The British author and journalist Melanie Phillips is perhaps the most visible embodiment of what I would call the post-Holocaust Jewish conscience in the English-speaking world—a conscience that was deeply shaken by the unexpected eruption of latent antisemitism in response to Hamas’ barbaric massacre carried out in southern Israel on October 7, 2023. Phillips has admirably articulated the shock felt by diaspora Jews who, after living through nearly eighty years during which the ever-present memory of the Holocaust had made antisemitism generally unfashionable, discovered that this new atrocity, rather than arousing sympathy for its Jewish victims of murder, rape, torture, and mutilation, had quite the opposite effect.
Her latest book, The Builder’s Stone, (Post Hill Press, 2025), had apparently been conceived before 10/7, but its writing was very much influenced by it; it focuses on the crisis revealed by the pogrom and the world’s reaction to it in the context of what we can still call Western Civilization. Phillips’ vision of the progression of Western history is much the same as my own, as was her shock at seeing the world’s largely sympathetic reaction to Hamas’ massacre while condemning Israel’s “genocidal” actions of self-defense. I was glad to see that her overall perspective on both the central role of the Jews/Hebrews in Western civilization and what should be done in this current crisis are very close to mine, all the more so in that we come to these judgments from very different backgrounds and theoretical presuppositions.
Although “firstness” is not one of her terms, Phillips clearly understands that within the Jew-Greek foundations of Western culture, the Hebrew component is not so much more important as more fundamental—as we might surmise simply from the fact that unlike the Jews, the Greeks are not subject to pogroms. Phillips emphasizes throughout the importance of the Hebrew Bible as the basic document of our civilization, not as a result of its implications for the afterlife or the nature of God’s transcendent existence, but as providing the foundation(s) upon which Western societies were constructed: on the one hand, the Ten Commandments and rules of moral conduct, on the other, the accounts of the relatively undespotic kingdoms that governed ancient Israel—models that were very much at the core of the nation-states that emerged from the Middle Ages to inaugurate the modern world. And she sees, I think quite rightly, that the postmodern West’s loss of self-confidence, centered on its tendency to no longer see in its hegemonic success, as it had in the aftermath of WWII, the proof of its value for humanity, but rather that of its sinfulness in exploiting and victimizing the rest of the world, has led it to return with a vengeance to its “originary resentment” of the Jews.
Phillips’ sense of Judaism has much in common with my own. No doubt the historic primacy of the Hebrews is the simplest demonstration of its “elder brother” status among the Abrahamic religions and their cultures. But in the spirit of GA, this chronological precedence is most significant for its minimality. As Phillips points out, Judaism is more concrete and less speculative than its Christian heir; as I like to put it, there is nothing in Judaism that requires its faithful to pronounce “Credo quia absurdum,” or in more Biblical language: “Scandal to the Jews, folly to the Pagans” (1 Corinthians 1:23).
Judaism is an essentially this-worldly religion, concerned with taking the most banal daily activities as occasions to remind the Jew to think at every moment of his duty to the divinity and to his people. Nor is there a Hebrew Divine Comedy; Jews talk casually about the afterlife, but Judaism is concretely concerned with our lives on earth, and most crucially, with preserving the continuity of its generations.
And thus it is that this most persecuted minority in world history survived stateless over two millennia, always as a tiny minority, yet always visible enough to attract the resentment of the majority. For the central component of the misleadingly named phenomenon of “anti-Semitism” is not prejudice against “Semites,” but resentment of Judaism’s historical priority—of its firstness—by a good percentage of the world’s population. Resentment, which differs from jealousy in its perversity that while envying the apparent success, or self-satisfaction, of its object, it desires to destroy the latter rather than (save secretly and unconsciously) to take its place.
One of Phillips’ main points is that the “Westphalian” system of nation-states that has spread across the world from the West took the Jews for its originary model, a nation being a people defined as at base monocultural, sharing not just a religion but an overall cultural heritage. And she notes further that the modern political models that succeeded those of the medieval era are likewise largely dependent on Old-Testament sources—blended of course with those of Greece and Rome.
And when in her conclusion, Phillips proposes the Jewish people and its religion as a model for the salvation of the West, this in no way excludes members of other religions. Following the Jewish model in this sense does not mean forcing non-Jews to celebrate the Jewish festivals or obey the 613 mitzvot of Jewish law, but going back to the roots of the sacred in its focus on maintaining a harmonious community grounded on a solid family structure that preserves its continuity through the generations. That Orthodox Jewish communities are more coherent and (outside of Israel) have a far higher birth rate than most others has meant that over the past few generations, the Orthodox—who are also far less likely to marry out of the faith—make up a much higher percentage of Jews than in the past. And similar has been the case in contemporary Christianity; not just Mormons and Catholics, but all Christians for whom religion is truly part of their lives and who consider themselves part of a religious community bend their efforts toward preserving their communities by raising children in the faith.
