Jewcentricity: Why the Jews are Praised, Blamed, and Used to Explain Just About Everything - Hardcover

Garfinkle, Adam M.

Hardcover

ISBN 10: 0470198567 ISBN 13: 9780470198568

Publisher: John Wiley & Sons Ltd, 2009

Synopsis

Advance Praise for Jewcentricity

""Adam Garfinkle punctures the myth of the omnipotence of the Jews with such intelligence and reflective sweep that we still can go on discussing the 'exaggerations' forever.""-Leslie H. Gelb, former columnist for the New York Times and president emeritus of the Council on Foreign Relations

""Jews, as the saying goes, are news. Why is that? In this elegant, witty, learned, insightful, always interesting, and occasionally alarming book, Adam Garfinkle explains the world's fascination with the practitioners of its oldest mono-theistic religion.""--Michael Mandelbaum, author of Democracy's Good Name: The Rise and Risks of the World's Oldest Form of Government

""One would have thought that everything that could be written or said about the relationship between Jews and their environment has been written and said. It was a pleasure, though hardly a surprise, that Adam Garfinkle, thinker, scholar, editor, and iconoclast at large, has been able to offer us fresh insights into this complex issue and apply his original mind to the subject matter.""--Itamar Rabinovich, former Israeli ambassador to the United States and former president of Tel-Aviv University

""There is a lot to argue about and ponder in this riveting manuscript. It is bound to cause a stir.""--Robert D. Kaplan, author of The Arabists: The Romance of an American Elite

""One way of looking at this brilliant book is to see it as an extended commentary on an old joke that defines a philo-Semite as an anti-Semite who likes Jews. Garfinkle shows, with many examples, what both characters have in common--a wildly exaggerated notion of the importance of Jews in the world. Garfinkle's argument is scholarly, lucid, witty, and very persuasive. It deserves a wide readership.""--Peter L. Berger, director, Institute on Culture, Religion and World Affairs at Boston University

About this title

About the Author

Adam Garfinkle is the founding editor of the American Interest, a bimonthly magazine on politics, culture, and international affairs. Prior to that he served as a speechwriter for secretaries of state Colin Powell and Condoleezza Rice. He has also taught at Johns Hopkins University's School of Advanced International Studies, the University of Pennsylvania, Haverford College, and Tel Aviv University.

From the Back Cover

If it's about Jews, it's news. From celebrities' conspiracy theories to American presidential candidates railing against anti-Semitism to the occasional news factoid that some person of interest has just discovered heretofore unknown Jewish relatives, nearly everyone wants to talk about it. Are the Jews God's chosen people? Many, Jews and non-Jews alike, think so--and about what other group is that question even asked?

Why is a tiny group of people who, for nearly two millennia, had no land to call their own the object of so much outsized and fanciful belief, both negative and positive? In Jewcentricity, Adam Garfinkle takes readers on a wry and learned tour of the world's obsessions with Jews. Hamas blames the financial crisis on Jews. Iranian television claims that the Harry Potter books and movies are a Ziono-Hollywood conspiracy. Mel Gibson blamed all the wars in history on the Jews. Jews win a disproportionate number of Nobel prizes, and arguments over the sources of supposed superior Jewish intelligence go on without end. Dishy actress Scarlett Johansson is Jewish, Madonna is into what some have told her is Jewish mysticism, and some claim that Abe Lincoln was Jewish.

Who cares? Way too many people, it seems. Drawing on insights from history, philosophy, religion, and social science, Adam Garfinkle explains how the strategies that kept Diaspora Jewry going for millennia have led many non-Jews to accuse Jews of chauvinism, secrecy, trickery, and conspiratorial lever-pulling, and to envy them for many of the same and other supposed talents.

Garfinkle divides the sources of grandiose claims about the Jews into four groups: anti-Semites, philo-Semites, Jewish chauvinists, and so-called self-hating Jews. He traces the origins and history of the most common myths about Jews and reveals how these impossible exaggerations, both positive and negative, feed off of and perpetuate each other.

