From Yahweh to Zion

by Laurent Guyénot

  The preservation of the group means the struggle against assimilation into other groups, through a cult of ethnic identity that begins at an early age. Referring to the Hebrew school of his childhood, which he attended after regular school hours like all American Jewish schoolchildren of his time, Samuel Roth explained: “The preservation of Jewish religion and culture are merely excuses for something else, a smoke-screen. What the Jew really wants and expects to achieve through the instrumentality of the Hebrew school is to cultivate in his son the sharp awareness that he is a Jew and that as a racial Jew—apart from all the other races—he is waging an old war against his neighbors. The young Jew must learn to remember that before anything else he is a Jew, that, before any other allegiance, comes his allegiance to the Jewish People.”661 What he learns in the synagogue, with the ritual of Kol Nidre, is that disloyalty toward non-Jews is blessed by God.

  Competitiveness with non-Jews involves strategies that can be described in Darwinian terms as “crypsis” and “mimicry.” The former, also called camouflage, is defined as “the faculty of a species to merge with its environment”; the second, as “the faculty of one species to resemble another.” These are adaptive strategies conventionally attributed to the Jews, and rightly so. The Jew has an extraordinary capacity “to conform externally to his temporary surroundings,” wrote Hilaire Belloc in 1922; “a Jew takes on with inexplicable rapidity the colour of his environment.” But this must not be confused with actual assimilation. Such crypsis is an adaptive strategy for security in a potentially hostile environment. By no means is it a renunciation of Jewish identity: “while he is, within, and through all his ultimate character, above all things a Jew; yet in the superficial and most immediately apparent things he is clothed in the very habit of whatever society he for the moment inhabits.” Another commonly expressed grievance against the Jews involves their propensity for secrecy. They are accused of hiding behind borrowed Gentile names, working in occult networks, and so on. Such mimicry is often suspected of serving concealment, not assimilation.662

  In A People That Shall Dwell Alone, social psychology professor Kevin MacDonald argues that Judaism is a “group evolutionary strategy among peoples.” He sees it as remarkably effective, providing the Jewish community with a decisive selective advantage. From his Darwinian perspective, Kevin MacDonald naturally sees crypto-Judaism as “an authentic case of crypsis quite analogous to cases of mimetic camouflage in the natural world.” This also applies, according to MacDonald, to the sincere converts who nevertheless maintain group separatism—those who, while willingly accepting the water of baptism, believe that it has not changed the nature of the blood flowing in their veins, and who feel the need to maintain the purity of this Jewish blood. “Indeed, one might note that New Christians who maintained group separatism while sincerely accepting Christianity were really engaging in a very interesting evolutionary strategy—a true case of crypsis entirely analogous to crypsis in the natural world. Such people would be even more invisible to the surrounding society than crypto-Jews, because they would attend church regularly, not circumcise themselves, eat pork, etc., and have no psychological qualms about doing so. […] Psychological acceptance of Christianity may have been the best possible means of continuing Judaism as a group evolutionary strategy during the period of the Inquisition.” 663

  From the same Darwinian perspective, MacDonald analyzes Reform Judaism, which mimics Christianity in defining itself as a religion. This allows the Jewish community to maintain its cohesion and endogamy. In other words, Judaism serves as the religious mask of ethnic Jewry. Thus in 1897, at the height of the immigration of Jews from Eastern Europe, the Central Conference of American Rabbis adopted the following resolution: “Resolved that we totally disapprove of any attempt for the establishment of a Jewish State. […] We reaffirm that the object of Judaism is not political nor national, but spiritual, and addresses itself to the continuous growth of peace, justice and love of the human race, to a messianic time when all men will recognize that they form ‘one great brotherhood’ for the establishment of God’s kingdom on earth.”664 Zionism is a reaction against this trend, which Moses Hess already condemned as the repression of one’s inner nature: “Those of our brethren who, for purposes of obtaining emancipation, endeavor to persuade themselves, as well as others, that modern Jews possess no trace of a national feeling, have really lost their heads.” A Jew is a Jew “by virtue of his racial origin, even though his ancestors may have become apostates.”665 According to Benzion Netanyahu, defining Jewishness as religion rather than nationality “was the fruit of self-deception rather than of hypocrisy.”666

