No doubt there are varieties of Christianity, such as Unitarianism, that reject the miraculous element in the Trinitarian church, considering Jesus merely as an exemplary human being and denying the Resurrection. But these varieties have never in any sense replaced the original; they reflect the tension between Christianity’s native Tertullianism and the Enlightenment. It seems obvious that the central focus of the Trinity, Jesus’ role as the Son, is not merely an integral part but the very core of Christianity—in other words, that Tertullian’s vision cannot realistically be denied.
Indeed, when it comes to minimalism, Judaism is a far better candidate, since God’s human-like activities all belong to the past, so that belief in Hashem takes place in a world where we have no reason to expect him to intervene even verbally. Thus the sole significant difference between the Hebrew One God and what GA calls simply “the sacred” is defined by His “historical” role in the Tanakh or Hebrew Bible, and what taking this role as historical truth entails—the object of the rabbinate’s infinite rereading of the text and its commentaries. Where Christian fundamentalists had difficulty accepting Darwin’s theory insofar as it contradicted the text of Genesis, Judaism accepts our experience of historical reality as in effect an interpretation of the Biblical text, unbound by narrow literalism. In contrast, for Christianity to abandon the “absurdity” of God’s actions by denying the Resurrection would be to destroy its fundamental connection to the sacred; if Jesus is merely an “exemplary” human, then Christianity is a moral doctrine like Stoicism, and its rites are merely the equivalent of historical commemorations. To deny God’s ability to realize and demonstrate the truth of the Trinity would be the equivalent of denying his creation in Genesis I.
Whereas the other miracles of the New Testament are of the same kind as those of the Old: “absurdities” that do not profoundly trouble our common-sense ontology and that are of the same type as the miraculous events in fairy tales, the Resurrection is of another kind altogether. Jesus’ human suffering on the Cross is depicted as real, and we must identify with him in the horror of his agony. Yet he has promised eternal life to his disciples: “I am the resurrection, and the life: he that believeth in me, though he were dead, yet shall he live: And whosoever liveth and believeth in me shall never die…” (John 11:25-26). Whence his appearances to his disciples subsequent to the discovery of the empty tomb, in which he makes clear he has returned to life, confirm, not that he has escaped death, but that he has died and subsequently returned to Earth in his “eternal” form, as his believers had been told they too would be.
Indeed, the minimal difference between the Jewish and the Christian attitudes to the sacred is this Christian insistence on the persistence of the miraculous. The New Testament was written in the context of Jesus’ life in the present time, and the Church’s insistence that miracles still occur prolongs—as does our calendar—this presentness indefinitely into the human future. In Judaism, rabbis and scholars can argue about the afterlife, but there are no affirmations of the persistence of the miraculous in our times.
The notion of “eternal life,” as promised by Jesus to his believers, is an essential element of Christianity, in contrast to Judaism, precisely because Christianity has no “people” of its own; all are welcome to become Christians, but Christendom is neither a people like the Jews nor an Umma like the potentially world-encompassing community of Muslims. As Jesus repeats his sacrifice regularly in the Eucharist, the faithful receive the renewed promise of the above-quoted verses as individuals.
And it is no accident that arguably the greatest masterpiece of medieval literature is Dante’s Commedia, which conforms to the Catholic understanding of the afterlife as the perpetuation of individual souls. The perpetuation of the “tribe” through the generations that is the focus of Jewish ritual, and that becomes in Islam the promise of the world-wide extension of the Umma, is rejected in favor of the persistence of the individual soul in communion with The Son.
It is no accident that, just as the richness of individuality we find in the Commedia is no longer conceivable in the modern nation-states of Europe, so European Christianity itself is increasingly more a historic glory than a lived reality. The rejected suggestion that the reopened Notre Dame de Paris charge tourists for entry is a sad recognition that Notre Dame has become more a national monument to visit than a cathedral in which to perform one’s devotions. The increasing religious dominance of Islam in Europe reflects the energy that post-colonial resentment has added to its promise of world conquest, that is, as an Umma. In this respect, the Jews reunited after their millennial dispersal increasingly view Israel as the Umma’s inverse image; not a product of world-conquest, but simply their own little country—yet one that (necessarily, one might say) includes a piece of the Muslim Waqf, where the two concepts of peoplehood come into open conflict.
And however much the Islamists believe in their paradise and 72 virgins, the real stimulus to their faith unto death is indeed the dream of achieving their goal of world conquest. Whereas the Jews would be happy simply to possess Israel without the surrounding hostility—and will fight to the death to preserve it. Indeed, the infuriating realization that, however modestly, the Jews have in fact already satisfied their territorial dream is no doubt the most powerful stimulus to Islamist Jew-hatred. For is it not a point of humiliation that the Jews now occupy their historical homeland, having remained after all these millennia a single people, so that in consequence, the atavistic dream of Islamic conquest has revealed itself as more a response to the creation of Israel than an authentic project?
Hence the Palestinian Arabs are presented as a separate nationality by both the Christian West and the Islamic East as a symbol of Islam’s dissatisfaction, not so much at not having conquered the world, but at seeing the Jews returned to the homeland that Islamism refuses in any way to recognize—naming al-masjid al-aqsa (the farther—i.e., from Mecca—place of worship) the very location of the two Hebrew Temples, and outraged at its possible contact with the Jews’ “filthy feet.” As Girard knew so well, mimetic desire is an endless source of ironies.