Complete with a thoughtful and detailed examination of how to recognize the difference between mere anti-Jewish sentiment and genuine anti-Semitism, Jewcentricity is the ultimate field guide to paranoid, romantic, diabolical, boastful, well-intentioned, and murderous misinformation about Jews.

From the Inside Flap

If it's about Jews, it's news. From celebrities' conspiracy theories to American presidential candidates railing against anti-Semitism to the occasional news factoid that some person of interest has just discovered heretofore unknown Jewish relatives, nearly everyone wants to talk about it. Are the Jews God's chosen people? Many, Jews and non-Jews alike, think so?and about what other group is that question even asked?

Why is a tiny group of people who, for nearly two millennia, had no land to call their own the object of so much outsized and fanciful belief, both negative and positive? In Jewcentricity, Adam Garfinkle takes readers on a wry and learned tour of the world's obsessions with Jews. Hamas blames the financial crisis on Jews. Iranian television claims that the Harry Potter books and movies are a Ziono-Hollywood conspiracy. Mel Gibson blamed all the wars in history on the Jews. Jews win a disproportionate number of Nobel prizes, and arguments over the sources of supposed superior Jewish intelligence go on without end. Dishy actress Scarlett Johansson is Jewish, Madonna is into what some have told her is Jewish mysticism, and some claim that Abe Lincoln was Jewish.

Who cares? Way too many people, it seems. Drawing on insights from history, philosophy, religion, and social science, Adam Garfinkle explains how the strategies that kept Diaspora Jewry going for millennia have led many non-Jews to accuse Jews of chauvinism, secrecy, trickery, and conspiratorial lever-pulling, and to envy them for many of the same and other supposed talents.

Garfinkle divides the sources of grandiose claims about the Jews into four groups: anti-Semites, philo-Semites, Jewish chauvinists, and so-called self-hating Jews. He traces the origins and history of the most common myths about Jews and reveals how these impossible exaggerations, both positive and negative, feed off of and perpetuate each other.

Complete with a thoughtful and detailed examination of how to recognize the difference between mere anti-Jewish sentiment and genuine anti-Semitism, Jewcentricity is the ultimate field guide to paranoid, romantic, diabolical, boastful, well-intentioned, and murderous misinformation about Jews.

Excerpt. © Reprinted by permission. All rights reserved.

Jewcentricity

Why the Jews Are Praised, Blamed, and Used to Explain Just About EverythingBy Adam Garfinkle

John Wiley & Sons

Copyright © 2009 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd
All right reserved.
ISBN: 978-0-470-19856-8

Chapter One

Chosen

To exaggerate is to weaken. -Jean Franois de la Harpe

The origins of Jewcentricity lie in the historical odyssey of an idea, a Jewish idea about the purpose of Jewish people. But it is the collision of that idea with the long and eccentric history of the Jews that has given particular shape to Jewish self-image and behavior alike over the centuries. More specifically, the strategies that Jews devised to survive as a people-a nation lacking a common land, a common spoken language, and political independence for more than two thousand years-have often proved perplexing to the non-Jews in whose midst the vast majority of Jews have lived.

Those survival strategies, motivated and shaped by the moral tenets of a religious faith that has claimed the Jews to be God's chosen people, set Jews apart and led most host societies to encourage Jews to remain apart. Separated from, but still within, their host communities, nearly everything the Jews did to enable themselves to continue their mission as the Chosen People made them chosen, and everything that made them chosen more often than not made them pariahs in the eyes of others. This chosen/pariah dialectic is the motor, the innermost source, of Jewcentricity.

