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del.icio.us Digg It!  new Last update - 21:33 05/10/2007 Druze student in Germany tests notions of Zionism, Jewishness By Anshel Pfeffer BERLIN - Each of the many tour guides at Berlin's Jewish Museum has his own route on which he leads groups of visitors. One could spend days trying to comprehend the complexity of the zigzagging building, designed by architect Daniel Liebeskind, or become engrossed in the challenging exhibition that starts with the Holocaust, thrusts you back in time to the beginnings of the Jewish Yishuv in Palestine, then leaps ahead to the 20th century. But for most visitors, the museum is just one stop of many, and a guide can significantly shape the museum experience. Samuel Schidem, one of the guides for Hebrew-speaking groups, chose to do his job in such a way as to "remove visitors from their Israeliness and make them think a little differently." Schidem shakes up the Israelis' regular thought patterns through their attempts to guess and catalog his identity. "Some of them think I'm Yemenite or Moroccan, or maybe that I come from South America. At the end of the tour someone always asks where I'm from and where I learned Hebrew. I say that I'm an Israeli. And then immediately I get, 'From where in Israel?' and I say, 'From Usfiya.' And then there's a bit of shock, and right after that they get all excited. But I don't tell them at the beginning, because then they wouldn't listen to me the same way during the tour." Advertisement It's obvious that Samuel Schidem, whose name was originally Issam Schidem, enjoys surprising people with his background. So much so that he has set himself the goal of "upsetting for Israelis this image of the good Druze guy with the pitas and labaneh," and also of redefining a few basic concepts, such as who is a Jew, who is a Zionist and who is an Israeli. He himself is in the midst of a search for answers to these questions, and his work as a guide at the museum the last five months is one step on that path. Schidem has been in Germany for six years, most of them spent studying philosophy, Judaism and languages at the University of Heidelberg. There, he supported himself with student jobs - he worked as a security guard, washed dishes, waited tables and shoveled snow. He moved to Berlin six months ago, following his academic advisor who came to teach at the University of Potsdam. "I looked for another restaurant job, and I worked for two days in an Italian restaurant and they screwed me with the pay. Then it suddenly dawned on me: What an Arab I'm being, only thinking about working as a waiter. Why didn't I ever think of writing a resume and looking for a totally different kind of job?" A random conversation with a female Israeli lecturer led to him getting in touch with the museum, which urgently needed a Hebrew-speaking guide, and after a brief training period, he set to work. Schidem is the fourth of six children in one of Usfiya's most established families. His paternal grandfather was one of the first Druze to fight alongside Israel in the Palmach militia at the start of the War of Independence. His maternal grandfather was an arms smuggler and dealer, a regular supplier to the pre-state Jewish militia's secret weapons caches in northern kibbutzim. His father served in the IDF and later worked in Haifa port. As a child, there were already hints that Schidem wouldn't follow the regular well-worn path of the Druze-Israeli male. Unlike other young Druze who are sent to the "prestigious" Jewish schools in Haifa, Schidem opted to stay at the local village school. "It was the smartest thing I ever did," he says now. "To go study in Haifa is to grow up with a split identity from the beginning. Instead of coming to improve the schools, the teachers and the principal sent their kids to Haifa. Maybe I was a coward, too." In Usfiya, he stood out. He started a Pink Floyd-inspired band, and walked around in boots and torn jeans emblazoned with anarchistic slogans. "I wrote songs in Arabic, Hebrew and English," he says. A series of run-ins with the school administration led to his permanent expulsion, but he eventually completed external matriculation exams. In the IDF, he went into the armored corps. "When we got to the induction center, they took the Druze enlistees and sent most of them to the Minorities Battalion. The ones with the highest profiles received an offer to enlist in Counter-Terror School. The two other guys who were with me went, but I said no. I was attracted to tanks, that seemed more complex and interesting than beating people up, which every Druze already knows how to do." Schidem did well in the armored corps and became the first Druze tank commander in the famed 7th Brigade, but when it was decided that he would not be continuing to an officers' course, he rebelled and was tried and sent to military prison. The romance with the IDF was over. "If I had stayed in Israel," he says today, "I would have been left all the time with the feeling that they screwed me over, because what does a Druze guy have apart from being an officer? All of village life and social status revolves around it. Even the women - they stand in line at the store in accordance with their husbands' rank. "I worked as a tour guide then in the Carmel, for a company that had Jewish management and offered Druze