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Torture: Reading Améry, Rereading Jewish Law

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Jean Améry

Abstract

Jewish law espouses several attitudes toward torture, from total prohibition, through condoning, to proactive advocating for using torture under certain conditions. Reading Améry’s testimony and bearing it in mind, has significant heuristic value in rereading the Jewish legal sources related to torture. Combining readings of cultural narrative with legal and political analysis raises the possibility of a categorical and universal criminalization of torture in Jewish thought and Jewish law. I argue that biblical narrative recognizes components of the modern concept of torture and their aggregative impact. It criminalizes torture even when ostensible justifications can be invoked, demanding individual accountability, as well as institutional preventative actions. I share intriguing complexities that became apparent from rereading specific Jewish laws related to torture. The aggregation of the new insights makes a compelling case for a Jewish-based position that torture be controlled, limited, and even criminalized, while leaving intact the possibility of acquitting perpetrators from punishment.

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Notes

  1. 1.

    Linking the prohibition in Exodus against abusing the ger (stranger/other, also: convert) to Egyptians’ torture of Israelites, positions the injunction against torture as a universal prohibition. The historical link also delegitimizes the justification of torturous oppression by supposed subversive actions, because the Egyptians justified the oppressive security measures by casting the Jews as a potential threat (Ex. 1).

  2. 2.

    Nachmanides criminalizes an act by culturally august figures, despite the matriarch’s status and Sarah’s ready excuse, the need to protect her position. The act is also is divinely sanctioned, since the angel commands Hagar to return to her “mistress and be tortured under her hands” (Gen. 16: 9).

  3. 3.

    A de jure prohibition of torture could enable and even facilitate the de facto use of excessive violence, whenever those in power wanted. Brundage (2018) documents this duality in the history of the United States, while Améry (1980, pp. 22–24) argued this is true for almost all states and societies.

  4. 4.

    One exception is a rabbinic form of extremely painful execution called “kipa” (BT Sanhedrin 71; Crane 2011, p. 491).

  5. 5.

    The extreme version of this argument—namely, the total suspension of law in state of emergency (Schmitt 1998)—is untenable from a Jewish legal perspective, certainly since WWII, and is not held by Broyde (see 2006b, p. 4).

  6. 6.

    Often, society is selective regarding what values merit inordinate efforts to save lives. In Israel, deaths from terrorism are significantly less than from car accidents, lack of preventive medicine or even accidents at workplaces (Israel-Vleeschhouwer 1998). Saving lives should be a systemic policy, not a single-agenda justification.

  7. 7.

    Under the Jewish Laws of Kings or the ancient rabbinical court’s emergency powers, torture was a legitimate practice in Jewish history (Kirschenbaum 1991, 2013; Crane 2011). However, these practices have no normative power (Kirschenbaum 2013; Israel-Vleeschhouwer 2014).

  8. 8.

    Police officers tend to justify violence against certain groups or kinds of people as part of their profession (Wahl 2017, Chap. 2, 5). Carver and Handley (2016) stress that it is actual practice in police stations and detention centers that matters, not ratified treaties or laws in books (even religious ones), which only have minor effect on practice.

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Authors and Affiliations

  1. School of Law, Sapir Academic College, Sderot, Israel

    Amos Israel-Vleeschhouwer

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  1. Amos Israel-Vleeschhouwer
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Correspondence to Amos Israel-Vleeschhouwer .

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  1. Tel-Hai Academic College, Upper Galilee, Israel

    Yochai Ataria

  2. Ludwig-Maximilian University of Munich, Munich, Germany

    Amit Kravitz

  3. Tel-Hai Academic College, Upper Galilee, Israel

    Eli Pitcovski

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Israel-Vleeschhouwer, A. (2019). Torture: Reading Améry, Rereading Jewish Law. In: Ataria, Y., Kravitz, A., Pitcovski, E. (eds) Jean Améry. Palgrave Macmillan, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-28095-6_7

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