As reported by the Jewish News Syndicate on January 14, 2025, a recent survey by the Anti-Defamation League shows that world antisemitism has increased, that young people are more antisemitic than their elders, and in short, that 46% of the world’s adults “harbor deeply entrenched antisemitic attitudes.” As a concrete example, it suffices to note that the world’s overall reaction to the barbaric Hamas incursion on October 7, 2023 was an increased level of Jew-hatred, followed by hostilely biased reporting of Israel’s military response, UN and ICC condemnations, and a variety of expressions of hostility to Israel and sympathy for the Palestinians whose suffering is inevitably presented as the result of “genocidal” Israeli war crimes.
In a way, the Jews should be proud that they do not easily fit into the role of victim. It took the Holocaust to make this characterization stick for a couple of generations, and it shouldn’t surprise us that today’s young people are no longer concerned with nor fully aware of it.
That so many are so deeply envious of the Jews may not bring the latter any material or affective benefits, but it is in many ways the greatest compliment one can pay a people: a sign that what antisemites cannot altogether avoid admitting is a sense of inferiority toward the “elder brothers” of Western sacrality, which is as much as to say, of Western humanity.
Jewish efforts at humility have not succeeded in reducing the hate they arouse, nor have their efforts at reducing enemy civilian casualties make their enemies any less bloodthirsty. All humans are equally human, but the Jews’ historic firstness suffices in many cases to inspire others to deny this truth, even in the absence of any manifestation of Jewish arrogance.
The danger for GA of insisting on Jewish exceptionalism is that the specific hatred Jews inspire distracts us from drawing general conclusions. For the most anthropologically significant question about the Jews is why monotheism which, although clearly the minimal, Ockham’s-razor theory of the sacred, is not after all practiced all over the world, cannot avoid acting as a curse on its discoverers.
To mention in comparison Akhenaton’s attempt to reduce the Egyptian pantheon to a single god can only be to contrast to the Hebrew example what is in effect a “minimal polytheism.” The Hebrew God is not a god, despite the traces of such belief in the use of the plural Elohim, or in the passage in Genesis 3 where Adam’s sin is denounced as a step toward eating the fruit of the tree of life and acquiring immortality. Although these passages are indeed part of the Torah, it is clear that they are witnesses to Hebrew religion’s ancient roots rather than signs of doubting God’s singularity. They reflect rather the confidence that the believers’ mature belief will have no reason to see them as excuses for backsliding, given their anthropological intuition that the singularity of God is not merely that of the center of a given scene (where other centers are possible) but of centrality itself.
But centrality, you might say, is an abstraction; a real scene has a real center, not a “centrality.” And precisely, a God embodying centrality is not a “natural” being, even an imaginary one. God is everywhere, as we say; he is at the center of all scenes, whose specific centers imitate his divinity. But there is no use in attempting to describe a universe, however intellectualized, in which the sacred can be made to appear as a participant; the sacred, the principle of the Für-sich-Sein or différance that frees humanity from the material world, is the prior condition of any conception of a “universe,” or simply of a scene, including those that we find already in cave-drawings or marked by handprints or inhabited by the earliest stone or clay figures.
There is really no mystery about the hostility engendered by the first people to invent/discover the unity of the sacred. “The sacred” can be spoken of as an abstraction, but the One God, whose “name” cannot be pronounced, is both an anthropological discovery and the object of a revelation to a specific people. Whence the necessity of an additional step in order that this revelation of the unity of the sacred be transmissible to other peoples, that it form the basis of a “universal religion.” Or to relate it more closely to its historical context, that the revelation of monotheism might challenge and eventually defeat the polytheism that surrounded it.
That a similar process did not take place in China or India, for example, shows that such a development was not inevitable, but given the subsequent (and barring total disaster, irreversible) course of history, in which Christian civilization came to dominate the West and created modernity while Islam as the religion of the West’s outsiders flourished in its wake, it seems clear that Christianity’s trinitary theology was the most anthropologically satisfactory means of transcending the indelibly “tribal” nature of Judaism to become a potentially universal religion. It is only apparently paradoxical that the minimal expression of monotheism could not become a universal religion, any more than the originary sign could become the basis of a universal language. What made Christianity a universal or transnational religion was necessarily a result of its break with Judaism, which had been in its origin the response of a specific people to the polytheisms that surrounded it—a people preoccupied to assert its difference rather than, as would have at that time been inconceivable, seeking to convert these believers to its own faith.