hospitality. I was frustrated by the superficiality of it. Whenever I tried to say something more about our culture, someone would say, 'You have great food.' With the tourists from abroad, though, it was different. You'd meet a Jew from the United States and you could talk with him for an hour about the Druze religion. They're keen to know more. But with the Israelis it was just food. So then I felt like the Jews from outside Israel are the real Jewish intellectuals." When his plan to marry a girl from the village had to be cancelled due to a shortage of cash, his frustration only grew. And then he was given a first opportunity to burst out of his confines, thanks to his work as head of the local chapter of the Hanoar Haoved Vehalomed ("Working and Studying Youth") movement. "When I got out of the army, I wasn't thinking very clearly and I sought relationships with Jews. In the army you get accustomed to everybody liking you, because on Sundays you bring the pita and the labaneh. Then I founded the chapter of Hanoar Haoved in the village." After three years of wearing the movement's blue shirt, in 1999 he was selected to be part of a Histadrut delegation to an international conference of professional unions, to be held in Frankfurt. "There were political and ideological seminars there, but it was basically an excuse for a shopping trip. They thought it would be nice to have a Druze guy there. To show the Germans how enlightened we are." The week in Frankfurt marked the start of his connection with Germany. When he returned to Israel, he heard about a Goethe Institute scholarship that would pay for an eight-month stay in Germany to study the language. He applied, was accepted and set off for Dusseldorf. "Everyone went wild over the fact that I was from Israel, but not a Jew and not an Arab either. I showed them another Israel. I lived in Dusseldorf, in a house run by a Catholic organization, and that's when I started to get to know Germans. Our teacher would invite us to her home, and I'd play with her little kids and babysit them, and through her I got to meet real Germans." The bond with Germany was not without emotional complications. "It was hard for me at first. In the army we did an educational program at Yad Vashem Holocaust Martyrs' and Heroes' Remembrance Authority and it made a deep impression on me. It made me feel that I was connecting to my Jewish friends and entered my awareness very strongly. And the more you know about the Holocaust, the harder it is to free yourself of it. "In the library in Dusseldorf there were books about the history of World War II and I read a lot. They also showed movies there. And I remember that I saw a movie about Goebbels and couldn't understand how a whole nation that was being subjected to terrible bombardments, whose capital was in ruins, could still be carried away after this lunatic who promised them total victory." What he had learned about the Holocaust made it difficult to fully relate to Germans, but when he came back to Israel, the Holocaust became one of the main reasons for his desire to return to Germany. "I returned to Israel after eight months, but I felt that because of this matter of the Holocaust I hadn't closed a circle. My thoughts were still back in Dusseldorf. You're just beginning to try to understand the meaning of the genocide of a whole people by another whole people and then you have to go back to Usfiya. At that point it didn't feel right going back to the village to contend with trivial issues." Two months later he decided to leave the village and return to Europe. At first he tried to escape the dark attraction of Germany, and spent a few months traveling in Spain and France, but finally ended up in Germany. This time he knew exactly where he wanted to go. On one of his trips during the earlier stay he had visited the medieval university city of Heidelberg and fallen in love with it. He enrolled there in 2001 to study philosophy. His first course was Introduction to Jewish Philosophy. "I felt like a light came in and lit up my brain. In the first lesson I felt that I'd found exactly what I was looking to study. It only gradually dawned on me that this Maimonides we were reading there and studying in German, and being taught by a non-Jewish lecturer, was the same Rambam whose name I recognized from Israel. I made up my mind on the spot to go study in the College of Jewish Studies in Heidelberg. It was a different Judaism than what I knew from Israel, so varied, and especially without the whole aspect of Israelis and Arabs and discrimination, detached from the context. Studying Judaism outside the borders of Israel was the best thing that ever happened to me. And I also had the advantage of already knowing Hebrew. At the time I didn't think about another advantage, that I knew Arabic, too." On a trip to the library he discovered that the German text of Maimonides had been translated from the Hebrew edition, even though the original book was written in Arabic. "I took out the original Arabic version, too, and in the next lesson I was debating with the professor, who knew Hebrew but not Arabic, about nuances in the translations." Thus began four and a half years of blurring and constructing a new identity in Heidelberg. "Someone shows up who knows Hebrew and Arabic, German and French, and no one knows what to make of him. They