Jewish dad and writer in South Korea
Sitars, Swastikas, and the Roots of the New Age
You probably think of sitars on Beatles records and swastikas on the Reichstag as two completely different things.
I did too.
But it turns out that the West’s fascination with Indian spirituality is intimately intertwined with its tradition of antisemitism. This is not something I knew when I washed up on the banks of the Ganges at the age of twenty-three, looking for my own alternative to the orthodoxies I’d been raised with. But it had a lot to do with how I got there, and also with why I couldn’t stop thinking about Jerusalem once I’d arrived.
Ali-uh-uh
My first foreign country was supposed to be Israel.
When I was twelve, my parents promised me a bar mitzvah at the Western Wall, but instead I got a baby sister and a backyard party at the Chabad rabbi’s house in Marin County, California, where I grew up. The biggest thing that happened to me was that a friend stole a bottle of Jack Daniel’s from the bar, and I had my first drunk.
Today I am a man.
Mine was an unusually hybridized version of Judaism. My parents were New York hippies who came to San Francisco to sell Earth Shoes, had a baby, and started to worry about how he’d know what it meant to be Jewish. They took me to the Reform temple, which I liked because it was clean and smelled nice and had a catered kiddush. But they found the whole thing square and bland, and soon they were drawn to the Chabad House across the Bay, in Berkeley, where the rabbi had a big red Mr. Natural beard and rode a Harley, and the religion was something freakier and more ecstatic, even if it smelled of pickled herring.
But what was for them a spiritual awakening was for me a series of restrictions and isolations: no more Saturday morning cartoons, no more Chinese pot stickers. I pushed back, quitting Hebrew school for the local public high school, growing my hair, going out on Shabbos. In college I took classes on Eastern religion and Native American literature and never once went to the Hillel.
So when I decided to travel after graduation, the place that came to mind wasn’t Israel.
It was India.
Zion on the Ganges
I had a kind of Ozymandian vision of myself gazing up in unshaven wonder at the Taj Mahal or a temple or a Himalayan peak—something very old, and something not at all Jewish.
I had already been traveling across India and Nepal for a couple of months when I arrived in Varanasi, the beating heart of Hinduism. I had seen temples and monuments and rituals. But nothing prepared me for the sheer intensity, the profusion, of spiritual life in this holiest of Hindu cities. Unlike a lot of Western travelers, I wasn’t fazed by the ritual bathing, the strange outfits, the chanting in dead languages. Orthodox Judaism had prepared me for all that.
No, what took me by surprise was a powerful feeling of envy. I kept thinking, This is what it might have been like if we hadn’t lost our holy city. The rituals and faith would be changed from what they’d been millennia ago, of course, just as they’d changed with time in Varanasi. But the sense of continuity—of doing now a direct extension of what your ancestors had done—that was what the Hindus had and we Jews didn’t.
Or so I thought.
I didn’t realize at the time, but I was joining a long tradition of Western thought that painted Judaism as fractured, broken, inauthentic, and that held out India as its antithesis: a society that had maintained its spiritual integrity since the dawn of time. India as a kind of anti-Israel has a pedigree, and not a pretty one. There’s a reason the guy who did the Holocaust also painted swastikas on everything. What’s more, it’s a pedigree that has swung both right and left. The thousand-year Reich and the Age of Aquarius have more in common than appears at first glance.
Lies, damn lies, and Jesuits
To see how this all got started, we have to go back to the Enlightenment, when Europe was beginning to digest the massive discoveries of the past centuries. There were so many new things, and no one knew quite how they all came to be. And so there developed an obsession with origins: of inequality, of civilization, of truth, of humanity—of religion. And as with so many European obsessions, this one became a Jewish problem.
It had long been understood that the Bible was the one true narrative about the origins of the world, and of religion. But what if you couldn’t trust the Bible? After all, the Hebrew part of it had been written down and interpreted by Jews. Who knew what falsehoods they’d sneaked in?
