The source of the Jew Hatred virus is a negative miracle
The nations wish to vex God, but cannot, so they vex Israel – Exodus Rabbah 51
Jews and Jew-hatred were born together. The Bible’s case study of Pharaoh, Patient Zero, shows the source of the disease is, like the Jews themselves, Divine.
Jew hatred as plague
After October 7, Jew-haters worldwide have mounted massive and terrifying protests against Israel and Jews. Otherwise ordinary citizens seem to be spontaneously afflicted with Jew-hating fever. They rip down posters of women and children who were abducted by Hamas as if it were their righteous duty. Mobs took to the streets of Western countries in the hundreds of thousands waving Palestinian flags and chanting, “From the River to the Sea.” Even when many of them couldn’t name what river or sea they were referring to, they understood what they wanted: celebrate bloodthirsty Hamas, prevent Israel from retaliating, and erase the Jews and the Jewish State from the map. The global pandemic of Jew hatred this year makes “Never Again” only a self-delusional slogan
The multiple ironies will drive you mad. As early as the next day, before Israel had even acted in Gaza, a chorus of calls for a ceasefire began as if a huge population was waiting for just this sort of moment to act against Jews. It is still intensifying today. Absurdly, after suffering the largest pogrom since the Holocaust, Israel was tried for genocide at the International Court of Justice at the Hague, though the word “genocide” was invented to describe what was done to the Jews by the Nazis and though Israel was trying to stop Hamas, terrorists explicitly dedicated to the genocide of Jews, or at least Zionists. The charge was so unfounded, even the ICJ, no friend of Israel, found no grounds.
Israelis are routinely called Nazis. Such evil inversions are one of the hallmarks of the Jew hatred.
The UN, world leaders and governments, noisy Palestinian partisans, well-meaning but naive and ill-informed peaceniks on social media, Hollywood stars, reflexive liberals – all were in truth calling for Jews to lay down their arms and suffer barbaric slaughter without responding, to be less than human. They devalue Jewish lives while demanding that Jews show superhuman forbearance. Jew haters attacked Jews in what they thought were their safe spaces: Western countries, Jewish cities like New York, on U.S. college campuses, even in public schools and town councils in the US, and in their private psychic and political bubbles. Jews who faithfully signed up for the agenda sympathetic to all victims – Black Lives Matter, LGBTQ+ rights, DEI, undocumented immigrants and all the other array of intersectional and righteous victims now suffered cognitive dissonance. How could my allies not only refuse to express shock at the worst Hamas atrocities, including the weaponized rape of women, but celebrate them? Their comrades’ implicit response was, “The Jews had it coming to them.” In the algebra of this ideology, Jews can’t be victims of Palestinians. They’re white colonialists. The implied conclusion was a familiar one. “Die, Jews!”
In short, Jews found themselves in their history again. Jew hatred is as old as the Jew. Eventually it happens everywhere we live. There’s a Jewish tradition, rooted in both mysticism and statistical truths about the order of the world, that our hosts in the Diaspora only suffer us for about four generations before they expel or kill us. Many Jews deluded themselves into believing America was different, but now it seems they are doomed to join their forebears in Spain or Germany or anywhere else we enjoyed a few decades of peace and hospitality. What explains this? Over the last centuries, millions of words and thousands of books, articles, and scholarly papers have documented this phenomenon and tried to diagnose its cause. They blame politics, culture, psychology, education, history, sociology, demagogic ambition, human nature, scapegoating,1 jealousy, Jews’ insularity, or some combination of these. They inspire paranoid conspiracy theories, blood libels, superstitious fears, and psychotic fixation: their allegiance is to Zion, to an internationalist family, to their network of global finances, to a secret cabal, to dark arts, to bloody rituals, to religious “protocols.” While every psychic, political and social route ends in forced conversion, state-sponsored genocide, expulsion or genocidal violence, none of these theories have satisfactorily explained the multiform ubiquity, irrationality, fluidity, virulence, spontaneity, disproportion, and inevitability of Jew hatred. In other words, no one has identified the root cause, much less offered any remedy.2
