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Spoiler alert.  I’m telling you the answer in the next paragraph.  You have experienced quite enough anxiety, what with the war and everything.  You don’t need the stress of wondering when the answer will come and whether it will be sufficient to explain this monumentally implausible phenomenon.

Here is the secret of Jewish survival: the people who hate us are idiots.  More importantly, we know that the people who hate us are idiots.  We can’t abandon our identities and join them, because they are idiots.  We can’t acquiesce and let them win, because . . . they are idiots.  They hate us for no justifiable reason and, therefore, we are better than they are, and they can not be allowed to prevail.  So we must survive.

Having gotten that out of the way, I can now present the argument in a more conventional manner.

What explains the survival of the tiny Jewish nation, people, culture, and religion, in the face of implacable hatred, overwhelming odds, and continuous oppression, persecution, and abuse?  Philosophers, historians and theologians from Augustine  to Toynbee to Mark Twain have puzzled over this question.

Twain most eloquently and memorably framed the question:

“If the statistics are right, the Jews constitute but one percent of the human race. It suggests a nebulous dim puff of star dust lost in the blaze of the Milky Way. Properly the Jew ought hardly to be heard of, but he is heard of, has always been heard of. He is as prominent on the planet as any other people, and his commercial importance is extravagantly out of proportion to the smallness of his bulk. His contributions to the world’s list of great names in literature, science, art, music, finance, medicine, and abstruse learning are also way out of proportion to the weakness of his numbers. He has made a marvelous fight in the world, in all the ages; and has done it with his hands tied behind him. He could be vain of himself, and be excused for it.

“The Egyptian, the Babylonian, and the Persian rose, filled the planet with sound and splendor, then faded to dream-stuff and passed away; the Greek and the Roman followed, and made a vast noise, and they are gone; other peoples have sprung up and held their torch high for a time, but it burned out, and they sit in twilight now, or have vanished. The Jew saw them all, beat them all, and is now what he always was, exhibiting no decadence, no infirmities of age, no weakening of his parts, no slowing of his energies, no dulling of his alert and aggressive mind.

“All things are mortal but the Jew; all other forces pass, but he remains. What is the secret of his immortality?”

I decline to provide Twain’s suggested answer because, despite the fact that he proclaimed himself free of any bias whatsoever, it is full of anti-semitic stereotypes, not all of them negative.  Augustine’s answer–that we are kept alive to bear witness to our great transgression–is clever theologically, but no longer relevant now that we have been absolved of killing God by a few Popes.  Toynbee, who thought that it was persecution itself that was responsible for our survival, was an anti-semitic, highly educated moron.

Over the years, I had developed my own text-based answer.  Jews survived because our fundamental text, the Bible, predicted, with devastating, chilling, and blood-curdling accuracy, the terrible fate that would befall us if we sinned, and also guaranteed us  ultimate redemption.  Thus, whatever happened to us was attributable to us and our God.  By contrast, for example, when the Hittites and Amorites took their gods into battle and the Amorites won, the Hittites could say, “Their god is stronger and better,” and abandon the Hittite religion and culture in  favor of the Amorites’.  That happened innumerable times in the case of Roman conquests.  The vanquished simply surrendered their gods and adopted the Roman pantheon.

The Jews, however, were different.  When we were defeated by the Babylonians, we did not say Marduk was victorious and superior.  The very notion is absurd.  Instead, we acknowledged that our God had delivered us into the hands of Nebuchadnezzar because we sinned, just as He said He would in Leviticus 26, Deuteronomy 28, and numerous books of prophecy.  So, unlike other ancient nations, we could be defeated without renouncing our religion.  On the contrary, each serial defeat over the centuries confirmed the accuracy of God’s message to us, so there was never any reason, even in the depths of harrowing defeat, to renounce or abandon the religion. We sinned; God punished us.  We will ultimately be redeemed.  No reason to abandon the faith.  We can just take it into exile until we return home.

Thus, I always thought that the genius of the Jewish people and the explanation for its survival was a combination of low expectations and belief in a very strategic Bible that attributed defeat to being punished rather than vanquished.

I am not sure whether that explanation continues to persuade, given the diminution in knowledge and belief in Jewish texts in the modern era.  There had to be more.

