Demolishing the demented logic of Western anti-Semitism
There are only 16 million Jews in the world, so why are they so important to the West? It’s an insanity of our education system that so many don’t know the answer.
We saw again on Yom Kippur, the Day of Atonement, the holiest day in the Jewish calendar, at an innocent synagogue in Manchester, another murderous, terror attack.
As the second anniversary of October 7, 2023, the most depraved and sadistic terrorist attack we’ve seen in modern times – when Hamas slaughtered innocent women, children and men, most of them Israeli but also some unlucky foreign workers and visitors – comes into focus, it’s striking that the chief international consequence has been a growing hatred of Israel and hostility to Jews.
Trump’s deal may not work, but it’s certainly the most hopeful development in the past two years. He has gone to great lengths to reassure Qatar and the other Gulf Arab nations, even giving Qatar a security guarantee, an unheard of gesture in the Trump White House. Because it’s just a presidential decree, not a treaty ratified by the Senate, it’s a lot less than a NATO commitment. Its main purpose is to assure the Qataris Israel won’t again launch a mission, even a targeted assassination, on Qatari soil.
If in exchange Trump gets peace in Gaza, it’s a very good deal. The great thing for the Palestinians is the deal involves America in the success of their future. If they’re smart, that’s a big plus.
But Qatar’s future role remains very unclear. The Qatari government walks both sides of the street. It has been a financial backer of Hamas. Qatar sponsors Al Jazeera, which puts out vast amounts of anti-Semitic and anti-American propaganda. Qatar is one of the biggest donors to US universities. It’s not sponsoring US civics or Western great books.
Yet Qatar also hosts the biggest US military base in the Middle East, is designated a major non-NATO ally and helps with many US objectives. Does Qatar really want peace between Israel and the Palestinians, or down the track to resume sponsoring the worst movements?
What have the Jews got to do with us?
One sobering truth is that even if, through some miracle, perfect peace between Israel and the Palestinians came, it wouldn’t end profound hostility to Israelor the pervasive hostility to Jews creeping back into the mainstream in Western societies. Pathological anti-Semitism long predates modern Israel. And it has many toxic but living streams feeding it.
Anti-Semitism is first and foremost monstrously unjust to Jews. But it’s more than that. It’s born in part of a hatred of the West itself, for the Jewish tradition is fundamental to the West, historically and today.
Most Western analysis misses this central point. All anti-Semitism today proceeds in part from hostility to the West. As Melanie Phillips argues in The Builder’s Stone: “People (in the West) think that Judaism is distant from their own concerns. This is one reason why the eruption of anti-Semitism in the West is a cause of such astonishment and irritation. Why, Westerners ask themselves, are the Jews at the centre of every drama? Why is everyone else constantly having to think about these people? What have the Jews got to do with us?
“The answer is everything. Judaism is the West’s civilisational soul. Christianity itself, the institutional foundation of that civilisation, rests upon Jewish precepts that Christianity thus channelled into Western culture. The Islamists, whose hatred of the Jews is embedded in their religious ideology, grasp this very well. They understand that without Jewish values, there would have been no Western modernity. So in order to resist modernity and destroy the West for Islam, they must wipe out the Jews.”
Phillips is speaking specifically of Islamist extremists, not of Muslims generally, though hostility to Jews is widespread in Arab culture. Western anti-Semitism long predates Arab anti-Semitism and derives initially from gross mistakes of interpretation by some Christians.
The Jews’ most important achievement
Christianity, like Judaism, has been overwhelmingly a force for good. But of all the things that trouble the Christian conscience historically, nothing is worse than the inheritance of anti-Semitism, which all mainstream Christian denominations now denounce. Sadly and bizarrely, anti-Semitism is making a comeback in some parts of the Christian right in the US, associated especially with figures such as Tucker Carlson and Candace Owens.
There are only 16 million-odd Jews in the world, so how are they crucial to the West? The Jewish religion emerged perhaps 4000 years ago in the Middle East. Our chief source for information about it is the Hebrew scriptures, commonly called the Old Testament. At this distance we can’t know or verify many facts from that period.
The Jews’ most important achievement was their religion. Pulitzer prize-winning novelist Marilynne Robinson, author of the exquisite Reading Genesis, argues the Book of Genesis is one of the most important books in history. It sets the foundation for Judaism, Christianity and Islam and indeed for much of the subsequent perception of the human condition itself.