Many have said that Jew hatred is a disease, an ineradicable virus. If the analogy runs deep, then let’s be rigorous about applying the methods of epidemiology to find a cause. When epidemiologists study a pandemic, they talk about finding “Patient Zero,” the first person they can identify as having the disease. If they find Patient Zero it sometimes enables them to pinpoint the source of the virus, then the virus itself, and then formulate an inoculation against it. This is our goal here: to identify the cause, what legalese calls the “cause in fact” as opposed to the many “proximate causes” that we often confuse for it.3
Patient Zero
I believe this Patient Zero has always been right in front of us, hiding in plain sight in the Jews’ own origin story of their time in Egypt. It is the aboriginal and archetypal Diaspora for all future Jewish Diasporas, from Babylon through America. Pharaoh of the Book of Exodus is the first leader of another nation who contends with the Hebrews after they’ve dwelled among them for several generations. He is also the first to exhibit all the symptoms of the full-blown Jew hatred virus.4 Here’s his back story:
Slave traders bring a captive Joseph to Egypt. Pharaoh dredges him out of jail because he has learned that Joseph has a special gift for interpreting dreams. Pharaoh is tormented by a strange nightmare his own wise men can’t decipher. Joseph tells him that his dream means that seven years of abundance will be followed by a seven-year famine in Egypt. Pharaoh is so impressed by Joseph’s preternatural insight that he appoints him as his second-in-command of all Egypt to put in place a strategy to prepare the kingdom for its impending disaster. Joseph’s first act is to rescue his eleven brothers, his father, and all their family and livestock from Canaan and settle them in Goshen, the fat of Egypt, on the Nile Delta in the northeast, closest to the land promised to their patriarch Abraham. Joseph then reorganizes the whole power and economic structure of Egypt to prepare them. He institutes a system of taxes of grain and produce to set aside during the fat years for the lean years, and builds a network of storehouses. During the famine, Egyptians run out of food. Joseph sells them the reserves of food and grain. When they run out of money, they sell him their land. When they run out of land, they have nothing to sell but themselves, and they beg Pharaoh to accept their offer of indentured servitude. Finally, Joseph makes all Egyptians move from their hometowns and resettles them elsewhere, presumably for efficiency. In short, Joseph has created a completely re-organized Egyptian empire consolidated under Pharaoh, who is now the complete hegemon and absolute ruler of the state, nominal owner of all the land and all its citizens. If ever a ruler owed a debt to another party for giving him power, it is Pharaoh to Joseph and his descendents. However, as the Bible says:
And Joseph died, and his brothers and their entire generation. And the children of Israel were fruitful and increased abundantly, and multiplied, and grew very, very mighty and the land was filled with them.
Now there arose a new king over Egypt, who didn’t know Joseph. And he said to his people, ‘Look! The people of the children of Israel are more and mightier than we. Let’s deal wisely with them before they multiply, and when we’re at war they will advocate for our enemies and add to the hatred and go up out of the land.’ Therefore, they set taskmasters to afflict them with their burdens. And they built for Pharaoh treasure cities, namely Pithom and Raamses. But the more they afflicted them, the more they multiplied and grew. And they loathed the faces of the children of Israel. And Egypt made the children of Israel labor hard, and they made their lives bitter with hard servitude, in mortar and in brick, and in all kinds of slavery in the field: all their service, wherein they made them serve, was severe.
