Rabbi Andrea’s Sermon 28th March / 10th Nisan 5786

LET OUR PEOPLE GO 

I recently saw a short video that, honestly, frightened me. It shows a series of figures looking up towards the sky: a Native American, two little girls standing among the ruins of Hiroshima, a Vietnamese peasant woman, a little girl among tents in the rain with the word “Gaza” beneath her, a beautiful blonde girl in a strange temple with the words “Epstein Island,” and an Iranian girl dressed in a white hijab (the creator of this video must have some sort of fixation on little girls...).

Then General Soleimani and Ayatollah Khomeini appear as well, and they too are gazing upward with hopeful expressions. Then a missile bearing the Iranian flag appears, streaking across the sky, and as the music swells it crashes into the Statue of Liberty in America.

The statue is revealed to have, not the face of a woman, but the head of a devil, with a pair of large horns. Once the statue is decapitated, everything falls apart and sinks beneath the water in fragments, while the words “A revenge for all” fill the screen in the final scene.

In short, it is a catalogue of the victims of American imperialism, capitalism, and Western cruelty. For some reason, African enslaved people are missing: there is always this reluctance, in certain Islamist and broader Middle Eastern narratives, to reckon with the role of Arab slave traders.

And they are all smiling, because the Iranian regime, with its bombs directly threatening New York, seen as a symbol of the Western world, is coming to bring justice.

What struck me most is that the fragments of Western civilisation which the supposedly liberating Iranian missile has come to sink into the waters of New York Bay are all indistinct, apart from the severed horned head and the cover of the book the statue was holding in its hand.

That cover is in Hebrew, and it reads: Talmud Bavli.

It is the Talmud. Exactly: you understood correctly. In that video, the Statue of Liberty, symbol of Western hypocrisy and global oppression, is imagined as holding a torch in one hand and, in the other, the text said to inspire all the horror in which we are living, according to the Iranian regime and its supporters: the Talmud.

For those who do not know, the Talmud is the stenographic record of extremely complicated and detailed rabbinic discussions on various aspects of Jewish law. Like any such discussion produced in the late imperial era, when the Roman Empire was extending its legislation across the Middle East, it includes trivial details alongside heights of extraordinary spirituality. Other peoples, subject to the Roman Empire, produced similar legal or customary compilations, often at the Romans’ own prompting, because Rome wanted to know, in effect: “Right then, tell us how you regulate yourselves, so that we can tax you more efficiently.” The difference is that Greeks, Egyptians, Nabataeans, and others did not continue the discussion and interpretation of their laws after the fall of the Roman Empire, probably because they did not find it all that interesting, whereas the Jews continued for centuries, and in certain ways continue still, the work of interpretation and engagement with new circumstances.

How this discussion among Jews, which concerns primarily us Jews, is supposed to be the foundational text of Western oppression against every oppressed group on earth, with the notable exception of Black people, I truly do not know. But I do know very well that parts of the Talmud have been selected and stitched together by anti-Semites in every historical era in order to depict Jews as dangerous racists plotting to dominate the world, practising human sacrifice, and teaching racial hatred in their schools.

So, it is hardly surprising to see anti-Semites defaming the Talmud. With social media, this rubbish circulates even more widely now. Every month I receive two or three emails from people who believe this nonsense and want to tell me how outraged they are.

This kind of propaganda began circulating in Russia in the 1920s, then passed into Nazi Germany, and is still spread today by far-right extremists. It is, of course, also popular among Islamists across the world, and is now disseminated freely by Iran.

The Talmud has been targeted before, even by popes in the Middle Ages, who ordered it censored and burned on the pretext that it contained insults against the Christian religion. But in the Iranian video, and in contemporary antisemitism more broadly, there is a significant difference. We are no longer accused simply of despising other religions. Here, the Talmud, the holiest text of Judaism, is presented as nothing less than the mainstay of a project of domination and exploitation. Not only do they divide the world into oppressors and oppressed, conveniently forgetting, among other things, African slavery. Not only do they cast themselves as avengers and bearers of justice, that is classic Iranian revolutionary ideology. They now see in the holiest text of Judaism, that is to say, in the Jews themselves, the enemy that must be destroyed. They want to get rid of us because they believe that, by doing so, they will create a better world.

This is where the so-called “theory of oppression”, so widely peddled today in academia, ultimately leads: to conspiracy theories according to which a cabal of elderly white men runs the world, and that cabal turns out, somehow, to be Jewish. Divide the world simplistically into oppressors and oppressed, colonisers and colonised, occupiers and occupied, without nuance, without intermediaries, without complexity, and sooner or later you end up in the company of anti-Semites. Or else you become one yourself.

To those who reply that these are only words, and that words do not hurt anyone, I answer that there is a long list of antisemitic terrorist actions carried out by Iran and its proxies. To mention only a few examples: the bombing of the Jewish mutual aid association in Buenos Aires in July 1994, which killed 85 people; the murder of five Israeli tourists in Bulgaria in July 2012, around the time of my first prayer in this synagogue; and the pogrom of 7 October 2023, financed by Iran and greeted enthusiastically by the Iranian regime.

