Hatred of Jews, Judaism, and Israel is hardly a new phenomenon. There is a reason the hatred of Jews is sometimes called the “oldest hatred.”
To the progressive, therefore, conservative or traditional hatred of Jews needs little explanation. A conservative is a supporter of tradition, and hatred of Jews has a long history. You do the math. From the perspective of the modern progressive mind, on the other hand, progressive antisemitism presents itself as a paradox. Progressives like to think that they are for, well, “progress.” And progress is about love, not hate, about liberality, not bigotry. Hence progressives, per their own self-definition, cannot be hateful. Given that self-image, many progressives, particularly progressively inclined Jews, have been surprised by the rise, or rather return, of high-profile progressive hatred of Jews, Judaism, and Israel. They should not be.
The deep, and seldom discussed premise of progressive ideology is the belief in comprehensive progress. In the progressive view, there is, nay, there must be an all-encompassing “arc of history.” It is what “progress” in the emphatic sense means, as all humanity moves from lower to higher. Diversity cannot exist outside of that arc. Any such diversity is, by definition, wrong, on the “wrong side of history.”
This view of history is not new to our age. Today’s version builds upon that of the Enlightenment. Although they could never quite agree on the exact details of history, many philosophes didn’t let that reality get in the way of the premise that there is such a story. Condorcet’s version of the stages of history was only one version created by a philosophe. Some disagreements about the true direction of history are allowed in this perspective, so long as the existence of many different visions is not viewed as evidence that the premise is wrong.
From at least that time to our own, the prospect of Jews remaining Jews makes that storyline difficult. Jews as an ancient people were easy to fit into that story. They were part of the story before our time. But Jews as a people still walking around, at least if they are more than a small remnant, are a problem. What are they still doing here? That uncomfortable question probably explains some of the longstanding secular animus against Jews and/or Judaism. In European culture, this might be seen as a variant of the common Christian belief that Jews were behind the arc of history for not accepting the new Gospel.
In the Enlightenment, Voltaire’s hatred of Jews and Judaism is notorious. Other leading Enlightened thinkers, such as Diderot, D’Holbach, and Kant, expressed similarly hostile views of Jews and/or Judaism. Some Enlightened thinkers who expressed such views also opposed the oppression of Jews. Their hope, or perhaps expectation, was that once Jews ceased to be walled off from the mainstream of European culture, they would cease to be warped by Judaism; they would become less Jewish and, in their view, more decent.
This Enlightened anti-Semitism was not unknown in America. Although our third president was personally sympathetic to Jews, he was hostile to Judaism. Jefferson’s views echoed Voltaire’s. The Jews, per Jefferson:
presented for the object of their worship a being of terrific character, cruel, vindictive, capricious and unjust. … Moses had bound the Jews to many idle ceremonies, mummeries and observances, of no effect towards producing the social utilities which constitute the essence of virtue … [and] instilled into his people the most anti-social spirit towards other nations. … [Jesus contended with] the priests of the superstition, a bloodthirsty race, as cruel and remorseless as the being whom they represented as the family God of Abraham, of Isaac and of Jacob, and the local God of Israel. They were constantly laying snares, too, to entangle him in the web of the law.
Jefferson could be personally friendly to Jews, and he sympathized with their plight. Jefferson was, after all, a strong supporter of religious liberty. But Jefferson almost certainly believed that progress would entail Jews leaving Judaism behind. Note his focus on Jews rejecting Jesus. They were morally backward because they were historically backward.
Thomas Paine, who arrived in the colonies shortly before 1776, expressed similar beliefs. Back in Europe by the early 1790s to work with the French Revolutionaries, he wrote The Age of Reason, in which he expressed sentiments similar to Jefferson’s: “The Jews made no converts: they butchered all.” Paine’s main goal was to use Judaism to attack Christianity. He continued, “The Bible is the sire of the [New] Testament, and both are called the word of God. The Christians read both books; the ministers preach from both books; and this thing called Christianity is made up of both. It is then false to say that Christianity was not established by the sword.” For Paine and many others, the rage was against religion in general, and Judaism in particular, blaming Judaism for what they hate about Christianity.
Jews had insisted on remaining Jews for a few thousand years, and this was a problem for the votaries of progress, and universal emancipation.
In other words, these Enlightened attacks on Judaism were not unrelated to the attacks of Paine, Jefferson, Voltaire, et al against Christianity as it had been known. Jefferson’s anti-Judaism, like that of other Enlightened thinkers, probably was connected with a large project of liberation from religion as it had been known in Europe and America before the Enlightenment. Ecrasez L’infame (crush the loathsome thing) was Voltaire’s slogan for it. Condorcet had asserted that in an earlier era: “The triumph of Christianity was thus the signal of the entire decline both of the sciences and of philosophy.” Progress would, therefore, be progress away from both Christianity and Judaism, and toward a more Enlightened set of beliefs, and way of life.