It’s right to talk of the Judeo-Christian tradition. Some Christians persecuted Jews. But the Old Testament is full of wisdom that shaped Christianity and shaped Western civilisation. The Old Testament is regarded as sacred scripture by Christians. They must revere it, for its words were always on Jesus’ lips. More than five billion Bibles have been printed. They all contain the Old Testament. The Old Testament gets a shockingly bad press these days. It’s a work of Jewish genius that shaped humanity and is full of warmth, love and deep ethics. It surely has its difficult passages, and it’s partly a record of a very violent time.
The genius of the Old Testament
Genesis provides the first, still the key, statement of universal human rights: God created humanity in the likeness and image of God. It provides the first great statement of environmentalism: God looked on his creation and saw that it was good. The whole of the Old Testament, as Jonathan Sacks has argued, is a polemic against human sacrifice. Sometimes directly, sometimes in indirect fashion, it’s a polemic against most barbaric practices of the pagan world. Where it can’t oppose these outright, as with slavery, it seeks always better conditions for slaves.
But beyond social conditions, over the hundreds of years of its composition, there is a sublime and transcendent moral beauty to the Jewish scriptures. Consider this from the Book of Micah: “What does the Lord require of you but to act justly, love tenderly and walk humbly with your God.” Surely the most sublime statement of ethics and purpose in all literature.
Jews and Christians believe God chose to disclose himself through the Jewish people. For religious believer, or atheist, it’s striking that while the Old Testament is the story of the Israelite nation, God is already recognised as the universal God. Jews are called upon to be a moral light to the nations and the balance between the particular, Israelites, and the universal, all humanity, is superbly accomplished.
Consider the command in Deuteronomy: “You will also love the stranger, for you were strangers in the land of Egypt.” Jews are explicitly commanded 36 times in the Old Testament to love and welcome the stranger. This is more than any other command.
There’s a breathtaking melody all through the Old Testament in which the particular and the universal interact. The universal subverts, transcends and fulfils the particular. Thus in the captivating Book of Ruth, Ruth, though a Moabite and not Jewish, becomes the great-grandmother of the greatest of the Jewish kings, David. Similarly, in the Book of Jonah God shows his concern for the Ninevites, enemies of the Jews. Throughout the Old Testament there are good people, outside the Jewish community, who are plainly right with God.
The Old Testament authors are also wise enough to realise that, even in the Jewish people’s wrestled dialogue with God, not every problem is solved. The Book of Job is still the most profound meditation on innocent suffering we have. And, finally, it doesn’t offer a complete moral explanation of this suffering but understands the element of continuing mystery in God’s purposes.
It is incidentally an insanity of our education system that students, unless they go to a pretty good Jewish or Christian school, will never encounter the incomparable ethical, historical, literary and religious genius of the Old Testament.
Why are Jews so successful?
The great British historian of the 20th century, Paul Johnson, in his A History of the Jewish People, argued that the world owes to the Jewish people “the basic moral furniture of the human mind”. Johnson wrote: “To them we owe the idea of equality before the law, both divine and human; of the sanctity of life and the dignity of the human person; of the individual conscience and so of personal redemption; of the collective conscience and so of social responsibility; of peace as an abstract ideal and love as the foundation of justice…”
Why then have Jews been so persecuted for so long when Christianity built so much on the inheritance of Judaism? Even before Christianity there was anti-Jewish sentiment in the ancient world because the moral vision of its monotheism was threatening to many pagan customs and beliefs. Then as theological differences between Christians and Jews developed, some Christians wickedly took a path of hostility to Jews as people. There came the accusation that Jews were Christ-killers. In fact, Jesus was put to death by Roman authorities and that has not led to Christian anti-Italianism.
John Barton, in his splendid book on biblical translation, The Word, concurs with Tom Wright that even the word “Jews” is mistaken in some of the New Testament and would have been better translated as the Judaeans.
In any event, from a few centuries after Christ right up until the 1930s, Jews in the West lived with differing degrees of persecution or restriction. Some of the greatest thinkers of Christianity erred disastrously in their writings about Jews. The most terrible example is Martin Luther, though there are many others.
Paradoxically, Jews became immensely successful in many Western societies, particularly the US, though there is no sadder book than Amos Elon’s The Pity of It All, which recounts Jewish experience, and magnificent Jewish achievements, in Germany from 1743 to 1933. All of which was destroyed in Adolf Hitler’s mad Holocaust.
