Remnant of a People

In 2016, Israeli singers Gilad Kahana, Tamir Muskat, and A-WA (a terrific Yemenite-Israeli band of sisters) put out an electronic, hip-hop-inflected banger: I’M A TRIBE. My usual taste in music? Nope. But it captures a poetic truth I haven’t been able to shake and have wanted to write about for years.

It opens dramatically: “There was a time we were one / We got broken—one thousand pieces, one thousand f*ck-yous. / We need to find each other, one by one.” Then A-WA answers in Arabic (loosely translated): “Cry, my family; it’s okay to weep for all that is dark. / We are divided a thousand ways, interwoven in a thousand ways. / We wear our identity with pride. / We do not lose ourselves in the division—we wear it here with pride.”

And how true is that. From the time we were simply called Israelites or Hebrews, before conquest, exile, forced migration, and centuries of separation scattered us across continents and gave us new names, we were one people. Ashkenazi, Sephardi, Mizrahi, Romaniote, Yemenite, Persian, Kurdish, Bukharan, Mountain, Krymchak, Georgian, Cochin, Bene Israel, Beta Israel — communities separated by geography and history, but remnants of the same ancient people. 

True remnants! Every community that survives today only exists because, generation after generation, some Jews escaped, hid, resisted, fled, adapted, or were simply lucky enough to survive. Someone lived long enough to have a child. That child survived infancy, disease, hunger, persecution, exile, or massacre long enough to have a child of their own. And somehow, across thousands of years, that chain was never completely broken.

But a remnant only exists because something nearly erased it. To appreciate Jewish continuity, we have to look at what we’ve survived.

We’ve been killed in horrible ways because we are Jewish. Killed for defending our Temples, killed as Jerusalem burned. Killed for teaching Torah under Rome, flesh raked with iron combs for refusing to stop. Killed under the Seleucids for possessing Torah scrolls, circumcising our sons, keeping Shabbat, refusing to eat pork even under torture, and refusing pagan idolatry.

Slaughtered in Medina after rejecting Muhammad’s prophetic claims. Slaughtered by Crusaders in the Rhineland for refusing baptism. Killed for refusing conversion to Islam, from Almohad North Africa and Spain to Yemen and Persia. Killed for being openly Jewish, and later for secretly remaining Jewish after conversion had been forced upon us.

Murdered for supposedly poisoning wells, spreading plague, murdering Christian children for their blood, conspiring with the Devil, or desecrating the Host—all because a child disappeared, disease swept through a town, or someone lied and said a communion wafer bled.

From York to Baghdad to Mashhad to Auschwitz to Israel to Washington, DC and our great state of Colorado! Burned at the stake, beheaded, hanged in town squares, beaten to death by mobs, gassed in extermination camps, stoned on highways, blown up in bomb shelters. Firebombed and shot in the name of a “Free Palestine.”

Those carried off by the Assyrians, or absorbed into other peoples through forced conversion, were lost to us too. Their descendants may preserve some remnant of that ancestry in DNA, but not in lived Jewish experience.

Amazingly, in most of those epic traumas, some sliver survived. Survived death marches, hijacked planes, and the bloodthirsty mobs. Survived rape, torture, and the trauma of witnessing their babies or entire families be killed.

Survived because they happened to get on a boat, train, or bus before the rest of their community.  Because sheer chance spared them in a terrorist attack, or because modern medicine and lifesaving measures existed when they needed them.

Avoided death by not lending money to the wrong person, working for the wrong person, or living beside the wrong person. By simply not being in the wrong town, the wrong city, the wrong kingdom, fiefdom, empire, country, or apartment building.

Survived because a church, a stranger, or a friendly neighbor took pity on them or showed them kindness. Because they hid in basements, cellars, attics, barns, sewers, and forests. Because they weren’t discovered, or, when they were, because someone chose not to turn them in. And because when someone did, they were lucky enough to run quickly. 

Survived behind hidden identities and fake names, by shedding religious symbols and disguising who they were.

And survived because of barricades outside synagogues, metal detectors, surveillance cameras, locked doors, bulletproof glass, armed guards, police patrols, vigilant soldiers, intelligence warnings, the FBI, the IDF, bomb shelters, and missile-defense systems—or because the person down the block happened to have a gun and thought quickly enough to save us. 

Divine intervention, luck, or something in between— we’re still here.

But our numbers are low. With only about 15.8 million Jews in the world, we are not as numerous as the stars in the sky or the sand on the seashore, as God once promised Abraham. And in addition to all the doom, gloom, and genocide, we’ve had to contend with the same mundane causes of mortality as everyone else: disease, accidents, suicide, shipwrecks, childbirth gone wrong.

That’s why thinking of ourselves as a remnant matters. Not because every Jew must be religious or live the same kind of Jewish life, but because we inherited a peoplehood that generations before us kept alive. After everything it took for us to still be here, why would we be so eager to let it dissolve, through assimilation or by promoting the very forces that seek our destruction?

From Toledo’s limpieza de sangre to Ferdinand and Isabella’s Spanish Inquisition, from Nazi racial laws to pro-Palestinian protests, history has affirmed one thing again and again: conversion and assimilation offer no get-out-of-jail-free card. A Jew is a Jew is a Jew. You’ll be shunned for it, chased for it, and possibly killed for it. Living in the 21st century hasn’t changed that reality.

While applying for a fellowship in college, the editor of a major Jewish publication I love took one look at my submitted writing samples and said, “You write a lot about dead Jews.” In my head, I thought, “Obviously. There are a lot of them to write about.”

Less than a century ago, we were slaughtered en masse—on such a scale that we still have not regained our pre-Holocaust numbers. And yet Israel exists. We’re lucky and blessed to live in a time when the Third Jewish Commonwealth, as Charles Krauthammer called it, is strong and able to defend itself. But Israel is not simply a refuge waiting for Diaspora Jews if things go south somewhere else. Nearly half of the world’s Jews already live there: millions of our people, descended from those who fled, hid, endured, and survived, now gathered together in one tiny country.

Yesterday marked three years since October 7, when Jews were murdered in their homes, hunted as they fled, and dragged away as hostages from the Jewish state. It was, and continues to be, a brutal reminder that the ancient danger did not disappear simply because Jews finally came home.

Those Jews are not some distant population. They are our people: the same scattered tribe, broken into a thousand pieces across continents and centuries, that somehow found one another again. Their survival is bound up with ours, and to distance ourselves from them (or even worse, aid or legitimize those who wish them harm) is to betray the remnant that generations before us fought and died to preserve.

Against all odds, we’re here today. We owe it to those who came before us not to take that for granted.