When Victims Rule (pdf)

THE CAUSES OF HOSTILITY TOWARDS JEWS: A HISTORICAL OVERVIEW
tual link to Jews is understood to have originated, of all things, around a piece
of real estate commonly understood to be part of the “Covenant,” which, says
Alfred Jospe, “is the agreement between God and Israel by which Israel accepts
the Torah [Old Testament] …. The concept of covenant signifies the consciousness
of what the truth is.” [JOSPE, p. 15] “The covenant,” adds Will Herberg,
“is an objective supernatural fact; it is God’s act of creating and maintaining
Israel for his purposes in history.” [EISENSTEIN, p. 274] “The covenant made
for all time means that all future generations are included in the covenant,”
notes Monford Harris,
“Being born into this covenental people make one a member of the
covenant. Berith is election. This is very difficult for moderns to understand,
let alone accept. It is our modern orientation that sees every human
being as an ‘accidental collocation of atoms,’ the birth of every
person as purely adventitious. From the classical Jewish perspective, being
born to a Jewish mother is a divine act of election.” [HARRIS, M.,
1965, p. 90-91]
“For Israel,” notes Edward Greenstein, “God’s immanence found expression
in the perception of God as a super person.” [GREENSTEIN, E., 1984,
p. 89] The idea that God was some kind of tradesman, and that he was a distinctly
dialectical Other to humanity, as a Lord, King, Patriarch, Commander,
and even Warlord of a worldly provenance has – with the religious commentaries
and meta-commentaries that evolved from His commands in Judaism –
provided fuel for modern scholarly debate about Jewish (and linked strands of
Christian) creations in the world of secular affairs, most particularly in their
materialist, rationalist, and patriarchal flavors. The result, in today’s Orthodox
Judaism, says Evelyn Kaye, is a “community [that] has developed an insular,
single-minded approach which is completely intolerant of any views that differ
from its own.” [KAYE, p. 23]
Whatever else they believed, Jews have traditionally understood themselves
to be – by hereditary line – special, intrinsically better than other people: they
were divinely esteemed. The Old Testament stated it plainly:
“For you are people consecrated to the Lord your God: of all the peoples
on earth the Lord your God chose you to be His treasured people.”
[DEUTERONOMY 7:6]
The notion that Jews – originally defined racially as the Israelite progeny of
Abraham (and a special lineage through his son Isaac, then Jacob, and so on) –
are the “Chosen People” of God is the bedrock of Jewish self-conception and it
resonates deeply in some form to Jewish self-identity to this day. What exactly
such a mantle of greatness confers has, for most, changed drastically over (particularly
recent) centuries, and is still a delicate source for self-reflection and
debate, ranging from traditional racist theories against non-Jews (still entertained
by many Orthodox Jews, and most of Zionism) to more modern, liberalizing,
and even secular notions that Jews are destined to lead humankind to
some kind of redemptive glory.
The extraordinary self-perpetuating ethnocentric premises of traditional
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