The answer to antisemitism is pro-semitism. Loud and proud.
Jews need to arm themselves – with knowledge. How many Jews have read Jewish history and are familiar with one of the most important stories of all time? Jewish history dates back 3,000 years and includes contact with the Assyrian, Babylonian, Persian, Roman, and British empires. Paul Johnson’s A History of the Jews is a classic.
How may Jews have read celebrated Yiddish writers, translated into English, like Sholom Aleichem or Isaac Bashevis Singer, who won the Nobel Prize for Literature? Or contemporary Israeli novelists like David Grossman or Amos Oz, who rank with the best in the world.
How many Jews have explored Jewish source texts like Ethics of the Fathers, an ancient source of experience and wisdom? Adam Kirsch’s book The People and the Books: 18 Classics of Jewish Literature is just one example of a survey of Jewish source texts.
Judaism is a religion, but it is also an ethnicity, a civilization, a culture, a history, a font of knowledge and experience rooted in the Land of Israel but not limited to its ancestral homeland. Jews had kingdoms in Israel thousands of years ago, as recorded in the books of the prophets and the innumerable archaeological discoveries yielding evidence of the Jewish presence there.
Judaism is the abused parent of its children, Christianity and Islam. Without Judaism, there could be no Catholicism, Protestantism, or Islam. Without Judaism, there would be no Western civilization as we know it, as Paul Johnson makes clear in his book. Jews have contributed immensely to every society in which they have lived. Jews constitute 0.2% of the world’s population – less than half of one percent – and yet have been awarded 32% of the world’s Nobel Prizes.
No people deserve pride more than the Jews
The answer to antisemitism may well be creating alliances with sympathetic non-Jews to tell the truth and expose unfounded conspiracy theories, along with other approaches; but first and foremost, Jews themselves need to know their own past, their history, and their contributions to the world. No people is deserving of pride more than Jews. Understanding Judaism as a force for good throughout history, in Israel and the Diaspora, should be a source of great satisfaction and inspiration.
Dr. Norman Lewis, in the British publication Unherd, reminds us of Saul Bellow’s comment that Jews are the only people in the world still unable “to take the right to live as a natural right,” making it easy for Jews to be the world’s perennial victims. However, victimhood is not in anyone’s best interest. When Jews consider themselves victims, it allows antisemites to define them, and Jews become objects rather than subjects of history. Jews have, admittedly, been victims throughout history, but it has not prevented great scholarship and great achievement – values we cherish today. These values arise from Jewish ethical monotheism, the foundation from which profound insights historically emerged from this astounding people. It is the positive aspects of the Jewish experience that must be learned, taught, and shared.
The sad truth is that Holocaust education, while essential, is incomplete when it comes to telling the story of the Jews. It shows Jews as victims and neglects the fact that both before and after WW II, Jews were culturally vibrant, intellectually creative, and a positive contributor to society.
The creation of the State of Israel was not only a response to antisemitism and the Holocaust. It was a return to an ancestral homeland to create an independent state that would be a positive force for contributions to humankind. And the Start-Up Nation has accomplished that goal in many fields – agriculture, medicine, science, technology – in only 75 years.
Unless Jews recognize their identity as a dynamic force for good throughout history, whether in the ancestral homeland or in the Diaspora, they risk falling prey to frustration and defeatism, always on the defensive. Jews cannot assume their identity if they do not cultivate a sense of pride. Jews cannot expect others to respect them if they do not respect themselves. Jews cannot respond to unfair accusations without a firm and profound knowledge of the facts at their command.
The response to antisemitism is the continued development of proud and knowledgeable Jews, steeped in their tradition, secure in their identity, affirming the truth with confidence, and living productive and satisfying lives. Only from such a people can we look forward to a thriving future.
Socrates’s “Know thyself” is not only a philosophical imperative for the individual; it is an essential call to a people to discover its own identity.■
Dr. Paul Socken is Distinguished Professor Emeritus and founder of the Jewish Studies Program at the University of Waterloo. This op-ed was originally published in the Jewish Journal (of Greater Los Angeles).