Dr Charles Asher Small

The Implications of Antisemites Defining the Jew: From Indigeneity to Colonial Settler
Dr. Charles Asher Small
Indigenous Embassy Jerusalem Academic Symposium, October 29, 2024.

Thank you very much. It is an honor to be here. Sheree: thank you for inviting me, it is incredible and important what you are doing, it is a privilege to be a part of it. My background is dealing with issues of antisemitism, so this is where I am coming from in my work, but I will try to connect it with issues of being indigenous to the land. I wanted to first say, like Professor Horowitz, I am from the tribe of the Levi’s so the connection to the land of my ancestors goes back to the time of Moses. This is a very important part of my culture.

I’m originally from Canada, and I know the Grand Chief is here so it is an honor to meet him. I grew up in Montreal and worked with the Mohawk people during the Oka Crisis. This was where the Mohawk people were trying to establish some level of sovereignty over their land, and the Quebec police force and the Canadian military were quite brutal with them. I was the president of Hillel at the time, the Jewish student organization at McGill University. We smuggled medical supplies through the rivers circumventing the police blockade that went on for many months. I worked with them on issues of indigeneity and Canada. My grandparents grew up in Amos in the Abitibi, and my grandfather owned a general store there, and he was the only person to allow the native people into his shop. They were banned from French Catholic stores. I grew up meeting them and going to their Tepees and their communities. I had very positive interactions through my grandparents as a child.

I became active in the anti-Apartheid movement. First Soviet Jewry, where I went with Russia and met with leaders of the Refusenik movement. I was active with the Ethiopian Jewish community. We actually rescued some Ethiopians and brought them to Canada before they were able to come to Israel. They went to Israel when their families were able to make it to Israel. I was very active in the Jewish community, then very active in the anti-apartheid movement. My first teaching job was at Memorial University of Newfoundland, in St. Johns, Newfoundland. I thought that I would create a conference on Apartheid in South Africa and Canada. I invited Peter Penushue, who was the Chief of the Innu Nation, who stayed at my apartment at St. Johns during the conference, looking at the common roots of Apartheid in South Africa and Canada. Many people perceive Canada as a liberal, multicultural democratic society, and there are good parts to Canadian society. However, we should also know the architects of Apartheid came to Canada in the 1940s, and were taken on a tour of Reservations in Canada. From this trip, they developed the idea of Apartheid. They created Bantustans and racialized laws based on the Canadian system. We have four dominion countries – New Zealand, Australia, South Africa and Canada – a man named Sir Francis Bond Head, who created a system of removing Indigenous people from the land through outrageous racism and racisms. This later became part of my studies in the United Kingdom. I became very good friends with Peter, and when I was living in Jerusalem, he came with his sons to visit me. I took him around the whole country – from Eilat to the North, to the four Holy Cities of Israel (Hebron, Jerusalem, Tiberius and Safed) and watching his perception of the land of Israel and learning about Jewish culture through the eyes of an Indigenous Chief who is really well educated in his culture, and his language and the wisdom of his ancestors, for me was fascinating.

Being with Peter really helped me to understand my connection to Israel. I actually became Kosher when I was in Sheshatshiu, in Northern Newfoundland and Labrador with Peter and his community. I grew up in a Kosher house, but I was  a teenager and I lapsed and I explored non-Kosher food. I was there for six weeks, and Peter took me hunting and gathering with his community. I was apprehensive to go hunting with his family. However, when we were hunting for caribou and geese, and in fishing, seeing how the intricate culture of the Innu people, and how they valued life and what they took to eat to sustain themselves was really beautiful. From the young children to the grandmothers, they all participated in preparing the food. It dawned on me, the laws of Kashrut, and how we have to be connected to the soul of the animal that we consume: I put two and two together. From that moment, 40 years ago, a lightbulb went off in my brain and I have been Kosher from that instance ever since. So, we have a lot of wonderful connections.

I also had the privilege of studying for many years with a Belz Rabbi. He became the Rosh Yeshiva – the head of the Yeshiva – of Montreal. I was the only non-Belz student he took. I grew up learning with him regularly for many years, until my early thirties. I was schooled in a deep sense of Jewish education. Through my human rights’ activities, I ended up getting a good Western education. I remember at McGill University, I took a course in political science and I studied about Apartheid in South Africa for the first time. I remember vividly going to the professor at the end of the class, in 1982, and I said when did Apartheid end. He looked at me and chucked at my naivete, and said that Apartheid did not end, and it still exists. This blew my mind because I grew up in a community where my grandparents generation were Holocaust survivors. I could not believe that in my lifetime there was this racist system that was based on a Nazi, European racist background. It was still ensconced quite significantly in power. I became active in the anti-Apartheid movement because of this. I met Professor Chengiah Ragaven who was in exile from South Africa and he actually taught – or conscientized – Stephen Biko, when he was a professor in South Africa. Biko was a medical student at the University of Natal and this is where the Black Consciousness movement emerged. Professor Ragaven who ended up marrying a Jewish woman from the United States, had Jewish children so he was close to our community. From him I became active and the Chairperson of the African National Conference Solidarity Committee of Canada, and later the United Kingdom. He sent me to Oxford to do my PhD, and he said to me to always remember to study the mind of your enemy. Never be brought into the system: understand where you are, and what your roots are. Always remember who you are when you go there. I thought it was a nice cliché, but as time goes on his words ring truer and truer in my mind.

