The Genius of Judaism

Title: The Genius of Judaism

Author: Bernard-Henri Levy

Translated by: Steven B Kennedy

Publisher: Random House, 2017 (First)

ISBN: 9780812982510

Pages: 240

Judaism and its believers have been subjected to discrimination and reprisals right from its origin around 2600 years ago. Apart from a brief stint of glory before Christ, their land, places of worship and right to self-rule have been hopelessly appropriated by others. It was Judaism that introduced the concept of monotheism to humanity. But what is it that evokes so much opposition from other faiths? A satisfactory answer is not yet received for this question and that’s why I had taken this book in the hope that it’d provide some clues to its exclusivity. The passion against Jews has hardened with the growth of Islamic extremism. The state of Israel is in the grip of a mortal conflict with Palestinian Arabs over a stretch of parched land saturated with history and belief. Though the Palestinian claim to sovereignty is uncontested, their struggle to gain it smacks of religious fanaticism. However, the growing violence in the region makes it a hotspot of international ramifications. As a result of all this, Jews in Europe are said to be facing a hostile crowd again after the Nazi holocaust. Bernard-Henri Levy is a French philosopher and one of the most esteemed and best-selling writers in Europe. He is the author of more than thirty books, mostly in French, including this one. Levy has undertaken several diplomatic missions for the French government. In this book, he takes stock of the position of Jews in France and expresses alarm at the steadily growing trend of anti-Semitism. He also proposes a way for Jews to engage with the rest of the world which takes its inspiration from the example of Prophet Jonah detailed in the Jewish scriptures. At the end of it all, my question unfortunately remains unanswered.

Levy expresses deep concern about anti-Semitism that is returning to haunt European Jews again. On a serious consideration of the coming predomination of an ideology of hatred, anti-Semitism poisons the body politic of Europe causing more damage to it than perhaps the physical attacks it may inflict on its victims. The author makes a historical analysis of the origins of it and identifies four distinct phases in its evolution. Jews were accused of deicide because they were supposed to have crucified Jesus Christ. Medieval Jews were persecuted on this count. However as the era of Enlightenment dawned, theological certainties gave way to rational thought. But surprisingly, Jews continued to be on the receiving end. The Enlightenment era thinkers accused them not for killing Jesus but rather for inventing him. A century later, with the advent of Industrial Revolution and modern capitalism, the socialist camp vented their ire on Jews for supposedly manipulating the levers of control that guided the capitalist system. Many of the captains of finance and industry happened to be Jews, but the public equated these icons which formed only a micro-minority of the Jewish population taken as a whole, to the ordinary individuals. But the strange fact unobserved by the author is that many of the socialist gurus like Marx also happened to be Jews. With the onset of modern science, racial and genetic aspects came in handy for the anti-Semites.

This book identifies anti-Semitism of the twenty-first century being run by the three engines of anti-Zionism, Holocaust denial, and reaction against crimes committed by Israel against Palestinians. Modern Islamic societies are pitted against Israel on this issue, but the appeal of jihadism on ordinary Muslims remain as strong as ever. Levy concludes that an internal battle is being raged between two Islams – the Islam of the throat-slitters and enlightened Islam. There is no doubt that the legitimate concerns of Palestine are to be accommodated within the two-state system. Anti-Semitism sometimes erupts in anger against continued American support to Israel. Levy proposes several arguments on why this is the most natural thing for Americans to do. The first and foremost is that Israel is the only true democracy in the region and the only island of stability. Ignoring this may be self-defeating for the Western civilization which amounts to betraying its roots and allowing them to dry up. The author finds it so tiresome having to defend Israel quite often, so distressing to have to present the same evidence over and over. For the record, Israel is a successful multi-ethnic democracy in which Arabs are given equal rights except that of obligatory military service. They are represented in Israeli parliament in proportions unheard of in any Western democracy. Arabic is the official second language of the country and Arabs have one out of the four judges in Israel’s Supreme Court. In contrast to this, Palestinian towns are overflowing with hate and fury where people dance in the streets when an Israeli soldier is lynched.

