By Richard Mather
[Article originally published on academia.edu for Holocaust Memorial Day / Yom HaShoah on 27th January 2024. Image: Wikipedia]
Thus this prejudice became a superstition, and fixed its roots deeply in the mind — Spinoza, Ethics [1]
A little forty years ago — October 1983 — singer-songwriter Bob Dylan unveiled his Infidels album, which featured the ironically-titled ‘Neighborhood Bully’, a song depicting the trials of the people of Israel. Probably written during the 1982 Lebanon War and then recorded in the following spring, ‘Neighborhood Bully’ is a passionate defense of the continued existence of the world’s only Hebrew-speaking country and K’lal Yisrael more generally [2].
As a movement dedicated to sustaining a Jewish homeland on some part of Eretz Israel [3], Zionism has been wilfully misinterpreted by hostile actors as a Jewish conspiratorial program for global domination and/or the oppression of Arabs in the Middle East. In reality, Zionists concern themselves with the survival of a Jewish-majority nation (with Jerusalem as its capital) in a world where anti-Semitism refuses to go away [4]. And that is what underlies Dylan’s song.
Do not be misled. The phrase “neighborhood bully”[5] is an ironic allusion to the common accusation that the State of Israel is an aggressor. But the real bully, says Dylan, is the international community that expects Israel to “lie down and die when his door is kicked in”, as well as those hard-core Islamist “maniacs” in the Muslim world who believe they have a “license to kill” Jews:
Well, the chances are against it, and the odds are slim
That he’ll live by the rules that the world makes for him.
There’s a noose at his neck and a gun at his back
And a license to kill him given out to every maniac [6].
It is true that Israel has little time for the “rules that the world makes for him”, but not so long ago the rule-making world barely lifted a finger during the Shoah. Nor did the international community do much to help the Palestinian Jews (many of whom were Holocaust survivors) in the Arab-Israeli Wars of 1947 and 1948. For centuries, all Jews, wherever in or outside of Israel, have been viewed by the world’s gentile majority as occupiers, trespassers and non-belongers. It is hardly controversial to say Jews and their culture have been under erasure for two millennia, starting with the Babylonians and continuing today under the banner of Palestinianism.
And so Dylan says this: After everything we’ve been through down the centuries — the massacres, the exiles, the pogroms, the gas chambers — you still don’t have our backs [7].
As the world’s chosen object of hatred, Israel is apparently owed nothing, least of all security and sanctuary:
What’s anybody indebted to him for?
‘Nothing’, they say, ‘he just likes to cause war’.
Pride and prejudice and superstition indeed.
They wait for this bully like a dog waits to feed [8].
Sadly, Israel is viewed pejoratively as ‘the Jew’ among nations, an outcast or pariah whose existence is under threat. Harold Bloom refers to this (in his study of Shakespeare’s Merchant of Venice) as “exposed marginality”. In a world of gentile suspicion and Judeophobic tropes, the State of Israel cannot escape the long shadow of gentile anti-Semitism that arguably found its most potent literary-cultural form in the notorious character of Shylock, the friendless Jewish money-lender who wants his pound of flesh, a stereotype that still resonates today on the Far Right and in Arab and Iranian propaganda [9]. As Dylan puts it, Israel as the Jew-among-nations has got “no allies to really speak of. / What he gets he must pay for, he don’t get it out of love [10]”.
The image of Shylock (however crude and erroneous), coupled with ‘the Jew’ as hated object, inspires a disdainful indignation that is pleasurably painful in the Spinozan sense. As Spinoza puts it in his masterwork Ethics, this double diptych of image/object and pleasure/pain turns a prejudice into a full-blown superstition that becomes fixed in the mind, making it hard to uproot [11]. This superstition has power over a person. The object of hatred must be managed, maybe even destroyed. Worse, as Spinoza’s notion of imitation of the affects tells us, such people seek out like-minded people where passions get re-affirmed and shared, producing a virus-like social contagion. Moreover, the more we find people who agree with us, the less conflicted we are about having these hateful emotions [12].
“Hatred can never be good” [13], says Spinoza, which is an obvious thing to say but many people seem to extract pleasure from hatred, even though it is categorised by Spinoza as a type of pain [14]. “We endeavour to destroy the man whom we hate”, which is the same as endeavouring to do something bad [15]. Anti-Semitism, therefore, is a kind of pain [16] and indicates “a want of knowledge and weakness of mind” [17]. It is also a kind of envy. “We endeavour to affirm, concerning a thing we hate, all that which we imagine will affect it with pain” [18].
