The return of the Jews to Israel/”Palestine” is perhaps the best demonstration in the history of the West of the persistence of sacred in contrast to secular projects. One has only to recall the line from Israel’s national anthem Hatikva (The Hope): Hatikva bat schnot alpayim—the hope is (lit.) the daughter of two thousand years—to appreciate in what sense a people can be defined by the paradoxical connection between the universal One God and its historical implantation in the land where the idea of Him was forged.
And similarly, the deep hatred of the Palestinian jihadists for the Jews, as demonstrated in their exhibition of sadism on October 7, 2023, demonstrates that this Jewish sacred is no illusion of a people that imagines itself as “chosen.” Several centuries after the Christian construction of a “transcendence” of Judaism that opposed a new/modern time (the one we still use for our calendars) to an ancient one—a form of transcendence that, when the dust seemed to have settled, allowed a Pope to call the Jews Christianity’s “elder brothers”—there was still a position to be taken in the Abrahamic dialectic: that filled by Islam, for which the Jews had crudely anticipated the definitive revelation that would be given to Muhammad. Thus they, like the Christians, were deemed worthy of not being summarily forced to choose between death and conversion, yet obliged as dhimmis to pay a fine (jizya) for their failure to recognize the true religion.
But since the establishment of Israel, all bets are off: “Palestine,” with Jerusalem as its capital, has become the eternal abode of its Muslim Arabs; the Ashkenazi founders of Israel are Khazars, Turkic nomads unrelated to the original Hebrews, while the Mizrachi Jews who had remained in the area but were expelled from the Islamic lands on the founding of Israel (where they now reside) are assimilated to “settler-colonizers.”
Fundamentalist Islam cannot be content merely with punctual miracles, such as Christians affirm in defining their faith by the Virgin Birth, Crucifixion, and Resurrection, but denies transpersonal historical realities that can be confirmed by countless facts of public knowledge—such as the “so-called” Holocaust.
Of course, as sacred matters go, if Judaism denies objective reality only in the mode of legend, which at the time the Torah was composed—centuries before the Greek historians—was the accepted way to describe historical phenomena; and Christianity adds an element of what Tertullian called the “absurd,” confined to a few specific cases, the only possible third position in the dialectic is the outright denial of the well-attested historical facts that establish the historical priority of Judaism among the Abrahamic religions. In Islam, the religion-founding ontology that allows for revelations of the sacred in daily life, however contrary to normal possibilities, reverts from the historical present of the New to the “legendary” style of the Old Testament to emphasize the Quran’s claim to originarity, not as a supplement to the latter, but as a perfect revelation meant to replace it.
Yet it is unfair to take the wholesale denial of Hillel’s Golden Rule that we find in today’s radical Islam as proof of the religion’s unworthiness to represent the Abrahamic tradition. The post-colonial era has encouraged a form of Islam dominated by resentment of the Christian West, a resentment that has focused, now that the colonial era is past, on the “scandal” of Israel’s renascence as a Jewish state whose European origins allow for its facile assimilation to a creation of “settler colonialism.” And no doubt Islam has from the outset thrived as the religion of Western civilization’s outsiders, whose faith is demonstrated by their willingness to give up their lives in battle in witness of its truth, often with the dehumanizing cruelty displayed in the October 7 pogrom.
Nonetheless, the success of the first Trump administration in developing the Abraham Accords and the promise of their expansion under Trump II demonstrates the feasibility of fraternal relations with Muslim nations from which both sides can benefit—most importantly in weakening throughout the West the force of the epistemology of resentment, for which Israel’s current struggle with Islamism has shown itself to be an ideal stimulant.
In the perspective that sees the three Abrahamic religions as the definitive configuration of the Western sacred, the ultimately dehumanizing insistence on absolute loyalty to the community of faith (the Umma) that provoked the 10/7 pogrom should be seen not as the essence of Islam, but as a sign of its never-fully-transcended sense of marginality with respect to the established cultures it first opposed (and largely conquered), a marginality powerfully renewed by European colonialism and even more radically by the (re)creation of Israel as a reassertion of Hebrew/Jewish firstness, to which Islam has “instinctively” reacted with violence as did the original followers of Muhammad. The second Trump administration should have a strongly dampening effect on this atavistic mode of Islam, which will no longer be left free to evolve in the direction of nihilism, as illustrated by the genocidal threats and boasts of the theocratic leadership in Iran.
And if we see this nihilistic faith in its crudest form in jihadi Islam, we must observe that the Western-originated “Marxist” principle that has ruled the “socialist” dictatorships of China, North Korea, Cambodia, et al, and that lacks any reference to the sacred, is little different. Gulags, concentration camps, slave labor, gas chambers… are imposed without any consideration of the Golden Rule; but most important, they reject even the safety valve of conversion that in principle remains possible in Islam until the very end, demonstrating thereby its ultimate unwillingness to deny the Golden Rule. Indeed, the kind of dictator-worship most clearly exemplified by North Korea’s quasi-deification of the Kim dynasty suggests that its model, rather than any of the Abrahamic religions, is pre-Axial king-worship. In other words, the mode of sacrality that drives these “revolutionary” systems is one of an atavistic sacred irreconcilable with Hillel’s principle, since as the term “revolution(ary)” implies, it is focused not on fraternal interaction with its other but on its destruction.
Thus where Islam’s tertiary outsider relationship to the earlier Abrahamic religions has always remained open in principle to the familial reconciliation already in progress between its “elder brothers,” revolutionary “Marxist” atheism erects a secular pseudo-sacred for which the shared humanity that links the societies under its domination to those of non-believers has no value. The virtual universality of the Umma, which in principle permits all to participate through submission (Islam) to its conception of the sacred, does not exist in it; indeed, the very notion of “fellow humans” has no meaning in this doctrine. And if the atrocities of Islam enact features of the religion that, while hardly peripheral, do not belong to its central core, to put it most simply, revolutionary dictatorships recognize no dhimmi status.
Today when the Western world as a whole is no longer in thrall to Communism in its various forms—as had remained the case for many peoples until the dissolution of the USSR—this nominally post-religious but in reality pre-modern form of sacrality appears to us, whatever our attitude toward religious belief and/or practice, as more alien than any form of such belief, as well as than the simple denial of the sacred that we call atheism. For in any of these cases, we can still understand as fundamental the universality of the Golden Rule, whereas in the Marxist/Communist world, certain classes and their characteristic modes of exchange with their fellows are by their very nature incompatible with the laws of human interaction, and consequently beyond the pale of human reciprocity.
For the source of the sacred as experienced reality is the individual soul; the reciprocity of the Golden Rule is not a “law” we must be taught, but an intuition that we can and must cultivate, because its seed is “always already” within every human being. In contrast, the “golden rule” of Communism, expressed in the Communist Manifesto as “From each according to his abilities, to each according to his needs,” is based on factors that we have no way of determining directly: what are your abilities, what are your needs? Only the apparatus of the socialist state can make such judgments, which are consequently inaccessible to an intuition that recalls to us the originary deferral of appropriative action and its transformation into a sign.
In the final analysis, our faithfulness to this fundamental intuition is the minimal core of the sacred that defines us as human, and that defines our modes of social organization as humane. Whatever denies the universal brotherhood of humanity is anthropologically incoherent and morally unsustainable. We can grasp this basic idea outside of organized religion, but not without recognizing the universality of the sacred, even if we prefer to call it by another name. And in the absence of this recognition, the only alternative to the dictator-worship that we find in China and North Korea is the cynical mafia-like organization of Russia—which itself is not without its peripheral dependency on Orthodox Christianity, as the Mafia was on the Catholic Church.