Who Taught Them To Spit?

Before we ask whether it is permissible to spit on a priest, perhaps we should ask a simpler question: is it permissible to spit on a human being? If the answer is not an immediate no, then the problem begins before theology, before politics, and before any argument about universalism. It begins with the classification of some human beings as more available for humiliation than others.

Rabbi Shmuly Yanklowitz recently warned that Jewish universalism is being forgotten. His concern deserves to be taken seriously precisely because it comes from inside Jewish religious life, from someone whose work has long argued that Jewish particularity should enlarge rather than contract our obligations toward others.

But perhaps the problem has already moved one step further. Perhaps Jewish universalism is not merely being forgotten. Perhaps we are beginning to discover whom it no longer protects.

Look at Jerusalem. Christian clergy are repeatedly spat at. Churches and monasteries are targeted. Earlier this month six religious Jews, five of them minors, were arrested after incidents at the Armenian Saint James Monastery. Days later another young religious Jew was filmed deliberately spitting at its entrance. A French Catholic nun was violently pushed to the ground near King David’s Tomb; the attacker was later found psychotic and ordered into psychiatric hospitalization.

The psychiatric diagnosis may explain that particular attacker. It cannot diagnose the social environment around him, nor can it explain why priests, monks and Christian religious sites have repeatedly become available as objects of humiliation. When the same gesture is reproduced by children and teenagers, another question becomes unavoidable: who taught them that a Christian is someone one may spit at?

The answer cannot simply be “the Torah teaches this,” because it does not. Rabbis have publicly condemned such behavior and rejected claims that Jewish law requires it. Yet children have been recorded describing such acts as religiously justified, while activists have invoked alleged Jewish tradition to defend them. That discrepancy is precisely where the real problem begins.

Religious education never consists only of sentences found in sacred texts. It consists of classifications, emphases, stories, exclusions and examples. A child may learn that Christianity is avodah zarah, that the cross represents idolatry, that Christians historically persecuted Jews and that separation from certain forms of worship is required. None of this necessarily produces violence. But when rejection of a doctrine is not sharply separated from degradation of the person who embodies it, a practical lesson can emerge without anyone formally teaching it: this person represents something contemptible, therefore contempt toward this person is permissible.

Then the street completes the education. A child sees an older boy spit at a priest. Nothing serious happens. Another does it. Someone laughs. An adult explains it away. A politician calls the perpetrators marginal. The police intervene occasionally, but the behavior returns. What begins as theological classification becomes social habit. A society does not need to approve violence in order to permit it. It only needs to make violence sufficiently inexpensive. Permission is not an official declaration. It is an architecture of consequences, teaching people what can be done, to whom, and at what cost.

The same mechanism appears in a different and more serious form in the West Bank. Palestinian farmers are beaten, homes entered, property taken, villages harassed. These events are not identical to the harassment of Christians in Jerusalem and should not be collapsed into one category. But different forms of violence can still share one structural feature: some people become easier to touch, humiliate, dispossess or attack because the expected cost of doing so declines.

That is why concentrating only on extremists is insufficient. Every society contains extremists. The decisive question is what their environment teaches them about feasibility. Who intervenes, who prosecutes, who excuses, who supplies resources, who provides political protection, and who says that the perpetrators do not represent us while accepting conditions in which the same behavior repeatedly returns?

There is an even more disturbing question: who teaches the next generation what kind of person may be treated this way?

Jewish history should make this mechanism unusually legible. Persecution does not begin only with spectacular violence. Before violence becomes systematic, boundaries of permissible conduct move. What was unthinkable becomes offensive but tolerable. What was intolerable becomes regrettable. What was regrettable becomes routine.

This is not an analogy between contemporary Israel and Nazi Germany. Such comparisons erase distinctions and make serious analysis impossible. The point is narrower and more demanding: Jews have historical reasons to understand what happens when membership in a category begins to reduce the protection attached to a human body.

Yanklowitz argues that Jews care for the stranger because we have experienced being strangers. But the stranger does not cease to be the stranger because he is Palestinian, Christian, Armenian or Muslim. If human dignity operates only after we have decided that the person before us belongs to an acceptable category, it is no longer universal dignity. It is conditional protection.

After October 7, Jewish fear is real. Israeli civilians were murdered, tortured and kidnapped, and Jews have every right to demand security. But security cannot become a mechanism through which obligations toward everyone outside the circle are progressively suspended.

Hillel asked, “If I am not for myself, who will be for me?” He immediately added, “If I am only for myself, what am I?” Today another question follows from both. If a child learns that a priest may be spat at, if a settler learns that a Palestinian farmer may be beaten, and if each case can still be explained as an isolated exception, what exactly do we believe will stop the boundary from moving again?

The Palestinian today. The Christian tomorrow. The secular Jew after that. The political opponent. The wrong kind of Jew. “Who’s next?” is therefore not an accusation that Israeli society collectively approves these acts. It is a question addressed precisely to those who do not approve them: what are we prepared to make impossible?

Rabbi Yanklowitz asks whether Jewish universalism is being forgotten. The sharper question may be whether some people are already learning, through particular forms of religious teaching, political language and everyday experience, that it does not fully apply to everyone.

Once that lesson becomes socially transmissible, the question is no longer only who taught them to spit.

It is who will be considered spit-able next.

Yochanan Schimmelpfennig