Why Jews Radically Oscillate Between Liberal Humanism and Zionism
Judaism’s possibly monolatristic roots may explain the Jewish propensity to ricochet between a belief in worldwide brotherhood and a parochial predilection to focus exclusively on our fellow Jews.
By David Gottfried
A large proportion of Jews agree with people like Bernie Sanders, and a huge proportion of Jews agree with Sanders’ antagonists. Similarly, a large proportion of Jews gravitate to the scarlet banner of socialism, and a large proportion of Jews eschew leftist politics and are conservative Zionists.
I propose that this divide in Judaism -- between Jews who believe Jews should work for the good of humanity and Jews who believe Jews should concentrate on aiding fellow Jews -- is in part caused by our possibly monolatristic roots. (A monolatry, explained below, is not the same thing as a polity or a belief that is monotheistic).
At the outset, I must concede that Judaism’s blood-drenched history is, perhaps, a perfectly adequate explanation for our desire to protect our own and to veer away from dreams of universal brotherhood. Jewish history is an unceasing litany of attempts to lacerate and incinerate the Jews. Fron Egypt to Babylon to Assyria to Rome, and then in Europe from the Spanish Inquisition (The bishop of Barcelona opined that one third of Jewry should be forcibly converted, one-third should be ousted from Spain and one-third should be executed.) to the crusades, to the massacres of the black plague (reputedly caused because the Jews poisoned the wells), to the pogroms prompted by the delusion that Jews used the blood of Christian children to make Matzah, to the blood-letting of the post-World War One Russian civil war, to the rabid racism of the Hitlerite hordes, the world has heaped enough hatred on the Jews to have made us a thousand times more chauvinistic than our staunchest critics imagine us to be.
Second, I opined, in a prior article on substack, that the Jewish propensity for high octane ideological fights was in part engendered by a multi-thousand-year dialectical conflict between Judaism’s prophetic and Legal traditions. Footnote 1.
Also, before I go any further, I must concede that Jews are not the only people who seem to be split between a seething left and a seething right.
Some historians contend that Latinos have a propensity to violently face off against one another as a strident, socialist contingent, redolent with the Romanticism of “La Passionaria” (A fervent and explosive fighter for Loyalist Spain) and Che Guevera, does battle with the Torquemadas of today from the death squads of El Salvador to the dungeons of Pinochet. Also, Arabs, not too long ago, seemed to be similarly split along harsh ideological fault lines as pro-Soviet, Egyptians used chemical weapons against Pro Saudi anti communists in Yemen in the 1960’s.
However, the left-right divide seems starkest among the Jews. Indeed, the Jews seem to be so furiously split between a raucous and ribald left wing and a savagely sanctimonious right wing that very often anti Semites can’t decide whether we Jews are the great Ogre of capitalism or the titanic Bolshevik bear of Communism. For example, Hitlerian propaganda incoherently asserted that Jews were agents of Soviet, Communistic crimes the world over in one sentence, and then schizophrenically asserted that Jewish criminality was caused by a cabal of capitalistic Jewish bankers. (For example, the “Protocols of the Elders of Zion” asserts that Jewish bankers and rabbis annually convene, in a cemetery in Prague in the middle of the night, to fine tune their plans to take over the world – this is where classical European anti Semitism becomes the inspiration for Hollywood horror movies)
In this essay, I will posit another reason for Judaism’s stark ideological divide: Conflicting ideas regarding G-d and his allegiances to the Jews and to other groups of people.
Judaism’s possibly monolatristic origins may explain the Jewish oscillation between universalism and Zionism.
Arnold Toynbee (I should note that many people deem him hideously anti-Semitic.) proposed that until the time of Ezra, who makes his appearance in Jewish History toward the end of the Babylonian exile, Judaism was a Monolatry.
A monolatry is not the same thing as monotheism. A monolatry has been described as a theistic system in which people worship only one God but believe there may be other Gods for other groups of people. For example, a monolatrist may believe that just as the G-d of the Jews looks after the Jews, there is another G-d that tends to the needs of Egyptians. According to Toynbee, we Jews were monolatrists and monotheists at the same time: We Jews believed that the Jews had only one G-d, and that made us monotheistic, and we Jews believed that other gods looked after other ethnicities and that made us monolatrists.
Judaism’s Holiest Prayer, the “Shema,” buttresses the proposition that Judaism was, initially, a monolatry.
Judaism’s holiest prayer, the Shema, translates into English as,
“Hear Oh Israel, the Lord your G-d, the Lord is one.”
Sometimes it may be translated this way:
Hear, all Israel, the Lord our G‑d, the Lord is One.
In referring to the Lord as “our G-d,” or as “your G-d,” it doesn’t refer to the lord as the G-d of everyone. The prayer might imply that the lord we worship is not the God of the Egyptians, Babylonians, etc.
Furthermore, the prayer seeks to communicate the idea that the Lord “is one.” At the same time, the prayer relates the idea that G-d is a unitary entity to only the Jewish people as the beginning of the prayer states, “Here Oh Israel.” If we believed that our G-d was also the G-d of everyone else, then why would this message, that G-d is one, only be apt information for Jews. In other words, if we believed that our G-d was also the G-d of everyone else, this prayer would be apt information for all humanity and the opening of the prayer might state, “Hear, all humanity…”
Similarly, I remember an exuberant, enjoyable song often heard at Synagogue Services. The song is known as Ayn Kellohanu. On Shabbas services it is usually placed toward the end, either before or after Adon Olom. Ayn Kellohanu, in the course of praising G-d, says that no kings, emperors or princes are as great as Our G-d. But if God rules the whole of the world, he is not just Our G-d.
This is not an idle thought. Judaism has many magnificent prescriptions on how one should lead one’s life. But are they for only the Jews or for all mankind.
When I was young, I was particularly enamored by this line from Leviticus:
“Thou shalt not stand idly by while thy brother’s blood is being spilt.”
But who is my brother ??
I think that the stern and parsimonious monolatristic roots of Judaism have appeared harsh and unforgiving to many Jews, that these Jews consequently endeavored to liberalize Judaism and make society more egalitarian and just for Jews and gentiles alike, that Jewish liberalism was often greeted with rabid anti semitism, and that the rabid antisemitism this engendered made Jews seek solace, once again, in our monolatristic beginnings, even if we forgot that we once may have been a monolatry.
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Footnote 1: https://davidgottfried.substack.com/p/five-reasons-why-jews-gravitate-toward