Orthodox Reflections

To hear a podcast discussion about the content of this article, click here to listen to Counterflow with Buck Johnson on YouTube.

Recently, I was walking through the exhibit floor of a conference, when a young lady approached me to sign a petition. Her shirt identified her as a representative of a pro-Israel Christian group. The petition was calling for a law punishing companies that took part in the Boycott, Divest, and Sanction (BDS) movement. When I hesitated, she said with a smile, “God only blesses America because we support Israel!”

With a baffled look on my face, I asked her, “Don’t members of the Body of Christ count for anything? What about the persecution of Christians in Israel? Or the human rights of Palestinians?”

She responded immediately, “The Jews are God’s Chosen People since the covenant made with Abraham. Christians in Israel are protected. Judaism supports human rights. The Palestinians are terrorists.”

I walked away without further dialogue, and without signing the petition. There are already enough limits on our freedom of speech and freedom of association in this country. No need to ask for more. The whole incident left me rattled. After being in the Orthodox Church for a long time, you can forget what Evangelicals really teach.

Most Evangelicals have an outsized love for Israel and a great deal of respect for Judaism. So much so, that Evangelicals have been known to borrow Jewish customs to be “more authentic”. A number of Evangelicals even teach “dual covenant” salvation. This is the belief that Jews can be saved because of the covenant God made with Abraham, without their having to accept Jesus Christ as their Savior.  Evangelical beliefs concerning Judaism create a problem for two reasons. First, the number of Evangelicals in the US is rather large, so their beliefs matter. Second, Evangelicals don’t really know anything about Rabbinic Judaism, so their beliefs are more grounded in myth than reality. They are not alone in this, as most American Christians of any variety are just as ignorant.

Believing in myths about Judaism has led America into more than one costly war, harmed our moral standing in the world, and silenced opposition to the ever-increasing Christian persecution within Israel itself. These myths harm us socially, as our very freedom of speech is increasingly constrained to prevent utterances labeled as “anti-Semitic”.

The religion of Judaism is a big topic, and covering all aspects of it is way beyond the scope of a single article. Rather, this is a focused attempt to correct what I perceive as the top three most harmful myths a majority of American Christians believe about Judaism.

With that scope in mind, let’s get started.

1. Modern Jews are the Descendants of Abraham

The Biblical story of Abraham being the ancestor of the Israelites is well known to all Christians. We accept its veracity, and the rest of the Old Testament, as a matter of faith. Reading the Christian Bible, we trace God’s Chosen People from Abraham to Isaac to Jacob down through the Kingdom of Judea and finally to Christ and the Apostles. Most people, knowing this history, believe that modern Jews (those who either practice Judaism or claim descent from those who did) are descended from the Israelites of the Bible. For many Christians, modern Jews, as the “Children of Abraham”, continue to be chosen of God and are heirs to all the promises of the covenant God made with Abraham. That includes the right to possess the land of Israel.

We commonly refer to the “Jewish people”, the “Jewish ethnicity”, sometimes the “Jewish race”, and even sometimes the “Jewish tribe”.  All those phrases presuppose that modern Jews have a common ancestry. Only, what if that’s not true? What if most modern Jews are not actually descended from the ancient Israelites at all? How does that change things, especially since (as we will discuss later) modern Judaism is not the same religion as practiced by the Israelites?

How is it possible that there are millions of Jews today who are not descended  from Abraham, and whose origins are not even in the Middle East? It is possible, because at one time Judaism was a very successful, proselytizing religion. The excerpt below is from an article called Try It, You’ll Like It: Should Jews Proselytize? from the site My Jewish Learning:

Most Jews today may not be aware of it, but Judaism has a long history of not only welcoming, but encouraging gentiles to become Jewish. From the day Abraham picked up a flint and performed his own circumcision, thus becoming Judaism’s first convert, ancient Israelites openly spread their teachings among the nations they encountered.

 

Jewish proselytizing was so successful, it’s estimated that by the first century C.E. fully 10 percent of the Roman Empire was Jewish, close to 8 million people.

 

“It’s an incredible number, and it means that the Jewish community was not meant to be this tiny, minuscule group,” notes Rabbi Lawrence Epstein, founder and president of the Conversion to Judaism Resource Center in Commack, N.Y.

