The Blogs: Why the Jews

Many groups have served as scapegoats throughout history, yet Jews occupy a uniquely recurring position. The persistence of antisemitism across civilizations that otherwise share little in common demands explanation. Jews have been accused of capitalism and communism, excessive nationalism and dangerous cosmopolitanism, tribalism and rootlessness, backwardness and modernity. The contradictions are so obvious that they cannot be explained by the actual characteristics of Jewish communities. Something deeper is occurring. The accusations reveal less about Jews than about the societies producing them. Again and again, Jews become associated with a culture’s frustrations, disappointments, and unrealized hopes.

David Nirenberg’s work provides an important clue. Throughout much of Western history, “Judaism” often functioned as more than a description of Jewish communities. It became a symbolic language through which societies discussed larger concerns about law, power, identity, commerce, morality, and social order. The specific accusations changed across time because the function remained remarkably consistent. Jews became a screen onto which broader anxieties were projected. Antisemitism survived dramatic historical changes because it addressed recurring cultural needs rather than specific Jewish realities. The specific accusations changed across time because the underlying function remained remarkably consistent.

Yet symbolic projection alone cannot explain why Jews occupy this role so frequently. Part of the answer lies in the unusual position Jews have occupied throughout history. The Jewish people exist simultaneously as a religious community, an ethnic people, a historical civilization, a diasporic minority, and, in modern times, a restored nation-state. There are few groups that fit neatly into the categories by which societies organize reality. Jews have often seemed both inside and outside dominant cultures at the same time, known but unknown, there but not quite disappearing through absorption. This makes their bodies and Judaism available for symbolic use with little or no relationship to actual Jewish existence. Their endurance muddied categories dependent upon well-defined borders.

The deeper reason, however, concerns the way Jewish existence relates to history itself. The essential act of faith for every Jew in every generation has been the refusal to accept the world as it is, and the determination never to be reconciled to suffering and injustice. Judaism is a civilization organized around covenant, memory, promise, exile, return, and expectation. Jewish identity remained organized around a future that had not yet arrived.

This testimony only becomes important when movements claim that redemption has arrived or is about to arrive through political, ideological, racial, or religious means. Every empire seeks permanence. Every revolution seeks consummation. Every utopia seeks reconciliation. Every redemptive system seeks closure. Jewish continuity therefore challenges more than the particular ideology. It challenges the possibility of historical closure. It reminds every system that reality is always more complicated than its categories and that history is always more open than its theories.

A remainder is that which a system cannot digest without giving up its own consistency. Think of a puzzle with one piece that doesn’t fit where it clearly belongs; not only does it leave the picture incomplete, it suggests that something may be wrong with that picture. The puzzle cannot close as long as the piece remains on the table. The remainder functions in this way: it is not just the puzzle piece that doesn’t fit, but the fact of having a puzzle piece that can’t be incorporated into the solution. It is that which remains after a system has accounted for, categorized, or incorporated all that it can. It marks the limit of the system.

The Jew therefore often functions as more than a scapegoat: he or she becomes a “witness.” A scapegoat is blamed for a crisis, but a witness reminds us of something we would prefer not to know and, most importantly, bears witness to the fact not only that redemption is incomplete, but that the system itself is incomplete. For a movement that believes it is the possessor of the secret to human fulfillment, this can be troubling indeed.

Mistakes are not flaunted by the system, but hidden. At first, the covenantal witness is an inconvenience, simply pointing out the contradictions that the system would prefer didn’t exist. But that inconvenience leads to irritation, irritation leads to threat, and threat leads to obstacle. Rather than accept the non-finality of history, the system begins to reinterpret the witness. Instead of viewing the Jew as testifying to the nonarrival of redemption, it begins to view the Jew as responsible for the nonarrival of redemption.

One source of antisemitism continually recurs. The Jew is hated not for having caused the incompletion, but because his or her presence reminds others that the incompletion exists. The accusation is against a people, but under the accusation is a rebellion against limits, lack of certainty, and the unfinished nature of the human situation. Human beings yearn for completion, certainty, and finishedness, but history keeps denying them those things. When movements become unable to tolerate that disappointment, they turn to people who can answer for why the future has not yet arrived.

In opposition to the antisemitic mindset, Halbwachs identified two services that Jews could offer to Christian societies: the first is as a source of critique and reflection, helping the group show a certain reserve in regard to hasty projects, and suggesting to it that it take time for deliberation; the second service corresponds to the anti-Semitic temptation at its deepest level, which is to project upon a people an annoyance that comes from people’s desire to be everything at once, to deny their finitude:

We can’t do everything we would like all at once. Children learn that. Maturity consists partly in not forgetting it, and societies, like human beings, must pursue, without hope of finishing it, this task of self-criticism.

Against completion, there stands the witness. For those who can stand to live with it, the witness inspires humility. For those who seek completion, the witness becomes intolerable. Antisemitism occurs at the moment that this reminder of incompletion is interpreted as the root of incompletion itself: one could fix the problem (incompleteness) if only one could get rid of this annoyance (the Jew). What is really rejected is not the Jew, but the limit that the Jew has come to represent: in their deepest dimension, anti-Semitic intentions are perhaps better tied to a certain impatience and exasperation in the face of the unfinished character of things.

Endnotes

David Nirenberg, Anti-Judaism: The Western Tradition (New York: W. W. Norton & Company, 2013).
Mary Douglas, Purity and Danger: An Analysis of Concepts of Pollution and Taboo (London: Routledge & Kegan Paul, 1966).
Michael Wyschogrod, The Body of Faith: God in the People Israel (New York: Seabury Press, 1983).
Gerald R. McDermott, Israel Matters: Why Christians Must Think Differently about the People and the Land (Grand Rapids, MI: Brazos Press, 2017).
Eric Voegelin, The New Science of Politics: An Introduction (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1952).
René Girard, The Scapegoat, trans. Yvonne Freccero (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1986).
Zygmunt Bauman, Modernity and the Holocaust (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1989).
Gerald R. McDermott and Andrew T. Abernethy, The Biblical Prophets and Israel’s Future (Wheaton, IL: Crossway, 2018).