And the king of Egypt spoke to the Hebrew midwives…and he said, “When you midwife the Hebrews … if it’s a son, then kill him…” And the midwives [failed and] said to Pharaoh, “Because the Hebrew women are not as the Egyptian women; for they are animals, and birth before the midwives come to them.” .. And the people multiplied, and grew very mighty. …And Pharaoh charged all his people, saying, “Every son that is born you shall cast into the River…”
A Clinical Evaluation of Patient Zero
As this Pharaoh observes his empire. I imagine him in a high tower of his palace in Memphis, surveying a bustling capital city filled with many peoples like any cosmopolis. He looks just to the northeast, up the Nile Delta to the fertile Land of Goshen. The Hebrews are flourishing. Instead of seeing his diverse nation with satisfaction, he is unnaturally focused on the Children of Israel. Their success and growth don’t just unsettle him, they anger him and make him afraid. He conjures an Israelite population bomb and sees them filling the land when, of course, that was impossible. His paranoia makes him see them as a fifth column, lying in wait to join Egypt’s enemies in the event of a war, adding to some vague foreboding “hatred” for which he has no prior evidence. The accusation is all-too familiar; we’ve heard it throughout history from demagogues in Europe and Arab countries, and even in America at various times: those Jews don’t have patriotic allegiance, nationalist loyalty. They are simultaneously lower, dirtier, more animalistic and coarser than us natives, and at the same time threatening in their outsized dominance and superiority, as they succeed in the marketplace with preternatural ability and arcane practices. At best they have dual loyalty, dividing their dedication between us and Israel, the land promised to them in their mythology. At worst, they are just awaiting their chance to betray Egypt, already actively plotting against us in secret, stirring up imaginary hatreds among our enemies. Fueling his animus, although the Bible tells us that this Pharaoh has no connection to, no memory of and therefore no allegiance or gratitude to Joseph, it’s much more likely that he is all too keenly aware of the debt he owes to him and his descendants for the power and control Joseph gave him, and like many tyrants he resents any claim on him, so he seeks to erase any legacy with murderous intent.5
Seized by his sudden irrational hatred and fear of Jews, he riles up his counselors. “Come,” he urges them. “Let us deal wisely with them.” He hatches plans to suppress the Israelite population. First he imposes “taskmasters” to extract progressively more burdensome taxes from them. He starts oppressing them physically, appropriating their labor to build treasure cities.6 Then he turns to genocidal plotting, first hiding his crime by conspiring with midwives to strangle Hebrew males at birth. When this doesn’t work – the Egyptian midwives compare the Hebrew women to “animals” who give birth too quickly – he goes public, rallying his nation as many tyrants did after him, declaring a pogrom to kill first-born male Hebrews. Clearly he must have prepared the way with demagoguery and propaganda to turn his people against the Jews and arouse their collective hatred.7 Pharaoh’s hatred becomes a national obsession, the virus a pandemic. Since he controls the airwaves – hieroglyphic scribes are closely held priests of the pharaonic cult and most of the population is illiterate in the complex script8 – he is able to move the culture, and so it turns on a dime.
What arouses Pharaoh’s hatred? “Mighty and swarming” Hebrews
Pharaoh may have had many proclivities, habits of mind, environmental circumstances and personal attributes – narcissism and megalomania – that made him prone to infection by Jew hatred. Like any king, he was responsible for foreseeing and planning to avoid threats to his kingdom. Like many tyrants, he is thin-skinned and defensive, quick to declare himself the victim of imagined slights, easily inflamed by his own imagination. Everything is personal. He sees no distinction between attacks on the state and attacks on himself. (L’etat c’est moi.) He is volatile, prone to sudden, extreme bouts of anger and changes of heart. He’s tormented by psychic events, like his dreams, and he acts on them.9 Where did the virus come from?
The original Hebrew of the Bible holds the key. As always, furtive meanings play across the text. Hebrew is at once more impoverished and yet richer and denser than our English. It contains hidden messages in the multiple connections among words. More akin to poetry, words skip their meanings across the text like stones on a pond, spreading ripples of overlapping echoes and meanings. Many of these hidden intents are lost in translation into English, which simply reads more stiffly than Biblical Hebrew.10
The Hebrew word for their proliferation is “rav,” Pharaoh sees Jews filling the land, overestimating their numbers wildly. Magnifying the size of the Jews (not to mention their power and influence) is one of the symptoms of the disease we’re studying.11 He conjures a dark future when the Hebrew population bomb overrun his kingdom.The Torah in its typically allusive fashion, echoes his dark vision in the swarming plagues (arov) that overrun Egypt. Pharaoh’s malign delusion about the Hebrews as a plague – the metaphor for the Jews throughout their history used to arouse natives to loathe them – manifests it in his divine punishment. God has a sense of humor – or at least of *poetic* justice. The plague of Jew hatred is answered by divine plagues. But the equation is made. They have a common source.
