I HAVE many critiques of the behaviour of the state of Israel towards the people and the territories of Palestine. Indeed, I reserve the right to critique the behaviour of any state – Israel, Palestine, the United States, the United Kingdom, Scotland when it becomes one – if it acts in violation of generally held, human rights-based standards, in war, diplomacy, economics and other areas.

As the world rages and roils around me, I feel more and more these days like a global citizen, first and foremost. It’s from this universalist position that I hope anything I might say about Israel, as a political nation in the present moment, is taken.

But the current furore, involving accusations of anti-Semitism in the Labour Party, has given me pause to ask myself a question that has genuinely never occurred to me before. In my critiques of Israeli state policy in the region – which involve an assessment of the power of Zionism as an ideology, among many other factors – am I actually masking my own anti-semitism?

I guess the reason I’ve never asked myself this question is that – for as long as I can remember, as a reader and thinker – I have had a deep emotional and intellectual attraction to Jewish culture and civilisation, in most of its manifestations. I don’t know how it might help anyone in the current situation – but I have a strong urge to tell this personal history. (First rule of a columnist: stay close to the emotion that, no matter how much you rationalise it, won’t go away).

The first memory is not so much the history lessons at school, but of my father, John Kane, sitting us down as a family to watch every episode of Holocaust, the 1978 TV series with Meryl Streep and James Woods. (Stern Catholic moral patriarch that he was, he’d compelled us all to watch Roots, an equivalent epic on American slavery, a few years before that).

Looking over the Wikipedia entry brings it all flooding back. But it was the elegant, talented Weiss family from Berlin – doctors, artists, pianists, footballers, chemists – and their descent into semi-naked, stumbling, abused wretches, herded into a carbon monoxide chamber in Hadaar, which carved the deepest groove inside me.

How could one set of Germans so viciously prey upon another set? I’d read enough war comics to understand the malevolence of Nazism. But why the Jews as their primary target? Who seemed to the telly-watching young me as fellow aspirers, just like our family?

Since that trigger, I have been intrinsically fascinated by Jewish civilisation. In the early 80s, on late-night Channel Four and in seminar rooms at Glasgow University, the high-concept talk was about “modernity” and “postmodernity”. The first was the era where science and industry and bureaucracy managed the world. The second, our current era, where those “grand narratives” and big structures were dissolving and falling apart.

When you read the history of Jewish settlement and diaspora around the world, it seemed that the Jews had already been both “modern” and “postmodern” for millennia. Modern, because the sheer intellectual effort of mastering and commenting on the Torah, as “the people of the book”, encouraged a facility in knowledge and expertise of systems, whether scientific, literary or financial.

Postmodern, because they applied this expertise wherever they found themselves, whether between cultures or inside capacious cities. Sometimes they were accepted for this role within the boundary walls, sometimes chased out of those boundaries.

As a former literature student, I’ve been reading the novels of American Jewish writers like Saul Bellow, Bernard Malamud and Philip Roth – and I’m always re-reading Joyce’s Ulysses, with the Jewish character Leopold Bloom at its centre.

These are all works whose heroes are thrillingly self-knowing, and searingly critical of the mores and standards of the modern world around them. They source much of that awareness in their professed identity as Jews.

I’ve also written elsewhere about the deep pleasures to be had from the website Old Jews Telling Jokes. It’s not only an amazing collection of old characters, but also a record of the power of humour – those explosions of reason and taboo – as a survival mechanism.

So given this urbane, witty, agile, adaptive sense I’ve always had of Jewish culture, it was a shock to me to discover, in later years, that one of the Nazis’ core accusations against Jews was that they were “rootless cosmopolitans”.

Look at our current conditions – incessant migration flows, people liberated from their localities by their smartphones and networked lives. We really need a form of popular cosmopolitanism – a general acceptance that the diverse world is always at your doorstep, so that we can prevent a future of endless micro-conflicts.

Doesn't Jewish history have so much to tell us about accessing this cosmopolitan spirit? But the Shoah happened: This scattered, talented people were rounded up and their genocide attempted, in the most industrial and rationalised manner. And so it has never surprised me that these historic cosmopolitans turned to a nationalist ideology – Zionism – in order to justify the territorial claim to a homeland.

The defence of that homeland has been implacable against any threat, real or constructed. The heavens will not darken again. But could we ever have an Israel that was about “rooted cosmopolitanism”? Yes, its territorial location accepted, but an Israel that shared its ingenuity and traditions with the region around it? Instead of deploying them in high-tech military incursions into already degraded Palestinian territories?

An American friend of mine, the technology writer Douglas Rushkoff, tried in the mid 2000s to start a movement called Open-Source Judaism. Open-source coding is a way for many people to contribute to the strength and power of a piece of software. Rushkoff makes the claim that “Judaism was intended as an open-source religion, to which all practitioners could have access. The texts themselves are amended and improved. Even the opinions of people who are “rejected” are kept in the record. Judaism is a religion negotiated, not a religion “believed”. It is a process.

“This could occur around a table, as it did in the old days – where anyone who had a bar mitzvah and proved they could read the text was allowed to participate in the discussion,” continues Rushkoff. “We remake the religion, constantly. Religion is a process of evolution. This was the essential Jewish difference. They left behind the dead, sacred religion of Egypt, and built a religion dedicated to life – not just staying alive, but keeping the religion alive rather than stuck in one moment.”

The Torah is “not a chronicle of Jewish history meant to prove our land claim to Israel, but a set of myths”, says Rushkoff. “Judaism is modernism. Judaism is the very contention that human beings can make the world a better place, rather than depending on the whims of God, or simply waiting for the apocalypse.

As you might imagine, there was a lot of pushback on Rushkoff’s ideas at the time. But they are tantalising. Beyond the trauma-driven steeliness of an Israel ready to do anything to defend its territory, we need to try to start different conversations with its citizens.

Why not appeal to the Jewish people at this primal, even spiritual level? What can your faith, coming from its historic core, teach the world about coexistence, critical thinking, adaptability, hope, progress?

And could you judge the behaviour of your own political state by the standards of a Judaism refreshed at its own wellsprings?

This is only my idiosyncratic journey into Judaism. But what’s saddest about the charge of “anti-Semitism” is that it shuts down these kinds of explorations, freezes the intellect and the heart. And, as far as my understanding goes, I can think of nothing less Jewish than that.

Pat Kane is a writer and musician (www.patkane.today)