in the 1960s, re-emerge in new renderings, as recent as 2018, fostered by some progressive members of the Chilean Congress. A 2014 survey of the Global Index, conducted by the Anti Defamation League that measures attitudes towards Jews in 100 countries, placed Chile higher on the list of anti-Jewish tendencies than Argentina. Forty percent of interviewees who held such views stated that they had never met a Jew.[iv]
Victor Grimblatt, who at 15 became a member of the Youth Communist League, participated in the resistance to the dictatorship until he was exiled to France in 1983, when he was student body president of the Electronics Department at Santa María University in Valparaiso.[v] The grandson of Jewish immigrants to Chile in the 1920s, both his Jewish and progressive identities originate from his family background. Fifteen years ago, he was one of the founders of a new Jewish religious community, Ruaj Ami, that sought to promote egalitarian, inclusive and progressive values. Of Jadue’s statements, he says, “He incites hatred towards all of us who fought for Chile. His words are offensive to Jews of the French resistance who were mostly communists. He insults my Jewish family as if we don’t deserve to be progressives.”
Today, listening to the remarks uttered by the mayor from his own party, Igor reflects: “This is at the heart of our contradictions and ambivalences as left-wing Jews. The belief in transformation of society together with the millennial internalized reality of being at times admired and at others despised. There is a certain unity in belonging to a people that is persecuted and a party that has also been persecuted.”[vi]
Maxine Lowy is a freelance journalist who has lived and worked in Chile since 1990. She is the author of Latent Memory.
[i] Jonathan Sacks (1948-2020), Universalizing Particularity, (Leiden: Brill, 2013).
[ii] Translated from remarks in Spanish by Daniel Jadue: “…siempre discuto, fraternalmente, con mis amigos judios de izquierda, que para mi hay una contradicción entre ser de izquierda y ser judío. Ser judío is parte de una concepción supremacista. If you are part of a chosen people, you don’t believe in the equality of all human beings above all. Aquí estamos ante una ideología que es lo mas nazi…”
[iii] References to the story of Igor Rosenmann are from an interview with this author in November 2013, which form part of her book “Latent Memory: Human Rights and Jewish Identity in Pinochet’s Chile,” (Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 2022), 109-114.
[iv] https://global100.adl.org/map
[v] Virtual communication with Victor Grimblatt, Jan. 3, 2024
[vi] Virtual communication with Igor Rosenmann, Jan.3, 2024
