For most people in the US, the world’s reaction to the Hamas-directed massacre of October 7, 2023, was a shocking revelation. Like nearly all Jews at the time, never having lived through an era of pogroms and persecutions, I could not imagine that the nation’s and the world’s near-unanimous emotion would by no means be horror at the gratuitously barbarous slaughter of hundreds of innocent people, but condemnation of the Israeli response even before it began. And, until the current conflict with Iran, the consensus throughout the Western world, let alone the Middle East, had been all the more that it was the Jews rather than their Muslim enemies who were to blame for “genocide.”
My reaction, once the surprise was past, has been to rethink in the light of this experience my previous understanding of the position of the Jews in Western culture, and by extension, in the rest of the world.
Many have reacted to this revelation by seeking the best means for dealing with this unexpected flood of antisemitic attitudes. I have my own opinions on this, but as a member of a generation of Jews that not only managed to avoid any serious expressions of antisemitic hostility but benefited far more than it suffered for its religious identity, and as one who has never held a mentoring role toward other Jews, I think it more appropriate for me to seek to profit from this new information on the level of theory rather than presume to offer practical advice to others.
As I have pointed out in a number of these Chronicles, antisemitism, like language, is not fully understandable from the essentially solipsistic stance of the Western philosophical tradition. But this rapprochement hardly explains what anomaly is shared by the search for explanations of these two phenomena. Whereas language, unique to humanity, is easily enough conceived as its point of departure, antisemitism is a particular historical development that can hardly be considered implicit in human nature.
Yet this very fact points to the historical reality that in its turn provides the point of departure for our understanding of antisemitism. It is not monotheism as such that makes Hebrew religion unique. Indeed, the earliest human communities were presumably monotheistic, sharing a single sacred object or category. Polytheism, as a later development, was presumably everywhere the result of the fusion of smaller monotheistic tribes into larger ones composed of a set of clans, each with their own god/totem. This is clearly the case in the classic studies of Australian aborigines, and is reflected on a far more sophisticated level by the Greek pantheon brought together on Olympus.
In this context, the uniqueness of Hebrew monotheism appears to reflect its dialectical emergence from within a world of complex societies that negates and transcends their polytheistic fragmentation by reaffirming the originary intuition of the unity of the sacred. As I have pointed out elsewhere, this intuition was simply and sharply presented by Hillel in his “golden rule” that sums up the central principle of the sacred: do nothing to violate the moral unity of the human community.
For prior to any speculation on the status of supernatural beings, the sacred is, on a par with language, a defining universal of human behavior. This is not to dismiss the significance of the ideas of the world’s theologians, but merely to place them, once more, in the perspective of anthropology, outside of which the very possibility of conceiving supernatural beings has no worldly basis.
Thus, as Adam Katz and I proposed in The First Shall Be The Last: Rethinking Antisemitism (Leiden: Brill, 2015), the simplest explanation for the world’s persistent hostility to the Jews is their temporal, and thus unavoidably ontological, firstness. The Jews themselves need never have compared their religion to any other, and indeed, their proselytizing activities have never been more than modest, since Judaism has never outgrown its self-concept as a confederation of tribes descended from the sons of Jacob/Israel. But their very lack of concern that others share their beliefs, their very sincerity in turning their backs on all other religions, has naturally been interpreted by the latter as a sign of infinite arrogance.
And even if the Jews’ survival as a people despite their dislodgement from their native land to exist in exile for nearly two millennia could be dismissed as the persistence of a delusion, yet in both the West, where the Old Testament reminds the population of Christianity’s Hebrew filiation, and the Middle East, where the Koran constantly defines itself against both its predecessors, they have remained both Christianity’s and Islam’s eternal precursors and rivals, often defeated in history but never in their own souls—precursors whose persistent endurance is a living demonstration of their ability to withstand seemingly forever the ever-present lure of their two brother religions, which may have tempted some but never touched the core of their own—while surviving the ever-recurring pogroms by which both have attempted to destroy it.
Thus we have no difficulty in understanding that ever since Israel’s successful revival of Hebrew and its economic and intellectual success has transformed the Middle East, Islamic hostility has taken the lead in Jew-hatred, applying to it the barbaric standards of jihad—beginning with the absurd falsehood that Jerusalem was from the beginning a Muslim city whose Temple Mount—where the two Hebrew Temples had stood—must not be defiled by the Jews’ “filthy feet.” This is faith turned to utter perversion, belief not in faith’s miracles but in its denial of reality. That after the 1967 Six-Day War non-believer Moshe Dayan blithely allowed the Muslim Waqf to remain in charge of the Mount was a thoughtless and most unfortunate concession.