 

Jews only stopped open proselytism because of pressure from Christian and then Muslim rulers, beginning in 407 C.E. when the Roman Empire outlawed conversion to Judaism under penalty of death. But the internal, theological impetus to be “a light unto the nations” (Isaiah 42:6) persisted through the centuries, albeit undercover, advancing and retreating along with Jewish fortunes in the Diaspora.

 

Now in 21st-century America, where Jews are a privileged minority openly practicing their religion, powerful in every area of political, social, and economic life, some rabbis and Jewish leaders are suggesting that it’s time to cast off the prohibition forced upon us by anti-Semites and return to our original universalistic mission. Judaism is a great religion, with much to offer today’s society. Why shouldn’t we make it more available to outsiders who might wish to join the tribe?

Have you ever seen that statistic? 10% of the Roman Empire, close to 8 million people in the 1st Century, practiced the Judaism of that day. That number is astounding, and could never have been the lone result of a “diaspora” of people from Judea (Roman Palestine). The massive growth in Judaism around the classical world was, in fact, a direct result of the success Jews had in converting pagans to their monotheistic religion.

During the reign of the Hasmonean Kings in Judea, neighboring peoples such as the Edomites were conquered and forcibly converted to Judaism. The Hasmoneans also injected a great deal of Hellenism into Judea and Judaism, which cemented the idea (already present in many Old Testament writings) of the “universalism” of the Jewish God. The following quote is from the book The Invention of the Jewish People by Shlomo Sand, Professor of History at Tel Aviv University:

It would not be an exaggeration to say that, but for the symbiosis between Judaism and Hellenism, which, more than anything, turned the former into a dynamic, propagative religion for more than three hundred years, the number of Jews in today’s world would be roughly the same as the number of Samaritans. Hellenism altered and invigorated the high culture of the kingdom of Judea. This historical development enabled the Jewish religion to mount the Greek eagle and traverse the Mediterranean world.

 

The conversions carried out by the Hasmonean kingdom were only a small part of a far more significant phenomenon that began in the early second century BCE. The pagan world was already beginning to rethink its beliefs and values when Judaism launched its campaign of proselytization and became one of the factors that prepared the ground for the great Christian revolution. Judaism did not yet produce professional missionaries, as its younger sibling would do before long, but its encounter with the philosophies of the Stoic and Epicurean schools gave birth to a new literature that demonstrated a strong desire to win souls.

 

At this time Alexandria was, if not the most important, one of the leading cultural centers of the Hellenistic world. It was there that the initiative was born, as early as the third century BCE, to translate the Bible into the widespread, common Greek dialect Koine. The Babylonian Talmud and the work known as the Letter of Aristeas would attribute the initiative to King Ptolemy II Philadelphus. It is doubtful if the Septuagint was in fact carried out at the behest of the Egyptian king, and it was certainly not a singular, brief act. It is more likely that the entire Old Testament was translated over many years by a large number of Jewish scholars, but the enterprise testified to the important symbiosis taking place between Judaism and Hellenism, through which the former was turning into a multilingual religion.

Most Orthodox and Roman Catholic Christians are fully aware of the Greek Septuagint translation of the Old Testament at Alexandria. How many of us, however, have ever stopped to consider that the real purpose of that translation was most likely to facilitate converting pagans to Judaism? Ironically, of course, it was that same Greek translation which was used by the early Christian Church to spread the Gospel. A fact that partially accounts for the later hostility of Rabbis to it.

As an aside, we often read anti-Jewish writings by the early Church fathers through the lens of WWII and the Holocaust. That is a serious historical mistake. In the first few centuries after Christ, the Jewish communities around the Mediterranean were not supine victims of Christian aggression. The Jewish communities dwarfed the early Church in numbers and influence. Until well into the 4th Century, Jews and “Judaizers” (heretical Christians who wanted to incorporate distinctly Jewish practices into Christianity) were slugging it out for souls with the early Church. There were mutual polemics. There were riots. There was bloodletting. There was slander. If you are going to read the early Church Fathers’ writings on Jews, then you have to place them in this context or you are being neither fair nor historically accurate.

