Jewish identity is religious, but also ethnic and bespeaks national existence going back thousands of years- all reasons for hatred.
Current law enforcement statistics show that Jews are targets of bias and hate crimes more than any other minority group, and these numbers are consistent with increases in violent antisemitism seen worldwide. The one constant seems to be the breadth of the pallet used to spew hatred against Jews on religious, ethnic, or national grounds, to minimize their identity by distorting its essence, and to trivialize their suffering by falsely equating it with all other prejudices. Even those who condemn Jew-hatred often exacerbate it by misstating the nature of Jewish identity and inadvertently giving credence to stereotypes that have been used to degrade Jews for thousands of years.
And these stereotypes are now legitimized by a diversity industry that disparages Jewish history and national claims and a social media establishment that provides forums for antisemitic content. The effect on the mainstream has been a blasé tendency to discount Jewish history and suffering – as reflected by the FBI’s ludicrous claim that Jews were not targeted in January’s synagogue hostage takeover in Texas, Whoopi Goldberg’s revisionist explanation of the Holocaust on national TV, and the Democratic Party’s continuing failure to purge progressive antisemites from its ranks.
The roots of antisemitism are often disparate but never mutually exclusive, whether based on religious doctrine, ethnic stereotypes, or ancient xenophobia. Regardless of the enabling ideology, it ultimately focuses on the Jews’ enduring continuity as a people and stubborn refusal to assimilate out of existence.
1.Despite frequent attempts at historical revisionism from both right and left (though mainly these days from the left), the Holocaust was no exception. And whereas European societal complicity may have been facilitated by generations of hostile Church doctrine, Jews were not exterminated for their religious beliefs.
Indeed, the Holocaust was very much about “race” as that term was understood outside the US for generations. That is, the term was variously used to mean heritage, ethnicity, or descent, particularly for people like Jews, whose major subgroupings (i.e., Ashkenazi, Sephardic, and Mizrahi) share a basic genomic profile reflecting common Mideastern ancestry. According to geneticist Doron Behar and colleagues in 2010, this is “consistent with a historical formulation of the Jewish people as descending from ancient Hebrew and Israelites residents of the Levant” and “the dispersion of the people of ancient Israel throughout the Old World.” (Nature, doi:10.1038/nature09103.)
Accordingly, Jews are a people possessing a characteristic faith, not simply a religious community connected by belief alone.
Whether race is biological (a notion disputed by biologists and geneticists) or a social construct informed by heredity, there is no doubt that distinct cultural groupings can possess multilayered heritages defined by ancestry, ethnicity, and tradition. This is certainly how friends and foes alike regard the Jews, and it is this identity that evokes perhaps the most virulent of hatreds based on religious, political, or cultural grounds. For many bigots, Jewish belief is irrelevant to their enmity for Jewish people. The Nazis persecuted Jews based on heritage and ancestry – not religious faith – and exterminated them regardless of whether they were observant, secular, or baptized.
Though antisemitic hatred may spring from many wells, its enduring hold on society is clearly premised on the Jews’ identity as a distinct people with a unique heritage. This holds true whether relating to Nazi racial theory or Church doctrine.
2.Christian antisemitism is certainly religious in its canonical basis. Indeed, antisemitic themes flow through Christian scripture and figure prominently in the passion narratives that accuse the Jews of deicide and of supposedly declaring, “his blood be on us and on our children.” (Matthew, 27:25.) Aside from the incompatibility of such accounts with history and halakha, they emphasize the perception of Jews as a distinct people singled out for opprobrium and abuse. It’s no surprise that the European Churches traditionally used passion plays to instigate deadly pogroms during Easter week.
The Reformation did nothing to mitigate theological Jew-hatred, and Martin Luther was just as malevolent as the Church he rejected. After realizing Jews would not embrace his version of Christianity, Luther in 1543 wrote “Von den Jüden und iren Lügen” (“On the Jews and Their Lies”), arguing that their homes, holy books, and synagogues should be burned, property confiscated, and legal protections denied. Luther described Jews as “poisonous envenomed worms,” advocated their expulsion or enslavement, and lamented that “we are at fault in not slaying them.”
