There is a curious painting by the surrealist artist, Rene Magritte that is more significant for its title than its content. The object of the work is a pipe, accurately represented in its mundane ordinariness set in a blank beige background as if it is floating in midair. Beneath the pipe is a caption in black cursive text representing the title of the piece. Translated from the French it says ‘this is not a pipe’. The apparent contradiction is the essence of the work as we are compelled to accept that what we are looking at is not a pipe, but a painting of a pipe. It forces us to recognise the obvious. Art does not replicate reality. It is not a passive medium that reproduces the world as it is. It takes the mundane and subsumes it into something unreal. The pipe becomes mythical by virtue of not being a pipe.
I decided to apply Magritte’s paradox to an object of my own imagination, selecting an ordinary photograph of myself. Rather than tag the picture with the title ‘this is not a man’ and invite all kinds of gender identity speculation, I looked more closely at an identity which I have always found profoundly problematic. I metaphorically invoked the spirit of my ancestors on both sides of my family and underscored the picture with the words, ‘this is not a Jew’. The effect of this odd experiment sparked a peculiar question in my mind.
Ask a Christian what makes them a Christian or a Muslim what makes them a Muslim and the answer is relatively clear. A Muslim adheres to the teachings of the Prophet while a Christian believes in the gospel of Christ. But when the same question is applied to a Jew, the answer is inherently more nuanced. There are Orthodox and ultra-Orthodox Jews, reformed Jews, secular, atheist and agnostic Jews, Zionist and anti-Zionist Jews, white, brown and black Jews, gay, straight and trans Jews, Jews that were born Jews and Jews that were born Gentiles. And then there are Jews like me who can never truly identify as Jewish because there is something inherently problematic about it. Every community has its apostate and I am certainly one of them, not through any crisis of faith but through an innate sense of antipathy. I just never felt inspired to embrace that which, like Magritte’s pipe, was never truly there.
The difference between a Christian and a Jew is not simply that one believes in Christ and the other does not (there is a community called Jews for Jesus) but that a Christian who renounces their faith ceases to be a Christian, whereas a Jew who converts to Christianity, Islam or Buddhism remains essentially a Jew, at least as far as the majority of Jews are concerned. A Jew who calls themselves a non-Jew is a Jewish non-Jew. A Jew who denies their Jewishness is committing a twofold sin. They are firstly denying themselves and by so doing challenging the truth of Jewish persistence. They are trying to deny the undeniable, effectively lying to themselves and the world in a fatal but futile attempt to negate a hardcoded fact. There is a congenital defence reflex built into the bones of Jewish identity that insists that any attempt to undermine that identity poses a threat, however incremental, of invoking the spectre of the Shoah. Antisemitism is always extant, like an active volcano. It is as persistent as the Jews themselves.
The Jews were historically a persecuted minority. It goes back to Moses and Pharaoh. It forms the very basis of their identity, their belief in themselves as a chosen people. To persecute the Jews is to invite the wrath of God, or in modern secular terms, the wrath of the Jews themselves. October the 7th is a reminder of what happens to those who trigger the Jewish conscience. For every Jew murdered, ten Palestinians will die. The price for harming the Jewish people is that your community will become like the tribe of Amalek, ripe for extinction. It says so in the Bible, and it is said by the secular lions of Judah, by their secular leaders and by their secular army. ‘Israel has a right to defend itself.’ Palestine by contrast does not have that right. In the aftermath of October 7, when Jews are accused of genocide, the most heinous crime against humanity upon which the nation state of the Jews itself was founded, it is incumbent to ask whether or not this is what the chosen people were chosen for. From being the conscience of the world to being the object of the world’s conscience is a peculiar shift of the boot to the other foot. It is no longer simply a question of the survival of the Jewish people but of another people.