In fact there is a panoply of bad emotions that Spinoza is keen to illuminate. Using his terminology, we can say that anti-Semites do not live according to the precepts of reason but are at the mercy of bad emotions. Judeophobia is hatred and, as Spinoza explains in the forty-sixth proposition of Ethics, “all emotions of hatred are bad”, whereas “he who lives according to the precepts of reason will endeavour as much as possible to bring it about that he is not assailed by emotions of hatred”. It follows that such a reasonable person “will endeavour to prevent any one else from suffering those emotions”.
‘One man’: Israel’s diachronic identity
‘Neighborhood Bully’ is something of a kaleidoscopic history lesson. Within eleven verses, Dylan refers to the Israelites’ descent into Egypt, the Babylonian exile, the “trampling” of holy books by Christians, Muslims and Nazis, and the Six-Day War of 1967. There is a clever reference to the fierce battles that took place in late 1947 and early 1948 when the Palestinian Jews fought the Arabs using “obsolete weapons”. And there is an acerbic rebuttal of the United Nations, which condemned Israel’s bombing of an Iraqi nuclear reactor in 1981:
He destroyed a bomb factory, nobody was glad:
The bombs were meant for him. He was supposed to feel bad.
What is particularly intriguing is the way Dylan refuses to differentiate between the State of Israel, the ancient Israelites, and the Jews driven out of Judea/Israel by the Romans in 70 CE. It’s as if the Book of Genesis, the Roman apocalypse, and modern-day Islamic terrorism, are happening at the same time to the same people.
Well, the neighborhood bully, he’s just one man.
His enemies say he’s on their land.
They got him outnumbered about a million to one.
He got no place to escape to, no place to run [20].
As well as viewing Jewish history in diachronic fashion, Dylan makes this personal: literally. The Jews — whenever and wherever they are — are bound together so tightly that they are “one man”: a corporate personality symbolised by the third patriarch of the Jewish people, Jacob, later given the name Israel. According to Jewish tradition, Jacob experiences many personal struggles both in the land of Israel and out of it, which foreshadow the trials and misfortunes of the Jewish people as they fight for their lives and their collective inheritance in the land of Canaan or Palestine. Furthermore, as a corporate personality, Jacob has his own rights and obligations apart from or separate to his constituents, which means that what may be true for the corporate personality is not necessarily true of his constituents and vice versa. In other words, Jacob can act in whatever way he sees fit without obtaining permission or agreement from every citizen that composes his body, which is exactly what governments do.
One explanation as to why the Jews in Dylan’s song are viewed as one man is because they have been restrained and corralled by the manipulative forces of anti-Semitism, forcing them to be separate from the nations, seeking solace in one another, and staying in what Spinoza calls “reciprocal contact”:
When a number of bodies of the same or different size are so restrained by others that they are in reciprocal contact with each other, or if they are moved with the same or different rapidity, so that they communicate their motions one to another in a certain ratio, these bodies are called reciprocally united bodies and we say that they all form one body or individual, which is distinguished from the rest by this union of bodies [21].
As Dylan puts it, the “one man” we know as Jacob does not belong anywhere, not even in his historic homeland. He is existentially guilty (“always on trial”) for the crime of “just being born”, of simply being:
Neighborhood bully been driven out of every land.
He’s wandered the earth an exiled man.
Seen his family scattered, people hounded and torn.
He’s always on trial for just being born [22].
The “one man” of ‘Neighborhood Bully’ seems to me to be a distant cousin of the vagabond in ‘Drifter’s Escape’ from 1967’s John Wesley Harding album, recorded in the weeks and months after the Six-Day War. (Whether the JWH of the album title is meant as a deliberate reminder of the Jewish national god, JHWH, is unknown.) After a hard journey, and uncertain of the accusation against him, the homeless and exiled drifter evokes compassion from the judge but not the people (in the same way anti-Semitic Christian mobs through the centuries persecuted Jews even as their leaders told them not to):
‘Oh, help me in my weakness’,
I heard the drifter say,
As they carried him from the courtroom
And were taking him away.
‘My trip hasn't been a pleasant one
And my time, it isn’t long.
