I
In the previous Chronicle, I pointed out the curious fact that in the upcoming presidential election, respectability,” as represented, say, by the Swifties, would definitely choose Harris over Trump. Such respectability as remains today is far indeed from Burkean respect for tradition. Yet it is accompanied by the same serene self-confidence. The Swifties, after all, are unspoiled young girls who look up to Taylor as a model of decent behavior. They have almost nothing in common with antisemitic or anti-Western demonstrators, let alone with Hamas terrorists. Yet they undoubtedly see Harris not merely as more respectable than Trump, but as a role-model, whereas he, associated with “deplorables,” is anything but. Little care they about Kamala’s past adventures with Willie Brown or her far-left stands on nearly all issues.
For between the Left and the “Joy” overflowing at last month’s DNC, there has emerged a natural bond that allows left-wing politicians to see themselves, like Nancy Pelosi kneeling to the ghost of George Floyd, as good Christians—not in the stuffy old Puritan sense, but as postmodern embodiments of Christianity’s essence. Indeed, the attachment of these self-styled liberals to the Palestinians, however murderous, is for them the highest expression of Christianity’s ideal: care for victims that sets them above their powerful oppressors.
How could this apparently Christian ideal draw the respectable to the genocidal torturers and rapists who invaded Israel last October?
It is easy enough to put the blame on the murderous culprits, the Palestinians who refuse to accept the existence of a Jewish state on “their” Waqf, indeed insisting retrospectively that no Jewish temples or other marks of possession had ever existed in Jerusalem, and whose terrorist organizations such as Hamas seek to enforce their will even at the sacrifice of their own (but preferably other) lives. But if the values evoked to defend these actions did not have their roots in the ultimate sources of our “respectable” traditions, they could not be used to justify them—or at least to justify the principle behind them, so that the details could be swept under the carpet.
Anthropologists have studied the variety of moral systems that human societies have edified over the millennia to the end of preserving themselves through the generations, and there seems little use in seeking to conceive abstractly an ideal system that will bring happiness to all, or even a maximal quantity of it. We have all seen how successful Marxism has been in creating “communism” as Marx himself conceived it—as the “realm of freedom.” At best, we can forgive Marx for conceiving “scientific socialism” without realizing what Marxists would call its “internal contradictions.”
The fact is that the West is still dominated by the three Abrahamic religions, of which the two most numerous are spin-offs of the Hebrew religion now called Judaism.
I have often referred to the text in Matthew 20:16, “So the last shall be first, and the first last…” as a prophecy that, if taken as an expression of desire, would be an expression of the “last’s” resentment. Certainly this is not a faithful Christian interpretation of the Sermon on the Mount, which leaves it to HaShem to chastise the Pharisees and other “hypocrites,” but one cannot deny that it sounds suspiciously like the war-cry of the sans-culottes on 14 July 1789.
Might we then find in this resentment, transfigured in theory but not necessarily in practice, the Achilles’ heel of the whole Judeo-Christian system? We could certainly make this claim about militant “Islamism,” which takes the Koran’s promise at its word in an unrelenting drive to convert the entire world to Islam and punish refusal or backsliding by death; but how could we get the Muslim faithful to agree? They are offering what they see as the true faith with its promise of eternal bliss; those who reject it, whether they live on in error or die, have already lost their chance. And if last year’s Hamas massacre may have gone beyond Islamic severity into sadism and mayhem, we could not say the same of the orderly ceremonies of throat-cutting carried out a few years previously by the Islamic State.
But in the Westphalian world of nation-states, this is precisely not the role of religion, and that world—the Western world—would never have arrived at its present level of development had we remained in thrall to wars of religion.
The Westphalian system of nation-states that has conquered the world was inaugurated in 1648 by Christians who had split into rivalrous Catholic and Protestant families that were not, like Roman and Orthodox Catholics, geographically separated, and consequently needed to establish a modus vivendi. Which was so successful that the consequent Western hegemony generalized its pattern to the entire world, regardless of religion or political system. In principle, the world could live in peace if each nation took care of its own, including its religious preferences, and chose diplomacy over war to settle international disputes.