Now go and smite Amalek, and utterly destroy all that they have, and spare them not; but slay both man and woman, infant and suckling, ox and sheep, camel and ass. (Samuel 15:3)
The vast majority of Jews are free from persecution and reside in the most affluent quarter of the world, which is not to argue that antisemitism is not a problem. But it is critical to put it in historical perspective. What the average Palestinian is experiencing in Gaza or the West Bank is more akin to what Jews experienced in the ghettoes of Europe or black South Africans under Apartheid. A settler Jew in Israel is more akin to a white Afrikaner of 1967. Every American President, whether Democrat or Republican, is by default a Zionist. This is not conspiracy theory. It is a plain self-evident irrefutable fact. A tiny nation in the holy land has a major impact on the world’s history because of one thing, the presence and persistence of the Jewish people.
A community that persists for four millennia must surely be worthy of an identity. Few apart from indigenous peoples have lasted longer and for a group that has rarely been isolated and subjected to conquest, occupation, exile, diaspora, displacement and resettlement, the phenomenon of its continuity is significant, if not exceptional. There are many ancient peoples who have stood the test of time. Language, culture and tradition are common characteristics upon which communities and nations are built. India is one of the oldest examples of this. Migrations, wars and invasions are also key characteristics of most nations as is the occasional genocide, but what marks the Jews as seemingly unique is the historical lack of a nation between approximately 943 BC and 1948 AD, and the naturalisation of the vast majority of Jews into different nations following the dissolution of the medieval ghettoes in the late 18th Century. Secularisation and assimilation allowed for Jews to become Germans, French, British, Russian, Australian and American, to adopt different political and cultural identities, liberal, conservative and radical, to shift from the curtailed professions of money lender, doctor, and goldsmith to banker, artist, composer, scientist, soldier, chancellor and prime minister. The Jew could be whatever and whoever they wanted to be, and yet remain a Jew, however muted and veiled. Many left their faith behind and became indistinguishable from their Gentile hosts.
The emergence of race-based ideology coupled with the rise of nationalism in the late 19th Century reignited a more radical form of antisemitism that located the problem of the Jews not in religion but in the ethnic characteristics of peoples that defined a nation as having indigenous roots in land, blood and a localised spirit. From Richard Wagner to Houston Stewart Chamberlain and Arthur de Gobineau, ethnocentric ideas about what constituted a people was framed according to who qualified to belong to that people. Those who did not qualify were inherently alien and would have to be treated differently and inevitably be seen as outsiders, a problem or a threat. Rarely does the marginalisation of a community result in peaceful coexistence. To Wagner, there was Jewish music and there was German music. A Jew could only ever emulate and never authentically create, being an outsider with his own spiritual character based on his race. Taken to its logical conclusion, the Jew would either have to be fully integrated or completely removed. Wagner could begrudgingly accept integration when it came to his Jewish conductor, Hermann Levi. Hitler, an ardent Wagnerian, was not prepared to make such exceptions. The Jew had to be removed, the music of Mahler or the poetry of Heine eclipsed and buried, the practitioners of so-called Jewish science exiled or destroyed. It was up to a Gentile to decide what was a German and what was a Jew and without antisemitism it can be argued that the Jews would have remained fellow Germans, French, Italians and Americans, their identity increasingly indistinguishable beyond the religious origins of their distant forbearers.
The truth of Jewish ancestry is that it is not homogenous and that the myth of a Jewish race as presented by racialist ideology is completely false. DNA testing can identify some Jewish characteristics but there is a diverse spectrum of Jewish ethnicity that can be traced to three distinct branches, each with little connection to the other, apart from a common religious thread. Ashkenazi, Sephardi and Mizrahi Jews are distinct groups, the first originating in northern and central Europe, the second in southern Europe and the Levant, the third in North Africa and Asia Minor. Before 1914, only eight percent of Palestine was Jewish and few of those had any connection to their European or African brethren.