And I still do not know
What it was that I’ve done wrong’.
Well, the judge, he cast his robe aside,
A tear came to his eye.
‘You fail to understand’, he said.
‘Why must you even try?’
‘Oh stop that cursèd jury’,
Cried the attendant and the nurse.
‘The trial was bad enough,
But this is ten times worse’.
Outside, the crowd was stirring —
You could hear it from the door.
Inside, the judge was stepping down
While the jury cried for more.
Aside from some minority support from the court attendant and the nurse who castigate the “cursèd” jury, intervention and salvation come deus ex machina, with God or Nature cracking sky and earth in naked wonder:
Just then a bolt of lightning
Struck the courthouse out of shape.
And while everybody knelt to pray
The drifter did escape.
The protagonist escapes with life and liberty intact but will surely face a trial of some kind again in the near future [23].
Like the drifter and Franz Kafka’s Josef K, Jacob is on trial for an unknown crime, a trial that is the result of trumped-up charges and is overseen by a “cursèd jury” (the international community, perhaps) from the braying mob (public opinion). The drifter may have escaped for now, but Jacob has no place to escape to, other than his ancestral land where he faces eviction [24].
While most people are at liberty to endeavour in their lawful pursuits, this right is not extended to Jacob who is expected to accept his own destruction. People just won’t let him be, which is why in ‘Neighborhood Bully’ Jacob does not survive in order to live but merely “lives to survive”:
Neighborhood bully, he just lives to survive.
He’s criticized and condemned for being alive.
Not supposed to fight back, and have thick skin.
Supposed to lay down and die when his door is kicked in [25].
But it is only natural that Jacob seeks to maintain and guard his own existence, says Dylan. Nothing by its own nature should give in to its own destruction. I am reminded here of these lines from Spinoza’s Short Treatise:
For it is evident that no thing, through its own nature, could strive for its own destruction, but that on the contrary, each thing in itself has a striving to preserve itself in its state, and bring itself to a better one [26].
In the first book of Ethics, Spinoza says that “to be able to exist is power” [27]. Furthermore, “no one one can desire to be blessed, to act well, and live well, who at the same time does not desire to be, to act, and to live, that is, actually to exist” [28]. Spinoza calls this desire-to-exist virtue. If Jacob’s essence is the endeavour to persist in his being, then the more he endeavours “the more he is endowed with virtue” [29].
Also virtuous is the will of constituent parts to work together. The bigger the collective endeavour, the more power the parts have, and the more chance there is of attaining and holding on to sovereignty. As Spinoza puts it in his little known and unfinished Political Treatise:
If two men make an agreement with one another and join forces, they can do more together; and so together they have more right over nature than either does alone. The more connections they form in this way, the more right they will all have together.
We might call Jacob/Israel’s cooperative endeavour, self-constitution, in part because it expresses the inherently socio-political nature of Zionism. Self-constitution, of course, requires faith to keep on keeping on. After having spent so long in exile, Spinoza’s remark that a second election of the Jews is possible (as long as they endeavour in their own self-belief) is pertinent and prophetic [31]. As Israeli statesman David Ben-Gurion remarked, Spinoza “foresaw the coming of the state” [32].
Spinoza says the biblical idea of chosenness or election really refers to the economic and security achievements of the Jewish nation. Furthermore, whilst rejecting the notion of chosen people in the rabbinical sense, Spinoza nevertheless concedes that the Jews have been preserved by a combination of anti-Semitism and Jewish separatism. Of this separatism, the “sign of circumcision” is the key component. “The sign of circumcision is, as I think, so important, that I could persuade myself that it alone would preserve the nation forever” [33]. If the sign preserves and gives strength to their survival, the Jews themselves are the eternal presence of that sign.
But will Israel survive, Dylan asks, if the “superstition” of anti-Semitism continues to undermine the morale and security of the Jewish people? In the end, the answer is “Yes”. Israel will survive because the restoration of the Jewish homeland is the closest thing we have to a (biblical) miracle. Israel’s special providence, its status as the Am Segulah, God’s treasured nation, means Israel is redeemed. Just as Jacob triumphed over the angel at Penuel [34] the Jews have triumphed over Hegel’s inexorable logic of history by returning to their ancient land.
