Israel Shamir, PaRDeS: an etude in Cabbala (BookSurge, 2004-2005) 192
pp. $12.99 ISBN 1-4196-0601- 8 

Reviewed by Tom White 

My coming upon the Internet writings, a couple of years ago, of Israel
Adam Shamir of Jaffa, Israel, a Jew and a Christian, yielded the same
sort of intellectual shock I got when I discovered the American poet
Ezra Pound back in 1950. 

Reading Pound—poetry and prose—I suddenly realized that here was someone
who knew all the questions nagging away at the back of my mind—and often
enough sitting right up front in it—and he was supplying answers that
were so good that they seemed like a drink of cool water on a broiling
hot day. 

Pound answered for me the question: What was wrong with the world
economic system that seemed to almost break my father’s spirit in the
1930s? And perhaps did kill his body; he died at 57 in 1941. 

Shamir answers for me the question: What is wrong in the world that our
nation is collapsing—or at least getting ready to collapse—in a welter
of monstrous, unpayable debt, illegal and unwinnable wars, pornographic
“entertainment,” grossly corrupt government, ruinous taxation, and
totalitarian-style police-state encroachments on the activities of
everyday people, all the while no one seems to be able to do anything to
stop any of it? 

Pound’s political and economic writings, which were a career sideline
for a man who was a superb if sometimes difficult poet, are still
politically incorrect, because he thought the chief architects of the
extreme folly of the two great European World Wars, which wrecked
Christendom and murdered millions of human beings, were the money men
and munitions men, the giant usurers in their role as warmongers. Pound
made plain that he thought—nay, he knew—that a lot of the biggest of
them were Jews. 

Shamir comes now with even more serious accusations, and reporting, if
you will, from the inside, to contend that “the Jews” (defined below)
are engaged in a monstrous scheme of world control and world government
that is within an ace of carrying the day. 

Shamir’s sensibility, if I am any judge, is a deeply poetic one, like
Pound’s (whom he cites in Pardes). A man without some appreciation of
the poetic, a man who cannot credit, for example, the fact that religion
is the supreme poetry of the human race—poetry risen to the level of the
living Truth—is unlikely to credit either Pound or Shamir. 

Both writers are cordially hated by what Shamir calls the Mammonites,
who, insofar as they pay any notice to either man, about equally detest,
in each of them, both the poet and the brilliant observer and critic of
contemporary madness, an observer who is uncannily right about what is
wrong. 

Shamir is himself a fairly recent convert to (Orthodox) Christianity. I
find everything that he writes (that I have so far read) illuminated by
a fine intelligence, a good heart, massive knowledge of world history, a
truly Christian humility, tremendous sophistication, considerable humor,
and a determination to speak his piece no matter what. 

Shamir’s primary focus is on the injustice to Palestine, but he sees the
situation there as a microcosm of what is ahead for the whole world: 

Israel/Palestine is the model of the world the Americans want to
achieve. It has peasants and their flocks dying of thirst, and on the
hilltop there are villas and swimming pools for the chosen folk, It has
a huge army and it has many labourers without any rights. In order to
turn all the world into Palestine they began now Word War 3 against the
Third World. 

Notice that Shamir says “what the Americans want.” The sad fact is that
what Israel wants is what America wants. We have long since hooked our
national wagon to the Israeli engine, a coupling insisted upon by the
wealthiest and most powerful élite group in the nation, “the Jews,” a
term which does not mean all Jews, only certain of them, those who fully
identify with and foster what Shamir calls the “Judaic spirit.” By this
term Shamir means that same materialistic, this-world-centered spirit of
upheaval and revolution that E. Michael Jones has been tracing through
the history of the last 2,000 years in Culture Wars Magazine, most
recently in the May issue in his article, “John Huss and the Jews.” 

Shamir makes a vital distinction early on in Pardes between a Jew or
Jews and “the Jews” or Jewry. Plain Jews are like thee and me, people of
an ethnicity but not defined by it. Plain Jews, like plain people
everywhere, are willing to go about expecting no special favors and
quite willing to identify themselves with their host country rather than
the one they or they forbears left some years ago, or, in the case of
the Jews, Israel. 

The oddity of Israel is that it is not really an ancestral homeland for
any modern Jew but got started only in 1948. Ever since, Zionist Israel
has issued a call to all Jews to come to it, or at the very least to
adopt its cause as their cause, and to work mightily to advance the
Zionist program. All this under the blanket claim that God gave “Greater
Israel” to the Jews (and only the Jews) in what the Christians call the
Old Testament, a claim hotly disputed by about a billion Muslims, among
others. 

