There is a sense in which my defense of the Jews as the innocent victims of undeserved hatred might be taxed as unfairly tendentious: that, as my own writings demonstrate, the Jews have an unfair advantage in the domain of what I call “originary thinking.” Not that their ancestors became human before other peoples, but because they discovered the essence of the sacred, and thus of the human, before the others. That this has not been laid out before in modern terms should not surprise us, any more than that the millennia of Jew-hatred have never been explained as anything but an irrational prejudice by those who have not succumbed to the temptation to share it.
Let me take an example from Greek reflection on the sacred, one that embodies an empirical attitude we tend to find more congenial than the rigorous iconoclasm of the Jews. In a famous fragment, the 6th century BC Eleatic Xenophanes, noting his compatriots’ propensity for depicting the gods and goddesses in human-like form, speculates that different animal species would do likewise, so that horses and cattle would have horse-gods and cattle-gods.
Yet in another fragment, he declares that God is one, that he abides in one place and does not move, yet “without effort he sets in motion all things by mind and thought.” Which is to say, Xenophanes’ notion of god is superficially quite close to the Hebrews’, including his namelessness. Yet the difference is that this philosophical god is merely a mental construct in a world where the “real” gods worshiped by the Greeks, which Xenophanes clearly considers childish fictions, remained the objects of official cults.
In such circumstances, “God” is a mere abstraction, something like the “Pascalian” figure I developed in Chronicle 840, whose principle of entropy results in matter organizing itself to preserve its negentropy, hence favoring the evolution of increasingly complex creatures. But Pascal’s own God was not an abstraction: he had revealed himself in the historical person of Christ, accepted by Christians as the human embodiment or “person” of the nameless Hebrew divinity who “is that he is,” and whom religious Jews just call “the Name” (Hashem), who created the world as a residence for a humanity for whom he has to learn to provide the appropriate moral training to permit it to form collectivities that will survive and prosper. Thus the story of Genesis is centered on the origin of human morality, on our learning to assimilate the divine command of right and wrong, which, as God himself “learns” in Eden, cannot be done simply as blind causality—or as Pavlov would have said, by conditioned reflex.
It is a consequence of the greater seriousness of the Hebraic sacred that the Torah has been transmitted more or less intact through the generations in a society constantly condemned to migration, whereas most of the Greek philosophers, whose society remained far more stable, are known today largely by fragments cited in other works, themselves rarely complete. The sacred implies, in the first place, reverence for the vehicles that transmit it, and for Judaism, this means not idols or statues but texts. We still possess many treasures of Greek philosophy and literature, but a large portion of even the major texts of Greek antiquity have been lost, absent the reverent care that sacredness imposes.
No doubt the major works of the greatest thinkers and poets have largely been preserved, and in any case, there is no point in preferring the productions of one or the other of the two sources of our civilization. But what the current turmoil teaches us is that, when push comes to shove, the majority of the Western societies, whose sacred books begin with the Torah, are more inclined to share the resentment of Islam’s fanatical murderers rather than the Jews’ desire to live in peace beside them. Christianity and Islam have much in common, and may perhaps evolve toward a modus vivendi that would enrich both, but the Islam that fights with the end of eliminating the Jews from the Middle East and the rest of the world is no friend of Christianity either, the Sunday people being, like the Saturday people, worthy only of the choice between conversion and, at best, dhimmization.
Thus the question we must ask is: why do these disciples of Christ feel more kinship with his enemies than with the Jews, who may have rejected his prophecies but had no part in his crucifixion? Or to put it differently, why do Christians feel less kinship with those who wrote texts that they consider holy than with those who have rejected these texts, as well as their Christian supplements, as imperfect drafts of their own holy book which almost no Christian ever opens? Is it not because their antisemitism is at the bottom a recognition that—however much Jesus enriched the Hebrew heritage, in ways that most modern Jews are ready to recognize, and however Christian wisdom may tell them that the Jews are their “elder brothers”—when given the choice, they sympathize with the savage murderers of October 7 more than with their victims, as though when Jesus told them to “love their enemies,” he had neglected to add “so long as they hate your brothers more than you”?
Let me give an example from what is superficially an entirely different domain: that, once more, of the origin of human language. In the August 23 New Scientist, Michael Marshall reviews on p. 26 a book by Madeleine Beekman entitled The Origin of Language (Simon & Schuster, 2025), with the accompanying blurb: “Beekman suggests the complexity of childcare drove language’s spread.”
Thus Beekman puts forward one more possible activity that may have “driven” the spread of language, as well it may, but gets no nearer than any other officially approved attempt to the origin of language. As Marshall puts it:
In proposing this idea, Beekman is wading into a very crowded marketplace. Many scenarios have been put forward for the evolution of language. Some say it developed in concert with technologies like stone tools; as we created more advanced tools, we needed more descriptive language to teach others how to make and use them. Or maybe language was a means of showing off [!], including through witty wordplay and insults. Then again, it might have allowed individuals to organise their own thoughts and was only secondarily used to communicate with others. [communication as a secondary effect of language!]
One appealing aspect of Beekman’s proposal is that it places women and children at the centre….
Need I say more? Certainly not to the readers of these Chronicles.
The idea that the care of children in the home “drove” the origin of language is incompatible with everything culture tells us about human society: how can words be spread throughout the community if they are first created in the relative solitude of maternal child-care?
No doubt this activity, like tool-making and various other techniques, may be said to have stimulated the evolution of language, that is, providing new signs for things of shared interest among humans. But it is nonetheless obvious, not merely in the abstract, but from our present practices, that the origin of language must have been in a collective activity, one in which the participants were not engaging in an unproblematically cooperative function like childcare or toolmaking, but one in which a danger of mimetic conflict had to be faced and conquered. Indeed, is it not disappointing that now that René Girard’s name is becoming well-known in association with “scapegoating,” none of his new fans has noted that really to take Girard’s key insight seriously is to realize that the key problem for humanity is the conquest of mimetic rivalry and its potential for violence—a phenomenon we are certainly witnessing in spades today!
And this failure, I would affirm, is a product of the Greek dominance over the Hebrew as an influence on our intellectual life, which has given us the glories of modern science, but which on the level of human relations has allowed resentment to flourish in the place of Hillel’s simple principle.
This is not the place to discuss in detail the text of Aristotle’s Nicomachean Ethics, but it suffices to point out that although Aristotle’s ultimate aim is to perfect the politeia, the community (of responsible adults), he begins with what he considers the individual’s aim of “happiness” or “pleasure,” rather than with Hillel’s simple “golden rule,” which seems unknown to Greek thought. In a word, the polity is a collection of individuals about whom the question of how they became human or “discovered” language or ethics is never asked. No doubt Aristotle and his fellows inhabited a pre-Darwinian universe. And yet the equally pre-Darwinian Hillel, while equally unaware of human evolution from the apes, focuses unlike Aristotle on the collective foundation of human ethics, the avoidance of mimetic conflict.
Certainly the Greeks were well aware of mimetic conflict in their dramas and epics—and it is of telling significance that when Aristotle himself touches on humanity’s mimetic tendencies, it is not in the Ethics but in a famous passage from Book IV of his Poetics:
Imitation is natural to man from childhood, one of his advantages over the lower animals being this, that he is the most imitative creature in the world, and learns at first by imitation.
And this “division of labor” indeed reflects the greatness of Greek literary culture in a society whose philosophical reflection nonetheless seeks the roots of ethics in individual “happiness” and “pleasure” without conceiving the need to grasp the origin of human social organization in our sacred intuition of right and wrong.