And so we come to Voltaire. Like many of the Enlightenment’s most influential thinkers, Voltaire was a Deist, which meant he believed in a unitary creator God, and he was an anticlericalist, which meant he thought the Catholic Church was unnecessary and full of shit. He was also not very fond of Jews, at least in the abstract. It’s not clear that he knew any. Like his fellow Deists, Voltaire mocked the old Biblical verities as so much nonsense, created by scribes and priests to dazzle and control the people. True religion—the natural religion that people must have believed before all the priestly corruption—could be discovered through reason. But it would bolster the case nicely if you could find some ancient text—older than the Bible, from before all the corruption set in—that corroborated your ideas about what was true.
And that’s exactly what Voltaire did.
He found it in India.
In the 1760s, when Voltaire got hold of a document called the Ezour Vedam—an ancient Veda in the form of a dialogue, in which a believer in multiple gods is neatly demolished by a defender of a primordial, all-is-one monotheism—he ran with it. And if the Ezour Vedam was a bit convenient, reading like a Jesuit pamphlet for converting Indians, that’s because that’s exactly what it was.
It was a forgery, written in French.
Voltaire probably knew this, but he was never one to let facts get in the way of a good argument. He championed the Ezour Vedam for the rest of his life, touching off a European mania for all things Indian.
On some level, then, my collegiate taste for dangly Tibetan earrings and a band called Nirvana was the latest iteration of a trend started by a man who declared himself “convinced that everything has come down to us from the banks of the Ganges”—including, it seems, a Jesuit forgery.
From unhealthy philology to Ill Communication
From the start, then, the West’s idea of Indian spirituality had more to do with the West than with India. And from the start, Indian spirituality was used in the West as a way to preempt the Hebrew Bible.
Actual translations of actual Sanskrit texts started reaching Europe soon after, and some of them were older than the Books of Moses. India came to be seen as the keeper of the world’s most ancient knowledge—which meant the purest, truest knowledge, closer to Adam and Noah and without all that inevitable Judaic corruption. Other, even older texts would be found later, and the Biblical timeline would be abandoned altogether, but that idea of wise old India still lingers in the Western imagination. All those New Yorker cartoons of wise hermits in mountain caves are its descendants.
It was also discovered in the late eighteenth century that Sanskrit and European languages were related. German seemed especially close. Scholars agreed, incorrectly, that there must have been a primal race—called Aryan, after an old name for India—and that they must have been great warriors and conquerors to spread their language so widely. Some nationalist Germans got attached to the idea that they were the Aryans, that all that was noble and good in European history came from them, and that it was their world-historical fate to renew Europe through another great Aryan conquest.
The Nazi fixations on India, Tibet, and the occult tend to be dismissed as an anomaly, a kind of sideshow to their main ideology. But they stuck it right in the middle of their flag. They weren’t subtle about it. The swastikas connected the Germans with ancient Troy, and also with India.
And as discomfiting as it may be, that same Nazi occultism—which was never separate from Nazi antisemitism—has shared roots with the cheery New Age mysticism that has us doing downward dog in our Lululemons at the strip mall. The same New Age mysticism that had carried me to India and Nepal, where the horns and gongs and crashing cymbals of the Tibetan monasteries were already familiar to me from the Beastie Boys—nice Jewish kids themselves.
The godmother of the New Age
Perhaps no figure is more important in this lineage that Madame Helena Blavatsky, a Russian of mysterious background who made her way to America and founded the Theosophical Society, a new religion based on her belief in “one truth which finds expression in all the various religions—except in the Jewish.”
Blavatsky is known as the godmother of the New Age, and her movement, Theosophy, founded in 1875, had a profound impact on Hindu revival in India itself. To this day, you can step into any New Age bookshop and find the full range of Blavatsky’s fascinations: Hinduism, Buddhism, Atlantis, ancient Egypt, Sufism, even kabbalah—but not Jewish kabbalah. In a mirror image of the Nazis, here it’s Blavatsky’s antisemitism that’s understood but dismissed as the anomaly, a footnote to the occult mysticism. But the two can’t be so easily separated.
