Major Jewish organizations, so often at the forefront of struggles for human rights and freedom of expression, have had only a muted reaction so far to the predicament of British writer Salman Rushdie.
An exception has been the World Jewish Congress, whose American Section said last week that it “deplores and is dismayed” by Iranian leader Ayatollah Khomeini’s death threat against the Indian-born novelist.
It called on all nations to treat death threats against Rushdie as terrorism.
The American Jewish Congress also reacted strongly, in a statement released here last week.
It said, “The outrageous and barbarous threats against the life of Salman Rushdie demand condemnation and public denunciation from every part of the civilized world.”
AJCongress called on the U.S. government and the United Nations “not only to register worldwide revulsion over these abominable threats, but to recommend appropriate concerted action to prevent them from being carried out.”
Khomeini and his followers believe Rushdie’s book, “The Satanic Verses,” blasphemes Islam by caricaturing the prophet Mohammed.
Individual Jewish writers, either in interviews with the Jewish Telegraphic Agency or as part of writers’ organizations, have also deplored the death threat and the reluctance of major bookstore chains to stock the novel.
Asked in those interviews whether Jews might also be angered by a book that mocks their beliefs or history, many of the writers agreed but said there are ways of expressing anger short of death threats or book burnings.
Unfortunately, they said, an odious anti-Semitic tract is the price to be paid for the principle of freedom of expression.
CONCERN ABOUT IRANIAN JEWS
The WJC statement was signed by Rabbi Wolfe Kelman, chairman of the organization’s American Section. Kelman was also a signator, along with Rabbi Marshall Meyer of Manhattan’s Temple B’nai Jeshurun, of a similar statement released by the Temple of Understanding, a New York-based interfaith organization.
Kelman said he was surprised by the lack of a greater Jewish response to the Rushdie affair, although he said he understood the hesitation.
“I imagine part of it may be concern of further weakening relations between Iran and Israel, and endangering the lives of Jews in Iran,” he said. “It’s a delicate question we weigh all the time.”
But Kelman suggested the affair may offer to supporters of Israel an opportunity as well “It’s important that when Jews are being characterized as oppressors and the Muslims as victims, there is this dramatic exemplar of why Israel must be careful living in a region that does not recognize pluralism.”
Putting it more strongly was Rabbi Mare Tanenbaum, former director of interreligious affairs for the American Jewish Committee. Tanenbaum, who writes a column distributed by JTA, said the controversy “discloses the core of a fanatic Islamic cosmology, which defines mankind as pitted in a clash between the children of light and the children of darkness (Satan).
“It illuminates the magnitude of the ideological barbarism with which Israel has had to contend since its founding in 1948,” he said.
THE PRICE OF FREEDOM
The Rushdie affair illuminates for Jews conflicts that go back to the Enlightenment of the 18th century.
Freedom of speech has meant not only Jews’ freedom to read and write what they want, but for others to publish sometimes ugly, even libelous ideas. Revisionist works denying the Holocaust are advertised by small publishers; Hitler’s “Mein Kampf” and the 19th-century forgery “The Protocols of the Elders of Zion” are readily available.
Even works by Jewish writers sometimes cause anguish. When he wrote “Portnoy’s Complaint” in 1969, Philip Roth was denounced as a “self-hating Jew” whose unflattering portraits of Jewish bourgeoisie would comfort anti-Semites.
Rushdie raised Roth’s case this week when he submitted, from his hiding place in England, a review of Roth’s memoirs, “The Facts.”
What responsibility does an artist have to avoid offending the sensibilities of a group? Has Rushdie only himself to blame for words he knew were potentially offensive to Moslems?
Chaim Potok, the novelist and rabbi, said that, as an artist, his own sense of responsibility “is limited to my own vision of the truth” and, he added, “my willingness to pay the price of that vision. It Rushdie didn’t know what he was doing, he was either naive or stupid.”
But the point is not Rushdie’s actions, said Potok and other writers, but Khomeini’s.
WHERE TORAH STANDS ON BLASPHEMY
Hugh Nissenson, whose most recent book is “The Elephant and My Jewish Problem,” a collection of short stories and journal entries, said certainly there are subjects that would make the Jewish community furious.
“The difference is no one would put a price on the writer’s head and call for his execution,” he said. If his own publisher came out with a reprint of “The Protocols of the Elders of Zion,” “I would not like it,” said Nissenson, “but I’d be damned before I’d call for its suppression.”
Potok, who took part in a rally in support of Rushdie in Philadelphia last week, said he has lobbied in the past against textbooks that have distorted Jewish history. But he called those efforts “acceptable maneuvering,” versus threats on an author’s life.
Potok noted that “The Protocols” have been reprinted around the world, including Arab countries, and the Jewish response has been to avoid an “overwhelming fuss” and create interest in the book that was not there before.
Anne Roiphe, who has written a novel about the newly Orthodox, says the Rushdie affair should sound a warning to Jews. “I look at the ayatollah and see a potential endpoint if our own fundamentalists are not checked by the rest of us,” she said.
Execution for blasphemy has its roots in the Bible. In Leviticus 24:14, the Lord commands Moses, saying, “he that blasphemes the name of the Lord, he shall surely be put to death.”
But modern history records no example of a Jew being put to death by other Jews for blasphemy. Even history’s most famous Jewish heretic, philosopher Baruch Spinoza, was merely banned by the Jewish community of Amsterdam, in 1656.
JTA has documented Jewish history in real-time for over a century. Keep our journalism strong by joining us in supporting independent, award-winning reporting.
The Archive of the Jewish Telegraphic Agency includes articles published from 1923 to 2008. Archive stories reflect the journalistic standards and practices of the time they were published.