couldn't figure out if I was Jewish or not, and they were embarrassed to ask me." It was at about this time that he began using the name Samuel. "I wanted to be accepted, it's like the process that a lot of Jews go through, when they look for a name that works in any language." When his classmates learned that he had served in the IDF, they were all sure he was Jewish. His combat background even helped him get a job as a security guard at the library of the College of Jewish Studies. "Aside from a few close friends, everyone thought I was Jewish. It was convenient and I admit that I took advantage of it because I thought it would help me be more popular. I had arguments, like one with a Russian Jew who said that all the Arabs should be expelled. It infuriated me that a Jew who had never been to Israel was making himself out as this big patriot without having any genuine connection to Israel. I told him that instead of living in Germany at the Germans' expense, if he's such a big patriot he ought to go serve in the IDF and become a settler. I didn't tell him though that I was a Druze, because then he wouldn't have given my words the same respect." When he worked as a security guard at the library entrance, students would come up to him with questions about texts in Hebrew and Arabic, and he was drawn into student politics as well. Before long he was elected to the student council of the College of Jewish Studies, which automatically made him a member of the European Jewish student organization. As part of that, in early 2004 he traveled to Holland to demonstrate with hundreds of other Jewish students against the international trial of Israel over the issue of the separation fence. Today he says he does not support the barrier "because it will fall in the end like all walls do." Schidem floated among the three main groups that make up the Jewish Studies scene in Heidelberg: Jewish-Israeli academics, European Jews - mainly of Russian origin, and German Christians searching for religious roots in Judaism. "The first question people ask someone who's studying Judaism is if you're Jewish. The second question then, is, what's your connection to the subject? When I would reveal that I was Druze, people would stammer - But you're studying Judaism? What's your connection? You can see how they think. As long as they thought I was Jewish, it was natural. But if I'm not, then why? I'm not Jewish, not Christian, not Muslim." This confusion of identities was heightened by the fact that he also took courses in the Semitic Languages and Islamic Studies department on the development of the Arabic language, and most of the other students there were of Arab and Muslim background. "There I would set straight anyone who was out of line on Israel. Once, they organized a departmental party and advertised it with pictures of Arab leaders. On one was a picture of Ahmadinejad saying 'I want to destroy Israel but I wouldn't miss this party.' The Jewish students wanted to ignore it, but I couldn't keep quiet. I went to the faculty, who got the student committee to take down the posters. Later on I organized a joint activity between the two student groups and a soccer game." But his maneuvering among the various groups wasn't easy, and sometimes his intentions were misunderstood. When he organized an event to mark 40 years of renewed diplomatic relations between Israel and Germany, he invited Prof. Moshe Zimmermann of the Hebrew University to be the guest lecturer. A local newspaper that wrote about the event highlighted Zimmermann's leftist political leanings, even though his talk had nothing to do with Israeli politics. "It caused me problems with some of the other students, who got angry that I'd invited him. Someone poked out his eyes in the pictures from the event that we had hung up. Some people said I'd invited him because I'm a Druze. One guy said to me, 'You should leave your Arab background aside. We're in the College of Jewish Studies here.'" After that incident, the move to Berlin really seemed to make sense. In Berlin, Schidem began volunteering with youths in the Neukolln district, also referred to as "New Gaza," because of the large number of Palestinian refugees from Lebanon who live there. "I went there after two months in the city through a friend who was a social worker. I joined her when she held a discussion with them on the subject of head coverings. They all said they were in favor of it because it is written in the Koran. I had a Koran with me. I asked who knew how to read Arabic. I took out the Koran, which was wrapped in a cloth and handed it to one of them. He took off the wrapping. I said, 'Stop - you're a Muslim and you're touching a Koran without first washing your hands and feet?' It paved my way into their world. "At first I didn't tell them that I'm Israeli. We talked about their families and each one introduced himself and said where he came from. Even though they were all born in Germany, not one said that he was German. They say that they're from all these Palestinian villages that no longer exist. To them, Israel doesn't exist. So I suggested that they come with me to see a movie at the Israeli film festival in Berlin, and we went and saw 'Avanti Popolo.' They didn't get a lot of things, but they liked the movie and afterward I suggested that we talk about it. "I asked them what they thought