Michael Walzer is a prominent, A-list, liberal, political philosopher who is also very much what one might call a racially conscious Jew. Over his career Walzer has written numerous pieces on Jewish themes and Jewish identity. For example, here is Mondoweiss’s review of a Walzer lecture on Jewish identity entitled: “Are We a People?”:
Walzer answered the question at once: Yes. Jews are a people in a way that no one else is a people. We are both religion and nationality…
Being both a religion and a nationality makes us an anomaly. We’re like the French but unlike the French we do not include Muslims and Catholics. And we can be members of the French nation but not the same as other members of that nation. Jews are French, English and Russian with a difference. We have been a nation for a long time. Jews may be comfortable and prosperous in America, but: we are not simply at home. Being full citizens in a stable democracy is a relatively new condition for Jews, and we can’t be entirely confident about its permanence, Jewish history is full of warnings. Now the existence of a Jewish state, Israel, makes things even more complicated. We are connected to Israel, to another place, to another geographical place and a different history; this makes us different from other Americans who do not have these connections..
Our anomalous status might make the world uncomfortable, but the world should just get used to it, Walzer said. There will be accusations of parochialism and disloyalty. We shouldn’t try and deny the anomaly so as to be liked; we shouldn’t be critical of ourselves. We should embrace the anomalies. We need not make excuses…
Of the pattern of Jewish particularism (as opposed to Christian universalism), Mondoweiss adds:
Walzer, having appeared on the scene as a liberal, has late in life occupied more and more the life of Judaism. Some of this is to his great credit as a scholar. He learned Hebrew in his 50s. But the orientation is defiantly particularist. He is not interested in Judaism as a universalist religion, as the anti-Zionist rabbis and liberal theorists offered it to the world. He doesn’t really want to share…
Writing in the NY Review of Books, a Jewish stronghold for determining socially acceptable literature worthy of review, Michael Walzer reviews David Nirenberg’s book Anti-Judaism: The Western Tradition (“Imaginary Jews“). It is a highly instructive piece, wherein a racially conscious Jew attempts to dispense as non-emprical and irrational the global historical reality of consistent gentile reactions to what are, arguably, recognizable patterns of Jewish ethnocentrism:
What Nirenberg has written is an intellectual history of Western civilization, seen from a peculiar but frighteningly revealing perspective. It is focused on the role of anti-Judaism as a constitutive idea and an explanatory force in Christian and post-Christian thought—though it starts with Egyptian arguments against the Jews and includes a discussion of early Islam, whose writers echo, and apparently learned from, Christian polemics…
Virtually every non-Jewish ethnic culture that comes into contact with Jews has had a relatively consistent narrative of Jewish characteristics. Anti-semitism likely did emerge as a rational response and reaction to the acculturated sociological realities of Jewish hyper-ethnocentrism and separatism:
A certain view of Judaism—mainly negative—gets established early on, chiefly in Christian polemics, and then becomes a common tool in many different intellectual efforts to understand the world and to denounce opposing understandings. Marx may have thought himself insightful and his announcement original: the “worldly God” of the Jews was “money”! But the identification of Judaism with materialism, with the things of this world, predates the appearance of capitalism in Europe by at least 1,500 years.
Walzer prepares to tackle those widely held stereotypes of Jewish behavior, a group of individual and collective behavioral characteristics which Walzer refers to as ‘Judaizing’:
Nirenberg’s proper subject is a hostile understanding of Judaism, early and late, reiterated by writers of very different sorts, with which the social-political-theological-philosophical world is constructed, enemies are identified, and positions fortified…
What is being explained is the social world; the explanatory tools are certain supposed features of Judaism; and the enemies are mostly not Jews but “Judaizing” non-Jews who take on these features and are denounced for doing so. I will deal with only a few of Judaism’s negative characteristics: its hyperintellectualism; its predilection for tyranny; its equal and opposite predilection for subversive radicalism; and its this-worldly materialism, invoked, as we’ve seen, by both Burke and Marx. None of this is actually descriptive; there certainly are examples of hyper-intellectual, tyrannical, subversive, and materialist Jews (and of dumb, powerless, conformist, and idealistic Jews), but Nirenberg insists, rightly, that real Jews have remarkably little to do with anti-Judaism…
Walzer goes back to the Gospels and then briefly charts the evolution of what might be called ‘anti-semitism’, if we define anti-semitism as the recognization of Jewish ethnocentrism and separatism as a group strategy which competes against non-Jewish groups for limited resources. (Walzer, like Nirenberg, generously uses the term ‘anti-Judaism’ instead, given how loaded the term ‘anti-semitism’ is.)
…It begins in the Gospels, with the earliest attacks on the Judaism of the Pharisees. Christian supersessionist arguments—i.e., arguments about what aspects of Judaism had been superseded by Christianity—were based on a set of oppositions: law superseded by love, the letter by the spirit, the flesh (the material world, the commandments of the Torah, the literal text) by the soul. “I bless you father…,” writes Luke, “for hiding these things from the learned and the clever and revealing them to little children.”
The Pharisees were indeed learned and clever, as were their rabbinic successors; the discussions and disputations of the Talmud are a particularly revealing display of learning and cleverness. By comparison (it’s a self-description), the early Christians were naive and innocent children to whom God spoke directly, evoking the faith that brought salvation (which law and learning couldn’t do).
The difficulty here is that the Christians very quickly produced immensely learned, clever, and disputatious theologians of their own, who were then accused, and who accused each other, of Judaizing—thinking or acting like Jews. The earliest Christian writers, Paul most importantly, were engaged with actual Jews, in some mix of coexistence and competition that scholars are still trying to figure out. Nirenberg writes about Paul with subtlety and some sympathy, though he is the writer who sets the terms for much that comes later.
By the time of writers like Eusebius, Ambrose, and Augustine, the Jews had been, as Nirenberg says, “a twice-defeated people”—first militarily by the Romans and then religiously by the imperial establishment of Christianity. And yet the threat of Judaism grew greater and greater as the actual Jews grew weaker and weaker. According to their triumphant opponents, the Jews never gave up their hostility to Jesus and his followers (indeed, they didn’t convert). They were endlessly clever, ever-active hypocrites and tricksters, who mixed truth with falsehood to entice innocent Christians—in the same way that those who prepare lethal drugs “smear the lip of the cup with honey to make the harmful potion easy to drink.”
That last charge is from Saint John Chrysostom, who was such a violent opponent of “the Jews” that earnest scholars have assumed that Judaism must have posed a clear and present danger to Christianity in his time. In fact, Nirenberg tells us, there was no such danger; the people mixing the poison were Christian heretics. If Saint John feared the Jews, “it was because his theology had taught him to view other dangers in Jewish terms.”
The critique of Jewish cleverness is fairly continuous over time, but it appears with special force among German idealist philosophers of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, who repeat many of the supersessionist arguments of the early Christians….
Judaism’s associations with worldly power and subversive rebellion are closely linked, for what is rebellion but an effort to seize power? So Jewish bankers can rule the world and Jewish Bolsheviks can aspire to overthrow and replace the bankers. In some alcoves of the Western imagination, the two groups can almost appear as co-conspirators…
The identification of Jews with merchants, money-lenders, royal financiers, and predatory capitalists is constant in Nirenberg’s history…
Nirenberg’s thesis is that historical forces of modernity, from the birth of capitalism to the development of modern Western philosophy, have effectively boosted group behaviors among all persons (Jews and non-Jews alike) such that the trends mirror longstanding stereotypes of quintessentially Jewish behavior.
As such, Nirenberg’s book may be an excellent companion piece to Yuri Slezkine’s thesis in The Jewish Century.
