When Victims Rule (pdf)

THE CAUSES OF HOSTILITY TOWARDS JEWS: A HISTORICAL OVERVIEW
Israelite genealogies and pedigrees that codifies sacred recipes for group solidarity,
self-aggrandizement (land conquest, et al), and self-preservation for
those with direct ancestral linkage to Abraham.
“The biblical faith [of the Old Testament],” writes scholar Bernhard Anderson,
“to the bewilderment of many philosophers, is fundamentally historical in
character. It is concerned with events and historical relationships, not abstract
values and ideas existing in a timeless realm.” [ANDERSON, p. 12] “The halakah
[Jewish religious law] does not aspire to a heavenly transcendence,” notes
influential modern Rabbi Joseph Soloveitchik, “nor does it aspire to soar upon
the wings of some abstract, mysterious spirituality. It fixes its gaze on the concrete,
empirical reality and does not let its attention be diverted from it.”
[SOLOVEITCHIK, p. 92]
“There is no Valhalla [afterlife Paradise] in Judaism,” notes Chaim Bermant,
“and no Garden of the Houris, and while there was paradise and hell,
both were to be experienced mainly on earth … Neither heaven with all
its joys, nor hell with all its torments (which, as described in the Talmud,
are akin to those of Tantalus) have a central place in the Jewish faith, Judaism
is of this world and in so far as it believes in the Kingdom of Heaven
at all it is as something which will become manifest on earth.”
[BERMANT, C., 1977, p. 16]
Beyond Israelite genealogies, the Torah (the Old Testament) includes an
ancient compilation of rules and regulations, elaborated upon in metacommentaries
by later Judaic religious texts, especially the Talmud, which codifies
correct behavior for all the minutia of daily living. In Jewish tradition, “the
whole keynote of being,” says sociologist Talcott Parsons, “starting with the creation,
was action, the accomplishment of things.” [PARSONS, p. 103] (And one
of the “keys to Jewish success,” says Jewish business author Steven Silbiger, is to
“be psychologically driven to prove something.”) [SILBIGER, S., 2000, p. 9]
“Judaism is not a revealed religion,” wrote the great German-Jewish philosopher
Moses Mendelssohn, “but revealed legislation. Its first precept is not
‘thou shalt believe’ or not believe, but thou shalt do or abstain from doing.”
[GOLDSTEIN, D., p. 43, in Jerusalem] “A constant motif of post-Enlightenment
ethics,” says Rabbi Jonathan Sacks, “is the rejection of religious authority
as an external command to which one submits. For this reason [philosopher]
Hegel is sharply critical of the Jewish structure of law. ‘Of spirit,’ he writes of
Judaism, ‘nothing remained save pride in slavish obedience.’ Much of
Nietzsche’s work is a deepening set of variations on this theme. Judaism, he
says, introduced ‘a God who demands.’ The autonomous self, central to modern
ethics, is radically incompatible with the structures of Jewish spirituality,
built as they are on the concept of mitzvah, command.” [SACKS, J., p. 100-101]
The all-encompassing and dictatorial manner of Jewish Orthodoxy in the
Talmudic (and other) interpretations of the Old Testament is reflected in this
observation by Gerson Cohen:
“The Torah encompasses and seeks to regulate every moment of life
… Nothing human is beyond the scope of judgment and its program of
15