One might say that the 20th century’s two world wars were the first major failures of this system. And although the first led to the founding of the League of Nations as a supranational agent of world peace, it failed to prevent the second. Nor has the postwar United Nations been much more successful. Its main accomplishment since 1948 seems to be denouncing Israel, a nation-state created in compensation for the genocide of nearly half the world’s Jewish population.
Nor are the consequences of the Hamas invasion and pogrom of October 7, 2023 anywhere near having worked themselves out. The “Red-Green” alliance of the Western Left with the Islamists that had remained largely implicit before that date has erupted into the open, and is far from subsiding. The old Left built on class resentment has transformed itself into a (New) New Left that identifies victimhood with “race”—but whose exemplary case of racial oppression is no longer American whites over blacks, but Jews over Palestinians, whose pseudo-ethnicity is a pretext for their shameless repetition of the word “genocide” in mockery of the Holocaust.
It is indeed something of a revelation that, although officially antisemitism is condemned by all but a neo-Nazi fringe, it is perfectly respectable to bewail (without citing the numbers’ real source) the thousands of casualties that Hamas tells us the Jews have inflicted on the Palestinians. The model for this was established at the beginning of the war. Although it soon became clear that it wasn’t Israel that bombed that Gaza hospital on October 17, which was barely touched in any case, no one offered excuses to Israel for the calumny—which, I remind the reader, included a deliberately misleading picture of some other bombed-out building at the top of the front page of the New York Times. As Daniel Pipes pointed out recently, Hamas is the first insurrectionary power that takes advantage of its dogmatically asserted victimary non-agency to starve its own people, knowing that any such suffering will be blamed on the Jews.
One can’t help seeing this extreme sympathy for the Palestinians as the victims of the Jews as just one more variant in the age-old history of antisemitism, which has always accused the Jews of poisoning wells, bleeding little children… Except that today, such antithetical sympathy is accompanied by a vehement denial of Jew-hatred; how indeed can viewing with horror the devastating Palestinian suffering at the hands of the powerful Jews be compared to antisemitism? Or to put it differently, after centuries of attributing to the Jews all kinds of powers they lacked to the end of justifying Jew-hatred, how can it possibly be inferred, now that their restored homeland indeed possesses real power, that current Jew-hatred is still based on prejudice? If the Nazis attributed to the Jews secret powers that impeded the triumph of the Aryan and other races, should we not rather say that they have proven prophetic?
Yet the strength of this argument lies in its remaining implicit. That Jew-hatred is a foregone conclusion whose justifications are merely a posteriori confirmations cannot be thought, let alone enunciated. Thus if the UN condemns Israel far more than all the other nations of the world together, this can only demonstrate that no other nation so consistently violates the principles of international law.
Or else, as old Jean de La Fontaine put it: Qui veut noyer son chien, l’accuse de la rage—He who would drown his dog, accuses it of rabies.
II
Is then Judeo-Christian religion, and at its root, Judaism itself, complicit in the sacralization of resentment that the post-revolutionary Left has made its watchword? Given that the root of human culture is the preservation, not of the “species,” but of the community assembled on the scene, we can say that there is no originary cultural drive to preserve anything more than this minimal community, and that the hope for the evolution of the sacred—as intuited by one’s “conscience”—from the participants in the originary scene to include all of humanity cannot simply be deduced from the originary hypothesis, but reflects the interactions of the diverse communities that descend from it. In particular, to reach the point at which a religion such as Judaism can emerge, we must follow the course of human history, but without abandoning GA’s originary insight into its roots.
How does this insight help us to understand Judaism, in both its “firstness” and its unique scapegoat role? Why is this small minority, which from the Roman transmutation of Judea into “Palestine” in the first century AD to the creation of Israel in the twentieth never possessed a home territory, so disquieting to the peoples that have hosted its members that they have not ceased for any length of time to persecute it? History has demonstrated the “stubborn” refusal of the Jews as a people to abandon their culture; the defection of many individual Jews has never sufficed to break the continuity that links those of today to their pre-Axial ancestors. The Jews refuse to disappear; Hitler’s “final solution” was the logical end of these persecutions, but also the ultimate demonstration of the Jews’ ability to survive quand même.
Unlike Christians and Muslims, the Jews have never sought to become the world’s sole religion. Judaism accepts converts, but never seeks them out, and instead remains focused on its own community, whose creedal destiny to serve as an example to the world makes it concerned solely with survival rather than conquest. Which sets up between the Jews and their persecutors the classical opposition between the irresistible force and the immovable object, which might seem comical if it did not involve millions of deaths.
