The Jews and the Greeks are universally understood to be the two peoples most directly responsible for the foundations of Western Civilization, the first for its religious and the second for its secular culture. Thus at first glance, the “firstness” I have alluded to as the source of the unique phenomenon of antisemitism or Jew-hatred should be shared between the two groups; no one would deny the foundational nature of the contributions of either.
Yet over the millennia, the fortunes of the two peoples have been very different. The Greeks, whose medieval culture nourished the Byzantine empire in parallel with its Roman variant in the West, later spent several centuries under the rule of the Ottoman Empire. As we recall from the example of Byron, the colonial status of Greece was a rallying point for admirers of Classical culture, while Britain, France, and Russia fought alongside the Greeks at Navarino in 1827 to restore Greece as an independent nation. I need not insist on the different reception of Israel by the international community.
Indeed, the idea of hating the Greeks—or any people other than the Hebrews/Jews—not merely in a kind of brotherly rivalry, but as unworthy of belonging to humanity itself, is inconceivable.
Thus it is unsurprising that no term for historical Jew-hatred can capture its uniqueness. Antisemitism, whose pretense of focusing on the Jews’ “racial”/linguistic heritage is obviously irrelevant—as people used to say, “but the Arabs too are Semites!”—is as good or bad as any.
To liberate the Greeks it sufficed to free the land of Greece, which, although its borders changed a good deal over the centuries, never lost its general location on the map, nor its sense of ethnic continuity. Whereas the Jews were for the most part driven from their original lands, first by the Persians, then the Romans, and more definitively by the Muslims in the 6th and 7th centuries. They were subsequently expelled, sometimes more than once, from most of the Western European countries where they had been allowed to settle, their population often thinned by pogroms, until Hitler’s “final solution” murdered something like 2/3 of the Jews of Europe. Meanwhile the Jews remaining in the former territories of Judea were never permitted to form a polity of their own until the establishment of the state of Israel in 1948.
The West stood up for Greek independence in the days of Byron and has accepted it as a matter of fact ever since. In contrast, the Jews, even those who had remained in Judea over the centuries, were never accepted as its rulers, and the establishment of Israel nearly 80 years ago, never fully accepted by its neighbors, is contested by a large—and increasing—percentage of the membership of the UN. In contrast, the local Arab population that Yasser Arafat began to refer to in the 1960s as “Palestinians” deserving of statehood have not only been uniquely granted, along with their descendants in perpetuity, the status of “refugees” with an eternal claim to return to the land supposedly granted to Israel, but their chimerical “State of Palestine” had been “recognized” by over 75% (147 of 193) of the UN’s member states even before the recent rash of recognitions by France, Great Britain, Australia et al.
The final irony: today the Greek population is among the most antisemitic in Europe, as witness the recent repeated attacks on Israeli tourists in the Aegean attempting to land in Greek territory. In the Statista table “The antisemitism index score in Europe in 2024, by country” (https://www.statista.com/statistics/1616141/antisemitism-index-score-by-country-in-europe/), the two Greek nations, Greece and Cyprus, were among the four highest scorers, at 50% and above.
And if much of the recent rise in antisemitism in Europe can be attributed to the political influence of the influx of Muslim immigrants, most notably in France, but also in the UK, Germany, Sweden, Belgium, the Netherlands, Switzerland, Denmark…, Greece has only a small Muslim population. Clearly, today’s Greeks feel far more kinship with the Palestinians in their statelessness than with the Jews finally restored to their original homeland.
The anthropological conclusion we must draw from this contrast is the primacy of the sacred over the semiotic element of human culture—in the first place, its language.
For to return once more to GA’s minimal hypothesis of the origin of the human, the key precondition that has allowed us to create a self-conscious semiotics in which we have what Sartre called our freedom to reflect on words/Ideas, is that which Derrida summed up in his brilliant portmanteau term la différance, which we may translate as (semantic) difference emerging from deferral (of appetite). In the hypothetical originary event, whose simplest model we may find in the hesitation of two party-goers both reaching for and finally renouncing the last canapé on the tray, only once the participants had converted their fear of conflict into a moral intuition of the sacred wrongness of putting the realization of their own desire above that of their fellows could they come to designate, by a sign derived from an abortive version of our “instinctive” gesture of appropriation, the object of their—and by extension, all humanity’s—common desire.
This intuition of a sacred interdiction that prevents us from denying our fellows’ equal claim on an object of common desire is the source both of all religious feeling and of our ability to designate, with a pointing gesture I call an ostensive—and eventually by verbal and written and encoded signs—the objects of our interest. Whence our ability to use the signs of language to express, in Platonic terms, Ideas that allow us to reflect on them and their interactions independently of our desires. But it is the priority of sacred deferral that permits the differentiation of the realm of thought into distinct Ideas.
Whence the anthropological priority of the cultural contribution of the Jews to that of the Greeks, whose immortal works would have been inconceivable without the sacred intuition that the Jews were first to define in minimal terms (“monotheism”) and to construct around it the history of their and the world’s peoples.
And whence Hillel’s famous “golden rule,” which reads: “What is hateful to you, do not do to your fellow: this is the whole Torah; the rest is commentary.” God need not be mentioned, even in the allusive sense in which he is “named” in Hebrew religious texts; the Jewish divinity is paradoxically both familiar and unknown. It is this simple moral intuition that is the basis of all religion, and that affirms the intrinsic equality of all human beings prior to any hierarchies they may later construct, as defined by the wrongness of individual attempts at asymmetrically seeking advantage over another.
And thus it is the very fact that it was the Jews, whose religion, minimalistic in conception, but maximal in its insistence on reminding its believers, through the obligation to perform the 613 mitzvot, of the presence of the sacred in every detail of daily life, would allow them to understand that this truth is indeed the foundation of the Hebrew Bible, that has made the Jewish people eternally susceptible to the hatred of the “nations”—who, as we see so clearly in the so-called “United Nations,” are constantly tempted to exclude this “chosen people” from the benefits of human fraternity.
That the Jews have contributed far more than their share to the cultural and civilizational progress of humanity is not the essence of their “election,” any more than is their eternal danger of being reduced to pariah status. The lesson of the difference between their fate and that of the Greeks is rather something we learn from reflecting on our originary hypothesis.
For the foundational nature of the sacred, as opposed to that of language, is not an arbitrary matter. Generative anthropology can declare, without any of the paradoxical air of Hillel, that the human begins, before language, with the replacement of reflexive inhibition by the sacred sense of interdiction, or more simply, with the primitive sense, the conscience of right and wrong as the same rejection of asymmetric behavior as Hillel’s Golden Rule. What, in philosophical language, Jacques Derrida called différance: to defer acting on appetite in order to appreciate the (sacred) difference of an object of potential desire, starting from the premise that all other things being equal, all humans will judge the object as worthy of interest, significant.
That the simple yes-no quality of the decision that invests worldly acts with moral value necessarily precedes language tells us that, before we can conceptualize the external world even in the minimal sense of designating an object by a sign that separates the thinking subject from the thought object, we must consciously choose to defer treating the latter as an object of appetite; we must affirm the moral rightness of its communal sharing. All the rest, as Hillel said, is commentary.