States of Exile

Nativists who claim Jews are out to conquer the world face two difficult questions: the question of theo-political motivation and the question of logistical capability. Theologically, Judaism tends toward nationalism, not imperialism; isolationism, not expansionism. If communism was to be seen as a front for Jewish world domination, the fact that Judeo-communists repudiated Judaism had to be explained away: thus the origin of the modern conspiracy theory. Anti-Semites had to forge the Protocols of the Elders of Zion to provide an imperialist theology for their enemy, because it could not be found in the enemy's own writings. As Raymond Ibrahim writes in Conflating History with Theology : Yahweh clearly ordered the Hebrews to annihilate the Canaanites and surrounding peoples. Such violence is therefore an expression of God's will, for good or ill. Regardless, all the historic violence committed by the Hebrews and recorded in the Old Testament is just that—history. It happened; G...

Yesterday was Victoria Day in Canada, a vestige of our monarchical past. Canada's head of state is still the Queen, represented in Canada by the largely ceremonial Governor-General, while the Prime Minister manages the daily affairs of government. Canada is not a republic but a constitutional monarchy. The Canadian model of governance has relevance for a theo-political understanding of Judaism. Kings and queens represent a check to untrammelled democratic power. Hitler was elected to office and commanded the undivided loyalty of the German nation. Mussolini, on the other hand, was hemmed in by the monarchy of Victor Emmanuel III. Even the Duce had to answer to someone. Israel is a monarchy, and a constitutional monarchy at that. Unlike the other Middle Eastern peoples, who tended to apotheosize their royalty as divine (think of the pharaohs), the Hebrews recognized the kingship of God above human rulership. Thus there always existed a greater entity (even if, paradoxically, that en...

The journal article Anarcho-Nationalism: Anarchist Attitudes towards Jewish Nationalism and Zionism provides a fascinating overview of this mostly forgotten theo-political alternative of the nineteenth and early twentieth century. Some background: Many Jewish radicals, socialists as well as anarchists, initially subscribed to the universalist ideas common to radical thought, ideas that [Moses] Hess himself used to advocate before his nationalist conversion in Rome and Jerusalem . In The Holy History of Mankind (1837), Hess maintained that Jews have a future in the modern world only as individuals, and that a solution to the Jewish problem would only emerge via a process of assimilation and integration into the universal socialist revolutionary movement. But while it took Hess a relatively short time to sober up to the reality, whereby national affinities were deeper and stronger than class solidarity, most Jewish radicals continued to believe for a long time that the social revolutio...

In an article from the New Republic on Slavoj Zizek, Adam Kirsch hurls a j'accuse! at Slovenia's "deadly jester" for his views on Judaism: Invoking Freud's Moses and Monotheism , Zizek asserts that Judaism harbors a "'stubborn attachment' ... to the unacknowledged violent founding gesture that haunts the public legal order as its spectral supplement." Thanks to this Jewish stubbornness, he continues, "the Jews did not give up the ghost; they survived all their ordeals precisely because they refused to give up the ghost." This vision of Judaism as an undead religion, surviving zombie-like long past the date of its "natural" death, is taken over from Hegel, who writes in the Phenomenology of Mind about the "fatal unholy void" of this "most reprobate and abandoned" religion. This philosophical anti-Judaism, which appears in many modern thinkers, including Kant, is a descendant of the Christian anti-Judaism ...