Judt and Juditism
E.A.Remler
October, 2003
Where This Title Comes From
Ideas evolve over time, and their labels change meaning accordingly. Evolution occasionally branches; one idea branches into two; an old label becomes ambiguous until each branch gets separately identified. A recent article by Tony Judt in the NY Review of Books illustrates the problem: we have an old label which is anti-Semitism, but Judt's article is not anti-Semitic. Because it nonetheless typifies an hostility to Jews that is widespread and influential, it needs to be identified and given a separate labeled.
Other currently used labels are inadequate. Anti-Zionist has a meaning that misses the deeper issue that I am after. Anti-Judaic is misleading because, at least in English, it seems to suggest merely some kind of hostility to the Jewish religion per se--its laws, customs and rituals. Anti-Jewish has been used to avoid using anti-Semitic, but is too general. Thus I have opted to presumptuously coin a new label.
Semitic comes from Shem, the name attributed to the founder of the Semites. From Judah, we can similarly coin Juditic. The first of these names is purportedly of a race, the second, a tribe, and this distinction will be seen to be especially appropriate. In this essay, I will define anti-Juditism, distinguish it from anti-Semitism, emphasize its importance, and suggest what can and should be done to answer its challenge.
Anti-Juditism and Survival
Most simply put, anti-Juditism is hostility traceable to the Jews' unique sense of themselves: the sense which arose, and to a large extent still arises from that of being chosen. Aside from the unity of God, chosen-ness is the Jews' fundamental claim: they are those who have the covenant. Chosen-ness is also fundamental to their extraordinary survival as a people with an unbroken, coherent culture: without it, such a survival is inexplicable.
An isolated culture can survive by transmitting its ways to the next generation with relatively little effort; but in proximity, cultures compete, and survival requires significant effort, which, in turn, can be motivated only by a correspondingly significant sense of self; a culture that does not think much of itself will not make much of an effort to propagate itself.
Ordinarily, most peoples make a substantial effort to survive, but nonetheless eventually fade away. Without geographic roots, this occurs after a few generations. Even when rooted, peoples conquer or are conquered, and their cultures combine and assimilate. We see that virtually every society is a patchwork of smaller peoples in various stages of integration and dissolution. Thus a normal sense of self eventually leads to loss of self; only the Jews' extraordinary sense of self could inspire the extraordinary efforts that have saved them from that fate.
Nothing has happened to cause this correlation between sense and survival to disappear. So if the Jews now lose their extraordinary sense, ordinary cultural forces will prevail and they will disappear--more rapidly without, but eventually, even with a land of their own one.
Whereas Anti-Semitism exerts an external pressure of rejection on individual Jews that tends to drive them together, thereby increasing group identity and adhesion, anti-Juditism acts from within as well as without, and corrodes that which binds them together. One can destroy people, but the other can destroy the people.
Anti-Juditism in Judt's Article
With this preliminary definition Judt's paper can be unwrapped to reveal its anti-Juditic core.
Judt assumes it as obvious, to reasonable, right-thinking people, that the idea of a Jewish state-- Jews in the majority, and with their religion/culture established by law--is an anachronism; thus, that there is "no place in the world today for a Jewish state". For Europe, Judt believes, having finally progressed to a multicultural society, all humanity must soon follow; and further, he believes that most of his readers can see this because they
"live in pluralist states which have long since become multiethnic and multicultural. "Christian Europe," pace M. Valéry Giscard d'Estaing, is a dead letter; Western civilization today is a patchwork of colors and religions and languages, of Christians, Jews, Muslims, Arabs, Indians, and many others…".
Within this apparently inevitable multicultural society, Jews will be free to preserve their culture while living at peace amongst others, including Arabs--at least eventually, after a period of benevolent external protection from their now understandably irate neighbors.
Consider the remarkable historical innocence of his proposed road map. On the basis of history, few rational Jews would risk their lives on a promise of benevolent European protection and a hope for Islamic liberalism. Or consider his view that for the Jews to resist a one-state multi-cultural solution, to demand a state in which one culture is established by law, is 'racist'. This, when such 'racist' states are the norm everywhere, and especially within Christian Europe; when addiction to racism has inspired so many of Europe's tribal wars, and justified its colonial conquests; and when Europeans--acting as the enthusiastic missionaries that recovering addicts typically become--preach anti-racism, most deliciously to the Jews.