The role of Judaism in the modern world—as the Torah had already suggested—is not to attract converts and seek to become the religion of the majority, let alone of the entire human race, but to serve as “a light unto the nations,” who need not merge with the Jews to be inspired by their example. There is clearly a desire today for a return to a stricter and more cohesive sense of religion, not out of mere nostalgia but from a sense that such cohesiveness is really the test of the sacred in all its manifestations: Can this body of doctrine and practices hold the community together even in this time of resentful skepticism, so that it may serve people of other faiths, not as a source of proselytization, but simply as a model.
The problem of theorizing religion will always be inextricably paradoxical: the element of belief cannot be derived from a definition of the divinity, however subtly put together. That is indeed the unique paradox inherent in the word God, and why the Jews avoid not only speaking but even writing it, putting G-d or Hashem (“the name”) in its place to show that no sign, no word, can designate the divinity in the same way that a sign can designate the objects of our world. It is in this sense that Judaism can claim to minimize religion’s paradoxicality and, in contrast to Christianity, adhere most closely to the core notion of the sacred by its minimization of absurdity.
The anomaly of Judaism as a model for religion in general is precisely that it refuses to play the role of such a model. Reducing Judaism to the Golden Rule as in Hillel’s aphorism is valid only in the context of the Jewish—or an equally coherent—community. No doubt the Golden Rule remains the ultimate moral truth of the sacred, but if it could simply enforce itself as a universal rule of thumb, reducing the sacred to a moral principle, humanity would never have needed any religion at all. Hillel’s point is deliberately paradoxical because the Golden Rule could only have been offered as summarizing in a few words “the Law and the Prophets” in a society whose culture was dominated by this or another Law and Prophets. And although Phillips herself does not enter into these anthropo-philosophical questions, I think she would not disagree.
My only substantive divergence from Phillips’ perspective is that of one who, without seeking a chimerical “end of philosophy,” believes that philosophy must accept its anthropological destiny—as Jacques Derrida would have done had he accepted GA’s interpretation of la différance as motivated by the need to avoid mimetic conflict. In this perspective, the specifics of the Jewish community that make the Golden Rule more than an abstraction need not be spelled out along with the Rule itself, but must be understood as the unspoken, even unspeakable accompaniment to its abstract formulation. The Jews’ relationship to Hashem is no more paradoxical that that of other peoples to their divinities—save that, experiencing itself as the primal transcendence of idolatry in the context of what will become Western civilization, it is the most minimal. Thus, precisely because Judaism emphasizes the impossibility of comparing Hashem with any worldly being, this truth once taken for granted, the Jew’s relationship to God becomes familiar, not to say “egalitarian,” in the sense that, as in various midrashim, one can argue with him as if with a neighbor, all the while simply talking for granted his transcendent status.
For the two modes of relationship are not at all incompatible. Once we simply take for granted that G-d is eternal and we are mortal, we need not share Achilles’ resentment of this immortality, for our two roles, in no way comparable, cannot become rivalrous. Need not—or perhaps we should rather say no longer, since that moment in Genesis 3:22-3 when G-d expressed the fear that once mortals eat of the Tree of Knowledge, they will eat of the Tree of Life and live forever—and as a consequence, threw us out of Paradise.
This does not make HaShem a fiction, but simply a being of another nature, the embodiment of the sacred—about whom we are guaranteed that, unlike the Christian sacred, he cannot, or rather, will not, take on human form and descend among us, as though, like the peoples about to be dissolved in the newly formed Roman Empire, we needed to be reminded that we too, despite our imperfection, possess a share of his divine nature.
To put this in broader terms, I think we need to discover/invent a way of talking about the sacred that does not immediately pose the question of belief, as though “bracketing” one’s religious convictions ipso facto made talking of the sacred impossible. It is notable that even Christianity, however founded on its affirmation of “absurd” beliefs, nonetheless emphasizes the eternal consequences for the souls of mortals not so much of maintaining these beliefs as of living up to them. Ultimately what matters is Imitatio Christi; acting toward others with charity is the real point of Christian life, as illustrated in Leigh Hunt’s “Abou Ben Adhem” and countless similar examples.
The anomaly of Jewish exemplarity, which by discouraging direct rivalry is as a consequence all the more productive of resentment, should be seen as exemplary of the constitutive paradox of the human condition, far more complex and tenacious than the not-so-simple problem posed among individuals by mimetic rivalry. It is the enduring success of Israel that more than anything else has provoked the current crisis of the Westphalian system of nation-states, whose Achilles’ heel had always been its susceptibility to anti-Jewish resentment. In its 2023 pogrom, radical Islam revived the dormant virulence of this Western resentment by layering a Hitlerian passion for the destruction of the Jews on top of its rejection of Westphalian pluralism in its drive toward an Islamic “end of history.”
It is for this reason that the achievement of a true peace in the Middle East that welcomes a restored Israel among the Abrahamic religions is crucial to sustaining our faith in our human future.