And so the “Al Aqsa Flood” demonstration on October 7, 2023 of jihad’s sadistic vigor, whose faith-driven denial of reality had yet remained beyond the limits of Jewish understanding, became the point of departure for a horrible correction of the consequences of Dayan’s error, a demonstration through mayhem and torture of Islam’s eternal right to this territory that it had in reality never possessed.
This brief elaboration of Jewish firstness, trivially simple as it may appear, is really all we need to keep in mind to understand the overall architecture, if not the details, of the trio of “Abrahamic” religions and their dominance of what can broadly be called the “Western” world.
With the evolution of the sacred, as of human language, the moment of its creation can be seen in retrospect to contain implicitly within itself the rest of its history. Thus what brought forth both language and the sacred was the deferral of “instinct”—of Pavlovian automatism—through designation, pointing, in the place of appropriating, as both a semiotic sign and a gesture of renunciation. It is what Derrida called the différance, the willed deferral of our body’s response to its appetite, opening up a temporal gap of “freedom” that Sartre called the néant. In this moment, we react freely, (non-instinctually, non-appetitively), to an object to which we attribute significance, whether it be the passing significance of something we designate by an identifying sign, a word, or an object of maximal significance that we hold sacred. In either case, our appetitive reaction is deferred, and at the same time, the object is designated to our interlocutor(s), whether a friend in conversation or a communal collectivity, as in a religious ceremony, as one that we have renounced assimilating as a mere object of appetite.
Similarly, what the Hebrews discovered was not “the superiority of one god over many,” but the essential unity of the sacred. And as I have previously pointed out (see especially Chronicles 840 and 842)—and as Pascal had intuited—what the notion of a unique divinity has in common with the apparent “will” of the universe is that they both necessarily favor what can endure, so to speak by definition. Into a world characterized by ever-increasing entropy, what is favored to endure includes mountains and seas, but it also includes increasingly successful, and therefore necessarily complex, negentropic forms of matter—life-forms that can reproduce themselves and seek thereby an “immortality” that conquers time. But as we know from experience, such forms, as they become liberated from their instinctual reactions, also become “self-conscious” or sentient, aware of their temporal existence as individuals—and therefore of their eventual demise, even as their species endures—such that they experience it by anticipation as a loss, as their personal death.
Whence the link between our moral conscience, summed up in the “golden rule,” that contributes to the preservation of our species, and our awareness of our unique individuality that is, ironically enough, the product of our species’ superior negentropy, and understandably appears to each individual as in conflict with it. Indeed, as technology comes closer to reproducing the hitherto unique features of the human brain, it becomes conceivable to interpret the current worldwide decline in human birth rates as a reaction to our species’ increasing dissatisfaction with the necessity of “passing on” our roles in life to our heirs—in contrast, for example, to devoting our energies (as do a number of billionaires) to prolonging our own lives in principle without limit. We may call this selfishness if we like, but we cannot deny the right of its practitioners to seek to embody in their own lives the progress of our species toward mastering its environment and thereby indefinitely extending its lifespan.
And as a result, the religious assurance of spiritual-transcendental life-after-death, essential to both Christianity and Islam, seems increasingly less believable, in contrast with the survival of our cultural heritage emphasized in the essentially this-worldly religion of Judaism. Whence the increase in the anti-Jewish resentment we call antisemitism, whose ferocity is a measure of its half-perceived and angrily denied irrationality. Whence also the increased urgency for Islam of creating signs of the historical fulfillment of its most radical prophecy, the promise of its universal reign bringing about the “end of history,” when the paradisiacal state of those who sacrificed their lives for Islam’s triumph will be extended to an entire world purged of infidels.
Under these conditions, no falsehoods are too unreasonable in order to justify the conquest and destruction of both Judaism and Christianity, as well as the blatant denial of their history. Hence the return of the Jews to Israel and the founding of the Jewish state can only be understood in the jihadist context as the prelude to Islam’s final triumph, begun on October 7, 2023.
But fortunately, the hope that the Middle East is in the process of embodying this triumph has now been shattered—one hopes, permanently—by our attack on Iran. It is now up to the USA, in alliance with Israel and hopefully other allies, to persuade Islam to renounce this unrealistic claim for the benefit of humanity and accept its place among the trio of Abrahamic religions that have shaped the civilization of the West and Middle East.