Holocaust deniers are painfully unmindful of the lessons that pogrom offered to humanity so as not to repeat it. Mass murders are commoner than people think, but Nazi genocide of Jews, represented by Auschwitz is unique for three reasons. It is the only massacre designed to be final, to annihilate even the tracesof the exterminated – their culture, language, places of worship, books. Then, it was extermination without any right to appeal. All of the prospective empire was to be judenfrei. This stirred up anti-Semitic persecutions in conquered territory as well, such as Ukraine. All these events set in motion a fierce wind of transformation in European revolutionaries of the 1970s who were Jews. They turned away from Mao to Moses.

A large part of the book is dedicated to examine Jewish injunctions on its adherents and how it reconciles the modern man in performing his duty to the civil society in which he lives. Levy argues that Jews subject the verses of the Talmud to the work of soul-searching, stimulation and suspension of accepted meaning that the Jews have practiced till then. The book treats the experiences of Prophet Jonah as a model to be emulated in the present world. As the Bible says, Jonah was commanded by God to proceed to the enemy capital of Nineveh, and to ask the people there to mend their bad ways or else face imminent divine wrath. Though reluctant at first, Jonah does this after he himself faces the displeasure of God by having to stay in the belly of a whale for many days. This redemption of Nineveh, whose people were antagonistic to the Jewish nation, serves as a metaphor today where Levy extends it to his work in Libya and Ukraine, both of which expressed a strong anti-Semitic sentiment.

Many parts of the book are written in an abstruse style, mixing religious philosophy with humanistic thought. Readers might wonder what exactly the genius of Judaism mentioned in the title is. Levy saves them the trouble by clearly defining what he means by it. The genius of Judaism resides in the effort of going to Nineveh (in the abstract sense); in the relationship with other religions and with the outside world that is the meaning of the lives of so many Jews. It also resides in the ability to produce a little of the intelligence that will offer people, all people, a little of the teaching that they need to be different from the others, to stand out from the crowd to which they are never fated to belong. Levy’s definition of Judaism is also startling. Approaching God only through belief is the point of departure from Judaism and the birth-certificate of Christianity. No Jew is required to ‘believe’ in God. Instead, they are encouraged to know Him through the study of holy writ and its commentaries. Now, would you ‘believe’ that!!?

The book is recommended only to philosophically oriented readers.

Rating: 2 Star

Who Moved My Interest Rate?

Title: Who Moved My Interest Rate? Leading the Reserve Bank of India through Five Turbulent Years

Author: Duvvuri Subbarao

Publisher: Viking Penguin, 2016 (First)

ISBN: 9780670088928

Pages: 323

Unusual it may seem, but the common man in India is very familiar with the Reserve Bank of India (RBI) as the bank which prints currency notes but in which you can’t open a savings account! True to the tradition and methodology of central banks worldwide, it indulges in a lot of activities designed to ensure the health of the country’s macro-economy. It is also the monetary authority of the country which keeps inflation under control while supporting growth, gatekeeper of the external sector, regulates and supervises banks, regulates payment and settlement systems and acts as the bank of banks as well as governments. Duvvuri Subbarao rose from the IAS cadre of Andhra Pradesh and climbed steadily up the ladder to become Finance Secretary to the nation. He was nominated as the Governor of RBI in 2008 by Prime Minister Manmohan Singh. This book covers the five years he was in office in which he had to tame the triple monsters such as the sub-prime crisis of 2008, European sovereign debt crisis of 2011 and the sudden fall of the rupee in 2013. Rao doesn’t distinguish between his private and official lives and he seems to have dedicated his entire time to satisfy the demands the country had placed on his shoulders. With about ten overseas conferences he had had to attend mandatorily in a year, there is practically no time left for anything. This book is not only about the challenges and dilemmas, but also an attempt to demystify the working of the Reserve Bank.

