Editing Israel Shahak (section)

===Public controversy===
In 1966, Rabbi [[Immanuel Jakobovits]] disputed the veracity of Shahak's story, claiming that Israel Shahak had been compelled to admit that the incident had not occurred.{{sfn|The Times|1999}}{{sfn|Jakobovits|1966|pp=58–65}} He cited a lengthy ''[[responsa|responsum]]'', by [[Isser Yehuda Unterman]], the Ashkenazi Chief Rabbi of Israel, who said that "the Sabbath must be violated to save non-Jewish life no less than Jewish lives", and cited a ruling by Rabbi [[Menachem Meiri]] that Jews ''should'' desecrate the Sabbath to save a gentile's life.{{sfn|Rickman|2009}}{{sfn|Boteach|2008}}{{sfn|Schwartz|2002|p=19}}{{sfn|Jakobovits|1966|p=59}} The opinions of these rabbis derived from the book ''Noda B'Yehuda'' (''Known in Judah''), in which the 18th-century religious authority [[Yechezkel Landau]] said: "I emphatically declare that in all laws contained in the Jewish writings concerning theft, fraud, etc. no distinction is made between Jew and Gentile; that the (Talmudic) legal categories [[goy]], ''akum'' (idolater) etc., in no way apply to the people among whom we live."{{sfn|Schwartz|2002|p=19}}

In 1967,{{citation needed|date=July 2017}} Ze'ev Falk, while dissociating himself from Shahak's Sabbath story which he regarded as an invention, acknowledged that it was this "fiction" and method of action which had indeed brought about Rabbi Unterman's ruling that allowed the Sabbath to be violated to save the lives of Gentiles. For him, Unterman's ruling may have opened a "new page" in Orthodox Jewish attitudes to righteous Gentiles and non-Jews alike.{{sfn|Falk|1997|loc=pp. 47–53: "It is incumbent upon the State of Israel to appear as a kingdom of mercy and not to be stringent in applying the [Jewish] law. While I dissociate myself from the methods of action of Dr. Israel Shahak, who invented the case of a Gentile who was not given treatment on the Sabbath, it was this fiction that led Chief Rabbi Unterman to issue a ruling permitting the violation of the Sabbath in order to save the life of a Gentile. While no explicit permit has yet been discovered concerning prohibitions stated in the Torah itself. perhaps this was the opening of a new page in our attitude towards righteous Gentiles and non-Jews in general, the culmination to be hoped for being that there will be no gulf between moral feeling on the one hand and the Halakha on the other.{{' "}}}}