Some of this Jewish desire for communal separation amid the larger society, and the willingness of non-Jews to enable or to tolerate it, is clearly tied to the simple fact of difference. But some of it has its origins in the discomfort caused by ambiguity. Just as people often fear difference, they often go to great lengths to dispel, explain, or ignore (as the case may be) ambiguity. Human beings live by the categories they devise to organize experience, and when things, events, or other people violate their principles of categorization, they strive to restore the explanatory power of their cognitive frameworks. Just as dirt is "matter out of place"-as the British anthropologist Mary Douglas, quoting Lord Chesterfield, took pains to explain-the Jews in their global sojourn have often seemed to others "people out of place," hence a kind of social dirt. As the Israeli writer A. B. Yehoshua once put it:

We have a tendency to drive the non-Jews crazy. There is something in our existence which leads whole civilizations to be obsessed with us. Earlier we drove the Europeans crazy and now we drive crazy also the Arabs. Something in our undefined existence causes this madness.... To live without borders, without taking responsibility. To be here and also there, yet not here and not there, and to maintain such an elusive existence, such an unclear identity.... It is about time we should understand that our ambiguous identity is causing individuals and groups who suffer a chaos of identity to cast on us awesome implications.

Is Jewcentricity, then, mainly the result of a prolonged intercivilizational misunderstanding? The kind where one episode tends to generate further episodes, gradually but ineluctably encrusting relations between civilizations to the point that no one can figure out how it all got started? Well, yes. However, the gentile misunderstanding of the Jews has become more protracted, ornate, interwoven, shifting, and ironic than any other roughly similar misunderstanding ever known. A central reason for this, at least for those societies that have been formed by Christian and Islamic religion, is that Jewish ideas have influenced them at one level even as flesh-and-blood Jewish communities have engaged them at another. The idea of chosenness itself radiated outward, became transformed as other "chosen" Abrahamic faiths sought to separate and distinguish themselves from their Jewish origins, and was then hurled back at the Jewish communities within. This is what led the redoubtable Israel Zangwill to say that the Jew is "the great misunderstood of history."

But that is not quite all there is to it: there is a circularity to the misunderstanding at the heart of Jewcentricity, because Jews have often misunderstood in turn the source of gentile misunderstanding. They understood traditionally that chosen meant different, not necessarily better, and they assumed that this distinction would also be clear to others. It was often, however, not so clear; difference, when associated with superior achievement of various kinds, easily blends into presumptions of snobbery. When who God in fact chose became a matter of theological dispute, and vulnerable Jews in Diaspora grew defensive about their own claims, "different" sometimes elided into "better," and the whole cycle began again. This would almost be amusing-a kind of reverse version of O. Henry's famous story "The Gift of the Magi"-if it were not so serious. But there it is-a misunderstanding that has shifted its bases and gears throughout the centuries and is doing so still.

To understand contemporary manifestations of Jewcentricity, we have to reckon with the fact that it is a phenomenon that has been many centuries in the making. Where did it all start? How did Jews become known worldwide as the people that considers itself chosen? Why the Jews?

The annals of history and anthropology are full of creation stories centered on the ancestors of the very writers of those stories. The idea that humankind itself is, as the Hebrew Bible suggests, the "crown of creation," is of course widespread, and the idea that a particular group with its own language and culture is the diadem at the center of that crown is not much less so. Indeed, the presumed cosmic union of land, people, and god is a formula so typical of ancient cultures that merely to summarize the principal examples would consume the better part of any given afternoon.

Ancient Israel is certainly one of those examples, though a minor one by conventional measures. The people of Israel were small in number, built no great monuments, constructed no great cities, conquered no then-known-world-spanning empires. Yet the people of Israel turned out to have anything but a minor impact on history, and that is because its version of its own origin was and remains an example of ancient ethnocentrism with a twist.

Ancient Israelites (also called Hebrews, and later and until today called Jews for reasons we will come to in a moment) came to believe that their ancestor Abraham was called by God Himself to propagate the revolutionary idea of monotheism. Monotheism was revolutionary not only because it proclaimed a single God, but also because the biblical creation story made clear that humanity was a parallel unity to a single God, having descended from one divinely created couple, Adam and Eve. And even more important than the idea that there is only one God was the astounding idea, for the time, that God is one, that God and his creation form a unity. (This is what the verse "Hear O Israel, the Lord our God, the Lord is One" actually means.) In other words, creation makes sense as a whole: there is a first cause, and all other causes are consistent with it.