These considerations come merely from what is evident in my synopsis; his paper generates many similar ones. But here, I want to think of them only as part of the paper's outer, visible layer that, by generating anger and inviting denunciation, diverts attention from and conceals a harder core. Anger tempts us to become embroiled in useless emotional argument.
At that core are questions concerning ideals that must be seriously addressed. Can Jews object to at least the ideal of a truly multicultural state? Is the ideal of people living democratically, and in peace and harmony, not one that we all should strive for? Is opposition to it not 'racist' almost by definition? Is the idea of a Jewish state not in opposition to the West's most modern, enlightened , and forward-looking ideals?
I write 'racist' because that is the racist word used by those who purposely ignore, or perhaps are ignorant of, law and custom concerning membership in the Jewish people; even so, the thrust of the word is correct. Jews on the whole do not accept for Israel, even as an ideal, the vision of a perfect multi-cultural democracy. Even if the whole world became as ideal as Judt imagines it soon becoming, the Jews would continue making extraordinary efforts to remain a people apart, culturally dominant in a state of their very own. Their efforts flow from, and are in support of, that special status they claim as theirs alone. That status is not 'just' in the ordinary sense of the word, and cannot be justified by ordinary criteria. Justification must transcend ordinary criteria--as does that of being divinely chosen.
A substantial number of Jews ardently subscribe to the ideals put forward in Judt's paper--so much so that they would risk their lives following his solution to the Arab-Israeli conflict. These people cannot be simply dismissed as self-hating Jews. Indeed, they take special pride in the fact that these ideals are clearly stamped with Jewish morality, and feel that their stand expresses the very essence of their culture.
They are not anti-Semitic, but they are anti-Juditic. For along with their special pride, they are embarrassed and repelled by what they perceive as their tribe's archaic, outmoded, superstitious, arrogant, and 'racist', belief in its divine election. As a consequence, in their hearts there is no truly just or otherwise compelling reason--one which transcends considerations of amity, brotherly love, good-will to all, et cetera, or reverence for martyrs, past and present, let alone mere pride and sentiment--for their tribe to survive.
The Root Problem
Summarizing up to this point: (i) anti-Juditism attacks the glue that hold Jews together as a people; (ii) and attacks the basic rationale for having a specifically Jewish state;(iii) but it is based on ideals almost universally endorsed by reasonable, forward-looking, right thinking people in the West, (iv) therefore, how can it be opposed? Should the Jews not be reasonable people?
There has always been a hard core--a remnant--of unreasonable Jews; the reasonable ones convert or simply fall away. After all, there are innumerable Gentiles who live lives more moral (either in a relativistic or absolute sense, either according to Jewish or other standards) than those of most Jews, and as moral as any Jew could hope for, so that if Judaism only means Jewish morality, there is no reason for the Jews to survive as a people. And if you want to throw in tradition, family warmth, Yiddishkeit, or what have you, these qualities can also be retained given a just, democratic, multi-cultural society. Perhaps they may disappear in time, but is preventing that future possibility worth martyrdom now--especially if the martyrs include your child?
The hard core, the unreasonable driving heart of the Jewish people, will always incur resentment and hostility except from those who agree with their extraordinary self-image--and for the foreseeable future, that does not take in many people. The root problem for Jews is satisfying themselves that that hostility is a burden--part of the burden of the covenant--worth bearing. Why is the effort needed for Jewish survival worthwhile? …What are Jews for? …. The challenge of anti Juditism which is at the heart of Judt's article must really be directed by Jews at themselves.
Before discussing that challenge, amplification, further justification, and background to what has already been said will be given.
The Problem of Emotional Subtext
Judt's paper features a degree of casual invective and bias that is perhaps surprising and certainly unnecessary. They are features that, again, are not worth angry argument; nevertheless, they are worth noting. We learn for example that:
Why this choice of words? Evenhandedness--even a mere show of it--would have been more effective. But apparently he could not (or chose not to) restrain himself. Word choice, like facial expression, is revealing: here, it reveals an obviously emotional antipathy. From a European scholar, publishing in a Jewish intellectual journal, such emotion is not easy to intellectually rationalize. Surely, something else is boiling within Mr. Judt to generate such vitriol in a plea for peace--a vitriol that certainly smells of anti-Semitism. So why is that label wrong?