And please do not come and tell me that Jews and Muslims can live peacefully together in Iran under supposedly enlightened Muslim rule, and that the problems began only with the State of Israel. As it happens, I grew up in Milan, and a very large proportion of the Jewish community of Milan consists of refugees from Mashhad: people who know a thing or two about the antisemitism of the supposedly enlightened Iranian regime.

Mashhad is a city regarded as holy by Shiite Islam, and the position of the local Jews has always been precarious. In 1839, a pogrom triggered by religious accusations led to the killing of dozens of people, the burning of the synagogue, and the forced conversion of the entire community to Islam. From then on, the Mashhadi Jews became the Jadid al-Islam, “new Muslims”, and for almost a century they lived a double life: Muslim in public, but Jewish in secret. When they were discovered practising Judaism, they could face brutal punishment, including public execution. Women, too, were vulnerable to abuse and violence.

Only under Reza Shah, in the twentieth century, did the possibility of openly practising Judaism improve somewhat. Even so, insecurity did not end, because in March 1946 there was a further attack in Mashhad against both Jews and the “new Muslims”, with injuries and looting.

After 1948, it finally became possible to emigrate to Israel, to Tehran, and then onwards to Europe, and Milan became an important centre of this diaspora.

And that is precisely my point: thanks to Israel, there are Jews who are alive and free to practise Judaism, instead of living in subjection under a dictatorship that now imagines drowning the Talmud. And the reason why the obscurantist and backward sectors of Iranian society now in power hate Israel is precisely this: thanks to that state, there are Jews who are alive.

And when I have said these things to emissaries of the Iranian regime who claimed to be Jews, and whom I had to meet at an interfaith event I was obliged to attend as a rabbinical student, those gentlemen refused to speak to me. From that point on, I acquired a reputation for being intolerant, an enemy of interfaith dialogue, and, oddly enough, an Islamophobe, simply because I reminded emissaries of the Iranian government that there are Jews who fled that country for Israel.

That is the rule: the only refugees one is supposed to speak about are the Palestinians. In my day, rabbinical students were certainly not encouraged to speak about, let alone taught about, the persecution of Jews in Iran at the hands of Muslim authorities. I do not know whether things have changed since then.

But let us return to the video. Let us return to the ideology it expresses. Let us return to this Shiite version of the “theory of oppression” so beloved in academic circles. Let us return to what is being said there about us Jews, in certain circles, the very same circles whose members will gather in London today, Saturday, for yet another march against racism. They say there will be Jews there too. On Shabbat. I do not believe these are Jews of broad culture or strong identity, and I do not think they know what the Talmud is.

The kind of Jews who campaign against racism alongside emissaries of the Iranian regime are Jews who are ignorant of the Talmud, and who oppose Zionism. No Zionism, no attachment to Jewish sovereignty, no understanding of Jewish vulnerability: what kind of Jews are they; one is tempted to ask?

Do we really need more proof that the current ideology of anti-imperialism and post-colonialism, the united front of all the oppressed peoples of the earth against Western civilisation, is fertile ground for conspiracy theories of every kind, and above all, today, for antisemitism?

There are Jews who, in the name of interfaith dialogue and religious freedom for Muslims, both worthy causes in themselves, have embraced that ideology. They have moved from asking for two states, one for the Palestinians and one for the Jews, to marching alongside those who call for the destruction of Israel and now for the drowning of the Talmud. The popes burned it; the mullahs would drown it. And yet these people speak of Jewish values. Is it a Jewish value to defend a regime that massacres its own citizens in the name of a free Palestine, organises antisemitic attacks, and calls for the drowning of the Talmud? Really?

It is Pesach, my friends, it is Pesach. Pesach, the festival of liberation from Egypt. Pesach, when we came to understand that the whole of Egyptian society was beyond reform, that there was no place for us there, that the structures of thought in the Egyptian world were permeated by idolatry and slavery. Our Sages say it: it is harder to remove Egypt from the hearts of the Jews than to take the Jews physically out of Egypt.

And so, I ask: how much of that Egypt is still present in the hearts of those who call for tolerance towards these followers of the new Pharaoh, who wants to exterminate us, subjugate us, and erase every trace of Jewish civilisation? How much time must pass before we understand that world, the world of so-called dialogue, entry into which requires us to renounce Zionism and abandon generations of Mashhadi Jews to suffering under Islamic rule? How long will it take us to understand that such a world is the opposite of Judaism, that it does not belong to us, and is in fact our enemy? How many more plagues must fall upon that realm of antisemitic oppression?

This Pesach, while Israel and the United States are engaged in helping the Iranian people remove the dictatorship organised and sustained by the worst elements of their society, must be a Pesach of true liberation, first and foremost, a liberation of the mind. It must be the moment in which we recognise our enemies and find the courage to call them by name. It must be the moment in which we defend the treasures of our culture and our civilisation: the Talmud, first and foremost, which our enemies want to drown. It must be the moment in which Jews present in the cultural industries, in academia, in journalism, in all those environments increasingly favourable to the Iranian regime and increasingly tolerant of that obscurantist barbarism, find the courage to say aloud: Let My People Go.