Jewish proselytizing continued intermittently throughout the first millennium in pagan lands, and scored some notable achievements such as the conversion of the Khazars. A Turkic people, the Khazars converted to Judaism sometime around the 8th Century. Their kingdom (situated across parts of modern day European Russia, Ukraine, and Kazakhstan), at its height, was more powerful and more populous than any previous Jewish kingdom, including that of Solomon. The Khazars were a force to be reckoned with. What happened to the descendants of this empire is still a matter of controversy today.

Among modern Jews there may be some actual descendants of Abraham. The majority, however, are not. The numbers are what they are. Further, the “expulsion of Jews” from Palestine, after the destruction of the Temple, has apparently been much overblown. Modern historians believe that perhaps the cultural and political elites may have been forced out, but the average farmers and common folk stayed put. Some of these Israelite descendants practiced RabbinicJudaism in the coming centuries. Most converted to Christianity. Eventually, many of their descendants converted to Islam. Which means there is Israelite descent among certain Middle Eastern populations of Christians and Muslims, perhaps in even higher proportions than among Israeli Jews.

The implications of all this are stunning for Zionism, for Evangelicalism, for post-WWII Christianity, for the human rights of Palestinians living under Israeli occupation, for those who believe that modern Jews are guilty of deicide by virtue of their descent, and for the entire concept of “anti-Semitism”. To avoid dealing with anything that might call into question the right of Zionists to the land of Israel, many Jewish leaders have tried to cover up much of their own history, especially about the Khazars and other successful examples of Jewish proselytizing. This quote is also from the Sand book referenced earlier:

There was anxiety about the legitimacy of the Zionist project, should it become widely known that the settling Jewish masses were not the direct descendants of the “Children of Israel”—such delegitimization might lead to a broad challenge against the State of Israel’s right to exist. Another possibility, not necessary in conflict with the former, is that the occupation of large, densely populated Palestinian territories intensified the ethnic element in Israeli identity politics. The proximity of masses of Palestinians began to seem a threat to the imaginary “national” Israel, and called for stronger bonds of identity and definition. The effect was to put the kibosh on any remembrance of Khazaria. In the second half of the twentieth century, the connection with the orphaned Khazars was steadily weakened, as the “Jewish people” gathered again in its original “homeland” after two thousand years of wandering in the world.

Perhaps there is no “Jewish race” or “Jewish tribe” or even a real “Jewish ethnicity” that is global in nature (as opposed to locally created due to hundreds of years of in-breeding). Perhaps modern Jews are really members of multi-ethnic, multi-racial, and multi-lingual communities that are united by a common set of religious beliefs and practices. This is another quote from Sand’s book on that topic:

If world Jews were indeed a nation, what were the common elements in the ethnographic cultures of a Jew in Kiev and a Jew in Marrakech, other than religious belief and certain practices of that belief? Perhaps, despite everything we have been told, Judaism was simply an appealing religion that spread widely until the triumphant rise of its rivals, Christianity and Islam, and then, despite humiliation and persecution, succeeded in surviving into the modern age.

2. Modern Judaism is the Spiritual Elder Brother of Christianity

Jesus was a Jew. Christianity sprang from Judaism. Judaism is the “spiritual elder brother of Christianity”. Christians and Jews worship the same God. We hear such statements so often, that most Christians accept them as facts. Each of these statements has a great deal of truth, but only when discussing the Hebrew religion of the 2nd Temple prior to 70 AD. Today’s Judaism is not the religion practiced by Christ during His lifetime. In fact, modern Judaism is younger than Christianity.

Orthodox priest Fr. Lawrence Farley recently got into some hot water with comments concerning Judaism. However that may be, in a clarification to those comments the father was absolutely accurate in his appraisal of Rabbinic Judaism:

Rabbinic Judaism is not synonymous with Mosaic religion. Specifically, Rabbinic Judaism lacks the Temple and its sacrifices, which were considered as the means of forgiveness and salvation for as long as it stood. (See the Song of the Three Young Men 15, in Daniel 3, with its prayer that after the destruction of the Temple by the Babylonians Israel had “no burnt offering or sacrifice or oblation or incense, no place to make an offering before God or to find mercy”. Note: it was through the sacrifices mandated in the Law through Moses that Israel’s worshippers “found mercy”).

