Antisemitism is the hatred of the Jewish people. Hatred of the Jews focuses on many aspects of the Jewish people. It accuses Jews of killing Jesus, controlling the governments of the world, having an outsized influence on the world’s economy, and even killing non-Jewish children as part of Jewish ritual. Yet, of all the hate aimed at the Jewish people, the attention on the Jewish people’s relationship with the Land of Israel has always been a recurring theme of antisemitism.
Rabbi Shlomo Yitzhaki, commonly known by the Rabbinic acronym “Rashi,” was a French rabbi and commentator who lived from 1040 to 1105 and authored comprehensive commentaries on the Talmud and the Bible. He is widely regarded as one of the greatest Jewish scholars to have ever lived, and his works have been studied by millions of Jews every single day since his death.
In one of the first comments he ever published, he asked, “The Torah which is the law book of Israel, should have commenced with the verse (Exodus 12:2) ‘This month shall be for you the first of the months,’ which is the first commandment given to the Jewish people. What is the reason, then, that it commences with the account of the Creation?”
Rashi explained that God began the Torah with the recording of the Creation so that He could give the basis for the Jewish people to take the heritage of other nations. For should the nations of the world accuse the Jewish people of being robbers – because the Jewish people took the lands of the seven nations of Canaan by force when they conquered it after the exodus from Egypt – the Jewish people can respond by saying that the entire earth belongs to God, and he can give it to whomever He wants.
Rashi’s explanation and the principle he taught about the justification for the Jewish people ruling, settling, and living in the Land of Israel is just as relevant today as it was a thousand years ago when he wrote his commentary.
As Ida Audeh the editor of Jerusalem Story, wrote, “Throughout their conquest of Palestine, Zionists adopted propaganda storylines that they took over a “land without a people” and “made the desert bloom” upon creating their state in 1948. It was a way of turning their wholesale theft and ethnic cleansing of an inhabited land into a miraculous tale. Far from taking over a barren, uninhabited landscape, Zionist forces and Jewish settlers violently and brazenly took over an intact, ready-made country.”
Israel and the Christian world
The Catholic Church spent centuries teaching that the proof of God rejecting the Jewish people was their exile from the Land of Israel. As Dr. Amnon Rammon, senior researcher at the Jerusalem Institute for Policy Research wrote, “The establishment of the State of Israel in 1948 posed a ‘complex theological challenge’ to the churches and the Christian world. How should the Christian world refer to the Jewish people’s success in establishing a sustainable Jewish state in the Holy Land, in light of the traditional Christian conception according to which the Jewish people were sentenced to punishment by exile and constant humiliation?”
Rabbi Joseph Soloveitchik focused on this rejection of Catholic theology as one of the most important aspects of the establishment of the State of Israel. “The theological arguments of Christian theologians to the effect that the Holy One has taken away from the Community of Israel its rights to the Land of Israel, and that all of the biblical promises relating to Zion and Jerusalem now refer in an allegorical sense to Christianity and the Christian Church, were all publicly shown to be false, baseless contentions by the establishment of the State of Israel,” he wrote, saying that “the central axiom of Christian theology was shattered.”
There is a teaching in the Talmud, “God irrigates the Land of Israel Himself, and the rest of the world by a representative.” In his commentary on the homiletic portions of the Talmud, the Rashba wrote, “The Land [of Israel] is called God’s treasure, and God’s ‘will’ is within it. The Land of Israel, the chosen land, was given to the Jewish people, the chosen people…The events in the Land of Israel are not directed by an angel or representative; all of the events occurring in the Land of Israel are always under the providence of God Himself.”
According to Rashba, God relates to the land through specific providence, rather than general providence as He does in other lands. General providence is what we call nature, i.e., the regular set patterns under which the world operates. While created by God, He does not dictate every individual act of nature. The Land of Israel is the only place in the world where all events are always under the providence of God Himself and is a sign of God’s unique relationship with the Jewish people.
For antisemites, the Jewish people’s relationship to the land stands as a constant reminder that the Jewish people play a unique theological role among the community of nations, which is an abomination to those who hate the Jews. Antisemites focus so much of their hate on the Land and State of Israel in order to reject the notion that the Jewish people play a unique theological role.
This hate acts as a lesson for the Jewish people to appreciate their exceptional role in the world and the centrality of the Land of Israel to Judaism and their nation. Far from being just a place to live, the Land of Israel is an essential aspect of Jewish identity and can never be separated from Judaism and the Jewish people.
The writer is a Zionist educator at institutions around the world and the author of Zionism Today.