  I am inclined to believe that unconscious self-deception plays a major role, since the unconscious is the seat of the group soul, as the group thinks through the individual. But the distinction between self-deception and hypocrisy is of little importance from a Darwinian perspective. It does not matter what Nahum Goldman really means when he writes: “Even today it is hardly possible to say whether to be a Jew consists first of belonging to a people or practicing a religion, or the two together.”667 Deliberately or unconsciously, these statements serve to maintain a misunderstanding, a strategic ambivalence. Religion and race are two different things, and Wolf’s assertion has no logical meaning unless we admit that Judaism is a religion seen from the outside and a “race” (ethnicity) from the inside: “The best strategy for Judaism is to maximize the ethnic, particularistic aspects of Judaism within the limits necessary to prevent these aspects from resulting in anti-Semitism.”668 The religious facade makes it possible to benefit from the religious tolerance of an open society. But the ethnic definition is also useful in a multicultural society, and helps to disarm critics through the “anti-Semite” label.

  Unfortunately, this strategy, once the Gentiles see through it, is one of the main sources of recurrent Judeophobia. Recognizing that the Jewish people everywhere form “a state within the state,” Adolf Hitler wrote in Mein Kampf (1923): “It was one of the most ingenious tricks that was ever invented to let this State sail under the flag of ‘religion,’ thus securing for it the tolerance that the Aryan is always ready to grant to a religious denomination. Actually the Mosaic religion is nothing but a doctrine of the preservation of the Jewish race.”669

  As the American rabbis suggested in their statement, the notion of religion, in its modern sense, presupposes a universal vocation. This vocation is unambiguous in Christianity and Islam. In the case of Judaism, on the other hand, universalism is essentially a message addressed to the Gentiles, even though it is internalized by many Jews. Universalism is interpretable in Darwinian terms as another form of crypsis by which the Jewish people of the Diaspora seek to minimize the hostility of the host peoples and maximize their sympathy. Again, it does not matter whether the double game is deliberately deceptive, or an instinctive, spontaneous way of adjusting communication according to whether one is addressing a family member or a stranger. After all, in the vast majority of people, ideas and opinions are like clothes. They are merely ways of appearing in public. One can have one opinion at home and another for social life, without necessarily feeling hypocritical. Moses Hess, addressing himself mainly to his fellow Jews, defended the national character of Judaism and denounced the assimilationist Jew’s “beautiful phrases about humanity and enlightenment which he employs as a cloak to hide his treason.”670 We are reminded of the double language of the book of Ezra, where Yahweh is “the God of heaven” for the Persian kings, but “the God of Israel” in the rest of the book. The book of Ezra is a key to understanding Judaism, since the Yahwist ideology with its tribal-universal ambiguity crystallized during this period. Put simply, it seems that Yahweh is the tribal god of the Jews that the rest of humanity takes for the universal God. This is why, although the Tanakh of the Jews and the Old Testament of the Christians are practically identical, they are two totally different books according to how they are read.

  The duplicity of m
odern Judaism has been discussed by Gilad Atzmon, who grew up in Israel in a family of Zionist militants (his grandfather was an Irgun official), but later became a severe critic of this legacy. To him, the Haskalah insight, “Be a Jew at home and a goy on the street” (formulated by the poet Judah Leib Gordon but often attributed to Moses Mendelssohn) is fundamentally dishonest: “The Haskalah Jew is destined to live in a dual, deceptive mode, if not practically a state of schizophrenia. […] The Haskalah Jew is deceiving his or her God when at home, and misleading the goy once in the street. In fact, it is this duality of tribalism and universalism that is at the very heart of the collective secular Jewish identity. This duality has never been properly resolved.”

  Zionism began as an effort to resolve this contradiction, so that a Jew could be a Jew both at home and in the street. But the result is that “there is no trace of universalism in either the Zionist’s ‘street’ or in his ‘home’.” However, since Israel has a vital need for support from the international community, the Zionist Jew still has to don the mask of universalism and humanism, not so much in the streets of Tel Aviv, but in those of New York, London, and Paris. For historical reasons, Zionism is today a global and not just a national project. Jews of the Diaspora participate in it at least as actively as Israelis do. “Within the Jewish framework, the Israelis colonize Palestine and the Jewish Diaspora is there to mobilise lobbies by recruiting international support.”671 Zionism is no longer a nationalism but a globalism, a project for a new world order.

