IS THEIli A CUIli FOR ANTI-SEMITISM'
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bility may be indisputable: everybody gets a turn at being persecuted, and
the Jews' turn comes round a little more often. Such a thesis is sound,
logical, perhaps even accurate.
It
is also insufficient and pedestrian, and
hardly takes into account the mythological wires that animate the hu–
man brain. It is a perspective that fits best into those minds that seek,
above all, safety in "normality," in the majority, in invisibility. The other
side of persecution as an equal-opportunity principle - its positive out–
come - is the principle of universal tolerance. Yet it is one of the most
bitter predicaments of recent Jewish history that this universalist credo,
transmogrified into totalitarian messianism, became a significant persecu–
tor of Jews. The historian
J.
L.
Talmon notes that for the Jews who
were drawn into totalitarian messianism at its hopeful inception, "the
atrophy of Jewish life did not seem too high a price to pay for equal
status."
It
may all have ended in the gulag, but first it bought Jewish si–
lence in the face of the growing exclusion ofJews.
The God of Israel has no body. The Covenant celebrates no blood.
The burial place of Moses is unknown, explicitly to prevent a material
shrine: that no one may worship a prince or a prophet or even a
teacher.
And just here can be discovered a difference.
It
may be that anti–
Semitism arises because the Jews as a people say No to the easily familiar,
to the expected, to the seemingly natural. The Jews as a people say No
to polytheism, because many gods divide humankind, and the vision of
Unity draws us to mercy. The Jews as a people say No to fatalism, be–
cause Kismet is slavery, and hinders flexibility, compromise, experiment, a
way out. While anyone may become a Jew, no one
must
become a Jew
as the only way to truth. The Jews as a people say No to exclusivity,
and No to infidel doctrine, and attribute the full blessings of righteous–
ness to anyone who lives in a community where there are courts of jus–
tice , and who eschew adultery, incest, theft, murder, the consumption of
flesh from a living animal. These are the No 's of compassion and obliga–
tion, and the Jews as a people of inheritance are entrusted to bear these
and others, in all their difficult grandeur.
It
goes without saying that a
Jew as ordinary human clay falters under their weight, fails them, deserts
them, resents them, runs with all the rest to do evil - but it is an inheri–
tance all the same, whether embraced or betrayed. The Jews as a
covenanted people are committed to the imagination of incorporeality;
this stands as a reprimand to those whose imaginations are bounded by
the body's frame.
Anti-Semitism, it seems to me, is exactly this: a self-administered rep–
rimand to its perpetrators and servants, who respond by painting the Jew
as they see themselves. Say that the Jew is a savage, and you confess to
