• Professor at Hebrew University
• Anti-Semitic writer

Israel Shahak was born on April 28, 1933 in Warsaw, Poland. His parents were middle-class, orthodox Jews who became Zionists. From 1963 to 1981, Shahak was a professor of chemistry at Hebrew University in Jerusalem. After his retirement, he traveled extensively to lecture on the evils of Zionism and the Jewish faith. In 1994 he published the book Jewish History, Jewish Religion: The Weight of Three Thousand Years - a rabidly anti-Semitic screed highly praised by Noam Chomsky and Gore Vidal (the latter wrote the book's foreword).

Dr. Shahak exhorted Jews to discontinue the atrocities allegedly associated with Zionism and orthodox Judaism. To begin this process, he advised contemporary Jews to first acknowledge the awful crimes allegedly committed by their forebears - crimes that, according to Shahak, triggered the "popular anti-Jewish manifestations of the past." He cited, as an example of such purportedly understandable uprisings, the Chmielnicki massacres of 17^th-century Ukraine. "Do decent English historians," he asked rhetorically, "even when noting the massacres of Englishmen by rebellious Irish peasant rising against their enslavement, condemn the latter as 'anti-English racists'? What is the attitude of progressive French historians towards the great slave revolution in Santo Domingo, where many French women and children were butchered? To ask the question is to answer it."

Shahak claimed, among other things, that "Jewish children are actually taught" to utter a ritual curse when walking past a non-Jewish cemetery. He stated that "both before and after a meal, a pious Jew ritually washes his hands. . . . On one of these two occasions he is worshiping God . . . but on the other he is worshiping Satan." Shahak further charged that orthodox Jews endorse, and commonly practice, the killing of those with whom they have ideological or theological differences. "For example," he wrote, "in the late 1830s a 'Holy Rabbi' (Tzadik) in a small Jewish town in the Ukraine ordered the murder of a heretic by throwing him into the boiling water of the town baths." Yet Shahak named neither the town nor the rabbi.

In the 1960s Shahak created considerable controversy when he told reporters that he had personally witnessed an incident where an Orthodox Jew, upon seeing a badly injured non-Jew whose life could only have been saved if he were to have received medical care very quickly, refused to call for an ambulance on the grounds that his use of a telephone would have violated Sabbath restrictions. This story was taken as fact and repeated by numerous publications, including the Israeli newspaper Haaretz and the Jewish Chronicle in London, which raised their collective voices to condemn the seemingly inhumane orthodoxy.

But in the Summer 1966 issue of the orthodox Jewish journal Tradition, Rabbi Immanuel Jakobovits (who would later become the Chief Rabbi of the British Commonwealth), explained that Jewish law not only permitted the violation of Sabbath restrictions in such circumstances, but in fact demanded it - whether the intended beneficiary was Jewish or not. Moreover, when Dr. Shahak was challenged to identify the "orthodox Jew" he had disparaged, he was forced to admit that he had concocted the entire tale.

Israel Shahak died in July 2001.