Particularly as he grew older, Jefferson increasingly embraced the Unitarianism that he believed to be the true teaching of Jesus, and he convinced himself that that’s what history intended. And history, he believed, was on his side. “It is too late in the day for men of sincerity to pretend they believe in the Platonic mysticisms that three are one, & one is three; & yet the one is not three, and the three are not one,” he wrote John Adams in 1813. Importantly, the context of that remark is a discussion of a bill legalizing anti-Trinitarian teaching in England. “I remember to have heard Dr Priestly say that if all England would candidly examine themselves, & confess, they would find that Unitarianism was really the religion of all.” Back in the US, Jefferson would assert, thanks to disestablishment, “I trust that there is not a young man now living in the US. who will not die an Unitarian.”
In other words, Jefferson believed that the true, mild, Unitarian teaching of Jesus would have become well nigh universal had establishments and corruptions of his teaching not gotten in the way, a change he expected to take place as establishments were done away with in the United States. Given a religious free market, good teachings would drive out bad, creating an America in which, as a practical matter, all were Unitarians. That would open up a world in which science and reason could make for true global progress.
What did Jefferson’s ideas mean for Jews? They could assimilate as Americans if they reconstituted Judaism along the lines some Enlightened Jewish thinkers were beginning to describe. And in some ways, Reform Judaism moved in that direction in the nineteenth century, with its rejection of dietary laws, and of Zionism, and, what almost inevitably followed from that, a weakening of the taboo against intermarriage.
Today Reform seems to be on the wrong side of Jewish history. Over 60 percent of Jewish children in the New York City area, for example, are orthodox. That’s not how history is supposed to go, per progressives. Among Christians, Unitarianism is supposed to supersede Trinitarianism, and among Jews, a mild, cosmopolitan Reform (essentially a Jewish Unitarianism), is supposed to replace traditional Judaism. This progressive view is, in part, behind the alliance we often see today between traditional Jews and Christians. Is that alliance part of a general turn or is it temporary? It could be either. For now, it seems to be a strong alliance. But if there is an arc of history only God knows all its turns.
The progressive turn against traditional Judaism has an international complement because Judaism is not merely a religion. It is the religion of a particular people, the Jewish people. To be a Jew is to be part of an ancient nation, or tribe, that has a particular homeland from which it was exiled by the Romans. That, too, presented a problem for Enlightened Europe, for the dream of the Enlightenment was universal peace. Even a thinker as sober as James Madison maintained hope for that visionary goal. In this context, note how Jefferson characterized Jews, blaming Moses for having “instilled into his people the most anti-social spirit towards other nations.” In other words, Jews refused to assimilate; they were, in Jefferson’s day, spread out among the nations. Given his view of Judaism, it is reasonable to conclude that when Paine said, in Common Sense, that “all Europeans meeting in America, or any other quarter of the globe, are countrymen” he did not have the Jews of Europe in mind. In other words, Jews had insisted on remaining Jews for a few thousand years, and this was a problem for the votaries of progress, and universal emancipation.
The scholar Peter Onuf notes that, in Jefferson’s apologia for the excesses of the French Revolution one sees the national dimension in his vision of progress: “The liberty of the whole earth was depending on the issue of the contest, and was ever such a prize won with so little blood? My own affections have been deeply wounded by some of the martyrs to this cause, but rather than it should have failed, I would have seen half the earth desolated. Were there but an Adam and an Eve left in every country, and left free, it would be better than as it now is.” Note Jefferson speaks of “an Adam and an Eve left in every country,” and assumes there will be countries. One pair per country, not two. Two or more rival pairs would create precisely the problem Jefferson was worried about. Some American Zionism reflected a version of that idea. Jews belong in their own country, and should not remain scattered among the nations. But once that project started to become a practical reality, of Jews actually returning to Israel, it became a problem, for the land was then occupied by descendants of people who had themselves moved to and/or invaded the land after the Jews had been exiled. From a view of history that accepts that tragic trade-offs will always exist, this problem is no surprise—yet another in an unending series of human problems. The palimpsest of peoples in Israel is not unusual. But for a people, once exiled (at least for any length of time) to continue to maintain that its true home is its ancient home, gums up the works of progress for those who believe that history is going from lower to higher, for it creates massive, and likely violent conflicts.
And that returns us to today’s progressive hatred of Jews and Israel. The current criticism of Israel is that it represents “settler colonialism,” a charge maintained by people who don’t think all whites should leave the Americas, that we should remove the Spanish heritage that is now pervasive in South and Central America, that mainland Chinese should leave what used to be called Formosa, or, for that matter, that Arabs should leave Israel, which they settled centuries ago. Even recent tribal movements within the Middle East are viewed as legitimate. Only Jewish return to our homeland is a problem, it seems. That the majority of current residents are descendants of Jews and Arabs who moved to the land after 1800, is also irrelevant to this narrative progressives seek to impose on modern history.