Despite wearing “so many scars” of all the previous attempts at annihilation, K’lal Yisrael continues to carry on existing. “Every empire that’s enslaved him is gone”, sings Dylan. Egypt, Rome and Babylon, as well as the Nazis and the Soviets, have all perished, but the Jewish people live on and have made “a garden of paradise in the desert sand” [35].
The enigmatic eleventh and final verse of ‘Neighborhood Bully’ takes on a deliberately apocalyptic hue, and hints at Israel’s miraculous relationship with God. Israel is “standing on the hill”. Not just any hill, but the hill, the Temple Mount, Zion itself, the place where it is said that God chose the Divine Presence to rest and where He gathered the dust used to create Adam. With the coming of the modern state, Israel in toto is Zion. Indeed, one could argue that the State of Israel is itself the promised Third Temple. And the time is coming say the prophets when the temple of Israel will be looked upon as a source of salvation, a light unto the nations, and so “all will be well / when God and man will be reconciled” [36].
In the days to come [at the end of the days], the Mount of the LORD’s House shall stand firm above the mountains and tower above the hills; and all the nations shall gaze on it with joy. And the many peoples shall go and say: ‘Come, let us go up to the Mount of the LORD, to the House of the God of Jacob.’ […] For instruction shall come forth from Zion, the word of the LORD from Jerusalem. Thus He will judge among the nations and arbitrate for the many peoples. And they shall beat their swords into plowshares and their spears into pruning hooks: Nation shall not take up sword against nation; they shall never again know war. O House of Jacob! Come, let us walk by the light of the LORD [37].
But the day Israel is looked upon with favour will only come after the arrival of true peace, because there is such a thing as false peace. False peace is manufactured by politicians in institutions like the United Nations and the European Union. Indeed, the seventh verse of ‘Neighbourhood Bully’ contains the lines, “He’s surrounded by pacifists who all want peace”, and as literary critic Christopher Ricks has noted, the line “surrounded by pacifists” is paradoxically threatening: "The word ‘surround’ often has its dark side [in Dylan's songs]. Dylan has elsewhere ‘Surrounded by fakery’ and ‘controversy surrounds him’; danger lurks in the line, ‘Well he’s surrounded by pacifists who all want peace’" [38].
Dylan’s assertion that pacifists are those “who all want peace” seems tautologically unnecessary until you realise true peace is the last thing these people want, as these lines from verse seven confirm:
They pray for it nightly that the bloodshed must cease.
Now, they wouldn’t hurt a fly.
To hurt one they would weep.
They lay and they wait for this bully to fall asleep.
The kind of peace that involves the obliteration of Israel can only be interpreted as a threat. Those pacifists who judge Israel’s existence, which is home to seven million Jews, to be worth less than a fly, have a vested interest in pacifying (that is, eradicating) the world’s only Jewish state.
Now, as Dylan sees it, the time is coming when Ha’Satan (the Adversary) will hide his true nature and masquerade as “a man of peace” claiming to have the answer to the long-running dispute between Israel and the world:
He got sweet gift of gab, he got harmonious tongue.
He knows every song of love that ever has been sung.
Good intentions can be evil, both hands can be full of grease.
You know that sometimes Satan comes as a man of peace [39].
As Dylan explains, true peace will come, but in God’s own time, and only after a final battle between light and darkness:
Well, howling wolf will howl tonight, king snake will crawl.
Trees that’ve stood for a thousand years suddenly will fall.
Wanna get married? Do it now —
Tomorrow all activity will cease.
You know that sometimes Satan comes as a man of peace [40].
No wonder then that in these final days Jacob “makes his last stand” [41] in the midst of a people led by fanatics in Gaza who agitate for the expulsion of Jews from the Land of Israel. Hamas, as well as the more extreme elements in the Palestinian Authority and UNRWA, openly call for the ethnic cleansing of Israeli Jews from the river to the sea. Having turned down numerous land-for-peace deals with successive Israeli governments, many Palestinian Arabs seem to indulge in what can only be described as aggressive nostalgia for a homeland they never really had. It could be argued that Arab-Palestinian hatred of Jews comes from the awareness of their own unhappy situation, that of being late-comers to a place where Israelites and Jews have ‘occupied’ (that is, lived, worked and prayed in) since 1200 BCE, i.e., well before before mass Arab immigration in the late 19th and early 20th centuries.
