The recent assassination attempt on Salman Rushdie has parallels among modern writers; but in Jewish history, literary dissidence goes back much further, to biblical prophets persecuted and murdered for denouncing social injustice and corrupt institutions.

The book of Jeremiah in the Hebrew Bible portrays a chilling scene in the palace of the Judean King Jehoiachin in Jerusalem, c. 605 BCE: Jeremiah’s prophecies are read to the king and, as each passage of doom is read, the king cuts out that passage and tosses it into the fire until it is all gone. Then he orders Jeremiah’s arrest.

Jeremiah is ancestor to literary dissidents such as John Bunyan in England, Taras Shevchenko in Ukraine, Alexander Pushkin in Russia, Emile Zola in France, Naguib Mahfouz in Egypt, Nadine Gordimer in South Africa, and many others — each opposed censorship. Some were physically attacked or exiled, others were jailed and executed.

Even so, Jeremiah was exceptionally outspoken: he denounced the Temple priesthood as a “den of thieves” and the common people for their idol-worship “under every green tree”; he scourged the Judean kings for betraying the faith and predicted (correctly) that the Babylonian king Nebuchadrezzar, God’s “servant”, would destroy the kingdom and deport its inhabitants to Babylonia; and he cursed the Judean king with a violent, ignominious end, a donkey’s burial, his carcass dragged outside the walls of Jerusalem.

Accused of treason, Jeremiah was beaten and tortured and cast by royal decree into a foul pit in Jerusalem. Freed by Nebuchadrezzar after the Babylonian conquest of Jerusalem in 586 BCE, Jeremiah as protégé of the Babylonian king was free to declare unhindered to his people the abominations that brought about their fall.
Nebuchadrezzar had destroyed the Judean state — but he set the prophet and Hebrew prophecy free.

Dissident prophetic culture — which deeply influenced the monotheist outlook in the Bible — had Babylonian support as it justified the defeat and exile of the kingdom and acknowledged Babylonia, despite its idolatrous beliefs and practices, as agent of God’s punishment of his people.

The destruction of the Judean monarchy made possible the flourishing of a formerly underground pro-Babylonian prophetic culture.

The Judeans were exiled to what must have been, in the 6th century BCE, the most varied, cosmopolitan place on Earth, “by the waters of Babylon”; and within a few decades a local religion was transformed into an international one, and a provincial people into a people with an international vision. From the destruction of Judah, Judaism emerged.

The prophets are painfully frank in their national self-examination, perhaps the first such critique of a failed state in history.

Nonconformists such as Jeremiah risked their lives by speaking out, as modern writers such as Emile Zola and Boris Pasternak have done, falling foul of the existing order, their works banned and burned, and their lives threatened.

Distaste for fanaticism in Jewish history accompanied a growing concern with law, but dissidence itself became enshrined in sacred Scripture. Jeremiah, from being a jailbird, his prophecies banned and burned, was revered by the Judean exiles. His writings are treasured to the present day as part of a sacred canon. His bitter words have timeless power:

What man has wisdom to know
and declare the word of God,
why the land is lost
and bare as the untravelled desert?
Because they abandoned my Torah,
which I gave them,
and did not listen to me
but followed their stubborn hearts –
the Baalim of their fathers.
Religious life as Jeremiah saw it in the dying days of the Judean kingdom was corrupt:

The priests ask not, “Where is the Lord?”
The religious judges know me not.
The shepherds of the people rebel against me.
The prophets prophesy to Baal
and chase vanities…

Jeremiah confesses his pain at being a prophet, hunted and persecuted, seduced by the divine word. Like some modern poets — Byron, Shevchenko, and Bialik, for example — he speaks for a damaged and degraded nation with the force of personal trauma:

The Lord’s word has brought me
nothing but insult and shame.
I said: “I’ll forget him,
no longer speak in his name.”
But he stayed in my heart
like a fire
shut in my bones.

At times he wished he had never been born. Yet, the prophet was not without hope and a joyful vision of return.
Jeremiah was a dissident posthumously vis-à-vis supersessionist Christian and Islamic theology, in affirming God’s “eternal love’”for Israel and the restoration of the Jews to their land. No Jewish wedding is complete without Jeremiah’s vision of weddings in Jerusalem:

… again you’ll hear
in ruined towns of Judah
and deserted streets of Jerusalem
sounds of joy and delight,
the voice of groom and bride…

Jeremiah was both visionary and realist: he exhorts the exiled Judeans to cooperate with the Babylonians: settle down, live normal lives, seek the welfare of the city (or land) where you live, “for in its welfare you will find your welfare”. This message held true in the entire history of diaspora Jewish communities.

How did the radical dissidence of exclusive monotheism become mainstream Judaism?

An answer might be found in the after-effects of the first Babylonian exile, in 597 BCE. This exile was punishment for a several-year Judean revolt against Babylonia. The aristocracy, wealthy landowners, and the military elite were marched with the king, Jehoiachin, from Judah to Babylonia, leaving the Judean peasantry, the “poor of the people” (dalat ha-am).

The exile of 597 BCE left the departed elites and their successors uniquely vulnerable to prophetic accusations as their institutional authority to crush rebels was gone. The post-597 BCE power vacuum allowed dissidence a stronger, more influential voice than previously.

The Babylonians assumed the dalat ha-am, having no leadership, posed no threat and could be left in Judah: they were wrong. A popular revolt erupted some ten years later, driven by hatred of Babylonian rule.

This revolt, crushed by summer 586 BCE, was followed by a second exile, this time of the common people. The exile created a window of opportunity to challenge the ruined status quo, though the Bible yearns for the restoration of the monarchy, which might have censored the Bible and imprisoned its editors.

For much of the Bible is radical and censorable. In Tenure of Kings and Magistrates (1649), for example, John Milton drew on biblical sources to justify the overthrow of the English monarchy and the execution of Charles I.

Biblical texts illustrate, with much sympathy, a wide variety in human behaviour, with frequent deviations on the part of leading figures, including Judah, Moses, and Hosea; some stray at times from strict monotheist faith. The book of Job was for centuries excluded from the canon as it questions divine justice, but it was preserved nevertheless; and the same was true of other questionable works, such as the book of Ezekiel and the Song of Songs.

The prophetic tradition in Judaism opened it to greater universality, as a world religion, foundation of Christianity and Islam. The dissident history of the Bible and the spread of a Jewish diaspora exposed to many different peoples and cultures encouraged greater tolerance in Judaism and outspoken opposition to abuse of power.

Heine, a liberal and political radical and target of persistent antisemitic attacks, recognised the threat of censorship in a prophecy with many echoes in Jewish history: “… dort wo man Bücher verbrennt, verbrennt man auch am Ende” (… where books are burned, people too will burn in the end).

David Aberbach is Professor of Hebrew and Comparative Studies at McGill University, Montreal. His book, The Hebrew Bible, Nationalism, and the Origins of Anti-Judaism, will be published later this year.