To get beyond mere smell, some of the history of hostility towards Jews will be helpful. This will now be provided in a brief historical detour, that will recapitulate much that is well-known; but it will also necessarily ignore much more than is mentioned, and will raise and leave unanswered more questions than are answered.
Jewish Election Before Christianity
Anti-Juditic, but not anti-Semitic, feeling existed in the pre-Christian era. Although all groups of that era felt divinely selected to some degree --a god and its people selected and served each other--the Jews were notorious for the unreasonable lengths to which they carried this idea. All peoples fought and died for their homes, tribes, kings, and so forth; they even sacrificed their children to ensure the foundations of their homes, but only Jews martyred themselves to serve God in their particular way.
This seemed foolish to pagans, if only because it missed the purpose of the divine contract/covenant: you served your god with sacrifice, and secured victory in return. If you struggled and lost to people of another god, your contract had failed in its purpose. It then made no sense to die to renew with the old god (thereby losing the life the contract was meant to protect) when you could easily switch to a winning god.
The Jews, however, could not do this; no alternative to God existed. There was nothing to switch to. The Jews were trapped, left with only themselves to fault for defeat. They could only keep trying harder to fulfill their contractual obligations if they did not want to lose hope of future benefits.
Pagans as a rule had no empathy with the singular obstinacy of the Jews. They could follow the rationale for it, but the level of commitment to monotheism that motivated it and led to religious zealotry and martyrdom is very rarely achieved through rational thought by anyone, including, in particular, nominal monotheists--Jewish as well as Christian--of all eras.
The proverbial obstinacy of the Jews struck pagans as not merely unreasonable, but barbaric-- especially to cultivated Greeks and Romans who prided themselves on their religious moderation and ecumenism, the multiculturalism of the era. Annoyance and condescension were often expressed by the upper classes, but other levels of society living in more direct competition with the Jews, expressed serious anger when authorities granted the latter all sorts of special dispensations to avoid having to deal with their fanatical resistance to assimilation.
Intellectual insight into the pure monotheism (perhaps first made fully explicit in the style of Greek philosophy by Maimonides) that forced them to adhere so vigorously to their contract with God, was as rare amongst Jews then as it is today, but for Jews it was not required. They considered the Torah to be a record of that contract: how and when it came about and how it operated. If you believe that record, you have historical, i.e.experiental, proof of the reality of the contract.
The Christian Switch to Anti-Semitism
A majority of modern occidentals, Jews as well as Christians, no longer have such belief. The late 17th century writings of Spinoza are often used to date the beginning of serious doubts amongst influential people as to the Torah's divine inspiration. Before then, most people did believe in the divine election of the Jews; afterwards, it gradually became at best an open question.
Starting from the advent of Christianity as the state religion of Romans, almost 1500 years before that loss of belief evolved, the Church created anti-Semitism by re-interpreting divine election for its purposes. It is unnecessary to recount details of this doleful episode. What is necessary, however, is to be clear as to the basic difference in the perception of the Jews the Church's actions caused: the difference between pre-Christian anti-Jewish feeling and Christian anti-Semitism.
The essence of the matter is that the Church not only proclaimed that the Jews were stripped of their select status, but selected them for de-humanization. It did not merely deny them a high status, but asserted a low one. Jews became, as the Moslems now like to put it, virtual pigs and monkeys, kept around in pens to demonstrate, as object lessons, the wages of their sin in denying Christ's divinity.
Before the Church-triumphant, the Jews were famous throughout the ancient world for their courage in battle, for their sober, law-abiding life-style--within Judah especially, as free farmers--and for the ethics and morals that they practiced as well as preached. The latter was their special attraction to the multitudes of pagans who associated with them, and later became the first Christians.
Each and every one of these qualities was sedulously reversed by the Church in its war on the Jews. Restrictions placed on rights to bear arms, rights of citizenship, rights to own land and so on, were crafted to make Jews appear to be not courageous but cowardly, not producers but parasites, not honest but cheats, and not a famously moral people (with a morality summed up in Hillel's dictum of goodwill toward ones neighbor) but one noted for a lack of goodwill, in fact a stealthy cunning and seething hatred towards all humanity.
