At the time I came to young womanhood, Jews of my generation believed we were way past the dark days of danger. Only refugees from recent tyrannies spoke of anti-semitism as a force that could show up “even here.”

Well that’s changed, evidently. But before I get to the cure, let’s find out what needs to be cured. Why not trace the trajectory of the thing, going back to its inception. The phenomenon doesn’t start in the Greco-Roman world. In cosmopolitan antiquity, opinions may differ with regard to Jews, but the Jewish presence doesn’t usually prompt dark obsessions.

However, in the first two centuries of the Jesus movement, this changes. As that movement becomes predominantly non-Jewish, a doctrine called “supersessionism” emerges. It holds that Jews used to have a special relationship with God – a covenant – but their covenant was discontinued due to Jews’ perpetual and unanimous bad behavior. As a result, the Jews’ former covenant has now been transferred to the dominant branch of the Jesus movement, based in Rome. Happily, certain restrictions pertaining to the Jewish covenant (like circumcision and dietary limitations), have been abrogated along with that transfer.

As for the still-actual Jews, some Christian thought-leaders (like Ambrose) denied that they retained any rights at all. Others (like Augustine) held that Jews did have a right to live, but only in poverty miserable enough to prove their supersession. (Prove it, I assume, with each rag that failed to warm their shivering bodies.)

This rationale for persecuting Jews prevailed until the modern period, inaugurated by Copernicus, Kepler and Galileo. When Newton solved the theoretical problems that had delayed the acceptance of the new world-view, the eighteenth century’s educated class shaped itself into what became known as the Age of Reason.

As for the Jews, now a modern rationale had to be found for demeaning them. It was determined that Jews sadly lacked the universal vision afforded by Reason. They were backward and narrowly tribal people.

When the Age of Reason gave rise to a reaction in Romanticism, priority went to feeling for one’s locale, love of nature and the people living close to it, deep-delving intuition and creative spontaneity. Accordingly, a new caricature of Jews had to be found. Jews were deemed rootless cosmopolitans.

Do we begin to get the picture? Whatever the Zeitgeist – the spirit of the times – was deemed to be, the Jews would be singled out as its adversary.

When the Nazis recast history in proto-Darwinian terms, as a struggle for dominance between higher and lower races, with theirs the self-described master race, Jews would be rated not merely another among the many “inferior” races. Jews alone would be the toxic race who polluted nature itself as well as society. Six million Jews were murdered with this rationale and the remainder likely would have been had the Nazis not lost the Second World War.

And now, in the post-Nazi period, when racism and dominance of local peoples by colonial powers is at last denounced and decried? What now? Well, Jews along with their ancient nation now restored to its Biblical language and land, have become the preeminent “racists” and of course “colonialists.” What else could they be? 

Once again: to find the Zeitgeist of any era, just identify the terms by which Jews get denounced in that era. Jews will be deemed the anti-Zeitgeist.

As a way of thinking, it’s ungrounded, unfair, mindlessly cruel and unreasonable. Put it on and it will work like trying to see while wearing blinders. Can it be cured? Can the people wearing blinders be persuaded to take them off? Myself, I’ve seen people become anti-semites; I haven’t personally seen anyone cured. It doesn’t act like ordinary prejudice. Nazi philosophers like Martin Heidegger, prominent Hitler-regime deputies like Joseph Goebbels, each had Jewish women in their lives whom they sincerely loved! You can deny the sincerity, but I see no reason to. As a murderous pathology, it seems quite peculiar.

Since it’s focused on Jews, let’s look at that side – at the object of the obsession. Judaism is a historical religion, in fact the most historical one. It makes the claim that God sees us as we think and act in our time. Therefore, if we’ve done the wrong thing, we need to admit it and, if we can, repair it with the person we wronged. Only then is it okay to talk to God about it. We don’t get saved from the human condition. We get repaired by acting appropriately within the human condition – with God’s help obviously.

Why did God “choose the Jews”? God had to make somebody carry out the pilot project of living with God in real time. One foot after another. And the Jews kept the record of how they had acted under their pilot-project assignment. Their preserved record is the Hebrew Bible. Their firstness in carrying out that assignment is a matter of record. It cannot be revoked. All the defamations in the world are powerless to change it. 

If God is an actor in time, along with humankind, some people must provide the first case of that assignment and provide the record. Without that, we have only the God-of-nature or of supernature. We don’t have the God of ourselves – of just who and where we actually are.

For Jews, Adam’s disobedience doesn’t plunge humanity into a state of sinfulness that’s incurable. The Hebrew record shows that human beings can sin, like Cain, or not sin, like Abel. Nor does the Hebrew Bible reference Adam again, after the fifth chapter of Genesis. I doubt Jesus references Adam in any of the four gospels. So far as I recall, the doctrine of Original Sin first appears in Paul’s epistles. So the Pauline interpretation of the crucifixion of Jesus, as effecting humankind’s redemption from Original Sin, solves a problem not familiar to the Jewish experience of human redemption.

So what, finally, is anti-semitism? And why does it go on from era to era, under different disguises in keeping with the era, but just as incurable in each era?

It is the bitterly rancorous belief that God really does prefer the Jews, that the covenant God made with the Jews is not superseded. And with it the concomitant belief that the brother who feels less loved can get to be preferred if he defames, desecrates and erases Jewish existence finally and forever. 

Friends, fellow siblings, it’s an obvious mistake. It’s kid stuff. Nothing and no one can erase Jewish firstness in recognizing, interacting with, and keeping the record of human interactions with the God of history. But nothing has to erase it. The historical record bars no one from knowing, loving and serving God in their own way.

Cain was mistaken in killing Abel. 

It gained him nothing.

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