In our work at the Institute for the Study of Global Antisemitism and Policy (ISGAP), we are very much engaged in mapping and decoding contemporary antisemitism. In mapping and decoding the war, and I am choosing my words carefully, the war against the Jewish people that is being waged as we know, in this neighborhood the kinetic warfare, but the war against the Jewish people is also being waged in Western Europe, North America, higher education, the media of record and popular culture. [10:28]

One of our projects now is looking at how Qatar if funding higher education and cultural institutions in the West. For those of you who do not know, Qatar is a small country of less than 350,000 citizens. The leaders of Qatar have a spiritual oath with the Muslim Brotherhood. The Muslim Brotherhood started about 100 years ago in Egypt in a reaction to British colonialism, and has taken the lies, Protocols of the Elders of Zion, European, genocidal antisemitism, and even Nazism, and fused it with a perversion of Islam, I am not speaking about Muslims and Islam, I am speaking about the Muslim Brotherhood. You can Google the Hamas Charter – Hamas is the Palestinian offshoot of the Muslim Brotherhood – and if the writers of the Covenant of Hamas were in my class, I would have banned them for plagiarism. They literally take the Protocols of the Elders of Zion, the words and ideas which led to and justified the systematic extermination of millions of Jews, as a core element of their ideology. Now, if that were not bad enough, we know there is sympathy for this genocidal, antisemitic, sexist, homophobic, anti-democratic social movement in the best institutions in the Western world, be it liberal universities or the media of record.   

We are mapping how Qatar – whose leaders follow all the religious edicts and rulings of the Muslim Brotherhood – Yusuf al-Qaradawi, always preached throughout his life that the true believer, the true Muslim, is obligated to finish the work of Hitler. This is who the Qatari regime follows. By the way, Yusuf al-Qaradawi was the founding director of the Board of Trustees of Islamic Studies at my alma mater, the University of Oxford. Oxford has one of the most important Islamic Studies departments in the world, which was started by the man who preached his entire life that Muslims are obligated to complete the work of Hitler when it comes to Jews. So we should not be shocked that this is the discourse in our finest universities.

There is three basic phases of antisemitism, and also in terms of being Indigenous to the land, we believe there are four exiles. There was slavery (which is Egypt), annihilation (Babylonians), assimilation (of the Greeks), and the Romans (Adom, the Europeans) have given us the longest exile in our teachings goes to the depth of the deepest sea. We know that the Roman exile – and this is what we are still dealing with in my opinion – encapsulates slavery, assimilation and annihilation. This is where we are perhaps today.

There was Christian antisemitism – and I think antisemitism is inherently genocidal, and these are the teachings of Robert Wistrich, David Nirenberg and other leading scholars – that for example, Christians through most of history, particularly out of Europe, believed that the Jew was blinded by evil for not accepting the Christian notion of the Messiah, and that the Jew can never have redemption. This is discrimination. But what makes it inherently genocidal is that the teachings also from the Churches taught that the Jew is not only blinded by evil for not accepting the Christian notion of the Messiah, but that we were hindering world redemption. In other words, we were blocking the redemption of the world. How do you stop this redemption? You forcibly convert, you exile, you murder to bring about redemption.

When the dominant gaze of the world shifted from religion to notions of nation or nationalism, race and ethnicity, the Jews living in many lands became the wrong people in the wrong land. The best scholars of the world, scientists, eugenicists, philosophers, theologians, taught that the Jewish race was poisoning the purity of the white Aryan race and nation. This racist antisemitism leads to the Holocaust. We have to understand that the greatest minds in German and European universities – scientists, philosophers, eugenicists, social scientists – all held this belief that led to the Holocaust. It was the racist antisemitism which came out of the so-called best universities in the world.

Now, today, Jews are white. We are being constructed as not ‘white, welcome to the club, we are so sorry for what happened to you, join us’. No. It is mind-boggling how stupid this is if you take a step back, but how dangerous it is. In less than eighty years, the Jew was systematically exterminated because they were not white and poisoning the purity of the white Aryan race, and then the descendants – the children and grandchildren of these intellectuals that laid the intellectual framework for our extermination – now define the Jew as white and the embodiment of all that is evil in the world. We are not just white, we are super white, we are super racism, we support Apartheid, we support occupation, we are colonizers, we are the new Apartheid supporters. This is increasingly from the universities, from the classroom to the encampments into popular culture. You have clowns, like [Ta-Nehisi] Coates and comedians, and other people in popular culture, saying that they know what Apartheid is. They visit [Israel] for a few hours, they write a book, and these are the darling of the intellectual liberals. They superimpose their limited experience and understanding of life, and define the Jew. Our enemies have always defined us.