For Christianity’s “transcendence” of Judaism took place in the context of the polytheistic universalism of the Roman Empire, whose dilution of the sacred into a plurality of gods and a plurality of polytheistic sub-religions was in effect a reductio ad absurdum of polytheism as a universal belief-system. The first Christians saw themselves as superseding Judaism by their recognition of the Messiah, whom the Hebrew texts had portrayed as the savior of their people in an apocalyptic future, but whom the Christians took the “absurd” step of situating now, in the person of Jesus. In Old-Testament times, only the Hebrews had felt the presence of the One God, whereas Jesus’ crucifixion took place now, before the eyes of the Romans as well as the Jews. And accordingly, in all four Gospels, a Roman Centurion, described as witnessing an earthquake that heralded Jesus’ death and tore the veil of the Temple, declared Jesus to be the son of God (e.g., Matthew 27:54)—the first moment of the transformation of the tribal religion of Judaism into the universal religion of Christianity.
As a result, the early Christians saw themselves as called upon to witness their faith by accepting martyrdom on Jesus’ example. And no doubt the willingness of these martyrs to bear suffering unto death as proof of their faith demonstrated the superior performativity of monotheistic religion to that of polytheism, whose gods’ unproblematic immortality, as we saw in the Iliad, had no use for human martyrdom—just as its conception of human afterlife was, as Odysseus discovered, one of diminishment rather than the fulfillment of divine judgment in the spirit of Dante’s Commedia.
The Trinity, although a fourth-century construction, was in its primary feature of making the “Son” a “person” of God along with the Father implicit in the worship of Jesus as Christ, as not in any way opposable to God the Father, yet as a separate “person” of Him. And what is perhaps even more remarkable, the third person of the Trinity, their messenger the Holy Spirit—whether “spirated” by both Father and Son, or just by the Father, as in the Orthodox church—anchors the human and the sacred in language as the primordial expression of humanity. Even Aristotle’s awareness of the centrality of mimesis to humanity does not cut as sharp an anthropological contour as John’s Ἐν ἀρχῇ ἦν ὁ λόγος—In the beginning was the Word.
Where in Genesis the One God had created the world with words, in the Christian version, the logos and the Son were alike persons of the Father-Creator—nor can one read this line from John without equating them, even before the immediately following passages make this parallel explicit (e.g., 1:10-11 “He was in the world / That had its being through him / And the world did not know him. / He came to his own domain / And his own people did not accept him.”) The Son’s eternity as (for Roman Catholics) the co-spirator of the Word demonstrates that what we see as before and after, as firstness and lateness, is in the realm of the sacred an illusion.
It is only in this perspective that Hebrew monotheism, incapable of accomplishing what Hegel would call the Aufhebung of its own firstness, can be experienced as excluding other peoples from the Jews’ privileged relationship with God, simply by the fact of situating their religious discovery in time, as history—failing which, we must not forget, the subsequent “absurd” Christian synthesis would have been inconceivable.
Epilogue
This seems to me the appropriate moment for me to recall what I consider my most memorable conversation with René Girard.
René never saw the point of my analyses of the origin of language, and he viewed my subsequent attempts to “minimalize” my hypothesis of the scene of origin, very different from his insistence on scapegoating or “emissary murder,” as a betrayal of his vision of “fundamental anthropology.”
Nonetheless, I would trace my first real understanding of what I would call the Judeo-Christian sense of the sacred to a brief exchange with René during my student years at Hopkins in the early 1960s, decades before my speculations about language.
In this scene that I have often returned to in my reflections on the sacred, I picture myself standing with René behind Gilman Hall.
Speaking as a Jew to a Christian, I express skepticism that a man could be le fils de Dieu—the son of God.
René’s reply: Nous sommes tous fils de Dieu—we are all sons of God.
Whether or not this assertion is fully in accord with Catholic dogma, it will always embody for me the essence of what we must call Judeo-Christianity, the foundation of Western civilization’s understanding of the human.
Biblical citations are taken from The Jerusalem Bible (Doubleday, 1966).