That there is only one God, one brotherhood of man, and that God is the author of a creation that is itself a unity, were ideas that changed the world. They posited the first universal moral vision, and they arguably established the earliest foundations for modern science. But there is even more to the twist than that: Abraham's relation to a land, within the ancient conceptual trinity of land, people, and god, was not to the land of his birth, Ur Kasdim in Mesopotamia, in what is today Iraq, or the land of his sojourn, the region of Haran, in what is today southern Turkey. Rather, as all those who know the biblical story are aware, God told Abraham to leave his native land and go to a new land God would show him. That turned out to be Canaan, later called the Land of Israel, part of which is Judea, and which has been generally known since Roman times as Palestine.

That land, and more besides, was to belong to Abraham's posterity, but not by a right fixed by might. Rather, Canaan was to belong to Abraham's seed through his son Isaac by dint of a covenant, a reciprocal and conditional relationship between the Creator of the universe and what became the people of Israel. (The rest of "the land between the two rivers" was to belong to the descendants of Abraham's other sons, notably Ishmael, but also the six sons he had with Keturah after the death of Sarah, as related in Genesis 25:1-6.) This, too, the idea of a conditional, covenantal relationship between a single God and a single people whose purpose was to minister to a universal brotherhood of mankind, was a new idea. The Israelites were the only "chosen people" of the ancient world who defined themselves more by a creed than by a bloodline and whose moral mission trumped the importance of their ties to a land.

It is on account of the singular purpose of Israel that the biblical narrative tells a story that was revolutionary in another way, as well. In every other ancient religious narrative, God is an ally of the existing temporal powers and the hierarchy that sustains them. Not in the Hebrew Bible, whose main protagonists are not rulers or warriors but ordinary people with extraordinary concern for living a morally informed life. In the story, if not in actual fact, Abraham leaves the most sophisticated urban culture of his day, crosses the river (hence the origin of the name Hebrews, from avar, to cross over), and sets off through the wilderness. The anti-hierarchical theme of the story is then replicated and greatly magnified with the story of Moses. Other ancient epics tell stories of noble-born children who somehow become the wards of slaves or the poor and are then restored to their rightful noble places. But Moses is born to slaves and ends up being raised as a prince of Egypt, only to reject privilege and associate his life with the underlings of society. As Jonathan Sacks puts it, the Moses story is an antimyth, arguably the world's first and certainly the most powerfully long-lasting antimyth in literature.

A people who believe in a God who disdains earthly power isn't likely to endear itself to those in power, even when those in power happen to be Jews. This notion, that political rule deserves respect only when it is just, is an indelible feature of the Jewish worldview. It is how within the biblical narrative the prophets of Israel, armed with the antimyth of the Exodus, show their mettle. Indeed, from the time of Moses' audiences with Pharaoh onward, one sees the manifestations of this dynamic playing out in Jewish history, sending forth sparks of opposition to tyranny that lit the tinder of Jewcentricity hither and yon.

Ideas have real social and ultimately political consequences, and the ideas embedded in the stories of credit and blame that human communities tell about God and creation especially so. What the Israelites believed about God set them apart from their neighbors, and over time the distinctions grew. For example, since there was only one God, gods fighting each other could not explain the forces of nature or disputes among peoples. Since the "Jewish" God did not die and get reborn with the seasons as gods typically did in pagan, or pantheistic, religions, the Israelites did not copy the resurrection rites of their neighbors, which often involved child sacrifice. Since God was beyond sexuality, the Israelites had no fertility rites either-no group copulations as with the Sumerians or institutionalized temple prostitution as with the Greeks-rites often associated with sexual excess and perversion.