It’s as if Ireland had a thing called Erinism, which required all the
diaspora Irish (60 millions?—recall that Anglo-Irish poet W.B. Yeats
called the Irish the “Jews of Northern Europe”) to support it in its
intention to reduce England to rubble, as Israel is reducing Palestine
to rubble. To be a true Erinist one would have to put Erin’s interests
above those of the United States or whatever nation one happened to live
in, send all kinds of money to the Irish government, and be prepared to
blindly defend Ireland whenever anyone pointed out that the limitation
of citizenship in the Erinist state to those of the “Celtic race” is a
retrograde tribal politics of the ugliest kind. 

Shamir on distinguishing a Jew from “the Jews”: 

. . . a Jew rarely knows or understands what the Jews want from
themselves and from bewildered mankind. This lack of understanding
causes many fine men and women to proclaim their support (or opposition)
to the body politic called ‘the Jews.’ Being born and raised a Jew does
not help at all, just as belonging to the elite troops does not provide
you with an understanding of the General Staff plans. . . . 

Our goal is to understand and explain what ‘the Jews’ want. This task is
a hard one, for the Jews have no obvious central command. It is hard to
swallow that the Jews can have a strategy but no strategist; and the
Protocols of the Elders of Zion are popular precisely because they posit
such a supreme (if obscure) strategist. However, ‘the locusts have no
king, yet they attack in formation’ (Proverbs 30:27) and devastate whole
countries as if by plan. 

It is possible there are no (or almost no) Jews who fully understand
what the Jews want. The term ‘The Jews,’ as used in this article, is
meant to denote a spiritual persona of higher rank, relating to
individual Jews like the Catholic Church is related to an individual
Catholic, or a beehive to a bee. Thus, there is no subjective personal
guilt associated with individual Jews, unless their specific actions or
inaction are criminal per se. Thus, this discourse should help an
individual to decide whether he wants to be a Jew or not, in the same
way one may choose whether one wants to be a communist or a Quaker.
(Page 7) 

In a sense this book, although offered to the world at large (and
available on Amazon), is a book by a Jew for Jews, having as a chief
goal to persuade them to drop their “Jewishness”—their determined
separateness—and rejoin the human race. Shamir, like Simone Weil,
contends that the idea that Jews are today still the specially “chosen
of God” (in exactly the same way Jews and Christians hold them to have
been in Moses’ time) is a truly mistaken idea, a truly poisonous idea,
especially poisonous for Jews, but poisonous for the whole world, too. A
lethal archaism of racial politics. 

Shamir’s political position on the Israel-Palestine contest is that the
Zionists—in his eyes clearly the aggressors, the invaders—should
dismantle their racist state, end their murderous hatred of their
Palestinian neighbors (who it must be admitted return the favor), and
proceed to melt into the population of Palestine, becoming the friends
and neighbors of Palestinians. 

The Jews should agree with the Palestinians to devise a single state
with all on both sides of the present impasse equal and welcome—one
person, one vote—and end all talk of any group’s being the chosen of God
with special claims on “The Holy Land.” 

The two-state plan the U.S. has favored will please no one in the end;
it will move inexorably toward an apartheid state, of which the symbol
is the new and hideous wall through Palestine that the Israelis are now
building, and I suppose the U.S. is paying for. (Our contributions to
Israel since 1948 are over $100 billion. That’s $100,000,000,000, in
case you were wondering, a sum which all by itself proves the U.S.
subservience to Israel.) 

As you can well imagine, Shamir’s contentions are calculated to make
American Jewish and Christian Zionists, the chief supporters of Israel,
foam at the mouth. Perhaps it is for this reason that Shamir has never
come (as far as I know) to the U.S., although he has been all over
Eurasia from England to Malaysia and Japan. He seems to move about
Israel with freedom and ease. It seems plain that Israel’s intellectuals
are less constrained by government and political correctness than
Americans and Europeans. 

In the May issue of Culture Wars, Paul Eisen, director of Deir Yassin
Remembered, in his article “Speaking the Truth to Jews,” sets out the
case against Israel’s treatment of Palestine over the entire period of
Zionist invasion of the Holy Land as coolly and accurately as I have
ever seen it done in any publication. All praise to Culture Wars for
carrying this article, first published in a 2004 book, Speaking the
Truth About Zionism and Israel. The book is available from Amazon. 

My purpose in mentioning this here is to highlight one problem Eisen
suggests we all have in the West in trying to make sense of things
Jewish: we have mostly felt we need to speak in codes, or in
circumlocutions, or simply keep silent on matters Jewish, to avoid
“being cursed as an antisemite,” as Eisen puts it. 

