The Jewish Power Blog: From Heroes to Victims

In examining how we might escape from the Jewish victimhood identity that so limits our ability to move toward reconciliation with the Palestinians, it is worth pausing and looking at that identity in a historical perspective.  It wasn’t always like this.

From the Torah to the dawn of modernity, the nation of Israel (the Jewish people) understood their history as the playing out of their covenant relationship with God:

If you follow My laws and faithfully observe My commandments, I will grant your rains in their season, so that the earth shall yield its produce and the trees of the field their fruit…  I will grant peace in the land, and you shall lie down untroubled by anyone; I will give  the land respite from vicious beasts, and no sword shall cross your land… (Lev. 26:3, 6)

But if not,

I will wreak misery upon you – consumption  and fever, which cause the eyes to pine and the body to languish; you shall sow your seed to no purpose, for your enemies shall eat it.  I will set My face against you; you shall be routed by your enemies, and your foes shall dominate you… (Lev. 26:14-17)

The prophets hammered away at this message, against the people’s resistance, against the belief that as long as we kept up the sacrificial service, God’s favor was assured.  And when the threatened ultimate punishment came to pass – the loss of sovereignty and of the Temple – prophets, and then rabbis, enshrined in text and tradition the belief that “for our sins were we exiled from our land.”  We were defeated by the Babylonians – and then the Romans – not because we lacked troops or weapons or leadership, not because we were powerless, but because we had used our power of agency to make the wrong moral choices.  Thus we were not victims, but responsible for our own suffering.

And through the centuries, we held on to this belief.  From the chronicles of Crusader massacres to the accounts of the expulsion from Spain, the recurring refrain is “on account of our sins.”  That is, God loves us and therefore chastises us so that we will keep the Torah’s commandments.

But then, from the eighteenth century, the rise of a secular worldview undermined this understanding of Jewish suffering.  If history is driven not by God’s will, but by power struggles reflecting economic interests and political ideologies, then why do we suffer?  Because we are powerless.  Looking back on the generations of persecution, we now saw a different picture: a nation bullied and battered because it lacked a homeland, lacked sovereignty, lacked an army, lacked self-respect, lacked muscles.  The exile was not a divine decree, but, in the words of the Biltmore Zionist Congress’ declaration in 1942, “a historic injustice.”

This transition from seeing ourselves as God’s chosen to seeing ourselves as history’s rejected led to a shift in Jewish identity.  Instead of seeing ourselves as a holy people because of the Torah’s commandments, we began to see ourselves as holy because of our suffering.  Nineteenth century historian Leopold Zunz declared:

If there is a ladder of suffering, then Israel has reached the top.  If the span of pain and the patience with which it is borne ennoble [the sufferer], then the Jews surely are a match for the nobility of any land (Nils Roemer, “Turning Defeat into Victory…” Jewish History 13:2, 1999, p. 67)

We are not responsible for our suffering, nor is God; “they” are.  So we, as victims, occupy the moral high ground.  The world owes us either emancipation – or restoration of our sovereignty.   And as it turned out, just as this worldview spread, new depths of mass Jewish suffering were being reached in Russia, only to be dwarfed by the horrors of the Holocaust half a century later.  These events reinforced a Jewish self-image as eternal victim.

I.L. Peretz’s “Bontshe the Silent” (1894) laughed bitterly at Jewish victimhood; Haim Nahman Bialik’s “In the City of Slaughter” (on the 1903 Kishinev pogrom) raged at it; “Fiddler on the Roof” (based on Sholom Aleichem’s stories from 1894-1914) made it a Broadway hit in 1964.  But what is remarkable is that even after 1948 and 1967, when the power of the nation state of the Jewish people was gloriously on display, Jewish victimhood identity was not diminished.  The most-visited national park in Israel is Masada, where Jews are said to have committed mass suicide rather than be enslaved and abused by the Romans.  And class “pilgrimages” to Auschwitz have long been a kind of ritual for Israeli eleventh graders.  Meanwhile, across the ocean, in 2019-20, the Pew Center asked U.S. Jews what behaviors they considered essential to being Jewish; “remembering the Holocaust” led, listed as essential by 76%; “leading an ethical life” – 72%; “caring about Israel” – 45%; “being part of a Jewish community” – 33%.

In Europe in the 30s and 40s, Jews were powerless.  In Israel, in 2025, despite the shock, fear, grief, and humiliation of October 7 2023, they are not.  Today, as the long arm of Israeli power crushes Gaza and reaches out to neutralize enemies thousands of miles away, still, we can’t seem to shake our identity (as Herzl, Max Weber, and Hannah Arendt said) as a “pariah people,” outcast, alone, powerless – eternal victims.  I believe that this dissonance constitutes a moral problem, and that unless we can restore an identity based on the responsibility to implement a vision of a better world, instead of one based on the moral superiority of the victim, it will be our undoing.