The degree to which this campaign succeeded in changing Jewish traits, in reality as well as in appearance, is far too complex and sensitive a question to be tackled here, but that the Jews did actually appear degraded and often de-humanized in Christian eyes is indisputable, as is the fact that very many Jews saw themselves through those eyes. Thus, the critical distinction: pagan anti-Jewish hostility in the pre-Christian era did not result in Jewish de-humanization and self-hatred; Christian anti-Semitism did.
The Transformation of Rationales I
Two thousand years of cultural conditioning are not erased in two hundred years. In fact, the advent of the modern era, which includes the loss of Church authority--part of the virtual 'Death of God' in the hearts and minds of the West--and the emancipation of the Jews, resulted in a general worsening of anti-Semitic perceptions and self-perceptions.
Educated classes freed themselves of the notion that Jewish depravity was either a cause or effect of a rejection of Christ, but an almost universal perception of actual depravity remained. It was accepted as obvious by virtually all Gentiles and worse, by most Jews as soon as they left their ghettos either physically or intellectually. The loss of a mere rationale is insufficient to dislodge such a well established and useful perception; even though the old religious anti-Semitic rationale was fading, one based on its economic consequences was already long in place.
But it gained a new vigor from the mid 18th to the mid 20th centuries for the following reason. Having been forced to survive through international trade, speculation, and finance, newly emancipated Jews were especially well equipped to thrive in the new economies (the so-called "new bourgeois order") created by the industrial revolution. Before that revolution they were perceived to suck the blood of the upper classes (that is, the only classes that then had need of capital) as usurers, and the blood of the peasants as merchants and tax collectors. Afterwards, this vision was easily extended to the new industrial working class, whose blood they sucked as capitalists. Thus, the ancient blood libel simply moved from religion to economics. This is basically how a new and even more virulent form of anti-Semitism originally attached itself to the intellectual left.
Of course, upon emancipation, the overwhelming majority of Jews, rather than being capitalists, were miserably poor. But this had no effect on the image of the Economic Jew. The poor ones were still blood-suckers albeit small-time: hucksters, cheats, and so on. One may argue with details of this image, and with reasons for it, but its general and universal acceptance is unarguable.
As an interesting and relevant example of it, its universality was commonly used to exonerate Marx--and by extension, the left--from the charge of anti-Semitism. Marx's essay On the Jewish Question is often called "anti-Semitic because it equates Jewry with the spirit of money-making, the merchant-huckster, preoccupation with self-interest and egoism-that is, with the commercialism of the new bourgeois order" (quoting here from an article by H. Draper entitled Marx and the Economic-Jew Stereotype). The basic argument is that it is unfair to single Marx out as an anti-Semite because everyone, including the Jews, was anti-Semitic in that sense at that time. The evidence for this is overwhelming and overwhelmingly depressing.
The Transformation of Rationales II
The Church gave indirect birth to both an Economic and a Racial Jew; economic, by the mechanism just discussed; racial, because a divine curse upon the Jews for their denial of Christ became transformed into a blood curse in the form of a racial characteristic. The word Semitism itself, was coined as a pseudo-scientific racial designation, and racial science assigned Jewish behavior to nature rather than nurture (Lamarckians such as the Soviets, blurred this distinction). Therefore, Jews could not be reformed, they had no escape from their fate, no hope of becoming normal and accepted members of society; they had either to be expelled or exterminated.
Fascism and Communism are similar in many ways; and these are reflected in corresponding portions of the less extreme political right and left. F. Hayek has argued that in post WWI Germany, the two differed mainly by which class-- upper-middle for the right or lower for the left--was to be favored. But left and right agreed on the supremacy of the state and on a shared hatred of liberalism. Thus the ease with which Socialists transformed themselves into National Socialists.
But to the Jews, their difference was stark and absolute. Fascism (especially German but other national versions were not different in principle) and its right wing sympathizers, subscribed to racial anti-Semitism, whereas Communists, and most Socialists, were economic anti-Semites. The latter offered reform, the former, only death. When combined with the left-right polarization in European politics, this choice naturally drove nearly all Jews to the left. But not only that; it blinded Jews to the actual hatreds underpinning left-wing anti-Semitism, which they preferred to 'understand' rather in 'scientific' terms. Furthermore, it effectively transformed many of them into anti-Semites.