Though the Theosophical Society was never large, it served as a kind of hub for an early spiritual counterculture. In the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, its members and hangers on included a kind of who’s who of leading thinkers, everyone from Thomas Edison and William James to Rudolf Steiner and Maria Montessori to Arthur Conan Doyle. It was part of a free-thinking milieu where casual antisemitism was taken for granted, and in particular this idea that the Jewish tradition was something corrupted, broken, fallen—that its claims to continuity were false, and that it was now a degenerate thing. As Blavatsky herself put it, the Jewish religion was distinguished by “hate and malice towards everyone and everything outside itself.”
Annie Besant, who took over after Blavatsky, had a softer line. She once welcomed a group of Hebrew Theosophists by declaring that “it would indeed be splendid if some of the nation which ignorantly rejected the World-Teacher when He came to them, using the body of a Jewish disciple as His vehicle, should welcome Him on His return two thousand years later.”
Jews might be all right, in other words, if they just stopped being Jewish.
Teaching Hinduism to the Hindus
Even more surprising is the way the Hinduism so many Westerners traveled to India to find was also a product of Blavatsky’s imagination. The Theosophists were instigators of both Hindu and Buddhist revivals, moving their headquarters to Adyar and drawing in more Indian followers for a time than Western. Annie Besant served as president of the Indian National Congress during the independence movement. Gandhi learned his Hinduism from Theosophists in London, who fed him at their vegetarian restaurants and gave him his first Bhagavad Gita. Even his later honorific, Mahatma—great soul—had Theosophical resonances: mahatmas are what Blavatsky called the mystical beings who reached out to her psychically from Tibet and told her what to write.
This Theosophical brand of Hinduism then became an export product, carried back to the West in backpacks and yoga bags. As with the Ezour Vedam, the West has continued to look to India for an ancient wisdom that could do an end-run around the Judeo-Christian, and it has continued to find exactly the wisdom it needs, often by putting it there to be found in the first place. The broken lines of Hebraic transmission are replaced by the mystic chords of the East—playing European harmonies.
The tight Hebrew pot
None of this ever went away. In a book of essays called Vedanta for Common Man, from 1962—edited by Christopher Isherwood, and with contributions from Aldous Huxley, Swami Vivekananda, and India’s first prime minister, Jawaharlal Nehru, among others—Gerald Heard insisted that Hinduism’s rise was inevitable “because the religious heredity of the West has now outgrown the tight Hebrew pot of cosmology in which it had been growing for two millennia.” For anyone “filled with a real longing to know and love God,” those old Hebraic doctrines were “a terrible obstacle.”
As with Voltaire, so with Heard: what Europe needed for its moral growth was to be rid of the Judaic.
That this could be delivered, without irony, less than two decades after the literal attempt to annihilate the Hebrews and replace them with Aryans, shows how deeply this idea of the Hebrew as inauthentic and problematic had made its way into Western thought, not only on the fascist right, but on the progressive left. As Blavatsky had it, “all the various religions—except the Jewish.”
I was, of course, no more immune to this thinking than anyone else. And so, like my fellow Hebrews Allen Ginsberg and Ram Dass before me, I had gone to find myself in India, not Israel.
The inauthentic and the all too authentic
Many Jews in the West have been shocked to see progressives turn on us, or at least turn away from us, after October 7. It has been disorienting to see Jewish pain mocked by senior academics, to see the whole progressive political apparatus shrug when Jews are shot and firebombed. But the threads were there—the threads that stretched back, through the New Age and Blavatsky, back to the Enlightenment idea of Jews as inauthentic and our heritage as a broken one.
You see this discounting of Jewish legitimacy in the ways people talk now about our connection to Israel, insisting that there isn’t one. One hears these days, endlessly repeated, the idea that the Jews of Israel are not the Jews of Judea, that this cannot be our homeland, that we are Europeans—forgetting that so many who came to Israel weren’t European at all, and that those who did come from Europe so often left because they hadn’t been European enough either.