 

After the destruction of the Temple in 70 A.D. Mosaic religion was mutilated and deficient, lacking its beating heart, which is why it was so widely mourned by the Jews as a terrible catastrophe. Obviously the Jews at the time had to carry on somehow, and they found refuge in the thought that prayer and penitence might somehow take the place of sacrifice. It was something of a stopgap solution, but what else could they do? For us it is enough to note that Rabbinic Judaism should not be equated with the religion of the Old Testament. The former became a religion of a Book in a way that the latter never was.

At the time of Christ, the Mosaic religion was sacerdotal with its center in the 2nd Temple in Jerusalem. That was the faith Jesus practiced. He is portrayed in the Gospels as worshipping in the Temple with His disciples. The modern faith of Rabbinic Judaism, grounded in the Talmud, was developed after the destruction of the Temple by Jewish scholars coming from the Pharisaic tradition, starting at a place called Jamnia, as a reaction to the loss of the Temple:

Jamnia or Yavneh (יַבְנֶה) in the 1st century AD was a small town located along Israel’s southern coastal plain between Jaffa and Ashdod. It is believed that Jamnia hosted the discussions pertaining to the establishment of the Jewish canon. According to Rabbinic sources, when the Jerusalem Temple was destroyed by Titus in 70 AD, Yochanan ben Zakkai (a leading Pharisaic proto-rabbinic leader who opposed the Saddusaic leadership) established a center of learning in Jamnia. This attracted proto-rabbinic scholars to this area. After the Temple’s destruction, Jamnia gradually became a new spiritual center in Israel. Israel’s legislative body (the Great Beit Din later referred to as the Sanhedrin) relocated to Jamnia (Babylonian Talmud, Rosh Hashanah 31a). Other names often associated with Jamnia are Gamliel II, the leader of Bet Din and Akiva ben Joseph, a charismatic leader from the days of Bar Kochba Revolt.

 

Prior to 70 AD, Judaism was fragmented into various sects. The Jamnia sages intentionally promoted an inclusive, pluralistic and non-sectarian Judaism. In light of new circumstances, they created a more flexible system of Torah interpretation that accounted for diversity and charted a new way to relate to God and his covenant with Israel (Shaye Cohen). They shaped the possibility of new Jewish faith and life without sacrifices, priesthood and the centrality of the Jerusalem Temple.

Part of the process of coping with the loss of the Temple was the growing centrality of the Talmud. The entire Talmud consists of 63 tractates written in Mishnaic Hebrew and Jewish Babylonian Aramaic. The Talmud contains the teachings and opinions of thousands of rabbis on a variety of subjects, including halakha, Jewish ethics, philosophy, customs, history, folklore, Biblical interpretation, and other topics. The Talmud is the basis for all codes of Jewish law and is widely quoted in rabbinic literature. The compilation of the Talmud probably began prior to the birth of Christ, but continued in Babylon up till at least the 5th century. There are also Rabbinic commentaries that are considered part of Talmudic studies which were written as late as the 10th Century.

The importance of the Talmud in Rabbinic Judaism was explained well in this article called Why Do Jews Study Talmud?:

For most of Jewish history, Jews in various communities have constituted self-governing enclaves within the larger society, and from the time rabbis rose to prominence as leaders of Jewry their legal traditions provided the rules by which these enclaves lived.

 

Thus rabbinic marriage law became Jew­ish marriage law, rabbinic rules about the Sabbath became rules for all Jews, and so on. The Talmud itself does not always state with precision what these rules are to be, and in the nature of things it could not anticipate new situations in which these rules would have to be applied. Thus study of the Talmud for its law became a chief activity of those in the community who were charged with teaching and enforcing that law.

 

In a paradox that determined the history of Judaism, the Talmud was Oral Torah in written form, and as such it became the clearest statement the Jew could hear of God’s very word.

 

This must not be understood too literally. The point is not that God dictated the entire Talmud to later rabbis in the same way some believed the Written Torah had been dictated to Moses, but rather that in the Talmud the Jew could find a clear expression of God’s will. The Talmud provided the means of determining how God wants all Jews to live, in all places, at all times. Even if the details of the law had to be altered to suit newly arisen conditions, the proper way to perform such adaptation could itself be learned from the Talmud and its commentaries. Thus this basic text uncovered the fullness of God’s rev­elation to the people of the Covenant. The Talmud revealed God speak­ing to Israel, and so the Talmud became Israel’s way to God. To study Talmud was to converse with the Creator of the Universe.