Even though the Governor of RBI is nominally independent of the controls of the government, he is bound by convention and precedent to bow to the government’s wishes, especially since the governorship is not enshrined in and protected by constitutional safeguards. The constant tussle between Rao and P. Chidambaram, the then Finance minister, is hinted at in the book. Chidambaram wanted to clip the wings of Rao, when he constituted a committee to manage liquidity concerns with the finance secretary as its chairman only a month after Rao’s assuming office. This was clear overstepping on the privileges of RBI and Rao vehemently opposed it. Besides, the government wanted a low interest rate regime in the lending sector to spur economic growth, but the bank had to intervene in the opposite direction to curb rampant inflation caused by the faulty fiscal policies of the government. Rao claims that he has set a record of 23 times in adjusting the interest rates – 13 times increasing and 10 times diminishing. The rate was reduced at first to bring into control the 2008 crisis seeping in from America and raised thereafter to tame inflation and shore up the rupee. Rao’s patient analysis of where the government had gone wrong is illuminating. He asserts that growth and inflation are not independent variables. If one is fixed, the other is automatically determined. It means that if the RBI is enjoined to deliver an inflation rate, the government will have to acquiesce in the growth rate that resulted. Governments often get confused on this idea. Chidambaram’s messy intervention in an attempt to force RBI policy is seen in another episode from October 2012. The finance minister wanted a rate cut, and so he convened a press conference on these lines just a day prior to RBI’s policy meeting. But, Rao was unrelenting and kept the rates unchanged. The minister extracted his revenge in the next G20 summit held in Mexico, where he totally ignored Rao in the dinner party hosted by the Indian ambassador. Moreover, Chidambaram refused to re-appoint two eligible deputy governors of the Reserve Bank whose terms were over but were supported by Subbarao for an extension.

The author had a baptism by fire immediately after assuming office as the governor on Sep 5, 2008. Just ten days later, the famed Lehmann Brothers went bust, setting in motion a cascade of events that embroiled the global financial sector in deep agony. Even in normal times, managing the tension between short-term payoffs and longer term consequence is a constant struggle. Rao admits that he wasn’t much familiar about the bank when he joined it, and so ushered in a program of dissemination of knowledge to the public. His rural outreach programs were the first of the kind in the country. This effort is claimed to be a part of demystifying the Reserve Bank in which the author contents himself with partial success. Data deficiency is lamented for the failure to link it to shape the economic policy. Data on employment, wages and industrial production do not inspire confidence. Data on services sector, which constitute 60 per cent of the GDP are scanty. The Modi government’s targeted implementation of GST might be a step in the right direction in doing away with the uncertainty of data.

What makes Subbarao stands out from the genre of such authors is his readiness to accept failure where it was warranted. He couldn’t stem the slide of the rupee in 2013 and was heavily criticized for that. This defeat came about through the hands off approach adopted by the bank. RBI was interested only in smoothing the transition to a stable exchange rate determined by market forces rather than trying to set the rate themselves. This means that if the market has decided to cut down the rupee by 40 per cent, the bank will only make the decline smooth to the new level rather than intervening to halt the slide at, say, 20 per cent. Rao also magnanimously attributes the restoration of confidence in Indian markets to the scheduled leadership change at RBI and the formidable reputation of his successor, RaghuramRajan. He shows no rancor to Rajan and remains on admirably friendly terms. The book demands greater autonomy for the bank which sets monetary policy. Regulating the policy might involve short-term pain which the government doesn’t like and paves the way for an intervention from Delhi.

I took up reading this book with some apprehensions because any volume on finance and economic policy is notoriously dry. But I must admit that I never felt like abandoning the book without completing it. Of course, the subject is still dry, but somehow, Subbarao makes it a little more palatable. This is in spite of his confession that he needs to improve on the communication front. He could’ve included some corridor antics and power play that invariably attends concentration of power in a few people. There was ample room for some backroom tactics, when the government was initially hesitant to extend Rao’s term after three years supposedly on Chidambaram’s opposition. The common man is always in the mind of the author but such complex verbiage like ‘hedging the forex exposures by corporates’ could’ve been simplified or explained. The book was published in early 2016 and we sincerely wish that he should’ve postponed it by one more year to include an informative discussion on demonetization announced in November 2016 when the high-denomination bank notes which comprised 84 per cent of the money in circulation were withdrawn overnight. This was such a direct assault on black money that it reverberated across all the corners of the nation, but seems to have produced mixed results. Readers would’ve enjoyed a detailed analysis of this drastic action from a former RBI governor. In the end, it can be safely said that the book studiously avoid controversy and sensational topics.

