Humanity's Alien Defenders

Anti-Jewish Jew Gilad Atzmon asks a key question amidst his vitriol:

Historically Jews have shunned many Gods, they dropped Jehovah, they dumped Marx, some have never followed Zionism. But in the light of the Holocaust religion, while bearing in mind the scenes from Gaza, Jenin and Lebanon, the Jew may have to continue in the tradition and drop “the Jew”. He will have to accept that his newly formed father-figure was formed in his own shape. More concerning is the devastating fact that the new father is proved to be a call to kill. Seemingly, the new father is the ultimate evil God of them all.

I wonder how many Jews will be courageous enough to shun their esoteric newly formed father-figure. Will they be courageous enough to join the rest of humanity adopting a universal ethical discourse? Whether the Jew drops “The Jew”, only time will tell. Just to remove any doubt, I did drop my “Jew” a long time ago and I am doing fine.

This is an argument Jews unwilling to "drop the Jew" must take seriously. What does it mean to "drop the Jew"? Atzmon says it himself: the Jew who drops the Jew joins the rest of humanity in adopting a universal ethical discourse.

Yet as Carl Schmitt, surely no philo-Semite, wrote in The Concept of the Political:

Whoever invokes humanity wants to cheat. To confiscate the word humanity, to invoke and monopolize such a term probably has certain incalculable effects, such as denying the enemy the quality of being human and declaring him to be an outlaw of humanity; and a war can thereby be driven to the most extreme inhumanity.

Atzmon wants to cheat. There is no pure, unadulterated "humanity" except perhaps Adam in the Garden. He is parroting a discredited Enlightenment dream of totalitarian sameness. As Joseph de Maistre observed:

I have met Frenchmen, Italians, Russians. I even know, thanks to Montesquieu that one can be a Persian, but I have never met man.

What Atzmon means by saying the Jew should "drop the Jew" is that the Jew should become a post-Christian, post-racial Americanized worshipper of the downtrodden like all good universalists.

Hannah Arendt responded to a related line of reasoning with the following:

One truth that is unfamiliar to the Jewish people, though they are beginning to learn it, is that you can only defend yourself as the person you are attacked as. A person attacked as a Jew cannot defend himself as an Englishman or Frenchman. The world would only conclude that he is simply not defending himself.

There is no more pathetic figure than the man sputtering as the Gestapo takes him away to Auschwitz, "But I'm not a Jew, I'm a universalist!" To be everyone's man is to be no man. Deracination is a gross indignity, and that applies to all peoples.

The choices for the modern Jew are not simply parochial tribalism or hollow universalism, despite Atzmon's delusions. There is a third option: rooted pluralism, or recognition of the universal from the standpoint of the particular.

Take the words of Martin Buber:

As a historical people, Israel enjoys no precedence over any other. Like Israel, the other peoples were all wanderers and settlers; they came ‘up’ from a land of want and servitude into their present homeland. The one God, the Redeemer and Leader of the peoples, strode before all of them upon their way.

Or Moses Hess:

The last chosen people, like the first, must atone for its sins before it is granted the privilege of leading its historical role, before it will be worthy to enter into the modern alliance of humanity, which is based on the equality of all historical nations.

Are there passages in the Bible that can be used to justify supremacism and violence? Of course. But there also passages like Isaiah 19:24:

In that day shall Israel be third alongside Egypt and Assyria, as a blessing on earth; for the Infinite One of the Many will bless them, saying "Blessed be My people Egypt, My handiwork, Assyria, and My inheritance, Israel."

And Amos 9:7:

"Are you not as the sons of Ethiopia to Me, O sons of Israel?" declares the LORD. "Have I not brought up Israel from the land of Egypt, and the Philistines from Caphtor and the Arameans from Kir?

I do not mean to convince non-believers with these passages. I simply mean to point out that Judaism does not automatically lead to "Gaza, Jenin and Lebanon" as surely as Christianity does not automatically lead to the Crusades and German history does not automatically lead to the blitzkrieg. (Not to mention that the latter two outscale the former by a wide mile.) The God of the Philistines or Palestinians is also the God of Israel. We must cultivate what is best in our own traditions, and become better human beings not in spite of, but because of our particularities. Nothing is more inhuman than the sublimated self-loathing of "humanity's defenders."