Now, particularly in the West, the United States and to some extent, in Canada – I grew up knowing that I was Jewish, my parents and grandparents never said I was white or not white. We were Jewish. The idea of whiteness was not a part of my upbringing or my studies with my Rabbi of the Belz community. It is not an issue for us. What is happening is that Jewish people, who have been disconnected, particularly in the United States, through all sorts of levels of assimilation and being disconnected from our culture and wisdom, do not know how to react. Are we white? We are not African American. Some of us look like we are white. Liberal Jews will say well some of us are brown, some of us are North African, some of us are Sephardic, some of us are Mizrachi, there are Ethiopian Jews: we are multicultural. But if you take another step back and think, the Ashkenazi Jews, who the clowns in America refer to as ‘White Ashkenazi Jews’, these were the victims of one of the most heinous crimes in history, because they were not white. Now the progressive clowns are saying that Jews are white. Because of assimilation, we as a community do not know how to handle it.

One of the projects that we are doing, and it comes out of my blessed experience in South Africa with meeting leaders of the Black Consciousness movement, out of my experience of learning from Peter about Innu culture and how they identify themselves, and ‘the other’. We are creating a project called ‘Jewish Consciousness’. What Biko and the South Africans did is that the white Europeans labeled them ‘Black’, and when you label somebody a race, you take all of the culture, wisdom, nuance and gravitas, out of them. They become a shell. They are black, we are white: white is superior, black and brown people are inferior. It is a good system. This is Hegel, the greatest European philosopher, the Ladder of Consciousness, White people at the top, and black people at the bottom. Hegel, and all the great intellectuals, say that the white man has to enslave the African man, because you raise their consciousness, you are doing a good deed. This is philosophy. It is incredible. What the Black Consciousness movement did was say that we are not simply black. We are Zulu, we are Xhosa, we have culture, we have wisdom, we have connection to the earth, we have cosmological understandings of our reality. They went back to their wisdom and took pride, strength from their wisdom. This led to an effective struggle against the Apartheid system.

This is why I am calling young Jewish people in the West to have Jewish Consciousness. Think of it: Emmanuel Levinas, great philosopher, takes from Pirkei Avot, the ethics from the Talmud and Torah, Jewish teachings, and he says that the moment we see our face in the face of the other, is the instant we become human. We need the other to be a human being. That is Jewish ethics. This is not tolerance. This is not the White man’s burden of conscientizing our slaves. The Jew needs others to be human. We recognize that every human being is created in the image of God. Through humility, Levinas teaches, Pirkei Avot teaches, if you are open to other people’s truth, and recognize that they are also created in the image of God. You open yourself up to becoming wiser, to sharing other people’s truth, to elevating yourself. So, if I am sexist, I have cheated myself of over 50 percent of the opportunities in my daily life to become wiser, because I am sexist. If I am a racist man against African people, I have eliminated over a billion possibilities to become human, to become wiser, we need the other.

Levinas also goes on to say that those who are trying to annihilate, those who do not see the other as human: there is no compromise, there is no negotiation. You cannot convince a social movement, like the Muslim Brotherhood, that believes that Jews emulate from the urine of donkeys and apes – this is their teaching – you cannot teach this movement that we are human. There is no negation. You stay, and you stand strong on your land.

Here we are. Once again, the Jew is facing a systematic organized war against us. The Muslim Brotherhood, the radical left who wants to – I think escape their own sins, by the way, it is wonderful that the Commonwealth now is calling on the British Prime Minister to issue an apology, and discuss reparations for colonialism and slavery, this when [Keir] Starmer and his intellectuals are saying that the Jews are the White people, and we are the colonialists. It is easy. I guess if I was a White liberal British guy I would prefer to have the Jews as being White rather than dealing with my heritage, because  have a lot to pay for.

I will just say one more thing. I was in a British fort in Ghana, visiting Jewish people, it is incredible: Jewish people in Nigeria and Ghana who are indigenous, there for many, many centuries, and this is not on our radar here in Israel and in the Jewish diaspora, but fascinating African Jewish lineage and history. The high Priest, the Levi, of the Jewish community took me to a British slave fort, we went up into the church, a small chapel with a wooden floor with beams. You could see through the floor cracks down below, which was the holding cell for the slaves who were about to be sent to the Middle Passage to the Americas. In the squalor, there was a lot of death and disease, and very few people actually made it to the ship, a lot of people died in this really horrific, disgusting, disease-filled space. The British people would go to church, and pray to their God, as white British christian people, and below they were not even human. So, I think indigenous cultures, wisdom we have a lot to offer, and a lot to empower young people. I think if we, indigenous people, share our wisdom, our ideas of who we are and how we are supposed to treat the other, which I know, from my limited experience with the Innu people, with some African people, that the wisdom, the respect, the humility that we share as concepts could really liberate each of us, and become a force for ethical good.

Sheree, what you are doing is very important, and I hope this will be the beginning of many, many more conversations and I hope our voices will be heard.