Everything Luther wrote would be reiterated by the Nazis in the Nuremburg Laws and on the pages of Der Stürmer.
3.Then there is the antisemitic foundation of replacement theology, which seeks to replace the Jews – an extant people defined by ancestry, language, and a unique relationship with G-d – with a faith community possessing no indicia of peoplehood. Those who claim they are “spiritual Jews” want to usurp “chosen” status without accepting the obligations and can only identify thus by corrupting Jewish Scripture and sacred text. Replacement theology is fundamentally antisemitic and no less repugnant than Luther’s pernicious dogma.
4.Though Christendom’s domination waned with the Enlightenment, Jews fared little better during the Age of Reason. The fathers of progressivism from Voltaire on down disliked Jews, whose ethnoreligious identity was anathema to emerging ideologies seeking to marginalize faith and nationality. The Enlightenment’s disregard for traditional Jewish identity (even among Jewish sympathizers) was succinctly articulated by Count de Clermont-Tonnerre in 1789, when he stated to the French National Assembly that “the Jews should be denied everything as a nation, but granted everything as individuals.”
Those who seek to portray Jewishness as either solely religious or purely national miss its unique essence as an ethnoreligious identity comprising both ancestry and faith. Jews are not defined solely by what they believe. Rather, their beliefs are obligatory because of their descent. The tendency to bifurcate Jewish identity or consider it religious only may come from well-meaning but ill-informed friends who believe similitude breeds acceptance. Such redefinitions, however, are also used to deny the Jews’ national integrity and ancient territorial origins.
This is why remarks stating the Holocaust “was not about race” or that Jews have no national past are so troubling. One might ask whether these comments reflect ignorance or ideology. There is no question that progressives deny the Jews’ national existence and connection to their homeland (which are supported by the archeological, historical, and literary records) in favor of a revisionist Palestinian Arab narrative (which is not). Therefore, whenever progressive media figures or celebrities make such statements, one can reasonably ask whether they are being politically doctrinaire or merely naïve.
Ignorance can be corrected by education, but ideological revisionism cannot; and they should not be allowed to deflect criticism when their comments are exposed by simply claiming some amorphous affinity for the Jewish people. If they want to disclaim antisemitic intent regarding any slurs they may have uttered, they would do better to accept responsibility for their words and condemn Jew-hatred among their peers.
5.The denial of Jewish history and national identity is itself a form of antisemitism that has become politically stylish among progressives; and it has international ramifications, particularly when the UN passes resolutions claiming the Jews have no connection to their homeland or that the Temple never stood in Jerusalem. These claims are reminiscent of Hitler’s “Big Lie” and consistent with propaganda entrenched in the Palestinian National Charter.
Indeed, Article 20 of that charter states:
“The Balfour Declaration, the mandate document and what has been based upon them are considered null and void. The claim of a historical or spiritual tie between Jews and Palestine does not tally with the historical realities nor with the constituencies of statehood in their true sense. Judaism in its character as a religion of revelation, is not a nationality with an independent existence. Likewise, the Jews are not one people with an independent personality. They are rather citizens of the states to which they belong.”
Such dissimulations are parroted by those who delegitimize Israel by denying Jewish history, ancestry, and provenance.
Jewish identity is certainly religious, but it’s also ethnic and bespeaks national existence going back thousands of years. Those who came from the shtetls of Europe surely understood the intrinsic nature of their Jewishness. My grandmother came from a Ukrainian shtetl and survived multiple pogroms. One of the only Slavic words she knew was “Zhyd” and she understood from experience that marauding Cossacks were not interested in how her community prayed or whether they ate kosher. The pogromists came to rape, pillage, and murder people they considered foreigners – quintessential strangers distinguished by language, belief, and blood.
To deny this is to steal the Jews’ history, and to steal their history is to reject their humanity.
And that’s the point.
©Matthew Hausman, J.D. All rights reserved.