The “antisemitic” thing is like a thrall thrown down by some magician to
make us speechless and stupid. I know I have felt its power, and even
though I have been trying to work my way out of it for years, I still
approach an article like this with a certain nervousness. And you have
to ask why, because I am old and (relatively) poor and beyond the reach
of any presumed Jewish malevolence. Still, the power of the magician’s
tricks is there, and one looks over one’s shoulder. I know I am not
“antisemitic”; I have any number of Jewish culture heroes, starting with
the Lord Jesus Christ; but . . . but . . . 

Eisen writes: 

Jews have never been so secure or so empowered [as now], yet many Jews
feel and act as if they are a hair’s breadth away from Auschwitz. . . .
Jews, individually and collectively, use their political, economic,
social, and moral power in support of Israel and Zionism. In their
defense of Israel and Zionism Jews brandish their suffering at the
world, accusing it of reverting to its old antisemitic ways. They claim
that criticism of Israel and Zionism is in fact criticism of Jews. Just
as the Jews were, in the past, objects of classic antisemitism, so
Israel, the state of the Jews, is the object of a new, modern
anti-Semitism. They will concede that Israel like any other state in the
world, is not exempt from criticism, but they do claim that Israel’s
right to exist as a Jewish state is so exempt. In effect, we may
criticize Israel for what Israel does, but not for what Israel is. 

However, Eisen’s whole article destroys the claim of Israel to exist as
it now does, because it is a religiously (that is, racially or tribally)
exclusive state, a clear instance of apartheid, a cruel, genocidal
oppressor of the Palestinians, whom it has killed, shoved out, or shut
in, and an illegitimate rogue state if there ever was one. (With
ourselves, the U.S., in hot pursuit of the same rogue-nation status, it
must be admitted). 

Shamir, detested and hounded by Israel fans everywhere, pulls no punches
in agreeing with Eisen. Shamir, too, is on the Deir Yassin Remembered
board, and he is an opponent of Israel’s current and past ways. And yet
he loves the Holy Land, where he immigrated from Russia, and he wants to
stay there. This love shines unmistakably in Pardes as it did in Galilee
Flowers, an earlier book. (Both books are available on Amazon.) He has
written recently (although not in Pardes but in an Internet essay, “The
New Bund at Old Tricks,” a remark that will do nothing to lessen the
distaste for him among Jews: “. . . [A]cceptance of Christ is the Final
Solution of the Jewish question, while assimilation and intermarriage is
the way to undo the vestiges of Jewish separatism.” 

That, when you reflect on it, is a most astonishing statement to come
from anyone, Jew or Christian, after what the world has been through in
the last century. It is however, what a Christian is bound to believe if
he is an honest Christian. What other fate can one want, in charity, for
a “disaffected one”? But let there be no coercion. God does not coerce;
man should not coerce. “There are no righteous wars.” 

Speaking of political correctness, I recognize that this article
violates the prevailing politically correct canon most grievously. I am
writing favorably about a writer who has been generously smeared by his
fellow Jews, which is supposed to put the kibosh on him good and well.
Also I, a goy, am talking about the Jews. That is not supposed to
happen. I am free to talk about Patagonians, Samoans, Germans,
Amerindians, and residents of the Falkland Islands, but nobody is
supposed to talk about the Jews as if they were a “thing” the way
“Italians” are a thing. 

The big bugaboo that has to get shattered—maybe has already been
shattered or is in the way of being presently shattered—is the cold pox
of fear that settles around the possibility that one could be called—“Oh
my God, my heart! my heart! I’m fainting!”—an ANTISEMITE. 

This is presently a far worse social sin than being called an
anti-Christian. In fact, that might get you some plaudits; it certainly
would not get you much active criticism. What’s to like about Christ for
right-thinking modern people? But to be called an antisemite is to
crumble into a nothing, become an unman, prove oneself a worthless
troll, commit a bummer, remove oneself from the ranks of civilized
people, etc., etc., etc. At least it’s that kind of disappearing act
that the people slinging the smears really want to help you achieve more
or less permanently. 

The term antisemite is flung around by the smear artists despite the
fact that it doesn’t really mean anything. (Arabs are semites, for
heaven’s sake.) And biological antisemitism, that is, objection to Jews
because of real racial prejudice, is virtually non-existent, and
everybody knows it. The objection is to the manifestations of that
“Judaic tendency” that Shamir (and Jones) are chronicling and which is a
real threat to all peaceful life on this globe. 

