Twenty Centuries of Being Looked At

How the gaze on the Jews was built, and the question it leaves

What can a Jew do, standing in an inheritance of twenty centuries of being defined from outside? I ask it as a practical question and I intend to answer it. But the answer requires understanding first why the outside gaze weighed so much and lasted so long. That weight was manufactured, and knowing how it was made changes what one can do with it.

A man was executed by Rome. Crucifixion was a Roman punishment for sedition, ordered by a Roman prefect, applied to someone proclaimed king in a restless province. The gospels were written decades later, after Rome had destroyed the Temple, by a community separating painfully from the Judaism it came from, while needing to survive inside the empire it hoped to win over. Blaming Rome for the death of its founder was suicidal; blaming the Jews served both needs at once.

Read in chronological order, the texts show the displacement in progress: the earliest keeps Pilate as the one who condemns; the later ones give us a hesitant, almost compassionate Pilate, a crowd that calls the blood down upon itself and its children, “the Jews” as a hostile block. No source outside those pages records any of it. What the record does show is the charge hardening into doctrine: the Jews had killed God. A crime against a man is judged and closed. A crime against God, in the logic that took hold, has no term and stains every generation.

That charge is the variable. The persecutions of the Christian world across two thousand years had many causes, and the record contains everything: legal humiliation, ghettos, expulsions from England, from France, from Spain, pogroms, blood libels, massacres. Dispersion without an army, visibility without power, economic functions both needed and despised, all of it fed the fire. None of it explains why the fire lasted twenty centuries. What deicide explains is the scale, the intensity, the demonization and the persistence: an accusation of infinite crime keeps hatred alive after every concrete cause has changed, because the culprit is guilty by existing.

Modernity drove the charge underground without killing it; when the nineteenth century translated theology into race, the guilt that conversion had once dissolved became biological, and a culpability that cannot be converted can only be eliminated. Deicide does not explain Nazism entire. Without deicide, the other causes of Nazism do not assemble into extermination. It is the piece the machine cannot run without.

Islam is the witness that proves it. Under Islam the Jew carried nearly all the same conditions: subordinate, taxed apart, marked by restriction, occasionally massacred, Granada in 1066, the Almohad persecutions that drove Maimonides himself into exile. Subordination was real and so was the violence. What never appeared there was the rest: no demonization of the Jew as a cosmic enemy, no fantasy of a people secretly controlling the world, no expulsions of hundreds of thousands, no project of annihilation. In scale, in intensity, in persistence, the two worlds’ conduct toward the same people bears no resemblance.

Islam venerates Jesus as a prophet. Nobody killed God there, so nobody could be eternally guilty of it. Everything coincided in both worlds, the dispersion, the subordinate status, the economic functions, except that one piece, and the result was of another order.

Islam’s war over Israel belongs, at its root, to a different history: that of a civilization that lost land it considered its own, as it lost Iberia and the Balkans, that fought for those lands across centuries and accepted the loss only when it became irreversible. Israel has not yet imposed that irreversibility on its neighbors’ imagination, so the fight goes on. This is the ordinary logic of peoples and territory through history.

But onto that territorial conflict, well into the twentieth century, European antisemitism was grafted. The Protocols of the Elders of Zion, a Russian forgery, circulate today in Arabic as an authentic document; the Hamas charter of 1988 invokes them. The blood libel reached Damascus in 1840 carried by French clerics. The heavy ammunition did not grow out of the land dispute. It was imported from the same Christian matrix that had manufactured the guilty Jew, which confirms where the manufacture happened.

Then, after the Holocaust, something occurred that complicates the story. The gaze turned favorable. The Jew became the unjust victim, the people that gave humanity so much despite its suffering, the nation that rose out of swamp and desert and defeated, again and again, adversaries many times its size. And the Jew embraced that gaze with enthusiasm. Understandably: after twenty centuries of the other’s contempt, the other’s admiration feels like arrival.

But the mechanism underneath stayed intact, definition through outside eyes, now with the sign reversed. That embrace is why letting go is so hard today, when the sign is turning again. And the reflex visible in part of Israel, declaring that the world’s opinion no longer matters at all, does not escape the mechanism either. Deliberate indifference is still orientation by the other, by rejection instead of by accusation. Living against the outside gaze is another way of living from it.