Few American Christians seem to know much about the Talmud, or its importance within Rabbinic Judaism. As we will see shortly, this is a serious problem, because the Talmud contains blatantly anti-Christian and anti-Gentile teachings. Rabbinic Judaism is not the faith of the Old Testament. It is a much younger faith that mediates its understanding of the Old Testament, the place of Jews in the world, and the practice of Judaism through study of the Talmud. Neither Jesus nor the Apostles would recognize Rabbinic Judaism.

Rabbinic Judaism was attractive to pagan converts in the early centuries AD, even though it was still in flux as the Talmud was not yet complete. Rabbinic Judaism continued to prove attractive to pagans such as the Khazars throughout the first millennium AD. Should Jews return to active proselytizing, it would no doubt be attractive to some people today.

The right of Jews to practice Rabbinic Judaism should be respected and protected. However, Orthodox Christians must understand that it is not the religion of Jesus and we do not have anything we need to learn from it. All that was good within 1st Century Judaism was already preserved within the Orthodox Church. Our faith is already complete.

3. Judaism Teaches Tolerance and Human Rights

At an ecumenical meeting in 2021 with representatives of Judaism, Bartholomew, the Patriarch of Constantinople, had this to say, “Throughout history, our two communities have shared many commonalities. We are two people who have been steadfast in the face of adversity. We are two people who have resisted oppression. We are two people who are ministering the God of Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob. We are two people that believe in the intrinsic dignity of the human being, fashioned in the image and likeness of God.”

According to Christian teaching, all are made in the image and likeness of God. Therefore, each person has inherent worth, regardless of religion, age, sex, ethnicity, and nationality. Most assume, like the Patriarch, that Judaism has the same teaching.  Further, since Jews have suffered persecution, most assume they are sensitive to the plight of others. Neither of these assumptions hold true. Though the truth is uncomfortable for modern Westerners to hear, it must be said. The more serious an individual becomes in the practice of Judaism, the more he/she tends to become insular and increasingly less concerned with the health, well-being, and rights of non-Jews. Highly secularized individuals from Jewish backgrounds can be different. That fact only proves the preceding rule.

Jews identify themselves as God’s Chosen People, by birth and not merely because of allegiance to a specific faith tradition. That idea by itself is bound to cause a certain amount of devaluing of the “other” in society. Beyond that, the Talmud, which is essential to Rabbinic Judaism, contains teaching  that is hostile to Gentiles:

In general, when the Torah states a law applying to one’s “neighbor,” the rabbis understand the law as applying to Jews and not to non-Jews.

 

Other rules assume that gentiles are, at best unreliable and at worst malevolent and violent. For this reason, a gentile is grouped together with dishonest butchers, gamblers, usurers and thieves who cannot act as witness (Shulhan Arukh Hoshen Mishpat 34).

 

Traditional Jewish law treats Jews better than non-Jews. Even the secondary, formalistic arguments and arguments from self-interest–“we cannot provoke their animosity!”–that permit more equitable treatment for non-Jews may seem morally problematic to modern Jews.

Secularized Jews often downplay the more troubling aspects of Talmudic teaching. However, very few ever outright demand that it be changed or publicly rejected. The real-world implications of this teaching are most readily apparent in Israel, where minorities such as the Palestinians are treated to appalling discrimination:

Just over 20% of Israel’s population of 9.45 million are Arabs, many of whom self-identify as Palestinians, while 2.9 million Palestinians live in the West Bank and East Jerusalem, which Israel occupied in the 1967 Middle East war. Another 1.9 million Palestinians live in the Gaza Strip, which Israel pulled out of in 2005 but the UN still considers to also be occupied.

 

More than 600,000 Jews live in about 140 settlements built in the West Bank and East Jerusalem. Most of the international community considers the settlements illegal under international law, though Israel disputes this.

 

Officially all Israeli citizens have equal rights, regardless of religion or race. But Amnesty’s report concludes that Israel “considers and treats Palestinians as an inferior non-Jewish racial group”.

