Selzer’s descriptions of both the Jewish Khazars and the Council of the Four Lands bear virtually no resemblance to historical reality. one which did not seek mundane power as its guarantor but which was built around a complete acceptance of the utter powerlessness of Jewish life.” To this acceptance of powerlessness, Selzer claims, belongs the credit for the rich religious culture that developed among Polish Jewry and that formed the basis of what has come to be known today as the East-European Jewish heritage. Since the ultimate fall of Khazaria to its Moslem and Byzantine rivals left behind no historically identifiable Jewish community to carry on in its place, Selzer regards this as proof positive that “Jewish experiments with political sovereignty have been unsuccessful and ephemeral.” The Council of the Four Lands, on the other hand, stood, he asserts, for “a radically different mode of Jewish existence. The first are the Jews of Khazaria, that obscure Turkish kingdom that held sway along the banks of the Volga between the 7th and 13th centuries, during which time, for reasons that are still largely a matter for historical speculation, it adopted Judaism as a state religion the second, the Jewry of Poland and Western Russia as it was organized during much of the 16th, 17th, and 18th centuries into the Council of the Four Lands, a self-governing body that was granted extensive home rule by the Polish crown in matters social, religious, and economic. Ignoring obvious examples of Jewish communities that flourished for centuries despite their enjoyment of impressive amounts of physical and political power, such as those of the First and Second Temple periods or the Jews of Babylonia under the Parthian Empire during the Talmudic age, and of others for whom the sudden loss of all physical and political power spelled equally sudden extinction, such as the Jews of Spain in 1492 or those of Eastern Europe during World War II, Selzer offers as polar paradigms for his equation of two Jewish communities from the early and late Middle Ages. Indeed, the case with which he defends his proposition that power and survival have been mutually exclusive forces throughout the course of Jewish history is so patently specious that it hardly deserves serious refutation. Not the least startling feature of this paradox, of course, is that historically it is demonstrably false, but history, it turns out, is not really one of Mr. means to feel a frightful intimacy with our ancestors in their suffering it means to live with the fear of persecution and discrimination it means to anticipate the most devastating calamities in the future, if not for ourselves, then for our progeny.” Because Zionism has sought to put an end to this situation, it must be viewed as “a collective abandonment of Jewish standards and the acceptance of majority ones in their place.” Moreover, the Zionist apostasy threatens the future existence not only of Judaism but of the Jewish people as well, for “one of the most startling paradoxes of Jewish history” is that “the ability of Jewish communities to survive seems to be in inverse proportion to the amount of physical and political power they enjoy.” Whereas Zionism represents Jewish consciousness as the will to secular power, “the traditional Jewish commitment has been to powerlessness.” True, powerlessness invites oppression, but oppression is precisely what being Jewish is about. His thesis, in keeping with his native talents, is simple. Selzer has moved on to the high ground of theology and world history. 1 Now, in The Wineskin and The Wizard, Mr. Three years ago he presented us with a modest volume entitled The Aryanization of the Jewish State, in which he sought to demonstrate that the State of Israel was the creation of a small but determined band of anti-Semitic conspirators from Eastern Europe whose sinister scheme it has been to remake the Jewish people in the image of the Gentiles and to perpetrate “cultural genocide” upon their unfortunate brethren from the Sefardic and Oriental communities of Asia and North Africa. Zionism Reconsidered: The Rejection of Jewish Normalcy. The Wineskin and the Wizard: The Problem of Jewish Power in the Context of East European Jewish History.