Anti-Semitism and the Jewish Response

Rabbi Nachman Bulman

Reflections on Purim and its implications to contemporary problems

PURIM is a holiday with a mask. Behind the mask, however, there lurks adult thoughtfulness and penetrating insight. And there are three things of importance to be learned from Purim: the causes of anti-Semitism; the proper methods of defense against it, and how we ought to celebrate deliverance from its effects.

The Causes of Anti-Semitism

And Haman said to King Achashveirosh: O "There is a certain people scattered and (yet) separated among the peoples in all provinces of thy kingdom; and their religious laws differ from those of all the other peoples; neither do they keep the religious laws of the king; nor would it profit the king to let them remain!"

A Step By Step Evaluation

Scattered and (yet) separated

These words are a concise and pungent statement of the dilemma which is at the heart of anti-Semitic sentiment. The anti-Semite sees Jews everywhere "scattered;" nowhere do they strive very hard to retain a cohesive and distinctive pattern of Jewish identity. He sees at the same time, however, that as a group, Jews are characterized by a quality of "stubborn indissolubility."

He may mistakenly attribute the paradox to a dark and ignoble hypocrisy on the part of the Jew. He may mistakenly attribute the paradox to the Jew's insufficiently strong desire for complete self-effacement and assimilation. He may never begin to fathom the matter as testimony, that collectively, the Jews cannot escape their historic destiny. He may never begin to sense that the seemingly interminable capacity of the Jewish people to renew its life from ashes of destruction, with creative powers unimpaired, is perhaps the most eloquent testimony that there is Divine meaning in the historic process.

He certainly fails to see himself as a "rod of Divine anger," whose purpose sometimes is to prevent the people of G-d from breaking down the Divinely established boundary "between Israel and the nations," to recall the Jew to an awareness of his Divinely ordained character and task, of his specific dependence for life and well being on Divine Providence, of his utter inability to find security through reliance on the good will of the nations.

All the same, he senses powerfully -- often more so than individually "unconscious" Jews - the grip of the riddle of Jewish survival on his own psyche and that of his world. And without understanding, he rages frenziedly at the Jew because of the existence of the riddle.

Their religious laws differ from those of all the other peoples

Here again, the eyes of hate sometimes penetrate, despite their distorted line of vision, to a depth of insight that cold and objective analysis does not reach. Haman perceived rightly, together with anti-Semites of every age, that Judaism is different, not only from any other religion, but also, from all other religions. He noted correctly that in human society religious denominational differences are usually harmonized under a broader common denominator of fundamental substrata of beliefs and values giving inner character and impulse to society; that usually the economic, political, social, and recreational phases of life, and even the inner state of the religious phase, are motivated by those "root" values, rather than by the doctrinal particularities debated in the official religious institutions.

But, he noted also, with sharp perceptiveness, that there are elements in Judaism that make impossible for its adherents genuine absorption in the total configuration of life's activities, with the peoples among whom they live.

An elusive and indefinable otherness remains. Some Jews seek to talk it out of existence by refusing to recognize the chosenness of Israel as a historic fact and referring to it as a "mere dogma" -- which they can then contemptuously dismiss, as a vestige of "chauvinistic tribal thinking," and which therefore can hardly have meaning for people who live in the 20th century, and have made the spirit of its culture and science their own.

But Israel's chosenness is not a "mere dogma." It is a fundamental principle of Judaism to whose truth all history bears witness. Jews may sometimes not find that fact a personally pleasant one to perceive, but anti-Semites often do perceive it, as did Haman, when he railed at our being inseparably bound to a religion generically different from all other religions.

Continue on to: Page 2