 

“The segregation is conducted in a systematic and highly institutionalized manner through laws, policies and practices, all of which are intended to prevent Palestinians from claiming and enjoying equal rights with Jewish Israelis within the territory of Israel and within the Occupied Palestinian Territories, and thus are intended to oppress and dominate the Palestinian people,” it says.

 

The report also says Amnesty has documented inhuman or inhumane acts – forcible transfer, administrative detention and torture, unlawful killings and serious injuries, and the denial of basic freedoms or persecution – that it says Israel has committed against Palestinians “with the intention to maintain this system” and that “amount to the crime against humanity of apartheid” under of the Apartheid Convention and the Rome Statute of the International Criminal Court.

 

Amnesty’s secretary general, Agnès Callamard, said: “There is no possible justification for a system built around the institutionalised and prolonged racist oppression of millions of people.”

 

“The international community must face up to the reality of Israel’s apartheid, and pursue the many avenues to justice which remain shamefully unexplored,” she added.

An Israeli security checkpoint for Palestinians 

A common rejoinder to complaints over the treatment of Palestinians is that they are all Muslim Jihadists dedicated to the destruction of Israel. However, it is not only Muslims which are subjected to persecution. Christians, Arab and otherwise, are also abused with the complicity of the Israeli government:

An Israeli journalist who disguised himself as a priest was mocked and spat upon in the Old City of Jerusalem in the latest incident of Jewish public animosity against Christians in Jerusalem.

 

Yossi Eli, a reporter with Israel’s Channel 13 News, said the pair were assailed “by a child and a soldier” within minutes of donning a brown priest’s robe and walking with a clergyman in the Old City, according to Haaretz.

 

The attacks are part of a larger pattern that began earlier this year, most recently at an Evangelical Pentecost event in May, where several Orthodox Jewish activists — including a prominent rabbi and the deputy mayor of Jerusalem — took part in a protest that eventually turned violent, with several of the protesters hurling insults at Christians gathered in the area and others spitting on them.

 

Among those who participated in the protest were ultra-Orthodox Rabbi Zyi Thau, the spiritual leader of the Noam Party, and Arieh King, the deputy mayor of Jerusalem, who equated Christian missionary activity with radical Islamic terrorism.

 

In a tweet, King applauded the “dignified and proper protest” and said, “As far as I am concerned, every missionary should know that he is not a welcome person in the Land of Israel.”

 

In April, the head of the Roman Catholic Church in the Holy Land, Latin Patriarch Pierbattista Pizzaballa, blamed the recent uptick in attacks in the Christian quarter on radical Jewish extremists feeling empowered and “protected” under Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu’s government.

Evangelicals, interestingly, are among Israel’s biggest supporters in the United States. If attacks on them continue, and finally get decent coverage in their media, one wonders what effect that will eventually have on believers stateside?

Now, one can make the case that what is happening in Israel currently is more the fruit of Zionism than of Judaism. There is indeed a case to be made for that, at least historically. Here is a discussion from Haaretz concerning Zionism, Israel, and the failure to form a secular Israeli identity:

Zionism as a national movement that rebelled against historical Judaism was mainly atheistic. Most of its leaders and activists ceased believing in redemption through the coming of the Messiah, the long-standing essence of Jewish belief, and took their fate into their own hands. The power of the human subject replaced the power of the omnipotent God.

 

The rabbis knew that, and were terrified – and, therefore, almost all of them became avowed anti-Zionists. From Hasidic rebbes Sholom Dovber Schneersohn, the Admor of Lubavitch (Chabad) and Yehudah Aryeh Leib Alter (the Admor of Gur) to leading U.S. Reform Rabbi Isaac Mayer Wise, founder of the Reform Central Conference, mitnagdim and Hasidim, Orthodox, Reform and Conservative, all saw the rise of Zionism as the end of Judaism. Due to the sweeping opposition of the rabbis of Germany, Theodor Herzl was forced to transfer the First Zionist Congress from Munich to the Swiss city of Basel.

 

For the atheistic Zionists, God was dead and therefore the Holy Land became the homeland; all the traditional holidays became national holidays; and Jerusalem stopped being a heavenly city and became the very earthly capital of an eternal people. But it wasn’t these decisions, or many others, that prevented secular nationalism from serving as the foundation for the establishment of the State of Israel.