The core of Pharaoh’s pathology, what sickens him, though, is his absurd hallucination that the Hebrews are “mightier than” Egypt. That’s even more fundamental than his distorted vision of their numbers, for surely were he to go to war to subdue the Israelites, he could easily do so with all the state military apparatus at his command. The root of the Hebrew word for this perceived mightiness is atzum. Two verses before Pharaoh’s vision, the text tells us that indeed, the Hebrews grew “very, very mighty” (וַיַּעַצְמוּ בִּמְאֹד מְאֹד). Here he says “many [rav] and mightier [atzum] than us” (רַב וְעָצוּם מִמֶּנּוּ).
The word for might, atzum, also mean “bone.,” It is a relative of “tree” etz [עֵץ] and “spine”; in other words, the sturdy, deeply rooted core or essence of something. It is used to describe the logic of an argument. Pharaoh has an instinctive and profound insight into the Israelites’ strength: they have backbone and interconnectedness, like roots and branches of a tree. Like his dreams, his irrational argument has a tinge of prophecy in it. He perceives that the essence of the Israelites is that they are all one family. However numerous they become, they are still aware of and feel a deep blood connection to each other. They are all literally one family tree, all the “children” of Israel – Jacob’s second name – the father of the twelve brothers who come to Egypt and spawn the tribes of the nation-to-be.
The Darwinian Jewish Project: to evolve Domestication
This idea of the Hebrews as a family is not just a nice theme or metaphor, it is the deepest premise of the Jewish story in the Bible. The Hebrew epic adventure of their origin is filled not with mighty warrior deeds, but episodes that unfold a vast Darwinian project across centuries in selective breeding. Its purpose is to evolve a properly domestic human with the sensitivity to nurture family.12 In Genesis, the sons or their wives who are selected to carry the “Jewish” gene are the domesticated, sensitive ones. God wipes out Noah’s whole generation with a flood because they corrupt family purity. Abraham favors the meditative well-digger Isaac over the angry Ishmael. Isaac chooses nurturing Jacob over the violent Esau. Jacob prefers the creative (if overweening) Joseph over his unreliable older brothers. Even the little we know about Cain is that he was sensitive (perhaps too sensitive).The civil laws throughout the Bible assume that all Jews are branches of a single family who deserve the respect and allegiance of blood loyalty. Converts attain the same status. This is one family you can join.
The result is a culture of divine domestication. When Esau and Jacob finally reconcile and Esau offers to accompany Jacob on his journey home, Jacob draws the line as keenly as any place else in the family saga when he averts the dangerous offer as diplomatically as he can:
‘My lord knows that the children are frail and that the flocks and herds, which are nursing, are a care to me; if they are driven hard a single day, all the flocks will die. Let my lord go on ahead of his servant, while I travel slowly, at the pace of the cattle before me and at the pace of the children, until I come to my lord in Seir.’ (Gen 33:13-14)
The other great thread of the Bible is that the laws it promulgates at great length are entirely aspirational. They form the utopian constitution of a nation not yet created, the prospective State of Israel that won’t be founded until the Jews finally reach the Promised Land forty years later. The chronicle of the Five Books of Moses ends just before this point, the world’s first and greatest cliffhanger, so while the entire story of the Hebrew is looking forward and idealized, the foundation is in the family, the blood shared among all citizens. Pharaoh sees the Israelitish idea is revolutionary and disruptive to his hegemony. Imagine a code of laws where justice is based on familial senses of allegiance, gentility, fraternity, generosity, mutual responsibility – even tenderness – instead of punishment. The Bible often uses the word “achim” – siblings – for the citizens of the future state of Israel. It took three thousand years for the French Revolution’s ideal of fraternité to re-imagine a nation based on it. Even the harshest of civil relations imagined in this future country, when a Jew becomes the slave of another Jew, is an economic transaction borne of unfortunate necessity, not oppression. Slaves have rights and their “owners” have responsibilities to them and owe them measures of respect. Slaves are still included in the religious circle of Judaism. The endpoint and goal of slavery everywhere else, (say, the Old South) was for the slave to be a perpetual motion machine for wealth: free labor with the great boon of making more slaves for free. The goal of Jewish slavery was for the slave to achieve freedom after seven years. At the end, owners must give their liberated slaves livestock, grain, and wine as a parting gift.