Judged from a political perspective, Christianity represented a radical break between peoplehood and religion. And that is something that Jews, qua Jews, have always rejected.
On the national side, as on the religious side, progressive ideology has precious little room for Jews to remain Jews. That Jews are an ancient people with Judaism as their religion, and, in a sense, Torah as their Constitution and Israel as their homeland does not fit into the conventional boxes of political and religious analysis. As the majority of today’s Jewish residents of Israel are descended from other nations of the Middle East, not from Europe, telling them to “go back to Europe” is a non-starter. And they can hardly go back to the diasporic settlements that kicked them out or, at the least, treated them as second-class citizens. Where else can they go but Israel? Yet that, too, is unacceptable because it means that two peoples have longstanding historical claims to the same piece of land, a reality that makes a mockery of progressive dreams of progress and perpetual peace. It means that insuperable political conflicts will always remain here on earth.
Amid hopes for universal and perpetual peace, it might still be true that the best we can do is to minimize war by recognizing that peace is a gift that can only be sustained with difficulty, and that justice for one will sometimes be injustice for another. Peace will mean accepting some injustice as better than war, and sometimes men will, understandably, find that trade-off unacceptable. But tragic choices will always exist. As Benjamin Franklin’s Poor Richard said, “He who lives on hope dies fasting.” From this perspective, the progressive focus on Israel is, in part, scapegoating. It is not that Israel/Palestine is the only place with an extremely messy conflict on earth. But it is easier to blame Jews than it is to recognize that progress has radical limits; if impossible, conflicts like the Jewish-Arab conflict in Israel are not atypical, and never will be, progressivism is a delusion. It’s easier to blame Jews, often turning to old blood libels and stereotypes of greedy Jews, than it is to question the central premise of progressive politics. This need for progress to be possible is one factor behind the rise of otherwise inexplicable groups like “Queers for Palestine.” It turns the focus on Israel for impeding progress rather than on the Hamas government that executes homosexuals.
That said, Jews and Judaism do present a distinct problem to the progressive, post-Christian mind. Judged from a political perspective, Christianity represented a radical break between peoplehood and religion. And that is something that Jews, qua Jews, have always rejected. In other words, the religious teachings of Jews, as opposed to Christians and progressives, do represent incommensurable understandings of the good. Both Christians and Jews seek to do good in the world. Sometimes, inevitably, those competing ideas of the good will come into conflict.
Sometimes there seem to be multiple independent, or seemingly independent, arcs of history. When Leo Strauss said that Jews “represent the human problem,” this problem is probably part of what he meant. Our continued existence as a distinct people brings the question of comprehensive progress into question. Once introduced into practical politics, the idea of a universal history becomes an insuperable problem, unless, perhaps, there truly is a unified and comprehensive progress drawing together all civilizations across the globe, and we can recognize it well enough for it to guide statecraft. If that can be achieved by an act of human Will, it is a rejection of God and His Providence. If it is what God wants of us, a certain humility in how history will get there is in order.
The great student of the Philosophy of the Enlightenment, Ernst Cassirer, (Leo Strauss’s dissertation advisor as history records), noted that for the Enlightenment theodicy became a political problem. Classically, the problem was to explain how, in light of the tragedies and evils of the world, there can be a just God who is the Creator. In the Enlightenment, a challenge presented itself as thinkers sought to explain why comprehensive progress is possible, given the historical record. What, if not human nature or the human condition, explains the bloody record of history? Can we engineer comprehensive progress? Must war remain part of man’s terrestrial existence? To religious believers, the arrival or return of a messiah might be necessary to achieve that end. But the philosophes cannot embrace that hope. They instead believed in merely human means of progress. Hence arose the Jewish Question or Jewish Problem: what to do about Jews as Europe was emancipated? The prevailing view among the Enlightened was that Jews must cease to be Jews in a robust sense of the term.
To a progressive, the arc of history is taken as an empirical universal, even though it is, in fact, a matter of faith. From God’s perspective, there may very well be such an arc, but it is also likely that any human claim to see a universal arc of history is, in fact, a delusion. What looks like “moving forward” to one is oppression to another. Hence politics will remain central to our lives on earth, as we seek the best possible, given the inevitability of tragic choices. The sober side of the Enlightenment recognized that; the millennial side much less so. In that sense, modern belief in progress is just another in a seemingly unending line of religious beliefs that seeks to replace Judaism, and other religions.
Merely human action can make things somewhat better for an age, but that’s not progress in the robust sense of the term. Progressives hate Israel because Jews represent the reality that true global progress is only possible with Divine intervention. There might be good in that limitation for it also means that good works will always be possible. There will always be real problems to be addressed rather than solved, and important work to do. So long as Jews walk the earth, there will be no final solution to the human problem.