Let us recall once more the line from the Sermon on the Mount: the last will be first and the first, last. Chronologically, and for the Christians, spiritually as well, the Jews are “the first” Western religion; nor is it an accident that (with all due respect to the New Testament and the Koran, the Zoroastrian Avesta, the Bhagavad Gita and the Mahabharata, Confucius’ Analects and the Buddhist Sutras…), the Old Testament, with the five Books of Moses at its core, remains the world’s most significant religious document.
The Jews have plenty to resent; but it never seems to their enemies as significant as what they resent in the Jews.
Of course we cannot conceive of Christianity or Islam in the absence of Judaism; that Islam’s fanatics are willing to do so is just one more sign of their shameless barbarity. But can we not say that the Hebrew religion had all this implicit in it from the beginning? that its “chosenness” was destined from the outset to be viewed by outsiders as the most insufferable arrogance?
It is that which makes antisemitism so irresistible. Forgetting Islamism’s indifference to facts, in today’s world made by Christianity—even as Buddhism is showing itself to be perhaps a wiser alternative—the Jews are the only people that can claim seniority. Which is why I believe that John Paul II’s wise conception of the Jews as the “elder brothers” of Christians points to a possible happy ending to Western antisemitism. Yet the history of the past 75 years or so, and all the more that of this past year, has shown that the return of the Jews to Israel, far from making them just one among the world’s many peoples, has brought new inspiration to those who remain faithful to the final solution; Israel, as the Iranians like to point out, is a one-bomb country.
Ironically, however historically justified, granting Middle-Eastern territory to the Jews just at the moment when Europe was liberating its colonies was bound to provoke a new surge of hostility in the surrounding Muslim population habituated to seeing the Jews as a subject (dhimmi) people. And over a half-century later, at a moment when Israel seemed at last to be gaining grudging acceptance in the Arab world, Obama’s perverse coddling of the Iranian regime turned the whole area into a powder-keg. As might have been expected of the USA’s first post-colonial president.
III
Concerning the question of Jewish “firstness,” one should not forget that two of the most significant stories in Genesis concern the usurpation of primogeniture. Cain was the older brother whose vegetal sacrifices were rejected by God as inferior to his younger brother Abel’s carnal ones; the latter’s murder was a response to what the elder experienced as usurpation. Cain’s anger may have been inevitable, but it could do no more for him than make him a holy sinner who bore “the mark of Cain” and could not be killed, a counter-example for all.
In contrast, Jacob’s obtaining the elder’s birthright from the hungry Esau in Genesis 25 is meant to demonstrate the superiority of ambition to mere seniority. Jacob’s willingness to work fourteen years for Laban’s daughter Rachel and his ability to successfully wrestle with God’s representative in Genesis 32, resulting in his renaming as Israel (meaning “I have struggled”), are what define his role as the last of the three classic patriarchs (Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob) in the transition from Abraham to Jacob’s son Joseph and the sojourn of his people in Egypt that leads to the Exodus and the founding of the Kingdom.
And while there was no possible positive outcome from Cain’s murder, whose entire world was ultimately destroyed in the Flood, Jacob’s ruse was justified a posteriori by his recognition of his debt to his brother and the respect that he pays him. It is only after Jacob had made his fortune by working for Laban and marrying his daughters that he receives the name of Israel, followed in Genesis 33 by his long-delayed reunion with Esau, to whom he shows deference and brings gifts, so that the brothers are happily reconciled.
This tells us that the values of Judaism are the effects not of its “firstness” but of its ability to interpret and implement its history as the working-out of a divine plan, an imperative that follows an intermingled series of legendary and real events to an depth unparalleled in any other religion, setting an example for the world of the human effort needed not merely to compose this narrative but to endlessly refine its interpretation in an unceasing effort to make divine providence coincide with reality.
It is this integration of intellectual and worldly energy that, combined with the more theoretical bent of the Greeks, gave rise over the centuries to the modern world. But the spiritual drive, rooted in self-conscious providentiality, that the Jews added to Greek rationality, their sense of their God-chosen duty to set an example for humanity, continues to arouse the jealousy of all but the strongest souls.