The idea that a single people was banished from its homeland into a state of exile is a myth created first along religious lines by a community whose faith is anchored in Jerusalem, and secondly by Jewish nationalists who in the face of antisemitism needed to create another myth that mirrored the ethnocentric prejudice of their persecutors. If the Jews too were a race, they were entitled to their own homeland based on an indigenous ancestral claim. The once and future kingdom of Jerusalem would become the secular equivalent of a Messianic call to return. Zionism harnessed biblical narrative to serve its romantic idealism of a secular promised land. The Jews, persecuted by their enemies, would not need to wait for a messiah to return home. The land was there for the taking and the Jews would achieve by politics what their rabbis could never have hoped to achieve in captivity. Thus was the myth of Jewish unity born. It was neither true nor accurate but it persisted and continues to persist as the question of Palestine endures to challenge its provenance. It is for this reason that the creation of a Palestinian state is seen as an existential threat to the Jewish homeland, being based on a counterclaim of hereditary and indigenous identity that mirrors and challenges the myth of Jewish origin. The ongoing war, occupation and expansion of Jewish settlements has buried the hope of a two state solution, meaning that a one state solution has only two conceivable outcomes. Either the majority of Palestinians are permanently exiled, or the struggle for self-determination persists and results in majority rule that will cripple the mission of Zionism to sustain a nation based on the dominance of a single people.
The paradigm shift from being the erstwhile oppressed to the oppressor is a peculiar dispensation that relies on the perpetuation of the legacy of persecution and prejudice to maintain its ethnic supremacy. The people that were once victimised shall never again be brought low. God’s chosen and anointed shall never again be made a sacrificial lamb. Power and the justification for power is grounded on the self-righteous indignation of four centuries of suffering. The nation of Israel has evolved from being a movement to free Jews from persecution to one based on the infliction of persecution. The allegation of genocide against the erstwhile victims of genocide is the dark consummation of a legacy of violence, vengeance, and victimisation. Palestinians have become what Edward Said referred to as ‘the victim’s victim’. This is the grim reward for the burden of endurance, of persistence, of self-election and self-deliverance. The land of Canaan that was taken from the Philistines (aka Palestinians) by an ancient tribe of Israelites became the modern birthright of Zionism which, in the face of racism and nationalism, found their own national and racial myth upon which to seize it for a second time. For this they were blessed with the gift that was a poisoned chalice.
Certain American Evangelists, also known as Christian Zionists, believe that Christ will return to Jerusalem on the Day of Judgement and restore the Holy Land to the righteous elect, namely Christians and Jews. On that day, they believe, the Jews will be converted and recognise Christ as their true Messiah. After rejecting him for two millennia and suffering the consequences of Christian persecution for centuries, this is the epitome of wishful thinking, but in the post-diluvian world where Man is fallen and corrupted, the aspirations of a Caesar can be reconciled with that of a Christ. Palestinian Christians have been quick to point out to these reformed Protestants that Jesus was both an Israelite and a Palestinian, just as he was both a Jew and a Christian. To render unto Caesar was to see the world as a foreshadowing of a world to come. If Jesus was indeed a Jew who came not to dissolve the law but to fulfil it (Matthew 5:17), he was not denying his own Jewishness but transcending it, and by so doing extending the faith in the one true God to all peoples. You do not have to be a believer or indeed even a Christian to note that the Sermon on the Mount is a call to see beyond tribe and blood towards a common bond in which Jew and Gentile can and must coexist. It is a message echoed in the meditations of the Buddha in whom all sentient beings are bound by the law of suffering to seek enlightenment, or remain forever mired in ignorance.
Religions are always prone to the corruption of power, but their essence is based on a spiritual awareness of the mutability of life in the face of extinction. The colossus of gold has feet of clay and all is but dust, as transient as the glorious sand mandalas of Tibet. The stones of empires decay into gilded splendour while the flesh of their dead are devoured by vultures. What was once built to last for eternity stands abandoned and empty. History is a litany of peaks and troughs, each ascent ending in downfall. There are no exceptions, not even for the chosen. All are equally forsaken when the veil trembles before the truth and the conqueror lies in the same field of dirt as the conquered.
Hi, this is Dov’s cousin Eliot. I recognized your style before he told me! Very good starting post!