Venezuelan president’s ugly corruption of his Jewish heritage

At the beginning of this month, Victor Kara-Murza, a British-Russian dissident, was suddenly released from his Siberian strict-regime camp and flown out of Russia as part of a major prisoner exchange. Murderers and spies were taken to the East, free thinkers and human rights activists were taken to the West.

When asked if this exchange opened the way to Russian hostage-taking in the future, Kara-Murza quoted from Sanhedrin in the Mishna: “He who saves one life – it is as if he had saved an entire world”. It is this sentiment which has propelled generations of Jews to participate disproportionately in movements which defend democracy, the rule of law and promote civil rights.

Both Kara-Murza and his mentor, Boris Nemtsov, murdered in Moscow in 2015, almost certainly by Putin’s assassins, are of Jewish origin. They join a long line of honourable activists who were often far from conventional Jewishness but refused to go along with the prevailing wisdom. 

They stand with those who opposed Afrikaner nationalism in apartheid South Africa, embraced the civil rights movement in the US and participated in the broad human rights movement in the USSR. They also stood against the acquiescence of the formal Jewish communal bodies when living under dictatorial regimes such as in Pinochet’s Chile in the 1970s.

All this was a consequence of Diaspora Jews being part and parcel of the societies in which lived but at the same time being the latest link in the golden chain of Jewish tradition. It also marked the difference between those Jews who marginalised universalism in Jewish teachings in favour of particularism and a quiet life and those who believed that both universalism and particularism were part of our inheritance and a central ingredient of Jewish identity in the twenty-first century.