Shekhinah: End of exile
If the ingathering of the Jews and the re-establishment of Israel is a condition of Judeo-Christian apocalypse, it also marks the end of God’s own exile, or more precisely, his Shekhinah’s exile, which is a notion found in Judaism’s colourful Kabbalistic tradition. Say the rabbis: Wherever Israel is, so is the Shekhinah, the feminine presence of the LORD. The 13th century Spanish Kabbalist Joseph ben Abraham Gikatilla, for example, said the Shekhinah was like a guest, “moving from place to place […] [u]ntil David and Solomon came, and placed the Shekhinah on solid ground in the Temple of Jerusalem” [42].
God’s completeness, the perfect unity of God and his Shekhinah, is dependent on Israel’s restoration, meaning Zionism is not just a politico-social movement but a world-redemptive truth with cosmic implications. For if God is to redeem both humanity and the world, neither of which can redeem the other (as Franz Rosenzweig will tell you), then God’s restitution primarily falls on Israel’s return to (and settlement of) the territorial space promised to Abraham [43].
Concluding remarks
Dylan’s song surprised many of his fans, but it was a natural outflowing of his Jewish heritage. Dylan considered moving to a kibbutz in the early 1970s and he has made several trips to Israel, both personal and professional. References to Zion, Jerusalem, Jews and Israel abound in his work (if often opaquely) between 1980 and 1983, and again between 1987 and 1992 [44]. Judeo-Christian apocalyptic themes in Dylan’s oeuvre go right back to his earliest days as a songwriter (e.g. ‘I’d Hate to Be You on That Dreadful Day’, ‘A Hard Rain’s A-Gonna Fall’) and continue to feature prominently in his recent work (e.g. ‘Thunder on the Mountain’, ‘False Prophet’).
It is hard to determine whether Dylan still stands by the sentiments expressed in ‘Neighborhood Bully’. In 1983 Dylan wanted the song released as a single (with an accompanying video) but his record company, wary of the political controversy that might ensue, refused. Dylan himself is sometimes wary of the song’s political sentiments. But then again he has always been enigmatic and enjoys ridiculing journalists who question him about the messages in his music. The fact that Dylan included an alternate take of the song on the recently-released Springtime in New York (as part of the celebrated Bootleg Series) suggests that he still considers the song important and relevant [45]. It is also worth noting that by performing in Israel, he has defied the powerful boycott, divestment and sanctions (BDS) movement, which has cowered many prominent artists and performers.
Whatever his current political and religious views (he veered back and forth between Hasidic Judaism and evangelical Christianity during the 1980s), ‘Neighborhood Bully’ remains an authentic expression of one man’s outrage over the persecution and slander of Israel. For too long, Jews have been on the receiving end of successive and often overlapping strands of anti-Semitism, whether it be at the hands of the Crusaders, the Inquisitors, or the Nazis (to name just a few). Islamic anti-Semitism, too, has played its part, most notably the expulsion of 800,000 Jews from Iraq, Tunisia and other Arab countries in the 1940s and 1950s [46].
With crematoria smoke and human ashes — not to mention pages torn from Israel’s holiest books — still blowing in the ether over large swathes of the globe, it is heartening to see an artist of Dylan’s stature take a stand against Israel’s nay-sayers and declare “J’Accuse …!”. What Dylan is saying, in short, is: Jewish life really does matter, and those of you who hate the world’s only Jewish state are infected with the stupid superstition of anti-Semitism. Dylan’s message is a sentiment that only gets stronger as the decades pass and hostility to Israel increases. And so, forty years after the unveiling of ‘Neighborhood Bully’, history demands an answer to a question posed long ago: Which side are you on? [47].
Endnotes
[1] E1appendix.
[2] K’lal Yisrael is a Hebrew expression for the Jewish people as a whole.
[3] Hebrew for Land of Israel, the territories of the dual kingdoms of Judea and Israel before successive occupations ended Israelite and Jewish independence.
[4] Anti-Semites seemingly derive their definition of Zionism from the notorious anti-Semitic forgery The Protocols of the Elders of Zion, a Russian document claiming to detail a Jewish plan for global domination. It is still widely available today, especially in the Middle East. Indeed, the 1988 charter of Hamas states that The Protocols embodies the plan of Zionist Jews.
[5] When referring to this phrase and the song title itself, I retain the American spelling. In fact, all quotes from Dylan’s songs retain their American English origin.
