The Jewish Loan

The Jewish Loan is the sum total of what has been derived from us.

Judaism is not part of a shared tradition with Christianity or Islam. Christianity and Islam’s connection to Judaism is one of derivation. It is The Jewish Loan.

They copied our prophets. They copied our texts. They even copied the borders of our Holy Land. Christianity calls itself the New Israel, as if it can overwrite us. Islam relabels our patriarchs as pious Muslims and claims they can no longer be identified with us because we are too تحريف tahrif, too corrupt.

The Jewish Question was never about understanding Jews. It was about eliminating us. It asked: What is to be done with the Jews? It assumed we were a problem to be solved. But the real question is why so much has been derived from us.

If it were just a matter of our symbols, histories, and narratives being stolen and repurposed, that would be one thing. But it is worse — because weaponization comes next.

First came admiration of our prophets. But then, we went from being the descendants of prophets to being “the killers of prophets.”

There was respect for our defense of our homeland. And then, the people of the Holy Land became known as “the people who stole the Holy Land.”

Time and time again, we contribute to the places where we live. But after a short time as a successful minority, we are redefined as “the corruptors of society.”

And now, after recognizing us for a few decades as the victims of genocide, there is an obsession with portraying us as “the perpetrators of genocide.”

The same reversal, every time.

With regards to the Holocaust inversion, facts do not matter. It does not matter that the Gaza Strip is less than one percent of Eretz Yisrael, while Nazi Germany took over most of Europe. It does not matter that Israel has more Arab citizens than ever in history, while Europeans stripped Jews of citizenship. It does not matter that less than one percent of the Arab world’s population lives in the Gaza Strip, while Europeans killed over ninety percent of Jews in multiple countries.

It seems as if Jewish suffering — countless examples of genocide, expulsion, double standards, and oppressive inequality — is inevitably appropriated and inverted by non-Jews who leech off The Jewish Loan with zero regard for facts, history, or our rights.

For thousands of years, Eretz Yisrael has been our homeland. The only sovereign states to ever exist there have been Jewish states. Jewish hands built it up. Jewish armies defended it. Jewish prayers longed for it.

Yet today, we are told we must have some other civilization rule over us — and that this is our necessary sacrifice for a “perfected” world.

Who should we choose to rule over us?

An Arab civilization that was established as part of an effort at global conquest? The Christian legacy of crusades and massacres? An Islamic state that renames our holiest sites and erases their Jewish origins?

No other societies on earth are forced to justify having a homeland the way Jewish people are. And no other society compares to the antiquity, continuity, and wholeness of our spiritual, linguistic, ancestral, identifiable, and territorial connection to what it means to be Jewish and have a homeland.

The White-Arab-Christian-Muslim world has stolen entire continents, wiped out civilizations, and redrawn maps at will. Yet we are the ones accused of theft for continuing to exist as Jews, in Jewish land, as a Jewish people.

The issue is not just appropriation, inversion, or denial. It is deeper. There is no simple answer to one simple question: why? What compels them to see themselves in Jewish history? What possesses a Nordic Christian or a Malaysian Muslim to consider our Jewish ancestors their own spiritual forefathers?

What makes literally billions of humans view a crucified Jewish man as their Christ, Son of G-d? Or a captive Jewish woman as their Safiyyah, Mother of Believers? Why does Al-Quran go to great lengths to narrate war against Jewish tribes as a sacred narrative? Why is Jewish suffering — whether through brutal execution, shocking rape, or relentless uprooting — so central to how entire civilizations construct their moral and spiritual identities?

Perhaps our debtors cannot stop fantasizing about a future with less of us — because then they would have to confront The Jewish Loan:

Their entire worldview could not exist without us.

But ours could exist without them.

And what happens when The Jewish Loan is called in?