So yes, we knew about antisemitism on the right, with their chants of “Jews will not replace us.” But we failed to notice that the left had its own version: “We will replace the Jews.” The easy embrace of river-to-sea totalism is a manifestation of this very old urge to replace the Judaic with something more authentic, older, truer.
And Palestinians?
Well, they suit the purpose. Edward Said, in Orientalism, diagnosed the way that the West defined Arabs as ancient, unchanging, unmodern—as relics of another age, incapable of true self-rule. If Jews were inauthentic, Arabs were all too authentic, trapped in a performance of a costumed, perfumed past.
Said himself saw the link:
By an almost inescapable logic, I have found myself writing the history of a strange, secret sharer of Western anti-Semitism. That anti-Semitism and, as I have discussed it in its Islamic branch, Orientalism resemble each other very closely is a historical, cultural, and political truth that needs only to be mentioned to an Arab Palestinian for its irony to be perfectly understood.
Each side had a role to play, defined from outside, by the West.
Brothers and idols
Back in Varanasi, in the 1990s, it was more than just the continuities of that ancient city that made me feel my Jewishness. There was also a feeling that I had stumbled into the world of Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob, a world of idols and polytheism, where the notion of a single, solitary God was still a freakish anomaly. It was in India, and not in Israel, that you could find a world Abraham might have recognized. It was in the lanes around Gyanvapi Mosque, lined with idol shops, that I remembered the Mishnaic story about the young Abraham—still Avram then—smashing all the statues in his father’s idol shop, in the world’s very first fit of monotheistic iconoclasm. When his father asked who’d done it, Avram blamed the one remaining idol. His father raged that it was impossible. “Then why,” young Avram asked, “do you worship them?”
The mosque was built by Aurangzeb in 1669 over the site of a demolished Shiva temple. As with many such mosques, it had become a contested site—the Babri Masjid, in nearby Ayodhya, had been demolished by Hindu zealots four years earlier—and the whitewashed onion domes of Gyanvapi were now surrounded by steel bars and policemen with rifles. The idol shops, full of Shiva lingams and Ganesh statues, felt intentional and threatening. I felt there a kinship with my fellow Abrahamic monotheists, even if I wasn’t really a theist at all anymore. And I knew that Islam behind barriers was something you could also find in Israel, though for different reasons. Here, too, India served as a kind of inversion.
That feeling of kinship stayed with me as I traveled across India, and I never really lost it, even with all of the conflict and disaster of the ensuing years. And that kinship matters now more than ever. If there is any way out of the trap Said identified—of being playthings in the psychodrama of the West—it is only the long, slow, excruciating path of Arabs and Jews learning to talk to one another. To see one another. Not through the borrowed glasses of European Orientalism and antisemitism, but as we are, as brothers and kin with a shared past, and therefore a shared future.
This is not, I know, a hopeful moment for all that. But what else is there? Here is Saul Bellow, writing in 1976:
Where Israel is concerned, the world swells with moral consciousness. Moral judgment, a wraith in Europe, becomes a full-blooded giant when Israel and the Palestinians are mentioned…What Switzerland is to winter holidays and the Dalmatian coast to summer tourists, Israel and the Palestinians are to the West’s need for justice—a sort of moral resort area.
This moral resort area—which some in the West have proposed, absurdly, turning into an actual resort area, while others go on cruises to visit it—has suffered horrifically these past two years, with little gained from all the hot noise around the world by allies and enemies of one side or the other.
It is something that we ourselves will have to remake. Together. As hard as that may be.
I am what I am
For now, there is little I can do to get us there except to speak as a Jewish person in the world. To be seen and heard as myself. To speak my truth into the fractious conversation that has always been the heart of Jewish life.
We must be visible.
We must be vocal.
We exist, and we are irreplaceable.
After October 7, I took out a mezuzah I’d had in a drawer for years and finally put it up on my doorpost. I live in South Korea, where no one knows what Jews are, and so no one knows what a mezuzah is either.
But I do.