[6] Verse five. Also on Infidels is a song called ‘License to Kill’, which talks of a killer “groomed for life” whose brain “has been mismanaged with great skill”. “Groomed for death” would be a more appropriate expression.
[7] Dylan is Jewish. He was born Robert Allen Zimmerman (Hebrew name: Shabtai Zisl ben Avraham). His grandparents left Europe because of persecution.
[8] Verse ten.
[9] Like Shylock, Israel’s capacity for invoking the most extreme emotional affects in others, notably hatred and resentment, is astounding and worth a study in itself.
[10] Verse six.
[11] E1 appendix.
[12] I am indebted to Heidi Miriam Ravven here, whose paper, “Spinoza’s Rupture with Tradition: On Ethics Vp39s” is a highlight of The Jerusalem Philosophical Quarterly 50 (July 2001). Spinoza’s personal rupture with the Amsterdam Jewish community effectively cut him off from his Jewish roots to such an extent that his attitude towards Judaism was often sour. Though he never embraced Christianity, his literary style became increasingly Latinised, thereby concealing the influence of Hebrew monism and Kabbalah on his metaphysics. Spinoza even changed his first name from the Hebrew ‘Baruch’ to the Latin ‘Benedictus’. Whether Spinoza can be called the first secular Jew is a matter of opinion. It does seem, however, that Spinoza ceased to consider himself as Jewish, even as the gentiles around him continued to think of him as a Jew. Calls for Spinoza to be posthumously forigiven continues to this day, though the notorious cherem or excommunication that saw him ousted from the community is yet to be nullified by the rabbinate.
[13] E4p45.
[14] As Dylan sarcastically says, in an unused song from 1966, “pain sure brings out the best in people, doesn’t it?”
[15] E4p45d.
[16] E4p47d and E4p45d.
[17] E4p47s.
[18] E3p26; the operative word here being imagine because the imagination refers to a mental experience that involves some kind of image and in Spinoza's theory this is the lowest form of cognition.
[19] Verse 4. As we are currently witnessing in the latest Israel-Hamas war, the Jewish State responds to a horrific act of terrorism by “knock[ing] out a lynch mob” but is condemned by “old women” who protest and demand a ceasefire. Israel is held to a different, some might say impossible, standard. Dylan may also been criticising left-wing Jewish intellectuals who speak up on behalf of the Palestinian Arabs whilst forgetting that the latter have more than enough allies to speak on their behalf. Perhaps the biggest obstacle to Jewish survival are those Jews who strive for a liberal universality whilst disregarding their own native values and traditions that have sustained the Jews for centuries.
[20] Verse one. The emphasis on place or more precisely no place is quite apparent. Israel’s “got no place to escape to, no place to run”, the implication being that land of Israel is no place (utopia) but a no place that is a real place, so real in fact that it is a permanent feature of the world’s landscape, much to the chagrin of anti-Semites.
[21] E2p13L3a2def. My italics.
[22] Verse three.
[23] The protagonist-speaker in ‘Ain't Talkin’ from Dylan’s Modern Times album (2006) is another of the drifter types, a pilgrim of the apocalypse, who calls on the Shekhinah (“pray for me mother”) to intercede for him as he makes his way through “the cities of the plague” carrying “a dead man’s shield” (the shield of Solomon perhaps?), whilst above him Ezekiel’s wheels are “flying” through the heavens. The pilgrim claims he can call on “heavenly aid”, but he doesn’t, and there’s no guarantee that aid would arrive anyway.
[24] I refer the reader to note 20.
[25] Verse two.
[26] Chapter five.
[27] E1p11.
[28] E4p21.
[29] E4p20.
[30] 2:13. Spinoza was keenly aware that Israelite/Jewish prophecy, as with all prophecy, was inherently political, and that the Bible comprises not only beliefs meant to engender ethical conduct, but also much political wisdom: a thoroughly materialist interpretation of scripture, akin to Thomas Hobbes’ own materialist interpretation of spirit. For more on this, see the third chapter of Spinoza’s Theological-Political Treatise and Hobbes’ Leviathan. While it is true that Spinoza stripped out the Bible’s supernatural elements and derided the notion of Jews as God’s treasured possession (views that won him no favours in Amsterdam’s Jewish community), he conceded that scripture, in essence, is a legislative programme for Zionism. Judaism’s 613 commandments, being as they are a form of national legislature, were only applicable in the Land of Israel and not enforceable in the diaspora, according to Spinoza. For Spinoza, the Torah was the political constitution of a historic Jewish state in the Land of Israel and was therefore inapplicable in the diaspora. But with the establishment of Israel, the Torah would take on new life. Israel’s holiest books would be trampled on no longer. And the joy that comes with being renewed is evident.
