The intolerance of the majority must not be confused with, or excused by, the exclusiveness of the minority. And what was sinister, or conspiratorial, about the exclusiveness of the minority? The Jews conspired at nothing except their own continuance, their perseverance as themselves.
Perhaps that was the Jewish insult: the essential indifference that is the mark of genuine difference; the natural independence of an authentic identity. There are many explanations of Jewish apartness — religious, philosophical, cultural, sociological; but finally it comes down to a sensation of honor so deep and so magnificent that it was immune to the influence of kings and popes and armies and mobs.
Writing in 1880 in praise of the Jews, Nietzsche remarked upon their ‘heroism spernere se sperni’: They despise that they are despised. So it may indeed be said, then, that anti-Semitism has a historical basis in the otherness of the Jews; but it is more precise to say that it has a historical basis in the spectacular failure of the non-Jews to accept that otherness, to experience it as anything but a provocation, an impediment to their pretensions to universality.
For this reason, then, I am suggesting that anti-Semitism is not a Jewish problem. The Jews can do nothing about the hatred of the Jews except defend themselves against it. But I have another reason for making this suggestion, which I am quite confident will be misunderstood as an argument for Jewish complacence in the matter of anti-Semitism. The other reason is this: that the conditions for a successful Jewish defense against the hatred of the Jews have never been better. A brief look at the course of modern Jewish history shows why.
It is obscene to talk of a positive consequence for the Jews of the Second World War, and yet it is important to observe, with some satisfaction, that the conclusion of the Second World War marked also the conclusion of the European age in Jewish history. There are still Jews in the European countries, of course; but the destiny of the Jewish people has at last left Europe.
The fate of the Jews (and the fate of Judaism) will be determined elsewhere, in Israel and in the United States. This period in our history is characterized by a friendly competition for the Jewish future between the Israeli dispensation, under which the Jews enjoy the protections and the privileges of sovereignty, and the American dispensation, under which the Jews enjoy the protections and the privileges of pluralist democracy.
By the standards of Jewish history, this contest between the Jewish attainment in Israel and the Jewish attainment in America is truly an embarrassment of riches. We must not permit the collective memory of our people to inhibit us from the imagination of happiness. We — I refer to most of world Jewry — may finally be living in the sun.
It will be clear that I do not hold a ‘Zionist’ analysis of American Jewish circumstances. I do not believe that the United States is just another address for Jews on the run, just a safer haven. I believe, rather, that the United States represents a revolution in Jewish history, a country that is — in its philosophical foundations and in its political practices — structurally hospitable to us. We cannot be pilloried as a state within a state in a state that is comprised of states within a state. We cannot be excoriated for difference in a society in which difference is the substance of sameness.
A scholar of anti-Semitism recently observed about the Jewish situation in the United States that ‘ultimately the important issue is not anti-Semitism; it is Jewish security.’ Surely this is the first era in Jewish history when the discussion of anti-Semitism and the discussion of Jewish security is not always the same discussion.
