Condemned for Wandering, Condemned for Coming Home

I came across an expression last week I hadn’t thought about in years,“the Wandering Jew.” It struck me that this label of the Jew leads to, what could be, one of the strangest ironies in Jewish history. That old accusation has been inverted, turned upside down and yet, it leads to the same conclusion. My immediate reaction was that this absurdity is humorous, but actually it is very sad.

This led me down the “rabbit hole” to discover the origins of the Wandering Jew which I had really never thought about. The legend comes from a Christian tradition that became familiar in Europe after a German pamphlet appeared in 1602. It’s about a Jew who taunts Jesus on the road to the crucifixion and is condemned to wander the earth until the “Second Coming.” Over time the wandering Jew came to represent the Jewish people, condemned to exile and forever the outsiders with nowhere to call home. 

But here’s what struck me as the obvious irony. You can’t be in exile unless you’re in exile from somewhere. And certainly the Christian world that persecuted Jews understood that Jews were a people who had once had a homeland and lost their sovereignty. According to this tradition they interpreted the loss of Jewish sovereignty as divine punishment. So when someone argues today that the Jewish connection to the land is some modern invention of European Zionists, remember that through most of history Jews were connected to that very land they lost, making them the “Wandering Jews.”

And here’s where irony becomes absurdity. For centuries, Jews were told they didn’t belong anywhere they lived. Sometimes the accusation was religious, and in more modern times it was race and that we were rootless, that our loyalties were divided, and that we could never truly be part of the nations where we lived. Our homelessness became part of the justification for treating us as perpetual outsiders not to be trusted. Then Jews returned to their ancestral homeland and reestablished national sovereignty, and suddenly we were told we didn’t belong there either. The eternal wanderer had become the foreign colonizer, and the Jew who was once despised for having no home is now condemned for coming home. 

In my search I also discovered that the Israeli writer, Amos Oz, captured this same contradiction in A Tale of Love and Darkness. He recalled how the walls of Europe had told Jews to go back to Palestine, only for the world to tell them to get out once they had returned. 

And this is why I believe that most forms of anti-Zionism are really antisemitism expressed as modern political morality. And to be clear, when I say Zionism, I mean simply the right of the Jewish people to national self-determination in their ancestral homeland. I’m not talking about criticizing Israeli governments or policies, which is entirely legitimate and which Israelis themselves do every day. I’m talking about the rejection of Jewish national existence itself, the argument that Israel is inherently illegitimate and that Jews have no rightful claim to sovereignty even in the land where their identity and civilization first took shape and where Jews have lived continuously through the millennia. It’s one thing to challenge what a country does, but it’s something totally different to insist that the country has no right to exist at all. 

There’s also a pretty simple way to tell the difference. If you object to a policy, that policy can change, and if you object to a government, people can vote it out. But when no change in policy, no new government, and no political compromise could ever make Jewish sovereignty legitimate, then the objection isn’t ultimately about what Israel does. It’s about the fact that Israel exists. That doesn’t mean everyone who calls themselves anti-Zionist is motivated by Jew hatred, but it does mean we need to examine what their arguments actually intend. When the Jewish people are denied a legitimacy that is recognized for other peoples, I think it’s more than reasonable to ask whether we’re witnessing an old prejudice finding expression in new ways as it has always done. I also believe most of us know the answer.

Antisemitism has never remained the same. It has adapted to the climate and values of different times, from religious accusations to racial theories and now, to the claim that Jewish national sovereignty is itself an injustice. The accusations may be different, and the people making them may understand themselves very differently from those who came before them, but the result is uncannily familiar.

What makes this particular contradiction so revealing is that the accusation has been completely reversed while the conclusion remains the same. For centuries, the Jew was condemned for wandering without a homeland, and now the Jew is condemned for coming home.

The Jew doesn’t belong no matter what.