Why did Jews become so successful, such that a fifth of Nobel prizes have been won by Jews? I believe no race or ethnicity is more or less genetically gifted than any other. The distinctive Jewish genius is to be found in religion, culture and circumstance.
The Jews are truly the “People of the Book”. Their culture profoundly values education, not least in their own books. They’re accustomed to memorising substantial portions of their scripture and this itself is a powerful tool of intellectual development. The moral discussion of Jewish scriptures is the heart of rabbinical reasoning, another powerful engine of intellectual development.
Family values
Jewish culture also stresses the centrality of the family. I’ve had many Jewish friends and thus have been invited to countless Friday night Shabbat dinners. The family gathering on a Friday night is central to Jewish life. Many Jewish families who do not actually believe in God nonetheless recite the prayers and observe the rituals for Shabbat dinner. They do this to honour their culture and their history.
Many cultures display versions of these virtues. In Western societies immigrant groups, Chinese or Indians say, typically outperform the host society educationally in the first and second generation before they feel completely comfortable. The Jews were never allowed to feel completely comfortable so they always had an extra edge of motivation.
Anti-Semitic sentiment is adaptive and protean. Some Christian leaders historically protected Jews but because Jews were banned from many professions some became money lenders and financiers. The history of persecution was particularly perverse. For 1000 years or more Jews were persecuted in part for being Christ-killers. Then when the Enlightenment came along they were disparaged for holding to the Bible. Then when the modern left came along Jews were the enemy because they played a role in finance.
Malign players invented conspiracies Jews were allegedly involved in. The prime example was tsarist forgery The Protocols of the Elders of Zion, which had Jews exercising secret manipulative power to take over the world. These tropes recur again and again with new twists. The contemporary left in its mad obsession with critical race theory and the like has decided that a crude analysis of power is the only valid interpretive prism.
Everyone is either oppressor or oppressed. Israelis, Jews generally, are oppressors in this mad scheme.
That’s not to say Israel never makes mistakes. I think Benjamin Netanyahu’s recent military policy grossly excessive. The military benefit of pursuing the last few Hamas operatives is disproportionately small compared with the suffering the policy is causing.
Nonetheless, the left’s relentless demonisation of Israel, and attribution to Israel of every exaggerated evil imaginable, in which the Albanese government has dishonourably participated, is demented and wicked.
Anti-Semitism among the American Right
Now there’s a new and dangerous outbreak of anti-Semitism on the American Right. It’s born of the interaction of several factors. A number of figures on the right, such as Carlson and Owens, have had tremendous success on social media. On social media the algorithms promote and reward novelty, extremism, intensity of opinion and transgression.
This, plus the collapse in authority of traditional institutions, creates an environment ready-made for conspiracy theories. Join this to the blind, almost mad, extreme isolationism of some parts of the Trump coalition, which is radically different from the simple distaste for needless foreign entanglements involved in the rational version of Trump’s America First, and you get endless new conspiracy theories involving Israel and Jews.
Israel keeps manipulating Washington into costly Middle East engagements, in this view. Beyond all this, the critique of liberal America among some right-wingers has become so intense it’s almost a hatred of modern America itself. And American Jews are an essential part of the story of modern America, which some on the right now hate.
And then the left having made such a grotesque fetish of race, some on the right are embracing the idea of a persecuted white race. So Jews once more are abused on racial grounds.
Trump himself shows no sign of being influenced by this madness. He is solidly pro-Israel. But he and Vice-President JD Vance don’t smack it down. Carlson, some of whose broadcasts lie somewhere between mad and disgusting, is still a valued part of the MAGA coalition even as he espouses policies directly opposed to Trump.
This is dangerous for Jews, and for all of us, because as politics and society become more extreme, the extremes meet up with each other. One place they meet is the age-old, foul evil of anti-Semitism.
Perhaps the enemy of all humanity has never forgiven the Jews for introducing the Ten Commandments. The debt that civilisation owes to Judaism is everlasting. Shalom to them.
More Coverage
If Donald Trump’s plan brings peace to Gaza he will not only save the lives of thousands of innocent Gazan civilians, he will strike a blow against a global resurgence of anti-Semitism, the hatred of Jews, the oldest, most corrupt, irrational and corrosive hatred in history.