Any non-Jew who makes this point can expect to be vilified, precisely by
other non-Jews. Shamir quotes Otto Weininger: “The Aryan of good social
standing always feels the need to respect the Jew; he is displeased when
Jews [like Shamir] make revelations about the Jews, and he who does so
may expect as few thanks from that quarter as from over-sensitive Jews.”

Shamir continues (page15): “His [Weininger’s] words are even more
relevant now; with the Rise of the Jews, it is the burden of people with
Jewish roots to undo Jewry.” 

To repeat: “. . . it is the burden of people with Jewish roots to undo
Jewry.” The thing is quite hopeless if the Jews won’t do it themselves.
Remember the dominical statement that “salvation is of the Jews.” And
keep in mind, too, that “Jewry” for Shamir is synonymous with “the
Jews,” not all Jews, but those possessed of the Pharisaic, that is, the
“Judaic” spirit, that was evident at the trial of Christ 2,000 years
ago. For Shamir it is the spirit of Mammon, the evil spirit that Christ
said was “the other choice.” One may serve God or Mammon, not both. 

Without Shamir and the great cohort of Jews and non-Jews (in which group
I include the editor/publisher of this magazine) battling so steadfastly
against the overwhelming spirit of Mammon that rules this age in these
ruins of Christendom where we dwell, I should feel discouraged indeed.
But I do not feel discouraged. There is clarity emerging at last. I do
think the Mammonites (Shamir’s term for all—Jews and gentiles—who
advance the “Judaic tendency”) will fail ultimately despite the present
seeming. 

For long years I have been in the same case as Omar, as reported by
Fitzgerald in The Rubayat: “There was a Door to which I found no
Key;/There was a Veil past which I could not see.” I do not pretend even
now to great wisdom and certainly not to great learning, but I do think
the Key has presented itself, and the Veil is lifting. 

I have been rereading the first few chapters of the Gospel of John in
recent days and it has, newly for me, the air of a dispatch from the
front lines. The issue was joined back then; it is apparently to be
settled fairly soon. 

Pardes is a short, deep book. I think anyone interested enough to have
read this article or to have received this magazine should own the book
and read and reread it. It is cheap enough to mark up. I have only
skimmed over a few of the points it makes. It, like good poetry,
requires frequent rereading and meditation. The first section, PaRDeS
proper, the “study in Cabbala,” is described (page 16) thusly: 

But what is the Judaic tendency and why should it be undone? Jewish
exegesis offers four escalating levels of penetrating into the deep
meaning of Biblical verses. The four levels are abbreviated as PaRDeS
(Paradise or orchard), for ‘peshat’, or plain reading, and ‘raz,’
‘derash,’ and ‘sod,’—the deepest mystic content. We shall follow this
scheme to expound the designs of the Jews: while peshat deals with
money, raz attends to discourse, derash is the political level and sod
is the theological plane. 

The 101 pages devoted to “the designs of the Jews,” follow this schema
and are packed with facts and theses of astonishing range and
novelty—and one might add, potential for outrage among the close-minded.
The rest of the book consists of six essays of great brilliance and
intense moral and social insight. For example, the essay, “A Study of
Art,” that Shamir wrote with his wife Alice, will tell you more about
the world of international High Art than I have ever seen set down on
paper before, and I assert, from some knowledge of the field, that every
word of it is true. It is the complete explanation of why, in the words
of poet Edwin Arlington Robinson, “art’s a vagrant, now on the town.” 

Let me close with an extended quotation from Pardes as an example of
Shamir’s scope and penetration. It was hard to make a selection, so many
passages offered unique insights. The passage I chose is the close of
the essay, “Zeno’s Arrow (Or How to Argue Your Case with Jews)”: 

The friends of Palestine have no problem with individual Jews—they could
be good or bad, our supporters or our antagonists. But the friends of
Palestine have a problem with “Jewry”—the organized structure of Jewish
communities. A few weeks ago, Haaretz published a huge page-long ad
signed by all prominent Rabbis of the land—three hundred of them—calling
for “Vengeance to the Evil Folk” [Palestinians] and enforcing religious
obligation “never to surrender a single inch of sacred land to them.” It
is a call to holy war. … 

Conclusion: In the present war, Jewry is a belligerent party; this
polity decided to wage war on too many enemies at once. Individuals of
Jewish origin could be good or bad; but the organization is hostile to
us. The victory over it is possible, but we have to pierce its Stealth
shield manufactured by many skilled hands in many arguments. 

Shamir’s Pardes is a whole quiver full of arrows designed to pierce that
shield. 

This review was published in the September, 2005 issue of Culture Wars.