The turn has causes that can be named. The generations of the Christian world that carried guilt and compassion after the Holocaust aged and died, Israel grew strong, and with the guilt gone and the victim armed, the old charge found its way back in the only clothing the postwar West allows it.

The clothing has a name: the anticolonial frame. The grievance is real where it was born; the Arab world was colonized and remembers it. Transferred to Israel it changes nature: it stops accusing the state of what it does and accuses it of what it is, illegitimate from birth, a colonial implant that should not exist.

It is a strange colony, one without a metropole, founded by a people that had never entirely left the land and had never stopped praying toward it. And states born of conquest govern half the planet without anyone proposing to dissolve them; one state alone has its existence put on trial. Since most Jews, wherever they live and whatever they vote, will not renounce that existence, the verdict extends to all of them. Guilty for existing: the sentence has been heard before.

On the street the distinction is not hard to draw. Criticizing the Netanyahu government is politics; Israelis do it in Tel Aviv every week. Harassing a Jew in Paris or Buenos Aires who holds no Israeli passport, or any Israeli abroad whatever he votes, for what a government does, is another thing entirely. In the same West where this happens, nobody attacks a Russian over Ukraine, nobody harasses Chinese students over the Uighurs, nobody assaulted ordinary Americans over the hundreds of thousands dead in Iraq. That restraint is the correct conduct: no one owes an account for a state he does not govern. One people alone is charged, person by person, with the conduct of a state.

Part of the far right recycles the world domination myth of the Protocols; part of the left, standing by reflex beside whoever it sees as weak, slides from the government to the Jews. When the target is the Jew as such, the charge doing the work is the old one. Russia, China and the American case are the control in the present argument that Islam is in the historical one: the grievance against a government exists, and it never transfers to citizens.

The gaze this note began with is back on the street. It was never mere looking; it was always a verdict. So the question returns, sharper. One way of losing is to dissolve into the majority to be left in peace: the definition stays in the other’s hands. The opposite way is to harden into the stubborn martyr who has stopped listening: fanaticism, a man locked inside his own gaze alone.

What the tradition built is a way of standing that requires neither. It is written into the origin of the name: Jacob is renamed Israel because he wrestled with God and with men, and prevailed. Wrestling is that position: a man who neither lets go of his adversary nor surrenders to him. And the blessing says nothing about destroying the adversary or convincing him of anything; the prevailing is a transformation that improves the other and oneself in a single movement.

Jacob comes out of that night and opens his heart to Esau, and Esau’s heart opens to him, and each remains himself. And what grew from that name kept its shape: a culture of permanent open argument, a text that keeps the losing opinion on the page. It fits the observant and the secular alike. The observant have carried that inheritance openly for centuries; the Jews who most visibly changed the modern world, many of them far from any synagogue, were exercising the same inheritance: the refusal to let any truth close itself.

The same equilibrium reappears on another plane. Inward, it was a way of standing before the gaze; outward, it becomes a particular people with a universal vocation that seeks to convert no one. Universalism without particularity dissolves; particularity without universal vocation closes on itself. The Jewish form holds again: to remain distinct and to work, from that distinctness, at repairing a world that belongs to everyone.

And here a structural wound must be named. A particularity that claims universal meaning, while wanting to convert nobody, reminds every totality that believes itself complete that it does not close. Nobody chooses this effect. What was done with it is another matter. It is part of why the gaze weighed so much, and no conduct will make it go away. Knowing it frees a Jew from two illusions: that the gaze would soften if he earned it, and that it would stop weighing if he denied it.

These words do not describe ‘the Jew,’ because he does not exist. There are Jews, observant and secular, businessmen and intellectuals, artists and scientists, in Jerusalem and in New York, and each one decides what to do with the inheritance. The structure does not travel in the blood; that idea belongs to the persecutors. It remains available: a way of looking at oneself neither only through the other’s eyes nor only through one’s own, and of continuing, knowingly or not, the old stubborn work of repairing the world.