Blindness and virtual anti-Semitism were already found in abundance amongst the very first emancipated Jews, but in time they became increasingly pathological. Nowhere is this seen more poignantly than in Socialist Zionism with effects that are highly relevant to this day. As H. Draper noted, it became the fashion for Zionist speakers to declare that "to be a good Zionist one must first be somewhat of an anti-Semite"; and in another quote from the past: "Labor Zionist circles are under the influence of the idea that the Return to Zion involves a process of purification from our economic uncleanness."
Post Holocaust Intellectuals
This short history has displayed no less than three distinct forms of anti-Semitism--religious, economic, and racial--all with the same label. Their differences are substantial and neither subtle nor obscure; nevertheless, the meaning of anti-Semitism in the heat of controversy easily slips and slides between them (in part because they lack distinct labels).
All three still flourish, but the Holocaust has de-legitimized them. Christianity has finally admitted to some shame, at least at official and intellectual levels, over its two thousand year attempt at matricide. Fascism and racial anti-Semitism, at least in the West, are intellectually out, except amongst the backward and unfashionable. And socialism, having gone soft, has softened its vision of the Economic Jew. None of the three is any longer imagined to be a legitimate rationale--at least to the Western intellectual class, which Judt represents.
What remains as legitimate is an anti-Juditism similar to that which existed prior to Christianity, and much of what was previously said about that period still holds in modernized form. In particular, the intellectual class still prides itself on religious moderation and ecumenism, or now more often, an atheism/agnosticism that includes multiculturalism, and still finds the Jewish sense of self to be unreasonable, if not barbaric.
Intellectuals are also connected to the more recent past. For various reasons, they are now largely a part of the soft-left, a group that as a whole retains its belief in the Economic Jew. This is evident, for example, in its insistent association of Jews, Israel, and Zionism, with the evils of American imperialism, capitalism, and the global economy.
As part of the soft-left, intellectuals share this vision to a degree--but with a difference. Anti-Semites tend to be prejudiced against Jews at a personal level. They know that each Jew has an ineradicable stain, applied either by God, by nature, or by nurture (i.e. religious, racial, or economic anti-Semitism respectively). As this stain is known to exist, there is no need to meet and judge individual Jews; prejudice is justified. On the other hand a distinguishing mark of the modern intellectual class is a self-image of intelligence and nobility of character that demands an unprejudiced acceptance, if not love, of all the peoples of the world. In fact, it is quite possible that not merely some but a large fraction of Judt's best friends are Jewish, considering where he is coming from intellectually, geographically, and politically. In any case, Judt knows that most Jewish intellectuals are reasonable people, and that most of the trouble is caused by an unreasonable core of fanatics.
When that trouble appears to seriously threaten world order, however, serious anger appears, often having the anti-Semitic smell evident in Judt's article. This being said, it is still worth re-emphasizing that conflating intellectual anti-Juditism with anti-Semitism is not only conceptually incorrect but also self-defeating. Just as a misdirected attack invites a dangerous flanking counter-attack, so also a misdirected epithet: a proper label will ensure a proper direction of attack, or defense, in a war of words. In counterattack, intellectuals will heatedly, self-righteously, and correctly, deny being anti-Semitic. They then become the aggrieved party, slip away clean, and thereby avoid explaining (to themselves as well as other) their animus against Israel.
The Challenge
Quoting from Maurice Samuel's The Professor and the Fossil,
"What, then, is the Jewish people? It is a continuous association of individuals, now some thirty five hundred or four thousand years old, working out an experiment in the relationship to God."
This description encapsulates nearly everything important: the past continuity, the continuous working out, the experimental nature of the enterprise, and the relationship to God, the last being (pace atheists) no more than the traditional name for the central mystery of existence--Why is there anything rather than nothing at all? The Jewish people are an experiment that seeks the best way to focus human attention on that most important question, and the best way to have it inform the conduct of life.
Missing only, in Samuel's description, is what has been already mentioned: that Jews are continually challenged to remember and truly believe in the spirit of his description, and thereby to remember why they should survive as such a continuous association of individuals. The core of Judt's article challenges them to remember.
The Jewish experiment being that of an entire people, I will refrain from discussing its results--the methods it has discovered--in the few remaining paragraphs of this essay; but there are a few points I wish to stress concerning experimental circumstances and methodology.
So let us be of good cheer. We are playing our historical parts, Mr. Judt is playing his part, none of it is essentially new, and if we keep to our parts, history provides us with the largest possible fund of solid experiential evidence that our contract will continue to be renewed.