[31] I would go so far as to believe,” said Spinoza, “[that the Jews could] raise up their empire afresh, and that God may a second time elect them” (Theological-Political Treatise, 3:105).
[32] Rebirth and Destiny of Israel. p.514.
[33] Theological-Political Treatise, 3:104. Spinoza, though shunned by the local Jewish community during his lifetime, features positively in the thought of the early Zionists, most notably the aforementioned Ben-Gurion.
[34] Genesis 32:22–32.
[35] Verse eight.
[36] Lines from Dylan’s ‘Lord Protect My Child’. Recorded during the Infidels sessions but not used on the released version of the 1983 album, the song saw the light of day on The Bootleg Series 1-3 (1991) and then again on Springtime in New York (2021). Note the double emphasis of the word “will” and is euphonic relation with the word “well”.
[37] Isaiah 2:2-3.
[38] Dylan’s Visions of Sin, p.457. The songs referred to here are ‘Sign Language’ (1976; unreleased) and ‘Handy Dandy’ (Under the Red Sky).
[39] The song is ‘Man of Peace’ on the Infidels album.
[40] Ibid. Dylan’s imagery derives, in part, from Zechariah 11:2 “Howl, cypresses, for cedars have fallen! How the mighty are ravaged! Howl, you oaks of Bashan, for the stately forest is laid low”. Howl, of course, is the title of Allen Ginsberg’s early masterpiece.
[41] Verse eight of the slightly different version of ‘Neighborhood Bully’ released on Springtime in New York.
[42] As quoted by Glenn Alexander Magee in Hegel And The Hermetic Tradition. As Magee notes, the Shekhinah — the presence of God and His attributes — resides in the “religious, cultural, and moral center of the people of Abraham”.
[43] “Unto thy seed have I given this land” (Gen 15:88).
[44] ‘Groom Still Waiting at the Altar’, ‘Tell Me’ (Springtime in New York version), ‘License to Kill’, ‘Angelina’, ‘Man of Peace’, ‘Blind Willie McTell’, ‘Foot of Pride’, ‘Too Late’, ‘Jokerman’, ‘I Will Love Him’, ‘Cover Down (Pray Through)’, ‘I and I’, ‘Julius and Ethel’, ‘Ring Them Bells’, ‘Shooting Star’, ‘Unbelievable’, ‘Under the Red Sky’.
[45] Moreover, Dylan chose to include the song on the standard edition of the album rather than relegate it to the much harder to get (and far more expensive) 5-CD deluxe version.
[46] The expulsion is sometimes described as the “Jewish Nakba”. Arab anti-Semitism in the first half of the 20th century was, in part, fuelled by a Hitler cult in places like Syria. The Mufti of Jerusalem, the leader of the Palestinian Arabs, formed an alliance with the Third Reich, and gained permission from Hitler to build a death camp crematorium in Nablus in the West Bank. Luckily for the Jews of Palestine, the scheme never materialised.
[47] The song is ‘Desolation Row’ on Dylan’s second album of 1965, Highway 61 Revisited.
References
Ben-Gurion, David. Rebirth and Destiny of Israel. Ed. and tr. from the Hebrew under the supervision of Mordekhai Nurock. New York: Philosophical Library, 1954.
Bloom, Harold. Shakespeare: The Invention of the Human. New York, Riverhead Books, 1998.
Dylan, Bob. Infidels. Columbia, 1983.
——— Springtime in New York: The Bootleg Series, Vol. 16. Columbia, 2021.
Hobbes, Thomas. Leviathan. Ed. Richard Tuck. Cambridge University Press, 2007.
Magee, Glenn Alexander. Hegel and the Hermetic Tradition. Cornell University Press, 2001.
Ravven, Heidi Miriam Ravven. “Spinoza’s Rupture with Tradition: On Ethics Vp39s”, The Jerusalem Philosophical Quarterly 50 (July 2001), pp 295-326.
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