  But has it ever been anything else? Theodor Herzl and Max Nordau no doubt thought of Zionism on the model of the nationalisms of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. “Early Zionist thinkers were apparently galvanized by a deep revulsion for the diaspora Jews,” writes Gilad Atzmon. “They preached for a radical metamorphosis of the Jew. They promised that Zionism would civilize the diaspora Jew by means of a manufactured homecoming. […] They vowed to change, striving to become a ‘people like all other people.’” Atzmon cites Aaron David Gordon, founder of Labor Zionism: “We are a parasitic people. We have no roots in the soil, there is no ground beneath our feet. And we are parasites not only in an economic sense, but in spirit, in thought, in poetry, in literature, and in our virtues, our ideals, our higher human aspirations.”672

  However, in retrospect, Zionist nationalism may have masked a very different project. No other nationalist movement has ever viewed the concept of a people in such exclusively genetic terms—not even Nazism. “Zionism is a form of racism and racial discrimination,” as Resolution 3379 of the United Nations General Assembly so aptly put it on November 10, 1975.673 Blood takes precedence over land. That is why Israel has never ceased to mean, for the Jews themselves, a world community rather than a national community. And that is why the ultimate goal of Zionism cannot be just Israel, as Gilad Atzmon stresses: “In fact, there is no geographical centre to the Zionist endeavor. It is hard to determine where Zionist decisions are made.” The strength of modern Zionism rests on an organic rather than hierarchical link between Jews. “While the organism functions as a whole, the particular organ fulfills an elementary function without being aware of its specific role within the entire system.”674 It is the ideology, internalized by each individual, that is the center. And this ideology, in the last analysis, is that of biblical Yahwism. Naturally there must be a cognitive elite to perpetually pump the ideology throughout the organism.

  This ideology is epitomized by the book of Esther, which Atzmon illustrates by quoting an article by Rafael Medoff titled “A Purim Lesson: Lobbying Against Genocide, Then and Now.” From the story of Esther and her cousin Mordecai, Medoff draws as a lesson the importance of infiltrating power (which he euphemistically calls “lobbying”): “The holiday of Purim celebrates the successful effort by prominent Jews in the capitol of ancient Persia to prevent genocide against the Jewish people.” So, Atzmon comments, “To internalise the message of the Book of Esther is to aim for the most influential centres of hegemony, to collaborate with power and bond with rulers.” And the Esther-Mordecai tandem is the perfect illustration of the organic complementarity of the different levels of Jews. “Medoff’s reading of the Book of Esther provides a glaring insight into the internal codes of Jewish collective survival dynamics, in which the assimilated (Esther) and the observant (Mordechai) join forces with Jewish interests on their minds.” Esther not only incarnates the assimilated Jew, but the most assimilated of all, the crypto-Jew, since the king and the people are unaware that she is Jewish. In the organic onion-layer structure of the Jewish community, even “anti-Zionists of Jewish descent […] are there to portray an image of ideological plurality and ethical concern.”675

