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remains an abstraction in the protean form of abstractness even through
the establishment of the State of Israel. Could you expand a bit on the
idea of abstractness and what is it about us Jews that makes us so ab–
stractable even though we feel ourselves to be so specifically there?
Robert Wistri ch:
Well, you've raised the question of the peculiarly
abstract, manipulable and protean quality of the Jews, and you also point
to the paradox that this is a people that is so concretely particular,
having, I would add, such a sharply defined identity of its own. Is there
anything in the Jewish people that lends itself
to
this kind of
mythologized anti-Semitism? I suspect it is partly connected with the
prolonged and uniquely diasporic experience of the Jews as a people in
exile: a people without soil, territory, or the normal attributes of
power, yet being able not just to survive, but to make such a difference,
to actually be a determining factor in certain key turning points in the
history of civilization. This is something inherently difficult to grasp or
accept for anybody, and especially, I suspect, for non-Jews not familiar
with the internal Jewish self-understanding. It can be a very disorienting
notion. Maybe, then, the level of abstraction that is often found in anti–
Semitism is an attempt, however inadequate, to somehow grapple with
the strangeness of the Jewish diasporic exisence, but that's only one
aspect.
I think when you go back to the historical base of the theology of
rejection that I was speaking about earlier, you really do find the seeds
of the problem. Actually, you could go back beyond the Church Fathers
to the New Testament itself; just look at the Gospel of John, for
instance. Already there, "the Jews" exist as a malevolent force seeking the
death ofJesus - they are in fact portrayed as the children of Satan. They
are not the sons of Abraham, but they are the sons of the devil. They are
already taken out of their concrete setting, stripped as it were of their
humanity. This was a theological necessity for a religion that comes out
of the matrix of Judaism and seeks to negate it. Christinaity had to
establish its claim as the "new Israel" by rejecting the
raison d'etre,
the
autonomous identity of the Jews and ofJudaism. This required reducing
the Jewish people and its historical continuity to an abstraction, turning
them into the expression of a negative, even a Satanic principle. This was
historically the root of anti-Semitism, even if since then, the abstract
myth of the Jew has acquired many new forms.
Beyond that, another point occurs to me concerning modern
totalitarian ideologies, and this extends beyond the Jewish case. Ask
yourself why, for example, the kulaks were exterminated in Soviet Russia
in the 1930s? Think of the gap between the "real" sociological