 

The main reason for Zionism’s inability to establish a secular entity with a constitution – in which religion is separated from the state – lay elsewhere. The problematic nature of defining the “Jew” according to secular criteria – cultural, linguistic, political or “biological” (despite all efforts, it’s still impossible to determine who is a Jew by means of DNA) – was what eliminated the option of a secularized identity.

 

For example, in 1918, Ben-Gurion – the future founder of the state – was convinced, as were many others, that most of the population of the Land of Israel had not been exiled, but converted to Islam with the Arab conquest, and therefore was clearly Jewish in origin.

 

In 1948, he had already given up on this confused and dangerous idea, and instead asserted that the Jewish people had been exiled by force and had wandered in isolation for 2,000 years. Shortly before that, he presented the weak and depleted religious Zionist stream with a valuable gift: In the famous “status quo” letter, all the laws pertaining to marital status, adoption and burial were given over to the Chief Rabbinate. The fear of assimilation was the nightmare shared by Judaism and Zionism, and it won out in the end.

 

Within a short time, the principle of the religious definition was accepted in identity politics: A “Jew” is someone who was born to a Jewish mother or converted, and is not a member of another religion. In other words, if you don’t meet those conditions, you cannot be a part of the revival of the “Jewish people,” even if you adopt Israeli culture, speak fluent Hebrew and celebrate on Israeli Independence Day. It’s a very logical historical process: Since there is no secular Jewish culture, it’s impossible to join by secular means something that doesn’t exist.

Judaism and Zionism are not synonyms. Not all adherents to Judaism are Zionists, but all Zionists at this point seem to use Judaism as a means of forging a national identity. A religiously-based identity that cancels the human rights of non-Jews living in Israel. Especially in the occupied territories, Israeli Jews are part of a system that oppresses their literal neighbors. People they see everyday, yet for whom they have no pity.

The more religious an Israeli is, the more in favor of this oppression he seems to become. On the contrary, the more religious a Christian is, the more he loves all people unconditionally. Love of one’s neighbor as oneself is, after all, the foundation of the Gospel. As the emancipation of slavery, the success of the Civil Rights movement, the political emancipation of Jews, the end of South African Apartheid, and many other examples make clear, over time a well-developed Christian conscience undermines systems of oppression rather than reinforcing them. Putting a boot on your neighbor’s throat is just not “Christlike”. Judaism, at least as practiced by the majority in Israel, seems to have no issue with keeping the “other” violently in check.

This Jewish feeling of superiority over the Gentile world is not confined to Israel. Twenty-years ago, a secular Jewish journalism professor from the University of Iowa, Stephen Bloom, published a book on the culture clash in the Northeastern Iowa town of Postville between locals and transplanted Hasidic Jews. The book, Postville: A Clash of Cultures in Heartland America, strove to present the conflict fairly from both sides. Bloom was secular enough to be accepted by the locals, but Jewish enough to get entrée into the world of the Hasidic Jews. In his presence, both sides opened up and told their true feelings. This passage is from a review of the book and discusses the introduction of Bloom to how the Hasidic Jews really felt about their Iowan neighbors:

There was a palpable groupthink among the Jews that refused to see the perspective of the locals, let alone empathize with them. The Jews were strictly transactional with the locals — we live here, you live here, leave us alone. But it was more than mere avoidance for the sake of toleration — it was an almost glee in deceiving the goyim that irked Bloom. The locals were essentially non-entities to the Jews — lacking any inherent value as human beings. To the Jews, however, their theology towards the gentiles made perfect sense — the Jew alone possessed a special relationship with God that required an insularity to protect it. The outside world — the non-observant world — was marked by one overriding theme: contamination and filth. The idea of fraternizing with the locals — of making nice with them — was then, at least to the ultra-orthodox mind, something incomprehensible.

The Gentiles were essentially “non-entities”. If the attitudes were reversed, the Gentiles would be accused of the vilest form of  “anti-Semitism”. Encountering this attitude bothered the secular Jewish author of the book.  Hopefully it bothers many more secular Jews, because they are among the only people likely to speak out about this double standard. Gentiles of all persuasions have been conditioned to silence.