The above leads me to the following unsettling thought:
At the time of Israel’s creation, the cliché was that, now that the Jews had finally returned to their ancient homeland, they would become just like all other nations, their différance having been their existence in exile and their need to define themselves as a people in other people’s lands. But the truth is exactly the opposite. While the Jews were in the Galut, people had as an excuse for disliking them that— particularly in an era when, considering that most of the population was attached to the land, nations were composed of reasonably stable mixtures of peoples—they were different, and at the very least could not simply be included in local social groups. Unless they converted, the Jews could not intermarry with their host populations, and so even forgetting about their elder-brother “Firstness,” wherever they lived, even in what had formerly been their homeland, they were in the scapegoatable position of quasi-outsiders.
But now that they have a homeland in Israel, after being obliged to defeat the armies of neighboring countries, and now that they have become a power on the world stage to match their intellectual achievements…
…the reasons to hate the Jews have only multiplied. Bringing together their European heritage plus that of the Mizrachi Jews expelled from the neighboring countries, they have shown the Muslims (and Christians) of these nations how much more skillful they have been in dealing with the tools of modernity. And their very insistence on granting the Muslim and Christian Arabs equal rights is just one more humiliation, if not for these Israeli Arabs themselves, then for those of the surrounding countries, who are forced to see these ethnic brothers and sisters in far more prestigious and wealthy conditions than themselves, a situation to which their rulers can only respond by urging on them the opposite of the “positive mimesis” that would lead them to emulate these lucky souls.
In a word, after gloating for 2000 years that the Jews are cursed and “wandering,” their neighbors now have had to face the fact that, as a people (despite their comically awkward political life—for as they say, where there are two Jews, and even more so, Israelis, there are at least three views), the Jews are pound for pound the most successful of all, if only because they have constantly been winnowed by the crudest form of Darwinian selection: that exercised by their fellow humans.
Thus the antisemitism we are witnessing today throughout Europe and in some areas of the US, especially on university campuses, is all too clearly founded more directly on simple resentment than on the old complex of supersessionism and scapegoating. The Jews are not being blamed for the latest plague, but simply for defending themselves against barbarous violence. Finding reasons to accuse them of “genocide” is so transparent an inversion that it points to a quasi-hysterical state of dissatisfaction, particularly in a Europe whose inhabitants prefer to view their increasing fear of Muslim self-assertion not as submission (the translation of Islam, as well as the title of Houellebecq’s possibly prophetic novel—Soumission—about France’s takeover by Muslims) but as a sign of their generosity to the victims of Jewish “genocide.”
Thus after the entirely mythical medieval “blood libel” accusing the Jews of crimes they never committed, Israel’s current Gaza military operation is truly a godsend; the Jews are actually killing people! So that, forgetting about the jihadists who beheaded Samuel Paty and shot up the Bataclan and the Charlie Hebdo office a few years ago, the Europeans can identify with the victimary Palestinians whose body-counts are calculated by Hamas itself in accusing the Jews of “genocide”—as if to demonstrate that Hitler was only wisely anticipating the horrors the Jews themselves would have perpetrated generations earlier had they had the chance.
In contrast to the old antisemitism, this new variety is virtually unconnected to the experiences of daily life. It’s not the memories of the Jewish tailor down the street who made the pants too long or the moneylender who charged too much interest, but the images in the paper and on TV of suffering Palestinians that provoke this new variety, not to be sure in the majority of the population, but in enough malcontents to comfort radicalized Muslim immigrants in their quasi-pogroms. No doubt the Amsterdam “pogrom” was hardly comparable to Kristallnacht, but its spirit was there—along with the authorities’ refusal to protect the Jews that has been witnessed in a number of other street incidents, including those on American and now British and other European university grounds.
Is this refusal motivated by European hatred of the Jews? I think rather by the confused and uneasy desire to be “nice” to these potentially dangerous immigrants, whose Jew-hatred one does not share directly, but is willing to accept at second hand, in contrast to the Jews whose very peacefulness can be seen as an attempt to obscure the cause of their assailants’ anger: a combination of cowardice and self-justification that makes it easy to choose sides.
After Trump’s return to the presidency, with the US firmly in the Zionist camp, things will surely be different from the Obama-Biden years, and America’s strong support of Israel will make her allies’ quasi-neutrality much harder to maintain. How this will mesh with Trump’s desire not to become involved in foreign conflicts is impossible to predict with certainty. As David Wurmser makes clear in his many-layered analysis for the Jewish National Syndicate https://www.jns.org/reflections-on-the-outlandish-navigating-the-strategic-earthquake-in-the-fertile-crescent/ , there are many players in the Middle East, and Trump’s presidency, following up on Israel’s aggressive self-defense, makes any confident prediction of coming developments impossible to gauge. But it is precisely in such situations that a strong sense of moral judgment and the courage to stand up for it are most valuable. The US is still the world’s greatest power—when it is willing to assert itself.
Whether this will lead to peace or a worldwide revolt against American power along with that of its Israeli ally is unclear. But of one thing we can be sure: antisemitism, Jew-hatred, is not now and may never be ready to disappear. Now that the West is beset by White Guilt, it finds it hard indeed to resist the temptation to choose as scapegoats for that guilt the still-surviving members of the people who, in however diplomatic a fashion, cannot cease to remind their fellows that they are the biological and cultural heirs of the creators of Western civilization’s conception of the sacred—its “chosen people,” to coin a phrase.