about Israelis. They all said that the Israelis are the ones who killed Mohammed al-Dura. That's their image. And then I said - What would you say if I told you that I am an Israeli? One immediately got up and walked out, but four others stayed. They asked me if I served in the army and if I shot Palestinians. I tried to explain to them that every Israeli soldier shoots at Palestinians. They asked how I know Arabic and I told them that I was studying the language. I didn't want to tell them the truth because they regard Druze with contempt, and I would have lost all status with them." Just as he hid his Druze identity from the Palestinian youths, Schidem hides his Jewish studies from his father. He is not ashamed, he is just not quite sure yet what it really means. He is certainly not the only Israeli to feel more Jewish than Israeli, though most people who feel this way are not Druze. "I feel Jewish, but the question is, what is a Jew? To me, a Jew is a humanist, and unfortunately a Druze is not yet a humanist, although the Druze religion is humanistic. I don't think that Druze today understand their religion. It's a very rational religion. I think that people of religion ought to make the content of the religion better known and put the religion to the test of reality and confront this world and the next world, too. I'm not an atheist, but my attitude toward religions isn't necessarily religious. Rather, it's philosophical. So I feel comfortable dealing with the Druze religion, which is philosophical at its base." Schidem recently began work on his doctoral dissertation, which will focus on the influence of the Muslim philosopher Abu Nasr al-Farabi on Maimonides. He is not the first scholar to make a connection between the two, but he also sees common origins with the ideas at the basis of the Druze religion. On this point, he knows that he is going to get into trouble, because he also plans to expose some of the secret details of the religion, which are zealously guarded by the elders of the sect. But this is precisely the sort of confrontation he is seeking. A decade ago, when he was preparing for marriage with a local village girl, Schidem bought a plot of land next to Usfiya that had actually been appropriated from his family back in the 1950s. Then, his goal was to build a house. Today, he dreams of building a school in his village, which he visits about once a year. "I want the school to teach music, languages, art and philosophy. All the things I wanted that weren't there. I want to bring the young people out of this conception that Israeli society has constructed for us, of the pitas and labaneh and the good soldiers and that the only good career is an army career and that you have to let your brain atrophy. Why shouldn't a Druze become a musician, a poet or a soccer player? When is there going to be a Druze writer writing about a Druze whore? Bookmark to del.icio.us Clalit's 'star' doctors Clalit is in talks with the treasury over approval of its 'Star Program' for hospitals. I have a sukkah My husband's sukkah was developed with the help of design software from NASA.   1.   He is a traitor 21:41  |  Israel 05/10/07   2.   He`s a good Israeli, an individual thinker 22:02  |  Margie in Tel Aviv 05/10/07   3.   Abu naser Farabi was a Persian philosopher. He was no a Arab 22:12  |  e.m 05/10/07   4.   Person calling himself `israel` is no Jew 22:22  |  Israeli 05/10/07   5.   Druze student in Germany tests... 22:25  |  Moshe Shafrir 05/10/07   6.   Very Moving Touching Story 22:30  |  Semsem 05/10/07   7.   Thanks e.m. for info.. 22:37  |  GWS 05/10/07   8.   # 1 Kohanes the traitor 22:55  |  ChanahS 05/10/07   9.   brilliant young man 23:05  |  sweis Melbourne 05/10/07   10.   "and become a settler" 23:23  |  John 05/10/07   11.   Samuel rocks 23:36  |  Julian Gough 05/10/07   12.   #1, it is amazing how impersonators can`t get it right 00:34  |  Jake 06/10/07   13.   Good Job 00:38  |  Dima 06/10/07   14.   #1 00:38  |  Dima 06/10/07   15.   A Very Fine Man 01:09  |  Danite 06/10/07   16.   QUESTION #1 01:10  |  TOBIA 06/10/07   17.   What a Kohane is to ChanaS 01:12  |  Max 06/10/07   18.   He is right in many respects 01:15  |  Shlomo from Tel Aviv 06/10/07   19.   Identity confusion in Israel.. 01:39  |  Baris Tarim 06/10/07   20.   Max 02:21  |  Nik Miller 06/10/07   21.   Max # 17 03:07  |  Philippe 06/10/07   22.   samuel 03:37  |  gary goldman 06/10/07   23.   #17 Max - let me define it for you 04:38  |  * BEN JABO 06/10/07   24.   One of the most insightful stories I`ve ever read in Haaretz 05:02  |  James 06/10/07   25.   Kohane is a translitteration of the Palestinian`s term for Cohen. 06:01  |  Jack 06/10/07   26.   #1 Boster 07:25  |  MR 06/10/07   27.   Very interesting and positive story---thanks! 08:35  |  Mea 06/10/07   28.   A Druze that wants to talk about his Religion? That`s Different 08:35  |  Efox 06/10/07   29.   Wow! He sounds interesting 09:48  |  Nechama 06/10/07   30.   col hakavod to Samuel-Issam! 12:59  |  Yosef 06/10/07   31.   #2 MARGIE IN TEL AVIV- The voice of REASON !!! 13:04  |  Anthony Fallon 06/10/07   32.   #31Anthony Fallon 15:02  |  MR 06/10/07   33.   Haaretz 18:00  |  MR 06/10/07   34.   #31 Anthony Fallon to Margie 16:17  |  * BEN JABO 07/10/07   35.   Kol ha Kavod 11:47  |  Lisa 08/10/07

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