  The Mission Theory

  Modern Zionism is a global project because it is the child of Yahwism—a rebellious child in its youth, but loyal in maturity. Jewishness itself is a global project, for what does election mean if not a universal mission? This universal mission, too, has a double face. There are many Jews who associate this mission with a priesthood for the salvation of mankind. Jabotinsky quotes in The War and the Jew (1942), in a mocking tone, a Parisian friend who adhered to the theory “that it was the sacred mission of the Jews to live scattered among the Gentiles and help them rise to higher ethical levels.”676 The Italian rabbi Elijah Benamozegh, author of Israel and Humanity (1914), is one of the most famous representatives of this “mission theory”: “The constitution of a universal religion is the ultimate goal of Judaism,” he writes. This entails a sense of Israel’s superiority: “In Heaven, one God of all men, and on earth a single family of peoples, among whom Israel is the eldest, responsible for the priestly teaching function and the administration of the true religion of humanity.” Universal religion therefore implies “the recognition that humanity must accept the truth of the doctrine of Israel.” This universal religion will not be Judaism proper, but an inferior form, founded on the laws God gave to Noah and not on the more demanding ones given to Moses. The universal religion of the Gentiles will be Noachism. “The special cult of Israel is safeguarding the means of realization of the true universal religion, Noachism.”677 This conception deviates significantly from the Bible, whose only universalist message is that the nations (goyim) must pay tribute to Yahweh in his Jerusalem Temple. It is therefore legitimate to ask whether the fraud of Noachism and all the other versions of the “mission theory” are not simply skillful rationalizations of Jewish supremacism. The same question may be asked about the attempt of Joseph Salvador, in his book Paris, Rome and Jerusalem (1860), to outline a universal religion based on a fusion of Judaism and Christianity. He believed that the natural center for this syncretistic religion would be Jerusalem, and therefore advocated the establishment of a new state, a bridge between the Orient and the Occident, encompassing the borders of ancient Israel.678

  Yet it would be wrong to suspect conscious hypocrisy in most of the countless Jewish thinkers who have echoed the Jewish people’s global “humanitarian mission.” There is certainly none in Alfred Nossig, a Jewish artist and activist who, before working for the emigration of selected Jews to Palestine by collaborating with the Gestapo in the Warsaw ghetto, wrote in Integrales Judentum (“Integral Judaism”), published in Berlin in 1922: “The Jewish community is more than a people in the modern political sense of the word. It is the repository of a historically global mission, I would say even a cosmic one, entrusted to it by its founders Noah and Abraham, Jacob and Moses. [. . .] It forms an unconscious nucleus of our being, the common substance of our soul. [. . .] The primordial conception of our ancestors was to found not a tribe but a world order destined to guide humanity in its development. This is the true meaning, the only meaning of the election of the Hebrews as a chosen people.”679

  In its secular formulation, the mission theory naturally substitutes superiority for chosenness: “I believe in our moral and intellectual superiority, in our capacity to serve as a model for the redemption of the human race,” declare
d David Ben-Gurion. “This belief of mine is based on my knowledge of the Jewish people, not some mystical faith.”680 But this “mission” has many broad, even contradictory interpretations. The rabbi Daniel Gordis, vice president of the Jewish University of Los Angeles, offers one variant in Does the World Need Jews? “Jewish tradition has always claimed that Jews need to be different in order that they might play a quasi-subversive role in society [. . .] the goal is to be a contributing and respectful ‘thorn in the side’ of society.”681 And so the “mission theory” can never be refuted: Whether it is constructive or subversive, the Jewish contribution is always a gift to mankind. It is positive both in bringing the One God to humanity, and in dragging religion through the mud; positive both in raising humanity’s moral level, and also in undermining moral values. Everything that the chosen people do, by definition, is a “humanitarian mission.” So the mission theory is in reality only a posture aimed at compelling respect and demanding gratitude. What it disguises as a “mission,” in the minds of the Gentiles but also of progressive Jews, is nothing but chauvinism and Jewish separatism. The ultimate purpose of the mission theory is to explain that Jews must remain a separate nation, in order to fulfill their universal mission.

  Implicit in the mission theory in all its forms is the inferiority of non-Jewish cultures. The Jewish historian Albert Lindemann observes in his co-religionists an instinctive propensity “to view surrounding Gentile society as pervasively flawed, polluted, or sick. The belief of Jews in premodern times that they, God’s chosen people, had been condemned by their god, because of their own sins, to live in subjugation in the polluted lands of the uncircumcised, the brutal, the unclean, the eaters of filth—of the reviled Children of Esau—took on new forms in a modern context.” So it does not astonish Lindemann “that many Jews have been, since the early nineteenth century, powerfully attracted to those modern secular ideologies that managed to reaffirm indirectly, with a new language, an older sense of the tainted qualities of prevailing Gentile life.”682 According to Andrew Heinze in Jews and the American Soul, “the story of American ideas about the mind and soul is one in which Jews have been central actors,” with the preoccupation “to purge the evils they associated with Christian civilization.”683