It is not possible to understand the origins of the Jewish people without reference to their religious identity
In the aftermath of the Simchat Torah killings and kidnappings by Hamas, disturbing eruptions of antisemitism have emerged the world over, sometimes with large public manifestations in otherwise liberal metropolitan centres. Whence does it come?
The stain of antisemitism is ancient, even if the term itself is modern. In one of the introductory galleries of the Yad Vashem museum and memorial in Jerusalem, three strains of antisemitism are identified as precursors to the Holocaust.
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The first was theological; strains of Christian “teaching of contempt” for Jews for lacking faith in Jesus Christ. (That would apply, mutatis mutandis, to Islam as well.)
The second was 19th-century thought which saw “the Jew” as somehow alien to the new nation-state organization of Europe, and a potential threat. Czarist Russia, for example, was explicitly antisemitic.
The third was the racial purity theories of the Nazi regime itself.
Alongside the violent history of antisemitism there was also a form of “genteel” establishment discrimination against Jews, as was the case against Irish Catholics or “coloured” races. In Canada, that was the antisemitism of Mackenzie King and McGill University.
But what are we seeing today?
The antisemitism manifest on secular liberal campuses is hardly driven by theological concerns. Nationalist anxieties about foreign elements do not animate antisemitism in multicultural protests that are themselves suspicious of nationalism. And the very crowds showing hostility to Jews are otherwise passionately committed to racial equality. The heaving masses on the streets are not bespoke gentlemen wringing their hands about the wrong sort of person dining at the next table in the club.
Might I suggest that there is another source for this antisemitism? An aggressively secular viewpoint that tends toward fundamentalism in keeping religion out of our common life has a challenge in dealing with the reality of the Jewish people.
It is not possible to understand the origins of the Jewish people, nor their astonishingly unlikely survival in history, without reference to their religious identity.
Many Jews conceive of themselves, their people and the modern state of Israel, in non-religious terms, emphasizing culture, ethnicity and history. But even such Jews think that there is something fitting, if not essential, for Zionism to be about Zion, as opposed to a Jewish homeland on Vancouver Island, which would be altogether more congenial. “Next year in Nanaimo!” doesn’t quite have the same ring to it.
The agglomeration of antisemitism around the modern state of Israel and its enemies cannot be separated from the status of the land itself. Either the land of Israel — itself a biblical term — is the Promised Land, the Holy Land, or it is not. To a certain prevailing secular mindset, the very notion of a Promised Land (promised by whom?) or a Holy Land is a stumbling block. Indeed, the very idea of the land — Indigenous peoples aside, one must curiously note — having a God-given sacred character is anathema.
Therefore the very idea of Israel — a land for Jews, where Jews are welcome, where Jewishness is determined in part by rabbinic principles — is an offense to certain secular, progressive mindset. Combined with Arabist sympathies, anti-American agitations and a weird conception of Israel as a “colonial” power, progressive secularism then becomes an incubator for antisemitism.
That explains, in part, why the fifth Israel-Hamas war has proved divisive for Canadian Liberals and American Democrats. Both parties are ostentatiously committed to equality and have historically stood with Israel. But both parties have drifted into secular fundamentalism. They have a religion problem and “the Jew” remains inescapably, at least in part, a religious category. It’s more complicated than that, but it cannot be adequately understood apart from that.
The secular-religious divide has become, over the past several generations, a more prominent part of Israeli life. The original Zionist project was proudly secular, even though it was about Zion, not decamping to Zanzibar. The secular/religious divide has roiled contemporary Israeli politics, though national unity has prevailed now in wartime.
Thinking about Israel and thinking about Jews means thinking about religion and thinking about God. Some people don’t like to think about that, and so have come to not like thinking about Jews. Or have come to resent the Jews whose presence requires thinking about.
National Post
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