The book is highly recommended.

Rating: 3 Star

The Struggle for Pakistan

Title: The Struggle for Pakistan – A Muslim Homeland and Global Politics

Author: Ayesha Jalal

Publisher: Belknap/Harvard University Press, 2014 (First)

ISBN: 9780674052895

Pages: 435

With the partition of India along religious lines in 1947, there arose in South Asia the bitter enmity of two brothers who shared much of the culture and destiny of the subcontinent. However, the substance behind Jinnah’s claim that Muslims constituted a distinct nation cannot be wished away. After a long series of protests and manipulations, he achieved his dream of aiding the birth of the nation of Pakistan for the Muslims of India. The newborn country always held India under its suspicious gaze as if it tried to subvert the young nation taking its first strides. Fears of a forceful re-annexation of Pakistan back into India were a potent concern for its people in the first decades of its existence. With India’s open support to secessionists in East Pakistan, relations between the two countries reached its lowest ebb, coupled with Pakistan’s crushing military defeat in 1971 and the separation of Bangladesh. This book’s title may confuse casual readers into thinking that the subject matter is related to the pre-independence machinations of Jinnah’s Muslim League. However, it is a history of the birth and growth of the idea of Pakistan (italics added) from League’s Lahore Resolution of 1940 till present. In that sense, the title should be understood as the struggle for the idea of Pakistan. This is relevant since even after seven decades, the country pitifully falls short of the aspirations of its founding father. Ayesha Jalal is a Pakistani-American historian who serves as the Mary Richardson Professor of History at Tufts University. She has authored many books on social, cultural and political aspects of South Asia, especially Pakistan.

Jalal’s incisive analysis identifies the rise of the military to a position of enduring dominance within the Pakistani state structure as the most salient development in the country’s history. Hatred against India is deep-rooted in Pakistan, which makes its soil fertile for the military’s tentacles to take hold effortlessly. The author narrates the arduous road to Pakistan traversed by its pioneering ideologists. In the Lahore session of the Muslim League, Jinnah asserted that India’s 90 million Muslims were not a minority but a nation in itself. The partition of the provinces of Bengal and Punjab defeated his plans for a negotiated settlement of Muslims in those provinces where they were in a minority. Here, Jalal pauses to romp home the point that religion was not the main impetus behind the creation of Pakistan. The demand for Pakistan was intended to get an equitable, if not equal, share of power for Indian Muslims in an independent India.

The first decade of Pakistan’s life was momentous. With Jinnah’s early demise, constitutional propriety and strict adherence to rule of law were the early casualties. Its efforts at constitution-making was a step in the right direction as Jinnah promised to base the state on the teachings of Islam but promised equal rights to religious minorities as seen in the Objectives Resolution of 1949. However, the Ahmadis were the first community to bear the brunt of religious intolerance when the state began its bigoted attempts to throw the Ahmadis out of the Islamic fold right in 1953 itself.

Pakistan is always in the grip of an insecurity complex. The cold war and the rise of US as a global power, the Indian threat and irritations with Afghan claims on its territory combined with the great challenges flowing from partition laid the basis of this insecurity complex. That may be the reason why the military ruled it for more than half of its existence. The military was relatively unscathed from the horrors of division because even though Pakistan received only 17.5 per cent of the financial assets of undivided India, it obtained 30 per cent of the defence forces. Kashmir becomes ever more significant if we take note of the water situation. All the western rivers of Indus flowed into Pakistan from Kashmir and as long as India controls the territory, Pakistan will always be on the edge. It entered into a military partnership with the US, but the bigger brother took the little one seriously only when it suited them. There were many instances in which Pakistan couldn’t enforce its will against the Americans on Pakistani territory. When Zulfikar Ali Bhutto, the foreign minister under Ayub Khan, wanted to visit the Badaber base of American forces in Pakistan where many covert operations were taking place, the US snubbed the Pakistani leader by confining him to the cafeteria of the base.

