Over at FirstThings.com, Richard John Neuhaus has an interesting gloss on Adam Garfinkle’s “Jewcentricity” piece (which I haven’t yet read [Oct.30 - well, now I’ve read it and it’s an interesting, well-presented point of view, but one in which G-d (and any spiritual reality) plays no role.  While it is of mild curiosity to peer briefly through Garfinkle’s lens, it is hard for me to assimilate that kind of pov or to assign it any weight at all; it seems to me to render pointless the whole Jewish experience (both as Jews experience it and as other religions experience it).  I recognize that this may place me in the minority of contemporary Jews, but it most assuredly places me among the majority of Jews who have lived the Jewish experience as well as among the majority of all adherents to any of the variations of the Abrahamic faiths.  But back to Neuhaus]).

RJN writes “I’m not sure what it means to say that Jews were at the epicenter of Christian theology, but it is certainly the case that Christianity is inexplicable apart from Judaism. Up until the toleration of Christianity under Constantine and its later establishment, it is fair to say that the Roman world viewed rabbinic Judaism and Christianity as two versions of Judaism, and in many ways that was, in fact, the case.

“Contemporary Europe is haunted by nationalisms past that drew it into unspeakably destructive wars, and most particularly by Hitler’s National Socialism. Hitler made no secret of his belief that the war on the Jews was aimed at exterminating the “root causes” of the Christianity that he despised.”

RJN cites “metaphysical boredom” as a possible cause of post-Christian Europe’s backsliding into anti-Semitism.

RJN’s observations are interesting, but I think he doesn’t reach back far enough - to “first things,” as it were.

In today’s world, largely as a result of Judaism-Christianity-Islam-Enlightenment, we tend to overlook the real tectonic plates along which human conflicts erupt: tribes. Tribalism - simple, instinctual, unintellectual, amoral tribalism - is a far more potent force than any of the big unifying universalist ideas to which we generally attribute the great victories and tragedies of civilized humanity.

Unlike Christianity, Islam and the post-Enlightenment secular ideologies, Judaism and Jews are uniquely “tribe-faith” and we famously do not seek converts, although we embrace them when it is beyond doubt that they are imbued with commitment to the faith and want to cast their lot with the tribe. Indeed, while much has been said of the fact that Judaism doesn’t encourage (let alone coerce) converts, little is written about the fascinating universalist corollary: Judaism teaches a specific uplifting, G-dcentric and moral role for all humanity. Jews are meant to act as a catalyst for humanity’s salvation, but not by obliterating their otherness (I note that Catholicism recently has begun to enunciate the idea that Judaism is salvific for Jews. I’m very curious to see how this doctrine manifests over time and I also wonder as to its contours, for example, does the Church now hold that Judaism is salvific for a convert or only for a Jew by birth?). Rather, by living unique lives dedicated to conspicuous, although not vulgar, witnessing to the existence and eternal presence of the Creator both unknowable and intimate, Jews at our idealistic best, are supposed to be “a kingdom of priests and a sanctified (lit: separate) nation.”

Without regard to the values inherent in the faith (which in one distorted form or another have been adopted and adapted by other tribes as various forms of Christianity, Islam and every secular humanist universalist faith) I believe Jewish otherness as a matter of ideas, of faith and doctrine, was far less the cause of persecution than the mere fact of tribal otherness. To be sure, it has been given endless ideological, even theological veneers (including replacement theology, racial science, exceptionalism, etc.), but at its core, Jew-hatred is a constant because it is tribal, regardless of the ideological idiom or euphemism used variously to justify or explain and encourage it.

With the weakening and contraction of European Christianity and with the collapse of its secular counterparts, Socialism and Communism, tribalism - ethnic brutality, even genocide, among people who have lived as neighbors for centuries - roars shockingly in to fill the vacuum left by the great (meaning enormously powerful, whether good or evil) unifying ideas and ideals.

In this way, Jews, as the eternal “other” have been the constant definer of European tribalism, but not of European faith. There, it was precisely the local tribal characteristics which led to the particular form of adaptation of the Jews’ universalist message. In that regard, I agree with FRJN that we Jews are not the epicenter - we are the external point which has provided the frame of reference for their own tribal self-definition once tribal humanity was exposed to the universal inherent in G-d’s revelation at Sinai (via the Jews).

Finally, I note the timeliness of this discussion coming, as it does, in the traditional Torah-reading cycle when the Torah tells us of the very beginning of human morality/immorality, then the transition from universalism to tribalism and finally the advent of the “faith/tribe:” - Noah/Tower of Babel/Abraham.

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