The Jewish Power Blog: Powerful Victims
As the Bible tells the story (Gen. 37-Ex. 1), Joseph arrives in Egypt as a foreign slave: totally powerless. By dint of his talent and wisdom, perhaps his good looks, and God’s help, he rapidly gains power over his master Potiphar’s household, but that power is only illusory: he has no protection from his master’s (and mistress’s) whims, and soon finds himself in a dungeon. Once again, his own qualities, and God’s help, elevate him to an even higher realm of power, second only to Pharaoh himself. He uses his position to benefit his family, arranging their migration and settlement in Egypt; to benefit the entire kingdom, organizing the response to the famine; and to benefit Pharaoh, creating a feudal economic system, wherein all land now belongs to Pharaoh. Nevertheless, it seems that Joseph remains an outsider, and his power illusory. After all, throughout history, rulers have understood (or learned the hard way) that it is always a good idea to have your second-in-command be an outsider, with no power base. And indeed, when Pharaoh and Joseph have left the stage, the new ruler finds it useful to portray Joseph’s clan, the immigrant Israelites, as outsiders, a potential threat; and so to enslave them. So the Israelites’ sojourn in Egypt ends as Joseph’s began, in slavery: powerless.
The Israelites were presumably a small minority of Egypt’s population, living in a restricted area. Was Pharaoh really afraid of them? And if so, was there any rational basis to his fear? Could it be that the peasants, now resentful of the feudal system, were becoming restless and the new Pharaoh needed a scapegoat to divert their anger from him? All is speculation… But the motif of the Jew as powerful/powerless outsider has had a long life. It crops up again almost a millennium later, in the Book of Esther.
The Bible knows the paradox that will haunt Jewish history to the present: the Jews are powerless outsiders – whose power is to be feared.
Of course, it is not hard to find examples of other groups seen as outsiders in a particular society, who despite their seemingly obvious powerlessness are perceived by the majority as a threat: those who are different in ethnicity, religion, race, gender, physical/mental characteristics. Anthropologist/philosopher Rene Girard calls this phenomenon “generative scapegoating”:
A community that actively eeks and finds scapegoats is usually a community troubled by dissension or by some real or imaginary disaster… At the instant the scapegoat is selected…, he obviously appears as the all-powerful cause of all trouble in a community that is itself nothing but trouble. The roles are reversed. The victimizers see themselves as the passive victims of their own victim, and they see their victim as supremely active, eminently capable of destroying them. The scapegoat always appears to be a more powerful agent… than he really is. (Violent Origins, 1993, p. 93, 101)
That is, the majority is troubled – by internal division, by its own powerlessness in the face of a real threat (e.g., a plague, a military defeat) – and seeks to escape responsibility for its troubles and/or for addressing them by assigning that responsibility to the scapegoat – a minority with no real power, but, correspondingly, no power to resist its assigned status. And so, the powerful majority adopts an identity as powerless victim of the minority (which is, of course actually powerless to inflict the harm ascribed to it); and thus the majority assumes the high moral ground of victimhood and divests itself of any responsibility for its situation.
Early Christians adopted a victimhood identity, both because the central symbol of their belief was the crucified Jesus, victimized, in their collective memory, by the Jews (Matthew 27:22-5); and also because, during the “age of martyrdom” (first-fourth centuries), Christians did suffer for their belief, at the hands of both Jews and Romans. But then, in the fourth century, the Christian victim community suddenly came into immense power, as Christianity became the official religion of the Roman empire. What developed from this dissonance was the paradoxical central cultural strand of western civilization: the Jews, who are and must remain powerless as punishment for their deicide and their rejection of the truth, are to be feared as the eternal victimizers of the Christian victims; they are the perfect scapegoats. Meanwhile, ambivalence about power troubled the various streams of Christianity through the ages, including this doctrine of Jewish victimization/victimhood. Only in 1965, in Nostra Aetate, did the Catholic Church formally revise its doctrine to absolve the Jews of the accusation of deicide.
Isn’t it interesting that a similar paradoxical dissonance has arisen in our day between the Jews’ victimhood identity and their attainment of significant power.
The world is troubled by this, and perhaps is unwilling to “allow” the Jews to escape their victim image, and so is appalled by Jews wielding raw power. They should “know their place.” Israel’s wielding of power seems to have re-energized old anti-Semitic currents.
Meanwhile, for the Jews, no matter how uneven the balance of power with the Palestinians, no matter how obvious is Israel’s overwhelming power, its ability to flatten cities, displace millions, assassinate leaders anywhere in the world, its total control of the skies – still, every Palestinian child throwing a stone is an existential threat, any mention of the forbidden words “Palestinian state” is treason, any questioning of the veracity of reports by the Israeli army spokesman is a blood libel, any negotiation is a sign of weakness.
Like medieval Christianity, it seems that the nation state of the Jewish people is developing a paradoxical ideology of powerful victimhood. It is a very attractive combination: power means no one can oppose you physically; victimhood means no one can question your moral superiority. The problem is that a victim is, by definition, powerless.
So, what are we? And what do we aspire to be?