A nation defined by this mystical unity of blood is awesome and threatening indeed. Egyptian citizens are serfs and supplicants, not brothers and sisters, at least since Joseph reorganized the Egyptian economy for his predecessor. The Jews’ numerical size is not their threat, it’s their idea of humanity and nationhood. Their omnipresent, omniscient all-powerful infinite God demands that all humans treat each other as one family in order to make the world holy and thereby, know Him.
The plague of the Jews is a negative miracle
This plague of the Jews has terrible ambivalence, two meanings at once: it both plagues them and makes their enemies see them as a plague. Even without a metaphysical explanation, we can see why it has no cure: Jews and Jew-hatred are twins. Pharaoh helps give birth to them; he is in effect their midwife. His dark plot leads to their enslavement, but also to their redemption. Everywhere we exist outside our home throughout history it follows us. It is the dark, mystical aspect of Jewishness itself, the other side of our coin. Jews cannot exist without Jew hatred. Our charge is to keep ourselves distinct – that is the meaning of the Hebrew word for holy (kadesh), but our distinctiveness arouses hatred.
Personally, the irrationality, inexplicability, spontaneity, persistence and ubiquity of antisemitism are dark testimony to the existence of God. Traditional Jewish writers often say antisemitism is “causeless [or baseless] hatred” [sinat chinam]13 which at first seems tantamount to a shrug of the shoulders. But there’s nothing in the cosmos that doesn’t have a cause.
When an inexplicable reality intrudes on ours we call it a miracle. In the instance of Jew hatred, it’s a negative miracle, evidence that the Finger of God stirs the pot of history, the violent price Jews pay for their mission, a negative miracle among the many positive ones that intervene in our history or surround us every day. It’s as if God needs both a holy force to encourage Jews forward to their redemptive destiny, and an evil one to drive them there. Perhaps it’s why the leaders of Jew hatred always seem to know more about us, our mission, than we do ourselves. It is no accident that Hamas perpetrated their horrors on Simchat Torah. The source of Pharaoh’s hatred isn’t that he is deluded about the Israelites, it’s that he sees the truth of them. If the superior Israelitish manner of organizing society is allowed to spread, it will drown him and his world. When Jews forget or abandon their mission and become more German than the Germans, the goad is waiting to remind us. This is the summary of all the Prophets on one foot, the story we tell ourselves.
The realpolitik calculations of a supreme ruler like Pharaoh or a sheerly materialistic view of society like Marx’s or Epicurus’ don’t explain the cause of Jew hatred. Its provocation and foundation is in a supernal realm that unites everything in the universe. If they are honest and insightful enough, when confronted with a superior paradigm, worldview, or system of organizing culture, or operating the cosmos, or being in the world, they will see the truth, just as scientists when presented with a superior theory must ultimately bend to the truth.
If Jews really do pose a threat to their host country, it is not by their number, nor by the potential for sedition or violence against their hosts, but by the transcendentally mighty idea they represent.14 As history has sadly shown, you can repress their number but not their symbolism. Even if they are a tiny fragment of a remnant in the world – less than 0.2% of the global population, and even if personally any particular Jew has little attachment to their tradition – they have a vision of the cosmos that enables their success, protected by a greater unity that no power on Earth has so far succeeded in eradicating.
The cure?
If indeed the source of Jew hatred is transcendent and congruent with the idea of the Jew itself, then there really is no cure short of the vision written into the other part of the Jews’ script: complete redemption of the world.
In the interim, while we endlessly await a Messiah, there is a kind of inoculation that might work with individuals, Jew-hater and Jew alike. Before the individual hater grabs a gun and comes to kill, before the psychic virus has completely dominated the reasoning faculties of a patient, before he or she joins the mob bent on pogrom, then perhaps there is still time. But it’s the exhausting, never-ending battle for truth. Jews, as they do in the International Court of Justice and the twittersphere, must continue to face the hatred with truth. For the Jew-hater has a weakness. He always lies, usually by first stealing the Jew’s truth, then trying to cover up the crime by erasing the witness, spiritual parricide. Though they invented the monotheism at the core of Christianity and Islam, they are its greatest enemy. It’s an exhausting and often fruitless fight, but it’s the only one that gives Jews any hope.
2024
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