So, with the help of Tucker Carlson, I have refined my thesis.  Our survival is not only based on the notion that our misfortunes result from our God’s punishment, as opposed to our God abandoning us or their god defeating us.  It is also based on the fact that, in almost all cases, the people who hate us for being Jewish and impose hardships or violence upon us, as well as the beliefs of those people, are so manifestly and demonstrably inferior to us and ours.  

It would be embarrassing and demeaning to let them prevail.  So we don’t.

Granted, the Romans had a great army that kicked the crap out of us; but they worshipped a God that took the form of a swan and other animals to rape women. No Jews exiled by the Romans felt that the Roman culture or religion was loftier than their own. We were not about to abandon the God who gave us the Torah for a bunch of oversexed Olympians.

Perhaps hundreds of thousands of Jews died in the 17th century massacres started by Khmelnitzky, but no Jews ever considered the Zaporozhian Cossacks their moral or intellectual superiors.  Ivan the Cossack was a troglodyte, hardly an attractive alternative.  

The savages who crossed the border on October 7–raping, mutilating, brutalizing terrorists–little more than programmed barbarians, did not represent anything we viewed as noble. As long as we still had breath in our bodies, we could never capitulate; they could never be permitted to prevail.  We, as a people, refused to admit defeat by people we disdained.

Admittedly, there were some Hellenist Jews who deemed Greek culture superior, but we killed them to make Chanukah.  No one considered the Nazis paragons of humanity.  And the Assyrians, Christians, Muslims who held sway over us from time to time held beliefs so silly that if I were to describe them, you would doubt my veracity (conscious of the fate of Charlie Hebdo and Salman Rushdie, and the sensibilities of our Christian Zionist readers, I will let you use your own imagination–just think treatment of women, child marriage, Inquisition and Crusades).

Tucker Carlson is a mix of Swedish, English, German, Scottish, Irish, Swiss-Italian, and Portuguese descent.  Not a single one of his ancestors was present in North America 400 years ago.  And yet he has the temerity to question whether Bibi Netanyahu has Jewish antecedents sufficient to justify a claim to the land.  I had a list of Carlson’s other nonsensical whoppers and deflections, but I just need to recite the most recent one to expose his imbecilic ignorance: Tucker Carlson believes, on the strength of unauthorized patches worn by some Israeli soldiers on their uniforms, that the current war is being waged on behalf of Chabad, in order to build a Temple on the site of Al-Aqsa mosque. Sure–just like the Salvation Army caused World War II. 

Candace Owens has been a liberal, a conservative, a Protestant, and a Catholic, the latter for almost two years now (setting a record for overimpulsive ADHD pundits).  She has claimed that Israel was responsible for 9/11, that Stalin was a Jew, that Erika Kirk killed her husband, Charlie, that Israel is committing ethnic cleansing, that Jews controlled the trans-atlantic slave trade, and so forth, ad infinitum.  Oh, yes, she says that Jews are pederasts;  she probably didn’t interview any former altar boys before her conversion.

Mamdani.  Fuentes. Darryl Cooper.  Kanye West.  Need I belabor the point?

Confronted by enemies like these, how can we feel anything but superior to them, and, feeling superior, how can we fail to do whatever is necessary to deny them victory, to prevail against them?

As John Kerry, one of the least self-aware enemies of Israel, said of his adversary George W. Bush, “I can’t believe that I’m losing to this idiot.”

If this is not the actual explanation for our survival, perhaps it should be.  Our mantra: we can not let these idiots prevail.  If we have any self-respect, we won’t let ourselves lose to the campus lemmings whose hallmarks are ignorance and anti-semitism.  We will view condemnations by NGOs and foundations funded by Jew-haters and driven by distorted, progressive ideologies as badges of honor.  We will take pride in the attacks being leveled against us by the likes of Omar, Tlaib, Newsom, Coons, Sanders, and Harris.

Because they are idiots.  Because however bad we might be, we are better than they are.

That’s it.  The secret to Jewish survival: however bad we might be, we are better than they are.  That knowledge sustains us.

Emil Fackenheim is said to have asserted the Eleventh Commandment:  Thou shalt not grant the Nazis a posthumous victory.  

I add a Twelfth:  Don’t let the idiots win.

© The Times of Israel (Blogs)