Pakistan’s polity and administration is largely oligarchic and mostly theocratic. Political and economic power is concentrated in the hands of 80 or so large landlord families. The urge to Islamize is a constant refrain. Ayub Khan’s constitution removed the word ‘Islamic’ to rename the country as the Republic of Pakistan. All references to the Koran and Sunna in the 1956 constitution were deleted. However, Khan was forced to recant on this issue and the terms were re-inserted as the very first amendment to the constitution.

Jalal gives a detailed narrative of the secession of Bangladesh. Not only were all military and political powers concentrated in West Pakistan, it was also economically far better placed. The per capita income in the West was 10 per cent higher than the East at partition, but boomed to 35 per cent higher by 1970. The Bengalis were treated as inferior from the beginning itself, with snide comments even on their skin colour appearing in polite circles too. The Urdu-only policy added fuel to the fire. Police firing on students protesting the language policy at Dhaka resulted in many deaths, and Bangladesh still mourns it as Martyrs’ Day. Bengali cultural assertions were frowned upon. Tagore and his works were purged from state media. Economic exploitation was rampant as the surplus from jute exports were pilfered to the West. At last, Bengalis found a voice in Mujib-ur-Rehman. His six-point formula as a precondition for a compromise plainly smacked of secessionist tendency. That it was a manifesto for independence is evidenced by the demands for separate Reserve Banks, foreign currency accounts and a paramilitary force for East Pakistan. With the birth of Bangladesh in 1971 with active Indian help, Pakistan fell into a deep gloom. 93,000 Pakistani soldiers had meekly surrendered to Indian forces at the end of the war.

Post-1971 era saw the rise of a military dictator Zia ul-Haq and judicial assassination of the elected Prime Minister Bhutto who was ousted by the military. Zia was a pious but unscrupulous man. He brought in the Hudood and Zina laws that respectively put blasphemy and adultery as the most heinous crimes punishable by death. At the same time, the military under Zia encouraged the trade and export of narcotics. Heroin was Pakistan’s largest export during the Zia era, earning it billions of dollars in illicit money. The army’s National Logistics Cell was known to be involved in the safe transport of narcotics from the northwest to the port city of Karachi (p.241). Not only Zia, but all military and bureaucratic bigwigs treated elected leaders with derision and contempt. As prime minister, Benazir Bhutto was asked to listen to the President’s address to the nation on television to learn of her dismissal from office. Corruption was rampant in all administrations and even Benazir, often affectionately termed the ‘Princess of Larkana’, was not immune from its clutches. Jalal hints that a dozen Pakistanis are known to have made enough illicit money since the start of the Afghan war to repay half the nation’s foreign debt.

The book gives a comprehensive picture of the post-1971 Pakistan when its course was closely tied to the developments in Afghanistan – the first in the form of Soviet occupation of the country in 1979 and then again in 2001 following its American occupation in a bid to flush out terrorists from its mountain fastness in the aftermath of 9/11. The book is nicely written in an impeccable language full of savoury idioms and phrases. It also focusses on the resistance among cultural and literary figures against authoritarian regimes. Sadat Hassan Manto’s writings are given pride of place. However, Jalal doesn’t mention about the sad plight of minorities as a result of Talibanization taking place since the 1980s. Cursory references are there, but readers expect more from the author. It is curious to note that in the list of acronyms given in the beginning of the book, only three Indian organizations are mentioned – the BJP, RSS and RAW! She makes a stunning claim that the RSS assisted the Indian army in quashing the rebellion against Kashmir’s accession to India.

The book is highly recommended.

Rating: 4 Star