The term pariah derives from a name applied in the past to the lowest caste in Hindu society, the “untouchables” now called Dalits; its connotations are: not accepted, not respected, outcast.  It is not clear when the term was first applied to the Jews; in 1895, Theodor Herzl suggested that Baron Hirsch address the congress of Jewish leaders he was about to convene thus:

You are pariahs! You must forever tremble at the thought that you are about to be deprived of your rights and stripped of your possessions. You will be insulted when you walk in the street. … You are not admitted to any honorable calling, and if you deal in money you are made the special focus of contempt…. The situation will not change for the better, but rather for the worse…. There is only way out: into the Promised Land. (p. 37)

 Later, in 1916, German sociologist Max Weber (in his book Ancient Judaism) depicted the Jews as a “pariah people” because when they lost their land, they developed an elaborate system of law and belief that kept them segregated from other peoples, suffering willingly, pending their future redemption.  Hence, they were, essentially, outcasts by choice.  The last sentence of Weber’s book:

All of this makes the Jewish community remain in its self-chosen situation as a pariah people as long and as far as the unbroken spirit of the Jewish Law, and that is to say, the spirit of the Pharisees, and the rabbis of late antiquity, continues and continues to live on.

That is, it is an oversimplification to claim that the Jews are outsiders purely because of anti-Semitic persecution: their outsiderness, while it is a source of suffering, is at the same time valued and cultivated as a key part of their identity… their “chosenness.”  A kind of power within powerlessness.  Perhaps this correlates with the rabbis’ concept of yissurim shel ahava, “suffering on account of [God’s] love.”  And with pagan prophet Balaam’s curse-turned-blessing: “There is a people that dwells apart, not reckoned among the nations.” (Num. 23:9)

In 1944, philosopher Hannah Arendt’s famous essay, “The Jew as Pariah: A Hidden Tradition,”  suggested that figures like Heinrich Heine, Franz Kafka, and Charlie Chaplin gave expression in their work to this idea of the Jews as pariah – ostensibly persecuted outsiders who take strength from their very outsiderness, “[the Jew] who does not recognize the class order of the world because he sees in it neither order nor justice for himself.” (Jewish Social Studies 6:2, April 1944, p. 112)

Both Weber’s and Arendt’s views of the Jews as pariahs seem to argue against the popular conception that the Jews’ suffering through the centuries represents just the consequences eternal anti-Semitism; i.e., that we are victims, powerless, and the only “solution” is to gain coercive (political, military) power to redeem ourselves.  Rather, the “chosenness” of the Jews is actually a “choosing-ness,” in that the Jews’ outsiderness was not simply imposed upon them against their will, but deliberately fostered by their commitment to living in separate autonomous communities governed by their own laws.  They could have become “insiders” by jettisoning their Jewish covenant identity completely and becoming like everyone else.  But then, of course, they would no longer be Jewish.

In the past two years, we’ve often heard Israel referred to as a “pariah state,” as various states and institutions have declared Israel to be untouchable, outside the family of morally acceptable nations, thus placing Israeli athletes, professors, artists, entertainers, institutions – and tourism – outside the pale.  What does it mean to call Israel a pariah state?  I think the expression is used, in different contexts, with two different connotations:

 As Herzl used “pariah,” the connotation is “victim.” Like the Dalit, our situation is hopeless, inherent in the structure of society.  Acceptance, integration, respect will never be accorded to us, for we occupy a permanent status of victim.  For Herzl, the solution was for the Jews to leave Europe and live in their own polity where the old “caste system” of Jewish segregation and exclusion could not reach them.  So some see the term “pariah state” as meaning “victim state,” helpless to change the eternal structures.  If so, that implies the failure of Zionism, for the Jews’ pariah status has simply been transferred from their dispersed communities to their state, which is, therefore, destined to live by the sword forever, never to have its right to exist recognized.

For Weber, the Jewish people’s pariah status seems to imply a choice to maintain an outsider identity. In our context today, we might say that Israel has chosen to exclude itself by a) insisting on an exceptionalist approach: the Jewish state has God-given privileges that exempt it from universal principles such as the right of all nations to national self-determination, basic freedoms (press, expression, movement), and peaceful conflict-resolution; and by b) employing its overwhelming military might to quash any objection or resistance to that approach.  Thus, Israel’s continued occupation of the West Bank and declared intent to do so forever, and its destructive campaigns in Gaza and Lebanon constitute a full frontal rejection of the above principles, and self-identification as an outsider to a family of nations it considers inconsistent, hypocritical, and fundamentally anti-Semitic.

Maybe “pariah” is not a useful or helpful term in our current discourse.  Maybe we need to cast away both victim identity and the claim that God is on our side, and focus on our freedom of agency – and hence, responsibility – as Micah urged, “to do justly, love mercy, and walk humbly…” (6:8), a project we had been working on for a long time before we, or anyone else, started calling us pariahs.

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