Perhaps most important, God was an ally of both liberation and historical change; He was not merely a God in and of nature, but a God in and of history. This had two major implications that lay at the root of defining what was and has long remained different about the Jews.

First, since God was first cause in a world that made internal logical sense, it fell to people to figure out their own way in that world. Only after God, or the gods, were expelled from the immanent here and now, exported to heaven, so to speak, could human reason begin to take hold as a means to understand reality.

Second and closely related, in the Jewish view history mattered as something more than just a series of events. It meant something. It progressed toward a goal, rather than cycling back around itself like the seasons. It was free to become what its actors wished it to become. An omnipotent God is a god who can control the world in such a way as to turn events toward those who recognize Him.

The rabbis understood this from the Torah text, specifically from how God describes himself to Moses at the burning bush. When Moses asks God to tell him who is sending him to Pharaoh, God answers with just three Hebrew words: "Eheyeh asher eheyeh." Cryptic as this sentence seems, and despite the many translations it has attracted, it is actually quite simple grammatically. As the first and last words are the future tense, first person of the verb to be, it means, "I will be that which I will be." In other words, I am free, and you humans I have created in my spiritual image, you are free, too. What you do matters to your future, which is yours to shape.

That is why the Hebrew Bible, unlike other ancient stories, amounts to an effort to write history, however arguable the result in terms of accuracy. As many observers have pointed out, it never mattered in other ancient narratives if what happened in the stories was literally true, for what was true did not happen in real human time but in heaven, among the gods. Abraham and the early Israelites essentially realized, which is to say brought into collective consciousness, the idea of a concrete now. History started to matter because it was understood to cumulatively create the present, just as action in the present created the future. One's behavior and decisions mattered, too, not just because they affected how the crops would grow or how to make one's family safe from the elements and hostile neighbors, but because they shaped the character of life, the quality of consciousness itself. That realization, so taken for granted now and thus so easy to underestimate as a revolutionary force, defines the inner logic of the Hebrew Bible.

And that-all that-is why, in turn, roughly a millennium after Abraham and the other patriarchs of Israel, what Jews believed and how Jews acted contrasted so vividly with what, say, Greeks believed and how Greeks acted. Whatever their material and philosophical achievements, the ancient Greeks practiced infanticide and slavery, and exalted pedophilia and homosexuality as the preferred natural order of things. Why not? Their pantheon of gods did the same. Above all, when Jews and Greeks encountered one another in the fourth and third centuries BCE, the Greeks still aligned their temporal power with those of their whimsical gods; the Hebrews decided that their chosen status did not align with conventional political and military power, and they often stood athwart it-and would outlast it.

To review here the whole skein of Jewish history as related by the biblical narrative we cannot afford. The more familiar one is with that narrative, the clearer its historical impact on Jewish thinking and behavior becomes, but what matters, in any event, is that the biblical text has an underlying theme; it is not just a chronicle of sometimes touching, sometimes obtuse stories. The theme inheres in the unfolding of the Jews' chosenness in history; it is the extended tale of the divine mission given to Abraham. The Hebrew Bible amounts to a continuous reinforcement of the idea of the Chosen People: the Jews believe in God's having chosen them; the Jews then act a certain way as a result; something happens that is necessarily interpreted in the light of chosenness; that interpretation impels further understanding and behavior, which is interpreted again in the light of the chosen mission; and so on and on. Out of all this comes not only a historical narrative studded with a presumed meaning but a theology pointing forward to redemption.

(Continues...)

Excerpted from Jewcentricityby Adam Garfinkle Copyright © 2009 by John Wiley & Sons, Ltd. Excerpted by permission.
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Edition details

• Publisher: John Wiley & Sons Ltd
• Publication date: 2009
• Language: English
• ISBN 10: 0470198567
• ISBN 13: 9780470198568
• Binding: Hardcover
• Number of pages: 320