Is such intolerance and devaluation of Gentiles emblematic only of Zionist or, perhaps, intensely religious Jews? Not really. Such feelings of superiority can be found among even secularized Jews. An example is James Deen, known as the “Nice Jewish Guy of Porn”. Deen has performed in thousands of pornographic movies since he was 18 years old. Deen deeply identifies as Jewish, even though he is not practicing and doesn’t seem to believe in the traditional God of Judaism. The following is from an interview with the Jewish Daily Forward:

I never really bought into the faith-God type of situation, but what I did enjoy was the Zionist movement, the culture behind it, the community. . . I identify with Judaism as a culture, and the culture encouraged me to learn, ask questions and strive for knowledge. I know how to shoot and light and edit, because I’m always trying to strive for knowledge at work. I don’t think I would have this type of mentality if I didn’t have my Jewish upbringing.

 

I don’t go into a place and think I’m Jewish, who else is Jewish, I need to work with them. Respect goes universally across all races, creeds, colors, religions, everything. The Jews know we’re better than everyone else — that’s all that matters. It’s true we’re the chosen people; it’s a fact.

Can you imagine the uproar if a “Christian” pornographer credited his upbringing in the Church for his successful work ethic in producing Porn in an interview with a Christian magazine? No such uproar seems to have occurred from the multiple interviews Deen has given to Jewish publications.

James Deen is a pornographer, an exploiter of women, and has been credibly accused of rape. Yet, he still identifies with Jewish culture and with a sense of being “chosen” (by a deity he doesn’t seem to believe in). Deen seems like an extreme case, but he is hardly alone among secularized Jews. Jewish Marxists like Wilhelm Reich and Herbert Marcuse inspired many of the Jewish pornographers at the vanguard of pornography legalization during the 70s. One such Jewish pornographer remembers going to porn studios with “my hair down to my ass, a copy of Wilhelm Reich’s Sexual Revolution under my arm, and yelling about work, ‘love and sex.’”

Jews have been at the forefront of many of the changes in Christian culture including legalized abortion and the acceptance of homosexuality. Pointing this out is only considered anti-Semitism if one is opposed to the results of their activism. According to the Jewish Daily Forward, “Jewish women were overrepresented in reproductive rights everywhere in the US.” Notable Jewish women involved in promoting abortion included Betty Friedan, Susan Brownmiller, Ellen Willis, and Gloria Steinem. While at a Jewish American Heritage Month event, Joe Biden stated, “I bet you 85 percent of those changes [referring to the public acceptance of gay marriage], whether it’s in Hollywood or social media, are a consequence of Jewish leaders in the industry.”

An article from Haaretz crows: “Brilliant actors like Larry David and Sarah Silverman are challenging America’s powerful religious, family-friendly culture and asserting their Jewishness by glorifying obscenity.” 

Nathan Abrams, a Jewish professor at the University of Aberdeen, summed it up, “Those at the forefront of the movement which forced America to adopt a more liberal view of sex were Jewish.” If Judaism really taught tolerance and respect for other cultures (including the majority one), then we would expect fewer Jews to be at the forefront of trying to transform them.

Further, free speech is not equally supported across the Gentile / Jewish divide, which you would not expect if Judaism valued tolerance. The current situation appears to be that Jews can say anything they like, including blatant obscenity and blasphemy, but the speech of Gentiles is subject to potentially severe constraints. In our modern cancel culture, criticism of anything Jewish, including Israel’s discriminatory policies, is often met with severe repercussions. An example is the site “Canary Mission”, which is dedicated to destroying the lives of college students who support the BDS movement as protest against Israeli apartheid. Below is from the site’s “About Us” page:

Conclusion

Judaism is a religion and a culture. It needs to be understood as such. Religions can be studied, criticized, and reformed. There are teachings within Judaism that are anti-Christian, anti-Gentile and do not align with the needs of modern nation states in which citizenship rights are independent of religion. Even among secularized Jews, a Jewish culture of supremacy and antipathy towards Christian society can often be found. It is time for Christians to put away their misconceptions about Judaism and deal with it honestly and forthrightly.

-Anthony Weber is an adult convert to Orthodoxy from Evangelicalism in the Antiochian Orthodox Christian Archdiocese