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I thought Purim had come early when I flicked on the Internet and found, on the English-language website (ynetnews.com) of the popular Yediot Aharonot newspaper, a ruling by Maimonides that Jewish law forbids Arabs from serving in the Knesset.
How can this be? The great philosopher, it may be recalled, lived not in Israel but in Egypt, in the 12th century, so he didn’t know from the Knesset. He gave Palestine a try, incidentally, after fleeing Spain, whose Muslim regime had turned dangerously radical. But the Rambam, as he is famously known, found a wonderful day job in Cairo, as personal physician to a most agreeable Muslim (the Sultan), and that gig trumped his aliyah. (As we say in Yiddish, plus ça change.)
Nevertheless, Maimonides, the halachic genius, holds plenty of sway today among Jews who dwell in Zion, and also elsewhere. Rabbis from Tiberias (where the tomb of Maimonides is a site of pilgrimage) to Teaneck, NJ, thumb through the 14 volumes of his still-indispensable legal code, which he wrote in his spare time and grandly named Mishneh Torah. Deeming his opus definitive, he provided no Talmudic citations.
“Rabbi Aviner: Halacha Bans Arabs from Knesset,” read the headline at ynetnews.com, and the story led off as follows: “A prominent Zionist rabbi ruled this week that according to the Halacha, a non-Jew cannot serve as a Knesset member in the State of Israel, even if the public agrees to it.” On his blog, in response to a reader’s question, Rabbi Shlomo Aviner (said Ynet) opined that “this was indeed against a halachic ruling issued by Maimonides, and that although later there were those who sought to allow it ‘if the nation agrees to it,’ Rabbi Zvi Yehuda Kook [a towering figure of religious Zionism in pre-state Israel] ruled this out as an ‘irrelevant’ consideration.”
For all I knew, Rabbi Aviner’s reported pronunciamento could have been misrepresented by Yediot Aharonot, a tabloid not known for the subtlety of its halachic explications. Duly diligent, I went Googling for the original text. I learned that Rabbi Aviner was born in Lyon in 1943, came to Israel in 1966, and lives in Samaria, in the settlement of Beit El, not far from Ramallah. I went to his official website, She’elot Shlomo (“Questions for Shlomo”), but couldn’t find the goods. I tried the yeshiva that he heads, Ateret Cohanim (which is located in the Muslim Quarter of Jerusalem’s Old City), but came up short there too. Finally, I found my way to a video page of halachic Q&A in Hebrew—is the Internet a miracle, or what?—and managed to gather (the rabbi mumbles, in a French accent) that yes, that’s what he said that Maimonides wrote. Rabbi Aviner added reassuringly that -- for the moment --Arabs in the Knesset are more a drawback than a danger.
In the video, the rabbi didn’t provide chapter and verse in Maimonides, but I’ve little doubt that the Rambam would have taken a dim view of Arab parliamentarians in the only sovereign state we Jews can call our own. In a famous letter (ca. 1172) to the beleaguered Jews of Yemen, he did not mince words: “Remember, my co-religionists, that on account of the vast number of our sins, God has hurled us in the midst of this people, the Arabs, who have persecuted us severely, and passed baneful and discriminatory legislation against us, as Scripture has forewarned us, ‘Our enemies themselves shall judge us’ (Deuteronomy 32:31). Never did a nation molest, degrade, debase and hate us as much as they.”
Case closed, but old texts can get us in trouble. In 1995, it was reported at the time, Yigal Amir delivered a d’var Torah, on a summer Shabbat at a West Bank settlement, on the subject of Phineas, grandson of Aaron the High Priest, who in the Book of Numbers slew with a spear the Israelite chieftan Zimri ben Salu as he consorted with a forbidden Midianite mistress, and was rewarded by God as a hero. Several months later, Amir, a law student, murdered Yitzhak Rabin, having collected opinions from nationalist rabbis that it was similarly a mitzvah to do so.
I’m sure Rabbi Aviner is a nice guy. On the Web, stroking his white beard, surrounded by holy books, he comes off warm and fatherly. Very far be it from me to lump him, heaven forefend, with assassins, not even on Purim. Indeed, the opposite: After Rabin’s death, an investigation revealed that Rabbi Aviner had explicitly stated that it was forbidden to harm the prime minister or other leftists. Earlier in the 1990s, according to the Hebrew-language Wikipedia (which according to some sages may be cited by journalists on Purim), Rabbi Aviner wrote (apparently lenient) halachic opinions involving the Palestinian intifada that prompted another rabbinic authority to grouse (in a responsum to a third rabbi): “He took things out of context . . . I think he got his inspiration or funding from [the left-wing] Meretz [party], or else is himself a member of the PLO.”
I kid you not, you can look it up: http://he.wikipedia.org/wiki/%D7%A9%D7%9C%D7%9E%D7%94_%D7%90%D7%91%D7%99%D7%A0%D7%A8. (Which, if you read it backwards, predicts the coming of the Messiah.) Perhaps, this leads me to surmise, this whole thing was blown into disproportion by some cheap-shooting rabble-rousing lefty Internet journalist with too much time on his hands. But that would be too much to ask—even on Purim.
Stuart Schoffman is a columnist for JUF News and an associate editor of The Jerusalem Report.
