Shlomo Sand, The Invention of the Jewish People - Rafapal

THE DISTINCTION 299
No Spanish government would survive long if it announced that it was the
state of the Castilians rather than of all Spaniards. The French republic does
not belong solely to the mainland Catholic citizens but also to the people of
Corsica, just as it belongs to French Jews, Protestants and even Muslims. Yet
for a Jewish philosopher living in Israel, this difference in national definitions
was too trivial to consider, since the "Jewish people's democracy" is equal in its
fine moral stature to any Western society.
Prominent among those who offered a theoretical underpinning to the
definition of Israel as a democratic state of the Jewish people were a number of
jurists. Since the Basic Laws had begun to insert the term "Jewish" into their
wording, various judges and professors of law felt it their duty to provide a
well-grounded defense of the new legislation. Papers piled up in the effort to
convince the skeptics that it was possible for a state to adhere to the Jewish
tradition yet treat its non-Jews as completely equal. The impression gained
from their writings was that their concept of equality was another way of
saying "indifference."
For retired Justice Haim Hermann Cohen, former deputy president of the
Supreme Court and minister of justice, as well as an Israel Prize laureate, the
issue was straightforward: "The genes of our forefathers are in us, whether we
like it or not. A man who respects himself strives to discover not only where he
stands and where he is heading, but also where he came from. The heritage of
Israel, in the broadest sense of the word, is the legacy that the state has inherited
by its very nature, and it makes it a Jewish state by its very nature." 77
This statement does not mean that Haim Cohen was a racist. He had
always been a liberal judge—in the Rufeisen case, his was the voluntarist
dissenting opinion—and he also knew that the "biological-genetic continuity
was very questionable." But making a considerable effort to define the nonreligious
Jewishness of his state, he asserted: "A Jewish identity does not mean
a biological-genetic continuity—more important is the spiritual-cultural
continuity. The former defines the state as the state of the Jews; the latter as a
Jewish state. The two identities are not contradictory—they complement each
other, and may also be mutually dependent and conditional." 78
It must have been this conditionality that led Cohen to include in the
Jewish continuity and the heritage of Israel not only the Bible, the Talmud
and its parables but also the work of Spinoza, the philosopher who had quit
Judaism and was ostracized by its followers. Yet while struggling mightily to
77 Haim Cohen, "The Jewishness of the State of Israel," Alpayim 16 (1998), 10
78 Ibid... 21.